Book 9: "The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire" by Doris Lessing

'After I left the hotel, through a lobby all excitement and noise – a trade delegation from the Sirian HQ on their planet Motz were just leaving, looking pleased with themselves – I walked straight into the park opposite. Some freely wandering gazelles came to greet me. They originate, as it happens, from Shikasta, stolen by Sirius and presented as part of a state gift. They licked my hands and nuzzled them, and I knew my emotional apparatus was nearly at Overload. Plant life in every stage of growth. The songs of birds. In short, the usual assault on one's stabilizing mechanisms. So hard did I find it to keep my emotional balance that I nearly went back into the hotel to join Incent.
Oh, the glamour of the natural life! The deceptions of the instinctual! The beguilements of all that pulses and oscillates! How I do yearn for Canopus and for its... but enough of that. Forgive my weakness.

I already suspected that the Canopean Empire was not as altruistic as it at first appeared, but in the fifth and final book of the series it also becomes apparent that its agents are fallible. The usual dispassionate stance of Canopus towards members of lesser species can be rocked, as its agents sometimes fall into a state where they are overtaken by emotion and easily swayed by rhetoric. When this happens agents are admitted to a Hospital for Rhetorical Diseases to undergo treatment designed to bring their emotions back into check and stop them from being affected so powerfully by words.

In this book Klorathy, who previously appeared in "The Sirian Experiments", guides the inhabitants of Volyen, its inhabited moons and neighbouring planets through the break-up of the Volyen Empire, while helping a junior agent called Incent through illness, relapses and recovery, and just about warding off the illness himself.

This isn't my favourite book in the series, although this book's stance against rhetoric and the power of words to rouse emotion and sway people to behave unreasonably was though-provoking. Incent's constant relapses and his alternating attraction to and shamed rejection of Shammat soon became tedious, although I was interested in the inhabitants of the Volyen system as they faced the break up of the Volyen Empire and invasion by Sirius and their reaction to the manipulation by Canopus.

Book 10: "A Loyal Character Dancer" by Qiu Xiaolong

The food poisoning incident made him think of Inspector Rohn. First the motorcycle, and then the accident on the staircase.
They might have been followed. While they were talking with Zhu upstairs, something could have been done to the steps. Under normal circumstances, Chief Inspector Chen would have treated such an idea like a tall tale from Liaozhai, but they were dealing with a triad.
Anything was possible.

A woman from a small village disappears while waiting for a passport to join her husband in the US. The woman's husband is refusing to testify in a trial of a people-smuggler unless his wife is allowed to join him, and an U.S. Marshall Catherine Rohn has been sent to Shanghai to escort the woman to her husband. Inspector Chen is put on the case and asked to look after the American because of his good English, and good-standing within the party, although she does speak some Chinese. Chen is well aware that this is a politically sensitive case, as it is imperative that the woman is found and handed over to the Americans quickly, so that China does not lose face, but he comes to suspect that some people would rather the woman was not found and handed over the the Americans

An interesting police procedural with plenty of politics, but this time there's added Triad action, flirting and Doctor Zhivago!

Book 11: "Only Human" by Tom Holt

In the mirror he saw a short, bald, middle-aged man with rosy cheeks and square, black-rimmed glasses; not entirely unlike what he saw in his mirror at home, except for the lack of horns and the regrettably uncloven feet. Trying to balance on these flat nan-bread-shaped things was a nightmare in itself; to someone who was used to the functional elegance of the hoof, it was like trying to do a Fred Astaire dance routine in snowshoes. The lack of horns was something else he’d have difficulty getting used to if this strange state of affairs lasted for any length of time. He’d often wondered how mortals managed without them; particularly office workers. How else did they pierce paper for filing in box files, or remove staples, or open Cellophane-wrapped packets of biscuits?

When God and his oldest son go fishing, his younger son Kevin is left in charge, but causes chaos on Earth and in Hell when he signs on to Mainframe and presses the wrong key. Down on earth, four English men and women find that they have swapped 'bodies' with a piece of industrial machinery, a medieval painting of the Madonna and child, a lemming and a Duke of Hell (albeit a demon who runs the payroll rather than torturing the damned). One of my favourite sub-plots involved the Prime Minister (now in a lemming's body) becoming leader of the lemmings by promising a brave new world in which there wold be no great leaps forward (or down) and everyone would stay where they were, while the lemming in the Prime Minister's body sat on top of a wardrobe in 10 Downing Street, periodically jumping off onto a pile of cushions and biting people.

A quick read, with convoluted sub-plots all coming together at the end, and a couple of loose ends involving Kevin's parentage and his relationship with the help desk girl from the computing company leaving room for a sequel..

Book 12: "The Keeper" by Sarah Langan

'I'll start, and you finish', the woman said. 'Once upon a time there was a little girl and she was very unlucky She was born in a haunted place where nothing ever died.'

Susan Marley is crazy. Betrayed by her family and friends, she stopped speaking when she was a teenager and wanders mute through the streets of Bedford, Maine. And everyone in town dreams about her, although they don't talk about that, and try not to think about it either. But although Susan is the townspeople's scapegoat, things were badly wrong in Bedford long before she was born.

What I really liked abut this book is the way the author casually introduces the horrific and macabre. You are reading along and all of a sudden you read something like "Just then, the closet door opened and a monster stepped out of it." that you hardly notice at first until you are brought up short and have to go back and re-read it. I found it a very effective technique, as it mirrored the way the townspeople skated over the strange things that happened in their town. Later in the book, when the dead stalk the town menacing those townsfolk who didn't sense them coming and flee town, the horror becomes more overt, and that fits too

Reviews of Books 9 to 12 cross-posted to 50bookchallenge.

Cinema Trips: January to March

Black Swan
Psychological horror about an unstable dancer whose grasp on reality disintegrates when she wins the lead role in Swan Lake.

Never Let Me Go
I never really fancied reading the novel that this film is based on, but having seen the film I think I would l like to read it no. It's a sad, grey film, with characters who are resigned to their fate. the saddest point was when the schoolchildren were so thrilled at the prospect of being able to buy toys with their accumulated tokens, and the fact that they were ecstatic when confronted with the rubbish (a naked Barbie doll with no arms, half a recorder) on the table. Towards the end of the film, I realised why they usually died on their third or fourth donation, and that nobody cared, not even them really. Andrea Riseborough obviously has one of those faces that can play pretty or plain - I would never have guessed that it was the same actress as in the one about the women factory workers.

Inside Job
A documentary about the credit crisis, featuring various involved parties squirming and being made to look like self-serving fools, as in the case of the guy who said he left his regulatory role in the midst of the crissis to return to academia because he needed to revise a textbook, and another academic who claimed that it was due to a typo that his CV contained a report called "Financial Instability in Iceland", when the report was actually called "Financial Stability in Iceland". Lots of shocked gaps and laughter from the audience.

The Adjustment Bureau
Lots of plot holes but still enjoyable due to the chemistry between the Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. I wouldn't be surprised if it was meant to have a Thelma & Louis/Ashes to ashes ending originally; I definitely got that vibe when they were trapped on the roof. I'm not sure whether or not the Adjustment Bureau was populated by angels or aliens. The Adjustment Bureau agents standing on the roof top in their overcoats at the beginning reminded me of the angels in "Wings of Desire", so to start with I was inclining towards the Chairman being God and the agents being angels, but thinking about it, perhaps it is more likely that they are aliens. The manpower shortages and the fact that plans can be changed when the ripples have got out of hand, seem more like the actions of powerful but fallible aliens (like in Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos: Archives series that I have been reading recently).

Paul
Not as good as Sean of the Dead, but still funny, with lots of geeky references to other films.

Submarine
A downbeat story of Welsh teens with relationship and parental issues. Good, but I was a bit disappointed because I expecting more after all the great reviews it had received.