I’ve recently read ‘The Sleepwalker’s Introduction to Flight’ by Sion Scott-Wilson. I picked this up, because I liked the sound of the novel’s premise. Practising to become a cliff-diver in the garden, Mikey Hough hits the ground and puts himself into a coma. When he comes out of it, he learns that in the accident, he has lost the ability to sleep. While in hospital, he befriends a former RAF pilot and vows to track down his stolen Distinguished Flying Cross.
However, this apparently is a comic novel. What this translates into is a succession of grotesqueries. None of them are funny. It also turns into another story where the teenage narrator is able to win the girl next door. This is a familiar device that feels more like fan fiction then anything believable. The difficulty I have is that the novel strains to be funny, when it would work better with a more restrained style. Not everything has to be humorous.
I’ve finally seen the new channel 4/More 4 programme ‘The TV Book Club’. It suffers from having less than 30 minutes to cover an interview, an author profile, a look at obscure words and a study and review of the featured book. So the book that some person has been trying to fit in time to read in a week gets dealt with, over four minutes.
I’ve also been trying to think of a vampire story that could work and be relatively fresh. The difficulty is that it does all seem as if it has been done before. Something that I have noticed is that the power level of vampires seems to have been going down since ‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker. In the novel, Van Helsing sits down and tells everybody about Dracula’s powers. According to him, Dracula has the strength of 20 men, the powers of necromancy, can control the weather, control rats, owls, bats, foxes and wolves, change himself into mist, go out in the day and dematerialise. But vampires rarely demonstrate all these powers in one novel these days
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