Call me Franklin Blake

After yesterday's fit of enthusaism for The Moonstone, I slept fantastically badly and, upon waking, immediately found myself scanning the headlines for news of the theft of a priceless diamond but nothing has, as yet, come to light...

Bareback

On the strength of her deeply cool list of top 10 cross genre novels, I picked up a copy of Kit Whitfield's Bareback. Fortunately for me, it turned out to be every bit as good as her tastefully perfect list suggested it would be.

The world is run by werewolves. The majority of the population, those born feet first, get to choose their jobs, get to go to university, get to enjoy live. They turn into mindless, ravening wolves with every full moon, leaving the world in the custody of the barebacks, the custody of DORLA, the Department for the Ongoing Regulation of Lycanthropic Affairs. Spun out of the Inquisition, DORLA takes care of the world while the majority of the population are luning, keeping them under control in their shelters, locking up the ones who violate curfew and generally cleaning up the mess.

Lola May Galley is a lawyer. Except she isn't &mash; she doesn't have the training — but she's as close as DORLA gets to the real thing. After her trainee is seriously injured during a moon night dogcatch and a colleague is killed shortly after being maimed by an unpleasant luning yuppie, Lola starts to uncover a trail that to a group who deliberately seek out the moonlight: the free-rangers.

Bareback is a clever, intelligent genre crossing novel that isn't afraid to be dark when it needs too be. Is it science fiction? It could be. It's certainly set in another reality, the nameless city with it's religiously named districts, Sanctus, Benedict, Five Wounds, is more Borgesian in it's sweeping, menacing outlines than Mievillesque baroque. Is it a crime novel? Again, it could be: Lola is a lawyer and investigator first and foremost, trying to track down the murderer of her colleague, but it's not a classic police procedural.

Is it a novel about prejudice? It's true that the barebacks have a hard time of it. They're routinely subjected to discrimination, from playground rhymes to lack of career choice to the casual way that bareback children are abused in the moon night creches just because no one can spare the time to look after them properly. Certainly, barebacks and lycos — both terms are equally pejorative — hold themselves separate, with the run down districts of the city acting as bareback ghettos and sure, the lycos have better life expectancies and fewer scars — they lose them during the monthly change — than their non-ricking fellows, but there's an uneasy balance of power between the two groups that defies simple categorisation. There is a particularly brilliant moment when the feud between DORLA and the lycos escalates and the agency suddenly starts pulling people off the streets, holding them incommunicado without trial. Even though the whole thing is still narrated by Lola, I suddenly found that my perspective had shifted and I realised why lycos were afraid of the agency: when threatened, they behaved exactly like the most ruthless of secret police, disappearing people for weeks on end, without confirming or denying anything.

Eventually, I suppose, it doesn't really matter which category the novel falls into (unless, perhaps, you're a bookseller). What really matters is that the characters are plausible, believable and that Lola, the first person narrator, is a spiky, difficult, but extremely human and deeply plausible. She's uneven, at one point disarming a slick city lawyer by raising her own short comings and describing how much she hates her own situation, she pushes away friends but ultimately realises that can't reject them because if she does she'll end up even more alone and, in the end, she manages to reconcile herself to who she is and to find a sort of peace.

In case you hadn't guessed, I totally adored this novel. I loved the dark, simply drawn lines of the cities, I constantly wanted the best for Lola, all the while knowing that things probably weren't going to come up roses for her. The lycanthropy as metaphor was elegantly applied and really drew attention to the arbitrary nature of disability — head first, feet first, how much difference can something so tiny make? I also enjoyed the consistent way that society had been re-imagined to incorporate lupine elements of history.

So, in conclusion, buy this novel. Buy it now. Read it. Enjoy it. I'm going to buy it for my mum (no way is she going to take my copy away from me). I don't think I can give a higher recommendation than that!

Today's phrase

In a moment of irritation — before anyone tries to claim that I have nothing but moments of irritation, I'd like to point out that I also have moments of vengeful fury, general grouchiness and melancholy cantankerousness — I said that it was my intention to kick arse and take names. When questioned as to the origin of this phrase, I said that I thought it was military, but now, upon investigation, I discover that it might possibly have been a police term. Then again, given the general reliability of the interweb, it might well not...