Review by Declan Madden
This debut novel introduces the character
of Clay Straker to the reader and is a story of industrial pollution in the
Middle East.
Clay Straker , retired from the South
African Armed Forces , has retrained as an engineer and now finds himself
working for Petro-Tex , a new kid on the block in the oil industry .Based in
Yemen his job involves environmental testing for the company in support of its applications
for government approval .This work mainly consists of cash donations to the
relevant officials and tribal leaders to smooth the process . The novel starts
with the kidnapping of Clay and his
Yemeni driver and a face to face meeting with Al Shams , a renowned terrorist
in the country.Al Shams is seeking the reason for the recent deterioration of
the health of the local population and gives Clay a deadline of one week to
highlight their plight .
What follows is a page turner which sees
Clay taking on the very company he has been promoting and its blatant disregard
for the Yemeni tribes . To complicate matters Rania La Tour , a journalist with
AFP , seduces Clay in order to get an interview with Al Shams but she too has
other motives . Clay becomes a fugitive and soon is fighting for his life and
running out of options . Who can he trust and how can he prove Petro-Tex is breaking
every rule in its efforts to extract oil from the Yemeni desert?
I really enjoyed this novel and found a
strong character in Clay Straker . The writing was well paced with plenty of
action . As I was reading I was certainly imagining a good movie in the pages
and, as is normal, trying to figure out who might play the lead role. I finally
settled on Matt Damon . I think there is scope for this character of Clay to
appear again in a follow up novel and I look forward to reading more from this
author . Definitely a cracking debut .
Exclusive Blog Tour Feature from author
What Hasn’t Been Said Before
As
my dad always used to say, five pounds (dollars) and my advice will buy you a
cup of coffee. Orenda Books in London
has just published my first novel, The
Abrupt Physics of Dying. So coming
to me for “Tips for New Writers” is like going to an L-plate driver for tips on
doing the Dakkar Rally. What I can do
is refer an aspiring writer to the thoughts of some other, much more highly
qualified sources. In fact, a very quick
search will dig up so much advice to writers that if you read it all you’d
never actually do the one thing you have to do to be a writer: write.
Hemingway said it best: “whatever happened the day or the night before,
you’ve got to get up and bite on the nail.”
No excuses. Just about everything
you’ll find on this subject refers to this one, entirely evident but impossibly
difficult reality. No matter what you
do, if you don’t actually produce –
string words together on the page – you’re not a writer.
EH
spent a lot of time writing about writing.
Many writers have. EH called it a
discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. That’s a good word for it, what we do. It wasn’t until I started long-distance
endurance sport (triathlon) about fifteen years ago that I found I could
actually write long. Triathletes talk about “going long”. The Ironman is a 3.8 km open water swim, 180
km bike, and a 42.2 km run (marathon), back-to-back. Ten plus hours of non-stop racing. To me
it’s like writing, like getting published.
Before you commit to finishing something like that you don’t think it’s
possible. The training commitment alone
is outrageous. It takes discipline and a
lot of time. But you do it. A lot of the time it hurts like hell, but you
keep going. You make a lot of
mistakes. You learn. And then one day you’re crossing the finish
line, and that’s about what it feels like when you finally hold that published
first volume in your hand. The cause and
effect is all around you, in the cheering crowds lining the finishing chute, in
the smell of the pages the first time you riffle through them, that electricity
firing inside you. You decided to do
it. You did what was required. And you got there.
Hemingway
also said: “There is no use writing anything that has been written before
unless you can beat it. What a writer
has to do is write what hasn’t been written before or beat dead men at what
they have done.” To me, that’s the other
really important thing: trust your own voice.
Of course, so much has been written that it can be a daunting
thought. But the possibilities for the
written word are infinite – literally never ending. And what has been done is finite. Mathematics proves that the difference
between the two, the room for innovation, is still infinite. Martin Amis calls it the ‘War Against
Cliché.’ But it’s not easy. I guess that’s the thing about writing – it’s
hard. Push yourself across that last ten
kilometres when it’s 35 C under a crushing sun and everything hurts and that
blister on your right heel has burst and is wearing itself raw and the liquid
is sloshing around in your shoe and you’ve already been out there for twelve
hours and you just want it to be over and you don’t want it to end. So train hard. Physically and mentally. And be prepared to go long, in a way that
hasn’t been done before.
Author Paul E.Hardisty
The Abrupt Physics of Dying is published by Orenda Books and is available in paperback and ebook format.
No comments:
Post a Comment