The Mapmaker's Monsters: Beware the Buffalogre - Hardcover

Sid Smith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330480308 ISBN 13: 9780330480307

Publisher: Macmillan Children's Books, 2010

Synopsis

This is Jim Fraser's story: an account of his life as a deserter living through the Cultural Revolution in China. Fraser makes his home in a community so isolated that it has become the perfect location for experiments of indescribable terror.

About this title

Review

Journalist Sid Smith's debut novel is a brave excursion into little-known and alien territory. Armed with stocks of historical, political and medical information, he has somehow made the imaginative leap into a realm few understand: the sealed-off world of China during the Cultural Revolution.

James Stuart Fraser, a private in the British Army, deserts and ends up spending 35 years "among the unshiftable Chinese". Many of those years are spent in the wretched poverty of a village of the despised Miao people, where life revolves around the solitary buffalo. The incredible tedium of Fraser's rural subsistence (existence is too strong a term) is evoked in a taut prose, filled with enthralling and convincing detail.

However, as time passes Fraser grows aware of the pseudo-academic work going on at the clinic, where eugenicists wreak havoc with village life in their search for the scientific "truth" of race. As years suddenly pass in a paragraph, the pace races unannounced to thriller speed and the carefully wrought momentum Smith had achieved is lost. Notwithstanding, Smith has an important story to tell, and at its best, Something Like A House is very good indeed. --Alan Stewart

Review

"...Something Like a House is a moving and inspiring account of a people and a way of life which, against difficult odds, manages somehow to continue." -- John Burnside, The Scotsman - 13.1.01

"...it is an impressively well-researched and sensitively imagined picture of an almost unknown society as it comes up against state politics, told in haunting, piercingly spare prose which never fails to make an impact. Smith's next novel should be eagerly awaited." -- Anthea Lawson, Fiction Shorts, The Times - 10.1.01

"An advance copy of Sid Smith's Something Like a House forces my year to end in January 2001. Never mind the 'first-novel' tag: this amazing, authoritative tale of a deserter in China - the only round-eye in the Red Guards - stains the mind indelibly, like a beautiful, harrowing dream." -- Graham Robb, Books of the Year, Daily Telegraph - 11.11.00

"I suspect this book will be compared with Robinson Crusoe (the outsider building his own abode) and Lord of the Flies (the long-term effects of context on individual mortality). It is a profound and sophisticated work of fiction." -- Robert MacFarlane, The Observer - 21.1.01

"Smith is a mercurial stylist, his prose by turns confounding and comforting, earth-bound and star-gazing... Phrase-making of breathtaking beauty jostles with stunted English, poetic finesse with language of purely functional use. And all the time you are spell-bound, mesmerised by a disturbing arrhythmia, the most enduringly unsettling aspect of this haunting and original novel." -- Charlie Hill, The Independent on Sunday - 21.1.01

"Smith's narrative is beautifully spare and lean without a trace of sententiousness; his unemotional tone contrasts pognantly with the sometimes lurid and horrific events that engulf Fraser and the 'medieval' villagers. Once you start reading this book, ut everything else on hold. Definitely the bee's knees. Buy it." -- Malcolm Reid, Time Out - 24-31.1.01

"Smith's parable is haunting in its simplicity, and arrestingly told." -- Andrew Crumey, Scotland on Sunday - 14.1.01

"Smith's real achievement is to have created a work that is dense with politics, history and science, but which has a ring of absolute truth about it. It reads not so much as a novel about an experience but as one that renders the experience itself - startling, strange, unmediated." -- Melissa Denes, The Daily Telegraph - 13.1.01

"Smith's sparse narrative well evokes the bleak environment..." -- Lisa Darnell, First Novels, The Guardian - 13.1.01

"The beauty of the author's approach is the way in which he subverts our sensibilities through stealth, using language to tease wisps of mist across meaning, forcing us to look more carefully, forcing us to consider nuances that may ordinarily have passed us by. The result is a book that simultaneously eats away at your heart whilst challenging our very understanding of what a novel should be. It is an extraordinary debut." -- Charlie Hill, The Birmingham Post - 13.1.01

Edition details

• Publisher: Macmillan Children's Books
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0330480308
• ISBN 13: 9780330480307
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224