Eve's Alexandria

All Talk

Time for another reprint SFX review; I wrote this one for issue 187, of Karen Miller's The Prodigal Mage (book one of the Fisherman's Children series). On balance, I found it quite an annoying read, but in a way that hasn't put me off trying something else by Miller in the future; when it's good, it's really very good. Its main problem, as so often with high fantasy, is excess.

--

"I'm his father. What I say goes." Parents. They never learn, do they?

Miller's latest - first in a follow-up series to her debut duology - is packed with fathers (and occasionally mothers) making a mess of parenting. With breathtaking obstinacy, short-sightedness, and (almost) always the best intentions, her adult characters manage to find exactly the wrong thing to say or do in any given situation. Bold, brash son getting overly curious about dangerous magic? Refuse to let him learn to use it safely, hide the spellbooks, and if all else fails don't bother to explain your reasons, just shout - louder and louder as he gets older. What could possibly go wrong?

Naturally, the magic of said son, Rafel by name, may be the key to saving the kingdom of Lur from the evil power that is steadily draining life from the land. But Lur is as divided and fractious as Rafel's family; social tensions between the Olken people and their former overlords the Doranen hamper every effort to take action.

Miller is clearly a very talented writer: her characterisation is a masterclass in nuance and sensitivity, and she has a visceral way with action. But the race against time to save Lur is off-puttingly slow, consisting largely of people discussing what is to be done - and why they absolutely will not let their loved ones do it - in ever shriller tones. These dialogues are well-crafted, but get wearyingly repetitive. It's frustrating, because when the plot gets going (from page 200, in fits and starts), it's so good: a compelling portrait of a blighted world in the company of flawed,
fascinating people.

~~Nic Clarke

A Garden of Forking Paths

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary upon them.

There can't be much left to say about Jorge Luis Borges' (1899-1986) slim, astonishing collection of short stories, Fictions (1944) - nor many people who haven't already read it. It's now about six months since I read the book, and I've lost my notes in the interim, but it seems appropriately Borgesian to offer some rambling observations despite all this... :-)

The collections comprises 14 stories, written between 1936 and 1944, plus (in the second edition) 3 additional stories from 1952-3. The ones that I found most compelling all come from the first half of the book, subtitled 'The Garden of Forking Paths' (originally a separate collection, 1941). All of them are fantastical, or told in a fantastical register, infused with love for the imaginary, and a playfulness that merges the real and the surreal at every opportunity. There are portraits of invented worlds, lengthy discourses on fictional authors and made-up languages - even reviews of non-existent books:

It would be impossible to trace the adventures of the remaining nineteen chapters. [...] The story begun in Bombay continues in the lowlands of Palanpur, pauses for a night and a day at the stone gate of Bikanir, narrates the death of a blind astrologer in a cesspool in Benares, conspires in the multiform palace in Kathmandu, prays and fornicates in the pestilential stench of the Machua bazaar on Calcutta, watches the day being born out of the sea from a scribe's stool in Madras

(--'The Approach to al-Mu'tasim')

One story, 'The Library of Babel', contains an entire library of such imagined books: everything ever written, everything that ever could have been written, and every other combination (however nonsensical) of letters besides. "In order for a book to exist, it is sufficient that it be possible", the narrator tells us, and so the library is unimaginably vast: "The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries." No single inhabitant of the Library can ever begin to encompass its contents, of course, or even comprehend their scale, and so they tend to die unfulfilled, decaying amid the "endless" shelves without ever having made much of a dent in their TBR pile this vast repository of possibility. Definitely how I'll go!

It's all done in a style that is at once soaring and densely textured, outlined with a precision that is almost fussy, or would be if it weren't so frequently laconic. Sentence-by-sentence, the prose is packed with information. Perhaps by way of demonstrating his dictum quoted at the top of this post, again and again Borges assembles a wealth of off-beat references (historical, literary, cultural) and apparently tangential detail into bewilderingly rich fantastical canvases. So it is in 'The Approach to al-Mu'tasim', and also in 'Funes, the Memorious', a sort-of eulogy for a chap who spent his life seeing absolutely everything, with the improbable, imaginative accuracy of a poet:

With one quick look, you and I perceive three wineglasses on a table; Funes perceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compared them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once.

Even lesser stories, like 'The Shape of the Sword', still contain some wonderfully evocative lines in this vein, capturing whole stories in a phrase: "there were scimitars from Nishapur, in whose frozen crescents the wind and violence of battle seemed to be living on".

Many of Borges' narrators - who are often rather dry, unflappable, drawing-room types, like the librarian of Babel - are apt to fuss over these tiny 'facts' of the fiction. All the more when the playful absurdity of a story's concept is greater, and the landscape being painted is vaster and more colourful; they speak with the scholarly authority of the literary critic or the antiquarian, laying out for us the authentically-dusty trail by which they came across this impossible revelation or that high adventure.

Take the excellent opening story, 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', which not only gives us one of the collection's best and most characteristic lines ("In life, Ashe was afflicted with unreality, as many Englishmen are; in death, he is not even the ghost he was"), but also introduces us to a fictional land in a fictional world - one that becomes more real the more the narrator investigates it. The whole thing is told retrospectively, the history of a personal scholarly endeavour gone live. Having heard an offhand reference to a place called Uqbar ("a region in either Iraq or Asia Minor", it is suggested), the narrator is spurred to try to track the place down, which appears in none of his books, save one.

He discovers that Uqbar is part of a whole different world, called Tlön, which was invented by a mysterious cabal and whose language has no nouns - one of a number of things that makes both it and its metaphysics fundamentally different from our own world.

At first we though that Tlön was a mere chaos, an irresponsible act of imaginative license; today we know that it is a cosmos, and that the innermost laws that govern it have been formulated, however provisionally so. Let it suffice to remind the reader that the apparent contradictions of Volume Eleven are the foundation stone of the proof that other volumes do exist.

But it does, nonetheless, work; and by the end of the story, Tlön and its meticulous rules have been embraced so enthusiastically, by a populace eager to follow any semblance of order (this is, we're reminded, the 1940s...), that it has begun to encroach upon our world. Its triumph looks certain, and our narrator rues the day he ever underestimated its power.

Another darkly mannered tale - my favourite, I think - is 'The Lottery in Babylon' (which, as the author himself notes in his prologue, "is not entirely innocent of symbolism"). Set in a - of course - fictionalised version of ancient Babylon, it describes how the titular lottery grew from a small-scale game, occasionally rewarding those who played with prizes (and then, later, sometimes inflicting punishments), to an inscrutable system that permeates every aspect of life in Babylon. So much so, that no-one even questions its utter dominance anymore:

Mine is a dizzying country in which the Lottery is a major element of reality; until this day, I have thought as little about it as about the conduct of the indecipherable gods or of my heart. Now, far from Babylon and its beloved customs, I think with some bewilderment about the Lottery, and about the blasphemous conjectures that shrouded men whisper in the half-light of dawn or evening.

I love that final line, how he gets so much that is suggestive of place and mood into a single phrase. There is such grandeur and strangeness here. The story may be, on one level, an extended metaphor for the operation of chance in human life ("Babylonians [...] obey the dictates of chance, surrender their lives, their hopes, their nameless terror to it"); later, we're told that the "Company" reputed to run the Lottery may not even exist, that the whole "sacred disorder of our lives" may be nothing more binding than tradition, or something as inescapable as random luck. Yet Borges does not stint on the atmospherics or the depths of his thought experiment. And so the world of his story lives:

Like all the men in Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment. Look here - my right hand has no index finger. Look here - through this gash in my cape you can see on my stomach a crimson tattoo - it is the second letter, Beth. On nights when the moon is full, this symbol gives me power over men with the mark of Gimel.

Other stories, while still partaking of the characteristic precision and allusiveness - and, often, the dry narrators - discussed above, dive into visionary feverishness. 'Death and the Compass', about a detective investigating a series of murders that seem linked with occult principles, turns the profusion of information into an expression of a mind losing its centre:

An Irishman tried to convert me to belief in Christ; he would repeat, over and over, the goyim's saying: all roads lead to Rome. At night, my delirium would grow fat upon that metaphor: I sensed that the world was a labyrinth, impossible to escape--for all roads, even if they pretend to lead north or south, returned finally to Rome, which was also the rectangular prison where my brother lay dying, and which was also the Villa Triste-le-Roy. During those nights, I swore by the god that sees with two faces, and by all the gods of fever and mirrors, to weave a labyrinth around the man who had imprisoned my brother. I have woven it, and it has stood firm: its materials are a dead heresiologue, a compass, as eighth-century cult, a Greek word, a dagger, the rhombuses of a paint factory...

Not just a man trying to convert him, but an Irishman; not just a prison, but a rectangular one; not just a cult, but an eighth-century one. All points of reference loop back into the world of the story, and the conceptual world of the narrator, enriching both.

In 'The Circular Ruins', meanwhile, Borges returns to the themes of 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' - but this time his viewpoint character is not watching the imaginary infiltrate the real, but actively participating in it ("He wanted to dream him completely, in painstaking detail, and impose him upon reality. This magical objective had come to fill his entire soul.") Like his author, he creates life through imagination, through words - but in more visceral detail than most novelists generally go in for:

He dreamed the heart warm, active, secret—about the size of a closed fist, a garnet-colored thing inside the dimness of a human body that was still faceless and sexless; he dreamed it, with painstaking love, for fourteen brilliant nights. Each night he perceived it with greater clarity, greater certainty. He did not touch it; he only witnessed it, observed it, corrected it, perhaps, with his eyes. He perceived it, he lived it, from many angles, many distances. On the fourteenth night, he stroked the pulmonary artery with his forefinger, and the the entire heart, inside and out. His inspection made him proud. He deliberately did not sleep the next night; then he took up the heart again, invoked the name of a planet, and set about dreaming another of the major organs.

(This story also has one of the other great lines of the collection: "At first, his dreams were chaotic; a little later, they were dialectical.")

And then some stories are quite simply bonkers (and funny). 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', is perhaps the apogee of the playful idea, serious execution juxtaposition I mentioned above. In it, he spins an elaborate - and, indeed, encomiastic - account of the eponymous man and his epic/quixotic quest to rewrite Don Quixote. Rewrite Don Quixote, that is, in the exact same words as the original: "Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which is surely easy enough - he wanted to compose the Quixote." The idea is, as our scholarly - of course! - narrator is at pains to point out, that being Cervantes and writing Don Quixote in the 17th century was "easy", indeed pretty much an accident of context; whereas setting out, intentionally, to write that precise book again in the 20th century, puts the whole thing in a new light.

Having rubbished Menard's detractors in suitably condescending scholarly fashion, the narrator compares two passages side by side; naturally, they're identical, but the different context in which the second Quixote was produced, in the narrator's eyes, transforms the meaning of the work:

"...truth, whose mother is history, rival of the past, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present and the future's counselor."

This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the "ingenious layman" Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hands, writes:

"...truth, whose mother is history, rival of the past, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present and the future's counselor."

History, the mother of truth! - the idea is staggering.

Bonkers. But brilliantly so.

~~Nic

The Flight of a Lifetime

  Did I mention that Esther and I are going to New Zealand in two weeks time? No? Well, I haven't really dared talk too much about it for fear of getting over-excited too soon. We booked our flights in January this year, in quite a drunken state - probably far above the safe limit for being in possession of a laptop and a credit card - and have been planning ever since.  The whole adventure was prompted by Esther's sister, who has been living and working in Wellington for the last year: in the circumstances it seemed silly not to take the opportunity to visit her and see the land of Lord of the Rings into the bargain.  I have always wanted to go, but never really took the idea seriously - its such a long way, and expensive, and I've never travelled beyond Europe.  Even now, with just 12 days to go until we take off, I can't quite believe we took the plunge and booked those tickets. Of course, if we'd known when we pressed the 'Buy Now' button on that fateful travel website how many more times we would find ourselves pressing 'Buy Now' over the next nine months, we probably wouldn't have plucked up the courage to do it.  Since we're spending three weeks travelling in both the north and south islands there has been an inordinate amount of organising and booking of internal flights (four in total - eep), ferries (one, at present), train journies (two), bus journies (two), bicycle hire (in three places), hostels (too many) and B&Bs (definitely too many).   It has been a most stressful and exhilarating experience.  Until now I never really understood the 'travel bug'; I have wanted to go places but I haven't relished the thought of long distance holidaying.  I get it now.  The anticipation, mixed with the uncertainty, mixed with the sense of liberation and adventure.  

Having gestated into a fully-grown, fully-planned trip over the last nine months, the time is almost nigh now.  And I'm in need of your reading advice. As you can imagine, flying from the UK to New Zealand is a truly long-haul experience: 24 hours in the air, plus lay-over time in the USA.  It turns out that choosing which books to take with me is the most difficult last-minute decision I have to make.  I have to take into account weight (not too heavy) and length (not too short, not too long), and I have to choose books that I'm willing to leave in NZ at the end of the flight - since I'll have to buy more books to fly home with, I can't afford to cart back those I took with me.

I've decided that two books, each about 500 pages in length, is my quota. Enough to keep me occupied, but not too much to weigh me down.  I have to remember that there will also be plenty of inflight entertainment. So far I've managed to decide on one of these books.  A few months ago I picked up my first BookCrossing book, left in a local museum, and I've decided it would be fun to pass it along somewhere in New Zealand. It couldn't possibly travel further from York than that!  The book is Shirley by Charlotte Bronte, and I'm just in the mood for it.  But what about the second book?  I've already got a Classic, so I want something contemporary. After an hour of vacillation and browsing I've narrowed it down to three possibilities, and would love your opinion on which I should go with.  The choices are:

1. Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz - This is the first book in the Cairo Trilogy and is set in Egypt just after World War I. The blurb describes it as 'a sweeping and evocative portrait of both a family and a country struggling to move towards independence in a society that has resisted change for centuries.'  It introduces the Al Jawad family - the tyranical, hypocritical Ahmad, a middle-class shopkeeping who runs his household strictly according to the Qur'an but dallies with the delights of Cairo; his three, very different sons; and his gentle, oppressed wife and cloistered daughters.  I've had it on the TBR shelves for a few years now and am drawn by the quote from the Independent on the back which compares Mahfouz with Tolstoy or Proust.

 

2. The Echo Maker by Richard Powers - I received a copy of the Jan-June 2010 Atlantic catalogue yesterday, and noticed that Powers had moved his new novel and his back catalogue to them. It reminded me how much I want to read this book, which won the National Book Award in 2006.  The synopsis sounds part psychological thriller, part commentary on the nature of the self.  It is about Mark Schluter, a truck driver who nearly dies in an accident on a remote Nebraska road. When his sister Karin arrives in the aftermath to take care of him he becomes convinced that she is not his sister.  Although she looks, acts and sounds like Karin, he is sure she is an identical imposter.  Meanwhile, armed with only a note left my an anonymous witness, Mark attempts to learn what happened on the night of his accident.  Sounds intriguing, yes?  I have read the first paragraph and must admit to being extremely impressed with the prose.

3. Acacia (Book 1: The War with the Mein) by David Anthony Durham - This is probably the most indulgent novel of the three, a high fantasy recommended to me by someone who doesn't ordinarily read fantasy and whose appreciation, therefore, speaks all the louder of its quality.  I won't give the synopsis because fantasy tome blurbs are always faintly ridiculous and this one is as impenetrable as usual, but it is enough to say it is almost certainly My Sort of Thing.  Epic, blah, defiance of conventions, blah, morally ambigious, etc. You get the gist. While there is a part of me that wants to take Powers or Mahfouz because I want to read those novels desperately, and what better time to tackle a long-term TBR shelf resident than when trapped 30,000 feet in the air, there is another part of me that thinks they're too serious and dense (particularly because my other book is Bronte). Wouldn't a fantasy epic be the perfect anecdote to the trauma of flying and jet-lag?

What do you think? Has anyone read these books and loved/hated them? Votes in the comments much appreciated.

~~Victoria~~

 

The Booker Prize Announcement...

UPDATED, 7th October: Justice has been done. Hurray!

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...is tonight, and I'm sure I won't be the only blogger tuning in to the radio or the television to find out the winner with bated breath.  I've read five of the six shortlisted authors this year, which probably means that the book I've missed (Simon Mawer's The Glass Room) will win.   Personally I think the field is incredibly strong this year, and I'm not just saying that because I'm a historical fiction junkie.  Yes, Mantel, Byatt, Waters and Foulds have written great historical fiction (in Mantel's case, magisterial) but their novels also represent great fiction generally. 

I don't think you'll be surprised to hear that Wolf Hall is my favourite to win. I feel quite strongly about it - it feels necessary.  I read an interview with Hilary Mantel in the Guardian in which she described her despair when a particular novel failed to make the Prize shortlist several years ago.  She wept because it seemed impossibly unfair.  I think I would feel the same; although there would be less weeping and more raging on my part.  Saying that, there is no book I have read that I absolutely do not want to win.  I think I would be disappointed if The Quickening Maze took it, simply because I feel Foulds can and should do better.  For the rest, I'd cheer for Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger (her best book to date I think) if it won; and I can see the real merits of both A.S. Byatt and J.M. Coetzee.   But my pleasure would be strained, because I would be thinking of that week reading Wolf Hall and the intense, continuing and probably permanant pleasure it gave me. 

Here are the books I've read in order of preference:

1. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

2. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

3/4. The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt tied with Summertime by J.M. Coetzee

5. The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

We shall see if the judges agree with me...

~~Victoria~~

Faded, with a Core of Steel

Celeste's back was curved but, like the Nautilus, she had a core of steel. This building inspired by a spiral shell with a series of air-filled chambers was the fulfilment of a dream.

I read Shena Mackay's Orange Prize-shortlisted Heligoland (2003) quite a while ago - six months, give or take - but my inner completist has never quite let go of the urge to write about it, however distant many of its details now are. It was one of my reading failures this year, and so this brief post is intended as a gesture towards understanding and expressing my frustration with it. (The short answer, of course, is that it's Not For Me; but I want something more than that.) I also suspect more than one of my co-bloggers here at EA would like it rather more than I did, so perhaps they'll find this piques their interest. :-)

The story centres on Rowena Snow, a mixed-race woman (Indian/Scottish) whose life, we learn through flashbacks and reflections during the main narrative, has been more rootless than most: she grew up at a boarding school, a year-round resident of the sort of deconstructed, faintly hippy-ish establishment where children are encouraged to pursue 'projects', get in touch with their feelings, and talk to their teachers as equals. For Rowena, who has very little sense of who she is or where she belongs, it's all a bit of a disaster. After the closure of the school, she drifts into aimless, unassertive adulthood, and ends up working for an agency that provides home carers for the elderly and infirm. Being compassionate and well-meaning, it suits her, but proves an emotional trap for one so self-effacing and naive.

She can see Pipe-Cleaner Man lying in his curtained front room. It's a parallel universe, a world of hospice transport that doesn't turn up, meals on wheels, painful infirmities and indignities. Days lit by low-wattage light bulbs and warmed by one-bar electric fires and measured out in pills and dressings and patent remedies, at the mercy of a procession of strangers earning less than the minimum wage.

Passages like this had some resonance for me, having recently watched my late grandmother struggle against the dual tide of illness: physical suffering, and the slow, poisonous decline of autonomy that accompanies it. But it isn't what the book is about, except as a thematic parallel. As the novel begins, Rowena is shocked out of her life when she is falsely accused of stealing from one of her clients, and summarily fired.

Numb and half-broken, she makes the sort of dotty lifestyle change that people only really do in literary fiction: she packs up her stuff and invites herself to live in the Nautilus, a South London architectural folly (shaped like its underwater namesake) that was once home to a bohemian/utopian community. It was, we're told, "designed as a working community at the heart of the wider community", and Rowena imagines it as a sort of promised land of the self, the Heligoland of which she dreamed as a lonely child. But, left behind by the times, the Nautilus is a washed-up, crumbling shadow of its former self:

age was corroding its complex interior and, by the start of the new millennium, there were few visitors, the ultramarine piano in the Nautilus Bar was dumb and all the original residents but Celeste and Francis Campion were long gone, and ideas and ideologies were broken glass and crumpled paper

The remnants of its community, rattling around its many rooms, are matriarch Celeste Zylberstein, who designed the place with her late husband Arkady, somewhat flaky wide-boy Gus Crabbe, and ageing poet Francis Campion:

The covers of Francis' books, faded to the colour of dusty tea and embossed with the Nautilus Press colophon, enclosed experimental verse and political satire as well as lyric and pastoral poems, but now that the world had gone beyond satire, he saw how his youthful absurdism was but a product of his era, odd-shaped piece in a jigsaw puzzle.

Rowena soon installs herself as cook, cleaner and all-round low-key cheerleader for the Nautilus, finding a certain freedom in her eagerness to please others, if not yet - stop me if you've heard this one before - finding herself. It's an intriguing set-up, and Mackay's descriptions evoke the fading ambience very well; some of her imagery is quite lovely, helping ground the story in its vivid surroundings and its characters' moods (like this, from Rowena's childhood: "The child's response was shaken out of her in a shuddering lamb's bleat as home at last they came to the cottage friezed with icicles").

And yet, as I so often find with literary fiction of this type, the story told in this prose is... dishearteningly banal, and overly familiar. It's another story of mildly-unpleasant people being mildly unpleasant to each other, and eventually reaching mild emotional epiphanies in the "sullen south London rain". It has touches of humour, some mild frissons of peril, and Rowena was well drawn, but above all the narrative often feels smothered in that curious, dissatisfying mixture of voices - character and authorial - that reminds me of something like Arlington Park, by Rachel Cusk. Take this, Rowena's crisis when faced with a potential competitor for what she sees as her place at the Nautilus:

"You must leave at once. Now. Before it's too late."

"How melodramatic! You sound like some ghastly horror film," Izzie titters, but smooths the Elastoplast protectively over her grazes. "What on earth do you mean?"

Rowena can't say that this woman with her crazy radiant simper has hijacked her own initial responses to Celeste and the Nautilus, and poses a threat to the balance of the little family of Celeste and Francis, Gus and Rowena. It is imperative that she remove her netball player's knees from Rowena's territory before they become fixtures.

I love the creative snark of "crazy radiant simper" and the bathos of "netball player's knees" - both feel like Rowena's observations, and have an infectious ring to them besides. But "hijacked her own initial responses" and "poses a threat to the balance" sound too much (to me) like an author interpreting her character for us, leading us to conclusions we'd already reached. Already not really grabbed by the drifting, rather dreary story, I began to feel stifled by the ponderous over-analysis.

There are moments when the obsessive second-guessing works; I much preferred the reflexive but raw self-doubt of something like this (again from Rowena):

"I could tell, from the way she trusts you."

But I'm only pretending to be nice so everybody will like me.

But like I said, maybe it's just Not For Me.

~~Nic

The Vaulted Sky

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

I first read John Clare during my first semester at University - our syllabus was a whistle-stop tour of poetry from Chaucer through to Heaney.  We were reading four or five poets a week, and Clare came lumped with Burns, Wordsworth and Coleridge.  Not surprising that his peasant pastorals were passed swiftly over in such illustrious company.  I don't remember very much of what was said on him in lectures; at least, not about his poetry.  But I have always remembered a little of his biography: the son of a poor illiterate labourer, born in a nowhere Northamptonshire village, who briefly took the world by storm with his poetry of rural life before ending his life broken and forgotten in an asylum. And then there is his incredible walk - penniless, half mad and alone - all the way from a private asylum in Essex back to Helpston in Northamptonshire.  It is a truly iconic moment in literary biography.

Adam Fould's second novel, The Quickening Maze, takes Clare for its strange and wonderful lynch pin. It is set in 1840/1 (just before the famous walk), the action taking place at Dr. Matthew Allen's Beach Hills Asylum in the Epping Forest where Clare was held between 1837 and 1841.  The plot, if the novel can be said to have such a thing, is beautifully simple, charting the inexorable decline of Clare's mental state and the unloosing of his self-hood which categorised his later life. His story brackets the novel, which opens with a prologue recalling his childhood and ends on the road to Helpston. Gathered inbetween is a cast of characters, some real historical figures, some not: Alfred Tennyson, for example, in mourning for his beloved friend Arthur Hallam, the Allen family and a religious ecstatic called Margaret. But Foulds, like Clare, is a poet and this is a poet's book: it is about words, not events. What happens in it is not really the point.  I mean, there are incidents (a woman is raped; another is courted by a bluff manufacturer; a business investment goes horribly wrong) and historical thematics, but these things are not the point. Its focus, its langorous movement, is a homage to one form in the guise of another. Prose serving poets and poetry.

I find poetry difficult; it doesn't make immediate sense to me. Which is not to say that I can't appreciate it - I have studied poets and, with help and effort, found inspiration and understanding. It doesn't come naturally though; it is not the same as when I read prose, and fall in love instantly.  This probably means that I am a limited reader, but it also means that I very much appreciate what Foulds' does in translating one medium into another in The Quickening Maze.* It almost seems like a cliche to say that it is 'beautifully written', so instead I will say that it is sensitively and thoughtfully written.  For the most part it is about the experience of life through words, about how language - the words we conceive and what we understand by them - shape us.  Thus there is Clare's relationship with nature, which drives him to the edge of reason; and Margaret's relationship with God, which subliminates her selfhood; and Matthew Allen's relationship with his own genius, which only serves to highlight the shortcomings of everyone else. It is a meditation on nature, and how it impacts on our emotions.  It is also about life's velocity, the way it feels quick-slow-quick, so that we run and then walk and then run again. This is an effect not dissimilar from the effect of metre in poetry; it is novel with great rhythm.  Let me show you what I mean; a short passage will do.  It occurs early in the book, when Clare has been tramping the asylum grounds like a dog on a short leash:

Ants fly over, carry beyond him. He can’t follow them further. Like a lock gate opening in a canal, the water slumping in, his heavy rage returns. He presses himself to the tree, looks down and sees the roots reaching down into the earth. The admiral’s hands. He has them himself for a second, thick, rooty fingers, twisted, numb. He shakes his hands and they’re gone. They reappear at his feet, and clutch down. The painful numbness rises, his legs solidifying, a hard rind surrounding them, creeping upwards. He raises his arms. They crack and split and reach into the light. The bark covers his lips, covers his eyes. Going blind, he vomits leaves and growth. He yearns upwards into the air, dwindling, splitting, growing finer, to live points, to nerves. The wind moves agonisingly through him. He can’t speak.

The prose is almost sexual; the writing intimate, and acute, conveying such an intense oneness with nature, at once terrifying and thrilling. 

I note that some Amazon reviewers of the novel struggled with it, because Clare and his history were not familiar to them.  Which led me to wonder if prior acquaintance with the characters and period is a necessary with this book. Like all historical novelists working with real individuals Foulds is plumbing (and therefore, expecting) a depth of foreknowledge in his readers; it is this foreknowledge that allows him to offer up nuggets of fact so sparingly. It strikes me that The Quickening Maze must seem a very vague novel without a ready built structure of events to support it. Similarly, it must help to know at least some of the poetry (Clares' and Tennysons') that weaves in and out of the text. So much so that I would say it was an inaccesible novel, if it wasn't clearly worth it for the words alone.

It is true, though, that words alone do not a novel make. Character is necessary too, and Foulds has some acute observations to make about his lead actors, namely Clare, Tennyson and Matthew Allen. He inhabits them well, drawing out their conflicts and impersonating their idiosyncracies.  He is not so good at his female characters (although Margaret is something of an exception).  Hannah Allen, for example, is the novel's inevitable passionate teenager, but any subtly in her character is warped out by a trajectory that carries her through a romantic obsession with Tennyson to a respectable marriage to a factory owner.  Her mother, Eliza, is almost entirely missing from the narrative, although it is possible to see this as intentional.  Like many women of her age she is taken for granted, by her husband and her children, the Angel in the House, taking care of the practicalities while the rest of the world swims about in a current of experience and feeling. Possibly Foulds intended her as the unsung helpmeet, offstage.  But I am unconvinced.  The rest of the novel does not reflect contemporary wisdoms in this way, and the narrator is omniscient, so it feels like an omission.

Perhaps it is because The Quickening Maze is better at extrapolating from historical realities, and building upon individuals who have left figments of themselves in poetry, biography and PhD theses, than it is at the purely imagined person.  Foulds is a master at extrapolation, at enlarging and imagining from life, but he is not so sure or so deft at the act of creation. He writes with an inspired grace about things he has experienced - like forests, and food, and the sky - and likewise translates his research. In that sense he is a poet successfully transitioning into prose.  However, he does not (yet?) have the great novelist's knack for playing God - for giving birth to something entirely fresh and new. We must continue to await his final transformation - poet into novelist - with anticipation. The Quickening Maze is not quite there yet.

~~Victoria~~

* Notably Esther, who does have a natural affinity with poetry, did not like the book as much as I did. She found it forced, and occasionally overwrought.  It would be interesting to know if other poetry fans felt the same.

Unlikely Reads: P.J. Parrish - Dead of Winter

 I sometimes receive unsolicited review copies of books I wouldn't dream of reading.  Mostly thrillers, some romance, the odd bit of crime fiction.  I imagine this is true for anyone who has requested books from publishers in the past - your name goes on some mailing list and, at intervals, books get fired at you unrequested. For the most part these books find their way into charity bags, or onto Bookmooch.  The odd one finds its way onto a book shelf, only to be weeded out at a later date.  Very occasionally, though, I pick one up and start reading it. 

Last week I was browsing around my shelves eating breakfast, and picked up a crime thriller that arrived the day before: Dead of Winter by P.J. Parrish, published by Pocket Books (an imprint of Simon & Schuster).  I read the blurb - police officer looking for refuge and a quiet life moves to the Michigan wilderness only to find himself investigating a serial killer targeting local cops - and smirked a bit. There were plaudits on the front cover from Michael Connelly and Lee Child, whose names I recognise from the best seller lists, and the dreadful tagline 'Revenge is a dish best served cold...'.  Straight to the charity shop, I thought, but opened it anyway.  The epigraph was Nietzche: Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.  I read the first three pages.  A police officer was murdered; the tension was good and the writing wasn't bad.  So I did the fatal thing: I put it in my bag and took it to work.  I finished it this morning, all 390 pages of it.

Did I enjoy it? Absolutely. Would I read another P.J. Parrish? Almost definitely.  Was it good? Hmmmm. Yes, and maybe, and not really.  Dead of Winter is a marvellously formulaic book - you know what you're getting from the moment you begin to read.  Louis Kincaid, the police officer seeking a quiet life in Loon Lake, Michigan, is obviously going to solve the crime by putting his life in danger; his shifty partner, Jesse Harrison, clearly knows more than he is letting on; and what are we betting that the culprit is right under our noses.  By page 40 I was pretty sure I knew 'whodunnit', and it turned out I was more or less right, give or take a few details. The crimes are not eccentric; the clues are your usual cliches - calling cards left by the bodies, and watches that have stopped several hours after a murder, that sort of thing; and the motives are pretty clear cut.  So why keep on reading? 

First, because it has been a while since I read a book which knows exactly what it is about: out with the complex themes, in with the clear-cut.  Second, because it is a relief to read a book written solely for entertainment which is so cleanly and professionally executed.  It turns out that P.J. Parrish is actually a pseudonym for two sisters, Kristy Monty and Kelly Nichols, and that Dead of Winter is the second in a series of novels featuring Louis Kincaid.  Kelly supplies the plots, while Kristy does most of the writing.  When I first read this I was slightly disappointed - I prefer the idea of a novel as the product of a single consciousness - but I shrugged it off because it makes so much sense in context.  Dead of Winter feels like a book negotiated between two minds. All its rough edges have been polished off by being rattled around.  Which is not to suggest that there isn't the odd clunky line, or nugget of cloying sentiment.  It isn't Shakespeare, and I can't concur with Lee Child that its 'beautifully written', but its certainly neatly written.  More importantly, the dialogue is crisp and fluent.  It trips very easily along and begs to be read.  It is probably this quality that got me hooked in those initial pages. 

Finally, it has ambition in terms of character.  Louis Kincaid is unexpected, not because he is bi-racial (although this is made more interesting than I initially predicted), but because he is so young (just 25) and so unjaded.  All the series' detectives I'm familiar with - Rebus, Wallinger, Frost - have been hardened and roughened by experience; their 'issues' are like shrapnel, so deeply embedded in their spines that they can barely bend.  In contrast Louis is soft and tender.  Of course he has a personal history - an alcoholic mother, unresolved anger at his white father, guilt over his neglect of his foster-parents - because this is what we require to justify his drive to be a police officer.  But he isn't utterly damaged, and I like that because it suggests that his creators see him as a person rather than as an archetype.  Similarly his relationships are dynamic and interesting.  He isn't emotionally constipated like so many of his peers; he hasn't buried his empathy so completely in order to protect himself from a surfeit of feeling.   Dead of Winter is particularly good at drawing out his complicated loyalty to Jesse Harrison, whose temper sometimes expresses itself in racial taunts.  Harrison is haunted by a difficult childhood and sickeningly desperate to play 'cop', partly for the power it gives him and partly for the sense of honour and meaning.  His role in the book is half cliche (inevitably), but also something else.

There is also the decision to set the book in the 1980s - in fact, in 1983, the year I born.  This creates a smoother path for the development of the race theme, but also allows the authors to get playful with gender prejudice. The best encounter of the book is between Louis, who is used to causing consternation amongst the predominantly white communities he polices, and a female Sheriff, who causes him similar consternation.  I read online that the Parrish sisters have recently started another series of crime thrillers with a female protagonist, and I can see how fertile that ground will be.  I'm looking forward to reading more from them, and will probably back-track to pick up the first Kincaid book, Dark of the Moon.  Not because P J Parrish is the next Ian Rankin, a crime writer about to break the genre barrier and become mainstream, but because when I'm looking for a canny, compelling guilty pleasure I could do much worse. 

~~Victoria~~

Those Magnificent Kinden in their Flying Machines

As promised yesterday, here's a reprint of a review I wrote for SFX magazine, issue 186 (Sept 2009). It's about the third volume of the 'Shadows of the Apt' series: Blood of the Mantis, by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

(My reviews of previous volumes in the series are here and here.)

--

This is an intriguing development: a fantasy series whose third book is actually shorter, by some two hundred pages, than either of its predecessors. To be encouraged, we think.

There are reasons beside the pagecount to give this a look. While the first volume introduced the high concept – an industrialising humanity shares physical and mental traits with insects – with a quest structure and some adolescent protagonists, the second gave us all war all the time as the Wasp Empire’s conquests spread. Blood expands the scope further, and brings a richer diversity of tone. We travel to fascinating new societies, like swampy Jerez and the sinister, semi-mythic cities beneath its neighbouring lake. Particularly well-drawn is Spider-ruled Solarno, whose fractious politics boils down to “shouting”, as snappy, appealing new character Taki puts it. A Fly pilot, Taki is in some of the book’s best sequences: aerial dogfights with the Wasps.

With so many storylines jostling for space, the (relative) brevity is not an unqualified good. Two compelling strands take place largely offscreen: Dragonfly noble Salma’s successes as guerrilla leader and his increasingly revolutionary turn (he has, we’re told, "a smile baked hard and sharpened to an edge"), and halfbreed Totho’s slide towards the Dark Side as an artificer collaborating with the Wasps, who justifies the brutality of his growing power to himself by recalling past slights incurred for his mixed lineage. Plotting and prose are still rather by-the-numbers, and the occasional cliffhanger chapter endings are clunky rather than suspense-building. But this leaner instalment goes to interesting places, notably its exploration of how culture clashes between kinden affect even the most intimate relationships, and the way war warps aggressors and defenders alike.

--

Tchaikovsky’s website contains a number of original short stories set in this world – including contributions from guest authors and fans. While browsing the site I also learned (from a comment near the end of this thread) that he's planning at least 10 books in the series!

~~Nic

In the Grim Darkness of the Lowlands, There is Only War

Preparing to re-publish another SFX review - of the third volume in Adrian Tchaikovsky's fun, and increasingly interesting, 'Shadows of the Apt' fantasy saga - I realised that I forgot to put up my review of the second instalment. (May have had something to do with the fact that I wrote the review three days before handing in my doctoral thesis; was a touch distracted, perhaps.)

So, here it is: Dragonfly Falling.

--

Middle book syndrome. (Or, increasingly in epic fantasy, middle three-books syndrome.) We all know it: since the story neither begins nor ends here, many authors seem disinclined to let anything begin or end here – giving us, instead, lots of middle and little forward motion.

Dragonfly Falling resumes the tale of an industrialising world whose human races share physical and mental characteristics with insects: Bees fly, Mantids are ferocious fighters with inbuilt claws, Ants have hive minds. Happily, it avoids many of the typical middle book pitfalls. Tchaikovsky introduces new characters, opening up fresh perspectives and threads in his plot, just as the Wasp Empire is opening up new fronts in its war with, well, everybody. The world is thereby broadened and deepened, to its benefit: the contrasting cultures of Ant cities Sarn and Tark add welcome nuance to the core idea of inherited traits, as do the increasing numbers of halfbreeds and free spirits we meet. Biology, perhaps, is not destiny, and the character development is excellent.

The pace and tone show less variety. There are a lot of balls in the air, plot-wise, but most amount to the same thing: war. With the invasion of the Lowlands in full swing, not a chapter goes by without people fighting, preparing to fight, or talking about fighting. Between the siege of Collegium, “city-state of tinkerers and philosophers” and home to Book One’s protagonists, and the refreshing frequency with which people switch sides, there is a lot going on; but too much that is too similar to hold the reader’s interest throughout.

--

There are also a number of new kinden introduced in this second volume, including Fire Ants and a creepy Mosquito (who is, entirely appropriately, a sort of vampire). Thankfully, the Slugs are apparently no longer with us...

Review number 3 will be up tomorrow!

~~Nic

Africa, like a fever (or More Doris Lessing)

There are two short prefaces to my edition of This was the Old Chief's Country: Volume One of Doris Lessing's Collecting African Stories (which was published in 1973).  The first is from the 1964 edition (which was itself a reprint of the 1951 edition); the second is from 1973.  Both seem to reveal important things about Lessing as a writer, and particularly as a writer about Africa.  I'm beginning to suspect that it is in this guise that I most admire her - the desperate longing for the veld, and the burning injustice of the 'colour bar' (as she calls it) are the life's blood of the early work I've enjoyed so far.  In the 1964 preface she says:

Writers brought up in Africa have many advantages - being at the centre of a modern battlefield; part of a society in rapid dramatic change. But in the long run it can also be a handicap: to wake up every morning with one's eyes on a fresh evidence of inhumanity; to be reminded twenty times a day of injustice,. and always the same brand of it, can be limiting. There are other things in living besides injustice, even for the victims of it.

You can see this conflict very clearly in Martha Quest and in the short stories in This was the Old Chief's Country.  Martha, for example, is an essentially divided figure: half of her is utterly repelled and emotionally provoked by the racial injustice of the colonial world she lives in, but the other half is hard to it, ambivalent, even accepting.  It is this dual nature that leads her to attend radical political meetings one evening, and go dancing at the Sports Club the next.  Every time she works herself up into an idealogical frenzy, she is overwhelmed by the enormous horror of the reality and the smallness of her personal actions.  This leads her to stagnate, smug in her convictions but unmotivated to act upon them.  I can imagine a similar effect upon Lessing's psyche.  Perhaps it goes a little way to explaining why her writing is both raging - blistering, angry, unforgiving - and lethargic with brutal cynicism.  She is tired of the horror; her imagination is overloaded with suffering. 

I have been particularly struck by one story in the collection thus far, A Sunrise on the Veld.  This was one of those originally published in 1951 and, according to Lessing, largely ignored by contemporary critics.  In hindsight though I think it gives enormous insight into her writing mind, or her writing persona if you prefer.  It is very short and very simple.  A white teenage boy, giddy on his own power, wakes up each morning at 4.30am.  He dresses, collects his gun, calls his dogs and sets out to hunt on his father's African farm.  Each morning he follows the same ritual routine, holding his glorious young body in check until eventually, inevitably, it becomes too much and he bursts:

Suddenly it all rose in him: it was unbearable.  He leapt up into the air, shouting and yelling wild, unrecognizable noises.  Then he began to run, not carefully, as he had before, but madly, like a wild thing.  He was clean crazy, yelling mad with the joy of living and a superfluity of youth.  He rushed down the vlei under a tumult of crimson and gold, while all the birds of the world sang about him.  He ran in great leaping strides, and shouted as he ran, feeling his body rise into the crisp rushing air and fall back surely on to sure feet; and thought briefly, not believing that such a thing could happen to him, that he could break his ankle at any moment in the thick tangled grass.  He cleared bushes like a duiker, leaped over rocks; and finally came to a dead stop at a place where the ground fell abruptly away below him to the river.  It had been a two mile long dash through waist-high growth, and he was breathing hoarsely and could no longer sing.  But he poised on a rock and looked down at stretches of water that gleamed through stooping trees and thought suddenly, I am fifteen! Fifteen! The words came new to him; so that he kept repeating them wonderingly, with swelling excitement; and he felt the years of his life with his hands, as if he were counting marbles, each one hard and seperate and compact, each one a wonderful shining thing.  That was what he was: fifteen years of this rich soil, and this slow-moving water, and air that smelt like a challenge whether it was warm and sultry at noon, or as brisk as cold water, like it was now.

I hope you'll forgive the long quote - I wanted to write it out in full.  First, because I think its a lovely piece of writing (I'm a punctuation fiend, as you may know, and I love the way Lessing punctuates); second, because I think it captures something of Lessing's feelings about Africa.  Not the haunted, prejudicial, brutal colonies that she writes about elsewhere, but the country itself, as it would be in its purity.  The boy's tumult of joy, of raw energy, is bound up with the land he's running through, the air he's breathing.  Again, in the preface of 1963, Lessing writes:

I believe that the chief gift from Africa to writers, white and black, is the continent itself, its presence which for some people is like an old fever, latent always in their blood; or like an old wound throbbing in the bones as the air changes.  That is not a place to visit unless one chooses to be an exile ever afterwards from an inexplicable, majestic silence lying just over the border of memory or of thought.  Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.

I love that: like an old fever.  Only Doris Lessing could describe something she loves as being 'like an old wound throbbing'.  But that is what makes it so powerful.  When Lessing talks about loving Africa, she is not talking about a sentiment or an affinity. She is talking about a possession, a sort of corruption of her being, by something crushing in its intensity.  It is not always pleasant.  In some ways it is downright damaging.  A Sunrise on the Veld ends with the death of a buck, although it is killed by nature rather than by the boy's shotgun.  He comes across it screaming in pain, a broken leg having left it vulnerable to attack by a colony of black ants.  They swarm over it, tearing it slowly, piece by miniscule piece.  It is a horrifying death, and the boy watches it.  It comes into his mind that he should shoot it, to end its pain, but he doesn't.  He is overcome again:

It was a swelling feeling of rage and misery and protest that expressed itself in the thought: if I had not come it would have died like this: so why should I interfere? All over the bush things like this happen; they happen all the time; this is how life goes on, by living things dying in anguish.  He gripped the gun between his knees and felt in his own limbs the myriad swarming pain of the twitching animal, and set his teeth, and said over and over again under his breath: I can't stop it.  I can't stop it. There is nothing I can do...  The knowledge of fatality, of what has to be, had gripped him and for the first time in his life; and he was left unable to make any movement of brain or body, except to say: 'Yes, yes. That is what living is.'  It had entered into his flesh and his bones and grown into the farthest corners of his brain and would never leave him.  And at that moment he could not have performed the smallest action of mercy, knowing as he did, having lived on it all his life, the vast unalterable, cruel veld, where at any moment one might stumble over a skull or crush the skeleton of some small creature.

He 'could not have committed the smallest action of mercy'.  It is a shocking thing to write, and a shocking thing to think: that cruelty is inevitable and that pain is a given.  You can see how such a realisation could shape a person, if they could come to accept it as truth.  I am forced to recall a passage from Walking in the Shade, the second volume of Lessing's autobiography.  She is describing her feelings after the death of her mother, with whom she had always had a difficult relationship.  I'm paraphrasing from memory, so forgive any inaccuracy, but she writes about how she was filled with a terrible, pressing grief that verged on rage (it is always rage, with Lessing) - at the waste of her mother's life, at her own actions .  And then she writes about how brutally and quickly she suppressed it.  She doesn't quite say: C'est la vie. People die.  What is the point in crying over it?  But she almost does.  It was one of those moments in the book, and there were several of them, when I was forced to look into the heart and mind of someone whose workings are so radically different from my own and face up to their difference.  Perhaps these African stories give some explanation of it.  Perhaps it is Africa, in both its guises, as colonial nightmare and as terrifying landscape, that shapes Lessing's work more than anything else.  This is a new idea for me, because I have always thought of her very much as a 'Western feminist writer', but more and more I think that is a misguided assumption.  At least in her early work, and in her autobiography, she is very much a writer from and about Africa.

~~Victoria~~