Eve's Alexandria

Blackmoor Takes it All

I haven't had time yet to finish up my review of Edward Hogan's Blackmoor, which I read as part of the Desmond Elliott prize shortlist (which I haven't finished entirely. No suprise there).  But I'm very, very, very pleased to see the announcement that it has won the Award and the £10,000 that goes with it.

Hurray! I can't stress enough what a worthy and entirely beautiful debut it is.  I will be writing about it very soon, but in the meantime you can see short reviews here and here.  And of course, you could buy it and read it for yourself.  Here is a blurb to be a-tempting you:

“You said once that Blackmoor killed Mum.”
“I suppose you don’t think that a place can kill a person,” says George.
Vincent shrugs. “I just want to know how.”
“Slowly, that’s how.”

Bird-watching teenager Vincent Cartwright lives out a bullied, awkward existence not far from the site of Blackmoor, a mysterious, vanished Derbyshire village. His mother Beth, half-blind and unknowable, and her life and death in that same village has always been a dark family secret, but as Vincent comes of age he begins to search for the truth.

~~Victoria~~

Dust to Dust

The Desmond Elliott shortlist has gotten off to an incredibly good start.  Thus far I've read Edward Hogan's wonderful, wonderful, wonderful Blackmoor (which is settling in my mind before I write about it) and Nathalie Abi-Ezzi's excellent long-form debut A Girl Made of Dust.  I couldn't have asked for two more striking and ambitious novels. Both are predicated on a world composed equally of incredible violence and blessed grace. I think they both go some way to capturing that essential contradiction of our universal nature: that we hurt and even kill each other out of love.  And they both do it with such compassion.  In this sense they are 'big' novels, though relatively modest in terms of page count.

A Girl Made of Dust is set in Lebanon in the early 1980s, in a town in the hills above Beirut, at the height of the civil war that tore the country apart between 1975 and 1990.  Its soundtrack is a horrendous cacophony of bombardment, shelling and screaming, at first in the distant capital and then increasingly closer and closer. At its centre is a family stubbornly clinging to their lives, suffering, as all families do, because of national tragedies and everyday griefs alike.  Our narrator is Ruba, a young girl of maybe eight or nine years old, who tells us the story of the loss of her own innocence in a voice both hardened to terror and utterly naive.  Through her we meet her parents - Nabeel and Aida Khouri - her older brother Naji, her Teta (grandmother) and mysterious Uncle Wadih, as well as a handful of other adults and children who make up her circle of acquaintance.  Her mother's wealthy, haughty friend Juhaina and Ali, the crippled Muslim who roasts nuts for the local sweetseller, are just two particularly striking examples in a carefully delineated community. 

As the novel opens Ruba is at that utterly guileless stage of childhood, when you begin to wonder why and how things happen but the answers that suggest themselves to you are wild and superstitious.  Thus she believes that her Papi's depression - Nabeel Khouri has been slumped in his chair for as long as she remembers - is the result of a curse, cast by the witch who lives in the old house on the hill.  Magic is the only possible explanation for such adult behaviour. The old glass eye she finds in the forest near their home is a talisman that has the power to free him.  At the same time, and with the ironic, literal-minded insight of a nine year old, she cannot see how the little plastic Virgin Mary her Teta keeps on her dressing table could possibly be the mother of God.  When it is suggested to her that the Virgin protects her from harm she shrugs it off:

She was really only a bottle filled with holy water that you could see if you unscrewed her crown and I didn't see how she could have saved me... I didn't really want to hear about the Virgin Mary unless Teta put her into a story and made her do something exciting like swim out to sea, or play hide and seek with God, or dig a tunnel all the way to Beirut and live in it.

The world of a child is complex in ways that an adult could never understand, and vice-a-versa.  While Ruba's parents listen to the news of an Israeli invasion on the radio, celebrate the election of a new president and then mourn his assasination, all the while looking up at the Israeli and Syrian fighter planes roaring overhead with fear, Ruba has more important things on her mind. How will she release her father from his curse, for example? Why is her friend Karim different from everyone else at school? Who is the disquieting new girl, Amal, and why is she mute? A Girl Made of Dust articulates very well the mysteries of alternate perceptions.  And Abbi-Ezzi does it, most impressively, without turning her tale on one single misapprehension between adult and child (as in, for example, Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men) but showing through the tiniest subtleties how we all perceive our own peculiar world. 

If Ruba consciously thinks of the civil war going on around her at all, it is in relation to her brother Naji.  He is increasingly disaffected by his father's pathetic inertia, and obsessed with collecting the spent shells of the militias who roam the forests.  Ruba likes them too because 'I liked to weigh them in my hands, like large beads, or line them up end to end, or fit the smaller ones into the larger ones, if they were empty, or clink them together.'  She domesticates them into toys, ornaments or beads like the ones her father constantly worries during his long chair vigils.  She has very little conception of them as weapons, or at least not in a way she can articulate.  The conflict is so natural in her eyes; the shells have been screeching overahead her whole life, like particularly noisy birds.  When men go by in the street in their jeeps, firing their machine guns in the air she doesn't even flinch.  She cannot know that the world is turned upside down when it has never been any other way.  Similarly, she cannot express horror or hurt at the cruel death of people or animals, since it appears an inevitable part of life. True, she knows she would prefer if a parachute appeared from a plane going down; she would prefer that the older children did not tie birds to posts for the cats to eat; and certainly she knows it is upsetting for men to be dragged to death behind speeding cars.  But she cannot say these things are cruel, or injust, or torturous.  Her body reacts physically - she is struck dumb, paralysed, frightened - but her mind cannot rationalise or moralise it.  Abi-Ezzi seems to capture perfectly the terrifying extents and limits of a child's compassion, of their sense of right and wrong.

I don't want to give the wrong impression that this is a novel about the horrors of the Lebanese civil war.  Because Ruba is our window into the world we only ever catch sideways glimpses of its atrocities (although our adult minds, schooled by increasingly gory news bulletins, fill in the blank spaces).  The domesticity of her mother's cooking and her grandmother's household chores are more real and solid for her, and so form the backbone of her narrative.  A Girl Made of Dust is full of the warmth of baking bread, of the scent of herbs and spices mixed, of the sound of laundry pounded and plants lovingly tended.  The novel opens, for example, with a scene so perfect it could be a memory.  Ruba and her Teta are folding clothes fresh from the washing line 'that were stiff and bent in strange shapes from the sun.' Ruba struggles with a pair of trousers that 'didn't want to be made small', while 'Teta's hands were slow and heavy, and things obeyed them.'  It is an incredibly comforting, soft beginning to a novel about civilian life in wartime, and it sets the tone for what follows: Ruba's family and their homelife is like a pair of warm arms encircling the story.  Even when, by the end, they are reduced to huddling in their inner corridor as the bombs shake their house, there is still food and stories and mattresses to protect them from the outside.  In its way the novel is a paean to the comforts of a home.

Which is not to say that the Khouri family isn't troubled from within.  Ruba's house is not an entirely safe haven. Nabeel's depression, Naji's burgeoning militarism, Teta's dark dreams and Uncle Wadih's nefarious business dealings also run like threads through the novel.  But there is something mitigating in the clack of knitting needles, and the kneading of dough, that reassures us of the essential heartspace of a family.  There is a cliche hiding in it, which like all cliches is entirely true: what does not destroy us, makes us stronger.  Ruba's family is well and truly tested by the conflict in Lebanon, but it reaffirms their determined love and compassion for one another.

Throughout Nathalie Abi-Ezzi writes within a strict emotional register, which makes for prose passages and dialogue stunning in their restraint.  In the interview conducted with her at the back of the book, she admits that A Girl Made of Dust was a longer novel, but that she ruthlessly cut scenes that seemed unnecessary or which could be made more powerful by oblique references.  You can see some of the scars where she has worked holes into the novel, in the same way that you can occasionally spot the editor's hand when watching a movie.  But in each case she has made a judicious choice: to show us, not to tell us.  More importantly, perhaps, she has excised all parts of the novel that Ruba could not have understood, or would not have considered important.  A child narrator is a tricky ask, but Abi-Ezzi handles it deftly.  Ruba only tells us so much; the rest we infere through her creator's skill.  The voice, too, is lovely.  It is eccentric like a child's voice is sometimes eccentric, but not cloying or affected.  Ruba occasionally describes something in a perfectly memorable and entirely unadult way; the August sun, for example, 'shone like Jesus'.  But she neither speaks beyond her years, nor like a puppet.  I would most definitely recommend spending some time with her.

~~Victoria~~

Into the concrete jungle

Samantha Harvey's The Wilderness is a terrifying and ambitious novel.  Terrifying because it is about the disintegration of the human mind, and ambitious because it is predicated on that old chestnut, the fallible narrator.  I'm of the opinion that fallible narrators are difficult creatures at the best of times - do it right and you question the very foundations of a reader's experience; do it wrong and your novel is a big fat fake - but a narrator with Alzheimers is something else altogether.  The question is not 'has it been done well?' but 'can it be done at all?' 

Jake is a recently retired architect in the middle stages of the disease, replaying the disjointed narratives of his life over and over in his head as though he is constantly on the verge of drowning.  He holds on to a series of 'facts': his first wife, Helen, is dead. His son Henry is in prison (although what he has done to get there is unclear).  He lives now with a woman he remembers as a sad old flame, but whom has since become his second wife.  The rest of his memories swirl about these central tenets in flurries of lucidity and uncertainty. The Wilderness is built on them, in alternating chapters. The first, third, fifth and so on are in the third person (mostly) and bear objective witness on Jake in the present; the second, fourth, sixth etc are in a discomforting first-third person hybrid.  That is, the tense is third person but the narrative is first person: we are in Jake's head, being told his thoughts and rememberings, apparently subjectively but with all the authority of objectivity.  This structure is artful for two reasons. Principally, it allows us to track Jake's real world deterioration and measure it against the increasing befuddlement of his internal life, but just as importantly it allows Harvey to retain the same prose style while reaping at least some of the benefits of switching in and out of different tenses.  She can sidestep the challenge of Jake's actually speaking - because it would be incoherent and horrendous, perhaps even impossible - by speaking as if she were him (which, of course, she is - cleverness, cleverness).

What are the things that Jake remembers?  First, and foremost, he remembers women.  The Wilderness may be a novel centred on a man, but that man is held together by memories of his mother, his wife, his lovers and his daughter.  They are the branches on which he hangs thoughts, and certain of their actions recur often, migrating from one context to another: his mother bringing out her chipped china cups for coffee, his wife cutting fruit, his lover, Joy, wearing yellow, his elusive daughter picking cherries.  These small actions of his women folk are key motifs in his life.  Along with others - a gunshot he once heard, and the cutting down of a wood - they are inserted into the crevices of his recall.  So often, in fact, that I was liable to lose patience after 200 pages of the sameness of his memoryscape.  But I suppose it is true that each of us can be boiled down to a handful of intense, sensory memories, so intense that they have become symbolic of everything we know about ourselves.

The other thing he remembers is buildings.  Not surprising for an architect, you might think. Yet it is not the technicalities that he remembers. A poignant scene early in the novel finds him sat in his office, just prior to retirement, reviewing some architectural drawings and completely at a loss to recall what they mean or what he is meant to be doing with them.  No, it is the feeling of buildings that he remembers, and his philosophy of human interaction with them.  Built into this is a surprisingly convincing apologetic for the concrete jungles of the 1960s, which Jake associates not with grey brutal despair but with a powerful yearning for freedom.  Visiting his son in the prison which he partly designed, he remembers how it was he decided to append a square concrete extension to its beginnings as an elegant Victorian manor house.  For him, back them, it was an act of subversion.  Now we would think it a desecration, but then it was a striking out against the establishment, a step on the road to liberation from the tyranny of mere aesthetics.  It was all part of a determination that human beings could be more than the beauty they created; they could live useful lives, in useful environments.  Life and buildings could and would be more than prettiness. 

Symbolism is something else that Jake remembers, or rather that Harvey remembers for him.  You could even say that all he remembers are symbols.  The cherry tree that dominates his memories of Helen and his daughter is a nexus of both hope and loss, although its starring role in the deaths of both his loved ones may be entirely imagined.  Similarly, the tensions in his marriage are expressed in the opposition of buildings: the faux-Tudor marital home that his wife loves and he finds distasteful in contrast to the moorland wreck of his childhood home that he dreams of resurrecting. 

It seems both courageous and foolhardy to use the unspooling threads of a ruinous mind as the backbone of a novel. The result is utterly and undeniably absorbing.  Reconstructing Jake's life is a detective exercise - can we, as readers, excavate the 'truth' about his past, pick out 'fact' from 'fiction'? What, for example, is the significance of the bible bound in human skin which Jake's mother gives to him?  Or of his advocacy for the state of Israel?  What about the letters his first wife continues to receive after her death?  Are they from a lover, or did he write them himself?  There are no answers of course, because there is no Jake, not really. There is only Harvey and her artfulness. This is the game that novels like this play so well.  It strikes me when I think of it: what a cruel, perfect trick a novel can be!  Leading us on, to speculate about more than what is on the page, only to whip objectivity out from under us and wear its subjectivity so brazenly.  The Wilderness reminded me, in this sense, of Ian McEwan's Atonement,  a novel which stirs up deliciously prickly questions about trust and reality in fiction. 

Harvey's narrative isn't quite brave enough, though, to inspire in me that same torrent of hate and love engendered by Atonement.  There remains tension, I think, between her determination to write from the principle of Jake's mental dissolution and to write her very best.  It is not always possible to meld the two, so that we end up occupying a disoriented middle ground, halfway between the first and third person: Jake's confusion on the one hand, and Harvey's authoritative prose on the other. I found myself yearning to hear Jake's voice; not just his thoughts, but his 'I'.  I wanted more of a linguistic mess-up; not just a mire of memory but of actual words.  A disorientation of more than facts.  What is his self like at the end of his illness?  We experience his memories and sanitized thoughts, but not his consciousness (because consciousness isn't entirely memories, is it?).  I found myself frustrated; wanting to get up closer to his experience. Not that Harvey's talents as a writer are in question - she is highly accomplished - only I feel she could have pushed the boundaries further.  She could have tried to move further into the subjective, or at least she could have pretended to do so a little harder.  The question, I suppose, is not whether she could have written this novel better - I doubt it - but could she have written a better novel about Jake's Alzheimers?  I think the answer to that question is yes, probably. 

I have read half a dozen reviews of this novel now, and all of them mention that it is upsetting.  I agree that it is, of course, both generally and personally. Certainly it gave birth to a paranoia about the inadequacy of my short-term memory - all of a sudden I seemed to be forgetting everything! Still, I don't think it tapped far enough into what is truly upsetting about Jake's disease. It didn't get far enough past the memory loss, past the confusion, and into the horrific dislodging of the consciousness, the thing in which everything else is rooted.  Perhaps this is an impossible ask; probably it is.  Perhaps Harvey has gone as far into the wilderness as it is possible to go.

~~Victoria~~

The Orange Prize, 2009

So, it's official: Marilynne Robinson has won this year's Orange Prize for Home.  Which is, of course, the only book on the shortlist that I haven't yet finished reading.  Still, after a mere 40 pages, I'm not surprised that it has triumphed. Or rather, I am surprised but pleasantly so, because books like Home (densely woven, unabashedly intertextual and theologically rich) don't usually win prizes.  It is a 'difficult' book certainly, since Robinson's peculiar genius is distilled to a single malt perhaps not to everyone's taste.  Already it is clear to me that it is less accessible than Gilead but just as brilliant, just as beautiful.  I think the decision in its favour is a powerful vindication of the Orange Prize's purpose, which is to bring world-class fiction by women into the public eye. Robinson is a top tier author, a literary heavyweight, whose winning defies the prize's stereotype as a parochial affair for lightweight fiction left out of the contemporary canon. 

Overall, I think this year's shortlist (and longlist too, to some extent) has been a glorious return to form for the Prize. The last few years have been more than lacklustre, full of the forgettable and omitting key players.  More than once I have sworn off it altogether.  But my belief in it is reaffirmed. It has successfully realigned itself with serious fiction, pushing the boundaries of our expectations in terms of theme and form, and disavowing the usual debate about 'women's fiction' in favour of, simply, fiction by women.  Hurray for that.

I still plan to write a two part review of the whole shortlist, because I have things to say about each novel but this is how I would rank them in order of preference (omitting Home, because I haven't finished it):

1. Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman
2. Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
3. Wilderness by Samantha Harvey
4. The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt
5. Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden

I must admit that listing them like that, 1 to 5, disguises the fact that Scottsboro, Burnt Shadows and Wilderness were all in the top spot at one time or another during the reading process. They are all flawed novels, I think, but flawed in an excellent sort of way.  Similarly Samantha Hunt and Deirdre Madden have been battling for last place.  The Invention of Everything Else began so well and ended so well, just a shame about what happened inbetweentimes, and Molly Fox's Birthday had flashes of promises that only served to highlight the pretentious failure of the whole.

So, what next now that the excitement is over for another year? Once I've finished Home I have an overdue appointment with Sarah Water's new novel, which has been waiting patiently for the last week. And then I'm toying with another prize shortlist, although a shorter one this time. I've been receiving press releases recently about the Desmond Elliott Prize, a biannual award for a first novel published in the UK.  Back in 2007 it was awarded to Nikita Lalwani's Booker nominated Gifted and the 2009 shortlist looks very interesting. Watch this space.

~~Victoria~~

Time in the Raw

"You're a very special young lady, Abigail Gentian," was what my mother told me on one of the many occasions when her ageless face addressed me from one of the house's panes. "You're going to do great things with your life."

She had no idea.

Somewhat belatedly (busy month), here is my final post on this year's Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist. (Previous posts are all linked here; the winner, announced at the end of last month, was Ian R. MacLeod's Song of Time.) Last but not least, then - more sort mid-table - comes the widescreen, epoch-spanning space opera House of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds.

The considerable scope of the book is signalled right in the (splendid) first line:

I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.

I was a girl then, a single individual called Abigail Gentian.

(Yes, I realise that's two lines, but I like them both!)

The narrative moves back and forth between three first-person points of view: there are chapters that look to the past, exploring memories of Abigail's past in her Gormenghast-esque home, growing from a pampered prolonged childhood into discomforting knowledge of her family's recent history; and chapters that look forward - six million years forward, give or take - to the epic journeys through space and time of Campion and Purslane, whom we gradually learn are two of Abigail's many clones (known by the rather lovely term "shatterlings").

The shatterlings of the Gentian Line, originally 1000 strong, spend their lives - which have been boosted by genetic modifications to something very close to immortality, it seems, although their numbers have suffered some attrition over the millennia through misadventure of various sorts - making great meandering circuits of the galaxy. These last for hundreds of thousands of years at a time, and are a mix of extremely well-equipped tourism, planetary engineering for hire, and occasional bouts of do-gooding/civilisational interference. At intervals (really long intervals), they meet to pool their memories of what they've experienced.

[Appropriately, it's now over a week since I started writing this post. Deep time blogging! Anyway...]

Some minor tweaks to the way their brains deal with memories go some way towards helping the shatterlings adapt to this way of life; but since, as one puts it, "'Our minds just aren't engineered to experience that much time in the raw'", more is needed. Their most important coping mechanism - and a recurring motif in the book - is their sleep technology, which allows them to spend as much or as little of the journey between two points in stasis (which they call "going into abeyance"). They are old, then, but not that old, and they meet other humans - or former humans; most organic life in the galaxy consists of beings that have evolved from humans - who are older:

"You were born that long ago [six million years], but I doubt you have experienced more than a few tens of thousands of years of subjective time. You are a bookworm who has tunnelled through the pages of history. Is that not so?"

The Gentian clones are not identical in the way that, say, twins are; rather, we're told, Abigail has modified each of them during their development, playing up some characteristic (physical, mental, emotional) in certain individuals, and different characteristics in others. They're not even all the same sex, which is a bit disappointing - an all-women space opera would've been something to see - although, given the way the plot works, perhaps not all that surprising. (People who know much more than I do about genetics tell me that this is impossible unless Abigail herself has a rare variant of Kleinfelter's syndrome; however, since Kleinfelter is the name of Abigail's nurse/guardian in the flashback chapters, I assume Reynolds is at least acknowledging the problem, although he never directly addresses it.) Thus, Campion is a man and Purslane a woman.

As the story begins, Campion and Purslane are making their way to a scheduled Gentian meet-up, with two passengers in tow: a robot (or a "Machine Person") named Hesperus, and an irritating aquatic critter called Dr Meninx (another product of evolution from humankind). The party is in no great hurry, and seem to spend much of the time having minor adventures (some of which turn out to be more relevant to the overall plot than others) and getting more and more delayed. But then, Campion, we soon learn (from Purslane), has spent the millennia turning procrastination into an artform:

He did not just put things off until tomorrow; he put them off for tens of kilo-years, until his delays and evasions consumed significant chunks of an entire circuit. His motto might have been Why do today what you can still do in a quarter of a million years?

They have other reasons to drag their feet; the pair not only tend to travel together - frowned upon by  Line custom, as each shatterling is supposed to see the world alone - but they are in a relationship. Purslane justifies this in flowery, but revealing, terms:

"I just don't think that an experience is worth anything unless you can remember it afterwards. [...] To see something marvellous with your own eyes - that's wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you'll both have that memory for the rest of your lives, but that each of you will only ever hold an
incomplete half of it, and that it won't ever really exist as a whole until you're together, talking or thinking about that moment ... that's worth more than one plus one."

Within the (suffocating?) communal identity of the Line, individuality and uniqueness are pursued through life as two halves of a pair; ironically, of course, these experiences can only remain uniquely incomplete if Campion and Purslane edit their memories before they share them with the rest of the Line (thus, too, selfishness seeps into the communal self).

One of the aforementioned adventures sees Campion - always looking to trade information, to further the Gentian Line's collective knowledge of the galaxy - swallowed (voluntarily and temporarily) by a sort of giant FutureLibrarian. This produces one of the great out-of-context lines of our time ("The peculiarities of the curator's digestive tract became apparent as I took in more of my surroundings"), although even in context it's entertainingly bizarre. This taste for the random, for the exotically batshit imaginative, is probably the most appealing aspect of the book; early on, we encounter "an outrageous confection of a planet: a striped marshmallow giant with a necklace of sugary rings". Reynolds does some very fun stupidly-giant-canvas description:

Four stiff black fingers reached from the dunes, each an obelisk of the Benevolence, each tilted halfway to the horizontal. The shortest of the fingers must have been four or five kilometres from end to end, while the longest — one of the two middle digits — was at least eight. From a distance, caught in the sparkling light of the lowering sun, it was as if the fingers were encrusted with jewellery of blue stones and precious metal. But the jewellery was Ymir: the Witnesses had constructed their city on the surface of the fingers, with the thickest concentrations of structures around the middle portions of the fingers. A dense mass of azure towers thrust from the sloped foundations of the Benevolence relics, fluted and spiralled like the shells of fabulous sea creatures, agleam with gold and silver gilding. A haze of delicate latticed walkways and bridges wrapped itself around the towers of Ymir, with the longer spans reaching from finger to finger. The air spangled with the bright moving motes of vehicles and airborne people, buzzing from tower to tower.

Indeed, there is little here that does not happen on a Giant Scale; I was particularly taken with the Dyson clouds: the practice of 'damming' stars by surrounding them with "thousands of ringworlds", since "there is nothing shinier [than ringworlds] in the known universe. That mirrored inner surface reflects everything, including neutrinos that would happily sail through fifty light-years of solid lead." The idea of using a wormhole as an enormous flamethrower (by anchoring one end in a star, and taking aim with the other)? Also very cool. Even the inevitable climactic chase sequence, good guys vs. bad guys, takes place over thousands of years, with the help of stasis/sleep technology...

When Campion and Purslane finally, belatedly, reach the gathering, the book shifts abruptly into thriller territory: the Line, they discover, has been attacked by forces unknown. Fewer than a hundred of the shatterlings survive to reconvene - with Campion and Purslane's timely help - on the planet described immediately above. A murder investigation - relatively speedy by the shatterlings' standards - is soon underway, with fingers pointed both within and without the Line.

The mystery's set-up is intriguing; but its resolution is, invariably, rather talky in execution, and almost a month after finishing the book I find it hasn't really stayed with me. A broader problem that I had with the novel, though, is that our two main narrators - Campion and Purslane - aren't nearly individual enough to justify the alternating viewpoints. Yes, I know, they're clones. Very possibly, indeed, this is part of Reynolds' point: the shatterlings aren't nearly as individual and autonomous as they think they are, and the ritual of sharing memories repeatedly draws them back into the fold from any divergence that may have taken place during a circuit. Perhaps this is signalled when, near the end of the book - near the start of the shatterlings' tale - Abigail is advised,

"They're not you, no matter how much you might wish them to be. They're your children. The more you try to force them to be like you, the more they're going to flare off in different directions like wild fireworks, the more they're going to surprise and disappoint you."

Perhaps, in response to this, she deliberately sets out to make them superficially different, so as to give them less apparent cause to rebel and go off like fireworks? Regardless, though, as a reading experience it rather lacks something, and it becomes increasingly difficult to shake the impression that Campion and Purslane get separate narratives simply so that we still know what is happening with both parts of the plot when they are forced apart.

Furthermore, whether or not Campion and Purslane are distinct individuals, they seem curiously wedded to heteronormative gender (here is Purslane under stress: "I pulled myself tighter against [Campion]. He felt fixed and solid, an anchor I could tie myself to"). So does the plot, large parts of which turn on female Gentians being threatened and/or rescued by their male counterparts. (There is one woman who does her own thing - a splendidly, horribly inventive extended torture programme in pursuit of information about the murders - but she is, alas, only a minor character.) This is, as I said above, disappointing, although I suppose it does function as an example of how the Gentians are in some ways hopelessly old-fashioned - if remarkably successful, still - in an otherwise mostly post-human universe. On which Niall has some excellent points: in many ways the shatterlings are still children, sleeping away the millennia while everyone around them experiences life directly, and grows up.

A fascinating scenario, then - I love the idea of the shatterlings as "fugitives from the past, envoys to the future", as one of Abigail's contemporaries puts it - but the story drawn out of it never fully engaged me, or quite did justice to the material. I did enjoy the way that the resolution to the murder mystery tied in with the flashbacks, but it was not enough.

If you want a taster of Reynolds, some of his short stories are available to read online (I really liked "Signal to Noise", from his collections Zima Blue and Other Stories, but unfortunately that isn't online).

~~Nic

In Which I Steal Memory Lane

 

I'm supposed to be writing a review of my first three Orange Prize reads today. It is on my To Do List and everything. But having sat down I find that I can't concentrate - it is an absolutely beautiful day outside and the sun is shining directly on my garden bench. It seems wrong to sit inside and type. Very wrong. 

Instead then, a lovely little meme that I stole from Niall at Torque Control (and which he stole from various other peoples). The idea is to list the books that most shaped your reading life as a child and young adult year by year, or by spans of years if your memory is as rubbish as mine. I like this idea, if only because it shows how unexpected our reading autobiographies are.  I would not, for example, have put Niall down as a childhood devotee of Little House on the Prairie but lo! he was. So, here goes:

Ages 6-8

Matilda by Roald Dahl - I actually remember when and where I read this. It was my first 'confident reader' book at school when, aged 7, I graduated from the set reading series onto the little shelves of books in the corner of the classroom. Loved it, still love it.

The Worst Witch Series by Jill Murphy - I got a set of these books for Christmas one year and read them endlessly. I seem to remember my favourite was A Bad Spell for the Worst Witch.

Ages 8-10

The Mallory Towers Series by Enid Blyton - I read other Blyton books but these stories set in a seaside boarding school were my favourites. I think they instilled in me a romantic view of education that never quite left me despite all those grinding years of poor state schooling.

The Amulet Stories by Edith Nesbit - Any Nesbit actually, apart from maybe the Railway Children (which I like more as an adult). Wakefield library had half a dozen 1950s hardbacks of her collected children's novels: The Treasureseekers, The Wouldbegoods, The Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet, The Story of the Amulet, The Enchanted Castle... I think I must have taken them out dozens of times.

The Dark is Rising Series by Susan Cooper - I think I would have read this towards the end of this period, maybe even when I was 11.  These dark novels about English folklore and myth probably led me on to read Fantasy in my early teens.

Age 10-12

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen - The 1995 BBC adaptation first screened around the time I turned 12. My mum and I would watch it together on the 'upstairs TV' and I read the book not long after. I think this was the first time I read a book and got so giddy at the end that I couldn't catch my breath.

Washington Square by Henry James - I think, although I'm not sure, that I read this before I read P&P. It was leant to me by a very enthusiastic, very young English teacher in my first year of secondary school and I stayed up all night reading it. I knew then that it was far too difficult for me to really appreciate but I loved it nevertheless. I believe this was also my first Penguin Classic.

The Plantagenet Saga by Jean Plaidy (a.k.a. Eleanor Hibbert) - At the same time that I was starting to read the classics I was also reading Jean Plaidy by the cartload, sneaking into the Romance section of the village library to dart off with 6 more.  It was the Plantagenet series, and particularly those starring Eleanor of Aquitaine, that set me on the path towards a degree in Medieval History. I often think I'd like to read them again, but I'm scared to, in case I'm disappointed.

Age 12-14

The Outlander Series by Diana Gabaldon - It was during this period of my early teens that my reading life went mad; I would go to the library and just pick things entirely at random. And so I have to include Diana Gabaldon's time-travel romances as a formative reading experience. These were the first books that I bought for myself from the adult section of a bookshop. They were the first books I read with explicit sex scenes in them. And when I got the internet a couple of years later they were the first books I reviewed online.  I still hold that they are highly superior examples of their genre. Also, the sex is good.

The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay - Again, I stumbled upon these at the library, my first adult Fantasy books, and a very good place to start with the genre I think. Of course I went on to ruin it all by reading lots of formulaic dross - David Eddings was a favourite, and Katherine Kerr - but I have Guy to thank for my continued penchant for High Fantasy.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson - I vividly remember reading this in the bath and deciding that I might quite like adult literary fiction after all.

Age 14-16

Bizarrely this is a bit of dead time in my reading memory and nothing specific stands out, probably because I read almost nothing but Fantasy series and old historical fiction from the 1950s and 1960s (because my little library lacked most things but not historical fiction from the 1950s and 1960s). Oh, and Terry Pratchett, lots of Terry Pratchett.

Age 16-18

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter - I pair these two together because I read them back-to-back when I was 16 and they've stuck in my head as somehow related. Around this time I was really beginning to think about feminism, and what it meant to be a woman writing.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson - I can't now remember who recommended this book to me now but it certainly resonated with my 17 year old self.

Does anyone else see a pattern here? Women, women, women. I wonder whether this is just a function of my memory, or whether I really did read more books by and about women all through my childhood. I'd love to hear fellow bloggers reading autobiographies, so feel free to make the meme your own.

~~Victoria~~

The Man Booker International Prize

A message in my inbox tells me that Alice Munro has won the Man Booker International Prize.  For some reason I'm incredibly pleased by this, despite the fact that I've not yet read anything by her.  She has loomed quite large on my literary landscape in the last few years and I have several collections of her work awaiting me on the interminable TBR pile.  I suppose this means I should move a volume of her short stories up a few spots. I hope she spends her £60,000 prize money wisely.

In other news, Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge is holding a women's literary festival - Women's Word - this June 13th-28th, with Ali Smith, Fay Weldon and Carol Ann Duffy as key speakers.  It sounds right up my street, but I'm afraid I can't tell you anymore about it as the website seems to be on the blink. (So be warned that the link may not work.)

Finally, have you heard the new Tori Amos album yet?  It hasn't really been out of the CD player all week at my house. Methinks this might be her most accessible and coherent album in years.

~~Victoria~~

Meanwhile, Elsewhere...

A quick self-promoting sort of note to say that my review of Juliet E McKenna's latest novel, Irons in the Fire, went up at Strange Horizons yesterday.

Irons in the Fire, the first in a new series from a new publisher for McKenna, is a typically rich, robust and unsentimental effort, which sees revolution brewing in Einarinn. Specifically, there is unrest in the coastal region of Lescar. Not that there is ever anything else in Lescar; it is not so much a country as a morass of mutually-hostile dukedoms, whose incumbents are engaged ceaselessly in making war on each other, and in squeezing out every last drop of Lescari blood and capital to fund those wars. Another characteristic of McKenna's books is that she is keenly interested where her characters fit into her invented pre-modern world, and how certain fantasy mainstays—women who live and travel alone, for example—can operate plausibly within its terms. In other words, farmboys tend to remain farmboys, and if they're fortunate they are able to scrape together the money to send their son to the town for a better education and a non-farmboy future. Or else the harvest fails, their lord extracts too much rent from them, and they join a mercenary band to die an early, bloody death instead.

Read the rest here.

A proper post, on Alastair Reynolds, will follow later this week.

~~Nic

The Samuel L. Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction

I received a press release a few weeks ago about the long list for the Samuel L. Johnson Prize and it made me want to cry. There were so many books on it that I wanted to rush out and read... Jonathan Bate's book on Shakespeare, Mary Beard's book on Pompeii and Adam Nicolson's history of his family home Sissinghurst; Holmes on science and the Romantics, Waugh on the Wittgensteins. Not to mention Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence, which I've been waiting five months for on the library's lending list. And no time, no time for any of them. *groan* Then, just eight days later the shortlist appeared, containing only one of the books I desperately covet but still looking like an interesting, thought-provoking prospect. I sense a trend in the direction of my reading this year. For some reason it is non-fiction that has mostly piqued my interest - when I go into bookshops it is the history and biography section that draws me in. New fiction receives barely a cursory glance. (Although, saying that, there are three novels out this month that I'm greedy for: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which I've had in proof for months, A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which I stroked covetously in Borders earlier today and, of course, Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger, which I'm expecting soon from the Book Depository. Yum.)

Here is that Samuel L. Johnson list in full (because it seems a shame to focus so soon on the final six), with the shortlisted books in bold. Perhaps you can enjoy them in my stead.

 

Lords of Finance: 1929, The Great Depression and the Bankers who broke the Worldby Liaquat Ahamed (William Heinemann)

Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate (Viking)

Pompeii by Mary Beard (Profile Books)

A Fork in the Road by Andre Brink (Harvill Secker)

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain De Botton (Hamish Hamilton)

Science: A Four Thousand Year History by Patricia Fara (Oxford University Press)

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (Fourth Estate)

The Lost City of Z by David Grann (Simon and Schuster)

Leviathan by Philip Hoare (Fourth Estate)

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes (HarperPress)

A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families by Michael Holroyd (Chatto & Windus)

Darwin's Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England by Steve Jones (Little, Brown)

Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar (Icon Books)

The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus by Julian Marozzi (John Murray

Hester: the Remarkable Life of Dr Johnson’s ‘Dear Mistress’ by Ian McIntyre (Constable)

A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland (Granta)

Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History by Adam Nicolson (HarperPress

The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS by Elizabeth Pisani (Granta)

The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War by Alexander Waugh (Bloomsbury)

~~Victoria~~

Excuses, excuses...(and an Orange aside)

Blogging has been nigh on impossible for the last few weeks, and will continue to be impossible for a few more I fear.  There is nothing I’d rather do than sit down and write a thoughtful review of Samantha Harvey’s Orange-shortlisted debut The Wilderness for Alexandria. I want to share with you my varied impressions of a book which comes so very close to fulfilling its ambitions. I’d also like to tell you about the rather bizarre but largely enjoyable experience of reading The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt.  If I could just find an hour to write a thousand words on Melanie McGrath’s wonderful Hopping I’m sure I could have convinced you to buy your own copy by now.

 

But, alas, my life is too full up of other things at the moment. That I’m reading at all is something of a miracle, and thanks only to my lunch breaks at work and trips to the bathroom. I’m teaching in the evenings, working during the day and studying for my MSc at the weekends, and trying to fit the rest of my life – eating, sleeping, etc - in around that.  I’m still hoping to fit in reviews of the Orange shortlist before the prize announcement, but I fear that might be overambitious.  (From what I’ve read so far I have a sneaky feeling Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows is the favourite to – it has certainly surprised me - although I haven’t read Home yet and I can’t imagine it being anything but brilliant.)

So, if you drop by and nothing has appeared from me at EA in a while, be assured that it is only a temporary hiatus. Life getting in the way and all that.  I’ll be back soon

 

~~Victoria~~