Eve's Alexandria

Past Perspectives - A Historical Summer

I'm about to go home to stay with my grandfather for a week, and I have big reading plans.  From the moment I arrive in the little village where my grandparents live I will be deliciously cut off from the hustle and bustle of the world, virtual and otherwise. I won't have access to the internet, or to a computer; my mobile phone will only work intermittently and the television will only be on for a few hours in the evening.  I'm more than ready for this kind of retreat - a whole week of early to rise, early to bed, and books, books, books. 

I'm aware of a preponderance of a certain type of fiction gathering on my TBR shelves lately.  Have you noticed that 2009 seems to be the year of historical fiction?  Sarah Waters, Hilary Mantel, A.S.Byatt and Adam Thorpe have all released historical novels in the past few months.  I've carefully gathered them all in to my nest, and have taken to looking at them every now and then like a squirrel with a pile of particularly tasty nuts.  I haven't allowed myself to read them though.  It never seems to have been the right time - there has been too much stress, too much wild running about to really enjoy them properly.  I've teased myself with the promise of their delights. Which is why this week is the perfect opportunity to indulge myself.  Who needs to pack clothes when there are four fat tomes lined up by the suitcase?

On the back of the glorious four (as they shall hence forth be known) I've conceived myself a project.  Or rather a theme, because a project sounds too much like hard work.  Historical fiction of all shapes, sizes and kinds will be my focus for the rest of the summer.  I'm interested, you see, in how and why we write and read historical fiction, and its relationship with the 'real' past. I've decided to supplement this reading of 'new' (to me at least) fiction, with some re-reading of the historical fiction I gorged on as a teenager.  Jean Plaidy, for example, who inspired my degrees in medieval studies.  I've mooched some of her Tudor series, starting with Uneasy Lies the Head about Henry VII's accession to the throne - I always found her books about relatively obscure and unpromising Kings to be her best.  And Diana Gabaldon whose Outlander novels consumed me for years in my mid-teens is surely worth a re-visit.  Cross-stitch (Outlander in the US) is going to prompt a wealth of nostalgia.  This is not to forget the historical series I'm reading at the moment and need to get on with, most importantly Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels.  I convinced Nic and Niall to watch Master and Commander: Far Side of the World with me last weekend and was immediately compelled to pick up The Mauritius Command (Book 4) ahead of my Historical Summer announcement.  I've also got the Brother Cadfael novels at the back of my mind.  I read A Morbid Taste for Bones back in April and was pleasantly suprised by its erudite readability, not to mention the clarity of Ellis Peter's unfussy medieval setting.  The next few are already lined up, most specifically One Corpse Too Many.

I'll be sure to let you know how I've gotten on when I return from my quietude at the beginning of August.  Until then perhaps you'd share some recommendations of excellent historical fiction? I'm eager to extend my reading list.

Happy reading to one and all!

~~Victoria~~

It Takes a Graveyard

"It is going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will," said Silas, "take a graveyard."

I suspect that there aren't many authors who could - or, indeed, would even set out to - write a sweetly charming novel about boy being raised in a cemetery by dead people, after the murder of his entire family. But in The Graveyard Book (2008), Neil Gaiman makes it seem effortless. Falling somewhere between a collection of short stories and a novel, this is a highly accomplished and (too?) polished young-adult tale - if, ultimately, a rather lightweight and forgettable one - with shades of Kipling and particularly of Edward Gorey. It is also graced with some marvellously off-kilter illustrations from frequent Gaiman collaborator Dave McKean.

Without wanting to be too flippant, it's a book that - and this may sound like a lazy comparison, but it's an apt one nonetheless - seems to be just waiting for its Tim Burton-directed stop motion translation to the big screen. The aforementioned boy, the self-named Nobody/Bod, is described through the eyes of one character as "a small, grave face and grey eyes staring up at her from beneath a mop of mouse-coloured hair". In both its visual and its emotional notes, The Graveyard Book shares the some of the sensibility of The Gashlycrumb Tinies and The Nightmare Before Christmas, but with a much friendlier and arguably safer overlay: disappointingly (at least to me), it is less mordant than the former, less exuberant than the latter.

The story is couched in a very visual style, resting not so much on detailed description, as on explicit invitations to the reader to conjure up the images for themselves, as in this, our first sight of the graveyard:

The fog was thinner as you approached the top of the hill. The half-moon shone, not as bright as day, not by any means, but enough to see the graveyard, enough for that.

Look.

You could see the abandoned funeral chapel, iron doors padlocked, ivy on the sides of the spire, a small tree growing out of the guttering at roof level.

You could see stones and tombs and vaults and memorial plaques. [...]

You would have seen these things, in the moonlight, if you had been there that night.

This engaging approach is reminiscent of Kelly Link (it surfaces again, later, in asides like "Abanazer Bolger had seen some odd types in his time; if you owned a shop like Abanazer's, you'd see them too") but again Gaiman's work emerges from the contrast as just a little bit nicer, lacking the razor-sharp surreality that Link achieves even in her YA fiction.

Nonetheless, Gaiman's narrative voice is distinctively and warmly his own. Time and again, here, he demonstrates his skill at the line-by-line act of storytelling - the skill that makes his live readings of stories such absorbing performances - through short sentences, carefully-deployed detail and emphasis, and precise but fluid use of sound and rhythm and juxtaposition:

The man Jack was tall. This man was taller. The man Jack wore dark clothes. This man's clothes were darker. People who noticed the man Jack when he went about his business - and he did not like to be noticed - were troubled, or made uncomfortable, or found themselves unaccountably scared. The man Jack looked up at the stranger, and it was the man Jack who was troubled.

"This man" becomes Bod's guardian; the relationship between the two of them is underdrawn, but in many ways more compelling for it. "There were people you could hug, and then there was Silas", Bod reflects, and what more do we need than that? The recognition it produces in the reader is worth paragraphs of exposition or pages of pseudo-father/son bonding.

It's a conversational, slow-build-with-shocks style that suits young-adult and children's stories well, and it shares with Doctor Who the strategy of conjuring otherness from the mundane and everyday, playing on childhood's blurrier boundaries between fantasy and reality, in such a way as to emotionally involve (and freak out!) the kids. This particular address to the reader reminded me very much of 'Blink', but it isn't alone:

One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it - water-stained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. [...] If the grave makes you want to be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate.

My choice of "warmly" to describe Gaiman's narration, however, was a deliberate one. Yes, it's warm, even when he's recounting, as at the start of this book, the murder-by-night of most of a family, and their surviving toddler's narrow escape from the same blade. Adam Roberts has argued that the warm (he calls it "twee") tone and dark subject are a damaging mismatch, and I don't entirely disagree; certainly, as I've already indicated, I found The Graveyard Book too lightweight to get under my skin in any lasting way. The multiple sad ironies of the headstone inscriptions belonging to Bod's dead friends - which tend to be shared with the reader as part of a thumbnail character sketch when we first encounter them - seem rather wasted as throwaway jokes. "Thomas Pennyworth (here he lyes in the certainty of the moft glorious refurrection)" is funny on its own, but taken with the various other expressions of (obviously now thwarted!) religious and personal hopes, it seems a missed opportunity for something deeper. Especially given that the book also gestures at the ways in which death is devastating far beyond physical pain:

"So?" he said. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead."

"Yes." Silas hesitated. "They are. And they are for the most part, done with the world. You are not. You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once's you're dead, it's gone."

Ultimately, these themes never properly connect with the story - the reasons the murder of Bod's family, and the increased presence of the villains in the action towards the end, both diminish the impact of these thoughts on death amid a more conventional fantasy climax of chase scenes and magical combat - and are left as a background layer, something for the reader to ponder rather than ever really shaping the text.

But The Graveyard Book does have its touching and its chilling moments. (And its funny ones; asked by his uncanny teacher who the "different kinds of people" are, Bod replies, Pratchett-esque: "'The living,' he said. 'Er. The dead.' He stopped. Then, '...Cats?' he offered, uncertainly.") The initial murders, before plot-revelation strips them of their mystery and much of their power, are disturbing precisely for being half-glimpsed and apparently, horrifically random; the ghoul's underworld city is a touch generic at first blush, but is made to live through the fairy-tale exaggeration of its depiction, and the way it illuminates its inhabitants:

all of the angles were wrong - that the walls sloped crazily, that it was every nightmare he had ever endured made into a place, like a huge mouth of rotting teeth. It was a city that had been built just to be abandoned, in which all the fears and madnesses and revulsions of the creatures who built it were made into stone. The ghoul-folk had found it and delighted in it and called it home.

~~Nic

The smell of coal, like a pearl

Service Announcement: This is post is written in a new way. That is: I have set myself a time limit - one hour - in which to write, finish and post it, no matter what happens. There are several reasons for this but the most pressing is that I have been having problems reviewing lately.  I imagine this is a result of intellectual burnout after months of working full-time, teaching in the evenings, lecturing at weekends and completing an MSc in between.  But I'm finding that even now all the major pressures have lifted - for a while at least - I still can't sit still long enough to finish writing anything. Meanwhile the pile of books to review grows and grows, and I become more and more frustrated with myself. This Cannot Go On.  Thus I'm following the advice of one my distance-learning tutors, which is: Just write the damn thing.  So here it is.  No drafts, no edits, no fanciness.  Just the way I wrote it first time. Eep.  

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The fledgling Desmond Elliott prize is off to an excellent start in my view.  This year's winner, Blackmoor, is Edward Hogan's debut about post natal depression, bird-watching and the coal miner's strike of 1983; and it is fresh and dark and extroadinarily good.  One of my best books of 2009 thus far? I should say so and then some.  This is a novel with a lot of thematic bite, packing an emotional punch and written in a beguilingly different (if not entirely radical) style.  What is there not to love?

It begins around 2005 with an act of violence born of pent-up frustration - an arbitrary attack on a group of cyclists - which sets the tone of the next 260 pages.  George Cartwright, the man who throws the punch, is a widower with an awkward, dreamy teenage son named Vincent and a sad history.  His life, such as it is, is devoted to repressing the nasty events of the past (including his wife's suicide) while also hiding them from his son.  Feelings like love, sympathy or compssion have been avoided or excised at all costs, as symptoms of weakness and liability.  It is a case of batten down the hatches.  Shut the front door and turn out the light.  It is George Cartwright against the world.  

Not that you can blame him.  His life began and was lived until the early 1990s in the pit village of Blackmoor, a shabby, shallow place, characterised by its narrow-minded claustrophobia.  Since the untimely death of his young wife there, George has been battling to leave and while he has succeeded in one sense, having removed to a nearby town and cut all physical ties, he has failed miserably in another.  When he stands in his suburban back garden at dusk, looking out at the horizon, he still sees something:

In the valley the lights blink behind the silhouettes of gently shivering trees. Sometimes as night falls, he believes he can see the other village, although this is impossible - Blackmoor is twelve miles away.  Nevertheless, a thick black space the size of a postage stamp seems to appear against the pimply illuminations of the other towns and villages.  He does not seek it out but sometimes it transfixes him, that tiny hole.  Then he shuts it out and shakes the memories from his head, like a wet dog ridding itself of water.

Blackmoor is a haunting place.  On the one hand it is a prototypical coal-mining village in the North of England, perfectly ordinary and familiar, at least to me. I grew up in Yorkshire, where my family have mined for generations, and know areas where there are still 'pit communities' just like it.  Although the mines themselves closed down several decades ago, the atmosphere and the mentality are still perceptible in the older generation.  The working man, with his 'pleasures' - the men's club, the footie, the dog races - and the wives, waging war against outsiders and eccentrics of any kind, shrieking at the gaggles of children running half wild in the street.  There is something homely, if not kindly, about this side of Blackmoor; there is even a whiff of local history about it. (Which is ironically reflected when Vincent and his only friend unwittingly set about an English project on it.)  But.  On the other hand it is nowhere you could find on a map, in this world at least.  It is grotesque; an Other, uncanny sort of place.  Through the looking glass, under the fairy hill, you know the sort of thing.  Edward Hogan signals this quite clearly in the early pages of the novel - he describes it with a disgusting, focused intensity:

Blackmoor is a tumour of grey roof tiles in the muscular hills of Derbyshire, its isolation exaggerated by the disused loop track that encircles it. The village consists of seven terraced rows, a pub, a church, a school, the Miners' Welfare Club, a recreational ground and a few slack heaps where the pit used to be... A simple plaque marks the capped shaft at the disused colliery. Dropping below ground, the tunnels remain, like one infinitely recurring mouth with herringboning for teeth, the tool-chipped ripples of the strata so similar to the veins and ridges of the human palate.  These burrows are filling slowly with water and other, more sinister elements. No more the tock of hooves, or the shouting, or the gutteral rumble of machines. Just the hysterical emptiness of the flumed earth. 

Reading Hogan's grandiose prose - which hugs close to a line he never quite crosses into verbosity - further alienates the place from us; forces the contrast between the beauty of the writing and  the nastiness it describes.  It is a world we know, and yet do not know.  It reminds me most vividly of Nicola Barker's Ashford in Darkmans, the work-a-day town that harbours anarchic, dark spirits at its heart, where ordinarily men and women wear their own faces and horrible masks at once. 

Of course, a place like Blackmoor, sinister as treacle, is not complete without an unspeakable evil.  And sure enough, we have plenty of candidates to choose from. There is the earth and the mine itself, closed down in the 1980s, which lies quietly plotting a revenge against the men and women who have riped out its bowels.  Gases and noxious water are gathering in its depths, leaking upwards to cause explosions and fires and deaths from suffocation.  There is the mining corporation which has previously withdrawn leaving unemployment, desperation and poverty in its wake, only to return with bright, nauseous promises on the discovery of a new coal seam.  There are the villagers , whose small-mindedness and petty jealousies create rifts and dispute in their community.  And then there is Beth Cartwright, George's doomed wife.  Early in the novel we learn how she died at Blackmoor after leaping from her bedroom window.  We also learn that in George's opinion, the place killed her.  Slowly. 

Beth was an outcast in Blackmoor for many reasons.  First, and strikingly, she is albino - a ghostly visitation, with long white hair and wandering eyes that won't settle.  Second, she is married to George, who scorned work in the mine (when it was available) and made a way for himself in a white-collar job which brought a bigger house, a car and the withering envy of the village with it.  Third, she is creative and sensitive.  This last is perhaps the most disconcerting for the other inhabitants of Blackmoor.  Beth makes her own clothes from bright fabrics.  She acts strangely, interacts with her neighbours in unexpected ways.  She sunbathes on her roof.  She paints her fence in stripes.  When she is pregnant, she eats dirt and coal; when her son, Vincent, is born she temporarily looses her mind.  Her neighbours begins to wonder if she isn't unlucky, or worse, somehow unnatural.  They begin to notice a confluence of disaster in her wake: a boiler explodes when she is passing in the street; a publican dies of monoxide poisoning after bad-mouthing her husband.  And so begins a witch-hunt, analogous to the witch-hunts of 400 years ago.  Hogan knows, as we know, that the human impulse to scapegoat is as strong today as it ever was.  In flashbacks we see first hand the tragedy that George has fought so vigourously to hide unfold.

It has to be said that there are similarities between Blackmoor and Beth.  Both have uncanny characteristics which can be explained away - Blackmoor is not malignant, it is an industrial wasteland; Beth is not a witch, she is clinically depressed - but which cannot quite be dismissed.  Ironically it is this element of Beth's make-up which attracts George to her.  He abhors what he perceives to be the monotonous cultural void of Blackmoor and relishes Beth's difference.  He is drawn to her exocitism, which Hogan perfectly characterises as her 'scarcity'.  He is faintly obsessed with the idea of loving her as an act of rebellion and, as the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that she is also a distraction from his manifold failures.  If he can't leave Blackmoor behind, he can at least stick two fingers up at it all by marrying the half-blind albino witch. 

I realise that is a very wooly, vague synopsis and commentary on a novel that is rich in symbolic complexity.  It barely mentions the novel's real-time protagonist: Vincent Cartwright, George and Beth's son, who grows up without ever knowing his mother and with no memory of Blackmoor.  But, bah, I'm running out of time and I want to stress other things.  The most important is that Edward Hogan is a spirited new writer, by which I mean that he is playful with language. Not just the form of it on the page, but also the sound of it, the poetry of it.  He turns puerperal (as in, psychosis) into 'pure peril'; microfiche into 'micro fish'.  And he confounds our expectations with his similes - he knows how and when to puncture and drop a sentence like a stone.  Like, for example, a bald man's head looking like a 'rubber-ended pencil'.  But he also knows how to float them off, as when he describes the cool smell of coal as 'the warmth of the sun trapped in there somewhere, like a pearl.'   There is an assuredness to his writing that surprises.  True, there are moments when he feels like a beginner, with a clumsiness here and there where he overreaches or misses his mark.  But for the most part the prose is delicious and invigorating.  I couldn't repress the occasional yelp of delight.  

I know that, like many other authors of his generation (which is also my generation), Hogan has been through an MA in Creative Writing and sure enough you can see the places where he has put what he has learned to good use. The narrative is tight and determined; the dialogue is sparse and realistic; the whole thing is closely observed; obviously revised, rewritten and rethought.  Still, I don't believe that is the secret to Blackmoor's true success as a first novel. It is too alchemical for that.  Dare I say that there is also a natural talent at work?  A gift for writing that cannot be taught, but which can only be awakened.  Hmmmm. Time will tell I suppose.  When his next book comes out you will find me in the queue for a copy.

~~Victoria~~

(Who spent 1 hour 10 minutes writing the above, in contravention of very clear rules.  Still, at least it got written!)

By the Numbers (of a d20)

I must apologise for the lack of content from me; June turned out to be a fantastically busy month. I'll be back next week with at least one new post, but for now here's a reprint SFX review, from a few months back, to be getting on with: Rides a Dread Legion (2009), by Raymond E. Feist. After a run of good review books, it all went a bit pear-shaped...

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Reader, beware: this may be the first in a new series, but there is a serious weight of backstory here. No less than twenty-four books written or co-written by Feist are set in the same universe. At times, during this instalment, it feels like the characters are going to synopsize the plot of each and every one.

It is easy to see why Feist keeps returning to the same well: it is a rewardingly complex creation, made up of multiple fantastical planets (and planes of existence) reachable by magical portals. The story possibilities are enormous, and glimpses of the ‘deep’ past are fascinating, like the fact that a community of elves living in splendid Lothlorien-esque peace, the eledhel of Elvandar, once built their power upon enslavement of other races. Unlike so many fantasy worlds, Feist’s is no static, pseudo-medieval society that has endured unchanging for thousands of unlikely years.

In practice, though, past books have generally boiled the story possibilities down to magical invasion – usually of Midkemia, home of human, dwarves and eledhel. The new series looks to be no exception. But Dread Legion spends most of its length in explanation and set-up, as an elven people called the taredhel flee the demonic ravaging of their home planet for Midkemia, and the usual suspects line up to defend the world once again.

Some of the set-up is plot-necessary, if inelegantly done. A handful of taredhel spend several chapters explaining their history to each other, and to an audience in Elvandar. The omniscient narration gives us the new characters’ backgrounds, generally in large chunks of text when they first enter the story. Elsewhere, though, the exposition only serves to highlight how entangled this story is with the existing continuity, as a seemingly endless litany of references to past adventures – many of which sound more interesting than the present one – slows the pace to a crawl.

There is limited action, and it tends to read like turn-based combat straight out of a roleplaying game. [Aside: The world of Midkemia began life as a roleplaying setting dreamt up by Feist when he was in college. So the very D&D fights are probably no coincidence...] Overly-precise information about the mechanics of spells and demon defences – and tension-puncturing language like someone receiving only “a nasty bump” after being magically slammed into a cave wall – get in the way of any thrills or grit. Certain characters, like troubled knight Sandreena, are interesting, but many are distinguishable only by name and backstory. Returnees like Pug, so fully portrayed in novels like Magician, are poorly served here.

~~Nic