Eve's Alexandria

'Are you reader enough for difficult fiction?'

Steven Moore throws this question down like a gauntlet on page 25 of The Novel: An Alternate History - Beginnings to 1600.  There follows a glib 'quiz' of the type found in teen magazines, where you chose answer a), b) or c) to some simple questions in order to find out what type of man you should date, or what kind of friend you are.  In this case the aim is to discover if you are a) 'uncultured' and threatened by 'the new and different' or b) 'open to any new experiences and willing to try new things.'   No prizes for guessing which group Steven Moore thinks he and all right thinking people belong to.

When I picked up Moore's huge, 698 page tome from the library I had certain expectations. Given its subtitle, I was anticipating a book of big ideas, that attempted to trace the lineage of the novel back to a root in the earliest known writings.  I was hoping for an introduction to scholarship and debate about the form's genesis, and an interesting bibliography of early 'novels' to explore.  What I did not anticipate was a thinly veiled diatribe about the superiority of experimental fiction, and a verbal assault on a named triumvirate of literary commentators who had published articles attacking 'the kind of fiction I [Steven Moore] love.'   It was only as I read the introduction that I realised, with growing disbelief, that The Novel: An Alternate History was actually written as one big, angry fart in the face of the popularisation of literary culture.   So biased, didactic and pompous was this introduction that I had no stomach to read the actual content of the book when I reached the end of it.  I simply could not have trusted another word that Moore said.*  Nevertheless, the 36 pages I did manage to read were so thought-provoking that I feel compelled to share my thoughts about it here anyway.

In 2001 B.R. Myers published an article called 'A Reader's Manifesto' in the Atlantic Monthly subtitled 'An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose'.  It pretty much did what it says on the tin, and admonished contemporary literary fiction for being too self-conscious, pretentious and writerly. (You can read the full text online.)  Around the same time Dale Peck wrote a review of Rick Moody's The Black Veil for the New Republic in which he used rather strong language in criticism of Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov and others.  (Again, the full text is online.)  Finally, Jonathan Franzen used a review of some posthumous publications of William Gaddis in the New Yorker to question the relevance of avant-garde fiction. (You guessed it, the text is online.)  For various reasons Steven Moore felt these criticisms keenly, not only on behalf of the authors in question but as a personal affront to his reading tastes.  The fact that he was Gaddis' biographer was, I imagine, another contributing factor. In some ways I can understand his ire.  I don't think Myers makes a particularly strong argument in his article either (although I think his observations about the unfortunate parallel between high-brow/low-brow novels in the past and literary/genre at present are astute enough).  But Moore's response seems excessive.

His answer is to write a history of the novel which foregrounds 'innovative, unconventional' fiction, traces the ancestry of Joyce et al back to Apuleius and proves the superiority of 'difficult' books.  Or at least:

'...if I couldn't convince MPF [Moore's disparaging way of referring to Myers, Peck and Franzen throughout] of the superiority of such novels over the kind they prefer - de gustibus non est disputandum ['there is no accounting for taste'] - I could at least try to refute these insulting, ill-informed assumptions about the writers who create such novels, and the readers who cherished them.'

Which makes pretty clear from the outset that it's going to get personal, and that the gloves are off.  The sides are clearly drawn: Moore against MPF,  Which would be fine, because I think there is a case to be made against the ideas expressed by Myers and the rest.  The problem comes in the way Moore casts the debate as a fight between good and evil, setting up a series of uncompromising dichotomies: art vs. entertainment, culture vs. populism, innovation vs. stagnation, openmindedness vs. bigotry.  He ends up sounding as dismissive, pompous and unreasonable as the critics he is opposing, not to mention thoroughly disagreeable.

At first the book is in a comic mode. Moore is rascally and funny, his prose style suggests a man of people, telling it like it is.  But it's not long until his critcisms of MPF start to feel more like a sharp elbow in the ribs than a gentle, persuasive nudge in a different direction.  There also comes a point when it is clear that he has decided that MPF are representatives of a wider class of reader for whom he has no respect. His implicit argument becomes as follows: if you don't like difficult authors it is because you don't understand them, and if you don't understand them it is because you are uncultured or uneducated or unworthy.  'Do you want to know a secret?' he says:

'Literature is not for everyone... when it comes to fiction, there's a democratic assumption that anyone with a basic education should be able to read and enjoy any novel... Hence some feel it is reprehensible to write a novel beyond a high school reading age. ... Why this bleeding-heart concern for 'the mass of readers', 'the common reader'? They have more than enough to satisfy them, as the best-seller lists indicate; most of the publishing industry caters to their tastes. Why this intolerance for the minority of readers with a different textual orientation who prefer an alternative kind of fiction... Such fiction is challenging and unconventional, granted, but the fact that it's not for everyone doesn't make it elitist, snobbish, pretentious, arrogant, or wrong-headed.  It's simply not for everyone.'

Everything about this paragraph makes my skin crawl.  But it's the dismissive 'they' that really gets to me.  'They' as in 'the masses' or 'common readers' who read best-sellers, who have a 'taste' for (Moore implies) unchallenging, conventional guff.  Not the 'they' who think differently, or have different interests, but the 'they' who are not clever enough or flexible enough to like the 'challenging' (read: good and worthwhile) novels.  When, a few pages later, Moore condescends to understand 'hostility from the uncultured... they always feel threatened by the new and different...', I'm just about ready to throw his own hefty tome at him.  I don't think I've ever read anything which could be so aptly described as 'elitist, snobbish, pretentious, arrogant and wrong-headed.'   It is so clear that the question of 'literary' vs. 'popular' novels has become symbolic of a much broader gulf for Moore.  It is not about the books themselves, but about the people who read them.  It is the people who are good or bad, who have right or wrong preferences, who are superior or inferior.  

By the time I reached the part of the introduction in which Moore justifies his qualifications for writing The Novel: An Alternate History, I felt I was a spectator in a massive (excuse me for this) pissing contest:

'My speciality is 20th century fiction, so I spend most of this book trampling through many fields where (some academics might say) I don't belong, though I should point out in my defense that I read pretty widely in world literature before I settled on contemporary fiction.  When studying for my master's degree in the early 1970s I became enamoured with medieval literature: I learned to read Middle English with some ease - I dedicated my first book to my Middle English professor, a flamboyant man named Sam Freeman, who died under mysterious circumstances the summer I studied Chaucer with him - then learned Anglo-Saxon from a former nun - and ate up things like the Welsh Mabinogion and Jackson's Celtic Miscellany.  After graduating, I made a list of all the major literary works I had not yet read... and spent the next few years working my way through Gilgamesh, Greek and Latin classics, the Bible, the complete Burton translation of The Arabian Nights...Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes...the great Russian novelists, all of which while supporting a serious Joyce habit and trying my hand at a few novels myself.'

Learnt Anglo-Saxon from a former nun?  I actually spluttered. It seems to me that the whole purpose of this passage, and of the introduction as a whole, is not to prove that experimental fiction is superior to any other type of fiction, so much as to prove that Steven Moore is superior.  Not just superior to MPF and co., but superior to you, me and everyone else we know too.  

There are no ifs and buts to anything he says, no room for another opinion.  After dimissing the realist novel as 'straightforward, lightly romanticized stories of recognizable people out of everyday life, usually narrated in chronological sequence and in language no different from that of the better newspapers and journals', Moore declares the novel's traditional development narrative is 'Wrong' with a capital W.  Here, as elsewhere, he admits of no subtlety or debate, despite the seriousness and complexity of his statement.  Out goes Cervantes (along with Austen, Dickens, Scott and friends), and in comes Xenophon: 'The novel has been around since at least the 4th century BCE and flourished in the Mediterranean area until the coming of the Christian Dark Ages.'  Now I don't think Moore is the first person to make this argument, far from it, and neither do I think that Cervantes sat down one day and had a bright idea that led to the birth of a new way of writing and thinking.  The 'novel' is clearly a negotiated and multiplicitous form, the product of centuries of syncretism and evolution. However, I think it is rather foolhardy to scoop up extraordinarily diverse literary traditions of poetry and prose from ancient Egypt to Ming dynasty China and claim them all retrospectively as 'novels'.  I think this is Pushing the Point Too Far, so far that it makes said point seem utterly ridiculous.  Moore has to contort the definition of 'novel' until it is virtually meaningless in order to lasso together all the examples he wants to use.

This is a true shame, because I think that beneath the hyperbole and the ego, there is a worthwhile idea in The Novel.  We are too quick to compartmentalise, circumscribe and define the novel, and fail to recognise its rich and complicated evolution or the ways in which it is still evolving.  However, I don't think this history is fairly served when proselytised as part of a polemic, or presented as just another kind of absolutism. The novel is too organic and generous a medium to be used as a stick to beat people with for liking one thing over another,or to prove the superiority of one mode of expression or thought.  It makes me sad to see it used in that way.

~~Victoria~~

* I was also turned off after fellow Alexandrian Nic read parts of the chapter on early Arabic 'novels' during a recent weekend visit and felt that the scholarship was highly dubious. 

Generation Gap

It wasn't that I forgot Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It's there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?

I was, I confess, surprised by Bernhard Schlink's The Reader (German original 1995; English translation 1997, by Carol Brown Janeway). The novel was so widely praised, and its subject matter so rich and weighty - an exploration of wartime guilt and culpability through an illicit cross-generational relationship - that I really hadn't expected it to be so utterly banal. But in the end I find I can't put it any better than did Peter Bradshaw, in his scathing review of the recent film adaptation; this is a "middlebrow sentimental-erotic fantasy" that, if nothing else, proves that not even the Holocaust is secure against tedious phallocentric solipsism.

Put another way, it's 200 pages of a grown man, Michael Berg, looking back through rose-tinted, faux-intellectualising spectacles at all the sex his fifteen-year-old self used to have. That the woman he used to have it with was a) more than twice his age (illicit thrill!) and b) a former concentration camp guard (dark secret!) was Definitely Not His Fault, oh no, although from time to time Schlink has Michael strike an angsty pose in order to make him seem more thoughtful than he actually is.

Michael's first encounter with the woman, Hanna Schmitz, is "almost an assault", once again underlining his complete innocence in the whole affair. Still, when she takes him home (to an apartment block marked by "the same smell of cleaning fluid, sometimes mixed with the smell of cabbage or beans, or fried food or boiling laundry" - descriptive prose isn't Schlink's strong point) Michael soon settles into finding her "seductive", seeing "an invitation to forget the world in the recesses of the body". Obedient to the rules of male adolescent fantasy written on her body, Hanna is not fazed or even amused by the boy's evident arousal, but quickly gets naked and starts groping him. They then spend the next 60 pages or so having having boring sex, increasingly prefaced by Michael reading various novels aloud to Hanna.

The dynamic of their relationship is, as might be expected, hardly egalitarian. Initially, Hanna uses the lure of her body to control him, and when that fails she opts for flat-out emotional manipulation; who can fathom, after all, the irrational mystery that is Woman's mood swings?

I admitted mistakes I hadn't made, intentions I'd never had. Whenever she turned cold and hard, I begged her to be good to me again, to forgive me and love me. Sometimes I had the feeling that she hurt herself when she turned cold and rigid. As if what she was yearning for was the warmth of my apologies, protestations, and entreaties. Sometimes I thought she just bullied me. But either way, I had no choice.

As if to underline the point, adult-Michael struggles to assign individuality to her in his memories:

Her face as it was then has been overlaid in my memory by the faces she had later. If I see her in my mind's eye as she was then, she doesn't have a face at all, and I have to reconstruct it. [...] I know that I found it beautiful. But I cannot recapture its beauty.

So far, so tediously unerotic coming-of-age story. Before long, Michael duly grows out of his Mrs Robinson, preferring to spend time with friends his own age; Hanna, disregarded as thoughtlessly as she was taken up, moves away.

At length, Michael becomes an equally self-absorbed university student, where he develops strong Views about both the war and the role of ordinary German people in the Nazi regime, whether through active participation or passive failure to resist. The notion of collective guilt, he says, was "a lived reality" for his "generation of students", who found themselves in the grip of a bitter conflict with their parents, over all the things that had gone unspoken since the war:

The more horrible the events about which we read and heard, the more certain we became of our responsibility to enlighten and accuse. Even when the facts took our breath away, we held them up triumphantly. Look at this!

But Michael's comfortable self-righteousness is disturbed when he discovers that Hanna, too, is on trial. Literally: she was a guard at Auschwitz, in 1944, and stands accused of (amongst other things) letting 200 women burn to death inside a church during a bombing raid. Michael rubbernecks at her trial and indulges in a spot of aimless Holocaust tourism, during which he demonstrates afresh his complete lack of empathy or emotional imagination - having visited a memorialised concentration camp, he notes "my awkwardness was not the result of real feeling, but of thinking about the way one is supposed to feel after visiting a concentration camp". He eventually concludes that he does feel a bit responsible for all those atrocities, after all, because he used to love Hanna - who, by the way, couldn't read all along, poor thing, which maybe excuses her from having done all that bad stuff back then.

Yes, really:

I was no stranger to shame as the cause of behavior that was deviant or defensive, secretive or misleading or hurtful. But could Hanna’s shame at being illiterate be sufficient reason for her behavior at the trial or in the camp? To accept exposure as a criminal for fear of being exposed as an illiterate? To commit crimes to avoid the same thing?

I suppose that this second half of the book - the revelations of Hanna's trial, and Michael's journey into Germany's history - is meant to make his earlier moral outrage seem smug and naive, a conclusion reached before all the facts were known. It doesn't, or at least not in the way Schlink (apparently) believes. Michael's youthful condemnation of his parents' generation for their comlplicity with the Nazi regime and its death camps is the very definition of kneejerk, it's true, but that's more an artefact of him than of his youth or moral stance itself. For one thing, as I've noted before, I find attempts to excuse culpability for such crimes (on the basis of circumstance or, as in this case, putative shame) to be questionable at best, and deeply distasteful at worst. Hanna's challenge to the judge, during her trial - she asks him what he would have done in her place - is pointed and urgent and correct, but it doesn't make the people who died in the camp any less dead just because someone else might well have acted (or failed to act) in the same way as Hanna, under the same pressures. Hanna's secret shame of illiteracy, and the culture of conformity surrounding her, go some way to explaining her actions, but they don't excuse them. A bad act isn't magically less bad just because it was done by a good person.

Secondly, while it is useful and interesting to engage in such debates, what pushed this reader over the edge as far as the book's banality was concerned was that even in the midst of this, it is still All About Michael. His initial reaction is to hope Hanna will be convicted, because that way she remains a fond and slightly moist memory for him, rather than a living human being who has an existence independent of his fantasy:

I realized that I had assumed it was both natural and right that Hanna should be in custody. Not because of the charges, the gravity of the allegations, or the force of the evidence, of which I had no real knowledge yet, but because in a cell she was out of my world, out of my life. I wanted her far away from me, so unattainable that she could continue as the mere memory she had become and remained all these years. If the lawyer was successful, I would have to prepare myself to meet her again, and I would have to work out how I wanted to do that, and how it should be.

Later, his main concern is the effect her trial and subsequent imprisonment have upon him: his adolescent memories, his relationship with his parents' generation, his ability to be self-righteous, his achievement of (a tiny bit of) self-awareness, his "appointment with the past" when he meets her again (I swoon before your clichés, sir!). In the end, there isn't enough eyeroll in the world for his self-serving annexation of her guilt, and consequent trivialisation of those who truly suffered, among both victims and perpertrators:

I had to point at Hanna. But the finger I had pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. Not only had I loved her, I had chosen her. I tried to tell myself that I had known nothing of what she had done when I chose her. [...] How could it be a comfort that the pain I went through because of my love for Hanna, was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate, and that it was only more difficult for me to evade, more difficult for me to manage than for others. All the same, it would have been good for me back then to be able to feel I was part of my generation.

Soft porn, mass murder, and navel-gazing. Not a winning combination.

~~Nic

On the Moors

I don't know a lot about crime fiction, except what I have learnt from the most casual and infrequent brushes with the genre.  But I have always had a sense that misdirection is important to a crime or thriller plot.  There will be twists and turns and often a moment when the detective/private investigator/unwitting layperson realises that they have made a fatal error in their reasoning, and are on the wrong track.  That's my conception of the genre anyway, and one of the reasons why I've never properly explored its potential,  because I'm wary of plots that are difficult or sinuous for their own sake, or simply for the purposes of 'tricking' the reader. 

No doubt all of this is a heinous generalisation, eliciting tuts and groans from crime enthusiasts on all sides; the equivalent of saying that all science fiction is set in space.  But it is all said in the name of laying my own ignorant prejudices bare, as a preliminary to explaining why I so much enjoyed the experience of reading Belinda Bauer's debut novel, Blacklands.  And why it has paved the way to my seeking out more crime fiction in future.  There are no twists or turns in Blacklands.  There is no doubt about who did it, or any ambiguity about the perpetrator. In fact, there is the opposite: the plot is the unravelling of a taut skein of inevitability, the trajectory is a sweet clean arc.  The ending, I think, is written into the opening pages.  As a result the momentum of the story is never a matter of mere suspense but of character development and thematic cache.  

Steven Lamb is a clever boy on the cusp of adolescence.  This fact and one other shapes the doings of his days.  The other fact is this: many years ago his Uncle Billy was murdered, aged 12, by the notorious child-killer Arnold Avery.  Although Avery is now in prison, and has been for 18 years, Billy's death hangs over Steven's family like a pall.  His nan sits in vigil by the dining room window in their little cottage on the edge of Exmoor, day-in-day-out, forever waiting for the favourite son who will never come home, and whose body has never been found. Steven's mother, Billy's older sister, takes out her feelings of inadequacy and neglect in the wake of the murder on her own two, fatherless sons.  The foisty unpleasant stench of poverty hangs over the whole household, signalled to all who know Steven by his half-mast trousers and cheap leaking trainers.  

Desperate times call for desperate measures.  Steven reasons that the best way to lay his Uncle to rest is to, literally, lay him to rest.  If he can only find Billy's body, buried somewhere in a shallow grave on Exmoor, then everything will be made better.  His nan will turn the full force of her love upon him, and his mother will relent her stern discipline.  This is easier said than done.  The police couldn't find Billy in the early 90s, and two years of digging random holes on Exmoor has got Steven no closer to this morbid treasure.  When the answer comes to him one day in English class it seems obvious: he should write anonymously to Arnold Avery, incarcerated for the rape, torture and murder of half-a-dozen children, and simply ask him where he put Billy's body.  From the moment Steven puts his pre-teen pen to paper there can be no doubt where his quest will lead him.  Or at least not really.  Arnold Avery is a killer of young boys; Steven Lamb is a young boy.  Two plus two equals four, and always will.

What I admired about Blacklands wasn't this (too neat?) premise, but the fact that the premise wasn't the point of writing the novel.  In an afterword Bauer admits that she began writing the book as a 'little story' about a young boy and his nan, and it is this story that remains at the heart of the book.  Steven's hunt for some simple comfort from his family is as compelling, if not more compelling, as his search for Billy's bones; and his ordinary teenage difficulties with bullies and friendships are as poignantly handled as his correspondence with Avery.  Bauer captures very well the ungainly confusion of a child passing out of his boyhood.  I especially liked the way that Steven's burning desire for a father found its antithesis in the form of Arnold Avery, whom he might not otherwise have approached.  And also the way that Arnold Avery's boyishness and boundless enthusiasm for Steven were infectious, at the same time as being utterly and gut-wrenchingly depraved. Oh, and the way the moor collaborated with and repelled the two characters by turns; and the hints, barely there, of a higher controlling hand, moving the characters - saving them, dooming them - for its own amusement.

Bauer's writing has a determined clarity.  By which I mean not a word is wasted; the occasional writerly flourish is well-placed and slick.  It occurs to me that it must be very difficult to write alternating POV chapters from a thirteen year old boy on the one hand and a murderous paedophile on the other without calling in the odd cliche.  The fact that Bauer keeps her first novel smooth and unfettered of the same is most praiseworthy, and entirely refreshing.  It has a strange innocence to it, for a book about a child-killer at least; a kind of open-handed generosity in its portrait of loss, misplaced hope and psychosis. I read the book really because Esther and I are going to the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival next weekend to see Attica Locke speak about Black Water Rising, and Bauer happens to be speaking in the same session (which is for debut crime writers).  I thought it was only fair that I should read her book before hand, and I'm oh-so-glad the event forced my hand.  It was quite the reading pleasure: a deceptively simple page-turner, with a lingering emotional and atmospheric chill to it.  More please.

~~Victoria~~

The Lunatic Fringe, or A Literary Surrealist

If you're ever looking to sample a spot of literary surrealism, then Alice Thompson's fourth novel The Falconer (Two Ravens Press, 2008) might just be the book for you.  Not because it is simply odd (although admittedly it is rather odd), but because Thompson's vision of the world, and her mode of narrative, is classically surreal.  In this slim volume of just 132 pages you will find all the strange juxtapositions, dislocations and subconscious dreamscapes you could desire.  And also the merging of the fantastic and the mundane, and the blurring of the boundaries between humans, landscapes and objects, with some classical intertextuality mixed in for good measure. 

The surface plot is almost a potboiler: It is the late 1930s and Iris Tennant has travelled to Glen Almain in the Scottish Highlands under a pseudonym, to become personal assistant to Lord Melfort, the Under-Secretary of War.  Although she serves Melfort diligently as he works to appease Germany and stop the the second World War, her real motive for taking a job in such an isolated place is personal.  She has come to investigate the mysterious suicide of her younger sister Daphne, Melfort's former secretary, in the Glen's petrified forest a year earlier.  In the process, and against her own will, she finds herself drawn into the shadowy lives of Melfort's two reclusive adult sons, Louis and Edward, and of the inexplicable falconer who plies his birds in the clear Highland air with a remorseless and primal efficiency.  But there is nothing traditional or prosaic about the way Thompson tells her story. 

As with her earlier novels, Justine and Pandora's Box, The Falconer is unconcerned with the mundane mechanics of plot or the ordinary actions of its characters.  It is engaged with the subconscious of the story: not the stuff that it is made of, but the opposite, the intangible effects on the psyche of the reader.  Just in the way, for example, that surrealist painting is visually compelling (melting pocket watches! spiffy men in bowler hats!) and yet essentially unconcerned with its surface imagery, so The Falconer's meaning, and its power, are located in the subconscious mind of its reader. 

The writing is often desperately plain, even abrupt.  Thus, when Iris arrives in Glen Almain:

It was a hot day in early August, with the kind of heat that seemed to make the pale blue petals of the harebells tremble.  The only signs of life were the flies hovering in the still air.  Carrying her suitcase, she began to walk up the glen's road.  She passed an old school-house, and noticed a small boy starng at her through the window.  He was unnaturally pale, with hair as white as the seeds of a dandilion clock.  Two dead falcons were pinned to the front door.

It is a prose style that I found difficult to adjust to, and difficult to like at first, second or even third touch.  Its plainness encouraged me to read quickly, while its sparseness demanded that I go slowly to properly appreciate it.  Acquaintance with her previous work has taught me that no word of Thompson's is misplaced, and that everything is carefully crafted for a particular effect.  Each sentence needs tasting and chewing over, or the substance of the book is lost.  The gods know that readerly patience and restraint are not usually in my stable of qualities, so The Falconer was almost, very nearly, a failed read for me.  But it definitely rewards a languid approach.  Forcing myself to read slowly, I found I intuited new things in Thompson's style.  Like, for example, the way that she is a playful writer, creating little linguistic tensions in one sentence only to deflate them in the next, setting up a steady atmospheric rhythm.  And the sly way she uses mirroring, echoes and non-sequitors to invest layers of meaning into scenes that look and feel awkward at first glance. 

I also learnt to better appreciate the sensual visuals in her writing.  I don't like to say The Falconer is a painting in words, because it sounds like such a hideous cliche, but that is essentially what it is, and consciously so.  Some books are deeply intertextual, but this one is more 'intervisual', if such a thing can be said.  It constantly invokes twentieth century (and earlier) art movements, with small verbal and descriptive clues.  So, a stranger on the train is 'abstract', an 'idealised verson of a more primitive self; and a landscape is 'dissected', a 'puzzle made up of small squares'; and an elderly aunt becomes indistinguishable from the inanimate things in her room:

The objects in the room - the rocking-horse, the jack-in-a-box, and the sharp-edged tin cars with their missing wheels - were all becoming part of her. They were where the hard parts of her body stuck out.  The room seemed to have become a fabrication of her bones and her walking consciousness.

All of which helps to secure the effect of the book, as a set of scenes and tableau more like a series of paintings than a fictional narrative.  As they progress in a dream sequence, it becomes increasingly clear that we are not meant to understand them or respond to them in the way a reader ordinarily would.  The book doesn't work at the level of story, despite the apparent promise of the synopsis, which is no doubt why the reviewer for The Scotsman tore it up for 'poor writing, unbelievable dialogue and cardboard characters.'   But, to give Thompson her dues, I think the  childlike naivity of the writing and the dialogue and the characters are all intentional aspects of the piece.  You can't apply the same critical criteria here that you might use with contemporary fiction at large, any more than you can use it to analyse the dream you had last night.  Neither the dream nor The Falconer are not about what they appear to be about.  You're like to have more joy considering them in the light of the collected works of Freud, or the surrealist galleries in the Tate Modern.   

Everything here is a code for something else.  Thompson intimates this in the very name of her protagonist.  In classical mythology Iris is Hera's messanger, who links the world of the Gods with the world of man, spanning one to the other like a bridge.  Thompson's Iris, coming from the real war-shadowed world of the 1930s into the soporific Otherworld of Glen Almain, does the same thing, carrying the reader from the conscious world into an ambiguous dreamscape.  The trajectory of Iris' story not how she solves the mystery of her sister's death, because this plot is barely more than an excuse for her journey.  Daphne is a cipher or a spell, and her death is more useful as a potent way for Thompson to access Iris' sub-conscious than as a nefarious suicide.

It occurs to me that The Falconer is exactly the type of novel that Stephen Moore is talking about and defending in his chatty fat tome The Novel: An Alternative History to 1600 (which I started the other day). It has none of the 'traditional satisfactions of fictional narrative - believable characters, satisfactory storylines, ephiphanies and the like'.  Instead it has the frustrating, perverse insight of a dream, with all the inconsequentiality, discomfort and darkness that are also native to the dreaming self.  It is an experiment,  in imagery and mythology, which is not always successful or consistent but is always interesting.  The key, I think, is not to read it for itself alone; you have to read it for yourself primarily.  It is a work of subjective meditation first, and a novel second.

~~Victoria~~

The Wasps Go Marching Two by Two

Yes, June was a quiet month here at Alexandria. To kick off what I'm sure will be a more productive July, here is a review I wrote for SFX magazine earlier this year: Salute the Dark, volume four in Adrian Tchaikovsky's fun on-going series. My reviews of the previous instalments are here, here, and here.

In related news, at a housewarming party a few months back I ran into Tchaikovsky's agent, Simon. "Oh, it's you!" he exclaimed. "Queen of the three-star reviews!"

I am amused. This one got three stars, too.

--

War may be good for absolutely nothing, but there’s no denying its effects on technology. By the end of this fourth installment of the ‘Shadows of the Apt' series, the peoples of Tchaikovsky's steampunk fantasy world have not only developed the local equivalents of mustard gas and a Gatling gun, they're also thinking about fixed-wing aircraft. If this volume is carnage - and, with the Wasp army invading new territory while its older conquests rebel in its wake, it is - goodness knows what's in store. We predict nuclear holocaust by book ten.

Salute the Dark wraps up the first phase of the story. Loose ends remain, and at least one major character death looks to be temporary, but there is plenty of resolution for dedicated readers. It will mean little to newcomers, though, and in general is less successful than the last two volumes. Certain characters - notably conflicted artificer Totho - stay largely offstage until their big moment, while others - like upbeat Cheerwell - mark time in brand new subplots that add little. With so many plates spinning, some struggle to earn their emotional payoff in the few chapters allotted them. New locales like the Dragonfly Commonweal get short shrift, and are accordingly much less vivid than the places we've visited previously.

Where Tchaikovsky excels is in portraying the courage of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances: uncertain, terrified, but trying anyway. There are still examples here: the new Bee queen of Szar, resistance fighters in Solarno. But the shift from the close focus of the previous books to a larger city-hopping canvas sacrifices some of the human story, giving the sense of pieces being moved around a board.

~~Nic Clarke