Eve's Alexandria

Reading Resolutions, 2011

I didn't make any reading resolutions for 2010, because they seemed less necessary than they had before, but the chronic biases that have emerged over the last 12 months need some curbing I think.  No better time than New Year to set myself some goals of self-correction. 

Resolution 1: To read more male writers

I feel ridiculous writing that, when the media, academics and reading community still sometimes privilege (even revere) male writers above their female counterparts.  But, the truth is, that I have developed a semi-conscious prejudice the other way.  Thinking carefully about it, I realise it runs deep.  It isn't just that I'm more likely to choose to buy, borrow or read a book by a woman, I'm also more likely to read reviews of books by women, and pursue recommendations of female authors.  I find my eyes glancing over new books by male writers and plumping instead with women's debuts; I pick up Classics by women before Classics by men.  It's a false preference, definitely, because it's not as though experience has taught me that I like fiction by women better.  It's simply that a reading habit that originated in a desire to correct a tendency the other way has swung far, far beyond its intended target.  So in 2011 I'm going to try to correct my gender bias with a little directed reading.  Not that I'm going to choose a list of books by men and plough determinedly through them, just that I'm going to be more aware of my literary diet.

I know what you're thinking: that I'm making a fuss about something silly, because surely the aim is that we don't have to think about an author's sex at all.  It shouldn't be a conscious matter like this, and what does it matter if I don't read many books by men?  Well, first, it matters to me because it means that I'm missing out on a whole world of books that are passing me by.  Second, it matters to me because its symptomatic of an underlying bias in the way I see the world. I deplore this same kind of bias when it works the other way - when the Booker Prize longlist of 20 books only has 2 or 3 women writers on it, for example and nobody seems to notice, - and so it would be hypocritical of me to ignore it in myself.  Thus, 'read more male writers' is my battle cry.  Most particularly, I want to read more 20th century classics by men - I haven't read any Roth or Pynchon or Auster or Bellow or Faulkner - when I've read many of their female counterparts (thanks in no small part to the excellent work of Virago).

Resolution 2: To read more fiction in translation

I say this every year: my reading is too Anglo-centric.  I read very little in translation, and not for want of exposure to it; again, it's a semi-conscious bias. I'm reaching for what I know, rather than for something new.  That, and I'm inherently suspiscious of the art of translation.  Am I really reading what the author intended?  Is the writing better in the original?  If I'm not reading the original words, where does the heart of the book lie?   Anyway, I'm prescribing myself a shot of Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman, followed by some draughts from the Dublin IMPAC Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the past winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature.  I've started on this resolution already by embarking on Independent People by Halldor Laxness, translated from Icelandic by J. A. Thompson.  Laxness won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, and I bought this book on the strength of the jacket comments from Annie Proulx, Jane Smiley and Fay Weldon, all of whom praise it in ecstatic language.  (Which, I realise, suggests that although Laxness was a man, I picked up the book because women authors I admire recommended it. Hmmmmm.  Oh well, it still counts towards Resolution 1.)

Resolution 3: To read more from my TBR

This is a mantra repeated across the lit-blogosphere with startling regularity, meaning that I'm not the only one who buys books in a frenzy of enthusiasm and then lets them sit and fade on a shelf.   It seems to me that there is a very short window of opportunity for many newly purchased or gifted books.  It lasts about a month, while the lustre of novelty hangs over it.  If I don't pick it up within that first month, then it's chances of being read rapidly decrease, until it becomes a fixture on the shelf and I feel as though I have read it even though I haven't.  It doesn't happen so much with Classics, because their appeal is not in their newness but in their timelessness; and it doesn't happen so much with non-fiction, perhaps because I choose those books more discerningly based on quite fixed interests (history, literature, nature).  But it happens all the time with recently published fiction.  I think because part of the attraction of a new book is its recent birth, its freshness, and the debate and dialogue surrounding it in review pages and online.  Six months down the line, the book that had me breaking down the door at Waterstones has been replaced in my flighty heart by another.  This is no doubt also why the vast majority of books I read in 2010 were published in 2010, or at least in 2009.  

I want to try and mitigate this tendency. (Though not eradicate it completely; I'm not going to plot my own failure by declaring a book-buying moratorium - I don't have the will power.  I know I don't, because I just took 5 minutes out of the composition of this very post to pop over to Amazon and buy a copy of Winifred Holtby's South Riding, because there is a new TV adaptation of it in the new year, and because several other bloggers seem to be reading and enjoying it.)  I'm going to try and make every other book I pick up a book from my TBR pile, and preferably from quite far down at the bottom of said TBR. 

I was going to make a fourth resolution, but no, I think three is probably enough.  The fourth will save for next year.  What do I think of my chances of success?  I think I can conquer resolution 1, if only by pursuing resolution 2.  I note, for example, that the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize has never been won by a woman in its 20 year history.  Never.  If I were just to read the winners of the last decade I would more than double the number of male authors I read in a year.  Oh the irony of my taking advantage of one prejudice to recitify my own! (Is it that more male authors are being translated? Or just that they're being read?  The longlists for the prize would suggest the former.)  And resolution 3 will contribute towards resolution 1 too, because (anecdotely) I seem more likely to read the books I buy by women than the ones I buy by men.  This interconnectedness of my goals should mean that I can fulfill them all.  We shall see. 

What are your reading resolutions?

~~Victoria~~

The Ten Best of 2010 (Year in Review, Part 2)

It's that time of year again, when I look back over my reading and pick out my ten favourite books of the year. So without further ado, and in no particular order (because I couldn't rank them in any way that completely satisfied me):

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

I think St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is an alchemical display. Each story in this debut collection is unique in its variety.  Never read a story about a Minotaur migrating west with his human family? Or about two brothers who set sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab to find the ghost of their drowned sister? Or about fifteen adolescent girls raised by wolves being introduced to civilisation by nuns?  No?  Well, here is your chance.

Each piece transcends traditional genre boundaries, segueing from fantasy to horror to 'contemporary' (whatever that is) with perfect composure, and wreaking havoc with our expectations at every opportunity.  Nobody reading the jocular title could anticipate the creepy ambience of the book’s opening story, ‘Ava Wrestles the Alligator’, in which a young girl rescues her sister from an insatiable spectral lover.  Nor the bittersweet humour of ‘The Star-Gazer’s Log of Summer-time Crime’ in which a boy pretends to be a criminal mastermind when he is really a budding junior astronomer.

What the stories do share in common are their young protagonists, all of whom are discovering the harsh, peculiar and blackly funny realities of their worlds as they run or trip or wander unaware into adulthood.  The title story, with its snarling snapping wolf-girls learning to speak and act like young ladies, is the perfect metaphor for shedding the easy instinctive skin of childhood for the contradictions and discomforts of womanhood.  But, like all the stories here, it is also a joy beyond the metaphor, simply by virtue of being what it is: weird and deftly written. 

In Great Waters by Kit Whitfield

Undoubtedly, for me, the Wolf Hall of 2010.  It sounds an unlikely success - a book set in an alternate medieval Europe, in which the Royal houses are populated by a weakening line of human-mermaid hybrids.  But Kit Whitfield's writing is powerful, and her vision of this alternate world is brilliant and uncompromising.  The novel's protagonists - the Princess Anne, land-born, cultured and fragile; and the interloper Henry, tossed from the sea by his mother and barely human - are alive with a precious independence of character.   I hope it is finding the wider audience that it deserves, and that it's just the first taste of great things to come from a new writer.  I now have a copy of Whitfield's first novel, Bareback (Benighted in the US), about a world in which a small minority of humans live amongst werewolves.  I'm savouring the thought of it, although I've been told that In Great Waters is a significant step up in form.

The Spire by William Golding

This is my third Golding novel.  I read Rites of Passage when I was a student; and then Lord of the Flies, for which he is most famous.  Both great novels, but The Spire confirms what I had suspected (and hoped): that Golding was a historical novelist at heart, and the best kind.  His fiction is about both alienation and about recognition - the things that we cannot comprehend and the things that are common to us all.  The story here is of Dean Jocelyn, a man obsessed with building the tallest spire there has ever been upon onto his cathedral, even unto the destruction of everything and everyone around him.  It is a narrative driven by simple phallic symbolism, but far from straightforward both in its style and substance.   The mix of sexual and spiritual energy is heady; and the book is worth reading for the final three pages of human desolation alone.  Admittedly though, tis not a merry book...

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

This debut novel may not be the subtlest analysis of race-relations in 60s America, but I don't care.  The liveliness of the three narrators is more than enough to sell it to me.  No doubt I was helped in this by the excellent narration in my audiobook version; so much so that I can't imagine having read this novel without hearing the alternately honeyed, brazen and twangy tones of Aibileen, Minny and Miss Skeeter.  The book is set in Mississippi and revolves around the experiences of black maids and the white families they care for at the very moment when the civil rights movement is gaining momentum.  Miss Skeeter is a recent college graduate, who comes home to discover that her own black nanny has been summarily dismissed by her mother; her eyes  subsequently opened to the degrading and depressing position of black women in her friends' houses and she determines to write a book about their experiences using first-hand testimonies.   It is one of those rare books about which I would use the adjective 'heartwarming'.  I even convinced my mum to take a break from her cosy mysteries to read it and she loved it too.  If you haven't yet availed yourself of Audible's 3 months at £3.99 subscription off, I'd do it now, and download this first. 

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey

This was another major find of the Orange Prize 2010; a book and an author that had previously passed me by entirely.  It is Roffey's second book, and is set in her native Trinidad, centred on an English couple who emigrate there in 1950s and subsequently stay to have a family.  The island itself is a powerful character in the book, personified as a seductive woman who inspires devotion in George Harwood, and confusion, jealousy and passionate animosity in his wife Sabine.  As Trinidad passes through the painful process of gaining its Independence, George chooses to remain when the rest of the British community return 'home' and Sabine becomes infatuated with the country's charismatic leader Eric Williams.  It is a hot, damp and fecund type of book.  I'm not surprised that Roffey's first book, Sun Dog (which is being reissued in 2011), was magical realist in bent; The White Woman on the Green Bicycle has the giddy hyperreality that is often on the other side of the genre.

Benny and Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti

This was one of those books that occasionally drops unsolicited through my letter box, and which usually goes straight onto the book shelf for a short sojourn before transfer to the charity shop.  But it caught my eye; I'd heard of Short Books before but never read anything from them; and the first page was a winner.  One weekend while Esther was away I read the whole thing. Yum, yum, yum. 

Benny and Shrimp is a fairytale-romance for grown-ups, with all the things a good fairytale should have: love, sex and death in spades. The story centres on ‘Shrimp’, a widowed librarian in her mid-30s who spends her lunchtimes at the cemetery staring at her husband’s grave, not out of hysterical grief but because of a bemused listlessness.  There she meets Benny, a lonely farmer with several fingers missing from his left hand who stands in danger of becoming an Old Bachelor.  They could not be more different: Shrimp is a culture junkie, who enjoys nothing more than a trip to the opera, while Benny is defiantly grounded in the realities of his dairy herd and yearns for a woman he can make a home with.  But the attraction is undeniable, and despite everything – the arguments, the misunderstandings, the awkwardness – they embark on an affair that can’t possibly last.  I’m not usually one for ‘relationship fiction’ but Katarina Mazetti expresses the impossibilities of love in modern times, and uses gender stereotypes with a self-conscious irony that endears her to me.   She does it without being twee or resorting to cliché (except with the aforementioned irony), and she’s funny too. 

Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada

When my friend Katy chose this book for her December book group choice I suppressed an inward moan.  I'd heard some Chinese whispers about the book: another 'discovered' work of Holocaust fiction, moving, human tragedy ala Irene Nemirovsky, and wasn't very interested.  I'd tarred it as one of those unfortunate books that become so critically ubiquitous they're passe.  Well, thank goodness for Katy. 

Hans Fallada was a convicted murderer, an alcoholic and a drug addict; a one-time writer of sentimental fiction sanctioned by the Third Reich, who wrote this masterpiece of a book in a 24 day fit of productivity at the end of his life and after a long stay in an asylum.  He died shortly before it was first published in 1947.  It is an extraordinary book, about entirely ordinary people; Fallada said he wanted to portray the banality of goodness and the banality of evil in one book.  Check, and check.  He tells the almost-true story of the Quangels, Otto and Anna, who have lost their only son in Hitler's war on the world and thereafter decide to take action against the state by writing and distributing postcards inscribed with anti-Fascist slogans.  Through the eyes of the Quangels, their neighbours and the detectives investigating the case, Fallada tracks the fall-out from their simple campaign, right to its inevitable end.  The prose is spiky and poetic by turns; the vision unsentimental and determinedly devoid of melodrama.  What makes it extraordinary though for me, is Fallada's insight into the mechanisms of the Nazi state and the psychology of resistance which were formed without a historian's insight. It definitely deserves its recent translation and rediscovery.

The Still Point by Amy Sackville

First of all, this book is a beautiful physical object, with it's French flaps and muted grey cover and thick, deckle-edged paper. Thank you for that Portobello Books.   Second, it is an exquisitely written, beguiling debut novel, almost too evocative in parts.  It takes the form of parallel narratives, with two women waiting in the same house for their husbands to come home.   In the present day Julia, great-great niece of the Artic explorer Edward Mackley, spends a listless day awaiting the return of her husband Simon from work; almost 100 years earlier, her great-great aunt Emily waits for Edward to return from an expedition to the North Pole.  The empty, languid, despairing texture of this house-bound pair, is counterpointed by the narrative of Edward's own failing expedition. Undoubtedly, though, the strength of the book is in it biting, bitter, beautiful vision of the Artic.

It was first long-listed for the Orange Prize, and has since won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.  This led to some rather vitriolic and unkind comment on the Guardian about Sackville's ancestry, education and literary apprenticeship.  My tuppence-worth is this: forget any latent prejudice against the stint at Oxbridge and the MA in Creative Writing.  It might have made it easier to get published - it never hurts to know the right people - but it didn't buy Sackville her success, her talent did that.  Also, let's not pretend to ourselves that a writing career has ever been the preserve of poor talented people living in drafty garrets, scribbling in ink made out of crushed acorns.  Privilege and independent means have always played their part in the ease of literary success.

The Emperor's Babe by Bernadette Evaristo

Aha, finally, a book I've written about at Alexandria - you can read my thoughts here.

'The story belongs to Zuleika, the child of Sudanese immigrants living in Londinium in the early 3rd century.  Married off to the fat, middle-aged and pathetic Lucius Aurelius Felix at the tender age of eleven, she has been kept caged in his villa for the last seven years: listless, childless and only allowed out on special occasions.  Into this bland, flat landscape comes Emperor Septimus Severus, on his way to vanquish Hibernia and extend his Empire just that little bit further.  The pair spot each other at the theatre: the eighteen year old ex-child bride and the aging warrior connect and, in Felix's absence, begin a short doomed love affair.'

  Villette by Charlotte Bronte

I always feel slightly ridiculous when I put an honoured Classic with a captial C onto my 'Best Reads' list; it feels a bit redundent.  I mean, of course, it's in my top 10 reads of the year: it's a timeless, critically lauded book by one of the most revered and admired novelists in the history of English Literature (with a captial E and L).   But Villette isn't on my list because it was what I expected it to be; precisely the opposite.  I'm putting it here because I'm in a state of marvelling at how surprising Classic novels can still be.  To put it bluntly, Charlotte Bronte's last and (probably) most autobiographical novel is just plain weird. Brilliant, but weird.  It's protagonist Lucy Snowe is apparently as cold as her name implies; dangerously passionate, but repressed and crushed almost beyond sanity and repair; a liar, whom the reader can hardly trust for an honest impression of a situation; and a woman who falls in love with a man who takes enormous pleasure in provoking, controlling and frustrating her.  Not the stuff that mid-Victorian novels are usually made of. No wonder Bronte was considered coarse in her day!  The strange but strangely perfect love affair between Lucy and the intractible, fractious Paul Emmanuel is impossible to predict, and so is the less-than-happy-but-probably-as-happy-as-it-can-be ending.  I might not recommend it to a Bronte virgin, but whole-heartedly to everyone else.

Onward now, to 2011, and all the wonderful books still to read.  I can't wait to hear about everyone else's reads of the year.

~~Victoria~~

"My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me."

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. Never was this more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that one joke isn't really enough to sustain a parody mash-up novel over 300 pages. Not even when the joke in question strews lashings of ravening undead ultraviolence in the path of the world's favourite Regency romance. And particularly not when the primary joke gets such half-arsed back-up in the form of some truly groan-worthy running innuendo.

"She remembered the lead ammunition in her pocket and offered it to him.'Your balls, Mr. Darcy?' He reached out and closed her hand around them, and offered, 'They belong to you, Miss Bennet.'"

My eyes, they will not stop rolling.

I was sold on Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) more or less as soon as I heard about it; to judge from the ubiquity of both it and the subsequent army of imitators in bookshops, I wasn't the only one. By the time I opened my copy I'd heard rather mixed reports, but I was still looking forward to it anyway. In the event, I gobbled it up in a weekend afternoon, and was reasonably entertained throughout - but this, overwhelmingly, was thanks to Jane Austen's contribution, rather than Grahame-Smith's.

The bulk of the novel remains Austen's text, with the zombie presence rearing its rotting head in casual asides and slight twists on the familiar prose. Austen's dialogue is slightly altered or extended, for example in the opening conversation between Mr and Mrs Bennet on the subject of Mr Bingley, who is to take over Netherfield Park since (as noted in the header quote) its previous owners were eaten:

"Bingley. A single man of four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!"

"How so? Can he train them in the ways of swordsmanship and musketry?"

"How can you be so tiresome? You must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them."

On other occasions, set piece sequences - like the dance at which the Bennets first encounter Bingley and Darcy - are interrupted by attacks of the "unmentionables" (the characters' preferred term for zombies):

A few of the guests, who had the misfortune of being too near the windows, were seized and feasted on at once. When Elizabeth stood, she saw Mrs. Long struggle to free herself as two female dreadfuls bit into her head, cracking her skull like a walnut, and sending a shower of dark blood spouting as high as the chandeliers.

As guests fled in every direction, Mr. Bennett’s voice cut through the commotion. "Girls! Pentagram of Death!"

Elizabeth immediately joined her four sisters, Jane, Mary, Catherine, and Lydia in the center of the dance floor. Each girl produced a dagger from her ankle and stood at the tip of an imaginary five-pointed star. From the center of the room, they began stepping outward in unison—each thrusting a razor-sharp dagger with one hand, the other hand modestly tucked into the small of her back.

From a corner of the room, Mr. Darcy watched Elizabeth and her sisters work their way outward, beheading zombie after zombie as they went.

Initially, it's really quite fun to see zombie mayhem erupt in familiar settings, and you'd be hard-pressed not to grin when Lizzie's reaction to being insulted by Darcy is to draw a dagger with the intention of "aveng[ing] her honour" by "open[ing] his throat". Lizzie is rather dour and humourless in Graham-Smith's additions, but her reply to Darcy upon being asked, grudgingly, to dance made me smile ("Thank you, sir, but I am perfectly content being the bride of death"), and her way of shutting up Mr Hurst, while staying - on sufferance - at Netherfield, was entirely splendid:

"Do you prefer reading to cards?" said he; "that is rather singular."

"I prefer a great many things to cards, Mr. Hurst," said Elizabeth. "Not the least of which is the sensation of a newly sharpened blade as it punctures the round belly of a man."

Mr. Hurst was silent for the remainder of the evening.

Indeed, the addition of zombies does change the emphasis of the narrative in some interesting ways. Mr Bennet, as the passages already quoted show, does particularly well out of the shift. In the original novel he is a witty, genial but essentially neglectful father; flighty Mrs Bennet may be intensely irritating, but she is the only one who makes any effort to find a secure future (by the standards of the time) for their daughters, rather than vaguely hoping that something will sort itself out. In the zombified version of the story, though, Mr Bennet is the one who thinks practically, having trained his five daughters in combat from a young age, whereas Mrs Bennet only wants to see them achieve a status - married women - that will prevent them from taking part in any further fighting. (There are still some social proprieties.)

Lizzie's clashes with Lady Catherine de Bourgh ("not only one's the King's richest servants, but also one of his deadliest"), meanwhile, are as much about actual combat as they are wars of words. There is still a very strong class element; Lady Catherine expresses astonishment that the family could not afford to retain any trained guards:

"No ninjas? How was that possible? Five daughters brought up at home without any ninjas? I never heard of such a thing. Your mother must have been quite a slave to your safety."

But their final confrontation over Darcy involves a knock-down, drag-out hand-to-hand fight - the sort of scene you never really realised you wanted to read, until you did. It's awesome, and one of the few good twists on Austen's tale in the second half of the book (the other is Wickham's fate); for the most part, by this stage I was still reading only because I was enjoying the excuse to read Pride and Prejudice again. (And all my laughter was prompted by lines from the original.)

The big thematic change that the zombie aspect offers - only half-intentionally, I think - is the parallel drawn between marriage and undeath. I have already noted that, in an obvious metaphor for gender roles within marriage, married women are supposed to give up fighting (Lizzie comments that she and her sisters "'are each commanded by His Majesty to defend Hertfordshire from all enemies until such time as we are dead, rendered lame, or married'"). The only major character to fall foul of the unmentionables, meanwhile, is poor old Charlotte Lucas, who is bitten early on. She confides in Lizzie that she has decided to marry the odious Mr Collins for the last months she has left before turning into a walking corpse, on the grounds that at least he'll give her "a proper Christian beheading and burial" when the time comes.

Brilliantly, Mr Collins is every bit as unobservant about this as he is with everything else; just as in the original, he continues to assume that his wife adores him despite all sense and evidence to the contrary:

It had been three months since she had seen Charlotte, and kind months they had not been, for her friend's skin was now quite grey and marked with sores, and her speech appallingly labored. That none of the others noticed this, Elizabeth attributed to their stupidity - particularly Mr. Collins, who apparently had no idea that his wife was three-quarters dead.

Marriage between incompatible partners as a slow march towards smelly, rotting oblivion; less subtle than Austen, perhaps, but in the spirit, I think...

But I don't want to overstate the effects of these changes. The background detail of how the zombie plague affects Hertfordshire life is included for momentary effect rather than because it has been systematically thought through, and often as not is dropped as soon as some cooler possibility presents itself. Thus we are told early on that young ladies are obliged to fight only with daggers, because anything else is not ladylike, but this dictum is instantly forgotten and no-one ever bats an eyelid when Lizzie, her sisters and others fight with swords or muskets.

Furthermore, things go downhill rapidly on the rare occasions when Grahame-Smith steps outside of Austen's text for more than a few lines. The episodes that are wholly new - for example, the Bennet sisters coming upon an overturned carriage under assault by unmentionables - squat inelegantly beside the familiar material, having none of the tone or observational acuity of Austen's own prose.

I'm not sorry I read it. It has two or three quite interesting ideas, the zombie thing was diverting for 40 pages or so, and - more importantly - I hadn't revisited Pride and Prejudice in some years, and was reminded how much I enjoy Austen. But in the future I'll stick to Original Flavour.

~~Nic

The Women We Don't See

I don't write about non-fiction very often here at Alexandria. Partly this is because, as an academic, reading non-fiction is a large part of my day job (and, to an increasing degree, so is writing it; a final copy of the contract to publish my doctoral thesis is sitting beside me on the desk as I type this). I do read monographs and biographies for pleasure, too, but my hit-rate of writing them up is much lower than it is for fiction. So my new year's blogging resolution is to write more about non-fiction - by which I generally mean, let's face it, history.

As it happens, one of the books that I most enjoyed reading this year - and then gabbling about, to anyone who would listen - was a monograph on late medieval Egyptian social history, Yossef Rapoport's Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society (2005). I picked it up to get some background for a topic, new to me, that I was teaching to my third-year undergrads: social history in Mamluk-era (1250-1517) Egypt and Syria. Since it was my first year of teaching the Mamluks at all - or the Crusades, or the Ottomans, or a whole bunch of other periods - I hadn't really been intending to start on the social history just yet, but one particularly forthright student asked, quite reasonably, whether she might look forward to hearing a single woman's name at any point during my course. It was slightly embarrassing, but (of course) also an opportunity, and so off I scurried to learn some more new stuff.

It's fair to say that research on the medieval Islamic world tends to be concentrated on military, political and religious history, and historiography; social and economic history, while not absent by any means, have traditionally attracted much less attention. In part this is a consequence of the available literary sources, whose narratives - inevitably - centre on the great deeds of great men, and not infrequently the perfidious deeds of some really awful ones. But, as has been hashed out at length among scholars of other regions and periods already, it is also about the way we read our sources, the type of sources we look at, and what we expect to find. Work like Rapoport's - and of the likes of Huda Lutfi, Carl Petry, and David Powers - challenges the assumption that it is simply not possible to write substantive history about women in medieval Islam. On the contrary: the women are there, we just aren't looking for them in the right places.

Rapoport's slim (114 pages, discounting bibliography and index), fascinating book builds upon a by-now established methodology for locating women in medieval Muslim society - examining accounts of divorce proceedings, and information on divorce in biographical works - in order to build up a picture of women's life in the Mamluk sultanate (primarily Cairo) that combines statistics and theory with thumbnail biographies of individuals. It is readable throughout, not least because Rapoport's findings subvert expectation at every stage. From a study of the exhaustive biographical dictionary of al-Sakhawi (d. 1497), for example, he finds that three in ten elite marriages in fifteenth-century Cairo ended in divorce.

Biographical dictionaries, I should note, are encyclopaedic tomes which - as the name would suggest - collect together biographical information on very large numbers of people. In Islam, this form of writing had its origin in hadith criticism: that is, the investigation of traditions (hadiths) about the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds. The idea was that, by scrutinising the background and education of the people who had transmitted a given hadith - information that was contained in the introductory 'chain' attached to a hadith, its isnad ("X told Y who heard from Z that the Prophet said...") - scholars would be able to judge whether a given hadith was authentic or not, and thus whether it had any legal authority. Biographical dictionaries, therefore, were reference works, offering information in a set format: for hadith transmitters, for example, it was necessary to provide the names of the transmitter's teachers, the cities to which they had travelled, and so forth.

Naturally, as the genre became more popular it was put to other purposes. Al-Sakhawi's biographical dictionary is about notable individuals - some hadith transmitters, but also poets, courtiers, historians, and others - who lived during the fifteenth century. It contains entries on 12,000 people, mostly men. From this work, Rapoport has been able to reconstruct the marital histories of some five hundred women of the period. It is, of course, only a sample (albeit a very large one by the standards of our medieval sources), and a restricted one at that, since most of the women in it are from the urban elite. But it is, nonetheless, a very revealing snapshot of medieval life.

As Rapoport notes, divorce in medieval Islamic law was first and foremost a seat of patriarchal privilege. As set out in the Qur'an, men had the legal right to unilateral divorce (talaq), which meant that they could, at any time, end their marriage by pronouncing the formula "I divorce you". The ease of this had some interesting consequences, one of which is remarriage was quite frequent for both men and women; furthermore, remarriage to the same person was also quite common, and it was presumably to limit frivolous and/or abusive use of talaq divorce that the Qur'an also stipulated (2:229-30) that talaq may not be used more than three times in a row on the same woman.

In practice, as the complaints of jurists like Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) make clear, people found ways around these restrictions. Jurists (faqihs) were scholars who could issue a legal opinion (fatwa) but did not have the authority (as a judge [qadi] did) to impose any sanctions. One institution that seems - if we take the conservative jurists' complaints seriously - to have become particularly important in this period is tahlil ('making lawful') marriage. After a talaq divorce had been pronounced three times, the only way a couple could remarry was if the women had married and divorced another man in the interim. A tahlil marriage was a quick-fix device to get around this, within the letter if not the spirit of the law: a third-party man was hired to contract a marriage with the woman, consummate it, and then immediately divorce her. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, some men appear to have made a career out of hiring themselves out in this way.) Then the original couple could remarry.

The reason for the rise of this dubious institution in the Mamluk period was a change in the tone of political and public life, with the increasing use of the 'divorce oath'. This type of oath traded on men's absolute patriarchal authority within marriage to boost his standing in the public sphere. A man would pledge himself to an undertaking - in commerce or politics, say - on the pain of a talaq divorce ("May I be divorced from my wife if I do not do X"). If he broke the oath, his marriage would be over, automatically and without appeal; amongst other things, sex with his (now ex) wife was instantly illegal. Because these things always escalate to silly proportions, men in very high-stakes situations were forced to increase their oaths to "May I divorce my wife three times if I don't do X". Which, of course, meant putting your wife through a tahlil marriage - that is, sex with another man - if you broke the oath, and wished to resume the marriage. Ibn Taymiyya opposed this (even to the extent of getting himself imprisoned), deploring a state and society that effectively prostituted women and forced men to pawn their marriages for political advancement.

A woman, if she wanted a divorce, had two options. The first was to seek a divorce with her husband's consent. To judge from the cases discussed by Rapoport and others, this sometimes went smoothly, being a simple recognition of a lack of compatibility and affection between the two parties; but in many cases the woman gave up some or all of her property in order to bribe her husband into agreeing. Unlike in Christian Europe in this (or later) periods, medieval Muslim women were entitled to hold their own property, even when married. They could inherit from their birth family (but were legally forbidden from inheriting as much as their brother(s), if they had any), and they also gained two types of property upon marriage: the dowry (jihaz) from their parents or guardian (which remained inalienably the woman's, not her husband's), and the marriage gift (sadaq), pledged by the husband in the marriage contract. The man's and the woman's respective property stayed separate; the man was obliged to meet all the costs of running the household, and the women was obliged to obey him.

The levels of sadaq and jihaz were, of course, expressions of the family's and the husband's social status, and vary considerably in the surviving evidence. Both of these entitlements - which generally consisted, at least in our period, of textiles, jewellery, and utensils (women were much less likely to own land than men) - offered women protection in the event of widowhood or unilateral divorce, allowing them to support themselves for a prolonged period without needing to remarry. Huda Lutfi, examining women's lives in the same period in Jerusalem, found that a large proportion of women in the city were self-supporting, often undertaking salaried work (usually in trade or textiles), and that most of these salaried women were unmarried.

The second option open to a woman seeking divorce was to get a ruling from a judge (qadi) terminating her marriage. For this she had to prove grounds for divorce, generally with the sworn testimony of witnesses: abandonment, abuse, or - in a fact that scandalized a number of European observers - the failure of the husband to financially support his wife to a level deemed adequate by the judge. The husband's failure to pay in full the contracted marriage gift was also, increasingly in the fifteenth century, cited as legally valid grounds for divorce.

One of the things Rapoport demonstrates is how canny individuals could use knowledge of the law to get themselves a better settlement. For example, there were - and still are - four main schools of Sunni law, and Cairo had a chief judge in each of them; some schools were known to be more favourable to women in divorce cases, and others to the men. If a woman divorced by talaq went to see a Hanafi judge, for example, her husband would find himself under orders to pay for her upkeep during the idda (the six-month 'waiting period' imposed by the Qur'an, during which the divorced woman may not marry another man).

One of Rapoport's subjects for case study is Zumurrud, a manumitted slave girl who improved her financial and social status considerably, by making three strategic marriages over two years. (Notably, she also represented herself in her marital negotiations, having no guardian to oversee the contract for her.) Her first marriage ended, consensually (on the condition that she gave up her marriage gift), after a year and three months. She then married another man, negotiating both a bigger marriage gift than for her first, and a guarantee of support for her child. Six months later, a talaq divorce left her with full upkeep during her idda and her larger sadaq intact. She then married again, two months later, adding a still larger marriage gift to her existing property.

Nothing is known of her life after this; but she had certainly come up in the world, in only two years. As ever, it is the individual human stories that make the history: people negotiating their way through society, making their lives as comfortable as they can with the tools - often unexpected to them - available to them.

The book is a little uneven in places; a couple of the chapters were first published elsewhere as individual articles, and the stitching isn't always concealed as well as it might be, leaving behind some repetition of analysis. But overall I thoroughly enjoyed this, and highly recommend it as a nuanced, detailed and often surprising discussion of life in a medieval Islamic society.

Oh, and, in the random fascinating facts column, I learned from this book that, due to the scarcity of wood in Cairo in this period, many families could not afford to cook at home, and thus subsisted largely on pre-prepared food bought from market stalls.

~~Nic

2010 in Review (Part 1)

2010 - what a year to end the decade.  This time ten years ago I was a sixth-former, studying for my A Levels.  I was waiting with baited breath to find out if I'd got into Cambridge (I hadn't) or St. Andrews (I had, and thank goodness for that).  If my recollection serves I was reading Philip Pullman's Northern Lights; my new favourite novel was The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, which I'd just studied for my English Lit coursework.  Weird to think that it was ten years ago - it feels like yesterday, and a lifetime ago.  I hadn't met the Alexandrians; I had never heard of blogging; I'd never visited an archive; I owned no more than a dozen books.  I'd never paid an electricity bill, or been supermarket shopping on my own, and I'd only recently discovered the internet.  I think that was the Christmas I got my first mobile phone.   I could never have predicted what my life would be like in 2010.  I was just a kid.

The intervening decade has been the university era, defined by undergrad, then post-grad, and finally vocational post-grad.  I will always think of this year as the year when I finally shed the last vestiges of those student days.  In 2010 I finished my diploma in Archives Administration, and got my first professional post as an archivist.  With that came the realisation that I now have a career, with responsibilities and prospects of progression, and that I have settled into a new city and a new stage of my life.  I'm not a vagrant anymore, with one foot in my parent's house and one foot in temporary student accommodation that changes every nine months.  I'm at home in my own house of five years standing; not so far geographically from where I started but thousands of miles from my 17 year old self.   I'm as close to being a grown up as I've ever been. 

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I won't remember 2010 as a year of reading though.   Between the end of the Archives course and the new job, I haven't had an awful lot of time for sitting down with a book (unless it was a book about archival description or preservation).  It hasn't been a year of blogging either - I've neglected Alexandria and relied on Nic to supply the content that I didn't have the energy to produce.  Because, although reviewing is a pleasure for me, it is time-intensive and mentally demanding.  Coming home and collapsing in front of some rubbish TV has been the order of the day over the last three months. 

Which isn't to say that there haven't been good books and bad books, and even the odd reading feat, this year.  After all 2010 is the year in which I finally managed to read the entire Orange Prize longlist.  I've been trying to do this for the past four years and failed miserably. Ironic that in the year that I had the least time, I had the most success at it.   It supplied me with some of my favourite and least-favourite reads of the year, from the glorious heights of M.J. Hyland's This is How and Clare Clark's Savage Lands, to the painful lows of The Wilding by Maria McCann and The Very Thought of You by Rosie Allison.  Without it I would never have listened to the audiobook of The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which I count as one of this year's greatest pleasures, reading or otherwise.

2010 was also the year that I started thinking seriously about reading fiction by African writers.  Inspired partly by my continuing reading-affair with Doris Lessing, and partly by my vehement reaction to another Orange long-lister (and Guardian First Book finalist) Nadifa Mohamed's Black Mamba Boy.  It was during a blog-versation about it with Buried in Print (another reading discovery of 2010) that I realised how little I knew about writing from the continent, and decided on a course of reading.  Which is how I came to read Amos Tutuola's extraordinary novel-cum-myth-cycle The Palm Wine Drinkard and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions.  And how I came to accrue a whole shelf full of classics from Heinemann's African Writer's Series (thank you to all those students selling off their course texts)!   I have enough to keep me going for another decade or two now.

At the same time I embarked on my chapter-by-chapter reading of Rachel M. Brownstein's study of women in literature - Becoming a Heroine -  first reading the book that the chapter was about.  Without it I doubt I would have read Charlotte Bronte's last novel, Vilette, in 2010; I doubt I would ever have read George Meredith's The Egoist in my whole life.  With 150 pages of the latter left to read I can't thank Rachel Brownstein enough for introducing me to the wordiest and most pompous Victorian author I've yet to meet (yes, even more pompous than Hardy, which is saying something).  Beneath the not-very-witty witticisms that hinge upon an obscure reference to Horace, and the descriptions of rainy days that extend to three pages, there hides a cast of minutely drawn characters, whose actions and decisions are subtly but forensically examined.  Who knew that the arguments of feminism in the 1970s were being articulated by a 60 year old Victorian man as early as 1879?  Not me, anyway.

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Looking through my trusty Moleskine at my reading notes, I fear that I've been guilty of enormous gender bias in my literary adventures this year.  I've read so few books by men that I'm embarrassed at myself.  The Orange Prize marathon didn't help, but only nine books by male authors is a shockingly low total even for me.  And three of those books - the first trio of the Matthew Shardlake novels by C.J. Sansom - were by the same man.  I never thought I'd say this but: must address my internalised prejudice against male writers in 2011.   The same goes for books written before 2000 - only nine of those too (it would be almost none without the African writers or the Heroine's project).  Number of books in translation also rubbish: a grand total of - ahem - two.  One, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; the other, Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada.

Genre analysis shows bias too.  2010 has been another year of historical fiction, following the vintage year of 2009 (should I re-read Wolf Hall over Christmas? Tempting, tempting).  I count 19 read in total.  This is opposed to only four sf titles (and that's counting Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven, which could arguably go into either category).  Amongst these four, though, are two of my favourite books of the year: Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (I'll be watching out for her debut novel next year) and Kit Whitfield's In Great Waters.  The latter has my heart for best book of my reading year, although it has some stiff competition in the form of The Spire by William Golding (one of the aforementioned historical novels).   Impossible to compare the two really, because they couldn't be more different in style, although both are set in medieval worlds. 

Over Christmas I plan to write up my best books of 2010, and also look ahead to my most anticipated books of 2011.  But I should spare a moment for all the books I meant to read this year, but didn't get to.  There are so many I can't name them all, but special mentions have to go to Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi, David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Everything Matters by Ron Currie Jr.  I picked you up so many times and then put you down again: most humbly begged apologies.  I'm sure I'll be adding to that list as I read more and more of the Best of 2010 articles and blogposts.  In the meantime, what should I have been reading this year? What books have you loved and hated? Tell all. Another thing I've learnt in 2010: I never get bored of this bookish talk. 

~~Victoria~~

The Imaginary Glass

He imagined civilisation as something lying outside the individual, a spirit which only required a little care to survive. It consoled him; as it had sprung up again after the Romans, and again after the Black Death, so it would now, after the darkness to come. His great book on the history of Neoplatonism thus became his plaintive song in the falling light, and gradually he worked in more and more commentary on Manlius' manuscript to illustrate the points he was making. He, too, expected defeat.

I loved the richness of historical detail and the dark-as-pitch sensibility of An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997), Iain Pears' tale of empiricism and murder in 17th-century Oxford. I'd been looking forward to reading its ambitious, multi-stranded follow-up, The Dream of Scipio (2002), for some time. The end of the western Roman empire, the Black Death, and the Nazi occupation of France, all tied together with a long-lost neo-Platonic treatise: a heady brew indeed, but one that, I'm sorry to say, ultimately proved to be somewhat less than the sum of its parts.

Three separate historical tales are interwoven in The Dream of Scipio. Each is told in the same dry, detached omniscient voice, to which the often fragmentary narrative structure makes an interesting counterpoint. All three threads are introduced through a series of out-of-order snippets - we learn how each of the three main characters meets their end before we know much else about them, for example - and the spotlight skips between the stories with an abandon that borders, at times, on free association. The goal, of course - in keeping with the neo-Platonic concepts that the novel repeatedly uses as a touchstone - is to find echoes and contrasts across the centuries.

The story with the earliest setting is the most interesting by some way, at least to this reader. From a once-plush villa in the south of late antique Gaul (a territory covering present-day France and parts of its eastern neighbours), Manlius Hippomanes can only watch as the Goths close in, the imperial machinery in Rome fails to defend the citizens of its provinces, and his social circle shrinks, both numerically and intellectually, beneath the twin forces of elite flight and the increasing unfashionableness of pagan philosophy in the face of Christianity's ascendancy. But unlike most of those around him, he recognises that fight and flight are not the only - or even the best - options open to him:

"He says that a few thousand troops now could make all the difference."

"He said that six months ago as well. It made no difference at all. Has something now changed?"

Felix shrugged his shoulders wearily. "We must try, surely? The whole of the civilised world is at stake."

Manlius smiled. "We are the civilized world, you and I," he said. "A few dozen people, with our learning."

In his ensuing efforts to find a modus operandi between Roman culture and 'barbarian' incomers - to preserve at least some of what he values, rather than gamble and most likely lose it all - Manlius is essentially an analogue for Sidonius Apollinaris, many of whose letters survive from the period. Like Manlius, Sidonius was an old guard of the Roman intellectual and political elite who, not without some agonising, saw which way the wind was blowing in the later fifth century, and opted to sail with it. Manlius manoeuvres his way into a bishopric, and uses this position of ecclesiastical authority to negotiate a space for Romanitas in the new world order.

Manlius' world is very well drawn, with plenty of incidental cultural and material details - the books he has access to, the meals made from the dwindling agricultural yield of his estate, the networks of patronage - forming a backdrop to the central events and conversations. Some of these are helpfully summarised for us by Julien Barneuve, protagonist of the Second World War strand, when he explains, to an unsuspecting bystander, the broader significance of the remains of a mosaic sponsored by Manlius:

"The whole place was crumbling. The fields were overgrown as there were no workers. The great estates were breaking up. Trade collapsed, the cities too. In that little patch you can see the decline of an entire civilisation, the greatest the world has ever known. I see you were cross when I pointed that hole out to you. It makes me angry, too."

"Why, sir?"

"Because civilisation depends on continually making the effort, on never giving in. It needs to be cared for by men of goodwill, protected from the dark. These people gave in. They stopped caring. And because they did, the land fell under the darkness of a barbarism which lasted for hundreds of years."

Unsurprisingly, the question of what constitutes civilisation, and what can and should be done to save it, runs through all three stories. For Manlius in late antiquity, the threat is twofold: the rise of the Church and the Germanic invasions (in the form of the Visigoths, who were at this time adherents of Arian Christianity - a heresy, in the eyes of the Roman church, although this is not an issue that gets explored in the novel). Julien’s France faces another, rather more implacable, German force in the shape of the Wehrmacht, and like Manlius there are several courses open to him when it comes to greeting the barbarians, all of which play out in the lives of three characters within his story: "The resister, the collaborator and the vacillating intellectual". In the fourteenth century, meanwhile, naïve young would-be scholar Olivier de Noyen finds Cicero a considerable distraction - at least for a time - from the horrors of the Black Death:

The beauty of the prose, the noble elegance of the ideas, the lofty majesty of the conceptions were like draughts of strong wine, and when he first discovered, then read, the one manuscript Ceccani possessed, he wept with joy for a full twenty minutes before immediately starting again.

Yes, intentionally or not, Pears really does seem to be equating the Christianisation of Europe with Blitzkrieg. Since I’m of school that sees Late Antiquity as different from, rather than automatically inferior to, the Classical world, this made me impatient: life was undoubtedly nasty, brutish, and short of good reading material in the early Middle Ages, but it was hardly Auschwitz. And, as Peter Brown and others have spilt quite some ink discussing, much of Christianity’s patriarchal excess comes from the Roman cultural milieu in which in developed. But anyway: the point is, while the paralleling is often very clever and illuminating, the narrative becomes bogged down in its thematic musings, leaving us to make only rather ponderous progress through the stories.

Never fear, though, because the appeal of civilisation gets reinforced, in all three plot threads, by a trio of women on pedestals, the threats to whose innocent allure underline What Is At Stake. You know the type; indeed, Pears himself lampoons the attitude at one point:

Dante's Beatrice was scarcely a real person by the time he had reduced her to verse; Petrarch's Laura might not have existed at all except in his imagination. Both loved their lovers more after they were dead, and could not disturb their imaginations with the onset of wrinkles or the annoyance of opinions independently expressed.

Alas, if only the appealing snark of this passage translated into Pears' treatment of his own female characters. Julien falls obsessively for Jewish artist Julia, who seems promisingly bohemian and vaguely edgy at first, but who is all too soon consigned to being little more than the captive object of Julien's devotion, trying to conceal her Jewish identity from Nazi spies in the village close to where Manlius once lived. Indeed, throughout the novel, Jews are firmly cast in the tragic and mostly faceless victim mould, whose primary role is to be menaced by the various barbarians, so that our heroic protectors of civilisation can get in some properly poignant angst at their inability to prevent them from dying (off-stage). Or, in the case of Manlius, be pressured into killing them himself to show his outward allegiance to the new barbarism - another way in which the late antique storyline is both grimmer and more compelling.

Olivier, meanwhile, has saintly, soft-spoken cypher Rebecca to moon over. In one of the novel's many exercises in parallel and contrast, where Julia seeks to hide her Jewishness, Rebecca - a servant in a Jewish household - allows herself to be perceived as a Jew, although she isn't. This is because, even at a time when Jews are being scapegoated for the plague, the truth - that she is one of the few surviving Cathars - is more dangerous to her. Olivier's solipsistic, bigoted reaction to the thought that she is Jewish is clearly meant to be ridiculous:

Now he knew for certain who she was and what she was - a servant, a Jew - he did not want anything to do with her. He was furious with her, indeed. For nearly two years now he had held this woman in his imagining, written his poetry, turned her into his muse. Every day in his mind he laid flowers at her feet, kissed her hand, more than that. And then he discovers her. And she is a Jew, a servant. He hated her, never wanted to see her again, of course not. The feelings she had aroused in him disgusted him.

But I am less certain that Olivier's desire for a mute muse is undermined quite so strongly as are his snobbery and anti-semitism, since Olivier's extreme idealisation of Rebecca only returns when he learns the truth, and - most importantly - we hear so little from Rebecca herself in the narrative.

The only one of these women who goes some way towards "disturbing [...] imagination with the annoyance of opinions independently expressed" is Sophia, Manlius' talisman and tutor in neo-Platonic thought. She is the second speaker here, trying - politely - to head off Manlius' obvious affection for her:

"You say that, at its best, the physical craving is a reflection of the desire of the soul to reunite with the ultimate beauty, with God. And can only be justified as such."

"But I said it was only a reflection. Not a reality. As real as a glass reflected in a pond."

"But a reflection of water in a mirror can make you thirsty."

"That is true. And that is what you should work towards. You should bend your mouth to the imaginary glass and try to drink."

"I know all this. I have learnt well. And yet I cannot stop."

There is plenty of unfulfilled desire lurking here, and despite the narrator's perceptive assertion that

this great passion was the more fulfilling for each because of its abstract nature, that for Manlius sex was something all men had with their servants when necessary, that for Sophia it was a reminder of a position in the world which bred resentment rather than release

- in practice it does seem as if Sophia is the one who is more restrained and self-protective, viewing her exchanges with Manlius through rather less rose-tinted spectacles than he does. She is quite forthright (by the standards of the novel, and the time she's in) and unabashedly intellectual, but - as with the other two women - her role is to be a symbol of what the male protagonist of her storyline is fighting for, and to spend most of her time thinking about said man. Thus, when we're let into her thoughts, much of what she does is interpret Manlius' actions and attitudes for us, in line with the philosophical lens through which both she and the novel see the world:

She suspected that the Manlius who retired to his estates, and the Manlius who emerged to impose himself on the province were in opposition to each other, not two facets of a harmonious soul. But she ignored this, because she needed to.

It is not hard to guess her trajectory in this post-Roman world; Pears wants her to be Hypatia so badly it hurts, although ultimately her story gains resonance from the real-world example rather than mapping onto it exactly.

The novel does, ultimately, complicate the matter of civilisation vs. the barbarians still further; as is signalled in Sophia's repeated imagery of reflection and reality, and of divided souls, Pears increasingly emphasises the ways in which civilisation and barbarism are two sides of the same coin, and the ways in which the former can so easily slip into the latter, even with the very best of intentions:

"Any amount of disgrace or infamy can be incurred," Manlius quoted, "if it is in the cause of virtue."

Had Julien been less influenced by his own predicament, then he might have looked harder and guessed the poet's motivations earlier than he did. He might also have considered the possibility that Manlius, in writing these words, was passing a verdict on his own acts, rather than providing a philosophical basis for them.

Lots of interesting potential, then, but the imbalance between theme, plot and character here too often results in a damagingly slow pace - and the detached narrative voice added to the oh-so-familiar trope of pedestal women in peril rather detracted from the emotional impact I'd expected to find in three tales of three such weighty historical periods. Intellectually interesting, but never really involving.

~~Nic

This is My Cell

[T]here was no risk in letting herself believe that these trees belonged to her; the rough trunks, the startling soft meat of a broken branch, the knobbled twigs rising in rows like choirs. The ground belonged to her, the human-made rises and falls of root and rock, carefully random, beautiful. The flowers were hers, stuporous in their mulch: the light and the stippled shadow, the stones and the rich rot underneath them, were all part of this place that felt like part of her. For the few minutes of passing through it, she was drawn into it like a breath.

Back in October, there was a very long discussion thread over at Torque Control - sparked by an interview with Tricia Sullivan - about why so little of the science fiction published in the UK these days is written by women. One of the ideas that came out of this fascinating conversation was that we should celebrate women's genre writing, both in the UK and elsewhere, by putting together a list of the best sf by women from the past ten years. (Voting is open to everyone, and runs until the end of December 5th; details of how to vote are here: go on!)

I'm still mulling over my own list of nominations, but one of them is certainly going to be Solitaire (2002, returning to print next year with Small Beer Press), by Kelley Eskridge. It's a coming of age story done as psychological thriller: a compelling portrait of a young woman battling both the system and her self after her world collapses, to emerge older, wiser and sadder from an extremely long dark night of the soul. The first chapter is available online here.

Solitaire is essentially a novel about the individual within and against the collective. Its central character, twenty-two year-old Ren 'Jackal' Segura, is a "Hope". She is one of thousands of people around the globe who shared the moment of their birth with that of a new world order: a single, unified planetary government. This accident of birth both affords Hopes huge social and economic privilege, and strips them of some measure of their individuality. As "the face of unity", representives of "a global community with shared dreams and common goals", their propagandistic value to the new government - and to their home nations - is enormous, and huge reserves of time and money are ploughed into grooming them for roles in the Earth Congress and its associated administration when they reach adulthood.

The privilege comes with a price, of course. One of these, and the most immediately obvious in the narrative, is the envy of others; early on, we see that some of  Jackal's peers feel overshadowed by the glamour of her Hope status, and are resentful of the educational and social opportunities she is given at their expense. In particular, Jackal's relationship with her mother, Donatella, has become increasingly difficult; while Donatella is ambitious and capable in her own right, she has invested so much of her intellectual and emotional energy into Jackal's future success that she seems to have lost all sight of Jackal as a (young) human being, and takes any mistake on Jackal's part as an unforgiveable failure.

Jackal, to a considerable degree, has come to share and internalise this sense of herself. As Snow, Jackal's girlfriend (who, rather awesomely and quite incidentally, has had body-mod surgery to turn one of her fingers into a Swiss Army knife), observes,

Sometimes I wonder how Jackal survived this woman's mothering. And I understand why Jackal is so blindly duty-bound and why she is afraid to ask people for help. Why she guards her core so fiercely. It's because she's an orphan whose parents are still alive.

Things only get worse when Donatella is passed over for a significant promotion - overseeing the development and implementation of new brain-chemistry technology - in favour of her precocious daughter. All this is exacerbated by the environment in which Jackal grows up; unlike her fellow Hopes, she is the living symbol not of a country but of a corporation:

That was who she was: the Hope of Ko. The Hope of the only commercial entity on the planet with its own home territory and almost-realized independence from its host nation, only a few negotiations away from becoming the first corporate-state in the new world order; the only commercial concern powerful enough to leverage its impact on world economy into inclusion in the Hope program.

Which brings us to the second, much larger cost of being a Hope: it means, unavoidably, a life lived in public, the individual will subsumed to the needs and desire of the collective or corporate body. What price Jackal's volition and self-determination, after all, when the fortunes of everyone connected with Ko are dependent upon her success? In everything she does, she must excel; her role in life, once she becomes an adult, will be to provide the company with a return on its investment, year after year. Here, for example, is the rebuke she receives from a tutor/line manager after a rare loss of temper on her part:

"I will not have you perceived as unable to manage conflict. I will not have you perceived as unable to be objective. You are the most important investment that this company will make in a generation. You will do everything in your power to justify that investment. You are the Hope of Ko, and I am making you fit to serve."

Unsurprisingly, given her circumstances and upbringing, the majority of the time Jackal is preternaturally self-aware and self-controlled, as Eskridge signals in the novel's opening paragraph:

So here she was, framed in the open double doors like a photograph: Jackal Segura on the worst day of her life, preparing to join the party. The room splayed wide before her, swollen with voices, music, human heat, and she thought perhaps this was a bad idea after all. But she was conscious of the picture she made, backlit in gold by the autumn afternoon sun, standing square, taking up space. A good entrance, casually dramatic. People were already noticing, smiling; there’s our Jackal being herself. There’s our Hope.

She is subject to constant scrutiny, not only from her friends, family and colleagues, but also - as the imagery of photographs here suggests - from the media; she is obliged to make regular time for the latter in her schedule (the appetite for details of the Hope's life is considerably, it seems). Her thoughts and feelings, much less her public actions, can never be entirely her own.

As the novel begins, Jackal's hard-won self-control is fracturing. "[T]he worst day of her life", in the words of the opening line quoted above, is when she discovers that she is not, technically, a Hope: her birth was late, by a matter of hours, but Donatella and unknown other associates falsified the records of the delivery to get her - and Ko - a piece of the world-government pie. This news, thrown at her in bitter anger by her mother, cuts to the heart of everything Jackal understands herself to be: public property, with the weight of the world on her young shoulders and a glittering, influential career ahead of her.

The way that Jackal reacts links into the novel's larger themes of self-determination and responsibility. Initially, she greets her devastation by seeking to remove herself from it; she gets drunk and has bad-idea sex with a male friend, Tiger. In a foreshadowing of later developments in the story, Jackal experiences the encounter - drawn with expressive economy by Eskridge - as a dislocation of body and mind: "The sex was a series of strobe moments, mouth here, fingers there, and she flowed through them click click click as if working a string of worry beads to count her sorrows away", and when it ends she returns to awareness by "step[ping] off the shelf in her head where she'd been storing herself".

What makes all this more interesting is that Jackal is not, as might be expected, either mutinous or sullen about her responsibilities. Her choice, years before, of the nickname Jackal represents one of her very few acts of rebellion against her mother (Donatella tried to get her to go for something more noble like Eagle). Even after learning she is not a Hope, her response - bar the immediate loss of self-control - is to redouble her efforts in service to Ko. It is partly a distraction, a way to fight her panic. But it is also a desire to do well, regardless. She thrives on the pressure, and adores both her training and her new job in charge of the brain manipulation project:

Even with too little sleep and apple lumps in her stomach, she hurried toward it. The work was like nitrogen in her blood, a fizzing feeling when she did well. Here she felt confident, real. Here she felt safe. When she doubted herself and her ability to play the role that she was being customized for, she pushed herself harder, staked out another skill and skinned itself and sucked it from the guts down to the marrow. It nourished her spirit in the same way that Snow sustained her heart.

Yet Ko is all-consuming and unforgiving, and Jackal - who has lived on the home island, near Hong Kong, all her sheltered life - has only a vague sense of what life is like outside it. When one of Jackal's classmates and colleagues turns down a job on the project Jackal is to lead, because of an unspecified moral objection to the research (as Jackal's father puts it, he "agonized over his damn principles, whether he could work on a project that he didn't approve of"), he and his family are forced to leave both the company and its island, and Jackal imagines him

swallowed up by one of the innumerable frightening things that awaited someone forcibly disconnected from the world's most powerful corporation.

Solitude among the trees of Ko - as expressed in the passage quoted at the very top of the post - is an important release for Jackal, and her attachment to the island's landscape is deeply felt. But she enjoys it precisely because it represents only a temporary escape: a pause from the demands of her life, not a severance of it. Corporate (and social) life on Ko gives Jackal's life structure and meaning, and the idea of its loss fills her with horror because she has never had to live her life for its own sake, or have only herself for company.

Then, abruptly, she is caught up in a horrific incident in Hong Kong, and left to twist in the wind - taking responsibility for something she didn't do - by her corporate masters in Ko. Here, a hundred pages in, the story abruptly shifts gear. Jackal is offered the chance to reduce her sentence by taking part in a pilot scheme for a new form of criminal rehabilitation: an experimental chemical process that creates a virtual environment in the subject's mind, in which the subjective sense of time can be controlled externally; ten months of real time in the programme, during which she will be fed intravenously, will be experienced by her as eight years. In the simulation, she will see no-one: two thousand, nine hundred and twenty days of solitary confinement inside her own head. Sick at heart, but with little choice, she accepts.

What follows - Jackal trapped in a virtual room in her mind, tearing herself apart and slowly, painfully, putting herself back together - is shown to us in sequential, random snippets. Here, at last, is the woman alone with her self. There is a bed, a cupboard, and an imaginary wall-screen that counts off the days; this is all, and Eskridge evokes the loneliness and the boredom and the creeping danger of insanity with quiet skill. There is no grandstanding, little shrieking or violence on Jackal's part: just the understated, skin-crawlingly endless build up of moments, the discovery that she increasingly finds "comfort in patterns, in repeatable actions, in controlled movements", the half-acknowledged fear that this might be a glimmer of madness.

As Ko's Hope, she could pretend to herself that she had control over her life, could in some ways enjoy the walls within which she lived. In the simulated prison cell, though, she has no illusion left: she is entirely and unignorably at the mercy of her captors. The relentless self-scrutiny to which she subjects herself - for want of anything else to do - proves more scouring than anything the outside world ever inflicted on her; passing day 900, she reflects:

I am in prison. She reached out and touched the wall nearest her. This is my cell. She touched her fingers to her breastbone. This is my cell. She thumped herself once, hard. This is my cell. Then she stood, looking around her, breathing, turning, looking, breathing, touching herself, for a long time.

After the tightly-constructed claustrophobia of Jackal's time in the prison - and it really is very well done - the story's continuation after her release could have been a disappointment. But the liberation that Jackal gradually comes to feel and appreciate is matched by an opening out of the narrative. Exiled from Ko, adrift in a world she never really understood even before her imprisonment, she finds a "strange, dislocated freedom" in living only for eating, sleeping, and "the clean satisfaction of getting things done". Outcast in a marginal neighbourhood of a strange city, Jackal has the chance to meet people on her own terms, without her status as a Hope weighing her down and colouring the way others interact with her. Above all, she finds herself drawn to a back-street bar named Solitaire, "a place where people can come and be themselves, even if their self is really weird", and where fellow former inmates of the virtual reality prison congregate - each with the aim of being alone in a like-minded crowd.

I've always been drawn to characters who survive and thrive when thrown back on their own resources, and Jackal's journey from everyone's pawn to self-reliant individual is a very enjoyable and satisfying one indeed.

~~Nic