Eve's Alexandria

Niceness Merely Pads the Cell

I'm surprised at how hard it is to find the words to express my sadness at the death, yesterday, of Joanna Russ. I only started reading her work relatively recently (and only began writing about her here last year), but in books like We Who Are About To... and The Female Man - and short story collections like Extraordinary People and The Adventures of Alyx - I found such a shock of recognition and liberation in Russ' eloquent anger that I feel like they have been part of my life and my way of seeing the world for much longer. Her death is a huge loss for feminism and for science fiction - in terms of both fiction and criticism - that is only made keener by the fact that, as I understand it, long-term ill health has prevented her from contributing to the conversation for many years now.

By way of small tribute, here is a review I wrote for Vector last year, of the critical essay collection On Joanna Russ (2009), edited by Farah Mendlesohn, which does a wonderful job of capturing so many of the facets of Russ: the writer, the thinker, the inspiration.

--

For reader and critic alike, Joanna Russ is an intimidating writer to approach. Her anger – at injustice, at wilful stupidity, at the patriarchal lines along which so much of the world is organised – is palpable in her writing. Reading her is never less than bracing. Her portrayal of women characters who respond to the patriarchal world with open aggression was taboo-breaking on publication in the Sixties and Seventies and remains arresting today. These characters are not (just) victims, striking out desperately; they are powerful agents who revel in their capacity for violence and there are few who do not see the necessity of it. Any other response, any hint of conciliation, only strengthens the forces ranged against them. As Farah Mendlesohn puts it, in her insightful introduction to this scholarly essay collection, for Russ "niceness is not a mitigating factor in the structures of oppression. […] Niceness merely pads the cell."

It is no coincidence, then, that the word which recurs in so many of these essays about Russ’s work and her place in the SF field as both reader and writer is 'fierceness'. It is no surprise, either, that the sharp-witted fierceness of Russ and other feminist authors met with hostility in some quarters. (It still does, albeit from less distinguished sources, if the letters page at feministsf.org is anything to go by.) These early reactions are charted – lucidly and entertainingly – by Helen Merrick in 'The Female "Atlas" of Science Fiction? Russ, Feminism and the SF Community'. Poul Anderson was not unusual when he declared, in response to Russ' 1972 essay 'The Image of Women in Science Fiction', that a feminist perspective on SF brought only bias and distortion to the table. In his view – entirely logical and objective, no doubt, him being a man and all – it was perfectly natural for there to be few female characters in SF since most SF writers composed "cerebral plots" that did not require love interests. But Russ' words did not fall on entirely stony ground; Merrick quotes Philip K Dick, for one, acknowledging the importance of anger in critiques of a dominant group, as making it harder for the dominant group to simply disregard them.

While there is fun to be had with kneejerk reactions like Anderson's – and satisfaction when Russ sharpens her pen in return – it is fascinating to see how far we have come and what a towering figure Russ was and is. Merrick's analysis of this instance of the debate over feminism’s place in SF brings into focus the broader theme of the first part of On Joanna Russ: Russ as a committed participant in the SF field and a serious challenge to the field's shared assumptions. Merrick's argument – that Russ' feminism represented a substantially new approach to genre criticism – is complemented in 'Russ on Writing Science Fiction and Reviewing It', by Edward James. In a wonderful advertisement for Russ' non-fiction writing, he examines her tenure as a reviewer for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction between 1966 and 1980. He shows us Russ as a sharp, eloquent and intellectually restless critic and often a very funny one (on The Day of the Dolphin: "M. Merle writes like this, by the way, it is very modish and experimental, it is called 'run-in sentences', she flung herself down on the bed, I will kill all publishers, she thought"). She values "utter conviction" in genre writing – SF that does not shy away from its SFnality – without giving a pass to substandard or unambitious work; a reviewer's opinion, she argues, is not arbitrary simply because no objective standards of quality exist. As her time as a reviewer goes on, her aspirations for the genre develop; she believes that SF can (and should) be better, that there is no reason for it to shy away from the challenge of diversity – not least, in the form of herself.

Lisa Yaszek's 'A History of One's Own: Joanna Russ and the Creation of a Feminist SF Tradition' looks at another aspect of the developing conversation of feminist SF, Russ' interactions with women authors and her attitudes to writing that explores women's concerns. As the title suggests, Yaszek seeks to set Russ in the context of feminist canon-forming with the result that some of the piece – while interesting to a reader like me, who did not know the history in much detail – is only tangentially about Russ. Dianne Newell and Jenéa Tallentire's 'Learning the "Prophet Business": The Merril-Russ Intersection', meanwhile, feels like it is part of a specialised debate that never quite comes into focus; that it spends so much space interrogating the "rivalry" between Russ and Judith Merril, before reaching the rather obvious conclusion that Russ' ideas changed over time, does not enhance its appeal.

When it comes to the essays on Russ' fiction, those that concentrate on a single work or a limited body of stories are, by and large, the strongest offerings. In 'Extraordinary People: Joanna Russ' Short Fiction', Graham Sleight offers a characteristically perceptive close reading of several stories (notably 'When It Changed', 'The Zanzibar Cat', 'Souls' and 'Bodies'), interspersed with brief but insightful comments on how a Russ story works. Russ, he suggests, builds new narrative frameworks before the reader's eyes, offering not simply argument – although there is always and ever that – but an exercise in how to argue. Unfortunately, after a strong start, Sleight's article winds down rather abruptly; it could easily have been half as long again. Gary K. Wolfe's 'Alyx Among the Genres' greatly enriched my reading of the Alyx stories, in particular the elegy for escapist reading that is 'The Second Inquisition'. (In general I would like to have seen more of this sort of piece in the book: ones that set Russ' work against the backdrop of her contemporaries' work.) I was much less convinced by Jason P. Vest’s take on Alyx in 'Violent Women, Womanly Violence: Joanna Russ' Femmes Fatales'; while Alyx can and does kick arse when necessary, I would rank self-reliance and quick-wittedness rather higher among her many skills.

The novels are better served in terms of attention, although the quality of the exploration is more variable. There are a strong pair of discussions of The Two of Them, each concerned with how we can read Russ today. I found Sherryl Vint's 'Joanna Russ’s The Two of Them in an Age of Third-wave Feminism' the most stimulating, for its interest in how women of different cultural backgrounds experience oppression differently (and how Western feminists have tended to forget or disregard this), although Pat Wheeler makes an interesting if unfocused return to the theme of fierceness with '"This Is Not Me. I Am Not That": Anger and the Will to Action in Joanna Russ's Fiction'. Some of the other single-work studies are less successful. Tess Williams makes some good points in 'Castaway: Carnival and Sociobiological Satire in We Who Are About To…', but the piece as a whole is a little uninspired – seeking the carnivalesque feels somewhat old hat – and never quite touches what makes the book so compelling: the brutal glee of the first half followed by the complete psychological breakdown of the second. Sandra Lindow goes for a heavily symbolic reading in 'Kittens Who Run With Wolves: Healthy Girl Development in Joanna Russ’s Kittakinny'; the result is unsatisfying and a touch humourless, although it does once again raise the issue of how being trained from birth to be 'nice' hampers rather than helps women and girls. Andrew M. Butler’s free-associative 'Medusa Laughs: Birds, Thieves and Other Unruly Women', meanwhile, induced head-scratching but little enlightenment in this reader.

It says much about how we read Russ' work – for idea, for argument, for short sharp shocks – that so few of the authors here treat with Russ as a prose stylist, as a writer on a sentence-by-sentence level rather than one whose words are there to serve her themes. Samuel R. Delany’s 'Joanna Russ and D.W. Griffith' is an exception, if a somewhat eccentric one, since it pivots on a thesis – that some of Russ' narrative structures were shaped by watching D.W. Griffith's films – which the author admits is wrong (following a conversation with Russ herself) at the end of the essay. Brian Charles Clark, in 'The Narrative Topology of Resistance in the Fiction of Joanna Russ', goes for something similar but spends as much time discussing other critics' theories as he does applying them to Russ, which is fine if you like that sort of thing but not immediately compelling for readers not versed in the scholarly debates.

Any edited volume such as this is bound to have a few misfires or, at the very least, entries that work more or less well for different readers. This is, nonetheless, a very welcome collection, an expansive and thought-provoking look at Russ that demonstrates the importance of seeing the various aspects of her career as a whole: fiction, criticism, activism, persona. That it does so in several different registers – a few pieces tend towards the esoteric but most are perfectly accessible to the general reader – is equally to be welcomed. For anyone interested in how SF became what it is today, this is well worth the read.

~~Nic

Wrong

The first time I kissed my father on the mouth it was the Easter holiday. A chill clear spring afternoon, the trees still black twigs and a lemon glaze on the white cloud sky... Through the window I had been watching the dog from the Phene Arms, overweight as pub dogs tend to be, rummaging in a garden hedge.  Sensing that I was so close to joy, even the heedless dog seemed a toy, a comedic charm staged expressly for my amusement.  I watched it for a moment longer, and then I stepped forward and kissed my father on his lovely mouth.

In my Orange longlist preview post I said that Anne Peile's debut novel, Repeat It Today with Tears, sounded like the kind of book that I would learn to anticipate only after I'd started reading it.  Meaning, I suppose, that it's not the a novel that I would seek out based on synopsis alone, but one that sells itself powerfully in the very early stages of the reading itself.  Which is pretty much precisely my experience of it.  It is a slim book, strangely sized. Slightly too tall for a mass-market paperback, slightly squat for a trade paperback.  The font is large.  It gives the visual and first impression of being slight.  Which it isn't. Not at all.

It sets out to tell an apparently simple story, of a sixteen year old girl's single-minded pursuit of the man of her dreams.  It is the early 1970s, and pre-Punk London is steeping in sexual revolution.  Susie, the novel's precocious narrator, is being groomed along the road to a Classics scholarship at Oxford, no small achievement for a girl brough up without aspirations or encouragement.  She and her older sister, Lin, have been indifferently raised by their single mother and her 'permanent man friend' Ron.   Their flat just off Clapham Common is not a family home so much as a place they all live together in a state of drowsy truce.  Susie's intelligence, and especially her gift for Latin, isn't nurtured, but she works hard at school nevertheless.  Not because she is ambitious - far from it - but because 'it brought me praise and because there was nothing else in my life that I liked very much.' 

Susie is desperate to be loved; more than that, she is desperate to be adored.  She feels these intense emotions of love and adoration herself, for the mysterious father she has never known: Jack ap Rhys Owen.   She makes it her life's work to learn about him, ever nook and inch of him.  She uses the back of her school exercise books to 'compile a list of everything I knew about my father', and treats the one photograph she has of him as an object of devotion: ' When I was alone I used to take it out and hold it in front of me, staring so hard that I could vivify the image and believe that he lived and breathed for me.  I felt that he understood me.  I do not recall that there was a time when I looked upon my father's face with anything but adoration.'

Flicking through the phone book one day, looking for teachers to prank-call, she stumbles upon his telephone number, and realises that he - Jack ap Rhys Owen - is living just a short bus-ride away in Chelsea.  With a terrifying determination she derails the course of her life in order to pursue her dream of him, working evening shifts in a cafe on the Kings Road and spending the weekends helping on the market stalls at the Great Gear Trading Company to be near to where he is.  She spies on his house each day, and begins to frequent the bars and clubs in the vicinity, making friends amongst a set of fearfully dubious characters.  She sees him from a distance, knows the car he drives and memorises his timetable; but they don't meet.  Until, one ordinary afternoon she accompanies a friend for an innocuous drink in a run-down bar, and there he is.  Next comes the kiss.  And after that a whirlwind of bliss and lust so heady and tender and beautifully evoked that it is too easy to forget that its subjects are a teenage girl and her tragically oblivious 56 year old father.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Susie narrates the story of her incestuous relationship with her father in retrospect, from a position of hindsight, but she is very clear.  She always knew what she was doing, right from the beginning, and that she does not regret it.  It is something, she believes, that she was born to:

'I do not shock myself... I never have.  You see, when my father had me in his embrace, arms and legs and hair all wound around, I used to cling on for dear life in my rapture, thinking only, 'This is what I was made for. This is why I was born.' And everything outside the act of possession was disengaged from me and my clasped love, as the rest of the fairground seems when the merry-go-round is turning.'

Later in her life, when the inevitable arc of her story has brought her crashing to earth, she spends a deal of time meditating upon a passage in St Paul's letter to the Philippians, from which the novel's title is taken: 'I have told you often, and I repeat it today with tears, there are many who are behaving as the enemies of Christ. They are destined to be lost.'

Destined to be lost.  Susie believes there is something doomed inside of her; a cruel twist of fate that she should be destined to love only the man who was her father.  She understands, of course, that incest is a Grade A sexual and social taboo.  Undergoing an education in sensuality, during her early forays into Chelsea, she vaguely shares her discomfort with an older friend, Lalla:

She [Lalla] said, 'I will teach you everything you need to know about men. You can have anyone was you want, darling, anyone at all.' 

'Even if it's wrong?'

'Wrong, what's wrong? There is no wrong, it's whether you want to or not, that's all that matters.'

Susie's London is awash with inappropriate lust; sex is no longer a sin but a right.  Nothing is wrong, nothing is out of bounds.  Everyone is testing and breaking taboos: sex with men, sex with women, sex in threes, in fours, sex with older men, sex with younger men, sex in public.  The lines that demarcated 'wrongness' have been shifted, blurred and finally erased.  Susie is told by Lalla, and by others, that she can do whatever she wants, with whoever she wants.  Of course, she is too astute to believe that they would sanction her seduction of her own father.  She can read between the lines: nothing is wrong, except the things that just are.  Incest is Wrong.  She knows it; she feels no remorse in commiting it anyway.

And not once but 'a hundred times, a hundred times a hundred times.'  This is what is so powerfully compelling about Susie's character: her ability to lie to others, while being brutally honest with herself.  Again, it is a role she understands herself to have been born to:

I suppose that I was a born liar.  I did not want to lie, not to Jack.  Sometimes, in the time when I was joined to him, I wanted to tell him the truth... Inside my head I might just have been repeating the diminutives of father over and over again.  ... Because I loved him so much and he told me, often, how happy I made him and how lucky, I never saw what we did as wrong.  But I did know that outsiders would fail to understand.  In consequence, I knew that I must absolve him from all possible blame by never telling him the truth.  I kept Dad and Daddy dumb, unheard inside me.

Anne Peile's writing draws you deep into the painful, testing wrongness of Susie's love, and of Jack's reciprocation, with a brazen eloquence.  As Susie tells it, their affair reaches the Shakespearean heights of the greatest doomed love stories ever told.  Their sex is gorgeously, disturbingly tender; their devotion, terrifying; Jack's disbelief, beautiful and sickening; Susie's love, so brutally sincere it could almost be innocent.  All of it, of course, is from Susie's version of events, and told from a time in her life when memories have become refuges, but nevertheless, 'wrong' starts to seem like the poor choice of word for what they do.

What is it that is 'wrong' about their relationship?  Surely there are far greater wrongnesses than the accident of paternity: the wrong of Susie's deceit, the wrong of Jack's adultery (because he does have a wife), the wrong of his willingness to be seduced by a girl forty years his junior with few questions asked.  The novel breaks down probes and questions all these wrongs in a sharp-eyed, forensic sort of way.  It seems to me that, by the final pages, the question it is most interested in is this: is there something wrong with Susie?  Wrong, I mean, from the start.  Is there a kernel of inevitable and pathological madness in her that estranges her from the world and all the norms of familial bonds?  Clearly she thinks so, and the evidence of her narration suggests that only through contact with Jack does she truly become anything like a whole person.  Her other life - the scholarship; the sharpness of her intelligence; the future she might have had - is nothing but a vague, drab backdrop to everything else.

As I finished the novel I realised that Susie reminded me of somebody.  Not somebody 'real' - not to worry! - but another character, one from last year's Orange longlist: Patrick Oxtoby from This is How by MJ Hyland.   Patrick, like Susie, does not have a 'normal' moral interpretation of the world; and M.J. Hyland, like Anne Peile, is fearless in asking what it is like to be a person who fits so poorly into the mould that family and society have made, and who in response commits a savage act, beyond comprehension, that leads to a new equilibrium.   And, like Patrick, Susie is delivered by what she does 'wrong'; the 'wrongness' chimes clear and true for her:

If you think I must mind this existence then I promise you that you are quite mistaken.  It was in the beginning that I minded my way of living because, try as I might, I never did belong. Only occasionally odd sections of printed pages caught and blew open the door in the wind and as it banged on its hinges I could see glimpses of beyond.

 Both books, I think, deserved short-listing for the Orange Prize.  Last week I predicted, hopefully, that Repeat It Today With Tears would be.  Alas, not. But I think it should have been.

~~Victoria~~

Mutually Assured Desperation

The problem with my particular gift, curse, call it what you like, is that everybody's lost something. Stepping out in public is like walking into a tangle of cat's cradles, like someone dished out balls of string at the lunatic asylum and instructed the inmates to tie everything to everything else. On some people, the lost strings are cobwebs, inconsequential wisps that might blow away at any moment. On others, it's like they're dragging steel cables. Finding something is all about figuring out which string to tug on.

It's April, and that means tis the season to be blogging the Clarke Award. (Scroll down to the bottom of the left-hand sidebar to read about the shortlists from the previous four years.) Anyway: two of the 2011 shortlistees I've already reviewed elsewhere; and so onto the third contender, the whip-smart fantastical noir Zoo City, Lauren Beukes' second novel.

Zoo City takes place in an alternate world, one distinguishable from our own largely by the exciting new way it has of marginalising people. Here, society's undesirables - the ones respectable folks won't live next door to, the ones passed over with a sneer for every legitimate job going, the ones hounded by the police for breathing and walking at the same time (but roundly ignored when they themselves are the victims of a crime) - are 'zoos', people whose guilt follows them around in the all-too-literal shape of an animal familiar. Acquired Asymbiotic Familiarism, as it is known officially, first appeared in the mid-1980s, and has been the subject of theorising and hysteria ever since; the afflicted - the 'animalled' - range from hardened criminals to those who, like the narrator, made some really bad choices. There is no indication in the book that an animal, once acquired, fades away with either repentance or time served; this is a stigma that lasts for life, reflecting actions that cannot be undone.

While zoos are demonised by the disapproving, and fetishised by the young and/or stupid - animals are on course to become essential fashion accessories for the edgier pop star, and there's even a Grand Theft Auto: Zootopia - the experience of having a familiar varies enormously. The book's first-person narrated chapters are interspersed with found footage-style extracts from scholarly articles, documentary film transcripts, and coffee table books about the phenomenon. The most interesting of these is Caged: Animalled Behind Bars, which reproduces interviews with people in prisons around the world. American and Australian interviewees explain how familiars operate as status symbols, the ferocity of your animal determining your place in the pecking order; in the Pakistan account, they're being used to torture inmates for information (hurting a familiar also hurts the one it's attached to). For others, they offer companionship. All come with compensatory fantastical abilities:

I oughta be pissed off, man. You can guess what it's like being in here with a Butterfly. Except for the stuff it lets me do.

See, when I go to sleep at night, I wake up as someone else. For the time I'm asleep, I live the day of someone else on the other side of the world. Man, I've been kids in Africa and India, I was once this old Chinese woman. Mostly I'm poor, but sometimes I get lucky and I'm rich.

What I'm saying is, I can't hate the Butterfly. Butterfly breaks me out of here every night.

Zinzi December, a former high-flying journalist who destroyed her career and her family with "a nasty drug habit", now scrapes a living by finding lost things; as described in the passage quoted at the head of this post, her Sloth familiar lends her the ability to 'see' connections between people and the things they have lost: "lost keys, love letters, beloved toys, misplaced photographs and missing wills. I even found a lost room once."

She lives in the Johannesburg slum of Zoo City. Her home is a crumbling, half burned-out tenement called - with savage irony - Elysium Heights, a place where, in the evenings, "[t]he smell of cooking - mostly food, but also meth - temporarily drowns out the stench of rot, the urine in the stairwells". On the morning we meet her, the stairway down from her apartment - or, as she puts it, "this dank room with its precariously canted floor and intermittent plumbing" - is "mummified in yellow police tape" from a murder investigation that no-one bothered to pursue, so she has to drop through a hole in next door's floor, crunching across broken glass past an insensible junkie to find a route to the outside world.

Despite - or perhaps in reaction to - her environment, Zinzi is a chatty, jaunty narrator. Beukes gives her some wonderful, simile-rich turns of phrase, both at her own expense ("I've left distinctive tracks across three holes [of the golf course]: the common kitten-heeled hustler") and at others':

Emmanuel's grin drops from his face like a kicked puppy, bounces on the pavement and tumbles into the gutter with a little pitiful yelp.

Not all of these pithy one-liners are quite so pithy, or successful; "since Sloth I've been so monogamous I make the demonstration banana that Aids educators use to show how to put on a condom, look slutty" is a good idea, but in practice it just stumbles breathlessly over its subclauses. Still, mostly the technique makes for a punchy, page-turning read. It also lets details of the world - and of Zinzi's character - seep into the narrative naturally through the way she responds to what she sees, and the comparisons she reaches for, rather than requiring pauses for infodump.

Zinzi's self-presentation, too, is compelling: an infectious mixture of self-directed snark and prickly pride. She's up-front about her pratfalls and ebullient about the casual prejudice she is subject to, but at times her insistence on how she's so over the superficiality of her old life, and so down with her new one, rings hollow:

I reach past him to pull out a vintage navy dress with a white collar, match it up with jeans and slops, and finish off with a lime green scarf over the little dreadlock twists that conveniently hide the mangled wreckage of my left ear – let's call it Grace Kelly does Sailor Moon. This is not so much a comment on my style as a comment on my budget. I was always more of an outrageously expensive indie boutique kinda girl. But that was FL. Former Life.

Zinzi repeatedly juxtaposes these different aspects of herself to raise a smirk. On one occasion, she describes a bank of recording equipment at a client's house as "at least semi-pro, if I'm any judge of expensive. And I am"; then, further down the same page, she follows up with: "There's a bankie of dope inside. And it's quality, if I'm any judge of substances. And I am." She uses irony to keep herself at arm's length from the world she's dropped into, but there are signs that this - coping mechanism though it is - can be corrosive in its own way. In particular, she can be glib to an almost aggressive degree when discussing both how far she has fallen, and the reasons why. She describes her familiar, Sloth, as "my own personal scarlet letter"; meeting her ex for the first time since she did a swan dive into junkiehood and he dodged the worst of the consequences to keep his job and his old life, she provides a snarky running commentary on his discomfort:

"Sorry, yeah, guys, this is my friend I told you about?" Gio's tone is loaded with things left unsaid. "Zinzi December. We used to work together." Sleep together. Take drugs together. Sleep together while taking drugs together at work together. It was a simple relationship, really.

She is even willing - with some regret, albeit mostly for her own pride - to milk the harm she did to her family, if she thinks it will help her on a case:

"What point do you wish you could go back to?"

"You first."

"The moment before I got my brother killed."

"Heavy," says S'bu, but I can tell he's impressed. And this is what I've come to, breaking out my worst personal tragedy to pry open a teenager. If I hadn't already hit my ultimate low, this would be a close contender.

Looked at one way, it is this willingness to exploit anything that got her into this situation in the first place; looked at another way, Zinzi no longer has the luxury of scruples. The comparative calm and safety of Zoo City for its inhabitants, she says, is one of "mutually assured desperation". To pay off her drug debts, Zinzi is locked into a sideline in 419 scams run by the people she owes, and there is a blithe callousness in the way she reels off her resume:

People want to believe: you just have to feed them plausible constructs. [...] I brush the dusting of Mongoose fur and flea eggs off my laptop, and flick open the screen to see if the phish have been biting.

I've become a master builder in the current affairs sympathy scam. A broken levee and an old lady with a flooded mansion, desperate to sell her priceless antiques cheap-cheap. A Chechnyan refugee fleeing the latest Russian pogroms with her family's diamonds in tow. A Somali pirate who has found Jesus and wants to trade in his rocket launcher and ransom millions for absolution.

It's all topical. All rooted in the hard realities of the world. Ironic that Former Life I never watched the news. But then, lifestyle journalists don't have to.

She is not without feeling; a scene where she meets two of her marks to seal the deal, posing as a traumatised refugee from some horrific internecine conflict, is excruciating for her as well as for the reader. But most of the time she manages to avoid thinking about the consequences of her actions for other people, or the fact that her lover, Benoit, really is a refugee, one haunted by the fear that he left his wife behind to die in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The central thread of the story sees Zinzi pressganged, through a combination of veiled threats and flat-out financial necessity, into taking on the sort of case - a missing person, the most difficult and painful of lost things to seek - she'd sworn never to attempt again. Like any good noir, the plot thickens swiftly, the complications and betrayals pile on, and our heroine spirals down into ever seedier and more dangerous circles, taking more than a few punches to the gut (literal and figurative) along the way. I have some reservations about the ending - although, unlike Niall, not for any excess of neatness, but rather for the utterly bonkers grand Guignol of it all, which seems to belong in a different register than the rest of the book.

This is an assured, gripping novel held together by a strong, appealing narrative voice and the courage of its convictions; I'm very pleased to see it getting the attention of the Clarke Award jury - even if it's more fantasy than sf, to my mind! I can't wait to see what Beukes does next.

~~Nic

The Orange Prize Shortlist, 2011

EDIT, 13th April 2011, 8.17am (due to be at work in precisely 13 minutes time. Eep!)

The actual shortlist was announced yesterday, and because it was my night to work late at the library, I hardly had time to digest it at all.  Now I've had a better chance to look, here it is:

Great House by Nicole Krauss

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

Annabel by Kathleen Winter

Room by Emma Donoghue

Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson

Which means that I guessed four out of the six below (hooray!); it would have been five if I'd gone with my instinct over The Memory of Love.  I feel very positive about the list as a whole - a little sad not to see Anne Peile on there, because Repeat It Today with Tears is a daring book that deserves a wider audience.  More thoughts soon.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Here I am, at 9.45am on the morning before the day of the shortlist announcement, already avidly waiting.  And while I'm waiting I thought I would make a nonsense prediction of which six longlisted books will be on the shortlist. Since I've only read four thus far, with five and six on the go, I don't have a lot of grounds to base it on, but what the hell. 

Of the books I've read, one is definitely on my own personal shortlist: Anne Peile's Repeat It Today with Tears.  From synopses and hype alone, I predict the following five to join it:

Great House by Nicole Krauss

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan

Annabel by Kathleen Winter

Room by Emma Donoghue

 
 

I almost omitted Room and replaced it with Jamrach's Menagerie (because that sounds more interesting to me); and I umhed and ahhed about The Tiger's Wife and about The Memory of Love instead. It's a very difficult year to predict.

More predictions from Jackie at Farmlanebooks - we have a pretty similar line-up.  

~~Victoria~~  

An Egg Cracked Open

I read Lola Shoneyin's debut novel The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives so quickly that it didn't even make it onto my 'Currently Reading' list.  It's a very gulp-able type of book, with thinly-sliced chapters that lend themselves to being read in 10 minute tea breaks; I found I was polishing off 75 pages over the course of a single lunch hour.  The speed of the reading - which makes it feel very light and zippy - very much belies the content of the novel, which is often dark and raw and stinging. 

From the beginning Shoneyin plays with voice.  The book opens in an omniscient mode, before switching into the first person, and from then on changing point of view character back and forth with every chapter.  The POV switches are unpatterned, which is quite unusual.  Most often these things are in some kind of predictable sequence, but not here; and it gives the book a forward propulsion, a vitality and life, that it might not otherwise have had. 

The story is ostensibly that of Baba Segi, a middle-aged, well-built Nigerian patriarch, and his young, university-educated fourth wife Bolanle.  Although they have been married for over two years they have yet to conceive a child, and since Baba Segi already has seven children by his first three wives, the blame is placed very firmly at Bolanle's door.   This premise is framed in such a way that we anticipate a comic romp to come from it:

When Baba Segi awoke with a bellyache for the sixth day in a row, he knew it was time to do something drastic about his fourth wife's childlessness.  He was sure the pain wasn't caused by hunger or trapped gas; it was from the build-up of months and months of worry.

The very idea of Baba Segi and the way his large, ample body responds physically to worry - with tummy aches and bowel rumblings - is a mark of eccentricity that thoroughly fictionalises and neutralises any danger in him.   It disarms you into thinking that this is going to be one of those bumbly novels, in which a character passes through successive coincidences and humiliations until they emerge triumphant and remade.  It's a very clever little trick to put you off your guard; it certainly worked on me. 

Having sought advise from 'Teacher' - a semi-mystic whisky-peddling, brothel-haunting eunuch who also fits the comic mode - Baba Segi decides the best course of action is to use Bolanle's education to find a cure.  No witch-doctor potions for her, no, no.  He will take her to the hospital and find a medical solution that will satisfy her.  Off they toddle, and its all a little silly with Baba Segi asserting his masculinity and being humbled by strong-minded nurses.  But it soon emerges that Bolanle's apparent infertility is the least of Baba Segi's problems: like all the women in his life, she has deeply held secrets.  For a start, right there in the hospital, she admits to having had an abortion in her teens.  It is the first in a long line of revelations that send Baba Segi running for the nearest toilet to ease his gripes, and it shifts the register of the novel sharply away from comedy, and towards tragedy.

Quite unbeknownst to Baba Segi his house is a seething pot of (literally) murderous jealousy, hatred and fury.  Iya Segi and Iya Femi, the first and third wives respectively, disdain Iya Tope, the second wife, and they despise Bolanle with a wretched fury.  They don't like each other very much either, but form an uneasy alliance based on the philosophy that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  The novel considers very carefully what it might mean to be a wife in this polygamous household: in terms of competition for resources, attention and security.  The wives live in a siege-like state, each one primed for a move for precedence or privilege on the part of any of the others.  It is a deeply political and strategic game; the arrival of Bolanle upset the uneasy peace between the first three and now it is all out war. 

What they all, unwittingly, share in common is their 'secret lives': the histories that have brought them together under Baba Segi's roof.  None of them are really there for love of him, or of their own volition.  Iya Segi's marriage gave her the freedom to pursue her own business dreams - she runs an empire of cement shops and keeps the money to herself; Iya Tope was given to Baba by her father as a token of appeasement after a disappointing grain harvest; and Iya Femi escaped a life of drudgery and powerlessness as a servant.  For Bolanle, Baba Segi is also an escape - all her hopes and academic successes have been ruined and expunged by the memory of a vicious rape when she was fifteen years old.  She is hungry for a simple life of abasement and quiet.  All four of the wives' share terrifying narratives of loss, revenge, suffering and loneliness, which interweave with the central (comic) infertility strand of the novel, building towards the revelation of their biggest secret of all. 

It is masterfully done.  I very much admire how Shoneyin has written a gut-wrenching book under the guise of comedy; it thoroughly undercuts the dominant stereotypes of African fiction published in Britain.  In my experience 'African novels' are marketed as falling into either one of just two categories: either they are books about funny, eccentric characters in funny, eccentric 'cultural' circumstances, or novels about Serious Issues which tap into (entirely justified) Western guilt about colonialism and racism.  That's a vast generalisation, I know, but it seems generally true to me.   What The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives does so successfully is give us one thing - the comic foil - while slapping us hard with the other.  It reminded me quite forcibly of the way Petina Gappah disguises the sorrow and pain and horror of her character's lives in the stories of An Elegy for Easterly with the winsome face of their funny side.  My only complaint is that the ending seems a bit too neat, and the enormous sacrifice required of Baba Segi's family is too great to bring about the lacklustre denouement of Bolanle's story arc.  But that is a problem of overall balance which I can readily forgive in the light of sharp, dark-light detail of Shoneyin's writing. 

As for it's position on the Orange Prize longlist?  Well, I would be surprised to see it on the shortlist next week, but that isn't to say I think it has no chance.  I wonder if it is one of those books that grows on a second reading, when you've understood what the whole will look like and so can concentrate on its constituent parts.  I'll certainly be looking forward to Shoneyin's second book; she's a writer to watch I think. 

~~Victoria~~

This book was very kindly sent to me by the publisher.

Signal to Noise

I was born into all that, all that mess, the over-crowded swamp and the over-crowded sematary and the not-crowded-enough town, so I don't remember nothing, don't remember a world without Noise. My pa died of sickness before I was born and then my ma died, of course, no surprises there. Ben and Cillian took me in, raised me. Ben says my ma was the last of the women but everyone says that about everyone's ma.

The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008), by Patrick Ness, is a noisy book. A certain amount of this is down to its central character, 12-year-old Todd, whose boisterous, gossipy narration regularly spills over itself with his eagerness to explain! everything! all at once! What's he doing, what's he feeling, what he's thinking, what he's trying not to think, what he knows about the background of anyone and anything with which he comes into contact: all of these are shared, shared and shared some more. For such a quickfire, chatty, action-packed novel - and I'm going to talk about the plot as little as possible here, because one of the great joys of it is how compulsively it keeps you turning the pages to find out more - Knife is a very interior story.

Or rather, it is an interior story that is forced to be exterior. Todd lives in on a planet where everything is out in the open. Animals can speak, including Todd's ace dog Manchee. ("The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk," Todd tells us in the novel's opening paragraph, "is that dogs don't got nothing much to say. About anything." Right on cue, Manchee provides the first direct speech of the novel: "Need a poo, Todd.") Related to this - although no-one is sure why - is the fact that men and boys are incapable of keeping their thoughts to themselves. Todd's inner monologue, and more besides, is broadcast to everyone in his vicinity in the small settlement of Prentisstown; he, in turn, can hear every word that passes through the minds of his fellow inhabitants. The effect is known as "Noise"; it is overwhelming, "like a flood let loose right at me", says Todd, "like a fire, like a monster the size of the sky come to get you cuz there's nowhere to run".

All of which is another reason why this book is quite so loud:

"Squirrel, Todd! Squirrel!"

Goddam, animals are stupid.

I grab Manchee by the collar and hit him hard across his back leg. "Ow, Todd? Ow?" I hit him again. And again. "Ow? Todd?"

"Come on," I say, my own Noise raging so loud I can barely hear myself think, which is something I'm about to regret, you watch.

Whirler boy, Whirler boy, thinks the squirrel at me. Come get, Whirler boy.

"You can eff off, too," I say, except I don’t say "eff ", I say what "eff" stands for.

And I really, really shoulda looked round again.

I've chosen this excerpt from the first chapter - which you can read in its entirety here - because it highlights several important aspects of Ness' storytelling style. The first of these is the voice of Todd: brusque when he feels himself losing control in a situation ("Goddam") but nonetheless ruefully reflective ("I'm about to regret..."), slightly ungrammatical ("shoulda") but bashfully self-editing ("eff"). For all his air of ebullience, Todd is deeply self-conscious about the image he presents, prone to rushing headlong into dialogue and description alike, then correcting himself; at times - particularly when he has done something that might look like weakness (or cowardice, in his eyes) - he even argues back against the imagined responses of his audience:

"Run!" I shout to Manchee, turning and making a break for the back doors. (Shut up, you honestly think a knife is a match for a machete?)

The second aspect of the book's style that the passage above demonstrates is the palpable glee with which Ness whips the rug out from under the reader, through abrupt changes in tone, sudden bursts of action, and cliffhanger scene and chapter breaks. It's been a while since I read a book that was so hard to put down - I galloped through all 479 pages in the space of a day - or that made me gasp aloud quite so often!

The third aspect is the sense of overload, for both character and reader: of everything happening at once, of hearing so many shouts at the same time that you can't possibly concentrate on - or properly process - it all, and end up missing what you most need to know. As Todd notes, early on:

[T]he swamp is the only place anywhere near Prentisstown where you can have half a break from all the Noise that men spill outta theirselves, all their clamor and clatter that never lets up, even when they sleep, men and the thoughts they don't know they think even when everyone can hear. Men and their Noise. I don't know how they do it, how they stand each other.

Men are Noisy creachers.

For the men of New World, Noise is deeply intrusive, and - short of leaving human society behind altogether for a life in the wilderness - inescapable. It is a brutalising, systemic lack of privacy that brings Todd close to run-on sentence hysteria whenever he discusses it ("[T]he town knows all about you already and wants to know more and wants to beat you with what it knows till how can you have any of yerself left at all?"). At intervals, Todd's experience of this is represented in the book by chaotic blocks of bold, spiky, all-caps text, half-sentences and random words scattered across the page and over the top of each other, offering partially intelligible flashes of others' stories - glimpses of pain, laughter, rage, mundanity - that get under the skin in just the right way. It is easy to see how someone could go mad in this sort of environment: the compulsion to try to separate out the threads, to uncover the secrets that lie beneath this strange, angry, all-male town, is strong; and the notion of everyone around you hearing everything you think or feel is disturbing in the extreme.

Unlike men, and all the other 'creachers' of New World, women and girls don't have Noise. This is something Todd only discovers by accident; all the women of Prentisstown died before he was old enough to develop memories of them, and women are now never spoken of, except in Noise, with great longing and regret. Prentisstown is, in any case, hardly a place where reflection on such matters is encouraged: books are banned for being "detrimental" to mental discipline, and punitive violence is endemic.

Thus it comes as quite a shock to Todd when, out in the swamp one day, he happens across "a hole in the Noise",

like a shape you can't see except by how everything else around it is touching it. Like water in the shape of a cup, but with no cup. It's a hole and everything that falls into it stops being Noise, stops being anything, just stops altogether.

The source of this quiet turns out to be the lone, terrified survivor of a scout ship that has crashlanded near the town: a girl, named Viola, part of the advance party for a new group of colonists en route to New World. Much of the subsequent story revolves around Todd's effort to understand who Viola is, what her existence means for everything he has been told about Prentisstown - and, most pressingly, how he can even begin to relate to someone without Noise:

She seems like maybe she's calming down. She's not shaking as much as she was, her arms aren't up so high, and she's not looking like she's about to run off at the first opportunity, tho how can you know for sure when a person's got no Noise? How can they be a person if they ain't got no Noise?

Todd is bewildered by Viola because, unlike everyone else he has ever met, he is not a party to her every waking thought and mood. It is a neat, and thought-provoking, reversal of gender assumptions. The 'statistic' that women naturally use over twice the number of words per day that men do may have been plucked out the air by a self-help writer, but the myth persists even after being thoroughly debunked because it speaks to a fondly-held stereotyped: after all, everyone knows that women communicate promiscuously, and men don't. In Knife, however, Todd is the one who talks, Todd is the one who frets about the communication barrier between them (he accuses her at one point of keeping her thoughts "secret"); Todd is the one whose heart is on his sleeve at all times. Viola, meanwhile, is the taciturn one, the one who hoards her words, unwilling to share herself and for a long time only disturbed by the amount she learns, unwittingly and unwillingly, about Todd. Todd's lack of privacy in this information-saturated world thus takes on a new dimension: he must learn to trust someone without automatically knowing everything about her.

This isn't to say that even Noise is synonymous with truth, of course. It is information only, and with self-discipline it can be used, and distorted. Early on, we learn that at least some of the native fauna have adapted to manipulate their Noise: Todd has heard swamp foxes "faking their Noise to sound like the squirrels they eat". Meanwhile, the central villain of the trilogy, Mayor Prentiss, derives much of his power - and his forbidding aspect - from his control over his Noise:

His Noise is awful clear and I mean awful in the awful way. He believes, see, that order can be brought to Noise. He believes that Noise can be sorted out, that if you could harness it somehow, you could put it to use. And when you walk by the Mayor's house, you can hear him, hear him and the men closest to him, his deputies and things, and they're always doing these thought exercises, these counting things and imagining perfect shapes and saying orderly chants like I AM THE CIRCLE AND THE CIRCLE IS ME whatever that's sposed to mean and it's like he's moulding a little army into shape. [...]

It feels like a threat. It feels like the world changing and leaving you behind.

In the land of the Noisy, the man who can hide his intentions is king.

This is a story thread that is taken up in the trilogy's second volume, The Ask and the Answer (2009). Again, I will try to avoid discussing the plot in too much detail, but if you intend to read the trilogy - which I highly recommend! - skip this second half of the review until you have.

The tale resumes with Todd and Viola imprisoned, separately, and the supremely creepy Mayor in control of the city of Haven, which is now dubbed New Prentisstown. What follows is an astonishingly tense and at times punishingly brutal novel: a study of how individuals and societies alike become warped beyond recognition by persistent, pervasive violence, whether it is used to dominate, to punish, or to defend; of the many and varied ways in which the ends fail to justify the means, because the means define the ends.

And despair. There's quite a lot of despair.

Stylistically and thematically, Ask is in many ways more of the same as Knife, only larger: the breathless action, bursts of violence, and multiple cliffhangers are all present and correct, but this time round the stakes are higher and the canvas is larger. Todd's narration still tumbles over itself in its haste, but in Ask the strain is clearer when he exposes his anxiety about his masculinity and fragile first steps into adulthood; the speed with which he denies any perceived weaknesses in himself, under even the most upsetting and stressful circumstances, is a much more obviously damaging strategy this time round:

And thru it all, the Mayor says nothing. He just walks round me, over and over again, listening to me yell, listening to me plead.

Listening to my Noise beneath it all.

And I tell myself that I'm doing all this yelling, all this begging, to hide in my Noise what she told me, to keep her safe, to keep him from knowing. I tell myself I have to cry and beg as loud as I can so he won't hear.

(shut up)

That's what I tell myself.

And I don't wanna say no more about it.

(just effing shut the hell up)

Todd has been trained by his upbringing in Prentisstown to think of adulthood, manhood, as something wrapped up in violence and requiring detachment from emotion. In this second book, the Mayor steps up the campaign he waged in Knife: to make Todd - the last boy born in Prentisstown, and thus hugely symbolic - complicit in a blood-soaked vision of masculinity, one predicated on a kick-or-be-kicked model of social standing.

In this brave new world - which looks more than a little like an exaggerated version of our own - a young man's self-worth derives from the degree of arbitrary power he can wield over others. Here, for example, is the Mayor's son Davy beating up the drugged slave labour - the indigenous population of New World, treated like semi-intelligent cattle by the human colonists (given the way the book ends, I suspect they will feature more prominently in part three) - to make himself feel better about the fact that his dad largely ignores him:

He smashes the butt of his pistol into the Spackle's face. You can hear the crack of bone and the Spackle falls to the ground clutching at his jaw, long legs twisting in the air.

There's a wave of clicking around us and Davy lifts his pistol again, bullet end facing the crowd. Rifles cock on the fence-top, too, soldiers pointing their weapons. The Spackle slink back. [...]

"Know what, pigpiss?" Davy says.

"What?" I say, my eyes still on the Spackle on the ground, my Noise shaky as a leaf about to fall.

He turns to me, pistol still out. "It's good to be in charge."

The Mayor doesn't just want to defeat those who resist him, he wants them to be a party to their own defeat. He asks questions over and over again - and creates a whole wing of his government dedicated to doing so, the Office of the Ask ("a building where no secret may be kept") - because he doesn't just want to take information, he wants people to surrender it to him, and know that they're doing so. That way, they know who holds the power:

"If you know she’s from across the worlds," I say, "then you must know her name."

And then the Mayor smiles, actually smiles.

And I feel more afraid than ever.

"That’s not how this works, Todd. How this works is that I ask and you answer. Now. What is her name?"

The Mayor wants the people he conquers to become like him. This is where Ask's far-reaching alteration to Knife's formula - it gives Viola a narrative voice, too - becomes crucial. Through Viola's eyes, the picture is complicated considerably. While Todd is co-opted into the ranks of the conquerors, Viola moves among the conquered: she tells the story of the women of Haven/New Prentisstown, and of the men who support them in secret. To a man like the Mayor who rules because - as he himself notes - he has absolute control of information, women and their lack of Noise are a natural threat. It is made clear, furthermore, that the gulf that Noise has introduced between men and women, the unequal footing on which it places their interactions, has created enough simmering resentment for many men to go along with him when he notes in hushed, sinister tones that women are "different", and that the "blurred" boundaries between the sexes that had become the norm in Haven have to be reintroduced.

Many of the women, meanwhile, are ready to meet violence with violence, in the form of a guerilla movement known as the Answer. As the two sides progressively step up their tactics, and the lines between men and women in the city are drawn ever more starkly, the book asks difficult questions about aggression, resistance, and surrender; is it better to suffer injustice than to perpetuate the cycle of violence? Or does peaceful resistance just get your crushed beneath the treads of a tank? While it is evident that there is no compromise with someone like the Mayor, who systematically lies and delights in torture, there is a clear sense that every bomb the Answer detonates plays into his hands: making the Answer more like him, lending justification to his distrust and oppression - as well as steadily eroding the possibility of not taking up arms for non-Answer women. Viola's narration shows us this debate at work:

"Everyone here is someone's daughter," she says quietly. "Every soldier out there is someone's son. The only crime, the only crime is to take a life. There is nothing else."

"And that's why you don't fight," I say.

She turns to me sharply. "To live is to fight," she snaps. "To preserve life is to fight everything that man stands for."

The Mayor and the Answer feed off each other. The Answer does not create the problem of the Mayor, but it gives him the excuse he craves to dominate and punish women for their difference; the leader of the Answer, meanwhile, revels in the power that the atmosphere of distrust and division gives her. Given the way the Mayor and his men interact with the Spackle, though, you rather suspect that, in the absence of the Answer, the Mayor would just invent an excuse to be a tyrant - and, indeed, there are several occasions on which the Mayor exaggerates or even fabricates the threat of the Answer (information and lies, again) to frighten the populace of Haven into obeying him.

Overall, quite dark, then, and the ending is grim indeed. But it isn't without hope, or without moments that made me want to cheer, like this rousing speech of Viola's:

"The Mayor thinks he knows everything. He thinks he knows what's coming. He's just sitting there waiting for me and Todd to show up and try and stop him. [...] But what he's forgetting," she says. "What he's forgetting is that me and Todd, we ran halfway across this planet together, by ourselves. We beat his craziest preacher. We outran an entire army and survived being shot and beaten and chased and we bloody well stayed alive this whole time without being blown up or tortured to death or dying in battle or anything. [...] Me and Todd? Together against the Mayor?" She smiles. "He doesn't stand a chance."

Thrilling stuff, and it finishes with another heart-in-mouth cliffhanger climax. Roll on the Arthur C Clarke Award nominated volume three, Monsters of Men.

~~Nic

Slowly does it

My Orange bandwagon is rolling very slowly.  Having finished Swamplandia, I had to put the longlist on hold temporarily while I read the latest installment of my Yorkshire Musuem Bookclub: The Coral Thief by Rebecca Stott.  This book took me longer than its mere 224 pages warranted, but it was the equivalent of literary kryptonite for me.  It utterly and completely put me off reading for the last week - I know that's a very damning thing to say, but so it was - and I had to drag myself kicking and screaming through its pages.  Meanwhile Anne Peile's Repeat It Today With Tears was sitting on my bedside table, crying out to me.  Well, thank goodness, I finished The Coral Thief yesterday and picked Peile up and it rewarded me by being absolutely compelling.  I ripped through sixty pages in 30 minutes, driven along by her wide-open prose and the sly, piquant voice of her sixteen year old narrator, Susanna.

But the lost week has put me terribly behind my own schedule.  The shortlist is announced on the 12th April!  Which is only 11 days away, and I've only read two of the books out of the 20.  Usually by this stage I've got at least five or six under my belt.  Eep.  In a panic I've picked up the sing-songingly titled The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives as well, and am hoping to finish both that and Peile by the end of the weekend.

Oh, I have a spare of Roma Tearne's The Swimmer if anyone is interested in it?  The publisher very kindly sent me two copies!

I have to admit there has been another stymying influence on my Orange reading, but this time in a good way.  About ten years ago I picked up John Reader's Africa: A Biography of a Continent in a second-hand bookshop.  It was on a whim really, because the cover was so striking and beguiling, and because Africa was such an unknown quantity for me.  Soon after that I went off to university and left it unread in my bedroom at my parent's house.  On a recent visit to see them, I rediscovered it (amongst a shameful number of other unread, unthought-of books).  Again I was beguiled by the cover, and despite the fact that I was already reading a non-fiction book - Peter Demetz's book on Prague - and despite the fact that the Orange Prize longlist was being announced the next day, I picked it up and read the first page.

It's rare that a non-fiction book grabs you by the throat, but this one does:

Africa is the Earth's oldest and most enduring land mass.  Ninety-seven per cent of the continent has been in place and stable for more than 300 million years, most of it for more than 550 million years and some for as much as 3,600 million years.  It is a story of accretion that records a large and significant fraction of the history of the Earth.  Incontestable forces assembled a continent as millions of years flitted by.  This is a timescale on which the average human lifespan is close to irrelevant... Africa has seen it all, and preserves the evidence.

Reader is a journalist by trade, and it shows in his writing.  This book may be 800 pages long but his prose has such immediacy that it doesn't feel daunting.  I'm 100 pages in and so far we've covered the geology of the continent, and the evolution of hominids up to Homo Sapiens.  We've clocked up millions of years and thousands of miles, zinging around the continent looking at diverse environments and dozens of archaeological sites, but I don't feel even the tiniest bit wearied.  It's because Reader writes in short bite-sized chapters, each one with the vitality of a 1500 article and easy to absorb.  His mastery of the material is incredible, but never pedantic; it's complex, but never befuddling.  He explains things in his own clever, slightly eccentric way.  He describes the creation of the Barberton Mountain Land like this:

...built of layers of sediment that were eroded from a pre-existing landscape and deposited in a marine basin, where they eventually accumulated to a thickness of more that five kilometres.  In their original state, around 3.6 billion years ago, they probably covered nearly 20,000 square kilometres - an area the size of Wales, or of Massachusetts.  The, around three billion years ago, a series of massive plutons - huge plugs of hard-wearing granite - rose on all sides of the structure and squeezed the basin like hands tightening around a pile of pancakes.

I wonder if a geological event has ever been described using pancakes for an analogy before or since?   Anyway, it's wonderful stuff, and hard as I try I can't stop picking it up and reading just a little bit more at bedtime. 

~~Victoria~~