Eve's Alexandria

Give Me Some

We were in sunny St. Ives in Cornwall last week, staying in the cottage of 'naive' artist Alfred Wallis (literally a stone's throw from Porthmeor Beach, pictured to the left).   It was perfectly relaxing - lots of sun and paddling in the sea and reading and eating delicious seafood and long vigorous coastal walks.  I could have stayed for another decade at least.  But alas, back to the real world.  It was very conducive to Orange Prize reading while it lasted.  I polished off the whole 300+ pages of A Visit from the Good Squad on the train journey from Yorkshire (simply brilliant - why wasn't it on the shortlist?); and then proceeded to gobble up Emma Donoghue's Room over the course of a day and half on the beach; and finally progressed past the first chapter of Nicole Krauss' Great House and finished it on the eight hour return train journey.  I also managed a third of Grace Williams Say it Loud.   Phew.  I felt positively giddy on literary fiction by women.

It leaves me on the last leg of the longlist, with just five longlistees and two shortlistees to go.  I plan on dedicating myself to the shortlistees, and am hopeful that I can polish them off before the final announcement the week after next.  The remaining longlisters will get their turn thereafter, and hopefully I'll have them all rounded off by the end of June.  Not quite up to speed this year, but it's the taking part that counts.

Of the books that I read in St Ives, Room was the one that exercised me the most. It is surely the favourite to win this year's Bessy (and always was, right out of the gate.)  Shortlisted for the Booker last year, and lauded by all and sundry, it has captured both the critical and popular imagination.  For my own part I have studiously avoided it for nine months, ignoring all the trumpeting and praise and feeling faintly discomforted by the premise.  You know how it goes: Jack, our five year old narrator, was born and raised in the single small room in which his mother has been imprisoned by a shadowy night-time figure he knows only as 'Old Nick'.   Although he has seen figments of the outside world on their old TV set, Jack's mother has allowed (and encouraged) him to believe that only 'Room' and its contents are real.  He has no conception of the great wide world; he and his mama may as well be floating, rudderless, in Outer Space.  Then an opportunity to escape presents itself, an almost impossible chance for a freedom Jack can't begin to comprehend, and nothing will ever be the same again.

I'll be honest, I don't know what to make of it.  I didn't know when I was reading it; I didn't know straight after; and even now, after several days of thinking on it, I still don't know.  It started an internal critical war for me, hard fought between my demons and my better angels.  I'll dramatise for you, in lieu of a review:

Better Angels: What a fascinating insight into the psychology of a child captive's mind! See, for example, how Donoghue shrinks the world of the novel to fit the smallness of Jack's world by dropping the definite article, so that it isn't a room but 'Room' and it isn't the table but 'Table', 'Rug', 'Bed' and so on.  Because Jack only knows of single things!  So when he encounters the outside world the biggest shock is going to be the multiplicity of rooms, tables, rugs, beds: the shock of the definite article...

Demons: Hang on a minute.  Don't get carried away on the dropping of the definite article.  Isn't the effect more infuriating and affected than anything else?  Just a way (amongst many) of infantalising Jack's voice for writer's pretence.  After all, he is hyper-literate for a five year old, well-acquainted with the use of the definite article in other respects and incredibly sophisticated at expressing himself.  It's just a well-placed trick to make him adorable, like the meerkats on comparethemarket.com adverts and their refrain of 'Simples!'. 

BA: But it's very consistently and well applied and Donoghue follows it up in the outside world, so that we see how Jack begins to understand and rationalise the fact that there are innumerable examples of tables and chairs and things that up until then have been unique and individual.  It isn't just a short-cut characterisation; it's a psychological reality for him.

Demons: Ok, yes, that's true, but she doesn't extend the concept far enough.  Just like there is some weak gesturing at the extraordinary disturbance Jack must have felt when meeting people other than his Mama for the first time.  His not wanting to be touched and so on.  But he gets over that pretty easily, didn't he?  I know children are quick to adapt but he seemed remarkably well-adjusted after a mere two weeks out of Room.  Well-adjusted but with some nice little quirks still, to show us that he remains different (e.g his dislike of shoes, and his fear of getting rained on).  It seemed to me that Room functioned on these tics of voice and little signposts of difference, to intimate vaguely at what must be the enormous psychological gulf between Jack and the outside world.  But Donoghue didn't spend enough time unpicking the impact of the schema that holds our world together, the ones that Jack would never have learnt; she only touches on minor outward seeming things like the 'Manners' that he needs to learn.  It's not brave enough.

BA: I think you're being unfair.  Donoghue suggests a lot of the difficulties that Jack encounters, like the disorientation of realising that there can be two identical objects in two different places, or that something continues to exist when it is out of his view.

Demons: Suggests yes, but thoroughly explores?  I mean, the latter - understanding that something continues to exist when you can no longer see it - that's something a child learns very early in its development.  Can you imagine the trauma of learning it as late as five years old, and under the circumstances that Jack learns it?  Donoghue makes it too easy for him and for the reader - she's playing at representing what a child raised in that environment would be like out in the world.   I think it shows a lack of ambition in tackling the true enormity of the subject of the novel.

BA: But you're discounting the impact of the TV and Jack's mother. I mean, he's already partly prepared through his years spent watching and observing them.  He's prepped; the novel just flicks the switch that turns a possibility into a reality.  And you can't deny how movingly the relationship between mother and son is played out?

Demons: No, you've got me on that one.  And I did think it was interesting, the way she perceives Jack's birth as 'saving' her during her captivity.  That by bringing him into that world, and condemning him to live confined as she was, allowed her to live on. I appreciate the moral questions that prompts.  I also liked the way that she wasn't always nice and understanding with Jack; that although she was an amazingly perceptive and innovative parent, she often failed to comprehend him or the way he saw the world they shared, and privileged her own extended worldview.  It made for a believable sort of intimacy.  The novel was strongest when it focused on that relationship.   

BA: And don't forget it was very suspenseful.  Even you have to admit that the escape scenes were pulse-raising. 

Demons: Pulse-raising I grant.  But pretty unbelievable. The whole book rests on a lot of improbables and forced scenarios.  The escape is bad enough, but the worst is the liberating of Jack's mother.  What the police do there, enticing Jack (who has never spoken to another living soul and who has no conception whatsoever of spatial geography) to help them find Room, that would never happen.

BA: You don't know that!

Demons: Oh come on, it would never happen! Never! They would have whisked him straight off to the police station or the hospital or somewhere else to be interviewed under controlled conditions.  It's like something straight out of a film.  Donoghue herself recognises this when she has one police officer quip to the other that she's going beyond the call of regular duty.

BA: I think you're just sore that the story is inspired by real-life events - you think Room is lazy.

Demons: Ok, yes, I do.  Lazy and manipulative, because it is tapping into raw and recent emotional resonances.  I particularly think so when the plot is so, so, so close to the Fritzl case, right down to the mode of escape and the five year old boy. 

BA: Don't you think that's a bit hypocritical, when you positively encourage historical novelists to take real world events as their inspiration?  And surely emotional resonance is a good thing to tap; it's powerful.

Demons: I knew you were going to come back at me with that.  I like historical fiction to revisit real world events when it provides new angles, opens up new interpretations, provides insight.

BA: You don't think Room offers insight into the horrifying experiences of people like Elizabeth Fritzl and her children?

Demons: No.

BA: No?

Demons: No. Because Room is a push-button novel.  It doesn't do anything with the extremity and trauma of that experience that a good piece of investigative journalism wouldn't do; it's just raising our temperatures for effect without telling us anything we couldn't have figured out by ourselves.

BA: Aha, but it's from Jack's viewpoint! Surely that's a unique way of seeing the situation?

Demons: I have to disagree.  The use of viewpoint in this case excites our sympathy and gives an 'angle', but it relies too much upon those linguistic gimics (like the definite article thing) and quirky details (like the shoe thing).  In fact, it belittles the whole situation, by turning it into some kind of developmental guessing game: what cute or curious thing will Jack do next because he's been locked in a shed for his whole life?!

BA: Now you're being really unfair.  I think that Jack's innocence of the horror of his situation, and his strange affection for Room and his old life, acts as an amplifier for the reader.  It makes his reactions both explicable and even sadder than they would otherwise have been.  What would you have preferred?

Demons: Multiple voices, definitely. Jack's mother, and Old Nick, and other people they encounter.  Just Jack is too shallow an approach to something so enormous.

BA: So you admit that the subject matter is fertile ground, and novels like this are necessary?

Demons: Of course, and Room is an interesting exercise in investigating it.  And it makes for pretty compelling reading.  And I can see why people admire it.  But I still wish it was a little subtler; a little broader; a little less gimicky.

~~Victoria~~

At the End of an Evolutionary Curve

It's always depressing to come into these scenes. "They were all inside when we broke down the door."

I nod absently as I shake monsoon water from my hat. "Great. Thanks." Liquid beads scatter on the floor, joining puddles of wet from the pop squad along with the maggot debris of the spaghetti dinner. I put my hat back on. Water still manages to drip off the brim and slip under my collar, a slick rivulet of discomfort. Someone closes the door to the outside. The shit smell thickens, eggy and humid. The nosecap barely holds it off. Old peas and bits of cereal crunch under my feet. They squish with the spaghetti, the geologic layers of past feedings. The kitchen hasn't been self-cleaned in years.

The older woman coughs and pulls her nightgown tighter around her cellulite and I wonder, as I always do when I come into situations like this, what made her choose this furtive nasty life of rotting garbage and brief illicit forays into daylight.

'Pop Squad', which appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine back in late 2006 and has now been collected in the excellent Pump Six (2008), was my first encounter with Paolo Bacigalupi's short fiction.

It wasn't the sort of reading experience you readily forget. Between the cops in hats, the rain, the light - which "strobes" through window blinds - and the world-weary voiceover, the story's opening is every inch the film noir. But it is more grimy (and pungent) than the clean lines of noir usually allow. These criminal women may be fetchingly half-dressed, but they provoke only disgust in the narrator; the clothes they are barely wearing are stained, the thighs they fail to cover are notable only for cellulite. There is an animalistic air to the way (just before the quoted passage) the older woman's breasts "sway", and to the fact that this kitchen produces not meals but "feedings". A clear sense of menace pervades the scene; a few pages later, this menace abruptly resolves in an arresting burst of violence, as the apartment's young children are linked up before the narrator:

"Sorry, kids. Mommy's gone."

I pull out my Grange. Their heads kick back in successive jerks, bang bang bang down the line, holes appearing on their foreheads like paint and their brains spattering out the back. Their bodies flip and skid on the black mirror floor. They land in jumbled piles of misaligned limbs. For a second, gunpowder burn makes the stench bearable.

You might say I was taken aback.

The roots of this dystopia, like so much of Bacigalupi's work, lie in a bleak view of humankind's future, in a world of scarce resources and wholesale environmental collapse. In 'Pop Squad', these issues are compounded by the technological breakthrough of "rejoo", a treatment that essentially enables those who take it to live forever, but which brings with it sterility. To the immortals, lounging decadently in their lofty homes - glittering spires that literally tower over the slums below, social standing inscribed on the urban landscape - this is a worthwhile trade: they live their own posterity, rather than entrusting their legacies to the uncertain tenancy of their offspring.

The only way to reproduce is to drop off the grid, and give up rejoo. But in this brave new world, having children is both illegal - because it increases the strain on the (we're told) already overstretched resource base of the society - and taboo - because these children, being illicit, will never be able to become full members of society, and take rejoo for themselves. To the narrator, whose job it is to travel the city killing illegal children, what these mothers (never fathers) choose to do - producing "terminal kids", who are "going to end up as compost" - is simple cruelty. His partner, Alice - who devotes her long life to playing ever more complex pieces of music, vying for supremacy with other virtuosos - shares his incomprehension:

"I can't imagine it. Cutting rejoo like that." She sighs and reaches out to touch a bonsai. [...] "Why give all this up?"

I don't have an answer. I rewind the crime scene in my mind [...] There's something there in the stink and noise and darkness, something hot and obsessive and ripe. But I don't know what it is.

The pair's honest confusion is effectively disconcerting as a way of drawing you into this future's dominant worldview: parenting is seen as bizarre, selfish, wilfully destructive. But the narrator's rehearsal of his disgust begins to sound hollow, even to him:

Who the hell chooses to live in dark apartments with shitty diapers, instant food, and no sleep for years on end? The whole breeding thing is an anachronism - twenty-first-century ritual torture we don't need anymore. But these girls keep trying to turn back the clock and pop out the pups, little lizard brains compelled to pass on some DNA. And there's a new batch every year, little burps of offspring cropping up here and there, the convulsions of a species trying to restart itself and get evolution rolling again, like we can’t tell that we've already won.

He begins, inevitably, to Have Doubts. The sterility of rejoo is both biological and, it is argued, conceptual; immortality has produced nothing more than a society of the self-obsessed, all vapidity and stunted imaginations. This is where - on a re-read, with the shock value of the events consequently diminished - the premise began to lose me: it all starts to feel too much like a smug morality tale. And so, indeed, it proves. As the story wears on, Bacigalupi begins to lay on the gotcha a little too thickly; the characters' confusion edges over from interestingly alienating into look-how-wrong-they-are mockery:

She smiles and stands on tiptoe to kiss me. "If we weren't going to live forever, I'd marry you."

I laugh. "If we weren't going to live forever, I'd get you pregnant."

We look at each other. Alice laughs unsteadily and takes it as a joke.

"Don't be gross."

Marriage and pregnancy as gross-out punchline; how edgy. Which side do you think we're meant to be on, boys and girls? From here it is, unfortunately, but a short few steps to the narrator discovering a baby he can't bring himself to kill, and a woman - its mother - who turns him on with her body that fulfils its proper female functions and her voice that drips with the self-denying rage of maternal instinct. Biology, it turns out, really is destiny. It's not just, as Niall says, a cop-out; it's downright throwback.

Still, the story wallows in some wonderfully foetid-fecund imagery ("Everywhere I go, the baby world is ripping open around me, melons and seedpods and fertile wombs splitting open and vomiting babies onto the ground. We're drowning in babies. The jungle seems to seethe with them"). Such imagery, Pump Six demonstrates, is one of Bacigalupi's trademarks. The oldest piece here, 'Pocketful of Dharma' (1999), sets the tone with its striking description of a sort of organic engineering at work, a city growing into life like an immense artificial tree:

Construction workers dangled from its rising skeleton, swinging from one section of growth to the next on long rappelling belts. Others clambered unsecured, digging their fingers into the honeycomb structure, climbing the struts with careless dangerous ease. Soon the growing core would overwhelm the wet-tiled roofs of the old city. Then Huojianzhu, the Living Architecture, would become Chengdu entirely.

It grew on lattices of minerals, laying its own skeleton and following with cellulose skin. Infrastructure strong and broad, growing and branching, it settled roots deep into the green fertile soil of the Sichuan basin. It drew nutrients and minerals from the soil and sun, and the water of the rancid Bing Jiang; sucking at pollutants as willingly as it ate the sunlight which filtered through twining sooty mist.

Within, its veins and arteries grew pipelines to service the waste and food and data needs of its coming occupants. It was an animal vertical city built first in the fertile minds of the Biotects and now growing into reality.

The story itself is a minor one, by the collection's standards: a Blade Runner-inflected portrait of the neon-lit, rain-lashed halfworld that exists in the shadows of all this, seen through the eyes of a scarred and half-crippled economic refugee from "a silent dirt village where no thing lived", forced into criminal courier jobs by the need to eat. Despite its stylish trappings, though - and a disembodied Dalai Lama in a datacube, a cute and rather poignant touch - 'Dharma' is a fairly conventional tale of a black market job gone wrong and a young man in over his head.

The firmly East Asian future of 'Dharma' finds echoes in a pair of linked stories here, as well is in Bacigalupi's first novel, The Wind-Up Girl. 2005's 'The Calorie Man' introduces another post-collapse future in which - fossil fuels having run out - food is the new fuel, and control of 'calories' is consequently big business. Biotech companies have, accordingly, developed a stranglehold on agricultural production, tightly regulating the availability of food to protect the energy markets - that is, their profits - against any possible "flood of food". In an extrapolation of current trends, crops are genetically modified for maximal energy output, and the biotech companies hold the copyright, obliging anyone who grows their wares to pay royalties.

Subsistence farming is, unsurprisingly, squeezed out; given the demand for grain to power transport and electricity, many go hungry, despite high yields and the efforts of agribusiness accountants - "those small gods with more power than Kali to destroy the world", as the main character Lalji thinks of them - to "calculate calorie burn quotas for the world". Maudlin Lalji gets mixed up in smuggling "unstamped" calories - grain taken from fields before the proprietory firm can extract its royalties - and unusually for Bacigalupi this tale has a relatively hopeful ending. In the wrong hands, genetics can create destructive monocultures; in the right hands, it offers subversive solutions to corporate domination.

A more vivid and expansive exploration of this particular invented world - if more restricted in terms of the locations it actually visits - is found in the Bangkok-set 'Yellow Card Man' (2006). Both this and 'The Calorie Man' are tales of an individual struggling against a faceless system; but whereas the earlier story introduces the environment through a slightly folksy quest story, with Lalji journeying to meet the titular gene-splicer, 'Yellow Card Man' presents us with a whole ecosystem of economically desperate, and a central character whose dignity and degredation are deeply affecting. Again, Bacigalupi leads with a passage that blends the human with the dehumanised, emphasising both the plight of the main character - so poor he sleeps in the stairwell of a high-rise heat trap apartment building - and the staggering scale on which he is not alone in his poverty:

Tranh wakes, gasping.

Sharp concrete edges jam against the knuckles of his spine. A salt-slick thigh smothers his face. He shoves away the stranger's leg. Sweat-sheened skin glimmers in the blackness, impressionistic markers for the bodies that shift and shove all around him. They fart and groan and turn, flesh on flesh, bone against bone, the living and the heat-smothered dead all together.

A man coughs. Moist lungs and spittle gust against Tranh's face. His spine and belly stick to the naked sweating flesh of the strangers around him. Claustrophobia rises. He forces it down. Forces himself to lie still, to breathe slowly, deeply, despite the heat.

Escape from the "blast furnace" of the tower block brings Tranh only to more humanity, first a "crowd of congee sellers, hemp weavers, and potato carts", and then to the soul-destroying sight of his anonymous rivals, standing in line already for the fleeting chance of paid work:

Yellow cards, yellow men. Huang ren all around, and Tranh is late for his one opportunity to climb out of their mass. One opportunity in all his months as a yellow card Chinese refugee. And now he is late. He squeezes past a rat seller, swallowing another rush of saliva at the scent of roasted flesh, and rushes down an alley to the water pump. He stops short.

Ten others stand in line before him: old men, young women, mothers, boys.

He slumps. He wants to rage at the setback. If he had the energy - if he had eaten well yesterday or the day before or even the day before that he would scream, would throw his hemp bag on the street and stamp on it until it turned to dust - but his calories are too few.

This is a world in which environmental collapse is not even the most pressing problem; more serious, from Tranh's point-of-view, are religious fundamentalism and an upswell of anti-Chinese hatred (which twin forces saw Tranh burned out of his once-thriving shipping business: "Green used to mean things like coriander and silk and jade and now all it means to him is bloodthirsty men with patriotic headbands and hungry scavenging nights"), together with broader shifts in the economic centre of gravity. Multinational corporations' calorie monopolies and the use of biological agents against business rivals were bringing Tranh's Three Prosperities down even before the eruption of violence; in the present, he finds himself outmatched and outpriced by a burgeoning labour force even more willing to do back-breaking work for next-to-no pay than desperate immigrants like him: gene-ripped workers - people genetically modified to enhance certain traits, whether strength or speed or docility - are the new go-to underclass for companies looking to cut their labour costs.

For all the drama in Tranh's past, 'Yellow Card Man' is a finely-tuned story of the sort of little tragedies and tiny humiliations that loom large in the life of people with nothing else left. A horrific, split-second workplace accident underlines the precariousness of the existence of Tranh and the thousands upon thousands like him in the city; with no health and safety regulations, no social safety net, and his ability to work wiped out in an instant, Tranh's fragility is brought home shockingly. And yet it is the small reminders of this abrupt change in status, of his inability to do something as fundamental as feed himself, that finally remakes him into a creature of despair:

"I don't care if you hate me. Just take my food. Curse me later, when your belly is full."

Tranh tries to control his hunger, to force himself to walk away, but he can't. He knows men who might have enough face to starve before accepting Ma's scraps, but he isn’t one of them. A lifetime ago, he might have been. But the humiliations of his new life have taught him much about who he really is. He has no sweet illusions, now. He sits. Ma beams and pushes his half-eaten dishes across the table.

Localised environmental collapse is front and centre in 'The Tamarisk Hunter' (2006) (available online here), which takes the collection back to the US. Like Lalji in 'The Calorie Man', this story's protagonist Lolo negotiates the difficult realities of the resource-limited world around him by playing both sides. In this future, the besetting problem of the south-western US, access to water, has ballooned with rising populations, as states - and their corporate partners - pour vast amounts of money into controlling what happens to 'their' water upriver. Lolo scrapes a living by uprooting the plantlife that dares to share California's water supply - specifically, tamarisks (a big one, we're told in the opening line "can suck 73,000 gallons of river water a year").

The tiny income this brings in, and the strictly regulated water allowance that comes with it, is the only thing that enables Lolo to go on living in the region. "[W]here other people have dried out and blown away, he has remained: a tamarisk hunter, a water tick, a stubborn bit of weed"; here, again, we see Bacigalupi's fondness for imagery that unites human life with their organic environment. To protect his job, though, Lolo is also covertly planting fresh tamarisks ("his insurance policy"), to ensure he always has something to uproot down the line. Even this strategy, though, is being steadily overtaken by developing technology, driven by increasing - and inevitable? - tensions between cities and their rural hinterlands, between the population and the demands of industry. Months after I finished reading it, the story's most enduring image for me is the enclosure of the river:

"Out toward the border. Big old mother. So big you couldn't climb on top of it, flopped out on the desert like a damn silver snake. All the way to California." He spits reflexively. "They're spraying with concrete to keep water from seeping into the ground and they've got some kind of carbon-fiber stuff over the top to stop the evaporation. And the river just disappears inside. Nothing but an empty canyon below it. Bone-dry. And choppers and Humvees everywhere, like a damn hornet's nest. They wouldn't let me get any closer than a half mile on account of the eco-crazies trying to blow it up. They weren't nice about it, either."

An earlier examination of the problems of water access, made metaphor by its invented setting, is 'The Pasho' (2004). Here the issue is not so much one of lack, as one of potential abundance. A young man returns from a glittering, metallic city of plenty to the desolate desert village of his birth, filled with nostalgia for his childhood home and burning with the conviction that the place can be remade, better, with the technology he has learned of during his absence. The theme of the mingling of old land and newer technology, and the ways the latter offers both respite from and barrier against the former, is signalled in the story's evocative opening lines:

The acrid scent of burning dung carried easily on the dry wind. Raphel Ka'Korum breathed once, deeply, tasting memory, then fastened his electrostatic scarf over his face.

In his time away, Raphel has become a Pasho, one of an educated class who are beautifully described as being "like dandelion seeds", drifting pockets of knowledge. A seed, of course, needs water to germinate, and it is this that Raphel hopes to offer the village: he carries within him the expertise needed to tap water sources deep underground. Not entirely surprisingly, Raphel proves naive and the villagers - chief among them his formidable grandfather Gawar ("a withered skinny man who wore his red robes cut open so that the virile white fur of his bony chest tufted out for all to see") - intractable.

But Bacigalupi resists making this a simple conflict, whether that be backwards villagers versus improving modernity, or life-affirming tradition versus soulless city. Both Raphel's and Gawar's positions have constructive and destructive elements in them; moreover, in Bacigalupi's best characterisation in the collection, both of them come to vivid life through combative conversations in which they share the memories that make them who they are. To many of the villagers, Raphel and his apparently benign desire to bring them drinking water is no longer Jai, no longer one of them. While the Jai certainly do not shun all technology, individuals like Gawar are suspicious of anything that will make Jai life easier, because they fear it will open them to the same vulnerability that they have exploited in others, in the past; moreover, Jai identity is bound up in hardship, and in the hardness that it creates:

"The Jai control our own own destinies. We are not the dirty Kai who choose slavery and have no words. We bathe every morning, charge our sonics in the afternoon, and write dust epitaphs for our enemies under the stars."

The story's ending complicates things further, effectively deconstructing both what Raphel is prepared to do to bring 'progress', and also the ways in which cultural clashes escalate, and become essentialised, as much through small acts as larger ones. Along with 'Yellow Card Man', this is probably the strongest entry in the collection.

Two of the other stories explore interfaces of humanity and technology through some judicious deployment of the grotesque. 'The Fluted Girl' (2003) is not so much a story as an extended exercise in balancing beauty and horror through a single crescendo of imagery. It deals with twin sisters adopted from poor parents by a wealthy patron, Belari, whose absolute power over his charges is written into the contours of their young bodies: fed medication to arrest their growth and subject to repeated modification through surgery, the girls are remade into Belari's very literal instruments:

No one noticed when the fluted girls took their places on the center dais. They were merely oddities, pale angels, entwined. Lidia put her mouth to her sister's throat, feeling her pulse threading rapidly under her white, white skin. It throbbed against her tongue as she sought out the tiny bore hole in her sister's body. She felt the wet touch of Nia's tongue on her own throat, nestling into her flesh like a small mouse seeking comfort.

Lidia stilled herself, waiting for the attention of the people, patient and focused on her performance. She felt Nia breathe, her lungs expanding inside the frail cage of her chest. Lidia took her own breath. They began to play, first her own notes, running out through unstopped keys in her flesh, and then Nia's notes beginning as well. The open sound, haunting moments of breath, pressed through their bodies. [...]

Lidia's hands found the keys to her sister, her tongue touching Nia's throat once more. Her fingers ran along the knuckles of Nia's spine, finding the clarinet within her, stroking keys. She pressed the warm breath of herself into her sister and she felt Nia breathing into her. Nia's sound was dark and melancholy, her own tones, brighter, higher, ran in counterpoint, a slowly developing story of forbidden touch.

As the show goes on, it becomes uncomfortably clear - as signalled by the phrase "forbidden touch" - that what the girls have been (re)created for is part music, part pornography. They perform "a choregraphy of lust", whose climax for the eager, privileged audience is the "spectacle of naked youth and music intertwined". As both fantastica and as a commentary on the commodification of female bodies, the effect is disturbing:

Suddenly, Nia wrenched at Lidia's shift and Lidia's fingers tore away Nia's own. They stood revealed, pale elfin creatures of music. The guests around them gasped as the notes poured out brighter now, unmuffled by clinging clothes. The girls' musical graftings shone: cobalt boreholes in their spines, glinting stops and keys made of brass and ivory that ran along their fluted frames and contained a hundred possible instruments within the structure of their bodies.

If 'The Fluted Girl' is delicately grotesque, 'The People of Sand and Slag' (2004) shoots straight for the bathos, with its collection of cheerfully oblivious future humans and the dog that they unwittingly abuse. As Niall points out, in many ways this is a thematic counterpart to 'Pop Squad'; both stories rely for their shock and effectiveness on close-in point-of-view narration, from characters utterly immersed in a world - and a worldview - diametrically opposed to our own. Unlike 'Pop Squad', though, which starts brilliantly but gradually loses its nerve, 'The People of Sand and Slag' sustains its affect throughout, perhaps helped by the fact that the whole thing is so unabashedly over-the-top. So we begin with the dog sinking its teeth into one character's arm; the character's reaction, though, is not alarm or pain, but amused detachment from the sensations of his body:

Jaak laughed. His bleeding stopped. "Damn. Check that out." He lifted his arm until the animal dangled fully out of the stream, dripping. "I got me a pet."

The dog swung from the thick bough of Jaak's arm. It tried to shake his arm once again, but its movements were ineffectual now that it hung off the ground. Even Lisa smiled.

"Must be a bummer to wake up and find out you're at the end of your evolutionary curve."

The dog growled, determined to hang on.

Jaak laughed and drew his monomol knife. "Here you go, doggy." He sliced his arm off, leaving it in the bewildered animal's mouth.

The human - or post-human - characters, who can subsist on sand and industrial waste, and whose enhanced bodies can swiftly regenerate from virtually any damage they sustain, are utterly lacking in empathy. They have no conception of the needs of living creatures who are not them. In their vaguely well-meaning - but easily distracted and unthinkingly destructive - way, they adopt the dog, but they have no idea how to feed it or care for it, or indeed how to avoid accidentally harming it. "I think I might have broken it when I put it in the cage," muses Jaak at one point, watching the suffering dog with more detached curiosity than concern; "It's not moving like it was before. And I heard something snap when I stuffed it in."

While it seems at times as if the presence of the dog might bring some caring instincts out of the post-humans, mostly it leads them to reflect on their own physical superiority - the fact that they could eat the dog, for example, while it is sickened by its attempt to feed on Jaak's arm: "We're the top of the food chain", reflects one. They feel no pity at its struggles, only puzzlement over its deficiencies; in the industrial wasteland of another post-collapse future, so inimical to ordinary life, the dog is unable to adapt and survive as humankind and its technology has:

I watched the dog, standing uncertainly on the beach, sniffing suspiciously at some rusting scrap iron that stuck out of the beach like a giant memory fin. It pawed up a chunk of red plastic rubbed shiny by the ocean and chewed on it briefly, before dropping it. It started licking around its mouth. I wondered if it had poisoned itself again.

"It sure can make you think," I muttered. I fed Lisa another handful of sand. "If someone came from the past, to meet us here and now, what do you think they'd say about us? Would they even call us human?"

Lisa looked at me seriously. "No, they'd call us gods."

There is the tiniest note of unease in the conclusion; having killed and eaten the dog, Jaak reflects that things are much better now that they don't have to worry about the creature hurting itself. But any hint of regret is fleeting, and - unlike in 'Pop Squad' - there is a very strong sense that post-humanity has moved on, for better or for worse, and become other.

The collection's final two stories - 'Softer' (2007) and 'Pump Six' (2008) - are, respectively, a minor retread of familiar themes and a bafflingly forgettable semi-farce. 'Softer' sees Bacigalupi relocate to the polar opposite of his customary settings (shiny, well-to-do suburbia), and dig into a character more overtly sociopathic than anyone else encountered in the collection; the maintenance of the character's emotional detachment from the act that opens the story (he murders his wife) is well done, but the story feels like it has made its point within the first few pages, and everything thereafter is just laying on the mood too thickly. 'Pump Six', meanwhile, revolves around irritating people taking large amounts of drugs and having increasingly stupid conversations; I've already forgotten most of what happened in it.

A strange note on which to end an otherwise extremely strong collection; I look forward, though, to reading more of Bacigalupi's work.

~~Nic

"They're fighting a war over who can be most peaceful."

We ride after the army thru the west end of town, down the main road, past what can only be the wreckage of the original jails the Answer burnt down in their biggest attack before today. I only ever been down here once, when I ran thru it the other way with Viola in my arms, carrying her down the zigzag road when she was dying, carrying her into what I thought was safety, but all I found was the man riding by my side, the man who killed a thousand Spackle to start this war, the man who tortured Viola for informayshun he already knew, the man who murdered his own son--

"And what other kind of man would you want leading you into battle?" he says, reading my Noise. "What other kind of man is suitable for war?"

A monster, I think, remembering what Ben told me once. War makes monsters of men.

"Wrong," says the Mayor. "It's war that makes us men in the first place. Until there's war, we are only children."

For various reasons, despite my good intentions - and a two-book head start on the shortlist - I singularly failed to get my Arthur C Clarke Award reading and posting finished in time this year. The always enjoyable Award reception was just two weeks ago, now; the prize went to Lauren Beukes' Zoo City, a result that pleased me, even if I was rooting for Ian McDonald's completely fabulous The Dervish House.

The fact that it's all over for this year doesn't mean I'm not going to write about the rest of the shortlist, mind. Next up is Monsters of Men, the characteristically intense concluding volume of Patrick Ness' Chaos Walking trilogy (books one and two of which I discussed here). More or less as I'd learned to expect by this stage, the final instalment proved to be another unabashed emotional rollercoaster, brimming with yelling, cliffhangers, explosions, yelling over the sound of explosions, and plain old Noise. It was, in short, good to be back with Todd and Viola, Ness' brave, determined, and fiercely loyal pair of narrators. If book one was a road movie, and book two a dystopia, book three plunges us into war, on at least three different fronts.

[Spoilers follow for the first two books, along with minor spoilers for this one. But frankly, if you intend to read the trilogy, it'd be better all round if you shut the computer down now, and come back to this review when you're done.]

The Chaos Walking trilogy is set on a distant planet that human beings begun colonising some decades ago - hospitable, but for one environmental quirk that has caused serious social rupture among the first wave of settlers: every living thing on the planet, whether it evolved there or travelled across space to reach the place and only arrived yesterday, thinks out loud. Constantly, and inescapably - with one or two very strong-minded exceptions - everyone broadcasts their thoughts to everyone else, in a buzz of words and emotions known as Noise. Everyone, that is, except human women. Some men learned, grudgingly, to accept this; some isolated themselves from human contact; a few, however, reacted badly to the abrupt appearance of such an unignorable new power differential at the heart of human society (and one that, moreover, favoured women). Widescale gendered violence was the dark secret of the settlers' past that Todd discovered during the first book, The Knife of Never Letting Go; in book two, The Ask and the Answer, tensions over this issue - and more generally over who would shape the future of the planet's human community - boiled over into fresh violence and some deeply disturbing repressive governance.

The story resumes in Monsters of Men with things getting even worse - it seems impossible, but it's true - for the inhabitants of Haven/New Prentisstown. Just as the city's leading figures - the Mayor, a brutal dictator with the power of mind control, and his implacable rival Mistress Coyle, a death-obsessed terrorist - have succeeded in bringing the population to open civil war, two groups of newcomers appear. The first is an army of Spackle, the planet's indigenous inhabitants, who fought a war with the human settlers some decades back, and were subsequently enslaved by them in large numbers; they are Not Happy. The second set of arrivals are the two-person crew of a scout ship, sent ahead of the main body of fresh human settlers - the same sort of ship that crash-landed in The Knife of Never Letting Go, killing all of its passengers except Viola. The scout ship is tiny, but significantly better armed than anything on the face of the planet.

...What could possibly go wrong(er)?

And the Spackle keep coming, climbing over the bodies of soldiers, and their Noises are wide open and so are the Noises of every soldier and it's like a thousand wars at once, not just the one I'm seeing but ones happening over and over again in the Noise of the men and the Spackle round me till the air and the sky and my brain and my soul are filled with war and I'm bleeding it outta my ears and spitting it outta my mouth and it's like it's the only thing I ever knew, the only thing I can ever remember, the only thing that's ever gonna happen to me--

Oh, yes; that.

In my previous post on the trilogy, I discussed Ness' style at some length: fast-paced, confrontational first-person narration, peppered with incident and with bursts of staccato sentences and single-line paragraphs that drag the reader along to heart-in-mouth cliffhangers - and then inexorably over the page to the next chapter, to find out what happens next. Here, therefore, I'm going to concentrate largely on the final book's themes: violence, forgiveness, identity, and the sadly rather fudged conclusion to the arc about gender begun in The Knife of Never Letting Go.

To the primary narrators, Todd and Viola, Ness adds a very welcome third voice this time round: the Return, a deeply angry individual within the enormous Spackle army. In The Ask and the Answer, the enslaved Spackle of New Prentisstown were slaughtered in cold blood by the Mayor's men. The Return was the sole survivor of this massacre, an experience that has left him emotionally shattered, and bent on revenge; he comes back having raised an army of free Spackle. Through him we see how the Spackle - or rather, as they call themselves, the Land - have developed a society in which the involuntary sharing of one's thoughts and feelings through Noise is embraced as a source of harmony and a way of communicating without barriers, rather than feared and resented as a loss of privacy.

But the Return's time among the humans - the Clearing, in the Land's resonant terminology - has changed him in ways that make it hard for him to find a home with the Land. When he explains to the Land who he is, they react with "great shock, an astonished recoil" to the modified slave language that he speaks: "something so alien, so individual". He hears in their Noise the guilt and disgust his arrival provokes in them; even though they come to him, telling him,

that I was one of them, that I had returned to them now, that I was safe.

That I was not alone.

But before they did all of that, there was shock, there was distaste, there was dread, there was shame.

Here at last was the Land. And it was afraid to touch me.

He, in turn, is led to shut parts of himself off from them:

For I have lived my life among the Clearing and I have learned much from them.

Including how to hide my thoughts, how to conceal what I feel and think. How to layer my voice so it is harder to read.

Alone among the Land, I am not fully joined to the Land's single voice.

Not yet.

The Return is an extremely effective addition to Monsters of Men, deepening the trilogy's exploration of identity and belonging, and of agency and leadership. In the isolation of the Return's individuality lies both his destructiveness and his strength of character; cut off from the comfort of the collective, he can find no solace nor safe outlet for his rage, and - in common with all the major characters - carries out a series of reckless, selfish acts, repeatedly derailing attempts to resolve the situation with anything other than violence. But his singular experiences mean that he can also make complex, difficult choices (both good and bad) in a way that it is not obvious the rest of the Land can, and he is capable of - although intensely resistant to - compassion and regret. He has (very affecting) memories of the love he shared with his "one in particular", who was killed by the Mayor's men, and it is these memories that allow him to understand the feelings that drive Todd, even though they are enemies. It is for these qualities - the combination of individuality and fellow-feeling - that he is singled out as a potential future leader of the Land.

The Return is a much-needed expression of the other, non-human side of the story just as the two forces close in brutal battle; his viewpoint layers ambiguity over every episode in which the humans debate exactly how much violence they need to commit to protect themselves. And debate they do, although Bradley from the scout ship is in a minority with voice-of-reason retorts like this:

"They attacked us."

"After we attacked them," Bradley says. "After they attacked us, after we attacked them, and so on and so on until we're all dead."

Bradley is also the voice of unattainably impersonal objectivity; Todd and Viola, trying their best to resist the violence but getting drawn into it over and over again anyway, led by heart and gut against wisdom and reason, are closer to the difficult majority experience. The plot contrives to put each of them in peril at least once every hundred pages, forcing the other into a fraught, emotional cliffhanger and - at times - a panicked burst of protective violence, sense and broader consequences be damned. After one such act averted (by the fact that someone else took action before she did), Viola looks back with dread on what her feelings for Todd have made her capable of:

Simone and Mistress Coyle are arguing but I'm really not hearing them--

Because I also know this.

When Simone asked me what to do--

I was going to say fire the missile.

I was.

I was going to cause this damage myself. I was going to say, yes, do it, fire it--

Kill all these Spackle, these Spackle with their real reason to attack someone who deserves it more than anyone on this planet--

If it would have saved Todd, it wouldn't have mattered, I was going to do it--

Mistress Coyle rebukes Viola for "making it personal at the expense of the entire world", and Viola herself later wonders,

If this is what Todd and I would do for each other, does that make us right?

Or does it make us dangerous?

As the Return repeatedly demonstrates, letting emotion cloud judgement can have devastating effects for many more people than just yourself. At the same time - here, as on several occasions, the book will not allow an easy answer - it is the emotional tie between Todd and Viola that enables them to overcome the corrosive mood of war, to think past themselves and continue to view others with compassion. "It's because nothing and no-one matters to you that you're willing to blow the world to pieces!" says Viola in response to Mistress Coyle's rebuke, and while she is not entirely correct; Mistress Coyle's problem is that the thing that matters to her is an abstract ideal, and she cares about it so much that she is willing, time and again, to put it above any individual person, or group of people. Where Viola is a better person than Mistress Coyle is not in having someone who matters to her, but in recognising (most of the time) that others also have people who matter to them.

In keeping with one of the trilogy's stated themes, some of these perilous situations are not real, but the products of faulty, limited, or misinterpreted information. Ness has a great time with the possibilities offered by the scout ship's communications technology, chiefly a clutch of flying probes that can transmit images back to video screens within the ship. As might be expected, having an eye on events only adds complications. We duly get scenes where the view is blocked at a key moment; scenes where a probe is not close enough to pick up sound; and, of course, scenes where the thing cuts out just when it is most needed. It's not subtle in its manipulation of narrative tension, but it's compelling nonetheless, and helps drive home Ness' interest in the way blunders and pigheadedness often drive such conflict, even among well-meaning people.

Todd, too, is sucked into fighting by the side of the Mayor, the man he reviles, out of the faint hope that in doing so he will make Viola safe; in the process, he finds both horror - unsurprisingly, it turns out that war is even worse when you can hear the fear and pain of everyone around you, on both sides, in their Noise - and a grubby sort of exultation that brings him uncomfortably closer to the Mayor:

That's the nasty, nasty secret of war--

When yer winning

When yer winning, it's ruddy thrilling--

For their parts, the Mayor and Mistress Coyle find - for a time - some common ground in the common goal of leading people into violence ("'You can't just stop fighting and call it peace, my girl,' Mistress Coyle says. 'The war goes on even as you're negotiating with the enemy.' 'Quite so,' says the Mayor.") Mostly, though, they can't resist their old one-upmanship; neither one of them can bear to let their rival have an inch, refusing to see the situation as anything other than a zero-sum game even as their power struggle repeatedly jeopardises the survival of the settlers. This all starts to get repetitive, frankly, but Ness uses Todd and Viola's younger, more straightforward view of the world to mine some darkly funny satire as the Mayor and Coyle start "fighting a war over who can be most peaceful", with Viola explaining:

Mistress Coyle, meanwhile, looks happier than I've ever seen her. She's even started talking about how to make the truce. Apparently, this involves a lot of blowing things up. Mistress Braithwaite, who did my soldiering training what seems like a lifetime ago, plants bombs in trees, hoping to show the Spackle we can outwit them and also hoping to capture one who isn't killed in the blast. Then we'll send it back saying we'll keep blowing things up if they don't talk to us about peace.

Mistress Coyle swears this is how it worked last time.

Or, as Todd puts it, more succinctly:

You kill people to tell them you want to stop killing them.

The fact that Todd is being succinct is a new development in Monsters of Men, the combined effect of his increasing control over his and others' Noise - as taught by the Mayor (never a good sign) - and his desire to hide from the traumas of the war. Cleverly, this is expressed both directly, as he reflects on how he has achieved this control, and in a more general withdrawal of Todd's narrative voice, a paring down of the giddy information overload of the younger Todd in the first two books. When Todd is hiding something from his Noise, he also hides it from the reader. This can be seen in the following extract, when the Mayor reveals - having, as ever, waited for the moment when sharing the information would give him the most power - that his subordinates have developed a cure for the blood poisoning he inflicted on New Prentisstown's women in book two:

"Why didn't you tell me, tho?" I say. "That you were close to a cure?"

"Because I didn't want to risk your disappointment if I failed."

He looks at me for a long time, trying to read me, but I'm so good at it now I don't think even he can hear me.

The Todd of Knife or Ask would have reacted to the Mayor's reply, at least in his narration; but in Monsters we are not always privy to his feelings. And if we are left out, so is Viola; her irritation at this demonstrates very neatly the imbalance that Noise creates between those who have it (and must reveal themselves) and those who don't (and thus can remain private), and I was delighted to see Todd calling her on her unthinking privilege, and the power it gives her over him:

"Viola, you know me. Out of everyone left alive on this planet, yer the one who does."

But I'm shaking my head. "Maybe not any more. Since I stopped being able to hear your--"

He really frowns at this. "So that's what you want, is it? I'm fine as long as you can hear everything I think but not the other way round? We're friends as long as you've got the power?"

"It's not about power, Todd. It's about trust--"

"And I ain't done enough for you to trust me?"

It's a shame, in light of this exchange, that Monsters of Men shies away from the central conflict and mystery of the trilogy: the fact that men have Noise, and women - alone of living things on the planet - do not. I share Abigail's frustration that the book fails to explore the issue - still less explain or resolve it - during what is, after all, a fairly hefty page count, and that the final statement on the matter is such a shallow one. A human character who has lived among the Land for some time - to say who it is would be a substantial spoiler - describes to Todd the wonderful future in which everyone, human and Land alike, will share in the joy of unfettered understanding through Noise, such that there "won't be any division twixt humans". When Todd not unreasonably points out that women don't have Noise - and surely, this reader editorialises with venomous sweetness, you couldn't possibly have forgotten that women are, y'know, humans too? - the other character brushes aside the objection as if it barely matters:

He stops. I'd forgotten, he says. It's been so long since I've really been around them. He brightens again. Spackle women have noise. And if there's a way for men to stop having Noise--he looks at me--There must be a way for women to start.

It's a cop-out, for which there is not a shred of in-story evidence beyond this ridiculous voice-of-God authorial intrusion; a head-patting there, there dear reassurance to shut down such killjoy objections. For a woman reader of what is otherwise a marvellously complex series of books, it's a deeply disappointing and alienating stumble at the final hurdle. In the heat of the reading moment, buoyed up by the heady action, it's easy to skim past it. But the further I get from the breakneck reading pace, the more bitter a taste this moment leaves behind.

~~Nic

Man is Wolf To Man

This year's Orange Prize reading continues at what feels like an agonisingly slow pace.  With barely five weeks to go until prize night, I've only read 8 of the longlisters (and only one book from the shortlist).  I'm beginning to feel that last year's longlist marathon was a bit of a fluke and that a successful repeat is unlikely.  Casting about for something to blame the inertia on, my eyes inevitably settle on Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge.

Oh, how I have struggled with this book! How its 600 pages of small print have taunted me.  At times I have actively avoided it: by leaving it upstairs by the bed for days on end, by not taking it to Prague with me last weekend, by piling other books on top of it and 'losing it'.  And oh, what a blessed relief to close its covers on the last page this evening and know that I don't have to pick it up again.

Please, don't throw stones at me. I know how well-beloved the book has been around the blogosphere (and amongst the print critics).  And, honestly, I'm an admirer too, though it may not sound like it.  Orringer has pulled off a feat of extraordinary creative stamina; the writing in The Invisible Bridge is simply gorgeous - balanced, textured, supple - and impressively sustained throughout.  It has been impossible not to re-read some passages several times for the sheer joy of them; like this one about a tree being felled:

Next came a series of creaking groans, momentum travelling the length of the trunk, the upper branches shouldering past their neighbours. That was the true death of the tree, Andras thought, the instant it ceased to be an upward-reaching thing, the moment it became what they were making it: timber. The falling tree would push a great rush of wind before it: the branches cutting the air with a hundred-toned whistle as it arced to the ground.  When the trunk hit, the forest floor thrummed with the incredible weight of it, a shock that travelled up through his bones to the top of his head, where it richocheted in his skull like a gunshot.  A reverberant moment followed, the silent Kaddish of the tree.

Can you feel the 'but' coming? 

But.  The devil is in the detail, and what a lot of detail there is here.  The book could have been 200 pages shorter, and about 30 pph (pages per hour) quicker, and yet none the worse for it. 

The story is a simple one: Andras Levi is the second son of an Hungarian saw-mill owner.  Brought up in the sticks but schooled for a brighter future, 1937 finds him aboard a train to Paris to take up a scholarship in architecture at the Ecole Speciale.  In his luggage is a mysterious letter to a K. Morgenstern, pressed upon him by a passing acquaintance; one of his first tasks in gay Paris is to deliver it.  The recipient, it turns out, is Klara, a Hungarian ballerina in hiding.  They fall in love, against poor odds - he is barely 21, she is 32; he is a penniless student, she is a successful teacher and the mother of a teenage daughter - and everything is set for a happy life together.  Then all of Europe is plunged into war, and the couple must return to Hungary and an uncertain future made all the more uncertain by one salient detail: they are Jewish. 

There is a lot of room in the tale for anguish, despair and yearning, as well as for love and hope and the avowal of life.  As the situation in Hungary worsens, Andras and his two brothers are called up to forced labour units, while their wives, parents and friends endure increasing hostility in Budapest.    In subject, prose and range, it is the stuff that great literary fiction is made of.  It should be Epic with a capital 'E'.  So why does it just feel long?  Primarily, I think, because of its languid pacing.   Nearly one half of the book is taken up with the Andras/Klara love-match, with some gentle tangents involving Andras' Jewish student friends in Paris and his brother, Tibor, who is studying to be a doctor in Milan.  You could argue that this is about narrative suspense, getting to know the characters before the war changes everything, giving you chance to invest in them before Hitler cuts them down.  Personally, though, I felt it was antithetical to narrative momentum.  After all, WWII and the fate of Europe's Jews is the mother of all plot-spoilers.  Trying to build up tension around the future of a Jewish couple in Paris in 1938 is like building a scaffold onto Everest to climb a little bit higher.  You're already as high up as you can go; fate is already bearing down.  Foreshadowing is virtually pointless.

Better to argue instead, I think, that the glacial pacing is to destabilises our expectations of a Holocaust/WWII novel by putting as much energy into sweet Paris dawns and architecture competitions as into labour camps and forced marches.  This fits with my overall impression of a book looking for new ways to approach the unapproachable.  I was dreading a revisit of Holocaust narratives past, but The Invisible Bridge is never that: the story of Hungary's Jews, citizens of a country that was an ally of the Reich yet independent of it, was both unfamiliar and unexpected. 

But, second but.

Orringer's characters don't feel like characters.  They feel like people, real people that actually lived, because the things that happen to them have the flavour of biography and not of make-believe.  This might sound like a Good Thing.  Surely it makes them better than 'just' characters?  But I disagree: characters in novels have to have their own reality, from their own world.  Do you see what I mean?  It's clear that Orringer has drawn upon the experiences of her own relatives for the shape and arc of the novel, and especially towards the end of the book there is a distinct flavour of non-fiction about what happens to her players.   It is as though she has been recounting what she has been told about the models for her characters, and not what happens to the characters themselves, in their own right.  I'm always suspicious of this muddying of the waters between fiction and biography when the subjects are intimately connected to the writer; it means they don't feel able to do what authors should do, which is throw away the script. 

The intimacy of Orringer's connection to the events she describes also imbues her characters with an aura of...well...holiness, of family sanctity.  It detracts from their roundedness: they are too perfect to be true.   Andras is the Good Man, an honest, earnest figure with principles and family values.  He entertains almost no internal conflicts - any doubt, anger, uncertainty in him is only a reflection of the big events going on in the world around him. His love for Klara is life changing, earth-shattering, pure and never tested.  At the Ecole Speciale Andras' three best friends are also types: Eli Polaner is the gentle, thoughtful homosexual; Rosen is the flaming political radical and activist; Ben Yakov is the handsome, damaged rogue.  Similarly, Andras' parents are cut-out figures - proud, clean-minded, good-hearted; his brothers are perfect contrasts to him: serious, productive Tibor and flighty joker Matyas.  They all move about the plot, and play their parts, and never do anything unpredictable. 

Fair is fair: I'm probably the wrong reader for The Invisible Bridge at the wrong time.  It's a very old-fashioned book (in the best sense), with it's elegant prose, linear structure and resolute ending.  I'm probably apt to be impatient with it, because I'm trying to read 20 books in two months, and because of my distrust for auto or family biographical novels.  Right now I can't imagine revisiting it, but perhaps I should, when I'm running at a slower pace.  If nothing else the quality of the prose and the clarity of the vision have convinced me to seek out Orringer's short fiction.

Onwards to the Goon Squad...

~~Victoria~~

To Coin a Phrase

Regrettably, said Mr Spools, with a straight face, their 'friendly' rivals, the wizards at Unseen University Press, had come a cropper with their talking books--

"Talking books? That sounds a good idea," said Moist.

"Quite possibly," said Spools with a sniff. "But these weren't meant to, and certainly not to complain about the quality of their glue and the hamfistedness of the typesetter. And of course now the university can't pulp them."

"Why not?"

"Think of the screaming!"

What more is there to say about (Sir) Terry Pratchett? He's a comic fantasy institution, of course, and deservedly so; Robert Rankin can pile on the madcap surreality and Tom Holt can be acute with his fantastical satires of mundanity, but no-one else gives nearly as good novel as Pratchett does. Pratchett may give his characters scrupulously silly names - conman-turned-postmaster Moist von Lipwig is once again at the centre of Making Money (2007), along with his paramour, chainsmoking deadpan goth Adora Belle Dearheart - but there is never any doubt that they are fully-rounded characters, rather than punchlines, and that they are going to star in rich, emotionally satisfying stories that trade in ideas as much as they do in jokes.

Amazingly, Making Money is the thirty-sixth Discworld novel (the young adult Discworld novels - which I've yet to read - having apparently been incorporated into the main series since the last time I blogged about Pratchett here). There is, as I noted in my last Discworld post, a certain familiarity and thus fatigue creeping in: another facet of our present-day world (in this case, banking and credit systems) is explained, explored and gently mocked through the prism of the creaking, stinking, invented city of Ankh-Morpork; the city's inhabitants, many of them recurring characters met in earlier books, turn up to greet this latest manifestation of modernity with the incomprehension of sheer bloody-minded literalness; another nefarious scheme to exploit or subvert or sabotage said innovation; the day is saved, and it all turns out to have been engineered by semi-benevolent dictator Lord Vetinari all along.

Having made a roaring success of the Post Office, rather against his better judgement Moist von Lipwig finds himself heartily sick of the resultant calmer, more settled, much less imminently deadly life he has built for himself:

At twenty-nine minutes past eleven the alarm on his desk clock went 'bing'. Moist got up, put his chair under the desk, walked to the door, counted to three, opened it, said "Hello, Tiddles" as the Post Office's antique cat padded in, counted to nineteen as the cat did its circuit of the room, said "Good-bye, Tiddles" as it plodded back into the corridor, shut the door, and went back to his desk.

You just opened the door for an elderly cat who's lost hold of the concept of walking around things, he told himself, as he rewound the alarm. You do it every day. Do you think that's the action of a sane man? Okay, it's sad to see him standing for hours with his head up against a chair until someone moves it, but now you get up every day to move the chair for him. This is what honest work does to a person.

Yes, but dishonest work nearly got me hanged! he protested.

So? Hanging only lasts a couple of minutes. The Pension Fund Committee lasts a lifetime!

With his trademark preternatual ability to slot people in where exactly they need to go - and exactly  where they will most effectively achieve what he wants them to, when he wants them to do it - Vetinari has just the job for him:

"Ahead of you, Mr. Lipwig, is a life of respectable quiet contentment, of civic dignity, and, of course, in the fullness of time, a pension. Not to mention, of course, the proud gold-ish chain."

Moist winced at this. "And if I don't do what you say?"

"Hmm? Oh, you misunderstand me, Mr. Lipwig. That is what will happen to you if you decline my offer. If you accept it, you will survive on your wits against powerful and dangerous enemies, with every day presenting fresh challenges. Someone may even try to kill you."

"What? Why?"

"You annoy people. A hat goes with the job, incidentally."

"And this job makes real money?"

"Nothing but money, Mr. Lipwig. It is, in fact, that of master of the Royal Mint."

In the time-honoured way of Ankh-Morpork institutions in need of an overhaul, the Mint is a decrepit shell that limps along with a desultory work ethic, two bob and a pickled egg in the way of resources, and a staff of eccentrics: a transsexual golem who goes by the name of Gladys and insists on wearing frilly aprons and making sandwiches, until Adora Belle gives her some feminist reading material; Mr Bent, a cashier with an aversion to sunlight, a suspiciously large wardrobe, and a truly OCD maths habit ("You could trust numbers, except perhaps for pi, but he was working on that in his spare time and it was bound to give in sooner or later"); and a small dog, who serves as the Mint's Chariman:

Watching a dog try to chew a large piece of toffee is a pastime fit for the gods. Mr. Fusspot's mixed ancestry had given him a dexterity of jaw that was truly awesome. He somersaulted happily around the floor, making faces like a rubber gargoyle in a washing machine.

Oh, and this wouldn't be a Pratchett book without the inevitable mysterious, gurgling machine in the basement - the aptly-named Glooper, watched over by an Igor - which uses hydraulics (it's a series of tubes!) to model the balance of payments and has Will Rumble Omniously For Most Of The Book And Then Explode Before The Climax written all over it.

Whatever the familiarity, though, it all builds into an entirely splendid farce that sees Adora Belle flirting with a dead wizard over ancient golem languages, an antagonist trying desperately to become Vetinari, a bunch of wizards demonstrating their eleven-dimension Cabinet of Curiosities (the wackier properties of which give literal meaning to the phrase "be there or be square"...), Moist breaking into his own bank vault, and the befuddled City Watch confronted by a seven-foot clay woman in a dress insisting that they wipe their feet before they can investigate.

Vetinari is on fine form, all silky, veiled, sarcastic dangerousness as usual:

"What's that round thing I always see poking out of the roof?" said Moist. "It makes it look like a piggy bank with a big coin stuck in the slot!"

"Oddly enough, it did used to be known as the Bad Penny," said Vetinari. "It is a large treadmill that provides power for the coin stamping and so forth. Powered by prisoners once upon a time, when 'community service' wasn't just a word. Or even two. It was considered cruel and unusual punishment, however, which does rather suggest a lack of imagination."

We also get a glimpse of what Vetinari gets up to in his spare time; adorably, he gets his secretary to time him at filling in sudoku puzzles (seventeen seconds). On the wizarding front, I can't imagine a junior academic in the land who wouldn't smirk a little at this:

Moist looked round at a young wizard, at least young by the standards of wizards, who had round spectacles, a clipboard, and the shiny sort of expression that says: I probably know more than you can possibly imagine but I am still reasonably happy to talk even to people like yourself.

"You're Ponder Stibbons, right?" said Moist. "The only one who does any work in the university?"

Other wizards turned their heads at this, and Ponder went red. "That's quite untrue! I just pull my weight, like any other member of the faculty," he said, but a slight tone to his voice suggested that perhaps the other faculty members had far too much weight and not enough pull.

Above and beyond all this, though, what is impressive is the way the plot and the themes of the novel gradually come to illuminate each other. Pratchett's joy in the use and manipulation of language, in the orchestration of wordplay to produce jokes, is as clear as ever, but in this instalment language - both spoken and written, and an especially as a source and expression of authority - is central. Moist is, of course, a conman by trade; he is frequently referred to as someone who plays with and shapes words, fostering others' belief through the tales that he tells and the way he tells them, repeatedly rescuing himself from scrapes with the gift of the gab (and just as often getting into them the same way). The Mint's reputation - and thus its fledgling career as a bank - rests on the rumours that are told about it, both by word of mouth and in the city's newspapers (in one sequence, the punters queuing in Moist's new bank are all reading a story in the Times about... the queue in Moist's bank). Moist's key scheme revolves around the introduction of paper money, which derives its authority - its wealth - in large part from what is printed on the scraps of paper.

And golems, of course, are brought to life, and commanded to act, by writing; the importance of words to the Discworld golems is signalled by the fact that every word they speak is headed with a capital letter. Herein lies Pratchett's single best - and almost throwaway - comic conceit in Making Money. What happens when golems start reading?

"I suppose a sandwich is totally out of—"

"I Really Must Get On With My Duties, Mr Lipwig," said the golem reproachfully.

"You know, Gladys, I can't help thinking that there's something different about you," said Moist.

"Yes! I Am Doing It For Myself," said Gladys, her eyes glowing.

"Doing what, exactly?"

"I Have Not Ascertained This Yet, But I Am Only Ten Pages Into The Book."

"Ah. You've been reading a new book? But not one by Lady Deirdre Waggon, I'll wager."

"No, Because She Is Out Of Touch With Modern Thought. I Laugh With Scorn."

"Yes, I imagine she would be," said Moist thoughtfully. "And I expect Miss Dearheart gave you said book?"

"Yes. It Is Entitled Why Men Get Under Your Feet By Releventia Flout," said Gladys earnestly.

And we start out with the best of intentions, thought Moist: find 'em out, dig 'em up, make 'em free. But we don't know what we're doing, or what we're doing it to.

"Gladys, the thing about books... well, the thing... I mean, just because it's written down, you don't have to... that is to say, it doesn't mean it's... what I'm getting at is that every book is--"

He stopped. They believe in words. Words give them life. I can't tell her that we just throw them around like jugglers, we change their meaning to suit ourselves...

He patted Gladys on the shoulder. "Well, read them all and make up your own mind, eh?"

"That Was Very Nearly Inappropriate Touching, Mr Lipwig."

Genius.

~~Nic