Eve's Alexandria

"Before the humans came, we didn't speak."

At this edge of town the angles and piazzas of our home alleys were interrupted by at first a few uncanny geometries of Hosts’ buildings; then more and more, until our own were all replaced. Of course we would try to enter the Host city, where the streets changed their looks, and brick, cement or plasm walls surrendered to other more lively materials. I was sincere in these attempts but comforted that I knew I’d fail.

China Miéville's Embassytown (2011) isn't the easiest book to synopsize. Oh, much of it is straightforward enough, and straight out of the classic science fiction toolbox: it is the far future, humankind has scattered among the stars (we have become, our narrator Avice notes, "homo diaspora"), and it's only a matter of time before they screw things up with some alien species or other. This sort of SF can rarely resist replaying the story of early-modern European explorer-imperialism, even if the point-of-view has shifted - somewhat - over the years, to acknowledge that the Others may have had a point.

In Embassytown, the narrative positions us - at least initially - with the intrepid human strangers in a strange land. The novel's primary setting is a small human colonial outpost on a planet named Arieka, whose indigenous inhabitants (the Ariekei, or 'Hosts') speak a language so beyond human comprehension that it, and the psychology behind it, are quite literally alienating. Future-humans haven't changed a great deal; childrearing is a collective endeavour and there are those, like Avice, who are specialists at navigating the reality-bending "immer" space/time through which it's necessary to travel to get across the universe, but otherwise people still eat, drink, argue, have sex and pair-bond in most of the same ways we might expect. Embassytown itself bears all manner of familiar features, like the children's games Avice recalls in the passage quoted above, involving daring each other to trespass in places their parents have warned them away from, and lavish parties for the colonial elite that resemble a Ferrero Rocher ad, except with more (largely metaphorical) back-stabbing.

Between all this and the first-person narration we are steered, therefore, in the direction of seeing things from the human side. The Ariekei/Hosts, after all, are much more difficult to get a handle on. Avice, again, recalls for us encounters from her childhood:

They were not the only exoterres I’d seen. There were exot inhabitants of Embassytown - a few Kedis, a handful of Shur’asi and others - but with them, while there was strangeness of course there was never that abstraction, that sheer remove one felt from Hosts. One Shur’asi shopkeeper would even joke with us, his accent bizarre but his humour clear.

Later I understood that those immigrants were exclusively from species with which we shared conceptual models, according to various measures. Hosts, the indigenes, in whose city we had been graciously allowed to build Embassytown, were cool, incomprehensible presences. Powers like subaltern gods, who sometimes watched us as if we were interesting, curious dust; and who provided our biorigging, and to which the Ambassadors alone spoke. We were reminded often that we owed them courtesy. Pass them in the street and we would show the required respect, then run on giggling. Without my friends, though, I couldn’t camouflage my fear with silliness.

Here and elsewhere, Miéville's interest in language as a signal of culture, as something that can include or exclude, shows through. The text is peppered with neologisms coined by this future society to describe both the familiar and the unfamiliar, and while "exoterre" is not difficult to parse (compared to say, "immer"), we are nonetheless expected to parse it for ourselves, to extrapolate from words we already know and work its meaning out from context; Miéville does not gloss it for us. (In its shortened form, as "exot", the word also recalls 'exotic', of course, ever a loaded term implying a power relationship of normality vs othering, between the viewer-default and the viewed-exotic.)

Neologisms are not unknown in genre fiction; nor are entire invented languages. But Miéville doesn't so much create a new language for his non-human race, as imagine a new type of relationship to language. The Ariekei's Language - it always gets a capital L, like the singular entity it is - comprises two curious features whose connection isn't obvious even by the time you've finished reading the novel. (Perhaps, as Abigail Nussbaum suggested in her review, that's because they don't really fit all that well together; maybe Miéville's reach has exceeded his grasp this time.) Firstly, each Ariekes has two mouths, each of which contributes (different) sounds simultaneously to form words in Language. It is, moreover, possible to reproduce the sounds exactly but still not be actually using Language in a way that the Ariekei can understand: they speak from two mouths because Language must be spoken that way, as the simultaneous act of two harmonised mouthpieces of a unified mind.

Humankind's early experiments with programming computers to communicate with the Ariekei, therefore, failed utterly: for the Ariekei, a computer-generated word in Language "means nothing, because it’s only sound, and that’s not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it". Instead, the colonists have had to breed a separate class of humans purely for the purposes of acting as Ambassadors to the Ariekei: pairs of clones, trained from an early age to think and speak as if they had one mind, and very carefully treated by all concerned as if they are single persons. Even their names are twinned (CalVin, SibYl, MagDa). When Avice, on one occasion, indicates that she can tell which half of one particular Ambassador is which, she is infringing a central social taboo of Embassytown, and giving a grave personal insult to boot.

Secondly, and in some way that I confess I don't quite understand deriving from this dual-mouth/single-mind form, Language has no figurative element. As Avice remember her ex-husband Scile explaining to her, in Language "words don’t signify: they are their referents". Spoken words don't represent, they are:

Their language is organised noise, like all of ours are, but for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen.

Ariekei, we're told, have no ability to talk in abstractions; they cannot speak about what is not. If they want to use figurative language, they must first create it in the world: they have to make similes literal before they can use them, by engineering a scenario to which, having witnessed it, they can later refer back. When they say that something "is like the stone that was split", they mean a literal stone that was literally split. Avice herself, as a child, was caught up in one of these scenarios; she is now a part of Language, and Ariekei speak her. The incident is never recounted directly, only referred to (and it sounds grim) - she is "girl who in pain ate what was given her" - which, she comes to understand, is "an expression intended to invoke surprise and irony, a kind of resentful fatalism".

We're repeatedly told, during the novel, that this absence of abstract language must mean the Ariekei also can't think abstractly, but I don't think this can be right, or the intended reading. Rather, the humans for a long time assume astract thought is impossible for the Ariekei, when in fact the Areikei can and do think abstractly, they just lack the ability to put it into words. How else could they know they lack a simile to express an idea if they don't even have that idea in the first place?

Another consequence of all this is that the Areikei cannot (or struggle to) lie. Here is something humankind, through the Ambassadors, is able to help them with:

For Hosts, speech was thought. It was as nonsensical to them that a speaker could say, could claim, something it knew to be untrue as, to me, that I could believe something I knew to be untrue. Without Language for things that didn’t exist, they could hardly think them; they were vaguer by far than dreams. What imaginaries any of them could conjure at all must be misty and trapped in their heads.

Our Ambassadors, though, were human. They could lie as well in Language as in our own language, to the Hosts’ unending delight. These eisteddfods of mendacity had not existed - how could they? - before we Terre came. The Festivals of Lies had occurred almost as long as Embassytown had existed: they were one of our first gifts to the Hosts.

This is something that is accelerated by the arrival in Embassytown of EzRa, "the impossible new Ambassador". He/they has/have been sent from the imperial metropole in an effort to undermine the colony's growing independence in its manufacture of Ambassadors. But unlike the clone Ambassadors of Embassytown, EzRa is very definitely two different people, and however well he/they can mimic Language, the effect is jarring - and, for the Ariekei, utterly intoxicating in a way similar to that of hearing humans speak deliberate untruths is. Soon vast swathes of Ariekei - and of their bioengineered buildings that make up the physical structure of Embassytown - are addicted to hearing EzRa, and getting increasingly violent when they don't get their fix.

The city twitched. It was infected. The Hosts had heard EzRa’s impossible voice, had taken energy from their zelles and let out waste, and in the exchange the chemistry of craving had been passed, and passed on again by the little beasts when they connected to buildings to power light and the business of life. Addiction had gone into the houses, which poor mindless things shook in endless withdrawal. The most afflicted sweated and bled. Their inhabitants rigged them crude ears, to hear EzRa speak, so the walls could get their fix.

Before long, the colonial outpost is under siege, and we're replaying the latter stages of the Raj, 'Indian Mutiny' and Amritsar massacre both.

At the same time as many Ariekei are falling under EzRa's largely unwitting spell (as Avice puts it, EzRa's voices "brought the Hosts to rapture"), they are some for whom speaking similes isn't enough: they want to use metaphor, to drop the 'like' and say simply that X is Y. Some of the humans, predictably, react with alarm; others want to encourage them. Either way, more or less everyone thinks about the situation in relation to humankind, rather than in the Areikei's own framing. Arguably - and perhaps this is Miéville's point - the humans can't do otherwise; just as the Ariekei cannot conceive of, or give voice to, a lie in pre-human Language, so humans cannot conceptualise of a way of seeing the world that does not have themselves at the centre of it. Scile puts it in stark Book-of-Genesis terms:

"Simile spells an argument out: it’s ongoing, explicit, truth-making. You don’t need... logos, they used to call it. Judgement. You don’t need to... to link incommensurables. Unlike if you claim: ‘This is that.’ When it patently is not. That’s what we do. That’s what we call ‘reason’, that exchange, metaphor. That lying. The world becomes a lie. That’s what Surl Teshecher wants. To bring in a lie.” He spoke very calmly. “It wants to usher in evil.”

To Scile and his allies, humanity's presence is corrupting, tempting the Ariekei away from the Edenic simplicity and truth of Language; one man, Valdik, takes to preaching in public about what a loss it would be for the universe if the Ariekei and their Language were to Fall. When Avice confronts Scile about the way he has been stirring up Valdik ("'It's not fair'" to him, she says), Scile retorts with, "'He’s not a fucking child, Avice [...] He decides what he wants'". The Ariekei, though, apparently don't get to decide what they want; Scile has decided for them that they are best left in their prelapsarian paradise. (On the other other hand, how meaningful can any choice the Ariekei make actually be, when the terms of that choice are being entirely or largely determined for them by the colonisers and the culture they are importing? Thorny questions.)

For Avice, meanwhile, the forced evolution of Language is a good thing for the Ariekei, however painful the process: it is a liberation ("Similes are a way out", she says. "A route from reference to signifying [...] We tell the truth best by becoming lies"). The Fall, after all, was a Fall from ignorance into knowledge:

The said was now not-as-it-is. What they spoke now weren’t things or moments anymore but the thoughts of them, pointings-at; meaning no longer a flat facet of essence; signs ripped from what they signed. It took the lie to do that. With that spiral of assertion-abnegation came quiddities, and the Ariekei became themselves. They were worldsick, as meanings yawed. Anything was anything, now. Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable. They could be mythologers now: they’d never had monsters, but now the world was all chimeras, each metaphor a splicing. The city’s a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city were sutured into a third thing, a heartish city, and cities are heart-stained, and hearts are city-stained too.

No wonder it made them sick. They were like new vampires, retaining memories while they sloughed off lives. They’d never be cured. They went quiet one by one, and not because their crisis ended. They were in a new world. It was the world we live in.

Either way, for the humans concerned and thus for the surface narrative, it's all about them. The impact of the colonisers, whether dreadful or uplifting, cannot but be transformative. For the Areikei's side of things, we are left to read from our own experience and assumptions about whether this might be a positive or a negative outcome for the colonised, or whether that's even a valid or useful question to ask. Both of these things are true, and neither: the revolutionary Ariekes Surl-Teshecher declaring, to the shock of his audience, "Before the humans came [...] we didn’t speak", and the Ariekei who tear out their own ear-fans to avoid hearing EzRa - or anything - any longer and thus escape humanity's influence ("that despairing, literally maddening act of revolt"). We cannot access the time and the mindset before the Fall; we can only have them described to us, inadequately and at a remove, in our own language. For better or worse - or both of those things - the Ariekei are forever changed by their colonial encounter. “Language," as one character puts it, "is the continuation of coercion by other means."

~~Nic

Departure Lounge of Crossed Destinies

Ruminations. People were Taking Stock. Tokyo tomorrow night that means I miss the connection the next one is Thursday which means I have to spend a couple of days there God I've always wanted to see Tokyo! The snowstorm was like a wall across a highway that brought cruise control to a whiplash standstill: but as you thought about it there were ways around it, through it even, and the other possibilities started to seem more, well, felt. Fists and tempers were still shaken at the blatant injustice of it all, but around the airport hall the mutant seed of force majeure was already sprouting up through the edifices of cherished Plans, cracking the walls and floors until they crumbled in a cloud of dust which, as it cleared, revealed something new.

Picking up where I left off almost a month ago: another book that made the list of last year's favourite reads was Rana Dasgupta's dazzling (and often gleefully surreal) story-suite Tokyo Cancelled (2005). The frame-tale has a group of passengers stranded in an airport overnight, after bad weather sees all flights to Tokyo cancelled. As the initial annoyance and worry fades, the group's minds turn to how they might pass the time; as the excerpt quoted above demonstrates, I hope, Dasgupta does a skilled job of sketching the dynamics of the crowd and its skittering trains of thought through playful metaphor and snatches of half-heard dialogue. Like Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims or Calvino's castle guests, the travellers hit upon storytelling as a solution.

Well, not unanimously, at first; someone feebly protests that they don't know any stories, to which someone else fires back, all run-on sentences in his breathless enthusiasm,

Everyone knows stories! I just told you I slept in the same bed as my wife every night for the last fifteen years in the same bedroom of the same flat in the same suburb of Tokyo - and look at all you different people! You just have to tell me how you travel to work every morning in the place where you live and for me it's a fable! it's a legend! Sorry I am tired and a little stressed and this is not how I usually talk but I think when you are together like this then stories are what is required.

Someone spoke: I have a story I can tell.

Simple, just like that.

And just like that, a treasure trove of Story is opened to us. Befitting the airport setting, the settings range wildly - Paris, Delhi, Frankfurt, Istanbul, New York, Lagos - but certain key themes and motifs are shared. One of these is the crossing of boundaries: between countries, between individuals, between inside and outside, between sleeping and waking, between the body and its surroundings.

In 'The Billionaire's Sleep', for example, we meet a captain of industry named Rajiv Malhotra, who is locked in a feverish need for constant activity. When he tries to sleep, "horizontality" proves to be "some kind of strange excitant that would send his exhausted mind scampering aimlessly around labyrinths of irrelevant problems to which he needed no solution". Searching for fresh stimulation - and for something on which to spend his money - he pays for an experimental treatment to create clones of himself and his wife, to give them the children they have never managed to have. Naturally, this being a sort of fairytale, the result is twins; equally naturally, to Rajiv's horror, one twin is adorable perfection while the other is born "shrunken, misshapen". He orders what he calls the "creature" removed from his sight - a retainer ensures the boy is raised, in safety and love, far away - and takes his perfect daughter home, where she rejuvenates all who see her with how pretty and content she looks.

As Sapna grows up, however, it becomes apparent that her rejuvenating effects are not confined to people, or indeed to animate objects at all. In a lovely, surreal passage, we're shown how, all around her, things spontaneously grow:

[A] morning visit was met by a room full of white seeds that drifted lazily on the air currents from floor to ceiling, spores emitted by the geometric rows of spiralling grasses that had sprung overnight from the antique Persian rug on the floor of Sapna's room. [...] They moved her into another bedroom, where a wicker laundry basket burst overnight into a clump of bamboo-like spears that grew through the ceiling and erupted into the room above. Wherever Sapna slept, things burst into life: sheets, clothes, newspapers, antique wardrobes.

So does her adolescent womb; Sapna is discovered to be pregnant. Before too long Rajiv has locked his perfect daughter up in a castle (well, a former mental hospital). She, in turn, sets out to defy the restrictions placed on her; like many tales in Tokyo Cancelled, 'The Billionaire's Sleep' shifts focus from one character to another partway through: it starts out seeming to belong to Rajiv, before switching allegiance to become Sapna's story. As her long-lost brother, Imran, becomes a reality-TV star and then plays the part of Ravana in an adaptation of the Ramayana, Sapna uses her music to reach out beyond the hospital walls:

The more she perfected her system, the more it seemed that time was the lost secret of European classical music. When she sat, eyes closed before her piano, waiting for the precise instant of the day (about 6.02 in the evening) for which the opening bars of Beethoven's last piano sonata were intended, when she struck out, astonishingly, into its angular chords, it made everything anyone had heard before sound like the indistinct irritation of hotel lobby soundtracks. [...] Crowds would come to listen outside the tower where she played; they would sit in silence in the street and feel that they were experiencing 6.02ness as they never had before.

A plant also transgresses the expected in 'The Changeling', although this time it does so by growing inside a person, rather than in the rooms around them. Our viewpoint character, but largely a witness to events rather than an actor within them, is a changeling named Bernard. The explanation of who Bernard is, as it happens, provides a neat little example of Dasgupta's method of creating a sense of the surreal: wherever possible, he skips a step or three, not bothering with introductory-level orientation, instead going straight for the incidental details that take the fantastic for granted. This is the sort of book in which our narrator opens not with 'changelings exist' or 'this is what a changeling is', as we might expect, but rather, "Parisians have traditionally treated their changeling population with resentment".

There is some initial discussion as to the humanity of changelings: supporters claim they're "more human than the rest of us", since their humanity is not gifted to them at birth but achieved through "supreme, self-conscious effort of will", but many fear and envy them, and Bernard's wife separates from him once she realises what he is, and therefore that he will not only outlive her but remain young even as she ages. But as in 'The Billionaire's Sleep', the real story lies elsewhere, with unrest in the streets of Paris, and a man Bernard rescues after seeing him collapse in the street, before discovering there's much more to him than meets the eye:

He was staring instead at the deep lesions that covered Fareed's entire body: swellings and pus-filled weals that scarred his chest and legs, eruptions like molehills that grew from either side of his stomach, black scabs that cut across his thighs like some knobbled mountain range on a relief map. He looked as if his entire envelope of skin was bursting open in every place, as if he was about to cast it off painfully, perhaps to emerge anew like some glistening reptile.

"Some rare plant is growing inside my body," Fareed explains; "its flowers are bunching under my skin". (Even in extremis, Dasgupta's characters are never short of slightly beyond-the-ordinary turn of phrase; I like the choice of 'bunching' for the verb, here.) It is Fareed who captures the mood as Paris goes into lockdown because of a smallpox epidemic, and Fareed who kickstarts a whole new cultural movement with his poetry about death.

Another human body repeatedly blurs the lines between life, death and unlife in the more light-hearted and silly 'The Store on Madison Avenue'. In New York, a secret son of Robert de Niro meets the lovechild daughter of Martin Scorsese and Isabella Rosselini - again, the use of precise detail to create the atmosphere of the surreal - and they fall in weird, adorable love, expressed via dialogue consisting largely of big, declarative statements that read like overly literal subtitles:

"I am a secret to the whole world. The only people that know are you and her."

"Why did you tell me?"

"Because you are not ordinary either. You can understand."

"But I grew up in an airport the son of immigrant workers."

"Nonetheless. I can see it in you. We will be friends. Come: let me teach you kung fu."

Together, Pavel and Isabella discover some magical Oreos - stay with me - that she can use to shapeshift. Into a shop. Specifically, "a store on Madison Avenue" that does really good business.Yes, really. All is going swimmingly until one day some gangster disrupt Pavel in the middle of the regular ritual to turn Isabella back to human. Then it all goes really bonkers, with Pavel failing to find money to pay off the mob and having to go on the run, while also calling a hilariously deadpan Oreos helpline to try to find a way to change Isabella back (the operative suggests he seeks medical attention; Pavel points out a doctor won't even realise she's human - "She is lying here looking like a demolished building, bleeding all over her car" - but to no avail). Finally, Pavel manages to "master the transubstantiation of matter and to turn it - in blatant patent infringement - against his enemies". Genius.

Interestingly, one of the few times where our narrator(s) breaks in with a direct plea to the reader to set aside disbelief, it is not for something supernatural at all. 'The Rendezvous in Istanbul', a moving little romance about a pair of lovers separated by a shipwreck, tries to get us to believe in something far more improbable - love at first sight:

Listen closely: for there are some moments when another's life breaks the rules of what is familiar, and they cannot be followed with the humdrum attention we usually grant to the world – and these are the moments that make that life unique. And let us also be careful how we tell this; for what Natalia saw, in what order, is important to understand. She knew she was passing a coffee shop, for she herself had drunk so many dainty coffees there; she looked at the window and saw the reflection in it of a man on the other side of the street who waved with his arms at a van as it reversed into a narrow parking space (whether this is significant for what followed is only a matter for speculation); and hazily, behind this crystal reflection, in the half-light of the interior and mostly veiled by the glass, she saw – in outline only, for the details were hidden and were only filled in later in her mind – she saw the gesture of a man (and even his gender was mostly a suspicion), a man who – let us state it as baldly and simply as it was – raised a coffee cup slowly to his lips and sipped. Perhaps it is difficult to believe, for such sights surround us every day and they tell us so little about anything at all, perhaps it will be difficult not to feel that there are other facts that are not being recounted; but that is the problem – at the risk of repetition – with assuming that the lives of others are just rearranged versions of our own: for before Natalia could see anything else, or even understand what she had seen, she had fallen suddenly, and breathlessly, in love.

Again the forensic level of incidental detail, piled up to create the effect of reality, but this time notes of doubt are sounded - the narrator's keen urging, of course, serves to highlight the fictionality of the moment, while at the same time asking us to recognise this, and embrace it anyway for its emotional truth. By the time Natalia's beloved, Riad, has coughed up a living bird and it has walked - since Riad's shipboard cabinmate cut its wings off, the cad - all the way from Marseille to Odessa to signal to her that he's still alive, I was so swept along by the whole thing I was more or less ready to believe anything.

An altogether more disturbing tone can be found in 'The House of the Frankfurt Mapmaker'. This is yet another tale that wrong-foots the reader, shifting its focalisation - and sympathies - part way through. It begins as the story of Klaus, a young German who gets himself lost in the Anatolian desert, and who initially seems to be the one in peril - or at least the one whose future looks precarious - when his car breaks down and he is stranded without water. Rescued by a local woman who lives in a cave nearby, he seems to have stumbled into a typical dangerous fairyland bargain: the woman offers to help him if he agrees to marry her mute, telepathic daughter. Klaus refuses, citing his unsuitability as a match in an apparent display of humility and sensivity ("I am not the kind of man you would wish for your daughter"), but at length he has no choice but to agree.

Dasgupta builds the sinister atmosphere with all the hallmarks of one type of story: the stranger in a strange land, beset by a canny, manipulative woman coded as a witch, and pressganged into accepting what looks like a classic sting-in-the-tail 'gift'. But then we return to Frankfurt with Klaus, and the woman's daughter, Deniz, joins him in his house via a long, literally underground journey of illegal immigration: she has travelled entirely through sewers between Turkey and Germany (the surrealist metaphor here is perhaps a bit too literal). Now we discover that the power and the malice lie not with Deniz and her mother, but with innocent abroad Klaus. He gives Deniz instructions on how she must remain in his house at all times, before admonishing her, "And do not go into the room at the top of the tower. That's my private room. Don't go there on any account."

The story, in other words, has become 'Bluebeard'. Deniz's freedom and identity are gradually stripped from her - boxes of baklava keep appearing spontaneously under her bed, but he disgustedly rebukes her when she tries to offer him some, and so she's forced to hide it in future - and when she defies his ruling about the tower her transition from powerful, magical figure to trafficked victim is completed, as Klaus effectively sells her off to indentured servitude at what must be the creepiest hotel in all existence:

The deal is complete. Klaus will whisper to his friend: "I don't want her in my house all day. Prefer her to be here where someone is watching her. As you can see, she can't talk. But still: I don't want her mixing with anyone. Forming friendships, alliances. Things can get out."

Mysterious body bags - and, er, some escaped monkeys - inevitably follow; much is conveyed through glimpses and hints rather than full explanation, and it's all the more effective for it. Of all the stories in the book, this one has stayed with me the most, albeit mostly to make me shudder a little whenever I think of it.

There are thirteen stories in all; not all are as successful as those discussed above, but most are still hugely enjoyable. 'The Tailor' is a 1001 Nights-style morality fable about a prince getting his come-uppance for cheating a tailor; 'The Memory Editor' sees a directionless young man in London picked by a company that deletes bad memories from people's minds because of his "unusual empathy with the past". 'The Doll' strays a little close to the cultural stereotype bone at times in its portrait of an overally driven Japanese businessman who creates a living doll for himself to be the ultimate accommodating girlfriend, but the jabs made at the expense of one-sided, exploitative relationships are nonetheless snarkily effective. He likes the doll's "uncomprehending" voice and imagines as "loving" (as opposed to, y'know, programmed) the way she sits beside him as he works. As she breaks her programming and starts demanding (amongst other things), more money and autonomy, she treats his whiny "Sometimes I think you don't love me for myself" with the contempt it so richly deserves, coming from a guy who tried to mould her to suit his needs and keep her entirely dependent on him. The thematic strands are pulled together - and, in a very light-touch, low-key way, some of the plot threads are nodded back to, as well - in 'The Recycler of Dreams', about a man who runs a homeless shelter in which people pay for their bed and board with a dream.

The whole thing is endlessly imaginative and marvellous fun, deftly negotiating an impressive variety of styles and tones - and drawing on a wide range of global storytelling traditions - in the creation of modern fables. Highly recommended.

~~Nic

The Black Bat

There are three epigraphs at the beginning of Kate Atkinson's new novel, Life After Life.  One is from Nietzsche, one from Plato and a quote from one of the book's characters.  They all boil down to the same essential question: If you could relive your life, if you had the chance to do it all again and change things for the better or worse, would you?

Ursula Beresford Todd has no choice in the matter.  She is born, and born, and born again on the 11th February 1910, and each time the thread of her life spools out slightly differently.  The first time we meet her for only the briefest moment before she dies, the umbilical cord choking off her first breath. 

An icy rush of air, a freezing slipstream on the newly exposed skin.  She is, with no warning, outside the inside and the familiar wet, tropical work has suddenly evaporation.  Exposed to the elements.  A prawn peeled, a nut shelled.  No breath. All the world come down to this.  One breath.  Little lungs, like dragonfly wings failing to inflate in the foreign atmosphere.  No wind in the strangled pipe. The buzz of a thousand bees in the tiny curled pearl of an ear.  Panic.  The drowning girl, the falling bird.

The second time she survives through the intervention of a doctor; another time because her mother snips the cord with a suspicious prescience.  This is the first hinge of many in her life, when events might shift and send a shiver of change through the story.

Sometimes Ursula lives to be an elderly spinster, other times 'the black bat' comes for her and she dies of childhood flu, or under a collapsing wall in Blitz-torn London, or even during one memorable twist by biting down on a cyanide capsule.   There are some constants - her father, Hugh; her mother Sylvie; her incorrigible, flirtatious Aunt Izzie; her brothers and sisters - but other figures loom in and out of her lives.  Friends, lovers, husbands, children.  Each iteration is different but similar enough that gradually, as the repetition grows insistent, Ursula becomes aware of a detritus of memories, emotions and fears from the times before.  She experiences powerful deja vu as a child, remembers events that have never happened both past and future.  Sometimes this drives her quite mad, and othertimes not.  Unconsciously at first, and then with ever greater determination, she starts trying to change things.

The novel is a slow burner, inevitably. The structure is complicated, each version of Ursula's life opening up more and more opportunities for the plot to diverge, and each chapter dodging back and forth between 1910 and 1967 and all the points in between.  There are times that Ursula gets stuck - at the age of 8 she is repeatedly thwarted by the Spanish Flu epidemic, which either kills her or a selection of her siblings; and later the Blitz is a myriad of deaths.  But, as she notes herself, practise makes perfect.  The practising gives Atkinson a lot of room to manoeuvre as a writer.  She can tickle a scene from many different angles, play with different scenarios, test character's reactions.  It is a game of 'what ifs' and might have beens, like history itself: a historian nephew of one of Ursula's later lives nonchalently shrugs his subject off as a litany of them. 

It's a risky technique, as it robs the narrative of forward momentum and leads the reader round and round in circles. But Atkinson pulls it off with the surgical precision of her prose and the generosity of her characters.  Ursula is the lynchpin of her particular world, but her family (and her relationships with them) is beautifully drawn out: prickly, unsatisfied mother Sylvie; quiet, unpreposessing father Hugh; boisterous, unlikeable elder brother Maurice; sensible sister Pammy; Teddy the much loved family favourite and Jimmy, the WWI victory baby, whose sexual 'leanings' are clear from a young age.  There are lovely subtleties at work as we relive their pleasures, fear and grief over and over again.  It gives the illusion of a much longer acquaintance than is usual in a novel, and I could have stood longer.

Ironically it is Ursula who loses out in this dance of characterisation, at least in the traditional sense.  There is an essential core to her personality, but the variety of her life experiences across the novel change her in significant ways and these many Ursulas make it difficult to know what is real about her.  An almost-constant of her lives is Dr Kellet, a psychiatrist who tries to help her with her dreams and deja vu.  He exhorts her to consider Pindar: 'Become such as you are, having learned what that is.'  Ursula is in the enviable and dreadful position of being able to do that, with an infinity of attempts at childhood, adolescence and adulthood. 

At first she is concerned to alter and finesse her own life experiences and those her siblings.  But with WWI and WWII in her path, it is inevitable that she has to cast her net of influence wider.  How can she save Teddy from a fiery death over Berlin during a WWII bombing raid, or her childhood friend Benjamin Cole's family from the horrors of the Holocaust?  There is an air of inevitability about what she concludes.  What if the life of the author of all this horror could be cut off in a moment?  There is a strand of Ursula's lives that takes her to 1930s Germany, to make friends with Eva Braun, to pick up her father's WWI revolver and end a pivotal life.  It is a bit of a narrative cliche this 'What if someone killed Hitler?' conceit, but Atkinson holds her nerve with it.  It isn't the main purpose of the narrative, it is just another action that Ursula works her way towards, given no more or less weight in the story than her struggles with the Spanish Flu.  The incident that looms largest, in fact, is a particular bomb hit during the Blitz of 1940 which Ursula returns to again and again with unrelenting despair and poignancy and just a little, perfect touch of humour. 

One thing: I'd get the hardcopy if I had my time again (and I will get one for my collection, and for re-reading).  I had an e-ARC and found reading it on my Kindle quite frustrating.  It's the kind of book where you want to flick backwards through it to re-read earlier chapters, earlier iterations of Ursula's life.  Navigating through the chapter headings was impossible, as reiterated sections all have the same titles, and I realised how bad I am at predicting the bitsI will want to come back to.  But never mind these niggly personal frustrations.  Life After Life comes highly recommended by me and I predict it will be on the Women's Prize for Fiction longlist (whenever that comes out - soon I hope).

~~Victoria~~

Resolute in January & February

Two months in to 2013 and it's time for a New Year's resolution progress check.  I'm still taking it all very seriously, probably because this year is a bit of a watershed with my 30th birthday in July. A perfect year to make some changes.

This is the first year in a long time that I have made non-reading resolutions.  The first was to pass my driving test; my second was to visit Orkney; and my third, well, that one I will keep to myself for now.  I've made big steps towards all three in January.  I passed my driving theory test a couple of weeks ago and have booked my practical test for a couple of months time.  Lessons are going really well - I love my instructor - and I can now navigate pretty much everything. This week I did a full circuit of the York outer ring road, complete with 6 multi-lane roundabouts, and am starting to feel like a real driver, if a very slow one.  I never thought this would happen because I was so disastrous as a teenager.  I got my provisional license at 17 but hated every second behind the wheel and gave up before I went to university.  Obviously the 13 year break has done my confidence the world of good.  (Also, it helps to have a teacher who doesn't shout 'Break! Break! Break! ... You used the break too soon' on the approach to every junction.)

And I booked the Orkney trip for the beginning of July (by which point I should be able to share in the driving to get there).  I won't be going alone - all the Alexandrians and their partners and several other friends are coming too - and we'll be spending a week on South Ronaldsay.  I'm looking forward to reading more George Mackay Brown, as well as a few sea and selkie stories in preparation.  Orkney by Amy Sackville popped through my letter box on Friday and is now enticing me from the sideboard.   I want, I want, I want.  If you have any other related reading suggestions, let me know! 

My reading resolutions were very simple: read more, and blog once a week.  Clearly the later hasn't quite bedded in yet, but I'm still trying.  The reading more though, that is working just fine.  I've managed to keep to my 'hour a day' quota, even on the heaviest and most desperate of work days.   I've read twice as many books as last year in January and February, as well as a host of magazines and short stories.

I've blogged about my two favourite fiction books of the year so far - Seraphina and Sisters by a River - but given I'm already behind blogging schedule I will share some brief thoughts on the others now. Fiction first.

The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas (2010; trans. Sian Reynolds) was my first crime novel of the year.  I picked it up from the library on a whim because one of my colleagues had been waxing lyrical about a later book in the series, and I'd also heard the name several times on The Readers podcast.  This is how I knew a) that Vargas is a woman and b) that The Chalk Circle Man is the first in her series of books about Commissaire Adamsberg, a Parisian detective.  This isn't a great deal to know when embarking on a novel, but still all my expectations were confounded.  I was expecting an involved, cannily plotted police procedural with a prickly, hard-nosed detective at the centre.  What I got instead was an intuitive and unfathomable character in Adamsberg, a man who solves crimes entirely by instinct, and a weirdly inconsequential plot.  Adamsberg is the antithesis of Sherlock Holmes, distrustful of the evidence and feeling rather than deducing his way to the murderer.  He is 'not in the habit of reflecting deeply...inferring, deducing, concluding, all that was a complete mystery to him....he was never sure where his ideas, his decisions, his intentions came from.'

This makes for a rather dreamlike crime novel, where evidence and incident are beside the point as Adamsberg drifts restlessly and apparently aimlessly around Paris.  Characters are given much more space to surprise us.  Vargas spends a long languid time introducing us to people like Mathilde, a reowned oceanographer who spends her time on dry land following random people in the street, and Charles Reyer, a blind scientist who is bitterly disappointed with the world and his place in it.  I liked the way that Mathilde and Charles aren't placed in the novel to *do* anything; Vargas spends a lot of time setting them up but not to be lynchpins of the plot.  Rather, to be interesting in and of themselves.  Similarly, Adrien Danglard, Adamsberg's deputy, looks as if he is there to play the staple role of sidekick.  But we get a lot more of this impeccably dressed drunk and single father of four than the position usually warrants. 

Vargas neatly sidesteps the tyranny of the plot; the staple elements of the crime novel are only a faint hum behind the lovely weirdness of her execution. I was excited to discover a crime book where I felt the characters, and the ideas the characters had, were more interesting than the drive of the story - a good job, since the murder plot itself is definitely the weakest thing about the book. Vargas is definitely on my list of authors to pursue further.

Almost immediately after Vargas I re-read Theft by Peter Carey, a book I first reviewed here in 2006.  I was refreshing my memory for my book group, which met at the York Art Gallery this month.  I don't think I would have revisited it in other circumstances; whilst I enjoyed it the first time, it wasn't a head-over-heels kind of enjoyment.  So picking it up again was a very instructive lesson in how rewarding re-reading can be.  Usually I re-read out of a desire to capture the pleasure of the first time, to revisit the characters and places that I loved and to eat up the writing again.  I embarked on Theft without any such fannish enthusiasm, to dutifully identify discussion topics for the group.  And I enjoyed it immensely, much more than the first time around.  Chewing over the precision of Carey's prose, I was struck by how many books I read each year that fall into a similar category as this one did - momentarily enjoyable, but not keepers - and what a disservice I might be doing them. 

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

Things have been a little slower on the non-fiction front.  One of my abandoned books of 2013 is Clarie Tomalin's biography of Charles Dickens.  I know this has been well received around the blogosphere, and very well received in the broadsheet media but, hell, I just couldn't get along with it.  I found the traditional linear narrative of Dickens' life dull, dull, dull, the discussion of his work and writing life trivial and Tomalin's apologetics for his treatment of his wife distasteful.   I read an absolutely fantastic review of it somewhere, that expanded on these flaws and expressed my thoughts completely, but now I can't find it in my feed.  Anyway, over 200 pages in I decided I'd rather read Dickens than read about him, and put it aside. 

I've been reading Diarmuid MacCulloch's magisterial Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490-1700 since Christmas and am still only 152 pages into a total of 700.  But this book demands to be read slowly and carefully. It has sat and daunted me on the TBR pile for years and years, and with good reason.  The theology is complex, the terms of reference wide-ranging - from Aristotle to Erasmus via every thinker in between - and the Europe MacCulloch paints is fragmented and politically unstable.  A good job then that he is so eloquent and comfortable on all these subjects.  Still, I'm glad I have those second year Modern History modules under my belt, so that I have a framework to place Luther, Zwingli, Hus and the rest in. 

There have been some lighter interludes.  I picked up Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland by Sarah Moss in the 12 Days of Kindle sale just after Christmas.  You know I'm fascinated by cold northern places ad nauseum at the moment and Iceland especially.  Moss is a lecturer in English Literature and a novelist - I have her most recent novel, Night Waking, and am looking forward to it - and in 2009, just after the financial crash, she spent a year teaching abroad in Iceland with her young family.  It was a year bookended by the collapse of the Icelandic banks on one hand - meaning the value of her salary halved over night - and the volcanic ashcloud that grounded flights all over Europe on the other.  In between it was very, very cold.

Names for the Sea is wonderfully difficult to categorise.  It is a sort of travelogue (although Moss admits that they didn't travel very much outside of Reykjavik) and a sort of memoir, with a bit of armchair anthropology thrown in.  Moss spends a lot of time thinking about how Iceland is different to how she imagined it would be, and this is where the book is most interesting.  She and her family - husband, two young boys - conceived of Iceland as a sort of leftie utopia: the most equal society in Europe, with universal free childcare, free university education, low levels of crime and a lesbian Prime Minster.  Somewhere along the way they conflated this with a middle-class lifestyle of boutique delis, organic vegetables, Boden and constant cultural activity for children.  A bit of a shock then to discover that Icelanders own more SUVs than any other European country; that buying fresh fruit and vegetables at all is next to impossible and that nobody takes their child to the museum. Moss quickly discovers that what she thought were the signifiers of a liberal society are nothing of the sort.  Well worth a read. 

And finally: Findings by Kathleen Jamie. After naming Sightlines, Jamie's second essay collection, as one of my favourite books of 2012 I knew that Findings was going to impress and it did.  I won't say more, because Litlove serendipitously read and wrote about it this month too. I think that everyone should read a little bit of Jamie, even if you don't think you like nature writing.  She is good for soul.

Now I'm off back to dig into Kate Atkinson's Life After Life.  It comes out in hardback in the next few weeks - I have a Netgally proof - and I can't wait to tell you about it. 

~~Victoria~~

Warning: Rogue Robots

It's been an age since I last re-posted any of the reviews I've written for SFX magazine here. Two recent(ish) pieces of mine have appeared on their site as well as in the magazine; both were lead reviews, so they're a bit longer than the average capsule review:

Black Opera, by Mary Gentle

For Black Opera, [Gentle] turns to Naples in the mid-1800s, marrying the city’s passion for bel canto opera to charged contemporary debates about science and heresy. Ambitious up-and-coming librettist Conrad Scalese finds himself the centre of both ecclesiastical and royal attention when the theatre hosting his new opera is hit by lightning on opening night. The Inquisition blame Conrad’s daringly open atheism; Ferdinand II sees an “opera miracle” – magic raised by the power of song – that he might use to his kingdom’s advantage.

Read the rest of this review here.

Surprisingly, it looks like neither Vicky nor I have written about Gentle's work at Alexandria before; but I did review one of her previous novels, Ilario, for Strange Horizons, all the way back in 2007.

The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord

Karen Lord’s follow-up to the infectious fun of her debut Redemption in Indigo is, at first glance, a more sober proposition. Whereas Redemption was a freewheeling fantasy based on Senegalese folklore, centred on a man with an appetite like an elephant’s and the woman who tires of cooking for him, The Best of All Possible Worlds is a science fiction tale about alien cultures in contact. Yet the two books share the same irreverent but warm-hearted concern with people: how they see themselves, what they value, and above all how they relate to each other.

Read the rest of this review here.

Both Vicky and I have written about Lord's first novel, Redemption in Indigo - Vicky at Strange Horizons, and me for SFX.

Finally, below is the full text of a capsule review that appeared in the magazine only, of Madeline Ashby's vN. The novel came out last summer, and that's when my review first appeared, but since it is now up for the Kitschies' Golden Tentacle Award (for best debut novel), it's been getting some renewed discussion, so this seems as good a time as any to (re)enter the fray.

--

What we're about to discuss isn't really a plot twist, since it happens in the prologue and the back cover gives it away, but for the spoiler-phobic: the tale of a rogue humanoid robot, Madeline Ashby's debut novel vN is brimming with ideas but patchy in the execution, though it does have one awesome set piece. Okay? Everyone else can join me in the next paragraph.

Five-year-old Amy is a sentient android. Unlike many of her increasingly common kind, Amy has been raised in a mixed family (robot mother, human 'father'), but what starts out seeming like a soft-focus retread of AI veers into the entertainingly gruesome when Amy's wacky robot grandmother arrives to attack Amy's mother, and Amy promptly responds by. eating her grandmother. Yes, really.

Amy, it turns out, lacks a 'failsafe', a piece of programming which ensures not only that robots can't harm human beings, but that they are helplessly affectionate and obedient towards them. Ashby does a great job of exploring how the failsafe can be abused: paedophilia is mentioned so frequently that it borders on the pointlessly lurid, but there are more subtle aspects that play very neatly into the worldbuilding and the backstory of the central robot characters. It's a shame the plot itself is so episodic and unengaging, with Amy lurching from peril to arbitrary peril, pausing only to be rescued or develop new powers. Ashby has bags of potential, though: one to watch.

--

On the shortlist for the afore-mentioned Golden Tentacle, one of vN's rivals is the marvellous Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman, which Vicky recently blogged about and on which SFX also asked me to write a longer piece. Said review went up on the site a few weeks ago, and so for the sake of completeness:

It shouldn’t work. In outline, Seraphina sounds like the fluffiest story imaginable: it’s about a precociously talented teenage girl with a Secret Heritage, Special Powers, and a kindly, eccentric dragon for an uncle. It contains characters with names like Queen Lavonda and Princess Glisselda. And look: here’s a brooding young love interest hoving into view!

Read the rest here.

~~Nic

Cannot Scrub the Sea From Her

Walking between buildings so short she can still see the sky, Corlissa forgets to miss San Francisco. So used to the city lights reflecting back orange off the night fog, she had forgotten stars. Locke. A man's town. The cruelty of laws has twisted the place into a Wild West throwback, where men outnumber the women twenty to one. Despite her own marriage, she still feels a distaste rising up at the unusual coupling of white prostitutes and Chinese men. Aberration added on to vice.

While sorting through books for some of my beautiful new bookshelves* the other day, I came across Shawna Yang Ryan's lyrical, understated debut Water Ghosts (2009; originally published in 2007 as Locke 1928), and realised that I never got round to posting about it here. Having bought it on the back of coffeeandink's recommendation some years back, I actually read it all the way back in 2011. The latter half of 2011 was not a time of much blogging for me, and so it fell by the wayside. But then I picked it up again at the weekend, and found myself re-reading passages; so I thought I'd dig out my notes and get a few words down about it, because I do think it deserves a wider audience.

Water Ghosts is set in Locke, a small town in Sacramento, California, that was founded by Chinese immigrants to the US in the early 20th century. It's a waystation for traders travelling up the river, and while in some ways it's a refuge and a haven from the hostile white-dominated towns in the region, there is a pervasive sense of fragility, of transience to Ryan's portrayal. This is nicely reflected in the cover images chosen for the two editions of the novel: the original a sepia-tinted portrait of a Chinese woman, this one - in hardcover, at least - a pale watercolour backdrop with lettering whose ink has run, giving an impression of damp paper and blurred edges.

Blurring edges is, in many ways, the project the novel is engaged in. Ryan uses a few lines from Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize speech as her epigraph:

Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.

Ryan's characters are all, one way or another, set adrift: immigrants, prostitutes, long-abandoned wives, a preacher's daughter discovering something she "had never even conceived of: that a girl could love a girl". She is interested in those who usually hover on the margins of frontier stories, exploring how longing shapes identity and hierarchies inscribe themselves on the body.

Fong Man Gum came to America as a young man, head full of tales about the wealth and opportunities to be found on the other side of the ocean: the streets are made of stones, not gold, he was told, and "the houses are ugly, but inside is furniture made of silk, beds full of feathers". But the idea of America, to him, is tantalising for much less tangible reasons:

His father's courtyard was large. Small maples grew in the corners. He swung open the door to the cool, European-style home. Two stories, many wide windows. His hand glided up the banister as he headed to his room. All the signs of modernization, but he knew that his father's tiled atrium, the stereoscope, the telephone, the Bible, were just Western surfaces. He wanted to remake himself all the way to the core.

Everything about it is sleek, and shiny, and bigger: Lau Sing Yan, a man lately returned to China and regaling Man Gum and his friends with stories from the other world has, we're told, "silky" hair and a "well-fed body, stuffed full of American food". For Man Gum, the old world has come to feel small and faded, a reflection of his insecurities as a young man growing to adulthood and fretting under the yoke of family responsibility; the legend that is America seems to be synonymous with everything that is new, and fresh, and modern. He notices that Lau is "hiding his callused hands with careful gestures", but with the prickly pride of youth he dismisses this evidence of hardship as a sign of Lau's inadequacy rather than a warning he might heed for himself.

Renaming himself Richard Fong, he abandons the barely pubescent girl his family has recently made him marry for a new horizon and a new self. When we meet him, he's running a gambling hall in Locke and having an afair - abusive, we later learn - with a white prostitute named Chloe at the local brothel. Even achieving this relative measure of security and status, though, has drawn long years of struggle from him, and Ryan sketches Richard's loneliness with moving, minimalist clarity. We're told, briefly, of the days when, "He needed to feel his body was real; it had gone without touching for so long." Women are vanishingly rare in Locke - a law banning Chinese immigrants from bringing their wives with them has been on the books for five years - and so Richard found comfort elsewhere:

And then, finally, there was that of which he would never speak. Near the end of the harvest. [...] One hand trying to stay the falling of pears from the bag, a foot that slipped on the last rung; the sudden warmth of a steadying hand at his back. Richard sank into it. The other man, Ah Lum, maintained his touch.

Chloe, for her part, has fetched up as a prostitute in "the Chinamen's town" because she had nowhere else to go. She arrived sixteen years old and heading into labour, having been taken in by the wrong man's sweet talking; stopping a woman in the street to ask for directions to the doctor, she was sent to Madame See's brothel instead. The novel is intensely interested in women's spaces and women's statuses in the uncertain environment of this frontier town, all bound up in race and class and expectation. The women Chloe asks for help cannot fully understand her, and in case she "saw Chloe only as a whitegirl. Whitegirls, she said, go to Madame See's". Almost by the time her baby is birthed, stillborn, Chloe's fate is sealed:

This she had not imagined. She wonders if any woman in Madam See's had - no, this was the alternate future, the life that tumbles down when being a nurse or a schoolteacher or a secretary or a shopgirl fails.

Madame See herself, like Richard, has remade herself, adopting a modified name for new shores (Poppy, from Po Pei); unlike Richard, she arrived from China at a much younger age, with her parents. As an ageing woman, she occupies a diminishing space in Locke, unable to compete with Chloe's desperate youthful appeal, even as she profits from her. She dreams of drowning women ("bodies with seaweed-strewn faces under water, glistening and pale, with bloated fingers and Delta crawdads scuttling through the water-heavy locks of their hair") and younger peoples' futures, and keeps an altar with incense and rice.

Corlissa is the only white woman in Locke who isn't a prostitute, but she, too, is there on the margins because there is nowhere else for her; her marriage to a Chinese man has seen her cast out from her family. Having spent years scraping together the money to feed the family because her husband's charity was always directed outwards rather than in, she now spends her time engaged in battles for supremacy with her teenage daughter (in an effort to combat "the impertinent lip, the unashamed stare", she cuts off Sofia's braids and forces her to throw them into the town's rubbish incinerator), and disapproving of the inter-racial sex going on at Madame See's (the quotation at the head of this post is hers). She maintains a carefully buttoned-up existence, but the novel repeatedly associates physicality - and especially food - with her, as it does with the other women, underlining their places in the home and in the community at large in terms of who they prepare food for, and who they eat with.

Richard and Corlissa alike take out their vulnerabilities on those below them in Locke's society. Richard abuses Chloe at least in part - I speculate - because it reminds him that, for all the harsh truths life has dealt him about his status in this new land, he is still better off than someone. He always feels guilty, we're told, "(never more than that first time, when she cried like she'd never been hit before)"; being a prostitute, Chloe is not accorded the same expectation of physical safety as other women (of course she must have been hit before, Richard tells himself). Corlissa, meanwhile, seems to exorcise her sense of exile by congratulating herself that she's just that little bit more respectable than everyone else, and trying to ensure her daughter remains the same. But this makes her sound spiteful, and she is not; but she is all too aware of how precarious her place is, and how quickly she could slide out of it.

Sofia, meanwhile, dreams of white, 'exotic' Chloe; and here we get a much more overt intrusion of the narrator, who addresses Sofia in the second person:

She was pretty, and you compared her to the only truly beautiful thing you had seen in your life - strips of burnt wallpaper floating across the bay and falling into the sea. She was pretty like singed paper on the wind.

But you didn't have these words - only a faint sense of the image and the feeling that arose. You couldn't even really think about your pulse, as you felt it in your chest and neck and wrist and thighs, or what your skin-flush in the spring morning sun meant, because this you had never even conceived of: that a girl could love a girl.

Irony is layered over this, because the reader knows, as Sofia does not because she is too young to remember, that her romantic imagery derives from a house fire that featured in the novel's prologue: a house fire, specifically, that began with a woman distractedly cooking a meal while she day-dreamed of flowers. Home, again, is precarious: it can be swept away in an instant, and what was beautiful to Sofia was destitution for many.

Into this anxious jostling for position and security come three women, who have apparently managed to get themselves smuggled across the ocean; they instantly become an obsession for the single men of the town, who follow them around like lost souls, and compete to give them gifts of "glass jewels, curls of poems, and softening fruit". One of them is Richard's abandoned young wife, Ming Wai, through whom we glimpse the reality of the delicate bound feet that one of the homesick men of Locke reflects on with such longing and wonder ("such little feet you could cup in a hand [...] small limp hummingbirds"), remembering his own wife left behind in China. When Richard brings her to his American home for the first time, more or less the first thing he does - even before showing her how to turn on the stove, and "how he likes the dishes stacked, the food placed" - is deal with her feet:

He begins to catch his breath. He wants to vomit; he wants her to stay. He slips off her split shoes, untucks the end of her cotton binding, and begins to unravel. He frees the toes that press into her arch. He releases the scent of sloughed-off skin - flesh wet with rot from its own humidity. He tips his head and concentrates on the task with lost face. He leaves ten feet of soiled cotton binding in a loose pile beside him, then massages Ming Wai's feet, gently, working blood into her famished limbs. Despite the pain, she is silent.

It is a stark, beautiful, touching scene; and yet the silence that gives it weight and solemnity is also oppressive: he does not ask if he may expose her feet like this, and she does not tell him how it feels. It is heartbreaking solicitude, but it's also a violation of her privacy, presuming on a relationship that exists between them only in name and memory (they have been ten years apart, and she was eight years old at their wedding).

Richard's gesture is one the novel repeatedly complicates. As noted above, as the novel goes on we learn of Richard's lonely longing for physical contact, and can see a culmination and fulfilment in this that he has been waiting for without fully realising it. At the same time, for Ming Wai it is not the immediate liberation we might imagine. A little later, we see Ming Wai struggling to walk, leaving a trail of blood across the floor, which Richard finds himself cleaning up before he can stop himself. He urges her not to re-bind her feet; they just need to heal, he says. "They are healed," says Ming Wai. "You'll have to break them again if you want me to be modern." The past, and one's home, are not so easily left behind, and we might question what is lost, what is gained, and where Richard's priorities lie.

Gradually, first Poppy and then Richard come to the realisation that the three women are not quite what they appear to be. Poppy dreams again of water, and remembers a woman who drowned herself after she slept with Poppy's father, and then came back as a spirit to haunt him, appearing in every surface of water and glass. Richard struggles to connect with the wife he idealised but barely knows, and begins to sense a subtle wrongness in her:

steps forward to rouse her, pauses. She smells unclean, as if the baths he insists she takes, the perfumes he insists she wears, cannot scrub the sea from her.

Only in recognising and surrendering to what she is - a water ghost, a resentful spirit returned to make him face his responsibilities, at last - does he finally begin to understand her situation, as the girl left behind by the heroic pioneering man gone off to make his fortune in an exciting new land:

The fingers settle, one by one. The lightness of her land-touch is gone.

He cannot leave. He becomes her. She had barely known him before he left. She shivered beneath him on the last night, her last chance to secure her position in the household with a baby boy. But there was no baby, and living in the household of his younger brother, she lost all status. [...]

She mended clothing and cleaned toilets while the servants watched.

So: lives lived on the margins, all washed up by the same slow river in the most marginal town of all.

~~Nic

[* Without wanting to boast or anything (much), I should note that these are just a few of the bookshelves. Elsewhere in the house, we have AN ENTIRE LIBRARY, people. I am the happiest little bibliophile in all the land...!]

Huge Flappy Hands

It seems to me that 'Westworld' is a terrific name for a multiplex cinema chain: a name which combines a cineaste's sense of modern movie history with a refreshing honesty about what to expect from a trip to your local ten-screener. Think about it: in Westworld the customers cough up huge amounts of money in order to escape from the humdrum reality of their everyday lives and to experience excitement, adventure and really wild things, all without the attendant risks to their person of doing any of those things for real. Their safety and enjoyment are guaranteed by the high-tech nature of this futuristic amusement park, in which everything is controlled by machines and computers that are activated from a distance by the management, who are notably unable to come to anyone’s assistance when everything goes pear-shaped and Yul Brynner’s electronic gunslinger starts putting holes in the park’s visitors. Next thing you know the fun’s over, the pain’s kicked in, everyone’s screaming and someone’s missing the top of their head. As a metaphor for the state of the 21st-century multiplex experience, I’d say that’s pretty damned hard to beat.

Sometimes, what you want is a polemic: a gloriously over-the-top flight of ultra-opinionated fancy that doesn't so much dismiss alternative views as chop them up into tiny pieces and then run a steamroller over them. Multiple times. While cackling.

Which I had an inkling I might get from The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex (2011), it being a book written by Mark Kermode and all. As a film critic, Kermode is smart, incisive and engaging, but above all he's passionate - a man whose "huge flappy hands" (as The Thick of It once put it) tend to end up waving in the air with the force of his conviction. His love of film is utterly infectious, and when his enthusiasm is aroused he bestows it liberally, whether it's on high-brow arty subtitled stuff or, er, Mamma Mia. Equally, Kermode's rants about films he dislikes are legendary, and I think it's fair to say are not a small part of the reason why the weekly film review show (aka 'Wittertainment') he does on BBC Radio 5 with Simon Mayo has such a huge international audience. A favourite of many is his take on Sex and the City 2 [link to YouTube video footage], a film he dubs "consumerist pornography", and which - after an initial, weary disavowal at the start of the review ("You're not going to get a rant on this") - has him so wound him up after six minutes of discussion that he ends up bursting into song. Specifically, leftie anthem 'The Internationale'.

It's all marvellously entertaining, and so too is the book. On one level it's a distillation of many of the themes he's been talking about for years: the role of film critics, the imminent death of 3D, the decline of the cinema-going experience, his adoration of Zac Efron, his loathing for Michael Bay ("the reigning deity of all that is loathsome, putrid and soul-destroying about modern-day blockbuster entertainment"). The discursive, digressive, anecdotal style is also familiar from the radio show; the first chapter spends fifty pages telling the story of a single cinema trip, because Kermode repeatedly derails himself, sparking off from glancing references in the main narrative to tell faintly 1001 Nights-style stories-within-stories about smashing up his laptop, the marvel that is Zac Efron's hair, the history of the studio system, and the latitude afforded to star power as exemplified by late-career Marlon Brando's antics on the set of The Island of Dr Moreau:

Apparently Marlon liked Richard [Stanley, the director], but when when co-star Val 'Boring' Kilmer got him fired for being weird, Brando carried on picking up the pay cheques and enjoying the catering whilst wearing an ice bucket on his head. (Don't take my word for it; watch the film. No, on second thoughts, just take my word for it.) Too lazy to learn his lines, Brando insisted on wearing (along with the ice bucket) an earpiece through which a script assistant could prompt his slurred speech, a trick he'd learned on The Formula. Unfortunately, according to co-star David Thewlis, Brando's earpiece also picked up police radio transmissions, which caused Dr Moreau to observe thoughtfully that a robbery was taking place at Woolworths in the middle of a meaningful soliloquy.

But the book is also an extended examination of the legacy of the film industry's - and cinema chains' - continual drive to cut corners, avoid risk, and bank on the sure-fire hit. Like Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (another massively enjoyable polemic), although with rather more of a focus on the consumer experience than on crazed individual personalities within the industry, Kermode aims to explain why so many of the films occupying screens at your local multiplex, especially over the summer, are lowest-common denominator tosh. He also spends quite a bit of time on the question of why the cinemas we watch this tosh in are so under-staffed - and the staff who do remain so under-qualified and/or under-paid - that while you can always buy multiple types of popcorn and buckets of fizzy-drink-flavoured ice, if the sound drops out when your film is halfway through, no-one in the damn building is capable of correcting the fault.

This happened to me once half an hour from the end of - yes - Transformers 2. The manager eventually offered that disgruntled patrons could cross the corridor to join another screening of the same film, which had startedabout 45 minutes after ours. I opted for the refund, because by that point no power on earth could have compelled me to sit through that bollocks again, just for the sake of seeing the ending. At a guess, it probably involves more shaky-cam explosions, gratuitous shots up actresses' skirts, and racist caricature robots, and frankly life's too short.

A good question, of course, was why I plonked down my money to see Transformers 2 in the first place, when I knew full well it was probably going to be like that (even if I hadn't quite grasped the scale of its that-ness). Kermode's explanation is that there's a sort of Stockholm syndrome going on; we've learned to, if not love, then certainly put up with, largely rubbish summer films, because that's what we've been trained to expect:

Here are three absolute truths:

1. The world is round.

2. We are all going to die.

3. No one enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

Oh, I know loads of people paid to see POTC3 (as I believe it is known in the industry). And some of them may claim to have enjoyed it. But they didn't. Not really. They just think they did. As a film critic, an important part of my job is explaining to people why they haven't actually enjoyed a movie even if they think they have. In the case of POTC3, the explanation is very simple.

It's called "diminished expectations".

Kermode being Kermode, he doesn't stop there; he glosses 'diminished expectations' as

the cinematic equivalent of long-term deprivation of the basics of a civilised existence. They are the multiplex dwellers who have become used to living in the cultural freezing cold, whose brains have been addled by poisonous celluloid asbestos, and whose expectations of mainstream entertainment have been gradually eroded by leaky plumbing and infestations of verminous pests.

They are the Audiences of the Apocalypse.

Mainstream films these days, he argues, pretty much always make money - quite a lot of money - in the long run. Even fabled flops like Kevin Costner's Waterworld claw their vast production and publicity budgets back eventually, thanks to the rise of the home entertainment market. However terrible, however critically derided an 'event' film is, the combination of a) 'bankable' stars (actors and actresses that people will pay to see regardless), b) 'opening wide' (i.e. a massive distribution push on the opening weekend, so the terrible film is showing in the biggest number of screens possible before word-of-mouth can get out about terrible it is - a trend that, as Biskind noted in Easy Riders, really took off in the 80s), and, if necessary, c) notoriety can still push a film into the black. You might not go to the cinema see a film you've heard is hilariously bad, but you might well rent the DVD one evening with some friends for a chuckle over a bottle of wine or three.

Kermode is well aware of the irony: critics like himself ranting about a bad film almost certainly contribute to that film's success, because all publicity is a sales pitch, one way or the other. Nonetheless, for him, this  doesn't undermine the role of film critics, because film criticism is ultimately about, well, being opinionated:

I don't think critics should do the job of telling you which movies to watch. Or what you should think about them. No, I think critics should do the job of watching all the movies and then telling you what they think about them in a way which is honest, engaging, erudite and (if you're lucky) entertaining.

This is not, he says, simply a case of critics being elitist, "applying highbrow criteria that cannot and should not be applied to good old undemanding blockbuster entertainment". Elsewhere in the book he explicitly celebrates the methods and output of shlock-meister Roger Corman. Corman was a direct and formative influence on the likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone; all worked under him at various times, obliged to stick to principles that Kermode summaries as,

1) No, you can't have any more money.

2) No, the movie doesn't need to be that long.

3) Yes, you do have to have either an exploding helicopter or at least one scene in a strip club.

4) After that, you’re on your own - knock yourself out.

Corman believed that the best way to encourage new film-making talent was to find people who loved avant garde international cinema and were desperate to be the next Ozu, Fellini or Antonioni, and then set them to work making Carnosaur 2.

The problem, he argues, is that we've learned to accept films that lack even the creativity and energy of exploitation cinema: insultingly stupid, bland, test-screened-to-within-an-inch-of-their-pixels studio products aimed squarely at the tastes of particularly dim 12-year-old boys (or occasionally girls; bafflingly, outside of pink-infested straight-to-video Disney sequels, girls have never really been seen as money-spinners by film studios, although presumably the screeching success of Twilight will lead to more equal-opportunities tosh in future. Yay?). This isn't to say that there's no place for kids' - or teenagers' - films, just that not all films need to assume their audience has no interest in following an adult conversation that isn't interrupted by an explosion. (Still less an adult conversation between - gasp - two women that isn't about a man.) Central to Kermode's case is the argument that the mainstream film industry can - and sometimes does - do better with its summer blockbusters. It just doesn't choose to.

The problem with movies today is not that "real" cinema-goers love garbage while critics only like poncy foreign language arthouse fare. The problem is that we've all learned to tolerate a level of overpaid, institutionalised corporate dreadfulness that no one actually likes but everyone meekly accepts because we've all been told that blockbuster movies have to be stupid to survive. Being intelligent will cause them to become unpopular. Duh! The more money you spend, the dumb and dumberer you have to be. You know the drill: no one went broke underestimating the public intelligence. That's just how it is, OK?

Well, actually, no. You want proof? OK. Exhibit A: Inception.

Now, I don't share Kermode's adoration of Inception. It's fun and stylish and I definitely felt a certain awe the first time I saw it when I paused for a moment, late on, to consider just how many plates Nolan has spinning at once. Still, it's not especially challenging, really, and its treatment of its female characters is only a little less appalling than any other summer film's. Yet there's no doubt that it's smarter and funnier than your average blockbuster. It does expect its audience to remember more than one plotline at once, it doesn't telegraph its ending from seconds past its opening, and it plays confidently, convincingly and entertainingly with a much bigger world than many science-fiction-in-name-only 'epics'.

Even when Kermode is not entirely persuasive, though, there is more than enough in here to amuse and inform; skilled thumbnail sketches of films abound, as do some lovely - and loving - celebrations of little-noticed corners of the film-going experience, like the value of a properly trained projectionist, or the smell (and dangers) of old nitrate film stock. Whether or not you agree with him, there is no denying that Kermode is a fine debater and raconteur - someone who at the very least makes the case for sustained, thoughtful, passionate engagement with art as a mode of entertainment in its own right.

And as someone who spends an appreciable amount of her spare time writing about books - not because I think everyone should agree with me (well, maybe a little), or because I secretly wish I were a writer (heh, no), or because it makes me money (it does, a little, for other venues, but I also have a day job I adore), but because I think writing about books is a valuable and interesting thing to do in its own right, something that makes me a better reader and contributes to a wider conversation with other people who also love reading - Kermode's is a message I can certainly get behind. If I video-blogged my reviews, my hands would be doing a lot of flapping about while I talked, too. Long may he continue to rant.

~~Nic

Sleeping Giant

Every so often as he sat at his desk he would feel his head grow heavy, and wonder at the pages already written as if it had been someone else who'd penned them. There before him lay the melancholy aggregate of the sleep of one of the vastest empires in the world. [...] To all intents and purposes it covered the sleep of the entire planet.

Comparisons are inevitable; let's get them out of the way quickly, so we can concentrate on the book in hand: I got a strong flavour of Kafka and Gogol from reading Ismail Kadare's The Palace of Dreams (1981; translated from Albanian into French by Jusuf Vrioni, and then from French to English by Barbara Bray, 1993). Not so much in a stylistic sense; there are similarities, certainly, but reading Kadare's words at a double remove I'm wary of pronouncing too strongly on that. Rather, The Palace of Dreams evoked the same sort of disorientation in me as did 'The Overcoat' or The Trial: the feeling of a world out of kilter, but also of expected narrative beats and emotional notes continually upset or displaced. This is paranoia both underscored and punctured by bathos.

The Palace of Dreams is a short, elegant entry in the great tradition of fictional(ised) totalitarianian dystopias, a subgenre of which (as regular readers will know) I am a fan: ruled by a government that's sort of the Ottoman Empire, and kind of Soviet Communism, and also in a way neither of those things, a subjugated Albania plays host to a vast arm of the imperial bureaucracy called the Tabir Sarrail, or Palace of Dreams.

When Mark-Alem, directionless young scion of a once-illustrious and still ambitious Albanian family, is found a job at the mysterious Palace through sheerest nepotism, its grandiloquent and utterly absurd purpose ("a vast enterprise, beside which the oracles of Delphi and the predictions of all the hordes of prephets and magicians in the past are derisory") is outlined to him. The Palace, he is told, exists to collect, classify, and analyse the dreams of all the citizens of the empire. Each day, dreams are recorded by local and regional centres, and dispatched by horseback courier to the Palace. (Later, he overhears a couple of couriers talking, and learns that there are some dreams the horses simply refuse to carry; this isn't a detail that's ever explored further, but I fell a little bit in love with the possibilities of it.)

Why? Because dreams are omens; they are insight:

[T]he Palace of Dreams is no mere whim or fancy; it is one of the pillars of the State. It is here, better than in any surveys, statements, or reports compiled by inspectors, policemen or governors of pashliks, that the true state of the Empire may be assessed. For in the nocturnal realm of sleep are to be found both the light and the darkness of humanity, its honey and its poison, its greatness and its vulnerability. All that is murky or harmful, or that will become so in a few years or centuries, makes its first appearance in men's dreams. Every passion or wicked thought, every affliction or crime, every rebellion or catastrophe necessarily casts its shadow long before it manifests in real life.

Mark-Alem's first entry to the Palace is hedged about with ominous narrative foreshadowing that is aware of, and revels in, its own absurdity. Arriving, he casts about for someone to show him the way in, and can only find a man standing on the pavement outside, who is - for no obvious reason - swathed in a voluminous cowl. We get an elaborate description of how the man's wordless gesture in the direction of the door is framed by "the enormous folds of cloth", but Mark-Alem, apparently oblivious to the slowly building horror-film strings all this creates in the reader's mind, reflects only, "Good heavens, what a strange get-up", and trundles off in the direction indicated. His reaction to the second symbol of Certain Impending Doom, by contrast, is amusingly disproportionate:

[T]he official with the morose expression had slowly risen from his chair. The movement was so slow and so smooth it seemed to Mark-Alem that it would never end, and that the formidable official on whom his fate depended was going to turn into a monster of some kind before his very eyes. He was on the point of yelling, "Never mind! I don't want the job. Give me back my letter. I can't bear to watch you uncoiling like that!" when he saw that the process was over and the official was finally upright.

This flipping back and forth, from blithe insouciance to borderline hysteria, is basically the story of Mark-Alem's emotional state during the novel, with the swings get wilder as he progresses deeper into the Palace hierarchy. Given the jobs he's expected to do, though, this is perhaps not that surprising. The scale - and the objective ludicrousness - of the task in hand can be inferred from the introductory spiel Mark-Alem is given. God sends us warnings, says his tour guide, of what is to come, but he doesn't expend too much effort ensuring it goes somewhere obvious and accessible. Thus:

It is up to us to find out where the dream has come to earth - to flush it out from among millions, billions of others, as one might look for a pearl lost in the desert.

Yes, that sounds like such an attainable goal, doesn't it?

The story thereafter essentially forms an ever-tightening spiral: of plot, of mood, of concept. We follow Mark-Alem deeper into the heart of the institution, as he is progressively, and for reasons that remain bafflingly opaque to him, promoted up the hierarchy. He has all those familiar first-day-at-work nerves - anxiety about pulling his chair from behind his desk, lest it send that awful screeching noise through the silent room and draw everyone's attention to him - with the added tension that he literally has no idea how to do his job. Confronted with a file of miscellaneous dreams and told to look for things whose 'significance' can only ever be clear in retrospect, how do you determine which ones can be filed safely away, and which ones need further examination? He divides the time until the first end-of-the-day bell between writing 'Useless' on dream reports that seem meaningless, making panicked reassessments of the same dreams - the more he looks at each one, the more he begins to think he maybe perhaps possibly he might see something in them after all... - and staring around the room at his fellow Selectors, wondering how they can possibly look so assured in their work.

Things only get more confusing the further up the ladder Mark-Alem goes. This feeling is literalised with a perhaps inevitable scene of him getting lost within the building itself, but here as elsewhere it's accompanied by a fun sense of bathos that stops it descended into over-familiar thriller territory:

Thinking he could hear footsteps not far off, he hurried along to join the unknown person making them; but the footsteps hurried too. He stopped; the other did the same. Then he realized that the footsteps were his own. God, he thought, it's always the same in this wretched place! How much would it have cost to put up a few notices showing the way to various departments?

(He eventually realises that the corridor he's in is circular...) Mark-Alem's move from Selection to the Interpretation department takes him further into the Palace's layers of bureaucratic redundancy. He spends days on the same file, chasing his tail around the maddening logic of a system predicated on hunting down smoking guns that, by definition, exist entirely in the increasingly fragile mind of the beholder:

The file was stuffed with dreams. Mark-Alem had read about sixty of them, and had set aside a score or so that at first sight he thought he might be able to decipher. But when he went back to them, instead of looking the easiest they looked the most difficult. So then he selected a few others, but after an hour or two they also had come to seem utterly confused and impenetrable.

"It's quite impossible!" he kept telling himself. "I shall go mad!"

He encounters dreams he picked out in Selection, and sees new things in them; he reads elaborate reports that he thinks might simply be the fabrications slipped in there by "provocateurs" (...or are they?); he even finds dreams that he fears might be saying bad things about his own intentions. It's a neat little demonstration of how totalitarian systems get under the skin: perpetuating themselves by multiplying imaginary threats, manufacturing reality, and turning everyone into potential subversives, until it is necessary to suspect everyone, including yourself.

Unsurprisingly, Mark-Alem drifts into a mental state that lies at some intersection of boredom, paranoia, and insanity, struggling to articulate his misgivings - or even, increasingly, to function outside his Palace role. His life becomes "like being in a fog which every so often seemed about to lift", but the possibility that clarity might emerge with the next report, or the next time he looks at the same one, keeps him endlessly searching. His mother notes he has become "emaciated", and he loses the ability to sleep:

He stretched out on the bed and lay there for some time with his eyes open. He felt quite calm. It was a painless kind of insomnia, cold and smooth. [...] His whole being seemed to have undergone a transformation.

In the background, there are political manoeuvrings among the elite, and occasional glimpses of Albanian tradition sneaking out from the beneath the blanket of empire; there is additional context here that I am not familiar enough with to interpret. Instead, I was mostly left feeling that the world looked just that little bit more odd now I'd experienced this book. So, recommended!

~~Nic

A Dragon State of Mind

Seraphina, Seraphina, Seraphina.  How did I love thee, let me count the ways...

Primarily, for the depth of the characters.  Yes, I could eat these characters up all day long (and did for two days straight, while intermittently bent over a sickbowl with norovirus, which is proof of just how charming they are).  I'm not a frequent reader of young adult fiction, for no reason other than ignorance - which I'm trying to fix with the aid of The Book Smugglers and things mean a lot - and you surprised me with the individuality of your protagonist. 

Seraphina is just sixteen years old, an unimaginable creature born of a human man and a dragon.  Yes, a dragon, a dragon that has taken human form and fallen in love with a lawyer of all people, in contravention of every law of the land of Goredd and of the peace treaty between human and dragon kind.  When Seraphina is a little girl scales appear on her body: a girdle of silver around her waist and around her left arm.  No one must ever know, see or - Saints forbid - touch this monstrous part of her.  Her true ancestry is revealed to her.  Linn, her dragon mother, died in childbirth but left her with a parcel of memories which now burst upon her as powerful visions and a menagerie of imaginary grotesques that she has to manage through meditation and self-control.  Her gift for music - something Linn also passed to her - is what saves her life, gives her meaning and at the beginning of the novel takes her right into the heart of Goredd's civic life, as assistant to court composer Viridius and music tutor to the young princess Glisselda. 

Sound slightly silly to you? Very average?  I refuse to let you even think it.  Seraphina tells it all in her own voice, aware of the danger of her situation, her isolation, but also tutored in self-control and too alive to the irony and possibility of life for self-pity.  She is capable - and does her job as court musician throughout the book, no matter her other adventures - and clever, and responsible, and open-hearted, and brave, but never impossibly strong or kick-ass or any of those other embarassing things that heroines can be.  She does have disastrously unruly hair that transforms her into a beauty when tamed but if this is the only trope-trap debut author Rachel Hartman falls into I can forgive her a thousand times over.

There are lots of other female characters to admire here too.  Goredd is ruled by a family of matriarchs: Queen Lavonda, author of the treaty between humans and dragons that has led to forty years of peace; her daughter and heir Princess Dionne and her granddaughter Princess Glisselda. They are descended from a dynasty founded by another Queen, the legendary Blondweg who united Goredd and is the protagonist of the national epic story.   There are female ambassadors; there are women who hit people; there are many female saints - the Cathedral in Goredd is named for one of them - and these saints are often the saints men pray to.  There is so little gender friction in this world it makes me suspicious; I go looking for it like a bloodhound.  But even flirtatious Glisselda, who is much more the archetypal princess than Seraphina the archetypal heroine, surprises me by being much more than the sum of her petticoats.

The dragons.  Don't get me started on the dragons.  When they are in their human form - called a saarantras - they struggle with their state of mind. The complexity and intensity of human emotions, impossible feelings in their dragon bodies, are overwhelming.  They practise a form of mental repression, an order and correctness that they call 'ard', the acceptable formation of thought and feeling.  It is the same system that Seraphina uses to control her visions and grotesques, taught to her by her dragon uncle Orma.  It makes dragons seem distant, cold and impolite; it is hard for them to 'pass' in human society (and impossible if they do not have an exemption from wearing the silver bell that marks them out at every step).  Harder still for us to read about and love them, and yet.  Orma is a wonderfully complex character, worked for amusement - the minor misunderstandings of human etiquette - and intensified by the fierce control of the emotions we sense he conceals.  He is the reticent male who cannot say how he feels, but squared.  The delicate balance of his relationship with Seraphina, to whom he has been like a surrogate father as well as a teacher, is heartbreakingly precise.  Her absolute trust in him is sweet but not in a saccarhine way: these are the limits and extents of love that she  has learnt to measure.

Secondly, (and it is so long since I said primarily that you have probably forgotten this Elizabeth Barrett Browning conceit, but lets plough on), for the breadth of Seraphina's world.  World-building is a tough cookie.  Rachel Hartman is clever because she doesn't try too hard.  The whole dragon vs human kind thing gives her a solid foundation on which to bolt a history and a set of opposing cultures and philosophies (and, hurray, this world does have cultures and philosophies, and more than one of each of them).  Then she introduces a religion, a religion built around saints, and this is really clever, because she can use this multiplicity of saints as a shorthand to structure worship, society, the calendar, sexuality, even the streets and marketplaces of the cities in Goredd. Each citizen of Goredd has a patron saint, who shapes their vision of the world; and each saint tells us something about the society in which Seraphina lives.  So, for example, we have saints of love (and, get this, it's homosexual love, but it stands in for all love) and a saint of war against dragons, a saint of scholars (and it's a female saint), a saint of music (so important to Goreddis), a saint of diligence and persistance. 

The human world of the book is undoubtedly going to get bigger.  We have been introduced to ambassadors from Ninysh, Samsam and Porphryr, and had hints of their cultures and of their racial differences.  But I also hope the dragon world will expand, beyond the hints and memories of the Tannamoot we have had so far.  One of the most intriguing peoples in the book are the Quigutl, a lesser species of dragon who cannot transform into human shapes and are treated like vermin in Goredd, a plague of stinky, panhandling immigrants to human cities, the lowest of the low, treated poorly by dragon and human alike.  

Thirdly, for the lengths that Rachel Hartman goes to integrate her themes.  There is such a lot going on in Seraphina about family, multi-culturalism, art, race, generational gaps and technology, that I couldn't possibly tell you it all.  Also, I really want you to read the book and discover it for yourselves.  But the thing that struck me most forcibly is how this is a book about the mind.  By that I don't mean that it is a cerebral fantasy about reasoning and philosophy, although it is partly about that and philosophy especially plays an important part in the development of Seraphina's love interest.  (Which I haven't mentioned yet, and which is remiss, but it would be spoilery to say any more than that there is one.)

What I mean is that this is a book about states of mind, about the perceptions people and dragons have of their thoughts and feelings, and the different ways they find of coping or not coping with them.  Essentially, the question it poses is: what makes anyone what they are - a soul, their feelings, their body?  And if so, how do we locate or define these things? Humans believe that dragons are soulless, unfeeling creatures, and dragons do not disagree.   But when they are in their saarantras they battle to preserve their dragon state against the flood of emotions their bodies create. How can you define yourself in a world where states of body and mind are so blurred and mixed?  The argument is reduced to a knee-jerk humans are humans, and dragons are dragons.  But what is the difference between a dragon and human when they look precisely alike, when they can fall in love with one another, when they can have children together? 

Seraphina holds its breath at a very important moment in Goredd, the moment when a younger generation of humans and dragons starts to break down the species barrier.  Starts to wonder what the real differences, aside from the obvious physical ones, are.  Seraphina, and others like her, are walking, talking proof of something, although no one is sure what that something is yet.  Her emergence into society is an enormous test for both of her peoples, and promises lots of fun in the books to come.

And, finally, I loved Seraphina because of the way it restored me to 'my childhood's faith, with a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints'.  Ok, I'm getting over emotional now, because I was sick when I read this and pretty low at heart, but honestly Seraphina did remind me of a feeling of reading that I thought I had lost last year.  When I came to sum up 2012 a few weeks ago I felt with sinking horror that I had misplaced my passion for books, during what must have been the longest reading slump of my life.  I wasn't necessarily reading bad books; I had just forgotten what books were good for.  I needed something that had that alchemical magic of my 'lost saints', those books that light you up.  These are not necessarily classics, except in your own personal taxonomy of classics.  Mine would include Guy Gavriel Kay's The Summer Tree; Diana Gabaldon's Outlander; Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South; Kit Whitfield's In Great Waters and, of course, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, all sitting together cheek by jowl in my mind.  Seraphina has something of those books about it. Even if it hasn't quite graduated to sit amongst them, the next book or the one after that might.  I have been reminded of the extraordinary potential joy of a story.  Thank you mightily Rachel Hartman. 

~~Victoria~~  

Aside:  I'm so glad to see that Seraphina has been shortlisted for the Kitschies' Golden Tentacle award, alongside Karen Lord's Redemption in Indigo (which I read and review for Strange Horizons in 2011).  It makes me seriously want to read the other contenders on the shortlist: Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon, Madeline Ashby's v/N and Tom Pollock's The City's Son.

Watching the strange things people did

Barbara Comyns is a perennial blogosphere favourite. It always seems as though someone is in the process of discovering her.  Last year I dipped my toe in and read her semi-autobiographical Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, about her disastrous first marriage to a penniless artist; and Nic read her later and much admired novel The Vet's Daughter.   Her mode is a joyous, creepy, deadpan surrealism that makes the experience of reading her equal parts delight and consternation. After the epic grandeur of A Game of Thrones (which I'm still promising myself to write about) and the mundanity of Toast I was in the mood for something offbeat and ever so slightly disconcerting.  Which is what I got here and then some.  This is the kind of novel in which little girls try to ride their pet rabbits and squash them, literally, to death.  

Sisters by a River was Comyns' first novel, published in 1947 and originally written as a series of vignettes to amuse her children.  Which is a slightly disturbing thought, given the subject matter.  Like Spoons, it is semi-autobiographical, inspired by Comyns' own childhood as the third of five sisters growing up in Bidford-on-Avon in the early 20th century.  The setting is the dilapidated and overgrown Shelford Court on the banks of the river, half in the water and half out of it. The mileau is familiar - it has that 1920s feel, complete with tennis parties, village doctors and trips to London for the 'season' - but also entirely unlikely. 

Barbara introduces each of her sisters in turn. Plain bossy Mary, the eldest, who insists that each of her sisters wears a particular colour of clothes (Barbara's colour is brown).  Then fair, sweet Beatrix, who finds religion in later life and plays the violin and becomes a batchelor girl with a flat.  Barbara comes next in the sequence, then the two youngest, who come together as a pair, Kathleen and Chloe.  The sisters are born like clockwork, eighteen months apart, and after six babies (there is an unnamed, unsexed sixth child born after Mary and never spoken of) their mother goes deaf suddenly and inexplicably. Barbara suggests, with a child's innocence and a mother's own frustrations, that 'perhaps her subconscious mind couldn't bear the noise of babies crying anymore.'   The deafness is a manifestation of the complete disconnect between mother and children - she refuses to hear them and, when she is angry, even refuses to look at their hands when they sign to her.  It is parental disaffection expressed as a physical disability, and it has a very real effect on the way the sisters feel about her, the way they see her:

Mammy seemed to loose all contact with us, we never looked on her as a real person, she seldom did anything for us, and if she did she was very selfconscious about it and made us feel all shy, when she talked to us, she would use a special voice, sometimes she would suddenly say 'Come and kiss me' we were awfull embarrised when she did this as were not at all demonstrative and when she felt that way Mammy was very sentermental, other times would be a very fierce and spiteful, thought she seldom hit us, she would say 'How I wish I'd never had you, I never wanted all these children' or 'You are just like you father, I hate you all.'

The spelling errors and grammatical inconsistencies are Comyns' own, retained in the text by the publisher, and become most insistent when she is agitated.  There is a lot to be agitated about.  The sisters' father is a drunk and deeply in debt, a fact that doesn't escape Barbara even at a young age; their granny is a cantankerous argumentative gorgon of a woman; one of their aunts is locked away in an asylum, the other is unmarried and growing bitter in exile in Falmouth.  The marriage between mother and father is not a happy one.  Barbara innocently recounts the story of their 'courtship': how her father owned the house in which granny and her mother lived; how he watched her mother grow up, and promised that if she learnt to cook he would marry her when she was old enough; how when she was 12 she cooked him a five course dinner and five years later became his wife.  There is a fairytale feel to this story, the way one thing leads to another, and also the way that there are so very few choices and the world is so narrow.  Barbara's mother never had a chance; her claustrophobic childhood world ended at the garden gate and Barbara's father was the only man who passed through it.  

The struggle for power and autonomy between the couple is set up from the beginning.  She chooses her weapons from the arsenal she has at her disposal: she flirts, pretends to have lovers, goes deaf, becomes hysterical.  She trundles helplessly along in the grooves that her life has made for her, with no means of escape.  Her wider family shun her.  Barbara's relations on her mother's side thought the match was beneath her. Her father was a common businessman, successful but still common, and rumour has it that he has 'a touch of the tarbrush' and that he has passed this 'touch' on to his daughters, the implication being that he has black heritage.   

Limitations and restrictions, poor choices or no choices.  The fact that Barbara spends her early life surrounded by women doesn't change the fact that their lives are a narrow street.  Granny is a menacing figure in the book, with her vinegary smell and attic room full of 'junk, spilt fullers earth, and everything all tangled up with hair nets, bits of cotton wool and sweets' but her story, once told, is a sorry one:

But Granny was not always a messy old woman, when she was young she had many admirers, I think she had eighteen proposals of marriage, she was not beautiful, but had great personality and was a fameous horsewoman...unfortunately in a fit of peque (that is what she always said...)she married the least worthy of her suiters; a weak charming man who spent most of his time and Grannies money looking for gold in America, he must have come home sometime because he had seven stillborn sons and my mother, at least Granny had them.

That last line - at least Granny had them - is impressive.  Granny looms larger than life in the sisters' world, an object of terror and duty, but is made very small by the shrinking of her grief for seven dead children to the very least part of the story. As she grows old, trapped in her house by a ridiculous fear of Jack the Ripper (the epitome of violence against women) and, like her daughter, estranged from her family because of her poor choice of a husband, she turns into the spiky parody that Barbara remembers.  A grouchy mother-in-law, who lives to quarrel with her daughter, and thinks of nothing except what is for lunch.  No wonder Barbara's mother refuses to hear a thing, if that is the fate she sees for herself.

Violence, both accidental and intentional, is a constant of life at Shelford Court.  Any moments of normality and boredom - those tennis parties and Christmas time - are nothing but a thin skin stretched to breaking point.  Some terrible things are done to and suffered by animals - there is a whole chapter dedicated to 'Some sad things to do with animals'.  Kittens are decapitated; dogs are shot while they sleep; goats burst.  It is no wonder that Barbara is haunted by dreams of decomposing corpses.  Her father is an abusive husband, erupting unexpectedly into vindictive rages and charging wildly around firing his pistols.  In one terrifying incident he attacks his wife with a hive of bees, the whole family looking on:

Mammy kept saying the wasps had so many nests in the river bank they would surely kill the bees and the hive MUST be moved, and she just when on and on about it moping and mowing and wailing away, and Palmer [the gardener] was growling away to himself, and Daddy swearing not to himself, then he grew awfully fierce and picked up the hive and shook the poor bees all over her she screamed and cried and really tore her hair and ran towards the house casting her bee covered closes as she went, but she didn't die or any thing frightful like that, she only had about ten stings which was a mercy.

Barbara does not, perhaps cannot, say that this is wrong - notice it is 'poor bees' not poor mother, and how her mother is implicated in the blame because of her moping, mowing and wailing - because it is normal for her, but she admits that the thought of bees made her sad after that. 

The violence stalks her in her dreams, which are full of 'frightful noises', 'crushing wheels and giant belts' and and those decomposing bodies 'that smelt all sweet and frightful.'  She wakes up thinking 'it must be true, everything was disgusting and the world would never get right again, you shook so much your teeth chattered.'   It is the closest she comes to saying that she is afraid.  All through the book it is difficult to tell whether the narrator speaks with the voice of a child, or whether she is grown-up Barbara speaking in hindsight.  In the end the answer is a bit of both, as they co-exist togther: the child who experienced these dreadful disconcerting things, and the adult who is frightened with and for her.

Communication and speech often fails people in Sisters by a River, just as the forms and correct spellings of words often fail Comyns herself.  Mother's deafness leads to nonsensical notes left in every room of the house, with several messages on different topics from different days, like a game of Exquisite Corpse.  The unlikely juxtapositions on these notes are matched by the unlikely ways that Barbara interprets adult conversations, mishearing or misunderstanding things.  When she is very young she struggles to distinguish between different objects or rooms in the house, between her mother and Granny, between gold and silver.  She finds it difficult to trust what she sees, which means we must question whether any of her memories are sound, and at the same time illuminates the world from unexpected and insightful angles.

Barbara hides behind the multiple disturbances of the novel, behind all the strange and wonderous and disgusting incidents of her childhood, as though she doesn't want to reveal herself.  Only on page 148 does she finally say anything directly about herself, revealing what she likes:

the things that interest me most, besides watching the strange things that people did, were paintings, trying to paint, dogs, reading and lieing in a boat in the sun and fishing.

These seem very ordinary and sedate things for a person who has grown up in such chaotic surroundings but they explain a lot.  Sisters by a River is a cacophony of observation and of seeing.  The scenes Barbara paints are unusually vivid, and beautiful; and they are the work of someone who has a palate for strangeness, for the surreal, for the dangerous.  Whereas usually novels have elements of strangeness that creep in, Sisters by a River has elements of normality.  Everyone and everything here is strange and sinister; when it is not strange, when it is not creepy, it is somehow out of place, creepier still.  So that when Barbara describes a fairly ordinary Christmas with ordinary Christmas presents and an ordinary dinner we feel slightly off-balance, distrustful.   Comyns has so successfully reoriented our vision that we see the world as it might appear refracted through the lens of Bosch or Dali.  Or through the wide-open eyes of a child with an unpleasant childhood.   I'm sure I agree with the introduction to my Virago edition: this book is a little masterpiece of visionary writing.   The Vet's Daughter next.

 ~~Victoria~~