Eve's Alexandria

A Woman Walks Into a Bar...

Vicky: A man walks into a bar in the ramshackle city of Saudade, in a galaxy far away, and sits down.  The bar is a certain type of bar, on a certain type of street.  Let's say:

'The bar was about halfway down Straint, a cluttered, narrowish street of two-storey buildings, along which two out of three had their windows boarded up... It featured a zinc counter slightly too high for comfort.  A row of bottles which contained liquids of unlikely colours.  A few tables.  The long window steamed up easily... In the morning the bar smelled of last night's garlic. Some mornings it smelled of mould too...'

And, as for the man himself?

'Vic - short for Vico, a name popular in Scienza Nova where he was born - was in the bar most days.  He ate there.  He ran his business out of it.  He used it as a mail drop, and as a place to check out his clients .'

On this particular day, his client is a woman - a little too tall, with long thin hands and 'that way of looking both anxious and tranquil a lot of those tourist women have...elegant and awkward at the same time.' Like all the women who end up in this bar, she is looking for something essential - sex, perhaps, or meaning, or even selfhood - and has come to Vic out of desperation and longing. 

In the common parlance of Saudade he is a 'tour operator', one of the rare individuals willing to take 'tourists' into the 'event site', a space-time phenomenon caused when parts of the Kefahuchi Tract fell to earth.*  The site is his livelihood: he takes people in, and he brings things out.  'Things' is the best way to describe them - although the official term is 'artefacts' - since what they actually are is anyone's guess. Bits of flotsam and jetsam of rogue matter and code, they're the most dangerous of all contrabands - volatile, incomprehensible and liable to destroy or consume you.  Not to mention, pretty freaky:

'He had no idea what it was.  When he found it, two weeks before, it had been an animal, a one-off thing no one but him would ever see, white, hairless, larger than a dong, moving away up a slope of rubble somewhere in the event site, then back towards him as if it had changed its mind and become curious about what Vic was.  It had huge human eyes. How it turned from an animal into the type of object he had finally picked up, manufactured out of this wafery artificial substance which in some lights look like titanium and in other bone, he didn't know.  He didn't want to know.'

Vic shifts his through a broker called Paulie DeRaad, 'one-time vacuum commando, facilitator and all-round Earth Militrary Contracts factotum', who uses his club, the Semiramide, as a cover. The cover is essential since traffic in 'artefacts' is ostensibly forbidden.

Len Aschemann is the detective in charge of halting, or at least limiting, the flow of site goods and he has his eye on Vic (and Paulie too). Haunted by the murder of his wife and almost terminally removed from human society, Len has dedicated himself to limiting the impact of the site on the city. Just around the time that Vic is ushering his female client into the event for the first time, Aschemann is beginning to suspect that he may be behind a major breach in security. He is almost sure, very nearly sure, that people are coming out who never went in.

Or, at least, they look like people.

Such is a basic - read: very basic - synopsis of Nova Swing by M. John Harrison, part hard-boiled noir, part SF and the most challenging and, in my opinion, the most rewarding book on this year's Arthur C. Clarke shortlist. A book, I must admit, which I disliked intensely for a good long while but which has won me over, page by page, until I'm ecstatic at its immense thematic possibility. I would go so far as to say that this is the only novel on the shortlist that fully convinces me of the wealthy potentiality of SF.

It does this in a number of ways, all of them to do with the novel's central conceit: the 'event site'.  The site is a multiplicitous and endlessly variable concept, at once 'the independable, the random, the exterior', and yet also the timeless and the enduring, the access point to a deep well of nostalgia.  It is a catalyst for change, but also a nexus for stasis and stagnation.  People's experiences of it are as numerous as the people themselves and the site has an infinite number of geographies, tesselations and formulations to trick, beguile and swallow them all:

'...streets transposed on one another, everything laid down out of sync one minute to the next. Geography that doesn't work  There isn't a single piece of dependable architecture in the shit of it. You leave the route you know, you're done. Lost dogs, barking day and night. Everything struggling to keep afloat.'

It is 'the hypermarket of the meaningless', where ironically everyone (nearly everyone) goes looking for their meaning.  This is true of Vic and of Len, of Paulie De Raad and Vic's client, whose name it transpires is Elizabeth Kieler. 

Yes, the site is certainly the centre of it all, or, rather, the lack of a centre - the lacuna into which everyone falls.  Those who touch it, or dare to dwell on or in it, loose themselves and their lives: Paulie DeRaad is consumed by an artefact Vic brings him, while Vic himself is incapable of distangling himself from it.  Throughout the novel he becomes increasingly obsessed with finding a 'map' to the interior created by his mentor and predecessor Emil Bonaventure, who is himself dying slowly of multiple site-caused diseases.  Len Aschemann is equally tied up in the site.  Although, in some ways at least, he considers it his nemesis and adversary, he is deeply invested in its mysteries.  It is like the third rail of Saudade - touch it and you die.  It drains you dry, literally, until all that is left is a husk, and the obsession and, if you're lucky, some mindless sex.  As Emil explains:

'"What's the difference between what you've seen and what you are? You want to know what it's like in there? The fact is, you spend all those years trying to make something out of it. Then guess what, it starts making something out of you."'

Both Vic and Len are swiftly becoming men bereft of meaningful existence.  Neither engages in interpersonal relationships, or takes a joy in eating, drinking, breathing or sleeping; neither has a sense of the future or particularly fond memories of the past. Both are inexorably and solipsistically determined to discover something about the way the site works.  It is almost as though there is nothing else in the world.

The real relationships of the novel happen to others - the site sucks away the possibility of making human connections - and even though both Vic and Len have the opportunity to forge friendships and romances, neither is capable of doing so.  Not that they aren't aware of their lack or the pathos in their situations.  It is Vic's awareness of his loneliness that brings him back, again and again, to Elizabeth Kielar, a young woman with her own gaping emotional holes.  When he reads her diary, handed to him in a desperate attempt to access the site, he sees something of himself:

'"Am I meant to live this way?' she asked herself. 'Is it the same for all these other creatures? Is this how they see things here?'  Speaking as one of those creatures, Vic would like to know too.

Len also seems to be aware that there is the possibility of an emotional interchange with his assistant, a woman whose name we never learn because he never asks her for it. He rejects her thoroughly though.  Out of fear, out of habit.

I read somewhere that 'Saudade', the name of the city, is a Portuguese word that is difficult to translate but means something like: 'a longing for something lost that may or may not return'.  It seems to me that the site is the locus of this longing in Nova Swing - its chaotic otherness is some kind of answer to the desperate questions that Vic, Elizabeth and Len seem to be asking themselves.  Who am I? Where did I come from? How did my life turn out this way? Where next?  The site, then, becomes a signifier of undomesticated meaning - the excitement of facing a raw muddle of time and space makes the viewer feel alive.  This is why, perhaps, Vic ends up having so much sex with his clients: the site makes them eager to affirm their fleshy and mortal bodies.  Of course, what becomes clear to the reader is that this is not really facing the 'other' at all but rather subjugating the self.  Going into the site, or seeking it out in anyway, is an act of self-mortification and destruction.

Which is why, I think, Harrison chooses to shift the perspective of the narrative away from the site-seekers towards the end of the novel, refocusing on the auxiliary characters, those individuals who actively turn away from and reject the glamour of the 'event'.  These are, by and large, women: Liv Hula, the owner of the bar in which Vic hangs out; Edith, Emil Bonaventure's daughter; and the nameless policewoman.  Nova Swing's most moving and evocative passages belong to these individuals who, without the melodrama of risk-taking and self-sacrifice, set about finding meaning in their world.   It is true that they are all haunted by nostalgic longing for the sometime-past of their better selves.  But they take their yearnings in their hands and, in the final 30 pages, once the noir trio of Vic, Len and Elizabeth has burnt itself out, bright and riveting, they find ways for themselves to move on.  It is Irene, a broken-down prostitute turned business woman who expresses it perfectly:

'"None of us is anyone any more. We all lost who we were.  But we can all be something else."'

In the end Nova Swing turns out to be about self-possession, about the extent to which you control your selfhood and the extent to which the 'other' determines who we become.  It is also about the extent to which the universe is inscrutable and beyond our understanding, and about the point at which we simply have to shrug and move past it.

I can't tell you how excited all this makes me.  And this is despite the fact that I find Harrison a difficult writer to warm to in terms of prose and setting.  My only real niggle is Nova Swing's trend in gender relations - that is, that Harrison has men set out to conquer the unknown, while women are largely happy to leave well alone and find themselves elsewhere.  I'm unsure how I feel about this, or how it fits with the wider implications of the novel's thematics.  Perhaps Nic will helpfully elucidate.

[*I'm aware that the Tract is connected with Harrison's earlier novel Light, and that Nova Swing is a type of sequel.  But I haven't read the former and so can't make comment on the connections; I leave that to Nic who has read both.]

~~~~

Nic:

The Long Bar at the Cafe Surf was full of fractured sunlight and bright air. Sand blew across the floor from the open door; the staff were sleepy and vague. Someone's toddler crawled about between the cane tables wearing only a T-shirt bearing the legend SURF NOIR. Meanings - all incongruous - splashed off this like drops of water, as the dead metaphors trapped inside the live one collided and reverberated endlessly and elastically, taking up new positions relative to one another. SURF NOIR, which is a whole new existence; which is a 'world' implied in two words, dispelled in an instant; which is foam on the appalling multitextual sea we drift on. "Which is probably," Aschemann noted, "the name of an aftershave."

He beamed down at the toddler, which burst into tears.

I'm not sure this will be either helpful or elucidating, but I'll give it go... Light is made up of three story strands. One, in the present day, concerns a physicist who moonlights as a serial killer and who first discovers the Kefahuchi Tract (with the partial help of two cats, one black and one white - referenced in Nova Swing as the name of Liv's bar). The other two strands, set among the human space colonies of the year 2400, follow a pair of characters who live in the shadow (figuratively speaking) of the Tract, essentially a weird thing in space described as "a singularity without an event horizon". No-one knows what exactly the Tract is - and the impression is that human beings are far from the first species to fail to understand it - but the human society of 2400 makes extensive but uneasy use of K-tech, hybridised machines that use code from the Tract.

At the end of Light, Ed Chianese flies a ship into the Tract, which may be the event that causes the splendidly-named "wrong physics" to fall down to Saudade and form the site. Nova Swing does appear to be set some years after Light, but still in living memory of it; I've read the date of 2444 in several places online, although I can't for the life of me recall whether it's actually mentioned in the book. (Anyone help?)

When we first meet Ed Chianese in Light, he's immersed in a tank having rather film noir-ish virtual reality adventures. That the reality is only virtual isn't apparent until the end of Ed's first chapter, when a giant duck turns up to signal his time in the tank is up - Harrison loves to wrongfoot his readers (the quote I began with hopefully gives a indication of how disorientating his prose can be). In the simulation, those Ed interacts with address him as "Chinese Ed". In Nova Swing, there are a number of references to Ed - but always as Chinese Ed. Which rather threw me. Now, I assume the implication is not that the whole of Nova Swing takes place in a VR simulation - although there were definitely times when I wondered, not helped by, say, one character having an existential crisis framed as "What if we're all code?". But still. Did the wrong physics have some bizarre warping on reality, somehow bringing Ed's noir game to partial reality on the streets of Saudade? Are the unreal people coming from the site in fact players of the game, out for hedonistic kicks? Or did Ed just adopt this variant name after the events of Light? Am I reading too much into this? (Undoubtedly.)

Which is very likely all a blind alley, in terms of working out what the book's about, but my confusion strikes me as thematically very appropriate. I talked about some of the structural and thematic concerns of film noir in our End of the World Blues discussion on Friday. Nova Swing has all this in spades - as might be guessed from what Vicky quotes above about the bar and the gumshoe and the dame - even down to a clever evocation of the visual conventions. Photography in film noir is all about chiaroscuro (sharp contrasts between light and dark, faces obscured by shadow, etc.); and time and again in Nova Swing, attention is drawn to the play of light and shadow on character's faces:

Aschemann's driver proved to be a woman who gave Vic a smile like salt, which Vic returned. Her face was alighted from complex angles in two or three different registers, by the dashboard, the neon, the splashout from The World of Today doorway: but he could see she had good tailoring and blonde hair cropped down to nothing much.

Similarly, Harrison's characters are trapped into dead-end lives they despise, whether by fate, circumstance, or simply fear of letting go of the past; everything they do only seems to mire them more deeply. There's Edith, for example, caught between caring for her dying father and trying to revive her own dreams; or Vic, spiralling into despair over his fixation with the site; or Len, obsessed with the unsolveable murder of his wife; or bartender Liv, who has been resting her head on her elbows for so long they're actually wearing dents in the countertop of her bar:

Liv Hula looked amused. "They never talk like that for me," she admitted to the woman in the fur coat. Then she had a sudden vision of her own life as hard-won, dug out raw from nothing much even the few times it seemed to swoop or soar.

As Vicky has said, the site is both a focus for the characters' hopes and fears, and a representation of their stasis and existential bewilderment. It's the possibility of change, and the dread of chaotic meaninglessness:

He used the stem of his pipe to indicate the Kefahuchi Tract, which lay draped across the night sky of Saudade like a string of bad jewels. "I used to dream of that," he said with a shudder. "Night after night, when I was young. You can't get change less ordered. Look at it, so raw and meaningless! The wrong physics, they say, loose in the universe. Do you understand that? I don't."

In some respects, I think Edith is the key to much of this. Here, she reflects on her early life, as a immensely-talented accordion-player touring space with her father:

She had no idea where they started from, or why, but she could still remember the endless stubby Dynaflow freighters, noncorporate rocket ports, afternoons in sawdust bars, Monas and barkeeps exclaiming over her, filling her with bad bar food and milk blued by the effort of keeping itself milk in the face of where it found itself. In return she filled the vacuum for them, the day they saw her and maybe even thereafter, as a cheap blurred smiling memory they could keep until whatever they'd been denying caught up with them at last.

I love the idea of "milk blued by the effort of keeping itself milk". This could describe the dilemma of any number of the characters: so determined are they to hold themselves together, to hang on to the image they have of themselves, to not grow up and accept change and take responsibility for their future, that they push away the present reality and live in the past, in a holding pattern. They try so hard to stay the same that they end up warping themselves. Even if they're not all sims in a VR game, what sort of volition or self-awareness do they possess? And frankly, faced with a universe that's not only vaster and stranger than you ever imagined, but where the alien and incomprehensible is just a few streets away and busy filling the air with old shoes and freak weather, who wouldn't spend quite a lot of time drinking or having failing relationships or fixating on trail-gone-cold old crimes?

Edith's recollection also link all this back to the question Vicky raises about the position of women in the novel. Because one possible reading (after noting that the active/passive divide isn't wholly gendered - consider Antoyne and Elizabeth) is, again, a noir-derived one. While women in film noir are a much more diverse bunch than the popular angels-or-whores perception implies, they do tend to be the observed rather than the observer - only men ever get voiceovers, and men's value judgements always frame the presentation of women. Their interior lives are closed to us. This attitude is encapsulated in Len's encounter with a woman from the site (emphasis added):

"I've seen you here," Aschemann said.

She leaned towards him when he spoke. Asked him for a match, upper body bent forward a little from the waist, head tilted back so that the dress offered her up wrapped in silk, jazz, light from the Live Music Nightly sign. She needed only a brushed aluminium frame to complete the image of being something both remembered and unreal.

I'd suggest that the women in Nova Swing start out this way, as their noir archetypes - Irene the knocked-about whore, Elizabeth the women-with-a-secret/possible femme fatale, Liv the sardonically sexless sidekick, Edith the spoiled but faithful brat. (Len's assistant being that cyberpunk adjunct to the collection, the souped-up, hard-as-razor-tipped-nails ice maiden). All are repositories for the expectations, assumptions, demands and fantasies of the people around them, like Edith was in her touring youth; all appear passive (even Len's assistant must do what she's told, or get slapped-down). All are slightly unreal. But when these women come into their own plot-wise, as Vicky describes, part of what they are doing, perhaps, is breaking out of this noirish framework of personal and narrative stasis - revealing themselves to be much more complex, active individuals, with their own hopes and strivings. Unlike the other characters, they don't waste energy on seeking an external intervention (via the site). They leave the construct behind, and become real.

Of course, not even accepting change necessarily alters much. But it's a start:

This was how life went. A single moment seemed to extend forever, then suddenly you were snapped out of it. The forward motion of time stretched whatever rubbery glue-like substance had fixed you there until it failed catastrophically. You weren't the person you were before you got trapped; you weren't the person you were while you were trapped: the merciless thing about it, Liv discovered, was that you weren't someone entirely different either.

Um. Perhaps.

As for Vicky, it took time, and several days' post-reading reflection, for me to fall for this book. But fall I have - even though I still don't really have a clue what's going on (as the above rambling will doubtless have shown...). Well worth the battle.

~~~~

Vicky: Definitely worth the battle. :-) In an email earlier today Nic said something along the lines of (and I paraphrase): 'writing/thinking about Harrison involves bouncing off an intellect way bigger than our own'.  I absolutely agree - I feel that I've hardly comprehended one aspect of 'Nova Swing' before another is jumping out at me. 

Still, between us Nic and I have brought out what I think is the most vigorous and important of its facets - Harrison's reapproachment of strategies of change and intervention; of the ways in which people reinvent themselves and their lives. Beneath all the genre-steeped nostalgia and noir, all the deft descriptive turns and the sardonic asides, I feel this is the key to unlock the heart of the piece. 

The Floating Rope World

Vicky: Round four of our Arthur C. Clarke reading and time to tackle End of the World Blues by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, a book about which I have decidedly mixed feelings. On the one hand, I thought it neat, endearing and warmly satisfying; on the other, stilted, stunted and born aloft by caricature.  I thought it told its story confidently, on a gentle gradient, but I didn't think it a challenging or controversial novel in terms of either plot or theme.  It had a languid sense of its own charm, but without any of the bark or bite of Gradisil or Hav or Nova Swing.  I mean: it made me feel comfortable, like I was swimming about in the SF equivalent of the womb, cushioned on all sides by the meandering predictability of the story unfolding. 

Here is how it goes: Kit Nouveau, a former British squaddie, has been living the ex-pat life in Japan for close on 20 years.  He has a Japanese wife, a world-renowned potter called Yoshi, and runs his own Irish bar in the Roppongi district of Tokyo.  His best friend is an Australian biker; he is sleeping, unbeknownst to him, with the wife of a Yakusa ganglord; and, every morning, he takes coffee to a young, tatty homeless girl.  He is occasionally dogged by memories of the summer of 2003, when he had a short, passionate affair with his best friend's girlfriend, Mary O'Mally but, all things considered, life is pretty good.  That is, until his bar blows up with Yoshi inside and he discovers that: a) he was never married, and b) that someone, somewhere, is trying to have him killed.

Nijie Kitagawa is the homeless recipient of Kit's morning coffee.  She has $15,ooo,000 stashed away in a train station locker, and some vague memories of the brutal murder of her family. She may also be (although, probably not) Lady Neku - the Baroness Nawa-no-ukiyo, Countess High Strange and Chatelaine of Schloss Omga - a refugee from the distant future in which families of gang-nobility rule over and 'protect' a scorched earth.  Either way she is a teenager, confused and on the run from herself.  On the night that Kit's bar is torn apart she steps in to save him from a second attempt on his life, this time an assassin, and exhibiting some frightening skill with a blade entangles her emotional life with his personal drama.

Because just as Kit's life in Japan is falling apart, his old one in England is coming back to haunt him in the form of Kate O'Mally, Mary's mother and a mafia boss in her own right.  She brings news that her daughter has killed herself and has left everything she owns - a flat in London, an art gallery and significant liquid assets - to Kit.  Harboring the suspiscion that her daughter is actually alive and scenting foul play, Kate asks him to come back to London and investigate.  And so off he toddles, with Nijie/Neku in tow, to play the amateur sleuth and unriddle a tangle of gang culture, interpersonal relationships and love grown nostalgic.

What should be obvious from this is that End of the World Blues is primarily about the past, about the decisions we do or do not make and the consequences of our actions.  (Which is pleasantly ironic for an SF novel ostensibly about futurity...) It is also a novel about the price of redemption.  For Kit the past comes most insistently in the form of Mary O'Mally, the woman he 'did wrong by' in the foolishness of his youth.  His absolution is clearly to be earned by reconciling the circumstances of her mysterious death and of his own destroyed life. So much so that the events of the novel represent a kind of therapy for him, the traditional kind in which the patient is brought into conflict with himself and the world, and is then reconciled through his own merits.  It has that feel-good aspect to it: imperfect man makes good.  Although, that is not to say that Kit is a thoroughly satisfying character. He is very much a 'type' with his rockstar name, his stint in the British army and his Irish bar.  I mean, there is something pathetically endearing about him, like a ragged old paperback or a dog with its tail between its legs.  He is one of those 'soldiers of fortune', rough around the edges but well-meaning, a gnarled tainted hero.  But he is also bland and a little too reticent.  I found it rather difficult to believe properly in his pain and guilt; it felt like film-guilt, the sort that is about to be redeemed any moment.  Improbable things are always happening to him - how does one man stumble into gangland so often? - and oftentimes his heroics are a little too noir.  Toward the end of the book, for example, after losing his finger in a confrontation with a drug dealer:

'"Mine," said Neku, grabbing a handful of clothes in passing.

"Was mine," Kit said, tossing segments of finger into the open bowl and pausing to check it flushed properly.' 

At no point does Grimwood convince me that Kit is hardcore enough - is anyone really? - to respond to his own dismemberment in such a way.  It's too incongruous to have, at one moment, Kit the burned-out bum and, at the next, when it suits the plot, Kit the mafia-savvy player.  There is something ill-conceived about it, as though the ideas have overpowered the plot-character framework.

Nijie/Neku is similarly dichotomous - one moment the little Japanese school girl, playing coy with an admirer, next the timeless, ruthless princess from the end of the world.  But then she ostensibly has the excuse of her dual existence (or, should we say, her split personality).  Which brings me to another of my uncertainties about the novel: the SF parts.  Kit and Nijie's story in our near-future world is regularly interrupted by chapters set in the 'floating rope world', Lady Neku's far-future realm.  They are at first set adrift from the main story, constituting puzzles in the text, deeply alienating interludes in which linearity plays no part.  However, it becomes increasingly clear that they are, in some way, analogous with the events which have occured (and are occuring) in Kit's world: that the actions of the nobility to which Neku belongs mirror those of the Yakusa, the Mafia and other gangs.   It also becomes increasingly clear that Neku's life-drama is closely allied to Nijie's.  So much so, in fact, that is seems more and more likely that Nijie has somehow created 'Neku' and the marvellous, frightening 'floating rope world' in order to cope with things that have happened to her in the real world.  Staying with the idea of End of the World Blues as therapy, she has engineered a mechanism whereby she can distance herself from herself - a world in which she can play out the horror of being the daughter of a murdered family at a remove.  All of which I like very much - it approaches the strategies of the traumatised mind with a sensitive and deft touch, and I concede that the 'floating rope world' is an interesting idea.

But.

But it feels just a little arbitrary to me.  As though Grimwood, who is so clearly aligned as a genre writer, woke up one day with a great idea for a story set in the near-future about love and loss and delusion.  And then proceeded to shoe-horn a determinedly SF element in because, well, that's what he does. The 'floating rope world' aspect of the novel only gets away with with being like it is - cursorily fleshed out and explored - because the reader already suspects it is the creation of a troubled mind and allows for its flaws.  So I end by liking the concept but not so much the execution of it.

Which leads me on to say that I don't really like Grimwood's prose style either. I'm sure even his greatest fans would admit that it is workman-like at best and stilted at worst, hardly the stuff that great poetry is made of.  I know this is a matter of personal taste though, and I come away from End of the World Blues with a hearty indifference.  I don't love it or hate it, or even dislike it.  I thought it was pleasant enough but certainly I wasn't inspired by it and I wasn't provoked.  If you wish you may interpret this as my damning the enterprise with faint praise.

~~~~

Nic: At last, a little bit of debate! Now, it would be fair to say that my experience of reading of End of the World Blues was rather a different one to Vicky's; I'm a Grimwood fangirl, having read all his back catalogue with the exception of the two books immediately preceding this one (they're currently keeping my other 450 or so TBR books company). While I certainly don't consider End of the World Blues one of Grimwood's best novels - that place belongs his Arabesk trilogy, particularly the middle volume, Effendi - it contains much of interest to a reader familiar with his work. It's an altogether warmer and maturer novel: reflective, wistful and (relatively) pared-down, and with a whole lot more redemption to go around than usual (even if still hard-won).

The prose is much less punchy and visceral than in the early books - and here End of the World Blues does suffer, because the breakneck/headfuck aspect was clearly always part of the appeal - and the splatter of brand names and tech-fetishising is likewise scaled down. But plenty of the trademarks are still on display: alienating, crisply-evoked locales; cooler-than-thou disdain, especially for the dumbing-down and sanitising effects of popular tourism ("One day, the real Roppongi, with its hostess bars and filthy courtyards would vanish forever, like Montmartre or London's Soho before it, leaving an ersatz theme park of perversion lite."); plus a little bit of the old ultraviolence:

Twisting the hot blade from Robbie's fingers, Kit moved before anyone had time to react. A sizzling slash to the throat, a smoky drag across both eyes and Kit was almost done, his final strike hissing its way under de Valois' chin and through his soft palate, braising his tongue.

... often mixed with mordant humour, as when Neku/Nijie rescues Kit:

"Simple, neat and looks to the untrained eye like an aneurysm."

"What about that?" said Kit, nodding to the juggling knife now sticking from the man's ribs.

"Oh shit," she said. "Instinctive overkill... I'm Lady Neku," she added, before executing a small bow and offering her hand. When Kit shook, he couldn't help noticing that her fingers were sticky.

(The ultra-sex, by contrast, is largely absent; I'm not mourning the loss...)

More significantly, both the characterisation and the film noir approach to structure remain intact, if to a less extreme degree. The former gives us the customary Grimwood protagonists - world-weary older man with a new identity and a dark past, deeply troubled and vulnerable but in some way remarkable young girl - and what appears at first to be their customary relationship configuration, a blend of sexual tension and pseudo-father-daughter dynamic. Yet here everything is smaller-scale and more personal. Particularly in Kit's strand of the tale, the accent is upon the individual guilt - his tiny, commonplace actions and betrayals, and their devastating emotional fallout - rather than the dramatic trappings of mob bosses and yakusa plots. The tone is of a continual but understated sense of loss:

Yoshi and Kit had shared a bed, lived in the same house and together run a bar but he still didn't know where she'd been born. Some shitty little village in the hills... That was what Yoshi said, when he asked her in the early days.

He had no idea which village or which hills.

Likewise, although Neku/Nijie's own betrayals play out across a bigger canvas, it is telling that they are mainly explored through the metaphor of her shellshocked future fantasy; the rocking of the criminal underworld that she precipitates is entirely secondary to the trauma she suffers, and so we catch only glimpses of it.

Similarly, these are more life-size characters. Here is one point where Vicky and I differ: the finger amputation, and Kit's reaction. I'm not convinced that Kit is that hardcore either. Nor, I think, am I meant to be (not something I'd ordinarily say of Grimwood's protagonists!). The response quoted is pretty clearly the result of bravado, and shock - it comes right after an episode of considerable tension and violence, at a point when adrenaline is still flowing (and the need to stay calm and escape is still paramount). You don't have to buy that Kit is 'hardcore' to believe that he - as an ex-soldier - knows a thing or two about the importance of reining in panic until there's time to indulge it. Shortly afterwards, his pain is all present and correct:

Trying to ride a motorbike with an amputated finger was a bad idea. The actual practice was worse. Every gear change made Kit chew his lip and fight to keep his hand on the bars.

And shortly after that, he's shivering and mumbling and only half-aware of what's going on around him.

Onto the structure. The subgenre of cyberpunk was - to grossly over-generalise, for neither the first nor the last time - film noir with flashy gadgets, snappier dialogue and a thumping soundtrack. Grimwood is writing in a post-cyberpunk tradition, but End of the World Blues (like all his novels) partakes of many of the same concerns: morally-ambiguous characters, trapped in dead-end lives, can only watch as the noose of circumstance (and, often, unprovoked betrayal) tightens around their necks - all told with liberal use of flashback, sardonic wit, and brutality, to confuse and disorientate while ultimately illuminating in unexpected ways.

Here, there is an added layer of misdirection, as Vicky has said, in Neku's Moorcock/Vance-esque floating rope world. These sections are somewhat cursory, it's true (although often quite fun):

"Stop it," she told Schloss Omga, her family's castle.

Maybe the castle was listening, or maybe it just got bored and decided to stop the architectural equivalent of twiddling its hair. Whatever, the next time Lady Neku looked, the tiles in her bedroom had changed back to polygons and that was the last change of the day.

Dragging herself to her feet, Lady Neku stared around her. The vomit was already gone, swallowed by the floor and fed back into the castle. Schloss Omga was good at telling the difference between living organics and waste. It hardly ever got this wrong.

Two potential counter-arguments: 1) Exactly how well-rounded would we expect a traumatised 15-year-old's imaginary world to be? 2) Consider these SFnal elements in terms of the audience (and marketing) ... readers expecting a genre novel are surely inclined to assume sf elements are real on the novel's own terms, unless proven otherwise (I did). So for some time they effectively obscure what's going on - who Neku is, what she's done - in true twisty-turny noir style. ;-)

More serious problems exist in the novel. The prose, as I said above, was somewhat disappointing; on balance, it simply wasn't as entertaining a read as previous Grimwood novels. I also find myself hoping that this really is the culmination that it appears to be for these now over-familiar character types, however appealing and striking their presentation here. Finally, the section set in London is much less interesting than those in either the Tokyo or the 'far future', bogged down in talky scenes and its tediously drawn-out fact-finding mission. End of the World Blues is a bumpy ride, then, and not really representative of what Grimwood can do; but it's an interesting, and unusually heartfelt, spin on an old formula.

~~~~

Vicky: Yes, we really do disagree on the finger thing.  I don't want to focus on it too closely but I think it has wider implications for Kit's character and who and what he is, so...  I could almost buy the bravado reading if it didn't go as far as it did - by the time Kit flushes bits of his own finger down the loo he has already killed a man (and whence his extraodinary skills, I ask myself? A middle-aged man grown reticent in Tokyo? His experiences of twenty years earlier don't go nearly far enough in justifying it!), negotiated local gang politics with some cronies, waited for Neku to have a wash and marshalled his rag-bag gang out a building surrounded by MI6 agents. It doesn't seem a planned action, since he does it almost as an afterthought as they're leaving, and the surrounding circumstances don't suggest that he chooses to make a set piece gesture. So why flush the finger? Why pick it up at all? And would bits of finger really flush? 

All this might sound incredibly pedantic, and it is, but I think it epitomises Grimwood's attempts to satisfy his audiences' desire for hyperbole.  I just couldn't suspend my disbelief through it; I felt real world implications creeping in and, for me, that is when SF has failed itself.   True, Kit is a little more shaken up later, but it isn't enough - he even sets out to sew up the wound himself for goodness sake!  Where is his devastated horror? Or his disbelief? Or his anger? Physical pain alone is unconvincing. Its like he has been expecting to have his finger hacked off in pieces all his life and has already reconciled himself to his loss.

It wasn't the only part of the novel that smacked of over-reaching - you could say, over-acting - either.  Neku mistakenly stabbing Kit's attacker in the ribs in a fit of over-enthusiasm niggled me too, and so I find it interesting that you quoted it as an example of Grimwood's humour.  I think I may have actually rolled my eyes at that point in the dialogue on my initial reading. ;-) It ripped me out of the drama of the moment, and it made me think: why? (In fact, as it happens, the plot itself answers this - to give Neku a reason to go to Kit's bar later that night. Tenuous methinks.) 

I think my real problem has to be this: none of the characters struck me as emotionally realistic. I admit there are moments that touched on moving (like the one you quote), but nothing that squeezed me in the right places.  Nobody acts like a real human person, except perhaps Nijie.  They are endlessly rising to the occasion, as if they're on strings. They're all types, all simulcra of people, and its difficult for me to get past that.

(I have a feeling this discussion might spill into the comments - hurray! to that. :-))

Postcards from Nowhere

'All of this makes the ponderous routine of Hav seem strangely introspective. Who cares? one soon comes to feel. Who cares if Missakian sounds his trumpet on the rampart? Who cares if the train is late, or what the Prefects did? Who cares if the gun goes off? Only the city itself, whose memories are so long, whose character is so elaborately creased or layered, and into whose idiosyncratic attitudes I find myself all too easily adapting.'

Nic: Hav, by Jan Morris, or: from the ridiculous to the sublime*; being the third part of the Eve's Alexandria Arthur C. Clarke Award reading.

[* with a splendid interlude, I should note]

A portrait of a fictional city penned by the queen of travel-writing, Hav has a complicated publication history (one that has caused questions to be raised about its eligibility for the award, an argument I’ll leave to others). The first part of the 2006 edition was initially printed as a series of letters – which charted Morris’s observations of and exploits in the apparently-doomed titular city over the course of a several-month 'stay' there - in various newspapers. These were then collected as a single volume, Last Letters from Hav, in the mid-1980s. The second part, new for this edition, has Morris (as both author and semi-fictionalised narrator, once again) revisit the place for a week in 2005, lamenting the changes wrought there by time and economics.

Morris places Hav on the (north?)eastern coast of the Mediterranean, an absolutely prime location for it to partake in (and not infrequently be swamped by) the complex cross-cultural currents of the area. At the time of Morris' first visit, Hav is an autonomous city-state (appropriately, for the region), one which has been subjected to a great many influences and invasions over the centuries – Celtic, Minoan, Greek, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Turkic (Saljuq, Ottoman, and beyond), Russian, French – anything and everything, indeed, that the area might be expected to throw at it.

The contemporary city is, correspondingly, a patchwork of ethnicities, cultural practices, architectural styles and folk legends, something Morris explores and discusses in several different registers. The first is the broad canvas description, the travel-writer's-eye-view, rendered as vividly as if she really were witnessing it:

The railway track cut a wide swathe through the Balad, and parallel to it ran a tram-line, about which in places swamped dense clusters of figures, some in brown or black, some in white robes - ah, and there came the first tram of the morning, pulling a trailer, already scrambled all over by a mass of passengers clinging to its sides and platforms. I watched its lurching progress south - through those shabby shanty-streets - past the power station - out of sight for a moment in the lee of the castle hill... and turning myself to follow it, I saw spread out before me downtown Hav around the wide inlet of its haven. To the west, at the end of the castle ridge, stood the vestigial remains of the Athenian acropolis, its surviving columns shored up by ugly brick buttresses. Away to the south I fancied I could just make out the Iron Dog at the entrance to the harbour, and beside it the platform of the Conveyor Bridge was already swinging slowly across the water.

There is a tension here – between the supposedly objective, outside observer looking down upon the city, and the inescapably culturally-conditioned pen that transmits the sight for the reader ("like a labour camp", "ugly") - that Morris continues to explore throughout the book, both by making herself a character in the proceedings, and by occasionally hinting at what her observing eye fails to see.

The second approach is the long-view analysis and contextualisation, providing historical anecdote and/or generalised conclusions about Havian culture, often conducted in dialogue with the (invented) perspectives of other (real) writers and thinkers on her created city:

Some scholars go further, and say that the conception of the maze has profoundly affected the very psyche of Hav. It certainly seems true that if there is one constant factor binding the artistic and creative centuries together, it is an idiom of the impenetrable. The writers, artists and musicians of this place, although they have included few native geniuses, have seldom been obvious or conventional. They have loved the opaque more than the specific, the intuitive more than the rational. Pliny said they wrote in riddles, and declared their sculptures to be like nothing so much as lumps of coal. [...] For myself I suspect this lack of edge has nothing to do with mazes, but is a result of Hav's ceaseless cross-fertilization down the centuries. Hardly has one manner of thought, school of art, been absorbed than it is overlaid by another, and the result, as Manet saw, is a general sense of intellectual and artistic pointillism - nothing exact, nothing absolute, for better or for worse.

(And Hav really has enjoyed an impressive guest-list over the years - including but not limited to Tolstoy, Hemingway, Wagner, Byron, Twain, and Churchill – whose comments demonstrate the many ways in which one may respond to a foreign, visited place).

Finally, Hav is explored through its residents: artists, public officials, traders, café-owners, intellectuals, ascetics; old and young, Greek and Turkish, effusively informative and carefully close-lipped. Morris, as narrator, is continually at work forging friendships and making connections, seeking to put together the pieces of the Hav puzzle by observing as many different aspects of it as possible. She visits monuments, private households, embassies, troglodyte dwellings, a religious retreat; she witnesses official receptions, daily activity in the market, and public ceremonial, like the exuberant (and, frankly, suicidal) annual rooftop race. The spirit of Hav, if there is one, clearly lives in its people and their customs - even if the stories are incomplete individually (often, we sense, deliberately), and Morris often feels driven to editorialise. Relaying the comments of Mr Chimoun, Captain of the Port, for example:

"...when I sit here and look out at that splendid view - look, do you see? there is the campanile of San Pietro - when I watch our great ships sailing in" (which they all too seldom do) "and hear the bustle of the merchants below" (he meant the hooting of trucks unable to get out of their parking place) "and when I hear the gun go off as it has for a thousand years" (the Russians instituted the midday gun, in 1875) "then do you know I feel myself truly to be some great signor myself".

Hav has a suitably turbulent history and a rich layering of social, political, and religious frameworks (at least some of which Morris misses), plus a host of little quirks: certain characteristic dishes, popular local songs, its own flora and fauna (and, splendidly, a Zoological Society that publishes its own journal). Even the inevitable 1920s colonial bar (the "air […] full of Turkish tobacco smoke" and the cocktails "arcane") puts in an appearance. It is so endlessly diverse and detailed that no visitor can hope to do more than glimpse its complexity ("the advantage of going native in Hav is that nobody knows what native is"). Indeed, so intricately wrought is Morris' little world that she even provides an etymology for its name:

In the second or first centuries before Christ, the theory is, Celts from the Anatolian interior found their way to the edge of the great escarpment and saw before them, probably for the first time in their lives, the sea. So blue it seemed, we are told, so warm was the Mediterranean prospect, that they called the place simply 'Summer' - still hav or haf in the surviving Celtic languages of the West

Throughout the centuries of change, Hav has retained its own unique cultural identity – or, rather (and perhaps more importantly), it has retained the idea and the supporting myths of its unique cultural identity. When the second part introduces us to a post-revolutionary Hav – now a "Myrmidonic Republic" run by a secretive cabal that likes "ideological certainty" in its architecture and streamlined unformity in its cultural practices (all the better for the tourist trade) – much is made, both by Morris and by her interviewees, of the passing of old Hav, and the fictional basis of much of what has replaced it.

One example: on Morris' first morning in Hav, she is struck by the "wistful threnody" of a sole trumpet, sounding a lament from the Castle walls, just after the call to prayer. She later learns that the trumpeter’s name is Missakian, and that his daily playing forms part of a venerable tradition – dating back, it is said, to 1191, when Saladin’s army re-took Hav after a century of Crusader rule, and a musician by the name of Katourian, who first came to the city with the Franks, sang the lament from the castle walls "as a magnificent farewell" for the departing Crusaders (before killing himself). Saladin – as he so often was in medieval stories like this one – was "moved by the tragic splendour of this gesture", and declared it a daily custom on the spot.

When she returns, however, Morris is saddened by what greets her in the morning – a change that proves representative of the new Myrmidonic (the allusion is appropriate) Hav:

As the sun's rim showed itself above the horizon I imagined the trumpeter in the cold lee of the castle wall, wetting his lips and raising his instrument as the city's minstrels had done every morning for so many generations. No silvery trump[et] called, to die away heart-rendingly into the mist. Instead there suddenly sounded, tremendously amplified over loudspeakers across the city, the lugubrious clanging chimes of a carillon, playing music that I did not recognise but which sounded almost fictionally antique.

The old custom is gone, explained by a new story of an equally tragic end (Missakian is said to have been killed, in mid-lament, by the first shot fired of the "Intervention", the revolution/coup that ushered in Myrmidonic Hav). It is patently false, and derided as such by opposition intellectuals to whom Morris speaks ("'Well cast your mind back, Jan dear. You were here that day. You know just as well as we do that the first shots of the Intervention were fired in the afternoon!'"). But theirs is the reaction of those witnessing the (rather clumsy) invention of a civic legend. Hav is built upon a host of tales that are little more plausible; Katourian, for example, would have been over 100 by the time of his heavily-symbolic suicide. All are the foundation myths of Havian identity; like any 'national' myths, they are remembered and invoked because they mean something to the audience of a given age, rather than because they are literally true. All is construct, to some degree. The difference is that Morris (the narrator) is present for one of those periods in which identity is more obviously being reshaped by short-term events, as the new government seeks to anchor its legitimacy in a reimagined past that links Hav's creation with Achilles.

Not all the changes are for the worse; nor can all of old Hav can be compelling simply for its oldness, however rose-tinted the view (on her first taste of the famed snow raspberries, Morris notes that, "the mystique that used to surround them was misplaced"). But the overall tone is an elegiac one, both for Morris’ own failures of understanding, and for what is lost when the world moves on:

It looked very different from the Hav I remembered. Gone was the esoteric skyline of turrets, minarets and gilded domes. Only the castle still stood on its crag high above. For the rest, all was a grey flattish blur of new buildings, low and flat, with a minaret protruding here and there, and a distant jumble of masts and riggings at the waterfront, but none of the gaudy eclecticism that made the old city so compelling.

~~~~

Vicky:  So much for divisive debate. Hav by Jan Morris (the only woman on the shortlist) is yet another Clarke novel on which Nic and I appear to agree entirely.  I too thought it a beautiful, graceful, eloquent and provocative piece, thematically rich and deliciously clever.  And so, since I have little to add to the above analysis, I'll make a different tack...

Nic has rather cunningly (and sensibly) managed to write her part of this post without approaching what will be, for some readers, the thorniest points at issue with Hav.  Not is it a good novel - it so clearly is - but is it eligible for the Arthur C Clarke Award? First, there is the problem of its publication history, to which I shall turn shortly, but secondly and more pressingly, there is the 'genre problem'. Namely, is Hav an SF novel at all? 

Now, it should be a fact universally acknowledged that defining 'genre' or SF is a tricky pain in the arse.  And so I think it best to give the first word on Hav's credentials to Ursula Le Guin in her Guardian review of the book :

'I expect academics and other pigeonholers may stick Hav in with Thomas More and co. That is a respectable slot, but not where the book belongs. Probably Morris, certainly her publisher, will not thank me for saying that Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognisable type and superb quality. The "sciences" or areas of expertise involved are social - ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history. Hav exists as a mirror held up to several millennia of pan-Mediterranean history, customs and politics. It is a focusing mirror; its intensified reflection sharply concentrates both observation and speculation. Where have we been, where are we going? Those are the questions the book asks. It poses them through the invention of a place not recognised in the atlas or the histories, but which, introduced plausibly and without violence into the existing world, gives us a distanced, ironic and revelatory view of everything around it. The mode is not satiric fantasy, as in the islands Gulliver visited; it is exuberantly realistic, firmly observant, and genuinely knowledgeable about how things have been, and are now, in Saudi Arabia, or Turkey, or Downing Street. Serious science fiction is a mode of realism, not of fantasy; and Hav is a splendid example of the uses of an alternate geography.'

Which has me mostly convinced, although I disagree somewhat on the cited difference between SF and fantasy and I'm not entirely sure that a novel is automatically SF because it functions in an SF-nal way. And I think that alternate history is more of a hybrid form than Le Guin allows, functioning thematically and narratorially in that lively space between SF and Fantasy.  Those are caveats, however, and I agree on the most important point - that Hav is SF and eligible for the Clarke.  For a beginning, I think the novel's form is unusually suited to SF -  even straight travel-writing requires its readers to adapt and acclimatise in ways similar to SF and fantasy, and fictional travel-writing even more so.  First there comes the alienation, the dizzy mixture of familiar and unfamiliar signifiers, then the reconciliation and recognition:

'I did what Tolstoy did, and jumped out of the train when it stopped in the evening at the old frontier... Very unusual, said the driver, to find a customer at the station these days, but he made the journey twice a week anyway, there and back, under contract to the railway.  This was the tunnel pilot's car, he explained and he was Yasar Yegen the tunnel pilot's nephew, the pilotage being a hereditary affair... Why did they a pilot for the tunnel? The Porte had insisted on it, for southbound trains only, as a token of the Sultan's sovereignty over the Pendeh settlement...'

But whereas in straight travel-writing (and in straight contemporary fiction too) the reader can become an 'insider' who can physically and emotionally 'live' in the world the writer invokes, in a fictional travel piece like Hav the reader remains an eternal outsider.  As in SF, he/she can never belong.  And yet, at the same time, he/she will always belong, because liminality, hybridity and connections made against the tide of the real are the salient points of the exercise.  The rest follows: that Hav is a meditation on the nature of utopia (and dystopia), that it deals in the ways that history, technology and mythology will be brought to bear on the future, that it resists being merely an allegory for the 'real world' and that it is fuelled by the forces of multiplicity and difference.  All these components, working together, are enough to convince me that Hav is true to the spirit of SF, even if we find its credentials difficult to weigh or evaluate.

As to whether the book is eligible for the award on the grounds of its publication history? That depends on whether you consider it to be a 'novel' at all: Is it a unified narrative with two co-dependent halves? Or a reprint of a novella from 1985, with an appended short story?  If you think the latter then, well, no argument, the book isn't eligible.  But if the former is true then, no question, it fits the criteria.  And as I see it the book should be viewed and read as a whole; the prior publication of the first half is irrelevant because it is subsequently transformed by the latter half. It becomes a fundamentally different piece and project and the tenor is thoroughly changed.  Further, I think an argument can be made for the novels' publication history as a thematic conceit.  That is, the staggered publication stands to epitomise the tensions between fiction and reality, between past and present, that thread through both halves of the book - the book's physical status colludes with the plot and meaning of the novel.  Which is deliciously post-modern and thoroughly satisfying.

I think it has been a brave choice for the shortlist, and one that could bear special fruit.  Certainly, it has sent me spinning off to read Morris' travel writing and to reconsider how alternate history and/or geography should be categorised in 'genre'.  I don't imagine it will win - consider the uproar? - but I do hope that the SF community will embrace and accept it as a sheep in the fold.

~~~~

Nic: Actually, I rather hope it does win...

Tin Can Land

Vicky: Jon Courtenay Grimwood tells us (via The Guardian) that Adam Roberts is 'the king of high-concept SF', and if the Arthur C. Clarke-nominated Gradisil - Roberts' sixth novel - is representative of his work, I must concur.  One of three 'traditional SF'* novels in the running for the Award, it proves a painstakingly well-crafted and thematically dense novel, heavy with ideas.

Structurally akin to the generational sagas of the early twentieth century, it is essentially three novellas strung together by DNA and the theme of revenge:

In the 2060s Klara Gyeroffy, aged 15, is amongst the first generation of 'Uplanders'.  Her father, a Hungarian by birth, is one of the pioneering explorers and enthusiasts who fly fixed wing aircraft into orbit and begin the process of colonising space.  He converts an old jet, fits it with the requisite materials and steadily climbs beyond the sky.  Explaining the electromagnetics that make this possible to his young daughter (and, thankfully, to this clueless reader), he uses Yggdrasil, the world tree of Norse mythology, as a metaphor:

"'It,' said my father, ' is a mighty tree from Viking myth... We don't need to grow such a tree. The Earth has already provided for us.  The Earth possesses something called a magnetosphere, created by the differential in rotation between the earth's molten core and its solid mantle.  Really - think of it like a bar from the North Pole in a great sweep through space, and in again at the South Pole. Ions from the sun stream down the branches of this tree, my princess, at the north and the south poles, to create the auroras.  Better, we can climb up the same branches to space.'"

His is the forteith 'house' dragged into orbit, a glorified tin can with a homemade atmosphere and zero gravity, and Klara spends her adolescence travelling back and forth between the Earth and the black.  The 'Uplands' in this earliest incarnation is hardly a place or a nation at all, just a rag-bag of wealthy, enthusiastic pioneers floating about in infinite space; it has no laws, no boundaries and no allegiances.  It is exempt from international treaties, and far from the reach of the world's two main powers: the US and the EU.  To Klara it is a kind of paradise, shared only with her beloved father.  Her world is brought tumbling down however when Kristin Janzen Kooistra, a tenant in their 'house' murders her father and steals the Gyeroffy home, leaving her bereft, bitter and earthbound.

Forty years later and Klara's only daughter, the eponymous Gradisil (named for the all-important world tree) is the de facto President of the Uplands.  Now technically a territory of the US (after a takeover in the early 2080s), Gradi is engaged in a determined campaign to unite the thousands of  Uplanders in a bid for their independence.  She spends all of her time and energy working towards these ends, sacrificing her relationship with her husband (who narrates the section) and with her two sons to the cause.  Ruthless and manipulative, but also charming and eloquent, it becomes clear to all around her that she is willing to sacrifice almost anything on the road to nationhood.

And a further forty years down the line Hope and Solidarity Gyeroffy meet in a luxury Upland hotel, run by US interests but under Upland government jurisdiction, to exact revenge for crimes committed against their mother, the posthumously beatified Gradi.

All three sections stand complete and justified unto themselves, and could easily be read independently from one another.  They each have their unique voice - Klara, Gradisil's husband Paul and the final omniscient observer - and their own style. But clearly they're thematically united: by the ideological vs actual and political development of the 'Uplands' and by the ubiquities of familial drama.  If Gradisil's structure is a variation on The Forsyte Saga, the narrative thrust has all the flavour of Greek tragedy: murdered parents, vengeful children, wronged husbands and siblings in conflict, mixed together with political and social upheaval - the development of national government and the consequences of power conjoined with the fate of families.

Now it's true that Roberts' prose is sometimes pedantic and that his characters are often, and above all else, cold and distant but, as I see it, these qualities serve Gradisil's ultimate purpose.  The Gyeroffy women, Klara and Gradi both, are quite disagreeable creatures, hard-nosed and closed off.  Neither of them exhibit 'maternal' instincts and neither is 'feminine' or 'intuitive' or 'emotional', and this is only right.  They are, after all, women living on the outskirts of life, at the very edge of the permissable.  Like all pioneers and colonists they are driven by physical hardship to positions untenable in the heart of society; and they're both consumed by a vision of the Uplands as it was or as it could be.  Perhaps most difficult of all to reconcile is their attitude to their fertility and procreative capacity, which they both reject in the selfish pursuit of life in zero gravity (where foetuses can't mature).  Gradisil especially adopts a violent oppositional stance to her womanhood and her sexuality, obliterating her identity as a mother, lover and wife through a preference for being only the 'President'.  In the most devastating and disturbing scene in the book she repels a rapist with a serrated device inserted into her vagina, invoking the 'virgina dentata' (toothed vagina) of myth.  In doing so she castrates her attacker with an inhuman calm that denies her victimhood, the visceral cost of her revenge and any ordinary emotion alike; only her husband recognises the trauma buried in her aplomb and even he struggles to see her as a woman and as his wife.   The reader snatches glimpses of vulnerability though, painful and all the more incisive because they are rare.

And it is not as though the novel is devoid of sympathy.  Roberts' male characters are wonderfully fleshed out, flawed and all at sea with their surroundings and with themselves.  Paul Caunes and Hope Gyeroffy are the obvious antitheses to Klara and Gradi, but more moving than either is Gradisil's one auxiliary character, Lieutenant Slater, a US soldier instrumental in the campaign to conquer the Uplands.  Slater shares narratorial duties with Paul Caunes in the second section of the novel and, at first abhorrent, later becomes Gradisil's pointman in matters of mundane emotional interest.  His failing marriage, his ordinary ambitions for promotion and his confusion in the face of death are his enormous strengths as a character. He has a blandness that, when faced with its own annihilation, becomes something extraodinary.

This is Roberts' real achievement with Gradisil: his dramatisation of lives lived in extremis, in a vacuum, narrowed by the constraints of the nascent civilisation of the Uplands. Whether insignificant or instrumental, all actors in such a play are magnified and laid bare - like Odin strung out on Yggdrasil they're at the mercy of sun and sky.

It would be a worthy winner of the Clarke, I think. 

[*Knowing SF fans like I do, I scent controversy in that statement. (Yes, I'm looking at you.  You know who you are.) I will say only this: I'm willing to haggle over the SF credentials of various novels until the cows come home - Jan Morris' 'Hav'; David Mitchell's 'Black Swan Green'; Ali Smith's 'The Accidental' to name but a few - but I reserve the right to call anything set partially (or entirely) in space 'traditional SF'. I've qualified it with inverted commas and even provided a caveat.  So now let us move on.]

~~~~

Nic:

"Do you know what a tree is? [...] A tree is a seed that wants to get into orbit."

Another blow for those of you who were hoping for more arguments in these dual-posts of ours: I thoroughly enjoyed Gradisil, and have to agree with Vicky's contention that it is "painstakingly well-crafted and thematically dense".

Let's start with the latter, from which we can draw two, interlinked strands: firstly, the challenges of establishing and maintaining a frontier society, and of navigating its transformation into something less rough-and-ready; secondly, an Oresteia-in-Space approach to familial relations and the legacy of violence and vengeance. (There's a third - memory and identity-creation through creative retelling of one's backstory - which I'll come to below).

The uplands are a paradise and a haven, to a certain way of thinking: they represent the opportunity to live and be, well, rich and geeky, devoid of such pesky curbs upon one's freedom as laws and, naturally, taxes. As a young Klara - half-smug, half-ironic - tells Kristin Jansen Kooistra, the woman she later blames for her father's death:

"It's a free land. Give me liberty or give me death."

"No police," [Kooistra] said, musingly.

"None of that. No government, no taxes."

Through Klara's retrospective and transparently self-serving narration, we see several examples of how this absence of law plays out - and, in the community's treatment of an ongoing dispute between Klara and her ex-lover, Jon, how soon the search for some sort of retributive justice rears its head, albeit an impromtu and easily derailed one. Lacking conventional channels through which to seek redress for her father's murder, Klara settles on personal revenge - although, as is characteristic of the novel, with a certain wry self-awareness:

It's easy to talk about melodramatic quests for vengeance when you're drunk and amongst friends who egg you on, but people can't actually live their lives that way, outside Viking sagas and Shakespeare plays.

The irony is a double one, in fact, for several of her descendants do indeed live their lives this way. The events of the middle section - ruthlessly single-minded Gradi's quest to forge a united, functioning society from the disparate tin cans of the uplands, and her sacrifice of an unborn child to this end - warp the lives of every member of the family. Gradi is Agamemnon, sacrificing Iphigenia for a fair wind to Troy; her husband Paul, whose child it is, is thereby tipped over the edge into doing a Clytemnestra; Gradi's surviving children (by other fathers), Sol and Hope, grow up to be Electra and Orestes, respectively (in the spirit of the Euripides version, i.e. half-maddened). This is interesting in and of itself: the characters are extremely well-drawn (Paul in particular, a complete weasel of a man and yet a pathetic one in the strict sense) and their motivations are convincing, even if their passions are often portrayed remarkably clinically; they are certainly not strait-jacketed by the parallels.

But Roberts also transmutes the mythic formula for his thematic purposes. Thus, the court case set-piece of the Eumenides - the final part of the Oresteian trilogy, in which Orestes faces the Furies for the crime of matricide, and is cleared by Athena on a legalistic technicality, representing a move from personal revenge to impersonal law(yers) - is brought forward. Here it is the Clytemnestra figure who is put on trial, as Hope seeks a distance from the act:

"We don't have to execute him! We could imprison him."

Sol shouts, "Brother, brother, he killed our ma!"

"I don't want his blood on my hands!" cries Hope.

Gradi being the revered founder of a nation, of course, this trial is every bit as vengeful as might be expected of frontier justice; but the fact that it takes place at all is a sign of how the Uplands have been transformed into a community by shared hardship and dreams, and of where this community might go in the future.

Onto the "well-crafted" part, then. Gradisil is a novel steeped in self-awareness, fascinated by the mechanics (and limitations) of storytelling. Roberts is an academic (of English lit), and it shows: Gradisil is full of formal exploration, from a playful and alienating look at language change (expressed in modified spellings, such as the removal of "c" from words ending in "-ck", all of which put me in mind of the mid-1990s German spelling reform), to the artful construction of the various competing narratives. (There's also sly, intertextual humour aplenty; although when Gradi says "misunderestimating" at one point, it's funny but potentially a clever-clever step too far).

Klara and Paul, our two first-person narrators, provide stories that are heavily partisan and entirely shaped by hindsight, told in tones that veer between the conversational and the self-consciously high-flown. Both frequently appeal to their audience as witness or jury, seeking to justify their actions and shape what will be remembered of them: Paul tries to present Gradi in the most reprehensible light as woman and mother and politician, though he cannot conceal his slavish love for her; Klara, leaving young Gradi behind on Earth when she returns to the uplands, notes that "in some sense, I had completed my duties as a parent, that at twelve Gradi had moved into adulthood." Both lie like crazy; both, moreover, admit to the necessarily schematic nature of a story told about events many years past, and the problems of reporting dialogue with anything like accuracy. The retelling is symbolic, representative, rather than truth. Klara concludes one scene with a short commentary on "the speech I have put into Jon's mouth"; elsewhere, Paul comments:

Of course she didn't say any of that. Can you imagine Gradi making a speech like that? I am extrapolating from several conversations, much less obviously aggressive on her part, over several occasions. I am trying to capture not the canny, considered mode of her speaking, but wat was in her mind.

In the third part, meanwhile, the omniscient narrator (who is, again, hyper-aware of the audience being addressed) makes asides like this:

Hope tries his meditative mantra to try and calm his poor little fish-on-the-riverbank heart. He repeats, silently to himself, his personal mantric phrase. Repeats it, re-repeats it. I can't tell you wat his phrase was, I'm afraid; it's an intimate secret, one he has told neither his wife nor any of his four children.

There's a danger, of course, that all this narrative playfulness could overshadow the experience of the novel as a novel. Certainly, I found the enforced and emphasised distance made Gradi tricky to get a handle on, both as a person and as an icon; it is to be expected (and is probably for the best) with a character of this nature, one who must inspire multitudes and then be sanctified, but it sometimes felt, especially in the early stages, as if her once-in-a-generation talents were discussed more often than they were demonstrated.

I also never connected with Slater in the way that Vicky did - but the extended passage describing his fall to Earth (under complicated circumstances) really is an astonishing, soaring piece of writing, showing what Roberts can do when he lays aside the irony for a while.

~~~~

Vicky:  Nic is right to highlight Roberts' tricky narratives - the way Klara and Paul constantly apologise for themselves; the way they fictionalise and transform events and individuals.  I think Gradisil is a particularly interesting character in this light.  She is, after all, the nexus of the novel and the catalyst for change in the Uplands...and yet she has no voice of her own.  The vision we have of her is entirely that given by Paul who, lonely and rejected, is hardly an objective observer.  I suspect this is why her qualities and talents don't sit quite right with her reputation: because Paul is incapable of understanding her charisma, he also fails to convince us.  Similarly he is unable to explain her appeal to the Uplanders - he knows she is popular, that she inspires incredible loyalty, but is somewhat immune to that appeal.

As for Slater, I admit that I was initially wooed to his character by the passage that Nic mentions - the long meditation on his fall to earth.  I leave you with a taste of it:

'He is going to die up here, soaring over the heads of everbody he knows, round and round, a man unsheathed. In a sense, he thinks, he has been pinned to the upper branches of the world tree and left to die of exposure, which gives his death an ancient and primitively pagan bitterness... He comes around the corner of the world and the sun emerges in its splendour, the splendour it wears every day and every night regardless of humanity's attention or inattention; indeed, not only careless of human observation but actively hostile to it. Burn out your eyes! Bright white focal point, look away, mauve afterimage, hanging as insistently in the centre of vision as a bothersome fly in the summertime.'

Unlocking the Tapestry

...'she knows that tangle of truth and lies, real life and make-believe, stained with sweat and blood, unpicked, restitched and probably covered with cat hair, is unique, a miracle of human endeavour in all its savagery and devotion.' ('The Needle in the Blood', Sarah Bower)

First, before I write anything else, I want to tell you just how good this book is.  I don't want to be coy about it; I don't want to prevaricate.  I just want to say, honestly: measured on a scale of books that are good and books that are ok and books that suck, this book is mind-bogglingly good.  I mean, I liked it.  I mean, I loved it.  I mean, I was so filled up with the pure joy of reading it, that I forgot that I'm ever a stickler or a critic or a cynic.  I forgot that medieval historical 'romance' makes me twitchy and that the merest whiff of 'womens' fiction' gives me hives.  And if that sounds unguarded, well, that's what lit-blogs are occasionally meant for - spontaneous and unabashed enthusiasm.

I've mentioned before that when The Needle in the Blood arrived from the lovely people at SnowBooks, I felt a good deal of uncertainty. The blurb with all its talk of sex and lies and enemies and lovers, all bound up with 1067 and the Bayeux Tapestry, did almost nothing for me.  I had that vague sense of foreboding that all historians feel when a novelist takes a pen to their period. (How will they skew the past to fit the contemporary readers' desire? What ludicrous things will they have historical figures say or do?  What myths will they doggedly perpetuate?) But Sarah Bower came with impressive credentials - Literature Development Officer for Creative Arts East; a tutor on East Anglia's very prestigious Creative Writing course; two years as UK editor for Historical Novels Review - and I was willing to give it a try. I'm so glad that I did.

In 1049, when Odo fitz Herluin de Conteville was in his mid-teens he became bishop of Bayeux under the aegis of his half brother, William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy.  Sixteen years later in 1066 he played a decisive, if not entirely definable role, in the Conquest of England whereby his brother became King and he became the Earl of Kent, the second most powerful man in England (and Normandy). Boasting land in 23 counties and a phenomenal groundswell of wealth, he appears to have had his fingers firmly in many temporal pies: politicking, fighting and indulging his body's desires.  Like many clergymen of his day he saw no contradiction between being a man of God and being a man of the world.  We know that he had at least one son, John (who survived him and became a regular at the court of Odo's nephew, Henry I), a testament to his libido; we know that he had an eye for beauty and for luxury and we know that he was pathologically ambitious. We think, although we can not be sure, that he commissioned the Bayeux Tapestry, the most beguiling and tricky artefact to survive from the eleventh century. (You Tube has a snazzy animation of part of the Tapestry here.)

This is the factual background to The Needle in the Blood, which opens at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and closes with the completion and display of the Tapestry in 1077.  The story it tells in between is a speculation on what historians do not, and cannot, know - how the tapestry was conceived; how it was designed and executed; how it came to be so idiosyncratic; and what it was meant to convey.  Being fiction it can do what historians can't (or, at least, shouldn't).  That is, it can find recourse in the vagaries of individual action and emotion, imputing motive and meaning where the historical record is woefully silent.  It can turn the making of the Tapestry into a properly human drama. (Think Novalis: 'Novels arise out of the short-comings of history.')

In 1066 Aelfgyva is an embroiderer and hand-maiden to Edith Swan Neck, King Harold's concubine, and a first-hand witness to the terrible devastation of the Norman invasion.  She sees the Saxon nobility thoroughly routed, her mistress hauled away in a cart to God knows where and the King's city of Winchester over-run by Odo, newly made the Earl of Kent.  Left destitute, unmarried and without protection, she does what lots of women in her situation have done throughout time: she becomes a prostitute.  Months pass, she looses hope of finding Edith and increasingly retreats into bitter fantasies of revenging herself on Odo, the despicable face of Norman cruelty.  Then she receives an unexpected visitor: a Norman nun, Agatha, commissioned by Odo to recruit embroiderers for a great project, a tapestry to chronicle and justify the Conquest.  Apparently, despite everything, Aelfgyva's neat hands and skill with a needle have not been forgotten.  She seizes upon her chance to get close enough to the great man to take some kind of vengence: if she cannot kill him, she can at least destroy something dear to him.  What follows is perfectly predictable: against their natures and strong wills, Odo and Aelfgyva develop a mutual attraction, fuelled as much by hate and disdain as by liking, and eventually fall in love. She becomes his mistress and a point of divisive conflict with the Church and with his brother. (*See below for some historical Tapestry stuff.)

It is what Sarah Bowers does with this material, perfectly mundane in itself, that raises the piece from a romance to literary historical novel.  Her narratorial style is initially disconcerting - a kind of omniscient third-person in the present tense, reminiscent of children's books - but is quickly reconciled and her prose is honestly quite startling. She has a gift for simile, and for descriptive language; she likes to stack images, smells and sensations in long, intense paragraphs.  This, for example, of Aelfgyva's first glimpse of the sketch plan for the Tapestry:

'Some are charcoal sketches on vellum, mostly palimpsests showing blurred ghosts of their previous uses beneath the fresh drawings, others are painted in linen but unframed, their raw edges curled and fraying. So striking are they, so alive in the warm, flickering, uncertain light, that Gytha [another form of Aelgyva] is indignant at the careless way they have been pinned up, a prey to dust and light, or the first gust of wind strong enough to rip them from the walls.  They make little sense to her, showing scenes as varied as ploughing and ship building, the preparation for a banquet, a hunting party, a farmer among his vines, but it scarcely maters.  They have, not beauty exactly, but a sense of authenticity... Peering at the images as they shimmer into view, she can smell the turned earth, hear the sucking, sighing waves and the hammering of shipwrights, taste the grapes, the way the sweet juice bursts into the back of your mouth when you press the fruit between tongue and teeth until the skin splits.'

Or this, the great feast given for Odo's birthday:

'This is a nightmare, a dream of excess of the sort you might fall prey to if you go to bed hungry.  There is too much of everything, not a square inch of the bleached linen spread over the high table that isn't covered by a dish of food.  Venison haunches marinated in red wine with cloves, fowl stuffed teasingly one inside the other, starting with swans and bustards, ending with ortolans and quails, squirrels' legs fried in sweet batter and pasties of songbirds crowned with tiny, gilded beaks.  There are wild boar, and tame rabbits kept in cupboards in the kitchen, force fed herbs and corn. Dishes of peas in cream and parsnips stewed with saffron, dried figs and apricots from Aquitaine washed down with sweet muscat from Provence...'

The novel is like this through and through. Languid and deliberate in its telling, vivid and tangible in its world-building.  Characters are similarly well-made, composite pieces and shown rather than told. Aelfgyva is herself a palimpsest of sorts, wrought out by a loveless first marriage and by four children dead in infancy, by her experiences of the Saxon court and of prostitution.   She is constantly seeking herself out:

'Where am I, she asks herself, where am I? Who is this woman with gold in her hair and the eyes of a mermaid? She looks for herself for a long time... But there are so many selves.  Peeping through the legs of the adults is the little girl growing up on oysters and fishhead broth, the silver black estuary... dream princesses, virgin-skinned witches with wits honed like shark's teeth.  Here is the bride wreathed with ivy and almond blossoms, carried to her bridegroom's house...and here the young wife, earnest, hardworking, awkward and disappointed in her husband's arms. The mother she will not look at, nor the ghosts whose tiny hands clutch at her skirts.  Here is the lay sister sewing her tears into altar clothes, and here she dresses her lady for love, taking her time... The whore... And backwards, and forwards, to the dark woman of Odo's deams.  That is all she is, why her reflection wavers and fades in front of her as though she is watching herself drown. She is Odo's dream.'

She is violently self-aware: aware of how her sexuality simultaneously weakens and strengthens her social position, of how precarious her status as Odo's mistress really is, of how vulnerable women generally are and of how narrow their scope of influence.  The novel is populated with women in similarly difficult situations - Judith, a Saxon widow pleading with Odo for her mere subsistence and the lives of her grandsons; Margaret and Alwys, unmarriagable twins; Emma, a mute who suffers from epileptic spasms; Agatha, Odo's sister and a nun not out of choice but out of necessity; the Countess of Mortain, barren and put-aside; and the Conqueror's own wife, Matilda, caught between the rivalries of her husband and sons', virtually imprisoned in Rouen.  Bowers has an excellent grasp of the bonds of kinship, obligation, religion and biology that bind these women together, and of how they're complicated by the Conquest itself. 

Similarly, she understands the bonds of vassalage and fealty that exist between Odo, his brothers, his allies and his enemies.  Odo is deliciously drawn, a man of 'vices mingled with virtues' as Orderic Vitalis would have it in his (broadly contemporary) Ecclesiastical History.  He is at once a compassionate lover, father and loyal brother, and a harsh master.  His justice is brusque and his temper is short; he thinks nothing of destroying villages or striking a woman; he kicks his dog and accepts rape as a consequence of war.  He is absolutely a man (and a bishop) of the eleventh century, a product of his education in the Church and of his position in the social hierarchy - ambitious, ruthless and acquisitive, but human.  At no point does Bower give into the temptation to make him a 'modern' man - so many male leads in historical romance are 'ahead of their time', incongruously sentimental and feminist.  He loves Aelfgyva but is, at times, despicable and unthinking, just as she is, at times, submissive and credulous.  He is realistically torn between his love for God, for power, for his brother and for his mistress.

Finally though, it is the way The Needle in the Blood stays true to the spirit of its endeavour that beguiles me.  The way it seeks to evoke its period and the way it maintains its characters in context, the way it wears its research lightly and heavily at the same time, the way it makes no concessions to the cliches of its romance plot. The way it alienates and then reconciles its readers to the difficult themes of the eleventh century and of the Conquest.  Truly, if there is such a thing as a good medieval historical romance, this is it.   

~~Victoria~~

*What this plot seeks to do is 'explain' one of the most disputed images on the Tapestry, the one subtitled Ubi unus clericus et Aelgyva and featuring a tonsured man caressing/slapping an English woman:

The image is mysterious for any number of reasons - because of where it appears in the narrative, because Aelfgyva is a common English name, because of the suggestive sexual image in the margin below it and because of the ambiguity of the priest's action - and has proved intractable.  For years commentators have been suggusting that Aelfgyva is the subject of a sexual scandal of the day and have identified her as various high ranking Englishwomen, although none are satisfactory.  Alternatively, it has been suggested that the image is a simple metaphor for the Norman chastisement of the English. Personally I think this problematic - true, the Tapestry is full of metaphor but no other scene is purely metaphorical and it is principally dedicated to action.  I think Bower's explanation is neatly satisfying, if entirely unlikely.

Saint Xinran and the Women of China

I spent most of this Sunday past cloistered with The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices, a non-fiction expose on women's lives in modern China penned by a radio presenter called Xinran. Not out of personal preference I should add, but because it was chosen for the last meeting of the York Lesbian Book Group.  The group is small and select, run by Read Write York and meets monthly at our local library.  Ostensibly the purpose is to discuss 'quality lesbian paperbacks' but, since these are rarer than they should be, the remit has been extended to cover mostly anything.  Last month I chose Patrick Suskind's wonderful Perfume, and this month a fellow group member chose Xinran.

Ugh. The resultant comparison is hardly favourable.

Esther read it first - with a persistant scowl, groans and the occasional yelp - and I really, really didn't want to pick it up. I had it pegged as a syrupy litany of womens' victimhood, written to appeal to that peculiar UK market for misery memoir and compounded by the exoticism of its Chinese subject matter.  In the end I was forced: Est was determined that I should suffer too.  And suffer I did: The Good Women of China was everything I dreaded, but worse, much worse than I imagined.  I hadn't factored the author into my calculations.

The prologue introduces us to the book's fearless and saintly heroine Xinran - who also happens to be our author - a Chinese radio presenter who moved to the UK in 1997.  She recalls how, exiting a tube station in London, a thief attempted to steal her bag; and how she resolutely refused to let it go and subsequently wrestled him to the ground in defense of her property.  When questioned later by the police and chastised for taking such a risk, she stated that she had to 'save her book': the only copy of The Good Women of China was in her purse.  And she could not countenance loosing it for, verily, it was her life's work and the vehicle by which she could present herself to the world.  Oh, and highlight the plight of Chinese women too.

What follows is a series of vignettes - 'true' stories from women of different walks of life whom she met during her stint as a presenter of 'Tales on a Night Breeze', a radio show highlighting womens' issues in China. Many of them prove devastating and moving: here are women who have lost their whole families in earthquakes; and here a woman who has been reduced to scavenging in dumpsters for food; and here a woman who has suffered years of sexual abuse at the hands of her father; and here a woman with mental health issues being raped with a stick.  But some read as pure stereotype - the obsessive, suicidal lesbian and the tribal women who (*shock*) don't wear make-up - and others seem downright unlikely.  One thing remains constant thoughout however: Xinran is the centre of every piece.  Each one is prefaced and rounded off with little anecdotes about how caring and daring she is, how radical and how generous.  She particularly likes quoting other people - colleagues, friends, fans, perfect strangers - saying how caring, daring, radical and generous she is.  She also enjoys: explaining ad nauseum that her radio show is unbelievably popular; fulminating on the number of letters she receives from adoring listeners each week; blushing over her incredible power and popularity. All, you understand, because of her insights into the female psyche.

What saddens me is that there surely are insights to be had from her experiences; and women's lives are worth exploring. But Xinran sits so squarely in the way, moralising and editorialising, that it's impossible to get to the real women behind the window-dressing.  And there is a lot of window-dressing.  It seems quite clear to me that Xinran has fictionalised parts of her 'true' stories.  The number of coincidences is uncanny: she is always at the right party or conference, or randomly meeting the right person, or staying in the right hotel.  She is forever *intruding* into her narratives. She has to be there, taking part - holding the hand of a grieving woman, being offered sex toys by a lesbian or sitting up in silence all night with a doomed lover.  She doesn't seem to understand that these are not her stories; that they belong to someone else.  Colonising them is a terrible act of violence on her part and robs them of their immediacy and impact.  The realness, the horror, is muted by it.  Even her most unpleasant stories, chock full of rape and death, are in some way romanticised, concerned with endless endurance and womens' purity of heart.   And she seems to think that her own endurance in gathering the stories, and remaining strong through the pain of listening to them, is particularly worth noting.

I wish I could have gotten past her, I really do.  I wish that The Good Women of China had been a meaningful book about Chinese women, with context and proper research and balanced case studies.  I wish that it had even half the impact of Yiyun Li's short fiction collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayer which contained several stories concerned with the lives women live in China.  It had immediacy and wealth of emotion; and, despite being fiction, an objectivity that Xinran's writing lacks.  I direct you to Li posthaste, while Xinran has now been returned to the library, never to be seen again.

~~Victoria~~

The Orange Shortlist, 2007

The Orange shortlist for 2007 was announced this morning and this is it:

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fourth Estate)

Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk (Faber)

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton)

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo (Chatto & Windus)

The Observations by Jane Harris (Faber)

Digging to America by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus)

Some interesting choices I think. The Adichie and the Desai seemed to be foregone conclusions, but I wasn't expecting The Observations to be there.  Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it - a hearty pastiche with a strong narrator - but I thought the end was somewhat soggy end and the overall ambience a little slack. (If it won it would be a slap in the face to Sarah Waters who failed to win with her vastly superior Victorian number, Fingersmith.)  However, I was expecting to see Carry Me Down by MJ Hyland, which I considered a great literary novel, and I had thought that Stef Penney's Tenderness of Wolves might make it.  Three of the books - the Xiaolu Guo, Rachel Cusk and the Anne Tyler - have been somewhat off my radar, something which I mean to rectify as quickly as possible. 

My prediction at this moment? I think Adichie is the most likely winner, but Kiran Desai is my quiet favourite.  I think that The Inheritance of Loss is one of those peculiar novels that works on you over time, so that, although you may not have seen all its best qualities at first, they emerge clearly in retrospect.

In other news, Cormac McCarthy has won the Pulitzer Prize for The Road.  Which is a sound and clearsighted piece of judging I think.

~~Victoria~~

And then we saw the daughter of the minotaur

You may have noticed Alexandria's extreme quiet in the last week or so since, for one reason or another, we've been unable or uninclined to post.  Nic has the better excuse - she is currently at home with her parents, and without internet access; while I've been working on some reviews for elsewhere, recovering from our hectic trip to London and cultivating an ambience of weekend serenity. This mostly involved sitting out in the sun and reading a lot, but also riding in a massive ferris wheel that gives amazing views of the Vale of York and considering the intricacy of steam engines (at The National Railway Museum).  My intention is to make up for this inertia by a) writing a series of short posts (can you believe it?!) about what I've been reading recently, hopefully to appear over the next few days, and b) giving you this link and tantalising you with the image below.  It is the work of Leonora Carrington (b. 1917) and appears on the front of Esther's new 'currently reading' The Seventh Horse and Other Stories.  I think it is wonderful, and that Carrington is a woefully undernoted artist of the 20th century.  If you like what you see, you should check out Susan Aberth's excellent book on her, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art, which is well worth the cover price.

Good night.

~~Victoria~~

The Conjugal Debt

On occasion I read a novel that requires something in the way of immediate comment, not (necessarily) because it is a work of particular genius or poverty, but because it provokes something essential in me.   A mental turn, if you like, either positive or negative. This happens less often now than I thought it would in the heady days of my early teens, when every book I read was a life-changing experience, every novel a revelation or an insult unto itself.  Now I can whole-heartedly adore or hate something without it having this effect; for example, it happened only once last year, even though it was a year with reading highs and lows.  (The catalyst then was Marilynne Robinson's Gilead.)  And so I'm surprised to have read two novels, both short, in as many months that have tipped and challenged my literary equilibrium.  The first was The Road by Cormac McCarthy, an extroadinary contemporary novel of undeniable powers (which I reviewed here); the second, finished only this week, was Ian McEwan's new little novel, On Chesil Beach.

It is by no means a perfect book; on finishing it I immediately thought of a problematic lacuna in its plot (from my point of view, at least) and I sometimes think that McEwan enjoys stating, rather than exploring, human emotion.  And, unlike The Road, it didn't make me quiver and exclaim and extol its virtues loud and long.  I don't think it will become a contemporary classic.  But it worked for me, and convinced me, and touched something extroadinarily personal in me. 

As regards prose, and like the other McEwan novels I've read (admittedly, only Atonement and Saturday), it was almost perfectly executed and controlled.  It was beautifully understated while, at the same time, desperately frustrating, trading on fallibility and wretched misunderstanding.  Like them, it did a masterful job of recreating the awkward comedy and melodrama of human relations, especially sexual relations, overlaid with a sense of their depth and meaning and playfulness.  It handled the narrowness and frequent meanness of personal tragedy with characteristic aplomb.  And it left me with a strong sense of both outrage and identification.

It is July, 1962.  Edward and Florence - newly-wed; bristling with uncertainty and confusion - are spending their honeymoon at a hotel in Dorset, situated right on the shoreline of Chesil Beach.  They're both young, only 22, and both university educated - Edward is a history graduate from University College London, while Florence is a violinist trained at the Royal College of Music.  They're  both ambitious, in their own ways (Edward, lazily, to write short historical biographies; Florence, desperately, to play the Wigmore Hall with her string quartet), and they're are deeply, deeply in love.  For now though, on their wedding night, they're both consumed with thoughts of consummation: with sex. For Edward 'the matter was rarely out of his thoughts...his fear of failure was great, his eagerness - for rapture, for resolution - was far greater.'  He hasn't masturbated for a whole week in preparation. He is determined to be in tip-top condition; he is:

'...mesmerised by the prospect that on the evening of a given date in July the most sensitive portion of himself would reside, however briefly, within a naturally formed cavity inside this cheerful, pretty, formidably intelligent woman.'

Florence's sensations are somewhat different; her anxieties are more serious:

'...she experienced a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness. For much of the time, through all the months of merry wedding preparation, she managed to ignore this stain on her happinesss, but whenever her thoughts turned towards a close embrace - she prefered no other term - her stomach tightened dryly, she was nauseous at the back of her throat.'

Neither of them knows how to express their sexual feelings or apprehensions, however, because: ' they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.'  It is several years before the sexual revolution; the Pill is still 'a rumour in newspapers, a ridiculous promise', the only permissible sex still, by and large, occurs inside of marriage and sex education remains the province of euphemism and the bridal handbook.  And so our couple eat their insipid wedding dinner - melon with a glace cherry; overcooked beef and watery vegetables - and begin the difficult matter of negotiating the middle way between sex and love. 

Interspersed with these scenes of their wedding night, which are both discomforting and compelling, is the history of their meeting and of their chaste love affair.  This, I think, is where McEwan's contruct fails him a little - Edward and Florence fumbling with each other on their wedding night is pathetic, gruesome and stickily real, but their early lives and love verges on caricature.   He comes from an eccentric country idyll - the fruit of the loins of a bumbling headteacher and his brain-damanged wife -  and has grown up in an atmosphere of gentile and messy poverty. As a result, he is at ease with himself and the world.  She, on the contrary, has developed in an atmosphere of wealth and control - her mother, an academic; her father, a successful businessman - and suffered under the stern disapproval of both of her parents.  It is possible, McEwan goes on to suggest, that she has been sexually abused by her father and that her mother, either consciously or unconsciously, resents her for it. 

This dichotomy of upbringing is meant, I think, to go some way to explaining and exploring their different attitudes to sex and their different approaches to intimacy.  But I find it problematical, not least because it seems to suggest that Florence is 'damaged' in an essential way and that her sexuality has consequently been stunted.  Admittedly, McEwan is careful never to say outright that 'Florence abhors sex because her father raped her', but still, he intimates it.  Why?  For me it represents a failure to honestly engage with the narrative of women's sexuality that he has set for himself: child abuse, even the merest hint of it, is too obvious an answer to questions of feminine libido and lusts, or the lack of them.  It feeds too clearly into stereotypes about 'frigidity', lesbianism and asexualism and into overtly Freudian diagnoses of feminine 'aberration'. 

This failure as regards Florence is symptomatic of the novel's general bias towards Edward, his life and his longings; the flashbacks more frequently concern him than her, and the denouement of the book focuses almost entirely of his future life.  What happens to Florence before or after the couple's difficult wedding night is never properly confronted or explored; her life is subject to a far more cursory exegesis than Edward's, and the resultant lacuna is daunting in a novella that has only two characters.  If this was a function of the novel's narrator - if 'he' were an actor in the same era, predisposed to disregard women's experience - I would be more willing to except it, but McEwan's narrator has all the benefit of hindsight and speaks with a showy omnipotence that makes Florence's narrowness more difficult to explain.

Nevertheless, although I consider this denial of Florence to be a flaw in the narrative, I don't think that it necessarily disfigures the whole enterprise. Indeed, I can bring myself to argue that it makes the novella more interesting, that it forces us to think more carefully about sex and sexuality.  I'm struck by the continued relevance of the 'conjugal debt' - in modern terms, the economy of sex that is considered inevitable and essential between men and women: the novel is a period piece certainly, but these same issues continue to dog our lives, perhaps even more so than they once did.  It would be foolish to think that sexual liberation has freed women (or men) from feelings, reservations and horrors like those which Florence experiences in On Chesil Beach.  Sexual difficulty is still virtually impossible to speak about and difficult for McEwan to approach: imagine a modern woman, facing the man (or woman) she loved, and declaring 'I do not like sex; I do not want to have sex with you.'  It would still be unacceptable; even more unacceptable now in an age where sex is an act of independence and power, an act in which all but the most religious are encouraged to participate without qualm.   If a woman says those things modern parlance determines that she is 'repressed' or in denial or psychologically damaged; her sexuality has been 'blocked' in some way, perhaps by abuse or a bad experience.

But what if none of that is true: what if her 'sexuality' is just radically different, what if her reluctance has nothing to do with fear or oppression and everything to do with preference and desire.  It is this possibility that touches me most with On Chesil Beach: that both Florence and Edward are constrained and doomed not by their inability to have sex but by the narrowness of their sexual paradigm.  Toward the end of the novel Edward allows himself to consider 'what if'; what if he had allowed Florence the freedom to accept and practise her peculiar form of conjugal love?  Perhaps, he intimates, they didn't need to centralise sex after all. I find this a provocative and interesting idea.

~~Victoria~~ 

Confessions

It's been something of a sparkly week for acquisitions here at the York branch of the Alexandrian library.  Not a day has gone by without a book purchase or the arrival of a yummy book parcel. 

It began last Sunday with a trip to Borders where, with a 20% off voucher burning a hole in my pocket, I bought Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk, the first book in his Cairo Trilogy.  I've had my eye on it for quite sometime - apparently 'a sweeping and evocative portrait of a family and a country moving towards independence', it is set against the backdrop of Egypt's occupation by Britain at the end of the First World War and focuses on the Al Jawad family.  It is the story of how Ahmed, a middle-class shopkeeper who rules over his wife, daughters and three sons with an iron will, struggles and adapts in the face of social and political upheaval.

Then, on Monday, two huge book parcels arrived for me, one from Amazon and the other from the very nice people at Gollancz.  I hadn't expected the former for at least another couple of weeks, given what I thought was the publication date of Ian McEwan's new novel On Chesil Beach; I'd preordered it under the misapprehension that it came out on April 5th.  But nevermind. (Very lucky that I had enough money in the bank at the end of the month!)  As well as the McEwan (which I've already read - wonderful!), I'd splashed out on Ellen Kushner's dark fable Thomas the Rhymer, a retelling of the legend of the bard who finds himself the subject of the Queen of Elfland's desire; A Fanatic Heart by Edna O'Brien, a collection of her best short stories (which makes it into Bloom's Western Canon); and The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, the first book in his Gentleman Bastards sequence.  The tempt quotes are, well, tempting: Richard Morgan promises me 'a great swashbuckling yarn', while Hal Duncan dubs it 'a rollicking blast of solid fun.'  Apt as I am to mistrust anyone who uses the work 'rollicking' in relation to a book, I'm willing to take Hal at his word - Lynch created a lot of chatter around the sf community when the book first came out, and praise flowed in from all quarters.  I trust that it'll be worth every effort.

The Gollancz parcel contained three books, all of them Arthur C. Clarke nominees - there's a reason for that; Gollancz are a classy sf publisher - and all of them gratis for review. (I think I'm right in saying they also bestowed their bounty on Nic.  Alexandria feels their love and revels in it.) I was particularly thrilled by my hardback copy of Nova Swing by M. John Harrison, a book that I found both difficult (make that: very difficult) and stimulating (make that: very stimulating). A joint Clarke post will follow from Nic and I, but I'm happy to say here and now that Harrison's book was first a trial and then a revelation to me.  Also in the parcel, Jon Courtney Grimwood's End of the World Blues, a cyber-punk-cum-hard-SF set partly in Tokyo and partly in South London, and Adam Robert's Gradisil, which sounds pretty thrilling to me. One Amazon reviewer assures me: 'Gradisil is a story of do-it-yourself homesteaders living in tin cans in Low Earth Orbit, struggling to remain free of the bickering nations of the Earth beneath them.'   It remains to be seen how accurate a synopsis that really is, but this will be my first Roberts' experience and I have high hopes.

I also got two other parcels with books for review this week: first, from Snowbooks, The Needle in the Blood by debut author Sarah Bower.  Now, I admit that when I read this blurb, my heart sank to my knees:

January 1067. When Odo of Bayeux decides to commission a wall
hanging to celebrate his role in the conquest of Britain by his brother,
William, Duke of Normandy, he cannot anticipate how this will change his
life even more than the invasion itself. As his life becomes entangled with
those of the women who embroider the hanging, he comes into conflict with
his king and his God. Friends and family become enemies, enemies become
lovers, nothing in life or in the hanging is what it seems.

A powerful tale of sex, lies and embroidery, The Needle in the Blood,
challenges the stereotypes of Norman and Anglo Saxon, exploring the effects
of occupation on both sides and all classes of society. It also examines
how women can make lives for themselves in the margins of patriarchal
societies. Its characters are brought together through the making of the
Bayeux Tapestry, one of the best known, yet most enigmatic, of mediaeval
artefacts.

I thought: no, no, no, not another historical romance that works itself up into a faux-medieval frenzy of knights and maidens!  But, I was wrong.  The Needle in the Blood is actually excellent; nay, not only excellent but the best medieval historical I've ever come across.  Bowers is a strong prose stylist (although her narrative mode takes some getting used to) and she has a firm grip on the thematics of eleventh century England - on the interlocking concerns of kinship, politics, art, marginality, vassalage and kingship.  She writes believable female characters; doesn't descend into saccharine with her love story (admittedly she still has time; I'm currently on page 220 of 575) and, best of all, she has an eye for detail.  True, her history is sometimes 'text-book' - it seems like she works in every theory ever posited about the Bayeux Tapestry - but I can see she's done her homework.

The other parcel came from Mark Thwaite at ReadySteadyBook/The Book Depository and contained two books with which I'm only slightly familiar: The Angel Makers by Jessica Gregson and Taming the Beast by Emily Maguire.  Both are published by small publishers and, if their first pages are anything to go by, have promise.  Dovegreyreader liked the Gregson very much (in a post I just can't find, despite searching), and so I have high hopes.

The remainder of the above pile - Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Hills; Patricia Ferguson's Peripheral Vision; and Careless by Deborah Robertson - are library books and so perhaps don't count in my confesions.  They're all Orange longlisters and I doubt my ability to get through them before the shortlist anouncement. There are just too many other good books in my path!  I dread to think what my confession will be after our Alexandrian gathering in London this week. Eeep.

~~Victoria~~