It has been a little quiet at Alexandria recently. As always, I have excuses - academic work, paid work, review work and the preparation for a little teaching job starting in April have all been eating up my time. In an attempt to rectify the situation, and yet still leave the evenings free, I've decided to embark upon a series of short lunch-time posts to fill the gap until life quietens down again. I thought it best to characterise them as 'Reading Notes', since they will be freeform and unedited, as notes are often want to be. So, without further ado...
Recently I have been reading the debut 'fantasy' books shortlisted for the 2008 Crawford Award as part of a longish review project for Strange Horizons, and I wanted to mention one of the nominees in particular. I don't know about you but I hadn't heard of Ron Currie's novel-cum-short story sequence God Is Dead (published in the UK by Picador) until the Crawford list was announced in January. I have an inkling that it received more publicity in the US than it did in the UK - I could only find one review online, from the Guardian, which I evidently missed the first time around - and I haven't seen it around the blogs. Which is a crying shame. Currie is a very promising young writer and God Is Dead is a brilliant debut.
Its title is also its plot: God is, literally, dead. He died in a Janjaweed raid on a refugee camp in Darfur, sometime in 2004, having taken the form of a Dinka tribeswoman in order to go amongst His people. Omnipresent but hardly omnipotent, He is as powerless as anyone else to stop the suffering and pain around him, although He feels guilty and very sorry about it. When death comes, it comes to Him as well. His corpse is subsequently eaten by a pack of hyenas, who inherit His all-knowingness (and incredible isolation) and spread the news of His demise around the world.
What follows is a series of aftermath stories, thematically linked but equally as capable of standing alone. In the first, a group of college friends make a suicide pact in the face of the ensuing breakdown of order and society; in another, a psychiatrist battles against an epidemic of child-worship that has emerged to fill the God vacuum; and in another, one of the hyenas who ate God explains the horror of feeling everything. The stories nest into each other chronologically, but are otherwise non-continuous. They're vignettes, I suppose, and character studies, and conjectures about what the world would do without its favourite crutch.
Putting aside the deliciousness of the concept itself, Currie is a wonderful writer: his prose is fluid and eloquent, as well as clean and tight. And his psychological insight is wide-eyed and violent; he is entirely unafraid of where his ideas inevitably must lead him. I'm incredibly excited about the way he has brought his disperate stories together into a debut novel, and can't wait to see what he does once he attains the full height of his powers. Whether or not it is 'fantasy' (the point is questionable), and whether or not it is eligible for the Crawford Award, is pretty much beside the point for me now. I already know who has won - the winner is announced at the same time as the shortlist - and it isn't Currie. But it should be.
~~Victoria~~