Eve's Alexandria

"You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike."

I spent the four-day Easter weekend at Orbital, this year's Eastercon (the UK national science fiction convention). For those unaware, the emphasis of an Eastercon is largely on the literary (and beer-ish) side of the genre (although there was one chap dressed as a Klingon; naturally, he made it into the "look at the geeks!" newspaper coverage of the con...) - the programme of events is based largely around discussion panels on a host of bookish and related topics, peopled by a mixture of fans and professionals.

I have a report up at the SFX magazine website here (wherein I managed to call Cory Doctorow an American rather than a Canadian; d'oh!); but a few more personal notes. I had a fabulous time: went to lots of great panels, spoke to lots of great people, bought books, had plenty of good food and beer, and generally basked in the sensation of sharing a building with 1300 people who love the same stories as I do. All very friendly and well-organised, and I can't wait for the next one.

My own event of the weekend, was my own panel: 'The Use of Mythology in Fantasy', at 10am (!) Saturday; with Neil Gaiman, Maura McHugh, Liz Williams and Sarah Singleton:

 

(That's me, second from the right. Photo courtesy of Niall; more here)

I'd been dreading this; I only said yes due to an unfortunate too-much-wine-during-a-programming-meeting incident, although nominally I was there to bring a historical perspective, since a large section of my PhD is about how medieval Arabic writers incorporated mythic stories and characters into historical chronicles. My first ever con panel, on stage with the con's headline guest of honour, while legions of his fans look on? 'Nervous' doesn't even begin to cover it. And lo, despite the ungodly hour, the main hall was indeed packed.

And lo, despite the ungodly hour, when I arrived in the green room before the panel, and was asked what I'd like to drink, I blurted out, "Beer!"

And lo, despite the ungodly hour, beer was brought for me.

Five minutes into the panel, to be precise. Yes, once we'd all sat down and introduced ourselves and just as Neil Gaiman was launching into his first point, a brimming pint glass suddenly hove into view. Cue laughter from crowd and panel. "I need this!" I explained (I really did). Cue more laughter, mine mildly bemused by the fact that everyone seemed to be laughing along with me.

The beer vessel was declared fittingly legendary, the ice was broken in the best possible way, and somewhere along the line Neil completely lost his thread. Hee! The panel went wonderfully, and for the rest of the con people kept stopping me to ask about my PhD, and the beer; one even dubbed me 'The Girl Whose Pint Upstaged Neil Gaiman'. I glowed, a lot.

And reflected once again on the many unforeseen ways in which books have transformed my life, and keep on doing so.

~~Nic

Making the Longlist look much longer...

Having spent the last few days moaning about the books that didn't make the Orange Prize longlist, I thought it was about time I looked at what was there more closely. My total ignorance of many of the titles was quite shameful. On the whole the field looks good, certainly better than I'd feared at first; there are several books that I wouldn't ordinarily have touched but will now try. Of course, a few that turn me off, but that is only to be expected and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Anita Amirrezvani The Blood of Flowers (Headline Review)

[Iranian/American, 1st Novel]

First up is The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani, a novel which is ill-served by its cloyingly sentimental press release.  Set in 17th century Iran, it is the 'story of one girl's struggle to live a life of her own choosing'; said girl faces all the obstacles one might expect - controlling male relatives, economic hardship, an unhappy marriage and societal norms - before exerting her 'extroadinary will' to save herself from a 'grim and unfulfilling future.'  Despite the formulaic pitch (aimed, no doubt, at a very specific audience), the background sounds intriguing: 'Set in the legendary time of Shah Abbas the Great, the novel captures the bustle of bazaars overflowing with pomegranates, rosewater and saffron; the breathtakingly beautiful silk and gold rugs of the Shah’s carpet workshop; and Isfahan’s incomparable bridges, gardens, teahouses, and hammams.'  And in an interesting sleight of narrative, the main character is unnamed, thus anonymous and every-woman.  I've placed a library-hold.

Stella Duffy The Room of Lost Things (Virago)

[British, 11th Novel]

Next is Stella Duffy's eleventh novel, The Room of Lost Things.  Having picked up and put down several of Duffy's previous books, I was surprised by the synopsis to this one:

Under his railway arch in Loughborough Junction, South London, Robert Sutton is taking leave of a lifetime of hard work. His dry-cleaning shop lies at the heart of a lively community, a fixed point in a changing world. And, as he explains to his successor, young East Londoner Akeel, it is also the resting place for the contents of his customers' pockets - and for their secrets and lies. As he helps Akeel to make a new life out of his old one, Robert also hands on all he knows of his world: the dirty dip of the Thames; the parks, rare green oases in a desert of high-rises and decaying mansion blocks; and the varied lives that converge at the junction. Humming with life, packed tight with detail, The Room of Lost Things is a hymn of love to a great and overflowing city, and a profoundly human story that holds us in its grip from the first sentence until the last.

I won't be reading it unless it makes the shortlist, but it sounds as though it could be interesting.

Jennifer Egan The Keep (Abacus/Little Brown)

[American, 3rd Novel]

Then there is The Keep by Jennifer Egan, a book that has been on the edge of my vision for a while.  I didn' t know a great deal about it until today though, so you'll forgive me if I just give another synopsis:

'Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank whose devastating consequences changed both their lives, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe, a castle steeped in blood lore and family pride. Built over a secret system of caves and tunnels, the castle and its violent history invoke and subvert all the elements of a gothic past: twins, a pool, an old baroness, a fearsome tower. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youths, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story—a story about two cousins who unite to renovate a castle...—that brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.'

It sounds just the thing for me, but typically the library doesn't have a copy. It might have to be a purchase, unless I can wheedle a copy from the publisher.

Anne Enright The Gathering (Jonathan Cape)

[Irish, 4th Novel]

Anne Enright's The Gathering, winner of the 2007 Booker prize, needs no introduction.  I read it last year and wrote about it here.

Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs (Virago)

[British, 4th Novel]

The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant looks like a novel that wears its metaphor on its sleeve.  Set in 1950s London, it tells the story of Vivien, a sensitive bookish girl, the daughter of reclusive immigrants, who is disturbed to question her identity by the arrival of her glamourous Uncle Sandor.  The press release helpfully points out that it is 'wise and tender novel about the clothes we choose to wear, the personalities we dress ourselves in, and about how they define us all.'  Thank goodness they spelled it; I'd never have riddled that one out for myself.  But, more seriously, this is one of those books that could be either brilliant or terrible.  Grant has won the Orange before, back in 2000 for When I Lived in Modern Times, and is certainly worth a look. 

Tessa Hadley The Master Bedroom (Jonathan Cape)

[British, 3rd Novel]

In contrast, Tessa Hadley's The Master Bedroom sounds like the antithesis of every book I've ever enjoyed:

A single woman at loose ends becomes the object of two men's affections—a father and his teenage son—in this sly, richly drawn novel. After more than twenty years in London, Kate Flynn has returned to her family home in Wales to care for her aging mother. Having cast off her academic career, she is unmoored, and when she runs into a childhood friend, David Roberts, at a concert, she finds herself falling for him, although she knows she's grasping at anything to fill the sudden emptiness of her life. David's seventeen-year-old son, Jamie, is also drawn to Kate's eccentricity and her strange, glamorous old house full of books and music and history. As both father and son set about their parallel courtships, Tessa Hadley's intricate, graceful novel explores the tangled web of connections between parents and children, revealing how each generation replays the stories of the one that came before, in new and sometimes startling patterns.

Undoubtedly, this means that I should challenge my expectations by trying it... but perhaps not until it makes the shortlist.

Nancy Huston Fault Lines (Atlantic Books)

[Canadian, 11th Novel]

I feel ashamed not to have heard of Fault Lines by Nancy Huston.  Originally written in French - the author is Canadian but has lived in France since 1973 - it has already won the Prix Femina, the Orange's French counterpart and been shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt.  It is a generational saga, charting the history of one family from wartime Germany to 1980s Israel to present-day California. Except not quite.  It is told backwards, beginning with Sol, a monstrously precocious six year old who idolises George Bush Jr. and masturbates to images of Iraqi torture and working back to his great-grandmother, an Eastern European child of Aryan appearance kidnapped by the Nazi's under the Lebensborn programme and brought up as a German.  Honestly, it sounds absolutely fascinating.  But of course, the library doesn't have it. Grrrrr.

Gail Jones Sorry (Harvill Secker)

[Australian, 4th Novel]

Does anyone remember this?  Back in 2006 Gail Jones was Orange longlisted for her third book, Dreams of Speaking, a tour de force of baseless literary pretension that provided me with no end of hysterical entertainment. Now she is back with Sorry and, of course, I have to read it.  I'm not sure anyone could produce two novels quite that bad, but I live in hope.  The plot certainly has a lot of scope for error:

'In the remote Australian outback during World War II, the emotionally stunted child of an English couple is befriended by equally adrift strangers. Perdita becomes friends with a deaf and mute boy, Billy, and an Aboriginal girl, Mary. Perdita and Mary soon come to call one another sister and begin to share a profound bond. They are content with life in this barren corner of the world until a terrible event lays waste to their lives.'

I find myself wondering whether the title is a pre-emptive apology.

Sadie Jones The Outcast (Chatto & Windus)

[British, 1st Novel]

Against my better judgement of the cover - it may as well be subtitled 'Fiction for Women of A Certain Age' - I actually like the sound of this.  Set in the home counties in the 1940s and 50s, it focuses on Lewis Aldridge, a 19 year old boy who has just been released after a two year prison sentence for setting fire to his parish church.  A child during the Second World War, Lewis is returning home to his family - his ill-adjusted father, Gilbert, and his difficult stepmother, Alice - in the hope of a new beginning.   It has the potential to be truly saccarhine.  But Mark Thwaite seems to like its chances and who am I to argue.  Duly requested from the library.

Lauren Liebenberg The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam (Virago) 

[South African, 1st Novel]

What does the title make you think of?  Is it 1970s Rhodesia (that is, modern-day Zimbabwe)?  No?  Me neither.  Apparently: 'Nyree and Cia O'Callohan are sisters who live on a remote farm in the East of what was Rhodesia. Beneath the dripping vines of the Vumba rainforest, and under the tutelage of their heretical grandfather, Oupa, theirs is a seductive world laced with African paganism, bastardised Catholicism and the lore of the Brothers Grimm - until their idyll is shattered forever by their orphaned cousin, Ronin. the press release calls it 'a magical evocation of childhood'  The press release also calls it 'laugh-out loud funny' and 'heart-breakingly sad', a combination that conjures The Poisonwood Bible and sets a high standard for comparison.  The cover is lush; faintly disconcerting in its cuteness.  My interest is piqued, but it doesn't come out from Virago until March 31st.   

Charlotte Mendelson When We Were Bad (Picador)

[British, 3rd Novel]

Aha! Finally! A book I've actually heard of; I even started reading it a few months ago. Admittedly it didn't grab me at the time, but I think I was distracted by various other books.  It should be right up my alley what with the Jewish interest:

'The Rubin family, everybody agrees, seems doomed to happiness.

…If this, the few minutes before the wedding, could be frozen and kept unsullied by the future – the Rubins in their heyday – their happiness would be complete. But it cannot be frozen. Things happen.

It is the wedding day of Leo, the glamorous Rabbi Claudia Rubin’s first-born son.  Leo, like his sister Frances before him, like, in fact, the famously happily-married Claudia herself, seems about to marry well.  But even perfect families can fall apart and today, at Leo’s glorious wedding, with every eye upon them, the spectacular fall of the Rubin family is about to begin.'

Deborah Moggach In The Dark  (Chatto & Windus)

[British, 16th Novel]

I shudder slightly everytime I see Deborah Moggach's name.  It has nothing to do with her previous novels (which I've never read), but everything to do with the part she played in the most recent film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, the one starring Keira Knightley.  She wrote the screenplay (with significant borrowings from the great Andrew Davies) and, while I know its unfair, I can't help blaming her for the horror of the bit with the pigs in the hallway or the kiss-in-mist at the end. Ugh.  But back to the Orange Prize.  The novel in question is another historical, set in inner London during the First World War.  Eithne Clay - pretty and enigmatically named - runs a shabby but genteel boarding house while her husband is away at the Front, along with Ralph, her fourteen year old son, and Winnie, a 'good-hearted maid from the country'.  Their lodgers include Alwyne Flyte, a communist, a cynic and a victim of a gas attack in the trenches.  When Eithne's husband is (inevitably) killed, her life, and the life of her dependents, is thrown into turmoil.

Anita Nair Mistress (BlackAmber)

[Indian, 3rd  Novel]

Another novelist and novel I hadn't heard of before. (This whole list business is making me feel very inadequate!) Set in present day India, the plot has a feel of Anita Desai about it (although negated somewhat by the loud cover):

'When travel writer Christopher Stewart arrives at a riverside resort in Kerala to meet Koman, Radha's uncle and a famous kathakali dancer, he enters a world of masks and repressed emotions. From their first meeting, both Radha and her uncle are drawn to the enigmatic young man with his cello and his incessant questions about the past. The triangle quickly excludes Shyam, Radha's husband, who can only watch helplessly as she embraces Chris with a passion that he has never been able to draw from her. Also playing the role of observer-participant is Koman; his life story, as it unfolds, captures all the nuances and contradictions of the relationships being made--and unmade--in front of his eyes.'

Nair's website describes her as one of India's most exciting writers, which is intriguing, if not a little hyperbolic; it's a shame that York City Libraries doesn't have a copy.  Part of the proceed from sales will go to the Nila Foundation set up to revive and regenerate the Nila river in Kerala. 

Heather O'Neill Lullabies for Little Criminals (Quercus)

[Canadian, 1st Novel]

Both the cover and synopsis of this make me think it's being marketed as fiction for the misery memoir generation:

'Baby is twelve. Her mother died soon after she was born so she lives with her father - and his heroin addiction. She's grown up in Montreal' red-light district, never staying anywhere long enough to call it home, and now Baby is losing the only constant in her life; her father. He's been sent to hospital and she's been forced into foster care. She longs for his return; other people's families are no substitute for her own. Starved of affection, Baby is attracted to all the wrong people. And when her father betrays her and she is sent to a juvenile detention centre, she is more at risk than ever. Baby' survival rests on her gift for spinning stories and for cherishing the small crumbs of happiness which fall into her lap. Poised on the threshold between childhood and adult life, she is bright, funny, observant and ultimately wise enough to realize that salvation rests in her hands alone.'

I'm instinctively wary of it and, although I'm hearing good things around the blogosphere, I'm afraid that it will just be an exercise in emotional manipulation. Also, 'Baby'?  I'll reserve judgement until the library puts its copy in my hands.

Elif Shafak The Bastard of Istanbul (Viking)

[Turkish, 7th Novel]

I've both heard of this one (hurrah!) and seriously considered reading it(hurrah again!)  Shafak is one of those writers whose name has been in the back of my mind forever, and The Bastard of Istanbul sounds particularly tempting.  At its center is the bastard of the title - Asya, a nineteen-year-old girl who loves Johnny Cash and the French Existentialists - and the four sisters of the Kazanci family who all live together in an extended household in Istanbul.  There is Zehila, who runs a tattoo parlor and is Asya's mother; Banu, a clairvoyant; Cevriye, a widowed high school teacher; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster. Their one estranged brother lives in Arizona with his wife and her Armenian daughter, Armanoush. When Armanoush secretly flies to Istanbul in search of her identity, she finds the Kazanci sisters and becomes fast friends with Asya. A secret is uncovered that links the two families and ties them to the 1915 Armenian deportations and massacres.

Shafak was prosecuted for 'insulting Turkishness' because of the content of the novel and, although she was eventually acquitted, the BBC has fussed about the 'controversiality' of long listing her.  Of course this makes me want to read it all the more.

Dalia Sofer The Septembers of Shiraz (Picador)

[American, 1st Novel]

Another debut.  I remember Sofer's novel coming out, and dovegreyreader's review of it, but I haven't given it a thought since then. Silly me. It sounds rather good:

'In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, rare-gem dealer Isaac Amin is arrested, wrongly accused of being a spy. Terrified by his disappear-ance, his family must reconcile a new world of cruelty and chaos with the collapse of everything they have known.

As Isaac navigates the tedium and terrors of prison, forging tenuous trusts, his wife feverishly searches for him, suspecting, all the while, that their once-trusted housekeeper has turned on them and is now acting as an informer. And as his daughter, in a childlike attempt to stop the wave of baseless arrests, engages in illicit activities, his son, sent to New York before the rise of the Ayatollahs, struggles to find happiness even as he realizes that his family may soon be forced to embark on a journey of incalculable danger.'

Scarlett Thomas The End of Mr Y (Canongate)

British (7th Novel)

Finally, a book I already own.  I relieved a friend of his surplus copy at New Year and pledged myself to read it as part of my 'I-will-read-all-my-Christmas-presents' challenge.  I've heard it called 'Foucault's Pendulum for the iPod age' and I'm not sure I can synopsise it clearly. Here goes: Ariel Manto is a postgraduate student working in the field of thought experiments with Professor Saul Burnem. Like her teacher she is fascinated by Thomas Lumas, the obscure 19th century author of a book called 'The End of Mr Y'  which nobody has ever read.  Finding a copy in an antique store, Ariel reads Lumas' detailed instructions on how  to enter the "Troposphere," an alternate world where the visitor can travel through time and space by entering other people’s minds and accessing their thoughts and memories. When Ariel uses the instructions to follow in Mr. Y’s footsteps and visit the Troposphere, she discovers a strangely enchanting, strongly addictive world. But she is quickly attacked by two menacing ex-CIA agents who also know the secrets of the Troposphere, men who are determined to enter her mind and destroy her memories.  With me so far? Because this is where it really gets weird: 'Shaking off her pursuers with the help of an errant Jesuit priest and a mouse-god named Apollo Smintheus, who becomes her guide and protector on this journey through consciousness, Ariel sets out to find Saul Burlem [I forgot to mention that he has gone missing by this point] who may be the only person left who can save her.'

Carol Topolski Monster Love (Fig Tree)

[British, 1st Novel]

What is it about novels about coupledom that turns me off? When I read the Guardian review of this I only got as far as 'the perfect couple in the perfect home' and switched off thinking 'meh, another book about the minutiae of a marriage going sour'.  I forced myself a little further this time, and it sounds much more sinister and much more compelling.

'Brendan and Sherilyn. A young couple in love. Each has met their soul mate, and nothing can come between them. In fact, the Gutteridges are so wrapped up in each other that their neighbours barely know them, despite the woman next door’s nosy curiosity. Their families and their work colleagues see only the perfect couple in the perfect home, the perfect car crouching in the drive. And then a baby is born – contaminating this pristine life in which there is only room for two. But they find the ideal solution. What may be one couple’s happy ending is everyone else’s indescribable nightmare…

Told through the Gutteridges’ voices, and those of their families, neighbours, and those who will come across them in the aftermath, this perverse love story hurtles to the heart of evil - the evil that could be anyone’s next door neighbour.'

Rose Tremain The Road Home (Chatto & Windus)

[British, 10th Novel]

I'm tiring a little now.  Like Nic, I've read Tremain's Music and Silence - I enjoyed it; didn't adore it - but I've collected several more of her novels over the years on the strength of it and Sarah Bower's recommendation of The Road Home on my initial Orange post has piqued my interest.  It is a highly topical novel at the moment, being about the flow of Eastern European migrant workers into the UK.  It is centred on Lev, a widower in his 40s, who arrives in London intent on sending money back to support his elderly mother and young daughter.  The Guardian review paints a sweet and convincing portrait of what sounds like an eminently readable novel:

'The arc of the novel is essentially one of self-improvement; although Lev has various ventures in employment, there is no plot, per se. We are, rather, accompanying Lev on his journey, relishing his many encounters - with a sexy, spiky co-worker at the restaurant who becomes his girlfriend; with the imperious chef from whom Lev picks up tips on the restaurant trade; with an elderly Englishwoman at a home; with a recently arrived young countryman named Vitas who misses, more than anything else, his dog. In Suffolk, part of a crew picking asparagus, Lev meets a farmer who takes a liking to him, and two benevolent gay Chinese migrant workers. Tremain is at her luminous best in these odd moments of companionability; she has the art of finding the improbable graces in human connection. That these relations lead Lev gradually to the road home gives the story a gentle, pleasing form, if not any real dramatic denouement.'

Patricia Wood Lottery (William Heinemann)

[American, 1st Novel]

And the prize for worst cover goes to... Maybe there is a good novel in there trying to get out, but unfortunately it looks like a cross between a GCSE textbook and a boardgame box. Ugh.  The excerpt I just read online, which reminded me of nothing more than The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time sans the charm, did nothing to soften me to its potential charm. Has anyone read it?

'Perry’s IQ is only 76, but he’s not stupid. His grandmother taught him everything he needs to know to survive: She taught him to write things down so he won’t forget them. She taught him to play the lottery every week. And, most important, she taught him whom to trust. When Gram dies, Perry is left orphaned and bereft at the age of thirty-one. Then his weekly Washington State Lottery ticket wins him 12 million dollars, and he finds he has more family than he knows what to do with. Peopled with characters both wicked and heroic who leap off the pages, Lottery is a deeply satisfying, gorgeously rendered novel about trust, loyalty, and what distinguishes us as capable.'

~~Victoria~~

"...Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

This was going to be a simple post, about the shortlist for the 2008 Arthur C Clarke Award. But then last night the sad news broke that Clarke has died, at the age of 90.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden has a moving tribute up at Making Light:

He was all about the transformational reframe, the cosmic perspective, that step off into the great shining dark. He believed it would improve us. He rejoiced to live in a gigantic universe of unencompassable scale, and he thought the rest of us should rejoice, too.

There's an obituary from the New York Times here; and, slightly disturbingly, here's the Guardian obit, written by a chap who is himself dead (as of ten years ago!).

On a brighter note, the video message that Clarke sent out late last year, marking his 90th birthday with remarkable warmth and joyful optimism, can be seen here (embedded Youtube video link, with transcript below).

I've only read a few of Clarke's many works (although I've read many more that were deeply influenced by him): 2001, of course, Childhood's End and the wonderful The City and the Stars. And, as of this evening, the short story "The Nine Billion Names of God" (available online here - go read it now!). A vast sense of wonder that never loses sight of the human connection; it is not for nothing that he is numbered among the greats.

Meanwhile, the Award he founded - for the year's best science fiction novel published in the UK - continues. The shortlist for the 2008 award was announced last week, and is as follows:

• Stephen Baxter, The H-Bomb Girl
• Matthew de Abaitua, The Red Men
• Sarah Hall, The Carhullan Army
• Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts
• Ken MacLeod, The Execution Channel
• Richard Morgan, Black Man

Niall Harrison, who is one of this year's judges, has links to various online-available reviews of the shortlisted books here - including one of The Carhullan Army at Strange Horizons, by our very own Victoria.

Like last year, all the books will be getting the Eve's Alexandria treatment; mostly by me alone, this time around, since Vicky is rather busy - but she hopes to join in where she can. I've had a good start to my reading, with the thoroughly enjoyable The Execution Channel (review to follow); fingers crossed for the rest...

~~Nic

The Orange Prize, 2008

It's that time of year again.  The Orange Prize longlist was announced this morning, much to my excitement. My first and dominant response to it is bewilderment. Over half the books and authors are entirely new to me, and there seem to be some notable omissions. Where is Nicola Barker's Darkmans?  Or AL Kennedy's Day? Where is Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods? I find it difficult to rationalise a list of 2008's best novels by women that doesn't include them.  Anne Enright's The Gathering sticks out like a sore-thumb of literaryness. And I wonder, uncharitably, whether they were simply too much for some of the judges.  I also wonder whether this could be the year that I fall out with the Orange Prize...

Anita Amirrezvani The Blood of Flowers
Stella Duffy The Room of Lost Things
Jennifer Egan The Keep
Anne Enright The Gathering
Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs
Tessa Hadley The Master Bedroom
Nancy Huston Fault Lines
Gail Jones Sorry
Sadie Jones The Outcast
Lauren Liebenberg The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam
Charlotte Mendelson When We Were Bad
Deborah Moggach In The Dark
Anita Nair Mistress
Heather O'Neill Lullabies for Little Criminals
Elif Shafak The Bastard of Istanbul
Dalia Sofer The Septembers of Shiraz
Scarlett Thomas The End of Mr Y
Carol Topolski Monster Love
Rose Tremain The Road Home
Patricia Wood Lottery

More indepth coverage later. In the meantime, can you think of other notable omissions?

~~Victoria~~

Biting the Sun

I'll never forget the time Danor and I, both female then, I might add, disabled the robot controller at Lookout 9A and let in a downpour of volcanic ash from one of the big black mountains outside, floods of it for units and units - everything went zaradann. They had to deliver food by birdplane, and the roads were full of robots trying to dig us all out. We even achieved an earthquake once. Nothing fell down, of course, though we all hoped the Robotics Museum would. Hergal and I were sitting in a big crystal tower at the time, unsuccessfully having love telepathically, and it shook like jelly, which was more than we were doing.

The Earth is a dying, desertified wasteland, human life is confined to a handful of domed cities maintained by quietly-authoritarian robots, but the party goes on, more or less, in Tanith Lee's splendidly bonkers technicolour dystopia, Drinking Sapphire Wine (comprising the two short novels Don't Bite the Sun (1976) and Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977)). This is a world in which young people (known collectively as 'Jang') binge-drink, sleep around and generally cause havoc not out of rebellion, but out of conformity:

Thinta liked the Dream Rooms, though it was reckoned to be pretty anti-Jang really. You always met lots of Older People with 'set ideas' who told you you shouldn't be there, but out having love and ecstasy or sex changes or Sense Distortion, like all young people are usually rigidly expected to have.

Jang is a socially- and legally-enforced adolescence that lasts for decades, during which time individuals are free to indulge in as much sex, drugs and self-harm as they please. They can perform all manner of daredevil stunts without fear of consequences. Death puts no cramp in one's style, since the robots can always provide a new body (the book's opening line is, "My friend Hergal had killed himself again") - in whatever style, shape or biological sex desired. Relationships are fleeting - although always formalised by a short period of marriage - and friendships flighty.

Indeed, Jang (and their elders) can have whatever they want; no-one needs to work, since the robots take care of everything, and the only currency is effusive, babbled gratitude to Our Robot Overlords - something that is more than a little creepy, in practice ("'I'll pay.' [...] I sobbed and laughed and blessed them, and called down upon the city the joys of the firmament."). Unless, that is, what they want is gainful employment:

"[...] the Committee does not employ the Jang. Your minds should be free to explore recreation and pleasure. Older People, if they wish, may render some sort of voluntary service, certainly, but in the formative years..."

"Have you ever asked any Jang whether they'd like to spend a few formative years doing something slightly useful?" I demanded.

"Er--" he said.

That it is a shallow sort of life does not escape our unnamed narrator, who as the novel begins is in the process of growing bored with the apparent utopia - hence the above exchange, one in an increasingly frustrated series of attempts to find distraction and (eventually) meaning. Recounting the story some time after the events, it is the narrator who gives the whole thing life and heart. (The narrator has neither given name nor obvious gender - this will be discussed further below - and so for the sake of simplicity will henceforth be referred to as 'N').

N has plenty of emotional blindspots, as befits someone never allowed to grow up. Upon receiving a declaration of enduring love that transcends physical appearance and gender, for example, N cannot overcome the horror that a suitor would choose such an unattractive body:

"Can't you see," Hatta said, pathetic, "the body I'm in doesn't matter that much? I'm still me."

"Well, be you in a groshing body and I'll marry you immediately," I said wildly. "That's a promise."

N is still amusingly, endearingly scatty, as when relaying the etiquette of Jang interactions and escapades, the main topic of the first book:

"Listen, Hergal," I stated, "I'm afraid I've put in an order to have you officially cut out of my circle of friends. It's not that I don't like you. I mean, you're really lovely, especially with your - er - wings, but I'm just tired of everyone coming up and saying to me: 'Is it true you know that floop Hergal? Do tell!'"

"I see," said Hergal. He didn't even have the politeness to cry. Everyone in the Jang always cries when they're officially cut out of circles.

Yet N is clearly much more thoughtful, and feels things more deeply, than is truly comfortable for the extended childhood involved in being Jang ("I was a bit of a pest," we are told at one point, "I always have too much imagination to fit inside my head"). Joining an archaeological expedition into the desert - yet another whim, a search for distraction - N finds a world unlike anything previously dreamed of, an emotional and sensory experience impossible to replicate inside the sterile, perfectly-regulated domes:

It's all real out there.

It's all beautiful and real, and throbbing and singing and alive!

I staggered; he grabbed me and snapped: "I told you you had to breathe, didn't I? Why don't you pay attention?"

But I had breathed. I'd more or less gasped my lungs inside out. [...]

I shook as I stood there.

It was dawn and red this time from some ooma mountain bursting flames, and greener near the top of the sky, and velvet dark above that, with a last sugar-sprinkle of stars. [...] And the sky was so enormous. It made me giddy.

But N still cannot quite cut loose from the protective, stifling spoon-feeding of the robot-controlled cities; nor can N find true joy there any longer. N's persistent ennui is unusual in this society, if apparently not unknown, and it is this, rather than pranks played on the authorities, that gets N marked down as a menace; pranks are conventional and expected, discontent with continual indulgence is not. Various attempts are made to control N's behaviour, but finally N goes beyond the pale - or, at any rate, gives the robots a pretext to act - by killing another Jang in a duel.

N is exiled to the desert, a fate that - it is assumed - will both quash N's rebellion of the spirit and set an example to other Jang. But against expectation, N makes the best of the situation, through a mixture of idealism, resourcefulness, accident, and canny manipulation. Conveniently for the plot, the robots have an inherent weakness: they have to give N whatever N asks for, because they are programmed to help ("I'd got the Q-R Committee by their service-to-humanity-programming curlies. Though a menace, I was human, and I had a need"). So they must provide the very basics for N's survival.

N thus manages to make a small piece of the desert bloom, and carves out a life there - albeit one not without pain, as when Pet, N's closest (animal) companion, dies ("So irrevocable, so unavoidable, so terrible, so dull [...] Don't bite the sun, you'll burn your mouth. I'd bitten ceaselessly, hopelessly, and I was burned, I was burned. I was a cinder."). Word spreads of N's exciting-looking pioneering, and soon N is joined by a small cluster of others from the cities - some hedonists, some idealists, and some saboteurs sent by the robots to stem this dangerous tide of self-sufficiency and freedom.

It's all very neatly done, an entertaining and uplifting story that treats a host of interesting issues with a lightness of touch and an infectious good humour that suits our narrator's essentially fun-loving personality. The robots are never very sinister - the world of the cities is a little too cartoonish for real dystopian fear - but their means of control are disturbing both in implication and in occasional demonstration in the story.

Naturally, given the Jang propensity to switch bodies regularly, the treatment of sex and gender is an important theme. Disappointingly, almost all the sexual relationships take place between individuals in opposite-sex bodies (N at one stage notes that "as a female, I felt nothing sexual or even romantic for Danor", Danor at that point being in a female body too; although this is prefaced with a "despite" and is a gloss on what is to all intents and purposes sexual jealousy, whatever the claims). However, these distinctions, interestingly, begin to breakdown among the nascent non-robot-controlled community in the desert, with new, and apparently more lasting, configurations appearing, including same-sex and multiple-partner relationships.

More nuanced is the treatment of gender. N chooses female bodies, predominantly - though definitely not exclusively - and hyper-feminised ones at that. Yet N also dreams of being the rescuer rather than the rescued, displays both 'feminine' and 'masculine' behavioural traits, and overall is a very proactive (if extremely hotheaded and reckless) figure - making for an unusual, for the time in which it was written, if essentially lighthearted character study. Intriguingly, it is clear that different individuals have different relationships with their bodies and their genders. Some respond in extremely gendered ways to a change in physical sex, while others do not; some have clear preferences for one or the other. As N reflects:

There were many like Zirk, who, when a male, tended to rangy heroic types with shoulders the width of Committee Hall doors, rippling bronze musculature, and a loud persona - for which Zirk made up, when female, by being about three feet tall, delicate as porcelain, and timid as a Four BOO sandrabbit. Then there were the ones like Kley, who, when male, was a quiet, well-mannered nonentity, and became a raging bully when in girl-shape. I, however, remained much the same either way. Always inclined to violence, chivalry, and general moodiness, the size of my breasts, or any alternative apparatus I happened to have about me, didn't really colour the situation to any vast degree - at least, I don't think so.

Great fun; recommended!

~~Nic

My Mother is a Fish

The quilt is drawn up to her chin, hot as it is, with only her two hands and her face outside. She is propped up on the pillow, and we can hear him every time he takes up the adze or the saw. If we were deaf we could almost watch her face and hear him, see him. Her face is wasted away so that the bones draw just under the skin in white lines. Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks. But the eternal and everlasting salvation of grace is not upon her.

I suppose you could say that As I Lay Dying (1930), by William Faulkner (1897-1962), is a little outside my usual tastes. It came recommended by an American friend, however - I gather that it is a not-uncommon high school text - and so it duly joined the TBR shelves some years back. I'm glad it did. Told in a stream-of-consciousness style by a rotating cast of viewpoint characters, As I Lay Dying centres around the quiet (indeed, silent) death of one Addie Bundren, and her family's fractious and somewhat inept journey to bury her - some distance away, at her request - in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi.

The narration is shared between the members of the Bundren family (the book's main voice being that of the thoughtful and articulate second-eldest son, Darl), their neighbours Cora and Vernon Tull, their local doctor, and various individuals encountered during the journey, mostly people whose land the family crosses en route, or whose barns they spend the night in. (And mostly people who are left bemused by the antics of this family with the coffin whose occupant is starting to smell). Everyone, of course, has a good supply of prejudices and secrets and predicaments, which are revealed but largely unresolved in the course of the novel.

There are five Bundren siblings: Cash and Darl, both probably in their mid-to-late twenties, Jewel, perhaps eighteen or twenty and Addie's favourite, Dewey Dell, seventeen and the only girl, and Vardaman, who seems to be emotionally and mentally much younger. All of them apparently still live at their parents' house, working the land (they grow cotton and raise some livestock) and occasionally making extra money by labouring on other farms in the area. Their father, Anse, is not so much a ne'er-do-well as a ne'er-do-anything-much-at-all; Darl tells us:

The shirt across Pa's hump is faded lighter than the rest of it. There is no sweat stain on his shirt. I have never seen a sweat stain on his shirt. He was sick once from working in the sun when he was twenty-two years old, and he tells people that if he ever sweats, he will die. I suppose he believes it.

Dewey Dell notes the same thing ("Pa dassent sweat because he will catch his death") to explain why neighbours and friends have to come and help the rest of the family pick the cotton. In his own, self-pitying narration, Anse maintains, "It ain't that I am afraid of work" and complains of "me and Addie slaving and a-slaving" to feed the (in his eyes ungrateful) family, although any slaving that goes on during the book, at least, leaves him untouched.

Nonetheless, Anse keeps a peevish control over the family finances, recalling with some bile how he had to pay out for Cash to train as a carpenter (and how Cash deprived him of six months' labour on the family farm after breaking a leg while helping construct a church roof), and veritably foaming at the mouth when he learns that Jewel has been sneaking off at night to work for a neighbour in order to save up and buy himself a horse. In the latter case, Anse's annoyance is three-fold: that Jewel is using his energies elsewhere ("Taken the work from your flesh and blood and bought a horse with it", as Anse puts it), that Jewel spent (his own) money in secret, and that Anse might have to pay to feed the horse. The level of control over the lives of his adult sons to which Anse feels entitled is striking, as is the fact that none of them can or will leave, despite their clear frustration and resentment; presumably their options are limited indeed. (Jewel flounces away in a rage on a couple of occasions, but always returns).

Finally, Anse appears to resent Addie's illness, again as lost labour and potential expense; when Dr Peabody is finally called out to see her - something Anse has hitherto refused to do - his main preoccupation is the cost:

And now I got to pay for it, and me without a tooth in my head, hoping to get ahead enough so I could get my mouth fixed where I could eat God's own victuals as a man should.

The reader could be forgiven for thinking, charitably, that some of this internal muttering is just displacement, ill-expressed grief at the prospect of losing his wife, but it seems from the very end of the novel that Anse's sorrow is short-lived if not non-existent: in Jefferson, he disappears for an afternoon, and returns to the party with a new wife (and a new set of teeth, purchased by stealing money from both Cash and Dewey Dell). It's impossible to be sure whether the second Mrs Bundren is a long-term mistress newly-married, or something else entirely.

During the journey, which is long and plagued by mishap (flooded rivers, collapsed bridges, etc) and poor planning, Anse repeatedly refuses offers of hospitality - hot meals and beds for the night - sanctimoniously insisting that he does not want to be "beholden" to anyone. This seems to be less about pride and more about an unwillingness to contribute work to his hosts' farms in exchange (still less offer his own hospitality in return some future day). It is an insult to his would-be hosts and it is certainly in blithe ignorance of his children's needs - two of whom are slowly cracking up, and a third, Cash, who has broken his leg again in an accident (this last is dealt with by the simple and disastrous means of pouring concrete over the wound, fixing him to the family cart and leaving infection to set in).

Amid all this long- and short-term emotional stress, the characters misjudge, snipe at, and occasionally sympathise with each other, in the dialogue and in their narration. Darl reflects approvingly on Cash's efforts to make Addie's coffin for her where she can watch while she dies ("A good carpenter. Addie Bundren could not want a better one, a better box to lie in. It will give her confidence and comfort"), while Jewel fumes:

It's because he stays out there, right under the window, hammering and sawing on that god-damn box. Where she's got to see him. Where every breath she draws is full of his knocking and sawing where she can see him saying See. See what a good one I am making for you.

Darl is the most articulate, or at any rate wordy (he describes the flooded river as "that single monotony of desolation", for example), and sensitively observant of the group, and his narration accordingly gives us the most novelistic if hardly unbiased view. Others express themselves in more limited or idiosyncratic ways. Vernon Tull's chapters - quite effusive when set against how laconic he is in speech - are heavily inflected by local dialect and syntax, while his wife Cora tends to hold forth in her mind as she does (to Addie, at least) in person, preaching her principles and fixating upon certain phrases and observations long past the point of banality. (Unlike Cora, good-hearted Vernon does not speculate on thoughts or motives, tending to note where people's gazes tend and the surface of their expressions, without attempting to read significance or mood.)

Cash is detached, Jewel angrier. Dewey Dell, heard from only infrequently, is all suppressed desperation and frantic entreaty; she is several months pregnant, and has been given ten dollars by the child's father to get an abortion (this is the money that Anse later steals from her; she, of course, cannot explain what it is for). She worries at words, trying them in different orderings to see if they produce new results, and is prone to finding pathetic fallacies to link her situation and self to the land around her:

I said You don't know what worry is. I don't know what it is. I don't know whether I am worrying or not. Whether I can or not. I don't know whether I can cry or not. I don't know whether I have tried to or not. I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

Dewey Dell's plight is moving, although much of it only hinted at and it is clear that she is not really Faulkner's focus; she fails to get her abortion and her future, by the end of the novel, looks bleak indeed. She is meant to step into her mother's shoes, and take care of the household - Dr Peabody makes this plain when he instructs her, immediately after Addie's death, to stop mourning and start seeing the needs of the poor men of the family ("I would try not to let it grieve me. I expect you'd better go and get some supper ready. It don't have to be much. But they'll need to eat.") We can only imagine Anse's reaction at the thought of another of his family members selfishly depriving him of their labour (and producing another mouth to feed!).

Vardaman's narration is, as might be expected, childish, and grows increasingly fractured as the emotional pressure bears on his young mind - the title of the post is the entirety of one of his chapters, expressing his inability to understand Addie's death and the prolonged 'afterlife' of her journey to be buried. It is also breathless when recounting moments of drama, as when the flooded river upsets the cart and sweep's Addie's coffin away:

Cash tried but she fell off and Dad jumped going under he went under and Cash hollering to catch her and I hollering running and hollering and Dewey Dell hollering at me Vardaman you vardaman you vardaman and Vernon passed me because he was seeing her come up and she jumped into the water again and Dad hadn't caught her yet.

The one voice that is mostly absent from this cacophony is that of Addie herself. She speaks barely a word in dialogue, narrating only one chapter - and that after her death. Everyone else fills her silences, or creates them, with their own interpretations of her thoughts and feelings. Cora, whose words I used to open this post, is the most outspokenly judgemental of all (although apparently only within the hearing of her husband or, in the past, of Addie), seeing in Addie nothing but pride, the opposite of everything she strives to be:

I have tried to live right in the sight of God and man, for the honour and comfort of my Christian husband and the love and respect of my Christian children. So that when I lay me down in the consciousness of my duty and reward I will be surrounded by loving faces [...] Not like Addie Bundren dying alone, hiding her pride and her broken heart. Glad to go. Lying there with her head propped up so she could watch Cash building the coffin, having to watch him so he would not skimp on it, like as not.

Lazy, pompous Dr Peabody has his own take on the matter when he sees her just before she dies:

She watches me: I can feel her eyes. It's like she was shoving at me with them. I have seen it before in women. Seen them drive from the room them coming with sympathy and pity [...] That's what they mean by the love that passeth understanding: that pride, that furious desire to hide that abject nakedness which we bring here with us, carry with us into operating rooms, carry furiously and stubbornly with us into the earth again.

Peabody's initial assumption ("When Anse finally sent for me of his own accord, I said 'He has wore her out at last'") about Addie's fate seems an accurate one. We get glimpses of the harsh realities of this life for women, mostly through others' eyes; as Tull reflects:

"She's a-going," he says. "Her mind is set on it." It's a hard life for women, for a fact. Some women. I mind my mammy lived to be seventy and more. Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went and taken that lace-trimmed nightgown she had had forty-five years [...] and laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes. "You all will have to look out for pa the best you can," she said. "I'm tired."

But Addie is no passive, saintly victim, either. What she has to say for herself is full of bitterness, and much bound up in Cora's notions of - and their arguments about - sin and duty. She is roundly dismissive of Cora's loud scruples and her calls to repent, convinced that

sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who have never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

The prevailing impression we get is of an impatient intelligence gone to seed, a clear-sighted, restless woman brought up to believe life was to be endured, not enjoyed: she remembers that her father once told her, "the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time". (Cora recalls that Addie's own version of this: "My daily life is an acknowledgement and expiation of my sin.") Before her marriage she was a schoolteacher, who hated her charges for her lack of power over them; she wed Anse, who in her retelling appears as a young man of little sense but substantial property, without any expectation of or apparently even desire for happiness.

Her relationship with Anse only bore out her assumptions ("He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that the word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack"), but the birth of her children altered things, and not for the better. With the arrival of Cash, she says, her "aloneness had been violated and then made whole again by the violation"; becoming a mother threatened her selfhood, and made it impossible to merely endure life as before. An affair with a minister produced Jewel, apparently the only one of her offspring she felt able to love. The others are bargaining chips, given to Anse in exchange for the roof over her head or in payment for Jewel whom she "stole" from him:

I gave Anse the children. I did not ask for them. I did not even ask him for what he could not have given me: not-Anse. That was my duty to him, to not ask that, and that duty I fulfilled. I would be I; I would let him be the shape and echo of his word.

The fierce disregard of Addie has left its mark on the whole family, and while every member of the family bar Darl and Jewel has some ulterior motive for the journey to Jefferson, they all nonetheless strive in the shadow of her coffin to carry out her last wish, as if to earn the approval in her death that they never had while she was alive.

Not a cheerful book, and not the sort of thing I would normally choose to read; but a fascinating, multi-faceted one, even so, a tapestry of life in the early twentieth-century American south. Perhaps two quotes provide a touchstone for the attitudes to life herein: one, from a minor character named Moseley, highlights the (sardonically) grim side:

And then, life wasn't made to be easy on folks: they wouldn't ever have any reason to be good and die.

And the other, from Vernon Tull, emphasises that sometimes the only traps in life are the one you make for yourself:

If it's a judgement, it ain't right. Because the Lord's got more to do than that. He's bound to have. Because the only burden Anse Bundren's ever had is himself.

~~Nic

(who's been quiet during the past month because it turns out that teaching undergraduate history, even for only half a term, is a lot of work... ;-))