Eve's Alexandria

And the winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award is...

Song of Time by Ian R. Ma cLeod

So saith a text from Nic at the Awards Ceremony, where I imagine she is celebrating her foresight with many a pint of frothy goodness.

~~Victoria~~

Arthur C Clarke Award 2009: Round-up

With half an hour to go before I must head into London for the ceremony, time for a few final thoughts on this year's Arthur C Clarke Award, the shortlist for which I've been posting about over the past week.

The first thing to note is that, sadly, I didn't manage to get through all the books on time this year. (I blame Anathem... :-)) A review of Alastair Reynolds' House of Suns will follow in due course; my initial impressions are of an enjoyably arch space opera, the sort that revels in the exoticism of its extravagantly-drawn universe and the enormously larger-than-life exploits of its cheerfully amoral (and unfeasibly rich) characters. Said characters apparently being (immortal?) clones of a young woman raised in a Gormenghast-esque city-sized mansion. Time will tell, but it's fun so far.

As for what I have read: my impression is that 2008 was a solid but unspectacular year for sf published in the UK. Whereas the past few years threw up - in roughly equal measure - books that aroused my passion and others that aroused my ire, 2008's cohort contains only one standout (Ian MacLeod's lovely Song of Time); only one that really got on my nerves (Mark Wernham's Martin Martin's on the Other Side), and even that - helped in no small part, I'm sure, by the fact that I was able to read it in an afternoon - didn't rouse me to the heights of fury of, say, Streaking. Everything else... I don't really have strong feelings about.

Anyway, that shortlist again, with links to my reviews:

Song of Time, Ian R. MacLeod

The Quiet War, Paul McAuley

House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds

Anathem, Neal Stephenson

The Margarets, Sheri S. Tepper

Martin Martin's on the Other Side, Mark Wernham

And I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for Ian MacLeod tonight!

~~Nic

Under the Infinite Black Sky

Dave #8, alarmed by the shine in Dave #27's eyes, warned his brother that he was committing the mortal sin of pride. "Our lives may be dedicated to the defence of God and Gaia and Greater Brazil, but that doesn't mean we're in any way like the heroes of the great stories."

"What are we, then?"

"Soldiers," Dave #8 said. "No more, no less."

[Warning: here be spoilers.]

The fifth book on the Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist takes us back into space - there are significantly more spaceships on this year's list, aren't there? - and also into the realms of genetic engineering, posthumanism, and climate change. More than any other book I've read this year, though, I find myself in two minds about my response to Paul McAuley's The Quiet War. On the one hand, it's a lean and (at times) quite pacy novel, which both builds interesting characters and does interesting things with them, and its big theme - humanity's relation to its environment(s) - arises organically from its exceptionally well-drawn twenty-third-century setting. On the other hand, it is desperately uneven - what in some parts of the novel is polished, careful leanness becomes talky, underwritten infodumping in others - and overall I feel that it doesn't play to its strengths nearly enough. Certain plotlines are sidelined into near-oblivion, while others go in unproductive, repetitive circles, and so much of the meat of it - the seething social tensions, the dirty politics, even the titular war itself, quiet or loud - is told, rather than shown.

But my strongest reason for feeling in two minds about the book is that I only learned after I'd finished it that there is a sequel in the works. Had I known this, I suspect I would have read The Quiet War in a different way (and perhaps would've enjoyed it rather more): I would not have spent so much of the novel looking for stories that were not (yet?) being told, and expecting a conclusion that never really came. Too late, I know why I was plagued, as I read, with a vague sense that something was missing; something was yet to start.

Ironically - and there is a part of me that wonders if it isn't deliberate in design, if nonetheless unsatisfying in practice - a vague sense that something has yet to start aptly describes the prevailing mood in McAuley's twenty-third century. Whether in the confined, environmentally-trammelled cities of Earth, or the domed colonies on the moons around Jupiter and Saturn (collectively known as the Outer System), there is a crushing weight of expectation: war, it is widely felt, is inevitable.

The Outer System is by no means a unified polity, or even something as close as a confederation: each moon, indeed each major city, seems to be largely self-governing, and the societies that have developed in them range between fairly liberal and quite conservative. But the Outers share certain cultural traits and ideals, including a penchant for genetic engineering, body modification, and (on the radical fringes) posthumanism more generally. Accommodating diversity is key; as one character puts it, Outer life is about:

"[...] the perfectability of the human mind, that goodness is worth trying, and that happiness is not only beneficial but constructive. In the past hundred years we have built a plenitude of societies founded on principles of tolerance, mutualism, scientific rationalism, and attempts at true democracy."

This is, of course, an expression of the Platonic form of Outer society. In practice, their fidelity to combative democracy and decisions reached by consensus has manifestly led to a rather superficial 'tolerance': as we see through certain characters' experiences in the colonies, loud public debate is fine, but only within certain pre-existing bounds of conformity, and (especially in the heightened time of approaching war) woe betide any really obvious outsiders, or younger and more radical voices. Even with these caveats, I still found A Quiet War to be a less convincing portrait of space colonisation than Adam Roberts' Gradisil, in which freedom is more obviously a magnet for sociopaths and libertarians; but McAuley nonetheless does an excellent job of establishing the idiosyncrasies and tensions of life on the various moons, and the important ways in which the freedom is illusory when manmade domes are the only things protecting you from the freezing vacuum of space. Wonderful descriptions of these alien moonscapes emphasise the beauty, but also linger over details like how their topography is shaped by asteroid craters - a clear sign of vulnerability if ever there was! - and the effort that had to go into making them habitable, like the city of Baghdad, on Enceladus:

The domed city came up above the horizon, standing on an ancient cratered plain whose contours were softened by layers of bright frost. [...] The city's tent stood on aerogel and fullerene composite foundations fitted inside the low ramparts of a small impact crater, and its interior had been flooded with melt water to create a circular lake with shellfish reefs. kelp forests, mangrove islands and vast rafts of giant water-lilies. From green islands at its centre rose a spiky city of skeletal spires scaffolded from fullerene spars.

One Earth-born character, no-nonsense biologist Macy, is enchanted by "Ganymede’s naked and unforgiving icescapes stretched cold and still under the infinite black sky", but notes:

She was a stranger in a strange land. Trying to imagine the long and possibly endless exile that stretched ahead gave her a strange, vertiginous feeling [...] year after year of breathing canned air, the low-grade but ever-present fear of a blowout or some other sudden and comprehensive disaster, cramped horizons and closed spaces. Living with strangers who had nothing in common with her. Strangers who sometimes seemed barely human.

The most urgent issue for the people of Earth, meanwhile, is dealing with the "terrible wounds" left on the planet by industrialisation and climate change:

The dead zones in the oceans, the flooding along the shorelines of every continent, the deforested deserts of the Amazonian basin and Africa, the vast and tumbled deserts of North America, the ruined cities...

Much salvage and reclamation work has been done, but population levels are beginning to bounce back after the climate catastrophes - and the colonial departures - of previous centuries. We see little directly of Earth, but are told repeatedly (this technique is a recurring flaw in the book, as we shall see) that life there is grim, only viable within vastly overcrowded and heavily policed cities. Environmentalism has, rather too late, been elevated to the status of religion, partly due to the work of "green saints" - geneticists and biologists who have led "a holy mission of returning the planet to a prelapsarian paradise". But some sections of the elite are unwilling to wait for Earth to be remade.

Thus, as the book begins, everyone knows that Earth's superpowers - in particular Greater Brazil (which controls large swathes of the Americas, and whose propaganda trumpets "one Earth under Gaia, indivisible, restored, replenished, and purged of all human sin") - have an acquisitive eye on the resources and the legroom of the Outers. Everyone knows that Earth's authorities cannot stand the Outers' autonomy, and that it is only a matter of time until an invasion is launched.

The tone seems to be set in the marvellously atmospheric opening chapter, which is told from the point of view of Dave #8, product of a covert Brazilian cloning programme. Genetically-altered and trained (or, more accurately, indoctrinated) as super-soldiers, Dave #8 and his brothers are kept under strict discipline - both military and FutureCatholic - in an offworld compound. Dave #8 dreams of the sky on Earth, and feels "a flutter of longing in his heart" when he glimpses it behind the Brazilian flag on a suitably patriotic video. But difference and introspection are suppressed at every turn:

In the struggle session that evening, each of his brothers stood up in turn and denounced him ringingly, as he had denounced them in other sessions after they had committed sins of omission or commission. He could not explain that he had been trying to catch sight of hidden faults in the reflection of his face. It was forbidden to attempt to excuse or explain any sins, and he was conditioned to believe that every punishment was just.

Dave #8 his brothers also dream of a declaration of war and the chance to kill Outers, as they have been promised - they have been bred for a 'quiet war' that is to be waged primarily through "propaganda, espionage, sabotage, and political coercion", dividing the Outers among themselves to destroy their resistance before it can begin.

Before that can happen, though, the factions favouring peace - both terrestrial and Outer - have to be defeated and discredited. Here is where the novel falters, and the promising tone set in the first chapter turns out to be a red herring, because what comes next are several long sections following attempts, of varying levels of secrecy and competence, to engineer or prevent war. There's nothing inherently wrong, of course, with a story in which the build-up to war is much bigger and more significant than the war itself, and when it works The Quiet War is much more compelling than a simple gun battle in space would be: the central irony of what eventually sparks overt military conflict does not come out of the blue (or the black), but is a perfectly-judged culmination of a lot of patient work on plot and theme.

The problem is that the book expends considerably more pages explaining what is happening than in letting us see it. Even when character are in the thick of things, their short conversations and cursorily-sketched thoughts keep being squeezed out by paragraphs of compressed context and summarised developments, telling us how to analyse the situation, like this:

In order to protect the city's freedom, habeas corpus had been suspended, the city's council had been given emergency powers by popular vote, and the council had granted the mayor, Marisa Bassi, the kind of absolute authority that would make most dictators weep with envy. Strict food and water rationing had been introduced.

Surely the point is better made by the experiences of viewpoint characters who are living through the tensions, as when Dave #8, finally put into play as an undercover agent on Dione, faces escalating daily hostility and is subjected to repeated invasions of his privacy, including apartment searches and interrogation; or when the Outer authorities arrest Macy and try to coerce her into 'speaking out' about life on Earth, and thus to bolster Outer resistance: "'Tell the truth about the repression and cruelty. How ordinary people are treated like slaves. How free speech and free thought are ruthlessly suppressed.'" Macy has no love of the cut-throat, hierarchical Earth - a society in which she is at the mercy of, as Sri puts it in a different context, individuals who are "noblesse without the oblige" - but refuses to take part in such blatant propaganda for anyone; her scruples are given short shrift, however, when she asks, incredulously,

"What exactly is he trying to save?"

"As far as we're concerned? It's the future of the human race," Sada said. "Little things like freedom, change, diversity. The kind of things you enjoyed while you were living with Newton Jones and the rest of his clan. Please, Macy. I want you to think very hard about cooperating because this really is your last chance."

It's a pity there could not have been more of the latter - the lived experience, the ground-level view - and rather less of the former. Still, both these passages point to the novel's central themes: that the Outers will gut their way of life in order to 'save' it - that Earth and Outer forces alike will go as far as rendering cities uninhabitable, by compromising their domes, in order to control the territory on which they stand - not only has clear present-day parallels, but also echoes what has happened before the story begins, on Earth. Explicit in the backdrop to the story is that humanity has progressively wrecked its homeland through climate change and exploitation, rather than change its way of thinking; now, clearly, it is doing it again. There is thus also a telling parallel between the beautiful-but-thoroughly-hostile environments in which the Outers have carved out their homes, and the planet on which human evolved, a land once perfectly suited to them because they adapted to thrive on it, but large swathes of which they have since rendered inimicable: if not swift death by vacuum, certainly poisonous to human life.

There are, as I've noted, some engaging characters. Dave #8 is disturbing in his brainwashing, and intriguing as he starts to move away from it through exposure to life on Dione. A brief recurring motif of people entering his apartment there, and commenting that he should put some clothes on, operates both as a subtle indicator of the ways in which he doesn't quite fit in normal human society (he replies "I was asleep" both times, oblivious to the fact that he 'ought' to be alarmed by his nakedness), and as a sign of how intrusive Outer society has become under stress (that people repeatedly barge into his apartment without giving him time to dress).

Macy starts off promisingly, as a successful and highly-skilled biologist, with a pleasingly blunt mode of expression ("'Why don't you tell me exactly what's troubling you?' she said to the diplomat. 'Then I can tell you why I can't do anything about it and get back to my work'"). But she is the character who is most let down by the meandering, inconclusive plotting. For virtually all of The Quiet War, her story cycles through the following steps: 1) get chased by the authorities for a crime she didn't commit, 2) get captured by said authorities and badly treated, 3) escape unbowed to some other part of the Outer System, 4) settle down for a brief while (so that McAuley can show us another moon); 5) return to 1). Over and over again! It gets annoying. Her main antagonist, meanwhile, is cardboard villain 101.

Finally, there is Sri Hong-Owen, the "gene wizard", who gets the most ambiguities and depth. She is an enormously talented geneticist, driven by self-assurance ("'They inherited their positions, Alder, but we earned ours. That's why we are better than them, even though they own most of the world'") and a burning ambition that eventually becomes debilitating, as she pursues her desire to be the best at all costs. Her devotion to her sons (well, mostly the elder) contrasts with her willingness - even if it is slightly reluctant - to abdicate moral responsibility for the human products of her lab, as when the Brazilian military make clear their intention to use her experimental 'Dave' clones for warfare:

"Don't involve me in this," she said.

"But these are your boys," the general said. He was smiling, but it was only to show his teeth. "Your creations. The flesh of your flesh, transformed by your skill and hard work. Surely you must have an opinion."

Here, arguably, her choices are limited - although she undoubtedly knew what her clones would be used for, and what they had been trained for. When some of her other creations are deemed too dangerous, and she is called in to deal the killing blow (via poison gas, when they have all been sedated...), her reaction is to feel "sorrow and self-pity swelling her heart"; later, she stamps down on scruples for the sake of her politicking - note that her empathy here is labelled 'sickness':

She could save their lives with just a few words. The impulse rose up in her like a sickness, making her dizzy and lightheaded, and then it was gone. She was in control of herself again.

But Sri, again, is doomed to spend too much of the plot going in circles and achieving little, and her climactic encounter with a fellow gene-wizard is fun to read, but hardly feels like a fitting conclusion to the novel.

This review has probably come out a little more negatively than The Quiet War really deserves; there are plenty of very good sequences (the coming of war to Dione, for instance, which brings exactly the kind of ground-level view I'd been craving), and it captures the fragility of human life both on and off Earth so evocatively. But it is frustrating at least in part because of these flashes of greatness; McAuley is evidently a writer capable of sharp-edged wonder, but the effect is lost here because the whole is so unfocused. In the end, I just don't think the book is structured or paced as a standalone.

~~Nic

Brain Drain

But Reg, he got too serious for my liking; kept swallowing too, like he was thirsty. I mark him down in the column marked 'suspect'. That's where you put people who aren't good consumers and who piss you off. Twats and idiots get a sus mark. Once they've got a sus mark next to their name off one of our FGs, they don't get no special offers or coupons or three-for-one surprises, ever.

[Warning: quite a bit of swearing in the quotations this time...]

It's become something of a tradition here at Eve's Alexandria when reviewing awards shortlists: administering a good kicking to the, let's say, less serious contenders. The dead weight, the shortlist fillers, the ones that are presumably only on there because the judges were napping, or couldn't agree on something else. In the case of the Arthur C Clarke Award, the point-and-laugh slots are often (but not always!) filled by lifeless, clueless literary fiction, the type of mainstream-published novel which plays with science fictional tropes that haven't been cutting edge in forty years, and which is so busy being, like, daringly imaginative that it forgets to get under sf's skin, or be any good.

[NB: 1) Although it didn't make the shortlist in its year - and much as it pains me to say it, since I generally love Margaret Atwood's work - Oryx and Crake is a prime example of this. So poor, so forgettable. 2) I certainly don't mean to imply that all shortlisted non-genre sf is invariably rubbish: Hav and The Carhullan Army were both marvellous books that I was glad to see brought to genre attention.]

Now, I will admit that 2009's "huh?" book - Martin Martin's On the Other Side, by Mark Wernham - is both less of a slog than either of last year's pair (Raw Shark Texts and The Red Men), and less drearily solipsistic and wishy-washy than 2007's (Oh Pure and Radiant Heart). (It's shorter, for one thing.)

But bloody hell is it irritating.

Martin Martin's begins with a pair of prologues, one set in 1944 and one in 2008, told in the sort of pedantically-wordy third-person narration that always strains the patience (see also: Streaking). Barely a paragraph goes by without some redundant description that fills space but says nothing, heavy-handedly conjuring visuals for the reader that the reader is perfectly capable of imagining for themselves - although if you're fascinated by the finer details of microwaving lasagne, this book may be for you.

Then the first-person narration kicks off - live from dystopian England, an unspecified number of years in the future - and suddenly taking the cardboard sleeve off the Waitrose lasagne seems really, really interesting by comparison:

Oi oi! Heads up! Jensen Interceptor here. And here is what I have to tell you: my fucking story. All the ins and outs and everything. Believe or don't, I don't give one either way, cos me, I'm going places, yeah?

Joy unbounded. After slightly less than a page of wittering on in a similar vein, Jensen concludes the first chapter with "Let's get right into it, then, yeah? Fucking great" (the latter being his catchphrase), and I'm fighting the urge to bang my head against the nearest wall. As his "fucking story" unfolds - a life of happy pills, home improvements, and a half-arsed performance as a government bureaucrat give way to some thoroughly inept spying (also for the government), which in turn gives way to possible time travel and psychic possession - I found the urge returning all too often.

Wernham does a good job of packing all the very worst aspects of modern life into his future dystopia. Unbridled capitalism has been elevated to an absolute good, and buying pointless but fashionable tat that breaks down or falls out of fashion (after a year, "cos by then it's rubbish and boring anyway and you want the new one") is a social duty. When Jensen's shiny high-tech Dermo Shower goes to the great plumbing network in the sky after a mere six months, his boss recommends a better model, explaining:

"The 90B lasts two years before anything packs in. It's well fucking cool."

"Yeah, well, it's shithole," I say.

"That's as may be, but the shower engineers need work, don't they, Jensen? [...] If showers don't break, Jensen, what would the shower engineers do? Think about it."

The government, meanwhile, monitors and controls its citizens at every opportunity; its justificatory rhetoric is an unholy mixture of right-wing paranoia, nanny-state paternalism and I've-got-mine entitlement. When Jensen goes on a training course for the security division, in order to take a new job monitoring people, his tutor tells him "how a secure society works, about how everyone keeps an eye on everyone, and how this becomes a self-perpetuating system of security, how lack of trust leads to complete trust" and that "Security without paranoia isn't security". Another security official explains that people like Reg, mentioned in the header quote above, "'lack clarity and simplicity'" in their thinking, and that it is necessary to "'monitor people so they don't make the wrong choices, so they don't start making a mess of things. [...] It's for their own good, you understand.'" Such people, of course, are just lazy, and jealous:

"You must remember, Jensen, they're nutters," says Brock. "Proper out of it in a really bad way. They're not like us. They've messed up their lives so they want to mess up ours."

"But that's so not fair!" I goes, and Brock nods.

"I know, Jensen, it sucks ass. Which is why we need to keep an eye on them."

It's the old refrain: poor people are only poor because they don't try hard enough, and they're going to steal away your hard-earned cash if taxes are raised/benefits are increased/immigrants are allowed in the country/'positive discrimination' is instituted! This appeal to the baser instincts is symptomatic of Wernham's dystopia: his whole society is organised to infantilise its members. The education is minimal, the explanations are kneejerk simple, and shiny baubles - or shinier drugs (there is a strong Brave New World feel) - are available at every turn to keep people like Jensen contented and stupid. If Jensen is a dumb, shallow, sexist bastard, it's because his environment is calculated to nurture his ultra-laddishness. He may also (it is hinted but never properly explored) have been chemically and behaviourally manipulated as a child to be a creature entirely of appetites. It's no coincidence (though wearying) that the book's female characters are limited to silent sex objects seen from a distance, and equally silent waitresses at the supposedly hedonistic bar Starfucks (whose service, despite the name, seems limited mostly to providing maternal substitute security for their arrested development male clients); the one woman with a speaking role is kept on a pedestal of perfection, and eventually dies to further the narrator's story.

How high does the infantilisation go? It's never clear - Jensen's boss Brock is, as we've seen, almost as dim as him (their exchanges were one of the few bits I found funny), and the implication is that the higher reaches of the security services retain more of their faculties, but Wernham apparently isn't interested in exploring the how and why of his world, instead plunging Jensen into an extended drug binge that may or may not also be a short stint inside the mind of the titular Martin Martin, a TV psychic who enjoyed a brief notoriety in 2008. This is impressively bonkers - I can't help but admire a book where the plot goes so Total Bollocks Overdrive (hat tip, Tony Keen) that I lose track of what's going on - and contains some nice touches, like the creepy, claustrophobic sequence where Jensen's face is reconstructed for his undercover work (shades of Minority Report), and eventually builds into a bureaucracy-will-eat-itself story reminiscent of Brazil. But it never really amounts to much, and is hampered by how derivative so much of it is.

Objectionable or frighteningly deluded narrators can be extremely effective devices, and virtuoso exercises in characterisation, when used well. But Jensen feels too much like a joke who outstays his welcome, and Martin Martin's is thus rendered little more a tedious, subpar retread of A Clockwork Orange. Burgess' novel remains compelling for its uneasy combination of familiarity and alienating difference - the recognisable dynamics of performative teen masculinity taken to violent extremes and clad in bizarre slang, the contrast between Alex's world and that of his hand-wringingly half-aware parents - and for the ways in which Alex emerges as a very real individual, damaged but indomitable, above and beyond the shock factor of his actions or the flashy ventriloquism of the prose.

In Martin Martin's, it is soon clear why Jensen is objectionable and deluded, as I've said: his environment is tailor-made to produce and reinforce his behaviour. In case we missed that, the dramatic irony is the disconnect between Jensen's perceptions and reality - Wernham's wink to his readers - is often clunkingly obvious:

When you don't watch the shows and can't afford to buy all the smart mags with the pictures of the famous people, you must sort of lost touch with what's going on in the real world, and then you find your heroes in people like Reg and worship them like they're Bammer Rhymes. It's tragic, really. As if Reg is as cool as Bammer. Reg is totally poor and doesn't even know what Jizz Factor or Purploids are! How can she be impressed with that? Fucking Reg.

But the book does nothing much with this, content to revel in its satire without reaching for anything more. There is a part of me, moreover, that found him not really extreme enough to be a satire, and certainly not enough to be really shocking. Jensen is a boorish waste of space, but he was hardly unfamiliar. We've all had to listen to someone who talks like this:

I wasn't as bad as Fyodor. He can't really take his boris that well and he ended up in the Roman room, and we all know what goes on there, yeah?

Fyodor's fucking funny. He doesn't say 'Starfucks', he says 'Tsarfucks'. It's a Russian thing. Fyodor's Russian, yeah? But like English too.

We've all been cornered by guys like him; I've avoided him in nightclubs, I've had to share train carriages with him and his loud, drunken, football chant-singing mates, I've rolled my eyes at the comments he's yelled at me from his car as he drives by. My own society is already tailor-made to produce and reinforce such behaviour.

The problem with Martin Martin's, then, is: I don't wish to spend any time in Jensen's company in real life; why would I appreciate 300 pages inside his head? The simple truth is that I don't care about Jensen, I don't care about what he cares about, I don't care about his world - and the novel, unfortunately, never once encouraged me to care. I could read (or watch) most of this elsewhere, without the irritating narrator; indeed, I already have.

~~Nic

Fascination Burnout

"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs." I said. "We have a protractor."

"Okay, I'll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string."

"That'd be great."

The Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist, round 3: Neal Stephenson's arm-straining tome of non-religious monasteries and made-up words, Anathem. Or: after the subtle pleasures of Song of Time, the deluge.

Although I've been an admirer of Stephenson's work in the past - I loved Cryptonomicon and thoroughly enjoyed (large parts of) Quicksilver - I have to say that I found his latest heavy-going. I'm aware that I'm in the minority on this; I'm aware that, on many levels, the book is not for me. But for several reasons, which I'll attempt to explain, I'm sorry to say that Anathem and I simply did not get on. I've avoided any major spoilers as much as possible.

I should probably start by noting that Anathem isn't a novel in any conventional sense; plot, character, setting, and prose all play a cursory fifth or sixth fiddle to the ideas. Stephenson's other books were prone to digressions, whether into early-modern economic theory or an equation to calculate wheel-turns on a journey taken by bicycle. Anathem is these digressions writ large; in Anathem, they're the point. It's an extended thought-experiment with speech marks and the odd fight scene*, a series of vaguely Socratic dialogues on points of philosophy, physics, maths, and the (primarily intellectual) history of Stephenson's invented world, Arbre.

[* and some ninja monks, who are completely ace.]

At the same time as being a thought experiment, Anathem is (as Martin Lewis and Abigail Nussbaum, who both liked the book rather more than I did, have also observed) a coming-of-age story, firmly in the Young Adult mode. The whole thing is engineered, carefully and cleverly and with admirable shamelessness, in such a way that everything revolves around our teenage narrator Fraa Erasmas, his male peers, and his big sister - the latter being cool and down-to-earth enough to be an honorary teenager (and indeed an honorary boy, about which more in a moment). Of course, said teenagers are, by virtue of their inherent awesomeness, uniquely qualified to save the world. All the adult characters are either mentors who recognise Our Heroes' special snowflake-hood and encourage them accordingly, or distant authority figures who Just Don't Get It. (Oh, and Erasmas is a bit of a twit about girls. So far, so traditional.)

To judge from the potted timeline at the start of the book and from references within the narrative, it seems that Arbre has developed much like our world. Or, rather, like our world would have developed, had it consisted entirely (historically, culturally, intellectually) of south-eastern Europe and (bits of) the Near East, with the power of both territorial states and the various Christian-analogue churches to redirect and relocate learning vastly reduced, if not wiped out completely ("'it does have the power to wreak changes on us'", one character observes of saecular authority, and so it proves). I'll complain more about this in a moment.

On Arbre, cloistered, ritualistic communities - 'maths' or 'concents' - stand apart from the vagaries of the 'Saecular' world, existing purely for the pursuit of scientific and philosophical knowledge, and for very involved, self-referential debates about same. Singing and dancing - of a rather singular variety - also feature:

Actually they weren't milling about; it just looked that way from where we sat. Each one of them represented an upper or lower index in a theorical equation involving certain tensors and a metric. As they moved to and fro, crossing over one another's paths and exchanging places while traversing in front of the high table, they were acting out a calculation on the curvature of a four-dimensional manifold, involving various steps of symmetrization, antisymmetrization, and raising and lowering of indices. Seen from above by someone who didn't know any theorics, it would have looked like a country dance.

Such recitals are a major part of a concent's ritual practice, and, as we discover when avouts of different maths meet each other, of the communal identity that distinguishes the concents from each other. Here is the narrator's account of a performance by the Matarrhites at the Convox, a great meeting of avouts that occupies a large section of the book:

They sang a kind of dirge - a lament, I realized, for having been torn from the bosom of their concent, and a warning, as if we needed any, that they weren't going to hang out with us any more than they absolutely had to. It was well carried off, but struck me as whiny and a bit rude.

The concents are amalgams of monastery, university, and - as described by the pen of Erasmas - boarding school, and these institutions form the setting for much of the book, as well its conceptual and perceptual framework. Even when Erasmas leaves his concent - primarily in order to travel to another for the Convox - he takes the mathic world with him, a bubble that cushions his awareness, and distorts his presentation, of life outside.

This isn't surprising; once they enter the concents, often as babies, foundlings left at the gates by desperate families, avouts have little contact with the outside world - referred to as 'extramuros', its inhabitants as 'extras' - except on certain festivals or under very restricted conditions. ("Guests from extramuros," he tells us, "like Artisan Flec, were allowed to come in the Day Gate and view auts from the north nave when they were not especially contagious and, by and large, behaving themselves. This had been more or less the case for the last century and a half.") The avouts' way of life, and the mathic world's long history, encourages them to take the long view, and see external events as little more than passing fads; all state structures, for example, are collectively termed 'the Saecular Power'. But Erasmas is selectively observant to a degree that borders on the absurd, utterly ignorant of anything that does not have a direct impact upon concent life, and of human interaction outside of philosophical dialogue or sparring with his male friends (a lot of which also takes the form of philosophical dialogue). Furthermore, and like his fellow avouts, he is frequently dismissive of what he does see, reducing extras to an undifferentiated mass of dim, materialistic non-entities. Here are Erasmas and Fraa Jesry, talking about the difference between life inside and outside the walls, on a foray extramuros during the ten-day festival of Apert:

"Those who remain [in the concent for life] seem happy, whatever that means."

"Certainly happier than the people out here."

"I disagree," Jesry said. "These people are as happy as, say, Fraa Orolo. They get what they want: naked ladies on their wheels. He gets what he wants: upsight to the mysteries of the universe."

"Let's get down to it, then: what do you want?"

"Something to happen," he said. "I almost don't care what."

This tunnel vision is undoubtedly deliberate: a reflection both of Stephenson's priorities and of the limiting, sterile nature of the view from Erasmas' ivory tower. As Jesry's final comment in the above exchange makes clear, the fact that the mathic world has become stagnant and self-satisfied is a significant current in the book. (It is also a sentiment I came to share, around a hundred pages into the book...) But Erasmas' social and cultural illiteracy is nonetheless deeply frustrating and, in combination with other problematic aspects of the way the book is constructed, makes Anathem an arid read, surprisingly limited in scope and richness for a 900-page novel about the nature of reality whose protagonist travels the world.

One of these problematic aspects was alluded to above: the fact that, wherever Erasmas travels and whenever he discusses Arbre's history, it's all rather overwhelmingly European. Now, this is explicable when you consider that the book essentially posits a world in which certain Platonic and Aristotelian ideas about the nature of reality are correct, and that Stephenson, manifestly, is interested in exploring this and only this. Erasmas again:

"You might say that the difference between us and you is that we have been infected by a vision of ... another world." [...]

"You mean like a different planet?"

"That's an interesting way of looking at it," I said. "Most of us don't think it's another planet in the sense of a speculative fiction speely. Maybe it's the future of this world. Maybe it's an alternate universe we can't get to. Maybe it's nothing but a fantasy. But at any rate it lives in our souls and we can't help striving towards it."

The problem is that the focus on a single narrator - an incredibly unperceptive one - and a single dialectic - broadly, whether reality exists independent of our perceptions, or not - has the effect of flattening and homogenizing the world. We see only a single intellectual tradition: that of the concents, the network of which appears to stretch worldwide, but with little apparent difference between individual communities on anything other than an organisational and (to an extent) ritual level, despite the fact that concents are all fed with new recruits drawn from the saecular society around them. The saecular settlements that Erasmas visits, likewise, look much the same, and all the religious traditions that he describes or comes into contact with are thinly-disguised flavours of Christianity; in addition, I remember only two languages, the elevated Orth of the concents and the inelegant Fluccish of outside (most avout can speak both). When the plot requires Erasmas and friends to come into contact with the Saecular Power, there appears to be a single world-government.

Where is the rest of this fascinating world? Where are the rival intellectual traditions, the other cultures, the different ways of living and thinking? (Where, for that matter, are the avout thinking about anything other than cosmology, maths and neoplatonism? There are a few brief references to genetics, but that's about it.) They are absent from the story's present and its (5000+ years of) history alike. Even if - as I suspect - Stephenson did not intend Arbre to be a fully-realised world, but more a vehicle for his thought experiment, it makes for an anaemic reading experience. At least for me.

My second big problem with Anathem is that, just as Arbre isn't really a world, so its characters aren't really characters at all, but philosophical positions with names attached. Erasmas ticks several of the YA protagonist boxes - loyal, earnest, gauche, easily-embarrassed, reasonably self-reliant, and amusingly self-deprecating ("Orolo had asked me along to serve as amanuensis. It was an impressive word, so I'd said yes") - without ever emerging as a fully-rounded individual whose interests extend beyond the plot and the obligatory adolescent love interest. His friends have a personality trait apiece: the smug one, the autistic one, the one who's into martial arts, the one who recreates a historical battle out of wild flowers (genius). But at least they get something to do.

For the very few named female characters with speaking roles, the outlook is gloomier. Stephenson gestures to sexual egalitarianism in the mathic world, but it feels cursory and tokenistic, and is barely reflected in the text. Despite (allegedly) growing up with girls as his peers and equals in the mathic community, and an equal split of male and female authority figures, Erasmas rather boringly retains a teenage-boy attitude straight out of broken modern Western society: girls aren't individuals with their own lives like he and his male friends, and they certainly aren't friends; no, they are crush objects and/or a vast female conspiracy. Whenever two girls speak together out of his earshot, they are - surely! - always talking about him. Often, his social ineptitude is endearing, at least early on in the book, but at times it is downright (and puzzlingly) obnoxious:

Tris was podgy and not especially good-looking, but she had the personality of a beautiful girl because she'd been raised in a math.

More broadly, most of the great thinkers we encounter, both in the present and the historical references, are male (the intellectual tradition goes back, symbolically at least, to a woman - but a woman speaking on the authority of her father, whose lessons she claimed to interpret). With a single exception, women in the concents are the organisers, the nurturers, and (in the case of Erasmas' circle) the love interests; virtually all the intellectual heavy-lifting that we see or hear of is left to the men.

So is the plot. The only female characters who appear in more than a few scenes are Erasmas' new love interest, old love interest, and sister. This becomes particularly glaring when - shortly after being summoned from their concent, as part of a delegation to the Convox - Erasmas and friends separate from most of the avouts to undertake a mission of their own, which of course turns out to be vital to the fate of everything:

I noticed a statistical oddity, which was that there was only one female, and that was my sib, who was pretty unconventional as females went. Intramuros, we didn't often see the numbers get so skewed. Extramuros, of course, it depended on what religions and social mores prevailed at a given time. Naturally, I wondered how this had come about, and spent a little while reviewing my memories of the hour-long scramble to get people into vehicles. [...] Perhaps there was something about this foray that smelled good to men and bad to women.

(The gender essentialism only gets more cringeworthy over the page, as he begins to witter on about Stone Age hunting parties. Make. It. Stop.) Gosh, perhaps it's just that men in the abstract really do like adventuring more! Or perhaps it's because this is the Plot Truck, and thus the girls don't get a look in - bar Cord, Erasmas' "sib" (sister) and the aforementioned honorary boy (she's a mechanic, and thus apparently not included in the female hivemind). Only one female character gets to make a decision that is at all significant to the plot, and she spends the rest of the book crying about it, leading Erasmas to make a typically tone-deaf judgement on her:

But it was a hurt she'd have to keep to herself, since most people she might share it with would not extend her much sympathy. "You sent your friends to do what!? While you sat on the ground, safe!?" So it was going to be a private thing between us.

Lucky girl, eh, to have such an understanding man? His stilted interaction with her is largely forgivable when they are teenagers in the concent together, but by this point in the story it makes for wince-inducing reading. This is part of a broader difficulty the narrative has with describing any non-intellectual contact: emotions and sensations alike - whether it's kissing his girlfriend or getting physically attacked - are almost universally reported, rather than directly expressed. ("Then awkwardness. It seemed appropriate to kiss her one more time. This went over well.") I realise that some people really do talk like this; but in Arbre, it seems, everyone does. One assumes this is the flattening, homogenizing effect, again; Stephenson's books have never been exactly character-driven

There is, as I've said, 900 pages of this: discourses on metaphysics, interspersed with episodes of teen awkwardness and descriptions of the concent's hierarchy and architecture, some quite vivid chapters on Erasmas' travels that made me perk up, followed by yet more physics discussions between interchangeable Fraas. It can be ponderous in the extreme; hundreds of pages at a time are given over to (usually colourlessly polite) debate. Still, one thing Anathem does not lack is a sense of fun, and to an extent of its own ridiculousness. A particular gem is a passage about "the Book", the task of copying and memorising which is "an especially dreaded form of penance" within the mathic (read: monastic) world. Alas, it's too long to quote in its entirety, but here is a taste:

Beyond about [Chapter] Six, the punishment could span years. Many chose to leave the concent rather than endure it. Those who stuck it out were changed when they emerged: subdued, and notably diminished. Which might sound crazy, because there was nothing to it other than copying out the required chapters, memorizing them, and then answering questions about them before a panel of hierarchs. But the contents of the Book had been crafted and refined over many centuries to be nonsensical, maddening, and pointless: flagrantly at first, more subtly as the chapters progressed. It was a maze without an exit, an equation that after weeks of toil reduced to 2 = 3. [...] The punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all of that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison infiltrate your brain to its very roots.

Stephenson, clearly, knows his strengths and weaknesses as a writer, and is unafraid to lampoon them, as in this, one of numerous (often quite pointless) extracts from 'The Dictionary' that pepper the text:

Calca: (1) In Proto- and Old Orth, chalk or any other such substance used to make marks on hard surfaces. (2) In Middle and later Orth, a calculation, esp. one that consumes a large amount of chalk because of its tedious and detailed nature. (3) In Praxic and later Orth, an explanation, definition, or lesson that is instrumental in developing some larger theme, but that, because of its overly technical, long-winded, or recondite nature, has been moved aside from the main body of the dialog and encapsulated in a footnote or appendix so as not to divert attention from the main line of the argument.

(Thus, indeed, does Anathem contain not only these Dictionary footnotes, but also a glossary and three Calca appendices that go into more detail about tangential geometrical problems raised in the main texts.)

There is a lot to like here: the central ideas are very intriguing, the writing is often engaging and funny, and when Stephenson actually lets rip with the practice rather than theory - I owe this phrasing to Niall Harrison's review - there is a very neat synergy between themes and form. But (for me at least) there was an awful lot more that seemed simply repetition and sterility. The pay off, while impressive, never convinced me that all those previous six or seven hundred pages had really needed to be filled with so many minor variations on the same few notes; moreover, while I've never seen a better metaphysical excuse for contrived plotting and a deus ex machina than here, it still does not a satisfying novel make. And by then, in any case, my senses had been dulled, in a way that Erasmas himself captures very well:

Arsibalt was horrified. "But how can you not be fascinated by--"

“I am fascinated,” I insisted. “That’s the problem. I am suffering from fascination burnout. Of all the things that are fascinating, I have to choose just one or two.”

[Beware: brief potential spoilers follow.]

There was one exchange that reminded me, though, of what is so appealing to me about science fiction, done well:

"But there is a side-effect that Orolo never warned us of," he continued, "which is that we've gone adrift. We don't exist in one state or another. Anything's possible, any history might have happened, until the gates swing open and we go into Apert."

"Either that," I said, "or we're just sleepy and worried."

"That is another possibility that might be real," Arsibalt said.

Of course, this being sf, the answer is: both are. If only the rest of the book had managed (or, indeed, sought) to achieve a closer meld of the speculative and the human.

~~Nic

"All we've got left is the future."

Memories, I've been told, are crucial. Memories are what you are. Forget your worries about what you will become - that will take place anyway - surround yourself instead with things which are important to you, even if they are painful. Submerge yourself in time. Swim in it. Drown. Well, I'm doing this now, sitting at this desk.

I promised myself that my reading and posting about this year's Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist would be less rushed than last year's. I certainly wouldn't let myself get to just over a week before the announcement and ceremony with five posts still to write. Oh no. Definitely not.

Ahem. The first installment of my Clarke shortlist posts, about Sheri S Tepper's The Margarets, takes the form of a review over at Strange Horizons. (Aside: in case anyone's interested, I recently updated the post indexing Alexandrian reviews that are hosted elsewhere online.) Now, at a pace that could hardly be mistaken for swift, I move at last onto the second - and my current favourite for the winner: Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod (whose earlier novel The Summer Isles I read and adored back in 2007).

Song of Time is, as the header quote should indicate, a novel about remembering and forgetting: how our experiences, our responses, and our memories of both those things make us the people we are. In keeping with this, the story is shaped around the narrated recollections of its central character, Roushana Maitland, a former concert violinist now living out her final weeks at her home in Cornwall. With Roushana, we look both backwards and forwards, simultaneously: her eventful life is our future, spanning a twenty-first century filled with great promise, creativity and technological advances, but also with environmental collapse and political upheavals.

Indeed, both novel and narrator are, arguably, as intensely concerned with the future as with the past: with lives lived in perpetual expectation of the future. The future, like the nostalgia of the past, can be consolatary, for both individuals and society at large: something to dream over, something to strive towards, or a necessary escape from the present, whether that present is mundane or tragic. As Roushana's mother says, after just such a tragedy:

"The past's gone, darling. The hopes and theories mean nothing. All we've got left is the future."

But what does it mean when the future is no longer something to be dreamed of, but something inescapably present? This is a sentiment expressed by several characters in the course of the novel, whether (more or less) positively - "'I mean, what I said about the future. I was wrong. The future isn’t something waiting ahead of us any longer. We’re living with it. It’s with us. It’s everything. It’s here'", as Roushana's brother Leo puts it - or wearily, as when Roushana recalls Leo's words, decades later: "The future's here, Sis. It's been and gone. And I'm still here. And so, now, are the dead." For Roushana and her family, and for the world around them, the future collapses into the present with stunning force, including but not limited to an eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano in the US. Only slightly less convulsive are the political and social upheavals Roushana lives through in Birmingham and Paris. These are the large-scale events of a more traditional science fictional future, transforming humanity's way of life, in a few fell swoops, beyond recognition. But equally devastating, in MacLeod's novel, is the slow drip-feed of time marching on, of the future becoming the present, and then the past. Viewed from one angle, after all, what is the future but the inevitability of death, for you and everyone you love? Unsurprising, then, that the novel's central technological speculation is concerned with memory as a way of taking the past into the future - and thus, perhaps, of staving off death.

Like Griffin Brooke in The Summer Isles, Roushana is a private, somewhat evasive narrator, a combination of English reserve (her mother is of Indian descent, her father Irish, but this is one cultural trait Roushana has fully absorbed from the land of her birth) and semi-calculated obfuscation; like Griffin Brooke, there are painful, unedifying truths in her past and her self that she would rather avoid. But Roushana has two reasons to tell her story, now. The first offers both a thematic touchstone - foregrounding the interplay of past memories, present realities, and hopes of the future - and a convenient device by which Roushana must order her recollections (somewhat) sequentially: she is making a sort of recording of herself, on a implanted memory-crystal, through which she, or something like her, a ghost-self built entirely of memory, will live on after her death.

What matters, she is told at the clinic, is not getting the whole truth and nothing but the truth; rather, "'the reflection of your true nature which counts'", even if it rests in illusion and delusion. (Rather raising the question - undoubtedly intentional, given how the novel climaxes - of what happens if your fellow ghosts have conflicting delusions about your shared pasts...) She has resisted the idea for some time - has, in fact, not reacted well to others who have undergone the treatment and attempted to maintain an acquaintance - but finally given in to the fashion. And fashion it is, all the rage:

They're not everywhere yet. But they're getting there. The cities nowadays - London where Edward lives, and Maria's Barcelona - are filled with these spillages of strange movement which catch at the edges of your eyes. Even in solid, stolid old Fowey, it's often hard to tell exactly what people are seeing now that its main streets are enmeshed in the ever-spreading network of crystal. For most of my life, the idea of someone talking animatedly to something you can't see has been commonplace. My grandchildren chase ghosts across Morryn's lawns on the rare occasions they visit me, and that women over there is laughingly embracing a near-invisible friend as she stands outside an antique shop and debates some purchase.

The second reason - and driver of the plot in Roushana's present, such as it is - is that a nameless, memory-less, identity-less stranger has washed up on the beach near her home. (That's him on the cover; I wasn't wild about the cover to begin with, but even less so since I started reading Watchmen, because now he just makes me think of Dr Manhattan.) The stranger is a metaphor, obviously, but also more. She has taken him in, is nursing him back to health in her memory palace.

Why did I choose to put him in this of all rooms, where everything is so personal, so much a part of me? These walls lean with awards, gold disks, rare scraps of manuscript, antique concert programs, images of my husband Claude conducting the world's great orchestras. The floor is strewn with family photos, old CDs, scraps of image, my children's crayon drawings. My desk is a shrine piled high with the past. My Guarneri violin lies waiting in its case. All I am is here - everything that I could find, anyway. Yet now I've brought in this stranger...

Filling the memory crystal is, of course, a trying process: its linearity is undermined by the inevitable randomness of which objects and images catch her eye in a given session - if never quite to the fractured extent that I imagine would really happen, if such technology existed - and it inevitably trends towards the old wounds, the emotional highs and lows rather than the mundane connecting tissue (another neat in-book rationale that ensures those parts of Roushana's life that we see are the dramatic, even melodramatic, ones).

As in The Summer Isles, MacLeod is exceptional at conjuring mood and place. Well, I was less sold on his Cornish coast (which, with its "lanes of wind-contorted trees which twisted down towards deep, unexpected valleys and framed glorious glimpses of the sea", seems a bit too generic). Where the earlier novel was all elegiac, dappled evening sunlight, though, Song of Time's touchstones are cities: stifling, claustrophobic, fetid cities, poised permanently on the brink of explosions to rival that of Yellowstone. Birmingham, where Roushana grows up, is "tired, sticky" and starless with light and air pollution, filled with "the boom of next door’s television and the drone of evening traffic on the Alcester Road", in which Leo's music is, by contrast, "like the cool flow of a midnight river". This city is sharp-edged, exhausting, debilitating, mirroring Roushana's state of mind as she tears herself apart and puts herself back together, with music, in the wake of her beloved brother's untimely death:

I was exhilarated. I was terrified. My skin crawled. I drove myself so hard and did without sleep and ignored my mother's occasional pleadings. This isn't the only thing in life, Roushana. You're over-stretched. How stupidly wrong could she be? Of course it was the only thing! I wanted to be stretched so far that I snapped into disparate pieces and then to examine my flayed body and find out what those pieces were, and what lay beyond. That might get rid of this curse of being merely good. [...] The swaying figures surrounded me. I was touched by gaunt fingers. I felt their hollowed breath. I shared the fatigue of centuries. On summer nights, as barricades went up and the helicopters flickered closer and cars were rolled and the flaming streets of Balsall Heath played orange across thunderous skies, I breathed the acrid smoke of funeral pyres. When the rains raged and the gutters giggled like gargoyles and fish-condoms swam in the streets, my teeth were gritted with the soils of the grave. On broken-glass mornings, exhausted but elated, the taste of dried blood was still on my bitten tongue as I trudged through the blasted world. My bleeding fingers stained the strings of my violin. It had to hurt. When it didn't, I knew I hadn't done enough.

Paris, too, home of Roushana and her husband Claude during their Bohemian heyday, when they set the city alight with their music and (less figuratively) with their political dabblings in the months before the world changed - rarely was the phrase "dancing on a volcano" more apt - is heady, baroque, and oppressive. It is another summer, of stifling heat, endemic strikes, and crippling water shortages. Roushana's recollections, and what she imagines to be those of her then political and cultural rival, evangelical prophet of doom Christos, raise things to a suitably melodramatic pitch:

[W]hether he wandered the clinic corridors or prowled the Parisian streets in search of fresh donors, all he saw was a fallen world. The unreachable skies teemed with promises of different flesh, intricate metals and plastics - new skins, new clothes, new perfumes, which cost more than the supposed worth of many people's lives. So he knew that this world was fallen and ending long before he understood the scriptures, for the world of scriptures was already all around him.

The Paris sections are the highlight of the book, tense, explosive and immersive. Roushana's memories continue, but - for us as for her - everything after this glittering time is slightly disappointing by comparison. Roushana and Claude live on together, in the house in Cornwall, but they are increasingly strangers to each other and themselves - as Roushana reflects after his death - struggling to separate themselves from their public faces, their performance. When, in the present, the recovering stranger begins to ask questions, Roushana's already-fragile control of the narrative of her self begins to slip. Past and present alike begin to unravel. In a final moment of melodrama, Roushana reveals the terrible secret that she has been skirting around throughout - but there is a sense in which it is inevitably (deliberately?) anti-climactic, after all the build-up of emotion and evasion.

But it is, nevertheless, a release. I'm left thinking of how stories about ghosts often centre around spirits haunting places (so apt, here), trapped by traumatic, unfinished events, finding release only through the resolution of those events. In light of which, however unsatisfying the secret and its revelation are, the clear-eyed decision it triggers in Roushana seems utterly right: she has her resolution; the future can go on without her.

Not quite up to the standards of The Summer Isles, then - but, as I said, my personal frontrunner. Four posts to go!

~~Nic

(who wrote this post to a soundtrack of Faith No More, to celebrate the fact that they've only gone and reformed (eleven years after splitting up*) for a tour. Since they've been my favourite band for nearly 14 years, I'm quite ridiculously excited.)

(* Said split was apparently caused not so much by the band members hating each other - as is generally the case in such situations - as by the members no longer caring enough to sustain the mutual hatred that, er, was pretty much the engine of the band from day one. Yeah. They're a strange bunch...)

Not Waving but Drowning

Another month, another of my print reviews transplanted to EA - this time, of a very fine novel indeed: In Great Waters (2009), by Kit Whitfield, an early candidate for my best books of the year list.

--

We see plenty of medievalesque royal courts in fantasy. Rarely are they handled with such deftness and depth as in Kit Whitfield’s second novel: not glittering courtiers trading witty barbs, but a precarious, constricted world, where threats come from all sides, and people do terrible things for the sake not so much of power as security.

For centuries, the crowned heads of Whitfield’s alternate Europe have been descendants of a single queen, Angelica, who married the Doge of Venice, forging an alliance between the Venetians and her mermaid-like ‘deepsmen’ kin. Her halfbreed offspring became sought-after spouses for every monarch who desired deepsmen aid for trade and defence.

But draconian measures to protect the bloodline from bastard halfbreeds have caused weakness; as the story opens, England’s royal house totters under the weight of inbreeding. When a young halfbreed is abandoned by his tribe on the coast, a disaffected noble has him reared in secret, grooming him to snatch the throne.

Whitfield is excellent on the struggles of the boy, Henry, to adapt to life and speech on land. She has a keen eye, and uses rich, sensually-descriptive language, for differences both physical – legs bred for swimming adapt poorly to walking – and conceptual. Clothes are “a blindfold for his body”; the sharp lines of houses are alien and threatening for one born to water. While Henry is concealed for safety, his royal counterpart, the princess Anne, hides in plain sight at her ailing grandfather’s court, retreating from danger and duty behind a mask of feigned stupidity. She is an exceptionally nuanced study of nobility’s privileges and strictures, growing into authority and shouldering the burdens of her (female, half-deepsman) “body politic”.

Elements of the ending don’t quite fit with the high standards of unsentimental complexity set in the rest of this measured, thoughtful novel; but overall this is stunning, beautifully written work.

[Review originally appeared in SFX 181 (April 2009).]

--

I really can't recommend this book highly enough. The writing is beautiful - rich and measured, tactile and often visceral, as in the opening paragraph:

Henry could remember the moment of his birth. Crushing pressure, heat, and then the contact with the sea, terrifyingly cold - but at the same time a release from constriction, the instant freedom of the skin. His mother gathered him up in her arms and swam to the surface, cradling him on her slick breast to lift his head above water for his first breath. Henry never forgot it, the mouthful of icy air, the waves chopping his skin, a woman's arms holding him up in a world suddenly without warmth.

Such prose excellently suited to a story that is, after all, in large part about physicality. A central theme is the characters' relationships with their bodies, and their bodies' with the world around them; how so much of power, and its lack, reside in the body, made literal and inescapably visible through the physical differences between landsmen and deepsmen:

Anne felt a sudden, unexpected sense of kinship with the captive boy. She had faced too many situations, surrounded by demands, questions, threats, where she had no way out. She could not hide herself among the crowd, could not claim ignorance, irresponsibility. Her face and form spoke loud, a clanging bell proclaiming to everyone who saw, here was a royal body, a body politic, a body expected to have answers.

I love that last line: "a clanging bell" is such a well-chosen image, one that fits the character's world and expresses her alarm at the very idea of standing out, and the usage of "body politic" is very neat.

The world, too, is interesting and well-rounded, although it felt more 16th-century than 14th, at least to me - there was something about the on-going effort, not always successful, to stamp out dissent that was reminiscent of Henry VIII. It is full of ordinary lives being lived and little, telling details, like the way the balance of power and culture is reflected in naming patterns. For example, most characters’ family names derive from bodies of water (Westlake, Claybrook), and noble titles come from rivers (Mersey, Thames) not land holdings.

Ordinarily, I would find it difficult to believe that any single dynasty could remain in power - not just in England, but any medievalesque country - for something like five centuries, but Whitfield makes a reasonable case (through backdrop and main plot, rather than much explicit explanation) for the combined force of a very weighty tradition, the need for good relations with coastal deepsmen, and the relatively-effective deterrance of burning at the stake as a punishment for rivals.

And, of course, the story is all about a challenge to the status quo...

~~Nic

Dorothea into Dodo

Watchful readers will know that I've recently finished reading Dickens' Bleak House after an interminable three months.  (Not interminable because the book wasn't to my taste - I loved almost every page - but interminable because of my reduced reading schedule and my naughty habit of putting big, bulky classic reads to one side while I fritter my way through some contemporary fiction.)  Having put it down for the last time I felt bereft and, in a moment of weakness, toyed with moving straight on to another fat Victorian novel (I was seriously considering some Trollope - Phineas Finn, probably, which would have been on my bedside table until June at least).  But I reminded myself of the huge pile of Orange Prize longlistees I had dragged home from the library and made a compromise: I chose a book inspired by a Victorian novelist rather than a Victorian novel.  I'm enormously glad I did.  Gaynor Arnold's Girl in a Blue Dress (which has been on my radar since the Booker longlist last year) is a neat pearl of a book -  literary but light, well-written without being uptight and thoughtful without being morbid or preachy.  It has been the perfect answer to three months of Dickensian inertia. I read it in just a few days, throwing off my Archives reading and pretending not to have a syllabus to prepare for next month's teaching.  If all books were this enjoyable I'd never get anything done.

As you may know, Girl in a Blue Dress is a fictionalisation of the fraught marriage and scandalous seperation of Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth. Admittedly, the characters do not bear these names - instead we have Alfred Gibson and Dorothea Millar - but the parallel is hardly subtle.  The couples lead virtually synonymous lives - from the children born and buried, to the novels written and magazines published (all with barely disguised titles) and the emotional breakdowns endured. There are some minor differences - eight children rather than ten, for example - but only one major one.  While Catherine Dickens was a silent party in her wedded life, drowned out by her husband's eloquence and the demands of social propriety, Dorothea Millar's is the only voice we hear in Arnold's novel as she narrates her present and her past to us.   We hear her side of the couple's story: young love, initial happy poverty, Gibson's growing success, the children that come one after another and the emotional rift that begins to yawn between them, arguably widened by the arrival of a certain young actress in her husband's life.  Alfred (and, by association, Dickens) is heard at second hand; he is reduced, powerless, put in his place.  I can almost hear Gaynor Arnold saying 'There! See how you like it!'.   

Like Charles and Catherine, Alfred and Dorothea are an unlikely match from the beginning.  When they first meet he is an aspiring but penniless writer, little better than a clerk, and she is the plump, pampered daughter of rich man; he has endured a childhood overcast by debt and hardship, while she has sewn samplers in a pre-lapsarian suburban eden.  In temperament, experience and ambition they are entirely at odds.  Nevertheless, they fall in love instantly - Dorothea with Alfred's exuberance, confidence and charm; Alfred with Dorothea's otherworldly innocence and, perhaps, the curve of her breasts in a certain blue dress.  As is so often the case it is precisely the things they initially admire in each other that bring them into conflict later.  As they years pass Alfred's nervous energy, combined with his insatiable ambition to be a Great Man, begin to wear on Dorothea, who craves simple pleasures and uncomplicated intimicies.  At the same time Dorothea's inability to keep house or play the glamorous hostess, frustrates Alfred's longing for a helpmeet to smooth the passage of his genius.  It doesn't help that Dorothea swells up like a balloon and pops out a child every 18 months, followed by a period of exhaustion and post-natal depression.  After 20 years of marriage everything that was once Dorothea - the vivacious confident girl in the blue dress - has been thoroughly repressed in 'Dodo', a fat, jealous embarrassment of a wife, abnegated to the point of extinction.

There is no one who recognises this as thoroughly as Dodo herself.  As the book opens we find her sitting alone in her tiny parlour on the day of Alfred's funeral, a forgotten widow.  Publically cast off almost ten years earlier (but still a lawful wife - divorce would have been an unthinkable scandal), she grieves with the heart of the girl she once was, holding on to the memory of Alfred's once-upon-a-time love.  Yet while she continues to offer herself at the altar of the author's greatness, she recognises the extent and injustice of her sacrifice.  The sacrifice all respectable married women are forced to make:

But I can't help reflecting on the Queen's situation; and how even she, the most powerful woman in the land, was under the thumb of her Prince.  And I see as if for the first time how we put aside all that is strong within us, all that is particular about us, and bend to the will of our husbands.

At a glance, and seen through Alfred's eyes and the eyes of the fashionable world, there isn't very much strong or particular in Dorothea to begin with.  Alfred cuttingly refers to her at one dinner party as humourless, soulless and without conversation - in jest, of course; when she jokes, he laughs not at the joke but at her attempt to make it.  Dorothea's own memories are all about Alfred's conversation, Alfred's exploits, Alfred's ideas; it is only obliquely and through the memories of others that we discover her real qualities.  She is visited in her closeted widowhood by Alfred's oldest friend, Michael O'Rourke (who may have amorous designs of his own), and it is clear that he remembers a very different Dorothea to the one she imagines; similarly, her children's nurse reminises about a very different sounding woman.  The Dorothea they describe is full of quiet grace and gentle conversation; a peace-maker; a loving mother and a caring wife; a retiring woman ground down by a tireless, obsessive, emotionally-constipated genius.  But not so retiring as to be Alfred's doormat -when she is ill-used or neglected, she demands restitution and fair treatment. It is only as much as her love deserves:

I never set out to quarrel with him, of course, and cannot count the occasions on which I bit back words of complaint or censure even as they rose to my lips. But it is not always possible to hide one's feelings, and my very love for him seemed to draw me into querulous demands that were out of my mouth before I knew, and jealous tempers that I despised even as I was in the midst of them. He accused me of having a limited mind; and wanting to limit him too. You would quench my light. You would silence my voice. You would claw me down to the commonplace. But to be commonplace is not a fault. The world needs commonplace people as much as it needs original people, and it is the worship of the commonplace people that made Alfred who he was.

The problem with her marriage, it becomes clear, stemmed not so much from her flaws as from Alfred's desire for opposing qualities at once: Dodo was to be undemanding and selfless, and yet always ready to fulfill his unspoken demands with energy; she was never to be jealous of his passion for other women, but still to be utterly devoted to him alone; she was never to get pregnant but always be available to share his bed.  In other words, she was to be the Angel of his House, a Little Woman along the lines of Esther in Bleak House: part servant, part dependent, part companion, part saint.  Never wanting anything, and being grateful for every crumb that dropped from the Great One's table. After Dorothea's banishment from the marital home, Alfred finds a replacement for her in her sister, Sissy (Georgiana Hogarth in Dickens' real life), who serves as his housekeeper and caregiver and is always at his side be it morning and at night.  Dorothea acerbically confronts Sissy's smug service late in the novel: Try giving birth to eight children in sixteen years, she says, at the same time as getting up at 4am to brew your husband's coffee and lay out his writing materials. See if you don't fall short too.

As the novel progresses and Alfred Gibson's old age indiscretions with the seventeen year old actress Wilhemina Ricketts emerge, one begins to sense that a deeper psychosis is also at the base of his failed marriage to Dodo.  Dorothea recalls his passionate obsession with her fifteen year old sister, Alice, who died of a fit in his arms, and finds echoes of it throughout his life.  She does not imagine - and nor should we - that Alfred was sexually attracted to vulnerable innocents (or, god forbid, little girls), but she comes to recognise that he was emotionally fixated on their qualities.  That their youth, beauty, sexual innocence, dependence and awe of him provoked his finest feelings of sympathy and love; that they embodied the sweetest version of the Angel in the House.  The 'girl in the blue dress' of the title is the composite of all these girl-women, the cumulative ideal of Gibson's imaginings. Dorothea realises this fully in meeting her nemesis, Miss Ricketts, who turns out to be nobody and nothing particular either. Just a delicate sparrow of a woman in need of a father figure:

'But it seemed - I beg your pardon - as if he needed something more.  Some ideal companion he had not yet met.' ... My blood chills in my veins as I hear the drum-roll of his discontent once again, and recognise that under all his compulsive romancing, and flirting, all his excessive hilarity, all the falling in and out of friendships, all the work, work, work, all the restless changes of his life - there was always the headlong quest for something that was forever beyond his grasp.

Innocence, after all, was always beyond Gibson's grasp and tragically so.  If he acted to possess the objects of his fancy, they were no longer what he wanted them to be; if he did not act, then they were lost to him and drifted into the arms of another. This is why he mourned so extravagantly and so long for little Alice, his lost love. After the shock and initial pain has past, he held on to grief because it was delicious.  By dying at the height of her perfection, Alice was always what Alfred wanted and needed.  He could possess her memory entirely, frozen in aspic.  Meanwhile, the brief moment in which Dorothea, plump and pretty in her blue dress, fulfilled his fantasy was destroyed instantly in marrying her. She explains to Miss Ricketts:

I sigh. 'Women don't have to do anything,' I say, 'They merely have to be.  The men will make what they will of us. Don't you see that you were simply another young creature to be endowed with all the perfections of his imagination. You are very much in the mould - his own particular mould, I mean. The mould I never fitted once I became his wife.'

All of which should make clear that Girl in a Blue Dress is a study in psychologies: the psychology of a Great Man and his wife, and the psychology of Victorian men and women more generally.  It is also a talking-cure novel, a record of character therapy - by telling us her story, Dorothea works out and through the difficulties and joys of her life.  This leads to some overly pointed philosophising at times, particularly on the issue of women's marital rights, but generally it is very smoothly carried off.  Arnold's prose trips neatly out of Dorothea's mouth, sweet and quirky and infinitely readable.

The question on everyone's lips seems to be: Does the novel tell us something new about Dickens? No doubt Gaynor Arnold knows her Dickens well, insofar as my 3-novels worth of knowledge can judge.  And no doubt Girl in a Blue Dress is an intriguing, insightful exercise in fictionalising historical figures, reimagining well-rehearsed details and skewing them slightly. As to whether it is a commentary on the 'true' history, I think not.  Arnold is playing a game of ideas and feelings with reality, but she has no agenda for re-evaluating it in light of her fiction - and this is why she changes the names, I think. Not just out of sensitivity and clarity as regards issues of fictionalisation but in order to highlight how personal and how particular her vision of Charles and Catherine Dickens' life is, one psychological pathway out of many.

I think the book has a relatively good chance of making the Orange shortlist - it has the balance of readability and extended scope that the judges seem to have favoured in their longlist.  While I was reading it I also received a press release about the 2009 Desmond Elliott Prize for best debut fiction and I note its appearance on that list as well.  There is certainly something pleasing about this novel that may not immediately meet the eye. 

~~Victoria~~

Why we still need the Orange Prize

I'm working on a post on Gaynor Arnold's Girl in a Blue Dress at the moment, and also on reading Ann Weisgarder's accomplished debut The Personal History of Rachel DuPree.  Given that, I've been thinking about the Orange Prize a lot, and about the controversy it causes year after year, and about whether or not it is justified to have a prize for women only.  Then I see the shortlist for the Impac Dublic prize - the world's richest English language prize - which was released today and I think: yes, hell yes, women still need a prize of their own.

The shortlist is eight books long; all eight books are by male authors.  The Guardian article I read about it notes that there are some notable omissions but, no surprises, the omissions are more of the same. Coetzee, Roth,  Hosseini, McEwan and Ondaatje have all 'missed out' or been 'snubbed'. Seasoned authors have been pushed aside by debuts. But nowhere does it mention or even note the gender disparity.  What about the great women writers on the longlist who missed out? What about Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, AL Kennedy or Anne Enright?  What about Annie Dillard or Sarah Hall? Joyce Carol Oates or Rose Tremain?  Haven't they been snubbed?  Do you know how many women have won the Impac prize since 1996? Three. 

This comes hot on the heels of last year's Booker shortlist, which was also thoroughly dominated by men. It looks to me as though the Orange Prize has never been more necessary. Can you imagine any other prize having a shortlist composed entirely of women writers?  I can't.  Every year I'm reading extroadinary work by women, and every year it slips by unnoticed.  It isn't because women aren't writing great fiction; it's because fiction by men is being privileged, either because of its style, or its subject, I don't know. Amongst our so-called literary giants women are still strange beasts.

The Orange Prize isn't the best solution to this problem, I admit, because it further ghetto-ises fiction by women, but at least it puts women's fiction on the table.  At least it puts it in shops and libraries and in people's minds.

~~Victoria~~