Eve's Alexandria

Reading Re-cap Redux, March

It has been a glorious Spring day here, a brilliant start to the long Easter weekend, with blue skies from dawn until dusk and a piercing sparkling light.  For the first time in six months I didn't wear wellies, hat and gloves to walk Juno; I even took my coat off in the sunshine.  The ground along the field edge and the lane was wondrously blessedly dry.  It has been nothing but mud and dirty puddles since October and I had forgotten what it was like to walk on firm ground.  What a relief.  It would have been a crime to stay indoors afterwards, so we got busy in the garden: mowing the lawn, picking up the million sticks that fall out of our trees, putting all the gravel that migrates off the driveway back on to it again.  Now I have that pleasant buzz of activity and fresh air on my skin and am in desperate anticipation of summer.  Best to have enjoyed it while it lasted, since tomorrow the rain and stormy winds are back. Sign, moan, groan.  

Ah well, bad weather means more time for reading and (no surprise) I'm keen to get back to my books after a day of exertion.  Ayelet Gundar-Goshen's Waking Lions is my current Kindle read and has my keen attention.  I really wasn't sure about it at first. The claustrophobic interiority of the writing, the focus on the less than salubrious thoughts of less than likable characters, made it feel narrow.  Some of the overt racism directed against the novel's Eritrean characters is distinctly uncomfortable, as is the sexism against women generally. But it has grown on me, page by page, as I've given myself over to the psychology of the Israeli desert and the intensity of the moral dilemma at its heart.   I've also just put my bookmark in Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss, the final book in her historical trilogy following the life and career of Alethea Moberley, one of the first women to qualify as a doctor in London in the 1870s. It follows on from Bodies of Light, which I first read back in 2014 and just finished re-reading in anticipation of the sequel (on which, more below).  Two things have bumped it up my TBR pile: it's been shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize (as was Bodies of Light before it) and an ARC of Moss' next novel The Tidal Zone (out in July) just dropped through my letterbox from Granta.   The new book is a stand alone, but I've read Moss in order from the beginning and I don't want to give up my perfect reading streak.

I'm reading faster this year than I have since 2007; by the end of March I will have read more books in three months than I did in the whole of 2014 (which was, admittedly, a dire year).  Which means that I have a few more things to quickly recap in order to stick to my 'write about everything I read' resolution.

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson (HarperCollins, 2015, borrowed from the library)

First up is this delightful graphic novel, which first appeared as a web comic between 2012-2014 and has taken the world by storm since then.  It's eponymous heroine is a headstrong and fearless shapeshifter, whose magical ability to transform herself into any living creature from a mouse to a dragon to your grandmother leads her to seek a job as sidekick to Lord Ballister Blackheart.  After losing his right arm in a joust at hero school Blackheart has made it his business to be an all-round Bad Guy and wreak havoc on the Institution for Law Enforcement and Heroics.  The Institution's hero-in-chief is Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin (yes, really), Blackheart's former best friend and the man who wounded him all those years ago.  There are giggles, quirks and quotables from the first strip of the comic to the last, mostly fuelled by Nimona's never-ending enthusiasm for causing havoc.  The will-they-won't-they kill each other / get it on tension between Blackheart and Goldenloin is sweet as anything.  But the tone changes markedly after the mid-point: the early larks about evil master-plans give way to a the central plot about the Institution's sinister abuses of power.  The origin and implication of Nimona's power is brought to the fore, as is the real world danger of her recklessness.  You can clearly see how Stevenson grew as both an artist and a storyteller over the two years she worked on the comic.  I can't help but think it would be better if I'd experienced it that way too, gradually and episodically rather than gulping it down. 

Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho (Macmillan, 2015, borrowed from the library)

I haven't seen or heard a bad word about this book from any quarter and on paper it sounded 100% my kind of thing.  A Regency setting in an alternate magical England that borders the land of Faery (ala Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell) where a former slave has just been made Sorcerer Royal against the wishes of practically everyone?  A smart, feisty mixed-heritage girl with more power in her little finger than half the magicians in England, in spite of the fact that Ladies Don't Do Magic?  A dastardly plot to rob the nation of it's flow of magical energy?  I couldn't order it from the library fast enough.  Which is why I feel a bit deflated when I admit that I didn't love it.  I liked it, but I didn't love it like I hoped I would.  It's charming and desperately well written - Cho maintains the early nineteenth century idiom without skipping a beat - and it has energy and action and witty repartee in spades.  It handles the racial and gender prejudices that both it's hero and heroine face with sensitivity and aplomb.  Still I found it hard to warm to either Zacharias or Prunella, the former being too reserved and proper and the latter being too forthright and improper.   At times the pastiche of the dialogue turned them into caricatures.  Prunella had a kind of unstoppable certainty in herself that turned me off, while Zacharias effaced himself into statuary.  The plot was full of moments where people turn up at just the right time - one character in particular, the witch Mak Genggang, always seemed to be breaking through windows in order to move the plot forwards.  I thought some elements of the denouement, and especially the romance subplot, felt thoroughly unearned.  Very clever, very accomplished, very neat but flat in my opinion.

Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss (Granta, 2014, audio download from the library and my own hardback copy) 

I spotted this on Overdrive, the e-book and audio book app for my library, and jumped on it with a squeal. I was facing a long tedious spring clean of the kitchen and had been looking for something to keep me company.  Signs for Lost Children had just been shortlisted for the Wellcome and I'd been reminded of how very much I admired Bodies of Light.  This was a perfect opportunity to re-read it.  The book is the second in a series about women and medicine and parenthood that connects Alethea Moberley in the nineteenth century to a writer and mother on a remote Scottish island in the twenty-first century.  The first book - Night Waking - focuses primarily on the present-day, interweaving the story of Alethea's younger sister May.  Bodies of Light shifts the action to Manchester in the 1860s and 1870s where Ally and May are growing up in the care of vastly different parents. Their father, Alfred, is an interior designer in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition, with a taste for fine things and earthly delights.  Their mother, Elizabeth, is a campaigner for women's rights, a reformer of public health and a harsh task-master.  Ally and May are caught between their competing ways of living in the world, at the mercy of their mother's discipline and their father's whims.  Ally in particular suffers physical and psychological abuse, pressured to embody Elizabeth's ideal of useful and unimpeachable womanhood.  Her schooling and then her doctor's training are as much about the cause of women as they are about her own interests and desires.  Moss's writing is gorgeously textured, with an impeccable attention to the detail of material culture and historical setting.  She dwells intensely on the physical experiences of her characters as bodies in time and space, with a focus on sensation - everything is touched, tasted, smelt in technicolour.  I thought this book was good the first time round but this time, listening to it at an indulgent pace, I thought it was absolutely impeccable. 

What have you been reading and what are planning to curl up with this Easter?  

(Oh, I forgot to say: bear with me, I'm fussing about with the design of the blog and have settled on this new format as an interim design.  I suddenly wanted a change to the old column layout but I'm so rubbish as changing it that I'm having to tackle it in stages.  I hope you don't mind it this way for a little while.)

~~Victoria~~

 

They are trying to break your heart

They Are Trying to Break Your Heart by David Savill

Bloomsbury, 24 March 2016

ARC, 348 pages

*My copy supplied for review by the publisher. 

On Boxing Day 2004 a massive earthquake out in the Indian Ocean caused a tsunami that swept the coasts of Thailand, Sri Lanka and India and killed over a quarter of a million people. In the aftermath of this utter devastation the fates of those who died and those who survived seemed arbitrary.  People who had been standing side by side experienced entirely different endings: one surviving with barely a scratch, the other wrenched away and battered to death; whole families gone, their bodies found miles apart, except for a toddler who somehow lived.  No rhyme nor reason, no differentiation between the deserving or the damned. No answers, no pattern.  A disaster like that is what it is: a force majeure, an act of God, almost impossible to comprehend. 

There is a moment in David Savill's expansive, generous debut novel that fixes on the moment before the disaster, after the initial, smaller wave came and went but before the big one that swallowed everything.  While animals made for higher ground, and birds took flight, people stayed still, even moved further into the path of disaster:

It was not the first wave they had to fear.  It was their ignorance.  They couldn't see the first wave for what it was.  The kindness of the world.  A warning.... On Kao Lak beach, even after the first wave made land, children played, and their parents watched. Only humans, with their human arrogance, possess the instinct to stand and stare at what they have never seen before.

So sure are we of our mastery of the world, we can barely believe its power over us. We are vulnerable; we are easy to destroy. Savill was a BBC journalist at the time of the tsunami, and spent six months reporting from Thailand in the aftermath.  He saw what happened with his own eyes, and seeing is believing.   

They Are Trying to Break Your Heart interweaves the experience of the tsunami with the trauma of the civil war in Bosnia ten years earlier, unlikely times and places bound together by the story of a man who died in both.  Kemal Lekic, a young hero of the war, was killed in shelling on his home town near Sarajevo in 1994.  His body was never found, assumed vapourised by a direct hit, and the coffin his friends buried was filled instead with keepsakes.  His surrogate brother Marko grieved hard, alongside Kemal's girlfriend Vesna.  

Fast forward to 2005 and Marko has resettled in England, got a girlfriend of his own, a good job; the war in Bosnia is behind him, a bad memory.  He's getting a takeaway - oh prosaic life - when his phone rings and an old mutual friend Samir tells him that Kemal is dead.  Again.  His body has been identified amongst the victims of the tsunami in Thailand.  He has been alive for a decade, running a bar on a beach, thousands of miles from his grave.  The body is being flown home - will Marko come home too, to lay him to rest a second time?  Marko's immediate return to Bosnia, flashbacks to the war and to his friendship with Kemal spin one half of the story.  Why did Kemal leave?  What happened to him during his final months as a soldier that made it easier to slip his skin, abandon the people who loved him, than stay?  

The other half of the book belongs to William and, through him, to Anya.  They are erstwhile lovers, who reunite at Kao Lak on the coast of Thailand for Christmas after a three year break in their relationship.  William is at an impasse in his life, washed up teaching English in Bangkok, while Anya is a human rights researcher for Dignity Monitor working on reparations for people displaced by the conflict in Bosnia.  The holiday is a tentative foray back into their thirteen year partnership, an experiment at William's request.  Unbeknownst to him, however, Anya has an ulterior motive for the visit.  She is unofficially on the trail of a war criminal, a man she thinks raped and murdered refugees while commanding a unit back in Sarajevo.  She has reason to believe he is alive and well and at Kao Lak.  His name is Kemal Lekic. 

The novel weaves a complicated web back and forth through time, flashbacks within flashbacks within flashforwards, so that sections from 1994 reflect back to the 1980s and onwards to 2005. The structure is slippery, unexpected and, though each section of the book is date and place stamped, we slide between before the wave and after the wave, between Sarajevo, Kao Lak and Bangkok without warning. Time and space are collapsed, so that William, recovering in Bangkok months later, still feels like he is dripping with tsunami water.  At first this is confusing and hectic; it leaves you feeling unhooked from the story.  You get used to it though, because Savill has a good ear for sense of place, a journalist's gift for invoking a Thai beach at Christmas or a judo championship in a bombed out city.  The writing is muscular and kinetic, pulsing with energy.  It has a good mouth feel when read aloud.  Here, for example, is Marko's arrival of Samir's house, back in Bosnia for the first time in a decade:

Samir's house is perched over the old Sarajevsko beer factory, on the hills above Bascarsija, where the wooden shacks lean into each other as if they are trying to hide.  But the house itself is a giant thing of unpainted concrete, three times the size of the old shacks... The house is half finished, no carpets, wires sticking out of the electric sockets and a carpenter's bench with a circular saw covered in blue tarpaulin.  He shows Marko the view over the tumbledown roofs of the neighbourhood, where minarets light up the beautiful early-evening mess of Sarajevo.  The night smells of friend onions, meat, and all the things he really misses about Bosnia. 

They Are Trying isn't always lyrical - though it often is - but it is always exacting and observant: the tarpaulin is not just any tarpaulin of your imagination, it's blue.  This detail gives the novel real-world texture, which is essential because otherwise the thematic weight of it would overwhelm the story.  Given the difficult subject matter - the wave, the war - it could so easily have been overwrought with meaning with a capital M, but it's not. It gives due respect to the substantive reality of what it fictionalises.

There is a lot going on in this book, about the nature of agency and control, about the dynamics of power, about guilt and redemption, but displacement out-themes the rest.  The movement of things and people from one place to another, across borders, across time, at the level of the individual and the nation, suffuse the whole from beginning to end.  It plays out most vividly in the tsunami itself, where the ocean is forced up and over land by the shifting of the seabed.  The wave is the activating force of the story - it brings Kemal, Anya, William and Marko into the same narrative space, and works on them as both a reality and a metaphor.  As the characters experience it, in life and then in the nightmares that follow, it reoccurs again and again.  The tsunami hits They Are Trying to Break Your Heart a dozen times or more.  William revisits it almost willingly, in fits of horror and relief:

He lies down on the bed and darkens the windows of the room with a switch in the headboard. Inside the sea is silent, and this silence is where he wants to return.  Above the water, only noise; people shouting, car alarms, snapping buildings, cracking trees.  It all happens in the roaring throat of the ocean.  The unmooring of the world. The wave picks up a car and pushes it slowly through the window of a shop.  The buildings drift like unanchored ships. The street slips, water grabbing William by the ankles and pushing him down where a cold silence pours in and he is free.  Here in the wave, where he holds Anya's hand. 

We see it roll in from multiple points of view, and it's dominance is such that even before it happens it darkens every encounter in the story.  There is a powerfully poignant moment just hours before the event, when Anya speaks to a little girl on the beach.  She is carrying an inflatable giraffe, separated from her parents; her fizzing lifeforce, her daring innocence as she darts away from Anya's concern, is made painful with anticipation of what will happen to her.  It is terrifying to think how unwitting we are, how oblivious to danger.  How our lives roll right up to the credits. The same is true for the children and young people dead in the shelling in Bosnia, the attack that supposedly killed Kemal, the bombs falling on them during a ceasefire party. 

The war in Bosnia turned thousands of people into refugees, and led to a mass migration into Europe and surrounding countries.  Marko, of course, is one of these, so, in his way, is Kemal and so are the women he allegedly raped.   People are moved, by violence, to new places.  Though life is arguably a constant cycle of movement, these displacements are extraordinary and traumatic.  They require a period of recovery.  As well as the moment of impact, They Are Trying is also about this recovery, and what happens to the people who survive the displacement, who go on carrying the terrible weight of guilt and responsibility of living when others have died.   When the novel begins both William and Marko are reserved and retentive. Their behaviour seems cruel or cold or crazy.  Only as their painful memories begin to surface, as they unpick and explore them, do they begin to emerge in their complexity.  Each of the book's characters is treated like this, with gentle tenderness, and the length of the novel provides space for you to grow affectionate, even with people who can be reprehensible.  Some aspects of their characters are deeply troubling, which is not surprising given the circumstances.  Marko in particular does and feels some dark things; and he is quicker to forgive others their dark pasts than we might like.  William behaves like a bit of a fool for significant portions of the book. Almost everyone is lying to everyone else, about their motives and their desires.  They are people though, and exposed like this they kind of break your heart.  

So, yes, the synopsis on this debut novel presses exactly none of my buttons: it's realist, contemporary, confronts war, natural disasters, human rights abuses. It is a million miles outside my comfort zone, and I don't really like the cover.  It was put in my hands by a publisher I like, blurbed by an author I admire - Anna Hope, who is part of the same writer's group as Savill - but I still had to challenge myself to pick it up.  Which is an abject lesson in how, sometimes, other people really do know what's best for you.  In a year already teeming with good reads, this book turned out to be amongst the best of them so far. 

~~Victoria~~

Reading Re-cap: January-March

I've been rather quiet on the blogging front this last month, after such a cracking start to the year.  Those of you who follow me on Twitter might have noticed I've been working on a chapter of my PhD ahead of an important deadline in April, and there is only so much writing I can bear each day.  The thought of cracking open the laptop and starting a review in an evening is painful after long hours in front of the screen writing about archival value systems.  And this particular chapter has been a traumatic one; it took me almost six weeks to realise that the reason it was so painful was that I was actually giving birth to twins.  Turns out that what I thought was a single chapter is actually two.  I spent yesterday splitting the 15,000 word behemoth in half and submitting the better two thirds to my supervisors.  I feel much better for getting it out of my hands for a few days; until my supervision next Wednesday it's off the radar.  Now for a long weekend off to recover. 

Reading is going to play a large part.  Reading and reviewing.  I have a longish piece to write about They Are Trying to Break Your Heart, the debut novel by BBC correspondent David Savill set in the aftermath of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.  And a shorter one about Nalo Hopkinson's piquant short story collection Falling in Love with Hominids.  On the reading front I'm 80 pages into Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho and am intent on luxuriating in that for much of the time, interspersed with catching up on some graphic novels. I have Nimona, the second volume of Rat Queens and the first volume of Lumberjanes on loan from the library.  I'm also just about to start another Pushkin Press translation: Waking Lions by Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen.  It's a realist contemporary story about a doctor who kills an immigrant man in a hit and run, only to find the man's widow on his door step the next day.  It's going to act as counter balance to the magical historical romp of Sorcerer to the Crown.  

At the beginning of the year I had a foolish ambition to write a little bit of something about everything I read in 2016.  I didn't count on how much I'd be reading though, or on how intense my research would get.  Still, there are a few things from my TBR and the library in the last four weeks that I want to at least mention. 

• Under the Skin by Michel Faber (Canongate, 2000, my own paperback copy)

Holy wow, this book is not what I expected. At all.  I have had it on my TBR for years and years, and after reading The Book of Strange New Things I decided to jump right in.  (See also my NYR not to hoard authors anymore.)  It's a stunning debut - mind-blowing, acutely observed and batshit crazy.  It's almost impossible to describe it in a non-spoilery way, and to be honest I think it's fairest to let you in on a few of its secrets. Otherwise, like me, you'll be innocently reading along and suddenly, whoa, you'll think you fell asleep and started hallucinating.  Under the Skin is about Issherley, a strange young woman who drives up and down the A9 north of Inverness looking for hitchhikers.  It's the fit, healthy men she's after, the ones who have no family, few friends, lives that no one will miss.  So far, so mysterious. But that's when the space llamas come into it.  Yep.  Space llamas.  You have to read it to believe it.  There is no way you could predict that Faber's second novel would be The Crimson Petal and the White.  I mean, no way.  I'll be so sorry if you doesn't write another book. 

• The Inheritors by Williams Golding (Faber, 1955, my own paperback copy)

I love Golding, love, love, love. The Spire remains one of the most powerful books I've ever read.  I picked up this novel about the devastation of a neanderthal family by the arrival of homo-sapiens in their territory from my TBR on a whim (and to over-satisfy the Read Harder challenge category for a novel set pre-1900).  It's a disconcerting novel, Golding's second book, told from the non-human perspectives of the neanderthals in a way that obfuscates and complicates the action.  Their consuming desires to eat, sleep, touch and vocalise dominate the narrative, often distracting from the drama of the story itself.  The limits of the characters' capacity for problem-solving, language and interpretation in turn limit the range of expression Golding can use.  Still, the novel achieves fine moments of  emotional insight - at the death of the family elder, at the loss of a young child - that brought me to tears twice. 

• A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale (Tinder Press, 2015, my own paperback)

Another TBR read and my first novel by Patrick Gale.  This was almost entirely redeemed for me by it's ending because, let's be honest, who didn't cry ugly tears at that letter and then happy tears in the final pages? Overall though I found it rather uneven and oddly paced, and the main character Harry difficult to get to grips with.  In the first third of the novel we get acquainted with Harry's life in England - his dutiful marriage, his diffidence, his unlooked for love affair with another man - in a traditional barely noticeable prose.  He's amorphous, unformed and unremarkable, showing no sign of the extraordinary strength of character he will show in the rest of the book.  Though this makes sense in some ways, because Harry is a ghost in his own life before he comes to terms with who he really is, it sapped the energy out of the reading experience for me.  The same could be said of the framing device, which felt overly contrived even at the outset.  

• A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (Oneworld, 2015, my own paperback copy)

In four words? Extraordinary, exhausting and devastatingly violent.  I read this for a book group I was roped in to facilitating at work and thank goodness I encountered it in that context, otherwise I fear I wouldn't have finished it.  That would have been a terrible shame because (and you know this already, what with all the prize wins) A Brief History rewards effort.  Told in a polphony of voices, from street kids and gang leaders, to CIA agents and unemployed receptionists, this imagining of Jamaica in the 1970s and 1980s, is rich in language, character and politics.  It's tough though, really tough, and not just because of the patois (I found reading that aloud really helped me get into the rhythm).  There is hardly a single act of kindness or hope in it.  The world it describes is imploding, both on the international stage and on the ground in Kingston and everyone is numb, or ruined, or traumatised, or in the business of making people numb, ruined or traumatised.  But the most challenging aspect of the book for me was casual and repeated violence against women, barely one of whom has a name or a story of her own.  The book's sole female point-of-view character spends most of her time on the run from violence, trying to make herself invisible.  I was both sad and relieved when I finished it. 

• All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (Titan Books, 2016, my own Kindle copy)

Science and fantasy collide in this giddy excitable story about friends Patricia - a witch - and Laurence - a physicist - saving the world from climate change and imminent destruction.  It's a weird one this, and I wish I'd written about it at the time because I feel like I had interesting things to say then.  But the passing of time has erased a lot of it from my mind.  My abiding positive feelings are: it was a lot of fun; I liked the beginning of the book, about Patricia and Laurence's childhood friendship, best; and I loved how, despite being massive geeks, both main characters still had crazy fantastic sex.  My abiding negative feelings are: there was about three bookloads of imagination crammed into this one novel and I wish some of them had more space to breath (like Patricia's magical education; Laurence's creepy corporate employer); the ending came whomping out of no where to save the day and felt rather unearned, given the extremity of the climate scenario; and the tree riddle was pretty feeble. 

Saga, Vols. 2 & 3 by Brian Vaughan & Fiona Staples (Image, 2013/14, borrowed from the library)

Don't quiz me on these.  I read both too quickly and greedily and didn't adequately take them in.  It was late at night with Volume 2, and I seem to recall I'd had quite a lot of wine AND it was late at night with Volume 3. I get it sufficiently to gamble on with the story once Volume 4 finally turns up at the library (why did this one have a disproportionate number of holds on?) I'll definitely have to revisit them before I write anything about this series as a whole.  Everything I loved about the first volume is still lovable here though, especially Hazel's wry omnipotence.  More than ever I enjoy the layering of the narrative 'voices': the art, Hazel's framing monologue, the character's direct speech and their indirect asides. 

• Arsenic for Tea by Robin Stevens (Puffin, 2015, borrowed from the library)

The Wells and Wong Detective Society have their second outing, this time to solve a murder committed in the middle of Daisy Wells' 14th birthday tea.  Amidst the cream buns and scones a dodgy antique dealer visiting the ancestral home has been poisoned with arsenic, and her brother, father and uncle are all prime suspects.  Cue much detecting!  Daisy and Hazel, with the help and hindrance of two visiting school friends, hide behind curtains and in trunks, interrogate the servants and reenact the crime scene with a doll's house.  I didn't think it had quite the spark of Murder Most Unladylike - I badly missed the school setting - but it was a lovely insight into Daisy's relationships with her parents, as well as an opportunity dig a bit deeper into the issues of class that emerged in the first book.  Next up First Class Murder. 

 

Feet in Chains by Kate Roberts (translated from Welsh by Katie Gramich, Parthian Books, 1977, my own Kindle copy)

Last one! This was another TBR impulse read, from my Kindle hoard this time.  It's an understated, forthright family saga set in the Welsh valleys, about the lives of Jane and Ifan, and the lives of their children, spanning from the 1870s to the 1920s.  It's about nature and work and socialism and education and love and change, and how dramatic everyday lives are without you really noticing it.  It reminded me powerfully of another Welsh novel I read last year: The Life of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price, a recent novel that must surely have been inspired by Roberts' classic of the 1930s.  The translation is bold, the prose is unadorned, the emotions barely visible but huge nevertheless. 

Gah! That turned into a longer post than I ever intended. If you've stuck with me to the end, I thank you.  Have you read any of these?

~~Victoria~~

The Incoming Tide

Maresi by Maria Turtschaninoff (trans. from Finnish by Annie Prime)

Pushkin's Children's Books, January 2016

256 pages, e-book

*My copy provided by the publisher through Netgalley. 

Maria Turtschaninoff's startling YA novel begins with an arrival.  A silent, traumatised girl disembarks from a ship in a remote place; money changes hands.  The women who live on the island have been expecting her, with some apprehension.  She barely says a word, except to give her name, Jai, and to ask, with fear, if there are any men there. There are not.  She has made it on a long lonely journey to the fabled Red Abbey, an island settlement in the middle of a wide ocean populated entirely by women.  The Sisters are devoted to the three aspects of the Goddess - the Maiden, Mother and Crone -  and to the care and education of young girls in all the arts of life.  The girls, each with her own story and from all corners of far-away lands, live at the Abbey as novices until they decide whether to stay forever or to take their skills back out into the world.  Some are sent by their families, others like Jai are fleeing horror or disease.  Men are forbidden to step a foot on land; when they come to trade they bob about in boats at the quayside.  The Abbey is otherwise entirely self-sufficient, making it's money from a precious dye found only on the island. 

It sounds like a paradise.  Our narrator, the eponymous Maresi, certainly thinks so.  She arrived at the Red Abbey some years before Jai, half-starved and grieving for the younger sister who didn't survive the famine she fled.  Her life before the hunger had been happy, her parents loving.  It is nature that has been cruel to her.  At the Abbey she learns about a different kind of life, one of rhythm, harmony, peace, in which everybody has a place, is entitled to the same in all things and nobody wants.  She cares for her fellow novices - although she is getting a little old not to have been apprenticed to a Sister - and takes Jai under her wing.  She shows her the Abbey's ways, and even allows her to share in her most personal and thrilling pleasure: reading.  Maresi has been taught her letters and languages by the enigmatic Sister O, and each evening retires to the scriptorium to read histories, science books, memoirs of ancient times. 

Slowly slowly Jai emerges from her silence, learning to trust the women around her, and shares a shocking secret.  Once the revelation is out it's impossible for the peace of the Abbey to hold.  Because Jai is being pursued, relentlessly and ruthlessly, by a man who should love her better than he does, and he will never never never stop.  Safety is an illusion. 

I can't say much more without spoilers, and I really wouldn't want to spoil this compelling story for anyone.  Maresi is a book that grew and grew on me as I read it.  It starts out as a lulling pre-lapsarian boarding school story, exploring the Abbey through Maresi and Jai's eyes.  Instead of midnight feasts and bun breaks there are morning rituals and seasonal celebrations; mythology and herbcraft are taught rather than maths or geography.  The girls chase goats over the mountain side rather than playing lacrosse.  You get the idea. Underlying the brand-newness of the world of Red Abbey are all the familiar tropes.  The Sisters are like school mistresses, each with her foibles.  The relationships between the junior and senior novices in their dormitories are like those between the big girls and the shrimps.  

Then, bam, Jai's story jolts the world and tips it sideways.  The book becomes something infinitely darker, disorientated by a horror taken straight out of our own cruel world.  The realities of misogyny and violence flood into the Red Abbey, reclassifying the story from school saga to feminist, humanist fable.  What seems like a sweet book about friendship and love becomes an unflinching confrontation between hate and humanity.  In what follows Maresi is forced to face up to the darkest parts of herself, the bits that the Crone breathed on as she took her sister, while Jai is brought to the brink of self-annihilation.  The other Sisters and novices at the Abbey are tested in their own ways too.  What must they give to protect their way of life?  By the end, the story is breathless and ferocious.  

Belief in a better way to live powers Maresi from beginning to end.  It's a book about hope, an exercise in utopia, and about how women might change the world.  I had planned to post about it yesterday, on International Women's Day and then things got in the way.  Ah well, every day is a day for women around here. Listen: don't wait for next year to read this beguiling, compelling book.  It's the first in a series and the next will be a prequel about the founding of the Abbey, Naondel. I'm told it's out next January, which is precisely when I will be reading it. (If I can't get my cheeky hands on a review copy that is.)  Join me. 

~~Victoria~~