Bibliothèque des Refusés
Susan Maxwell
Embedded Files
Reviews
Reviews
Also available on LibraryThing and Goodreads
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux: 2014). Southern Reach Trilogy #1.
That VanderMeer takes a ‘less is more’ approach is embedded right from the moment the reader discovers that they will not learn the characters’ names. This sets out a ground rule—that you will barely get the amount of information you need, and not a comma more—and it reinforces the strange, strained relationships between the scientists, who will share a transformative experience without knowing anything about each other, and between their expedition and Area X, an intensely, compellingly weird landscape.
The story is a first-person narrative, the ‘I’ is a product of an isolated youth, an ‘expert in the uses of solitude’. This makes for an interesting point of view, especially here. The question of the reliability of the narrator naturally enough arises, but is more difficult to answer when events recounted never seem to amount to more than hints as to something else: the past, the future, a different interpretation.
The very first feature the four scientists encounter is the foot of a stone stairway that tunnels down into the ground, which the narrator stubbornly persists in calling a tower. The scientists are part of an official investigation into the ‘mysteries’ of Area X, but all they really discover, even those that survive, is that the mysteries are far more evolved than anyone expected. They entered the Area X territory in the hope of finding out about its mysteries, but three out of four do not survive their encounter with its unmediated reality. They arrive under instruction to record information about Area X but Area X seems, in its unexplained way, to be recording itself, keeping the scientists’ records as well as their remains.
By the end, the narrator has acknowledged the collapse of her "compulsion" to "know everything"¸and that even if she had clung to it, “[o]ur instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish." What makes this compelling is that it is an admission not of defeat but of a radically altered perspective of her role in relation to uncanniness, which, under the circumstances, seems the only sane admission to make.
VanderMeer pulls off the remarkable feat of presenting an immensely rich and immersive story in a narrative style that is elusive and ambiguous and a linguistic style that is reticent yet precise. This is a compelling combination.
Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri
Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri
Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri (Stelliform Press: 2023)
‘Solarpunk’ is the term used to categorize fiction that speculates on post-radical-change life, and does so on the assumption that there will be survival, however radically changed. It is fundamentally optimistic about the continuation of human life, and life with a ‘civilized’ aspect; that is, concerned with more than brute survival. In Another Life, Ulibarri presents a very convincing vision of how the post-climate-collapse society organizes itself materially. The circumstance presented is of a community established after the planned flooding of Death Valley.
The need for an alternative way to live became pressing after Thomas Ramsey’s Planet B project failed spectacularly. His plan, and its collapse, is indicative of the sort of grand scale, grand theft, great lie consumer capitalism that preceded the social as well as climate collapse from which the Otra Vida community arose. There is no real presentation of the kinds of structures that make people like Ramsey possible, so he comes across as a ‘Big Bad’, a sui generis villain rather than the logical extreme of a particular, and profoundly complex, set of priorities, assumptions, and indulgences.
There are two storylines in Another Life, one personal and one political. The former concerns the implications of a scientific discovery, and the second arises from ideological conflicts.
The discovery itself is a clever one, based on theorizing a holographic universe, and on reincarnated material having unique markers that can be genetically tracked under certain circumstances. The storyline arises from implications of reincarnation—what your previous life implies about your current self—which feel naïve, rather than profound. A significantly more interesting possibility—a human reincarnated from animal, a human with past experience but no experience of being a human—is raised, but resolved only in terms of human emotion.
The Otra Vida community experiences some conflict with police, and with opposing ideologies from those outside, but there is no sense of actual threat. We see plenty of evidence of fair-mindedness in the community, of capacity for reflection and an impulse to honesty. But there is none of the sort of dogged, tough-minded persistence that, being necessary to push through any kind of unpopular change even at domestic rather than global scales, must surely be a characteristic required to sustain radical change within a radically destabilized society.
It is this that gives Another World a specifically utopian, rather than purely speculative, feel: it isn’t that the possibility of such a community under significantly altered circumstances feels unconvincing, it is that everyone is so nice about it. In twenty years, there has been only one ‘rival’ for Galacia’s role of Mediator. The worst anyone inside Otra Vita does is kill a hornet, and even they are just ‘crass’. All the real threats are outside. A utopian slant is not a criticism, but it does not come across as well-secured.
One thing that is oddly lacking is any depiction of the landscape after the Oil to Water Project flooded Death Valley. There is a reference, during the backstory of the community, to the positive environmental impact, the possibility of increasing biodiversity, and of ameliorating the decline of desert wetlands. These are never mentioned again. The focus is very much on human survival. This is not to suggest that a work of fiction is responsible for addressing the implication of every circumstance it describes. At the same time, there is here arguably a perpetuation of the sort of anthropocentrism that is at the heart of our current crisis (or crises).
What works very well is the development of the Otra Vida community and its practices, which are closely bound to structures familiar from contemporary society. The ways of surviving massive temperature increases seem reassuringly likely: reading as practical implementations, or logical extensions of, alternatives already at least theoretically possible. The community is very thoroughly planned and clearly presented, the characters are both human and humane; as a whole, the Otra Vida reads like a very realistic manifestation of Galacia’s motto “Their way of life wasn’t built for us, so we built another life.”
A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe by Alex White
A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe by Alex White
A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe by Alex White. Orbit Books (2018). Salvagers #1.
This was a solid, fun read. A sports celebrity, Nilah Brio is focused on the next big race and on her career, accepting any price that needs to be paid to reach each target; happily for Brio, most prices are out of sight and mostly paid by other people.
Mid-race, Brio has a bewildering encounter with the terrifying ‘Mother’ and is framed for murder, and falls into the rackety company of a bunch of salvagers. It is an environment that, while not personally hostile to Brio, certainly has no damns to give about her special status. It’s a very fast-paced adventure, with a lot of fight scenes which (despite these really not being a big draw for the present reader) are ingenious and engaging. There are a couple of romances (again, not a draw here) that manage not to slow down the pace, and are quite fun, and occasionally funny in their bristly way, as well as earning a LGBTQ+ sticker.
What is not entirely clear is why exactly everyone is so desperate to get their hands on the eponymous big ship. The Harrow was thought to have been destroyed, and can itself wreak terrible devastation, but it all feels a bit vague, as though the fact of the ship’s existing is reason enough; like Edmund Hillary saying ‘it was there’ when asked why he climbed Mount Everest.
But the pace of the action and the polished, if not remarkable, writing mean that it is easy enough to suspend the disbelief. The Big Bad—‘Mother’—is properly scary, and the overall world-building, which involves both detailed technology and mind-magic, is very well done, thorough and convincing. The characters are well-drawn, though so instantly recognizable—the egotistic darling of the sporting fraternity, the noir-ishly washed-up and betrayed treasure-hunter dragged into ‘one last job’, the bickering, loyal crew—as to seem not entirely three-dimensional. If not a new favourite, Big Ship… is definitely worth a read.
The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison
The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison
The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison (Gollancz: 2017 [1974])
Harrison says he never much liked this book, but that it achieved what he had intended, which was ‘to take the piss out of’ certain tenets of SFF at the time: that the main character drives the action, that the universe is knowable, and the universe is anthropocentric.
The Centauri Device takes the piss and pours it all over the place. John Truck is the main character and never seems to know what is going on. He is dragged into the plot to get the device because he is half-Centauri, and he is manipulated, lied to, threatened, and generally kicked about by all political shades. He is not a hero at all, and he only reluctantly speaks for ‘all who breathe the air of tragedy’ when none on the political spectrum can offer anything else.
Women characters are hardly worth the effort, being limited to ‘port ladies’, Truck’s limp wife, and one-eyed Alice Gaw, a sort of pulp-punk Sister George. Everything in the worlds Truck encounters is compromised, vulgar, and demeaned. There is quite a bit of violence, in fact anything that is physical seems to be violent, or to invite violence, but the register in which everything is written is sophisticated and even, very unlike the heightened register (often involving very unlikely similes) of more contemporary works.
There is a very noir-ish, Tiger Lillies aesthetic and some great characters, including the full-blooded grotesque Grishkin, Truck’s friends Tiny—the ‘last great musician’, who incurs the wonderful characterisation of having ‘all the moral sensibility of a maggot in a cemetery’—and Fix the bo’sun.
Truck has no authority, no power, and seems to have no real aim in life except not to die. He is the grubbiest, most ramshackle, and most inept of Chosen Ones, but not without depth when pressed. Whatever meaning there might be lies in that response, and the ultimate decision about the deployment of the device is with Truck because of it. Even unreflective Truck, and the wretchedness experienced by those living on the abrasive edges of corrupt worlds, have an occasional desolate richness; not poetry but resonances of poetry in being both brief and illuminating: Truck recognising his fellow hustlers and losers “shivering with cold and fear of the long, incomprehensible future’, and his desolate struggle back to his ship, his encounter with the undramatic but profoundly alien Device.
The Centauri Device is a space opera (at the The Stars My Destination end of the spectrum), but despite the drugs, the legions of dead bodies, and the spaceships, there are unexpected echoes—or, rather, adumbrations—of the alienating elegance of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again.
The Cloak of Feathers by Nigel Quinlan
The Cloak of Feathers by Nigel Quinlan
The Cloak of Feathers by Nigel Quinlan (Hachette: 2018)
Every year, there is a festival in Knockmealdown. Every year, it is rubbish. This year, it might not be just rubbish, it might be lethal.
Brian Nolan is a recent resident in Knockmealdown, ‘a thick, lumpy soup of legends’, where the annual festival features inedible, peaty, bread, and events so bad that the Tourist Board has warnings against attending. It is also a place that is peculiarly adjacent to the Otherworld – it is said that the Gentry Below were so angry about a pig factory being built there that a boar, Mulkytine, crossed the border and led the freed pigs on a riot.
At the same time, Knockmealdown has a sort of Brigadoon element – despite its polluted lake, derelict houses and invasive Helweed, there are still fleeting glimpses of the beautiful place Brian’s father recalled from his youth, where getting a lift on the back of a swan-graceful cow was just the sort of thing that might happen.
Brian is coerced into helping with the annual festival, along with Derek and Helen (a ‘thick-headed hooligan’ and ‘a horsey princess’ respectively), and this festival is due to be literally a once-in-a-lifetime event. The Gentry Below attend the festival once a century, and this year is the year. The Gentry Below arrive in style, and Brian, momentarily forgetting how they hate being referred to directly, calls them fai…er…uses the f word.
As if that isn’t bad enough, he gets bowled into the King and Queen by Fester, a sooty tangle of something with a beak. The monarchs, already furious at the miserable state of Knockmealdown and devastated at the disappearance of their daughter, are in no mood to be forgiving. For the humans to have a chance of surviving the rage of the King and Queen of the Otherworld, Brian (on the advice of Fester) issues the Challenge of the Four Feats to the devious Cluaracan.
What follows is a magnificently bizarre series of adventures. Naturally, everything is stacked against Brian and naturally, the Cluaracan seems to hold all the cards. Every word is devious and twistable, and the action progresses at a hurtling pace as success seems to breed the threat of a following failure. As in the best fai…folktales, it is not cunning but clear-sightedness that wins and in the course of events, the real reasons behind the curse on Knockmealdown are revealed.
If there is any unevenness in the tale, it is that the start of the story has a slightly rushed feel, before the narrative gets the bit properly between its teeth. This haste means some of the backstory and location take a second reading, and there is only partial exploration of some really good concepts, especially the ‘wild form’ of the Gentry Below, or banshees on bicycles. At the same time, the story is told at a cracking pace, so there is no time to linger on absences.
Brian, who narrates, is determined, indefatigable, and quick-witted enough to cope with what is thrown at him, whether it is enchanted dancing or a hurling match resembling something from the Boyhood Tales of Cúchullain. There is also a strong sense of the importance of the location of events, that it is the place, even more than the people, who were cursed, and that maltreatment of the place that both the humans and the Good Folk call home is an action that demands consequence.
It is a very satisfying read, not only because of the ingeniousness of the challenges, but the humour and inventiveness with which they are answered, and the latter gives the tale a distinctly joyous feel.
Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman
Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman
Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman (Faber and Faber: 2014; first published 1975)
There are very few books, even ones that I have enjoyed, that I know while reading them that I will do so again. This 1975 collection of short stories by Robert Aickman is one. I am a recent addition to Aickman’s audience, ever since I read ‘The Stains’, a longer instance of what he called ‘strange stories’. ‘Strange’ hardly does justice to the stories in this collection, which almost casually embody the sentiment of the volume’s epigraph, from Sacheverell Sitwell, ‘In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation.’
In the year that he died, Aickman won a World Fantasy Award for ‘Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal’, one of the stories in this collection; and perversely enough, this was one of my least favourite. It is, in its gothic way, a straightforward story—a kind of pastiche—so there is less about this that is recognisably Aickman than the other stories. Similarly, though the heart of ‘Niemandswasser’ is as dark and cold as you might hope, the setting does not cause the flesh to creep. It has a very fairy-tale ring to it, with a Prince and a kingdom, and rather heightened language. It is the language that particularly undermines these two tales. The real and leaden dread of the best stories here is the way that the mundane and quotidian plunge the character into inexplicable and possibly dangerous situations.
An editor of pornographic literature may have experienced a future event. A salesman seeks refuge, and finds nothing but rococo bizarrerie. A woman buys a house on a path where, in some world, new pall-bearers take up the coffin. Aickman’s characters are very distinctive, and their slightly neurotic personalities add to the strong sense of inexorability that is reminiscent of some of Patricia Highsmith’s novels. Everything appears ordinary at the start, and some small kink in a plain suburban path brings it to a tipping-point, when it turns into the path through the forest, without the reader being able to pinpoint how exactly it happened.
‘Meeting Mr. Millar’ has a faint sense that the mystery has been resolved, but it has been resolved off the page. It is conceivable that the cuckolded husband of the story has a grasp on what is happening (he is one of the few sturdy, practical, likeable characters in the collection) but it is evidently none of the reader’s concern. ‘The Swords’ is possibly the eeriest, but ‘The Hospice’ is a strong contender for the strangest story in this collection. There is an immediate sense of nightmare when the food is described, and the reader visualises a steaming slab of turkey, accompanied by a sauceboat full of ‘specially compounded fluid, dark red and turgid.’ There is clearly no escape when the protagonist notices that one guest is fettered by the ankle. Aickman’s horror is built up with subtlety. The monstrous meat is ‘seeping slightly with a colourless, oily fluid’ which is somehow far worse than mere liquid. In 'The Real Road to the Church', the woman on the route to the church hears a ‘faint, fluttering knock, not necessarily on the outer door.’
Two of my favourite podcasts have aired episodes on Cold Hand in Mine—Weird Studies focusing on ‘The Hospice’, Backlisted on the collection as a whole. In the latter, Andy Miller (I think) had embarked on an effort to synopsise a ‘typical’ Aickman story, and the editor Simon Spanton had suggested “Something happens, which may or may not.” Miller also said “He likes to take you somewhere, and leave you there, without saying there’s the path back.” There is no path back with Aickman. You have been through the story, and nothing ever returns to normal.
Daughter of the Beast by E.C. Greaves
Daughter of the Beast by E.C. Greaves
Daughter of the Beast by E.C. Greaves (DieselPunk Creative: 2022). Vyshivka Trilogy #1.
The Vyshivka of the trilogy title calls to mind (presumably deliberately) vyshyvanka, the embroidered shirts that are part of the national dress of Ukraine and Belarus, and whose patterns carry local or personal meaning. Daughter of the Beast is in six parts, each one a ‘stitch’ in the story of Zyntael Fairwinter, from her capture by the Vulkari to her meeting with the reality of a prophetic dream. In between these points, she does a great deal of travelling and undergoes a radical change, finding new strengths, new loyalties, and new family.
It is a well-plotted and engagingly told adventure. The large number of characters is handled well, and the individual scenes—battles, complex social interactions, new locations—are strong and evocative. It is also very funny in places, and there is a humorous touch throughout.
What is less clear is the overarching world. The individual locations, for example, all work very well, but getting a picture of the overall world is trickier, especially as Zyntael and her new crew seem to travel in a circle. Similarly, though there are plenty of raids and fights, and talk of loyalties and political shenanigans, the overall background of political realities and their consequences are harder to fix upon. The author’s own description notes that Zyntael is negotiating a world that is ‘built by men, and built for men’; it seems a shame that in her coming-of-age story, she is cast so quickly into a pretty traditional ‘feminine’ role.
These points notwithstanding, this is a very enjoyable, reasonably well-written book—if slightly over-long—that, even for a reader not much here for coming-of-age stories or battle scenes, has enough good stuff to encourage moving on to the second instalment, Sister of the Dead.
Elsetime by Eve McDonnell
Elsetime by Eve McDonnell
Elsetime by Eve McDonnell (Everything With Words: 2020)
Sixty-odd years separate the childhoods of Glory, an ambitious apprentice jeweller, and Needle, a river-side mud-lark. Darting between them, stitching their fates together, is the crow, Magpie. Or Fusspot, depending on whether you’re in 1864 or 1928.
Elsetime is a time-slip story, focused on the children’s shared imperative to help steady their families’ precarious finances, and their separate ambitions: Glory to become a master jeweller, Needle’s to find his mysteriously-vanished father. It is Needle, the diffident synaesthete able to sense the stories attached to the objects he finds, who travels from his own time to Glory’s. It is Glory, already under professional pressure by her employer, who recognises some of the names on a plaque that will be put up to commemorate the fourteen who perished in a flood – due to happen tomorrow. The stakes are very high – the children are down to a bare handful of hours to raise the alarm of the threat to the city, rescue Needle’s father and complete an order that could make or break Glory’s dreams of owning her own emporium.
What no mere summary of the plentiful action can convey is the polished richness of the book. There are a number of tropes – the orphaned children, the Dickensian sensibility of unjust adults, destitution and Winter weather – refashioned by their setting. The children both face challenges more personal than their circumstances. Glory not only has a wooden hand but a dreadful difficulty in not saying exactly what she thinks – admirably suitable for following her older sister in embracing the suffragist movement but not welcomed by her social ‘superiors’ – and a tendency to act without reflection. Needle, on the other hand, cannot speak when he needs to, and, though an exceptionally kindly person, he feels he lacks courage.
There is an unusual kind of historical sense to the story, not just because both children live in past times, but because of the way that Needle’s work is presented. He fishes objects out of the muddy banks of the great industrial river at low tide, objects lost and swept to one side of the main flow and forgotten. When he holds them, he can see part of their story. Thus, two important factors in the presentation of material history are embodied: the importance of the traces of the everyday past that are often neglected in favour of big or transformative events, and the concept of objects telling stories. The banks of the river have become a museum and Needle is their curator.
The prose is stuffed with creativity – everyone and everything, including the weather and the river, is creating, embellishing or inventing, all the time. Those who are absent are remembered through their creations and the world of material artistry lingers in the place-names and memorials of the city. There are secrets and hidden things everywhere, too, not just treasures under the mud for Needle to find, but beautiful things hiding in secret pockets and secret rooms. Even the story itself has half-covered treasures; as Conan Doyle teased Sherlock Holmes’ fans with the untold accounts of The Giant Rat of Sumatra or the Tankerville Club Scandal, now the Library of Unwritten Stories contains hints of the Buried Chalice of the Murderous Bishop, and the Mystery of the Letter in the Bottle.
To wring the last drops from the metaphor, the story is well tailored: every seam is assured, not a button is loose and every time it seems to be approaching its close, there is a last development to tidy away a thread the reader will kick themselves for having missed. This is a clever and well-plotted tale, told with verve and humour, with endearing characters (even one of the baddies has their ‘one bit of good’), in a detailed, textured setting. Happily, it is one treasure that does not need to be schmocked out of the mud.
Elsetime, Eve McDonnell, published 2020 by Everything With Words, cover and illustrations by Helen Ovenden.
Fairy Hill by Marita Conlon-McKenna
Fairy Hill by Marita Conlon-McKenna
Fairy Hill by Marita Conlon-McKenna (O'Brien Press: 2023)
This atmospheric adventure draws on the folk-belief that fairies swap children for ‘changelings’. Anna is visiting her divorced father on her grandmother’s farm in Sligo, to get to know his new partner and their son, Jack. Anna discovers that the stones of a fairy-fort lie where her father is planning to plough, and, through her great-aunt Lily, learns that the sídhe will take revenge.
Anna’s enthusiasm for new experiences—sport, defences against the sídhe, pottery—is very engaging, and she is both kind and thoughtful. The atmosphere of Fairy Hill is very attractive. Anna watches a heron fishing by Starling Lake, learns horse-riding, enjoys food, and attends a family get-together. At the same time, though, the descriptions of place are sometimes oddly generic. Anna seems to enjoy herself, though there is some lack of consistency in her reactions, as she jumps from enjoyment to boredom and back again.
The story itself is a little slow to start, and transpires to be the story of changelings, children stolen away by the sídhe of the fairy-fort. The disruptive intrusion of the ousted world of the intangible, the world that can only be spoken of in compromised terms of superstition, fairytales, is well-handled. The threat comes close to Anna’s family, and she is able to recruit her great-aunt Lily to help. Lily recalls a time when those who believed in the sidhe would deal with them respectfully—showing respect to that which is very ‘other’. She is also able to offer practical help in negotiating with the sídhe.
The family dynamics, though, strike extremely uncomfortable notes. Anna’s anxiety to ‘fit in’, and her acceptance of responsibility for other people’s feelings, is exploited by her father, Rob, and her stepmother, Maggie. They assume that they can use Anna as unpaid child-minder to her baby stepbrother, obliging her to play with him and help him to eat; her father tells her that this is ‘what big sisters are for’. Her stepmother is sharp with her when she makes a mistake, laughs at her first attempt at using a pottery-wheel, and suborns her into helping at the market-stall. Distressingly, Anna internalizes the role that is laid out for her: she accepts that she should fit in and be nice. She feels guilt at being ‘selfish and irresponsible’ for not taking better care of her stepbrother. Frankly, by the time Anna has been emotionally manipulated into accepting that she will only be loved if she is an obedient girl, it is hard to see exactly why being stolen away by the sídhe is such a bad option.
The effective eeriness of the sídhe’s intrusions and threats are balanced by the cheerful, friendly ambiance of Anna’s visits to, and explorations with, relatives. She repeatedly encounters the past, too, through her grandmother’s diaries, Lily’s memories, and meeting the mysterious, lonely Daniel. This ruffling up of time adds subtlety to the tale, especially as the excitement and pace increase around the final encounter, when Anna must brave the dangers of the fairy-ring. The landscape is excellently rendered as a borderland between worlds: the familiar becomes unfamiliar; everything might be more than it seems, and Anna must understand the natural, as well as the ‘other’, world if she is to succeed in negotiating with the sídhe.
If the reader can set aside the quick-witted and brave Anna’s recruitment into the performance of sexist ideology, this is a lively, atmospheric adventure, somewhere between the waters and the wild of Yeats’s 'The Stolen Child' and the hostile forest of Stevie Smith’s 'Little Boy Lost'. .
Gold by Geraldine Mills
Gold by Geraldine Mills
Gold by Geraldine Mills (Little Island: 2017)
Alienation permeates, like a debilitating fog, the world of Orchard Territory where survivors of a volcanic catastrophe live with their families at the mercy of the violent climate and the despotic Sagittars. Twin boys, Starn and Esper, were born after fall of ash that killed a huge proportion of the world’s flora and fauna, leaving the remaining humans to perform the mechanics of life in a dystopian, unjust and profoundly artificial life.
As the humans have to perform the task of pollination previously taken care of by the natural world, everything about the way they live every day is at a remove from any recognisable natural activity. Their world is one in which pineapples and marzipan are meaningless words and food is spoken of in words that are as scientifically derivitive as the substance itself – “orgone water”, “vita-shakes” and “electro-fluid.” Starn loves the things of the sky while his brother Esper loves the things of the earth, but neither one has seen so much as a bird or a badger except in illustration. The boys, their widowed father and their friends all try to keep at a remove from the Sagittars, and from the indigents, the homeless outcasts. There is no indulgence in the physical world, no fun in the snow, no lounging in the sun, the boys don’t even recognise apple-blossom.
Though the boys are accepting of life on Orchard, it is thrown vividly into relief in comparison to the Virus Islands. The islands – cut off from Orchard by a strait infested with the fabulously nightmareish zanderhag fish – are complete worlds, unlike Orchard Territory. On Orchard, the ash and the charred stumps of trees are perfect symbol of the stunted lives of its inhabitants, whose adults are shaped by what has been lost and by memories of the dead. The scavanging birds, wild weather and the poisonous plants found on the islands are as material as the dazzling colours and real food and the birdsong. The fear the breath of a wolf engenders is not like the fear that accompanies an ideology of keeping your head down in a grey world.
Starn is the narrator and is a combination of inarticulacy – he “floors” his brother more often than he talks to him – and clarity. His words for plants he does not recognise are effective so anyone who has seen a blackberry will know what he means by blackfruits on spikers and when his brother is ill his “silence bounces off the walls.” Starn seems particularly sensitive to exclusion, and to being unwanted, despite knowing his father calls them both “precious”. Starn resents Esper but cannot do without his brother and his narration has a constant, underlying resistance to isolation and desertion.
If there is a criticism of the book it is only that, having brought the brothers to their destination the story whisks them away again too quickly. Their acceptance of the reality of the mystery left to them by their great-aunt and their life-changing decision with regard to their next move occupy fewer than twenty pages. There is an appropriate inevitability about the decision, but the reader cannot help regretting the final briskness with which they are escorted out of Mill’s finely-imagined and language-loving world.
Aside from the vigorous and thrilling narrative, a couple of themes are worth mentioning. Firstly, while gender is not relevant in the narrative, exactly, it is noticable to begin with because of the very strong absent presence of Starn’s deceased mother and sister. This gendered theme is then echoed in the depiction of balances of power as the boys encounter representations of different forms of human social structure. What is interesting, though, is where there is ambiguity, and where the balance is between human, rather that female or male, and the environment.
Secondly, and like Patricia Forde’s stimulating The Wordsmith, there is a hint of A Canticle for Leibowitz about Gold. The person in charge of the Biblion glories in the job title of Defender of the Page. It is from his glimpse of da Vinci’s notebooks and his first encounter with an actual book that Starn finds a way for his brother and himself to go to the Virus Islands in pursuit of treasure. If The Wordsmith depicts the philosophical relationship between language and reality, Gold provides a robust and engaging depiction of the impact of words on a practical and adventurous mind. The only response is to read both.
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, trans. Benjamin Moser (Penguin: 2014 [1977])
This is Lispector’s last book (she died the same year that it was published). In his essay, 'A Passion for the Void', Colm Tóibín describes the novella as the book in which “all her talents and eccentricities merged and folded”, and, although it is not autobiographical, he suggests it is “an exploration of a self that is sometimes glimpsed but never known.”
I did not immediately love the book—though it was kind of touch and go—stimulating and intriguing though it is. I am more at home with irreal or absurdist writing that in a way riffs on an idea, gives the reader a thread to cling to regardless of how unpredictable the story that follows and stays with the same idea, however absurd or disconcerting it might be, for long enough that the reader can see the landscape. Lispector disconcerts by being suddenly in one place, then in another, like a springtail, without any evidence of motion in between. “If you see what I am saying, fine,” the narrator says at one point, “if you don’t, that’s fine, too. But why am I bothering with this girl when what I want more than anything is purely ripe and golden wheat in summer?”
There are two things going on in the novella. One is the story of Macabéa, “ugly, underfed, sickly and unloved,” told by her boyfriend Rodrigo, and the other is the story of writing the story. Both are brilliant in their way, but possibly too strong a meat as a first foray into Lispector’s writing. Toibín’s illuminating essay is the introduction to the book, and if this work is the one in which encapsulates Lispector’s writing style, then perhaps it will be better appreciated—by me, at any rate—when these “talents and eccentricities” have been encountered in a less concentrated form.
[Tóibín’s 'A Passion for the Void' is also available as an article in the Guardian.]
The House of Drought by Dennis Mombauer
The House of Drought by Dennis Mombauer
The House of Drought by Dennis Mombauer (Stelliform Press: 2022)
The storyline is a variation on the ‘lost manuscript’ trope of Gothic literature: a filmmaker in Sri Lanka is looking for the ‘human story’ to give ballast to a documentary (called…House of Drought) about climate change, and comes across an abandoned mansion at the edge of the jungle. The stories behind the mansion’s bad name are revealed, along with its entanglement with the local legend of the Sap Mother in the jungle, and reach their final interlinking when the director goes into the house to explore.
Readers for whom a sense of connection to the characters is important may be disappointed; the similarity between them would make it difficult to choose a ‘main’ character, one whose fate matters. On the other hand, this does successfully reinforce the house as a main character, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. The unnamed mansion, the ‘Dry House’, has a similarly possessive relationship with the land beside which it was built, and it is said more than once, should not have been built, it is wrong, not real, like Jackson’s ‘not sane’ Hill House. First seen through a haze, the Dry House is firmly (if anything here is firm) located on the borders: between the food-producing paddy-fields, and the jungle, away from the main track, but rattled by passing heavy lorries, its material form harking back to colonial times, its current tattered state reflecting the passing of those times.
The narrative’s point of view switches as each story is told to unravel the mansion’s mysteries. The stories intersect, but it reads less like overlapping and more like tunnelling; each storyline that is introduced shine new lights down bizarre tunnels, that reflect against, but don’t illuminate, what is there. [They are like a sort of spiral, or return].
Each story starts in the middle of the culminating action, and then shifts back to its beginning. This moving backwards in very small steps, like a frame-by-frame reversal of film, is very effective. It has the disorienting effect of a spiral, and (to mix sensory metaphors) it echoes the appearance and behaviour of the passageways in the house later on. But the impact of this tight winding of the narrative is reduced here and there, because of the muddiness of the time-frame. The film director’s narrative is contemporary, but the chronological relationship between each story is not clear until later (and sometimes not at all). This is partly because the story has a feature of a sort of compression of time (like time-slip stories, where people have lengthy experiences but in ‘their’ time have only been away minutes), but without leaving signposts for the reader as to where they are in history. But it is also partly because there is no real difference in the ways that the characters, and their interactions with the house and its surroundings, are presented. They speak the same way, they notice the same things, and this has the effect of flattening out the time-line, to the detriment of the atmosphere of unease.
This lack of clarity is a weakness. The book has two particular characteristics that mean clarity is vital: being a novella, it is short, and secondly, it relies in part on necessary vagueness or imprecision. Its length means there is less time to get into a narrative stride. The story has to sprint – not necessarily be fast-paced, but the communication of ideas and events has to be achieved with great assurance. Reliance on vagueness needs to be supported. There is a lot of tension and dread to be inspired by lack of precision – think of Blackwood’s 'The Willows' – but for this to work, everything around the necessarily vague elements has to have a strongly-contrasting precision. Otherwise, the story becomes murky, and, instead of being confident that they have landed firmly on their feet, the reader is distracted by untangling details that should have been clear. This is a pity, because the story is very well imagined and engaging, and the nature of the house, and of its interactions with people, are very individual.
The blurb for the book draws attention to the story’s connection to climate change. The mansion can be read as a metaphor for the sort of anthropocentric bias that reduces complex ecological systems to the status of ‘resource’ or ‘potential’, and this is very well done. When the house was built, it was “driven like a stake” into the heart, or spirit, of the forest, which manifests in the Sap Mother. But the practical consequences, and the lived experiences, both of climate change and colonialism/postcolonialism are spoken of by characters, without having sufficient presence in the story. In contrast with this, the experiences of the Dry House, and the encounters with the Sap Mother, are very detailed, and are key parts of the direct narrative. The physical interior(s) of the house are very compelling, subtle, and unnerving, with a constant a tension between the mechanical and the biological. The Sap Mother’s appearance is described by a character in folklore language (“her eyes are oily seeds, her teeth blossom in the night soil”) and her appearance in the narrative is frightening, being amorphous and imprecise. Fiction used to make points can become a lecture rather than a story, so this may have been a safer choice, but it means that the climate-change concern of the story is secondary to the strong Gothic and myth or ghost story elements.
The prose and – apart from the disruptions of linearity – the narrative style are straightforward. There is no drama in typography or appearance, and no translation of emotion into intense physicality, that is often relied on to rack up tension. The pace can feel a little slow, but this has the benefit of creating a tension with events as the story unwinds. Though in some places – especially with the characters’ interactions – there is some flatness, settings and descriptions are well-realised, especially the build-up of unease and oddness in and around the house.
In short, The House of Drought is well worth the time of any reader with a taste for Gothic literature, though it needed a bit more polishing to make it sparkle like the gem it very nearly is.
Lucia by Alex Pheby
Lucia by Alex Pheby
Lucia by Alex Pheby (Galley Beggar: 2018)
There is a line of argument that institutional archives are ‘structurally spectral’, to use Verne Harris’ phrase, that their function is deconstructive and hauntological. That Lucia is not a biography of Lucia Joyce is stated at the start. It’s all fiction, deduction, adduction, supposition—with no access to evidence, what else could it be? Arguably, Lucia is a manuscript within ‘Lucia’s’ archives. The uncovering of ‘Lucia’s’ sarcophagus—and the writing of the book—is presented in a series of excavation passages, and in one, the narrator performs ‘what I could of the ceremony of the opening of the mouth’. This is an encapsulation of an aim of the book, a search for the voice of a dead person. Herein, though, lies a complication. Every archive contains the absences of the disenfranchised. Even if Lucia seeks to symbolically ‘open the mouth’ of the dead ‘Lucia’, there are no words of hers there, only what has been said of her. Had she been able to haunt, to disrupt, would she have presented herself in the same light?
Lucia has unrelenting grimness. ‘Lucia’ as the passive subject of ritual is a keynote—we start with her funeral, where she is almost invisible. There is close, even mesmerizing, focus on rituals to which she is subject, and in this there can be seen an abstract of the sort of brutal and dehumanising world where such rituals could have a religion or doubtful science as a patina: slapping at the menarche, near-fatal water treatments for mental health, a number of options for abortifacients. Some episodes are hinted at but not described, like encounters with various men with their scratchy stubble and their hurried response to a step on the stairs. Some, like the terrible episode with the rabbit, are compellingly detailed.
It is a matter of record that Lucia was placed in an institution when her mental health had collapsed. It is a matter of rumour that she was sexually abused. Had she not been ground to dust before and after death, would Lucia, a creative person, a talented dancer, have chosen these graveclothes? Would she have elected to present herself so exclusively in the shattered and shattering prism of abuse? In fact, there is a recurring sense that, in fact, it is the men of the Joycean milieu that are the focus of this uncomfortable, twisted, and inspired paean to brutality discreetly indulged.
At the same time, Lucia is a work of great assurance and brio. If silencing a voice with much to say creates a vacuum, chimeras are born. Pheby presents these impressively well, often as existentialist riffs, using fairytales, or questions framed (a la Cruiskeen Lawn) as catechisms. One or two might not quite swing, but most are excellent, some inspired. In one excavation passage, the narrator states that ‘Lucia’ ‘has gone to the next life friendless and I will be her friend.’ This brings to the foreground a tone that dominates the novel: indignation that Lucia endured such things. This echoes the scene of the opening of the mouth ceremony which includes the blessing ‘may you emerge vindicated’.
To create a monument of words, however nuanced, to relentless dehumanisation places its victim in explicit postures. It degrades the perpetrators by criticism, but without restoring dignity to their victim. But the contribution of dignity, and fulfillment of the statement of intent—‘I will be her friend’—is arguably achieved by ‘Lucia’ being the inspiration for and focus of a work of such exceptional and striking creativity.
Nostalgia by Mircea Cărtărescu
Nostalgia by Mircea Cărtărescu
Nostalgia by Mircea Cărtărescu; trans. Julian Semilian (Penguin Modern Classics)
Nostalgia comprises three short(ish) stories, and two novellas, each told by a different first-person narrator. A censored version (entitled Visul, ‘The Dream’) appeared in 1989 and the full work as Nostalgia in 1993. An English version was not available until Julian Semilian’s 2005 translation. A shallow internet search brought up two reviews, both of which seemed to miss essential points of the work. Kirkus compared Cărtărescu’s “phantasmagorical world” to Dalí’s images, but this loses the deep-seated uncanniness of Cărtărescu’s writing, its existential uneasiness within the familiar; de Chirico would be a better choice, or Carrington. A Spectator review bizarrely compared Cărtărescu to C.S. Lewis, saying Nostalgia summoned “the wonder and terror of a Danubian Narnia”. Tell me you never read fantasy without telling me you never read fantasy.
The stories are impressive, even dazzling, but marred by pervasive essentialist sexism. The female characters are thinly sketched in flat, minor roles, and even in 'The Twins', where one of the main characters is (mainly) a woman, her whole life is dominated by her romantic relationships. The male narrator of 'The Twins' doesn’t flinch from open misogyny when he recalls the childhood experience of being naked with his friend Marcela: “[t]he incipience of contempt insinuated itself in me, while in her, it was the beginning of humility and veneration”. There is also a tendency to use animals as sacrificial victims—itself not an unusual ‘feminine’ role—whose trauma or death either reveals something about the hero, or teaches him An Important Lesson. Such reliance on convenient stereotypes of any ‘other’ acting as a foil to or a mirror of the main character makes for tedious reading.
This problematic aspect is outweighed by the quality of what remains. Cărtărescu is an outstanding writer, and his imagination, both wild and elegant, is at its most confident and impressive in the second half of 'The Twins' and especially in 'The Architect', in which the effect of that most banal of sounds, the car-horn, on the central character has, ultimately, cosmic repercussions. The first and least inter-connected story, 'The Roulette Player', has a very distinct charm, gritty, violent, and fantastical, like a Dostoyevskian Bulgakov.
Nostalgia is described by its author as a novel, because the stories are connected ‘subterraneously’. It is not a novel in the sense of a continuous narrative, but the locations feel sustained, like the relationship between the characters and their material environment. All the stories take place in Bucharest, but in its unorthodox, unofficial places – alleys between home and school, the secret locations of an illicit sport, the backrooms of a museum. The environment is uncanny; there is a sense that the demi-monde locations are sorcerous in their effects on the characters. Although recollections of youth form much of the narrative, the original Romanian title is more apt, resonating as it does with intensity of experience, suspension of logic, and dismissal of explanation, rather than with a desire to return to a fondly-remembered past.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury: 2018)
It has been some months since I read Piranesi and I have hesitated to review it. To do so feels like coming in at a stride from a bracing country walk, entering a beautiful room, and trampling mud, tufts of dead grass, and clumps of peat all over their fabulous Tabriz carpet.
Piranesi is a remarkable book. It tells the deeply weird story of a man, the narrator, who spends his days in close examination of the statues that populate the halls of the House he lives in. ‘House’ does the place an injustice; it is a world in itself, with an ocean in the lower floors and birds circling the upper. The original Piranesi, the eighteenth-century engraving artist, produced a series of ‘invented prisons’, but they could hardly be more involved or complex than the House.
Piranesi has, he believes, always lived in the House, and is entirely accepting of his existence, and the reality of the House. His unruffled serenity, his unshockable narrative of life, are themselves elements of the world’s atmosphere. Everything is uncanny, and uneasy, and weird, but not in a threatening or mysterious way. Rather, what Piranesi recounts is so very other, it is hard to know how to respond, or how to try to apprehend the world. In Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the narrator is disbelieving when Henry Winter tells him that he and his four friends decided to hold a bacchanal. Henry, piqued by the disbelief, asks, “What if you’d never seen the sea before? What if the only thing you’d ever seen was a child’s picture … Would you be able to recognize the real thing even if you saw it?” This is the weirdness of Piranesi – looking at a real, convincing world without any understanding of it, looking but experiencing not comprehension, but severe cognitive dissonance.
Clarke invokes Narnia in one of her two epigraphs, and the impact of the House’s statues recalls the Charn waxworks in The Magician’s Nephew and the scattered statues in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Even before the true nature of those figures is revealed, they are inherently eerie and wrong. It is not just the Gothic effect of doubles or mirror-images, it is because they are records of, not memorials to, some terrible event. The statues in the House are disconcerting, being recognisable as statues but giving nothing away about their meaning or their references.
Piranesi has travelled widely through the rooms of the House, discovering its statues, which he interrogates for meaning but treats kindly, giving them gifts. This kindness, he believes, is in keeping with the generosity of the House towards him. He finds what he thinks of as gifts from the House – when he needs something, the house provides – and the nature of the gifts is probably the first hint of the world outside the House. The gifts are very practical, and sit oddly in the echo-chamber of Piranesi’s life in the House, which seems to be more a condensed, intense aesthetic experience, than corporeal movement through a material place.
That the House is not all that exists is hinted at by Piranesi’s belief that there is someone else in the House, whom he calls ‘the Other’. A tentative dance begins, as Piranesi tries to find, or at least to communicate, with this ‘Other’. Eventually he does, and the reality is a great deal more mean-spirited than the generous-hearted Piranesi expected. For all that, though, Piranesi rises to the truth, and seems rather to bring with him remnants, not of what the House was, but what he believed it to be, a belief that seems ultimately more real than the feet of clay of its inventors..
Randall, or The Painted Grape by Jonathan Gibbs
Randall, or The Painted Grape by Jonathan Gibbs
Randall, or The Painted Grape by Jonathan Gibbs (Galley Beggar: 2014)
A difference in a sense of humour, so George Eliot wrote, is a great strain on the affections. The first chapter or two of Randall seemed to be some ways derivative and not very promising, and in many ways very irritating. The narrator/main protagonist (the POV changes) could be Richard Papen or Nick Carraway, or Tom Townsend, the partially-assimilated alien in a closed, privileged world.
The milieu upon which Vincent Cartwright, merchant banker, comments is the Young British Artist scene in 1990’s London, which seems – in this representation at least – to have largely been a bunch of self-indulgent, self-aggrandising media whores, intoxicating themselves into greater heights of over-blown inanity in a world where good contacts could turn homeopathic traces of artistic talent into obscene quantities of cash. Even at that, the descriptions were redolent enough to strike chords even for one only ever fleetingly and tangentially a witness on the fringes of the art-student world.
And what a world it recalled: the narcissism that turned every toddler-tantrum into evidence of genius; every sullen, rebarbative flouting of basic good manners evidence of creativity kicking (in quite the wrong direction) against the pricks; the performance and rhetoric of rebellion and rejection of social norms; the god-awful, eye-clawing, pretentiousness that permeated everything.
That Gibbs’ tale was not realistic became a possibility when Damien Hirst is killed in a traffic accident, and in consequence of looking at someone else’s review, the veil was lifted: this is a satire. It remains a question why its satirical identity was not obvious (this reader too accustomed to the unsubtle declarations of S.J. Perleman or Paul Jennings? Too traumatised by abrupt recollections of being stuck in the soul-sucking company of someone still aglow from their piece of awful, sub-(sub)-Joycean performance art? Who knows.) but the realisation increased the appreciation ratio considerably.
Cartwright is a third person character, and, in the sections lifted from a memoir, a first-person narrator, who has been a wealthy friend of a small group of Goldsmiths’ artists in the early Blairite era. He is particularly friendly with Randall (single name only, natch), for whom he makes a couple of valuable connections and for whom he functions as a ‘wealth manager’. Randall married Joanne, after she and Cartwright split up. Joanne and Vincent meet again for the first time in some years, after Randall’s death. The cause for the re-connection is Joanne’s discovery of a large collection of pornographic paintings by Randall, scandalously featuring almost everyone they know.
There is a central difficulty with reading the novel, and it derives from Gibb’s skill in characterisation of people and their milieu. They are so convincing, and in consequence, so repellent and mockable, that it is very difficult to work up any concern about any of them. They are vapid and meaningless, so there is necessarily a lack of any sense of tension if one cannot find a single damn to give about any of them. Their work has aesthetic or creative value only within the context that they have themselves created for themselves (with the exception of two talents, Kevin and Aga, who are primarily remote from the story).
The female artists are caricatures of both the artistic and the wealthy-socialite worlds, even Aga, beyond her talent, is a paper-thin character. The most rounded female character is Joanne, and though she has an art-related profession, her role in the story is primarily defined by her sincere and compassionate relationships with Vincent, then Randall, and finally her son. Randall is, necessarily, the most developed – he can hardly be called complex, under the circumstances – character, and his main charm is that he is openly deeply shallow, and in any case, he is dead by the start of the novel. It may be a necessarily evil in a satire that characters can’t be fully developed. If Randall and the people in his milieu were living beings, if they were the literary equivalent of Lucien Freud’s subjects rather than almost pen-sketches, then Randall’s realisation – that he is full of sound and fury and signifies nothing outside of the toasty echo-chamber of commodified art – would be a tragedy of Medean proportions.
There is a small smack of tragedy in the final scenes. Josh, Randall’s and Joanne’s teenaged son, throws his toys out of the pram over the disposal of his father’s art-work. That it has already been made clear that his father’s death was profoundly shocking and distressing to Josh does not stop the specifics of his spitting out of the soother from being pretty tedious. But the response of his mother strongly suggests that she will transfer her pampering obligations from one male ego to another. Worse still, it seems that Josh’s girlfriend Gaby is destined for the same supporting role.
The external anxieties – what to do with the rude nudes? – are presented as though the cause of anxiety are obvious, and the exact nature of the consequences attendant on the paintings being made public are not articulated. Is the reader to conclude that the artist’s reputation will be damaged if it is known he painted smut? Given the scatological theme of a previous series of works, that hardly seems likely, nor that, where a market has purchased repurposed skid-marks, it could not be persuaded to purchase a little fake fornication.
Will Randall’s main buyers and patrons be offended by seeing themselves thus depicted? But Randall’s whole schtick was shock, and maximum outrage the chief ambition, so why should they clutch their pearls at this logical, if juvenile, extension? Why would their outrage be taken seriously? Without an overweening and specific reason for panic, the reaction of Joanne and Vincent to finding a secret studio full of paintings of people having sex seems to be simple embarrassment. It is an understandable reaction but if the characters are not very interesting, and there is no apparent threat, it is difficult for the reader to enter into the same spirit of upheaval and anxiety.
Many, nearly all, individual bits of Randall are very good, but it does not quite work as a novel. It is more like a series of observant, informed, witty, critical articles about visual art, that have been woven into a narrative, in the way of the musicals Mamma Mia and Killer Queen weave a story (or, 'story') that will provide a reason to display individual songs (there, happily, any similarity ends).
The narrative is told partly in the first person, from Vincent’s point of view, and these sections are part of the novel that Vincent is writing. But this interesting meta aspect is not really explored, and there is only one extended depiction of his attempts to write, which in any case turns into an opportunity for recounting memories, rather than reflecting on the writing process. The switching point-of-view becomes more of a stylistic device than an opportunity to extemporise on the nature of writing.
What is worth reading the novel for even on their own, regardless of the plot, are the artworks and events Gibbs presents (presumably of his own invention) on behalf of Randall, which are quite magnificent in their terrible, pretentious, manipulative way.
The Ruined Map by Kōbō Abe
The Ruined Map by Kōbō Abe
The Ruined Map by Kōbō Abe, trans. E. Dale Saunders (Penguin: 2020 [1967])
An unnamed detective is hired to find his client’s husband. The husband is a salesman who disappeared at the corner of a street near their home, and the client's brother has tried without success to find him.
The detective never seems to be quite certain what he is looking for, and the story reads often as though he has two and two in his two hands, but he cannot make them make four. He seems to be in between very distinct places for much of the book: the couple's apartment and his own office, the office and the dry channel where the prostitutes work, the office and the noodle-shop, and so on. Neither the places nor his journeys between them lead to any advancement in his case, as though the eponymous ruined map he has been given keeps him in the wrong place, rather than guiding him to where he might find answers.
In the same way, the detective seems to be in-between the pages of the book, but never quite in, let alone driving, the story. He expects to find ways of resolving the mystery through his obsessive attention to irrelevant details, like traffic patterns or matchbooks. He never seems to get any closer to the object of his search, except insofar as he begins to identify strongly with the husband, thereby failing to find either of them.
The Ruined Map is written in a naturalistic way, and is bleakly funny in places, but both characteristics serve to underline isolation as a fundamental human experience, as the detailed description of particular places throws into relief the universality of absurdity as characteristic of life.
Sea of Souls by N.C. Scrimgeour
Sea of Souls by N.C. Scrimgeour
Sea of Souls by N.C. Scrimgeour (2023)
Isla Blackwood is a scion of nobility in Silvreckan, a sort of alt-Scotland, and she bolted seven years ago for the sea. She is now returning because her mother is mortally ill. Although Isla wants nothing more than to return to the seas that call her, events overtake not only her but her brother, Lachlan, and their guardian and swordmaster, Dacre. Like everyone in Silvreckan, Isla has always feared the selkies, but will have to join forces with at least one if they are to try and stop an escalation in violence.
This is a good, meaty (sometimes literally…) adventure, fairly low-fantasy in that it reads like a sort of pre-modern Scotland doused in mud and rinsed in folklore. It is very effective, and in places, the bumping up of the fantasy with the ordinary is funny, like Isla’s realisation that she really is home because it is slashing rain. It is very pacy, too, and gets down to the action quickly once Isla is back on dry land. There’s a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing as the three main characters re-establish the relationships that were sundered when Isla took to the ships. Sometimes they seem to tread the same ground more than once, but it does create the effect of their paths to each other being formed by how they walk them.
The main reservation for the present reader—which is a matter of taste, so may not be a drawback for others—is the heightened register in which the tale is told. If from the first page, emotions are already being reified in strong physical terms—a letter ‘burning’ in her hand, dread ‘wrapping its fingers around her heart’—then what is left to you to describe what happens when you see a selkie take a bite out a man’s throat? If the prose starts at even the lower end of operatic, it risks ending up in the purple. At the very least, some readers will feel like there is a lot of loud emoting.
Scrimgeour writes the fantasy and the adventure parts significantly better than the romance. Again, this may be a personal preference, romance even in sub-plots really being no draw for this reader. But when it comes to the fluttering interactions between Isla and Dacre, the writing becomes undeniably clichéd. A writer who can present such a cracker of a plot, who vividly dispatches characters on treks across uneasy, frozen landscapes, or on desperate attempts to outrun in a rowing-boat both a selkie and a storm, can do better than faint smiles playing across the brooding swordmaster’s lips.
These are comparatively small points in the overall book, but they did make an impression, because when the book is good, it is very good. Its strongest points are the plot itself, and the atmosphere in which it unrolls, both of which are distinctive, immersive, and solidly realised. 'Sea of Souls' is the first of the ‘Sea of Souls saga’, and despite the few reservations, will definitely be a saga to follow.
I received an ARC for free, and am leaving the review voluntarily.
A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch (Vintage: 2001; first published 1961)
Having tried once to get to grips with Iris Murdoch via Henry and Cato (left aside after initial enthusiasm turned to a sense that it was all too over-indulgent), A Severed Head was my next attempt. It is a comedy of sorts, though it does call to mind an observation about Susan Hayward that “her lightest touch as a comedienne could stun a horse”. The narrator, Martin Lynch-Gibbon, starts off in a state of over-privileged bliss, having both a beautiful, motherly wife, Antonia, and a beautiful mistress, Georgie, to whom he can be comfortably condescending as she is the younger by a significant degree, and loves him deeply. Even on his own admission, Martin is not expected to pay for his emotional and sexual shenanigans.
Then Antonia starts the ball rolling by announcing she is in love with someone else, and like dominoes falling, everyone turns out to be in love with, or at least sleeping with, everyone else. Martin spends the novel drunk and being plunged into barely-controllable reactions to a series of almost contradictory revelations, as his circle of intimates engage in a sort of sexual musical chairs. Antonia loves Anderson, then he is “a demon”; Antonia loves Alexander, Martin’s brother; Palmer is in bed, if not love, with his half-sister Honor, with whom Martin finally… and then Georgie… then Alexander… It all happens at a cracking, Benny-Hill-chase speed; every time Martin sobers up, there is some new revelation to send him spinning away.
There is a sort of Molly Keane-esque grotesquerie about the whole business (and an Anglo-Irish connection: Martin feels a sentimental attachment to “that poor bitch of a country” in which both he and the author were born). Honor is an anthropologist, and is the severed head of the title (though happily, only metaphorically). Martin, having once attacked Honor in a cellar, later literally prostrates himself in front of her; I am still unsure if this was intended to be as funny as it was. Georgie makes the wonderfully Gothic gesture of sending her hair to Martin, signalling a suicide attempt. The characters take themselves terribly seriously, and are very deftly made believable, despite being on a spectrum careening between Bertie Wooster and some hyper-articulate character from a Jacobean tragedy. Martin is bearable because he at least admits that he wants nothing more than to have his cake and eat it. Georgie is the best of the bunch, and puts an unerring finger on aspects of Martin’s character that he has the grace to acknowledge he had hoped she would not notice.
That Honor is Jewish seems to be mentioned at every hand’s turn, particularly when describing how ugly she is, with her “sallow Jewish mask” of a face, and black greasy hair, an emphasis that is unpleasant and startling. It seems a shame, too, that Georgie, who seems a decent sort of person, is caught up in this farago with these selfish, emotionally unstable people. She is incapable of being without a man for more than two minutes at a stretch but unlike Antonia, does not seem happy with any of them. Taken as a singularity, rather than as part of the cast, Georgie is less on a merry-go-round and more circling the drain.
Despite the tortuous intertwinings of dreadful characters, the prose is very clear and lovely, and it makes for an unexpectedly enjoyable read. It is a short book, too, which stands it in good stead since a lengthy account of the inner lives of this charmless crew would pall quickly. Despite all of the psychoanalytical talk, and Martin’s repeated attempts to understand and articulate himself and his reactions—and, in fairness, to behave well—no-one seems to understand anything new by the end of it all; they return to the same old posturings, just in someone else’s bed.
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison , (Gollancz: 2020)
Olivia Laing, in her Guardian review in 2020, noted the “precise and estranging fluency” of Harrison’s writing. It is a perfect tool for depicting uncertain negotiation of uncertain worlds.
Shaw, one of the main characters, starts the novel coming to (incomplete) rest after motion: he has had a breakdown, and has just moved house. He meets Victoria in the place where he has come, if not to rest, at least to a stop of sorts, and almost immediately she leaves, moving house in her turn. His mother has dementia, and takes pleasure in tearing up family photographs, destroying memories. Victoria’s mother has died and Victoria is moving north to Shropshire to live in the house her mother left behind.
Sunken Land is a story that has key absences: Shaw’s sense of distance from himself, Victoria’s deceased mother, the repeated failures to communicate. Shaw and Victoria seem barely to have come together before they separate. There are significant gaps in knowledge, too: the true business of the person who gives Shaw a job, the reason that copies of The Water Babies keep turning up, what is the source of the voices Shaw can hear through his wall.
This makes it sound as though Sunken Land is about the uncanny, or weird experiences, and that does it the injustice of pinning it down, but weirdness is inherent in the novel like hair on an arm, giving it distinction; the novel would look odd without it, like a face without eyebrows. It is not about them, they are factors in and consequences of life. What is most memorable is not so much the strange occurrences and recurrences, the unsettling glimpses of disturbing things, but the maps of the characters’ diffident interactions with the world, both familiar and defamiliarized, maps that are built up with such subtlety, and with so unique a literary palette, that it is almost startling to stand back and see how immaculate and strong is the resulting fictional reality.
In a 2017 interview with Heather Marshall, Harrison said that he looks for the ‘I don’t know why you did that’ moment at the endings of his own short stories, and there are plenty of these in Sunken Land too, keeping the reader on their toes, keeping the prose too dynamic and complex to be burdened down by the shifting, often gloomy, atmosphere; it is a gloomy world, but the weirdness and Harrison’s remarkable prose make it almost rebelliously suffused with resilience.
Thirty-Two Words for Field by Manchán Magan
Thirty-Two Words for Field by Manchán Magan
Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape by Manchán Magan (Gill: 2020)
This is the kind of book that remains in use for reference, even though it bears reading all the way through. As an author, I have found it very valuable for world-building, not just in terms of how to make up likely Hibernia Altera place-names, but in terms of thinking about the different ways the landscape is understood and interpreted by those who live with it.
It is intriguing to see the way that language that is in everyday use will focus so finely on different forms of common things; not just the thirty-two words for field, but the range of words for a hole in the ground, depending on whether it was a spawning fish that made it, or it was a shelter for a wild animal.
Also intriguing is the reminder that words can have among their multiple meanings those that seem unconnected; a goat muzzle and an invisibility cloak, for example. The words for landscape can reflect a different way of looking at things: there is a measurement of land, ‘copla’, which does not refer to distance or space but to the carrying power, the potential productivity level that a piece of land can sustainably reach.
This book is informative, very engaging, and, for a non-speaker of Irish reading a native speaker, very convincing. Some assertions, unrelated to the language itself, could be more useful if they came with footnotes or a reference for further reading. These include assertions about interpretations of myth, the linguistic link between Irish and India, or with Arabic, or about the traceable marks left by spoken words. Less convincing are the occasional sweeping statements about, for example, Irish people having a unique relationship with the land itself, along “we are rooted to the island” lines, or ideas about race memory.
Anglicized Irish place-names have a weird, nearly quantum, state—entangled with two languages but meaning nothing in either without translation—that Tim Robinson described as being ‘like twigs snapped off the trees’, and Thirty-Two Words goes a long way to assisting the interested non-speaker towards a more informed understanding of the landscape.
Velma Gone Awry by Matt Cost
Velma Gone Awry by Matt Cost
Velma Gone Awry by Matt Cost (Encircle Publications: 2023)
8 Ballo is somewhere between Philip Marlowe and Lieutenant Columbo, with a trace of Nero Wolfe, and is on the dangerous trail of a shimmy-shaking Sheba, a smoky-eyed femme fatale with whom he becomes infatuated. He is a private investigator working out of 1920s Brooklyn, hired by the tough, bigoted 'businessman', Hartmann whose daughter – the eponymous Velma – has gone missing. She may be on a bender in a juice joint, but she may have been abducted. Hartmann has ‘stepped on many toes’ in the course of his career, and a number of the toes belonged to two ruthless mobsters, Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel and his associated Meyer Lanksy.
This sets the tone for the book; at every turn, Ballo finds his investigation scoops up another famous name. Dorothy Parker helps out Ballo and his friend-cum-wingman, Pearle. Zelda Fitzgerald’s kitchen is the location for a regrouping. Babe Ruth sits in a corner somewhere being a boor. Ballo impresses the company at the Algonquin Hotel. It sounds heavy-handed, but it isn’t – once the reader accepts the slightly unlikely premise that Ballo’s investigation will bump up against so many aspects of his city, the effect is a good one. It is helped that there is an informed depth to everyone, or to Ballo’s opinion of them.
Ballo is an engaging character; he has a humantities degree and experience of the trenches of World War I, and these seem to be the explanation for his reflective and tolerant nature, meaning it does not seem too ‘modern’ when he brushes against (or gets in a fight with) the racists, the homophobes, and the misogynists. The historical detail is very convincing, and without any sense that opportunities are being manufactured to show it off, and there is a light but firm touch with the secondary characters, too, who are deftly drawn, recognisable but unfussy.
The trigger warnings include profanity, violence, death, and sex, but should include abuse, too. The temperament of the book is more The Thin Man or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes than Farewell, My Lovely. Ballo functions within, but at a remove from, the grimmer aspects of life, so readers might prefer to be alerted to a smack of Chinatown.
This is a good, enjoyable read, well-written, observant, and engaging. It balances its resonance with the atmosphere of compromise, violence, and grubbiness that is characteristic of noir, with being solid detective entertainment.
The Way to Work by Séan Ashton
The Way to Work by Séan Ashton
The Way to Work by Séan Ashton (Salt Publishing: 2023)
In its first pages, this has a strong Leonard and Hungry Paul feel to it. The voice is of a very ordered person, one who thinks ahead about details. He is a forty-something salesman, cat-litter being his product, and the first-person narrative enumerates the significant aspects of his daily routine, and any tiny deviations therefrom, suggesting he has been institutionalized by the undemanding demands of life.
His daily commute is on the 8:08 train. A colleague takes the same train, and the narrator goes into some detail about the unspoken understanding they have that allows them to negotiate their uncomfortable proximity; uncomfortable because they are not in work, or in a meeting, but in that ill-defined time and place between their personal and their work lives. This detailed reflection on the borderlands within a life become the dominant topic of the story, and as it does, the tone shifts out of the routine into the unpredictable, from the ordered everyday to the absurd.
The morning commuter train turns out to be something entirely different. Ashton has said that his aim was to keep his character “on the threshold of the familiar and the strange”, that the novel was an exercise in “sustaining liminality”. It is an admirable and convincing experiment, but does not quite succeed, possibly because of the speed with which the narrator becomes acclimatized to the world of the train. This gives the sense that the strangeness very quickly, through being expressed as his experience, loses its strangeness and becomes as familiar as the soul-crushing corporate speak of the new cat-litter boss. The framework of strangeness and liminality is there, with the endless propulsion forward, the increased identification of the narrator, not just with life on the train, but with the train itself (echoes here of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and his theory about bicycle ‘mollycules’).
There is certainly a great deal that is strange, even grotesque, including the narrator himself at times but just as O’Brien’s narrator (like Ashton’s, nameless) brings with him to the afterlife a warp of his own, so does the passenger on the 8:08 service to infinity bring with him an ordinariness that always tips the balance away from the strange. It also has some excellent one-line reflections, not comic but revealing, and all the more effective for being delivered in the same rather fussy manner in which the narrator delivers his other, often banausic concerns. Like the 8:08 train, it does not reach its destination; perhaps there is none, or if there is, arrival is not necessary.
This is a novel that very nearly works, and while there is an unfinished feel, it is an impressive near-miss. It is a bold and striking experiment that is cleverly and sometimes elegantly sustained.
The Weightless World by Anthony Trevelyan
The Weightless World by Anthony Trevelyan
The Weightless World by Anthony Trevelyan (Galley Beggar: 2015)
This is an interesting one but in the end, ‘weightless’ applies as much to the book as to the machine proposed by the inventor. Much of the dialogue could be used cinematically without alteration, and the locations are instantly absorbing, both the very expensive, urban, consumer-capitalist environment of the protagonists, and the alien and alienating parts of rural India through which they travel in order to meet the inventor of the anti-gravity machine.
The main protagonist is himself a bit weightless – gusting like a released kite from one conviction, one decision, to another. His girlfriend is frankly weird, like a form of alien life described without any real understanding of either form or function. She’s terribly peculiar. The only other woman in the story is Aya, who seems to be there to symbolise colonial oppression and exploitation, and to embody post-colonial resentment.
Overall, it reads like a very observant, engaging, and sometimes lyrical series of travel descriptions linked by an intriguing but ultimately unresolved science fiction idea.
The Wickwire Watch by Jacquelyn Hagen
The Wickwire Watch by Jacquelyn Hagen
The Wickwire Watch (The Riverfall Chronicles #1) by Jacquelyn Hagen (Mastmarner Books: 2022)
This is a cracker of a story. There is a strong Dickensian feel to its presentation, a sort of nineteenth-century four-squareness of character and action, and of its prose, too, which has a well-judged light humour that never falters, and is never over-done. There is a very definite A Christmas Carol something even about the first line: ‘Had Mr. Bash known this was the night he was going to die, he would have stayed at home.’ It is a richly realised world, cleanly told and well-sustained.
The plot is complex but crisply revealed. An orphan, called, among other things, Inkwell Featherfield, picks the wrong pocket and ends up first in the hands of the police, and then, in need of money, running an errand for a journalist. He finds himself pursued by Spektors, of which he has never heard, and is rescued by the notorious Colonists, who are hunted by every right-thinking citizen. (In Ink’s world, this is a bit like being pursued by Black Shuck, and rescued by the Tonton Macoute). He is forcibly brought to the Colonists’ world, a flying island carrying their village, and he has no means to escape. Once there, though, he begins to discover that not everything he has believed is necessarily true, that there is a multitude of sides to every story, and that his favourite motto—trust no-one—is becoming a matter of life and death.
There are a couple of niggles. Inkwell clearly has a backstory, and clearly it is to remain for the time being a mystery. But the lack of information about him means that some of his reticences, including his refusal to trust anyone, do not appear to be grounded in anything in particular. The result is that there can be an unevenness about the effects his early life have had on him, so sometimes it seems forced, as though it is there to serve the plot. Similarly, there are one or two points that feel just too coincidental, that he would be in a particular place, just at the right time to find a particular thing. But they are relatively small points, and they do not spoil either the pace of the adventure nor the fluidity and charm of the storytelling.
The Wild Way Home by Sophie Kirtley
The Wild Way Home by Sophie Kirtley
The Wild Way Home by Sophie Kirtley (Bloomsbury: 2020)
Time-slip stories are a familiar trope in all sorts of literature: in books for younger readers, the slippage is usually into the past rather than (as in Wells’ The Time Machine) into the future. In this, The Wild Way Home slips further than usual, landing Charlie Merriam back into the Stone Age. Charlie’s playground is Mandel Forest, with landmarks not just of place but of imagination – Deadman’s Cave, the Spirit Stone – and a river. When Charlie’s brother is born with a ‘tiny, not-right heart’, Charlie runs away to the sanctuary of Mendel Forest, and there encounters an injured ‘wild boy’, Hartboy (both children mishear the other’s name, and are called Cholliemurrum and Harby for most of the story). Hartboy, in circumstances that are not explained, can find neither of his parents, and is desperate to find and protect his baby sister.
Hartboy introduces the recurring theme of ‘make safe’, and the two children essentially take care of each other, Charlie helping Hartboy until he recovers from his concussion, Hartboy helping Charlie escape from wolves. The adventures that surround their attempts to find what is left of Hartboy’s family, and to get Charlie home, are straightforward and engaging, and both are negotiating a level of guilt: Hartboy because he ‘failed’ to take care of his baby sister, Charlie for running away from the shock of a shattered imaginary ideal, and thereby abandoning the much-anticipated sibling.
A recurring sensibility, if not theme, is the way that the time-slip is represented by different experiences of nature, rather than purely differences between the humans. Charlie’s previous encounters with the natural world have all been positive, and reassuring, where thunderstorms are exciting, animals are pets, hunting is a game. Overwhelmed by the shattering of a confident expectation of life with a new sibling, Charlie tried to reject circumstances by running away. But in the Stone Age, the forest is a wild place, neither playground nor refuge, and the only thing that counts is being able to survive, and help your own to survive. No plan or idea or person, however important or cherished, is immune to the random and impersonal chances of nature.
For what is primarily a well-paced adventure story, The Wild Way Home is reflective, and this, along with the presentation of the natural world as a place with its own rich meaning, makes for a very rewarding read. The balancing influence of a wild place is reminiscent of David Almond’s Kit’s Wilderness and Skellig, and the connection with the Stone Age will recall also Stig of the Dump.
The Wings of Ashtaroth by Steve Hugh Westenra
The Wings of Ashtaroth by Steve Hugh Westenra
The Wings of Ashtaroth by Steve Hugh Westenra (2023)
This, oddly enough, was a DNF; oddly, because it is very well written, and also the setting—a low-fantasy world based on the Punic Wars—is an immediate attraction. The problem for the present reader is a book of this length where the narrative driver is not shaping up to be of pressing interest. It would take a lot to win a commitment to read a story of over 300,000 words, and the fate of a royal family—even with repercussions for everyone else—does not cut it for me. Though the writing is very good, it is not at the level of those writers (a list in single figures) whose writing alone would be sustenance enough.
That any book needs to be 300k words long is a difficult argument, even without attributing any validity to market-driven ‘rules’ about length; a novel is the map, not the territory. This one doesn’t drag exactly, but it is slow, and even if a reader is not insistent on a particular form of narrative arc (conflict, resolution, all the rest of it), reading a book that feels more like an experiential history lesson is quite a different thing to reading a story.
The point of view changes frequently, but this is a very effective approach, layering up a world. The narrative is sprawling (in terms of the cast of characters), far-reaching (in terms of the scale of the location being drawn into the action), and complex (in terms of the number of threads feeding into the story, and the complexity of the result). Nearly four hundred pages in, there is not a very strong sense of how, or even if, these stories and their protagonists are going to come together. On one hand, this is very realistic, in that most people living through interesting times are just tottering along trying to get by, and are not involved in, or have no influence in, the larger currents of political and economic life. On the other, if the reader is spending a lot of time in the head of a character who, however full of action their lived experience, is not appealing to them, then it is hard to sustain an interest if the interconnectedness of things is not discernible. The difficulty for the present reader of remaining engaged is exacerbated by the fact that the inner lives and lived experiences of the rich and powerful are just not that interesting to them.
On Kobo, this book is 2,488 pages—it would have to be irresistible on every count to win that kind of investment; that it didn’t is not surprising, despite its many strengths. A DNF, but also a recommend: the aspects that left this reviewer behind will hit the sweet spot for many other readers.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse