2024/172: The Book of Chameleons — Jose Eduardo Agualusa (translated by Daniel Hahn)

The train gave a long whistle, then a bewildered, long drawn-out howl, like a red ribbon stretched across the seafront. [p. 122]

Félix Ventura, an albino, lives in a crumbling mansion in Luanda with his best friend, Eulálio, who happens to be a gecko. Félix is in the business of creating well-documented family histories for those who need them: "businessmen, ministers, landowners, diamond smugglers, generals". The novel (originally published in Portuguese with the title O vendedor de passados, 'The Seller of Pasts') opens with a photojournalist seeking an authentic new identity. Félix names him José Buchmann, and Buchmann goes off to explore his invented past -- finding elements that seem to be real.

Meanwhile, Félix begins a romance with the glamorous Ângela Luciá, who in turn introduces him to Edmundo Barata dos Reis, a homeless derelict who she says is an 'ex-agent of the Ministry of State Security'. No, howls Edmundo: "‘Not ex-agent, say rather ‘ex-gent’! Ex-exemplary citizen. Exponent of the excluded, existential excrement, an exiguous and explosive excrescence. In a word, a professional layabout." And (of course) Ângela, Edmundo and Buchmann turn out to have history together. 

This is a novel about real and invented stories, about people's pasts and how they shadow the present. Eulálio, who shares dreams with Félix, believes that he was once a man: "It’s been nearly fifteen years that my soul has been trapped in this body, and I’m still not used to it. I lived for almost a century in the skin of a man, and I never managed to feel altogether human either." (There is a subtle hint that he might have been a particular man, a famous author. There are also hints that Félix has created a history for his reptilian friend.) The prose is gorgeous, the underlying story -- rooted in the Angolan civil war -- brutal and violent. I loved Agualusa's prose and will read more by him: and I look forward to rereading this novel to better appreciate how the final conflict(s) are foreshadowed.

Fulfils the ‘A Book By A Central African Author’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

2024/171: The Truths We Hold — Kamala Harris

... something ugly and alarming was infecting the presidential election. The Republican primary was turning into a race to the bottom—a race to anger, a race to blame, a race to fan the flames of xenophobic nativism. And the man who prevailed crossed every boundary of decency and integrity—bragging about sexually assaulting women; mocking people with disabilities; race baiting; demonizing immigrants; attacking war heroes and Gold Star families; and fomenting hostility, even hatred, toward the press. [loc. 2164]

I started reading this just before the US election, confident that it would give me an insight into the next President. ... It's taken me a while to finish it: a glimpse of a lost future. Harris is passionate about equality, about unity, about justice. I was shocked by some of the statistics she quoted ('Black babies are twice as likely as white babies to die in infancy, a stunning disparity that is wider than in 1850, when slavery was still legal') and inspired by some of the work she's done, as Attorney General of California, on reforming criminal justice. She comes across, in this 2019 book, as driven, energetic and determined: as somebody I'd enjoy knowing personally. The quotation at the top of this review is from her account of the 2016 election -- and her discussion of Russian interference in that election was chilling.

I wish she had won in 2024.

2024/170: Minor Detail — Adiana Sibli (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette)

... there was nothing really unusual about the main details, especially when compared with what happens daily in a place dominated by the roar of occupation and ceaseless killing. [loc. 748]

A short, powerful, harrowing novel, in two halves, that examines helplessness, brutality and occupation. The first half of the novel is set in 1949 and follows a squad of Israeli soldiers, focussing on their commander, who's suffering from a festering insect bite. In pain and hallucinating, he perpetrates horror: the slaughter of a group of Bedouin and the gang-rape and murder of a young woman. The commander is never named: nor is the girl. Her dog follows her, howling, as she's driven to her death.

The second half of the novel shifts in tone. A young Palestinian woman, never named, is determined to investigate the murder, which happened exactly 25 years before she was born. Her life is described in minute detail. (I suspect she's neurodivergent). She borrows a colleague's papers so that she can circumvent the travel restrictions and visit the IDF Museum, and the site of the Bedouin girl's death. It's a military zone. A dog is howling. She is shot.

The matter-of-fact, emotionless tone of the first half of the novel is deeply unsettling: we are told nothing about the emotions of those involved, or what happened afterwards. The young woman's narrative, which forms the second part of the book, is full of her fears of crossing borders, especially borders that she doesn't recognise. Perhaps this lack of confidence in her response to social cues is what makes me think that she might be neurodivergent. Or perhaps it is the only way she can stay sane in an occupied country, in a place where her culture has been destroyed like the villages that pepper an old map she uses, but have left no trace in the land through which she travels.

The detachment and restraint of this novel, and the clarity of the translation, made it a superficially easy read: but like blood into sand, or petrol into clothes, Minor Detail has sunk into me and affected my world view.

The story is based on a documented incident: the commander in question stood trial.

Fulfils the ‘A Book Set In A Place That Has Experienced Genocide’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge. Palestine is still experiencing genocide: I don't think it has ever stopped, and since the Hamas-led attack on Israel it has become catastrophic. In 2023, Shibli won the German LiBeraturpreis, an annual award for women authors from the Global South, for this novel: the award ceremony was cancelled due to the October 7th attacks.

2024/169: Hadriana in All My Dreams — René Depestre (translated by Kaiama L Glover)

One thing he said was very true: even in my coffin I was far closer to a carnival drum than to the tolling of church bells. [loc. 1580]

Set mostly in 1938, in the Haitian seaside town of Jacmel, this is the story of Hadriana Siloé, a white French girl who dies at the altar on her wedding day -- but has actually been zombified. The story's told, mostly, by her friend Patrick Altamont: they shared the same godmother, Madame Villaret-Joyeuse, who's reputed to have seven loins (there's a note in the afterword about the translator's difficulty in 'figuring out how to translate Depestre’s twenty or so terms for human genitalia') and whose final lover was a 'diabolical deflowerer' who'd been transformed into a butterfly. Patrick remains infatuated with Hadriana, whose death came after she said 'yes' to her wedding vows, and who's therefore the widow of Hector Danoze; whose death is celebrated not with a solemn mass but with a bacchanalian carnival; whose body mysteriously vanishes from her grave.

I liked the different modes of the narrative, from Patrick's breathless account of Hadriana's death to Hadriana's own account of ... well, of what happened next. (And what happened before the wedding: despite her family's wealth and whiteness, she was far from the helpless virginal heroine of other zombie stories, and clearly relished her sexual adventures and her 'sinfulness'.) The novel is erotic, fantastical, phantasmagorial and often very funny. I also found some scenes harrowing, in particular when Hadriana, escaping her captors, sought help in the town. The townsfolk loved their 'Creole fairy' and had just spent an evening celebrating her life and mourning her death -- but nobody would respond to her frantic banging on doors.

The Introduction by Edwidge Danticat contextualises the story as a deconstruction of the zombie trope, a negation of the typical Hollywood offering of brainless monsters. While the political context is only lightly sketched, the romanticism that echoes through this novel written in exile is lush and poignant. Danticat's introduction also mentioned 'lodyans', a term with which I wasn't familiar: it's a Haitian literary tradition, 'a tongue-in-cheek narrative genre meant to provoke laughter'.

Fulfils the ‘Inspired By Caribbean Mythology, Legend, or Folklore’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

2024/168: The Gathering Night — Margaret Elphinstone

If young men didn’t die there’d be too many... Young men must die, just as young Animals must die when we hunt them. If there weren’t so much death we’d all perish, and not be able to come back. I’d always known that young men must die. But not my son! [loc. 258]

Set in Mesolithic Scotland, around the time of the Storegga slide, this is the story of Nekané and her family, who are of the Auk People: her daughters Haizea and Alaia, Alaia's partner Amets, Nekané's dead son Bakar, and Kemen of the Lynx People who joins them after his home and clan are swept away by a monstrous wave. Kemen also forms an attachment to Osané, a woman from another camp who's been badly beaten and does not speak. It soon becomes clear that something is wrong, perhaps in the world of the spirits: the hunters come home with less meat, and the winters are harsh. Nekané, who becomes a Go-Between -- a shamanic figure -- after her son's disappearance, slowly comes to recognise the root of the wrongness.

There's a solid belief in reincarnation, and a baby is not named until its soul is recognised: when someone dies, their name is not spoken again until they've returned. There's a strong spiritual element, but it's firmly rooted in the mundane business of survival, the constant busyness of finding food, rearing children and gathering fuel. Though Nekané and the other Go-Betweens talk of spirits and guides, there is nothing supernatural in this slow, thoughtful novel: just the accounts of the various characters, each with their own voice and concerns and bias, and the gradual revelation of crimes committed and the punishments that must be imposed.

In an Afterword, Elphinstone discusses her use of Basque names (which did feel slightly odd, but 'Basque is thought to be the only extant language of pre-Indo-European – which is to say, pre-agricultural – origin on the western seaboard of Europe.') There's more about the writing of The Gathering Night here.

I've owned a paperback of this novel for many years, and never managed to get past the first few chapters, which I find slow and melancholy. (I note that I also found Voyageurs difficult at first, though I don't recall having this problem with pre-blog Hy Brasil, or with Light or The Sea Road.) I finally read the Kindle version, and think it counts as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/167: Confounding Oaths — Alexis Hall

Gentlemen with fairer fortunes, fairer skin, and more interest in the fairer sex might have been able to get away with cocking a snook at a world that at once despised and admired them. [loc. 1387]

Standalone sequel to Mortal Follies, which I enjoyed very much: again, the narrator is Puck, unaccountably exiled from the court of Oberon and forced to live in modern London and pay rent. 'This is the second of those stories I have chosen to share. If you have not read the first, why not? Do you personally dislike me? Are you determined to see me suffer, interminably and without even the comforts of a scribbler’s income to lighten my exile?' 

We are reunited with Miss Bickle, who's writing a story entitled 'The Heir and the Wastrel', which is about Mr Wickham and Mr Darcy: 'carefully constructed, enthusiastically delivered, and contained a number of details that the anonymous lady author of Sense and Sensibility had necessarily elided for fear of the censors'; with Miss Maelys Mitchelmore, protagonist of Mortal Follies, and her lover Lady Georgiana; and with John Caesar, son of a Senegalese freedman and an earl's daughter. Confounding Oaths is the story of John and his relationship with Captain Orestes James, 'Wellington's favourite', a Black soldier whose squad of Irregulars includes a vitki (a Norse-flavoured seer) and Sal, who's 'a woman in a dress, a man in uniform and a devil in battle'. When the elder and plainer of John's sisters, Mary, asks a helpful fairy for 'Beauty Incomparable', Captain James and the Irregulars come to the aid of the Caesars.

This, like Mortal Follies, is great fun, witty and frothy, and full of pointed observations from our cynical narrator. The Norse influence is strong, and we pay a visit to the temple of Isis-Fortuna. Titania plays a major role, and there's an attempted sacrifice to Artemis at the climax of the novel. Confounding Oaths is much more about the fae than about the old gods, and it's set more solidly in the demimonde of London. It's a bigger world in some ways, with references to the war with Napoleon and the unsavoury occult habits of Europeans. Captain James is pleased to be 'on the side of monarchy, serfdom, and the sceptred isle, rather than the side of liberty, equality, and subjugating Europe'. 

Also features a trip to the opera (Fidelio), a visit to the Tower, and a cult named after Iphigenia. Never mind the cultists, the racists, or the misogynists: this is an excellent remedy for bad weather and low mood.

2024/166: Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night — Julian Sancton

In the absence of easily accessible natural resources to exploit, stories were what polar explorers extracted from these barren icescapes. And the best stories weren’t the ones in which everything went well. [loc. 2192]

An enimently readable account (I stayed up past midnight to finish it!) of a Belgian expedition towards Antarctica from 1897 to 1899. The leader of the expedition was aristocrat Adrien de Gerlache de Gomery (not a born leader): Roald Amundsen (later the first person to reach the South Pole) was the first mate, and Frederick Cook (later to claim that he'd been the first person to reach the North Pole) was surgeon and photographer, with a side order of anthropology. Georges Lecointe, the captain, was temperamental and threw a live cat (named Sverdrup) overboard. Various members of the crew shot albatrosses. Is it any wonder the expedition suffered from scurvy, mental illness and mutiny? I think not.

Madhouse at the End of the Earth opens with Amundsen visiting Cook in Leavenworth, where he'd been imprisoned for fraud since 1923. Sancton's account of the expedition is also, in part, a vindication and celebration of Cook: without him, and his knowledge of Inuit diet and the symptoms and treatment of scurvy, it seems probable that the expedition would have vanished in the icy waters of the Weddell Sea, where Gerlache had deliberately sailed the ship into pack ice, so as to overwinter there. 'Despite its dangers—rather, because of its dangers—an imprisonment in the ice would solve each of those problems. It wouldn’t cost any more money, de Gerlache wouldn’t lose any men—at least not to desertion—and it would make for a dramatic story.' [loc. 2185]. Gerlache was very much aware of how the story would be reported, and the importance of good press. Cook -- a natural problem-solver who devised gruesome fenders made of penguin corpses to protect the hull from the ice -- was fascinated by the Antarctic: his work as zoologist and botanist identified many new species. And Amundsen, still in his twenties, was determined to prepare for polar expeditions of his own.

Sancton brings the Belgica's crew to life: the hard cases, the anti-scorbutic diet (rat meat would be fine, human meat wouldn't, because humans can't synthesise their own vitamin C), the moments of levity (Lecointe trying to insert the roll for the Belgian national anthem in the coelophone (barrel organ) while drunk, and putting it in backwards), the increasingly fragile mental and physical health of the crew members. The Belgica didn't make it to the Pole, but it did overwinter with only two four deaths (one man overboard, one man with pre-existing heart condition: one cat monstrously thrown overboard, the other cat -- named Nansen, though female -- dying of kidney disease) and considerable gains to Antarctic science.

I bought this in September 2021, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

Though Cook is remembered today -- if he is remembered at all -- as the charlatan who lied about reaching the North Pole, he may yet find redemption in the next phase of human exploration: manned missions to Mars... Cook’s observations, his warnings, his ad hoc remedies and recommendations, have directly influenced NASA operating procedures. [loc. 5245]

2024/165: Rebel Blade — Davinia Evans

In this city, money might be power, but true legitimacy comes from public spectacle.[loc. 2521]

Finale of the Burnished City trilogy, following Notorious Sorcerer and Shadow Baron. After the changes that swept through Bezim at the climax of Shadow Baron, Siyon Velo -- the Sorcerer, the Alchemist, the Power of the Mundane -- is lying low, blamed for the turmoil and upheaval ... and for the monsters converging on the City, drawn by the power he's unleashed. Meanwhile, Anahid is settling into her role as Lady Sable, and watching her little sister Zagiri attempt to overthrow the azatani, the ruling class, from her position of privilege.

If the first novel focussed on Siyon and the second on Anahid, this is very much Zagiri's story. She's not always a great judge of character, and wanting more power for the common folk of Bezim is an admirable goal that nevertheless attracts some shady individuals. Zagiri's impetuous nature and her bravi love of risk bring her, via tribulations major and minor, to a public duel at the Hippodrome. But even Zagiri can be upstaged...

Rebel Blade catches up all the threads of the previous novels and weaves them into epic. (Nearly all the threads: a couple of minor characters vanished without trace.) There are treacheries great and small, surprise reveals of identity, and Establishment figures rejecting their roles. And there is happiness, sometimes in surprising forms, for our three protagonists. I loved the revolutionary vibes, the notebooks, the determination to maintain masks literal and metaphorical: I loved the varied careers open to women, and the resolutions of old pain. 

And of course I now want to reread the whole series, from Siyon's first impossible act...

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 03 December 2024.

2024/164: Orbital — Samantha Harvey

We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summery burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast. [loc. 1672]

A short, intense, literary novel set during 24 hours -- sixteen orbits -- on the International Space Station. From one angle, nothing happens: from another, everything happens. The six crew members (four men and two women: American, Russian, Japanese, Italian) watch a super-typhoon form; watch a film about possessed cosmonauts; carry out their scientific and maintenance duties, a constant flow of tasks; are captivated by the Earth spinning by below them. 

Each has a rich inner life, from the man considering a postcard of Las Meninas to the woman mourning her mother's sudden to death, to the man concealing the cherry-sized lump next to his collarbone. Each becomes profound: the nature of God, the importance of love, the fragility of Earth. Humans are 'an animal that does not just bear witness, but loves what it witnesses', and the six crew members' perspectives on the Earth are fascinating, poignant and full of love. 

This is a beautiful book, and a deserved Booker winner. It was also shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, which recognises authors who 'can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now': and yes, though the crew cannot affect anything they see, there is hope and love there. (On Ann Druyan's brainwaves forming part of the 'cargo' of Voyager, Harvey writes 'The sound signature of a love-flooded brain, passing through the Oort Cloud, through solar systems, past hurtling meteorites, into the gravitational pull of stars that don’t yet exist.' [loc. 1315]) 

I'm downloading the audiobook, because I think the rhythms of Harvey's glorious prose will be accentuated when read aloud.

The simultaneous not wanting to be here and always wanting to be here, the heart scraped hollow with craving, which is not emptiness in the least, more the knowledge of how fillable he is.[loc. 1513]

2024/163: Ghost Bird — Lisa Fuller

“Remember, daughter, the world is a lot bigger than anyone knows. There are things that science may never explain. Maybe some things that shouldn’t be explained.”

Recommended by an Australian friend, whose review hooked my interest. It's unavailable as an ebook in the UK, so I went for the Audible version, splendidly read by Tuuli Narkle (who, like the protagonists and the author, is of First Nations descent). The one drawback of audio books is that I don't tag passages and make notes for reviews...

Laney and Stacey are twins, growing up with their mother -- their father's dead -- in a small town in Queensland. Stacey's a good girl, studying hard so she can leave behind their small town, with all its casual racism and long-standing feuds. Laney prefers to skive off school, hang out with her boyfriend Troy, and freewheel through life. But one night Stacey doesn't come home, and Laney's been dreaming of her twin being snatched by someone ... or something.

This is a YA novel with elements of horror and fantasy, firmly rooted in First Nations spiritual beliefs and the stories that have been handed down through the generations. The most monstrous element of Ghost Bird is the combination of racism and apathy that Stacey encounters at every turn, from her school and from the police, and from the white folk who refuse access to 'their' land, where Laney disappeared. Stacey isn't allowed to join the adults in their search, either, which she resents bitterly. She is not without resources, though: she has the old stories her Nan told her, she has her awesome cousin Rhiannon, and she is not afraid to break the rules.

There's a lot of emotional tension in this novel, especially between Stacey and her mum: there's also tension between how Stacey has been brought up to behave, and what she feels is right. I loved the close-knit extended family, with its complex connections, obligations and loyalties; the focus on women and girls, rather than men; the role of tradition, belief and stories. Fuller has a gift for imagery, and even in a cold British winter I could feel the suffocating heat and the dryness of the land. This is an excellent first novel, and I'll look out for more by this author.

2024/162: Americanah — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[the dinner party guests] all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well-fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty. [p. 341]

The novel opens with Ifemelu getting her braids redone: she's going home to Nigeria after fifteen years in America, where she's gone from being broke and depressed to becoming a Fellow at Princeton. She's the author of a popular blog, 'Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black' (excerpts from which are peppered through the novel) and a perceptive observer of racism and Black culture in America. But now she's going home, to a country where race isn't an issue.

The other strand of the novel is the life of Ifemelu's teenage sweetheart, Obinze. Now a successful businessman and married with children, he too emigrated -- to England, where he worked illegally and, despite arranging a fake marriage, was eventually deported.

The novel focuses more on Ifemelu's experiences than on Obinze's, but Adichie (like her characters) is attuned to the subtle shadings of racism and the various ways in which it manifests. I found her vignettes of Black life in America and in England diamond-clear and razor-sharp: the depiction of Lagos life, with its political corruption and unreliable electricity, its sense of the best years being ahead rather than behind, was vivid and emotive. It took me a while to get into this novel, but once I was in I loved it -- and it clarified, for me, some of the differences between the US and the UK treatment of black and brown people.

Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past. [p. 539]

2024/161: Ocean's Echo — Everina Maxwell

Surit, not for the first time, felt a deep unease about the observational skills of his senior officers. A lit fuse didn’t stop being a lit fuse just because it had decided to burn politely. [loc. 1796]

Tennal has taken great pains to escape his aunt, a powerful legislator, and to escape the noise of other people's (and his own) surface thoughts: as a reader, his mind is 'a little too open to the universe'. He spends his time flitting from dive bar to socialite party, hiring his mind-reading skills to criminals and traitors -- until, calling his little sister to congratulate her on her forthcoming entry to legal academy, he accidentally re-enables the locator function on his wristband. In short order, Tennal is scooped up and delivered to his aunt. She informs him that he's being conscripted into the Orshan military, and furthermore will be synced with an architect (a mind-writer) who will control him. Tennal used to let people write him for fun, and to get away from his own thoughts, but he is terrified by the thought of being forced into a sync. He spends his first weeks on a military spaceship being as awkward as he can, claiming civilian status until his architect arrives, and disrupting every possible interaction.

Then he meets Lieutenant Surit Yeni, the architect his aunt has lined up to sync with Tennal. Surit, the son of an infamous traitor, is much more powerful than he's let the miltary know -- but he is also honorable and compassionate, and unwilling to follow an order which he believes to be illegal. The two fake their sync and work together, in splendid synergy, to attempt to discover why Surit was chosen for Tennal, why the alien remnants (used to create the first readers and architects, a couple of decades ago, against the express wishes of the Resolution) are being hoarded, and what the ongoing war is actually about.

I enjoyed Maxwell's first novel, Winter's Orbit, but reading Ocean's Echo immediately after that really made me appreciate the growth of the author's craft. Perhaps it's simply that Ocean's Echo is less romance-in-SF-setting than SF-with-romance: the world-building, the non-romance plot and the characters' distinct plot arcs (Tennal's difficult family relationships, Surit's understanding of his mother's treason) are given more foreground than the growing attraction between the two men. Which is not to say that the romance is at all lacking ... 'Surit worked in a universe of fixed possibilities. Tennal was a chaos event. Surit was drawn to it like a gravity well. '

As in Winter's Orbit, the secondary characters -- especially the other members of Surit's unit -- are complex and have agency: the friction between Tennal and Istara, who teaches him piloting, is delicious. Though this is set in a different corner of the galaxy, the cultural milieu (no prejudice based on gender, skin colour or sexual preference) is the same, though Orshan has a more military ambience. There's plenty of humour and snark, but there are also weighty underlying themes: duty and conscience, honour and pragmatism, sacrifice and redemption. I loved it.

2024/160: Winter's Orbit — Everina Maxwell

“The palace revoked your clearance and you don’t even know why. On top of that, your partner dies—might have been killed—and Internal Security can’t even get themselves together long enough to give you the right data about it. And you can’t complain to your family because the palace says that you need clearance to do even that ..." [p. 143]

Prince Kiem, whose grandmother is the Emperor of the seven-planet Iskat Empire, is ordered by her to marry his dead cousin's partner, Count Jainan, who happens to be the diplomatic representative for the planet Thea. Kiem, who's something of a scandal magnet, didn't know his cousin Taam well, and he's never met the presumably-grieving Jainan. But, as the Emperor says, someone has to marry Jainan in order to preserve the treaty with the Auditors, who represent the Resolution -- a galactic bureaucracy which controls the 'links' which connect far-flung corners of the galaxy, and which is extremely interested in alien remnants discovered by those under its purview.

Jainan is not particularly keen on marrying anybody, either, but he knows his duty. It's immediately obvious from his narrative that his marriage to Prince Taam wasn't a happy one, and that Taam had gaslit, bullied and isolated Jainan. Slowly, though, he comes to realise that Kiem is not like his cousin: that he's a good man with a conscience, determined to do the right thing and unravel the tangle of obfuscation, deceit and restriction surrounding Taam's death. Cue a murder mystery, a slow-burn romance, a genre-typical lack of communication between the romantic leads, sabotage, interplanetary diplomacy and a trek across a snowy wilderness, where we learn that bears on Iskat are scaly and have six legs.

I really liked the characterisation here. Kiem is plain-spoken and kind, which is an underrated virtue: Jainan is scholarly, with a speciality which comes in handy when they're investigating Prince Taam's dubiously-legal mining operation, and emotionally brittle. Kiem's aide Bel is a spiky delight and deserves her own book. Kiem and Jainan are both slow to understand (a) who the real enemy is (b) that the other person in the relationship feels the same as they do. They each make decisions and take actions that seem, to put it kindly, illogical. But in the end they save each other, or perhaps save themselves. This was a sweet romance, with an interesting plot and tantalising (i.e. fragmentary) world-building: an excellent mood-lift in the dark days of November.

I bought this in October 2021 -- having, I'm fairly sure, read an earlier and shorter version posted as original fiction on AO3 -- and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list. And then I immediately bought and read Maxwell's second novel, Ocean's Echo. Review imminent!

2024/159: A Short History of Humanity: How Migration Made Us Who We Are — Johannes Krause / Thomas Trappe (translated by Caroline Waight)

If you look at the settlement of Europe as the drama it so often was, then at least 70 percent of its cast are descended from the antiheroes: the migrants who arrived on the continent and subjugated it 8,000 and 5,000 years ago. [loc. 2165]

An informative, accessible and fascinating book about archaeogenetics and what the study of ancient humans' DNA can tell us about patterns of migration. It's Eurocentric, but that allows the authors -- Johannes Krause, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, and journalist Thomas Trappe -- to focus on the origins of present-day Europeans, and the waves of migration that have swept over the continent from east to west.

There's a thorough examination of the role of plague in human history, from its effect on migration (easier to migrate into an area where most of the population has died) to the lingering fear of migrants bearing disease. I hadn't known that there was a 'first wave' of plague, non-bubonic and probably transmitted to humans by Asian horses, in the Mesolithic: that variant died out just as bubonic plague was evolving. Nor did I realise that after regular outbreaks of plague in the early medieval period (including the Plague of Justinian), the disease went dormant -- at least in Europe -- for centuries before the lethal epidemic of the mid-fourteenth century. The reason is unknown, but Krause hypothesises that earlier outbreaks, as well as cultural and social changes, had reduced population density to a level which precluded mass outbreaks. (He also points out that 50% of medieval plague infections were non-lethal, and conferred lifelong immunity on survivors.)

Also fascinating was the discussion of non-Homo Sapiens DNA inheritance: in sub-Saharan Africa there are no traces of Neanderthal DNA, whereas it's 2.5% in Europeans. Indigenous peoples of Australia and Papua New Guinea are about 7% descended from Neanderthals and Denisovans. It's not only different human species that can be detected in DNA: Southern Europeans, and especially Sardinians, have less genetic indication of incoming migration than in other areas.

There are also intriguing insights into the origins of syphilis (not a souvenir brought back to Europe by Columbus' crew) and the spread of tuberculosis and leprosy. And despite the violence and disease historically introduced by waves of migrants, Krause is at pains to stress that 'human beings are born travelers; we are made to wander.' He argues against the ways in which genetic evidence has been used to fuel ethnic conflicts, and explains how genetic differences are reducing as humans become ever more mobile. And he stresses that the issues facing the world today 'are constants in human history: deadly pandemics and constant migration'.

A really good read: full of science, but with a distinctly humanist slant and a refreshing refusal to interpret prehistory through the lens of the present.

2024/158: Signal to Noise — Silvia Moreno-Garcia

He lifted the needle. There was the faint scratch against the vinyl and then the song began to play.
“Okay, now we hold hands and dance around it,” Meche said.
“Really,” Sebastian replied dryly.
“Yes. That’s what witches do. They dance around the fire. Only we don’t have a fire, so we’ll dance around the record player.” [loc. 983]

It's 2009, and IT professional Meche is returning to Mexico City for the first time in twenty years, to attend her father's funeral. It's 1988, and Meche is 15, hanging out with literature-mad Sebastian and young-for-her-age Daniela, and discovering that the three of them can do magic. Alternating between the two timelines, Signal to Noise is the story of what went wrong between Meche and Sebastian, Meche and her parents, Meche and herself.

This was Moreno-Garcia's first novel, and features some predictable plot elements and occasional clunky sentences. We never get an explanation of the magic, or why only some records (physical records! those round things!) work as magical foci. And I'd have liked more about the grandmother's history, and her sacrifice. But I liked the atmosphere of a Mexico City high school; the way that music twines through the story; the relationship between Meche and Sebastian, and the uncomfortable dynamics of Meche's family; the way that the past must be faced before it can be left behind.

I bought this in September 2020, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/157: The House of the Stag — Kage Baker

“But this is all absurd!”
“Isn’t it? I lie to survive, because people fear and respect a black mask more than an honest face. Life became much simpler once I understood that.” [p. 288]

This has been on my wishlist for ages, and was suddenly, briefly affordable...

Gard grows up in a close-knit family among a tribe of gentle forest dwellers, the Yendri. He's bigger and stronger than the other boys, and he doesn't believe in the divinity of the newly-arrived prophet. Then come the Riders, who enslave the Yendri: the prophet Beloved walks through walls, tending to the wounded and despairing, but Gard would rather fight back in more physical ways. He ends up exiled, and trying to climb the mountains beyond which lies a fabled promised land ... and finds himself, crippled by frostbite, prisoner and slave to a coven of immortal mages who employ hordes of demons to keep their Citadel running. Gard attracts the eye of the ambitious Lady Pirihine, Narcissus of the Void: he also befriends a number of demons, including the lovely, deadly Balnshik. Trained as a gladiator and then as a mage, Gard learns a great deal about the world and about his own nature. Then the Citadel is destroyed, and Gard turns to acting ... but his ultimate aim is to become a Dark Lord, with his own mountain stronghold and (obviously) werewolf valet.

Meanwhile the Yendri are flourishing under the care of a young woman known as the Saint, who is pure and compassionate and sensible. I am not comfortable with the circumstances of her first meeting with the Master of the Mountain... But on the whole (and despite slavery and genocide and rape and murder and some deeply unpleasant scenes) this is a cheering and gently humorous novel. It doesn't shy from the horrors of the world, but neither does it linger on them. Instead, it shows us people making the best of their situations: it shows us kindness and forgiveness, loyalty and just deserts, and a multitude of magics, from theatre to magecraft to the inner lives of demons. There were moments when I wanted to look away -- but more moments where I smiled, or laughed aloud, or reread a conversation just to relish Baker's humour. I wish she'd lived longer and written more.

I realised about halfway through that this was actually a prequel to The Anvil of the World, which I read nearly 20 years ago and now want to reread!

2024/156: Where the Dead Wait — Ally Wilkes

When animals were slaughtered -- butchered correctly -- they’d have the blood drained. This was the stink of something still fat with blood. Being cooked hastily, for starving men. Something was in the room with them. [p. 127]

I'd found All the White Spaces compelling and well-written, so was keen to read Wilkes' second novel. Her prose is still resonant and evocative, but I didn't enjoy Where the Dead Wait as much: partly, I think, because I didn't find the protagonist (William 'Eat-Em-Fresh' Day) as sympathetic as Jonathan in the previous book, and partly because I found the cannibalism thoroughly unpleasant.

There's a lot more than cannibalism to this novel of 19th-century Arctic exploration. The focal character is William Day, disgraced survivor of a polar expedition, who returns to the Arctic thirteen years later because his second-in-command, Jesse Stevens, has gone missing in the same area. Those members of the original expedition who made it home had resorted to 'the last desperate resource' -- a euphemism for cannibalism -- but Day knows, though has not revealed, that Stevens' nature held darker secrets. Day, who was in inadmissable and unrequited love with Stevens, is accompanied on the rescue mission by old crew mates and a gang of whalers who survived a shipwreck but were changed by it, and by two especially unwelcome passengers: Stevens' wife, a medium, and Avery, a newspaper reporter. Three unwelcome passengers, perhaps: for whenever Day looks into a mirror, or catches a glimpse of a reflection, Stevens is there.

The gradual revelation of the earlier expedition's fate, told in parallel with the second voyage, is excellently paced. Day's slow disintegration has an inevitability as horrific as the events that haunt him. The characters are intriguing (especially Arctic Highlander Qila, and Olive Stevens the medium) and the tension between them palpable. Elements of colonialism ('the expedition’s first acts had been to claim the land around them, as if theirs to do so'); echoes of Heart of Darkness and The Terror. But I now know much more than I wanted to know about cannibalism and the preparation and cooking of human flesh.

They’d taken the good cuts first. And then, with almost unimaginable hubris, they’d buried what was left. [p. 173]

2024/155: We Are All Ghosts in the Forest — Lorraine Wilson

They were not ghosts, but the forest was not just a forest anymore and people had written far too many stories about wolves for them to be unchanged. You tell a thing it is hungry enough times, can you blame it for hunting? [loc. 2388]

Katerina, formerly a photojournalist, lives in her dead grandmother's house, near a small village in Estonia. The villagers think she's a witch (they're right) because she has a knack for herbalism, a talent for talking to bees, a coat whose pockets nearly always give her what she needs, and a ghost cat named Orlando. The forest is semi-sentient, and full of ghosts from the Crash -- when the internet collapsed in on itself, spawning infectious digital ghosts that might be fragments of birdsong, or a galloping horse, or sentient fungus. Or wolves out of fairytales, more intelligent and malevolent than their natural cousins.

The novel begins with Katerina returning to her village with a young boy in tow. His name is Stefan, and he's mute: he gave Katerina a note from his father (a man she doesn't know) asking her to take care of his son. Katerina teaches him to manage the basic tasks of the farm, and tries to find out what became of his father. Could he be somehow linked to the new and terrible illness that's killing travellers? And can Katerina -- with the help of the forest, and the bees, and even the ghosts -- find a cure for it?

This is a slow, dreamy novel, beautifully written and suffused with loneliness and mystery: it reveals its secrets only gradually. The characters seem defined as much as by what they've lost (Katerina mourning her sister, Jaakob trying to 'fish' for the ghost of his husband, Stefan missing his father) as by what they do. There is prejudice (Katerina, as well as being a witch and a traveller, is mixed-race) and xenophobia. The post-technological society that Wilson depicts is as mystical as it's practical. There is great power in stories, and in the ways those stories are told.

Pragmatic and practical, Katerina's inner conflict between her compassion and her fear of emotional connection is vividly depicted: I liked her interactions with the (sometimes prickly) villagers, and she won me over by sprinkling salt on Orlando the Ghost Cat, who turns black to soak up the heat of a stray sunbeam. 'Salt strengthens the signal... Or the current, if that’s how it works. Electricity, either way. Copper powder works better but it also lasts longer and then he starts shredding the rugs'. Definite pandemic vibes here, too, with the isolation and the constant threat of infection... A slow read, but a beautiful one.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 07 NOV 2024.

2024/154: Dreadnought — April Daniels

The dirty little secret about growing up as a boy is if you’re not any good at it, they will torture you daily until you have the good graces to kill yourself. [loc. 82]

YA superhero fiction. Danny, fifteen, has gone to the shopping mall to buy nail polish and is hiding out in an alleyway painting her toenails: it's the one way she can rebel against being stuck in a boy's body. Then a superhero, Dreadnought, falls out of the sky. Dying, he passes his 'mantle' -- his powers -- to Danny. And part of that mantle is changing the recipient's body to match their self-image. 'That is not the chest I woke up with', observes Danny.

She's finally herself: but her transformation is only the start of the novel. It's not easy being a fifteen-year-old superhero, but it's even harder being a girl with an abusive father who could never have accepted Danny's transgender identity, and refuses to believe that Danny can be happy about her new body. Danny quickly discovers that her best friend David is actually a complete jerk: but she makes a new friend, Latina vigilante Calamity. Calamity's a 'greycape', morally ambiguous: blackcapes are villains, and whitecapes are the good guys. The local whitecape chapter is the Legion Pacifica, who contact Danny and invite her to Legion Tower. Not all of the Legion are cool with the new Dreadnought, and TERFy Graywytch questions her gender. Danny's happier hanging out with Calamity and fighting crime, but their ambition is greater than their ability: going up against a major blackcape is not a smart move.

I enjoyed this a lot, though did feel that most of the characters could have done with more backstory, and indeed more personality. I'd have liked more world-building, too, though there are some intriguing snippets of superhero history: 'In the last great gasp of radio journalism, the whole world stayed glued to their sets to listen to the live reports as [the original] Dreadnought and Mistress Malice savaged each other...' But this gave me a warm glow and a nostalgic affection for the MCU in its heyday (the Legion are reminiscent of the Avengers: a super-strong fighter, an android, a Norse deity, a guy in a suit of armour, a witch...). Not sure I'll read the sequel just yet, but I'd recommend this as a fun read.

I bought this in DEC 2020, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/153: We'll Prescribe You a Cat — Syou Ishida (translated by Emmie Madison Shimoda)

‘The amount of time you spent together probably matters, but less time doesn’t mean less love. Whether it’s a day or a year, human or cat, and even if we may never see them again, there are those who are irreplaceable in our lives.’ [loc. 2613]

Somewhere in Kyoto, in an old building down a gloomy cobbled alleyway, is the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul. It can only be found by those who need it, who are weighed down by emotional pain. And the door is very heavy, but you have to keep pushing. Inside, terse nurse Chitose will direct you to Doctor Nikké, who will -- as it says on the tin -- prescribe you a cat. An actual cat, in a carrier, with a printed instruction sheet.

We'll Prescribe You a Cat is a series of linked short stories. Kagawa is unhappy at work, and is prescribed a cat who upends his life: he ends up in a much more pleasant job. Koga loathes his new supervisor, who's full of compliments for everyone: his cat helps him connect. There's a ten-year-old girl who's struggling socially, a perfectionist who can't forgive others, a geiko who's lost her own cat and can't get over the guilt. Many of these patients also encounter Dr Kokoro, who looks exactly like Dr Nikké: and Abino the geiko is shocked to find that Nurse Chitose looks exactly like her. There are disturbing rumours about the unit occupied by the Clinic for the Soul: that it's jinxed; that it was used by unscrupulous cat breeders; that it's haunted by ghosts...

Chitose and Nikké are delightful characters, and each cat that they prescribe has a distinct personality. The patients, with their problems and their resolutions, are sensitively written, and though there are echoes of loss, grief and cruelty beneath the surface, the overall mood is joyous.

I liked this much more than I'd expected. The translation reads smoothly, and the hints of magic realism never overdone.

Buddy-read with N, but I kept getting ahead as it was so compelling.

You know the old saying, “A cat a day keeps the doctor away.” Cats are more effective than any other medicine out there.’

2024/152: The Bright Sword — Lev Grossman

“You are not who you think you are, and Britain is not what you think it is. I return you now to Camelot. Your disaster is already in progress.” [loc. 3099]

I rate Grossman's Magicians trilogy (The Magicians, The Magician King,The Magician's Land) very highly, but wasn't sure I wanted to read his take on the Matter of Britain. It was a Daily Deal, though, and I couldn't (well, didn't) resist. I think I loved it, but it's still too soon to say. There is a lot in its nearly 700 pages.

The story begins with Collum, an orphan and bastard who at seventeen is a spectacular warrior, heading for Camelot to pledge allegiance to King Arthur. He arrives too late: the Battle of Camlann was a fortnight ago, almost all the Knights of the Round Table (well, those who survived the Quest for the Holy Grail) are dead or missing, and Arthur was last seen being borne away, gravely wounded, on a magical ship. Those few who remain -- Sir Bedivere, Sir Dagonet, Sir Palomides, Sir Dinadan, Sir Scipio -- are empty of purpose and drowned in misery. Over the course of the novel, their histories (and some of the most famous episodes from Arthurian tradition) are explored, and we learn what the Round Table and Camelot meant to each knight. Morgan, Nimue and Guinevere are important figures, though -- unlike the knights -- none gets her own chapter. And meanwhile, there's a Green Knight and a new Quest and, perhaps, a new king.

This is post-Roman Britain, replete with anachronisms ('the Dark Ages king and the pretty high medieval trappings, Camelot and all the rest of it, [writers] who pick and choose what they like from history and sweep the messy bits under the rug', says Grossman in his entertaining Afterword), a land laid waste by the conflict between God and Faerie, a land threatened by Saxons fleeing rising seas to the east, and by the old gods, and by the new king at Camelot. I found the vestiges of pre-Roman Britain -- the light of civilisation going out, the people who 'scurried back to the old hill forts, which they barely remembered how to live in', the tribes that were once legions -- more engaging and poignant than the medieval-flavoured fantasies of flying ships, shining swords and combat in plate armour.

I very much liked the sense of time in this novel, of the events as happening at one brief moment between a long past and an equally complex future: of the history of Britain as a continual roil of story, 'the past never wholly lost, and the future never quite found'. I liked the knights' tales, which encompass cultural difference ('what the fuck is a zero?' someone asks Sir Palomides, who's from Baghdad), neurodivergence, gender and sexuality, and religious faith. Every time I dip into the novel for a quotation or a reference, I find myself rereading a page or so. I'm looking forward to revisiting The Bright Sword in years to come.

He looked up at the empty clouds, and ... wondered, not for the first time but for the very last, why it should be that we are made for a bright world, but live in a dark one. [last lines]

2024/151: Can't Spell Treason Without Tea — Rebecca Thorne

... unlike Kianthe, who’d ignored this problem and hoped it’d go away, Reyna had spent the time strategizing. She’d always known her freedom wouldn’t come easily, or without a fight—but the Arcandor was supposed to be neutral, and thus, a fight wasn’t truly an option. Two people couldn’t topple a country. [p. 284]

Sapphic romantasy with Reyna (bodyguard to the ruthless Queen) and Kianthe (the Arcandor, leader of the mages) running away together to start a book-and-tea shop. Their elopement is triggered by an assassination attempt on the Queen, foiled by Reyna -- who's wounded in the process, and realises just how little regard said Queen has for her loyal staff.

...I just had to go back and amend that paragraph because I'd mixed up the two characters, an error which I think illustrates my response to this book. 

Though the chapter viewpoints alternate between the two women, they don't have especially distinct voices. They don't really do things as a couple (the books are Kianthe's thing, while Reyna never rereads a novel; the tea is Reyna's thing). Though they make much of their excellent communication ('This was dissolving from a productive conversation into a defensive debate. Kianthe was prone to that, but usually Reyna guided her to a better path') they don't really seem to understand one another very well.

I think I'd have enjoyed the book more if it had started earlier in their romance, rather than presenting them as an established couple -- albeit a couple who have never lived together. And as far as 'cosy' fantasy goes, the stakes here (angry dragons, treason, bandits, murderous monarch) feel rather too epic. I found the ending rather unsatisfactory -- it's basically just postponing any reckoning -- and the constant use of 'tome' instead of 'book' ('the tome on her bedside table'; 'plucked a random tome from the shelves') became irritating quite quickly.

Some nice themes and ideas, but it didn't engage me enough to read more in the series.

2024/150: The Scholar and the Last Fairy Door — H G Parry

Eddie has wanted to hide from the world. Hero had wanted to make it new. Alden and I, in our own ways, loved the old, safe world -- Ashfield and Camford, tradition and beauty, the sunlit days of our childhoods before the Great War.
But the world had never been safe, not for everybody. It had been broken for a very long time, and the war had only shown those cracks for what they were. [loc. 5056]

Clover Hill has grown up knowing that magic isn't for her: it's the realm of the Families, the aristocrats who have magical blood. Nevertheless, when her brother Matthew returns from war terribly wounded by a faerie attack at the Battle of Amiens, she becomes determined to find a way to heal him. She enters Camford, founded by the magical department of Oxford University and in the thirteenth century, as a scholarship witch, somewhat out of her depth both socially and academically. When golden youth Alden Lennox-Fontaine finds her reading a book about faerie magic -- which is banned, and all doors to the faerie realm supposedly closed -- he finds her intriguing enough to draw into his coterie. Clover becomes friends with Hero, Eddie and Alden, and they discover a shared interest in the faerie doors and where they might lead. But the doors were shut for a reason, and their daring experiments have catastrophic consequences.

Dark academia at its best, with a thoughtful exploration of class, privilege and prejudice. I've encountered some elements of this world, and this plot, before: for example, in The Golden Enclaves and a plethora of other works where the happiness of the many depends on the suffering of a few. There are plenty of novels about 'a school for magic' and the intense friendships that outsiders can form: there are plenty of novels about hubris. For me, this novel succeeded because of Clover's voice, and her (impulsive and sometimes immature) personality. The pace is slow and considered, the characters diverse in a period-typical way (Clover's mentor, Lady Winter, is from Madras; one of the characters is gay, one is bisexual; working-class characters as vividly drawn as the aristocrats). Though much of the first half of the novel (set in 1920) takes place in Camford, the second half sees Clover visiting London and Paris.

One minor complaint is the lack of Brit-picking: nobody in 1920 would think of anything as 'the size of a fifty-pence piece', and there are occasional unBritish turns of phrase ('you didn't have to come meet me'). Overall, though, I enjoyed this very much, and am now keen to read Parry's other novels.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 24 OCT 2024.

2024/149: The Betrayal — Helen Dunmore

The blob of sun on the corridor wall wavers. The day shines before him, impossibly ordinary and beautiful. This must be how the dead think of life. All those things they used to take for granted, and can never have again. [p. 13]

Sequel to The Siege, The Betrayal begins ten years later, in late 1952. Anna is a nursery teacher, Andrei is a doctor, Kolya is a sullen and uncommunicative teenager who annoys the neighbours with his piano-playing. Andrei is asked by a colleague to give an opinion on a sick child, Gorya: "My ‘initial findings’," says the colleague, "are that this patient is the son of — an extremely influential person." No wonder he wants to pass the case to somebody else. Gorya forms a liking for Andrei, so Gorya's father Volkov -- a commissar in Stalin's secret police -- insists that Andrei takes the case. It does not end well, and Andrei, together with the Jewish doctor who performs surgery on the boy, become scapegoats.

Anna meanwhile is trying to conceive; trying not to draw her boss's attention to the fact that her father was a banned writer; hiding her father's diaries, which not even Andrei knows about; making a dress for the Doctors' Ball, from some silk left to her by Marina, with a sewing machine lent to her by her wealthy friend Julia; trying to keep envious neighbours at bay; trying to keep going after Andrei's arrest. She is a very ordinary person, but she does have good friends, and they are her salvation.

Andrei is the core of this novel, in particular his charged interactions with Volkov. His talent for diplomacy can only take him so far, though, and his professional ethics won't protect him from the system. In the background is the Doctors' Plot conspiracy, in which a number of doctors -- mostly Jewish -- were accused of deliberately causing harm to top Soviet figures. Andrei, though not Jewish, is subject to many of the same injustices and indignities. But Volkov still has a spark of humanity left in him.

I didn't find this as compelling a read as The Siege: in places it felt almost formulaic, and distinctly predictable. (I kept expecting more of a twist, perhaps Kolya's involvement in the denunciation of Andrei.) Perhaps the lack of tension was simply because, unlike the siege of Leningrad, the terrors of Stalin's Russia are so well-known, so common a theme in fiction. 

At the end of the novel, Anna celebrates the death of Stalin: "I hope that just before he died, he saw the ghosts of all the people he’d murdered, and knew that they were waiting for him." And perhaps that new world she was hoping for at the end of The Siege will have a chance at last.

I bought The Betrayal in November 2021, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/148: A Trick of the Light — Louise Penny

'That’s what this is about, Inspector. Bringing all the terrible stuff up from where it’s hiding.’
‘Just because you can see it,’ Beauvoir persisted, ‘doesn’t make it go away.’
‘True, but until you see it you haven’t a hope.’ [loc. 3510]

Clara Morrow, after a crippling attack of nerves, has celebrated her first solo art show: first at the gallery in Montreal and then in the little village of Three Pines, which can't be found on any maps. Her husband Peter, who is trying not to show his envy, discovers a dead body in their garden the morning after the festivities. The dead woman is Clara's old friend-turned-enemy, Lillian Dyson: near her body is an Alcoholics Anonymous token. Was Lillian dealing with step 9 in the programme, making amends to those you've hurt? And was she murdered because somebody couldn't forgive the pain she'd inflicted?

There are different kinds of pain in this novel. Gamache is still mourning the agents who died in the factory debacle (Bury Your Dead) and Jean-Guy Beauvoir, his second-in-command, is still in constant physical pain from the injuries he sustained. Jean-Guy has also separated from his wife, and is trying to summon the courage to invite another woman on a date. And there is Peter's consuming envy, and Lillian's vicious art criticism, and Ruth Zardo's bitterness, and art critic Denis Fortin's homophobia.

This is a novel about forgiveness and its lack, about addiction and breaking the cycle, about secrets that ferment and others that are spoken. Penny has an extraordinary knack for observing and describing emotions: her large cast all have complex and vivid internal landscapes, and Gamache has the gifts of understanding and compassion -- as well as a steely determination to solve the murder and see justice done. That he does so with grace and sympathy is, for me, the appeal of this series. I have stocked up on the next few novels to get me through the British winter...

Not for the first time Three Pines struck Myrna as the equivalent of the Humane Society. Taking in the wounded, the unwanted. The mad, the sore. This was a shelter. Though, clearly, not a no-kill shelter.

2024/147: O Caledonia — Elspeth Barker

The billows washed into Janet’s face, the wind took her breath, she clung to the mane, elemental air and water, terror and ecstasy. She could die like this and never know the difference, horsed on the sightless couriers of the air. [loc. 1710]

O Caledonia opens with the murder of sixteen-year-old Janet, and then flashes back to her short, unhappy but vividly beautiful life. Janet is a misfit in her family: poorly parented, fonder of animals than of humans (who behave inexplicably and unpredictably), intelligent, romantic, solitary. She is an utterly charming and relatable protagonist, though I do sympathise (a little) with her parents. I saw myself in Janet who, given a pram to play with, repurposes it as a chariot for Dandelion, the family's apex predator: 'so long as in transit he could gnaw at a sparrow’s wing or other pungent trophy from his lair'. Dandelion is not the only excellent cat in this novel: also of note is Mouflon, Aunt Lila's cat, who caused the death of Lila's husband. By way of contrast, when Janet and her brother Francis are presented with a new baby sister, they bury her under a heap of earth and dead leaves.

Janet's perception of the world is marvellously rich and voluptuous. There are hints of synaesthesia, and vivid multisensory responses to words: "...she intended to be a princess... she loved the word, with its tight beginning and its rustling, cascading end, like the gown a princess would wear, with a tiny waist and ruffles and trains of swirling silken skirts. Purple of course" [loc. 241]. The sheer exuberance of her solitary experiences in the wilderness surrounding Auchnasaugh Castle, the rambling family home, is uplifting -- and in sharp contrast to Janet's misery in the company of her family, and especially at boarding school.

For some reason -- perhaps the comparisons to I Capture the Castle and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, perhaps the measured and precise prose -- I'd assumed O Caledonia was written in the 1950s (when it's set) or a little later. No: Elspeth Barker's only novel, it was published in 1991, to great acclaim.

I bought this in April 2022, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

Maggie O'Farrell's introduction drew me in when I read the sample chapters...

2024/146: Still the Sun — Charlie N Holmberg

“Good night, Pell.”
The words are hard, final, but they give me pause. “What does that mean?”
He glances at me, bright eyes hard. “What does what mean?”
“Good night,” I repeat, letting go of the knob. “What’s ‘night’?” [loc. 2119]

Pell is a metalworker and engineer living in Emgarden, a small village which may be the only settlement that exists. Nearby is an old fortified tower, and an amaranthine wall which can't be crossed. There are thirty-eight people living in Emgarden: no newcomers, no births -- and Pell keeps losing her train of thought when she tries to think about that.

The villagers live in a cycle of sun and mist: eight hours of sun, five of mists which cloak the land. One cycle, a stranger appears at Pell's door during the mists. He says his name is Moseus, one of the two keepers of the tower, and he promises Pell plenty of scrap metal if she can help him get the machines in the tower working again. Pell, who frequently has to relinquish her tools to make farming implements so that they don't all starve, accepts with enthusiasm. But when she's amid the Ancient machines, working out their mechanisms and how to restart them, she experiences visions that could almost be memories -- and that seem to be connected with the other inhabitant of the tower, the mysterious Heartwood.

Pell is confused for much of the novel. Every time she begins to understand something, she discovers another mystery, and some of those mysteries have to do with her own sense of incompleteness, and her increasingly unreliable memory. When she finally discovers her connection to the tower, to Moseus and to Heartwood, it's almost an anticlimax except that it is extremely, gigantically Epic.

I enjoyed the engineering, but despite her first-person narration I didn't really warm to Pell, and the romance didn't convince me. There was very little world-building, though there is a rationale for that: still, I'd have liked more than desert, flowers and machinery.

An Amazon First Reads offer in June 2024.

2024/145: Barrowbeck — Andrew Michael Hurley

There wasn't much in the way of entertainment in Barrowbeck. But I began to see that living there was all about distraction, warding something off, evading something, and that I'd been doing it myself without realising it. [loc. 2053]

Barrowbeck is a village somewhere on the Lancashire/Yorkshire border: a river runs through it, and the fells enclose and overshadow the houses. It is not the kind of place that attracts tourists. Barrowbeck is a series of thirteen stories, vignettes of life from the founding of the village (by refugees from a violent invasion) to floods and collapse in 2049. I suspect that the germ of the stories can be found in the shaman's pronouncement in the first tale: "All this would be theirs. The gods wanted nothing in return. Only that the valley-folk should always remember that they were custodians here. No. Servants.' [loc. 253]

And yet, after that ominous beginning, the events of the stories are not especially horrific. There's a stranger who's blamed for bringing ill luck to the village, a girl who may be possessed by something in the river, the ghosts of the fallen raising their voices in Easter hymns after World War I... Each story stands alone, unconnected to other characters or phenomena, and each has a unique ambience. Barrowbeck is very definitely folk horror, the horror of ... well, of folk: of people whose motivations are obscure and perhaps unnatural, of the times when the villagers' moods coalesce into a single urge, of the sense of some terrible power at the edge of vision.

I did enjoy Barrowbeck: Hurley's style is subtle and flexible. But, having read the author's three previous novels (The Loney, Devil's Day and Starve Acre), I'd expected more overt horror. Perhaps the real horror is most evident in the last couple of stories: the irreversible effects of the climate catastrophe, the world we will have lost.

Many of these stories appeared, in somewhat different forms, in the BBC Radio 4 series Voices in the Valley. I'm planning to listen to them soon.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 24 OCT 2024.

2024/144: The Wilding — Ian McDonald

The beauty and terror that welled out of this place took hold of Yeats’s mystic, holy Ireland, held it up and ripped it apart. Beneath its torn skin was old Ireland, deep Ireland, the Ireland buried in the bogs and beneath the fields of grazing, turned to leather and knot and iron-oak. Waiting down there. [loc. 2304]

Lough Carrow used to be a working bog: now it's a rewilding project, left to nature for two years during the Covid pandemic. Some of the locals mutter suspiciously about wolves being sneaked in while nobody was looking. Pádraig runs the Wilding, but most of the novel's from the point of view of Lisa, a young woman with a murky past, a stolen copy of Yeats' Selected Poetry and a place awaiting her at UCL. Lisa oversleeps after celebrating the latter, and thus gets landed with wild sleepover -- five twelve-year-olds and their three teachers, trekking through the bog and camping in its remotest corner.

The kids are a handful: all on medication, with mental health issues, traumatic histories and/or bad attitudes. But there are things even worse than adolescent children in the bog, and once Lisa and her cohort set off the pace of the story (if not of their trek) is headlong.

I heard the author reading from this at Worldcon and was gripped, though The Wilding was not quite what I was expecting. Lisa is a splendid character, backstory and backbone and some attitude of her own: her interactions with the kids shift in tone over the course of the novel but are always credible and human. The kids themselves are at first annoying but become individual, even likeable, with distinctive voices and very different perceptions of the world. The descriptions of the natural environment, of the silence and non-silence of the bog, of light on water and blurry motion at the edge of vision, are spectacular. And there are echoes of Yeats' poems throughout.

There's a reference to Pádraig 'checking for signs of incipient folk horror' when he touches base with the villagers, but The Wilding's horror is something older and weirder than a few peculiar locals. Some of those locals are very peculiar: I'm sure Dom Purvis and his maps and zones is a callout to Holdstock's Mythago Wood... McDonald has been one of my favourite authors for many years: though his scope here is perhaps narrower than in his best-known (SF) novels, his prose is as glorious as ever.

2024/143: Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic — Tabitha Stanmore

...it is not my place to say whether the magic practised by cunning folk was real: I don’t know, I wasn’t there. What we can say is that there was a variety of spells to draw on, and that they got results often enough to maintain belief in their efficacy. [loc. 599]

A social history of what Stanmore terms 'service magic': the everyday assistance offered by 'cunning folk', rather than learned magi or wicked witches. Cunning folk would help find a lost item, identify a thief, provide a healing potion, or tell a fortune. Midwives were often also cunning folk.

It's all too easy to think of witchcraft and magic in the medieval and Renaissance centuries as something to be feared, punishable by death. Stanmore draws on her research to argue that service magicians were seldom accused of malevolent magic. Indeed, one of the services increasingly in demand was curse-lifting and 'unwitching'. Many spells invoked saints or angels: religious faith and magic were complementary, rather than opposite, ways of understanding and affecting the world.

Stanmore recounts some fascinating cases in this book, and examines the portrayal of magic and magic-workers in early modern literature. She also points out that superstition is by no means extinct: 'In the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic many psychics reported being busier than ever: the online business-reviews website Yelp apparently saw searches for ‘Supernatural Readings’ more than double in April 2020, after lockdowns had been announced across the globe.' [loc. 3144]

This was an interesting read, though occasionally repetitive and sometimes a little discursive. Lots of intriguing research, though -- as Stanmore explains -- many of the cases are incompletely recorded. If there's a flaw in the book, it's her reluctance to explain how 'magic' had credible effects. There are a couple of instances where she suggests a real-world explanation for an outcome, such as leaving the most likely suspect last in a magical test to increase their nervousness and thus their likelihood of failing. (Granny Weatherwax would just call it headology.) Cunning Folk is frank about its focus on the social aspects of service magic, rather than the psychology of practitioners and their customers, and it's well-researched and referenced.

2024/142: Scarlet — Genevieve Cogman

‘No society that’s ruled by kings and vampires can ever be the right thing,’ Fleurette said firmly.
‘But can a society that sends innocent people to the guillotine be right?’ Eleanor asked. [loc. 4374]

In which Eleanor, a simple housemaid, is recruited by a dashing gang League of aristocrats to travel to France and aid in the rescue of a woman to whom she bears a striking resemblance: Marie Antoinette, the former queen, now imprisoned by revolutionaries. Why yes, this is the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, with the added twist of vampires -- the sanguinocrats* who live for centuries, are barred from holding offices of state, and who feed upon the living. Eleanor has the scars to prove it: being a blood donor was a requirement of her employment in the household of Lady Sophie, Baroness of Basing.

Eleanor isn't stupid, though she's young and rather naive at the outset of the novel. She quickly proves her worth to the League and to Sir Percy Blakeney. And she attracts the attention of Lord Charles Bathurst, aristocrat and scholar. When it comes to the crunch, though, Eleanor must (initially) rely on her own wits to escape Paris and her pursuers. Fortunately, she's a straight-faced liar: even more fortunately, she finds herself in a position to assist someone who can return the favour. And then some.

This is basically a heist novel with a long, dramatic pursuit through the sleaziest parts of Paris, in the shadow of Madame Guillotine. There are vampires and revolutionaries; there is plenty of opportunity for Eleanor to keep a cool head in the face of mortal peril; and there are moments when her inner voice sounds just like Irene from the Library. But that is not a bad thing.

This didn't grab me as much as I'd hoped, but it's the first in a trilogy and I already own the second, so qui vivra verra.

* Cogman's Afterword adds: 'the term ‘sanguinocrats’ was actually used during the French Revolution – admittedly in reference to the Jacobins who acquiesced in the September 1792 massacres'.

2024/141: Our Endless Numbered Days — Claire Fuller

I sat next to the fire and imagined our microscopic white and green island adrift in the blackness – an overlooked crumb, left behind when the Earth was gobbled whole by the Great Divide. My father told me many times that winter that the world ended beyond the hills... [p. 192]

Peggy is eight years old in 1976, living in north London with her concert-pianist mother Ute and her father James. James and his friends, the North London Retreaters -- who believe the apocalypse is imminent, most likely via economic collapse or a Russian nuke -- meet at the house, and Peggy is fascinated by their planning. Then something changes (Peggy doesn't understand what, but it's fairly obvious to the adult reader) and Peggy and her father flee to Die Hutte, deep in a German forest, for what is initially termed a holiday. Except that one day her father returns from the forest, weeping, and tells Peggy that the rest of the world has disappeared. They are alone in the forest: and so they remain for nine years.

Because the novel is not structured chronologically, we know from the start that Peggy does return to the world, to the North London house and her mother and a younger brother whose existence she never suspected. The story of how she left the forest, and of what happened to her father, alternates with her readjustment to the mundane world. It's partly a survival story (Peggy and her father used to watch Survivors on TV: I remember that programme) and partly a psychological study of obsession and self-delusion. The prose is great, and Peggy's account of life in Die Hutte reminded me at times of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle: the little rituals, the skew of her world-view, her focus on small elements of their environment.

I found the ending deeply unsettling, and in fact I think reading Our Endless Numbered Days made me feel differently about The House at the Edge of the World -- also about father and daughter, and about family relationships. It's unfair to draw a comparison, for the emotional tone is very different: but the finale of Our Endless Numbered Days, even with Peggy's aside that 'my brain plays tricks on me, that I have been deficient in vitamin B for too long and my memory doesn’t work the way it should', was horrific, powerful, and cast the whole story into a different light. Despite that, I'm looking forward to reading more of Claire Fuller's fiction, which I have been accumulating...

I bought this in November 2016, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/140: The Amber Fury — Natalie Haynes

This is why I like the play we’re reading. It’s about the things which can’t be forgiven, even if no-one meant to do the wrong thing. [p. 78]

Alex Morris is grieving the death of her fiance Luke. She moves to Edinburgh, where she studied, to take up a job teaching at a pupil referral unit. Her fourth-year class has five students, all with definite views on drama and plays (not Shakespeare, they've done him at school; not The Misanthrope, Mel 'can't stand' Kiera Knightly, who's on the cover of the film tie-in edition; not Jerusalem, because who cares about the state of England?). They end up reading Greek tragedy, which may be why everything goes horribly wrong.

The novel isn't told chronologically: we begin with Alex talking to lawyers, because one of the class has done something monstrous. We don't find out what has happened, or who has done the monstrous thing, until quite late in the book. Meanwhile, we (and the class) learn more about what happened to Alex, and why she goes to London every Friday and comes back the same night.

Alex, at least initially, is broken by grief: she doesn't really care about anything, which means that she makes mistakes in her handling of the fourth-year class. (We don't get to see any of her other classes, or anything about how well or how badly those go: the fourth years are the emotional focus of her work, and of the book.) Alex's narrative is punctuated by extracts from diaries written by the class at her behest: a lot of hinted backstory, but most of the focus is still on Alex and the plays they're reading and discussing in class. Haynes' afterword explains why she chose these plays: Oedipus for crimes committed in ignorance; Alcestis for love and self-sacrifice, the Oresteia for vengeance and difficult family relationships. Each of these speaks to the students in ways Alex probably never thought about.

This is a well-paced novel, though rather claustrophobic in its focus on Alex: the students are not as fully characterised, but they have distinct personalities. Haynes also depicts the dark and cold of an Edinburgh winter very vividly. (Maybe I don't want to move to Scotland after all.) And amid the monsters, there is kindness and support. If only it had been there sooner for the fourth-year class.

I bought this in May 2015, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/139: Forest of Memory — Mary Robinette Kowal

Have you turned off your Lens, turned off your i-Sys, stepped away from the cloud, and just tried to REMEMBER something? It’s hard, and the memories are mutable. The cloud is just there, all the time. You reach for it without thinking and assume it will be there. [p. 25]

Novella set a century or two in our future: Katya Gould is a dealer in Authenticities and Captures, seeking out old tech such as typewriters and selling them to collectors. She's fascinated by wabi-sabi, the marks of use and decay on an object: 'something that witnesses and records the graceful decay of life'. And she records everything she experiences, thinks, sees -- until she meets a man in the forest and he somehow severs her connection to ... everything.

Kowal explores our increasing reliance on technology and the way it distances us from the real world, and especially the natural world. Katya's abductor, who calls himself 'Johnny', at first seems to be hunting deer: but perhaps his real purpose out in the forest, out of the connected world, is something more like Katya's own.

The story is presented as Katya's account (typed on a 1918 Corona typewriter) of the days she spent in the forest with Johnny. She's constantly questioning her own memories, wondering what she has forgotten. And her fear of the forest, of a world for which she has no map, is vividly described.

I hadn't realised this was a novella when I started reading, so was surprised by what felt like an abrupt and sudden ending. When I thought about it, I realised that although Forest of Memory has the bones of a novel, it stands complete and solid in itself.

I bought this in March 2016, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/138: Miss Pym Disposes — Josephine Tey

If God did dispose -- as undoubtedly He did in the latter end -- then perhaps the disposing was already at work. Had begun to work when it was she and not someone else who found the [evidence]. It had not been found by a strong-minded person who would go straight to Henrietta with it as soon as she smelt a rat, and so set the machinery of man-made Law in motion. No. It had been found by a feeble waverer like herself, who could never see less than three sides to any question. Perhaps that made sense. But she wished very heartily that the Deity had found another instrument. [p. 123]

Miss Pym is a former teacher, now the bestselling author of a popular book about psychology. She visits the all-girl Leys Physical Training College at the behest of her old friend Henrietta Hodge, the Principal, who has invited her to give a lecture. Miss Pym is at first discomposed by the early-morning bells, the wholesome vegetarian diet, the lack of a reading-lamp in her room. She is a lonely woman, though, and welcomes the warmth, kindness and liking bestowed upon her by the students. Then a terrible accident occurs: and Miss Pym, with her close observations of students and staff, with her knowledge of human nature, cannot help but suspect that it is not an accident at all.

This is an unusual mystery novel, because the bad thing occurs very late in the book, and the guilty party seems evident. Tey's pacing is admirable, but it's her eye for character that impressed me most. Miss Pym is well aware of her own failings ('Lucy decided to forget her weight just this once and enjoy herself. This was a decision she made with deplorable frequency') and, later in the novel, berates her own inadequacy. ('As a psychologist she was a first-rate teacher of French'.) She interprets physical appearance as an indication of character, despite understanding that 'face-reading' is not regarded as a credible science, and is prone to forming snap judgements. By the end of the novel, Miss Pym's disposal -- her decision to act on the basis that the 'right' thing is not always the 'proper' thing -- seems monstrous. While Tey has told us that Miss Pym is sweet, kind and well-meaning, she has shown us Miss Pym's flaws in merciless detail.

Miss Pym Disposes is in some respects a dated novel: there are prejudices of race, class and nationality (Teresa Desterro, a talented and flamboyant Brazilian dancer studying at Leys, is known as the Nut Tart), and references to the friendship of head girl 'Beau' Nash and gym star Mary Innes as 'not normal... David and Jonathan'. Although the novel was published just after WW2, I suspect that it's set in the 1930s: there is no mention of the war, of rationing, of Germans being in any way undesirable as colleagues or friends. There are very few men in the novel: even fewer with anything approaching a role in the story. So perhaps the shadow of wartime is present after all.

I bought this in July 2018, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/137: The House at the Edge of the World — Julia Rochester

We were conjoined at some point of the soul. It was a terrible epiphany. Combined, we made a monster. Somewhere I had read that in a case of conjoined twins one tends to be stronger, sapping the other’s blood and organs. I wondered which of us was the parasite. [loc. 2401]

John Venton fell off a Cornish cliff on his way back from the pub one night. After his death, his twin children -- Morwenna and Corwin^* -- go their separate ways: Morwenna eventually to London to bind books, and Corwin to volunteer in far-flung corners of the world. But seventeen years later, their grandfather Matthew's illness brings Morwenna back to Thornton, the family house.

Matthew, whose ambition to leave this corner of Cornwall was foiled by ill health, has devoted much of his life to painting a huge and intricate map of the area around the house, a circle with a radius of twelve miles, which is as far as he could walk in one day and still be home by evening. The map is full of iconic representations of Matthew's life and its events: a seagull's nest with one egg, a viper in a heap of leaves, a farting devil. And it hides (of course) a secret.

The focus of the novel is the relationship between Morwenna, the narrator, and her twin brother. Morwenna is thoroughly unlikeable, but honest and self-aware. Corwin is superficially lovely, but perhaps rather hollow. Their close bond excludes and alienates their parents, as well as Morwenna's boyfriend and the shared friends of their teenage years. (There is a splendidly catastrophic scene at a wedding when Morwenna and their mother argue.) Morwenna knows if it's Corwin calling as soon as the phone rings. And she has a plan to bring him back to Thornton.

This was a beautifully written novel that, with hindsight, was also quite depressing. It's hard to warm to Morwenna, and her mother is pitiable and unpleasant. I didn't get much sense of Corwin, perhaps because Morwenna thinks of him as an extension of herself. The only truly likeable character was Matthew. And the secret at the heart of this novel, which could have blossomed into something positive, became poisonous. Fascinating emotional interactions, and powerful evocations of the Cornish coast and countryside: but, like Corwin, something hollow at the centre.

Splendid and positive review by the much-lamented Diana Athill.

I bought this in June 2017, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

^* I am unable to read the name 'Corwin' without being immersed in memories of Zelazny's 'Chronicles of Amber'. The twins were named by their mother, who always felt out of place at Thornton, 'overcompensating for not being local'.