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]