2019/18: Wakenhyrst -- Michelle Paver

I'm still conscious of that staring from the fen. I can't shake off the feeling that something has been let loose -- and that it's out there now, biding its time. Waiting to come in. [loc. 2698]

The framing narrative of Wakenhyrst is set in 1966. Dr Robin Hunter is keen to contact the elusive Maud Stearne, daughter of esteemed medievalist Edmund Stearne who, fifty years earlier, murdered a man in broad daylight as his teenaged daughter watched. Since then, Maud has lived in seclusion at Wake's End, the family home, deep in the heart of the fens. She refuses to publish her father's notebooks -- which Dr Hunter believes may contain observations about the Wakenhyrst Doom, a sixteenth-century painting now on display in the village church -- or his unfinished work on medieval mystic Alice Pyett.

The main body of the story takes place in the early years of the twentieth century. Maud grows up adoring her mother, who is frequently pregnant, and longing for her remote father's approval. What a shame that, though brighter than either of her younger brothers, she is female! As Maud grows older, she begins to question her father's rules, even whilst acting as his assistant. When she begins to read his notebooks, she is merely hoping to find something about herself.

Edmund Stearne is the archetype of a particular type of misogynist -- one I've encountered several times in recent novels. He views his studies as a form of seduction -- 'Pyett will prove a coy mistress, very hard to read, but already she is yielding riches. It will take months to lay bare all her secrets' [loc. 1350] -- and is thoroughly dismissive of Maud, despite her intelligence and interest. It's not just his daughter: Stearne has little time for any woman unless he finds her sexually attractive. He dismisses the family doctor's suggestion (after yet another stillbirth) that he might have sex with his wife slightly less often, or perhaps use contraception. And he is profoundly opposed to superstition -- though he has some eccentric rules of his own.

Maud, meanwhile, is learning a great deal about the world from the superstitious 'common people' she encounters: Jubal Rede, a vagabond who lives in the Fen; Clem Walker, the good-looking under-gardener; Ivy, the pulchritudinous housemaid. Each of these helps her to understand an aspect of what is happening to her father. What she does with that knowledge is a different matter.

This novel didn't terrify me in the same way as Paver's earlier horror novels, Thin Air and Dark Matter. In those novels, I was struck by the sheer claustrophobia of the great outdoors. Here, the claustrophobia is more literal. Maud seldom ventures beyond the house, except to visit the fen, a haven of wildness and freedom. She is terribly isolated, but not alone. And perhaps Wakenhyrst lacks immediacy: we are shown the force or entity that afflicts Maud's father through his notebooks, but that narrative is interspersed with Maud's own, more mundane (though also horrific) story.

There is a great deal of subtlety to Wakenhyrst, and it definitely repaid rereading. But even after rereading, I'm still not clear on whether Maud made peace with something, or whether that something pursued Edmund and inspired his paintings.

Paver's afterword confirms the influences and inspirations that I thought I recognised: Alice Pyett is based in part on Margery Kempe, and St Guthlaf (to whom the village church is dedicated, and after whom the fen outside the house is named) owes a lot to St Guthlac. I confess I didn't make the connection between Edmund's paintings and Richard Dadd.

I received a free review copy of Wakenhyrst from NetGalley in exchange for this honest review.

2019/17: The Last Walk Out -- David Helton

Paintbrush was a good dreamer. She'd predicted at least two deaths ... a lot of minor accidents, and the sighting, last year, of a skyman. Nobody had seen a skyman around here for a generation, and then Paintbrush dreamt about one and told everyone about it the next morning, and that afternoon Breeze looked up and saw a skyman way over on the south Gorge rim. For a long time he looked down at the settlement through that big eye of his ... [p. 8]

Storyteller Gibbous Moon is seventy years old, and doesn't want to enter the slow decline of old age: instead, he has decided to adopt the old custom of the Long Walk Out, abandoning his settlement and heading into the unknown. Little does he realise that he's about to become a 'holopark' star, caught on a holo-camera and broadcast to colonies all over the solar system.

And the humans in those colonies begin to question whether the virus that made Earth uninhabitable so long ago is still a threat ...

Gibbous Moon, together with his daughter-in-law Paintbrush and her baby son (and a dog named Yellow) encounter a skyman named Allaby, who's beginning to realise that not everything he's been told is true. His colleague and long-distance lover, Jenny, finds herself involved in rebellion, and nominated for a desperate mission. And the religious factions -- the Keepers of Jerusalem, the Lazarines, the Pilgrims -- all have different ideas about what a return to Earth might mean for their followers.

This was a surprisingly entertaining read, though some of the characters occasionally reverted to archetype. (Jenny in particular sometimes reminded of a woman in a Sixties space opera. Accidental lesbianism! Self-indulgence with a side-order of nakedness!) Gibbous was a delight, and certainly the most likeable person in the book. The juxtaposition of hunter-gatherers and planet rangers fuelled a great deal of merriment -- The Last Walk Out is often very funny -- while emphasising the underlying theme, that humans are humans wherever you put them.

I found it hard not to read that catastrophic virus as benign ... but that's probably just my inner misanthrope at work.

2019/16: The Goblin Emperor -- Katherine Addison

"I can already see the changes," Shulivar said. "You do not hold on to power as your father and grandfather did. You are not afraid to let it go. And you have new ideas, ideas that no emperor before you has ever had. ... No other emperor would ever have attended the funeral of his father's servants. No other emperor would have accepted a woman as his nohecharis. You bring change ..." [p. 398]

Confession: I started this novel more or less when it came out, and abandoned it because I found the plethora of names and terms confusing. (I don't think I was at my best that spring.) Also, I had somehow missed the fact that 'Katherine Addison' is a pen name for Sarah Monette ...

Reader, I revisited: and this time around I found myself vastly enjoying the expansive, detailed, baroque society depicted herein.

Maia is eighteen years old, and has spent much of his life in exile with a hated cousin: then an airship accident kills his father the Emperor, and the Emperor's other sons, and Maia -- half-elf and half-goblin, dark-skinned and unpolished and ignorant -- inherits the mantle of Emperor.

He hasn't a clue how to behave, or how to rule: he is imprisoned by his new role, caged by the expectations of those around him (some of whom are more helpful than others), and desperate for friendship even while brutally aware that everybody he meets is his social inferior.

Maia is also kind-hearted and intelligent, qualities so rare at court that he manages to achieve a surprising amount, or perhaps a quantity of surprise. The politicians who think he can be steered and manipulated gradually realise that he is an astute observer who has a good instinct for who to trust, whose knowledge and experience to rely upon. The guards -- the omnipresent nohecharei, two of whom are always with Maia -- learn when to assist, and when to stand back. And Maia learns a great deal about himself, and about his family -- his families, for he meets his maternal grandfather for the first time.

The world-building is intricate and credible. This is a society where the elite hold all the power: but there are revolutionaries. This is a society which restricts the activities permitted to women: but there are women who write novels, or captain ships, or practice astronomy. This is a society with airships and magic, where the latter can be used to investigate suspicious 'accidents' of the former. This is a society with religion, meditation, faith: with music and opera, hurrah!; with poetry, architecture, ambitious civil engineering projects and ancient conflicts. It's fine, I gradually realised, that I didn't find it wholly accessible at first: nor does Maia. Yes, some of the names, and some of the linguistic details (the ways that formal titles are constructed, the differing forms of address), were confusing. I let myself go with the flow.

And, surprisingly, it is a very positive and cheering novel. The court is a pit of vipers, and some grim crimes are perpetrated: but Maia's own kindness and compassion affect not only those in his immediate circle, but all of his subjects .... and perhaps even people beyond the borders of his realm.

2019/15: Swordheart -- T. Kingfisher

"It's a sword."
"Yes, but you came out of a sword. It seems redundant."
He stared at her as if she had lost her mind. "I can't very well wield myself, lady."
Oh. Perhaps he'd go blind. [p. 18]

Halla, a widowed housekeeper, has just inherited a great deal of money from her great-uncle. Tragically, the rest of his family are feeling cheated: their proposal is that Halla marries her clammy-handed cousin, and they lock her in a room to consider her options. Suicide seems preferable to being controlled by the loathsome relatives, and Halla -- in her night-dress -- unsheaths the ornamental sword hanging on the wall.

Except that the sword is not merely ornamental, and it harbours Sarkis, an immortal warrior who was imprisoned in steel long ago, after ending up on the losing side of a forgotten war. Sarkis is haunted by the memories of his similarly-incarcerated friends, Angharad Shieldborn and the Dervish: luckily Halla's lack of martial skill encourages Sarkis to distract himself by helping her.

And Halla helps Sarkis, too: helps him discover what became of the lands he called home, and explores the limitations and limits of his prison.

I should also mention that Swordheart is absolutely hilarious: Halla's sensible, sardonic manner and Sarkis' world-weariness offset one another very nicely, even before romance sparks between them, and there is some very entertaining dialogue. This is a light-hearted novel, but it has dark elements -- for instance, the pet bird left behind by the great-uncle, which occasionally roars about 'the end of the world and the screams of the damned' -- and I suspect future books in this projected trilogy will explore the ambiguities of saints and sinners hinted in this volume.

WARNING: Swordheart is set in the same world as The Clockwork Boys and its sequel, The Wonder Engines, and contains spoilers for the latter (which is why The Wonder Engines is in my 'unfinished' Kindle category) ...

2019/13: The Fever King -- Victoria Lee

They ought to walk into that camp with the ground soaked in blood and magic and look Bea King in the face as she died alone and frightened at eight years old, at eight years old, and tell her she didn't deserve to stay in their country because her parents brought her here illegally. Because she was a refugee. [loc. 2565]

The world has moved on: it's the twenty-second century, and the former United States has fragmented. Noam, growing up in Carolinia (rich and Northern) is the son of undocumented immigrants from Atlantia (poor and Southern) and has been fighting for refugee rights since he was old enough to understand that Carolinia didn't welcome him or his family. Now he's woken up in a hospital bed, survivor of the magical attack that killed his father -- and made Noam, aged sixteen, a technopath.

Noam's new talent allows him to exercise some control over technology, and it attracts the attention of the minister of defense, the charismatic and unnaturally preserved Calix Lehrer. Noam is inducted into a government training programme for 'witchings' like himself, though each of his fellow students has different skills and talents. Most intriguing to Noam is Dara Shirazi, Calix Lehrer's adopted son, who's devastatingly attractive, brittle and opaque. Noam would really like to trust Dara (and indeed to kiss him) but he can't be sure which side Dara's on: chances are that he'd betray Noam's plan to use his new skills for Atlantia, against Carolinian policies, laws and expectations.

It doesn't help that Noam still doesn't understand what Dara's power is. Or, for that matter, Calix Lehrer's.

This is a novel about discrimination, exclusion, control and rebellion, and the author has posted about how it's rooted in her experience as a Jewish American. There is also a post about content warnings which I strongly recommend that you read if you're likely to be adversely affected by descriptions of genocide, physical or sexual abuse, violence, murder, parental death ...

It is quite a dark novel, but Noam is a likeable -- and believably teenaged -- protagonist, and Dara a fascinating cipher. (And I find that I would quite like to read Calix Lehrer's backstory.) Despite the darkness, there is loyalty, affection, friendship and romance. The worldbuilding is intriguing, and you will be pleased to know that the effects of climate change have been moderated. (Though not in a way that anyone with sense would recommend.)

I selected this as my free Amazon Prime book for February, and enjoyed it enough to pre-order the second volume (due 2020).

2019/14: Temeraire -- Naomi Novik

Certainly no man not raised to the life could be easy at the prospect of suddenly becoming an aviator, and he loathed the necessity of asking his officers to face it. It meant, after all, an end to any semblance of ordinary life. It was not like sailing, where you might hand your ship back to the Navy and be set ashore, often whether you liked it or not. Even in times of peace, a dragon could not be put into dock, nor allowed to wander loose... [p. 11]

First read as an ARC in 2005, acquired at the Worldcon. Reread because after seeing How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World I wanted a cheering story about human/'animal' friendship and partnership, and this seemed to fit the bill. (I am over-familiar with McCaffrey's earlier works, which sustained me through my teens: I know whole paragraphs by heart, and besides there is insufficient sense of friendship between her dragons and their riders.) Indeed, the dragons Temeraire and Toothless share some traits, though Temeraire is rather larger, can speak several human languages and likes jewellery.

Novik carries off the nineteenth-century prose style rather well, and the story itself bears rereading (not least because I'd forgotten quite a lot of the details in the intervening 14 years). I found Will Laurence more congenial this time around, and enjoyed the ways in which his world view was broadened by his unlooked-for association with Temeraire.

My previous review is here: the 'inexcusable Americanisms' were amended before publication*, and -- perhaps knowing that this is the first in a series, which I don't think was clear in 2005 -- I am less concerned about lack of 'edge'. The wider world in which Temeraire and Laurence exist is fleshed out in subsequent volumes (which I am gradually acquiring and reading) and there is opportunity for depth, resolution et cetera.

I wish I could remember why I said, in that review, 'don't believe Stephen King'. Ah yes: he described it as a cross between Susannah Clarke and Patrick O'Brian. I happily concede the O'Brian, but feel as though there may be a McCaffrey influence too, especially in terms of the emotional bond between dragon and handler. Which is what makes the books a delight, because Temeraire is a decidedly opinionated dragon.

*why, yes, my name is in the credits ... :)

2019/12: Everything Under -- Daisy Johnson

I'd always understood that the past did not die just because we wanted it to. The past signed to us: clicks and cracks in the night, misspelled words, the jargon of adverts, the bodies that attracted us or did not, the sounds that reminded us of this or that. The past was not a thread trailing behind us but an anchor. [p. 14]

I read this on a friend's recommendation, and had managed to forget what she had told me about the embedded myth(s): which was a good thing, as I could better appreciate the gradual revelation of the themes, and the way the story was constructed -- gender-bent, seen aslant, in negative space.

Gretel has not seen her mother for years, and has only vague and conflicting memories of the time when they lived together on a riverboat. There was, Gretel remembers, a strange boy named Marcus. There was a creature called the Bonak, the name of which meant 'the thing we are afraid of'. There were other invented words in the secret language they shared: Gretel did not realise until later that those words were private. Now Gretel has a pleasing, ordinary job as a checker of dictionary definitions. And then she receives a phone call from her mother.

Everything Under is primarily Gretel's gradual recollection of the events of the long-ago winter when Marcus arrived, when a river-thief preyed on the communities of the river-bank, when Gretel and her mother left behind the mooring where they'd lived since Gretel's birth. Gretel's narrative is interrupted by her mother's memories and by Marcus's story: between the three of them, a story builds up. Or built up.

I found this book extremely unsettling -- I think it gave me nightmares -- and compulsively readable. There's an immediacy to Johnson's prose style (the omission of speech marks, the flickering of past and present tense, the unanswered riddles) that drew me in. The landscape of that half-remembered winter is post-industrial, strewn with rubbish and discarded fridges: the river runs through it like a timeless mythic thing. Gretel and her mother have little interaction with 'the modern world'. They don't listen to the radio; books aren't mentioned; there's no fast food, youth culture, money... In some ways the river is an island and they are castaways. They are utterly reliant upon one another, until the appearance of Marcus. (Does Gretel understand what happened with Marcus, as the reader eventually does?)

There are primal themes here. Feast and famine; journeys towards and away from family; gender ambiguity (at least two trans characters); the monster beneath the water, coming closer. There are fathers absent and otherwise, and twice-given names, and prophecies that twist themselves into tragedy. It's not an easy read but it is a gorgeous, transcendent transformation.