2022/007: Winter -- Ali Smith

...the people in power were self-servers who’d no idea about and felt no responsibility towards history...They were like a new kind of being, she said – like beings who’d been birthed not by real historied time and people but by plastic carrier bags, she said.
Eh? he said.
That unhistorical, she said. That inhuman. That brainless and unknowing about all the centuries of all the ways that people carried things before they were invented. That damaging to the environment for years and years after they’ve outgrown their use. Damage for generations. [p. 55]

Art (short for Arthur) is due to visit his mother Sophia in Cornwall for Christmas, but his girlfriend Charlotte has dumped him and is wreaking a very public vengeance by posting nonsense to his Twitter account. Panicking at the thought of explaining all this to his mother, he recruits a Croatian bystander, Lux, to play 'Charlotte' for three days.

Sophia, meanwhile, is experiencing a vision, or a presence, of a floating child-head that gradually turns into a stone sphere. This will be important later. She has not spoken to her sister Iris, a Greenham Common veteran and lifelong activist, for three decades: it seems likely that they are on opposite sides of the Brexit chasm, but the rift goes back to their teens. When Art and 'Charlotte' arrive, fresh from the horrors of the GWR Christmas service (this was horribly evocative: I used to do that journey annually), Lux realises that Sophia needs help.

I didn't find this quite as enjoyable as Autumn, possibly because I disliked Art and, to some extent, Sophia. But there are similar themes: the importance of art (Barbara Hepworth's work is featured), the lure of happy memories, the lies that people tell themselves and one another. There is a story about a child meeting a god at midwinter; there are rumours on social media of a rare bird sighted just down the road. And there are strong echoes of Dickens' A Christmas Carol -- only to be expected from a novel which opens with the line 'God was dead: to begin with'.

All the crises are still there, Brexit and global warming, misogyny, the climate emergency, racism, ageism, warmongering, Trump, Grenfell, Boris Bloody Johnson ... But there are also moments of joy, and the possibility of reconciliation, and the year has turned: the days are getting longer, there is hope that the light will come back.

2022/006: Autumn -- Ali Smith

I’m tired of the news. I’m tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren’t, and deals so simplistically with what’s truly appalling... I’m tired of the violence there is and I’m tired of the violence that’s on its way, that’s coming, that hasn’t happened yet. I’m tired of liars. I’m tired of sanctified liars. I’m tired of how those liars have let this happen. I’m tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. ... I’m tired of animosity. I’m tired of pusillanimosity.
I don’t think that’s actually a word, Elisabeth says.
I’m tired of not knowing the right words, her mother says. [loc. 518]

An old man is dreaming and remembering, rhyming and trying to work out whether he's dead. A young woman is trying to renew her passport at the Post Office, but staff reject her photo because her hair is wrong. She goes to sit beside the sleeping man at the Maltings Care Providers, and reads to him from Brave New World. These are Daniel Gluck and Elisabeth Demand; they both care about art, about books, about music; they have been friends since Elisabeth was eight years old. They are both lost, to some extent, in their memories and their dreams: and Smith unfolds their stories in a mosaic of scenes, remembered and forgotten, from their pasts.

Autumn ricochets through times real and imagined, but if it has a chronological setting it's the summer of the Brexit Referendum. 'All across the country, what had happened whipped about by itself as if a live electric wire had snapped off a pylon in a storm.' Foreigners, and anyone who looks foreign, are being told to go home. Families are divided: so are villages. The art of almost-forgotten Sixties artist Pauline Boty is woven through the story, as are references to Christine Keeler and allusions to Shakespeare's Tempest. (Daniel dreams he's imprisoned in a pine tree, while Elisabeth recalls a production of the play, and focusses on the father-daughter relationship: she's never known her own father.)

Smith's rage at the referendum result flavours the novel, but doesn't overwhelm it. The focus is on Daniel and Elisabeth, and on Elisabeth's relationship with her mother, and -- just a little -- on her mother's schoolgirl crush on a TV star. Autumn is a surprisingly lovely book -- surprising because I knew it was 'about' Brexit -- and reading it confirmed my decision to read the whole 'Seasonal' quartet in one indulgent swoop.

2022/005: The Devil You Know -- Mike Carey

But how many people do you know who actually get to choose what they do for a living? My careers teacher said I should go into hotel management, so exorcism it was. [p. 27]

Freelance exorcist Felix Castor has been avoiding exorcisms since one went horribly wrong, but the bills are piling up and his amiable landlady Pen is at risk of losing her house. Felix is taking 'ordinary' jobs to make ends meet, but his most recent booking, as a stage magician at a spoilt teenager's party, did not end well. When he receives a request to exorcise the ghost of a young woman who's haunting an archive in Euston, Felix -- Fix to his friends, of whom he has few -- decides it might solve his immediate difficulties.

Exorcism isn't just a job, though: it's a vocation. Fix has been seeing ghosts since he was a small child, and is extremely good at banishing them by playing tunes on his tin whistle. He doesn't know where they go when they're gone -- 'wherever music goes when it's not being played' -- and we get the sense that until now he hasn't really considered the ghosts as anything other than a nuisance to the living. But the young woman haunting the Archive is another matter, and as Fix discovers more of her story (and incidentally irritates or alienates almost every living human at the Archive) he starts to question his own role in her silencing. Is he pest control, or a rehoming agent?

I liked this vision of London, some time in the early years of the third millennium, busy with ghosts and were-folk and demons. It's still very much London, but these days people check whether it's a full moon before going out after dark, and religious types (like Fix's brother) are certain the apocalypse is nigh. There are tantalising fragments of world-building (which I'm sure are expanded in later volumes) and of Fix's own past. And there is a work-experience demon, Juliet, who has the marks of an intriguing recurring character.

There are four more Felix Castor books: I'll likely read more, not least to follow up the various sub-plots introduced in this volume.

Read for Lockdown Book Club.

2022/004: Base Notes -- Lara Elena Donnelly

Scent is the strongest link to our memories. What I do just makes a deeper connection. Brain chemistry or black magic — it’s unclear. People pay a lot of money for it, though. [loc. 231]

Vic Fowler has taken control of Bright House, a small and innovative perfumier in New York City, after the death of its founder (and Vic's lover) Jonathan Bright. Vic has developed a method for encoding memories in scent, and is contracted by plutocrat Joseph Eisner to create a perfume that will evoke a particular memory: the catch is, the memory is of an incident that Eisner never actually experienced. And, oh yes, Vic will need to commit three murders in order to produce the requested fragrance. Success will mean the financial salvation of Bright House: failure will mean that Eisner reveals Vic's part in a previous death, already being investigated by persistent PI Pippin Miles. To avoid suspicion, Vic enlists the help of three friends, and sets in motion a claustrophobic spiral of lust, greed, and death.

Like Donnelly's Amberlough trilogy, this is an exquisitely sensual book. Vic is a splendidly complex narrator, who perceives the world as much (more?) through smell than through sound or sight. There are some lush and unusual descriptions: 'the spermy scent of decorative pear trees', the metallic back-of-the-throat tang of gasoline. The character portraits at the beginning of the novel are exclusively olfactory, and every chapter opens with a scent portrait: “Notes de Tête: Ozone. Notes de Cœur: Burnt bacon. Notes de Fond: wet earth, gasoline.” And, as Vic stresses, the base notes -- the lingering odour, the filth, the dirt -- are as important as the top notes.

This is very much a New York novel, contrasting the glitter of Met galas and exclusive fetish clubs with the squalor of Vic's mildewy basement apartment and the constant pressure of trying to survive as an artist in a milieu where money matters more than anything else. "The rules are: they can push your rent up every year. The rules are: if you’re born rich you stay rich, and if you’re not you spend your whole life trying to get there." It's also a queer love story, an exploration of creativity, and an excursion into skewed morality and grotesque rationalisation that brings to mind early Poppy Z Brite, in particular Exquisite Corpse -- though with considerably more, albeit dark, humour.

I like the gradual sketching-in of Vic's past, and the occasional reminder that we are being told a story: "I expect the deeper we get into all this, the less and less you’ll like me. I’m not bothered. That’s not the point." And Vic, though fascinating and enigmatic, is not easy to like: sociopathic, selfish, and towards the end, as things begin to spiral out of control, slapdash. But I did like the novel very much, though somewhat uncomfortably: and it has made me want to wear perfume again, every day, despite the fact that most days nobody but me will smell it. (I would not wear one of Vic's specials, though.)

In Donnelly's afterword, she credits Jude Ellison Sady Doyle’s “My quest to find the great American perfume”, published in The Guardian. She doesn't mention her short story The Dirty American, which is very much a prequel to Base Notes. (There's an accompanying interview here.) I've never read Patrick Süskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, though I understand it's a historical take on a similar premise, so can't comment on similarities to that novel: but Donnelly mentions it in interviews, and in Perfume: A Little Piece of Fiction to Wear Against Your Skin on Tor.com.

Fulfills the 'published in 2022' challenge of 52 books in 52 weeks. (Thanks, Amazon First advance copy!)

2022/003: Scales and Sensibility -- Stephanie Burgis

It was a truth universally acknowledged that any young lady without a dragon was doomed to social failure. [opening line]

England, 1817. Small 'dragons' have been discovered in South America, and have become fashion accessories. Elinor Tregarth's frightful cousin Penelope has one, of course, but he isn't properly housebroken and she treats him appallingly. Elinor, as the poor orphaned cousin living on the charity of her withdrawn aunt and enabling uncle, hardly dares complain: but one afternoon Penelope's behaviour becomes too much to bear, and shortly thereafter Elinor departs the Hall with only the clothes she stands up in, a few coins she's managed to save, and Sir Jessamyn the dragon.

Encountering a charming fortune hunter and his scientific friend -- who maintains that fairy tales are just stories, that dragons have no magic whatsoever and certainly can't breathe fire -- Elinor hopes that they will aid her escape. But through an unfortunate combination of events, Elinor finds herself back at the Hall, magically masquerading as Mrs DeLacey, a fashionable influencer -- and trying to avoid blackmail, penury, discovery and true love.

This was charming: frothy and funny, romantic and fantastical, and with some excellent secondary characters. I particularly liked the underlying awareness of class, privilege and wealth. Elinor's parents were ruined by an unscrupulous entrepreneur; the maid Sally is keen to find restitution, if not justice, for her sister's dismissal after being framed for theft; Elinor is keenly aware that without money of her own, she has few recourses.

I can report happy endings all round, at least for those who deserve them, and some tantalising hints -- Elinor has two sisters, similarly exiled to friends and relatives in distant parts -- of further novels in the series.

I hereby declare this my first 52 books in 52 weeks book of the year, meeting the 'Jane Austen-inspired' challenge, if only for that opening line.

2022/002: The Animals in that Country -- Laura Jean McKay

‘This flu means people can talk to animals.’
Her head shoots up. ‘I want the flu, Granny. Don’t you?’
‘Grown-ups don’t wish they had diseases, and neither should you.'
'But don't you?'
...'Course I bloody do.' [loc. 615]

Australia, not long from now: Jean works at a wildlife park run by her son's ex-girlfriend Angie, and spends a lot of time with Angie's daughter Kimberley. Jean drives the zoo train, fortified by sly nips of vodka, and provides a commentary for the tourists: "One's saying 'give me that chow, you mongrel' ... and then the other one says 'I'm no mongrel, I'm purebred'. Jean would like to be a ranger, but Angie thinks she anthropomorphises the animals too much. When Sue the dingo gets caught in wire, Jean -- who thinks Sue is her special friend -- doesn't wait for the rangers to turn up, and gets badly bitten freeing Sue. Meanwhile, visitors are heading for the park, infected by the latest flu ('zoanthropy') which appears to enable enhanced communication between humans and animals.

They all -- Angie, Jean, Kimberley, Kim's daddy Lee -- get the flu.

Angie tries talking to Bernie, the park's crocodile, who wants to play. Jean is sobered (only metaphorically) by the realisation that all the small mammals are constantly terrified of humans, who they think will kill them. And Lee takes Kim and sets off south towards the ocean, to hear what the whales are saying.

The animals' communication is not speech: it's the language of bodies, a whisker, a smell, a fart. It's set in a different font (not sufficiently different on my default Kindle settings, but plainer in the Cloud Reader app) and it is allusive, surreal, distinctive, speciated. There is nothing cute here, no Dr Dolittle with his kindly care for child-like inferiors: instead I was reminded of Wittgenstein's argument that 'if a lion could speak, we could not understand him'. As Jean and Sue travel south on the (literal) trail of Lee and Kim -- yep, it's a road trip, a sparring-for-dominance buddy movie -- Sue's observations are sometimes opaque, while Jean is frequently drunk, probably feverish from her infected bite, and perhaps too trusting of her fellow humans. Over the course of their journey, Jean discovers some hard truths about her family: she also learns a lot from Sue. And by the novel's unexpected, downbeat, desolate close, she has lost everything that mattered to her.

I found this a compelling read, and a deeply unsettling experience: looking up from this to find my cat staring at me was ... alarming. It made me think of how often and how trivially we anthropomorphise, project and tell stories about the animals in our lives. Remember that the carrion birds are discussing how soon they'll be able to eat you. Remember that mosquitos want to drink until they die. Remember that the whales call us home into the deep.

I'd be doing the novel a disservice by not mentioning that it is also celebratory, cheerful, often very funny; and that Jean, with her drinking and her abrasive personality and her deadbeat life, is a fascinating narrator. I loved the different voices of the different species, and the surreal insights into animal life: cats freezing time by catching mice, pigs released from their abbatoir future milling around in the road. Evocative descriptions of the Australian desert: all-too-credible responses to pandemic. A deserving winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award.

2022/001: Project Hail Mary -- Andy Weir

“The whole world put you in charge of solving this problem, and you came directly to a junior high school science teacher?” [loc. 857]

A man wakes up in a white room; can't remember his own name; can't remember where he is, or why; works out that he's American, English or Liberian (he thinks in imperial units) ... and keeps getting flashes of memory, which he begins to piece together.

Dr Ryland Grace is not on Earth. He's on a spaceship, the Hail Mary. He's alone with two dead crewmates, a very long way from home, and he's been sent to save the world.

I shan't reveal more of the plot, because it's cleverly doled out, scrap by scrap, and the pacing of the revelations is excellent. The story kept me guessing almost to the final page, and it was surprisingly moving as well as being jam-packed with science and engineering. I don't read much 'hard' SF, which is to say SF that focuses on physics. I found Project Hail Mary engaging without being intellectually overbearing: perhaps because Grace is a science teacher, used to explaining things to children, his descriptions of his thought processes are pitched for an audience that isn't familiar with the scientific principles involved. There are bullet points, but few, if any, equations.

Grace is a fascinating character, gradually recovering his memories and piecing together the fragments of his life on Earth and the crisis that led to his current isolation (and indeed to his amnesia). He's remarkably level-headed, considering his situation, and extremely practical. What I most liked about him, though, was the way he thought: the way every strange new scenario (of which there are many) prompted new questions, new theories and new ways to test them. It's a brilliant illustration of the scientific method -- and of the difference between science and engineering.

I enjoyed this novel a lot, despite a few loose (though not vital) threads. Now I might give The Martian another try, though I suspect it will elicit memories of the film, which I liked a lot.