2022/21: Dead Lies Dreaming -- Charles Stross

“Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." [p. 97]

Volume One of Stross's Laundry-adjacent 'New Management' series: I am that rare reader with no experience of the Laundryverse, and can report that Dead Lies Dreaming works perfectly well as a standalone.

The background: it's December 2015, and Santa Claus is being crucified by elven warriors outside Hamley's; the UK's new Prime Minister is a Lovecraftian Elder God, who has reinstated the 18th-century Bloody Code (in which the majority of crimes are punishable by death); magic has become a force in the world again, and various individuals have developed abilities which they code as superpowers. Our protagonists: in the mostly-evil corner, Rupert de Montfort Bigge, cultist plutocrat with more ambition than intelligence, and his PA Eve Starkey, to whom he entrusts the task of acquiring a very dangerous book; in the mostly-good corner, a found family of queer millennials with unregistered superpowers, committing a series of crimes that'll fund their leader Imp's film about Peter Pan; in the middle ground, thief-taker Wendy Deere, on the trail of Imp's gang but distracted by her attraction to their getaway driver, Del. (Del, incidentally, is short for 'the Deliverator -- ironic nod to a fictional hero, the protagonist of a cyberpunk epic about ninjutsu, linguistics, and extreme pizza delivery': a nice nod to Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and a reminder that this is not not our world.) Imp and his crew are squatting in what used to be the family mansion, where there is a hidden portal to a dream version of Victorian London (guess the year!) wherein the Bad Book can be found. It remains only to note that Imp is Eve's brother, and the plot tightens neatly and twistily into shape.

This was often very funny, and sometimes very uncomfortable. There are recognisable aspects to this London -- gentrification, austerity, workplace sexism, transphobia and homophobia, the hell that is the M25 -- and a cleverly constructed heist playing out on several levels. It's also ... not mundane, not by a long shot, but unexpectedly devoid of eldritch horrors. They're in the background, but most of the evils herein are human.

I liked the ways in which Stross riffs off and borrows from Peter Pan (Wendy's surname is misremembered, several times, as 'Darling') and I appreciated Eve's professional excellence: the wording of contracts is always worth attention. Interesting and diverse characters, though appearances are seldom described; nicely layered London ambience; tragic backstories only slowly revealed; tantalising hints of the larger world. (The Chelsea Flower Show? okaaaay, that actually does make sense.)

Now, of course, I'm tempted to dive into the Laundry-verse ...

2022/20: Sundial -- Catriona Ward

Pain and fear are like that, an explosion that sets the genes alight. I imagine the flames racing along ... like coal seams catching fire. [loc. 1301]

Every novel by Catriona Ward is unsettling: each is different to the others. Sundial is no exception. Rob is locked in a toxic relationship with her unfaithful husband, Irving. After a crisis involving their daughters Annie and Callie, Rob decides that it's time she and Callie did some serious mother-daughter bonding. They'll have 'the best time ever' at Sundial, the isolated desert house where Rob and her sister Jack grew up. Callie is uneasy about the trip: she's worried about what Annie will get up to in her absence, and her friend Pale Callie is full of theories about Rob's true agenda. But Pale Callie isn't ... well, she's not entirely reliable. And nobody else can see her.

Slowly we learn the history of Rob and Jack, growing up home-schooled by Falcon and Mia, more or less oblivious to the endless parade of graduate students who come to Sundial to work with Mia on her experiments with dogs. (Some of the scenes with the dogs are viscerally unpleasant, others deeply upsetting.) Rob and Jack are twins, very close: but Jack is changing in ways that Rob isn't. That change holds the key to Callie's oddities -- but there are aspects of it, and of her own past, that Rob only gradually comes to understand over the course of the novel.

The two narratives, Rob and Callie, kept me guessing almost to the end of the book. I didn't find them especially likeable characters to start with, but they are extraordinarily vivid, plain-spoken without being straightforward, and their claustrophobic relationship is brilliantly observed. Nothing in this novel is what it seems: the rosebush over the grave, the hole that Rob digs, the buried secret, Mia's research... There are just enough inconsistencies to keep the reader engaged, to indicate that there's more beneath the surface. (Actually I think there might be some red herrings too. Contact lens solution?) And the resolution, though spectacular, doesn't attempt to tidy away every thread.

Sundial is unsettling and sometimes upsetting, truly tragic and often lyrical. Ward's eye for detail heightens the sense of claustrophobia, and the feeling of something unseen, out of focus, apprehended in glimpses. I keep thinking about aspects of the characterisation: Callie's relationship with food, and Rob's (neither of which involve judgement or commentary); Rob's boarding-school stories, written out by hand; Irving's gaslighting.

Thanks to NetGalley for an advance review copy, in exchange for which I have written this honest review. UK publication date 10 MAR 22.

2022/19: Moonwise -- Greer Ilene Gilman

But in Cloudwood it was endless hallows. There no wren was slain, no seed was scattered; though he cried the ravens from the turning wood, no winter ever came to green. The gate was lost... [p 23]

Two young women, Ariane and Sylvie, find themselves in balladland: in a chilly wintry wood, or on a moor, in the world of Cloud which they invented (or discovered) in a synergistic gleeful season of storytelling when they were younger. Ariane journeys through Cloud and encounters a child who is also, perhaps, an ancient deity or power: Sylvie's journey is (or seems) shorter, and she travels with a tinker who becomes her friend, but who, like the child, may be something more. There are two witches, goddesses, forces: Malykorne and Annis. Annis is winter and wants to freeze time. Mally wants spring, and the cycle of the year.

For long swathes of this novel I was not sure I understood what was happening: but the plot is just one layer of this novel, varnish or garnish over an intricately woven web of words. There's a lot of north-country dialect here -- specifically northern English, with its Nordic roots ('Tha'st nodded again, and t'cake's kizzened up') -- and though the wood that Ariane and Sylvie enter seems to be somewhere in North America, there is a European, perhaps a British, feel to it. The wren is hunted, there are stone circles and thornbushes, scarecrows and stars, bleak fells and homely farmhouses shuttered against the night. The language is seductive and incredibly dense. I think I recall someone saying that reading Moonwise was like being inside a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins ... though there are also moments where it seems about to break into iambic pentameter, and the text is studded with echoes and iterations of folk-song, ballad, fairytale. Ariane, and especially Sylvie, bring a touch of modernity too, albeit modernity as of the novel's 1991 publication: '"What has it got in its 'pocalypse? Tell us that, precious."'

I have attempted to read this novel more than once and been distracted by mundanity: turns out what I needed was a quiet winter weekend (it's a very wintry book) and a melancholic nostalgia for the act of shared creation. And now I feel equipped to continue reading Cloud and Ashes, which is ... set in the world of Cloud, or tells tales from Cloud, or is simply a layer below the stories in Moonwise.

Unaccountably not available as an ebook: I do own the paperback, but reading physical books is increasingly uncomfortable on the eyes, so I resorted to the Internet Archive.

2022/18: The Haunting of Maddy Clare -- Simone St James

“I don’t have an opinion about ghosts. It’s people I don’t believe in, I suppose.” [loc. 157]

Sarah Piper lives alone in London, eking out a precarious existence by taking whatever temporary jobs the agency offers. Her latest employer is Alistair Gellis, a wealthy war veteran in need of a female assistant: he is a researcher of ghosts, and his usual companion, Matthew Ryder, is away attending the birth of his sister's child. Besides, this particular case requires the presence of a woman, because the ghost of the servant girl Maddy Clare really doesn't like men.

Sarah accompanies Gellis to bucolic Waringstoke, where she discovers that she is unusually receptive to ghosts, and that Maddy Clare's ghost is real -- and utterly terrifying. Maddy was taken in by the Clare family as an adolescent: she came to the doorstep of Falmouth House one night, filthy and half-naked and bearing the marks of assault. Mrs Clare offered sanctuary, though her husband was never comfortable around Maddy -- but then something changed, and Maddy hanged herself in the barn. Sarah's task is to discover why Maddy killed herself, but the folk of Waringstoke are not wholly cooperative. And when Matthew Ryder shows up, initially resentful of Sarah's presence but gradually coming to respect her, things become more complicated.

Sarah's first-person narrative offered more commentary on the post-war roles of men ('You can’t imagine how hard it is to come home from hell and be expected to pick up the threads of a life') than on her own situation: I think her backstory -- the deaths of her parents, her loneliness in the big city -- could have been more integrated with the main plot. I wasn't wholly comfortable with her interactions with Matthew, either: she seemed to lack agency. Perhaps that passivity makes the novel more effective: there's an especially terrifying dream-pursuit through a dark forest, with a sense of malevolent presence and relentless pursuit. But there is also peril from the living, and all three ghost-hunters become targets.

Given the time in which The Haunting of Maddy Clare is set, I'd expected something more plainly connected with the Great War. Instead, it's that other war, the war in which women and children are cast as victims.

2022/17: Angel Landing -- Alice Hoffman

What he intended to do was not even a plan; it was more like a storm of thoughts that encircled him, so that every step he took was soft and far off the ground, as if his ideas had sprung from the sky. [p.49]

Natalie, a social worker, lives in her aunt Minnie's boarding house in the small Long Island town of Fisher's Cove. Natalie is in Fisher's Cove because her boyfriend Carter is a fervent anti-nuclear protestor, currently protesting the new nuclear power plant being built at Angel Landing, out by the harbour. Then there's an explosion at the plant -- and a few days later, Natalie has a new client, Michael Finn, who claims to have been responsible for the blast. Carter is happy to support Finn, whom he regards as a figurehead for the anti-nuclear movement: but Finn is no hero, and his actions are inextricably (and, to Finn, inexplicably) tangled with his relationship with his father.

The story is split between Natalie's first-person narrative and a third-person review of Finn's life. I did not like Natalie at all: I found her selfish and self-obsessed, and irredeemably shallow. Her first thought on acquiring Finn as a client is 'he might very well soon be quite famous. If he were to be my client I might be interviewed during the course of his trial; the New York Times would contact me, Newsweek would telephone, the Fishers Cove Herald might ask for a daily psychology column.' (p. 32). It's only late in the novel that she understands Carter's genuine commitment to his cause, his passionate love of the natural world and his dread of nuclear accidents. Natalie doesn't seem to like anyone, though she is drawn to Finn for reasons she doesn't explore.

Finn's relationship with his father, which has a more traditional arc, is sad and brutal and, finally, resolved. Finn's story, and the histories of his father and grandfather, are about powerlessness and power, turning away from one's dreams and accepting 'life keeps on going the way it was going'. Is his pivotal act, the mis-fitting of the valve, motivated by destruction or by the need to assume some control over his own life? The novel would have been uneven if it'd focussed solely on the Finns: but Natalie's part of the story did not have the emotional weight to balance Finn's.

Some splendid writing, but also some typos due, I think, to poorly-proofread OCR. There are echoes of the Three Mile Island incident here, though it's never mentioned by name: assuming that reference, this is set in the late 1970s. I think it's one of Hoffman's earliest novels: it really didn't feel up to the standard of her later work.

2022/16: Something Fabulous -- Alexis Hall

“For heaven’s sake”— Valentine tried, and failed, to keep the impatience from his voice —“if we lived life as though it were a novel, we’d spend all our time becoming embroiled in improbable adventures and spouting nonsense about filling our vast and empty souls with joyful aches.”
“Yes,” said Tarleton, “and?” [loc. 286]

Extremely funny and gleefully ahistorical Regency-ish M/M romance. Valentine, Duke of Malvern, has proposed to his childhood friend Arabella and been rebuffed. He is subsequently woken at four in the morning by Bonaventure Tarleton, Arabella's twin brother, who informs him that Arabella has run away and that the two of them must pursue her immediately. During their search for the elusive Arabella, Bonny (I am not a huge fan of this nickname) describes his life with his sister, revelling in books and writing their own continuations -- yay fanfic! -- and desperately hoping for financial salvation. He also reveals that he is not a person who falls in love with women. Valentine is appalled: nobody had ever told him that falling in love with men was an option ...

Pretty much everyone in this novel is queer, with the (possible) exception of the suspicious innkeeper. Valentine and Bonny encounter a lady novelist and her friend, who have offered shelter to Arabella ("she leaned in and kissed her companion full on the lips. What a very strange friendship these women had developed. Perhaps it was the remote location..." [loc. 2040]) and have several unexpected encounters with Valentine's aristocratic acquaintance Sir Horley, who flirts shamelessly with Bonny and tells Valentine they have so much to talk about next time they meet. And Arabella, though she turns out to be a shameless drama queen, has definite, if novelistic, ideas about her own future.

Once I discarded any expectations of historical accuracy (or more accurately historical-ambience tropes), this was an absolute delight to read. There were a few points where I was uncomfortable with how Valentine was treated, and I felt the novel needed more of the backstory about familial expectations and how, exactly, Valentine had disappointed the Tarletons. But overall, a hilarious, charming and warm-hearted romance.

2022/14,15: The Many-Colored Land and The Golden Torc -- Julian May

Things are never going to be the same here again.
The sun-bright face darkened. Nodonn’s voice rolled in their minds. ‘Go back where you came from, accursed!’
Claude said: You fool. We came from here. [The Golden Torc, p. 348]

I first read Julian May's Saga of the Exiles in the mid-1980s, not long after the final book in the quartet was published. I was captivated by the characters, the plot, and the setting, and May's Pliocene has become part of my mental furniture. Following a discussion (there was wine) the other night, I found myself craving a reread, and powered through the first two novels in just over 24 hours.

I still love them.

They're not without flaws, and my reading experience is very different now, almost forty years after my first encounter with May's Pliocene world, populated by time-travellers from the 22nd century and two races of aliens from another galaxy, whose names and feats echo (or, in-book, are echoed in) mythology and folk-tales. The aliens -- the tall, beautiful Tanu and the smaller, more ordinary Firvulag, who are opposed in an ancient battle-religion -- have psychic powers: humans are more or less enslaved, but their very presence has drastically changed the balance of power between Tanu and Firvulag, and has insidiously affected Tanu society. These first two novels deal with the arrival and subsequent adventures of a group of eight time-travellers ('Group Green'), who read like a collection of archetypes and who, in various ways, change the Pliocene world beyond recognition. Notably, it's the two youngest members of the group -- both under the usual age limit of 28 years old, both qualifying for time travel only because of their criminal acts -- who bring about the most dramatic transformations.

One thing that struck me this time around was how predominantly white the characters are. (All of Group Green -- five men and three women -- are white. The Tanu are pale-skinned, as are those Firvulag whose actual, as opposed to illusory, appearance is described.) There are humans from other ethnic groups, but they are definitely a minority in Exile. Another surprise was how heterosexual and cisgendered everyone is. The few exceptions are called out, and often mocked, by other characters. To be fair, the time-travellers are by definition people who didn't fit into the diverse and humane society of the 22nd century: I'd imagine that intolerance and abuse might be aspects of the not-fitting-in. But there are some especially unpleasant comments about the single trans character in these two novels, and some already-dated slurs against lesbian characters. (Gay men seem to get less abuse.)

And yet I still love these novels. The ingenious ways in which myth and folklore are woven in -- "Wouldn’t you agree that it was highly unlikely for future humanity to have retained any recollections of a race of small shape-changing exotic people who live in underground dwellings?" [MCL, 4614] -- and the humans' atavistic responses to the Tanu and the Firvulag. The ways in which the humans, as well as the exotics, come to personify (originate?) myths of their own: the Flying Dutchman, David and Goliath ... The spectacular geology and geography of Pliocene Europe; the hints of the Galactic Milieu, from which the time-travellers have fled for various reasons. The complex motives and self-analyses of the members of Group Green, and their interpersonal conflicts. The depictions of extinct fauna, and the delightful self-domestication of felis zitteli. The (mostly) well-paced and well-plotted prose, and May's knack for humour and for snappy dialogue.

A few notes on the Kindle editions: 1) I dislike the most recent covers, and it seems that the ones before those were even worse. My cover images here are from the 1980s Pan editions, which introduced me to the Saga. 2) the maps are almost unreadable. Hmm, do I still have my paperback copy of A Pliocene Companion? 3) I think the text has been recreated, or maybe OCR'd, for the Kindle versions: there are a few typos, transposed lines etc.

I'll probably reread the other two books quite soon, but not yet, not yet: they are darker, and the scope is broader.

Apparently my last reread was in 2006 (review here): I seem to recall a plain-text version with a lot of bad OCR -- 'tore' for 'torc', et cetera.