2022/80: The Time of the Ghosts -- Gillian Polack

Lil says that the things I see all came with us Europeans. It’s a palimpsest laying over Canberra and we scrape it off so Canberrans can live in the real city. [p.23]

Kat is a teenaged runaway who finds herself under the protection of three old ladies: Lil, Ann and Mabel. She refers to them as her grannies, and she runs errands and does housework in exchange for food and board. Not explicitly mentioned in the deal: ghost-hunting, werewolves, dead bushrangers, the thing in Mabel's wood pile, and dark children. For Kat's grannies are not entirely what they seem, and one of them (at least one of them) is much older than anyone would suspect.

This is a novel focussed on female characters and on the small kindnesses and accommodations that they perform for one another. Kat, it should be noted, often exhibits more consideration than the older women. There are a lot of meals (the ladies cook for one another once a month, and now Kat is present to help prepare and serve the food) and quite a few excursions to Canberra's suburbs. Though I don't know the city at all, it began to feel comfortable and familiar.

Some of the supernatural elements, such as Mabel's garden of protection and her wood pile guardian, seem comfortable, too: others, like the drowning girl who cries, and the large cat that lurks outside the Japanese embassy, are much more threatening. And there are mundane horrors, too. Lil is becoming frail; Ann's husband is divorcing her; Kat is trying to summon the courage to phone home, to the family who seemed to have replaced her with a younger half-sister.

There are three narrative threads here: the account of Kat's education with the grannies, Kat's later (or mostly later) blogposts with their benefit of hindsight, and the 'tales of Melusine', which initially seem to be versions of fairy tales written down by Lil. Melusine, in those tales, is a fairy and also Jewish, and her stories span centuries, from medieval France to the horrors of Nazi Germany.

I'd been meaning to read something by Polack for a while, and The Time of the Ghosts -- with its themes of found family, friendship and kindness -- tempts me to read more.

2022/79: Knot of Shadows -- Lois McMaster Bujold

If a man found dead in the harbor in his nightshirt was mysterious, a man found dead in the harbor in somebody else’s nightshirt was utterly inexplicable. [loc. 415]

This latest instalment in the Penric and Desdemona series is another novella, a murder mystery set in the port city of Vilnoc in winter. A corpse is found in the harbour, wearing another man's nightshirt: so far, so ordinary. But when the 'corpse' wakes up in the morgue and starts banging on the door (from the inside), Learned Penric and his attendant chaos demon are called in to advise. Surely this is a textbook case of demonic possession?

Of course it is not nearly that simple or straightforward, and Pen and Des, assisted by Penric's student Alixtra, end up investigating fraud, finding a missing child and arguing with a god. This is in some ways quite a 'cozy' mystery, with little of the wider world intruding: though there are echoes of themes from The Curse of Chalion, the stakes here are not nearly as high. But it's also quite dark, though Pen does his best to provide closure, justice and mercy.

Despite the deaths, and the grieving of them, this was a comforting read. I was especially struck by Penric's reaction to the death of a Temple rabbit, unable to bear being possessed by a god. It was such a kind and compassionate moment, and it epitomises Pen's character. After all, Pen's kindness is the reason that Penric and Desdemona are together at all.

2022/78: The Apparition Phase -- Will Maclean

Is it more terrifying to believe somewhere is haunted, or to believe that nowhere is? [loc. 3009]

Set firmly in the Seventies, the decade of The Unexplained (part 2 free with part 1!) and Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World, of The Stone Tape, of ghosts and UFOs and cryptozoology, of ouija boards and Soviet telepaths and flexidiscs of the voices of the dead. Tim and his twin sister Abi grow up in suburbia, fascinated by the supernatural and obsessed with ghosts. When they acquire a camera, they fake a ghost photo and show it to a girl at school: she faints, and though Tim and Abi congratulate themselves they also feel slightly bad. But when they confess to the hoax, Janice doesn't believe them: "You drew a shape on a wall, thinking it was clever, thinking it was funny. But it’s not. And now it’s here. And you live here."

Fast-forward a couple of years, as the twins -- sent to separate schools -- become less codependent. And then Abi goes missing: and Tim ends up at a run-down manor house in Suffolk, with a group of teenagers who are trying to contact the spirit world.

Tremendously atmospheric for anyone who (like me) was a solitary weirdo in the Seventies: I do wonder what younger readers will make of the closely-observed minutae of teenage life during that period. The Apparition Phase is a distinctly British, suburban sort of horror novel, with Tim's class consciousness another way in which he's alienated from his peers (the boys at the manor house call him 'Comprehensive'), and the vividly depicted post-industrial landscape: slow-running ditches sheened with oil and littered with abandoned appliances, sagging wire fences, old tyres, phone boxes that smell of stale cigarettes.

The horror is primarily (though not exclusively) psychological, and the nastiest scenes happen between the lines: the LSD that Tim drops with a bully-turned-friend, Juliet's secret, Abi's fate. Tim is, it becomes clear quite early on, not entirely reliable as a narrator: he isn't exactly likeable but I ended up feeling considerable sympathy for him, and for the ways in which he's failed by the adults in his life. An excellent novel, and a debut: I'll look out for more by Maclean.

2022/77: How High We Go In The Dark -- Sequoia Nagamatsu

I wish I could taste. I wish I wasn’t so tired all the time. I hate that when I do have the energy to go out, I get angry at all the people who didn’t get the plague or somehow walked away from it scot-free. I hate how the world is finally coming together to help the planet when I’m coming undone. [loc. 3748]

It starts with the discovery of an ancient corpse in the permafrost, part Neanderthal and part something else, and the precautionary (and haphazard) quarantine that follows. Or perhaps it starts when a woman leaves her child behind to embark on a long journey. Or when a robot dog malfunctions. Or when a pig starts to speak.

How High We Go In The Dark is more a collection, a connection, of short stories than a traditional novel: I was reminded of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, though the mood and the setting(s) are quite different. The chapters are distinct first-person narratives, though the narrator of one story may be a character in another. There are overarching themes: family, mutual acceptance, the industry of death. For, although parts of How High We Go were published in the Before Times, this is very much a pandemic novel, exploring the human side of the 'Arctic plague' which transforms the world. There are euthanasia theme parks (apparently the Euthanasia Coaster is a thing); death hotels; genetic modification; public grieving. There are stories about reconnecting with one's community, and stories about holding onto whatever remains of the dead.

The writing is beautiful, despite the bleakness of the scenario, and there are glimpses of connections that are never explained. I was moved to tears by some chapters (a man trying to preserve the recording, the spirit, of a dead woman within a failing robotic dog; a pig declaring that it wants to help) and left cold by others.

Unfortunately one of the chapters that really didn't work for me was the final one, 'The Scope of Possibility', in which the story comes full circle, the plague's origin is explained, and a great many names are clunkily dropped. This chapter felt like a trivialisation of what had gone before, and I found it oddly distressing.

Yet there are happy endings here, and reunions, and homecoming: there is art, and kindness, and love, and hope. Sometimes surreal, sometimes melancholy, the best of this novel has lodged in my brain.

2022/76: Assassin's Apprentice -- Robin Hobb

I’m going to be teaching you how to kill people. For your king. Not in the showy way Hod is teaching you, not on the battlefield where others see and cheer you on. No. I’ll be teaching you the nasty, furtive, polite ways to kill people. [p. 68]

The setting is a pseudomedieval world with two flavours of magic: Skill, which involves telepathy and coercion between humans, and Wit, which is more about the bonds between humans and animals. The nobility, in the Kingdom of the Six Duchies, are given names according to the virtues to which they should aspire: Shrewd (a king), Verity (a man), Patience (a woman), Regal (a villain). When Prince Chivalry's bastard child is deposited with the castle guard, he has no name. Growing up in the royal household, he becomes known as Fitz; forms a close connection with a dog named Nosy, until that connection is discovered; and is selected for training as an assassin.

There is a lot of detail in this novel, a lot of worldbuilding and politicking and machination. Hobb tells the story from the viewpoint of an older Fitz looking back on his youth, and sticks to a narrow first-person voice: no 'as I learnt later' or 'if only I had known that'. This means that there's considerable tension. I'm not sure it accounts for Fitz's precocity, though perhaps his pariah status and solitary nature inclines him to observe, reflect and extrapolate rather more than the average pre-adolescent.

The vast 'Elderlings' series of novels -- eighteen to date, mostly over 500 pages long -- is immensely popular, and has been recommended to me by many people. Assassin's Apprentice, I'm afraid, seems likely to be my sole foray into it. Fitz simply did not engage me, and the setting was so grim. Child abuse (emotional rather than sexual), animal abuse and death, child soldiers (what else is a pre-teen assassin?), enforced personality change (using magic to turn an enemy into a 'lapdog'), zombies ... No, thank you. I was intrigued by the character of the Fool, who does not seem quite human and who declaims prophecies in doggerel: but not enough to persevere with the multi-trilogy series.

Purchased in 2014 ...

2022/75: The Dark Between the Trees -- Fiona Barnett

The wood was a liar, but beneath that was buried something true, and fascinating, and the wood was telling her what it was, if only she could tune into it properly, or decipher it. [loc. 829]

In 1643 a small company of Parliamentarian soldiers is ambushed on a hillside somewhere in Northern England. Their only hope is to seek shelter in nearby Moresby Forest. Never mind that the locals tell stories about terrible secrets among the trees...

In 21st-century England, five women pass through the boundary fence and into Moresby Forest. Dr Alice Christopher, historian, has devoted her career to the lost soldiers. Why did seventeen men enter the wood, and only two emerge? Dr Christopher is accompanied by Nuria, a PhD student; Sue, from the Ordnance Survey, who haven't published a map of the wood for fifty years; and Kim and Helly, representatives of the National Parks authority. The women have GPS, and phones, and metal detectors: and it's not a very large wood ...

This was slow and spooky. I was inescapably reminded of The Blair Witch Project, though for reasons of ambience and forestry rather than anything more specific. The narrative cuts between the women and the soldiers, which heightens the suspense. It quickly becomes clear that there is something unnatural about Moresby Forest, and the two parties each recount tales of witches, of a medieval charcoal-burner whose family might have died of plague, and of a fearsome beast known as the Corrigal. Around them, trees appear and disappear. Gradually, each party – the all-female expedition and the all-male military company – diminishes …

Some interesting themes here: the different ways in which leadership works in the two companies are especially well-drawn, with Alice’s obsessive curiosity in strong contrast to Captain Davies’ sense of duty to his men. The women are dismayed by the failure of their technology: the men turn to prayer, which is as good an option as any.

There are evocative descriptions of the forest in both narrative threads, but – perhaps because of the aforementioned oddities of that forest – there is very little sense of season. Anyone who’s walked in a forest knows it’s a very different place in spring than in autumn: but the forest that the characters are walking through is timeless, reminiscent of Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, and seems to manifest its own microclimate. I didn’t get much sense of the characters’ physical appearances, either, or of their lives outside the forest: even Alice, perhaps the most detailed of the characters, was described more in terms of academic grudges than everyday life. I think that sense of isolation was part of the story, but it made the characters less engaging. And I didn't find the (fairly abrupt) conclusion wholly satisfying, but it was logical.

Thanks to Netgalley for the free ARC in exchange for this honest review. UK publication date is 13th October 2022.

2022/74: The Assassins of Thasalon -- Lois McMaster Bujold

The god’s Presence had to be a devastating certainty to every person there, Sighted or not, though some might not quite recognize the source of the awe that scraped on their souls so rawly. Foretaste of death. Too much World beyond the world for mortal minds to encompass. [loc. 3526]

Set two years after The Physicians of Vilnoc, this is a novel rather than a novella, with plenty of intrigue and action. Penric (and Desdemona, his chaos demon) are comfortably settled in Orbas. Penric's wife Nikys is pregnant with their second child. Her brother Adelis, approached by agents of their homeland Cedonia, is attacked by a sorcerous assassin: only Penric's presence, and Desdemona's power, saves his life. Penric would rather rid the assassin of her demon, thus making her a secular problem, and return to his books. But the White God refuses to take the demon from the assassin, a young woman named Alixtra: and Penric, Desdemona, Alixtra and her demon, and a charmingly rustic saint, head for Thasalon to unravel the assassination plot and, perhaps, the machinations of the god.

There they encounter Adelis' excellent fiancee, Lady Tanar, and her secretary Surakos Bosha (both introduced in The Prisoner of Limnos) and are caught up in the aftermath of another, more successful, assassination. After which matters become extremely complicated.

This isn't, or isn't only, a murder mystery. Both assassins have very good reasons for their acts; various villains have convoluted and well-established webs of influence; Pen and Des find their responsibilities, as well as their sympathies, changing rapidly. Kindness, compassion and mercy are set against ruthless ambition and greed: and here, in this novel, with the direct influence of gods as well as mortals, good triumphs over evil. Though nothing in The Assassins of Thasalon is quite as black and white as that.

Comforting, amusing, well-written and theologically intriguing: an enjoyable read.