2012/27: Flora's Fury -- Ysabeau Wilce

A famous criminal, assisted by a protection egregore and a flying octopus, have a knock-down drag-out ruckus in my lobby over a girl hiding behind a false name, who has arrived at my hotel in the company of a Pacifica express agent. Most people would be very curious. But I am not nosy by nature. All I care about is who is going to pay for the damages.

Flora's Fury: How a Girl of Spirit and a Red Dog Confound Their Friends, Astound Their Enemies, and Learn the Importance of Packing is the third in the series that began with Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog, continued with Flora's Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room), and (thankfully) shows no signs of stopping, or even slowing down.

Hurrah!

Flora is no longer a schoolgirl. Now she is Lieutenant Fyrdraaca, seconded to the Commanding General's Office -- which means she's reporting to Buck Fyrdraaca, the woman who Flora has only recently discovered isn't her birth mother at all. Her true mother, Azota a.k.a. Tiny Doom, was allegedly executed by the Birdies -- Califa's Huitzil overlords -- shortly after Flora's birth. Flora's increasingly certain that Tiny Doom is alive and well, and she is not impressed by her mother's failure to make contact. Indeed, the novel opens with Flora preparing to locate Tiny Doom by arcane means. Circumstance, in the shape of unscheduled baby-sitting duties, intervene. But Flora doesn't see why one can't take one's five-month-old half-brother to a secluded Grotto to perform a magickal working ...

Flora is an excellent heroine: resourceful, witty, determined, romantic ... and bloody livid about all the ways in which she's been lied to. She isn't a Fyrdraaca at all, as she'd thought all her life; her erstwhile beau Udo has run off with the Warlord's granddaughter, Zu-Zu (who unwittingly (?) sticks the knife in by dressing as Azota for a masquerade); her military career consists not of glory, but of child-minding and running errands; she is a pawn in grand political schemes that she barely glimpses and certainly hasn't consented to be part of; and, though prone to travel sickness, she's travelling -- by land and by sea -- for almost the entire novel.

Like all good quest novels, Flora learns about herself as much as about her world and her circumstances. Part of that process is accepting that she's been wrong about a lot of things. And in the process of discovering (some of) what's really going on, she pays a price that's higher than she realises.

Still! In Flora's Fury, Wilce tantalises with further hints at the history and geography of this alternate world where the Aztecs (or their cognates) rule the southwest of the North American continent, and the United States never came into being. There are pirates, zombies and shapechangers (some better-dressed than others); there are dime novels (including the 'Red Top Rev, Vigilante Prince' series, based loosely on Flora's father, which I really want to read); there are supernatural entities from Springheeled Jack to the Lord of the Smoking Mirror; there are love spells, crossroad magicks and the Anima of Califa's greatest hero (who is fond of bathing). Flora faces it all indomitably, determined to make her own fate.

And now I have to wait for the next instalment ...

2012/26: Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project -- Spencer Wells

People constructing family trees are typically investigating events from the past few centuries, while population genetics starts there and pushes further into the past. Most of us have a sense of our family history, but eventually we all hit a brick wall. Our DNA breaks through that wall, providing a unifying path that leads from the present into the realm of deep ancestry. (p. 13)

This book is effectively The Genographic Project for Dummies: no scientific background required. Spencer Wells is the director of the Genographic Project, which was founded by National Geographic and IBM as a non-profit genetic anthropology study, attempting to map historical human migration. Proceeds from the sale of DNA-testing kits go to 'help indigenous peoples around the world' (174). Unlike its predecessor, the Human Genome Diversity Project, it does not concern itself with patenting genetic data or preserving cell lines.

The story so far, grossly oversimplified: about sixty thousand years ago (two thousand generations), the ancestors of the human race began to migrate from Africa. As they spread out over the world, their DNA mutated ('genetic drift'). These mutations, which persist in the DNA of an individual's descendants, are genetic markers which can be used to identify migration patterns. Small groups -- and they were all small groups: "Genetic data suggest that the human population size crashed to as few as 2,000 people around [the time of the last great ice age]" (p. 139) -- could be cut off from other groups by mountains, glaciers, rivers. If an individual in that group had a particular genetic marker, all his or her descendants would also have that marker. (Male progeny will carry it on the Y chromosome; female in mitochondrial DNA.) So everyone with the marker would have a single ancestor. By mapping the geographical distribution of a marker, and subsequent mutations, it's possible to identify roughly when and where that single ancestor lived.

Wells explores the science and culture of genetic genealogy in a number of case studies: 'Odine', a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings; 'Margaret', Wells' grandmother, whose DNA is a potted history of agriculture; 'Phil', whose Native American ancestry links him to Siberian populations; 'Virumandi', an Indian man who shares a rare genetic marker with some aborigines in Australia; and 'Julius', a Tanzanian hunter-gatherer whose DNA is used to illustrate the vast genetic diversity within Africa.

One thing I learnt as a result of reading this book is that there are actually only two types of people: those who think the Genographic Project is dead cool, and those who think it isn't. I am firmly in the former camp, not least because I know so little about my family history.

Well, I know a bit more now. I am (like 5-10% of the population of Great Britain) in haplogroup K, which means I have discovered a new cousin and that I share a common ancestor with a great many Ashkenazi Jews. Having opted for the basic, anonymous test, I was intrigued enough to sign up for Family Tree DNA, which might make it possible for me to trace my maternal grandmother's ancestry.

Deep Ancestry emphasises the is sometimes over-breezy, and sometimes poorly worded ("no two people look alike": er, you mean 'identical', don't you?) but it does what I've always loved in pop science books: it makes me want to know more, to learn, to understand.

2012/25: Runelight -- Joanne Harris

There's an old Northlands saying that goes like this: When lies don’t help, try telling the truth. Loki knew it well, of course, but much preferred his own version, which was: When lies don’t help, tell better lies. [location 8600]

It's three years after the (second) End of the World(s) (as recorded in Runemarks, the first in what I profoundly hope is an ongoing series riffing on Norse myth), and the repercussions of that apocalypse -- or, as Old Nan's rhyme has it, 'pucker-lips' -- are still rippling out across the world.

In the idyllic village of Malbry, Maddy Smith is still living with her father -- except that now it's her true father, the god Thor, who (like the other reincarnated Æsir gods) is struggling to adapt to mundane life. Thor is not wholly happy with the discovery that his prophesied son 'Modi' has turned out to be a female, Maddy. Little does he realise that the second son of the prophecy is not going to turn out entirely as hoped either.

Family matters aren't exactly working out for Loki, either: the Trickster finds himself embroiled once more in a steamy family saga, with ex-lovers refusing to accept perfectly reasonable explanations for his absence ("Be fair. I was dead --" "Being dead is no excuse!" (loc. 1185)), and children who are all too happy to acknowledge their parentage. "Dude. We're the Devourers." (loc 1144).

It is (as usual) a time of omens and portents. Old Nan's nonsense lullaby features three apocalyptic riders (Carnage, Treachery and Lunacy) and a nursery-rhyme muddling of myth and legend. Odin, old One-Eye, is dead, but his ravens (who appear, at least in Hugin's case, to have acquired broad Glaswegian accents) are still bright-eyed, curious, and prone to interfering in the affairs of mortals. It's the End of the bloody Worlds again, and Æsir and Vanir are ready to fight shoulder to shoulder -- assisted, this time, by the forces of Chaos. It's up to Loki to come up with a way to get them all to the battleground: to World's End, six hundred miles from Marbry, where Maggie Rede is living hand-to-mouth in the catacombs beneath the Universal City, hoarding the Book that is her most precious discovery, about to meet the man she'll marry.

What could possibly go wrong?

Runelight wouldn't be half as entertaining without a working knowledge of Norse myth and some idea of what happened in Runemarks. Armed with these, I found myself charmed, amused and full of admiration. Loki's tricks ring true: or possibly -- given how loaded a concept 'truth' is -- it's more accurate to say that they're in character, and would fit as easily into mythic canon as into the road-trip adventures of a motley crew of incarnated deities. Odin's long game is as carefully constructed as anything in American Gods, let alone in the original sagas. Maddy's conflicting loyalties (remember, she's not just half-god; she's a teenager, with all the emotional turmoil that can involve) are painfully familiar and have far-reaching consequences.

There are some likeable new characters (not least the short guy, Jolly, who is most definitely not a dwarf) and some interesting viewpoints -- for instance, the use of the word 'grooming' to describe Odin's role in Maddy's childhood. Though the term's commonly used now to describe paedophilia, it does have overtones of manipulation and hidden agendas, which are entirely apt. Harris doesn't deal in black and white: none of her characters are wholly good or wholly evil, and most of them -- god or mortal -- grow, or at least change, over the course of the novel.

It is also immensely, joyously funny, despite the odd apocalypse and the usual betrayals, misunderstandings, family feuds and nasty scraps of myth. Highly recommended.

2012/24: Our Tragic Universe -- Scarlett Thomas

Problems with this novel (again). The items on it were: It is boring; it has no focus; it is self-indulgent; I hate the central character; it’s too depressing; no one wants anything; no one does anything; there are no questions to be resolved; there is too much narration. Then I thought this would make a nice opening to Notebook, so I pasted the whole list onto the first page. I smiled at my own audacity. Surely no one, not even the most metafictional and post-modern of writers, had ever begun a novel with a list of its own faults? (p. 170)

Meg, a blocked novelist, is trying to review a book for a national newspaper. The book is about postmortality, with the central premise that everyone is 'currently living, and re-living, in what I will term the Second World, which has been created by the Omega Point as a place where you prepare for the rest of eternity' (p. 40). Meg has plenty of time to spin notions from this theory (another excellent way of avoiding writing her Great Novel) while trying to avoid the rather more pressing issues of her dysfunctional relationship with Christopher ("if I could kiss someone else, then I could never kiss Christopher again. In the last five months he hadn’t really noticed this." (p.20)), her friend Libby's inability to choose between her lover and her partner, and Meg's own directionless life.

This is a storyless story, a rambling exploration of the esoteric and the eccentric (Chekhov's Letters, the Cottingley Fairies, a beast that may or may not be roaming Dartmoor, a prophecy made when Meg was younger ("'You will never finish what you start ... You will not overcome the monster. And in the end, you will come to nothing" (p.70)) and the mystery of the book she reviewed, which turns out not to have been sent by her editor at all.

It's a couple of weeks since I read Our Tragic Universe (mea culpa, am behind on my blog: hey ho) and more than any of the events that occur (more or less at random) in its pages, I recall a profound irritation with the ending, which felt too romantic to fit the rest of the novel.

But I do love the immediacy of Thomas' descriptions of the south Devon coast in winter, quiet and faded after the summer rush of the tourist season. I was charmed by Meg's dog Bess (possibly the most likeable character in the book). And I am amused by Meg's fascination with her own failure to write, which oozes verisimilitude:

I was always trying to make the novel catch up with my life, and then deleting the bits that got too close, wiping them out like videogame aliens in a space-station corridor. I still didn’t know what to do about it. I’d invented a writer character from New York who deletes a whole book until it’s a haiku and then deletes that, but then I deleted him too. (p. 35)

2012/23: The Hammer -- K J Parker

Gignomai picked up his book, but he’d lost interest in it long ago. He’d stolen it for Furio last year, because Furio liked books with knights and tournaments and castles and dragons. But most of the characters in it were just like his family, though the author didn’t seem to have realised that, or he wouldn’t have made them out to be heroes. (p.88)

Gignomai met'Oc is the youngest son of a noble family, living in splendid (and squalid) isolation in a nameless colony. The met'Oc family home is on the Tabletop, an easily-defended upland: the family's power, though somewhat in decline since their exile from Home, is maintained by their possession of the only firearms in the whole of the colony. The rest of the colonists eke out a hand-to-mouth existence, trading with Home for the manufactured goods that can't be acquired in any other way.

(The colony, by the way, occupies a small corner of the land formerly inhabited by the so-called Savages: as becomes clear later in the novel, the Savages couldn't give a damn about the colonists, because they don't believe the colonists are real in any significant sense.)

The novel opens with young Gignomai using a sledgehammer to crack a nut -- or, rather, solving the problem of a chicken-thieving wolf by overly drastic means. "Next time, he decided, I'll make sure I think things through." (p.7) Next time ... but next time is fourteen years later, and the collateral damage is proportionately higher.

The Hammer is a novel of three parts: 'Seven Years Before', 'The Year When' and 'Seven Years After'. It should come as no surprise that we don't learn what happened in that pivotal year until quite late in the book. Whatever it was, though (and it's not quite as grim as the linchpin of The Belly of the Bow), it's the straw that breaks Gig's back, sends him sneaking out past his father's sentries into the colony, with a stolen heirloom and a massive grudge against his whole family.

Gignomai is a likeable character, with friends who seem fond of him (some of the narrative is from their viewpoints). He's hard-working and surprisingly humble, though apparently unable to let go of a certain sense of noblesse oblige. He's not a typical met'Oc, though: instead of wanting to rule the colony, he comes up with a plan to make it independent. "The colony gets rid of Home, everybody gets the stuff they need – even the savages, so they’re doing well out of it. Everybody gains, nobody gets hurt. What could be better than that?" (p.131) Unfortunately, he doesn't realise -- or perhaps doesn't care -- that he's in a K J Parker novel, that nothing is ever that simple, and that no good will come of it.

There's rather more tidying-up, fewer loose ends, at the end of this novel than in some of Parker's earlier works: one might almost say that the motivations and morals are hammered home. (ahahaha). I've remarked before on Parker's tendency to use pronouns instead of names, and the inevitable confusions and misreadings that ensure: this is much less noticeable in The Hammer than in, for instance, The Company. And though the action, the scheming, the grand plan are necessarily at a smaller scale in Parker's standalone novels than in the Fencer, Scavenger and Engineer trilogies, there are advantages to this: The Hammer is a well-structured book that brings us closer to its protagonist than we ever were to Bardas, Poldarn or Vaatzes.

2012/22: The Kingdom of Gods -- N K Jemisin

"...you liked to kill people, back when you lived here. You would do tricks on them, sometimes funny tricks ... but sometimes people would die."
Still funny, I thought, but perhaps this was not the time to say such things aloud. (p.25)

The Kingdom of Gods opens with the words "There will be no tricks in this tale. I tell you this so that you can relax." (p.5). Are you convinced by this? The narrator of this novel is Sieh, the eternal child, the Trickster, and he turns an irreverent eye on the Three: Bright Itempas, Nahadoth the Nightlord, and Yeine, the Grey Lady, whose role is to provide balance.

Sieh has had millennia to come to terms with wanting what he cannot have. The Three are his parents, and the parent-child relationship is especially rocky when the parents are deities with their own conflicts and concerns. Oh, Sieh's tried growing up, assuming a more adult role ("I had grown up before, hundreds of times; I knew the pattern that my body normally followed" (117)). But something is happening to him that he cannot control -- something that may be connected with Shahar and her brother Dekarta, two mortal children of royal blood whom Sieh has befriended (or, perhaps, corrupted).

Sieh's unique status -- a god, but not one of the Three; a child, but not one who will ever grow up in any real sense -- makes him an informed, albeit biased, observer of a world in flux. The Arameri are not as powerful as they were when Yeine came to Sky as her grandfather's heir, in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Bright Itempas is no longer the sole deity, but one of Three -- and an outcast, trying to redeem himself by righting all the wrongs committed in his name. Shahar (named after her ancestor, the Arameri ruler who helped Itempas overthrow Nahadoth and murder Enefa) is destined to rule, but wants to be more temperate and democratic than any Arameri before her. And on the streets of Shadow, the terrestrial city above which the Arameri palace Sky still hangs, there's a groundswell of atheism.

Atheism is a tricky concept when gods, godlings, demons and mortals interact on a daily basis. Not believing in the gods doesn't make them any less real; doesn't make sense. One character describes himself as a 'primortalist':

It means 'mortals first' — neither an accurate nor complete representation of our philosophy, but as I implied, there are worse terms. We believe in the gods, naturally ... But as the Bright has shown us, the gods function perfectly well whether we believe in them or not, so why devote all that energy to a pointless purpose? Why not believe most fervently in mortalkind and its potential? (p.111)

It's another thing for Sieh to take into account in his altered state. Worship is nice ("Even gods need encouragement sometimes") but not essential. Trust is more important, but can he truly trust anyone? Even his mother Enefa deceived him, though Sieh has forgotten (been made to forget) the details of that deception. Shahar (and, to a lesser extent, her brother Dekarta) love Sieh but have their own intrigues to play out. There are gods whom Sieh does not know: there is the Maelstrom, an inchoate swirl of chaos from which the Three were born, with which he somehow resonates.

There are aspects of this novel that didn't quite convince me: there's a thin, razor-sharp line separating the sublime from the ridiculous, and a couple of climactic scenes teetered precariously thereon. Sieh, though, is a delight: a cynical trickster who nevertheless is determined to remain true to his nature. ("You’re careful to act impulsively — even though you’re experienced and wise enough to know better." (p. 324)) Of course, the trickster can be tricked: but there's always another card up his sleeve. Remember that opening assurance? Yeah, right.

2012/21: The Broken Kingdoms -- N K Jemisin

I am, you see, a woman plagued by gods. It was worse once. Sometimes it felt as if they were everywhere: underfoot, overhead, peering around corners, and lurking under bushes. They left glowing footprints on the sidewalks. (I could see that they had their own favorite paths for sightseeing.) They urinated on the white walls. They didn’t have to do that, urinate I mean; they just found it amusing to imitate us. I found their names written in splattery light, usually in sacred places. I learned to read in this way. (p.15)

Oree Shoth lives in Shadow, the city that was once Sky but is now shaded by the impossibly huge World Tree that sprang into existence at the end of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. It's ten years since the fall of the Arameri, and Shadow is swarming with godlings, the lesser children of the gods. Ten years ago, of course, there was only one god worth the name: Bright Itempas, the Skyfather. But Itempas, demoted to Dayfather, is now one-third of a trinity, the other gods being the Nightlord and the Grey Lady.

The Three don't much concern Oree. Blind (though always able to see magic) she makes a living selling statues and trinkets, and -- unlike Yeine, the protagonist of the previous book -- is firmly rooted in a network of close relationships. Her lover, Madding, is a godling; some of her best friends carry the blood of gods. And the mute, reckless house guest she rescued from a rubbish bin is definitely a god ...

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, despite its title, was claustrophobically focussed on the politics and power-plays in Sky, the city in the clouds. The Broken Kingdoms pans out to show the lives of ordinary folk in the terrestrial city -- though Oree is not exactly ordinary, and her house guest attracts attention from unexpected quarters. (It's interesting to see Oree's gradual recognition of characters who are already familiar to the reader: this second book does stand alone, but is greatly enriched by knowledge of the first.)

Oree is a delight. She's self-reliant and grounded (metaphorically, as well as literally!) in a way that wasn't an option for Yeine: she has a sense of humour, which was a luxury Yeine couldn't afford: she's a single woman who neither wants nor needs protection, and she's comfortable in her skin, her city, her difference.

Of course, gods and comfort go together like electricity and water.

Oree's heritage holds secrets, and she realises that she's a danger to those she cares for: worse, she is being used as a weapon. But she also learns that the gods are to be pitied as well as feared, and that she has the power to heal, as well as to harm. The focus of The Broken Kingdoms may be on Oree, and perhaps on the wider social transformations brought about by the events of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms: but the arc of the Inheritance trilogy concerns the Three, and this middle book progresses their story as well as Oree's own. It works on multiple levels: likeable and / or intriguing characters, a fascinating world, a murder mystery and an exploration of Big Themes (race, class, colonialism, gender, slavery, oppression) that doesn't detract from a damn good read.