2021/146: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants -- Robin Wall Kimmerer

The very facts of the world are a poem. Light is turned to sugar. Salamanders find their way to ancestral ponds following magnetic lines radiating from the earth. The saliva of grazing buffalo causes the grass to grow taller. Tobacco seeds germinate when they smell smoke. Microbes in industrial waste can destroy mercury. Aren’t these stories we should all know? [loc. 5324]

My 'dip-into' book for most of 2021: Kimmerer's essays and stories reward contemplation: I don't think I would have appreciated the book as much if I'd read it cover to cover without breaks.

Kimmerer is a professor of botany and forest ecology, who is also a citizen of the Potawatomi nation. She describes Braiding Sweetgrass as 'a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world. This braid is woven from three strands: indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story' [loc. 320] and combines folk tales and mythology with a profound understanding of ecology, botany and zoology. I was particularly intrigued by the ways in which traditional First Nations practices reflect a balance, almost a symbiosis, between humans and the plants and animals on which they rely. For example, the Nechesne people of Oregon greeted the annual return of salmon to the river, but didn't start fishing them until the fourth day after the first fish had been seen. This ceremony meant that more fish made it upstream into the forests, bringing nitrogen and nutrients as well as spawning the next generation. I was struck by the reciprocity inherent in this approach: a gift for a gift, a responsibility towards, well, food.

Kimmerer writes powerfully of her rediscovery of her own heritage: learning the language of her ancestors and marvelling at the world-view it facilitates. I shared her joy at discovering the word 'Puhpowee... “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.” As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term'. [loc. 996] And I was moved to tears by some of her descriptions of the wounded natural world, of the damage that has been done: some of it irreversible, but not all. Kimmerer's grief for what's been lost is honest, raw and painful, but she has practical suggestions for repair and reparation.

There were points at which it would have been easy to tip into sentimentality, especially when Kimmerer echoes the animism, and the anthropomorphism, of myth and story. But I felt this was balanced by her scientific background and by her knack for interpolating fascinating facts. This book made me want to walk in the woods, to immerse myself in the natural world, to turn my back on the city and marvel at the worlds in a yard of hedgerow, a muddy riverbank, a rotting log. The urge to roam is less practical these days than before the pandemic, but I am determined to reroot myself, however briefly.

Fulfils the 'Memoir by an Indigenous Woman' prompt for the Reading Women Challenge 2021.

2021/145: The Merlin Conspiracy -- Diana Wynne Jones

Blest London was quite a bit different because they’d never had the Great Fire. There were thatched cottages in Mayfair and the parks were all in strange places. [p. 312]

(Re)read immediately after Deep Secret: my memories, as usual with rereads lately, were extremely vague, but I'm not sure I noticed on first reading (nearly 20 years ago) how very different it is to Deep Secret. For one thing, it comprises two first-person narratives, both from teenagers: Arianrhod, known as Roddy, who's part of a peripatetic royal court in the Britain-analogue Isles of Blest; and Nick Mallory, late of Bristol and the Empire of Koryfos, who is still keen to be a Magid but who seems to have completely forgotten his beloved sister Maree ...

Roddy and her friend Grundo (whose mother is up to No Good) discover a dastardly plot against the Merlin, who has, in this world, equal status with the Archbishop of Canterbury. They become separated from the Court and embark on an epic quest-journey around the Isles of Blest, hoping for aid from several of Roddy's powerful relatives. (I had forgotten just how Powerful her grandfather was.) Eventually they invoke a wizard, and get Nick, who is still unable to travel between worlds on his own, but has nevertheless managed to get into plenty of trouble. Notably, he's apparently incurred the enmity of the powerful wizard Romanov, who lives on 'an island made from at least ten different universes in at least seven different centuries' because he is avoiding his (ex-)wife.

It's fair to say that Nick and Roddy do not immediately hit it off. There are plenty of distractions, though: dragons, imbued silverware, city spirits, a prehistoric ghost with a shattered hip (about whom I would happily read whole novels), and several personable animals including an elephant named Mini.

A friend suggests that the difference in tone and ambience is because this was published and marketed for a younger audience than Deep Secret, which was apparently intended for an adult audience. I still think it's odd that Nick has so thoroughly forgotten Maree that she doesn't rate a single mention in The Merlin Conspiracy. I did love the specifically British mythology and folklore, though, and the glimpses of this other not-Britain with its straighter coastlines and huge white church where Nick expects to see St Paul's Cathedral, and the royal Progress which keeps the realm healthy. There is also a subplot concerning magical influence, slavery and consent, which I think is well-pitched for a young adult audience without being grossly simplified.

And hey, it's Diana Wynne Jones: it felt like greeting an old friend after too long an absence.

2021/144: Deep Secret -- Diana Wynne Jones

...here you can turn five corners and still not make a square. [p. 117]

Reread for Lockdown Book Club. I first read this fairly soon after it came out, in 1997: I recall enjoying it a lot, but I hadn't felt the urge to reread, and had (as usual) forgotten a lot of the details of plot and character. I'd also let some period-typical attitudes (most blatantly the fat-shaming) and dated technology (faxes! backup discs!) wash over me. The past is a foreign country...

Rupert Venables, 26, is a Magid, charged with urging Earth (and some other worlds in the multiverse) 'Ayewards', towards magic and good. It's a hefty task even before his mentor Stan dies: and when Rupert is left to find a replacement Magid, assisted only by Stan's disembodied voice -- and taste for Baroque choral music -- he begins to feel out of his depth. Politics and lost heirs in the Koryfonic Empire, also in Rupert's remit, complicate matters: so does his weird neighbour Andrew. And when it turns out that Fate has drawn all five of the possible Magid candidates to an SF convention, for ease of assessment, Rupert finds himself very definitely floundering.

One of the Magid candidates is Maree Mallory, to whom Rupert takes an instant dislike: Maree is adopted, does not get along with her stepmother Janine, and is plagued by dreams of a thornbush goddess -- who may be related to the deity worshipped by the assassinated emperor of the Koryfonic Empire ...

All of which sounds horribly tangled in summary, but -- as is so often the case with Diana Wynne Jones' books -- fits together like the gears of some intricate mechanism. Deep Secret was marketed as a novel for adults, and it's arguably more complex than many of her YA novels: there are multiple viewpoints, unevenly represented, and several of the major events of the novel happen off-page, reported (with variable reliability) by the characters. There are some familiar tropes, such as the wicked stepmother and the ancient, malevolent goddess.

But the joy of this novel, for me, was the depiction of SF fandom in its natural setting. The book club consensus recognises at least one of the characters as someone we know in real life, and we have all stayed in convention hotels which feel non-Euclidian, unmoored from reality, and prone to sudden shifts. Deep Secret is a delight, despite its sometimes unkind depiction of fandom ('vast bosoms', filkers, social ineptitude, general weirdness): I was immediately eager to reread the sequel, The Merlin Conspiracy ...

2021/143: Mexican Gothic -- Silvia Moreno-Garcia

“I suppose now you realize we are not like other people and this house is not like other houses." [loc. 2971]

The setting is Mexico in the 1950s, opening in Mexico City but focussed on an isolated mansion near a decaying mining town. Noemí Taboada is a glamorous young socialite who enjoys parties, boyfriends, driving a convertible and studying anthropology. She's not best pleased to be summoned home from a party by her father, who is concerned about the wellbeing of her cousin Catalina. Catalina was always the imaginative one, beguiled by Gothic literature and fairytales: her recent letters imply that her English husband, Virgil Doyle, is planning to poison her. Noemí is packed off to High Place, the gloomy, sprawling home of Doyle and his family, to determine whether there's any truth in Catalina's fears.

Noemí is an interesting protagonist: somewhat impulsive, prone to rule-breaking, independent in thought and manner, but with a weary understanding of women's roles in patriarchal Mexican (and English) society. She realises the need to ingratiate herself with the Doyles: "women needed to be liked or they’d be in trouble. A woman who is not liked is a bitch, and a bitch can hardly do anything: all avenues are closed to her". [loc. 807] Catalina, by contrast, is two-dimensional. Her illness, and the brevity of Noemí's visits with her, don't give much opportunity for character to be revealed.

There's a distinct sense of menace to High Place, and a very real -- though far from predictable -- threat to Noemí and Catalina: but I found Moreno-Garcia's prose heavy and distancing. This is an atmospheric novel, with a well-paced ramping-up of mystery and dread: the comparisons to du Maurier are well-deserved, and I was also reminded of Shirley Jackson and her gift for revealing the terror of the ordinary. Yet Mexican Gothic didn't engage me as much as I'd hoped.

2021/142: Falling in Love with Hominids -- Nalo Hopkinson

...anywhere there’s water, especially rioting water, it can tattle tales to your mother. [loc. 2545]

Eighteen short stories by Nalo Hopkinson, all with some element of the fantastic, some quite slight, many foregrounding young black women, several featuring queer and poly relationships. There are stories of metamorphosis (I especially liked 'The Smile on the Face', which riffs on the idea that if you swallow a cherry stone a tree starts growing inside you) and transformations of other works ('Shift' is a reimagining of Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' from Caliban's perspective). SF tropes such as time travel, zombies, and genetic engineering are twisted into unexpected shapes, and elements of Caribbean folklore (Mama d'Lo, douen children) are given 'contemporary' settings.

That all sounds like a list: I'm not good at reviewing story collections, especially single-author collections where there is, perhaps, less contrast between stories and styles than in a multi-author anthology. I generally limited my reading to one story per session, but some of the stories have admixed in my memory.

That said, 'The Smile on the Face' -- which is a story about adolescence, about the cruelty of high-school bitchery, and about learning to love yourself the way you are -- left a powerful impression on me: definitely my favourite of the stories in here, though I suspect that others will deepen with rereading. 'The Easthound', a zombie-apocalypse story in which children, immune to a virus that transforms adults, survive in the ruins of a Canadian city, had a particularly effective and poignant twist. And 'Emily Breakfast', in which cats fly and chickens are descended from dragons, was a charming and cheering fantasy story with a queer setting.

Fulfils the 'Short Story Collection by a Caribbean Author' prompt of the Reading Women Challenge 2021.

2021/141: Dark Pattern -- Andrew Mayne

“I can’t find her in a lab,” I explain. “That’s not the way the Dark Pattern works. Sometimes you can see it. Other times you just have to be it.”
“The Dark Pattern? Do you even listen to yourself?” [loc. 3922]

Dr Theo Cray is on the trail of a serial killer who works in hospitals; he's also plagued by the fear that he's running out of time. He's certainly slipping up more than before, making mistakes because he's so convinced by his own theories. It takes a visit to his old mentor to shake him out of his own arrogance -- and even then he's convinced that only he can solve the case.

Theo is definitely falling apart in this novel, but he's still fascinating. I was surprised by the ending, but not wholly convinced. I've enjoyed this series -- even when, as with viruses and now hospitals, it's a little too relevant to Real Life -- and found in the four books a tragic arc of rise and fall, hubris, a good man trying to prevent evil and making moral compromises of his own. The scientific asides are excellent, too. Enjoyable, interesting, informative and well-written: I may return to Mayne's work, but for now I need more cheerful fare.

2021/140: Murder Theory -- Andrew Mayne

No good deed involving pseudo–mass murder and cannibalism goes unpunished. [loc. 2915]

Dr Theo Cray is called in by the FBI to investigate an inexplicable murder, at a site where murdered bodies were buried -- the victims of the villain in Looking Glass, which leads Theo to wonder if there's some connection to his previous case. The apparent perpetrator claims to recall nothing, and all his colleagues insist that the man they knew wasn't a murderer. But there's something weird showing up in his MRI. Theo also realises that there's a mysterious individual visiting murder sites. Could he have a rival -- or a fan?

This novel deals with viruses, which is a little too close to the bone at present. Still, I found Theo's investigations fascinating: and I watched his increasingly extreme, and increasingly macabre, methods with horrified fascination.

Lots of interesting science here, including an explanation of the Viking 'sunstone' (used for navigation in medieval times) and some speculation about the effects of our internal biomes, which made me feel somewhat queasy.

Ends on a fairly major cliffhanger, so I needed to read the fourth and final in the series ...