2021/158: Picasso, I Want My Face Back -- Grace Nichols

O England
Hedge-bound as Larkin
Omnivorous as Shakespeare.
[from 'Outward from Hull']

I'd previously encountered the 'Weeping Woman' poem for which the collection is named, though couldn't recall where: it may have been when it was Poem of the Week in the Guardian, in December 2009. The poem-sequence is effectively a monologue by Dora Maar, Picasso's lover and the model for Weeping Woman: I do remember being struck by the line 'He might be a genius but he's also a prick'.

I find it challenging to review a collection of poetry, especially one as wide-ranging as this: Nichols interweaves art, landscape, memory and the female experience -- the latter especially in the 'Laughing Woman' series of poems -- and gives voices to subjects and objects as diverse as Ophelia, the Empire State Building and Tracy Emin's Bed. Her snapshots of life are vivid (for instance, a poem about how to cross a road in Delhi) and her evocation of a trip into the interior of Guyana, where she was born, makes me crave an experience I've never had. I think my favourite in this collection, though, is the title track, the shifting tone and perspective of Dora Maar celebrating and bemoaning her fame, and reclaiming her self.

Fulfils the 'Poetry Collection by a Black Woman' prompt for the Reading Women Challenge 2021.

2021/157: Sorcerer to the Crown -- Zen Cho

In truth magic had always had a slightly un-English character, being unpredictable, heedless of tradition and profligate with its gifts to high and low. [p. 22]

I'd started this novel several times and hadn't engaged: it must have been a case of 'right book, wrong time' because when I settled down with it, I was delighted. Yes, the premise (Regency England, with magicians) is reminiscent of other works, most notably Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but the execution is very different. Cho's protagonists -- Zacharias Wythe, a freed slave who has become Sorcerer Royal, and Prunella Gentleman, a young woman whose English father and Indian mother are both dead, leaving her to assist at a school for 'gentlewitches' -- have to maintain good manners in the face of constant microaggressions. Their guardians (Sir Stephen, who purchased Zacharias -- though not his parents -- as a boy; Mrs Daubeney, who tells Prunella to eat with the servants) have given them some degree of social standing, but have also made it extremely clear that this kind benevolence is contingent on good behaviour. And both have secrets: Prunella's concerns the stones she has, more or less, inherited from her parents, while Zacharias has made a terrible bargain with his late master's familiar, the dragon Leofric.

British magic is draining away, a crisis that most members of the Society for Unnatural Philosophers blame on 'woolly Afric' Zacharias. Zacharias, having identified the proximate cause for the decline in magic if not the rationale behind it, is saved from a magical assassination attempt by Prunella. In turn, he agrees to bring her to London and help her learn magic -- an option not usually available to young women, since magic is very much a man's world in the British Empire. Indeed, the most-practiced spell at Mrs Daubeney's school is the 'seven shackles', which 'If practised regularly, the exercise will extinguish seven of the most common types of magic of which the mortal frame is capable'.

Enter Mak Genggang, a powerful witch who has come from Malaysia by way of Fairyland to confront the Sultan of Janda Baik about his attempts to enlist the Society's help against a group of female magicians. She provides Prunella and Zacharias with a great deal of food for thought. Not least among her pronouncements is that 'all the greatest magic comes down to blood,... and who knows blood better than a woman?': an axiom which enables Prunella to unlock the secrets of her heritage, and incidentally be one of the few Regency heroines to allude to menstruation.

The women in this novel are seldom helpless, and are determined to get what they want. Prunella, in particular, is ruthless and (according to Zacharias) amoral: there's one incident which made me queasy, where she's faced with a deadly choice and chooses the lesser (but in some ways less forgiveable) sacrifice.

Sorcerer to the Crown depicts a magical crisis and features a romantic sub-plot, but it also addresses colonialism, sexism and racism, There are some horribly credible period-typical attitudes here, and the measured cadences of Cho's prose don't make it any more palatable: but there is also an ending that is both traditionally happy and narratively satisfying. I'm now looking forward to reading The True Queen.

2021/156: Elder Race -- Adrian Tchaikovsky

I am only now ... beginning to realise just how broken my own superior culture actually was. They set us here to make exhaustive anthropological notes on the fall of every sparrow. But not to catch a single one of them. To know, but very emphatically not to care. [p. 148]

Lynesse Fourth Daughter, accompanied by her laconic companion Esha Free Mark, is on a quest: a demon is threatening the land, and she seeks the help of the fabled sorcerer, Nyrgoth Elder, who aided her family centuries ago against the evil Ulmoth. The sorcerer, when they find him in his forbidding tower, is seven feet tall, horned, and wears 'slate robes that glittered with golden sigils'.

Nyr Illim Tevitch, anthropologist second class of Earth's Explorer Corps, is woken from his long, artificial sleep by the outpost's caretaker routines. At first he thinks this might mean the return of the Explorer Corps, but there's been no communication from offworld in nearly three centuries. He's been abandoned, and the locals -- whose culture, and language, has evolved in leaps and bounds since he last mingled with them -- want his help. Lyn speaks of magic and demons, but Nyr is a scientist and a scholar, as he tries to explain.

Unfortunately both those words translate as something like 'wizard'.

On one level this is a straightforward, and very entertaining, exploration of the old axiom that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. (There's a bravura chapter where Nyr's explanation of colonisation is shown next to what Lyn hears. A great deal is lost in translation, as it were, though Nyr is speaking the local language as best he can: he doesn't understand the nuances or allusions in what he's saying.) On another level, it's a story about different ways of looking at the world; and on yet another, it's about Nyr's appalling loneliness and depression, and how he decides to deal with it. He has an enviable device, a Dissociative Cognitive System, which is supposed to cut him off from his feelings so he can make rational decisions: he is, perhaps, overreliant on it. (He tries to explain depression to Lyn, but what she hears is a tale about a beast that ceaselessly pursues and torments him.) The DCS can't be used constantly, though, and sometimes it is better -- healthier and more useful -- to experience the emotion than to block it out. (I say this as someone who has experienced mental health issues for much of my life.)

There are two narrative voices: Lynesse in third-person past tense, and Nyr in first-person present. I wonder how differently the story would read if these were switched: if we had Lyn's stream-of-consciousness rather than her framing of the story, and Nyr's mostly-dispassionate reflections on his actions.

This is a short novel, barely more than a novella, and it could easily have been a long one: I'd have loved to read more about Sophos 4, with its vestiges of high technology and its complex matriarchal society, the echoes of Earth culture (what is the red face that now appears on funerary urns?) and the various genetic modifications that have been made to the planet's inhabitants. But the story of Nyr and Lyn is contained and complete, and though it doesn't wrap everything up it does resolve in a very satisfactory way.

2021/155: Old Baggage -- Lissa Evans

‘You’re a very disputatious woman,’ he said, as if that were a slur. [loc. 2189]

This is, chronologically, the first in the loose trilogy that continues with Crooked Heart and V for Victory, both of which I read in 2021 during pandemic lockdown. Old Baggage is at once more and less cheerful: it's set before WW2, and focusses on women's rights, especially the multiple campaigns for female enfranchisement.

The setting is Hampstead in 1928, and the protagonist is Mattie Simpkin, a single woman in her late fifties who is somewhat adrift, nostalgic for the glory days of the suffragettes. She lives with her friend and lodger, Florrie Lee (known as 'the Flea'), whose support goes largely unacknowledged. When Mattie encounters a fellow campaigner from the old days and realises that the young women of 1928 lack direction and drive, she sets up a girls' club called the Amazons. The first recruit is a young woman named Ida: later come others (including Winnie and Avril who also appear in V for Victory). Mattie's Amazons gain healthy exercise and life skills: they also attract the attention of the Empire Youth League, a militaristic youth club run by a former comrade of Mattie's. All might yet be well, except for the insidious presence of Inez, the daughter of yet another suffragette -- and of a man who was very dear to Mattie.

There is much to like about this novel: the centring of female experience; the middle-aged protagonist looking back on the days of bread and roses; the small tragedies (the old baggage of love, loss, injustice, imprisonment) that Mattie and the Flea carry with them; the gaps between Mattie's self-image and her tactless, sometimes cruel behaviour. When catastrophe strikes, it's a small, domestic sort of catastrophe, an error of judgement rather than a deliberate betrayal -- though none the less painful for that. There's a good London ambience, too, though less so than in V for Victory: Mattie lives a more rarified life than Vee.

Once I'd finished this, I went back to check a couple of references in the other books and ended up rereading most of V for Victory, which is certainly my favourite of the three: really good, though, to see some of the characters from Old Baggage showing up as grown adults, in a world changed in ways they could barely have imagined.

2021/154: Weave a Circle Round -- Kari Maaren

"She time travels constantly. She does it because she can’t. Every so often, the insanity spills over into my life, and I find myself doing something I can’t be doing either.” [p. 121]

Freddy Duchamp is 14, Canadian, and lives with her little sister Mel ('treacherous genius') and her detested step-brother Roland ('shambling mess'). Their parents are ... extremely hands-off, and certainly don't notice or care when some peculiar people move into the house round the corner. Josiah seems more or less normal: Cuerva Lachance (Freddy finds it impossible not to use her full name) is charismatic, eccentric and chaotic. Freddy finds them intriguing and likeable, until Josiah starts trying to be her friend at school, which interferes with Freddy's strategy of remaining below the radar of her classmates. One concussion later, Freddy wakes up a very long way from home, and discovers that Josiah and Cuerva Lachance have different names -- names that are familiar from films and books ...

(I suspect I originally wishlisted this charming YA novel because of those names, but I had forgotten my rationale by the time the price dropped: so the big reveal was a big reveal, and I would rather not spoil it for anyone else.)

This was a delight, anyway: time loops, the power of story, the tensions between chaos and order, and some excellent historical vignettes. I was reminded of some of Diana Wynne Jones' novels, and slightly of Neil Gaiman's work too. Freddy is a likeable and effective narrator, who realises over the course of the book that she needs to change, and who is instrumental in rebuilding relationships within her family as well as, y'know, making a cosmic difference. I also liked Roland's evolution from shambling mess to sharp-witted gamesmaster -- a role that becomes highly significant -- and the glimpses of Mel's problematic role in the family.

My only major criticism would be the continued absence of Freddy's mother and stepfather. In a Diana Wynne Jones novel I'd probably interpret their uninvolvement as the result of a spell (though, hmm, Time of the Ghost), but that doesn't seem to be the case here. And why have the authorities not noticed or acted?

Highly recommended, regardless of that issue: I hope to read more by Kari Maaren.

2021/153: The Christmas Murder Game -- Alexandra Benedict

She would have liked to be a snowflake in the drifts that lined the road. An individual lost among many. She’d like to not be seen ever again in a whiteout of her own life. If she always felt cold, then she wouldn’t know when the sun wasn’t shining. [loc. 1267]

Lily Armitage is, despite her inclinations, spending Christmas at Endgame House, her late aunt's mansion in the snowbound Yorkshire Dales. It might be better if her aunt Liliana was still alive, or if Lily herself didn't associate the house with her mother's Boxing Day suicide in the maze twenty-one years ago. And it would certainly be better if Lily's cousins -- mean girl Sara, withdrawn Gray, brothers Tom and Ronnie, Rachel who's brought her wife Holly -- were less toxic.

Aunt Liliana hosted an annual Christmas mystery game, with twelve clues and twelve keys. Even dead, she is domineering, and this year's game goes ahead despite her recent death. The stakes are higher now, though: not only will the winner inherit Endgame House, but Lily believes that the mystery of her own mother's death will be explained.

And then the mysterious deaths begin ...

I certainly missed a lot of the allusions and playful references here: Benedict has woven in anagrams and titles of Christmas murder mysteries throughout. I'm not sure, either, that the clues can be decoded by the reader: for me, the interest was in watching the characters react to and interpret each of the sonnet-clues. Marvellously atmospheric, very wintry (Christmas cheer is unsurprisingly thin on the ground), and with some unexpected relationships revealed as the novel draws towards a close.

Many of the characters (especially Sara) are pretty unpleasant, and those who aren't actively nasty don't have a great deal to contribute to the plot. I'm not sure I liked Lily, but she's an interesting character: a designer of baroque dresses, bisexual, introverted, trapped in her memories.

I love Alexandra Benedict's writing, but didn't enjoy this as much as The Beauty of Murder or Jonathan Dark, or the Evidence of Ghosts: those novels had supernatural aspects and an unsettled ambience, while the horrors in The Christmas Murder Game are all human.

2021/152: Lavondyss -- Robert Holdstock

'Each of you was born with memory of the same ancient event, and the abundance of later myths and legends that had developed from it...Lavondyss for you – for all of us – is what we are able to remember of ancient times ...’ [p. 398]

Having reread Mythago Wood, I found myself craving the Ice Age and the multiple circling-backs of Tallis' story in Lavondyss. Tallis is the sister of Harry Keaton, Stephen Huxley's companion in the earlier novel. Guided by a letter written by her grandfather in the margins of a book of myth and legend, she develops a rich and strange personal mythology, donning hand-made masks to channel different voices, and discovering the secret names of the fields and streams around the village where she lives. She encounters, and impresses, an aged Ralph Vaughan Williams: she misses her brother, and wants to find him again: she catches a glimpse of a dying warrior, and falls in love with him. And she tells stories that she doesn't understand ...

Lavondyss revisits and reshapes the themes of Mythago Wood: here, the siblings are bound by love instead of envy; the female protagonist is more powerful than anyone else; there is more sense of the 'present' (the 20th century) informing events, and of 20th-century thoughts being available in the deep past at the heart of the forest. And Lavondyss, that deep cold heart, is an atavistic memory of the never-ending winter of the last glacial maximum, a place of horror and honour, a place where the cruel origins of stories about princes and castles can be revealed.

Here's my review from my last reread, back in 2010. I have a clear memory of Rob telling me that it wasn't a time loop, which I found immensely comforting: but apparently I did not have that memory then, and Rob died in 2009 ... Have I created a comforting memory, or did I simply forget that conversaion back then, and remember it again more recently? .. .I also note that this time around I recalled slightly different aspects of the novel, but it was distorted out of shape: I'd thought the majority of the story took place within the wood, but Tallis doesn't enter the wood until nearly two-thirds of the way through.