2024/145: Barrowbeck — Andrew Michael Hurley

There wasn't much in the way of entertainment in Barrowbeck. But I began to see that living there was all about distraction, warding something off, evading something, and that I'd been doing it myself without realising it. [loc. 2053]

Barrowbeck is a village somewhere on the Lancashire/Yorkshire border: a river runs through it, and the fells enclose and overshadow the houses. It is not the kind of place that attracts tourists. Barrowbeck is a series of thirteen stories, vignettes of life from the founding of the village (by refugees from a violent invasion) to floods and collapse in 2049. I suspect that the germ of the stories can be found in the shaman's pronouncement in the first tale: "All this would be theirs. The gods wanted nothing in return. Only that the valley-folk should always remember that they were custodians here. No. Servants.' [loc. 253]

And yet, after that ominous beginning, the events of the stories are not especially horrific. There's a stranger who's blamed for bringing ill luck to the village, a girl who may be possessed by something in the river, the ghosts of the fallen raising their voices in Easter hymns after World War I... Each story stands alone, unconnected to other characters or phenomena, and each has a unique ambience. Barrowbeck is very definitely folk horror, the horror of ... well, of folk: of people whose motivations are obscure and perhaps unnatural, of the times when the villagers' moods coalesce into a single urge, of the sense of some terrible power at the edge of vision.

I did enjoy Barrowbeck: Hurley's style is subtle and flexible. But, having read the author's three previous novels (The Loney, Devil's Day and Starve Acre), I'd expected more overt horror. Perhaps the real horror is most evident in the last couple of stories: the irreversible effects of the climate catastrophe, the world we will have lost.

Many of these stories appeared, in somewhat different forms, in the BBC Radio 4 series Voices in the Valley. I'm planning to listen to them soon.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 24 OCT 2024.

2024/144: The Wilding — Ian McDonald

The beauty and terror that welled out of this place took hold of Yeats’s mystic, holy Ireland, held it up and ripped it apart. Beneath its torn skin was old Ireland, deep Ireland, the Ireland buried in the bogs and beneath the fields of grazing, turned to leather and knot and iron-oak. Waiting down there. [loc. 2304]

Lough Carrow used to be a working bog: now it's a rewilding project, left to nature for two years during the Covid pandemic. Some of the locals mutter suspiciously about wolves being sneaked in while nobody was looking. Pádraig runs the Wilding, but most of the novel's from the point of view of Lisa, a young woman with a murky past, a stolen copy of Yeats' Selected Poetry and a place awaiting her at UCL. Lisa oversleeps after celebrating the latter, and thus gets landed with wild sleepover -- five twelve-year-olds and their three teachers, trekking through the bog and camping in its remotest corner.

The kids are a handful: all on medication, with mental health issues, traumatic histories and/or bad attitudes. But there are things even worse than adolescent children in the bog, and once Lisa and her cohort set off the pace of the story (if not of their trek) is headlong.

I heard the author reading from this at Worldcon and was gripped, though The Wilding was not quite what I was expecting. Lisa is a splendid character, backstory and backbone and some attitude of her own: her interactions with the kids shift in tone over the course of the novel but are always credible and human. The kids themselves are at first annoying but become individual, even likeable, with distinctive voices and very different perceptions of the world. The descriptions of the natural environment, of the silence and non-silence of the bog, of light on water and blurry motion at the edge of vision, are spectacular. And there are echoes of Yeats' poems throughout.

There's a reference to Pádraig 'checking for signs of incipient folk horror' when he touches base with the villagers, but The Wilding's horror is something older and weirder than a few peculiar locals. Some of those locals are very peculiar: I'm sure Dom Purvis and his maps and zones is a callout to Holdstock's Mythago Wood... McDonald has been one of my favourite authors for many years: though his scope here is perhaps narrower than in his best-known (SF) novels, his prose is as glorious as ever.

2024/143: Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic — Tabitha Stanmore

...it is not my place to say whether the magic practised by cunning folk was real: I don’t know, I wasn’t there. What we can say is that there was a variety of spells to draw on, and that they got results often enough to maintain belief in their efficacy. [loc. 599]

A social history of what Stanmore terms 'service magic': the everyday assistance offered by 'cunning folk', rather than learned magi or wicked witches. Cunning folk would help find a lost item, identify a thief, provide a healing potion, or tell a fortune. Midwives were often also cunning folk.

It's all too easy to think of witchcraft and magic in the medieval and Renaissance centuries as something to be feared, punishable by death. Stanmore draws on her research to argue that service magicians were seldom accused of malevolent magic. Indeed, one of the services increasingly in demand was curse-lifting and 'unwitching'. Many spells invoked saints or angels: religious faith and magic were complementary, rather than opposite, ways of understanding and affecting the world.

Stanmore recounts some fascinating cases in this book, and examines the portrayal of magic and magic-workers in early modern literature. She also points out that superstition is by no means extinct: 'In the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic many psychics reported being busier than ever: the online business-reviews website Yelp apparently saw searches for ‘Supernatural Readings’ more than double in April 2020, after lockdowns had been announced across the globe.' [loc. 3144]

This was an interesting read, though occasionally repetitive and sometimes a little discursive. Lots of intriguing research, though -- as Stanmore explains -- many of the cases are incompletely recorded. If there's a flaw in the book, it's her reluctance to explain how 'magic' had credible effects. There are a couple of instances where she suggests a real-world explanation for an outcome, such as leaving the most likely suspect last in a magical test to increase their nervousness and thus their likelihood of failing. (Granny Weatherwax would just call it headology.) Cunning Folk is frank about its focus on the social aspects of service magic, rather than the psychology of practitioners and their customers, and it's well-researched and referenced.

2024/142: Scarlet — Genevieve Cogman

‘No society that’s ruled by kings and vampires can ever be the right thing,’ Fleurette said firmly.
‘But can a society that sends innocent people to the guillotine be right?’ Eleanor asked. [loc. 4374]

In which Eleanor, a simple housemaid, is recruited by a dashing gang League of aristocrats to travel to France and aid in the rescue of a woman to whom she bears a striking resemblance: Marie Antoinette, the former queen, now imprisoned by revolutionaries. Why yes, this is the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, with the added twist of vampires -- the sanguinocrats* who live for centuries, are barred from holding offices of state, and who feed upon the living. Eleanor has the scars to prove it: being a blood donor was a requirement of her employment in the household of Lady Sophie, Baroness of Basing.

Eleanor isn't stupid, though she's young and rather naive at the outset of the novel. She quickly proves her worth to the League and to Sir Percy Blakeney. And she attracts the attention of Lord Charles Bathurst, aristocrat and scholar. When it comes to the crunch, though, Eleanor must (initially) rely on her own wits to escape Paris and her pursuers. Fortunately, she's a straight-faced liar: even more fortunately, she finds herself in a position to assist someone who can return the favour. And then some.

This is basically a heist novel with a long, dramatic pursuit through the sleaziest parts of Paris, in the shadow of Madame Guillotine. There are vampires and revolutionaries; there is plenty of opportunity for Eleanor to keep a cool head in the face of mortal peril; and there are moments when her inner voice sounds just like Irene from the Library. But that is not a bad thing.

This didn't grab me as much as I'd hoped, but it's the first in a trilogy and I already own the second, so qui vivra verra.

* Cogman's Afterword adds: 'the term ‘sanguinocrats’ was actually used during the French Revolution – admittedly in reference to the Jacobins who acquiesced in the September 1792 massacres'.

2024/141: Our Endless Numbered Days — Claire Fuller

I sat next to the fire and imagined our microscopic white and green island adrift in the blackness – an overlooked crumb, left behind when the Earth was gobbled whole by the Great Divide. My father told me many times that winter that the world ended beyond the hills... [p. 192]

Peggy is eight years old in 1976, living in north London with her concert-pianist mother Ute and her father James. James and his friends, the North London Retreaters -- who believe the apocalypse is imminent, most likely via economic collapse or a Russian nuke -- meet at the house, and Peggy is fascinated by their planning. Then something changes (Peggy doesn't understand what, but it's fairly obvious to the adult reader) and Peggy and her father flee to Die Hutte, deep in a German forest, for what is initially termed a holiday. Except that one day her father returns from the forest, weeping, and tells Peggy that the rest of the world has disappeared. They are alone in the forest: and so they remain for nine years.

Because the novel is not structured chronologically, we know from the start that Peggy does return to the world, to the North London house and her mother and a younger brother whose existence she never suspected. The story of how she left the forest, and of what happened to her father, alternates with her readjustment to the mundane world. It's partly a survival story (Peggy and her father used to watch Survivors on TV: I remember that programme) and partly a psychological study of obsession and self-delusion. The prose is great, and Peggy's account of life in Die Hutte reminded me at times of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle: the little rituals, the skew of her world-view, her focus on small elements of their environment.

I found the ending deeply unsettling, and in fact I think reading Our Endless Numbered Days made me feel differently about The House at the Edge of the World -- also about father and daughter, and about family relationships. It's unfair to draw a comparison, for the emotional tone is very different: but the finale of Our Endless Numbered Days, even with Peggy's aside that 'my brain plays tricks on me, that I have been deficient in vitamin B for too long and my memory doesn’t work the way it should', was horrific, powerful, and cast the whole story into a different light. Despite that, I'm looking forward to reading more of Claire Fuller's fiction, which I have been accumulating...

I bought this in November 2016, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/140: The Amber Fury — Natalie Haynes

This is why I like the play we’re reading. It’s about the things which can’t be forgiven, even if no-one meant to do the wrong thing. [p. 78]

Alex Morris is grieving the death of her fiance Luke. She moves to Edinburgh, where she studied, to take up a job teaching at a pupil referral unit. Her fourth-year class has five students, all with definite views on drama and plays (not Shakespeare, they've done him at school; not The Misanthrope, Mel 'can't stand' Kiera Knightly, who's on the cover of the film tie-in edition; not Jerusalem, because who cares about the state of England?). They end up reading Greek tragedy, which may be why everything goes horribly wrong.

The novel isn't told chronologically: we begin with Alex talking to lawyers, because one of the class has done something monstrous. We don't find out what has happened, or who has done the monstrous thing, until quite late in the book. Meanwhile, we (and the class) learn more about what happened to Alex, and why she goes to London every Friday and comes back the same night.

Alex, at least initially, is broken by grief: she doesn't really care about anything, which means that she makes mistakes in her handling of the fourth-year class. (We don't get to see any of her other classes, or anything about how well or how badly those go: the fourth years are the emotional focus of her work, and of the book.) Alex's narrative is punctuated by extracts from diaries written by the class at her behest: a lot of hinted backstory, but most of the focus is still on Alex and the plays they're reading and discussing in class. Haynes' afterword explains why she chose these plays: Oedipus for crimes committed in ignorance; Alcestis for love and self-sacrifice, the Oresteia for vengeance and difficult family relationships. Each of these speaks to the students in ways Alex probably never thought about.

This is a well-paced novel, though rather claustrophobic in its focus on Alex: the students are not as fully characterised, but they have distinct personalities. Haynes also depicts the dark and cold of an Edinburgh winter very vividly. (Maybe I don't want to move to Scotland after all.) And amid the monsters, there is kindness and support. If only it had been there sooner for the fourth-year class.

I bought this in May 2015, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/139: Forest of Memory — Mary Robinette Kowal

Have you turned off your Lens, turned off your i-Sys, stepped away from the cloud, and just tried to REMEMBER something? It’s hard, and the memories are mutable. The cloud is just there, all the time. You reach for it without thinking and assume it will be there. [p. 25]

Novella set a century or two in our future: Katya Gould is a dealer in Authenticities and Captures, seeking out old tech such as typewriters and selling them to collectors. She's fascinated by wabi-sabi, the marks of use and decay on an object: 'something that witnesses and records the graceful decay of life'. And she records everything she experiences, thinks, sees -- until she meets a man in the forest and he somehow severs her connection to ... everything.

Kowal explores our increasing reliance on technology and the way it distances us from the real world, and especially the natural world. Katya's abductor, who calls himself 'Johnny', at first seems to be hunting deer: but perhaps his real purpose out in the forest, out of the connected world, is something more like Katya's own.

The story is presented as Katya's account (typed on a 1918 Corona typewriter) of the days she spent in the forest with Johnny. She's constantly questioning her own memories, wondering what she has forgotten. And her fear of the forest, of a world for which she has no map, is vividly described.

I hadn't realised this was a novella when I started reading, so was surprised by what felt like an abrupt and sudden ending. When I thought about it, I realised that although Forest of Memory has the bones of a novel, it stands complete and solid in itself.

I bought this in March 2016, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/138: Miss Pym Disposes — Josephine Tey

If God did dispose -- as undoubtedly He did in the latter end -- then perhaps the disposing was already at work. Had begun to work when it was she and not someone else who found the [evidence]. It had not been found by a strong-minded person who would go straight to Henrietta with it as soon as she smelt a rat, and so set the machinery of man-made Law in motion. No. It had been found by a feeble waverer like herself, who could never see less than three sides to any question. Perhaps that made sense. But she wished very heartily that the Deity had found another instrument. [p. 123]

Miss Pym is a former teacher, now the bestselling author of a popular book about psychology. She visits the all-girl Leys Physical Training College at the behest of her old friend Henrietta Hodge, the Principal, who has invited her to give a lecture. Miss Pym is at first discomposed by the early-morning bells, the wholesome vegetarian diet, the lack of a reading-lamp in her room. She is a lonely woman, though, and welcomes the warmth, kindness and liking bestowed upon her by the students. Then a terrible accident occurs: and Miss Pym, with her close observations of students and staff, with her knowledge of human nature, cannot help but suspect that it is not an accident at all.

This is an unusual mystery novel, because the bad thing occurs very late in the book, and the guilty party seems evident. Tey's pacing is admirable, but it's her eye for character that impressed me most. Miss Pym is well aware of her own failings ('Lucy decided to forget her weight just this once and enjoy herself. This was a decision she made with deplorable frequency') and, later in the novel, berates her own inadequacy. ('As a psychologist she was a first-rate teacher of French'.) She interprets physical appearance as an indication of character, despite understanding that 'face-reading' is not regarded as a credible science, and is prone to forming snap judgements. By the end of the novel, Miss Pym's disposal -- her decision to act on the basis that the 'right' thing is not always the 'proper' thing -- seems monstrous. While Tey has told us that Miss Pym is sweet, kind and well-meaning, she has shown us Miss Pym's flaws in merciless detail.

Miss Pym Disposes is in some respects a dated novel: there are prejudices of race, class and nationality (Teresa Desterro, a talented and flamboyant Brazilian dancer studying at Leys, is known as the Nut Tart), and references to the friendship of head girl 'Beau' Nash and gym star Mary Innes as 'not normal... David and Jonathan'. Although the novel was published just after WW2, I suspect that it's set in the 1930s: there is no mention of the war, of rationing, of Germans being in any way undesirable as colleagues or friends. There are very few men in the novel: even fewer with anything approaching a role in the story. So perhaps the shadow of wartime is present after all.

I bought this in July 2018, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.