2026/061: Eyeliner — Zahra Hankir

I found eyeliner in the Arab world’s deserts and in the savannas of Africa, in the hair salons of Iran, and in the alleyways of Kyoto. I found it on the faces of Indian storytellers, Latin American freedom fighters, and Palestinian activists.

A surprisingly wide-ranging and fascinating cultural history of eyeliner, from Queen Nefertiti (an influence on the author as a teenager) to New York drag queens. It begins with her own experiences as a British-Lebanese teenager, and covers the different types of eyeliner -- kohl, sormeh, kajal, and more, each with different origins and recipes -- and the manifold reasons for which people wear it. From ancient times, kohl was regarded as protective (studies have confirmed its antibacterial properties) as well as decorative: today, eyeliner is ubiquitous.

The book is organised geographically. Hankir starts with ancient Egypt and the bust of Nefertiti (with added Orientalism): then on, through the Wodaabe tribe of Chad (where it's the men who paint their eyes and flaunt their beauty); the use of sormeh as a political statement in Iran; use of kohl by both sexes in Jordanian Bedouin; Chola (Latinx) looks in California; kajal used on babies in India to ward off the evil eye, and in traditional theatre where it's used to blur gender roles as well as accentuate expressions; geisha traditions and colours, and more gender queering; drag queens in New York; Amy Winehouse and her legend; and the trend for ornate eyeliner 'graphics' on social media. 

There were a few points where connections were somewhat vague (commenting on Stevie Nicks and Patti Smith wearing eyeliner feels like commenting on random passers-by: it is, these days, more exceptional for a performer not to wear it!) but on the whole Hankir sticks to her thesis, which is that eyeliner is not only a cosmetic but a powerful connection to culture. She also interrogates the appropriation of Black and Asian trends by white influencers, the political and religious views on eyeliner in Islam (Muhammad is thought to have used kohl), and an expression of identity.

Written during the Covid years: Hankir thought it was a 'trivial' subject but her mother corrected her. 'A layered study of cultures of colour... that also brings delight to readers'. It delighted me.

2026/060: Titanium Noir — Nick Harkaway

“You’re the shock absorber. From the Titans’ point of view, you stop the masses from realising the extent of their subjugation. You relieve them of the need to exercise raw financial and political power in the protection of their interests where those interests collide with the law. But ... you also protect ordinary humans from the consequences of that subjugation as best you can. Yours is an equivocal profession. But I hear you’re not entirely an asshole.” [loc. 2879]

Cal Sounder, consultant detective, is hired to investigate the murder of a reclusive scientist, Roddy Tebbit, who died in his own home and apparently by his own hand. Complicating the matter is the fact that Tebbit was a Titan -- a recipient of a genetic therapy called T7 (possibly something to do with telomeres) which reverses ageing, increases muscle and bone density, and incidentally makes Titans literally larger than life. On the downside, it's extremely expensive; it affects memory; and the process can be very painful.

Being at least in part a noir novel, the city features prominently in Titanium Noir. (It's unclear what the city is called, or where it's located. All we know is that it lies on the shore of Lake Othrys.) Cal knows everyone in the city's murky underworld: bar owners, weapons dealers, criminal masterminds. He also knows some of the Titans: his ex-girlfriend, Athena, is the daughter of Stefan Tonfamecasca, the man who discovered T7, and is a Titan herself. And as Cal's investigation develops more twists and complications, he needs to talk to Tonfamecasca himself.

I enjoyed this a lot, despite the genre-typical violence. There are satisfying twists and surprises, a good use of SFnal ideas, and some fascinating minor characters. (At one point Cal is lectured on the Titans by a Marxist bar owner -- see the quotation at the head of this review). I liked the blend of noir dialogue, near-future setting and elements of Greek mythology. 

I've owned this book for several years: now congratulating myself on buying the sequel, Sleeper Beach, when it was on offer.

2026/059: A Legacy of Spies — John Le Carré

...how much of our human feeling can we dispense with in the name of freedom, would you say, before we cease to feel either human or free? [loc. 3719]

Published in 2017, and very much a post-Brexit novel: at one point Smiley says to Peter Guillam "was it all for England, then? Of course it was... But whose England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I'm a European."

Told from Peter Guillam's point of view: he's an old man now, retired to his family's farm in Brittany, but he's called back to London to explain his actions during Operation Windfall (as told in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which unaccountably I have not read in the last two decades) and refute the accusation that he's a 'professional Lothario hired by the British Secret Service, [who] roped in susceptible girls as unwitting accomplices in hare-brained operations that fell apart at the seams'. 

To some extent this is true (parallels can be drawn, as Le Carré reminds us, with the spy cops scandal) but Guillam nevertheless denies everything. He does not accept responsibility -- at least, not out loud -- for the deaths of other operatives or innocent dupes. His interrogators are dogged, but Guillam is still a professional, and still loyal to the mysteriously-absent George Smiley.

Le Carré's prose is in a class of its own: reading his work is a delight. He is the master of the balanced sentence, and his depiction here of an ageing intelligence operative, looking back on love and danger and subterfuge, is as compelling in its recreation of 1960s spycraft as in its exposition of Guillam's emotional landscape. I liked Guillam as a character, and found his inventive rebuttals of accusations very satisfactory. One interrogator tells him 'I'm trying to read your emotions. I can't. You either have none, or you have too many.' The latter, I think, is more accurate.

2026/058: Hidden in Snow — Viveca Sten (translated by Marlaine Delargy)

All these fucking men, exploiting vulnerable women. [p. 386]

First in a new series of crime novels set in the Swedish town of Åre, a quiet ski resort surrounded by mountains and forest. Hanna Ahlander's life has imploded, both professionally and personally: her boss has 'sent her home to think things over' and clearly wants her gone, and her boyfriend has broken up with her -- leaving her homeless. 

Salvation comes in the form of her sister Lydia, who suggests that Hanna spends some time at Lydia's lodge in Åre. Hanna finds herself helping the local police with a missing-person case, a young woman who disappeared on her way home from a party. She works with Detective Daniel Lindskog, who's recently become a father (though seems to prioritise his job over his family). Soon, she's asked if she'd consider transferring to Åre...

There were some interesting themes here -- the influx of migrants in Swedish society, the multiple ways in which men abuse and prey on women, the grandeur of nature -- but I disliked both Hanna (who takes a lot of risks, not all of them legal) and Daniel (who is prone to fits of rage, can't deal with the press, and keeps complaining of the effort of fatherhood while his girlfriend is left to do almost all the work). Sten's prose style (at least in translation) failed to engage me, and I wasn't a fan of the 100+ short chapters. I also felt that there wasn't enough foreshadowing of the villain: and I wasn't a fan of opening with the discovery of a body, in a flash-forward, before introducing the characters and the missing-person case. One last niggle: Hanna's ex is (justifiably) furious that she destroyed his clothes and shoes before leaving. He's threatening to report her to the police. But she has a minor car crash, and 'when he heard about the accident, all his anger melted away.' Yeah, right.

Oh, and the Kindle edition has some weird formatting -- place names in bold italic...

Lovely wintry atmosphere, great sense of the dangers of the natural world: but I would prefer it without these people in it.

2026/057: You Dreamed of Empires — Álvaro Enrigue (translated by Natasha Wimmer)

It never occurred to them, of course, that half the sauces of the dishes they had just eaten were moderately hallucinogenic, and thus their delectable sense of relaxation was in truth a welcome to the esoteric between-place where the Colhua permanently resided. [loc. 278]

I had been expecting a fictionalised account of Hernán Cortés' 'conquest' of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the so-called Aztec empire. (Enrigue points out that the inhabitants 'identified as Tenochca, the descendents of Tenoch': 'Aztec' is lazy shorthand by 19th century historians.) My expectations were subverted, exceeded and left by the wayside, for this is a manic and unpredictable novel: set on a single day (9th November 1519) when Cortés and his soldiers enter Tenochtitlán and meet Moctezuma.

Cortés, here, is less a conquistador than a slaver and pirate. His intentions have been overtaken by ambition, and by the support and influence of the local tribes. He has no idea whether they will be allowed to leave the city (which is a Borgesian labyrinth of corridors and rooms), and he doesn't realise that Moctezuma is less interested in the Spanish than in the cabuayos they rode in on. Moctezuma, meanwhile, is permanently high -- his shaman somewhat exasperated by his craving for more hallucinogens -- but sharp enough to deal conclusively with vexing family matters as well as with his barbaric guests.

Enrigue has immense fun with the scenario. He switches tenses, shifts focus, editorialises from his twenty-first century perspective, and has Moctezuma hearing T Rex's 'Monolith' -- perhaps what Enrigue was listening to himself, when he wrote.

I love this room, said Moctezuma, you can’t imagine how I miss being a priest. Where there were splotches of blood, he saw sprays of flowers. The withered fingers of the hands of great warriors sacrificed during the year’s festivals swayed pleasingly like the branches of a small tree to the beat of some music he couldn’t place, though in a possible future we would have recognised it. It was T. Rex’s ‘Monolith’. [loc. 1886]

(The lack of quotation marks, indeed of any conventional marking of speech, is a quirk of style that made me pay more attention to who was speaking, rather than on the rhythms of dialogue.)

You Dreamed of Empires strays far from the usual remit of historical fiction, but it's gloriously counterfactual and immense fun, vividly described (for instance, the reek of dried blood from the priests who sit near Captain Jazmin Caldera at dinner; the difficulty of cutting one's toenails with a dagger; the shadows cast by floating flowers in a pool) and exuberantly revolutionary.

2026/056: The Luminous Dead — Caitlin Starling

“That was the look of somebody resigned to being the monster they knew they were.”

Gyre lives on Cassandra-5, a planet with immense mineral wealth but little else to commend it. She takes a contract to explore a particular cave system -- dangerous, because the caves are often collapsed by native beasts called Tunnellers -- which will pay enough money for her to get off-world and search for her mother. She's been surgically fitted into a life-support suit, and she expects to find a full team supporting her by comms. Instead, she gets a single person: a woman named Em.

Neither Gyre nor Em has been wholly honest. Gyre's lied about her experience: Em hasn't revealed the true purpose of the mission, or the number of failed (and fatal) attempts already made. But it's Em who's in the position of power. She can order Gyre's suit to dispense drugs, sedating her: she can even manipulate the suit remotely, dragging Gyre along.

In the darkness of the caves, Gyre keeps feeling that she's not alone. That she's being watched. And she catches glimpses of things that can't be there -- that Em assures her aren't there. But she can't trust Em...

This is an immensely claustrophobic novel: Gyre imprisoned in her suit, unable even to touch her own skin; repetitive conversations between Em and Gyre; the physical dangers of the cave, and the possibility that Gyre has been exposed to something psychotropic. Gyre has no friends, and only the memory of her mother to motivate her. Em is an orphan, who's sent many to their deaths and seems likely to do the same to Gyre.

I found this slow, and often repetitive. There are only so many sumps Gyre could swim through before it felt tedious: there are only so many arguments that Gyre and Em can have about the earlier expeditions, and about whether Em is telling Gyre the truth. Perhaps if I had read the ebook rather than listening to the audiobook (excellently and emotionally read by Adenrele Ojo), I'd have skimmed... Psychological horror, in a science fictional setting, with just two characters: it's a bold debut, despite its flaws. I'm interested to read more by Starling.

2026/055: The Weaver of the Middle Desert — Victoria Goddard

She could weave those falling descants, those trilling calls, those infinitely varied notes into her work. Could she weave sound and silence together, craft a curtain that would keep a tent silent or hold the songs of mourning or merriment within its folds? [loc. 530]

Arzu is the eldest of the three daughters of the Bandit Queen, desert nomads whose world is strongly reminiscent of the Arabian Nights. Her younger sisters, Pali and Sardeet, have each had a novella to themselves (I find that I haven't read Pali's, The Warrior of the Third Veil), so it's Arzu's turn. But she is not as young nor as ambitious as her sisters. She's already happily married to a man of the clan, and her magic is founded on the gentle arts of weaving and threadcraft.

Nevertheless, when Pali -- back from warrior training -- suggests that they visit Sardeet, Arzu is happy to embark on the journey. It turns out that Sardeet's second husband is almost as awful, in different ways, as her first, and additionally has gone a-roving. The three sisters climb a magic beanstalk to find him...

This was sweet but slight: just what I needed, halfway through an unsettling and claustrophobic novel. It's really nice to find a fantasy protagonist whose ambitions compass home and family, who is happy with who and where she is. Pali will always be heroic: Sardeet will always be beautiful (and perhaps a little too trusting): Arzu... I think her gift is happiness.