2017/81: Bellman & Black -- Diane Setterfield

What little there had been to frighten or pain him was left behind in the forgotten days of childhood: as a man he saw no reason to be afraid. Now some great hand had peeled back the kind surface of that fairy-tale world and shown him the chasm beneath his feet

Young William Bellman, aged ten, aims his slingshot at a distant rook and -- improbably -- kills it. He's full of regret: he didn't mean to ... but then a fever strikes, and he begins the process of forgetting.

This is Victorian England, and death is a fact of life. A stranger in black appears, first at Will's mother's funeral, and then at every other funeral Will attends. Nobody seems to know who the stranger might be. But one night Will, drunk and grieving after the death of someone close to him, encounters the black-clad stranger in a graveyard and makes a deal. True, he can't quite recall the details the next morning: but there was a deal, surely there was?

Will -- already a successful businessman, due to a series of convenient though much-mourned deaths that have catapulted him to ownership of the textile mill -- exerts all his commercial acumen, and ferocious self-discipline, to fulfil his part of the deal. The result is Bellman & Black: an emporium of funerary wares.

But there's this deal, or this opportunity ...

I didn't engage with this novel as much as I'd expected. Will is not an especially interesting character; the mysterious Black (whose nature's never explicitly stated) is a shadowy background figure until the denouement; the 'rook' vignettes between the chapters were fascinating and lyrical, but insufficient. There's a very Gothic feel to this novel, and some almost hallucinatory passages, but I found it strangely mundane despite its subject matter.

Also, despite marketing / categorisation, it is not a ghost story, and only very marginally 'horror'.

2017/80: The Furthest Station -- Ben Aaronovitch

It was no use pointing out that we were actually policemen, not gentlemen, because Nightingale has a very clear idea where one ends and the other begins. One day, I’m hoping, he’ll show me where that line is. [loc. 159]

Commuters on the leafier parts of the Metropolitan line are being abused by ghosts: the trouble is, nobody remembers their encounters for very long. Enter Jaget Kumar (British Transport Police) and Peter Grant (the Folly), who -- with the help of Peter's teenaged cousin Abigail, and minimal supervision from DCI Nightingale -- apply modern policing methods to the mystery, and find that the ghosts may have a mission that's a matter of life or death.

This is a slight novella, though it does contain multiple plot strands (not all of them resolved): I think it fits between Foxglove Summer and The Hanging Tree chronologically, but there's little reference to the larger arcs of the series (Lesley, the Faceless Man, Tyburn et cetera). The Furthest Station (Cheshunt, for those without a Tube map to hand) is a nicely self-contained Rivers of London novella, with some tantalising hints of Nightingale's past (but, as usual, not enough of Nightingale's present) and some foxy friends for Abigail.

When is the next full novel due?

2017/79: Thin Air -- Michelle Paver

‘...the Big Stone’. That’s all Kangchenjunga is. ... It might possess a semblance of animation, because of the wind, and the crack of canvas, and the distant rumble of an avalanche on the Saddle – but that’s all it is, a semblance. There is no life up here. And no menace, either. The Sherpas are wrong. This mountain has no spirit, no sentience and no intent. It’s not trying to kill us. It simply is. [loc. 1382]

Thin Air is set in the mid-1930s. Stephen Pearce, who's just broken with his fiancee, is glad to have been recruited by his brother Kits as the doctor for a mountaineering expedition. The expedition's goal is to climb Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, which has never been successfully summitted. Over them all hangs the heroic shadow of the Lyell expedition of 1906, in which most of the men died. (Well, most of the British men. Quite a lot of coolies and Sherpas survived.)

Stephen and Kits don't really get along: there is a great deal of sibling rivalry and ill-will. This makes Stephen even less willing than the others to speak of his premonitions, of the glimpses of a dark figure that he sees, of the sudden silences that cut him off from 'earthly things' and leave him with a sense of appalling loneliness. He's a man of science, damn it! He doesn't believe in ghosts, or psychic energies, or warding off the dead. His odd mental state must be the thin air altering his perceptions, or some kind of altitude sickness ...

Stephen comes to believe that there is something malevolent with them on the mountain. And as he discovers, and remembers, and discusses more about the Lyell expedition, he begins to realise that the official account doesn't tell the whole story. But why is he the only one of the five mountaineers -- apart from the dog Cedric, who will no longer share Stephen's tent -- who is experiencing the strangeness?

This is one of the more unnerving ghost stories I've ever read: I suspect that images from the novel will stay with me for a long time. It's very similar, in many respects, to Paver's Dark Matter, which I read earlier this year and found equally chilling: but perhaps the ways in which it's similar -- first-person narrative; complex, repressed emotions; isolated 'frontier' landscape of dangerous physical extremes; dogs that sense more than humans do; journals -- are also the ways in which it's effective.

And, like the best historical novels, Thin Air sparked a fascination with its setting: in this case, early twentieth century mountaineering, which is dangerous and frightening (and exhilarating) even without supernatural elements.

Any recommendations for novels which might have the same emotional impact on me?

2017/78: Tremontaine: Season One -- Ellen Kushner, Malinda Lo, Joel Derfner, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Patty Bryant, Racheline Maltese

It was a fairy tale, they said—a Riverside fairy tale. The fair maiden Tess needed a protector, and so the foreign princess had fought every pretender until she found the one Riverside swordsman who was honest and true. [loc 3991]

Serialised fiction, like the renaissance of the novella, is one of those publishing trends that's increased in popularity with the rise of the e-reader. Personally I prefer my fiction in complete chunks, so -- after sampling the first 'episode' of this SerialBox series -- I held off until the complete 'first season' was available in a single volume. True, I missed out on cliffhangers and suspense: but I was rewarded by a long day's delightful reading.

Tremontaine is set in the world of Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint, The Privilege of the Sword and The Fall of the Kings -- all of which I now want to reread, but none of which is required reading for Tremontaine. In Tremontaine, Kushner's let other authors into her world to play, and the results are surprisingly seamless and unsurprisingly delightful.

I pitched this to a friend, before reading, as 'little or 0 heteronormativity' which is, it turns out, quite accurate. (There is some: but this is a society which is apparently free of homophobia, and there are a number of same-sex relationships, and at least one character I'd class as asexual.)

The plots revolve around William, Duke of Tremontaine; Rafe, a student at the university who's convinced the world is round and enlists Micah, a vegetable-selling mathematical prodigy, to help him prove it; Ixkaab, a trader-princess trying to live down an unfortunate misstep; Tess, an artist and forger; and their assorted families, friends, foes. But at the heart of it all is Diane, Duchess of Tremontaine, who sits at the centre of the web and spins. Here is a woman who is determined that Tremontaine will thrive: that aim underlies everything she does, and she does it all very capably. Though she is not the only clever, scheming individual herein.

Tremontaine is exquisitely mannerist, often very funny, utterly compelling. There are enough ongoing threads to make me eager for Season 2, and almost tempted to read Season 3 as each episode is published. A delight.

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This is my thousandth post on this blog! I had no idea when I started this that it would become such a habit.
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