2020/022: Lord Heliodor's Retirement -- Amy Rae Durreson

He didn’t want to talk about it, or even think about it, but his mind kept catching on it anyway. It was like having a broken step on a stairway you used every day. You could learn to step over it, forget about it except for the odd time when it caught you by surprise and you tripped, risked falling.[loc. 305]

A short, sweet m/m romance. Lord Heliodor is in his fifties, and has more or less given up on love. He's traumatised by the aftermath of a vile curse -- which led to him having to kill his transformed friends while protecting his sovereign -- and when it's suggested that he might benefit from a rest, he retires to his childhood home, and a life of leisure, with ill grace.

There is a new librarian, who turns out to be more than he seems. There is a dastardly plot, and its undoing by men of valour. And perhaps there is some work, still, for someone of Lord Heliodor's calibre.

This was a calm and cheering read: the world, and the society, were sketched rather than detailed, because the story focussed on Lord Heliodor's PTSD and the recovery process. It was refreshing to read a romance with an older protagonist, and Lord Heliodor's thoughts and concerns are very much those of a successful individual in middle years who's undergone a traumatic experience, and the slow pace of the romance suits him perfectly.

2020/021: Call Down the Hawk -- Maggie Stiefvater

For you, reality is not an external condition. For you, reality is a decision. [loc. 746]

I greatly enjoyed Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle (The Raven Boys, The Dream Thieves, Blue Lily, Lily Blue and The Raven King -- so how did I miss that a new trilogy, focusing on the Lynch brothers, has been promised for years and that the first volume came out months ago?

Call Down the Hawk has a very different ambience: darker, more dangerous, less mythic -- which is not to say that it lacks the fantastic, for that's an essential part of the story. Ronan Lynch (my favourite of the Raven Boys) can dream things into existence: this is both a blessing and a curse. He is separated from his boyfriend Adam because he's become less able to control his dreams, and because Harvard would rather nobody dreamt murder crabs and motorcycles in their dorm rooms. Gansey and Blue have headed off on a road trip: Noah, of course, is gone. Ronan is left to moulder at the Barns, the rambling house where he grew up, and to wonder why black nastiness -- 'nightwash' -- oozes from his eyes and nose when he doesn't dream enough.

Jordan Hennessy is a forger par excellence, who can reproduce any painting, any signature. It's not just art that she can copy, though. She and the girls she lives with exist in an uneasy equilibrium of created and creator.

Carmen Farooq-Lane, recruited to a secret international taskforce known as the Moderators, works with Visionaries (who all share a vision of a world in flames) to locate and neutralise Zeds, one of whom will some day dream that apocalyptic flame into existence.

There are a lot of stories woven into Call Down the Hawk. Declan, Ronan's deliberately dull elder brother, turns out not to be so dull after all: Matthew, the youngest of the Lynch brothers, is starting to grow up: and the lady in a long-sought painting may not be Ronan's mother after all. There are shadows of other players in this dangerous game: the Boudicca organisation, the new Fenian ...

At the heart of the novel, though, are characters who are trapped by their abilities, or their natures, without truly understanding them. Adam may be moving on: Ronan can't. Jordan wants independence, but her nature prohibits it. Carmen is beginning to question the work she does, and perhaps her latest Visionary will provoke more questions.

This is a far darker, bleaker story than the preceding quartet. I missed the women of Fox Way, and their cheery witchery. (If there's a specific lack in this novel, it's older characters: almost everyone's in their teens or twenties.) It took me a while to attune to the ambience, to start to like this grimmer Ronan, to appreciate Hennessy's art and Declan's control and Carmen's icy facade (and right hook). But it was worth persevering, and now I'm eager for the next in the trilogy.

[Note: I don't think it's necessary to have read the quartet before starting this, but there are some references that will make more sense if you're familiar with what's gone before.]

2020/020: Ormeshadow -- Priya Sharma

A hundred things, viewed through new eyes, made a mockery of his life. Furtive glances and whispers. The anger and coldness that fell around him for no reason, surprising him at unexpected moments. The confusion and the double meanings. [loc. 1356]

Gideon is seven when, with his parents, he leaves behind the life he knew in Bath and goes to live at Ormeshadow. The farmhouse is home to his uncle Thomas and family: there is old tension between Thomas and Gideon's father John, and a different tension between Thomas, his wife Maud and Gideon's mother Clare.

Gideon does not like living at Ormeshadow. The only happy moments are those he spends with his father, up on the Orme -- a rocky ridge which, John tells him, is actually a buried dragon princess, the last of her kind. John's stories of treasure and dragon-wars, and of the role their own family played in protecting the Orme, are a stark contrast to the unfriendliness and lack of warmth at Thomas' house.

Tragedy strikes; Gideon's life becomes even bleaker, as Thomas visits the sins of the father upon the son; and then the world changes.

This novella is constructed, not as a seamless narrative, but as a mosaic of scenes from Gideon's life, told in tight third-person point of view. He observes events without understanding what he's seeing, or reasoning out a story of his own. He's bowed by guilt and solitude. And then the world changes: and subsequent scenes (except, perhaps, the final one?) are told from differing viewpoints: a fisherman, a wealthy lawyer.

I found Ormeshadow very bleak, though beautifully written and interestingly structured. This is a tale of deprivation and poverty, woven through a frame of old grudges and older secrets. The weather is seldom fine, the meat is always greasy, and love begets betrayal. (Sweetheart, Clare, John, Eliza ...) And though the pivotal event of the story confers a kind of emotional reparation, I'm not convinced that it is a fair or reasonable resolution.

2020/019: The Doctor's Discretion --EE Ottoman

He'd never really felt as if he suffered under the weight of his particular form of manhood any more than he suffered under his desire for other men. His body might not be configured in quite the way he would have liked, but it generally worked well enough. [loc. 2454]

The setting is New York in 1831: the protagonists are William Blackwood and Augustus Hill, both doctors, who meet when they are engaged to catalogue the scientific and medical collection of the late Doctor Russell. It's not clear why they've been chosen for this task, for both are outsiders: William is Black, educated in Glasgow because no American school would take him, and Augustus is a disabled former Naval surgeon.

The two are immediately attracted to one another, and they don't take things slowly. But then Augustus discovers that a 'hermaphrodite' -- in modern parlance, a trans man -- is being confined at the hospital where he works, and he enlists William's help to free Mr Moss: "Because I am like him."

William does not react well. It is to his credit that he is able to work with Augustus to free Moss, who may have made some powerful enemies. And to Augustus' credit that he sets aside his personal distress for the greater good.

The setting, the supporting cast and the different oppressions and prejudices to which the characters are prey, were fascinating: but the plot didn't really hang together for me. Despite the dangers and the risks, everything fell into place very quickly and neatly -- or, like Doctor Russell's bequest, was left unexplored or unexplained. It all seemed rather too easy, and there was no obvious antagonist. (Well: society.)

Still, a very interesting exploration of a period and location with which I'm unfamiliar, and a sensitive depiction of the issues of trust and honesty in a relationship where neither person has previously been free to be himself.

2020/018: Paladin's Grace -- T. Kingfisher

“Look, if you can’t laugh about the homicidal fits that make you a menace to society, what’s even the point?” [loc. 3002]

Stephen used to be a paladin, a precision berserker fighting on behalf of a god. Then that god, the Saint of Steel, died: and Stephen and his fellow paladins went mad.

Paladin's Grace is set three years later. Stephen and his few remaining fellows serve the Temple of the White Rat, making themselves useful, repaying their debt to the order which saved them. Stephen, for instance, has been assigned to loom menacingly in the background while a healer makes his rounds in a poor quarter of the city. Then Stephen sees a woman being harassed by a couple of boorish acolytes, and steps in to help. (Not to rescue.) The woman is Grace, a master perfumier with a pet civette ('perfume weasel') who's stifled by the aftermath of a toxic relationship, despite the new life she's made for herself.

Stephen and Grace are both rather hapless when it comes to romance, and out of their depth when they become enmeshed in a sordid assassination attempt and an unpleasant series of murders. (As Kingfisher notes in her afterword, 'there are generally fewer severed heads and rotting corpse golems in fluffy romance'). Luckily for them both, help is at hand, in the shapes of Zale (non-binary lawyer-priest of the White Rat) and Marguerite (Grace's landlady, a glamorous spy).

Paladin's Grace is a fluffy romance, between two likeable, damaged (and somewhat timid) protagonists: but it also deals with abusive relationships (and how relief can look like happiness), the unpleasant Order of the Hanged Mother, the downsides of being a berserker (ruined trousers), and the practical difficulties of decapitation. There are some pretty horrific concepts here, but then there is also a paladin who likes to knit socks, and a perfume-weasel who likes to curl up in Grace's hidden clothing-stashes.

Takes place in the same world as The Clockwork Boys (I really must read the second volume of that story!) and Swordheart, somewhat later than the events of those novels but not requiring any knowledge thereof.

I don't think I was in quite the right mood for this novel when I read it, but I do think I'll come back to it -- and I did laugh out loud at 'inexpert slobbering'.

2020/017: The Lost Future of Pepperharrow -- Natasha Pulley

The second a thing was no longer possible, he forgot it. It was why he maintained that a book was nothing but a dead story, thank you, and he preferred them while they were still alive, fluttering about in someone’s mind, with lots of possible endings and interesting side bits, before the editor pulled them off and pinned it down on paper and he forgot all the good parts. [loc. 434]

I was immensely pleased when NetGalley provided me with an advance review copy in exchange for this honest review. Twenty-four hours after receiving the notification, I'd finished my first read-through, and I haven't really stopped thinking about it since.

The Lost Future of Pepperharrow is a direct sequel to The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. (I am still wondering how the events of The Bedlam Stacks will affect, or have affected, this version of the world. Something should have changed by now ...) In Watchmaker, Pulley introduced Keita Mori, who remembers possible futures, and telegraph clerk -- later, Foreign Office translator -- Thaniel Steepleton, who becomes Mori's friend and lover. These two , together with workhouse orphan Six and physicist Grace Carrow (both also featured in the earlier novel), are the focus of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow: there are new characters too, including the redoubtable Mrs Pepperharrow and bellicose Count Kuroda, Prime Minister of Japan.

For the majority of the novel does take place in Japan, where Grace Carrow is teaching, and Thaniel is engaged by the British Legation to uncover the reason for the Japanese staff's complaints of ghosts, and Mori is returning to the life of wealth and privilege he abandoned. Meanwhile, Russian warships are 'exercising' off Nagasaki, and the new Japanese Navy -- forty ironclads from Liverpool -- is due to arrive any day. Mori is constructing a delicate edifice of coincidence and causality that will change the future, but he won't (or can't) say why.

I found a great deal to love in this novel. Pulley's prose is inventive and evocative: Thaniel's narratives are especially rich in novel metaphor ('the room hammocked around him') and his synaesthesia is almost like an additional sense. I liked Grace much more in this novel, and Mori -- 'the king of useful deaths' -- becomes a grandly tragic figure, a world-shaper with a burden of grief and guilt rather than just someone who might bring about a convenient coincidence. Six, who may be 'on the spectrum', is a remarkably vivid character for a nine-year-old girl, and her sidelong observations are astute and sometimes unsettling. Takiko Pepperharrow, working-class, half-English, actress and theatre-owner, is marvellous: intelligent and fierce, with a dramatic arc that I found enormously affecting. (Her choices are her own, not forced upon her.)

It took me some time to articulate what I liked most about Pulley's Japan: despite the ghosts and the tea ceremonies, it is neither mystical nor exoticised. These are people living ordinary lives, no stranger than Thaniel's fellow Londoners.

I found the glimpses of lost futures especially poignant. Mori stops remembering a future when it becomes impossible: this affects his language, his actions, his thoughts. He is at once in control of possibilities, or fates, and at their mercy. Imagine how a clairvoyant grieves, when someone hasn't yet died ...

Random observation: Pulley doesn't often describe physical appearance, and never in any detail. We get Thaniel's perception of someone as 'short and plain', or Takiko noticing that her husband's bones are more prominent. Nobody looks at anybody, except sometimes at their clothes: and even then it's more to do with quality and style than with physical detail. I still don't know what colour Thaniel's hair is: and it doesn't matter.

I am still wondering about several aspects of the novel. Spoilers in white! Why the dragon? Why just that one? Will anyone in this universe disprove the existence of luminiferous ether, as Einstein did in our timeline? (My guess is no, because here it is literal.) Why did Mori get ill in Paris? And how does he remember radio? And what about Merrick's plantation? And do owls really have chins?

I would also like to add that this is, in part, a wholly satisfactory love story. And, separately, a truly tragic story of unrequited love.

UK publication date may be as soon as 25th February...

2020/016: Beneath the Rising -- Premee Mohamed

Like thirteen years of friendship with the glass wall of her secret between us, like the barrier separating animals and humans at the zoo. And yet here we were, nine thousand kilometers from home, together. A girl and her dog. [loc. 4507]

Johnny (short for Joanna) is a prodigy whose inventions have changed the world. She and Nick have been best friends since childhood, despite being different in almost every way: Johnny is white, wealthy, and a genius, while Nick is brown, works a mundane job to look after his family, and can't justify getting a degree. Perhaps the only thing they have in common is that, as children, they were the sole survivors of a hostage situation.

Their shared PTSD is just one of the factors in their friendship: they are both tremendous geeks (there are multiple references to the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies, to D&D, to Superman and Pulp Fiction and Jurassic Park) and they trash-talk one another constantly. Nick is the first to know when Johnny makes a ground-breaking discovery that promises clean, free energy. But her latest invention draws unwanted attention -- and Nick realises that there are things Johnny's never told him, secrets that dwarf Nick's unrequited crush on her.

This is a world whose history is not quite our own. In September 2001, for example -- a year or so before the events of Beneath the Rising -- two planes were hijacked and almost hit the World Trade Centre. And it is a world transformed by Johnny's inventions: cures for HIV and Alzheimers, alternatives to plastic, housing for disaster zones, molecular recycling...

But Johnny has paid, and is paying, for her gifts, and the price is appalling. Cosmic horrors are gathering at the edges of the human world, seeking a way in. Only Johnny and Nick can avert disaster -- or so Johnny claims. Nick, stumbling after his friend on a hectic quest that takes them from Canada to Morocco to Iraq and onward into the ancient places of the earth, can't figure out how he can possibly be part of the solution.

Premee Mohamed's The Apple Tree Throne was a highlight of last year's reading for me, hence my requesting Beneath the Rising for review. The two are very different books: both are emotionally subtle and written with precision, but here the story is on a far broader canvas, and the underlying secrets more epic. That said, I found the relationship between Johnny and Nick seized my attention in a way that the cosmic battle for the future of humanity did not. It's refreshing to see a friendship treated this seriously: it's horrific to see the foundations of that friendship.

Thanks to NetGalley for my advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review.

2020/015: The Museum of Modern Love -- Heather Rose

She is swimming in sensations, thoughts, memories and awareness like everyone else, but while this happens she looks into the eyes and hearts of strangers and finds a point of calm. It is her metier to dance on the edge of madness, to vault over pain into the solace of disintegration. [p. 58]

Set in New York, in 2010, around the real performance The Artist is Present by Marina Abramović at the Museum of Modern Art. Abramović sat for seventy-five days, up to nine hours a day, and looked into the eyes of whoever was sitting opposite her. Heather Rose's work explores the impact of the event on a number of people: a widowed, grieving art teacher named Jane; Brittika, a PhD student with pink hair; Marco, the official photographer; Abramović's dead war-hero mother ('She has been dead for three years and she finds death rather as she found life—an inconvenience'); an omniscient narrator who may be a kind of muse; and, centrally, film composer Arky Levin, whose wife is in a nursing home and has taken out a court order prohibiting him from visiting.

I found Levin an interesting character, because I disliked him intensely -- he is self-centred, arrogant and self-pitying -- but still felt compassion for him. The unnamed, genderless narrator steers him towards Abramović in order to reawaken his creativity: his changing reactions to the artist, and the art, are the focus of the novel. Like many of the other characters, whether or not they sit with her, Arky is transformed by Abramović. Is his transformation more momentous than Jane's, or Brittika's?

I didn't wholly connect with this novel: I wonder if that's because of the distancing effect of the narrator's viewpoint. We are given insight into the thoughts and emotions, and the pasts, of various characters, but there's little tonal difference, and no sense of engagement: because the Muse, or whoever is telling the story, is more interested in the art that any of these characters have created or might create than in the pain that catalyses that art. ('pain is the stone that art sharpens itself on', [p. 38]) This is art in its broadest sense, the opening out, the sense of connection. Rose portrays this beautifully, but still with that disconnect.

The Museum of Modern Love is a love letter to an artist, a kind of print retrospective of her career. Abramović's courage and dedication to her art is intense. (I found some of the descriptions of previous performances quite unsettling!) There's an interesting essay by the author here, concerning the evolution of the work. Abramović gave permission for Rose to centre The Museum of Modern Love on her art and her story, and is reportedly very pleased with the result.

Petty gripe: reviewing my notes, I was annoyed all over again by the jarring 'house elf' at a pivotal moment.
"...at last, these two people meet in person on two chairs opposite each other. Marina Abramović and Arky Levin. I am assigned to stand beside them—memoirist, intuit, animus, good spirit, genius, whim that I am. House elf to the artists of paint, music, body, voice, form, word. I have acquired the habit of never saying too much." [p. 257]

Read for the Reading Women Challenge 2020: this fulfils both #5, 'A Winner of the Stella Prize or the Women’s Prize for Fiction', (it won the Stella Prize in 2017) and #10, 'A Book About a Woman Artist'.

2020/014: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street -- Natasha Pulley (reread)

Altogether worse than pain was that maddeningly clear vision of having not tripped, not broken anything, when logic held up a lamp in the straight tunnel that time drove humans through, and showed that the walls were made of glass. [loc 4163]

I first read this some years ago (2016 review) but I'm not sure I paid attention to the title: although telegraph clerk Thaniel Steepleton is the focal character, he's not the protagonist. Reread because I greatly enjoyed The Bedlam Stacks, and had just pre-ordered The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, which seems to be the third in a trilogy I didn't realise was happening.

Rereading, and attempting to focus on Mori rather than Thaniel -- through Thaniel's own bias, ignorance and emotion -- was an interesting exercise. I was saddened all over again by the fate of a mechanical octopus, and as fascinated as ever by Thaniel's synaethesia (he sees sound in colour). And, knowing a little more about Keita Mori from The Bedlam Stacks, I was able to appreciate his strategic planning rather better. I did find I liked Grace rather less on this second reading: but I can't say that her actions were unreasonable.

One of my criticisms in my previous review was that the setting didn't feel like the nineteenth century. I think now that the backgrounding of religion, royalty and so on is a reflection of Thaniel's class and nature, rather than an omission.

Very much looking forward to the new book!