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.

2021/151: Mythago Wood -- Robert Holdstock

She was not violent, perhaps because the old man himself could not think of a woman being violent. He imposed a structure on her, disarming her, leaving her quite helpless in the forest. [p. 57]

This is a novel I return to again and again, each time finding something new. This time around I found the toxic masculinity almost overpowering: but this is, after all, a novel about tensions between father and son and between brothers. It's not an accident that the only female characters are either dead (Stephen and Christian's mother) or mythic (Guiwenneth).

In brief: the setting is the English countryside just after World War II. Ryhope Wood, apparently a small patch of ancient woodland, harbours ancient landscapes and mythic archetypes -- 'mythagos' -- who are created from the wood itself and from the collective unconscious of humans who venture into the wood. Stephen Huxley, returning from war, finds his father dead and his brother Christian mourning the death of his wife, Guiwenneth, who Stephen never met. Christian reveals that Guiwenneth was not truly human ('she had no life, no real life. She’s lived a thousand times, and she’s never lived at all') and that 'she was father's girl'. When Christian disappears into the wood, returning older and angrier to abduct another version of Guiwenneth, the stage is set for a mythic quest-narrative, with Stephen and his new friend Harry Keaton in pursuit of a myth and its origins.

There are some pseudo-scientific elements -- George Huxley experimented with electricity and hallucinogens, and he and his various correspondents eagerly discuss the prehistoric roots of the societies and stories he discovers in the wood -- but the focus is on the formation of myths and mythagos, and the ways in which stories play out again and again.

I reread this after reading Scenes from Prehistoric Life, which reminded me of the strangeness, and the resonance of Holdstock's myth-making. I hadn't revisited Mythago Wood for many years, and was surprised by how much I remembered of it. But quite quickly I realised that this wasn't the book I was craving: I wanted winter, and a female protagonist, and old memory in snow ... Onward to Lavondyss!

2021/150: Scenes from Prehistoric Life: From the Ice Age to the Coming of the Romans -- Francis Pryor

We tend to think that people in the past judged everything from a practical perspective: were certain changes going to benefit the occurrence of wild game, or the growth of cereal crops? But in reality, they would also have had an emotional response to any changes that were happening around them. [loc. 638]

Fifteen 'scenes', beginning half a million years ago (Boxgrove, Happisburgh) and concluding with snapshots of life in Roman Britain: they're not so much scenes from prehistoric life -- though there's quite a bit of informed speculation -- as scenes from an archaeologist's life, rich with anecdote and simile. I enjoy Pryor's writing (for instance, in Britain BC) and found the subjective, discursive flavour of these essays rather engaging. Pryor is at pains to point out that the inhabitants of prehistoric Britain were anatomically and neurologically the same as modern humans: that their lives were as complex and varied as our own, and that they were swayed by emotional as well as practical considerations.

I especially enjoyed the chapter on Seahenge, which contextualised the creation of the monument: at least 51 people worked on the timbers, judging by the distinct marks left by different axes. Pryor likens the cost of an axe around 2000 BC to the cost of a car around 2000 AD (a comparison I found compelling) and speculates that the larger axes were wielded by younger, stronger men, while smaller axes -- used for more precise work -- belonged to older, more experienced workers. Pulling together evidence from dendrochronology, axe-marks and the archaeological excavations at the site, Pryor depicts a ritual occurring in the spring of 2049 BC, and ties it to theories about wood representing life and stone (or, in north Norfolk, earth) representing death.

This probably isn't the best book to read about archaeological excavations, or the introduction of bronze, or neolithic burial customs: but it is a splendid book if you want to appreciate a lifetime's experience in archaeology, and a humane and compassionate perspective on those who left traces of their lives in the British landscape.

2021/149: Wintering: The power of rest and retreat in difficult times -- Katherine May

Some winters are gradual. Some winters creep up on us so slowly that they have infiltrated every part of our lives before we truly feel them. [loc. 1480]

Katherine May's book on surviving winters meteorological and spiritual feels especially apposite in this second winter of the pandemic. Her definition of wintering as 'a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider' rang true for me: in a way, much of this year been a wintering for me, and I appreciated May's exploration of self-care, of regarding the darkness as an opportunity for rest and recuperation, a time to reach out rather than hunker down, a time for craft (which is not the same as creativity) and for realigning with the rhythms of the natural world.

I did find some parts of the book -- May's journeys north in search of the aurora, her trip to Iceland, her solstice at Stonehenge, her cold-sea swimming -- less interesting than others. May is an excellent writer, lucid and lyrical, but I did not empathise with the tightness of her diamond shoes. Her acceptance and endurance of the gloom, waiting for winter to pass and spring to come, was what I found most helpful: I'm trying to reshape this winter, with its attendant melancholia, as a fallow period from which I'll emerge revitalised.

Lots of fascinating material here: the first and second sleeps of 'natural' winter nights before electricity, the winter customs of northern countries, the wildlife of the English countryside, the weird beauty of snowfall. I am reminded to recognise the year's rhythms: we've turned the year, the days are getting longer. That, despite electric light and warm houses, we are still affected by the natural cycles of the world.

Wintering was the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, December 5-9 2021: excerpts read by Melody Grove.

PS: I've just noticed that this book has two different subtitles: 'How I Learned to Flourish When Life Became Frozen' and 'The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times'. I'm not sure which came first, or why the change, but I think the former makes it seem more of a memoir, while the latter is angled towards self-help.

2021/148: The Dark Archive -- Genevieve Cogman

I’m not interested in working for someone who thinks I should be able to achieve the impossible because it makes for a better story. [p. 148]

Irene and Kai are back in the London they've made their home -- the London where great detective Vale lives and works, and pursues a master criminal known as the Professor; the London where Lord Silver holds court; the London, and Europe, in which both Kai and Irene have become targets of assassins and kidnappers. Who could be behind it all? An old enemy resurrected, or a threat that never really went away? Can Irene's irritating apprentice -- Catherine, Lord Silver's niece, whose ambition is to be the first Fae to enter the Library -- become less irritating and more useful? Can Kai's vexing and overbearing brother Shan Yuan, self-proclaimed tech genius, actually live up to his own ego? And when Vale reveals a devastating connection, is he actually telling the truth, or has his trace of Fae heritage incited him to simply create a good story?

Splendid denouement in the spaces under La Sagrada Familia; some surprising reunions; Catherine's desire to be a librarian rather than a Librarian (she loves books, not the whole keeping-the-balance-twixt-order-and-chaos routine); that showstopping revelation ... A fast and pacy read with a great cliffhanger. And yet, and yet ... the next (and currently last) in the series has been out for a fortnight and I haven't grabbed it yet. Perhaps three of this series in a month would be a surfeit: and there is (I hope) time enough.

2021/147: The Secret Chapter -- Genevieve Cogman

‘The United Kingdom?’
‘Very strongly tied to Europe, which is why CENSOR has an English name and acronym. It did attempt to leave the European Union last year, but apparently that was prompted by demonic interference. A lot of politicians were subsequently tried for treason and beheaded at the Tower of London.’ [p. 149]

The latest in Cogman's 'Invisible Library' series, set in a multiverse where each world is somewhere on the axis between order (dragons) and chaos (Fae). I always forget how much I enjoy these, and I also forget who's who and what's what ... In The Secret Chapter, Irene and Kai become involved in an art theft on a high-tech world. During a dinner party hosted by the mysterious Mr Nemo in his Caribbean supervillain lair, a heist is proposed: if Nemo's hand-picked team acquires a very specific version of Géricault's 'The Raft of the Medusa', he'll grant each member of the team (a dragon tech expert, a Fae thief, a gambler, a driver and an enforcer) an item from his personal collection. For Irene this is the only way of acquiring a book which will save the world where she went to school from a rapid descent into chaos, so naturally she accepts the challenge. What could possibly go wrong?

Answers on a postcard of Vienna, please ...

This novel introduces several new characters, some of whom I very much hope to encounter again. It also hints at some intriguing backstory concerning the history of the dragons -- secrets which the dragons would very much prefer remained secret. And there is an intriguing subplot dealing with power, conscience and rebellion. But mostly it is great fun, breathless and fast-paced and full of abrupt reversals, betrayals, alliances, and petty sniping. An entertaining read: I went straight on to the next in the series ...