2022/28: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine -- Gail Honeyman

No one was supposed to live like this. The problem was that I simply didn’t know how to make it right. Mummy’s way was wrong, I knew that. But no one had ever shown me the right way to live a life... [p. 232]

Eleanor Oliphant is thirty years old, a creature of habit who wears identical clothes every day, does not believe in pretending or hiding her feelings, spends her evenings and weekends alone, and is proud of needing nobody else. Despite this, she has just fallen in love with the man she intends to marry, though they have not properly met.

Or: Eleanor Oliphant is thirty years old, poorly socialised, represses all memories of her childhood, drinks a bottle of vodka every Friday night, has no meaningful social interactions except for fraught conversations with her mother, and states that she has no emotional needs. Despite this, she has developed a crush on a guy in a band, and is stalking him.

Eleanor's life changes when she and a colleague Raymond assist an old man who's collapsed in the street. Her workmates, initially prone to mockery, begin to warm to her; she forms positive relationships with Raymond, his mother, and the family of the man she helped; she transforms her appearance in readiness for a face-to-face meeting with the future husband.

I'm still thinking about this novel, which I engaged with for reasons of plot rather than style. I took it very personally, because it made me think about my relationship with my own mother (who died over thirty years ago, which does not stop me internalising her voice and her opinions), and also because Eleanor at the beginning of the novel -- mocked, oblivious, lonely, judgmental -- reminded me of the worst aspects of myself. It's a good novel about loneliness and about emotional abuse, and it has an emotional arc that avoids easy (romantic) resolutions. I started off disliking Eleanor, and by the end I both liked and pitied her. I formulated theories as I read, and some of them turned out to be right: I still also think that there's a possibility that Eleanor, who believes she is 'terrible', is responsible for her own situation. But I would rather take the story at face value, as a tale of leaving the past behind and learning to live well.

Also, I am very much in favour of cats as therapy animals. Finally Eleanor has met someone more judgmental than herself.

2022/27: Fludd -- Hilary Mantel

He touched the shed’s wall, gingerly, as if fire might have begun in the damp fibres of the wood. Can it be, he thought, that the transformative process is already underway? In these days, he no longer worked in metal, but practised on human nature; an art less predictable, more gratifying, more dangerous. The scientist burns up his experimental matter in the athenor, or furnace, but no scientist, however accomplished, can light that furnace himself. [p. 101]

Reread: I last read this in 2007 (my previous review; 'other times, other manners', as Fludd reflects.) and had forgotten almost all of the plot. It's set in a Catholic village, somewhere in the north of England, in the mid-1950s. Father Angwin is instructed by the bishop to remove the 'idolatrous' statues in the church, a task to which he does not warm. Shortly a young man named Fludd appears, and Father Angwin and his housekeeper Miss Dempsey assume he is the promised (or threatened) curate. However, Fludd's business is transformation, and his greatest work is the unwilling nun Philomena -- though Father Angwin, Mother Perpetua and Fludd himself (not to mention the statues) are all changed by Fludd's arrival.

This time around I was especially charmed by the neighbouring hamlet of Netherhoughton, who are rumoured to play football with human heads, and whose little children play with ouija boards in the church aisle during services. 'Up there, they were still gossiping about the Abdication; not that of Edward VIII, but that of James II. Their quarrels stretched back to time immemorial; they had grievances that pre-dated the Conquest.' And Fludd, of course: Fludd is fascinating, because we are afforded only tantalising glimpses of his thoughts, his heart, his history.

I do like Mantel's Cromwell novels (and one day shall get around to reading The Mirror and the Light) but I have a secret preference for her early, unsettling, slightly supernatural novels, such as Fludd. The precision of language and vividness of imagery remain, but the black humour has mellowed in her later work, and I miss it.

The Kindle edition does not start at the beginning, which is vexatious. In the print edition, the novel opens with a description of Sebastiano del Piombo's 'The Raising of Lazarus': in the Kindle edition, that content is still present, but the 'beginning' of the book is set as the first page of Chapter One, describing the arrival of the bishop. I had a nagging sense of something missing but would have continued to miss it if I hadn't reread my own review. The Lazarus reference is highly relevant to the novel, and its omission removes an important element of the plot.

2022/26: The Liar's Dictionary -- Eley Williams

Winceworth had returned to vexing over why no word had been coined for the specific type of headache he was suffering. The bitter meanness of its fillip, the sludgy electric sense of guilt coupled with its existence as physical retribution for time spent in one’s cups. A certain lack of memory, as if pain was crowding it out. You drink too much and this headache was the result – the world was surely in the market for such an affliction to bear a name? [p. 50]

From 'A is for artful (adj.)' to 'Z is for zugzwang (n.)', this is a novel for lexicophiles: for people (like me) who, reading it, would use the Kindle dictionary lookup (with varying degrees of success) for agrupt, forbs, grawlix, leucocholy, peltee, smeuse, zarf ... and would be charmed, rather than vexed, by the existence of mountweazels. Can a dictionary be taken seriously if it contains made-up words? This question exercises Mallory and Winceworth, both small cogs in the great machine that is Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, infamously incomplete and -- in Mallory's time, more or less contemporary London -- due to be digitised by David, last scion of the Swansby dynasty. Mallory's chapters alternate with those of Winceworth, a menial lexicographer in 1899: when we first meet him, he's wondering why there is no word for an alcohol-induced headache. ('The modern use of hangover and morning after as having anything to do with alcohol only cropped up in 1919,' explains Mallory helpfully.)

Both Mallory and Winceworth hold secrets: Mallory has a girlfriend, Pip, but is not out at work; Winceworth has affected a lisp since childhood, and is undergoing company-mandated speech therapy, deemed necessary now that he is working on words beginning with 'S'. Both are prone to distraction. And both are threatened by terrible, literal explosions. There are also a lot of birds (including a pelican in St James' Park) and a number of cats, all named Titivillus after a demon of typology, all nicknamed, regrettably, 'Tits'.

The plots are not the primary charm of this novel, for me, though they're surprisingly, unpredictably interesting. What I found joy in was the playfulness of the prose: the non-sequiturs, the increasingly baroque digressions, the mountweazels that grant Winceworth a kind of immortality and give Mallory (ably assisted by Pip) a real sense of purpose for a change. It is not all lighthearted. Winceworth discovers some ugly behaviour and a woman who is not what he thought she was: Mallory and Pip have a constant non-argument about Mallory's inability to acknowledge their relationship. But words, here, matter, and the metaphor of the inaccurate and incomplete dictionary illustrates a variety of misunderstandings and misrepresentations, wilful and otherwise.

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2022/25: The Hollowing -- Robert Holdstock

So much of myth, so much of legend, so much of it is turned around deeds of heroism, and bravery, and revenge, and war … and it all comes down to one thing: death. Violent death. [p.156]

I think I probably read this when it first came out in the early 1990s, and I think it may have been the point at which I began to lose my love of the series. In Mythago Wood and Lavondyss, the mythagos are focii of fascination, objects of desire and curiosity, living fossils of ancient myth. Here they are entities to be warded against: "The station is surrounded by an electronic barrier that repels most mythagos, but also by more traditional warding methods: scarecrows, masks, shields and weapons hung from trees, totem poles. Anything that works." And the focus is on the humans who are, for various reasons, researching or pursuing mythagos. Lacan is a Frenchman who fell in love with a mythago: Helen Silverlock, who reminds protagonist Richard Bradley of 'Cher from the pop duo Sonny and Cher' and who is trying to find a trickster: Alexander Lytton, obsessed with Huxley whose notes and diaries revealed the existence of mythagos in Ryhope Wood; and Richard himself, who is trying to find the son he believed dead. Alex Bradley has created mythagos of his own, and is hiding in a fabulous ruined cathedral, pursued by the 'giggler' who preys on other mythagos.

In this version of the story, Tallis Keeton (of Lavondyss) never comes home and her father dies lost and mad. (Her mother? Who knows? The women in this story get short shrift.) In this version of the story, heroes become monsters (Holdstock's Jason is especially repellant) and there is less wonder, little magic. Instead, the wood feels grim and mean. Is this because of Richard's shortcomings as a protagonist? I did not care for him at all, even before he revealed himself as sexist, racist, and irresponsible.

I think what I found in the earlier novels, and what I missed in this one, was the sense of deep time, the hidden origins of myth. This feels more like a war against those myths -- and the myths embodied here are more familar, more evolved. Gawain and the Green Knight; Jason and the Argonauts; the Tower of Babel. Do I want to continue with the series? Maybe not just yet.

Petty gripe du jour: a schoolboy in the late 1950s / early 1960s would not be eating a Lion bar, as they were only launched in 1976.

2022/24: The Wren Hunt -- Mary Watson

I knew magic, and it wasn’t ghost stories about a tree girl in a ruined cottage. [p. 14]

From the sample chapters -- including an unsettling scene in which Wren Silke is pursued through the woods, just after Christmas, by a band of teenage boys -- I'd expected a story rooted in traditional British folklore, the hunting of the wren and the pagan rituals of the year's end. That expectation wasn't wholly fulfilled, though there are allusions to druids, bards and sacred groves. Instead, this is a YA fantasy novel, with echoes of Celtic folklore (nemeds, druids, a girl made of flowers) and a strong romantic plot of love across the divide. Wren, the narrator, is an augur, with the rare ability to 'perceive patterns in random things'. Sometimes her visions foretell the future, but she is forbidden from seeking patterns in 'body fluids', especially blood. Between augurs and judges lie hundreds of years of hostility: the boys who pursue Wren every Boxing Day are judges, though they may not know she's an augur.

At the behest of her family, Wren undertakes a secret mission to locate and retrieve a lost treasure from Harkness House, the stronghold of Cassa Harkness, leader of the judges. She has to deal every day with David, who's led the eponymous Hunt for years; and she has to hide her growing feelings for Tarc, David's boss and, despite his youth, head of Cassa's security. Tarc seems to know something about magic, but he can't be allowed to find out Wren's secret. And meanwhile, Wren's nearest and dearest -- her sister Aisling, her friend Sibéal, her grandfather Smith -- seem to be hiding secrets of their own.

There were some interesting themes here, and some good descriptions, but overall this wasn't a satisfying read for me. I felt there were a lot of unfinished plot threads: Wren's vanished mother, the actual Wren Hunt, the rituals ... And while it's set in modern Ireland, with cellphones and computers, there doesn't seem to be any of the political or religious tension of the 'real' Ireland. I note that the author is South African, now living in Galway: I wonder what drew her to Ireland?

2022/23: A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush -- Eric Newby

The chickens were produced. They were very old; in the half-light they looked like pterodactyls.
‘Are they expensive?’
‘The Power of Britain never grows less,’ said the headman, lying superbly.
‘That means they are very expensive,’ said the interpreter, rousing himself. [p. 268]

I'd encountered Newby's writing long ago, in The Last Grain Race, an account of working on a commercial sailing ship in the late 1930s. A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is a more traditional model of mid-20th century British travel writing. Newby and his friend Hugh Carless set out, secure in their Britishness, to climb a mountain in what is now Afghanistan. Neither has much in the way of mountaineering experience: both are restless, chafing at their employment (Newby in his family's London fashion business, Carless in the Civil Service). After a brief diversion to Wales, where some hearty barmaids teach them the basics of climbing and laugh pityingly at their haplessness, the dynamic duo are on the road to the Hindu Kush. There, they encounter a variety of more or less helpful locals, who are suprisingly tolerant of our heroes' ineptitude. Luckily, at least for the purposes of this book, Newby is very much aware of just how ill-prepared and ignorant he and Carless are, and he pokes fun at the two of them rather more than he does at their long-suffering guides and companions.

There is a breezy, self-deprecating cheerfulness to Newby's account which I found very appealing, and which reminded me of the travel-adventure books I read as a child, from my father's side of the bookshelf: Heyerdahl, Byron, Shackleton, Frater, Slocum. A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush was written in the mid-1950s, in the twilight of the British Empire. Despite the attitudes with which Newby and Carless have grown up, it isn't as racist or as colonial as I'd feared. Newby respects the long and bloody history of the region, and the self-sufficiency of those who live there. He is less complimentary about their sanitary arrangements, but given that the entire party comes down with dysentery (and is reduced to using the works of John Buchan for cleanup) this is understandable.

Astonishing that two untrained climbers got so close to the summit of a mountain that had 'never been climbed', at least by Europeans: delightful that, even sick and weak, both Newby and Carless could appreciate beauty and experience euphoria. "After the half-light of the building, the light in the courtyard was blinding, incandescent; the dust in it thick and old and bitter-tasting, as if it had been swirling there for ever. We were in Afghanistan." [p. 63]

This edition contains an afterword by Carless, contextualising their expedition: "Afghanistan was then cocooned in a rare period of peace and stability which lasted for some forty years until roughly 1973. This allowed our small expedition to go forward without let or hindrance."

NB: the Kindle edition isn't great for the maps or photos, but these can be found online.

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2022/22: The Falling Sky -- Pippa Goldschmidt

‘It’s funny how we concentrate on the things we can see, the galaxies and stars, and we forget about the absences. All the spaces in between. But they’re just as important. Trying to work out why things aren’t there is just as important as why they are.’ [loc. 3845]

There are two narrative threads to The Falling Sky: 'Now', and 'Then'. 'Now' tells of Jeanette, an astronomer living in Edinburgh, and her observation of something that appears to contradict the Big Bang model of the universe. 'Then' is the story of Jeanette's youth, growing up first in the shadow of her sister Kate, a talented swimmer, and then in the silent void left by Kate's sudden, accidental death, which their parents never talk about in front of Jeanette.

I found astronomer-Jeanette engaging, with her momentous discovery, her poor social skills and her fraught love life. (She's a lesbian, but not an especially proactive one.) Goldschmidt, who says in the afterword that 'I wanted to bring to life the process of doing astronomy and show both the beauty and the uncertainty of that process', is good at conveying both the sense of wonder and the humdrum routine of a professional astronomer's life. Jeanette's desire to open up her research for discussion causes friction with those around her, and her observational talents desert her when they are focussed on other people.

There's some resolution to the story, and some sense that Jeanette is beginning to deal with her sister's death and with the other losses she's experienced: but I wanted more sense of closure, of completion, of questions answered. Perhaps that's the problem with astronomy as a metaphor, though: 'the uncertainty of that process'.

I visited Blackford Hill (the site of Edinburgh's Royal Observatory, and the setting for some of the novel) last year. I think it's coincidence that The Falling Sky surfaced from the un-downloaded depths of my TBR quite soon after that visit.

2022/21: Dead Lies Dreaming -- Charles Stross

“Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." [p. 97]

Volume One of Stross's Laundry-adjacent 'New Management' series: I am that rare reader with no experience of the Laundryverse, and can report that Dead Lies Dreaming works perfectly well as a standalone.

The background: it's December 2015, and Santa Claus is being crucified by elven warriors outside Hamley's; the UK's new Prime Minister is a Lovecraftian Elder God, who has reinstated the 18th-century Bloody Code (in which the majority of crimes are punishable by death); magic has become a force in the world again, and various individuals have developed abilities which they code as superpowers. Our protagonists: in the mostly-evil corner, Rupert de Montfort Bigge, cultist plutocrat with more ambition than intelligence, and his PA Eve Starkey, to whom he entrusts the task of acquiring a very dangerous book; in the mostly-good corner, a found family of queer millennials with unregistered superpowers, committing a series of crimes that'll fund their leader Imp's film about Peter Pan; in the middle ground, thief-taker Wendy Deere, on the trail of Imp's gang but distracted by her attraction to their getaway driver, Del. (Del, incidentally, is short for 'the Deliverator -- ironic nod to a fictional hero, the protagonist of a cyberpunk epic about ninjutsu, linguistics, and extreme pizza delivery': a nice nod to Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and a reminder that this is not not our world.) Imp and his crew are squatting in what used to be the family mansion, where there is a hidden portal to a dream version of Victorian London (guess the year!) wherein the Bad Book can be found. It remains only to note that Imp is Eve's brother, and the plot tightens neatly and twistily into shape.

This was often very funny, and sometimes very uncomfortable. There are recognisable aspects to this London -- gentrification, austerity, workplace sexism, transphobia and homophobia, the hell that is the M25 -- and a cleverly constructed heist playing out on several levels. It's also ... not mundane, not by a long shot, but unexpectedly devoid of eldritch horrors. They're in the background, but most of the evils herein are human.

I liked the ways in which Stross riffs off and borrows from Peter Pan (Wendy's surname is misremembered, several times, as 'Darling') and I appreciated Eve's professional excellence: the wording of contracts is always worth attention. Interesting and diverse characters, though appearances are seldom described; nicely layered London ambience; tragic backstories only slowly revealed; tantalising hints of the larger world. (The Chelsea Flower Show? okaaaay, that actually does make sense.)

Now, of course, I'm tempted to dive into the Laundry-verse ...

2022/20: Sundial -- Catriona Ward

Pain and fear are like that, an explosion that sets the genes alight. I imagine the flames racing along ... like coal seams catching fire. [loc. 1301]

Every novel by Catriona Ward is unsettling: each is different to the others. Sundial is no exception. Rob is locked in a toxic relationship with her unfaithful husband, Irving. After a crisis involving their daughters Annie and Callie, Rob decides that it's time she and Callie did some serious mother-daughter bonding. They'll have 'the best time ever' at Sundial, the isolated desert house where Rob and her sister Jack grew up. Callie is uneasy about the trip: she's worried about what Annie will get up to in her absence, and her friend Pale Callie is full of theories about Rob's true agenda. But Pale Callie isn't ... well, she's not entirely reliable. And nobody else can see her.

Slowly we learn the history of Rob and Jack, growing up home-schooled by Falcon and Mia, more or less oblivious to the endless parade of graduate students who come to Sundial to work with Mia on her experiments with dogs. (Some of the scenes with the dogs are viscerally unpleasant, others deeply upsetting.) Rob and Jack are twins, very close: but Jack is changing in ways that Rob isn't. That change holds the key to Callie's oddities -- but there are aspects of it, and of her own past, that Rob only gradually comes to understand over the course of the novel.

The two narratives, Rob and Callie, kept me guessing almost to the end of the book. I didn't find them especially likeable characters to start with, but they are extraordinarily vivid, plain-spoken without being straightforward, and their claustrophobic relationship is brilliantly observed. Nothing in this novel is what it seems: the rosebush over the grave, the hole that Rob digs, the buried secret, Mia's research... There are just enough inconsistencies to keep the reader engaged, to indicate that there's more beneath the surface. (Actually I think there might be some red herrings too. Contact lens solution?) And the resolution, though spectacular, doesn't attempt to tidy away every thread.

Sundial is unsettling and sometimes upsetting, truly tragic and often lyrical. Ward's eye for detail heightens the sense of claustrophobia, and the feeling of something unseen, out of focus, apprehended in glimpses. I keep thinking about aspects of the characterisation: Callie's relationship with food, and Rob's (neither of which involve judgement or commentary); Rob's boarding-school stories, written out by hand; Irving's gaslighting.

Thanks to NetGalley for an advance review copy, in exchange for which I have written this honest review. UK publication date 10 MAR 22.

2022/19: Moonwise -- Greer Ilene Gilman

But in Cloudwood it was endless hallows. There no wren was slain, no seed was scattered; though he cried the ravens from the turning wood, no winter ever came to green. The gate was lost... [p 23]

Two young women, Ariane and Sylvie, find themselves in balladland: in a chilly wintry wood, or on a moor, in the world of Cloud which they invented (or discovered) in a synergistic gleeful season of storytelling when they were younger. Ariane journeys through Cloud and encounters a child who is also, perhaps, an ancient deity or power: Sylvie's journey is (or seems) shorter, and she travels with a tinker who becomes her friend, but who, like the child, may be something more. There are two witches, goddesses, forces: Malykorne and Annis. Annis is winter and wants to freeze time. Mally wants spring, and the cycle of the year.

For long swathes of this novel I was not sure I understood what was happening: but the plot is just one layer of this novel, varnish or garnish over an intricately woven web of words. There's a lot of north-country dialect here -- specifically northern English, with its Nordic roots ('Tha'st nodded again, and t'cake's kizzened up') -- and though the wood that Ariane and Sylvie enter seems to be somewhere in North America, there is a European, perhaps a British, feel to it. The wren is hunted, there are stone circles and thornbushes, scarecrows and stars, bleak fells and homely farmhouses shuttered against the night. The language is seductive and incredibly dense. I think I recall someone saying that reading Moonwise was like being inside a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins ... though there are also moments where it seems about to break into iambic pentameter, and the text is studded with echoes and iterations of folk-song, ballad, fairytale. Ariane, and especially Sylvie, bring a touch of modernity too, albeit modernity as of the novel's 1991 publication: '"What has it got in its 'pocalypse? Tell us that, precious."'

I have attempted to read this novel more than once and been distracted by mundanity: turns out what I needed was a quiet winter weekend (it's a very wintry book) and a melancholic nostalgia for the act of shared creation. And now I feel equipped to continue reading Cloud and Ashes, which is ... set in the world of Cloud, or tells tales from Cloud, or is simply a layer below the stories in Moonwise.

Unaccountably not available as an ebook: I do own the paperback, but reading physical books is increasingly uncomfortable on the eyes, so I resorted to the Internet Archive.

2022/18: The Haunting of Maddy Clare -- Simone St James

“I don’t have an opinion about ghosts. It’s people I don’t believe in, I suppose.” [loc. 157]

Sarah Piper lives alone in London, eking out a precarious existence by taking whatever temporary jobs the agency offers. Her latest employer is Alistair Gellis, a wealthy war veteran in need of a female assistant: he is a researcher of ghosts, and his usual companion, Matthew Ryder, is away attending the birth of his sister's child. Besides, this particular case requires the presence of a woman, because the ghost of the servant girl Maddy Clare really doesn't like men.

Sarah accompanies Gellis to bucolic Waringstoke, where she discovers that she is unusually receptive to ghosts, and that Maddy Clare's ghost is real -- and utterly terrifying. Maddy was taken in by the Clare family as an adolescent: she came to the doorstep of Falmouth House one night, filthy and half-naked and bearing the marks of assault. Mrs Clare offered sanctuary, though her husband was never comfortable around Maddy -- but then something changed, and Maddy hanged herself in the barn. Sarah's task is to discover why Maddy killed herself, but the folk of Waringstoke are not wholly cooperative. And when Matthew Ryder shows up, initially resentful of Sarah's presence but gradually coming to respect her, things become more complicated.

Sarah's first-person narrative offered more commentary on the post-war roles of men ('You can’t imagine how hard it is to come home from hell and be expected to pick up the threads of a life') than on her own situation: I think her backstory -- the deaths of her parents, her loneliness in the big city -- could have been more integrated with the main plot. I wasn't wholly comfortable with her interactions with Matthew, either: she seemed to lack agency. Perhaps that passivity makes the novel more effective: there's an especially terrifying dream-pursuit through a dark forest, with a sense of malevolent presence and relentless pursuit. But there is also peril from the living, and all three ghost-hunters become targets.

Given the time in which The Haunting of Maddy Clare is set, I'd expected something more plainly connected with the Great War. Instead, it's that other war, the war in which women and children are cast as victims.

2022/17: Angel Landing -- Alice Hoffman

What he intended to do was not even a plan; it was more like a storm of thoughts that encircled him, so that every step he took was soft and far off the ground, as if his ideas had sprung from the sky. [p.49]

Natalie, a social worker, lives in her aunt Minnie's boarding house in the small Long Island town of Fisher's Cove. Natalie is in Fisher's Cove because her boyfriend Carter is a fervent anti-nuclear protestor, currently protesting the new nuclear power plant being built at Angel Landing, out by the harbour. Then there's an explosion at the plant -- and a few days later, Natalie has a new client, Michael Finn, who claims to have been responsible for the blast. Carter is happy to support Finn, whom he regards as a figurehead for the anti-nuclear movement: but Finn is no hero, and his actions are inextricably (and, to Finn, inexplicably) tangled with his relationship with his father.

The story is split between Natalie's first-person narrative and a third-person review of Finn's life. I did not like Natalie at all: I found her selfish and self-obsessed, and irredeemably shallow. Her first thought on acquiring Finn as a client is 'he might very well soon be quite famous. If he were to be my client I might be interviewed during the course of his trial; the New York Times would contact me, Newsweek would telephone, the Fishers Cove Herald might ask for a daily psychology column.' (p. 32). It's only late in the novel that she understands Carter's genuine commitment to his cause, his passionate love of the natural world and his dread of nuclear accidents. Natalie doesn't seem to like anyone, though she is drawn to Finn for reasons she doesn't explore.

Finn's relationship with his father, which has a more traditional arc, is sad and brutal and, finally, resolved. Finn's story, and the histories of his father and grandfather, are about powerlessness and power, turning away from one's dreams and accepting 'life keeps on going the way it was going'. Is his pivotal act, the mis-fitting of the valve, motivated by destruction or by the need to assume some control over his own life? The novel would have been uneven if it'd focussed solely on the Finns: but Natalie's part of the story did not have the emotional weight to balance Finn's.

Some splendid writing, but also some typos due, I think, to poorly-proofread OCR. There are echoes of the Three Mile Island incident here, though it's never mentioned by name: assuming that reference, this is set in the late 1970s. I think it's one of Hoffman's earliest novels: it really didn't feel up to the standard of her later work.

2022/16: Something Fabulous -- Alexis Hall

“For heaven’s sake”— Valentine tried, and failed, to keep the impatience from his voice —“if we lived life as though it were a novel, we’d spend all our time becoming embroiled in improbable adventures and spouting nonsense about filling our vast and empty souls with joyful aches.”
“Yes,” said Tarleton, “and?” [loc. 286]

Extremely funny and gleefully ahistorical Regency-ish M/M romance. Valentine, Duke of Malvern, has proposed to his childhood friend Arabella and been rebuffed. He is subsequently woken at four in the morning by Bonaventure Tarleton, Arabella's twin brother, who informs him that Arabella has run away and that the two of them must pursue her immediately. During their search for the elusive Arabella, Bonny (I am not a huge fan of this nickname) describes his life with his sister, revelling in books and writing their own continuations -- yay fanfic! -- and desperately hoping for financial salvation. He also reveals that he is not a person who falls in love with women. Valentine is appalled: nobody had ever told him that falling in love with men was an option ...

Pretty much everyone in this novel is queer, with the (possible) exception of the suspicious innkeeper. Valentine and Bonny encounter a lady novelist and her friend, who have offered shelter to Arabella ("she leaned in and kissed her companion full on the lips. What a very strange friendship these women had developed. Perhaps it was the remote location..." [loc. 2040]) and have several unexpected encounters with Valentine's aristocratic acquaintance Sir Horley, who flirts shamelessly with Bonny and tells Valentine they have so much to talk about next time they meet. And Arabella, though she turns out to be a shameless drama queen, has definite, if novelistic, ideas about her own future.

Once I discarded any expectations of historical accuracy (or more accurately historical-ambience tropes), this was an absolute delight to read. There were a few points where I was uncomfortable with how Valentine was treated, and I felt the novel needed more of the backstory about familial expectations and how, exactly, Valentine had disappointed the Tarletons. But overall, a hilarious, charming and warm-hearted romance.

2022/14,15: The Many-Colored Land and The Golden Torc -- Julian May

Things are never going to be the same here again.
The sun-bright face darkened. Nodonn’s voice rolled in their minds. ‘Go back where you came from, accursed!’
Claude said: You fool. We came from here. [The Golden Torc, p. 348]

I first read Julian May's Saga of the Exiles in the mid-1980s, not long after the final book in the quartet was published. I was captivated by the characters, the plot, and the setting, and May's Pliocene has become part of my mental furniture. Following a discussion (there was wine) the other night, I found myself craving a reread, and powered through the first two novels in just over 24 hours.

I still love them.

They're not without flaws, and my reading experience is very different now, almost forty years after my first encounter with May's Pliocene world, populated by time-travellers from the 22nd century and two races of aliens from another galaxy, whose names and feats echo (or, in-book, are echoed in) mythology and folk-tales. The aliens -- the tall, beautiful Tanu and the smaller, more ordinary Firvulag, who are opposed in an ancient battle-religion -- have psychic powers: humans are more or less enslaved, but their very presence has drastically changed the balance of power between Tanu and Firvulag, and has insidiously affected Tanu society. These first two novels deal with the arrival and subsequent adventures of a group of eight time-travellers ('Group Green'), who read like a collection of archetypes and who, in various ways, change the Pliocene world beyond recognition. Notably, it's the two youngest members of the group -- both under the usual age limit of 28 years old, both qualifying for time travel only because of their criminal acts -- who bring about the most dramatic transformations.

One thing that struck me this time around was how predominantly white the characters are. (All of Group Green -- five men and three women -- are white. The Tanu are pale-skinned, as are those Firvulag whose actual, as opposed to illusory, appearance is described.) There are humans from other ethnic groups, but they are definitely a minority in Exile. Another surprise was how heterosexual and cisgendered everyone is. The few exceptions are called out, and often mocked, by other characters. To be fair, the time-travellers are by definition people who didn't fit into the diverse and humane society of the 22nd century: I'd imagine that intolerance and abuse might be aspects of the not-fitting-in. But there are some especially unpleasant comments about the single trans character in these two novels, and some already-dated slurs against lesbian characters. (Gay men seem to get less abuse.)

And yet I still love these novels. The ingenious ways in which myth and folklore are woven in -- "Wouldn’t you agree that it was highly unlikely for future humanity to have retained any recollections of a race of small shape-changing exotic people who live in underground dwellings?" [MCL, 4614] -- and the humans' atavistic responses to the Tanu and the Firvulag. The ways in which the humans, as well as the exotics, come to personify (originate?) myths of their own: the Flying Dutchman, David and Goliath ... The spectacular geology and geography of Pliocene Europe; the hints of the Galactic Milieu, from which the time-travellers have fled for various reasons. The complex motives and self-analyses of the members of Group Green, and their interpersonal conflicts. The depictions of extinct fauna, and the delightful self-domestication of felis zitteli. The (mostly) well-paced and well-plotted prose, and May's knack for humour and for snappy dialogue.

A few notes on the Kindle editions: 1) I dislike the most recent covers, and it seems that the ones before those were even worse. My cover images here are from the 1980s Pan editions, which introduced me to the Saga. 2) the maps are almost unreadable. Hmm, do I still have my paperback copy of A Pliocene Companion? 3) I think the text has been recreated, or maybe OCR'd, for the Kindle versions: there are a few typos, transposed lines etc.

I'll probably reread the other two books quite soon, but not yet, not yet: they are darker, and the scope is broader.

Apparently my last reread was in 2006 (review here): I seem to recall a plain-text version with a lot of bad OCR -- 'tore' for 'torc', et cetera.