2022/73: The Physicians of Vilnoc -- Lois McMaster Bujold

...disease recognized no borders or boundaries. Rather like gods, that. [loc. 532]

And the alternate title for this novella would be Penric and the Plague. A little too relevant for comfort, even two and a half years into the Covid pandemic ...

Penric has been living in domestic bliss for a while with his wife and small daughter: then his brother-in-law, General Arisaydia, asks him to come to the fort, where a mysterious illness is afflicting the garrison. The plague spreads to the city, and to a nearby camp of political prisoners. Penric and Desdemona use their combined magic to treat the sick, but it is a tremendous strain on both, and the plague just keeps coming. Can Penric and his demon find the cause, and perhaps the cure?

This revisits some earlier themes: Penric has previously sworn off medicine after a plethora of difficult cases -- those he couldn't cure -- drove him almost to suicide. Now, though, he's older and wiser, has more to tie him to life, and is more experienced than those he's working with: a young doctor, and an older man who's recently acquired a demon of his own. In the end, though, Penric is very much at the mercy of his god, and again he seems to be a useful tool for that deity.

Not my favourite of the novellas, but it does make me want to go and reread Penric's Mission ...

2022/72: The Orphans of Raspay -- Lois McMaster Bujold

Just once, Pen thought glumly, he’d like to get an answer to prayers, instead of being delivered as one. [loc. 261]

This novella could easily have been titled Penric and the Pirates ... Penric (and his chaos demon, Desdemona) are travelling incognito when their vessel is boarded and captured by pirates. Penric is deemed pretty enough to be a high-value prize, so he's imprisoned with some other potentially-lucrative captives, including two small girls who have set out, after the death of their mother, in search of their father. They don't immediately trust Penric but his general wholesomeness wins them over. Delivered to pirate HQ, Pen and Des concoct a number of practical and feasible escape plans, all of which fail due to other people. Eventually Penric is rescued, with the two girls, and with a hefty anti-ransom from the pirates who would prefer him to leave them alone.

A light and cheery read. People are killed off-page, but there's very little actual cruelty. The pirates are Quadrenes, i.e. don't believe in the Fifth God, the Bastard, who Penric serves: there are some theological elements here, not least because the orphans' mother was a prostitute and a follower of the Bastard, hence Penric's sense that he is being used to fulfil the god's wishes.

The girls are sweet, the pirates are wicked, Desdemona is awesome. Next!

2022/71: The Last Werewolf -- Glen Duncan

In their cellular prison my devoured dead roused. (A consequence of eating people: the ingested crave company. Every new victim adds a voice to the monthly chorus.) [p. 127]

I have owned this book for over a decade. I'm not sure why the time has never been right for it ...

Jake Marlowe is, as he discovers in the opening pages of this novel, the last surviving werewolf. WOCOP -- the World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena -- are very good at wiping out supernatural creatures, though there still seem to be a plethora of vampires around. There are, to Jake's dismay, no female werewolves to be found. Additionally, it's a hundred years since any werewolf-victim turned werewolf in the traditional manner. Allegedly this is due to a virus, but Jake is suspicious.

Mostly, though, he is tired of life. 'I just don’t want, I really can’t take (in both senses of the verb) any more life.' He's pretty much ready to let WOCOP, in the person of their werewolf specialist Grainer, take him out with a silver bullet at the next full moon. (He did eat Grainer's father.) But then matters complicate themselves, and Jake realises there might yet be good reasons to live ... and new dangers to face.

The Last Werewolf is full of literary references and nihilistic philosophy. It's often very funny, and frequently gets down and dirty in the most animalistic, physical kinds of ways. It felt weirdly like a supernatural romance aimed at young men. (Though I do like the Washington Post's description of it as 'James Bond with dog breath'.) Jake is an engaging narrator, accepting but regretting his lupine appetites ('Two nights ago I'd eaten a forty-three-year-old hedge fund specialist. I've been in a phase of taking the ones no one wants...') and gruesomely precise about the physical manifestations of the Curse. Duncan's prose is powerful and evocative, and Jake's intelligence and erudition are a nice contrast to the scenes where he devours his prey. There's quite a lot of explicit, dirty sex, and plenty of violence: but that's not all there is to Jake.

For a number of reasons I am hesitant about reading the other two books in the series, but it's possible that sooner or later I will return to Duncan's books.

2022/70: State of Wonder -- Ann Patchett

Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don’t know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it’s not. It’s a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it. [p. 43]

It's over twenty years since I read The Magician's Assistant, and State of Wonder has had, I think, a similar effect on me: a kind of euphoria, a sense that something unreal, or differently real, is hiding beneath the surface of the novel.

State of Wonder opens with pharmaceutical researcher Marina Singh learning of the death of her research partner Anders Eckman. The news is reported by her boss, Mr Fox, who is also her lover: he persuades her to travel to Brazil, to find out what really happened to Eckman (the letter from Brazil is terse, almiost dismissive) and to report back, as Eckman was supposed to have done, on the work that Dr Annick Swenson has been doing for the company. Marina has a history with Dr Swenson: but when the two finally meet, in the opera house in Manaus during a performance of Orfeo e Eurydice, Dr Swenson doesn't seem to remember Marina at all.

Marina is, perhaps, more suited to the expedition than Anders Eckman was. Her heritage (American mother, Indian father) enables her to blend into Brazilian society in a way she's never been able to in Minnesota; though she loses luggage and phone, she almost welcomes the freedom that comes with being out of touch with her everyday life. Unlike Eckman (whose wife and children mourn him) she has no close ties, either to family or to friends: certainly not, she realises, to Mr Fox.

It also turns out that she has a lot to learn in the Amazon: about Dr Swenson's research, about the various tribes that she encounters, and about herself. She comes to care for a young deaf boy, Easter, who is thoroughly competent in the ways that matter in this Amazon backwater, but whose nightmares rival Marina's own. (Apparently Eckman was trying to get Easter to America.) And she learns of the dual nature of Dr Swenson's work: not only a fertility treatment but perhaps an immunisation against a killer disease.

Dr Swenson is a strange sort of mother figure to Marina, a icily single-minded scientist who puts her work above everything else and who seems to hold the Lakashi in a higher regard than the company who have funded her research for so long. For Marina, Swenson and her work are the centre of the novel: Marina's own mother, though alive and well in (presumably) Minnesota, is notable for the things that Marina doesn't tell her -- the nightmares, the affair with Mr Fox, the reason that Marina switched from gynaecology to pharmaceuticals. And Dr Swenson, it turns out, does remember Marina, and has a particular task in mind for her.

I was reminded of Heart of Darkness, with Swenson as a reticent Kurtz; also, of course, of the Orpheus myth, with Marina going down into the underworld in pursuit of the dead. But there is much more to State of Wonder: the casual denial of communication (Anders' letters to his wife didn't make it far, Marina loses her satellite phone ...), the mundane dangers of the jungle, the perils of malaria and of the drugs used to treat it, the abandonment of children by their parents, the complexities of the bond between Marina and Anders ...

I did not like Dr Swenson, but she fascinated me. Marina was easier to like, though perhaps not to know. I particularly admired the evolution of her relationship with Dr Swenson: being able to ask the same question twice, being able to refuse to cooperate. And the secondary characters -- the laid-back Bovenders, who are gatekeepers of a kind; Milton the driver; the other scientists at Swenson's research compound -- are distinct individuals, with tics and traits and degrees of emotion. A splendid, thought-provoking and haunting novel: I'm still contemplating the ending.

2022/69: Villager -- Tom Cox

I feel it all getting under the cotton and passing through me -- the sun, the butterflies, the maybugs, the tune of the water, the breeze, the falling light -- and I am the moment and nothing more. [p. 231]

I helped to crowdfund this book, Cox's first novel, and I feel suitably rewarded by getting to read it! The narrative takes the form of interconnected stories set in a fictional Dartmoor-ish village, Underhill. Each chapter is headed by a title and a date ('Search Engine (2099)'; 'Billywitch (1932)') and the framing voice, the 'Me (Now)' is, well, the hill itself, Underhill Tor. (Echoes of The Raven Tower here, with its geological narrator...)

Anyone who reads Tom Cox's social media will find some elements of Villager familiar: the rush of the rising river outside the window, the conversations with cows, the cold-water swimming, and of course the folk music. If Villager can be said to have a single underlying plot, it's probably the story of folk singer R J McKendree, who first visits the village in the late 1960s and finds inspiration, not least in a local folk song called 'Little Meg', which he hears sung by an old man in the village pub. McKendree will return to Underhill decades later: meanwhile, his recording of 'Little Meg' will become a cult classic, only available as a Hungarian vinyl pressing.

And of course there's Little Meg herself, who appears (I think) at several points in the novel, including on a village chat group where she talks about her favourite goose. She's been around a while... Villager is fascinating, and fascinated -- by archaeology, folklore, music, merganser ducks, weather, changing skies and the layers of village life. There are echoes between the people living in the same house at different times, and some distinctly science-fictional elements (I especially liked the search engine).

This is a book that makes me want to return to Devon, to spend days walking the narrow lanes, swimming in the sea, climbing through granite boulders and ruined villages on the moor. It also, more achievably, makes me want to be outside in nature. But oh, to be in Devon in the summertime, with the green hill rising above the beach, and wild strawberries on the dusty verge. (And, all right, the rain.)

2022/68: The Godmother -- Hannelore Cayre, translated by Stephanie Smee

You may call us wops, vulgar foreigners, outsiders – but tremble, good people, for we shall crush you all! [loc. 1933]

Patience Portefeux, 53 years old and a widow, works as a French-Arabic translator for the Department of Justice, specialising in phone taps. She has two grown daughters at university to support, and retirement home fees for her mother to pay: there's never quite enough money. Patience, the daugher of immigrants, grew up in a criminal family and feels considerable sympathy for the criminals whose calls she translates. When she discovers that the nurse tending her mother is also the mother of a drug trafficker who's about to be busted by the police, Patience decides to intervene -- and ends up with a new dog (a former police drug-sniffer named DNA) and, subsequently, a ridiculous quantity of high-grade Moroccan cannabis resin. She turns out to be a pragmatic and efficient businesswoman, and remarkably competent at keeping her new business secret from her fiance, Philippe, who's just taken up his new role as Commander of the Drug Squad.

This was a very enjoyable, and often amusing, read. Patience is cynical, misanthropic and independent, capable of profound compassion but dismissive of 'the State' and its treatment of immigrants. The translation is smooth, colloquial and witty. I did feel that more could have been made of Patience's synesthesia: it's mentioned early in the novel ("My thing is that I taste and feel colours. [loc 127]) but never really comes up again. The final scene with Philippe felt like a cop-out (pun intended). And Cayre made me weepy with a few (non-graphic, non-explicit) sentences about animal euthanasia, which will likely stay with me long after the rest of the novel has faded.

2022/67: The Glass Hotel -- Emily St John Mandel

She’d never believed in love at first sight but she did believe in recognition at first sight, she believed in understanding upon meeting someone for the first time that they were going to be important in her life, a sensation like recognizing a familiar face in an old photograph: in a sea of faces that mean nothing, one comes into focus. You. [p. 123]

The eponymous hotel is a glass-and-cedar construction on a remote island in British Columbia. Vincent Smith (female) tends bar; Jonathan Alkaitis, financier, owns the hotel; Vincent's brother Paul works at the hotel. One night, shipping executive Leon Prevant checks in, and is shocked to see a threatening message scrawled in acid on the glass. How these four people relate to one another -- betrayal and theft, love and hatred, ghosts and lies -- is the matter of the novel. The Glass Hotel is mostly set in 2008, and thus it's perhaps no surprise that the financial crash looms large, not only in the background but in the foreground. (I learnt more about Ponzi schemes than I had expected.)

I read this immediately after Sea of Tranquility, though did not enjoy it as much: there are some fantastical elements -- at least two characters are haunted by the dead, literally and metaphorically -- but it's more claustrophobic, less hopeful, less compassionate. I found the characters fascinating, if sometimes naive and sometimes mercenary, and I endorse the importance of art and beauty: but despite the splendid prose and the intriguing hints of the preternatural, this just didn't engage me as much as Sea of Tranquility.

I hadn't realised that Mandel reuses characters. (Multiverse of Mandel? I think some characters also appear in Station Eleven, in different forms.) Vincent is mentioned in Sea of Tranquility: Paul's a character in both novels, as is Vincent's friend Mirella. There are other echoes and resonances, such as the graffiti on the wall of a prison cell, and the 5-minute videos that Vincent starts making as a lonely teenager. And one character has a 'counterlife', which seems to have become a reality in the later Sea of Tranquility. Though The Glass Hotel didn't really engage me, I still want to read more Mandel, if only to see what other lives these characters might have lived.

2022/66: Sea of Tranquility -- Emily St John Mandel

“If definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be so what... A life lived in a simulation is still a life.” [p. 246]

In 1912 second son Edwin St John St Andrew, exiled to British Columbia for his embarrassing anticolonial views, wanders into a forest and experiences a moment of darkness, motion, an echoing violin. Almost immediately afterwards he encounters the new priest, who is interested in what Edwin might have found beneath the trees. In 2020 Mirella Kessler attends the premier of a new work by composer Paul James Smith, whose work is accompanied by a video shot by his dead sister Vincent. The video contains a glitch of some kind, a moment of darkness, a violin, a whooshing noise ... Two centuries later, novelist Olive Llewelyn, born in the Moon colonies, is touring Earth to promote her new novel. There are rumours of a pandemic, and she's already homesick. A passage in her novel tells of a moment of darkness, motion, an echoing violin and a forest: one interviewer is very interested in this episode. And two centuries after that, in 2401, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts discovers that his sister Zoey works at the Time Institute, and is investigating a case of corruption...

This novel reminded me strongly of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, though I have a feeling, vague because 17 years separate them, that I enjoyed Sea of Tranquility more. There is, unsurprisingly, time travel, with all its attendant paradoxes and loops and security problems; there is the simulation hypothesis; there is, inescapably, a pandemic. (This novel was written in the first year of Covid-19.) And it examines elements of pandemic and post-pandemic life: the exhaustion of virtual meetings -- 'turns out reality is more important than we thought' -- and the oddness of being in a room with another person, the opportunities for fresh starts, the sense of the world ending ('What if it always is the end of the world?' asks Olive) and the strangely enticing prospect of a post-apocalyptic future with less technology...

Sea of Tranquility is a good science fiction novel, with glimpses of marvellous futures (the Far Colonies! the Night City!): and it is also a thoroughly humane and compassionate story, about connections made and lost, about mercy, about the importance of art. I liked it very much, and it inspired me to read more of Mandel's work, which I've been acquiring steadily -- but for some reason not getting around to reading -- since Station Eleven.

2022/65: The Lamplighters -- Emma Stonex

She thought of it as falling. Weightless. Disbelieving. Waiting to be caught but nobody ever did, for years and years and on it went and down she fell and there were no resolutions, no clarity or closure. [p. 22]

Last year's other novel about inexplicably-abandoned lighthouses: I loved Natasha Pulley's The Kingdoms inordinately, and hestitated to read this for fear of dissonant overlap. But the territory is quite different. The Lamplighters is set in the 1970s (when three lighthousekeepers disappear from the Maiden, a lighthouse just visible from the Cornish coast) and the 1990s (when a bestselling author interviews the women left behind, hoping to finally unravel the mystery of the mens' disappearance). Stonex shows us what each of the men were thinking, in those last days, and how each of the women have dealt with two decades of the liminal state, the never-ending liminal state, between disaster and resolution. There's a secret affair (or is there?) and a past tragedy, an uncaring corporation, two clocks stopped at 8:45, a locked door... In some ways this is a locked-room mystery. How did the men disappear? What became of them? Trident, who run the lighthouses, maintain that the Supernumerary -- Vince, who's done time and prefers confinement and isolation to the wider world -- did away with his two superiors. Jenny, wife of Bill the assistant keeper, nurtures a grudge against Arthur's wife Helen and hints darkly at a breakdown of the working relationship between Bill and Arthur. But the men, out there fifteen miles from land, battered by storms, cut off from radio contact by bad weather, constantly avoiding friction ... what do they see? Who comes to visit them?

The Lamplighters is based on the disappearance of three men from the Eilean Mòr lighthouse, in the Outer Hebrides, in the winter of 1900. That has never been explained, either. I loved Stonex's prose, and found the story intriguing, though not all the characters were likeable. Stonex is at her best when writing about the natural world, and especially the sea. She writes, of the smell, 'briny, clean, like vinegar kept in the fridge': odd, original, true. I didn't altogether like the one-sided 'interview' format (only answers, no questions) in which the women's stories were primarily told. I did appreciate the Gothic undertones of lighthouse life, and the inexplicable moments in each man's story: maybe supernatural, maybe psychological, maybe a waking dream. Was there a mechanic? Was there a silver man? Was there something bright, falling, or a storm, or a white bird?

Note that there is a brief, horrific incident involving a child and a dog.

2022/64: Amongst Our Weapons -- Ben Aaronovitch

It never seemed to occur to Heather that Francisca might be a refugee from the dim and distant past—not even when she fainted at her first sight of an airliner. I’d have sussed it on the first day—which just goes to show why more science fiction should be included in the National Curriculum.

I was a little trepidatious about this, the latest instalment in the Rivers of London series, as I'd found the previous volume (False Value) slightly disappointing. Reviews from trustworthy friends were positive, though, so I bought and read it: and then reread the entire series whilst recovering from a bout of post-Covid nonsense.

The novel opens with a murder in the London Silver Vaults on Chancery Lane: a flash of bright light and a man lying dead with a hole in his chest and a chunk of metal deeply embedded there. There are traces of magic on the metal, so this is clearly a case for Peter Grant and his boss Thomas Nightingale, plus new trainee Danni and Muslim ninja Sahra Guleed. The investigation involves puzzle rings, a stolen lamp, a religious cult and a trip to Glossop, ancestral home of Alexander Seawoll. Also bloody Lesley. And Peter's working to a deadline, because his partner Bev is due to give birth soon, and (what with her being a powerful river goddess) it's more than his life's worth to miss the event.

This was an enjoyable read: the usual pop-culture references (including the title), Guleed being awesome, Peter's random thought processes, a rural river, foxen, a new flavour of magic and something that might be an alien or an angel. I felt the pacing languished a bit in the middle third, and I do hope that Lesley will eventually either step out of the shadows or bugger off. Also, I crave more Nightingale -- not less -- and would like to know what Varvara is up to. But overall, better than expected -- and yes, after rereading the whole series, I do like False Value better as well.

2022/63: Deep Water -- Patricia Highsmith

‘Considering he was a friend of yours,’ Joel began, just as Vic had known he would, ‘I don’t think it’s very funny of you to joke about his death.’
‘He wasn’t a friend of mine.’
‘Of your wife’s.’
‘A different matter, you’ll admit.’ [p. 18]

First published in 1957, but doesn't feel at all dated, though the scenes of small-town New England life in the Fifties -- parties, swimming pools, part-time jobs for the wealthy, so much drinking, a certain amount of period-typical discrimination -- do have a retro, gilded ambience.

Vic and Melinda van Allen live a comfortable life in Little Wesley, mostly because Vic lets Melinda take lovers whenever she wishes. 'It was not that he objected to Melinda’s having affairs with other men per se... it was that she picked such idiotic, spineless characters.' [p. 28] Vic would rather read books (he's a small-press publisher) and breed snails. Nothing in the agreement says that he has to like her lovers, though: he drives off one especially repugnant contender by claiming to have murdered a previous beau. Vic likes this story, and embellishes it to himself, though fairly soon the actual murderer confesses. But the seed has been sown, and for Vic it's a small step from pretence to reality.

The narrative is tightly woven with Vic's inner life, and his gradual (and perfectly rational) transformation from patient cuckold to psychopath. It's easy to like him, easy to dislike Melinda and feel contempt for her rather vulgar behaviour -- not to mention her lack of engagement with their daughter, Trixie -- and easy to accept Vic's gradual disintegration, his lapses of memory, his sudden flares of emotion, his odd impulses. What I did end up wondering was why he and Melinda had married at all ...

Highsmith's writing is a masterclass in psychology and in writing tight third-person viewpoint: there are moments of humour (usually in dialogue) and of considerable poignancy. I hope to read, or reread, more of her work.

2022/62: Vespertine -- Margaret Rogerson

"So you dont know whether you were a man or a woman in life.”
“No, and I don’t see why it matters. Humans are so tedious. Oh, you have dangly bits. Congratulations, you're going to put on armour and swing a sword about. Oh, you've ended up with the other kind. Too bad -- time to either have babies or become a nun." [p. 131]

Described by the author as 'Venom meets Joan of Arc', Vespertine was both funnier and more profound than I'd expected. Artemisia was possessed by an ashgrim as a child, and bears the physical and mental scars of her attempts to stop it trying to kill her family. Now she's a nun, determined to spend the rest of her life tending to corpses and avoiding social interaction. Artemisia lies to the priest who's come to evaluate the nuns for admittance into the Clerisy, pretending she can't sense the spirits trapped in the reliquaries, but Confessor Leander sees through her pretence.

Then the convent is attacked by possessed soldiers, and Artemisia, defending her home, inadvertently awakens the most powerful of the bound spirits, a revenant. Only a vespertine, a priestess trained to deal with relics and spirits, can defeat the forces of evil -- and the knowledge of how to become a vespertine is all but lost, except to the nameless revenant which has taken up residence in Artemisia's mind.

Vespertine's setting is reminiscent of medieval France, and Artemisia's progress as popular heroine reflects that of Joan of Arc: there are some entertaining insights into the relic industry, the splinters of wood dipped into pig's blood and sold as holy arrows, the mindless faith which Artemisia inspires in the peasantry. But the greatest pleasure comes from the interactions between Artemisia and her unwanted guest, who is immensely powerful, thoroughly cynical and capable (after some time in Artemisia's company) of surprising altriusm.

The world-building is solid and interesting, especially the religious aspects, and there is a predominance of female characters. Found families, acceptance of neurodivergence, a raven named Trouble and an epic battle between good and evil: what's not to like? I enjoyed this more than Rogerson's earlier An Enchantment of Ravens, perhaps because of the lack of a romantic element -- Artemisia neither wants nor needs that particular form of belonging -- or perhaps because of the sarcastic, secretive revenant and the evolution of its relationship with its host.

2022/61: The Bone Season -- Samantha Shannon

'...Some of us don’t want Styrofoam, Paige. Some of us want silver and satin and sordid streets and spirits...' [loc. 6640]

The novel opens in London in 2056, over a hundred years since Scion took control in response to 'an epidemic of clairvoyance'. Paige Mahoney lives with her father and works in an oxygen bar (caffeine and alcohol being prohibited substances) in what initially feels like a steampunk setting. But Paige lives a double life: she's a member of a notorious gang of clairvoyants, or 'voyants' -- the term is used for a broad spectrum of psychic powers -- and her special talent is out-of-body excursions, dreamwalking. One night a job goes wrong and Paige is hauled off as a prisoner to Scion's secret base: the 'lost city' of Oxford, a Type A Restricted Sector. There she discovers that everything she thought she knew about Scion is wrong. What used to be the United Kingdom is under the control of an alien race, the Rephaim, who use Scion to 'harvest' human clairvoyants in their decades-long war against the Emim. The harvest is every ten years, and it is known as the Bone Season.

The ambience of The Bone Season is very much epic YA, with a protagonist who's uniquely gifted, whose worth -- though she's at pains to conceal it -- is recognised by both humans and Rephaim, whose courage and determination, et cetera. The world-building is good, and very detailed, though inevitably a lot of it is conveyed in infodumps: I did love the alternate history, and the meticulous classification of various forms of clairvoyance. The emotional switchbacks of the plot are well-paced, and the central romantic relationship credibly Gothic. (It took me a while to realise that the romantic subplot of The Bone Season has more than a little in common with Jane Eyre.)

I don't think I am the target audience for this novel: I enjoyed reading it, but I didn't love it enough to continue the series (three more books so far, another three to come).

Another read from the depths of my Kindle: purchased in 2014 ...