2023/069: To Be Taught, If Fortunate — Becky Chambers

It’s understandable why humans stopped living in space in the 2020s. How can you think of the stars when the seas are spilling over? How can you spare thought for alien ecosystems when your cities are too hot to inhabit? How can you trade fuel and metal and ideas when the lines on every map are in flux? [loc. 234]

A science fiction novella set early in the next century, when citizen-funded space exploration has replaced the national space agencies of our own time. This is exploration for its own sake, without the desire to profit or colonise. The narrator is Ariadne O'Neill, one of four crew members on the Lawki 6. Their mission is to investigate a solar system containing four habitable worlds: to enable this, they make use of a technique called somaforming, which temporarily alters the human body, conferring 'that little bit extra we need to survive on different worlds'. Each world they visit has different requirements, and Ariadne compares the somaforming to metamorphosis: she maintains that it's the most ethical way to explore. Communication with Earth takes 14 years: the crew receive news packets, and send reports, but there's no real-time interaction. The worlds in this system, the icy moon Aecor and the planets Mirabilis, Opera and Votum, have complex and very different ecosystems: it's unsurprising that Ariadne, Jack, Chikondi amd Elena lose interest in the news packets, which seldom have anything of relevance in them. Except, one day, they realise that the packets haven't been arriving as regularly...

This was such a fascinating read: the little team and their (generally very comfortable and distinctly queer) interactions, the ethical dilemma of whether their explorations damage the living beings they encounter, the sheer wonder of each new world -- I found the story and the setting utterly engaging. The choices, good and bad, that the crew make have emotional resonance: and the final choice, the one they don't make, brought tears to my eyes.

The novella's title comes from the golden record carried on the Voyager space probe: 'We step out of our Solar System into the Universe, seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate.' That provenance adds poignancy to a short but profound story.

2023/068: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne — Katherine Rundell

To write about death in the way he did – to send a suction pump down into the gap between what we know and what we fear – was to risk chaos. Donne knew it and did it anyway. [loc. 2893]

A splendidly effervescent critical biography that emphasises both the transformations of John Donne ('the persecuted, the rake, the lawyer, the bereaved, the lover, the jailbird, the desperate, the striver, the pious, John Donne the almost dead and reporting from the front line of the grave' [loc. 4318]) and the constant thread of invention that ran through his life. All the basic material is here -- born a Catholic, youthful adventures, being imprisoned by his father-in-law, a dozen children and half a dozen infant mortalities, his wife's death, his entry to the priesthood and his immensely popular sermons as Dean of St Pauls -- but in Rundell's engaging, enthusiastic account there's something of the wit and imagery of Donne's poetry, and its 'violent joy'.

This is an immensely readable biography (rather more so, in my opinion, than the standard works) and Rundell's passion and compassion for her subject rings clear on every page. Rundell does bring up the question of whether Donne was a misogynist (one chapter is entitled 'The Paradoxical Quibbler, Taking Aim at Women') and argues that some of the more excessive poems, such as 'The Flea', were written for his male fans rather than for female lovers. Of which, she posits, he may not actually have had very many. That doesn't make him less of a misogynist, of course: 'It would be absurd to try Donne anachronistically as a misogynist; but alongside the poems which glorify and sing the female body and heart, there are those that very potently don’t.' [loc. 1895].

This book persuaded me to revisit Donne's poetry, including Metempsychosis, which I found impenetrable as an undergraduate but now find fascinating.

Fulfils the ‘Memoir / Biography / Autobiography’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

2023/066: Starter Villain — John Scalzi

WE HAVE TOO MANY CATS IN TOO MANY HIGH PLACES.
"So you're not just spying on villains," I said.
IT DEPENDS ON WHETHER YOU CONSIDER THE RESIDENTS OF THE WHITE HOUSE AND 10 DOWNING STREET VILLAINS. [loc. 2976]

Charlie Finzer is down on his luck. His job as a newspaper reporter has evaporated; he's been working as a substitute teacher, which doesn't really bring enough money in to do more than survive; his father died recently, and he's living in the family home which his siblings would very much like to sell. Recently divorced, Charlie has little in the way of a social life: his most important relationship is with his cat Hera. But there's more to Hera than meets the eye, as quickly becomes apparent when Charlie's estranged Uncle Jake dies.

Apparently Uncle Jake was not only the reclusive billionaire owner of a large chain of parking structures, but also a successful supervillain with a plethora of ill-wishers. Cue the arrival of Mathilda Morrison, who asks Charlie to represent the family at Jake's memorial service, and who subsequently acts as his sidekick and bodyguard while Charlie, very much a fish out of water, travels to a supervillain HQ in a Caribbean volcano, and tries to hold his own amid the 'professional disruptors' who are expecting him to take over his uncle's business.

Starter Villain is a fast-moving and tightly-plotted tale of interspecies cooperation, international villainy, and the importance of unionisation. There's little in the way of description: instead, the story is driven by dialogue, punctuated by the occasional infodump. Many tropes are interrogated, many cliches mocked, and Charlie's business-reporting background enables him to make some incisive criticisms of the whole supervillain industry. It's an engaging and cheering novel, with some stealth thought-provocation amid the humour and the backstabbing. Worth noting, too, that the female characters (including Hera) are supremely competent, courageous and likeable. And best of all: talking cats! John Scalzi's afterword acknowledges the influence of Mary Robinette Kowal's Elsie), inspiring me to catch up with her recent activities.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review. UK publication date is 21 SEP 2023.

Update 22SEP23: Theme song by Dessa, commissioned by the author!

2023/067: The House in the Pines — Ana Reyes

Why would Maya need a key to a cabin she’s already inside? But as soon as she thinks it, the thought slips away, and what happens over the following few minutes will lie buried beneath the lowest cellar floor of her head for seven years. [p. 234]

Maya has problems sleeping: years later, she's still haunted by the memory of her best friend Aubrey dying whilst talking to Maya's then-boyfriend, Frank. Now, even though Maya's life is superficially delightful, she's addicted to sleeping pills and self-medicating with alcohol -- and it's unfortunate that the week she stops taking the pills is the week she sees a viral video of another young woman dying suddenly in Frank's company. Painfully aware of gaps in her memory, she returns to her mother's house to try to solve the mystery of what happened to the unknown woman, and to Aubrey ... and to Maya herself. Maybe she can even find the cabin deep in the pinewoods near Frank's own childhood home, the cabin that Frank built with his own hands, the cabin that Maya remembers with utmost clarity.

There were some interesting aspects to this novel, not least the way in which Frank has affected Maya, Aubrey and the woman in the video: though I think I understood this before Maya did, the description of her discovery was compelling. On the other hand, I never really felt a sense of dread or inevitability about Frank. More intriguing was the story of Maya's father, 'disappeared' by the regime in Guatemala before Maya's birth, and his unfinished magical realist novel, which seems to mirror some of the secrets and some of the doubts that Maya's experiencing.

Slightly annoyed by the 'present' scenes being told in the past tense and the 'past' scenes being told in present tense, though I suppose this does mirror the immediacy and powerful emotion of Maya's teenaged years.

2023/065: Speak of the Devil — Rose Wilding

... being part of a group of women who had decided to take action against one man, who had in some way harmed them all, felt like all women finally taking a stand. It felt like something big was coming, and coupled with the approach of the new millenium, she couldn't help but feel shook up, overwhelmed by anticipation and joy at what she thought was the beginning of a new era for women. [loc. 2183]

On the evening of 31st December 1999, seven women are summoned to 'the usual place'. There, they discover the decapitated head of a man they all knew; a man they all had reason to wish dead. Jamie has beguiled each of them in different ways: the pregnant teenager who thinks he's going to leave his wife for her, the aunt who raised him, the friend who's stood up for him when she wondered if she should, the woman who loved him despite her daughter's mistrust, the journalist he raped, the mother of his child, his wife ... One of them killed him: one of them delivered his head to this hotel room, with the snake sigil clumsily painted on the wallpaper.

An eighth woman, Nova, is a police detective, in a relationship with one of the suspects (but also with another woman who's less ... complicated). Her investigations, and Jamie's victims' memories and reactions, form the bulk of the novel. Set in and around Newcastle in the 1990s, Speak of the Devil evokes that time and place with a wealth of detail. The eight female protagonists (at least three of whom are queer) are distinctive characters, with idiosyncrasies of speech and behaviour. This was a very readable thriller, and I didn't guess the identity of the murderer until near the end. If there's a flaw, it's that we never get inside Jamie's (decapitated) head: we don't know what made him a narcissist, a psychopath, a monster. But though he's central to the action, it's not really about him at all.

Trigger warnings for violence, suicide, sexual abuse, rape.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK publication date is 22nd June 2023.

2023/064: Scribe — Alyson Hagy

He had told her his transgressions, and she had recorded them to the best of her ability. But it wasn’t safe or simple to take on the burdens of another person’s history, all those sins and vacancies. [loc. 710]

The unnamed protagonist of Scribe is a woman living alone in the house she once shared with her sister, a healer who was reputed to have miraculous powers. The woman makes a living writing letters, which are more therapeutic or confessional than they are simple communications. She lives precariously, allowing the Uninvited -- travellers, or maybe migrants -- to camp on her land, but reliant on the goodwill of local despot Billy Kingery. When a man calling himself Hendricks comes to ask her to write a letter, and to read it aloud at a certain crossroads, her precarious life begins to topple.

This is a short, poetic, unsettling novel. The nameless protagonist is a hard woman: she's had a hard life, and she gives up her secrets slowly, and perhaps only to herself. Hendricks only gradually reveals his own history, though he seems a decent sort of fellow as he kills and skins a wildcat, and promises to chop wood for her. The setting is sketched in lightly: it's a rural area, some time after a war (or a series of wars) that set brother against brother: after the wars, the plagues came, and the people who survived hold to 'the hard, forged links of memory'. A post-apocalyptic future, then, with echoes of the American Civil War: a rough, lawless country, where trickery and greed trump good intentions.

The prose is glorious: "He repeated his invocation, slowly, sonorously—with all the bitter syllables mortised into place. What a great mansion it is, she thought. What a stout and foolish mansion is the human heart." [loc. 229] I don't think I enjoyed it -- there was too much darkness at its heart, echoing back through generations -- but scraps of it have lodged and will remain with me. And it is, in the end, about how a person's history becomes a story, how it forms an arc.

It was all a writer could do: lay out the consequences of a person’s choices. [loc. 1684]

2023/063: The Frame-Up — Meghan Scott Molin

Dating a non-geek means they might want to normal-fy me. I am terrified of someone constantly telling me my shows or comics are dumb, wishing I’d “tone down my hair a bit,” or asking me to give up my job ...[p. 91]

Michael-Grace is thirty years old, goes by MG, designs extravagant costumes for her drag-queen friend Lawrence, a.k.a. Latifah, and holds down a job as a comic-book writer at Genius Comics, working on a reboot of a thirty-year-old superhero comic called 'The Hooded Falcon'. She's the only female writer in a moderately toxic male environment, and she's sworn off romance after her last boyfriend made secret YouTube videos of her. MG refuses to live down to her mother's expectations: instead, she's excited to discover that the final unfinished run of 'The Hooded Falcon' may not have been unfinished after all. But someone else has also made this discovery -- maybe the same person who's running around the city, cosplaying as the Golden Arrow -- and MG could hold the key to the mystery. Enter LAPD detective Matteo Kildare, who proposes a fake relationship so he can get to know her colleagues and make use of MG's trade and fandom connections.

It's a familiar trope, but nicely handled here as MG slowly realises that Matteo knows nothing about geek culture (he hasn't even seen Star Wars!) and that maybe her mistake has been her insistence on dating geeks... This doesn't stop her keeping secrets from Matteo, as she tries to weigh up conflicting loyalties and ambitions, and work out what she really wants.

This was a fun read, a mystery revolving around comics and fandom with some very real peril and a good exploration of the culture that brought us Gamergate. MG is a likeable heroine, a little over-confident in her ability to succeed where LAPD's finest have failed, and determined to solve the mystery even if it means breaking promises. Her friends and colleagues are generally good people and well-characterised, and there's a strong theme of found family and of the freedom to be oneself. Fascinating take on comics history, too, and the rivalries and motivations of creators.

This is the first in a series: I'd be happy to read more, once the TBR pile has shrunk a bit.

Fulfils the ‘Set in a workplace’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

2023/062: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida — Shehan Karunatilaka

Being a ghost isn’t that different to being a war photographer. Long periods of boredom interspersed with short bursts of terror. As action-packed as your post-death party has been, most of it is spent watching people staring at things. People stare a lot, break wind all the time, and touch their genitals much too much. [loc. 2845]

If Maali Almeida had a business card, it would say 'photographer, gambler, slut'. He is -- he was -- a war photographer documenting appalling crimes during the Sri Lankan civil war; a reckless gambler who lies about his habit; a flamboyant gay man who cheats on his partner DD (a Cabinet Minister's son) with countless random hookups. Maali was a complex man: now he is dead, and in an afterlife of hellish bureaucracy. And he has seven days -- seven moons -- to decide what next: will he enter the Light, or remain a ghost amongst the living? Wil he be able to communicate with DD, or with his best friend Jaki, about the box of photos under his bed that could bring down the government? And will he be able to discover, in one short week, who was responsible for his murder?

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is told in the second person, present tense, with multiple flashbacks and a lot of complex political strife. It's a merciless depiction of homophobia, civil war, corrupt government and a brutal regime that uses torture, imprisonment and disappearance to dispose of troublesome -- or merely inconvenient -- individuals. Maali is not a wholly likeable narrator, but he has a sharp wit and a refreshing cynicism, and he's well aware of his own failings without feeling much guilt about them. (He also name-checks Arthur C Clarke and claims this 'sci-fi visionary' for Sri Lanka.)

This wasn't exactly a pleasant read, simply because of the brutality and injustice of the world that Maali's haunting: but the juxtaposition of the supernatural and mundane worlds, and the moments of lyricism and raw honesty, made it a compelling read. Karunatilaka gives fairly clear explanations of the different political and non-governmental factions, and balances the sheer nastiness of Maali's death with considerable dark humour.

2023/061: A Song for Summer — Eva Ibbotson

They clinked glasses. "Water is for the feet," she said obediently. And then: ‘Where does it come from, that toast?’
‘I got it from Stravinsky. He always says he conducts best with a couple of glasses of cognac inside him.' [p. 247]

An old favourite, reread for the first time in many years -- possibly since I first read, and reviewed, it in 1998.

Ellen is raised by her mother and her aunts, three suffragette sisters, but unaccountably would rather do housework than work towards liberation and equality. She takes a position as housekeeper in a private school in Austria: the Hallendorf School is far from a traditional school, tending towards experimentation, nudity and knitting khaki balaclavas for the International Brigade. The staff are an interesting bunch, and Ellen is determined to love the children in all their savagery (though she does struggle to love the parents who have neglected their offspring). There is also a mysterious handyman, Marek, who has fitted wheels to a paralysed tortoise, and who Ellen is drawn to. But Marek has a secret -- as well as a glamorous soprano lover -- and as the Second World War begins, Marek and Ellen are forced apart by circumstance and nationality.

I noticed this time around that Ibbotson skips over certain key scenes -- a discussion between Ellen's English admirer and Marek, Ellen and Marek's parting -- and only refers to them much later. It keeps the suspense going but feels a little unfair. There are also several moments when time is wasted, the romance delayed, because somebody jumps to conclusions: this was frustrating. And I noticed much more of the music, including that line about Stravinsky, and a cameo by an elderly Richard Strauss, whose opera Der Rosenkavalier underpins part of the novel.

Ibbotson's novels, which seem to have been rebranded as 'young adult' romances, are such a delight, and there's always considerable depth and even darkness beneath the sweet and sparkling love story. A quick check of this blog indicates that, after discovering Ibbotson's romances in the 1990s, I have reread all but Magic Flutes, which I shall save up for next time I want a comforting, witty, warm-hearted reread.

2023/060: Hokey Pokey — Kate Mascarenhas

He was paying her to spy, but he must realise that, more than the money, Nora wanted to hear she was indistinguishable from the Icon. I've missed you being her. It was a victory to hear him say it. It made her want to cry. [loc. 401]

On a cold night in February 1929, Nora Čapek checks into the Regent Hotel in Birmingham under a pseudonym. She's there to follow opera singer Berenice Oxbow, who's married to Nora's fellow psychoanalyst Leo Cadieux, and report back to Leo. Nora has a unique gift: she recalls everything she hears, and can repeat every word she's ever heard, verbatim, in the style it was first spoken. "Because of this she saw herself as truthful." But she has a number of secrets to conceal, not least her own nature. On the other hand, Leo has convinced her that her memories of an unsettling childhood in an English forest, some time before the First World War, cannot possibly be real. They are, he asserts, fantasies rooted in her difficult relationship with her mother. Only gradually do we discover that Leo is wrong, and that Nora's 'fantasies' are the key to her nature.

Nora's not the only one with secrets. A fellow guest, Arthur Crouch, has lived in the hotel for years, claims to know every inch of the building, and says there's a well in the cellar that will bestow forgiveness on any who drinks from it. He seems to know a great deal about the staff, too. And Berenice draws all eyes to herself on her first night in the hotel, when she seems to go into a trance and declares that 'a lady with flowers tattooed on her forearm' is in terrible danger. When she's escorted from the dining hall, Nora returns to her own room to apply panstick to her distinguishing mark, a tattoo of a chrysanthemum surrounded by little pink dots, like nettle rash. It's worth noting that Hokey Pokey, in this instance, is the name of a cocktail made from absinthe and stinging nettles (recipe provided). Arthur treats Nora to several of these.

The shifting relationships between Nora and Arthur, and Nora and Berenice, begin to feel even more claustrophobic when trains to and from the city are cancelled due to a freak snowstorm. And Nora's goal metamorphoses, from listening to -- and 'recording' -- every word Berenice says (or sings), to a desire to know Berenice for herself.

This was an original, and extremely atmospheric, horror novel: beautifully written with considerable psychological depth, and revealing its secrets with tantalising langour. It's a love story, a story of professional rivalry, a tale of the supernatural: I liked it very much.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK publication date is 8th June 2023

2023/059: The Last Remains — Elly Griffiths

This is where, twenty-four years earlier, a timber circle had emerged from the sea, a great archaeological discovery, certainly, but also an event that, in Cathbad’s opinion, created a disturbance in the ether, a cosmic jolt that is still causing repercussions in the lives of the people involved. ‘Things are still slightly out of balance,’ he said recently. ‘Ruth and Nelson. That only happened because of the energies from the dig.’ [p. 250]

The fifteenth (and, as it turns out, the last 'for now') Ruth Galloway novel: Ruth is an archaeologist and head of the archaeology department at the fictional University of North Norfolk. Her on-off love interest, Harry Nelson, is a Detective Chief Inspector. Their daughter Kate is now at secondary school. Ruth's friends include Cathbad the druid, Ruth's recently-discovered half-sister Zoe, and various police officers and academics, past and present. The setting is more or less contemporary (Cathbad is suffering from Long Covid, the first time I've seen it used as a plot device) and mostly East Anglia, with a focus on the neolithic flint mines known as Grimes Graves. And the murder mystery here begins (after a prelude describing an unsettling 'living archaeology' experience, some years before the action of the novel) with the discovery of a woman's skeleton behind a boarded-up alcove in a cafe.

This felt, in places, very much an end-of-season special: characters from previous novels reappeared, situations were resolved, improbably happy endings were achieved. That made it a very pleasant read, though there was also considerable tension, of several kinds, building until the last chapter. Ruth exhibited more backbone ('See you in a week. Bye now.') than in previous books, and Kate played a key role. The skeleton's origins were discovered, the bad behaviour of a senior academic revealed, and Tony Robinson and Mary Beard were namedropped. And all's well that ends well -- but now I want to reread the whole series, start to end! There are some early volumes that I barely recall...

Fulfils the ‘Written in Present Tense’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

2023/058: Five Red Herrings — Dorothy Sayers

The road from Kirkcudbright to Newton Stewart is of a varied loveliness hard to surpass, and with a sky full of bright sun and rolling cloud-banks, hedges filled with flowers, a well-made road, a lively engine and the prospect of a good corpse at the end of it, Lord Peter’s cup of happiness was full. He was a man who loved simple pleasures. [opening paragraph]

I had a vague notion that I'd read all Sayers' Lord Peter novels, but apparently not! This one was not an unalloyed delight, since much of the plot revolves around railway timetables. In Scotland, in the 1920s. With concomitant oddities, such as crossing the tracks to board one's train; the presence of multiple staff on a station; being able to send unaccompanied items; and so on. This was a time when it was deemed reasonable to walk into a strange house if the door was unlocked... The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

An enjoyable mystery revolving around the death of a disagreeable chap named Campbell, and Lord Peter's analysis of the loose-knit community of artists in which he lived and died. The six prime suspects -- for lo, Campbell's death, falling down a cliff near a well-known scenic spot, is not as accidental as it initially appears -- are distinctive and interesting characters, ready to talk about their art or lie about their whereabouts. There are also a few women.

Sayers had immense fun with the Scottish accent here ('noo we see as there was no necessity for a’ they whigmaleeries') and the dialogue is splendidly evocative, though occasionally dated (for values of 'dated' including 'racist'). Lord Peter's methods are delightfully unconventional and creative: Sayers' depiction of him is witty, allusive and rather more physical than in some of the other books. Not one of her best (my top three are The Nine Tailors, Murder Must Advertise, and Gaudy Night) but a pleasing way to spend an evening, and an intriguing insight into everyday life a century ago in Galloway.

2023/057: Something More than Night — Kim Newman

People who know magic isn’t real look straight at a ghost and see a flapping bed sheet. They deal with an irrefutable demonstration of how things really are the way an oyster deals with a speck of grit. The truth gets coated in a hard, shiny shell that can be worn proudly. A pearl is a lie you can roll between your teeth. [loc. 488]

A writer of mysteries is summoned to a crime scene: a man is dead, apparently by suicide, in a car that's been driven off a pier. Raymond Chandler (for it is he) can't help noticing parallels to his novel The Big Sleep (in which one unresolved plot thread is 'who killed the chauffeur?'): he's also distressed to discover that the victim here is his old friend Joh Devlin, with whom he and his friend Billy Pratt had previously investigated the mysterious doings of a movie mogul, Ward Home Jr., who'd run screaming and aflame from his mansion. It is Billy (better known by his Hollywood name, Boris Karloff) who summoned 'R. T.' to the scene of this new crime, and Billy who is still suffering the aftermath of the Home House case. R.T. and Billy are old friends, and had their first encounter with the supernatural while at school together. Now they are confronted with a friend's apparent suicide, and by the appearance of a woman, soaked but alive, from the trunk of the sunken car.

This is an enjoyable and fast-paced crime novel with its heart in the pulp fiction of the period, and its brains very much on display. There are riffs on Frankenstein as well as on Chandler's work, and there are a plethora of cultural references, of which I probably noticed fewer than half. Newman's prose is suitably hard-boiled, his dialogue excellent, his hints of the supernatural enticing, and his invention -- for instance, the Sparx Brothers, who carry out a series of slapstick-inspired murders including techniques such as 'poisoned pie to the face' and (narrowly-escaped) 'death by falling safe' -- is both a delight and a marvel of balance. Comedy and supernatural horror (witchcraft, mad science, sacrifice, resurrection) blend marvellously in this novel, without it ever losing its focus on R.T. and Billy and their long friendship. I have bounced off Newman's fiction previously but this has convinced me to try it again.

2023/056: Savage Beasts — Rani Selvarajah

"...Jans is always hungry. Not as much as Frederick here ..."
"'Jans'? Why have you given them such strange names?" Meena asked as she stroked the boar behind its ears. He turned his head and nestled his face in her hand.
"They're Dutch names. They're the names of the former occupiers of this place," said Kiran.
"You named the boars after the Dutchmen who lived here?"
Kiran chuckled. "Something like that..." [loc. 2299]

A retelling of the story of Medea and Jason, transposed to seventeenth-century India and, later, South Africa and England. Meena is the daughter of the Nawab of Bengal. She lives in luxury and privilege, but is made miserable by her abusive brother. One day, sneaking out to the docks, she encounters James Chilcott, nephew of Sir Peter Chilcott of the East India Company. James tells Meena he has been sent to infiltrate the palace but has decided to betray his uncle's cruel plans. Will Meena help him? Flattered by his attention, and strongly attracted to this handsome Englishman, Meena arranges a meeting between James and her father, and subsequently flees with him (and with a great deal of gold). They seek help from Meena's aunt Kiran, living in exile in Ceylon: but she dislikes James and tries to warn Meena against him. Meena, though, is in love -- and pregnant -- and James has vowed that they're as good as married.

The colonial setting highlights the ways in which Meena is demonised, dehumanised, and treated, despite her royal birth, as a 'savage beast'. Even in Bengal she's abused by her male relatives: once she reaches the Cape of Good Hope, it is made very plain to her that she has no place in colonial society, much less the refined balls and shopping expeditions enjoyed by her English peers.

There were some fascinating ideas here, and the basic premise drew me in: but unfortunately I didn't feel that either Meena or James were consistently characterised. Meena in particular, though far from stupid, seemed constantly surprised by the prejudice she encountered. I couldn't reconcile her independence and strength with her continued attempts to repair her failing relationship with James. James himself seemed two-dimensional: having seduced Meena and persuaded her to leave Bengal with him, he seemed uninterested in behaving with kindness, let alone love, towards her.

I didn't find Savage Beasts as enjoyable a read as I'd hoped: knowing the myth of Medea well, I was intrigued to see how Selvarajah would explore her character and her actions, especially the later parts of the myth (see Euripides). Meena seems to have less agency than her mythological counterpart, though she does enact some of the more violent episodes, in sometimes-unexpected ways. I found the writing uneven, with some jarring phrases: Meena is 'gobsmacked' at one point, and James later accuses her of 'morose paranoia'. I found it hard to imagine Meena saying 'okay, now we can finally get to the crux of the matter'. It's not just dialogue, either: though there are some lovely descriptive passages, much of the prose is flat and repetitive.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review. UK publication date is 25th May 2023.

2023/055: The Mislaid Magician — Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer

...you will find letters from your children. Do not believe everything they tell you. The part about the snake is true enough, but I assure you there are no basilisks in Thomas’s study. I would have noticed.

Not quite as enchanting as Sorcery and Cecilia, but an enjoyable read -- though apparently not one that sticks in my memory, as I read and reviewed it in 2010. I had no sense of familiarity as I settled down to read this a couple of weeks ago... Can I look forward to many more accidental rereads?

My original review can stand unamended, though I did feel that Kate -- staying home to look after Cecy's children as well as her own, and fielding a plethora of youthful adventure -- gets a raw deal.

2023/054: Gnomon — Nick Harkaway

Catabasis for the masses [p. 603]

An extraordinarily dense and layered narrative, which I had to restart twice before I was sure I understood what was going on. (And now I am not so sure that I did understand.) The setting is a near-future Britain, surveilled by the Witness (an all-seeing, all-knowing combination of AI and CCTV) and governed by the System (direct democracy, where everybody gets to vote on selected matters). Mielikki Neith is a Witness inspector, and something of a celebrity: she's engaged to investigate the death of Diana Hunter, a woman who was living off-grid and possibly spreading sedition. Mielikki is given access to the recordings of the surgical/chemical interrogation: not mere audio-video, but a way of examining Hunter's lived experience during the process. Except that, instead of Hunter, there appear to be other people in her memories: a Roman alchemist (former lover of St Augustine), a Greek banker (haunted by a shark, or possibly a god), and an Ethiopian artist, Berihun Bekele, who's producing the artwork for a game that features an all-seeing, malevolent Witness... And there's something else in there too: not strictly a person, but an entity in the distant future, which seems to be a sociopath.

Spoiler, slightly: it is not all a game.

There are so many layers of narrative here: the splendidly divergent voices of Athenais ('Show me but once how to bend the laws of fate, and I will tie them in such knots as shall make your head spin'), Kyriakos ('reality is something I’m losing touch with, and have been since a god-shark invaded my head and crashed the stock market') and Bekele ('Between six and seven in the evening on a Thursday, I felt the last of [my art] turn to dust inside me'); Mielikki's insistence on discovering the truth behind Diana Hunter's 'Scheherazade gambit', a nice term for the creation of false narratives to confound the interrogator; the 'appalling certainty' of the entity that calls itself Gnomon. (Surely mere coincidence that that's the name of the case as assigned to Mielikki Neith?) Each story, each narrative, is coherent, complete and cogent: each is, in its way, a lie.

Harkaway throws in a plethora of digressions. I've learned about alchemical concepts, about catabasis (journeys to the underworld), about the racist chemistry of celluloid film, about the etymology of words for blackness. I have learned, and tested the knowledge, that it is very difficult to vomit while humming a tune. And I have forgotten much already... Perhaps the overall novel could have been tighter, less discursive, less uneven: perhaps it might have been shorter, less convoluted, less twisty. It's certainly not an easy book to read in fits and starts. But Gnomon repays close attention with an exuberance that made up for my frequent moments of confusion. The characters are vivid, the plot paradoxical and the prose a delight. And now (having put off reading this for years after acquiring it) I may just have to purchase Harkaway's new novel, Titanium Noir, and dive in.

Fulfils the ‘A Character Who Is A Refugee’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge. Bekele escaped imprisonment in Ethiopia before immigrating to London.

2023/053: The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition — Ursula Le Guin

I’m not sure if the dragons will ever return out of the west beyond the west, yet I know Tehanu will. I know where Ged goes next. But the storyteller doesn’t tell all she knows. When the story is over she falls silent. Then, after a while, perhaps she says, “But listen now! I have another tale to tell! [loc. 17466]

That rare artefact, an illustrated Kindle book where the illustrations -- beautiful illustrations, by Charles Vess -- are clear, visible and well-integrated. This was a 99p Kindle Daily Deal in June '22, and it contains all six books (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu, Tales of Earthsea and The Other Wind), together with miscellaneous shorter Earthsea fiction, and fascinating introductions and afterwords by Le Guin.

I think I'd read all the fiction before, apart from the four late stories. But I've been reading and rereading A Wizard of Earthsea for nearly half a century, for so long that it's become part of me: while somehow I didn't get around to reading The Other Wind for over a decade after its 2001 publication, and have, as far as I recall, not reread it until now.

I read the whole sequence, start to finish, over a long weekend, and it was an immersive and utterly delightful experience. The deep familiarity of the first two novels; the layers of The Farthest Shore, which I did not understand when I first read it as an adolescent (though some of the imagery is firmly rooted in my subconscious); Tehanu, which would have distressed me when I was a child and is still fairly harrowing; the stories in Tales from Earthsea, which I don't think I had ever really fitted into the wider narrative arc; and The Other Wind, the only book of Earthsea that I've read since beginning this blog in 2005. (I've never reread it, and I think now that this might be because the setting is more urban, more courtly, more crowded. What has stayed with me from the initial trilogy is the sense of a traveller, sometimes with a companion and sometimes utterly alone, going into the wild places of the earth.)

This wasn't only a joyful reprise of the familiar and a review of the less-familiar: nor was it only a heartfelt appreciation of Le Guin's craft. With the inclusion of the author's introductions and afterwords, her 'Description of Earthsea', and her perceptive comments about the evolution of Earthsea (and, necessarily, the evolution of herself as its author), the story does indeed feel 'Complete', and the narrative rightness of its arc shines clear. The fiction is a delight, a revelation, a 'spell for the refreshment of the spirit': Le Guin's honest and thoughtful commentary -- how she came to see the magic and history of Earthsea, and the Old Powers, 'in a different light, under a larger, kinder sky' [loc. 4732] -- grounds the stories, and gives them historical and personal context. ('Men’s writing was seen as transcending gender; women’s writing as trapped in it. Why am I using the past tense?' [loc. 18812])

I've been thinking about the ways in which choice is a theme. 'It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.' [loc. 1757] 'Freedom ... is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.' [loc. 4575] '...in the beginning of time, mankind and the dragons had been one, but the dragons chose wildness and freedom, and mankind chose wealth and power.' [loc. 15940] (That choice, made in the deep past of Earthsea, made me think of the great Neolithic choice: hunter-gatherer or farmer?) '...he had spent his life learning how to choose to do what he had no choice but to do' [loc. 17262]. There's a spiritual aspect to that last, a sense of going with the flow, that appeals to me.

And one loose end: I still don't know if Lebannen and Ged ever meet again, after their parting in Roke at the end of The Farthest Shore. Le Guin surely knew, but she did not share that story.