2024/159: A Short History of Humanity: How Migration Made Us Who We Are — Johannes Krause / Thomas Trappe (translated by Caroline Waight)

If you look at the settlement of Europe as the drama it so often was, then at least 70 percent of its cast are descended from the antiheroes: the migrants who arrived on the continent and subjugated it 8,000 and 5,000 years ago. [loc. 2165]

An informative, accessible and fascinating book about archaeogenetics and what the study of ancient humans' DNA can tell us about patterns of migration. It's Eurocentric, but that allows the authors -- Johannes Krause, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, and journalist Thomas Trappe -- to focus on the origins of present-day Europeans, and the waves of migration that have swept over the continent from east to west.

There's a thorough examination of the role of plague in human history, from its effect on migration (easier to migrate into an area where most of the population has died) to the lingering fear of migrants bearing disease. I hadn't known that there was a 'first wave' of plague, non-bubonic and probably transmitted to humans by Asian horses, in the Mesolithic: that variant died out just as bubonic plague was evolving. Nor did I realise that after regular outbreaks of plague in the early medieval period (including the Plague of Justinian), the disease went dormant -- at least in Europe -- for centuries before the lethal epidemic of the mid-fourteenth century. The reason is unknown, but Krause hypothesises that earlier outbreaks, as well as cultural and social changes, had reduced population density to a level which precluded mass outbreaks. (He also points out that 50% of medieval plague infections were non-lethal, and conferred lifelong immunity on survivors.)

Also fascinating was the discussion of non-Homo Sapiens DNA inheritance: in sub-Saharan Africa there are no traces of Neanderthal DNA, whereas it's 2.5% in Europeans. Indigenous peoples of Australia and Papua New Guinea are about 7% descended from Neanderthals and Denisovans. It's not only different human species that can be detected in DNA: Southern Europeans, and especially Sardinians, have less genetic indication of incoming migration than in other areas.

There are also intriguing insights into the origins of syphilis (not a souvenir brought back to Europe by Columbus' crew) and the spread of tuberculosis and leprosy. And despite the violence and disease historically introduced by waves of migrants, Krause is at pains to stress that 'human beings are born travelers; we are made to wander.' He argues against the ways in which genetic evidence has been used to fuel ethnic conflicts, and explains how genetic differences are reducing as humans become ever more mobile. And he stresses that the issues facing the world today 'are constants in human history: deadly pandemics and constant migration'.

A really good read: full of science, but with a distinctly humanist slant and a refreshing refusal to interpret prehistory through the lens of the present.

2024/158: Signal to Noise — Silvia Moreno-Garcia

He lifted the needle. There was the faint scratch against the vinyl and then the song began to play.
“Okay, now we hold hands and dance around it,” Meche said.
“Really,” Sebastian replied dryly.
“Yes. That’s what witches do. They dance around the fire. Only we don’t have a fire, so we’ll dance around the record player.” [loc. 983]

It's 2009, and IT professional Meche is returning to Mexico City for the first time in twenty years, to attend her father's funeral. It's 1988, and Meche is 15, hanging out with literature-mad Sebastian and young-for-her-age Daniela, and discovering that the three of them can do magic. Alternating between the two timelines, Signal to Noise is the story of what went wrong between Meche and Sebastian, Meche and her parents, Meche and herself.

This was Moreno-Garcia's first novel, and features some predictable plot elements and occasional clunky sentences. We never get an explanation of the magic, or why only some records (physical records! those round things!) work as magical foci. And I'd have liked more about the grandmother's history, and her sacrifice. But I liked the atmosphere of a Mexico City high school; the way that music twines through the story; the relationship between Meche and Sebastian, and the uncomfortable dynamics of Meche's family; the way that the past must be faced before it can be left behind.

I bought this in September 2020, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/157: The House of the Stag — Kage Baker

“But this is all absurd!”
“Isn’t it? I lie to survive, because people fear and respect a black mask more than an honest face. Life became much simpler once I understood that.” [p. 288]

This has been on my wishlist for ages, and was suddenly, briefly affordable...

Gard grows up in a close-knit family among a tribe of gentle forest dwellers, the Yendri. He's bigger and stronger than the other boys, and he doesn't believe in the divinity of the newly-arrived prophet. Then come the Riders, who enslave the Yendri: the prophet Beloved walks through walls, tending to the wounded and despairing, but Gard would rather fight back in more physical ways. He ends up exiled, and trying to climb the mountains beyond which lies a fabled promised land ... and finds himself, crippled by frostbite, prisoner and slave to a coven of immortal mages who employ hordes of demons to keep their Citadel running. Gard attracts the eye of the ambitious Lady Pirihine, Narcissus of the Void: he also befriends a number of demons, including the lovely, deadly Balnshik. Trained as a gladiator and then as a mage, Gard learns a great deal about the world and about his own nature. Then the Citadel is destroyed, and Gard turns to acting ... but his ultimate aim is to become a Dark Lord, with his own mountain stronghold and (obviously) werewolf valet.

Meanwhile the Yendri are flourishing under the care of a young woman known as the Saint, who is pure and compassionate and sensible. I am not comfortable with the circumstances of her first meeting with the Master of the Mountain... But on the whole (and despite slavery and genocide and rape and murder and some deeply unpleasant scenes) this is a cheering and gently humorous novel. It doesn't shy from the horrors of the world, but neither does it linger on them. Instead, it shows us people making the best of their situations: it shows us kindness and forgiveness, loyalty and just deserts, and a multitude of magics, from theatre to magecraft to the inner lives of demons. There were moments when I wanted to look away -- but more moments where I smiled, or laughed aloud, or reread a conversation just to relish Baker's humour. I wish she'd lived longer and written more.

I realised about halfway through that this was actually a prequel to The Anvil of the World, which I read nearly 20 years ago and now want to reread!

2024/156: Where the Dead Wait — Ally Wilkes

When animals were slaughtered -- butchered correctly -- they’d have the blood drained. This was the stink of something still fat with blood. Being cooked hastily, for starving men. Something was in the room with them. [p. 127]

I'd found All the White Spaces compelling and well-written, so was keen to read Wilkes' second novel. Her prose is still resonant and evocative, but I didn't enjoy Where the Dead Wait as much: partly, I think, because I didn't find the protagonist (William 'Eat-Em-Fresh' Day) as sympathetic as Jonathan in the previous book, and partly because I found the cannibalism thoroughly unpleasant.

There's a lot more than cannibalism to this novel of 19th-century Arctic exploration. The focal character is William Day, disgraced survivor of a polar expedition, who returns to the Arctic thirteen years later because his second-in-command, Jesse Stevens, has gone missing in the same area. Those members of the original expedition who made it home had resorted to 'the last desperate resource' -- a euphemism for cannibalism -- but Day knows, though has not revealed, that Stevens' nature held darker secrets. Day, who was in inadmissable and unrequited love with Stevens, is accompanied on the rescue mission by old crew mates and a gang of whalers who survived a shipwreck but were changed by it, and by two especially unwelcome passengers: Stevens' wife, a medium, and Avery, a newspaper reporter. Three unwelcome passengers, perhaps: for whenever Day looks into a mirror, or catches a glimpse of a reflection, Stevens is there.

The gradual revelation of the earlier expedition's fate, told in parallel with the second voyage, is excellently paced. Day's slow disintegration has an inevitability as horrific as the events that haunt him. The characters are intriguing (especially Arctic Highlander Qila, and Olive Stevens the medium) and the tension between them palpable. Elements of colonialism ('the expedition’s first acts had been to claim the land around them, as if theirs to do so'); echoes of Heart of Darkness and The Terror. But I now know much more than I wanted to know about cannibalism and the preparation and cooking of human flesh.

They’d taken the good cuts first. And then, with almost unimaginable hubris, they’d buried what was left. [p. 173]

2024/155: We Are All Ghosts in the Forest — Lorraine Wilson

They were not ghosts, but the forest was not just a forest anymore and people had written far too many stories about wolves for them to be unchanged. You tell a thing it is hungry enough times, can you blame it for hunting? [loc. 2388]

Katerina, formerly a photojournalist, lives in her dead grandmother's house, near a small village in Estonia. The villagers think she's a witch (they're right) because she has a knack for herbalism, a talent for talking to bees, a coat whose pockets nearly always give her what she needs, and a ghost cat named Orlando. The forest is semi-sentient, and full of ghosts from the Crash -- when the internet collapsed in on itself, spawning infectious digital ghosts that might be fragments of birdsong, or a galloping horse, or sentient fungus. Or wolves out of fairytales, more intelligent and malevolent than their natural cousins.

The novel begins with Katerina returning to her village with a young boy in tow. His name is Stefan, and he's mute: he gave Katerina a note from his father (a man she doesn't know) asking her to take care of his son. Katerina teaches him to manage the basic tasks of the farm, and tries to find out what became of his father. Could he be somehow linked to the new and terrible illness that's killing travellers? And can Katerina -- with the help of the forest, and the bees, and even the ghosts -- find a cure for it?

This is a slow, dreamy novel, beautifully written and suffused with loneliness and mystery: it reveals its secrets only gradually. The characters seem defined as much as by what they've lost (Katerina mourning her sister, Jaakob trying to 'fish' for the ghost of his husband, Stefan missing his father) as by what they do. There is prejudice (Katerina, as well as being a witch and a traveller, is mixed-race) and xenophobia. The post-technological society that Wilson depicts is as mystical as it's practical. There is great power in stories, and in the ways those stories are told.

Pragmatic and practical, Katerina's inner conflict between her compassion and her fear of emotional connection is vividly depicted: I liked her interactions with the (sometimes prickly) villagers, and she won me over by sprinkling salt on Orlando the Ghost Cat, who turns black to soak up the heat of a stray sunbeam. 'Salt strengthens the signal... Or the current, if that’s how it works. Electricity, either way. Copper powder works better but it also lasts longer and then he starts shredding the rugs'. Definite pandemic vibes here, too, with the isolation and the constant threat of infection... A slow read, but a beautiful one.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 07 NOV 2024.

2024/154: Dreadnought — April Daniels

The dirty little secret about growing up as a boy is if you’re not any good at it, they will torture you daily until you have the good graces to kill yourself. [loc. 82]

YA superhero fiction. Danny, fifteen, has gone to the shopping mall to buy nail polish and is hiding out in an alleyway painting her toenails: it's the one way she can rebel against being stuck in a boy's body. Then a superhero, Dreadnought, falls out of the sky. Dying, he passes his 'mantle' -- his powers -- to Danny. And part of that mantle is changing the recipient's body to match their self-image. 'That is not the chest I woke up with', observes Danny.

She's finally herself: but her transformation is only the start of the novel. It's not easy being a fifteen-year-old superhero, but it's even harder being a girl with an abusive father who could never have accepted Danny's transgender identity, and refuses to believe that Danny can be happy about her new body. Danny quickly discovers that her best friend David is actually a complete jerk: but she makes a new friend, Latina vigilante Calamity. Calamity's a 'greycape', morally ambiguous: blackcapes are villains, and whitecapes are the good guys. The local whitecape chapter is the Legion Pacifica, who contact Danny and invite her to Legion Tower. Not all of the Legion are cool with the new Dreadnought, and TERFy Graywytch questions her gender. Danny's happier hanging out with Calamity and fighting crime, but their ambition is greater than their ability: going up against a major blackcape is not a smart move.

I enjoyed this a lot, though did feel that most of the characters could have done with more backstory, and indeed more personality. I'd have liked more world-building, too, though there are some intriguing snippets of superhero history: 'In the last great gasp of radio journalism, the whole world stayed glued to their sets to listen to the live reports as [the original] Dreadnought and Mistress Malice savaged each other...' But this gave me a warm glow and a nostalgic affection for the MCU in its heyday (the Legion are reminiscent of the Avengers: a super-strong fighter, an android, a Norse deity, a guy in a suit of armour, a witch...). Not sure I'll read the sequel just yet, but I'd recommend this as a fun read.

I bought this in DEC 2020, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/153: We'll Prescribe You a Cat — Syou Ishida (translated by Emmie Madison Shimoda)

‘The amount of time you spent together probably matters, but less time doesn’t mean less love. Whether it’s a day or a year, human or cat, and even if we may never see them again, there are those who are irreplaceable in our lives.’ [loc. 2613]

Somewhere in Kyoto, in an old building down a gloomy cobbled alleyway, is the Kokoro Clinic for the Soul. It can only be found by those who need it, who are weighed down by emotional pain. And the door is very heavy, but you have to keep pushing. Inside, terse nurse Chitose will direct you to Doctor Nikké, who will -- as it says on the tin -- prescribe you a cat. An actual cat, in a carrier, with a printed instruction sheet.

We'll Prescribe You a Cat is a series of linked short stories. Kagawa is unhappy at work, and is prescribed a cat who upends his life: he ends up in a much more pleasant job. Koga loathes his new supervisor, who's full of compliments for everyone: his cat helps him connect. There's a ten-year-old girl who's struggling socially, a perfectionist who can't forgive others, a geiko who's lost her own cat and can't get over the guilt. Many of these patients also encounter Dr Kokoro, who looks exactly like Dr Nikké: and Abino the geiko is shocked to find that Nurse Chitose looks exactly like her. There are disturbing rumours about the unit occupied by the Clinic for the Soul: that it's jinxed; that it was used by unscrupulous cat breeders; that it's haunted by ghosts...

Chitose and Nikké are delightful characters, and each cat that they prescribe has a distinct personality. The patients, with their problems and their resolutions, are sensitively written, and though there are echoes of loss, grief and cruelty beneath the surface, the overall mood is joyous.

I liked this much more than I'd expected. The translation reads smoothly, and the hints of magic realism never overdone.

Buddy-read with N, but I kept getting ahead as it was so compelling.

You know the old saying, “A cat a day keeps the doctor away.” Cats are more effective than any other medicine out there.’

2024/152: The Bright Sword — Lev Grossman

“You are not who you think you are, and Britain is not what you think it is. I return you now to Camelot. Your disaster is already in progress.” [loc. 3099]

I rate Grossman's Magicians trilogy (The Magicians, The Magician King,The Magician's Land) very highly, but wasn't sure I wanted to read his take on the Matter of Britain. It was a Daily Deal, though, and I couldn't (well, didn't) resist. I think I loved it, but it's still too soon to say. There is a lot in its nearly 700 pages.

The story begins with Collum, an orphan and bastard who at seventeen is a spectacular warrior, heading for Camelot to pledge allegiance to King Arthur. He arrives too late: the Battle of Camlann was a fortnight ago, almost all the Knights of the Round Table (well, those who survived the Quest for the Holy Grail) are dead or missing, and Arthur was last seen being borne away, gravely wounded, on a magical ship. Those few who remain -- Sir Bedivere, Sir Dagonet, Sir Palomides, Sir Dinadan, Sir Scipio -- are empty of purpose and drowned in misery. Over the course of the novel, their histories (and some of the most famous episodes from Arthurian tradition) are explored, and we learn what the Round Table and Camelot meant to each knight. Morgan, Nimue and Guinevere are important figures, though -- unlike the knights -- none gets her own chapter. And meanwhile, there's a Green Knight and a new Quest and, perhaps, a new king.

This is post-Roman Britain, replete with anachronisms ('the Dark Ages king and the pretty high medieval trappings, Camelot and all the rest of it, [writers] who pick and choose what they like from history and sweep the messy bits under the rug', says Grossman in his entertaining Afterword), a land laid waste by the conflict between God and Faerie, a land threatened by Saxons fleeing rising seas to the east, and by the old gods, and by the new king at Camelot. I found the vestiges of pre-Roman Britain -- the light of civilisation going out, the people who 'scurried back to the old hill forts, which they barely remembered how to live in', the tribes that were once legions -- more engaging and poignant than the medieval-flavoured fantasies of flying ships, shining swords and combat in plate armour.

I very much liked the sense of time in this novel, of the events as happening at one brief moment between a long past and an equally complex future: of the history of Britain as a continual roil of story, 'the past never wholly lost, and the future never quite found'. I liked the knights' tales, which encompass cultural difference ('what the fuck is a zero?' someone asks Sir Palomides, who's from Baghdad), neurodivergence, gender and sexuality, and religious faith. Every time I dip into the novel for a quotation or a reference, I find myself rereading a page or so. I'm looking forward to revisiting The Bright Sword in years to come.

He looked up at the empty clouds, and ... wondered, not for the first time but for the very last, why it should be that we are made for a bright world, but live in a dark one. [last lines]

2024/151: Can't Spell Treason Without Tea — Rebecca Thorne

... unlike Kianthe, who’d ignored this problem and hoped it’d go away, Reyna had spent the time strategizing. She’d always known her freedom wouldn’t come easily, or without a fight—but the Arcandor was supposed to be neutral, and thus, a fight wasn’t truly an option. Two people couldn’t topple a country. [p. 284]

Sapphic romantasy with Reyna (bodyguard to the ruthless Queen) and Kianthe (the Arcandor, leader of the mages) running away together to start a book-and-tea shop. Their elopement is triggered by an assassination attempt on the Queen, foiled by Reyna -- who's wounded in the process, and realises just how little regard said Queen has for her loyal staff.

...I just had to go back and amend that paragraph because I'd mixed up the two characters, an error which I think illustrates my response to this book. 

Though the chapter viewpoints alternate between the two women, they don't have especially distinct voices. They don't really do things as a couple (the books are Kianthe's thing, while Reyna never rereads a novel; the tea is Reyna's thing). Though they make much of their excellent communication ('This was dissolving from a productive conversation into a defensive debate. Kianthe was prone to that, but usually Reyna guided her to a better path') they don't really seem to understand one another very well.

I think I'd have enjoyed the book more if it had started earlier in their romance, rather than presenting them as an established couple -- albeit a couple who have never lived together. And as far as 'cosy' fantasy goes, the stakes here (angry dragons, treason, bandits, murderous monarch) feel rather too epic. I found the ending rather unsatisfactory -- it's basically just postponing any reckoning -- and the constant use of 'tome' instead of 'book' ('the tome on her bedside table'; 'plucked a random tome from the shelves') became irritating quite quickly.

Some nice themes and ideas, but it didn't engage me enough to read more in the series.

2024/150: The Scholar and the Last Fairy Door — H G Parry

Eddie has wanted to hide from the world. Hero had wanted to make it new. Alden and I, in our own ways, loved the old, safe world -- Ashfield and Camford, tradition and beauty, the sunlit days of our childhoods before the Great War.
But the world had never been safe, not for everybody. It had been broken for a very long time, and the war had only shown those cracks for what they were. [loc. 5056]

Clover Hill has grown up knowing that magic isn't for her: it's the realm of the Families, the aristocrats who have magical blood. Nevertheless, when her brother Matthew returns from war terribly wounded by a faerie attack at the Battle of Amiens, she becomes determined to find a way to heal him. She enters Camford, founded by the magical department of Oxford University and in the thirteenth century, as a scholarship witch, somewhat out of her depth both socially and academically. When golden youth Alden Lennox-Fontaine finds her reading a book about faerie magic -- which is banned, and all doors to the faerie realm supposedly closed -- he finds her intriguing enough to draw into his coterie. Clover becomes friends with Hero, Eddie and Alden, and they discover a shared interest in the faerie doors and where they might lead. But the doors were shut for a reason, and their daring experiments have catastrophic consequences.

Dark academia at its best, with a thoughtful exploration of class, privilege and prejudice. I've encountered some elements of this world, and this plot, before: for example, in The Golden Enclaves and a plethora of other works where the happiness of the many depends on the suffering of a few. There are plenty of novels about 'a school for magic' and the intense friendships that outsiders can form: there are plenty of novels about hubris. For me, this novel succeeded because of Clover's voice, and her (impulsive and sometimes immature) personality. The pace is slow and considered, the characters diverse in a period-typical way (Clover's mentor, Lady Winter, is from Madras; one of the characters is gay, one is bisexual; working-class characters as vividly drawn as the aristocrats). Though much of the first half of the novel (set in 1920) takes place in Camford, the second half sees Clover visiting London and Paris.

One minor complaint is the lack of Brit-picking: nobody in 1920 would think of anything as 'the size of a fifty-pence piece', and there are occasional unBritish turns of phrase ('you didn't have to come meet me'). Overall, though, I enjoyed this very much, and am now keen to read Parry's other novels.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 24 OCT 2024.

2024/149: The Betrayal — Helen Dunmore

The blob of sun on the corridor wall wavers. The day shines before him, impossibly ordinary and beautiful. This must be how the dead think of life. All those things they used to take for granted, and can never have again. [p. 13]

Sequel to The Siege, The Betrayal begins ten years later, in late 1952. Anna is a nursery teacher, Andrei is a doctor, Kolya is a sullen and uncommunicative teenager who annoys the neighbours with his piano-playing. Andrei is asked by a colleague to give an opinion on a sick child, Gorya: "My ‘initial findings’," says the colleague, "are that this patient is the son of — an extremely influential person." No wonder he wants to pass the case to somebody else. Gorya forms a liking for Andrei, so Gorya's father Volkov -- a commissar in Stalin's secret police -- insists that Andrei takes the case. It does not end well, and Andrei, together with the Jewish doctor who performs surgery on the boy, become scapegoats.

Anna meanwhile is trying to conceive; trying not to draw her boss's attention to the fact that her father was a banned writer; hiding her father's diaries, which not even Andrei knows about; making a dress for the Doctors' Ball, from some silk left to her by Marina, with a sewing machine lent to her by her wealthy friend Julia; trying to keep envious neighbours at bay; trying to keep going after Andrei's arrest. She is a very ordinary person, but she does have good friends, and they are her salvation.

Andrei is the core of this novel, in particular his charged interactions with Volkov. His talent for diplomacy can only take him so far, though, and his professional ethics won't protect him from the system. In the background is the Doctors' Plot conspiracy, in which a number of doctors -- mostly Jewish -- were accused of deliberately causing harm to top Soviet figures. Andrei, though not Jewish, is subject to many of the same injustices and indignities. But Volkov still has a spark of humanity left in him.

I didn't find this as compelling a read as The Siege: in places it felt almost formulaic, and distinctly predictable. (I kept expecting more of a twist, perhaps Kolya's involvement in the denunciation of Andrei.) Perhaps the lack of tension was simply because, unlike the siege of Leningrad, the terrors of Stalin's Russia are so well-known, so common a theme in fiction. 

At the end of the novel, Anna celebrates the death of Stalin: "I hope that just before he died, he saw the ghosts of all the people he’d murdered, and knew that they were waiting for him." And perhaps that new world she was hoping for at the end of The Siege will have a chance at last.

I bought The Betrayal in November 2021, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/148: A Trick of the Light — Louise Penny

'That’s what this is about, Inspector. Bringing all the terrible stuff up from where it’s hiding.’
‘Just because you can see it,’ Beauvoir persisted, ‘doesn’t make it go away.’
‘True, but until you see it you haven’t a hope.’ [loc. 3510]

Clara Morrow, after a crippling attack of nerves, has celebrated her first solo art show: first at the gallery in Montreal and then in the little village of Three Pines, which can't be found on any maps. Her husband Peter, who is trying not to show his envy, discovers a dead body in their garden the morning after the festivities. The dead woman is Clara's old friend-turned-enemy, Lillian Dyson: near her body is an Alcoholics Anonymous token. Was Lillian dealing with step 9 in the programme, making amends to those you've hurt? And was she murdered because somebody couldn't forgive the pain she'd inflicted?

There are different kinds of pain in this novel. Gamache is still mourning the agents who died in the factory debacle (Bury Your Dead) and Jean-Guy Beauvoir, his second-in-command, is still in constant physical pain from the injuries he sustained. Jean-Guy has also separated from his wife, and is trying to summon the courage to invite another woman on a date. And there is Peter's consuming envy, and Lillian's vicious art criticism, and Ruth Zardo's bitterness, and art critic Denis Fortin's homophobia.

This is a novel about forgiveness and its lack, about addiction and breaking the cycle, about secrets that ferment and others that are spoken. Penny has an extraordinary knack for observing and describing emotions: her large cast all have complex and vivid internal landscapes, and Gamache has the gifts of understanding and compassion -- as well as a steely determination to solve the murder and see justice done. That he does so with grace and sympathy is, for me, the appeal of this series. I have stocked up on the next few novels to get me through the British winter...

Not for the first time Three Pines struck Myrna as the equivalent of the Humane Society. Taking in the wounded, the unwanted. The mad, the sore. This was a shelter. Though, clearly, not a no-kill shelter.

2024/147: O Caledonia — Elspeth Barker

The billows washed into Janet’s face, the wind took her breath, she clung to the mane, elemental air and water, terror and ecstasy. She could die like this and never know the difference, horsed on the sightless couriers of the air. [loc. 1710]

O Caledonia opens with the murder of sixteen-year-old Janet, and then flashes back to her short, unhappy but vividly beautiful life. Janet is a misfit in her family: poorly parented, fonder of animals than of humans (who behave inexplicably and unpredictably), intelligent, romantic, solitary. She is an utterly charming and relatable protagonist, though I do sympathise (a little) with her parents. I saw myself in Janet who, given a pram to play with, repurposes it as a chariot for Dandelion, the family's apex predator: 'so long as in transit he could gnaw at a sparrow’s wing or other pungent trophy from his lair'. Dandelion is not the only excellent cat in this novel: also of note is Mouflon, Aunt Lila's cat, who caused the death of Lila's husband. By way of contrast, when Janet and her brother Francis are presented with a new baby sister, they bury her under a heap of earth and dead leaves.

Janet's perception of the world is marvellously rich and voluptuous. There are hints of synaesthesia, and vivid multisensory responses to words: "...she intended to be a princess... she loved the word, with its tight beginning and its rustling, cascading end, like the gown a princess would wear, with a tiny waist and ruffles and trains of swirling silken skirts. Purple of course" [loc. 241]. The sheer exuberance of her solitary experiences in the wilderness surrounding Auchnasaugh Castle, the rambling family home, is uplifting -- and in sharp contrast to Janet's misery in the company of her family, and especially at boarding school.

For some reason -- perhaps the comparisons to I Capture the Castle and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, perhaps the measured and precise prose -- I'd assumed O Caledonia was written in the 1950s (when it's set) or a little later. No: Elspeth Barker's only novel, it was published in 1991, to great acclaim.

I bought this in April 2022, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

Maggie O'Farrell's introduction drew me in when I read the sample chapters...

2024/146: Still the Sun — Charlie N Holmberg

“Good night, Pell.”
The words are hard, final, but they give me pause. “What does that mean?”
He glances at me, bright eyes hard. “What does what mean?”
“Good night,” I repeat, letting go of the knob. “What’s ‘night’?” [loc. 2119]

Pell is a metalworker and engineer living in Emgarden, a small village which may be the only settlement that exists. Nearby is an old fortified tower, and an amaranthine wall which can't be crossed. There are thirty-eight people living in Emgarden: no newcomers, no births -- and Pell keeps losing her train of thought when she tries to think about that.

The villagers live in a cycle of sun and mist: eight hours of sun, five of mists which cloak the land. One cycle, a stranger appears at Pell's door during the mists. He says his name is Moseus, one of the two keepers of the tower, and he promises Pell plenty of scrap metal if she can help him get the machines in the tower working again. Pell, who frequently has to relinquish her tools to make farming implements so that they don't all starve, accepts with enthusiasm. But when she's amid the Ancient machines, working out their mechanisms and how to restart them, she experiences visions that could almost be memories -- and that seem to be connected with the other inhabitant of the tower, the mysterious Heartwood.

Pell is confused for much of the novel. Every time she begins to understand something, she discovers another mystery, and some of those mysteries have to do with her own sense of incompleteness, and her increasingly unreliable memory. When she finally discovers her connection to the tower, to Moseus and to Heartwood, it's almost an anticlimax except that it is extremely, gigantically Epic.

I enjoyed the engineering, but despite her first-person narration I didn't really warm to Pell, and the romance didn't convince me. There was very little world-building, though there is a rationale for that: still, I'd have liked more than desert, flowers and machinery.

An Amazon First Reads offer in June 2024.

2024/145: Barrowbeck — Andrew Michael Hurley

There wasn't much in the way of entertainment in Barrowbeck. But I began to see that living there was all about distraction, warding something off, evading something, and that I'd been doing it myself without realising it. [loc. 2053]

Barrowbeck is a village somewhere on the Lancashire/Yorkshire border: a river runs through it, and the fells enclose and overshadow the houses. It is not the kind of place that attracts tourists. Barrowbeck is a series of thirteen stories, vignettes of life from the founding of the village (by refugees from a violent invasion) to floods and collapse in 2049. I suspect that the germ of the stories can be found in the shaman's pronouncement in the first tale: "All this would be theirs. The gods wanted nothing in return. Only that the valley-folk should always remember that they were custodians here. No. Servants.' [loc. 253]

And yet, after that ominous beginning, the events of the stories are not especially horrific. There's a stranger who's blamed for bringing ill luck to the village, a girl who may be possessed by something in the river, the ghosts of the fallen raising their voices in Easter hymns after World War I... Each story stands alone, unconnected to other characters or phenomena, and each has a unique ambience. Barrowbeck is very definitely folk horror, the horror of ... well, of folk: of people whose motivations are obscure and perhaps unnatural, of the times when the villagers' moods coalesce into a single urge, of the sense of some terrible power at the edge of vision.

I did enjoy Barrowbeck: Hurley's style is subtle and flexible. But, having read the author's three previous novels (The Loney, Devil's Day and Starve Acre), I'd expected more overt horror. Perhaps the real horror is most evident in the last couple of stories: the irreversible effects of the climate catastrophe, the world we will have lost.

Many of these stories appeared, in somewhat different forms, in the BBC Radio 4 series Voices in the Valley. I'm planning to listen to them soon.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 24 OCT 2024.

2024/144: The Wilding — Ian McDonald

The beauty and terror that welled out of this place took hold of Yeats’s mystic, holy Ireland, held it up and ripped it apart. Beneath its torn skin was old Ireland, deep Ireland, the Ireland buried in the bogs and beneath the fields of grazing, turned to leather and knot and iron-oak. Waiting down there. [loc. 2304]

Lough Carrow used to be a working bog: now it's a rewilding project, left to nature for two years during the Covid pandemic. Some of the locals mutter suspiciously about wolves being sneaked in while nobody was looking. Pádraig runs the Wilding, but most of the novel's from the point of view of Lisa, a young woman with a murky past, a stolen copy of Yeats' Selected Poetry and a place awaiting her at UCL. Lisa oversleeps after celebrating the latter, and thus gets landed with wild sleepover -- five twelve-year-olds and their three teachers, trekking through the bog and camping in its remotest corner.

The kids are a handful: all on medication, with mental health issues, traumatic histories and/or bad attitudes. But there are things even worse than adolescent children in the bog, and once Lisa and her cohort set off the pace of the story (if not of their trek) is headlong.

I heard the author reading from this at Worldcon and was gripped, though The Wilding was not quite what I was expecting. Lisa is a splendid character, backstory and backbone and some attitude of her own: her interactions with the kids shift in tone over the course of the novel but are always credible and human. The kids themselves are at first annoying but become individual, even likeable, with distinctive voices and very different perceptions of the world. The descriptions of the natural environment, of the silence and non-silence of the bog, of light on water and blurry motion at the edge of vision, are spectacular. And there are echoes of Yeats' poems throughout.

There's a reference to Pádraig 'checking for signs of incipient folk horror' when he touches base with the villagers, but The Wilding's horror is something older and weirder than a few peculiar locals. Some of those locals are very peculiar: I'm sure Dom Purvis and his maps and zones is a callout to Holdstock's Mythago Wood... McDonald has been one of my favourite authors for many years: though his scope here is perhaps narrower than in his best-known (SF) novels, his prose is as glorious as ever.

2024/143: Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic — Tabitha Stanmore

...it is not my place to say whether the magic practised by cunning folk was real: I don’t know, I wasn’t there. What we can say is that there was a variety of spells to draw on, and that they got results often enough to maintain belief in their efficacy. [loc. 599]

A social history of what Stanmore terms 'service magic': the everyday assistance offered by 'cunning folk', rather than learned magi or wicked witches. Cunning folk would help find a lost item, identify a thief, provide a healing potion, or tell a fortune. Midwives were often also cunning folk.

It's all too easy to think of witchcraft and magic in the medieval and Renaissance centuries as something to be feared, punishable by death. Stanmore draws on her research to argue that service magicians were seldom accused of malevolent magic. Indeed, one of the services increasingly in demand was curse-lifting and 'unwitching'. Many spells invoked saints or angels: religious faith and magic were complementary, rather than opposite, ways of understanding and affecting the world.

Stanmore recounts some fascinating cases in this book, and examines the portrayal of magic and magic-workers in early modern literature. She also points out that superstition is by no means extinct: 'In the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic many psychics reported being busier than ever: the online business-reviews website Yelp apparently saw searches for ‘Supernatural Readings’ more than double in April 2020, after lockdowns had been announced across the globe.' [loc. 3144]

This was an interesting read, though occasionally repetitive and sometimes a little discursive. Lots of intriguing research, though -- as Stanmore explains -- many of the cases are incompletely recorded. If there's a flaw in the book, it's her reluctance to explain how 'magic' had credible effects. There are a couple of instances where she suggests a real-world explanation for an outcome, such as leaving the most likely suspect last in a magical test to increase their nervousness and thus their likelihood of failing. (Granny Weatherwax would just call it headology.) Cunning Folk is frank about its focus on the social aspects of service magic, rather than the psychology of practitioners and their customers, and it's well-researched and referenced.

2024/142: Scarlet — Genevieve Cogman

‘No society that’s ruled by kings and vampires can ever be the right thing,’ Fleurette said firmly.
‘But can a society that sends innocent people to the guillotine be right?’ Eleanor asked. [loc. 4374]

In which Eleanor, a simple housemaid, is recruited by a dashing gang League of aristocrats to travel to France and aid in the rescue of a woman to whom she bears a striking resemblance: Marie Antoinette, the former queen, now imprisoned by revolutionaries. Why yes, this is the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, with the added twist of vampires -- the sanguinocrats* who live for centuries, are barred from holding offices of state, and who feed upon the living. Eleanor has the scars to prove it: being a blood donor was a requirement of her employment in the household of Lady Sophie, Baroness of Basing.

Eleanor isn't stupid, though she's young and rather naive at the outset of the novel. She quickly proves her worth to the League and to Sir Percy Blakeney. And she attracts the attention of Lord Charles Bathurst, aristocrat and scholar. When it comes to the crunch, though, Eleanor must (initially) rely on her own wits to escape Paris and her pursuers. Fortunately, she's a straight-faced liar: even more fortunately, she finds herself in a position to assist someone who can return the favour. And then some.

This is basically a heist novel with a long, dramatic pursuit through the sleaziest parts of Paris, in the shadow of Madame Guillotine. There are vampires and revolutionaries; there is plenty of opportunity for Eleanor to keep a cool head in the face of mortal peril; and there are moments when her inner voice sounds just like Irene from the Library. But that is not a bad thing.

This didn't grab me as much as I'd hoped, but it's the first in a trilogy and I already own the second, so qui vivra verra.

* Cogman's Afterword adds: 'the term ‘sanguinocrats’ was actually used during the French Revolution – admittedly in reference to the Jacobins who acquiesced in the September 1792 massacres'.

2024/141: Our Endless Numbered Days — Claire Fuller

I sat next to the fire and imagined our microscopic white and green island adrift in the blackness – an overlooked crumb, left behind when the Earth was gobbled whole by the Great Divide. My father told me many times that winter that the world ended beyond the hills... [p. 192]

Peggy is eight years old in 1976, living in north London with her concert-pianist mother Ute and her father James. James and his friends, the North London Retreaters -- who believe the apocalypse is imminent, most likely via economic collapse or a Russian nuke -- meet at the house, and Peggy is fascinated by their planning. Then something changes (Peggy doesn't understand what, but it's fairly obvious to the adult reader) and Peggy and her father flee to Die Hutte, deep in a German forest, for what is initially termed a holiday. Except that one day her father returns from the forest, weeping, and tells Peggy that the rest of the world has disappeared. They are alone in the forest: and so they remain for nine years.

Because the novel is not structured chronologically, we know from the start that Peggy does return to the world, to the North London house and her mother and a younger brother whose existence she never suspected. The story of how she left the forest, and of what happened to her father, alternates with her readjustment to the mundane world. It's partly a survival story (Peggy and her father used to watch Survivors on TV: I remember that programme) and partly a psychological study of obsession and self-delusion. The prose is great, and Peggy's account of life in Die Hutte reminded me at times of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle: the little rituals, the skew of her world-view, her focus on small elements of their environment.

I found the ending deeply unsettling, and in fact I think reading Our Endless Numbered Days made me feel differently about The House at the Edge of the World -- also about father and daughter, and about family relationships. It's unfair to draw a comparison, for the emotional tone is very different: but the finale of Our Endless Numbered Days, even with Peggy's aside that 'my brain plays tricks on me, that I have been deficient in vitamin B for too long and my memory doesn’t work the way it should', was horrific, powerful, and cast the whole story into a different light. Despite that, I'm looking forward to reading more of Claire Fuller's fiction, which I have been accumulating...

I bought this in November 2016, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/140: The Amber Fury — Natalie Haynes

This is why I like the play we’re reading. It’s about the things which can’t be forgiven, even if no-one meant to do the wrong thing. [p. 78]

Alex Morris is grieving the death of her fiance Luke. She moves to Edinburgh, where she studied, to take up a job teaching at a pupil referral unit. Her fourth-year class has five students, all with definite views on drama and plays (not Shakespeare, they've done him at school; not The Misanthrope, Mel 'can't stand' Kiera Knightly, who's on the cover of the film tie-in edition; not Jerusalem, because who cares about the state of England?). They end up reading Greek tragedy, which may be why everything goes horribly wrong.

The novel isn't told chronologically: we begin with Alex talking to lawyers, because one of the class has done something monstrous. We don't find out what has happened, or who has done the monstrous thing, until quite late in the book. Meanwhile, we (and the class) learn more about what happened to Alex, and why she goes to London every Friday and comes back the same night.

Alex, at least initially, is broken by grief: she doesn't really care about anything, which means that she makes mistakes in her handling of the fourth-year class. (We don't get to see any of her other classes, or anything about how well or how badly those go: the fourth years are the emotional focus of her work, and of the book.) Alex's narrative is punctuated by extracts from diaries written by the class at her behest: a lot of hinted backstory, but most of the focus is still on Alex and the plays they're reading and discussing in class. Haynes' afterword explains why she chose these plays: Oedipus for crimes committed in ignorance; Alcestis for love and self-sacrifice, the Oresteia for vengeance and difficult family relationships. Each of these speaks to the students in ways Alex probably never thought about.

This is a well-paced novel, though rather claustrophobic in its focus on Alex: the students are not as fully characterised, but they have distinct personalities. Haynes also depicts the dark and cold of an Edinburgh winter very vividly. (Maybe I don't want to move to Scotland after all.) And amid the monsters, there is kindness and support. If only it had been there sooner for the fourth-year class.

I bought this in May 2015, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/139: Forest of Memory — Mary Robinette Kowal

Have you turned off your Lens, turned off your i-Sys, stepped away from the cloud, and just tried to REMEMBER something? It’s hard, and the memories are mutable. The cloud is just there, all the time. You reach for it without thinking and assume it will be there. [p. 25]

Novella set a century or two in our future: Katya Gould is a dealer in Authenticities and Captures, seeking out old tech such as typewriters and selling them to collectors. She's fascinated by wabi-sabi, the marks of use and decay on an object: 'something that witnesses and records the graceful decay of life'. And she records everything she experiences, thinks, sees -- until she meets a man in the forest and he somehow severs her connection to ... everything.

Kowal explores our increasing reliance on technology and the way it distances us from the real world, and especially the natural world. Katya's abductor, who calls himself 'Johnny', at first seems to be hunting deer: but perhaps his real purpose out in the forest, out of the connected world, is something more like Katya's own.

The story is presented as Katya's account (typed on a 1918 Corona typewriter) of the days she spent in the forest with Johnny. She's constantly questioning her own memories, wondering what she has forgotten. And her fear of the forest, of a world for which she has no map, is vividly described.

I hadn't realised this was a novella when I started reading, so was surprised by what felt like an abrupt and sudden ending. When I thought about it, I realised that although Forest of Memory has the bones of a novel, it stands complete and solid in itself.

I bought this in March 2016, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/138: Miss Pym Disposes — Josephine Tey

If God did dispose -- as undoubtedly He did in the latter end -- then perhaps the disposing was already at work. Had begun to work when it was she and not someone else who found the [evidence]. It had not been found by a strong-minded person who would go straight to Henrietta with it as soon as she smelt a rat, and so set the machinery of man-made Law in motion. No. It had been found by a feeble waverer like herself, who could never see less than three sides to any question. Perhaps that made sense. But she wished very heartily that the Deity had found another instrument. [p. 123]

Miss Pym is a former teacher, now the bestselling author of a popular book about psychology. She visits the all-girl Leys Physical Training College at the behest of her old friend Henrietta Hodge, the Principal, who has invited her to give a lecture. Miss Pym is at first discomposed by the early-morning bells, the wholesome vegetarian diet, the lack of a reading-lamp in her room. She is a lonely woman, though, and welcomes the warmth, kindness and liking bestowed upon her by the students. Then a terrible accident occurs: and Miss Pym, with her close observations of students and staff, with her knowledge of human nature, cannot help but suspect that it is not an accident at all.

This is an unusual mystery novel, because the bad thing occurs very late in the book, and the guilty party seems evident. Tey's pacing is admirable, but it's her eye for character that impressed me most. Miss Pym is well aware of her own failings ('Lucy decided to forget her weight just this once and enjoy herself. This was a decision she made with deplorable frequency') and, later in the novel, berates her own inadequacy. ('As a psychologist she was a first-rate teacher of French'.) She interprets physical appearance as an indication of character, despite understanding that 'face-reading' is not regarded as a credible science, and is prone to forming snap judgements. By the end of the novel, Miss Pym's disposal -- her decision to act on the basis that the 'right' thing is not always the 'proper' thing -- seems monstrous. While Tey has told us that Miss Pym is sweet, kind and well-meaning, she has shown us Miss Pym's flaws in merciless detail.

Miss Pym Disposes is in some respects a dated novel: there are prejudices of race, class and nationality (Teresa Desterro, a talented and flamboyant Brazilian dancer studying at Leys, is known as the Nut Tart), and references to the friendship of head girl 'Beau' Nash and gym star Mary Innes as 'not normal... David and Jonathan'. Although the novel was published just after WW2, I suspect that it's set in the 1930s: there is no mention of the war, of rationing, of Germans being in any way undesirable as colleagues or friends. There are very few men in the novel: even fewer with anything approaching a role in the story. So perhaps the shadow of wartime is present after all.

I bought this in July 2018, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/137: The House at the Edge of the World — Julia Rochester

We were conjoined at some point of the soul. It was a terrible epiphany. Combined, we made a monster. Somewhere I had read that in a case of conjoined twins one tends to be stronger, sapping the other’s blood and organs. I wondered which of us was the parasite. [loc. 2401]

John Venton fell off a Cornish cliff on his way back from the pub one night. After his death, his twin children -- Morwenna and Corwin^* -- go their separate ways: Morwenna eventually to London to bind books, and Corwin to volunteer in far-flung corners of the world. But seventeen years later, their grandfather Matthew's illness brings Morwenna back to Thornton, the family house.

Matthew, whose ambition to leave this corner of Cornwall was foiled by ill health, has devoted much of his life to painting a huge and intricate map of the area around the house, a circle with a radius of twelve miles, which is as far as he could walk in one day and still be home by evening. The map is full of iconic representations of Matthew's life and its events: a seagull's nest with one egg, a viper in a heap of leaves, a farting devil. And it hides (of course) a secret.

The focus of the novel is the relationship between Morwenna, the narrator, and her twin brother. Morwenna is thoroughly unlikeable, but honest and self-aware. Corwin is superficially lovely, but perhaps rather hollow. Their close bond excludes and alienates their parents, as well as Morwenna's boyfriend and the shared friends of their teenage years. (There is a splendidly catastrophic scene at a wedding when Morwenna and their mother argue.) Morwenna knows if it's Corwin calling as soon as the phone rings. And she has a plan to bring him back to Thornton.

This was a beautifully written novel that, with hindsight, was also quite depressing. It's hard to warm to Morwenna, and her mother is pitiable and unpleasant. I didn't get much sense of Corwin, perhaps because Morwenna thinks of him as an extension of herself. The only truly likeable character was Matthew. And the secret at the heart of this novel, which could have blossomed into something positive, became poisonous. Fascinating emotional interactions, and powerful evocations of the Cornish coast and countryside: but, like Corwin, something hollow at the centre.

Splendid and positive review by the much-lamented Diana Athill.

I bought this in June 2017, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

^* I am unable to read the name 'Corwin' without being immersed in memories of Zelazny's 'Chronicles of Amber'. The twins were named by their mother, who always felt out of place at Thornton, 'overcompensating for not being local'.

2024/136: In Cold Blood — Truman Capote

“Am I sorry? If that’s what you mean—I’m not. I don’t feel anything about it. I wish I did. But nothing about it bothers me a bit. Half an hour after it happened, Dick was making jokes and I was laughing at them. Maybe we’re not human." [loc. 4734]

Capote claimed to have invented the 'non-fiction novel' with In Cold Blood. Serialised in the New Yorker in 1965, the decades since its initial publication have cast considerable doubt on Capote's 'immaculately factual' account of the Clutter family murders. Still, this work provides a thorough, if dramatised, summary of the case.

Capote's prose reads like fiction, with metaphors aplenty (the stray cats gleaning roadkill from radiator grills, for instance) and explorations of character. His study of Perry Smith (who may have committed all four murders, or just two of them) is sympathetic, and reads as a depiction of a closeted gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal. The album of bodybuilder pictures; the protests such as 'Some queers I’ve really liked. As long as they didn’t try anything'; the way that Dick, his co-defendant, calls him 'honey'. Perry's own letters show that he's articulate and ambitious ('I happen to have a brilliant mind. In case you don’t know. A brilliant mind and talent plus. But no education...'). Capote makes it clear that Smith was psychologically damaged by a rough childhood. Dick, on the other hand, is a rapist, a paedophile and a man who enjoys running over stray dogs. (Perry, by way of contrast, tames a squirrel after he's imprisoned for the murders.)

The Clutter murders were opportunist, difficult to tie to the culprits because so random: Smith and Hickock drove hundreds of miles to rob a man they'd never met, a man who a fellow prisoner told them had a safe full of money. (He didn't.) Capote writes 'The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning.' And though his depiction of the victims is sympathetic and touching, he never met them: it was the murderers, and especially Perry Smith, who held his attention.

Read for a 'true crime' reading challenge on StoryGraph, and because it's a classic work. I liked the prose more than the subject matter.

2024/135: The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock — Imogen Hermes Gowar

‘How was the play?’ asks Mrs Frost. ‘Did you take in even a line of it?’
‘Oh! I regret I watched a great deal too much of it, knowing I was only invited there for one night. I should have looked more about myself; I believe I missed some gossip. I must find a gentleman who has a good box, Eliza, and who will let me sit in it every night; that way I need pay no mind to the play unless there is really nothing else to see.’ [loc. 863]

Mr Hancock is a successful merchant, a childless widower who shares his Deptford house with his niece Sukie and Bridget the maid. He is a philanthropist and a thoroughly decent fellow. Mrs Angelica Neal is a successful courtesan, beautiful and profligate, sharing an apartment on Dean Street with her companion Mrs Frost. She is exuberant and likeable. They are brought together by spectacle: for one night, one of Mr Hancock's sea-captains returns from a long voyage to tell his employer that he has sold the ship he captained, and purchased with the proceeds a mermaid.

The mermaid (to modern eyes, I suspect, an obvious fake) is exhibited around London, restoring Mr Hancock's fortunes. He meets Angelica at one such exhibition staged by Angelica's former bawd, the redoubtable Mrs Chappell. Angelica is in the market for a new 'protector', her old duke having died: but then she meets the young and handsome Rockingham, and thinks no more of Mr Hancock. Will he bring her a mermaid? she asks, laughing.

This is very much a book of two halves, and at the midpoint it pivots into something darker and stranger and altogether less explicable. If the first half of the novel is represented by the orgiastic whores' dance that accompanies the first mermaid's exhibition -- and Mr Hancock's disgust at the licentiousness of that dance -- then the second half could be the brief exchange between Captain Jones and Mr Hancock: ‘I got you what you want ... I found her. But I think – I think perhaps you should not have her.’

Gowar's prose is measured and balanced, full of the rhythms of Georgian speech -- I was reminded at times of Pope -- and of fascinating period details (Angelica curling her hair in papers torn from a Wesleyan tract; a shell-lined grotto at a Blackheath mansion; the elaborate sea-nymph costumes, and sea-green pubes, of the dancing prostitutes; the condoms soaked in milk). The characters, even the minor ones, have aims and issues that enrich the atmosphere of the novel rather than simply furthering the plot. (Poor Polly, dark-skinned prostitute, escaping Mrs Chappell's luxurious tyranny to discover that life on the street is much, much worse.)

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock (a thoroughly misleading title) explores freedom and oppression, commerce and love: and shows us how these can shade into one another. It was a splendid read, with delectable prose, and I look forward to rereading it.

I bought this in October 2019, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/134: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon — Wole Talabi

...things like totems and relics and idols and masks and shrines were commonplace; just the background elements of existence, the rigorously religious tools of worship in the lives of men. They may have been made, charmed, used, broken, reclaimed, or forgotten, but they always mattered to someone. It was a certain kind of savagery to keep these once purposeful items for no other purpose than display, as trophies in memoriam of a colonizer’s self-given right to take. [p. 224]

A romantic tale of Shigidi (a former nightmare god, working for the Orisha Spirit Company) and Nneoma (a succubus, but also a fallen angel), who are recruited for a heist. The eponymous Brass Head is locked away with 50,000 other stolen treasures in a place protected by dark magicks. Why yes, it is the British Museum: and security is provided by Section Six, a special branch of the Royal British Spirit Bureau, who are rumoured to have ties to the very oldest spirits of the land.

This precis is scant preparation for the opening chapter, in which Shigidi and Nneoma in a London cab driven by an infamous old reprobate, pursued by a furious giant in a makeshift chariot drawn by the four bronze Horses of Helios: very much in media res. The narrative skips backwards and forwards in time, sketching out the histories of the characters and their alliances. There are cameos from other pantheons, cinematic fight scenes, a strong post-colonialist theme, and set-up for a potential sequel.

This was a great read, blending romance and mythology with a classic heist plot. Shigidi and Nneoma are fully-realised characters, emotionally credible and powerful within well-described limits. The spirit-world in which they exist is detailed and fascinating: I was especially interested by the Orisha Spirit Company's conflicts and alliances with other religions. Occasional clunky sentences could have done with another edit ('Her flowing red dress was loose and flowed over her body’s where it encountered her curves.'), and the ever-shifting timeline often cut away just as things were getting interesting: a cheap trick of pacing. But I liked this novel, and look forward to more by Talabi.

Fulfils the ‘West African author’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

2024/133: Red Plenty — Francis Spufford

The capitalists looked surprisingly ordinary, for people who in their own individual persons were used to devouring stolen labour in phenomenal quantities. [p. 33]

A collection of linked short stories exploring the economics of the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s. I'm not sure whether this counts as fiction or creative non-fiction: while Spufford does invent characters, he explains their inspiration in the footnotes. (For example, geneticist Zoya Vaynshteyn, who speaks out against closed trials and suppression of research, is modelled on biologist Raissa Berg.) There are plenty of real people in here, too, from Kruschev himself to computing pioneer Lebedev and poet Sasha Galich. And there are real events -- the Novocherkassk massacre, the American Exhibition -- mixed in with the 'confabulations' about rural poverty, about death trains, about the value of industrial equipment being calculated by weight.

I'd absorbed, by osmosis, the notion that this was a science-fictional work: yes, if the science in question is economics. (See Adam Roberts' excellent review in Strange Horizons for more discussion of this argument.) Spufford himself introduces the book as 'not a novel. It has too much to explain, to be one of those. But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story...' [p. 3] And as he documents the rise and fall of the Soviet economic model, and the horrors perpetrated in its name, this blend of fact and fiction allows for exuberant prose and amusing exchanges. I'm wowed by Spufford's recent novels (especially Cahokia Jazz), but this has persuaded me to pursue his (alleged) non-fiction as well.

One of the many things I learnt from Red Plenty: 'Russian has no ‘h’, and renders the ‘h’ sound as ‘g’ rather than as (the other option) ‘kh’. The USSR was invaded in 1941 by a German dictator called Gitler.' [p. 401]. And due to the reading habits of some of the characters, I have been sparked by an urge to read one or more of the Strugatsky brothers' SF novels -- Roadside Picnic, Monday Begins on Saturday et cetera...

2024/132: Swordcrossed — Freya Marske

Something in him quietened, within the skins of these other invented people. [they] might have had their own small worries, but they didn't have a disaster sprawled in their wake. Or an unwanted future hanging over their heads.
Being himself was a failed experiment... [loc. 546]

I liked Marske's 'Last Binding' trilogy (A Marvellous Light, A Restless Truth, A Power Unbound) very much. Swordcrossed is considerably less epic, and though the world it's set in is not our own, there is no obvious magic. (Though there might have been in the past of that world, when the gods were more active in human life...) 

Mattinesh Jay is the hardworking, dutiful heir to a House which trades in wool. Business has been extremely bad lately, and he's about to make a marriage of convenience to the likeable, sensible Sofia, heiress to a brewing empire. Unfortunately, getting married involves hiring a swordsman as best man, to duel anyone who raises an objection to the wedding: Sofia's admirer Adrean is certain to challenge, and cashflow issues mean that Matti can't afford to spend as much as he'd like on a swordsman. Instead, he ends up hiring Luca Piere, a newcomer to the city who says he wants to build up his reputation.

Luca, with his mass of red hair and his inability to sit still or stay quiet, is chaos incarnate. It's unsurprising that straitlaced Matti, having more or less blackmailed him into providing lessons in swordsmanship as part of the deal, finds himself attracted to Luca. More surprising, but utterly credible on the page, is Luca returning the sentiment. Not everything is as it seems, though: the Jays' run of bad luck may not be random mischance, Sofia's ardent swain may be more pest than prospect, and Luca is definitely not being entirely honest with Matti.

This was a delightful read: there's just enough about the wool trade and the Houses, and their gods and quarrels, to sketch out the lines of the world, but the focus is primarily on the romance between Matti and Luca. They work well together as men with a shared goal (Luca being fascinated with Matti's trials and tribulations, and determined to bring his skillset to bear on them) as well as having instant sexual chemistry which, for different reasons, both try to resist. There's a tantalising glimpse of a trans character -- apparently when you have your naming ceremony you can choose a new name and new pronouns! -- and an absence of racism, homophobia and sexism. Matti's sister Maya has as much agency, and more freedom, than Matti himself, and she -- along with Luca's brother Perse -- is a character I'd have liked to see more of. Overall, a frothy romance with swords, farce, maritime fraud and satisfying resolutions.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 10 OCT 2024.

2024/131: Chain-Gang All-Stars — Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

...the massive violence of the state was “justice,” was “law and order,” and resistance to perpetual violence was an act of terror. It would have been funny if there weren’t so much blood everywhere. [loc. 2540]

'Chain-Gang All-Stars Battleground' is the top-rated show on CAPE, the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment channel. Prisoners facing a death penalty or incarceration over a certain amount of time can volunteer to become a Link, a part of a Chain. Individuals on one Chain engage in mortal combat with opponents from another Chain. If a Link survives for three years, they win their freedom. The average life expectancy is three months.

The novel's multitude of viewpoint characters include Links Loretta Thurwar and Hurricane Staxxx, lovers and stars of the Angola-Hammond Chain; Hendrix Young, one-armed spear-wielder; and Simon J Clark, utterly broken by torture and nicknamed the Unkillable. (All were imprisoned for murder, from violent rape and murder to self-defence. And of course have committed many more murders since, as part of the show.) There are also other voices: fans, protesters, an announcer, a scientist... These are interesting for their angles on the show, the cultural context, the prejudices of race and class (the Links are mostly non-white) and the creeping complicity of it.

Though it's the future, with new and exciting technology utilised to cause pain and record violence, Adjei-Brenyah's footnotes snag our frame of reference back to the present day, with stats about race, innocence and violence in the US carceral system. This is more a pitch-black satire than it is science fiction: and it is a love story that finishes on an irredeemably tragic note.

Read for lockdown book club. It took me a while, because this is a very violent book, in terms of physical and social violence. I think it is a timely and important novel, with powerful prose and complex characters, tackling important issues. The fact that I didn't enjoy reading it is incidental.

2024/130: Curfew — Phil Rickman

City-type dangers is something they takes for granted – never questions it. But they never thinks there might be risks in the country, too, as they don’t understand. Well, we don’t understand ’em properly neither, but at least ... at least we knows there’s risks. [p. 639]

Crybbe is a quaint little town on the Welsh border, not really on the tourist trail despite its picturesque town square, its ancient monument the Tump, and its centuries-old traditional curfew bell, rung one hundred times every night at 10pm. The townsfolk are placid, untalkative, relentlessly ordinary. Radio reporter Fay Morrison, who's moved to Crybbe to look after her father the canon (early stages of dementia) finds it an unwelcoming place. Bransonesque music mogul Max Goff wants to turn Crybbe into a New Age mecca, importing tarot readers, mediums and the like. His latest recruit is J M Powys, author of a well-received Earth Mysteries book, who's mourning the death of his friend, the dowser Henry Kettle. Powys -- Joe -- finds that Kettle left him a legacy, a house in Crybbe. But he also begins to realise that there is something very dark about Crybbe, something that the townsfolk tried to keep at bay when they destroyed the ancient standing stones: something that Goff and his cohorts risk awakening.

This, Phil Rickman's first novel, is extremely long -- 700 pages in print -- and somewhat rambling: nevertheless, I raced through it in two evenings, because it's engaging, well-paced and keeps the mysteries coming. There's a nice balance between actual dark horror and gentle mockery of the New Age types, with interesting characters (including plant hire magnifico Gomer Parry, who appears in the Merrily Watkins books but is rather younger here) and some powerful scenes. First published in 1993, so it feels authentically 1990s rather than dated: no mobile phones, no internet to speak of, that pre-millennial new age culture that seems to have either faded away or transmuted into activism.

I bought this in November 2014, and finally read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list.

2024/129: Tooth and Claw — Jo Walton

You can make your way by your own wits and claws, while I must always be dependent upon some male to protect me. Wits I may have, but claws I am without, and while hands are useful for writing and fine work they are no use in a battle. [p. 63]

Patriarch Bon Agornin dies, and his children gather at the deathbed to distribute his wealth amongst themselves. Penn the cleric hears his father's confession; eldest sister Berend and her husband Daverak take more than their share; Avan, enraged by Berend and Daverak's behaviour, mounts a legal case against them; Selendra is compromised by another cleric, Frelt; and Haner is dispatched to live with Berend and Daverak, away from her beloved Selendra and the only home she's ever known.

So far, so Victorian. Walton acknowledges a debt to Trollope, and adds that 'this novel is the result of wondering what a world would be like…if the axioms of the sentimental Victorian novel were inescapable laws of biology'. Bon Agornin and his children are dragons; the wealth to which Berend and Daverak help themselves is the flesh of his body (dragons only grow when they devour another dragon); and Selendra's 'compromise' happens when Frelt gets close enough to trigger a full-body blush, traditionally linked to marriage.

This is an entertaining comedy of manners, with doomed romances, buried treasure, disapproving mothers and loyal servants: and the darker sides of those elements, sexism and class privilege, oppression, servitude, snobbery, and (unlike Trollope) cannibalism. Set against this, there's a strong thread of radical thought, as Selendra in particular begins to question why the servant class must have their wings bound and be denied dragon-flesh. Selendra is probably my favourite character, though Sebeth (Avan's lover, lower-class and 'no maiden... head to toe an even eggshell pink') has a poignant and fascinating history, and a very satisfactory resolution.

Yes, there are humans (the loathed Yarge) but they are mentioned only in passing, apart from one scene at the end of the novel with an Ambassador. The focus remains on the dragons, with their railways and their hats, their legal and physical conflicts, and -- as the last line of the novel tells us -- 'the comfort of gentle hypocrisy'. A delightful pastiche with some thoughtful world-building.

I have owned this novel for over a decade: I read it as part of my 'Down in the Cellar' self-challenge, which riffs on the metaphor of to-be-read pile as wine-cellar rather than to-do list. I enjoyed it a great deal, and can't say whether I regret having ignored it for so long, or whether I'm glad to have read it at a time when it granted me some much-needed uplift.

2024/128: Bury Your Dead — Louise Penny

That was the danger. Not that betrayals happened, not that cruel things happened, but that they could outweigh all the good. That we could forget the good and only remember the bad. [loc. 5220]

Bury Your Dead is the most complex and the most compelling of the Gamache novels that I've read to date. There are three strands, at least, to the story. Gamache is staying with his old mentor in Quebec, recovering (physically, mentally and emotionally) from an operation that ended tragically. Insomniac and tormented by memories, it's with a sense of relief that he finds himself involved in a murder, a body buried in the cellar of 'the Literary and Historical Society, that bastion of Anglo Quebéc'. The dead man, Augustin Renaud, had been obsessed with finding the grave of Samuel de Champlain, founder of Quebéc and focus of the separatist movement. 

In parallel to this are Gamache's memories of a shoot-out in an abandoned factory, and those who died under his command: but not until the very end of the novel does everything about that operation become clear. And meanwhile, in Three Pines, Jean Guy Beauvoir is continuing investigation of the murder case that was the focus of The Brutal Telling, talking to the villagers, being assailed by Ruth Zardo's poetry, and discovering the truth -- or something closer to it -- about who murdered an elderly man deep in the woods.

That Penny keeps all these plots balanced, clear and engaging is laudable in itself: that she also shows us Gamache's guilt and sorrow over his failure to save his colleagues, and evokes wintry Quebec and the close-knit community of the Lit and His, is virtuosic. It was good to see Gamache's second-in-command, Beauvoir, out of Gamache's shadow: and to see sullen Agent Nichols saving the day.

I am very tempted to read my way through the whole series now (especially as I've accidentally encountered some spoilers for future novels): but it's not as though I have nothing else to read...

2024/127: A Rule Against Murder — Louise Penny

“Not everything needed to be brought into the light, he knew. Not every truth needed to be told.”

Reading The Cruellest Month (third in the series) reminded me that (a) I enjoy Penny's 'Three Pines' series very much (b) I found The Brutal Telling (fifth in the series) an uncomfortable read, and attributed this to reading it out of sequence. When I discovered that I could borrow the fourth novel, A Rule Against Murder (under its US title, The Murder Stone) from Internet Archive, I decided it was time to fill in the gaps.

Inspector Gamache and his wife, the fragrant Reine-Marie, are celebrating their wedding anniversary at Manoir Bellechasse, a beautiful and secluded inn not far from the village of Three Pines. Most of the rooms at the inn have been taken by members of the Finney family, rich and entitled, who are using their reunion to make one another miserable. There are surprise guests, a tremendous storm, an ungendered child named Bean, and an impossible murder.

Which is, of course, Gamache's milieu (though the Finneys think he is a shopkeeper). Lacoste and Beauvoir arrive on the scene, and Gamache's steely resolution and profound understanding of humanity are focussed on the murder -- though there are subplots and layers: fathers and sons, wealth and ruin...

I felt there were some weaknesses in the plot, but overall this was a good read, and kept me guessing until the eventual revelation of the murderer's identity and motivation. And it was interesting to see a little more of Gamache's personal life, and his relationship with his own son. I did miss the ambience and characters of Three Pines, though.

After this I reread The Brutal Telling in preparation for the sixth book in the series...

Fulfils the ‘set during a holiday you don't celebrate’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge. The action occurs around Canada Day, 1st July.

2024/126: The Cruellest Month — Louise Penny

Kneeling in the fragrant moist grass of the village green Clara Morrow carefully hid the Easter egg and thought about raising the dead, which she planned to do right after supper. [opening line]

It's spring in the cosy Canadian village of Three Pines, and a famous psychic has come to stay at the B&B. Well, not that famous; not actually a psychic; and not that willing to parade her skills for the villagers. Nevertheless, they decide to hold a seance in the old Hadley House, a nexus of nastiness in the first novel and generally not a cheerful place. What could possibly go wrong? One of the participants is literally scared to death: or is she?

Chief Inspector Gamache and his team become involved in the investigation, turning up some old secrets, some new friends and an undercurrent of treachery. Nothing is quite what it seems, and Myrna's explication of 'near enemies' -- emotions and their almost-indistinguishable opposites, such as attachment / love, pity / compassion, indifference / equanimity -- provides one route towards solving the crimes. (I use the plural because besides murder, there is corruption, slander and deceit. Jealousy is not a crime, but there's a lot of that here too.)

I know these people are imaginary, but I like them: their friendly rudeness, their long-held secrets, their idiosyncrasies, and especially Gamache's determination to be, and do, good. Louise Penny's prose occasionally jolts me, especially when her viewpoint character changes abruptly, but on the whole it's well-written and evocative. I can see myself becoming addicted to these novels...

2024/125: The Power — Naomi Alderman

When he walked past a group of women on the road – laughing and joking and making arcs against the sky – Tunde said to himself, I’m not here, I’m nothing, don’t notice me, you can’t see me, there’s nothing here to see. [loc. 3846]

Some time soon, teenaged girls everywhere begin to develop the ability to zap other people with electricity -- anything from a minor shock to a lethal one. A new organ, the 'skein', is identified as the organ of electricity. The girls can awaken the power in older women, too. And within months women all over the world are rising up, targetting oppressors, fighting back.

Alderman's four protagonists experience this change in different ways. Allie, whose Christian foster parents have abused her, begins to hear a guiding voice, convincing her to found an all-female community. Roxy, a London gangster's daughter, avenges her mother and stands up to her father. Margot, a middle-aged American politician, acquires the power from her troubled daughter Jos, and uses it to clear her path to power. And Tunde, a young Nigerian man who's training as a journalist, becomes a chronicler of this unforeseen revolution, travelling the world and meeting formerly-enslaved sex workers, female soldiers, and the redoubtable Tatiana, the wife of Moldova's president.

It turns out, unsurprisingly, that power corrupts: that women are capable of being just as violent and cruel as men. There are some deeply unsettling scenes in the latter part of the novel, and Alderman evokes the Bacchae at one point to remind us that there's a long history of female violence. And though at first it's amusing to see the microaggressions, the nervousness, the imbalances turned upside down, it quickly becomes sobering, even depressing.

Though I've owned this novel for some years, I'd never got around to it before. I didn't know about the framing narrative, which is set far in our future (though I don't wholly accept the implicit history of how we might get there from here) and I didn't know just how unpleasant some scenes would be. I'm glad I've read it, despite those scenes, despite the bleakness: it's well-written and inventive, with interesting viewpoint characters, and it examines its central conceit with care and nuance. I wonder if the novel would be more intersectional if Alderman were writing it now.

Fulfils the ‘self-insert by author’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge. The framing narrative features letters by 'Neil Adam Armon' to a 'Naomi', who is a successful author and probably a former lover...

2024/124: The Perfect Golden Circle — Benjamin Myers

...the call of the cuckoo, the sonorous song of it, sung from little lungs, a sweet thrum freed from the funnel of its throat. It is a call down the centuries, shaped by deep time and desire. Desire to spread the message that summer is coming in on the breeze and all the sins of winter shall be forgiven and forgotten. Forgotten as the new scents and notes stir senses nullified by dead seasons past. [loc. 506]

The setting is somewhere in the west of England, in 1989. Calvert (ex-SAS, Falklands veteran, lives in the second smallest house in England) and Redbone (crusty new age traveller type, no fixed abode) are spending the summer creating corn circles. Their friendship is a quiet one, full of things left unsaid and questions never asked or answered. They are the fixed points in one another's lives: Redbone has a series of girlfriends, who all eventually give up on him, and Calvert does not do relationships. Their shared passion is to 'fuel the myth and strive for beauty', and perhaps also to get people to learn to love the land. Also, of course, to mess with the straights, cause chaos, and instil a sense of wonder in those who flock to see their art.

There's one chapter per 'crop circle' (most of which aren't circles) and several involve nocturnal encounters with other people: fly-tippers, hare-coursers, an elderly woman calling for the dog who ran away many years before, a coked-up aristocrat who thinks Redbone is his gamekeeper... Redbone creates the designs, Calvert scouts for locations, and they relish both the anonymity and the appreciation. The two men are profoundly rooted in the land, its histories, its stories.

I suppose that this is technically historical fiction: but 1989 feels realler to me, in many ways, than 2024. I remember the media reporting of corn circles, and the various myths that sprung up about them (even after Doug Bower and Dave Chorley went public with their admission that they'd made many circles in Wiltshire and the surrounding counties). Myers has the benefit of a vantage point in the novel's future, and hindsight is 20:20. Calvert's speech about the 'island mentality' is especially sobering from a post-Brexit era: "The sea is a border, a boundary, and living on an island like this makes us think we’re something special. But we’re not. We’re just scared, that’s all. We’re scared of the world. And that breeds arrogance and ignorance, and ignorance signals the death of decency." [loc. 869] 

The two are also both wondering if humanity will even make it to the third millennium. The heatwave of summer 1989 was unusual for that decade ('I've never known it this hot for this long,' says Redbone, stripped to the waist at 4am), but relatively normal for the 2020s, though climate change is only mentioned towards the end of The Perfect Golden Circle.

I found this marvellously immersive, evocative, rural without sentimentality, emotional without much being said: I'll keep an eye out for more of Myers' novels.

Anonymous, anti-capitalist and awe-inspiring: were crop circles actually great art? -- article by Myers.