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.