Sabriel was pubished to great acclaim in Australia in 1995: despite that acclaim, and the awards it won, it didn't make it to UK publication for another five years. And I've owned a copy for several years, and only just got around to reading it.
The novel (marketed now as YA, but apparently aimed at a general adult market) opens with a glimpse of life in the Old Kingdom, a land of magic and walking Dead: the necromancer Abhorsen and his baby daughter join a caravan of travellers. Then the action cuts to Wyverly College, where Sabriel -- now an assured sixth-former -- is studying. This land, Ancelstierre, is far closer to our own world, though somewhat less advanced: the college is lit by electricity, private cars are just becoming a reality, and the troops stationed along the Wall, guarding against incursions from the Old Kingdom, have machine guns and tanks. Those don't always work, along the Wall, though: they wear mail and carry swords in case of magical attack.
Sabriel enters the Old Kingdom on a mission to find her father: instead, she finds his house, and a white cat named Moggett which is actually a fearsome creature, magically bound to serve. Sabriel skis, flies, sails and sprints from cliffhanger to cliffhanger, learning more about the nine gates of death, and the Dead who cross back over into life, and an ancient, evil enemy of royal blood.
Nix's writing is plain and occasionally plodding -- I wasn't really carried away by his descriptions -- but I found Sabriel a surprisingly enjoyable read. It's well-paced (though the regularity of the cliffhangers begins to pall) and the people that Sabriel encounters are interesting individuals rather than stereotypes (though occasionally theey're archetypes). Sabriel herself does her growing-up very quietly, and her transition from proper schoolgirl (albeit one given to resurrecting roadkill) to sword-wielding necromancer seemed unnaturally smooth and painless. Perhaps because the novel's told from her point of view, she's not an especially engaging character, though her ability to get on with the task at hand (and occasionally to succumb to impetuousity) is a nice change from dithery Romantic heroines.
As soon as I'd finished the book, I ordered the two sequels, Lirael and Abhorsen: as good a gauge as any of my opinion of this volume!
Monday, June 12, 2006
#58: Bone House -- Betsy Tobin
A murder mystery set somewhere in England, in 1603: there's little sense of time or place, but that might just be a comment on the timelessness of rural life. Tobin presents the corpse -- that of a 'great woman', Dora, the village prostitute -- and sets up various suspects. Her narrator is a rather humourless young woman, a maid at the manor house, who makes it her business to discover the reason for Dora's murder. She's aided by a young painter who has arrived from Holland to paint the Dowager, an elderly but sharp-witted woman who has plans for our narrator.
I found the author's reluctance to bestow names on her characters rather irritating. I can make a case for not naming a first-person narrator: but was it necessary to keep referring to 'the painter', 'my mistress', 'my master', 'my mother'? I couldn't detect rhyme nor reason to the characters who were named: Dora herself, the doctor Lucius, the lord of the manor (who becomes 'Edward', at least to his mother, towards the end of the book) and Dora's son, who doesn't exactly have a name but is always referred to as 'the Long Boy', on account of having grown to adult size by the age of eleven.
So much for the names. The language seemed lifeless, a prime example of the approach to historical fiction where slang, colloquialisms, contractions and humour are all regarded as newfangled nonsense, to be avoided when writing about The Past. There were scenes that were remarkably powerful, but that was in spite of the prose. The narrator never really came to life; the ending seemed rushed, and not solidly supported by the rest of the story; and the nameless narrator felt somehow unfinished throughout, full of potential but never quite realising it. The ending did nothing to realise or redeem her, either.
I found the author's reluctance to bestow names on her characters rather irritating. I can make a case for not naming a first-person narrator: but was it necessary to keep referring to 'the painter', 'my mistress', 'my master', 'my mother'? I couldn't detect rhyme nor reason to the characters who were named: Dora herself, the doctor Lucius, the lord of the manor (who becomes 'Edward', at least to his mother, towards the end of the book) and Dora's son, who doesn't exactly have a name but is always referred to as 'the Long Boy', on account of having grown to adult size by the age of eleven.
So much for the names. The language seemed lifeless, a prime example of the approach to historical fiction where slang, colloquialisms, contractions and humour are all regarded as newfangled nonsense, to be avoided when writing about The Past. There were scenes that were remarkably powerful, but that was in spite of the prose. The narrator never really came to life; the ending seemed rushed, and not solidly supported by the rest of the story; and the nameless narrator felt somehow unfinished throughout, full of potential but never quite realising it. The ending did nothing to realise or redeem her, either.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
#57: Prozac Nation -- Elizabeth Wurtzel
What on earth makes a woman in her mid-twenties, thus far of no particularly outstanding accomplishment, have the audacity to write a three-hundred-page volume about her own life and nothing more, as if anyone else would actually give a shit?
More to the point, what stroke of luck got that book published?
Ten years after its first publication, Prozac Nation -- 'Young and Depressed in America: A Memoir' -- is still being reprinted: my copy has a new afterword by the author. Wurtzel says "I wanted to write like rock'n'roll," and she's captured a certain destructive quality that's there in stereotypical rock'n'roll behaviour: Wurtzel's depressive episodes very much the equivalent of smashing guitars, taking too many drugs, all those excesses that are already passing into legend. Perhaps she was born too late: perhaps she should have been a child of the sixties or seventies. But then she probably wouldn't have lasted long enough to get Prozac: she started taking it in the late 80s and was one of the very first people to have it prescribed.
I can't deny, as a depressive, that it's heartening to find someone else describing with wit and bitter humour the broad outlines of what's been happening in my head. The black wave of depression? Tick. The way that depressive episodes have nothing at all to do with external events? Tick. And so on and so forth. It's not all the same, either in cause or effect, but there's enough there to reassure anyone who's been in that state: to reassure anyone who thinks it is just them, that there isn't any hope. Because Elizabeth Wurtzel felt like that, and she was wrong.
Wasn't she?
Wurtzel, clearly a veteran of many years of therapy, analyses her depression and attributes it to her parents' divorce and her father's subsequent refusal to have anything to do with her. And over and over again, her relationship with her mother triggers self-destructive behaviour. Wurtzel makes the very good point that there is nothing special about her: lots of people live through similar events and don't become depressed, don't have breakdowns, don't want to die. A lot of the book is about her learning to accept that, never mind the others, that's the way it is for her, and (reading between the lines) it's not because of anything she's done. (Interestingly, no one seems to ever tell her to take responsibility for her mental problems.)
Perhaps it's a cultural thing. Wurtzel seems to live her depression much more in the open than many English people I know. Not just in the book -- which, it seems to me, is therapy as well as memoir -- but in fact. If she's ashamed of her behaviour (which I'm certainly not saying she should be) there's no sign of it: a series of public breakdowns, overdoses, neediness, demands, screaming rages.
Wurtzel writes honestly about suicidal urges; about getting on with life despite the pain; about the distinction between chemical and emotional causes of depression, and her suspicion that if the emotional stuff persists for long enough it produces long-lasting chemical changes; about wanting tangible reasons to feel miserable; about depression being the only thing that defines a self; about going into overdrive to stop thinking; about growing up and not fitting in; about never being good enough; about wasted potential, and unrecognised potential; about the fragility of love, and the way it doesn't fix anything; about having the same therapist as Patti Smith. I don't always like the person she's writing about, and I don't see myself in her, but reading this book it's very easy to understand how close she came, not to suicide but to self-destruction.
As she says in her afterword, there are far worse problems in the world. But depression affects so very many people, blights so many lives, costs so much financially and emotionally ... and perhaps is triggered, more and more frequently, by the disintegration of the whole idea of family in modern America.
Worth reading if you are or have been or know someone who is depressed.
More to the point, what stroke of luck got that book published?
Ten years after its first publication, Prozac Nation -- 'Young and Depressed in America: A Memoir' -- is still being reprinted: my copy has a new afterword by the author. Wurtzel says "I wanted to write like rock'n'roll," and she's captured a certain destructive quality that's there in stereotypical rock'n'roll behaviour: Wurtzel's depressive episodes very much the equivalent of smashing guitars, taking too many drugs, all those excesses that are already passing into legend. Perhaps she was born too late: perhaps she should have been a child of the sixties or seventies. But then she probably wouldn't have lasted long enough to get Prozac: she started taking it in the late 80s and was one of the very first people to have it prescribed.
I can't deny, as a depressive, that it's heartening to find someone else describing with wit and bitter humour the broad outlines of what's been happening in my head. The black wave of depression? Tick. The way that depressive episodes have nothing at all to do with external events? Tick. And so on and so forth. It's not all the same, either in cause or effect, but there's enough there to reassure anyone who's been in that state: to reassure anyone who thinks it is just them, that there isn't any hope. Because Elizabeth Wurtzel felt like that, and she was wrong.
Wasn't she?
Wurtzel, clearly a veteran of many years of therapy, analyses her depression and attributes it to her parents' divorce and her father's subsequent refusal to have anything to do with her. And over and over again, her relationship with her mother triggers self-destructive behaviour. Wurtzel makes the very good point that there is nothing special about her: lots of people live through similar events and don't become depressed, don't have breakdowns, don't want to die. A lot of the book is about her learning to accept that, never mind the others, that's the way it is for her, and (reading between the lines) it's not because of anything she's done. (Interestingly, no one seems to ever tell her to take responsibility for her mental problems.)
Perhaps it's a cultural thing. Wurtzel seems to live her depression much more in the open than many English people I know. Not just in the book -- which, it seems to me, is therapy as well as memoir -- but in fact. If she's ashamed of her behaviour (which I'm certainly not saying she should be) there's no sign of it: a series of public breakdowns, overdoses, neediness, demands, screaming rages.
Wurtzel writes honestly about suicidal urges; about getting on with life despite the pain; about the distinction between chemical and emotional causes of depression, and her suspicion that if the emotional stuff persists for long enough it produces long-lasting chemical changes; about wanting tangible reasons to feel miserable; about depression being the only thing that defines a self; about going into overdrive to stop thinking; about growing up and not fitting in; about never being good enough; about wasted potential, and unrecognised potential; about the fragility of love, and the way it doesn't fix anything; about having the same therapist as Patti Smith. I don't always like the person she's writing about, and I don't see myself in her, but reading this book it's very easy to understand how close she came, not to suicide but to self-destruction.
As she says in her afterword, there are far worse problems in the world. But depression affects so very many people, blights so many lives, costs so much financially and emotionally ... and perhaps is triggered, more and more frequently, by the disintegration of the whole idea of family in modern America.
Worth reading if you are or have been or know someone who is depressed.
#56: A Dead Man in Deptford -- Anthony Burgess
Burgess's last novel, written in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Marlowe's death: I think it's the first of Burgess's novels that I've read and enjoyed, after sampling him at too early an age and not appreciating the wit, the wordplay or the subject matter.
The Marlowe (Marley, Merlin, Morley) of A Dead Man in Deptford has the passions of a young man: for tobacco and boys, as the apocrypha has it, but also for learning, for the theatre, for poetry. He's a proto-heretic, in that he questions divine teaching, and never quite seems to lose the mindset that he acquires at Cambridge: the notion that it's all a game of rhetoric and argument, that the worst that can come of any discussion about religion is to be outwitted on a point of theology. He's too free with his talk of heresies and sin, and that would be enough to damn him. But he's also involved with Walsingham and Poley, with a network of spies and infiltrators and trouble-makers, and it's his distaste for that work that leads him to an inn in Deptford.
Step back. The narrator, never-named, is one of the actors who Marlowe consorts with 'in a very palpable sense': and he begins "You must and will suppose (fair or foul reader, but where's the difference?) that I suppose a heap of happenings that I had no eye to eye knowledge of or concerning." All right, our narrator is unreliable: he supposes and perhaps invents: but he is present just often enough to remind us that he's there, pretending omniscience.
There are all sorts of games and sports with language in this novel. Perhaps the finest is a sex scene, which has to be a contender for Best Fictional Sex Ever, though I reckon it could also vie for a place in Private Eye's 'Pseud's Corner', depending as it does on a working knowledge of Latin: Oscula, oscula, engagement of light beards and oscula oscula elsewhere, amplexus, complexus, and also sugere of this and that, and then interjectus and also insertio and great clamores gaudii, laetitiae, voluptatis.
Here too is Walter ('Water') Raleigh, and his new-found Vice of smoking: his courtly gossip and his unsanctioned marriage. Here's Shakespeare, a mild-mannered acquaintance of our narrator who sucks him mildly dry of all he knows about plays. Here are diverse and horrid executions -- a good show if the victim's alive to see his entrails torn out -- and rumours that the Queen's hounds are fed on human flesh. Here's hothouse rumours and the sense of paranoia and oppression that comes from a regime teetering on the edge of tyranny.
And here at the end is 'your true author, I that die these deaths, that feed this flame, mourn as if it all happened yesterday.' I think it's that love, that engagement, that shines through this whole novel, that brings it to vivid life: that and Burgess's love of language. Oh, I have learnt a deal from this book.
The Marlowe (Marley, Merlin, Morley) of A Dead Man in Deptford has the passions of a young man: for tobacco and boys, as the apocrypha has it, but also for learning, for the theatre, for poetry. He's a proto-heretic, in that he questions divine teaching, and never quite seems to lose the mindset that he acquires at Cambridge: the notion that it's all a game of rhetoric and argument, that the worst that can come of any discussion about religion is to be outwitted on a point of theology. He's too free with his talk of heresies and sin, and that would be enough to damn him. But he's also involved with Walsingham and Poley, with a network of spies and infiltrators and trouble-makers, and it's his distaste for that work that leads him to an inn in Deptford.
Step back. The narrator, never-named, is one of the actors who Marlowe consorts with 'in a very palpable sense': and he begins "You must and will suppose (fair or foul reader, but where's the difference?) that I suppose a heap of happenings that I had no eye to eye knowledge of or concerning." All right, our narrator is unreliable: he supposes and perhaps invents: but he is present just often enough to remind us that he's there, pretending omniscience.
There are all sorts of games and sports with language in this novel. Perhaps the finest is a sex scene, which has to be a contender for Best Fictional Sex Ever, though I reckon it could also vie for a place in Private Eye's 'Pseud's Corner', depending as it does on a working knowledge of Latin: Oscula, oscula, engagement of light beards and oscula oscula elsewhere, amplexus, complexus, and also sugere of this and that, and then interjectus and also insertio and great clamores gaudii, laetitiae, voluptatis.
Here too is Walter ('Water') Raleigh, and his new-found Vice of smoking: his courtly gossip and his unsanctioned marriage. Here's Shakespeare, a mild-mannered acquaintance of our narrator who sucks him mildly dry of all he knows about plays. Here are diverse and horrid executions -- a good show if the victim's alive to see his entrails torn out -- and rumours that the Queen's hounds are fed on human flesh. Here's hothouse rumours and the sense of paranoia and oppression that comes from a regime teetering on the edge of tyranny.
And here at the end is 'your true author, I that die these deaths, that feed this flame, mourn as if it all happened yesterday.' I think it's that love, that engagement, that shines through this whole novel, that brings it to vivid life: that and Burgess's love of language. Oh, I have learnt a deal from this book.
#55: The Conjuror's Bird -- Martin Davies
This novel tells two stories, and manages to maintain suspense despite the fact that they are being told in the same book, and thus clearly connected. In fact there's a third tale nested within the present-day narrative, and the roles in that aren't as clear-cut as they appear at first. And yet, I didn't find the novel a success. It should have worked better than it does, and I think the lack is in the prose, and perhaps in the marriage of fast-paced thriller with measured historical love story.
Davies links a few historical facts -- the mysterious Ulieta bird, of which only a single drawing exists; a 'gentleman' who waited at Madeira for Joseph Banks, and was clearly female; Banks' broken engagement, and his nameless mistress -- and weaves them into a story which is compelling and credible. Banks doesn't really come to life, but his mistress is tenderly drawn and her story unfolded at a measured pace.
Meanwhile in the present, there's John 'Fitz' Fitzgerald, an expert in extinct birds; his lodger Katya, a Swedish student; his ex, Gabby, a dedicated ecologist and conservationist; and Karl, Gabby's new lover, who is determined to track down a rumoured specimen of the Ulieta bird -- one known to have been in the possession of Joseph Banks -- and make his fortune. Does he want it for a DNA bank being put together by a reclusive Canadian millionaire, or for the personal glory of finding it? Either way, he enlists Fitz's help: and so does Mr Potts, an American whose agenda has more to do with money than with rarity or conservation.
The prose never really comes to life. The modern sections read like a run-of-the-mill thriller, with occasional sloppy writing: "feet in black tights had crept from their shoes and were curled up discreetly on the red leather sofas", et cetera. The historical sections are written in a solemn, rather bland style, no contractions and few commas. There are occasional brilliant images, but on the whole they merely distract from the surrounding material.
The plot is clever enough, revolving around letters and sketches and chance meetings: Davies also offers a very credible explanation for Banks' famous fit of temper, refusing to join Cook's second expedition over a matter of cabin space. But there are at least two elements which only work, only surprise, because information has been withheld that could reasonably have been expected to be revealed. (For example, Banks knows his mistress's surname, but never uses it when thinking or speaking of her or her family.)
Entertaining and thought-provoking, but could have been so much better.
Davies links a few historical facts -- the mysterious Ulieta bird, of which only a single drawing exists; a 'gentleman' who waited at Madeira for Joseph Banks, and was clearly female; Banks' broken engagement, and his nameless mistress -- and weaves them into a story which is compelling and credible. Banks doesn't really come to life, but his mistress is tenderly drawn and her story unfolded at a measured pace.
Meanwhile in the present, there's John 'Fitz' Fitzgerald, an expert in extinct birds; his lodger Katya, a Swedish student; his ex, Gabby, a dedicated ecologist and conservationist; and Karl, Gabby's new lover, who is determined to track down a rumoured specimen of the Ulieta bird -- one known to have been in the possession of Joseph Banks -- and make his fortune. Does he want it for a DNA bank being put together by a reclusive Canadian millionaire, or for the personal glory of finding it? Either way, he enlists Fitz's help: and so does Mr Potts, an American whose agenda has more to do with money than with rarity or conservation.
The prose never really comes to life. The modern sections read like a run-of-the-mill thriller, with occasional sloppy writing: "feet in black tights had crept from their shoes and were curled up discreetly on the red leather sofas", et cetera. The historical sections are written in a solemn, rather bland style, no contractions and few commas. There are occasional brilliant images, but on the whole they merely distract from the surrounding material.
The plot is clever enough, revolving around letters and sketches and chance meetings: Davies also offers a very credible explanation for Banks' famous fit of temper, refusing to join Cook's second expedition over a matter of cabin space. But there are at least two elements which only work, only surprise, because information has been withheld that could reasonably have been expected to be revealed. (For example, Banks knows his mistress's surname, but never uses it when thinking or speaking of her or her family.)
Entertaining and thought-provoking, but could have been so much better.
#54: Innocence -- Kathleen Tessaro
This is the story of Evie, who comes to England from America, aged 18, to study acting: befriends the girls she shares a house with, Robbie and Imogene, who are both also drama students: falls in love with Jake, a rock musician: and ends up turning away from her dreams.
Interwoven with that thread is the story of Evie in her mid-thirties, a single mother with a four-year-old son (Alex), an eccentric landlady, and a career teaching drama at the City Lit. Robbie is dead, knocked over by a taxi in New York City: but they'd grown apart anyway.
Gradually the events that led from drama school to the City Lit are unfolded, and Alex's origins become clear. And suddenly, a blast from the past, Evie encounters an old friend in very unexpected circumstances: an old friend with a message.
I didn't like this book nearly as much as Tessaro's previous, Elegance: I don't know if it's simply that I'm not at the right point in my life to read it. It's very much a wake-up-and-take-stock novel, a book for women in their thirties who've spent their twenties living life (possibly living it a little too hard) and now start to wonder where they are and what they have. There are two 'morals', two lessons, in this book -- two that really stand out, anyway -- and I'm not sure I agree with either of them.
The first is, possibly predictably for this genre (I suppose this is what they call 'chick lit', though it's better-written and better-plotted than other examples I've read), that it's never too late, that there are opportunities -- not only of the romantic sort -- everywhere if you just open your eyes. And the second is that there are no mistakes, no accidents: that we end up where we're meant to be.
Evie does find closure, and new beginnings, and a new lease of life: and I'm happy to say that there is a happy ending that doesn't depend on romantic fulfilment.
There's a big Plot Device in this novel that's never really explained. How does the old friend reappear? But if you can accept that, and suspend disbelief at a couple of outrageous confidence tricks (in which no one is hurt, though an ego or two might be bruised), then this is an enjoyable read, whether or not you buy the moral at the end:
There's a peace that comes from the integrity of self that the rough fortunes of happiness can't touch. But it can only be paid for in acts of courage.
Interwoven with that thread is the story of Evie in her mid-thirties, a single mother with a four-year-old son (Alex), an eccentric landlady, and a career teaching drama at the City Lit. Robbie is dead, knocked over by a taxi in New York City: but they'd grown apart anyway.
Gradually the events that led from drama school to the City Lit are unfolded, and Alex's origins become clear. And suddenly, a blast from the past, Evie encounters an old friend in very unexpected circumstances: an old friend with a message.
I didn't like this book nearly as much as Tessaro's previous, Elegance: I don't know if it's simply that I'm not at the right point in my life to read it. It's very much a wake-up-and-take-stock novel, a book for women in their thirties who've spent their twenties living life (possibly living it a little too hard) and now start to wonder where they are and what they have. There are two 'morals', two lessons, in this book -- two that really stand out, anyway -- and I'm not sure I agree with either of them.
The first is, possibly predictably for this genre (I suppose this is what they call 'chick lit', though it's better-written and better-plotted than other examples I've read), that it's never too late, that there are opportunities -- not only of the romantic sort -- everywhere if you just open your eyes. And the second is that there are no mistakes, no accidents: that we end up where we're meant to be.
Evie does find closure, and new beginnings, and a new lease of life: and I'm happy to say that there is a happy ending that doesn't depend on romantic fulfilment.
There's a big Plot Device in this novel that's never really explained. How does the old friend reappear? But if you can accept that, and suspend disbelief at a couple of outrageous confidence tricks (in which no one is hurt, though an ego or two might be bruised), then this is an enjoyable read, whether or not you buy the moral at the end:
There's a peace that comes from the integrity of self that the rough fortunes of happiness can't touch. But it can only be paid for in acts of courage.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
The Tourmaline -- Paul Park
This review originally appeared in Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association, in July 2006.
The Tourmaline follows A Princess of Roumania, and will make no sense to anyone who hasn't read the previous instalment. Even those who have read it might flounder: this is the second half of a book intended as a single volume, split at what initially seems an awkward point. The end of Princess had great dramatic impact, but the logical division seems to be about a hundred pages into The Tourmaline, when Peter and Andromeda -- last seen on a river-bank in upstate New York -- undergo a transformation, a translation, as radical as Miranda's own.
In The Tourmaline, the focus changes from the wilderness of North America to Europe; to Roumania, a country torn by war and looking to the White Tyger for salvation. Miranda, reeling from an abrupt arrival, doesn't know what's expected of her, or even what she's capable of doing. And perhaps everything she's been told is false, because there is already a White Tyger in Roumania; Nicola Ceasescu has claimed her country's love and loyalty, and is determined to prevail by any means necessary, magical or mundane.
Peter, still travelling with Andromeda (who's also been transformed by her experiences) is no longer the rather diffident teenager of A Princess of Roumania. With the help of a mysterious African woman -- she seems a child, but there is nothing childish about her -- Peter's found his way to Europe, and he and Andromeda are making a living, searching for Miranda, searching in fact for some meaning to this extended stay in a world that's not their own.
Park draws back, showing us a broader world: a world in which Africa is technologically superior to Europe; in which barrels of a secret substance, labelled 'nepenthe', come north by train to aid the former Baroness Ceasescu in her covert war against the Germans; in which King Jesus crucified the generals before the walls of Rome, and remnants of an older race of humans roam the forests of Roumania. Magic works, here, though it's a strict and rigid discipline as full of theories and standard texts as any science. Nicola Ceasescu's methodology, her scientific magic, gives new dimension to the pre-Copernican cosmology of the first novel: she sets a spell that's also a trap, asking for help, and it seems that she is answered.
Yet all the world's a backdrop for Miranda's story, and the stories of Peter and of Andromeda. None of the three is especially likeable, as a character: that's one way in which Park subverts the tropes of genre fantasy. He's iconoclastic, too: the Magic Jewel? A fake. The letter from Miranda's dead aunt Aegypta? Lost before it's read. There's no logic to the Subterranean Portal (the weakest element of the novel, but I trust the author to explain it when the time's right). And the white tyger, that rare and special creature of the Roumanian countryside, turns out not to be a fearsome legend: it's no larger than a lynx.
Many readers seemed to misunderstand A Princess of Roumania, reading it as a YA novel (which it isn't, though it concerns Miranda's coming-of-age) or a historical fantasy (it's almost certainly set in the present day, albeit in another universe). I suspect this novel, with its broader view of the world in which Miranda, Peter and Andromeda find themselves, will confuse the issue further. Paul Park's clear, precise prose doesn't prevent him from clouding the issue with maddening scene-changes just as some vital crux is reached; with occasionally-clumsy obfuscations ("the soldier talked for a long time," without reporting what was said) and a presentation of this new world as is, unexplained. Something's hidden in plain sight, here, and I'm very much looking forward to finding out what it might be.
The Tourmaline follows A Princess of Roumania, and will make no sense to anyone who hasn't read the previous instalment. Even those who have read it might flounder: this is the second half of a book intended as a single volume, split at what initially seems an awkward point. The end of Princess had great dramatic impact, but the logical division seems to be about a hundred pages into The Tourmaline, when Peter and Andromeda -- last seen on a river-bank in upstate New York -- undergo a transformation, a translation, as radical as Miranda's own.
In The Tourmaline, the focus changes from the wilderness of North America to Europe; to Roumania, a country torn by war and looking to the White Tyger for salvation. Miranda, reeling from an abrupt arrival, doesn't know what's expected of her, or even what she's capable of doing. And perhaps everything she's been told is false, because there is already a White Tyger in Roumania; Nicola Ceasescu has claimed her country's love and loyalty, and is determined to prevail by any means necessary, magical or mundane.
Peter, still travelling with Andromeda (who's also been transformed by her experiences) is no longer the rather diffident teenager of A Princess of Roumania. With the help of a mysterious African woman -- she seems a child, but there is nothing childish about her -- Peter's found his way to Europe, and he and Andromeda are making a living, searching for Miranda, searching in fact for some meaning to this extended stay in a world that's not their own.
Park draws back, showing us a broader world: a world in which Africa is technologically superior to Europe; in which barrels of a secret substance, labelled 'nepenthe', come north by train to aid the former Baroness Ceasescu in her covert war against the Germans; in which King Jesus crucified the generals before the walls of Rome, and remnants of an older race of humans roam the forests of Roumania. Magic works, here, though it's a strict and rigid discipline as full of theories and standard texts as any science. Nicola Ceasescu's methodology, her scientific magic, gives new dimension to the pre-Copernican cosmology of the first novel: she sets a spell that's also a trap, asking for help, and it seems that she is answered.
Yet all the world's a backdrop for Miranda's story, and the stories of Peter and of Andromeda. None of the three is especially likeable, as a character: that's one way in which Park subverts the tropes of genre fantasy. He's iconoclastic, too: the Magic Jewel? A fake. The letter from Miranda's dead aunt Aegypta? Lost before it's read. There's no logic to the Subterranean Portal (the weakest element of the novel, but I trust the author to explain it when the time's right). And the white tyger, that rare and special creature of the Roumanian countryside, turns out not to be a fearsome legend: it's no larger than a lynx.
Many readers seemed to misunderstand A Princess of Roumania, reading it as a YA novel (which it isn't, though it concerns Miranda's coming-of-age) or a historical fantasy (it's almost certainly set in the present day, albeit in another universe). I suspect this novel, with its broader view of the world in which Miranda, Peter and Andromeda find themselves, will confuse the issue further. Paul Park's clear, precise prose doesn't prevent him from clouding the issue with maddening scene-changes just as some vital crux is reached; with occasionally-clumsy obfuscations ("the soldier talked for a long time," without reporting what was said) and a presentation of this new world as is, unexplained. Something's hidden in plain sight, here, and I'm very much looking forward to finding out what it might be.
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