The White Tyger -- Paul Park

This review originally appeared in Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association, in November 2007.

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This is the third in Park's Roumanian quartet, following A Princess of Roumania (2005) and The Tourmaline (2006). (The final volume, The Hidden World, is due next year.) Though penultimate volumes can sometimes seem slower and less eventful than other parts of a quartet -- marking time, building suspense -- The White Tyger provides a new perspective on previous events, and considerably more information about the world in which it's set. A great deal happens in this volume of the story, though it's inconclusive. There are reversals, mistakes, the gradual subversion and destruction of several well-laid and long-term plans. All it takes is a little greed, the wrong person in the right place, the hidden world trickling into the real.

The White Tyger moves the focus away from Miranda Popescu, who's been transplanted from our own Massachusetts to become a fairytale princess, a symbol of freedom and hope, in a Roumania quite different from the one we know. Miranda -- seen by her family's loyal followers as the embodiment of the White Tyger, a legendary symbol of Roumanian freedom -- is a shadowy puppet in this novel, and when she does appear it's seldom in a sympathetic role. There's more warmth in the widowed Baroness Nicola Ceacescu, calm within her web of plots: the Baroness is as happy to use magic -- simulacra, 'the old country magic of whores', and a degree of foreknowledge that may be prescience or predetermination -- as poison or intrigue. Sasha Prochenko (the bold and dashing lieutenant whom we encountered first as a girl, and then as a dog) is now a tripartite creature, capable of being male or female or something quite inhuman: and the ways in which Prochenko's three selves manifest, merge and interact with new protagonists, is fascinating.

Park fleshes out his world in this volume of the quartet. In A Princess of Roumania our own reality was written off as an elaborate deception to hide Miranda: now it's reinterpreted as a failed experiment. "Models for evolution, heliocentric ... fairy stories. A world where dreams mean nothing. Where the dead are dead. Where stars are only balls of flaming gas and planets are dead rocks, and we are only responsible to our own selves."

Miranda, the archetypal self-involved teenager, says lamely "And I thought it was all for me."

Roumania, even while occupied by the Germans, is the cultural, or magical, or actual centre of a world in which a god has been imprisoned in a tower for the last three centuries: where Cleopatra has taken her place amongst the deities on Olympos (and a world in which this deification is perceived as history rather than mythology): where Shakespeare's known as 'that English refugee' and Newton -- who 'died of syphilis and mercury in Potsdam, a drunken broken man' -- is more famous for his alchemy, and a few unpleasantly effective devices, than anything else. After all, in this world, Copernicus was wrong.

The story gathers pace like a runaway train -- yet there's also a curious, calming distance between the reader and the characters, a sense that we are watching their stories unfold rather than inhabiting those stories. In a way that could be said for the characters, too: that they're not inhabiting their own stories. For a world constrained by fate and gods, there are a great many individuals creating and recreating themselves, choosing the myths by which they live and die. Nicola Ceacescu, whose unfinished opera The White Tyger -- with herself in the leading role -- shows a steely determination to revise her own history and that of all Roumania, strives to find the myth that fits what she has done, and what she's become. Will she be Cleopatra with her asp? Or will she assume the attributes of that other princess of Roumania, the infanticidal Medea?

It remains to be seen whether or not Park can pull all the threads of his narrative together, explain every allusion and reinterpretation, in the final volume of the quartet. But having come this far, my hopes are high.

#57: Special Topics in Calamity Physics -- Marsha Pessl

On Friday, March 26, with the same innocence of the Trojans as they gathered around the strange wooden horse standing at the gate to their city ... Hannah drove our yellow Rent-Me truck into the dirt lot of Sunset Views Encampment and parked in Space 52. The lot was empty, with the exception of a swayback blue Pontiac parked in front of the cabin (a wooden sign slapped crookedly over the door like a Band-Aid: MAIN) and a rusty towable trailer ("Lonesome Dreams") chucked under an evangelist oak. (It was in the midst of some violent enlightenment, branches stretched heavenwards as if to grab hold of His feet.) A white sky ironed, starched, folded itself primly behind the rolling mountains. Garbage floated across the lot, cryptic messages in bottles. Sometime in the last week or so, it had sleeted cigarette butts.

I had to buy this as soon as I saw the title, and I'm pleased to report it was a damned fine read.

Blue van Meer is a precocious and over-educated American teenager, reared peripatetically -- 36 schools between five and sixteen, I think it was -- by her brilliant left-wing father after her mother's death when Blue was five. This odd upbringing has produced a girl who provides a reference for practically every metaphor, weird statistic or astute observation that she comes out with. I'm still trying to decide if it's irritating or reassuring.

Because I like Blue. She reads far too much (each chapter bears the title of a Great Work of Literature, from Othello to Che Guevara Talks to Young People). She's a geek, or possibly a nerd: top of the class in every school she's attended, remarkably mature for her age and possessing a confidence that does a great deal to conceal a lack of social skills. Or perhaps she just falls in with the wrong crowd - the Bluebloods -- when she starts her senior year at St Gallways, in Stockton, North Carolina.

Right from the start it's clear that this is a murder mystery, that Hannah was murdered and that Blue was the one who found her. The novel is about how Hannah dies, but not only about that: it's about lies and secrets and the past, about people who disappear and people who create new identities, about things that aren't at all what they seem (I can't count the layers of deception) ... about Blue's transformation, at the hands of Jade Vine, from plain Jane -- oh, did I mention the visual aids? drawings by the author, presented as photos, throughout -- to all-American teen ... about, really about, Blue's claustrophobic love-hate relationship with her father, Gareth van Meer.

I don't think I can do justice to the convolutions of plot, and I don't think I should try. The writing, the prose, was what dazzled me (in good and bad ways). Sheer pyrotechnic writing, wordplay and sly humour (I'd say more than half of the references are sheer fabrication), acerbic observation (Blue is especially dry on the vagaries of the June Bugs, her father's serial girlfriends, each ditched before things can get too serious), Milnean Capitals, and some gorgeous metaphors -- hair ivying across a chair, sauteed kitchen air.

All of which makes me wonder if the novel is structured around the two points when Blue is lost for words. The first time, she leaves a word-length space in the sentence, a space to stand for an indefinable personal quality: the second time, at the end, she acknowledges the lack of a word and moves on.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a novel that I suspect could be read on several levels: murder mystery, coming-of-age novel, satire on modern American life, a cult novel with clever in-jokes and pop culture references. It's reminiscent of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, but too much has been made of the similarities: though both novels are set at school and deal with the gradual (apparent) acceptance of an outsider into a clique, presided over by a benign academic, the outsiders are quite different, as are the cliques and the acceptance and the outcome.

I recommend it to anyone with a bit of the nerd, geek, outsider in them, anyone who appreciates writing that fizzes with invention but not just for the sake of it: certainly to anyone who was ever told, as a teenager, that they read too much. (Believe me, you never read as much as Blue.) And I am very much looking forward to Pessl's next novel.

There's a heavily interactive website to which I've just lost half an hour.

#56: The Floating Egg: Episodes in the Making of Geology -- Roger Osborne

Marking this as 'read' is a bit of a cheat, because I read about half and skimmed the rest: and how I wish I'd thought to read it in the ~10 years I've owned it, instead of picking it up ready to package and send it to a BookMoocher, and finding myself entranced!

The Floating Egg is a series of pieces (not really essays: some of them are quotations from original sources, some are fictionalised vignettes, some are straightforward historical accounts and some are collections of historical minutae) concerning geology: in particular, the geology of the North Yorkshire coast around Whitby, an area which Osborne clearly knows and loves. There are chapters on alum (the 'floating egg' of the title refers to the method of extracting alum from a solution of mineral salts: a hen's egg, placed in the mixture, would float to the surface at the moment when the liquid had reached the correct density), on meteorites, on dinosaur fossils, on Captain Cook, and on theoretical geology -- the strata that are typically found adjacent to one another in the British Isles, an understanding of which helped early geologists to earn their keep by advising mining corporations.

Each chapter stands alone, though some make strange reading taken together. It's just the right sort of book to rekindle my interest in a science of which I used to have a working knowledge (almost took Geology O-level as an additional subject, but class was Saturday mornings and I couldn't get to it). It made me want to do some serious fossil-hunting again, to walk Yorkshire beaches and pick up jet and ammonites, to revisit the Natural History and Science museums and look at old bones and ancient iron.

Shall try to BookMooch a copy ...

#55: Trim: Being the True Story of a Brave Seafaring Cat -- Matthew Flinders

This good-natured purring animal was born on board His Majesty's ship the Roundabout in 1799 during a passage from the Cape of Good Hopeto Botany Bay; and saving the rights and titles of the parish of Stepney, was consequently an Indian by birth. The signs of superior intelligence which marked his infancy, procured for him an education beyond what is usually bestowed upon the individuals of his tribe; and being brought up amongst sailors, his manners acquired a peculiarity of cant which rendered them as different from those of other cats, as the actions of a fearless seaman are from those of a lounging, shame-faced ploughboy;

I bought this on spec: it's a neat little hardcover, about 50 pages long, and it was on offer in Nauticalia in Greenwich. I'm fond of ships' cats, and fascinated by the affection they often elicit from Navy and civilian sailors alike. In Trim, Flinders -- more generally known for circumnavigating Australia, a feat which he clearly couldn't have managed without Trim's help -- shows a warm and whimsical side of himself. Apparently the book was written while its author was held prisoner in Mauritius by the French. Flinders wanted to improve his prose, and his beloved cat had just disappeared (eaten, he was sure, by hungry slaves): the result is this touching little tribute.

Trim, named after a character in Tristram Shandy, was a proper seafaring cat. He was perfectly capable of swimming, and of catching hold of a rope-end, if he fell overboard. He invited himself to dine in the officers' mess, and his somewhat forward table manners (grabbing food off the fork of a lieutenant who was talking too much) were tolerated to a surprising degree. He did get a hiding for stealing meat from the larder, though. He took an interest in astronomical observations, scaled the rigging only when the order was given, and loved to chase musket balls around the deck.

Trim did not take to life on land, on one memorable occasion leaping straight through a sash window that somebody had inconsiderately left closed with him on the wrong side. Back at sea, though, he survived shipwreck and privation before his master's imprisonment: Flinders was prevailed upon to lend him to the young daughter of a French lady, but he strayed (or, given the character of the creature, escaped) and was never seen again.

Flinders is definitely writing half in jest when he lauds Trim's fine looks, bemoans his vanity, recounts his adventures &co: it's a gentle parody of the picaresque. But the affection he felt for his constant feline companion, and the clarity with which he conveys Trim's character, is timeless: it brings Flinders and Trim back to life.

There's a lovely page about Trim here, with a photo of the statue of Flinders, fine upstanding Navy chap, and his cat rubbing against his leg.
And the Maritime Museum have a delightful multimedia Trim page for children, here.

#54: A Circle of Stones -- Shelagh MacDonald

This is a reread, but I first read the novel so long ago that I'd forgotten most of the plot. All I remembered was an English girl (Tini) on a Greek island channelling the goddess Athene, and Pethi (her Greek friend) with his cat riding on his shoulder. (I have fond memories of trying to persuade the cats at home to do this. I may also still have some scars.)

A Circle of Stones, like its sequel Five from Me, Five from You, is set on the island of Serifos, the birthplace of Perseus. McDonald's writing is clear, not condescending (I wonder if children today would find it difficult, as they apparently find Rosemary Sutcliff's writing hard work) and unaffectedly poetic: the 'swearing tremble' of a cat's growl, for instance. She balances the beauty of the island -- blue skies, white houses like sugarcubes tumbling down the hill -- with the grinding poverty that sends most of the men abroad, because there's no work.

Pethi has a secret which might make all the difference to the islanders. George, Tini's father, is an archaeologist who'd love to share that secret. And the man who owns most of the island's mines is scheming to close the mines and make his fortune another way. Vleppo (the aforementioned cat) plays a major role in thwarting those schemes. (I'd forgotten just how much violence there was in this book. I'd forgotten just what Vleppo does.)

Rooting around on the web, I find there's another children's novel, No End to Yesterday, by Shelagh MacDonald -- but it's set in the 1920s. I suppose she'd written all she wanted to write about Serifos, Pethi and Tini. I do wish there was more.

#53: Pilgrim -- Timothy Findley

I have lived many times, Doctor Jung. Who knows, as Leda I might have been the mother of Helen -- or, as Anne, the mother of Mary. I was Orion once, who lost his sight and regained it. I was also a crippled shepherd in thrall to Saint Teresa of Avila; an Irish stable-boy and a maker of stained glass at Chartres. I stood on the ramparts of Troy and witnessed the death of Achilles. I saw the first performance of Hamlet and the last performance of Moliere, the actor. I was a friend to Oscar Wilde and an enemy to Leonardo... I am both male and female, I am ageless and I have no access to death.

Pilgrim (he admits to no first name) is introduced to us in such a way that we expect the entire novel to be told in retrospect: we meet him as he walks out at 4am one spring morning in 1912 to hang himself in the garden of his Cheyne Walk home.

Pilgrim, though, can't die. After hours dead his heart begins to beat again: and his dear friend Lady Sybil Quatermaine accompanies him to Switzerland, to the Burgholzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich, where he is given into the care of one Herr Doktor Carl Gustav Jung.

Henceforth Pilgrim is as much Jung's tale as Pilgrim's own -- more, perhaps, since for quite a while Pilgrim refuses to speak at all. Luckily, Sybil has entrusted his journals to Jung, and Jung's wife Emma reads them: at first with disbelief and later with a growing fascination. For Pilgrim writes of other lives he's lived, of other times: of the time when he was Elisabetta Gherardini, gazing upon the painter Leonardo with a deadly hatred; when he was Manolo, a crippled Spanish shepherd-boy, and begged a young Catholic woman named Teresa for a miracle she could not bestow; when he was Simon le Jeune and signed his name in the great glass window at Chartres Cathedral; of walking the walls of Troy, shaded by a parasol, watching heroes fight ...

Of course, these may all be fantasies. The nature of Pilgrim's condition is never made clear, and -- aside from his undoubted resistance to death -- there's no objective evidence to support his claims. There is a birthmark (or is it a tattoo?) in the shape of a butterfly -- Psyche's symbol -- that appears to accompany him through all these lives. There's his assertion that although he dies and is reborn, he never knows what it is to be a child.

He is, if nothing else, a man who inspires great loyalty: from Kessler, a man with madness in his own past, who tends him in the Clinic; from his manservant Forster, who affects disguise and engages in espionage to 'rescue' his master; from Lady Sybil, who may be a spiritual messenger or simply a Victorian aristocrat with a penchant for the supernatural; from Emma, who weeps over his journals and rejoices when it seems he's free. Doves and pigeons are drawn to him. Photographed in the snow, a butterfly appears in the picture.

Towards the end of the novel, Pilgrim becomes decidedly more active: he has an agenda, and he wants the world to listen, for some of his dreams are of a future filled with blood and war.

I read Pilgrim feeling that there were layers of the story that entirely eluded me. Perhaps this is a tale of madness, of Pilgrim as just another patient at the clinic -- where the Countess Blavinskeya believes herself to be an inhabitant of the Moon, where a woman plays piano with Robert Schumann's hands, where a man writes on every surface with an invisible pen, and another believes himself to be a dog. (Picturesque madnesses. Upper-class madnesses.) Or perhaps it's a tale about art and the power of art, from Leonardo's light-and-shadow to the glorious colours at Chartres ...

Or perhaps it's a tale of the case that Jung could not solve, that shaped his interests in mysticism, synchronicity, the collective unconscious. Perhaps Pilgrim is that collective unconscious embodied.

Perhaps.

#52: The Navigator of New York -- Wayne Johnston

The eponymous Navigator -- from the old word for 'explorer', though this novel's set in the first years of the twentieth century -- is Devlin Stead, a young man from Newfoundland. Devlin, after receiving a series of letters to which it's impossible to respond, travels to New York to confront the letters' author, Dr Frederick Cook.

Connoisseurs of Arctic history will be familiar with Cook's name and his history: his claim to be the first man to reach the North Pole, and the first to scale Mount McKinley in Alaska. The first claim was challenged by Robert Peary, whom history recognises as first to the Pole; the second was proven fake by Cook's travelling companion, who testified that they had not ascended the mountain. Debate still rages.

And debate rages within these pages too: Peary and Cook's feud, post-Pole, occupies a significant portion of the novel, with Devlin fiercely loyal to Cook. Cook, after all, knew his father, Francis Stead, and was on the expedition on which he died. Cook, it turns out, also knew Devlin's mother. And Cook is a man who can keep a secret: indeed he relinquishes them only reluctantly, and even the last few pages of the novel contain unexpected revelations -- unexpected to Devlin, at least, though I was beginning to suspect that there might be a little more to Cook's version of events than he'd yet disclosed.

Though the focus, for the main part, is on the relationship between Devlin and Cook, the scenery is stunning. The sense of New York -- Manhattan -- springing up almost overnight, the sheer energy of this new city (when Devlin first arrives, the north part of Manhattan Island is still fields, where families live in shacks: Cook recalls a time when men hunted small game from the roof-gardens of the Dakota Apartments), is vividly recounted, its sheer vitality a marked constrast to the polar wastes. Which is not to say that the Arctic passages are lacking: Johnston evokes the emptiness, the oddness of the polar regions in language that reminds me of Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen. Devlin's mother walks beside him across the ice, the fifth in a party of four. Jo Peary, devoted wife of the explorer, poses in formal dress with her daughter Marie on a Greenland beach. The Belgica is photographed by night, eerily flash-lit ...

Eventually, a 'day' consisted of an hour-long twilight, the sun barely clearing the almost-flat horizon to the east before it began to set again.
We could not keep our minds from reacting as they normally would to the light conditions, could not help feeling that this was the dusk of a day in which the sun had run its normal course across the sky and now was setting. We did what people do at dusk: gave in to reflectiveness, to thoughts of the past and what the coming days would bring.

Devlin's story is inextricably linked with Cook's -- and with Peary's, after Devlin saves him from a chilly death in Greenland. And in the end, Devlin, who has given his allegiance wholeheartedly to Cook's cause in the feud between the rival explorers, discovers that Peary holds the key that will unlock the last of Cook's secrets.

Devlin is very much of his time, stiff and shy, his emotions painted in bright simple colours. I'm not sure I liked him, but I pitied and envied him. And Johnston's writing, his evocation of Newfoundland and New York and the Arctic, is sparse and brilliant at once, like light on snow.