2012/41: (Re)Cycler -- Lauren McLaughlin

...my girlfriend is cheating on me, my alter ego is playing tongue lacrosse with the dregs of Brooklyn, and her gay boyfriend is trying to be my pal ... [p.89]

Sequel to Cycler, this novel takes up the story some months after Jill's (and Jack's) less-than-perfect prom. Jill is determined to leave the small Massachussetts town where she's grown up, but she's on the horns of a dilemma. Option one is to move to New York with her best friend Ramie, who also happens to be Jack's girlfriend and who has a place at a prestigious fashion and design college. Option two is to head off with Tommy Knutsen, Jill's own more-or-less boyfriend, on a cross-country roadtrip.

It's not an easy decision because Jill (who turns into Jack for four days a month, making common-or-garden PMS seem tame) is basically making the choice for both herself and Jack: "I have to decide which one of us gets a sex life" (p. 5). As it happens, Jill hasn't got around to sex yet. Jack, on the other hand, is determined to make the very most of his four-twenty-eighths of a life ...

New York is enough of a culture shock for Jill, who's a small-town girl at heart: Jack, on the other hand, has only recently experienced anything beyond the confines of Jill's bedroom, where he was locked up with peanut-butter sandwiches and porn for all his phases. He doesn't exactly go wild, but he does meet some young men his own age, who proudly show him their Girl Chart, on which intimate details of various hook-ups are plotted. 'Glad I'm not like that,' thinks Jack blithely.

All isn't sweetness and light with Ramie, who seems to be turning against both Jill (who she thinks is selfish) and Jack (who keeps holding her back) in favour of her new fashion-mentor, Marguerite. Jill is heartbroken over Tommy's departure, and does her best to get over him by flirting with someone of whom Jack very strongly does not approve. And Jack? Jack starts to learn the difference between love and sex, and between ego and liking oneself.

I didn't find this novel as satisfactory as Cycler: there are a lot of interesting sub-plots (Jill's cycle becoming less regular, Jack's relationship with their parents, Ramie's withdrawal) but no real conclusion. Though Jack's starting to grow up -- as Jill points out, he never had to go through childhood, which explains quite a bit of his character -- he has a long way to go. I'd like to read more of their story.

2012/40: Frankenstein -- Mary Shelley

Were we among the tamer scenes of nature I might fear to encounter your unbelief, perhaps your ridicule; but many things will appear possible in these wild and mysterious regions which would provoke the laughter of those unacquainted with the ever-varied powers of nature...

Another novel read for the Coursera fantasy and SF course. I know I've read this cover to cover before (it was one of the novels I studied as an undergraduate) but I'd forgotten a great deal of it, and found it much more poignant and profound than I'd expected.

Also, Victor Frankenstein is an arrogant twit who lacks empathy.

Now I am finally ready to read The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, Peter Ackroyd's fanfic riff on Shelley's original.

My Coursera essay:

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Frankenstein's three narrators -- Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and Frankenstein's nameless creation -- are lonely. Walton writes to his sister 'I bitterly feel the want of a friend' and believes he has found that friend in Frankenstein. Frankenstein is deeply affected by the death of his friend Henry Clerval, 'the most noble of human creatures'. The Creature yearns for 'compassion and friendship' -- at first from humans that he encounters, then from his creator, and finally from the companion that he entreats Frankenstein to create for him.

These friendships seldom have happy consequences. Frankenstein wishes to create a 'new species [who] would bless me as its creator and source': perhaps he also hopes that his creation will become his friend. Instead, at the moment of the Creature's awakening, Frankenstein turns from his 'dream' in disgust and horror. The Creature's subsequent jealousy and rage lead to the death of the two people most dear to Frankenstein: his bride Elizabeth, and his friend Clerval.

The Creature's overtures of friendship inspire only fear and violence in those he meets. The De Lacey family flee their home. Little William rejects the 'hideous monster', and is killed. Worst of all, the man who brought the Creature to life turns from him. Though Victor Frankenstein admits that his duty to his creation is 'to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being', he refuses the Creature his friendship and affection, and destroys the half-made companion that would have been the Creature's bride.

Walton alone is not destroyed by his brief friendship with Frankenstein. However, his friendship is not enough to save Frankenstein: 'I would reconcile him to life, but he repulses the idea'. He cannot even fulfil Frankenstein's dying wish: his 'curiosity and compassion' prevent him from destroying the Creature. He sails for England, consoled only by the prospect of reunion with his sister, mourning a friend he barely knew.

2012/39: The Book of Lies -- Mary Horlock

...hate or anger is passed down from one person to another, and you never hit the right target because you always aim too late. [loc. 3231]

Set on Guernsey, The Book of Lies comprises two narrative threads: that of teenage Catherine in the 1980s, who begins her story by telling us she killed her friend Nicolette; and that of her Uncle Charles, who -- looking back from the 1960s -- records his perspective on the events of his own teenage years, during the German Occupation.

Catherine -- Cat -- and Charles are very different people, but as the novel progresses it becomes clear that they also share certain traits and circumstances. Both have lost their fathers (and perhaps blame themselves); both are desperate to escape the island. Both are liars, whose stories spiral out of their control with disastrous consequences. Both are bullied and tormented until they snap. And more concrete concordances gradually emerge: a house, a name, a particular spot on the cliffs ...

The mood is claustrophobic: Cat is trapped in the tangled web of small-town society, Charles is living under martial law. Of course things were at once simpler and more dangerous in wartime, but the urge to escape -- if not physically, then into the bottle or into imagination -- is a constant, whether the peril is mortal or simply monotonous.

I found Charles' account, with its evocation of wartime life and its frequent interpolations of patois (‘Si nous pale du guiabye nous est saure d’l’y’vais les caurnes’ … ‘Speak of the devil and you shall see horns’ [loc 320]) interesting and credible, but for me it lacked immediacy. Cat, though, was compelling: clever, precocious, unpopular, eaten up with rage and grief but lacking the tools to identify or temper them. (Her mother's emotionally distant: but then she, too, is grieving. And lying.)

The only note that didn't quite ring true is the lack of music. I can't imagine a teenager in the mid-Eighties being completely oblivious to music ...
... or perhaps I'm projecting.

Anyway: highly recommended, well-researched and taut with emotional conviction.

2012/38: A Room Full of Bones -- Elly Griffiths

"...a group calling themselves the Elginists. They demanded the return of the skulls. Said they should go back to Australia and be buried in their ancestral ground ... said they needed to enter Dreamtime, or some such rubbish. I gave them short shrift. Those heads belonged to my great-grandfather. They’re very rare. One’s been turned into a water carrier." (loc. 803)

The fourth in the Ruth Galloway series, and for me, I'm afraid, the least satisfactory.

Ruth has a one-year-old daughter, whose father refuses to see either of them; a new next-door neighbour, Aboriginal poet Bob Woonunga; and some doubts concerning the sudden deaths of a museum curator and then the museum's owner, wealthy racehorse owner Lord Smith. What she doesn't have, in this novel, is any involvement in the crime-solving process. She doesn't even do archaeology, unless you count visiting a museum, which I don't.

There are some intriguing ideas in A Room Full of Bones. Much of the interest, though, comes from the developing relationships -- positive and negative -- between the characters. Nelson isn't well; DC Judy Johnson is apparently having pre-wedding nerves; Cathbad has a new lover; Lord Smith's widow has an unexpected alter ego. Yet it all feels ... generic, without the sparkle or the intellectual background of the previous three novels. Perhaps Ruth's passion for archaeology was her defining feature: as a single mum, she's clearly frustrated -- but also frustrating.

2012/37: Dracula -- Bram Stoker

... he is not free. Nay, he is even more prisoner than the slave of the galley, than the madman in his cell. He cannot go where he lists, he who is not of nature has yet to obey some of nature’s laws ... [Chapter 18]

Read for the Coursera Fantasy and SF course (week 3).

I'm not sure I'd ever read Dracula from start to finish: I was surprised that the pacing was so slow (except in the final chapter where it's frenetic), and the revelations so gradual.

There's a lot to think about in this novel: Van Helsing's attempts at the scientific method (he doesn't share his thought processes with his colleagues); the culture of bribery which prevails in Eastern Europe, and why this is different to the profligacy with which Harker et al distribute beer money to the British working class; railway timetables, and whether the trains in England were really so very much more reliable than those abroad; how Mina internalises the cultural consensus on the inferiority of women, even though she's clearly smarter than most (if not all) of the men in the novel; sources of income for the middle-class Harkers (primarily the legacy from Hawkins, one presumes, and the largesse of Lord Godalming); why Lucy is so very irresistible to men.

My Coursera essay (below) started life as a discussion of the Count's attraction to Lucy. (Perhaps she reminded him of Vampire Bride #1, who is also described as blonde and blue-eyed: on the other hand, apparently death alters the colour of Lucy's hair, as the figure they 'recognise' as Lucy in the Hampstead graveyard is dark-haired.) But then I came up with a hypothesis that seemed to answer a frequently-asked question on the course forum ("Why did Dracula go to Whitby in particular?"), and was surprised not to find any discussion of it online.

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The plot of Dracula is driven by Count Dracula's decision to leave Transylvania and establish himself in England. "I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London," he tells Jonathan Harker. Yet, although Dracula has purchased a house in Purfleet, east of London, his first landfall in England is hundreds of miles away at Whitby. The correspondence of Dracula's solicitors, the highlighting of Whitby in Dracula's atlas, and the log of the Demeter, all indicate that Whitby was always his intended port of arrival.

Dracula's presence in Whitby is essential to the novel's plot. It is there that he meets Lucy Westenra, and drinks her blood. Lucy's ensuing 'illness' causes Dr Seward to seek the help of Van Helsing, whose knowledge of vampires enables him to deduce Dracula's nature. Yet no reason for Dracula's arrival in Whitby is ever stated. It could be an attempt to draw attention away from his London estate. Another possibility is that Whitby, though not a major port, seems a good destination for the crates of earth that the Count ships from Transylvania.

However, it is probable that Dracula has read about Whitby churchyard, where "part of the bank has fallen away, and some of the graves have been destroyed". Of the remaining graves, "in nigh half of them there bean’t no bodies at all". Dracula's research materials include newspapers, so he may also have read an account of the suicide and burial of George Canon. Van Helsing's description of Dracula's "earth-home... the place unhallowed, as we saw when he went to the grave of the suicide at Whitby" clarifies the significance of the latter: a suicide's grave is not holy ground. Dracula chooses Whitby because he is confident of finding refuge near the port, whether in an empty or an unhallowed grave.

2012/36: Sharps -- K J Parker

There was no defence. If you tried to block, you needed both hands; you'd mutilate yourself for life, and you could only do it once. So: no defence. Instead there was attacking and avoiding, ideally at the same time, so that in escaping your opponent's attack, you formed and forwarded your own. That, he realised was the difference, and the reason why he'd done so badly at Joiauz. You couldn't just endure. It was pure aggression. "Welcome to the messer," Suidas said, as they halted to catch their breath. "You can't protect yourself. Your only way out is to kill the other man." [location 2689]

Permia and Scheria have been at war, on and off, for years. At the opening of Sharps an uneasy peace prevails, not least because a Scherian general (codename: the Irrigator) drowned an entire Permian city. Now, forty years later, the two countries -- both plagued by economic recession, civil unrest, and religious extremism -- maintain a cold-war policy of mutual, begrudging tolerance.

Let the Games begin!

Four skilled individuals are chosen to make up a Scherian fencing team, which will tour Permia and pave the way for the resumption of diplomatic relations. Not that they actually have to do any diplomacy themselves, which is probably for the best... Phrantzes, the team's manager, is a ageing fencing champion; Suidas is a veteran of the wars, suffering from PTSD and self-medicating with alcohol; Giraut got caught with a senator's daughter, and ended up killing the senator; Iseutz, the sole woman on the team, has flatly refused to marry; and Addo, perhaps the most skilled fencer of them all, happens to be the son of the Irrigator. Oh, and there's Yvo Tzimisces, the political officer, who might've stepped straight out of a Le Carre novel. (Tzimisces is my favourite character. He has class.)

They're all very popular in Permia (Parker's depiction of fencer fandom is delicious): but they're expected to fight with messers, rather than rapiers. The messer is basically a large knife, designed to inflict maximum damage: a far cry from the buttoned foils and blunted longswords of competitive swordplay. ("It's like ten centuries of scientific fencing hadn't happened," says Suidas sadly. [loc. 2701]) The messer is also a metaphor, hence the novel's title (and the excerpt above). They're fighting with sharps, no holds barred: and the opponent isn't necessarily the other fencer, or a Permian, or an enemy.

And, as though there weren't already sufficient ingredients for disaster, it turns out that someone on the team has an extra page to their agenda. This agenda may include assassination, treachery or vengeance: or, of course, all of the above.

Parker's earlier novels / trilogies tended to focus on a single protagonist. The Engineer trilogy had several protagonists, whose stories wove together to further the broader plot. Sharps, by contrast, has an ensemble cast: five individuals who are constantly interacting, share an apparent goal and have similar cultural backgrounds. (Several of them are also connected by the 'folly pillar, complete with a lavishly paid pretend stylite to sit on top of it' [loc. 1915], purchased by one of Addo's ancestors.) The fact that none of them can be trusted as narrators, viewpoint characters or even sportsmen is beside the point: the relationships that form and fracture reveal motives and feelings that are otherwise unexplored.

As usual with Parker's novels, Sharps is darkly humorous, intricately plotted, and full of surprises. There's less of the obfuscation-by-pronoun; the women get a better deal (though there is still at least one nagging wife too many); nobody gets turned into a weapon, though to be fair most of them are weapons already, one way or another. And there's no magic: this is not so much a sword'n'sorcery novel as sword'n'spying.

Incidentally, Sharps is set in the same world as The Folding Knife and the Engineer trilogy: there are mentions of the Aram Chantat, the Invincible Sun and the Mezentine Empire. However, it's clearly later in the history of that world: Scheria and Permia have an eighteenth-century feel, though I might have been misled by the props.

2012/35: Red Shift -- Alan Garner

Face was moving in a different time. He knew Macey, but talked to other people, things. He spoke, but in all the words of Rome and the tribes. He seemed to be happy, and for Macey it was the only shield.
"I am well I hope you are can fight now you I. Why come not on Mow Cop yet all please but every not worry. I want know now all see same sky now soon.
... Face's words closed without end. (p. 118)

When I first read Red Shift (I was probably about 14) I was far too young to understand most of it. There are certain sections I recall vividly -- Cross Tracks, the whisky, the fossil in the fireplace, Tom's a-cold -- and sections that I'd completely lost. I didn't remember the Civil War passages at all. I didn't recall that the Romans were the remnants of the Ninth. And I didn't make the connections between the three pairs of protagonists: Macey and the unnamed priestess/goddess, Thomas Rowley and Margery, Tom and Jan.

I did recognise, I think, that despite the different historical periods, the events of the book took place in the same place, and that certain perceptions were shared across time: Tom smashing the window, the blue-silver-red train. I think I knew that the link was connected with the votive axe -- a weapon of murder in Macey's hands, a protection against lightning for Thomas and Madge, a shared memory (and later a symbol of betrayal) for Tom and Jan. The axe is real in a way that few things are.

On rereading, I'm glad I didn't realise just how bleak and bitter a novel it is. Beautifully constructed, beautiful spare language, dialogue sharp enough to cut: but it's a grim tale of rape and murder, cruelty and betrayal, and the endings are more peaceful (as in the cessation of conflict) than actually happy. Each woman is pregnant; two of them (at least: I still can't parse the scene on the church roof) have been raped; all the protagonists find their sanctuaries violated. And yet they hold on.

Red Shift is more compelling than enjoyable: it's too deep and too layered for mere enjoyment. It's not all doom and gloom: I like the camaraderie of the Romans, holed up in enemy territory, and the way Garner writes Latin as American military-speak: "'He was a member of the Imperial Roman Army, engaged in putting down insurgents.' 'I don't care what he was doing in Latin...' (p. 86) I like the sense of the universe turning around a fixed point, and the priestess / goddess grinding her corn counter-clockwise. Tom's expositions on astronomical theory impressed me massively as a teenager, and now evoke a fondness for his brittle cleverness. And, at last, I think I understand Jan.