2012/58: Mythworld 1: The Festival of Bones -- James A. Owen

... the Book of Alberich. Do you understand what this could be? Not a poetic cycle, or a mythologized history. This could be an accounting, perhaps only once or twice removed, of the actual father of Hagen — the very instigator of everything in the Prose Edda, the Nibelunglied, and... Wagner’s Ring. [location 1625]

Read this on a plane, which might have contributed to my fuzziness about the plot and characters. The Festival of Bones is part conspiracy theory, part 'search for lost book containing wisdom of the ancients', part occult thriller. It namechecks Wagner, Alexandra David-Neel, Arthur Pendragon and the myth of the Erl-King. Also, there are zombie students. No, real zombie students, not students who spent last night in the bar.

The Festival of Bones contains some cool and intriguing ideas, but the presentation feels muddled. Actually, the whole novel feels like a fix-up prequel to another work (though it isn't; the second novel in the sequence was published well after the first). The writing is competent at worst, with occasional flashes of excellence, and the excitement ramps up throughout the book. It just didn't click with me, but that might be due to the tired, fraught state in which I read it.

2012/57: Madensky Square -- Eva Ibbotson

At ten o'clock this morning, Frau Hutte-Klopstock, the wife of the City Parks Superintendent, handed me a magazine and said she wanted to look like Karsavina in The Firebird .

"Something diaphanous, I thought," she said. "Shimmering. In flame or orange."

Frau Hutte-Klopstock is healthy, she is muscular; she is sportif and athletic. A small glacier in the High Tatras has been named after her and of this one must be glad. But oh God! Karsavina!

Some of Eva Ibbotson's romantic novels have, I believe, been reissued as 'teen reading'. I wish I'd been able to read them as a teenager, rather than reading the dire bodice-rippers in the local library: but they are not written specifically for teenagers, and there are many shades of grey [haha] in their protagonists' moralities.

Madensky Square was the first of Ibbotson's romances I read, probably in 1998; I recall picking it up in the Holborn branch of Books Etc, reading a random page and being entranced by the heroine's voice. Fourteen years later, reading the newly-released Kindle edition, I'd forgotten almost all of the plot, so it felt like a fresh delight.

Vienna, 1911. Susanna runs a successful dress-making business in a small, neighbourly square. Her lover is a Field-Marshall, but Susanna does not pine over his frequent absences or beg for him to leave his wife. She's far from lonely. Aside from her regular customers (including the Countess von Metz who pays for her dresses in 'antiques'; Magdalena, ethereal bride-to-be of a jovial pork butcher; Leah Cohen, who needs a dress for the races that will also do for planting oranges in Israel...) there are the other inhabitants of the square; Susanna's anarchist assistant Nini, who models clothes for the bourgeoisie with an authentic sneer; and Susanna's dear friend Alice, the only person to know the details of Susanna's personal tragedy.

Alice experiences tragedy of her own: her lover Rudi has a heart attack, and is not expected to live. Alice has no chance of being admitted -- a mistress! -- to the hospital where Rudi's dying, until Susanna steps in with common sense (and an 'in' in the form of Rudi's equally sensible daughter, who'd much rather her father was happy).

And then there's Sigismund, the orphaned ten-year-old prodigy whose piano-playing fills the square like spring. How, in this city of artists and writers and professors and musicians, can he hope to find success?

What I like most about Madensky Square is Susanna's voice: a keen and cutting critique of the society in which she lives ("Frau Hutte-Klopstock is back from the High Tatras. Her sister has been in Paris and says that Poiret is freeing women from the corset. All I can say is that if he was designing for the women of Vienna, he would think again ...") coupled with expansive kindness and a fierce loyalty to those she deems worthy. She's seldom sentimental, eminently practical, and far from flawless, and there is a lyrical clarity to her observations which makes them memorable.

I'm hoping that more of Eva Ibbotson's adult novels will show up on Kindle's Deal of the Day ... I think I still own them all, but it's an excellent excuse to reread!

2012/56: Angelmaker -- Nick Harkaway

He is the man who arrives too late. Too late for clockwork in its prime, too late to know his grandmother. Too late to be admitted to the secret places, too late to be a gentleman crook, too late really to enjoy his mother’s affection before it slid away into a God-ridden gloom. And too late for whatever odd revelation was waiting here. He had allowed himself to believe that there might, at last, be a wonder in the world which was intended just for him. [location 1985]

This is a hard novel to review, because there's just so much in it. (Also, I took a very long time to finish it, for a number of reasons: the fact that it's still clear in my mind says more about the book's quality than does that protracted reading.)

Clock-mender Joshua Joseph Spork, known as Joe, is the son of an infamous Sixties London gangster. Though Joe tends towards the legal side of life, he still has many friends and contacts on the shadier side. This comes in useful when he's framed for a murder he didn't commit.

Edie Banister is ninety but far from senile. In her WWII heyday she was a code-breaker, spy and assassin. Old habits die hard, which is fortunate for Joe and his new friend Polly, sister of sardonically fearsome lawyer Mercer Cradle.

The eponymous Angelmaker device, a.k.a. the Apprehension Engine, is 'not just some clockwork toy. It is a scientific advance of ludicrous complexity, so secret that no one who knew about it could understand it and no one who would understand it could be allowed to know about it' [location 3651]. It is made of brass and resides in Lostwithiel. Its function is to provide humans with a different perception of reality.

Combine, add elephants and cryptography and governmental misbehaviour and a quest for immortality. No ninjas, as such, but there are zombies in all but name.

Stir well.

[many many false starts removed here! But really, they all mean 'this is COOL / CLEVER / FUNNY'.]

Harkaway's prose is lighter and more comic than Neal Stephenson's, but similarly strewn with a captivating plethora of detail and plot. His sentences are often elegant and his female characters reassuringly credible. (They tend to pass the Bechdel test, too, given the opportunity.) Angelmaker is very readable, and has a flavour all its own: not quite steampunk, not quite thriller, not quite SF or fantasy. Or romance. Nor is it very much like The Gone-Away World, Harkaway's debut novel. I admire variety in an author, and hope his next novel is as surprising as Angelmaker.

2012/55: Bacchae -- Euripides

Kadmos: Is your soul still quivering?
Agave: I don't understand your words. I have become somehow
sobered, changing from my former state of mind.
Kadmos: Can you hear and respond clearly?
Agave: Yes, for I forget what we said before, father.
Kadmos: To whose house did you come in marriage?
Agave: You gave me, as they say, to Echion, the sown man.
Kadmos: What son did you bear to your husband in the house?
Agave: Pentheus, from my union with his father.
Kadmos: Whose head do you hold in your hands? [lines 1268-1275]

Read, along with several other tragedies (Oedipus Rex, Oresteia, etc), for the Coursera Greek and Roman Mythology course. I've seen a couple of productions of Bacchae, but wasn't familiar with the text.

Gods, it's a nasty story. But also quite funny, if you look at it from Dionysus' point of view. There's a dash of trickster to his character here, though I don't think it softens his punishment of Agave. (Pentheus, on the other hand, is a prick who deserves his fate.)

The essay I wrote is below ...

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The Relationships between the Human and the Divine in Euripides' Bacchae

Euripides' Bacchae centres on the conflict between King Pentheus of Thebes, grandson of Kadmos, and the god Dionysus. Pentheus, like many of his countrymen, refuses to acknowledge the divinity of Dionysus: the god exacts a terrible price for this insult, not only causing the death of Pentheus but destroying Kadmos' whole house.

Dionysus' wrath is implacable, but he does not simply strike down the unbelievers. Instead, he assumes the guise of a foreign priest and allows Pentheus' soldiers to capture him. A servant reports that Dionysus 'laughed and allowed us to bind him and lead him away' [440], and Dionysus' attitude towards Pentheus is similarly light-hearted, which infuriates the king. Their banter, and the almost comic nature of Dionysus' escape from captivity, reinforces the god's power. Pentheus is both prey and toy.

Euripides contrasts the playfulness of the god with Pentheus' desire for control: he also draws parallels between the two, depicting them both as prone to anger and motivated by pride. 'You rejoice whenever ... the city extols the name of Pentheus. He too, I think, delights in being honored.' [318-22] Dionysus avenges the Thebans' failure to honour him by driving their king to madness and death, the latter at the hands of his own mother Agave. Kadmos reproaches Dionysus for the severity of the punishment he has inflicted on Thebes, saying that 'Gods should not resemble mortals in their anger' [1348]. Dionysus is at once divine and human, inciting madness and displaying human emotion.

The two sides of Dionysus, 'the most terrible and yet most mild to men' [862], are both apparent in Bacchae. The Chorus sing the praises of the god of wild revelry and wine, and the liberty and freedom he bestows upon his worshippers, while the action of the play moves towards the madness and death of the king who refuses to worship the god in his gentler guise. Those who deny the god are destroyed by him, and even those who worship faithfully -- like Agave -- may find their lives in ruins when they wake from sacred madness.

2012/54: The Odyssey -- Homer, translated by Robert Fagles

And the ship like a four-horse team careering down the plain,

all breaking as one with the whiplash cracking smartly,

leaping with hoofs high to run the course in no time —

so the stern hove high and plunged with the seething rollers

crashing dark in her wake as on she surged unwavering
[Book XIII, lines 93-7]

I'm not sure I'd ever read The Odyssey from start to finish before: Robert Fagles' translation sings, and made the reading much more enjoyable than it might've been if I'd stuck to one of the older versions available for free on the web! I found myself reading the Odyssey as a gripping narrative of a long journey home, with timeless metaphors and some shrewd observations on human nature. And hindsight kicked in a great deal, making me realise that I'd been exposed to innumerable Odyssey-references in popular culture. (One scribble in my notebook wonders if Zelazny was referencing the Odyssey in the first Amber series.)

The Greek and Roman Mythology course offered by the University of Pennsylvania via Coursera was extremely good. Professor Peter Struck's video lectures were engaging (plus, a great incentive, the weekly quizzes referred back to the lectures :)]. I became thoroughly engaged with the source material (not just the Odyssey, but assorted tragedies, Hesiod's Theogony, a couple of Homeric Hymns, and some Vergil to round it off) and also with the theoretical tools presented in the course: structuralism, functionalism, myth and ritual, euhemerism and Freudianism.

Below is my first essay.

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A Structuralist Interpretation of Odysseus' Conversation with Achilles

In book XI of the Odyssey, Odysseus journeys to the underworld to consult with the ghost of the seer Tiresias. Whilst there, he encounters many other ghosts, whose speech and behaviour illustrate the opposition between life and death.

Odysseus' exchange with the ghost of Achilles [Fagles, p. 265] crystallises this opposition. "There's not a man in the world more blest than you," Odysseus tells his fallen comrade. Achilles was honoured as a god during his lifetime, and mourned by his comrades when he died. Now, says Odysseus, "you lord it over the dead in all your power".

But Achilles argues, passionately and bitterly, that he'd "rather slave on earth for another man ... than rule down here over all the breathless dead". This is a reversal of his stance in the Iliad, when he spoke of his desire for a short life and a glorious death. The glory and fame he won at Troy do not compensate for the loss of city, family and identity that death entails. Odysseus, who bemoans that he has "never once set foot on native ground", may have lost these things temporarily, but Achilles' loss is permanent.

Achilles' first words to Odysseus reinforced the latter's kinship ties: "royal son of Laertes". Later, Achilles questions Odysseus about his father Peleus and his son Neoptolemus. He wants to know whether his son became a champion, and yearns to protect his aged father from "all those men who abuse the king with force and wrest away his honor". Achilles is helpless and ignorant, while Odysseus hopes (the gods willing) to be reunited with his own father and son. Indeed, Odysseus will eventually reinstate his own father's honour and laud Telemachus' passage to manhood -- options that are no longer available to the dead Achilles.

The dead are powerless and ignorant: they cannot even speak unless given blood by the living. Yet it is death that makes Achilles appreciate the life and the opportunities that he has lost.

2012/53: Little Brother -- Cory Doctorow

...what if I decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of Times Square, and you'd be buck naked?
Even if you've got nothing wrong or weird with your body -- and how many of us can say that? -- you'd have to be pretty strange to like that idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it in until we exploded.
It's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing something private. It's about your life belonging to you. [chapter 4]

Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it; Doctorow is of the teenagers'. Never trust anyone over 25? PARADOX, for the author of this novel is definitely too old to be trustworthy.

I felt excluded in a way I hadn't when reading Alice in Wonderland. And, yes, actually my politics are pretty much in line with Marcus's: but I'm of the opinion that a lot of what happens in the world is rooted in appearances.

Or, put it another way: imagine that I am holding something that looks like a bomb, and I refuse to let you near enough to examine it. Over there someone else is holding an apparently-identical something that looks like a bomb, and they also refuse to let you near enough to examine it, and then it blows up.

Am I holding a bomb?

Might you be forgiven for thinking that I was?

Don't get me wrong: I enjoyed reading the novel, which was well-paced and full of interesting 3D characters. I found the crypto side fascinating, and I can well believe that this is 'the day after tomorrow' in terms of US civil liberties. (Or UK civil liberties, for that matter.) I am wholly in agreement with the distinction in that quote at the top, between 'shameful' and 'private'. But I did find myself somewhat alienated by Marcus' narrative, and this was an excellent opportunity to write a 'controversial' essay [below] for the finale of the Coursera Fantasy and SF course!

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Reading Little Brother feels like an abrupt return to earth after the imaginative, expansive novels we've read in the last nine weeks. I'm perplexed by its inclusion on a course that, until now, has focussed on genre classics. The prose, pitched at a young adult audience, is functional rather than poetic. The happy ending is more teen romance than world-changing epiphany. And it's set in the very near future: indeed, the time it's set in may already have passed.

Is Little Brother science fiction? It's fiction about science -- the science of cryptography -- and on that level it's educational and informative, albeit about crypto software and hardware that already exists. As the author says, "The technology in this book is either real or nearly real" [1]. Marcus' treatment at the hands of the DHS is extreme, but several enforcement agencies are guilty of similar excesses, in the USA and internationally. Little Brother is more extrapolation ('if this goes on') than invention.

Another aspect of the novel that I question is the presentation of older generations. "I know who not to trust: old people. Our parents. Grownups." [2] While this distrust of 'grown-ups' has its roots in the counterculture of the 1960s -- 'never trust anyone over 30' -- it's less justified now than it was then. Ange's and Marcus's parents have grown up in turbulent times, and are aware of the abuses perpetrated by corrupt agencies. It's worth noting that Marcus does find trustworthy adults: journalist Barbara Stanford and his own parents. (Though Marcus' Dad does toe the party line until he discovers that his son has been wrongfully imprisoned.)

But in this novel, people my age are part of the problem, not part of the solution. I am the enemy, and I feel excluded in a way that none of the other novels we've studied have made me feel. Maybe that's why I didn't engage with, Little Brother. It wasn't written for me.

Works cited:
Cory Doctorow, Little Brother, 2008: accessed online at http://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.htm
[1] Little Brother, introduction
[2] Ibid, chapter 10. The quote continues: "Grownups. When they think of someone being spied on, they think of someone else, a bad guy. When they think of someone being caught and sent to a secret prison, it's someone else -- someone brown, someone young, someone foreign. They forget what it's like to be our age." Okay, one character's viewpoint: but offensive to me as an activist and libertarian who's (gasp!) over 40.

2012/52: Bareback -- Kit Whitfield

Interrogators are men, usually, men with missing feet, ruined faces, mauled genitals. The worst, the unusables, the ones who'll never be the same again. ... [they] may be missing a kilo of flesh, but it doesn't slow them down. ... They learned a long time ago that however much flesh you take from another man, it'll never replace your own. [p. 250]

Lola is not a lycanthrope: she's a 'non', wholly human, which puts her in the 0.4% non-lyco minority in the nameless (though Londonesque) city where Bareback takes place.

Like all nons, Lola is employed by DORLA, the Department for Ongoing Regulation of Lycanthropic Activity. Every moon-night she and her colleagues police the lycos -- who have, at moonrise, become lunes, not wholly human -- and enforce the curfew. Of course, once a lyco has gone lune they don't necessarily remember why the curfew is a good idea, or why they shouldn't resist being taken to the nearest shelter ...

There is little that is comfortable about Lola's life. Her early experiences, in the creches which shelter non-lyco children on moon-nights, are traumatic and embittering. Her relationship with her lyco sister Becca is strained, though she adores Becca's baby son Leo. She has few friends. And when she meets Paul, a lyco social worker who gives her refuge when she needs it, she's absolutely ready to fall for him.

However, the cases she's working on (a DORLA colleague shot with a silver bullet, a curfew-breaker who claims his car broke down) begin to overlap with one another, and then with other aspects of her life ...

Lola isn't an especially likeable character, but she's easy to empathise with. What I liked most about Bareback, though, was the world-building. The novel is scattered with throwaway detail: UN-enforced moon-night truces between countries at war, the role of rural nons in protecting livestock, the scientific theories about what causes nons to be born abnormal, the black market in used DORLA combat gear. (Hey, it's a fetish.) The lyco / non divide is as stark as -- though not equivalent to -- divisions of class, race, gender in our own world. (I don't recall the race issue coming up in Bareback, though I may simply have forgotten it: class and gender, though, are certainly present, skewed by the wolf in the room.)

The prose is beautiful: full of stark philosophy and the harsh light of Lola's perception of human behaviour. And throughout the book, the unspoken question: would she rather be lyco? And if others had the choice, what would they choose? What would they do, to choose?

I am very much looking forward to reading Kit Whitfield's 'mermaid' novel, In Great Waters.