2015/25: Slade House -- David Mitchell

"If you're smart enough to discover immortality, you're smart enough to ensure your own supply and keep very very very shtum indeed." [loc. 2125]

The door to Slade House is small and made of iron: it's down an alleyway in a nameless town -- likely Reading, from various clues -- and it isn't easy to find. (Indeed, few people know where it is, even locals who've lived in the area all their lives.) Every nine years, on the last Saturday in October, a visitor is summoned to Slade House.

In 1979, thirteen-year-old Nathan Bishop and his mother are invited to a musical soiree. They have difficulty finding the house, but after that all seems well, until Nathan notices that the garden is melting. He has just taken a Valium to suppress the more exuberant aspects of his behaviour: perhaps that would explain it?

In 1988, windowcleaner Fred Pink wakes up after being in a coma for nine years. He was the last person to see the Bishops alive, and his account reopens their case. Disagreeable DI Gordon Edmonds, who fancies himself as the new Columbo or Bergerac, arrives at Slade House to investigate.

Come 1997, a group of students from the university's Paranormal Society (organised by Fred's nephew Axel) show up for a Halloween party and a horror-movie ambience. The Slade House disappearances are notorious, and each student has a reason for attending. Sally Timms (who has a crush on Todd, another member of the group) is among their number.

2006, and Sally's journalist sister Freya is determined to discover Sally's fate. She meets up with Fred Pink in the local pub, and is spun an incredible tale of immortality and vampirism. Hard to believe ('it's all a bit Da Vinci Code'), except ...

And in 2015, conspiracy theorist 'Bombadil' and a mysterious psychiatrist (who's written a paper on the case of Fred Pink) join forces to investigate the mysteries of Slade House. (I have only just discovered, with glee, that Bombadil has a Twitter account: if I were you I would resist reading until you've finished Slade House, though it's not exactly spoilery.)

Slade House interweaves its narrative, and its characters, with Mitchell's earlier work. It's directly connected with The Bone Clocks (my review), but I also spotted references to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Cloud Atlas and [possibly] Black Swan Green. In structure, too, it's a continuation of earlier work: the interlinked stories which resolve into a greater whole.

What I enjoyed most about this short novel was Mitchell's characterisation. Nathan, who's probably somewhere on the autistic spectrum, was a delight ("Mr Moody our scoutmaster told me to get lost, so I did, and it took the Snowdonia mountain rescue service two days to find my shelter"); Edmonds thoroughly sleazy in a very 80s way; Sally and Freya both strong and fragile in different ways; Slade House's inhabitants bright and brittle, cruel and carefree; and Iris? Iris rocks.

2015/24: The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps -- Kai Ashante Wilson

A number of petty miracles lay within Demane's power. His reflexes, his strength, were rather better than even the most gifted of athletes; and his sense of sight and smell, and so on, could wax exceedingly keen at times. But the blood of TSIMtsoa ran thin in him, and it seemed he could not manage the metamorphosis into great power. Even so, provoke him enough, and the provoker would catch a glimpse -- radiant, dark -- of the stormbird.[loc. 502]

The blurb made this short novel sound like fantasy, but it's very much towards the sfnal end of that genre. Demane is an 'earthbound demigod', I suppose: or, to put it another way, he's somewhat more evolved (or engineered?) than most of the people he encounters on the road through the Wildeeps.

The plot of The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps is slight: Demane is engaged as 'Sorcerer' to a travelling caravan composed of wealthy merchants and the brothers who protect them from the perils of the road. The brothers speak colloquially, are strong and violent; the merchants keep themselves to themselves, speaking a different language (in which Demane is not fluent). And then there's the Captain, who Demane loves, who is a heliovore and a fearsome warrior and speaks mostly in musical tones.

Demane and the Captain are both outsiders, set apart by their heritage. Their ancestors have left Earth, abandoning them: 'the gods could only carry away Homo celestialis with them... because the angels had already learned to make their bodies light. When a magical predator (a jukiere, or wizard-cat) menaces travellers on the road through the Wildeeps -- where 'all the worlds .. touch and overlap' -- it's up to Demane and the Captain to defeat it.

So much for plot: what stands out in The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps is language, from Demane's inability to express himself to anyone save the Captain, to the rich patois of the brothers, to Wilson's lush, vivid, idiosyncratic prose. At times his style reminded me of Zelazny or Wolfe: he really is that good. Plus, the relationship between Demane and the Captain is wholly credible: they love one another but they don't always understand, or agree with, or have the same beliefs as one another.

In some ways this novel is a disappointment: it's too short, it stops rather than ending (there is an ending, but it's abrupt and I don't like it: though I'm all in favour of brevity over verbosity, I feel Wilson could have written just a little more. But I am extremely keen to read more of his work.

Here's a great article on 'Language and Code Switching in Kai Ashante Wilson's The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps' -- Leah Schnelbach.

2015/23: The Night Life of the Gods -- Thorne Smith

...she could flirt with Perseus or Apollo, but, after all, she was not really interested in them. They were the sort that appealed to the ordinary run of women. They were great big beautiful boys with hearts of gold and all that. Her long-legged scientist was different. He was homely and nervous and refreshingly bitter about things in general. [loc. 2769]

Prohibition America. Hunter Hawk, a wealthy and eccentric inventor, develops a ring which can turn people to stone -- and bring statues to life. Quickly petrifying his obnoxious relatives (though he spares his niece Daphne, whose sardonic humour is a good foil for his own).

One drunken moonlit evening Hawk encounters a leprechaun, and more to the point the leprechaun's charming 900-year-old daughter, Megaera (Meg for short). Hunter Hawk, of whom his housekeeper says 'He's not ruined a maid since I've kept house for him, and that's been all of his life. He's been a great disappointment to me in that direction' belatedly discovers Love. He and Meg head to New York City, pay a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and bring a whole pantheon of Greek deities to life. With, as the Radio Times used to say, hilarious consequences. The Olympians 'put their whole life into whatever they chanced to be doing', and their zest for the modern world is charming and infectious.

The Night Life of the Gods has humour in abundance, much of it involving alcohol, disregard for social and legal mores, and the joys of liberty. What it lacked, for me, was depth. Sure, everyone has fun; everyone drinks a lot; everyone escapes the confines of their mundane (or, indeed, monolithic) existences. The characters muse, from time to time, on the nature of sin or the chains of paid labour. (They do not, as far as I recall, discuss the morality of Hawk's petrification of his relatives, or of some inconvenient law enforcement officials.) It's a carefree novel, and surprisingly modern in some respects (Smith's female characters are independent and opinionated -- though there is more than a whiff of racism in a couple of scenes) but I suspect it was much more fun to read when it was first published in 1931.

2015/22: Blood Feud --Rosemary Sutcliff

So Thormod went to Valhalla alone – no, not alone; he went in good company, but without me. It did not come to me until long after, that that must have been the way of it in any case, for if I had died that day on the Thracian hillside, I would have had another road that I must follow – unless, indeed, I had lost that road for ever when I took my oath with the rest of the old Red Witch’s crew on Thor’s Ring at Kiev. [loc. 1818]

Reread: I am very fond of this novel, and had cited it as an example of how to write historical fiction. My argument is approximately this: that details about the characters' meals, or how long a particular style of clothing has been worn, are far less important than the brief bright glimpses of timeless experience. When Jestyn notices the pattern of reflected light on the roof of a boathouse, I recognise that. It brings the past to life for me in a way that infodumps about tunic styles or recipes for fish sauce never will. Sutcliff's knowledge of the period -- and this is tenth century Europe, not Roman Britain -- is clearly extensive, but she doesn't labour that learning. Exemplary.

Anyway: what more can I say? Still just as good as when I last read it [review here] -- and I still respond to the same aspects, though I also picked up some more information about the Varangian Guard this time around, possibly due to reading Tom Holt's Meadowland recently.

2015/21: The Twyborn Affair -- Patrick White

She was too disgusted with herself, and human beings in general, ever to want to dabble in sex again, let alone aspire to that great ambivalence, love. [loc. 6383]

A novel in three parts, with three protagonists: or three parts played by one protagonist.

In the first third of the novel, set on the French Riviera some time before the First World War, we encounter the sophisticated and beautiful Eudoxia. Her lover of Angelos Vatatzes believes himself the heir of Byzantium: they live as man and wife, and fascinate a visiting Australian, the rather vulgar Joanie Golson (who turns out to be very well acquainted with 'Eudoxia's' mother, Eadie Twyborn).

Lieutenant E. Twyborn, DSO, washes up at a sheep station in Australia some time in the 1920s. Eddie spends some time with his parents in Sydney -- the Judge and Eadie, the former detached and the latter unmaternal -- but the focus is on country matters: he is seduced by the bored and voluptuous Marcia Lushington, and ... well, not exactly seduced by the virile Don Prowse.

The final third of The Twyborn Affair takes place in London during the Second World War. Eadith Trist is the madame of a London brothel, 'the tail end of a dream nobody ever succeeds in arresting', the focus of romantic (or erotic) overtures from more than one man. But then Eadith encounters the recently-widowed Mrs Twyborn, and everything changes.

The Twyborn Affair is often very funny, but it is also bleak and bitter. Whichever form Eudoxia / Eddie / Eadith -- let's just say 'E' -- takes, there are always secrets to be hidden, half a life to be concealed: and E cannot or will not believe in love. Angelos Vatatzes knows the truth (or some of it) about E, but it's unclear whether any of the other characters do. Indeed, I'm not sure what motivates E, apart from the desire to escape the stifling confines of convention, and to allow at least some part of E's personality to flourish.

I read this because it was mentioned in Elizabeth Knox's Black Oxen -- The Twyborn Affair was the third I read in a couple of months which presented a triptych of protagonists who turned out to be the same person. Though I admire this novel -- and acknowledge that White's aims are quite different to those of Knox or Jemisin -- I cannot say I enjoyed it, or engaged with it, as much as the other two.

2015/20: Black Oxen -- Elizabeth Knox

Surely it's better to be human and live with grief, than outgrow your humanity and learn to raise the dead too late to raise your own. [p.269]

I'd owned this novel since 2007: I'm not sure why it took me so long to read it, given my admiration and enjoyment of Knox's other novels.

This was the second novel I'd read within a month with the same central conceit: multiple viewpoint characters, who turn out to be the same person. The effect here was quite different, though. Black Oxen felt, at times, like a novel whose major events happened off-stage, off-page.

Apart from a brief prelude set in Scotland, the novel takes place in three imaginary worlds. 'Eden' is the most archetypally fantastic, but we only catch glimpses of the characters' lives there. Lequama is an imaginary South American republic, replete with black magic and political posturing. And the framing story, that of the narrative therapist whose newest patient is a frustrating enigma, is set in a near-future California. (It should be noted that 2022 is rather closer now than it was when the novel was first published in 2001.)

There's a list of characters at the beginning of the novel ('poets, foundlings, prostitutes, revolutionaries, escaped convicts, torturers, psychotherapists, entomologists, child film stars and billionaires', to quote the Guardian review) which includes one significant morsel of information. What would really have helped would have been a timeline, possibly at the end to minimise spoilers: I made my own, and found myself admiring Knox's craft all over again as the stories meshed together and another, more profound story was revealed at their intersections. [Also a couple of inconsistencies: but this is fiction, dammit, and fiction of a magical and flexible sort.]

I'm circling around the plot, because it's difficult I feel this is more a novel about character than about events. At its core is Carme Risk's father, who is beautiful and mysterious, 'morally unencumbered' and possibly not wholly human. (Carme's narrative therapy is an attempt, or so she claims, to make sense of her father's stories, and of the worlds through which he's passed.) When we first meet Carme's father, in the mid-1970s, he is a nameless foundling: his self-appointed guardian Carlin Cadaver names him Abra. Abra discovers a portal to another world; lives there a while, undocumented; finds himself amnesiac in La Host, Lequama's capital, where he seems to have a somewhat mystical history and is known as Ido; disappears again, leavng only a journal or two.

Abra, or Ido, is a compelling and charismatic character. None of his doctors or therapists can make sense of him: nor, for many years, can he make sense of himself. Yet his story emerges from between the threads of Carme's own story, of the political and personal machinations of the post-revolutionary movers and shakers in Lequama, and of the sketchy details of life in Eden. Abra's emotional landscape is as complex as his personality: he is far from heroic, especially to himself, but his gifts (which might be called curses) compel him to act as an agent of change wherever he goes.

After I'd read Black Oxen (twice) I turned to Knox's collection of essays, The Love School, and discovered that the novel's roots are in the storytelling game she's played with her sister and their friends since the early 1970s. I'm fascinated by co-writing, co-creation, and all too aware of how hard it can be to set down one's inner universe -- that ongoing narrative with a cast of thousands -- in a form that others, lacking the nuances of the story's evolution, will understand. I felt I understood rather better why Eden was never described; why Abra and Dev's relationship, though it precipitates the main events of Black Oxen, was backstory; why Knox chose Carme to bind the stories together.

The title refers to a street in La Host, where sacrificial black oxen were led to the temple in pre-Conquest days, and where key characters find themselves again and again. Early in the novel, Carme produces a drawing of a line of oxen: but are there many oxen, or is there just a single black ox at different stages of that doomed journey? Black Oxen provoked a great many questions of this kind. Nothing is here without purpose: any image may hold a key, and any gesture might reveal another thread of the story.

2015/19: The Crane Wife -- Patrick Ness

Stories do not explain. They seem to, but all they provide is a starting point. A story never ends at the end. There is always after. And even within itself, even by saying that this version is the right one, it suggests other versions, versions that exist in parallel. No, a story is not an explanation, it is a net, a net through which the truth flows. The net catches some of the truth, but not all, never all, only enough so that we can live with the extraordinary without it killing us.[loc. 1697]

One night George, a middle-aged divorced man living in Bromley, wakes to an unearthly keening. In his garden he finds a huge white crane, with an arrow through its wing. He removes the arrow, and the crane flies away.

Perhaps it is coincidence that Kumiko, a mysterious and beautiful Japanese artist, comes into George's print shop the next day. She makes exquisite art from feathers: George, as it happens, makes origami figures. The combination of their artistic creations makes something greater than the sum of its parts -- illustrations to a story about a volcano in love with a crane -- and George finds his life transformed. He is one half of a fashionable artistic collaboration, and he is in love.

George's daughter Amanda has troubles of her own (her workmates are vile; she's a single mother still in love with her son's father; she's not that good with people, including herself), and she is amazed and appalled to find that her father has a new lover. George tries to reassure her, but in the process realises that he actually knows very little about Kumiko. He's never even visited her home.

Tensions escalate, old secrets boil up, and the story of the crane and the volcano -- which is interposed with the chapters of George and Amanda's stories -- rushes on to its conclusion.

There are some beautiful images in this novel, and the central story of George and Kumiko is at once romantic and pragmatic. I was less taken by Amanda's story, not least because its tone was more humourous and colloquial, and it sat oddly with the mythic elements. (Print shop employee Mehmet, and even Amanda's bitchy and apparently vacuous colleague Rachel, have more gravity than Amanda.) The way that the story of the crane and the volcano twist around and into the 'mundane' parts of the story, though, is intriguing and accomplished.