Copernicus upset the moral order by dissolving the strict distinction between heaven and earth. Darwin did the same by dissolving the strict distinction between humans and other animals. The next step is the dissolution of the strict distinction between fiction and reality ... (p. 158: 'The God Particle')
Two versions of this anthology are available: the limited edition contains an extra three stories (by Ian Watson, Storm Constantine and editor Ian Whates). Are these three stories worth the extra cost?
The theme of the anthology is subterfuge, 'a clever device or strategy used to evade a rule, escape a consequence, or to hide something ...' The authors collected here have approached this challenge from vastly different angles: about half the stories are fantasy, though boundaries blur, and they range from a rather joky, Golden-Age type story about the Large Hadron Collider to a hallucinatory tale of a world where love and hate are directions, and angels can be called down to answer supplications.
Recurrent themes include telepathy, twists in time, poetic justice (the tables turned). The subterfuges practiced here range from wishes that should never have been granted to treachery and treason, from hidden pasts to hidden agendas. This is a very British anthology; all the authors are British by residence if not birth, and several of the stories are set in locations aglow with familiar detail: Cambridge, a small seaside town in Norfolk, a village on the south coast. Whether comfortably, weirdly local or wholly fantastical, those settings are peopled by ... well, by people: by characters who are involved with the events that surround them, who are changed by those events, who are embittered or triumphant or despairing.
There's some impressive worldbuilding and some clever twists: though Whates has juxtaposed big-name writers with new voices, the quality is remarkably even. I shan't discuss all 19 stories (16 in the cheaper edition) here, just namecheck a couple of my favourites. Juliet McKenna's 'Noble Deceit' is a fantasy about a boy who can make substance out of shadow -- and how he learns that the things he creates aren't just toys. Dave Hutchinson's 'Multitude' is set in a near-future Britain where humans have been defeated (and slaughtered) by elves, who've returned from some mysterious 'other place' -- they were last around when the North Sea was still forest -- to reclaim their land. (Is it coincidence that the entire global economy, communication network and infrastructure has collapsed? I suspect not.) Hutchinson's protagonist, Kaz, is an intriguing character, and there's enough dimension to him to keep him sympathetic even once his nasty past's revealed. And Steve Longworth's 'The God Particle' feels just like one of those Golden Age short stories, complete with twist, but I like what he's done with astrophysicist Piet Hut's theories: reality and anti-reality ambiguons and their six flavours ...
I'd also like to mention Nick Wood's 'Thirstlands', an understated and haunting tale set in Africa when the water's drying up and everyone's thirsty. 'Thirstlands' was selected from a shortlist of six stories written by members of the BSFA's Orbiter workshops. For my money it's one of the most mature and subtle stories in the anthology.
Quibble, though a minor one: the book could have done with more proof-reading, as there are a number of small but distracting errors (missing punctuation; homonyms, such as 'discrete' instead of 'discreet'; plain typos).
I'll be reviewing this properly for Strange Horizons: review will be linked when it appears.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
#21:Flora's Dare ... -- Ysabeau Wilce
Flora's Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) -- Ysabeau S. Wilce
This underwater world is an illusion ... my Anima is translating Elsewhere into images I recognise and understand. I know the salmon are really elementals, the kelp is really ætheric energy, the coral is really fragments of old sigils, broken and encased with time. But the illusion is beautiful and I wish with all my Will that I could enjoy it, drift through the Current forever, give in to its pull, allow it to carry me away.
But I cannot. (p. 462)
Flora's Dare continues the story of Flora Fyrdraaca, just turned fourteen and now under the stern gaze of her newly-sober martinet father. (Her mother, the General, is absent for much of this novel: a shame.) Flora is wrestling with all manner of problems: a midnight curfew cramping her style; a best friend whose latest money-spinning scheme involves bounty-hunting and Sonoron Zombie Powder (one whiff of this stuff and you are no more wilful than a piece of cheese. They use it in Huitzil to control sacrifices and wanton wives (p. 35)); a crush on her mother's great enemy, Lord Axacaya; the problem of what to wear to the Warlord's Birthday Ball; the impossibility of finding a copy of yellowback novel Nini Mo vs. the Ice Weasels: the Ultimate Ranger Dare. And Flora's a growing girl, exploding out of her stays ...
As soon as I'd finished reading Flora Segunda I was greedy for this, the second in the trilogy: it doesn't disappoint, being quite as frothy and frivolous and fun as the first -- etiquette, fashion, honour, rock'n'roll -- with even darker undertones and some harrowing backstory. Murder, (attempted) rape, treason, arson, possession ... The treatment's never sensationalist or overly graphic, and often the more adult themes are merely hinted at. (A special mention to Madama Twanky's Nethersheaths, extra large.) The 'Flora' novels may be targeted at the YA audience, but Wilce handles some mature themes herein, and does so without heavy-handed moralising.
Indeed, perhaps a tad more moralising would've been acceptable: Flora, who is fourteen, does some pretty nasty things, yet doesn't seem to reflect upon them. There's not a lot of time for regret in the breakneck plot, but a girl who gets sentimental over a zombified duck might be expected to show some distress after killing a human being.
The primary plot thread -- in which the city of Califa is shaken by earthquakes caused by an imprisoned, enraged magickal entity -- spins out rather nicely, as does the tale of the capture of infamous criminal Springheel Jack, with his sparkly red snake-festooned 5-inch-heel boots. I confess, though, that my closest attention was on the backstory that's gradually being revealed. I'm fascinated by Hotspur's swashbuckling past and tragic love for Cyrenacia Brakespeare, a woman whose nicknames include the Whip and the Butcher, whose 'crimes were legendary and almost too long to list. Forgery, murder, treachery, treason, necromancy, grand theft ...' I'm avid for more of the family secrets that Flora uncovers, and hooked by her assertion that 'blood will out'. Oh, she's her mother's daughter, all right ...
There are a host of new characters in Flora's Dare; some anticipated, others familiar to readers of Wilce's short stories and novellas, yet others wholly new and unexpected. Lots of strong women: this is a gender-neutral world, in that gender has little or nothing to do with what a person does, or how they dress, or how they interact with others. On the other hand, it's still the women who bear children, wear ill-fitting stays, and have the worst toilets ...
I'm a little dubious as to how well some aspects of Flora's Dare work without any knowledge of those stories: for instance, I believe there's a reason for Flora's incredible luck. Though no doubt that'll be expanded (or confounded) in the third book.
Much is explained in this volume (the mysterious lights and weird events at Bilskinir House, abandoned and closed up since the death of the last of the Harðraaðas; the provenance and nature of the plush pig that somebody sent Flora on her fourteenth birthday; the Ultimate Ranger Dare), but there's a hell of a lot to be revealed in the third and final novel for which I cannot -- but must -- wait.
This underwater world is an illusion ... my Anima is translating Elsewhere into images I recognise and understand. I know the salmon are really elementals, the kelp is really ætheric energy, the coral is really fragments of old sigils, broken and encased with time. But the illusion is beautiful and I wish with all my Will that I could enjoy it, drift through the Current forever, give in to its pull, allow it to carry me away.
But I cannot. (p. 462)
Flora's Dare continues the story of Flora Fyrdraaca, just turned fourteen and now under the stern gaze of her newly-sober martinet father. (Her mother, the General, is absent for much of this novel: a shame.) Flora is wrestling with all manner of problems: a midnight curfew cramping her style; a best friend whose latest money-spinning scheme involves bounty-hunting and Sonoron Zombie Powder (one whiff of this stuff and you are no more wilful than a piece of cheese. They use it in Huitzil to control sacrifices and wanton wives (p. 35)); a crush on her mother's great enemy, Lord Axacaya; the problem of what to wear to the Warlord's Birthday Ball; the impossibility of finding a copy of yellowback novel Nini Mo vs. the Ice Weasels: the Ultimate Ranger Dare. And Flora's a growing girl, exploding out of her stays ...
As soon as I'd finished reading Flora Segunda I was greedy for this, the second in the trilogy: it doesn't disappoint, being quite as frothy and frivolous and fun as the first -- etiquette, fashion, honour, rock'n'roll -- with even darker undertones and some harrowing backstory. Murder, (attempted) rape, treason, arson, possession ... The treatment's never sensationalist or overly graphic, and often the more adult themes are merely hinted at. (A special mention to Madama Twanky's Nethersheaths, extra large.) The 'Flora' novels may be targeted at the YA audience, but Wilce handles some mature themes herein, and does so without heavy-handed moralising.
Indeed, perhaps a tad more moralising would've been acceptable: Flora, who is fourteen, does some pretty nasty things, yet doesn't seem to reflect upon them. There's not a lot of time for regret in the breakneck plot, but a girl who gets sentimental over a zombified duck might be expected to show some distress after killing a human being.
The primary plot thread -- in which the city of Califa is shaken by earthquakes caused by an imprisoned, enraged magickal entity -- spins out rather nicely, as does the tale of the capture of infamous criminal Springheel Jack, with his sparkly red snake-festooned 5-inch-heel boots. I confess, though, that my closest attention was on the backstory that's gradually being revealed. I'm fascinated by Hotspur's swashbuckling past and tragic love for Cyrenacia Brakespeare, a woman whose nicknames include the Whip and the Butcher, whose 'crimes were legendary and almost too long to list. Forgery, murder, treachery, treason, necromancy, grand theft ...' I'm avid for more of the family secrets that Flora uncovers, and hooked by her assertion that 'blood will out'. Oh, she's her mother's daughter, all right ...
There are a host of new characters in Flora's Dare; some anticipated, others familiar to readers of Wilce's short stories and novellas, yet others wholly new and unexpected. Lots of strong women: this is a gender-neutral world, in that gender has little or nothing to do with what a person does, or how they dress, or how they interact with others. On the other hand, it's still the women who bear children, wear ill-fitting stays, and have the worst toilets ...
I'm a little dubious as to how well some aspects of Flora's Dare work without any knowledge of those stories: for instance, I believe there's a reason for Flora's incredible luck. Though no doubt that'll be expanded (or confounded) in the third book.
Much is explained in this volume (the mysterious lights and weird events at Bilskinir House, abandoned and closed up since the death of the last of the Harðraaðas; the provenance and nature of the plush pig that somebody sent Flora on her fourteenth birthday; the Ultimate Ranger Dare), but there's a hell of a lot to be revealed in the third and final novel for which I cannot -- but must -- wait.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
#20: Martin Martin's On the Other Side -- Mark Wernham
We're all like ... eels in the mud at the bottom of the river, all burrowing away in our little tubes, eating the fucking mud and thinking that there's nothing else going on -- just our little tunnel and our mud and our wriggling. But that's not how it is. There's totally, like, a fucking whole lot more to it. Like, eels, yeah, they're just in the mud at the bottom of the river, They think that's all there is. Until they get grabbed by a hungry trampy, then they discover that there is air and blue sky and the whole world above the river. Then they get stabbed in the head and have their skin stripped off and then they get eaten. (p. 180)
Read for a panel on the Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist. Martin Martin's On the Other Side feels like science fiction for people who don't read science fiction, though I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the unlikeable laddish narrator, Jensen Interceptor: maybe it's the very British dystopia, reminiscent of 1984, A Clockwork Orange, Brazil.
Jensen Interceptor (the name feels like a joke, though there's no explanation of it: other characters have 'normal' names) works for the Department of Media and Culture, paying off his Life Debt, and spending his free time at Starfucks (pills and orgies, general laddishness) and watching Monster Trucks and Porn Disco on his plasma TV in his trendy Rotherhithe Sky Tower flat. North of the river, London is a sleazy dirty backwater: south of the river is where it's all happening. And Jensen's going to make sure he's part of it.
It looks as though his bosses have faith in him: they assign him to investigate Reg Rankin, leader of a group of Martinists. The cult of Martin Martin is distinctly messianic: MM was this bloke who lived in olden times and ... could read minds and see into the future and talk to the dead ... he was killed by the king or something because Martin was going to teach everyone in the world how to be like him ...(p.62). He had a TV show, and was being promoted by his manager Devlin Williams when they both died after a police chase: Martin Martin was thirty-three years old.
Naturally Jensen Interceptor doesn't believe a word of this. Not at first. But then he's given a make-over, and infiltrates Reg's group: meets a girl, walks the streets of Islington, and starts to doubt the world he lives in and the value of the life he's been leading. Oh, and he has some very peculiar experiences. Or perhaps he doesn't.
Jensen doesn't know what's real and what's not: realistically, neither do we. How much of what he experiences is drug-induced or fed to him by the 'gov'? Is he really, at any point, possessed by the spirit of a murdered man? Jensen doesn't always distinguish between reality and virtuality: Starfucks, for instance. And maybe, like Reg, he's the subject of medical experimentation.
Jensen does become more likeable as the book progresses, as his perceived world starts to fracture and he begins to question the government, the society, the world in which he lives. But that's a narrow blinkered world: there's little sense of the world beyond Britain, except in the (possibly hallucinatory) glimpses of Reg's past, of a time when the EU broke up, the American empire collapsed and China intervened in the Middle East. The emphasis is on the police state that's Britain, where security and paranoia are two sides of the same coin, where everyone's investigated.
There's more to this novel than I initially thought, but it still has a hollow empty feeling, an unsatisfactory inconclusion.
Read for a panel on the Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist. Martin Martin's On the Other Side feels like science fiction for people who don't read science fiction, though I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the unlikeable laddish narrator, Jensen Interceptor: maybe it's the very British dystopia, reminiscent of 1984, A Clockwork Orange, Brazil.
Jensen Interceptor (the name feels like a joke, though there's no explanation of it: other characters have 'normal' names) works for the Department of Media and Culture, paying off his Life Debt, and spending his free time at Starfucks (pills and orgies, general laddishness) and watching Monster Trucks and Porn Disco on his plasma TV in his trendy Rotherhithe Sky Tower flat. North of the river, London is a sleazy dirty backwater: south of the river is where it's all happening. And Jensen's going to make sure he's part of it.
It looks as though his bosses have faith in him: they assign him to investigate Reg Rankin, leader of a group of Martinists. The cult of Martin Martin is distinctly messianic: MM was this bloke who lived in olden times and ... could read minds and see into the future and talk to the dead ... he was killed by the king or something because Martin was going to teach everyone in the world how to be like him ...(p.62). He had a TV show, and was being promoted by his manager Devlin Williams when they both died after a police chase: Martin Martin was thirty-three years old.
Naturally Jensen Interceptor doesn't believe a word of this. Not at first. But then he's given a make-over, and infiltrates Reg's group: meets a girl, walks the streets of Islington, and starts to doubt the world he lives in and the value of the life he's been leading. Oh, and he has some very peculiar experiences. Or perhaps he doesn't.
Jensen doesn't know what's real and what's not: realistically, neither do we. How much of what he experiences is drug-induced or fed to him by the 'gov'? Is he really, at any point, possessed by the spirit of a murdered man? Jensen doesn't always distinguish between reality and virtuality: Starfucks, for instance. And maybe, like Reg, he's the subject of medical experimentation.
Jensen does become more likeable as the book progresses, as his perceived world starts to fracture and he begins to question the government, the society, the world in which he lives. But that's a narrow blinkered world: there's little sense of the world beyond Britain, except in the (possibly hallucinatory) glimpses of Reg's past, of a time when the EU broke up, the American empire collapsed and China intervened in the Middle East. The emphasis is on the police state that's Britain, where security and paranoia are two sides of the same coin, where everyone's investigated.
There's more to this novel than I initially thought, but it still has a hollow empty feeling, an unsatisfactory inconclusion.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
#19: The Thief -- Megan Whalen Turner
I stepped forward until I could reach to take the stone. Then, with my hand extended, I stopped, and was perfectly still as I watched the pattern of light on the velvet robe shift with the movement of a breath. My heart was like stone inside my chest. (p.147)
Gen, chained to a prison wall beneath the city of Sounis at the beginning of this Newbery Honor book, is a famous -- or rather infamous -- thief, caught and imprisoned for stealing the king's seal and then bragging about it in a wine-shop. He's sprung from gaol by a nameless magus who, it turns out, wants him to accomplish an even more daring theft: the retrieval of an ancient treasure that'll persuade the Queen of neighbouring Eddis to marry the King of Sounis. Gen, pragmatic, accepts the challenge, and finds himself travelling with the magus, a pair of stuck-up young aristocrats, and a sturdy soldier. All of them, of course, have Secrets. Including Gen.
The world through which Gen travels is grounded in Greek myth and legend, though the gods have different names, different purviews, different foibles. And those gods are distinctly real: there's a spooky moment when Gen realises this, a nicely understated pivot-point of immanence.
I liked Gen's voice -- sharp, street-wise, good-natured and cynical -- and the revelation of his secrets, both obliquely through his own tales of his immortal namesake and more directly when he's finally forced to act. And I very much like the grudging respect between Gen and the magus. Looking out for the other two in the trilogy.
Gen, chained to a prison wall beneath the city of Sounis at the beginning of this Newbery Honor book, is a famous -- or rather infamous -- thief, caught and imprisoned for stealing the king's seal and then bragging about it in a wine-shop. He's sprung from gaol by a nameless magus who, it turns out, wants him to accomplish an even more daring theft: the retrieval of an ancient treasure that'll persuade the Queen of neighbouring Eddis to marry the King of Sounis. Gen, pragmatic, accepts the challenge, and finds himself travelling with the magus, a pair of stuck-up young aristocrats, and a sturdy soldier. All of them, of course, have Secrets. Including Gen.
The world through which Gen travels is grounded in Greek myth and legend, though the gods have different names, different purviews, different foibles. And those gods are distinctly real: there's a spooky moment when Gen realises this, a nicely understated pivot-point of immanence.
I liked Gen's voice -- sharp, street-wise, good-natured and cynical -- and the revelation of his secrets, both obliquely through his own tales of his immortal namesake and more directly when he's finally forced to act. And I very much like the grudging respect between Gen and the magus. Looking out for the other two in the trilogy.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
#18: Flora Segunda ... -- Ysabeau Wilce
Some of these sigils were quite complicated. The Recollection Sigil ... called for several arcane ingredients (attar of crimson corn, starfish eyes, and a bowline knot), required that the adept prepare by drinking nothing but fizzy lemonade for three days before, and ended with the adept setting herself on fire. The Revelation Sigil ... called for six adepts and copious blood-letting. The Recovery Sigil required actions too disgusting to even contemplate. (p. 100)
In need of a feel-good read, I set aside all the books I should be reading: Flora Segunda was exactly what I needed, but it's far from shallow and the frothiness is more enjoyable for the dark undercurrents.
Flora Segunda -- Flora the Second, the first having died -- is the youngest daughter of the Warlord's Commanding General ('Mamma') and Hotspur, former glory of the Fyrdraaca family, now broken and mad following three years as a prisoner of war. Flora's fourteenth birthday -- her Catorcena -- is approaching: she'll go off to the Barracks and learn to be a proper soldier in the martial tradition of the Fyrdraacas. "We are born to the gun," says Mamma: but Flora doesn't want to be a soldier, she wants to be a Ranger like her heroine Nyana Keegan. Trouble is, Rangers (solitary and stealthy, magick-users) were outlawed, and none survive.
Meanwhile Flora juggles housework, school and the arrangements for her Catorcena party (dress-making, writing and sending invitations, baking tamales), while waiting for her mother to return from military inspection, and dreading her mad father's next descent from the Eyrie where he drinks, smokes and grieves.
Until the day when an overdue library book and a capricious Elevator (Crackpot Hall, a.k.a. Fyrdraaca House, has eleven thousand rooms, mostly inaccessible) combine to introduce her to Valefor, magickal Butler (or Denizen) of the house, abrogated by Mamma for reasons that are never clarified. Valefor -- a skinny boy with purple eyes -- persuades Flora that he can help her, if she'll just share a little of her Anima, her spiritual energy ...
Mamma hates magick: it's a trick, she says, a cheat, an easy way to do hard things. Mamma is all about the hard things. (p. 2)
The plot of Flora Segunda is delightfully complicated: I won't attempt to recount it here. Suffice to say that there are pirates, ghosts, magickal disguises, ice-cream parlours and beautiful foppish youths (well, Flora's friend Udo). Also plenty of backstory, family and otherwise, some of it remarkably dark and bloody for a YA novel.
The setting is fascinating. The Republic of Califa is situated on the west coast of a vast continent, a client state of the Huitzil Empire: the Huitzils (nicknamed the Birdies, as their name translates as 'hummingbirds') are given to blood sacrifice and cannibalism, and are served by half-human, half-eagle Quetzals. Califa is Hispanic -- no evidence of English influence -- culturally reminiscent of the 18th and 19th centuries, with 20th-century overtones: opera, ice-cream parlours, horsecars, Madama Twinky's Lip Rouge, yellowback pulp novels ... There's magick, elaborate and baroque: there is a complex system of etiquette, bows and curtseys and fans. This is not our world -- though Hotspur is given to quoting William Blake, and Valefor has clearly read Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark.
Flora's language is occasionally quite childish, but she's a brave and resourceful -- if occasionally reckless -- character with an innate talent for magick, who matures and changes over the course of the novel: I'm looking forward to reading the sequel, Flora's Dare, to watch her growing up a little more.
I liked Flora, but I instantly developed a crush on her father (disarmingly, and disconcertingly, referred to by Flora as 'Poppy': Udo calls him Hotspur). Beautiful, broken and with a mysterious swashbuckling past; paints a black mourning stripe across his face; a thin shadow in a worn cadet shawl and bloodstained frock coat creeping out the back door to buy more booze (p. 9): what's not to like? I really want to read more of his story, though I feel rather like a spectator who's watching the wrong part of the stage.
Wilce has written several short stories set in Califa, aimed at an older audience and featuring characters who are (mostly) dead in Flora's time. Of course I had to hunt these down: the language is similarly baroque, bubbly and witty, though the themes are rather darker and more adult.
And I crave more ...
In need of a feel-good read, I set aside all the books I should be reading: Flora Segunda was exactly what I needed, but it's far from shallow and the frothiness is more enjoyable for the dark undercurrents.
Flora Segunda -- Flora the Second, the first having died -- is the youngest daughter of the Warlord's Commanding General ('Mamma') and Hotspur, former glory of the Fyrdraaca family, now broken and mad following three years as a prisoner of war. Flora's fourteenth birthday -- her Catorcena -- is approaching: she'll go off to the Barracks and learn to be a proper soldier in the martial tradition of the Fyrdraacas. "We are born to the gun," says Mamma: but Flora doesn't want to be a soldier, she wants to be a Ranger like her heroine Nyana Keegan. Trouble is, Rangers (solitary and stealthy, magick-users) were outlawed, and none survive.
Meanwhile Flora juggles housework, school and the arrangements for her Catorcena party (dress-making, writing and sending invitations, baking tamales), while waiting for her mother to return from military inspection, and dreading her mad father's next descent from the Eyrie where he drinks, smokes and grieves.
Until the day when an overdue library book and a capricious Elevator (Crackpot Hall, a.k.a. Fyrdraaca House, has eleven thousand rooms, mostly inaccessible) combine to introduce her to Valefor, magickal Butler (or Denizen) of the house, abrogated by Mamma for reasons that are never clarified. Valefor -- a skinny boy with purple eyes -- persuades Flora that he can help her, if she'll just share a little of her Anima, her spiritual energy ...
Mamma hates magick: it's a trick, she says, a cheat, an easy way to do hard things. Mamma is all about the hard things. (p. 2)
The plot of Flora Segunda is delightfully complicated: I won't attempt to recount it here. Suffice to say that there are pirates, ghosts, magickal disguises, ice-cream parlours and beautiful foppish youths (well, Flora's friend Udo). Also plenty of backstory, family and otherwise, some of it remarkably dark and bloody for a YA novel.
The setting is fascinating. The Republic of Califa is situated on the west coast of a vast continent, a client state of the Huitzil Empire: the Huitzils (nicknamed the Birdies, as their name translates as 'hummingbirds') are given to blood sacrifice and cannibalism, and are served by half-human, half-eagle Quetzals. Califa is Hispanic -- no evidence of English influence -- culturally reminiscent of the 18th and 19th centuries, with 20th-century overtones: opera, ice-cream parlours, horsecars, Madama Twinky's Lip Rouge, yellowback pulp novels ... There's magick, elaborate and baroque: there is a complex system of etiquette, bows and curtseys and fans. This is not our world -- though Hotspur is given to quoting William Blake, and Valefor has clearly read Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark.
Flora's language is occasionally quite childish, but she's a brave and resourceful -- if occasionally reckless -- character with an innate talent for magick, who matures and changes over the course of the novel: I'm looking forward to reading the sequel, Flora's Dare, to watch her growing up a little more.
I liked Flora, but I instantly developed a crush on her father (disarmingly, and disconcertingly, referred to by Flora as 'Poppy': Udo calls him Hotspur). Beautiful, broken and with a mysterious swashbuckling past; paints a black mourning stripe across his face; a thin shadow in a worn cadet shawl and bloodstained frock coat creeping out the back door to buy more booze (p. 9): what's not to like? I really want to read more of his story, though I feel rather like a spectator who's watching the wrong part of the stage.
Wilce has written several short stories set in Califa, aimed at an older audience and featuring characters who are (mostly) dead in Flora's time. Of course I had to hunt these down: the language is similarly baroque, bubbly and witty, though the themes are rather darker and more adult.
And I crave more ...
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
#17: An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England -- Brock Clarke
... sometimes the lies you tell are less frightening than the loneliness you might feel if you stopped telling them (p. 278)
At the age of 18 Sam Pulsifer burnt down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst -- "it was an accident!" -- and spent ten years in prison for that act of arson and the (accidental, incidental) deaths of two people in the fire. Having served his sentence, he creates a new life quite separate from the old: house in the suburbs of Amherst, two delightful children, gorgeous wife (100% ignorant of Sam's past), steady job. Then Thomas Coleman, son of the couple who died in the fire, shows up on Sam's doorstep. And Sam's carefully-constructed new life crashes and ... burns.
While Sam was in prison, he received a lot of fan letters -- letters suggesting that he might wish to burn down the heritage home of such-and-such a writer. Now those houses are being burnt down (or lightly singed), there's a detective on Sam Pulsifer's trail, and Sam's determined to discover the culprit and prove himself innocent. He wants to discover the truth.
Sam Pulsifer doesn't take responsibility: not for the fire, not for anything. He defines himself as a bumbler, and nothing's his fault, and he's not actually that good at the mundane details of life. We know this from observation, but he keeps reminding us anyway.
This is a novel about stories: the stories Sam's mother told him about dreadful supernatural menaces in the Emily Dickinson House; the postcards sent from all over the USA by his father during the three-year period where he was absent from the family home; the memoir published by Morgan, a bond analyst who was in prison with Sam and has borrowed some anecdotes; the stories Sam's mother and father tell about one another, and about Sam; the stories Sam tells himself, and others.
Sam (or the author) has a lot to say, none of it good, about Literature. He mocks a book-club meeting -- the book was there to give the women (mostly) a reason to confess to the feelings they'd already had before reading the book, which as far as I could tell they hadn't actually read (p.85) -- and slides in a snide remark or two about Willa Cather, Mark Twain, J. K. Rowling, Edith Wharton (I kicked the novel [Ethan Frome] away from me, something I had been wanting to do for twenty-six years, and in doing so I imagined I was striking a blow on behalf of its many unwilling, barely pubescent readers (p. 194)) and critic and novelist Jane Smiley (though that's a pretty subtle, and rather affectionate, snipe).
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is an entertaining read, full of apparently profound aphorisms about truth, lies, stories, parents and children. And yes, it's about painful truth and a really rather nasty denouement, and Sam finally taking responsibility in an unexpected way.
I read this novel because I wanted a break from genre. It didn't engage me as much as the genre novels I've been reading lately, even though the themes -- murder, parent/child, truth, deception -- are big themes. Some excellent one-liners, though, and a sly sniping humour.
I suppose ... the ability to empathise with the people we hate is exactly the quality that makes us human beings, which makes you wonder why anybody would want to be one. (p. 283)
At the age of 18 Sam Pulsifer burnt down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst -- "it was an accident!" -- and spent ten years in prison for that act of arson and the (accidental, incidental) deaths of two people in the fire. Having served his sentence, he creates a new life quite separate from the old: house in the suburbs of Amherst, two delightful children, gorgeous wife (100% ignorant of Sam's past), steady job. Then Thomas Coleman, son of the couple who died in the fire, shows up on Sam's doorstep. And Sam's carefully-constructed new life crashes and ... burns.
While Sam was in prison, he received a lot of fan letters -- letters suggesting that he might wish to burn down the heritage home of such-and-such a writer. Now those houses are being burnt down (or lightly singed), there's a detective on Sam Pulsifer's trail, and Sam's determined to discover the culprit and prove himself innocent. He wants to discover the truth.
Sam Pulsifer doesn't take responsibility: not for the fire, not for anything. He defines himself as a bumbler, and nothing's his fault, and he's not actually that good at the mundane details of life. We know this from observation, but he keeps reminding us anyway.
This is a novel about stories: the stories Sam's mother told him about dreadful supernatural menaces in the Emily Dickinson House; the postcards sent from all over the USA by his father during the three-year period where he was absent from the family home; the memoir published by Morgan, a bond analyst who was in prison with Sam and has borrowed some anecdotes; the stories Sam's mother and father tell about one another, and about Sam; the stories Sam tells himself, and others.
Sam (or the author) has a lot to say, none of it good, about Literature. He mocks a book-club meeting -- the book was there to give the women (mostly) a reason to confess to the feelings they'd already had before reading the book, which as far as I could tell they hadn't actually read (p.85) -- and slides in a snide remark or two about Willa Cather, Mark Twain, J. K. Rowling, Edith Wharton (I kicked the novel [Ethan Frome] away from me, something I had been wanting to do for twenty-six years, and in doing so I imagined I was striking a blow on behalf of its many unwilling, barely pubescent readers (p. 194)) and critic and novelist Jane Smiley (though that's a pretty subtle, and rather affectionate, snipe).
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is an entertaining read, full of apparently profound aphorisms about truth, lies, stories, parents and children. And yes, it's about painful truth and a really rather nasty denouement, and Sam finally taking responsibility in an unexpected way.
I read this novel because I wanted a break from genre. It didn't engage me as much as the genre novels I've been reading lately, even though the themes -- murder, parent/child, truth, deception -- are big themes. Some excellent one-liners, though, and a sly sniping humour.
I suppose ... the ability to empathise with the people we hate is exactly the quality that makes us human beings, which makes you wonder why anybody would want to be one. (p. 283)
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
#16: The Hidden World -- Paul Park
Now she could see herself where the worlds come together and the paths branched down to Great Roumania, and Massachusetts, and the hidden countries, and the land of the dead. This was where the alchemist had built his tower, sealed up the creature that eats away the knowledge of these things. No, knowledge is too strong a word. (p. 283)
The Hidden World concludes the quartet that began with A Princess of Roumania. Miranda Popescu, still homesick for the imaginary world (our world) created as a refuge for her by her aunt Aegypta, finds herself entering the hidden world, the ultra-reality that lies beyond and within the 'real' world where Miranda now lives. That 'real', geocentric world -- the British Isles destroyed by earthquake and tidal wave, North America a wilderness inhabited by yellow-haired savages, Roumania a world power, the Roman gods still worshipped, dead people and vampires and shapeshifters walking abroad in daylight -- is seen through reflection, mirror, analogy. It fascinates me, and I feel cheated by the dearth of detail in this fourth volume.
The novel opens with Miranda recuperating in an isolated farmhouse, musing on her missing friends Andromeda and Peter, and haunted in dreams by her dead aunt Aegypta Schenk, who's still intent on Miranda's destiny and the salvation of Great Roumania.
Roumania is in turmoil: at war with Turkey, both in the real world, where massive tanks roll up from Africa, and in the hidden world where monstrous hybrid dogs snarl and snap. Airships (should they be termed 'zeppelins' here?) rain bombs upon Budapest: radiation sickness afficts survivors of a train crash in the south of the country. The old government has been overthrown, and some still mourn the death of the infamous diva Nicola Ceaucescu, rumoured to have been involved in sundry wickedness ...
It is not wise or prudent to curse the dead, because the dead can hear us. Often they don't care. Many are able to lay down their grudges with their abandoned bodies. Many are able to forget their struggles and animosities. Nicola Ceaucescu was not one of these. (p. 66)
Critics seem to love Nicola Ceaucescu, the widowed Baroness: the most complex, poisonous, entrancing, unforgivable villainess I have ever encountered in a tale says John Clute. One of Park's major achievements in this sequence is to make her a sympathetic villain, -- well, a likeable and charismatic one. She's very much a product of her time and her world, and her fragile, careful shell of vulnerability ("the happy thing about being a woman ... you don't have to do anything, but only suffer for long enough" (p. 207)) overlays an indomitable core. Being dead is no impediment to Nicola Ceaucescu: on the contrary, it opens up whole new realms of opportunity.
This review may seem patchy, top-heavy with quotation. That's because I'm still working through and thinking through this novel: it feels oddly unfinished, though perhaps that's the author's intention. There are a number of things I think are significant, and not merely interesting. For instance: photographic portraits of General Frederick von Schenck (Miranda's father) show his face 'blurred and indistinct': he's in motion, hidden in plain view, unrecognisable. For instance: in this world Jesus was not crucified, but was responsible for the crucifixion of the Roman generals. For instance: the tourmaline that permits Miranda to enter the hidden world is less and less like a stone, more like a fruit or a 'tough little sack of flesh'. For instance: Newton and Kepler were alchemists, and Newton a great admirer of Kepler. It was Newton who broadcast the tale of Kepler seducing a creature of the Hidden World 'with a mixture of honey and blood', and locking it in a stone tower. (It was Newton, too, who conjured six demons, demons who later ended up in General von Schenck's pistol.)
... perhaps before that you could pray to God and God might answer. There were miracles that could be verified. The histories are full of them. Since then, nothing. Not a single visitation or answered prayer. Now we are left with science as a last resort. (p. 178)
This is not to deny the sense of resolution in the last few chapters of The Hidden World. Both Andromeda and Peter find a measure of peace with their true selves: of the original three protagonists, though, it's Miranda who sees her choices clear-eyed and determines that the price she'd have to pay is too bitter, too high.
"There were a lot of books I used to read ... There was always something to be accomplished, and it was always difficult. People suffered. But at the end of the book it was all worth it, because the thing was finished and the story over. That's not true here."
"No," said her aunt. "That's not true here."
"Tasks without end," Miranda said. (p. 282)
Read for (overdue) Vector review -- this is the more subjective version, and I may also post the actual review after publication.
The Hidden World concludes the quartet that began with A Princess of Roumania. Miranda Popescu, still homesick for the imaginary world (our world) created as a refuge for her by her aunt Aegypta, finds herself entering the hidden world, the ultra-reality that lies beyond and within the 'real' world where Miranda now lives. That 'real', geocentric world -- the British Isles destroyed by earthquake and tidal wave, North America a wilderness inhabited by yellow-haired savages, Roumania a world power, the Roman gods still worshipped, dead people and vampires and shapeshifters walking abroad in daylight -- is seen through reflection, mirror, analogy. It fascinates me, and I feel cheated by the dearth of detail in this fourth volume.
The novel opens with Miranda recuperating in an isolated farmhouse, musing on her missing friends Andromeda and Peter, and haunted in dreams by her dead aunt Aegypta Schenk, who's still intent on Miranda's destiny and the salvation of Great Roumania.
Roumania is in turmoil: at war with Turkey, both in the real world, where massive tanks roll up from Africa, and in the hidden world where monstrous hybrid dogs snarl and snap. Airships (should they be termed 'zeppelins' here?) rain bombs upon Budapest: radiation sickness afficts survivors of a train crash in the south of the country. The old government has been overthrown, and some still mourn the death of the infamous diva Nicola Ceaucescu, rumoured to have been involved in sundry wickedness ...
It is not wise or prudent to curse the dead, because the dead can hear us. Often they don't care. Many are able to lay down their grudges with their abandoned bodies. Many are able to forget their struggles and animosities. Nicola Ceaucescu was not one of these. (p. 66)
Critics seem to love Nicola Ceaucescu, the widowed Baroness: the most complex, poisonous, entrancing, unforgivable villainess I have ever encountered in a tale says John Clute. One of Park's major achievements in this sequence is to make her a sympathetic villain, -- well, a likeable and charismatic one. She's very much a product of her time and her world, and her fragile, careful shell of vulnerability ("the happy thing about being a woman ... you don't have to do anything, but only suffer for long enough" (p. 207)) overlays an indomitable core. Being dead is no impediment to Nicola Ceaucescu: on the contrary, it opens up whole new realms of opportunity.
This review may seem patchy, top-heavy with quotation. That's because I'm still working through and thinking through this novel: it feels oddly unfinished, though perhaps that's the author's intention. There are a number of things I think are significant, and not merely interesting. For instance: photographic portraits of General Frederick von Schenck (Miranda's father) show his face 'blurred and indistinct': he's in motion, hidden in plain view, unrecognisable. For instance: in this world Jesus was not crucified, but was responsible for the crucifixion of the Roman generals. For instance: the tourmaline that permits Miranda to enter the hidden world is less and less like a stone, more like a fruit or a 'tough little sack of flesh'. For instance: Newton and Kepler were alchemists, and Newton a great admirer of Kepler. It was Newton who broadcast the tale of Kepler seducing a creature of the Hidden World 'with a mixture of honey and blood', and locking it in a stone tower. (It was Newton, too, who conjured six demons, demons who later ended up in General von Schenck's pistol.)
... perhaps before that you could pray to God and God might answer. There were miracles that could be verified. The histories are full of them. Since then, nothing. Not a single visitation or answered prayer. Now we are left with science as a last resort. (p. 178)
This is not to deny the sense of resolution in the last few chapters of The Hidden World. Both Andromeda and Peter find a measure of peace with their true selves: of the original three protagonists, though, it's Miranda who sees her choices clear-eyed and determines that the price she'd have to pay is too bitter, too high.
"There were a lot of books I used to read ... There was always something to be accomplished, and it was always difficult. People suffered. But at the end of the book it was all worth it, because the thing was finished and the story over. That's not true here."
"No," said her aunt. "That's not true here."
"Tasks without end," Miranda said. (p. 282)
Read for (overdue) Vector review -- this is the more subjective version, and I may also post the actual review after publication.
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