2015/13: After Z-Hour -- Elizabeth Knox

I wanted to learn something, and felt that this might be my only opportunity in an age of noise, distractions, proscribed imagination and inattention, an age where as an intelligent, educated person I was only sufficiently powerful. This — house, storm, closed road — was my element. Out in the world I was at ease. But here I was alive, surrounded by a warm crowd of ideas and possibilities, knowing that even to surrender myself to the circumstances would not endanger me — I couldn’t be endangered, not just because I have a strong will and, inside myself, a great hinterland of anger from which strength flows like an endless army, but because here I was whatever could endanger me. [loc. 956]

After Z-Hour is Elizabeth Knox's first novel, originally published in 1987 and reissued in 2014. It begins with a tremendous storm, and landslips that strand six travellers overnight in a house that is not as abandoned as it seems. There is much debate between the travellers -- three of whom (Kelfie, Jill and Basil) share the narrative -- about whether the house is haunted. Meanwhile, another voice gradually coalesces: Mark Thornton, a New Zealand soldier who served in the First World War. Whatever channel has opened, it flows both ways: Jill dreams Mark's dreams, Mark catches glimpses of Kelfie, Kelfie wakes from a swoon to speak in 'quaint' slang.

This is not a straightforward novel. It is certainly not a traditional ghost story with creeping fear, revelation, and a culmination of exorcism or escape. Instead, the pasts (and presents) of each character are slowly revealed: Jill the bereaved step-mother, Kelfie the abandoned teenager, Simon with the secret in the boot of his stranded car. It's clear that they are all changed by their night in the house, but their futures remain implicit, beyond the scope of the novel's Aristotelian unities. Except Mark: Mark's future is already past, though his dreams and memories -- vividly resurrected -- are as immediate as Jill's grief or Simon's guilt.

Come to think of it, most of the characters carry their own ghosts with them, either literal dead or figurative losses. I'm unsure about Hannah and Ellen: of all the characters, they are the two I felt I still didn't know well by the end of the book. But Basil's disappearing house, Jill's dead stepdaughter, even the presence of a dead friend in Mark's narrative ... they are all haunted.

Several of Knox's recurring themes -- mourning, dreams, the importance of community -- make an appearance here: so does her gift for precise, lapidary metaphor. ("Rain says, ‘this, this, this, this …’ Snow says nothing." [loc. 1278]) Her characters are all fully rounded, perhaps more self-aware than the average individual -- or perhaps they are simply in a situation which promotes that self-awareness. I was especially intrigued by Kelfie -- Knox describes him in the foreword as 'Machiavellian' -- who is perceived by the others as something not quite human but whose secrets are at once commonplace (in their roots) and profound (in their effects). It's interesting to speculate what he would become, as an adult.

I had to read After Z-Hour twice before I felt that I understood it. This was, however, no hardship.

Afterword: this anecdote of Kelfie's is me to a T. Except for me it was willows and reeds.

‘When I was a kid—’

‘You still are.’

‘—I found a narrow, crescent-shaped gully, in the middle of some low hills, cut by a stream which emerged from the ground, ran for a little way in the open air, then went underground again. I used to spend a lot of time there. I made mud idols and put them in the branches of trees. I made shrines. When the land was sold for a subdivision some guys in bulldozers scraped the top off a hill and pushed all the earth into the gully, filling it up. They never climbed down to look at the tarata, hawthorn, mahoe, and the shallow brown stream. I always wanted to go back there—and it took me a long time to realise I could. Not only am I walking among the trees now, through sunspots on the stream, also I’m buried, still immersed and still unearthing myself.’ [loc.3383]

2015/12: To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee

Atticus Finch won’t win, he can’t win, but he’s the only man in these parts who can keep a jury out so long in a case like that. And I thought to myself, well, we’re making a step – it’s just a baby-step, but it’s a step.’ [loc.4230]

Read in advance of seeing the Barbican Theatre production [my review here]: I'm one of the few people I know who wasn't forced to read this at school, and I am glad of it because I suspect a lot of the subtleties would have passed me by in my early teens.

Scout Finch is an intriguing narrator, who sees more than she is aware of seeing: her account of events in the little Southern town of Maycomb in 1935 -- when her father defends a Negro against a white woman's accusation of rape -- is gripping because unsensationalised. Scout is (at least initially) more interested in the mysterious recluse Boo Radley, and in her Aunt Alexandra's visions of Scout's deportment (dresses! playing at tea parties!). It's clear that her father is her hero, but she only gradually begins to understand the strength and nature of that heroism.

I found To Kill a Mockingbird quite educational: I had no notion of the Ladies' Law (basically, a man could be jailed for swearing or using offensive language in front of a woman) and little understanding of the culture and morality of the South in the Depression, before WW2. "‘Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win,’ Atticus said." [loc.1483]

There are some aspects of the novel that I suspect were less contentious when it was first published. Mayella's clearly been repeatedly abused by her father, and Lee offers little hope for her or other 'white trash' -- illiterate, impoverished, deprived. And I'm still not convinced that Atticus' muddying of the truth about Bob Ewell's murder is consonant with his ideals of justice.

I read the sample chapter of Go Set a Watchman, and a couple of reviews: I don't feel that I need to read the whole of that novel to understand this one, nor do I wish to read Lee's earlier take on the characters.

2015/11: A Company of Swans -- Eva Ibbotson

Had she always been wanton? Edward asked himself as he leaned his aching head against the trunk of a tree, uncaring of the ants, the termites, the poisonous spiders it might harbour. Was it just this damnable climate or had it gone on all the time? Had she crept out at night in Cambridge to come out of cakes in Trinity ... out of seashells in Sidney Sussex ... out of cornucopias in St Cat’s? A gigantic moth flew into a lantern; it was new to science, but he let it pass[...] He had meant to marry this girl whose ankles had been gaped at by three dozen gentlemen at dinner ... He had meant to commit his life to her in Great St Mary’s and approach her reverently in a honeymoon hotel in Bognor Regis ... He had meant to introduce her to the Mater! [loc.3053]

Reread: it's a long time since I enjoyed the gentle pleasures of an Eva Ibbotson romance, and I had forgotten how hilariously funny (and precisely observed) Ibbotson's novels can be.

A Company of Swans is set just before the First World War. Though it begins in Cambridge (which I'd forgotten), most of the action takes place in Manaus, a city deep in the heart of the Amazonian rainforest.

Harriet Morton's mother is dead, and her father -- the Professor -- does not approve of education for women. Oppressed by her father and her miserly aunt (who 'kept in her bedroom a box labelled ‘String too short to tie’'), Harriet's one solace is her ballet class. (She has a fiance, Edward, but he is .. dismal.) When she's offered the opportunity of a role with the corps de ballet in Manaus, her father forbids her to go: but Harriet's iron will prevails, and she runs away.

The corps de ballet is made up of a number of fascinating characters: the gorgeous and chaste Marie-Claude, who is saving up to marry; Simonova, the fading but indomitable prima ballerina who sees in Harriet something unique; fiery Olga Narukov, with a kick like a mule. But there is life outside the ballet, too. Before Harriet left England, she promised a small boy that she would find his uncle Rom, a rubber-planter in Manaus. Rom turns out to be fabulously wealthy and darkly handsome, his playboy demeanour concealing strong principles and a tragic past. He finds himself strangely intrigued by plain, serious, innocent Harriet -- who in turn falls deeply, devastatingly, joyously in love.

Reversals, coincidences, betrayals and mistaken identities abound: happiness is achieved, mostly: old wounds are healed. A delightful novel.

Somewhat surprised to find these novels now marketed for teenagers: when I first read them, they were aimed at adult readers. That said, there's nothing especially explicit, though Harriet does display an enthusiasm for being ruined that some parents might find disturbing.

2015/10: Meadowland -- Tom Holt

Home’s such a bloody delicate thing, one slight change or one thing missing and it’s screwed up for ever; and a man’s better off blind or missing a hand or a leg than being away from his home. Greeks I’ve talked to since I’ve been here, they think we Icelanders are soft because the most a court of law can do to you back home is make you an outlaw, so you’ve got to leave your house and move away to another part of the country, or overseas. Soft; I don’t think so. I think it’s the cruellest thing you can do. I mean, everybody dies sooner or later, but having to live in the wrong place, in a place that’s not meant for you to be in - that’s cruel. And I never even did anything wrong. [loc.5957]

It's 1037, and John Stethatus, an elderly Byzantine civil servant, finds himself stranded in the mountains with a great deal of gold and a trio of Varangian guards: Kari, Eyvind and young Harald. Kari and Eyvind are veterans, and they regale the company with their stories of the Viking colonisation of Vinland. ("It’s not Wineland, it’s Meadowland.’ Easy mistake to make, of course, specially for an Easterner, with an accent. See, in our language, it’s almost the same word: vinland. Only, if it means ‘wine’ it’s pronounced vin, but if it’s ‘meadow’ it’s more like veen." [loc.3494])

Readers of K. J. Parker will recognise some tropes here: grumbling veterans, the minutiae of everyday life (hey, now I know how to clean a chainmail shirt), strong but shrewish women, unreliable -- or possibly just misguided / thick-skinned -- narrators, the general air of neglect and brokenness around failing settlements, the odd hint that something vaguely weird, or fated, is going on ...

Holt's version of the two surviving Vinland sagas (Eiríks saga rauða and Grænlendinga saga) is a tale beset by ill chance, poor judgement and internecine conflict. Both Kari and Eyvind -- who tell the same story, more or less, but from very different points of view -- sailed on all the voyages recounted in the sagas: Kari may have been the first person to set foot in Vinland. They describe the meeting with the skraelings and Freydis Ericksdottir's reaction to same; the feuds back in Iceland, the navigational errors, the tension between Christianity and 'the old ways': and their story convinces Stethatus that Vinland is 'a place that takes your strengths and turns them into weaknesses'. Armed with this insight, he dispenses some good advice to young Harald ...

I like Holt's writing a lot, though I dislike his treatment of female characters: still, with Freydis he does have a point, and he doesn't have much to say about the rather more likeable Gudrid (see my review of Margaret Elphinstone's The Sea Road, a novel which covers similar territory from a very different perspective). Holt's depiction of the easy discomfort of Eyvind and Kari's codependency produces some of the novel's most entertaining moments: and his knack for crafting apt similes ('asking a tricky question’s just like splitting timber. You tap the nose of your wedge into a little thin shake in the wood') is impressive. That said, Meadowland is really just a novelisation of the sagas, wrapped in a comic frame. I think I prefer Holt's historical work when it's prefixed pseudo-.

2015/09: Dogsbody --Diana Wynne Jones

Glimmering, frantic, frosty, the cold hounds came pouring into the open. Everything was helter-skelter gleaming eyes, gleaming coats and the wild pattering of feet, as hundreds of white dogs raced after the dim shape. [loc.2913]

A reread, latest but not first: I think this may have been the first Diana Wynne Jones novel I ever read, back at secondary school. I loved it then and love it still.

There are two 'dogsbodies' here: Sirius, the Dog Star, who is incarnated in the body of a puppy as punishment and atonement for a crime; and Kathleen, a young girl who has been taken in by her aunt while her father is in prison, and who ends up doing almost all of the housework. Kathleen adopts Sirius, who eventually remembers that he is searching for the weapon with which the alleged crime was committed: with the help of humans and others -- including the Wild Hunt and its Master -- all is finally made right.

I am amazed at just how much is packed into this novel. Jones' trademark humour (Sirius' interactions with the household cats), Kathleen's isolation (her interactions with her two male cousins are a darker, unhappier mirror of Sirius and the cats), the beauty of Earth, the chilling Wild Hunt and its mysterious Master. He is a fascinating figure, and I suspect he's a synthesis of a number of mythic hunters and lords of the underworld:

The Master said uneasily, “Don’t look too closely. The truth has no particular shape.”
“I know that,” Kathleen sad, rather impatiently. Her eyes stayed watching the space above the Master’s head for all that. “But you’re not Arawn, are you?” she said.
The boys had seen the Master for the first time. They were both terrified. Robin’s teeth chattered and he said, “But he could be Orion or Actaeon, couldn’t he?”
“Or John Peel,” Basil said, very derisively because he was so scared.
Sirius wondered what the three humans had understood about the Master that he had not. It was clear that the Master knew they had understood it, by the way he changed the subject.

I found myself more intrigued by the Hunt, this time around, than by the galactic society (not that sort of galactic society) of luminaries and effulgents that's only lightly sketched. The Master's dual nature as hunter and hunted; the 'tender terror', 'savage sorrow', 'fierce pity' that Sirius feels towards him; most of all, perhaps, Jones' refusal to explain him, in a way that's all too rare these days in children's and YA fiction.

[just found an interesting blog post about the Master, https://onceonatyme.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/hunting-the-hunter/]

“No, darkness is not movement,” he said sombrely. “Nor is the other part of my power, which comes from things as they must be. I’m stronger than you are, luminary..." [loc.3091]

2015/08: The Invisible Library -- Genevieve Cogman

Her life was more than just airship chases, cyborg alligator attacks, and hanging out with this alternate universe’s nearest analogue to Sherlock Holmes. She was a Librarian, and the deepest, most fundamental part of her life involved a love of books. Right now, she wanted nothing more than to shut the rest of the world out, and have nothing to worry about, except the next page of whatever she was reading. [loc. 3694]

Irene works for the Library, a vast mysterious place outside time and space from which any alternate world can be reached. Her job is to retrieve specific books for the Library: texts vary from alternate to alternate, and some books are inextricably bound to the alternates in which they were written.

We first encounter Irene as she burgles a School of Magic ("ANY KIDNAPPERS WILL BE TORN TO BLOODY RAGS BY OUR PROFESSIONALLY MAINTAINED HISTORICAL ARTEFACTS!") for a memoir about necromancy. On returning to the Library, she is swiftly assigned another mission -- and a new assistant, the mysterious and aesthetically pleasing Kai.

Their new quest takes them to an alternate London in search of a unique edition of Grimm, which turns out to contain a couple of extra stories that are important to the Library. This London is a smoggy, steampunky variant, with Leichtensteinian zeppelins, cyborg alligators, vampires and werewolves ('the Whitechapel Roaring Boys'), an infestation of chaotic Fae, a Great Detective ... and a rogue Librarian, whose outrages are the stuff of legend and whom Irene is very definitely not qualified to deal with. Her new apprentice turns out to have some secrets of his own, and to cap it all her own former mentor, the sleek and snide Bradamant, seems to be after the very same book as Irene and Kai.

The Invisible Library is an absolute delight. It's very fast-paced -- something is always happening, and Irene is always in the thick of it -- and full of literary allusion and warped versions of familiar London landmarks. It is also very funny in parts, and quite philosophical to boot: and it sets up admirably for a sequel or three. Irene is a likeable, intelligent and competent protagonist, and most of the supporting cast are pleasingly characterised.

I enjoyed this novel immensely and have pre-ordered the next volume: my only qualm is that the author may end up focussing on the alternates to the exclusion of the Library itself.

2015/07: The Girl With All The Gifts -- M. R. Carey

Yesterday she thought that the hungries were like houses that people used to live in. Now she thinks that every one of those houses is haunted. She’s not just surrounded by the hungries. She’s surrounded by the ghosts of the men and women they used to be. [loc.3177]

Melanie is top of her class. She's ten years old. She lives on a military base and is studied by scientists. She has a crush on her teacher, Miss Justineau, who reads Greek myths to the children, and shows some affection for Melanie. Sergeant Parks, on the other hand, dislikes and fears her. Melanie doesn't know why.

This is post-apocalypse Britain, variant zombie: the 'hungries' infest the cities, mindlessly devouring any living beings. If the victims survive, they too become infected. Ophiocordyceps, a parasitic fungus, alters their behaviour to propagate more effectively, but it only does so in blood. Otherwise there'd be nothing at all, instead of a few remnants, left of global civilisation.

The Girl with all the Gifts reminded me of old-school science fiction, H. G. Wells and Jack London and so on, though I suspect they wouldn't have considered a little girl an engaging protagonist. I think the novel works because of Melanie's initial ignorance, and subsequently her determination to live and to soak up the new-found world outside the base:

The world pours in through her eyes and ears, her nose, her tongue, her skin. There’s too much of it, and it never stops coming. She’s like the drain in the corner of the shower room. [loc.1245]

Melanie isn't quite like a normal ten-year-old girl. She certainly has different interests, and different life experience. But her upbringing enables her to confront some unpleasant facts courageously and inventively -- and, in doing so, she changes the people around her. A really resonant moment for me was Parks' epiphany: "He has a sense, for the first time in his soldiering career, of what a war crime might look like from the inside." [loc.4534]

I still can't decide if I liked this novel, but I found it compelling and provocative reading.

NB: a friend and I were discussing whether this is a feminist novel. It's true that it has a female protagonist; that the three most important characters are all female; that none of these are defined by their relationships with men. (Indeed, the resolution is pretty much a denial of sexual relationships!) But K argues that there is a lack of embodiment, and I think I agree.