2017/03: History Play: The Lives and After-life of Christopher Marlowe -- Rodney Bolt

‘The question confronting a young man in [Elizabethan times] was not, am I heterosexual or am I homosexual, but where do my greater loyalties lie, with other men or with women.’ The answer for Kit was ‘with both’.

Reread, for a paper on Christopher Marlowe in Historical Fiction that I was unable to give (due to ill health) at the Historical Fiction Research Network conference. My earlier review is here.

I still think it's a delightful bit of historical play: I suspect I caught some more in-jokes this time around: and I found myself more intrigued than before by the ways in which 'Shakespeare's' sonnets, read in particular sequence, can be made to tell a story. (It's like tarot cards: put 'em down in any order and construct your narrative.)

Reading on Kindle made it easier to search and match up different threads, characters, themes: however, it also made the footnotes harder to follow (impossible, in fact, on my old Kindle 3, as the footnote refs didn't seem to work as links: I ended up having footnotes open on my phone's Kindle app, and reading the main narrative on the Kindle itself.)

Plenty of sound scholarship on the known events of Marlowe's life, and the lives of those associated with him: plenty of playful invention regarding a life in exile. Still highly recommended.

2017/02: Her Majesty's Will -- David Blixt

Kit considered for some little time. "It is a plan both reasonable and wise."
"And therefore you loathe it."
"Exactly. But I see little choice in the matter." [loc. 1856]

A frivolous and light-hearted novel, based on the premise that Shakespeare met Marlowe in the 1580s and got caught up in the world of Elizabethan spycraft: with, as they used to say in the Radio Times, hilarious results.

There are occasional anachronisms and the authorial voice is sometimes intrusive -- but this was a fun read with a nice frisson between stolid, more-or-less sensible Will and mercurial Kit.

2017/01: Hammers on Bone -- Cassandra Khaw

"You're the only one who can help." "What makes you say that?" "Because you're a monster too." [loc. 47]

It is not immediately obvious that the office of John Persons, PI, is in Croydon. This is because he speaks, and narrates, in typical gumshoe noir: his client has a look that could 'carve Harlem sunsets', and Persons would 'tip a trilby to his folks'.

His client is a ten-year-old boy, Abel, who wants Mr Persons to kill his stepfather before the stepfather kills Abel or his little brother James.

Mr Persons does not balk, or throw up spurious legal arguments. This is because, contrary to appearances, Mr Persons is not actually a hardbitten PI from a Golden Age detective novel. That's just the meat-suit he is wearing. He comes from a different genre of Golden Age pulp ...

Those who, like me, are not that familiar with the Lovecraftian mythos do get some clues: and I'll argue that actually -- as in all the best crossover (fan)fiction -- you don't need to know the details of the original work. It's sufficient to be aware that Persons is, on the inside, an inhuman monster, and that there are other such beings walking (slithering?) the mean streets of Croydon.

Persons is a monster: McKinsey, the wicked stepfather, another. But the true monsters in this story are not eldritch, but shriekingly banal. They are poverty, domestic abuse, misogyny: they keep Abel's mother in an abusive relationship, and McKinsey in a safety net of laddish co-workers, and Abel and James in a state of helpless miserable terror.

Detective noir is a stereotypically sexist genre (Khaw writes about that here). Persons -- whose life, before the narrator moved in, must have been a surreal blast: was he really a black PI spouting noir banter in Croydon? -- is casually sexist, a constant low-level stream of 'skirt' and 'dame' and 'frill'. But not all the female characters in Hammers on Bone can be dismissed so easily: Sasha calls Persons on an uninvited intrusion, and Sasha's boss calls Persons on ... well.

I liked this very much, and then I looked up the Lovecraft references and reread it and liked it even more. Khaw's writing is excellent, tough and poetic and pretty gruesome in places: I'm hoping for more Persons.

2016/81: The Three -- Sarah Lotz

He also expressed concern that Jess could be an alien being, but I assured him that aliens don’t exist and he was more than likely dealing with a bad energy influx.[loc. 4863]

On a single December day, four planes crash in different parts of the world, resulting in the deaths of over a thousand people. There are just three survivors -- all children aged around six -- and The Three takes the form of a collection of interviews, news cuttings and transcripts of the coverage of those children (Bobby Small, Hiro Yanagida and Jessica Craddock) after the crash.

Evangelists claim they are three of the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse, heralding the end of the world. Paul Craddock, Jessica's uncle, believes they are something ... strange. One man believes that Bobby has cured a neighbour's Alzheimer's. And the children themselves? We don't get a great deal of insight into their experience, their perception, their memories.

I can't say I enjoyed this. The writing occasionally felt lazy, and it was sometimes hard to distinguish the characters. While The Three was an interesting take on the gradual alienation of the adults closest to each child, it didn't really deliver on its initial premise, and the hints of the supernatural (3am, the Japanese 'ghost hour'; ghosts with no feet; the suicide forest) remained mere hints.

2016/80: Golden Hill -- Francis Spufford

It had been his study to fit whatever part of the honeycomb housed him. But here – though it would suit him now... to fall in with the merchants’ preferences, whatever they might be, or at least not to flout them too scornfully – he must study not to fit. He must remain the mercurial, the unreckonable stranger.[loc. 619]

New York, 1746: the mysterious Mr Smith arrives from London, with a bill of exchange for a thousand pounds and a smiling disinclination to reveal anything whatsoever about himself, his purposes, or the purchases he hopes to make.

Smith -- handsome, competent, eloquent and amiable -- is taken up by New York society, and makes a number of friends and acquaintances. He attracts the attention of the Governor; of banker's daughter Tabitha Lovell; of Septimus Oakeshott, who knows more about a recent theft than he admits; of Mrs Terpsichore Tomlinson, a former actress who is now an officer's wife. And meanwhile the sixty days between the bill of exchange being presented and its falling due are ticking past.

In the best traditions of the picaresque novel, Smith finds himself duelling; escaping over the rooftops; wooing a difficult woman; seduced in a bathhouse; gambling for high stakes, feasting, appearing in a play; observing, at every moment, the social mores and institutionalised iniquities of New York life. Golden Hill, indulging these traditions, also plays with their conventions. There are three passages -- a card game, a duel and the bathhouse seduction -- where we're shown the novelist's exasperation at trying to describe their character experiencing something of which they, narrating, have no first-hand knowledge. There are also occasional observations on Smith's naivete and impetuous behaviour: hints, perhaps, that the author of this picaresque has mixed emotions about Mr Richard Smith.

I was, I think, expecting something along the lines of Stephenson's Baroque Cycle: certainly, at least for the first few chapters, Smith is very much concerned with matters of economics, currency and trade. But it gradually became clear that this was an altogether different kind of novel: and though Spufford gives us all the information necessary to contextualise Smith's behaviour, I confess I didn't foresee the denouement. Nor -- because of my ignorance of this period of history -- did I realise just how catastrophic a certain revelation would be.

Golden Hill is clever, witty, compassionate and splendidly written. There are a lot of likeable characters (I think I actually cried at the fate of one of them), and plenty of complex motivations. Smith, in particular, is most interesting when he's at his lowest: his miserable anger at losing his right to chose, his self-flagellation for making the wrong decisions. (" – It will be observed that these realisations were coming rather late," remarks the novelist dryly.) The immediacy of Spufford's descriptions of eighteenth-century New York is breathtaking, and I seldom felt that he was including anything merely for the sake of including it. Delicious.

2016/79: More Than This --Patrick Ness

Isn’t dying once enough? he thinks. Am I going to have to keep doing it? But then he thinks, No. Because you can die before you’re dead, too.[loc. 1132]

The book opens with a detailed description of Seth's death, drowning in an ice-cold sea. Then he wakes up, and is, as far as he can tell, in Hell.

It looks a lot like England, where he grew up. His family moved to Washington state after the bad thing that happened to his little brother Owen: but now he's back in his childhood home, and the town is deserted, and he is, he must be, in hell.

He's not entirely alone. He meets Regine and Tomacz, who warn him about some of the hazards of the place, and help him make sense of some of his memories. There was a boy he loved, who he thinks betrayed him: there was his difficult relationship with his parents, who neglected him in favour of Owen.

Or did they?

After a certain point in this novel, I was unable not to think of it as a variant on a well-known SF film of the 1990s: however, given that it's a YA novel, it's possible that the target audience won't make that association. And anyway, there are different issues being addressed here: teen suicide, relationships, sex and race and immigration, the nature of reality, the fallibility of memory, and why you should be careful about taking intimate photos on your phone.

Ness is an excellent writer, and his prose and the deceptive simplicity of Seth's experience carried me through the passages that I found less credible or less engaging. Seth's Hell may be in his own mind, but it's harrowing: Regina and Tomacz' experiences are just as grim, and just as grittily real.

I'd like to know which book Seth was reading, though:

he takes a book from the bookcase. It’s one of his father’s, one Seth has already read part of years ago, sneaking it from the shelf in America when his father wasn’t looking. It was far too old for him at the time and, he smiles wryly, is probably too old for him now. There’s large quantities of good-spirited sex, metaphors that run on just for the hell of it, and plenty of philosophical musing about immortality. There’s also a satyr who features heavily... He looks at the cover again. A satyr playing pan pipes, far more innocent-looking than what it got up to in the story. [loc 1457

This is bugging me! Any suggestions? John Fowles?

2016/78: The Age of Miracles -- Karen Thompson Walker

After the slowing, every action required a little more force than it used to. The physics had changed. Take, for example, the slightly increased drag of a hand on a knife or a finger on a trigger. From then on, we all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?[loc. 525]

The Earth's rotation slows, making days longer: ecological and sociological disaster ensue, as crops fail, the magnetosphere thins, and the US Government decrees that America will run on 'clock time' -- meaning that noon might be the middle of the dark hours.

This is not the plot, though: this is the background. The plot revolves around Julia, an eleven-year-old girl living in California, who observes the world changing from the self-absorbed perspective of an adolescent. Her best friend is taken away by her family, who believe that the slowing is a sign of God's wrath; Julia's mother starts hoarding food and showing signs of 'the syndrome'; their neighbour Sylvia rejects clock time and asserts that humans can adapt to the new rhythms of nature; and Julia's grandfather restocks his nuclear-proof bunker.

Age of Miracles is a coming-of-age story, set in a world that is slowly disintegrating: nothing can be trusted to remain the same, a sound metaphor for adolescence. It's a beautifully-written book, and Walker's choice of narrator means that any flaws or fallacies in the science can be glossed over as a product of the character's ignorance. (I did get annoyed when she referred to astronauts on the space station -- stranded because all the equations have changed -- as being 'ten thousand miles higher' than hot air balloons. Nope, two hundred and fifty miles higher, give or take. Or is this poetic hyperbole?)

Julia witnesses the breakdown of the modern world -- a kind of slow apocalypse -- with the same fascinated semi-comprehension that she turns on the people around her. Her father may be having an affair; her own budding relationship with Seth Moreno has more, and more surreal, hurdles to overcome than the typical pre-teen romance. Julia is (though she doesn't admit it) painfully lonely: her first-person narrative, looking back from the vantage point of her late teens, is focussed more on the relationships around her than on the invisible catastrophe that is changing everything.

The Age of Miracles is a compelling read. I didn't know, when I read it, that it had been sold for a record-breaking advance ($1m). I'm not sure that it's that good: but the juxtaposition of slow catastrophe and adolescent angst worked for me.