2022/73: The Physicians of Vilnoc -- Lois McMaster Bujold

...disease recognized no borders or boundaries. Rather like gods, that. [loc. 532]

And the alternate title for this novella would be Penric and the Plague. A little too relevant for comfort, even two and a half years into the Covid pandemic ...

Penric has been living in domestic bliss for a while with his wife and small daughter: then his brother-in-law, General Arisaydia, asks him to come to the fort, where a mysterious illness is afflicting the garrison. The plague spreads to the city, and to a nearby camp of political prisoners. Penric and Desdemona use their combined magic to treat the sick, but it is a tremendous strain on both, and the plague just keeps coming. Can Penric and his demon find the cause, and perhaps the cure?

This revisits some earlier themes: Penric has previously sworn off medicine after a plethora of difficult cases -- those he couldn't cure -- drove him almost to suicide. Now, though, he's older and wiser, has more to tie him to life, and is more experienced than those he's working with: a young doctor, and an older man who's recently acquired a demon of his own. In the end, though, Penric is very much at the mercy of his god, and again he seems to be a useful tool for that deity.

Not my favourite of the novellas, but it does make me want to go and reread Penric's Mission ...

2022/72: The Orphans of Raspay -- Lois McMaster Bujold

Just once, Pen thought glumly, he’d like to get an answer to prayers, instead of being delivered as one. [loc. 261]

This novella could easily have been titled Penric and the Pirates ... Penric (and his chaos demon, Desdemona) are travelling incognito when their vessel is boarded and captured by pirates. Penric is deemed pretty enough to be a high-value prize, so he's imprisoned with some other potentially-lucrative captives, including two small girls who have set out, after the death of their mother, in search of their father. They don't immediately trust Penric but his general wholesomeness wins them over. Delivered to pirate HQ, Pen and Des concoct a number of practical and feasible escape plans, all of which fail due to other people. Eventually Penric is rescued, with the two girls, and with a hefty anti-ransom from the pirates who would prefer him to leave them alone.

A light and cheery read. People are killed off-page, but there's very little actual cruelty. The pirates are Quadrenes, i.e. don't believe in the Fifth God, the Bastard, who Penric serves: there are some theological elements here, not least because the orphans' mother was a prostitute and a follower of the Bastard, hence Penric's sense that he is being used to fulfil the god's wishes.

The girls are sweet, the pirates are wicked, Desdemona is awesome. Next!

2022/71: The Last Werewolf -- Glen Duncan

In their cellular prison my devoured dead roused. (A consequence of eating people: the ingested crave company. Every new victim adds a voice to the monthly chorus.) [p. 127]

I have owned this book for over a decade. I'm not sure why the time has never been right for it ...

Jake Marlowe is, as he discovers in the opening pages of this novel, the last surviving werewolf. WOCOP -- the World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena -- are very good at wiping out supernatural creatures, though there still seem to be a plethora of vampires around. There are, to Jake's dismay, no female werewolves to be found. Additionally, it's a hundred years since any werewolf-victim turned werewolf in the traditional manner. Allegedly this is due to a virus, but Jake is suspicious.

Mostly, though, he is tired of life. 'I just don’t want, I really can’t take (in both senses of the verb) any more life.' He's pretty much ready to let WOCOP, in the person of their werewolf specialist Grainer, take him out with a silver bullet at the next full moon. (He did eat Grainer's father.) But then matters complicate themselves, and Jake realises there might yet be good reasons to live ... and new dangers to face.

The Last Werewolf is full of literary references and nihilistic philosophy. It's often very funny, and frequently gets down and dirty in the most animalistic, physical kinds of ways. It felt weirdly like a supernatural romance aimed at young men. (Though I do like the Washington Post's description of it as 'James Bond with dog breath'.) Jake is an engaging narrator, accepting but regretting his lupine appetites ('Two nights ago I'd eaten a forty-three-year-old hedge fund specialist. I've been in a phase of taking the ones no one wants...') and gruesomely precise about the physical manifestations of the Curse. Duncan's prose is powerful and evocative, and Jake's intelligence and erudition are a nice contrast to the scenes where he devours his prey. There's quite a lot of explicit, dirty sex, and plenty of violence: but that's not all there is to Jake.

For a number of reasons I am hesitant about reading the other two books in the series, but it's possible that sooner or later I will return to Duncan's books.

2022/70: State of Wonder -- Ann Patchett

Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don’t know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it’s not. It’s a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it. [p. 43]

It's over twenty years since I read The Magician's Assistant, and State of Wonder has had, I think, a similar effect on me: a kind of euphoria, a sense that something unreal, or differently real, is hiding beneath the surface of the novel.

State of Wonder opens with pharmaceutical researcher Marina Singh learning of the death of her research partner Anders Eckman. The news is reported by her boss, Mr Fox, who is also her lover: he persuades her to travel to Brazil, to find out what really happened to Eckman (the letter from Brazil is terse, almiost dismissive) and to report back, as Eckman was supposed to have done, on the work that Dr Annick Swenson has been doing for the company. Marina has a history with Dr Swenson: but when the two finally meet, in the opera house in Manaus during a performance of Orfeo e Eurydice, Dr Swenson doesn't seem to remember Marina at all.

Marina is, perhaps, more suited to the expedition than Anders Eckman was. Her heritage (American mother, Indian father) enables her to blend into Brazilian society in a way she's never been able to in Minnesota; though she loses luggage and phone, she almost welcomes the freedom that comes with being out of touch with her everyday life. Unlike Eckman (whose wife and children mourn him) she has no close ties, either to family or to friends: certainly not, she realises, to Mr Fox.

It also turns out that she has a lot to learn in the Amazon: about Dr Swenson's research, about the various tribes that she encounters, and about herself. She comes to care for a young deaf boy, Easter, who is thoroughly competent in the ways that matter in this Amazon backwater, but whose nightmares rival Marina's own. (Apparently Eckman was trying to get Easter to America.) And she learns of the dual nature of Dr Swenson's work: not only a fertility treatment but perhaps an immunisation against a killer disease.

Dr Swenson is a strange sort of mother figure to Marina, a icily single-minded scientist who puts her work above everything else and who seems to hold the Lakashi in a higher regard than the company who have funded her research for so long. For Marina, Swenson and her work are the centre of the novel: Marina's own mother, though alive and well in (presumably) Minnesota, is notable for the things that Marina doesn't tell her -- the nightmares, the affair with Mr Fox, the reason that Marina switched from gynaecology to pharmaceuticals. And Dr Swenson, it turns out, does remember Marina, and has a particular task in mind for her.

I was reminded of Heart of Darkness, with Swenson as a reticent Kurtz; also, of course, of the Orpheus myth, with Marina going down into the underworld in pursuit of the dead. But there is much more to State of Wonder: the casual denial of communication (Anders' letters to his wife didn't make it far, Marina loses her satellite phone ...), the mundane dangers of the jungle, the perils of malaria and of the drugs used to treat it, the abandonment of children by their parents, the complexities of the bond between Marina and Anders ...

I did not like Dr Swenson, but she fascinated me. Marina was easier to like, though perhaps not to know. I particularly admired the evolution of her relationship with Dr Swenson: being able to ask the same question twice, being able to refuse to cooperate. And the secondary characters -- the laid-back Bovenders, who are gatekeepers of a kind; Milton the driver; the other scientists at Swenson's research compound -- are distinct individuals, with tics and traits and degrees of emotion. A splendid, thought-provoking and haunting novel: I'm still contemplating the ending.

2022/69: Villager -- Tom Cox

I feel it all getting under the cotton and passing through me -- the sun, the butterflies, the maybugs, the tune of the water, the breeze, the falling light -- and I am the moment and nothing more. [p. 231]

I helped to crowdfund this book, Cox's first novel, and I feel suitably rewarded by getting to read it! The narrative takes the form of interconnected stories set in a fictional Dartmoor-ish village, Underhill. Each chapter is headed by a title and a date ('Search Engine (2099)'; 'Billywitch (1932)') and the framing voice, the 'Me (Now)' is, well, the hill itself, Underhill Tor. (Echoes of The Raven Tower here, with its geological narrator...)

Anyone who reads Tom Cox's social media will find some elements of Villager familiar: the rush of the rising river outside the window, the conversations with cows, the cold-water swimming, and of course the folk music. If Villager can be said to have a single underlying plot, it's probably the story of folk singer R J McKendree, who first visits the village in the late 1960s and finds inspiration, not least in a local folk song called 'Little Meg', which he hears sung by an old man in the village pub. McKendree will return to Underhill decades later: meanwhile, his recording of 'Little Meg' will become a cult classic, only available as a Hungarian vinyl pressing.

And of course there's Little Meg herself, who appears (I think) at several points in the novel, including on a village chat group where she talks about her favourite goose. She's been around a while... Villager is fascinating, and fascinated -- by archaeology, folklore, music, merganser ducks, weather, changing skies and the layers of village life. There are echoes between the people living in the same house at different times, and some distinctly science-fictional elements (I especially liked the search engine).

This is a book that makes me want to return to Devon, to spend days walking the narrow lanes, swimming in the sea, climbing through granite boulders and ruined villages on the moor. It also, more achievably, makes me want to be outside in nature. But oh, to be in Devon in the summertime, with the green hill rising above the beach, and wild strawberries on the dusty verge. (And, all right, the rain.)

2022/68: The Godmother -- Hannelore Cayre, translated by Stephanie Smee

You may call us wops, vulgar foreigners, outsiders – but tremble, good people, for we shall crush you all! [loc. 1933]

Patience Portefeux, 53 years old and a widow, works as a French-Arabic translator for the Department of Justice, specialising in phone taps. She has two grown daughters at university to support, and retirement home fees for her mother to pay: there's never quite enough money. Patience, the daugher of immigrants, grew up in a criminal family and feels considerable sympathy for the criminals whose calls she translates. When she discovers that the nurse tending her mother is also the mother of a drug trafficker who's about to be busted by the police, Patience decides to intervene -- and ends up with a new dog (a former police drug-sniffer named DNA) and, subsequently, a ridiculous quantity of high-grade Moroccan cannabis resin. She turns out to be a pragmatic and efficient businesswoman, and remarkably competent at keeping her new business secret from her fiance, Philippe, who's just taken up his new role as Commander of the Drug Squad.

This was a very enjoyable, and often amusing, read. Patience is cynical, misanthropic and independent, capable of profound compassion but dismissive of 'the State' and its treatment of immigrants. The translation is smooth, colloquial and witty. I did feel that more could have been made of Patience's synesthesia: it's mentioned early in the novel ("My thing is that I taste and feel colours. [loc 127]) but never really comes up again. The final scene with Philippe felt like a cop-out (pun intended). And Cayre made me weepy with a few (non-graphic, non-explicit) sentences about animal euthanasia, which will likely stay with me long after the rest of the novel has faded.

2022/67: The Glass Hotel -- Emily St John Mandel

She’d never believed in love at first sight but she did believe in recognition at first sight, she believed in understanding upon meeting someone for the first time that they were going to be important in her life, a sensation like recognizing a familiar face in an old photograph: in a sea of faces that mean nothing, one comes into focus. You. [p. 123]

The eponymous hotel is a glass-and-cedar construction on a remote island in British Columbia. Vincent Smith (female) tends bar; Jonathan Alkaitis, financier, owns the hotel; Vincent's brother Paul works at the hotel. One night, shipping executive Leon Prevant checks in, and is shocked to see a threatening message scrawled in acid on the glass. How these four people relate to one another -- betrayal and theft, love and hatred, ghosts and lies -- is the matter of the novel. The Glass Hotel is mostly set in 2008, and thus it's perhaps no surprise that the financial crash looms large, not only in the background but in the foreground. (I learnt more about Ponzi schemes than I had expected.)

I read this immediately after Sea of Tranquility, though did not enjoy it as much: there are some fantastical elements -- at least two characters are haunted by the dead, literally and metaphorically -- but it's more claustrophobic, less hopeful, less compassionate. I found the characters fascinating, if sometimes naive and sometimes mercenary, and I endorse the importance of art and beauty: but despite the splendid prose and the intriguing hints of the preternatural, this just didn't engage me as much as Sea of Tranquility.

I hadn't realised that Mandel reuses characters. (Multiverse of Mandel? I think some characters also appear in Station Eleven, in different forms.) Vincent is mentioned in Sea of Tranquility: Paul's a character in both novels, as is Vincent's friend Mirella. There are other echoes and resonances, such as the graffiti on the wall of a prison cell, and the 5-minute videos that Vincent starts making as a lonely teenager. And one character has a 'counterlife', which seems to have become a reality in the later Sea of Tranquility. Though The Glass Hotel didn't really engage me, I still want to read more Mandel, if only to see what other lives these characters might have lived.