2023/171: Release — Patrick Ness

The boy takes a breath. “Today was a day I had to let go of a lot of stuff. Like everything that was tying me down suddenly got untied.”
“And I the same,” the spirit says. “Today is the day my destiny changed.”
“So did mine.”
“I know,” the spirit says. “I heard it coming. I followed the longing for it.” [p. 275]

Over the course of Saturday in a small town somewhere in Washington State, a gay teenager's life is transformed. Also, the world -- possibly the universe -- is saved.

Adam is seventeen; still half in love with his ex, Enzo; maybe half in love with his current boyfriend, Linus; doing his best to obey his evangelical parents; reliant on his friendship with Angie. Saturday morning starts with errands for his mother, and Saturday night he plans to attend Enzo's going-away party. Between those two events Adam finds himself questioning the limits and certainties of his world, and unwittingly saving the world. For on the other side of town, the ghost of a murdered girl is rising from the lake, and somehow she's entwined with the Queen of another realm. The spirit sends the Queen on a mission of vengeance, accompanied by a seven-foot-tall faun who's unable to warn her of the dangers...

I loved this. Ness wraps together the two stories -- the primary narrative of Adam's Saturday, and the secondary (and perhaps more significant) story of the Queen, the ghost and the faun -- with care and restraint, leaving the reader to make the connections between the two. Adam's interactions with his family and friends are so vivid, especially the pivotal conversation with his father. ("It hurts my heart that you're afraid"). His gradual realisation that he's freer than he thought he was, that his world is opening up, is something I wish I'd read as a teenager, feeling doomed by very different constraints. While the story of the Queen and the spirit and the faun seems at first lighter and more predictable -- though told in a more poetic, mythic style -- it's a different sort of delight. The faun, in particular, is fascinating: "He wonders if she will win this time. And if she doesn’t, will he have time to eat anyone before the worlds disintegrate?"

I'm about to reread The Rest of Us Just Live Here for a book club discussion, and I'll be thinking about Release and comparing the ways in which the fantastical intrudes on the mundane, and how irrelevant it is or isn't.

Fulfils the ‘doesn't fit any of the other prompts’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge. I mean, it probably could be shoehorned into several of the categories, but there isn't room because they're all fulfilled.

2023/170: The Dreamers — Karen Thompson Walker

This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love. [p. 137]

I'd enjoyed Walker's The Age of Miracles, so had good expectations of her second novel. I don't think I knew that it was a pandemic novel: and technically it's not, because it was published in 2019. But it is spookily prescient, with conspiracy theories, refusal of vaccines and masks, blaming of outsiders ...

At a university campus in California, a student falls asleep and can't be woken. The sickness spreads; the inhabitants are told to avoid contact with others; the army sets up roadblocks to prevent anyone leaving town. And it turns out that the sleepers are dreaming, furiously dreaming: 'there is more activity in these minds than has ever been recorded in any human brain — awake or asleep' [p. 60].

Walker's cast includes a survivalist father and his two young daughters; their next-door neighbours, who have a small baby who's feeding on donor milk and could have been exposed to the virus; an ageing college professor whose lover is slowly dying in a care home; a psychiatrist, quarantined in the hospital and worrying about her daughter; and Mei, the roommate of the first student to die, whose shyness has prevented her from making friends with the other girls in her dorm. Each of them deals -- or fails to deal -- with the crisis in different ways. And each of them suffers loss.

There's a distinctly SFnal element to the story: the dreams -- perhaps prescient, perhaps creating whole realities -- experienced by those who've succumbed and fallen asleep. Walker's focus is, instead, on survival mechanisms, on the ways in which people push back against quarantine and lockdown, and on the small acts of kindness or selfishness which shape the world. Like The Age of Miracles, it doesn't really finish: it fades. But that openendedness fits the premise better than any definite resolution would.

It was unsettling to read this account of a pandemic, albeit a localised one, and see how accurately Walker's fiction predicted some aspects of the Covid pandemic. But this is, mostly, a kinder virus. "...how much quieter that ending would be, a whole world drowned in sleep, than all the other ways we have to fall." [p. 284]

2023/169: The Fell — Sarah Moss

... when you deprive people of external stimulus their brains slow down, almost a survival strategy, who could bear to be running on all cylinders and locked in like this, you’d go mad, poison yourself with your own fumes. [p. 25]

Kate is desperate to escape the claustrophobic confines of the home she shares with her teenaged son, so she goes for a walk. But the country's in lockdown, and Kate is supposed to be isolating after a colleague caught Covid: she's breaking the law just by leaving her garden. And she's heading up to the fells, in November, without her phone and with dusk approaching.

This is a short but powerful novel about Covid, survival, the will to live, and the ways in which people's lives are inextricably intertwined. It's told from four points of view: Kate herself, with her lack of will to live ('the longer this goes on the less she objects to dying') and her frustration with lockdown restrictions; Matt, trying to make sense of his mother and occupying himself with online gaming and half-hearted attempts at housework; Alice, their next-door neighbour, who's a cancer patient and is terribly lonely; and Rob, a divorced father who volunteers with Mountain Rescue.

Moss's writing is spare and precise: I found it very evocative of that first winter of Covid, with the usual seasonal slump in my emotions magnified by hopelessness, loneliness (not something I generally suffer from) and rage. Kate's urge to be up in the high places, 'muscle and bone doing what they’re made for', enjoying her solitude, was immensely relatable: I also found Matt's helplessness and muddled emotions familiar, and I ached for Alice and her fear of her body's rebellion. Rob is, in a way, the outsider: but his sense of duty, and the guilt he feels at abandoning his teenage daughter to go out in the dark and the weather to search for a missing woman, is in sharp contrast to the inward-looking, self-absorbed narratives of the other three. (This is not a criticism of Kate, Matt or Alice: their circumstances force them to focus on their own lives, however much they'd like to be interacting with other people or with the wide open spaces.)

It's strange to read novels about the (ongoing) Covid pandemic, especially the first year with the lockdowns and the uncertainty, and remember how comprehensively it changed (and continues to change) my life. Moss, focussing so closely on her four characters, barely refers to the wider world, the political shenanigans and the massive social and economic shifts of 2020. I think I find this tight focus preferable to the novels which try to capture the mood of a nation, or a state, or a city. But watch this space!

2023/168: The Night Manager — John Le Carré

The combined rôle of saviour, escaped murderer, convalescent house-guest, Sophie’s avenger and Burr’s spy is not an easy one to master with aplomb, yet Jonathan with his limitless adaptability assumed it with seeming ease. [p. 313]

Le Carré's first post-Cold War novel, published in 1993. (Adapted for TV by the BBC more recently: I haven't seen this version but it stars Tom Hiddleston, makes several changes to the plot, and is highly praised by Le Carré himself.) Jonathan Pine, the central character, is an orphan, an 'army wolfchild ... caterer, chef, itinerant hotelier, perpetual escapee from emotional entanglements, volunteer, collector of other people’s languages, self-exiled creature of the night and sailor without a destination'. More importantly, he's a man with a strong moral code, a thirst for adventure and an attitude towards women that is not entirely healthy. Part of his backstory involves a French-Arab woman, Sophie, who passed him some confidential documents from her arms-dealer boyfriend. She told him not to send copies to the British intelligence agencies, as the boyfriend had contacts there. Pine decided he knew best; sent the documents to a contact in British Intelligence: Sophie was brutally murdered. Pine blames himself for her death, and he's right about that. He also blames one of the boyfriend's arms-dealer pals, a fellow called Roper. When he's given the chance to infiltrate Roper's inner circle, destroy his business and avenge Sophie, he jumps at the opportunity.

This is an intricately-plotted novel with many digressions (Pine building his fake identity via sojourns in Cornwall and Canada) and almost as many factions. Pine, despite his solipsism, is an engaging character, a close observer of everything and everyone around him (which extends, of course, to Roper's girlfriend Jed, who he thinks is stupid but cannot help falling in love with anyway) and possessed of rather more courage than is good for him. Unfortunately, the aspect of The Night Manager that's stuck with me is an extended torture scene near the end of the novel: it's not explicit but the sheer inescapability, the unrecoverable damage, is distressing.

I like Le Carré's writing a great deal, and am trying to ration my consumption of his novels since there won't now be any more. I don't think this is one I'd return to, though at least I now know to skip forward at a particular point. And I am tempted to watch the TV adaptation, especially for its radical reworking of 'Leonard Burr', the dogged and stoical intelligence operative who single-handedly saves the day.

Minor gripe: what is this satellite company named 'Inmarisat'?

2023/167: Time Shelter — Georgi Gospodinov (translated by Angela Rodel)

...one day, very soon, the majority of people will start returning to the past of their own accord, they’ll start “losing” their memories willingly. The time is coming when more and more people will want to hide in the cave of the past, to turn back. And not for happy reasons, by the way. We need to be ready with the bomb shelter of the past. Call it the time shelter, if you will. [loc. 592]

The first ever Bulgarian winner of the International Booker Prize, Time Shelter deals with nostalgia (in a very different, and much more European, way to Prophet) and features a character who, to a veteran reader of science fiction, appears to be a time traveller. Gaustine, who the narrator isn't sure whether he invented, is 'equally at home in all times'; writes letters to the narrator as if from 1939; and '[jumps] from decade to decade just as we change planes at an airport'. Whether this is time travel or delusion or a kind of performative outsider-ness is never explained.

The novel starts with Gaustine creating a clinic in Zurich for sufferers of Alzheimers, who often seem to live (or want to live) in the past. Each floor of the clinic recreates a different decade, lovingly and meticulously recreated: brands of cigarettes, copies of magazines, the colour of the wallpaper. The clinic proves extremely popular, not only with the patients but with their families. More clinics open, and eventually a referendum is held, in which each European country decides which decade of the twentieth century they will live in. 'There was something romantically doomed about such a referendum, especially given the recent fiasco with Brexit ...' (Britain is not allowed to participate, not being part of the EU any more.)

Much of the rest of the novel concerns the political, artistic and economic movements trying to influence referendum results in various countries, with an understandable emphasis on Bulgaria, where the rival factions favour the 1920s (the Heroes) and the 1970s (the Socs). More generally, the Seventies and Eighties prove most popular, with only Italy voting for the Sixties. Meanwhile our narrator bemoans what is lost, fears what might be to come, and wonders whether Lot's wife -- turned to salt as she looked back -- was the Angel of History.

I felt my literary credentials shrivelling as I read this. I loved the narrator's cultural milieu, his quotations of Auden and the Doors, his appreciation of the tumultous past of Europe. But I became lost in the increasing fragmentation -- of the novel's structure, and of the world, and of the narrator's identity -- towards the end of the novel. And I'm not sure that even in this weird nostalgia-shaped Europe a historical reenactment would lead to World War 3.

From the author's afterword:

For a person who loves the world of yesterday, this book was not easy. To a certain extent it was a farewell to a dream of the past, or rather to that which some are trying to turn the past into. To a certain extent it was also a farewell to the future.

2023/166: System Collapse — Martha Wells

Visual, audio, or text media could actually rewrite organic neural processes. Bharadwaj had said that was what I’d done with Sanctuary Moon: I’d used it to reconfigure the organic part of my brain... it could and did have similar effects on humans. [loc. 2020]

In which Murderbot, along with ART / Perihelion and assorted humans, deal with agricultural robots, ancient contamination, mutiny, lost colonies and PTSD.

I'm not going to go into the plot too much: it's a perfectly good adventure novel with some excellent characters (old and new), and the usual sarcastic, distinctive narration. I've been trying to work out why I found the novel unsatisfactory, and I think it's primarily because Network Effect was such a gamechanger, in terms of Murderbot's interpersonal relationships and found family. At the end of that book, Murderbot was considering joining ART's team and travelling through the wider universe, and this seemed like the beginning of a whole new phase. And then: not.

The human parts of Murderbot (and I don't just mean the cloned tissue) are definitely coming to the fore, and the events of Network Effect are causing unexpected and unwelcome repercussions which interfere with Murderbot doing its job. For much of this novel it's separated (by circumstance) from most of its support network. It forms new relationships -- notably with Tarik and Iris, who are part of ART's crew -- and begins to deal with the aftermath of trauma.

It's not at all a bad novel, but I suspect my expectations were unrealistic. I did enjoy it more the second time around, after skimming Network Effect (a stratagem I highly recommend, since there isn't much in the way of recap) and reminding myself of what had happened in that novel.

2023/165: Dark North — Gillian Bradshaw

That was the first I saw of the Empire: skill at building, and power, and tolerance. It astonished me -- and I didn't even know that Auzia was just one small fort on the fringe of something so vast a single mind can't know it. [p. 224]

Gillian Bradshaw has taken a single mention of 'an Ethiopian soldier ... a notable jester' in the Historia Augusta and spun a novel around that nameless African man. Dark North is set in Roman Britain in 208AD, during Septimius Severus' efforts to (a) prove that Britain is an island and (b) conquer all of it, even Scotland. The protagonist is a cavalry scout called Memnon: Romans can't pronounce his actual name, rendered here as Wajjaj. We first encounter him in the process of swapping the Second Parthica's standard for a lewder version of the same, an escapade that earns him the plaudits of his fellow soldiers but encourages his commander to send Memnon off on a long, potentially hazardous journey away from any chance of retribution. En route, Memnon encounters, and saves the lives of, two Romans from the Imperial household: Castor, the Imperial chamberlain, and Athenais, a secretary and a member of the Empress' household. Memnon befriends them, and their influence and support is invaluable to him when his duties (and his personal affairs) involve him with the Emperor's feuding sons Geta and Caracalla; with unrest amongst the tribes; and friction between the Aurelian Moors and the Frisian troop with whom they share a fort.

Memnon is a fascinating character: a notable jester indeed, but also a man who's lost (and bloodily avenged) his family, who fears that his bloodthirsty vengeance has made him a demon, who is the stealthiest and probably the cleverest scout in his unit, and who would quite like Roman citizenship but has no ambition to be anything other than one of the lads. 'Ethiopian' was used to refer to anyone south of Libya, and Memnon's origins are sub-Saharan: his dark skin is remarked upon as 'ill-omened', and he is likely the first Black man that any British tribesman has encountered. He's capable of extreme, and effective, violence, but clearly happier playing -- and getting away with -- creative practical jokes. Unfortunately his superiors have recognised his worth, and Memnon is forced to take life more seriously. The episode in the Historia Augusta, neatly woven in, is something of a last plantive rebellion...

It's a shame that this is out of print and unavailable as an ebook: I think Bradshaw has only written two novels set in Roman Britain (the other being the marvellous Island of Ghosts, set a generation earlier and featuring a troop of Sarmatian cavalry: one of my favourite historical novels), and it seems a shame to have 50% of them unavailable.

Fulfils the ‘Secondhand’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge. (I read this via the Internet Archive: it was a scan of a withdrawn book from the Bedlington branch of the Northumberland County Library, last borrowed in July 2019.)