2024/033: Medea — Rosie Hewlett

Atalanta once told me the world would make me the villain of this story, but she was wrong.
The world tried to make me the victim, so I became its villain. [loc. 4372]]

This is the second modern retelling of Medea's story that I've read in the last year (the first being Rani Selvarajah's Savage Beasts, which transplants the story to 17th-century India): I may avoid further novels based on this particular myth, because neither novel really came together for me. While all the key elements are present in Hewlett's novel, the pacing is uneven and the characters -- apart from Medea herself, and perhaps her aunt Circe -- one-dimensional.

Medea endures a horrific childhood after playfully transforming her brother Apsyrtus into a pig. Once returned to human form, he is cruel to her, as is their abusive father. Medea loves her sister Chalciope, but Chalciope is married off to a man who Medea had hopes of wedding. Then Jason and his crew show up, keen to commandeer the Golden Fleece: Medea helps Jason to accomplish the impossible tasks, leaves Colchis with the Argo and its crew, and dedicates her energies to Jason and his ambition. Jason, here, has little in the way of personality: just a stream of demeaning remarks, reframing Medea's actions and casting doubt on every aspect of her behaviour. Ugh.

Medea would have done well to listen to Circe's advice, which included not marrying Jason, and not turning to the dark 'death' magic unleashed by murder. Instead, she decided (like any teenager) that she knew best, and that Jason's ambition -- and her own desire to be in control of her life -- justified any atrocity. Her use of the dark magic, and her fight to stay in control of it, was at once the most original and the most unsettling aspect of the novel.

I found Medea unevenly paced, with sudden jumps of a year, ten years, five years. That final section came with an unexpected and perhaps unnecessary change of narrator, too, to Chalciope: but Chalciope's sympathy and pity are a good contrast to Medea's rageful hatred. The use of modern colloquialisms -- 'OK'; 'I'll take it from here'; 'that must've been tough to hear' -- jarred with me, too: I don't expect dry old-fashioned language but the dialogue felt false. Sadly, this novel just didn't work for me.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK publication date is 21st March 2024.

2024/032: Langue[dot]doc 1305 — Gillian Polack

I need a medievalist. Right away. [loc. 230]

An account of a, primarily Australian, research trip to medieval Languedoc, told mostly from the viewpoint of historian Artemisia Wormwood. Artemisia (who chose her own surname after divorcing her family, for reasons which are explained late in the novel) is out of work -- and in urgent need of funds -- when she's approached by an old friend who has a proposition for her. The project is a time-travel expedition: the team will spend nine months in 1305, establishing a base in a cave system near the little town of St-Guilhem-le-Desert in Languedoc. Their aim is to study meteorology, biodoversity, astronomy and climate change. They will, of course, stay concealed and not affect the lives of the locals. 'History will be fine,' team leader Luke reassures Artemisia. But Artemisia, who understands that 'it's about how people describe their realities', is not convinced.

It turns out that none of the team (except Artemisia) can communicate with the locals; that none of them (except Artemisia) understand the culture of the time into which they've been deposited; that none of them (except Artemisia) are especially concerned about interacting with the people of St-Guilhem-le-Desert. She is regarded as an irritation by the others, described as 'support staff' and not allowed to participate in planning sessions. But it's Artemisia who has to intercede with the locals when another member of the team, the dislikeable Sylvia, steals a valuable book. In the process, she becomes friendly with a local knight, Guilhem -- though he is not sanguine about 'the people who live under the hill', and he is not wholly honest with Artemisia.

Langue[dot]doc 1305 is often hilarious, but quietly so. Artemisia's conflicts with her colleagues (especially Sylvia, and team-leader Luke, whose area of expertise seems to be drawing things on whiteboards) are horribly recognisable to anyone who has worked in academia, or in a dysfunctional team. Luckily they're not all awful, and Artemisia is pretty self-sufficient. I laughed at the Connie Willis jokes, and shared Artemisia's appalled amusement at Sylvia's behaviour. Which is not to say that the novel is light-hearted and cheerful: some pretty grim things happen towards the end of the story, and it becomes clear (at least to anyone with a working knowledge of medieval history) that ... well, that things have changed. 

I enjoyed this a lot. I like Polack's prose, and the Australian inflections, and her wry ironic humour. And I note that I've also greatly enjoyed The Time of the Ghosts and The Year of the Fruitcake. I should certainly read more of her work...

Fulfils the ‘title starting with the letter 'L'’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

Fulfils the ‘A Book With A Number(s) In The Title’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

2024/031: Klara and the Sun — Kazuo Ishiguro

Our generation still carry the old feelings. A part of us refuses to let go. The part that wants to keep believing there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer. But there’s nothing like that, we know that now. [p. 277]

Klara is an AF, an Artificial Friend. We first meet her in the shop, waiting to be bought. While she's part of a window display she witnesses a Beggar Man and his dog apparently dying and then being resurrected by the Sun: also, a vile machine that pumps out Pollution. (The capitals are Klara's.)

Eventually Klara is purchased and goes home with her new family: Josie, who is suffering side-effects of a genetic uplift programme, and her Mother. Josie is often ill, but she has a friend, Rick, who lives nearby. Rick is not uplifted and this limits his options in life. Klara strikes up a sort of friendship with him, as she learns more about Josie, and the Mother, and Josie's dead sister Sal. She realises that she will have to intercede to have Josie made well: that a sacrifice is needed.

Klara and the Sun is sometimes rather sentimental, but that's because Klara was designed to be sentimental. She doesn't understand much about the world, and she misinterprets or simply doesn't rationalise some of what she sees. She is devoted to Josie, even when she understands what her own role might be. And though one character refers to 'AF superstition', I think that Klara has developed something like religion: I'm certain that aspect of her story wasn't in the original specification. The novel's ending is bittersweet and brought tears to my eyes, but Klara at least seems happy.

The worldbuilding is very lightly sketched, mostly because Klara isn't interested: but there are elements that feel familiar (such as bereavement dolls) and themes that resonate: jobs vanishing because of AI, increasing social divisions between the wealthy and the poor, communities defending themselves 'when the time comes', nepotism ...

With hindsight, this reminded me of Never Let Me Go, which I feel also dealt with a non-human protagonist and the questions of whether she was a person, whether she possessed a soul. And I think there's a theme there too, of people seeing things they perhaps shouldn't see, and drawing erroneous conclusions from them -- something that children, of course, do all the time.

Fulfils the ‘title begins with K’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

2024/030: Old Man's War — John Scalzi

The reason we use force when we deal with other intelligent alien species is that force is the easiest thing to use. It’s fast, it’s straightforward, and compared to the complexities of diplomacy, it’s simple. [p. 166]

Widower John Perry celebrates his 75th birthday by saying goodbye to Earth, his life and everything he's ever known. He enlists with the Colonial Defense Forces, who have technology which is rumoured to 'reverse ageing'. The downside is that, should you survive your two years' tour of duty (which may be extended to ten years), you can't ever return to Earth: instead, you will be given a new life in the colonies. Perry is fine with all that. He's still mourning his wife Kathy, and there's nothing left for him on Earth except old age and death.

Turns out the 'anti-ageing' is a brand-new body (the 'full body transplant' of which I have been dreaming lately), a BrainPal AI assistant (which Perry names Asshole), and plenty of weapons training; a bunch of new friends; and the opportunity to visit exotic new worlds and kill whatever's already living there. For this is not a friendly universe. Humanity is (as usual) in a race to expand, to colonise, to boldly go et cetera. So are all the other intelligent species out there, and apparently (a) there are a lot of them and (b) they all want Earth-like planets too. (Why yes, Scalzi does acknowledge a debt to Heinlein in his afterword.) Much of the book is a montage of battle scenes, as Perry becomes initially blasé and then increasingly uncomfortable about his job. He maintains friendships with the people he trained with, a diminishing pool as one by one they're killed off; he discovers the Ghost Brigades, and some highly dubious ethical practises; and he kills things people.*

I enjoyed this much more than I'd expected to: I am not a fan of military SF, and I'm more or less a pacifist. Scalzi's take on the Huge Intergalactic Melee has room for conscience and grief as well as slaughter, though I think he also made an effort to include a variety of shocking scenarios. I did have two issues. One is that the Colonial Defense Forces seem to be wholly American (we don't encounter anyone who isn't from the US); one is that a person 'grown' from the DNA of someone else seems to acquire their emotional connections, which is horribly close to Destined Soulmates.

When I finished this book (which I've owned for nearly 10 years) I doubted I'd read more in the series: but actually I'm intrigued...

Fulfils the ‘apostrophe in the title’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

*"The people! The things!"
"The things," said Ford quietly, "are also people."

2024/029: Disturbance — Jenna Clake

There was not a box in which to write: I have been casting spells with my teenage neighbour and I think I might be losing control. [loc. 1639]

The nameless narrator of Disturbance is in her mid-twenties. She has moved to a small town to escape her abusive ex. She's still frightened that he will track her down, or that he's dead and haunting her. It does seem that there is a presence sharing her small flat: lights flicker, doors open and close, she feels as though she is not alone. One hot night, she watches from her window as her teenaged neighbour Chelsea enacts some kind of magical ritual, perhaps connected with Joseph, whose treatment of Chelsea troubles our narrator. 'I knew from experience that the accusations could only worsen, and then something terrible would happen.'

She becomes friends with Chelsea, and with Chelsea's friend Jess: she attempts magic to rid herself of the weight of that abusive relationship, and perhaps to remove any remaining influence of her ex. But she's still not sure that magic is possible -- and she begins to wonder if Jess really has Chelsea's best interests at heart.

This is an aptly-titled novel: it gave me nightmares, and made me think about some of my own long-ago relationships in a different light. I'm not sure the narrator is altogether sane, and I'm not sure whether the things that she experiences are 'real' in any objective sense. But her voice is powerful, and the story of three 'witches' is unsettling, though it never tips fully towards the supernatural. I think I'll read more by this author: I found her style compelling.

Fulfils the ‘published by Hachette’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

Fulfils the ‘A novel with an unreliable narrator’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.

2024/028: Almost Surely Dead — Amina Akhtar

She’d say [a prayer] and then clap three times and blow air on me. Phook marring, it was called. She said it would keep all the scary things away when I was little. But it didn’t. She was the scary thing in my life, and the prayer never kept her away. [loc. 1315]

Dunia Ahmed is the subject of a 'true crime' podcast series: she's been missing for over a year, after several very public attempts on her life. It's unclear why anyone would want to hurt her: she was a young woman of Pakistani heritage, a pharmacist in New York City, unmarried (and dealing with a broken engagement); she had a few good friends, though was estranged from her sister; her mother had recently died.

The story is told in many different voices, including 'Dunia at 5' and Dunia just before her disappearance, as well as the various guests on the (appallingly ghoulish) podcast. From quite early in the book it's apparent that Dunia had a difficult childhood. Her mother blamed Dunia for a number of unpleasant events, including her father's death, and Dunia was accused of making up stories about friends that nobody else could see.

The gradual revelation of what happened to Dunia is intriguing, but I wasn't as impressed with the way it was told. The awfulness of the podcast hosts was hammered home, and a lot of the dialogue and stream-of-consciousness was clunky and repetitive. The last third of the novel felt substantially different in tone, and made it into more of a mundane thriller. I did like Dunia's father's jinn stories, though, even though Dunia's mother hated them. With good reason.

Fulfils the ‘a sticker on the cover’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

2024/027: The Hunter — Tana French

Her dad and Rushborough are the only weapons she has, or is ever likely to get, against this townland. They're locked and loaded, ready to her hand. She didn't go looking for them; something laid them in front of her ... [loc. 2389]

Second in the Cal Hooper series, this is set about two years after The Searcher. It's a long hot summer, drought laying waste to the Irish countryside. Cal is now in a relationship with Lena, though she refuses to let him make her responsible for his moods. Trey is still mourning her lost brother Brendan -- and still determined to avenge him, regardless of not knowing who caused his death. She wanders the mountain looking for Brendan's unmarked grave. Then Trey's father Johnny returns unexpectedly from England, with a fellow in tow who claims Irish blood and may even be related to some of the folk of Ardnakelty. And this fellow, Rushborough, believes that there's gold in the mountains...

The Hunter is told from several different viewpoints, of whom I think I liked Trey the best. Cal has more or less been accepted by his neighbours, but he's still struggling to negotiate the unspoken rules and unbreakable laws of the place. "Lack of clarity is this place's go-to, a kind of allpurpose multitool comprising both offensive and defensive weapons as well as broad-spectrum precautionary measures." [loc. 4334]. Neither Trey nor Cal has much reason to welcome Johnny, even before it becomes clear that Johnny is not being wholly honest about the reasons for his return.

I liked this more than The Searcher (though still not as much as the Dublin murder mysteries) especially as there's an underlying note of mystery, of the inexplicable. The emotions, the motivations, the everyday conflicts and the underlying bonds of Ardnakelty are splendidly portrayed, and there's a strong sense of a community layered with epic tales, no matter how small the canvas. This book should be read by anyone contemplating relocation to a quiet rural village. It's made me wonder how much I never understood about the place where I grew up...

Fulfils the ‘a revenge story’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK publication date is 7th March 2024.