Kintu – Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Posted on 17/08/2019 by Roseanna

51l2euiflllAnother one that took me yonks to finish, but also one I rather enjoyed, especially for its atmosphere. Clearly I picked a bad period to read good, atmospheric books.

That being said, I think I did enjoy this less than the others, but I feel like the fault for that sits more with me than with the book – I felt like I was missing a lot of context that would have helped me fully grasp some of what was going on. It never stopped me following the story, but I felt like it was doing more and cleverer things and I was just missing them by being an ignorant fool. Which is kind of annoying, but totally my problem. And the only way it would have got around that would be to massively handhold me… at which point, presumably it becomes deeply annoying and patronising to anyone who does have the context to appreciate it properly. So it definitely did the right thing. I just don’t particularly treasure my ignorance (cue one thousand Wikipedia pages until 3am – the best way to learn about things you never actually intended).

The book is set across multiple generations of one family in what is now Uganda, from the 1750s up to the present day (though not totally in that order), and a curse which afflicts each generation and that they must seek to break. But it’s about more than just that story – it’s about the changing lives of the people in the region through successive events of invasion, colonial rule and independence, and reconciliation of tradition with the legacy of foreign invasion and rule. About traditional religion vying with evangelical Christianity, and the mixed religious heritage of the people of Uganda. It’s also about twins, and about love and relationships, about compromises and mistakes and shame and secrets and transgression. It’s about living with the legacy your parents have given you, even the ones you don’t know about, and how they shape your life. There’s a lot going on, but it meshes well together, and creates a nice, cohesive whole in the end.

The start… is a bit more patchy. It takes a while for things to come together, and for it to start being clear how the different timelines interact with one another. You know the characters are related, of course, but exactly how they link up beyond that takes a while to get clear in your head. But once it does, things seam together beautifully, and it flows along very well.

I particularly like the extent to which the pattern of the events in the 1750s is played out over and again, repeated and amended and re-examined by later generations, with different viewpoints and different intentions. It’s not about the inevitability of fate, they’re not all doomed to do the same things over and over, but more they have the same pattern about their lives, and we get to see how different people react to that, pulling and stretching the story in different directions. Particularly, there’s a chapter at the end focussing on an old academic, and reading him responding to the previous story as he knows it, musing over it and trying to draw out the pattern is beautifully meta.

The 1750s chapters are also particularly evocative in and of themselves – we get a very close focus on the emotions of Kintu Kidda, with whom the curse all starts, and get to see exactly why he did as he did, for all that we may disagree. He’s simultaneously an alien character – someone with a lot of power, whose decisions have wider repurcussions, who must think of a wider group of people who all depend on him – and also very familiar. His loves and his irritations. We get the intimate detail just as much as the political scale, and the way the two are presented help each work to the greater interest of the other. As we moved away from his chapters, I was sad to have to move on, but looking back, if we’d dwelled on it any longer it would have thrown out the balance of the story as a whole.

I did find the pacing a little slow for me, and the switches between characters did not always make sense as I read them (though sometimes more in hindsight), not sufficiently to stop me enjoying the book as a whole. The ending was also a little… odd for my taste… but I got the feeling it was invoking storytelling traditions outside just the normal novel format, and again, I feel like if I’d known a little more, I’d have been able to see it was doing more than I could see.

I’m glad I read it, and it’s doing a lot of really interesting things. There’s no denying it’s artistically great. I just got quite frustrated with myself at how much I was clearly missing, and I’d like to come back to it again in a few years, ideally having read more Ugandan fiction, and I think I might get more out of it then.

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Lord of Emperors – Guy Gavriel Kay

Posted on 17/08/2019 by Roseanna

a1j5irpxzelI nearly fucking CRIED. I don’t cry at books. It made me feel emotions and it was deeply distressing at the most fundamental level. By which I mean I fucking loved it. And I know this is blasphemy – there are those of you who would hunt me down for saying so – but… I think it was better than Lions of Al-Rassan. I’ll just let that sink in.

Ok, stepping away from the post-book euphoria for a second, what I actually mean is that Guy Gavriel Kay has grabbed a big pointy stick and jammed it into various key locations in my soul, and for all that it is definitely objectively a good book, it is also a book that has affected me on a more personal and emotional level because it deals with some things I care about, or am interested in, and deals with them deftly but also absolutely brutally. It’s not a book that wanted to pull any punches, but was willing to build up to its brutality slowly and carefully, to make it all the more devastating.

Because I think that’s what Kay does do best – the emotional gut-punch. And part of what’s so good about it here is that that patience has been stretched out over two books rather than one, making it even more devastating when it does come, for all that waiting.

If you’ve not read Sailing to Sarantium, a) do, it’s great and b) the book(s) follow(s) a mosaicist in not-the-Eastern-Roman-Empire, and the events happening during the life of totally-not-Justinian the Great and totally-not-Amalasuntha, around trying to restore the fading greatness of the not-Roman-Empire in a time when it is very much waning. The book is partly set in the pseudo-Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy and partly in pseudo-Byzantium, following the wider political events as well as the individual life of the mosaicist, and how those events affect him. It’s Kay’s usual “history with the names rubbed off” thing and maybe a bit of fantasy, and just as usual, it’s done very very well, with beautiful imagery, prose that really sticks with you, and complex, compelling characters. It’s a good story with a well chosen end point and totally works as a standalone.

Lord of Emperors picks up not long at all after the events of the first book, and builds on its great foundations to give you even more. We come back to the mosaicist, and some of his friends, as well as to the emperor himself and a Sassanid* doctor, whose threads all slowly draw together into a great whole that seems inevitable when seen from the end point, but you’d never even realised was coming from the first book.

It’s about mortality, loss, grief, mercy, mistakes and above all about art and legacy, and what they both mean to the people who make them. And you come very quickly to care intensely about the art and the legacy, precisely because it’s so so easy to love the characters who care about them too. The mosaicist, Crispin, is working on a mosaic on the dome of what will eventually become the Hagia Sofia, and he’s working into it the people he’s loved and lost, the magic that he finds in the world, and his own understanding of the glory of god. We see that slow unfolding of what his art truly means to him, and I at least could not help but love it with him. Likewise, I find the emperor a wonderfully drawn, thoughtful, pragmatic but compassionate ruler, and so it is basically impossible for me not to care about his thoughts about his own legacy and the empire he’ll leave behind him.

All of which of course makes it all the more brutal when GGK decides to Fuck Shit Up (as is his wont). I mean, of course, knowing history, it is not a spoiler that Justinian does not reunite the empire and bring about a glorious golden age of Roman splendour to outlast the ages. So you know going in that won’t work, and so even at the start, the endeavour is tinted with the failure you know will come, you just don’t know how. Because GGK doesn’t stick entirely to the script history has given him, just close enough for it to have these wonderful moments of interlinking, and a whole sense of atmosphere and place. Which of course means you can never really be certain you know where the plot is going. Sometimes it takes… turns. And stabs you right in the feels, repeatedly, with something sharp but also rusty, and keeps on going at it.

Anyone who’s read Lions of Al-Rassan knows what I mean here.

GGK turns sadness, loss and absolute wtf-have-you-done-oh-my-god-nooooo into an art form, so it’s the sort of sadness that you come back to, and want to do again and again, and keep reading his books even though bad things happen to good people. It’s a very specific niche, but one some of my favourite books occupy, like The Sparrow, and as above, what it more than anything says is that they know how to make characters you fall hopelessly in love with. Even his secondary characters are fleshed out and compelling – the Amalasuntha character is incredibly smart, and watching her suss things out is a total joy. He writes a lot of very varied but very good women, I find. And you love all of them, in some way. And that makes the book. The experience.

He also, pleasingly, and not unsurprisingly, since he’s modelling closely on real events, gives a much more real and plausible picture of a religion and its impact on the political than most fantasy does. It treats it like an actual religion, rather than the usual fantasy simplistic nonsense (looking at you, Hundred Thousand Kingdoms), and shows how it can mean and enormous amount to different people, to be crucially important to them, and yet be acted upon in wholly different, even contrasting ways. And I think again this is because he’s great at writing people, and makes it a problem or a complexity within his plot that is about humans being human, not about there being a simple answer, or someone being evil, or the bad god made them do it. He’s aware of the way that people work, even when they’re all trying to do what’s good and right, and how their differences shape the world around them. Again – brilliant characters, making the whole story brilliant with them.

And I haven’t really got much more to say than that. I could keep going about how lovely his prose is, the imagery of the city of Sarantium on the hill, the mosaics in the candlelight, the relationships slowly developing between the people. It’s all absolutely brilliant. But I’ll just be saying that over and over and over. I love his books. If you’ve never read one, I’d recommend trying, because they’re so evocative. And if you’ve already read one, you know how great they are… so I probably don’t need to tell you this one is too.

It’s probably my favourite. I get to feel like I’m in the world and minds of Byzantine people, and I feel it drawn for me in perfect, vivid clarity. It’s easy to inhabit it, and it’s a world I want to inhabit. He’s done his GGK thing, but set it somewhere I wanted it… and what more could I ask for?

 

*I give up on calling anyone pseudo-whatever. His people are the “Bassanids” in the book. It’s not meant to be subtle.

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Rosewater – Tade Thompson

Posted on 16/08/2019 by Roseanna

9780316449038I managed to get in on this one juuuuuust before he won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Couple of days maybe. But a very long time after a lot of people I know had been talking about it. So not actually in there early, if I’m honest. Ah well.

It was interesting because I’d had mixed reviews from people I know. It had been nominated for book club more than once, and absolutely raved by several people. But also totally meh-ed by others. I went in not really knowing what to expect.

And sad to say, I ended up more in the meh camp (and for the same reasons) than the yay camp, but I can at least see what the yay is all about. But for me, it was absolutely undercut by me really really not getting on with the protagonist. It’s not just his attitudes – though they are annoying – as those are often undercut by other characters. It’s clearly not that the book agrees with him, far from it. But it’s also that I didn’t really seem able to connect with him at all. The way he thought… didn’t work for me. I didn’t get him – his actions sometimes absolutely baffle me. And that made it really hard to sympathise or like him. And it’s a very protagonist focussed book, so no matter how much I might be interested in the other characters, the lack of empathy from the protagonist for them severely limits my window into their emotions and personalities. They feel flat, because one of the protagonist’s flaws, at least for me, is that he’s an emotionally stunted misogynist prick, and so he views them through that lens, often just as a set of reactions to bounce his “hilarious” thoughts/propositions off, rather than fully realised human beings. And it doesn’t matter how much the book undercuts him… I just don’t care about reading through that lens.

Which is a shame, because a lot of the rest of what’s going on is GREAT.

The book is set around a town called Rosewater in Nigeria, a site of activity and occupation by an alien fungal… thingy… with a town wrapped around it. The story flickers back and forward in time, from the inception of the town to the present day and bits in between, all through the eyes of Kaaro, a government agent with a shady past who’s been in Rosewater since the very start, and is in a position to see when things start to change in the present for people like him. Because he’s got mind powers (hence being a useful government agent), as do a lot of others in Rosewater. They use them in various ways – including the amusing bank psychic firewall – but without a deep understanding of what they are and how they really work. This too gets explored throughout the book, alongside our deepening understanding of the alien dome, and the state of the world post alien incursion.

First and foremost, that world is brilliant. Super interesting, well thought out, politically nuanced and just… great. Thompson has obviously done a lot of thinking about what an alien presence on this scale would mean for humanity, and it shows in the little references just as much as in the big exposition, the way it touches on daily life as well as grand scheme politics. The way people choose to relate to it. We get hints of the world outside Nigeria dealing with the same issues, and coming to different conclusions about it, too, but without distracting from our main focus.

The non-chronology is also handled very very well, and the points at which we flit back and forward slip in at just the right moments to give more context, without leaving you stuck in one part too long, longing for the other, or too short and a bit shellshocked over what’s going on. It also manages to use this as a good tool for suspense, signposting strongly where in the chronology key events happened, but skirting round them in the narrative until later on, to keep the reader on their toes.

Thompson also has a pretty decent eye for the descriptive, especially when it comes to the alien life form, so we get a lot of good passages about how it looks, sounds and feels, and just how alien it really is, even as much as it is rooted in the reality of those who live around.

But, however accomplished most of the novel might be – and it is, I see why it won the Clarke – the fact of the matter is, at least for me, that Kaaro’s personality is just a massive barrier to really getting into the story. He makes fucking stupid decisions, in ways that don’t make sense to me, and has ridiculous opinions and ways of dealing with people. I wanted to smack him within a chapter or two, and that feeling never goes away. No matter that he’s meant to be a good guy, and that his actions do often end up being towards the good in the end… he himself is just ugh. UGH. Apparently the sequel has a different protagonist, which is at least promising, and I may end up reading it just to see how much of a difference that makes. But this is one of those times where a character is just awful enough to override everything. He’s what I’m going to remember, he’s what I’m going to come back to when talking about the book to other people. And he’s terrible. Such a shame.

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Lud-in-the-Mist – Hope Mirrlees

Posted on 16/08/2019 by Roseanna

lud-in-the-mist-470962_00

This… is quite late. I finished the book *checks* most of a year after we read the book for book club. Like… nine months at least. Whoops. Worst part is, I actually enjoyed it, and apparently far more than a lot of the rest of book club. Just… somehow… nah, didn’t happen. I sort of stopped reading, picked something else, and then it sat on my to read pile, glaring at me, until I gave in for the sake of the reading goal. And then… I enjoyed it again. Sometimes it’s weird what I do and don’t want to read in any given moment.

I suspect what actually kicked me into reading it was finishing The Porpoise. I mentioned a lot in that review how it’s more an atmosphere book than a plot book, and to a lesser extent, this is the same. It’s not all that focussed on what happens so much as creating a particular feeling to the story. There’s still a plot, it’s still a book where occurrences occur… but they’re just not the main focus. It definitely feels more about creating a world inspired by fairy tales, and people inspired by the peculiar sort of people you get in fairytales. Which for me at least it managed really rather well. Or… well… in many ways it’s more about creating a subtle caricature of the world of a fairytale, in order to play with the ideas that go into creating that atmosphere. It never strays into the full hammer of “HELLO THIS IS SATIRE DID YOU NOTICE”, for which I’m grateful, but you get the sense throughout that the author is gently laughing at it, and maybe at you for going along with it.

Which, when you think about it, is entirely fair. Fairytales are fucking weird. And Mirrlees is definitely leaning on some of those aspects to play it up.

But more than that, it’s a book that seems to be trying very hard to be about broader, wider themes, and the dedication to those ideas and symbols gives the whole thing an unreal quality (which sits perfectly well in a fairytale anyway) when it comes to the people and their lives. The people of the story are there in service to the greater ideas that their lives seem to be embodying, and so could never really be given much leeway in being naturalistic.

It is probably worth noting, we read this in book club for the theme “pre-1970s”, and not only is it very much that, but it predates The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit by over a decade. It’s playing by different rules than the fantasy we know now, and it’s very hard coming to this sort of thing with a modern context, and trying to look at it without that lens making you think certain things about what it’s being. I’m trying to think what the landscape of “fantasy”* even looked like in 1926. You obviously had the legacy of gothic romance/horror, which was not in the ever so distant past, and fairytales from long before that but… besides that. Tolkien kinda did birth the genre, and he hadn’t happened to it yet. He only took up his professorship in Oxford in 1925, so he was probably writing it when this was published, come to think of it. Or he was busy translating Beowulf. But in any case, the literary world Mirrlees wrote this in was profoundly different from the one to come. It’s no wonder it doesn’t entirely resonate with the modern reader of fantasy – it’s an aunt to our own tradition, rather than a parent, perhaps.

It’s not purely by accident it’s Tolkien I’m comparing Mirrlees to here, and not just because it was his work that went on to spawn the fantasy genre as we know it. They both exist at the other end of the tradition, and are both taking from much much older pre-existing stories. They’re both drawing on fantastical sources, with their own peculiar logics and ways of defining events, realities and people, and creating their own worlds inspired by, but different from, those traditions. Where Tolkien takes from Anglo-Saxon myth, Mirrlees is taking specifically from the fairytale, and both works resonate incredibly strongly with their sources – the more I read Tolkien as I get older, the more and more I see the layers of his sources in what he’s made, the language and the structure, the way people see the world around them. Likewise, I suspect if I were to reread this close by a Grimm collection, I’d be seeing links too (though it’s clear she’s not limited herself to, or even focussed mainly, on those – the fairies themselves feel like a peculiarly British iteration). So these are two works poised before/on the brink of fantasy, both of whom are creating new magic from known and very old stories. Making novels out of tales of a very different sort.

Of course, Tolkien is more successful. I mean, no reason to belabour the point, what he did was bloody good. We know this. But I think it’s interesting to have this book from a little earlier, doing something that feels in some ways similar. It’s worth thinking why both of them, and why this? Were there others that have been lost to time too… or just lost to me because I don’t know much about literature then?

To focus back on Mirrlees herself, her world-building is fairly cursory. She’s made a coherent enough setting for everything to happen in, but it’s not a book that we need things to have the deepest meanings and histories for them to make sense. It’s about the ideas, the feeling, much like fairytales themselves. And so, at least to me, what she’s succeeded at is very much the same thing Tolkien has – making a book that draws on an existing tradition that feels incredibly true to that tradition. But of course, the problem is, fairytales have a distinctly artificial quality to them. They have their precise set of internal logics that don’t do well when exposed to the light of day. People take strange paths, make strange decisions, and it only makes sense if you’re willing to abide by fairytale reasoning. Which, while being told the story, especially as a child, you are. This is how stories work. But for an adult novel? Sometimes it’s a little hard to stop the questions coming, to pick at the artificiality and wonder why there’s nothing under the surface. Mostly, this is rescued because the book doesn’t shy away from what it is and what it’s doing, and instead leans on what that style is good for – making a bigger point about morals or ideas. It’s not a morality tale per se, but it has a lot of the flavour of one, and it’s hard not to see the ultimate conclusion as having a lesson in it – it isn’t subtle. But the desire to scrutinise still remains a little, and it does ruin things a little, at least for me.

Ultimately, I enjoyed it, I liked what it was doing, and I thought it was intensely clever, witty and occasionally ironic. It’s a thoughtful book that knows it’s medium, and uses, emphasises the limitations of that medium to make its points. But it is ultimately limited by what it’s drawing on, and I couldn’t always take it seriously in the way I think I was supposed to. And yes, it’s not really got much in the way of driving plot. That’s not what it’s here for. But to some extent, I think that need for a driving narrative is a very specific, modern, SFF want, and I ultimately don’t think its absence is a loss, in something striving for other things entirely. You just have to look at it through the lens of its own context, not the one we’re in now.

*Scare-quotes mainly for “was stuff even really fantasy yet then?”

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The Porpoise – Mark Haddon

Posted on 07/08/2019 by Roseanna
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It’s rather pretty, and my copy is signed.

I am, of course, a sucker for anything classics-related. Because some things never change. So I came across something that was being well-received and had tenuous links to classical mythology? Sold. I barely even read the blurb. Which, if I’m honest, I often think is the best way to appreciate a book anyway – come at it completely clean. It certainly worked here. Though possibly it didn’t matter; I suspect I was always going to love it. Not that I’m necessarily predisposed to love everything classicsy – woe betide the author doing it “wrong”, after all. But it didn’t, so hurrah.

Mainly, I was always going to love it because it’s bloody good.

That being said, it’s not a book I’m going to use the word “enjoy” about. It is a brilliant, wonderfully written book I am glad to read and have read… but if I said I “enjoyed” it is slightly brings my sense of fun into question. In the same way one doesn’t “enjoy” The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s just too grim. And so, with a heavy content warning for death and sexual abuse, is this (full warning in footnote)*. But it’s beautifully, emotively, vividly written. It grasps the threads of the classics and the Shakespearean and weaves them seamlessly together, and interleaves the wondrous and the divine with the brutal and the visceral. It takes the awful and makes it an intrinsic component of the narrative, and so the whole could not be as well-made without it. It’s never enjoyable to read that stuff – not here and not anywhere else – but it isn’t gratuitous, it’s done with a purpose that is felt throughout, and one that, at least on balance for me, is worthwhile in the end.

I think a lot of the beauty comes from the uncertainty of what events take place, and which are stories borne from the mind of the protagonist. Some are clearly defined, but some are hazy, and feel like they could just as easily be a recasting of real events as they are a complete fabrication. The whole book has a dreamlike quality that made it easy to read, but without that rush of crescendo you get from strongly narrative books. It’s a thing I tend to like when there’s good prose to support it and there certainly is that here.

I can’t quite put my finger on what about the prose is good. It’s not flashy in its loveliness. I think it’s just solidly well-crafted throughout, with that measured and focussed way of creating vivid imagery that makes something feel much more visual. It’s no China Miéville novel, making it obvious that the concentrated madness of the prose is sort of the point. That would get in the way of what it’s trying to do. No, it’s just… being good at what it does, carefully, quietly and smoothly all the way through, picking just the right word or phrase to not just get the job done, but make it shine. It’s incredibly visual, and despite the fact I read it now several weeks ago, there are still parts of it that are sticking with me purely as imagery, rather than the words on the page – mainly the nautical scenes, but also some of the people, the places and a few frozen moments of drama. For all that the places it is set are primarily imaginary, it’s incredibly rooted in the landscapes it has created, and take pains to make this sea, this wood, this temple stick with you in the moment, just as much as the people and their feelings and choices.

Which isn’t to say I don’t care about the people, I really do. Even the annoying dude. Ok, except one guy, for reasons. But other than him, everyone has something compelling about them. Everyone has something that makes you want to know what happens to them, or understand why they do what they do. But the protagonists particularly, you feel for them on a very real level, and cannot help but worry for them, and want things to turn out well. They’re interesting, they have rich inner lives, they make mistakes, or suffer hardships, or struggle, fail, succeed and grieve. They’re proper, developed human beings. But first and foremost the book is an atmosphere book, not a people book or a plot book. Which is fine, or it is for me at least, but I know there exist plenty of people for whom it is an issue. If you like your novels plot-driven, I suspect this isn’t one for you. It’s a very stop-and-smell-the-flowers sort of novel… but the flowers may or may not be abject misery. Ymmv.

I am noticing that the older I get, the more patience I have for this kind of thing, and the more regard I have for well-written prose, and books doing more than just telling a punchy story. I still like me a punchy story, but it’s not enough anymore. And sometimes, if it’s doing all the other stuff really well, I don’t need the punchy story at all. I’ve no idea what’s changed, or why, but it definitely has – and it’s partly why (sadly) a lot of the books I liked as a late teen and slightly beyond just aren’t cutting it anymore for me, when I reread them. I can still see why I liked them before, I see what I was enjoying, but it’s not quite enough anymore. Which is why, for instance, I’m not planning to reread American Gods anytime soon… I went right off Neverwhere when I reread it, and I don’t want AG to suffer the same cruel fate. It’s part of why I wish so often that SFF as a genre would be more focussed on good prose, good characters and the actual craft – when I do get them, the whole thing is just so much more satisfying, and what used to be sufficient starts lacking. And then I read stuff like this, and it actually satisfies, and does so much more in the same space. If we could get that for SFF more consistently, I’d be a very happy woman.

But in the meanwhile, I’ll happily keep reading classics inspired litfic to fill the hole. I’ll just be over here in the Natalie Haynes section (I really do need to read one of hers – she’s done another one this year and I should just get on it).

 

*Full (spoilery) content warning: violent, graphically described death and assault, sexual abuse of a child, incest.

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Consider Phlebas – Iain M. Banks

Posted on 31/07/2019 by Roseanna

71-9z-minllHaving finally finished all the Culture novels – and soon intending to read Player of Games again for book club – I decided it was time to reread the one I disliked the first time round, and led to me not reading any of his books for several years. I know my book tastes have changed in the last few years – and the first time I read it was now many many moons ago, back when I was a first year undergrad* – so maybe it was worth re-examining.

And yes, yes it was. It was a rare instance of my opinion of a book changing for the better when I reread it. But I’m not sure it’s because my taste has changed, rather that having the rest of the Culture novels provided me with a context that made the events of the story more relevant, and without which I just felt a bit stranded, the first time I read it. And for all that I’m glad I enjoyed it more this time around, I’m not sure I think that it’s a good thing to only enjoy a book (and one that is meant to be able to function independently) once you have the rest of the story to fit it round. It’s like all the times someone defends a crap first book because “but it gets better in the sequels!”. Maybe it does, maybe that means the series as a whole is good, but just because the rest of the story gets better doesn’t rescue the quality of the crap book. Not that this is crap… just not as good as the rest of what he’s done, and only really enjoyable with that context.

One thing that has stayed true from my – now a decade old – first read of this one… I dislike the main character. Quite a lot. Not just dislike him as a person, though that is true, but also as a viewpoint. I understand what he’s there for, to provide a perspective that dislikes and is fighting against the Culture… but I kept thinking the story would be so much better if told from the perspective of the Culture agent, Perosteck Balveda, who keeps cropping up throughout the story. I get it, she’s not going to give you that contrasting perspective, she’s going to be Culture-woo, with maybe a bit of self-doubt and nothing else… but I am drawn to her far more than Bora Horza Gobuchul, our actual protagonist. He’s single-minded, closed-minded and callous, without having anything particular about his way of looking at the world that makes those traits interesting. His lack of self-awareness and introspection are totally valid and necessary for the plot, but they make me want to hit him, to make him see what a numpty he’s being, how blind. But also… he gives us one, continuous, unbending external view of the Culture, and once we’ve got that from him, it never gives us anything more… so it feels a waste that the whole book is dedicated to it. We get brief snippets of another character (within the Culture) and her viewpoint is so much more interesting because it changes, she thinks, she doubts, she wonders, and she does consider the possibility that she (and the side of the war she’s on) might be wrong. Whereas Horza… no, not really. He’s an action hero, bound up in the present, the current plan, the current danger, and by being stuck only in his mind, we miss out on a lot of the meandering consideration that I really enjoy in Banks’s novels.

Because of that, I ended up giving this a 3… which seems like a pretty low score, when I actually mostly enjoyed reading it. But there are other Culture novels that got a 4 and which are noticeably better. There are other Culture novels that give us that outside perspective of the Culture. There are other Culture novels with action and adventure. And they are all… just better. But at the same time, I did enjoy it… just not so much for itself.

Looping back, once I’ve read everything else, heard all those hints and snippets about the Idiran War, to see the war itself was really interesting. But it was the interesting of filling in the gaps, of getting the answers to questions, or more background, not an enjoyment rooted in the story as it is presented to us. And so I felt like I couldn’t really give it more than 3, because its value is dependent on a load of other, better stories. But that value is there. And as a context-bonus for the rest of the Culture novels? Great!

Banks also remains a great story-teller, with the wry humour delicately woven through a story that touches on a lot of important themes of obsession, grudges and unwillingness to see the other point of view. As with all of his SF novels, he remains able to make a Point without having to fetch his Moralising Hammer – you never feel lectured to, but the point is still clear as it permeates the story, as is the ideal way. Obviously there are times when subtlety isn’t a virtue, but here? Absolutely, and Banks is the master of it. There are also great hints and foreshadowing moments that only become clear on rereading, or on reaching the end of the book, because they haven’t been signposted all to fuck, and instead of hitting you around the head, leave you with a vague feeling about things, the source of which only becomes clear later. I love it.

It’s made me really look forward to rereading The Player of Games, and it was an easy, pleasant, speedy read that gave me a load of exposition on a universe I find fascinating. Sure, the main character is a shit, but you can’t win every time.

It’s also reminded me I really need to get round to reading some of his work without the M. Every time I pick up one of his books it sucks me in… so I should keep doing that.

9780553292817-uk

Somewhat unrelated point, but the Culture novels are one of those series I can’t really imagine with any other covers than the ones I know. They’re really simple… and really soothing somehow. They’re nothing special at all, and yet. And then I go looking for an image to use for the post and I find this monstrosity. It really is quite hideous. That font alone…

 

*Nearly 11 years… my god…

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The Electric State – Simon Stålenhag

Posted on 31/07/2019 by Roseanna
94bbc429b239455d6e6ad8ed94bd57ff433e

It’s even got that realistic-yet-fantastic feel of Dinotopia’s art…

I only came across this one because it’s been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, which the boyfriend has been reading nominations for. As it turns out, the Clarke nominees, at least this year, are vastly more interesting than either the Hugos or Nebulas, so I possibly made errors in which award I decided to read. This may change my plans for next year; we’ll see. But anyway, having listened to someone enthuse about them all as interesting SFF books, it definitely made me want to have a go at pretty much most of them, but this one was particularly enticing because look at that cover… The art is weird and beautiful, and it immediately smacks you with the nineties flavour of it all, while also cutting straight to the full force of an SF landscape. It’s also the size of a full on coffee table book, though maybe not quite as thick.

It’s also not exactly entirely a graphic novel. Which is intriguing. It’s more a short story with heavy illustration, reminiscent of the Dinotopia* style of book (although for grown-ups and less OMG DINOSAURS, alas). The illustration panels are far more just scene-setting and background than they are plot devices. They supplement the words, rather than being an intrinsic part of the narrative. And yet they are an intrinsic part of the book – it wouldn’t be the same at all without them, and they’re what give it is atmosphere and a lot of the feel of the setting. Not only are they gorgeous (they really are) but they so perfectly capture the stylings of the nineties while incorporating elements of futuristic tech. It’s not exactly cyberpunk – it doesn’t feel crowded in enough for that – but it’s that sort of flavour. Yet there’s a hugeness and an emptiness to the whole thing, a feeling of a world that once teemed with life and activity being slowly abandoned, that is almost entirely conveyed visually. You know things from the story, but you feel them from the art. And it’s really wonderfully balanced. The pictures draw you in, seeming at first to be just vast landscapes, just a background, but the more you look, the more you see clues about the story within them. The more they give you extra information, as well as the scope that words don’t quite manage to convey.

The story follows a girl making her way across a ruined American landscape, searching for something. On the way, she narrates parts of her life, her parents and foster parents, as well as what happened to make the world the place it is in the book. We see abandoned robots, empty cars, the bones of giant ships as well as the motels and drive-throughs necessary for a long journey through the desert… but with adverts and signs made strange by technology that never was.

I suppose in some ways it is a coffee table book. It’s not got a strong, driving pace to push you through on story. It’s more slow, thoughtful and eerie by turns, a haunting view of something that didn’t come to pass (but might yet).

And yeah, there’s a definite amount of commentary on current stuff going on. It’s hard not to take the central immersive technology that diverts people from living their lives as anything other than a manifestation of anxieties around social media and heavy internet/mobile usage in general. But it doesn’t come across as judgingly didactic, rather an exploration of what could be.

I’m making it sound quite vague and airy, which isn’t entirely fair. There’s definitely a central plot going on, with a background line of the narrative that led up to the plot we’re following, but what I enjoyed about the book was so much more about that atmosphere and subtle exploration, that it’s that I’m focussing on.

That being said, you don’t really get much of a sense of characters. You know what the protagonist thinks and how her life has been, but you don’t get much of a feel for her as a person, rather than just snapshots of things that have happened. She feels just as distant as the landscapes, just as lost, and for all that I’m pretty sure it’s deliberate, it severs you from much of a real, human connection to her. It didn’t make enough of a loss for me, but I can see it being a problem in a longer narrative, or one less driven by feeling of place.

All in all, it was a satisfying experience, more than it was a read. I’m very glad I came across it, and would definitely seek out more by the author. It has the feeling of something to read on a quiet day, looking out of the window with a cup of tea. Something to appreciate when you have the space and time to sit and think and look, not hurry through. Also it is faaaar to chonk to read on the tube.

*God I loved those books. I surely have my copies around somewhere; I wouldn’t have got rid of them. They were so pretty.

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Magic in Ancient Greece and Rome – Lindsay C. Watson

Posted on 31/07/2019 by Roseanna

35c35bae69782ad779e4f921febfc2aaHow the hell do I review an academic non-fiction book? I mean, really though. Because it fails on a lot of the metrics I’d normally use (it hardly has a compelling plot, after all) and well… it’s just so much of a different thing. And I’m not an academic – I haven’t anywhere near the awareness of the current literature to review it in a proper academic way. I’m just someone who likes reading about witches and Romans. Possibly this is where my intention to review everything I read trips up a little bit. This probably doesn’t need a review. But when have I ever felt the need to change my plans simply because they didn’t survive contact with reality? So it’s probably going to be another short one.

Fundamentally, this gave me what I wanted, which was “info on magic in Ancient Greece and Rome”. Full marks for fulfilling the brief and accurate labelling. Maybe minus a few marks for the title not being a pun name, but what can you do? Everything else is bonus, because I now know more about the topic, which was the desired end result. And the amount more I know is about the amount I’d have wanted for the size of the book, and I have bibliographies to link me to further reading should I so desire (I do).

In terms of writing… well, it’s an academic book. It’s not designed to be easy to read. It wasn’t deliberately convoluted and I could follow it fine, but we aren’t gunning for a clear narrative here. It presents the information in a logical progression, it clearly follows through and signposts what it’s doing well. It’s not using ridiculous language to make itself sound smarter… though I did have to look up two new bits of vocab. They were quite technical words though. In my defence. Also I’ve already forgotten them, which doesn’t say great things about my information retention.

The main thing though? It was really, really interesting. Reading about the real magical practices of a period is a great contrast to reading the mythical magic narratives either of that time or inspired by it (the book does also draw on literary evidence to link in, which was nice), and I am mainly enjoying it as a tool for further thinking when I’m reading examples of magic in subsequent fiction, and the way that magic may (or may not) link into religious practices. I’m surprised more fiction doesn’t draw directly on what we know about the reality of magical practice in the ancient world, frankly. Especially when so much of what is written manages to feel too simplistic or abstracted, why not draw on the actual history as a way of grounding your narrative and making it feel more plausible and more… authentically messy?

Most importantly, it’s left me with more questions and more things I want to read about, especially to link it up with stuff I already know (if anyone has any useful info for the links between/actual transmission of magical/ritual practice between Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece/Rome please tell me because I would read the heck out of that). So yay.

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Paper Girls Vol. 2 – Brian K. Vaughan

Posted on 31/07/2019 by Roseanna

paper-girls-tp-volume-2-graphic-novel-1802985_1024x1024It’s probably been a bit too long since I read volume 1 – I am not 100% sure I could have given you a plot summary before I started reading this one – but it worked out ok in the end. Luckily it’s the sort of story that signposts back to the previous stuff quite a bit, so I felt like I’d been clued in, more or less, as I went. Also it’s just quite pretty. That makes up for a fair bit.

But no, all was well. The story made sense, even with my hazy recollection, and it just remained – because I do remember this bit – just as enjoyable as the previous one.

That being said, the main draw is more the dramatic art style than the plot, exactly. It’s just really, really lovely to look at. Especially the colour-scheming – the general skew towards the purple/pink end of the spectrum is really attractive, especially in the big dramatic wide-view scenes. The way the weird future tech is portrayed is also gorgeous, and the contrast between it and the setting is wonderful.

Which isn’t to say the plot is bad. It isn’t, and I need to buy the next volume to find out what the heck is going on. Which is kind of why the art is possibly more of a draw – it still feels very much at the early plot stage where all the pieces are being laid out, and I don’t feel like I can really have a valuable comment on… any of it until we get some more answers. I need to know how things play out before I can say how well done it is (or isn’t). If it does all come out well, it’s done a great job so far at playing out a mystery in small pieces, giving us just what we need to keep wondering but without leaving us so baffled there’s no point. But there’s that waiting for the penny to drop feeling that means I’m not… quite sure yet. I have faith, but that’s not the same as being proved right. We shall see.

I do love how female centric the story so far is. Obviously all the protagonists are young girls, so there’s always going to be that focus, but so many of the other characters drawn in so far have been female too. Sure, plot reasons. But I like that they’ve made a plot that caters to that. Especially one where it’s about some girls having a plucky adventure, and that’s… it? It’s the reason I wanted to like Lumberjanes, because it fills that niche. As it happens, it felt too young for me, which was a bit sad, but still. It’s also the reason I’ve been enjoying the new She-Ra. Ok no, that’s also massively nostalgia. But there’s a particular style of girls having adventures story that I really do enjoy, and if there could be more of those with a grown-up skew – not full kids or YA? That would be super. This is filling that niche for me, and as long as the plot continues to be passable, and the art beautiful, I’ll continue to be sucked in just for the blissful escapism.

I should get back to reading Squirrel Girl, now I think of it…

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Space Opera – Catherynne M. Valente

Posted on 28/07/2019 by Roseanna

space-opera-9781481497503_hrTHE HUGOS ARE VANQUISHED. I HAVE CONQUERED THEM. Look upon my toil ye mighty and wonder what the fuck I’m doing with my life. Jesus Christ this was a bad one to end on. I knew I wasn’t going to like it, I always knew… but I had underestimated quite how spectacularly shite it was going to be.

As I imagine you can guess from the front cover, the concept is “space Eurovision”, with the bonus fun twist of if the loser is a newbie, their civilisation gets wiped out. Not spoilers at all, humans are the newbies. Hijinx ensue. And you might think “huh, that seems quite a Douglas Adamsy sort of a premise, it could be quite funny”. And on some level, you may indeed be correct. Certainly the author is trying very hard to write like Douglas Adams. And there are a lot of puns, both Eurovision themed and otherwise.

Yes, there’s a “but”.

But… think back to Hitchhiker’s, right? And think back to the really funny bits, when Adams goes off on one, and does a weird little bit of exposition, sort of orthogonal to the plot, where you learn about the quaintly hilarious ways of people from a particular planet. That encyclopaedic tone while conveying nonsense information. Those are your laugh out loud moments, because they’re a bit… unexpected. You’re not quite sure where it’s going, and it lifts a story out of the mundane and into the absurd. Now imagine the /entire book/ was written in that tone. The whole thing. Without ever letting up or pausing for breath or giving you even a moment of honest-to-goodness just some plot happening to carry you from one “comedy moment” to the next.

Those quotation marks are doing a lot of work, I hasten to add, because it’s only tenuously comedy. Part of the problem with it being unrelentingly trying to be funny is it somewhat dims the actual comedy value of the enterprise. But it’s dimmed a fair bit more by trying too fucking hard and coming up short. She ain’t Douglas Adams. Please someone tell her to make her stop trying.

That being said, honestly, if that sounds like your cup of tea? Godspeed my friend, but this review is not for you. I absolutely accept that for some people, this will be absolute catnip. But those people are emphatically not me, and I feel like you’ll know if you’re one of them. So feel free to check out now, before I baffle you with my desire for occasional pauses in the puns.

But yeah, not for me. Humour is really really hard to explain or describe. It takes a large chunk of what’s good away when you start to dissect it, and a lot of it is super situational and contextual in any case. You need to know the right number of things, or hold the right sort of opinions, or have the right sort of experience to be the correct audience for whatever thing… and even then it might just not be to your taste. You might prefer watching people fall over instead. In any case, while I don’t feel entirely qualified or capable of dissecting on a deep level the nuance of the humour going on here, I do think it’s an easy thing to see that you do need some pauses between things to make the jokes work. You need contrast. If something is trying to be funny by being unexpected and absurd, it doesn’t work if it keeps happening so you keep expecting it.

And then of course, there’s the problem that I’ve read Douglas Adams… so I kind of know how this joke goes. And we all know ruining the punchline is a problem.

But aside from the unfaltering barrage of absurdism and punning, there’s a deeper issue going on, and one that did leave something of a bad taste in my mouth as I was reading. Valente is being very flippant, that’s very much part of the point of what she’s doing. It even does the dark humour thing, making jokes about bad stuff because better to laugh than cry and all that… except… she’s not quite landed on the right side of the line. And again, it’s a hard thing to perfectly explain or delineate, but some of the jokes, the ones about genocide and so on… didn’t quite manage it. There were several teeth-sucking moments of “really… you went there? really??” that mean something has definitely gone awry. I’m not talking about the premise – for all that the idea is about humanity being entirely wiped out if they suck at singing, that bit actually at least lands – but there are a couple of comments here and there about why humanity sucks (the usual “look at x thing we did in history – we don’t deserve to live” that is relatively stock in trade for SFF) that sort of… pick the wrong thing, and just do it that bit too clumsily. And then there are the “comedy” foreign accents. Yeaaaaah. I realised I just pulled a face as I was thinking about them. They were Not Good, let us say. Not Good At All. Which is really annoying because I’m led to believe some of the appeal is having those characters be from non-WASP backgrounds and the relatability so… could we maybe have just tried that little bit harder to get it out of 1950s sitcom accent territory?

I suppose I should talk about the story as well, but there’s not much to say. Whatever you’re assuming the plot is? Absolutely. Yes, that’s how it ends. It is 100% predictable but it’s not trying to be anything else. It’s not here to be a clever plot. It’s here to be cute and funny and that’s what made it, for me at least, so utterly punchable.

Likewise, the characters are far more joke vehicles than they are human beings. They’re massive caricatures, because they need to be for the sake of the absurd tone it’s striking. And the aliens – while being suitably actually alien – have that reductive quality that Adams had too, where he felt the need to assume universals about sentient life, especially when it came to character traits. Sure, it’s meant to be funny, but if it’s not done well (and here it’s not) it just seems a bit… well, is that it? Is that all you could manage? Everything’s a bit samey, and rather than coming across as a Point, it just feels half-arsed.

If nothing else, reading this has reaffirmed that I should absolutely not reread The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as an adult, as it’ll annoy me no end, and let’s not spoil any happy childhood memories here. I mean, I reread it as a late-teen and it was “ok I guess, still funny in parts” and if that trend has continued? Let’s just not, eh?

But also just… in and of its own self, even leaving Douglas Adams out of it. It’s just not very good. It’s trying very very hard and that is part of the problem. It wants so very very much to be funny, won’t you look at it, please, pay attention, look, look, it’s doing a cartwheel, isn’t it sweet? No. No it isn’t. Please go away.

A sad way to end a frankly tragic series of Hugos, my final rankings stand thus:

  1. Revenant Gun – Yoon Ha Lee (this basically isn’t going to change)
  2. Spinning Silver – Naomi Novik
  3. Trail of Lightning – Rebecca Roanhorse
  4. The Calculating Stars – Mary Robinette Kowal
  5. Record of a Spaceborn Few – Becky Chambers
  6. Space Opera – Catherynne M. Valente

I didn’t quite hate any of them as much as I’ve managed to detest some of the worst ones in previous years. But aside from my top spot? I barely give a shit about any of them. The average is just so low, and I know there was better fiction out there last year than this. I know Yoon Ha Lee won’t win, so in absence of that, I’m guessing Trail of Lightning will take the top spot, though I wouldn’t be surprised if Novik managed it either. If the thumbscrews were administered, I’d eventually admit I’d live if either of those two won. Any of the rest? Jesus Christ it’s a shitshow.

I might read the Arthur C. Clarke Award next year instead…

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