The Poppy War – R. F. Kuang

Posted on 14/04/2019 by Roseanna

the-poppy-warThis one’s not going to be spoiler safe, I’m sorry. I didn’t like the book, but there’s no real way for me to explain why I didn’t without spoiling some fairly major plot points (and indeed, the ending).

Equally, I’m going to be discussing some deeply unpleasant and upsetting stuff that happens in the book, so trigger warnings for genocide and rape here too.

So… there feel like definitely three sections to the book. There’s the first third, which is an incredibly by the numbers kid-goes-to-fantasy-school one. And it’s not even well done. There’s no tension around her getting there, even in the places that are crying out for it. She decides to take the very hard test, to escape poverty and her horrible family. She revises very hard. And then she passes the test and does the best at it in her whole province. And that’s… it? Yay? So off she pops to the Best School, where she gets mocked for being from a peasant background. So far so tropey. There’s the one person who stays her friend anyway, and there’s the one guy who hates her because she punched him, and he rallies all the other posh people around him to hate her. If you think this sounds like the start of The Magician’s Guild by Trudi Canavan, you would be 100% correct. And indeed, one of the teachers really likes her (because she’s smart and works hard) and one hates her (because he’s a massive snob). It’s so… so tropey. It’s not even trying. I was speaking to another friend about it, and his take is that it’s a carbon copy of the first part of The Name of the Wind, and yep, that’s true too*. It’s just. There is literally nothing about the story arc in the first third that is anything other than painfully predictable and familiar. And sure, those stories we named that it’s copying? They’re well-regarded (ish)… but they’re better written than this is. Rin, the protagonist, doesn’t really get much of an internal life, let alone a rich one, and her relationships with the other characters are skeletal at best. I enjoy The Magician’s Guild because I enjoy the people in it. This… there’s not really anyone with enough of a personality to connect with.

Oh and then of course there’s the wise but crazy guy who ends up as her mentor, but doesn’t pay attention to students unless they interest him in some way.

We then switch to the middle section which is, y’know, a middle section**. It gets you where you need to be, via “look, isn’t war grim and awful”. Yeah, thanks book, we know. It doesn’t honestly give you that much other than laying the foundations for various plot reveals in the third section.

And then the third section is where shit really goes down. And I don’t mean that in a good way. So, it turns out our protagonist is one of the last two members of a people wiped out by the Muganese (pseudo-Japan) in the previous war. She and her comrade who’s a few years older are the only survivors of this genocide. Now Nikan (pseudo-China) is at war with Mugen again, and they are witnessing the atrocities committed against the Nikara people by Muganese soldiers. We see time and again these terrible acts of war, and listen to the characters say that the Muganese aren’t human, they’re just animals, they’re not really people, they have no emotions, they’re just a machine, a hive mind… it goes on. Which every time is portrayed as a really valid response to witnessing absolute atrocities, including a thinly veiled copy of the Massacre at Nanjing and a vivd description by one of Rin’s classmates of her own rape at the hands of the enemy soldiers, and the murder of another girl, pregnant at the time, and the dismemberment of her baby ripped from her womb by the commander of the Muganese. She tells stories of what happened to other girls, including those who were mutilated to accommodate their rape. Everything is told graphically and brutally.

Which leads the protagonist and her colleague to make a decision to unleash supernatural forces against their enemy. They’re captured and tortured along the way, but eventually, Rin reaches the point where she can commune with her fire god and it agrees to grant her a request. She requests that it destroy the entire island of Mugen, which it does by awakening a dormant volcano and obliterating everything in a violent, enormous eruption. We see this from her and other characters’ perspective in a very direct comparison to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mushroom cloud and all. We have several in depth descriptions of how the Muganese would have died, including the children.

The main problem I have with this is that the story has taken pains every step along the way to make you feel this is in some way justified. At the very moment, it questions it a little, but you’ve been going hand in hand with Rin so long, and been told so many times by the story that the Muganese “aren’t human”, that the story is clearly setting you up to feel that this is somehow justified. Rin herself even uses a justification about the number of deaths making them not even deaths anymore… just a statistic. And I can’t go along with that. I cannot sit along with a story that wants me to feel justified in genocide, whether for revenge or to end a war or for any other reason. I just… no.

I have other objections, about the relatively poor writing, the terrible characterisation, the ridiculously tropey beginning, the way I could predict from fairly early on all the major plot “twists”. But they’re not the reason I dislike this. I dislike it because the author has done a poor job of handling something that could have been done more carefully, more impactfully, and instead left me upset and uncomfortable with what the book seems to have wanted me to feel, and how it seems to have trivialised genocide for mass consumption. I’m in no position to comment on how a character should feel about any of the events Rin lives through in the book. I’m just not. But I think any person is in a position to comment on how the narrative seems to be skewing to make you condone something like genocide.

No. Just no.

Current Nebula rankings:

1.
2.
3.
4. Trail of Lightning – Rebecca Roanhorse
5. The Poppy War – R. F. Kuang
6. Witchmark – C. L. Polk

Theoretically, I can imagine something slotting in between 4 and 5 there, because there’s a bit of a gap, but I’m frankly hoping 1-3 will be conveniently filled by books I super enjoy. I fully anticipate Witchmark remaining in bottom place because it’s just quite shit. I’m happy with the gap between 4 and 5 being my benchmark though… anything that’s above it, I won’t be upset if it wins.

*Come on, fantasy novels. Can we do better than this please? Can we stop having every magical school narrative follow the exact same formulaic path all the way through? Please?
**Friend tells me this section is also super tropey if you’re familiar with Chinese history. I am not, but I’m gonna trust him on this one.

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Trail of Lightning – Rebecca Roanhorse

Posted on 14/04/2019 by Roseanna

71g2j9ij73lThings can only get better, right? In this case, yep, absolutely.

For a start Trail of Lightning has some actual substance to it and achieves a proper story with a normal pace and characters that are actually characters. This shouldn’t have to be a bar to cross for the Nebula Awards, but that is apparently where we are this year, so it’s worth mentioning that this one clears it, no questions.

In some ways, it’s an interesting one for me, because I both was quite interested by it, but also quite bored with it. Not to the level of Witchmark at all, but for all that some of it is interesting, unusual or new to me, the fundamental plotting isn’t particularly doing much work to go beyond normal fantasy trope arcs. But then the setting and the characters are interesting, so it’s going a bit both ways.

The book follows a monster hunter in a post-apocalyptic other world, where climate change has ravaged the Americas and Dinétah (the former Navajo reservation) has broken away as a separate country to protect itself and its people. But in this new world, the monsters – and gods – of legend have returned, and need to be dealt with by people with particular skills. Maggie is our protagonist, and has exactly the sort of harrowing past you’d expect from someone who hunts monsters from a job, and so her story is part adventure and mystery, but also part confrontation of her own demons and history.

You see what I mean about that tropey plot, hm?

The characters also do start out fairly flat and uninspiring, but as the plot develops and you get more information, they do flesh out and grow into more realised people, and I at least certainly started to feel sympathetic towards them, even if I wanted someone to roll their eyes at Maggie at some point. By the end, I was definitely invested in how things turned out for everyone.

For all that the plot is pretty tropey too, it’s well paced and relatively well written, so I was ploughing through it at a fair pace. It’s not interesting writing, or anything that makes me want to spend time pondering the use of language and rhythm, but as workmanlike prose goes, it’s doing its job just as well as it needs to do. If you want your novel just to tell you the story and no more? It does that.

The interesting bit, for me, is the setting. But that’s because it’s a setting and a mythology I’m coming too with no prior knowledge. And that’s great – it’s brilliant not to deal with the same old same old every single time – but it means I don’t have the expertise to assess it on its own terms. Is it good at being Navajo mythology? I have no idea. Is it good at being a solid setting for a fantasy novel? Ok, that one I can weigh in on, and absolutely yes it is. My ignorance never felt like a barrier to enjoying it, but nor did it dwell on educating me about things that were taken for granted within the world. I like my books not to patronise me, generally speaking, and to trust that I’ll be able to follow along and pick up what I need to pick up as I go, and this absolutely does that. There were no convenient exposition characters who existed only to explain why such and such a god was annoyed with whoever. When those bits came up? They came up naturally, well-integrated into the storyline and without feeling like they were added just because the author needed to make us understand.

I suppose this book occupies some of the same niche for me as the Night Watch series. A lot of what I was getting from it was “ooh, Navajo myths”, rather than “this is a good story”. If you’d told a similar story with myths I already knew? I think it’d be kinda boring. And I’m not saying I think this means it failed, or not exactly, but it means there was more it could have given. The Night Watch was fascinating because it was urban fantasy in a totally different setting, even though the fantasy itself wasn’t super innovative. Here is the same just with monster hunting. So I’m slightly torn on how I want to feel about it. It’s doing a good thing by being not the same thing as everything else, and I definitely appreciate it on that level, but part of me thinks that shouldn’t be enough, not without doing more to make the story itself more… something.

Over all it was… interesting but fundamentally both unsatisfying, and an end of the genre that I am not particularly interested in. Its world-building was brilliant, and the setting a lovely one, but at its core was a story that could have been more than it was.

It was, still, however, leaps and bounds better than Witchmark. So, current standings are:

1.
2.
3.
4. Trail of Lightning – Rebecca Roanhorse
5.
6. Witchmark – C. L. Polk (I’ll be surprised if something else is so bad to knock it off the bottom spot)

Next up, The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang

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Witchmark – C. L. Polk

Posted on 10/04/2019 by Roseanna

36187110._UY1119_SS1119_ (2)And onto the Nebulas!

The nominees for this year are:

Witchmark – C. L. Polk
Trail of Lightning – Rebecca Roanhorse
The Poppy War – R. F. Kuang
The Calculating Stars – Mary Robinette Kowal
Blackfish City – Sam J. Miller
Spinning Silver – Naomi Novik

For once, I’ve read none of them before, though of course I have read Uprooted by Novik. Coming into it, the latter three are the ones I’m most interested in, with Blackfish City being the unknown one that could go either way. I figure I’ll probably like Spinning Silver – she’s good, she knows how to write myth, it’ll be fine – and then the premise of The Calculating Stars is pretty solid.

On the flip side, the premise of Witchmark seems pretty meh to me, people whose opinions I trust didn’t like The Poppy War and while the setting of Trail of Lightning looks interesting, it sounds like the actual story is going to be fairly pat monster hunting. I could be wrong. Sometimes it happens. But even so, we’re starting with the one I thought I would enjoy the least.

And it did indeed turn out to be crap, so at least I am a good predictor of my own tastes.

It’s not just that it’s not a very me book (it really isn’t, my god it isn’t). It’s also just so… insufferably twee. And juvenile. And clumsy. It’s so hardcore first novel in the worst possible way. The writing is clunky, the plotting is all over the place, the author’s clearly distracted by how pretty the love interest is (which I super don’t care about) and assumes that you can substitute dramatic Feelings for actually having an explained setting or solid plot (nope). So all in all, a pretty poor start.

The book is set in fantasy pseudo-England, around the time of the fantasy pseudo-First World War. Which means it’s not steampunk, but it has a lot of the hallmarks of what I don’t like about the genre. First and foremost – please, for the love of god, can Americans stop writing near-parody levels of twee British historical settings? It’s painful to read. Or Canadians, in this case. I know you love Mary Poppins, guys, but can you just contain yourself and not have to have everything be so… quaint and cheesy? I spent the entire novel in a half-cringe. It’s not about getting historical details right – after all, it’s not an actual historical novel – it’s about the tone. And there’s something abrasively children’s-film-about-to-burst-into-song-and-dance-routine about the whole thing. As if My Fair Lady were a historical documentary to use as source material or something. I just can’t.

It also sort of deals with the horrors of war and shellshock but then… magic-ises them, which I feel somehow detracts from actually dealing with it in any meaningful way. It’s a hard thing to do, building that kind of real-world suffering that’s still close to living memory into your work, and it can easily go wrong. I don’t feel like it hit the mark here at all.

Outside of the setting, the story is pretty pat fantasy trash. Nothing happens that I was remotely surprised by or interested in, and for all that the pacing was terrible, you pretty much saw everything coming in plenty of time to be slightly bored when it actually happened. The characters too are pretty much your trad fantasy nonsense, but not particularly well-drawn ones, so there’s very little substance beneath the trope. Someone has a dark secret? Oh noes! Whatever will he do to keep it hidden?! The tension, there wasn’t. Some of them are frankly so inconsistently portrayed, they feel more like avatars of plot progression than anything remotely resembling a person at all. And so it’s all just dull, dull, dull.

I suppose I got through it pretty quickly? But that’s only because I didn’t care. I didn’t need to take any of it in. I’ll be winning if I’ve forgotten it in a few months, because it’s taking up valuable brain space that could be filled with something more useful, like facts about moss, or thinking about why sizes of infinity are ridiculous, or how much I hate Robin Hobb. You know, the important stuff. I suppose the most accurate and damning summation I can give is that it wasn’t even worth hating. I’m not angry at it. There’s nothing to be angry at – it’s this substanceless sham of a novel that doesn’t deserve anyone’s praise because… well, there’s nothing there. It does nothing we haven’t seen before better, worse, more interesting, more charming, more insightful, more idiotic or more memorable. It’s like someone took the average of all the crap fantasy books and then rubbed the corners off. It’s… mush.

So yeah, good job me, starting with the rubbish ones. Fingers crossed it gets better from here.

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Ghost Wall – Sarah Moss

Posted on 10/04/2019 by Roseanna

81nayjmvlplI’d been looking at this for a while but not got round to it, so when it turned up in the Women’s Prize longlist, it was the kick I needed to actually get round to reading it.

Good decision all round that one. My only problem was, it was so good, I kept not reading it until I could find a time to sit down and fully appreciate it, rather than stopping and starting. It’s just so wonderfully, beautifully written. It’s only a small thing, just 152 pages, but it is absolutely packed with emotion and resonance, and it stretches far outside itself to pull you in to something more. It is expansive and discursive, all within the realms of a tiny, concisely told story… it manages to imply worlds of meaning. It conveys huge layers of emotion and development in a simple word or a look from one character to another. A sentence is left to tell you everything you need to know about a person’s history, and do so beautifully. It is what short fiction is made to be.

The story follows Silvie, a young girl whose abusive father is an amateur archaeologist with an enormous class related chip on his shoulder. They’ve ended up spending a summer doing “experiential archaeology” with a university professor and three of his students, living the lives of bronze age Northumbrians. But there’s tension between the professor and her father and the students, and the issues of class, of privilege of gender and power dynamics come up again and again, bringing it all to a crescendo of oh my god what. We also see echoes of a girl sacrificed to the peat bog by her people in the long ago, woven into Silvie’s story.

I think what’s most impressive is how much it’s managed to do in so few pages. Moss manages to draw compelling character portraits in the smallest moments, and so give you a great sense of the whole in one scene, one action. And then Silvie, whose perspective we follow, gets such a depth of character and soul, that you almost feel you’ve read a much longer novel. Her mixture of fascination and resentment, and even disdain, mixed with something like obsession, for the students, and one in particular, are fascinating and beautiful to read, but also incredibly resonant with the teenage experience of new people, especially those just that bit older, that bit cooler. The divisions of class make and mar their relationships, leaving gulfs of incomprehension that neither side can bridge, simply because they don’t have the foundations on which to build it.

I suspect some of the appeal is also how deftly it plays with ideas of class, the north south divide and social anxieties around it all. And well, those are themes that are not only going to resonate with me, but leave me divided – that torn-ness, not being able to find a “right” and “wrong”, at least ideologically, is really really engrossing. Moss clearly has a great feel for those tensions and foregrounds them hard, because they are hugely important themes, and ones that do permeate things like history even now, and definitely intensely so when the book is set. And when you combine them with the gender themes, the power dynamics, it’s a book set in the past that is still so very now.

It’s a high bar, and one I don’t use lightly, but I honestly think I might describe this book as perfection. There’s nothing it doesn’t do well. It’s short, brutal, vivid and sweet, full of teenage longings and vast, yawning gulfs of newly understood differences. It’s deeply rooted in a lot of British things that go… not unsaid, but not as discussed as maybe they ought to be, and it has that rare and wonderful quality of being no longer than it needs to be. So I’ll take note and do the same with my blog post.

Read it though, you won’t regret it.

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The Raven Tower – Ann Leckie

Posted on 02/04/2019 by Roseanna

51dm2wd-wzl._sx323_bo1204203200_Oh my god.

I mean, after reading the Ancillary series, the bar was set pretty high for Leckie. And when I found out she was doing a fantasy novel… it was both thoroughly exciting, and slightly daunting – she’s clearly amazing at SF… can she do the same for fantasy? Turns out, yep, she can. She absolutely can.

If you read the blurb, it doesn’t, on the face of it sound like anything super innovative. And in many ways it’s not. But, as I’ve said before, you can either be new or be good, and she’s decided to lean hard on the latter. Very hard. And there are bits of new scattered throughout, while the larger scale drive isn’t anything necessarily desperately innovative. But the smaller parts layer together to make something wholly wonderful and unique, as well as taking the narration in an entirely unusual direction.

We follow Eolo, narrated in the second person, who is the aide to Mawat, the heir returning home to find his father missing and his uncle on the Raven’s Seat. He must work out what happened to his father, and try to regain his position, and we watch all of this through Eolo, who is doing most of the work, and the thinking and the investigating. Meanwhile, we get snippets of the history of a god of the world, telling us about the distant past.

The joy of the story is how Leckie marries up these two threads, laying the foundations and trailing the hints to let you piece things together for yourself, all the while creating a beautiful, brilliant world and exploring it for you from the beginning and the present at the same time.

The whole thing is an absolute joy, but the part I’m going to focus on is the mythological angle, because it’s something that is so often done badly in fantasy, so it’s great to see someone handling the concept of the divine really well, and especially doing so without heading towards same old same old. And it’s a problem that is understandably difficult to write around – how do you write a plausible story in which your gods are immanent and physical, visible and present in daily life in a tangible way that informs the very nature of your society? Where the will of the gods is not complex or unknowable, but delivered in possibly quite clear terms by the god themself? And it’s easy to go badly wrong, especially in the ways that it affects the portrayal of organised religion and belief. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is a great example of this done badly, because it goes so simplistic. It builds in no space for humanity in the complexity of how it views its ideas. It assumes because the gods are simple, black and white, that the human sphere of their power will be that way too. Which seems to go against how humans work quite dramatically, at least in my opinion. And then there are the countless examples of what I like to think of as Greek-myth-lite, where you have a pantheon of a simple number of deities (around the 12-ish region commonly, but not too far either side if not), where each god has a clearly defined role and sphere of influence, and it’s all neatly and evenly divided into who does what, with one story told about how it all came about, and everyone believing in the same gods doing the same things, or maybe with one wacky sect with a different view (possibly that someone is/isn’t evil that everyone else thinks t’other way around) and that’s… it. And not only is that so fucking boring, but it abandons this hugely fertile ground for interesting stories. For conflict, for misunderstanding, for tension and politicking, for just understanding the nature of how humans work, in the great complexity of the stories that have existed in the world on that topic.

I mean, if you take actual Greek religion, and look at how it changed and evolved and conflicted and shifted, how things varied region to region, god to god and time to time. And then you compare to some of the stories that are just those myths with the names rubbed off? It’s awful. And of course, in one novel, you cannot expect the full depth of a real, living tradition, but you can expect so much more than what we usually get, and more importantly, you can expect someone to get the spirit of the thing right, to understand how it interlinks with political power, social change, and find in it a crux of an idea that works, even if the necessities of storytelling force a simplicity out of it.

And that’s where Leckie has come in.

I don’t want to talk too much about how it develops across the span of the narrative, because I think that would take a lot of the joy out of discovering it as a reader, but I will say that the way she tells the story of her god in its early days, and its relationships with the people who worship it and the other gods they worship is wonderfully refreshing. Is it simpler than a real tradition of religion would be? Sure. Of course. But by telling it about one single god, and focussing just on their perspective, while having them know about the vastness of what else was out there, you create that required simplicity while acknowledging complexity. And the way she displays the traditions of reading omens are lovely. But more importantly, her god story is just… different. I’ve not read something like that. It made me think and wonder, and want to know what was going to happen next. And the way it related to humans was fundamentally plausible, just as much as the way they related to it. The reverence, the fear and the belief were laid out, and joined together in the way the society worked to make a coherent whole.

It also helps that she told this story over the long long span of a god’s life, so you got to see the change and progression over lifetime after human lifetime, as well as getting the snapshots within a human lifespan from the Eolo-perspective story. Again, this allowed for that nuance, that change and development that makes me believe it, rather than the flat and lifeless monoliths you get in a lot of fantasy. Leckie gets it and I love it.

Outside of that nugget of pure joy, I can find no real fault with anything she does. Her characters are just as lovely as the ones she made for Ancillary, and they live in a world with social issues and pressures, just as they did there. She is a great teller of worlds, giving us the richness of a backdrop we need in the tiniest of throwaway details, and making the reader realise how much of that richness is often absent. For her, it isn’t just about the story, it’s about embedding it in its context. And the fact that the story is beautifully told too? Awesome. The pacing is wonderful, gathering and swelling at the speed it needs to without feeling rushed, but still able to deliver the gut-punch twist moments when it has to, and have that absolute momentum to keep you interested.

As soon as I started reading it, I struggled to put it down, and I wish it could have lasted longer because it was a joy. After the Ancillary series, I was already sold on Leckie a hundred times over, but this has convinced me all the more. Whatever novel she puts out next, I will pre-order it, in the certain knowledge that it will be something worth reading.

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The Girl King – Mimi Yu

Posted on 30/03/2019 by Roseanna

41dvwuv5q4l._sx329_bo1204203200_Another bit of trash I picked up on a whim. I think it was just that kind of month? I looked at the cover and went “yes, I know what this is going to be”, and so I picked it up to read, and it was what I expected. People who say not to judge books by their covers don’t understand how marketing works.

The book follows two sisters after the death of their father, the king, and the change in planned succession from the elder to her male cousin. It’s a story about coming of age and political struggles, with a hefty dose of magic chucked in. And more importantly, it’s a story with some decent, varied characters to latch onto to make the (relatively predictable) narrative worth following along. There’s nothing about it I found particularly new or innovative, but it was good at doing what I wanted, which was to be distracted for a little while by something I wanted to keep reading. And the setting is pretty good too. It’s doing fantasy pseudo-China, which is a nice break from pseudo-medieval Europe.

We primarily follow the elder sister Lu, the eponymous Girl King, who was promised to ascend her ailing father’s throne after his death, despite the protests of ministers who want a male ruler. When this decision is overturned, she has to fight first with politics, then through war and magic, to try to regain her throne. She’s accompanied by a boy from a tribe that was destroyed at her father’s hands during a war in her childhood, who also gets some chapters from his perspective, with whom she needs to find some sort of accord to try to work together and overcome her (somewhat caricaturedly awful) cousin.

But there are also flashes over her meek little sister Min, who needs to survive at court while Lu is busy fighting for her throne, and is forced to struggle with her torn loyalty to her sister and her mother.

All three characters have something to give to the story, and the author balances them well, so you never feel like you’ve wallowed too long on one story before moving on. She doesn’t feel the need to split things evenly, instead giving us more of Lu, and only punctuating with Min at the moments where she’s needed to make the story flow well – which feels like a really good decision. Early on in the story, Min is relatively less interesting than the others, so only coming back to her at crucial moments gives her story more feeling of movement than it might otherwise have. In comparison, Lu’s story is the one with a real driving movement to it, so focussing on her gives the overarching story more of that pace.

That balance also means the relationships between them work better – the characters spend a lot of time apart, but they’re linked by the time they spent thinking about one another, and their reflections of each other keep that connection going across the plot.

Outside of the characters and their relationships, there’s not a whole lot I’m into. The setting is good, but not super well explored. The plot is… fine? But not interesting, it’s the same old vaguely political turmoil coming of age. It’s not done badly, but I’m not stunned. But I picked this up wanting fun escapism, and that’s exactly what it delivered. So I’m not mad at it.

It’s not exciting, it’s not new, but it’s fun and easy to get stuck into, and that’s what I wanted.

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The Familiars – Stacey Halls

Posted on 24/03/2019 by Roseanna

The FamiliarsI bought this on a whim, really. Not actually because it was pretty (though it really rather is), but because it felt exactly like what I wanted to read at that moment – escapist, female-focussed, historical and a little bit dark. I wasn’t expecting it to be the most cutting, insightful and emotionally deep thing I’ve ever read… and it wasn’t. But it was a page turner, and escapist, and I started reading it and suddenly where did the time go, why is it dark outside?

And hey, the premise did appeal to me. It’s set in Lancashire during the witch trials, and follows a lonely young woman who finds herself in need of a friend, but the one she comes to is under suspicion for witchcraft herself, and they must rely on each other to get through. It’s female-led fluff that focusses on women supporting each other in spite of the nonsense of men, with a possible withcrafty background, and I am very much here for that. Is it an insightful critique on the politics of the witch trials? Nah. Is it very much eye-rolling the men who surround the main characters? Hard yes.

The characters, for all that they’re kind of why I’m here for it, aren’t particularly deep. The protagonist is a young, rich wife without much in the way of life experience, and… well. She’s not got a rich internal life, for sure. She’s pleasant, and tries hard, and is doing her best for the people she cares about… and she definitely gets better throughout the novel. What she mainly is is entirely sympathetic and an easy view into the world. It’s easy to follow along with her, easy to agree with her trust/mistrust of people and her desire for justice but her powerlessness to achieve it. I doubt she’s 100% historically authentic but I don’t really care, because it was just Nice. Her friend is likewise… not particularly well-explored, but you can’t help but feel for her and her situation.

And well, it’s a bit of history I’d like to see more novels set it. Especially more novels focussing around the experiences of the women of the time. This one isn’t someone suspected of witchcraft herself, but that in many ways is part of the charm – she’s as much an observer as we are, and narrates her discovery of what’s going on to the less-knowledgeable reader with easy grace, and no clumsy hammers of exposition to be found. Likewise, her youth and sheltered life give her cause to ask the questions the reader wants an answer to readily, letting her learn with us, giving us an insight into the fraught religious and political situation of Lancashire at the time.

And the plot is gripping enough. It hits all the right notes, paces itself well and delivers what it needs to deliver come the time. No, none of it is particularly innovative or groundbreaking. but what it does, it manages perfectly well, and above all readably.

Interestingly, this book reminded me of one of the questions that comes up in the book club question list – did the characters speak in their own voices, or in the voice of the author? And it’s because the character speaks so clearly in her own voice that I think I enjoyed it so much. We inhabit her mind readily, and her hopes, fears and determination, and that’s what really makes good trash for me (which this is). Something where you can ride along with someone, totally absorbed in their story, for a little while, and step away from yourself. That it did admirably.

If you want a fantasy novel about actual witchcraft, this isn’t for you – it leaves mainly unanswered the issue of how much the accused witches actually can tap into supernatural powers. Because it’s a book about women’s struggles and relationships, more than it is a book really about the witches and their contested witchiness. But it’s a very good backdrop for what it’s trying to do.

All in all, a solid bit of good trash I was very happy to read, but don’t go into it expecting anything more than a nice time-filler. Would definitely recommend as book to take on holiday.

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Dreams Before the Start of Time – Anne Charnock

Posted on 10/03/2019 by Roseanna

517qmg8qa3lWhoops! I forgot I read this first. In my defence, it’s kind of tiny (and I think I was part way through The Familiars when I read it, just so I’d be in time for Book Club).

That said, for something so small, it has a lot going on. It’s not a book of a driving single plot to carry you through the life of one or two characters. Instead, it’s a series of interconnected vignettes exploring ideas on a theme – how will reproductive choices change as we progress, generation by generation, into the future. It’s one of the few novels I feel like I want to tag with “speculative fiction” instead of “science fiction”, precisely because it is just there to speculate, to throw out ideas and muse on them, and then move on to something new. It’s not giving us answers, or deep explanations, it’s not about the science. The science is simply the means to begin the thought, the prompt for the rippling out of social change, idea change, conflict and introspection. Because fundamentally, this is a book about people and their interconnected lives, and how those lives are touched by the choices each generation makes.

I liked it. I liked it quite a lot, in fact. Not least because it is so refreshing to see SFF about reproductive technologies – it’s an area of life already massively touched by science, and one that has had huge social impacts in my lifetime (and still is having). It’s the frontier of the intersection of science, ethics and religion. You would think it prime territory for truly thoughtful, philosophical and indeed speculative fiction. But hey, them’s women’s issues, much less interesting than spaceship battles, right? It’s no shock to discover that Charnock has been a science writer for the Guardian, and I think this is part of what makes her portrayal of the science going forward so successful, as she understands it the way someone writing for a newspaper needs to – how does this affect our lives, right now? She asks that question, again and again, constantly drawing it back to the little moments of people’s day to day existence, in a way that grounds it so closely into reality, even as it marches onwards into the hypothetical. And that again is why I liked it so much, it focuses on those people. Those real transitional moments in people’s lives. And then it comes back to reexamine them a generation later, and again and again, showing us what the future thinks of our current choices, shows good decisions made rash and thoughtless by the march of progress, all through the lens of genuine personal importance. And again, reproduction is a fantastic vector for a story like this, because it is always intimate and personal and vital, whether for the good or the bad, and touches on all lives in some way or another.

Her characters, for me, are well realised and plausible, some I like and some I don’t, but drawn in the quick strokes of someone needing to give you all you need to understand a person in a short space of time. They are snapshots, because they need to be, but for me they were good ones. Some of them are terrible people, and there’s no questioning that, but they form a necessary counterpoint in the ideas of the book; it feels like Charnock is triangulating around each thought, seeing it from all the different angles as well as across time. But whether good or bad, they all feel real, with real problems, and she’s picked each snapshot well to showcase the personalities quickly and effectively. I also just connected with several of them instantly on an emotional level.

It’s a small book, so it cannot, by necessity, dig down into the deeper issues presented by each change in technology, but I think that’s a feature, rather than a bug. It keeps it from focussing too hard on the intricacies of the science, and forces the focus to remain on the human angle, which is sometimes a perspective SF… likes to forget about. And I just… I like caring about people, and the effect of societal change on each level of human interaction. I don’t really care about the science itself, most of the time*, beyond a passing thought of “ooh, that’s cool”. I care about what the science does for the people, the plot, the relationships and the knock-on effects. And this is caring about precisely that. Can we have more of it please?

I’m really glad I read it, and I hope Charnock keeps writing like this, as precisely this sort of social focus is what I think SFF needs more of. If I see something else by her, I’ll definitely seek it out. It was also a great book club book, sparking a really interesting discussion, and a great book to read for jumping off onto your own thoughts about what the future might bring.

 

*Embassytown is a notable counterexample… but that’s because the science there is linguistics. And even then, it’s not just about the science.

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Lies Sleeping – Ben Aaronovitch

Posted on 28/02/2019 by Roseanna

51qitffamplSo the thing about the Rivers of London books is, they’re just… funny. As in actually hit the right comedic notes at the right time with a sort of offbeat humour, and it helps that some of it is about Latin grammar. Whatever else they do* (or don’t do), with plot or characters or setting or what have you, they make me laugh out loud while I’m reading.

But, that being said, much though I enjoyed this one, I’m glad it felt like the end of the series. It seemed to be trailing a bit when it came to stringing a proper plot together. It was still good – I still gave it a 4 on Goodreads – but the cracks are starting to show. Both in terms of it starting to feel repetitive – we know the characters and how they are and what they’ll do, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to chuck them into truly “new” scenarios – and also, conversely, in that we keep getting hints that Aaronovitch wants to move on – he’s setting up the successors to Peter and Nightingale and Walid, and I find it much harder to latch onto them than I did to their originals**. It’s a weird position to put the book in, and it’s sad, but also good. If this truly is the end of the series, it’s probably for the best he’s drawn it to a close at a natural point.

So, while it was never going to be a stellar read for me, the inertia of joy I got from the series as a whole is still strong enough to see me through it doing the same things it always does, but again! Is it still deeply embedded in London and its actual geography and place? Why yes, this scene is set in the pub I play D&D in every week! And likewise, they reference the Temple of Mithras under the Bloomberg building, which I have visited***. It continues to be an excellent way for someone who lives (or has lived) in London to get a sense of authenticity and current-ness on the whole thing. Sure, it’ll probably date it tragically too, but I’m reading it now so I don’t mind.

In a similar way, the plot is still, as my mother would say, a ripping yarn. It’s fun, it’s an adventure, it pulls you along with it with ease and grace, it gets you involved in the characters and their lives and motivations, without bogging down the pace with minutiae.

And yes, I do still love the characters (*cough* Nightingale *cough*).

But it’s… stopped being as exciting precisely because it’s just same old same old? It’s not got the problems of A Foxglove Summer thank goodness, because different can definitely be bad, but… I guess I only want so much of the same good thing, and that so much is drawing to a close here.

I think, if I were to evaluate it as a series as a whole, I’d say it was a pretty successful one. It only really has one dip in quality, it’s managed a distinct arc that takes it from first to last book, and it makes sure to resolve most of the plot points that evolve throughout the series without resorting to bullshit final book hand waving to carry it off. It feels like a planned and completed work in its entirety, as well as in individual snippets, which is nice to see. It’s also one I feel will have a lot of re-read value for me, and will keep on giving the same joy when I come back to it, because it keeps its value not just in surprise and suspense, but in doing the thing it wants to do well and gladly, and above all, making it fun.

And I think all that is why I think of this as the best example of urban fantasy, the first that always springs to mind. The Dresden Files can go suck a dick, frankly, in comparison, no matter how they might have got there first.

Now to wait 18 months and discover that this isn’t actually the end of the series, and I look a massive ninny because he’s gone off writing the adventures of Abigail in novel form or something. I hope not. It feels like he wants to go do other things. I’m honestly not sure I’d seek out anything else he wrote, as I’m not sure he’d be able to grab me in the same way again. I’d probably give them a go if nudged, but I think this series manages to fill a weird niche of not feeling like I like it because I like what the author has done, but more feels like the author has coincidentally tripped into this great idea that fitted the time and place I encountered it perfectly. Yeah, he didn’t mess it up, which is great… but some of what’s great about it isn’t… it. It’s context. And that isn’t really tied to the author at all. In the same way I have zero desire to engage with the works of JKR outside of Harry Potter – she captured a moment with that, and I think seeking out anything else she’s written would burst the bubble Harry Potter occupies. Though being capable of viewing the internet where JKR has been is also a problem for that, alas.

Still, capture me it did, at the right moment, in the right mood, and I’m glad I’ve now seen it all the way to the end… short stories aside, of course. Because there’s always that tiny bit more.

Next up, I read a historical fiction about women living in Lancashire during the witch trials and struggling through difficult pregnancies. Because CHEERFUL.

*Important warning re: bigotry in the books. There’s a definite hit of transphobia in I think book 2 or 3 in the series (can’t recall which right now) and that has resurfaced here. It was a throwaway line, but it was definitely there and I was truly hoping someone had told the author to… maybe not… and he’d learnt his lesson. I know that was a sticking point on reading the series for some, so if that’s you, yes, it’s still there, avoid.

**He doesn’t seem to have a succession plan for Postmartin, so I can still maintain my happy daydream of that being my job to take over.

***It’s a really well curated little mini museum, by the by. I would strongly encourage you to visit; they do cool things with technologically-assisted exploration of objects and fancy-ass lighting. I do love an immersive exhibition.

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The Furthest Station – Ben Aaronovitch

Posted on 13/01/2019 by Roseanna

furthest-stationAll the previous Rivers of London books, I’ve read pretty promptly after I was made aware of them. But when this one came out as a teeny weeny novella… it still cost loads in hardback compared to the number of pages you got, and I was Stubborn, so I’ve only got round to reading it now that someone has kindly let me borrow their copy. Which came with a warning that the contents weren’t a direct sequel to The Hanging Tree, and were kind of orthogonal to the plot generally. Which was, indeed, very true.

That wasn’t the main issue with it, however. The main issue is that it is actually just too small, and you’ve got what could very nearly be the plot of a whole novel squidged down into a novella… a fairly slim one at that… and so by necessity a lot of the connecting the dots and so on is skimmed over and it just doesn’t hang together very well. Like, the idea is great. But I got to the end and was sort of hazy on how various bits actually related to each other, because you never really got shown exactly, or not in the nice, comprehensive way you do in the full novels. And I kept thinking of more bits where I’m not really sure where it went… threads that just led nowhere. It was really quite unsatisfying.

That being said, I did still giggle a couple of times. It hasn’t stopped sounding like Aaronovitch, even if it is half-assedly cobbled together.

So the idea is, ghosts have been showing up on the Tube, freaking people out, then disappearing from memory. Peter Grant wants to know why. So far, so mystery, so normal. And it does proceed as normal. We get some collaboration with the BTP, some Grant-esque thinking outside the box, some in depth descriptions of London landmarks with a side order of side-eye for the realms beyond the M25. But that’s kind of where it stops being good. Because the seeming is all there, the feel of a Peter Grant novel… but once you get to the bit where the action starts to happen and they start to unravel the mystery, it all falls apart because there just isn’t the space in the book to do the work to tie it all together. We’re talking about getting to a bit of the reveal and me going “wait, what, when did they join those two up?” and having to skim back, and honestly still not finding it. Like, I can figure it out by implication, but it’s just not there. And the resolution, even if you’re happy to rest on implication to get there, isn’t all that satisfying either. It’s all a bit too… convenient coincidences.

So I don’t really see why he made it a novella? It’s not like the publisher is going to refuse to let him do another book at this point, is it? I mean, case in point: Lies Sleeping. So why is this one a short? Layer it in with some background hijinx and it could totally have made a whole novel. The only reason I can think of is that it doesn’t tie in to the Faceless Man plot arc, and so he felt he couldn’t have a whole book taking you away from that storyline. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but if the result is so… unsatisfying… I’m not sure it’s a worthwhile logic anymore.

It’s not that I object that it’s a tangent from the plot – I would have been happy with a book of “some other stuff happens” and accepting that. It just feels like there was a whole novel and chunks have been ripped out of it for the sake of expedience, and we’re left with this bleeding ruin that doesn’t have kidneys or a ribcage anymore.

Which makes me a little concerned for the other novellas he seems to have planned.

The internet tells me there’s one going to be about What Abigail Did On Her Summer, which, cool, could go either way. There’s one about whatsername the American liaison, which, again, cool. And then… and then… there’s one about magic in Roman Londinium and one about Nightingale. And I genuinely made an embarrassing squeaky noise when I found both of those out… so knowing how badly this came out makes me genuinely worried about them as novellas. I admit, unashamedly, to absolutely adoring Thomas Nightingale as a character, human being and general dispenser of Latin grammar based shade… so for the love of god don’t give him a mangled novella. It’d be like taking Good Omens and making a tv show out of it, but giving the guy playing Aziraphale hair that looks like they dunked his head in a bucket of bathroom bleac- oh wait shit. I forgot, the world is a terrible, terrible place.

Maybe I’ll wait until someone else has read the Nightingale novella before I touch it. I’m all for writing scathing reviews (honestly, they are more fun, and definitely easier to write) but I possibly don’t want anyone to see the level of anguished emoting I’d get about Aaronovitch fucking up Nightingale. Or Romans.

Possibly I need to rethink my priorities in life. Who knows.

Anyway. I’m glad I read this one, if only in a completionist sense, but it really is a shambles of a book. I’ve got Lies Sleeping on the go next, and it at least so far looks like we’re back on form in terms of writing a coherent narrative and filling in all the plot holes with community policing and forms filled out in triplicate. Fingers crossed things stay that way… and that he decides actually Nightingale needs his own full series of seven books or so… ideally where he solves crime in a cosy and historical manner. A girl can dream.

 

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