Paul McAuley, "War of the Maps" (2020)

The blog tends, not by design so much as the sheer cumulative pressure of stuff—what we might call the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the world of commercial SFF programming, vis-à-vis ‘good versus mediocre’—to the Negative Review. This, I know. More: I’m reading a dumpertruckful of fantasy as the moment and there’s a danger that this blog will sag into a swampy, snarky monotony as a result. So let’s break that monotony. Let's talk about a novel I read recently I really rate.

I am, I should say before going further, a hard-core McAuley fan. Part of that is, I think, a simple admiration for his technical skill as a writer: he has a marvellous sfnal imagination, writes very good prose (his default style is deceptively unshowy, but it packs a significant amount of artistry and evocative sleight into its hand), structures his stories well—never too rushed or over-busy, rarely too slow—and sketches character deftly and compellingly. But part of it, as with any writer a reader really groks, is personal. I happen to like very much the way McAuley blends aspects of SF pulp melodrama with what (for want of a better phrase) I’d call a literary sensibility. He articulates certain recurring fascinations, and in some cases recurring images, that happen to really resonate with me, for who-knows-what reason: dogged plodders and Odinic antagonists, secret sharers, strange biologies, iterations of loss and withdrawal, particular refractions of London and some other, I think closely related, refractions of fairyland (some of these latter surprisingly austere). Art is sometimes highly personal like this, and that’s fine. What lands with me may not with you. It might be interesting to try and pin it down a little more precisely—interesting for me, I mean—but then again I’m not sure I do want to murder to dissect, actually. We’ll see. Where we are at the moment is that he’s one of those authors (it’s a smaller list, for me, than you might think) whose work I buy automatically, all of it, as soon as it comes out.

Which brings me to War of the Maps (2020). This is a Big Dumb Object novel that is, I presume by design, (a) relatively lean (400 pages or so), (b) smart rather than dumb, and (c) much more about subjectivity than objectivity. The BDO here is an unusual Dyson sphere built around our sun but in the far future after sol has become a white dwarf. The sphere is constructed at that radius where the sun’s gravity pulls 1g on the outside surface of the structure, and here, illuminated not directly but by networks of orbiting mirrors, is where the characters live. It’s a vast topography, of course, although mostly given over to a ‘world ocean’ in which continent-sized (and smaller) islands, known as ‘maps’, are located. The ‘maps’ terminology is also used to refer to the inhabitants' various gene-lines, which some of the inhabitants of this BDO are skilled at editing. Anyway: the original, godlike builders of this world have long since abandoned it, and its myriad ordinary inhabitants are living with a series of mundial delapidations, not the least of which is a kind of quatermassian ‘red plague’, a ‘tailchaser virus’ that rewrites biological forms in monstrous and spreading new forms. The story is hung on a central thread: a lawman, known as the lucidor, has come out of retirement to track a dangerous criminal—another of McAuley’s charismatically deranged geneticist wizards, this one called Remfrey He—through foreign lands. The first two thirds of the story or so follow the peripatetic, episodic adventures of the lucidor; the last third brings the story to its denouement at the (extraterrestrial, or extradysonic) source of the plague.

Like many major artists, McAuley returns over and again with a kind of creative obsession to certain types, or tropes, or images. His bibliography is divided broadly between far-future space opera, and now-or-near-future-thrillers, with the occasional alt-historical or environmental standalone dropped in (he’s also written a few non-sf thrillers and procedurals). War of the Maps revisits his Confluence trilogy: not in the sense that it’s set in the same world—it’s not—but very much in terms of vibe and focus. This is not a criticism. I consider the Confluence books, taken as a whole, one of the very best works of 1990s SF. Confluence is a trilogy, and so, in its briefer compass, is War of the Maps: it’s three parts are, respectively, a sort-of Western, a war story and a weird sea-story Treasure Island retread, into which is mixed, as I noted earlier, a Conradian Secret Sharer narrative.

The lucidor tracks across this strange world and has various adventures. Some readers might find the pace over-leisurely, but I think it’s right, since it gives the Les-Misérables-from-the-cop’s-POV narrative just the right amount of time to accrue the needful momentum for the ending to punch its weight. McAuley is an old hand when it comes to providing his reader with artfully suggestive glimpses of his larger world, and some of these were definite highlights. Not that it all comes off, I think. Inhabitants of these maps have various, if mild, X-Men-mutation-esque powers (Remfrey He, for instance, has the ‘silvertongue’ power of rhetorical persuasion; the Lucidor’s power is also an X-Men staple, the power to damp-down other characters’ powers) but this aspect of the story isn’t entirely developed or integrated into the larger whole. The huge ‘alter nests’, filled with plague-mutated humans living ant-like lives shorn of higher brain functions, make for some striking and memorable biogothic set-pieces, but there are also quite a lot of sub-James-Herbert giant crabs, which spooked me rather less. And although the slower pacing here didn’t bother me, it’s not always easy to hold a radically episodic plot in a larger shape. More, there seemed to me something slightly, well, blurred about the representation of the lucidor himself. He’s an older man, a widower, determined and dogged, and that determination and refusal to give up not only powers the plot but drives the denouement—well done, I'd say. Sometimes the novel has him as a kind of Clint Eastwood, or perhaps more a Mike from Better Call Saul, figure, which works fine. But sometimes he is a rather different, less outward character: more a figuration of grief as such, somebody internally locked down, often affectless except for his one driving shard of determination to go onward (man, to quote Thom Gunn, you gotta go). This, I think, is better, and not entirely miscible with the elderly action hero version of the character.

And if I had to call it, that’s what I’d say War of the Maps is really about. McAuley has been eloquent about grief in several of his earlier novels; he can write that condition from the inside out, and do so expressively, movingly, never over-playing it. It seems to me, for all that his novels often contain whizz bang outward-urge space operatics, that McAuley's peculiar genius is for loss: an affinity for that which is passing, a sunt lacrymae rerum particularity. His real interest sits, I think, in a strange lagrange point between a fascination (evident in his life as an academic biologist) with the bursting fecundity of life, and a fascination with entropy, actual and metaphorical. In that sense War of the Maps does have a different centre of gravity to Confluence: that earlier, and I think greater, novel is about things flowing together; this new one is about things falling apart, the centre struggling to hold, and the anarchy of losing that which matters most being loosed upon the world. It’s about the edges of maps, about here-be-monster liminalities as a trope for being old and alone and facing the end. It’s a fine, powerful novel and easily the best thing I’ve read in 2020. So far.

Maria Lewis, "The Wailing Woman" (2019)

The fourth in a series, this: ancient societies of werewolves, witches, vampires, demons etc cohabit secretly with regular humans in contemporary Australia, a sort of What We Do In The Shad-Oz, though, obviously, not as funny. I haven't read the first three, and so cannot comment on their quality (they might be Tolstoy for all I know); but I have read the fourth, which concerns banshees. The screaming of these folk causes destruction and death, and so they were all transported from Ireland to Oz long ago: ‘they came on six prison ships, fifteen hundred women … they were brought out thin, pale, smelling like piss and shit. Some of them were wearing a Scold’s bridle’ [53]—the latter detail to prevent them doing their terrifying and fatal scream, you see. The descendants of these women now constitute a kind of Untouchable caste in modern Oz, working with the dead in funeral homes and cleaning-up blood-soaked crime scenes and so on, since it is with the dead they have their magical affinity.

There's a precipitously steep hierarchy in magical society, and banshees are low down, though not so low as vampires (‘loathed, nasty cat-like creatures ... they were considered below ghouls, which were part of a lower tier of supernatural creature that didn't have any kind of cognitive behaviour or quantifiable intelligence’). Anyway, our heroine Sadie has her throat mangled as a girl to stifle her banshee shriek; but when she is grown-up she falls in love with the sexy son of the man who undertook that mangling, a geezer called, with some improbability, ‘Texas Contos’. Their true-love-not-running-smooth narrative involves much running around, secret-uncovering, some gore and ick, and a quantity of jovial, sweary, matey bantz. This latter is the novel's default, really.

As fable, this novel is saying something about the subaltern voice: about the many Celts pitilessly banished by Anglo imperial power centuries back who have now made their own antipodean realm in Sydney and like cities (‘fuck you, England!’). It's also, clearly about gender, and is amongst other things a story about the patriarchal desire to silence women, to impose procrustean standards of behaviour upon them, and accordingly of the elation channelled by women refusing to collaborate with that mode of oppression (‘fuck you, men!’). As Lewis announces in her afterword, utilising here as throughout the book her rather haphazard vernacular: ‘thank you to all the IRL wailing women out there, the otherworld sisters and what not. This book is supposed to be about finding your voice and using it, so hopefully that's what you take away from it.’ Fair enough, and what not. Commendable, even. But my hesitant male voice burbles on nonetheless, in a manner that inescapably indexes patriarchy, of course, and can accordingly be discounted.

The truth is my cliché-geiger-counter continually sputtered and fizzed as I read this novel, as eyes ‘lit up’, as events ‘took her breath away’, as they saw one another ‘in the flesh’ and were ‘proud as punch’, as ‘her blood ran cold’ and so on. Indeed so much was this a case of and so on that my cliché-geiger-counter blew its fuse somewhere around page 100 (‘Sadie hated silence: she loathed it with every fibre of her being’ [107] may have been the final straw).

My problem is presumably mine alone: but cliché means stereotype, and stereotyping is precisely the problem with sexism, as with racism and other such prejudices in which human specificity is overwritten and human individual potential shut-down in favour of a caricature and generalised stock-image, a collective negative cartoonification. This is a novel with its heart in the right place, no question. The thing is: novels are not made out of heart. Novels are not made out of feelings, or vibes, or righteousness, or bantz, or even out of stories or characters or imagined worlds. Novels are made out of words. If we wish to challenge the bigotry of stereotype in such a medium, surely we need to work as hard as is necessary to avoid stereotype when we put those words together? Make war on cliché on the level of style and form, as well as on the level of content? No?

No? Well alright then.

The consensus does run the other way nowadays, I suppose. Not only do readers (who, as you can see on Goodreads, adore this novel) not mind cliché, they actively embrace it. Much of the appeal of this book, I'd guess, is its vibe: of having fun with your mates, danger and love and excitement: Sadie's sisters and friends, and of course the adoring Tex, whose physiological reaction to arousal is almost as improbable as his name (‘he gripped the fabric of her dress, his pulse racing so fast he worried his Adam's apple would burst out of his throat’ [209]). The gang are here to ground the protagonist's adventures (which is to say the p.o.v. character's—which is to say, our—adventures) in a mileu of supportive camaraderie, and the thing with friends is that they are familiar, that we're comfortable with them, they are the relationship correlative of cliché.

Perhaps readers don't want a style that ‘gets in the way of’ the things they hope to extract from their book-reading experience. Maybe there's an Oz aspect to this too (though I run the risk here myself of stereotyping, I know) that prefers straight-talking, even if it errs on the side of the stale, to fancy-pants up-yourself pretentiousness. That values a common touch over fine writing. Either way we're talking about an attitude that sees the actual stuff of novels, words cast into sentences, sentences assembled into blocks of text, as impediments to the story and the character and the Feels, rather than seeing the story (and the feels) as radically shaped by the particularities of the words the author chooses. I daresay I'm the one out of kilter on this. I should lighten up. I wouldn't want to get so worked up that my adam's-apple bursts out of my throat, certainly.