Ark

Ark cover “If the answer’s not the one you want, maybe you’re asking the wrong question.” So says Patrick Groundwater, one of the multi-billionaire founders of the Ark One project. His mantra is taken up by others during the development of the spaceship that Patrick and his compatriots hope will offer some of humanity – specifically, their children – an escape route from a drowning Earth. Patrick’s daughter Holle, in fact, uses the principle to ask the question that leads to an essential technological breakthrough. A reader, meanwhile, faced with the answer that is Ark, might struggle to find the right question. It’s not the question that ended the book’s predecessor, Flood – “What is Ark Two?” – since although that question is answered, Ark’s primary focus is Ark One. Yet nor is the question as simple as, say, “what happened next?”

For quite a long time, in fact, the question appears to be “what happened elsewhere?” Flood made it clear that, beyond the launch of Nathan Lammockson’s absurd ocean-going Ark, other projects were afoot to save some remnants of humanity from the inexorably rising waters, and indeed, one of Flood’s rescued-hostage protagonists, Lily Brooke, handed over the daughter of a friend to the Ark One project specifically. Ark reprises that scene for its opening, from the point of view of the daughter, Grace Grey, but then, rather than taking off at a tangent to its predecessor, the novel flashes back to 2025 – not too long after the start of Flood – to spend 200 pages detailing the preparation of the ship and its crew. This can feel a little familiar. There is not, for example, much room within the chronology of the flood for different kinds of stories than the ones Flood covered, with the result that Ark necessarily recapitulates some of Flood’s key notions (most notably the destabilising effect of the steadily increasing flow of refugees from drowned areas into any remaining sanctuary) and partakes of the same urgent tone.

And in the context of Baxter’s work as a whole, even the foreground is not as new as it first appears. In place of Flood’s adult characters, harried from place to place, Baxter here focuses on a group of children growing up in the closest thing to a safe haven left in America during this period. But the sun around which their lives orbit is the Ark: that one of the children sits around reading Heinlein and Niven points to the tradition this novel is in dialogue with, I think. Ark is an Engineering Project novel, and bears plenty of comparison to, say, Voyage (1997), or perhaps more significantly, given the apocalyptic context, Titan (1998). It’s a more American sort of novel than Baxter has written for a while – certainly more American than Flood, which was, for all its ostensible globe-trotting, unashamedly a very British apocalypse; here, a President frames the Ark project, and survival, as part of America’s Manifest Destiny. At the same time, this is not to say that Ark is hard sf, and in fact it comes complete with an honest-to-god Star Trek-style warp drive, to carry the Ark along in a bubble of spacetime, and enable the plot to be completed within a single lifespan. But its themes are familiar from the earlier novels — the tensions between military and civilian interests, and between science and politics as a necessary cost of any large-scale space effort; the intense training programmes, which are in a significant sense literally inhuman, and which unignorably deform the humans who pass through them.

Ark can be a sternly utilitarian novel. To fuel their project, for instance, the masters of the Ark trawl the pool of refugees – “It’s astounding the talent you can filter out of the flood of displaced” (34) – and those who get picked up in such drags, such as the engineer Liu Zheng, are under no illusions about their position. “You’re more than a commodity,” Patrick tries to tell him. “More than a set of skills.” Zheng’s reply is chilling in its bluntness: “Am I? None of us is anything without land, Mr Groundwater” (40). Much is also made of the motivating power of a central mission, of not so much the potential of humans working as part of something grander than themselves, but – once again – the necessity for it. “We are not looking for the outstanding individual,” Holle Groundwater is told. “We are looking for a crew” (63). As with Zheng, the emphasis is on individuals demonstrating their value: Holle, aged six when we meet her and in her early twenties when launch day finally comes, is our primary viewpoint in this section of the novel, but it’s by no means certain that she will last the course. We stay with her as the Ark project is taken over by the rump of the US government, as the somewhat casual but relentlessly intellectual training programme is replaced with something more sternly militaristic, as knowledge of the project becomes public and she and her peers become the last celebrities – but also as people she has trained with her whole life are gradually winnowed out of the crew selection process. The psychological consequences of such a life are, it seems, inevitable.

Jonathan McCalmont’s review of Ark argues that its essential familiarity should be balanced against Baxter’s “seemingly ever-increasing control” over his material. There is something to this. Without question, many parts of the novel are vivid. A shuttle-crash training mission is interrupted by an incursion of “eye-dees” – the refugees not authorised to enter the polder – who are scared off when one candidate, Don, starts cold-bloodedly shooting them down. And there’s a good, if brief (probably too brief) interlude in which Holle experiences life beyond the walls of the project, as one of the faceless millions of refugees. And if much of Ark’s first half feels mechanical – as in the murder-mystery plot that, when the long flashback is over, seems to have been inserted only to give Grace a narrative excuse to get to know the main Candidates – well, you might say, Baxter is often a mechanistic writer, deliberately so, and in his best novels that suits the material he’s working with. In Flood, the plot is as remorseless as the rising water, and the most notable achievement of Ark’s first half, perhaps, is to convey a sense of the mundanity of the Ark project, its fundamental grubbiness. We’re told that “The Ark was an expression of dreams, as much as logic” (83), but for 200 pages, even as the story sweeps towards the launch, and the flight plan becomes ever more delightfully unlikely, that dream is mired in much of the worst of petty humanity.

I’m less convinced by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro’s argument that the paralleling allows for a satisfying “aesthetic of symmetry”. Indeed, between the recapitulation of Flood and the echoes of the “NASA trilogy”, the questions the first half of Ark answers seem to me to be rather unsatisfying ones, to the point that when launch finally comes – in frantic, well-described scenes, although ones that are again reminiscent of earlier Baxter, in this case the novella Mayflower II (2004) – and the Ark soars free, it might be a blessed relief.

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He deliberately steadied his breathing. He turned, looking back the way he had come. And there were Earth and moon, hanging in space, visible now that the pusher plate eclipsed the sun. […] He held up his thumb, and was able to cover both of the twin worlds. In the first few days, as they had looked back at the receding home planet, they had all been shocked by how little land remained. Even Colorado, which had seemed so extensive when they were down there living on it, was only a scatter of muddy islands, threatened by the huge curdled semi-permanent storms that stalked the ocean world. But from here he could see no detail.

They had already come so far. (203)

Characters in Stephen Baxter novels are fond of remarking on how poorly humans, as a species that evolved on African plains, are adapted to life in space. But I think there is a sense in which humans-in-space is a natural focus for Stephen Baxter’s writing. The sparseness and directness of his style captures something of the all-alone-in-the-night situation of an ape on an interstellar voyage: takes the shock experienced by Wilson Argent in the above quote and makes the reader feel it as well. And the dysfunctions of Baxter’s characters – which loom as large in Ark as they ever have – seem an appropriate response to the vast concepts those apes must wrestle with. Jokes about shits-in-space aside (although, somewhat surprisingly, I don’t recall a single space-toilet scene in Ark), I can’t think of another contemporary sf writer who can so compellingly describe, as Jonathan puts it in his review, a sense of alienation in an empty universe. “They had already come so far”; but they have a very long way to go.

Which is to say that no, of course the launch doesn’t offer any relief. Not for nothing do the characters speculate that what they’ve built is merely “a prison in space” (276). The claustrophobic, crisis-riven atmosphere of much of the second-half of Ark is in an important sense merely an intensification of the atmosphere of its first half — the “bubble of safety” (60) that Holle recognises she grew up in becoming a literal bubble, the seeming-impossibility of the warp bubble shooting them off to the stars. No wonder that they turn inward, huddle inside the two counterbalanced hulls of the Ark (Seba and Halivah, named, we are told, for great-grandsons of Noah, though “Havilah” is consistently misspelled). What is in some undeniably literal ways “a whole new experiment in human affairs” (261) is, in other ways, the same-old same-old. Factions spring up in the aftermath of the chaotic launch – gatecrashers, illegals, Candidates – which quickly harden into prejudices and, crammed into the volume of three jumbo jets, the eighty or so crew find themselves frequently at loggerheads.

The hundred pages or so documenting the Ark’s journey to “Earth II” are the best of Ark, and in many ways the best of Baxter. Along with Holle, and Grace, the most prominent crew members are Kelly Kenzie, their captain – or, as she designates herself once their journey is properly underway, with what Holle considers to be utopian optimism, “speaker” – and Venus Jennings, the sf-reader I mentioned earlier, in charge of the ship’s navigation and astronomical observation. The narrative is episodic, designed to allow us to get to know the crew in their new habitat. Baxter takes us though a day in the life of the Ark in mid-journey, from Holle’s point of view: a search for a missing child, how the senior crew deal with the seductions of virtual reality “headspace”, how they plan for crew expansion (that is: having more children), the shipboard games they play and laws they develop. And he gives us striking set-pieces, such as a fire that leads to an emergency separation of the hulls. Scattered debris sparkles prettily against the brutal walls of the warp bubble. The grip of necessity, already strong in the first half of the novel, tightens here, becoming Cold Equations bullishness. When they reach Earth II, after the best part of a decade’s travel, and find it less than the brochure seemed to promise, there is the clearest sense anywhere in the book of the most interesting question Ark answers. Not: can humanity survive? But: can it adapt?

One of the major battlegrounds for these tensions is sex. The original mission design called for a balanced crew, men and women boarding two-by-two, and a plan to maximise genetic diversity by ensuring that any given pair of men and women had only one child together. (There are a handful of gay candidates, we are told, but they’re still expected to “donate their genetic material” at the appropriate time.) After the chaos of the launch, which left some of the planned crew behind, and carried away some military and other personnel who forced their way on board at the last minute, there’s an imbalance – more men than women – which undermines almost every attempt to maintain a stable society. It may (or may not) have been clear from my review so far that, even more than Flood, this is primarily a story about women. The back cover, in fact, blurbs the novel as “the story of three women, Grace, Venus and Holle and their part in our struggle to rescue a future from the waves”; a slightly odd choice given that Venus is never as prominent a character as Kelly, but certainly accurate on the principle. Indeed the most important male characters are callous patriarchs, serial abusers, or mentally ill. Make of this, as they say, what you will; I at least did not detect any essentialising conclusions to be drawn, except perhaps the trivially true point that the sort of constraints that come to define life aboard the Ark are, across the world today, usually more familiar to women than men.

It’s at Earth II and after that Ark begins to spin apart. The crew splits: some wish to attempt colonisation, some to return to Earth, and some to travel onwards, to a newly detected Earth III. Although Baxter lets the colonists go (at least for now; their descendants’ fate is chronicled in last year’s pretty good novella, “Earth II”), he clings on to the other threads. There have been hints, it’s true, that something like this might happen – seemingly superfluous chapters about some of those left behind on Earth, interspersed with the crew’s antimatter-mining efforts at Jupiter, even a brief scene from the viewpoint of an elderly Lily Brooke – but it becomes, to my mind, a near-fatal flaw, a critical loss of focus. Adam Roberts notes that he didn’t know how the novel was going to end. I have to finesse that. I certainly had a sense of how each individual thread was going to end; to the extent that I didn’t know how the novel was going to end, it was the result of being unable to find any coherence among the divergent threads of story.

Or, put another way, in the end I couldn’t find the right question to ask of Ark. It seems too much a novel of disparate parts – not by any means all bad; but not unified. Perhaps I shouldn’t be treating it so much as its own book. It’s true that the series Baxter has written over the last decade or so – the Manifold books, Destiny’s Children, even Time’s Tapestry – follow the same general pattern, in that they eschew direct continuity even as they share a setting, and can generally be read in any order, and true that readers coming cold to Ark seem to find things to enjoy. But I can’t see the separation as entirely successful in this case. To the contrary, I start to wonder how the tale would have looked if the two novels – the one story – had been published in a single volume. I can imagine an integrated Flood and Ark, in which the overarching story is the trial of living in catastrophic times envisioned as a kind of generation starship, with each new generation raised in radically different circumstances to their parents, and thus coming of age with radically different expectations. Ark emphasises this theme in its second half, as the sense of a project the drives the first half is gradually lost, but for all its lopsided structure, without the additional context in Flood the treatment lacks weight. Now, Flood and Ark would have been a beast of a book, and would certainly have sacrificed Flood’s awesome clarity; but it might also have done some things better than either book does alone, and leave me less able to frame Ark as an answer to: “what bits of story were left over from Flood?”

Elsewhere

Or, two bits of self-promotion. First, I have an article in the new issue of Journey Planet, the fanzine edited by the Bacon-Brialey-Garcia superteam:

The direct link to the (fairly hefty) pdf of the issue is here. It’s all themed around alternate history; my piece is about Stephen Baxter’s Voyage. I’m guessing this is probably also the only time I’ll share a table of contents with Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Paul McAuley and John Scalzi.

Second, I have a review of Justina Robson’s Chasing the Dragon, fourth in the slowly-improving Quantum Gravity series, at Strange Horizons, which is probably the only sf novel you’re likely to read in the near future to contain the phrase, “he was still surprised sometimes to look down and find that he was made of cloth.”

The Returners

The Returners cover The Returners – Gemma Malley’s third young adult science fiction novel, and the first to stand alone — tells a tense, uneasy story. It may open with a too-familiar earnestness — “What is important,” Will Hodges insists, almost as soon as we meet him, “is that you never know. You never know when everything is going to change” (3) — and, indeed, it may be the case that, by the end of the novel, there has been a little more change for the better than can be entirely believed. But it would be a mistake to make up your mind about this story too quickly, I think; the revolution is at least more internal than external, and there are moments worth experiencing during which it does not seem like a foregone conclusion.

We are in the near future: to be precise, the main action of the novel takes place in suburban England between 4th May and 18th July, 2016. Malley’s extrapolation to this point is minimal. By far the most obvious shaping conceit of The Returners is that The Recession Never Ended, with the consequence that Britain is sliding ever faster down a right-wing nationalist slope. The “National Party” is gaining in power and influence, promising a government that will “work to make Britain great again”, instead of letting the country “get walked over by anyone and everyone” (26). A friend of Will’s father, a policeman-turned-politician called Patrick, takes them to rallies with queasily familiar chants: England for the English! British Jobs for British Workers! If Will’s mother was still alive, it is suggested, things may not have got this bad for this family. But she has been dead for some years, and in her absence neither Will, nor his father — a lawyer whose high-paying private-sector job was a casualty of the economic climate, and who now works for the Crown Prosecution Service – have been immune to the temptations of Patrick’s slogans. Simmering anger, rooted in fear and confusion, is a constant of their lives; and if their resentment is not exactly handled with the subtlety of, say, Ian R MacLeod’s The Summer Isles (2005), it is still grimly recognisable. Enter the plot: a Chinese youth called Yan, once Will’s friend, is arrested for stabbing a white pensioner, and Will’s father is assigned as prosecutor in what is, it becomes quite obvious, a frame job, designed to inflame racial tensions and build support for National Party policies.

While we’re worrying about all this foreground – and, to be honest, whether we can take an entire novel of a narrator as obnoxiously insecure as Will – Malley is establishing a quite peculiar background, one that makes The Returners even more claustrophobic. There’s something funny about Will’s memory. He remembers his mother, dead, “her long hair splayed out over the water like a painting” (5) – like a cliché – but not the circumstances surrounding that death. He remembers whole conversations word for word, and others not at all. He hates history lessons, not least because they give him migraines, and remind him of the terrible dreams – dreams of people suffering and dying – that he doesn’t understand. And then there are the freaks, the strangely familiar people who stare at him in the street: “haunted, sad-looking eyes boring into you, eyes that you recognise; that recognise you, except you don’t really recognise them because you don’t know them, you know you don’t – you’ve been through every person you’ve ever met in your life and they are none of them” (15).

How does all this start to come together? With the hollow-eyed freaks catching up with Will:

“Not reincarnation. Not like other people think of it,” she says. Her voice is soft but insistent. “We actually come back, Will. We’ve existed throughout time. We experience the worst that humankind is capable of; we absorb the pain, contain the horrors. We remember, Will. We are humanity’s conscience.” (134)

Will is, it seems, one of them, and in fact something unprecedented: a Returner who doesn’t remember. Hence the dreams, of Native American massacres, of slave ships, of concentration camps and of Rwanda. He was there, he is told, for all of it. He will be there for it, this time: a gathering of Returners means that suffering is on the way. Hence the visceral reaction against history; as he later puts it, “What’s the point of remembering if it just happens again and again?” (177)

So here, we think, is the twist. Now we will see Will learn about the other side of the coin. The sudden inversion of Will’s privilege seems a bit easy, perhaps, but it’s a worthy story, isn’t it? If there are no characters of colour actually on stage, as such (we have barely seen Yan, and the ethnicity of the Returners is carefully unspecified), Will’s attitudes are worth exploring, aren’t they? And if there’s something disquieting about the notion that humanity was somehow protected from the worst of the Holocaust (and the rest), well, perhaps that’s an unfortunate but unintended consequence.

We should give Malley more credit. The Returners, of course, have not told Will the whole truth, and when they do it becomes clear that we are meant to be asking all the questions listed above, and others. And if the novel’s final third is on one level a conventional broadside against the sort of lazy hands-off fatalism the Returners advocate – they insist that events are “All pre-determined, all set out like milestones on a journey we haven’t met yet” (176-7), and that “We cannot change them. Only humans can change themselves” (178) – it also becomes a rather more nuanced examination of inherited or inculcated responsibility, one that confronts the role of those who held the whip, rather than fetishises those who suffered under it. It remains a white story — a final, cathartic, plot-resolving confrontation aside — and, perhaps just as significantly, a masculine story. But it is also a story that refuses easy sympathy without refusing all sympathy, and one that presents a convincingly scary portrait of the ease with which prejudice can take root and grow, complete with two or three scenes whose intensity I suspect will stay with me for some time. The very end, as I already suggested, perhaps does take Will (and his world) too far for me: “Argue”, he tells the Returners. Argue with those “who think that foreigners are to blame for all our problems, or people who believed different things, or people who eat different food or watch different television programmes. Tell them they’re wrong. Make them see it. Force them to see it” (249). It sounds strange to hear the words in his mouth, after everything he has said and done by this point. But I wonder whether, for a few people, it might be what works.

Seven Bites of Tender Morsels

Tender Morsels cover One. Tender Morsels is not a short story. This is stating the obvious, but it bears repeating for any reader of Margo Lanagan who, like me, has had their expectations of her fiction shaped by the work collected in White Time (2000), Black Juice (2004), and Red Spikes (2006). There is a temptation, after a particularly striking encounter with a writer working in one form, to be disappointed that their work in the other form does not have the same zing of newness: to feel that, say, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl “merely” explores in greater depth a future already presented in stories collected in Pump Six; or, in the other direction, that Ian McDonald’s Cyberabad Days “merely” adds a spectrum of perspectives to the world of River of Gods. I do not claim to be immune; I feel the lure of both those opinions, though I try to resist them. And in that sense, Tender Morsels is “merely” another fairytale retold with an emphasis on the grit and grim of the real. But, you know, longer.

Two. Re-reading “Snow White and Rose Red” once done with Tender Morsels, it is a real joy to discover how clever, and how sly, Lanagan’s revisioning is. The spine of the Grimm tale – two girls, living with their mother in a cottage in the forest, have encounters with a friendly bear and a wicked, treasure-hungry dwarf – is retained in Tender Morsels. But in Lanagan’s novel, the realm in which this takes place is a secondary world, a personal heaven to which the mother, Liga, escapes from a horrific childhood in a “real” world: this is both a necessary escape, and the sort of sanitisation of reality performed by the Brothers Grimm on the later editions of the tales they collected. The bear (multiple bears, actually, in the novel) and the dwarf are intrusions from the “real” world, and eventually harbingers of heaven’s end; and, most importantly, the novel shows us the story before and after the fairytale.

Three. Lanagan remains an extraordinary writer of action, of things happening. Her language itself can create unease; it is only very carefully euphonious, far more often tending to beauty of a guttural, earthy sort, particularly in dialogue or first-person narration, suited to action and discussion. (Less suited to description and reflection, which occasionally seemed to me a weakness.) But this is not to say she is explicit. Much attention has been lavished on the first few chapters, which cover Liga’s upbringing. She is repeatedly raped by her father (leading to several forced abortions, and eventually to Branza, the novel’s Snow White); after her father’s death, she is raped by a gang from a nearby village (leading to Urdda, Rose Red). Reading about this is even more harrowing than it may sound, in part because it does not seem to be leading anywhere (perhaps because a direction would mean a hope of escape), but primarily because Lanagan writes around the terrible events so effectively. Miscarriages endured by Liga are covered (“She tried to stop the baby, but it had been poised to rush out, and so it rushed out, with a quantity of wet noise”, 15), as is the aftermath of rape (how Liga “washed and washed her cringing parts”, how “to walk was to hurt”, 47); but the rapes themselves are not. That’s left to us to imagine.

Four. The novel seems to me to be built around a series of stark contrasts, set up early in the book. Most obviously, there is the contrast between Liga’s two worlds: that defined by her father – “he had run the world for her” (37) – and that defined by her own desire. The former is a place of relentless brutality, the latter somewhere Liga can be utterly trusting of everyone and everything around her. The tranquillity of this world is equally relentless in its way, and bold Urdda, in particular, grows to chafe against it, and eventually leaves. Men and women are divided by perspective: every scene told from a man’s point of view is first-person, while every scene told from a woman’s point of view is third-person. The logic behind this division never quite became clear to me; it could be an effective way of underlining the privilege accorded the male gaze in the novel’s “real” world, but the first-person perspectives persist even when the men are in Liga’s heaven; and a mild criticism of the novel might be that we are never given access to the perspectives of the men who actually commit the worst acts. But perhaps the argument should be that the perspectives we are given access to confirm that not all men are beasts, because man and animal are also contrasted, as young men taking part in a local ritual intended to “civilise” them find themselves transported to Liga’s heaven and transformed into bears. One such is noble, the other rather less so. And so on.

Five. The final section of Tender Morsels – when both daughters and Liga are back in the “real” world – is, I think, the best, but not without its perplexing moments. There are two points in the novel at which Lanagan seems to give her characters a freebie. The first is Liga’s salvation, when she is given the means to access her heaven by a force that is never explained; if the characters were religious, it would be an act of God. The second comes in the latter stages of the book, after Liga tells Urdda how her daughter was conceived. Urdda becomes (not surprisingly) incandescently angry; it is revealed that she has magical talent; in her sleep, unconsciously, she causes five voodoo dolls to go out into the village and gang rape each man involved in her mother’s ordeal; and in the morning she wakes, unknowing, and “fresh of it all”; “Yesterday”, she says, “I thought I would burn with that rage for the rest of my life. Today – well, I have no particular feelings about it at all” (407). She acknowledges that this is “not natural”; but it still feels far too consoling. Life does not provide vengeance so clean, or so easily.

Six. Urdda’s vengeance stands out all the more because most of the second half of Tender Morsels is devoted to questioning and — partially — deconstructing its earlier dichotomies. When the family are first reunited in the “real” world, there is a sense of right finality, as though the story is ending; yet at the same time you can feel, between your thumb and forefinger, the thickness of pages still to go. And so you conclude, because you are back in the world where Liga was so abused – because that horror, as Urdda puts it, is sitting “lumped in the past … impossible to ignore” (389) – that something bad is going to happen. It never does. But the expectation leads to some scenes of almost unbearable tension, often revolving around Branza. Unlike her sister, Branza never chafed against Liga’s heaven. She is desperately unworldly; in Gwyneth Jones’ resonant phrase, a true veteran of utopia, confused by the tragic distance between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. So when she goes for a walk on her own – having been warned against such excursions by her sister – we fear for her. And, sure enough, she is menaced; yet she stands her ground, and bites one of the boys, and the rest are cowed. She walks home safely. Liga is delighted by the sight of her daughter’s accomplishment — “In some way, she had bested them; they were afraid of her, look!” (337) — but another character, standing at Liga’s shoulder, remarks that there’s nothing like being raised in heaven to give someone false confidence. The moment is punctured: we have to agree with that. And yet, Branza walks.

Seven. As Gary K Wolfe puts it in his review, the central theme of Tender Morsels is “the balance between the brutal abuse Liga herself has suffered and the overprotectiveness of the world she has made”. For Abigail Nussbaum, this leads to the novel’s major flaw: that it tells two stories, and that the morals of those stories clash:

Tender Morsels starts out as a story about a character who endures terrible injustices because she lives in a world arrayed against her, and who escapes into another world. It ends as a story about that character learning that life in the real world, though fraught with dangers, is worth more than life in a dream. The problem is that the lesson learned from the second kind of story–acceptance of the inevitability of heartbreak and pain–is precisely the lesson one shouldn’t learn from the first kind of story, which strives to elicit rage and indignation. It’s one thing to say ‘unhappiness and misfortune are the risks you take if you choose to live in the world,’ but it’s quite another thing to say ‘being made into a sex slave by your father and then gang-raped by men who think that having been impregnated by him makes you fair game is the risk you take if you choose to live in the world.’

I don’t entirely disagree with this, as the discussion above of Urdda’s vengeance – which I think can be read as existing to address the rage and indignation produced by Liga’s story, and sweep it under the carpet – may suggest. But it does strike me as risky to draw such direct morals from a novel which is, at base, about revising one of the most moralistic forms of literature there is, and which seems to me to so carefully manage the possible meanings of its events, inviting interrogation. Still, the novel has a happy ending, or something very close to it, despite the well-established darkness of the world — Wolfe writes of “a note of almost astonishing sweetness”, while Meg Rosoff describes a book that “celebrates human resilience” with “audacity and grace” — and a reader does have to be able to accept this as honest. For my part, the security the women achieve, while limited by the nature of the society in which they live, seems convenient but not tenuous. As the novel closes, Urdda is (thanks to the revelation of her magical talent) well on her way to being a powerful witch, Branza is marrying the story’s most noble man (who she met, as a bear, in Liga’s heaven), for love, and Liga is sharing a good house with another witch, who (thanks to the dwarf’s trips to Liga’s heaven) is independently wealthy. As to lessons, if we must have one I think I’m closer to David Hebblethwaite: neither Liga’s childhood nor her heaven makes a good guide to living in the world; neither should be trivialised, but they must not be the whole of the story. Or as Rosoff asks: is it possible to return to life from unspeakable trauma? Answering that question without seeming patronising is a tricky needle to thread, but I’d say Lanagan manages it much more than not; and that if you’re looking for a guide to living in the world, you could do worse than look at Tender Morsels.

Cyberabad Days

Cyberabad Days cover After a novel as thorough as River of Gods (2004), any add-ons have to earn their keep. The stories collected in Cyberabad Days do so by fleshing out the timeline of the future, and (perhaps less nerdily) fleshing out perspectives excluded from River of Gods — and not just in the sense that none of the characters live in Bharat, the seat of the novel’s action. So, for example, in the first story, “Sanjeev and Robotwallah” (2007), we see the collapse of our India into the nation-states of McDonald’s novel, and the arrival of the “lighthoek” personal computing devices that will become ubiquitous; and we see it through the eyes of a village boy who becomes a combat-robot fan, is drawn into the circle of the child-soldiers who remote-pilot them, and confronted with the terrible mundanity of war. Convincing youthful perspectives are a feature of the book, actually, from the bratty Westerner in “Kyle Meets the River” (2006), whose father is involved in (redundant) nation-building efforts after India fractures, to “An Eligible Boy” (2006) caught, by changing demographics, in a wife-drought. The first-person, subjective account is also common, with slightly more mixed results: Hugo-winner “The Little Goddess” (2005) reads even better this time around, smoothly exploring McDonald’s future from the perspective of another kind of outsider, a young girl chosen as the Royal Kumari of Kathmandu, while “The Dust Assassin” (2008) is probably the closest thing the collection has to a weak story; it’s not long, but feels too long for the ground it covers. “The Djinn’s Wife” (2006) conceals the identity of its narrator until its final page, and in doing so plays with the idea of McDonald’s India as “exotic”, as a location for outlandish tales. Each story’s protagonist, however, is their own person; each provides an angle we haven’t had before, each explores new facets of the social and technological changes that run through this future.

Put another way:

India is her people and we are all only, ultimately, the heroes of our own lives. There is only one hero’s journey and that leads from the birth-slap to the burning-ghat. We are a billion and a half heroes. (297)

(Or indeed: “if it were a different man preparing to blow up the same bridge it would be a different story. Most idea-driven SF that purports to treat of character misses that.”)

The blockquote is from near the end of “Vishnu at the Cat Circus”, the collection’s only original work; although to compare it to any of the other tales in the book feels rather unfair, since at a shade under 100 pages it truly is a short novel, not a short story, and surely would be published and considered as such in any other genre. Couched as the seemingly-garrulous life story of an aging Brahmin, one of the genetic elite of River of Gods — engineered to live twice as long and age twice as fast as regular humans — it is both a brilliant study of another convincingly different character and, because a crucial part of that difference is the ability to see “the connectedness of things … the biggest picture” (236), the most complete description McDonald has produced of this future history. I did feel just a little pandered-to by this, actually; the transparency of what elsewhere is left to inference, the pulling-together of many threads, the revelation of What Happens Next. But to linger on that feeling would be to sell “Vishnu at the Cat Circus” very short indeed, since it’s surely forgivable in a swansong to a setting as rich as this, and since (among other things) the story is, without ever being heavy-handed, precisely about the act of storying a future, of standing back as an author (or a critic) and trying to get a sense of the whole (the sense that River of Gods refuses to allow its characters), trying to make sense of the whole. Easily worth the price of admission, as they say; one of the best things I’ve read all year, in fact.

Palimpsest

Palimpsest cover Oh, this is a cold book. Its main characters, our four guides who contract the passport to the fantastical city of Palimpsest, are broken individuals all; there is almost no warmth in the very frequent sex they all engage in; and the closer they get to achieving their dream of permanently moving to Palimpsest, the clearer it becomes that for all its wonders, it is like everywhere else a place to live, not an answer. Reviews — Matt Denault, Dan Hartland, Deborah J Brannon, Annalee Newitz — rightly talk about how penetrating the novel is on the relationship between the real and the fantastic. I’m a little surprised that words like possessiveness and selfishness don’t crop up more often; they seem to me necessary to capture the full desolation of the desire that the Palimpsest virus induces, an addictive need to make a place ours, to make it us, to fill ourselves up with it: an need familiar to readers of fantasy that the novel at first mocks, with its absurdly imaginative glimpses of a city that refuse to become a whole, and then, towards the close, seems to concede. The great weakness of Palimpsest, as Dan is most forceful in articulating, is that to this end its characters are tools, not players, and they can feel a little thin, not to mention hapless (perhaps particularly the two men; the two women felt more sharply defined to me throughout). All four are victims of the story, not shapers of it — a feeling reinforced by the highly structured, highly stylised nature of the book, which clinically cycles between the characters, forcing more direction onto them than their individual lives ever seem to contain. But perhaps this is a final chill irony: an unresolvable struggle between the irresistable artifices of stories and something more fluid, less satisfying, that we have to try to recognise as life.

White is for Witching

White is for Witching cover If there is any disappointment associated with this book, it’s that I read it too late in the year to buy it for anyone for Christmas. Oyeyemi’s third novel is, like The Opposite House, a fierce, fluid and economical tale, more explicit about its fantastic content but still laced with sufficient uncertainties that after one quick read I don’t feel able to speak authoritatively about “what happened”. I tend more to Jane Shilling‘s view of the book than Carrie O’Grady‘s, however. So, to describe its three narrators: Eliot, whose twin Miranda is at the heart of the book, and who appears to be sincerely conscientious about her worsening health; Ore, who falls into a relationship with Miranda when the two of them meet in their first year at Cambridge, and comes to visit her at home during the Christmas vacation; and 29 Barton Road, the house where Eliot and Miranda and their father Luc live in Dover, whose voice is (mostly) the voice of Miranda’s mother, and grandmother, and great-grandmother (as Dan Hartland notes, the voice of history), speaking in chorus, fearful of and prejudiced towards anyone not of the family, anyone different. Their hold over Miranda only grows. A darkly self-aware ghost story, then, with an uncommon freshness that springs from its acuity of insight into character and circumstance; a book in which the scariest thing is what the fear of other people can become, and do.

The Girl With Glass Feet

The Girl With Glass Feet cover A brief break from Interzone to say that I agree with everything Kari Sperring has already said about this book in her review for Strange Horizons, except that I gulped it down in a couple of days. An intense, entropic, ugly-beautiful fable; heavy with the cold, crisp details of remote St Hauda’s Land, tangled in the quasi-incestuous closeness of the community that lives there, people both exquisitely and exasperatingly broken. A book about ways of seeing, about what we don’t see of other people, or choose not to see, or are incapable of seeing, and what we lose in consequence; and therefore about the power of glimpses, where the fantastic lies in how something is seen as much as in the images breaking through a convincing quotidian skin: “Those few inches of transition astonished him even more than her solid glass toes. Bones materialized faintly inside the ball of her foot, then became lily-white and precise nearer her unaltered ankle … In the curve of her instep wisps of blood hung trapped like twirls of paint in marbles” (62). And a cruel story that chooses, uncomfortably, to pay more attention to its men and its landscape than its women; a story that does address this uncomfortableness and this cruelty, but doesn’t escape either. Somewhat in spite of myself, I am transported.

Three Reviews

A first novel first, and one that by rights should be much more annoying than it actually is. Graceling is, after all, set in a generically medieval world with Seven Kingdoms, and never doubts that monarchy is just fine as long as there’s a Good Monarch on the throne; takes as its protagonist a very special young woman with a Grace — a magical talent of mysterious origin — that allows her to be the very best fighter in any of those kingdoms; and has its characters’ maturity levels thoroughly backwards, with a ten-year-old child who says things like, “Think … It wasn’t such a strange thing for him to do, knowing he might die in a fight” (280), and ostensibly worldly adults who need to ask, “Well, why does it pleasure him to hurt people? […] Everyone has some kind of power to hurt people. It doesn’t mean they do” (293). Moreover, it is distinguished by a procession of names that run from the uninspired — Wester for the Western Kingdom, Nander for the Northern one, Estill for the Eastern one, and so on — to the unbelievable — human characters called Tealiff, Raffin, Patch and, most painfully, Po. The whole book is like this, in a way that never really becomes unobtrusive: familiar, safely shaded within the lines of genre convention. And yet, somehow, it’s also zippy good fun, from first page to last.

My answer to this conundrum is to say that Cashore has a Grace of her own: a Grace for clarity. Graceling is distinguished by its crisp, direct language; by the orrery precision of Cashore’s plotting; by the careful but never ambiguous nuances of her characters’ emotional progressions; and by the firm yet unhectoring development of an argument about what it means to be a young woman — a woman with power — coming of age in a man’s world. The irritations noted above flow from the same well (Graces are never entirely without cost), as do some others: the Bad King Leck, for instance, who is simply and purely villainous not just because he has a Grace for telling lies about the world and making them stick — which would be enough — but because he tortures children and small animals.

On with the story. As the book begins, our Graceling, Katsa — yes, one letter away from being something you can order in Wagamama — is a thug for a Bad King, one who seized on her skill for violence as soon as it demonstrated itself, and moulded her into his strong arm. She has killed and tortured for him, often; but in secret rebellion, she has also set up a Council to carry out good deeds in an attempt to balance the scales. On one such Council mission, Katsa encounters another Graceling, a Prince from one of the other kingdoms — the aforementioned Po — who turns out to be on a mission of his own that intersects with hers. After some narrative throat-clearing, they join forces to solve the mystery of the kidnap of Po’s grandfather. It’s a well-paced adventure, with appropriately thrilling action, and satisfying revelations; but it is also, for a good long while, pretty much an excuse to have the two of them spend time together journeying across the Kingdoms, developing a relationship that is by turns affecting, nauseating, admirable and questionable: which is to say, believable.

In this Cashore is aided by her choice of Grace for Prince Po. Graces can be for almost anything you can imagine; physical skills such as swimming or climbing, say, or psychic talents such as precognition. Po’s Grace is of this latter type. He can sense the presence of other living beings, and when any of them think about him he picks it up like Noise. The downside is that, like other psychic Graces, such a talent attracts a certain degree of prejudice from the people of the Seven Kingdoms — or would, if they knew about it; Po takes care to keep the true nature of his Grace secret. On the upside, it’s a convenient way for Cashore to force characters to be direct with one another about their feelings, and provides many opportunities for knowing riffs on the development of relationships:

They had entire conversations in which they didn’t say a word. For Po could sense when Katsa desired to talk to him, and if there was a thing she wanted him to know, his Grace could capture that thing. It seemed a useful ability for them to practise. And Katsa found that the more comfortable she grew with opening her mind to him, the more practised she became with closing it as well. It was never entirely satisfying, closing her mind, because whenever she closed her feelings from him she must also close them from herself. But it was something. (177)

This is, though Katsa doesn’t use the word, what learning intimacy is like — a sense of the importance of human connection — and it’s a particular challenge for one as fiercely independent and physically-focused as she. (As she has to be, I might say; her Grace is an integral part of her, in that it’s shaped her personality, probably as significantly as anything in her lived experience.) There’s a lot of this sort of thing, and a lot of it goes straight to your heart. [Both Katsa and Po are extremely well-visualised characters, and their thoughts and reactions are complex and meaningful.] The problem, however, is an occasional sense that it’s too easy: that Po is too completely well-adjusted, too good to be true, too sympathetic, patient and generous at all times and to a fault. Po and Katsa’s relationship, for all its mutuality, is not one in which two people grow together, it’s one in which Po waits for Katsa’s emotional growth to catch up to his. The major emotional challenge faced by Po doesn’t come until late in the novel, and it’s the challenge of one who is knocked down and has to get up again, not — as Katsa’s challenge is — one of reaching beyond yourself. Some coincidences of content — an experienced survivor mentoring a younger girl; a long, frozen trek to get someone to safety — had me wondering whether Cashore was referencing The Adventures of Alyx; and thinking that, I can’t help wondering what Russ would make of Cashore’s certainty in the potential for and of open-hearted romantic relationships.

But the clear argument running through Graceling is that it is possible to see clearly in matters of the human heart, and always better to do so. As illustration, consider the portrayal of anger, or more accurately the portrayal of the limits of anger. Katsa is often angry, and her anger is always justified; her world is filled with injustices, and not just ones that afflict her personally. But her anger is also often problematic — “She must guard against using her Grace in anger”, she realises. “This was where her nature’s struggle lay” (94) — usually for the specific reason that it clouds sight, and leads to rash action. We are never allowed to doubt that impulsiveness, action by instinct, is a vital part of Katsa — again, probably innate, thanks to her Grace, as much as learned — but though it solves problems, such solutions are never fully satisfactory. (And towards the end of the book, one of the signs that a particular King is Good is his insistence that Katsa goes slow, thinks first, doesn’t rush in.) It is a somewhat refreshing approach, and one of the relatively few aspects of the book where Cashore does more than simply colour within the lines.

Many Graces, of course, turn out to be more subtle in their action than they first appear, and subject to change over time, with implications for both Katsa and Po’s sense of identity. But the true nature of Po’s Grace, when it is explicated, late in the book, is not a surprise. He begins to sense the physical world, as well as living creatures:

“And then, in the cave, with the soldiers shouting outside and my body so cold I thought I would bite off my own tongue with my chattering teeth — I found it, Katsa.”

He stopped talking, and he was quiet for so long that she wondered if he’d forgotten what he’d been saying.

“What did you find?”

He turned his head to her, surprised. “Clarity”, he said. (323)

In its best, purest moments, Graceling is like this: a revelation that lights the darkness.

If Kristin Cashore’s Grace is for clarity, Frances Hardinge’s is for play. The opening paragraph of her third novel snares you not just because it’s so confidently done —

It was a burnished, cloudless day with a tug-of-war wind, a fine day for flying. And so Raglan Skein left his body neatly laid out on his bed, its breath as slow as sea swell, and took to the sky. (1)

— but because what it’s describing is a pure kind of freedom, and sounds like fun. And Hardinge doesn’t let it rest there. Skein is a Lost, which means that he’s capable of sending all his senses off independently: “a gifted Lost might be feeling the grass under their knees, tasting the peach in your hand, overhearing a conversation in the next village and smelling cooking in the next town, all while watching barracudas dapple and brisk around a shipwreck ten miles out to see” (1). Just imagine the possibilities. Hardinge does, both for humans and for other animals. Also found on Gullstruck is a species called the farsight fish, which possesses Lost-like abilities and is thus “notoriously difficult to catch because it was almost impossible to take by surprise” (37); though if you do catch it you can borrow its ability for a short period, leading to a rather Douglas Adams-ish observation about the problem of gulls who have feasted on farsight flesh getting confused, thinking they can still see around mist when they can’t, and flying into a cliff.

Hardinge is playing with us in another way here, though, because Raglan Skein isn’t the protagonist of Gullstruck Island. Who is? It might be the girl on whom Skein spies: Arilou, “the most important person” in her village, and “arguably the only excuse for its existence” (4). Arilou is a Lost too, the first born to the Lace — a coastal-dwelling tribe — in over fifty years, and approaching the age where her abilities are due to be formally tested. There is always the danger, with an untrained Lost child, that their senses will wander off, never to be fully reunited. But when they are trained, the Lost are vital, forming a sort of living communication network for Gullstruck, and (in the form of the Lost Council) mediating between the various peoples living on the island. Gullstruck is a messy place; the diverse cultures of the island’s native tribes have, for generations now, been subordinate to the impositions of Cavalcaste settlers — despite the settlers’ stubborn lack of adaptation to the requirements of their new home, in their stubborn retention of inappropriate clothing, in their too-tall buildings, and their outdated laws. (There are no exact historical parallels, but the Gullstruck natives are something like South Pacific islanders, and the Cavalcaste are something like Northern Europeans.) Given the relative lack of space, at this point almost everybody on the island is mixed-race — Hardinge’s word is mestizo — but it’s the Cavalcaste traditions that dominate, particularly their ancestor-worship. So having a Lost in the village is, indeed, a good thing; it brings respect, influence, possibly wealth, all things the Lace have lost. Unfortunately, the secret the village keeps from the outside world is that Arilou may be a lost Lost, her senses hopelessly scattered; or she may be a Lost and mentally damaged in some way; or she may not be a Lost at all.

So Arilou isn’t the protagonist either. Maybe it’s the girl we meet at the start of the first chapter proper —

On the beach, a gull-storm erupted as rocks came bouncing down from the clifftop. Half a step behind the rocks scrambled Eiven, her face flushed from running. (5)

Eiven looks like good protagonist material. She is bold, agile, and confident; she brings news of the arrival of the Lost Inspector, and sets off the preparations for his visit.

And then she pretty much disappears from the narrative. We are being played with, again. There is, admittedly, a clue; the narrative spots a girl who escapes Skein’s notice, “anonymous as dust”, and boldly informs us that “you have already met her, or somebody very like her, and you cannot remember her at all” (4). But it’s another fifteen pages or so before we actually get to meet Hathin, who turns out to stay at the centre of the narrative for most of the rest of the novel’s thirty-nine chapters. First we meet Minchard Prox, assistant to the Lost Inspector, and it’s through his eyes that we learn Hathin is Arilou’s sister, minder and translator. The Lace cover story is that Arilou’s slurred speech is the result of incomplete control of her body (not an uncommon problem for untrained Lost), and only Hathin can understand her. The reality is that Hathin is making it up as she goes, and she’s going to need all her wits to trick the Lost Inspector into thinking Arilou can pass the tests he’s going to set.

Oops. Played again. That is what happens next; but it’s also a distraction, marking time until the real plot snaps into action. Skein dies mid-way through the tests. Soon enough it becomes clear that every other Lost on the island has also died — except Arilou. At first it seems that this will be a benefit to the Lace, a chance to regain some respect and importance. Of course, all too quickly, suspicions are turned against the Lace: did they kill the Lost? They stood to gain. The village is destroyed, and Hathin flees with Arilou across the inland volcanoes. A quest is born: to escape, to clear the name of the Lace, and to bring the true culprits to justice. Hence, presumably, the rather naff title of the US edition: The Lost Conspiracy.

At that point things get a bit more predictable (making it a sort of inversion of Hardinge’s first novel, Fly by Night); but in the end you don’t read Gullstruck Island for the plot. You don’t even read it for the characters who, though appealing, and inter-related in complex and satisfying ways (Hathin and Arilou’s relationship is beautifully developed), are not that deeply rendered. You read it to be enchanted by Hardinge’s voice, whether whimsical or deadly serious, or both at once:

Despite her high status, Milady Page usually spoke Nundestruth. It was nobody’s language, everybody’s language, a stew of words taken from the tribes and the Cavalcaste alike. By the time the first settlers’ grandchildren were full-grown, they found that however carefully they taught their own children their ancestral tongue, the children caught the hybrid chatter in the streets and brought it home like mud on their boots. “That gibberish may be good for the fields and the beach but Not Under This Roof!” the parents cried, only succeeding in giving the new language its name. Proper-speak, the old colonial language, earned the nickname “Doorsy”, indoors-speak. (28)

Most of the time, Hardinge writes in a kind of Nundestruth; resolutely playful in her descriptions, fearlessly indulging in rhyme (“Like many Gullstruck officials he was both well-heeled and bell-heeled”, 9), or cranky repetition (Port Suddenwind, the largest Cavalcaste town, is a “creaking clockwork of laws, laws, laws”, 26), or alliterative chapter titles (“Twisted Tongues”, “Farsight Flesh”, “Trial and Trickery”, “Heat Haze”). But she’s equally competent in Doorsy, when the situation calls for it: “And so ended the conference of the invisible, in the cavern of blood and secrets, on the night of the mist” (43). It is in no way as neat a novel as Graceling (a quite Doorsy book), but it makes of its freedom a strength: it finds joy and pride in its messiness, in the messiness of the things it describes.

Everything is alive, in Gullstruck Island. “Thunder rolled unseen cannonballs across the sky” (69); “the little clock gnawed away the hours” (111); “flames flung loving, golden arms around the summer-roasted palm thatch” (123). And there are the volcanoes that define Gullstruck’s geography and are, to the tribes such as the Lace, the true powers on the island. These are wonderfully handled: clearly, meticulously researched, but gifted with their own personalities that aid and abet Hathin and Arilou on their journey, from cranky Mother Tooth to mad Lord Crackgem, and the jealous love triangle that is Sorrow and her two suitors, Lord Spearhead and the King of Fans. So much in Gullstruck Island rests on who and what you see as living and worthy of respect, as distinct and individual. For the Lace, the answer is just about everyone and everything; the Cavalcaste are distorted by their fixation on the dead. And in the novel’s darkest moments, the islanders cease being individuals altogether, and become something else: “Mob wasn’t people. It took people and folded their faces like paper” (278).

This is, ultimately, the only real source of disappointment in the book. Gullstruck Island is a light address to serious topics — the hatred stirred up against the Lace in the wake of the Lost deaths is not new, it is an awakening of an old, ingrained prejudice, exploited by the story’s villains. (Who, if doubt remained, are Bad News either because they actively dislike the mess of diversity that characterises Gullstruck, or because their preference for order, their aversion to play, enables them to be twisted into malicious tools.) Hathin’s campaign to right the scales leads her down a dark path, swearing a vengeance that it is very clear could break her, that does in some ways immediately break her. All of this is good: that you don’t put a bunch of volcanoes on the mantel in Act I if you’re not going to do something with them in Act III does not make the ending too neat. What does, unfortunately, is the reduction of people to Mob, because it allows problems to be solved too easily. It’s too great a contrast with Hathin’s spirited individualism (no romance here); it’s not just that it allows there to be a spider at the centre of the web, but that it allows removal of the spider to leave the world a better place. This is, of course, marvellously freeing; the end of the novel is full of messy freedoms — “true joy, like true pain, does not care how it looks or sounds” (487) — and puts Hathin in a position to be whatever she wants to be. But freedom from the ancestor-worship of the Cavalcaste even becomes, it seems, freedom from history: and that’s a freedom too far for me.

There is some discussion of the ease with which groups of people can be manipulated in The Ask & The Answer, too. “A man is capable of thought”, one character notes. “A crowd is not” (120). It’s a sentiment that acquires new force in the context of Chaos Walking, for a couple of reasons. One is that the series is set on New World, a planet on which all men, and all active fauna, constantly broadcast their thoughts as Noise. (This includes the sentient Spackle, for whom it is the only method of communication, but not women, who remain exempt — at least for this, the middle book of the trilogy. Since it is pointedly noted, without explanation, that this fact sets humans apart from every other species on the planet — female animals have Noise — presumably further developments will be forthcoming in volume three.) The second reason is that if Patrick Ness has a Grace, it is for manipulation; like The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask & The Answer is staggeringly effective at guiding the responses of its readers, at controlling the flow of information and shaping raw events into irresistable story.

We start out with protagonists Todd and Viola in the power of the series villain, Mayor Prentiss, who has brought the largest town on New World under his sway, and is keen to use the excuse of Noise to institute full-scale segregation of men and women. As he puts it, so carefully and reluctantly: “The borders between men and women had become blurred, and the reintroduction of those borders is a slow and painful process […] but the important thing to remember is, as I’ve said, the war is over” (130). You might be forgiven for thinking, just briefly, that he’s right. The council of what was once Haven, and is now New Prentisstown, did after all vote to submit to the Mayor’s authority because they didn’t want more war, because they decided that capitulation was the best way to save lives. The deposed chair defends the decision: “Not everything is black and white, Todd. In fact, almost nothing is” (36).

Yet what happens in The Ask & The Answer seems black enough. Crudely put, it is the first steps towards building Gilead. Todd and Viola are split up, and the narrative splits with them. Todd is kept alive for the potential the Mayor sees in him, and assigned to oversee the management of a contingent of Spackle prisoners — previously used as servants by the inhabitants of Haven, they are now locked up together, and kept docile through the application of a “cure” for Noise. Viola, meanwhile, is kept alive for the information the Mayor thinks he can get out of her, about the incoming second wave of colonists, and locked up in one of the town’s Houses of Healing with the other women.

The bond between Todd and Viola is — of course — unbreakable, but both are, to an extent, seduced by the crowds they find themselves associating with. Viola becomes part of The Answer, originally set up as an all-female — and thus silent — combat unit in the Spackle war, now reformed as a a Carhullan Army waging a bombing campaign on New Prentisstown. (It’s interesting to note how completely normal it is, both for the novel and for its characters, that the women fight and can fight; there is no amazement on anyone’s part, not even any pointed remarks. The Mayor’s misogyny is not grounded in thinking women weak, in other words; nor does it seem to be grounded in wanting to control their bodies. It seems, instead, to be grounded in the fact that, without Noise, he cannot control them.) Todd, on the other hand, finds himself trying to rationalise the actions his new position forces him into — better he’s the one to implement the latest restriction on Spackle freedom, because at least he cares a little — all the while being shaped by the Mayor’s insistent thoughts, which, he tells us, “hatched right in the middle of my brain, like a worm in an apple” (207). Todd’s sense of self — always fragile, in Noise — starts to deteriorate, and worse, to be consciously repressed.

Even leaving aside the narrative split, The Ask & The Answer is thus a very different book from its predecessor. It’s still told in forthright Nundestruth (Viola’s voice is a bit more Doorsy than Todd’s, but not dramatically so), but a headlong chase is replaced with a slow accumulation of intensity; a tour of New World is replaced with a close focus on New Prentisstown; and an unpeeling of the truth of the world is replaced — other than in a couple of broad hints such as the one noted above — by a concern with the manipulation of truth, how lies become truth in the first place. (The Mayor’s ability to manipulate Noise is, it is clear, an ability to manipulate truth, an ability to make lies true not a million miles from that possessed by Bad King Leck.) It is still, fear not, a quite extraordinarily absorbing story, one of those books you inhale more than read; and though it is (inevitably) a less tidy book than The Knife of Never Letting Go, I think it perhaps more penetrating.

We are the choices we make: nothing more, nothing less. That’s what the Mayor tells Todd in the book’s opening scene, and what Mistress Coyle, head of the Answer, tells Viola somewhat later. Even choices we think we have to make are choices, this book says: rationalizations are just that. And individuals are, in fact, as vulnerable as crowds, if not more so. But this is not to say — despite the insistences of several characters — that there are no right and wrong moves, no black and white to be found in this novel. Todd and Viola’s complicity in the actions of the Mayor and of The Answer is pushed just about as far as it can go; to follow their progress through this book is to watch them make choices, to understand why they make those choices, and yet to know that the choices they make are wrong. The novel insists that what matters is not how you fall down, but how you pick yourself up again; but Viola and to an even greater extent Todd, fall a long way in this book.

The Mayor’s actions are unambiguously black from the get-go, and it becomes increasingly obvious as the novel wears on that Mistress Coyle’s tactics are just as unforgivable. The thing is that they are, both of them, plausible kinds of wrongness, ones that exist, with all their seductive and coercive potency, in our world as much as in that of Chaos Walking. What is hard is not identifying them as wrong, but finding and acting on the right and the good in the face of their existence, and their tendency to grapple each other in violent, escalating feedback loops. This is something Ness gets right that I think the other two books discussed above don’t quite manage. The Mayor is ultimately as cartoonish as Leck, and he’s on screen for a whole lot longer. This seems like a weakness. But in fact his one-dimenstionality matters less, because it’s so clear that he’s merely the visible tip of an iceberg. Leck’s ideas may be insidious, but they’ve got nothing on the prejudices into which the Mayor taps and to which he gives form. By the end of The Ask & The Answer, Todd and Viola have demonstrated that the Mayor can be defeated, but they’re left to face the world the Mayor has wrought: left to face, in other words, the Mayor’s ideology. There’s more than one war that needs to be won in Monsters of Men.

This is the Summer of Love

This is the Summer of Love cover As I have noted before, it’s not that I deliberately disparage horror fiction. It’s just that in general, what disturbs me is not, it seems, what disturbs writers of horror, or what such writers think should disturb me. I think this is partly a matter of familiarity, and partly a matter of presentation. Editorial hyperbole, certainly, is never more distracting than when it’s telling you how you’re going to feel. So it’s a shock in itself when the introduction to a story such as Monica J O’Rourke’s “Cell” — “as fiercely uncompromising as anything we’ve published” — really does turn out to denote a story of comparable quality to the work of other newish horror writers such as Joe Hill and M. Rickert. In outline, “Cell” is formulaic: a second-person narrative in which “you” find yourself imprisoned in an unidentified prison, with your fellow inmates being carted off by black-robed folks one by one, or else banging their heads against the wall as a way of committing suicide. Two things make it work: that the narrative doesn’t flinch; and that it is self-interrogative. By the first I don’t mean that it’s graphic, but that it remains tense throughout, and stays true to the totalising, intimidating nature of its premise. (“You” pass in and out of sleep several times; on one such occasion, O’Rourke writes that sleep “has been searching the darkness for you” [74]. Were I to indulge in my own hyperbole, I’d suggest that the same could be said of this story.) And by self-interrogative, I mean that “Cell” foregrounds the nature of both second-person narration and horror fiction. The disjunct between the “you” of the story — a married caucasian Christian man with two children — and the “you” reading is never downplayed; indeed the central questions of the story involve guilt and empathy, how the former, including in the form of watching others suffer, engenders the latter, and what that implies for the sincerity of either emotion.

But self-awareness, sadly, is not always self-interrogation; if it were, then This is the Summer of Love, the first anthology edition of PS’s Postscripts magazine, which at least so far as I’m concerned has more than its share of mildly metafictional horror tales, would be much more to my taste than it is. (The anthology becomes the latest victim of my ongoing skirmishes with genre horror quite inadvertently: I read it because it’s advertised as simply a “new writers” special — albeit with a flexible definition of “new” that translates to “people who may have published quite a few stories that we think you won’t have heard of”.) Into the category of “middling success”, for instance, falls RB Russell’s “Literary Remains”. The setup involves an older woman recalling an episode from her youth: she was in her early twenties, living on her own for the first time, in a band, and working in a second-hand bookshop to make ends meet. One of the shop’s customers, an elderly man, develops a creepy but seemingly harmless mild obsession with the narrator, leading him to donate various books of ghost stories — some rare editions, some pulp, all heavily annotated. The narrator finds her interest sparked by the annotations, and from there she develops an appreciation of the man’s own, little-known, fiction. Then the man dies, and becomes posthumously successful, and the narrator finds herself visiting his flat to help with an assessment of his book collection for resale. The voice throughout is unfussy and well suited to the denoument; the trouble is that the denoument delivers nothing unexpected. That is to say, creepiness ensues, of a kind that may be in the narrator’s head (having been sensitised by the man’s fiction) or may be real and which, if real, constitutes sexual abuse. Russell leaves enough unstated, and introduces enough doubt about his narrator’s perceptiveness and accuracy of recall, for the story to work passably well, but there’s no denying its predictability, and predictability (as a story like Joe Hill’s “Best New Horror” demonstrates) is itself a form of comfort. Although that said, arguably the most terrifying sentence in the story is the first, with its utter dreariness: ‘When I look back on my life in Eastbourne in the late 1980s, I find it amazing that I could ever have had enough time and energy to accomplish what I did’ (129).

There’s a writer at the centre of “The Family Face” by James Cooper, too, and here predictability has produced a story so snug in the grooves of genre that it’s barely there to criticize. Said writer is English, called Michael, and heading to the country for a week’s peace, quiet and writing; on his way he meets an odd and apparently itinerant family, one of whose members specialises in carving uncannily life-like dolls. Michael declines to take one, but on arriving at his remote retreat he finds himself haunted by a child carrying a half-finished doll. There is a wearying laziness to the tale — Michael’s first encounter with the boy is described as being ‘as though somewhere, just out of sight, the trace of someone’s nightmare was being inexplicably defined’ (91), rather than in a way that might actually evoke nightmarishness — and by the time Michael is thinking that ‘he knew implicitly that there was nothing remotely derivative about his own mounting disquiet’ (95) all you can do is roll your eyes.

Speaking, as we were earlier, of bad ways to introduce stories, here’s another: “I believe new writers are forced to be copyists by publishers who accept only work of a kind that has been successfully received”, says Clive Johnson. Whatever the truth of this assertion — and I’ll be charitable and accept that some attenuated version of it is true for at least some publishers at least some of the time — it smacks of defensivness for a writer, let alone a relatively new writer, to introduce his work this way. Unlike “Cell”, “Pieland’s Dream” doesn’t quite escape its introduction, either. It begins as a sort of club story, with one member of a writing group relating his dream to the others (and in the process renders the introduction doubly redundant by putting very similar sentiments into the mouths of its characters), and develops into a deconstruction of the desire for and impossibility of originality, as another member of the writing group begins to experience the dream, before they all perform in a play that recreates a key scene from the dream; the story gradually tightens its grip on them, ultimately killing one of the group. What’s good is Johnson’s willingness to be inventive; there’s a decent dialogue-heavy opening section that juggles its characters well, an almost dialogue-free section of some intensity, and sections towards the end rendered as a transcript. What doesn’t work so well is pacing; none of the sections feels quite the right length, and Johnson doesn’t quite manage to balance the different levels at which the story is operating. And there’s the sense that even if the form is original, acknowledging the familiarity of the base tale does not, here as in “Literary Remains” and “The Family Face”, translate into a successful iteration of it.

There are fewer writers, but not much more success, in the non-horror tales. Deborah Kalin’s “The Wages of Salt”, for example, seems to me a classic case of an interesting setting coupled to under-developed story. Alessia is a student in New Persia, an intriguing if sometimes baffling city-state on a salt desert. (One source of bafflement: why is salt “white gold”, the basis of New Persia’s economy, given its apparent abundance?) She is researching the nature of the “theriomorphs”, nicely realized half-man half-animal creatures that occupy the salt plains around the city; that research ultimately leads her, and us, to a new understanding of the therimorphs, and her. And sadly, that — plus a few rather perfunctory exchanges on ethics and pragmatism, and the abstract value of knowledge versus the immediate value of coin — is it. Similarly inessential is Neil Grimmett’s “A Hard Water”, a short, mimetic piece about fishing. The water of the title is a spot that appears to be idyllic and undiscovered, but in actuality is a hard water, which is to say one that refuses to give up its fish. The narrator, obsessesed with the place, is one of only two fishermen to stick it out over the season, hoping to land an enormous carp. There is a sort of rivalry with the other fisherman; there is the suggestion that his wife is using his absences to have an affair; there is a climactic storm, and a hint of the immanent fantastic. It is perfectly reasonable and unexceptional.

Livia Llwellyn’s “Horses” is the most fully realized sf piece, although it certainly carries a horror glaze: it is the story of the nuclear apocalypse and after as experienced by an American Missile Facilities Technician called Angela Kingston. Its ambitions are good, aiming for a mix of McCarthy nihilism and Russ anger, but the end result is too messy and melodramatic to match either. Llwellyn aspires to the cinematic, and some images, such as an emaciated man emerging from a dark tunnel “as if a swimmer is breaking the surface of the ocean”, are vivid; but too many others, such as nuclear explosions on the horizon described as “voluptuous jets of lightning-shot ziggurats” (22), are confused (can you even have a jet of ziggurats?). Emotional moments, too, tend to be overly dramatic, such as Kingston’s acceptance of radiation poisoning on the grounds that when it reaches her heart, it will be surprised to find said organ already gone; or the establishing assertion that “In the next twenty-four hours, she’ll take the pill, or a bullet. Which one it will be, she cannot say” (16). Which is a shame, because in many ways Kingston’s dysfunctionality — suicidal yet driven to survive — is narratively and psychologically promising, at least until Llewellyn stoops to soften her (slightly) with maternal love. Even the lack of a happy ending can’t stop that feeling like a bit of a betrayal. But it is better, at least, than Chris Bell’s “Shem-el-Nessim”, the title of which is also the name of a magically bewitching perfume, which may be linked to visions of a mysterious beautiful woman, and which includes sentences of this kind: “They lay together in the failing light of a late afternoon, the indescribably oriental fragrance of her skin buffering the room’s airlessness” (64). I’m not convinced a strong perfume in an airless room would work quite like that, but fine, it’s magic; and the deployment of “oriental” makes me cringe; but what really gets my goat is the addition of “indescribably”. Admittedly it is an easy word to misuse, but here it is misused in a way that makes everything else about the sentence worse. There is no irony: this is entirely straight-faced exoticisation for no original, or even unoriginal but strongly felt, reason.

Leaving “Cell” aside, the most intriguing stories are those which open and close the collection. Like so many of the pieces here, they reflect on storytelling; but they do so via cinema rather than prose, which seems to work better. Unsurprisingly, given that it both closes and lends its title to the anthology, Rio Youers’ “This is the Summer of Love” is also more explicitly than most of the pieces here about love — as an emotion, and as a story humans tell to each other. Nick Gevers’ overall introduction to the anthology singles Youers out as a “major discovery”; he apparently has a novella, a novel, and some more shorter fiction forthcoming from PS. “This is the Summer of Love” doesn’t, by itself, justify this investment, but it doesn’t suggest it’s a terrible mistake, either. It is assured and occasionally bold work: the story of Terri and Billy, two teenagers obsessed with classic film who fall in together for a summer. The perspective is primarily Terri’s. The story opens with an exchange of overheard, unattributed dialogue: Terri (as it turns out) asking Billy to take her away to California. Billy says no, because “he knows he can only be her hero for as long as she needs one” (158), which may raise eyebrows. Flashback to when they met: Terri miserable, beaten by her father, convinced that love exists only in movies, that it is “all sweet fiction” (159). Suddenly Billy is there, and Terri has fallen head over heels: “Everything was gray next to him” (159). His smile is so beautiful it is “celluloid”(161) — a particularly effective choice that, I think. He is Brando, Dean, Stewart rolled into one.

The most appealing thing about “This is the Summer of Love” is its willingness to be shamelessly intense and (unlike, say, “Horses”) to recognize the absurdity of that intensity. It is at times hyperreal, a tale of young love and domestic abuse told with the fevered vision of Hollywood. The highs are very high, the lows very low; and the highs often disguise the lows, like the make-up Terri applies to turn the ghostly image in her mirror into a starlet. A melancholy ambivalence can be discerned: Hollywood saves Terri, day to day, possesses her in a sense, while Billy saves and possesses her in another; and at the end she achieves a happy ending, but it is happy in large part because she wants to be possessed, just not by her father. Billy’s opening worry, in other words, seems in no danger of passing: she’ll always want a hero.

And in Norman Prentiss’ opening tale, “In the porches of my ears”, out of what at first seems to be blandly middle-class American narration — meet Steve, who is snobbish enough about cinema to disdain the usual blockbuster fare, but thinks arthouse means “subtitles or excessive nudity” — but becomes slightly more warty and convincing, something quite clever and moving emerges. Steve recounts a trip to the cinema with his wife Helen, in which a (deliberately genericised version of a) Working Title-esque contemporary British romantic comedy is spoilt by the couple sitting in front, one of whom is blind and the other of whom narrates the events on screen. Steve and Helen’s annoyance appears to be validated when the woman, seemingly cruelly, changes the ending, relaying a bitter interpretation of the closing scenes that causes her companion to break down in tears; yet when Steve approaches the man afterwards to explain the real ending, the thanks he gets is deeply sarcastic.

There is an obvious commentary here on writing and rewriting, and the idea that different people get different things from stories (something of which I’m never so conscious as when reading work marketed as horror); and it’s deepened by a second part to the story, which establishes certain parallels between the two couples, and is explicit about the idea — the horror — that there may be “awful, unnarrated tragedy” (10) beneath the surface of a tale. Much is left unsaid (in the satisfying, rather than maddeningly oblique, sense), and any fantastic component is (appropriately) left to the reader to infer. But what makes the story work particularly well as an opening tale is its dark spin on the overall title: certainly love has a summer, but by implication it therefore also, inevitably, has an autumn and winter. To resist this, the tale suggests, is a kind of solipsism, a desire to make a story of love ours, to own it and make it relevant to us, to close the aching gap between story and life without regard for the consequences. As an introduction, it might be saying: do not try to make the stories that follow fit your love. Let them be their own thing. I might reply: if only more of them had managed to achieve such independence, or aspired to.