Tag: fantasy

Douglas Thompson, Ultrameta (2009)

30th July 2010 / / 3 Comments

If you thought Cloud Atlas was a little too conventional, Ultrameta may be the book for you. Trying to interpret (let alone synopsise) Douglas Thompson’s extraordinary first novel is probably a fool’s errand, but let’s see what happens anyway. Subtitled “A Fractal Novel”, Ultrameta is constructed as a series of linked short stories and story-fragments, but exactly how they’re linked is open to debate.

Ultrameta centres on Alexander Stark, a university professor who disappeared, and then apparently began sending letters to his wife Charlotte – letters written not as by him, but as by a series of different characters, some describing events thatcross over into the surreal. Later, Stark reappeared, with no memory of what had happened, but took his own life – and more notes were found on his body. Subsequent investigations undertaken by a journalist named Martha Lucy, and DI Walter Dundas of Strathclyde Police establish that many of the people named as the “writers” of Stark’s letters actually existed. Is Stark deluded. Might it be that Stark was all of these people? Could there really be such a place as Ultrameta, the “city of the soul” to which Stark refers, that constantly refashions itself? Or is Stark just deluded?

The novel Ultrameta is presented as the collected notes of Alexander Stark, bookended by correspondence between Martha Lucy and Charlotte Stark, and introduced by Walter Dundas. But Stark’s notes link together in an unusual way: the first fragment ends with the narrator listening to a radio play whose words begin the second chapter, narrated by a ten-year-old Stark in the library of his house; that chapter ends with the boy reading a manuscript which begins with opening words of the third chapter, and so on. The twenty-five chapters are arranged in twelve pairs, running from 1a to 12a, and then from 12b back to 1b, on either side of the central chapter 13 (also called ‘Ultrameta’. In effect, the novel is a journey through a series of nesting shells, and back out again.

A complicated structure, then, but what does it do? To my mind, it sets up two contrasting views of what Ultrameta is: on the one hand, a linear narrative; on the other, a set of smaller narratives. The first view, perhaps, invites an interpretation of continuity (i.e. the narrator is genuinely the same person throughout, taking on different personas); the second, an interpretation of separateness (i.e. these are all different people, and Stark is deluded). But no single interpretation quite fits.

Identities and realities are constantly shifting in Ultrameta. Multiple characters return home with amnesia and start reading through their mysterious notes. The letter from Charlotte to Martha placed at the end of the book is a world away from the one at the beginning to which it’s replying. Even the novel’s structure cannot be relied upon to stay the same: the chapters don’t all flow neatly into the next; and the second chapter in a pair isn’t always a direct continuation of the first. There probably isn’t a definitive interpretation of what’s going on in Ultrameta, but that hardly matters when the ride is so intriguing.

And, though Thompson’s prose can be overly dense at time, there are some very fine moments to be found within the pages of Ultrameta – to name two, I was struck by the chapter that brings Icarus into the present day (rendering modern technology strange by having someone from the past describe it isn’t a new idea, of course, but Thompson does it very strikingly); and the eerie section in which the narrator makes an organism out of his house, with himself at its centre. But it’s the entirety of Ultrameta that impresses the most; there’s nothing else quite like it, I’m sure.

Elsewhere
Douglas Thompson’s website
Eibonvale Press

Tim Powers, ‘Parallel Lines’ (2010)

27th July 2010 / / 1 Comment

Caroleen Erlich reaches her seventy-third birthday, her first without her twin sister BeeVee. But it looks as though BeeVee may turn out to be as domineering in death as she was in life, because she’s writing out messages with Caroleen’s right hand. I like the way this is introduced and handled – Powers’ down-to-earth treatment gives the idea a freshness –but I don’t think the ending lives up to the promise of that beginning.

Rating: ***½

Elsewhere
‘The Works of Tim Powers’ website

Kat Howard, ‘A Life in Fictions’ (2010)

23rd July 2010 / / 1 Comment

This is Kat Howard’s first published story, and very fine it is, too. The five-page tale of a woman who finds herself being literally written into her boyfriend’s fiction (and being pushed out of her own life in the process). It succeeds because of the elegant way it conveys the underlying horror of the situation. On the basis of this piece, Howard is a writer to keep an eye on in future.

Rating: ****

Elsewhere
Kat Howard’s blog

Jonathan L. Howard, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer (2009): The Zone review

20th July 2010 / / 0 Comments

The Zone website is now carrying my review of Jonathan L. Howard’s debut novel, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer. It’s a comedy in which Johannes Cabal seeks to get his soul back from the Devil, who demands a hundred other souls in return. Cabal has a carnival at his disposal to assist with this, but, of course, it’s not that straightforward.

I found Johannes Cabal the Necromancer to be moderately successful, and gave it 3 stars. You can read the full review (which includes some more general thoughts on comic fantasy) by clicking on the link below.

Elsewhere
My review at The Zone
Some other reviews of Johannes Cabal the Necromancer: Amanda at Floor to Ceiling Books; Matt McAllister for Total Sci-Fi.
Jonathan L. Howard’s website

Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death (2010)

18th July 2010 / / 3 Comments

This is the first time I have read any of Nnedi Okorafor’s work, and I suspect that what I’m about to write will not do justice to Who Fears Death. I suspect that I’ve seen only a fraction of what there is to see in the novel, but I’ll try to put my impressions into words nevertheless.

Some distance in the future, when disaster and the weight of centuries have turned our present time into echoes, a girl named Onyesonwu – ‘Who Fears Death’ – is born of violence, her Okeke mother raped by a Nuru man, as part of a concerted effort by the latter tribe to wipe out the former (Okorafor draws parallels in the book with the situation in present-day Sudan). Onyesonwu is thus Ewu, with sand-coloured skin and hair – a social outcast.

And there is something else which marks Onyesonwu out as different: she has powerful juju, of which shapeshifting is merely one of the first manifestations. This normally being the preserve of men, Onyesonwu has to push against multiple barriers in her desire to learn more. But learn she does and, in the course of doing so, discovers that her biological father, Daib, is himself a powerful sorcerer who wishes her dead. Onyesonwu resolves to take her revenge on the Nuru general, and sets out across the desert with a group of friends, and Mwita, the boy she loves – and finds that her reputation has preceded her.

There are many different aspects of Who Fears Death on which one could focus, but the one that stands out to me is the way in which it interrogates a standard literary template – namely, the  fantasy quest; I think Okorafor does that as thoroughly as China Miéville did in Perdido Street Station, albeit in a rather different way. The structure of Who Fears Death is superficially that of a quest fantasy – a band of companions crosses a landscape to defeat an antagonist intent on taking over the world of the book; there’s also a prophecy concerning the fate of the world, which could be fulfilled by either Onyesonwu or Daib – but the end result does not play out in the way one might typically expect of that form.

For example, Onyesonwu is not a straightforwardly ‘heroic’ protagonist: she is prone to anger, may at times be hated by her friends, and the use of her powers can result in death and destruction. The protagonist may actually be every bit as dangerous as her enemy. Though Who Fears Death tells of someone overcoming the obstacles to truly become herself, it’s a rite of passage that comes at great cost to Onyesonwu, those close to her, and the wider world.

Something else that particularly struck me about the novel is that Okorafor includes some aspects which would normally drive a fantasy novel straight off the rails for me (such as the exercise of mighty, world-changing magical powers), but which don’t seem so problematic in the context of Who Fears Death. I think there are several reasons why this is so, One is that the sorcery is very well woven into the fictional world; one accepts easily that this is how that world is. Furthermore, all this power does not come without consequence in the book: it may cause great pain, even when used for beneficial purposes; and there is often a price to be paid for the use of magic – and not always paid by Onyesonwu.

So, that’s what I took away most from Who Fears Death. Sampling some of the other online commentary on the book, it seems that others have found a range of things to talk about. To me, that’s a sign of a rich work of fiction; I’d recommend Who Fears Death as a book well worth reading.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of Who Fears Death: Matthew Cheney for Rain Taxi; Carol Cooper for The Village Voice; Zetta Brown for The New York Journal of Books.
Nnedi Okorafor’s website

Tim Davys, Amberville (2007/9)

16th July 2010 / / 6 Comments

This is the first book I’ve read for the Transworld Summer Reading Challenge; I thought I might start my posts on the challenge with a few words on why I selected the books I did. It’s quite straightforward with Amberville: anyone who reads this blog regularly will know that I have a soft spot for odd books, and this was the most obviously odd title on the list – a noir thriller with a cast of stuffed animals.

The story goes like this: Eric Bear has a happy life, married to the beautiful Emma Rabbit and with a good job in advertising. But, in his past, Eric was involved with some shady characters, one of whom now comes calling – Nicholas Dove, who has heard that his name is on the Death List, which means (if the tales are to be believed) that the Chauffeurs will shortly come to escort him on the ultimate one-way journey. Dove demands that Eric find the Death List and get his name removed from it, or Emma will be the one who pays the price. The job should be straightforward enough, because the Death List is just a fable; but Eric gets his old gang back together all the same – and, of course, the truth proves more complicated than anyone thought.

So, this Scandinavian crime novel (the author is Swedish; ‘Tim Davys’ is a pseudonym) is far from the norm, and could have been ridiculous – but it’s not. What is perhaps most striking about Amberville is that Davys tells his tale with a completely straight face; one might laugh briefly at the thought of, say, a stuffed dove walking around with two stuffed gorillas for heavies, but not for very long, because it’s not funny at all in the context of the story – it’s deadly serious. Davys creates his world with such integrity that one can’t help but take it seriously. His control of voice is also superb, switching between different characters whose voices are all distinctive, no matter how brief their turn at narration (and here, I must also acknowledge Paul Norlen’s excellent work as translator).

Driving the plot of Amberville is a mystery – is there a Death List, and, if so, who’s behind it? – which is deeper for reader s than it is for the characters, because we have more questions to ask: what is this place, Mollisan Town, inhabited by walking, talking, living stuffed animals? What goes on behind the scenes to make it all work (the inhabitants of Mollisan Town know that the young animals are manufactured somewhere and delivered to the city in vans, but no one thinks to question any further)?

Well, Amberville is the first novel in a series (though that’s not clear from the edition I was reading), so the answers aren’t all forthcoming here. That’s not a problem in itself, but I do think it has a knock-on effect – it seems to me that the major revelations for this volume are made some time before the end, leaving the rest of the book to be mostly i-dotting and t-crossing, which feels somewhat anti-climactic. This is unfortunate, because most of the rest of Amberville is pacy and engaging (with an added helping of speculation about the nature of good and evil, courtesy of Eric’s brother Teddy).

My misgivings about the conclusion of Amberville make me feel a little less inclined to find out where Davys takes his series; but the momentum of the earlier parts of the book is considerable. It’s worth a look, I think.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of Amberville: Jane Bradley at For Books’ Sake; Presenting Lenore; Mike Krings; Mur Lafferty.

Jeffrey Ford, ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’ (2010)

12th July 2010 / / 1 Comment

I find Jeffrey Ford to be a reliable writer of interesting (by which I mean good) fantasy. This story is a fine example of his talent, as what appears at first to be an evening out for a couple in love proves instead to be more of a nightmare – and the price of escape is high. Ford leaves his readers to piece together exactly what is happening in ‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’, and I think that’s the key to the tale’s affect, as the real tragedy of the situation emerges gradually from the happiness.

Rating: ****

Elsewhere
Jeffrey Ford’s website

Keeping it fresh

11th July 2010 / / 2 Comments

What does it take to make an old trope feel fresh? I’m prompted to ask this question by the return to British screens of Misfits, which is currently getting a repeat showing on Channel 4 on Saturday nights. If you’re unfamiliar with the show, Misfits is about a group of young offenders who get caught in a storm that grants them (and others) super-powers. The thing is, it’s a much more interesting programme than it sounds; for all that it might seemingly be based on a hackneyed trope, there’s a freshness to it. One reason for this is that, I think, Misfits is determined to stay true to the context of its story.

To explain what I mean, I’ll first take a step back and look at the example of Heroes, another show about ‘ordinary’ people with super-powers (there’s a further similarity in that characters’ abilities were initially related to their personalities and/or circumstances in some way). Heroes was essentially a comic book on the telly, and it came to the television medium with various aspects (both good and bad) of superhero comics – cliffhangers, alternative timelines, and so on. This worked well enough  in season one: the aesthetics were fresh, and I think there were some smart ideas – for example: giving such a visible power as flight to the character who’s the most public figure; giving regeneration to a teenage girl, who’s at probably the only time in her life when such a power would be unwelcome, because it’s a mark of difference. But Heroes went off the boil after that, for a variety of reasons, but including that it got wrapped up in its own continuity and moved too far away from what (I think) made it distinctive. It couldn’t be about ordinary people with remarkable abilities any more, not when some of its characters became so mighty-powered, and not when such extraordinary plots were being hatched.

Misfits strikes me as different. At least in its first season (the second has yet to air), every fantastical happening is filtered through the prism of inner-city teenagers with ASBOs; the idea of ‘super-powers’ is put into the service of a story about that kind of people in that kind of place – and this is what gives the programme its freshness. It’s the same thing that made the ending of Ashes to Ashes satisfy, even though the concept (a purgatory for coppers) wasn’t particularly surprising – it worked because the 1980s, police-procedural aesthetic remained intact throughout.

I’ve seen a similar effect at work in books. There are times I’ve found myself abandoning series of supernatural thriller/detections, because I felt they were relying too much on their built-up continuity to generate drama, instead of the root idea that made them interesting to me in the first place. But, just recently, I read The Radleys by Matt Haig, which is a vampire story with that sense of freshness. And, again, that freshness comes less from the concept – a middle-class family of abstaining vampires trying to get on with life – than the way Haig keeps the theme of ‘middle-class family travails’ at centre-stage, and deploys the vampire trope through that theme.

I’m coming to think that even the most venerable of tropes can be revitalised if integrated thoroughly enough with a particular setting or aesthetic. I wondered if any new takes were possible on the Arthurian mythos; and then, last year, I read Nicky Singer’s Knight Crew, which places aspects of that mythos in a story about feuding street gangs. It’s not fantastical as such, but it uses the significance of Arthurian names and icons for part of its effect, transforming them in the process – and that runs to the very heart of the novel.

This post has tried to put into words some thoughts that I’ve been mulling over for a while. I guess I can sum them up by saying: one way to make a trope fresh is to place it in a different context, and make it serve that context. The results can be interesting.

A.C. Tillyer, An A-Z of Possible Worlds (2009)

9th July 2010 / / 11 Comments

Now here’s a book which has clearly been made with great care and attention by its publishers (Roast Books of London): An A-Z of Possible Worlds is presented as a box of twenty-six individually-stapled booklets, one for each letter of the alphabet, each containing its own story. Happily, the tales themselves more than live up to the presentation.

Anne Tillyer has written a set of stories which each concern a place that doesn’t exist. Generally speaking, they stand alone: there are several scattered cross-references and commonalities, but the unity of the collection emerges not from them, but from Tillyer’s style, which I’d broadly characterise, rather unhelpfully, as a ‘storytelling’ style – that is, she captures something of the timeless quality, the flowing rhythms, of folktales. This can lend itself to imagery, such as the following evocation of place:

The central boglands are both the beginning and the end of the world; the place where everything comes to nothing and nothing ever changes. Nature lies in a coma, time has given up trying to pass and the only things that move are the flies and the fog and the driving rain. Here, the natural cycles of birth and decay have unravelled and run in a straight line. Even the rain that falls on the bog is never released into rivers or the roots of trees but seeps from puddle to mud and stagnates there forever. It is the stasis that all life must overcome and to which all life will return. Evolution never made it past first post… (‘The Bog’, p. 1)

This is a long beginning that repeats its point, but I think that very technique works well here: an accretion of detail, like layers of sediment,  that brings home the stifling atmosphere of the bog. (The description continues as Tillyer moves into the story proper, with similarly atmospheric results.)

It’s not all about the imagery, though. There are stories here with fascinating ideas, such as ‘The Labyrinth’, with its people whose ancestors made home on an island generations ago, and who now have no sense of time; reading about their actions is unsettling, but also fires the imagination. There are also tales of the absurd, like ‘The Job Centre’, in which a country’s leader declares that there is full employment in his nation – which is news to the people queuing in the job centre at that moment. A plan must be devised to create work for these people, and the results raise a wry laugh.

As much as the stories in An A-Z of Possible Worlds stand alone, they gain considerably from being part of the whole. Not all of them completely satisfy as stories in their own right – there are some, for example, where a turn of phrase really stands out in my mind rather than the plot – but these are bolstered by other tales, which have complementary strengths. It’s the whole edifice of what Tillyer has created which impresses most, rather than individual pieces of it.

Which is not to say that there aren’t some excellent individual stories here. To pick out two: ‘The Youth Hostel’ concerns a remote hostel which is one day visited by a journalist from an interiors0 magazine, who writes a feature on the place as an example of ‘rustic charm’. The popularity of the youth hostel grows exponentially as a result, but visitors don’t necessarily get what they were expecting. This story is both neatly plotted and makes pointed commentary on attitudes to ‘tradition’.

Another story I liked in particular was ‘The Casino’, which is about a country colonised by the wealthy and turned into their own private playground, where they can enjoy the finest luxuries and the best healthcare. But this lifestyle is threatened by too many people living too long, and the proposed solution is not a pleasant one… Again, this is a nicely constructed tale (there is a certain inevitability about the plotting of both ‘The Casino’ and ‘The Youth Hostel’, but Tillyer’s craft is such that one does not feel short-changed by this), with an added vein of satire, this time on the subject of authority.

The way that Tillyer writes about places in these stories – often in the abstract, without names or many other specifics – they really do become ‘possible worlds’. They’re places that one knows don’t exist, but could, perhaps, if the world had more interstices. Imaginary as they are, though, it is fascinating to explore these worlds in this remarkable collection.

Elsewhere
Further reviews of An A-Z of Possible Worlds: The Fiction Desk, The Literateur, and Vulpes Libris
Interview at The Literateur with A.C. Tillyer, and Faye Dayan of Roast Books

Matt Haig, The Radleys (2010)

7th July 2010 / / 6 Comments

There isn’t exactly a dearth of vampire fiction around at the moment, so it would take something quite distinctive to stand out from the crowd. I think Matt Haig’s new novel manages to do just that. The Radleys may appear to be a normal family living in a sleepy North Yorkshire town; but parents Peter and Helen keep a dark secret from their neighbours, and even from their children – The Radleys are a family of abstaining vampires.

The secrecy can’t last forever, though. When young Clara Radley is attacked by Stuart Harper, a boy from school, she defends herself by biting his hand, which draws blood; that first taste gives Clara a strength that she’s never known, and a desire for more – Harper doesn’t stand a chance. Peter does his best to cover up the killing, and (against Helen’s wishes) calls on his brother Will, a practising vampire with hypnotic powers and a distinct lack of morals. The careful charade of the Radleys’ existence may be about to come to an end.

There are two things which, to my mind, make The Radleys work so well. One is that the book has the conviction to take its central idea seriously. Sure, there are some jokes – about, for example, the hidden perils of modern middle-class life (garlic in the salad dressing!), or vampire pop-culture (songs like ‘Ain’t That a Bite in the Neck’) – but the underlying tone is not whimsical, but quite matter-of-fact. What could have been played entirely for laughs instead has some dramatic heft.

What combines with this seriousness of tone to make the book such a success is that Haig roots his story so firmly in everyday life, and, by doing so, he is able to move beyond it. The problems of the Radleys are the problems of many a family like theirs – teenage children trying to work out their own identities, parents wishing to protect them from life’s dangers but not necessarily being able to, and so on – but given a particular twist because they’re vampires. It is tempting (and possible, to a degree) to read the vampirism as a metaphor –think of it as a murky past, for example, with Will the wayward uncle who might lead the kids astray; for blood, read booze or whatever – but I don’t think anything fits quite perfectly. And I’d say that’s a good thing – the fantastic is more real within the story if can’t easily be reduced to a single metaphor.

It would be reasonable to observe, I think, that The Radleys is not doing anything drastically original. But it is different enough from the norm, and so well crafted, that it’s a great pleasure to read.

Elsewhere

Reviews of The Radleys at Chrissie’s Corner and Book Chick City
Matt Haig’s website
Canongate

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