Tag: fantasy

Books from FantasyCon

21st September 2009 / / 2 Comments

Three points:

1. I’ve decided to get more into photography — not in any major way, just to practise a bit and see how well I can do.

2. Yesterday, I returned from FantasyCon with… er… ‘a few’ books in tow.

3. I’ve seen other bloggers do ‘books received’ posts, but never done any like that myself.

Combining all these three, I present to you some gratuitous shots of the books I got from FantasyCon. (I know they’re not the best possible photos, but I’m uploading them as they are to record what level I start from with the photography.)

FCon books 1a

FCon books 2a

FCon books 3a

As to when I’ll get around to reading any of these books: your guess is as good as mine…

Heroes in the Wind: From Kull to Conan (2009) by Robert E. Howard

3rd September 2009 / / 1 Comment

Heroes in the Wind is a new volume from Penguin Modern Classics collecting together fourteen stories by Robert E. Howard, selected and introduced by John Clute. In a way, this development may be surprising: if you’d never read a word of Howard, what would you imagine his stories to be? Escapist potboilers with mighty-thewed heroes, perhaps? In a range of ‘classics’?

Clute asks a similar question at the start of his introduction: knowing what we do about Howard, should we — do we want to — read him? Yes, says Clute, because whatever else Howard was, he was a storyteller (literally speaking the words of his stories aloud as he typed them); and because he had more to say to us than bald synopses of his tales may suggest.

What do I make of that, reading Howard for the first time here in 2009, and being of a similar age as he was towards the end of his career? I cannot be as enthusiastic as Clute, but I do see where he’s coming from.

Let it be acknowledged first of all that the negative aspects we may anticipate — the stereotyping, the bloody violence — are indeed here; and, regardless of the distance of history, they make for unpleasant reading (to put it mildly). But, side-by-side with these, Howard’s fiction has what Clute referred to in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) as the ‘wind of Story’ — a restless storytelling energy that led to such dynamic passages as this charge into battle led by Cormac of Connacht (from ‘Kings of the Night’):

A wild roar answered [Cormac], and loosing rein he shot down the slope with five hundred yelling riders plunging headlong after him. And even at that moment a storm of arrows swept the valley from either side like a dark cloud and the terrible clamor of the Picts split the skies. And over the eastern ridge, like a sudden burst of rolling thunder on Judgment Day, rushed the war-chariots. Headlong down the slope they roared, foam flying from the horses’ distended nostrils, frantic feet scarcely seeming to touch the ground, making naught of the tall heather…

I can’t deny the sheer kinetic force of such writing. Yet I find myself feeling ambivalent about these stories. I think it’s because I don’t find the positive qualities to which Clute refers to be as prevalent within the tales as I’d have liked.

Yes, I know: other people’s readings should have no bearing on mine; but this is one occasion where what I’ve read about the book (namely Clute’s introduction) has influenced how I read the book. I don’t actually think that’s a bad thing here, because Heroes in the Wind is Clute’s book as well as Howard’s; and I feel it’s only right to pay attention to his views on the material he has compiled.

Clute’s introduction is, incidentally, a fine example of what an introduction should do, which is to provide context and illuminate the book in a way that enhances the reading experience, rather than obviating it. How many times have you seen an introduction to a work of ‘classic’ fiction that starts with a warning like: ‘This introduction makes the plot of the book plain’ — or that does exactly that, but without the warning? Not here, thankfully.

The main positive qualities of Howard’s stories that I take from Clute’s introduction are the dynamism of telling which I noted earlier; and a certain sense of bleakness that gives the tales more of an edge. I see both of these qualities in the stories themselves; the trouble is that, too often, I found myself noticing them intellectually, rather than feeling them emanating from the prose (admittedly, this was more often an issue with the latter quality than the former).

The stories of Heroes in the Wind are grouped into three sections. The first contains early sword and sorcery tales with a number of protagonists, notably the Atlantean Kull, King of Valusia, and the Pict Bran Mak Morn. Though there is an energy about these pieces (they include ‘Kings of the Night’, from which I quoted the passage above), I get a sense of it being held back. In part, I think this is because the characters are held back somewhat (most especially Kull, who longs for the days when he was a warrior, free to roam); and of course Howard had less experience as a writer then.

What I think comes through most strongly in these first tales is a sense of horror at what lies beneath the skin of reality: most of them involve an encounter with supernatural entities from beyond (on a historical note, it’s fascinating to see how much thinner the line the line between sword and sorcery and horror could be eighty years ago than it is today). There’s also a recurring theme that time and civilisations will pass, that we are ‘the jest of the gods’ – but the full force of this didn’t come across the same.

The volume’s second section moves away from sword and sorcery; and it’s here, in ‘Graveyard Rats’, that I find Howard really hitting his stride. This is a horror story which begins with a man being driven insane when he finds his dead (and buried) brother’s head on the mantel and goes on to unravel what happened, and why. The momentum of this piece never lets up, and Howard smartly plays on our expectations; but I wouldn’t go so far as Clute does in calling it ‘an oneiric vision of how the world claws its victims into obedience and death’  — I don’t find the story quite as powerful as that.

Also in this section is one of the collection’s longest tales, ‘Vultures of Wahpeton’. John Middleton, the sheriff of Wahpeton, hires a Texan named Steve Corcoran as his deputy to deal with a mysterious gang known as the Vultures. But there’s more to the situation than meets the eye: Middleton is actually the leader of the Vultures, and makes a deal with Corcoran to double-cross the gang and split a hoard of gold. And the intrigues continue… Again, Clute is a good guide to the story — ‘we are left with a sense of the profound entrapping starkness of the world’ — but, also again, I do not feel this as strongly as he suggests. There is a bleak moral complexity to this piece: ‘Vultures’ could as well be a metaphor as the name of a gang; and, thanks to his background, even Corcoran’s moral code is more elastic than one would anticipate from a ‘hero’ (even taking into account historical distance). Yet, I keep coming back to that same stumbling-block: that something stops me experiencing this on a deeper emotional level. I’m coming to think  that I just don’t find Howard’s pulp style very effective in this regard.

On to the final section, and Howard’s most famous creation — Conan; and, straight away, I feel that the ‘wind of Story’ blows more strongly here than it did through the earlier sword and sorcery tales. Conan is a freer protagonist, and Howard’s telling is freer; ‘The Tower of the Elephant’ demonstrates marvellously what its genre can offer: the unceasing forward motion of the quest, and the fizz of strangeness and magic. I don’t think it works quite so well when we don’t travel directly with Conan (or Howard’s secondary protagonists)– for example, there are passages in ‘A Witch Shall Be Born’ in which past events are reported, and they don’t have the same impact as when we are ‘there’, so to speak; but, at his best, Howard is every bit the storyteller that Clute’s introduction promises.

I’d like to conclude by returning to a subject I mentioned in passing at the beginning — are these stories really escapist? I suppose, before I started Heroes in the Wind, I was expecting  to find bracing adventure stories within. What I found was something slightly different, something that I don’t feel is quite so well suited to being read for escapist motives; because these stories seem all too mindful that there is ultimately no escape. In this context, the fight of the warrior reads like a frantic attempt to beat back the inexorable tide of reality — the kind of bleakness to which Clute refers.  [EDIT 9th Sept: I’ve been made aware that my wording here is not as clear as it could be, so I’ll clarify. I was talking about escapism because it’s an accusation often – and often unfairly – levelled at fantasy. Howard’s fiction isn’t like that, which, in my view, is wholly a positive attribute.]

In the end, I have to say I’m rather ambivalent towards these stories as a whole; I see what’s good about them, but there isn’t quite enough of it in them for me. But there’s more to Howard’s tales than first appearances suggest; and his heroes will live on. I think it’s good that we have Heroes in the Wind as an overview.

‘A Tiny Feast’ (2009) by Chris Adrian

20th August 2009 / / 1 Comment

This post is about the second story to be discussed in Torque Control’s weekly discussion schedule. It’s not actually due for discussion until the 30th of this month; but, as noted in a previous post, I don’t know whether I’ll be online for the next week or so, which is why I’m blogging about it now.

The story in question is ‘A Tiny Feast’ by Chris Adrian, and was published in the New Yorker (and is available to read online: click the story title). After one of their periodic arguments, Oberon presents Titania with the gift of a human changeling. We join them in a hospital, where the child is being treated for leukaemia; the story chronicles how the faeries try to deal with the alien world of mortal medicine.

I think this piece is wonderful, in more than one sense of that word. Adrian does a superb job of working through the ramifications of his fantastical idea. Most obviously, perhaps, there’s going to be humour in the juxtaposition of traditional faeries and modern society – and so there is: witness, for example, the method Titania finds for playing a Carly Simon LP, before ‘[singing] to the boy about his own vanity’; or the times when the faeries’ glamour drops, and the medical staff become dazzled by the very presence of Titania and Oberon.

Yet there’s another, less playful, side to ‘A Tiny Feast’. Adrian makes some telling observations (‘The doctors called the good news good news, but for the bad news they always found another name’), but the heart of his story concerns the emotional trajectory of the characters, and Titania in particular. At first, the boy is just another changeling to her (she never even gives him a name); gradually, though, she comes to care about him – but the story-logic by which the faeries live has the final say. It makes the tale not only a fine piece of fantasy in its own right, but also a striking metaphor for how we may react to the terminal illness of a loved one.

Sunday Salon: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

16th August 2009 / / 0 Comments

TSSbadge4The Picture of Dorian Gray falls squarely in the category of ‘books I know about and so don’t need to read; except that, when I do read them, it turns out I didn’t know them at all’. What prompted me to read it now? It was the choice for a new reading group I’ve joined, which met for the first time this afternoon; and it seems a good subject for a Sunday Salon post. (NB. This is more likely to be a series of scattered impressions than a proper ‘review’.)

If you had asked me to summarise the book a couple of weeks ago (i.e. before I’d started reading it), I’d have told you that Dorian Gray was a man who didn’t age, whilst the figure in the portrait of himself that he had hidden away aged instead. And I’d have been wrong. It’s true that Dorian doesn’t age; but the picture bears the marks of psychological ravages as well as physical ones — and it’s the former that prove more damaging.

We first encounter Dorian Gray at the home of his artist friend Basil Hallward, who’s been painting the titular portrait. Here, Dorian meets the vile Lord Henry Wotton, a hedonistic aesthete who values ‘beauty’ above all else, and disapproves of such values as loyalty and unselfishness. Dorian is at first wary of Henry’s worldview; but, when Sybil Vane, the young actress to whom he is engaged, kills herself (because of the harsh way in which Dorian dismisses her and the acting which is so close to her heart), Dorian sees the first change in his portrait — and this causes hm to throw himself into a life of decadence. The rest of Wilde’s novel chronicles Dorian’s decline, as he becomes ever more selfish, ruining the lives of others, even to the point of murder. He does start to have doubts and regrets in the end; but by then it may be too late for him.

I found The Picture of Dorian Gray to be a fascinating psychological portrait; what’s particularly interesting is the way that Dorian’s life and ‘self’ become distorted, even as his body stays the same; he might have escaped the ageing process, but Dorian can hardly be said to have remained immaculate, as he wished.

Related to that last point is the issue of morality. Wilde’s preface (I’m unsure whether or not it is meant to be taken at face value) includes a comment that ‘there is no such thing as an moral or immoral book’; but I do see the book as quite moral, because the Dorian’s selfishness and hedonism seem to me to be presented in an ultimately negative light. However, I don’t think a reading of the novel as a bad-things-happen-to-bad-people moral fable quite works; because, strictly speaking, Dorian gets his comeuppance for seeking to abandon his decadence (as symbolised by the portrait); and Lord Henry, who espoused in the first place the philosophy that led to Dorian’s (and others’) ruin, gets no comeuppance at all. So there is some moral ambiguity there; I think the issue is probably going to remain unresolved in my mind.

As a novel… I hestitate to judge a hundred-year-old book by my own modern standards of how a novel should be; but, for what it’s worth, I thought it well written but a little awkwardly constructed, with Wilde whizzing over a period of eighteen years between the most important events in Dorian’s life, and leaving the details of who some of the characters are rather sketchy.

Anyway, the most imprtant thing is that I found The Picture of Dorian Gray to be a good, thought-provoking read — deservedly a ‘classic’.

BOOK REVIEW: The Hundred-Towered City by Garry Kilworth (2008)

2nd August 2009 / / 0 Comments

I first read Garry Kilworth as a teenager, and he’s written some fabulous stories, so I was pleased to have the opportunity to review him at last. Unfortunately, The Hundred-Towered City is not one of his best books. It’s a jolly time travel romp set in Prague of 1903: fun, yes, but not much more than fun — which is why I’ve given it 3 stars over at The Zone.

Read the review in full.

Difficult Questions: Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan (2008)

24th July 2009 / / 4 Comments

(WARNING: This review contains discussion of adult concepts. Judge for yourself whether you wish to continue reading.) 

There has been something of a stir about Tender Morsels in the British press recently (in the Observer and the Daily Express and the Daily Mail), mainly over the sexual content of what has been perceived to be a children’s book. First of all, let’s clear up some misconceptions: Tender Morsels is not a book for children — it is addressed to adults (be they old or young), and expects its readers to reflect on uncomfortable issues. Furthermore, though the book does include many harrowing events, it treats them far less frivolously than these write-ups suggest . But, in a way, it’s apposite that these issues should be raised; because one of the central themes of Tender Morsels is how far we should shield children from ‘difficult’ issues.

Margo Lanagan’s latest novel is an interpretation of the tale of Snow White and Rose Red, and unflinching from the very start. As a teenage girl, Liga gives birth to two daughters, one the result of sexual abuse by her father (who is  subsequently killed), the other of a gang-rape committed by boys from the village (these are depicted obliquely — the latter taking place entirely ‘off stage’ — yet not in a way that skirts around them; later harrowing scenes may be less oblique, but are still not treated lightly). Unable to face life in a world that has done all this to her, Liga prepares to throw herself from a cliff; but is rescued by some magical agency that transports her to the world of her heart’s desire — a world much like her own, but idyllic. There she raises her daughters: Branza, fair and calm; and Urdda, wild and dark.

However, others eventually find their way into this dream-world: first a dwarf, who finds that he can turn things there into precious gems and metals; then a young man, dressed in a bear costume for a festival in his village, who turns into a real bear in Liga’s world. And the traffic is not all one-way. Urdda, having known only Liga’s heaven, stumbles into the real world and finds it much more to her liking. Ten years pass in the dream-world, and one in the real, before Urdda finds a way to bring her mother and Branza through; how will they cope in reality, with all its complicated, messy realness?

Before I get into the issues, let me say that Tender Morsels is a beautifully written book. For example, this, narrated by the boy-turned-bear:

From [Liga] and around her were all the smells of warmth, of home, of women. Fire and food, cloth and cleanliness. In my own house — my father’s house, but only me and Aran in it — no matter how I swept and scrubbed, all it smelled of was grief yet. I did not know what to do with it to make it a home again.

Lanagan is skilled evoking joy, mystery, and profound horror, all within the same narrative voice. And it’s a voice that feels right for telling fairytales (her first-person narrators ring similarly true) — because Tender Morsels is still a fairytale in many ways: magic causes trouble; wishes have drawbacks; those who do wrong are punished; there is a happy ending (though it’s not a neat one), and a strong moral heart.

What is the message of this story? It’s about facing reality head-on: Liga comes to realise that. by raising her daughters in her heaven-world — by trying to conceal the real world from them — she has deprived them of the opportunity to truly live. Life in the real world may be uncertain and dangerous, but it’s where people belong. (Lanagan labours this idea a little too much, but not so much that it disrupts her story.)

Does this mean, then, that the author is saying that sexual violence is everywhere, that it’s just a fact of life? I don’t think Lanagan’s message is that bleak, though it is honest and complex, and not necessarily comforting. I’ll explain my reasoning.

First, Lanagan stylises even the ‘real’ world of her novel: no hints of political structures, for example — no sense that this world would function as an actual place; therefore, I think she’s not saying that this is how reality is, but using sexual danger as a metaphor for danger in general. (Why sex? Perhaps because it’s an aspect of pre-industrial European societies that was there, but which we don’t often include when we think of them. I should also add, in case I’ve given the wrong impression, that Lanagan does include some positive portrayals of sex — it’s not always violent and brutal in the world of Tender Morsels.)

Even if we’re talking in generalities, then, does that mean the book is saying that children should just face up to the bad things in the world? Not necessarily — finding out the truth doesn’t automatically make life much easier for Lanagan’s characters; and Tender Morsels acknowledges the argument in favour of Liga’s raising her daughters in the dream-world: she was protecting them — what’s wrong with a mother wanting to do that? So I don’t think Lanagan is saying we should race to discover the many distressing aspects of life — just that we shouldn’t try to pretend they don’t exist.

It seems to me that a key issue behind the three articles I linked to above (and this related one from the Guardian books blog yesterday) is about trying to have some control over the manner in which children learn about ‘difficult’ issues. I don’t think it’s unreasonable per se to want to do that; I do think it’s unreasonable to expect books automatically to be a space conducive to that aim.

As for Tender Morsels, it’s a wonderful piece of writing that leaves one thinking deeply about the issues it raises. But it’s not for children.

BOOK REVIEW: Purple and Black by K.J. Parker (2009)

1st July 2009 / / 0 Comments

Now online at SF Site: my review of K.J. Parker’s new Subterranean Press novella Purple and Black. It’s a tale of war and treachery told through the military dispatches between an emperor and his governor on the frontier. It’s good fun, asks some serious questions, and does quite a lot within its essentially limited structure.

Read the review in full.

Fantasy and Crime Fiction: The Cases of China Miéville and John Grant

17th June 2009 / / 10 Comments

(NOTE: As I once discovered after leaving a post on an old message board, China Miéville used to work with someone called David Hebblethwaite. For the record, I am not that person, and have no other connection to Miéville; John Grant, however, has been a friend for the best part of ten years. None of this, I trust, has had any bearing on what follows.) 

The City & the City by China Miéville (2009)
The City in These Pages by John Grant (2008)

Here are two fantasy-inflected police procedurals, or perhaps two crime-flavoured fantasies, or perhaps both. The two texts offer interesting approaches to mixing crime fiction and fantasy, yet in some ways they are polar opposites.

***

mieville First, to China Miéville’s new novel, The City & the City. (I’ve been reading discussions on this book by Niall Harrison, Dan Hartland, and Adam Roberts; I’ll be referring to them a few times in this post.) Two things you can almost guarantee of a China Miéville novel are that it will have an urban setting, and that it will play games (albeit probably with serious intent) with genre. And here, indeed, we get both: our setting is somewhere in the region where Europe and Asia meet, in the fictional cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma, which are unique in that they overlap in physical reality.

(Technically, this is a spoiler, but I reveal it because it makes the book more interesting, and because Miéville reveals it himself forty or fifty pages in. Actually, it’s possible to work out what we’re dealing with before then, because the very first chapter mentions an area called a ‘crosshatch’. Now, ‘crosshatch’ was coined as a critical term in the Clute/Grant Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997); it means a region where different realities intersect — and, in this novel, crosshatches are the points where the realities of Ul Qoma and Besźel become intertwined. Like Jeff VanderMeer in the comments on Niall Harrison’s post, I’m not sure why Miéville feels the need to employ misdirection over this: if you know what a crosshatch is in a fantasy context, there’s no mystery; and if you don’t, the first-person narrator is happy to spill the beans soon enough, so why does he pussyfoot around to begin with?)

Anyway, the cities overlap, and it’s possible to sense both of them at once. It’s not wise to do so, however, because if you cross the border illegally (and there’s only one place to cross legally), you will have committed ‘breach’, and the mysterious forces of ‘Breach’ (more distinctively different names would have been nice) will take you away and… well, nobody knows, but you won’t come back. So people in both cities try their best to ‘unsee’ the other place.

(Another aside, but I found this ‘unseeing’ business rather wearying. It’s very tempting to read it as a metaphor for the way we ‘unsee’ people in our own lives — indeed, the instinctive ‘pull’ towards this metaphorical reading is as strong as any I’ve felt in a long time — but I don’t think it holds up to close examination. To generalise, the people we may choose to  ‘unsee’ tend to be [so we believe] worse off than ourselves; but the default ‘other’ in The City & the City is Ul Qoma, which is better off than Besźel. And actually, we don’t really ‘unsee’ people in the same sense; we ignore them, we might even pretend that they don’t exist — but that’s very different from actively trying not to perceive something, as happens in Besźel and Ul Qoma.

(My point here is that I’m left unsure whether I’m supposed to take this metaphorical reading seriously, and there are problems either way. If I am, the metaphor doesn’t work; if I’m not, it’s intrusive. Miéville is surely too canny a writer not to know that this reading is possible, but why make it so noticeable if it doesn’t work? Unless he’s making a point about metaphors themselves, in which case, I wish he’d found a less annoying way to make it.)

Back to the story: our narrator is Tyador Borlú, a Besź detective investigating the murder of a young woman who turns out to be an Mahalia Geary, an American archaeology student, working on a dig in Ul Qoma that was looking at artefacts of the mysterious Precursor civilisation that existed before the two cities became conjoined (whether Besźel and Ul Qoma were originally two cities that fused, or one that split apart, is unknown). Mahalia, it transpires, believed in the existence of Orciny, the third city rumoured to exist in the interstices of the other two, and thought by most to be superstition. She also seems to have made enemies amongst the myriad extremist political factions of the cities. Borlú’s investigation takes him not only to Ul Qoma, but on a journey of discovery to the very heart of his reality… but you’d expect nothing less, would you?

Some negatives: Miéville’s prose and characterisation seem… not so much lacking as unsatisfying; these may be consequences of the story he has chosen to write. There are, of course, moments of very effective writing (on the contrast between the office and the crime scene: ‘Black tea and bread and paperwork, the boredom and striplights, all so much not like the peeling back of that wet-heavy, cumbersome mattress, in the yard, in the dark’), but on the whole, the prose seemed so restrained that the individual cities didn’t come to life in my mind. There’s much more spark when Miéville is writing action and describing the intersection of realities; maybe it’s that the investigation format restricts the author’s opportunities to write those kinds of passages.

In terms of characterisation, Tyador Borlú’s voice comes through as a voice, while nevertheless exhibiting Miéville’s signature style. But Borlú and colleagues feel somewhat flat; they don’t seem to have much personality (though this may be because the narrative is so focused on the investigation that we don’t get chance to see the characters ‘in the round’), nor are they distinctive enough individually.

Be that as it may, the real interest of The City & the City lies elsewhere. Between them, Harrison, Hartland, and Roberts raise two related issues (at least, to my mind they’re related) that get at the heart of what I think is most interesting about this novel. These issues are how far it is possible to accept the fantasy notions as existing in the real world; and how well the modes of fantasy and crime fiction work together. And most interesting about the novel for me is what I think Miéville is trying to do with the fantasy: to take something fantastic, and make it part of reality — and not just in the sense of ‘what would it be like if..?’, but in a truly fundamental, formal sense.

Niall Harrison and Dan Hartland both have problems ‘believing’ in the overlapping cities, or at least in the cities’ existing in our world. I was trying to pin down exactly what they meant, when I realised there was an unspoken assumption in their discussion: it seems to me that they assume the conjoined cities are a product of shared delusion, that Besźel and Ul Qoma are one city, and that the ‘boundaries’ between them are just in people’s minds (so are all place boundaries, technically, but I trust the distinction I’m making is clear).

Now, it never entered my head — and still doesn’t — to think that the situation in the book is anything other than as literally described; I assumed, and still assume, that Besźel and Ul Qoma are two places whose realities are intertwined; their inhabitants don’t have to ‘believe’ in the relationship between the cities, because that is how things are. So, from that point of view, I have no trouble accepting Miéville’s basic reality, because he imagines it solidly enough.

Why do I assume all this is ‘real’ and not delusion? Because of the words Miéville uses: ‘crosshatch’ is the clearest suggestion that we’re dealing with physical realities here, but there are subtler hints. The author makes other critical terms into everyday words (I spotted ‘alterity’ and ‘equipoise’, to name two); people talk about ‘invoking’ Breach, as though it’s not clear to them whether that agency is supernatural or not, or whether that makes any difference. This all seems to me an attempt to deliberately blur the lines between the fantastic and the mimetic, at the level of the text itself; and in that respect, I think it works very well indeed.

(This is not to imply that I have no problems with Miéville’s reality-building; I do have trouble accepting his characters’ response to their reality. I can’t believe people would have the discipline to keep ‘unseeing’ things for hundreds of years; the sheer effort would surely be too great, not to mention that it’s impracticable (you have to be able to dodge out of the way of traffic from either city, for one thing). I also can’t believe that the rules of Breach, shown as they are to be absurd and morally reprehensible (Breach will come down on you like a tonne of bricks if you accidentally stray across the boundary, but will leave the most heinous crime untouched if it didn’t involve actual breach), could have lasted for so long without protest. Perhaps this is Miéville’s comment on people’s unthinking adherence to unjust rules; if so, it’s too exaggerated to have real impact.)

Then there’s the issue of crime versus fantasy, and whether there need be a ‘versus’ at all. Roberts in particular argues that the two modes don’t really work together in The City & the City; and I agree with him — but I also think the novel depends on that being so. I’d agree that the fantasy keeps the pages turning more than does the mystery (certainly I was gripped the most when I was reading about the fantastic elements); but the two are bound together as tightly as the cities themselves. The mystery element plays into and, to an extent, subverts our expectations of the fantasy — and, ultimately, eats away at the fantasy until all that’s left is a core.

The City & the City works well enough as a detection: it has the requisite plot twists, and the denouement is as satisfying in its unmasking of the villain — but that’s all. The fantasy element is by far the most interesting part of Miéville’s novel; and his stripping away of the fantasy to bring the crime story to the fore means the book loses some of that interest. It’s a case of a book which is fine at what it does, but still makes one wish it was doing something else instead.

***

grant John Grant is another writer who’s not afraid to push the buttons of genre to see what happens (and, by coincidence, he was one of the editors of the very same encyclopedia in which the critical term ‘crosshatch’ was coined); that quality is richly displayed in his novella The City in These Pages. As its title suggests, this is an homage to Ed McBain’s ’87th Precinct’ novels — though it soon becomes rather more than that. The basic story is that the boys of New Amsterdam’s 14th Precinct have a serial killer on their hands; they dub him the ‘Humor Guy’ because of the darkly comic nature of his modus operandi (the first sees a local crime boss found inside a giant condom, for example). The killings grow more and more incredible, until the Humor Guy turns himself in, claiming that the world itself is not as it seems…

I’ve read only two Ed McBain novels, but all the same, I recognise enough of the similarities Grant’s novella shares. There’s no need to be familiar with McBain’s work, though. For one thing, the style of prose Grant uses here is a joy to read; rapid-fire, with tongue nicely in cheek (‘[the cops] watched in close-up the stationary back of a truck belching pollution at them. It was in town to deliver farm-fresh organic produce for the health benefit of everyone whose lungs it was corroding’), I’d say it’s more successful than Miéville’s style, in its different way. Characterisation is broad-brush, and sometimes feels awkward (one of the cops occasionally ponders some Big Questions, which proves necessary for later in the story, but still jars a bit with the way the rest of his character is presented), but they’re still engaging, thanks to Grant’s humour.

The crime story is… not really a crime story at all (there is a ‘crime’, in a sense, but it’s not the one you think it is). Certainly it’s not a detection as such, because the protagonists don’t undertake a proper detective process — the Humor Guy calls all the shots. In short, the crime story isn’t the point. What is the point is the fantasy, and here Grant excels. I’ve read quite a lot of his fiction and, enjoyable though I often find it, I sometimes feel that, if I know where he’s coming from, I might be able to see some of where he’s going. Not in this case.

The City in These Pages swings from humorous police procedural to grand cosmic speculation — as I kind of expected it would. But, just when you think you’ve got it pinned down, it wriggles free of your grasp and does something else. Even now, having read it, I can’t decide on a definitive interpretation of what happens. The novella offers many ideas to fire the imagination, of which I’m prepared to reveal one: you know all those brief period of life that you can’t recall in detail — boring journeys to work, and so on? What if those periods of time ‘escaped’ and someone else could live in them? Grant’s skill in juggling ideas like this, and all the other elements of his story, makes for a remarkable novella

***

Let’s conclude by asking once more: do fantasy and crime fiction work well together? Based on these texts, in one sense the answer is ‘no’, because neither is comfortable with being both genres at the same time: Miéville sacrifices fantasy to tell his crime story; Grant uses crime fiction as a springboard into his fantasy story. On the other hand, the friction between fantasy and crime has produced a couple of fascinating works here, even if those works aren’t entirely successful. Maybe a little antagonism between genres isn’t such a bad thing after all.

The City & the City has been nominated for the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Read all my posts on the Award here.

Replay by Ken Grimwood (1986)

4th June 2009 / / 4 Comments

Jeff Winston is 43, his life at a dead-end, when he dies suddenly — and wakes up back at college in 1963, with full knowledge of the intervening twenty-five years. He has the chance to create a better life for himself, and Jeff seizes the opportunity with gusto, placing bets and making investments that leave him a very wealthy young man. Jeff makes a hash of trying to impress his old wife this time around, and isn’t really keen on the heiress he eventually partners; but Jeff does love Gretchen, the daughter resulting from that relationship. So Jeff has pretty much made it — until he reaches the age of 43, dies at exactly the same moment, and returns to 1963, with the previous quarter-century erased from all reality, except in Jeff’s own memories.

And so the cycle repeats, with Jeff living out his life anew, able to remember each iteration but not to make any lasting change — until, in one ‘replay’ (as Jeff calls these iterations), the anomaly of a blockbuster movie he’s never heard of before leads Jeff to Pamela Phillips, the film’s maker and a fellow replayer. Perhaps inevitably, as the only two who know (or could ever understand) what the other is going through, they fall in love. But they discover a pressing issue: the beginnings of each replay are becoming ‘skewed’; though the moment of death for both Jeff and Pamela remains the same, the time their awarenesses return to is growing later and later — so much so that they may only have a handful of replays left.

I came to Replay with a certain amount of anticipation: it won the World Fantasy Award, and was reprinted in Gollancz’s Fantasy Masterworks series a few years ago, so clearly it had a high reputation. There was also the general sense of apprehension one often has on reading a ‘classic’ (even one that’s only twenty years old), wondering if it will stand the tests of time and of familiarity with its themes. Well, there was no need to be concerned this time — Replay is a wonderful book that deserves all the praise it has been given.

It’s important to say first what Replay is and isn’t about: it’s a time travel story, but not one about time travel per se; Grimwood attempts no real explanation of why the replays are happening. Rather, he is much more interested in the emotional ramifications of the premise on his characters, and it’s here that the novel really shines. Each replay is different, as Jeff chooses different paths through his life; and these never feel arbitrary — there’s a logic to their progression. He starts off, as one might in his situation, using his knowledge of the future to improve his lot materially. Then he moves to trying (unsuccessfully) to change history for the better; learning from his first replay to create greater contentment in his second; descending into hedonistic nihilism in the third when it becomes clear that nothing he does will last; and so on. And it rings true at every stage.

The interplay between Jeff and Pamela also changes subtly each time they meet, as their different experiences change them; and this too remains believeable throughout. There’s a moment towards the end that particularly made me smile (I’ll not elaborate on it, to preserve the effect), when Pamela reacts to Jeff in a way he isn’t expecting; and, as readers, we can see the matter from both sides — and have sympathy for both characters. The final position of the protagonists’ relationship is also unexpected and yet, with hindsight, is probably just as it would be in reality. It’s this emotional authenticity that makes Replay such a joy to read.

Something else that makes Replay a joy is the way it’s written — not so much individual nuggets of prose (though it has its share of them, such as the passage describing what goes through Jeff’s mind as he dies for the first time), as the way the novel is structured, and its general tone. There are a few times when the book gets tedious (Jeff’s hedonistic period drags in particular); but, generally, Grimwood knows exactly when to throw something new into the mix to move the story forward, whether it’s Jeff’s discovery of other replayers, or… well, find out for yourself. There’s also a very welcome lightness of tone to the book — not an absence of seriousness, but an energy to the telling. One useful function of this is to stop this moral tale feeling too preachy. There were a few a moments when I felt that Grimwood-the-author was lecturing me-the-reader, but they are few; even the ending, with its moral of ‘make the most of the life you have’, doesn’t really feel didactic, because the story has made the case for that viewpoint so persuasively.

Apparently Grimwood was working on a sequel to Replay when he died (at the sadly young age of 59). I’m ambivalent towards the idea of a second book: on the one hand, if he could have made it as good as this, I would love to find out what he had planned. On the other hand, Replay is fine as it is, needs no embellishments, and deservedly puts its author’s name down in history as one of the greats. Replay was not the first text to examine the question ‘what if you could live your life again?’, and it certainly wasn’t the last — but, in its elegance and eloquence, it must surely be one of the best.

Eastercon

16th April 2009 / / 1 Comment

I went along to Bradford for my first Eastercon (British National Science Fiction Convention) at the weekend — just for a couple of days, to see what it was like. I enjoyed myself, but not as much as I’d hoped to; I think that came down to feeling more like a ‘visitor’, so I’ve booked for the full weekend next year. This post will give some general impressions I had of the con.

First, there was a lot going on, much more than at Fantasycon or Alt-Fiction (the conventions I usually attend) — something like nine or ten different rooms in use (not all at the same time, but still), plus media programme, games room and art show. I was very impressed at the range of events on offer, which included film shows (in addition to the media room), music performances, talks on science and history, and even items that had nothing much to do with science fiction (oh, to have been there for the ‘science of chocolate’ session!).

I was surprised by the size of the venue. For all its many streams of programming, and its much larger number of delegates (I believe that Eastercon typically averages about 800-1000 attendees, compared to Fantasycon’s 200), the physical space of the convention could not have been much larger than that of Fantasycon (and I’m sure the social areas were smaller). The dealers’ room was also much smaller than I had expected. Having said all this, I don’t if it was typical of Eastercon, or whether it was just the size of that particular hotel.

As for the events I attended — I saw John Clute ‘in action’ on a panel for the first time (he was every bit as erudite as I thought he’d be). There was a talk on the Clarke Award shortlist, which I’m sure I would have got more out of if I’d read all the books. And quite an interesting panel on ‘old versus new SF’, in which the two ‘teams’ of participants recommended three books of ‘old’ or ‘new’ SF to each other. I hadn’t read any of the six books under discussion (More than Human, The Man in the High Castle, Stand on Zanzibar, Revelation Space, River of Gods, and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union); but I found it striking that the ‘new’ books were all by reasonably well-established authors (respectively Alastair Reynolds, Ian McDonald, and Michael Chabon), and I wondered which ‘new’ writers the panel would have recommended. Alas, there was no time for such questions, and it’s a whole different discussion anyway.

Highlight of the two days: well, it has to be discovering one of my reviews quoted in publicity material, but that doesn’t have anything to do with Eastercon, so…

Best panel: not about SF, but a talk on urban exploring, and seeing fascinating photos of the old American Adventure theme park, and other abandoned buildings. It’s amazing what abandoned places are out there — though I’ll happily leave the exploration of them to others!

Most interesting fact: I never knew that Tiffany was a name that goes back hundreds of years. But, to paraphrase the contributor (I forget who it was), ‘Princess Tiffany’ would just not sound right in a serious fantasy novel nowadays.

Favourite coincidence: there was a depot opposite the hotel belonging to a company called ‘T H White’. I don’t think they were guarding Arthur, but you never know…

Anyway, that’s my little report on Eastercon LX, and I look forward to experiencing the full weekend next year.

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