Tag: literature

Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010)

18th December 2010 / / 7 Comments

One of the things for which fantastic fiction is particularly good is dramatising metaphors – and, more than that, creating texts that can be read equally productively at both metaphorical and literal levels (Mr Shivers by Robert Jackson Bennett is a good example from earlier this year). Charles Yu’s debut, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, does this, but it also goes further, dramatising science fiction itself as a literary mode.

Yu’s protagonist is himself named Charles Yu (from now on, I’ll refer to the protagonist as ‘Charles’ and the author as ‘Yu’), a time machine repair-man living in, yes, a science fictional universe – which is to say, one built so its inhabitants could enjoy the sorts of adventurous lives one reads about in sf, but which could never be possible in mundane reality. (The thing is, though, the construction of this minor universe was imperfect, and only those who can afford it get to live in the sf-nal part.) Charles has one of the ‘back room’ jobs needed to keep his universe running smoothly, and, when he’s not on a call, spends most of his time (such as the concept applies to someone who lives outside the usual chronological flow) in his phone-booth-sized TM-31 time machine, with no company but a dog that sort of exists, but only on a technicality; his time machine’s gloomy AI; and the occasional call from his boss, who’s virtual but doesn’t know it. He also reflects a lot on his relationship with his father, who invented the time travel technology, and has now gone… somewhere.

One of the golden rules of Charles’s profession is: if you ever see another version of yourself, run. Well, Charles has seen a future version of himself, but he shot him, thereby trapping himself in a time loop. Before he died, that future version handed Charles a book and told him that the key was inside. The title of that book was How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe…

In Yu’s novel, time travel is linked explicitly with Charles’s issues with his father; as he solves the problem of the time loop, the protagonist is simultaneously working out how to deal with and move forward from those personal issues. But How to Live Safely would be a pretty thin read if that were also there was to it; happily, there is much more. Yu, it seems to me, is examining the value and the limitations of both science fiction and ‘literary’ fiction (quotation marks because I don’t personally see those two as entirely separate, but we’ll go with the difference here, because science-fictionality and ‘reality’ are different in the novel). The time travellers who provide Charles’s bread and butter don’t have as much power as they think, because it’s not possible to change the past in the science fictional universe, however hard they try. The way Charles solves his problem is effectively a fusion of the two modes, as he relives his memories as an outside observer, before a return to science-fictionality slots the pieces together.

The novel’s dialogue between modes is also reflected at the level of prose, as Yu blurs the line between the scientific and emotional aspects of his book by using scientific language in his descriptions. For example:

Our house was a collection of silences, each room a mute, empty frame, each of us three oscillating bodies (Mom, Dad, me) moving around in our own curved functions, from space to space, not making any noise, just waiting, waiting to wait, trying, for some reason, not to disrupt the field of silence, not to perturb the delicate equilibrium of the system. (p. 34)

Yu creates some quite powerful effects in How to Live Safely. One scene that I think works particularly well is when Charles visits his mother, who is currently living in her own repeating hour-long bubble of time, and there are echoes of a parent’s being abandoned in a home (‘I don’t like it in here,’ Charles’s mother tells him. ‘Why did you stick me in here? Can you please take me out? I don’t like it in here’ [p. 81]). And such moments are nicely balanced out by the playfulness elsewhere in the book, the humour in Charles’s situation, and the way Yu handles the self-referentiality of the book in our hands purportedly being one that Charles himself has written. There’s a lot to enjoy in How to Live Safely, and a lot to think about afterwards.

Elsewhere
Radio interview with Charles Yu on KCRW
Adam Roberts reviews How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe in The Guardian

M.D. Lachlan, Wolfsangel (2010)

14th December 2010 / / 2 Comments

Acting on the prophecy of the witch queen Gullveig, King Athun takes twin boys from an Anglo-Saxon village during a raid. One, he names Vali and raises as his own; the other, Feileg, is kept by Gullveig to serve as her protector and sent to be schooled in the wolf-magic of the berserkers. Over the years, the twins become pawns in the complex game of magical subterfuge that is the eternal war between Odin and Loki. To say that Wolfsangel is a Viking fantasy with werewolves would technically be accurate but it would do a disservice to author Mark Barrowcliffe, whose debut fantasy (published under the name ‘MD Lachlan’) is a much richer book than that bald description suggests.

Wolfsangel pays its dues as a fantasy adventure story: the plot is suitably eventful, with twists and turns a-plenty, and Lachlan is a deft writer of action. But, while the violence in this novel may be brutal, it is not gratuitously so; the author brings home that violence plays a key part in the world of his story and he shows how harsh and restrictive it makes life for his characters. Vali is a prince who refuses to play the role expected of him by his society – he abhors fighting and his true love, Adisla, is a farm girl (who is far more resigned to the status quo than he). Perhaps his ultimate quest in Wolfsangel is to break free of those social strictures.

But Vali (and other characters) are bound in even deeper ways than they can imagine – and this is where magic comes in. Lachlan’s treatment of magic is interesting and distinctive, depicting a mysterious force that not even its ablest users understand fully (“a puzzle not a recipe” as one character puts it). Particularly striking is the way that this magic consumes and distorts those who wield and come into contact with it: the witch queen might have power enough to make her a goddess of sorts but the price she has paid is that her body will forever remain that of a child. Similarly, the magic of the berserks grants Feileg immense physical ability but it also twists his personality into something not quite human (“I am a wolf” he repeats, as though it were a mantra). The struggle to avert the destinies laid down by magic parallels Vali’s fight against society.

The whole world of Wolfsangel is suffused with the unknown. Gods are present in both divine and mortal aspects but aren’t necessarily aware of who they are. Magic floats through the narrative, with many seemingly unsure of where its reality stops and superstition begins. Even the geography, the very extent of the world, feels only half-known to most of the characters. It lends the book a real sense of strangeness, which runs alongside and rounds out the more conventional adventure story.

Wolfsangel is the first novel in a series that will move forwards through history; I’ll be interested to see how that works but, if the rest are a good as this one, it will be a series that needs reading.

This review first appeared in Vector 264, Autumn 2010

Elsewhere

M.D. Lachlan’s website

Some other reviews of Wolfsangel: Paul Kincaid for Strange Horizons; Adam Roberts at Punkadiddle; Jonathan McCalmont at The Zone.

New Stories from the Mabinogion: Lewis and Griffiths

10th December 2010 / / 5 Comments

Gwyneth Lewis, The Meat Tree (2010)
Niall Griffiths, The Dreams of Max & Ronnie (2010)

These are the latest two volumes in Seren Books’ series reworking the medieval Welsh tales of the Mabinogion. I don’t really know those myths, but, luckily for me, there’s a handy synopsis at the back of each book that helped me get up to speed. However, when I read the synopsis in Gwyneth Lewis’s The Meat Tree (based on the fourth branch of the Mabinogion, the story of Blodeuwedd), I thought, how do you make a novel out of this, when it’s so disjointed by comparison?

Well, Lewis tackles that issue head-on and has come up with a fascinating solution. The Meat Tree is set in 2210 and focuses on Campion, an ‘Inspector of Wrecks’, and his apprentice Nona. They investigate a ship which has apparently come from Earth, though surely it’s too well-preserved, and there’s no sign of what happened to the crew. In the hope of gaining some clues, Campion and Nona turn to the virtual reality system placed prominently on the ship; this plunges them into the tale of Blodeuwedd – but what was its significance to the crew?

Representing the myth as a VR game addresses its episodic nature, as the protagonists experience it episodically (‘the progression of the plot can feel very uncomfortable,’ says Campion [p. 37]). But, more significantly than this, it also puts a distance between the myth itself and our viewpoint characters, which allows Lewis to interrogate the myth as she goes, as well as retelling it. The text becomes something of a live laboratory, as Campion and Nona try to puzzle out what the story might have meant to the people who told it (both in their immediate fictional context and, by implication, to the original medieval tellers); they explore issues such as the symbolic representation of gender and power in a way that doesn’t feel at all forced.

On a narrative level, though, The Meat Tree is also fascinating. The story is told entirely through the medium of Campion’s and Nona’s ‘synapse logs’ and ‘joint thought channel’, so that’s layer another of perception to add to all the rest. The protagonists’ identities shift and accrete (for example, near the beginning, we have Nona and Campion in the game playing male characters who have been turned into animals, one male and one female – and how well Lewis handles the writing of it), and even eventually bleed out of the game. There are also moments that bring the bare details of the myth sharply off the page, such as when Blodeuwydd (a woman created magically from flowers) realises that she is ‘a flower made of meat’ (p. 173).

Towards the end of the novel, there is perhaps too much of a sense of the two protagonists slotting everything together conveniently – but, then again, what else was going to happen? It would be too much of a let-down if the mystery of the ship stayed a mystery, and there’s no one else to do the figuring-out. Whatever, The Meat Tree is a spectacular work of the imagination.

***

After that, Niall Griffiths’ (relatively) more conventional retelling of two dream stories in The Dreams of Max & Ronnie pales a little in comparison, perhaps. But, still,

The first and longer of Griffiths’ novellas, ‘Ronnie’s Dream’, is based on the Mabinogion story of Rhonabwy, whose dream was a vision of King Arthur and a vast gathering of knights. Griffiths’ Ronnie is a squaddie about to set off for Iraq; the leader he meets in his dream is not Arthur, but an analogue of Tony Blair. Reading ‘Ronnie’s Dream’, I felt the limitations of not having read the Mabinogion; a synopsis is fine, but it can’t give me the sense of the original tale. Griffiths’ version is a satire, primarily on the Iraq war, but it doesn’t quite work for me on that level. For one thing, it feels like a bit of a grab-bag – mostly stuff on the war, but it also squeezes in some swipes at celebrity culture and some social stereotypes – which dilutes the focus somewhat. For another, as targets of satire, these issues seem to me quite well-worn, and I’m not sure that this tale says much about them that is fresh.

This is not to say, though, that ‘Ronnie’s Dream’ has no bite. Some aspects certainly have, such as the Blair-figure’s stock speech (‘By my actions have I answered questions. The time has come for an end to talking…’ [p. 68]), which is repeated until ground down into empty rhetoric. In addition, the contrast between the poetic style of Griffiths’ narration and the more modern, colloquial dialogue is very effective; and there’s general interest in seeing how the author adapts details of the myth for the present day.

Griffiths’ second novella is ‘The Dream of Max the Emperor’; originally the story of Maxen Wledig, a Roman emperor who goes (or sends his men) in search of a beautiful woman he saw in a dream, here Max is a Cardiff crime boss. He eventually finds his beauty in north Wales, but all is not as it seems; for example, the castle in his dream turns out to be a film set. This theme goes deeper into the story; one of Griffiths’ best effects in the novella is the way he portrays the Wales outside Cardiff as a place that’s as strange to Max’s men as any land of myth would be:

They travel out of the city limits and each one feels a small falling-off as they enter a land they don’t recognise, through valleys between dark slag-mountains and past heaps of refuse and rotting industrial machinery, past rusting pitheads and smelters and quarries and all of it a-crumble. Over a plain. Across big green bumps on the world’s face. (p. 127)

Something that both Griffiths and Lewis manage to do in their respective books is evoke a true sense of fantasy, the disquieting and disorienting sense that (at least within the pages of the book) the world is not as you thought. In doing so, they show just how much vitality these myths still have.

Elsewhere
Seren Books
Gwyneth Lewis’s website
Sam of Cold Iron & Rowan-Wood reviews The Meat Tree
Annabel Gaskell reviews The Dreams of Max & Ronnie and The Meat Tree
Paul Kincaid reviews the first two New Stories from the Mabinogion for Strange Horizons

This review (half of it, anyway!) is posted in support of ‘women and sf’ week at Torque Control.

Lauren Beukes, Zoo City (2010)

8th December 2010 / / 6 Comments

The late 1990s saw the first case of what became known as Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism (AAF) – or, more bluntly, the Zoo Plague.  Anyone who does something bad gains an animal (which is apparently an extension of their selves), a magical ability of some sort, and the threat of destruction by the “black cloud” of the Undertow. That “something bad” is deliberately vague, because nobody in the alternate present/several-months-hence of Lauren Beukes’ novel knows precisely what causes this condition; which of course means that people can place their own meaning on to it – but to become a “zoo” or “animalled” is certainly a social stigma.

On that note, meet Zinzi December, one-time journalist, now living in the Zoo City area of Johannesburg. Responsible for the death of her brother, Zinzi now has a Sloth and the ability to find lost things; she earns her money from the latter, and from a sideline in 419 scams. When her current client turns up dead, Zinzi has to take the best job she can get, which is being hired by a music mogul named Odi Huron to find the missing half of his latest act, the teen duo iJusi. You don’t need me to tell you that it’s not as simple as that.

But hold on, because that makes it sound as though Zoo City is a noir-ish mystery with fantastical overtones – which it is, but the mystery is not the most important thing; rather, the investigation seems to me a device to facilitate a journey through the book’s world (the city, that is). And one of the most striking things about that world, as both John Clute and Niall Harrison have noted, is how low-key its fantasy is; the presence of animal familiars aside, if you didn’t know there were magic in the novel’s world, it would be easy to miss. This is magic so thoroughly integrated into the world that it becomes just another tool to be used in life (as Zinzi says, “You do what it takes, you take the opportunities” [p. 346]); in this regard, Zoo City reminded me of The City & the City (the presentation of the Undertow, as an overt irruption of the possibly-supernatural into real life, also recalled for me the latter novel’s Breach), though where Mieville’s novel puts its fantastical construct front and centre, Beukes’ keeps its one hidden like an individual tree in a forest.

Adam Roberts coined the term “worldbling” to describe showing off through world-building; when I’d first finished Zoo City, I thought to myself, this novel demonstrates the opposite of worldbling.  But, having since read Clute’s review, I’m coming to a slightly different view: if this novel has any worldbling (and I do think it has some), it’s of the Cook’s-tour kind, not about the magic, but about the place. And Zinzi’s travels in the city are extensive, taking in glitzy clubs, the sewers, and more besides. She also finds herself taking on many roles during the course of the novel: as well as the standard finder of lost things, she will step back into her old journalistic circles, and act out parts in face-to-face scams; she’ll be the lover she is, and perhaps even the lover she once was. I think this is where AAF really comes in at a metaphorical level; to acquire an animal in Zoo City is to become displaced and different – literally so, as a part of you manifests as another creature; but also displaced from society, and Zinzi is not the only character who is forced by circumstance to become someone else. Even the area which is now Zoo City used to be different.

I think I’d agree with Niall that the ending of Zoo City lets the book down somewhat. There’s a too-strong sense of pieces being moved into position on the gameboard, in a novel that doesn’t initially feel as though it has a board. However, Beukes’ telling is what carries the day; quite apart from anything else, the momentum of the story and narration is gloriously unstoppable.

Lauren Beukes’ first novel, Moxyland, has been on my shelves waiting to be read for some time. After this, it won’t be staying that way for long.

Elsewhere
Lauren Beukes’ website

This review is posted in support of ‘women and sf’ week at Torque Control.

This novel has been shortlisted for the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts about the Award.

Pam Bachorz, Candor (2009)

6th December 2010 / / 1 Comment

The Floridian model town of Candor is a picture of wholesomeness, its children impeccably behaved. It’s all thanks to Candor’s founder and mayor, Campbell Banks, and the subliminal Messages that he pumps out underneath the town’s ever-present music. Families pay a hefty fee to move to Candor, but the deal they make if life-long; once you start hearing the Messages, even a single night away from them is fatal, and anyone showing signs of deviance may be subjected to a programme of complete mental reconditioning in the ‘Listening Room’.

The only kid who knows about the Messages is the mayor’s son, Oscar who has trained himself to resist, and now maintains the pretence of being a perfect child of Candor, whilst covertly arranging escapes from the town (and supplying clients with CDs of his own counter-Messages) . At the start of the novel, Oscar meets Nia Silva, an edgy new arrival in Candor, as yet unaffected by the Messages; he soon becomes attracted to her, and it’s a race against time for him to keep her as she is – not that the attraction is entirely mutual.

I’d characterise Pam Bachorz’s debut as an interesting novel that doesn’t quite live up to its promise. On a narrative level, Candor is efficiently told, and the multiple iterations of will-they/won’t-they are very nicely handled; there’s no shortage of page-turning tension. But what I find missing is a true sense of the strangeness of this place. That narrative efficiency is perhaps a little too efficient to really build up the atmosphere; yes, I felt the chill of what it means to live in Candor at a couple of plot pivots, but it wasn’t there as a constant note in the background.

Similarly, the novel makes some examination of ethics, but it only goes so far. Campbell and Oscar Banks represent two opposing ‘ sides’, but it’s made clear that both have their rights and wrongs – yet I don’t feel the issues these raise are examined as fully as they merit. Campbell is the villain of the piece, and, though we do learn the reasons behind what has done in Candor, it never really prevents him from being unambiguously a bad guy.

This matters less, though, than the case of Oscar, where I think the novel is aiming for a more firmly ambiguous portrait, and doesn’t quite get to the heart of it. Though he is the novel’s narrator and ‘hero’, Oscar is hardly the most sympathetic character, because he is so self-serving. The question is raised of just how much better he is than his father – after all, Oscar is not above manipulating others for his personal gain, and not always with the excuse that he’s helping them escape. Yet, though the question is asked, it’s not explored in detail, and I think that Candor misses out on some depth as a result.

In sum, Candor is a fast read, and a rather engaging debut – a good way to spend a few hours – but it doesn’t truly linger.

Elsewhere
Pam Bachorz’s website

This review is posted in support of ‘women and sf’ week at Torque Control.

Books of 2011

23rd November 2010 / / 5 Comments

Anyone who has been to university may remember the feeling of looking at all the societies during Freshers’ Week and going, that looks fun, and so does that, and so does that… until you end up joining more than you reasonably have time for.

Well, I thought I’d have a look through some publishers’ catalogues for next year, and make a list of books that sounded interesting. You can guess where this is going.

So, let us be clear that the following is not a list of books I intend to read in 2011, though I certainly will read some of them. Think of it more as a kind of ‘advance recommended reading’ list, with the caveat that I don’t know what any of them are like. But that one looks interesting, and so does that one, and so does that…

***

Alice Albinia, Leela’s Book
Paul Bailey, Chapman’s Odyssey
Elia Barceló, The Goldsmith’s Secret
Kevin Barry, City of Bohane
Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Robert Jackson Bennett, The Company Man
David Bezmozgis, The Free World
Rahul Bhattacharya, The Sly Company of People Who Care
Frances Bingham, The Principle of Camouflage
Carol Birch, Jamrach’s Menagerie
Sharon Blackie, The Bee Dancer
Stefan Merrill Block, The Storm at the Door
Chaz Brenchley, House of Doors
Chaz Brenchley, Rotten Row
Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination
Keith Brooke (ed.), The Sub-genres of Science Fiction
Ellen Bryson, The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno
John Burnside, A Summer of Drowning
John Butler, The Tenderloin
Lucy Caldwell, The Meeting Point
Warwick Cairns, In Praise of Savagery
George Makana Clark, The Raw Man
Ben Constable, Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa
Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall
Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf
Enruque de Hériz, The Manual of Darkness
Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad
Will Elliott, Pilgrims
Stuart Evers, Ten Stories About Smoking
Tom Fletcher, The Thing on the Shore
Essie Fox, The Somnambulist
Claudie Gallay, The Breakers
Petina Gappah, The Book of Memory
Rachel Genn, The Cure
Andrew Sean Greer, The Path of Minor Planets
Jon Courtenay Grimwood, The Fallen Blade
Faïza Guène, Bar Balto
Benjamin Hale, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore
Sophie Hardach, The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages
Dermot Healy, Long Time, No See
Ida Hattemer-Higgins, The History of History
Alois Hotschnig, Maybe This Time
Lars Iyer, Spurious
Richard T. Kelly, The Possessions of Doctor Forrest
M.D. Lachlan, Fenrir
Simon Lelic, The Faciility
James Lovegrove, Diversifications
Michael Marshall, The Breakers
Cornelius Medvei, Caroline
Dinaw Mengestu, How to Read the Air
China Miéville, Embassytown
Angela Morgan Cutler, The Letter
Bradford Morrow, The Diviner’s Tale
Adam Nevill, The Beast
Cees Nooteboom, Foxes in the Night and Other Stories
Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife
Helen Oyeyemi, Mr Fox
Matthias Politycki, Next World Novella
Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides
Christopher Priest, The Islanders
Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb
Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
Adam Roberts, By Light Alone
Geoff Ryman, Paradise Tales
Sunjeev Sahota, Ours are the Streets
Nat Segnit, Pub Walks in Underhill Country
Jacques Strauss, The Dubious Salvation of Jack V.
Kirsten Tranter, The Legacy
Jan van Mersbergen, Tomorrow Pamplona
David Vann, Caribou Island
Katie Ward, Girl Reading
David Whitehouse, Bed
Conrad Williams, Loss of Separation
Luke Williams, The Echo Chamber
Naomi Wood, The Godless Boys
Alexi Zentner, Touch

What are you looking forward to next year? What have I missed?

The finding of lost children: Donoghue and Robinson

15th November 2010 / / 11 Comments

Emma Donoghue, Room (2010)
Ray Robinson, Forgetting Zoë (2010)

The two novels I’m reviewing here weave beautiful tales from ugly subject matter: namely, the abduction and long-term captivity of children. Both are less concerned with plot than with character – the key question is not, ‘will they escape?’ but ‘what effect do these events have on the people involved?’ Whilst the process of uncovering the answers may be harrowing, it has resulted in two powerful works of literature.

Emma Donoghue’s Booker-shortlisted Room is narrated by five-year-old Jack, who has lived his entire life in the 121 square feet of Room, the space in which his mother (‘Ma’) has been held captive for the past seven years by a man whom she and Jack call ‘Old Nick’. As far as Jack is concerned, this space is all that exists; the novel progresses from establishing the parameters of Jack’s mental world, through Ma’s (successful) escape bid, to Jack’s attempts to adjust to life in an outside world that he didn’t know was real.

Jack’s narrative voice is critical to the success of Room; though I’ve heard a few people say they felt it stumbled at times, it mostly held up for me; the main quibble I’d have is that Jack continues to call the sun ‘God’s yellow face’ throughout the book, which didn’t convince me given what else he knows, and the influence of astronomical concepts on Jack’s mental framework (he thinks of TV programmes as ‘planets’). I also have a general, vague sense that Jack doesn’t seem quite as disoriented by the outside world as I might expect him to be; but, to be fair, I can’t put my finger on any specific instances to illustrate that.

(As an aside, it strikes me that the success or otherwise of Jack’s voice depends on what one considers the first-person narrative to be. I can see that Jack’s voice may be problematic if the text is considered a straightforward spoken/written/thought account; but, unless they indicate otherwise. I tend to think of first-person narratives as ‘impressions’ filtered through the medium of prose, which leads me to allow more latitude than I otherwise might.)

The character revealed through Jack’s narration has a convincing mixture of precocity and naivety: his education through television and Ma has given Jack knowledge beyond his years in some subjects, but he still has many misconceptions about the real world; Jack’s little linguistic quirks (for example, he doesn’t go to sleep, he ‘switches off’) serve as jarring reminders that we view the world of Donoghue’s novel through a distorting lens.

But Room’s real power, I think, lies in its gaps. There’s a gap between what has happened to Ma and what Jack understands; it’s up to us as readers to fill in that gap; so, for example, Jack’s comment, ‘I think Old Nick put those marks on [Ma’s] neck’ carries much more weight for us than it does for the boy.

Even more poignant, I think, than the gap between the reality of events and Jack’s perception of them, is the gap between who Ma is and who she might have been. She was kidnapped by Old Nick as a nineteen-year-old student; at times, such as when she tells Jack her story, we catch glimpses of the independent young woman she would probably have been in her early twenties – but that life is forever lost to her, because she became Jack’s Ma instead (symbolically, we never do learn her name; even though Jack sees it written down, he doesn’t reveal what it is). Ma’s life, like the novel, revolves around Jack; it’s a struggle for him to comprehend what’s happening when she tries to assert her individuality in the outside world. By novel’s end, however, there’s a sense that both Jack and Ma are ready to move on.

If Room is focused relentlessly inwards on Jack, then Ray Robinson’s Forgetting Zoë faces outwards, reaching across vast landscapes and into the lives of not just its abductee, but also her mother and her captor. In 1999, Thurman Hayes takes his mother’s body to Canada, where she grew up; whilst there, he abducts ten-year-old Zoë Nielsen. For the next eight years, Hayes keeps her captive in his ranch in the Arizona desert and its underground bunker; by the time she escapes, the girl Zoë was is a distant memory.

Robinson’s prose and characterisation in this novel are exquisite. Here, for example, is Thurman reflecting on his father’s hands:

…to Thurman the hands only ever spoke one word and that was hurt. They contained bones that had fractured many times and reset, broken against walls and furniture, the skulls of cattle, Mom, Thurman. Hands so masterful at gripping axes and shovels and carpentry tools and soldering irons, the stock of his rifle and shotgun. So useful for overturning a table with a single, effortless flick, for giving a backhand so fast it was heard before it was felt, for grabbing a fistful of hair and smashing heads into walls.

The precision of the detail there is so vivid, and the way it illustrates manual ability sliding so easily into violence. The opening section of Forgetting Zoë shows brilliantly how the young Thurman is damaged and becomes the monster we see in the later parts of the novel. Growing up in a violent household, with feelings of inadequacy because he can’t be the man his father wants him to be, Hayes’s feelings bubble over and he ends up with a confused attitude to women that leads him to…

Well, that’s another striking thing about Forgetting Zoë: some of the key events take place ‘off-stage’, so there are gaps in our knowledge of cause and effect. For example, we never see the actual abduction of Zoë; whilst it’s readily possible to construct a theory of why Hayes kidnaps her, we don’t know the full story; when we meet him and Zoë again after the abduction, they are changed characters; we have to work to reach them once again, which adds another layer of richness to the novel.

Another lacuna in the narrative is the bulk of Zoë’s captivity. In 1999, we see the beginnings of Zoë the ‘true Canadian girl of big sky, big moon, of big sunsets and clouds’ slipping away in the bunker; but the contrast with her eighteen-year-old self when we jump forward to 2007 still carries quite an impact. The section covering the run-up to Zoë’s escape is perhaps the most powerful in the whole book, as Zoë is torn between her desire to escape and her reluctance to leave Hayes behind. With its uncertain passage of time, this section has a sickening ebb and flow, as one wonders if Zoë ever will gain her freedom – and the fact that we already know from the section title that she will does nothing to diminish that effect.

The title of Forgetting Zoë refers more than anything to Zoë forgetting herself. She starts to do that during her captivity, of course; but there’s a more positive interpretation of the title to be found at the end – that of being able to forget the past. As with Jack in Room, there is a sense of new beginnings for Zoë. And, as good a book as Room is, I think Forgetting Zoë may just be one of my reads of the year.

Links

Room
Emma Donoghue’s website
Video interview with Donoghue
Some other reviews: Adam Roberts; Farm Lane Books; Bookgeeks; Savidge Reads.

Forgetting Zoë
Ray Robinson’s website
Scott Pack interviews Robinson
Some other reviews: Bookmunch; Farm Lane Books; Scott Pack; Alison Flood for The Observer.

Green Books Campaign: Javascotia

10th November 2010 / / 0 Comments

This review is part of the Green Books campaign.Today 200 bloggers take a stand to support books printed in an eco-friendly manner by simultaneously publishing reviews of 200 books printed on recycled or FSC-certified paper. By turning a spotlight on books printed using eco-friendly paper, we hope to raise the awareness of book buyers and encourage everyone to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books.

The campaign is organized for the second time by Eco-Libris, a green company working to make reading more sustainable. We invite you to join the discussion on “green” books and support books printed in an eco-friendly manner! A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on Eco-Libris website.

The book reviewed here is printed on FSC-certified paper.

Benjamin Obler, Javascotia (2009)

It’s 1994, and Mel Podgorski – still in his early twenties, with a failed marriage behind him, and a year spent in the doldrums – gets another chance to make something of himself. He lands a job as a market researcher working on behalf of a large coffee chain, and is sent across the Atlantic to Glasgow, to scope out the competition. Whilst there, Mel finds himself falling for an art student named Nicole Marston – and gets caught up in the group of anti-motorway protestors to which she belongs.

Javascotia is one of those frustrating reads which is never quite as good as one senses it could be. Benjamin Obler has a flowing prose style, tending towards lengthy expression, but only rarely in a way that outstays its welcome. However, some aspects of Mel’s first-person narration are more problematic: for example, he’ll note the differences in language (“[…]most of the listings were bedsits – in American English, studios or efficiencies – and the section of the paper was headed adverts”, p. 39); which is fine at the beginning, to show that Mel is still finding his feet – but he’s still making such remarks towards the end of the novel, when the technique is redundant and can be pretty irritating. I’m also not sure that the novel’s structure serves it all that well – Mel’s life in the US is dealt with mainly in one long section (over a hundred pages) in the middle, which I found to really disrupt the momentum built up in the earlier part of the book.

There is an interesting theme running through Javascotia, though, which I’d characterise as exploring the gap between impression and reality. It’s there in the way that Scotland doesn’t live up to its tourist-brochure image for the American characters (Mel isn’t the only scout we meet), and the way that Glasgow’s coffee outlets aren’t as Mel imagines them to be. It’s there in the way that Mel is shown not to have known his wife (and, indeed, his parents) in the way he thought he did. And it’s there in a nicely rueful ending.

There’s an interesting story told in Javascotia, but the way it is told doesn’t quite do it justice.

Elsewhere
Ben Obler’s website
Extract and Obler’s “five favourite cups of coffee”, at Penguin Books
Obler’s top 10 fictional coffee scenes, at The Guardian

Literary Blog Hop

6th November 2010 / / 3 Comments

Literary Blog Hop

The Blue Bookcase blog is hosting a “Literary Blog Hop” this weekend, and I thought I’d take part, as I tend as I tend to think of this blog as covering literary fiction. Participants are asked to answer the following prompt: Please highlight one of your favourite books and why you would consider it “literary.”

Okay, that’s a good opportunity for me to think through what I mean by “literary”. I doubt I could come up with any hard-and-fast definition that wouldn’t have fuzzy edges, but here goes. I don’t think of literary fiction as a category that excludes particular genres; I think of it as a general description of books that I can appreciate as something more than just a way of passing the time.

The novel I’ve chosen to highlight here is my favourite read of last year – The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton. I’ve already written on it at some length here, and so don’t want to repeat myself too much, but, to give some context: The Rehearsal is about an alleged scandal between a teacher and pupil at a girls’ school, and a play inspired by the scandal which students from the local drama college decide to stage. Then again, that’s not really what the book is “about”; it’s about different kinds of performance and pretence – in life, not just in theatre.

What makes The Rehearsal “literary” for me is the way that its main theme is played out on so many levels, and that the different aspects reinforce each other. The drama students literally put on a show; the girls at the school do so metaphorically in how they relate to each other. Some scenes read more like a theatrical production (and not necessarily the one being staged at the drama college) than a report of “reality” – even the novel itself is putting on a show. Catton takes risks with structure and dialogue, but it all works, because everything is tied back to the central idea of rehearsing.

So, that’s The Rehearsal. Now to check out some of the other blogs in the hop…

Robert Edric, Salvage (2010): Strange Horizons review

5th November 2010 / / 0 Comments

Today, I make my debut as a reviewer on Strange Horizons. SH is, in my view, pretty much the best place to go online for reviews of speculative fiction, and I am very pleased to be contributing to it.

The book I’m reviewing is Salvage by Robert Edric, a novel set one hundred years into the future, when climatic disruption has displaced many and new towns are being built to house them. Edric’s protagonist, Quinn, is an auditor sent to examine the development of one such town; what he finds is, to put it mildly, not encouraging.

But, already, I’m going over ground covered in the review itself, so I’ll stop there, and invite you to read my Strange Horizons piece by clicking this link.

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