Mar 31 2018

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

This powerful book about a woman discovering her own agency through the lens of the Bangladeshi immigrant experience surprised me at how timeless it felt even though it’s set at the turn of the 21st century. It’s very much in the tradition of classics by Thomas Hardy and Willa Cather, documenting with a fine eye for time and place the interior lives of their flawed and sympathetic characters. It actually came as a surprise to me that this book chronicled the period that it did as it felt somehow older, less modern, but to a very large extent that speaks less to the book than to the rapid tumult of progress in the era covered and, more pertinently, in the places it details. Bangladesh and England with their fraught histories with one another and on their own make excellent backdrops for a study of a woman who learns that there is more to life than just existing.

My only criticism of this novel is that it felt less like a novel than a series of vignettes strung together, mostly competently but occasionally with enough of a leap in the narrative to make the gap noticeable. There are a lot of shockingly underwritten scenes, in the manner of Leo Tolstoy, but unlike the great Russian, Monica Ali wisely refuses to compensate by overwriting other scenes to a dull and grisly death.

I requested this book from my library because I stayed very nearby Brick Lane, in Bethnal Green, when I was in London briefly earlier this year. I was actually a bit disappointed reading it because the Brick Lane I know is quite different just over a decade on, tho I interpret this as an improvement and another sign of rapid progress to the good. Contrasting my visit with the book did emphasize again how oddly underwritten the riot scene, among others, was: Ms Ali is not quite as good describing exteriors as she is at emotion. The novel is still shockingly good for a debut, and definitely belongs on a shelf next to its predecessors as a modern classic.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/31/brick-lane-by-monica-ali/

Mar 25 2018

Spook Street (Slough House #4) by Mick Herron

I need more Slough House books. You guys don’t understand: I need them (she says, tapping her veins.) It’s so unfair that Book 5, London Rules, isn’t out yet in the US.

ANYWAY, with Spook Street, the Slough House series has officially become my favorite spy series. Aside from being smart and topical, these novels are funny as hell. And you know I like my stories to be liberally sprinkled with empathy and kindness, which these definitely have. Since we’re talking about books chronicling exploits in modern espionage, there’s also going to be a lot of nastiness, but in Mick Herron’s hands, none of it is gratuitous and all of it is heartbreaking (or at the very least hilarious.)

So yeah one of my favorite characters died in these pages and I’m still mad as hell about it, but I trust what Mr Herron has done with his writing to respect that narrative choice, because it was clear that Mr Herron respected that death and gave it the writing it deserved. I also loved his pacing: there is nothing so thrilling as coming to the “oh shit” realization just a handful of pages before the author masterfully reveals the truth.

My only criticism is that I’m getting rather tired of River, who is starting to be the mediocre white dude who manages to sail through life as the extremely boring hero of the piece (also, duh, Jackson Lamb is the hero here and I will brook no competition, especially from bland young white men from privileged backgrounds.) I am, however, intrigued by the addition of Coe to Slough House after what happened in Nobody Walks, especially since I want Bettany back on the streets now that Taverner is on the outs. But who knows if the bleak, tragic Bettany has a place in a world that uses often inappropriate drollery to cope with the horrors modern life flings at our security services ? I wouldn’t put it past Mr Herron to manage that integration with both skill and panache, honestly, and I CANNOT WAIT for London Rules.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/25/spook-street-slough-house-4-by-mick-herron/

Mar 24 2018

Any Day Now by Terry Bisson

For a good part of the way through Any Day Now, I was fairly certain that it would turn out to be the fourth perfect book, and even now I am not entirely sure that it is not. The book won’t be for everyone, though; I bounced off of the novel completely the first time I tried to read it.

If I had to say it was like anything else, which it isn’t, I would say it’s halfway between Ferrol Sams‘ three books about Porter Osborne, Jr. and The Armageddon Rag by George R.R. Martin. The story starts as a coming of age tale, with Clay, Bisson’s protagonist, as firmly located on Kentucky’s northern border as Osborne was in central Georgia. Clay is a generation younger than Osborne. Where Osborne fought in World War II, Clay is the son of a returned sailor, the last one off his sinking ship, forever marked by the experience.

(Clay grows up in the same town where Bisson did and eventually starts at a college in the Midwest not unlike Grinnell, which Bisson attended. Though Clay is a personal name rather than a family name, given that he is from Kentucky it was impossible for me not to think of Henry Clay and the other Clays who shaped both state and national history.)

Bisson tells the early part of the story in short snippets that are short on description, long on dialog, and that I found achingly beautiful. Bisson populates the small town with vivid people, capturing a Kentucky between eras, between north and south. Within 30 pages, Clay is in high school, and within 50 in college, but those formative years are as clear and memorable to a reader as they were to Clay. Some of the phrases coined then among friends echo through the years as they progress in their lives, leave town, fail to leave town, see each other again as time passes. Clay picks up a little bit of science fiction — a phrase from Arthur C. Clarke but as he starts to reach out toward a world beyond Owensboro it’s jazz and Beat writing that provide the rocket fuel for his launch.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/24/any-day-now-by-terry-bisson/

Mar 21 2018

Consider Phlebas (Culture #1) by Iain M. Banks

My first thought on finishing this book is “That was stupid.” And maybe in the late 1980s when this was written, the concepts invoked might have been considered new and interesting enough to paper over the book’s many other faults. In 2018, however, reading Consider Phlebas was a hard, unrewarding slog.

First and foremost, this book is really badly written. I am aghast that anyone could think otherwise. Iain M Banks loves to describe and describe and describe in mind-numbing detail the least interesting parts of the scenery. He spends pages describing the appearances of the crew of the CAT for no discernible reason other than to say “hey, these aren’t the standard humans you’re familiar with!” Which is also? A wildly unnecessary task. If their non-standard bodily characteristics had had any bearing on the narrative then great, but spoiler: they don’t! And every scene on the trains in the end was incredibly dull by virtue of being hopelessly overwritten. There is suspense and there is sheer tedium, and I was bored as hell by all the myriad descriptions of ruined metal. It was a total trainwreck of over-writing.

There were a lot of interesting set pieces that were just overworked by Mr Banks and then further made irrelevant by not having consequences beyond said set piece (tho I did enjoy the callback to the Damage game at the end.) I think a large part of the problem with Consider Phlebas is that it reads as if Mr Banks was trying to “redeem” the space opera genre. That kind of authorial condescension never bodes well for the reading public. It’s one thing to write for yourself, or for love of a genre (one excellent recent example being S. A. Chakraborty’s City Of Brass, which was originally Islamic history/fantasy fan fiction) but to go into writing, particularly into writing genre fiction, without the primary purpose of entertaining your readers, pretty much dooms your book to being a dull, moralizing exercise devoid of genre’s enlivening spirit.

I also wasn’t the hugest fan of the politics of this book. The Culture is a socialist techno-utopia that starts a war against the religious militants of the Idiran because the latter are a provocation to the former’s way of life? Which somehow justifies the billions of lives lost? The fuckery is this? That reasoning is sheer propaganda, the kind of excuse bandied about by greedy politicians and generals intending to exploit an area’s resources, to their gullible/sheltered constituents back home in order to pacify complaints about cost a/o morality. No one actually goes to war for that reason, it makes zero sense. Even the Christian crusades had the dubious goal of retaking the holy land, not just a “Muslims are a provocation” nonsense. Had the Idirans attacked first, this would have made a ton more sense, but Mr Banks was busily pushing a weird Noble Savage narrative that I found incredibly irritating, especially since they were clearly a stand-in for Islamic civilization. It was like he was trying to invert conventional Western expectations, which I’m all for, but did it in a way that ignored basic concepts of logic and self-preservation inherent to most sentient beings (not that I know any beyond human beings, but is a reasonable extrapolation given that we’re talking about a book written by a human person for a human audience.)

Anyway, this book was dumb, and I’m sorry I suggested it to Ingress book club. Book clubbers, if you’re reading this, I’m so sorry. I hope the TV version that started our conversation is way better.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/21/consider-phlebas-culture-1-by-iain-m-banks/

Mar 19 2018

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.” (p. 1)

So much of The Dispossessed is already laid out for readers in the novel’s opening paragraph: things that do not look important but are, the reality of ideas, the rough and improvised nature of a key setting even after seven generations of settlement, the strength of people’s willingness to follow customs. No people appear in the first paragraph, and though people are alluded to in a general way on the book’s second page, no specific characters make an appearance until the third, and no names are mentioned until the seventh.

With this start, Le Guin signals to her readers that The Dispossessed will be a novel of ideas and of types as much as it is of the individual characters who populate the two worlds where the book takes place. I have sometimes seen The Dispossessed with the subtitle “An Ambiguous Utopia,” although the edition I have simply says “A Novel” on the title page. In either case the reality of ideas, the idea of boundary, the notions of utopia, and the seven generations are all important to both setting and story.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/19/the-dispossessed-by-ursula-k-le-guin/

Mar 18 2018

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

What a terrific book. What it lacked in pathos for me, it more than made up for in the breadth of its empathy and historical vision.

Structured as eight short stories and an epilogue connected by their cast and timeline, Lovecraft Country plunges an ordinary black family of the 1950s and their friends into the kinds of eldritch terror made famous by that dreadful racist, H. P. Lovecraft. If anything, the main weakness of Matt Ruff’s book is that it doesn’t reach the levels of creeping supernatural horror often achieved by the book’s namesake. However, it more than makes up for it by exposing the all too real horrors of American racism, something far too many Americans want to forget or pretend were never that bad. Mr Ruff does something extraordinary with this book by not only putting this terrible evil front and center but also by making it a worse villain than anything dreamt of in natural philosophy, as the occultists in this book call their branch of study.

My favorite stories were, interestingly enough, the ones with female protagonists. Hippolyta Disturbs The Universe was easily my favorite of the bunch, both in the dream-like quality of the storytelling and for the sheer scariness of it. And the emotions! As a mother and an intellectual, I very much connected with Hippolyta and with Ida. It was also hard not to connect deeply with Ruby’s story in Jekyll In Hyde Park, even after coming to sympathize so well with her brave and clever sister, Letitia, in the first two stories. Which isn’t to say that the male characters aren’t also well drawn and sympathetic, just that Mr Ruff does an exceptional job writing of black women, a demographic which he does not have a natural advantage in, not being a part of either.

Anyway, I’ve already added another book of his to my To-Read pile because this extraordinary book shows off a mind that is at once keenly intelligent and determinedly kind, a combination I particularly love of my authors. Also, Mr Ruff’s writing is funny as hell. Atticus’ deadpan response to Samuel’s big speech in the opening story still makes me laugh just thinking about it. I have a feeling that reading more of Mr Ruff will be both a pleasure and a reminder to be a force for good and the truth. Not many authors can pull off both.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/18/lovecraft-country-by-matt-ruff/

Mar 17 2018

The Girl Who Drank The Moon by Kelly Barnhill

I really wanted to like this more, after the strong recommendation I got for it from Saladin Ahmad, but it was so weirdly annoying! It was very hard for me to believe that a 500 year-old witch who had been instrumental in helping to maintain the health and happiness of a large populace through one-on-one interactions could be so absolutely bone-headed in raising her own child. And I’m not saying that parenting is easy — I have an absolutely lovely 7 year-old and adorable 4 year-old twins who are a trial — and I absolutely 100% believe that discipline is hard but it felt like Xan just didn’t even try to get Luna to focus before locking away all her magic with a half-assed spell. I get it, children are exhausting, especially if you’re no spring chicken, but there was a distinct element of “oh, Luna is too lively for me to contain through actual parenting” that I found exceptionally irritating.

There were some fun twists on the typical fairy tale, and I thought the parable of the Protectorate and its politicians to be quite apt for our present times, but the book felt a little too pleased with its idea of its own cleverness overall. I suppose I might have liked it as a young reader, but as a parent, I thought it was pretty meh, and I’m usually a sucker for the parent-who-will-do-anything-for-their-child storyline, of which this book had not just one but two!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/17/the-girl-who-drank-the-moon-by-kelly-barnhill/

Mar 11 2018

The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley

The fuck was that?!

And I don’t mean that in a bad way either, it was just weird as hell and kinda gross. Pulling my professional pants on, I’m pretty sure the greatest part of my disorientation is the fact that, while this is billed as an outer space opera, I couldn’t shake the impression that this was all inner space and that these women were really anthropomorphized cell structures within a greater biological organism, of which the world/ships were also a component. I would love to see what an actual biologist would have to say about this (and don’t think I haven’t trawled the Internet looking.)

Anyway, there’s this character, Zan, who wakes up with amnesia after coming back from a failed raid on the world/ship Mokshi. Apparently, she keeps going in and keeps getting shot back out, the sole survivor, to return to her war-like people, the Katazyrna. At least, she thinks they’re her people, as Jayd, the beautiful woman she instinctively knows she loves, keeps telling her when she returns. But there’s something rotten in the state of Katazyrna, and when Jayd leaves Zan to form a political alliance with the world/ship Bhajava, whose warriors are ostensibly the reason Zan keeps failing to complete her raids on the Mokshi, Zan finds herself adrift and unsure who to trust, especially after all hell breaks loose and she finds herself facing a fate worse than death.

So far so space opera, and Kameron Hurley hits all the notes, even the ones that feel perfunctory (see: the climax, of a sort, in the Mokshi control room.) The emotions felt less than inhabited, particularly as the book wore on. Jayd wasn’t a terribly convincing character emotionally and while I enjoyed the idea of the change in her relationship with Zan by the end, I didn’t care about the actuality. Maybe it’s because I didn’t at all feel the impact of her earlier and greatest betrayal, and so I didn’t really understand the need for change viscerally. Like, I get it intellectually but there were also a lot of intellectual reasons for their relationship to continue as it was so idk.

Definitely a wild ride of a book and recommended for anyone wanting something entirely fresh in science fiction. It’s still tough for me to think of this setting as the future of outer space, tho, instead of a clever retelling of biological processes at the cellular level.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/11/the-stars-are-legion-by-kameron-hurley/

Mar 08 2018

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

At different parts in the Discworld books, Terry Pratchett considers what might happen when something like a modern technology appears in the magical, quasi-medieval societies of the Disc. Moving Pictures was the first of these, back at the 10th book in the set, and they become more common later in the run. The Truth introduces newspapers. Going Postal features a revival of Ankh-Morpork’s Royal Mail. The clacks, a semaphore system that has effects a bit like the telegraph and the internet did in our world, was introduced in The Fifth Elephant, though it was not the main topic of the story. Looking at what other people have written, I see that I have a few more ahead of me in the eight books that remain after Going Postal.

I started out skeptical about Going Postal. The setup struck me as a deus ex Vetinari: using the powers and abilities of Ankh-Morpork’s ruling Patrician to set the story in motion, rather than having it emerge more naturally from the setting or from previously established characters. The authorial hand is very visible in the beginning. Pratchett wants a certain kind of character doing a particular thing with the postal service. On the other hand, the kind of character Pratchett wants at the center of this book is interesting: Moist van Lipwig is a con man, a thief, a reprobate. He has been looking out for number one so long that looking for a way to get away with the loot is a reflex.

The clacks have been taken over by a bunch of caricature capitalists, and Vetinari wants some competition in the business of delivering messages, so he puts Lipwig in charge of reviving the ancient postal service that was once the pride of Ankh-Morpork but has since fallen onto hard times. It’s not so much administrative ability that’s necessary to restoring the post but rather the ability to inspire people to believe that it will function. And getting people to believe things is Lipwig’s specialty.

I think that Going Postal, like Monstrous Regiment, would have been better if it had been shorter. In particular, the first third of the novel feels like it is wandering around, with comic bits playing out longer and more slowly than necessary, and with other developments unfolding at a pace that’s more languid than leisurely. It’s Pratchett, so it’s never hard going, but it’s looser than earlier Discworld books, not always to its benefit.

On the other hand, there are funny bits and arch observations throughout, and the action really is headed somewhere interesting. In some ways, Going Postal is an extended meditation on belief — inspiring it, harnessing it, and taking advantage of it.

“You want to deliver this letter to [the god] Offler?” [the priest] said, yawning. An envelope had been placed in his hand.
“It’s addressed to him,” said Moist. “And correctly stamped. A smartly written letter always gets attention. I’ve also brought a pound of sausages, which I believe is customary. Crocodiles [the god’s aspect] love sausages.”
“Strictly speaking, you see, it’s prayers that go up to the gods,” said the priest doubtfully. …
“As I understand it,” said Moist, “the gift of sausages of Offler by being fried, yes? And the spirit of the sausages ascends unto Offler by means of the smell? And then you eat the sausages?”
“Ah, no. Not exactly. Not at all,” said the young priest, who knew this one. “It might look like that to the uninitiated, but, as you say, the true sausagidity goes straight to Offler. He, of course, eats the spirit of the sausages. We eat the mere earthly shell, which believe me turns to dust and ashes in our mouths.”
“That would explain why the smell of sausages is always better than the actual sausage, then?” said Moist. “I’ve often noticed that.”
The priest was impressed. “Are you a theologian, sir?”
“I’m in … a similar line of work,” said Moist (pp. 332-33)

Pratchett had also been listening to the women in his life, and believing them. Moist is in a disreputable bar, meeting up with a woman from the golem trade, Miss Dearheart.

When [Moist] returned, his seat was occupied by a Currently Friendly Drunk. Moist recognized the type, and the operative word was “currently.” Miss Dearheart was leaning back to avoid his attentions and more probably his breath.
Moist heard the familiar cry of the generously sloshed.
“What … right? What I’m saying is, right, what I’m saying, nahrmean, why won’t you, right, gimme a kiss, right? All I’m saying is—” (p. 292)

Miss Dearheart drives a spiky heel into the drunk’s foot, and tells him how hard she can kick with the other spike.

With great care the man stood up, turned and, without a backward glance, lurched unsteadily away.
“Can I bother you?” said Moist. Miss Dearheart nodded, and he sat down, with his legs crossed. “He was only a drunk,” he ventured.
“Yes, men say that sort of thing,” said Miss Dearheart. (p. 393)

Once it gets underway, though, Going Postal is zippy fun with just enough seriousness to keep the deliveries from going astray. Much of that comes from Moist looking at the world with new eyes, as he sees both the perils and the possibilities of having people truly believe in him for ends greater than quick cash.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/08/going-postal-by-terry-pratchett/

Mar 07 2018

The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville

I should not have taken as long as I did to get through China Miéville’s novella, The Last Days of New Paris. The main story is less than 180 pages; the afterword tacks on another 15 or so, and I mostly did not read the notes that are appended afterward. That the words “get through” are the first that spring to mind is telling, though I suppose the larger lesson is that Miéville’s work is hit-or-miss for me. I’ve read eight of his 13 published books (tried a ninth, Un Lun Dun, but bounced). Perdido Street Station felt like a revelation when I read it; The City & The City is terrific, an amazing mash-up of Cold War, maybe-magic, and the human tendency not to see what we don’t want to see. I’m not sure that it fulfills all of its promises, but even getting nine-tenths of the way there is an achievement. I’ve been told that Embassytown is as good as these two; it’s on my shelf of books to read, and I’m looking forward to reading it at some point. On the other hand, This Census-Taker didn’t do much for me.

In the world of The Last Days of New Paris, a massive, mystical bomb exploded in the French capital in 1941, releasing strange energies into streets newly occupied by the invading Wehrmacht. Within a certain yet uncertain radius around the point of detonation, the laws of physics have been pushed aside and Surrealist works have manifested themselves into reality. The top half of the Eiffel tower remains suspended in midair though the bottom half has been destroyed. The novella opens with one of these manifestations, which Miéville calls manifs, headed toward a German barricade somewhere in the streets of Paris. The manif is a “torso, jutted from the bicycle itself, its moving prow, a figurehead where handlebars should be. She was extruded from the metal. She pushed her arms backward and they curled at the ends like coral. She stretched her neck and widened her eyes.” (p. 4) Another woman is riding the manif, which is a thing that Miéville’s narrator, Thibaut, says should not be. He is not able to find out much more. The Germans shoot both manif and rider. Thibaut scampers from his hiding place long enough to hear the rider’s dying words and receive a playing card from her.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/07/the-last-days-of-new-paris-by-china-mieville/