Author: katenepveu

Posted on

Cherryh, C.J.: Cyteen; 40,000 in Gehenna; Downbelow Station; Regenesis

Cyteen cover
For no apparent reason, a month or two ago I found myself picking up Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh, which I’d read in college, found gripping and completely incomprehensible, and never reread. This sent me on a Cherryh spree that I pulled myself out of only because I had (and still have) a lot of reading to do for Readercon.

Anyway, for the sake of time I’m not going to put a lot of effort into summarizing the books I read, which were Cyteen; 40,000 in Gehenna; Downbelow Station; and Regenesis: two of these are Hugo Award winners, Cherryh is a major author, there’s lots of reviews and summaries out there.

Cyteen made a lot more sense this time around, though I did immediately have to reread it to determine whether it was just me, or whether a couple of key characters were in fact genuinely inscrutable or got their characterization too late in the game. (I think it was the latter.) I understand why people bounce off (1) the opening in-universe textbook excerpt and (2) the first third of the novel, but I loved both of them and wouldn’t suggest anyone skip them. The first of those is perhaps the more unusual: I do love an in-universe document generally, but I think I must click with Cherryh’s prose particularly well, to say "hell yeah, here we go" upon opening a novel to:

Verbal Text from:
THE HUMANE REVOLUTION
“The Company Wars”: #1
Reseune Educational Publications: 4668-1368-1
approved for 80+

Imagine all the variety of the human species confined to a single world, a world sown with the petrified bones of human ancestors, a planet dotted with the ruins of ten thousand years of forgotten human civilizations—a planet on which at the time human beings first flew in space, humans still hunted a surplus of animals, gathered wild plants, farmed with ancient methods, spun natural yarns by hand and cooked over wood fires.

And while the first third is a horror show because it’s got Ari I in full swing, that’s why it’s important—a book that’s about recreating Ari I needs to have that perspective in it.

Anyway, this doesn’t hold up quite as well upon a close second read because of the characterization stuff I mentioned before, but it is very close to brilliant, I think: it’s remarkably wide in scope and ambitious as well as being intensely claustrophobic, which is a good trick. The density, hothouse atmosphere, unreliability, and deeply fucked up abusive relationships all remind me of the Locked Tomb, if that’s useful, though its narrative voice is nowhere near as distinctive.

Of course one of the things about Cyteen is that Ari I is extremely wrong about at least one thing that the reader can determine: true brilliance does not mean that literally every other person in the universe is incapable of understanding you. This is both deeply anti-scientific of her [*] and typical of her arrogance—an arrogance that is enabled and encouraged by Union society, to be fair. Between knowing that she’s demonstrably fallible, and the way Cyteen is haunted by whatever happened on the planet Gehenna, 40,000 in Gehenna was the obvious thing for me to pick up next.

[*] Chad literally wrote a whole book about this!

Alliance Space cover
And 40,000 is just a really great book, more successful than Cyteen in my opinion. It was actually written before Cyteen, and I’d love to know what it was like reading them in that order! But it’s hard to talk about because I’m not sure what constitutes a spoiler for it. There is what you get in Cyteen, which is that Union landed 40,000 colonists, mostly azi, on a planet and deliberately abandoned them there in order to deny the planet to Alliance. During Cyteen, it becomes a political crisis because Alliance has now found the planet and determined that the colonists had "devolved into a primitive lifestyle." I guess I can say that the book spans about two hundred years, with time jumps of varying lengths, and that in places it gives me Steerswoman vibes (or the other way around given the timing, though I don’t know if Kirstein has talked about Cherryh as an influence). I think my only critique is that there’s some gender stuff that feels maybe a smidge on the nose? But on the whole it’s an impressive and enjoyable book and a great showcase of Cherryh’s range, especially back-to-back with Cyteen.

Downbelow Station cover
Next I read Downbelow Station, which is set during the Alliance-Union war and is told from the POVs of various Alliance characters. Cherryh says, in the introduction to the 20th anniversary edition, that in order to keep the book’s size down she "took out all the transitional and descriptive bits in a final edit." Don Wollheim sent it right back to her to put them back in, Betsy Wollheim added in the scene headings, and "DAW created a new size category to make it possible to publish the book uncut"—does anyone know what that means? Anyway, good editing, Wollheims; so much of the tension of the book comes from seeing this entire fragile space station from so many perspectives and really understanding what’s at stake.

This book is a little more morally simplistic than the others here, which mostly was a relief, honestly—characters who both mean well and have some ability to do well! Unfortunately, it does result in a somewhat stereotypical "primitive friendly native" depiction of the hisa, the species indigenous to the planet that Downbelow orbits. I’m told they get developed more in Finity’s End, and I very much wanted to dive into that and the rest of the Company Wars books after finishing Downbelow.

Regenesis cover
Unfortunately, as mentioned above, Readercon calls, so I turned to Regenesis as a way of easing myself out of this Cherryh binge. This is the many-years-later sequel to Cyteen, which I expected to be disappointing based on the unanimous reactions of my friends, and I was correct. Its solution to "who murdered Ari I?" is so uninteresting that I reject that reality and substitute my own (actually Jo Walton’s final suggestion in this post). On the personal level it’s mostly Ari II trampling every boundary she sees, in ways that I’m uncomfortably unsure whether the narrative disapproves of, and on the plot level it’s all internal Union political maneuvering and no sociogenesis. I genuinely cannot recommend it no matter how much one wants to know what happens after Cyteen. (And on the strength of four whole books, I’m prepared to boldly declare that 40,000 is what happens, in all the ways that matter.)

Ending on Regenesis did have me tempted to read just one more! to finish on a stronger note, but I managed to not eat that potato chip, and I look forward to getting back to these books soon-ish!

I’ve put up a spoiler post mostly for gossiping about the characters.

2 Comments

Posted on

Cherryh, C.J.: Cyteen; 40,000 in Gehenna; Downbelow Station; Regenesis (spoiler post)

This is the spoiler post for Cyteen; 40,000 in Gehenna; Downbelow Station; and Regenesis. The non-spoiler post is here.

Because I’m talking about four different books, I’m going use clickable expandable tags instead of a read-more. You can also use these in the comments, like so:

<details>
<summary>This will be the clickable text; it’s optional</summary>
This will be hidden behind the clickable text
</details>

Cyteen

The characterization bits I referred to in the main post: it’s impossible to tell what’s up with Jordan with what we have here (does he have a genuine professional dispute with Ari I? is it just the tug-of-war over Justin? both?); and the key bits about Denis’s personality coming in so late in the book ends up being tell-not-show in a sub-optimal way.

My reread notes to myself include “Ari II is in fact also very creepy”—and that’s before I read Regenesis!

(Also I know life is a rich tapestry but I was not remotely so horny as a just-menstruating child, my god.)

Two more things, of vastly differing scale.

First: Worms in the tapes is the first-order fear when it comes to this kind of thing—see Mikhail Corain’s opening POV section—and yet the fact that Ari I has already done it, and not just to the Gehenna azi, seems almost undersold in the book!

Second: does Ari II get the equivalent of a mood ring for her birthday?

And Dr. Edwards’, then, which was a piece of gold plastic until you put your fingers on it or laid something like a pencil on it, and then it made the shadow in different colors according to how warm it was, and you could make designs with it that stayed a while.

40,000 in Gehenna (but also Cyteen, again)

I can’t tell whether we’re supposed to find the calibans’ sentience a surprise or not.

I was initially resistant to the idea that Ari I’s hidden imperative to the azi made any difference at all, because of how thoroughly Jin 458’s descendants do not listen to him, but a friend points out that the weirds seem to be wholly azi-descended. So I think this has to say more about my knee-jerk reflexes around parenting than anything else.

But I think that Gehenna does show that Ari’s wrong in a more fundamental way: Ari I put all this work into deep-sets—CIT deep-sets—because she thought that humanity needs to be united at that level, lest it diverge into lots of little groups that will be in constant conflict. Yet Gehenna diverges radically from galactic society and, in the tantalizing final section of 40,000, are back in that society with apparent benefits to all.

(I can’t believe it took me until now, thinking about how the onlooker calls the caliban a dragon, to wonder if these were also in response to Pern.)

Downbelow Station

For some reason, I have no idea why, I was immediately afraid that Elene was going to play an unpleasant structural role. So I cheered extra hard when she came in with the merchanter’s alliance. (The overall Quen-Konstantin-Talley situation was quite juicy and I hope Josh can come back sometime.)

…and I’m running out of steam and don’t have anything else to say about this right now.

Regenesis

It’s minor, but even with how self-absorbed Ari is, I find it hard to believe that she thinks her successor will need Giraud Nye that much.

Ari in her impenetrable tower, with everyone she cares about around her (nevermind asking them first)!!!

The reason I’m not sure that the narrative disapproves is that it goes easy on Union overall. All the clear horrors of this book are in the past (the treatment of azi soldiers) or mustache-twirling obvious bad guys (Defense). Meanwhile Ari I insisted that azi are not supposed to be a perpetual convenience … which they certainly are on Reseune … and Eversnow is explicitly pitched by Yanni as a reason to keep up the demand for azi, thereby maintaining Reseune’s hold on power … to which Ari II makes no objection.

Gah. Gah, I say.

No Comments

Posted on

Pratchett, Terry: (29) Night Watch (reread, 2024)

book cover
With my head still full of Les Misérables, it occurred to me that I could reread Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch, which in retrospect was definitely a Les Mis riff that I hadn’t known to recognize any of the prior times I read it.

Actually, it turns out that this is the anti–Les Mis. I’d noted before that it does not believe in revolutions. But I hadn’t been able to register before that the idealist who wants to declare a People’s Republic, Reg Shoe, is absolutely an Enjolras stand-in (somewhat unfairly, as neither he nor Hugo was into redistribution of wealth). Poor Reg is also the comic relief and only achieves dignity in defeat.

In addition, the dogged cop is Vimes, not Javert (and it is so disorienting to read this from a cop’s perspective) and the elusive criminal is Carcer (a gleefully unrepentant murderer), not Jean Valjean. And one of the evil torturers has invented "craniometrics," which it’s hard not to see as a (justified) jab at Hugo’s belief in phrenology.

Finally, there are still not enough female characters, but at least those that are present have motivations other than romantic love, and sex work is morally neutral.

No Comments

Posted on

Hugo, Victor: Les Misérables (tr. Christine Donougher)

book cover

I began reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables at the very start of 2023. I can date this relatively precisely because I’d signed up for a newsletter that sent out one chapter per day, starting January 1—there being 365 chapters of The Brick, as it is known to fans. I don’t know if I immediately started reading on New Year’s Day, but I had caught up by January 4, which is when I started posting to Tumblr about it (here’s all my non-reblog posts).

I kept up with it for a little bit, but rapidly discovered that it worked better if I read in large chunks. [*] So I read Part One in February, Part Two in April … and then Part Three in December, when I barely remembered anything that had happened previously. (I had tried it in the summer, but with no success.) I got through Part Four also in December, with some hopes of finishing the book on the original schedule, that is, within the calendar year. When that didn’t happen—I finished the sewer digression on December 31—I ultimately decided to reread the whole thing from the start before pushing through to the end.

[*] Having spent my formative years reading one or more complete books per day, I have yet to figure out how to read something new-to-me slowly over long periods of time. This is one reason why my novel reading has dropped so precipitously.

This turned out to be a very good call, because wow, it was though I’d never actually read Part Three, the way it seemed completely new on reread. Also, I’d switched to the Christine Donougher translation after my friend ellen_fremedon said that it rendered Hugo’s arguments "remarkably transparent." And I definitely understood what he was getting at much better this time around, though it’s also possible that I’d finally internalized the various relevant points of French history. (It is truly embarrassing how often I stopped in my first reading and said, wait, what does Hugo think of, e.g., Napoleon?)

So I spent a very intense *mumble* days doing almost nothing but (re)reading Les Mis, finishing earlier this week. It’s such a relief to be done! 2023 was the year I had giant novels hovering over me: nominally, I was reading this; rereading Moby-Dick (which I’d read in December 2022) along with Whale Weekly; and rereading Heaven Official’s Blessing on Mastodon (though that only started in the summer). [**] The key word there is of course "nominally," though I have hopes of going back to Whale Weekly now.

[**] Heaven Official’s Blessing (Tian Guan Ci Fu or TGCF) is an enormously long Chinese webnovel by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu that I’d read, twice, in 2021; the eight-volume official English translation has recently completed. It has eaten my brain as much as The Locked Tomb series has, not that you’d know either of those things from this booklog because I haven’t been updating consistently. I do hope to write up both eventually.

As for the reading experience, I should say first that I was in the somewhat-rare position of being basically unspoiled for the story. Somehow my knowledge amounted to: (1) there was a group of young revolutionaries on a barricade: two of them were consistently paired by the fandom, and I was pretty sure they all died?; (2) someone stole a loaf of bread; and (3) Russell Crowe was a cop who couldn’t sing. Seriously, that was it.

Fittingly, that was a lot of preface. What did I think of the book?

I have mixed feelings. Hugo is trying to do at least two things: tell a deeply dramatic and sentimental story about Jean Valjean (the aforementioned bread-stealer) and a relatively small group of people who keep crossing his path; and convince the French people to overthrow Napoleon III so that he, Hugo, can return from political exile. And the latter is not always of particular interest to me.

It’s not that I object, as a general matter, to the digressions that are the most obvious manifestation of the political purpose. I absolutely adore Moby-Dick, after all. (It is truly wild reading these two books in proximity, by the way; they are both long, digressive, heavily symbolic mid-19th c. novels with strongly-present narrators and clear political messages, but they could not feel more different to me.) And I think there ended up being only one digression in Les Mis that I could not understand the purpose of, the rant about monasteries. I don’t think the rest are skippable: for instance, we need to spend the first fourteen chapters with the Bishop of Digne so that we believe his interactions with Jean Valjean thereafter. (Even though Hugo says—in the very second paragraph of the book!—that a particular fact "in no way impinges on the basic substance of what we are about to relate," which is a truly bold way to start your honking enormous novel.) And I was delighted by the infamous sewer digression—Hugo just has so many feelings about it!

But seeing what role a digression is playing doesn’t equate to enjoying its presence. For instance, the Waterloo section may be even more infamous than the sewer one. I admit, it does start out by very effectively conveying the horror of the battle. But it then devolves into propaganda: and while I can intellectually appreciate Hugo’s attempt to turn Waterloo into a victory for France, I’m simply not the audience for it—or for extensive panegyrics to France’s greatness, or very long navel-gazing on the difference between riot and insurrection, or minutely-detailed odes to a Paris that is no more.

Talking about the digressions may give the wrong impression: the Jean Valjean drama and the revolutionary exhortations can’t be separated from each other. The plot is also in service to the political message. Which means that through the whole book, I wanted to tell Hugo, "I see what you’re doing there." It’s all very constructed. A lot of the time this works! Once, a character feels a time-sensitive obligation that they desperately do not want to fulfill, and Hugo just keeps piling on obstacle and reprieve, obstacle and reprieve, over and over again in this amazing extended sequence. Is it remotely plausible? Probably not. However, I don’t care because it fits with the character and makes for highly compelling reading.

But sometimes the constructed nature doesn’t work. For instance, there was one sequence at the barricade that was supposed to be very tense and moving, but instead it felt like an idiot plot, so I got annoyed at the failed emotional manipulation. And more generally, if I’m always seeing what the author is doing, then I’m failing to be immersed in the story. Sometimes what the author was doing were surprisingly telling bits of characterization, or tense scenes of suspense, or quite funny jokes, or movingly sad parts. But the feeling of edifice was inescapable.

The other reason I have mixed feelings is that Hugo is absolutely awful when it comes to women in this book. He consistently and vociferously argues that their highest happiness consists of entirely subordinating themselves to the man in their life. I very nearly threw my ereader at the wall when I got to this paragraph about a man being "contentedly blind" in the care of his sister:

Quote hidden for length and revolting sexism; click to show or hide

Incidentally, let us say that on this earth where nothing is perfect, to be blind and to be loved is in fact one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. To have continually at your side a wife, a daughter, a sister, a delightful human being who is there because you need her and because she cannot do without you, to know you are indispensable to a person who is necessary to you, to be able constantly to measure her affection by how much of her presence she grants you and to say to yourself, ‘Since she devotes all of her time to me, I must have all of her love’; to see the mind though you cannot see the face, to be able to count on the loyalty of one person when the world is eclipsed; to perceive in the rustle of a gown the fluttering of wings, to hear her to-ing and fro-ing, going out, coming home, talking, singing, and to think that you are at the centre of these footsteps, of this talking and singing; to demonstrate at every moment your own magnetic power, to feel all the more powerful the more infirm you are, to become in the darkness and by means of the darkness the star round which this angel gravitates — few joys equal this….

He also spends so much time talking about virginity, virtue, and beauty as interchangeable—while leering at the beautiful virtuous virgins and talking about their irresistible wiles. It truly made my skin crawl. When these particular obsessions haven’t been tripped, he’s capable of characterizing the female characters just as well as the male; but unfortunately they get tripped regularly, and indeed key bits of the plot depend on it. So it, too, is inescapable.

To sum up: I’m glad I read it, and I enjoyed parts of it. I’m looking forward to seeing the musical in a couple months, because I find adaptations interesting, and I’ll keep an eye on the fandom. But I can’t say that I liked it, and I have no desire to read more Hugo.

A spoiler post follows.

2 Comments

Posted on

Hugo, Victor: Les Misérables (tr. Christine Donougher) (SPOILERS)

This is the spoiler post for Les Misérables, in which I talk about the ending, the characters, and whatever else comes to mind as I browse my ebook notes. Here’s the non-spoiler post if you haven’t read the book and/or would like something marginally more coherent.

Continue reading “Hugo, Victor: Les Misérables (tr. Christine Donougher) (SPOILERS)”

6 Comments

Posted on

Osman, Richard: Thursday Murder Club, The

book cover
I was having a lousy day and wanted something charming and comforting, so I picked up Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, which is a bestselling mystery novel set in a swanky British retirement community. I’d heard that it was funny and refreshing, and I was very willing to be pleased. I mostly was … until I thought a little more about the ending, at which point I found it genuinely distressing.

There were definitely points before the end where I raised my eyebrows, mind. I noticed very early that we were in the kind of book where the third-person narrator refuses to acknowledge a character’s race, even where the character would unquestionably notice it. This was, as I expected, a sign of a book in which nonwhite characters exist but no thought has been given to how those characters’ lives would be affected by their race.

There’s also this unlovely musing from one of the—sympathetically portrayed!—police characters:

She had arrested a shoplifter in Fairhaven last week, and when he had struggled, she had brought him down with a baton behind the knees. She was aware she had hit him much harder than she should. Sometimes you just had to hit things.

No! You really don’t!

My initial notes to myself said that the book had a core of sadness but resilience, and I do stand by that: it’s a retirement community, so a lot of people are facing mortality, especially that of their loved ones, but are still changing and learning and enjoying their lives. And I liked the mosaic effect created by the short chapters from lots of points of view, though I can see that it could easily be frustrating to other readers.

But the ending. There are two parts that really stick in my craw. The first is that it seems like it’s trying to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to morality. The second, and much worse, is that there’s a death that is absolutely a murder but that is not treated as such by either the characters or the narrative, which I can only interpret as horrific unthinking ableism.

So, unfortunately, I don’t trust the author enough to keep reading the series.

No Comments

Posted on

Kingfisher, T.: Thornhedge

book cover
In my post-Paladin’s Faith hangover, I naturally turned to the only other T. Kingfisher book I had yet to read, Thornhedge, a novella-length Sleeping Beauty retelling.

The author’s note at the end says that this is the first thing she sold to Tor, though for publishing reasons other things have come out first. And having read it, I can see why. As Kingfisher says,

[…] I would probably say that it is a sweet book, and then presumably someone would point out that the heroine is raised by child-eating fish monsters and the villain is torturing people and animating the dead, and I would be left flailing my hands around and saying, “But it’s sweet! Really!” because I am not always the best at judging the tone of my own work.

… I still think it’s sweet, dammit.

I agree with her: it is sweet. In contrast, her two books from Saga Press are contemporary supernatural horror, and then the books Tor published subsequently are secondary-world fairy-tale-quest-horror, 19th century horror pastiche, and contemporary supernatural horror again. [*] Following up the Saga-published books with a sweet short fairy-tale retelling could easily give the wrong idea about where her oeuvre was headed.

Anyway. This is Sleeping Beauty in which the imprisoning fairy shapeshifts between girl and toad, and a kind and thoughtful Muslim knight shows up having read about a cursed keep in some old books. (This is also an alternate history in which a cure for plague was found "in the Holy Land" before the Crusades happened, and Muslim refugees peacefully settled a depopulated Europe. I think it’s roughly 1100 C.E., though there’s a reference to it being more than 200 years since "Justinian’s third plague" that I was confused by for a while, as I could find the Plague of Justinian or the third plague pandemic but not both, as it were.)

There’s not a lot of surprises here, but there is a lot of decency and people doing their best, which makes this far from the worst way to spend a bit of time.

[*] Since this is the night where I recap lots of T. Kingfisher books I haven’t booklogged, those books, in the order mentioned, and what I thought of them:

  • The Twisted Ones: incredibly scary;
  • The Hollow Places: less to my taste;
  • Nettle and Bone: fucking great;
  • What Moves the Dead: I wanted it to be science fiction instead;
  • A House with Good Bones: I’ve run out of patience for the protagonist of a contemporary supernatural horror novel taking time to accept what genre she is in, which is completely unfair of me but there you go.

No Comments

Posted on

Kingfisher, T.: (204) Paladin’s Faith

book cover

T. Kingfisher’s Paladin’s Faith is the fourth book in her Saint of Steel series (a.k.a. the Paladin’s Noun series), which is itself set in the same secondary world as a few other novels, all of which I have read and none of which I have booklogged.

The novels that established this world are the Clocktaur War duology, Clockwork Boys and The Wonder Engine. [*] As I read them, I was intensely reminded of the worldbuilding in the Doctrine of Labyrinths series, for the elaborately scary possibly-sentient machines; Discworld, for the gnoles; and Chalion, for the demons. This was unfortunately distracting.

[*] They were followed by the as-yet-standalone Swordheart, which has clear hooks for two sequels.

I also do not vibe with the way that Kingfisher writes romance here—all of the books in this world are romance novels—as the principal obstacle tends to be self-loathing and low self-esteem, which gets very same-y after really not very many books. (I originally theorized that I did not vibe with the way that she wrote het romance, because I did quite like the f/f romance in The Raven and the Reindeer; but the third book in the Saint of Steel series is m/m and I had the same reaction. Maybe it’s just romance involving dudes? There’s three books left in this series and two of them will be about female paladins; one of those seems likely to be het, but I’ll hold out hope for the other.)

Anyway, that’s two paragraphs about what I find suboptimal about the books in this world and yet I have in fact read all of them. Kingfisher (who is also Ursula Vernon) does great action, humor, and competence porn (especially in her side characters), and she has a knack for the little things in the worldbuilding that make it still enjoyable even while it reminds me of lots of other things.

Paladin’s Faith is, as I’ve indicated, halfway through the seven-book Saint of Steel series, and it feels like where the series as a series really hits its stride. The Saint of Steel was a god (yes, despite the name) who called berserkers to his service, the paladins of the book’s titles. Then he died. Only seven of his paladins survived; they all now serve the Temple of the White Rat, which (as this book says) "solved problems. That was their god’s entire purview. They were staffed with lawyers, social workers, healers, and organizers." (In fact, I recommended the books on an Arisia panel about laws, lawyers, and trials.)

The first two books were connected by a secondary plot, while the third book felt more like a standalone adventure except for a last-page drop of unexpected information about the wider world. Faith doesn’t follow directly on that ending, but it brings back a character from the first book, resolves a lingering issue from the second, pointedly updates us on the status of the characters from the Clocktaur War duology, and sets up what is clearly going to be part of the series endgame. Some people have felt that this is kind of a lot for one book to do. And that’s entirely reasonable, but I actually liked it: it said to me, okay, this series is going carry across plotlines both in the short term—by having them show up in just a couple of the books—and in the long—by definitely having an overall plot for the full series, which it certainly didn’t have to. I can’t wholeheartedly love these books, but I definitely do enjoy them.

No Comments

Posted on

Byatt, A.S.: Ragnarök

book cover

Back in November, I was sad to hear of A.S. Byatt’s death. Having re-read Possession somewhat recently, at least in the grand scheme of things, I instead picked up her Ragnarök, which was written as part of a series of novellas that rewrote various myths.

Byatt chooses to tell the story of Ragnarök through the POV of a "thin child," evacuated from London during the Blitz, who reads a 19th-century book of Norse myths and revels in all their uncertainty and contradictions and distance—as Byatt herself did in her own childhood. It’s a neat way of dealing with the question of whether to attempt psychological realism, especially when the present-day reader is so far removed from the mindsets of the original audience. I’m not entirely sure I agree with Byatt (in the afterword) that a modern retelling requires personalities, but I do appreciate the clear-cut stand the book takes on this: these are myths as understood by a child who is reading from a non-modern source, and therefore there shall be none of that.

One might well find the conceit of the book a little on-the-nose, which is fair; reality is not always a defense against such reactions. It works for me. More importantly, the prose is so good that I just want to roll around it in. I wish I could analyze what makes Byatt’s prose so compulsively readable to me, because I cannot put my finger on it. But it is; I even got a quarter of the way into The Virgin in the Garden before I remembered that I don’t really like mainstream fiction.

Finally, the bit about the cow made me remember this delightful family tree by Korwin Briggs.

No Comments

Posted on

Turner, Delia Marshall: Dog of the Dead

book cover
I came across Delia Marshall Turner’s Dog of the Dead backwards: I saw a link to the short story "Stubborn stains", which is truly lovely, and thought that the novel was a sequel to it.

It turns out that the short story is actually the sequel, not the other way around. However, they both stand alone fine, so that lack of knowledge did not affect my reading experience.

What did affect my reading experience, however, is a piece of information that is literally in the book blurb but that I did not figure out until quite some way into the book. I don’t know which way I would have preferred to learn it, so I’ll let you decide. Here’s the blurb:

Middle school English teacher Martha Whitaker has finally made it to winter break, and she is not going to let anything keep her from completing her vacation chores: Not the appearance of an immense egg on her kitchen table, not her nosy neighbor Mr. Miklos, and not a crowd of former students popping up out of nowhere to ask her help.

Click here to uncollapse/collapse the spoilery part

She will certainly not allow the armies of the recently dead (or her own unexpected demise) to deter her from painting her living room and the upstairs bedroom.

Ms. Whitaker is used to staring danger in the face, calling it by its full name, and asking it if it has done its homework, and with her small army (or on her own, if necessary, because one person always ends up doing all the group work), she will […] do what needs to be done.

But either way, I did find the book ultimately difficult because the protagonist sticks so adamantly to her own goals and perspective, not listening to other people or seeking to understand what their motivations are. It is both admirable and deeply frustrating, and I don’t think the hidden bit of the blurb would have made it any better. The tight focus also means that I’m hazy on the motivations behind a significant chunk of the plot.

Basically this is a great concept, I’m glad I read it, but I did not feel in sync with it. I do recommend the short story, however, and I look forward to reading the next one.

She also has a 1990s secondary world fantasy trilogy, The Ways of Magic, which starts with Nameless Magery; anyone have thoughts on whether I’m likely to find it more congenial?

No Comments