Kaleidoglide

This is my last ever post

2011-07-10T23:20:00.002+05:30

On this blog, anyway. It feels weird, because I've been here since sometime in 2004. But I've been thinking for a while that I needed an internet home of my own. So a website it is, and at some point when we've finished tinkering with it it will be very shiny and have sections for published fiction and the like.

For now, though, my blog is here.

I find, now that I'm doing this, that I'm actually a bit worried about keeping all the people who read this thing in the switch over. So please follow me over and, er. Tell your friends?

Don Marquis, Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers

2011-07-06T00:11:00.003+05:30

My regular KindleMag column on out of copyright books returns this month and can be read in the magazine or at the site, here. This month I focused on a wonderful collection of satirical pieces by Don Marquis. You can read them here. The version of the column I sent in to the magazine was written before Pottermore was announced - the timing meant that they had to change it in the final piece, but I prefer my ignorant first version and that's the one I'm using here.

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As I write this column, J. K Rowling is teasing the world with her “pottermore” publicity campaign in which she reveals that she will reveal (but not just yet!) what her new project is about. By the time this is published I expect the big reveal to have taken place. If it has not, I will be quite annoyed.

The one thing I do not expect the book to be is a spin-off from the original series in which Hermione gathers together a select group of Hogwarts students to discuss art, literature and spiritual improvement.

Luckily, Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers does exist. Don Marquis’ 1916 book is a glorious little collection of sketches in which Hermione and her friends explore the intellectual climate of America at the beginning of the Twentieth century (“We took up economics not long ago—our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you know and gave an entire evening to it”).

Dr. Jagades Chunder Bose says that plants are almost as sensitive as human beings—they have feelings and susceptibilities, you know, and all that sort of thing.
Isn't it wonderful how the Hindus find these things out?

This group of thinkers is not afraid to tackle serious issues: Will the best people receive the Superman socially? What is one to do about the mid-Victorian values of one’s parents? Does all this study of sex hygiene mean the death of romance? Nor are they afraid take up serious causes: though so very often the Masses are ungrateful. And the women’s rights movement is all very well, but what about “that horrid yellow color on the banners and things”?

A prominent member of Hermione’s circle is Fothergil Finch, the poet. “Fothy”, though he may not look it, is virile in his soul and in revolt against organized society (Once, he fed a peanut to a caged monkey in defiance of the sign telling visitors not to feed the animals). There’s also the artist Voke Easeley who has a large, expressive Adam’s Apple and has pioneered the art of painting sound portraits with his larynx. Voke Easeley’s wife has a talent for talking about books she hasn’t read that I can only admire. The Swami Brandranath has seven wives, one for each of the spiritual planes upon which he exists. (“How wonderful they are, the Orientals. And just think of India, with all its yogis and bazaars and mahatmas and howdahs and rajahs and things!”) Isis the Astrologer disapproves of the Swami, but he in turn thinks she is a charlatan.

Marquis skewers this sort of half-understood, dilettantish engagement with the world. And yet, he protests, it’s not entirely mean-spirited. In a verse titled “Hermione’s Boswell Explains” he protests that Hermione’s antics inspire sadness, not scorn in him. I’m not so sure that’s true. With a few minor changes in topic, Little Groups of Serious Thinkers can be found anywhere. And for me, at least, the familiarity and the opportunity to mock play a big role in making Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers the comic masterpiece that it is.

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Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno

2011-06-29T20:07:00.003+05:30

If our Left of Cool column is meant to celebrate anything it is the glorious and the weird. I read sections of Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno last year and fell deeply in love with it for just these traits. Rereading the whole thing a couple of weeks ago I found more and more things to make me happy; were I to start quoting every bit that made me want to share it, this post would get completely out of hand. The whole thing is here, though, and I can't resist quoting the bit with the horns and beards:

For I prophecy that we shall have our horns again.
For in the day of David Men as yet had a glorious horn upon his forehead.
For this horn was a bright substance in colour and consistence as the nail of the hand.
For it was broad, thick and strong so as to serve for defence as well as ornament.
For it brightened to the Glory of God, which came upon the human face at morning prayer.
For it was largest and brightest in the best men.
For it was taken away all at once from all of them.
For this was done in the divine contempt of a general pusillanimity.
For this happened in a season after their return from the Babylonish captivity.
For their spirits were broke and their manhood impair'd by foreign vices for exaction.
For I prophecy that the English will recover their horns the first.
For I prophecy that all the nations in the world will do the like in turn.
For I prophecy that all Englishmen will wear their beards again.
For a beard is a good step to a horn.
For when men get their horns again, they will delight to go uncovered.
For it is not good to wear any thing upon the head.
For a man should put no obstacle between his head and the blessing of Almighty God.
For a hat was an abomination of the heathen. Lord have mercy upon the Quakers.
For the ceiling of the house is an obstacle and therefore we pray on the house-top.
For the head will be liable to less disorders on the recovery of its horn.
For the horn on the forehead is a tower upon an arch.
For it is a strong munition against the adversary, who is sickness and death.
For it is instrumental in subjecting the woman.
For the insolence of the woman has increased ever since Man has been crest-fallen.
For they have turned the horn into scoff and derision without ceasing.
For we are amerced of God, who has his horn.

TSG column here, and the unedited version below.

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So much of our language, when we wish to talk about things that are huge and overwhelming, is religious in nature. This is not because everything that is awe-inspiring has a religious connection (as an atheist it would be quite sad if I believed this). But historically religions have spent a lot more time talking about this sort of thing, which may be why religious literature is so often so very good at expressing it.

Take joy, for example. The most joyful piece of literature in the world is a long, religious poem whose title translates to “The Joy of the Lamb”. In 1757 Christopher Smart was admitted to St Luke’s Hospital as a lunatic patient. He was in the main in solitary confinement with only his cat Jeoffry for company. He was released in 1763. During his time at St Luke’s he wrote Jubilate Agno, a work in four fragments.

As far as I can tell, Jubilate Agno is basically a list of things that make Christopher Smart glad. What makes it wonderful is that Smart seems to think everything worthy of celebration.

Almost every sentence in the poem begins with the word “Let” or “For”, usually printed on opposite pages. The “Let” sections pair various names from the Bible with what amounts to a catalogue of living things – Smart provides lists of mammals, insects, birds, sea-creatures and plants in the form “Let Huldah bless with the Silkworm -- the ornaments of the Proud are from the bowells of their betters.” or “Let Simon the Tanner rejoice with Alausa -- Five days are sufficient for the purpose of husbandry.” (He's not big on sex).

Occasionally more personal concerns will intervene. When he gets to the sea-creatures we have “Let Crispus rejoice with Leviathan -- God be gracious to the soul of HOBBES, who was no atheist, but a servant of Christ, and died in the Lord -- I wronged him God forgive me.”

This sudden switching between the cosmic and the personal carries over to the “For” sections which consist of a series of weird and wonderful aphorisms. Smart moves from universal, spiritual statements like “For the praise of God can give to a mute fish the notes of a nightingale” to “For I bless God for the Postmaster general and all conveyancers of letters under his care especially Allen and Shelvock.”

Here are some other things that Smart thinks worthy of praise:

Jeoffry the cat: The lines on Jeoffry are some of the most-extracted (and most adorable) in English. If there was room here I’d include them all. But I’m particularly fond of “For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.”

Beards: Twice we’re told that “shaving of the beard was an invention of the people of Sodom to make men look like women.” Later Smart explains that Englishmen should wear beards because beards are a step along the way to horns, and horns are good for “subjecting the woman”, which is why hats are a heathen abomination. Incidentally, Smart appears to have been clean-shaven.

Physics: “For MOTION is as the quantity of life direct, and that which hath not motion, is resistance. / For Resistance is not of GOD, but he -- hath built his works upon it. / For the Centripetal and Centrifugal forces are GOD SUSTAINING and DIRECTING.”

People whose surnames resemble animal names: “For I bless God to Mr Lion Mr Cock Mr Cat Mr Talbot Mr Hart Mrs Fysh Mr Grub, and Miss Lamb / …For I bless God for the immortal soul of Mr Pigg of DOWNHAM in NORFOLK.”

Also worthy of praise are the alphabet, fresh bread, the thirteenth of August, libraries and booksellers, and simple machines.

I could quote Jubilate Agno forever. It is strange and hilarious and somehow conveys a massive, reverent joy that just makes the world a better place.

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“For I have seen the White Raven and Thomas Hall of Willingham and am my self a greater curiosity than both.”

Francine Pascal, Sweet Valley Confidential

2011-06-19T17:53:00.005+05:30

Somewhere in my blog drafts there exists a post about sequels (particularly when they come a few years later, and/or are by different authors) as a form of literary criticism - in that they generally comment in some way upon the original text. This being my blog I was illustrating this with reference to the Pamela Cox Malory Towers/St Clare's sequels and fillers. Some day I must see about finishing it. But this is what makes sequels inherently interesting to me (and is also a big reason for my championing fanfiction, but that's another post).

I'm also deeply fond of the Sweet Valley High books. We have a long history together - I bought my first at the airport when I moved from England to India; I got into trouble at school a couple of years later with a certain teacher who thought she ought to be allowed to dictate what I read; I bonded with wonderful people (like the brilliant Anna) over them.

Recently I reviewed Sweet Valley Confidential, the ten-years-later sequel to the Sweet Valley High books. The review was here in last week's TSG. The unedited version is below - I did think of putting some of my reactions while reading it up here, but the only point at which they really got funny was my outrage at Lila Fowler's boob job (should I have put a spoiler warning here?). I will eventually put up a plot synopsis in crayon, though.

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There’s a sense in which all adaptations, sequels, and even fanfiction of a work of literature or film function as a kind of critical appraisal. This is inevitable –each of these requires commentary on and interpretation of the original work. So a “ten years after” sequel to a successful franchise, years after the franchise has run its course, and by the woman who created the characters and setting yet didn’t actually write the books, has the potential to be far more interesting than the book itself would indicate.

The Sweet Valley High series (along with its various spinoffs; Sweet Valley Kids, Sweet Valley University, and others) was conceived of by Francine Pascal. At the centre of the series were the Wakefield twins, Jessica and Elizabeth, beautiful and identical but with opposite personalities. The new sequel, Sweet Valley Confidential, revisits the same characters ten years later.

A sequel to the Sweet Valley books was never going to follow any sort of internal consistency. This would be impossible; while the original series allegedly took place when the twins were 16, the books existed in that strange suspended time as do a lot of long series. Multiple birthdays and Christmases passed without aging the characters in the slightest. All this means that Sweet Valley Confidential is able to pick and choose its history and it does so seemingly at random.

In this book the twins are estranged. Elizabeth works as a theatre critic in New York, cut off from her family. After a disastrous marriage to a jealous millionaire, Jessica is engaged to Elizabeth’s former boyfriend Todd.

The original readers of the Sweet Valley High books are all in their twenties and thirties now, and presumably well aware of some of the more ridiculous aspects of the series. So, it seems, is Pascal herself. It’s hard to imagine why anyone who hadn’t read the original series would pick this book up, and this knowledge allows Pascal to do more with the book than she could otherwise have done. The book is full of snarky references to the original series. It’s never outright parody, but there’s an arch knowingness to it – a signalling to the readers that both she and they know this is all very silly. A scene in which the twins’ mother is reduced to growling “bring out the fucking cake” is hilarious entirely because of its incongruity with the original series. At times the tone is outright sarcastic:

It was a fun wedding. Not a whole lot different from any Sweet Valley High dance, which, as everyone knows, is not a whole lot different from real life.

The book ends with an epilogue of the “where are they now” variety, in which we are given potted histories of characters who were not mentioned in the book itself. This is blatant fan service, but then, so is the whole book.

At times the mocking allusiveness can be genuinely uncomfortable. In veiled references that would be lost to anyone who didn’t remember the original books, Pascal reminds us of an attempted date rape and a false accusation of sexual assault that took place between couples who (in this book) are now living happily ever after.

The knowing tone is unpleasant, but it is not consistently maintained. At some points this seems a genuinely unironic sequel –the twins are still flawlessly beautiful and talented, fat people are still anathema, and everyone is still the same person he or she was in high school.

Then there’s the sheer badness of it all. Jessica’s ditziness is indicated by the dropping of anachronistic (Sweet) Valley girl “likes” into everything she says. Then there’s the sex; it’s odd enough to see characters from one’s childhood having sex, but Pascal makes it all quite needlessly terrible; in the first chapter Elizabeth’s heartbreak is so profound that “[s]he cried after every orgasm”. Or this, rather happier encounter:

When they made love, it was completely loving, full of such deep tenderness that the passion almost played second to the adoration.

But the passion was there, and once the love had been established, the excitement took over and spun them out into the wild reaches of the glorious.

At last Elizabeth knew the splendid, the marvelous, the amazing, the spectacular!

The over the top!

Over the top indeed.

Read without reference to the rest of the series, Sweet Valley Confidential is merely a bad book. With the knowledge of the context behind it, however, it is awkward, uncomfortable, and depressing. One can only hope that the forthcoming Sweet Valley High movie, to be scripted by Diablo Cody, is less painful.

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I do have questions. With the option of cherrypicking her series history, Pascal could so easily have not included the attempted daterape or the false accusation - just as she chose to ignore Jessica and Todd's multiple affairs over the course of the series. Things like this make me wonder if the book is more thought out than it appears - which doesn't stop it from being shite, but still.

Rachel Ferguson, The Brontës went to Woolworths

2011-06-12T11:48:00.003+05:30

I expected myself to really love The Brontës went to Woolworths. When I did not, I did what any reasonable person would do; tried to make it more entertaining by reading it as a horror novel. Naturally.

Last week's Left of Cool piece on it is here. Here is the original version; both may contain spoilers.

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If there’s one thing that people know about the Brontë family (apart from that the three sisters wrote books, of course. Or that story that Somerset Maugham tells of how Branwell Brontë died standing up.) it is that they spent their youths inventing fictional worlds. The siblings collaborated in the development of the kingdoms of Gondal and Angria. Branwell and Charlotte were responsible in the main for Angria, while Gondal belonged to Emily and Anne. In addition to the creation of maps, stories and histories, Emily and Anne were known to pretend to be particular characters themselves. This continued into their adulthood, and apparently shocked poor Charlotte.

The relationship of the Brontë siblings with Angria and Gondal is the sort of thing that was made for fiction. And so other writers have riffed off the idea. I’m particularly fond of Antonia Forest’s brilliant Peter’s Room, in which a group of teenagers try their hand at “Gondalling” and find it soon getting out of control.

Rachel Ferguson’s 1931 novel The Brontës went to Woolworths is another book that plays on the Brontës’ tradition of make-believe. The Carne sisters (Carne was the name of the Brontës’ cousins on the maternal side) live in a world of make-believe. The three sisters (Deirdre, Katrine and Shiel) and their mother have made up elaborate fantasies about a number of people whom they do not really know. Chief among these are the Judge Toddington (“Toddy” to the Carnes) and his less-remarkable wife Lady Mildred. Shiel’s governess, the comparatively dull Miss Martin, is alarmed by the entire family’s willingness to live a make-believe life. She is even more concerned by her young charge’s inability to tell the difference between the real and pretend.

It’s hard to decide how I feel about these books and the characters. On the one hand, the Carne sisters are frequently charming. Take this, from the beginning of the book:

A woman at one of mother's parties once said to me, "Do you like reading?" which smote us all to silence, for how could one tell her that books are like having a bath or sleeping, or eating bread - absolute necessities which one never thinks of in terms of appreciation. And we all sat waiting for her to say that she had so little time for reading, before ruling her right out for ever and ever.

On the other (and quite apart from all the willful self-delusion and the borderline stalking of the Toddingtons) they are also rather despicable. Lady Mildred’s inferiority (imagined at first; real once they meet and befriend the couple) is signaled throughout by her vocabulary and pronunciation of certain words marking her out as Not One of Us. Katrine can seek a career in the theatre, but a man she works with is acknowledged to be an unfit partner. And governesses are contemptible – Miss Martin is dull for being uncomfortable with their games, but the governess who succeeds her cannot join in without getting it all wrong.

Yet these problems are resolved if you focus on one factor in the book – the Brontës (and those concerned with plot spoilers should stop reading now). The trip to Woolworths mentioned in the title actually happens. The Brontës appear in the story as ghosts. And the real Brontë sisters all worked as governesses.

I suspect my reading of this book might surprise the author. But she is dead; literally as well as in a Roland Barthes, Death of the Author way. And so in her absence I’m choosing to read The Brontës Went to Woolworths as a horror story. One that features charming, terrifyingly deluded upper-class child-women (the possibilities for psychological horror are immense) and real, live ghosts. And the governess, (like her literary predecessor in Henry James’ Turn of the Screw) seeing horrors all around her, and, (like her other ancestor Jane Eyre) quite possibly the only sane person in the place.

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Karen Joy Fowler, What I Didn't See

2011-06-06T00:35:00.004+05:30

A couple of months ago I reviewed Karen Joy Fowler's short story collection What I Didn't See for Global Comment. I'm reposting that piece here for the sake of completeness, and because apparently people are asking about brilliant female writers. Here is one.

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If there is one thing that is obvious from Karen Joy Fowler’s work to date, it is that she is interested in books and how they work. The Jane Austen Book Club, for which she is chiefly known (it spent quite some time on the New York Times bestseller list and was adapted into a movie in 2007) engages with the modern romance genre and with science fiction as well as with Austen’s novels. The Case of the Imaginary Detective, also published as Wit’s End, is a crime novel about crime novels. Sarah Canary, her first book, seems to change genre with each person who discusses it.

What I Didn’t See is a collection of Karen Joy Fowler’s short stories, the first such collection since 1997’s Black Glass. Most of the stories in this collection have been published elsewhere, with the oldest (“The Dark”) first published in 1991 and the most recent (“Halfway People”) in 2010. So it’s unsurprising that they don’t immediately form a unified collection. However, while it would be reductive to say that literature is Fowler’s subject, this is a frequently recurring thread that is useful to hang on to.

The title story, “What I Didn’t See”, was published in 2002. This story about a group of people on a gorilla hunt in the 1920s does not on the surface show allegiance to any particular genre. Despite this it won a Nebula award in 2003. While not visibly SFnal in itself, the story is in conversation with one of the great short stories of the genre, James Tiptree Jr’s “The Women Men Don’t See”. Tiptree’s story is about alienation, both with regard to race and (primarily) gender and to actual aliens. Fowler’s narrator, unlike Tiptree’s, is a woman who becomes in part complicit in the unseeing of women.

“The Halfway People”, “The Dark” and “King Rat” all engage with fairytale or folkloric elements. “The Halfway People”, first published in a collection of fairytale retellings titled My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, plays off the fairytale of the six swan brothers. In the Grimm brothers’ story, the brothers are turned into swans by a curse which is eventually broken when their sister weaves shirts for them. The youngest brother, whose shirt was left incomplete, has a swan’s wing for an arm. Fowler locates the fairytale in the mouth of a woman who loved this youngest brother, and makes of his story a bedtime tale for her son.

“The Dark” manages to combine a history of plague, the Vietnam war and feral children into a disturbing story which also contains references to the Pied Piper of Hamlin. “King Rat” is a simpler piece in which the narrator remembers a friend of her family, yet again the story of the Pied Piper and his attendant lost children lurks in the background.

“Booth’s Ghost” appears here for the first time. This is a story about the family of John Wilkes Booth after the assassination of Lincoln. Edwin Booth’s acting career is dogged by his brother’s crime, and he is equally haunted by the ghost of his father – so iconic an actor of Hamlet as to make it almost impossible for Edwin to play the role. Besides the Shakespeare connection “Booth’s Ghost” is in conversation with another text in the same book; “Standing Room Only” tells the events leading up to Lincoln’s death through the eyes of a young girl with a crush on John Wilkes Booth.

The intertextual nature of most of these stories adds depth and can be stimulating, yet most of the stories could probably stand quite well without it. Fowler is marvellous at evoking beauty and strangeness, and her narrators are odd enough to be real. The central character of “Private Grave 9”, a photographer at an archaeological dig competing with Howard Carter’s, stands out here. And the teenaged characters who appear in many of the stories are among her strongest voices.

Family also plays a major role in the collection. It can be a source of happiness and comfort, as in “The Marianas Islands” in which the young narrator explains the family history that led to her owning a submarine of her own. Family here is an unmitigatedly good thing; as the narrator says “the first thing you need to know is where you are”. In most of the stories, however, the family plays a more ambiguous role.

“The Last Worders” is a story about a town obsessed with poetry and a river that doesn’t exist. But it is also the story of a long-standing and uncomfortable rivalry between two sisters (and here again we have a fairytale staple) over a man they could both love. “The Pelican Bar” chronicles years of torture meted out to a girl who is sent to a horrific reform school by parents who never see her again. Parents are unreliable; the terrified child narrator of “King Rat” seeks out her father for protection and finds him annoyed with her. The parents of a pregnant girl in “Familiar Birds” force her to carry her child to term and put him up for adoption. In “Always”, a story about immortality in a cult of sorts, there’s the impression that the narrator is trying to escape a stepfather who “was drinking again” and a mother whose life “would have been so much better without me”. In “Standing Room Only” Anna’s discovery of her mother’s plot with John Wilkes Booth comes across as a betrayal.

And there are the lost children. They form the focus of the last story, “King Rat”, but really they are all over this book. From Norah in “The Pelican Bar” whose parents remain unaware that they have lost her to Paul in “The Dark” to the adopted child in “Familiar Birds”. The final passage of “King Rat” (and therefore the book) feels as if it were coming from Fowler herself; nothing could be more appropriate than that a collection so aware of stories should end by commenting on itself:

I hate this story. Vidkun, for your long-ago gifts, I return now two things. The first is that I will not change this ending. This is your story. No magic, no clever rescue, no final twist. As long as you can’t pretend otherwise, neither will I. And then, because you once bought me a book with no such stories in it, the second thing I promise is not to write this one again. The older I get, the more I want a happy ending. Never again will I write about a child who disappears forever. All my pipers will have soft voices and gentle manners. No child so lost King Rat can’t find him and bring him home.

What I Didn’t See is dark and often painful to read. Yet it’s also honest and weird and lovely. It has all the lightness of touch that you’d expect from someone who has spent so long dancing around the boundaries of genre.

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Do you like reading?

2011-05-30T11:18:00.002+05:30

Skimming through this once more and this struck me as being rather quotable.

"A woman at one of mother's parties once said to me, "Do you like reading?" which smote us all to silence, for how could one tell her that books are like having a bath or sleeping, or eating bread - absolute necessities which one never thinks of in terms of appreciation. And we all sat waiting for her to say that she had so little time for reading, before ruling her right out for ever and ever." - Rachel Ferguson, The Brontës Went to Woolworths

Suspicious Bulges II

2011-05-24T18:51:00.005+05:30

I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that this post (along with a couple about the hotness of Marat Safin) is one of the most searched items on this blog. Still, for those who are here because of it, some further reading on the subject.

This is from Stephanie Laurens' Captain Jack's Woman. Laurens writes ~~terrible~~ fatally addictive (to me) Regency romances. I don't know how much research she does - therefore I don't know to what degree her statement of the problem below is accurate. But clearly she has also given thought to the issue.

He supposed he should give her some brandy, but he didn't really want to get closer. The table was a protective barricade and he was loath to leave its shelter. At least he was wearing his "poor country squire" togs; the loosely fitting breeches gave him some protection. In his military togs, or, heaven forbid, his town rig, she'd know immediately just how much she was affecting him. It was bad enough that he knew. (pg 72)

Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, Rob Sitch, Molvanîa: A Land Untouched By Modern Dentistry

2011-05-23T00:23:00.006+05:30

My Left of Cool piece this week was about the travel guide Molvanîa: A Land Untouched By Modern Dentistry.
Here is a famous citizen of Molvanîa:

And here is the column.

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One of the many wonderful things that Youtube has given me over the years is “supersonic electronic”, a song about romance and interstellar travel by Zlad!. (Sample: “Hey love crusader, I want to be your space invader; for you I will descend the deepest moon crater”). At the end of the song Zlad! salutes his supposed homeland, Molvanîa. I was curious about this country and wished to find out more.

Molvanîa is the subject of a 2003 travel guide (of the Jetlag Travel Guides series), Molvanîa: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry. In this volume, experienced travellers like Philippe Miseree and Andy ‘The Animal’ Wilson explore the major cities of Molvanîa, providing prospective tourists with useful information regarding the hotels (equipped with spittoons and occasionally furniture), the cuisine (centred around pork fat, beetroot and garlic brandy) , and cultural activities (consisting in the main of pornography or peasants beating donkeys).

Located somewhere in central Europe, the country features some diverse geographical features. The Molvanîan Alps to the South, the Steppes to the East, the Great Central Valley (home to the capital city of Lutenblag) and the Western Plateau. It has a fascinating past. During its eventful history this small country has been invaded by Goths, Tatars, Turks, Huns, Balts, Lombards and militant Spanish nuns (the Romans were scared off by a description of Molvanîan women). In the 20th century, buoyed by liquorice and parsnip production, Molvanîa entered World War II on the side of the Germans. In the post-war period it came under Soviet control. That all changed with the fall of the Lutenblag Wall (due to shoddy construction) in 1982.

Molvanîa has had its share of great personalities. Djar Reumerten, the country’s most famous philosopher, is known for having proved conclusively that he did not exist. There is scientist Willjm Krejkzbec, a Nobel Prize near-winner whose “academic fame has been largely overshadowed by his much-publicised interest in sado-masochism (see ‘Museums’ section p106)”. Szlonko Busjbusj, the father of modern Molvanîa, reduced the alphabet by 33 letters, made wheelbarrows legal tender, and has a number of bridges, rivers, roads, and a communicable disease named after him. The country’s patron saint, St. Fyodor, is best known for drinking an entire vat of communion wine, and occasionally fasting for up to three hours.

Molvanîa is fictional; a hodge-podge of clichés and jokes about Eastern Europe. This is certainly not the first travelogue to focus on a fictional country. A notable predecessor is Malcolm Bradbury’s Why Come To Slaka?, purportedly written by the politburo for travellers to an imaginary soviet state (Slaka had previously been the setting for Bradbury’s novel Rates of Exchange). Bradbury’s travelogueis about satirising propaganda quite as much as it doesthe genre of travel writing. Molvanîa: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry is less ambitious, taking its format from the more easily recognisable travelogues with which we’re all familiar. Chapters on the major cities are divided into sections about transport, accommodation, dining, shopping and entertainment, and these are all subdivided into luxury, mid-range and budget options. The back flap carries a guide to the symbols used in the book, which include such markers as “Nudist camp” (symbolised by a pair of binoculars), and “Devil worship” (a pentacle) as well as more ordinary ones such as “entertainment” (a hangman) and “public toilet” (a lit cigarette). The last pages of the book also advertise other works in the series, such as Let’s Go Bongoswana, Viva San Sombrero! and Surviving Mustaschistan.

The book never seems sure what sort of humour it is aiming for. It careens wildly between hilariously earnest praise and snarky comment – the latter generally beating the reader over the head with its humour. The spoof titles above are an example of what’s wrong here: Surviving Mustaschistan? Was that really the best they could do? It’s things like this that keep Molvanîa: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry merely amusing instead of outright hilarious. The Zlad! song was better.

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John Hodgman (ed), The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes

2011-05-09T13:15:00.004+05:30

Why yes, I did write an entire column about a joke book. This week's Left of Cool.

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A surprising amount of our humour is about the difference between “us” and “them”. With the cruder forms of humour this is obvious. Most jokes about women, or gay people, or people from other countries, or people with funny accents are clearly meant for an audience of people like the teller, not like the subject. There’s a sort of bonding that goes on; you and I can joke about this because we are the same; our separation from those people is shared. In that sense, most jokes are in-jokes.

If there’s a publisher that understands this, it is probably McSweeney’s. McSweeney’s, the publishing house behind the journal McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern among other things, was founded by Dave Eggers. It’s easy to dislike McSweeney’s and everything connected to it; everything the company publishes is infused with an archness and a self-reflexive irony that can be quite irritating. Eggers himself is best known for his book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and that title is indicative of much of the sort of thing that is associated with his company. It can be smug, it can be overly precious, it is far too concerned with its own cleverness – and all of these criticisms can be found in the works it publishes itself. For example, the website McSweeney’s Internet Tendency boasts a piece titled “McSweeney’s Pretentious Horseshit”, part of a series of letters to “entities unlikely to respond”.

Yet the sheer cleverness of their publications, the willingness to play around with form, and the association with a number of brilliant authors make up for much of what would otherwise be unforgivably irritating. I suppose it is possible to loathe McSweeney’s, but I’ve never fully managed it.

Few publishing houses display so clearly their knowledge that they are directed toward a specific demographic of people. Add to that the recursive nature of a book about books and it makes perfect sense that The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes (published by Vintage, who have published other McSweeney’s anthologies before) should exist.

That the cover is on backwards is only the first indication of the sort of book this is. It is is more about the hilarity of books in general than about particular parodies of specific books. It does not require you to be that much of a reader; what it does require is that you know a bit about books. So there are multiple riffs off the canon -James Joyce gets a couple of entries, as does Homer; Lolita, Macbeth and Beowulf are present and Gregor Samsa has a cameo as a sports coach - but none of them require that much familiarity with it. We all know the basic plots and characters, and that is enough. The number of people who have willingly read Boswell’s life of Samuel Johnson is probably very small, yet Teddy Wayne’s “Johnson’s Life of Boswell” works simply because we know that Boswell existed.

When it isn’t playing with the sparknotes version of the literary canon, the collection focuses on books that it can be reasonably sure everyone has read – children’s books. The Harry Potter parodies fall flat, but John Moe’s “Winnie-the-Pooh is My Coworker” is excellent. As is “Re: Hardy Boys Manuscript Submission” by Jay Dyckman, in which an editor turns down a rather too contemporary manuscript.

Other pieces choose to talk about literariness, rather than specific books. Notable are Brian Bieber’s “Tales of Erotica: Chuck Norris and Me” and a piece in which Charlie Anders has a serial killer explain literary terms (the “Synecdoche vs. Metonymy” section is illustrated through dismembered body parts and is really very illuminating).

If The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes doesn’t require specialised literary knowledge, then, it’s still a book of in-jokes of sorts. It is a book directed specifically at the McSweeney’s reader; indeed it almost manages to be an in-joke about in-jokes.

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Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

2011-05-08T01:50:00.005+05:30

I've written about Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket on this blog before. This month it was the subject of my column at Kindle Magazine. Slightly longer version below.

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There’s a bit at the beginning of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (a book too well known to ever appear in this column, but both out of copyright and brilliant) in which the narrator laments the filling in of the world map, as new places were explored. “It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery--a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over.”

Unknown places allow for stories about them*. In medieval Europe India was a fantastic place, populated with all manner of strange creatures. Centuries later adventure novels (of the Rider Haggard variety) had people discovering hidden valleys and lost civilisations in parts of Asia and Africa and South America. As the world became more and more known we had to find other blank spaces to fill in – Jules Verne and Edward Bulwer-Lytton both went subterranean with Journey to the Centre of the Earth and The Coming Race; some writers turned to other planets (particularly Mars, and I think this is at least one of the reasons for the flowering of science fiction in this period).

Edgar Allan Poe goes south. In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Poe’s only complete novel, the title character stows away aboard a whaling ship. He is helped in this by his friend Augustus, whose father commands the ship. After some mutiny and wholesale slaughter they end up on another ship, this one dedicated to exploration. They sail towards the Antarctic, discover new lands, and have hair-raising encounters with native barbarians. All of this is quite normal as far as nineteenth century adventure stories are concerned.

But this is Poe, and so obviously it cannot be a normal adventure story. Throughout, it is infused with the sort of weirdness that Poe is so skilled at invoking. A sense of everything not being quite real lurks under everything. So when Pym hides himself on the ship, it has to be a nightmarish situation involving a coffin, rancid meat and feverish dreams. Later the few people left on the ship must see (or hallucinate) ghosts. As Pym sails south in the last moments of the book he feels “a sudden listlessness” and becomes more and more passive, as if in a dream. At times the unreality of it all reminds one of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The violence and gore of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is often ridiculous, particularly since the author seems to feel that each chapter must somehow surpass the last in sensationalism. Yet the adventure plot is only the structure; what elevates the book is the sheer strangeness that runs through it. This is only enhanced by the kind of ambiguous ending that most writers would not dare attempt.

Arthur Gordon Pym may not be as famous as other of Poe’s works, but its influence has definitely been felt. Elements of it can be felt in H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and Jules Verne references it in The Sphinx of the Ice fields. Most recently, Mat Johnson’s 2011 novel Pym tells the story of a man obsessed with Poe’s book. Ludicrous and over the top it may be, but it is somehow special.

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*See also Daniel Abraham's post defending "exoticism" here. I read a fantastic response to it by Jha on tumblr, but no amount of searching has produced a permanent link. If anyone does have the link, please post it?

Edit: Link to Jha here. (Thank you!)

The hidden joys of acknowledgements pages

2011-05-05T15:50:00.002+05:30

I don't think this is going to convince me to always read them, but oh well.

From the acknowledgements pages of The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, edited by Michael Schmidt:

Laura Riding” “A City Seems”, “The Troubles of a Book”, “The Mask”, “One Self”, “The World and I”, “The Reasons of Each”, “Poet: A Lying Word” and “Divestment of Beauty” from The Poems of Laura Riding, by Laura (Riding) Jackson. Copyright © 1938, 1980. Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press, Manchester, Persea Books, New York, and the author’s Board of Literary Management, which, in conformity with the late author’s wish, asks us to record that, in 1941, Laura (Riding) Jackson renounced, on grounds of linguistic principle, the writing of poetry: she had come to hold that “poetry obstructs general attainment to something better in our linguistic way-of-life than we have”

More on Among Others

2011-05-01T17:30:00.006+05:30

As I mentioned in my previous post, Jo Walton was kind enough to let me pester her over email with questions about books and fandom and genre. Here is a (very little edited) transcript of that conversation:

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AS: You've mentioned in a couple of places that this story is partly based on something that happened to you in your childhood. How much of Among Others is from your own life?

JW: The books are all real. But it's best seen as a mythologisation of part of my own life. Some of it is actually literally true, some of it is made up, some of it is the simplified essence of what happened -- and all of it anyway is filtered through memory. I compressed some things and made up other things. The good stuff -- the library group, all of that, is made up. I didn't discover fandom until I was grown up.

AS: And that's another thing you've talked about a bit - the 'truth' of how something was experienced, which can differ quite a bit from the *facts* of what happened. In some ways, how you choose to mythologise your life may be even more revealing than the bare facts. Was that particularly difficult or frightening to do?

JW: Yes. I don't think I could have done it if I'd been any closer to it. Thirty years is quite a lot of perspective.

There's also a thing where fiction has to make sense, and reality doesn't. I had to leave a lot out and simplify a lot because of that. It just gets to be too implausible if you work too closely with reality.

AS: You obviously like playing around with genre structures. I'm thinking particularly of Farthing (and the mixing of the country house mystery with the alt-history plot) or Tooth and Claw. Among Others offered plenty of opportunity to do that (school stories, fantasy, basic coming-of-age story, etc). Did you consciously choose not to?

JW: Yes. Well, sort of. I remember saying to my editor Patrick Nielsen-Hayden at one point when I was writing it -- my most successful books have been very conscious of genre and playing with it, but with this one it's hard to even say what genre it is. But all that sort of thing is part of what I need before I can start writing, it's part of the axiomatic things that surround the possibility of a story. So I'd already decided on all of that when I started writing. The thing that was most conscious with that was the magic -- I really wanted the magic to be different from the way magic is in books.

AS: In the piece you wrote on John Scalzi's blog, you mentioned Catherine from Austen's Northanger Abbey as one of a few characters in literature who we see reading and being influenced by what they read. Who are the other characters you can think of that do this, and why do you think there aren't more of them? (I ask this partly because reading Among Others I was reminded a number of times of one of my favourite writers who also has a main character who reads a lot - Antonia Forest)

JW: I haven't read Forest, though she's been recommended to me before. There's Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. There's Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, of course. Byatt's Possession, which is full of it and there's the lovely moment when somebody is searching for something in a house an they are overcome with the memory of the laundry lists in Northanger Abbey. A recent excellent example is Cherryh's Deliverer where there's an alien child who has read Dumas and uses it. And Delany does this wonderful thing at the beginning of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand where he replicates the experience of reading through a culture in a couple of pages, and the culture is all made up, all science fictional. And then you see the character who did that from outside for the rest of the book, and you keep seeing flashes of what he has read in what he does and how he reacts.

I think there aren't more of them because people are afraid, as Byatt says in Possession it's self-referential and can remove the reader from the experience of reading by reminding them they are reading. I wish Byatt would read Delany! But I think she's wrong, I don't think it does that, and really most of the reactions I'm getting to Among Others seem to confirm this.

AS: I think Byatt's wrong too (And surely we don't need to be reminded that we're reading?) That sense of identification with the main character - both as a reader in general and as a reader of those specific books - is really intense.

A friend of mine just read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and broke down at one of the bits where the main character is reacting to Tolkien.(And the most powerful moment (for me) in Among Others was a direct Tolkien quote. I'm not sure how to frame this into a question, but.)

JW: I haven't read Oscar Wao either! I've thought of another example -- Roald Dahl's Matilda. In the book he doesn't reference titles, but in the film you can see the books she's taken out of the library in her little cart and one of them is the old Unwin edition of The Hobbit. I think when you see something like that,. or the conversation betweem Cassandra and Topaz in I Capture the Castle about War and Peace it just gives you an extra layer if you connect to the book too.

AS: Unlike Wim I have read Vonnegut, but could you talk a bit about the concept of the karass as Vonnegut uses it and as Mori does?

JW: Vonnegut describes it as a group of people who have a genuine connection, as opposed to a granfalloon, who have a supposed but unreal connection. So being from the same town as somebody would be a granfalloon. A karass orbits around the same object or idea. The way Mori uses "karass" is that she wants people with a genuine connection to her because she feels so disconnected -- but she uses magic to find one. So is that genuine? Interesting thought. Because she uses magic for that, she's going to remain connected to those people all her life, whether she wants to or not, they will keep turning up.

AS: And fandom is a karass of sorts?

JW: I think it is. I don't know if Vonnegut would have agreed.

AS: One of the most enjoyable things about Among Others is the knowledge it assumes on the part of the reader - Mori's belief that Tiptree is a man, or the line "huorns will help" that can go unexplained (or a more mainstream example, where Mori thinks I Capture The Castle is about a siege). It's so obviously a book for a community of people who have read what you've read. In a book that is partly about fandom as a community, are books about books in some way about finding a karass?

JW: I first listened to the Beatles because they're mentioned in Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven and I first listened to Holst because he's mentioned in Mary Renault's Purposes of Love, and Cassandra Mortmain put me off Bach for years... I think there's a kind of culture tracking that goes through books set in the real world. I think that's the big plus of setting your book in the real world, actually.

But then there's also the fun of being in another world. There's Lucy buying Nineteen-Seventy-Four in Farthing "by that man who wrote the animal book" thinking it will cheer her husband up, and in Half a Crown Elvira reads a book by Alice Davey, which is a book that Tiptree never wrote in our universe.

The thing I wanted was for it to work if you didn't get the reference,but for it to work better if you did. I mean if somebody hasn't read I Capture the Castle, they can just think it's something about a siege, the way anybody naturally would.

Where it's about a karass, it's about saying that the more of that you pick up, the more you and Mori are part of the same karass. You can enjoy the book without remembering precisely what huorns are, but the more of that you do know the more you're likely to like it.

One of the things that's been great since it's come out is the reaction from people much younger than me and the people from different cultures who see something of themselves in Mori.

AS: Connected to this, and going back to my Lord of the Rings question, how far do you think a canon of sort is necessary for this sort of community (or this sort of book) to work?

JW: If you don't have shared references then what you're left with is people whose minds work a certain way -- and I think that can be enough, but sharing the references helps. You don't have to get everything. But caring about some of the same things is where fandom starts.

AS: Mori's growing awareness of politics, particularly gender politics, was another thing that I enjoyed watching - such as her realization that only one (female) member of the book club seems to initiate discussions about female authors. Another such moment is her analysing why The Tempest doesn't work the same way for her if Prospero is played by a woman. Were you thinking of the recent Julie Taymor film that did just that?

JW: No, I wrote it a couple of years ago, ages before that. That's honestly one of the autobiographical things -- i really saw a production of The Tempest about then which has a female Prospero and which didn't work. And I wanted to put The Tempest in for thematic reasons, drowning books, and magic, and because that's the production I saw when I was fifteen, I just put it that production in.

AS: Another thing that felt very 2011 was the insistence on the importance of libraries in the story as well as the dedication, particularly since as I read the book I was also watching the outrage in the UK over library cuts. Libraries: how amazing are they?

JW: Well I wrote it in 2008 I think, but don't get me started on the decline of British libraries, because I can rant about it at great length. Fortunately I live in Canada where we have still have terrific libraries. It's ridiculous really -- I live in Montreal, which is French speaking, and the provision for books in English in libraries for the Anglophone minority here is better than where my aunt lives in Cardiff.

As for the dedication, this is my book about books -- it had to be for librarians!

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Jo Walton, Among Others

2011-05-01T17:11:00.005+05:30

I mentioned recently that my reading this year had become focused on books about books. One of the reasons (probably the biggest) for this is that I read Jo Walton's Among Others a couple of months ago. A short review of it appeared here, in yesterday's Indian Express.

A version of that piece below:

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Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end. Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn’t supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans. And it doesn’t care about me any more than the Shire cared about Frodo. But that doesn’t matter.

A teenaged girl with friends among the fairies fights her mother, a powerful and evil witch. Though she triumphs and saves the world, she loses her sister and receives a permanent injury.
But this is not the story of Among Others. When Walton’s book opens, what might in other stories be considered the main action of the plot has already taken place. Mori Phelps has already escaped her mother and faced her sister’s death. She must now find her place among others – her English father’s family (Mori is Welsh) and the girls at her boarding school. Sexual awakening, an increased understanding of gender dynamics and the perils of family are all things she must learn to negotiate.

These issues – adolescence, finding a place in the world, learning to engage with others, recognising how the world works, dealing with loss – all seem far removed from the world of epic battles between good and evil. Walton based aspects of Among Others on events from her own life, and it reads as an authentic account of growing up. What makes it unusual is that Mori’s engagement with the world around her comes through books.

Often these are specific books. At the beginning of the book a character expects her own experience with fairy magic to be similar to The Lord of the Rings. When Mori contemplates going to boarding school she wonders if it will be like the novels of Angela Brazil (it is not). A realisation that her parents have read and discussed some of the same books as her is an early recognition of them as real people. Mori’s gradual realisation of how the sexes are treated differently comes through the way female authors are discussed in her book club, and a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Among Others is written for people who read; often references are not explained, but assume the knowledge of the reader. Mori joins a science fiction book club (in a nod to Vonnegut she calls this her “karass”) and has a series of discussions about books. Her views on sexual morality come from Robert Heinlein, then Samuel Delany, and she assumes that James Tiptree Jr. is a man. All of this will delight a reader who grew up in the genre – the book is full of these little shibboleths put there to remind a certain sort of reader of a certain shared cultural experience. Often the emotional impact is massive if you know what is happening; when, towards the end of the book, Walton quotes directly from Tolkien (“Huorns will help”) it is overwhelming.

More than just the books, Among Others is clearly a love letter to the science fiction and fantasy reading community as a whole. But a more general love of reading keeps this accessible to even a person who does not pick up on all of Walton’s references, or share her experiences with science fiction fandom. You don’t need to have read Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 to understand that not having finished a good book seems a perfectly adequate reason to stay alive.

Despite all of the book discussions (Among Others is a book about books before it is anything else) the epic fantasy plot does continue in the background. Mori’s mother is a constant, lurking threat that surfaces from time to time, trying to break into her new life. If her frequent intrusions seem a bit incidental, this is because they are. Though there is a showdown at the end, it is never really the focus of the book; real living happens in the gaps that big narratives leave, and in the long stretches before and after the main plot, and this too is a comment on literature. (Subtly done but very present is another quest – to save the elms of the world from Dutch Elm disease. Saving trees: Tolkien would have approved.)

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Walton was also kind enough to answer a few questions I had. I'll be putting that short interview on the blog as well.

Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

2011-04-24T23:22:00.002+05:30

My review of Karen Russell's Swamplandia! appeared in Saturday's Mint Lounge.

There are all sorts of interesting things about Swamplandia! that couldn't really be addressed in a review. I'm not generally that concerned about plot spoilers in a book. In this case, however, being spoiler-free was essential to my reading of the book. I think Swamplandia! allows for some very intelligent playing around with perspective and fantasy and reality - and it is very frustrating not to be able to discuss these aspects of the book when I think that (along with the fine prose) they're some of its biggest strengths.

As ever, an edited version appears below.

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Karen Russell’s 2006 collection of short stories, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was as notable for its odd, often fantastic take on growing up as it was for its memorable title. Last year Russell, who is now 29, appeared on The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list of promising young writers who the magazine believed would be significant in the years to come. Swamplandia! is her first novel, and it recently achieved a place on this year’s Orange prize longlist.

Swamplandia! is an extension of one of the stories in St. Lucy’s Home… , “Ava Wrestles the Alligator”. As in many of her short stories Russell adopts the voice of the adolescent. The narrator of most of Swamplandia! is a teenaged girl named Ava Bigtree, daughter of Hilola Bigtree, the famous alligator wrestler. Hilola dies of cancer and Big Chief, Ava’s father, finds it difficult to keep up the family’s alligator-theme park, Swamplandia!, located in the Everglades of Florida. Matters are worsened by the advent of a big hell-themed amusement park not far away.
Ava and her sister Ossie are left alone on the resort. Ossie falls in love with a ghost and first she, then Ava, must embark upon a journey to the Underworld. Meanwhile, their brother Kiwi must deal with an underworld of his own; life on the mainland at the World of Darkness theme park. Once Kiwi has left Swamplandia! the book is divided in two – the chapters that follow Kiwi are alternated with Ava’s point of view sections. Kiwi’s journey parallels Ava’s own, yet the contrast between the two worlds is always clear. Where Ava must dive into the water with the alligators to prove herself, Kiwi must rescue a swimmer from a pool where the water is dyed red. Russell emphasises the contrast with her prose; the utilitarian language of Kiwi’s sections of the book could not be more different from the startling, lush account of Ava’s journey through the swamp.

Stands of pond-apple trees were adorned with long nets of golden moss and shadowed a kind of briary sapling I didn’t recognize. Air plants hung like hairy stars. We poled through forests. Twinkling lakes. Estuaries, where freshwater and salt water mixed and you could sometimes spot small dolphins. A rotten-egg smell rose off the pools of water that collected beneath the mangroves’ stilted roots.

The division of the book into ‘Ava’ and ‘Kiwi’ sections has its drawbacks, however. The contrast between the sterile World of Darkness and the Everglades may make sense, but compared to the over-the-top loveliness of Ava’s sections, the ones focusing on Kiwi fall rather flat. The middle child, Osceola, never gets a voice and is never a fully realised part of the story. In the central sections of the book, where Ossie’s relationship with the ghost develops, the pace slackens considerably. A long chapter giving the ghost a background story feels rather orphaned in the middle of the text, though it is a fine piece of writing in its own right.

Russell makes the question of whether this is fantasy or magical realism (or simply the characters’ own imagination) irrelevant. The writing shifts easily between the mythic and the real. Ava is in many ways still a child, and her age allows for this constant moving between registers. On at least one occasion this shift leads to a devastating revelation. The fantasy elements of the story are intangible and unsettling, but fit perfectly.

[T]hings can be over in horizontal time and just beginning in your body, I’m learning. Sometimes the memory of that summer feels like a spore in me, a seed falling through me.

I think something more mysterious might be happening, less articulable than any of the captioned and numeraled drawings in The Spiritist’s Telegraph. Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.

For all its strangeness, Swamplandia! is also the account of a family’s coming of age after a huge loss. As a family drama it is honest and moving and funny.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she told me that night. But until we are old ladies—a cypress age, a Sawtooth age—I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.

Russell never quite manages to keep up the brilliance that shows for long stretches of this first novel. But these heights, when they are reached, are truly extraordinary. While Swamplandia! is very far from being a perfect book, it is the sort of book that makes you truly glad that the author is still at the beginning of her career.

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Julian Gough, Jude: Level 1

2011-04-24T22:38:00.003+05:30

My most recent Left of Cool piece gushes rather embarrassingly about Julian Gough's Jude: Level 1. A couple of things:

I was in Jaisalmer for a few days last year and rode a camel for the first time in many years. One thing I learnt on this eventful ride (it involved a thunderstorm, the village of the children of the damned, and some very dubious gin) was that to ride a camel is basically to perform a series of pelvic thrusts. I am not sure how much research Mr Gough did for this book, but the sex scene atop a camel strikes me as almost plausible.

The stealing of Will Self's pig is in itself a brilliant act, but I wonder if I should not have mentioned it here. Gough's book is good enough to stand on its own and the author should not have to stand in the shadow of his own felonious awesomeness forever. Still, here's a link to a video of it.

Edited version below.

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“If I had urinated immediately after breakfast, the Mob would never have burnt down the Orphanage.” Julian Gough’s Jude: Level 1 manages an opening line that is bound to become a part of literary history. With luck it will lead at least some people to read this excellent book.

Julian Gough is an Irish novelist as well as the singer and lyricist for the group Toasted Heretic. Activities for which he has been famous in recent years include an attack on fellow Irish writers for failing to engage with modern Ireland (2010) and rather magnificently (and Wodehouseishly) stealing Will Self’s pig (2008). The pig in question was a Gloucester Old Spot, the prize awarded every year to the winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic writing. Jude: Level 1 had appeared on the shortlist that year, and had lost out to Self’s The Butt.

The plot is simple enough. At the age of eighteen Jude unwittingly causes the destruction of the orphanage (located in Tipperary, Ireland) where he grew up. In the process a valuable letter that might contain the secret of his parentage is destroyed. Jude travels first to Galway, then Dublin, spreading chaos and destruction in his wake.

Jude: Level 1 is a picaresque novel, with a title character who feels rather like a Don Quixote. Jude is a hapless innocent who falls unknowingly into adventure wherever he goes. In the course of his travels across Ireland he blows up a building, leads a group of anarchists to bloody revolution, is mistaken for Stephen Hawking, has plastic surgery to make himself look like Leonardo DiCaprio and (in unusual circumstances) obtains a second penis in place of his nose. He also falls in love, and spends a large part of the novel trying to locate the love of his life; a quest that leads him from fast food restaurants into the depths of Ann Summers and finally across the sea.

Humour can be difficult to sustain and Jude: Level 1 occasionally grates. The journey to Galway at the end of the first section and the long (long) pursuit of Angela across Dublin in the third can get particularly tedious, particularly if one attempts to read the whole thing at one go. But it’s hard to imagine why any reader would: there is so much to savour.

An extended joke about Apple products allows also for a Biblical gag that is terrible and wonderful at the same time. One scene, in which Jude loses his virginity on a galloping camel while leading a revolutionary army, would itself be a good enough reason to read this book even if the rest of it were terrible.

It isn’t all just silliness, however. Jude: Level 1 is a satire, and quite a serious one. It takes for its target a number of the features of Celtic Tiger era Ireland; its economy, its relationship with Europe, its relationship with England and with its own past, the role of the church, and so on. This may perhaps make the books a little less accessible than they would otherwise be – to a reader completely unfamiliar with the country’s history and politics things like the Charlie Haughey cameo and the references to Eamon de Valera might be meaningless. Yet humour throws up strange similarities across countries. I defy any Indian reader to read the account of a Fianna Fáil political rally at the beginning of the book and not find it both familiar and hilarious.

The promised sequel (to be set in England) still has not appeared, though I am trusting that it eventually will. But sequel or not, Jude: Level 1 is a ridiculous, brilliant piece of writing. Had I read it in 2008, I too would have been tempted to steal Will Self’s pig.

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Manju Kapur, Custody

2011-04-19T21:50:00.004+05:30

I reviewed Manju Kapur's latest book for TSG, here. Short version: I didn't like it very much. Long, unedited version below.

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Raman Kaushik is a nice middle-class boy with IIT and IIM degrees, a job in a multinational soft drinks corporation and an extended family in East Delhi. Shagun is a very beautiful woman about whom we know little else. The two marry and live quite a happy middle-class life for a few years before things get rocky, Shagun falls in love with another man, and a long custody battle begins. Manju Kapur’s latest novel chronicles the various intricacies around the dissolution of a marriage and a family.

The end of this marriage is explored from multiple angles, with Kapur shifting from character to character, point-of-view to point-of-view. This makes for a nuanced rendition of the situation so that the text as a whole never allows an easy apportioning of blame. Raman’s rage and bewilderment are both understandable, but it is equally clear why any woman might not wish to stay married to him.

Unfortunately, this technique doesn’t make it any easier to sympathise with the characters – perhaps it was never meant to. Raman’s tedious self-righteousness grates and is only occasionally relieved by a flash of personality. Shagun all but disappears two-thirds of the way through the book and from this point onwards is mostly seen through other people’s reports and her own cringe-worthily banal letters to her mother.

Ashok, Shagun's lover and (later) husband, comes off worst of the lot. Apparently a business school degree renders one incapable of thinking in non-business terms, and any sort of marketing job fills one’s head with cliché. He thinks of Shagun as “a perfect blend of East and West” and reflects that “[t]o woo her would thus be that much more difficult: he must first create a need before he could fulfil it. But he was used to creating needs, it was what he did for a living”. Later, he is exhorting her to think “out of the box”.

Of the four major adult characters in Custody it is only Ishita, the woman whom Raman later marries, who comes out of the book as much of a person at all.

One unfortunate result of Kapur’s jumping from voice to voice is that the book itself ends up having no voice of its own. Kapur has been compared to Jane Austen for her detailed, sharp depiction of a comparatively small section of society but here, at least, the comparison breaks down. Austen is always definitely herself; in Custody Kapur is not. So when, for example, the text describes the new India where “[a]nything seemed possible if you worked hard enough. India was becoming a meritocracy, connections were no longer necessary for success” it’s hard to tell if Kapur is for some mystifying reason imitating Ashok’s trite patterns of speech and thought, or whether the triteness is unintentional. And surely Raman’s thinking of a carton of mango juice (which he is supposed to be marketing) that it “swam insouciantly about in the pool of anxiety that lay at the heart of his working life” is supposed to be humourous?

The focus of the book is very much on the Indian middle-class, and it is not an entirely sympathetic one. Mrs Kaushik, Raman’s mother, is depicted as entirely awful, and Ishita’s marriage-mad mother Mrs Rajora is only slightly better. (This is where an Austen parallel could be drawn – these women are both slightly reminiscent of her Mrs Bennet). Yet Kapur’s portrayal feels very much like that of an outsider and her barbs are at the most obvious of targets.

The elder Kaushiks put a grille across the passage, black granite tiles on the walls and floor of their section of the corridor and hung a small chandelier with dangling crystal pendants in the middle… Rohini declared she thought she was living in a palace her new home was so grand…

The real Central Park, not the falsely named builders’ creation in Gurgaon.

“Beti, why did you listen to him? What is the need for all this secret-vekret?”

As seen above (“secret-vekret”, really?) the cadences never quite ring true. The set of values Kapur associates with her subjects also appears inescapable. Ishita, who appears the one exception, finds herself at the end of the book consulting astrologers, changing her child’s name for superstitious reasons, and even reflecting upon the irony of it all.

Custody is admirable for its balance, for its depiction of its central relationship, and particularly for the authentic-seeming portrayal of the two child characters. But none of these quite make up for its obviousness, its lack of a sense of direction or the blandness for which it can have no possible excuse.

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(Does anyone else have trouble writing the word "custody"? I always end up with "custory".)

Lawrence Durrell, Stiff Upper Lip

2011-04-11T19:05:00.005+05:30

My Left of Cool piece this week discussed Lawrence Durrell's very silly Antrobus stories, collected in Stiff Upper Lip. I discovered these stories only recently, when my best friend came across a lovely old edition of the collection.
The column is at the newspaper's website, here, or can be read below (including the footnote I carelessly left out of the website version. Despite what the headline on the site implies, I do not think Durrell's Big Books are in any way pretentious.

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Most reasonably bookish Indians discover Gerald Durrell reasonably early in life. It’s only later that Lawrence Durrell appears on the radar. I’m not sure how many of them ever really discover Lawrence; books that look as if they’d take an effort to read are never going to be that widespread. But everyone knows that he exists, and it’s something of a shock to realise that the author of the Alexandria Quartet and the Avignon Quintet is the “Larry” of My Family and Other Animals.

The reader of My Family and Other Animals knows that (Lawrence) Durrell lived for some time in Corfu. During the Second World War he worked for the British embassies in Egypt and later for the British government in Yugoslavia. His stint in Egypt led to the writing of the Alexandria Quartet. His stint in Yugoslavia led to something very different: the Antrobus stories, of which Stiff Upper Lip is the second collection.

For a person who has not read them the defining characteristic of the Alexandria and Avignon books is that they are long. They are also complex and interlinked (Durrell preferred to use the term “quincunx” instead of “quintet” to describe the Avignon books, since the former term indicates a more linear progression).

Against these vast, rich works for which Durrell is known Stiff Upper Lip rather stands out. This is a slim volume of stories about life in the diplomatic corps, ably illustrated by Nicolas Bently. They are populated with people whose names range from the Dickensian (Dovebasket, Bolster, Wormwood*) to the Wodehousean (Polk-Mowbray, Butch Benbow, Mungo Piers-Foley). All the stories are narrated by Antrobus, a character who, like the Oldest Member of Wodehouse’s golf stories, seems to do very little but tell stories chronicling the follies of those surrounding him.

And such follies they are. That I have invoked Wodehouse twice already is a clue to the sheer silliness of Stiff Upper Lip. The English diplomatic corps faces multiple murder attempts (perpetrated by one jealous lover and one disgruntled writer), culinary adventures (the accidental consumption of both horsemeat and garlic – of which garlic is considered the more generally horrifying), Dutch poetry and jewel thieves. A diplomatic dog show goes horribly wrong when a villainous attaché blows a dog whistle for a prank. Of particular interest to the readers of this paper, perhaps, will be “The Swami’s Secret”, featuring the suave Anaconda Veranda who gives reincarnation lessons by post.

Not every story in the book focuses on these Eton-educated diplomats. Durrell democratically includes an account of the sufferings of Percy, the second-footman at the embassy in "The Iron Hand". In “The Game’s the Thing” there is an attempt to appease the Italian Mission by inviting them to a football match and losing. In our modern, post-match-fixing-scandal times we have a tendency to assume that every match is fixed, an assumption that is perhaps born out of a belief that fixing a match is easy. It is not, we learn, even though “we British know how to lose gamely. Prefer it, in fact. We had all taken on that frightfully decent look as we puffed about, showing ourselves plucky but inept – in fact in character”. Unfortunately not everyone on the team possesses the sporting spirit and, predictably, things do not go quite as planned.

In the hands of a different writer, Stiff Upper Lip would not be quite so strange. Had Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh written it one might have shrugged, reflected that it was not entirely in their usual style, and moved on. Silly and funny as it may be, its weirdness stems mainly from the incongruity of this author and these stories. This isn’t the Lawrence Durrell we know; but it is certainly recognisable as Gerald’s “Larry”.

*"Wormwood" is also a character in C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. This character forms the inspiration for the name of the school teacher in Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes series. This is one of those things people who quiz are very pleased about knowing. But that's beside the point and doesn't make the name any less Dickensian.

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I must get myself a nice copy of the Alexandria Quartet soon. Does anyone have any recommendations as to which edition?

Diana Wynne Jones

2011-04-06T00:54:00.003+05:30

One of the best children's writers we had died recently. There have been new Diana Wynne Jones books all my life, and I'm still not entirely reconciled to the fact that there won't be any more. The night I heard the news I sat and reread Fire and Hemlock for the first time in many years. It turns out it's still brilliant.

I wrote this tribute for the Sunday Guardian. It can be found on their site here This is a slightly longer version - longer mainly because in the absence of space constraints I couldn't not include the whole of that quote.

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British writer Diana Wynne Jones died last week, at the age of seventy-six. She had written close to fifty books for children as well as a couple for adults; she had won awards (never enough) and been runner-up for several more; her 1986 book Howl’s Moving Castle had been made into a critically-adored Hayao Miyazaki film. By anyone’s standards she was a significant figure within children’s literature. She was already a name (though never as big a name as she deserved to be) when I first started to read. She had had fifteen books published before I was born and continued to write well into my adulthood - Enchanted Glass came out a year ago and a novel for younger readers, Earwig and the Witch, is set to be published posthumously in 2011.I cannot claim to have read half of her work, yet the thought of no more Diana Wynne Jones books is as unsettling as it is sad.

Her connection to the literary world went beyond her writing. The various tributes that have been written this week have brought up the most wonderful stories about her life. As a child she lived in the house where the children in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books had lived, and managed to annoy Ransome himself. She also managed as a child to antagonise Beatrix Potter. At college she was taught by Tolkien and Lewis, and in later years would go on to exert much influence over the careers of writers like Neil Gaiman. As Farah Mendlesohn (the author of a book on Jones) notes in a tribute to the writer, Jones “had not just grown fans, she had grown writers”. She was still writing when writers who had read her books as a child had grown up, and written books of their own. The Harry Potter books have a lot to do with the boom in children’s publishing over the past decade (many of Jones’ own books were reissued for this reason) but most of these writers grew up on Diana Wynne Jones.

Her books were often quite disturbing. Many existed in a space between traditional children’s fantasy and realism. So a parent might not be an evil stepmother, but s/he could be self-absorbed or criminally neglectful – the title character of The Lives of Christopher Chant sees so little of his parents that he’s terrified that he might one day meet them in the park and not recognise them. The adult world might be a terrifying place, but a lot of the reasons for this terror were the same ones that any child would go through. For years I was reluctant to re-read the earliest pages of Fire and Hemlock, one of her finest books, not so much for outright scariness as a sense of deeply felt unease. And she wasn’t afraid to demand thought from her child readers; she never wrote as if she expected us to feel lost in her many-layered narratives. And if sometimes I did get lost it didn’t matter.

As serious as all of this sounds, all my memories of reading her books involve laughter. A lot of it was clever wordplay or absurdity of the sort that anyone would find funny. But the best parts, and the ones that I suspect were responsible for all the writers this author raised, were the bits about books. A lot of the humour in Diana Wynne Jones was directed at people who read and could therefore be assumed to understand exactly what she meant. Take the beginning of Howl’s Moving Castle, where she explains that “… it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of the three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.” Or A Tough Guide to Fantasyland, an entire book of sendups of fantasy tropes. Or even the episode in Fire and Hemlock where a character writes a clichéd description of a back and is sent a corrective note:

Dear Polly,
Tom wishes you, for some reason I can't understand, to consider the human back. He says there are many other matters you should consider too, but that was a particularly glaring example. He invites you, he says, to walk along a beach this summer and watch the male citizens there sunning themselves. There you will see backs - backs stringy, backs bulging, and backs with ingrained dirt. You will find, he says, yellow skin, blackheads, pimples, enlarged pores and tufts of hair.
This is making me ill, but Tom says go on. Peeling sunburn, warts, boils, moles and midge bites and floppy rolls of skin. Even a back without these blemishes, he claims, seldom or never ripples, unless with gooseflesh. In fact, he defies you to find an inch of silk or a single powerful muscle in any hundred yards of average sunbathers. I hope you know what all this is about, because I don't. I think you should stay away from the seaside if you can.
Yours ever, Sam.

She laughed at the genres she wrote in, intelligently but lovingly, and in doing so made us think about books and how they worked.

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There's a wonderful list of links to tributes at the Strange Horizons blog, here. Gaiman and Mendlesohn's are particularly lovely, but there's also a fantastic long essay by Rush That Speaks.

Susan Coolidge, Clover

2011-04-05T00:06:00.003+05:30

Look, I've tried. I've read the three Katy books, I've read Clover, and I just don't get Susan Coolidge. Clover was my out-of-copyright book for review at the Kindle Magazine this month.

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Most Indian children of my generation grew up reading English children’s books. This has changed to a great extent since. But even back in our time there were a few classics from North America that found their way into our libraries. Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, and Daddy-Long-Legs (discussed last month in these pages) were among them. Also in this little group of recommended classics were Susan Coolidge’s Katy books.

There were three Katy books: What Katy Did, What Katy Did at School and What Katy Did Next. I was not a fan of any of them.

What Katy does, if I remember correctly, is to go from being an absolutely normal child to a plaster saint. This is because she injures her back, and over years spent in the “school of pain” and unable to walk learns to be good and virtuous and motherly. When she goes to school in the next book, she continues to be a very good girl, and despite the inclusion of a few amusing side characters (I do not include the excruciatingly whimsical “Rose Red”) it’s all very dull. In the third book she is taken on a trip to Europe where she is once again good and cheerful, nurses a sick child, and attracts a husband by showing herself to be nicer than her more attractive cousin. This would be quite a satisfying story if Katy had any personality at all.

I only learnt recently that there were two more Katy books, Clover and In The High Valley, and that Clover (published in 1888) at least was considered better than the rest. Both were out of print and available for many years. Clover is Katy’s younger sister and the book focuses on her coming to terms with her sister’s marriage. A large chunk of the book is taken up with this wedding, complete with a visit from Rose Red plus one child who lisps in a way that the author probably thought was adorable (I cannot agree). One of Clover’s brothers falls ill and she accompanies him on his convalescence to Colorado where she goes sightseeing in canyons and accumulates suitors.

If Clover is better than the Katy books, the improvement is in the scenery. Coolidge seems to like Colorado, and some of the descriptions of trips are rather lovely. There’s also a strain of humour in the form of the passive-aggressive Mrs Watson who has been invited along to help Clover, yet seems to think things should be the other way around.

Unfortunately, Clover is even less of a person than Katy was. With Katy, one at least had a vague memory of her careless youth; Clover appears to have been saintly throughout. There’s nothing quite as unappealing as a flawless person.

I confess myself defeated where Coolidge is concerned. There must be something about her to make so many people claim to have loved the books in their childhoods, and certainly Clover is considered a particularly good example of her work among those who have read it. Clearly I am missing something, and if so I am missing it in all of Coolidge’s work. I don’t think I will be reading In the High Valley.

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If you're deeply fond of Coolidge, do feel free to express outrage or explain why.

What I Didn't See, Karen Joy Fowler

2011-04-03T13:33:00.002+05:30

I'm pretty sure no one in India is going to read anything that isn't cricket-related today. (Pause here for a moment to be overwhelmingly happy). But I have a review up at Global Comment of Karen Joy Fowler's most recent collection of short stories. Short version: it's brilliant; where can I find a copy of Sarah Canary?

Read here.

About books about books

2011-03-31T01:06:00.005+05:30

I planned to read more Russians this year, and I'm still hoping it will happen. But a number of other factors (including a larger project that I seem to have let myself in for) have coincided to make sure that my reading thus far has had a different theme - that of books about books. I'm not counting literary criticism here (since that is necessarily about books) but I'm thinking of characters in books who read and think about what they read. So far this year these books have included Jo Walton's Among Others, Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me, and Francis Spufford's The Child That Books Built. I've also read the most recent Karen Joy Fowler collection and Charles Yu's How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, both of which engage with other works of fiction though not as directly. I'll certainly soon be rereading Junot Diaz' The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Antonia Forest's The Ready-Made Family. I might even reread Northanger Abbey, since I haven't visited it in a few years.

But: what next? What am I missing that has a protagonist's reading as a major part of its plot? I need recommendations, internet.

Shatnerquake and Left of Cool

2011-03-28T22:48:00.004+05:30

A couple of weeks ago I started writing a new column. Left of Cool will appear in The Sunday Guardian every Sunday. Aadisht Khanna and I (on alternating weekends) will be talking about books that are mildly odd or completely bizarre or just generally obscure and wonderful. This week (most serendipitously the week of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy's 80th birthdays) I chose to focus on Jeff Burk's Shatnerquake.

The review in the paper can be found here; an edited version is below.

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William Shatner fascinates me. Even now, after decades of seeing him in other things and knowing just how far he is from one’s mental picture of what a dashing, heroic space captain ought to look like, it is possible to watch one of the original series episodes of Star Trek and have a crush on Captain Kirk. It makes no sense.

The internet is fond of a certain game. It is called “Who would win in a fight?” Popcultural figures are pitted against each other in imaginary duels, as people conversant with these figures and their skillsets work out what possible strategies and advantages they could possibly deploy against each other. Superman vs Batman? Alien vs Predator? Chacha Chaudhary vs Godzilla? Who would win in a fight between a William Shatner character and another William Shatner character?

Jeff Burk goes a step further in his book Shatnerquake. The question Burk asks is this: who would win in a fight between all the characters Shatner has ever played and Shatner himself?

The story, if you can call it that, is as follows. William Shatner is at a convention for William Shatner fans. Unfortunately, so are a group of Campbellians, fans of Bruce Campbell (who has also had an odd acting career, though not quite as much of one as Shatner). These Campbellians, having infiltrated the convention, set off a “fiction bomb” which brings all the characters Shatner has ever played into this reality, where they cause chaos and destruction.

The result is both less stupid and more awesome (depending on how you the reader feel about very silly books about cultural icons) than it sounds. Every other line is a reference to something or the other that is Shatner related, and it would take a serious connoisseur to unpack the full extent of the book’s allusiveness. As a mere dilettante myself, I suspect I only picked up the most obvious references. So you have Captain Kirk killing innocent fans dressed as Klingons and sexually harassing other innocent fans dressed as Orion slave girls, T.J. Hooker yelling at people, and bewildered bystanders witnessing spoken word performances. When he speaks, Shatner keeps making the random pauses that we know him for. There is a man in a red shirt whose name (it is Stephen) Kirk refuses to know. The plot of Shatnerquake itself might be a reference to the actor’s appearance in a skit on Saturday Night Live, in which he insulted a convention-ful of Star Trek fans. The book even has a two-dimensional animated Shatner, invisible when he turns sideways. And somehow (and I cannot give Burk enough credit for this) it is actually readable.

Perhaps Shatnerquake could not work if it were about almost any other celebrity figure. But as Burk himself points out in a letter to Shatner at the beginning of the book (it ends with the postscript “please don’t sue me”), one is never quite sure whether the actor is acting, when he is parodying himself, when he is serious. Shatner has had quite a bit of success spoofing James T. Kirk, but it’s more than that; as Burk says, “[His] entire life has become an elaborate work of performance art”. The actor has been blurring the lines between actor and character for so long now that it makes perfect sense that they should be completely obscured in this manner; there simply isn’t a Shatner-persona we can take as more ‘real’ than any of the parts he has played. From this perspective the book ties in perfectly with the larger piece of art that is Shatner’s own life.

The first page of the book carries a list of the author’s other works, among them Shatnerquest and Shatnerpocalypse. I suspect that neither of these books exists, but so strange is this actor’s career that I would not be surprised if they did. Or even if he had written them himself.

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Jean Webster, Dear Enemy

2011-03-10T16:17:00.003+05:30

In my regular column for this month's Kindle Magazine I talk a bit about my discomfort with Daddy-Long-Legs and conclude that Webster's Dear Enemy is far better.

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I have a rather complicated relationship with Jean Webster’s 1912 novel Daddy-Long-Legs. When I discovered it (I was 11 or 12 at the time, I think) I loved it; it was exactly the sort of thing a girl that age might be expected to love. Brilliant, funny orphan Judy Abbot is sent to college by a mysterious benefactor (an anonymous trustee of the orphanage where she has grown up) on the strength of one humorous essay. Her benefactor’s only condition is that she write to him regularly and she does so, giving him the nickname Daddy-Long-Legs. While at college she meets the gorgeous young uncle of one of her classmates. Gradually she falls in love with him, but hesitates to tell him the secret of her background. Of course it turns out that he is her mysterious benefactor and it all ends happily.

As a grown-up, I find that I have my doubts. It’s difficult to be wholly supportive of a relationship where the (older, richer) man is deliberately manipulating and keeping information from the woman. Not to mention the inherent (and I'm sure unintended) creepiness of Judy’s calling her future partner “Daddy”.

If Daddy-Long-Legs is a teenage girl’s book, its sequel, Dear Enemy (1915), is a book for adults. Dear Enemy tells of the adventures of Sallie, Judy’s college friend, as she attempts to take over and refurbish the orphanage. Like the first book, Dear Enemy is told entirely through letters; Sallie writes to her fiancé Gordon, to Judy, and to the grumpy local doctor who she soon begins to refer to as her “dear enemy”. It is obvious from the beginning, when we learn that Judy and her husband disapprove of Gordon and are hoping Sallie will fall for the doctor, how this is going to go.

But for all its predictability, Dear Enemy is a surprising leap forward from the first book. Daddy-Long-Legs has its moments of seriousness, but Dear Enemy has long conversations about things like whether or not eugenics works, women’s rights, how institutions should function; it’s a book that treats its characters and (more importantly, perhaps) its readers like grown-ups. And unlike a number of other books with similar settings (many of them written much later than this one) it manages not to patronise or romanticise or become twee.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about it is Gordon. We the readers know how this is supposed to go – the heroine of the last book disapproves of this man, he is a charming politician, surely he will turn out to be a cad and she will turn to the taciturn doctor? And yet this plot, familiar as it is, would have diminished Sallie. Instead we are shown a man who is really quite nice, though he has his flaws, and with whom she could have been happy. The break-up, when it comes, is amicable and blame is not flung around. Readers of romance will know just how rare this is.

Dear Enemy was adapted into a TV series in the 80s so can hardly be called obscure. Still, it’s a lot less famous than the book it follows, and that strikes me as rather unfair.

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Nicole Polizzi, A Shore Thing

2011-03-07T00:10:00.005+05:30

If I have one regret over writing and reviewing A Shore Thing it is that the sunburn scene did not make it into my review due to lack of space. Gia, the protagonist of the story, gets a job at a tanning salon called Tantastic. An attractive but pale young man comes in for a tan and she gives him a light one (out of consideration for his skin). He invites her to a party at his house. Unfortunately he decides in the intervening time that his tan is not sufficient and takes matters into his own hands; as a result, a couple of days later, Gia arrives to find the young man naked, bright red, and in considerable pain from the sunburn all over his body. Amazingly her presence still manages to excite him enough that they can spend a few minutes chatting about whether his engorged penis most resembles a barbershop pole, a candy cane or a Dr Seuss hat before he begs her to leave because the pain is too much to bear.

Between this and the numerous descriptions of people doing shots out of each other's navels, I found the book a pleasant and instructive experience.

A version of this review at Guardian20, here.

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If you consider books important at all, it’s easy to believe that the celebrity novel signals the end of literature. These books are generally terrible, the people they are about have lives that manage to be both expensive and uninteresting, and most of them are ghostwritten, so that they don’t even feel like they have basic integrity. And (to rub it in further) most of them are bestsellers.

By any normal standards, therefore, A Shore Thing by Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi is an abomination. Snooki is known for her work on MTV’s The Jersey Shore, a reality show that apparently features a group of Italian-American housemates spending their summer at Seaside Heights in New Jersey. Snooki is perhaps the best known of the group – though as someone who does not watch the show I cannot really explain why.

A Shore Thing tells the story of the well-meaning but accident-prone Gia Spumanti (based on Snooki herself) who is spending the summer in Seaside Heights with her cousin Bella (based on fellow Jersey Shore star Jenni “JWoww” Farley). While Gia gets a job at a tanning salon, accidentally becomes a YouTube celebrity and attempts to mend her new employer’s broken marriage, Bella works in a gym and makes a series of terrible romantic choices.
In many ways A Shore Thing feels like a rather awkward young adult novel (which makes sense; though it hasn’t been specifically marketed as one the show’s audience would seem to skew that way) with its story of girls Finding Themselves over the course of one summer. It emphasises such important moral lessons as the fact that date rape is bad, that education is good, that eating disorders should be avoided because it’s perfectly okay to love one’s “badonkadonk”. On the other hand, much of the humour seems like it could have come straight out of American Pie. One long and cringeworthy scene involves laxatives and men’s bathrooms; a romantic date ends with a jellyfish sting and the inevitable urination.

However banal and juvenile this may sound, A Shore Thing is bizarrely entertaining. It’s hard to tell how much of this is due to the work of Valerie Frankel, Snooki’s “collaborator” on the book. In the acknowledgements Frankel is thanked for “help[ing] me translate my ideas onto the page”. Yet frequently the book reads more as a parody of The Jersey Shore and Snooki herself than anything else. For example, we see Gia “dancing on the spot to music that, like dolphins and small dogs, only she could hear”. We learn that “[s]he loved dancing and was talented too. Gia won a contest in high school for shaking it the longest and hardest without spilling a drop of her vodka tonic”. And she’d like to wear orange, but “that was too close to her skin tone to pull off”. When she overhears an acquaintance saying harsh things about her and kicking over a trash can in her rage, Gia’s outrage is entirely for the harm caused to the community. “Go ahead, call me a fat whore, she thought, but for God’s sake don’t litter!”

Gia is not the only character to be the victim of what seems like constant mockery. Linda, a character who once had a party with a friend where “they each ate three cookies” also comes in for some of it. We learn that one of the things she admires about her boyfriend Rocky is that “he loved to fight. When Rocky pounded down some kid because she asked him to, Linda felt loved and treasured.”

A subplot in which two men compete to manipulate, pick up and sleep with women is another clue that this might all be a really bizarre satire. The competition bears a distinct similarity to another reality TV show, the genuinely disturbing Keys to the VIP. Then there’s a gloriously meta moment where an entire, naked, room of spray-tanned women discuss the “bend and snap” seduction technique from Legally Blonde and unleash it on an innocent delivery man.

If it is a spoof the question remains; does Snooki know?

Then there’s the fact that this book is so quotable. A bridesmaid claims that “Nothing says ‘I, like, love you’ like a spray tan. An incident where Gia accidently trips over a shark and finds herself standing rather too close to it gives rise to the greatest line in the book (and I suspect in literature for 2011): “Don’t eat me, bitch”.

All told, for all its banality and lack of depth it’s hard to hate A Shore Thing. There’s something so innocent and earnest about it – this is a world in which date rape can be avenged through a paintball game, where a house burning down is no big deal, and where the guy who stole your car probably only wanted to refurbish it. It is bizarrely appealing. If this is the death of literature it’s a lumbering, adorable puppy of a death.

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Peter Y. Paik, From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe

2011-02-10T23:43:00.005+05:30

My review of Peter Y. Paik's From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe appeared in last week's sunday guardian, here. This one was difficult to write: I'm not sure reviewing an academic book for a mainstream audience even makes sense. I enjoyed reading Paik's book, though more for occasional insights than for any sustained argument.

The point I've made about writing criticism of Moore is one I'd love to go into in more detail if anyone feels like discussing it. I attempted a Lost Girls paper a couple of years ago and found myself doing exactly the same thing that I accuse Paik of here.

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The word “utopia” refers to a perfect society, governed by an ideal socio-legal system. Yet the term, coined by Thomas More in 1516, literally means “no place”. Over the centuries various works of literature have considered what utopia would look like; Plato’s Republic is an early example. The science fiction genre has often explored the dystopia, utopia’s opposite, in which everything has gone horribly wrong and “perfect society” means “totalitarian government”. What is perhaps less discussed is the massive, catastrophic change that would be required to bring about such a state of affairs.

In From Utopia to Apocalypse Paik analyses a selection of science fictional texts in the light of the insights they provide into revolutionary politics. He stresses upon the totalitarian impulse at the heart of revolutionary politics; what the book’s blurb describes as the “fantasy of putting annihilating omnipotence to beneficial effect”. Among the works he examines are Alan Moore’s comic Watchmen, Hayao Miyizaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind and three films: Jang Joon-Hwan’s Save the Green Planet, the Wachowskis’ Matrix trilogy of movies and James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta, adapted from the work of the same name by Alan Moore. The focus on comics especially is an unusual and not unwelcome choice – the texts examined here are definitely science fiction, but none of them are the novels or short stories traditional to the genre. Equally welcome is the decision to explore cultural products from Asia as well as the UK and the USA.

At all points the book stands in danger of turning into the Alan Moore show. In addition to the chapter-and-a-half dedicated to Moore’s work (in a book that contains only four chapters this feels unbalanced), the introduction is dominated by a discussion of his Miracleman. This isn’t necessarily a flaw – these sections are smart and engaging – but it does make the work as a whole seem a little unbalanced. The Moore chapters are good, but they’re not particularly relevant; partly because Moore has been studied extensively before, but also because his fiction is so self-consciously commenting on itself that it’s easy for a critic to slip into merely explaining what the text is already doing.

Paik’s strongest chapters are the ones dealing with slightly less mainstream texts. He makes an insightful study of Save the Green Planet, a Korean movie that chronicles the interactions between a violently angry man and a businessman whom he believes to be an alien of a race that secretly controls humanity. But the book’s biggest strength by some distance is its in-depth study of Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind. The exploration of the choices of a character who is portrayed as simultaneously saint-like and destructive (Nausicaä effectively chooses to sacrifice the entire human race to a higher cause) is nuanced and fascinating. Coming after this a final chapter on The Matrix and V for Vendetta feels like a bit of a let-down. The comparison of the politics of the latter film to those of the original comic is entertaining but hardly new.

It’s hard to decide who the intended audience for this book might be. Some sections might be rather intimidatingly scholarly for a casual reader who is not well versed in political theory. On the other hand, Paik spends a part of his introduction painstakingly explaining the connections between popular cultural products and the societies that create them; to the hypothetical academic reader this is rather like reinventing the wheel. It’s also interesting to note that Paik engages comparatively little with the major science fiction critics (barring a mention of Carl Freedman and a few references to Jameson; Zizek and Badiou, by contrast pop up on every other page). On the whole this is a good thing. I’m certainly in favour of more critical angles being brought to science-fiction criticism, and certainly wouldn’t advocate that critics all keep reading and referring to the same people ad infinitum; on the other hand, to contribute to a conversation you need to be a participant in it.

One thing that From Utopia to Apocalypse does seem to lack is a final chapter. A book like this one is never going to lend itself to a neat conclusion but it seems to end more abruptly than one would like. Despite these flaws, however, Paik’s book is engaging, often rigorous and very well worth reading.

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Piracy and privilege and property and publishing and other things that begin with P

2011-01-20T13:35:00.003+05:30

Apparently people are talking about this again. This isn't so much a post as a way of directing people who are interested to fantasyecho's collection of links (which I found via Shweta Narayan).

Also to quote this, from qian's first post there, because it is so familiar*:

"Order it from Amazon!" It takes a million years for the book to arrive, you pay a swingeing amount**, it's held up at the post office and you have to drive out and pay taxes to collect it, and all the while you're aware that it cost you four times the amount it cost an American to buy it. The worst insult? In almost every case, the author is not even contemplating that somebody like you will be reading it. You quite simply do not exist in their world.

*It's not quite as bad as this in India anymore, because we've had a few really good online bookstores (Flipkart!) start up in the last few years. Plus there always have been a few good bookshops that could surprise you, if you lived in one of the major cities.

** "But the book depository has free worldwide delivery!" Here is the list of countries they ship to. I appreciate them and the work they do, but I really think they need to remove that "worldwide" from all over their site.

Some things I am reading

2011-01-15T13:02:00.002+05:30

Yet in fact Strongbow was spending very little time on botany. Instead, unexpectedly, he had turned his vast powers of concentration to the study of sex, an endeavor that eventually would bring about the fall of the British Empire.

*****

There, there, they sit and cerebrate:
The fervid Pote who never potes,
Great Artists, Male or She, that Talk
But scorn the Pigment and the chalk,
And Cubist sculptors wild as Goats,
Theosophists and Swamis, too,
Musicians mad as Hatters be—
(E'en puzzled Hatters, two or three!)
Tame anarchists, a dreary crew,
Squib Socialists too damp to sosh,
Fake Hobohemians steeped in suds,
Glib females in Artistic Duds
With Captive Husbands cowed and gauche.

*****

Not knowing better and other thoughts about books and race and words

2011-01-15T11:24:00.004+05:30

Some theses on books and race, not directly related to but inspired by some of the comment that these new edits of Huckleberry Finn have caused. Feel free to apply these (in modified forms obviously) to sexism, or most other forms of discrimination. I repeat, none of this is directly related to Twain’s book. I haven’t read Huckleberry Finn. (For actual Huck Finn commentary, see here,here and here).

Thesis 1: Racism was not invented in the Twentieth century.
Things which were not perceived as racist when they were written may still have been so at the time; they did not magically come to be that way after someone proposed this revolutionary idea that we should treat all people like human beings. It also means that things a lot of us consider completely innocent now will likely be looked upon with horror in a few decades. As long as we’re moving in the direction of being nicer to a greater number of living beings, this is a good thing and does not cause me too much concern.

Thesis 2: Most of the time, they did know better.
There’s a particular defence of racism in literature that I find insulting to pretty much everyone involved. That is that people living at a particular point in time simply didn’t know better than to be racist. This is patronising to start with – “s/he doesn’t know any better” is not the sort of remark you make about someone you’re treating as an intellectual or moral equal. But it’s also only varying degrees of true. At most points in history there have been plenty of people suggesting that certain forms of behaviour were not okay – it’s one of the ways we’ve gotten to (at least) this point. I’m not suggesting that it doesn’t take effort, or that it isn’t far easier to believe what your society and the structures that make it up make it easiest to believe. But, particularly in the twentieth century, the means for knowing better have always been there, and people who chose to have had the opportunity to seek them out. To suggest that this is not the case does a tremendous disservice to all the people and movements in history that worked so hard at taking those first steps and making those thought processes available.

Thesis 3: Things that are critical of colonialism/slavery/other things associated with racism may still be racist in and of themselves.
Three words: Heart of Darkness. Strongly anti-colonialist. Frequently very beautiful (subjective, I know. But I think it is and so do many other people). Racist. I’m not a huge fan of people who dismiss it entirely for that last characteristic, but I prefer them to the sort of people who believe that because of its anti-colonial stance it simply cannot be racist and the rest of us are all just missing the point.
[Corollary: “The author once said this thing that was really progressive” is not a particularly strong defense of a work of literature.]

Thesis 4: Fraught words are fraught.
And thus we descend into lolcat speak. I’m against removing words from books. I think we need to keep them there and confront our pasts. And this is a viewpoint I’ve seen in a lot of commentary on the Huckleberry Finn debate. It’s well-meant, and to a point I agree with it. But I’d like to do this with the understanding that making those decisions for everyone is a tricky issue. No one has a right to mandate individual responses to words – certainly not in situations where the fraught histories of those words have generally been to the disadvantage of the individual whose response you are attempting to mandate. This has all gotten very convoluted.

Thesis 5: Replicating the racial politics of the forms you emulate is still racist.
Certain Tolkien Scholars, no one cares how many medieval texts you cite to prove that the portrayals of certain groups of people were *only* that way so they’d echo his literary tradition. Missing the point. Stop now.

I suspect this is an ongoing list. What else would you add?

Talbot Baines Reed, The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's

2011-01-06T21:01:00.002+05:30

My regular column about out of copyright books, for Kindle magazine (whose decision for this issue to do a huge Assange-glorifying story without mentioning the charges against him is one I'm not too pleased with). I cheated a bit - The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's is one of the books I covered in my thesis and so pontificating about its relationship to the genre was all too easy. Still.

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It is generally believed that the first school-story was Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays. I’m not sure I agree. Origin stories for genres are tricky. Genres don’t just spring fully formed as from the head of some writer or the other – tropes from books get used and reused until they coagulate into a particular form.

If there is such a thing as the first book in a genre, perhaps it ought to be the first book that knows it is being written within a genre. By that argument a strong contender for the first real school-story is Talbot Baines Reed’s The Fifth Form At St. Dominic’s, published in 1881.

Before Baines Reed, a young reader in England might have read Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), the story of how young Tom grows up and becomes a credit to Rugby school. It’s sometimes preachy, but it has its moments. This hypothetical reader might also read Dean Farrar’s Eric, which tells of the prolonged downfall of a sinning schoolboy. It would be terribly depressing were it not so heavy-handed. A few decades later Kipling’s Stalky & Co. would mock the book for its ridiculous sentimentality. With The Fifth Form At St. Dominic’s, things changed.

The book tells the story of the Greenfield brothers at St. Dominic’s school. Stephen, the younger brother, is a new student. Oliver is in the fifth form of the title, and is taciturn, honourable, and a good sportsman (the stuff literary heroes are made of). As Stephen negotiates the difficulties of public school life for the first time, Oliver finds himself falsely accused of wrongdoing and shunned by his classmates. Meanwhile, led by the magnificent Anthony Pembury, the members of the fifth have created a wall magazine in which they mock the doings of the sixth form.

As a school-story fan it’s fascinating to see how much Baines Reed borrows from his major predecessors. The long descriptions of sports matches, the ragging of new boys, the idealized headmaster are all there. The downward spiraling of the real culprit is the sort of thing Farrar might write - though Baines Reed's characters are allowed the possibility of redemption, rather than prolonged, gloomy deaths. But equally it’s interesting to see how closely the book corresponds to the pattern that most later school stories would follow.

Most importantly, it’s fun. Like most of Baines Reed’s work, The Fifth Form At St. Dominic’s was published in The Boy’s Own Paper. The good end happily, the bad are punished and the reader learns a Valuable Moral Lesson, but considering the tenor of a lot of his contemporary children’s writers, Baines Reed did a good job of not shoving that aspect of it down his young readers’ throats. It’s easier to see this book as a forerunner to the Frank Richards or Enid Blyton school stories than it is to imagine Tom Brown’s Schooldays in that role.

Perhaps the author’s greatest achievement of all was the inclusion of Anthony Pembury; sharp, funny, and no good at sports. Characters like this do not usually pop up in the school story, but one rather like Pembury appeared in 1909 in a school story titled Mike. The character’s name was Psmith, and the author was a young man named P.G Wodehouse.

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Not the best books of 2010

2011-01-04T23:45:00.003+05:30

As with last year I’m not going to do a “best books of 2010” list because I’m sure I’d think I was horribly wrong no matter what I wrote. So this is more of a most memorable to me personally list:

Edit: I knew I was going to miss something embarrassingly important. Ian McDonald's The Dervish House was absolutely gorgeous and I can't believe I didn't put it on this list. (I blame the bout of food poisoning that has kept me home, awake, and oddly productive today.)

Skippy Dies, Paul Murray: This may not be a best books list, but if it was this book would still be on it. It’s certainly my favourite new book in a very long time. Partly because I know and love school stories so well, partly because it is just brilliant. It’s an Irish school story, but it’s also got science fiction and science science and drugs and love and druids and priests all thrown in, and it’s funny and over the top and always just about on the verge of collapsing under the weight of itself, and it makes me quite incoherent with glee.

Light Boxes, Shane Jones: I bought this purely on the basis of how pretty the cover was. I did worry that it seemed a little smug, but then I read it and adored it anyway. Strange and lovely and fable-like (fablesque? fabulous?) and gory and quite wonderful. Review here, and also a signal boost to the amazing Raven Books where I picked up my copy.

Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro: Seriously Funny Since 1983, Jai Arjun Singh: If this was a “best books” list I don’t know if this book would be on it. Certainly I’d feel a little odd about it, since Jai is a friend and I am obviously biased. But this is the first time someone I know has published a long work that is nonfiction and non-academic, and I was fascinated by how recognisable the person I know was; how his voice and the sort of things that interest him and concern him, came across in the book. Of course this is all a very personal reading of the book, but it was a new feeling to me, and so thoroughly enjoyable.

Jaclyn the Ripper, Karl Alexander: I started reading this on the last day of 2009, could only manage a few pages at a time (though it provided some drunken entertainment on new year’s eve) and eventually struggled to the end in 2010. I was supposed to review it, but after a long struggle finally gave up (I’m sorry, Niall!). In a year when I read multiple Indian 100 rupee novels and the occasional essay by an undergraduate, among other things, this book stands out as not only the worst thing I read all year, but the worst thing I have ever read full stop. Most memorable books of the year? I suspect this one is seared into my brain forever.

In Great Waters, Kit Whitfield: I bought this because a bunch of people with reliable opinions had said good things about it. As ever they were proved correct. This is an incredibly smart, atmospheric, historical novel. With mermaids. It has things like politics and court intrigue and a plausible history, but with all that it never gets worldbling-y, and it keeps that strange, elusive feel that is one of the reasons I first loved fantasy. The author also has an excellent blog, here.

Christmas Stories, Various: Brought out by Scholastic India – and here is a disclaimer: they employ me and that is why I don’t talk much about children’s books here anymore. This collection isn’t so much on this list for literary merit (though it has stories by some pretty great writers, including Mridula Koshy, Payal Dhar, and the epictastic Kuzhali Manickavel) but because it has a story by me in it. The story is about black magic, brothers and bicycle theft. It’s the first thing I’ve ever written for children, and I’m quite proud of it. I had another (for grown-ups this time) story accepted for publication this past year for an anthology with another publisher. Hopefully that will come out sometime in 2011 – but this is my first and it’s special.

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart: As I said above, I don’t talk much about children’s books here because of possible conflicts of interest. But I have loved E. Lockhart ever since I read The Boy Book a couple of years ago. If I could make one book compulsory reading for teenagers (which would utterly defeat the purpose) I think Frankie Landau-Banks would be it. It’s got intelligent teenagers, and Bentham, and Foucault, and sexual politics, and sexual attraction and an ending that isn’t happy. I hurtled through it through the night, only stopping every few chapters to dance around the room.

All About H. Hatterr, G.V Desani: I ended up writing an entirely separate post about this one. But this was revolutionary – a bizarre, funny epic that made a point of not taking English seriously. I’m embarrassed I’d never read it before and thrilled that I finally have.

The Etched City, K.J. Bishop: A friend had been telling me for a couple of years that I needed to read this. When I finally got down to it this year my mind was quite thoroughly blown. Here's a link to Paul Smith's piece on it.

Kumari Loves a Monster, Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, Shyam, Jagan and Pritham K. Chakravarthy: I’m not sure what to say about Kumari… apart from actually describing it – it is a series of pictures of tentacle beastthings romancing pretty girls from Tamil Nadu. With a few lines of poetry in both English and Tamil for each scene. This should be enough, but Kumari Loves a Monster doesn’t just rest on the cool idea; it is actively adorable. It is also hot pink.

Wolfsangel, M.D. Lachlan: This book is two books. One is a huge Viking werewolf fantasy – it’s massive in scale, and feels meaty and real and generally good. The other is a quiet, thoughtful, dreamlike meditation on gods and magic and human interaction with myth. One book felt like The Long Ships (which I am reading), the other felt like The Owl Service. Wolfsangel was startlingly good, and I look forward to reading Lachlan’s next.

The Perplexity of Hariya Hercules, Manohar Shyam Joshi: I wish I’d read more translated work this year. I picked this book up for its marvellous title. I’m not sure what I was expecting; certainly not something quite this. A playful, postmodern romp – I wrote more about it here – and as far as I can tell, a very good translation.

The Thing Around your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: An author I’d been planning to read for a long time, and a collection of short stories. The Thing Around Your Neck was as dense and layered as I’d been led to expect, but I was unprepared for how direct and strongly felt it seemed. I will be reading her novels this year – and if you have not read her and need convincing, her wonderful TED talk ought to be enough.

Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrlees: A classic that I had (for reasons unknown) never read before. Outwardly very delicate and pretty and fable-like, but then it turns out to be full of murder and addiction and other unexpected things.

Glass Coffin Girls, Paul Jessup: I like stories, and therefore I like stories that think about stories. Jessup has very much the same sort of approach to genre and how it works as I do myself. This is a great, strange little collection of horror-ish stories based on fairytales. There’s an element of dream logic to many of the stories that somehow works really well. This collection (or one story in it) also has the distinction of being the only thing I read this year that made me feel actually, physically ill.

Honourable mentions: Turbulence, Reading Series Fiction, Zoo City, Super Sad True Love Story, Four British Fantasists, rereads of Sarah Caudwell’s Hilary Tamar books, Joan Aiken rereads, a Gormenghast reread, and the most recent Terry Pratchett. Adam Roberts’ gorgeous, ludic Yellow Blue Tibia was a joy to read, and I’m told that New Model Army (I have exercised great discipline in not buying it yet) is even better. Under My Roof, Nick Mamatas’ smart, hilarious post-9/11 novel. My gorgeous, Australian edition covers of Celine Kiernan’s Moorhawke books (along with Light Boxes these are the prettiest additions to my shelves in 2010) are tempting me to reread the first two as soon as possible. Alan Garner’s The Voice That Thunders and Catherynne M. Valente’s The Habitation of the Blessed were both started in 2010 and will be finished in 2011 – both are promising to be pretty memorable.

Things I am looking forward to in 2011:
Anna Carey’s first book, The Real Rebecca. Anna is a good friend (disclaimer again) and a really good writer and a generally lovely person, so I’m expecting this to be amazing.
New Adam Roberts book, again with a three-word title. This man is alarmingly prolific.
The Popcorn Essayists, a collection of film essays by Indian writers. Apart from the fact that it’s edited by Jai, it’s got Manil Suri talking about being a cabaret dancer and Musharraf Ali Farooqi talking about (I think) foot-fetishes.
New China Mieville book. I was a bit disappointed in last year’s Kraken, but even Mieville’s more disappointing books tend to have plenty of meat to them. I’m hoping that this shift to what looks like a more traditionally genre-ish book (as much as that is ever likely to be the case with this author, anyway) will eliminate a number of the flaws I perceived in the last book.
Karen Russell’s Swamplandia. St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves is one of the best collections of short stories I’ve read in recent years. I’m very keen to see what Russell does with the novel form.
A Dance With Dragons. I read very few fantasy series, and this is probably a good thing. I am one of those awful people who cannot rest till I own the set – regardless of whether I actually like the books. At this point (this is probably very unflattering to GRRM and I beg his pardon) I’d be quite satisfied if someone would just give me a bulletpointed list of the major plot points till the end of the series. This is unlikely to happen. I shall read A Dance With Dragons and hop about impatiently for the next book instead.
Russians: I am reading them. It struck me this year (in part because of Elif Batuman’s The Possessed) that I had not read enough of the writers of whom she spoke. Since this is clearly something that needs remedying, I am making Russian literature something of a project this year. Suggestions for what I should read and when are more than welcome.

2010 Books

2011-01-04T23:32:00.003+05:30

A complete list of everything I read up until June is available at the 2010 Books tag. Then work and life got a little overwhelming and now the thought of doing a detailed review of everything I read in the second half of the year is intolerable. But here is a list, at least.

M.D Lachlan - Wolfsangel
Julia Quinn – Ten Things I Love About You
Karl Kesel and Terry Dodson – Preludes and Knock Knock Jokes
Kit Whitfield – In Great Waters
Gwyneth Jones - Imagination/Space
Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan – Confessions of a Listmaniac
Vishwajyoti Ghosh – Delhi Calm
K.J Bishop – The Etched City
Shane Jones– Light Boxes
Celine Kiernan – The Rebel Prince
Rama the Steadfast (Penguin edition)
George Orwell – Books vs Cigarettes
Brian Lee O’Malley – The Scott Pilgrim series
Tishani Doshi – The Pleasure Seekers
David Foster Wallace – Consider the Lobster
Tom Shippey (ed) – The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories
Searle and Willans – The Molesworth books
Margo Lanagan – White Time
Terry Pratchett – I Shall Wear Midnight
Gail Carriger – Blameless
Jai Arjun Singh and Nisha Susan (ed) - Excess
Adam Foulds – The Quickening Maze
Pradeep Sebastian – The Groaning Shelf
Francisco X. Stork - The Last Summer of the Death Warriors
Richard Marsh – The Beetle
E. Nesbit – The Enchanted Castle
E. Lockhart – The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
Wrede and Stevermer – Sorcery and Cecelia, The Grand Tour and The Mislaid Magician
Loretta Chase – Last Night’s Scandal
John Mortimer – Rumpole and the Angel of Death
Ian MacDonald – The Dervish House
Mervyn Peake – Gormenghast
Victor Watson – Reading Series Fiction
Michael de Larrabeiti – The Borribles
Sarah Caudwell – The Shortest Way to Hades
P.G Wodehouse – Ice in the Bedroom
Samit Basu – Turbulence
Kate Lawson – Mother of the Bride
Salman Rushdie – Luka and the Fire of Life
Paul Jessup – Werewolves
Walter Moers – The Alchemaster’s Apprentice
Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay
Zoran Zivkovic – 12 Collections and a Teashop
Kate Bernheimer (ed) – My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
Gary Shteyngart – Super Sad True Love Story
Lauren Beukes – Zoo City
Mark Gatiss – The Devil in Amber
Edmund Crispin – The Moving Toyshop
Josephine Pullein-Thompson – Pony Club Cup, Pony Club Challenge and Pony Club Trek
Rick Riordan – Heroes of Olympus: The Lost Hero
Jeff Vandermeer – Finch
Talbot Baines Reed – The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s
Antonia Forest – Autumn Term
JoSelle Vanderhooft – Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories
John Masefield – The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights

Also odd chapters from academic works, a bunch of regency romances by various authors, Pamela Cox’s sequels and fill-ins to the Malory Towers and St Clare’s books, and I lost the notebook where I list these things for a while in between, so I think I may be missing something. Probably not anything important, since I’d remember it if it was.

Not the most challenging year, judging by the quantities of fluff I read, but I think it was a good one.

DU and Hatterr

2011-01-03T22:35:00.003+05:30

I was trying to write a short note on G.V Desani’s All About H. Hatterr (one of the best things I read last year) and then I began to digress and talk about my university syllabus and it all got very long and turned into a post of its own. So here it is:

I wanted to talk about a particular aspect of the Delhi University undergraduate English syllabus (of which I am mostly quite a fan). Most people (and I was one of them) have read very little Indian writing when they start the course, and the university has wisely included a compulsory Indian Literature module that introduces them to some of the better 20th century Indian literature. The only problem with this that I can see is that it is introduced in first year. The first year is when we’re also given Victorian literature to read, presumably because this the sort of writing with which we’re assumed (probably correctly) to be familiar. The Indian Writing course has some pretty impressive stuff on it, for all that: almost the first thing we read was Ismat Chughtai’s “Lihaf”. There’s Jayanta Mohapatra, there’s Tendulkar’s Ghashiram Kotwal (which is marvellous even though I think we’d have appreciated it more if we’d read it a couple of years later when we were reading people like Dario Fo) and Mohan Rakesh’s Adhe Adhure (ditto but with Beckett) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadowlines which, combined with a really good professor, was the text that really taught me how much a text gives you to play with.

Still, faced with a class of undergraduates recently come from CBSE/ICSE schools, I can imagine the university would leave out a few things as possibly being too much. If it was necessary to break us in with the Victorians (for the next two years the compulsory courses all followed historical chronological order), it was equally necessary to keep the Indian literature we did accessible and recognisable. And since this is the only reason I can think of for All About H. Hatterr’s exclusion from the syllabus, I think it’s best to assume that this is why.

There’s an Angela Carter essay where she talks about the enormous importance of James Joyce both to the English language as a whole and to her personally:

Nevertheless, he carved out a once-and-future language, restoring both the
simplicity it had lost and imparting a complexity. The language of the heart and
the imagination and the daily round and the dream had been systematically
deformed by a couple of centuries of use as the rhetorical top-dressing of crude
power. Joyce Irished, he Europeanised, he decolonialised English: he tailored it
to fit this century, he drove a giant wedge between English Literature and
literature in the English language and, in doing so, he made me (forgive this
personal note) free. Free not to do as he did, but free to treat the Word not as
if it were holy but in the knowledge that it is always profane. He is in himself
the antithesis of the Great Tradition. You could also say, he detached fiction
from one particular ideological base, and his work has still not yet begun to
bear its true fruit. The centenarian still seems avant-garde.

And that is what Desani could, should be for us. We are still angsting over the idea that English is a foreign language in this country – there are plenty of issues around our English usage to angst about (like the amount of power those of us who can speak it hold) but this, whether or not we are allowed to use it as if it belonged to us, should not be one of them. Desani owns English. He’s not afraid to dogear it or roll over onto it or do whatever he needs to to get the effect he wants. And the results are bizarre and musical and hilarious, but they also achieve a cadence that feels appropriately Indian even to someone like me who has major issues with that descriptor.

Desani’s approach to language is so far away from the way English is taught and experienced in Indian schools that it isn’t even, as with Joyce and the Great Tradition, the antithesis to it. The two bear no relation to one another; they exist in different planes entirely. And so I’d like to see what would happen if Delhi University undergraduates were to be exposed to All About H. Hatterr. In third year, perhaps– by then there’d be a certain amount of context to help them to make sense of him. Yet if an unsuspecting class of first years were to come across H. Hatterr it might be exactly what they needed for the next few years of college.

Gary Shteyngart. Super Sad True Love Story

2010-12-22T10:12:00.003+05:30

I'm rarely as irritated by a book as I was by Shteyngart's dystopia. I'm also rarely as respectful of one. When I reviewed this book for The Sunday Guardian I had to hold myself back. Because however fine a writer he is (and he is one) and however well-conceived his dystopia (and it mostly is, very) he's still the sort of writer who needs you to know that he knows that he's writing yet another love story about a middle-aged man and a beautiful young girl.

This doesn't stop Super Sad True Love Story from occasionally being quite gorgeous, though.

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It is perhaps rather obvious that dystopic fiction should structure itself around the fears of its contemporary society. Orwell’s 1984 (the dystopia everyone has read), for example, deals with constant surveillance by an all-powerful state that has taken over even language.

One of 2010’s biggest theatrical releases was The Social Network, a film whose reception said a lot about the centrality of Facebook to our lives. In India, 2010 also saw the release of Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex aur Dhokha, a film about social voyeurism and the media. In 2010 it’s not Big Brother who is watching you: it’s everyone.

This is certainly the case in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, a dystopian satire in a world where all information about a person is constantly available to those around him. People own apparats, devices to link them to social networks wherever they are. Everyone around you knows your financial status, personal history and “fuckability” rating. It is in this world that middle-aged, hopelessly unfashionable Lenny Abramov falls in love with the much-younger, beautiful Eunice Park. As their relationship progresses, so do larger world political events. Until America falls apart.

The novel uses various formats in order to tell this story, shifting from Lenny’s diary entries to Eunice’s emails and chat transcripts. Lenny’s keeping of a written, personal diary is, like his habit of reading physical copies of books, very unusual in a world where books may not be banned, but are unfashionable enough that most people believe they smell bad. Both Lenny and Eunice experience genuine difficulty in reading, and Lenny has had to re-train himself to write. Interestingly Shteyngart has said (in an interview with the Paris Review) that one of his reasons for choosing this particular narrative style, with the text broken up into short sections with different formats, was that he believed people nowadays find it hard to read a book cover to cover – that we’re no longer as equipped to read books as we once were. This will become the novel’s biggest flaw.

Lenny is an interesting narrator. His many flaws are visible throughout the text. This is the sort of man who uses the word “eponymous” a page into beginning his narrative, and a couple of pages later is gushing about “the Baroque architecture of twentysomething buttocks”. He is attracted to women with tragic pasts – particularly victims of child abuse.

His feelings for Eunice arise naturally out of the sort of person that Lenny is. Early in the book he describes her as a “nano-sized woman who had likely never known the tickle of her own pubic hair, who lacked both breast and scent”. He attempts to convince himself that “the woman I had fallen for is thoughtful and bright”, but it comes across merely as an attempt to convince himself of his own lack of shallowness. He claims that “for me to fall in love with Eunice Park just as the world fell apart would be a tragedy beyond the Greeks”. When the tragedy comes, however, it is not the loss of this relationship that is affecting but the loss of many others.

Lenny’s relationship with his friends, for example. One of the few positives that Shteyngart’s dystopia allows for is that this “permissive” age allows for more physical closeness among men who “grew up with a fairly tense idea of male friendship”. With the rest of the world constantly tuning in honest conversation becomes difficult, but there’s never any doubt that there’s love there.

Eunice’s emails to her family and her friend “Grillbitch” (real name Jenny Kang) are equally moving. Perhaps because she’s younger and better able to communicate with technology, Eunice never seems to feel, as Lenny does, that the modern world makes it harder to communicate with her friends and there’s more honesty in her emails and chat transcripts than there ever is in Lenny’s private diary. Eunice grows and changes over the duration of the novel, and is in the end a far more sympathetic character.

Then there’s Lenny’s love of America. If this novel’s title were intended to refer to its narrator’s relationship with his country it would be quite understandable. Lenny commits himself to loving his country even as it collapses around him, and the sense of what has been, or is about to be, lost pervades the novel.

Every returning New Yorker asks the question: Is this still my city?
I have a ready answer, cloaked in obstinate despair: It is.
And if it’s not, I will love it all the more. I will love it to the point where it becomes mine again.

At the end of the novel, however, Shteyngart disappoints. He provides a frame narrative, and in it attempts to forestall a number of criticisms that might be made about the novel. That it is too much in the style of “the final generation of American “literary” writers”. That Eunice’s entries are preferable to “Lenny’s relentless navel-gazing”. It’s the sort of thing that might be intended to intimidate the reader into not making those criticisms herself – yet Shteyngart’s knowledge that these potential criticisms exist does not make them less true.

And this is ultimately my problem with Super Sad True Love Story. It is beautiful, it is smart, it is incredibly moving, but ultimately it does not trust its readers to read it. Shteyngart will cut the crusts and literally break his book into bite-sized pieces for his readers, and make for himself the criticisms they might have made. One of his fictional reviewers describes Lenny’s book as a “tribute to literature as it once was”. Super Sad True Love Story is the opposite; it’s a book for readers who are already in the dystopia that Shteyngart describes.

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Here are a couple of other reviews: Sasha Nova at BSC, Patrick Hudson at The Zone, Deepanjana Pal at Mumbai Boss.

More on women and SF: I ramble about my own list for a bit

2010-12-09T22:29:00.008+05:30

I mentioned Torque Control's current women and sf focus in this post a few days ago. The results are in and Niall has been posting short reviews of the books in the poll's top ten. So I wanted to talk a little about my own list.

First, there's the question of defining what science fiction is. I don't think any of the books on my list would qualify as "typical" sf. Possible reasons for this: it's a result of my not reading very much sf; it's because not enough women write sf in the first place and I therefore had to really stretch for names; a "best of" list is not likely to contain much that is typical in the first place, since these are supposed to be the books that really stand out. I suspect my list is a result of all three.

In general I think rigid genre boundaries are a bit silly- genre classification is a tool to help us think about books, and the moment it becomes cumbersome you discard it. But in a situation like this I think it's also important to be careful of how far one stretches the definition of a genre. As Jo Walton points out here, there are a lot more famous female authors writing fantasy than sf, and part of the point of this month is to examine that fact - redefining fantasy books as sf isn't going to help anyone.

I really enjoyed this post by Shana Worthen on the subject of how to classify LeGuin's Lavinia. To my shame I still haven't read the book despite having bought it at the beginning of the year. I suspect the only sort of science fiction I'm really interested in is social-science fiction (does that exist as a term)? Worthen's post would apply perfectly to something like Mary Gentle's Ash, which would certainly have been on my list if it had only been published a year or so later. It's probably why things like dystopias and alternate histories also figure in my head as "sf".

People/books that aren't on my list:

I would have loved to have Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell on the list if I could even vaguely justify it to myself as science fiction. I could not.

Aadisht asked in the comments of my last post on this subject whether Gail Carriger was on it. Much as I love the Parasol Protectorate books, she is not. I definitely think her books can qualify as sf, but I'm still waiting for her to write a book that absolutely blows my mind. She's created a setting that makes this possible, certainly, and it's bound to happen eventually.

Justina Robson and Tricia Sullivan are names that pop up on almost every other list of this sort that I've read, but I've never read anything by either author. Neither of them is to be seen in most Indian bookshops, but I know my library has some of Robson's work and I must get down to reading it.

Now the list:

Scarlett Thomas - PopCo
Shelley Jackson – Half Life
Gwyneth Jones – Bold as Love
Kit Whitfield - In Great Waters
K.J Bishop – The Etched City
Steph Swainston – The Year of Our War

PopCo was a gift from a friend (who posts here) a few years ago. It is the only thing by Scarlet Thomas I've read so far, so for all I know her more recent books are better. But PopCo is intelligent and ruthless and fully deserves its place here.

Half Life is something I read a couple of years ago when I went through a stack of Tiptree award winning books in a month - triggered by The Knife of Never Letting Go being a joint winner (with Nisi Shawl's Filter House). Jackson's book is rich and playful and complicated and headache-causing. If I hadn't enjoyed it so much I might think it was too clever for its own good. But I did and it wasn't and that's that.

Earlier this year I read Gwyneth Jones' book of essays and criticism, Imagination/Space. I thoroughly enjoyed it and suspect I prefer Jones' nonfiction to her fiction. Which makes it all the more impressive that she has multiple entries in the poll's top ten. Bold as Love is a great place to start reading her work; in addition to being a very strong book itself, it's the start of a good series. I just discovered that the first few books are actually available for free download on the Bold as Love website.

I spent a while backandforthing over including Whitfield's book in this list. Eventually I sent it off without her, but then I read this post. I'm still not entirely convinced, but if there's any chance of having In Great Waters on this list I want to take it. I ordered it this summer after reading some very enthusiastic reviews and was thrilled by it. It maintains its strangeness throughout, it's powerful and uncomfortable, and really good.

A friend has been telling me for a couple of years that I must read K.J Bishop's The Etched City but I only took his advice very recently. Apparently he was right. The Etched City starts off like a typical fantasy novel, and then something happens and it all turns inside out and gets very good indeed.

Swainston's books are another series that look like a typical fantasy at first glance. But it's set within an interesting multiverse, and as the series progresses (The Year of Our War is the first of the books) this becomes more and more important. In addition, Swainston's a very good writer.

And that is where my list ends.

Starter for Ten: In which I discover the perfect quizmaster

2010-12-07T01:21:00.007+05:30

On Saturday I read David Nicholls' comic novel, Starter for Ten. It's set in the 80s, and is about Brian, a young man who is earnest, lower middle class and a University Challenge fan. He gets into university (Englit) and makes it onto the University Challenge team. He also falls rather stupidly in love.

Nicholls is capable of being really funny. This, a few pages into the novel, was one of the passages that had me giggling and made me want to continue with it:

I think it's fair to say that I've never been a slave to the fickle vagaries of fashion. It's not that I'm anti-fashion, it's just that of all the major youth movements I've lived through so far, none have really fitted. At the end of the day, the harsh reality is that if you're a fan of Kate Bush, Charles Dickens, Scrabble, David Attenborough and University Challenge, then there's not much out there for you in terms of a youth movement.

A few pages later a character is described as "carbuncular". I was sold.

However, I think I'm just not cut out for comic novels where the protagonist (particularly a first-person protagonist)'s cluelessness is the butt of most of the humour. This was my major problem with Sidin Vadukut's Dork, when I read it earlier this year. As with Robin Verghese, I spent most of the novel being irritated by Brian's various idiocies. Even when he is being treated horribly by the woman he is supposedly in love with I'm hard pressed to sympathise - serves him right for being shallow and uninteresting. It's a pity; as I said above, Nicholls is incredibly funny.

My other problem with the book is that there is not enough University Challenge in it. Quiz shows in general are things that make me happy, but UC is just special. The BBC does not broadcast it in India and this is something that makes me miserable on a regular basis. (I've tried asking friends in the UK to record each season for me. They refused to believe I meant it.) I could have dispensed with a good portion of the actual plot of the book if it were replaced with people answering questions.

Starter for Ten was made into a movie, Starter for 10, a few years ago. I have never seen this movie. But it has Rebecca Hall in it (and also Benedict Cumberbatch from Sherlock; this will become important) and is therefore presumably worth my time.

Another movie that involves education and a quiz show is St. Trinian's. I'm not entirely sure how to excuse my love for this film - I'm inclined to think that anything that brings together Ronald Searle, delinquent schoolgirls, Stephen Fry, and Rupert Everett in drag cannot be a bad thing. I own all the older St Trinian's films and they are a constant source of joy to me.

In St. Trinian's a team of schoolgirls competes in a quiz show called School Challenge so that they can get into the National Gallery for nefarious purposes. Stephen Fry is the quizmaster of School Challenge, and he is excellent. Fry does, of course, have a long history with the quiz show.

Fry is soon to appear in the role of Mycroft Holmes in the sequel to last year's Sherlock Holmes.

In Starter for 10 the quizmaster (Bamber Gascoigne) is played by Mark Gatiss. Gatiss plays Mycroft in the BBC Sherlock (the Cumberbatch version).

I'm not sure that this says anything profound about the character or about quizmasters in general - unless it's that the sort of actors who look like they could play men who like a sedentary lifestyle and a lot of information also look like they could play men who like knowing things (and often also like a sedentary lifestyle). But it's a nice little coincidence. It's obvious that Mycroft Holmes would be the perfect TV quizmaster - if he could bestir himself to show up at the studio.

Lauren Beukes, Zoo City

2010-12-06T23:29:00.005+05:30

I wrote a short review of Lauren Beukes' Zoo City for Saturday's Indian Express. It's a fantastic book, and one that's quite likely to be seen as a classic in the near future. I'd like to see more set in this universe (not a sequel - I think Zinzi's story ends at the right place) because there's a lot in it to play with. My IE piece focused on the genre elements of the book but there's quite as much to be said about the familiars, the ways in which the familiars are discussed (the reason I can read the book as science fiction) and the way Beukes weaves other forms of writing into the text.

I think (and I've been trying to work this out since I wrote the review) that the one thing that stops the book from entirely blowing my mind is that it didn't feel as if there was enough. I thought the causes of animalling and the Undertow deserved more exploration; not necessarily explanation, since as I've said in the review the not-knowing works rather well. Sometimes it was as if this potentially really great concept was warring for pagespace with a really tight, strongly plotted story. The story won, and while this wasn't necessarily a bad choice, ideally the choice wouldn't have had to be made. Judging by many of the reviews I've read I suspect that I'm alone in this viewpoint though.

Either way, it's a smart, solid, good book. An edited version of my piece is below:

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Lauren Beukes is a South African journalist and writer. Her first book, 2008’s dystopia, Moxyland, was well-received. Zoo City, her second novel, is a fantasy crime thriller set in the city of Johannesburg.

Zinzi December is a former journalist. After the death of her brother (for which she is in some way responsible) and a spell in prison she moves into Zoo City, a ghetto in Johannesburg inhabited by other former criminals. Here she begins a new life and ekes out a living writing emails for 419 scams and helping people to find missing objects, which are all too frequently in the city’s sewers. The one thing she refuses to do? Find missing persons. Then a client dies and Zinzi is unfortunately on the spot. She’s persuaded by a pair of thoroughly unpleasant characters to take on the case of a missing teenage popstar, and from there on it all goes to hell. Thus far we have a reasonably typical (and rather good) noir crime novel.

Except that Zinzi carries a sloth with her everywhere she goes; her lover has a mongoose and her new employers are accompanied by a poodle and a bird of prey. In this universe, somewhere around the mid-90s certain people began to be accompanied everywhere by animal familiars. This “Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism” or “animalling” seems to happen to individuals who have killed someone, and though many theories are discussed in the book no one seems to know why it happens. The animalled are ostracized within their society and targeted by the police; the very presence of the animals confirming that they are guilty of something. Nor can you get rid of your animal by killing it – those whose animals die become victims of something called the Undertow (left undefined and all the scarier for it).

So there are elements of urban fantasy. And possibly science fiction as well; though very little is known about aposymbiotic familiarism, it is generally discussed with the assumption that there is a rational-scientific explanation for it. Beukes herself has suggested “muti noir” as an appropriate genre name, but then that might just relegate it to a genre of one.

Whatever it is, though, Zoo City is impressive. The text is interspersed with different sorts of writing – exerpts from music magazines, medical journals, gossip blogs, internet spam and even something that looks like an imdb page. Zinzi, with her tragic past, her (frequently amoral) survival instinct and a job that skirts quite close to “detective” makes the ideal noir protagonist.

As an outsider, it’s tempting to read almost everything that comes out of South Africa as being in some way about apartheid. In the case of 2008’s District 9, this was certainly justified, though it did somewhat draw attention away from the sfnal aspects of the film. In Zoo City the parallels are less obvious, but they are very present. A number of places in the city have a “policy” against allowing the animalled in. Zinzi and those like her are subject to greater scrutiny by the law and are restricted to living in the only area in the city that will have them.

Wider African politics are also woven into the plot, particularly in the form of Benoît, Zinzi’s lover and a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC. Zinzi herself impersonates an impoverished girl from the DRC (much to Benoît’s disgust) in the service of one of her 419 scams.

Then there are the animals. Fans of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series will be familiar with “daemons”, animals that exist as a sort of external manifestation of the human soul. Beukes namechecks Pullman within the text with a web page that references “Steering by the Golden Compass: Pullman’s fantasy in the context of the ontological shift (2005)”. Beukes’ familiars are different from Pullman’s daemons, particularly because they exist only for a marginalised few. But this makes the relationship between human and animal far more interesting – simultaneously resentful and (reluctantly) affectionate.

If Zoo City has a particular flaw it’s that its characters are not very likeable. Perhaps this is for the best, considering the number of awful things that seem to happen to them. Despite this Beukes’ book is intelligent, gripping and relentless, and I look forward to seeing what she does next.

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I'm a bit surprised that I've had cause to reference District 9 (a film about which I felt rather ambivalent) in two reviews in a row now.

Women writing SF

2010-12-05T19:05:00.005+05:30

I'd meant to post this ages ago (and thought I had, but since I cannot find it anywhere I must have been wrong) but Niall Harrison is asking people to email him their lists of the best works of SF by women in the last ten years. I'm currently agonising over my own list, but I hope more people will send in theirs. Entries to be in before midnight (British time, I assume) tonight. Please send in suggestions - it's a good thing that Niall is doing, and I look forward with interest to the results.

I will post my own (pathetically short) list* when I am satisfied with it.

*I suspect my problem is as much a result of not reading enough SF as it is of not reading enough books by women.

The Moving Toyshop and female biology

2010-11-23T23:37:00.013+05:30

While reading I often come across useful facts about the psychology of women - that we are changeable, that we like shoes, that poison is our preferred method of murder and so on. These are all practical and worth knowing, but I rarely (outside of pornography) come across a startling physical revelation. This happened yesterday when I was reading Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop. In the scene from which I quote, the poet Richard Cadogan has just discovered a corpse.

She was dressed in a tweed coat and skirt and a white blouse, which emphasized her plumpness, with rough wool stockings and brown shoes. There was no ring on her left hand, and the flatness of her breasts had already suggested that she was unmarried.

Huh.

This bit of biological hilarity aside, The Moving Toyshop is great fun. The only other Crispin I'd read was Holy Disorders, which was entertaining but not remarkable. This is entirely different.

Considering that Crispin's detective, Gervase Fen, is a professor of English, it makes sense that the book should be very literary. But while literature is important to the plot (the whole thing hinges on a knowledge of a particular poet but I shall say no more) and the title comes from Alexander Pope, I was surprised by how aware of it's own status as fiction the book was. Catherynne Valente has just posted about her love of books talking about books, and books that know they're books, and it's a love I share. And I think with genre fiction in particular there's an opportunity for texts to demonstrate awareness of the fact that they are part of a genre, and to be in conversation with said genre.

So you have a villain who kindly sits the detective and his companions down before explaining everything to them-only to be shot through the window of the opposite house (and could that be a reference to "The Adventure of the Empty House"?) just as he's about to reveal the name of the murderer. You have a whole array of suspects, a completely absurd plot, and ridiculous car chases around Oxford during which this sort of thing is said:

"Lets go left," Cadogan suggested. "After all, Gollancz is publishing this book."*

And you have the narrative commenting on Fen's love of the deus ex machina as a technique, and attributing to this the fact that a deus ex machina has just occurred within the text. This is the sort of thing you'd complain about in most mystery stories; here, as an affectionate comment on fiction, it's hilarious.

Conclusion: I need to read more Crispin. What next?

*My copy is published by Vintage, but a perusal of the copyright page proves Cadogan to be correct.

Ian McDonald, The Dervish House

2010-11-15T01:28:00.003+05:30

A version of this appears in yesterday's Guardian20, though I don't think it's on the site yet. I don't think there was ever any way I was not going to like an Ian McDonald book set in Istanbul, but this was just gorgeous - rich and dense and stimulating.

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The 2009 movie District 9 opens with an observation about the arrival of an alien spaceship. "To everyone's surprise, the ship didn't come to a stop over Manhattan or Washington or Chicago, but instead it costed to a halt directly over the city of Johannesburg." There is an awareness here that the terrain of science fiction (when it has been on Earth at all) has been rather limited.

That is, to some extent, changing. Both the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke awards for 2010 were awarded to novels with plots that played out in non-traditional settings. China Miéville's The City and the City took place between two fictional Eastern European countries, while Paolo Bacigalupi's The Wind Up Girl was set in a future Thailand.

Since 2004, British science fiction writer Ian McDonald has been exploring alternative settings for speculative fiction. His works in that time have included River of Gods, an award-winning novel set in future India; Cyberabad Days, a collection of shorter fiction set in the same world; and Brasyl, set in Sao Paulo and the Amazonian jungle, and in the future and the past. His latest novel, The Dervish House, takes for its setting near-future Istanbul.

It is 2027 and Turkey has been a part of Europe for five years. On a Monday morning the head of a suicide bomber explodes in a tram. McDonald begins his new book with a number of separate threads, all seemingly connected only by the explosion and the fact that the protagonists all live and work around Adam Dede square, "small enough for two tea shops but big enough for rivalries". The square is also home to an old tekke, or Dervish House, and it is around this building that the stories revolve.

There is Cam, the boy detective who must wear special earpieces to shut out sound, and who experiences the world through his shape-changing robots. Georgios Ferentinou is a Greek economist and the brains behind the "Terror Market". Necdet is a young man with a troubled past. He lives in the Dervish House with his brother, and after witnessing the explosion begins to see djinn everywhere. Leyla Gültaşli, a young woman who is trying to escape the pressures of family, finds herself forced to accept a job with a cousin after the tram explosion prevents her from getting to a job interview. Adnan Sarioğlu is a businessman and his wife Ayşe Erkoç an art dealer. Ayşe accepts a commission to find a "Mellified Man", a saint whose body has been turned into pure honey.

As the novel progresses these stories connect in other ways as well. The ways in which people's lives and pasts intersect and come together to form parts of the larger narrative are an appropriate method of telling this story. This is because McDonald's major preoccupation here seems to be those fundamental concerns of storytellers, scientists and sociologists everywhere: how things fit together, how they become parts of a bigger whole, and what constitutes individual identity. So we have Cam’s robots, joining together, breaking apart, joining again to form new shapes; the cells that make up a human body turning into computers; a silver Koran that is cut in two, each half supposedly yearning toward the other because the Koran is one thing; the entire history of the city in its individual stones.

Istanbul is the perfect location for this novel. It seems terribly cliché to point out that the city sits at the point where Europe meets Asia, straddling the East-West divide. McDonald's Istanbul works as a natural connector of things. East and West, Islam and Christianity, various empires and names layered one on top of the other. The city's history ("twenty-seven centuries") is skillfully woven into the story, moving from historical Byzantium and Constantinople to more recent events. Ataturk, relationships with Kurds and Greeks and attempts to be a part of Europe all inform the plot.

And then there's McDonald's prose that somehow manages to bring together art, economics, and the sounds of the city and make them all surprisingly lyrical

The Baku Hub opens before him. It’s a beautiful, intricate flower of traders and contracts, derivatives and spots, futures and options and swaps and the dirty menagerie of new financial instruments; micro-futures, blinds, super-straddles, fiscalmancy evolved in quant computers so dark and complex no human understands how it makes money; all folded like the petals of a tulip around Baku’s fruiting heart of pipes and terminal and storage tanks. Istanbul is a barker’s tent, a street hustle by comparison. Baku is where the gas goes down.

The Dervish House is dense, both in its language and its content, and is occasionally somewhat intimidating in the level of engagement it demands from the reader. But it is precisely because of this that it is a book that does engage the reader fully. As a work of science fiction it is vast in its scope and bursting with ideas. As a work of fiction it is as exquisitely crafted as one of the miniatures it occasionally uses as a metaphor. McDonald is a gift, and it's high time readers outside science-fiction discovered this fact.

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Other people have reviewed this and seen that it is good: see Strange Horizons, Punkadiddle, @Number 71

Kate Bernheimer (ed), My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me

2010-11-14T18:25:00.008+05:30

Yesterday's Indian Express carried a short review of Kate Bernheimer's anthology of fairy tales. A 500 word review was never going to be enough to discuss a collection of 40 stories (many of which could do with posts to themselves) and I'm very tempted to do a longer version sometime this week that discusses some of the individual stories in depth and goes into some of the wider themes that I was forced to leave out. For now, here's the short version.

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There is a sense in which all fairytales are retellings. The Brothers Grimm collected their tales from a long tradition of oral storytelling. Charles Perrault adapted his for the drawing rooms of 17th Century France. My Mother She Killed Me My Father He Ate Me opens with an Angela Carter quote: “Who first invented meatballs? In what country? Is there a definitive recipe for potato soup?” Carter’s own 1979 work, The Bloody Chamber, was a seminal act of fairytale retelling. Bernheimer’s collection of forty fairytales by various writers is dedicated to Carter, and her shadow looms large over many of the stories.

Many stories in this collection are entirely original works that use fairytale tropes. Neil Gaiman’s “Orange” takes the good-sister/bad-sister theme that runs through many fairy tales, but adds aliens, artificial tan and police reports. Kelly Link’s “Catskin” has links to Rapunzel and Puss-in-Boots but is an entirely original piece.

Writers like Brian Evenson, Susan Shuh-Lien Bynum, Hiromi Ito and Joyce Carol Oates base their pieces on established stories. Evenson’s “Dapplegrim”, based on a Norwegian folktale, is dark, obsessive and full of bloodshed. Ito’s “I Am Anjuhimeko” is powerful and epic in scope. Oates and Bynum tackle stories previously riffed off by Carter but take them in entirely different directions. Oates’ version of the Bluebeard myth is clever and surprising, while Bynum’s “The Erlking”, about a mother's anxiety over her child's education, was one of the highlights of the anthology for me.

The Grimm brothers’ “The Six Swans” forms the starting point for some of the best pieces. Karen Joy Fowler’s “Halfway People” in particular is a gorgeous, brutal story about yearning and incompleteness. Shelley Jackson’s “The Swan Brothers” is, hands down, the best thing in the book, partly story, partly a loosely connected set of observations about the fairytale. Here, for example, are the Things You Learn From Reading:

Women are trouble—if it isn’t an evil wife, it’s an evil stepmother. Or mother-in-law. Mothers are usually all right, unless they’re witches—watch out for witches. And their daughters.

You might be all right with kings, princes, and fathers, unless, as is usually the case, they’re under the influence of someone else, usually a woman. Men are weak. Sometimes they rescue you, but they always have help—from ants or birds or women. Sometimes you rescue them. This is kind of sweet.

You can trust animals. Sometimes they turn into people, but don’t hold that against them.

Children had better watch out.

To retell a story inevitably leads to thinking about how narratives work, and many of the pieces in this collection are, like Jackson’s, stories about stories. Kim Addonizio’s “Ever After” has seven dwarves reading “Snow White” as a religious text. Karen Brennan’s “The Snow Queen” and Francine Prose’s “Hansel and Gretel” both have their narrators thinking through their own relationships with fairy tales. Notes from the authors explain the genesis of each story and provide further insight into the mechanics of these narratives.

My Mother She Killed Me My Father He Ate Me is an impressive anthology, featuring some of the most exciting writers in the world at the moment. There are some real treasures in this collection, with all the menace and magic of the traditional fairy tale.

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Various Links

2010-11-13T09:05:00.005+05:30

The Carl Brandon Society are having a fundraiser to benefit the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship. If you enter you could win an eReader that comes pre-loaded with work by some amazing spec fic writers. Details here.

Via Queen Emily, this study seems to show that our brains can predict the future. Or something.

Here is a much (much!)-belated link: As most people who read Indian blogs will know by now, a few weeks ago there was a case of plagiarism involving the magazine India Today - editor Aroon Purie's letter at the beginning of the magazine contained some rather distinctive lines that had been lifted from Grady Hendrix's Slate piece on Rajinikanth. A number of blogs reported the incident - very few mainstream news sources did so (Aditya Sinha, who I like and respect, did a piece in the New Indian Express. His is the only article on the subject that I saw).

And then Mitali Saran, whose funny, indignant, personal column Stet is one of my favourite newspaper things, wrote a column on both the plagiarism and the Indian media's reaction to it. Guess what happened?

Much respect to Mitali for standing up and making a big deal of this. And I hope Stet will soon be appearing elsewhere.

From plagiarism to piracy - Celine Kiernan would (understandably) prefer for you to buy/borrow her books, rather than illegally download them. The Speculative Scotsman did a post on the numbers involved, and this led to some fascinating discussion in the comments.

From piracy to pain - Aadisht had an article in yesterday's Mint Lounge about the phenomenon of the 100 rupee novel. I am all too familiar with some of the books from which he quotes (I lent him some of them).

Catherynne M. Valente has a new book out and I am waiting most impatiently for my copy. The book is based in the Prester John myth and in order to explain who he was to those strange people who did not read Mandeville for fun (I know, right?) she wrote a post on Scalzi's blog and made this magnificent and totally authentic video:

E. Nesbit, The Enchanted Castle

2010-11-10T17:01:00.003+05:30

As I mentioned last month, I'm writing a monthly column for Kindle Magazine. In each installment I'll be talking about a book that is out of copyright and available for free on the internet. For the November issue of the magazine I decided to revisit E. Nesbit and her gorgeous children's story The Enchanted Castle. Five hundred words simply isn't enough space to really discuss something as rich and layered as this, and the piece ended up being a mere summary. But I'm glad I reread it and am hoping to do a longer piece on Nesbit's children's fiction soon.

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In an article I read recently, the writer bewailed the degeneracy of today's youth. Her proof? That modern children did not read exactly the same books as they had when she was young.

I do not ever wish to be that writer. I love the explosion of children's and young adult fiction that we've seen in the past couple of decades, and hopefully am not arrogant enough to believe that what I read when I was a child was somehow superior by virtue of my having read it. And I quite understand why no one seems to read E.Nesbit anymore. But I'm not entirely resigned to it.

Edith Nesbit is a fascinating figure. She was one of the founders of the Fabian Society, had an open marriage, and lectured on socialism. She's best known for her children's stories but she also wrote fiction for adults, including one of my favourite horror stories, "The Shadow".

Nesbit's fiction (children's and adults') is notable because there's always so much going on beneath the surface. "The Shadow" is all about the insecure narrator and's jealousy and fascination. The Railway Children (perhaps Nesbit's best known work) is at its subtle best when it is referring (never too directly) to the heartbroken wife of a wrongly imprisoned man who must hide their situation from her children.

The Enchanted Castle is far from the most famous of Nesbit's books, but it's in many ways her best. Three children are prevented from going home for the holidays by illness, and they resolve to make their own fun. In exploring the area around their school they come across a castle (or possibly a country house) a princess (or possibly the scullery maid) and a magic ring.

Noel Coward praised Nesbit's ability to evoke hot, summer days in the countryside. But these are never the comfortable, middle-class idylls that his words might seem to suggest. The children play at being explorers, secure at first in the knowledge that they have a picnic lunch and that magic probably isn't real. They move to a sense of wonder and from there to growing unease. Nesbit's world is all golden and sunlit on the surface, but underneath it is shifting and layered and strange and horrible - this is why she's such an effective horror writer as well. The Enchanted Castle contains grotesque, nightmarish scenes in which statues and gods and creatures made by the children themselves come to life. Plenty of children's writers have tackled the idea of games of make-believe gone horribly wrong (Antonia Forest's Peter's Room is incomparable) and with the popularity of role-playing games they will probably continue to do so. But this is the most viscerally terrifying take on the trope that I've ever encountered.

And this is why, though her situations are hopelessly dated and her characters are frequently too good to be true, I hope people continue to read Nesbit. There's a weirdness at the heart of her fiction that is unlike almost anything else for children. And The Enchanted Castle may just be the strangest of her works.

Read This Now, or Little Light is magnificent

2010-11-08T12:37:00.003+05:30

This is not about self-esteem. This is not about self-help. This is a moral issue. This is an issue of the basic liturgy of human interaction–because it is our daily rituals that define the four corners of the world and the arches of the sky, it is our stories that tell us how to recognize our own faces, and we have been denied our place in the human liturgy for far too long and it is long past time to erupt up from the landscape that conceals us and demand, not just our rights, but the basic essential core of worth and decency that makes us people and therefore worthy of rights in the first place. We have been denied this and we have been told we are the problem.

Stephen Fry on pedantry and loving the language

2010-10-23T23:56:00.002+05:30

As most of you know, I write a weekly language column for the New Indian Express' EdEx supplement. I write this column because I love the English language and it seems to me entirely reasonable that I should write public love notes to it on a regular basis - much like accosting strangers with pictures of one's offspring ("aren't they beautiful?"). I think I manage not to be a pedant most of the time, though I stand by the occasional argument for clarity, whatever Stephen Fry may say in the video below.

As for said video, I think it's gorgeous and true and it made me cheer. Watch it immediately.

I gush shamelessly about Gail Carriger

2010-10-17T16:17:00.003+05:30

Some of you may remember that at the end of last year I listed Gail Carriger's Soulless as one of my most memorable reads of the year. Since then, Carriger has been most obligingly prolific- Changeless came out this spring, and Blameless a month or two ago.

I wrote a short appreciation of the Parasol Protectorate series in yesterday's Indian Express. Talking about three books in a limited number of words was difficult, but I managed to touch on some of the aspects of these books I love: that they're funny, fluffy, clever and wonderful at relationships. I wish I'd also been able to talk about how they're very, very geeky. Romance novels that my boyfriend is as excited about as I am. That is pretty amazing.

My gushfest about the series is below; earlier pieces on the first two books are here and here.

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Everyone is sick of love stories with vampires in them. Most people are well on the way to being sick of werewolf romances as well. And among the groups of people who actually know what Steampunk is, it has for some time been commonly thought to have had its day.

With this in mind, Gail Carriger’s series of steampunk romances featuring both vampires and werewolves ought to feel stale and annoying. Yet three Parasol Protectorate books (Soulless, Changeless and Blameless) have come out in the past year, I have devoured them all, and I am in no danger of tiring of them.

Soulless introduces us to Alexia Tarrabotti, a London spinster afflicted with a large nose, an Italian surname and a surfeit of intelligence. She’s also a preternatural, the opposite of supernatural. Not only does she have no soul, but physical contact with makes vampires and werewolves temporarily mortal.

Unlike most well brought up Victorian ladies, therefore, Alexia knows “the supernatural set” quite well. She is especially fond of the vampire Lord Akeldama with his outrageous clothing and harem of attractive young men; and Professor Lyall, the wonderfully sane werewolf Beta. Equally, she feels strong dislike for the gorgeous Lord Maccon, a werewolf pack Alpha with an annoying protective streak where Alexia is concerned. Of course she does.

Romance fans know exactly where this is going.

Soulless is primarily a romance (though with plenty of blood and guts and mad scientists). Its sequels, Changeless and Blameless are closer to adventure novels. Changeless has Alexia traveling to Scotland (by dirigible), while Blameless has her being chased across Europe amongst a gloriously silly profusion of guns, false moustaches and hot air balloons.

These books are ridiculous, and entirely comfortable being that way. But they’re also intelligently conceived. The series is thoroughly grounded in history – in Carriger’s universe the Puritan fathers left England over the decision to welcome supernaturals into society, and werewolf and vampire skills, social dynamics and safety converns are the major reasons for the Empire, the bureaucracy, and the blandness of British cuisine. Real historical concerns are brilliantly woven in; for example the second and third books in the series both address the Egyptian Question in ways that are wholly unexpected.

Alexia is a wonderful heroine. There’s never any danger that falling in love will cause her to lose herself. She’s clever, frequently self-serving, not particularly nice, and fully capable of bludgeoning you to death with her parasol should she feel threatened.

Equally, as satisfying as Carriger’s rather Heyeresque romance plot may be, the majority of the series’ most moving moments have come from the marvelous cast of side characters. I love Alexia and Maccon but would quite happily sacrifice their adventures if it meant more time with Lord Akeldama and his partner Biffy, or Madame LeFoux (excellent milliner or evil genius?) or (especially) the magnificent Professor Lyall.

Carriger’s language owes a lot to Wodehouse. It’s a difficult style to sustain, and occasionally the author slips up or sounds too forced. But this is easy enough to forgive. These books are unselfconsciously funny, smart, and completely fresh. They’re an absolute delight.

I don’t know how long this series is going to be; a fourth and fifth book have been announced, but there is no information on whether the fifth will be the last. But if Carriger is going to keep producing things at this rate and of this standard, I’d be quite happy for it to be, well, endless.

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Pradeep Sebastian, The Groaning Shelf

2010-10-12T19:49:00.004+05:30

The Sunday Guardian (who will get their website up and running soon so I can finally link to them) carried my review of Pradeep Sebastian's The Groaning Shelf this weekend.

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If you're the sort of person who likes books, collects books, or spends more time and money on books than you can really afford, there's something very attractive about the genre of books-about-books. Because what these ultimately are, are books about readers. Quite apart from the rather egocentric pleasure of reading about oneself, it's comforting to know that one is not alone.
The Groaning Shelf is a collection of short personal essays by Pradeep Sebastian, covering various aspects of book love. The book contains pieces on unusual bookshelves, book theft, first editions, the art of reading and specific books or authors.

The collection as a whole is somewhat inconsistent. Particularly in the earlier pieces Sebastian seems unsure of what audience he is addressing. At times he addresses the reader as a fellow bibliophile, or at least as someone reasonably well-read. At others the reader is assumed to know nothing; it is hard to warm to an author who says things like “As we bibliophiles say”. In an essay on titles, for example, Sebastian refers to a friend who preferred not to title her work even before she read e e cummings. The reader who is familiar with cummings has no trouble understanding this. But surely even the reader who has never touched a book in his life (it’s hard to see what such a reader would be doing with a book about bibliophilia) can work most of this out from context? Apparently Sebastian thinks not, and a paragraph later he is explaining that cummings published a book with no title. Similarly, while quoting a friend who draws an analogy between marginalia and Ariadne’s thread of Greek myth, he feels the need to retell the entire myth.

I suspect that this particular problem arises from the fact that many of these essays are edited versions of Sebastian’s columns in various papers. It is understandable that those particular pieces might originally have been pitched toward a more general audience rather than a circle of Serious Bibliophiles (though the tone seems rather patronizing even then) but surely they could have been brought to some consistency?

The newspaper connection might also be the source of another issue I had with the collection. Each piece is only a few pages long, and when Sebastian tackles broad subjects like book covers or first editions there simply isn’t enough room for him to go into any depth. The grouping together of the essays by theme does help with this, but it’s not quite enough.

It would be interesting if the individual essays in this collection had dates on them, as it’s not clear whether this is all recent work or a collection of writings over a period of time. The later pieces are far superior to the earlier ones. Presumably subject matter has something to do with it. Sebastian is at his best when he is dealing with more specific subjects. His enthusiastic pieces on Amitava Kumar and Pico Iyer (in whose cases I share his opinions) and on J.D. Salinger are far more fun to read. The chapter in which he attempts (albeit unsuccessfully) to garner critical respectability for the movie version of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead is hilarious. A piece on Sherlock Holmes rewrites and pastiches is probably the best thing in the book – Sebastian leaps gleefully about, from Chabon to Bayard to Gilbert Adair. This is book-love, made far more visible than in the earlier pieces about things like cover-design and shelves which are, after all, ultimately extraneous matter. But then, perhaps, that’s one of the fundamental differences among book-lovers that Sebastian notes.

Sebastian’s book is uneven in tone and occasionally pompous, but among the essays included are some absolute gems. It wouldn’t be an essential part of my collection of books about books (if I had one; Sebastian does) but it is an enjoyable read.

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Garner love

2010-10-12T18:43:00.002+05:30

For many months now I've been promising myself a reread of Alan Garner's magnificent book The Owl Service (and a rewatch of the very good BBC adaptation alongside). I've written about Garner on this blog, though never enough to express quite how vital he has been to me, and to how I read.

Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (which I only read quite recently, in 2008) is now fifty years old, and The Guardian have an interview with him up here. And though I've linked to it before, here is an essay by Garner that I am particularly fond of.

Elsewhere on the internet

2010-10-10T15:51:00.002+05:30

The Future Fire have my review of Mark Mellon's Napoleon Concerto. I really wanted to like this more than I did (and I feel particularly guilty when I'm harsh about small press books) but it simply didn't live up to its promise, for me.

Kindle, The Beetle, and hints of great change

2010-10-10T15:30:00.003+05:30

Kindle is a new monthly magazine. It looks good and has some very impressive ideals. I've really enjoyed the last couple of issues. Now the nice people behind the magazine have offered me a regular column. Each month I will be reviewing something that is awesome, out of copyright, and available for free online. I've been trying to read more old books in any case, and I like being able to justify this as "work".

I also like that I will be sharing pagespace with people for whom I have a tonne of respect. The books page also has Aditya Bidikar (who writes short strange fiction and comics, writes about comics and is lovely in all ways) and Abhijit Gupta (who is brilliant, judges things, and who I first befriended over a shared love of Mervyn Peake).

My piece for the October issue is on something that I consider to be a classic, Richard Marsh's The Beetle. It's bizarre and delicious and I wish someone would make it into a movie.

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In 1897 a certain book is published about a strange, seductive, foreign creature that comes to London and wreaks havoc, and kidnaps women. A group of men (one of whom has already had a harrowing encounter with the creature in its lair) set out in pursuit. It is part detective novel, part horror story. But this book is not Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it is Richard Marsh’s mostly-forgotten classic The Beetle. Dracula was also published in 1897, and Marsh’s book outsold it considerably. It’s strange that the book is so little known today.

A young politician named Paul Lessingham encounters a mysterious cult while traveling in Africa. He manages to escape it, but is pursued to London by a strange and inhuman creature. Along the way Lessingham’s fiancée Marjorie and her friend and would-be-suitor Sydney Atherton get caught up in this mess. As do an innocent clerk and a private detective. Eventually the Beetle kidnaps Marjorie.

One thing that makes The Beetle fascinating to me is that it encapsulates so perfectly everything one might be worried about in Britain in 1897. Imagine; there you are, trying to convince yourself that the British Empire is strong and mighty and invincible. But you’ve conquered parts of Africa (and especially Egypt) that are constant reminders of great empires eventually collapsing. They’re also reminders that the people you’ve conquered are capable of more than you give them credit for, and may even have knowledge that you do not have. It’s an uncomfortable thought.

Back home, things are equally fraught. Feminism has happened. Women are demanding the vote. Even gender isn’t that stable anymore. And in the middle of all this, Richard Marsh writes the character of the Beetle –able to shape-shift, androgynous, African, tanned and genuinely scary. It’s almost as if he purposefully set out to create the embodiment of everything his countrymen feared, wrapped up in one demented package.

And there’s Marjorie Linton. It’s difficult to be sure what the book makes of Marjorie. She’s a feminist, makes her own decisions, and campaigns for the right to vote. She has more personality than any of the other major characters. The inability of this little group of Victorian men to deal with her (Atherton’s moustache-quivering outrage is particularly choice) is occasionally played for laughs, but equally there’s an undercurrent of unease over where all this women’s liberation will end. Marjorie does not get a happy ending.

But you don’t need to be a Victorian to be affected by The Beetle. At its best moments (these generally involve large insects) it is genuinely menacing. It’s also marvelously structured, with its multi-person narrative, its flashbacks and its changing styles. It’s the sort of book that is so tempting to analyse that one often forgets that it is an incredibly entertaining and surprisingly accomplished book in its own right. It’s ludicrous and pulpy, but that could be equally said of books that are far better regarded. At the end of the day, The Beetle is enormously fun to read, and who’s going to turn that down?

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And now here is a hint of great change. Great changes are to occur to this blog in the near future. I hope you'll all stick around.

Tishani Doshi, The Pleasure Seekers

2010-09-10T22:48:00.003+05:30

My review of Tishani Doshi's The Pleasure Seekers appeared in last sunday's Guardian20. It's not the most positive review I've written.

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In 1968 Babo Patel, a Gujarati boy from Madras, flies to England for further education. Babo is full of good intentions (he will steer clear of meat; he will do well academically; he will come home to his parent-approved fiancée, Falguni), but then he meets Siân, a Welsh girl with whom he immediately falls in love. Babo is forced to return to India by his horrified parents, and the couple must endure months of separation before the Patels relent, Sian moves to India, and the two are married. The Pleasure Seekers goes on to tell the story of their marriage and of their children, Mayuri and Bean.

Author Tishani Doshi is also half-Welsh and half-Gujarati. The Pleasure Seekers is a fictionalised account of her own upbringing in a “hybrid” family (it becomes clear as one reads that Doshi is Bean, the younger daughter). More importantly, it is a tribute to the author's parents who are described on the dedications page as “the original pleasure seekers”. The idea of people who both love and experience pleasure thoroughly is one that certainly deserves to be celebrated in fiction. Unfortunately, The Pleasure Seekers never quite manages to live up to this presumed goal.

While the immigrant novel and the family saga are perfectly valid forms of literature, they have both been done a number of times before, and with each new addition to either genre one finds oneself looking for reasons why this book in particular should stand out. Siân's adjustments to life in India in the earlier parts of the novel offer a potentially unusual angle on a much-worked theme, but this is a comparatively short section of the larger narrative. When it comes to Bean's immigrant experience Doshi is disappointingly ham-fisted:

At her grandparents' grave, Bean sat trying to work out how part of them were part of her, how part of this village was part of her. Because if she understood this, she thought, perhaps she'd understand where she fitted into the rest of it – into this mist and rain, these houses and cars, there people walking their dogs, leading their lives […]
[…] Why do I always feel like I'm visiting wherever I go? Why? Why? Because the sky's so high.

Nor is the Jones-Patel family's disposition towards pleasure-seeking particularly evident - the book keeps telling us this about the family, but never actually shows it.

And then there are the odd little sound effects (Doshi has described them as “chutneyfication”) that are scattered through the text. These would not be a problem were they not so overdone – to hear the process of falling in love described as “ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom-boom-boom” is only mildly annoying the first time one comes across it. But then it happens again, and then again, the sound effects intruding upon the prose till they begin to feel like those jagged-edged “pow”s and “biff”s from the old Batman TV series. People's smiles are (repeatedly) “jhill mill jhill mill”, ghosts fold themselves into the corners of rooms “ka-chink ka-chink” – this one is almost improbable enough to be an authentic family saying, so I'm tempted to let it pass – and Babo and Siân have sex “sha-bing, sha-bang” until Babo's midlife crisis takes its toll on his “Mr Whatsit” (soon after we have a reference to another Whatsit being inserted into a Ms Sunshine. When two characters manage a “sympathy fuck” later on, it's difficult not to cheer).

There is also a magical grandmother. Ba, Babo's grandmother,can smell her family members from miles away (they all smell like spices) and takes a touching interest in her offspring's personal lives that has her assisting in Babo's conception. Other members of the Indian family include the mockworthy, less cosmopolitan cousins (you can tell, because they have unibrows and are fat) and Babo's kind but uncomprehending mother. India is all peacocks and lizards. It's hard, as an Indian reader, to tell whether this stereotyping extends to the Welsh parts of the novel, but when Siân wanders around “with Dylan Thomas tucked under one arm” it seems very possible.

This wouldn't be so irritating were it not that Doshi's prose is occasionally really good. The sections documenting Mayuri and Bean's childhood are gently funny and surprisingly sensuous at the same time and it's at these points that you remember that the author is an accomplished poet. It never lasts long enough. The Pleasure Seekers is clearly a very personal book, but ultimately it's not a very good one.

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Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Delhi Calm

2010-08-30T18:55:00.003+05:30

An edited version of the review below appeared in Delhi's Sunday Guardian a couple of weeks ago. I really liked the look of Vishwajyoti Ghosh's book. The artwork is fantastic; very intelligent, and full of references to things you can't not recognise if you've grown up in India. In contrast, the prose was merely adequate in most places, and in some was awkward enough to let the book down entirely.

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“Nothing like this ever happened. If it did, it doesn't matter any more, for it was of no interest or relevance even while it was happening. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This is a work of fiction. Self-censored.”

Vishwajyoti Ghosh's Delhi Calm opens with the above disclaimer. This is not, it implies, a graphic novel about the historical Emergency. Ghosh's character “Moon” has no connection whatsoever with Indira Gandhi. The figure of the “Prophet” is not based on Jayaprakash Narayan. But this rather overwrought disclaimer is in a speech bubble, and the speech bubble emerges from an illustration of a megaphone, and the megaphone is inside a larger panel... and therefore part of the (fictional) content of the novel itself. It's a lot more complex than it at first appears.

Delhi Calm traces the movements of three young men, all former members of a political music group and followers of “the Prophet”, a political figure clearly modelled on JP Narayan. The band eventually drifts apart, but “Master”, “VP” and Parvez find their lives intersecting once more in Delhi during the Emergency. What follows is a series of impressions of life in a city where Prime Minister Moon (along with her sons, the Prince and the Pilot) reigns supreme. There is an element of surrealism in the constant, sinister presence of the masked “Smiling Saviours” (who appear as an interesting visual tribute to Alan Moore, author of that great political graphic novel, V for Vendetta).

The Parvez-VP-Master story is rendered in sepia tones and uses a (mostly) traditional graphic novel format. The unusual colour palette contributes as much to the tone of the novel as the extremely strong artwork. These sections are interleaved with a more traditionally-structured, black-and-white history of Moon's life that reads as if it were from a newspaper or magazine. Occasional full-page spreads give Ghosh further opportunities to showcase his art. There is also a frequent use of pop-cultural imagery, particularly in the use of signs and posters.

Perhaps the best thing about Delhi Calm is the way in which Ghosh depicts propaganda and the construction of narratives by those in power. The megaphone that speaks the disclaimer is only one of many: the panels of this book are full of words. These may take the form of slogans, of street signs, banners, posters, advertisements. Newspapers are frequently depicted, and the title of the book itself is taken from one newspaper report. Delhi is only “calm”, of course, because it is not allowed to be anything else.

These narratives are created not just by bombarding citizens with posters and banners bearing the message, but also by curtailing what other people are allowed to say. One of the more chilling scenes in the book is an essay competition described by a schoolboy, one of Master's tuition pupils. The “essay” (extolling the virtues of Mother Moon) is dictated to the students by the teacher, and the students are judged on their handwriting and spelling skills.

Yet the deployment of words as weapons is not entirely one-sided, and Ghosh avoids the pitfall of turning this into a flat tale of state oppression by allowing his characters plenty of agency and showing that there's a lot going on under the city's “calm” exterior. At the beginning of his character's story arc, the importance of Parvez's linguistic skills is stressed. The Naya Savera band spread their message through song, and VP is a writer of songs as well as a journalist and copywriter.

Strangely, for a text that conveys so strongly the importance of narrative and the power of words, the writing is Delhi Calm's weakest point. Vishwajyoti Ghosh is both the writer and the artist of the book, and his skills in one area far outweigh his skills in the other. In one large panel, two children sit astride an elephant bearing the slogan “We Are Two, We Have Two”, while below them a woman is fleeing a man who wears a Smiling Saviour mask and carries a giant syringe. It's a powerful image, but it is ruined by the clumsy dialogue in the speech bubbles:

“Stop running after me. I am 48! That too, a widow... Pleeeease!”
“Who cares? I have targets to meet... One kilo Dalda, I promise, please! Get sterilised, you...”

While few moments in the book are quite this awkward, the prose is never quite as smooth as one would like. It's unfortunate, because it has the effect of jolting the reader out of what is in most respects a very fine book.

Delhi Calm is a fascinating commentary on the emergency. It has plenty of flaws, but there's also plenty to admire and to think about, and the familiarity of some of its imagery is distinctly uncomfortable.

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Shane Jones, Light Boxes

2010-08-29T23:11:00.003+05:30

Today's Indian Express carries a short review I wrote of Shane Jones' Light Boxes. I bought this book for the shallowest of reasons (it is physically gorgeous - tiny and quirky and with shiny coloured bits that glow), so I feel very lucky that it turned out to be so likeable on the inside as well.

And here is an edited version of the Express review.

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“The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February” - Joseph Wood Krutch

February has taken over the town. February is eternal winter; February is a God figure in the sky; February is a man who writes in a house in the woods. Whatever he is, February is destructive and must be fought.

Shane Jones' Light Boxes was first published by a small independent press (Publishing Genius Press in Baltimore) in 2009. It was a critical success, and Penguin picked it up, and gave it a wider release earlier this year.

Light Boxes begins with February's ban on flight. He sends his priests into the town to burn hot air balloons and paper aeroplanes, and to destroy anything else that flies. Thaddeus Lowe, a former balloonist, along with his wife Selah and daughter Bianca revolt against these conditions. They paint balloons into hidden corners, and kites all the way up Bianca's arms.

After an abortive attempt to fly a kite in defiance of February's orders (but February's orders are far more than that, and a cloud shaped like a hand slams the kite to the ground), Thaddeus is approached by a group calling themselves The Solution. The Solution wear plastic bird masks to remind them of what they have lost. They are organizing a revolution. As first Bianca and then Selah are taken away from him, Thaddeus becomes the main figure in the war against February.

The scenes of organised (and increasingly futile) revolt form a reasonably coherent narrative, but things are complicated by the interspersing of little snippets of February's own life in his cottage in the woods (or the sky) with someone referred to only as The Girl Who Smelled of Honey and Smoke. These scenes make February's relationship with the town (and with Thaddeus' reality) rather ambiguous, and it is difficult to attempt any sort of unified reading of the novel as a result. Is this a story about rebellion? A story about narrative? A story about depression? It lends itself to all of these theories and more, and then flits away at the last moment.

Jones experiments with different ways of using text. Font size varies wildly, some pages will only carry one line, and there are lists and recipes and diagrams and the like. February's own writings show up from time to time, and make for fascinating reading.

Note Written by February
There is a house builder and his wife. Name the house builder February and refer to the wife as the girl who smells of honey and smoke.
You coward.

At times Light Boxes seems to be trying too hard, so that it risks being overly precious. It is slightly too aware of its own cleverness and quirkiness. But the quirky imagery (balloons and owls and brightly coloured masks against the grey weather) easily becomes macabre – Selah's lovely, grotesque death is one of the strongest moments in the book – and this saves the book as a whole from ever quite being twee. And the sections where Thaddeus Lowe must cope with the loss of his family are deeply-felt and real, and definitely not pretentious.

Light Boxes is an odd little (literally; it's small and practically square in shape) book, and one that is beautiful and baffling and wonderfully crafted. More of this sort of thing, please.

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English has failed me

2010-08-25T01:48:00.002+05:30

Does the English language have a way of addressing an email or letter to someone whose name, gender or designation you don't know that isn't "sir/madam" or "to whom it may concern"? These are situations where you can't casual, but you don't want to be stiff.

If English does have a better option , feel free to mock me here for not thinking of it (but tell me what it is as well, please).

If not, it really, really needs one.

manifesto

2010-08-12T10:40:00.002+05:30

I'm thinking I should just give my language column to @Grammarhulk.

HULK RATHER SMASH PRESCRIPTIVISM. HULK DELIGHT IN PLAYING WITH RULES OF GRAMMAR AND SPELLING; THEY NOT SET IN STONE. HULK THINK LINE BETWEEN “WRONG” AND “NEW USAGE” VERY BLURRY, AND ALWAYS COME DOWN ON SIDE OF CLEARER COMMUNICATION. HULK SEE NOTHING WRONG WITH SPLITTING INFINITIVES, ENDING SENTENCES WITH PREPOSITIONS, USING SINGULAR “THEY.” HULK CHAMPION IDIOLECTS, DIALECTS, CREOLES. HULK CONNECT WITH NETSPEAK, LOL AT LOLSPEAK, FASCINATED BY TXT ABBREV. HULK SMASH PEOPLE WHO CALL ORGANIC LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT “BAD GRAMMAR.” HULK SMASH CENSORSHIP OF “BAD WORDS.” LANGUAGE BEAUTIFUL LIVING THING. SHOULD BE APPRECIATED IN WILD, NOT PUT IN CAGE. HULK SMASH ALL CAGES!
THAT SAID, HULK HATE WHEN PEOPLE NOT THINK ABOUT WORDS THEY USE. IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND WORD ORIGINS, CONNOTATIONS, CONTEXT. “THAT’S SO GAY” FUNNY WHEN GAY PERSON SAY IT, NOT FUNNY WHEN STRAIGHT PERSON SAY IT. HULK FAN OF IRONY BUT NOT AS DISGUISE FOR CRUELTY OR CARELESSNESS.

Charming Gentlemen

2010-07-12T23:17:00.006+05:30

(Contains spoilers for multiple books)

One of the great moral dilemmas I struggle with is my love of Georgette Heyer's Devil's Cub*. However much I adore it, I've never been able to ignore some of the sinister opinions in the text.

Vidal is an attractive young marquis who must flee to France after a drunken duel in which he may or may not have killed his opponent. He decides to take with him a beautiful young woman who he has been attempting to seduce. Unfortunately, her older sister decides to come instead in order to protect the younger sister's reputation. Vidal is furious when he finds out he's been tricked, and attempts to rape her. She defends herself by shooting him in the arm; he realises that she must be a nice girl if she's willing to defend her honour like this; a couple of hundred pages later they are in love and able to marry with parental approval. Meanwhile, the mother and sister of our heroine (whose biggest crime is to be crass and lower middle-class) are never redeemed.

Another Heyer book, The Convenient Marriage, has a charismatic aristocrat try to take revenge on an old acquaintance by kidnapping and raping his wife. The wife in question manages to knock him out with a poker and run away before rape occurs. Later, her husband fights him (with swords), wins, and the two men become friends again. The whole attempted-rape-of-wife thing is forgotten, and one imagines the man will be a valued dinner guest in the couple's household for years to come. One person who will not be invited to dinner is the husband's former mistress, who aided the would-be rapist in some of his (earlier, less rapey) plans. That bitch.

Moral: pretty much anything an attractive man does is excusable in some way. Forgive and forget, eh?

Devil's Cub was published in 1932, and The Convenient Marriage in 1934. Heyer's politics were not progressive (her anti-semitism in a few places is pretty jarring). And I'm not a historian, so I don't really know how socially acceptable rape was in the late 1700s or the 1930s.

I've spoken before of my desire to finish Stephanie Laurens' books so that there won't be any more of them for me to read (this is a perfectly logical reason to do such a thing). Yesterday I read The Promise in a Kiss, a prequel to her Cynster books. It was published in (I think) 2002.
This book features an Evil Guardian who manipulates our heroine into attempted theft by threatening to rape her little sister. Things are sorted out, the hero is heroic, and...it turns out the man wasn't planning to rape the child after all. The threat (and the whole plot, including the theft) was for the lulz, because what else is there to do for fun when you're a bored aristocrat?

Sebastian humphed. He looked down on his old foe, knew the wound he’d delivered would cause serious discomfort for weeks. Counseled himself that that, together with all that would come, was fair payment for all Helena had suffered—that he couldn’t, no matter what he wished, exact further physical retribution. “You and your games—I gave them up years ago. Why do you still play them?”

Fabien opened his eyes, looked up, then shrugged—grimaced again. “Ennui, I suppose. What else is there to do?”

And it's so sad that the ~~Evil Guardian~~ Ennui-afflicted Charming Gentleman has no children! And he's not an actual rapist. And he ends up being a close friend of the hero and heroine, and they're genuinely sad when he moves to America. So...that's alright then, I guess? The real villain of this book is the hero's sister-in-law: she's pushy, presumptuous, and will later in the series be blamed for her son's murderousness and general sociopathy.

I suppose it's progress - in seventy years there's been a shift from actual rapists being condoned to people who only threaten rape as a manipulative tool being condoned. Clearly the Laurens book is a massive victory for feminism.

*My life is hard.

June Reading

2010-07-08T03:41:00.003+05:30

Looking over this list I realise I read less SFF than I usually would last month. This is interesting, I guess? I didn't read half as much as I wanted or expected to; especially considering how much of this is fluffy bedtime reading. I am forced to blame the world cup.

Hope Mirrlees - Lud-in-the-Mist: This is such a classic that I'm mildly embarrassed about never having read it before. It turns out it's utterly gorgeous. Plot-wise it's incredibly simple (middle class townspeople threatened by the smuggling into town of fairy fruit - I'm tempted to describe it as a crime thrille) and I wondered when I started reading if it was going to be pretty and insubstantial. It's not, it's gloriously ambiguous and lyrical and full of light and shadow. I'm very tempted now to reread The King of Elfland's Daughter (published a couple of years before Mirrlees' book) and see how it compares.

Sarah MacLean - The Season: I didn't enjoy this one at all. I suspect this is in part because I'm used to reading Regency mystery/romances for grown-ups, who are expected to be familiar with the setting. Having things explained for young readers (and heroines who are modern teenagers in empire line dresses) really put me off.

Kate Hewitt - The Greek Tycoon's Reluctant Bride: Read because someone at work thought my reaction would amuse them. This proved to be the case.

Elif Batuman - The Possessed: I reviewed this for the Indian Express and talked a little more about my reaction to it here.

Tom McCarthy - Tintin and the Secret of Literature: I'm still not sure what the big "secret" turned out to be, unless it was that 'popular' literature is as fruitful a ground for literary criticism as capital L Literature. This was still tremendous fun to read; McCarthy bombards the Tintin books with multiple sorts of theory and in the process succeeds in writing a book whose main point seems to be look, look, theory can give you so much to play with. Which it can, of course, and this is one reason why I like it, but I suspect if you're the sort of person who likes that sort of thing you already know this.

Samit Basu - Terror on the Titanic: Nothing I say about this book could possibly be unbiased - not only is Samit a friend but the book is published by my employers. So you might want to keep that in mind when I claim that this book is funny and smart and utterly silly, and that the Morningstar Agency series looks to be a strange (and hilarious) mixture of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the Bartimaeus trilogy. But also I'm right.

Stephenie Meyer - The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: I'm not a fan of Stephenie Meyer, as this old, desperately trying to be fair, post probably makes clear. Still, I'd read all four Twilight books, and thought that this novella, removed from the main story of the series, might avoid some of its major flaws. Plus someone on Twitter dared me.
I'm sure I came to the book prejudiced against it. Still, it was remarkably bad. Meyer continues to be unable to create a real, flawed, likeable character for her narrator, and if she has gained in self-awareness since writing the first of the books (I'm choosing to believe that certain choices she made were deliberate) her prose is still frequently cringeworthy.
I did giggle at the "Hulk smash!" bit though.

Edmund Crispin - Holy Disorders: This was my first Gervase Fen book, though I've had friends accost me and read out bits of others in the past. It made me accost people and read out bits. I was rather alarmed by the ending (basically, some people are just evil. and it might be genetic.) but it was a fun read.

John Mortimer - The Antisocial Behaviour of Horace Rumpole/Rumpole Misbehaves: I've read only a few of the Rumpole books. I was surprised to see how comparatively recent this one was (2007). I know Mortimer died last year and I think this may have been his last book, but iPods in Rumpole are a bit jarring. Still, it was extremely funny.

Susan Stephens - The Italian Prince's Proposal: Discussed here.

Julia Quinn - To Catch an Heiress and How to Marry a Marquis: Lumped together because they are a duology. I love Quinn. She's utterly reliable; likeable, frivolous romances with plenty of witty banter. These two books, involving aristocratic agents of the Crown and the women who love them, aren't her best, but they're still fun. How to Marry a Marquis is better because it involves Lady Danbury (familiar to readers of other Quinn books) and a woman dressed as a pumpkin.

Julia Quinn - What Happens in London: I said I liked Quinn. This book, though, deserves a seperate entry, because nothing else will demonstrate. It has spies. It has possibly evil Russians. It has couples who bond over reading bad books to each other. This is entirely similar to my own romantic life except for the spies and possibly evil Russians. It is the most delicious piece of froth since Loretta Chase's The Devil's Delilah. Also:

There were really no words to describe it.
She stood in the doorway, thinking this would be a fine time to create a list titled Things I Do Not Expect To See in My Drawing Room, but she was not sure she could come up with anything that topped what she did see in her drawing room, which was Sebastian Grey, standing atop a table, reading (with great emotion) from Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron. If that weren’t enough—and it really ought to have been enough, since what was Sebastian Grey doing at Rudland House, anyway?—Harry and the prince were sitting side by side on the sofa, and neither appeared to have suffered bodily harm at the hands of the other.
That was when Olivia noticed the three housemaids, perched on a settee in the corner, gazing at Sebastian with utter rapture. One of them might even have had tears in her eyes. And there was Huntley, standing off to the side, openmouthed, clearly overcome with emotion.
“‘Grandmother! Grandmother!’” Sebastian was saying, his voice higher pitched than usual. “‘Don’t go. I beg of you. Please, please don’t leave me here all by myself.’”
One of the housemaids began to quietly weep.
“Priscilla stood in front of the great house for several minutes, a small, lonely figure watching her grandmother’s hired carriage speed down the lane and disappear from view. She had been left on the doorstep at Fitzgerald Place, deposited like an unwanted bundle.”
Another housemaid began to sniffle. All three were holding hands.
“And no one”—Sebastian’s voice dropped to a breathy, dramatic register—“knew she was there. Her grandmother had not even knocked upon the door to alert her cousins of her arrival.”
Huntley was shaking his head, his eyes wide with shock and sorrow. It was the most emotion Olivia had ever seen the butler display.
Sebastian closed his eyes and placed one hand on his heart. “She was but eight years old.”
He closed the book.
Silence. Utter silence. Olivia looked about the room, realizing no one knew she was there.

The sequel-of-sorts, Ten Things I Love About You, was out this month, and I should be getting my copy any day now. The Booksmugglers do not seem to be bowled over, but I can trust Quinn to at least be amusing.

P.G Wodehouse - Young Men in Spats: Wodehouse. Short stories. Idiotic young men, love, nudity, Tennyson, animals, and that one story where Uncle Fred breaks into a random house and furthers the cause of young love. I've read them all before, but they're still delightful.

Chris Lavers - The Natural History of the Unicorn: Leavers traces the various possible origin stories for the unicorn - not just the physical features of the animal (and how they change over time) but all the other bits that go into making up the myth. And then he looks at all those bits in the contexts of the societies that added them to the myth, and...I tried to explain what this book was to a colleague and baffled her completely. I really enjoyed it - it's clever, frequently very witty, and I like fantastic beasts. Leavers doesn't come to any solid conclusions, only suggesting directions to think along, and I appreciated that. It was excellent, and I think I'll be using it in the future; not for anything specifically unicorn-related, but as a pointer to how myths come into being.

Robert Holdstock - Avilion: Holdstock's last book affected me in much the same way as the first one I read did. It's a more direct sequel to Mythago Wood than Lavondyss was (I have not yet read The Hollowing or Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn). In the past I've always had to read Holdstock books twice - once to feel them (he is an incredibly sensual writer) and once because the being caught up in the feel of the book means that I don't engage with the intellectual aspect that he also brings. On a first read, this is beautiful, though I don't think it quite lives up to Mythago Wood. On a second - we'll see.

* Edit - I'm not sure how Chris Lavers ended up being credited as David. Wtf, brain. Sorry Mr Lavers!

The Gaudiloquence of Elif Batuman

2010-06-28T17:58:00.006+05:30

I'd been looking forward to Elif Batuman's collection of essays about life studying Russian books, The Possessed, for quite some time, on the strength of the introductory essay which I linked to on this blog a few months ago. This despite the fact that I am shamefully underread in Russian literature.

The book is much as you would expect it to be based on that one piece. It's self-centred and occasionally overly precious, but I loved it anyway.

It's a bit uneven. The American and Russian sections are wonderful; Batuman can be an incredibly funny writer as well as a very moving one, and when she writes about things she knows and loves she's a joy to read. The Samarkand sections though, despite being set in Samarkand, do not work for me. Apparently Batuman did not enjoy her time there, and so from the fond humour of the other sections we move abruptly toward this sort of thing:

The Uzbek soccer fans' lack of identification with the Turkish national team was what finally made me see that Uzbekistan wasn't a middle point on some continuum between Turkishness and Russianness. Uzbekistan was more like a worse-off Turkey, with an even more depressing national literature. Even I, who was always making fun of Orhan Pamuk, could see that if Pamuk were magically ceded over to the Uzbeks, they would have cause for a national holiday.

On the whole, though, the sheer, joyous love that informs most of the book makes up for moments like this. It's not perfect, but it's highly recommended.

An edited version of the (tragically short) piece below appeared in Saturday's Indian Express.

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In her introduction to The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, Elif Batuman says of Cervantes' Don Quixote that he “had broken the binary of life and literature. He had lived life and books; he lived life through books, generating an even better book”. The Possessed is a collection of essays which shows Batuman herself doing much the same thing, immersing herself in books, looking for parallels and answers to her lived experiences. Describing her own transformation into a literature student she asks “wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?” Batuman speaks eloquently and joyfully of love and the experience of being obsessed.

This is not a book about Russian literature, but about Batuman's love of it and her developing relationship with it. Batuman claims that what first attracted her to the Russians was a sense of half-understanding and absurdity, and this is reflected in the strange and hilarious forms that her study of the language takes. It is (like any love story) completely self-indulgent.

In “Babel in California” a conference on Isaac Babel descends into chaos. “Who Killed Tolstoy?” has her wandering around Tolstoy's estates as part of an investigation into Tolstoy's “murder” (a subject chosen more for the purposes of funding than for any beliefs the author might have). Missing suitcases, unrepentant airport staff (“are you familiar with our Russian phrase resignation of the soul?”) and incontinent old gentleman all play a part in a comic piece that also speaks thoughtfully of death.

“Summer in Samarkand” is divided into three parts that are scattered throughout the book. These sections do not deal directly with Russian literature – the essays are an account of a summer spent learning Uzbek – yet Batuman's commentaries on Uzbek language and literature are very much in keeping with the rest of the book. If they jar with the rest of the book it is more because of the tone of humour. The affectionate delight in absurdity that characterises the portions of the book set in America and Russia is gone, and the writing suffers as a result.

The last piece, “The Possessed”, is named after a Dostoevsky novel and makes clear its parallels with Batuman's graduate school circle. Things come together, and characters mentioned in passing in earlier essays come into focus. This is the darkest section of the book. Yet Batuman concludes “if I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that’s where we’re going to find them.” And if there are no answers, Batuman shows us that love can still be an end in itself.

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The Indian Blogger's Genre Confusion

2010-06-27T01:52:00.002+05:30

A Mills & Boon book has confused me.

As anyone who has ever read one knows, M&B publish short, uncomplicated romance novels. There are various subgenres (see Doctors or Sheikhs), but most of these books stick to a reasonably basic pattern, with minor variations that have set in with time. Some that come to mind: sex/no sex, sexism/less sexism, virgins/unfulfilled divorcees or widows/women who have had previous happy relationships. The pattern is as follows: man and woman meet – man is masterful and probably richer – there is antagonism – feelings develop – there is a misunderstanding – it all ends happily.

A successful Mills & Boon novel sticks to this model. It may be written well or badly, but once the name (and long-stemmed rose logo) of the publisher are on the book, this is all you expect it to be doing. And expectations do inform how one reads a text, what one looks for, and how one judges it.

Which leads to a (to me, interesting) question. Consider a hypothetical situation in which a book contains all the plot elements I mention above, but aspires to do more than simply tell the story which the reader of this genre wants and expects to read. Imagine this book is published under the Mills & Boon brand, with the same sort of title, the same sort of cover as the rest of the company's output. How do you read and judge it?

It is unlikely that this situation would ever actually occur. M&B would not be the first publisher of choice for an author who sought to do something different, since the name would not attract the sorts of customers who might be interested. Plus it might alienate their existing buyers. As a romance reader I'm quite conservative myself, and can well imagine that a sizeable chunk of readers in the genre feel the same.

But reading Susan Stephens' The Italian Prince's Proposal I have to wonder if this is that book.
On the surface it contains all the conventions of the genre - the title follows the "the something someone's something" pattern of many recent titles. The plot involves a hot, arrogant prince who needs to marry quickly and chooses a pretty English girl who is desperate for the money. Love happens. They fight. She returns to England. They are reconciled. So far so familiar.

Except it isn't. Right from the start something feels off about this story, and then, around the 100th page, it all gets rather surreal. There is a sequence where both characters are half asleep and walking around the house, popping into each other's bedrooms to take a look. There is a dreamlike sequence involving grape-treading (apparently the quantities of grape juice everyone is breathing lead to headiness). In my head this is actually all very filmable and could be gorgeous, but it would not be a realist movie. In this book, it feels completely out of place.

Add to this the gardener, an endearing old man who gives the heroine wise advice (and turns out to be the king) . His inclusion gives the story some of the feel of a fable. And then there's the fact that the entire plot (what there is of it) revolves around the musician sister's need to own a famous violin. It's all very weird. With all this going on, the terrible plot seems like an afterthought.

At no point in the reading of this book did I find it particularly enjoyable. And I'm wondering now how much this had to do with the fact that it was sold to me (where "sold" involves stealing things from my mother's bathroom) as a Mills & Boon book. Would I have found some merit in it if it had a different sort of jacket? Or was it just fundamentally bad?

May Reading

2010-06-01T00:01:00.012+05:30

My reading this month included a number of books I'd read before and quite a bit of fluff (these two mostly overlapped). In addition to the books mentioned here, I'm still dipping in and out of Helen Merrick's wonderful book The Secret Feminist Cabal. I've also just gotten hold of Gwyneth Jones' Imagination/Space, also published by Aqueduct (here's a good review). And I'm in the middle of a reread of Mark Charan Newton's Nights of Villjamur. I'll be reading City of Ruin when I'm done. Other books I'm hoping to finish in June include Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (I started it today and love it so far) and Elif Batuman's The Possessed, which I first heard of a few months ago when Batuman wrote this gorgeous piece for the Chronicle. Assuming that her writing is generally of this calibre, this looks like being a remarkable book.

And so on to the books (in no particular order).

G.V Desani - All About H. Hatterr: I started reading this in April. I loved it; it's challenging and playful and generally wonderful. I wrote more about it here.

Jesse Bullington - The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart: I wanted to like this a lot more than I ended up doing. It's incredibly smart, frequently very funny (the brothers' theological debates in particular), and I absolutely love the cover art. And yet somehow it just did not click for me. I may be missing something obvious, since most reviews I've read of it have been overwhelmingly positive. I can't pinpoint anything that the book did wrong (except maybe the cod academic framework which felt wholly unnecessary) so clearly we were just not meant to be. I will say this for Bullington, his writing is effective. He managed to make me feel rather queasy on two occasions. There's one particularly unpleasant rape scene, and another scene that I do not wish to spoil for anyone, but between this and Paul Jessup's "It Tasted Like the Sea" I may never eat fish again.

O. Douglas - Olivia in India: Someone on a mailing list that I read mentioned O. Douglas and I looked her up. I was rather surprised to find that she was John Buchan's sister. A couple of her books were available on project Gutenberg, and I picked this one to start with. I was a bit wary of a book written in 1912 about an Englishwoman's travels in India, but found myself charmed anyway. The book is a series of letters from a young woman (who is travelling to India to meet her brother) to an unnamed young man. The colonialism is inevitable, but for the time surprisingly not offensive. Olivia actually engages with India, which is rather nice. Occasionally the attempt to be charming and quirky gets a bit much, but on the whole this was very likeable indeed.

Rick Riordan - The Percy Jackson series: I finally watched the Percy Jackson movie and while it was pretty good I felt that the pacing was off and it was a lot less clever than the books. This made me reread all five books in the series as well as Percy Jackson: The Demigod Files, a slimmer volume containing three short stories and some mock interviews of characters in the series. The series is fantastic; The Demigod Files is insubstantial.

Georgette Heyer - Frederica: I read Heyer when I'm tired, which is why some of her stuff seems to pop up here every month or so. Frederica is not her best, but it is quite good and has a hot air balloon and steam engines. Which makes it practically steampunk, right? Right?

Lisa Kleypas - Suddenly You: This was recommended by a friend who thought I would enjoy a Victorian publishing romance. It was nice and started off very well indeed. But I felt it threw out a number of lures for places that the story could possibly go, and then went nowhere. It's a little unfair to judge a romance novel for not being more than a romance novel so I can't really blame it for failing to take up the publishing angle, or the child abuse angle, or... (there were quite a few such angles). But I would have liked a better structured plot, at least.

China Miéville - Kraken: My review is here. My reaction was largely positive, but with a few caveats. Watching Miéville having fun and being a geek was nice.

Mark Mellon - Napoleon Concerto: I'm supposed to review this for someone so I won't say much here. This is an alternate history steampunk novel set in Napoleonic France. I'll be linking to my review when it is up.

Nick Mamatas - Under My Roof: I am a bit of a Mamatas fangirl, for various reasons. This probably means that I am biased, but I loved this book to pieces. It's a hilarious, slim book about a telepathic 12 year old whose father has built his own nuclear weapon (it's inside a garden gnome on the lawn) and declared independence from the United States. It's very smart and very political and entirely lovable and I'm surprised more people have not read it.

Julia Quinn - The Bridgerton Series: I did not reread all of the Bridgerton books this month. I read four; The Viscount Who Loved Me, An Offer from a Gentleman, Romancing Mr. Bridgerton and To Sir Philip with Love. There's not much to say about these - none of them was a particularly strenuous intellectual exercise. But I love Quinn and I'm really looking forward to Ten Things I Love About You (review here).

Jon Courtenay Grimwood - Pashazade: Another alternate-history novel. Ashraf Bey arrives in Al Iskandriya and is immediately embroiled in a murder mystery. Fast paced and clever and massively entertaining. I suspect I'd need a second read to attempt any sort of critique (and I think there are aspects of it that could do with some examining) but I found it extremely enjoyable.

John Gardner - Grendel: I recently confessed on twitter that I had not read this, though I'd meant to for a while. The recommendations of a couple of people who had read it convinced me not to put it off any longer. I'm glad, it's stunning. There's not enough space here for anything like a review - and since I finished it only a couple of days ago I think I'd like some time to think about it and possibly return to Beowulf - but it's a glorious book.

Georgette Heyer - Lady of Quality and Black Sheep: These two books are the same book: discuss.

Squid pro quo

2010-05-29T15:28:00.005+05:30

Today's Indian Express has a short review I wrote of China Mieville's Kraken. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, but thought it was a bit flabby and relied too much on its references to pop and geek culture. I could not resist using the Express' gloriously bad pun in the title. (The repetition in that last paragraph is all my fault).

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The main attraction for visitors to London's Darwin Centre is a perfectly preserved giant squid, Architheusis dux (Archie to those who work there). Then one day it disappears, tank and all, without a trace, and Billy Harrow, a museum curator, finds himself the target of a number of very strange people. With this, the reader and Billy are thrown into an alternative London, replete with squid-worshipping cults, rival gangs (one of them ruled by a terrifying sentient tattoo) and unionising animals; where a special branch of the police force exists to control supernatural happenings. It's a London where one can literally read the entrails of the city to divine the future. And everyone seems to think that the world is about to end.

China Miéville was recently awarded an Arthur C. Clarke award for his 2009 novel The City & the City, making him the only author ever to have won the award three times. His latest book, Kraken, is a comic, allusive adventure story set in London. This is far removed from the dense, baroque language of Miéville's earlier books. If anything, it is closest in style to his young adult novel Un Lun Dun. This does not, however, mean that it's an easy read. Like any Mieville book, Kraken is brimming with ideas, about (among other things) groups and fandom and cities and religion and belief. It’s also Mieville’s least restrained work yet.

The book reads as a loving tribute to geekdom, a gleeful tour of all that growing up as a science fiction fan entails. The fascination with cephalopods and tentacles has been a big part of geek culture for a while now, and is traceable back to the pulp horror writer H.P Lovecraft. There are references in the text to other major writers who have influenced Miéville, including J.G Ballard and Michael Moorcock. There are a number of references to Star Trek: Wati, a disembodied revolutionary spirit, spends much of the novel communicating with the other characters by inhabiting an action figure of the original series’ Captain Kirk. Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, another fantasy novel set in London, gets a nod in the form of Goss and Subby, two apparently immortal assassins who call to mind Gaiman’s Croup and Vandemar. There’s even an element of The X-Files in the interaction between Vardy and Collingwood, members of the special police.

Last year, Booker judge John Mullan dismissed the entire Science fiction genre as being “bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other”. Miéville has been critical of this extremely reductive (not to mention ignorant) view of the genre. Yet Mullan’s description seems a strangely apt description of the world Billy enters. It’s far too tempting to point to the parallels between the cult-filled underbelly of Kraken’s London and science fiction fantasy fandom itself. In part this is because the preoccupations of this world (giant squid! Atlantis!) are so fannish. Miéville makes the connection even stronger with the introduction of Simon Shaw, a character who is both a “Trekkie” and a part of the supernatural underground.

Far more than being a book about fans, though, this is a book for that “special kind of person”. If you grew up watching Star Trek, reading Moorcock, playing Dungeons and Dragons, Kraken is an utter delight.

But this may actually be the book’s biggest flaw. At times it appears more an act of redamancy towards the genre than an actual novel. Plot is occasionally sacrificed for the sake of a pun, or a clever allusion. The conclusion is clever but it is unnecessarily dragged out, to the point that we end up having multiple “final showdown” moments.

With a little more of the discipline and rigour that characterise some of Miéville’s other works, Kraken could have been brilliant. Yet a Mieville book is always worth reading. Kraken is the product of a fascinating mind at play, and is worth reading for that reason alone.

Some Book links

2010-05-27T01:48:00.010+05:30

...a few things I've been meaning to link to:

Paul Charles Smith recently reread Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan trilogy. My love of Peake is well known to those who have been reading this blog for a while, but if I haven't yet convinced you of his greatness I hope that Paul will.

Adam Roberts has been reading (for the first time, and I suspect it will be the last) Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. Fans of the series may not find these posts entirely enjoyable, but I think they're excellent. A sample:

As Samuel Beckett’s career progressed, his writing became more and more pared down, less and less verbal, increasingly approaching the asymptote that was at the heart of Beckett’s bleak vision: silence. The great, productive paradox at the heart of Beckett was that one of his century’s greatest verbal artists mistrusted the ability of words ever to articulate truth—not just particular arrangements of words but verbal art itself. The Unnameable, in that near-sublime novel, says: ‘I’ll speak of me when I speak no more.’ For him silence is ‘the only chance of saying something at last that is not false.

To step briskly ab sublimi ad ridiculus, Jordan’s career manifests something similar. Insofar as Heroic Fantasy is a fundamentally narrative artform, to which readers go in order to experience the pleasure of following the movement of characters through time, Jordan says: no. Wotix is the closest he has yet come to a book that disperses that force of narrative momentum—that great strength of the novel as a mode—into a great swarm of indistinguishable coexistent characters and non-progressions. If the traditional novel takes the shape of a quest, a linearly horizontal progression through narrative time, Wotix explodes that linearity in a bewildering near-dimensionless knot or tangle of non-progression.

The above, combined with their shared connection with Russia, makes me wonder if Roberts is distantly related to the Pandeys.

Larry Nolen has also been reading the Wheel of Time books, though in his case these are rereads. He's generally worth a read, and though he's kinder to the books than Roberts, these are still thoughtful, critical, and funny.

Casting actors for imaginary movie versions of books is generally great fun (and something I have spent far too much time on). A few months ago Gail Carriger discussed who she would like to see play her characters here. I love most of her choices, except that Paul Bettany would clearly make an ideal Professor Lyall.
Now Celine Kiernan has a competition up on her blog where you get to cast her three main characters for the chance to win the trilogy - which means getting hold of The Rebel Prince many months before the rest of us. ~~And then I will be forced to hunt you down and commit violence upon your person.~~ Go look.

Gav at the NextRead blog has been hosting a short story month. Plenty of excellent story recs there, but here I am talking about an Edith Nesbit story that I love.

You've probably already read Sridala Swami's interview of China Mieville. If not, do so immediately. I admire both of them, and they seem like they're both really enjoying this conversation.

And while on the subject of Mieville, Jonathan McCalmont wrote this epic review of The City and the City. I liked the book rather a lot when I read it last year. But it's a good review - I've only recently discovered McCalmont and so far I'm a fan.

Also, Roswitha (like me) has been keeping a record of everything she reads this year. She's also (unlike me) a wonderful writer, and her Book Munch posts are a joy to read.

Finally, and not particularly book related: Aadisht is now writing an opinion column for Yahoo India. The first two columns are here (I took that picture!). I may be biased, but I think they are hilarious. Sanjay Sipahimalani and Jai Arjun Singh are also writing for yahoo. Nothing but good can come of this.

All About H. Hatterr

2010-05-19T22:31:00.003+05:30

G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr occupies a strange place in the canon (if there is such a thing) of Indian writing in English. One hears of writers who love it - Salman Rushdie is quoted at length on the back of my copy - but really, hardly anyone has read it, it's close to impossible to find, and most people have never heard of it. I did a course on 20th Century Indian Literature in my first year of college, and I don't think Desani was ever even mentioned.

So I was thrilled to find a copy (nyrb edition) a couple of months ago in a Delhi bookshop. I was also extremely intimidated by it, which is why this Spotlight Series on NYRB Classics came at such a good time. I forced myself to get on with it.

All About H. Hatterr begins with an introduction ("All About...") by G. V Desani, with an account, presumably mostly fictional, of how the book was published.

So to Betty Bloomsbohemia: the Virtuosa with knobs on. I was summoned, Come Monday: but bagged Tuesday. I was questioned closely. Honouring me, as I never was ever! she insisted that I do explain the ABC of the book. Awed, I did the best I could. A. A man's choice, Missbetty, is conditioned by his past: his experience. That's true of his words too. I dare you, there are other ways of saying 'Aspirin'. 'Corpsereviver', 'Acetyl-Salicylic compound'. To one, M.P stands for a Member of Parliament. To another, it might mean major parasite. Depends on his experience. That's all why this book isn't English as she is wrote and spoke. Not verbal contortionism, I assure. B. There are two of us writing this book. A fellow called H. Hatterr, and I. I said to this H. Hatterr, 'Furgoodnessakes, you tell 'em. I am shy!' And he tells. Though I warrantee, and underwrite, the book's his. I remain anonymous. C. As for the arbitrary choice of words and constructions you mentioned. Not intended by me to invite analysis. They are there because, I think, they are natural to H. Hatterr. But, Madam! whoever asked a cultivated mind such as yours to submit your intellectual acumen or emotions to this H. Hatterr mind? Suppose you quote me as saying, the book's simple laughing matter?

I was in love.

It makes little sense for me to tell you that the rest of the book ("H. Hatterr", by H. Hatterr) is divided into seven parts, with a "critique" ("With Iron Hand I Defend You, Mr. H. Hatterr, Gentleman!" by Yati Rambeli, formerly widely known as Sri Y. Beliram, B.Com., Advocate, Original and Appellate, Civil and Criminal) at the end; that H. Hatterr is the son of an Englishman (in the navy, I think?) and a Malay prostitute; or that each section begins with the words of a different sage of some sort. Because what really matters about this book is the language. I've marked out passages on practically every page of my copy simply because they delighted me. This is taking ownership of the English language, and it's pure brilliance. Hatterr and his firend Banerji's cultural references are to Shakespeare and old school ties and pantie-vests from Bond Street made in Huddersfield, but they're also very much of India. It's an acknowledgement of our past - this is where we come from, this is what we have been, this is an authentic language for our experience.

Amardeep Singh discusses the novel far more intelligently here.

YfL13: Rules and Pudding

2010-05-18T15:30:00.002+05:30

I've missed out of posting a couple of weeks' Yell For Language columns. I apologise if anyone was particularly looking forward to them. Here is yesterday's, anyway.

[An edited version of this was published in the New Indian Express' educational supplement yesterday].

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To Prove: To establish the truth or validity of by presentation of argument or evidence.

To Prove: To determine the quality of by testing; try out.

I have a peeve. It is not a pet peeve, because I have many peeves and asking me to choose a favourite would be akin to asking a parent to choose a favourite child.

My peeve is this: the rampant abuse of the expression “the exception that proves the rule”. It's one of those things people will just glibly throw out when something happens that doesn't fit their current system of understanding, and it's clear that they have no idea what it actually means.

This expression does not mean what you think it means.

People nowadays tend to think of the word “prove” in terms of evidence; like fingerprints on a murder weapon (the victim in this case apparently being the English language). But think about what this would mean for “the exception that proves the rule”. You're effectively saying “I have a theory about how the world works. This piece of information, does not fit my theory. Therefore my theory must be accurate”. No one with half a brain would accept this as a rational, logical statement! The only reason people continue to throw the phrase around is because they're used to throwing language around without thinking about what it means. The continued, thoughtless use of this phrase is just another indication that we live in a world where the vast majority of people haven't got a clue what they are actually saying. I find this thought depressing.

So what does the phrase actually mean? It's all in the word “prove”, and it becomes obvious when you think about other situations in which we use the word. “Waterproof” does not mean “substance that proves water exists”; it's fabric that withstands water. To “proof” a document has to do with checking it for errors. “To Prove” has multiple meanings, and the two I've listed at the top of this article are, I think, the major source of confusion.

Ultimately there are two possible ways to read the phrase in question. One is quite close to the usual interpretation (though different enough to matter): If something is to be considered exceptional, it implies (or proves) that there is a normal state (a rule, in the sense that we use “as a rule”) for it to be an exception to.

The other possible reading takes the word in its other sense; “to test”. In this case, “the exception proves the rule” because the existence of an exception causes you to question the rule, and find out if it really is universally applicable. I prefer this version of the phrase, but it is less popular.

It's precisely because of this sort of linguistic confusion that I'm fond of another phrase, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”. This one presumably means that one tests the quality of pudding by eating it, but it works both ways – it's equally true that eating pudding is a great way to discover whether or not pudding exists. Plus, it is a phrase that positively demands that we all eat pudding, which is surely a good and noble task.

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Storyfinding help?

2010-05-16T00:48:00.003+05:30

There is a (fantasy) short story that I read years ago and recently I've been thinking I'd like to read it again. The only problem is that I cannot remember who it was by. It was in an anthology of some sort when I read it; I've skimmed through some of the fantasy anthologies I own but haven't found it (which doesn't necessarily mean it isn't there). A title and author would help.

Here is what I remember: a brother and sister arrive (by ship) at an island, and there is a creepy but strangely attractive flying boy. There is possibly a cave as well.

That's all I remember. Does anyone recognise this? I get the feeling it's by someone at least reasonably famous.

April Reading (II)

2010-05-09T04:21:00.010+05:30

And we're well into May.
April was a really busy month workwise, and I found myself reading quite a bit of fluff. May is likely to continue in the same vein, though I do have the new China Mieville book, and I'm also planning an Iron Council reread when I'm done with it. Here is the rest of what I read in April, anyway:

Victoria Alexander - What a Lady Wants and A Visit From Sir Nicholas: I've mentioned reading some of Alexander's books over the last few months, and it's probably obvious that I'm susceptible to light fiction that appears in series form. A Visit From Sir Nicholas is interesting that way, in that it's historical romance, and it's the same family, but is set a generation or so later, in the Victorian age. It also makes lots of references to A Christmas Carol and was in general quite entertaining and fun (and won a Romantic Times Viewers Choice award). What a Lady Wants on the other hand felt a bit pointless - I spent most of it wondering what the two lead characters were whining about.

Amanda Quick - Mischief: The title (which really put me off the book) turned out to have nothing to do with the story. This is a romance set in alternate-History Regency England, where the craze for Egyptology (I've mentioned before that Imperial Britain's fascination with Egypt is something I love reading about) is replaced because some British explorers found an island kingdom called Zamar with an equally fascinating history. Both main characters are obsessed with the island - he is the man who first discovered it, and she analyses the facts he reports and publishes papers under a male pseudonym. It was great fun to read, though the plot (they are investigating the truth behind her best friend's death) was less entertaining than the setting. I spent quite a bit of time wondering if the alt-hist aspects of the book meant that I could classify it in my head as Spec Fic. I have decided that I can.

Georgette Heyer - Arabella: Old favourite. There is a comical dog, there is the recognition that Regency England also contains lots of un-picturesque poor people, and there is a hero who actually recognises that he has been an arse and apologises for it.

Elsie J. Oxenham - The Girls of the Hamlet Club: As some of you know, my Masters' thesis focused on school stories, and I've grown up reading a lot of Girls' Own literature. This is the first of the Abbey Girls books - a series that is absolutely massive. I'd read The Girls of the Hamlet Club a few years ago and have only read the later books in the series since. Coming back to this one, I was surprised at how different from the others it was - there's a half-written post on this which will be published soon.

C.S Lewis - Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength: Since I've had reason to refer to these books a few times lately, I thought a reread might be in order. Result: I still think Out of the Silent Planet is a decent space-travel story. It has some good aliens, some lovely alien landscapes, and it does First Contact rather well. And the religion stuff isn't too jarring at this point, partly because the greedy businessman and the mad scientist are both pretty obvious villains without our needing much convincing. The book is also made better by the hints about another Martian race who were wiped out by a cataclysm, and who Ransom (the Very Christian philologist who is the main character of this series) is fascinated by.
Perelandra was intolerable. It's a pretty colour palette, and some of the underground sections are genuinely terrifying, but the long, simplistic theological debates? Lewis seems to enjoy writing "debates" where one of the characters is either a complete strawman or a bit of an idiot - see for example that awful bit in The Silver Chair (which may or may not be based on Lewis' debate with G.E Anscombe, and I don't particularly care) - and all they really do is to make their author seem smug, simplistic, and incapable of questioning himself.
That Hideous Strength was the one I was looking forward to because I hadn't read it in a while and had good memories of it. Evidently I had forgotten the hilarious scene where Jane (the female half of a couple who have been terribly misguided by modernity, education, and all this "gender equality" rubbish) is told by a resurrected Merlin that she's the wickedest woman in Britain because she and her husband were fated to have a baby who would Save the World but then they went and used birth control! It's possibly the greatest anti-reproductive rights argument I have ever encountered. What would have happened if the Virgin Mary had been on the pill? Lewis asks us, Had you ever thought of that? Had you?
I cannot say that I had.
Also, what is with Miss Hardcastle? Did Lewis really write a lesbian character?
Having said which. Despite the utterly bizarre/reprehensible politics of this book, I really enjoyed it. It's dystopic, has sections that feel like classic science fiction (along with classic SF's cheerful disregard for actual science), and contains Merlin and a bear.

I wonder how Lewis would feel at being included in this post. Other than his own, all the books are by women, and most of them romance writers.

April Reading (I)

2010-04-30T01:19:00.010+05:30

I'll be out of town for the weekend and swamped with work for a few days after that, so here in advance is the first bit of my monthly post on books I've been reading. Luckily I've written about quite a few of these already so links are all that is really needed.

H.G Wells - The First Men in the Moon: I am planning to read (and in some cases reread) all of Wells over the next year or so, because I think I have neglected him. And also because I have obtained some very pretty editions of his books. For this book (which I wrote about here) I read the Penguin Classics edition with an introduction by China Mieville.

Edgar Allan Poe - The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket: I wrote about this here. I loved it; it was shrieky, ludicruous, surprisingly creepy goodness. I'll soon be reading the Verne book that riffs off it (many thanks to Fëanor for pointing it out to me).

Gail Carriger - Soulless and Changeless: I read and enjoyed Soulless last year, and thought it would be fun to reread it before Changeless came out. It was still good the second time around, and Changeless turned out to be even better.

Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl: I thought this was excellent. I could have wished the publishers (or the author) had not gone and italicised every Thai word, but well. It was engaging and impressive. I'm just not sure how much I liked it. Jonathan M. has a good review of it here.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - The Thing Around Your Neck: I read this at the beginning of the month and really should have written about it then, when it was still fresh in my mind. It's too late now, but wow. This is a wonderful collection. It's thoughtful and restrained and feminist and African and occasionally gutwrenching. I'm reading everything this woman has ever written.

Paul Jessup - Glass Coffin Girls: I reviewed this here. It's a collection I'll be returning to often, I hope. It's dark and rich and gives you so much to think with. Delicious.

Kyla Pasha - High Noon and the Body: I wish I knew enough about poetry to talk about this collection as it deserves to be talked about. I've been dipping in and out of it since February and have consisently been blown away. Lovely, lovely book.

Syed Muhammad Ashraf - Numberdar Ka Neela (translated as The Beast by Musharraf Ali Farooqi): Tranquebar are doing these nice little short story/novella editions of Indian fiction, and I thought this one looked good. I was particularly drawn to it because Musharraf Ali Farooqi is a fine translator and did such a wonderful job on the Hamzanama and Tilism-e Hoshruba. The Beast is a satire of sorts about a power hungry zamindar who trains a violent bull to protect his interests. It's a frequently comical, frequently angry murder mystery, that has lots of things to say about the nature of power. It's also an incredibly nuanced piece of writing. I hope to return to it and write on it at length, but until then read Roswitha on the text.

The rest of my reading for this month will follow, including whatever I read on the plane tomorrow.

Delhi Noir

2010-04-29T23:41:00.005+05:30

Edited version of a shortish review that appeared in the New Indian Express (here) a few days ago:

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For the past few years, Akashic Books have been publishing anthologies of noir writing set in various cities across the world. The selection is diverse and fascinating, with such unusual settings as Trinidad, Istanbul, Richmond and Havana.

Published by Harper Collins in India, Delhi Noir is edited by Hirsh Sawhney, and it is an intriguing collection of short fiction set in the capital city, populated by a diverse cast of characters. Irwin Allen Sealy's “Last In, First Out”, the story of a vigilante auto-rickshaw driver named Baba Ganoush, is one of the best things about the collection. Baba Ganoush is that classic character of the genre; the decent guy whose attempts to do good are thwarted by an immoral system. In this he has a lot in common with the narrator of Omair Ahmad's “Yesterday Man”, a private detective investigating a case with links to the 1984 riots. Likewise, Hartosh Singh Bal's excellent “Just Another Death” features a well-meaning journalist trying to uncover the real story behind a mysterious death in the fact of a number of extremely successful attempts to conceal the truth.

“Hissing Cobras” by Nalinaksha Bhattacharya is a classic, hardboiled story about a policeman who blackmails and rapes a young housewife, while Mohan Sikka's “Railway Aunty” has an older woman manipulating a young man into performing sexual favours, first for her and then for an increasing network of her acquaintances.

Radhika Jha's “How I Lost My Clothes” stands out in this collection. It is the bleakly funny tale of a man who finds himself unexpectedly naked and travels through the city attempting to remedy this. “How I Lost My Clothes” straddles the border between the realistic and the bizarre. Jha is not the only writer to introduce elements of non-realistic fiction. The title character of Ahmad's “Yesterday Man” might easily have popped straight out of a magical realist novel. And though Uday Prakash's wonderful “The Walls of Delhi”, translated by Jason Grunebaum, at first appears a solid, traditional story of a man tempted by money into making a bad decision, a subtle twist at the end makes one wonder if this story too might fall into that category.

Manjula Padmanabhan's “Cull”, on the other hand, is outrightly Science Fiction. Set in a dystopic future Delhi where every aspect of human life is regulated, this is the story of a group of stubborn members of the underclass who refuse to be wiped out.

The collection does have its weaker points. Siddharth Chowdhury's “Hostel” feels incomplete and is too clearly extracted from a larger work. It suffers further from being placed right after Mohan Sikka's stronger piece. Ruchir Joshi's “Parking”, set an upper-class South Delhi neighbourhood, is a good story but it's not really “noir” enough. It and Padmanabhan's story both fit uncomfortably in this collection. Indeed, the placing of Padmanabhan's story at the end of the collection rather gives the idea that the editor wasn't sure what to do with it.

It is also a bit unfortunate that Uday Prakash's story should be the only translated piece in a collection of fourteen stories.

On the whole, however, Delhi Noir is a good collection which brings to light a few real treasures. I will be seeking out more work by writers like Prakash, Jha and Sikka. Akashic have plans to publish a Mumbai Noir collection in the near future, but it will have a hard time beating the Delhi edition.

YfL10: Some flatulence

2010-04-27T23:14:00.002+05:30

I've been lazy about posting either of my columns here for the last couple of weeks, but here is yesterday's Yell For Language column. It is about farting.

(An edited version of this was published in the New Indian Express educational supplement, EdEx, on Monday)

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Petard: A small bell-shaped bomb used to breach a gate or wall.

I have been reading the expression “hoist by his/her own petard” in books for as long as I can remember. In context, it's a simple enough expression to understand – it merely signifies that someone has become the victim of his own plot; that his plan has backfired upon him. Because it was so easy to make sense of it at first, and in time, I suppose, because I was so used to seeing it, it had never occurred to me to wonder what the word “petard” meant. I assumed (the presence of “hoist” made me think it had something to do with rope) that a petard might be some sort of jungle trap; the kind where you carelessly put your foot into a loop of rope and suddenly find yourself hanging upside down from the branch of a tree.

Recently though, I was reading an old children's book (I forget which) in which a child asks what the expression means, and all the adults around her burst out laughing and tell her that it is an expression she should not repeat. This was intriguing, so I resolved to find out what was so shocking about the expression or the word.

“Petard”, it seems, comes from a medieval French word, “peter” (pronounced the French way, not as Spiderman's real name). “Petards” were explosives used in the sixteenth century to blow up walls or huge gates. To be “hoist” by one's own petard would, therefore, mean that one had been thrown by the bomb that one had set. This is all very satisfactory and not scandalous at all.

Nowadays, however, the word in French means “firecracker”. It will be noted that the one thing bombs and firecrackers have in common is that you light them and they explode. Does “peter”, then, mean “explode”? Close enough, but not quite – it turns out it means “to break wind”. Flatulence. Farting.

Perhaps this is what the adults in the book I referred to meant when they declared the expression unfit for children's ears. I can find no other undesirable connotations of the word. But what really delights me about this discovery is that the expression “hoist by his own petard” takes on a new and glorious meaning.

In Roald Dahl's The BFG (a children's book whose name I do remember), the big friendly giant of the title shuns regular fizzy drinks for a special variety in which the bubbles move downwards instead of upwards. This saves him the embarrassment of burping, but it does lead to the gas in the drinks being otherwise expelled. As a result he spends a great deal of time flying happily about, propelled by the force of his own flatulence. Clearly Dahl did not think intestinal gas an unfit subject for children's ears.

I end this with the revelation that the Greek “peter” (Spiderman pronunciation appropriate here) means “stone”, which is presumably the material from which the sixteenth century walls blown up by petards were made. Language is strange.

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Glass Coffin Girls (and the boys who know them)

2010-04-25T19:27:00.011+05:30

Paul Jessup's Glass Coffin Girls is a collection of eight surreal short stories (with an introduction by Jeff Vandermeer). I'd had this for a while and finally decided to read it last week. I'm glad I did; Jessup is an intriguing writer.

"Secret in the House of Smiles" is the first story in this collection, about a man who cuts bits of women out of magazine pictures in an effort to piece them together into an image of the perfect woman. It's also about his vampire hunting friend. It's a good story intellectually, but the point at which it really grabbed me was when the two main characters are walking through a forest being followed by a vampire who until now has seemed not much of a threat. This is nightmare logic (at least the logic of my nightmares), and it's real, and it works.

"Glass Coffin Girls" has at its centre a story that is more domestic drama than anything else - a rather weak male protagonist caught between two women with stronger personalities than his own. But it's also full of fairytale elements; glass coffins, giant walking dogs, birds caged and otherwise, all made weird.

My two favourite stories in the collection have some similarities. The protagonists of "Stone Dogs" and "Red Hairs" start their respective stories in schools where they don't quite fit in. Both stories also contain mysterious foxes. "Stone Dogs" is wonderful. A school is snowed in and all the students are trapped inside. Books are weirdly powerful, everyone is having sex, and a purple haired boy (part anime character, part fox) arrives to warn our narrator that the world is ending. It's hard to explain just how awesome this story is - there is fantasy fandom, there is teenage angst, there is anime, there is an apocalypse. There are ice giants.

"Red Hairs" is rather less straightforward and I wasn't entirely sure what to make of it. The early sections reminded me a little of a very different sort of writer, Laini Taylor's "Goblin Fruit".* It's fascinating to see that Jessup's writing can also be very sensual - my experience of this story is wholly tied up in colour and smell. It has a warm, autumnal feel to it, and it's accompanied by the smell of ink which Jessup accurately describes within the story. This is of course a very personal reaction, and I don't know if it would work this way to another reader, but I hadn't realised that this kind of writing could evoke this mood.

I was equally unsure of what to make of "The Drinking Moon", though in a less pleasant way. I suspect I'm simply not the sort of reader this is for - it felt like weirdness piled upon weirdness with nothing else to it, and it simply did not work for me. I didn't particularly dislike it, but I didn't get anything out of it either. "Wire Rabbit" was interesting for the shift in language, and "Jars of Rain" probably requires a whole post to itself. I still don't know how much I like it as a story, but I'm fascinated by how much is going on in it and how much one could do with it.

"It Tasted Like The Sea" is the last story in the collection. It balances things out quite nicely - where the first story had a man cutting up magazine pictures of women, this has a character who cuts up real women to turn their dismembered limbs into art. (Similarly, "Stone Dogs" and "Red Hairs" are the third stories from the beginning and end respectively). Again, this story draws on the language of fairytales, particularly the Bluebeard myth. It also draws on some of the themes of the previous story: mermaids and dismemberment among them. It's the strangest story in the book, and the most horrifying.

This is a collection of stories about women, but the men, and their attitudes to the women, are one of the most interesting things it explores. There are a number of connections between the men of different stories, and I think I'm going to be going back to this again and thinking about it more.

Glass Coffin Girls is not all brilliant, but it's fascinating enough to keep you thinking and wanting to write. It's an impressive collection on the whole, with a few moments of pure joy.

[For the sake of transparency: I received an advance eARC from PS Publishing. Also, I've talked to the author a bit over twitter since I started reading]

*In the comments here, the author says that this collection has received some good reviews among readers of paranormal romance. That would fit.

"Every species of calamity and horror befell me"

2010-04-20T05:05:00.005+05:30

...or, The Trials of Arthur Gordon Pym
[There are spoilers, if you care about that sort of thing]

I don't actually remember reading The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. I always assumed I had in my extreme youth because I remembered the basic plot and it isn't one of those books that is so embedded in culture that everyone knows the plot just by existing. But surely I'd have remembered reading something this odd?

It's tempting to sneer a bit at this book for being so ridiculously over the top. There's a quality of breathless "and then, and then, and then!" about it - there was a mutiny! And then we were shipwrecked! and there were ghosts! And we had to eat a crew member! Then we were attacked by sharks! Yet this works - this is a story posing as a travel journal and if this were supposed to be a realistic narrative (it's not) it would be a bit strange to have it carefully plotted. As a horror (? travel? fantasy? shipwreck? angry natives, run away!?) story it works even better - the eerie, bizarre incidents build up one on top of the other and by sustaining a level of hysteria throughout the book promise a spectacular climax.

I was struck by how genuinely weird the book is. Towards the beginning, when Arthur stows away aboard the ship, his friend Augustus has made careful arrangements to conceal him until they're safely away at sea. He is to be hidden down a secret passage (on a ship!) in a box:

The taper gave out so feeble a ray that it was with the greatest difficulty I could grope my way through the confused mass of lumber among which I now found myself. By degrees, however, my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, and I proceeded with less trouble, holding on to the skirts of my friend's coat. He brought me, at length, after creeping and winding through innumerable narrow passages, to an iron-bound box, such as is used sometimes for packing fine earthenware. It was nearly four feet high, and full six long, but very narrow. Two large empty oil-casks lay on the top of it, and above these, again, a vast quantity of straw matting, piled up as high as the floor of the cabin. In every other direction around was wedged as closely as possible, even up to the ceiling, a complete chaos of almost every species of ship-furniture, together with a heterogeneous medley of crates, hampers, barrels, and bales, so that it seemed a matter no less than miraculous that we had discovered any passage at all to the box. I afterward found that Augustus had purposely arranged the stowage in this hold with a view to affording me a thorough concealment, having had only one assistant in the labour, a man not going out in the brig.
My companion now showed me that one of the ends of the box could be removed at pleasure. He slipped it aside and displayed the interior, at which I was excessively amused. A mattress from one of the cabin berths covered the whole of its bottom, and it contained almost every article of mere comfort which could be crowded into so small a space, allowing me, at the same time, sufficient room for my accommodation, either in a sitting position or lying at full length.

Pym shows absolutely no surprise at the notion that he is to encoffin himself and sit around in the dark for a few days; it is treated as an entirely routine part of stowing away. He obligingly goes off into a delirious dream for a few days. He wakes up days later to rotten meat, a dog who is behaving strangely , and the discovery that the ship has been taken over.

But it's the delirious dream part that I find interesting - for someone who has just recently shown such willingness to bury himself prematurely (a chapter or so later Pym finds himself impersonating a corpse again) Pym seems to be suffering quite the breakdown.

While occupied with this thought, however, I fell in spite of every exertion to the contrary, into a state of profound sleep, or rather stupor. My dreams were of the most terrific description. Every species of calamity and horror befell me. Among other miseries I was smothered to death between huge pillows, by demons of the most ghastly and ferocious aspect. Immense serpents held me in their embrace, and looked earnestly in my face with their fearfully shining eyes. Then deserts, limitless, and of the most forlorn and awe-inspiring character, spread themselves out before me. Immensely tall trunks of trees, gray and leafless, rose up in endless succession as far as the eye could reach. Their roots were concealed in wide-spreading morasses, whose dreary water lay intensely black, still, and altogether terrible, beneath. And the strange trees seemed endowed with a human vitality, and waving to and fro their skeleton arms, were crying to the silent waters for mercy, in the shrill and piercing accents of the most acute agony and despair. The scene changed; and I stood, naked and alone, amidst the burning sand-plains of Sahara. At my feet lay crouched a fierce lion of the tropics. Suddenly his wild eyes opened and fell upon me. With a conculsive bound he sprang to his feet, and laid bare his horrible teeth. In another instant there burst from his red throat a roar like the thunder of the firmament, and I fell impetuously to the earth. Stifling in a paroxysm of terror, I at last found myself partially awake.

It strikes me as I write this that the characters all spend a good deal of their time not in their senses. There's a drunken boating expedition in the first chapter that nearly causes Pym and Augustus their lives; there's a lot section during which they and Dirk Peters are crazed with hunger (which happens to be when they see the alleged ghost ship), and the last section of the book, as they sail closer to the south pole, has a definite dream like quality to it.

And that's how the terror element works as well. The shriekiness of the beginning (which is also the section where things like rotting flesh and cannibalism form the major part of the horror) gradually slips into this muted fear that is far more effective. When the southern barbarians kill most of the crew towards the end of the book, it's a relatively bloodless mass murder that involves getting a cliff to fall on top of them (the earlier chapters would have included some dismemberment at the very least). The final sections of the book have the narrator and two of his companions sailing south into the unknown. At the very end Pym sees "a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow" and the narrative ends abruptly, with nothing more than a note in the frame narrative to tell us that the next few chapters are missing, that Pym is dead, that companion Dirk is alive. The climax we were promised turns out to be not knowing.

Arthur Gordon Pym is bizarre - it has elements of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", Lovecraft, and the pirate comic in Watchmen, and I haven't said half of what I want to say about it here. I'm surprised it hasn't been referenced more in later literature - and if anyone reading this can think of instances where it has, let me know?

"Uless"

2010-04-15T02:25:00.011+05:30

(Every post should start with a Kate Beaton comic)

Reading H.G Wells' The First Men in the Moon I found myself preoccupied with the number of things about it that reminded me (mostly superficially) of later works. For example, in my head the Selenites look very much like the Bones, even though Wells tells us their bodies are insectoid.

They also look a lot like the underground dwelling gnome creatures from the land of Bism in C.S Lewis' The Silver Chair. Lewis was worryingly present during my reading of this book (he has been far too present on this blog recently) - his Out of the Silent Planet is strongly influenced by The First Men in the Moon. Except that Lewis' scientist is a rather scary imperialist and his religious man of letters is lovely and fits right in. Wells is a little more interesting with regard to his two major characters.

[Spoiler warning, but this thing has been out for more than a century]
The story: an out of work banker ruralises and considers becoming a playwright. He meets a scientist who lives in the area and is working on inventing a material that resists gravity. Alive to the commercial possibilities the banker (Bedford) gets involved. When Cavor, the scientist, invents the material, they travel to the moon where they lose their spaceship and anger some natives (by killing them). They also consume some magic mushrooms. Bedford finds the spaceship, loses Cavor, and flees to Earth taking with him lots of moon gold. Due to a Victorian equivalent of Balloon Boy the ship is lost (so is the child) and Bedford cannot return. Luckily he still has all that gold.
However, a scientist then begins to pick up radio signals from the moon which are from Cavor updating us on his life, the Selenites, and what he has learnt about them. Eventually he comes to a realisation that everything he has told them about Earth and war and colonialism (and the fact that he's the only one who knows how to make Cavorite, the anti-gravity substance) means that they would be wise to kill him. So they do, and that is the end.

The science is off, as Verne would complain, but that is clearly not the point. Because this is a fascinating portrayal of men from Earth encountering new land. When he first realises the possibility of space exploration, Bedford is ecstatic.

My imagination was picking itself up again. "After all," I said, "there's something in these things. There's travel--"

An extraordinary possibility came rushing into my mind. Suddenly I saw, as in a vision, the whole solar system threaded with Cavorite liners and spheres deluxe. "Rights of pre-emption," came floating into my head--planetary rights of pre-emption. I recalled the old Spanish monopoly in American gold. It wasn't as though it was just this planet or that--it was all of them. I stared at Cavor's rubicund face, and suddenly my imagination was leaping and dancing. I stood up, I walked
up and down; my tongue was unloosened.

"I'm beginning to take it in," I said; "I'm beginning to take it in." The transition from doubt to enthusiasm seemed to take scarcely any time at all. "But this is tremendous!" I cried. "This is Imperial! I haven't been dreaming of this sort of thing."

Once the chill of my opposition was removed, his own pent-up excitement had play. He too got up and paced. He too gesticulated and shouted. We behaved like men inspired. We were men inspired.

The Moon, it seems, has plenty of gold. Bedford is ecstatic.

Cavor is not treated particularly well either. He doesn't form a nice, unworldly contrast to Bedford and his grabby hands - he is callous (that the men who he employs in his research all die because of the cavorite is something he ignores), he never really shows much excitement at anything but science. When he receives his chance to be the narrator in the final chapters of the book, he comes across as quite as unpleasant as his companion. Bedford may think that writing a play needs only a couple of weeks, and he may think killing aliens and stealing their stuff is decent human behaviour - he's worldly, but he's also of this world, and human. He has probably read Shakespeare. He's too much of a philistine to bring any reading matter on his trip, but then he reads the cheap magazines he picks up at the last minute to remind himself that people exist. He's the one who can communicate - I don't think it's an accident that Cavor's narrative, when it comes, is broken and full of static, or that it breaks down mid-sentence into the nonsense word "uless" that probably means "useless".

And Bedford has genuine moments of enthusiasm and seeing (or I could be reading too much into this - he's the narrator for most of the novel, so if Wells wanted to draw attention to something exciting he had few other options). But you have bits like this as a result:

I turned about, and behold! along the upper edge of a rock to the eastward a similar fringe in a scarcely less forward condition swayed and bent, dark against the blinding glare of the sun. And beyond this fringe was the silhouette of a plant mass, branching clumsily like a cactus, and swelling
visibly, swelling like a bladder that fills with air.

Then to the westward also I discovered that another such distended form was rising over the scrub. But here the light fell upon its sleek sides, and I could see that its colour was a vivid orange hue. It rose as one watched it; if one looked away from it for a minute and then back, its outline had changed; it thrust out blunt congested branches until in a little time it rose a coralline shape of many feet in height. Compared with such a growth the terrestrial puff-ball, which will sometimes swell a
foot in diameter in a single night, would be a hopeless laggard. But then the puff-ball grows against a gravitational pull six times that of the moon. Beyond, out of gullies and flats that had been hidden from us, but not from the quickening sun, over reefs and banks of shining rock, a bristling beard of spiky and fleshy vegetation was straining into view, hurrying tumultuously to take advantage of the brief day in which it must flower and fruit and seed again and die. It was like a miracle, that growth. So, one must imagine, the trees and plants arose at the Creation and covered the desolation of the new-made earth.

Imagine it! Imagine that dawn! The resurrection of the frozen air, the stirring and quickening of the soil, and then this silent uprising of vegetation, this unearthly ascent of fleshiness and spikes. Conceive it all lit by a blaze that would make the intensest sunlight of earth seem watery and weak. And still around this stirring jungle, wherever there was shadow, lingered banks of bluish snow. And to have the picture of our impression complete, you must bear in mind that we saw it all through a thick bent glass, distorting it as things are distorted by a lens, acute only in the centre of the picture, and very bright there, and towards the edges magnified and unreal.

Changeless

2010-04-13T23:58:00.002+05:30

[Spoiler warning: if you haven't read Soulless and don't want the plot given away you might want to not read this post. Go and buy Soulless instead - it's really good.]

Gail Carriger's Soulless was an excellent first novel - hilarious fluff with moments of actual creepiness. One of its biggest strengths, for me, was how familiar it felt; the tropes being referred to are recognisable, are lovingly retraced and parodied, and the result was still incredibly fresh. It was as if Carriger and I had similar bookshelves and that is the sort of thing that makes you feel safe.

Changeless is a completely different sort of book, and I suspect it's a better one.

Changeless begins with Alexia (now Lady Woolsey) finding out about a mysterious affliction affecting all the supernatural beings in the city. In her new post as muhjah to the queen, Alexia tracks the source of this malady to Scotland; upon which journey she is accompanied by her sister (catty), her best friend (featherheaded, in love, and devoid of fashion sense), her husband's valet (actor with odd taste in women) and a French milliner/inventor/genius (delicious, and possibly trying to kill her). It's all most inconvenient, and someone tries to throw her overboard, and her wonderful new parasol won't open when it rains, and then she has to sort out the messy family affairs of her husband's pack who have recently returned from Egypt...

Carriger really plays up the steampunk element in this book, with the dirigible (mentioned and depicted on the cover) and the aethographors and Madame Lefoux's tech-geekery.

So Changeless is funny and silly and geekful. But it also feels to me to be a lot more substantial than Soulless.From a couple of things I've read, I've gotten the impression that Carriger's conception of these books is deeply rooted in the history and the structure of the British Empire. With this book (and possibly because of Alexia's new political role within the plot) you get a much wider sense of the existence of the empire, which made the fictional universe a lot stronger for me. I suspect that with the next book we'll see even more of this. I loved the inclusion of Egypt in the plot - Victorian England's* relationship with Egypt is something that fascinates me and it's always fun to see it referred to.

The one thing that did annoy me a little was the way in which Ivy and Felicity are both treated by the text - I'm choosing to believe that their characters are going to be the subjects of some startling reveals in the next book, and that their uni-dimensionality here is intentional.

Soulless did the (capital R) Romance brilliantly, but I didn't think it was as good at actual emotion - when emotional scenes happened they were touchingly awkward (Maccon telling Alexia she'd been raised to feel unworthy? Aww). When the focus of the book is off the Alexia-Maccon romance the relationship between the two is a lot easier to see. Changeless does emotion a lot better -Near the end of the novel there is a moment that is actually gutwrenchingly sad (and also a cruel, cruel cliffhanger). Everything about the text of Soulless reassures you and lets you know that nothing too awful will happen. Lord Akeldama will not be killed by rogue scientists; Alexia will end up with the hot, rich man who loves her; all will be well.

With Changeless that certainty is taken away, and suddenly it's just not that comfortable anymore. And as much as I adored Soulless for precisely that comfort, I rather think I love this.

*And Scotland's, of course.

Practically Marzipan: An Obituary

2010-04-10T16:43:00.003+05:30

I discovered last week that William Mayne was dead and had been for about ten days. The reason it had taken me so long to find out was that hardly anyone had reported it - the Darlington and Stockton Times had a story here, and that was the only mainstream publication to have mentioned it at all. Since I wrote the column last week there have been a few more mentions of his death - Locus has a bit here, and links to this bit in the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, and I've discovered this two line obit in the Times. There's a nice, long piece by Julia Eccleshare in the Guardian too. Which probably makes this column unnecessary. Still, though.

I suspect I made this more about me than was strictly warranted.

[An edited version of this was published in today's New Indian Express]

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This must be how the Michael Jackson fans felt.

When Michael Jackson died last year and various people were writing obituaries, I was a little disturbed by friends' refusal to confront the child sexual abuse allegations. It wasn't their conviction that he was innocent of the charges that was bothersome (everyone has the right to weigh the evidence for themselves and believe what they choose) – it was the complete dismissal by people who would normally take such allegations very seriously, just because they happened to be fans of the accused. That's the easy way out, of course; it's harder by far to acknowledge that an artist whose work you love and admire may have had serious flaws or committed crimes. There were obituaries that did just that, and those must have been difficult to write.

Fans of British children's writer William Mayne do not have the comfort of wishing the bad parts away. Mayne was charged with the sexual abuse of young female fans. He pleaded guilty (though he later retracted this statement) and was convicted in 2004. He was imprisoned for two years.

I discovered Mayne's writing only last year, and as an adult. I had heard him spoken of in connection with other children's writers I liked, and around this time last summer invested in secondhand copies of A Grass Rope (which won a Carnegie Medal in 1957) and A Swarm in May (which was filmed in the 1980s). And I was overwhelmed; this was phenomenal writing. Not quite real, not quite fantasy, deep and introspective and uncomfortable and lovely. When I look back and try to remember my childhood (which wasn't that long ago) Mayne's books feel achingly familiar.

And this is not just my opinion. Mayne was widely acknowledged as one of Britain's finest children's writers. In addition to all the critical acclaim, he was quite popular. In addition to the movie of A Swarm in May, a five-part television series adaptation of another of his works, Earthfasts, was shown on the BBC in 1994. By anyone's standards he ought to be considered at least a reasonably well-known writer.

Mayne was found dead in his home on the 24th of March this year. He was 82, and he seems to have died alone. Only one newspaper (and not a particularly big one) has reported his death. As of this date (almost two weeks after his death) none of the major papers have made mention of it. I don't know why that is; whether it has anything to do with his crimes (and as I said before, such an obituary has to be hard to write) or he has just been forgotten.

Mayne was one of the greatest writers of the last century. His writing thrilled me when I first discovered it, and it continues to delight me. His actions in his personal life on the other hand upset and anger me. It's a contradiction that we should all be used to handling by now (so many great artists have been less than ideal as human beings), yet somehow it's still hard.

But I'm writing this column because Mayne deserves some sort of memorial, somewhere. He was brilliant, he was loathsome, but he mattered, and it would be shameful to let that knowledge die.

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Also (and I wish I could have hyperlinked this in the column itself) here is the Guardian's report of Mayne's trial. The quote from Mayne there enrages me.

Three pairs of hands and some waffling on genre. Also, Fabio.

2010-04-08T23:42:00.010+05:30

There has been quite a bit of debate on various SFF blogs in recent months over the nature of book covers. I'm not going to rehash the whole thing because the people who have been following the discussion are all probably really sick of it by now, but briefly, some people are annoyed by the sameyness of a lot of SFF cover art at the moment, with all the hooded figures and swords and things. Which is a valid enough complaint. On the other hand, other people have pointed out, a major (perhaps the primary) function of the cover is to sell the book to as many people as possible. That means making sure that regular readers of the genre see the book and recognise it as the sort of thing they like. Those cliche elements on the cover act as useful signifiers. [I'm simplifying unfairly - if you haven't read this stuff and want to, go here, here and here].

On the whole, I'm neutral. I'd like things to be more original; then again, the fiction I read doesn't usually have this problem - I haven't read as much epic/ sword and sorcery fantasy in the last few years as I used to. Plus, generic covers have been useful to me as a romance reader, so I can quite well see why they would perform that function for someone who reads fantasy in the same way. So yes, cover cliches as useful signifiers of genre make sense to me.

---

I was very amused a couple of years ago when the good people at Sepia Mutiny came up with this hilarious Anatomy of a Genre post where they pick apart the various elements of a generic Indian Novel In America (is there a less clunky term for this category of book?) cover*. The book in question is The Mango Season by Amulya Malladi. For a more detailed pointing out of what, specifically, makes that cover so...generic, you should probably read the SM post. Or just look at the picture of the cover below, along with a couple of other books that deal with a similar theme.

Except, wait. One of these things is not like the others.

Earlier today I read about Heather Tomlinson's Toads and Diamonds on John Scalzi's blog. Toads and Diamonds is a retelling of a Perrault fairy tale set in India. What it is not is a generic Indian Novel in America. But would you be able to tell by the cover?

Tomlinson's book is set in India and the publishers are justified in using an "Indian" image (however cliched) on the cover. Just as, for example, the publishers of Adam Roberts' Yellow Blue Tibia could have argued for the inclusion of a romantic image on their cover (the title is apparently a play on the Russian for "I love you"). Yet if I'd gone into a bookshop and seen this I'm pretty sure I would have been surprised and confused (and delighted!) to find Roberts' book between the covers.

(Yellow Blue Fabio)

It's a silly example, but that is how weird it feels to see a book from one genre with a cover that so obviously suggests it to be part of another

I have no idea whether Ms Tomlinson's publishers purposely designed the book to look like the sort of covers above, or if it's all a very odd coincidence. Perhaps it'll get mis-shelved, or someone walking past the SFF section in a bookshop will do a double take and buy it and so become a hopeless fantasy addict? I do not know.

*The existence of this sort of genre raises a few other interesting questions in the context of this cover debate - I'm footnoting them because I don't really want to make them the subject of this post. In some of the discussions around covers people brought up the issue of publishers "whitewashing" covers (which the publishers involved presumably think will sell more books) vs using cliches to indicate genre. (which the publishers involved presumably think will sell more books). To my mind the difference is obvious, yet here is a genre where the cover conventions are entirely dependent upon presenting a very specific picture of India to a mostly Western audience. You could hardly call that entirely divorced from race. Hmm.

YfLs6 & 7: Gopi Manjuri with donuts for afters.

2010-04-05T23:21:00.004+05:30

I was lazy and failed to post the Yell for Language column last week. As a result, this week you get two whole columns on the subject of spelling.

Hurrah?

[Edited versions of the pieces below appeared in the New Indian Express today and last monday.]

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A la carte: according to a menu or list that prices items separately

Among the more fascinating sites upon which one can see the English language being used are restaurant menus and signs. Some of these are completely unrelated to the food itself – I recently visited a cafe in Pune where patrons were informed in no uncertain terms, “READING WRITING USE OF LAPTOP STRICTLY PROHIBITED”, conditions that might have led to difficulties where reading the menu and ordering food were concerned. Nissim Ezekiel famously wrote a poem based on the noticeboard at his favourite Irani cafe which had a long list of things that patrons were not supposed to do, including “No bargaining/ No water to outsiders/ No change/ No telephone/ No match sticks/ No discussing gambling/ No newspaper/ No combing/ No beef/ No leg on chair/”. One wonders what patrons were allowed to do.

But signs and menus (or in one case, Meenu) that deal with food are far more exciting. It is amazing to note, for example, the new and wonderful forms that a basic dish like matar-paneer takes on asit travels across the country. One can sample mutter-panir, mater-panner, mottor-paneer, cheese-peas (to attract the foreign clientele, perhaps?), often within two hundred metres of each other. You could also order some toast, or “tost”, accompanied by omelette, omlet, omlit, or even crumbled eggs. Or Garlic Bread with Chesse, which is sadly less about the intellectual stimulation and more about the calories. A venue in Calcutta practically bludgeons you with the perplexing sign “CHICKEN HUNGER TASTE”. Chinese food options include chowmin, chomin, gobi manchurian, and gopi manjuree. If you're lucky enough to be in a place which serves alcohol, you could even have a Child Bear on the side.

It's far too easy to mock the dhabas and reasonably inexpensive restaurants though – especially since the food they serve is frequently delicious. It is far more satisfying to visit an expensive place, where the people writing the menu have attempted to make the food sound as wonderful as possible with prose that grows thicker and purpler by the moment. What you thought was a dosai is actually a golden rice pancake, crisped to perfection with coconut chutney offering a transcendent experience. On Valentine's Day I visited a restaurant in Delhi that had hopefully marked at least half the items on its menu as having aphrodisiac properties (artichokes, who knew?). They had also written flowery and ungrammatical pieces of poetry to describe their cocktails, making me particularly keen to sample something called “First Kiss”:

“Kiss is a lovely trick designed by creature to stop speech, two souls but with single thought, two heart but beats as one. Served with a slice of banana.”

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Lexicography: The editing or making of a dictionary (Merriam-Webster)

Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words. (Dr. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language)

In 1746 Samuel Johnson started his project of creating a definitive English language dictionary. There had been other works before, but none of them had been particularly satisfactory, and Johnson practically had to start out from scratch. When you think about it, it's mindboggling: that it took Johnson less than a decade to write (it was published in 1755) is amazing.
Three years later, Noah Webster, the American lexicographer, was born.
Noah Webster is the “Webster” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary (the “Merriam” part comes from the name of the publisher). Webster had very firm ideas about language and education – he believed that American students ought to learn from American, not British, books.
It was Webster who initiated a number of the differences between American and British spelling that we still see today – dropping the “u” from words like colour and flavour and changing “re” to “er” in centre. I do not know whether he was responsible for changing “doughnut” into “donut” (I will never accept this spelling. It is pointless and makes no sense), but he did apparently try to change “tongue” into “tung”. Fortunately it never caught on.
Webster genuinely believed – and lets face it, he had a point – that the rules of English language spelling were far too convoluted and could do with simplifying. He also seems to have wanted not only to definitely distinguish American English from British English, but to create a standardised language for Americans. In addition, he added new words that were unique to America. When Webster's dictionary was published in 1928, it was big enough for two volumes and contained seventy thousand words – almost thirty thousand more than Dr. Johnson's version.
What I find fascinating about Webster's dictionary is that it was written as a means to an end – the author had these stated goals that he hoped his dictionary could achieve. Dr. Johnson occasionally stuck a few hilariously snarky opinions of his own into his dictionary definitions (see “Oats: a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”, or “Monsieur: a term of reproach for a Frenchman”) but there's no sustained effort to make the reader subscribe to Dr. Johnson's opinions – on language or anything else. Which is why, while Johnson's dictionary is more fun to read (as far as you can call reading a dictionary fun), Webster's is fascinating for showing clearly that even dictionaries are not ideologically innocent. And once you've figured that out, language becomes much more fun to play with.

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