Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Oyinkan Braithwaite's MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER (Narr Adepero Oduye)

I've always hated the saying that two people "fight like sisters," though at times I've also been grateful to hear it, once I realized that the kind of guy (it's always a cishet dude) who uses it is one I needn't associate with beyond what's necessary for politeness. Kind of like the guy who spends the whole first date bitching about his ex. There are red flags and then there are gigantic swaths of fabric the color of arterial blood and still wet enough to drip and fully, it sure smells like iron in here all is a sudden...

My Sister, the Serial Killer is first and foremost a novel about sisterhood, about a relatively plain but infinitely capable, patient and compassionate older sister, Korede, and a gorgeous, glamorous and slightly spoiled younger one, Ayoola. Korede works as a nurse in a hospital where she is highly respected, if not exactly universally liked, and is up for a promotion there; Ayoola gets jetted off to places like Dubai for weekend shopping sprees and night life on the arms of rich and shady businessmen. 

Guess which one their mom likes best. 

And which one a handsome doctor who has had Korede friend-zoned for years falls head-over-heels for after meeting her just once.

By the time Dr. Handsome meets Ayoola, though, we have learned that Korede's bombshell sister has an annoying habit of killing her boyfriends "accidentally" and "in self-defense" -- and of relying on her calm and competent, medically trained sibling to help her do away with the evidence and clean everything up.

Now Korede must watch as her crush falls in love with her sister, and seems handpicked by fate to be Ayoola's fifth victim (though at the time they meet, Number Three has only just been pulled out of the trunk of Korede's car and dumped into the lake). 

That all could feel very plot-by-numbers, especially given the short length of the novel (just above four hours in Adupero Odunye's note perfect narration); it could have resulted in a very formulaic novel. Debut novelist Oyinkan Braithwaite, though, saves her book from this fate by giving her point of view character an emotional candor that lets us really feel her conflicts as she goes about her complicated days at work and at home, and by giving us some very unusual and touching plot devices that carry her further into her dilemmas, like a lovely sub-plot concerning Korede's relationship with a coma patient at her hospital. Which sub-plot manages, deftly, to have a significant impact on the main plot. Braithwaite knows what she's doing.

We get to see Korede taking on the unaccustomed mantle of officially acknowledged leadership (having been an obvious but unrewarded leader for years beforehand) at the hospital, struggle with her feelings for Dr. Handsome and her fears for him, and deal with both her deep concern for and growing resentment of Ayoola*, often in the same taut and affecting scene, making My Sister, the Serial Killer a perfect little jewel of a novel that rewards your tiny investment of time in reading it far out of proportion to its brevity. I look forward to more of Braithwaite's work. And I guess I have to tweak my search parameters a bit in future, too.  I obviously don't read enough thrillers, you guys. 

*Beautifully complicated by the fact that part of her objection to the relationship between Dr. Handsome and her sister is that he doesn't love Ayoola for any of the reasons Korede thinks make Ayoola worthy of being loved; at one point when Korede asks him point blank why he loves Ayoola, all he can tell her is that Ayoola is "beautiful and perfect," meaning he doesn't know Ayoola at all. Meanwhile, Korede is listing off all of Ayoola's best qualities, which only Korede knows, in her head. That's a very good sister!

Saturday, January 27, 2024

Ned Beauman's VENOMOUS LUMPSUCKER (Narr by John Hastings)

I didn't know how much I'd been wanting Ned Beauman to write some actual speculative fiction, preferably also with reduced Nazi content) until Ned Beauman wrote some actual speculative fiction that still made me laugh, bitterly. 

Venomous Lumpsucker is even more of a departure from what I've become accustomed to in Beauman's work than the above suggests. Instead of a history-less historical fiction, it is every bit as science fictional as, say, The Mountain in the Sea or War with the Newts. Instead of romantic and sexual obsessions, we have characters seeking redemption and atonement, both for their own sakes and for humanity's. Instead of biting satire, we have envenomed biting satire.

The title fish is an imaginary species of cleaner fish (like pilot fish or wrasse),* that, yes, injects venom in its bite, but more importantly, in its cooperative behavior the lone scientist studying them compares to that of Asian gangsters, it shows signs of significant intelligence. Maybe even greater than dolphin-level. Maybe as great as ours allegedly is. Or as great as that of certain Newts or Octopuses.

It is, of course, on the edge of human-caused extinction in the near-future world of this novel. And if its would-be saviors are anything to go on, it's going to go right over that edge really, really soon. 

Karin Ressaint and her accidental partner in species preservation, Mark Halyard, both work in the Byzantine new extinction industry, a complex and insincere global system that makes the fossil fuel industry's token efforts to combat climate change look, well, no, those still look horribly feeble and hollow but, well, actually, it's hard to say which is worse. Suffice it to say that Karin's job is evaluating the intelligence levels of endangered species who will be made extinct by any proposed economic activity in order to determine how much money the proposing enterprise will have to fork over for killing off the species. Intelligent species cost more. There is a whole system of Extinction Credits involved in this that I'm not going to mess with explaining here, but that's basically it. Our future global society, in Beauman's savagely jaundiced view, will have corporations, and thus everybody else, fully accepting species extinction as just another cost of doing business, while nobody even pretends to consider not doing the things that will cause extinctions -- and also a whole gross derivatives market built on top of the credit system. In which executives with inside knowledge occasionally dabble, because of course they do. 

Such a one is Mark Halyard, who works for the gigantic sea-bottom mining company whose next project will most likely wipe out the venomous lumpsucker. But since he and his colleagues game the system better than anybody, they're even less worried about things than usual, because they're on the verge of yet another successful attempt at changing the legal definition of "extinction" into something with bigger loopholes to buzz on through; namely that even if the last actual living member of a species dies off, that species won't technically be extinct as long as its genome, tissue samples, brain wave patterns, etc, have all been preserved well enough for them to be brought back to life, Jurassic Park style, in some theoretical future when we'll somehow have magically fixed up the damage we did that killed them off in the first place. Because of course we're totally going to do that someday, guys. It'll be great. Just wait. 

At first these two characters would seem to be at odds with one another, but as the plot ramps up and horrible unforeseen happenstances just happen to happen, they find they kind of have a common goal: to minimize the damage done by poorly controlled autonomous mining equipment and Halyard's ill-timed foray into playing the Extinction Credit Market. Oh, and an apocalyptic hack, but we'll get to that.

Along the way they visit corporate-run wildlife preserves (so underfunded but under so much pressure to succeed at any cost that the manager of the one our duo visits has secretly agreed to allow toxic waste to be dumped, in leaky drums, right in the middle of the Pristine Preserve), climate refugee camps (in which a gross new zoonotic disease has emerged that does disgusting cosmetic damage to cattle and the human serfs who herd them -- refugees are cheaper even than robots for some kinds of labor) and a libertarian sea-stead community that might as well be Rapture from Bioshock right before everybody gave it up for lost -- and that's just all in the book's first half. Because they're on the trail of a mystery as well as desperately trying to find other populations of venomous lumpsuckers; they're also on the trail of who or whatever hacked and destroyed the entire system that preserved all of those DNA sequences and tissue samples and recordings of mating calls and habitat data in one swift attack right before Ressaint and Halyard met up.

And every stop shows us more and more examples of cynical depravity on both petty and grandiose scales. I especially howled at a character met in Not-Rapture, a Professional Conservationist who funds his noble and legit operations by taking samples of actually endangered species and, with the help of a Mad Scientist, tweaks the DNA just a little bit, then returns the "evidence" of a "whole new species" to the wild to be discovered by habitat monitoring robots, thus earning tradable Extinction Credits when the government "saves" the nonexistent pseudo-species.

I mean, this is still a Ned Beauman novel.

Once again, the novel has multiple endings, and none of them are exactly satisfying, but I think in this case the unsatisfying endings have a definite point: tidy endings are products of art rather than reality; in the real world, we're all just muddling through and doing what we can at least half-assedly convince others is our "best"; nobody is really in charge; there isn't a plan; problems are never solved but only kicked, can-like, down the road. Anybody who tells you differently probably just embezzled a bunch of money from their employer and wants your help in laundering the loot.

Fucking Ned Beauman.

*Of course I only added that parenthetical note because I think "wrasse" is a cool word that's fun to say or otherwise use. 

Tuesday, January 2, 2024

NO DUCKS GIVEN: Day Three: 2 January, 2024

the fact that we're broke because I had cancer, the fact that that broke us, it broke us, the fact that I shouldn't say that because here we are, still kicking... the fact that Phoebe helped us out and we'll never be able to pay her back...

I'm not even a hundred pages into Ducks, Newburyport but I can already see that we're going to at least touch on everything that could make a person fret circa 2018 before I'm through the thousand or so yet to come, like an Infinite Jest for grown-ups. Without any embarrassing attempts at AAVE, I'm guessing/hoping.

I went through a year of cancer treatments *at a remove* a decade or so ago, when my dad was diagnosed -- very early by a family doctor who was a little boy when my dad was in his prime, who noticed that my dad's voice had profoundly changed during that doctor's years of medical school and army service -- with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. But he was already on Medicare and so the financial hit was negligible, and the diagnosis was early enough that all he ever needed was a tonsillectomy and a few rounds of monoclonal antibodies and he was still cancer-free when he died last month of Alzheimer's and an opportunistic infection. But if it had hit him in his prime, when that family physician was still a kid and those drugs weren't around and Dad would have had to go the chemo route, it absolutely would have broken us. Our narrator caught a bullet that we dodged. But as she says, they're still kicking; whatever Leo does for a living earns enough to keep them in their house and feeding four children while she does unpaid labor at home and apparently supplements their income by selling homemade pies? Which, how much money can she actually make that way?


By the way, I'm sick of typing "unnamed narrator." Since she seems to have sisters named Abby and Phoebe, I've decided to start calling her Gabby, because her internal monologue is very gabby indeed and it matches nicely with the "bee" phoneme at the end of the others' names. And it was my very own personal nickname as a little girl who made frequent appearances in my mother's newspaper column that she wrote until my sister and I were old enough that we might have friends who could read it and mine it for things to tease us about. She gave us each code names to further shield us a bit: Gabby and Gus. Though everybody knew and none of our school mates were ever imaginative enough to seek ammunition in the newspaper.

Am I trying to hard to identify with this character?

Anyway, it's really mother and daughter relationships that loom large in the chunk I read today. Gabby, we learn, is still dealing with the somewhat recent loss of her own mother, whom she calls Mommy in her head (and yes, this makes my own eyes leak because it's only two weeks tomorrow since I lost my Daddy and yes, I still called him Daddy to his face even as I gave him his last kiss goodbye when he was just starting to turn cold), and her daughter Stacy* is a teenager so disapproving of everything that Gabby does as to make Gabby sort of low key afraid of all teenaged girls. 

We already know that Stacy is quite outraged by what she has recently learned about the history of slavery in the U.S. and successfully has applied abolitionist reasoning to argue her way -- and by extension, her siblings' way -- out of having a share in household chores. I wonder how much longer it's going to be before Gabby is being blamed for Trump (still president at the time of this novel), climate change, wage stagnation, health care costs, maybe even for getting cancer. Angry teenagers paint with very broad brushes.

Another motif that keeps coming up is famous old shipwrecks, first the Titanic and now the SS La Bourgogne of 1898, which hit another ship rather than an iceberg and which is infamous for the poor ratio of crew to passenger survival rate because "the crew kicked and stabbed the passengers so they could get on the lifeboats" and so only one woman was saved and 300 drowned. In Gabby's opinion, the Bourgogne was a worse disaster than the Titanic and I think she has persuaded me. But so, why does Gabby know so much about shipwrecks? It's that what she reads about in her vanishingly small spare time? Did she write papers about them in college? Was she in the Navy before she became a mother, full-time or otherwise? I still have so many questions.

But there are still no ducks, still no Newburyport.

*Whom I'm now more certain is Gabby's daughter from her first marriage, because Gabby recalls buying Stacy a miniature piano at a junk shop the day after Leo proposed to Gabby. And this probably just adds to Stacy's hostility, if she, for instance, resents having a stepdad? Or any of the many other things that children of divorce have feelings about? Unless maybe her bio-dad died and Gabby was a widow before marrying Leo? Like I've said, so many questions!

Monday, January 1, 2024

NO DUCKS GIVEN: Day Two: 1 January, 2024


Last night on Mastodon, where I happily landed not long after Lonny Emeralds turned Twitter into Xitter, I saw a venn diagram that could maybe serve as a back cover for Lucy Ellman's massive torrent-of-consciousness novel,  Ducks, Newburyport.

Ducks, Newburyport, of course, pre-dates COVID-19 and so neither Ellman nor her unnamed narrator knows what an "anti-masker" might be apart from someone who, say, really hates Halloween, but the toddler and mountain lion overlapping just cried out to me to be included in these early days of exploring this literary chonk. 

Our narrator, parent to four children, has certainly had experience with toddlers (and may still be having same; it sounds like at least youngest son Jake is in that age range,  though hey, I dragged a blankie around long into my elementary school years. What babyish habits might the baby of a family not have, really?), and the prologue-cat could well be a mountain lion of she doesn't indeed turn out to be the house cat with big dreams I initially imagined.

But... do we know for certain that toddlers don't also want to kill you? I mean, based on the novel so far, the kids are certainly wearing our narrator down to a nub and not giving her much help in keeping the household going. Her oldest, Stacy, who I'm now guessing is a teenager rather than grown and out of the house, seems to have won the chores/allowance dispute for all time by calling it "slavery" when kids are asked to pick up after themselves or each other, to say nothing of emptying the dishwasher, and so our narrator is trying to do it all. Not sustainable, ma'am. Your toddler alone will kill you (says I with no kids but with a chronic illness that makes me think that maybe I can relate...)!

What's kind of freaking me out so far in this book is how closely the narrator's thought processes and mine seem to match, as her mind wanders to the same homonyms and related yet-unrelated ideas and words. I like to think of myself as a unique individual, but am I, when some fictional character in a big fat novel, a suburban mother of four children (in contrast to my childless spinsterhood) also thinks of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Anne Shirley and Anne Elliott all at once while also considering why she hates words like "extrude." Which means that some novelist put those thoughts together and extruded these thoughts that I've felt were mine alone into a book a few years ago. On the one hand, this is comforting: I'm not alone, our shared culture and educational system have had similar results and given us things in common; on the other, well, of I'm not a unique and beautiful snowflake, then what's the point of me?

There's a podcast to which I'm an occasional and irregular listener, Gen X: This is Why, the idea of which is to explain the weird beliefs and tendencies and habits and hang-ups of people my age through the lens of the pop culture we consumed as kids. Its primary focus is on individual episodes of the TV adaptation of Laura Ingalls/Rose Wilder's libertarian pioneer fantasies, Little House on the Prairie. It's a charming show hosted by a pair of sisters who tease out loads of weird misapprehensions people our age may well have originally derived from that show in the 70s when it was on prime time. I think they're definitely onto something; famously we of the tiny forgotten demographic between the Baby Boomers and most of their children weren't only shaped by being barely supervised latchkey kids fending for themselves after school but by the books and TV shows that were aimed at us. So it actually makes perfect sense that this still-unnamed suburban housewife narrator has thought patterns and cultural touchstones so very like my own, even though I never actually read any Lucy Maud Montgomery.*

I'm beginning to suspect the our narrator, like author Ellman herself, is maybe a bit older than I, or was raised by stricter and more traditional parents than mine were; she refers, for instance, to Charles Ingalls as having an Amish-like beard, which generally means a beard without a mustache, a look far too goofy to have ever suited Mr. Michael Landon )who embodied the character as an absurdly handsome 70s sex symbol with a truly luscious head of hair, but was always clean-shaven, even in black and white as Little Joe, and never mind how he always had a sharp razor and soap and time to preen every day even in a long hard winter of near-starvation). Her Charles Ingalls is a purely literary Charles Ingalls, whereas mine is decidedly a televisual one. Michael Landon intruded on my imagination before Charles Ingalls ever got a chance, because the TV show was inescapable for a school-aged child before I was sophisticated enough to appreciate the books, by which time the last thing I wanted was to read about pioneer kids, who didn't feel different or exotic enough for a girl seeking escapism from 1970s Wyoming, where at least one classmate still pooped in an outhouse when he was at home (and was a Nellie Olson-caliber bully but also knew how to use his fists. Ask how I know) and another had to wear a baseball helmet until first grade because he'd been kicked in the head by a horse as a toddler.

Then, too, there is the fact that her homemaker idol is Irma S. "Joy of Cooking" Rombauer, whose tendency to put mayonnaise on or in everything and love of putting everything else in aspic it seems that our narrator is only now starting to question as a journeywoman adult where I was, if anything, taught to mock the Rombauers by a range of gloriously untidy and slapdash female authority figures who were happy to watch Julia Child on TV but treated her as a fantastic and unrealistic character as weird and exotic and weirdly powerful as, say, Ozma of Oz, whom our narrator has yet to mention as she has also skated around Nancy Drew. I think our paths are about to diverge, as indeed her obvious possession of a candy apple red KitchenAid stand mixer that she claims has paid for itself indicates. And I mean, after all, her author is a graduate of Evanston Township High School, and I know several other such types and, well, none of them have ever had to subsist on a diet of instant ramen and eggs unless they'd blown their stipends on beer for the week, if you know what I mean.

*Our tiny school library didn't have any, nor did our even tinier public library, and by the time the TV show with Megan Follows turned up, I was only interested in science fiction and fantasy and heartily sick of Nancy Drew, which our library had the complete series of and was my rock bottom choice to read that I nonetheless had to read a lot because there wasn't much else. It was the 1970s in Wyoming.

Sunday, December 31, 2023

NO DUCKS GIVEN, Day One: 31 December, 2023

I think 2024 might be my year of reading big fat books that I've been meaning to get around to, and I'm starting with Lucy Ellman's Ducks,Newburyport. At 1022 pages in its original edition, it's what I could reasonably call a chonk.

It's so big, in fact, that I think a regular single post on the book won't possibly do it justice, nor, in all likelihood, would breaking it into pre-arranged parts or pieces like I did with, say, 2666. So I'm going to do it diary style. However much I read in a day, that's how much I'll cover in that day's post. Maybe this will be cool and fun, maybe not.

So! Ok the last day of this dreadful year of 2023, I'm starting my very first read of Ducks, Newburyport. And away we go!

"When you are all sinew, struggle and solitude, your young – being soft, plump, vulnerable – may remind you of prey."

I was not expecting this to start off from the point of view of a mama cat, but sure, why not? We're treated to the experience of having a litter of kittens utterly depending on one in the first week of their lives, and I couldn't stop thinking of that other, entire novel from the point of view of a cat character, Robert Repino's Mort(e), which starts with the titular hero developing a close relationship with his neighbor's dog. Maybe Morte is these kittens' daddy. Who knows? Why not? This whole book could take part between early chapters of Mort(e), before the ants unleash their uplift virus that makes animals sentient. Wouldn't that be interesting?

But wait, no, is this maybe about a mountain lion or bobcat or something rather than a domestic cat, because the "den" is maybe not metaphorical and mama cat is dreaming about hunting because she actually has to hunt to produce milk? But then how much does this matter, because soon enough we're off on a giant stream-of-consciousness on the part of, I think, a suburban mom but now I don't trust my first impression interpretations at all! And if the whole book continues like this, we'll, I can see where it would be hard to break into pre-planned reading chunks so maybe I've accidentally stumbled across the perfect way to blog this?

By the way, I tried very hard to keep away from reviews or impressions of Ducks, Newburyport, having avoided even the season of the Two Month Review podcast dedicated to it, so I'd know as little as possible about the book, going in.

Our main narrator, whom we learn is indeed the parent of four children if not for sure their mother, feels like a member of my generation but I do encounter an unbridgeable divide between her(?) and me: thoughts come around a few times to the Titanic but this book was published before Oceangate so can I even relate to this character now, who doesn't think of billionaires and orcas when the subject of the Titanic comes up? Lo, how swiftly differences in understanding magnify and ramify, but isn't that why we read and write fiction?

Anyway, I find myself liking her(?) so far, even if she does begin every new thought with "the fact that" like a precocious little kid whom you shouldn't have asked what they learned in school today. I mean, I kind of was that kid, back in the halcyon days of the Nixon administration...

Meanwhile, ok, I'm pretty sure the narrator is a woman, a mother, because I've suddenly got strong Nightbitch vibes from passages like this:

...Leo really has no idea what goes on here all day, the fact that he’d probably flip out if he ever found out what’s really involved in feeding, clothing, housing and shepherding four whole kids, kidherding, the fact that my entire life is now spent catering to their needs and demands, cleaning toilets, filling lunchboxes, labeling all their personal property, shampooing and brushing hair, discussing everything, searching for lost stuff...

Amusingly, my Kindle tells me I have 25 hours and 53 minutes left in this book by the time I reach my fairly certain conclusion that the narrator is female. Which means that no, I haven't even read the jacket copy, which no doubt gives that away, right away. Buckle up!

Questions I already have on Day One of this read:
1. Who is this Stacy the narrator keeps mentioning? My guess right now is that Stacy is the narrator's grown, or at least oldest, daughter, maybe from her first marriage (begun in a silver-grey dress) while maybe the rest of the kids are from her second (blue and white dress)?
2. I originally thought Leo was the narrator's one and only husband but later she(?) mentions an Ethan. Leo is spoken of as someone who she(?) should have trained early on to help with the copious housework but later Ethan is mentioned as having a den for which he should get a pinball machine and hey, I want a den with a pinball machine! Can I have a den with a pinball machine? I would want the Addams Family one like we had at DeKline at Bard in the 90s, how about you? How about Ethan? Would Leo also like a den with a pinball machine?
3. What's up with the kitty in the prologue? I'm reminded now, as I ponder it, the lovely, lyrical passage at the beginning of Ursula K. Leguin's The Lathe of Heaven, in which the author describes a jellyfish "current-borne" and "wave-flung" and which I've always thought of as poor George's first effective dream** and that it turned him into the essentially passive character he is for most of his novel. Is this cat something our narrator is imagining or remembering or using as a lens with which to understand her life? Will she turn into a werecat the way the protagonist of Nightbitch turns into a weredog? Or are they destined to meet, woman(?) and cat, in a culminating scene a thousand pages from now?
4. Am I ever going to see a period/full stop again?
5. Is anyone attempting to translate this novel into other languages? Don't tell me it can't be done; I've read lots of Jose Saramago in English!
6. The title and cover art promised me ducks. Where are the ducks? There ought to be ducks. Send in the Ducks. And the Newburyport.

*I'm guessing Leo is her husband. But then, I thought the cat in the prologue(?) was a wee domestic cat though I still hold onto the possibility that the cat could still be a housecat with delusions of grandeur.
**Ugh, now whenever I encounter the word "effective" as a modifier of another word, my brain immediately inserts "altruism" and my mind projectile vomits with tremendous force. The 21st Century sucks so hard.

Blogger's note: I'll probably cover more grounds on this in subsequent days, but I had a big ol' pot of gumbo to make for my family's meagre New Year's Eve, which is already over and it's time for this Little Black Duck to go to bed. More tomorrow. And Tomorrow. And Tomorrow. But for now, Duck off!

Thursday, August 31, 2023

Tony Burgess' IDAHO WINTER (Narr by Tristan Morris)

"The ditches are shallow and the falls are all too short."

Sooner or later, I was bound to run into a book in which a character within that book not only discovers they are a character in a book, but also manages to have words with their author. It's been a temptingly low hanging fruit since the book tree was planted. Or something like that.

And I'm not surprised to see it in the works of Tony Burgess, whose narrators often address asides to their readers, asides that not only comment on events within the narrative but on literary tropes that are or aren't being employed, the weirdness of writing generally, etc. Ordinarily I roll my eyes at this kind of thing. But of course, this is Tony Burgess, a writer whose works I can't stop compulsively reading and re-reading, even though they horrify me body and soul the way nobody else's can unless it's maybe Jeremy C. Shipp.

Of course Idaho Winter's eponymous hero has a terrible, pitiful existence; he's in a Tony Burgess novel. He's not exactly going to be showered in praise and given everything he could ever want for his birthday and marry his childhood sweetheart and live happily ever after. But where in other novels Idaho (yes, that is his name; moreover, his dad's name is Early, as in Early Winter. But his mother is simply known as Wife. We'll get to that) might encounter language poisoned zombies, or a teeming hellscape in which zombies have been shot into orbit, there to block out the sun in their sheer twitching numbers, here his antagonists are merely everybody who knows him or meets him, and for no reason at all except that Idaho seems to have been Born to be Hated, like the hapless hero of some second-rate Middle Grade novel. Except turned up to 11. So Idaho's father, Early, only ever feeds him half-rotten (or wholly rotten; he's not picky) roadkill and uses Idaho's bedroom as a trash heap; the school crossing guard meticulously plans and maliciously executes Idaho's near-death-by-car every morning, cursing when he manages to escape today's car after she has carefully guided it to hit him at high speed; other students in his class not only treat him with grotesque unkindness but are punished by the teacher if they treat him with insufficient grotesque unkindness, making every day an unofficial competition to see who can be the meanest to Idaho Winter, with maybe an accidental actual school lesson or two.

All of this begins to change when Idaho, on the day we have first encountered the horrors of his daily existence, gets a tiny break from them when he meets a girl named Madison. Madison is so kind and has so much love for the world that she can even extend a little to Idaho, and furthermore not only shares his pain but is very much pained by the fact of his painful existence, and the two form the beginnings of Idaho's first friendship in a series of sweetly tender exchanges that are obviously setting up something horrible to happen to them both. And when it does, Idaho, who is completely alien to the concept of helping others or standing up to danger on another's behalf because there have been no examples of either in his life, runs home.

And things get weird, because Tony Burgess, author of Idaho Winter and of Pontypool Changes Everything and of The N-Body Problem*, informs us that this in no way reflects his intentions for how this scene was supposed to play out. Idaho has gone utterly rogue, off script, and, in the process, discovers that there is an actual author of all of his sorrows and that Tony Burgess is that author, and does what any sensible pre-teen boy who is all but feral and only knows how to lash out in hapless self-defense at best might do. As Burgess explains to him that his existence is so ridiculously and undeservedly horrible on purpose, the better to make his story stand out, Idaho realizes that nothing is real and that he actually has the upper hand in this weird moment.

When Tony Burgess, author of Idaho Winter, finally gets out of the closet in Idaho Winter's terrible house, he emerges into an utterly unrecognizable and bizarre world full of monsters from Idaho's unconscious (my favorite: the Mom-bats, and you'll have to read the novel to find out what those are like) and conscious thoughts and the surface of the earth is uninhabitably dangerous to characters and authors like him. When monsters finally chase him underground, he discovers a small cadre of minor characters from his story, most of whom he hadn't even sketched out beyond giving them names (leading me to of course conclude that his naming of Idaho's mother as simply Wife represents a writer's habit of using stand-in words or names in early drafts until they find the perfect moniker) and the merest beginnings of a role within the town -- which means in this world, they have almost as much agency as Idaho, though not his incredible power (comparable to that of Anthony Fremont in the famous Jerome Bixby short story/Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life", recently covered in my favorite of all the podcasts, Strange Studies of Strange Stories, nee The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast). Among them is poor Madison, now a figure of almost holy reverence but unique peril; anyone who gets too close to her not only pities her sad fate at the jaws of the wolves that attacked her and Idaho in the Before Times, but is also afflicted with paralyzing, mind-destroying sadness.

Tony Burgess, author of Idaho Winter, knowing that all of this is his fault, resolves to set things right with the help of this strange underground (including Madison, whom he somewhat ingeniously finds a way to bring along on their quest). How successful is he in doing so? Knowing that this is a Tony Burgess book, you cannot assume that he will be successful at all, just that you're going to want to see if he is. Or isn't.

The absurdity and insanity of Idaho Winter is only enhanced in audio book form by the choice of narrator, and his choices in bringing the story to us. Tristan Morris gives a prim, Niles Crane quality to the prose that is so at odds with the subject matter that the listener/reader can't help but giggle at the slapstick horrors Burgess unleashes, and handles the many challenges of bringing a book like this to life -- like rendering the muffled voice of a second head that has sprouted from the back of Mrs. Joost, the homicidal crossing guard, a head that is compelled to narrate events in real time like a deranged newscaster -- with imagination and a minimum of fancy production tricks. Read Idaho Winter in print if you prefer, but I highly recommend the audio book, which will take up only three hours or so of your time, for extra fun. And this novel is fun in addition to horrifying and depressing and gross and sad. I mean, it's Tony Burgess.

*The title of which I kept conflating with the more famous Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and thus repeatedly convinced myself I'd already read Three Body Problem for a very long time.

Saturday, July 15, 2023

Mark Lawrence's THE BOOK THAT WOULDN'T BURN

It's always the books you don't have that call to you, you know that. Not the ones already on your shelf. They can wait.
A new trilogy from Mark Lawrence is an inherently wonderful prospect, but one set in a giant, labyrinthine library that not only fills an entire hollowed-out mountain but whose inside is probably bigger than the outside and allows people who explore it enough to engage in a limited form of time travel? Aww, Mr. Lawrence, you wrote a(nother) book just for little old me? You shouldn't have. But I'm glad you did.
 
The Book that Wouldn't Burn is kind of set in the same world as Lawrence's Broken Empire pair-of-trilogies-and-some-sidequels*, but absolutely does not require any knowledge of those other books to enjoy. There are simply a few Easter eggs to tell us that the Library and its people exist somewhere in that world's timeline, plus the name of the city at the base of the Library's Mountain is Crath, as in Jorg of Ancrath. It might prove, in the projected next two books, to have more and more definite ties to the Broken Empire, but it needn't; they'd just be grace notes for Lawrence's fans, of whom I am one.

We explore this tiny-yet infinite world with one Livira, whom we meet as a little girl who shares a precarious existence with a kin-unit of maybe 40 people in a settlement out in The Dust, living on a meager bean crop carefully tended with water from a single well. We figure out quickly that Livira, nicknamed for a tenacious desert weed, is another avatar of the girl Lawrence likes best to write: smarter than her society expects or wants her to be, fierce, inquisitive and bluntly practical. Her perilous existence out in the Dust where she regularly gets into scraps with boys much bigger than she and fetches water from a well her settlement keeps having to deepen to continue its usefulness (and their survival) would be a fascinating study on its own, a Fremen tale without a sietch, like the original settlers on Arrakis, but Lawrence has different designs for little Livira.

For a start, humans are not/no longer the only sentient species on this broken earth, as we quickly learn when a vicious band of Sabbers (the word just means "enemy" in the common language of Livira's people) attack and destroy and round up all the human children they can find, whether to eat or sell as slaves, they're not telling, but no sooner has Livira discovered that at least one of them can sort of speak her language and has started annoying that individual with endless questions, than the Sabber train gets derailed by a loosely organized military or paramilitary band from Crath City, locus of the famous Library, to which it has always been Livira's secret wish to immigrate someday. 
Be careful what you wish for, etc.

Livira quickly learns that, while the Sabbers are regarded by Crath City's inhabitants and their King (who has everybody convinced he's descended from the original builder of the library and no, it is not possible to encounter mention of him and not wonder if he's an ancestor or descendant of Jorg of the first Broken Empire series) as barely more than animals -- it is Known that they interbreed with dogs, for example -- "Dusters" like Livira and her friends are considered hardly any more human; her kind are fit only to work and live in the city's sewers.

But of course Livira is not going to settle for being perceived or treated like that, and by the time she actually enters the city, she has already convinced one of her new captors, a man named Malar who quickly became my favorite character, that she might be worth a bit more to him if given a chance. Eager to be rid of this tiny pain in the ass, Malar steers her into the notice of a mysterious man named Yute. Yute sees her potential even more clearly, and picks her for a point-making stunt in the "Allocation" process that assigns young Crathians to their future roles in the adult world. When she then bulls her way into making an even bigger Point than Yute probably intended, she ends up as his latest protƩgƩ and a trainee inside the Library.

Interwoven with Livira's story is that of Evar, a young man who is trapped and has grown up, Piranesi-style, with four other children deep inside the Library itself, which is, of course, completely uninhabited and falling to ruin, but a Chamber within it has been semi-repurposed for human survival with a central pool and book-soil in which a small crop of foodstuffs can be grown. Evar and his siblings all emerged as young children from a mysterious Library device called The Mechanism, about which more in a bit, into which each had disappeared at various points in the distant past, not having aged despite having been missing for perhaps centuries. Alll, except for Evar, have come out of the ordeal with a preternaturally acute and useful skill set that amounts to superhuman expertise. One is a master psychologist, one the greatest assassin since the word was coined, another has most of the history of the world crammed into his head, and the group's only girl is a one-woman army, with a headful of tactics, strategy and weapons-lore that matches her homicidal hatred of the Sabbers. Evar, though, just has a hole in his memory and a vague notion that he spent his Mechanism-time with a beloved Woman whom he knew, even as a little kid, was his Destiny.

Evar and his "siblings" have been raised by strange and powerful android-like functionaries of the Library that reminded me of nothing so much as the bakelite robots who raise Ishmael the Cyclops Boy in B. Catling's Vorrh Trilogy, the Assistant and the Soldier. We learn much more about these two mysterious guardians as the novel unfolds, but that way lies way too much spoileration, even for this blog.

The Mechanism from which Evar emerged is a fascinating bit of kit, even for an infinite Borgesian Library: a person who enters it with a book winds up experiencing that book in a very direct and lifelike way that alters that person's character and experience of the world forever. This is how Evar's siblings all acquired their superpowers originally: they wen't into the Mechanism with authoritative non-fiction books under various circumstances (the one female in Evar's world, for instance, whose name is Clovis, was hidden in the Mechanism as a small girl with a Big Book of War Stuff right after watching Sabbers slaughter her entire family and kin-group and yes, Clovis is very much more like Lawrence's typical tough little girl and serves here perhaps to show us what Livira would have been like without the Library), and as part of their continuing education when the five of them came out of the Mechanism together, Evar's siblings have all continued to use the Mechanism to broaden and deepen their abilities. Evar, though, avoids the Mechanism, emotionally haunted by his lack of real memories of his experiences within it. The big difference we know of between Evar's and his siblings' Mechanism backgrounds is that Evar went into the mechanism with a novel.

Considerable space in the plot is devoted to the wanderings of Livira and of Evar through the fascinating mysteries of the Library**, which eventually bring them together, but once they're very tenuously together, Lawrence explodes both of their worlds in fascinating and (for me at least) surprising fashion. It is telegraphed early on that little Livira will eventually grow into Evar's mysterious dream woman, but none of that prepares us for how this develops; I thought I had anticipated the nature of the obstacles to their relationship but I was delightfully wrong! And the actual antagonistic forces pack even more of an emotional wallop than I'd been bracing for. 

There is also some of Lawrence's best prose-craft to date, as when Evar, freshly parted from Livira by cruel fate, contemplates how much she means to him:
...he could do nothing but love, need and want her. Whatever she looked like and whatever crimes her people had wrought, she was Livira, coiled around his heart, woven through his veins. He would find her again... at least there would be an honest parting between them, not one forced by sudden circumstance. And having lived his life within the confines of a library Evar knew that endings were important.
I haven't yet read everything that Lawrence has published -- for reasons beyond me, for instance, my local public library has yet to purchase either of the sequels to The Girl and the Stars -- but this feels like somewhat new territory for Lawrence's fierce skinny weed-girl heroine, whose relationships with other characters usually revolves around friendship and sisterhood rather than romantic love. He writes the latter as well as the former, all while also crafting my favorite kind of novel hands down: one that begs to be read again immediately from the beginning after a revelation near the end invites me to completely change my understanding of key story elements.

I really, really hope that Mark Lawrence and his crew at Random Penguin don't dilly dally too much in letting me back into the Library, is what I'm saying. I haven't been this tortured by the immediate unavailability of a book's sequels in a long, long time and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with myself while I'm waiting, besides, of course, read The Book that Wouldn't Burn again.

*Or at least it takes place in a world that can access the Broken Empire World via its Lewisian Wood Between the Worlds-esque "Exchange." And yes, Livira and Evar have some very Digory and Polly moments together there, but, as Livira eventually comes to discover, in whatever iteration of the old stories she is thinking, she herself contains both the Witch and the Princess, because Mark Lawrence is serious about his fantasy.

**The biggest of which are what it's really for and if it is a net good for the world or not. We come to learn that civilizations have destroyed themselves utterly in possibly planet-killing ways, over and over again, always with the help of the knowledge they recover once somebody discovers the Library. We just never seem to overcome the warlike side of our nature that leads us to harness knowledge for its destructive killing power, and this entire novel serves very strongly as an indictment of the alas, still very common, perspective that knowledge isn't any good unless it's practical, that culture and the humanities are useless and the people who want to study them are frivolous drains on society's resources, but Lawrence doesn't err on the side of "no, the humanities are More Important," just keeps firmly pointing out that knowledge without philosophy is dangerous as fuck.