Benjamin Myers' THE PERFECT GOLDEN CIRCLE

He knows there is something else under all this. He knows there exists an under-England, a chthonic place of hidden rivers and buried relics, of the bones of extinct animals and battle-slain bodies. Layer upon layer of it, laminations of land, each made from stories packed tightly by the weight of time so that they become something else, just as wood becomes charcoal. So many stories, so many unseen footsteps. So many secrets that go beyond the limitations of the here and now.

I have a well- documented history of loving things like crop circles and of loving the people who love them. One of my favorite people ever to live was an aficionado; it's over this shared love that we first became friends. I still miss Mac Tonnies, all the time. 

I wish he was still around to have enjoyed The Perfect Golden Circle, Benjamin Myers' delightful character study of English eccentricity and the single- minded pursuit of a certain very unusual art form. 

 The Perfect Golden Circle is a delightful piece of conventional prose fiction, structured entirely around the serial creation by two men of vast crop circles of increasing scope and intricacy, intercut with snippets, John Dos Passos-style, of public reactions to same, mostly via the press. 

One way in which this novel, which takes two real "land artists" from the 1970s and 80s as inspiration but in no way tells their actual stories, really stands out is in its treatment of male friendship as something that can just be, without elaborate shared backstories or pseudo-psychoanalysis or invented conflicts or petty rivalries or toxicity of any kind. While they are very different men with no real reason to even know each other, let alone spend hours in the pub planning and more in the farm fields of England in the dead of night executing their plans, they do all of that, always together. Falklands War veteran Calvert and crustpunk Redbone don't even have a meet cute in the text of the story; we meet them in the third year of their project, the year they've decided to go beyond having a strange shared hobby and turn it into, as Redbone describes it at one point, a pursuit of art, myth and mystery. 

But the book's primary delight is describing the near-miss adventures the pair experience over the course of their summer as various other denizens of the British countryside at night, from rabbit-hunting weasels (in more than one sense) to tipsy toff landowners to the ever-increasing number of crop circle fanciers, armed with crackpot theories, homemade detective gear and flashlights, who are hoping to catch the aliens/fairies/secret agents/whatever in flagrante.

This was an especially enjoyable read for me on the heels of Andy Sharp's English Heretic, similarly concerned with English geography but altogether different in how the landscape might be interpreted. Here the land is scrutinized by Calvert's experienced logistical eye as he seeks the right field for the right project, which must not only be big and flat and full of ripening cereal crops but must also be accessible to two guys in an ancient VW van, and near a feature, natural or man-made, of sufficient height and, again, accessibility from which to view their creations in all their bizarre glory. 

It's better still if they have an interesting local name which can be incorporated into their private nomenclature. The best of these is the Cuckoo Spittle Thought Bubble, with the first two words coming from the name of the elevated landmark and the latter two describing the design they pressed, step by step with planks and ropes, into the grasses -- carefully and respectfully so as not to break the grain stalks and ruin the harvest. 

Ruining the harvest comes later, when the press blows up the sensation and people start flocking from as far away as exotic Oklahoma and Wyoming (heh) to see and study Calvert and Redbone's work, camping and trampling and dumping and landing helicopters. At least the more enterprising farmers can make up their losses by charging admission to see their new wonder.

Another source of great charm in The Perfect Golden Circle is the pair's consistent enjoyment of the attention given their work and the wild speculations about it. They take particular pleasure in seeing how close the press comes, in naming their productions on television or on the front pages of daily, sometimes national or international newspapers, to giving them the same names Calvert and Redbone did themselves. 

I'm reliably told by a friend on one of my book-focused Discord servers that Benjamin Myers is a reliable source for very, very good and beautiful books, but that no two of his are very much alike. Based on this one, I'll be exploring more of his work soon -- but not too soon, because I don't know if you've really noticed, but I'm on a year of trying to read only one book by any one author, and I'm doing my best to stick to that, but it's hard when I keep getting invited on buddy reads and book club forays. So I might cave and get, say The Gallows Pole or something sooner. Who knows?

Pip Adam's AUDITION

I am thinking very hard for a moment but trying not to go quiet like we did the last time we tried to think very hard.

One of the sillier, yet rather profound, bits of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy concerns the Belcerebons of the planet Kakrafoon. Formerly a highly civilized and quiet race, their perceived smugness about their civilization annoyed the rest of the galaxy into afflicting them with the dread social disease of telepathy. Once so punished, in order not to broadcast their every stray thought to the rest of the world, Belcerebons had to keep up a constant stream of chatter, at the expense of all other activity. Their planet thus became a very noisy and inane place.

I mention this because a similar fate, though not under similar circumstances, has seemingly befallen the crew/passengers aboard the star ship Audition, a craft powered by sound. And while any sound would originally have done, these crew members soon have to resort solely to talking because, well, they're not on the Audition because of their superior skills or merits, but because they are afflicted by a freakish and continuous growth. This growth, which has resulted in our characters all having been about three times normal human size in every dimension at the time of the ship's departure from Earth, has left them, as Pip Adam's touching, inventive and at times weirdly theatrical novel, Audition, begins, confined to the three largest spaces on board ship, into which they now barely fit so they can't move anymore, can't make the sounds of footsteps or opening and closing doors or rustling fabric; the only sound they can make is by talking, calling out to one another by way of a continuous babble of conversation, which at first is just status reports on how their legs are losing circulation and maybe gonna die and fall off or how the big skylight on the basketball court where one is trapped is now just a keyhole relative to the size of their still-growing eye. When that runs out, they start trying to piece together how they got there, but are quickly thwarted by a big problem: they don't seem to remember anything from their pasts except that they had been launched into space because they were too big to stay on Earth.

They were the unwanted. That was clear to them, perhaps it had been from the start. They took up too much room.

Then we start to get a little more information about the crew members - Alba, Stanley and Drew - from the perspective of one of their earthside trainers in an extended flashback. The Giants, as they came to be called, have been herded to a big sports stadium in Europe to be trained for their special mission: they are to be sent in giant spaceships to explore and maybe colonize other parts of the galaxy. A joke is made that this will make room for 540 regular sized humans, as many jokes are made at the Giants' expense, for as they have grown, so have the distances that their nerve impulses must travel. Like the dinosaurs to which these poor people are often compared, they seem slow and stupid to the rest of us, and dangerous, and greedy for resources, and did I mention dangerous? People who are different are always dangerous, you guys. Even if they can't accidentally step on you and squash you like a grape.

But so before these Giants get launched into space, they must be "trained" -- really, conditioned, brainwashed even -- to follow patterns of behavior and belief set by the normal-sized humans (though, the Giants always tell us, they hate being called that), and to forget as much as possible their lives before the stadium they've been taught to call the "Classroom." Presumably this is so they don't develop resentments over how they were treated prior to the "launch 'em into space" solution was adopted, but also in general to make them more biddable. Thus all their prior habits of speech in the book's introduction begin to make sense as programmed responses. They've really done a beautiful job with the ship, you guys. The Classroom was beautiful, too. The teachers were so kind. The food was so delicious.

And so they all find themselves in space, unable to recall anything about their previous lives as ordinary human beings, compulsively responding to lights and sounds like trained monkeys and unable to hold on to the simplest thoughts once a behavioral trigger is activated. It's horrible to behold, even just in print, a real tragedy that seems inescapable even before they come up with a seemingly doomed idea: 

We thought if we broke the ship, we'd remember,' Drew says. 'That we'd get it back. Ourselves before the classrooms.' The ship settles again, suddenly, and the sound levels out. 'And we were wrong,' Alba says.

It's pretty much the most tragic observation I've seen made in speculative fiction, and remember, I've read stuff like The Sheep Look Up multiple times. But...

About 2/3 of the way through this gently strange and obscurely distressing book, Audition morphs into a kind of first contact story, and once if the best, in terms of conveying the truly alien, that I've encountered that was not written by Peter Watts. Because what our trio encounters at first adjusts them/itself into something in accord with Alba's and Stanley's and Drew's senses and understanding, accommodating them so beautifully they think they're maybe in Heaven, but then starts pulling them along to meet the new universe and awareness halfway in a very subtle and convincing manner:

Stanley and Drew are beside her and they’re under the tree where they spent the first night. It is changed. Some kind of autumn has come over it. Its branches reach the ground now and it’s a different colour. The sky around it has also turned. Everything is shifting from the pastels into much more saturated colours. The brightening has been happening, Alba now realises, gradually the whole time they’ve been there. But now it’s at a point where it affects everything. The whole world sings in the bath of the colour field that comes from the sky but the tree has definitely changed colour, it isn’t an effect of the sky. The three newcomers who aren’t that new anymore shade their eyes from the brightness but T.J., A.J. and R.J. look at them with open eyes, waiting for them to sit down. The locals are stiffer in their movements and possibly taller. They sit in a more anchored way than the first day they sat together. They are taking up a different space. Alba looks at Stanley and then at Drew and none of them have changed in the same way. No physical change has come over them at all. They are the same as when they first arrived. Which surprises her because her insides feel completely rearranged.

I can't say much more about this aspect of the novel without giving too much away, so I'll just take a moment to marvel at how it transforms the entire rest of the story, including some pretty distressing material that comes up once our trio manages to break their conditioning and remember how they knew each other before the Classroom, before they even became Giants. Audition isn't here to coddle us and our delicate little feelings (though it's not here to brutalize us, either), you guys.

What it is here for, is to ask us to ask ourselves how certain we are that the world has to be the way it is now, that people have to have the relationships that they have, that what we know now about the universe is all that we can know, and that we are right about what we think we do know. That's all a pretty big job for a novelist, but judging from this book, my first read from both author Pip Adams (and from her fascinatingly off-beat U.S. publisher, Coffee House Press, which, more from them very soon!), Pip Adam is up for the job.

I think I'm going to need to read this one again sometime soon.

Andy Sharp's THE ENGLISH HERETIC COLLECTION: RITUAL HISTORIES, MAGICKAL GEOGRAPHY

Can we use film geographies to create cultural maps across a slice of time?

A long, long time ago when I first became concerned that all I ever seemed to read or watch was fiction, I made a particular effort to start adding more non-fiction to my cultural diet, went to the University of Wyoming's Coe Library (from which you could check out any number of books for a whole semester), and grabbed a big stack of stuff. One of which was Simon Schama's then-brand-new Landscape and Memory, a book that in many ways changed my life. Among other things, it led me to concoct, sometime later, one of my odder blog posts about how I personally had imagined the landmarks and locations of The Lord of the Rings when I was a kid.

Landscape and Memory is just that kind of read. But it's one that is almost sui generis; it wasn't until I discovered* W.G.Sebald and especially Rings of Saturn that I found anything to compare. 

Now I've found a third such project, a book that sums up a unique artist's strange and fascinating and definitely Ballardian (he even references Simon Sellars!**) oeuvre, English Heretic. A project that seems to have been aimed specifically at my little head but about which I'd been totally unaware until somehow I learned about Andy Sharp and The English Heretic Collection: Ritual Histories, Magickal Geography.***

Imagined in direct opposition to English Heritage and all it stands for, Andy Sharp describes his English Heretic project as a way to "use place as a means of fecundating the imagination." The resulting book is a survey of decades' worth of incredible creativity and energy, rendered in very serviceable prose, with lots of astonishing little insights popping up like graveyard ghouls from a cemetery that's older than my entire country.

As the quote I used to start this post indicates, a lot of Sharp's work begins and ends with film locations and sets, especially those appearing in the low-budget esoterica of the 1970s folk horror masterpieces he loves (many of which can be enjoyed via YouTube or Tubi as of this writing), like Witchfinder General or The Blood on Satan's Claw or The Shout or The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, aka Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. I have seen precisely none of these films, but I'm looking forward to doing something about that soon. Judging from the trailers, I'm in for a pretty good time!

Anyway, a discussion of the latter film yields exceptional fun: The filming of Living Dead took place partly at a somewhat famous church, Hathersage in Derbyshire, and was interrupted by a coach load of tourists who "on witnessing the zombie orgies informed the authorities." The film crew had been working and camping it there for three days without official permission, of course. By the way:

The tourist party had come to Hathersage to view Little John's grave which takes up seven feet of the burial ground. Little John is the church's most famous inhabitant. I'd like to imagine Little John's reanimated corpse joining forces with Guthrie**** and his undead merry men to reap anthropophagic revenge on the do-gooding snitchers of Hathersage.

Sharp goes on to connect elements of the film's plot with actual local folklore, but leaves us to speculate whether the filmmakers were consciously aware of that folklore when making the movie. I mean, it's way more fun that way, right?

One location I can't believe Sharp didn't write about in any of these projects of his, is Winspit Quarry, though. You may think you don't know this place, but, friends, if you've ever watched much of the original Doctor Who series, you've likely spent rather a lot of time looking at it: it's that quarry Privately owned but publicly accessible at your own risk, this has to be one of the most haunted locations on the Sceptered Isle. It's stood in for so many alien planets, you guys. The psychic ghosts of so many rubber-bodied aliens are stalking it. And it's not like Andy Sharp doesn't know his Doctor Who or his Blake's Seven or anything. But maybe this is simply too famous a location for him.

Sharp isn't only concerned with films, though; another major cultural touchstone for this work is most of my very favorite psychologist, James Hillman's, later works after he developed his "acorn" theory of personality development, which I first encountered in a book he collaborated on with Michael Ventura, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotheraphy and the World is Getting Worse.***** The personality at its youngest and least developed is Hillman's acorn, which is tiny and nut-shaped but contains within it the potential to grow into a vast and branching oak tree; as it becomes a sapling it develops "nubs" which Hillman views as behavioral and obsessional interests that hint at the personality's mature form, destiny and role in the world. Sometimes, as with, say, Winston Churchill, Hillman sees these nubs in a kind of negative, as when he considers Churchill's childhood stammer as a kind of fear or intimidation of the promptings his soul was giving him that prefigured that one day he would have to save the world by his speech. I believe Hillman went further with this notion in a book of his that I still haven't read but which turned out to be his most popular, The Soul's Code.

Anyway, Sharp calls on Hillman and his acorn theory as he contemplates personalities as diverse as Aleister Crowley, J.G. Ballard and Max Ernst, all viewed through the lens of place. He particularly goes to town on Ballard, whose fractally fascinating life as a child in a Japanese prison camp, an avant-garde writer of incredible science fiction short stories and a single father who only really got weird with it after his wife's untimely death left him raising four children a stone's throw away from a major film studio.

Of course Sharp is most interested in Crash, though The Unlimited Dream Company and The Atrocity Exhibition get plenty of attention, too. But it's Crash and its unforgettable character of Vaughan who really haunts English Heretic, as a fictional subject of Sharp's "Black Plaque" project, again, in direct mockery of English Heretic's plaques concerning the doings of various celebrated English people in various English places.

Sharp likes the nastier sort of person, of course. Don't we all?

At the rate I'm going, all but homebound on the high plains of the western U.S., I'm never going to get to visit the U.K., will never see any of these places with my own failing eyes. Thank Yog that people like Andy Sharp and Simon Schama are writing the next best thing to being there, books like English Heretic.

*Thanks to my late, lamented friend Lethe Bashar, aka Chris al-Aswad.

**IYKYK

***And no, I don't remember how I found out about this book, and it's driving me crazy. I've interrogated my usual suspects and nobody's owning up. So maybe Andy Sharp has just been beaming this book at my bean since 2020 and my skull is just too thick -- I do famously have incredibly dense bones, like freaking Wolverine -- to have admitted the signal right away. Or something.

****Guthrie played a drowning victim who spends the film as a soaking wet "submarine zombie."

***** A book which I cannot recommend highly enough, old as it is. Hillman and Ventura bounce off each other beautifully, and pushed each other into a lot of wild ideas that the rest of our culture is still catching up with.

Zülfü Livaneli's ON THE BACK OF THE TIGER (Tr Brenden Freely)

One hundred years and change ago, the Young Turks deposed the ante-penultimate Ottoman emperor, Sultan Abdulhamid II, and sent him, his wives and most of his children into exile in the then-Ottoman-controlled Greek City of Salonica/Thessaloniki. He was one of those rulers who was never meant to hold power, but when the throne came to him anyway, he gave up his idea of being a merchant and climbed up onto the the metaphorical beast named in Zülfü Livaneli's On the Back of the Tiger, a historical novel concerning Hamid's final years, and spent the next 30+ years of his life doing his best to look like he was riding that tiger rather than just being carried away by it. 

The novel, rendered into transparently readable, even journalistic English prose by Brenden Freely, is chiefly derived from the notebooks of one Atif Hüseyin Bey, who served as physician to Hamid and those members of his family who shared his exile. The doctor is thus a major character in the novel alongside the deposed sultan, and one of the book's greatest pleasures is watching the former's attitudes about the latter shift from resentment and hostility (Atif grew up with the prevailing idea of Hamid as the standard wicked and bloodthirsty tyrant) to grudging respect, to sympathy and even a kind of fondness, despite the constant criticism of his contemporaries, a number which includes the future first president of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

He was now certain that he and the former Sultan had reached a new agreement. It was as if he was the judge and the sultan was the defendant. One was interrogating, and the other was being interrogated. The doctor laughed aloud at the sense of power he felt, then began coughing from the cigarette smoke he just inhaled. After he got his coughing under control, he thought to himself,  Having power is a wonderful thing.

The uses and limits of a monarch's power when he sits atop a deeply entrenched bureaucracy is the main question On the Back of the Tiger sets out to explore. Abdulhamid II is regarded by history as the last absolute monarch the Ottomans allowed, but even he assumed the throne only by agreeing to become a constitutional one. That he dissolved the parliament within a year of his enthronement is the first charge laid against him by his doctor as stand-in for his people - but Hamid easily deflects this by pointing out that said parliament was one in which Turks were a decided minority; the parliament was composed of members of pretty much every ethnicity and religion the world had to offer, and most of these granfalloons were seeking independence from the Empire and thus had every incentive to undermine it and obstruct the executive (the Sultan). And Hamid became Sultan during another round of the Ottomans' historic conflict with Russia. Therefore the parliament forced Hamid's hand.

Hamid's sobriquet in the West, and amongst his own peoples in secret, was the Red Sultan, for all the metaphorical blood on his hands, chiefly for the Armenian genocide that happened on his watch. But how much responsibility can really be loaded into one man, even one popularly understood to be omnipotent? Was he really omnipotent, astride the tiger of state that fought him constantly and sought always to attack and devour him? 

His doctor keeps having to ask these questions as they get to know one another, as the doctor struggles to reconcile the historical villain with the mild, civilized and cultured man who takes more pride in his carpentry skills than in his lineage, and whose family members show real devotion to and affection for him at every turn, further undermining his monstrous reputation.

These conflicting ideas come to a head in, for example, an early conversation the doctor has with the former Sultan about the fate of an ex-official imprisoned on his orders, and presumably executed in jail on those orders, too. The Sultan insists that had he wanted that man dead, he would have just ordered him executed. The man's actual death by strangulation while imprisoned, Hamid says he didn't know of until it was too late for him to prevent it. How much power can one man wield over the vast and complex apparatus of an empire, comprising individuals constantly having to interpret their mandates and act on their initiative to do what they assume is his will? As they've been doing for hundreds of years according to tradition and perceived necessity?

Livanelli doesn't pretend to have the answers to any of these questions, but in inviting us to ponder them he invites us to think about our own current crop of wannabe Sultans, including the ones in Turkey and Hungary and Trumpistan. And while I certainly don't like being asked to extend sympathy or respect to these autocrats, the thing that really separates them from people like Hamid stands out in very sharp relief that finally makes me, at least, decide that I don't have to. Hamid never made the kinds of speeches that these guys do. At least not in public. At least not overtly. At least not in front of TV cameras.

But what did he say in private? Those things, we're never going to know.

But it sure is interesting to think about, isn't it?

Fleur Jaeggy's THE WATER STATUES (Tr by Gini Alhadeff)

On his face had been spread as though with a spatula, an expression of peace, a sermon painted over a pale complexion. Though thin, at the core of his bones there was steel.

When a book is full of sentences like this, as Fleur Jaeggy's The Water Statues is, I wind up thinking even more about the translator than the author. I can't help but imagine Gini Alhadeff sitting and pondering each one, searching for a precise word order, an exact placement of modifying phrases and clauses, with an expression of concentration but also a slackness to her face not unlike the novella's protagonist, here.

The Water Statues, though even more compact than its page count might indicate, is densely packed with some of the most extraordinary sentences I've ever encountered, and for this reason alone is a book I would suggest to anyone because at least one of them is bound to resonate for them. So yes, the temptation to quote half of the book here is powerful, but I resist, because I don't want to rob you, reader, of the experience beyond what I already have.

The Water Statues might be an account of a young man, Beeklam, wondering why he can't grieve as his father does for his recently deceased mother, but then again it might be an account of that same person but as an old man, Beeklam, who is regretting the sale of his three best statues, one of which someone at some point had named after Beeklam's dead mother. Why not both, you might ask, to which I would reply, not this time. This book is like one of those weird plastic holograms we used to see all the time that contained two completely different images but only showed one at a time, depending on how light was hitting it. The old man, Beeklam, really doesn't seem like he was ever the young man, Beeklam, in the past, or vice versa. Their stories just occupy this same space. 

And what a space it is. Beeklam lives in Amsterdam in a house near the water with a flooded basement full of statues. A 21st century reader can't help but be reminded of Susanna Clarke's magnificent Piranesi, though this space is small and confined, with no tides washing through to freshen the waters and bring sea life to its rooms. Beeklam has deliberately caused this out of a desire to live like one who has drowned. 

Yes, it's all very strange, the more so for a static, dreamlike quality that would feel to have leaked over from something like J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World but for the habit of The Water Statues' characters to soliloquize as though a proscenium arch has just appeared above them, a quality all this novella's own.

I have read stranger books, even just this year, but none of them have made me feel quite as unmoored as this one 

Layla Martinez' WOODWORM (Tr Sophie Hughes & Annie McDermott; Narr Raquel Beattie)

How a novelist handles tension is everything in horror and suspense. Most of what I encounter in these genres lets tension build and build and build until it's pretty near unbearable and then releases it all in an ecstatic final climax. And that's fun and satisfying and takes a certain amount of skill and a sure grasp of one's story that I can only admire. 

Other authors, though, authors like Spanish novelist and essayist Layla Martinez, construct something more intricate, full of small winding bits and catches and very, very controlled little releases. I suppose people would describe this as "edging" but it's more interesting than that in Woodworm, with its pair of narrators (a grandmother and granddaughter) and its exquisite blend of supernatural horror, generational trauma, class resentment and elements of rural soap opera.

And it's short, not even 150 pages in Sophie Hughes' and Annie McDermott's English translation, which is full of interesting alliterations and rhythms that really translate wonderfully to the audio book medium, which is how I experienced Woodworm. 

But speaking of translation, one thing that gets lost in it here is the effectiveness of the book's title; in Spanish this book is called Carcoma*, which literally means "woodworm," but the onomatopoeia of the word spoken aloud is also a sound effect the author and the audio book narrator employ magnificently to convey many of the strange noises made by the ghosts and other malevolent presences as they go about their spooky business. 

For this is a haunted house story. The animated spirits of the dead, though, are the least interesting things haunting this house, originally built by a very bad man to contain -- really to entrap -- the poor woman he married in order to found the dynasty of unfortunate women condemned to live in the house and the nasty, gossipy, judgy and destitute Spanish village surrounding it.

The founding patriarch, by the way, made a habit of entrapping women, using his personal attractiveness, Andrew Tate-style, to draw in  many of them, only to manipulate them into prostitution to make him a small fortune, which in turn is how he afforded a fine house for the one he decided to marry, only to make her the most miserable of them all.

This pimp-patriarch (pimptriarch?) is the grandfather of one of our two narrators (unnamed; nobody in this novel has a first name and only one family -- significantly not the family living in the House -- gets a surname), a woman we only come to know as "The Old Woman" who has by reputation and necessity come to serve the region as a cunning woman, dispensing simple remedies and charms and curses to her neighbors, who despise and fear her, but not enough not to dispense with her services. The Old Woman is also subject to what we can only think of as absence seizures, in which supernatural beings "take her away" for hours at a time to share secrets with her. The Old Woman believes, or at least professes to believe, that these are saints, specific ones like Saint Lucy or Saint Sebastian (heavy on the martyrs with grotesque iconography, or who died by torture, or both), and further believes that it is via her prayers to them that her ill will against people who have wronged her, her daughter or her granddaughter, is put into effect. Enemies of the household accidentally break their legs in improbable accidents, go missing, get sick and die, all through her prayers to her "saints."

Of course the reader is skeptical, not about the reality of these "saints", but that they're really saints at all, especially when her granddaughter, "The Girl" who is our other narrator, reveals that their house is also visited by angels, and that angels don't really look at all like they do in Renaissance paintings and Catholic iconography. They're more like giant praying mantises with huge compound eyes. See the novel's Portuguese cover below.

Meanwhile, The Girl has grown up without parents; her teenaged mother was murdered (by one of two paramours) shortly after The Girl was born, and the girl's wealthy and privileged (probable) father has never acknowledged her, might not even know she exists for all that one of his family's many homes is next door to that of The Girl and The Old Woman. His is the family who gets a surname, and who long ago sought to employ the Pimptriarch's family members as domestic servants - a measure the Pimptriarch's pride would not permit, but one of which his descendants, including both The Old Woman and later The Girl, in turn, avail themselves, to the disdain of all. 

The inciting incident takes place in this rich neighbor's household, when The Girl allows, whether out of neglect or of simple and resentful malice, a great calamity to befall her cruel and snobbish employers, coincidentally at about the same time as The Girl first notices that her own mother's restless and fitful remnant is one of the many shades haunting her family's ancestral prison of a home. You know, the mother who got it on with the rich boy next door and then got murdered, either by him or by the boy she was gonna marry since the rich boy was leaving her to fend for herself and the baby...

It is left ambiguous as to what, if any of the weird and frightening phenomena that characterize the House can be attributed to The Girl's mother, whose ghost (?) is condemned continually to enter the place via the front door, versus the family's many other malevolent ancestors and their helpmeets of dubious nature and provenance. Something haunts a wardrobe in the bedroom The Old Woman and The Girl share; it does its best to lure people inside it, never to be seen again. Something else produces an apparition of a pair of legs that protrudes from under The Old Woman's bed. Then there are the aforementioned "saints" and "angels" who supply The Old Woman with endless gossip and the odd bit of important and actionable intelligence. All of these manifestations are barely regarded by the living women of the House, though The Girl, in her chapters, still expresses a certain pride in her ability to resist the wardrobe's blandishments and to ignore the whispers and cracks and carcoma/caruncho sounds that wake her in the night.

Woodworm is thus an incredibly effective and multilayered** bit of modern horror fiction, full of heavy emotional impact and genuine chills -- and surprises. It would have been so easy for Martinez to give The Girl a fate similar to her grandmother's or her mother's, the same only more brutal. Hints that this might happen abound. But while The Girl is as bound to the House as any of them, her own inner strength and resourcefulness let her remain her own character with her own agency and her own ideas about how to avenge her mother's family against her (probable) father's and against the villagers who have also done more than a little to add to their misery. Martinez and The Girl have other and more interesting plans, though, that lead to an even more satisfying conclusion than I felt I had any right to expect.

If there is a flaw in this work, it is in the audio book production. Raquel Beattie, the narrator, appears to be very much a go-to for Latina/Hispanic fiction and the narration thereof, especially if it requires an appropriate accent. But this is not a work of Latin American fiction, but of Spanish, so she uses her own standard American English speech patterns -- except for a rather cartoonish lisp, the kind that Americans who want to show off their sophistication affect when pronouncing place names like Ibiza (with a theta sound for the "z"). Which lisp she imposes throughout the text on all the ordinary English words of the translation, rather than on just the Spanish nouns and names. And she gives The Girl, who is rather more of an asexual Amazon than a nymphette, a breathy and sensual voice to differentiate her from The Old Woman (whose voice is ideal for the character, tough and serious and weary and protective and, yes, resentful) that really just annoyed me. So I kept being yanked out of this utterly incredible book by the narration. This would have angered me more if I hadn't just DNF'd another audio book that I stuck with way longer than I would have in print just because the narrator gave it a better performance than the material deserved. I figured they balanced each other out. 

And I never once considered setting Woodworm aside, despite my mild irritation at the audio. I would even listen to it again sometime, though I would really rather experience it as text. But Audible got me with an incredible sale price and Woodworm had been on my TBR for quite a long time, and...

Anyway, I sure hope Martinez, who seems more inclined to non-fiction than fiction of any kind, does decide to write another novel or two or three. I'm here for them if she does!

*It's even better in the Portuguese translation: Caruncho!

**I mean, I haven't even gotten into all the echoes of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime that echo through this tale. As my beloved Langdon from the Death//Sentence podcast observed of this book, it's the most Spanish thing imaginable. Well, at least since Guillermo del Toro's fairy-insect infested Pan's Labyrinth.

Ethan Rutherford's NORTH SUN or THE VOYAGE OF THE WHALESHIP ESTHER

We're told not to judge books by their covers, and to that I mostly hold, but occasionally I must make an exception. When this beauty started staring out at me from A Strange Object/Deep Vellum's web page, I had to bring it into my home. I mean, look at this thing!

And once it's come into your home, this cover's baleful stare, if allowed to peek out from under or from the top of one's stack of recently acquired books to be read (on dead tree despite the pain), will compel one to read it, and soon, if only to find out what the hell this staring creature even is.

Even if the book's possessor is a stubborn old crone-in-training like your humble blogger, feeling tsundoku guilt and determined to read some of the tomes that came here before it. Compelled by this cover, I took it up out of turn. And so here we are, with Ethan Rutherford's debut novel, North Sun or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, in the very year in which it was published.

And yes, there's a whale carcass in the room that I can't ignore, viz, the last book about whaling* I wrote about on this blog, which entry is still one of the most read things I've ever written, I'm pretty sure, my old review of Moby-Dick. Which most people seem to interpret as me roasting Melville's maritime masterpiece but 1. I love an unlikeable protagonist especially if he's an unreliable narrator and 2. The tedium is very much the point of that book and as such i respect Moby-Dick as a pinnacle of creative achievement and 3. I've since read it again, after having fallen in love with China Mieville's Railsea, and found more to admire in it a second time around. I could just take that post down (since I can't just let it sink into oblivion apparently) but I can't bring myself to do so. It's a pole holding up the tent of my identity. I'm the chick who called Ishmael the annoying hipster on the boat.** I own it. 

But anyway, North Sun or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther is a book that, for the first third or so, almost feels like a very streamlined and snappy retelling of the story of the Essex, that unfortunate ship whose fate inspired Moby-Dick and is depicted in In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, book, film and podcast episode.*** And of course, in certain respects, one sea voyage is very like another, at least to start with. The action is briskly told, the periods of inaction elided over, everything described in terse sentences, quick paragraphs and severely truncated chapters that would seem to be the very opposite of Moby-Dick. For a while this feels like it might turn out to be the whole point.

But then [REDACTED] shows up not long after a pair and then a whole pack of [REDACTEDs] attack and on the heels of a second encounter between little [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and the sinister and very large [REDACTED] in the bowels of the ship -- and everything changes. The ship turns north at the Sandwich Islands -- they are not merely on a whaling expedition, but are also off to try to recover a Mr. Leander, captain of another whaling ship, who lost his charge to the pack ice and sent the Esther's eventual captain back to New Bedford, MA to tell the owners of both the Esther and the lost Dromo, that nobody was coming home from the Dromo even though its captain is married to one of the family's daughters -- and heads up to the Arctic to hunt whales, walrus and Leander.

By the time the ship is on its new heading, the reader has realized that they are sailing, not only into chillier, more dangerous waters, but also into the wild waves of Weird Fiction, as I'll get into in a bit.

Ahoy!

On the Esther sails through the choppy winter sea! She swoops her spirit up one wave and down another, proud and vain. Finally, the cold truly catches and the temperature drops. The water turns gray and leaden; every surface of the ship remains damp. The fog smothers and surrounds them. But the silence they sail through is not the absence of sound at all. Rather, it is the presence of all sound. The cold bites the men's skin; they feel it in their teeth. They bundle against it, but that's how it is.

How many chapters would Herman Melville have taken to describe this? I kid. Kind of.

But anyway, the hazards of a whaling voyage are many, even before things get explicitly Weird. For instance, while of course I'm enough of a veteran of maritime fiction to know what a shipworm is (actually a kind of clam, with a long flexible body; they use their little shells as drill bits to bore through the wood of ships) but I've never encountered them depicted as crawling free between locations on deck where little ship's boys could potentially see them. Which, this alone could introduce a note of horror for the squeamish reader -- which I am not. I am a sicko, which is why I decided to share an amusing-to-me image of these strange and destructive critters:

Thank you, Internet. You're still capable of providing some good things.

Oh, and by the way, the worms in the book, have grown to be as big around as your arm

and proportionally as long. You're welcome!

But Rutherford isn't here just to try to gross us out. He's enamored of the imagery the setting affords him, and takes full advantage: 

That morning the men have their first glimpse of clustered ice. What a sight! The northern sun glints off the Frozen expanse - her light is a dancing thing, it plays over the basin and reflects crystals in the air. The ice cakes are like glistening scraps skimmed from the pots. They see no patch of color in front of them. Everything - sky, snow, apparent horizon - is a gradation of brilliant white. Except, of course, for the sea itself, which, in the leads and channels, appears black.

Which is to say that we get some quite beautiful prose in North Sun, but with which the author never gets too carried away. The above passage, like the passage I quoted before, constitutes almost an entire chapter, and soon we are back to the plot, the plot, the plot! This is 21st century fiction for the TikTok audience, or something, lean and hungry and raring to get back to pursuit or butchery or uncanny haunting or...

Weirder things. Things which I'm not going to spoil for you but which chiefly concern the two little Riggs brothers, aged ten and twelve, though they are listed on the manifest as twelve and fourteen because, while whaling families are, as one captain observes early in the novel, monsters, they're not complete monsters. They wouldn't employ child labor or anything, I mean come on! But anyway, these two little boys, being the smallest bodies on the boat, get all the nastiest jobs, like getting lowered into the head cavities of slaughtered whales to collect all the spermaceti (you can't have a whaling story without spermaceti!) and being subject to the unwelcome attentions of the kinds of people who pay unwelcome attentions to powerless little boys (trigger warning, there, though nothing gets too graphic).

But there's also a dude who kind of fills the role of the Bond Company Stooge in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Mr. Thule (great name for a vaguely sinister figure, no?), who stays mostly below decks until they reach the ice but then emerges as a figure of unexpected force and knowledge who may be exercising some kind of weird occult powers on behalf of the ship's owners and who is absolutely unperturbed by the forces of weather, wind, tide, wildlife or the increasingly outlandishly bad luck that has afflicted the ship at least since they rounded Cape Horn, the kind of luck which has their chief harpooneer blowing his hand off in a rare bit of comic relief as he experiments with a new kind of explosive harpoon dart that can kill a whale before the animal can dive below the ice and threaten to drag a whaleboat under with him, as nearly happens soon after they arrive in the Arctic.

And there is another figure aboard about whom I'm not going to write here but who will haunt me for a long time, I think. Oh, Old Sorrel. I might even cut out this paragraph just for mentioning him at all. I don't know yet. If I leave it in, it's just because I decided to tease you, dear readers.

I didn't know how much my life was lacking a combination of Herman Melville and Drew Magary (if you know, you know. Crab) until this book found me, but now I'm craving some more whaling tales. And, fortunately for me, I have at least one more in the teetering TBR stack. And readers, that one rhymes. 

Stay tuned!

*That's not an incidental appearance of the practice in an Aubrey/Maturin novel.

**It is perhaps a mark of that post's relative antiquity that I felt the need exhaustively to define what a hipster is.

***Only the latter two have I experienced as of yet, but I have the book on deck for sometime soon. The podcast episode, by the way, is a mini-series by the guys at Last Podcast on the Left.

Antoine Volodine's RADIANT TERMINUS (Tr by Jeffrey Zuckerman)

Recently I indulged in a buddy read with my old pal, the Popqueenie, of one of my favorite Philip K. Dick novels, Dr. Bloodmoney, so that tale of post-nuclear-apocalypse and mutant psychic superpowers was very much on my mind as I settled into my second foray into the one-man genre of post-exoticism* that comes to us from the many-named author who invented it.

Radiant Terminus has cemented my interest in the work of Antoine Volodine/Manuela Draeger/Elli Kronauer/Lutz Bassman/Infernus Johannes. And damn it, I may have actually to learn French at some point because only some of his books have made it to English translation.

It's also very much an exploration of what life would have been like in post-nuclear Marin County in Dr. Bloodmoney if [REDACTED] hadn't [REDACTED] [REDACTED].** Except instead of the remains of luxurious and affluent northern California, we're in what's left of an old collective farm from the heyday of the world-encircling Second Soviet Union, and instead of the aftermath of a nuclear war, we have a world slowly devastated by Chernobyl-type accidents as the Second Soviet Union, under constant attack by pockets of fascists, slowly receded from its high water mark, leaving collective farm/village complexes like Radiant Terminus to fend for themselves without regular and competent maintenance of their neighborhood nuclear power plants. 

Oops!

We begin our story following the desperate retreat of a trio of survivors of the battle that lost the fictional territory of the Orbise. Slowly dying of radiation sickness and out of food and water, the three have one hope left: if the most able-bodied among them can make it to the next settlement and bring back some water and food.

Unfortunately for this barely-survivor, Kronauer (yes, one of the author's heteronyms), the next settlement is Radiant Terminus, where the nuclear plant has not only failed catastrophically but its core has completely melted down and later sank deep into the earth. The residents now use it as a sort of all-purpose garbage disposal, which they can only do thanks to the heroic efforts of "one of the most valiant figures of the second Soviet union, a legendary survivor, sagging under medals and highlighted in various enlightening stories," the Gramma Ugdal. The Gramma Ugdal, who is only ever referred to this way, has mutated into an immortal woman who cannot be harmed by radiation and thus has become famous for rushing in to help after countless nuclear accidents. Since this is so, she can safely handle contaminated carcasses, bits of furniture and farm equipment, whatever needs disposed of, and push it down into the melted-down core to its destruction. She has found, furthermore, a way to, at least partially, heal radiation damage in some others by the use of various altered waters. And that's not all. Sometimes she can bring them back from the dead. And if she can't with her waters, there's someone else around who probably can.

For the Gramma Ugdal is not the only immortal in Radiant Terminus! Her former husband from her long-ago (like 100 years long ago) youth, Solovyei, is also immortal and their reunion was unexpected and consequential, for he has powers even greater than hers*** for all that he has lived in obscurity where she became an international hero. But see, Solovyei is this novel's Hoppy Harrington, a figure of menace and bizarre psychic powers, who absolutely dominates Radiant Terminus and its environs by dominating the minds and bodies of its people. None of whom has the first idea of how to revolt against their god-king, all of whom have at least been led to believe that they literally owe him their lives, and many of whom are pretty sure that they only even exist because Solovyei has, Borges-like, dreamed them.

Solovyei also has a special hell set aside for any man dumb enough to involve himself, even in the most innocent way, with one of his three weirdly beautiful mutant daughters by "unknown mothers." Take poor Schulhoff, who legally married one of them and seemed genuinely to love her, but whom Solovyei has made to forget her utterly and roam the earth, as he explains upon meeting our veteran, Kronauer: 

Solovyei has made sure it will never pass. He makes me walk from forest to forest, from lake to lake, and when the absence of the woman I love seems a little less unbearable, when the loss makes me suffer a little less, he reintroduces himself in my head and he revives my urge to remember. He whistles in my head until I collapse. He keeps whistling, he sings his sorts of poems. It lasts for days and nights. I can't escape it. I can't die. I'm stuck within his clutches. Within his dreams. No death is available to me. I also wonder if maybe I'm actually inside one of his dreams. It won't pass and I can't escape.

Thus while we might have been expecting a tender reunion between the Gramma Ugdal and her Solovyei,  and a nice autumn twilight love story, what we get instead is a Twilight Zone episode. The one with Billy Mumy as a terrifying and omnipotent child. Except this time he's a gigantic full-grown man with yellow eyes and an axe in his belt and three beautiful mutant daughters and a conviction that no male human being ever born has ever meant anything but harm to the female of the species and must be punished for his bad intentions. And if a man Solovyei encounters actually doesn't have bad intentions towards those daughters, well, not only does Solovyei not believe it but he'll actually warp reality to make his preconceptions true. And then administer "appropriate" punishments.

Yikes.

So, half Hoppy Harrington and half Palmer Eldritch, let's say. Or maybe, the malevolent supercomputer I AM. And a little bit of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz - Solovyei loves to inflict his poetry on the entire village via a loudspeaker system.

But come to think if it, what Solovyei reminds me of the most is Dr. Haber, the subtly-terrifying-until-he-abandons-subtlety villain of Ursula K. Leguin's The Lathe of Heaven, who parlays his hypnotic control and medical/psychiatric power imbalance over poor George Orr to dream his way to world domination. Like Haber, Solovyei appears to have swollen his physical dimensions to match his massive self-conception; the first thing everybody notices upon meeting him is that he is simply huge, with a big axe shoved through his belt for extra intimidation. It's a classic diversion on both characters' parts, minimizing their actual threat by distracting their victims with the display of a quite different one. Few are guarding against a psychic attack when the likelihood appears to be that the opponent is going to just step up and tear one to pieces with his bare hands.

For all this, though, what Radiant Terminus seems most concerned with is the impact of literature, of Volodine's imagined post-exotic canon, on the people who have read it. The literary star of this novel is one Maria Kwoll, a post-exotic feminist whom even Andrea Dworkin might consider extreme. Because one of Solovyei's daughters is the village librarian and grew up on Kwoll's works, she has made sure that nothing written is left to be read except those works and things like machinery repair manuals and agronomy pamphlets. The result is a village of people, not only utterly under Solovyei's control, but also under Kwoll's influence: to them, sex is inherently aggressive and gross, it's impossible for a male human to think about anything else anyway, and everything such a creature says or does is in "the cock's language."

Which means that yes, even Solovyei is a Kwollite. Kwollian?

There's another element of Radiant Terminus that I can't help but single or for praise: its inventiveness in dealing with the altered landscape of a world that has suffered a thousand nuclear accidents. Volodine conjures up a whole alternate herbarium for his world. It's as if he decided that the Voynich manuscript was an accurate rendering that had just come unstuck in time. We get to learn a bit about them through the character of Kronauer, whose wife was busy on a project to identify all the weird new flora before the fascists murdered her, and about whom he thinks as he mentally catalogs what he sees on his journey to Radiant Terminus: 

Molle-guillotes, malveinés, ashrangs, smallglory captives, willow benaises. Damsels-in-flight, masquerats, four-o’clock beauties, pituitaines, sweetbalers, or midnight Jeannes.****

Like I said, I might have to start working on my French, which I can already kind of parse because of years farting around with Portuguese, Latin and Spanish, just so I can explore the rest of Volodine et al's works set in this bizarre world.

I hope there are lots more Crones in it.

*My first being Manuela Draeger's Eleven Sooty Dreams, another book with a prominent and formidable grandmother-who-isn't-a-grandmother figure -- which I simply love. As for what "post-exoticism" is, it's a sort of Marvel Cinematic Universe but for a group of imaginary and revolutionary writers who form the cultural milieu of a worldwide Marxist-Leninist society, the Second Soviet Union, that was hugely successful and utopian until it wasn't. The post-exotic works of Volodine et al are now its autopsy in print, melancholy and lovely and weird as hell. So, you know, pretty close to being my ideal reading material.

**If you know, you know. If you don't, go read Dr. Bloodmoney.

***Oddly, this gives an author the best excuse ever to use an omniscient narrator, for Solovyei can read minds even at infinite distances in addition to his other uncanny abilities, as is made plain when, almost exactly halfway through the novel, he is revealed to be possessing a crow that has been following some of his banished citizens around. These passages are written in the first person omniscient, but most of the rest of the book is in a very traditional third, which seems like a missed opportunity to have one of the best bastard narrators of all time. Le sigh.

****Those "Jeannes" have a longer name, by the way; they are Jeanne-of-the-Communists. Volodine is nothing if not committed to the Second Soviet but.

Robert K. Merton's ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS: A SHANDEAN POSTSCRIPT

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton in a letter to Robert Hooke, 1675.

Memes are older than the Internet. We just used to call them "aphorisms" or "quotations" or "folk wisdom". And back before we called them "memes" they were pretty hard to trace to sources. Pretty hard but also, as mid-century intellectual delight Robert K. Merton has proven in his utterly wonderful On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript, a whole lot of fun! 

Anyone who's spent more than ten minutes reading this blog knows that my favorite novel, probably ever, is Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, which I'll be reading again later this summer as not one but two of the Discord Servers I hang out on are brewing up giant buddy reads of this book. 

I'm going to encourage all of them to try to track down a copy of On the Shoulders of Giants (or OTSOG, as Merton himself has charmingly dubbed it and elucidates late in this work as a versatile new word which by all rights should have entered our vernacular but has largely been replaced by the less amusing but also less opaque "humblebrag") as either a companion read or a chaser. It's just the perfect example of what I've always imagined as the ideal way to live a life, as Casaubon attempted to do in Eco's novel:* be the "Sam Spade of Culture "

The mystery here being, while most modern people think it was Isaac Newton who first said "If I have seen further, it was by standing on the shoulders of giants,"** intellectuals know he was condensing and paraphrasing a much earlier thought. A meme. But where did he get it? And where did that person get it? And the person he (or she, or [singular] they, but let's be honest, probably he, at least in that for most of recorded history only men got to record their thoughts in any durable way. So probably he, though who knows if he got it from his wife or sister or mom?) who passed it on from distant antiquity? But how distant? 

Helpfully, once Merton has spent many pages (in the form of a letter to Bernard Bailyn, whom I chiefly know as a the author of The Idealogical Origins of the American Revolution***, a book beloved of libertarians, both with and without the capital L) teasing out the history and provenance of the phrase all the way back to the 12th century and perhaps to even earlier, he presents us with a helpful table suitable for copying out and hanging on the wall to remind us all that no idea is truly original, that immature artists borrow from the mature artists who originally stole them from Oscar Wilde, etc.

But so, OTSOG would really seem to have no business being as entertaining as it is, but the fact remains: this is the most fun I have had with a piece of non-fiction in years. This is because Merton, while a serious scholar, indeed the "father of modern sociology" (who has a lot of fun in one of this book's many digressions considering this matter of intellectual fatherhood of things like anatomy and physiology and many other arts and sciences) is also a very funny and playful writer, at least in this work, which, after all, takes its subtitle from the novel that was post-modern before there was any modern of which to be post-, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It is a very Shandean work with its wide-ranging and curious approach to its subject, its willingness to stray off its mapped-out path (but always to find its way back. Eventually) and its overall tone, which, get ready for that.

Consider this, a meditation on the word "stand" into which Merton enters after spending some time comparing versions of the aphorism, in English and other languages, some of which are ambiguous about the position of the dwarfs in relationship to their giants -- standing versus sitting:

The OED**** requires 38 columns of tight-packed print to set out 104 meanings of the word and its various formations. After studying a few dozen of these meanings, one suffers and an attack of paranomasia. One doesn't know whether one is standing on one's head or on one's feet. In such cases, one must suppose, the only sound position is a stand-pat policy if one is to stand committed to truth and be prepared to stand the consequences. This may stand one a high price, but as things stand, to stand firm may stand one in good stead and may indeed be the only way to stand off abominable ambiguities. One must simply stand one's ground if one stands for something rather than nothing. If, I say, one stands for standards, if one is more than a stand-in for a scholar, if one wishes to preserve one's scholarly standing and to stand on good terms with one's peers, then one must take a strong stand. In the end each of us stands under the heavy obligation to stand guard and to stand to our guns in the face of the standing threat to single-sensed clarity. To stand upon ceremony in these matters or to stand much upon one's dignity would only mean that we have little else to stand upon. United we stand, provided that we do not stand upon our differences but stand together, side by side, rather than stand apart, aside or astrut. We must stand by not, not back, if we are to stand off the standing threat or at least bring it to a standstill. Only so, do we even stand a chance; only so, can we achieve a common understanding. This is no mean venture and the question is: can you stand it?"

This is merely my favorite example of the kind of writing to be enjoyed in OTSOG. There are so many others, so many fascinating nuggets of information and of speculation about the information he has found. When I first started reading OTSOG I was ashamed to realize that I had owned my personal copy for over 20 years; as I read, though, I found that only now, and maybe not even only now, had I the personal resources to appreciate its many pleasures: I already knew the names of most of the scholars Merton discusses, from my own academic studies and also from my repeated readings of things like Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, a trilogy of novels teeming with historical figures, including Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and Samuel Pepys, who figure so deeply in the middle sections of the delicious gossip on offer in OTSOG.

It even gave me a clue or two as to where some of my other favorite works of fiction may have gotten some of their ideas, including, of all things, that of Tim Powers! A detail from his The Stress of Her Regard was very likely taken from a source mentioned in OTSOG, which Merton discusses when quoting from Tristram Shandy as the hero's father, still awaiting Tristram's birth, is trying to clear up a footnote:

Should you think this is just another invention of Stern's parturient imagination, you would be badly mistaken. There actually was an ignorant physician and man-midwife, William Smellie, who did indeed... mistake the caption of the drawing of a petrified child just taken from its mother's womb as the name of an author.

How could I not think of the detail in The Stress of Her Regard about a baffling section of a medical text being mistaken for the removal of a petrified infant when it was "really" (in Powers' delightfully magic- and monster-riddled version of the early 19th century) instructions on how to implant a tiny statue into a human body, to create a link between Powers' stony monster race and humans, to allow to monsters free reign in our world?

I have no idea how easily a copy of OTSOG may be to find these days; my own I got at an out of the way used bookstore in the middle of Wyoming at the tail end of the 20th century. It was exactly the sort of weird medicine I needed right now as we begin a summer full of stupid foreboding and anti-intellectualism at levels not even the most hidebound clerical authorities of the "dark ages" seem to have striven for. I needed its reminder that it is fun to be smart, that knowing things can be a source of enjoyment second only to finding things out. Your own joke about dwarfs and giants and seeing far here.

*Eco, you may note if you can read the crummy scan of the cover art that I had to use here, wrote an introduction to the edition that I own and it is every bit as charming and witty as we might expect from the god who created Causaubon, Diotallevi and Jacopo Belbo.

**In a letter to fellow Baroque Cycle character Robert Hooke. I'm not going to pretend to be the intellect that Merton is; I first learned about Robert Hooke (and Samuel Pepys and many others besides) from Neal Stephenson.

***Who, based on copyright dates for the original editions of these two books, might well have been working on that very book while Merton was writing him this "letter." So yes, I might be reading that again soon...

****The Oxford English Dictionary, the latest edition of which runs to 20 volumes in print; it has since ceased to be published in print due to its mass, which is now measured in megabytes. Over 500 of them. 

Raymond St. Elmo's LETTERS FROM A SHIPWRECK IN THE SEA OF SUNS AND MOONS

To a certain degree, I'm still trying to figure out the freaking ocean of words I just swam through, as I contemplate the very unusual and ambiguous Letters From a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons, by Raymond St. Elmo. I mean, I know I had fun shaking my head over the combination of godpunk, sea adventure, star-crossed romance and epistolary interrogation it contained, but did I ever actually figure out what was going on? Enough to write a coherent post about on this here blog? 

Let's find out.

Interviewer: Describe how to kill Typhon.

Oh, there are as many ways to kill a god as there are to destroy a man. Personally my favorite is to melt him down in confusion and despair. 

Readers here who are also readers of Gene Wolfe have already raised their eyebrows at the mention of the ancient Autarch and god-king of the Whorl, but this Typhon is merely (?) a storm god, one of a cargo hold-full of mostly dead and/or forgotten deities being carried aboard the good ship Unicorn from San Francisco, at which point the last of them was collected, to the mysterious and uncharted island of Theodosia.

Typhon could also be our protagonist, cloaked in the body of Clarence St. Elmo*, the blind old sailor rousted out by the unknown Interviewer for purposes unknown but urgent for that entity.** A mad scientist on the island on which Clarence and a few of his crewmates from the Unicorn thinks Clarence is Typhon, anyway. 

Clarence has been adopted, though, not by Typhon, but by the Egyptian god, Thoth, who appears to him with advice and wry commentary in the form, usually, of a sea bird, though occasionally he's got a vaguely human form, shrouded in black.

But all of this is just distraction, as far as the Interviewer is concerned; they claim to have dredged up Clarence to help in a search for two green leatherbound books, one in Etruscan and the other a French translation of the first -- allegedly. As for Clarence... He's just this poet, you know? 

I saw some useful poetic fodder in the situation. It's just my nature. I considered putting seaweed in my hair and appearing to them as my own drowned ghost. The idea made me laugh, then the laugh made me check. I did have seaweed in my hair. Maybe I was my own drowned ghost. The idea scared me so I combed it out with my fingers and headed on.

To arrive at the above situation, shipwrecked and pondering how to approach some other castaways, Clarence first allowed his beloved's father and fierce, ancient aunts to chase him away from her, so very away that he left their hometown of Maidenhead, NJ for San Francisco and thence joined the crew of the Unicorn. Which brought him to a weird island complete with lighthouse, a seminary run by the aforementioned mad scientist, the Master of the Green, and many other features atypical of your standard Robinson Crusoe-esque fare. Like a bunch of gods and ex-gods rampaging around and wreaking havoc. Only some of whom seem to have been along for the ride on the Unicorn. I think. Were there already some feral gods or ex-gods on the island? I never decided for sure.

Meanwhile, back on the voyage, Clarence wrote his beloved K. (all we ever get is this initial, never a name) a series of longing letters which give the novel its title, and the Interviewer has only secured his cooperation by convincing him they have a way of seeing that she gets them, since she didn't in real life? 

Except what is the reality of any of this, here?

While trying to figure all of this out may feel like too much work to some (my own dear personal mother, who spotted this book in our shared ebook library and was intrigued by the title, started it before I did but DNF'd it for this reason), it is a fun exercise for the Wolfe-pilled who actively seek out this sort of thing -- but it's not the only reason to give this book a try! 

There's also the enjoyment of watching perhaps the most ill-advised sea voyage since Ishmael signed on to the Pequod. The Unicorn, we learn, is a perfectly fine ship but its crew mostly abandoned it long before it reached San Francisco; they were terrified of its cargo of statues of forgotten gods, you see. Also, the captain is kind of a freak show. The result is that the ship can attract no kind of competent or experienced crew, so nobody has the first idea what to do when things immediately start going wrong in ways both predictable and un-.

I'm bouncing around in chronology, here, but guess what: so does the novel! It's all part of the puzzle box, one which I'm not sure I've solved yet. Truly, I am not sure I understood this novel. 

But the experience of reading it was fun enough to make me more than willing to try it again sometime. So maybe stay tuned...

*As though we are perhaps meant to wonder if he is not an ancestor of the author of the novel Letters from a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons? Except I think "Raymond St. Elmo" is a pseudonym? But who knows. All I could find poking around in the wreckage of the internet was that St. Elmo has written a bunch of other books that seem even weirder than this one. But few biographical details.

**Or entities. Sometimes the Interviewer uses plural pronouns in referring to itself/themselves. And frequently sounds, as does Clarence sometimes, too, like a piece of software or otherwise artificial being.

Jared Pechaček's THE WEST PASSAGE (Narr by Steve West)

Ok, bear with me here. Things are gonna get weird. I know, I know, when are they not? But this is in the upper reaches of the kind of weird that I really, really like and often find it very difficult to adequately describe. This risks me accidentally talking you out of giving this book a try, which is one of the reasons I didn't blog about this book when I first read it back in December*. And I'd almost rather just leave you stumbling around and maybe happening upon it by chance than accidentally talk you out of trying it. 

But this is a really weird, really cool, really unusual book. Even by my standards. 

So.

The West Passage, Jared "By the Bywater" Pechaček's debut novel, is kind of the answer to "what if we could return to the great castle of Gormenghast centuries after Titus Groan rode off to become Mervyn Peake, and the Bright Carvings and everything else were left to rot, and no new Master of Rituals had been appointed, and so everybody had just sort of half-assedly continued some half-remembered versions of all the ceremonies and customs... but those customs actually all turned out to have, like, existentially important functions. Like keeping terrible, deadly eldritch beings in check? And making the seasons happen? Which, the castle is so big that different parts of it experience different seasons?"**

Can you imagine that?

Ok. Now imagine that instead of the Earls and Countesses of Groan there were... bizarrely shaped, multiply-eyed, terribly powerful, inscrutable, gigantic eldritch "ladies" in charge of it all, but they seem to have mostly gone mad or lost interest in doing whatever it is they do when they're not conferring arcane and possibly pointless forms of authority and/or literally changing the minds of whatever puny, hapless humans happen to blunder into their presences?

Oh, and here and there are bits of really odd technology and whatnot still in use, baroque and Rube Goldbergian and not necessarily being put to their originally intended uses. They kind of remind me of some of the contraptions of, say, the goblins in Jim Henson's Labyrinth. 

So that's the setting. How about the story?

It's a bit simpler. A bit.

We meet two apprentices from the Grey Tower (the only tower that's no longer under the direct control of a Lady). Kew was the apprentice to the tower's late Guardian, who trained him pretty well in Protecting (against what? Nobody seems sure anymore) but died without passing on the title and whatnot that would give him the authority to take over for her. There is only one way for him to get what he needs to do the job now, and that's to go find a Lady. And give her a cryptic message from his late boss: something or other is waking up. And it sounds like that might be bad?

Maybe?  

Our other apprentice-about-to-rise, Pell serves with the Grey Women (not Ladies, human women) who perform the rites and duties associated with death and birth. Pell helped with the services for Kew's mistress, witnessed one error, committed some others herself, and is now pretty sure that it's her fault that winter has come way too early to the Gray Tower and she must travel to other parts of the Castle to find out how to put it right. Is she correct in this?***

Maybe?

The West Passage, then, is kind of a double quest narrative, though one in which neither of our plucky young heroes really have any idea about the nature of their world, their rulers, or what they're supposed to be doing. Kind of like everybody else.

And the quests? Might not really be the point anyway. 

The atmosphere in which all of this takes place is deliciously strange and borders on the nonsensical, Lewis Carrol as interpreted by Jeff Noon via Mark Lawrence. It's not exactly hostile but it's not not hostile. Everybody remembers different bits of lore differently (delightfully, the old lore is referred to as coming from "story times," and the really, really old lore from "song times"), and many are desperately, jealously clinging to different bizarre privileges that may or may not be actually important to the overall survival of this world. 

What I'm still not adequately conveying here, though, is the sheer mad inventiveness of it all. For instance, at one point, thinking that a bee is merely something somewhat like what you and I would also call a bee, Kew, sure that he's done for, gasps to it "Tell them I tried," just to say some last words to something, if not someone. Only moments later, the bee turns out to have treated those words as a message, and to have delivered them to someone "with the face of a trout." Which Kew is not at all surprised by, and I don't think it's just because it's more surprising that someone is there at all than that it has a fishy head. And before we know it, Trout Mask Replica (not his real name, but come on) is asking Kew, who is still surrounded by hungry jackals, if he has seen any lizards about. "You'd know a lizard if you saw one. Big suckers. Teeth like boats."

There are tons of weird little one-offs like this, sending the message to us that this world really really isn't ours, that pretty much all the nouns should be in scare quotes, or at least the animate nouns should be, and that the more you pay attention to what's going on, the less certain you should be that you understand what's going on. I'm not going to accuse Pechaček of deliberately misleading his readers, but I'm not going to absolve him of this, either.

Let's just say that never has a book seemed more dissimilar  from my first to my second reading - and it was only a few months between them. I need a lot longer than that to forget things. But I was definitely watching the wrong pair of hands the first time around. 

So of course I'm thinking about Gene Wolfe, here. And you know I don't mention him lightly. And also of Jeff Vandermeer, of whose Area X this world could be a descendant, the Palace a thousandth mutant iteration of the Lighthouse, the Ladies and other creatures the descendants of Ghost Bird and her dolphin-husband.

But, of course, maybe it's always been this way, here. Beehives have always been things you can saddle up and ride out to someone's rescue. Fancy cakes were always made and decorated, not to be served and eaten, but to be tipped immediately out onto a midden heap almost as high as the Castle is tall. Butterflies have always been part of funeral rites in which they suck the corpse dry.

Adding to the fun is the book's habit of breaking up the narrative with odd passages that, say, invite us to consider what mistakes a character has already made in the course of a quest. It's again hard not to think of Labyrinth, which adds a lighthearted bit of whimsy here and there to leaven the heavy duty strangeness. 

If she'd gone that way, she'd be headed straight to that castle. 

And yes, sometimes, just sometimes, things hit that level of cute.

Believe it or not, all of this insanity comes to a very satisfying conclusion, one of the best I've encountered in recent years of reading weird fiction and Weird Fiction. While I would gladly spend much, much more time exploring this Palace and the world in which it exists, there aren't any cliffhangers, plot holes or loose ends leaving me clamoring for a sequel. Sometimes it's okay to write a stand-alone.

But I'm sure hoping Pechaček's got something else in the hopper that'll be ready to show us soon. I really get the feeling that, as many other reviewers have commented,  including my boys over at Death//Sentence, Pechaček is only getting warmed up.

This is cause to celebrate. And maybe to create an elaborate cake for... reasons.

 *Which, I mean, it was December, but also, caveat listener: narrator Steve West has a very deep and rich voice, distractingly so. He's like Jot Davies on a diet of virgin's blood and truffled chocolates. 

**As in when it's summer in one wing, it's fall in the next one over. Probably. But it's not quite as big as that suggests. Though it does take a few days' walking to get from one wing to another, so, still pretty big.

***Oh, by the way, both of these questing characters get new names in the course of the story, and one of them switches gender. Because this world is just like that, yo.