B. Catling's THE VORRH

Two covers for the first volume of B. Catling's trilogy seem to appear with equal frequency when a curious would-be reader starts poking around, the one at the left and the one I have reproduced further down. Both of them are maddeningly deceptive about what kind of book The Vorrh really is, for it is neither as coldly abstract as the black and white cover*, nor as lushly imaginative as the more colorful one.

Some have compared The Vorrh to the work of Mervyn Peake, whose famous Gormenghast trilogy I have started once or twice but not had the will to finish even while appreciating its uniqueness at least enough to see why this comparison is somewhat apt: Gormenghast, a "fantasy of manners" is both engaging and off-putting in its seeming plotlessness and the artificiality of its characters; The Vorrh is, perhaps, a fantasy of projections, slightly more plot-driven but also off-putting because it gives up its secrets so very, very reluctantly. And the artificiality of its characters, about which more in a bit.

The Vorrh of the title is an imaginary African forest, originally imagined by French surrealist Raymond Roussel for his Impressions of Africa, an outlandish romp through a wholly imagined version of the continent. Roussel becomes a character of sorts in Catling's book, a sketch of his story bookending the rest of the action, mostly just to remind us of how earlier generations with no actual experience of Africa romanticized it, but also to add another layer of weirdness to what is already a pretty weird tale.

For this book, The Vorrh is evoked rather than shown as an African forest of supernatural dread that just might conceal the original Garden of Eden at its heart -- and has a completely transplanted European town, moved stone by stone from one continent to another -- on its edges, thriving on an extractive economy based on timber from the forest (yes, children, this story is in part an answer to the question no one else has ever asked -- what if we started logging operations in Eden?) harvested by conveniently docile native slaves (their docility supernaturally compelled by the presence of... A pretty nasty thing I'm not going to spoil for you here though it's a perfect example of Catling's amazing ability to conjure up the truly grotesque) who are the only people who can come and go from the forest without losing their minds or memories (because they kind of don't have those to begin with? Maybe? At least according to the White Men who manage them? But maybe for reals? Maybe?). The Vorrh is also inhabited by creatures straight out of John Mandeville's fables of the kingdom of Prester John (for those non-Prester John fans out there, similar beings are visually depicted in Rene Laloux's crazy time travel cartoon Gandahar/Light Years) and by beings known as The Erstwhile, who are probably degenerated angels (?) and a sad, silent, grotesque and grey-skinned figure whose toenails have turned to horns or maybe hooves but whose human hands (the first human hands, we are told) look kind of normal and who might be Adam, as in Adam from the book of Genesis (?) Not even Roussel could come up with this stuff, is what I'm saying, but here he is, sharing some pages with them. Sort of.

Nor is Roussel the only historical figure to appear here, as a more fully developed narrative serving as a sort of mini-biography of photographic pioneer Edward Muybridge (with added steampunkish/fantastical elements and a fun interlude when he did some work for Sarah Winchester of Mystery House fame) is interwoven with accounts of Catling's own characters, which include Ishmael, a stunted cyclops of a boy raised by small bakelite robots until a pushy teenaged busybody, Gheertrude Tulp, invades the basement of the mysterious mansion given over to his care, accidentally destroys one of the robots and decides to finish raising him herself; Williams/Oneofthewilliams/The Bowman, Great War veteran and borderline white savior figure who resolves to explore the Vorrh after his shaman-lover dies and commands him to turn her into a sentient bow and two white arrows, which he fires ahead of himself to sort of (?) maybe (?) show him the way deeper into the forest(?); Cyrena, a blind woman who has her sight restored after spending a carnal carnival night with Ishmael, and many more, including a Scotsman who sort of accidentally finds out the secret of manipulating the local "hive-minded" tribesmen, another guy Tsungali,** who might be a member of that tribe but maybe it's a different tribe (the ambiguity is deliberate, as far as I can tell) who joins a host of other weird figures who have chosen to try to prevent The Bowman from crossing the Vorrh even if it means killing him, and...

Do you see?

So I can't even tell for sure if I liked The Vorrh, as such. It's overflowing with weird and neat ideas, and full of passages of stunning imagery (Catling is also an accomplished poet). None of the characters are remotely sympathetic*** but none of them are boring... And always there is the mystery. A sequel, The Erstwhile, is next on my to-be-read file, and a third book in the trilogy, The Cloven, is due out later this year. I'm tentatively on board for the rest of the set. We'll see how I feel after The Erstwhile. Which, judging from the title is going to be a bit more focused on the degenerated angels? Maybe?

Whatever. As long as the prose is still good.

*And I cannot account at all for the choice of such obvious eclipse imagery on this cover, either.

**Tsungali, who has spent most of his life as a colonial soldier and who carries a semi-sentient rifle, is my favorite character, chiefly for one scene quite early in The Vorrh, in which he visits England to serve as a living exhibit for his masters, and chances upon a display of artifacts in the British Museum that are not only the work of his own "True People" but are in fact things that his grandfather made and used, as his grandfather's ghost tells him. This is by far the most deeply felt and moving scene in the entire book, and so seems a bit out of place among the violence and willful misunderstanding and surrealism, but it made Tsungali stand out as, for me, the heart of the book.

***To be frank, all of them are awful, except Tsungali and MAYBE Ishmael, and even he is awfully creepy, even if we can understand why he's creepy. But this book is full of violence, rape, exploitation, manipulation, more violence, grotesquerie, class snobbery, yet more violence, and did I mention violence? I mean, the book starts with a guy dismembering his dead lover to make her spine into a weapon, so... yeah. Not a book to take up if you're looking for depictions of healthy relationships, honest conversations or demonstrations of the power of love and human kindness. While it's plenty critical of colonialism, it still lavishes a lot of loving detail on the mindsets that made colonialism possible and yes, this includes the female characters (which in addition only barely pass the Bechdel Test).

Henry James' THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA

It's been a while since I spent some time with good old Henry James, America's greatest social novelist.* And it's only because I stumbled across a nifty-looking biography of the man when Open Road Media had a 24-hour free-for-all on Amazon that I realized I hadn't read any James since Portrait of a Lady. But which to read, which to read?

Then I encountered, somewhere I don't remember, an observation that Princess Casamassima was likely an inspiration for Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, probably my favorite Conrad after Nostromo, and so there I went.

But so anyway, stop me if you've heard this one: Boy meets Princess. Boy falls head over heels for Princess.  Princess loves communists. Boy pretends to be communist to get closer. Princess sees through him but figures she can get him to bring her some real communists. Boy complies and brings her tiny half-French bastard bookbinder. Princess will love bookbinder and pet bookbinder and hold bookbinder and squeeze bookbinder and she will call bookbinder George. Exeunt Boy, with blue balls. Exeunt bookbinder, by his own hand. As such.

Which is to say that neither the Princess Cassamassima, nor the bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, is the driver of this plot, even though the book is named for the former and the latter is the point of view character. Hyacinth is so passive that even his choice of profession only comes about via the vigorous exertions of others; the Princess is equally passive, at least until someone finally brings her what she wants and she must work a bit to keep it. 

Doing all the actual work of the novel is a character who hardly appears in it, at least at front and center: the gentlemanly, the cosmopolitan, the conventional Captain Sholto (the Boy), who manipulates everything behind the scenes: he's even partly responsible for the radicalisation of Hyacinth, who might have stayed a drinking dilletante himself had he not been presented with Sholto's annoying example of same. 

And the romance- and- radicalization plot isn't even the only thing. James has at least as much fun with two other stories, both of which would be right at home in a modern high school dramedy: The competition between Hyacinth and Sholto over who a picturesquely poor family " belongs" to (settled, inconclusively but forever, when the Princess sails in and takes it over. They're hers.  They were always hers. You boys were just keeping the sofa warm for her), and the even more brittle-ly funny one between the Princess and one Lady Aurora, better born than the Princess but a middle aged spinster, whose lifetime of actively visiting and nursing and spending her meager allowance on the genuinely poor is somehow made to look amateurish and gauche when the Princess announces that actually, she owns nothing  ( probably because her estranged husband took it all away?) and "when thousands... haven't bread to put in their mouths, I can dispense with tapestry and old china." 

Straight out of, say, Clueless, or maybe Mean Girls, am I right?

What this all amounts to seems to be James' version of social satire,  a take on the class war that doesn't take it very seriously. James' socialists don't really seem to understand socialism, and spend most of the novel trying to hide this from one another while also trying to simultaneously impress each other with how aware and committed they are, and to discreetly pump each other for information as to what they should be doing to further their cause. Thus there are moments of actual humor, genuine laugh-out-loud moments, that I did not expect from James.

Does that mean a re-assessment is in order? It may. But I've got a lot of other stuff going on, so don't hold your breath for one, K?

*Indeed, the last time I took him up, I was just beginning to have joint problems and thought recording audioboo blog posts was a temporary solution until they got better, ha ha ha ha ha ha sob...

100 Books #66 - Jasper Fforde's THE EYRE AFFAIR

Time travel! Cloned animals! Nineteenth century social novels! Exclamation marks! Most of those last from me! These Thursday Next novels, in other words, are a hell of a lot of fun! And this is only the first of seven extant so far! It's as if Lavie Tidhar and Tim Powers became devout Catholics* and got married and had a whole lot of children together! I don't know which one of them gets to be the mom by the way!

More than anything, The Eyre Affair, and, from what I'm hearing, all the rest of the books in this series, is a novel for a certain kind of person: the kind who crows with delight at the idea of children trading Henry Fielding bubblegum cards and arguing over what is a fair exchange for a rare Sophia (answer: an Allworthy, a Tom Jones and an Amelia). I am that kind of person.

It is also for the kind of person who thinks The Sandbaggers (a 1970s British TV show about a very small unit of very covert Cold War operatives) was one of television's greatest achievements. I am also that kind of person.

Ditto for the kind of person who dreams about what it would be like if radical Baconians (people who think Francis Bacon was the actual author of Shakespeare's plays) and Marlovians (people who think Kit Marlowe was better than Shakers, or even that he was the real author) engaged in various forms of combat in the present day, said combat/competitiveness including door-to-door solicitations like so many Mormon teenagers on Mission. Oh  yes, I am one of those as well.

If you're reaching the conclusion that I would have liked this book even if the characterization and plotting were crap, you are right. Fortunately, those elements are of a quality almost as worthy of praise as all these schticks that Fforde has combined here. I say almost only because really, I'm pretty sure no plot, no characters, could ever be as awesome as Richard III (the play; I do feel the need to emphasize that it's the play rather than the actual king, as we are dealing with some time travel here) being heckled, Rocky Horror-style.

And I'll stop just dropping bits now, I promise. But gosh, are they fun. The temptation to share all of my favorites is really hard to resist.

At heart, the Eyre Affair is a detective novel, one that, probably, counts as a cozy mystery. Thursday Next, a veteran of the Crimean War (that is still going on in this alternate 1985), works in "LitTec", a sort of crime squad dedicated to, e.g., stamping out the trade in fake original Byron manuscripts purportedly brought through time. It's not very exciting work, and she is tired of it and longs for adventure, but when she gets sucked into a high level investigation for which she is uniquely qualified, she gets more than she bargained for. As well she should, in such a world!

Soon she's on the trail of a supervillain who can't be photographed or filmed, which means no one knows what he looks like - except our heroine, who happens to once have had him as a professor. And not appearing in photos is just one of his powers. He has a lot of powers.

So yes, this book is lots of fun, but there are some quirks, some of which feel a bit amateurish, that bugged me from time to time. Like our narrator's** tendency, when relating flashbacks to other characters, to include the kind of dialogue tags, complete with adverbs, that are natural for a first person narrator of a piece of fiction, but which real, normal people -- or characters in most quality fiction -- do not use in ordinary conversation, and especially not when reporting to superiors in an official capacity. Think about it. If your boss had called you in to ask you about something bad that happened, would  you say things like "Acheron smiled admiringly. He would have continued his brutal game for as long as he could, but the distant wail of police sirens hastened him into action. He shot me once in the chest and left me for dead" would you? No, you would say something like "we heard sirens, and then Acheron smiled, shot me, and took off." Or at least I would.

I can almost, almost, accept this as a very clever stylistic choice on Fforde's part; this is a world that takes classic literature extremely seriously, and our narrator is someone who spends a lot of time up to her eyeballs in it (literally, but I'm trying to avoid major spoilers), and so maybe, just  maybe, she would actually talk that way.

To police and higher ups in the secret service.

In a disciplinary/investigative setting.

 OK, no, I just talked myself out of that completely. It's official: I consider this a flaw, and a fairly annoying  one.

I'm inclined, though, to forgive Mr. Fforde this tic, not just because of the amusing bits the flavor of which I suggested above, but for the interesting conceit he has cooked up for these books: novels have a real and tangible existence, and each reading of one activates it as a sort of rigidly performed stage play, the characters and creatures performing their roles perfectly, identically, every single time, down to the smallest gesture. As it is written, so shall it be, over and over until nobody reads the book ever again -- except for special cases when a reader somehow penetrates the printed page, enters the story and interferes. Then, not only can that "performance" change, but so can the original text. Forever.

See? Interesting! Even when it's not combined with time travelers and cloned pet dodos and interagency politics and star-crossed love stories! But here, it is!

As the title of this novel suggests, the book getting picked on by both villain and heroine is Jane Eyre, with which the villain interferes to a disastrous degree and which our heroine must repair by foiling the villain and minutely supervising the course of the plot once the villain is foiled. Which is to say that, while I can't imagine anyone who wasn't already a fan of Jane Eyre picking up this book, heaven help that poor soul, especially if he or she is spoiler-averse.

For the rest of us, this is, as other reviewers have put it, a silly book for smart people, at least the kind of smart people who wish that art and literature were taken as seriously in this world as in the one Fforde has imagined. And yes, of course, I am one of those, too. Aren't you?

Oh, and Doctor Who fans will probably like this, too.

*And hey, Tim Powers already is one, I think.

**And well, as long as I'm taking pot-shots at the narration, Thursday is a awfully omniscient for a first person narrator. Awfully.

100 Books 73 - Jules Verne's EIGHT HUNDRED LEAGUES ON THE AMAZON

Most of us know Jules Verne as one of the granddaddies of science fiction. Journey to the Center of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days... Balloons! Submarines! Weird-looking tunnel borers!

Sometimes, though, our boy liked to try his hand at somewhat more conventional storytelling. I say "somewhat" because apparently even when he staked out what a slightly later age would tend to regard as the territory of Joseph Conrad, and an even later age as that of Werner Herzog, he still went a little crazy with it – both in terms of sheer possibility and of melodrama.

Exhibit A of this kind of Verniana would be his Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon, in which he, not content to simply write what the rather bland title might imply, did not confine himself to any ordinary boat trip. Our heroes and heroines do indeed travel 800 leagues on the Amazon River from Peru deep into Brazil, but this is Jules Verne: this ain't no flotilla of canoes. Klaus Kinski is not going to lose his marbles on this trip.

Instead the vessel of choice is both cargo and ship, a raft called by the local term jangada, constructed from a small forest's worth of valuable timber and big enough to transport a small village down the river. That's right: village. These voyagers build several houses, storage sheds, and even a chapel complete with church bell onto the back of this raft. A prosperous farmer's family, servants and farmhands are all making the trip.

A Wyoming girl born and raised, I suffered repeated failures of imagination as I took this journey with the family. The biggest river I knew growing up was one I could wade across to go get a snack. I was 16 before I beheld anything much bigger, the Mississippi, but the bus I was on drove very rapidly over the bridge, and thus that river's impact on me was minor. My college years were spent literally on the banks of the Hudson, but even that, even after spending four years white-knuckling a steering wheel every time I drove across the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, didn't seem like quite a big enough body of water to gently carry village on its bosom.

I just kept thinking of Fitzcarraldo, if not of Aguirre, and waiting for the journey to fail, or at least run into some major logistical problems.

But instead – exhaustive geographical and natural historical survey of the Amazon aside – Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon is actually more of an ordinary human story than that. There is crime, there is covetousness, there is young love, and an earnest tribute to good, old-fashioned, hokey honor.

There is, in other words, rather an ordinary 19th-century romance, with a bit more science than usual tossed in. This may give some readers, expecting some more proto-steampunk goodness, cause to complain; it never really becomes an exciting story, given that most of the action is provided simply by them forward motion of the current. But there is good melodrama, and the second half of the novel has a lovely cryptological bent to it.

File it under gently diverting reads.