Namwali Serpell's THE OLD DRIFT (Narr by Adjoa Andoh, Richard E. Grant and Kobna Holbrook-Smith) with a brief excursis on Zamrock

Phew! I feel like I just binge-watched like 15 seasons of a top quality family saga/soap opera on a par with, say, the original TV adaptation of The Forsyte Saga, but with more life and color in just one scene than that masterful production had in its whole run, not because The Forsyte Saga was dull or colorless (though the original adaptation was in black and white, tee hee) but because The Old Drift, especially as brought to life by Adjoa Andoh and Kobna Holbrook-Smith*, is so intense, colorful, grand and real that I feel like I've known these characters for years now.

And while the fact that The Old Drift -- the title refers to a part of the Zambizi river that is slightly more navigable for crossing than it is for most of its length, where an early settlement is established around the turn of the last century -- is set in and around Zambia instead of a few neighborhoods in London might give it an unfair advantage in terms of vividness, it's really author Namwali Serpell's intense involvement and intimacy with her characters, given incredible life by the devastatingly talented Adjoa Andoh, showing off a broad range of accents, tones and stylings that make the audio edition a true standout -- and her commitment to sharing that involvement and intimacy with her readers, that sends The Old Drift to a whole 'nother level of storytelling.

Also, it has a Greek chorus of mosquitos. And I'm not going to say that's the best part of the book, though it certainly would be, for me, for most books, because The Old Drift has so many other contenders for "best part" that the mosquito chorus becomes just another astonishing wonder among many.**

The story the mosquitos and the more conventional narrator tell are tremendous in scope -- over a hundred years of Zambian history, from its initial contact with white settler-colonialists through its years as part of that travesty called Rhodesia to its emergence as an independent nation state that once even had a space program and beyond -- but also, as I said before, incredibly intimate. By this I don't just mean you are going to experience a lot of menstrual and pregnancy issues right along with the novel's characters, though of course there is that -- but also that as the generations of three different families keep meeting and interacting in strange ways, the reader comes to feel that she knows them better than they do themselves, because the reader recalls bits of their histories that the characters themselves don't seem to know, to wit...

All of this starts when a British would-be-explorer makes a stupid blunder in a frontier bar, and the blunder's victim's daughter overreacts and does permanent, debilitating injury to a bystander/bar employee. This incident lives in the lore of the three families -- the British guy's, the victim's daughter's, and the bystander's -- for only a generation or so before being forgotten, or at least never mentioned by any of the later generations of characters in the novel's text, but the reader gets to appreciate how the courses of all of these lives bear the mark of this ridiculous incident, and of subsequent ones in later years such as the decision of a honeymooning couple who hit a bicyclist with their car to just leave him where he lays with a pile of money instead of staying to help him, or of a wife still very much in love with her husband to take the necessary steps to go and confront the woman he's sleeping with instead of her.

See where it's so like a soap opera? It's utterly engrossing and unfailingly dramatic but it's also way more grounded in reality than any soap opera I've seen, and beautifully, beautifully told. Namwali Serpell's skill as a poet shines in the mosquito interludes, but her mastery of prose is there for us to admire throughout:

Now, as her baby wept for hunger and as she herself wept distractedly - weeping was just what she did now, who she was - Matha felt that dawning shock that comes when you look at yourself and see a person you once might have pitied.

Which is a pivotal moment in the named character's development,and then there's heart-shattering stuff like this that speaks to and for us all: 

Old like her father was old, a shaggy shambling old, an old where you'd lost the order of things and felt so sad that you simply had to embrace the loss, reassuring yourself with the lie that you hadn't really wanted all that order to begin with.

Time is a bitch. 

There is also a gentle strain of what I can only call magical realism in the novel. One character, Sybella, is born with so much hair that grows so thick and fast that she lives most of her life as a sort of female Cousin It (but still finds a husband and raises a daughter and then grandchildren); another, the Matha of the first pulled quote above, never, ever stops weeping copiously after the moment there depicted, to the baby's endless detriment until that baby grows up into a strong and self-reliant woman who winds up doing incredible business making and selling wigs made from Sybella's hair. Sybella and Matha's lives and fates are united by the Stupid Inciting Incident; Sybella is the daughter of the girl who pushed the bystander and Matha is the granddaughter of the bystander, but neither of them knows this, or that they're destined to meet the bumbling Brit's granddaughter-in-law in a scene that is so dramatic and disastrous and riveting that it doesn't need all of that historical baggage to be a jaw-dropper, but since the reader has it, that Simpsons-racing-to-the-couch moment is utterly unforgettable and deserves to be as famous as the Simpsons scene I referenced.

And that's not all, for The Old Drift is not just a historical family saga with magical realism elements, it is a grand example of speculative fiction in its fullest and most inclusive sense, for as its arcs and family lines approach the present day, its characters are looking toward the future with ambition and purpose, and the three families are each as important to those ambitions and purposes as they are to one another, as children from each family come together to continue the work of one's father -- a physician and medical researcher who has made the conquest of HIV his obsession to the cost of pretty much everything and everyone else in his life -- and to mitigate the harm that father's singleminded pursuit of a cure for AIDS has inflicted on another's mother, who turned out to have a T-cell receptor mutation that showed tremendous promise toward the creation of an eventual HIV vaccine. Meanwhile, that mother's son is obsessed with inventing a mosquito-sized drone, and the daughter of the third family is in the picture, too, as she attends school and learns about activism, Marxism and the art of political protest. Later in adulthood, this trio pools its many talents and resources and hatches a plan that will change Zambia forever. This is African futurism at its very finest and most pointed because...

Zambia, both in the novel and in the real world, is at or near ground zero for investment/meddling by the People's Republic of China, continuing the long tradition of exploiting Africa for extractable resources in a somewhat kinder disguise as Chinese money, immigrants and visiting executives build roads and factories, re-open mines, establish schools and hospitals, projecting Soft Power in a very rigid fashion. Grappling with this reality is the biggest challenge the Millennial generation of Zambians, black, white and brown, face as they continue to work toward nationhood, equity, dignity and strength, hopefully without sacrificing a cultural heritage that predates Cecil Rhodes and David Livingston, for all that they and men like them arrived on the African continent and assumed it had been created for their use and damned whatever inconvenient people got there before them (or, this being Africa, never left in the first place).

I learned a hell of a lot about Zambia in the course of listening to this stunning work, enriched by what little knowledge I did already had, which was entirely and only about the Freedom Rock or "Zamrock" of the 1970s, in which a small but immensely creative and talented group of muscians who had grown up on American and European pop music took up that industry's tools, especially the electric guitar, and made their own thing with it and I am a fan! At least one character in The Old Drift discusses this amazing flowering of musicianship in passing, and several other scenes mention slightly older examples of Zambia's earlier pop music history (OMG, The Dark City Sisters, you guys!), and so of course I'm going to spend a little time sharing some of my favorite examples of this music, including first and foremost, only because this novel begins at the famous location after which a band I really dig named themselves, but they ain't named Victoria Falls, friends, oh no. They are Musi-a-Tunya (the original name of the falls) and just listen to this song by the same name!

In fact, really, you should just go listen to that whole album, Welcome to Zamrock on your streaming service of choice*** as many times as it takes for you to fall in love and then buy the damned album on physical media because you never know when streaming services will fail or have a dispute with the artists or other nonsense. And then listen to the sequel album, Welcome to Zamrock Volume 2. And hunt up other individual tracks by whoever catches your fancy. There's so much goodness out there, you know how it works!

And while you're at it, check out Dark City Sisters because oh my goodness the tight girl group harmonies alone are worth a click or two, here's my favorite of theirs. Thanks for the recommendation, Namwali!

Have another favorite of mine:

But now I'm really digressing and robbing you of the fun of exploring this stuff for yourself. Go, explore! And listen to the 100% pure high grade awesome that is The Old Drift in audio book form. Probably you should plan on listening twice, because this is another one in which the ending reveals a whole 'nother way to interpret what you've been hearing as it also makes you realize that you've been too distracted by the incredible character drama to notice the slow burn infrastructure going on behind it.

This. Is. A. Masterpice!

*Richard E. Grant only appears at the very beginning, which concerns itself with the founding blunder and has a white English colonizer for a protagonist.

**Though the mosquito interludes are where Kobna Holbrook-Smith takes over and makes an absolute meal of the chorus' dramatic lines and strange perspectives and sound effects and the poetic rhythms of their text. I would listen happily to a whole book of just that, but I don't suppose there'd be much of a market for such a thing. I'd sure like to visit the universe next door where everybody clamors for narratives from the point of view of mosquitos delivered like speeches from Sophocles, though!

***Psst. If you actually care about some of your streaming dollars maybe actually making it to artists, or at least to their heirs/copyright holders/sick old grannies/whomever, some services are better than others. I'm only using YouTube here because it's easiest to embed clips on Blogger from it, and it's also a service that you don't have to have an account to enjoy instantly. But otherwise...

B. Catling's THE ERSTWHILE

Where the first book in B. Catling's Vorrh series, The Vorrh, was a scattershot of interesting ideas, weird characters and language games, its sequel, The Erstwhile, is a bit more conventionally readable, while losing none of the prior's strangeness. All in all its a much more enjoyable read, but I'd kind of expected that.

I only took up the first book after reading a few tantalizing reviews of the second, which focused on the title character class. The Erstwhile are basically remnant angels, those who had failed to defend the Tree of Knowledge from Adam (Eve is never mentioned in this derivation from the book of Genesis) and were cast aside and forgotten after that little mishap. In the thousands (millions? Catling takes no stance on how old the Earth might be) of years since then, these angels have gone to ground -- literally in some cases -- and devolved into weirdly malformed monster shapes with moss and plant life growing on various bits even before they became completely quiescent.

Or so it seems until some of them start interacting with humans again, usually when they are accidentally discovered in and around The Vorrh by European colonists looking for resources to exploit there. When a few of these beings are dug up and shipped back to Germany, they come under scrutiny and care and start to seem human-like. And when one emerges mysteriously from the mud on the banks of the Thames in the 18th century and becomes the freaky muse of one William Blake (yes that William Blake, whose image of Nebuchadnezzar graces the cover of this novel and in this story is understood actually to be a portrait from life of one of the Erstwhile), and then spends a century so drifting among human society in London, that one becomes so human that he takes on the name of Nicholas Parsons and becomes a sort of trustee at Bedlam.

Meanwhile back in the Vorrh and the colony city of Essenwald, all of the characters who survived the previous novel are trying to live out their lives after those weird events, with varying degrees of success. Ghertrude Tulp is mysteriously pregnant but not sure by whom -- Ishmael? Some random guy on the same carnival night that Ishmael slept with Cyrena Lohr and by so doing cured her blindness? Ishmael and Cyrena are living together in her sumptuous house and getting tired of having sex with each other. And the city is in steep economic and social decline since the Limboia, the "mindless" slave labor force that kept the timber industry going in the last novel, have up and disappeared. Others have tried to take up the work, but unlike the Limboia, they can't handle the weird powers the forest exerts on puny human minds -- namely all but erasing them.

Soon Ishmael, the only man anyone knows who has traveled through the Vorrh without losing his memories and mind, is drafted into leading an expedition to go find the Limboia and it's all a bit like Werner Herzog's Herz aus Glas.

Already you can see that this novel has a lot more of a conventional focus and structure to it. The expedition provides one of its main narrative threads, twined with another in which a new character, Dr. Hector Schumann, is called upon to take up the mysteries posed by the Erstwhile brought to Europe. A third story, of a lonely old woman who rescues a mysterious baby from the abandoned home of The Vorrh's white savior figure and his black shaman mistress/wife, is woven in less well for all that there are structural parallels between it and the Schumann story in their final thirds. And the fate of Ghertrude's baby is, I guess part of all of this, too, but not really?

For this book is a textbook case of Middle Chapter Trouble. For all that it's a much more enjoyable read than its predecessor, it's even more frustrating, in that exactly none of the questions or problems it or the prior book poses gets resolved at all, leaving a lot for the final book, The Cloven, which just came out, to answer. But, to be honest, I have zero hope that anything will actually get resolved, because Catling isn't here to try for narrative coherence. He's all about the language.

And some of this is downright beautiful:

The stillness of the water became a secondary feature to the movement of the snow. It fell straight down into its own reflection on the mirrored Thames, the depths of the reflection rising up to meet it. Each flake fell from a black sky and fluttered up from the river's black bed to meet its twin and become one before disappearing.

I mean, god damn!

A lot of the time, though, Catling threatens to become downright annoying, especially when he gets precious with malapropisms -- which I have to assume is what he's doing because otherwise 1) He's kind of a doofus and 2) The editorial staff at Random Penguin all need remedial courses. I'm assuming its deliberate because I'd rather that were true. But there sure is a lot of "finally crafted jewelry" and whatnot in here.

But so maybe it's just sunk cost fallacy working and maybe it's still just good enough to make me want more -- I really can't decide -- but I'm looking forward to The Cloven. But I've got a lot of library books to get through before I go looking for it, because right now I'm Vorrhed out.

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).

Dorothy Dunnett's SCALES OF GOLD

Oh, Niccolo, Niccolo, Nicollo. It's been too long since I followed your adventures. So long that I had to catch up again by listening to all of the books I'd already read as audio books*

There is a stinger of a surprise ending to Scales of Gold, the fourth in the House of Niccolo series, that threatens to blot all that comes before it from memory. I'm not going to give away that ending, because it's a doozy, but in so resolving, I'm making this a harder blog entry for myself.

The machinations of Niccolo's enemies (his very estranged supposed father and grandfather, and the rival mercantile house, the Vatochino, chief among them) have left Team Niccolo cash poor but rich in responsibilities, so the need becomes immediately evident that the gang needs money. Hard money. The very hardest. And where, before the New World ripened for the plundering, did gold come from?

Africa. And where does Niccolo's best friend and maybe sometime lover (last novel the King of Cyprus said sooner or later Niccolo would either have to send him away or make him his lover), Loppe the polyglot omnitalented African, a former slave who has mentioned betimes that it would be swell if he could go home and show Niccolo the sights and they could maybe get some gold...

But meanwhile, other fallout from Niccolo's previous adventures is falling out. His maybe-father, Simon de St. Pol, has a sister, who had a Portuguese husband that died last novel (and of course some people blame Niccolo, but we know the truth), leaving behind a young son and half of a trading company (Simon owns the other half, dun dun DUUUUUNNNN), and it, too, is on the brink of failure, but Niccolo has a plan to maybe save it and blah blah blah everybody is on the island of Madeira (not yet famous for its wines) but oh, they're too late -- Simon has been there and decided to sell off his half of the company to... The Vatochino! His sister and nephew will be destitute, unless Niccolo and Loppe can save the day!

But wait, they don't think they're going alone, do they? Because no. The nephew, Diniz Vasquez, must go with them. And so must... Oh jeez. So must one Bel of Cuthilgurdy, Simon's sister Lucia's best friend and traveling companion**, and also... Gelis van Borsalen. Last seen as Katelina van Borsalen's bratty little sister back in Niccolo Rising. She's all grown up now, as attractive as her late sister, and pretty damned sure that, whatever the official ruling, Katelina's death is also Niccolo's fault. And she's not going to give him any peace, going to follow him wherever he goes like a buxom young Fury.

Many of Niccolo's other friends are involved in this venture as well, but the significant one aside from those already named is Father Godscalc, originally the house chaplain to the Charetty Company (Niccolo's original employer as well, whose widowed owner he married by way of positioning him to help her to expand its scope and get him a good start in business in his own right, and from which he wound up inheriting many excellent advisers, partners and helpers, some of whom are keepers of various of his secrets and some of whom can barely stand him and some of whom are just in it for the money. Of these, Godscalc is one of the secret keepers, of course), who also wants to go to Africa, but not for gold; he wants to find a land route from the continent's western coast to Ethiopia, believed to be the true home of that legendary Christian king, Prester John. Goldscalc envisions a great evangelical pilgrimage to Prester John's kingdom, saving souls and making converts all the way, and securing from that great king a pledge of money and manpower to help save the rest of Christendom from the Turk. Niccolo, Niccolo kind of owes him one.

But so, adventures. Lots and lots of adventures, including an entertaining sea battle on the way from Madeira to the mouth of the Gambia, in which a ship that Niccolo was given by Emperor of David of Trebizond back in The Spring of the Ram but was originally owned by, you got it, Simon, must attack a ship sailed by the Vatochino without being recognized as both companies race for the gold. Whoever gets there first has the upper hand in contacting the natives and making the deals for that season's haul.

But all of that's just preamble. The heart of this novel is in, that's right, Timbuktu, a city of clay and mud that dissolves when it rains, only to be built again because it is a city of scholars, holy men and entrepreneurs, and its position makes it the crossroads for much of western Africa's commerce circa the 15th century. Everybody in Niccolo's party has something to learn there, as well as things to acquire (like copies of scrolls from the impressive libraries repositories of Timbuktu). The interlude here is as lovely as anything Dunnett has written, and as satisfying. But Dunnett is never satisfied merely with being satisfied, and Prester John beckons.

A lot of people point to this novel as a turning point in Niccolo's development as a man and a character, and they are right to. Up to this point he has been largely passive and protean, exercising his talents in mostly hidden ways, often only when others have forced him to. Here he finally takes his fate and that of others deliberately into his hands, realizes he is an adult and that his life doesn't have to be solely one of avenging the circumstances of his irregular birth. He leaves Africa interested in finding for himself the pleasures of family life, which he has tasted with the Charetty company -- his late wife had two nearly-grown daughters who eventually came around to being okay with having a stepdad just a few years older than they -- but now wants for real. And now I'm not going to say anymore about that because it's all tied up in the twist ending, a real emotional cliffhanger that had me plunging straight into the next novel, the Unicorn Hunt.

Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy!

*Which, these are pretty good, but I could have done without all of the accents, especially on the female characters. Most male narrators don't do female voices well anyway and really shouldn't even try, but they sound much worse when they're also given comic Italian or Flemish or Greekish accents.

**Which, get ready for Bel. She's late middle aged, fat, Scottish, fiercely intelligent, stubborn and altogether awesome. She may be my favorite Dorothy Dunnett character yet. I love her so much I had to consult the oracle of internets to make sure she appears in later books, because if she got killed off (spoiler: not in this novel) I was going to be very, very angry.