Alan Moore's JERUSALEM (Narr by Simon Vance)

"That's what art's for; it rescues everything from time."

An early chapter in Jerusalem, Alan "Swamp Thing" Moore's enormous contribution to prose fiction, depicts a black man, born a slave in the United States but freed by the Emancipation Proclamation as a teenager, whose wanderings have landed him in and around Northampton, England in the early 20th century. Henry, sometimes called "Black Charlie" by the locals, first surfaces briefly in a prior chapter as a figure that chapter's point of view character (who is actually named Charles but goes by "Oatsey," a nickname derived from Cockney rhyming slang and who turns out to be someone famous you're going to have to read the book to find out about) encounters at two interesting moments in that character's life. When the next chapter proved to be focused on Henry/Black Charlie, I felt a rare delight in that the author had recognized that a figurant in one story was interesting enough to deserve his own chapter. As I've observed here before, I have a habit of getting more interested in background or side characters than I am in the protagonists, and I'm usually left frustrated. But not here!

And not only does Henry get a fascinating back story and a fulfilling afterlife in "the Upstairs"*, but his chapter is the most moving one yet encountered as one settles in to this enormous work of over 1200 pages (just over 60 hours!). Henry, who travels the countryside on a sturdy bicycle with ropes for tires, drawing a cart as he goes about his rounds, with wooden blocks attached to his feet for braking (because this is from before bicycles had brakes) learns near the beginning of his day that his favorite hymn, "Amazing Grace" was written by a pastor at a church in Olney, which is not far from where Henry hangs his hat and dotes on his family. On a whim, Henry takes time out from his ordinary rounds to visit the church and bask in the wonder that a white guy in England wrote a song that Henry has always felt best reflected the Black experience in America. Upon arriving, he is disappointed to learn that the pastor, John Newton, is not buried by the church in Olney, but, as readers who already know about John Newton, or even can just guess there's going to be some irony here, can foresee, this isn't going to be Henry's worst disappointment of the day. Go read about John Newton at that link, if you don't already know.

We are spared a scene where the kindly churchwarden who admits Henry to the building and shows him Newton's portrait reluctantly shatters Henry's illusions about the author of "Amazing Grace"; when we pick up with him again he is pedaling home and having to stop every mile or so to wipe the tears from his eyes.

Of course, I had to wipe my own. Alan Moore, what are you even doing to me, man? I was ready for some crazy magick (I'm a huge fan of, for instance, Promethea) or some gratuitously gross Lovecraftiana (seen Neonomicon? Jacen Burrows was the illustrator, if that gives you any clue on that score), or another round of "let's dump out the whole box of action figures and make them fight evil together (Hello, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) or some intensely esoteric and deep pop culture local to Moore's hometown of Northampton (Dodgem Logic, anyone), but not to get my heart torn right out of my body and squeezed dry before I'm even sure what this enormous doorstop of a novel is really going to turn out to be!

Which is kind of a hybrid between one of Edward Rutherford's better efforts and B. Catling's Vorrh Trilogy (even to including quite a significant role for one William Blake in its back story)**, except tossed into a kaleidoscope, there to be manipulated with manic energy at varying speeds by its author-operator. Ah, there at last is the Alan Moore I expect.

Interestingly, the reader's experience of Henry's "Amazing Grace" experience makes a useful lens through which to look at one of Jerusalem's larger themes; for as much as it is geographically concerned with Northampton and the region within it known as "the Boroughs", it is, in terms of character, somewhat focused on a peculiar family, first known as the Vernals and later the Warrens when a woman of the family in the early 20th century marries a man named Tom Warren and it's their descendants we subsequently meet and observe, who have been marked out by an ancestor's possibly fated encounter with an angel (and these angels are just as weird as Catling's Erstwhile while also partaking of, at least metaphorically, the internet's obsession with the weirdness of "biblically accurate" angels) in the 19th century. A strain of supernatural power that presents as a distressing mental illness appears in many of them, but what it amounts to is that they have come to perceive time very, very differently. They see all of it at once. So, for example, when John "Snowy" Vernal's first daughter is born, he can't handle the birth because he already knows how her whole life will go, what tragedies she will face, and how she will die in 80-some years: all alone and not even noticed for a few days. I'd probably jump up on a nearby roof instead of watching the delivery, too, Snowy.

So our experience of wincing in anticipation for Henry's loss of innocence regarding the author of "Amazing Grace" (presuming the reader already knows the realities of John Newton's life, which I think is pretty commonly known now? But I live in a bubble of internet where it is and maybe you don't? Anyway, pretend you did because it's dead easy to educate yourself) mirrors that of Snowy and others of his family, earthbound kwisatz haderachs without the benefit of sworn fedaykin or interstellar travel.

The Vernal-Warrens, often in sibling pairs, continue this weird existence well into the 21st century, in which their unique birthright as sort of supernatural watchmen of "the corners" makes them an integral part of a great universe-defining Event set for 2006, for which the first half or so of the book, including a whopping 11 chapters of a toddler's near-death experience, is just table setting and elaborate foreshadowing and even so when the Event finally comes, the reader is by no means ready for what's coming.

A lot of this book is written from a sort of multidimensional, godlike perspective we've seen Moore play with in, for instance, Watchmen, whose Dr. Manhattan character narrates his experience in an omniscient "everything that happens is happening at once" style, finally perfected for Jerusalem because the characters in Jerusalem afflicted with this power still care. They care deeply, whether they are angel-Builders who know that what they're asking of the Vernals will be hard for them or fathers who know that their granddaughters are doomed to die young even as they watch the baby's mother being born. 

This continues even into the novel's ostensible main character (and Moore's self-insert figure), the irascible, seemingly sociopathic artist Alma Warren - whose younger brother, Mick, was the toddler who spends eleven chapters choking on a cough drop while his spirit is lead on a bewildering and revelatory tour of time and space by a gang of deceased fellow Northamptonians who have chosen to spend their afterlives as street urchins calling themselves the Dead Dead gang*** -- is passionate about the welfare of what's left of the denizens of her beloved Boroughs, where England has been stashing its unwanted working class and its unwanted weirdos for some 800 years, and mad as hell at how the forces of globalization and gentrification (given form in the Upstairs as a giant torus-shaped chimney, sucking in and burning up the very substance of the world from a spot near a pub) have torn the community apart and especially what this means for its older citizens who have known no other life and are suddenly uprooted and moved into unfamiliar apartment blocks full of strangers. This is her hobby horse and the great subject of her coming art exhibit in 2006, which is ostensibly the Event towards which everything else in the novel is leading us, except...

Except about halfway through one figures out that the most important person in this novel is one whom we've barely met, who doesn't even get a name unless you're paying very close attention/going back to re-read or re-listen to sections (her name is Marla). She's just a poor, drug-addled sex worker whom we see sort of in the background of other scenes in 2006 and for most of the novel she's just a bit of local color, until we realize [SPOILER ALERT DUH] that she is the same person whom Mick briefly met during his tour of the Upstairs, a woman who had a terrible past but turned it around and wound up doing an incredible amount of good by developing a questionnaire that helped a future-from-our-perspective UK government humanely and sensibly handle a flood of climate refugees and all around prevent the country from becoming, say, what we see in Alfonso Quarron's searing Children of Men.**** She's so important that Asmodeus himself tried to manipulate a young and ghostly Mick (newly arrived in the Upstairs) into promising to help Asmodeus kill her someday, but instead, with the help and inspiration of the Dead Dead Gang, he helps rescue her from a client-turned-rapist who has decided to murder her (this act of heroism also involves ghosts from other time periods and living relatives of Mick and Alma but it all starts with the Dead Deads).

But up until her escape from gruesome death, she has been the only person we've met who hasn't gotten the Henry treatment. Do you think maybe Alan Moore has a point in all of this? Maybe something about always be kind and stand up when you can because you never know how important what you've done might turn out to be for future generations, maybe? What a silly, comic book writer thing to spend 1200+ pages to tell us. Silly, silly Mr. Moore.

Anyway, like we always love to joke about Gene Wolfe, patron saint of big complicated books you have to read many times to understand, I just read Alan Moore's Jerusalem and all got was the sinking feeling I'm going to have to read it again. Because I almost got too distracted by the epic flights of fancy (we haven't even talked about Snowy Vernal's afterlife, journeying to the very end of time and space itself with his beautiful baby granddaughter on his shoulders!) to notice this, and at first I actually found the ending of Jerusalem a bit of a let-down. But it's not. Because what seems like the ending -- Alma's exhibition and its moderately satisfying but decidedly not epic denouement -- isn't the point at all.

Magicians are tricky.

Anyway, wow.

*Which is sort of Heaven-like but a lot more interesting than most afterlives, incorporating as it does a lot of elements of the kind of space-and-time-bending geometry that marks the last act of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar but still manages to serve as a stage for a lot of good old fashioned character drama and a rollicking good post-mortem adventure story. Because Alan Moore

**Others have insisted this is a sort of James Joyce homage/pastiche, and there are certainly elements of that, but for me the Rutherford/Catling elements are far too prominent in comparison to the Joyce ones, for all that there are whole chapters of Joycean near-gibberish - which, cheers to Simon Vance for rendering so perfectly comprehensible that his narration has half- convinced me to try Finnegan's Wake after all. 

***And if you're thinking those eleven chapters are my favorite part of Jerusalem, gold star to you. Mick's adventures with the Dead Dead Gang are so delightful even the denizens of the Upstairs are fans, because one of the kids, Drowned Marjorie, managed to write and publish a complete account of them in the afterlife, but hasn't yet as these adventures take place, except the kids keep running into beings that are huge fans of theirs and do them favors as a result, because time is way more than wibbly-wobbly and if Alan Moore is ever allowed near Doctor Who it'll pretty much collapse all of existence. 

****A movie that came out in 2006, which is the year in which Alma's Exhibition and the Rape of Marla/Kaff take place and this cannot be a coincidence; if there's any writer living who pays razory attention to pop culture, it's the Wizard of Northampton.

Pauline Melville's THE VENTRILOQUIST'S TALE

The piece of chalk Wormoal held slid across the wet surface of the blackboard as he tried to write the words "Eclipse - A Rational Analysis of Myth." Water leaked from the ceiling directly above his head. Chofy watched the words disintigrate. Wormoal shook his head in annoyance. He tried again, and the chalk skidded off the board."

Colonizers and their beneficiaries (which I've decided definitely includes tourists and scholarly types) getting their comeuppance, or better yet, being ignored or swallowed up by the territories they've intended to conquer, are my favorite kind of colonizers if such a thing must exist. I enjoy watching would be conquistadors fail (see Werner Herzog's famous Aguirre the Wrath of God), I think the original Peter Weir version of The Mosquito Coast is even better than Paul Theroux's novel*, and I love, love, love, how Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquist's Tale threatens to combine both of these sub-narratives of the Failed Colonizer right up until another, greater force swoops in and upsets everything.

The Ventriloquist's Tale does have me completely baffled in one respect though: the title. The first chapter of the novel is told in first person by a narrator we don't hear from directly again until the epilogue, and we are told that this narrator is a master of ventriloquism in that he/she can perfectly imitate the call or cry of every animal in the wilderness of Guyana and Brazil, and can make it sound like it's coming from anywhere, but (unless this person turns out to be one character whose birth comes near the novel's end but who would seem to have been killed off? Most likely? And hadn't exhibited this talent in the course of what little of the story concerns them in the text proper?) this seems to have exactly zero bearing on the story being told -- even if this titular ventriloquist/narrator does turn out to be the minor character there is an off chance that they are, what's the point of this establishing chapter? Anyway, moving on.

As I mentioned above, The Ventriloquist's Tale is the story of a handful of people who tried to make their mark on the challenging savannah/rain forest landscapes in the interior of Guyana (but has nothing to do with that other famous failed colonization of Guyana led by the Reverend Jim Jones, thank you very much), a Scottish adventurer who thought he'd come make his fortune in the late 19th/early 20th century, a Catholic Priest who thought he'd convert all the tribes of the Guyanese interior and win their souls for Jeebus, and, in the late 20th century, a researcher who has come to Guyana on the trail of a famous visitor to the region between the World Wars, one Evelyn Waugh, who commemorated his visit in a book, Ninety-Two Days: A Journey in Guyana and Brazil, 1932, which I haven't read, and a much better known short story, "The Man Who Liked Dickens", which I have. Of these, the scholar, Rosa Mendelson, seems more interested in the story than the travel book, and seems to have concluded (though without explicitly saying so) that the character in the story called McMaster was based on a real person, Alexander McKinnon, the aforementioned Scottish adventurer.

Before we meet any of these people, though, we are brought to visit the McKinnon family of the late 20th century, descendants of Alexander, a Scottish transplant to the region who, unsuccessful in business in Georgetown, turned to a rudimentary form of ranching in the countryside and "went native." Following the custom of the Wapsiana tribe in whose midst he settled, he married a pair of sisters and had a whole bunch of children with them around the turn of the 20th century. His children's lives, in particular his son Danny's and daughter Beatrice's Oops! re-enactment of a certain mythic archetype and the consequences that follow, form one of the novel's two main storylines, in which Waugh turns out to have played a laughably insignificant part.

Chief among the late 20th century family members we meet are Chofy, a grandson of Alexander's who is 20 years into a so-so marriage with a Wapsiana woman and has a son with the delightful name of Bla-Bla (!), and his aunt, Wifreda, sister of Beatrice and Danny and the only person left around who recalls anything of Waugh's visit, but doesn't want to talk about it because in her mind all memory of it -- which amounts to a schoolteacher giving the famous author a haircut -- is bound up with the family tragedy caushed by Beatrice and Danny's exploits, and with the doomed efforts of a Catholic Priest, Father Napier, to bring the Good News to the Guyanese, village by village, tribe by tribe. Eventually both Alexander McKinnon and Father Napier leave the region and return to Scotland, with Father Napier having made even less of an impression on the land or its peoples than McKinnon did (for after all, McKinnon, like McMaster in the story, fathered a great many of those people), to say nothing of Waugh, who apparently just got a haircut there. All three are like the chalk marks the anthropologist Wormoal fails to make on the blackboard in the scene I quoted above.

Waugh, though, at least had an effect on the outside world, which is what brings Rosa to Guyana in the late 20th century. Asking around Georgetown, where Chofy has come to work for a while and earn some money for his family back in the village, she learns of the McKinnons, reaches her conclusion about them, and manages to get an introduction to Chofy, who immediately falls in lust with her and becomes her very passionate lover. About which, look: I don't usually enjoy sex scenes, am kind of famously prudish about them, but these are some of the funniest sex scenes I've ever read because Chofy is 1. Very direct about his desires and 2. Very fond of narrating the goings-on. I couldn't not giggle.

Speaking of funny, author Pauline Melville, who was herself born in Guyana to an English mother and a Guyanese father, and her father had some "Amerindian" ancestry, so she could be telling us old family stories for all we'd know -- but she is also an actress. And if you're anything like me, you've seen her in a lot of weird and funny roles. Go look at her IMDB page. That's right; Vyvyan's Mum wrote this book. And wrote it well. I'll be looking for the rest of her stuff, which has won many a literary prize, eventually. If this is any example, it's easy to see why. The Ventriloquist's Tale, funny sex scenes and all, is a profound portait of culture clash, the difficulties of choosing between traditional and modern values, and the monkey wrench that sends all the pieces flying apart that is romantic/sexual love. I did not want it to be over. When's the next eclipse?

*I haven't seen the new TV series, because it's on a streaming service I don't get and my budget for those is 1. Allocated already and 2. Just fine the way it is. So I also won't be seeing Foundation any time soon, unless it gets released on physical media that I can check out from the library. Harumph.

Dilman Dila's A KILLING IN THE SUN

Once again I am reminded how big a mistake it is ever to snooze on African speculative fiction; Ugandan writer/filmmaker/activist Dilman Dila has a whole sky full of fresh air to blow through the genre, and I'm annoyed as heck that I only heard of him via a Story Graph challenge some eight years after his collection A Killing in the Sun was published.

But, better late than never.

From the very first story, "The Leaf Man" we see that his imagination is both powerful and on point. "The Leaf Man" is a traditional healer and occasional shaman who has been helping his country deal with the malaria problem for his whole career, traveling from village to village on his government-issued bicycle with a passel of herbs and wisdom. Until one day, a foreign corporation talks its way into using his home village as a test locus for their latest Big Science solution to the malaria problem, which not only proves to be worse than the original problem but to get worse with every attempt to solve the new problem. Meanwhile, our Leaf Man has figured out how to keep himself and one starving foundling child safe, only to become a hunted figure. This story alone is a must-read for everybody who thinks CRISPR is going to be the answer to everybody's prayers and monkey's paw? What's that?

Several of the other stories in the collection share a universe in which most, perhaps all, of the African continent has come under the dominion of a very powerful being with either supernatural powers or access to otherwise unknown advanced technology, who has set himself up as the Emperor of Africa and created an Orwellian nightmare in the name of freeing/decolonizing the continent's peoples. All white people (and possibly Arabs, too?) have either been expelled or secretly enslaved; the remaining population all live in giant "pyramids" with thousands of other families and are strictly monitored for conformity to the Emperor's idea of what constitutes truly African culture; but hey, there are personal ornithopters and it seems to be a post-scarcity economy. BUT, among the things that are considered colonial/not-African culture are non-procreative sex and any kind of female empowerment or emancipation, and a standardized skin tone is enforced on everybody by means of a chemical that is both a dye that can be rubbed into non-conforming skin or a drug that pregnant women are required to ingest to make sure that their babies are born dark enough.

Of these stories, the most impactful for me was "A Wife and A Slave" which concerns a man, Kopet, who once upon a time had plans to emigrate with his fiancee to Sweden but just as they were leaving the new African Empire was declared and they elected to stay home -- to his tremendous regret, as not long after their wedding his now-wife, Akello, has taken all of the new emperor's strictures to heart, especially the one about non-procreative sex and how the husband must not have to dress or even wash himself, not even his hands after a meal (which he must eat with his fingers, cutlery being a shameful colonial artifact). The bright and engaged and independent woman he fell in love with, and had enjoyed a healthy sex life with before Empire, is now fully engulfed by her role as Good Wife. The story concerns a series of near-misadventures and an encounter with an escaped white woman who was born into slavery but has dared to try to escape it, on the way to finding out if his marriage is doomed forever. No, your eyes are leaking.

Other stories, such as "The Healer" concern the eternal conflict between Western-style religious beliefs and traditional folk medicine and what happens when one tribe adopts the former and all but exterminates another who still practices the latter (which, because this is speculative fiction, actually works to the extent that it is basically magic, as is also the case in "The Leaf Man). Then there's "Itanda Bridge" in which the military forces a young man, Obil, to dive for evidence from a car crash at the bottom of a river, only for Obil to discover an amazing Lovecraftian secret just a bit downstream from where the wreckage isn't. The title story, "A Killing in the Sun" threatens to feel like a rehash of Jorge Luis Borges' "The Secret Miracle" right up until it totally doesn't because there are Witches Involved. Every story has a recognizable speculative fiction touchstone but does something unique and unexpected with it, usually in such a way as to tug at the reader's conscience and her heartstrings as Dila explores friendship, romance, the love of a father for his children, and the question of how much of a person's loyalty a regime has the right to claim -- except for one story near the end, which comes completely out of left field and turns the bizarre up to 11.

"The Yellow People" could be viewed as just another clever twist on a zombie story, but it could also be viewed as a very clever twist on a serial killer story! It's told from the killer's point of view -- he's a white man who moved to Uganda to better practice his grisly hobby with less chance of being caught or punished --  and that killer racks up a truly epic body count before something weird starts happening with the bodies he has stashed away on his property. I found "A Wife and A Slave" more emotionally satisfying but "The Yellow People" is quite possibly the best and most intriguing story in the bunch - and, no, by the way, there isn't a dud among them. You might wind up liking the collection's final entry, "A Bloodline of Blades" and its struggle between a tradition of assassination and a competing one of music to be better than "The Yellow People"; you might also prefer the creepy delights of "Okello's Honeymoon" as it tells us the story of a young man's near destruction by supernatural forces on his wedding night. Point is, there's something for everybody who loves speculative fiction.

Dilman Dila is definitely going on my "OMG must read everything he does" list. And as I mentioned above, Dila is also a filmmaker. I wanted to embed one of his shorts here, but YouTube won't let me because there's adult content. Do yourself a favor, though, and go check out his YouTube channel. His films are narratively compelling and universally appealing, full of suspense and just enough WTFery to keep the viewer riveted. I especially recommend his very recent Kifaro, which could easily fit in as an entry in A Killing in the Sun as it explores the intriguing relationship between binary computer code and African divination systems through the time-honored story of a man who catches his cheating wife. Give this man a proper film deal already! I want to see what he can do with a feature length.

Or a novel, for that matter.

Matt Wallace's SAVAGE BOUNTY

 I told you it wouldn't be long before I took up Volume Two of Matt Wallace's Savage Rebellion trilogy. This is both because the first, Savage Legion, was everything I like and nothing that I don't about epic fantasy, but also because I have definitely decided in my old age that the closer together I can read books in a series, the better, although Matt Wallace and his publishers actually did us all a solid in the form of a very helpful "Previously in" introduction that summarizes the key points of Savage Legion and can this become a norm, please?

Savage Bounty picks up almost right where Savage Legion left off, with the newly ascended Dyewan, no longer a bright little cleaning girl rolling around the campus of the Craiche Institute of Technology (properly called the Planning Cadre but I like thinking of it as CIT) participating in the funeral rites for Edger, who revealed himself as the secret actual ruler of Craiche but also as a moral monster of unconscionable proportions at the end of Savage Legion, prompting Dyewan to take the step she had unconsciously been planning for anyway, of killing him. But her unconscious-yet-brilliant plan allowed her an easy alibi; everybody just blames a failure of the wonderfully weird assistive technology Edger used to talk and breathe that I'm still going to make you read the books to discover. Dyewan is now poised to take over as the secret ruler of Craiche, setter of priorities, maker of plans, architect of Craiche's future. Whoa.

Meanwhile, Lexi is now the prisoner of one of the bureacrats who has been thwarting her efforts to preserve Gen Stalbraid and to find Lexi's missing husband. Councillor Barr is descended from the former nobility of Craiche and has managed through cunning, manipulation and all the other dark arts to hold on to just enough power to conceal the fact that she still owns a huge chunk of property just outside the city that she has turned into a sort of living history museum and I can't have been the only person to have read this and thought of Antebellum, right? Barr has servants in livery and a castle and refers to Lexi as a Lady and is just a complete Madame D'Auroet of a person. She has a role for Lexi to play that in a way offers Lexi everything she could want short of getting her husband back, but Lexi already distrusts her all the way, even before Lexi almost gets eaten alive by some giant carniverous plants that guard an apparent escape route from the garden.

As for Evie, she has managed to convince what's left of her Savage Legion to join with their supposed enemies, who have been revealed not to be a mighty rival nation opposing Craiche but the last pathetic remnants of various peoples upon whom Craiche has been pursuing a campaign of genocide for generations, and is fixing to lay siege to a city that it turns out used to belong to her new allies. Oh, and she's a legendary general now, and the spy who was her first frenemy is her lover and it's all very Paul Atriedes without the mystical bits, which is excellent.

And now, off on adventures of their own is the nonbinary warrior Taru, late of Gen Stalbraid and Lexi's only true friend, now themselves conscripted into a Savage Legion and shambling along with them to defend the very city that Evie the Sparrow General is about to attack!

Somehow, though, this brewing battle for Craiche's Tenth City is not nearly as interesting as how Dyewan's and Lexi's widely divergent paths threaten to eventually come together, as Dyewan strives to extend the promise of Craiche to all of its citizens and not just the ones who are traditionally useful (read: not poor, not sick, not injured, not old) while Lexi is caught in a plot to drag Craiche back to its elitist feudal past. Again, not thinking about the real world circa winter of 2022 at all, nope, nope!

Alas, as is so often the case in middle volumes of trilogies, while the trajectories of our three heroines start veering towards an intersection or two, they don't yet touch (and was Wallace trying to warn me of this by naming a character Edger, I wonder?), while that of Taru comes so close to one of the ladies' that I wanted to scream when I realized I was reading the final chapter of Savage Bounty and I wasn't going to get to see them meet. And then I did scream, because [REDACTED] happens, and now I'm going to have to join the obnoxious chorus of people asking Matt Wallace if he's done writing Volume Three yet, has he, huh, huh, when do I get it give it to me noooooooooow.

Which means that, by any measure, Savage Bounty is a roaring success. Now excuse me. I need some Throat Coat tea to heal my poor throat. It's been a while since I shrieked like that. Kthnxbai!

Tade Thompson's FAR FROM THE LIGHT OF HEAVEN (Narr by Clifford Samuel)

"It's strange that space is at its most beautiful when it's trying to kill you."

I loved the heck out of Tade Thompson's stupendous Wormwood Trilogy, aka the Rosewater books, which are the coolest slow-motion-invasion/metamorphosis narratives since Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis series, so my expectations for Far from the Light of Heaven were exceptionally high. And I was definitely in the mood for the blend of gumshoe detective fiction and space opera that it offered. Especially since it's basically, for a good while at least, a locked room mystery in space! I mean, come on! Who's been peeking at my Christmas list?

Of course, I also had a big question going in: What's up with the ethereal blue wolf on the cover? A fan of Joyce Chng's Starfang novellas (werewolves in space, people!), I wondered if another terrific writer had taken up that bonkers idea. I was dead wrong on that detail, though. Which is fine. Because the wolf in this book is a whole different kind of awesome. 

Far from the Light of Heaven takes place mostly on board a long range passenger spaceship of the kind that brings colonists on one way trips, in suspended animation, to settle planets in other star systems. The Ragtime is controlled by an artificial intelligence during the long crossings, but by company policy (for it is a commercial vessel) it also has a human captain as a fallback in case something goes wrong with the A.I., its army of service robots, or the hibernation pods. On this voyage, that captain is a second generation astronaut named Shel Campion, who is on her first assignment but will sleep through most of it, just like the passengers. So far, so good. 

But it wouldn't be much of a story if the Ragtime were to make its way from Earth to the Lagos system with its routine undisturbed, right? So when Shel is done recovering from the wake-up protocols, we can probably expect that Something Has Gone Wrong.

Boy, has it.

As Shel soon discovers, she's been put in charge of a spaceship-sized crime scene, in which a massacre of a whole bunch of her sleeping passengers has occurred. A stickler for rules and protocol the way the best rookies usually are, she immediately notifies the local authorities -- for at least the Ragtime reached its destination! Soon both the company she works for, which has offices on the Lagos space station, and the governing body of the planet whose future colonists are -- or were -- aboard Shel's ship are responding in ways that... could be more helpful, maybe?

Enter Rasheed Fin and his android partner Salvo, a crime solving duo from the planet Bloodroot, who board the ship to investigate the multiple murders that have left a pile of neatly dismembered but jumbled body parts in a big gruesome heap! Except some of the body parts are missing! Unless some of the dead colonists did not go into hibernation with the standard human complement of limbs!

Oh, and one of the dead a) totally broke the rules by sneaking a cybernetic pal aboard and b) was the richest human being in the entire universe. But no, the cybernetic didn't do the killings; all the cuts are clean and precise and, as Fin and Salvo start finding out the hard way, were made by the ship's service robots, who have somehow been reprogrammed to want to tear humans to pieces. But they were fine when Ragtime left Earth! Honest! Nonetheless, Shel looks like the only possible culprist for the killings!

DRAMA BUTTON

Then, complicating matters even more, along comes "Uncle Larry" - famed astronaut on the wane Laurence Biz, the ceremonial Governor of the Lagos space station, who was Shel's late father's best friend, and Uncle Larry's mysterious daughter Joké, who seems to have tagged along mostly because she's developed a crush on her imaginary version of Shel. At least Shel has somebody on her side now, though, right?

But, as with any good problem, adding more people to the equation just magnifies the complications. In this case, the homicidal robots just have more targets for their sharp edges and then somehow a bunch of secret experiments are let loose and look, this is a short book that is crammed full of incidents, all right? Especially since we're not done adding characters! There are more! Each time, Thompson braids the new people and their agendas quite deftly and cleverly into the overall narrative, ratcheting up the tension, augmented by a whole new strand of social justice/revenge, until you can hear it TWANG.By the time the locked room mystery is solved -- which is much earlier than is customary with such things -- the reader will barely notice the customary sense of relief that usually accompanies that solution, because even more lives are even more on the line by this point! Arrrrrrrgh!

Clifford Samuel's smooth voice and Caribbean-inflected British diction lends all of this madness a touch of sanity even though he pauses at strange points in sentences. It sounds like he had fun narrating this, which is something I do look for in an audio book narrator, and I will look forward to more of his work as well as Thompson's. Even better if they continue to collaborate on driving me crazy via my earholes. Well done, gentlemen!

Ada Palmer's THE WILL TO BATTLE (Narrated by T. Ryder Smith)

 Ada Palmer did some interesting things as her weird and highly imaginative third volume of the Terra Ignota series, The Will to Battle, kicked off that I both admire and find frustrating as hell, which is my reaction to this series overall anyway, so let's just talk about that right away before I get around to the rest of the book.

As the story begins, most of her 25th Century society is in shambles. A 200+ year conspiracy of minutely targeted assassinations to keep the peace has been unmasked at the expense of exposing the complicity of three of the seven Hives (for more about these and the way this society as a function works as a whole, look at my posts on the earlier volumes, Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders) in that plot. 

Furthermore, a grander plot to make one young man, the unbelievably strange J.E.D.D. Mason, the heir to the leadership of all seven Hives, has also been unmasked, exposing, yes, the complicity of all seven Hive leaders and numerous other high officials as compromised in some fairly icky ways. Plus, a very public attempt on the life of J.E.D.D. Mason that was actually successful also forced the "miracle child" Bridger out of hiding to bring J.E.D.D. Mason back to life (!) and pretty much shatter the ever-precarious commitment to secularity in this society; if a child like Bridger and a young man like J.E.D.D. Mason can exist, that's a Babel Fish caliber argument that there really is a God of some kind and that that God has been paying attention and chosen to intervene.

This is a hell of a read for the early days of Russia's attack on Ukraine, by the way. 

But so, everybody is in crisis, starting with the Congress of the Universal Free Alliance (the seven Hives), this society's ultimate deliberative/legislative body, whereat a whole lot of drastic measures have been put up for debate, up to and including dissolving the Hive that hosted and hid the assasination conspiracy. In order to force everybody to slow down and think things through, the head of the Masonic Hive, Cornel Mason, who bears the title of Masonic Emperor (and is also the adoptive father of J.E.D.D. Mason), takes the drastic step of joining the session and demanding the floor for a filibuster, in which we finally get to learn what "Black Law" and "Gray Law" and "White Law" mean both as modifiers for "Hiveless" (people who have chosen not to become members of any of the seven Hives) and as codifications of this society's laws in and of themselves, and reads out long-winded but carefully thought-out passages from the universal charter that governs all of Earth. For two long novels previously, hundreds and hundreds of pages and/or hours and hours of audio, we've encountered those terms -- Madame D'Arouet always wears her Black Law Hiveless sash over her elaborate 18th Century cosplay, for instance, and we've frequently heard other characters and officials as being Gray Laws or White Laws, but had to stumble along on context and our traditional (Western) associations for the associated colors. But now we finally learn what it all really means: Black Laws agree to be governed only by a bare minimum of the codified laws of the UFA, those that have universally been agreed to be undebateable over generations (like don't kill people, don't destroy nature, don't torture animals, don't interfere with emergency workers, don't break contracts, etc*); the Gray Law Hiveless and White Law Hiveless have agreed to be governed by further expansions of these laws, but we don't get to find out the details of these as Mason's filibuster is finally concluded when other delegates break in to announce that they have complied with his wishes and come up with a reasonable agenda for the session.

So on the one hand I really, really like how Palmer made the infodump of these laws an organic part of the plot instead of sticking them in as an appendix or just forcing us to cruise on context, but I'm also really, really annoyed that we had to wait until this third volume for this to come up. But there are other frustrations yet to consider and, yeah, bigger than usual spoilers in my very spoilery blog for TLTL and SS.

A big concern as a handful of characters desperately try to hold everything together is with whom a new-old character is going to side, and it's not really Mycroft; nor is it Bridger the Miracle Child, except that it kind of is, because the heartbreaking climax to SS saw Bridger giving up his self and his body to become a much more limited but still amazing character who both is and isn't Achilles, and yes, I mean the Greek hero whose Rage touched off the Iliad (which one of Mycroft's murder victims was re-writing as a space opera with giant robots duking it out between the planets). The resulting new-old character, who not only carries the Greek hero's memories and personality (very much as imagined by Homer but also somewhat the actual man the mythical figure is supposed to have been based on) but also those of the kind of battle-hardened World War II-ish officer represented by the little green army men toys kids apparently still play with into the 25th century, and the re-imagined Achilles of the space opera rewrite of the Iliad. It's weird and complicated and I kind of wish more attention had been given to what existence must really be like for such a being, but what's important here is that he is the only human-ish being alive who actually knows how to do this whole War thing. So everybody wants him on their side, especially since he and Mycroft kind of come as a package deal, except for the whole problem that Mycroft is simultaneously both a) Everybody in the whole world's slave as a Servicer but also b) Very much a part of J.E.D.D. Mason's sworn staff, so, big thumb on the scale there. This storyline alone is enough drama and angst to fill a whole book but this is Terra Ignota so...

But first, I have to express one great big disappointment that is really more my problem than the book's but it greatly diminishes my enjoyment of this series in much the way the revelation that Niccolo/Claes in Dorothy Dunnet's House of Niccolo has at least one frankly supernatural ability in that he can totally douse for water and precious metals, which annoyed me so much that I still havent read past The Unicorn Hunt even though I 100% love that series and want to know how it ends. And yeah, five years is a long time to hold a grudge but there are so many other good books out there, you guys!

Anyway, J.E.D.D. Mason is a god.** Maybe Bridger was, too, only he didn't get to grow up and his transformation into Achilles divested him of his extraordinary powers, so we'll never find out, but J.E.D.D. Mason is totally a god, invited by what he calls The God of This Universe to visit here and have a Conversation after he's experienced existence here for a while. I really, really could have done without this, and if it wasn't for the fact that this novel ended on not so much a cliffhanger as a possibly misperceived tragedy every bit as devastating as the Bridgermorphosis that ended SS I might have just stopped but all the stuff that happened at the end there was just stunning and I had to find out what happens next, for all that really not a whole lot happened in this one; it's just that what little did happen was huge and had tremendous consequences that has put all of humanity and (as Mycroft points out) all of its history of sacrfice and achievement at stake, because what was it all for if humanity finally decides to end it all in a family spat after hundreds of years of peace?

But so, there's the prolonged parliamentary debate I mentioned above, and then a visit to the Blacklaw stronghold of Hobbestown which, again, is so interesting I would absolutely love to read a whole novel set there for all that it's basically Galt's Gulch with cooler technology, and along the way J.E.D.D. Mason not only reveals to everybody that yep, he's a god, but also declares war on everybody else and demands the unconditional surrender to him personally of all seven hives, but nobody seems to care too much about that because there's already going to be a war, until the guy that originally shot J.E.D.D. Mason dead decides he's going to make everybody care and a temporary planetary truce is declared so the Olympic Games can be held in Antarctica (!) and the Utopians rile the waters some more by whisking away everybody on earth with the knowledge and capability to build "Harbingers" (this world's term for any kind of weapon, nuclear, biological, cybernetic, whatever, that can end the world) so that nobody has the advantage that they pose and everything goes even more to hell than the reader has already been expecting and I'm IN.

Plus, except when he is voicing the two characters that are going to be annoying to listen to anyway, Madam D'Arouet and Thisbe, T. Ryder Smith has grown on me. I've still gone ahead and just squeezed my budget to get the ebook of the fourth volume, though, since my library still hasn't acquired it in any edition yet and I want to finish this series with it all still fresh in my head because otherwise I'll probably never bother.***

But, I am so not down with the god thing, you guys. Snarl. Anyway, onward to Perhaps the Stars.

*I found a great site that has transcribed the whole of the law code read off by Emperor Mason here. It's been a great resource for writing this post since one of the other annoyances of audio books is how difficult it is to go back and check on important passages like this.

**His only godlike power, though, is inspiring ridiculous, even slavish loyalty in those close to him, and being really, really annoying. He was raised by Madame D'Arouet, after all, who decided on top of everything else to basiclaly make him learn seven or eight languages at once, so he grew up speaking his own idiosyncratic pidgeon of all of them that only a handful of people can understand and needs Mycroft, who also happens to speak all of those languages from a systematic self-education he undertook as part of his Big Murder Plot as a young man, to translate for him. So I don't know if it's just meant to be J.E.D.D. Mason really being an annoying character or if he just seems more so because Mycroft has chosen to write his chronicles in the style of the 18th century, but J.E.D.D. Mason's monologues (which is the only way he speaks, generally; he declaims) sound something like this:

[My universe] differs greatly from this one… My universe does not have time, space, limit, ignorance, discovery, exploration, hope, solitude, or death… Your own Creator, the Maker of this universe, is My Peer. He made this flesh so that I might visit His universe and here perceive His works. It is a dialogue between Us. During My visit I have experienced some forms of human suffering, so I sympathize with what you endure for Our dialectic, but I know no other way for Us to communicate.

But so, anyway, I'm still not sure if he is "actually" a god or if he's just convinced everybody that he is a god, but they're functionally the same thing so, yuck. 

**Though I'm still going to finish House of Niccolo someday soon. Just, again, there's not going to be anymore new Dorothy Dunnett, so I'm rationing her out like I do Philip K. Dick.

Amber McBride's ME (MOTH)

Poetry was our first vehicle for long-form storytelling - witness all the national epics and the ones that have become world treasures. Homer's stuff. The Icelandic sagas. The Mahabharata. The Kalevala. All of that. I've read almost all of it and daydream about doing a podcast dedicated to this art form.

The novel in verse is only slightly a thing in our day and age, though. There's the Aniara, largely on the strength of which (and it is mighty strong), Harry Martinson won a Nobel Prize. There's Vikram Seth, who writes novels in sonnets... but I don't see a lot of people employing pure lyric as a medium for storytelling. Though maybe I just haven't looked hard enough. 

I sure did find me a terrific one, though.

In Me (Moth), poet-novelist Amber McBride tells a melancholy and beautiful coming-of-age romance one almost unbearably lovely lyric at a time -- with each line both advancing the plot and demonstrating what perfection in expressive lyricism looks like, all in just a few lines.

Our heroine, Moth (named by Shakespeare-loving parents after a fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream) is a Black teenaged girl and talented ballet student who once dreamt of being the next Misty Copeland before tragedy ripped her out of the world in which that seemed possible and dumped her in a new city and a new high school full of unfriendly strangers. She endures it quietly and alone until the next new kid comes along, half-Navajo Sani, depressed and lonely and trying to disappear behind his hair and a cloud of cigarette smoke. 

Their relationship begins on a school bus bus, their whispered confidences perfectly pithy and perfectly imagined. They reveal their secrets to one another slowly and carefully until we love both of them to pieces and are so invested in their well-being that we almost want to stop reading to keep them safe from what McBride probably has in store from them, but of course that would be a mistake.

With a name like Moth, our girl can't help but pay attention to these insects, their habits and their life cycles -- and in the process of illustrating this, McBride constructs some of the best poetry about insects I've encountered since first reading Hart Crane's "The Moth Whom God Made Blind" decades ago.*

 

But just as Me (Moth) joins the Crane poem in examining the surprise and heartbreak of a creature out of its element, it gropes more with issues of survivor's guilt and especially with the question of how much joy is appropriate for a grieving survivor to feel or express as life goes on ("Maybe if I didn't gorge myself on life, there would have been some left in the car for Mom & Dad & Zachary," Moth muses early on). Both Moth and Sani are "muffling our passions, for reasons" as Sani says to Moth in their first exchange of text messages. 

Both, too, are heirs to a little bit of magic; Moth had a grandfather proficient in Hoodoo, which, he told her long ago, shares elements with Native American medicine -- Sani's Navajo father's own area of expertise. It's like the two were made for each other, a healthier, if initially sadder, Veronica and J.D. Only instead of terrorizing their school, the pair up and run away with one another in search of both a kinder and more interesting life.

Their road trip across the American south lets them stop at poignant sites associated with this country's twin sins of slavery and indigenous genocide, a sad background against which their gentle courtship is conducted, and they compose together their Summer Song, which Sani will sing and to which Moth will finally dance again. 

This is a book to savor slowly as one would a great poetry collection, but doing so will require a supreme effort as the reader is gently propelled by the story of this journey of discovery and connection. Amber McBride absolutely shattered my heart, but then very kindly swept up the pieces and sewed them back together with good red string. I can't wait to see what she does next!

*I swear that the text of this poem used to be available to just read online but hell if I can find someplace to link to here. The internet is getting so effing broken.