Adam Levin's THE INSTRUCTIONS

The rest of the crowd booed. Not so much at Maholtz as the implications of the anticlimax he and I had just provided them. To see an oppressor felled without a hint of violent struggle can’t help but tarnish the shine on your victim badge. To see Maholtz made to cower so easily had to make those who would have otherwise cheered wonder how they, for so long, could have cowered so readily before him. They were booing themselves.

If Michael Pemulis, the very best character in Infinite Jest who is neither in drag nor in a wheelchair, were about five years younger and a student at a Chicago area day school instead of a Boston area tennis academy, he would be Gurion ben-Judah Macabee, the criminally, the messianically precocious hero of Adam Levin's big honking fiction chonk, The Instructions. Except instead of a tennis racket, our boy is packing a weapon of his own devising called a penny gun, and a pocketful of tiny metal wing nuts.

And a brain, an insight into humanity, and an advanced understanding of ethics that would shame any of the Incandenza family, would probably shame a Dostoevsky character. 

I am a middle aged Wyoming woman, neither a 21st century middle schooler, nor a child of the suburbs, nor even a little bit Jewish* so I'm about as under-equipped a reader for this novel as one could ask for, but I read it with admiration and delight anyway.

I was as charmed by its depictions of actually healthy and loving family dynamics as fascinated by its eternal school day themes of intra- and inter-clique politics, petty and serious rebellion, unjustly wielded authority, unbearable boredom, grandiose plans for the future, philosophical speculations both juvenile and profound, concerns earthly and spiritual and, of course, young love. 

But what young love it is: 

Above all, June and I were in love. I wanted reassurance because she’d gotten winked at, but it wasn’t her fault that she’d gotten winked at. It was Berman’s fault. He shouldn’t have winked. He shouldn’t have gotten me wanting reassurance. Especially because there could be no reassurance. That’s what was chomsky. To think that a hand-squeeze would reassure was chomsky. Had June squeezed my hand, I wouldn’t feel reassured; I’d only wonder why she thought I wanted reassurance. I’d worry that she thought I wanted reassurance because Berman’s wink was, in fact, worth worrying about. = If June had squeezed my hand, I’d want more reassurance. And I saw it was good that she hadn’t squeezed my hand. Which isn’t to say I stopped wanting reassurance, but that all at once I saw what needed doing, not to me or for me, but by me: I had to tell Berman not to wink at my girlfriend. Had he not been an Israelite, I’d’ve thought of that sooner, gone straight to confrontation. Instead of burning sweaty seconds lamely sorting useless feelings, I’d have risen to my feet and said, Don’t you fucken wink at her.

A big thinker as well as an over-thinker is Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, who is already infamous when he first shows up for classes in a new middle school, where his prior record of fights and rebellion lands him immediately in the school's special disciplinary unit called The Cage, in which every student is confined to an individual carrel and is closely monitored by a beady-eyed Australian disciplinarian with a name, Botha, that I associate with South African apartheid (I'm sure not accidentally am I so reminded). He doesn't teach, doesn't do anything but watch the students like a hawk and enforce the Cage's infinitely long list of behavioral standards while other teachers nervously present lessons to around 30 fifth through seventh graders, which Gurion is, I think, the only fifth grader by age but, as compensation for his immediate entry to The Cage, the school also agreed to honor his prior promotion to seventh grade on account of his intellect. 

Classic, this. 

But so, Gurion is very, very concerned about justice (and his father is a renowned civil rights attorney), about studying the Torah and about promoting the welfare of his co-religionists to whom he refers as Israelites rather than as being Jewish students. One of his many acts prior to his advent at his current school was to invent a punk little weapon constructed from the top of a plastic soda bottle and a rubber band, and to write out minutely detailed instructions on its construction and use, as well as to design a strict ritual for how this knowledge is to be taught and disseminated., starting with: Only to Israelites. His goal is to arm every Israelite boy in Greater Chicago and beyond with a weapon easily broken down into disposable trash, but capable of launching a small projectile (he uses a penny and calls it, thus, the Pennygun, but we encounter a sort of co-inventor who came up with the same device independently but uses it to fire fountain pen nibs and thus calls it the Pengun). This weapon has achieved a mythic status among devotees of The Instructions as evident from this YouTube clip explaining it.

Gurion also has a loftier project going on than merely helping young Jewish boys to defend themselves from antisemites and school bullies, however; he has been drafting for some time a work he fully expects will one day be regarded as scripture. And many of his former schoolmates, forbidden though they are by their parents from associating with him ever again, consider him a wise leader and teacher, even to calling him Rabbi, and agree that his writings will indeed become scripture. Two of whom, we learn, have even served as translators, necessary because Gurion chose to write about half of the original in Hebrew.

So is this book a very long marriage of The Books of Jacob and Heathers? Certainly more so than it is a descendant of Infinite Jest, for all that I invoked that book at the start of this post. Gurion does feel a bit like Pemulus, but differs vastly from that yachtsman-capped mischief-maker in that, for starters, the closest he ever comes to mind-altering substances is a cigarette or two he is deftly manipulated into sharing with the school's Golden Boy as Golden Boy seeks to co-opt Gurion's growing authority as an outcast leader. Which Gurion only figures out later, but don't you worry. Everybody gets their due in this massive work. Justice is served, like revenge, a bit cold... Or maybe not so cold?

For, on top of everything else, we find that author Adam Levin can write the best kind of action scenes, in which every shot, punch, kick, launch and thwack is clearly delineated, precisely described, but the pace is never allowed to lag. I say this as someone who often skips long flight scenes because I find them boring. But I mean...

By my side, on his knees again, Desormie gripped my face by the jaw and started squeezing. I bonked him with the megaphone. He squeezed unfazed. I got the bell to his ear and flipped on the siren. He threw himself backwards and I started getting up, but my hurt wrist kept folding beneath my weight and Desormie returned and he kicked me in the stomach.

The above is even better if you know who Desormie is. Neener.

And this, from a special sub-plot we can call the Revenge of the Band Kids, in which Levin shows us the weapon in everything:

Their brass scarred from teeth and their padcups askew, the bandkids were blitzing in squads of fours and fives, walking through the mini-riots, mowing down anyone. Cymbalists alternated neckchops with headclaps. Flautists pulled their flutes apart for double-fisted piking. Tubas and euphoniums remained strapped to players who held them under-arm to ram with like jousters. Splinters poked from fractures in oboes used for skullshots. The buttons jammed forever on trumpets gone knuckleduster.

Which is to say that, at heart, The Instructions is a war story at least in as much as the famous Pillow Fort vs Blanket Fort episode of Community was. Well, except instead of blankets and pillows we have actual blows exchanged and projectile pennies, wing nuts and pen nibs fired by Gurion's small army, the Side of Damage (and their junior auxiliaries, Big Ending and The Five, which, get ready for those five scene-stealing Best Buddies**) at their foes, the Arrangement. What, you thought that cover art was symbolic? This is middle school.

But so, my readers may well ask, is this a tale that really needs so many hundreds of pages to tell? Oh, yes. But are they really so satisfying, those pages? Also yes.

And I haven't even gotten around to all of the terrific character drama, the terrific characters, like Gurion's brand shiny new girlfriend, the fierce and fiery and newly-converting-for-his-sake June Watermark. And his best friend Benji Nakamook. And the one they call Brooklyn, as newly arrived as Gurion with even more dramatic a back story, with whom Gurion bonds immediately and who challenges him in ways Gurion usually only experiences with adults. If it weren't for the buddies of The Five, Brooklyn would be my favorite character in the book. 

And there are so many more. By the novel's climatic combat scene, the reader knows most of the Side very well, has watched a few of them fall in love (mutually!) and others learn for the first time that they have power. Usually for the better. Usually.

And yes, like so many books I'm reading now, this one seems to be more important to the present moment than to the one in which it was written, for all that it is a tale that could only take place then (2007), could only feature characters born just before 9/11 and raised doing active shooter drills in school. More than ever I am convinced that the Zoomers, largely the children of my own Generation X, are fundamentally different beings from those of us who remember not having to take off their shoes in public in order to board a plane and when phones were fastened to walls and History supposedly had an End, in whichever way you choose to define that word. Theirs is a fundamentally different world and they are prepared to live in an even stranger one. 

Too, lots of us have been promulgating the "gonna tell my grandkids" meme for years. What if they were to believe us? Because they don't really care? Because they have real problems, but have also at least solved the problem of what to do with all of those pennies lying around everywhere. It's a better idea than CoinStar or whatever. 

We damage we.

All great books command re-reading, but you can’t ever read the same book twice. Knowing, as you do, from the second reading forward, that A will lead to B, to Y to Z, your post-first readings are far more concerned with what exactly happens between those events, far more concerned with those parts you scanned (or even skipped) the first go-round in your rush to discover what would happen next.

Yeah, that's pretty much Gurion, and by extension, Adam Levin, equating their own book with the other great ones. But here's the thing: it is their equal. And I'm already looking forward to reading it again. I underappreciated some of these kids the first time. Including, possibly, Gurion himself!

Damn.

*My nickname at Bard among my soon-to-be dining companions for four years of mealtime shenanigans was "Blond and Blue" as in "Uh oh, Blond and Blue is giving me shit" -- at least until one way discovered that my name rhymes with a famous Dinah Shore ditty that serves as the theme song to, coincidentally, the movie "Heathers" thus guaranteeing me four years of hearing my name sung out loudly and not very tunefully before every meal I ate in Kline Commons. I was a member of an all-gentile cast of the Purim play one year, though...

**I've quoted too much from the climax, but I have to add just one snippet of The Five in action:

The Five were fine too; didn’t need coverage either. Bored with Shlomo, who no longer convulsed, and glimpsing Eliyahu between heads and shoulders, they gamboled toward the south wall, the better to see, a capering troop that undermined its native cuteness shooting mystified kids in the eyes at close range, stepping on crotches and faces on purpose, vociferating multiple Yiddish vulgarities.

These are little guys, maybe ten years old (like Gurion himself, actually, which is part of why, maybe, he takes them seriously where others would pat them on the heads and imagine them in propeller beanies), who have already had enough of bullying but quickly learned that if they can count on each other, they count. And since one of their number got pasted in the halls earlier in the week, they have their own little vendetta against the aforementioned Shlomo, who forfeited his Israelite status when he picked on the shrimp in order to commit a hate crime by proxy. And I mean, one of them even gets to rescue a cheerleader from a groper, with masterful fifth-grade aplomb. Egads, these kids are the greatest!

Stuff I Loved in 2024

My Internet friend Ben Werdmuller had a lovely idea for wrapping up what has honestly been a pretty wretched year for those of us who don't coat our faces with weird orange makeup every morning. I had originally been persuaded by my Own Dear Personal Mom to do a favorite books of 2024 post when Ben shared this post of his on Mastodon (aka the best alternative to the cesspool that once was our beloved bird site). What a fantastic idea! After all, even I occasionally do things besides reading.

But let's be honest: this is mostly going to be about reading. Because I've given up most other forms of recreation for various reasons, many of them medical but many because I realized a few years ago that I'm well past the likely midway point in my lifespan and likely do not have enough time left, even if I gave up sleeping (which I already do very little of), to read everything on my ever-growing To Be Read list.

But anyway, enough preamble. On with what I liked from this year. 

Television 

What? A big long paragraph about how all I want to do is read and I'm starting with TV? Something I resentfully sit through while still sneaking a page or two, just for the sake of spending "quality time" with my family? Yes. The Imp of the Perverse built a mansion on my shoulder and is very hard to coax out of it. Almost as if it has been sentenced to house arrest there or something! Which, you'll see what I did there in a moment. 

A Gentleman in Moscow 

Showtime's excellent adaptation of Amor Towles' wonderful novel was the only TV show I watched this year that I hadn't already seen before (the only other thing I watched, besides pretending to pay attention to some Buffalo Bills games with my mom and sister, was the BBC's 2000 adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy) and I just watched it over the holidays with my family and I loved it. Ewan McGregor was in no way who I imagined as Alexander Rostov when I originally listened to the excellent audio edition of the novel narrated by Nicholas Guy Smith; as is usually the case when I imagine a Russian male character, my mind casts Anatoly Solynitsin in the role. But McGregor was great, as was his gorgeous and intelligent wife Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Anna Urbanovna and the young women who played Nina and Sofia. This story of a Russian count who escapes the fate of most of his peers in the Russian Revolution via a misattributed poem that convinced the new regime he would be useful to them if kept prisoner in Moscow's famous Metropole Hotel could easily have been dominated by the production design but the show's creators wisely focused very tightly on Towles' amazing cast of characters and their stories. The show is worthy of the novel, and of all the hype it has received.

 

Music

I'm a middle aged fuddy duddy who has tried to keep myself open to new music, but I'm afraid this year was very much dominated for me by "legacy acts" releasing brand new albums that kept true to why I originally loved them but don't sound like they came through a time portal from the eras in which these acts first gained fame.

Richard Thompson - SHIP TO SHORE

I've loved Richard Thompson since my partner on our very amateurish college radio show first introduced me to Thompson's RUMOR & SIGH back in 1991. I kept up with his new output and happily explored his back catalog with Linda Thompson, Fairport Convention, etc and he's never once bored me. So color me not surprised that his 2024 output is still great. As the cover art conveys, the album has a very nautical feel. It never descends into just "Richard does sea shanties" though that would be fine. Thompson explores many themes that have little to do with the sea along with those that do, balancing the jaunty nautical stuff with his traditionally atmospheric guitar work and his unique and shiver-inducing voice.* My favorite track on here is "Singapore Sadie" but there isn't a skippable cut on here. 

John Cale - POPTICAL ILLUSION

John Cale is one of my favorite musicians of all time. The Velvet Underground without him feels incomplete; his solo work is spectacular and varied and he has impeccable taste in collaborators (his albums with Brian Eno, for example, are exceptional) as he demonstrated just last year with his album MERCY, which is how I discovered one of my new favorite singers, Weyes Blood. MERCY is so good that I took it as a capstone to an amazing career and was grateful to have it, but Cale isn't done yet. POPTICAL ILLUSION is loaded with absolute bangers that I can't stop listening to, especially "Shark-Shark" (which, check out this bonkers music video) and what I insist is a brand new classic, "How We See the Light." This. Is. Pop.

Laurie Anderson - AMELIA

Laurie Anderson's art is always an event in my world, and her 2024 concept album dedicated to the story of Amelia Earhart is an exceptional example of how affecting her work can be. Even if you set aside her incredible cast of collaborators, the atmosphere of mystery, wonder, adventure and tragedy she conjures out of ordinary instruments and her deep and meditative voice as she narrates her version of Earhart's experiences is absolutely riveting. I'm guilty a lot of the time of using music as a secondary experience -- I blast really complicated prog rock as pain relief, filling my mind with other signals to block the constant neural spam my chronic illnesses constantly harass me with, and I also read a lot while playing music for similar reasons -- but stuff like Amelia occupies me entirely. And it's educational, too!

The Cure - SONGS FOR A LOST WORLD

I mean, you knew this was going to be on here, right? I'm a white Gen Xer from the United States. The Cure was my everything for the 1980s and 1990s.** And as everybody knows, they came into 2024 with an album destined to own it. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. The entire Internet is raving about this album. For good reason. 

Winter's Blue and Radiant Children - NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER

I swear I'm not putting this here just to lay claim to a tiny sliver of hipness or prove that I actually do listen to music that comes from this century, but of course that's the message this really sends, isn't it? I only know of this album because Jordan Holmes, co-host of the Knowledge Fight podcast, mentioned this album as his "bright spot" on an episode -- which is how I've found a lot of "new to me" acts in recent years, including Godspeed! You Black Emperor and Helado Negro, to name two others.*** And yes, a member of G!YBE is in this ensemble. Anyway, this is just great, moody, atmospheric and noisy music that combines a wintry bleakness with environmental sounds, heavy distortion and a painful beauty that stays with me long after the last sounds of "White Phosphorus" fade out.

Books

Ok, I mostly write about books on this blog, and I only write about books that I really really love and that I either think haven't gotten enough attention from the general reading public or I'm obligated to write about in exchange for an advance copy (a habit I'm trying to break but having a hard time with), so really, if you want to know what books I loved in 2024 you could just read my 2024 entries and call it good, but I did read some other excellent books that I didn't write about on here either because I was too ill at the time or because I thought they were getting plenty of coverage elsewhere. So that's what I'm going to focus on here.

CAHOKIA JAZZ, by Francis Spufford

CAHOKIA JAZZ was on a few "most anticipated" and "best of early 2024" type lists but then sort of disappeared from discussions about what was an exceptional year for new books. I'd really hate to see this get lost in the shuffle because it is hands down my favorite book that was published this year. I like a good alternate history milieu and CAHOKIA JAZZ has a great one: It's the Roaring 20s in North America, but it's a North America in which the indigenous population largely survived the germ warfare imported by Europeans and went on to flourish, standing up to enough of the waves of settlement to establish urban centers like the city-state of Cahokia, and maintain a melange of Native culture while still adapting with the technological developments and other historical currents of the 20th century -- and welcoming other races and ethnicities. The world thus established is rich and convincing and a spectacular setting in which Francis Spufford enacts a classic crime noir plot that could hold its own against classics like Chinatown. Except instead of clueless white boy Jake Gittes, though, we get Joe Barrow, an accomplished Black jazz pianist who is also a detective on Cahokia's city police force. The grisly, possibly ritualized murder case he catches, in a city where an Aztec pyramid occasionally hosts human sacrifices, turns out to have huge implications for the city-state as a whole. I'd love to see this made into a prestige miniseries. It could be a season of Fargo. Don't skip this one.

Percival Everett - JAMES

Again, I'm one tiny voice in a global chorus of praise. It's a bestseller. It won the National Book Award for fiction. It should have won the Booker Prize. It retells a classic and makes it better and richer. You've probably already read it and loved it. So did I.

Alan Moore - THE GREAT WHEN

I've come to love Alan Moore's prose fiction as much as I do his graphic novels, comics and magazines (yes, I have a stack of early issues of Dodgem Logic and no, I'm not ready to share them with anybody yet), so I eagerly awaited this first novel in his new Long London series that is projected to be a quartet. His most expressly magical work since, say, Promethea, THE GREAT WHEN establishes a dual London slightly remeniscent of China Mieville's THE CITY AND THE CITY but Moore's other London that is contiguous-but-separate from the London we know is utterly bizarre and one hundred percent magical. Or rather, magickal, because this sphere owes more to the likes of Alastair Crowley and Austin Osman Spare than to Gandalf or Dumbledore.

Our hero is a lowly teen who rejoices in the utterly batshit name of Dennis Knuckeyard, who is only surviving post-WWII London through the grudging good graces of Coffin Ada, a second-hand bookshop owner who employs him and let's him live in a room in the flat above the store where she smokes, drinks and knows things. It's a mostly miserable life for Dennis and looks to be made only worse when a mysterious book that shouldn't exist turns up in some new inventory he's been sent to fetch. His adventures in both Londons are bizarre, creepy, fascinating and occasionally tug at the heart, if one still has one. And Coffin Ada is even more magnificent than she sounds.

Audio Dramas & Podcasts

Observable Radio

This "found audio" drama in which a  broadcaster, who just might be the last human alive on earth after a weird comet's disastrous fly-by, tries to reach out to his missing friend, is also a cool exploration of many alternate earths. Does that make it an anthology series? Kind of.

The comet, in addition to disrupting ordinary life on what I *think* is meant to be our good old ordinary planet Earth but might not be, also has somehow thinned the boundaries between different universes just enough for our broadcaster to receive bursts of radio signals from alternate Earths that all slowly seem to be succumbing to some kind of slow invasion. Our man has started recording these intercepted transmissions and shares curated segments of them as he tries to reach a friend? lover? mentor? relative? whom he believes might still be out there and listening and willing to help figure out what the hell is going on. 

Meanwhile we learn of the existence of worlds in which the entire world is an oligarchy still firmly in control of historic dynasties like the Hapsburgs, who routinely enact elaborate assassination plots against one another; in which Christmastime is known only as The Holiday and involves the military mobilization of a child army known as The Naughty to defend the U.S.' northern border from the annual incursion of an eldritch horror that says "ho ho ho"; and, my favorite episode, in which large language models have been allowed to take over entertainment, municipal and emergency services and pretty much everything else, with entertainingly horrible consequences. I'm still waiting for my Paper Street Psychics tour tee shirt.

The show has a large, diverse and ever growing cast of terrific voice actors and singers to play out the collection of snippets of news broadcasts, advertising and recorded proceedings of the government and corporate bodies that make all of these worlds the bizarre, tragic, fascinating and occasionally funny ones they are, while the frame narrative maintains the air of tension and mystery that makes all of this cohere. I've listened to every episode multiple times and I'm still discovering little details in this lovingly crafted weirdness.

Weird Little Guys

I have to really, really love a show to put up with I Heart Media's terrible, terrible advertising, so Molly Conger's fascinating little show had a huge strike against it from the start. And I still sometimes let the new episodes pile up on my podcatcher just because I can't face the awfulness, which, the subject matter is bad enough! But Conger is such a throrough researcher, a candid and self-reflective presenter, and a pleasant and thoughtful personality that Weird Little Guys has become can't-miss listening for me. It just sometimes takes me a few days to steel myself to listen.

Sort of a companion piece to the famous Behind the Bastards, Conger goes small where Robert Evans goes big. She's interested in the lesser known but often just as awful people without whom most of the big bads Evans covers would be much less damaging and dangerous. Conger digs deeply into the backgrounds of the kind of guys who haven't yet made headlines, or have only made very niche headlines for things like burning crosses on other people's property or building pipe bombs for terror projects or creating small but terrible media ecosystems that celebrate mass murderers and urge viewers and listeners to join their ranks and become terror "saints" by planning and executing their own attacks on the unsuspecting public. She's the kind of woman who knows her way around a courtroom and a court filing hundreds of agonizingly dull pages long, and has a true storyteller's instinct for the illustrative details and anecdotes that bring these weird little guys to life and remind us that they live among us and maybe, just maybe, we can prevent one or two of them from going postal on us with a little more kindness and empathy? Maybe? But probably not. By the time they're on Conger's radar, we probably need to duck and cover on sight. 

Fourth Reich Archaeology

Hosted by two "noided" lawyers podcasting under the pseudonyms of Dick (as in Cheney) and Don (as in Rumsfeld), this show is as weird and disturbing as its title suggests. The general premise of the show is that the much-imagined Fourth Reich (as in the successor to Hitler's Third) is not a thing of the future but of the past and present, and Dick and Don are here to dig out from under decades of propaganda and obfuscation as many clues as they can to prove that the Fourth Reich is an almost seamless continuation of the Third and is better known to us as the international corporate regime that is what really governs the so-called Free World. It's a notion that seems far-fetched and overly paranoid to many, even today, but this pair has a lot of information on their side and are both, as one might expect, very good not only at constructing complex arguments but at effectively communicating them as well.

So far, the gents are focusing on making their case through the lens of the life and career of our 38th President of the United States, Gerald R. Ford. You know, the one nobody outside of the state of Michigan ever got to cast a vote for until he was running for re-election as POTUS and got beat by the late, much lamented, Jimmy Carter. Ford had a much more interesting life than I had ever imagined, as did his wife Betty, who is much more than just a name on rehab chain. While Ford was the first president I was old enough to know my name (just barely!), I knew next to nothing about him except that he'd pardoned Nixon. I now know that this is one of the less interesting facts about the guy. 

The show -- which also boasts a killer playlist of interstitial music skillfully deployed to drive home various points -- is currently taking a bit of a detour into a deep, deep dive into the Warren Commission and the men who served on it, one of whom was one Gerald Ford. It gets a bit out there at times but it's never not interesting and, like I said, it's full of facts that I have encountered nowhere else except maybe in Gravity's Rainbow.

There's more, and doubtless stuff I'm forgetting, but it's already 15 days into 2025 and I'm tired. BUT, is there something you think I missed? Let me know over on Mastodon!

*The first song of his that I ever heard was "Psycho Street" and so I always feel echoes of that in his voice.

**I'm one of those weirdos who prefers KISS ME, KISS ME, KISS ME to DISINTEGRATION, by the way.

***Both of whom also released new albums this year, by the way. They're great, but I'm trying to keep this listing on the short side.

Cole Haddon's PSALMS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

I thought I'd see a novel in which Phish's "Divided Sky" created the universe (because, well, it did) before I saw one in which David Bowie really and truly actually was the one and only thing that kept that universe together, but that was reckoning without yet another irresistible force in the universe: Cole Fucking Haddon.

This is another wild ride, friends. Buckle up. Or don't. You might prefer it in the alternate universe into which you get flung by weird forces you can't even perceive, let alone comprehend. I mean, you do you.

Haddon's debut in prose fiction* is pretty much what I had hoped Herve LeTellier's The Anomaly would be, and then some. Which means that yes, we're dealing with Simulation Theory again, but in a much cooler way that also encompasses the multiverse and time travel and I've already mentioned that David Bowie wrote the Music of the Spheres, right? David Bowie wrote the Music of the Spheres, you guys. And saved Ali from letting fear eat his soul just as a sort of side effect. Dammit, who's cutting onions in here?

I promise I'll settle down at some point. Maybe in the next review.

I kind of liked this book, you guys. It has everything I like best in speculative fiction, including some things I haven't encountered before in speculative fiction before but now slightly resent that I hadn't, like amazing lady scientists making huge differences in multiple centuries, I Am My Own Grandpa type character arcs, interesting answers to questions like What If Elon Musk But Worse, villains that turn out to be more interesting than they seemed at first and at least one teenage antihero who is building bombs destined to explode in multiple centuries because a bunny rabbit he believes is Allah himself has been telling him to with terrible urgency and persuasiveness and you will not believe where this teenager ends up as your favorite character in the whole cast of battered babies and misfits getting ground through the gears of Haddon's many interwoven plots. Which plots both do and do not neatly resolve themselves offscreen and subtly and with enough ambiguity to keep even the most discerning alternate reality snob/comics guy happy.

A word of warning, though, to those like me who read pretty much entirely in ebook format these days (as readers of this blog know, I have extraordinary difficulty physically holding print books, let alone turning their pages, these days, and it's only gotten worse over the years): a great deal of the David Bowie-esque material takes place off screen and is told in the form of things like newspaper clippings, which are embedded as graphics files in the ebook version, meaning the print is very, very, very small and closely formatted to resemble the content they represent and even with my very best cheaters on I struggled to read these bits. Fortunately, there are only a few of these, because you absolutely don't want to skip them; they are expertly done and add a whole extra, wonderful layer to the storytelling of Psalms for the End of the World.

Now excuse me. I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to find a way to break into the world where this book got all of the notice and acclaim and international translation attention that went to The Anomaly in this one. Who knows, maybe that's also the one where Gene Wolfe got a Nobel Prize.

*He is also an author of some kickass comic books, wrote a lot for Hollywood and even got to create a real live TV show for NBC starring the guy who played an alternate version of David Bowie in Velvet Goldmine. All of this and only then did he decide to publish a novel. Cuz why not?

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...

James S.A. Corey's LEVIATHAN FALLS

 I finally allowed myself to finish my first read-through of Leviathan Falls, the absolutely perfect concluding volume of the two-headed author monster we call James S.A. Corey's Expanse series, but had my mother not been patiently waiting to read it after me, I might still be dragging my feet and would not yet know that it is an absolutely perfect conclusion to one of the greatest science fiction series I've ever read. Though I had inklings right from the start because Corey hasn't let us down yet, not even a little bit.

I realize there is a bit of a lacuna with regards to this series on this blog because I read its later volumes during my hiatus. I'll write about them someday, especially about Tiamat's Wrath which wrung my heart out completely just in time to drown it in tears, or something, but we're here to talk about endings, how to stick the landing, and how they should now just go ahead and teach this series in every writing class ever.

Leviathan Falls was completed during the pandemic, but this shows in only the best of ways. As the unknown threat that destroyed the Builders* looms ever larger as an existential threat to all of humanity, no matter how far we have scattered via the physics defying technology the Builders left behind, we are reminded again and again, that we are in way over our heads, here. When the Builders began defying physics, they harnessed energies from a whole 'nother universe and damaged it terribly, earning them the wrath of whatever kind of force called that other universe home, and that force wiped the Builders out completely. Now that humans have sort-of harnessed some of the Builders' left-behind technology like a civilization sized John Frum cult, we've inherited the Builder's exterminating enemy as well. But where the Builders actually understood their technology and, to a degree at least, the forces it harnessed, and seemed to have a degree of unity within their civilization-or-species as to look to us like a hive mind, we, as series heroine Naomi Nagata observes several times, are having to do it all with humans. Who have not evolved beyond what they were when confined to just one gravity well, that of good old Earth. Jumped-up primates with brains that weren't even capable of the level of civilization we associate with, say, the Stone Age without a great deal of violence, coercion, kluges and savagery. Why, at the very height of our material culture (late 1950s/early 1960s USA, say), we were still involved in a Cold War with others of our same species, only allowed a minority subset of our population to own property, move freely about the country, hold political power, etc.

I make it sound like there's a lot of preaching in this book but that's not it at all. It's just that the very plight the Expanse's civilizations finds itself in mirrors our own current jackpot of existential threats, and it's the flaws of our individual primate brains that stand in the way of implementing the solutions that people are just barely capable of dreaming up. As people in our own world deny climate change, refuse life-saving vaccines and public health measures, etc, people in the Expanse's world, though many have been kept in the dark about the overwhelming nature of the Big Threat, are also incapable of seeing the big picture and following through on the strategies devised to save it. For instance, it's been known for a few novels now that the Gate system that has allowed humans to colonize distant solar systems within fractions of a human lifetime has its limitations, and a big one of them is the frequency with which it will bear traffic.** Exceed the discovered safe volumes and speeds and some ships "go dutchman", as in the Flying Dutchman, a famous ship from the Age of Sail that disappeared without a trace. While in previous novels, traffic through the gates was controlled, first by the Transport Union (a somewhat ad hoc authority cobbled together out of the remnants of Belter culture to supervise the weird not-space between the Gates) and then by the Laconian Empire (originally a renegade Martian military faction who stole a sample of protomolecule, disappeared through a Gate and emerged years later as a powerhouse of such overwhelming force that its leader, Winston Duarte, wound up being the Emperor of Everything); with both of those forces removed from the board, the Gate network is a free-for-all. Our girl Naomi has devised a brilliant way to manage traffic and keep anybody from dying/disappearing/whatever it is that happens to people when ships "go dutchman" but it requires things like cooperating, giving a shit about other people, being patient and other things that individual humans still aren't very good at, left to their own devices. Sigh.

But while this is going on, Naomi and what's left of her crew are back together on the Rocinante, and while Jim Holden has even more PTSD than he already did after years and years and years as a captive of the Laconian Empire, and while Alex Kamal has his mind on other things from time to time like the fact that out there in the churn is not only his son but a newborn grandson whom he might never even get to meet, and while Amos Burton has been transformed into something kind of unearthly even though he still mostly acts like our favorite Murder Mechanic, it's still the Rocinante's crew and it's as wonderful for us as it is for them to have them all breathing the same recycled air. And beloved characters from past novels turn up here and there, too, notably Elvi Okoye and her husband Fazal, now Science Big Shots for the remains of the Empire, and young Theresa Duarte (heir to the Empire but no she doesn't have blue skin or red eyes) and her aging but still intrepid dog, Muskrat are along for the ride, too, and you KNOW you've always wanted to see what it's like to have a dog in space. In zero G. Oh, man, if your head doesn't explode into candy every time Muskrat is center stage, see a therapist soonest.

We even get to see [REDACTED] again!

We only get to enjoy this a little bit, though, because not only is the Big Threat out there threatening, but so is Winston Duarte, who, through protomolocule monkey business over the course of several novels has metamorphosed from capable miltary officer to renegade leader to founding father of a nation state to immortal dictator of all of humanity and has since become... something even stranger and more dangerous. He poses very nearly as big a threat to humanity as the Big Threat, and is incommunicado unless he feels like manifesting as a sort of super-intense hologram of himself where he's least expected and there were so many times in these last few Expanse novels that I was nearly won over to liking him a bit so even this revelation of his inhumanly inimical intent hits hard in the feels, even before his daughter Theresa comes looking for him.

All of this is resolved satisfactorily, which would be awesome just for this novel, but also the whole giant series, which has covered the Rocinante's crew's entire adult lifetimes into old age, is also resolved more than satisfactorily. Even as I sat there sort of guarding myself the way someone anticipating a gut punch flexes her stomach muscles, I was in awe of how well all of this was being accomplished before my eyes, even as, a few times, I shook my mental fist at the two-headed author-monster for emotional distress inflicted on the way. So while I swore in the months before Leviathan Falls was finally released that I was not ready to see this go, no, not ever, I am pleased that it was ended so perfectly.

And I'm busily trying to carve out time to read the whole series again from the beginning as one, big expanse of novel, someday. Amidst all my other projects.

It's worth it.

*The eventual name of the civilization-or-hive-mind that were the original creators of the protomolecule that has been wreaking havoc with humanity since Leviathan Wakes first graced our literal and electronic bookshelves a decade or so ago

**Not can: will. For all we ever learn the Gates can handle whatever we throw threw them, but the Big Threat notices if our traffic through them gets too dense, and it strikes when it notices.

Hilary Mantel's THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT

History is always a spoiler for historical fiction, so I knew, as the virtual pages of The Mirror and the Light dwindled, that I was about to lose a beloved friend and I emotionally braced for it, but even so, I cried when it happened... in the book. Of course it really happened over 500 years ago.

Hilary Mantel definitely fills the role left empty lo these many years by the late Dame Dorothy Dunnet, and Mantel is a more than worthy successor, but she hasn't aped the mistress' achievements so much as inverted them. Dunnett wants us mystified by her heroes, guessing at their motivations and what they're going to do next, unable to penetrate their facades. Thorfinn, Lymond, Niccolo, all are observed from the outside; we get accounts of their deeds from the point of view of everbody else they encounter, spending a bit exploring the interiority of each of their friends, enemies, lovers, employers, lords. And nobody does this better than Dorothy.

This is not where she and Hilary Mantel overlap. What they share is a commitment to research and to world-building (as my friend Connor Wroe Southard explores in his latest) and an utter lack of fear of going long to create as complete a portrait of their ages and milieus as they can. Mantel just assumes a bit less erudition and command of languages on the part of her readers, is all, which can make her seem a bit more accessible than Dunnett, but beware: Mantel doesn't suffer foolish readers either. The first and, to a degree, second books in this trilogy were famously difficult for many readers (and, at first attempt, for me as I discussed on this blog long ago) due to Mantel's commitment to the tightest possible focus on her protagonist that didn't require an out-and-out first person narrator; we hover practically on his shoulder for hundreds and hundreds of pages, a bit baffled at times until it dawns on us (or is explained) that in Hilary Mantel's Tudor England, "he" means Thomas Cromwell 99% of the time, even if he is not named in a sentence or paragraph and someone else, say, King Henry VIII, actually has been. I found this incredibly off-putting the first time I read Wolf Hall, but have come to not only embrace it but possibly prefer it to the first person narrator to which authors usually resort when they want to achieve this level of intimacy with a protagonist.

And intimacy there is, right up until the moment the axe falls, and throughout the account of the last, greatest and most troublesome act of Thomas Cromwell's career. He has been intimately involved in the getting of all of Henry VIII's replacement wives. Queen 2.0, Anne Boleyn, absolutely relied on him until she found, to her surprise, that she could not, and Cromwell took advantage of her fall to take down a whole bunch of men who had treated Cromwell's original Patron (Cardinal Thomas Wolsey) badly after Wolsey repeatedly failed to get the Pope to annul Henry's marriage to Queen 1.0. Anne's reign and downfall encompass the second novel Bring Up the Bodies, which ends more or less right as the headsman from Calais executes her publicly with a sword inscribed, as we learn in this third book, "mirror of justice, pray for us," the first of many references to mirrors and lights, here.*

The Mirror and the Light takes us through the reign of Queen 3.0, Jane Seymour, whose rise together with her family from Wolf Hall owes, again, a lot to Thomas Cromwell, and who might have proven a boon to the whole country had she survived after giving birth to Henry's only legitimate son, and then the campaign to find Queen 4.0 (who winds up being Anne of Cleves, but not with much success). But Queen Search is the least interesting plot here, as other events overtake the Henrician court, such as the famous Pilgrimage of Grace (the original astroturfing plot, generally thought to have been engineered by Europe's Catholics as a way to bully Henry back into the Roman fold), the future Bloody Mary's early stubbornness about her status, that of her mother, and whether or not her father could actually be the head of a church, and the continuous plots of various cadet branches of the English royal family to unseat the Usurper Henry and replace him with one of their own blueblood sons. Cromwell is in the thick of all of this, and his fierceness on Henry's, Mary's and also Margaret Tudor's (Henry VIII's niece, a princess of Scotland being raised in Henry's court) behalf earns him lots of new enemies and intensifies many old conflicts; many of his rivals, new and old, remind him throughout this book that since Cromwell owes all that he is and has (which has come to be quite a lot, as Cromwell even finishes his life with the title of Earl of Exeter -- a title that once was held by one of those cadet branches of the royal family until the last male of the line dies childless, and remember, Cromwell's dad was a scary drunken abusive blacksmith from the slums) to the king, if the king ever turns on him, he's done for. Cromwell basically just says, of course, and continues to do so right until the end, giving this book a greater air of tragedy even than the early scenes in Wolf Hall when the sweating sickness raged through his household and killed all the ladies and little girls.

Meanwhile, Anne Boleyn's family still seethes over her fate, for which they blame Cromwell, and they plant the final seeds of Cromwell's destruction with another daughter of the family, the vain and silly Kat Howard, who will be Queen 5.0 and gets married on the day of Cromwell's death. Queen 2.0 and 5.0 share an uncle in Thomas Howard (fabulously played by my beloved Bernard Hill in the TV adaptation, which showed that Hill is just as good playing a dick as he is a hero or a coward. Ahh, my Bernard!), who rages through the whole trilogy but has especially good scenes in this book as he and Cromwell occasionally seem on the verge of finally becoming friends, or at least calling a truce, until Howard's pride in his lineage always wins out; Cromwell is a Nobody and needs Put In His Place and nothing will be right in the world until he is.

Again, all of this is taking place in an immersively detailed world, which I was able to flesh out even more thanks to a lot of references to contemporary music of the time. There were enough of these for me to construct a pretty good playlist on Spotify, to which I added some other stuff that I'm reasonably sure would be familiar in Henry's court, and, of course, a selection of Henry's own musical compositions. Of course Henry composed music. He was a Renaissance Man if anybody was! Anyway, everything I could find that was mentioned by name is on there, along with some of my other favorites from Henry's lifetime in Venice, Florence, the Holy Roman Empire, etc. I listened to it a lot as I finished the book, and it was a great balm on my poor heart as I watched Cromwell arrested, imprisoned, questioned, impugned and executed.

Now, excuse me. I think I need some alone time.

*The overarching metaphor of the book is teased out there; before electricity and incandescent or LED bulbs, the light of a candle was often magnified by placing it in front of a mirror to bounce the rays back into the room. As Cromwell discusses often with his king, a ruler must serve as both things, mirror and light, setting a good example to his subjects and magnifying the benefits of good behavior into his realm. Um, about that...

Guy Gavriel Kay's FIONAVAR TAPESTRY

This post is going to concern itself with not one but three books, because once I'd finished the first volume of Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, The Summer Tree, I immediately plunged into its sequel, The Wandering Fire, and when I finished that (in a little over a day and a sleepless night), I plunged immediately into the concluding The Darkest Road and then I had a good cry but did not wish for more because everything wrapped up so satisfyingly that I did not need more.

This pretty much never happens. Especially with epic/high fantasy, a genre for which my lack of love is pretty well known.* Hey, I'm as surprised as you are (though my love for Kay's A Song for Arbonne should have given us all a clue, I do suppose). And yet right now, I'm happily also in the middle of that Broken Empire stuff, too. It pays sometimes to ignore your prejudices, eh wot?

Anyway, I started off, a week or so ago, prepared not to like this one so much. Alarm bells started ringing right away as I settled down to read the first book, which starts off with a lengthy and detailed dramatis personae, a thing that always makes me roll my eyes because it so often suggests to me that either someone doesn't trust me enough to keep track of all the characters contained in the story such a list precedes, or someone's publishers don't think the author did a good enough job making said characters vivid and distinct enough for anyone to be able to keep track without a handy guide. Either way, my hackles go up, and yes, I had the same eyebrow raising experience the first time I cracked open Dorothy Dunnett, but her books are so damned intricate and complex that those lists turn out to be (occasionally) necessary even for an attentive reader because hundreds of pages sometimes go by between encounters with some characters in Dunnett, oh yes. But Dunnett has been an exception for me in this, as in so many regards.

Guy Garviel Kay, turns out, is another. Except I didn't need, ever, to refer to the dramatis personae, because as in Arbonne, so in Fionavar (to which I'd seen a reference in Arbonne as "Fionvarre" and had been wondering about since, to my happiness): Kay's characters, both his own creations and those he borrows from mythology and legend, are alive and distinct and unforgettable and captivating. As is their world, their struggle, their story.

The trilogy's focus is on five of them, more or less, young university students who come from our world (and from Toronto, my very favorite city), who attend together a lecture on Celtic myth by a world-famous expert and then find themselves whisked into said expert's company after the lecture under the guise of showing him a much better time than would all those dreary academics who are expecting him at their post-lecture do. But it is the lecturer, who turns out to be a powerful mage from another world named Loren Silvercloak (and yes, that name gagged me at first, as so many names in the d.p. gagged me, because I hate epic fantasy, remember?), who whisks them away -- to another world, where they are "needed" as ceremonial guests for a king's golden jubilee. By magic, he and his "source"**, a dwarf named Matt Soren, transport the five to Fionavar, the first of all worlds, kind of like C.S. Lewis' Aslan's Country, the world of which all other worlds are just sort of imperfect copies echoing its motifs and patterns.***

And then it turns out, of course, that the Five -- handsome, playful, emotional Kevin; helpful, kind, wise Kimberly; wounded, stand-offish, moody Paul; beautiful, proud Jennifer; and big, strong oddball Dave -- aren't just there for a party. There are roles and very important work for all of them to fulfill in Fionavar, if they're willing, or maybe even if they're not.

And those roles are deeply archetypal, a Jungian parade of quests and tasks and ritual enactments and sacrifices that could all get so hokey, so in-your-ribs and on-the-nose, but don't because Guy Gavriel Kay is some kind of wizard. Even someone who knows the archetypes he's playing with very, very well has surprises in store for her, reading these novels. They might not be plot surprises per se, for such a reader; the surprise is how deeply felt and emotional these developments can be, how necessary they are to make the overall story work, and how they raise lumps in the throat, make tears sting in the eyes such that one could all but short out her ebook reader. Excuse me for a moment.

And yes, the girls' stories matter just as much as, sometimes more than, they boys', and no, it's not because the girls strap on boobplates and are suddenly strong enough to wield giant claymores or because they develop preternatural skills at archery or in any way, really, do anything remotely like what the boys do. Kay laughs at the Bechdel test. Kay understands women and men and honors them both. Kay writes people. Extraordinarily.

And he writes extraordinary fight scenes, including one single battle between a larger-than-life hero and a giant unkillable demon that goes on for some ten pages and is riveting not just for the well-described action but for the scene's staggering emotional content, deft shifts of point of view, and barely-hinted at future importance. As I said over on Goodreads after finishing that scene, "Jesustitsfucksake, Lancelot!"

Yes, that Lancelot. Arthur and Cavall are in this, too, drawn in from their eternal twilight afterlife just as Kevin and Kim and Paul and Jennifer and Dave were from theirs, but not quite given their interiority. Kay knows well enough to leave his most archetypal characters as just that, archetypes, icons, who nonetheless are integral parts of this story and who interact with Kay's own characters in a myriad of ways without in any way ceasing to be icons to be regarded with awe and reverence. Neat trick, that.

 I'm still in awe myself from the experience of reading these books. And this is a trilogy with a flying unicorn in it, for Pete's sake.

Yes, boys and girls, a high fantasy trilogy with a flying unicorn made me cry. Go outside and check the skies for falling crabs and periwinkles.

And read these books, if you haven't.

*Nor are those detailed in that sonnet the only reasons I generally roll my eyes at the genre, as I'm sure my long-term readers figured out long ago, and as I'm sure I've made even more clear in this post.

**I'm not going to get into the details here, but magic in Fionavar is different, yo. As in it takes two, a mage and a second person who is the source of his energy, to do it. And the relationship between a mage and his source is a powerful one even when they are not already otherwise best friends or lovers or both or all of the above, i.e. it's quite fraught.

***Look, the trilogy is referred to as a tapestry. So much weaving/fibercraft metaphor in this. So much.

Guy Gavriel Kay's A SONG FOR ARBONNE

It's been a long, long time since I struggled so with a book as I did with Guy Gavriel Kay's wonderful A Song for Arbonne. And that's a good thing. I'd never get anything done if I went through what I went through with this one every time I sat down to read.

The struggle, incidentally, was not to finish it all in one long greedy gulp. I had to force myself to pace myself. I had to sip.

I knew pretty much right away that I'd found another favorite, you see, and I'd only have this first reading once.

A Song for Arbonne is, for me, the perfect kind of fantasy novel, which means in lots of ways it probably barely counts as fantasy. There are no prophecies, no chosen ones, no blatant manipulation by gods or immortals or wizards. There's barely any magic, and a reader can pretty much choose to ignore as coincidental or at least as a matter of interpretation what magic there is.

What's there in place of all those tiresome tropes is absolutely top-notch character drama in a world similar to our own (except in that it has two moons, one of which shines a beautiful blue in the night sky), in a period that might more or less equate to our twelfth century. The known world consists of six nations, more or less versions of regions of Europe, with the titular Arbonne pretty clearly based on Eleanor's Aquitaine, a chivalric culture of troubadours and courtly love but one in which women can actually wield political power and inherit property and you can already see a part of why I loved this book so; Kay obviously did a lot of thinking about how this could work. The central fact of this culture is that it reveres a goddess, Rian as the equal of the world's war god, Corannos, so it follows that mortal women should also be treated as equals -- at least in Arbonne's high culture/ruling classes, which are all we get to see here.

This idyllic land is uneasy neighbors with a much more traditional fantasy kingdom, Gorhaut, a male-driven culture given to sneering at "woman-ruled Arbonne", who revere Corannos only, and who have, as this novel gets into gear, recently concluded fifty years of border war with another country by ceding over a huge chunk of territory in exchange for a lot of money, thus displacing a huge chunk of Gorhaut's population and leading all eyes to look south to the ripe-for-the-taking fertility and ports of Arbonne.

Drama button!

But it's the personalities of the figures involved that truly matter. I'm not going to spoil those here, except to say that a lot of the country's fate comes down to the unfortunate choice made a generation ago by a headstrong woman who was married to a duke and cuckholded him with a troubador who later on became a duke himself, leaving a legacy of hatred that threatens to weaken Arbonne fatally. Good thing the country is ruled by a devastatingly astute and strong women (who happens to be the headstrong woman's mother) -- and that a mysterious man from Gorhaut has appeared on the scene, introducing a whole new set of consequences (and daddy issues).

Every single character matters. Every single arc matters. Everything is given its due. The construction of the narrative is flawless. The writing is nearly flawless -- like many, I found myself annoyed by the occasional slip into present tense to, I guess, heighten the drama of some scenes, usually involving the mysterious man's family in Gorhaut, but even there the prose was gorgeous.

Now I've just got to struggle with the urge to binge-read the rest of Kay's stuff. Wish me luck.

J.G. Ballard's HELLO AMERICA

While the Planet of the Apes' iconic Statue of Liberty Buried In The Sand is an old favorite, I think I prefer J.G. Ballard's Lady Liberty: Navigation Hazard (see the Dutch cover for this novel, in the lower right corner of this post), upon whose crown which the good ship Apollo (named for, of course, the famous lunar expeditions) tears open its hull as its already mad captain takes it full steam ahead toward the glittering golden dunes engulfing New York City as depicted in this brilliant cover art.

I can't exactly call Hello America post-apocalyptic; the rest of the world is just fine, thanks (albeit yes, culturally and technologically ebbing from the high water mark of mid-century civilization). America, though, is a hundred years dead, victim of its own excess (the fossil fuels ran out) and of other countries' questionable decisions, chiefly that of the USSR, which dammed the Bering Strait to improve its own climate and make of Siberia the world's new bread basket. Altering ocean currents so profoundly has left (most of) North America a scorching desert, one which Ballard of course describes vividly and beautifully:

Half the Appalachians had been destroyed by the sun to yield this deluge of rock and dust. Street signs and traffic lights protruded from the sand, a rusty metallic flora, old telephone lines trailed waist-high marking out a labyrinth of pedestrian catwalks. Here and there, in the hollows between the dunes, were the glass doors of bars and jewelry stores, dark grottoes like subterranean caves... In the centre of Times Square a giant saguaro cactus raised its thirty foot arms into the over-heated air, an imposing sentinel guarding the entrance to a desert nature reserve.

We see this surreal future cityscape through the eyes of one of Ballard's more active protagonists, Wayne, a Dublin-born descendant of Americans who fled back to Europe when America became uninhabitable. Wayne starts his journey as a stowaway aboard the Liberty-crashing Apollo, which is bringing a scientific expedition to America to investigate the source of some worrisome radiation readings that are coming from the continent's interior -- the last one who left did not turn out the nuclear lights, if you know what I mean. True to Ballardian form, Wayne is driven by a strange obsession, or set of obsessions, as is each member of the ship's crew. For Wayne, coming to America is both a search for his half-imaginary missing father (a scientist from a prior expedition that never returned) and for his own destiny, for young Wayne fantasizes about being the 45th President of the United States.*

Wayne crosses the continent with a strange crew of scientists, paramilitary wannabes, the usual Ballardian cast, right down to the token female, physicist Anne Summers, who is, as usual, stuck carrying all the men's bullshit anima projections across the desert and into the Amazonian jungle that has encroached into the American Southwest (now as lush and overgrown as the East is dry and Saharan, because deliberate climate change). So the ship's captain and most of the other military types assume she'll be their submissive sex-kitten once the desert has softened her up and teased loose that severe hairdo, which happens soon enough: "and there emerged, like a flare of light from a grenade, the long blonde hair that now shadowed her from the sun... This white mane made her resemble some beautiful nomadic widow, endlessly crossing the desert in search of a young husband."

Of course that second fantasy is Wayne's. He's going to make her his First Lady, don't you know. A gallant, gallant soul, is Wayne. And never mind what Anne might actually want for herself. No, really, never mind, because (sigh) her character pretty much devolves the second she sets foot on the "golden" sands of Manhattan. She's a nuclear physicist of enough importance to be selected for this potentially vital expedition, but get her near a derelict department store and all she wants to do is loot ball gowns and cosmetics counters so she can play dress up. Oh, Anne.

So yeah, Wayne (and Ballard, dammit) could probably do better.

Ah, but so many things stand between Wayne and his goals (goals! A Ballardian protagonist with goals!), not the least of which is the new Great American Desert**, still sparsely populated by the weird, half-savage descendents of the people who couldn't get/keep it together enough to evacuate the continent when everyone else did; these post-American Indians are divided into regional tribes with names like The Professors (from Boston), The Executives (Manhattan) and The Bureaucrats (Washington DC), who engage in bizarre cargo-cult imitations of mid-20th-century civilziation and name themselves after major international brand names.*** So soon Wayne finds himself in the company of freaks named GM and Pepsodent... and the reader finds herself wondering when he's going to encounter Mrs. Etheyl Shroake and establish diplomatic relations with England-after-the-nuclear-misunderstanding.

Enter one Charles Manson, who has deliberately adopted the name of the 20th century's most famous psycho killer and has beaten Wayne to the job of being POTUS #45. A most Kurtz-like figure might Manson seem to be, except it's pretty obvious that he was looney-tunes long before he set up his kingdom in the jungle and started up a program of bizarre Phildickian robot-building and nuclear-missile-recommissioning with the help of a scientist who got stranded in America a generation or so ago...

So yes, of all the Ballard I've read to date, Hello America is the most nearly plot-driven. Story elements come together, as do characters. Loose ends get tied up. A story gets told. The work is every bit as vividly hallucinatory and allusive as the elemental apocalypse books, every bit as beautifully written, every bit as hiply magical, but it's more of an actual story than I've grown used to coming from him. Which is awesome.

But even so, the plot is not really the point, for above all else, Hello America is a meditation on the emptiness of mid-century dreaming, of our culture's enduring fixation on Presidents and movie stars and madmen, in which we seem wont to indulge even at the expense of sustaining the civilization that produced these idols. Somebody else clean up this mess; I wanna have a martini and look at Playboy. And shut up about Peak Oil. What are you, a Russki?

And it's also an indulgence in that most seductive of fantasies, that of infinite elbow room. Everybody who comes to this America has a dream of having a continent to him- or herself. Perhaps everybody always has. Hell, as Sartre observed, is other people. So the gleaming golden shore of a dune-submerged metropolis must look a lot like heaven.

At least until your camels die. Or you run out of lipstick. Or you find yourself staring down a scrum of robotic Presidents.

Ballard, man...

*The 44th, of course, having been Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown, who spent out the remainder of his term and days meditating at some Japanese zen center after his nation and his presidency dissolved into a state of non-being.

**Which, this landscape and the remnants of human attempts to maintain the status quo ante for a while within it make Hello America feel almost like a direct sequel to The Burning World, as Wayne and his party keep encountering sad little examples of pathetic attempts to survive that world's new normal -- water reclamation stills built out of spare parts, kluged-together steam engines hastily mounted into classic Detroit-built automobiles, etc.

***More stuff to tick off the feminist in you: not only is there an all female tribe called The Divorcees who are pretty much just a multi-form parody of mid-century womanhood, but then there's this cultural tidbit from the Executive tribe: all Executive women are named Xerox, because they make good copies.