Kate Sherrod blogs in prose! Absolutely partial opinions on films, books, television, comics and games that catch my attention. May be timely and current, may not. Ware spoilers.
Showing posts with label historical fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label historical fiction. Show all posts
One hundred years and change ago, the Young Turks deposed the ante-penultimate Ottoman emperor, Sultan Abdulhamid II, and sent him, his wives and most of his children into exile in the then-Ottoman-controlled Greek City of Salonica/Thessaloniki. He was one of those rulers who was never meant to hold power, but when the throne came to him anyway, he gave up his idea of being a merchant and climbed up onto the the metaphorical beast named in Zülfü Livaneli's On the Back of the Tiger,a historical novel concerning Hamid's final years, and spent the next 30+ years of his life doing his best to look like he was riding that tiger rather than just being carried away by it.
The novel, rendered into transparently readable, even journalistic English prose by Brenden Freely, is chiefly derived from the notebooks of one Atif Hüseyin Bey, who served as physician to Hamid and those members of his family who shared his exile. The doctor is thus a major character in the novel alongside the deposed sultan, and one of the book's greatest pleasures is watching the former's attitudes about the latter shift from resentment and hostility (Atif grew up with the prevailing idea of Hamid as the standard wicked and bloodthirsty tyrant) to grudging respect, to sympathy and even a kind of fondness, despite the constant criticism of his contemporaries, a number which includes the future first president of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
He was now certain that he and the former Sultan had reached a new agreement. It was as if he was the judge and the sultan was the defendant. One was interrogating, and the other was being interrogated. The doctor laughed aloud at the sense of power he felt, then began coughing from the cigarette smoke he just inhaled. After he got his coughing under control, he thought to himself, Having power is a wonderful thing.
The uses and limits of a monarch's power when he sits atop a deeply entrenched bureaucracy is the main question On the Back of the Tiger sets out to explore. Abdulhamid II is regarded by history as the last absolute monarch the Ottomans allowed, but even he assumed the throne only by agreeing to become a constitutional one. That he dissolved the parliament within a year of his enthronement is the first charge laid against him by his doctor as stand-in for his people - but Hamid easily deflects this by pointing out that said parliament was one in which Turks were a decided minority; the parliament was composed of members of pretty much every ethnicity and religion the world had to offer, and most of these granfalloons were seeking independence from the Empire and thus had every incentive to undermine it and obstruct the executive (the Sultan). And Hamid became Sultan during another round of the Ottomans' historic conflict with Russia. Therefore the parliament forced Hamid's hand.
Hamid's sobriquet in the West, and amongst his own peoples in secret, was the Red Sultan, for all the metaphorical blood on his hands, chiefly for the Armenian genocide that happened on his watch. But how much responsibility can really be loaded into one man, even one popularly understood to be omnipotent? Was he really omnipotent, astride the tiger of state that fought him constantly and sought always to attack and devour him?
His doctor keeps having to ask these questions as they get to know one another, as the doctor struggles to reconcile the historical villain with the mild, civilized and cultured man who takes more pride in his carpentry skills than in his lineage, and whose family members show real devotion to and affection for him at every turn, further undermining his monstrous reputation.
These conflicting ideas come to a head in, for example, an early conversation the doctor has with the former Sultan about the fate of an ex-official imprisoned on his orders, and presumably executed in jail on those orders, too. The Sultan insists that had he wanted that man dead, he would have just ordered him executed. The man's actual death by strangulation while imprisoned, Hamid says he didn't know of until it was too late for him to prevent it. How much power can one man wield over the vast and complex apparatus of an empire, comprising individuals constantly having to interpret their mandates and act on their initiative to do what they assume is his will? As they've been doing for hundreds of years according to tradition and perceived necessity?
Livanelli doesn't pretend to have the answers to any of these questions, but in inviting us to ponder them he invites us to think about our own current crop of wannabe Sultans, including the ones in Turkey and Hungary and Trumpistan. And while I certainly don't like being asked to extend sympathy or respect to these autocrats, the thing that really separates them from people like Hamid stands out in very sharp relief that finally makes me, at least, decide that I don't have to. Hamid never made the kinds of speeches that these guys do. At least not in public. At least not overtly. At least not in front of TV cameras.
But what did he say in private? Those things, we're never going to know.
But it sure is interesting to think about, isn't it?
We're told not to judge books by their covers, and to that I mostly hold, but occasionally I must make an exception. When this beauty started staring out at me from A Strange Object/Deep Vellum's web page, I had to bring it into my home. I mean, look at this thing!
And once it's come into your home, this cover's baleful stare, if allowed to peek out from under or from the top of one's stack of recently acquired books to be read (on dead tree despite the pain), will compel one to read it, and soon, if only to find out what the hell this staring creature even is.
Even if the book's possessor is a stubborn old crone-in-training like your humble blogger, feeling tsundoku guilt and determined to read some of the tomes that came here before it. Compelled by this cover, I took it up out of turn. And so here we are, with Ethan Rutherford's debut novel, North Sun or the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, in the very year in which it was published.
And yes, there's a whale carcass in the room that I can't ignore, viz, the last book about whaling* I wrote about on this blog, which entry is still one of the most read things I've ever written, I'm pretty sure, my old review of Moby-Dick. Which most people seem to interpret as me roasting Melville's maritime masterpiece but 1. I love an unlikeable protagonist especially if he's an unreliable narrator and 2. The tedium is very much the point of that book and as such i respect Moby-Dick as a pinnacle of creative achievement and 3. I've since read it again, after having fallen in love with China Mieville's Railsea, and found more to admire in it a second time around. I could just take that post down (since I can't just let it sink into oblivion apparently) but I can't bring myself to do so. It's a pole holding up the tent of my identity. I'm the chick who called Ishmael the annoying hipster on the boat.** I own it.
But anyway, North Sun or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther is a book that, for the first third or so, almost feels like a very streamlined and snappy retelling of the story of the Essex, that unfortunate ship whose fate inspired Moby-Dick and is depicted in In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, book, film and podcast episode.*** And of course, in certain respects, one sea voyage is very like another, at least to start with. The action is briskly told, the periods of inaction elided over, everything described in terse sentences, quick paragraphs and severely truncated chapters that would seem to be the very opposite of Moby-Dick. For a while this feels like it might turn out to be the whole point.
But then [REDACTED] shows up not long after a pair and then a whole pack of [REDACTEDs] attack and on the heels of a second encounter between little [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and the sinister and very large [REDACTED] in the bowels of the ship -- and everything changes. The ship turns north at the Sandwich Islands -- they are not merely on a whaling expedition, but are also off to try to recover a Mr. Leander, captain of another whaling ship, who lost his charge to the pack ice and sent the Esther's eventual captain back to New Bedford, MA to tell the owners of both the Esther and the lost Dromo, that nobody was coming home from the Dromo even though its captain is married to one of the family's daughters -- and heads up to the Arctic to hunt whales, walrus and Leander.
By the time the ship is on its new heading, the reader has realized that they are sailing, not only into chillier, more dangerous waters, but also into the wild waves of Weird Fiction, as I'll get into in a bit.
Ahoy!
On the Esther sails through the choppy winter sea! She swoops her spirit up one wave and down another, proud and vain. Finally, the cold truly catches and the temperature drops. The water turns gray and leaden; every surface of the ship remains damp. The fog smothers and surrounds them. But the silence they sail through is not the absence of sound at all. Rather, it is the presence of all sound. The cold bites the men's skin; they feel it in their teeth. They bundle against it, but that's how it is.
How many chapters would Herman Melville have taken to describe this? I kid. Kind of.
But anyway, the hazards of a whaling voyage are many, even before things get explicitly Weird. For instance, while of course I'm enough of a veteran of maritime fiction to know what a shipworm is (actually a kind of clam, with a long flexible body; they use their little shells as drill bits to bore through the wood of ships) but I've never encountered them depicted as crawling free between locations on deck where little ship's boys could potentially see them. Which, this alone could introduce a note of horror for the squeamish reader -- which I am not. I am a sicko, which is why I decided to share an amusing-to-me image of these strange and destructive critters:
Thank you, Internet. You're still capable of providing some good things.
Oh, and by the way, the worms in the book, have grown to be as big around as your arm
and proportionally as long. You're welcome!
But Rutherford isn't here just to try to gross us out. He's enamored of the imagery the setting affords him, and takes full advantage:
That morning the men have their first glimpse of clustered ice. What a sight! The northern sun glints off the Frozen expanse - her light is a dancing thing, it plays over the basin and reflects crystals in the air. The ice cakes are like glistening scraps skimmed from the pots. They see no patch of color in front of them. Everything - sky, snow, apparent horizon - is a gradation of brilliant white. Except, of course, for the sea itself, which, in the leads and channels, appears black.
Which is to say that we get some quite beautiful prose in North Sun, but with which the author never gets too carried away. The above passage, like the passage I quoted before, constitutes almost an entire chapter, and soon we are back to the plot, the plot, the plot! This is 21st century fiction for the TikTok audience, or something, lean and hungry and raring to get back to pursuit or butchery or uncanny haunting or...
Weirder things. Things which I'm not going to spoil for you but which chiefly concern the two little Riggs brothers, aged ten and twelve, though they are listed on the manifest as twelve and fourteen because, while whaling families are, as one captain observes early in the novel, monsters, they're not complete monsters. They wouldn't employ child labor or anything, I mean come on! But anyway, these two little boys, being the smallest bodies on the boat, get all the nastiest jobs, like getting lowered into the head cavities of slaughtered whales to collect all the spermaceti (you can't have a whaling story without spermaceti!) and being subject to the unwelcome attentions of the kinds of people who pay unwelcome attentions to powerless little boys (trigger warning, there, though nothing gets too graphic).
But there's also a dude who kind of fills the role of the Bond Company Stooge in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Mr. Thule (great name for a vaguely sinister figure, no?), who stays mostly below decks until they reach the ice but then emerges as a figure of unexpected force and knowledge who may be exercising some kind of weird occult powers on behalf of the ship's owners and who is absolutely unperturbed by the forces of weather, wind, tide, wildlife or the increasingly outlandishly bad luck that has afflicted the ship at least since they rounded Cape Horn, the kind of luck which has their chief harpooneer blowing his hand off in a rare bit of comic relief as he experiments with a new kind of explosive harpoon dart that can kill a whale before the animal can dive below the ice and threaten to drag a whaleboat under with him, as nearly happens soon after they arrive in the Arctic.
And there is another figure aboard about whom I'm not going to write here but who will haunt me for a long time, I think. Oh, Old Sorrel. I might even cut out this paragraph just for mentioning him at all. I don't know yet. If I leave it in, it's just because I decided to tease you, dear readers.
I didn't know how much my life was lacking a combination of Herman Melville and Drew Magary (if you know, you know. Crab) until this book found me, but now I'm craving some more whaling tales. And, fortunately for me, I have at least one more in the teetering TBR stack. And readers, that one rhymes.
Stay tuned!
*That's not an incidental appearance of the practice in an Aubrey/Maturin novel.
**It is perhaps a mark of that post's relative antiquity that I felt the need exhaustively to define what a hipster is.
It was well known at that time that meteorological conditions in Prague were usually connected to conditions in the Emperor's mind, a phenomenon that certain churchmen as well as the vulgar attributed to the action of demons flitting in and out of the emperor's head, which evidently they could, on this theory, enter at will - "anything of course can be explained by recourse to a head entering demon."
While the title and stunningly odd cover art of Adam Erlich Sachs' stunningly odd The Organs of Sensesuggest that this weird little novel will chiefly concern itself with how we apprehend the world directly, the text is occupied with a very different but related matter: how most of what we say we "know' about the world actually comes at many removes from such direct apprehension.
Told as an encounter between a young Gottfried Leibniz (he of the monads and the famous dispute with Isaac Newton over which of them could claim to have invented calculus*) and an elderly, blind astronomer, The Organs of Sense never lets the reader forget the chain of custody through which the facts and ideas being discussed are coming to us. We are constantly reminded, for instance, that our knowledge of what happened in this encounter and what was said comes to us via later writings of Leibniz.** And very, very often, we are also reminded how various anecdotes the astronomer shares with Leibniz reached the astronomer, as when he relates a story in which the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II punked his art agent over how dumb it was for that agent to hold forth for an absurd length of time over the various technical and art historical qualities of Giuseppe Arcimboldo's painting, Water, without having once mentioning fish. I mean... Look.
Anyway, the astronomer originally heard the story from Emperor Rudolf's Court Chamberlain, who presumably had to oversee clean-up efforts after Rudolf convinced his art agent that he was facing severe punishment for being a phony and a blowhard and the art agent wet himself.
So yes, there are some amusing moments in this otherwise very serious book.
But why has Leibniz traveled out of his way, right after being denied his doctorate for his first learned publication, to meet an unnamed blind astronomer in his remote mountain observatory?
Because not only does this astronomer claim to have invented the telescope (a feat usually credited, in a prefiguring of Leibniz' future in the calculus dispute, to someone more famous) and has in fact built the longest one then in existence, but he also claims that doing so led directly to the loss of his eyes (he is not only blind but has empty hollows where his eyes were, but, as we soon learn, his tear ducts are still intact and functional); and not only has he invented and built the greatest of telescopes but lost his eyes, but he also claims he can still see through said telescope***, and that in doing so he, alone in all the world, has predicted a total solar eclipse for the very day and location on which and to which Leibniz has made his scientific pilgrimage.
Leibniz wants to be there to see whether or not the old guy is right.
And meantime, they have a few hours to kill. During which the astronomer relates his story to Leibniz and makes a frequent show of putting an empty eye socket to the viewfinder of his telescope, "looking" for a moment, and then jotting something down with a quill. He is adding to his catalog of stars, which he is determined will be longer than anybody's.
Of course I thought of this scene from what is perhaps my very favorite movie of all time, Peter Greenaway's**** Drowning by Numbers:
Will the eclipse actually happen? Will we find out how the astronomer still "sees?" Will we get to find out what he's been writing down? Will his dad ever realize his dream of being re-appointed the Imperial Sculptor?
Speaking of the astronomer's dad, fans of a fictional trope that's turning up a lot in late 20th and early 21st century fantasy fiction makes an appearance of sorts here: that of an actual, physical city that is a tangible representation of a human creator's memory palace. I'm speaking mostly of Jeffrey Ford's Well-Built City and of Alex Pheby's Cities of the Weft and maybe also Jeff Noon and Steve Beard's Gogmagog and Ludluda. Is that enough to call it a trend or a trope? I feel like Christopher Priest and Susanna Clarke may have played with it, too. At any rate, the Vienna of Emperor Maximilian's day, the astronomer insists to us via Liebniz, via Liebniz' translator, was a physical representation of the mind of the astronomer's father, who had designed most of its facades and buildings and sculptures during his time as Imperial Sculptor to Maximilian. Who was later fired by Rudolf when Rudolf dumped all of Maximilian's functionaries and moved to imperial court from gold and marble Vienna to "black-spired" Prague.
And it is in Prague that the astronomer, or so he tells Leibniz, who tells us via his unknown translator, loses his eyes and loses credit for inventing the telescope and loses his dignity to become, well, the punchline of a shaggy dog story, the point of which really seems to be that "learning math is important, actually."
To the point where I almost think that conveying this is, actually, the point of this novel, for all that it mostly consists of amusing scenes of Hapsburg court politics and pseudoscience and discovery and madness, feigned and un-.
By the way, this is also very much an alternate history in addition to its other attributes: the Rudolph II of The Organs of Sense seems much the same as our historical Hapsburg, but book-Rudolph had fewer children with his mistress and gave them different names, though the Prince Heinrich of the novel shares the outlines if not the details of the real eldest son's, Julius', main claim to fame, as a murderer. Heinrich comes to relate this story in considerable and exhausting detail to the astronomer while the astronomer is disguised as a priest come to hear Heinrich's confession, adding yet another layer of indirect storytelling to the text.
Which Sachs' continues to emphasize, so at least once we are reminded that one of the princesses told something to Heinrich, who told the disguised astronomer, who years later told Liebniz while they awaited an eclipse that may or may not happen, who relayed the tale as part of a journal article, which a translator then rendered into English, from which Sachs derived the story he is telling us.
Got that?
*A significant factor in the vast and convoluted plots of Neal Stephenson's incredible trilogy, The Baroque Cycle, a perennial favorite for re-reads, chez moi.
**And yes, adding still further to the chain of custody through which this story has passed, our actual narrator for this overall account is the unnamed translator of this fictional account of this fictional event in the life of the very real Leibniz.
***Yes, of course I'm thinking of how Paul Atriedes can still "see" in Dune Messiah. This astronomer's "vision," too, may be "oracular."
Time is really like an army of cockroaches. I have to force my hands to keep moving; it is like making myself squash cockroaches, one at a time. By my calculations, it takes one hundred finished tags to squash one cockroach.
By the time the above passage hits and makes sense to the reader, she understands the character expressing it so thoroughly that she doesn't even notice how nonsensical these words seem unless she goes back and reads it again later. At the time, she just knows that she feels it deeply, knows exactly what the character means, has been there, too, counting cockroaches with luggage tags. We are in the hands of a master of his chosen form.
It's been a while since I've indulged my love of big, sprawling social novels that 19th century Europe and North America produced in plentitude. There are still many of them I haven't read yet. I've only scratched the surface of Balzac's Human Comedy, for instance, and there are still a few Henry James chonks I haven't read yet, and while I've made a pretty throrough study of the Big Russians, Anna Karenina is still somewhere in my TBR. But I'm a perverse chooser of what to read next, and very much on the sucker lists of Open Letter, Deep Vellum and the Dalkey Archive so of course when I got the urge to grab a mammoth again, I turned to... late 20th century Japan.
First published in 1985, Marshlandis set in the late 1960s and early 1970s and flashes back to even earlier. It is, as I've hinted, a very long and involved and in-depth look at Japanese society, mostly in its post-WWII years but also in earlier times in the life of its hero, Atsuo Yukimori, ex-convict, ex-soldier, and, as we first get to know him, soon-to-be universally vilified suspect in a shocking terrorist attack on Tokyo's train system.
Atsuo is a very satisfying and meaty character to follow through a realist fictional life, introspective and honest, ashamed but never blaming anyone but himself for his many strayings from the straight and narrow path his poor family tried so hard to set him on. We meet him first as a middle aged bachelor living a very self-regulated, respectable but limited bachelor life in Tokyo, where he is the shop foreman for an auto repair business in the heart of the city. But, as we know from the very first, he has a checkered past, a deserter from this service in the Japanese army during World War II (and we'll get all of the details of his less than illustrious career in the Empire's service), a petty thief, something of a con man, a pickpocket... But we also know, before novel's end, that several of his stints in prison were pretty much entered into by his choice as the only way to stay alive, sheltered and fed through the devastating years of Japan's reconstruction, years that didn't have much use for him as a free man but did offer the chance for him to gain useful skills as an incarcerated one.
But I'm focusing too much on Atsuo, who is about as much the main character of Marshland as McNulty is of The Wire; he's the first one we get to know but is only one of many, all of whose stories matter to the overall narrative and scope of the book. There's Atsuo's vain and self-important employer, Mr. Fukawa and his devious secretary/mistress; Atsuo's nephew, also a worker at the shop and the dormitory "mother" who runs it's employee housing; there's the beautiful young student Wakako, who brings love and romance into Atsuo's life even as she draws him, inadvertently, into the world of student revolutionary politics and the police attention that brings; there are the hard-working, poor and honest members of Atsuo's family and the spoiled, immature but passionate student revolutionaries busy occupying buildings and trashing businesses and preaching doctrine at each other; and the police officers and prosecutors who have been watching them and whose baleful and possibly fatal attention comes to rest on Atsuo and Wakako after a train bombing... And the defense attorneys and private citizens who come together in the name of justice and hope and won't let Atsuo and his fellow defendants give up. All of them have lives and backgrounds and motivations and fears and desires that a good thousand pages or so allow us to explore in considerable depth and lets most of not all of them claim at least a little of our sympathy.
And, in Otohiko Kaga, we have a supremely confident novelist who misses no opportunity to put the emotional screws to us like a detective interrogating a prime suspect. Thus even the moments that should shine through with supreme happiness are tinged with tragedy and despair and bitterness, while those of desolation and enforced solitude still have hints of bitter humor and, sometimes, of possibility.
All of this is accomplished in a sound and unflashy style, so spare and simple that I honestly don't know how much is Kaga's and how much is translator Albert Novick's. Regardless, neither is trying to show off any dazzling chops or experimental elan. They've got a big, complicated, emotionally devastating story to tell and they're too committed to it to mess around with tricks of language or narrative beyond the occasional extended flashbacks.
Kaga has, also, a magnificent gift for nature writing. I have so many examples of this marked, but I think this is my favorite, from when Atsuo and Wakako are out in the Hokkaido wilderness, exploring scenes from Atsuo's childhood when he dreamed of becoming a hermit in the titular Marshland:
Those columns of ice really did take on individual forms as they grew over time, forms that were ever changing; forms that expressed - something. Some kind of will, the will that set nature in motion. That was the thing. This was not human will. There was too much variety there. It was beyond what people could make. In Tokyo the will that moves nature was in hiding. It was hidden by concrete and steel and cars and glass - the things made by people. But the stars showed the will of the creator of the natural world. So did the forest, the sea, the lake.
And yes, partaking in even earlier literary traditions, the state of the landscape is a beautiful stand-in for the emotional lives of the characters as well as the essential changelessness of the world beyond the socio-economic and political struggles of Tokyo and Osaka and Nemuro. Indeed, the final chapter for Marshland is a bravura example of linking the break-up of the ice atop frozen rivers and lakes to the freedom of new possibilities the characters are only just daring to consider as they fantasize about leaping onto an ice floe and letting it carry them out to sea. The beauty is all the greater for having been earned through hundreds and hundreds of pages of every kind of sight and sensation and emotion known to man crowding in on us and seeming like they'll never let us budge.
Anybody out there who's wondering what to put on a syllabus alongside, say, Crime and Punishment or ThePortait of a Ladyor Middlemarch could do worse than adding this; anybody who loves deeply involving modern-ish narratives like The Wire or just in the mood for the deepest possible exploration of the mid 20th century and how its various tensions and social currents affected real people should block out some time to spend in the Marshlands. This book is brilliant.
Anglican Church," he muttered. "You nearly never go to church anyway -- your church is the moors, your priest is your dog, your God is -- I don't know what. The wind.
Anybody who's been reading this blog for more than ten minutes knows how much I freaking love Tim Powers. He was the first author I ever put on the Automatic Buy list, long before I realized I even had such a thing.
But because he was the first and was, for a long time, the only, I still collect him in hardcover. Which is a format which I read with increasing difficulty as the years go by.
So while I was running around screaming like a little kid on Christmas Eve waiting for Powers' latest, My Brother's Keeper, to come out, had pre-ordered it the moment that was possible, I'm only now, almost a year later, finished reading it.
I beg you, do not take that as any kind of commentary on its quality, anymore than you should take its dirt-common title or its cover blurb from, of all people, Orson Scott Card.*
Because My Brother's Keeper is Tim Powers' tensest and creepiest read since he invented his own micro-genre of literary historical weird fiction (which lesser mortals have failed to duplicate. Cough. Seth Grahame-Smith. Cough) with The Stress of Her Regard, to which he returns here, not with a sequel like the serviceable but not exceptional Hide Me Among the Graves, but a true spiritual successor, pitting the Brönte sisters, their hapless brother and their Yorkshire parson father against a family of sort-of werewolves. I say "sort of" because these are werewolves in the way that the lamiae of Stress/Hide Me are vampires. This is still Tim Powers, an OG chaos magician of literature, the kind of guy who says "what if these classic monsters but both cooler and more sorrowful?"
And yes, of course there is a very Heathcliff-esque character striding the moors with Emily Brönte and her gigantic bull mastiff, Keeper (who is one of the best dog characters I've encountered in recent years and within recent years I read Jeffrey Ford's Well-Built City trilogy. Keeper ranks up there with Wood!), but he is not an inspiration for Heathcliff; the Emily of My Brother's Keeper already has a completed manuscript of Wuthering Heights in her writing case, has indeed been tempted by her brother, Branwell, to meet the wonderfully sinister and perfectly named villain, Mrs. Flensing, by suggestions that Mrs. Flensing has publishing connections in London.
No, Powers just lets Alcuin Curzon, the "one-eyed Catholic" whom Emily and Keeper rescue one day, serve as a sort of unremarked-upon slant-rhyme to Heathcliff, the better to enlarge the imaginative power of she whom Emily Dickinson named "Gigantic Emily Brönte" by his presence, instead of diminishing her by creating a lame figure for her creation to be based on.
I like it.
Honestly, I haven't been this excited by a Tim Powers novel since the very first time I read Last Call. Do not snooze on this one, or I'll let Mrs. Flensing get you.
*Just, remember that we liked Card once, and he wrote some good books before he started milking his IP dry.
Did you know, Pavel Kuzmich," Vartolomeyich said to his neighbor, "that I got here on a bicycle and that one man prophesied that I would end up behind bars.
One of my favorite things in reading translated literature is little passages like the above in which a good English pun comes at me out of nowhere and I get to ask myself a question like, so is 'behind bars/handlebars' a pun in Serbian* like it is in English? And I disappear down a linguistic rabbit hole trying to find out if it's the original author or the translator who gave me a good belly laugh.
Svetislav Basara's delightfully weird The Cyclist Conspiracyis also the second book I've read in this weird little translated literature project I've got going on this year to give me powerful Illuminatus! Trilogyvibes, though it gives even stronger Foucault's Pendulumvibes because Basara writes international literature where Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson wrote weird hippie pulp, by which I chiefly mean, there's not a lot of porn-y sex scenes in The Cyclist Conspiracy -- because it's got much weirder and more erudite stuff to show us.
The titular conspiracy, more properly called the Order of the Little Brothers of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross, is a secret society so esoteric and occult that you could be a lifelong member without knowing it until another member reaches out to you by oblique means (a random postcard from an exotic locale, for instance) and you are informed that henceforth your dreams at night will be used to instruct you in the goals and practices and lore of your new seekrit club. Which has some even stranger beliefs than communicating oenerically, but we'll get to that.
The novel presents as a kind of scrapbook (a form also taken by War of the Newts) or dossier on the conspiracy, meaning it contains a hodge-podge of points of view and styles, a centuries-old parchment here, a newspaper clipping there, a lesser-known Sherlock Holmes story somewhere in the middle... needless to say, Basara's and translator Randall A. Major's command of all of these forms is brilliant and usually darkly, drily funny, but if you're looking for well-drawn characters or a coherent story arc, look elsewhere than The Cyclist Conspiracy.
The Little Brothers of the Evangelical Order of the Bicycle believe themselves to have been organized in the wake of the scrambling of tongues at the Tower of Babel, whose architects the Little Brothers believe still exist in a form like their own, and seek to once again build that mighty, God-bothering edifice. The Order opposes this, though in a way their goal is somewhat similar since their own occult program aims to establish, at the end of history, a giant "World Insane Asylum" in which mental illnesses are not treated or cured but given free reign to be expressed and enacted, i.e., if you think you're Napoleon, you're given a uniform and a battlefield and an army against which to fight the army of a guy who thinks he's Wellington.
There is a complex and theological justification for why this establishment is the preferred end of human society that is difficult to summarize, partly because it only made sense to me while I was reading it and partly because it is extremely, extremely complex and theological. But fun, if you're the kind of reader who enjoys Umberto Eco, or wishes Shea and Wilson had taken themselves a little more seriously.
What keeps the book from becoming a boring theological tractate is the variety of storytelling devices employed, the eccentricities of the characters introduced, and the interesting locales in which their adventures take place, from an undiscovered island in the North Sea to a Soviet-era gulag to the mystical and holy city of Dharamshala. Oh, and the fact that the Little Brothers conspiracy is enacted backwards in time. For instance, for (again, complex and hard-to-explain here) reasons, the conspiracy really needs Franz Ferdinand to be assassinated in 1917 and they plan it from the future, communicating with members via the medium of dreams to pass on instructions to be given to the proper agents in the past, i.e. even Gavrilo Princep's visit to the sandwich shop was carefully coordinated and not the coincidental detail conventionally believed. And of course, since the rest of the world doesn't understand the Little Brothers or, mostly, even know they exist, none of the assassination's actual planners is ever caught!
The conspiracy's other activities include stunts like tearing around Victorian London on a velocipede shooting out public clocks and window displays of timepieces, thus inspiring the plot of Adrian Conan Doyle's and John Dickson Carr's latter-day Sherlock Holmes tale, "The Adventure of the Seven Clocks" and an organized group bicycle ride-cum-pilgrimage from Belgrade, Serbia to Dharamshala, India, as well as parchment messages in bottles sent from the aforementioned undiscovered North Sea island and the entire life stories of various eccentrics described in various fragments of text, including a selection of free verse poetry by one, and the accounts by another of how, during World War II, the Nazis almost managed, via a hastily assembled corps of dream warriors, to destroy the Dream Cathedral in which the Little Brothers meet outside of time and space.
It's a weird and funny read that demands a lot of its reader but rewards her richly, and someday I hope to see what other gifts this author has brought us. Am I 100% certain that I understood The Cyclist Conspiracy completely? Uh, no. But I enjoyed the hell out of it anyway, and I think you would, too.
My Radetzky March isn't quite over. I'm still hoping to squeeze in at least three more books! Will I succeed? Stay tuned, true believers. And meanwhile, if you know a hard-working literary translator in your actual life, buy them a drink for me. I met one on Mastodon while we were all watching the World Baseball Classic! And got tipped off to some new books I'll be reading, and telling you all about, in a different month later this year.
*It might be more correct to say Serbo-Croatian since I'm pretty sure that's what the language was still called in the mid-1980s when this book was first written and Serbia was still part of Yugoslavia and lots of linguistic hairs were still waiting to be split? But I'm already out of my depth on this subject. What matters to me is the language's word for "handlebars" (specifically those of a bicycle) is управљач ("upavlach") and for "bars" as in those of a prison cell is решетке ("reshetke") so, no, it's not a Serbian pun but now I want to know what this passage said more literally in the original! Was it as good as the implied handlebars/behind bars that Randall A. Major gave us? Given the overall quality of the book and Basara's international reputation, I suspect it is.
That he should be considered beneath the dignity of this working man’s beast-child is a bit of a blow. Yes, he is becoming a plant, but he comes from an excellent family, and he doesn’t think the outside world would consider him so bad a prospect.
In the Weird alternate Victorian London of The Peculiarities, Whitechapel and Bethnal Green have become infamous not only for the crimes of Jack the Ripper, but also of The Blind Headsman, Mister Fancy Pants, the Rabbit Hunter and the Fool with a Hook. Also, women occasionally give birth to litters of rabbit kits instead of human babies, the famous London Fog has tendrils that can actually grasp and manipulate objects and people, and there are some people walking the streets concealing under their sober London clothes the green shoots and leaves sprouting from their bodies.
Welcome to David "The Coffee Trader" Liss' foray into weird fiction. He's as good at the weird as we've always known him to be at straight historical fiction. His forays into comic books have served him well.
"The Peculiarities" is this world's name for a generalized invasion of weirdness that is for-sure happening in London and rumored also to be going on in other world cities like Paris and New York. There's all the weird stuff I mentioned above plus phenomena like people turning lycanthrope, by which is meant nothing so expected as your ordinary everyday werewolf who turns from human to wolf at the full moon, but a human who grows fur and a snout and pronounced canines and pointy ears for good. One thinks of, say, Dog-Faced Joe from Tim Powers inimitable The Anubis Gates. But wait, there's more. Other folks become various kinds of sex maniac and a junior clerk might suddenly try to, say, rape their hated boss in broad daylight right in front of all of the other clerks, and would have succeeded if a few of those subordinates hadn't decided that proper subordinates don't just stand there and watch while their hated boss gets bummed by the lowliest clerk in the office, they peel that lowly clerk off the boss and shove him into a closet like a bunch of god damned heroes, and then meekly go back to work copying out correspondence, checking columns of figures and sorting documents for filing. As it were.
Amid all this madness lives our hero, Thomas Thresher, younger son of a banking magnate, who has always expected that he is to act like a typical younger son of a rich and important man and piss away a respectable but not alarming amount of Daddy's money on cards and whores and booze-ups and pointless Continental tours with other younger sons, only to learn upon Daddy's death that he doesn't get to do any of that any more but is expected to Work for a Living at the Family Business, at which he must start on the lowest rung, as a junior clerk. Which means he is there for the aforementioned near-rape of his detestable boss, Mr. Philpot, by the only guy in the office who was ever decent to Thomas. Oops.
And before you can say "let's all go to a ritual," Thomas is haring off after a mystery, for in his toils at the bank he has noticed that his family's firm has been busily buying up the tiny, inconsequential (to the bank, if not to the individuals) debts of a lot of little people, and won't let any of them pay it back. Thresher's Bank prefers to have something to hold over these people, for reasons that are not at all apparent. The anomaly bothers Thomas, but he doesn't actually do anything about it until he recognizes a name on one of the letters he's meant to file away: the mathematically inclined childhood best friend who, despite actually having been rather a good influence on Thomas, was mysteriously forced out of their school when they were 12. Thomas suspected at that time that this expulsion was at the Threshers' behest, to put an end to the friendship, but never did anything about it until he is reminded of it all these years later.
And before you can say "let's all draw a pentagram just over there, maybe" he has a crush on his old friend's widow, is visiting wolf-women in unsavory neighborhoods, and is planning to crash an open house of one Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, there to consult no less a person than Samuel McGregor Mathers (having already met William Butler Yeats in his initial inquiry about his bank's holdings in petty debts). And also, Aleister Crowley!
But more interesting than all of this is one of Thomas' companions in mystery-solving, one Esther Feldstein, whose father is in league with Thomas' brother to such an extent that the two have decided that Thomas and Esther should get married! For the good of the bank, Big Brother says. And Esther's father is rich, if nouveaux so, but not so much so that Esther is a catch. For one thing, as her name might suggest, the Feldsteins are Jewish, and this is still the 19th century. So why are these two moderately powerful (if outsizedly so in Thomas' and Esther's individual lives) people trying to pair these two off, their own inclinations be damned?
But Esther's status as Thomas' hand-picked-for-him bride is not what makes her interesting: she is smart, observant, committed to social justice (it is she, for instance, who notices that the Peculiarities mostly affect poor families, that poor women are much more likely to give birth to rabbits, etc), sure of herself and ready to take action on what she cares about. She is, really, everything that Thomas is not and has never been, and is thus obviously a much better match for him than his friend's widow, but even more so -- she would have made a much better heroine for this book!
But it's Thomas we have to deal with, Thomas' point of view that we get to share as he does mathematical/magical battle with unseen forces, faces down the Elegants (ghostly/vampire-ish creatures that reminded me of nothing so much as the Gentlemen from the famous Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, "Hush") and puts his crack junior clerking skills and thwarted mathematical talents to the best possible uses to foil his brother's nefarious plot that does indeed link the family bank to the Peculiarities. He's not such a bad sort, is Thomas. He's just very much outshone by Esther. So it goes.
I would have missed this book completely if it wasn't for Lavie Tidhar's devotion to plugging book bundles for charity (whether they feature his own work or not), so to him, my thanks. David Liss is never one to snooze on. It would be a terrible shame never to have found this. Which, there's kind of room for a sequel? I would read many more volumes of stuff set in this world, whether the hero be Thomas, Esther, Ruby (a wolf-girl who helps them quite a bit) or even some brand new characters. Like the aforementioned Tim Powers, Liss has created a truly original and intriguing magical system and thus a world with room for many more cool adventures. Crossing my fingers for more of this!
There's a fad nowadays for de-romanticizing the Middle Ages in various ways. A lot of contemporary fantasy that takes its cues from history, for instance, takes the route of brutalizing women to be gritty and "realistic" (whatever that means in a made-up world in which magic, dragons, deities, etc. exist). I've read at least one history book this year that sought to "brighten" our perspective on the period. But I've not encountered many that take the route of Otessa Moshfegh's latest, Lapvona, toward a new version of the Age of Faith.
Set in an unspecified fictionalized region of Europe in an unspecified century (coded very strongly as pre-Enlightenment), Lapvona takes aim at that last characterization of the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance; there is considerable religious feeling among the residents of the village that gives the novel its name; most of these are vegetarians, or at least ovo-lacto vegetarians, out of a vague notion that eating meat is sinful, but they have no firm grasp on doctrine or theology. Villiam, the lord of the manor set above the absurdly fertile valley where the hovel-dwellers of the village and the odd semi-pastoral herder live and toil has no firmer grasp than his peasants, and even the priest who lives with Villiam, one Father Barnabas, doesn't seem overly familiar with the Bible or the liturgy, performing rituals so rarely that he would have to brush up on them if anybody even cared or would notice that he's about half making up his words and gestures as he fumbles through the odd wedding or funeral.
We are only peripherally concerned with Villiam or Barnabas, though, as the Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring of this novel unfold; our point of view character is a malformed, ugly and partially disabled boy named Marek, a child who only knows a few things about his absent mother, told to him by his bitter and hardbitten guardian, Jacob, who beats Marek at any provocation, works the boy half to death and has convinced the child that his suffering is a sign of his being specially chosen by God to Suffer the Most because suffering pleases God, to which end Jacob is also a flagellant who inflicts almost as much pain on himself as on his son, every night once their small herd of sheep (raised for wool and milk but never eaten by anyone in Lapvona, though bitter necessity forces Jacob to part with most of each year's crop of lands to be sold elsewhere for meat to pay the high taxes Villiam demands of all of his subject peasants) is settled in safely. Jacob and Marek have secrets, the revelations of which are the chief driver of the plot of Lapvona, as the villagers' dire straits are made even more dire by a drought that is more the fault of their foolish and greedy lord than of the angry God they seek to placate.
Which, trigger warning: in addition to domestic violence and rape and a Lysa Arryn-level of prolonged breast feeding/nursing behavior (as in the village wet nurse keeps on letting people suck on her into adulthood and even middle age) there is animal abuse and, yes, cannibalism and you are really going to need a strong stomach to get through it all. I've put books aside for much less, but I fought through to the end of Lapvona because the novel remained compelling throughout even though the only remotely sympathetic character is barely in it and everybody else is, I can't even say fun to hate, just horrible to watch, like a highlight reel from a CPAC convention except no mass media was necessary to send all of these people into derangement and reprehensible deeds.
Not since Robert Silverberg's Book of Skulls have I felt so punished by a book even as I admired its precision of message and its deft handling of details. We never get to the Grand Guignol level other reivews had led me to expect, but it was never beautiful either. Frankly, I'm stumped as to what it really is, but it's something.
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...
Adorable young love positively oozes from every crevice like maggots from a newly-exhumed corpse in podcaster Dana Schwartz' first historical novel. If that seems an unkind, unappealing or unromantic comparison to make, Anatomy: A Love Story might not be for you. But if you're a reader of my blog, that's probably not an issue, is it?
Anyway.
Let's take a moment, first and foremost, to talk about the perfection of this book cover, in which the skirts of our Georgian era heroine are carefully arranged to depict an anatomically accurate-for-being-done-in-textile human heart. Our heroine being a very young woman of the nobility* who wants with all of her (metaphorical) heart to become a surgeon. Not a physician, whose hands are rarely dirtied and who mostly exists to supply different varieties of opium to the well-heeled, but a surgeon. You know, the kind that hacks off diseased limbs and cuts gouty old men for "The Stone" and whatnot. As I said, this book cover is perfection. Chef's kiss. No notes.
Our heroine, Hazel Sinnet, has grown up in an honest-to-goodness Scottish castle, largely unsupervised because she doesn't matter to the family's fortunes so long as she sticks to their plan for her from birth: marry her first cousin, the son of her mother's brother, who is a Viscount. Until then, she's on her own, set to amuse and educate herself. In her father's library. Which is full of old and out-of-date but still fascinating books on medicine and natural history. Well, I mean, really.
Plus, young Hazel is definitely one of us, as she demonstrates in her reaction to her lady's maid's suggestion that she take a break from her studies and go out and let society see her in a fashionable Edinburgh park, for which she might perhaps take a book. One book!:
One book? One book? Now you're being absurd. What if I finish it? Or what if I find it impossibly dull, what then? What am I supposed to read if I either complete the book I brought or I otherwise discover it to be unreadable? Or what if it no longer holds my attention? Someone could spill tea on it. There. Think of that. Someone could spill tea on my one book, and then I would be marooned. Honestly, Iona, you must use your head.
Life was so different and difficult before ebooks let us tote about a hrair books at all times, was it not? For the record, she ends up taking three books, two medical texts and a brand new novel by an unknown author, simply credited as "A Lady" - Sense and Sensibility. Well, of course it's that one.
But this is a love story. Who is her love? Surely not the cousin she was practically bred for; indeed, he is a boring dandy for all that he's been pretty indulgent about her eccentricities since they were (nobly born, privileged, rich) toddlers naked in the mud together. Who would it be most dramatically inconvenient for a a rich young lady to fall in love with?
How about the guy who procures bodies for Edinburgh Medical College? Who also works all the backdrops and the main curtain at the local theater? That is closed for another bout of Roman Fever (aka malaria) ripping through the city for yet another devastating plague season? And which Hazel fancies she'll be able to cure but only if she gets to study enough bodies of those who have died of it? I mean, how is she not going to fall in love with a Resurrection Man, unless he's really old and ugly and missing bits? Which sturdy young Jack Currer is decidedly not, though few would call him handsome?
Yeah.
But so, the only thing that I didn't completely love about this book was the unnecessary speculative fiction elements tacked on to its ending. A mystery involving the murders of other Resurrection Men and the maiming of various denizens of Edinburgh's scummy, slummy Old Town added quite enough excitement to the plot without [REDACTED], for me, but as ever, your mileage may vary.
Really, I'm pretty delighted that Schwartz, who has made a name for herself condensing the most scandalous or tragic or simply dramatic stories from the lives of the titled nobility of (mostly) Europe, chose to write a book like this instead of just a book version of her podcast. She has employed the skills she honed telling us lurid tales of Elizabeth Bathory and the Mayerling Incident and Sophia Dorotea of Celle to bring us an absolutely charming YA story of frowned-upon young love and the aspirations of a young woman who dares to dream of more than having the best dresses and jewelry to wear at the ball.
In Kaikeyiauthor Vaishnavi Patel has not only brought a complicated figure from an Indian national epic, the Ramayana, to vivid life in a manner reminiscent of Pauline Gedge or Diana Paxson, but also taught us an incredible lesson on the power and worth of emotional intelligence.
Kaikeyi, Yuvradni (princess) of a kingdom with a name virtually identical to hers, discovers not long after her father banishes her mother from the kingdom, that she has a certain magical gift: with concentration, she can enter what is called the Binding Plane, upon which she can see visual representations of the emotional bonds between people and, to a certain agree, manipulate those bonds. As a young girl she can only manipulate the bonds between herself and another, as she does when she convinces her twin brother, Crown Prince Yudhajit, to teach her what he's learning from his tutors but is forbidden her by sexist tradition, even after she proves to be the best administrator the kingdom's palace ever had. Thus young Kaikeyi gets to learn how to ride horses, fight with swords, shoot arrows, throw spears and drive a chariot -- skills she will later put to use in addition to her Binding Plane powers to secure herself firmly in the esteem and affection of her eventual husband, Raja Dasharatha of Kosala. While she's already kind of his favorite of his three wives because she's pretty and sure of herself, she rises to Number One in everybody else's estimation (well, almost everybody else; there are some Sages who still scowl at a woman being anything but a brood mare, of course) when she persuades her husband to let her ride out to battle with him, and then by a combination of her martial and Binding Plane skills lands herself with a chance to serve as her husband's charioteer in battle! And then she saves his life! And still manages to make it look like her husband was the real hero, because emotional intelligence isn't just a power she wields on the Binding Plane! This deed wins her his eternal gratitude and esteem, an eventual place on his governing council despite her being a woman, and the promise of two boons, requests that she may make at any time during their lives that he vows to the gods he will fulfill, no matter what she asks for.
I am only now reading the Ramayana, in an old fashioned translation into English verse, but I know that in that story Queen Kaikeyi is pretty close to being a villain (or is an unambiguous villain, if you're a misogynist, which, there's lots of misogyny in this story), so it's nice to see her get a chance at rehabilitation as a whole person with recognizable and relatable motivations and loves and fears. Patel gives Kaikeyi only a tiny chip on her shoulder about ancient India's sexism and a whole heart full of love for her husband (just not in a romantic or sexual way; she tolerates her wifely duties but comes to esteem Dasharatha as a close friend and an honorable man), his other two wives, and all of her husband's children, not just her own son by him, Bharata. This even though one of his sons by his other two wives turns out to be an earthly incarnation of the god Vishnu, the Rama that gives the Ramayana its name, and thus turns out to be quite a handful even before he's fully grown. Throughout the novel, though, she shows in word and deed that she considers all four of Dasharatha's sons to be her sons as well, little boys she loves to cuddle and play with and teach, then young men whose futures she plans for carefully despite knowing that they can't happen as everybody expects, for when she became Dasharatha's third wife she extracted a promise from him that whatever the birth order of his children, his first son by Kaikeyi would inherit his throne. This promise, and concerns that arise for Kaikeyi during the boys' childhoods stemming chiefly from a fundamentalist tutor who has persuaded Rama, and therefore all four of the sons, that women like Kaikeyi are an affront to the gods and should keep to their place, and that all the work she has done to help the people of Kosala, and especially the women, has been evil and needs undoing, are what forces her to use her two boons to affect the succession when Dasharatha suddenly decides to abdicate despite still being young and vital.
Dasharatha is totally under Rama's divine (but not necessarily benign, or even conscious) influence, Kaikeyi sees, and furthermore sees that Rama is not remotely ready to wield his divine or royal powers wisely yet, himself being under possibly demonic influence. Her boons are thus to send Rama into exile for ten years, and for Bharata to take the throne. Thus in the novel this is not a matter of her pride or status-panic; it's a sacrifice, of her relationships with everyone she loves, of the esteem her kingdom has held her in, of everything. By the time this inevitable doom befalls her, Patel has made us feel every bit of Kaikeyi's complex emotional world, but has left it all just ambiguous enough to let us wonder, even as we cry with her when her sons turn on her and her husband fades away, if Kaikeyi's understanding of events is actually correct. Sometimes the majority is wrong, but sometimes they're right. Sometimes we get confirmation of which side has the correct perspective, but most of the time we're stuck muddling on through without ever being sure, and that's where good literature comes from.
Kaikeyi is exceptional literature and good storytelling and I can't wait to see what Vaishnai Patel does next.
"Literature is a particular type of knowledge, it is --" he sought the right words, and suddenly a phrase came ready to his lips -- "the perfection of imprecise forms."
And now I'm just sitting here wondering what high falutin' pseudo-18th-century Polish sounds like, and how much of an extra effort that would have posed to Croft. A better literary detective than I, though, will have to answer that in full; I can just say that, thank goodness, Croft chose not to render the prose in high falutin' pseudo-18th-century English. I just had my year's dose of that and then some, yannow?
Anyway, now you know why I've been mostly absent from this blog of late, having tackled several monster books (others being the second volume of Michael Moorcock's Pyat Quartet, The Laughter of Carthage, Ada Palmer's Perhaps the Starson dead tree and Alan Moore's Jerusalem in audio format) that... have all turned out to have very similar scope and themes, actually. Ow, my brain.
Anyway, The Books of Jacob. Deep breath.
At its heart, The Books of Jacob is a great big hunk of quality historical fiction of the Edward Rutherford/John Follett variety, except Eastern European instead of Anglocentric, and also including a tinge of magic realism in the form of a character, Yente, whose slow decline and psuedo-death we witness early on and then whose afterlife as a pseudo-ghost is woven deftly into the account of larger events in 18th century Ukraine/Poland, in which Catholic priests, Orthodox presbyters and Jewish rabbis all have their long-winded and deeply flawed say as they wander in and out of village life, agriculture and commerce. I was brought to recall bits of Eugene Vodolazkin's Laurus at times; at others the experience of reading The Books of Jacob made me really want to re-read Sjón's magnificent CoDex: 1962 for something like the fourth time, for CoDex 1962 could almost serve as a sequel to The Books of Jacob.
Anyway, Jacob, known to history as Jacob Frank but born with a completely different name just as almost everybody in this massive tome was. Jacob Frank... not so much presented himself as a reincarnation of the last guy a small population of the Jewish population of 18th century Poland and Ukraine thought was the Messiah as allowed everybody to continue thinking he was that Messiah after they'd all convinced themselves, is the only character whose perspective on things we don't get in these 900+ pages; Tokarczuk gives us multiple third person narrators with the points of view of Jacob's parents, cousins, grandparents (of whom the aforementioned Yente is one), wife, lovers, children and nephews, all of whom at various times try to break out of Jacob's orbit and live their own lives but are always drawn back into Jacob's tight little world of theological, ethical and existential problems as he tries to keep his small sect of True Believers from dying in various conflicts or from being executed in various pogroms and threatened pogroms as their mostly-Polish homeland is on the verge of being partitioned into three pieces, given to Russia, Prussia and Austria to rule when its hereditary rulers proved ineffectual against stronger neighbors' territorial ambitions and internal strife within its commonwealth, and if this sounds like a weak-ass description of the historical background of this novel that's my fault and not Tokarczuk's or Croft's; this is a huge bolus of unfamiliar history and culture for a Wyoming girl to try to get down and I wound up letting some of the details wash over me because there was so much else going on in the Frankist sect and among the assorted nobles, religious figures and occasional Turkish officials and merchants who at various times sheltered, aided, persecuted or barely tolerated the Frankists and their antics.
Among said antics being a checkered record of converting to other faiths as directed by Jacob or his predecessor Messiah and then, to curry favor with their new co-religionists, confirming some of the nastiest prejudices about the Jewish faith their new brothers in Allah or Christ (Orthodox OR Catholic, though it's mostly their mass-conversion to Catholicism that gets focused on here) have. Like the Blood Libel. Yeah. It's a warts-and-all portrait of the sect that Tokarczuk is going for here.
I had to put the book down for a while when I came to that, since I read it in the late spring of 2022 while a whole bunch of my own fellow citizens have decided it's in their interests to revive crap like the Blood Libel while also insisting that Jewish Space Lasers are responsible for Californian wildfires, etc. And, of course, my experience of reading this book was colored by the other stuff I was reading at the time, such as the second Pyat novel with its own Antisemitic smorgasbord of content (if you TL;DR'd my post on The Laughter of Carthage, I'll just say its main character is a Jewish Ukrainian who nevertheless decides Tsarist Russia was better Russia and, fleeing to the United States, becomes a traveling rabble rouser for the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s) and the finale of Terra Ignota with its Messianic character who, like Jacob Frank, had a tendency to glop up his polyglotism to the point where only his closest acolytes could understand him. And there were plenty of cosmic and theological speculations in Jerusalem, too, of course. I did not choose to combine these reading experiences deliberately; that's just how it worked out, but it was a very, very interesting combination that might have broken my brain forever except phew! I'm an atheist. Now more than ever.
But anway, The Books of Jacob. It's almost but not quite entirely unlike my prior Olga Tokarczuk experience, the delightfully odd and dark Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, a book I'm planning to read again as one of those that promises to be a fundamentally different book once you know Who Dunnit. I'm probably not going to re-read The Books of Jacob, though, because, having had to look up so many historical references and personages, I feel like I already read it twice. But everybody should read it at least once. Possibly without the company of the other books I had going on, but you do you, friends.
Do I hate myself? Sometimes I'm pretty sure I hate myself. Or at least the imp of the perverse sitting on my shoulder really hates me, because I had the terrific idea that now, while Ukraine is dealing with a Russian invasion/occupation effort and state legislatures all over the U.S. are trying their hardest to roll back every bit of social progress our country has made in my lifetime and before, I somehow decided it would be an interesting time to read the rest of Michael Moorcock's sprawling, challenging and really hard-to-handle Pyat Quartet, also known as Between the Wars, being the continuing first person account of pretty much the whole of the 20th Century by a narrator so unlreliable as to make Severian seem like Walter Cronkite.
I first encountered the character of Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski , aka Colonel Pyat, back in 2015, back when The Former Guy was just an annoying game show host and we still believed in things like the political norms we'd come to take for granted like peaceful transfer of power and presidents getting to nominate and confirm supreme court justices no matter at what point in their terms vacancies occurred. The first novel in the quartet, Byzantium Endures, took Pyat from his birth in Kyiv on January 1, 1900 (Julian calendar), through the Russian Revolution and a little beyond. It introduced us to the thoroughly unsavory (as in self-aggrandizing, lying, womanizing, alcoholic, cocaine-addicted, anti-semitic, racist, paranoid, etc.) figure, first as someone the author (Michael Moorcock's self-insert-stand-in) met late in Pyat's life in London and to whom the author promised to see Pyat's memoirs into print, sight unseen, sure they'd be fascinating. But as the fictionalized Moorcock takes great pains to explain to us in a vast prologue to the text of the novel, Pyat's memoirs were really just a mess of ramblings in multiple languages, newspaper clippings, blueprints for inventions he claimed to have come up with first and other messy and barely legible ephemera, i.e. we're already pretty annoyed by the very idea of Pyat before we see a page of the novel's actual text. Furthermore, Moorcock took even greater pains to create a text as a sort of afterword to give us a glimpse of what the fictionalized Moorcock had to work with to produce the work in our hands, and it's a masterpiece of the kind we'd expect more from Philip K. Dick than Michael Moorcock. I compared it in my original review to Confessions of a Crap Artist and to that I still hold. Jack Isidore, eat your heart out.
Volume 2, The Laughter of Carthage, picks up more or less right where Byzantium Endures left off, in about 1920. After a long ship voyage as an exile/refugee from Odessa to Constantinople in which Pyat has shared a cabin with the future mother of Eternal Champion Jerry Cornelius but established a torrid shipboard romance with a widowed Russian Baroness, Pyat lands in Constantinople and starts debauching himself, continuing to see his Baroness, who hopes he'll run away with her and her exquisite daughter to Berlin, but also finding a young Romanian sex worker who is a dead ringer for his childhood sweetheart, Esmé, Pyat takes a while to get back to his career as an inventor.
Before we know it, though, he is rescued/taken prisoner after almost getting to try out his flying machine, in which all the parts, including a fuel tank and propeller, are strapped onto a human being, somewhere in Anatolia. Pyat bullshits his way into getting a free ride back to Constantinople, where all he has are lady troubles and a healthy dose of paranoia that Carthage (his synechdoche for, confusingly, both the Jews and the Muslims and, for good measure, the Catholics -- basically everybody who isn't "Byzantium", which, as he established in the first novel, he considers to be, basically, Tsarist/White Russia and whomever else he can convince himself is Protestant and White enough to be worthy of continuing to bear the Torch of Civilization) has never stopped pursuing him in the form of Bolshevik spies. Before escaping Constantinople, Pyat has to do some unsavory tap-dancing to avoid getting reported to the local authorities as a pedophile, ending by complicating his situation still further by convincing the Baroness that "Esmé" is actually a spy in whose trap he is haplessly caught. As he plots to "rescue" Esmé, the Baroness plots to rescue him, and it's all vintage Pyat. Whatta jerk. But there's so much worse to come.
Within a year I would become so famous the matter of one small factory and an insignificant municipal airport would seem a petty concern indeed. I had been given the opportunity to conquer the entire new world with my genius. A strong, scientifically advanced America would be the most powerful country on Earth. Once celebrated here, I would automatically come to influence the world. Then at last Russia, my old spiritual Russia, could be rescued from the Bolshevik scavengers. The steppe would grow green and beautiful again; the wheat-lands would bloom, the forests retain their tranquil profundity and the new golden cities would arrive, the cities of reborn Byzantium.
Such are our man's thoughts as he escapes from his latest collapsed effort to make his fortune from his "genius" invention of a slightly better airship and the development of Memphis, TN as the airship capital of the U.S., if not the world, rescuing the American South from its economic woes endured since the Civil War. Alarm bells should be ringing at this. And they should ring even louder when I tell you this scene takes place in 1922. And that our man Pyat's favorite movie is Birth of a Nation.
That's right, Pyat's new path to fame, fortune and influence is gonna be as a traveling rabble rouser for the second version of the Ku Klux Klan (hilariously exposed and lampooned by Robert Evans and friends as a proto-Multi-Level-Marketing grift in this episode of Behind the Bastards. Indeed, this second volume of Moorcock's most despicable anti-hero contains a murderers row of main characters from that podcast, with even Old Shatterhands and his creator, Karl May, getting name checked here. We could almost call The Laughter of Carthage "Behind the Bastards: The Novel" except it was published way back in 1984, likely before anyone involved with that show was even born. But I mean, Pyat even found the White House "disappointing" compared to the Klankrest in Atlanta, GA). But first we have a charming interlude in Europe, in which Pyat spoils Esmé rotten in luxury hotels, going to movies and clubs in 1920s Rome where he rubs shoulders with lots of actual historical figures who eventually become close friends/supporters of one Benito Mussolini, of whom Pyat already approves, of course, and then makes a stop off in Paris, intending next to join Mrs. Cornelius in England but only after he's extracted some profit for his genius airship ideas which, of course, come to nothing when "Carthage" strikes again and bankrupts the nascent airship company he and several French speculators have formed, and his French partners have all naturally made poor, innocent Pyat the scapegoat and never mind that he was living entirely off money he borrowed from an old friend from his Odessa days who, of course, has a disgusting homosexual crush on Pyat (never mind that Pyat is himself quite comfortably bisexual, and his joyful reunion with a Russian Prince from the first novel quickly turns into an affair as passionate as what he continues to have with the underaged Esmé, whom he has convinced everybody is his sister) and is thus pretty much yet another avatar of "Carthage", and it was only the extravagance with which he spent and "invested" his borrowed money (mostly on cocaine) that convinced the French partners that he was sound enough to trust with their capital and credit in the first place...
Anyway, soon he has to get out of France quick, but can't swing a trip to England yet OR afford passage for both Esmé and himself to his next destination, the USA, where he pretty much repeats his French adventure except this time it's down in Memphis, and instead of escaping to another country to try again with his airship schemes (which again have blown up through no fault of his own), he falls in amongst the upper echelons of the Ku Klux Klan, who bring him aboard a fancy paddle steamer on the Mississippi to give a special briefing to the colorfully hooded and gowned elite of the KKK about the dangers of Bolsheviks, Muslims, Catholics and International Jewry from his first-hand knowledge. His remarks are so entirely to the Klan's liking that he gets booked for repeat performances all over the country in the company of a formidable and sexy-yet-mature woman who chaperones him about the nation and fucks his brains out in train cars and hotels from coast to coast while he spreads his message of Peace and Love but only if you're "Byzantium." Along the way, Pyat manages to continue to learn nothing until this, too falls apart and he now has the Invisible Empire on his tail, another set of enemies that should be pretty hard to square as "Carthage" but he kind of starts framing them that way in his head anyway because Pyat and then, wonder of wonders, he is once again rescued by Mrs. Cornelius, who made her own way from Constantinople but also got sidetracked into the USA as part of a dance troupe of British Beauties entertaining in vaudeville-type theaters up and down California with the vague hope of being Discovered and made into a Movie Star, which is where we leave her and Pyat, who is absolutely convinced that he can make her dreams come true and never mind his track record on bringing his own fantasies to reality. Hey, he's only 22.
Many reviewers have complained that this second volume of the Pyat Quartet is not as interesting as the first, and they have a point in that Byzantium Endures is set against one of the most dramatic backdrops 20th century literature had to offer: World War I and the Russian Revolution. It also gave us genuine pathos in the stories of Pyat's mother and their neighbors, including the sad fate of Esmé the First, who only ever wanted to become a nurse and save the lives of Ukraine's brave fighting men, but, in Pyat's absence while he was off fighting and getting lost and getting conscripted as an agent by both sides at various times, got herself raped multiple times when the triumphant Red Army invaded and did what conquering armies do best in the early days of conquest. The Laughter of Carthage continues with the painstaking research and recreation of bygone days that made the first volume even more special, but replaces the drama with mere movement -- a picaresque -- in which we watch Pyat comically misunderstand his place in the world, the nature of his companions, and, as I said, fails ever to learn from his experiences, choosing at every failure to simply blame it on "Carthage" and shake his fist at enemies who barely know he exists.
Where the book, like its predecessor, succeeds enough to be worth the comparative tedium, though, is how brilliantly it achieves Moorcock's primary goal in telling us his ultimate anti-hero story here in our mundane real world: helping its readers to feel at last like they understand how capital H Hate happens, how people who seem perfectly ordinary and might even be ok to have a beer with once in a while are actually monsters who think the only people who count as people and deserve to share the Earth are able-bodied, well-educated, fair skinned, Protestant, cocaine-snorting fascists like Maxim Pyatnitski. It's an understanding that isn't pleasant to have, but is necessary for us in this dumb century -- a care package full of survival tips from the dumb century that came before it. Anyway, I really just want to see what kind of ridiculous adventures Pyat has had -- or believes himself to have had, or expects us to believe he had -- before he winds up a cranky old fart running a junk shop in Portobello Road. According to the blurb for the third volume, Jerusalem Commands, he's going to Egypt next. I'm down.
