Laura Purcell's THE POISON THREAD

It's been quite a while since I indulged in a good old gothic novel, or in this case a good new gothic novel.

Originally titled The Corset for good reasons I'll get into later on in this post, Laura Purcell's The Poison Thread (also a good title) perfectly treads that fine line between a grounded fantasy/fabulist and a plain historical novel very, very carefully, preserving its ambiguities right up until its final lines. Does the novel's more obviously victimized heroine have supernatural powers or is it all just coincidence? Is the novel's other heroine really as obnoxious and entitled as she seems, or is she actually quite all right and as worthy of being rooted for as her counterpart? Who are the actual villains, here? Are there actual villains besides circumstances and the twin demons of capitalism and the class system?

I'll start with the more obviously sympathetic of the novel's two heroines, Ruth, born to a beautiful daughter of the landed gentry and a rather feckless artist. Ruth's mother, of course, disobeyed her family and married the artist and was punished with ostracism and poverty for it. As Ruth (portrayed in the audio version with wonderful prickliness by Jayne Entwhistle) begins the story, their little family is living shabbily on what little Ruth's mother can earn by sewing and embroidering in the gig economy of Victorian England - making beautiful things or parts of beautiful things for fashionable ladies who obeyed their parents to wear. She takes in work from a nearby shop from whom she has to purchase the raw materials, and then proceed on trust that the shop owner will buy back the finished work for a fair price. Tweenage Ruth has thus grown up around needlework and has started to show a talent for it herself that bodes somewhat better for the family's future... Until disaster strikes and Ma falls pregnant with a little sibling for Ruth. A little sibling nobody wants, least of all Ruth, who nonetheless grudgingly sets to work on making baby clothes and blankets while Ma languishes ill in bed and Pa smokes and drinks and paints badly. It is in her memories of this period that Ruth discovers what she comes firmly to believe is a terrible truth about herself: her negative emotions, whether they be resentment or fear or hatred or envy, seep through her needle into her sewing and can magically affect those who use or wear her work for the worse. Maybe even for the fatal.

Of course there is a mundane real world explanation for every death Ruth comes to blame herself for as her ever more reduced circumstances land her in a sadistically managed Victorian sweatshop. The fact that a lot of green pigment employed in fabric dying and wallpaper during this period was made with arsenic, for instance, is much more plausible an explanation for the untimely death of a young bride on whose mostly green trousseau Ruth was forced to work than actual stitch witchery on Ruth's part, and never mind said bride used to beat up on Ruth when they were schoolgirls together, and once ruined little Ruth's one and only little girl corset her mother had made for her. But the coincidences pile up and circumstances conspire to convince Ruth that she is basically a serial killer, right up until she blurts out what she believes is the truth to her secret crush just as his wife (who's lady's maid Ruth has become, and who is a villain-adjacent figure from both Ruth's and her crush's past) lies dying, and Ruth gets accused of murdering said wife and is in the local jail awaiting trial when our other heroine meets her.

Dorothea Truelove (eyeroll) is another daughter of the gentry possibly poised on the brink of following in Ruth's mother's footsteps (she is secretly engaged to a policeman who once recovered her pocketbook from a thief), but this is not her only peculiarity. Her late mother converted to Catholicism shortly before dying, and secretly led Dorothea to take up that faith herself, with an emphasis on the doing of good works, like visiting prisoners. Dorothea grows up to sit on the board of a local women's prison, where she struggles to make it a humane place where actual reform is possible - - and where she can indulge her passion for the newfangled science of phrenology. As voiced with almost exaggerated gentility by Elizabeth Knowelden, Dorothea spends a lot of the novel seeming almost impossible to like, self-righteous, deluded, interfering, patronizing, almost a caricature of the upper-class young lady of charity, whom one suspects of doing good works for show... Until one realizes she doesn't really have an audience for her Good Deeds, not even a phrenology professor to impress, as a lesser writer might have given her.

Moreover, her story is peculiarly related to Ruth's long before she takes up the accused murderess as her latest project. Again, a lesser writer might have given them a secret foe in common, an unsuspected family tie or some other such trope, but Laura Purcell is a more subtle storyteller; learning Ruth's story leads Dorothea to reflect on her own, and to realize that her own life has rather different threads running through it than her father and lady's maid have allowed her to see.

So this is a novel that both ticks all the gothic boxes while still remaining fresh and surprising. I spent the last third of it pretty sure I knew how it was going to end, but wound up surprised, if a trifle annoyed that the ending was more than a little abrupt and came a bit out of left field.

A motif within the text that I found especially striking concerns that garment for which the novel was originally named, the corset. A late 20th/early 21st century girl like me usually grows up thinking of these as terrible relics of the cruel past: confining, painful, sometimes dangerous, restricting the breath, compressing the organs, piercing the skin to permit fatal infections, etc. The idea of a little girl wearing one seems horrible and unnecessary, even if one recalls that the idea of children's clothes as anything other than merely smaller versions of adult clothing in every detail is actually pretty recent. I was therefore very much stricken by the realization that to this character, Ruth, a corset could have positive associations. Her original corset, destroyed by a bully, was something she treasured as made by her mother even before it got ruined, and the scene when Ruth's mother sees what's become of it and realizes why it happened is a powerful one that brings us right into the story of their family. Soon mother and daughter are concocting plans to repair and renew it. These plans run afoul of real life, of course, but later when Ruth has finished the task alone and put it on, only to find herself incapable of taking it off again and winding up more or less permanently encased in it through some significant life events, we find that she regards it as her secret armor, its "embrace" a source of comfort and strength as she endures the initial round of sweatshop torments.

Later, of course, corsets take on more negative connotations, but again they are not the conventional ones: corsets are the commercially sold product of Ruth's talents with a needle. Unleashed upon a world that has not treated her well. That is actually treating her even more badly than she knows, even before Dorothea shows up with her rosary and calipers.

I had already resolved that I'd include some more gothic fiction and even romance in this year's reading when a Twitter friend of mine, also named Kate/Katie (@outofmyplanet), mentioned she'd just read this and really enjoyed it. I'm grateful to her for sharing this and to Laura Purcell for helping me start off my new year right.

Now excuse me, I think I have some socks to darn. **

*For a bit of extra wildness, the villain - adjacent in this novel is also named Kate! 

*Or rather, take too my mother to darn, because my messed up hands haven't been able to manipulate a needle in a decade, which made this read a bit more poignant for me. I used to embroider a lot! 

Jeffrey Ford's THE PHYSIOGNOMY (Narr by Christian Rummell)

 Late last year the great Iggy Pop collaborated with Catherine Graindorge, an artist of whom I had not yet heard but of whom I am now a fan, on a song and a deeply affecting piece of video art called "The Dictator" which I think is useful to have in mind as we consider today's novel, Jeffrey Ford's The Physiognomy.

Like Graindorge's villain in the song, with "magic to turn the day to night," the dictator depicted in Ford's novel,  has magic to completely warp his citizen-slaves' perceptions of one another by having decreed that The Physiognomy, a species of phrenology in which it is the facial features more than the shape of the skull that is the Measure of All Things, is the only valid way to determine a person's worth.

Phrenology, which seems along with Flat Earth and Race Science and a lot of other odiously dumb beliefs we once thought safely Of the Past* seems to be making a bit of a comeback in our world, so it's perhaps a very good thing indeed that Cley, the physiognomist protagonist of the first book of Ford's Well-Built City trilogy is quite possibly the most immediately unlikeable narrators I've encountered since, well, the last student of phrenology whose story I read as one-half of Sarah Purcell's excellent The Poison Thread. Ford's creation, though, puts Dorothea in the shade early in his novel as, confronted directly with the appalling plight of one of his society's greatest losers, he shares very matter-of-factly with us a truly insupportable conclusion about the sufferer. 

The Physiognomy's narrator-character, sent on a mission to the back of beyond by the Master of the Well-Built City, has just seen a local yokel who has spent a life mining a substance called Blue Spire and is now in the final stages of being transmuted, while still alive, into the very substance the poor sap once mined**, which is the coal-analogue that makes the fabulous technologies that keep the Well-Built City running. As the pitiful figure, directly sent by the mining town's mayor to be observed first-hand by the Physiognomist, finally completes his stony metamorphosis before our protagonist's eyes, as the miner's own eyes startlingly shift to make contact in their last second of mobility before hardening forever, our guy says, right to the poor man's face, "perhaps you will heat my apartment this winter" and a moment later quips to a nearby worker that the miner needs dealt with as he "seems to have taken a stand." How droll.

The world Cley inhabits, though, is endlessly fascinating and a weird delight to explore. My favorite early example of this is Anamasobia's church, which sounds like... what if the fabulous Moria scenes from Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring had been filmed on life-sized, practical sets and then used long after the filming is over and done as a vast and awesome temple to Aulë? And then used as a giant examining room in which to force a town's entire population to strip naked for minute inspection of their bodies, one by one?

Jeffrey Ford has a hell of an imagination, is what I'm saying. For this is a mere detail from a grotesque whole: the civilization that gave birth to Cley and formed his character is every bit as ugly as he assures us are the "inferior" faces and physiques he rejects. As in very. 

The Well-Built City is the creation in every way (even its currency is named for the guy) of the authoritarian, sadist mad scientist cum dictator called The Master, who deliberately sought out the most odious methods of social control he could find, turned them up to 11, and demanded that the upper crust of his society celebrate them constantly or risk his painful, even fatal, disapproval. Chief among these is "The Physiognomy": the only judgement worth making about a person (aside from their ability to toady up to the Master (but not so much as to annoy him, of course) is how closely they conform to an arbitrary ideal of physical Beauty. If you come reasonably close to it, you are judged intelligent, noble, moral, etc by virtue of your personal prettiness. If you don't conform, you are obviously stupid and criminal and possibly not fit to breed even if you're actually quite talented or skilled (not that you'd ever be given an opportunity to demonstrate or develop such talents or skills because you ipso facto don't have them if you're ugly). And yes, this means that the beautiful people in positions of power and responsibility are often incompetent morons. One way to make sure you're always the smartest guy in the room is to make sure no other smart people ever get to enter the room. 

And so our boy Cley, vain, shallow, cruel and arrogant as he is, wields a great deal of power via his calipers and nostril-width gauges and his bogus erudition about how the minute angle of one's eyebrow determines your ability to pour him a decent drink or whatever. His judgment determines all -- so the Master must hold some other power over such as Cley, which he does via a heroin-like drug called Sheer Beauty, a highly addictive hallucinogen that gives Cley hours of dreamy pleasure by making everything around him seem like an exquisite aesthetic experience only occasionally marred by imagined visits by, say, Cley's judgmental former mentor, whom Cley helped convict of a crime, the capital punishment for which was having his head exploded by means up a drug (invented by the Master, who is really a demented evil genius) that causes one's head to swell up until it bursts. Often this sentence is commuted by the merciful Master, though; most people who "should" have their heads blown up are instead sentenced to an exile at hard labor, though it's an exile with some almost pleasant aspects, as I'll discuss in a bit, as we discover when Cley runs afoul of the Master and gets the same treatment himself.

What's most fascinating about this world, though. is the ambiguity with which we must regard it, not just from sharing the point of view of a privileged and unreliable narrator given to long hallucinatory flights of fancy, but also when we try to assess to what degree this is a genuine fantasy novel in which magic is actually a thing, starting with, is the Physiognomy in any way real? By which I mean, is this a world in which its claims are actually true instead of being accidentally true through the force of belief? Has the Master some how made it actually true with his magic? Or has he just used his magic to convince everyone that it's true? Or, has he just successfully bullied everybody, the mundane way, into behaving as if they believed it until (fake it 'til you make it!) they actually believe it?

These questions become even more interesting when we learn that the Master literally created the Well-Built City from the ground up -- or, at least we learn that this is the dogma in which Cley and all of his fellow citizens believe. Or pretend to believe so they don't get their heads blown up. Can the Master actually blow up people's heads, though? He seems always to commute that sentence, at least within the confines of this narrative.

Dude sure blew up my head, anyway?

As for how the Master's sentences are commuted, it doesn't seem entirely terrible, though it, too, has some bizarre aspects that we can't be sure are real, coming to us as they are from Cley's skewed perspective. The person to be punished is banished to an island where he is to be set to work mining sulfur for the rest of his life. But this isn't a gulag like we might expect if we've read, say, Dostoyevsky or Solzhenitsyn. For one thing, the accommodations seem kind of nice; the exile gets a room to himself in the island's only inn, with clean linen and privacy and a nice view, and he may, once his work shift is done, relax in the inn's bar, where he gets to enjoy the company of an incredibly intelligent and adept monkey who, among other things, "likes to play bartender" in the words of the only other inhabitant/inhabitants of the island that Cley meets, a guard who may or may not be two identical people, one vicious and cruel and the other friendly and kind. The cruel one plants an interesting narrative seed that some readers might already have noticed but I did not until this point, when he keeps telling Cley as he beats the tar out of the physiognomist that "the mine is my mind, my mind is the mine" -- suggesting that the Well-Built City might as much be a figment solely of the Master's mind and Cley just a figment within it, something that might be explored more in the book's two sequels.

There's so much more going on in this book, by the way. So much more. A bartending monkey is maybe the least weird thing we encounter. There is a representative of what may be a separate humanoid species, whose features both do and do not conform to the ideal Cley is charged with upholding to such a degree that they drive him a little bit crazier than he already is. There is a beautiful young village woman who is as ardent a student of The Physiognomy as ever there was, with whom Cley falls in love and then, Incel-style, punishes horribly when she is revealed to have a life and goals of her very own that don't include Cley. There is a giant of a man, Caloo, who falls into another punishment scheme of the Master's that reminded me of China Mieville's Punishment Factories in the city of New Crobuzon of which the Well-Built City was already reminding me before poor Caloo gets most of his internal organs replaced with clockwork/dieselpunk horrors. And there's the story's McGuffin, a mysterious White Fruit, the theft of which was Cley's original mission to solve. Supposedly the fruit conveys immortality to those who eat it, but does it really? The people who wind up eating it in this story don't fare too well after doing so.

There are, of course, two more volumes in the Well-Built City trilogy, but for reasons I haven't really been able to determine, I'm not rushing to read them the way I usually am. I do know that part of which is because The Physiognomy tells a perfectly satisfying self-contained story, with little to no pointing ahead to greater issues or further adventures the way, say, Ada Palmer's or the Dyachenkos' series did from book one. Its conclusion is open-ended enough to allow for continuation but isn't a cliffhanger, nor is it particularly a downer ending in need of uplifting by its sequels. I suspect that, really, though Cley definitely undergoes a great deal of character growth as he negotiates his new perils, he's still a thoroughly unpleasant person with whom to spend my time; while I feel for the little people in whose oppression he colluded for so long, I haven't been allowed to get to know any of them, trapped as I've been in Cley's repulsive head. Do I care about them enough to see how they fare in the aftermath of The Physiognomy? Right now, only in theory. I'm more intrigued, still, by their world, by the quest to find out how much of it as presented in this first book is "real" and how much is just Cley's addled understanding of it. Will the world as it really is be as interesting, though? I suspect that this is the question that may draw me to read Memoranda some day, and maybe even The Beyond. 

But, you know, I have an awful lot of other books waiting in a pile in my sitting room, on my e-reader, and in my audiobook library, and I don't at present feel inclined to postpone any of them to spend more time with Cley. Jeffrey Ford, yes, but not really Cley. Unless the Big Dictator someday forces me to.

*I imagine that even now some poor kid is enduring instruction in the art, though; it seems very much to be the sort of thing that The Indicted Guy might someday try very hard to promote as a means of regaining or holding onto power. He has already written off half the human race as useless except for intimately grabbing if we meet his standards of decorativeness.

**We have already been told, with chilling breeziness in audio book narrator Christian Rummell's perfectly supercilious tones, that miners whose families can afford to keep their stony blue bodies around as monumental decor, referred to as "Hardened Heroes"; our guy's hotel suite even features the owner's brother as a sort of human vanity stand. If a miner's family is less well off once the miner can't mine, though, the miner becomes a more consumable commodity. Hey, times are tough even in fantasy novels, man. 

Marina & Sergey Dyachenko's ASSASSIN OF REALITY (Tr Julia Metov Hersey, Narr Jessica Bell)

There is a kind of deeply pessimistic magical thinking that occurs to some people when they find themselves on the verge of falling in love (or, really, already having so fallen but not ready to admit it). We say to ourselves something like, oh no now God or the universe or fate or my enemies have another hostage for my good behavior. They know they can't actually hurt me directly because I'm hopeless already, but they can hurt this person that I might love, and hurt me that way. 

Marina & Sergey Dyachenko's Vita Nostra books are all about exploring what this means when it's literally true. Last novel, the hostages were heroine Sasha Samokhina's mother and Mum's new husband and baby. If Sasha didn't study hard at the weird school she'd been coerced into attending, terrible things would happen to her family. Examples were made when she tried to test this, even as she (was told that she) gave up her humanity in order to become something entirely else; her studies were preparing her to wield incredible power, and so there had to be incredible consequences if she showed signs of misusing it.

At the first novel's end, when she took the all important third year Placement Exam at the Torpa Institute of Special Technologies, Sasha, already acknowledged as the school's finest current student and poised to become a uniquely powerful Imperative Verb in the Great Speech, manifested as something even more alarming and unexpected than that. An Imperative Verb could profoundly influence other Parts of Speech (as she learned when she understood that her then-boyfriend, a Subjunctive Verb, would never really have freedom or free will while they were together), but the Password she turned out actually to be is more powerful yet. Too powerful. There must be consequences.

This second novel, Assassin of Reality, starts off with an imposition of some of those consequences, conducted in such a way as to free her original hostages for her good behavior from their roles, and introduce a new one: an attractive airline pilot, Jaroslav, who grew up in the town of Torpa and flies a regular route in and out of its municipal airport. They are immediately and ferociously attracted to one another, but it all feels rather forced and Sasha senses the hand of her terrifying advisor, Farit Kozhennikov in it all. 

It is, of course, only one of her problems. 

As she begins her fourth year at the Torpa Institute of Special Technologies, Sasha is, oddly, warmly welcomed back by her classmates, even those who previously resented her, but regarded with outright hostility by their most important teacher: their frighteningly altered former gym teacher. This teacher, Dima, whom everyone had been led to regard as a gentle himbo, is in fact every bit as scary as Farit -- maybe even more so, as he shifts between his himbo and his steely-eyed bastard personas moment to moment and without warning. And he teaches the most difficult and dangerous class yet, in which students must examine and manipulate diagrams that can manipulate them back, for the worse. 

It is Dima who declares Sasha an "Assassin of Reality" but won't explain why, and flatly refuses to teach her. Another instructor at the school with whom she has a better relationship tries to help her make up for this severe handicap, but with limited results -- and strangely joins her advisor Farit in encouraging her to let a love affair with Jaroslav happen! She needs, they tell her, a way to recharge herself, get away from it all, and, most importantly, a source of fear to balance out the spells of omnipotence that have led Sasha to believe, in her grander moments, that she can fix everything that's wrong with the world, even the fact that people have to die.

Speaking of dying, Farit has shown up with a new way of using Jaroslav to compel Sasha's good behavior, a way that doesn't harm a hair on Jaroslav's head, and is even crueler than casually reminding her that any airplane can crash. And it's as subtle as when the Tenth Doctor asks Harriet Jones' aide-de-camp if Harriet maybe looks "a bit tired." And as devastating.

Some readers have complained that Assassin of Reality isn't as interesting as Vita Nostra, which was, after all, intended as a stand-alone, but I think it's every bit as interesting, just differently so. Vita Nostra was first and foremost a coming-of-age, structured by Sasha's progress through her first three years at Torpa; Assassin of Reality, while still taking place almost entirely at the school, has far murkier territory to explore: adulthood, with its new responsibilities, burdens, freedoms and fears. Sasha hasn't graduated yet but the Placement Exam she didn't really pass so much as obviate at the end of Vita Nostra was still very much a rite of passage (which not everybody survived), and her life after it is very, very different.

Part of this is because we finally find out what happens to Torpa students after they pass the Placement Exam; first- and second-year students are simply told that third years move on to study "elsewhere" after Placement, but it turns out it's really "elsewhen" -- they are transported as a group 15 years into the future, effectively cutting them off completely from their families and former lives in general (with the exception of poor Kostya, Sasha's first friend at the school, who has the dubious honor of being the son of their terrifying advisor, Farit)! That this kind of means that maybe Jaroslav was just a kid when Sasha endured her first three years at Torpa is never really explored but it's hard not to think about anyway.

Moreover, this book masterfully draws out a thread of ambiguity, if possibility that has been there in this story all along. Except for Sasha's winged flights over Torpa and her deeply weird experiences of profoundly altered perspective, we haven't seen much that is overtly magical or supernatural. Even the supposed time travel could really just have been accomplished by updating the decor of the Institute and adding some newer technology.* 

There is always the possibility that Farit has simply manipulated Sasha and her classmates, threatened them, confused them, spirited them away from their loved ones, shut them in with a bunch of equally vulnerable young people and made them work to exhaustion and beyond at stuff that makes no sense. They get little sleep, are forbidden most outlets for normal youthful energy, and become convinced that their teachers and Farit have godlike power over them. What does that all sound like?

It sounds kind of like a cult, to me. Sasha wouldn't be the first young woman to become convinced, through a series of events and circumstances and, yes, abuse,  engineered to be as bizarre as possible, that she's had a few supernatural experiences. Possibly with the help of psychedelics in the tea everybody is always sipping?

"It's too much to just give up, isn't it?" Sasha was dizzy, as if Farit's voice was alcohol of the highest proof, or a warm poison flooding her ears. 

And just when Jaroslav seems poised to become a source of actual strength for Sasha, when he and his father seem about to become a new family to which she might gladly belong (she even starts to consider having a child), Farit, with just the barest suggestion, turns her against her new love. And it never occurs to her that Farit might have simply lied to her. By the time he poisons her love with a few words, she is convinced of only two possibilities: that Jaroslav and his father have been lying all along, or that while they might have been real and honest and sincere before, Farit has such power over time and reality that he has reached back in the history of their lives to make his whispered slanders into the truth. But the simplest and most likely possibility is not the correct one in this mixed up world of Sasha's. 

This is, of course, the least interesting way to understand what's been going on in these books and I don't necessarily espouse it. I do, however, admire the skill and care that went into constructing the world of these novels, such that the mundane interpretation is even possible. I plan to go back and read these first two books again before I tackle the third, Migrant which, I'm told, has already been translated by Ms. Hersey, but does not yet seem to have a publication date in English. I have, however, been working very hard on my Russian vocabulary, and an ebook of the original Russian edition was very inexpensive so maybe... maybe I'll jump the gun. 

Of course, I said that about the third of Rodrigo Fresán's Tres Partes, which was published in English before I was even halfway through the Spanish edition, so pfft. I will note, though, that my Russian is way better than my Spanish. 

Either way, I'm excited for Volume Three, even though this second book had a very satisfactory ending on its own. 

*Just because they were using physical books, pencils, paper and blackboards in Vita nostra didn't necessarily mean that plasma touchscreens, smart phones and computers didn't exist, after all, just that the school didn't provide them. This could be for reasons of budget, aesthetics or the behind-the-times requirements of pedagogy.