Kit Whitfield: Benighted (Bareback)

• On Amazon
• Author's website
• Excerpt

Benighted (Bareback in the UK) is a striking and well-written novel set in a grim alternate reality. Whitfield depicts rampant social injustice and a culture of chronic violence. The emoting is on the heavy-handed side, but the main character and the world are engrossing.

Benighted is a modern-day story, but grounded in an alternate history dating back to the Middle Ages. Lycanthropy is the norm, and every full moon the population turns wolf. Society copes with its animal side repressively, imposing full-moon curfews and lock-ups.

Far worse off are the tiny minority who are born disabled, unable to change. These non-lunes or “barebacks” are despised and disadvantaged from birth; as adults, they’re pressed into dangerous work “dogcatching” for the government, sent out at full moon to round up and pen loose wolves.

The story is told by Lola May Galley, a dogcatcher and legal representative for lune offenders. When her colleagues are attacked by both wolves and humans, Lola fears she’s next.

Benighted society

Whitfield presents a very effective dystopia, with a lot to say about power and privilege, and clear analogies to modern social injustice. Non-lunes are only one percent of the population, but they’re crucial to maintain lune society’s compartmentalization of their wolf natures—a Faustian bargain dating back to the Inquisition years:

Luning, already regarded by the Church with the suspicion that sex, childbirth, and all the other carnal upheavals the human frame fell prey to, became a matter of panic. The Inquisition came down hard; they went on the hunt. The Dominicans, the founders of it all, took up their nickname like a banner: Domini Canes, the Hounds of God, appointed to run down Satan’s wolves. Protestants, who by then were killing Catholics with equal fervor, declared luning to be an unregenerate state, because you were incapable of faith while under its influence. Pious citizens who feared temptation to sin, or frightened citizens who didn’t want to find themselves at the stake, take your pick, but people began locking themselves away. […]

We were useful, back then. People needed us.

That’s Lola: intelligent, bitter, and well aware of the ugly sides of the law she serves.

Despite the themes of prejudice and alienation, this is not an epic struggle of good versus evil. It’s Lola’s book, and she lives in a moral grey area—as do her lune clients. Lunes rarely remember their wolf experiences, and civil trials permit what amounts to a sleepwalking defense: I did it while I was a wolf; I don't remember it; I wouldn't have done it otherwise. The lunes’ inability to police themselves makes it hard to imagine a "save the world" happy ending; the world of Benighted remains screwed up, and the focus stays on Lola’s struggle to stay alive and sane.

Not likable, but sympathetic and reliable

Lola is frankly a bit of a pill. She has to be tough to survive her job, but she’s also inconsistent, self-centered, and prejudiced. She’s a thorough pessimist, and a nervous wreck—certainly not the tiresome "plucky heroine triumphs over adversity" female character type, but is she too hard to like? Not in my judgment. Lola’s not precisely an unplucky sad sack, and she’s no villain, but she’s a character on the cusp. Will fear harden her attitude into outright persecution of lunes, or will she continue trying to walk the line, defending lunes in court and treating them as humans--except at full moon?

I find Lola more sympathetic than likable—or perhaps likable by Anne Lamott’s liberal definition: "someone whose take on things fascinates you", who’s flawed in understandable ways, or who has the survivor’s "certain clarity of vision". Lola’s rough edges are understandable, and I appreciate seeing a complex female character facing significant moral dilemmas.

The over-bright side

The writing and the messages in the book are not subtle. Lola has been abused in every imaginable way—the litany is overwhelming. Her downward spiral is relentlessly dark, while the happy-sunshiny scenes with her infant nephew and her lover, Paul, can be maudlin.

Paul especially is too good to be true. His entry into Lola’s life is overly serendipitous and he’s infinitely patient with Lola’s freak-outs. He does, however, make a significant contribution to the story: Paul’s hippie-dippy quest for self-knowledge provides a faint hope that lune society could change.

Benighted is not the typical werewolf novel that’s flooded the market recently. I imagine it could be shelved under literary fiction, science fiction, or horror. Like my favorite speculative fiction, Benighted alters today’s world just enough to create pointed social commentary, and it’s refreshing to see writing that makes me empathize with a challenging character. The dénouement is rather a let-down, much like a mystery in which on the last page the sleuth deduces the presence of some unseen hand directing the action. However, the provocative climax is what’s stayed with me.

Grade: B for Lola's melodramas, the "unseen hand" ending, and some clunkiness in describing her relationships. An A for an interesting voice, a fascinating world, and a provocative, memorable story. Overall, A-/B+.

Tags: books, reviews, horror, fantasy, alternate history, speculative fiction, werewolves

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Sophie Gee: The Scandal of the Season

• On Amazon
• Author's website
• Excerpt

The Scandal of the Season fictionalizes the events that inspired Alexander Pope’s satirical poem “The Rape of the Lock”. The novel is set in London in 1711, in a fascinating period in English history and literary history. I wish I could say Gee brings the figures of the time to life, but her social commentary works better than her character development.

The period

Scandal is set at the end of Queen Anne Stuart’s reign, near the height of the Jacobite plots to put exiled James II on the throne, and a time of renewed tension between Protestants and Catholics. Alexander Pope plays a starring role in the novel, and we see his early interactions with Jonathan Swift, Richard Steele, and Mary Pierrepont (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu).

Pope visits London in the company of his country neighbors, Teresa and Martha Blount. Teresa is a local beauty, disappointed by her reception in London; Martha is plainer and predictably sweeter. The Misses Blount hope to be introduced to London society by their city cousin, Miss Arabella Fermor. Arabella is a renowned beauty, but only breaks into the upper echelons of the social hierarchy when she catches the eye of Robert Petre, the 7^th Baron Petre. Meanwhile, Petre covertly supports a rather silly Jacobite plot, endangering himself and his family’s estate.

Love quintangle, or more

Scandal has quite a tangle of central characters, but only one is well fleshed out.

Gee convincingly portrays Alexander Pope as a gifted young man with great ambition and a terrible post-adolescent awkwardness. His hunchback, sickliness, Catholicism, and desperate self-consciousness cost him in the hypercritical society he so wants to impress. Pope’s outsider status and fragile connections tie together the novel’s several threads of political, social, and literary history.

Gee’s command of historical detail is excellent, but there’s more commentary than life in the book. Pope is well developed, but he’s absent for long stretches of narrative. Martha is an acute observer, but she too hangs about the periphery of the action. The action hinges on characters who are little more than mouthpieces for Gee’s commentary.

Martha Blount quietly adores Pope, while Pope pines for her sister Teresa. Teresa treats Pope badly, setting her sights on Lord Petre, who in turn falls hard for Arabella Fermor. (Petre’s previous liaisons also figure into the story.) In addition, John Caryll is godfather to Martha and advisor to Pope, and was trustee for Petre’s estate.

The primary love story is between Arabella Fermor and Robert Petre. Gee acknowledges the affair between Arabella and Petre is the least documented aspect of the book; it “had to be filled in imaginatively, based on very light evidence in letters and diaries from the time.” Gee shows them at first simply as Beautiful People, each smug at capturing such an enviable partner. But after some mutual peacocking, they find themselves in love.

Given that the romance is a major strand of the story, it’s disappointing that Arabella and Petre remain two-dimensional. Gee takes us into the characters’ thoughts, but I rarely find these passages authentic. Rather than the characters’ private reflections, we hear Gee’s didactic moralizing. With so many articulate characters onstage, I'd have liked to see inside their heads more.

Climax? What climax?

There's little tension in Scandal, and the final blackmail is unconvincing. John Caryll appears as a convenient bogeyman at the beginning and end of the book, but each time his role—and the news he brings—isn’t well fleshed out. This bald treatment makes the threat of anti-Jacobite action appear flimsier than it should, and adds to other questionable aspects of the climax. If Petre’s funds weren’t supporting the Jacobites, a charge of treason is nonsense. If Jenkins is the threat, surely he could be paid off. If Petre saw Arabella one last time, why didn’t he warn her what was afoot? The explanation for each is frankly silly.

The ending of Arabella and Petre’s romance provides a mild kind of narrative climax, but the true resolution of the book is Pope’s decision to write "The Rape of the Lock", and Pope’s social climbing success. In keeping with her pointed commentary throughout the book, Gee wants “to leave people remembering that sexual and social pleasure are often incompatible with domestic harmony.”

Late in the book Gee has Pope explicitly reject sexual and social pleasures. The narrative is explicitly structured to reward his renunciation of society and sex with new social standing and professional success; and to punish Arabella and Robert Petre for being part of the social world, and improvidently falling in love. As an interpretation of Pope, perhaps it works; as the climax of the novel, the "Naughty naughty; I told you so" is smug and unconvincing.

The Rape of the Lock

Gee has also written an introduction to a new edition of Pope's "The Rape of the Lock". The Scandal of the Season corresponds closely to her interpretation of the poem.

Pope’s poem gives us the feeling of an outsider looking in, noticing things and overhearing conversations that he ought not to be seeing. What we get in "The Rape of the Lock" is the beginning of English comedies of manners.

Gee’s Pope has a chronic spleen and a sharp-tongued approach to people around him that are in keeping with some of his writings—such as his “Of The Characters of Women: An Epistle To A Lady”, which begins

Nothing so true as what you once let fall,
"Most Women have no Characters at all."

Why so unsatisfying?

I enjoyed The Scandal of the Season more as fictionalized history than as a novel. I appreciate the glimpses of the early-18th-century political and literary world. I’d prefer to see more of those dimensions and fewer of the rather bland social scenes and the stilted, un-historical romance.

Most importantly, the majority of the characters simply don’t breathe. Their situation itself is interesting, given the religious and political issues, the literary period, and the multiple interlocking love triangles. But the writing is too banal to capitalize on the great setup.

As Jonathan Wolff said recently,

Academic writing needs to be ordered, precise, and to make every move explicit. All the work needs to be done on the page rather than in the reader's head. By contrast, good literature often relies on the unsaid, or the implied or hinted at, rather than the expressed thought.

In Scandal I found too much said, in too didactic a mode. All the characters are articulate, but there's little nuance below the obvious level of repartee. Where there is additional meaning to be mined, Gee does the work for us, explicitly instructing us how to read the character's views and what they mean in the society of the time.

Grade: A- for interesting situations and clarity, C+ for the flat writing and characters (apart from Pope). As Pope isn't onstage enough to carry the book, and neither fiction nor nonfiction needs to be written with so many entirely symbolic characters, I'll go with a B- overall.

Tags: books, reviews, history, literary, poetry

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Jennifer Egan: The Keep

• On Amazon
• Author's website
• Excerpt
• Cheesy "Visit The Keep" site

The Keep is a twisty, layered tale. It's both a Gothic novel and a prison memoir, alternating between a crumbling Eastern European schloss and a prisoners’ writing program in New York. The layers of narrative continually interrupt each other, creating a House of Mirrors effect, but I never lost interest in the characters or the narrative.

Danny and Howie are cousins with a strained past. As children, Danny was popular and eager for approval; Howie was a weirdo with a big imagination. The two were friends until Danny played a malicious prank that left Howie traumatized and claustrophobic.

Twenty years later, the tables are turned. Danny’s a bit player with the Mob, while Howie’s a successful entrepreneur. After years of silence, Howie asks for Danny’s help converting a small Eastern European castle into a hotel. Danny is only too glad to get out of New York just then, but suspects that Howie hasn’t truly forgiven him. Danny’s anxiety is exacerbated by being away from his familiar scene, and living among the secret histories of the castle.

The story is told in installments by Ray, a maximum-security prisoner taking a writing class. The writing instructor, Holly, has troubles of her own, but Ray’s story captures her attention. It’s unclear which of the story’s three male characters represents Ray, or how much of the story is fantasy. Nevertheless, Holly comes to believe that it’s true.

---

Getting away, getting back

Howie’s dream is to create a refuge from the demands of the world, a phone-free, schedule-free meditative space. His vision of The Keep's future patrons is straight out of Wordsworth: "The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers". It’s a vision that’s guaranteed to give Danny the willies.

Danny prizes his ability to suss a situation. He’s hyperaware of his surroundings, and of his status in the hierarchy of knowledge and power.

When [Danny] first came to New York, he and his friends tried to find a name for the relationship they craved between themselves and the universe. But the English language came up short: perspective, vision, knowledge, wisdom-those words were all too heavy or too light. So Danny and his friends made up a name: alto. True alto worked two ways: you saw but also you could be seen, you knew and were known. Two-way recognition.

However, Danny’s "alto" depends on being plugged in; he’s so adapted for communication that he can sense the presence of wireless networks. Without gossip, email, and phone, Danny feels like a fish out of water, and his questing senses conjure up ever more paranoid scenarios.

Careful what you wish for

Danny is fascinated with other people’s versions of alto (or perhaps Ray, telling the story from prison, is fascinated by it). Howard has power but craves release from the attendant obligations. The castle is haunted by a baroness holed up in one tower, powerless except in her own mind—a mirror image of Danny.

All the characters are trapped in different ways—by others’ expectations, by their own frantic lives, by jail cells, by addictions and responsibilities. All the characters get a glimpse of something new—peace, respect, a creative outlet, a different way to live—and not always with happy results. Some would die to protect the status quo, and some would die for their new vision. Danny is particularly troubled by change, and seeks a way back in to his familiar tightly-bounded world.

Goth

The form and setting of The Keep are pure Gothic. Much of the story is told by a prisoner, purportedly looking back on a strange period of his life. There’s an empty castle, labyrinthine corridors, walls that seem a different shape by night, a mysterious baroness living in a tower.

Many of these Gothic elements are not themselves central, but they contribute to a sort of magical realism that pervades the castle portions of the book. As in The Turn of the Screw, the setting works on its inhabitants, shaping and increasing their private fears until what’s objectively real is less important than the characters’ perceptions. In keeping with the Gothic setting, Egan is heavy-handed on the atmospherics and the house-of-mirrors subplots in which each story is reflected in another.

Loose, female ends

Many Gothic novels leave the conclusion of the book to a young heir or secretary who provides shocked commentary on the diarist’s fell tale. Egan leaves the ending in the hands of Holly, the prison writing instructor, but gives her a more active role.

Over the course of the book, Holly develops a tentative, ill-fated relationship with Ray. Their interactions are closely circumscribed yet emotionally charged by their student/teacher relationship and more. More than Ray himself, though, his story changes Holly’s vision of her future, and she’s ultimately moved to investigate the truth of the tale. In the final chapters, Holly emerges as perhaps more desperately in need of Howard’s peaceful retreat than any of the men in the story.

Metafiction & magical realism

While The Keep’s overall structure is metafictional, the story isn’t cold or overly academic. It’s impressive that despite being constantly jerked out of the trajectory of the story (or realizing the trajectory was a chimera), the narrative remains compelling and the story retains that tug to engage with the characters. The magical realism of the castle scenes, while strange, keeps the reader emotionally in touch with Danny. The prison scenes develop Holly, who is the most straightforwardly sympathetic character in the book.

Wikipedia has nice descriptions of both writing forms:

• “Metafiction draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.”
  
• “Magic realism… is a fusion between scientific physical reality and psychological human reality; it incorporates aspects of human existence such as thoughts, emotions, dreams and imagination.”

Much of The Keep’s charm is the way it blurs internal and external reality; even Danny’s paranoia is sympathetic when seen from the inside. Danny inhabits a near-dream world of fact and imagination, perception and self-consciousness, that I find fascinating as a depiction of how our consciousness processes our surroundings. Howie's challenge to Danny sums up the story:

“What’s real, Danny?... We’re living in a supernatural world, Danny.”

Grade: B+ for a weird and wild ride.

Tags: books, reviews, gothic, metafiction, magical literary

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Mary Gordon: Spending; A Utopian Divertimento

• On Amazon

Spending is a fascinating book. Art, sex, love, and money are inextricably woven together in the protagonist's mid-life struggles.

Monica Szabo is in her 50s, divorced, with grown children, and responsible only to herself. For years she's taught art and taken care of a family rather than full-time creating art. What would it take to truly throw herself into the artist's life?

A sugar daddy.

It's a great premise, and Gordon explores it thoughtfully. At the start of the book Monica gives a talk at a friend's gallery. Mid-talk, she takes an unplanned detour. This quote gives a sense of her ironic voice:

Sometimes, when I'm in the middle of going for the big laugh, or the next big laugh, the wave crashes and I look around me and see only flotsam and jetsam: old condoms, Tampax holders, empty bags saying Cheetos or Made in Taiwan. But that wasn't happening. The wave wasn't even beginning to crash. So I said, "You know, folks, there's a tradition that male painters get to take advantage of: the woman who's a combination model, housekeeper, cook, secretary. And of course she earns money. And provides inspiration. All over the world, girls are growing up dreaming of being the Muse for some kind of artist. Looking at their bodies in mirrors thinking, 'Maybe some man would like to paint that.' Reading French cookbooks that tell them how to make really succulent little dishes out of horsemeat with a lot of bay leaves and wine. Preparing physically and spiritually to carry his canvases to a hard-hearted gallery owner, their muscles straining, their eyes brimming with shed or unshed tears. Now I ask you, mothers and fathers of America, are your boys dreaming of these things? Where, I ask you, lovers of the arts, where are the male Muses?"

And he stood up, just there, in front of everyone, and said, "Right here."

The man who volunteers is a cipher known only as "B". His life apart from Monica is vague. His explicit purpose is to be her foil, her support, her lover, her inspiration, her concierge; he's extraordinarily perfect in the role. (Remember, this is Utopia.)

So the story is all Monica: how she takes advantage of B's offer, her guilt over "taking advantage", her sense of obligation to achieve great art now she's thrown down the gauntlet, her qualms over accepting money and pleasure from B. (On that front, Monica's daughter suggests she stop angsting and think of herself as a sex worker.)

The sex is explicit, but not at all gratuitous. Monica's physical relationship with B is inspiring, quite literally: her artistic flowering is strongly shaped by their shared pleasure.

The pace flags in the middle, but by the end, Monica has struck out in a new artistic direction and reaped some professional acclaim. To do so, she's taken advantage of money on a scale she never expected to have. Did she sell out? I would say no, but I'm sure some readers feel differently. And that is in some ways the crux of the book. When there's a clear choice, as Gordon draws it, whether to reject "the system" (the money, the patronage, the affirmative action, the favors from friends) or take advantage of it, which path is going along with the status quo, and which is subverting it? It's a timely question with resonance beyond the art world.

Spending is a departure for Gordon. In a 1998 interview, she discusses the book's place in fiction:

While many reviewers have noted this book about sex and pleasure is a departure from the dark themes of her former bestsellers... the work does reflect Gordon’s commitments to feminism and risk-taking....

"I think I’m doing something quite radical, but people won’t get it. My radical act is that a woman has good sex and nobody dies. And that, in fact, is something you don’t see much in fiction. Nobody dies. Nobody’s punished. Good sex for a woman without punishment is rare. So that’s my radical act, but nobody’s going to get much up in arms about it. I don’t think people care that much about fiction about women unless it involves mutilation of the body."

Grade: A-

Tags: books, reviews, fiction, literature, romance, sex, art, feminism

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