C.L. Wilson: Lord of the Fading Lands

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• Author's website
• Excerpt (PDF)

Erin Galloway of Dorchester Publishing was nice enough to send me an advance copy of Lord of the Fading Lands. I’m glad she did--Wilson has a gift for storytelling, and her prose is polished. I was disappointed by the book’s reliance on well-used tropes: the romance is straight out of Christine Feehan’s Carpathian playbook and the fantasy setting is more detailed than innovative. Nonetheless, for a debut novel it’s striking, and I’ll try another book sometime.

Rainier Tairen Soul, King of the Fey, is several thousand years old and a part-time fire-breathing giant winged cat. The last time he ventured out of the Fading Lands, he destroyed half a continent. Now a vision sends him back into the world, seeking a future for his people.

Ellysetta Baristani is the adopted daughter of a woodcarver in stodgy, pious, unmagical Celieria. Ellie appears to be simply a preternaturally nice mortal girl, but Rain recognizes her instantly as his other half. Women don't get to choose their marriages in this world, so it's up to Rain to convince the Celierian king to release Ellie from another man’s claim. Claiming Ellie and politicking distract Rain from investigating a nebulous conspiracy, but it appears that that conflict will happen in a later book.

Alpha and orphan

Ellie and Rain are familiar romance character types—so familiar that based on an excerpt, Laura Vivanco pegged the characters:

the hero was a type I’d read many times before. He’s the most powerful male in the world, he’s capable of violent rages, he has a very tortured past and he falls in love with an innocent, much younger woman. He’s so possessive he frightens her, and he reacts instantly to any threat (perceived or real) against her….

The heroine’s an orphan who’s something of an ugly duckling (perceived as ugly by her adoptive culture, coming into her own power), under threat and in need of rescue…

Wilson sometimes sacrifices character development for reinforcement of these standard traits. Instead of how Rain reacts to the world, we’re told what he wears; instead of who he is now, we get his powers, his tragic history, and generalizations about the Fey.

The built-up world

Wilson’s attention to detail is laudable, but sometimes less might be more. For example, an important courtroom scene includes a lengthy description¹ of Rain’s clothes. It doesn’t say anything new—we know he's handsome, wealthy, and powerful—so rather than the fashion report, I’d like to see the legal and political interludes developed farther. These scenes are crucial to illuminate inter-kingdom politics, and to explain the villains. (The evil Mages merit more discussion--thus far, they're simplistic villains for villainy's sake.)

Sci fi and fantasy author M John Harrison propounds a different approach to worldbuilding:

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding. […] Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there.

and

Substitute imagination for exhaustiveness, and inventiveness for research.

Harrison is often provocative, and here he stakes out an extreme view, but I agree to a large extent. Not every world must be built the same way, but in Fading Lands I wanted a better balance of emotional and political explication versus décor. The detailed description also slows down some key scenes, which may be one reason some readers find Fading Lands slow going.

Truemates, lifemates, fated love

In the Elloran world, fate and race determine much of the characters’ lives. Every Fey character is noble and gifted; every Celierian character is ordinary. This robs the diplomatic conflict of tension: the Celierians are too far outclassed by the Fey. Ellie’s special qualities are evidently due to her non-Celierian blood; even her father’s business success has a non-Celierian cause. The Celierian women come off particularly poorly. Their lives are dictated by fate, race, and whichever man claims them, and they’re not notably charming, admirable, intelligent, or honorable: they’re perfect pawns for the men of the story.

The lack of outstanding female characters, and the emphasis on fate, are also clear in the romance. Wilson says her “truemates” concept is not the same as Feehan’s “lifemates”. I see no essential difference between the two, though some readers disagree with me. Like Feehan’s Carpathians, Fey men are fearsome warriors, but each kill adds darkness to their souls, gradually deadening their emotions. Like the Carpathians, Fey women are gentle; Ellie fits right in, as her sweetness heals all wounds and even inspires a Fey bodyguard to pledge himself to her. (It’s a little much; not even Feehan’s women save the souls of men other than their mates.) Like Feehan's Carpathians, there's some lip service given to the importance of the woman making an emotional choice but the outcome is never in serious doubt.

Fading Lands also reminds me of Ann Maxwell (Elizabeth Lowell)’s Timeshadow Rider (1986), a space-fantasy romance about a made-for-each-other couple from an all-powerful race with an animalistic side. However, Maxwell’s book is explicitly about overcoming cultural conditioning and sets up a more clearly worked-out tension between fate and choice.

Wilson is a good storyteller, and I enjoyed Fading Lands, though I found it heavy on genre clichés. Many romance readers will enjoy the alpha male/sweet female relationship, but on the fantasy side the mythology and characterization seem rather standard and un-innovative. It didn't strike the sweet spot for me, but it was an engaging read.

Grade: B-
(I'd give it a C+ for carrying forward so many bad-old-days-of-fantasy conventions, but it's really no worse than average in that regard. Besides, it's a B+ for storytelling. Storytelling and voice mean a lot to me.)

---

¹ From Chapter 6:

Tall, lean, and searingly handsome, Rainier vel’En Daris exuded the dark, dangerous beauty and mystery of the Fey race as he strode down the blue carpet. His black leather tunic and snug leggings seemed to absorb light, while his bristling collection of Fey blades were so highly polished that they reflected light back with almost blinding intensity. Black boots, tooled with scarlet and purple tairen, crossed the length of the throne room in smooth, ground-eating strides. A scarlet sash embroidered with taired worked in gold thread draped from his left shoulder to his right hip, just below one of the two crossed bands of Fey’cha daggers, while a chain made of fist-sized squares of gold, each set with large Tairen’s Eye crystals, hung from one shoulder to the other. A golden crown circled his head, each of its six points topped with a small globe of priceless Tairen’s Eye crystal. Even without the crown, no one who saw him could fail to recognize he was a King. He carried power as effortlessly as his broad shoulders carried the purple-lined black cape that billowed out behind him.

Tags: book, review, fantasy, romance, magic

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Kit Whitfield: Benighted (Bareback)

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• 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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Paul Levine: Solomon vs. Lord

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• Author's website
• Author's blog
• Excerpt

Solomon vs. Lord is a lively combination of legal thriller, romantic suspense, and comedy. The mystery isn't memorable, but the characters have surprising depths, the repartee is crisp, and I laughed out loud. I wish more books had such deft dialogue.

Steve Solomon is a no-holds-barred defense lawyer whose iffy-looking advertisements adorn city buses. Victoria Lord is a brand-new lawyer anxious to prove herself to a demanding district attorney.

When their personality clash costs Victoria her job, Steve inveigles her into a temporary partnership defending Katrina Barksdale. Katrina’s case is high profile: her husband died during a bondage game on their yacht. Meanwhile, Steve’s personal life becomes even more complicated than the merry widow’s, as he fights both his sister and the state for custody of his autistic nephew.

Florida, the surreal sunshine state

I'm a sucker for books in which the setting strongly shapes the narrative. Especially Florida. Florida is a strange, strange land where almost anything seems plausible. In books by Susan Orlean and Carl Hiaasen, Florida is practically a character in its own right. In Solomon vs. Lord, Florida lends a crazy variety to the cast and settings. Where else could “old-money Miami” Victoria and “barefoot Coconut Grove” Steve face off in downtown courtrooms, a cult camp in the swamps, a luxury yacht, and an avocado plantation?

Mystery: strangely absent

The mystery itself isn’t particularly mysterious. It’s neither densely-plotted nor intense, the murder isn’t overly gory, and all the elements of the solution are telegraphed to the reader early on. The final solution seems meant to be ingenious but is only middlin' so—and not entirely convincing. This weakness makes the mystery a mere backdrop to Steve and Victoria. The subplot involving Steve's nephew is far more engaging than the murder case.

Character, character, character

What’s special about Solomon vs. Lord is the interplay between the title characters. Their chemistry makes for an engaging sparks-at-first-sight romance. The repartee is both funny and revealing, in the vein of The Taming of the Shrew (though it's hard to say who's the shrew here).

To quote Bob Mayer, "Dialogue reveals a great amount of information about your characters. It is their chance to express themselves". In The Scandal of the Season I complained that the characters' witty exchanges were mostly situational comedy—more arch commentary than character development. Levine, in contrast, writes dialogue that lets us see inside the characters, past Steve’s superficial jackassery and Victoria’s apparent prissiness.

Levine works within conventional legal-thriller forms, but turns them on their heads. At first sight, Victoria and Steve are nothing surprising: she's a rule-follower, he's a rule-breaker. She prepares, he extemporizes. But there's a reason she's a uptight: part of it's personality, part is because she's a new-minted lawyer with a fire-breathing boss. Similarly, Steve is a good guy under the jackass front… but the jackass is part of him too.

Levine credits his TV experience (JAG) with making his writing leaner and his dialogue “zippier”. Both are evident in Solomon vs. Lord; the repartee zips from the first page.

The man in the holding cell loosened his tie, tossed his rumpled suit coat into a corner, and stretched out on the hard plastic bench. The woman in the facing cell slipped out of her glen plaid jacket, folded it carefully across an arm, and began pacing.

"Relax, Vickie. We're gonna be here a while," the man said.

"Victoria," the woman corrected. Her angry footsteps echoed off the bare concrete floor.

"Wild guess. You've never been held in contempt before."

"You treat it like a badge of honor."

"A lawyer who's afraid of jail is like a surgeon who's afraid of blood," Steve Solomon said.

"From what I hear, you spend more time behind bars than your clients," Victoria Lord said.

"Hey, thanks. Great tag line for my radio spots. 'You do the crime, Steve does the time.' "

"You're the most unethical lawyer I know."

"You're new at this. Give it time."

"Sleazy son-of-a-bitch," she muttered, turning away.

"I heard that," he said.

Nice profile, he thought. Attractive in that polished, cool-as-a-daiquiri way. Long legs, small bust, sculpted jaw, an angular, athletic look. Green eyes spiked with gray and a tousled, honey-blond bird's nest of hair. Ballsy and sexy, too. He'd never heard "sleazy son-of-a-bitch" sound so seductive.

"If you weren't so arrogant," he said, "I could teach you a few courtroom tricks."

"Save your breath for your inflatable doll."

"Cheap shot. That was a trial exhibit."

After this unpromising start, the easy labels—sleazeball vs. silver spoon, clowning man vs. uptight woman—give way rapidly.

I don’t need a lengthy disquisition on Steve and Victoria’s feelings to believe in their rapprochement. The two are dissimilar both superficially and in deeper ways, but they find unexpected things to admire in each other. Both are idealists, and Victoria recognizes Steve’s affinity for the underdog even if some of his clients give her the willies.

Crucially, Steve and Victoria develop a genuine professional respect: she recognizes his expertise in court, while he predicts she'll be extraordinary in the courtroom as she gains experience. Near the end, one scene sold me on them as a couple: Victoria acknowledges how much she's learned from Steve, and--unexpectedly--he in turn listens to and learns from her. Their efforts to reconcile a growing professional and personal respect with awkward realities—Steve really can be a “sleazy son-of-a-bitch” and Victoria really can be uptight—are both endearing and a source of ongoing tension.

Uneven secondary characters

There’s a hodgepodge of unusual secondary characters. The standout is Steve’s nephew Bobby. Damaged by abuse and neglect before Steve took him in, Bobby is both appealing and appalling. He’s also good for a number of easy laughs: one of his talents is anagramming people’s names.

The book occasionally slides into pure slapstick, and Levine includes some stock characters. Worst among these are a ridiculously evil district attorney, and Victoria’s nice-but-bland fiancé, Bruce the avocado king. Bruce is strangely oblivious to the undercurrents as Victoria puts him in one ridiculous situation after another. It’s hard to believe in their relationship, and it’s beyond ridiculous that Victoria’s never told him she’s allergic to avocado. That kind of trying-too-hard comedy grates in several scenes.

Worth the read

While I’d love a more intriguing mystery and less slapstick, it’s a very fun read. Steve and Victoria carry the book. I’ll read the next in the series to see whether the plotting will perk up—and whether the characters will remain so engaging.

The entire first chapter is online at Levine's site, and also in audio, read by Christopher Lane. (I don't care for Lane's "Victoria" voice. There aren't a lot of female characters in the book, so it's a real problem if the voice ruins the main one.)

Grade: A- for entertaining protagonists and dialogue; C+ for the mystery elements. I enjoyed it, so I'll call it a B+.

Tags: books, reviews, mystery, thriller, comedy, florida

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Sophie Gee: The Scandal of the Season

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• 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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Emma Donoghue: Landing

• On Amazon
• Author's website
• Excerpt

Landing is a well-written epistolary romance. The central duo are an "odd couple" drawn in rather heavy-handed contrasts, but they aren’t simply stereotypes: they’re nicely fleshed out in their different milieux. Unfortunately, I don't completely buy the final solution to the long-distance affair.

Landing opens with Jude Turner and Síle O’Shaughnessy sharing a disturbing experience on a transatlantic flight. Back in Dublin, Ireland, and “Ireland”, Canada, Jude and Síle start a correspondence that rapidly becomes central to their lives. The two women fall in love through email; telephone calls and visits deepen the relationship and increase the tension of the distance between them.

Contrasts

Síle and Jude are drawn as such opposites that the contrasts become a little tiresome, though they never become caricature. Indo-Irish Síle, 39, leads a big-city life in Dublin and loves to travel. Canadian Jude, 25, lives in her childhood home in a town of 600, two hours from Toronto. Síle is into gadgets; Jude is a techno-phobe. Síle is involved with a refined blonde Irish woman; Jude with a rough-edged half-Mohawk man.

On the other hand, Donoghue uses these contrasts well in writing about Jude and Síle’s passion for each other. This is the first time I’ve read a love story between two women that shows a wide array of loving feelings, not emphasizing the “feminine” side of love or the couple’s common experience as women. Landing has what Nicola Griffith calls "triple girl cooties: a girl writing from the POV of a girl who likes girls", but this triple-whammy doesn’t render the story bland. The characters’ differences create a varied dynamic, and Donoghue writes about their feelings in ways that I often find touching and real. The darker side of relationships is missing--Jude and Síle don't spend enough time together to argue--but their love is well described.

Why, then, am I unsure that Jude and Síle have what it takes?

A lack of togetherness

Jude and Síle have a far more dimensional relationship because of their differences. At the same time the contrasts are so strongly drawn that I have trouble imagining a happy ending. The long-distance relationship plays into this uncertainty, adding layers to the story but also keeping the women's relationship somewhat superficial.

Jude and Síle's letter-writing provides a lot of opportunity for quotation and allusion. In a metafictional touch, Jude often excerpts letters from the museum’s archive. However, many of the allusions are rather bleak stories, such as the Nathaniel Hawthorne story of the snow-child who couldn't thrive outside her natural setting.

At the same time, the epistolary structure of the book keeps Jude and Síle physically apart. The reader never sees them become comfortable in each other’s sphere and the relationship stays at the level of a honeymoon, so there's little conflict.

Real life = emotional life

There’s a persistent theme in Landing that “reality” consists of what’s most emotionally vibrant in life, not simply the habitual or the near at hand. Without that emphasis, I suspect the story would fall flat. If our "nearest" were necessarily our "nearest", who would ever try a long-distance relationship or an on-line flirtation?

This theme is particularly explicit when a written “I love you” changes Síle’s perceptions about where her “real” life lies: not in routine and familiarity but in emotional connection from afar.

She’d made the mistake of thinking that dinners out and traffic jams were her real life, and this connection with Jude was just a transitory preoccupation. But now she saw that she’d been living out her real time onscreen [via email]….”

As the relationship progresses, both women find their everyday lives receding:

They rang each other at any time of day or night…. Síle had started taking occasional baths now, to remind her of Jude, and because there seemed more time to kill.

Different styles of cleaving unto

The style of commentary in Landing reminds me of an article by Elizabeth Campbell:

[Epistolary] novels have always been about sexual politics.... [They] use the letter as a subversive and freeing agent and also as a mirror in which they not only seek themselves and/or another but attempt to change their lives to reflect the mirror image.

Donoghue integrates several ideas of femininity and gay culture into the story. Both Síle and Jude are openly gay, and comfortable with themselves, which adds a great deal of honesty to their developing relationship. Both women have close friends and supportive communities, but at times experience prejudice.

Síle's relationship with her partner is more comfortable than sexual.

Kathleen had silently forwarded her a link to some online journal article about the high incidence of "what is popularly known as bed death" in long-term lesbian relationships.

Having lived celibate for several years, Síle is occasionally disconcerted by Jude’s past relationships, and seems alarmed that Jude still considers herself bisexual.

”Did it feel any different with the girls?” Síle wanted to know.

No answer for a second. Then, “Sex is always different, depending on who you’re with.”

“Your generation’s really ditched the old labels, haven’t you?”

I found Landing well written but a little static in places, slightly sterile in the first half’s letters, and I don't completely believe the ending. I plan to try Donoghue's historical novels: I'm curious to hear her voice in a different setting without the epistolary form. Her Slammerkin is the story of Mary Saunders, a servant who murdered her mistress in 1763. Life Mask fictionalizes a (possibly) historical love triangle between playwright Richard Sheridan, actress Eliza Farren, and the Earl of Derby in 1790s London.

Grade: B- because I wasn't convinced. But I really am interested in trying Donoghue's other books.

Tags: books, reviews, romance, ireland, canada, lesbian

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Curtis Sittenfeld: Prep

On Amazon
• Author's website

Prep is a mostly well-written, acutely observant novel about a teenage misfit at an East Coast boarding school. I was pleasantly surprised to find fresh storytelling in such a well-worn plot.

Sittenfeld has an exceptionally strong voice, and Prep has a lot of perceptive passages depicting adolescence--along with a tangle of outsider issues: gender, class, race, and self-esteem. The book is light on plot, and it drags in places, but the running commentary on class, sex, and self kept me turning the pages with interest.

Fitting in

Prep shows the start of Lee Fiora's awkward years, a period of feeling out of step and desperate to fit in. Is that due to the school, or is it Lee? Would she have struggled equally at her local high school? It's hard to say.

Lee's plain-spoken Midwestern family are baffled by her desire to attend boarding school. Far from her family, Lee becomes someone they wouldn't recognize: not a snooty prep school girl but an unhappy, sneaky introvert, trying not to draw notice yet desperate for notice. (Lee could have been drawn from a brochure on low self-esteem in women.) Prep is full of canny little observations like this one:

On the circle, a bunch of boys were playing football, slipping and rolling in the grass. Listening to their cries, I felt a familiar jealousy of boys. I didn't want what they had, but I wished that I wanted what they wanted; it seemed like happiness was easier for them.

Indeed, some of the book's best moments use that gender divide to highlight the outsider's wish to be someone. Lee feels alienated from the other girls because of their social confidence, their calm, or their polish; she envies the boys' seeming freedom from her anxieties:

I wanted to take up people's time making jokes, to tease the dean in front of the entire school, to call him by a nickname. What I wanted was to be a cocky high-school boy, so fucking sure of my place in the world.

Critics compare Prep to The Catcher in the Rye, and I understand why. Prep puts the reader in the mind of an angry teen, unhappy with her lowly place in the scheme of things. Ed Park of Salon finds this typical:

The boarding-school bildungsroman is... [not] really about the privilege that permeates the setting. Indeed, an anti-materialist tone generally creeps in, and... the protagonist will be having a miserable time.

However, Lee couldn't be more different from Salinger's Holden Caulfield in her desperate desire to be part of the social hierarchy of the school. Lee behaves in ways her family would never understand, the start of a pattern in her life:

This was just the beginning! For years, there would be so many things I'd do for a guy that I wouldn't do in my usual life--jokes I wouldn't normally tell, places I wouldn't normally go, clothes I wouldn't normally wear, drinks I wouldn't normally drink, food I wouldn't normally eat or food I would normally eat but wouldn't eat in front of him.

Hemidemisemi-unreliable narrator

Sittenfeld manages to make the reader understand Lee and her surroundings more clearly than does Lee--but without undermining Lee as a narrator. It works because the teenage Lee isn't such an unreliable narrator that you can dismiss her perceptions; she excels at observing, and to some extent interpreting, life around her. Some of her self-analysis comes through hindsight as in the quote above, but most is relayed to us by her teenage self. She's more perceptive than many adults, but she flounders in applying it to herself and acting on it.

Lee also fails in her understanding of others: she sees the people around her primarily as symbols of what she lacks. Lee's limited vision is both a strength and a weakness in Prep. The other characters aren't very fully realized, which is a drag for the reader. On the other hand, this self-centered narration is fitting for the teenager Lee is, and late in the book Lee is forced to recognize that her vision has been one-dimensional; that she's grossly misperceived several people.

Coming of age

I'd wondered if Prep would be chick lit. I'd say no. It's a conventional coming-of-age story enlivened by tensions of class, gender, and race. Compared to the classic coming-of-age novels it's lightweight; most of Lee's difficulties could be easily solved if any adult chose to take an interest. But most comings-of-age aren't as full of sturm und drang as, say, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. As a candid eye into the head of an unhappy teenager, Prep is exceptional.

I said the book drags. Could Sittenfeld have layered in such a number of class, gender, race, and coming-of-age issues in a shorter book? Possibly not. The boarding-school setting (a thinly disguised version of Groton School) creates a microcosm in which Lee confronts a variety of issues in a short time and a small community. Nevertheless, at times I felt the book tried to do too much. Much as I enjoyed all the keen observations and bon mots, and the layer upon layer of issues, it could have been tightened up in the interests of keeping the story moving.

Prep was a sleeper hit in 2005. Sittenfeld's second novel, The Man of My Dreams, didn't sell quite as well: a mere 42,000 to date. Not bad. She's now working on a third novel.

Grade: B- for predictability; A- for perceptive, idiosyncratic writing. Overall... B+.

Tags: books, reviews, fiction, school, teen, outsider

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Neil Gaiman: Neverwhere

• On Amazon
• Author's site

(Seeing Ratatouille reminded me to post this. Sentient rats, sewers, losing one's home....)

Neverwhere is an imaginative tale of an innocent who stumbles into a magical world. The story is fun and full of interesting allusions, but a little insubstantial. I enjoyed the idea of an invisible world around us, but wished the theme were better developed.

Richard Mayhew is a nondescript Londoner who one day performs an act of kindness: he stops to help an injured girl. The girl is the Lady Door, and by helping her Richard is sucked into the world of London Below. Unable to return home, Richard has little choice but to join Door's motley entourage.

Richard's new companions are legends of London Below, knowledgeable, cynical, and each pursuing a private agenda. Mopey, helpless Richard seems an unlikely addition to the group. Will his stodgy nice-guyness get him killed?

The innocent who stumbles into a magical world is an old theme (Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland). The freshness of Neverwhere is that the magical world is part of the "real" world, usually unseen but ever present. London Below is the sewers, tunnels, crawlspaces, and Tube stations of London. It's a gritty shadow city in which legends are real and villains are vile. But its roots in the familiar are what create that frisson the next time you step over a sewer grate.

Points for style

Neverwhere is full of allusions to urban legend, Arthurian and Greek legend, fairytales, horror classics....

The saxophonist at Bank Station is Lear; the marquis trades him a reel written by Merlin's master Blaise (see Malory's Morte d'Arthur).

The Great Beast of London is confronted in a very Arthurian hunting scene; the pure of heart triumphs where the mighty but corrupt fails. (The fabled New York sewer alligators get a mention too.)

At the British Museum, a guard calls the gala the Masque of the Red Dress. The Masque of the Red Death is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, in which the élite party while the populace die in agony.

I enjoyed the references, but many of them felt like superficial flourishes. They weren’t intrinsic to the story, didn’t create a deeper story under the surface. Not every book has to be a thickly-layered Satanic Verses, but in Neverwhere sometimes the number of allusions seems to get in the way of a deeper story-building.

The Cat Who...

One of the clearest allusions is the marquis de Carabas, named for the character in Puss in Boots (popularized around 1700 by Perrault's Mother Goose). In the fairytale, Puss helps a poor young man pretend to be a marquis to woo a princess. Laura Vivanco points out that the cat is often a self-serving figure and sometimes even a female who walks off with the marquis at the end. I do recall a version in which the cat has an ulterior motive—-or perhaps it’s distrusted for being such a good schemer. And in the older form of the story, the cat is willing to kill for its goals; it's no benign fluffball.

In Neverwhere the marquis is a fixer, a knowledge broker, an arranger. He helps the princess at a price, making abundantly clear that he has his own agenda. He isn’t quite a power behind the throne or éminence grise, but one can imagine him in such a role.

Puss is an interesting fairytale. Benign on the surface, but a number of elements could have a very different twist, depending on the character and gender of the cat. Similarly in Neverwhere, the marquis drives the story to a large degree. He's an extremely shifty character, but he's central to the hopes of everyone in the story.

A Tube runs through it

The other allusions that work especially well are about London geography. As Richard lives in London Above, he realizes that the straightforward London of the Tube maps is a fiction; all kinds of twists and details are omitted by the simple point-A-to-B diagrams. As he gets to know London Below, the Tube itself becomes more real to him, full of history and people and meaning.

Our hero?

Richard comes into his own gradually. He starts off a passive observer, in both London Above and London Below. After he falls down the rabbit hole, he asks few questions. When he does ask, it's generally about immediate logistics, not larger questions. He doesn't even articulate a wish to go home; he retreats into a fog. But near the halfway point,

Somewhere inside Richard a small, reasonable voice pointed out that… most of his experiences of the last few days had been impossible. Richard ignored it. He was learning, awkwardly, to trust his instincts…. He opened his mouth and tasted the wine once more…. It made him think of skies bigger and bluer than any he had ever seen... everything simpler, everything younger than the world he knew.

Shortly afterward, he must choose to stay alive and to believe in the London Below that he's experiencing.

Law of the jungle

London Below is indeed a more raw, perhaps simpler life than Richard knew; very different from the wishy-washy life he’d led Above. People in London Below unabashedly pursue their own ends, and some are by nature dangerous to others (e.g. Richard's encounter with the sexy, deadly Lamia).

Visuals

In 1999, Gaiman gave Lucy Snyder his fantasy cast for Neverwhere:

If I could cast it with all dead actors, I'd have Peter Sellers playing... an awful lot of the parts!... You could get the young Brigitte Bardot playing Door, and Alec Guiness playing anybody Peter Sellers isn't. The young Alec Guiness, not an Obi-Wan Kenobi. And maybe Louise Brooks playing Hunter. Or anything, really, I don't mind what Louise Brooks plays; if all she wanted to do was hang around the set and make tea, I'd be there!

Neverwhere was Gaiman’s first novel, and it came from a TV series, so I’d like to read his later books and see what his style has become. American Gods is on my pile, and I may try Stardust since the movie’s due out.

Grade: B+

Tags: books, reviews, fantasy, scifi, fiction, gaiman, neverwhere, stardust, london

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Paula Guran: Best New Paranormal Romance

• On Amazon
• Editor's website

While some of these stories are excellent, none of them resembles what I've previously read as "paranormal romance". Some are romantic; very few are paranormal. I'd call the collection a cross-section of supernatural and straight-up sci fi/fantasy, generally involving significant romantic relationships. I'll review the stories first, then talk about the collection as a whole and Guran's definition of paranormal romance.

[Update: Guran's new anthology is called Best New Romantic Fantasy 2, a much better title if it's like this collection.]

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The stories

In many of these stories, a crucial part is the reader's unfolding understanding of the magical element. I'll try not to "spoil" that.

Follow Me Light by Elizabeth Bear
Alternately arid and gripping, in part because the story's time moves at varying speeds. At a couple of points Pinky comes into crisp focus with strong physical description; near the end the narrator does too.
Grade: B+

A Maze of Trees by Claudia O'Keefe
A strangely lovely story, full of longing and loneliness and sense of place. An excellent grounding in the physical world sets up a connection between the inner/outer realities that's essential to the story.
Grade: A-

The Shadowed Heart by Catherine Asaro
Straight-up space sci fi, of the dated variety. The characters are drawn in very archetypal male/female constructs: he large, half-machine, a warrior, isolated; she small, frail, a teacher, self-sacrificing, with a loving family.
Grade: C-

Walpurgis Afternoon by Delia Sherman
A drawing-room piece portraying magic as a charming addition to suburban life. Apparently magical people are attractive, nonjudgmental, well to do, content, and desirable neighbors. Not remotely a romance. Geoff and Burney seem to exist solely to express disapproval of (a) lesbianism and (b) magic. One such character in a short story gets the message across; two is the author clubbing me on the head.
Grade: C+

A Knot of Toads by Jane Yolen
Delightfully neo-Gothic. Yolen has a light, deft hand for a hair-raising tale. The 1930s setting adds atmosphere without making the story feel remote.
Grade: A-

Calypso in Berlin by Elizabeth Hand
Hand reaches back to the Odysseus story to evoke the cruel side of love and eternity. The most densely layered story in the collection, Calypso asks what we really love: the lover, or who we are with that person. Mordantly provocative.
Grade: B+

A Hero's Welcome by Rebecca York
Ultra-old-school sci fi. Again, archetypal characters, though better developed than in Shadowed Heart. Technically solid writing, but full of predictable tropes and not a particularly memorable voice.
Grade: C

Single White Farmhouse by Heather Shaw
More charm than plot. I enjoyed the Baba Yaga imagery and the overall concept, but that isn't enough to carry the story; it goes stale before the end. Like Walpurgis, a male secondary character serves as a disapproving Greek chorus over lesbianism and sex.
Grade: C+

Magic in a Certain Slant of Light by Deborah Coates
A well crafted story, just the right length for what it wants to tell. Nora's life is creeping toward predictability, psychically, emotionally, and professionally. Her regaining the magic is a straightforward story but with nice layerings of symbol and meaning.
Grade: B+

Fir Na Tine by Sandra McDonald
Men who burn, and the women who douse them? Something seems a little off in the premise. At its best, this should be a story of longing for the fire but being unable to survive it. But there are too many episodes that don't develop the story; it runs out of gas.
Grade: C+