Tag: speculative fiction

Review 2603: Babel: An Arcane History

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Knowing that this wasn’t my genre, I still decided to read Babel because it sounded interesting. I tried very hard, but it was a DNF for me at about 150 pages. I’ll tell you why in a bit.

A Chinese boy, later called Robin, is dying from cholera when he is mysteriously cured by the application of a silver rod by a stranger named Dr. Lovell. It is too late for Robin’s mother, however.

It is the first half of the 19th century, the height of the British Empire. It seems odd to Robin that once he is well, Dr. Lovell offers to make him his ward and have him educated. The doctor is not warm in his manner, but Robin accepts, suspecting it’s the doctor who has been sending his family books all his life and provided a Scottish nurse. For Robin is now fluent in both Cantonese and English. He also sees a strong physical resemblance between himself and Dr. Lovell.

Robin is educated in Latin and Ancient Greek for the next few years living in Dr. Lovell’s home in Hampshire. The doctor continues to be cold and in one case beats the boy badly for forgetting to go to a lesson.

Finally, Robin is sent to Oxford to study in the translation school, Babel. Besides translating books into English and writing grammar books, Babel’s mission is to handle silver, which can process magic spells through language. Robin makes friends with the other first years—Ramy, Letty, and Victoire, yes, girls at Oxford 100 years before they were let in. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Almost immediately, just as he’s introduced to this new, exciting life, Robin meets a man who looks almost identical to him. This is Griffin Lovell, an early protégé of Dr. Lovell’s, and he belongs to the Hermes Society, a secret group that steals Babel’s silver to give to the more deserving. And Robin helps them.

Before I get into my general problems with the historical angle, I thought it was a shame that Kuang brought the Hermes Society into the novel so soon. I would have liked to see what was going on in Babel without the distraction of the resistance movement. Kuang doesn’t even let Robin go to school for one day before he gets involved with them. That may turn out to be important for the plot. I don’t know, because I quit reading very quickly afterwards.

OK, here’s my problem with some of these genre-bending books. If you’re going to put a magical realism book or speculative fiction in a historical setting, at least get the details right. You can’t cheat by saying this is your alternate reality. Having girls in Oxford might squeak by as part of this invented school if the girls acted even remotely like 19th century women. Having some of the characters with social attitudes closer to 21st century ones I give a reluctant pass to, since some of these characters are from suppressed populations.

However, having the characters use words or think thoughts using words that are anachronistic—no. In one case, for example, Robin thinks about huffing a scent, that is, inhaling it. At that time, though, huffing meant breathing out. The word didn’t start meaning breathing in until the late-ish 20th century, and then it referred to breathing in drugs, although the usage may be more general now.

Another wrong detail is Robin’s casual use of a fountain pen. The problem is that although fountain pens had just barely been invented by then, they were not in general use until much later in the century. In the 1830s, they cost about £2000, although I don’t know whether that’s an amount that is adjusted for 2025 or not.

Historical novels need to get the details right, whether they’re genre bending or not. In my opinion, it’s only fair to change the details that apply directly to the alternate reality. Otherwise, writers are just being lazy.

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Review 2575: Lanark

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I was going to start my review of Lanark, considered by many to be a landmark of literature, by saying it has nothing to offer women. Its female characters are either cardboard creatures or sex objects or both. Its male protagonist fantasizes as a boy about raping girls. Its cover, with drawings by Gray, has a total of six naked women and one clothed man. (The rest of the figures are heads.) I was going to start with this (in fact, I have) until I came across a review in The Guardian from 2019 by Sarah Detum that calls it superb and talks about how clearly it sees how men regard women. But was it looking at that or exhibiting it? I’m not sure. And I don’t think that was Gray’s purpose. And I hope Detum isn’t right, because if so, it’s a depressing thought for most women.

The novel is broken into four parts and starts with Part 3. Then it breaks off into an apparently unrelated (but it isn’t) story, Parts 1 and 2, before returning to the original story in Part 4.

The novel begins in a city that has no sunlight. The protagonist, Lanark, is told it’s because developers have built the buildings so high up that light can only be seen for a few minutes at dawn. The city, Unthank, is an allegory for hell. Lanark can’t remember his past, and everyone else seems to spend their time hanging out in bars. Lanark can’t even get laid, despite ogling every woman he sees. What fresh hell is this?

I haven’t mentioned much of the science fiction/fantasy spin that seemed to fascinate critics in 1981, but that’s not unusual now. Of course, there’s the no-sun, but also people are developing weird diseases. Lanark begins getting dragon skin, where his skin turns black and scaly. And a woman has a mouth that talks appearing on her arm. I have to confess that this stuff seemed childish to me or like Gray took too much LSD when he was younger.

Lanark finally decides to make an end of it and drown himself in the sea. When he wakes up, he’s in an institute in an entirely different world. There, a seer begins telling him a story, set in post-World War II Glasgow, about Duncan Thaw (Part 1!).

The two sections about Duncan follow him through boyhood to young manhood. He is a stubborn person with his own ideas about what he wants to do, so he’s always butting up against authority figures. He finally begins studying to be an artist.

None of the sci-fi/fantasy elements exist in these two parts, and I found them the most readable. But Duncan is also the character with no social skills who fantasizes about raping women and never gets laid. What fresh hell is this again? (He gets a girl in the end. I can only wonder about her taste.)

Although the writing is such that I felt the novel was clipping along fairly well, it was when the book gets to Part 4 and returns to Unthank that I suddenly realized I had no interest in continuing it, in fact was dreading the return to Unthank despite knowing that most of the plot was in the last part of the book. That made me look around a bit to see if there was even one critic who agreed with me instead of gushing about what a masterpiece it was. (I was thinking maybe it was too dated.) Thank god for Jim Crowley of The New York Times, who, although largely complimentary, says, “The longer the book goes on, the more rapidly its magic leaks away,” (I didn’t think it had any) and calls its structure a Mobius strip.

Frankly, by then I was done, 200 pages from the end. Yes, it didn’t seem right to repay the effort it took to get that far by not finishing, but that’s what I did.

Lots of reviews called this novel playful, but to me it seemed distasteful and heavy. As for any magic it may have, that was overwhelmed for me by its misogyny.

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Review 2342: The Memory of Animals

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The Memory of Animals is Claire Fuller’s apocalyptic pandemic novel, so I usually would not have read it. But then again, it’s Claire Fuller.

Neffy has volunteered for a drug trial, an unusual one where a vaccine is to be tested for the first time by humans. The virus is already wreaking havoc, so the subjects will be vaccinated and then given the disease. Neffy, we learn later, has recently experienced a series of difficult events and has joined the trial for money after losing her job. Before she even starts the trial, she hears of a variant of the virus that is even worse.

After Neffy is given the virus, she becomes very sick. She is aware of being locked in her room and deserted. When she recovers, she finds the clinic is empty except for four other study participants—Leon, Yahiko, Rachel, and Piper. They tell her that the medical staff abandoned them and all the rest of the participants left—that only Neffy and a few others were given the virus before the trial shut down.

Outside is an apocalyptic world where the occasional person or two, looking ill, stumble by outside the clinic, and stores are looted. The remaining participants are hiding in the clinic, living off the food they’ve scavenged from the trial and the staff’s lockers.

The narration goes in different directions, as Neffy addresses letters to an octopus she cared for in her job. She also is introduced to a device brought by Leon that allows her to revisit scenes from her past. With little to do in the clinic, she begins revisiting so that she can see her parents and her stepbrother/lover Justin.

This novel is moody and contemplative rather than eventful. It explores such issues as the treatment of animals in labs and zoos, our responsibilities to other people and animals, the dangers of freedom vs. the comfort of restriction.

Sometimes this novel flagged a little for me. I was less interested in the present-time story than in the revisits. I also came to understand how someone could love an octopus.

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Review 2273: The Man in the High Castle

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I wanted to read The Man in the High Castle for the 1962 Club, but it didn’t arrive from the library in time. Although speculative fiction is generally not my genre, this book is so well known that I was curious about it.

The novel postulates that the Axis powers won World War II. As a result, the United States was divided between Germany and Japan except for the Rocky Mountain states, which were deemed unimportant. Germany has the Eastern states and Europe and Japan has the Pacific states and Asia.

The action of most of the novel takes place in San Francisco, where a lot is going on. Frank Frink has quit his job at the factory and been convinced by his coworker to make jewelry, which his coworker is trying to sell. Mr. Cheldan, an antique dealer who specializes in pre-war American goods, very popular with Japanese businessmen, who are the only people with any money, finds out that some of his goods are counterfeit. A mysterious Swede named Mr. Beyner is coming to visit Mr. Tagomi at the Japanese Trade Mission. In the Rocky Mountain states, Julia Frink, Frank’s ex-wife, has met a young man. All of these characters incessantly consult the I Ching.

The fortunes of all these characters are going to be affected by the death of the head of Germany and the resulting factional struggle for power. A shocking book is circulating that posits that the Allies won the war. It’s banned in German areas, but in San Francisco everyone is reading it.

Almost 100 pages into this novel, I was profoundly uninterested in what was going on with all these characters. I only continued with the book because it began to be obvious who the person referred to by the title was, and I was mildly interested in that.

One of my problems with the book was the writing style, which is often very telegraphic, especially when reporting characters’ thoughts, leaving out parts of speech and using a lot of sentence fragments. I’m not familiar with Dick’s writing style, but at first I thought this was a device to show a sort of stereotyped Japanese influence, but then he used the same style for the thoughts of characters from the German-controlled areas.

I won’t tell what it is, but this is a novel with a twist. For me, novels with twists generally make everything fall into place, just a new place. However, in this case I felt the twist made the whole rest of the novel meaningless.

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Review 2188: Which Way?

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Which Way? is an early speculative novel about how a small choice can affect the rest of your life. After a beginning section that introduces us to Claudia Heseltine and gets her to the age of 22, she is presented with a choice of invitations—two by letter and one by phone—for the same weekend. Then the rest of the novel is split into thirds depending upon the invitation she decides to accept.

Claudia is a popular girl with intellectual and cultural interests. She has a close friendship with Hugo Lester, and at the point where the decision comes in, she has promised to visit his family home, and it is clear that he plans to propose to her. So, selecting another of the invitations means breaking her promise.

I found interesting what Benson makes of Claudia’s three fates and how these reflect the times. In two stories she marries, although only in one does she marry Hugo. In one she has a romantic (as opposed to sexual) affair with a married man and in another a full-fledged affair with the same man. All of the stories involve some pain, but Claudia herself changes with the situations she is in, so that in the story where she is faithful to her husband she seems the most superficial and frivolous.

Although, interestingly, she ends up happiest in the story where she remains single, she thinks she has missed the most important things in life—which are, of course, marriage and motherhood. There’s no happy career girl in the novel, although Simon Thomas points out in the Afterword that at her marriage she is much more innocent than he would have expected for the 1920s. In both stories in which she is married, she spends her honeymoon crying after ignoring the vaguely ominous things her mother tries to tell her.

I thought this book was most interesting as a portrait of the times, for the choices that are available and how Claudia views them.

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2182: The Love Child

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I guess I can say I’ve been theme reading lately with no plan to do so. By this I mean that I’ve been accidentally reading books with something unusual in common within weeks of each other. For example, I never read any books set in Sri Lanka (except one historical romance I read several years ago), yet within weeks I ended up reading two literary novels set there, one in the 80s and one more recently. Similarly, last summer I read two books set in Madagascar. Now, who would think that there were two books about an imaginary person who comes to life? Yet, a few weeks ago I reviewed Miss Hargreaves for the 1940 Club, and here is another novel on the same subject.

The Love Child is a different kettle of fish from Miss Hargreaves, though. The latter is an amusing romp, while the former looks more seriously at the fate of women in post-World War I England, where there was a surplus of them by nearly two million.

With the death of her mother, Agatha Bodenham (considered middle aged at 32) finds herself unexpectedly lonely. She and her mother have been very reserved and have not engaged in society, so she has no friends.

She remembers having an imaginary friend when she was a girl, a friend named Clarissa whom she romped with until her mother told her she was too old for such things. She begins by remembering the games she played with Clarissa, and eventually Clarissa reappears as an 11-year-old girl. Clarissa is a graceful, delicate girl, completely Agatha’s opposite. Agatha plays make-believe games with her and enjoys herself. But slowly Clarissa becomes visible to others.

When called upon to account for Clarissa’s existence, Agatha is confused and says she is her “love child.” No one believes this, but everyone assumes Clarissa is some relative.

Problems begin, though, when Clarissa starts to have a mind of her own.

This novel is quite a sad story, maybe, depending on how you understand the ending. It rests on then-current beliefs about how the lack of motherhood might affect women (it was published in 1927) and in the fate of unmarried women. I found it sometimes flagging for me but was interested to see how it ended.

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2179: A Shock

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If I hadn’t been reading A Shock for my James Tait Black project, I certainly would not have picked it out based on its description on the back cover: “a rondel of interlocking stories . . . both deracinated and potent with place, druggy but shot through with a terrifying penetration of reality.” How pretentious.

The stories are unusually linked, by characters but also by stories told in a pub. Although I found some of them interesting, I did not find them emotionally engaging, and the explicit sex in some of them is not my thing.

Notice that I haven’t said what they are about. That’s because it’s hard to describe, and a short recap of each story wouldn’t help. Although not exactly magical realism, some of the stories, while apparently set in reality, become a little fantastical.

And that’s what I have to say about that.

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Review 2172: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

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Just by coincidence, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is the second book set in Sri Lanka that I’ve read in a few months. It is part of my Booker Prize shortlist project.

It’s December 1987 and Maali Almeida is dead. He finds himself watching his body being thrown into a lake, but he can’t remember who killed him or why. A photographer, a gambler, an irresponsible and unfaithful gay lover, Maali had a purpose—to reveal the photos he’s taken of the carnage and double-dealing involved in the civil war in the hopes of stopping it.

Faced with a grotesque and bewildering afterlife, Maali is determined to get his two friends, Jaki, who is in love with him, and DD, her cousin with whom Maali was in love, to find his hidden photographs and make sure they are seen. To do this, he has to figure out the inconsistent rules of the In Between, avoid being consumed by the demon Mahakali, and learn how to be heard by humans.

As with Lincoln in the Bardo, I was not enamored of Karunatilaka’s conception of the afterlife nor was I very interested in the philosophical ramifications of Maali’s conversations with other dead people, demons, and animals. However, I was very interested in his depictions of Sri Lanka’s war and got dragged into the action almost despite myself. His humor is not mine, however.

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Review 2130: The Cartographers

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Seven years ago, Nell Young was on her way to her dream job after interning in the Cartography Department at the New York Public Library. Her father, the head of the department, had hinted that a position was hers. In her excitement, she went down into the archives hoping to make a big discovery. This action initiated the Junk Box incident, after which she found herself fired and unemployable. Eventually, she got a job finding and copying maps for decorative purposes. She hasn’t spoken to her father since.

Suddenly, she receives a call from Swann, a former co-worker, telling her that her father was found dead in his office. She goes there to talk to the police. The death appears natural, but they are looking into it. When she is sitting at her father’s desk, she surreptitiously presses a button for a secret drawer and finds a portfolio. Returning home, she finds a map in the portfolio—not just a map but the one that appeared to be worthless when she originally found it in the Junk Box seven years ago, an ordinary road map from 1930.

When Nell looks the map up, she finds that every other copy of it has either been destroyed or stolen. It appears to be valuable on the dark web, but prospective searchers are warned to beware of a mysterious group called The Cartographers.

If you read my blog, you probably know I have a tricky relationship with magical realism. Suffice it to say that I found this novel most interesting before the magic came in, which it did in a obvious way at about page 150.

But I even had some problems with the realistic parts—in particular, that scholars of cartography would take seriously the idea of the Dream Atlas, not to mention the subsequent project.

Another problem was the shift in narration. Most of the book is in third person, but several chapters revealing secrets from the past are narrated by various friends of Nell’s parents. First, multiple narrators need to sound like different people. Shepherd’s do not. Second, the style of third-person narration is different from speaking. Shepherd’s is not.

I guess readers who go into this novel just as an adventure story and don’t look at it too closely will enjoy it most.

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Review 2072: To Paradise

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After reading Yanagihara’s deeply touching second book, A Little Life, I couldn’t wait to plunge into To Paradise. While reading the first section, though, I was afraid I was going to be disappointed, especially as it is of the genre speculative fiction, which is not one I’m usually interested in. But Yanagihara knows how to spin a tale.

The novel is split into three books, each set 100 years apart, starting in 1893. Although I’ve seen the novel described as a history of a family, let’s just say that names and personas repeat through the book, only with characters taking different roles. All of the books are set in New York City. They also feature strangely inert main characters.

This New York, though, is different from the one we know. After a civil war, the United States is fractured into pieces, one of which, called the Free States (in which New York resides), believes in freedom of religion and marriage between any two adults. David Bingham belongs to a family whose members are all in same-sex marriages. He is from a wealthy old family, and he is the eldest, but he has been a disappointment to his grandfather. He is subject to bouts of debilitating depression and seizures, and he has shown no interest in pursing any kind of career.

Another characteristic of the Free States is the prevalence of arranged marriages. David’s grandfather has been trying to arrange one for him, and the current candidate is an older man named Charles Griffith, whom David has at least agreed to meet. He likes Charles, but then he meets Edward Bishop, a poor musician. David falls for Edward, a man he knows his grandfather would consider a fortune hunter.

In 1993, David Bingham is a young Hawaiian who has left his home and his heritage as a native prince and with an incomplete law degree is working in a law firm. He is living with the wealthy older head of the firm, Charles Griffith, and although he loves Charles, because of this relationship, he spends most of his time with older men. AIDS is making its way through the community.

Also part of this book is a long narrative by David’s father, who is obsessed by his friendship with Edward Bishop, a Hawaiian nationalist with a dream of a return to a Hawaiian monarchy. Although this action causes a bit of a lull in the novel’s forward motion, we come to understand David’s alienation from his family.

In 2093, Charlie Griffith is a young woman living in a dangerous and autocratic society, the controls of which are designed to limit the spread of a deadly series of infectious diseases. Charlie herself is limited mentally and emotionally because she was a victim of one of these viruses when she was a child.

Her grandfather has arranged a marriage for her, but has traded a possibility of a loving marriage for a secure one with a gay male. Her husband has vowed to care for her in exchange for the appearance of a heterosexual marriage because homosexuality is becoming illegal. Then Charlie makes a friend named David.

This novel has many overarching themes, that of family, particularly relationships with grandparents, as none of the protagonists have functioning parents; sexuality in society; sickness and disease; and self-actualization. I was at first taken aback by the extreme passivity of its protagonists and in fact thought the first David Bingham was selfish and immature. Still, Yanigihara’s narrative pulls you in, and I found this novel completely absorbing. Some readers will be disappointed by Yanagihara’s decision to leave endings open, but I think that’s one of the things that makes this ambitious novel more interesting.

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