a gallimaufry

round-up: August 2024

This month I’m still not up to reading anything very challenging, but that doesn’t mean to say I haven’t read some excellent books.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl (reread)

Still seeking something to quench my The Secret History thirst, at the beginning of this month I turned to a novel with some similarities in its set-up. Blue Van Meer’s life with her professor father has been peripatetic, with never more than a term or two in any one town. But then they arrive in Stockton, NC, where Blue is to spend her final year of school preparing for Harvard. Lonely Blue is flattered to be invited to join the Bluebloods, a group of students favoured by the film studies teacher, Hannah Schneider, who hosts them at her house every week. And then on a camping trip in the forest, Blue finds Hannah hanged from a tree. I enjoyed this novel a great deal more than when I first read it and it was massively hyped: now I can see it more clearly. Blue’s narrative is precocious, snobbish and perceptive, and the story twists satisfyingly, though I could have done with a lot fewer of the mainly invented bibliographical references with which the text is increasingly unconvincingly and annoyingly peppered. Also features probably the most insufferable father figure in literature.

The Little Friend, by Donna Tartt

Finally had the chance to fill the void left by The Secret History when this arrived in the post. Lacking the narrative drive of TSH, The Little Friend is a very slow and immersive novel to read, but I alone perhaps of all readers everywhere think it’s a better book, stuffed with extraordinarily vivid writing. When she was a baby, Harriet’s brother was murdered and his killer never caught. This summer, twelve-year-old Harriet intends to avenge him, a journey that takes her to dark places and dangerous people. Tartt explores the effects of the original traumatic event on Robin’s family and friends, and the deeply unequal society in which they live. Awful and amazing.

The Edible Woman, by Margaret Atwoord (reread)

Marian is engaged to be married but her subconscious seems to have doubts. An entertaining look at the life prospects of a young female graduate in 1960s Toronto, it was Atwood’s first published novel and impresses with its wry, pragmatic humour. In some ways, life has improved so much for us since then. In some ways, it hasn’t changed at all.

Barbara Comyms: A Savage Innocence, by Avril Horner

I have been waiting for years for this, a life of one of my favourite writers, and this is a good solid biography. Comyns drew closely on her own life for some of her fiction, and that life was pretty colourful, which makes for an interesting biography: a childhood filled with animals and eccentric, neglectful parents; early artistic ambition blighted by extreme poverty and a useless husband; racketeering in World War II; marriage to a second husband who was suspected of being a spy; ex-patriot life in Spain. Even in the middle of the last century, publishing was fickle and it wasn’t until Virago championed Comyns’s works in the 1980s that her talent was properly recognised. Time to reread her novels again…

The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler (reread)

Read this first so long ago that I had forgotten most of it but odd whiffs came back to me, usually minor details. What a smart writer Chandler was, how ably he constructs his world, every word really works for its place. Not always convinced by his female characters, if I want to carp.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John le Carré

My first le Carré! Not what I was expecting, very cynical, very sordid, very good.

In the Forests of Serre, by Patricia McKillip

In every way, the diametric opposite of le Carré. McKillip’s fiction, especially her later works, are what I read when I am sad. They are magical, ambiguous, beautiful and hopeful. Even the villains are noble. It is quite hard to describe them, as they tend to have a chorus of characters rather than a central character, who must somehow achieve harmony together in order to resolve a problem which they may not even understand after it has been resolved. A big wallow in loveliness.

Cinderella is Dead, by Kalynn Byron, and A Study in Drowning, by Ava Reid

In Cinderella is Dead, a cruel king oversees a society where the legend of Cinderella is used to oppress women. In A Study in Drowning, a student of architecture is commissioned to design a house by the sea for the heir of her favourite writer. I’ve chosen to put these two YA novels together because I thought they both had lots going for them, considered theme both flawed, yet felt more forgiving of the flaws of one than of the other. And I have been wondering why that was, and yes it depends on the flaws. I suppose that it always comes down to a quality of the writing, that it does a bit more than just tell you a story but creates a mood or atmosphere, or conveys more than just what is on the surface. And secondly I suppose that if you have a mysterious dead author, Welsh mythic vibes, fairies and a vast, mouldering house, I am always going to cut you more slack.

Tidemagic: The Many Faces of Ista Flit, by Clare Harlow

There’s a lot of really good children’s fantasy being published at the moment and this is a prime example. In Shelwich, people have been being snatched by monstrous grilk, including Ista Flit’s father. And magic, which is fuller when the tide is high, is growing stronger. Can Ista and her friends find the missing people and discover the secrets hidden in the caverns under Shelwich before it’s too late? I think you know the answer, but it’s a fun adventure getting there.

October, October, by Katya Balen

Have been wanting to read this since it was first published and it was absolutely worth the wait. October lives an idyllic life in the woods with her father until he has an accident and she has to go and live in London with her mother, from whom she is estranged. Magical and astoundingly written in a child’s stream of consciousness, so hard to do well and this was just perfect.

 

Framing Fantasy: Matthew Sangster & Brian Attebery

A couple of days ago I watched this fascinating discussion about fantasy between Dr Matthew Sangster and Professor Brian Attebery, chaired by Dr Dimitra Fimi under the auspices of the Glasgow University Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. (By the looks of it, their YouTube channel has lots of other interesting talks on it.)

I enjoyed it a lot and was particularly taken with the idea of ‘fuzzy sets’ which they talked about as part of the vexed question of how we define fantasy. ‘Fantasy literature’ is a western construct and even within that tradition there are plenty of works which are hard to categorise. Few people would argue with The Lord of the Rings being classified as fantasy, but what about The Master and Margarita, Lolly Willowes, Nights at the Circus or Orlando? (And is it even useful to divide literature like this, unless of course you are a bookshop?)

The idea of fuzzy sets builds on the idea of there not being a binary fantasy/realist divide in fiction, but something of a continuum. You look at relationships and influences of texts upon another – and then you start creating a more interesting picture to explore. An example that they gave was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy: an influence being Dickens’s fiction. Rather than isolating texts, you open them up.

Anyway, if you have time, then do listen… And last year I wrote about Brian Attebery’s Fantasy: How it Works for Shiny New Books if you are interested...

 

Ombria in Shadow, by Patricia A. McKillip

It’s a funny thing, but during the school holidays I seem to have less time for writing blog posts than during the term. So a month has passed since my last post, and that wasn’t really a post anyway. Meanwhile I have eaten a lot of cheese, holidayed in Norfolk and Suffolk, gardened, played with my daughter and read quite a lot, although I haven’t felt like writing about any of the books I have read, much as I enjoyed them. However, I do feel like writing about Ombria in Shadow because I was so struck by it.

I am not well read in fantasy because for a long time I was prejudiced against most of it, despite having immersed myself in the work of C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Susan Cooper and Alan Garner as a child. However, all fiction is to some extent fantasy, and fantastical literature can do things that realist literature cannot, and I’ve enjoyed diving in to it. Patricia McKillip being a highly regarded American writer of fantasy I thought I would investigate her work, and Ombria in Shadow, which in 2003 won both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award, seemed a good place to start.

(Kinuko Y. Craft, cover art for Ombria in Shadow, from here)

The plot appears fairly straightforward. Upon the sudden death of Royce Greve, the crown of Ombria passes to Prince Kyel, still a little boy. His creepy great-aunt, Domina Pearl, will act as regent; with eyes apparently everywhere and a very sinister royal guard, only the foolish dare challenge her. What ‘the Black Pearl’ intends is not immediately clear, but it bodes no good for her subjects. Ranged against her, but powerless, are Royce’s former mistress, the bastard son of one of Royce’s sisters and Mag, a girl made of wax by a subterranean sorceress, Faey.

McKillip is rightly admired for her atmospheric prose, and she uses it to evoke a city which bears loose similarities to Renaissance or perhaps eighteenth-century European city states, lit by swords, dressed in brocades and steeped in treachery. Yet for all the rich detail of sapphire-heeled shoes and poison-dribbling toads, the effect is of a dreamlike rather than concrete world, perhaps because McKillip uses a lot of visual description but relies much less on smell, touch or sound to convey her world. This is particularly appropriate to a novel which meditates on ambiguity, illusion and alternative realities. Nothing and nobody is what or whom they appear to be, and sight is proved time and time again to be unreliable, vulnerable to manipulation and trickery. Artists and sorcerers have the most accurate vision.

(Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Triumphal Arch, from Grotteschi, etching, engraving, drypoint, burnishing; c. 1748; the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The city itself, rather than any of the characters, forms the focus of the novel. Past its prime, violent and decaying, it is a city with a shadow, another city beneath its streets. This dark city is actually Ombria’s past in physical form: time has been made into place. Those who look hard enough can find entrances to this shadow city in crumbling doorways and old dusty shops; they are usually seeking Faey, who will prepare any potion, poison or charm for a fee. Ombria’s palace too has a shadowy counterpart, a labyrinth of abandoned rooms which – not to spoil too much of the story but I always spoil things a bit in my reviews, sorry, I can’t really write them otherwise – are also a portal to another realm. The city and its shadows are being thrown out of balance by Domina Pearl and ultimately the plot drives towards not the destruction of evil or good but the renewal of Ombria and the restoration of harmony between its two sides.

Biological parents are all but non-existent, but maternal relationships – Domina Pearl’s and Lydea’s with Kyel, Faey’s with Mag – are significant motivators in a story in which the male characters are largely ineffective or unable to act, and the women are powerful and drive the plot. In fact, the biological origins of many of the characters are unclear for much if not all of the novel. Where do Domina Pearl, Faey and Mag really ‘come from’? Even Ducon’s parents remain nameless. The court is full of young men who resemble one another because they are all of the House of Greve, but this doesn’t actually mean anything. They plot but direct what little action they’re capable of against the wrong targets, never Domina Pearl; they resemble kings but do not behave like them. Just as the past, where Faey lives and to which Domina Pearl is deliberately abandoning the present city, may influence but should not define Ombria, so your genetic inheritance does not dictate who you are. Indeed, Faey’s pretend ghosts spouting fake history and the final chapter of the novel (I don’t want to give away any more!) suggest that time is unstable and unreliable anyway.

Here is the passage in which Lydea, the former king’s mistress, visits Faey in her underground mansion. It illustrates McKillip’s style and the book’s interest in time as physical, malleable:

Lydea, drinking an endless cup of tea in the sorceress’s leafy chamber, realized occasionally, in the buried part of her where time still moved, that she was spellbound. Somewhere, hours passed during a single sip; night fell as she replaced her cup in the saucer; the sun rose when she lifted it again. The sorceress, or an illusion of her, spoke lightly of the weather, though there was none, and of people whom she seemed to think that Lydea knew, while her terrible eyes smoldered and fumed boiling pitch and fire. Sentences echoed through time, repeating themselves. Now and then, Lydea, her mind as tranquil as a summer afternoon, heard the echo, felt her mouth move to say something appropriate words that she must have said a hundred times between the moment she began to raise her cup and the moment it touched her lips. She never tasted the tea; she might have been drinking cloud.

‘How fortunate we are that the morning rain has ended,’ the sorceress commented, though neither night nor day was visible around them. ‘We will be able to go after all to—’ She stopped abruptly. Lydea felt perfunctory words leaving her lips like bubbles. The sorceress interrupted her harshly. ‘There is a stranger below.’

Lydea, about to make her usual reply to that, realized she had none. As if a glass dome over her had shattered, she sat in shards of time, bewilderedly trying to piece fragments together. She stared at the teacup halfway to her lips.  The tea was stone-cold and had grown a tiny, floating garden of mold.

This is not a novel that teaches you a great deal about human nature but it is a novel which makes you look at the world about you differently. I have found myself addicted to McKillip’s beautiful and suggestive language and her rich use of fairy-tale and Gothic imagery, her ability to conjure mystery and magic, and even though I have an obscene number of books waiting to be read all I want to do now is order all of her novels and immerse myself in her imagination. Are there any other McKillip fans out there? Speak to me!