Recent reading
Feb. 27th, 2024 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeRider at the Gate, by C. J. Cherryh
When I was halfway through this book I posted on discord:
"It's set on an alien planet where all the animals are overwhelmingly psychic, and humans can only survive by forming telepathic bonds with the native horses. Two things I find really compelling about this are: the image of daily life out in the wilds, constantly being brushed against by the viewpoint of mice observing you from the bushes (and the fear that it might be a large predator spoofing a collection of mice). And, the way it's about emotional regulation. A rider's emotions, if uncontrolled, will pass to their horse, who will broadcast it to other horses and back to their riders, making a feedback loop. This makes life difficult! Especially as one of the main characters is, for perfectly understandable reasons, very bad at it.
That remains basically my summary and sales pitch! More thoughts, having finished:
There was a conversation on that same discord recently about the degree to which people see what they read in the mind's eye. As I may have said here before, I'm in the middle, it depends very much on the book. I kept putting this one down, reading another grabbier novel, and coming back to it; I think the un-grabby part of this book, for me, is the way its descriptions totally fail to evoke images for me. I have no sense of distances, my mental images are restricted very closely to the events described. On a bridge high above a ravine, I see the planks, and I see the dangerous rocks below, but it's as though there's no gap between them. There's peril, but no space. And I have only the haziest sense of what the horses in this book actually look like.
The strengths of this writing, for me, are about the insides of people's heads. A lot of this book is trekking across snow, and it's not the snowy landscape that's vivid, it's the being cold and having a headache and having a splinter through your thumb. Even though I kept putting it down, I became absolutely sure I wanted to finish it once I got to the hundred page mark and there was a scene in which a callow young rider was being criticised/talked down to/taught by an experienced one, and the young rider couldn't stop projecting his dissatisfaction with this out through his horse's mind. Juicy uncomfortable dynamics! There are other emotional/logistical set pieces which are more spoilery to describe but really good.
And there's a great sense of people mucking along through contingency as best they can. I don't think there's a major character in this book who doesn't at some point make a huge mistake. I was trying to come up with a Lord of the Rings comparison, but at first, all the ones I thought of seem to be criticising Tolkien for not doing things he actually does do; it's not that people in LotR don't make significant mistakes, and it's not that people in Cherryh novels don't make heroic and successful efforts. Maybe in a Cherryh novel the Fellowship could succeed. But there's no grace here, as there is in LotR; no special likelihood that anything lies behind human effort.
The Bonobo's Dream, by Rose Mulready.
I hesitate to say much about this short book, because many of its pleasures lie in not quite knowing what world the characters live in. The first time it described somebody cutting a lemon 'with two hisses of air' I thought, that's not really an apt description of a lemon. The second similar description made it clear that something really weird was up with this household's fruit. Re. envisioning what you read, I spent a while in this book not knowing whether to see the characters as humans or bonobos.
The book starts with James; whatever species he may turn out to be, he's a boy who feels pressured by the attention of his parents and mostly wants to sit alone in his room drawing the trees out the window. His father is a famous artist who no longer even cares about the affairs he's having; his mother is lonely and bored and unsettled in her memories. His sister is coming home soon for her birthday. She always brings trouble; but perhaps not usually as much as this.
I bought The Bonobo's Dream from the $5 trolleys where I work, because it had a blurb from Margo Lanagan, and another blurb describing it as 'Aldous Huxley on more mushrooms than usual, or Angela Carter on pixie dust.' I think Angela Carter books themselves are already on at least this much pixie dust, (and I haven't read any Huxley), but I do think it's a less random blurb than a lot of 'this book is Classic X + Classic Y' blurbs are.
I didn't get to the end feeling totally satisfied - I think I wanted it to keep on developing a bit longer than it did, but its shape is quite simple in the end and didn't quite click for me. Still a good one to have read.
When I was halfway through this book I posted on discord:
"It's set on an alien planet where all the animals are overwhelmingly psychic, and humans can only survive by forming telepathic bonds with the native horses. Two things I find really compelling about this are: the image of daily life out in the wilds, constantly being brushed against by the viewpoint of mice observing you from the bushes (and the fear that it might be a large predator spoofing a collection of mice). And, the way it's about emotional regulation. A rider's emotions, if uncontrolled, will pass to their horse, who will broadcast it to other horses and back to their riders, making a feedback loop. This makes life difficult! Especially as one of the main characters is, for perfectly understandable reasons, very bad at it.
That remains basically my summary and sales pitch! More thoughts, having finished:
There was a conversation on that same discord recently about the degree to which people see what they read in the mind's eye. As I may have said here before, I'm in the middle, it depends very much on the book. I kept putting this one down, reading another grabbier novel, and coming back to it; I think the un-grabby part of this book, for me, is the way its descriptions totally fail to evoke images for me. I have no sense of distances, my mental images are restricted very closely to the events described. On a bridge high above a ravine, I see the planks, and I see the dangerous rocks below, but it's as though there's no gap between them. There's peril, but no space. And I have only the haziest sense of what the horses in this book actually look like.
The strengths of this writing, for me, are about the insides of people's heads. A lot of this book is trekking across snow, and it's not the snowy landscape that's vivid, it's the being cold and having a headache and having a splinter through your thumb. Even though I kept putting it down, I became absolutely sure I wanted to finish it once I got to the hundred page mark and there was a scene in which a callow young rider was being criticised/talked down to/taught by an experienced one, and the young rider couldn't stop projecting his dissatisfaction with this out through his horse's mind. Juicy uncomfortable dynamics! There are other emotional/logistical set pieces which are more spoilery to describe but really good.
And there's a great sense of people mucking along through contingency as best they can. I don't think there's a major character in this book who doesn't at some point make a huge mistake. I was trying to come up with a Lord of the Rings comparison, but at first, all the ones I thought of seem to be criticising Tolkien for not doing things he actually does do; it's not that people in LotR don't make significant mistakes, and it's not that people in Cherryh novels don't make heroic and successful efforts. Maybe in a Cherryh novel the Fellowship could succeed. But there's no grace here, as there is in LotR; no special likelihood that anything lies behind human effort.
The Bonobo's Dream, by Rose Mulready.
I hesitate to say much about this short book, because many of its pleasures lie in not quite knowing what world the characters live in. The first time it described somebody cutting a lemon 'with two hisses of air' I thought, that's not really an apt description of a lemon. The second similar description made it clear that something really weird was up with this household's fruit. Re. envisioning what you read, I spent a while in this book not knowing whether to see the characters as humans or bonobos.
The book starts with James; whatever species he may turn out to be, he's a boy who feels pressured by the attention of his parents and mostly wants to sit alone in his room drawing the trees out the window. His father is a famous artist who no longer even cares about the affairs he's having; his mother is lonely and bored and unsettled in her memories. His sister is coming home soon for her birthday. She always brings trouble; but perhaps not usually as much as this.
I bought The Bonobo's Dream from the $5 trolleys where I work, because it had a blurb from Margo Lanagan, and another blurb describing it as 'Aldous Huxley on more mushrooms than usual, or Angela Carter on pixie dust.' I think Angela Carter books themselves are already on at least this much pixie dust, (and I haven't read any Huxley), but I do think it's a less random blurb than a lot of 'this book is Classic X + Classic Y' blurbs are.
I didn't get to the end feeling totally satisfied - I think I wanted it to keep on developing a bit longer than it did, but its shape is quite simple in the end and didn't quite click for me. Still a good one to have read.
