landingtree

Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson.

When aliens land on the moon, Ariel Blum is a programmer and snarky video game reviewer, paying the bills by working on endless retreads of a pony game he doesn't respect. As soon as he sees footage of an alien using a computer, he says, "They play computer games too! I'm going to get my hands on one and review it." One of the aliens – an anarchist collective of twenty-one species whose attitude to first contact is "whenever someone has an interesting idea we'll give it a go" – thinks this sounds like interspecies-harmony-creating fun. At a time when alien contact is changing absolutely everyone's lives, this is a story about how it changes the lives of Ariel and his friends, who end up not exactly central to unfolding events but closer to the center than they had any expectation of getting.

The book does have a plot, but it feels very much like a lot of people getting on with their lives in whatever way makes sense at the time. This is probably due to the book being serialized and the author has said he's making the sequel tighter, but nevertheless I enjoyed the looseness.

I always used to wonder what science fiction was written by people in science fiction novels, here we have humans learning to think about first contact by playing the games made million years earlier by people from another species when they were first contacted. I love the details of how the various aliens have arrived at fiction differently.

I don't like the romance plots – ( “i.e. ) Also I thought the duo of government representatives sat on a not-totally-satisfying seesaw between comedic and serious representatives of the coercive nature of government. Also, if you don't like Ariel's 'snark on the internet' voice, this may not be for you, since the book's constructed entirely out of his public and private blog posts.

The High Jump, by Elizabeth Knox.

This has been on my to-read shelf for almost as long as I've been in Wellington. It's autobiographical fiction, three novellas, originally published as singles but always meant to build on each other, each set in a different childhood home. It's told from various viewpoints but hones in more as it goes on Lex: middle sister, stubborn yet suggestible, capable of being overwhelmed by her own imagination.

This writing is in love with language, it's hurtling round the race track and sometimes skidding off at the corners. Every metaphor is surprising, some with perfect aptness, and some strange enough that I have to stop and peer: “their blood measuring and selling seconds by the yard, hearts' meters ticking over.” Extravagant, yet not there for nothing, in a chapter focused on children beginning to grapple with the reality of death. I've read interviews with Elizabeth (am I on first-name reviewing terms with Elizabeth? I suppose so. I have eaten curry at her house) about how she wouldn't go back to that, how consciously she curtails it in later books. On the one hand I'm glad she did, because it's sometimes too much, it's sometimes sentences prancing circles around bewildered pages and paragraphs – but on the other I'm going to go off enthusiastically to find her other early language-drunk books which I haven't read.

Some of my favorite moments in Elizabeth's books are disasters – she's written the two best sequences involving dangerous fire that I can think of. To her, the world is elemental: this book is peppered with moments when it leans in, thrumming with vitality and force.

All Elizabeth Knox characters are inflected with Elizabeth – here as often in her books I sometimes stop and say to myself, “Would this person really think this subtle bit of wordplay?” Like how Pamela Dean characters tend to quote Shakespeare, Elizabeth Knox characters tend to rest weight on puns and shavings of significance in the sounds of words.

This book is very much about children struggling to find language for things, ways of thinking about the unthinkable, relying on the adults in their lives to help pace their understanding and sometimes being let down horribly – as in the third section, when one of the sisters is abused by a neighbor and the others struggle to react, surrounded by adults who they can't rely on to do more than maintain a polite silence.

A Free Man of Color, by Barbara Hambly

A historical murder mystery set in post-Napoleonic New Orleans. Benjamin January was born a slave but freed in childhood, trained in Paris as a musician and a surgeon. Now personal tragedy has brought him back to his old home, where he's quickly entangled in the events surrounding a murder. In a city where he must carry papers proving that he's free, and where even those might be worth nothing in the wrong context, he has to negotiate a justice system which is not wholly uninterested in finding the actual killer but may be a whole lot more interested in not convicting anyone white and important. Which brings him up against the question of why he returned to a place like this, and what he stands to gain and lose by leaving it again.

The book took a while to get up to steam – I didn't super enjoy the book's setup phase, I didn't click into being properly engaged until Benjamin was standing over a dead body – but once it gets steam it gets a lot of it. The intricacies of New Orleans culture are really well done and interesting, and I care about the people. So this leaves me not inclined to go read other things by Barbara Hambly except that I do now want to read all the other Benjamin January novels, because I am invested. (Would this happen to me with every other Barbara Hambly series also? We shall not know for some time, because Benjamin January is going to take me ages, there are nineteen books and counting.)

Reading next:

Sofia Samatar's short story collection Tender, possibly. Alas that a cool local bookshop is closing down, happiness that I found this at its closing sale. Or maybe I'll read one of the (*counts*) twenty-four books sitting beside my bed. Hmm, I should maybe put some of those away on the... almost completely full shelves, right, I guess these just live here now.

It isn't obvious to me why I don't like this book more. I read an earlier draft of it too, and I assumed that my somewhat disengaged response was largely based on my mood at the time, but no, I have the same response now -- while still seeing all the positives which originally made me track the problem to myself instead of the book. One of the book's characters lives under a spell which makes him impossible to fully perceive - people look at him and see not a memorable face, but an assemblage of features - and the book itself seems to me to rest under a spell like that. Out of the corner of my eye it seems like a book I should like more than I do, which, as with The Obelisk Gate, I find frustrating. It makes me want to spend more time thinking about it, and not posting this post until I'm more sure -- but in service of my intention to write up every book I read, and since I'm already two books behind:

The Absolute Book twines various stories together, but begins with the fact that Taryn Cornick's sister has been murdered, and Taryn has found a way to answer that murder with vengeance. But she, previously an atheist, is given reason to believe that she may have a real and damnable soul, and even though her own sin is subtler and more apparently just than the one she has punished, she may be disproportionately imperilled by her actions. Because she has recently written a book of popular history which has made her interesting to those who can exploit sin, a book about the disasters to which libraries are vulnerable, in which one particular artifact pops up again and again, surviving fires which should have destroyed it. An artifact whose trail had been lost, until she picked it out and put it on display.

Even this bit of plot summary feels like too much disturbance of the book's smooth surface -- the choice of when to make what obvious being so particular, when the protagonist begins in a state of ignorance about the rules of reality. But also, as plot summaries go, it doesn't begin to cover things. This is a thick book with a lot going on in it.

So what doesn't work for me? Things I have to invest effort in believing. I think that's what adds up cumulatively to my disengagement, even though in every instance, I can invest the effort. Characters who don't feel whole to me unless I give them a little extra twist: the one with the spell of vagueness on him, who spends the whole first chunk of the book not feeling vague to me at all. A spy who doesn't feel like a spy, who never has the kind of conversation which suggests specific professional competence. (In fact the whole response of the authorities to what's going on in the book feels insufficient to me. The book isn't really about those authorities, but they feel like a loose end, or rather like something which has been rendered a single loose end when it should have been something more complicated. I'm not sure if I use 'should' there to mean 'would in reality' or 'come on, you've put in spies! There has to be spy stuff when you've put in spies!')

This thing with characters is an extension of the quality which I remember making the characters in others of Elizabeth's books (especially The Vintner's Luck) complex and real to me: a quality of not being filled in from the start, not declaring themselves at once by action or self-description, but of slowly opening, to end up complete. I wonder if it's simply the much wider angle of The Absolute Book which makes the difference, withdrawing far enough that I start seeing unreality instead of unveiling coherence.

There is also the metaphysics, which are blended in a way that doesn't quite sit well with me.* And there's the pace of revelation and what I can hypothesize about what's going on. I don't have large enough expectations about what the story's central artifact is and who is hunting it and why to be left with them either satisfyingly fulfilled or satisfyingly undermined -- and this applies to the experience of rereading it, too -- even though I like the answers. This came clearer to me when I was trying to describe the story of those who are looking for the artifact, because I could describe them in a single neat sentence, but it's a sentence that takes you right from the start of the book's questions about them to the end of its revelations: a satisfying sentence, no smaller slice of which is as satisfying.

Among the many features of the book I like -- wonderful descriptions of beauty and ugliness and, especially, of fire, details of the blended metaphysics which tingle down my spine -- two set pieces stand out, extended scenes which do opposite involving and difficult things and in which everything I've described as not working does work: one of them an action scene based on close attention to what's physically possible and to the rhythms of suspense, and the other taking place on a plane of reality where where the physically possible is almost but not quite irrelevant, and something like dream-logic reigns. I'd take either scene as an exemplar of how to write that thing. One of them kept me up till one in the morning and I cried at the end of the other.

* Not the thing which doesn't sit well with me, but a side-question which has been occurring to me every so often: when did gods being shaped and fed by belief, instead of/as well as the other way around, become one of the standard options available to fantasy? I remember meeting it first in Small Gods, but is that when it was new?

To begin with, there's the invented South American country, the group of soap-operatic revolutionary heroes, the three fictional First Nations, and the haunting in the presidential palace. It's a strange book where I have to put those things into the first line of the review, because they don't enter naturally into anything else I want to talk about.

Black Oxen has a quality of concentrated unexpectedness which is most familiar to me from cinema, from Mulholland Drive or Belle de Jour, where what is surprising may not be the next turn of the plot so much as the next choice of shot, or word, or tone, and where skilled use of incongruity makes parts of it positively hilarious -- while some of the tones involved are very dark indeed. I find it delightful in its density. This is not a book like The Dragon Waiting, where half the cleverness is unstated, in what's taken out of the structure without making it fall. Black Oxen is thick with itself. It has a wide reference with which to be unexpected; the physical world it's set in is textured and busy -- in the way that I can glance out my window right now and see, oh, a slightly rusty corrugated tin roof with two rustier nails popped up out of it, and, for some reason, a loose door hinge lying off to one side. The book has reference to a complicated world, whenever it wants what's outside the window to be realer than 'the tin roof', or wants one of its characters to be working a job not listed in a top twenty of common jobs in fiction. It also has a breadth of reference in that its characters, when they quote, are as likely to quote the Moomin books as Yeats.

It's a genre book without the usual genre tags. There's a story by Elizabeth Knox in the Small Beer Press Steampunk! collection, which made me think about the definition of steampunk, because, though it had anachronistic blimps and geothermal power, it did not feel fabulous. One of my expectations of steampunk is that it should walk a fine line between feeling possible and impossible, that it should not just have genre tags but wave them enthusiastically about its head in the parade. The story in question did not feel like steampunk to me because it felt too possible. Knox describes the real and the unreal with the same kind of telling sensory detail, which you wouldn't think would be hard to do, but it's a rare feeling for writing to give me, the feeling that it's not fantasy being written but naturalistic fiction about magic. (My usual association with those words would be, "Oh dear, someone scornful is trying to reinvent the elf," but this is a case of extreme familiarity with both elves and wheels). In this book, going to another world might be a minor backstory detail, and is anyway subordinated to the fact that whatever world you're in you have to live there, in the same kind of reality as everyone else does.

It is worth mentioning also that the book is very long, that it has enough plot to take it right through into a state of near plotlessness, and that the character list at the beginning is also printed on a handy bookmark so that readers can refer to it throughout without flipping back to the beginning. This is a book where there'll be a character who is actually named Abra Cadaver, and then his father will explain that he chose such a terrible pun in order to draw people's mockery away from crueler and more obvious corpse jokes (but also partly on a dare), and then the fact that the main character is named after both a corpse and a spell will end up having significant resonance. There is a character who the cast list describes as 'Edwin Money, a frail and elderly billionaire,' and your mileage may vary, but I love the book's determination to have its cake and eat it too. The characters all talk in a voice very like Knox's, with the same wordplay, wordplay that's willing to be slightly ungainly to get across complicated significances. And then they refer to the fact sideways and dare you to complain.

I sometimes want to complain. I come in and out of sympathy with this book.

One of the specific bits of it I come in and out of sympathy with is the main character. Knox has written him several times -- something she does is have the same characters occur at different points along the sliding scales of who they might be, in different books. (This book is closest to their source, I think, because it's the one most closely based on her childhood-and-after imaginary game, where the characters were first played -- which probably accounts for something of this book's strangeness, being something which was first improvised collaboratively and then shaped and polished individually). The spectrum of Abras is frustrating, though interesting, to read multiple books about. Abra is a genius, he has enough physical charisma to make lovers the way some people make acquaintances, he may alter the entire world when he gets around to it, but has such a complicated passivity that I sometimes want to shout at him to just do something in a straight line for once, he cares for others extremely well when it comes to domestic detail of all kinds, and sometimes very well but sometimes screamingly badly when it comes to macro-level choices. His possibilities are summed up fairly well by a point in this book when he says to someone that he'd set out to be good, but now found he was only well behaved. If you're less interested in Abra than the book is, there's still much to enjoy in it, but it will also be fundamentally irritating.

There is no instance, in this book structured around therapy, of therapy succeeding. There aren't any stable therapist/client relationships in which the therapist actually helps in the way one might expect a therapist to. (Contributing to this is the fact that Abra subverts most attempts by therapists to understand him by seducing them -- passively, of course. And there's something uncomfortable also about the dynamic of passive seduction in institutional contexts, lying close as it does to victim-blaming. I'm entirely satisfied that it makes sense for Abra, but I feel the tendrils of that discomfort in the rest of the book. Something about the way abusers are always allowed to present their justifications, even though not sided with). There's a character who says at one point (in what I am tempted to read as the book's voice, though that is dangerous) that therapy is reductive, replacing the complexity of possible human motivations with a slim textbook's worth of standard diagnoses. I'm sure there is therapy done that way, but it corresponds so little to my feelings about the nature and value of therapy that it was one of a number of pieces of grit in my reading experience, things I looked at sideways and went, "...not exactly?" about, even while saying "That does work for Abra, doesn't it? He isn't someone who'd be understood by the usual methods, especially not in that decade." I wonder if I'll feel that grit rereading other books of Knox's, or if the disagreements are between me and this particular one, or me and 2001-Knox. (2019-me and 2001-Knox, for none of this troubled me last time).

The book's structural device -- a series of narrative therapy sessions in which diaries and stories are discussed -- doesn't do much for me. There is too little in what it's supposed to be to cover the fact that it is a device. But in another way, the book's structural concern with therapy is very interesting; I don't think I've read another book where the past so often has new information layered back into it, new motives found or theorised, new details given, new perspectives seen. It is a book all out of order, full of people writing down memories of people narrating memories of things the reader might have expected to find out a hundred pages ago if they were ever going to find them out at all, and it works very well, making a texture I haven't met elsewhere. Though it's completely different, I think of Hexwood: it is like human memory. And it is also about walking forward onto sharp points of pain in order to take up responsibility.

My most fundamental problem with the book, the reason it is not one of my favourite books but only a book I love, is a feeling that the characters have been stretched to fit. Not stretched much, but the structure has reached out and tugged them towards it. And that is a problem, in a book whose epigraph reads, "like diamonds we are cut with our own dust." I almost believe in Abra's choices. I almost believe in the ship which spins in the convection current of its own burning. I will be very happy if I can find out how to believe in them completely, but at the moment I don't.