landingtree

This is the tragedy of John Wilberfoss, first and last captain of the Nightingale. War has sundered the galaxy, isolating thousands of inhabited worlds, and it is the task of the Gentle Order of St. Francis Dionysos to stitch them back together; the Nightingale is their hospital ship. The book is narrated by the autoscribe, Wulf, an ancient robot repurposed over the years for one function after another until one of the repurposings incidentally gave him sentience, who nevertheless keeps reminding the reader that robot biocrystalline sentience is different to the human and does not permit an understanding of mystical experiences. Mystical experiences being germane to the loss of the Nightingale on her first voyage, along with every soul aboard her except the captain.

Based on that description, I like the book less than you'd think. But that isn't to say I don't like it.

It's a book almost without twists and turns, of Wulf going into little digressions no one of which is more important than any other: hence Mosaic, not Tapestry. There's a section where Wulf quotes an obscure early source relating to the Order, and says, "This confirms that St. Francis and Dionysos were originally separate entities", before going on to talk quite a lot about Dionysos on the one hand and St Francis on the other in a way that implies many other sources, all of which would make that point less obscurely. Which is about the level of 'That isn't quite how the world works' which I get from the whole book. More of that history would have been lost, or less, or else there are mechanisms hiding behind Wulf's degree of access which we're never shown.

In a similar but more important vein, the whole book is the story of Wilberfoss, a man who could have been great, suffering terrible trials as best as he can: holding himself together, being torn apart, and being given a chance to reassemble himself. All at a mystical level of detail which sometimes, but not always, reads to me as insight. How the leadership of his Order chose to offer him the captaincy, why the fracture-lines of his strengths were chosen as the best available from a huge candidate pool, we are not shown. The selection procedure seem to me as culpable as Wilberfoss for what goes wrong. But this isn't really a book about the systems he is being tried within. The result is an odd mingling of society-scale and individual-scale disaster.*

Also, the monastery at which Wilberfoss begins the story has a servant -- race? species? -- of people who are congenitally blind and small and who navigate its corridors by clicking smooth stone spheres together and listening to the echoes. They are a remnant population from a war-torn world. It seems that they can only survive in the benign setting of the monastery. In the book they're mostly present as atmosphere, and they work well as that... and I don't think I'm supposed to read the institution which set this up as sinister, although I immediately began to. I think I'm supposed to read it as, 'Species, races, and populations can in fact lose their life force and die or cease to develop,' I want to read about the member of this species who left the monastery and became something different, or else I'm not going to believe that 'doing most of the physical work involved in maintaining a monastery' is really a rosy deal.

But as well as those things and others like them, there's the robot narrator describing his early life as a textiles quality inspector -- and there's Wilberfoss growing up in a dome farm beside the Sour Sea and taking stupid risks out of a longing for the open spaces he knows other planets have -- and the forty days Wilberfoss' spends meditating on the question of whether to leave his wife Medoc and take up the offered captaincy, only to find, when he emerges to tell her he's leaving, that she had divorced him thirty-seven days ago in anticipation of this fact and has almost chosen a new husband out of several interested candidates, though she wishes him all the best.

So: this is an oddly semi-real book which casts shadow-books for me. It's creative and vivid, though, and so they're vivid shadow-books.


( Cut for in-no-way-relevant cat photo )



*Worth noting: I had been listening while gardening -- back when I read this book, in the days when I could go to other houses' gardens -- to the podcast 'You're Wrong About', which covers the period of American history I know about mainly from Doonesbury and my parents' explanations of Doonesbury. The podcast looks at events and then at how they were thought about and remembered in the years following. Inevitably, as each episode goes on, the fog of Individual Blame will part to reveal Structural Issues. So I was probably more primed than usual to read a book like this and go, "Hmm, didn't clear away that fog much."

Today I was introduced to Vincent's, a shared art space on Manners Street where anyone can turn up and make whatever they like with the resources and equipment provided, at no charge. There are beads, clay, potter's wheels, a kiln, presses, fabrics, interesting paper, boxes of buttons, pieces of old jewellery. Even for someone fairly uncrafty, it's a delight to fossick around in. There's an attached gallery, and various classes on Tuesdays. While my friend finished scoring out a stamp shaped like a van and rolled ink on a clear perspex plate, I strung together beads on copper wire to hang on my wall. In the front of a beading book I found this, and copied it out:

"It would seem strange to be able to pick beads for a chain in one's own garden, yet that is what is done by two girls on Long Island. They have a plant on which grow Job's-tears. These tear-shaped seeds, ranging in color from pearly white to black (there are brown ones too) make attractive muff-chains. The gray ones are strung with cut-steel seed beads, two between each of the Job's-tears, and the brown in the same way, using gold beads to separate them. But beware, if you raise Job's-tears, of using them in their natural state. They should be boiled like chestnuts before stringing, for a tiny grub is often found in them, and he may at any time make a meal of the silk on which the beads are strung".

-Mary White, How To Do Bead Work.

That seems ready to become fable at the slightest of nudges -- perhaps it doesn't even want the nudge.

...

Everything is out of my old room, at last, and new tenants moving in this coming weekend. The paperwork is signed, therefore it is real. I've given over my key, and my new room has entered a new phase of being full of boxes (and a saint).

My flatmate Luke has given in at last, and adopted the kitten. seahearth, you should still come and visit her on Friday if it suits, but there's no longer a rush. I'm pleased she's staying! Also, anyone within radius, be warned: I am now a kitten vector. There will be others, and if you want not to have cats in your lives you should adopt that position firmly, or you will sooner or later adopt a kitten instead. Angelo's friend group is a cautionary tale: riddled with them.

Biology exams are finished. The last course of my degree (all going well) begins in five days: Dionysos.

My first is in monarch, not trespass or dratted

My second shows up in both scamper and nap

My third scratches at the door after midnight with a mouse in its mouth, and doesn’t listen when you tell it good Riddles don't work that way

( And while none of me is in my owner’s house, I’m all among carrots )