Review: The Vorrh

The Vorrh by Brian Catling
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fifteen pages into this one, I was ready to declare it a masterpiece. The opening scene describes a man constructing a bow from the bones and sinews of the woman he has loved, a woman who, supposed to have various dryad like powers, has just died. It’s haunting and memorable, a cross between a love story and a fever-dream fantasy. And then it goes even further when the man ventures into a mysterious forest – “the Vorrh” of the title – finding his way by shooting arrows from his bow/lover and then following the path they trace for him.

A hundred pages into this, I had almost resolved to give it up altogether. I wanted more of our original protagonist, but the book had spun into at least half a dozen seemingly unrelated tangents. There’s a story about a cyclops being raised in the basement of a well-preserved old mansion (where disembodied creatures keep a vague but terrifying order) by creatures made of bakelite plastic. There’s a native hunter, resentful of the British who have trained and armed him, who determines to kill our bow-explorer. There’s a “Frenchman” who, as various footnotes and commentaries explain, is Raymond Rousell, the French surrealist poet, who determines to venture into the Vorrh in dilettante fashion. There’s the pioneering photographer Edward Muybridge who’s venturing around the world taking pictures and dipping a toe into the Victorian occult. There’s a vicious Scottsman, MacLeish, who oversees work crews of slaves who are the only ones able to harvest the timber of the Vorrh – and then only because they are near-zombies.

And those separate plots – I may have missed a couple – all have further branches that divide into ever smaller tributaries of narrative, only some of which later come together. It’s so busy, so crowded with strange characters and radically shifting metaphysics, that it seemed – after those first 100 pages – an impenetrable mess.

But I did keep reading. For a time it was out of perversity, with a sense that I wanted to be able to counter some of the great hype I’d heard about the book. Then I felt a growing curiosity as I saw some of the different elements beginning to cohere. And at last I discovered an unexpected and deep joy: this was a book that seemed never to exhaust its inventiveness. It implies familiar fantastic tropes, mythological possibilities, and historical touchstones, all of which come together in a balance I could never have predicted but that I can still somehow appreciate.

Nothing here turns out as you would expect. [MAJOR SPOILERS:] Williams, our bowman, loses everything – his bow, his memory, and finally his life. Ishmael, our cyclops, gets a second eye and becomes a dull figure inclined to settle down with the woman whose sight he has restored while remaining friends with the woman who “raised” him and now bears his child. The economy of the great city by the Vorrh begins to falter as the slave work crews have fled and no one can bring in the wood. What begins as a quest concludes as a murder but, maybe, we see our hunter Tsungali assume the mantle and proceed in what will be the second part of the trilogy.

[END SPOILER:] The surprising and, to some readers I imagine, disappointing outcomes are only part of what makes this a concussive, memorable work. This is – as Alan Moore says in his spectacular afterword – an effort to wrest the fantasy novel from the narrow tropes and signifiers of the post-Tolkien experience. This is fantasy written by someone who may never have read a word of George R.R. Martin, and that’s all to the good even as Martin does many things very well.

Moore’s point, one I’ve tried to make without Moore’s articulateness, is that the imagination ought to be freer to follow its own course. All of this book is vaguely familiar, yet none of it proceeds as we expect it might. This is a glimpse of how we might free fantasy from the tyranny of the Tor paperback, those punishingly long “high fantasies” of kingdoms governed by rules from what Blake would have called “Newton’s night” rather than from a truly unfettered imagination.

I see some reviewers comparing this to the Gormenghast trilogy, and I do buy it. Gormenghast is haunted by what-might-have-beens, though – a fine ambition, but one that makes it feel as if we are coming too late to the real magic of its vision – while this feels more like ever-unfolding possibility.

By way of comparison, I’d add Drew Magary’s The Hike and Josiah Bancroft’s Sendlin Ascends, recent books that explore a similar refusal to play by “the conventions” of the quest narrative and, instead, plunge into the surreal and imaginative. Solid as each of those is, though, neither is at this level.

Instead, the only comparison that really holds for me is Alan Moore’s own Jerusalem, a vast and ambitious novel that begins not with the surreal but with the lower-case-D divine of Blake himself.

I’d rank Jerusalem even above this – it’s more coherent while achieving a similar sense of deep wonder – but I have two more books of Catling’s trilogy to go so maybe it will get there by the end.

You’ll know if this sounds too busy and too strange for you, and, if it is, stay away. If you’re intrigued, though, if you think there’s a chance that the deep weird might attract you, then give this a shot. With Moore’s Jerusalem and a handful of other books, it’s at the heart of a set of novels showing the potential for the true fantastic to produce a literature as vast and colorful as dream.


View all my reviews

Review: Slow Horses

Slow Horses by Mick Herron
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There are a lot of good ideas percolating in this one, and that gives me enough optimism that I’m tempted by its sequel, but there are also a lot of deep problems that keep this from being an especially memorable work as it stands.

Above all, the great idea is that our collective protagonists are a group of MI-5 British intelligence agents who have all screwed up in one way or another. One shut down the London tube for a day when he had his squad hold a gun to a suspect a with a blue flannel over a white t-shirt when the real suspect had the reverse colors. Another slept with the wife of the Venezualan consul. Another drank too much. And another simply forgot a confidential file on the bus.

They’ve all been exiled to the dead end of “Slough House,” a place named after the suburb so awful and backwater that it’s where they set the British version of The Office. (And the American version chose Scranton, where I work and think of at least partly as home.) The idea is that, while others do the glamorous work of spycraft, they’re left to push paper and occasionally sort through rubbish for old credit card statements. They are the titular “slow horses,” suspect figures doomed to depressing careers and held hostage by the promise of modest pensions.

When a seeming group of National Front-like anti-immigrants determine to kidnap a young Pakistani-English man and promise to cut his head off, though, it’s the Slow Horses who have a better chance to make things right. Like Derek Raymond’s The Devil’s Home on Leave – though better than that one (while less good than Raymond’s amazing He Died with His Eyes Open) – this gives the underdogs a chance at solving a crime other law enforcement people have overlooked.

At the heart of this, that anger, that barely repressed sense of the fundamental unfairness of life, permeates the novel in interesting ways. Our potential victim, Hassan, doesn’t deserve what happens to him any more than anyone else. And we come to see that many of the fortunate thrivers don’t deserve their luck either. In a flickering way, it conjures what noir has to do (at least as far as I’m concerned): raise ideas of fundamental morality in the context of crime and the specter of amorality.

There are two major problems with this iteration of the experiment, though.

First, it’s irritating to see Herron switch perspectives as frequently and erratically as he does. The scenes here are almost all short and choppy, and he way overplays the pregnant pause; there are simply too many instances where, right before a big reveal, he changes scene. And, even more frustratingly, he’ll often rewind a bit when he returns to the thread he’s dropped. In small doses, that can work; overdone like this, it’s irritating.

Second, too much of what actually happens is contrived. Above all, [MAJOR SPOILER:] the plot to kidnap Hassan turns out to have been hatched as a counter-espionage effort by an MI-5 official who wants to frame the anti-immigrant right and, in foiling them, to win credit abroad. That’s such a bad idea that it undermines the effect of the whole set-up here; the “winners” in the race for espionage careers may not be any smarter than the Slow Horses themselves, but surely they can’t be that stupid.

And that problem persists in less structural ways too. For instance, two different characters trip during crucial physical showdowns, keeping their good-guy antagonists from having to kill them. That’s a clear failure of imagination on Herron’s part, and it’s too bad because it seems as if he could push this just a hair farther to something more compelling. We don’t need LeCarre level inspiration at every turn, but a little more attention can bolster the whole.

As I say, though, those real flaws may simply be growing pains. There’s a kernel of real inspiration here and, given the good reviews I see of the sequel, I have a sense that Herron may have moved beyond them in his later work.


View all my reviews

Review: The Museum of Modern Love

The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In college, I spent a lot of time trying to think about Frank O’Hara’s poem, “Why I Am Not a Painter.” Part of that was because my father and O’Hara split the major Hopwood Awards at the University of Michigan in 1950 – Dad won for prose and O’Hara for poetry – so that difference in genre seemed personal. And part of it was for the poem itself: what might it mean to go after a similar artistic statement in paint rather than words.

This novel explores a real-life conceptual artist’s work. Marina Abramovic sat at a table in a New York gallery for 75 days, and hundreds of people sat across from her briefly to meet her gaze. She was “present” to strangers, and it was an event that resonated. I was surprised to hear that even my children had heard of it.

It was also, it seems, powerful for the thousands who witnessed it, and Heather Rose has set out here to transform some of that experience from the performance genre to the novel.

As a result, this is both an effort to reclaim Abramovic’s original experiment – what does it feel like to be present for anyone who comes before you? – and an experiment in genre. It’s a little bit of what O’Hara was doing in trying to bring a painting into his poem.

I love that ambition, and I love that this novel works as well as it does to make Abramovic’s work resonate. I don’t know whether I’d have been moved by the actual experience of it, but I do know that I appreciate having it brought to me through multiple perspectives – including Abramovic’s own (thought much of that, I gather, is fictionalized from her biography).

Conceptually, then, this is more than worth it.

As a novel itself, though, it has its ups and downs. Our main protagonist is a composer of movie soundtracks. And, as such, he is himself invested in the work of transforming the images of cinema art into musical art.

Arky Levin is carrying a deep sadness. His best friend and closest collaborator has died in a recent car accident, and his wife is slowly dying from a wasting neurological disease. What’s more, because she remembers how devastated her father was when her mother died in similar fashion, she has fashioned a legal care document that denies him access to her. She’s left him all the money and resources he needs to continue his art, but he’s not allowed to come see her.

I get why that situation has emotional power here – and I get that it sets up an emotionally effective conclusion when [SPOILER:] Levin finally insists on visiting his nearly unconscious wife and being fully present for her as Abramovic has been for him – but I can’t escape the deeply contrived nature of it. The genuine power that Rose gives this is diminished by the clear artificiality of the barriers she’s thrown up for Levin.

There are a range of other characters too, most prominently a gentle woman from the South who’s lost her husband to cancer and sought distraction in New York. I love the way she and Levin bond over watching Abramovic watch others, and I love the way Rose conjures a sense of community among those who have been moved by the experience.

That said, though, I think the second half of this begins to run a little out of steam. The intense focus of the beginning, when Levin and his new friend forge a connection of mourners who can’t quite name their pain, gives way to other sub-plots that deal more with the world of art, its making, and its marketing. The characters that emerge there are ones, as I see it, who are less affected by the experience of the art than by the work of creating it. All that still works, but without quite the same beautiful edge of the opening chapters.

In any case, this is certainly a strong and moving work. It’s a reminder of how hard it is to open yourself to another’s pain, and that’s worth exploring in every medium we have.


View all my reviews

Review: Solaris

Solaris by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At a conceptual – and probably historical – level, this is a masterpiece.

A scientist who’s worked to repress his past, a past that involves a lover who killed herself when he left her to pursue his career, is assigned to observe a planet far away. That planet, Solaris, has evidenced signs of consciousness for two generations of scholars. Awkward as that sentence sounds, it’s accurate: it’s the planet itself, a conscious ocean, that is the alien presence.

Scholars who’ve already studied it made all sorts of news in their time, but by the time Kelvin arrives, Solaris study has become old news. It’s so alien, so frustrating to would-be human communicators that they have largely given up. Largely, but some want to provoke the alien intelligence by bombarding it with microwaves.

In response, the planet finds a way to produce physical projections of people the scholars (all men) are haunted by. For Kelvin, it’s his dead girlfriend.

As a result, the best of this is the best of what science fiction does. At the edge of what we know of the world, we see a character confronting his deepest self. It’s haunting to watch him as he realizes he has something like another chance with Harey, a chance he realizes is fictional, is dependent on denying that he knows Solaris is responsible for it.

When I reflect on what I know of the history of sci-fi, I can’t imagine, say Star Trek or Dune, without this. It’s a lesson in what the genre can be made to do, and I gather it was a direct inspiration for much of what followed.

All that said, I haven’t marked this as a spoiler because we get to see most of it in the first several pages. That is, we get most of the best of this right away, conceptually.

Actually reading it, going through the different chapters and the unfolding of Lem’s exposition, is a little less enjoyable. The science exposition here – where we have Kelvin paraphrasing the work of academics who’ve come before him – can drag. And, powerful as some of the human scenes are, they don’t always have the narrative power of the best of this. The truth is, almost nothing happens here other than what I see getting revealed, or at least hinted at, in the opening pages. And, good as Lem can be, it’s hard to be riveted by every page in something that is both abstract and inert.

Do consider reading this, though. It’s my second Lem in about a year. I enjoyed The Star Diaries – which are brilliant but uneven – and now I am startled to find the same mind behind both of them. That one is clever and funny, and it’s full of action and adventure. I enjoyed reading it much more than this, but I’m enjoying the after-taste of this one more. I’ve known Lem by reputation for some time; it’s a pleasure to see how he delivers.


View all my reviews

Review: The Journey

The Journey by Sergio Pitol
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m glad I read the introduction to this – written by George Henson – because otherwise I’d really have been lost. Henson argues that we should read Pitol as someone who (and I paraphrase) lives in text. He’s not writing a conventional memoir, nor a conventional novel. This is a book that simply moves forward in a space we may never have realized was a literary space.

In practice, that means Pitol is writing the story of his visit to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, but that his actual journey is only a frame for him to excavate his memories and his thoughts on other writers. It’s hard sometimes to tell where his dreams end and his opinions begin, and then there’s the deeper question of what he’s seeing and experiencing during his Georgian visit.

I don’t know Pitol’s other work (a friend gave me this one to read), but I understand that he’s one of Mexico’s major literary figures. On the plus side, then, it’s striking to see how he finds affinities with Eastern European figures that have no reference to the U.S. perspective I generally take for granted. I’m happy to overhear him speaking with Georgian officials, and it’s a comfortable reminder that there are times I – as a U.S. reader and thinker – should just be quiet and listen.

I do have two larger concerns, though. On the one hand, this has a whiff of the deep excavation of self that has irritated me above all in David Foster Wallace but that I’ve been troubled by in Karl Ove Knausgard and even Elena Ferrante. Maybe I’ve missed some essential 21st Century aesthetic move, but I still value craft, and, for me at least, the central job of such craft is to focus an account. There’s a sloppiness of form to all these generally acclaimed writers. They boast the chance to live within the interesting mind of an other, but I find it overwhelming and distracting. I want to know what the central story is rather than to be subject to the changing whims of my narrator.

In other words, I think authors have a responsibility to exclude much of what they might otherwise choose to put in. Craft dictates that we cut out things that don’t fit or, more imposingly, that we find the form that can accommodate such movement. I love ideas that clash with the main argument; I’m troubled here and elsewhere when I feel as if I’m being asked to accept a complete change of gears.

On the other hand, I am intrigued by the play of Pitol’s mind, and I’d be interested to see what he might do in a form that called on him to work more with narrative. There’s a peculiar moment in the chapter dated “30 May” when he interrupts his descriptions of meals with various Georgians to write, “My approach to all these activities is real, but there also lives in me the project of the novel of the lower bodily stratum. I long to get to Prague [where he’s been living], to the shelf where Bakhtin’s book…is located.”

In other words, in the middle of this strangely formed book, we get the writer telling us he’s more interested in a book he’s hoping to write.

I can conceive of an argument that privileges such an approach to literature. I can see how some people would prefer the raw materials of a project to the potential project itself. I guess I can see how some would praise what I might call a deconstructed piece of literature.

Still, if I can conceive all that, I can’t quite experience it. There’s a lot that’s interesting here, but I think I’d rather read the novel he went on to write about this trip to the notebooks, dreams, and outlines that we get here.


View all my reviews

Review: Kings of the Wyld

Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My brother told me to read this one, and there’s not a whole to say beyond that other than that it’s goofy fun. I’m reminded that, right up there with running too long, the distinctive flaw of most contemporary fantasy is how seriously it takes itself. There’s a humorlessness running through all the Tor six-inch spine books; all of creation typically stands at risk and only the great fill-in-the-blank hero can save it.

Not quite here. Our protagonists are a reunited ‘band’ of mercenaries – really a Dungeons and Dragons style group of heroes – who’ve come together to rescue the daughter of one of them. Eames does a good job of prompting us to realize that we know most of the context here. These guys have fought a thousand battles, getting singed or stabbed along the way, but never suffering a fatality. Unless you count their bards. Like Spinal Tap drummers, they keep losing their bards.

There’s a small thread of the serious here – our main hero, Clay, has become a family man who’s torn between staying home and helping his old friend on a mission of mercy – but mostly it’s a sustained good time. Our heroes have to regroup, have to pass through a forest full of terrors, and then have to confront an overwhelming horde of monsters whom we’ve come gradually to learn about along the way.

Eames begins with one major joke: these bands of mercenaries occupy the same pop-culture niche of their world as rock and roll bands occupy (or occupied) for us. Instead of being metal-heads who call their guitars “axes,” they carry real axes (and swords) as they carve up the bad guys or each other.

Eames manages to sustain that joke far longer and to much better effect than I’d have imagined. In this world, everyone wants to be a “merc.” Everyone wants to get famous as a great warrior – or thief or magician. Many get killed along the way, but it’s always in a fashion that reminds us this is just a kind of game.

Eames does a strong job of varying his narrative style, never letting the various battles devolve into this-guy-swung-then-that-guy-swung. I found myself so impressed with the clever way he solved some of the later narrative problems that I laughed along with the style itself.

And in the middle of all that, we get occasional moments of poignancy. My favorite is a two-headed monster, one head of which is blind. As the creature stumbles through one disaster after another, the sighted one narrates a happy and beautiful experience. The blind head thinks they’re venturing through beautiful fields and, when made to wear oxen yoke, that they’re bearing splendid artifacts around their necks. It’s a sweet fantasy within a fantasy, and it’s one of the many small things that lands here.

Don’t expect great literature here, but do expect a good time.


View all my reviews

Review: The Feral Detective

The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have been so bewildered by the nature of our historical moment, that I find myself reading a lot of things as allegory for our contemporary America. I find Trump-analogues in all sorts of places, sometimes taking comfort in the sense that we’ve survived such deep narcissism and greed before and sometimes horrified with the sense that what see today is a distillation of much that has long threatened us. Sometimes those comparisons are there, at least if you squint, and sometimes I know I’m just imagining them.

This is a novel that asks us to read it as an allegory of Trump’s moment. On the day of his inauguration, Phoebe quits her job at a liberal New York publication in order to find, well, something. She’s aware of being caught in a kind of bubble, aware that there’s a larger America that may as well be an apocalyptic wilderness for all she knows of it.

Then, when a friend’s young adult daughter goes missing in the wilds of California, she volunteers to try to find her in that hard-to-imagine space.

In an irony that the deeply gifted Lethem must surely intend, those wilds turn out indeed to be an apocalyptic wasteland. Arabella has found her way to a community divided between the diminished intellectual and cultural descendants of a pair of one-time counter-culture communes. The “wolves” are all male and live in a kind of Mad Max society, willing to murder for their beliefs and recognizing as chief the man who can kill the last chief. The “rabbits” are mostly women, and they maintain a gatherer kind of lifestyle that resists the wolves as well as most technology and culture of the last couple decades.

Pheobe’s guide through this alternative America is Charles Heist, the feral detective of the title. He’s a child of both the wolves and the rabbits, a man who, without knowing his particular parents, was raised in both tribes and now commits himself to protecting any who unwittingly fall into their struggles. She falls in love with him in a New-York kind of way, seeing him as just another hook-up. He may or may not fall in love back, but if he does it’s in cowboy fashion: deep but humorless, a love without guile and accepting affection as implicit promise.

The mystery at the heart of the novel gets pretty tangled, even lost, which amplifies the political confusion at the heart of it as well. Phoebe has needed to escape her New York bubble, but she hasn’t exactly found enlightenment in the harrowing world she discovers. She becomes tougher, and she becomes someone capable of an uncynical love, but she also never quite stops flirting with the possibility of turning her adventures into a New York Review of Books style expose of that “other America.”

I say admiringly that I’m not sure what Lethem is trying in the end to show us about Trumpism. On the one hand, it’s tempting to read this in the context of Lethem’s own notorious move from the NYC he chronicled perhaps better than anyone of his generation in Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, Motherless Brooklyn, and Dissident Gardens. That accounts for some of the fatigue with New-York-as-America’s-cultural-capital that’s out front here.

On the other, Lethem seems to be exploring a larger zeitgeist in the way that only the most daring of our novelists can. Much of Chronic City’s brilliance comes from the way it refuses to give us a stable foothold; everything there is caught in a cannabis haze. In similar but not quite so successful fashion here, everything is coated in a post-truth patina. The characters’ separate truths threaten always to become separate realities. It’s no spoiler to say that we never really know whether Phoebe has discovered happiness or whether she’s simply given way to Charles’s and the West’s rural delusion.

I don’t feel any less confused by our American moment after reading this, and I don’t think Lethem has any bullet-point insight to help with our cultural clarity, but – in a consoling way – I don’t feel quite so alone in my bewilderment. This may be a great novel, and it may be something that turns out to be a confusing trifle. I don’t think we’ll know until (and may it happen soon) we have a new President and enough historical perspective to make fuller sense of what we’re experiencing.

For most of the last decade, I thought of Lethem as my single favorite working writer. (That may be a surprise to people who know me as a big fan of Philip Roth, but it was a new Lethem that really got me.) Then I was disappointed after teaching Chronic City that so many of my students didn’t seem to appreciate it. And then came his last novel, A Gambler’s Anatomy. For the first time, I saw Lethem as uninspired, as a writer just going through the paces. It had moments that may have clicked, but it felt like his jump-the-shark moment, and I came close to giving up on him as a real talent. (And I transferred my favorite working novelist title to Richard Flanagan.)

This one gives me hope. It’s weird and ambitious, and I think it might some day be one worthy of standing next to the really excellent work that Lethem has done.


View all my reviews

Review: Children of Time

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one is only a few years old, but it feels as if it’s stepped out of what they call the “classic sci-fi” era of the 1950s and early 1960s.

I mean that mostly in a positive way. The characters are generally flat, and there’s a fundamental clumsiness to the way Tchaikovsky handles plot, but the bottom line is that this is a novel that’s exploring a big idea. In this case, that idea is what it means for us – for us as human beings – to declare a fundamental right to our planet.

The premise – the result of several contrived plot twists – is that the last of the human race is aboard a failing space ark and hoping to land on a planet that earlier generations terraformed. That new planet, however, is home to a species of intelligent spiders, shaped for the most part by the accident of a virus intended to speed up natural selection along human lines.

So, the fundamental ethical conflict is whether “we” as humans should have the right to claim an alien planet for ourselves or whether the spiders, who are also somewhat like “us,” should have the right to maintain the only home world they’ve known.

Intriguingly, Tchaikovsky doesn’t take sides. While the narrative strategy is awkward, the effect is spot on. Roughly half the chapters come from the perspective of the humans on the ark, humans who – thanks to cryogenic naps – wake up every few decades to get up to speed on recent changes. The other half come from spiders. In a clever sci-fi move, Tchaikovsky has those spiders recall what their ancestors learned. As a result, we have a version of the same protagonists from the time they first dimly sense that working together with a quasi-language will allow them to conquer up to the generations able to launch satellites. The same names recur, and the same general personality quirks predominate.

As a [SPOILER:] Tchaikovsky ultimately ducks the issue or, as it seems, sets up a sequel that defers some of the same questions. (He allows the surviving humans to become infected by the same virus which allows them to understand the mutual possibilities for life on the planet.)

I did enjoy this, more than I anticipated, and Tchaikovsky has many moments of real cleverness. A particular favorite of mine comes when they discover another terraforming experiment. Instead of becoming Earth-like, however, the planet has gradually evolved into the home of a single planet-sized fungus. I thought that was a striking way to imagine what we might do in our attempts to direct life.

I’m not sure I’m on board for what I see is the sequel, though. This is a book that contemplates evolution and its ethical implications in thoughtful ways. Much of sci-fi has evolved over the last forty years, though, and it’s done so for reasons that I generally admire: more psychologically grounded characters and more sophisticated narrative control. Like the planet at its center, this one has evolved in different and unexpected ways, and I think I’ll look for work written in what I recognize as stronger ways.


View all my reviews