Review: Circe

Circe by Madeline Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Circe we meet in The Odyssey is a witch with the capacity to transform men into swine. There’s more to her, but that’s the main point.

In this book, Madeline Miller transforms that nugget of a story, making Circe not merely an antagonist defined largely through her relationship to Ulysses, but a character in full.

What’s more, Miller works that transformation by imagining Circe as someone who is perpetually transforming herself. The first line (and I paraphrase) declares that they didn’t know what to call Circe when she was born. She was too high a goddess to be a mere nymph, but she was too diminished from her father Helios to be a full blown divinity.

That is, she is always in between other possibilities. She is never quite a daughter since her parents lose interest in her. She is rarely a sister, since sister and one brother want nothing to do with her and she is more of a pseudo-mother to her other brother. And it isn’t clear whether she is a divinity who can wreak transformations or she is a witch who knows how to harness the power of pharmacy to her ends.

The deep beauty of this novel (in contrast to the surface beauty of Miller’s fine writing) is the way it shows us a character who only gradually emerges into what she understands as a “true self.” Once she becomes, more or less, an adult, she makes the terrible mistake of transforming the beautiful nymph Scylla into a monster who kills countless sailors. She carries that guilt for most of an eternity, even as she is sentenced to remain on the island where Ulysses eventually finds her.

I feel compelled to warn of a [SPOILER ALERT:] but it’s also true that nothing here is terribly surprising. We watch as Circe slowly discovers her compulsion to love mortals, something we see in the way she early on succors Prometheus (that great early Titan whose love of humans brought us the gift of fire but cost him never-ending torment) and then through her love for Daedalus, Ulysses, and, in the very end, Telemachus. She becomes a lover, a lover-protector, and finally a full-blown wife. And, most movingly, she becomes a mortal woman, one who understands that the wages of death is love, one who – come at last to understand that she belongs by the side of Telemachus – trades her divinity for the chance fully to be part of a human love.

To end where I began, then, this is Miller transforming a classical myth into something that is also very much contemporary. In the case of her fine Song of Achilles, she took the ancient Iliad and made it comment on our contemporary life by putting the unapologetically gay Patroclus as our narrator. Here, in this even stronger work, she’s taken the Odyssey and transformed it into a story not about how the gods shape the fate of mortals, but about how we are all the product of the world we transform for ourselves. That’s certainly relevant in a moment when we are all called to be aware of how human activity has reshaped our global climate, but it’s relevant in larger ways of self-understanding too.

Telemachus, as Miller tells it, is given the choice to succeed his father, to be a man who will live forever in legend as a king and a warrior. Instead, he rejects Athena and declares he is happy to live a quiet life. He cares nothing for glory, only for the chance to live a decent life. In Miller’s version, his desire meets the fully transformed Circe, and theirs becomes a love affair of which we have no great song. Instead, we get only a fleeting glimpse of a character who, having known the greatest powers of the universe, elects to share her life with a man who wants only simplicity.

Miller is visiting my campus next week, and I am glad to confirm that I remain a big fan. I look forward to her talk, and I hope she has a third novel coming our way before too long.


View all my reviews

Review: Just Above My Head

Just Above My Head by James Baldwin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is one of the three or four greatest short stories I know. I’ve read it at least a dozen times, often to prepare for teaching it, and I have teared up almost every time. It takes a perspective “we” can almost know – a middle-aged African-American high school teacher who’s served in the army – and has him serve as “our” guide to the great artistry and deep hurt of his jazz-inspired brother. The story somehow collapses the whole of the brothers’ lives – there’s a line about our narrator catching Sonny when he takes his first steps – and even echoes the deeper experience of African-Americans as a whole. And it also may be the greatest primer to the possibilities of jazz that anyone has ever written.

I’ve put “we” and “our” in quotes because It’s a deep question when it comes to defining who it is Baldwin is writing for. I think “Sonny’s Blues” is powerful in part because it’s a supposedly marginal figure who’s able to make his story accessible to a generic – read “white” as near synonym – audience. Of course, it’s more than that as well, and part of its power is the way it ultimately makes me realize how wide the world of perspective is beyond my own.

This novel comes more than two decades later, but I think “Sonny’s Blues” informs it. The novel begins as almost a reprise, with our narrator, Hall, writing of how he learned of his brother Arthur’s death. (“Sonny’s Blues” begins with the narrator learning of Sonny’s arrest for heroin possession.) Then it spends a good chunk of the first “book” exploring how they came to be estranged and how they came to understand one another.

This novel is, in its way, even more ambitious, though. It deals not just with the African-American experience and the power of music (Arthur is a successful gospel singer) but also the civil rights struggle, sexual abuse, and homosexuality as an emerging cultural possibility.

This is an important book, as is anything Baldwin ever wrote. And, since it is Baldwin, there are moments of soaring prose. (Consider two quick gems: “Music does not begin as a song. It can become a song, but it begins as a cry.” Or “Our suffering is our bridge to one another. Everyone must cross this bridge.”) And, given that this is written in 1979, it’s an important landmark in naming the LGBT experience as authentic to the American experience as a whole.

This is not, in the end, though, a great novel. Its ambition weighs it down throughout, and it seems often to be reminding us of all it’s trying to do. I often found myself admiring some of the characters’ insights, but I seldom found myself caught up in the story itself. I felt good about being someone who was reading it, but I didn’t enjoy the reading as I would have hoped.

For starters, the dialogue here is clumsy. Characters don’t talk to each other so much as make speeches in front of one another. (The grand quality of many of them reminds me of the social realism novels of the 1930s, of something James Farrell might have written in the years before he discovered James Joyce.) Or, when they aren’t, they’re moving the narrative forward in awkward ways, introducing each other and explaining things in dialogue that we could get more efficiently through other narrative forms.

And then there are the explicit sex scenes. I have no problem with the content, but they often feel almost clinical, like we are being asked to acknowledge that, yes, human animals experience arousal and lust of this sort. They make me think a little of the great Monty Python skit where, for a sex education class, John Cleese, as a professor, invites his wife into the room, and they proceed to go at it on a desk. Then he interrupts himself occasionally to scold the students for laughing. Maybe nothing about this books says “ ’70s novel” more than that, but it feels dated and awkward. It’s great that he’s showing that we should be no more shocked by gay sex than by hetero, but neither comes across as authentic.

But the biggest problem I have is with the fundamental narrative structure. Our narrator is Hall, but it seems as if Baldwin is bored with him. (There’s even a part, at the start of the final book, when Hall asks himself why he is trying to tell this story – a telling bit of uncertainty – and he concludes that it’s to make sense of Arthur’s story more than his own.) Most of this story, then, concerns Arthur – or others like their neighbor and some-time lover Julia – often in private moments Hall could never have known.

In other words, Hall is a narrator telling us about events he can’t possibly have seen, which undermines him as a narrator/character.

Narrative technology has come a long way in the forty years since this came out. I think of what I like to call the rhizomatic novel where we get a series of only tangentially connected stories in a single volume, stories that, in conversation, tell more than any one figure could know. Or we get the proliferation of excellent short story cycles that have come out since. Instead, this seems like a novel trapped in a form of story-telling that can’t quite encompass it.

There is greatness here. I suspect there’s greatness in anything Baldwin ever put down on paper. But this work as a whole doesn’t come together as it might. I am glad I read it, but I am also glad I am finished reading it.


View all my reviews

Review: Days Without End

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Queer Frontier Picaresque

In critical theory, “queer” has a technical meaning. That is, it’s the conscious effort of looking at a system defined by a binary opposition and asserting there is either a middle ground or an alternative to the two extremes. If “queer” originally meant someone who was neither entirely “male” or “female,” someone whose sexuality didn’t align with what was understood to be the norm, it has become a sometime badge of honor and a way of critiquing certain forms of knowledge.

In this peculiar novel, our narrator and protagonist, Thomas McNulty, sees the world through just such a queer lens. He rejects commonplace binaries and takes the world as it comes. As a young man – in a scene that’s both funny and warm – he and his best friend, John Cole, find work dressing as women and dancing with lonely miners in the American West of the 1850s. Neither man is troubled to be an object of desire for other men, and Thomas develops a taste for it, ultimately often preferring women’s clothes to men’s.

Then, when they “fall in love” before long, it’s almost an afterthought to hear they’re having sex. This is a novel set before there’s really a modern conception of homosexuality, so Thomas and John don’t have a template to follow. They’re drawn to each other, and that’s enough.

Eventually, they join the army together and fight first in the Native-American wars and then in the Civil War.

Throughout, Thomas challenges what we think we know about essential binaries. War and peace blur into a constant march/struggle/time with other men. That’s true as well with American/Irish, husband/wife, Native-American/American, war/slaughter, slaughter/self-defense, and manifest destiny/live-and-let-live. Where another narrator might comment on the perpetual strangeness of his experiences, Thomas takes it all as it comes…though he does favor that word, “queer,” in much of what does pass for analysis.

The first half of this is extraordinary, and I thought for a while it marked a peculiar back-to-back Barry victory for me since I had so recently read Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier (so far my pick for novel of the year). Like a lot of picaresques, though, it has some trouble sustaining its momentum. For instance, I love the casual way Thomas describes the early battles, but this loses a little when those fighting descriptions get longer. The weirdness of Thomas’s perspective – the way he so often notices things others don’t and, conversely, can’t see things others take for granted – gets tempered.

[SPOILERS:] It’s moving when the two men adopt a Native-American girl, protecting her in part because neither sees her as a potential sexual object – but it starts to venture into cliché when she turns out to be the niece of a Plains chief who’s threatening war unless she’s returned. It’s further cliché when, after she’s shot, it turns out she’s saved by the bullet’s striking the gold coins sewn into the bodice of her dress.

[FINAL SPOILER:] The end redeems some that, though. It takes a great deal of slaughter of Native-Americans, and Thomas’s killing one of his closest friends, and possibly another of their friends murdering on his behalf, for Thomas to return to their small homestead unharmed and free of legal troubles. In that space, Thomas somehow loses the capacity to grieve. He seems strangely unaffected by what he’s been through, and that “queer” perspective returns, leaving the novel subversively undermining the sense of the nobility of the frontier experience.

I’m still not sure the whole would be great except for Barry’s lyric, often gorgeous prose. Just a few examples:

On the extreme heat of the West, “You could arrest sunlight for murder out on the plains.”

“It’s a hard task to make something out of nothing, as even God can attest.”

“We have our store of days, and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”

When one character, who’s been active in slaughtering Native-Americans, later marries a Native woman, “I guess love laughs at history a little.”

And, maybe my favorite, “His skin is made of the aftermath of smiles.”

So, yes, there is a lot to admire here. I understand Barry has other novels dealing with the extended McNulty family, and I’m excited to try some more of them. This doesn’t quite rise to the level of the best of my old favorite William Kennedy, but I get a vague sense that there might be something reminiscent of that other masterful chronicle of Irish-America.


View all my reviews

Review: What to Do about the Solomons

What to Do about the Solomons by Bethany Ball
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one seems to have my name written on it. When a friend saw it was a multi-generation saga about Jews who get caught up in crime, she practically assigned it to me. (Thanks, Maya.)

That description doesn’t quite fit the story, though. It is multi-generational, it is Jews, and someone is accused of crime (but, as the dust jacket goes on to say, it’s a false accusation.) Instead, it’s about a tangled extended family, one where everyone seems fairly screwed up. But, as I said, it’s Jews.

I had some difficulty settling into the rhythm here and, while I may never have actually grown comfortable with it, I wound up admiring it for that original rhythm as much as anything. This is, from the start and more or less throughout, frenetic. The scenes are short, and the sentences rapid fire. Ball rarely stops for exposition, and she assumes a family structure that everyone should know. That’s hard to follow, but it does feel true-to-life. I doubt I could have made sense of this if I’d listened to it because I often had to stop my reading to flip back a couple pages or to consult the helpful family tree in the opening pages.

As it stands, though, we get four generations of an Israeli, sometimes U.S. family. The patriarch, Yakov Solomon, has managed to help his kibbutz grow into a massive business. He’s gone from child of the Israeli War of Independence to socialist, to compulsive womanizer and controlling older figure.

His various children live in his shadow. A son-in-law is torn between his dreams of being an artist and his sense of obligation to the kibbutz. His youngest son has built a financial empire in California but gets double-crossed by an old friend. And then [SPOILER:] he never learns that he’s been kept from his childhood sweetheart because she is secretly his half-sister. And another son is disappointed in his life (along with some of Yakov’s brothers.)

Put like that, this feels like soap opera, but that doesn’t quite describe the effect. Instead, Ball is trying – largely through her narrative rhythm – to give an impression of a great span of time compressed into a series of powerful moments. There are some ruts here; I think three plots involving middle-aged or older characters finding their way back to childhood loves is at least two too many. And there is some unnecessary drama. (Why fight over the family fortune if there is, really, enough for everyone?)

All of that leaves the end of this somewhat arbitrary feeling.

Still, there’s some rare ambition here. Ball is doing something substantially more difficult than any plot summary can suggest. She’s challenging narrative as we typically get it.

I don’t think this lives up the blurbs on its cover, but I do think Ball is an intriguing writer. I admire this is as an experiment and I found, the more I read of it, that I grew to enjoy the crazy even more for its tone than for what was happening.


View all my reviews

Review: Night Boat to Tangier

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a staggeringly good novel.

Think Waiting for Godot meets Pulp Fiction. Or think Hammett at his best somehow conversant in the details of the 21st century.

Better yet, don’t think of anything else you’ve read. When I started this, I got the strange feeling that Barry had somehow invented the novel all by himself, that he’d found a new way to tell a sustained story, one that managed to do without conventional dialogue or recognizable paragraph structure. And yet, somehow, the novelty of it works. There’s a story, one that, as it folds and re-folds onto itself, becomes ever richer. And there are characters who, despite spending the present tense of the novel sitting in wait for a series of night boats from Tangiers (as the title promises) become ever more human, ever more tragic in the smallness of their dreams and the vastness of their hunger.

The back cover blurb was enough to get me interested – a pair of aging Irish gangsters waiting for a boat to come in – but this is so much more than the sum of its action that, as the saying goes, it feels like calling Moby Dick a novel about a whale.

Maurice Hearne and Charles Redmond are down-on-their-luck, 50 year-old former drug dealers. They’re in Tangiers hoping to find Dilly, Maurice’s daughter, who’s run away to live a vagabond life in Spain. But, again, it’s not the what of that, nor even the how, so much as the ever-echoing why. As they sit and wait – sometimes intimidating younger people they think might have word of Dilly – they ponder the nature of death and, though it sounds trite to say it, the meaning of life. The violence, the love, the heroin highs and the existential lows have to have meant something, they all but say to each other. Neither has a satisfying answer, but neither can quite give up either.

I’m paraphrasing here, of course. Much as I’d insist those are the questions they ask, the language they use is a kind of everyday Irish poetry. I’d have to quote the whole book – short and lyrical enough that it’s tempting to call it a kind of poem – to give a full sense, but here’s some flavor.

“Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond sit on a bench just a few yards west of the hatch. They are in their low fifties. The years are rolling out like tide now. There is old weather on their faces, on the hard lines of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths. But they retain – just about – a rakish air” (2).

Or, “It is a tremendously Hibernian dilemma – a broken family, lost love, all the melancholy rest of it – and Hibernian easement for it: fuck it, we’ll go for an old drink” (20).

The details matter, because they’re the stuff of the lives of two men who, though so close to potential caricature, become ever more human. At the same time, the details don’t matter. It’s just two men, confronting their mortality on a mostly fool’s errand to find a young woman who seemingly wants no more to do with them, who can’t quite surrender the urge to compel life to mean what they once wanted it to mean.

This is a gangster novel, I suppose, and I know gangster novels. It’s also a novel that stares right into the deepest questions we carry with us. Like only the very best literature, it does so without blinking.

This was long-listed for the Booker, but I see it isn’t a finalist. That’s a disappointment because I’m hard pressed to believe there’s a better novel that came out this year.


View all my reviews

Review: The Sisters

The Sisters by Dervla McTiernan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this one up because I’ve been enjoying Irish noir of late. And because, well, it was short and it was free (from Audible).

As it turns out, this is less Dublin noir than Dublin third-wave feminism procedural. That’s not a bad thing, but it isn’t quite what I was looking for.

Still, I’m pleased to see McTiernan bringing some real skill to this. You can see the pieces coming together – one sister is a rising barrister and the other a low-rung figure in the garda (police). The set-up implies they’ll run into sexism and condescension, and then the mystery – a young man has been accused of murder on the strength of two or three ultimately thin eyewitness testimonies – has holes that open up early enough to take away a lot of the uncertainty.

To McTiernan’s credit, though, she moves through the necessaries with efficiency. It’s no spoiler to say that, once the sister in the garda gets a confession, the story’s over. I can well imagine someone else padding a denouement that added little except additional pages.

I understand this is a prequel to an existing series, so it’s possible someone coming “back” to it with awareness of the sisters’ later careers might find a lot to enjoy in “cookies,” in references to things that will take place only later.

All in all, I’d call this solid work. It’s good to see McTiernan bringing a feminist lens here, and it’s good to see her refusing to waste time in the telling.


View all my reviews

Review: Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest

Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Louis Armstrong once famously said of understanding jazz, “If you gotta ask, you’ll never know.” As evocative as that legendary phrase has been to representing the meaning of the form, though, there were still some of us who had to ask.

I was lucky to have a father who got it. Not the cutting edge stuff, not Eric Dolphy or AACM, but he was open-minded to a degree that’s astonishing only in retrospect. Without being a fanatic, he knew a lot of the good music that was out there, at least first-generation. He told me once that he was able to see Sidnet Bechet play regularly, and he once wrote a story inspired by the experience. The first time he took me to hear Dixieland jazz – at a cousin’s wedding in New Orleans – he told me most of what I needed to know: the music was a conversation, with each separate performer telling his (or rarely, her) version of the same story, commenting on, amplifying, or contradicting what others had said. His one sentence changed the way I heard the world.

All of us were lucky to have, most prominently among other fine writers, James Baldwin, who explained the creative work behind jazz’s next generation. “Sonny’s Blues” taught me to hear Thelonius Monk, Horace Silver, Bud Powell and other pianists; it opened up the space between the notes as something I could appreciate as much as the notes themselves.

And now, with this, those of us who still have to ask are lucky enough to have Hanif Abdurriq to tell us about what was happening in the early years of hip-hop as a strain of artists found a way to wed the new aesthetics of production to an artistic and political vision that stretched back through Baldwin and the most thoughtful of the African-American tradition.

I picked this up to get a primer on how to listen to A Tribe Called Quest, and that would have been enough. I didn’t expect to find a writer so gifted, one who – like Baldwin – is able to strike his own pose while keeping one foot in the academic world and another in the smoky jazz club/house party cultural space. Abdurriq is a jazz poet himself, though, someone whose rhythm of language matches the complexity of his rhythms of thought.

So, reading him is a joy, as much a joy as learning about the music that inspired him. I already had a feel for “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” (some 20 years after it was really hot), but this is my first time appreciating “Bonita Applebum,” and some of the other pieces. I had already liked what I heard of their final album – their Saturday Night Live performance in the wake of the Trump election was a comfort in its focused anger – and now I have a larger way of connecting their earliest work with their final.

Not all of this is as incandescent as the early chapters. Toward the middle this “descends” to what I’d originally hoped it would be, a catalogue of the band’s material and, at times, a look behind the scenes at how the pressures of the industry changed their dynamic and relationships. I enjoyed even this part, though, since it’s what I thought I was coming for. Abdurraqib presumes a background knowledge of Q-Tip and Phife-Dawg that I didn’t have, but that’s nothing that a couple minutes on Wikipedia can’t cure.

What’s more, there’s the bonus for me that, while he’s writing as an African-American who came of age in hip-hop’s adolescence, he’s also writing as a Midwesterner in a genre defined by a clash of different coasts. More specifically, he’s writing as an Ohioan – he went to Beechcroft High School, close enough to my own that my team wrestled there every year – so I feel guided here by someone on whom I can make a modest claim of shared perspective (even if I am a decade older).

I’d have recommended this if all it did was answer my basic question(s) about the Tribe of Quest/Native Tongues school of hip-hop. It turns out to be much more than that, though. It’s elegant and excellent enough that, if I get the chance to teach African-American literature again, pieces of it will be on my long-list of possible things to share.


View all my reviews

Review: The Cloven

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

We’re told at the beginning of The Vorrh that the great, dark forest of the title has a powerful effect on any human who ventures into it. At the extreme, the forest consumes consciousness, turning once-ordinary people into the soul-less Limboia. Our first hero, Williams – so much a protagonist that he actually narrates in the first person for a time – eventually loses his memory and sense of purpose, helped along only by the power of the great bow he’s constructed from his dead, mystical wife. Even those who venture into its edges for brief periods to oversee exploiting its resources can feel their spirits becoming unsettled. They want to get through their work and then flee.

I think that’s ultimately a good metaphor for what it’s like to read this. I can, if I put my mind to it, reconstruct the seven or eight central threads and characters here: the Ghertrude-Syrena-Ishmael triangle, Williams and his quest/murder/reassemblage, the Hector-Nicholas fusing, the Sidrus/Wassidrus unraveling, the lost Modesta, the lost Rowena, the strange background of the Kin, the economics of Essenwald, and the real-world references to Raymond Roussel, Edward Maybridge, and Eugene Marais.

Remembering what I read takes an effort, though, and what comes to mind more readily is the sense that I’ve experienced a bizarre and overwhelming journey. I have not walked through the world that Catling created, but I have been to it. That’s the experience of reading this; you lose a sense of coherence, even a sense of self-as-reader, as you go through the dark and impenetrable jungle.

So, when I say I recommend this, I mean that I recommend this for the ineffable experience of reading it. I can easily see how someone would dislike it for its persistent refusal to follow anything like the implied “rules” of fantasy or even of the novel itself. It breaks all sorts of conventions, and even I – who very much enjoyed it – can’t pretend to make sense of large portions of it.

But it’s that wide refusal to settle for what we expect that makes it so rewarding. Catling fights against the tyranny of a domesticated imagination. There are constant “wild and untamed” passages, elements that don’t quite link to the whole. Read this for its various stories, and maybe even more for some of its magical scenes. Above all, though, read it for the promise that it will take you on a compelling journey that, once it’s finished, will seem as mysterious after the fact as before.

I’ll add simply this: if the first volume of this seems to me a celebration of the feminine, and the second seems masculine, this one seems committed to a kind of hermaphroditism. Throughout we see characters who combine in bodies, from the way Williams is born anew in Sidrus/Wassidrus to the way the writhing bodies of ants function as a composite corpus, to the way those same ants bring about the merging of Ishmael and Modesta and the restoration of the Limboia to something like real life. And, of course, we have the climactic end when Hector joins with Nicholas to give the Erstwhile a chance at something like redemption for his part in the failure to keep Adam and Eve from the Tree of Knowledge.

Confused? Yeah, so am I. But I am also fulfilled. I may venture back into the Vorrh someday, back to a place that will be both familiar and bewildering. For now, in the shadow of the reading adventure, I’m satisfied to have seen the great shapes I’ve read about, and I recommend it to anyone willing to live in such deep uncertainty, anyone willing to resist the conventions that govern so much of what’s out there.


View all my reviews

Review: The Erstwhile

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

In retrospect, it’s easy to see that the first volume of Brian Catling’s trilogy begins with a transformation of the feminine into the masculine. In the first, amazing scene, a dying priestess is transformed into a living bow – the very essence of the male symbol, derived as it is from Apollo as archer.

This second volume begins with the reverse. One of our male characters, discovering an abandoned infant, suddenly grows breasts in order to feed it. And we have, as well, our bow disintegrating itself into a cradle, reversing the gender implications of the original transformation.

Those opening chapters set a different tone, which changes things for a while. Then, like the first volume, this one is so magically bewildering that the tone changes throughout. We get some of the same characters back, some transformed, and we get some new ones.

I don’t think I could adequately summarize what takes place, but that’s the ultimate art of this work. Catling’s imagination is so broad, his concerns so varied, that it never settles into anything predictable. To that, I say, thank goodness. No single part of this is ever boring, and none seems entirely detached from the whole. Reading it as a perpetually unsettling experience, though, because it never hardens into something predictable and “finished.”

(In a review for locusmag – a review I’ve only started since it has spoilers for the final volume of the trilogy, Katharine Coldiron speaks of Catling making “rookie mistakes” in not answering all the questions he asks. With apologies for not yet having read all she has to say, I think she’s the one missing the point: this is fantasy unfettered. It’s fantasy that denies the fundamental mistake of the post-Tolkien genre. We’re seeing an imagination unfold into ever-new, ever newly possible alternatives. If this somehow ends with everything resolved, I’ll think it a deep betrayal. One of the major points of this is to remind us of the power of the weird. It’s not retelling some “high fantasy” kingdom’s escape from Armageddon with nothing changed but the names.)

In this case, Catling is concerned, among other things, with the warping effect of colonialism on the colonizers. The Limboia, the zombie-like figures needed to harvest the timber on which the city of Essenwald depends for its wealth, have been lost. A major thread here concerns our “healed” cyclops, Ishmael, as he sets out to help find them. In the harsh caste system of the place, he’s in-between. He isn’t fully “white,” but he’s been accepted by them as a lover and a servant, and he has hopes of achieving more.

We also have Gertrude, who has thought herself fully born of the timber barons’ caste. It turns out that her history is deeper, though. A bit like Ishmael, she is the product of a different genealogy – though fully accepted by her new family – which makes her encounters with the mechanical Kin all the more bewildering. She may be someone/something they’ve produced, and her daughter – eventually kidnapped – may have a powerful role to play in the forest of the Vorrh.

There’s also a newly introduced priest who, in a thread that’s haunting and still unfinished, is compelled by the young girl of the beginning to write a message with his own blood and flesh. As he writes, the letters draw a seething group of ants who bring them to life as they pass back and forth in the contours he has drawn. (Modest spoiler from the first few pages of the final volume that I have just begun: we meet the real-life intellectual Eugene Marais who’s book, Soul of the White Ant, may offer an explanation for ant behavior.)

And then there’s the new character, Hector Schumann, a Jew who’s come from Germany to interview various institutionalized figures whom he comes to think of as fallen angels, the Erstwhiles of the title who were supposedly called upon to guard the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Having failed in their duty, they’re a kind of abandoned group. They have nothing to do but fade slowly from the world.

One of those characters, Nicholas, has found a way to become something closer to human, though, and he and Hector become allies for inscrutable reasons. Eventually Hector has to hide out from an increasingly anti-Semitic German government, and he takes shelter with a Jewish gangster, “Rabbi” (an ironic title) Solly Diamond. And this whole plot-piece takes place a decade or more after the events in Essenwald without, so far, a clear connection between them.

I’m moving sideways with all that, recounting what happens but not effectively describing how it feels to experience it happening. That’s the joy of all this and, in the case of Nicholas, a clue to the origins and ambitions of Catling’s project.

Nicholas speaks often of his “Old Man,” the poet William Blake who was the first to encounter him after he awoke from almost two millennia sleeping below the Thames. (Does any of that quite make sense? Of course not. And that’s the magic.) In fact, the opening scene of the novel – and apparently the cover image – involve Blake interviewing and sketching Nicholas for his work.

Even before such an overt reference, I found myself tracing the Blakean influence here. Like Allan Moore’s Jerusalem (and, though we forget, like Tolkien himself) Catling is a kind of neo-Blake, someone intent on seeing beyond the world as it presents itself. As Blake put it famously, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, man would see things as they truly are: infinite.

That’s ultimately what this project strikes me as being about. Like Moore’s Jerusalem, it’s about consciously imagining an extra dimension to the world, about dreaming that we what we see is only the beginning of what our minds might apprehend. Katharine Coldiron – and Orson Scott Card and so many others who have big sales in the genre – want to imagine a world that, looking different from our own, ultimately answers to the same trajectory of narrative. Catling and Moore deliver something much more, something that leaves us feeling smaller for the glimpse we get of an imagined space so much larger than the world we know.


View all my reviews