→ April 28, 2025
→ By

The Book of Love.

The Book of Love is Kelly Link’s first novel, coming nine years after her third short story collection Get In Trouble was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – a rarity for genre fiction of any sort. This novel, following a quartet of teenagers after three of them end up accidentally dead and are purposely brought back to life by a demon of questionable intent, is a damn masterpiece.

The novel opens with Susannah mourning the disappearance and presumed death of her sister, Laura, and two of Laura’s friends, Daniel – Susannah’s putative boyfriend – and Mo, a year earlier. But it turns out they were just mostly dead, and in the second chapter, we meet the three of them, plus a fourth character, as the guy they thought was their boring music teacher Mr. Anabin reveals he’s brought them back from the death place, and that he’ll give them another chance at life, altering everyone else’s memories so they think the trio were just away on a study-abroad program in Ireland. It turns out that this is part of a more complex deal between Mr. Anabin and another demon (or whatever he is) named Bogomil, whose history is longer and more complicated than anyone imagined. We follow the four as they try to figure out how to fulfill Mr. Anabin’s requests so they can stay alive while also navigating their relationships with each other, with people in their New England town of Lovesend, with a new visitor or two, and with an all-powerful evil entity who would like nothing better than to just eat them all up.

Link builds the world of this book piecemeal, giving us hints as we go along as to what lies just beyond the ‘door’ through which the three friends passed, even holding off on introducing or explaining some key characters until well into the narrative. It adds to the book’s dreamlike atmosphere, which itself connects to Susannah’s dreams about Bogomil and the way Mr. Anabin and later other characters play with sense and memory, while also keeping the reader from becoming too omniscient, so we can better feel the confusion of the troika as they seek to understand their situation and their changing abilities.

The book overflows with interesting characters, highlighted by the fantastic four at the heart. Susannah and Laura are sisters, opposites in nearly every way, but believable and fleshed-out, even more than the two boys. Daniel’s a bit of a goof, a well-meaning one, the guy who drifts through life while good things happen to him; while Mo is a more tragic figure who hates Daniel for exactly that reason. The way the four interact, with fights and tiffs and real moments of emotion, may be the greatest strength in a book that is as strong as any I’ve read in a year.

The story meanders at times, yet it never feels padded and certainly doesn’t slow down for anything or anyone; the final quarter or so seems to move at top speed, as the trio figure out some things about their predicament and the various competing forces lock Lovesend under a spell that may end in the destruction of the entire town. I don’t know if Link entirely stuck the landing here; it’s imperfect, but not bad by any means, just perhaps a little too tidy, where everyone gets some variation of a happy ending – or at least not a sad or tragic one. The denouement with the final boss is also of debatable quality; it works, barely, but again relies on a little hand-waving that this is all just fine and go with it. And I did go with it, to be clear.

If you like the work of Neil Gaiman, which I always have, but are looking for similar literature by any other author for obvious reasons, this is the most Gaimanesque novel I’ve ever read. It has dark, creepy elements, and it sits on both sides of the divide between life and death, with flawed main characters and demons from the benevolent to the purely evil. It has the feeling of an impossible story, that no one should be able to write this well, with prose this clear and clever, with characters this three-dimensional, and with a story that nearly sets the pages on fire as you progress. It’s on the list of finalists for this year’s Nebula Award, and I have no idea how the Hugos whiffed on it. The Book of Love is a marvel.

Next up: Alexei Panshin’s Nebula-winning novel Rite of Passage.

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→ April 22, 2025
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Uprooted.

Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2015, inverts the usual formula for the “chosen one” story about a child who turns out to play an extremely important role in a history-changing event, and whose powers are critical in the way that event unfolds. The protagonist here, Agnieszka, isn’t even the one her village believes is going to be chosen by the local wizard, called the Dragon to serve as his apprentice, and she’s hardly the sort of student the Dragon was hoping for, but her presence there sets off a broad, violent conflict that will determine whether their society can survive or will be overrun by the sentient forces of the Wood. It’s smart and vaguely subversive of the traditions of this trope, although it becomes unspeakably violent in the resolution in ways I found hard to stomach.

Agnieszka lives in a small village near a dangerous forest called the Wood that acts with malevolence, corrupting anyone who enters it or eats its fruits or leaves and causing them to commit violence against anyone around them, like automatons under the Wood’s command. She’s chosen to become the next apprentice to the Dragon, the wizard for this particular part of the kingdom, a stern, cold man who takes a young girl under his tutelage every ten years or so – but after they leave his service, they never return to their original villages. Once Agnieszka gets to the Dragon’s tower, however, one of her friends from her village ends up corrupted by the Wood, which would normally require her execution to protect the rest of the valley, but Agnieszka finds a spell that might remove the corruption from her friend. That in turn attracts the attention of the crown prince, whose mother disappeared into the Wood many years before, and who demands that the Dragon and Agnieszka come with him into the forest to find and rescue the Queen.

Much of what Agnieszka does – or what happens to her – is a combination of circumstance and her own tenacity, making her an interesting lead character but not a terribly complex one. She’s driven by a simple sense of right and wrong that is fundamentally humanist; she refuses to sacrifice a single life, ever, even if it has the potential to save many other lives down the road. Some of this is wisdom, as she realizes the path of killing everyone corrupted by the Wood has no end to it, as it doesn’t stop whatever force underlies the Wood’s endless thirst for territory, but Novik defines Agnieszka more by the high value she places on an individual life. Again, it makes her interesting, but not very deep.

The Wood ends up the more intriguing character, so to speak, although I got a bit lost in the explanations of what exactly is behind the Wood’s sentience and its Anton Chigurh-like drive to kill anything in its path without regard for anything about the victims. It’s a better exercise in world-building than character development, saved by the fact it’s well-written and mostly well-paced.

The body count in Uprooted is enormous, enough to make George R.R. Martin jealous; it’s most likely a comment on the futility of war of any sort, but Novik’s tone towards the massive losses of soldiers in the last two conflicts borders on the callous, and it’s out of sync with Agnieszka’s almost single-minded focus on saving any individual life she can. This was ultimately what turned me against Uprooted, even though I enjoyed most of the read; it just devolves into pointless violence, with one scene that recalled the trench warfare of World War I, and there’s no real point to any of it. Characters climb over piles of dead bodies to continue the fighting, and often don’t even understand why they’re doing so. It’s just too far removed from what powered the first three-fourths of the book. I wouldn’t recommend against Uprooted, but in the end it just didn’t get over the line for me.

Next up: Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, winner of last year’s Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

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→ April 7, 2025
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A Sorceress Comes to Call.

T. Kingfisher won the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Novel for Nettle and Bone, a dark fantasy novel with an indelible main character and outstanding prose, using the fantasy trappings in the setting rather than relying on them to drive the plot (or in lieu of one). Her latest novel, A Sorceress Comes to Call, has been nominated for this year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel, and it features more compelling characters and strong writing, although this time around Kingfisher leans more into the magic aspects of the story and it’s not always to the book’s benefit.

Cordelia is a 14-year-old girl who lives with her mother, Evangeline, a sorceress and a generally awful human, a clear Mother Gothel figure who uses her powers to leech money from men and to keep Cordelia in line – making her Obedient, where Evangeline can completely control Cordelia’s every action and word, while Cordelia is locked in and able to see everything that she’s doing and saying. Evangeline’s most recent “benefactor” appears to be done with her, so she takes her vengeance and sets off in search of new prey. She ends up ensnaring the Squire, whose sister, Hester, sees right away that Evangeline is bad news – referring to the woman as Doom in her thoughts – and eventually realizes that Cordelia is her mother’s prisoner, not her accomplice. The two must work together to try to stop Evangeline from marrying the Squire and casting Hester and all the servants out, and at the same time to free Cordelia from bondage, while, of course, Evangeline is not one to take opposition lightly and lashes out in violent ways.

Kingfisher is a hell of a storyteller; even when Sorceress started to veer more into using magic to resolve major plot points, she never lets her foot off the gas, and almost every plot twist is both well-earned and ratchets up the tension significantly. Cordelia’s a little bit of a cipher as a character because she’s so beaten down by her mother’s iron grip that she hasn’t had a chance to develop much as a person, so Hester ends up the real heroine, and she’s a star. She needs her own series of mysteries or something similar, because she’s rich and complex, smart but not unreasonably so, a little funny, a lot self-deprecating, and torn between her romantic inclinations and her fierce desire to maintain her independence. This becomes her story more than Cordelia’s by her force of personality, and watching her think and work through the problem of Doom is every bit as compelling as reading a classic Agatha Christie novel.

Where Sorceress loses a little bit relative to Nettle and Bone is in how much it relies on magic to resolve the major conflicts of the story, and how Kingfisher does so. After one of the big plot twists, an entirely new paranormal thing happens that hadn’t been introduced or even implied previously in the story, and it is critical in the ultimate plan to defeat Doom forever. That plan also requires the use of a ritual that doesn’t rely enough on the ingenuity or strength of the characters; they just have to get Doom in the right place and say some words and poof, which reminded me of that insipid show Charmed. That ritual follows a long stretch of time within the book where Hester, Cordelia, and some of their allies spend days poring through books looking for the solution, which is the only part of the book where the plot slows down.

Kingfisher does eventually stick the landing here once you get past the magical hand-waving that gets us to the climactic battle, with an incredibly tense series of scenes through the fight itself and a balanced epilogue that treats both of the protagonists fairly and in ways that are true to their characters. I’m hoping we see Hester again somewhere, as she’s a marvelous creation and too good to waste on just a single book. Kingfisher has said in interviews that she was inspired to write this by reading Regency romances, so perhaps she’ll decide to continue in that vein and bring Hester back for another go.

Next up: I’ve just finished Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom and begun Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, the latter the winner of the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ February 17, 2025
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A Stranger in Olondria.

Sonia Samatar’s first novel, A Stranger in Olondria, first crossed my radar because N.K. Jemisin recommended it – many years ago, maybe close to ten at this point, enough so that I don’t remember even what Jemisin said beyond praising the book. It is an unusual work of fantasy literature, with a real emphasis on the second part: Samatar’s prose and narrative are smart and challenging, taking the reader on a vast, epic journey through a new world of literature, poetry, religion, war, and bigotry, all in service of her hero’s quest to give solace to the tortured soul of a girl who died without a proper burial.

A Stranger in Olondria starts in another place entirely, and seems almost mundane by comparison to what will follow. We meet young Jevick, the second son of his strict, wealthy merchant father; his older brother was born simple, and thus was a disappointment to their father, who wanted an heir to his trade. Jevick’s father hires a tutor to help Jevick learn the Olondrian language and some of its culture, a choice that turns out to be timely as Jevick’s father dies suddenly, leaving his son to take over the family business without any direct training from his father.

On the ship he takes with his small retinue to get to Olondria, he meets a couple with a young girl, Jissavet, near his own age, who is dying of a form of curse, the true nature of which will become apparent in very small slivers as the story progresses. Jevick reaches Olondria and is overwhelmed by the luxury and iniquity of the big city, but soon afterwards he is visited by a ghost, that of the young girl, who promises to haunt him until her body is found and cremated in accordance with her culture’s norms. These visitations mark Jevick as a holy man, as the Olondrians believe her ghost is an angel, and drops him directly into a simmering religious/political conflict (really, when are the two ever separated, in life or in fiction) that will eventually put him on the run even as he tries to assuage the ghost and find her body for a funeral pyre.

This is a work of depth, in almost every way. Samatar is writing for people who read literature, using words typically not found in contemporary fiction but more common in British literature of the 19th or early 20th centuries, and crafting a layered and unsimple narrative that demands your constant attention. This is not merely the story of a haunting, which would have given us just a rote adventure as Jevick and whoever his companion or the moment might be have to flee from one spot or another while also trying to figure out where Jissavet’s body is. Samatar has instead laced the story with epic, narrative poetry, and built a world beneath the plot where unseen forces are simmering just below the boiling point, an uneasy peace in Olondria that Jevick shatters simply by being there and confiding in one person that he has been visited by a ghost. (That person was his landlord, which shows you that you should never, ever trust a landlord.) Rather than populating the novel with idiosyncratic side characters, Samatar populates it with flashbacks, stories, and myths that further build out the world and explain different aspects of the various cultures in this world she’s created. It feels scholarly, unsurprising as Samatar is a professor at James Madison, and a poet, and the daughter of a Somali scholar/historian of some renown as well.

In December, I read Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, which won the 2023 Nebula Award for Best Novel, but I never reviewed it in large part because I couldn’t decide what to say. Chandrasekera has also built an incredible, immersive world in his novel, one with political and religious undertones, but in the end, it’s unclear if the building was in service of anything other than itself. The story doesn’t really resolve – the bright doors of the title are a Macguffin, I’d argue – and the protagonist is in some ways a pawn, lacking the agency we expect in a main character. I liked the book as I was reading it, but then felt let down enough by the ending that I punted on a write up. A Stranger in Olondria helped me articulate why: If you’re building a fantastical world, I’m probably going to get sucked in fairly quickly, but you still have to pay it off in the end in the plot and/or the main character’s arc. Chandrasekera didn’t do that; Samatar did, and the Jevick who returns home at the end of her novel is an entirely different young man than the child who left it only some months earlier. It deserves a wider audience – and that’s probably why Jemisin was talking it up whenever she did.

Next up: I’m reading Robert Walser’s peculiar novel Jakob von Gunten, after which I’m going to try to tackle W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

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→ November 3, 2023
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Nettle & Bone.

T. Kingfisher (the nom de plume of writer Ursula Vernon) won this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel for Nettle & Bone, a light fantasy novel that subverts many tropes of the genre while adhering to others as it follows its protagonist on a quest to save her sister, the Queen of the North Kingdom. It is a blast to read, with some wonderful side characters alongside our hero and a great balance of humor and darkness, although I’m not sure it has the thematic depth of some of the best winners of that honor.

Our hero is Marra, the youngest of three sisters in the tiny Harbor Kingdom, a city-state located around the midpoint of the coast between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms, protected by its strategic location and the desire of both neighbors to avoid having it fall into their rival’s hands. As the story begins, Marra’s eldest sister, Damia, is married to the young Prince and heir to the throne of the Northern Kingdom, but she dies in an equestrian accident before she can produce a son, so the Prince then marries the middle sister, Kania. When Marra goes to see Kamia as her sister is about to give birth, however, Kania gives her a cryptic warning, and subsequent events cause Marra to realize her sister is the victim of a violent husband. She finds a dust-witch to try to obtain a way to kill the Prince, which ultimately leads her on a journey across two kingdoms with a party that grows to four, not counting the chickens, and ends with a showdown in the royal chambers.

Nettle & Bone is a quest novel, and we get a classic adventuring party of a cleric, a fighter, and a couple of mages, roughly speaking, where the pleasure is in the interplay between these characters as well as the world-building. Kingfisher has a Gaimanesque knack for crafting weird and creepy magical realms, with more delightful settings here than I can count – very reminiscent of a well-crafted RPG campaign, but with the detail of a Neverwhere or Among Others, where you’re immersed in the scene even as the writer asks you to believe any number of impossible things. The goblin market is an obvious homage to Gaiman’s work, among others, but Kingfisher gives it enough unique flourishes that it stands on its own merits.

I absolutely tore through this book, and I’ve already recommended it to two strangers who asked about it when I was reading it in public. That said, I have two major criticisms of the book, although only one of them affected my enjoyment of the work. That one is straightforward – Marra is not that interesting of a character. Kingfisher sure as hell tries to give her some personality, but beyond making her a worrywart, she doesn’t have much to distinguish herself. She’s the observer of the action, a Nick Jenkins (from A Dance to the Music of Time), but all three of her companions on the quest are more compelling characters. Marra’s whole family is boring, honestly; Kania’s a cipher, her mother doesn’t even have a name, I think, and her father is somewhere else. Kingfisher’s strength may lie in creating side characters, which is a real skill and not something I wish to diminish, but the time we spend with Marra alone forms some of the least interesting pages in the book.

My second criticism of Nettle & Bone is an academic one, which is that I don’t see much of a theme here – and for many readers, that won’t matter at all. It didn’t affect my pleasure in reading the book, either; it’s great fun, I laughed quite a bit, and I enjoyed a lot of the time I spent with these characters and in this world. I usually don’t think much about deeper themes or meaning until a book is done, after which it’s often all I think about – what is the author trying to say? What might they want the reader to take away from the book? Marra is a strong female lead, and her world, like ours, is patriarchal, while two of her three companions on the quest are also women, so there’s no question the book has a feminist bent. Beyond that, however, I couldn’t discern any greater themes here. That’s fine for the average reader, maybe for the vast majority of readers, but if we’re comparing books for the purpose of an award like the Hugo, I think questions of theme and meaning do matter. That said, I haven’t read any of the other nominees yet, so I have no opinion on whether this book was worthy other than to say I loved every minute while I was reading it.

Next up: Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a self-published, Kickstarted novel from 2014 that has spawned three Hugo-nominated sequels. I’m on page 10.

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→ October 24, 2023
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Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

I’m a bit of an oddball for my age bracket when it comes to Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve played the pen and paper game, while in middle school, and liked it but found the actual process kind of slow, and of course when you put a bunch of teenaged boys together in a room, they will begin to act like idiots at some point and the game becomes secondary. (They didn’t stay idiots, though; that group now has two successful lawyers, one of whom has defended death-row inmates; a senior VP at a big insurance company; and whatever I am.) I loved some parts of it, including the character creation, and thought others were slow. I did get very into video role-playing games, both within the D&D universe, such as the Pool of Radiance (which I never completed – I couldn’t beat the final boss, even when I tried to play the game again in my 20s), and without, like the Bard’s Tale and some Ultima Games. Regular readers know I became obsessed with the original Baldur’s Gate trilogy about twenty years ago, and I won’t try the newest game because I’m afraid I’ll disappear into it for days or weeks. So I have some nostalgia for the game, but it’s limited, and when people ask if I was a D&D player I generally answer with something like “not really,” because I don’t know the lore or the rules anywhere near like dedicated players do.

Thus I approached the Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves movie (free on Amazon Prime) without any particular bias towards or against the film; I don’t think I was predisposed to like or dislike it, or to criticize it for any lack of fidelity to source material. I did worry it would be too fan-servicey, or corny, or maybe just boring because plenty of video-game stories lack the depth required for a two-hour film. D&D: Honor Among turned out to be a lot of fun, witty, fast-moving, a little too silly at times, but very enjoyable, and the rare film that left me hoping we’ll get a sequel.

Chris Pine plays Edgin Darvis, a bard who begins the film in prison with his comrade Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), a barbarian fighter, after the two were part of a large robbery gone very wrong, which also led to Edgin’s daughter Kira going with one of the members of their crew who escaped the authorities, the thief Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant). We see their parole hearing, where Edgin dissembles at length, waiting for one particular judge to arrive, allowing the script to give us Edgin’s and Holga’s back stories – he was part of the peacekeeper group the Harpers until a Red Wizard they’d arrested killed his wife, after which he teamed up with Holga, who became a sort of surrogate mother to Kira, and later Forge and the elf Simon (Justice Smith), a young mage who, like low-level magic users in D&D, isn’t good for much because he’s so inexperienced. When Edgin and Holga finally get out of prison, they find out that Forge is now Lord of Neverwinter, and perhaps not the welcoming old friend they expected to find. They reunite with Simon and draft the tiefling druid Doric (Sophia Lillis), a shapeshifter who, we find out quickly, Simon is rather sweet on. Hijinks, magic, and combat ensue as they try to find the missing magic item they were after in the busted burglary that landed the two in prison, while also rescuing Kira and uncovering whatever Forge’s game is.

The story’s fine, although you can see in general where things are heading and the film doesn’t rely too heavily on big twists and plot surprises. It’s the characters and the actors who make this so much fun, notably Pine, who wisecracks like Michael Bluth with a bit more savoir-faire and less befuddlement at what people around him are doing. Pine sets the tone from the rambling monologues he gives to stall for time at the pardon hearing, making it clear that the script is going to lean heavily on humor and his personality, and less so on the lore of the source material – which is good, because I don’t think anyone needs a film about the 5e core rules set or lengthy soliloquies about critical hits and saving throws. His interplay with Rodriguez is very strong, as she’s doing a sort of Rosa Díaz/Cara Dune mashup that contrasts nicely with his “I’ve got this under control” smartass vibe. Smith has his moments as a supporting character whose importance increases as the story moves along – again, thematically consistent with the rules of the game – and it seems like the script sets his character and Lillis’s up for bigger roles in any future installments. Grant is a complete ham, but it works, and having some knowledge of his behavior over the years, including on the set of this movie, well, perhaps it wasn’t that big of a stretch for him.

Combat in role-playing games can be a slog for players, and even in the best of circumstances it’s still driven by probabilities whether through dice or cards or some other similar mechanism, which would not translate very well to screen or page. The combat sequences in Honor Among Thieves dispense with all of that – the characters just fight, mostly Holga, who can take out a whole army, although Simon plays more of a role as the party gains experience. It’s a subtle nod to the way the game is played without ever slowing down the overall story; the fights are entertaining, well choreographed, and, most importantly, quick. (There’s also very little blood or actual on-screen violence – it’s all cartoonish or out of sight, less violent than a typical Marvel movie.)

There are some clear plot conveniences here and a visit to the Underdark that raises all sorts of questions about architectural stability and sanity. I also wouldn’t call any of the character development or overall themes “deep,” as the script is happy to give us these four adventurers and allow their chemistry to keep things light and fun, which is this film’s greatest strength. I laughed quite a bit, and I was reasonably invested in the plot, even though I think anyone can guess the general outline of the conclusion. It’s a great, not too serious adventure film in a genre that doesn’t often get this treatment.

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→ January 17, 2023
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Elder Race.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race made the shortlist for this year’s inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, which first brought him to my attention even though he’d written twenty-odd novels before this and won a few awards along the way. It’s a quick read with a clever conceit at its heart: what if the person who’s supposed to be a great wizard is, in fact, just a human who possesses sufficiently advanced technology that it appears to be magic?

The ’wizard’ Nygroth Elder is, in fact, Nyr Illim Tevitch, an anthropologist left in stasis to keep an eye on this colonized planet while the remainder of his crew has long since left to return to Earth – which may or may not still be a going concern. Lynesse Fourth Daughter, a princess so junior you might call her a spare to the spare, believes there’s an existential threat to her people, so she treks to Nyr’s tower to try to enlist his help to fight what she calls a demon, which her own mother thinks is a fabrication to try to gain attention or glory. Nyr reluctantly agrees to help, even though his directive is to observe but not interfere, even if refraining might cause harm to the people he’s watching, and they set off on a quest to find and defeat the threat. Along the way, the culture clash between the two emerges through their languages, as Nyr can’t even explain what a scientist is, and the translation engine he uses makes everything sound to Lynesse like some sort of magic.

Elder Race is a quest novel – or novella, which is how the Hugo Awards characterized it, giving it a nomination in that category in 2022 – but one with a metatextual component as well that, in some ways, is the more interesting of the two. Tchaikovsky tells the story by alternating narration between Lynesse and Nyr, thus presenting both sides of most of their conversations, which operates as a commentary on fantasy literature and works that try to blend fantasy and science, as well as a more humanist look at the challenges of communicating across cultures. The fact that Lynesse’s language lacks so many words that Nyr takes for granted and finds himself unable to express even through translation recalled Samuel Delany’s classic novella Babel-17, which takes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – that the structure of a language influences how its speakers view the world – and turns it into an entire story, where a language is a weapon that alters speakers’ minds. Here language is less insidious, but stands as a concrete example of the difficulty of communicating across all of the boundaries that separate people, not just language but culture, history, religion, and more. Language is the visible manifestation of what amounts to a religious difference between Lynesse’s people and Nyr; what her family and subjects believe is magic is just technology they’ve lost in the centuries since humans colonized this planet.

Nyr is the more interesting and developed character of the two, in part because Lynesse is, by design, depicted as naïve – she’s young, but also not very worldly even within the confines of this civilization, and her faith in Nyr based on a historical anecdote is almost charming in its innocence. Nyr, meanwhile, has to grapple with both his role as potential savior, or as a failed savior, to Lynesse’s people, while also facing the fact that he might be severed permanently from his own civilization, condemned to a lonely existence where he enters long periods of suspended animation and can’t forge enduring relationships with anyone. He encounters crippling depression and covers it up with the help of embedded tech that takes the old trope about men compartmentalizing their emotions and turns it into software; he can just push it aside and deal with it later.

Tchaikovsky – who spells his name Czajkowski outside of his writing, as he’s of Polish descent rather than Russian – packs a lot into the 200 pages of Elder Race, without skimping on the quest part of the story, which is the real narrative that drives the book forward. You could probably just read this as a straight-up quest without giving the larger themes a second thought and still enjoy it. I found those themes gave this novel more heft and staying power in my mind after I finished. It’s to Czajkowski’s credit that he managed this in such a brief novel that revolves almost entirely around just two core characters.

Next up: I’m many books behind in my writeups, but I’m currently reading Brian Clegg’s Gravitational Waves: How Einstein’s Spacetime Ripples Reveal the Secrets of the Universe.

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→ December 4, 2020
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Piranesi.

Has any novel been as long-awaited as Susanna Clarke’s sophomore work Piranesi? Her first novel, 2004’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, is one of the best books I’ve ever read, perhaps the best written this century so far, a brilliantly rendered epic about rival magicians in the 1800s, complete with the funniest footnotes I’ve ever seen. Clarke fell ill after writing it, and other than one book of short stories, published nothing until this year, when Piranesi appeared, as if from another world, in September. While it’s quite unlike her first novel, Piranesi is remarkable – brilliantly rendered, again, but in a completely new way, with a new voice and an atmosphere of mystery and dread throughout.

Piranesi is the name of the narrator, although we come to learn that his story, and his name, are more complicated than they first appear to be. He lives alone in a gigantic castle of hundreds of rooms, some sort of labyrinth, and the only person he ever sees is one he calls the Other, who seems to be conducting some sort of research on Piranesi and the house. As the story progresses, though, it becomes clear that there’s far more to Piranesi than even he realizes, as his memories start to come back to him in dribs and drabs, and he realizes there are other people in the world besides himself and the Other.

The less said about the story, though, the better. This is book about memory and loss, and it’s best to recover Piranesi’s memories, and learn the truth about him and the House that he treats as a sort of god, along with him. Clarke has, once again, created an immersive, dreamlike otherworld that will pull you in, even though this one is as nebulous as the world of Jonathan Strange was clear and familiar. It was easy to look at her first novel and see her influences in 19th century British literature and to understand where she was gently parodying the books she obviously loved from that era. Piranesi, however, is unlike any novel I’ve ever read. The closest comparisons I can think of – David Mitchell’s Slade House came to mind – aren’t really that close.

While the mystery of who exactly Piranesi is and what he’s doing in this house – which floods often, and doesn’t appear to have any exits – unravels, Clarke gives the reader ample time and fodder to consider his plight. He’s alone most of the time, yet oddly at peace with his situation, even though he’s in frequent peril from everything from the rising waters to lack of food. (The Other brings him gifts, including food, although Piranesi largely seems to live off dried seaweed and fish he catches.) There are the bones of 14 other people in the House, and Piranesi seems to think they speak to him, somehow, as do the various statues. Was he always mad? Did solitude drive him to madness? Why isn’t the Other trying harder to help him? And who is 16, the person whom the Other warns Piranesi to avoid at all costs?

The House is a character of its own in the book, especially given how Piranesi interacts with it, and could stand as a symbol for any of several real-world analogues. It’s a dream world, in the sense of the endless structure of dreams, but even more resembles the human imagination – a fractalized rendition of the world of our minds in a series of rooms that might be changing each time Piranesi visits them, in a total space that might have an end that Piranesi hasn’t actually found. There’s a sense of incompleteness within the House that feels like the sort of dream you get when you’re not completely asleep, but where impossible things creep into your mind enough that you know after that you weren’t completely awake, and how within those semi-dreams you can also feel trapped by your own confusion. I’ve had more of these experiences during the pandemic, for some unknown reason, and while Piranesi was in progress long before COVID-19 existed as a pathogen in humans, it takes on a different meaning eight months into the ongoing plague.

There might be a bit too much exposition in the middle of Piranesi, where Clarke has to break the spell a little bit to explain to the reader just how Piranesi got to the House and what might be coming next, but the resolution is gripping and veers from the expected in multiple ways, not least in the timing of events towards the novel’s end. It isn’t Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell because nothing could be, and perhaps it’s for the best that Clarke’s follow-up isn’t in that same universe, as she’d once promised. This new creation of hers is just as magical as the first, but in its own, memorable way.

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→ August 14, 2020
→ By

Or What You Will.

Jo Walton’s Hugo-winning novel Among Others   is one of my favorite novels of any genre, a beautifully written story around two incredibly compelling characters that just happens to have a slight element of fantasy to it. It’s an exemplar of genre fiction in that the fantastical parts of the book accentuate the plot but don’t define it. That book led me to pick up her 2019 novel Lent, which delves into Renaissance and Roman Catholic history and, again, uses a fantasy-like twist to tell a better story, but where the main character is the real star. And that, in turn, led me to her brand-new novel Or What You Will, which seems like an even more serious novel while drawing on the great history of metafiction in literature, going back to Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler… and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds to explore life, death, and meaning in new ways.

Or What You Will gives us Sylvie, the author, in her 70s, widowed, writing her new novel while visiting Firenze, which serves as the inspiration for her fictional duchy of Thalia and a series of novels set in the equivalent of the Renaissance, featuring several characters borrowed from Shakespeare’s plays (notably The Tempest and The Twelfth Night, the latter of which gives this book its title). The narrator and protagonist, however, is a voice in Sylvie’s head who has become many characters within her novels, and who realizes that when Sylvie dies, he will too, so he hatches a plan to make them both immortal through her writing – not just through fans, but a form of actual immortality in a Thursday Next-like world inside her books.

The chapters alternate, roughly, between scenes from within this new Thalian novel, which include Orsino and Viola (The Twelfth Night), Caliban and Miranda (The Tempest), Geryon (Dante’s Inferno), and the real-world Marsilio Ficino; and conversations between Sylvie and the narrator that unfurl the former’s life story, including an abusive first marriage and an idyllic second one, a brutal and unloving mother, and a late-blooming yet successful literary career. Those introspective chapters, which I assume at least draw a little from Walton’s own life (she didn’t get her first published novel until she was 35), are clearly the superior ones here, implicit meditations on life and legacy, unfolding a fascinating personal history of a three-dimensional character. The chapters set in Thalia are strongly reminiscent of Lent, which was set in Firenze during the Renaissance and featured Ficino and Pico della Mirandolo, who also appears in this book, but there are a couple of twists to life in Thalia versus that of real-like Italy that put it strongly in the realm of science fiction or fantasy. The characters in Thalia are aware that their world is different, and that other worlds exist, although they only know Sylvie as a god. It becomes a bit like Lisa Simpson’s “I’ve created Lutherans!” experiment; we’re looking down at these people, waiting for them to figure out what we already know, and knowing that they’ll have to figure it out for the book to end. There’s a separate intrigue around the rivalry between Orsino and Geryon, and the sudden appearance of Caliban from beneath the ground, which is moderately interesting but takes a clear back seat to the main storyline.

Walton manages to keep the narrator’s specific plan to save Sylvie’s life, and thus his own, out of the novel until close to the end, and introduces a clever wrinkle for the narrator to surmount for the entire plan to work. The conclusion is a bit beside the point, however, since it doesn’t work in our world and thus prompts you, the reader, to think about your own mortality and legacy, something that has at least been on my mind more than ever this year, between the pandemic, friends losing loved ones, and changes in my own life. That’s really why the novel works even with its implausible fantasy elements – that, and Walton’s typically lovely writing, especially when it comes to describing our world’s Firenze, a city she clearly loves – these themes are universal and timeless, and the way she presents them is both novel and still as comfortable as the familiar routines of Sylvie’s writing life.

Next up: I’m halfway through Emily St. John Mandel’s newest novel, The Glass Hotel.

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→ April 6, 2020
→ By

Lent.

Jo Walton’s Among Others was one of my favorite novels from my reading of (nearly) all of the Hugo winners, a perfect use of fantasy elements to elevate a brilliant story, rather than relying on the fantasy (or sci-fi) bits to provide the entertainment. Her latest novel, Lent, goes a bit further in leaning on a single fantastical quirk to take the real-life story of Girolamo Savonarola, a martyred monk in 1490s Italy who was believed to have the gift of prophecy, and turn it into an extensive meditation on how small choices in our lives can have extensive, long-lasting effects on our world.

The first third or so of the book seems like a straightforward telling of the last six years of Girolamo’s life, from 1492 until the infamous “bonfire of the vanities” that led to a turning of public sentiment against him and his eventual imprisonment, torture, and hanging at the hands of the “do as we say, not as we do” Catholic Church. Girolamo preaches against corruption and secular art, gets under the skin of the Pope and other powerful clergy, and eventually they manage to win the political battle and execute him. After his death, however, we learn something about Girolamo before he returns to earth, back in 1492, to try it all over again – but this time with the knowledge of what transpired in his previous life, as well as that new bit of information, and thus can alter his choices to see if he can get the outcome he ultimately desires. He’ll fail again, return to earth, make new decisions, fail again, and so on until the final chapter where we will learn if he gets it “right” in the last attempt in the novel.

That conceit itself isn’t new, but the reason Girolamo gets to play life as a sort of role-playing game where he restarts from his last save is a new twist that provides a stark backdrop to the choices he makes – and, in many ways, makes some of them more selfless than before. Walton thus gives us a meditation on free will and chaos theory within a story about grace and salvation, one that upends traditional Catholic theology while playing around within its borders. There’s a slow build in the first section, but once you see what’s going on, and Girolamo himself is armed with the same knowledge, the entire concept becomes more interesting, and every subsequent decision that he makes carries much more weight, even when you know that it’s going to ultimately fail and lead him back to restart the cycle from some point in his past.

Girolamo himself makes for a fascinating protagonist as Walton writes him, although I think she’s softened his character a little to emphasize his generosity of spirit and belief in the church as a way to spread the religious and mundane philosophies of Jesus Christ in the world, thus deemphasizing to some extent his puritanical beliefs and attacks on secular art and culture. There’s one scene of a burning of secular or “profane” works, although even within that Girolamo is presented as more resigned to the event than the fanatic he appears to have actually been. He becomes friends with more than one character who is committing adultery, including a woman who would certainly have been seen as “fallen” in that time, which seems like it may not have been consistent with the actual Girolamo (although it’s a reasonable use of poetic license).

The magic of Walton’s writing seems to be in the getting there more than the destination itself, as I think it’s fairly clear where Lent is likely to end; it’s how Walton gets to that point that captivates. I wish she’d been able to give a bit more depth to the panoply of characters around Girolamo, many of whom are interesting even when a bit two-dimensional and just required more page time to help flesh them out, but the main character is so fascinating – as is the side character Crookback, whose real-life identity may be apparent to astute readers – that the book still soars without it.

Next up: José Saramago’s The Double.

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