Madeline Miller – Circe

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Book Review, Circe, Classical Greece, Madeline Miller

Ancient of Lays, vibrantly and powerfully brought to life

Madeline Miller’s first book, The Song of Achilles, was a standout, stunning read. So it was with a mixture of trepidation and delight that I embarked on this, her second, Circe.

Within a few sentences I settled back with a huge sigh of surrendering relief, as it was clear from the off that the very high bar Miller had set for herself with her working of the story of Achilles was going to be equalled by Circe.

I can’t say this book is better than that one, or that one than this. In truth, she has sung another magical song for Circe.

There won’t be any surprises in the narrative, not for anyone enamoured of Ancient Greek – what do we call it, mythology? history?

When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist. They called me nymph, assuming I would be like my mother and aunts and thousand cousins. Least of the lesser goddesses, out powers were so modest they could scarcely ensure our eternities. We spoke to fish and nurtured flowers, coaxed drops from the clouds or salt from the waves. That word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language, it means not just goddess, but bride

Here again is part of the story laid out in Homer

Circe is in sharpest relief as part of Odysseus’ task/journey. She is the daughter of Helios, one of the Titans – older, more archaic and unpredictable gods, who were overthrown by the Olympians. Circe, who transgressed in some way, ends up banished to an island. Her story connects with Odysseus as she is a witch/some kind of punitive goddess, and turned Odysseus’ sailors, and other sailors, into swine. Odysseus ‘tricks’ her, or is wise enough to be alert to how her spell happens (just don’t drink wine offered by witches)

Brides, nymphs were called, but that is not really how the world saw us. We were an endless feast laid out upon a table, beautiful and renewing. And so very bad at getting away

The Wine of Circe, Edward Burne-Jones

But there is a lot more to Circe’s connections with these ancient lays, Jason, Medea, Theseus, the Minotaur, Ariadne, Prometheus, Daedalus, Icarus and more, all have stories which touch hers

Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two

Miller, who I think is shaping up – if not exceeding, the carrying of Mary Renault’s mantle, breathes vibrant, relevant life into these tales of long ago.

She is immersed, as someone who went the academic route into the study of classical Greece, in her research. But, she is a transformative, magical, inspired writer. Either she knows the spells to get the Muses to descend, or she has inherited Circe’s special magical gift of ‘transformation’ because this gripping, intense, lush story springs off the page, and I have to say this ‘real’ world felt a flatter, colour leached one, compared to the enduring power of those classical times

Beware the Moly – like all skilled witches Circe is a dab hand with plants for good and ill

I really cannot recommend this highly enough. Narrative, character, thought provoking substance and a skill with the craft of writing itself, all are superb.

Let me say what sorcery is not. It is not divine power, which comes with a thought and a blink. It must be made and worked, planned and searched out, dug up, dried, chopped and ground, cooked, spoken over and sung. Even after all that it can fail, as gods do not

I have to say that those Ancient Greeks have exerted a strong pull on me since childhood – mythic, archetypical, speaking to powerful collective unconscious depths. They are so much more than ‘fantasy’ And Miller, as a writer, gets those hairs up on the back of the neck shivers in this reader, echoing what some of those ancient sites in Greece do.

Another powerful woman who should not be messed with – Janelle Monae, Django Jane

Circe, in Miller’s telling, might easily be a Sister. Even though there is ONE bit of skulduggery against a prettier nymph, but, oh she realises her fault

I was delighted to read this as an ARC from Netgalley.

Circe UK
Circe USA

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Robert Dinsdale – The Toymakers

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Book Review, Historical Fantasy, Robert Dinsdale, The Toymakers

Sensing the life in everything : Magic for adults which will make, and break, your heart. Repeatedly.

Who did not, as a small child, believe their toys were alive, or, at least, HOPE they came alive when your back was turned…….and so, yes, reading the synopsis of this book, my heart quickened a little in anticipation of recovering that state of ‘magic, real magic IS the world’, that was some of the place of that child, not ‘pretending’ a toy was alive, but, even if only momentarily, believing.

The fact that this book was being compared to The Night Circus (which I adored, and catapulted me back into that place) was also appealing. The fact that it was compared also to The Miniaturist gave me pause (lacked it, in my opinion). I needn’t have worried. The Night Circus pleasurable shivers of delight up the back of the neck started very early with The Toymakers.

Primarily taking place in 1917 and making a journey TO that time and place from some 11 years earlier, the Toymakers is set in what any toyshop should really be – a magical place where the maker-of-those-toys really is a true mage and can make the toys live.

Though the period of the First War will occupy a bulk of the book, it will end in the 1950s.

The most terrible things can happen to a man, but he’ll never lose himself if he remembers he was once a child

And that ‘primarily set in the period of the First War’ gives, I must warn, a lot of heartbreak to readers. A good author will have us invested in many of their characters – and Dinsdale, on this showing, is a very good author indeed.

Mightn’t it be…that until you’ve seen the dark, you don’t really know the light

Do take delight, as much as you can, in the playfulness and yes, that childhood remembered magic in the early part of the book, because payback time of grief will come. Without this reader feeling in any way manipulated, or in any way that the author was mechanically moving any of his sometimes surprising cast of characters around, my heart was being swung between imaginative delight and ‘I can’t take the sorrow of this’ moments.

Readers’ Appropriate Behaviour In A Public Place warning : Do not read in a public place.. If you must, ensure you have a ready supply of tissues.  Involuntary cries of ‘oh no, no, no’ whimpers of grief and the like can alarm innocent bystanders.

Brief synopsis and subject matter, avoiding spoilers :

Cathy, a young girl, pregnant, single, disgraced, runs away from home in Leigh-on-Sea to London, after seeing a curious, alluring advertisement in a local paper

Help Wanted…Are you lost? Are you afraid? Are you a child at Heart? So are we. The Emporium opens with the first frost of winter. Sales and stocktaking, no experience required. Bed and board included. Apply in person….

Cathy becomes winter help in a most extraordinary toy shop, Papa Jack’s Emporium. Papa Jack, originally a man with a different name, and we suspect, a tragic story, set up his extraordinary toyshop, after arriving in this country from Eastern Europe, and Tsarist Russia, the father of two young boys he had not seen for many years.

Papa Jack, originally a carpenter, crafts exquisite toys, out of quality material when he can, but he can also create something extraordinary out of found materials such as pine cones, twigs and grasses. Really extraordinary.

By the time young Cathy reaches the Emporium, it is a famous and established place, financially successful, fabulously strange. Those two young boys, Kaspar and Emil are now also extraordinary toymakers, a little older than Cathy. Fast, loving, supportive brothers; fierce, struggling sibling rivals, both as inheritors of Papa Jack’s love, Papa Jack’s dream for the stability and future of the Emporium, and … well, much more.

A secret has been revealed, and finally I understand the true meaning of toys….When you are young, what you want from toys is to feel grown-up. You play with toys and cast yourself as an adult, and imagine life the way it’s going to be. Yet, when you are grown, that changes: now, what you want out of toys is to feel young again. You want to be back there, in a place that did not harm nor hurt you, in a pocket of time built out of memory and love

There are toys here, of course; there is magic, too. What is this book? It is a story of war, it is a story of the tangled web of relationships – parents and children, brothers and sisters, men and women. Not to mention toys themselves. What relationships might they have? What relationships could they have? Dinsdale makes us think about Creation itself, question who we are. He creates puzzles of time and space for us …..we just need to let our imaginations surrender to what once they were

I can’t praise this highly enough. I’m intrigued to discover Dinsdale has written earlier books, and  I shall nervously explore them…….nervously because this book is so extraordinary that I would be surprised to have missed a writer so fine, for so long

The challenge is the one a reader has with a book which makes its own world so very much realer than the world we know. What on earth can I read next, that will not disappoint and seem pale and insubstantial? Poor author who has to follow Dinsdale. Not fair!

I received this from NetGalley as a (very well done) digital ARC

Lucky, lucky readers about to start their journey with this one

The Toymakers UK
The Toymakers USA

Sylvia Townsend Warner – The Cats’ Cradle Book

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Book Review, Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Cat's Cradle Book

“If you speak Cat at all there is no reason why you should not speak it fluently. It is simply a matter of application”

The sparky, weird (sometimes a little Shirley Jackson-ish) Sylvia Townsend Warner has here written a rather wonderful book of ‘fairy tales’ from a particular perspective

The narrator, or perhaps we should say, the editor, comes by chance on an intriguing house in the English Countryside, It is

a seventeenth century house with a long façade and a reed-thatch roof. It gave an impression of slenderness, of being worn smooth and thin like an old spoon

The house and gardens contain perhaps 19, perhaps 27 cats and kittens. And the tenant of the house, and perhaps amanuensis and companion of the cats, is an unusually handsome young man (in the eyes of the narrator)

We cut a great deal of asparagus, and carried it into the kitchen. While I trimmed it and tied it in bunches he prepared nineteen fish dinners, and stood in the yard calling:

“The cats, the cats! The little cats!”

Besides the asparagus there was some cold pigeon pie and a plateful of sugar biscuits. And there was a bottle of vin d’Anjou, Several cats sat in the dining room, some on chairs, some on the window-sill, some on the large rosewood table. When, with the sugar biscuits, coffee and brandy were served, one of these, a massive marmalade cat, rose up and began to sip delicately from the wide glass

And perhaps we should draw a discreet veil over the swiftly erotic connection between this handsome young man and the narrator or editor of The Cat’s Cradle Book. What is really important is the speaking, and understanding of Cat.

The young man is fluent both in speaking and understanding – and, in fact, the love of his life was a remarkable Siamese cat he met whilst employed in Turkey, in the diplomatic service. Haru, the cat was a consummate storyteller, and like Sheherezade, beguiled with her stories. William, the young man, quickly began to study these, and other stories and which he realised were savage and instructive variants of the various myth and fairy stories which are so commonly told to children across the globe. It quickly becomes clear the original of ‘our’ fairy stories were tales told by generations of mother cats to their kittens.

And the stories are a little odd – for example, The Fox-Pope :

A fox who had been reading the Lives of the Saints was so delighted with the style of the book that he decided to become a saint himself. It seemed to him that he would be happiest as a hermit; so he retired to the Transylvanian Alps, taking with him a great bundle of lettuces and a cold chicken to eat on Sundays and saints’ days

These are not just whimsical and fey though. Townsend as a writer is far closer to Grimm (or Jackson) than she is to pretty Perrault. So we have crows feasting on the eyes of corpses, and our almost Fox-Pope resisting the nymph like temptation of a female rabbit whilst eating her litter ‘as solitude is essential to hermits’

                          Aoshima, Japan’s Cat Island

What we have here, then, is a collection of some of these cat’s cradle stories. But, before we can begin to enjoy them, it is only fair to warn the ailurophiles who are the ones most likely to enjoy these strange and literary tales, that though the narrator clearly loves cats, since she has learned to understand the language, though she only speaks it tolerably well, there is quite a lot of heartache to go through, as there is a high count of loved cats who are passed into cat afterlife. This is not due to human savagery, merely time, and the length of a life

This is a delightful collection – however, I feel both mean and heartless in championing it. The book is out of print, no digital version exists, and I may have snaffled the last inexpensive second hand copy, advertised on Abebooks, after a fellow blogger praised this collection, following a chance find in a second hand shop. The Cat’s Cradle Book was originally published in 1960 by Chatto and Windus.

We can only all hope that someone decides to reissue more of Townsend Warner’s books, or, perhaps, a wonderful epublisher of ‘forgotten’ minor (but wonderful) uniquely resonating voices from earlier in the twentieth (like Open Road Media) brings these back.

I note that Townsend Warner seems to be appearing and re-appearing on a lot of literary blogs whose authors are particularly active in championing unjustly vanished out of consciousness and print, writers, particularly those who were at one point so well served by Virago

And I must of course make obeisance to Jane from Beyond Eden Rock. She is one of the bloggers buzzing about Sylvia Townsend Warner and is indeed that blogger who found a copy of this, in a second hand shop. I did not trust time, and chance, and went screamingly in search on the Internet. You can read Jane’s alluring (or should I say ailuring) (!) review here

Katherine Arden – The Bear and The Nightingale

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Adult Faerie Tale, Folk Tales, Katherine Arden, Medieval Setting, Russian Setting, The Bear and The Nightingale

A perfect, darkly mythic tale of old Russia

Katherine Arden’s first book should grip anyone with a love for old folk/faerie tales, especially those who prefer their those tales to have more than a whiff of the darkly sinister about them – less Perrault, more Grimm, and. perhaps heavy with Pagan roots.

Arden, in transpires, is a Russophile, and spent some time in Russia as a student, steeping herself in its Medieval past. The Bear and The Nightingale is, by all accounts, the first volume of a trilogy. I’m glad I didn’t know that when I requested it from NetGallley, as I’m not wildly enamoured of the fantasy/fantasy YA genre, particularly where sequels are concerned, as my prejudices tell me this may all be too marketing driven and not enough driven by creative integrity.

However….prejudice is so often there to be exposed and exploded, and, after a slow start, Arden hooked me up and tied me tight into her wonderful tale of a family, minor relatives by marriage of the tsar of the time, living far away from Moscow. The central character is a wild, witchen child – or, at least one who sees more than others, and is aware of the myriad domestic and nature deities which are well established in the pantheon of pre-Christian (and even post-Christian) myths and legends from classical times. And Slavic folk lore has many of these.

Vasya’s mother Marina, who died giving birth to her, (they always seem to) had a kind of second sight, and could see those nature and hearth deities. She is happily and passionately married to Pyotr, a heroic, but ordinarily mortal man. Most of her children are four square without other powers, but Vasya and her older brother Sasha ‘see beyond’

The old religion and a mystical Christianity have to sit side by side with each other, sometimes easily, and sometimes….not. Some of those with additional powers, like Marina, and like Vasya, juggle a more universal sense of holy and sacred better than others.

16th century Icon, Kremlin : Only Begotten of the Father and the Word of God

When a highly devout and charismatic priest with dreams of leadership and glory is banished from Moscow to Pyotr’s domaine, a deadly clash between faiths and practices is set in place. And compounded by the fact that Pyotr has had a new wife foisted on him, by the Tsar – for political reasons. The new wife, Vasya’s stepmother, is not much older than Vasya, who is standing on the edge of moving from girl to woman. There are the usual folk tale tropes of wicked – or at least, spiteful, stepmother and far nobler, braver stepdaughter, but there are also darker forces around, as stepmother Anna, who also has powers to see the native deities of the house, the woods and the forests, fears and hates them as demons. She wishes not to be a wife, not to be a mother, and longs to be a Christian nun. Vasya, the most wonderfully spirited, passionate child and woman wishes to be curtailed by wifedom, motherhood nor a Bride of Christ. She is akin to elementals and wishes for a life of adventure, which her sex denies her

There are wonderfully dark forces abroad in this, satisfyingly archetypal battles between Good and Evil – except, which is which, is not always so simplistically obvious. The dark Marozko, Frost King, demon of winter is simultaneously a less malevolent figure, Jack Frost.

Ivan Bilibin, artist and stage designer 1902: The Heroine Vasilisa outside the hut of Baba Yaga

And saint-like beautiful priest Konstantin, who paints fabulous icons, and seeks to lead the people away from worshipping older gods, is desperate to hear the voice of God

Suffice it to say, the story started a little slowly, but I kept reading with some interest until the hooks took hold, as Vasya became old enough to show her heroic qualities

The marketing of the book is falling between several stools – because the writing itself is quite complex, it has an adult, fantasy marketing but the age of the central character mark it as Young Adult. I requested it from NetGalley on its General Fiction (ie NOT YA) marketing, and only as I neared the end wondered whether it would ALSO appeal to that market.

Lacquer box illustration of Morozko folk tale

Definitely a read for short days and long midwinter nights though………..

And, yes, I WILL be looking out for the sequel………

The Bear and The Nightingale will be published on the 12th January in the UK and two days earlier in the States. The young author, one to watch, surprisingly has not grown up in the far North – she is a Texan, but I was convinced she dwelt in frozen, evergreen forests, and gambolled with the wolves……

The Bear and The Nightingale Amazon UK
The Bear and The Nightingale Amazon USA

Frances Hardinge – The Lie Tree

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Book Review, Frances Hardinge, Gothic Fiction, The Lie Tree, Victorian set fiction, Young Adult Fiction

“Faith had always told herself that she was not like other ladies. But neither, it seemed, were other ladies”

Frances Hardinge’s YA book, The Lie Tree, with its angry, highly intelligent, discounted central character, fourteen year old Faith Sunderly, is set in 1868, with a central theme involving scientific enquiry, fossil hunting, Darwin’s theories, their impact on faith, and the deepening realisation for the central character, that her life is unlikely to be what her character and abilities should fit her for, due to the unfair opportunities closed to her gender.

There was a hunger in her, and girls were not supposed to be hungry. They were supposed to nibble sparingly when at table, and their minds were supposed to be satisfied with a slim diet too

Hardinge won the Costa Children’s Book Category Prize with this – and, in fact, the Costa Judges also awarded it the Costa Book of The Year, the outright winner over the other category winners. And it is easy to see why

Firstly, she is a wonderfully rich literary writer, taking pleasure in rich language, gorgeous imagery – and giving huge pleasure to the reader. She has created a brilliant central character – awkward, fierce, resentful, loving, frustrated, and far more intelligent than most of the other inhabitants of her world, male and female, her contemporaries and the adults.

Faith is absolutely believable as an educated, intelligent, individual middle class girl on the edge of womanhood in Victorian England and she also stands for what it might have been like for many young girls of similar intelligence and independent thinking, rammed into the corseted embrace of narrow opportunities and confined expectations

For most of his six years, Howard had looked to Faith to be his oracle, his almanac, his source of all truth. He had believed everything she told him. This tide was changing though. Girls don’t know about sailing, he would say suddenly. Girls don’t know about the moon……Each time he said such a thing it was a shock, and Faith felt her domain of expertise breaking apart like an ice floe

So Hardinge’s book inhabits a real society at a certain time, but is also very much a fantasy historical novel, and a kind of detective story. It’s a mash-up which for the most part works very well indeed, and has much to absorb and fascinate the adult reader as well.

Faith, her winsome, eyelash batting, flirtatious mother, her far less intelligent younger brother, Howard, and her austere, secretive clergyman fossil hunting father leave their Kent home under some sort of secret cloud of impending disgrace. The Reverend Sunderly has achieved fame (and in fact, notoriety) around the discovery of a fossil which appears to verify the existence of the biblical Nephilim. Sunderly and family decamp to Vane, one of the Channel Islands (an invention which seems as if it must in fact exist!) which is a hub of archaeological interest.

Her emotions were so large and strange that they seemed to be something outside her, vast cloud patterns rolling and colliding above while she watched

There are darker matters afoot, and this is much more than a working out of Victorian reality – Hardinge injects dark Gothic fantasy into the mix, including a search, by several interested and fanatical parties, for a fabled and curious tree, The Mendacity Tree, which grows in complete darkness, has frightening hallucinogenic fruit and may even possibly be The Tree Of Knowledge of Good and Evil. There is even a beloved pet snake.

Along the way, murder, suicide, good old fashioned lust for riches, thwarted passions, revenge and a small society turning on those who flout its conventions flicker in and out of view. Hardinge also skilfully exploits that favourite crime-fiction trope, the country house murder – in this case, as the shenanigans which are going on happen against the background of a small island, the list of suspects, and the motives for the various mysteries which will need unravelling, are dizzyingly busy.

My only reservations about this glitteringly absorbing book came in the last 40 or 50 pages, where the pace of plot, ravelling up and being unravelled, became a bit too much for me, and the sense of galloping towards the tie up, the reveals, the explanations for the first time made me realise that I was reading a book for a younger market, perhaps one more desirous of fast, dynamic, dramatic action

The Lie Tree Amazon UK
The Lie Tree Amazon USA

Charles Lambert – The Children’s Home

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Book Review, Charles Lambert, The Children's Home

Midwich Cuckoos and The Beast

One of the great strengths of Charles Lambert’s eerie, unsettling short novel is that he sets up an odd world, one which seems inherently plausible but he does not attempt to dot the is and cross the ts of logic. There is sufficient day to day, detailed reality to carry the fantastical elements, and the writing style, which eschews whimsy and the ethereal, rather serves to underline the strange normality of its weirdness. This means that the odd and the more usual versions of ‘reality’ sit alongside each other in a kind of delicious tension of opposition

Morgan Fletcher is the heavily disfigured scion of an extremely wealthy family, whose strange family business goes back for at least a couple of generations. The reader (and Morgan himself) is not quite sure what the family business was – some kind of world trade, as his grandfather amassed all sorts of strange travellers’ curios from far off lands.

Something has happened, some kind of breakdown in society, and Morgan lives in isolation. His wealth means there are various retainers and servants about the place, but no one sees Morgan except his housekeeper, Engel, who arrived some time ago. Outside the walls of Morgan’s empire, there were at some point violent encounters between citizens. We assume as a result of some kind of apocalyptic collapse of society. Various myths have probably circulated about Morgan’s terrible disfigurement, and it’s quite possible that everyone is as afraid of seeing the terribly damaged man as he is of being seen. So one myth which Lambert’s book is hinting at is ‘Beauty and the Beast’ – and of course, in the fairy tale, the Beast is actually possessed of far more beauty in his soul than most of the ‘unbeastly’, of unexceptional physiognomy. There are mismatches between the outward mask and the inner beings of many. And Morgan is clearly a good man. However, children begin to arrive at his domain, no one is quite sure from where, or indeed, why. And Morgan’s goodness is shown by the fact he gives them sanctuary. And, pleasingly, the mysterious children are not repelled or frightened by his damaged appearance. Instead, they trust him.

Figures In The Mist, photographer Vtal, Deviant Art, Commons

The children are not quite what they seem. They have some curious abilities – their ferocious intelligence, their speeded up development, for one thing. Another literary memory being used is John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos. The reader, like the children, like Morgan, begin slowly to become a little less sure of their own, or anyone else’s agenda. There is also a ‘good doctor’ who comes initially to take care of the children’s health, and a firm friendship develops between Morgan and Crane, as they try to understand where the children have come from, who they are, and what is the purpose which Morgan is playing out in their lives.

There are also sinister forces outside, figures of authority, who threaten the children.

Lambert’s great skill is to start his story in the sweet and light, and by increments to turn those lights down, to create shadows, twilights, rustlings, and slowly leave the reader feeling more and more unsettled and uneasy.

As others have noted, this book crosses genres – it is a literary fiction, post-apocalyptic, science fiction-ish horror fantasy thriller digging around in dark myths and imaginings.

And its knotted up genres are brilliantly woven together. Lambert leaves the reader (well, for sure he left this one) with the feeling that there are probably further allusions to be found. There is some very dark and shocking stuff – but the darker Lambert gets the more delicately and subtly he describes things. He understands that less is far, far more, he really does

it set me thinking about those books we were given to read as children, about travellers and shipwrecked sailors. How they found themselves in strange lands. magical lands where time went backwards or animals spoke their language. But they weren’t strange or magical to the people who lived there, were they? The people who lived there were normal. How formless it all is until an outsider gives it form

I recommend this strongly – and suggest it is best read when the nights are still quite long, for full uneasy hairs up the back of the neck effect!

I was very happy to receive this as an ARC, from the publishers, Aardvark, via NetGalley. This is the second book I’ve read from Aardvark – on this showing, a most interesting publisher, going outside the mainstream

I was alerted to this wonderfully satisfying and strange read by Fiction Fan. You can read her great review with unsettling graphics here

The Children’s Home Amazon UK
The Children’s Home Amazon USA

Paraic O’Donnell – The Maker of Swans

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'Magic Realism', Books about Books, Irish writer, Paraic O’Donnell, The Maker of Swans

Of roses, swans and the ordering of fine things in great rooms……….

Paraic O’Donnell’s strange, seductive, immersive Gothic literary creation had me pretty well hooked from the off.

Set in a time which is not immediately clear, it has an eerie, crumbling quality which feels almost Gothic Victorian – except that the dramatic opening involves the arrival of cars to the crumbling mansion which is the main setting. However, at a later point in the novel, where some back story of one of the central characters will be revealed, the mode of personal transport appears to be horses, with the theft of ‘a good horse from a coaching inn’ . As some of what is going on in the book is tied in with a secret society, mysterious powers, and some indication that those connected with the society seem to age more slowly than the rest of us, it’s perfectly possible some kind of Rip Van Winkle effect is happening………………

This is a difficult book to categorise in some ways. It inhabits some kind of nether world which is not exactly magic realism, not at all faery, somewhat fantastical, whilst at the same time much involved with reality, and, even more so with the power, mystery and magic of artistic creation itself. Particularly writing. It’s also a mystery, a thriller. And beautifully written.

Millais – The Lady Of Shallott 1854

Where Paraic O’Donnell has particularly scored is in his creation of character and relationship. Clara is an unusual young girl, an astonishingly gifted artist, and someone with an imagination of great intensity. The true potency of that imagination and artistry will become clear as the story progresses.

 ‘What art must do is attempt, as nature has, to assemble the tissues of beauty for itself. It must construct its own rose from the raw air, endow it with its colour, its small weight, its tender volutes – even its scent. Art must set this thing before us, must assert its reality in the void of our disbelief. It must make it live’

Clara strains against the impulse to yawn, She is thankful that she has never been made to go to school. It is this sort of thing, she supposes, that children must endure in classrooms all the time 

Clara is also mute, and in some ways self-sufficient. She is not emotionally withdrawn, though, and her strongest connection is Eustace, who is a kind of minder, retainer, butler, major domo, possessed of both brains and muscle, and employed by the owner of the crumbling mansion, Crowe. Crowe is dissolute and louche, a genius of a writer, though exactly what he is writing is again, something to discover. He might almost be the writer of everything which ever was. Crowe, Eustace and Clara exist in some kind of equable state. Unfortunately this is shattered at the start of the novel. Definitely the worse for drink, and in a squabble over his latest woman, Crowe kills a would be rival, unleashing the forces of retribution. Those forces will be implemented by shadowy members of the strange secret order Crowe belongs to. Eustace, who is the central character, the central point of view, for most of the novel, is the one who will try to salvage things, to prevent the un-spelt out punishment which Crowe must suffer, as the murder has broken an immutable law of the strange society. Eustace is deeply loyal, there is some strange history to be discovered between him and Crowe, but most of all, he wishes to protect Clara, the mysterious child, and keep her from harm.

Altered Reality Royal Photographic Society Ribbon. Photographer Michael Maguire: Morning Mist

The agents of harm are also a little strange. Chastern is a dying academic, deeply envious of Crowe’s creativity, deeply disdaining his crudity and indulgence in fleshly pursuits. Chastern has his own ‘minder, major-domo, retainer and all the rest, – a sinister, watchful, highly intelligent, dangerous and deadly one.

There are definitely god-games being played, and things get remarkably dark and messy

O’ Donnell creates his immersive story wonderfully well. The book is not presented in linear fashion, there is a lot of cutting back and forth, in time and place, but for the most part this is managed really well, and I enjoyed the gradual unpicking of the past as the story progressed insistently towards ‘what happens next’ page turning suspense

I must confess to a sense of disappointment in the ending of the book, the two final confrontations. The games played with the reader (well, this one) the hints and allusions had been most enjoyable and atmospheric, but I fell out of complete surrender at the end

Nonetheless, a very impressive first novel. If you were intrigued by, for example, The Night Circus, or Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, for both quality of writing and the compulsive, authentic strangeness of the created world, I think this will appeal. Like those two novels, it is much more literary than fantasy fiction.

I must also comment on the delectable cover image, which drew my attention to the book. It is both beautiful, and, having read the book, is in keeping with major themes; far more than ‘the title is swans, a picture of swans’ . The artist is Sinem Erkas

I received this as a review copy from the publishers via NetGalley

The Maker of Swans Amazon UK
The Maker of Swans Amazon USA

Michael Cunningham – A Wild Swan: and other tales

Tags

A Wild Swan, Adult Faerie Tale, Book Review, Michael Cunningham, Yuko Shimizu (Illustrator)

Subversive Once Upon a Time, They All Lived Mainly Unhappily after……………..

Michael Cunningham’s A Wild Swan is a darkly, slyly, sour and witty adaptation of some particularly potent faerie tales.

There’s more than a whiff of Angela Carteresque sumptuousness and sexual meaning out in the open, though Cunningham pulls many of these tales into the here and now.

How could I not start snickering, in a kind of wry, sophisticated fashion, at an opening like this:

Most of us are safe. If you’re not a delirious dream the gods are having, if your beauty doesn’t trouble the constellations, nobody’s going to cast a spell on you. No one wants to transform you into a beast or put you to sleep for a hundred years…
The middling maidens – the ones best seen by candlelight, corseted and rouged – have nothing to worry about. The pudgy, pockmarked heirs apparent, who torment their underlings and need to win at every game, are immune to curse and hex. B-list virgins do not excite the forces of ruination; callow swains don’t infuriate demons and sprites.

Most of us can be counted on to manage our own undoings

I was immediately captivated by the authorial voice which opens out ‘what’s really going on’ displaying the often difficult world of love and marriage, and mismatch between expectation and reality, to belie the traditional ‘they all lived happily ever after’ .

These morality tales (what faerie tales often were) updated, are often beautifully upended. So, for example, the beginning of Cunningham’s version of Jack and The Beanstalk, Jacked :

This is not a smart boy we’re talking about. This is not a kid who can be trusted to remember to take his mother to her chemo appointment, or to close the windows when it rains.

Never mind asking him to sell the cow, when he and his mother are out of cash, and the cow is their last resort.

We’re talking about a boy who doesn’t get halfway to town with his mother’s sole remaining possession before he’s sold the cow to some stranger for a handful of beans….Jack isn’t doubtful. Jack isn’t big on questions. Jack is the boy who says, Wow, dude, magic beans, really?

I was absolutely thrilled to be offered this as a review copy by the publishers, Fourth Estate, in digital version………however, I would urge you to get the wood book, as there are stunning illustrations to each story, by the artist Yuko Shimizu, and I did long to see them on paper.

Yuko Shimizu’s illustration for the story “Beasts”

The stories are pretty well all magnificent, and it will be the readers’ pleasure to work out which fairy tales they are based on. The Hansel and Gretel tale is probably my own particular favourite. Most do not end anywhere near happiness, and one must feel grateful, therefore, for the absence of that ‘ever after’

Though, to be fair, kind, a little bit magical and hopeful , the final story, Ever/After does give us one redemptive sweet tale to take away, albeit one which starts more realistically and less under the illusion of the romantic happy ever after. In the last story, the couple have fewer stars in their eyes and are not bewitched by sprinklings of too much magic.

HIGHLY recommended; in fact magical

These are, by the way, very definitely faerie stories for ADULTS and not for children

A Wild Swan: and other tales Amazon UK
A Wild Swan: and other tales Amazon USA

Ilka Tampke – Skin

Tags

Book Review, Druids, Dystopia, Fantasy Fiction, Ilka Tampke, Iron-Age Britain, Skin, Young Adult Fiction

Excellently written YA/Fantasy Fiction/Historical Fiction/Dystopian Apocalypse with Lit Fic knobs on thrown in for good measure

Well. Ilka Tampke is an Australian writer, and Skin is her first novel. And what a strange, but excellent novel it is.

Skin is set in Britain, and specifically in Summer (Somerset) between AD 28 and AD 43 in a matriarchy. Iron-Age Britain, a Druid culture, and the might of Rome preparing for invasion.

The central character, Ailia, born in AD 28, is some kind of outsider, and part of the book’s journey is to find her complex destiny, which will bring her to become a leader of her people. Ailia’s age, and her intelligent nature, her individuality and leadership qualities of course suggest the book has a YA market, with Ailia as a role model to identify with. There are also strong young men who are leaders or seers – so heroes of action and heroes of reflection and emotional integrity.

But this is not only a book for a YA audience – it is likely to have appeal for those who are followers of all the heroic myth and fantasy serials which are increasingly popular, probably for a 20s audience.

Celtic knot

I’m neither of those markets, but was interested in this because although the cynic in me could suggest this might be a book written to capitalise on some populist markets, and is at least a small series (I understand there is a sequel), and the strong storyline and characters inevitably suggest filmic possibilities – the actual writing, not to mention the unusual setting, was the lure.

The exact rituals and beliefs of ancient Druidic culture have been rather lost in the intervening 2000 years, particularly as Rome did not tolerate Druidism, and, Christianity, some 300 years later, after Constantite the Great’s conversion, did much to complete its veiling. I’m not certain, one way or another how much Tampke’s very detailed, fascinating weaving of ‘Druid’ culture and ideology is real, partially real, wholly imagined – but what I will say is there is an absolute coherence in her blend, which is satisfying both in terms of its mysticism and ritual, and it’s very graphic depiction of the world. She has clearly woven into the story a central idea from Australian totemic spirituality (and, I think, Native American Indian culture) that of animal totems, a kind of connection to the rest of the living world which anchors humanity as a part of the animal kingdom and a part of the landscape. I found all those aspects of her possible invention absolutely fascinating and the book is ‘true to itself’ And has that wonderful quality of tapping in to deeper, wider myths. The book as a whole is absolutely ‘the hero journey’ It can be read on many levels simultaneously and doesn’t topple over itself for being made to bear too much.

Iron Age Celtic Des Res Round House

If you love adventure stories, particularly fabulous ones which make integrated sense, rather than just being a gung ho collection of mythic or actual battles, I recommend this. I swept through it, turning pages fast, caught up in the story, but also found myself very satisfied with the integrity of her characters, the complex relationships, the believable structures and culture of her ancient society. And there are some wonderful – didn’t see this one coming – twists and turns.

Ailia, her central character is without ‘Skin’ in metaphorical rather than literal, anatomical terms. Skin is the totem tribal connection – her journey to find ‘Skin’ and its meaning is satisfyingly archetypal.

The passage from womb to world was only half a birth – the body’s birth. Our souls were born when we were plunged, as babes, into river water, screaming at the cold shock of it, given our name and called to skin.

Deer. Salmon. Stone. Beetle. The North wind. Skin was our greeting, our mother, our ancestors, our land. Nothing existed outside its reach.

Beyond skin there was only darkness. Only chaos.

Because I was without skin I could not be plunged or named. I was half-born, born in body but not in soul. Born to the world but not to the tribe. I could never marry lest skin taboos were unknowingly betrayed…….I was not permitted to learn. All learning began and ended with the songs of skin

Finally, I received this as a review copy from Amazon Vine UK.

Even more finally, the hardback book itself is stunningly beautiful, with gold coloured mandala like shapes, suggesting complex artistic metalwork all nudging at symbols of interconnectedness, which underlines much of what the book is about.

Skin Amazon UK
Skin Amazon USA

Ransom Riggs – Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children

Tags

Book Review, Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs, Young Adult Fiction

Not just a book for Peculiar Children

Ransom Riggs quirky, spooky, YA lit-fic horror crossover, set in Wales, is a sure-fire delight – with this adult, never mind the YAYAs!

Riggs is/was an avid collector of strange photos from long gone times, and began, particularly to be fascinated by faded, peculiar photos of children. Probably they were attempts at trick photography techniques, with the photographer playing around with exposure, framing, shutter time and the like, but he had amassed a steady collection of these from various flea markets and vintage sales, as the afterword to my copy, where an interview with Riggs is included, explains.

So, the photographs and the development of a fabulous story to link them, developed. The central character in this book, 16 year old Jacob, is shown some of these photos by his Polish Jewish grandfather, and then discovers more, and the people and meaning behind them.

Jacob is in many ways a typical adolescent of his kind. Gifted, (though not really initially understanding in what way) intelligent, introspective, a loner, not quite the son his controlling parents might wish for, he is nevertheless extremely close to his grandfather, Abraham, who appears to be retreating into senility, with paranoid stories of monsters. Following his grandfather’s death, which damages and fractures Jacob, he becomes determined to try and track down and discover more of Abraham’s past as a young boy, leaving his native Poland as the Nazis moved in, and arriving as part of a kindertransport at a school on a remote island off the coast of Wales; that is Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

How Peculiar those children were, not to mention the Peculiarities of Miss Peregrine herself, and how Jacob (first person narrative) discovers his own connection to all this is a wonderful journey. It is extremely well-written, twisty, turny, mind-mangling and with some genuine shocks which do not feel gratuitous. And it has also a lightness of touch, Jacob has a self-deprecating, self-mocking sense of humour and is a fine companion for the reader.

And those photos (which made me choose to get the real, rather than eread, version) are most weird and wonderful

Although personally I felt that the inevitable fight between the goodies and the baddiesat the end was a bit clichéd, I am aware that such battles are needed, but this was the one section of the book where Riggs did not quite sustain his absolute originality for me, and also, the one area of the book where I realised I was not the intended audience.

Terrific page-turner.

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children Amazon UK
Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children Amazon USA