Jennie Melamed – Gather The Daughters

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Book Review, Dystopia, Gather The Daughters, Jennie Melamed, Post-Apocalypse, Speculative Fiction

Female Dystopias

Jennie Melamed’s Gather The Daughters does of course inevitably remind the reader of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. This was such an extraordinary and shocking book at the time of its publication. Atwood had put no completely invented ideology into it; she sewed together trends, happenings and events from across history and geography. Atwood casts a long shadow, but Melamed, a psychiatric nurse practitioner who specialises in working with traumatised children, has clearly had her own professional experiences which have gestated this book.

Unfortunately, various world events – such as the kidnapping of young Chibok schoolgirls by Boko Haram and the democratic election of Trump, despite his ‘locker room’ boast of entitlement to grab and grope, not to mention the regular exposés of historic child abuse cases – sadly indicate that the need for writers to shock and warn us against any complacent thinking that the war for female equality and control over one’s own body has been won, is still a pressing one.

Melamed’s book is set in a possibly not far distant future, though it harks back to earlier, simpler times

Some cataclysmic apocalyptic world event has happened. Possibly. A small group of influential men have established a patriarchal, small island colony. Here, life is made secure and possibly viable, at least if you are one of the influential men. These rulers, The Wanderers, do maintain certain links with the Badlands, where some kind of plague, some kind of terrible devastation lurks. Occasionally, a new family will arrive on the island.

Harking back to some kind of particularly warped Amish style community, there are strict controls in place. These are mainly directed against women. Marriage happens remarkably early, within a year of the onset of menstruation. Life is also short, and once physical fitness is past early shuffling off of mortal coil is expected. There are also strictures on the number of children allowed. The powerful have devised ways to manage this, mainly through the indoctrination of a should and should not Holy Book, devised, as they so often are, for the powerful to keep others without power

Thou shalt not allow thy wife to stray in thought, deed or body. Thou shalt not allow women who are not sister, daughter or mother to gather without a man to guide them. Thou shalt not kill.

There is a brief, idyllic period set aside for the children. With rigid rules in place from birth till death, for all, and especially for the female all, a short summer season where children are allowed to run feral, live outside, and do as they please is a small time of wild paradise. Everyone knows the dark rules and the dark penalties for infringing those rules outside the brief summer escape. There is no other freedom of expression – except that resistance also, always needs to find ways and means.

Melamed tells this religious cult, island story through the voices of some of the girls. Janey is the oldest, the most dangerously subversive, starving herself in order to delay the onset of menstruation, marriage, motherhood. Amanda was her closest friend, but Amanda is now married and pregnant, her time of brief freedom and escape forever gone. Vanessa is daughter to one of the wanderers, the ruling elite; Caitlin the daughter of a particularly brutal man, not one of the especially privileged, though every man is privileged enough, in this society.

She discovers that grief is a liquid. It passes thickly down her throat as she drinks water and pools soggily around her food. It flows through her veins, dark and heavy, and fills the cavities of her bones until they weigh so much she can barely lift her head….At night, it rises up from the floor silently until she feels it seep into the bedclothes, lick at her heels and elbows and throat, thrust upward like a rising tide that will drown her in sorrow

Melamed recounts her quite horrific story with much delicacy and finesse. It is a spell binding story, a malevolent one, a warning one – and, unfortunately given the seeping violence of the times, wreaked by those who seek to turn back, in various ways, the freedoms women won during the twentieth century, a story one must hope is not, in any way, prophetic

I received this as a review copy from Amazon Vine. It will be published on 25th July

Gather the Daughters Amazon UK
Gather the Daughters Amazon USA

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Dan Vyleta – Smoke

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Book Review, Dan Vyleta, Dystopia, Smoke, Young Adult Fiction

Reservations about beginning section and how it careers towards ‘action wrap’ : the ‘filling’ in the sandwich hooked me completely

Reading Dan Vyleta’s Smoke has been a sometimes absorbing, sometimes slightly frustrating experience

The dust-jacket blurb, which I feel is somewhat misleading, would have made me pass on by – it suggests this is a YA book, it suggests there will be magic. There is a kind of truth to the former. Though the central characters in the book are certainly mid-teens, privileged, and attending schools where the offspring of the privileged and wealthy are sent, this is no school for fledgling magicians (the ’if you liked’ Rowling hook) . I can see certain similarities – the literary, gothic imagination – with Pullman, though other than the original concept – the presence of sin and more sinisterly – sinful thoughts – made visible, almost everything else comes from science and politics, albeit in an altered world.

The hook of the book for me was Vyleta as author. I admired The Quiet Twin, his dark, rather Kafkaesque, look at life in a Viennese tenement square of apartments, circa 1939. It was mordant, real, and grotesque.

To some extent Smoke, set in a kind of alternative, steam-punkish late nineteenth century Victorian universe, has many of the wonderful, eccentric, imaginative strengths of his earlier writing. Vyleta’s dark, rich imagination, and the adventure, problem solving, ‘detection’ narrative drive of the book, to uncover a mystery about how this society is organised, serves as a terrific vehicle to examine aspects of our own, as well as an earlier society’s politics of privilege structure, and heading-towards-dystopia-and-control science

In Vyleta’s book, the central characters engaged in the quest are two friends, both at a privileged school in Oxford. Charlie is a genuinely ‘good’ boy, kindly, loyal, intelligent, compassionate. He comes from one of the very privileged and wealthy families in this world who make up (some things never change!) the ruling class. Most of the politicians and movers and shakers have come from this privileged educational background. Educated at the best private schools they will go on to the best Universities. Privilege and wealth will also give them access to all sorts of darker advantages. Thomas is his friend, a damaged boy, also privileged, but the whiff of dangerous subversion hangs around him. I was reminded of Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If ‘ on one level. Set against Thomas is the gooder-than-gold Head Boy. Unlike the truly laudable Charlie, Julius is absolutely not as he seems.

In very Victorian fashion, the underclass are despised and feared (has this quite passed, in our current society?)

The conceit that structures the book links sinfulness (which becomes visible as the thoughts of sin are revealed by the sinner emitting smoke) as very much something which that underclass inhabit – their sins and degradations are highly visible. The whole purpose of the elite’s schooling is to force sublimation of sin and sinful thinking. The aristocracy hardly emit smoke, so the lower classes are presented with daily reminders of their own inferiority.

However, as in ‘If’ resistance and revolution, and its possibilities can arise from everywhere. There are some mysteries to be uncovered, as Thomas too is not quite as he seems. Two friends, an enemy – and a girl. Livia is the daughter of an extremely privileged woman, Lady Naylor, who is also a radical, highly intelligent, highly influential, and a scientist. Livia has an utter compulsion to ‘goodness’ and is quite priggish. In a neat twist the mother is more ambivalent, and wishes her daughter were less rigidly sublimating and repressing – certain parallels to eating disorders suggest themselves.

                                     Crystal Palace

I was fascinated by the way Vyleta weaves politics, class, religion, social control, rebellion, science together, and his skilful using both of what is real, and of what might arise from reality with a slightly altered science behind it.

What did not work for me as an adult reader were the more luridly dramatic inevitable battles between good and evil, which became a little cartoonish for my adult tastes.

The beginning of the book, the setting out of the world is a little slow and ponderous, and might even mean that its perhaps intended audience does not stick with the book, once past the opening, and once I had accepted the premise, I found the central section becoming engaging, but did find myself disengaged (as is usual for me) by the inevitable battles, fights, and all the rest – the kind of event in Hollywood movies where with more than physically possible mortal wounds the heroes, anti-heroes and villains are able to miraculously somehow continue their deadly fisticuffs over and over, streaming blood etc etc.

I guess also the ‘love triangle’ at times felt a little predictable, but Vyleta did have a very interesting take on it.

Does it/ will it fall between the stools of YA and adult audience, or will it also satisfy both? This is what I can’t quite decide. The ‘filling’ as in a sandwich, I found fed me well as a reader, I had reservations about the two quite different kinds of bread, beginning and end!

I received this as a review copy from Amazon Vine UK. Curiously, it will be released Kindle only in the UK on 24th May, and not available, wood, till July, whilst that May date sees publication wood book in the States, but no digital release pending.

AND an earlier request for this on NetGalley was also granted later. Thanks NG, thanks Vine!

Smoke Amazon UK
Smoke Amazon USA

Sara Taylor – The Shore

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Book Review, Dystopia, Sara Taylor, Southern Gothic, The Shore, Virginia

Dark, violent, disturbing, beautifully written, and with an obsidian glitter

The Shore is a highly assured debut novel by a young author, originally from rural Virginia, whose tertiary education was in the UK, which is where she now lives.

The setting of this interweaving, deeply entangled collection of individual stories, spins itself backwards and forwards, picking up a thread here, leaving it dangling, working that thread into another patch of story, ranging between 1876 and 2143, within the geography of a patch of small islands off the Virginia Coast, and loosely within the interlocked lives of a couple of individuals born in the 1850s, and their descendants.

The family histories are dark indeed. Women, across the generations, abused by some of their menfolk, who are themselves hardened by poverty and prey to addiction, whether illicit alcohol, home stilled during Prohibition, or, in modern times, the cooking of crystal meth.

One family strand tells the story of Medora, child of a Shawnee Indian woman and a brutal white landowner. Medora learns the lore of plants, and within her descendants there are those who still follow shamanic ways, prophetic ways.

It’s extremely difficult to categorise this powerful book – the future moves into an obvious dystopian world, which is heralded in the declining fortunes of the rural community from that 1850s start, and which is echoed in the history of many rural communities in the developed world in the twentieth century.

The book starts with a murder and a mutilation, and there are more murders to come, not to mention rape, castration, physical and emotional abuse – and yet, there is no sense at all of a gratuitous writer titillating with all this

When news of the murder breaks I’m in Matthew’s buying chicken necks so my little sister Renee and I can go crabbing. There isn’t much in the way of food in the house, but we found a dollar and sixty-three cents in change, and decided free crabs would get us the most food for that money. Usually we use bacon rinds for bait, but we’ve eaten those already

I’m squatting down looking at the boxes of cupcakes on a bottom shelf when a woman steps over me to get to the register……….She’s a big fat woman, with more of an equator than a waist; she steps heavy, all of her trembling as she does, and for a moment I’m worried she’s going to fall and squish me. She dumps a dozen cans of pork and beans on the belt and gets out her food stamps, then digs down the front of her stretched-out red shirt and pulls a wrinkled ten-dollar bill out of her bra to pay for a pack of menthols

Taylor writes extremely well – and can capture the voices of different generations, different times, men, women and children.

I really liked the fact that I never knew quite where I was going in her book, the fact that she does not follow a one directional linear route with it. The structure mirrored, if you like, the tangle of braided lives, with the grand pattern coming clear at the end, and earlier lives of people now long dead touching the sections set in the twenty-second century

Nicolas Raymond, Misty Assateague Island Marsh

What is also noteworthy, despite the brutality, the violence, the wastedness of many of the lives, is a fierce connection to the land, and family ties, and friendships, particularly concepts of sisterhood, whether sisters by blood, or sisters purely by gender.

Finally, the UK book cover is rather wonderful. It does not at all suggest, or hint at the true nature of this book, and I am so pleased that it doesn’t. There could have been some very poor and schlocky design, illustrating some of the violence of the subject matter. It was only on finishing the book that the cover began to reveal its subtle appropriateness (shells, just shells of various kinds)

I will, for sure, be following this writer with interest. After such an assured, and original beginning, I have no idea what subsequent books might bring. Taylor has a voice which is unusual, feels authentic, and, for once, the dust-jacket praise seems deserved.

For me, Adam Thorpe, poet and novelist (Ulverton) captures her best:

Sara Taylor has a completely natural unforced feel for language and voice: a remarkable debut

It is.

And, it was a review of this, by Bending Over Bookwards which alerted me to the fact this had been sitting patiently on my bedside TBR, waiting to be read. I wish I could remember who or what first alerted me to buy it, and thank them, but, alas, sunk in the Assateague mists of time

Edit : Now how could I have forgotten that the person to thank is the inestimable Madame ‘Giffy’ Bibi, who so kindly reviewed the book back in July, including several quotes to show the fine quality of Taylor’s writing – here’s the link to her great portmanteau post Inexcusable to have forgotten, particularly as my comment on that post said – I’m heading straight off to buy this. AND I did!

The Shore Amazon UK
The Shore Amazon USA

Ilka Tampke – Skin

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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

Claire Fuller – Our Endless, Numbered Days

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Book Review, Claire Fuller, Dystopia, Our Endless Numbered Days, Post-Apocalypse

And after the end of the world……….life went on, because the end did not begin.

Claire Fuller’s first novel, the brilliantly titled, teasingly contradictory Our Endless Numbered Days, is a strange, disturbing, beautifully written book about dark family dynamics, the wonder and magic of childhood, deep fears, obsession, staying alive, the end of the world, all tied up with the enduring power of childhood fairy stories, and their dark symbolism

The book takes place over a 9 year time period. It opens in Highgate, London, in 1985. Peggy is 17. She has returned to her family home after a 9 year absence, disturbed and traumatised after being inexplicably missing, kidnapped by her father, when she was 8.

Back in 1976 Peggy was the beloved only daughter of a wealthy, apparently happily married couple, though both, in their own way, were rather self-obsessed. German mother Ute was an internationally lauded classical pianist, who has rather slipped into domesticity following her cradle snatching marriage to James. At 17, James was 8 years Ute’s junior.

Liszt’s Campanella plays its part in the story……

Despite the hazy gloss which the returned Peggy remembers, of the summer of 1976, there were definite cracks and oddities in her parents’ marriage. James had become a member of a group of Retreaters, survivalists preparing for a some-time imminent end of the world, `after the bomb falls’, by retreating far from civilisation, finding remote pockets in the countryside, learning again how to fish, hunt, gather. The group is led by a mysterious American.

Peggy, who is obsessed by the book The Railway Children, is nicknamed Punzel (as in Rapunzel) by her father. And, yes, all the symbolism and allegories are there a-waiting.

In the summer of 1976 Ute departs for a concert tour. Left in the care of James, father and daughter appear to have a kind of idyllic summer (in the child’s imagination) as they begin to act out the end of the world retreat in the jungly back garden of their Highgate mansion, which merges in the undergrowth, with the cemetery. They live under canvas, don’t wash, and eat squirrels and rabbits which James traps.

This, to Peggy/Punzel is all an enormous adventure, much more exciting than school and the discipline her mother imposes. And then the adventure gets even more exciting and wilder. James and Peggy leave the country, en route to Die Hutte, a mysterious hut deep in the probably Bavarian forest:

`A magical, secret place in the forest’ my father said with a catch in his voice. `Our very own little cabin, with wooden walls, and wooden floors, and wooden shutters at the windows.’

His voice was deep and smooth; it lulled me.

`Outside we can pick sweet berries all year round; chanterelles spread like yellow rugs under the trees; and in the bottom of a valley a Fluss overflows with silvery fish, so when we’re hungry and need supper, we can just dip our hands in and pull three out’.

The Hutte is a real place, marked on a map, and Peggy is excited, as she expects they will meet Ute there.

However, excitement and strangeness soon turn very dark indeed, as once far from civilisation, James tells Peggy that the world has indeed ended, and the two of them are the only survivors.

Except, clearly, it hasn’t, and they aren’t. None of this is a spoiler, as we know, from the opening chapter, that Peggy is now 17 and has only returned from that hut in the forest two months ago. Peggy is forced to be an unreliable narrator because her father, who has created this narrative for her to inhabit for her endless numbered 9 years of days, has made a lie the reality by which the two have lived

An eight year old, and her father, in a dark, Grimm’s fairy tale forest, the only beings left alive, somehow having to survive the freezing winters. What happens to a child with no other human contact except one other being – no other world view except her own, as told to her by the other human?

A forest, too can be as inaccessible a prison as a tower. Not to mention the roles of various forests in other fairy tales.

Fuller’s dark, frightening book employs nothing of the supernatural – there are no tricks of external fantasy, but certainly the reader will be aware of the dark psychological undercurrents which the fairy tale is constructed to explain.

It’s a dark and twisted tale, but also has a strange beauty. There’s a kind of seductive dream in the Walden-like idea of that life in the forest, a kind of honest simplicity of living within the landscape, learning its ways. Though nothing in this book is simple, and its whole premise is fashioned on a lie a father has created for his child.

And thanks to fellow blogger, FleurInHerWorld, whose intriguing review of this excellent book alerted me to its existence

Our Endless Numbered Days Amazon UK
Our Endless Numbered Days Amazon USA

Emmi Itäranta – Memory of Water

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Book Review, Dystopia, Emmi Itäranta, Finnish Literature, Memory of Water

Poetry, melancholy, Nordic mists and Chinese tea, in a dry, dystopian landscape

Finnish author Emmi Itäranta astonishingly wrote her first novel, a delicate, dystopian Sci-Fi outing, simultaneously in Finnish and English. Born in Finland the author is resident in the UK. Memory of Water won one Finnish literary prize and was nominated for another.

We are beyond ‘The Twilight century’ (our own) Mankind’s wasteful, indifferent attitudes to its own species and to the planet we share with other species, has resulted in the climate changes from which there is no real return. There has been the melting of the icecaps, the warming of the planet, and most of the landlocked freshwater has gone. Much of the land is given over to huge landfill containing the unrecycleable wastes of this century and the one before – plastics, electronics, consumer junk, which there is no longer the power to use.

Potable water comes, strictly quota controlled, from desalination plants. Hoarding, iillegally tapping into this water supply, and possessing more water than the agreed quota is a capital offence.

China has become the dominant world power, ‘New Qian’. World culture is now Chinese culture, and the world is a Chinese empire

Set in ‘the Scandinavian Union’, Memory of Water’s narrator and protagonist is 17 year old Noria. She is the daughter of a tea master, himself part of a long lineage of tea-masters:

Tea-masters are the watchers of water, but first and foremost we are its servants

In some sense, Noria’s lineage makes her a traditionalist, and an observer and adherent to older duties and customs than those imposed by political decree. The tradition is one of interior discipline and reflection

Noria and her childhood friend Sanja, a skilful inventor and repairer of those long ago obsolete pieces of junk found in landfill from ‘The Twilight Century’ become in some sense, unwittingly, unwillingly, the guardians of human, peer, connection, set against the hierarchical connections of dictatorship and its apparatchiks.

I was fascinated by way this story was told, the creation of the world, and the often quiet, lyrical language. Characterisation was excellent, and Noria and Sanja, their friendship and its challenges, beautifully handled

Past-world tea masters knew stories that have mostly been forgotten………………….The story tells that water has a consciousness, that it carries in its memory everything that’s ever happened in this world, from the time before humans until this moment, which draws itself in its memory even as it passes. Water understands the movements of the world, it knows when it is sought and where it is needed…………Not everything in the world belongs to people. Tea and water do not belong to tea masters, but tea masters belong to tea and water

Itäranta’s interest in sci-fi and dystopian literature is impeccably on the side of reflective, imaginative thinking, and geopolitical awareness, rather than blazing light-sabres and intergalactic derring-do. Writers and books she recommends as her inspirers or books to inspire others include Ursula K Le Guin, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Orwell’s 1984.

I received this as a review copy from Amazon Vine UK

Memory of Water Amazon UK
Memory of Water Amazon USA

The Prescient View of Science Fiction writers

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Book Review, Dystopia, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, Science fiction, SF, Soapbox

Ray Bradbury –  Fahrenheit 451

Back whenever, Science Fiction was a genre I never thought about, convinced that such writers were (sorry, this is about my previous prejudices, and may not reflect reality about the genre, then or now AT ALL) geeky guys without social skills stuck in a 7 year old comic book fantasy of space-ships, ray-guns, stun-guns, giant robotic females with mammaries the size of whoopee cushions, who happened to be coloured green or red and had just dropped in from Venus or Mars.

It took me some time to realise that some writers whom I thought of as pretty thoughtful and thought provoking – H.G.Wells, George Orwell. (I liked their politics too) John Wyndham, even Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) were also writing in this genre. Science Fiction in the hands of these writers had far less to do with ray guns (or even Ray-Bans) and had everything to do with a device for looking at our society.

Then no less an admired writer (by me) than Doris Lessing began to write the stuff in the Canopus In Argos series, and moreover began banging the SF drum, saying that some of the most exciting writing was happening in the genre, as it was a perfect medium for Society to examine itself. Big ethical and philosophical ideas of now and the future could be teased out and examined, and moreover, of course, SF was a way of looking at what both a Utopia and a Dystopia might look like – or even whether Utopia itself was in fact really achievable, or just another Dystopia.

Added to my roster of other writers to admire (and I liked their politics!) were of course Lessing herself, Ursula K Le Guin and Sheri Tepper – not to mention Margaret Atwood and even Marge Piercy in Woman On The Edge Of Time. Suddenly it seemed as if there were a whole raft of feminist writers – fine writers, feminists, turning to this genre as a way of exploring gender politics, socialism – and I realised, hey, you know what, I LIKE SF!

Anyway, this preamble has brought me to re-reading some earlier SF classics, – most recently, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Now Bradbury in this book may not be writing such well crafted complex characters as some of those writers I have mentioned, and the plot itself may even be a bit sparse or creaky, but my goodness, I am shocked and chilled and awed by how much of today’s culture he was predicting 60 years ago

Reality TV where we all become content not only to watch others living, rather than living ourselves, but, no doubt, the next step arriving very soon where our TV becomes interactive and we ourselves get inserted as bit players in the soaps we watch, or software that inserts our names into live TV, so that the TV talks directly to us, with announcers addressing us directly. Then we can live even less.

He seems to have mainlined into the fact that we have dumbed culture down, his description of the way people talk to each other so that actually they are not talking about anything at all seems unnervingly like the “and then he said, he was like, it was, you know, like, it was, yeah, no, know what I mean?” babble.  You hear these conversations all around, more and more being said without any meaning:

 People don’t talk about anything’…’They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else

He predicts also the worst excesses of PC speak, and puts his finger neatly on the button of our expectation of happiness as a right, our inability to come to terms with the fact that pain and suffering are a real part of embodiment, of living in a world of matter. The best, the justest, the fairest society will not be able to end our personal suffering

 Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these

I was shaking my head in amazement at the accurate identification of our can’t be still, can’t reflect society which settles for circuses (never mind the bread) and drinks, drugs, medicates, and buys its way out of having to acknowledge that pain is an unavoidable part of life itself – we will grow old (if we are that lucky); we will have to manage the loss, at some point, of those we love, and we too will die.

There is more – a society which cannot deal with complexity, with the fact there may not always be an obvious right and an obvious wrong, and this too, we cannot bear. One of the great challenges are situations where whatever action is taken, it will not be without some great cost, and yet we have to take some action, as the not taking an action is of course itself an act. Events in Syria are so much illustrative of this. I am minded of W.B. Yeats’ poem The Second Coming:

The best lack all conviction, whilst the worst
Are full of Passionate intensity

How do we live having let go of  the comfortable and childish security of a world which is black OR white, and let ourselves inhabit that more confusing  challenging world filled with ever more subtle complexities of paradoxes, conflicts and oppositions coexisting together into and and, rather than either or?

 If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.

And, seeing ahead to the vapid game show, where factual knowledge gives us the illusion we have intelligence and wisdom

 Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so full of facts they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving

He talks also about our inability to bear silence – everyone cushioned from the world by their own blare of noise wall to wall music piped into our heads, children plonked in front of the pabulum TV, learning early to be passive not interactive, – even the fashion for elective caesarians on non-medical grounds.

What makes this book so powerful still is the fact that so much of its dystopian vision is the way our lives actually are; not in fact so much ‘science fiction’ after all, rather a sociological analysis

We don’t need giant invaders from other galaxies with super powerful rare weapons to destroy us, and our world. We are ourselves those violent, aggressive, alien invaders

Fahrenheit 451 Amazon UK
Fahrenheit 451 Amazon UK

Christopher Priest – The Adjacent

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Book Review, Christopher Priest, Dystopia, Sci-Fi, SF, The Adjacent

Dark Ravens, not White Doves, Emerge from the Magician’s Hat

Christopher Priest is adept at mangling the mind of an unwary (and even a wary!) reader; all his books tangle, darkly, with our perceptions of reality and identity. His new novel, The Adjacent, is no exception, weaving his lifelong themes of shifting realities, alternate and parallel realities of time and place, and the alternate and parallel life of individual identity itself.

Other Priest meta themes to be woven in are prestidigitation, illusion and magic, state control, dystopia, mankind’s heavy and bellicose footprint across the landscape of our history, and the lies and deceptions of our, public relations spin accounts of our time and culture, and the dark and shadowy underbelly of social control and our nightmare, `uncivil’ selves.

Vexaton.DeviantArt.com Commons

The Adjacent weaves a story through several settings, beginning with a post-apocalyptic world, some 40 or 50 years ahead of today. Physicists have found another way of manipulating matter, which, similarly to the splitting of the atom, can be (and will be) used in the service of destruction and control, however much the invention may have been designed as `pure science for the good’.

The effects of global terrorism, environmental damage and twenty-first century religious wars have changed our world forever.

Frighteningly, as so often with Priest, none of this really seems like science fiction – the only factor which isn’t clearly visible over the horizon – or already here – is `Adjacency’ (which I shan’t spell out, it is for the reader to discover)

Strep72 photostream. Flicr, Commons

There is a flipping back and forth between post-apocalytic twenty-first century, the First World War and the Second World War, and, to continue Priest’s other territory of islands, specifically post-apocalytic islands, we revisit some earlier landscapes from his previous novels The Islanders and The Dream Archipelago.

More, I will not say, there are love stories within here, and a surprising (but perfectly apposite) appearance of a pertinent author, but even to mention characters is to destroy the careful series of shocks and recognitions which it will be the reader’s pleasure to discover.

In effect, with his interest in stage magicians and their world, I always feel as if Priest’s readers ought to become, in effect, bound by the rules of the Magician’s Circle, and NOT reveal Priest’s tricks!

I did have a slight feeling of let-down with the ending of this one, and that is all I will say against this book.

An earlier criticism, which is that Priest cannot inhabit female sensibility well, and that there is always a certain coldness and detachment in his accounts of sexual encounters between men and women, something which feels like a flaw, an over-cerebral approach to the possibility of human warmth, did dissolve away, rather, late on the book.

Priest remains a deeply disturbing, sometimes a little chilly and cerebral, but ALWAYS challenging, unsettling and thought provoking, writer. Wallpaper, muzak, marshmallow writer he is NOT. Rather a pearl from the grit in the oyster kind!

I have been an uneasy, sometimes uncomfortable, admirer of Priest’s writing for nearly twenty years, since first encountering The Glamour which may well have been the first of his novels to escape from being sidelined by the often dismissive Sci-Fi label. Priest indeed being one of the authors (along with Doris Lessing, Ursula K.Le Guin, and John Wyndham, not to mention H.G. Wells) to sternly tell me not be so snobby, narrow minded and dismissive, and to realise its not the genre, it’s the WRITING I should look at.

The unease, by the way, is caused by the often scarily prescient quality of Priest’s vision. His is uncomfortable and challenging, not escapist, literature

The Dream Archipelago Amazon UK
The Dream Archipelago Amazon USA

 

Christopher Priest – The Islanders

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Book Review, Christopher Priest, Dystopia, Literary Fiction, Sci-Fi, SF, The Islanders

The subtitle of Christopher Priest’s The Islanders `All men are islands’ cocks a snook at Donne’s `No Man is an Islande’ which points out interconnectedness. Priest’s supposed `gazetteer’ of the islands of The Dream Archipelago both reinforces Donne and his own subtitle, which hints at the also truth of isolation, inward looking, self-reflective nature of islands and island dwellers

This is a book to mangle minds. Told by several unreliable narrators – including the writer himself, who turns out to have dedicated his book to one of his mysterious characters, and thereby does that `up yours’ gesture to the reader who wonders how much the writer of the foreword, Chaster Kammeston, is, or is not, Priest himself – this book systematically pulls rugs out from under the readers’ feet, up-ending and wickedly landing them on the floor.

Those familiar with Priest’s writing will be no strangers to his ability to severely disorientate and deliberately unsettle the reader, turning his dream landscapes to nightmare, whisking what seemed safe ground away to reveal the yawning chasms of danger beneath. Echoes of his earlier works are scattered throughout the text. Indeed the islands themselves are part of The Dream Archipelago, the title of a previous work. One of the islands is the island where lottery winners achieve, through medical science, immortality, and some of the island names as well come from that previous work

Set in what is probably a post-apocalypse near or parallel future of this world, (environmentalists are already predicting this could be nearer than we think) global warming has flooded most of the landscape, leaving 2 war torn major land masses and the long, divided chain of islands of The Dream Archipelago. Presented as a travelogue or guide to some of the major islands, which, according to Kammeston are idyllic, peaceful areas of neutrality outside the still warring land mass areas, where the arts, education and scientific research which benefits all are held in high regard, we quickly learn that much of what Kammeston claims can be disregarded. The `no man is an island’ of Donne’s view and the `all men are islands’ of Priest’s subtitle clash and weave together – the oppositions proving and disproving each other just like 2 of the major installation artists of the book are shown to do.

Nothing is as it seems here, Priest reworking some of his major preoccupations with illusion, sleight of hand, the conscious attempt to deceive of theatrical magic – the major focus of his earlier The Prestige (GOLLANCZ S.F.).

To lay out more of the spells, the illusions, the darknesses and the oppositions Priest explores would be to spoil the new reader’s own journey of dislocation and necessary obfuscation.

If you are unfamiliar with Priest’s work, an excellent place to start is The Glamour (GOLLANCZ S.F.) (which is where I first encountered Priest) To describe him as an SF writer – as often happens – is not completely right. To my mind, he is a kind of English Borges, a philiosopher metaphysician with a scarily challenging mind and imagination. What I particularly appreciate in this book, is a sense of light touch and playfulness, leavening the darkness
The Islanders

Patrick Flanery – Fallen Land

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Book Review, Dystopia, Fallen Land, Literary Fiction, Novels about America, Patrick Flanery

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water”
T.S. Eliot The Wasteland

Patrick Flanery begins his second novel, Fallen Land, with an immediate account of brutal, planned violence, recounted in cool, restrained, ungratuitous language. The year is 1919, and the violence is in America, in a wave of race riots. Flanery’s refusal to linger or indulge in overblown language to describe the events which start this novel, adds to the immediate shock and horror felt by the reader. His cool, dispassionate writing serves to underline a theme which runs through the novel – there is a quotidian violence at the heart of America, underneath its golden dreams of itself, there is always a darker history of blood, fear and hatred.

Jump forward to the post 9/11 world, the legacy of that violence still forms part of the breast milk of America’s dreams of itself, the land of the free, of opportunity – but its riches are built on the backs of the unfree, on land taken away, on land worked by others who were stolen from their own lands to work as slave labour for those who stole the land from the indigenous people

But this is no easy polemic, no easy bleeding heart liberal piece of writing, designed to make the reader feel good about themselves because THEY do not inhabit that world of casual racism and exploitation. As in his previous book, Absolution, Flanery is adept at working into the rounded, complex nature of a human being, forcing us to realise we cannot easily take the simplistic view of ‘me good, you bad’ – he constantly worms his way into the rot at the heart of the golden apple, and conversely the seam of gold inside the epitome of rank destruction.

One of his central characters, the architect and proto psychopath Paul Krovik, is himself part of that immigrant heritage that came to America in pursuit of that golden dream of the land of the free. Brutal, misguided, deranged he may be – but we are forced to inhabit the noble golden dreams which led to Krovik’s dark choices and downfall. The reader knows, from the start, this man is evil – but Flanery makes us look further and more deeply.

Set against the dysfunction of a society turning its back on the past, turning its back on its own evolutionary history, its connection to life and the land, is the keeper of connection the first person narrator of her story, and of what is human, humane, humanity, Louise Washington, descendant of those slaves.

Louise allows Flanery another voice – that of beauty, imagination, the power and magic of words, often taken for granted in the way the land itself has been taken for granted. Only Louise represents a thin hope for the future, holding a respect for the raped and fallen land, its trees, our ancestors, a living connection to the past, the fecund earth, before the American dream which was built on an idea of ‘the land’ but, without respect for the reality of ‘Gaia’, tarmacs over that complex, textured earth.

Flanery is, I fear, also writing the world we are busily creating, where the greedy maw of global corporate culture grinds up and destroys our unique, individual, messy, unconformist living human animal expression, leaving us robotic and without soul. Louise, and the two ‘dysfunctional’ children (read: real) Copley and Joslyn, may not be enough to stop us walking voluntarily into the machine

This is an EXTRAORDINARY book, about so many things, with so many layers, impossible to do justice to without spoiling and inhibiting the journey of discovery each reader will make. It has an absorbing story, a narrative, it has complex, interesting and well-drawn characters, it has language which is appropriate to character, subtle, textured and poetic when needed, plain and pared back when needed, it has complex and rich ideas, content and form. To read it, is to make a journey where you believe you are travelling in one way, to one destination, and suddenly you reach a view above the trees and realise there is a whole new vista and the view you have come from is not, after all, all there is. Layers upon layers unfold – but here is the magic – the book is all of a piece with itself.

Sometimes, superlatives cannot even begin to scratch the surface of how good a book is, or why.

Straddling and defying genres impeccably – thriller/crime, science fiction,  literary fiction, my only reservation – and it is a big one – is – what on earth can I now read, that will not seem thin, pale, and not worth the time spent on it?. I do hope Patrick Flanery is working very diligently indeed on book number 3 – perhaps I should just slowly re-read Absolution again while I wait……………….

I am very grateful indeed to have received this review copy
And even more grateful to a fellow friend and Amazon reviewer Fiction Fan, who initially alerted me to Flanery in the first place – her review had me desperate to get this!

Fallen Land Amazon UK
Fallen Land Amazon USA