His Monkey Wife by John Collier

Well, this certainly was a book! Not a fun book, one full of racism and sexism and irritatingness, but certainly a book!

I had to put in a special request to retrieve this from off-site storage, and I can really see why it isn't read so much these days. Unless, of course, someone was making a study about snide British colonialism and smug dismissals of the New Woman. Which I hope someone is doing. This could be a little known but prominent component.

The main character is a teacher in Africa, where he loves Black people, although this part of the book is full of stereotypes about them. While there, he acquires a chimpanzee, names her Emily, and Emily learns how to read, falls in love with him, and pines away. She also saves him from an evil and lascivious African woman who tries to seduce him, and failing that, to have him killed.

He takes Emily with him when he goes back to England as a present to his fiancee, Amy, which rocks Emily to her core. Everyone they meet mistakes Emily for a person, which...really? Okay. I have watched chimpanzees, and even were they literate and clothed, I'm pretty sure the hair would give them away.

Amy is a model of the New Woman as perceived by Collier, which means that all her pleas for independence and time to discover herself are sheer self-centeredness and pettiness. Amy is a piece of work, not wanting to get married, but of course stringing her unfortunate fiancee along, to Emily's dismay.

Emily sneaks out to the reading room of the British Museum, and although she reads all the classics, it doesn't alter her obedient nature to the main character. *sigh*

Finally, near the end, she snaps on Amy's wedding day, takes her place, the groom doesn't notice until the kiss. The archbishop says they'll marry anything to anything these days, which...what? The main character is repulsed, but Amy can't admit what happened, tries to take the credit for a joke, and they split up. Eventually, the main character (can you tell I can't remember what his name is?) is penniless and homeless and is taken in by Emily, who has become rich and famous as a dancer (again, as a human, although I'm quite sure showgirl outfits leave little to the imagination.)

Eventually, all comes out, he forgives her and loves Emily after all, and they return to Africa. On their return, Emily is so kind and gentle and obedient and silent that every man they meet wishes they had a monkey for a wife. Ugh.

The intro tries to explain how this book isn't a dig at the New Woman, but given that, and given the ideal Emily is supposed to embody, with silence being the most notable feature, he can talk in circles all he likes, but that isn't going to make this a less irritating book.

It's not a hard read, the writing is fine, it's the ideas and story that are really offputting.

A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore

This is maybe the third or fourth (or fifth?) Christopher Moore that I've read, and I've had varying reactions to them. A few I've really enjoyed, a few others have seemed to be straining too hard for a chuckle, without enough meat to them to make them a pleasant meal if the jokes don't whet your appetite. This one, fortunately, weighs the scale down more on the funny and substantial side.

Still, I am not finding them gut-bustingly hilarious. There are some good jokes, there are some amusing sequences, and the oddly matched taxidermied animals amused me greatly, but from far and large, this was more gentle smile territory than laughing-out-loud-alarming-my-husband fare. Which is okay. I have that reaction to a lot of humour writing. I respond much better to verbal humour, not so intensely to written.

The reason I think this one works better for me is the emotional core of it. Sure, the main character is a bit of a bumbler (or as Moore likes to repeatedly call it, a Beta Male), but he has suffered major loss and is trying to go on living as best he can.

So, the plot. Soon after his baby daughter is born, Charlie runs back into his wife's hospital room, only to find a strange man there, and a dead wife. The first part of the book deals with the genuine emotional impact of this, Charlie stunned by the medical fluke of the death of his wife, while trying to figure out how to keep this new small pink thing alive.

Then he discovers that the reason that he could see the man in his wife's room was that he, Charlie himself, is about to become like him, not quite Death, but someone who finds objects into which people put their souls and claims them around the time of death. Then, through his second-hand shop, he makes sure those souls find new homes.

Which is intriguing, the idea that most people are walking around quite happily and functionally without souls, but that there is a steady movement of souls around. We're never given a good explanation between souled and soulless. (What is is with authors refusing to actually define this? I'm looking at you, Gail Carriger.) I wish that was gone into in detail, because it's obviously not as simple as souled=good, soulless=bad.

At any rate, when Charlie messes up, strange voices start to hiss at him from the sewers, threatening all sorts of bodily mayhem. He eventually learns that what he does helps keep the world in order, and it would be bad if he didn't. Charlie becomes convinced that he himself is the big kahuna Death,  who has been absent from the world for a long time.

(The actual answer to this is a twist that is so obvious from the first few pages that I really hope it wasn't supposed to be a surprise. Because there's some pleasure in watching Charlie totally, consistently, and in a manner that owes a lot to Good Omens, miss the point, but I really hope the author wasn't expected his readers to miss it too.)

So it's a book about grief, wrapped up in a book about small taxidermied animals in fancy-dress, creepy Celtic goddesses in the sewers, and hellhounds that eat soap. It doesn't feel like there's another leap there about death more generally, and that would have been even better, but if we're merely talking about Charlie and his journey through a world made strange by his wife's absence, that's certainly enough emotional punch to carry this one through, to give some satisfaction when the jokes don't quite make it.

Unpossible and Other Stories by Daryl Gregory

Daryl Gregory has been one of my favourite discoveries of the past couple of years. I've read two of his novels, Pandemonium and Raising Stony Mayhall and fallen quite in love with them. This time, I was settling down to read his short stories, and by far and large, I enjoyed them quite a lot. But there's also a way in which what I like most about this author is better displayed in longer formats.

See, what I've been most struck by is Gregory's ability to take an idea and keep pushing it past the bounds. There are moments where he's set out something fascinating, and it feels like that would be the story for most authors, but he invariably presses on into what the implications of this revelation would be, taking ideas about demonic possession and about zombies into strange metaphysical spaces I could never have imagined. I've loved every minute of that.

Short stories, by definition, are short. And so, while we have the same provocative ideas I've enjoyed, and some themes that are truly right up my alley, there isn't room for that kind of further extrapolation. Don't get me wrong. These are good short stories. It's just that I almost always want to know what Gregory would have done with this idea next, after the story ends.

It's not a bad problem to have. On the other hand, these are really good short stories. Many of them are about intersections between medicine and faith, and truly, when you get into those territories, I am right there with you. Others are meta-tales about superheroes and supervillains, and the shape of the world around them.

The stories about faith and medicine were probably my very favourite, and he takes medical ideas and interweaves them with people just beautifully. The story about prions and belief, "Damascus," took my breath away - it was both truly terrifying and incredibly intriguing. I felt for the main character even as her actions horrified me.

The first story in the book, "Second Person, Present Tense," about the illusion of consciousness, was similarly mind-bending. The couple about superheroes and villains were a lot of fun, and it's hard to not see small echoes of "The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm," the story in which the working class in the country of the supervillain still have to go to work the next day, even when the superheroes attack, in Segovia in the most recent Avengers movie.

These are stories about damaged people, about people trying to find something to believe in, even if it's just in themselves as beings. The ideas are great, but they're rooted in really strong characters as well - these are not the type of stories that use ideas as substitutes for people. These are ideas being played out through people, and who those people are is intrinsically crucial to how they develop.

In other words, these are really good short stories. But they make me long for a full-length novel, and I hope to get to a few more of Gregory's novels soon. I haven't been disappointed yet in his work, and frequently mind-blown.

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft

If you wanted a list of sentences I thought I would never say, "I have just read something by H.P. Lovecraft" would be way up there. Like, way up there. I don't read horror, and I've had bad experiences, not with Lovecraft himself, but with Lovecraft-inspired roleplaying games. I had to swear off playing Call of Cthulhu years ago, to my husband's lasting chagrin, as I found that they were too upsetting and depressing for me to play any longer. Bill and I hashed it out for a long time, trying to isolate what exactly it was that put me so on edge to play Call of Cthulhu, and while I was satisfied with our explanation of the utter lack of agency I feel when I'm playing that game, I'm not sure that gets at all of it.

There are other games where I've played characters out against overwhelming odds, with death on the line, and they haven't made me as upset. I don't know.

So because of that, I've steered far away from Lovecraft. I'm not good at horror at the best of times, and so this seemed safer if it were one of those places where my reading habits and this author never intersected.

Then I ran out of books on a weekend. Blew through all my library books. Had two days of the library being closed before I could get new ones. And my online SF book club on goodreads was reading At the Mountains of Madness. So I asked Bill if he thought I could handle it. He thought I could, and that I probably wouldn't find it scary at all. So I sat down and read this novella.

He was right. Not scary at all. Interesting, but with little sense of dread. I think I know why that is, but we'll get there in a bit.

In this book, explorers go to Antarctica and discover horrors, and the survivors are now trying to warn off another expedition. What they find there are the remnants of a lost civilization, inhuman, with still some monsters lurking in the deeps. And gigantic penguins.

This is most description, page upon page of description, and this is where I start to realize why I think it is that I'm not weirded out by this. Bill and I were talking as I was partway through, and he was saying that for him, the disturbing part is Lovecraft trying to describe the indescribable, and it's that leap where you can almost picture it but not quite that is so very unsettling.

The thing is, I am not a visual thinker. Most paragraphs of description, no matter how lush, result in no more than the shadowy edges of a picture, and more often stay as the pleasure of words. That leap where you can't quite picture it? That's me, pretty much all the time. So reading Lovecraft's descriptions is not that different from reading any author's descriptions. That sense of it remaining just outside your perception is entirely missing. Or far too present, I suppose, but I've made my peace with it.

So there was no sense of unease, just an adventure story with nasty monsters that never leaped to pictures in my brain because that just never happens. As such, I enjoyed it, and it didn't traumatize me, and I'm not feeling quite so wary of Lovecraft. Still, I won't be running out to play Call of Cthulhu again any time soon.

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list from which to pick, of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Amie.

After I was lamenting, a month or so into reading this book, how long it was taking me to read it, Amie, who had recommended it to me in the first place, replied saying she hadn't managed to finish it. This made me cock an eyebrow. On the other hand, I am a damnably stubborn woman, and books that are difficult to read but not actively unpleasant stimulate my competitive impulses.

So I changed how I was reading it. Instead of trying to read it in 100-page chunks, as soon as I got up in the morning, while the oatmeal was simmering and the water for coffee and tea was boiling, I'd try to read two chapters. And that's it. That's all I would read in a day. So it took me months, wore out the entire number of renewals I had on the book at the library, and still got taken back a day late, but I finished!

I feel like I've conquered something.

So, on the other end of this bizarre meditation on trying to structure space and time in systematized manners, without regard for natural landscape or desire, what do I think? I think I'm still puzzled. It's hard to call this book enjoyable, exactly, but I don't resent having read it. (I do, however, feel an immense amount of freedom, like I've put down a heavy pack, that I don't have to start the day trying to read another 20 pages.)

There is so much strangeness in this book, and so much language that is obfuscatory and meta, that I frequently felt entirely lost, and that's not particularly usual for me.

On this other hand, this book has invisible mechanical ducks in love with French chefs, werebeavers, a descent into the Hollow Earth, Chinese Feng Shui experts fallen in with debauched Jesuits straight from an anti-Catholicism novel, and a whole host of other oddities. Every time one of these sections came up, with their exceedingly strange and yet somehow appropriate stories, I was enthralled.

I think the problem is maybe the stuff in between. Problem is perhaps too strong a word, but between these incidents of oddness, we get Mason & Dixon, travelling, surveying, astronomizing, quarrelling, and drinking. They maybe have feelings for each other, but it's buried under prose so deep it's hard to breathe in.

There are also layers of meta that I'm sure I'm just not getting. There's an incident at the start of the book including a sailor named Patrick O'Brien, who knows everything about boats, that felt like it was clearly a reference to the author of the same name, which warned me to be on the lookout for similarly meta references, but if there were any, they went right over my head.

It's the kind of book I'd like to come back to in, oh, say 10 years, and see what it says to me now. There's an underlying theme about how we divide, catalogue, and structure reality that I'm still grappling with. I'll let it sit for a while, and see where it goes. Also, other people should read this now, so I can discuss it with them.

Irma Voth by Miriam Toews

I have read a lot of Canadian fiction the last little while. It's one of those odd bumps that turns up, when suddenly a whole bunch of books from a whole bunch of lists harmonize in front of me. I've gone from Margaret Atwood to Tomson Highway to Miriam Toews in short order. I think that may be it at the moment, but we shall see.

That's really apropos of nothing, I'm just trying to figure how to get into this review. Because, you see, I liked Irma Voth quite a lot, but I'm not quite sure how to start this off. So I'm easing myself in by analyzing what I've been reading. Enough temporizing.

This is the third Toews book I've read, and of the two I've read previously, I really loved A Complicated Kindness and liked A Boy of Good Breeding okay. So I had high hopes for Irma Voth, and I am more than happy with what I found. Like A Complicated Kindness, this one takes place within a Mennonite family. In this case, a Mennonite family that has relocated to Mexico from Canada.

Irma is the oldest daughter in the family (an older sister having died.) She falls in love with a Mexican man and marries him against her father's wishes. Her father manages to manipulate them into taking the house next door, where he can keep his thumb on them. Her husband runs off, possibly because he's involved in drugs, and so she is left alone, cut off from her family next door, with no source of support.

Into the third house in this little patch of land moves a film crew, working on a movie about the Mennonites. Knowing that Miriam Toews was involved in the movie Silent Light, makes it feel like that experience informed the writing on this, although it's hard to know exactly.

Irma gets involved with the shoot as a translator for the German actress brought over to play the lead, who has no languages in common with the director. Her younger sister is increasingly chafing against the rules at home, but Irma feels powerless to intervene.

Two things that really struck me about this book: one, how beautifully Toews' prose captures someone who has things to express that she has no idiom for. The writing as Irma is restrained, but restrained in a way that is bursting at the seams with efforts to express what has, to this point in her life, been inexpressible. That feeling of suppressed emotion really drives this book.

The second is subtle, and comes through mostly in the bits where Irma is translating (wrongly and on purpose) the director's desired lines to the actress, but it extends beyond. There is this theme of the emotions that all the men around them presume the women there have, with the knowledge that what they really want is a blank canvas for their own thoughts. Struggling under the weight of projected emotions, Irma, her mother, and her sister all are much more complex and difficult characters than the father, the director, any of the other men, wish to see.

I also enjoyed that when Irma leaves the farm, this isn't a simplistic tale of the corruption of the big city. There are good people Irma finds, even when small unkindnesses occurs, and she's able to get along instead of being ground down by the relentless wheels of the uncaring city. It feels more true that people are kind and cruel everywhere, it is not just rural or urban that makes them so.

All in all, I really enjoyed this entry into Toews' work, and I am excited in particular to get to All My Puny Sorrows at some point.

Kiss of the Fur Queen by Tomson Highway

Different books bring different pleasures. Sometimes it's the plot, tense and urgent and carrying me along. Sometimes it's characters, people I come to love and want to see what happens to, and who make it hurt when bad things come. Most rarely of all, I think, it's the writing itself, the kind of writing that wraps you up and carries you along, that, rather than being at best unobtrusive, leaves me searching for just the right turn of phrase to capture how the prose makes me feel.

I remember describing Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin as being liked being sucked down into molasses. I've described Guy Gavriel Kay's writing as creating moments of pure crystal. Catherynne Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making had such surgical precision in the placement of each word.

It's a good sign when I start looking for these metaphors. Kiss of the Fur Queen is another such. The best I can come up with at the moment is that the prose is graceful and gliding, with occasional moments of blunt force impact. There are echoes of oral storytelling that I really enjoyed, repetitions of phrase that recur, adding a pleasing note to an already exciting style.

Kiss of the Fur Queen is not an easy book. But it's not an overly dark one either. There are moments of lightness, of hope, in a story that is ultimately rich and complex, avoiding easy answers to difficult questions.

It is about two brothers, Cree children from Northern Manitoba who are the first generation to be sent away to residential schools, where horrific abuses occur. These are not lingered on, but they are not obscured either. Both children carry those scars with them into later life. One, Champion, renamed Jeremiah, trying to become a concert pianist and striving to assimilate, while the other, Gabriel, becomes a dancer, and exorcises his demons by throwing himself into his body, in ways beautiful and dangerous.

The book also touches on missing Native women in Winnipeg, outreach done in urban Native communities, racism, and those who are trying to reclaim their Native heritage as worthy and beautiful in its own right. Jeremiah's inability to accept it for most of the book, shown through his reaction to Native music, so unlike what he has been training himself to perform, is poignant.

As I said, one of the things I like most here is that there are no easy answers, no easy outs, no simple reclaiming that can make someone whole. It's a struggle, and a daily one, to find meaning in a world that does not admire complexity, that wishes to see in binaries.

The prose is remarkable, the story compelling, the characters intriguing, and the wrongs done horrific and far too real. This was the choice for our book club last month, and it was widely enjoyed.