Elizabeth and After by Matt Cohen

Back, many many years ago, when I worked at Indigo in Kingston, I remember this book coming in, and selling a butt-ton of them. I never got around to reading it at the time, even though it was a local author and all the things I heard about it were good. Now, in my early forties, I finally settled down to read Elizabeth and After, and I have to say that I enjoyed this just as much as I thought I might. It doesn't hurt that it's set in the near environs of Kingston - it's always nice to see your places reflected on the page.

In a weird coincidence, I was reading Elizabeth and After, in which one of the main characters ends up working at a local video store for a while, at the same time I was reading Universal Harvester, in which the main character works at a local video store. It meant I had to remind myself every once in a while that this was the book that was not horror, and probably added a strange frisson to my reading.

Instead of horror, we have straight Canadian literature, and it's just really, really well done. Elizabeth and After is set in West Gull, north of Kingston just far enough that the people who live there tend to only drive into the city on occasion. (And Kingston is not itself a big city, but it's the closest one to these people.)  It's a community where most have known each other for most of their lives, with occasional new arrivals, but just as many people leaving.

The book starts with a man in the old age home stealing a brand new Cadillac from the local Big Man's car lot, and joyriding it into the lake. It's a really wonderful introduction to the area, the people, and the eccentricities we're going to meet. He's not just a charming old man who likes joyriding, though. He's an alcoholic. He's a widower (Elizabeth's husband, and we get introduced to the car crash that killed her years ago.)  He's semi-estranged from his son. Nobody in this story is a flat characterization, and I think that's what I enjoyed most.

This book slips back and forward in time, bringing new aspects of the characters to light, and it's always done so well. The old man's son returns to town when his agreement with the police (probation?) finishes - he beat up the man his wife was cheating on him with. The wife asks him to come back to the small town where he is known far too well, to be in his daughter's life. He does. This has more levels though, than the trope about everyone in a small town knowing everyone's business. People are more likely to come to conclusions about their neighbours, perhaps, but it is not as simple as that.

There's a man in town, old now, who everyone quietly assumes is gay, as he's never had a relationship any of them have ever known about. As we go back and forth to the past, though, a quite different reason for never displaying a partner comes to light, as do more details about Elizabeth's accident, and the holes it left in many people's lives. We also learn about Elizabeth and how and why she came to live in this small eastern Ontario town, since she was definitely not born there.

We also get the childhood histories of Elizabeth, of her husband, of the other older man in the town. We do not get so close to the men who are the antagonists to various characters - those who want power in this small town, to be seen with power, and who react to losing it badly. There are some nice subtle things on the limits and abuses of power in this small town.

Most of the story comes back to Elizabeth as a touchstone - what she was, what she promised, what was lost, who is to blame. (Everyone thinks they are to blame.)  This isn't the story of people yearning to leave their small town. It's about people trying to be who they are where they are.

Downward to the Earth by Robert Silverberg

Elephants are interesting creatures. They're intelligent, inventive, and so, so much bigger than we are. I guess I'm not totally surprised that when science fiction writers go looking for ways to conceptualize alien species, they might come up with something that is remarkably elephant-like. I'm just surprised that I can point to several different examples of elephant-like aliens. Maybe my SF/F book club will do a theme on that at some point.

What does having an elephant-like alien species do? It puts humans in a physically fragile spot, and challenges our ability to empathize with them, I guess. In one of the books I've read, the elephant-like species is an invading and technologically superior force coming to earth, while Silverberg's take on this seems very much patterned on India immediately after the withdrawal of the British colonial forces, except without the division of India and Pakistan.

Silverberg also seems to be trying to do a Heart of Darkness thing here, as the main character travels deep into native territory to find a man named Kurtz, who is rumoured to have become a dark and terrible reflection of himself.  (It's been a long time since I've read Heart of Darkness, so I don't have a lot more to say than that. I wish I remembered more, so I could do a deeper dive.)

Using alien species as ways to examine race is, of course, not new in science fiction, but it is problematic. Who we call alien, and what features we project on to aliens has a logic all its own, and not a subtle one. The other is always the racialized other, and "humans" tend to speak from a white American or European standpoint. It flattens out races among humanity, making the default human characters almost universally white, and where they are not white, experience of race is rarely mentioned. It tends to get almost entirely projected outward. It's a nice fantasy to imagine a  universe where humans had utterly moved beyond internal racism and only retained external aspects...well, that's not really that pretty, and also pretty damned unlikely. As above, so below.

So, with all that being said, how does it work, in this particular book? The book is self-consciously hearkening back to certain aspects of British colonialism, although the humans are not necessarily British. There feel like strong parallels to India. (Interestingly, the only female human in the book has a name that suggests she might possibly be of Indian descent, but if there's a specific description that makes it clear, I missed it. The perils of not thinking visually.)

Wait, do the not-elephants have any women? Do they have any genders? There's a reference to two of the nildoror having sex, but when we meet individual nildoror, I feel like they're all given male pronouns, whether or not they would be applicable. Huh. I will have to check this.

The main character is a former colonial administrator returning to a planet, contrite that he was so racist before. Now he is seeing the nildoror as sentient beings for the first time, and not just beasts of burden, which is how he used to treat them. Most humans have left the planet as it is turned back over to the nildoror, but he has come, thinking to travel to the Valley of Mists to undertake the nildoror rebirthing ceremony. No human has reported on this ceremony, and while a few humans are rumoured to have undergone it, the stories say they come back as monsters. (Guess what might have happened to Kurtz!)

There is another intelligent race on the planet, the sulidoror, which are much like humans, and the main character now sees them everywhere, when they were mostly hidden before. He assumes the nildoror have subjugated the sulidoror in turn, but the answer is more interesting than that. And then the end of the book, oh what to make of the end? We get a turn to enlightenment in a Buddhist sense, or to incarnation in a Christian one.

If you like older science fiction, and this peaks your interest, it might be worth a read. It's not a perfect book, and some of the blind spots are rather glaring, but I found what Silverberg was trying to do here quite interesting.

Space Opera by Catherynne Valente

"Life is beautiful, and life is stupid."

This is either the first or second of the universal laws that are laid down by a philosopher from one species in this book, and it certainly struck a chord. This is a book that argues for more joy, more sparkles, more glam, not in order to pretend that the universe doesn't suck sometimes, but because when things are awful, we can still create some magic. It can't necessarily fix everything, but it's not pointless, either.

I have never seen Eurovision live. Last year, encouraged by Catherynne Valente's enthusiastic tweeting of the proceedings, I did track down some performances on Youtube, and...oh my. That is crazy and fun, and not really about good, necessarily. I'd be interested in seeing more, although perhaps not to the extent that I've bothered to bestir myself to find out when it happens next. (Okay, I just googled, it's in May.)

This book is, of course, spawned by a tweeted question to Valente about what Eurovision would look like in space. Obviously, that bore fruit, and now we have a deliciously messy look at exactly that. The tone is very similar to Douglas Adams, but the subject matter is all Valente's own. We have alien races that look like roadrunners, or sort-of teddy bears, or zombies or just about anything at all you could possibly think of. What do they all have in common? An invincible belief that their own race is sentient and a suspicion of anyone making the same claim.

This led to galaxies-spanning Sentience Wars, and when that was all over, the surviving races sat down and tried to figure out how to make that never happen again. And they came up with their own version of Eurovision. Any newly discovered planet would compete in the next one, and as long as they didn't come in last, they wouldn't be utterly obliterated for being not even sentient enough to know a good tune when they heard one. Of course, the other planets had gotten pretty sophisticated by then, and a simple tune wasn't going to cut it. You needed some showmanship.

When first contact is made, though, the list the alien brought with theirself as suggestions for who Earth send, it turns out most of them are dead. Well, all of them, actually. Except for Decibel Jones, who is something like a failed version of David Bowie and Prince put together. Glam as hell, he and his band, the Absolute Zeroes, had a smash album before falling apart musically and emotionally.

(There's a very good and disturbing sidebar about how upset the British and American governments might get if the representative of the human race were frivolous, bisexual, multiracial, and glam as hell. They'd rather supply their own, thank you very much, someone they can control. The aliens know that's a fast track to disintegration city, so they opt for Decibel Jones and the one remaining Absolute Zero.)

On the trip to the competition, Decibel Jones has to deal with the ghosts that brought him here, and the resentment/fondness of Oort, his bandmate, as well as the loss of the other Absolute Zero that brought them all low. They also have to contend with other aliens when they arrive at the venue, since winning or even placing in the competition has come to include some kidnapping and assassination attempts. Will the human race survive, when Decibel and Oort don't even have a song ready?

How does it read? Well, I start giggling on the very first page, and very frequently thereafter. In this one, Valente has a totally different tone, light and amusing, while bringing up issues of surprising depth. There's a knack of observation mixed in that reminds me of some of the best British comedic science fiction and fantasy, although it is only the main character who is British, not Valente herself. She's got the knack down pat.

Traitor's Blade by Sebastien de Castell

I've come back around to my "Read-Alike" project - this is the one where I take my top ten lists, and try books that are recommended by the NoveList database as read-alikes. This has been an interesting object lesson in how much books are how they are about things, not what they are about. (Thank you, Roger Ebert, for putting your finger on this so precisely!)  I can almost always see why the algorithm has spat out the results it did, but the books are often vastly different in how they approach similar subject material.  Some of these books have been downright terrible. Some are pretty good. One made it onto the next year's Top Ten list, so that time, at least, I found a gem.

I wasn't quite that lucky this time, but neither was this one of the read-alikes that I had to pull myself through bodily, to finish. This is quite good fantasy (with a couple of quibbles). It just doesn't in any way live up to the book that sparked the recommendation. Then again, The Lies of Locke Lamora is a pretty damned high bar to live up to.

In the end, Traitor's Blade was never a chore to read. I enjoyed it while I read it. However, and you can probably tell that there's a however, there wasn't much that made me eager to read any sequels, if there are any. Near the end, something interesting happens, and if the whole book had been about that storyline, I think I'd be much more interested. It is genuinely a bit innovative, but the rest is similar enough to things I've read before that I think I'm good having just read the one.

This is one of the problems with fantasy, sometimes. Some of the tropes have been worn so smooth that revisits to this territory are not my favourite thing. Something about those books would have to be deeply extraordinary to add an author to my list. That didn't happen here.

What we have is three men who seem like they're a reference to the Three Musketeers. In this fantasy kingdom (and magic itself is a little sparse on the ground, but not absent), there was a king. That king wanted to reform the kingdom, making it more just for the common folk, taking power away from the dukes and duchesses. In return, the dukes and duchesses had the king killed. The Greatcoats, the king's personal force, trained to be magistrates to enforce the new laws, did not prevent his death.

As the book opens, it's now been many years. Falcio Val Mond and two of his Greatcoat compatriots are reviled as traitors, both to the king and to the power of the duchies. They hire themselves out as mercenaries, but Falcio cannot let go of the dream of his king. When a wealthy trader they were paid to protect is assassinated, Falcio and his crew join a caravan taking a young woman to a faraway duchy, where political intrigue will ensue. Along the way, Falcio will keep getting distracted by injustice, but see no way to resurrect a dead ideal.

So, the quibble. The author makes a point that the Greatcoats were one-third women, and tries to make this a world without gender roles as strict as we might expect in something that seems roughly like Europe in the Renaissance. However, the main character still tries to use "fights like a girl" as an insult, and defends it even when called on it by other characters. Why would that even be an idiom in this particular world? What kind of sense does that make? It's a weird hill for a fictional character to die on, given that it in no way reflects the society that spawned him.

Oh yeah, and as soon as we get the main character's backstory, there's an immediate fridging for motivation.

Outside of that, the women characters are not bad. I don't feel like they're really really deep, but I don't really feel that the men are either. The characters are interesting enough, just not hugely complex. All in all, this is a swashbuckling fantasy that mostly doesn't have much magic, so it is like The Lies of Locke Lamora. Just nowhere near as much fun, or with as much to say.

The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware

A friend loaned me this book because it has a tarot reader as a main character, and I'd just recently started reading tarot cards professionally, after having spent 25 years learning them quite thoroughly. The tarot reading is not a huge part of this book, which is mostly a thriller, and not a bad one at that. As it pertained to tarot, I thought it was perhaps unfortunate the exact take Ware decided to take, but it's not an unreasonable one. It's all about expectations from tarot reading, really.

The main character, Hal, lost her mother recently, and in order to make ends meet, has taken up her mother's role as a tarot reader on the pier of an English seaside town. She's in debt with usurious interest, and it's coming due, and her legs and life have been threatened. So, when a letter arrives about a grandmother that can't possibly be hers leaving her a bequest, she decides to see if she can con her way into a small amount of money.

Of course, when she shows up at the funeral and reading of the will, it's not a small bequest at all. It's the entire house, quite a large country estate. So Hal is caught by her lies as family secrets swirl around her, and she has to keep her own secrets while others are definitely keeping theirs - and worse, she starts to like some of the people she's conning.

Hal's a good character, by far and large. It's just too bad that she views her job, and tarot as a whole, as a con. She doesn't believe she can tell the future, so she relies on cold reading. And sure, absolutely, you can read that way. I don't think it's ethical at all, and so yeah, if that's what she's doing, there are issues. (I am terrible at knowing exactly what people are feeling while I'm reading tarot cards. I realized long ago, as a tour guide, that I often mistake deep concentration for disbelief. But then, I also tell people that I'm not psychic before I start their reading, and that I'm not there to wow them with what I know, or to tell them what their futures hold. I'm there to help them reflect on their present)

It gets strange because what Hal seems to think about tarot cards is not that far off what I think. There's no reason for her to run this like a scam. Be up front, tell people you're providing a mirror for their lives, a way to recognize patterns and understand personal stories, but that they'll be doing most of the work fitting what they know to what you're saying. But she thinks she can't say that, and so she runs it like a scam, which is frustrating, upset with herself when she pretends she can tell the future. (Also, the author tries to have it go both ways by having tarot cards whenever they come up, be uncannily accurate about situations.)

But really, that's not the focus of the book. The focus is the family Hal finds herself sort-of part of, the interactions between the three brothers who are her theoretical uncles. Hal discovers a picture fairly quickly of them as young people, with her mother there - a cousin of the family with a similar name to a daughter who disappeared many years ago. So, she's related, but not necessarily the way the lawyer's letter and the will describe. There are concerns about the money, but also about justice, and all three brothers are understandably very interested in whatever happened to their long-lost sister.

And some people don't want the truth to come to light, about the sister, about Hal, about the cousin. Some of the twists seemed a little telegraphed, but all in all, this holds together as a competent thriller set in a spooky old house in England. I'll say mystery too, because it does have some good central mysteries to be uncovered.

Something More Than Night by Ian Tregillis

*Spoilers Below*

I really wanted to like this book. I really, really did. It sounded so interesting! Unfortunately, the execution didn't quite live up to the premise, and I never sunk into what was going on. I frequently had moments where I wrinkled my brow because the narrative conceit the author was going on just didn't work for me, in the context in which it was done.

When you tell me this is a contemporary fantasy about angels vs. humans, and done with a noir flair? I was very interested. I love noir. I tend to enjoy noir tropes being applied to different circumstances, as long as it is done well. So I started this book expecting to thoroughly enjoy it.  Alas, that was not where I ended. I didn't hate it either, it's just that this feels like it's two-thirds of a good book, and one-third...not. Premises aren't fully thought through. Narrative conventions don't hold up to the merest bit of scrutiny. It's just not fully baked.

There are two main characters here - one, Bayliss, is a low level angel who has been given an important task - when Raphael, one of the most important angels, is murdered, he needs to pick a human to take Raphael's place. Preferably one who won't kick up a fuss and will just keep their head down. That one ends up, accidentally, being Molly. Bayliss was out to get her brother killed in an accident and thus turn him into an angel, but Molly stepped in the way, and so, it's her.

Molly is not a pushover, and is pissed that she's dead, ready to push the limits of being an angel, despite what Bayliss says. And as she does, the full extent of the angelic murder plot are slowly revealed, involving people on earth with a penchant for having angel wings grafted on their backs, and a dodgy indulgence system.  Also with Molly's own struggles to connect with people she's left behind, when she learns that pushing too hard can lead to brain aneurysms.

You know what? That's all fine. It's where we then try to push noir and noir tropes on top of this story that it starts to fall apart. And it's start at the beginning. Bayliss tells us that, through his centuries on earth, he dealt with the isolation by getting into Raymond Chandler. Which...doesn't account for all the time before that. If he's prone to fads, what were his other coping techniques? The noir is fun, but he constantly reminds us that it's not really like that, it's just the lens he's putting on top of his interactions with angels. It's strangely alienating.

If you get past that, the take on angels is interesting. Angels (and cherubim and all the rest) don't know what the greater power is out there, they just know the Metatron appeared at some point and bound them close to earth, where the consensual reality they create helped stabilize physical laws so that humans could come along. This means that the angels really hate humanity. They see them as part of the bars of their prison. Also, there's no afterlife. Just Molly, and that's a special case.

Here's the spoilery bit, though. It turns out that Bayliss has been lying the whole time, not just to Molly, but to the reader. The problem with trying to use an unreliable narrator technique here is that there's no one he's trying to fool or lie to in his sections of the book. It's not addressed to anyone in particular. It's not addressed to potential readers, a la Murder of Roger Ackroyd, still the gold standard in unreliable narrators. Yes, I get why he lies to Molly, but there seems to be absolutely no reason that the text we're reading should conform to those lies. It's not there to fool anyone, except on the meta level of the author trying to fool the reader.

And this drives me crazy! Give Bayliss someone to be writing this to, someone to whom he also needs to lie, or have it be a detective's report to Molly or whatever the fuck, and then his lying makes sense. It is the disjuncture between the fiction and the stated purpose of the fiction that is the problem. Unreliable narrators can work great, when they're narrating to someone. Take that out, and it's pointless. There was no reason to write it that way. It would have made no difference to the story unfolding if it was the truth of what happened instead, with that juxtaposed to what was told to Molly.

(It's also not great unreliable narrator. I can't think of a single thing that, once the gimmick is revealed, I suddenly see in a new light. It's not a new spin on old things, it's just that most of them seem to never have happened. There's nothing here that rewards the reader for having been interested.)

(Also, I have used too many italics, and have read Emily of New Moon and am now expecting Mr. Carpenter to appear in a puff of smoke and say something withering.)

If this had just undergone a little more thought, if it had jelled more, this might have been a really interesting book. As it was, I was always dissatisfied, even before the reveal. Nothing seemed to fit together right.

The Ambassadors by Henry James

*Spoilers Below*

I just spent a review trying to figure out why I didn't like a book that was very similar to a "classic." It was kind of a relief to go from that to this book, which is undeniably by someone who is literary and wrote classics, and to be able to say that I really enjoyed The Ambassadors quite a lot. I think I enjoyed it more then A Portrait of a Lady, which had some aspects that grated on me. Phew! I'm not an entire Philistine, after all!

It's funny. This book spends quite a lot of time not saying things directly, even though they're fairly obvious, but it's so indirect that you're not even sure what's not obvious. And yet, it works. It feels like this should drive me crazy, that I should want someone to say what they mean, for once, and yet that is the point of the book. It's about a culture, a place, where things are said and not said in different ways, clashing with another culture in which the things not said are slightly different, but so are the ways in which you interpret things that are not done.

Look at me, I'm turning into Henry James. I'm very sorry if the previous paragraph was oblique. I could narrow it down by giving a spoiler that certainly isn't revealed in these terms in the novel: Yes. They're fucking.

Of course, you can say that, but what does it mean? This is really the great delight of The Ambassadors, that it takes a sexual and emotional relationship so seriously and with such tolerance of ambiguity. What does it mean emotionally, if it means anything at all? What does it mean materially? What does it mean physically? What, oh what, does it mean socially? Sex, after all, does not happen in isolation - it's as much a part of the culture as anything else, just one with heavily charged meanings and interpretations. Oh, Henry James, I sort of love you for this book!

So, we have as a main character Strether, a man in his fifties, editor of a minor literary journal in a small town in New England. He is provisionally engaged to a rich widow of that town, but before they get married, she dispatches him to France to find her wastrel son and convince him to come home and take up the family business.

Once he gets there, though, Strether finds that he rather likes Chad as he is now, that whatever he has been up to in France suits him rather more than not, and whereas he was quite a callow jerk before, now he's charming and altogether polished. Strether also enjoys his own time in Paris very much, but a lot of it is trying to figure out what exactly is going on between Chad and a married woman and/or her daughter.

It is here that no one will give a straight answer. Strether has to observe and become part of Chad's circle to discover who Chad might be romantically attached to, and what that means. Strether is more than willing to let that float as ambiguity, and in fact, seems to prefer it that way. If he doesn't know the exact details of what's going on, he can see the effects, and there is no need for moral judgement. He can simply enjoy Chad as he is now, and be delighted to get to know Marie de Vionnet and her daughter.

So, instead of urging Chad to return to the United States, he encourages him to stay longer, until his mother sends over her daughter and daughter's husband to check up on both Chad and Strether. At that point, Strether must face that the ambiguity he relishes will not be tolerated by New England society, or the daughter, or the mother, and he is being found wanting for not passing harsh moral judgement, immediately.

This isn't all in praise of ambiguity, though. The very looseness of what's been going on has also meant that Strether has been able to tell himself some romantic stories which, it turns out, may not be borne out by the evidence. Chad's attachment may not be quite as firm as it first appears, and he might revert to the New England-style more easily than Strether himself.

All in all, this is a fascination book on the role of cultural context, ambiguity, and judgement in differing societies, and I had a lot of fun reading it. I frequently didn't understand any more than Strether, but that meant I got to discover as he did. It's an interesting read decades on, when the issues that would pop to my mind are not those that would come to others.