redshift

We were all more or less thieves, at Lant Street. But we were the kind of thief that rather eased the dodgy deed along, than did it.

Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters, is a melodramatic romance set in Victorian England, with a twisting plot full of thieving, betrayal, sex, and confusion. I’m still, at time of writing, trying to work out what I really think about it. It’s convoluted, lengthly, and yes, very, very full of melodrama. It also ticks a large number of boxes for me personally — namely, the core relationship is a lesbian one, the shifting of various people’s identities throughout the book is intriguing, fact and fiction get wildly confused, and it’s about con artists.

The melodrama and plot twists, as well as the style in which the story is told, feel like a very conscious reference to and play on tropes of Victorian literature itself – and the book is partially concerned with said literature, too. This bit is where I begin to get confused, and feel unsure of my response to the book; on the one hand, I certainly tore through it fast enough, but on the other, parts of it were on the repetitive and heavy-handed side, and to me, it didn’t always quite work. I always wanted to know what would happen next, but I did not always lose myself in the story, and I didn’t always entirely buy into what it was trying to do. Specific examples are more difficult as the plot twists are important to the story and I wouldn’t want to undermine that for anyone planning to give it a read.

I can’t recommend this book as highly as I would some of the others I’ve reviewed here, but I will say that if you’re interested in the sorts of things the novel deals with then you might want to give it a try; it didn’t all quite fall together for me, but I suspect that views are going to vary a lot on this one. And I’d certainly consider looking at other Sarah Waters novels myself on the strength of this one.

“I think you recognize cities better on the atlas than when you visit them in person,” the emperor says to Marco, snapping the volume shut.

And Polo answers, “Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.”

The copy of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities that I read says, inside the front cover, Set in a near-mythical past, pivoting inevitably on Venice, Invisible Cities is emphatically a book of our time, of your city. And that has a bit of truth to it. It’s about all cities, really, and I often felt as though it was about all times as well – or at least a great many. The book is a series of word-sketches of cities, framed within conversations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo about the state of the Khan’s empire and about cities in a more general sense. It’s about imagination, reality, perceptions. And, of course, Venice.

It’s completely captivating, at least to me; little snippets that are individually intriguing build on themes, fit together to make something even more interesting. I’m somewhat in love with the language and ideas here.

As with a great many good books I read I feel almost reluctant to say too much about it; I feel as though it’ll be better if you discover it for yourselves, although that does rather defeat the point of a review. Nonetheless.

If you’d like something thoughtful and intriguing and more than a little strange, try this one. By the time I’d finished reading, I’d bookmarked every third page or so, just because it had something on it that interested me so much. I had trouble picking quotes because I wanted to quote entire chapters for you.

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave.

“You can resume your flight whenever you like,” they said to me, “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.”

Things have been quiet around here, and I’m sorry for that. I’m reading a great deal (44 books this year, LibraryThing informs me, and I’m fairly obsessive about noting down everything I read there so it’s probably correct) — fiction and non-fiction, stories for children and for adults, books about social history and about individual lives, books on queer theory, comic books, picture books, poetry books, murder mysteries, science fiction…

Why haven’t I been posting about them? Maybe because April is a strange month, and by the time I’d got past that I was so far behind that thinking about catching up came with a vague sense of guilt. I know that’s silly. I’m good at silly.

I’m back because I read a book I just have to post about. More on that in another entry! And hopefully somewhat more regular updates to come in future. (I suspect Crystal, who was good enough to host this blog, will pull sad faces at me if I don’t get back on top of this one soon anyway. And then I’ll feel as though I’ve kicked a puppy.)

She preferred her military history with more temporal displacement. A century or two, say. She imagined some cool future scholar looking through a time-telescope at her, and gave him a mental rude gesture.

As with Young Miles, Cordelia’s Honour is a compilation volume, although in this case it contains only two books: Shards of Honour and Barrayar. The books in question are set before and around the time of Miles’s birth, respectively, and focus on his mother, Captain Cordelia Naismith, and the sequence of events which cause her to meet Miles’s father, Aral Vorkosigan. Given this, the basic outcome of the book shouldn’t be surprising, particularly if you pick them up in the same order as I did (i.e. publication order, not chronological order) — but the process of getting there is beyond convoluted, and a really good read.

The books play strongly on the contrast between the societies Cordelia and Aral come from (Beta Colony, where freedom of choice, equality and so on are emphasised, and Barrayar, a planet controlled by an emperor with a warrior caste as the main political players and discrimination of a whole variety of types is rife); the joy of Bujold’s writing is that it isn’t a clear-cut comparison between an idealised democracy and a deeply despotic empire. Both sides have problems, often big ones.

The characters themselves are delightful, too; from the glimpses of Cordelia and Aral I gained reading Young Miles I had every reason to expect that a story about their past would be fascinating, and I really wasn’t disappointed.

Of the two I find Barrayar to be by far the stronger book, although both are enjoyable; Cordelia very much comes into her own in the second book, against all odds, and that’s a joy to read. Any flaws I could pick up on — and there were a couple, but small enough and probably personal enough to me as a (slightly odd) reader to not be worth giving much coverage here — really didn’t undermine the strength of the stories and the characters.

I’d be inclined to recommend the Vorkosigan saga to anyone who likes political sci-fi, really. These books and the others I’ve read contain a mixture of action and politics which has done a good job of keeping me interested, and the setting is fascinating.

Reading order probably isn’t that important, either, although I would say that the compilation volumes Young Miles or Cordelia’s Honour are likely to be the best places to start. The books aren’t always the easiest to get hold of outside the US, but various online booksellers and some independent bookshops can often do the trick. They’ve worked so far for me!

She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.

Girl meets boy by Ali Smith is a retelling/reinterpretation of the Myth of Iphis, from Ovid. It’s a love story, between boys and girls, girls and girls, people and other people. It’s a political story. It’s a story about gender and identity and self. It’s a story with a lot of joy and affection and kindness to it, and it’s a story that sometimes defies categories and definitions. The proper word for me, Robin Goodman says, is me. Which is, really, one of those moments which to me feels precisely right. This book did that to me quite a bit.

True, it would have been nice if it was longer, with more about some of the characters. But if that’s the worst I can find to say then I’m sure someone is doing something very right.

They looked old in the photo, I could see that now. They looked like two old people. Their features were soft. He looked smooth, sweet-faced, almost girlish. She looked strong, clear-boned, like a smiling young man from some Second World War film had climbed inside an older skin. They looked wise. They looked like people who didn’t mind, who were wise to how little time was left.

Miles gestured the injured mercenary captain ahead of him into sickbay with a little jab of his nerve disrupter. The deadly weapon seemed unnaturally light and easy in his hand. Something that lethal should have more heft, like a broadsword. Wrong, for murder to be so potentially effortless–one ought to at least have to grunt for it.

Young Miles by Lois McMaster Bujold is a compilation volume, containing two novels and one novella of the Vorkosigan Saga: The Warrior’s Apprentice, The Mountains of Mourning, and The Vor Game. While the actual reading order of the series can be a bit confusing, the first of these was the first published and the others follow from that within the timeline of the series. There are books set previously, which I haven’t yet read, focusing on other characters and events. I started at this point almost by chance, but it seems to have been a good place. The saga is space-opera, full of interplanetary tension and all the rest.

The first and last of the stories in this volume, the full length novels, are full of wild adventure (misadventure?) across space, with the central character, the crippled Miles Vorkosigan, just barely keeping everything running as he invents wildly to try and make situations work, with varying success. The novella, The Mountains of Mourning, is a more subdued and thoughtful piece set on Miles’s home planet, dealing with social prejudices. It’s a short murder mystery, of sorts, focused entirely on the rural society of Barrayar.

There are a lot of things I’m fond of about these books. They balance humour and seriousness wonderfully, and many of the characters are fantastically sharp, well-drawn people who are honestly fascinating to read about. The adventures are really great fun, and the writing drags you along. (I finished reading The Vor Game in the small hours of this morning, due to an inability to put it down and go to sleep.) I think, really, I’m fairly thoroughly hooked; I’ll certainly be hunting down more of this series.

“Simon,” said Count Vorkosigan, “there’s no doubt ImpSec will have to go on watching Miles. For his sake, as well as mine.”

“And the Emperor’s,” put in Illyan dourly. “And Barrayar’s. And the innocent bystanders’.”

Gathering is peculiar, because you see nothing but what you’re looking for. If you’re picking raspberries, you see only what’s red, and if you’re looking for bones you see only the white. No matter where you go, the only thing you see is bones. Sometimes they are as thin as needles, extremely fine and delicate, and have to be handled with great care. Sometimes they are large, heavy thighbones, or a cage of ribs buried in the sand like the timbers of a shipwreck. Bones come in a thousand shapes and every one of them has its own structure.

Another of Tove Jansson’s books written for adults, The Summer Book is a gorgeously simple and captivating story about an old woman and her young grandchild spending summers together on an island off the coast of Finland. I find this story captivating, for many of the same reasons I was captivated by A Winter Book.

I’ve mentioned the story’s simplicity, which may need explanation. The language and description is wonderful and precise, with a sense that there are no wasted words, and it reads absolutely beautifully. The story itself is not complex, but it has a lot to say; about people and relationships and life and death and the sea. In relatively few words it paints absolutely vivid pictures of people, places, moments.

A book that I am really going to treasure, this.

Suddenly he burst out, “And now Backmansson is gone.”

“Where did he go?”

“He is no longer among us,” Verner explained angrily.

“Oh, you mean he’s dead,” said Grandmother. She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn’t have time.

I write in the year 1901.

My name, my real name, is Alfred Borden. The story of my life is the story of the secrets by which I have lived my life. They are described in this narrative for the first and last time; this is the only copy.

The Prestige deals with the rivalry of two stage magicians/illusionists, Rupert Angier and Alfred Borden, in the later years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries, and the enduring effect of that rivalry on their families through the generations. It was adapted into a film in 2006, which I saw at the time, so I didn’t come to the book entirely fresh. I enjoyed the film greatly, but I very much wonder what I would have made of the book had I read it without foreknowledge of elements of the story. The book, though, is substantially different to the film; even more so than I expected as far as half way through the book. There were a fair few surprises; events that unfolded differently, characters that I perceived in an entirely different light, and so on. I’m unable to avoid writing this partly as a comparison between book and film, rather than just as review of the book on its own merits; I’m sure plenty of more comprehensive reviews of just the book can be found all over the internet. Apologies, anyway.

The book is very strangely told, combining journals of the two main characters with stories and experiences of their great grandchildren. In the earlier parts of the book the important events feel as though they’re being recounted from a great distance, and I found it somewhat disconcerting — I’m still somewhat in two minds as to what I think about some parts of the narrative. On the other hand, once I got really absorbed in the book and realised the central mysteries weren’t actually the most important part of the story (unlike the film, where they are more the emphasis), I began to enjoy it a lot more and with far fewer qualifications. It’s something of a melodrama, but enjoyably so on the whole, and the combination of illusion and genuine weirdness is intriguing.

Worth reading, but I’m not as enamored with it as some, I suspect. I am, however, finding myself very much wanting to read more of Christopher Priest’s books — ones I know less about in advance!

A Small Theory

People observe the colours of a day only at its beginnings and ends, but to me it’s quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colours. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses. In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them.

The Book Thief is a book about a German girl called Liesel Meminger, set during the second world war, and it is narrated by Death.

This book has been much talked-about amongst my friends, and I’d been led to expect great things of it, but it actually took me two attempts to get through it, and I spent a lot more time over it than I typically do with books. This isn’t entirely the book’s fault, but I think that on first picking it up I did perhaps feel a little disappointed, as though it wasn’t living up to expectations. The use of German phrases in the text disconcerted me (although they are explained and not just sitting there untranslated), and the story didn’t have enough instant draw to pull me in and make me unable to put it down. I planned to finish it eventually because it seemed interesting, but I wasn’t massively enthusiastic.

Allow me to exercise my right to completely change my mind. This book is, once it warms up, actually pretty fantastic, and definitely rewarded the effort I put into getting through the beginning. As you may have surmised from my initial sentence about the subject matter of the book, it’s not a happy story. It’s a long way from being unremittingly depressing, though, and in many ways I found it uplifting. It’s humorous and engaging. It’s (to borrow a word from a friend yet again) unsentimental, too, and deals with terrible things in a very matter-of-fact manner which feels fair and honest, and I respect that a great deal.

It’s also just (just?) a Very Good Story, with some wonderfully human characters.

At some point I believe I may have cried.

They say that war is death’s best friend, but I must offer you a different point of view on that one. To me, war is like a new boss who expects the impossible. He stands over your shoulder rpeating one thing, incessantly. ‘Get it done, get it done.’ So you work harder. You get the job done. The boss, however, does not thank you. He asks for more.

Any sheets of paper she’d already written on lay hidden against the surface of the table, because if words lie face down there’s a chance they might change during the night; you may suddenly come to see them with a new eye, perhaps with a rapid flash of insight. It is conceivable.

A Winter Book is a collection of short stories by Tove Jansson, divided into three parts — snow, flotsam and jetsam, travelling light. The first part is a childhood in and around an artist’s studio; the second is a childhood on an island; the third is adult, but no less evocative or touching. It’s described as a book of “short stories for adults” — presumably to differentiate it from the Moomin books for which Tove Jansson is far better known — but really, it’s a book of short stories for anyone, I think.

Many of the stories are more than a little autobiographical, and reading the book I got the very strong sense of seeing the world through the author’s eyes, getting to know her a little at a time. These are sketches of life, often very simple but also captivating. There is a lot about island life, about childhood, about growing older and letting things go.

I’m a coastline girl. I lived until I was eighteen within half a mile of the shore, and the significance of the sea in this book really caught me, probably all the more so because of that. I’ll borrow a few of Val’s words on that subject, and I hope she will (yet again) forgive me: She lived much of her life in the archipelago and later on a small island in Finland. It shows. The sea is not only an inspiration. It’s there in almost everything she wrote and it seems almost like a character in its own right.

And a wonderful character too.

This is a beautiful book.

You can close your mind to things if something is important enough. It works very well. You make yourself very small, shut your eyes tight and say a big word over and over again until you’re safe.