Daemon's Return

La Belle Sauvage, Philip Pullman

It's been years since I read Pullman's spectacularly imaginative trilogy, His Dark Materials, but it's still as memorable as ever. With its parallel, if familiar, universes, clever reworking of dark matter, epic (humanist) good vs. (religious) evil narrative, and it's unforgettable daemons, it's not a work that ever quite leaves you. Like The Lord of the Rings, its first world-building volume is its best, and like TLofR, it builds to a satisfying climactic good-vs.-evil showdown. But with less songs, thankfully.

So, it was with some trepidation that I picked up the first volume of a planned successor trilogy. But I needn't have worried - Pullman is as sure-footed as ever, and pulls off a great read even where the main destination of the tale is already known.

Set in "Lyra's Oxford", the version of Oxford in the parallel universe that kicks off Pullman's original trilogy, it centres around the everyday life of Malcolm, son of a publican. Into his life comes baby Lyra, entrusted in mysterious circumstances to a local convent where Malcolm performs odd-jobs. Her arrival sparks interest from both the Magisterium, the ecclesiastical wrong-uns of Pullman's universe, as well as Lyra's somehow distant father, Lord Asriel. Skirmishes between these forces steadily spill into Malcolm's world, ultimately forcing him to rescue Lyra in the face of an epic flood, and sending him and Lyra on a strange journey among the other forces underlying the world.

This latter journey is the only weak spot in what's otherwise a greatly enjoyable tale, and then only because it's arguably a tad too fantastical when set against the rest of the book (which is, of course, saying something). In every other way, La Belle Sauvage satisfies - it fleshes out Lyra's Oxford, and the daily life and politics within it, more completely; it makes Pullman's daemons even more intriguing; it gives the reader some enjoyable tradecraft when Malcolm becomes something of a spy; and it slowly and gently transforms Malcolm's ambivalent relationship with Alice, a seemingly surly girl working at his parents' pub, as they are swept down river with Lyra and forced to become her guardians. Also, while it shares HDM's antipathy to organised religion, here it presents religious characters who are genuinely good, principally the nuns, alongside non-religious ones who are not, making for a more nuanced and less antagonistic relationship with faith.

So, all for the good. Although making the down-river drift of Malcolm's canoe, La Belle Sauvage, a little less jarringly otherworldly might have made it even better for this reader.

In passing, amusingly, and echoing a joke made in the book, my phone autocorrects "La Belle Sauvage" to "La Belle Sausage".

American Gods

As Carole's book group is (inexplicably) doing this novel tomorrow, I thought that (finally) I'd better get my thoughts down so that I can chip in in absentia.

American Gods by the British writer Neil Gaiman, is centred on Shadow, an ex-con released back into the world just as his waiting wife is killed in a car wreck. Bereft, he quickly finds himself bodyguard to a mysterious stranger, Mr. Wednesday, who involves Shadow in a series of cons as they journey across contemporary America. These travels include meetings with a succession of otherworldly characters that Wednesday is trying to persuade to join him, seemingly on a crusade. As events unfold, it becomes clear that Wednesday is actually a latter-day incarnation of the Norse god Odin, and that his various contacts are similarly disenfranchised old gods, at sea in a modern world where the new gods of television, the internet and the media have displaced them. Touching a raw nerve with these proud, supernatural has-beens, Wednesday intends to lead them into battle to restore some of the power and grip on humanity's imagination that they once enjoyed. But Wednesday's scheme is not quite what it seems, and there are other, deeper plots that even he is not aware of. Initially seeing himself as an outsider to this war, Shadow comes to realise that he has a pivotal role in deciding its outcome.

First the good. American Gods is easily one of the most imaginative novels I've read in quite some time (but see later, or here). Gaiman's central idea of old gods as isolated, largely powerless shadows of their former selves, cut adrift in modern America is simply brilliant. And he milks humanity's back-catalogue of dead religions, European and otherwise, to create a fantastic array of outlandish characters, all scraping precarious or anonymous livings in a society that no longer has any need for them. It's quite a feat making the reader, especially this reader, more than a little moved by the plight of once mighty gods kicked to the kerb by the materialism of the present-day and the gods that this has spawned. And the novel's main story arc is enjoyably twisty too, with a nice final act (or almost final act, see later) realisation of the gods, old and new, of what's really going on.

But, unfortunately, it's not all good. While I did enjoy the novel at the time, and am enjoying it even more in retrospect, it's frequently a bit of a chore to read. The downside of Gaiman's imagination is that he's not reined it in, and has stuffed the novel to the rafters with material that, while clever and fun to read, ultimately simply distracts. What's actually a relatively slight - but good! - plot becomes buried by just too much ancillary "stuff", to the point that I frequently lost track of why what was happening was happening. (And the novel's over-long coda involving a malevolent old god is definitely a stretch too far.) Even when a novel is full of imagination - perhaps especially then - it needs not to lose focus, lest the reader be overwhelmed. I did manage to claw my way back by the end, but I still needed to read Wikipedia's potted summary to get the whole thing straight in my head. Which is something of a shame for an otherwise masterpiece of imagination.

My other criticism is one that I've made before in another review of a fantasy novel, one that - I would argue - applies more widely to fantasy as a genre. Namely,

... that the underlying rules to which the novel is working are either flexible or completely absent. Characters die but can be brought back; inescapable situations suddenly have secret backdoors; mundane objects are revealed as powerful table-turners. Essentially, deus ex machina is the defining feature of the genre. After a certain point, the fun drains away when you realise that the corner into which the author has just painted his characters is probably something that can be (will be) got around with a few deft strokes of the pen. And, conversely, it can create situations where the reader might not unreasonably expect a reversal that never actually comes.

American Gods is no different in this regard. Which I don't really hold against it - since this comes with the genre - but it ultimately diminishes such novels for me. I simply can't engage with their characters in quite the same way as I would with a normal novel, where there are some things that you simply cannot come back from. Of course, my favourite genre - science fiction - also has more than its fair share of "gods from the machinery", but I'd argue that it tries to play a little more fairly within its own rules. True, gods do sometimes still appear, but SF novels - the good ones anyway - will retrospectively bend over backwards to explain where they came from. Fantasy novels are quite happy to flip Gandalf from Grey to White with nary a second glance.

So, in summary, a great - if completely sprawling - read. I'd more or less wholly recommend it, even for skeptics of the fantastical, but I'd encourage both paying close attention and making sure that one takes a good run at it. A solid 7 / 10.

Cephalopod fantasy

A bit of a gear-change this time. A not-uncommon refrain at Strange News is me railing against the ghettoisation of science fiction by the gods of mainstream fiction. Nonetheless, at the same time my default stance is to look hypocritically downwards over the broad fantasy genre that usually shares the bookshelves with SF. As Margaret Atwood recently discussed, where fantasy ends and science fiction begins is not entirely unambiguous (though the presence of dwarves/elves is usually a pretty definitive sign), so it's not as if I'm on solid ground in my prejudices. Anyhow, to step down from my soapbox and embrace (if only for one book) a personal bête noire, I turned to a UK author, China Miéville, and his recent apocalyptic novel Kraken.

(For full disclosure: this isn't as big a step/concession as I'm making out. The novel is centred around my favourite invertebrate group, and begins in the sumptuous setting of a former employer.)

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Billy Harrow, a curator at the Natural History Museum in London, is not having a good week. While conducting a public tour of the specimen collection he discovers that its prize entry, a 8.6 m Architeuthis that Billy himself curated, has completely vanished. Worse, a new "specimen" has appeared among the assembled preservation jars: a man folded neatly, if tightly, into a glass vessel. But Billy's troubles are only just beginning. The disappearance of one bottled animal, coupled with the appearance of another, attracts the attention of Baron and Collingwood, members of a specialist, and secretive, police unit that deals with less-than-natural occurrences. They reveal to Billy the existence of a Kraken cult that reveres the giant squid, a member of which, Dane Parnell, is also NHM staff. But Dane and his fellow worshippers aren't the only third parties interested in iconic giant molluscs, nor are they even remotely the most outlandish. Before long, Billy finds himself on a journey through a London that he barely recognises, where ancient spirits live in statues, where squirrels are unionised, and where the sea itself is a god.

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Wow. While it would be fair to say that this novel hasn't won me over to fantasy, I was pretty entertained, and regularly astonished, by the imagination on display. It starts like a completely conventional, if somewhat bizarre, mystery story with a missing cephalopod for its McGuffin, but after only a few pages the more fantastical elements begin to creep in. By the end of the novel, it's wall-to-wall deviation-from-reality. What was most impressive was how consistently Miéville ups the ante on with his outlandish occurrences. At first, his Kraken cult alone seemed pretty off-the-wall, but this was trumped time and time again, with the late appearance of the Sea as an active force as a particular high point in outlandishness.

My favourite of Miéville's creations was probably Wati, an Egyptian spirit who was originally confined to a statue on a pharoh's whim, but is now free to roam all statues, including, enjoyably strangely, a Captain Kirk action figure. What made him even more appealing was that this otherworldliness was then combined with a more mundane role as a union leader, initially drawn into the action because of a strikebreaking squirrel. I also really liked the disrespectful, and slightly sultry, telepathic police officer, Collingwood, whose feigned disinterest and sharp, text-speak insults really brightened things up. Though I did think that, after giving her a great entrance, Miéville didn't really use her anywhere near enough in the latter two thirds of the book.

There's a "But" in all this, however. One that applies to all of the fantasy that I can remember reading, including classics like LotR. Namely that the underlying rules to which the novel is working are either flexible or completely absent. Characters die but can be brought back; inescapable situations suddenly have secret backdoors; mundane objects are revealed as powerful table-turners. Essentially, deus ex machina is the defining feature of the genre. After a certain point, the fun drains away when you realise that the corner into which the author has just painted his characters is probably something that can be (will be) got around with a few deft strokes of the pen. And, conversely, it can create situations where the reader might not unreasonably expect a reversal that never actually comes.

Here, Miéville gets passed this - in a way - by being so imaginative in his "cheating". I never really got anything like that sinking feeling I had in LotR when the Dead Men of Dunharrow were plucked out of thin air to turn the final battle in The Return of the King. While science fiction has its fair share of deus ex machina, it usually tries to play more fairly within its own rules, and often bends over backwards to retrospectively explain any "gods" that appear to have popped out from beneath the sofa cushions. Which, I guess, is why I prefer it as a fantastical genre: the real world conforms to rules, so I expect it of my fiction too. The wholesale abandonment of this in fantasy is what irks me, at least in part because I suspect that it's just lazy writing. A skilful author might very well construct an emotionally resonant scene in which the reader fears for characters they've come to love, but it seems slapdash when that's resolved by a cheap sleight of hand.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that, while I have my reservations, I really enjoyed Kraken. I don't know that I'll be visiting Miéville's fantasies again any time soon, but it's difficult not to recommend any novel so consistently innovative in its creations, especially one in which a cephalopod plays such a pivotal role.