January and February 2023 Books
While January and February are by far my least favourite months of the year – those long winter days post-Christmas dragging their feet on the long slog to spring – they do often happen to be great reading months for me. And these last couple of months have been no exception. I felt compelled to tier-rank the books this time, but all of them were worthy and valuable to me in some respect. This period was marked, though, by a particularly wonderful foray into a couple of fantasy worlds, which is just the sort of thing you need when the world outside is grey and dull.
The Best
The Scar by China Miéville
I think this is probably one of the best fantasy books I’ve ever read. The follow-up to Perdido Street Station, this book follows Bellis Coldwine, a woman on the run from her beloved home city New Crobuzon. She boards a ship to a faraway colony, only to find her journey commandeered by forces far beyond her control. I didn’t know much about this book going into it beyond the fact that there were going to be pirates, and I enjoyed the revelations and plot twists throughout, so I won’t go into much more detail.
Miéville brings together everything I love about fantasy here. He is relentlessly imaginative and unusual in his creations, and his writing conjures up the places he’s created like no other author I’ve come across. He also always brings the big ideas when it comes to the powers that shape his plot, and the reveal here was the perfect foil to the concepts expressed in Perdido. Too often when you have these ingredients in a fantasy novel, you don’t also get a rollicking plot but here we have a really well paced novel and despite its length, the pages flew by. There are so many excellent, vividly drawn characters in these pages that I won’t long forget. For those that perhaps found Perdido’s style too bloated or the plot too slow, I think there is still a chance you might enjoy The Scar, which is more direct on both points. I wish Miéville had written twenty books set in this world. There is only one book next – The Iron Council – and a short story, so in the meantime I’ll have to savour what we do have.
Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb
As a person that finds it difficult to find fantasy that suits me, I wasn’t expecting another success in the same month, but my first venture into Robin Hobb’s work was also quite wonderful. Inspired by all the love she gets in our SBJ community, I had been keen to read her for a few months, and decided to start at the very top of her Realm of the Elderlings series with the Farseer trilogy. In this first novel, we follow Fitz, a bastard child training to be an assassin in a royal household while the tangles of court politics shift about him.
Whilst the world here feels like it’s on more familiar ground than Miéville’s, there are still some lovely imaginative touches that speak to a love of the natural world. Unlike other ‘epic fantasy’, Hobb’s focus here is mostly on the inner life of her protagonist, and her writing feels psychologically real and therefore vivid in its depiction of Fitz. Don’t get me wrong though, there is still a pacey plot here – at least by my standards – and plenty to get your teeth into. Her ability to write a realistic human being (take note Brandon Sanderson, who we will get to in a minute) means there is a real warmth to her work that reminds me of my beloved Le Guin. This is a woman who understands that human ties are some of the most important factors in our lives and knows how to write them well. Upon finishing this one, I immediately ordered the next two in the trilogy, even though I have more than enough books to keep me occupied on my shelves. I’m sure you will see more Hobb in my round-ups this year.
Pew by Catherine Lacey
When our SBJ community voted for this for February book club, I knew we were in for a treat. This was a re-read for me, and I looked forward to unpicking some of its mysteries with fellow readers. Our discussion was indeed one of my favourite book club discussions so far. The first time I read it was a few weeks before I gave birth, and so although I knew I liked it a lot, I was somewhat preoccupied (!) and wasn’t quite able to get into its stickier spots. This time around, it has easily become one of my all-time favourite books.
It's a strange little novel about a person of no discernible age, race or gender, who walks into a small town in the American South and unsurprisingly causes ripples of confusion, fear, and curiosity amongst the residents. The first time I read this, I really felt the universality of what Lacey was trying to say; that we categorise too much, that we read too much into people’s appearances, that we should look instead to each other’s humanity more. But this time, I felt much more the specificity of its setting in the South, and Lacey’s familiarity with it. Born in Mississippi, I felt like this novel was also about her coming to terms with the place she grew up and using the character of Pew to reveal the inner workings of this world. Of course, undoubtedly, it can be read both ways, and these are just two of the layers at work here. Because the question of who Pew is probably deserves a dissertation of its own, and I loved working through some of the novel’s approaches to faith, to humanity, to trauma. I highly recommend reading the Le Guin story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ alongside it; Lacey quotes from it in the epigraph, and the two texts speak to each other in really interesting ways. I would venture to say it was Lacey’s starting point and inspiration for the novel as a whole. And any author that uses Le Guin like that gets my vote.
The Great
Fifth Business / The Manticore / World of Wonders i.e. The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies
I finished Fifth Business way back in the murky days of December, and the latter two books in this trilogy were my first reads of the year. So I am really having to cast my mind back for this review. The trilogy follows a selection of characters from a small town in Ontario in the early twentieth century. There were many elements of these novels that felt familiar to me, and yet they are also quite unique, so bear with me as I try to capture something of their essence. Although all three novels were bound up into one volume in my copy, they were each relatively distinct, so let’s take them one by one.
One of the first things to note, I think, is that Robertson Davies was very good friends with John Irving, and the opening of Fifth Business went on to inspire the opening of A Prayer for Owen Meany. In its opening pages, Dunstable Ramsay avoids a snowball thrown by his friend Boy Staunton. Instead, it hits pregnant Mrs Dempster, who then goes into premature labour. This small event becomes the catalyst for all the subsequent events across the three novels. For those who have read Owen Meany, this will certainly feel familiar. Like Irving, Davies also has a strong narrative voice and confident prose style, as well as a real sense of psychological realism to the writing. But Davies is a little more experimental across these three novels. In this one, narrated by Dunstable (later Dunstan), he tells us the majority of his life story. He goes to war, he comes home, he comes to terms with his Presbyterian upbringing, he teaches history at a local college, he continues his friendship with Boy Staunton and his interest in Paul Dempster, the child born too early. It is well-paced, it is interesting, and it is with him that we encounter one of the major themes of these books, which is the “mythical elements that seem […] to underlie our apparently ordinary lives”. Ramsay has a fascination with saints, and the way ordinary people can do extraordinary things. It is this theme that makes these books unique; whilst we never quite tip over into magical realism, we just touch upon it in such a way as to elucidate what Davies is trying to get at: that life is strange and unknowable, and that not everything about it can be analysed rationally. That individuals are sometimes more than just their human selves.
When I read that the second book was about a man undergoing a Jungian psychoanalysis, I cringed. Psychoanalysis and I are not a good match (though I’m willing to admit Jung is superior to Freud). But I was very pleasantly surprised by The Manticore, and it is this theme of mysticism that saves it. Through David (Boy Staunton’s son), we find out more about Ramsay and about Boy Staunton, adding another piece to the overall puzzle. Whilst it perhaps wouldn’t have the popular appeal of Fifth Business, which is a more whole and complete novel in and of itself, the ending to this one was quite striking, and I was looking forward even more to World of Wonders.
Unfortunately, this final novel was a bit of a disappointment, and it took me much longer to get through it. It follows Paul Dempster, who over the course of the previous two novels, we know has become a famous magician (yes, really!) called Magnus Eisengrim. Told from the point of view of Ramsay once again, we listen to Paul tell the story of his life. Part of the problem is that Paul is quite unlikeable, and part of it is the form in which the story comes out. It is told over a number of nights after dinner in the company of some filmmakers; a cinematographer, a famous director, a producer. Each of these people seems to present a different ‘take’ on storytelling, and their exchanges often felt clunky. Where the previous two novels felt so true to the telling, this felt like a real departure. And although Paul has the most outlandish life of all the characters, the narration felt matter of fact; the desire he feels to reveal the truth behind the magic, the carnival, the theatre, succeeds a little too well in taking the joy and weirdness out of the book.
So what to make of the trilogy as a whole? Overall, I found it very enjoyable. It certainly had its flaws but there were many remarkable elements in here that make me look forward to the other Davies trilogy I have on my shelves. It’s certainly worth trying Fifth Business if it appeals to you, as it works well as a standalone, too.
TW for World of Wonders: sexual abuse
O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker
We open with the image of sixteen-year-old Janet lying murdered beneath a stained-glass window in her draughty Scottish castle of a home. Though this novel is billed as a gothic tale, the book as I see it is a rather different thing. There are gothic elements, sure, but this is the story of Janet’s short life. She finds it difficult to connect with others, even the members of her own family, and struggles with her burgeoning womanhood. But she does feel deeply connected to the natural world, and some of the most beautiful parts of this novel lie in its nature writing, Barker’s ability to capture something of Scotland in its pages. The ending feels strange and abrupt, and you may see yourself in Janet or you may find her frustrating, but largely I found this to be a great little novel that made me yearn to return to Scotland and reminded me of how often our society fails its children, particularly girls. It didn’t hurt that we read this one together for January book club, and so I got the most out of it discussing it with friends.
Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula K. Le Guin
By the second story, I was worried about this collection. The first story was great and classic Le Guin; one flawed character redeems another. But the second felt off; a bit clunky and forced somehow. But as I sank into the third story, and then the fourth and final, I understood what Le Guin was doing here, and felt awed as always by her vision. These are stories that as a totality capture the difficulties and realities of life on two planets, Yeowe and Werel, the former having been colonised and ruled by the other. The enslaved peoples of Yeowe have recently thrown off the yoke of the Werelians and are in a state of flux, facing their own problems of how to newly organise themselves and counter the misogyny entrenched in their culture. Werel, too, must come to terms with the loss of Yeowe, and the masters’ power over the enslaved people of their own planet seems to be on the brink of unravelling. By providing us with many different perspectives over the course of the four stories, Le Guin paints such a comprehensive picture of the devastation of colonialism, the difficulties of depicting societies in black and white terms, and the sheer bravery of the revolutionaries that overturn seemingly insuperable regimes. The stories harmonise together beautifully and explore so many interesting themes alongside those outlined above. Couched as always in Le Guin’s deceptively simple style that simultaneously brings about some of the most beautiful and perceptive sentences you’ve ever read. A real joy, despite its clunkier moments.
[This one is out of print but is available secondhand]
The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
I wrote eight pages of notes on this 250 page novel, which is usually a good sign that I liked it (for reference, I wrote one page on The Way of Kings, which is 1000 pages long). This was one of the books I read as part of my ‘vague dystopia’ project I took on in February; I wanted to read it alongside The Wall and I Who Have Never Known Men, as the three had been talked about and compared to one another in our Discord server. The latter two definitely share more thematically (particularly as both are written by women), but I found this one to be the more masterful of the three.
In it, soldier Giovanni Drogo is posted to half-forgotten Fort Bastiani a few days walk from his home city. Life at the fort seems essentially pointless; there is no enemy to guard from, nor has there ever been. The officers there seem in a state of stasis. And yet many of them feel this inexplicable pull to the place, and though he determines to leave after a few months service there, an enchantment drops over Drogo, too. He ends up spending decades in this nothing place, going through the same motions day after day. One of the best things about this book, and one of the reasons why I have so many pages of notes on it, is trying to work out what it all means. Is it about how/why people get themselves into monotonous, boring lives (as the introduction states, the inspiration for this book came from Buzzati's own boring job working the night shift at a newspaper)? How humans tend to live in the future, always feeling like there is more time ahead when something might happen, but never doing anything to actually bring that about? Are the soldiers protecting the world of meaning from the world of nothingness, and by being on that border find themselves in some sort of meaning hinterland? Is it about the concept of borders and national boundaries more generally? Is it about how we perceive time, what makes it speed up or slow down, how the promise of the future always creeps into what we are doing in the present? Is it more specifically about soldiers and the heroic fantasy they weave about themselves when the reality is very mundane? It is easy to make interpretations based on any of these ideas, which is what makes this novel so clever.
The style is dreamy, detached, and relatively simple. It is easy to skim this book and think… what was that all about? But when you get into the minutiae of the sentences, the above interpretations begin to unfold around you. Based on this, though, this novel won’t be for everyone. But if you enjoy trying to untangle a puzzle-like book, and you don’t mind the fact that maybe there just aren’t any definite answers, it may just be for you.
Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter
This is a wonderful and touching little novella about a family of a father and two boys who are dealing with the grief of losing their wife and mother. They are visited by the figure of the Crow, described in the blurb as ‘antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter’. Crow plans to stay ‘until [they] don’t need me any more’, and begins to guide this family through their grief. It is delivered in short excerpts from the points of view of the different characters (I loved that ‘The Boys’ were a collective voice) and is lyrical and strange; sometimes reading more as poetry than prose. Porter manages to capture something of the experience of grief in this unconventional style, including its absurdity. It’s one of those that would bear many re-reads to flesh out all that Porter is doing here. Of course, being short, it does go by in a flash and perhaps will not make a huge impression unless you do re-read it and dive into its stickier patches. It reminded me a lot of Lanny, and I’m keen to read Porter’s latest work, too, as he is a uniquely talented writer.
The Good
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
This was my first experience of Moshfegh, and though I was initially pleasantly surprised, I landed pretty much where I thought I would about her work based on many reviews I’ve read over the years. This novel is – unsurprisingly – about a woman named Eileen. She tells us the story of a pivotal moment in her life; stuck in a small New England town with her alcoholic father, working in a boys’ prison, she is deeply unhappy with her life and herself and longs to get out. I thought Moshfegh did a fantastic job of bringing Eileen’s distinctive voice to life. I loved the opening sections and felt immersed in Eileen’s world. But then it began to drag, and in the end this short novel took me far longer than it should have to read. There was something fundamentally missing for me. I understand that Moshfegh likes to present us with realistic, unlikeable women, and I don’t have a problem with that. But that can’t be the main focus; that isn’t interesting enough in and of itself. It was missing some greater theme or narrative arc, and there was no light here. Usually a little bit of lightness, of human connection, can deepen the darker parts and make them more impactful. It felt a little one note. But the prose itself was very accomplished. I have My Year of Rest and Relaxation on my shelf so I’ll be trying that this year and I am looking forward to it, but I feel like Moshfegh may not be for me.
Limberlost by Robbie Arnott
Like Eileen, there were things to like about this book, but it didn’t leave a very big impression on me. It’s about a teenage boy living in rural Tasmania, helping his father with the family orchard while his older brothers are away fighting in World War II. The prose, again, was very accomplished; the nature writing in particular was lovely and really put you in the protagonist’s world. As I moved deeper into the novel and it began to jump around in time, I felt it lost a bit of its narrative tension and in turn my interest was waning. In the end I concluded it was one of those novels that is more like a collection of vignettes, lyrically sketched for the reader, but I would have liked to see it more complete. Like so much contemporary fiction, I felt it would have been a better novel had Arnott worked on it for a bit longer; it had a half-baked feel. It tied up nicely in the end, bringing together some of the various plot points in a way that made narrative sense. I would definitely read more Arnott as I liked his style and I don’t read enough Australian fiction, but I won’t be thinking about this one for a long time to come.
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
So as I mentioned, I wanted to read this alongside The Tartar Steppe and The Wall and make a little comparison of the three. I did feel myself drawing a few small connections from this and The Wall with Pew, too. Pew is certainly different, but it definitely has a mystifying and cryptic element that feels familiar, alongside some examination of gender and societal roles. It’s very satisfying to find texts that talk to one another, and I’ll be looking for similar companion books I can read together.
Anyway, onto I Who Have Never Known Men. It is narrated by an unnamed character, who for her whole existence (at least that which she remembers), she has lived in a cage with thirty-nine other women. The women are not allowed to touch each other, prevent one another from receiving food, or even raise their voices at one another. With this novel, Harpman is asking what it might mean to be raised a woman in this world, where so much is stripped away. Naturally, our narrator is a little odd and the style is quite detached. There are some insightful observations made about what it means to be a woman in a world without men, particularly toward the beginning of the book.
But overall I wasn’t particularly invested in this one. It’s a little too detached for me, and while I don’t mind a vague book (obviously!), in this one it felt like the mysteries within it didn’t match up. Like Harpman had absolutely no sense in her own head what might have happened here, so that the various things the narrator encounters are not very cohesive. With The Tartar Steppe, you could feel that Buzzati had at least a few theories on the go. In general it felt like a thought experiment, and fell a little flat as a novel and reading experience. But still, some interesting points made, and even more worthy when compared with The Wall…
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
If I had to say which one I preferred, I think I would say this novel pips the Harpman. In terms of its exploration of womanhood, I think it helped that this narrator had actually been in the normal world before their isolation and that made for more interesting comparison between the before and after. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s start with the basics.
In this novel, our narrator is holidaying at her cousin’s hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains. When her companions head into town for the evening and never come back, she begins the lonely, unrelenting process of survival in this beautiful but difficult landscape. A transparent wall has mysteriously appeared, hemming her into this wilderness. Outside, it looks like the world has stopped entirely. She has a dog, some cats, and a cow she luckily stumbles upon. Much of the novel is taken up with her hard labour keeping them all alive (with some losses on the way). The nature writing is really the standout here, hence why my copy is printed as part of the Vintage Earth series. But as I say, the narrator makes some great observations about womanhood, and about the kind of life most humans carve out for themselves; disconnected from nature and from material reality. In the afterword to my edition, Claire-Louise Bennett makes the great point that the Wall allows Haushofer/us to imagine a woman living alone in the woods without us asking all the questions about why she might put herself there. So on the speculative fiction side, don’t expect any answers or even a particularly rigorous examination of the Wall or what it might mean. In this book it is merely a device for us to watch this woman’s transformation, and new connection to her environment. It is slow and quiet and didn’t have the emotional heft that I typically need to make a novel more impactful for me, but I appreciated it for what it was.
The Fine
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson [audio]
I listened to this book and while I thought it worked pretty well as an audiobook and I liked the narrators well enough, I went back and forth constantly with the book itself. I finished it, and it just about held my attention, so there were some redeeming qualities to it. But ultimately, it just wasn’t for me. Remember what I said about finding it difficult to get hold of fantasy that worked for me? This novel sort of sums up everything I don’t particularly connect with in one fell swoop. No doubt I’m about to get a bit ranty…
Firstly, the characters are not particularly psychologically real, which I definitely value in my novels. They need to have recognisably human elements for me. Giving them a background story alone does not add dimension. It is the ability of a good writer to create a vividly realised and well-rounded character. There were a lot of inconsistencies in the main characters’ actions and motives. I don’t think Sanderson is a particularly gifted writer just on the basics; the characters are two-dimensional, the prose is stilted and overly detailed. Look, I can love flowery and descriptive prose (hello, Perdido Street Station!), but here it doesn’t serve a purpose or further the themes of the novel, or even set the scene particularly well. As I joked with those on the buddy read for this one with me, how many rugs do I need the descriptions of? If you’re describing a rug to me, I need it to lend atmosphere – is this scene particularly cosy? Is it intimate? What does a rug mean to you? Here it was like Sanderson had closed his eyes and said, yes, there’s a rug in this room so now it must make its way into the text. This is a bit paint-by-numbers for me when it comes to the use of description. Instead of effective description, then, we just get absolutely shedloads of the stuff. To me, this is not good worldbuilding. It’s lazy worldbuilding.
Secondly, I don’t connect with war, I don’t connect with the idea of honour, I don’t think these things work just on their own. A pointless war is happening in this book. Everyone says it’s pointless. Why am I reading hundreds of pages from its frontlines? I can’t tell you how relieved I was when Robin Hobb’s Fitz says ‘I didn’t give a peg about weapons-training’, because neither do I. If you’re going to incorporate these things into the plotline, I need them to be fully interrogated. How does honour relate to masculinity? How does masculinity play out here? There was so much handwringing in this book about whether it is ever honourable to use violence and to kill others. This is such a black and white view of the issue. I want more complex discussion about the relationship between violence and power. Our main character here, Kaladin, is a real Mary Sue of a character (or Marty Stu or whatever male equivalent you want to use). You can add in a flaw or two, but if you have an honourable male protagonist that is really good at fighting and you want everyone to be on his side at all times… it is going to be difficult to get into those interesting grey areas.
It’s easy to forget this book was published in 2010 rather than the 90s. I think partly because it’s pretty derivative (sorry, Sanderson fans)! But also, because it isn’t pushing the envelope with its underlying ideas. To me, its ideas were really stuck a few decades ago. The depiction of slavery was quite painful, and *yawn* yet another fantasy book – where you can imagine anything you want – where women have this subjugated role and have to walk around literally one handed. I’m willing to believe this may have improved over the course of his career, but it certainly wasn’t very impressive here. I would say the ideas in Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice feel more modern than in this, despite it being sixteen years older!
But you know, it did teach me some things about myself. First of all, that I’m assuredly a snob and have been ruined by my years studying literature. I know so many love Sanderson’s work, and I wanted to love it too. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with liking books that are not particularly ‘good’ art. But I can’t enjoy a guilty pleasure read these days. I will pull everything apart. There is a part of me that loves getting my teeth into a book like this though to find all the things I don’t like, so it wasn’t a totally wasted effort. And whilst I was briefly taken in by the tension at the end of this one and wanted to know more, on reflection I don’t think I’ll be returning to Sanderson’s work in a hurry. Perhaps if I’m stuck for an audiobook again.
The Painful
In Search of Lost Time: The Prisoner and The Fugitive by Marcel Proust
I won’t dwell too long in the world of Proust, because if you ever make it as far as volumes five and six of In Search of Lost Time, you don’t need a review from me. If I had known what this journey would entail when I first began it in the spring of 2020, I’m not sure I would’ve embarked on it. No doubt we’ll cover this a bit more when I finally get round to reading the final volume. But suffice it to say that The Prisoner and The Fugitive were definitely some of my least favourite volumes if not my least favourite of the whole experience so far. They focus on the narrator’s relationship with Albertine, as he effectively imprisons her in his flat for much of this book. This is page upon page upon page of material on jealousy and romantic love. Worse, it is abundantly clear that Proust had absolutely no concept of what true romantic love or even just any love at all actually looked like, so self-absorbed he/his narrator was/is. But he presents all his observations as if they are universal truths. Not to mention the abundant misogyny and homophobia. Truly a horrible reading experience, but I’m so deep now that I can’t turn back. I must plough on, even if it’s for bragging rights only.
