There's just something about faeries and Elizabethan England that mix, isn't there? It seems like I can't turn around without tripping over a book that involves the two. And that's not necessarily a bad thing; I like faeries, and I like Elizabethan England. But as with most trends, it can become hard to find writers who are using the material in inventive ways. Fortunately, that's just what Seanan McGuire does with "Rat-Catcher". There are beings of faerie, but they are also cats. As one of them--a rebellious prince who tries to stay out of court politics--learns of an impending disaster that will burn London, magical and mundane alike, he struggles with his split loyalties. I wish I could be unconditionally enthusiastic about this novelette, but in spite of its fun premise and adequate execution, it didn't quite leave much of an impression on me.

Rand doesn't have much love for the goings-on in his father's court. He much prefers to spend his time in cat form, watching plays and hanging out with the actors. As an immortal, he is fascinated by mortality and the depth and passion associated with it. McGuire draws a contrast between the short-lived but brightly burning humans Rand observes and the dull, stagnant court that he attends as he tries to warn his father-the-king of their doom. The promise of eternal life makes each day seem less special, less important.

McGuire also touches on self-fulfilling prophecies, with Rand wondering whether London would have burned at all if they hadn't acted in response to this prophecy. This isn't something she explores in much detail, though.

And that's about all that I remember. "Rat-Catcher" isn't bad. In fact, I don't mind saying it's very good. It's a neat little story about a faerie-cat and his problems, with a good historical backdrop and some nice dialogue. Yet it is also an ephemeral experience; unlike some fiction, it has not left much in the way of a mindworm. I can tell how impressive a book is by how long it takes me to stop thinking about it after I finish reading it. "Rat-Catcher" does not take long to read and doesn't stick around for much longer thereafter.

As with most of the Hugo novelettes this year, I'd happily recommend this but am not all that impressed by it.

I’ve reviewed the two novels that comprise this omnibus separately:

God Stalk

Dark of the Moon

I read God Stalk and Dark of the Moon as part of the omnibus The Godstalker Chronicles. However, I’m reviewing them separately because they are separate novels with standalone—but connected—arcs. They work well as an omnibus edition, because the latter picks up almost immediately following on from the former. Whereas I had a great deal of difficulty with God Stalk, however, I found this one slightly more tolerable.

To be honest, about fifty pages into Dark of the Moon, I started flipping through the remainder of the book to try and get a sense of whether things got more interesting or—crucially—more intelligible. I was having the same problem I encountered in God Stalk: every few pages, suddenly I would find that I had no idea how whatever was happening had happened. Who was this random new character? Why was Jame suddenly halfway across Rathillien? Cue several minutes of backtracking while muttering under my breath.

Obviously, I was having trouble concentrating on the story. And this is after deciding that this book is actually easier to follow than God Stalk, although on the whole it’s probably more boring. Jame and her new Kendar companion Marc wander across Rathillien to meet up with the Kencyr Host and the Highlord, Torisen, who is probably Jame’s twin brother. Meanwhile, Hodgell also relates events happening with the Host from Torisen’s point of view. It’s politics, and it provides a very interesting glimpse into the culture of the Kencyr. Unfortunately, it drags in comparison to Jame’s portion of the narrative, which comes with some substantial action.

As with the first book, I can see why Dark of the Moon earns praise. Jame’s label of anti-hero is more obvious here than it is in the first book: her struggles with a darker side to her abilities are far more overt. And we get to see a lot more of the Kencyr and learn about their culture. With Tai-tastigon out of the way, the landscape returns to the safer footing of a stalk fantasy world. On the surface this might seem disappointing, but by playing in a familiar sandbox, Hodgell saves on the reader’s cognitive capacity, freeing up more to spend on things like Kencyr culture. I think part of my problem with God Stalk was that I spent so much energy attempting to grok Tai-tastigon that any notions about following the plot were fanciful at best.

And again, I don’t like having to express my dissatisfaction with this book, because I want to like it and praise it. Hodgell’s storytelling has a nice spark of originality to it. There is some interesting potential in the contrast between Jame’s character and the typical gender performance of a Highborn lady. But these two books have reminded me of the intense subjectiveness of the reading experience. It doesn’t matter how much I try to notice and mention objective features of merit—when it comes down to it, on a gut level, this book just didn’t click for me.

There is no way to rationalize it or explain it away. Dark of the Moon is marginally more tolerable than God Stalk but not a huge improvement. I don’t regret sticking out the entire book, but I’m not in a hurry to continue with the series. I suspect I’ll be setting myself up for more disappointment if I do.

I’m not saying I’m book-stalking Laini Taylor. I’m not not saying it either. My landlady happened to borrow Blackbringer (or Dreamdark: Blackbringer for those in favour of colon book titles) from the library while seeking the third instalment of the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy. This isn’t it, incidentally—it’s actually Taylor’s debut novel, but in many ways it’s even better. How can that be? Well, it has fairies. And djinn. And dragons.

Did I mention it has fairies?

In Blackbringer, eight Djinn wove the Tapestry of the world, including fairies. (Humans, apparently, are an anomaly no one saw coming.) Four thousand years ago, the Djinn withdrew into hibernation. Since then, the fairies have declined from once-great masters of magic and knowledge to smaller, more insular tribes. A lone fairy, Magpie Windwitch, has revived the practice of demon-hunting, and travels the world with a troupe of actor crows in search of demons to rebottle before they can cause mischief and destruction. The eponymous Blackbringer is the Big Bad, and as Magpie struggles to defeat it, she uncovers the truth behind her own identity and the answer to many of the mysteries surrounding the mythology of the world Taylor has created.

And oh, what a world it is. The setup, in which animals and supernatural creatures have anthropomorphic adventures while human civilization is a mere backdrop reminds me a lot of series like Kenneth Oppel’s Silverwing. But Taylor has taken all the tired tropes of fairies and tossed them away. She comes up with a truly fascinating creation story involving the fiery Djinn and an air elemental. And, as with all good cosmogonies, this one ends with the gods abandoning their children: no living fairy has spoken or seen a Djinn, and it’s up to Magpie to wake the Djinn King, the Magruwen, and convince him that this world is worth saving. Because isn’t that always the problem with God? He could save the world, but what if he doesn’t want to?

Magpie is a powerful protagonist. Though she’s technically the Chosen One, there is little in the way of prophecy about her. She has to use her wits and perseverance to weather the challenges that present themselves, including the fearsome Blackbringer, ornery Magruwen, and malicious Vesper. All the while, she builds relationships with other fairies, like Talon and Poppy, and cares for the crows that are her friends and family. Even as a blackness spreads over Dreamdark and threatens the fabric of existence itself, Taylor portrays a world rich with relationships and cultures. The fairies have warriors and artists, historians and healers, archaeologists and opportunists. But, as the legends that Magpie has collected hint, they used to be so much more. So magical.

Magic in Blackbringer is an important force and tied to the fabric of reality. Taylor’s Tapestry metaphor is joined by the idea of envisioning glyphs for various phenomena, such as floating or viewing memories. These glyphs work because of the way the Tapestry is woven. I like how Taylor presents the idea of such a system without going into overwhelming detail. The book is certainly couched in a tone and style that make it accessible to young adults, but the plot and characters make it enjoyable for readers of any age. I never felt too old for Blackbringer, and at the same time, I never felt like Taylor was simplifying things or condescending to younger readers.

The enemy is a fairly interesting one. Half the book consists merely of trying to classify and characterize the Blackbringer, to turn it from a nebulous foe of pure darkness into something that can be fought and (hopefully) defeated. Then there’s Vesper, an unrelated antagonist who crosses paths with Magpie. Theirs is the sort of enmity born from an antithesis of spirit: Vesper is self-centred and deceitful; Magpie is honourable and dedicated to truth. She can’t help but mess up the nice little con Vesper has going in Dreamdark, so Vesper tries to dispose of Magpie (twice). Against the larger problem of Blackbringer, Vesper’s machinations look fairly silly, and indeed, she is brushed away prior to the climax without much trouble at all. (I can only hope that her banishment leaves the potential for a return and a revenge plot one day.) Vesper’s inclusion seems more about establishing Magpie’s character and testing her mettle prior to the final confrontation with Blackbringer than it is about posing a serious threat.

The ending of the book is somewhat rushed and underdeveloped given the meticulous plotting that precedes it. The resolution appears somewhat as a fait accompli once Magpie brings all the appropriate, hard-earned ingredients together. But this doesn’t ruin my enjoyment of the book as a whole, because it is just so fun to allow Taylor to show us this wonderful world that she has created and watch Magpie’s awakening as a hero, leader, and inspiration. Blackbringer is the ideal combination of daring adventure and thoughtful character study. It has a sequel, and apparently Taylor hopes to return to this world for another book at some point, and I really hope she does. Because the Dreamdark series is Fairies Done Right, and all I can say is that I want more, more, more.

Lee Collins has gone and done it, people. He has made me a fan of a Western-based series. I never thought I would see the day. But if I liked The Dead of Winter, then I guess I loved She Returns from War. This sequel is everything I wanted and nothing like what I expected; Collins manages to satisfy my appetite while simultaneously surprise and delight.

Whereas The Dead of Winter is a straightforward story about hunting monsters in the Wild West, She Returns from War is a subtler narrative of vengeance and power. Collins turns Cora Oglesby into a kind of sidekick and mentor figure to a new protagonist, Victoria Dawes. When the novel opened with Victoria and the accident in which her parents perish, I was a little confused and wondered when we would be returning to the United States and Cora. Gradually I warmed to the idea of Victoria as a hunter-in-training. She is in for a rude awakening on the frontier, of course, and Collins milks the fish-out-of-water subplot for all he can.

As a main character, Cora was one of the principal attractions of The Dead of Winter. She embodies what one often desires from strong female protagonists: she is smart, sensible, capable. She has emotions, a relationship that has a great deal of influence on her motivations, but she isn’t defined only by her relationship to male characters. She drinks and shoots and swears and is, in all these ways and more, most unladylike considering the performance of gender in her era. Collins replicates this Cora, as seen from an external perspective, in this book. To this mix he adds Victoria. She is a more conventional sort of lady, at least at first, though even from the beginning she demonstrates that she is far from a shallow flower. As the story unfolds, she shows off a core of tempered steel that allows her to adapt to the rougher ways of surviving on the frontier. She learns to drink and shoot (not so much the swearing).

Victoria goes in search for Cora because she needs someone to help her track down the Black Dog that caused the death of her parents. She hears that Cora will help her when others wouldn’t because of her gender. Cora has retired since the events of the first book, set up that "printing shop" she and Ben had always talked about, and now lives in luxurious decadence—such as one gets in the Wild West. She has no regrets about refusing the Call when it shows up in the form of Victoria—until Victoria is kidnapped by a Navajo witch and her vampire toyboy, who is claiming to be the Big Bad from book one. At first it seems like Cora’s demand that Victoria lead her to their hideout and help her take them down is just a sideshow prior to their return to England. Soon, though, it becomes apparent that this story is the plot of the novel.

As a I mentioned above, this book has more complex and personal themes for Victoria, Cora, and the antagonist Anaba than did the first one. Yet structurally it is much simpler, and I suspect that is one reason why I enjoyed it more. The Dead of Winter was packed full of vampires, werewolves, and wendigos. It had twists and turns aplenty. While this never became too much, it was a veritable feast compared to the light repast of She Returns from War. Sometimes, less is more. As Victoria and Cora play cat-and-mouse with Anaba in the desert, Collins has plenty of opportunities to explore the way in which losing the people closest to us alters our desires. All three of these women have lost loved ones, and all three are now using the powers that they have in order to demand a price from the world: Victoria wants revenge against the Black Dog; Cora uses her expertise and grit to retire and open a bar; Anaba’s inherited magic allows her to target white people, the group she views as responsible for her family’s destruction.

The title is quite apt. This is a story of women not recovering but reacting to experiences of profound loss in an active, empowering way. Collins sidesteps a lot of the more pedestrian hunter tropes—are all monsters truly monstrous and whatnot—to get at the more basic truth that the life of a supernatural hunter is dangerous and that people often die. Nothing demonstrates this with more finality than Cora’s own death, which is the twist analogous to the big reveal at the climax of The Dead of Winter. I admit that until the very end I was sure Cora would find a way to cheat death; Collins cruelly prolongs such faith for a few more pages by allowing her one last gasp before the end.

Just as shifting the principal perspective from Cora to Victoria was bound to upset some readers, I’m sure killing off Cora has met with frowns and consternation from many. It’s a gutsy move, killing off your protagonist, especially when the series is nominally in her name and she is such a unique, recognizable character. How to carry on? Well, Victoria’s journey is far from over: she still has to return to England and track down this Black Dog thing. I, for one, would like to read that adventure.

Don’t be fooled into thinking I dismiss Cora’s death lightly just because I remain sanguine about the future of the series. I’m not sure, were I in Collins’ place, that I would have done the same thing. It would have been nice to know Cora longer than the two books we’ve had with her. Then again, that’s the wonderful thing about literature: there is nothing to stop Collins from writing more stories set earlier in Cora’s career, perhaps when she and Ben were together and truly hunting as a couple. Unlike television, there is no need to worry about actors ageing or moving on to bigger, better roles. The potential for more Cora stories will always be there. Until then, Victoria has also emerged as an interesting character in her own right with a story of her own to explore and enjoy.

The Dead of Winter was a nice surprise that invited me to reconsider some of my habitual snobbery against the Western genre (albeit a Western genre with heavy fantasy elements). She Returns from War is nothing short of thunderous confirmation that Collins is a superbly skilled writer capable of executing clear, original ideas and characters. I’m really enamoured of this series now. Seldom have I been so pleased to be proved wrong about an opinion of a certain type of book or story—it just goes to show how important it is to read widely and read with an open mind.

My reviews of the Cora Oglesby series:
← The Dead of Winter

I had no idea what to expect from Tigerman. All I knew is that Nick Harkaway has a new book out, and so I wanted to read it. At first it seemed like this was a pleasant, slightly uneven postcolonial story of an old soldier bonding with a boy on a doomed island. Gradually, I came to understand that there is much more happening beneath the surface. Tigerman lacks a lot of the flamboyant absurdity of Angelmaker, and it hews more closely to the recognizable tropes of literary realism. But the result is just as surreal and evocative as anything else Harkaway has written.

With a name like Tigerman, I kind of wondered if Lester would turn out to be some kind of superhero. And the boy’s obsession with comic books pointed in that direction. But this part of the narrative is slow to develop. The boy’s comic book and pop-culture-infused language serves merely to highlight and lampshade the absurdity of what’s happening on Mancreu.

If you’re looking for a book that exemplifies how pop culture and memes have become a part of colloquial English, then Tigerman is a good starting point. Lester, being of a different generation from the boy or myself, comes to Mancreu without much knowledge of memes or comic books. (He recognizes Star Wars references, of course, because he is the right age to have seen the original movies in theatres, and Star Wars is the juggernaut of all pop culture references.) The boy educates him, though, and about half of everything they say to each other is shaded with these allusions to a wider world. But remember that this is a world the boy has no direct experience with, and it’s a world that Lester has spent the better part of his life away from, ostensibly defending through his deployments to Afghanistan or Iraq.

So the first half of the book is mostly about Lester’s relationship with the boy, as well as his relationship with various other characters of interest on Mancreu. Similarly, language here plays an important role in signifying how to interpret these characters. The foul-mouthed, melodramatic ranting from Lester’s politican superiors like Africa gives me flashbacks to the politicians in the Johnny Worricker movies. It’s entirely believable, these interactions between Lester and others, regardless of whether they could actually happen.

This holds true for the setting too. The island itself is—and these are Harkaway’s words, not mine—a kind of Casablanca, condemned but execution stayed because further study is required. The situation is a mixture of contemporary political thriller and near-future science fiction: black sites and illegal organ transplant ships circling an island of strange, anomalous behaviour-altering clouds. Specifics behind Mancreu’s state aside, it’s easy to believe that such a political grey zone could exist in today’s world. Tigerman is realistic, but in a way that explores reality as it is presented by media. Whether or not black site interrogation facilities exist in the way Harkaway depicts here, thanks to media, they are certainly a part of our current cultural consciousness.

So, in one sense, Tigerman is Harkaway’s most realistic, most serious book yet. A great deal of it is grounded in the here and now. Yet on another level, there are great big incredible parts of this book that require leaps of faith. My own faith is rewarded when Tigerman eventually becomes reality, and as Lester grapples with the disorder and chaos that threatens to swallow the island’s beleaguered civilization, I finally came to grips with what this book is.

See, it dawned on me that Tigerman is a kind of adolescent comic book superhero fantasy from an adult’s perspective. Lester wants to adopt the boy and takes on the Tigerman identity as a way to impress him and bond with him. I don’t think Lester takes the idea of Tigerman very seriously at first. It isn’t until much later in the book that Lester demonstrates he has internalized the Tigerman identity. As he prepares to invade the Elaine and rescue Sandrine, he ponders how to accomplish this without killing anyone:

He was treating this as something for Tigerman, because he could only perform it as Tigerman, in Tigerman’s mask.… And Tigerman did not kill, or had not, and did not make his plans with killing in mind.

Lester the Sergeant is an army man, a soldier. A killer, if needs must. Tigerman is a hero in the comic book sense, and he does not kill. For him to kill would be to cross a line:

… that would end it all. Even in this pass, the boy would see the shift in him, in the fiction they had created together, from knight to dragon. He would shy away from a red-handed killer even in his gratitude….

Tigerman, then. It had to be Tigerman, doing things Tigerman’s way. A famous victory, the Sergeant sighed to himself, not an infamous one.

It bothered me, in the new Superman movie, when Superman killed Zod. Superman doesn’t kill. This is a core part of his character. It doesn’t matter how big and bad the Big Bad is. He. Does not. Kill. Not all superheroes are like this, but Tigerman—at least, the Tigerman created as a shared vision of Lester and this boy—follows that creed. He is a non-lethal but unstoppable force of myth and mystery.

Lester takes on the Tigerman identity reluctantly, but he soon grows into it. He has too long sat idle on Mancreu. He has orders not to act, not to interfere. Lester is an ideal soldier; he follows orders to the letter. Yet he has to act, because at his core he’s also a good person. Tigerman allows him to act without holding himself-as-Lester accountable for those actions. It is the type of deniability that dovetails perfectly with the realistic world of cloak-and-dagger diplomacy Harkaway portrays here.

Unfortunately, there has to be a twist that pulls the rug of justice out from beneath Tigerman/Lester’s feet. He eventually runs into a villain who is dangerously genre savvy (TVTropes) in a way that reveals the hollowness and futility (TVTropes) of attempting to be a comic book superhero in the “real world”. Thus Harkaway provides a potent reminder that not only is it difficult to vanquish the villain, but sometimes it’s difficult even to understand who the villain is. This theme recurs throughout the novel, as Lester grapples with the shadowy identities of those involved in the Fleet and their erstwhile nemesis/sometime-ally, Bad Jack.

In some respects, with Tigerman and to a lesser extent even his earlier novels, Harkaway reminds me of a softcore China Miéville. Mancreu is a mosaic of misfits, myth, and magic much in the way New Crobuzon is. The identities of Harkaway’s characters are fluid, always changing as the facts on the ground change, making for an interesting and dynamic story in which the protagonist is never sure he’s on solid ground.

Tigerman is not as overtly funny as Harkaway’s previous two novels. There are still the occasional sparks of laugh-out-loud dialogue, but by and large this novel maintains a more sombre tone. The ending, with Kaiko Inoue’s brief note and the airline ticket, is pitch-perfect in that respect and seems almost inevitable. Lester’s reaction is simultaneously an acknowledgement that nothing has changed (he is still “the Sergeant”) but that everything has changed (and he has to move on). Rather than seeing this shift in tone as unfortunate, however, I choose to see it as assurance of Harkaway’s versatility. I loved Angelmaker for the zany pastiche thrill ride that it was, but I also enjoyed Tigerman, just for slightly different reasons.

You don’t need to read Oryx and Crake prior to reading The Year of the Flood. The two novels take place concurrently (though this one does extend slightly beyond the other’s narrative, wrapping up the cliffhanger of Snowman discovering that other humans have survived). However, I would recommend you read them close together. I only read Oryx and Crake back in March, but even a short span of two months has obliterated a good deal of the plot and characters from my memory. That’s a shame, because one of the best things about The Year of the Flood is seeing minor characters from Oryx and Crake pop up in minor or even major capacities. Ren, who was Jimmy’s high school girlfriend, is a significant protagonist in this book; she spends several years of her childhood with Amanda, who later becomes Jimmy’s girlfriend during his adult years. Similarly, this book provides a different, less personal perspective on the apocalyptic events that Snowman recounts in the first novel.

As is typical in my reading of Atwood, my problems with this book started off as mostly stylistic. She’s a lovely storyteller; it’s just that her style of writing doesn’t always work for me. Hymns from her God’s Gardeners cult introduce each section. Within each chapter, her narrator can be sporadic in attention to detail. Ren’s chapters are in first person but Toby’s are in third person limited omniscient. I wasn’t a fan of how we kept jumping between the two characters. However, I gradually changed my mind as I continued. By the end, I had come to value the multiple perspectives that Atwood offers. In this respect, The Year of the Flood branches out and helps to mitigate the unreliability of Jimmy/Snowman’s story. We get to see what is happening to this part of the world through the eyes of people who are not all that associated with Crake, who don’t have first-hand involvement in kickstarting the apocalypse. As with the first book, this one takes place both before and after the apocalypse, with Ren and Toby remembering or recounting their lives that led up to the year of the flood.

Oryx and Crake was very much a polemic against the influence of corporations on our lives and society. This theme remains in The Year of the Flood, but Atwood shifts the emphasis from corporations to religion. Ren and Toby both belong to a fringe sect called God’s Gardeners. They practice veganism, eschew complicated technology, and try to venerate and work harmoniously with nature. In their rejection of consumerism, God’s Gardeners are everything the corporations want to avoid in a spiritual movement (though they are at least not violent in their prosletyzing). Both Ren and Toby have experience with life in the "Exfernal world", as they call it, Ren afterwards and Toby previously, which offer interesting contrast to their lives in God’s Gardeners. Through this group of people, Atwood examines the possibility of rejecting capitalist ideas and behaviours that have precipitated many of the crises humanity now faces.

Atwood portrays the Gardeners quite realistically for a semi-cult religion. They are neither paragons of nature lovers, nor are they monstrous, corrupt abusers of women and children. They are people. Some, like Toby and Lucerne and even Zeb, don’t even believe in the creed that Adam One and the other senior Gardeners create. Lucerne abandons the Gardeners (though, in an exhibition of decency, she stops short of actually betraying them to CorpSeCorps), taking Ren with her; Zeb eventually splinters away from the main movement. Atwood has a lot of positives to show when it comes to embracing nature and rejecting capitalism: the Gardeners seem healthier and calmer people. But ultimately, it’s clear that simply retooling one’s belief system is not enough. Religion or spirituality are not panaceas for all of humanity’s problems; individual people are complicated and will always have flaws and foibles and moments of weakness.

Nevertheless, the God’s Gardeners’ approach to reconciling science with the Biblical account of creation struck a chord for me. This is by no means a new objective for some religions. What makes it interesting in this case is Adam One’s motivations: he seeks to mend the amorality in science, which he attributes to atheism. This call for a more "socially conscious" science echoes some of Margaret Wertheim’s arguments in Pythagoras’ Trousers and is an idea that has been in the forefront of my mind for a while now. It’s so tempting to think of science as neutral, as a tool or process for explaining the natural world that is neither good nor bad. Yet if one examines that proposition, it soon becomes patently false. And what Atwood has created in these two books is a world where science has been co-opted by capitalist entities for the relentless pursuit of profit to the exclusion of all else.

So this is cautionary social science fiction at its best. It’s a warning, not against scientific progress itself, but progress unchecked and driven by avarice and blind ambition. What we need is science and progress driven by motives that are questioned, examined, and reframed in a socially conscious way. We need science not just for humanity but for the Earth as a whole—because if we don’t have that, then the Earth will quite happily swallow us and move on to the next great thing. Many people on both sides of the environmentalism and global warming debates are missing the point: environmentally responsible initiatives and policies are not, should not, cannot be about saving the environment. The environment is going to do just fine regardless of whether humanity is around. These initiatives are about saving humanity from the unfortunate consequences of our alterations to the environment. If we don’t change what we are doing, the climate will change, the environment will change. Some species, maybe humans included, will go extinct. The Earth will go on, but it will not be the Earth we know. And it is up to us, as a global society, the extent to which this change will impact the human species.

The transformative aspect of The Year of the Flood reminds me a lot of Octavia Butler. There are so many different transformations here. Prior to the Flood, Ren is a sex worker in a boutique operation called Scales. She uses the latest in technology to temporarily alter her appearance and make herself more enticing and arousing for the clientele. Related technology allows the God’s Gardeners to help people, including Toby, alter their appearance in radical ways—hair and skin colour change, even voices change—so that they can go underground and disappear. The Flood, of course, includes Crake’s lovely little plague that eliminates and sterilizes the bulk of the population, after which the survivors must contend with a plethora of gene-spliced new species who seem to have a deviousness and cunning heretofore unseen in the animal kingdom.

So despite my reservations about the style of the book, The Year of the Flood once again enthralls and impresses with its sincere exploration of a corporate-dominated, environmentally-barren future might hold. The characters are complex, flawed people whose choices help drive events in this brave new world. The stakes are as high as they can possibly be, and the result is a story that makes you think about the direction in which we are heading as a species, even as it entertains and enchants you.

Thrilled by the excellent recent adaptation by the BBC, I decided it was time to finally read The Three Musketeers. I have vague memories of borrowing a book with a yellow hardback cover from the library when I was much, much younger. But at that precocious age I found the nineteenth century language and over-the-top tropes of romance and revenge difficult to enjoy, and I don’t recall if I ever finished it. This time, I did a little research and discovered that Richard Pevear has a relatively new translation out, and that my UK library had a copy! Strangely, the title page promises that this edition is “Translated with an Introduction by Richard Pevear,” but there is no introduction to be found. Huh.

It seems almost silly to give much of a plot summary of The Three Musketeers. Everyone knows the story, right? Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are the eponymous black sheep within the musketeers: the ones who don’t play by the rules but nevertheless still hold to the ancient rites of honour. D’Artagnan is a young Gascon man eager to make his name by joining the musketeers, and he quickly befriends the Three and joins them on many adventures. Together they fight the machinations of Cardinal Richelieu and his minion, the irredeemable Milady de Winter.

Except, it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Alexandre Dumas’ story is one that has become so popular, been adapted so many times, that its original narrative has become snarled and twisted and confused in public consciousness. Having now read the book, I can see why: this is a massive novel that plods on and on in a series of interrelated episodic adventures that can be repetitive at times. It’s not difficult to understand why the various writers of adaptations have streamlined and simplified the story for television and movies. In so doing, they have associated the three (or four) musketeers with the ideas of heroism, courage, and bravery. Also, they have a chocolate bar named after them. How many literary characters can say that?

Most of the adaptations manage to portray the heroes with flaws as well as virtues: they capture the carousing, the drinking, the gambling—oh, and the irrepressible urge to duel. But they elide over some of the most memorable moments. For instance, the musketeers’ four respective manservants play crucial roles in the books, almost as important as the musketeers themselves—and, for the most part, the musketeers treat them like shit. Athos doesn’t let his speak, and Dumas goes out of his way to describe how d’Artagnan forbidding his servant to quit his service actually endears his servant to him more…. Meanwhile, a lot of the problems in the book are the result of the musketeers drinking and/or gambling too much. They tend to pick fights where none are necessary. Then they go running to hide behind Captain de Tréville’s skirts, using their special friendship with him to get out of trouble. When they need more money, they chat up bored wives for loans.

So the musketeers aren’t the shining heroes we have made them out to be in popular culture. They are, to Dumas’ credit, much greyer and more morally complex than that. The same can be said for Cardinal Richelieu and Milady. Although it’s easy to mistake this book for a florid romance set two centuries before it was written, it is a far richer story of how personal whims and ambitions and relationships affect the political tapestry of a continent like Europe. For his love of Queen Anne, Buckingham betrays his nation. D’Artagnan finds himself set against Richelieu not necessarily because they are so different but because Richelieu’s methods conflict with d’Artagnan’s sensibilities.

One thing that surprises me in the novel is the very fair treatment that Dumas gives Richelieu. He is not a one-dimensional, transparent villain. It’s clear that Richelieu is acting for what he believes is the good of France. This is a perilous time for the kingdom, which has remained staunchly Catholic in the face of rising Protestantism, and has managed to alienate even the other Catholic countries in Europe—namely, Spain. Richelieu is legitimately worried about alliances between these countries and invasion or rebellion, and his scheming is, ultimately, an attempt to make sure that France is prepared. Peter Capaldi captures a sliver of this side of the character in the BBC adaptation, but his Richelieu is also a more personally self-absorbed character.

I wonder if Dumas was secretly fascinated by seventeenth-century France, so much so that he ached to write a political thriller about the events therein, only he knew that it would sell better if he couched it in the contemporary ideas of the romance. By our standards he is incredibly sexist—women are, to Dumas, the fairer and weaker sex, and indeed, part of Milady’s villainy is her presumption to “rise above” the proper stations of motherhood and companionship as a woman and seek a man’s destiny in life. (He also has this weird obsession with women’s hands.) But for his time, Dumas might have been perceived as fairly liberal, for a male writer, in his depictions of women characters.

That’s not saying much, of course. It’s sufficient that Dumas’ women have more agency than fenceposts. There are basically three important female characters (I’m not counting Kitty): Anne, Constance Bonacieux, and Milady. Although Dumas’ portrayals of them are far from faultless, he nevertheless manages to capture the dangerous and difficult nature of being a woman in seventeenth century France. He shows the empty court life that Queen Anne must lead, the emotional gulf that separates her from her husband and leads her to seek love in an English ambassador. And, oh, did this book make me love Constance even more than I did in the BBC version. In the latter, she is merely d’Artagnan’s landlady rather than the queen’s seamstress. But this additional dimension in the original text makes her character much more interesting. She and Anne are both victims of the oppressive, patriarchal nature of the time. They lack the power to do much about their situations, and they ceaselessly exercise the little power they do have to make their lives better, only for men to swat them down again if it’s inconvenient.

But it’s in the portrayal of Milady de Winter that Dumas truly excels at a nuanced portrait of women’s struggles. As I note above, there are very problematic aspects to Milady’s use of her sexuality to get what she wants, and the ending of the book seems to say that Dumas is punishing her for having the gall to act, essentially, the same as the musketeers do. She is the Cardinal’s agent in the same way that the musketeers are the king’s/queen’s/whatever. In fact, it’s arguable that Milady has a more legitimate claim to being a loyal French agent than the musketeers. Richelieu sends her to assassinate Buckingham—who, let us not forget, is English—because it would prevent the launch of an invasion fleet. That kind of seems like a good thing to do if one is concerned for French sovereignty, no? But the musketeers rush to stop her, and then condemn her for engineering Buckingham’s death, despite the fact that he is clearly an enemy of state and she totally had the Cardinal’s permission. Who is the wrong now, hmm?

Indeed, there is a delightfully subversive edge to this, the major plot of The Three Musketeers. For a long time prior to achieving her goals, Milady is imprisoned in a castle in the English countryside. She laments the fact that, as a woman, she is unable to merely fight her way free and escape through physical feats. Instead she must resort, as always, to her beauty and wiles. And my interpretation of this is not that Dumas is painting Milady as a sociopathic viper but as an unfortunate, psychologically scarred woman who has to do a lot of unsavoury things in order to survive. She is aware of how her gender has affected her life, has made things harder, and she has been forced to hone whatever few weapons she could forge from her disadvantages. So even though there is something fairly unfortunate in how Dumas portrays Milady’s vituperative scheming against d’Artagnan and her consequent fate, I also think that she is a far more complex character than she might seem at first glance.

These layers, then, are what result in the wonderful and transcendent quality of The Three Musketeers. On one level it is a straightforward romance, a tale of swashbuckling heroes against scheming villains. It has swordfights and chase scenes and all the melodrama that anyone could want—and I love it for that reason, far more than I suspected I would. On another level, it depicts the difficult life of musketeers in seventeenth-century France. The four musketeers are complicated and flawed characters who make mistakes and essentially function as vigilantes. Dumas captures the tense political situation in Europe at the time. And onto that additional level, he overlays the ambitions and relationships of individuals—both men and women—depicting how these alter and affect the fates of nations. The Three Musketers is an adventure novel, yes, but it should never be dismissed merely as that. It is nothing short of an amazing and impressive work of literature that deserves its status as a classic.

Micah Grey runs away and joins the circus. It’s a common enough idea in literature. There is something magical about circuses, which function as heterotpias in which misfits and outcasts find a place where the rest of society can tolerate or ignore them as long as they offer entertainment value. What makes Pantomime different from the run-of-the-mill circus novel is its setting. Ellada is a country in a different world with a society relatively similar to mid-nineteenth-century England. Its power and political influence over colonies or former colonies wanes as the power in its Vestige weapons, remnants from the extinct Alder people, depletes. Real magic seems to have departed from Ellada along with the Alders, and only little scraps of marvellous Vestige, along with the mysterious Penglass domes, remind people that the fantastic used to exist.

That, and the circus, of course.

I had the good fortune to attend a pantomime during my time in England. Pantomime is an appropriate title for this book, and not just because the circus performers put on a panto at the end in which Micah nearly gives away his secret. The panto itself isn’t that important, though it certainly fits with the tone and texture of the story. No, the title works because of the overall narrative that Laura Lam has crafted and the way she presents it. Micah, who was once Gene, who is actually Iphigenia, is a complex tangle of identities and disguises that certainly don’t help sort out the issue of who Micah is. Like a pantomime, there are the obvious villains—Bil, the Shadow—and the more sympathetic antagonists—Micah’s parents—along with allies and fellow protagonists like Aenea and Drystan.

The only difference from an actual pantomime might be that this book doesn’t have a happy ending and a marriage. In fact, after teasing us with dramatic shifts in tone throughout the book, Lam has things take a decided turn for the worse during an emotional, devastating climax that leaves Micah as a fugitive in an unfamiliar city with only one of the other circus performers as a companion.

I really enjoyed Lam’s depiction of Ellada and the way she teases out the mysteries of Vestige and Penglass. She does a good job of sketching out the broad strokes of Elladan society without too much exposition. Elladan society—or at least, nobility—is highly gendered, which offers a useful juxtaposition for Micah as an intersex person. Micah’s parents’ betrayal and decision to surgically alter Micah is a painful but all-too-predictable response to Micah’s non-binary sexual nature.

But Micah’s experience in the circus belies its potential as a safe space. It’s just as rough and dangerous as the outside world, especially when managed by the abusive Bil. At times Lam is a little too circumspect—she telegraphs Micah’s intersexuality obviously enough but only tiptoes around the edges of Bil’s domestic abuse until, suddenly, it becomes a huge deal in the climax.

And about that climax, with its non-resolution and the cliffhanger ending. Pantomime resembles The Assassin’s Curse in this respect; it seems like it is one book split in two rather than a solid, standalone story. I don’t mind when the first book in a series leaves a hook for a continuing adventure, but not to offer any resolution at all leaves me wanting more closure.

This disappointment doesn’t negate the excitement I had while reading the rest of the book though. In addition to her interesting worldbuilding and good grasp of character, Lam knows how to pace her plot. I read this book during a school week, which sadly meant I had to work it in around things like, you know, real life. And I could tell how much I was enjoying the book by how much I itched to take out my tablet and read when I had other things to do. Micah and the circus sink their hooks into you and don’t let go.

Pantomime offers an interesting example of how the marketing decisions of a publisher play such a major role in the way a book is received. Ann Leckie’s debut Ancillary Justice has made huge waves and received a Hugo nomination, and the novel’s biggest talking point is how Leckie presents gender in it. In contrast, Pantomime’s inclusion of an intersex character and the struggle to find a place in a rigid class-based society are buried behind vague, bland cover copy that makes some people feeling like they are “spoiling” the book if they discuss this fairly essential feature without a thousand warnings and caveats beforehand. Now, Strange Chemistry is small potatoes compared to Orbit, and I’m not saying that Pantomime would ever have been playing at the same level as Ancillary Justice. But this novel arguably presents more interesting and nuanced issues of gender and sexuality than the other, and it’s a shame that it hasn’t been marketed in that way.

The adage is true: one can’t judge a book by its cover. There is nothing in Pantomime’s description or opening pages to suggest it is anything more than a bland romance about two people who find themselves joining a circus. But the story quickly blossoms into something much deeper and more enchanting, opening onto a wonderful new world of Lam’s creation. So far 2014 has been a good year for books for me, and the last few weeks in particular have been a good run. Pantomime is no exception: takes common tropes and ideas and blends them with an original, exciting world full of new characters to create a brilliant story.

I have often lamented our slavery to linear time. It is a peculiar form of universal injustice, this fact that we can never revisit moments once they become “the past”, that the present is continuously slipping through our hands and solidifying into something we cannot change, except through the careful or careless manipulations of memory and history. What would lives be like if we could experience every moment simultaneously? What if we were conscious of time not as a line but as a point, all possibilities raging furiously and brilliantly at once. Well, it would be overwhelming. And probably a little depressing.

Kurt Vonnegut’s depiction of the block time view of the universe, and its implications, is the most intriguing part of the famous and controversial Slaughterhouse-Five for me. Billy Pilgrim’s consciousness is drifting along different points in his personal worldline, effectively making it seem that he is mentally time travelling. This, along with his abduction and temporary imprisonment in a zoo by the Tralfamadorians, happens in such a way that no one could possibly prove Billy is travelling through time—ultimately, we are left to decide for ourselves whether Billy’s experiences are “real” or delusional.

Slaughterhouse-Five’s narrative structure works for me. Vonnegut’s prose is simple and so seductive yet extremely difficult, in a sense, because it is so satirical. It is all too easy for me to slip, skim, and start—“Wait, he said what?” Since Billy kept hopping to different points of his life, I did not have to spend any effort paying attention to when he was, only what was happening. Indeed, I think this book has given me a little more respect for novels that jump around in their internal chronology. Although I’m still not happy when novels that do not obviously involve time travel jump from present to past without so much as indicating it with a caption, I will try to be more sensitive to the artistic choice an author conveys with such shifts of reference.

Aside from throwing into question Billy’s very sanity, the major consequence of his time-travelling is a deeply-ingrained sense of fatalism. Billy knows how he is going to die; he has not merely seen his death but lived it. The Tralfamadorians are similar to Billy; they perceive the fourth dimension of time much as we perceive three dimensions of space, and so for them everyone is alive and dead at the same time—dead being slightly less interesting, of course. When they confess to Billy that they know how the universe ends—that they are, in fact, responsible—he asks them why they can’t work to prevent it. And they shrug and say they can’t because they know that’s how it will happen.

This is the betrayal of the non-linear existence, at least in this type of universe. Perceiving existence as a simultaneity of moments necessitates burying any hope of free will: we cannot change what we will do, because we are doing it and have always done it. And this type of fatalism is an invitation to nihilism, to a long, dark tea-time of the soul as one reflects that, if we have no ability to control our actions, then what kind of meaning can existence have? Hence the phrase that permeates this book: so it goes. For a non-linear narrative, those are awfully linear words, evoking an acceptance of the flow of events born out of awareness that those events are inevitable and unchanging.

Billy seems to handle his fatalism rather well, with the possible exception of going crazy. I suppose for a young soldier in World War II, knowing that one survives and goes on to become a successful optometrist could be very comforting. Similarly, while Billy is not particularly in love with the woman he marries, he does so because he has seen most of their marriage and decided it isn’t that bad. Billy is someone who settles, kind of a pushover. Another word might be equanimous. He accepts it all: his involvement in war, the bombing of Dresden, his marriage, his abduction, his death—what other choice does he have?

I suppose I am dancing around the central motif, war. I’m avoiding talking about it because I’m not sure what to say. Slaughterhouse-Five is a work that is both timeless and of its time: when it first came on the scene in 1969, it greeted a generation that was in the middle of the Vietnam War and a generation that had experienced the Second World War. Vonnegut addresses these generations explicitly, going so far as to make this book metafictional by writing himself as a character into the novel and including an introductory chapter explaining the genesis of this work.

This first chapter contains an extremely sensible declaration. Writing about his novel, the author says, “It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” This is the truth that literature returns to us. It reverses the damage done by statistics. When we say thousands and millions dead, we are being accurate and truthful—but we also have trouble feeling those deaths. My generation’s experience with war is going to be very different from those of my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Trench warfare has been superseded by guerrilla warfare, which in turn is being replaced by the warfare of robots, drones, and cyberspace. Our wars are becoming more abstract, and with that abstraction we are at risk of losing sight of the principal product of warfare: dead human bodies.

Slaughterhouse-Five and books like it rescue us from such a grim fate. They take an event so unimaginably unintelligible, like the Dresden bombing, and find a way to reconnect it to our human experiences. Different authors pursue this in different ways. Some opt for visceral descriptions of what it was like to be there; others choose to pursue the fallout of witnessing such a massacre as veterans attempt to move on with their lives. Vonnegut uses his sharp wit to pull back the curtain and wonder at the meaning of it all. It’s interesting to note that despite their different perspective on time, the Tralfamadorians do not have an eternally peaceful society:

“But you do have a peaceful planet here.’

“Today we do. On other days we have wars as horrible as everything you’ve ever seen or read about. There isn’t anything we can do about them, so we simply don’t look at them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments….”

I feel like Vonnegut is speaking directly to the future here. This is a declamation of our tendency toward apathy through wilful ignorance. Substitute “on other days” for “in other parts of the world”, and you have a description of our planet today. There isn’t anything we, as individuals, can do about the wars happening elsewhere—so most of the time, we simply don’t look at them. We ignore them. We look at pleasant moments: videos of cats, funny webcomics, and images of cats with hilarious captions. Because, ultimately, we don’t know how to deal, and we know we don’t know how to deal, so we avoid trying to deal with it at all.

So that’s the timeless aspect of Slaughterhouse-Five. I imagine it’s not the same effect it had in 1969, but this book talks about war in a way that will remain relevant until war itself becomes obsolete (and will that ever happen?). It is a large, literary shrug in the direction of those who go on about war being an inevitable, necessary action in the name of peace.