It has been ages since I read The Ghost Brigade and over a year since I read The Human Division, which chronologically takes place after the events in The Last Colony but doesn’t spoil a lot of it. I guess it’s a testament to my terrible memory (and the reason why I write these reviews) that I remembered almost nothing about either books when I started reading this one. I couldn’t really recall who the Obin were, or who Zoë Boutin or her father Charles were, or why any of this mattered. Rather than worry or fret about these gaps, I just sat back and let John Scalzi’s writing persuade me.

If I wanted to be lazy, I could say that this is typical Scalzi. And for those who haven’t read Scalzi before—and if you haven’t, you should start with Old Man’s War—that means it is full of humour, particularly sarcasm and irony, of an irreverent variety, punctuated by lulls of intense, brooding seriousness. Scalzi writes a kind of postmodern space opera—it’s not quite as absurd as Monty Python, but you have a feeling that they would be comfortable selling their records in the lobby at intermission.

This book is clearly set up as the concluding volume of a trilogy. John Perry and Jane Sagan, the protagonists of the previous two books, unite to take on all-comers in this book. It has a tone of finality to it that is only bolstered by the author’s note at the end, in which Scalzi bids adieu to John and Jane even while leaving the door open to continuing on in this universe, as he eventually does. This structure works well: Scalzi allows himself a lot of freedom with The Last Colony, because he doesn’t have to worry about putting all the toys back in the box. Mindful of the arc of his characters, however, he still strives to provide emotional closure on John and Jane and what they have been through these past three books.

As with the previous books, the antagonists of the series are both the Colonial Union and alien species. Though the Colonial Union is human and therefore ostensibly “the good guys,” from the perspective of the colonists on Roanoke, “the good guys” are not so good. Although a dark part of this universe, the idea that humanity achieving space travel results in a second age of colonialism and imperialism is an intriguing one. The CU essentially treats the galaxy like a big land grab—and it’s not the only species doing this. There isn’t room for a United Federation of Planets; even the Conclave, which appears to be striving towards such a goal, is really more of a loose alliance of self-interest.

It’s clear, though, that we should be cheering for Roanoke, for John and Jane. They are fighting the Man in all his forms, and they are doing it with the power of rock and roll. They call in favours—or sometimes, as in Jane’s case, favours are granted without their consent—and constantly adapt to the latest news and threats. This is not a long book, but a lot happens; the pace is breathless at some points, and just when it seems like Roanoke has a chance, Scalzi drops a new bomb—sometimes literally.

The writing, as I said, is typical Scalzi. And as such, it also has the typical Scalzi flaw, which I talked at length about in my review of The Human Division: all his characters sound the same. John, Jane, Zoë, Savitri, Gau … they are all snarky bastards who enjoy witty repartée. Scalzi is a dialogue machine; most of this book is probably fun conversation. Alas, the one-note-ness of it is noticeable and occasionally grating.

Similarly, Scalzi can’t resist what I call “the smug reversal.” It goes like this: big bad aliens show up to take the planet. They magnanimously demand surrender. The human who responds doesn’t just say no; they smugly offer the attackers a chance to surrender instead. The first time this happens, it’s charming and fun. The second time … well, it falls flat, because now I’m left wondering if it’s going to keep happening. The whole point of a crowning moment of awesome is that it is the crowning moment. If your characters are prepared and have a trick up their sleeve all the time, suddenly your story loses all sense of tension, because there’s no need to worry about how they’ll get out of their latest predicament.

Those are really my only quibbles with The Last Colony. Otherwise, it’s another fun science-fiction story that blends aspects of military SF and colonial SF. It operates under the hypothesis that we get to the stars … and we basically keep behaving like the collective dicks we tend to behave like here on planet Earth. Which isn’t all that much a leap, I guess. But it makes for some good stories.

My reviews of the Old Man’s War series:
← The Ghost Brigades | Zoe’s Tale (forthcoming)

I started re-reading the entire Temeraire series recently. I didn’t post a new review of His Majesty’s Dragon, because I felt my original review said everything that needed to be said. Throne of Jade, however, has been lingering on my to-reread shelf for years, a somewhat hyperbolic five stars attached to it, no explanation. So it’s only fair I give it a review it deserves. Yes, I’ve downgraded it to a satisfactory three stars. But that still means it’s good.

If you haven’t read His Majesty’s Dragon yet, then you have no business jumping into the series with the second book. It’s not that you will be lost so much as bored. Naomi Novik provides little in the way of backstory or exposition here, but any reader paying attention will quickly clue into the fact that his is an alternative history of the Napoleonic Wars with dragons. Whereas His Majesty’s Dragon features plenty of aerial battles and dragon-fights, Throne of Jade is more about the political fallout of William Laurence captaining a Chinese Celestial dragon for the British.

I chose to read this book now because I wanted a quick read. Sure enough, I flew through this in about a day. Even though it isn’t perfect, it is compelling. Novik ends her chapters abruptly, not always on cliffhangers but often enough in ways that make you want to keep reading, even when you know you should be going to bed, or doing something more … er … productive. That was true for the first book, and it is no less true for Throne of Jade, even though most of this book is spent on a tedious journey around Africa to China.

Novik remains committed to a certain level of realism. Despite dragons being a thing, there is no magically faster method of travelling to China. So Laurence and Temeraire set off via dragon transport, the least stylish way to travel. Rather than handwave an eight month journey, Novik chooses to examine the unique situation of our protagonists. This is one of the longest journeys undertaken by a transport, so there is considerable time for tension between the navy men and Laurence’s aviators (including the scandalously female Roland). Oh, and the presence of a Chinese delegation certainly doesn’t help anything.

So there are storms and sea serpents, dinners and parties, and Temerair shows that he knows how to swim. It’s alternatively charming and boring and hilarious. And then we finally get to China, and more politics and even some drama ensues.

Throne of Jade reminds me of How to Train Your Dragon. There are more dragons here than there is fighting. And, indeed, I’d definitely recommend this series to an older fan of the How to Train Your Dragon books or movies who wants some slightly older dragon-themed literature. Novik’s intelligent, talkative dragons are every bit as endearing as Toothless. Temeraire’s firebrand politics allow Novik to interrogate the problematic parts of eighteenth-century European culture.

Whereas the first book featured a lot class, family, and gender issues, the sequel focuses on racism and colonialism. Laurence is, naturally, a product of his times. He has adjusted to having women serve with him, but only because it is a necessity—as a proper gentleman, of course, he couldn’t possible condone it as being ordinary or fitting! Similarly, he sees himself as progressive in his support for abolition. Yet Temeraire challenges him on issues of slavery, drawing parallels between slavery and the service of dragons in Britain’s military. And, of course, there is the meeting of West and East, with each seeing the other as “barbaric” and uncivilized.

I love Temeraire. I love how he refuses to be placated when people threaten Laurence. I love his sheepishness when trying to explain his absence to Laurence while they are in China. Novik does a fine job making Temeraire both a person and, as a dragon, alien in some of his morals and points of view.

Throne of Jade is a worthy sequel to the first book. Ultimately, however, I suspect it will be the Feast of Crows of the Temeraire series: worthy on its own merits, but pales in comparison to some of the more dramatic instalments. But I definitely urge you to check out the series, starting with the first book, and read on from there.

My reviews of the Temeraire series:
← His Majesty’s Dragon | Throne of Jade →

Right, so you don’t have a soul, which means any supernatural creature you touch turns back into a mortal. Handy, but also it makes you a kind of threat to the supernatural community. Queen Victoria makes you muhjah, which is a fancy term for “I have a bureaucratic position as well as target painted on my back.” And you marry a werewolf member of the peerage. Who is Scottish. Then, suddenly, a phenomenon that replicates your preternatural mortality effect across supernaturals in a wide radius shows up in London before migrating north to Scotland. So, of course, you need to investigate, but somehow your snide half-sister and your ditzy fashion-challenged friend manage to inveigle their way into your dirigible party, where the three of you are joined at the last minute by a cross-dressing hat-making French inventor lady scientist who hates the guts out of your French maid.

This kind of thing happens to me all the time.

Alexia Tarabotti (or now Maccon) is a great protagonist, especially when juxtaposed with the romance-trope–heavy setting that Gail Carriger has created here. Though she shares many characteristics with the hapless romantic heroine, she also has a strong sense of agency and a desire for autonomy. We saw this to endearing effect in Soulless, which can be read as Alexia’s struggle to find independence in a society where women of her class have very little, and preternaturals even less so. Changeless is a case of “be careful what you wish for.” Alexia now has even more rank and power, is married to a man of rank and similar power—and who is a ruggedly handsome, sexy werewolf type to boot—and can essentially run her own life, more or less. But she spends most of the book playing catch-up, realizing that she still has a lot to learn about supernatural politics and her own nature as a preternatural.

Carriger does interesting work here, because while Soulless was an effective parody of romance (and even supernatural romance), that does not lend itself well to an ongoing series with the same protagonist. Alexia is married, has settled down, is no longer on the market and “lookin’ for love.” So while Carriger can occasionally invoke a romance novel trope here or there, she has to rely more heavily on the other aspect of her parody, which is Victorian society.

My review of Soulless touches on how Carriger portrays an alternative version of Victorian England, and I criticize her for not going as deep as I would have wanted. Changeless makes me rethink this position a little bit. It’s not so much that Carriger is parodying Victorian society itself—she’s parodying our present perception of Victorian society. A lot of what we think of as “Victorian” in terms of morals and attitudes towards sex, gender, etc., are actually tropes themselves—and like most tropes, many of them have a kernel of truth, but they have evolved and taken lives of their own. In such characters as Felicity, Ivy, Alexia’s mother, Lord Akeldama, et al., Carriger attains a hyperbolic state of satirizing our ideas about what was scandalous and what was permitted in Victorian society.

I’m still not convinced it works, mind you—but I have a little more respect for what Carriger is doing here.

Carriger’s portrayal of sexual desire and the romantic interactions between Alexia and Conall was also something I ended up re-evaluating part-way through the book. At first I was somewhat annoyed by the frequent interjection of scenes in which these two verge upon getting it on—intimations and innuendo, and a lot of talk about nudity, though no actual graphic depictions. It’s not that I mind such scenes, nor do I object to the way Carriger is unapologetically depicting Alexia as a person with a sex drive and desires beyond being a sex object. That’s all well and good. But the frequency and repetitive nature of the scenes seemed like a tiresome digression from the rest of the plot and more salient character development.

I do like it when books can change my mind, and it’s nice when my opinion of something a book does changes as I continue to read. In this case, I started to think about this portrayal of sexuality and nudity within the context of how Carriger is deconstructing romance novels. That’s when I realized that she’s really trying to reclaim women’s sexuality in literature when it is incredibly dominated and perverted by the commodified depiction of sexuality in the romance genre.

There is very little that is feminist about a romance novel. On the surface, sure, it seems to be about empowering women by letting them read about women doing naughty and titillating acts. And therein lies the problem: the enjoyment, here, comes from the transgressive nature of the reading. These acts are so titillating precisely because, in general, our society does not approve of the sexual empowerment of women. Growing up, women get told their bodies are scary and complicated and mysterious and will hurt them for the rest of their lives, but they better deal with it and not complain, because men don’t want to hear about it! “Sex positive” feminism is a thing and is growing louder, and that’s great. But generally our society is still incredibly sexually repressed. We are not much better than our conception of Victorian sexuality—and worse, we’ve papered over our problems with a veneer of “sexual liberation” that is more illusion than any tangible improvement.

So here’s where Carriger and Changeless differ: the nudity and sexuality here is not transgressive. It’s not strange within the context of Alexia’s world—it’s unusual for someone like Alexia to marry a werewolf, maybe, but if anything it has only improved her standing in society. True, this world maintains the kind of rigid gender roles and expectations for comportment we often associate with Victorian society—Ivy’s innocence with regards to kissing seems to be poking fun at this. But in her depiction of Alexia and Conall’s relationship, now that Alexia is a married woman, they sleep two to a bed and have plenty of sexy times. There’s none of this separate beds, women are frigid nonsense.

I don’t really have a complex grasp of the true nature of Victorian attitudes towards sexuality. And, unless you happen to be an expert in that period, neither, probably, do you—we just share a kind of cultural conception of the time period. In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter. Because I’m also pretty sure Victorian society didn’t really have werewolves or vampires living openly—but here, in Carriger’s alternative universe where telegraphs don’t work but aetherographic transmitters do, that happens to be a thing.

Carriger has hit upon the fundamental feminist truth of writing fantasy, which is that even when your setting is based on an actual historical time and place, you can change things for the better. If Carriger is injecting supernatural creatures into Victorian England, she sure as hell can also play around with performance of gender and sexual expression.

Now, as with my earlier comment about her satire of our ideas about Victorian times, whether all of this works is another matter entirely. Let’s just say that I love the characters and love this world Carriger has created, but the plot of Changeless is kind of a drag in comparison. The mystery is flaccid and dull; most of the tension seems contrived. This is particularly true when it comes to the finale, in which Carriger delivers a twist that sets up the next book rather neatly—but she requires Conall to behave, shall we say, far too hyperbolically for my tastes.

Changeless reaffirms my impression that the Parasol Protectorate series is a promising one with great ideas that don’t always live up in their execution. By my personal criteria, story always has to come first—but great ideas, while never quite making up for a lacklustre story, at least give me a lot to think about, and write about, and that’s always good. This is about on par with a lot of other ongoing, character-based fantasy series, where the individual books are not themselves all that remarkable, but the overall world and adventure becomes something altogether worthwhile.

My reviews of the Parasol Protectorate series:
← Soulless

I have to return this book to the library soon, because despite putting it on hold, it has another hold on it already. Already. This Chuck Palahniuk guy sure is popular. Yet I feel as if I should do my civic duty and put a sticky note inside this book that reads, “Don’t bother.” That’s pretty much my review of Damned, in two words.

Madison Spencer is a thirteen-year-old girl, the daughter of rich-but-eccentric parents who love her but are not close to her. She overdoses on marijuana on her thirteenth birthday, dies, and goes to Hell, which it turns out runs on candy and forces people to work, usually as telemarketers. (It is Hell, I guess, so that’s fair.)

Madison Spencer is really concerned with letting you know that she is well aware of who Judy Blume is and that she has a good vocabulary. That’s why she starts every chapter with a faux-naive address to the Prince of Lies himself: “Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison,” and why every time she uses a word that you might doubt a thirteen-year-old would know, she lampshades it by challenging you and reminding us of her bookish habits, because she feels alienated and angsty (unlike any other teen in the history of ever). When she isn’t sharing her thoughts on her own sexuality, she’s rubbing decaptitated heads into giant clitorises, telling living people that dying and going to Hell is a bucket o’ fun, and punching Hitler and ripping off his moustache as a trophy (because why not?).

Going to be honest: I kind of stopped paying attention after the punching Hitler part. But by that time I was too far in to quit, and I rather hoped that Palahniuk would somehow pull a redemptive ending out of his ass that would, if not make my time sunk into this worth it, at least give me something marginally positive to say in this review.

Alas.

Damned occurs entirely in the first-person voice of Maddy. And that’s where it falls flat for me: Chuck Palahniuk does not convince me that this is a thirteen-year-old girl, or at least, not any thirteen-year-old girl I want to sympathize with:

A crew of sinister Snarky Miss Snarky-pants girls at my old boarding school, the infamous three who taught me the French-kissing Game, they once professed toe ducate me about human reproduction. As they told it to me, the reason boys desire so desperately to kiss girls is because, with each kiss, the activity makes the boy’s wanger grow larger. The more girls a boy can kiss, the larger a wanger he’ll eventually possess, and the boys boasting the largest are awarded the best-paying, highest-status jobs. Really, it’s all very simple. All boys devote their lives to amassing the most elongated genitals, growing the nasty things so that when they eventually wedge them inside some unfortunate girl, the distant end of the enlarged wanger actually breaks off—yes, the wanger flesh becomes so hardened that it shatters—and the broken portion remains lodged within the girl’s hoo-hoo. This natural event is much like those lizards that live in arid deserts and can voluntarily detach their squirming tails. Any amount, from the pointed tip to almost the entire wiener, can literally snap off inside a girl, and she’s fully unable to remove it.

WTF, Chuck? The above language sounds like something I’d more likely find in Worst. Person. Ever.—and you wish you were as darkly hilarious as Coupland. Not only is that just crude, but it’s not even the type of crude that would actually slip out of a thirteen-year-old girl’s lips. Trust me, I asked a couple of people who were once thirteen-year-old girls. Did you?

It’s not even the “thirteen-year-old” or the “girl” parts that Palahniuk fails so badly at: Maddy just doesn’t seem like an actual person. She is a badly written character. And given the equally-bad twist at the end, maybe that’s intentional Palahniuk is just trying to be uber-meta and clever—but I’m just not charitable enough to cut him such a large length of slack. My slack is incredibly short supply these days, and I cannot dole it out to just anyone. You have to earn some of my slack, Chuck, and you don’t do that here.

Even if I cut you slack on Maddy—and I’m not—the rest of Damned is still a disaster. Let’s talk about Hell:

I explain the seemingly arbitrary rules of which people run afoul, how each living person is allowed to use the F-word a maximum of seven hundred times. Most living persons haven’t the slightest idea how easy it is to be damned, but should anyone say fuck for the 701st time, he or she is automatically doomed. Similar rules apply to personal hygiene; for example, the 855th time you fail to wash your hands after voiding your bowels or bladder, you’re doomed….

Such yawn. Much boredom.

And yes—I will say this explicitly, lest someone reads these criticisms and challenges me on the grounds that I did not “get it”—I get it: Palahniuk is trying to make Hell sound boring and drab and overly bureaucratic. The problem with that? It’s boring (and drab). Matthew Hughes does a far superior job depicting an overly-bureaucratic Hell. And he manages to do so while exploring some interesting moral and philosophical issues. Palahniuk just seems to be working out some prurient plotlines that don’t actually go anywhere.

One reason I got so far into the book before realizing I should bail is that I was waiting for something to happen (beyond the going to Hell part). Maddy spends the first hundred pages stuck in a cell or wandering aimlessly around Hell with her friends before we even get a glimmer of the wider structure of the place. Even then there seems to be little hope of an over-arching storyline. Maddy veers from one remembrance of her parents’ terrible parenting to another, and all the while she has conversations with living people over the phone. Oh, and then she goes off on some kind of sabbatical and ends up punching Hitler.

Because … why not?

Then there’s the twist at the end. Without spoiling it, all I can say is it puts Maddy in a Satan-killing mood, and that’s where the book ends. On a cliffhanger. After less than three hundred pages. Maybe if you had led with the twist, Chuck, and built an engrossing story around it, then I would have liked Damned. As it is, now I just feel like you spent an entire novel working up to the real story, in Doomed. The irony here is that the only reason I read Damned is because my Dad gave me a copy of Doomed many Christmases ago, and I thought it sounded very interesting but that I should read the first book in the series before I read it.

Past!me, you were so wrong, it is not even funny.

Damned is crazy, and not in a good crazy way. I’m guessing Palahniuk wants to be clever in a shocking-look-at-me-for-how-outrageous-this-is! kind of way. It all falls very flat, and the result is nearly three hundred pages of boredom topped only by my disbelief—in everything. It has been a long time since I’ve read a book, and finished it, and not had anything good to say about it. I’m less than 10 books into 2015, and already I think I have a solid candidate for worst book I’ve read this year.

My two words still stand: Don’t Bother. Read anything else. Read another Palahniuk book. Read a Twilight book. Read Twilight fanfic. But leave this one on the library shelf where it belongs. Don’t even think about putting it on hold.

I read, and greatly enjoyed, The Toss of a Lemon years ago. Now Padma Viswanathan is back, this time with a Giller Prize nomination, again with a book connected to India, but now one firmly grounded in Canada’s history and conflicted mixture of cultural obligations as well. The Ever After of Ashwin Rao is every bit as complex and emotionally sensitive as one might expect from a literary award nominee. While it didn’t quite engender the same lasting sense of enjoyment that I seem to recall The Toss of a Lemon creating, it still manages to be a marvellous work of fiction.

Despite its title, I’d argue that The Ever After of Ashwin Rao is not, actually, about Ashwin Rao. He is the nominal protagonist and the first-person narrator for most of the book. And, true, Viswanathan spends a lot of time developing him as a character: the events of the book affect him, and we seem him coming to terms with his own losses. But over time, the story of Seth’s family overshadows Ashwin’s own narrative. Viswanathan shares details he couldn’t have access to—though, I suppose, there is an argument to be made that all of these details are actually part of a narrative Ashwin wrote, as part of his narrative therapy procedure, and do not actually reflect what happened. How’s that for an unreliable narrator?

Regardless, my point is that this book is about so much more than a single man working through his grief. Viswanathan’s careful creation of an Indian–Canadian psychologist who is looking to create a book of interviews and stories about those grieving over the Air India Disaster, when he himself lost a sister and niece and nephew in the disaster, is clever and heartwrenching to equal degrees. She fixates upon one of the most prominent and tragic events in recent Canadian history, yet she manages to capture the most human elements and reactions to it. Although the trial of the alleged perpetrators is ongoing in the background, it never takes the forefront—it is just setting, a way of establishing the atmosphere and tone in which Ashwin does his work.

As humans (sorry, aliens and robots who are reading this in the far future when my reviews are the only remaining corpus of human writing), we all have some kind of experience with grief. We know that grief has strange, unforeseeable and lasting effects on individuals. We handle it in different ways. Some people gather their grief close to their chests, hoarding it as if the feeling alone can somehow compensate them for their loss; others want to share and open up and form new connections as compensation for ones they will never feel again. There is no right or wrong way to grieve, provided your grieving process is right and healthy for you.

Ashwin isn’t interested in the grieving process, however, so much as he is interested in the aftermath of that process. With twenty years passed since the disaster, he wants to know how well families have “adjusted” to what happened. The immediate feelings of grief are gone—and what is left? This is the “ever after” of the book’s title: the harsh and inescapable truth that, when people die, we keep going. And like a ripple propagating forward through time after a time-traveller inadvertently steps on a butterfly, this grief has profound but subtle influences on the people it touches.

For me, the highlight of this book is not so much any individual’s portrayal as it is the way Viswanathan contrasts Indian and Canadian cultures. Ashwin, Seth, Venkat, and Lakshmi are all Indians who immigrated to Canada (though in Ashwin’s case, he then moved back to India)—they have a “Canadian experience” that has affected them, but they were essentially raised Indian. Seth and Lakshmi’s daughters, on the other hand, are Canadian by birth, Indian by heritage. Their conceptual framework is quite different—and they were so young when the disaster struck that their reactons differ in that respect as well. Viswanathan is sensitive to these differences in her characterization, making for a rich tapestry of human emotions and behaviours.

Ashwin draws parallels between the Air India Disaster and the Golden Temple massacre in India, where Indian military forces stormed a Sikh temple that was under the control of resistance forces. This led to massive fallout: Gandhi’s subsequent assassination at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards, and then mob-conducted pogroms against Sikh families in India to which the government and police turned a blind eye. Later in the book Ashwin continues to ruminate on the complicated, fragmented nature of Indian religious consciousness: how Britain divided its colonial possession along Hindu and Muslim lines, leaving the Sikhs out in the cold. Do the Sikhs “deserve” or “need” their own nation? Is it even right or reasonable to silo people by religious identity? Even though I am capable of comprehending and considering these questions from an abstract perspective, it’s impossible for me to understand them in the context that a character like Ashwin, who grew up in India, does. I was reminded, once again, of how my own life and upbringing and privilege to live in a “stable” and “boring” place like Thunder Bay, Canada has influenced my perception of what the world is like.

Of course, the Air India Disaster was not really an Indian disaster but a Canadian one, even if our government didn’t seem to take that point at the time. The victims were, by and large, Canadians—that they happened to be of Indian descent, on an Indian-owned airline, was beside the point. The perpetrators, too, were likely Canadian—albeit influenced by Indian–Sikh radical ideologies, sure. But as Viswanathan and my own Wikipedia-fuelled research indicate, it’s not like CSIS and the RCMP were totally ignorant of potential threats. They just didn’t act on them. Then, in the years that followed, a strange silence and reluctance to admit wrongdoing. Two decades before a trial.

That idea that the Air India disaster was not the Canadian government’s responsibility because the passengers were of Indian descent is the potent descendent of a much more overt and noxious colonialist streak that runs through our history. Viswanathan invokes the Komagata Maru incident, reminding us that Canada was very much “for white British subjects only” well into its time as sovereign country. I don’t know if it’s because of or in spite of our stereotypical reputation for politeness and fairness that we don’t want to talk about, acknowledge, or make amends towards those sorts of missteps in our past … despite our pretensions towards humility on the world stage, we are not so different from that country to our south (Canada’s sweater), and the close ties we maintained with mother Britain occasionally meant we were worse. The fact that, in 1985, these people didn’t receive better posthumous treatment because of their ethnicity and heritage speaks to the continued conflict within Canada about what it means to be Canadian, to be a citizen, to have “a Canadian culture.” That is a conflict that remains as-of-yet unresolved.

This is probably why the book is so affecting, why it’s so difficult to read despite being, on its surface, placid and perhaps even dull in its lack of events to punctuate its equilibrium. It evokes so many ideas, especially uncomfortable ones. I dragged my heels reading this—it’s a reasonable-length book, and I’m reading one that is arguably longer now in about the space of two days—but you need to take your time to let the feelings sink in.

I said earlier I didn’t enjoy this as much as Viswanathan’s first novel. That shouldn’t be taken as criticism of this one. Enjoyment probably isn’t the most appropriate term for a book like this. And they are different types of stories: one is a sprawling, multi-generational look at changing attitudes, while the other is a more constrained attempt to chart the vicissitudes of grief. It’s difficult to compare them or judge one against the other, so I don’t want to try. Both are probably worth reading, if this sort of fiction—Indian-Canadian, semi-historical, emotional and literary in tone and breadth—is what you’re in the mood for. It’s heavy; I should have gone for a definitely-lighter book afterwards but seem to have ended up with a similarly moving title instead. Such is life.

I don’t want to go into spoiler territory discussing the twist or the denouement that follows. Suffice it to say, I’m not sure I understand the impulse that led Viswanathan to do that—but I understand the sentiment behind those closing pages. We spend so much of our life at the mercy of chance events, of others’ actions, of unforeseen consequences that influence our own opportunities. There is an impulse in all of us to act, to move, which can either manifest itself as lashing out or as reaching out, depending on our emotional pique of the moment. Above all else, there is that fundamental and unshakeable truth: time marches on. We can’t go back. We can’t revisit loved ones long gone; we can’t undo mistakes—ours or others’.

Like Seth, heading along the beach and into the ocean, we have only one choice: do we walk or do we run into our future? Do we cower, or do we embrace it with open arms?

Huh, so it appears I’m not the only one to liken this to The Handmaid’s Tale. So there goes that idea for a review.

I guess I’ll just have to talk about young adult literature and dystopian fiction and how not liking this book means you hate women.

Just kidding about that last part.

Sort of.

In addition to reminding me of Atwood’s novel about fertile women being the property of men who believe it is their duty to breed them, Archetype reminds me of When We Wake. The protagonists of both novels wake up in an unfamiliar world—Emma as a result of amnesia, Tegan because she has been on ice for a century—and are at the mercy of people who might not be on the level with them. Consequently, they are more reactive than proactive at first. Many of the same criticisms one might level at M.D. Waters could also be directed at Healey.

But one book is YA, the other is not. Some people seem content to cut YA slack, but if they decide a novel is “not YA,” then they are happy to slaughter it. Because teens don’t deserve quality fiction too? It’s not that I have an antipathy towards YA: I am harsh on it because I have high standards. And yeah, I totally agree that, in many ways, Archetype feels like a YA novel. But criticizing it for that reason demonstrates the harmful effect of categorizing our literature in such artificial ways, particularly when this action comes with implications about gender as well.

Let’s examine why Archetype seems so YA. What is it, exactly, that makes a book YA? Of course, standard disclaimer here that this is my entirely subjective view—your mileage may vary, and maybe you don’t see the parallels at all and don’t get what the fuss is about. That’s fine; move along.

At its basic level, I suppose, literature is for “young adults” if they are the intended audience. But how can we know that? Are all books with young-adult protagonists automatically YA because young adults will identify with them? That certainly seems to be the mould of the form these days: young adult protagonist with a highly individualistic streak, usually from first-person, stream-of-consciousness perspective, has an adventure in which they discover virtues of self-esteem, etc. The book “speaks” to the young adult reader about the issues they struggle with in early, late, or post-adolescence in way that older readers might recognize but not quite understand any more.

That seems like a smokescreen to me. Archetype doesn’t have a young adult as its protagonist. So why does it seem so YA? In reality, most YA literature gets labelled because we think it’s less complex, less sophisticated, less robust than “real literature.” This is certainly the argument behind Ruth Graham’s invective against adults who read YA, a polemic so riddled with literary and genre snobbery that it makes Northrop Frye look like just some guy who wandered in off the street. Graham is willing—oh-so-generously, oh-so-magnanimously on her part—to leave YA to the teens, who need to “earn” their way into “the adult stacks” (I wonder who policed her library as a kid, because my librarians never questioned my beeline into the adult stacks, though someone probably should have warned me about reading the first three A Song of Ice and Fire books when I was in Grade 7…). We adults, on the other hand, have to put away our toys and read “proper” literature—i.e., complex and not always with “satisfying” endings—because, if we don’t, our poor kids will see us reading “their” literature and never want to grow up as readers! The horror!

I think what Graham and many who pan YA are tapping into is a general discomfort over the erosion of adulthood ongoing in pop culture. But that isn’t YA’s fault, and it doesn’t mean YA is inherently good or bad, or that adults should or should not read YA. (For what it’s worth, my two cents here and ultimate rebuttal to Graham is that, if we think our kids should be reading it, we should be reading it too: after all, shouldn’t we try to empathize with and understand them as much as is possible?)

Archetype’s YA vibe is a result of Waters’ writing style and the plot structure. Emma is debatably a young adult (she is 26, nearly my age, and to be honest I still feel like a young adult, even if most YA literature targets people younger than me). Moreover, her amnesia means she doesn’t have the same experiences you and I might have that help her describe her surroundings or react to other people. So she seems a lot younger than 26, in some ways. The narration has a simplistic quality to it, with bold and transparent telegraphing of how Emma feels to the reader, which definitely resembles what one sees in a lot of YA. Combine this with antagonists whose motives are only ever partially explored and a dystopia that is only barely sketched, and you have yourself a YA novel that happens to have some hot-and-heavy sex in the middle of it.

Indeed, if I lay all my cards on the table, I’d argue the sex scene is maybe the only reason this novel can never be labelled YA in any marketing sense. I can see an editor having a conversation with Waters—not saying it probably happened, but I could see it happening—in which they try to persuade her to cut or trim the scene in such a way that it’s more acceptable for a younger audience. “We’ll sell a thousand more copies,” they say, “because we can market it to the young adults at the upper end of the spectrum as well as the regular reader.”

It’s unfortunate, too, that we seem to have so thoroughly associated dystopian fiction with young adult literature in the present decade’s critical consciousness. It’s not like they were always one-and-the-same—no one, no one is going to argue that The Handmaid’s Tale is YA—except that many, including me, feel it’s one of the best books to teach in an English classroom, and I’d heartily recommend that any young adult, just becoming aware of those fraught issues of gender politics and women’s autonomy over their bodies, read it. And yeah, I’d tell them to read Archetype too. Yes, it has sex in it. If you think teenagers aren’t reading stories with explicit sex scenes … good. You keep thinking that. Because you are adorable.

Ultimately, YA is, of course, little more than a label that serves as a marketing gimmick. It’s a way to sell more books, just as the trend to market YA to adults by way of mainstream pop culture is just another way to sell more books. That is why I’m so distrustful of criticism that attacks a book on the basis of its YA status (or lack thereof): it’s a red herring, critically speaking. There is no YA and non-YA: there is just literature. And yes, some of it is absolutely terrible. Archetype, in my opinion, is not.

The fact that one might criticize it based on its resemblance to YA troubles me. Dianna Anderson’s thoughtful somewhat-rebuttal to Graham’s article explores the idea that YA’s only defining characteristic is, as I said above, the protagonist’s age. And she argues in favour of taking YA seriously as literature, because doing otherwise is, as her title implies, sexist. If you disagree out of hand, then bear with me for a moment, and allow me to walk you through a thought experiment.

Suppose we reverse the genders in Archetype. Suppose Emile wakes up with amnesia, only to have a woman doctor and a woman claiming to be his wife tell him that he was in a terrible accident. Suppose Emile gradually learns that not everything is as it seems, starts having flashbacks that seem to be someone else’s memories of fighting in a resistance—of nearly dying—and of having a lover who isn’t his wife. Let’s add in another wrinkle: most men in this world are sterile, so the government of East America passed a whole bunch of laws in which men who can get women pregnant are legally required to stud, whether they want to have children or not.

Would we ever dare mistake this for YA?

No. This sounds like the plot of a weird-ass science-fiction novel to me, but definitely fare for adults (and by adults, I mean anyone mature enough to read adult-level prose, regardless of age!). Portraying Emile as a former resistance fighter now captured and at the mercy of the enemy would, to most readers, conjure images of butch action heroes—thanks, Hollywood. We would automatically ascribe Emile a sense of agency and action that we don’t grant to a woman character, even if he remains just as inactive and useless as Emma is at first. (I actually like the extent to which Emma takes charge later in the book, even if I recognize it might not be as well described or fleshed out as some might like.)

Part of the inherently sexist nature of our society is the way in which we infantilize women—something Sady Doyle talks about in her piece on adulthood, linked above. Anderson argues this is an inherent problem with blanket criticism of YA as non-literature, because of YA’s popularity with women and its status as a field dominated by women authors. I’d go further and argue that, having encouraged older women (and men) to read YA, the ouroboros of censure is now looping back around and establishing a double standard in which older women reading YA is yet another sign of their frivolity and insincerity. As always, women are simultaneously expected to and dismissed for appearing youthful. It’s not a coincidence that women dominate the YA field while we hold up predominantly men as examples of “serious literary juggernauts”—and it’s not a coincidence that so-called “chick lit” bears a less-than-subtle resemblance to the “satisfying” and trite story structure that Graham so detests about YA.

I was all prepared to dismiss Archetype. I was sceptical when I plucked it from the New Books shelf at the library: I had exactly the same initial reaction that many people had after reading, namely, that it sounded like an adult version of YA dystopian fiction that would be too sketchy to be satisfying. But I was wrong, and I realized that almost from the beginning—well, at least, after devouring the first 120 pages in one sitting. That might have something to do with how easy it is to read the book—the narration and prose are not very dense—but I’d like to believe that it also has something to do with my ability to feel sympathy for Emma’s predicament.

It feels a little bit like sacrilege to draw parallels to The Handmaid’s Tale, so I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels the similarity. Atwood’s novel is such a complex masterpiece, both in the technical and emotional sense, that to liken it to a debut novel in which the main character and setting are both so under-developed seems disrespectful to our own Canadian juggernaut. But the proof is in the plot: the parallels are inescapable. Both novels are harrowing because their depiction of a dystopia, however unlikely, is merely the backdrop around which they portray the powerlessness and cruelty of a woman experiencing a lack of autonomy. The kicker being, of course, that these books are not so much morality plays or cautionary tales as they are, deep down, critiques of our own presently misogynistic culture.

Look, in the way I presently identify and perform my gender, I’m not a woman. So I’m not trying to speak for women here. But from what I read, from what I see, it seems like this is a society that has it out for women’s autonomy and women’s control over their bodies. It’s true that, unlike Atwood, Waters doesn’t explain much about the origins of the fertility issues or the decline of America into civil war and its bifurcation into the free West and the oppressive East. But she doesn’t have to: Emma’s suffering is enough. The terror that she feels at the prospect of pregnancy, the pressure that she feels from Dr. Travista and Declan—and their language and treatment of her, of course—is enough to make the message clear. Through a quirk of my biology, I happen to have the privilege of never having to worry about this. No one will ever tell me I am expected to carry a child. No one will ever tell me I am bound by law to carry a pregnancy to term. No one will claim me as property and brand me like breeding stock.

Yet Archetype hit a nerve for me, because I see echoes of this behaviour in our society today. In the United States, that nice little sweater that Canada wears, the predominantly male political bodies are very interested in regulating women’s individual bodies, including their access to affordable birth control and their ability to terminate pregnancies. Pretty much they want to consign women to lives of poverty “for the children” (which doesn’t seem very nice, personally), and they aren’t afraid to take away women’s freedoms and autonomy to do it.

So if you’re a dude who was sympathetic enough to shudder when reading Archetype or The Handmaid’s Tale because you hope that future doesn’t happen … look again. Because too many women have to worry about living in that world in the present. (And that’s just the developed countries.)

Look, I agree that there is plenty about Archetype that doesn’t pass muster. Noah is unpredictable to the point of feeling like a caricature of the grieving husband (and, to be honest, the softness of the science surrounding the twist in the second act gives me misgivings). Waters does a little better, in my opinion, with the subtlety of Declan’s attitude towards Emma: he does seem to care for her genuinely, albeit on his own twisted terms. Yet for a book so interested in playing up the ambiguity of amnesiac Emma’s situation, the drama and mystery surrounding her missing memories is resolved fairly neatly and quickly and, yes, predictably.

So for all those reasons, it’s fair to criticize this book. Aforementioned comments aside about not liking this book implying a hatred of women, there are totally legitimate reasons not to like this particular book—up to and including “I just didn’t like it.” But let’s not dismiss it because it feels like YA—that’s a troubling indictment both of YA and books that, like this one, embody and articulate the precarious attitudes in our present society towards the issues of women’s autonomy and agency.

Archetype is a story about a woman who is trying to find her voice. This would be a powerful narrative in any time and place. It is even more powerful here and now, in our present time and present culture, which is striving so hard to co-opt feminism, to tell women they are free and empowered, when in reality their autonomy and their voices remain fragile things. Waters might still need to hone her skill, but her aim is squarely on the target: these are serious, weighty matters, and Emma’s story is of a calibre and quality high enough to handle them. I didn’t love every moment of Archetype; it has plenty of technical flaws—but I love how it made me feel, even if those feelings were predominantly disconcerting. I love when literature can affect me, even if it the emotions and thoughts it stirs are difficult ones. In this respect, Archetype verges upon that transcendent quality many writers strive to reach for their entire careers. It should most definitely be taken seriously. YA—which this is not—should most definitely be taken seriously.

I’m going to keep reading widely and keep fighting my inner genre snob. He’s a little less vocal these days, and I think that’s a good thing, but he does occasionally rear his hobgoblin head and wrestle me for control of these reviews. So I’m always grateful when I find reviews that rankle me and books like Archetype that exceed expectations based upon such snobbery. It’s a nice way to be reminded I have biases that need examining. Shouldn’t that be what literature is all about—helping us be better humans?

Both perverse pleasures and particular perils accompany the act of reading, for the first time, two consecutive books in a series back to back. The pleasures are obvious: having devoured that first morsel, you eagerly consume all else within reach. Sometimes years pass between my readings of books in a series, and by then I’ve forgotten all the characters, and the nods to previous books are much less satisfying. The perils are not necessarily universal. For me, because of the way I write reviews, I almost never have the review for my previous book written by the time I start the next one. So my reading of the sequel can influence my review of the first book, adjusting my perspective and biasing my initial opinions. I already knew, before I started Autumn Bones, that Dark Currents was good but not great. Its lustre has only dimmed further in comparsion to this second novel—still no gem, but undeniably an improvement of the already entertaining first book of Jacqueline Carey’s Agent of Hel series.

I’ll skip the summaries. Either you’ve read the first book, or you’ve at least read my review for Dark Currents, so you know the score. This book picks up a month or so after the first one. Daisy and Sinclair are not-quite-but-almost an item, and after an unfortunate encounter with a satyr in rut, a booty call quickly complicates their relationship. The romance and sex in Autumn Bones is a lot more overt and a lot more mature. But it’s also handled better than many comparable series I’ve read. The central conflict is more intense than the dull mystery of the first book: Sinclair, although he grew up in Kalamazoo, is originally from Jamaica and descended from a line of obeah men and women (basically Jamaican witches), and his family wants him back home—even if it means unleashing a spirit to haunt him and the town until he comes back. As the situation becomes more and more tense, Carey explores just how far Daisy might be willing to go, both to enforce Hel’s order and to help out friends like Sinclair.

It’s worth pointing out that Daisy is, what, 21, 22 years old? That wasn’t so long ago for me, and I don’t have the baggage of being half-hellspawn. So before we go judging Daisy, let’s keep in mind that it’s difficult to get everything right at that age. Carey does a good job portraying a young woman who, despite maturity probably beyond her years, makes some stupid mistakes that add up. It’s really nice that she gives us a strong woman protagonist who isn’t all that badass. I love badass women characters; don’t get me wrong—but badass should not be the only flavour of strong/complex women. Daisy is badass-in-training, but her fallibility and flaws make her a far more appealing and sympathetic character.

The situation with Sinclair, Cody, and Stefan is a good example. I could take the easy route here and just criticize the sheer number of men expressing interest in Daisy. Then again, this is her story; she is the main character, so I mean … yeah. If this were Jen’s story, we’d hear all about her love life (and even though it isn’t, we still hear a little about her love life—because Carey cares about developing the supporting cast too!). No, I really want to examine how Carey handles romance, sexual attraction, and Daisy’s role as Hel’s liaison.

In those urban fantasy novels that verge upon being just paranormal romance, it’s not only common but almost required that the female protagonist be the love interest of at least two male suitors, preferably of differing supernatural lineages. Carey seems to be checking that box here with Cody, a werewolf, and Stefan, a ghoul. One is powerful and full of raw sexual attraction; the other is the brooding and mysterious stand-in for vampires, because Carey already established that vampires here suck (both literally and figuratively). And then you’ve got Sinclair, pretty much human but capable of seeing auras and on the verge of being drawn back into the world of witchcraft and ceremony to defend himself from his family.

Laudably, Carey eschews easy, contrived drama through romantic squabbles and misunderstandings. Daisy and Sinclair argue about Sinclair’s reluctance to talk about his past and how this ultimately comes to bite them all in the ass—but it doesn’t blow up nearly to the proportions that would be required if this were a Hollywood supernatural rom-com. No, Daisy, shockingly, deals with it like an adult, by talking first to her friends, then calming down, then talking to Sinclair and explaining her feelings. It’s almost as if communicating with people helps to avoid misunderstandings and mistrust! Similarly, despite mixed feelings about Stefan, Daisy largely keeps her cool—important around a ghoul—and talks things out with him.

Cody is a slightly different story. All I’ll say is that Carey deftly distinguishes between romantic and sexual attraction, while at the same time pointing out how easy it is to conflate the two.

Carey avoids problematizing Daisy’s attraction, which seems to happen all too frequently in other romance novels. The problem is not, “Oh, woe is me, so many attractive but dark and brooding supernatural men want to jump my bones.” Daisy’s attractiveness as a person and her availability are not problems. Rather, the correct locus for this internal conflict is the fact that Daisy is young, inexperienced, and not quite sure what she wants. Even better, Carey is articulate enough to explain this to the reader, whereas authors often characterize the heroine so poorly that we are left with little understanding of her desires and motivations beyond a generalized need for a romance, if not a specific one.

I’m going to keep coming back to Daisy’s youth, because this was a defining part of Autumn Bones for me, and I’m starting to embrace it as a defining aspect of the entire series. See, Daisy is young, but she’s not Buffy-in-high-school young. This isn’t a young adult series; she isn’t off at a supernatural school or in college or anything like that. But she isn’t quite at the “been there, seen that, done this” stage of early thirties onwards like many of the most capable characters (women and men) in other urban fantasy novels. So Daisy is quite a nice character for people like—well, for people like me, people in their mid-twenties who are still trying to make sense of life after formal education. This is the decade where we begin to understand what it means that the world has been around for a long time before us and will continue (hopefully) a long time after us—even if we realized this in our teens, the tunnel-vision hubris of hormones means it is difficult for us to internalize it. But the harsh and unforgiving world after formal education means we can’t help but confront the essential truth that we are fundamentally insignificant to the grand events of human existence—even if, through some combination of incredible luck and skill, we manage to find ourselves in a position to influence events on a global scale, we cannot ever truly claim to grasp the full ramifications of our deeds.

This understanding is present at the existential level in Agent of Hel as well: Daisy, quite literally, can bring about Armageddon by petitioning her demonic father for her birthright, an act that will allow him to leapfrog the Inviolable Wall and unleash hell on Earth. Carey complicates matters by introducing another half-breed hellspawn like her who has apparently claimed his birthright. Daisy is just as confused as we are about why this hasn’t ended the world, and Carey smugly stays silent on the matter. (Wouldn’t it be interesting if people have been lying to Daisy all this time, “for her own good”? I’m not optimistic enough to believe that’s the reason, but it would make for such a nice, dramatic twist.) More widely, though, Daisy is a great and identifiable character because she just feels like a real person. Her relationship with Sinclair is not stereotypical; it is not perfect, but it also isn’t the trainwreck so often seen in books and movies for the sake of drama. But I’ll stop talking about romance and relationships here, because that’s not the highlight of this book.

No, Autumn Bones works because it gives us a lot more to enjoy about Daisy’s official position. In Dark Currents, she was little more than yet-another-supernatural-style-cop. She played detective, interrogated and found clues, and then was around for the bust-em-up finale. Yawn. Here, though, we see Daisy become much more comfortable in her role as Hel’s liaison. It would be inaccurate for me to say she begins to take it as more of a responsibility, because that is how she has always regarded it … let’s just say she becomes much more proactive. There are numerous episodes throughout the story—most notably, at the House of Shadows with Jen’s sister Bethany—where Daisy has to assert her authority. And, of course, the heaviest moment happens when Hel summons Daisy for an audience and expresses her disappointment that Daisy let Sinclair’s mom run roughshod over Daisy and the Pemkowet coven and Heĺ’s order. Receiving the “I am not angry; I am very disappointed in you,” talk from the Norse goddess of the dead must not be any fun. At all. But Daisy bears it well, and she bucks up, and she resolves to do better.

I’d like to talk about what doesn’t work in this book—because it is far from perfect—but to be honest, what doesn’t work just isn’t interesting enough to discuss at length. I don’t care for Lee—but that’s a personal impression, not a problem with the way Carey writes him. The climax and denouement are not nearly as satisfying as the first two thirds of this book. Rather unusually, I saw the identity of the antagonist of the last act coming from fifty pages away, so I was underwhelmed by the big reveal. Carey’s strengths definitely lie in her characterization and the wonderful setting she has created in Pemkowet. Her plots continue to satisfy me only so much as they require Daisy and other characters to grow and react to their many tendrils.

But the bottom line can only be that, having turned the last page on Autumn Bones, I really wished I had Poison Fruit on deck. I don’t—but my library has two copies on order as of December, and I just placed a hold for one of them.

My review of the Agent of Hel series:
← Dark Currents | Poison Fruit →

Poison Fruit, like Autumn Bones, does not let much time elapse between books. The events of Halloween are still fresh in people’s minds as New Year approaches. Now Daisy has to get to the bottom of what the hell-spawn lawyer Daniel Dufreyne is doing buying up land around Little Niflheim. And she also needs to sort out her complicated feelings about her attractions to Stefan and Cody.

I’ll start off with the romance angle here. Poison Fruit feels like the most conventional of the three books in terms of how Carey deals with the romance. In the first book, because we were still getting to know each of the characters and the setting, it felt fresh and interesting: Daisy’s attraction to Cody was mitigated by Jen’s crush, and her attraction to Stefan was more of a notion than anything else. When she ended up dating Sinclair, it was a relief—Carey didn’t seem like she was setting up a love triangle. Then Autumn Bones came along, and suddenly Sinclair is out of the picture, and Cody and Stefan are waiting in the wings. Still, though, not much of a love triangle, because the relationship with Cody was purely a physical one.

It’s hard to avoid it, though: Poison Fruit is pretty much a love triangle. Granted, Cody and Stefan are pretty chill about the whole thing; I appreciate that they aren’t vying for Daisy’s affection (and, indeed, Cody is trying really hard to ignore the attraction at all, because he wants to settle down and have pups with a nice lady-werewolf). Still, I’ll confess to a little disappointment: I was really hoping Carey could offer us something beyond the “multiple hot guys” scenario that seems to proliferate through urban fantasy fiction with female protagonists (the opposite heteronormative case of “multiple hot girls” afflicts such fiction with male protagonists, of course).

That being said, I’ll give Carey credit for creating conflict and drama within the relationship without making either character an idiot. Daisy and her new lover make mistakes; they push each other’s buttons a little too far—which, you know, is troublesome when you have eldritch powers that flare up when your emotions run high—but as with Daisy and Sinclair’s relationship, the solution is—shockingly—communication. This fruit might be poisoned, but at least it isn’t low-hanging.

The diction of the sex scene was a little humorous, but that might just be me.

Daisy’s relationships, romantic or otherwise, are important to the enjoyment of this book as a whole, not just because of her status as narrator but also because, as half-hellspawn, half-human, she is representative of Pemkowet itself. She straddles the mundane and the eldritch communities, subject to the laws of both, and thanks to her roles in the Pemkowet police and as Hel’s liaison, charged with upholding both mundane and eldritch law. It’s tough, walking that line. Carey demonstrates that, as much as the existence of the supernatural is an established fact in this universe, acknowledging that something exists and believing in it are two different things. Time and again, mundane humans have trouble understanding the significance of eldritch affairs and their impact on human activity in Pemkowet.

The lawsuit that Dufreyne brings against the town is brilliant. I like the idea that eldritch beings and chthonic gods have to be savvy about mortal concerns like wealth and property and liability law, lest they run afoul of a judge vulnerable to powers of persuasion. This was a fun way for Carey to juxtapose the more traditional customs of eldritch interaction—honour, favours, etc.—with our more litigious society—but it also has very serious consequences.

Other than that, I don’t have much else to say. Poison Fruit is just as fun as the other two books in the series. (The less said about the literal deus ex machina ending, the better.) It was a welcome break after reading a couple of heavier books, and Carey’s writing is as enjoyable as ever. I’m starting to get that feeling one gets after binging on too many of the same type of book in short order—but I don’t regret reading all three Agent of Hel books so close together either.

I can’t find Carey herself saying anywhere that this is the last book, but other places seem to think this is the conclusion of a trilogy. It’s true the climax and resolution have that feeling. But there is still plenty here for Carey to explore, should she choose to return to Pemkowet and Daisy Johanssen. I would be sad, honestly, if she didn’t, to the point that my overall opinion of this series is paradoxically contingent on it continuing. If it stops here, Agent of Hel is a good urban fantasy trilogy that occasionally attempts to rise above genre convention. That’s it. On the other hand, it has so much potential to grow better and better with each instalment—but whether we will see that realized is up to Carey.

Oh, and Skrrzzzt is totally the best. I love him so much.

My reviews of the Agent of Hel series:
← Autumn Bones

Well, I liked this better than In the Skin of a Lion. Michael Ondaatje doesn’t quite terminate quotation marks with extreme prejudice in The Cat’s Table, and the story is more straightforward. Call me boring, but I like that.

The protagonist is also named Michael, and certain elements of the plot are apparently autobiographical (but only just). Michael is eleven years old and travelling from Sri Lanka to England, where he will live with his mother and attend a nice school. He’s travelling alone on the ship Oronsay, but he befriends two boys his age. Together, they have the run of the place, get into adventures that find them or adventures of their own making, and generally have a good time during a period that seems timeless. In between these episodes, Ondaatje weaves hints and scenes from Michael’s adult life, including his relationship with his cousin Emily.

I liked reading about the shenanigans that Michael and his friends get up to. It was charming and funny in that wistful, semi-nostalgic kind of way. The atmosphere Ondaatje describes will be familiar to anyone who was a child for at least one or two summers, no matter how long ago. The days and nights merge together into a single, seamless expanse during which anything might be possible. You find your allies, stake your claims, erect your forts, and fight your battles. It’s an interesting time, and Ondaatje captures a lot of that excitement, albeit in the more interesting, magical setting of a voyage across the ocean!

And now comes the difficult part of the review, the part where I discover I don’t have much to say. The Cat’s Table is good? I liked it? I don’t know. And that, in itself, should be a sign of trouble. It took me a while to pinpoint why I can’t love this book, but I think I have it: there is a curious dearth of conflict.

Despite the fact that the book is kind of a flashback, Michael seldom editorializes his younger self. He doesn’t really pass judgement on incidents such as his complicity in the Baron’s robbery—things just happened, and he was a part of them. Young Michael makes choices, does good things and bad things, but they are just a part of his life. Does he regret anything? The characters around him certainly do, but I don’t get the sense that he does. The characters around him—Emily, the prisoner, Miss. Lasqueti … they have conflicts. Yet Michael, occasionally a participant and occasionally an observer, always seems to pass by.

Even once we get glimpses of his adult life, any sense of conflict is implicit rather than there on the page. He marries Ramadhin’s sister and then later divorces her—fine, but why? Where are the scenes of romance, of recrimination, of resignation? We only get the structure of the thing and none of its content: a skeleton of a story instead of the story itself. As one might expect from Ondaatje, the descriptions in The Cat’s Table are complicated and exquisite. The story is another matter.

So that’s where I’m at. No intense analysis, no long-winded review. It was a book that was pleasant enough to read, but I’m left distinctly underwhelmed. There was no reason for me to identify with the protagonist, to feel concern for his wellbeing or his tribulations, because it doesn’t seem like he had that many. The Cat’s Table has beautiful prose, but that only distracts for so long from deeper issues that make it more difficult to love.

One of the central conceits of Jailbird is that the RAMJAC corporation seems to own everything, and it is owned by Mrs. Jack Graham, a reclusive woman whom few people have met in person and who gives orders by telephone, confirming them by mailing a letter to her subordinates signed by fingerprints from both hands. That’s weird, right?

Problem is, this is a Vonnegut novel, so it’s not nearly weird enough.

Walter F. Starbuck is a Harvard man, a minor public servant who does time in a white-collar prison for tangential involvement in Watergate. The story begins with Walter’s release; most of his earlier life is told as a series of flashbacks, with Walter meditating upon and foreshadowing various formative events. Having lived through much of the twentieth century, Walter is the world-weary proxy for the author, able to use his decades of experience in the public service to demonstrate how, no matter what happens, this is life. So it goes, eh? As the story goes on, Vonnegut introduces any number of improbably named supporting cast members, dipping into their lives to various degrees, and connecting them in ways both unlikely and realistically serendipitous.

In these respects, Jailbird is typical Vonnegut fare, and for the first half or so, I was quite enjoying it. Despite the setbacks dealt to him, Walter was remarkably mellow. He goes through his life almost as if he can’t believe anyone is bothering to interact with him. So many protagonists of stories are heroes: they are often the most important or become one of the most important people in the story’s setting. Vonnegut seems to have set out to demonstrate that it’s possible to tell a good story about someone who isn’t a hero, isn’t an antihero, isn’t anything. He’s just some guy, you know? He hasn’t made much of a big difference doing anything in his life. But he’s OK with that.

Somewhere towards the back half, though, I began to check out. The novel starts to take weird twists and the plot begins to spiral outwards at an accelerated pace rather than in the tight, constant coils of the earlier part of the book. I wasn’t sure what was going on—but in the head-scratching, unable to enjoy myself kind of way, as opposed to the usual Escher-like constructions Vonnegut springs upon the reader.

Some of this is a personal issue: I’m just not that interested in Watergate or its fallout. It’s difficult for me, as a child of this era, to relate to that particular part of the twentieth century. I feel strange saying that, because I have no problem enjoying the myriad stories set in World War II, which is surely a world much more different from mine than America during Watergate. But I studied World War II in school, and its presence in our culture far overshadows that of Watergate. Moreover, in today’s accelerated news cycle coupled with unprecedented access to information, it seems like a new scandal rears its head every second day. Keeping up with the illegal activities President of the United States and his advisers was exciting in the 1970s. Now it’s just another exhausting facet of your unpaid Internet labour.

Another disappointment peculiar to my tastes and preferences is the dearth of science fictional elements. That’s not an automatic failure—Bluebeard similarly lacks science fiction, and I still loved it. No, just my mood in general at the time was hoping for more zany and unforgettable pulp sci-fi on the order of The Sirens of Titan. Oh well.

I will say this: I like the subtle way in which Vonnegut critiques both capitalism and communism here. Whenever we discuss critiques of communism in fiction, Orwell always dominates. Don’t get me wrong, I love Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm as much as the next self-respecting English student, and Orwell’s corpus of anti-authoritarianist literature is amazing. Yet there is so much more to be said and so many other people saying it.

Latent in Jailbird seems to be the premise that World War II really fucked everything up in terms of capitalism versus communism in a way that few people anticipated. Though its cost in terms of lives was staggering and atrocious, it did jumpstart the economies of Europe and America, even as it triggered the long slide of Russian communism towards its eventual collapse. But the social changes that accompanied the absence of young men from the workforce and the general fatigue with fighting that followed the war really altered the way in which people thought about work and acquiring profit.

(Oh, and having the ability to destroy all life on the planet with a few bombs also changed things.)

Vonnegut is clever in the way he connects the Watergate-era politics of Walter’s career with Walter’s earlier efforts in post-war Germany. He illustrates how the decisions made following the war have influenced the rise of various corporate interests, a process that has continued towards a concerning climax in my time. The RAMJAC corporation lurks in the background of the first part of Jailbird: it keeps coming up, but no one ever discusses what it is or why it seems to own everything. (And I like at the end how Vonnegut reveals that it doesn’t actually own that much—perception can be far more powerful than fact.) That RAMJAC is more of a trojan horse than anything is fun, though I wish Vonnegut had played with the idea more instead of just stating it flat out towards the end.

I’m happy I read Jailbird, and I wouldn’t rule out revisiting it at some point in the future—I might like it better then! That being said, there are plenty of other Vonnegut novels to read, or ones I’d rather re-read first, so that won’t be a priority. It just lacks the volume of satire and humour I want from my Vonnegut, preferring instead elements of pure farce, which don’t satisfy me quite so much. Though still eminently Vonnegut in voice and style, it is not the an exemplar of his work.