16 – Jade City
Another absolute banger here – it gets a full-throated five stars. Imagine someone crossbred the Godfather with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. That’s basically what the book is – it’s got its own twists and turns and such, but in the end it’s literary wuxia set in a city roiling in the chaos of a turf war. An isolationist nation has thrown off the yoke of imperial control, and the guerrillas that fought off the invaders are now running things – with the complicity, and often direct support, of the civilian government.
Over time, the guerrillas have essentially become powerful crime syndicates, their influence extending into every facet of the country. They demand tribute from those businesses in regions they control, and in exchange for preferment and protection they are gifted it freely and enthusiastically. They’re the Green Bone clans, made up of honour-bound gangsters swaddled in ‘Jade’ – a mysterious and powerful bio-reactive gemstone that can only be found in their home country. Those that wear jade are granted superhuman abilities – speed, perception, strength and so on. The more jade a Green Bone wears, the more respected they are – and the more dangerous they can become. Mostly the Green Bones claim jade in battle – the victor of an honourable killing can take the jade from their victim and display it as a trophy. Not everyone can wear jade without going mad, and even those that can wear it effectively develop the lethal Itches if they push beyond their own tolerances.
Jade City isn’t really all that much about the powers that Green Bone fingers and fists (soldiers and officers) can wield though. That’s just the background of the story, which is primarily one of divided loyalties and family obligation. There’s plenty of action, don’t get me wrong, but the book does action very well – its punches are storytelling and its kicks are world building. When someone pulls a knife on someone else, it feels like it’s just another way to explore character development. Clausewitz once said that ‘War is the continuation of politics by other means’, and that’s how a lot of this book feels. It never loses sight of the role that action is supposed to play in a story – it’s supposed to illuminate those elements that exposition and dialog can’t ever truly tease out from the shadows. In a city absolutely steeped in toxic machismo and the lethal cocktail of blood-oaths and superpowers, there are characters that absolutely can’t contribute to what’s happening unless it’s through their sheer physicality. For all the focus on jade, it’s mostly its totemic qualities that really matter – its power as a symbol, as a currency, and as a temptation for the underclass that covets it.
As the tension escalates, it sharpens the themes at its core. Everyone in Jade City is so conflicted – drawn in the direction of their nature while pulled into the gravity of their fate. Characters spin around the early parts of the book like ball bearings in a balancing maze game – bouncing aimlessly off of each other until they settle into their mostly permanent roles. But nobody settles into a role for which they are fit – everyone in Jade City is struggling to live up to the high standards and colossal responsibilities associated with jobs they never chose to undertake. Everyone in Jade City – at least on ‘our side’ of the gang war – is marked by the accumulated sadness of the sacrifices they, and those around them, are forced into as they compress under external pressure. It’s all about loyalty in the end. Loyalty to the clan. Loyalty to the family. And loyalty to a moral code that runs through the city like a polluted river, its pristine headwaters unable to retain their purity as they come into contact with the realpolitik of a complex world of conflicting allegiances.
Yeah, it’s really good. I’d probably have rolled right into the sequel if I had it on my shelves at the time.
17 – The Housekeeper and the Professor
I’ve only read two of Yoko Ogawa’s books – the previous one was the Memory Police, which I reviewed her a couple of weeks ago. And it’s odd that it should be these two I think because – without consciously linking them together- they’re two books about the same thing… the ephemerality of memory. The Memory Police was a compelling, almost philosophical treatise into epistemology within a dystopian social construct. The Housekeeper and the Professor is more intimate – a story about what it means to mean something to someone. It’s not a story of unrequited love, but a more mundane form of unrequited appreciation.
The Housekeeper works for a maid agency in a Japanese city. One day she is retained to clean the home of the Professor, a troublesome client who has gone through almost ten maids in the short period of time he’s been on the agency’s book. The Housekeeper finds out why he’s been such a n issue pretty quickly – the Professor, while possessed of a pleasant manner and being immensely gifted in mathematics, has a memory that spans only eighty minutes. An accident in the 1970s left him with a severe form of anterograde amnesia – his last permanent memory is from 1975. Every day, she meets him anew and he must navigate an unreliable matrix of notes pinned to his suit to situate his life correctly within each new day. He draws a picture of her, pins it to his wrist, and writes underneath ‘my new maid’. His clothes are covered in these reminders – the only way he has to create a permanent memory with an impermanent mind.
Most prominent amongst these notes is the one that reminds him of the key fact of his existence – his memory only spans an 80 minute period. It’s the first thing he sees every morning, and the thing that anchors his day and disassociates his life from the world around him. All that sustains him really is his love of mathematics. That remains strong and it is clearly the only genuine romance he’s ever experienced in his life. It’s how he communicates important lessons, and how he makes connections with the people around him. His memory may be transient, but the numbers are always there. But sadly, even this stability in his life is fading. Eventually, he won’t remember anything new at all.
That’s the book, essentially – the story of a fundamentally one-sided affection between the Housekeeper and his Son, and the affable eccentrics of a man whose own affection is permanently inaccessible. What he can’t give though in terms of reciprocity, he makes up for in his love of numbers. A love that he transmits to his housekeeper and her son as he entrances them with ever deeper explorations into the magical way numbers can connect people together. They bond over the rich intricacy of number theory, and over baseball, and over the simple joy of being – literally- in the moment together.
It’s a lovely book – it really is. It contains, it has to be said, a lot more math than I was expecting but it’s (almost) all presented in a way that really connects you to the professor. It’s how he communicates the things that matter to him, and as such he takes great care in how he teaches it. In the process, he teaches us – sort of. A lot of it won’t be new to a reader with even a casual acquaintance with prime numbers and their odd implications. But it’s still very charming in the way it helps underline the character relationships. If he can’t offer permanent friendship, he can at least offer permanent enlightenment.
But even as lovely as the book is – a gentle exploration of an intricate and intimate set of relationships – it’s also vaguely horrifying. The professor doesn’t seem unhappy with his lot, but it’s hard as a reader to avoid reflecting on what a life like that would involve. How it would narrow all your opportunities into a laser-beam of compromise. The effort that it would take to avoid being plunged into perpetual despair. A world where any casual remark can set you down a path of confronting, temporarily, your debilitating loss. A mental landscape where all that matters in the here and now has to be constrained within an eighty minute span. It’s heart-breaking, really. The professor copes cheerfully with a life situation that I know would crush me.
There are few thieves as malevolent as the one that steals away the mind. The one that corrupts causality. The one that leaves only a mind that will forget where a precious treasure was stored, and will forget the act of hiding it. The mind that looks at its own patchwork collection of inconsistent memories and laces them together with paranoia and distrust before forgetting the reasons for its own negativity. The Housekeeper and her son have nothing but affection for the old professor, and he’ll never be able to reciprocate with a relationship deeper than what can be built in a handful of minutes.
This isn’t a book really where spoilers are appropriate. If you know the trajectory of the opening paragraphs, you know where the conclusion will inevitably land. It’s not as simple as the book being predictable. It’s more like the book is inevitable.
Towards the end, the professor deteriorates to the point that even his current situation of assisted living is untenable and he’s taken into permanent care. The Housekeeper tells his sister-in-law that she’ll visit regularly, to be met with a kind of baffled surprise. ‘Why?’, she asks, before (not unkindly) pointing out, ‘He can never forget me, but he can never remember you’.
I know this sounds like an intensely sad book, but it’s not really. It’s certainly a sad scenario, but one that is still full of warmth and affection. Maybe in the end, for some people, life can be all about the transient moments.
18 – The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
This book is like all the Normandy interactions of Mass Effect, wrapped up in the crew-bonding moments of Firefly, with a hot sauce of the occasional flashes of companionable tranquillity you’ll find in the rare quiet moments in the Expanse. It’s what you’d get if you turned Stardew Valley into a science fiction novel. It’s a warm bowl of soup in the form of a book.
Lots of books have likeable characters, banding together through unlikely events. Lots of books have chemistry between the protagonists. This isn’t a book that’s doing anything particularly unusual in any way. It’s neither exceptionally innovative in its framing nor ambitious in its storytelling. What it has though is an appreciation of ‘stillness’ –the simple act of observing the intimacy of nothing much happening at close quarters. It’s an extended meditation on the second-hand restorative power that comes with being permitted to see people caring and being cared for.
One of the things that most bothers me about modern society is that so many parts of it have lost the ability to look for the best in others. We’ve abandoned a collaborative search for the common ground. I’m not being misty-eyed about a past that never existed with that – as a whole this has never been something humans have been particularly capable of at scale. But it feels more and more like we’ve abandoned the shared sense that it’s something to stive for. Instead, we’re increasingly tribal. Increasingly polarized. Increasingly focused on ‘punching nazis’ or ‘owning the libs’. In the performative theatre of modern discourse, conversation is a zero sum game. The common ground has become a battlefield.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is a book about people from all kinds of backgrounds with all kinds of opinions. And they manage to negotiate within themselves and between others a state of agreeable compromise. They ‘get on’ with each other, in challenging circumstances. They give and take. They accept that all social rights come with social responsibilities. They see the best in each other, because they want to believe in the people around them. And in that act of believing people are fundamentally good, they find abundant evidence to support that belief.
This is a book then about how I wish the world really was. I’d like to live inside the Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet because it seems very far removed from the shitshow world in which we all actually live.
19 – Mexican Gothic
I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that has slid so readily and so easily over my mind without ever actually penetrating its surface. Honestly, I know I really didn’t like it but also I don’t have anything approaching enough of a memory of any individual part to be explicit about why. It’s a book that has me reaching for the old Nietzsche quote – ‘It’s hard enough for me to remember my opinion without also remembering the reason behind it’.
Mexican Gothic a tedious chore of a book where 250 pages of outright banality culminate in 50 moderately more exciting pages of not very much. It’s a 300 page book that feels like a thousand page tome. I say ‘read’ here but this was an audiobook I was listening to on the way into work and back, and it is so dull that I was over stimulated, in comparison, by staring blankly into space.
That’s how Mexican Gothic felt to me – a book so dull that it can’t even compete with commuting.
Here’s what Mexican Gothic is. It’s Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Again. Except it’s been bound up in 50s Mexicana alongside the Goodreads promise of ‘omg a twist that will justify all the time you spent reading it’. A young socialite is sent by her father to investigate the circumstances of her recently married cousin, who has sent a troubling letter from her new marital home. Her job is to visit, investigate, and determine if there’s a reason for her cousin to be brought back to the city. She arrives to find herself in a house marked by decay and neglect, where an extremely weird familial dynamic holds court. She discovers that there’s more to the house, and the family, than first impressions would imply. And, as she delves deeper, she has ever greater reason to fear for her cousin, and herself.
It’s actually a pretty strong premise, once you accept that – as I say – it’s mostly Rebecca. Again. It’s very prettily written – the author clearly has talent. It’s kind of unfortunate really that such nicely constructed words are wasted on such aimless, meandering content. It’s occasionally evocative. But it is always dull. When the glimmer of the writing manages to illuminate the turgid, vapid story you find that all it does is highlight how little there is to it. The author directs your attention with flowery, byzantine turns of phrases but your attention somehow never ends up anywhere worthwhile or proportionate to the verbiage. It’s like someone transmuted Russell Brand into a novel.
I’ve written before in various places about the proportionality of tension. In that I mean that there’s a certain mix you need to achieve a cathartic payoff in a story. If you want people to coil like a spring, you need to master the rhythm of timing. One page of tension followed by one page of release just doesn’t work. Tension needs to ramp up and ramp up and ramp up before it’s released over the right amount of time. The last season of Game of Thrones is a masterclass in how not to do it.
Mexican Gothic goes way too far the other way. It spends 250 pages attempting to build tension by immersing you in a creepy, weirdly unsettling environment. But it keeps on doing it way beyond the point it can be effective because in the end nothing is actually all that creepy or all that weird. Instead of an elastic band taut and ready to snap we get a piece of tired, overstimulated rubber that flops disappointingly. It reminds me of Jason Mendoza in the Good Place, whose idea of hell is a party where he’s constantly waiting for the bass to drop… but it never drops. By the time the book gets to anything as interesting as an incident, you’ve already stopped caring. Or at least, that was the experience I had of it.
As I say, it’s a shame. It’s got some lovely writing in it. That writing just deserves to be in a better book. And the cover, which is stunning, should be repurposed for something less tediously unnecessary.
20 – The Invisible Library
I enjoyed reading the Invisible Library, but mostly because it is an absolutely undemanding read. The literary equivalent of a bag of Doritos – effortlessly consumed. But really the most I can say about it is ‘this sure was a book’. I didn’t at all resent the time I spent with it, but it’s probably not how I would chose to spend that time if I had the chance of a do-over. It’s a fun, easy read and it’s hard to say all that much more about it.
But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean I won’t.
The setup of the book seems like a smart missile designed to explode inside my own heart. There’s an invisible library, worked by mysterious librarians who seek out rare and remarkable books across the multiverse (very Discworldly, actually – the whole setup just screams L-Space). Our protagonist Irene is a junior Librarian, sent into a dangerously chaotic world to capture just such a book. That world is infected by the Fae – the Fair Folk – who are capable of wielding their glamour to bewitch the normal humans of the alternate reality (again, very Discworldly – the main antagonist wouldn’t have been out of place in Lords and Ladies). She is paired up with a novice she must instruct, and constantly in conflict with a more senior librarian who is undermining the mission for reasons of her own. Working in her favours is that she can speak the Language, which allows her to issue instructions to objects around her. She can open locks and animate statues, with the strength of the effect being dependant on how much the object wants to obey (shit, was this actually a Discworld book all along? This has morphic resonance written all over it). Turns out, of course, that getting the book is more challenging than she may have hoped.
And as I say, it’s good, honest fun. But it’s also a book that makes a big swing in its pitch and doesn’t really connect with the follow through.
The Discworld parallels above are actually important, because they capture a lot of what I felt about the Invisible Library. It feels like a first draft of the Discworld book someone would write if the franchise was gifted to a second author. A lot of the elements are there, as is the philosophy, and many of the fundamental storytelling devices. And if it had been exquisitely drafted and redrafted like your average Discworld novel I think it could have been exceptional. It just feels a bit thin though – a lot of promising ideas that are never really fleshed out to the extent they need to be. The story is there. The humanity – maybe not quite so much. And definitely what is missing is the spark of genius that animates a Discworld book.
The Invisible Library, more than anything else, feels a bit like the kind of cake you make after following the recipe book of a famous chef. The right ingredients are there. They’re in approximately the same proportions. They went through the same alchemical process of cookery. The inconsistent and bland facsimile that comes out of your oven is a pale imitation of the original. Some recipes are difficult to follow because they require something ineffable – something that doesn’t survive the process of being broken down and pinned to the page. The Invisible Library is a cake made from a Discworld flavoured recipe and – yeah, it’s not the same thing at all.
I should be clear that I don’t think it’s explicitly the intention of the author to produce counterfeit Pratchett. I just think that’s what has happened.
But to be fair, this is the first entry in a longer series and I don’t think the Colour of Magic (the first Discworld book) is up to all that much either. There’s promise here, certainly. The question to myself though is whether that promise is sufficient to invest my time in any of the follow-up books.