21 – The Binding
Pauline is a little upset at me about the Binding. She describes it as a six out of five book – the highlight of her 2022 reading. I describe it as ‘very good’, but apparently that’s not quite enough. So bear in mind that it has been established as canon that I am wrong about this one. Or at least, not right enough to pass the exit interview. I did enjoy it a lot – it’s a kind of grungy mash-up of Wuthering Heights and the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That’s a powerful combination that is delivered through some genuinely skilful writing. But I didn’t enjoy it to the level that would keep Pauline satisfied. So bear in mind, she has a more glowing perspective that you might want to take into account.
The Binding is a kind of alternate magical history book where the act of making books is primarily reserved to those with the occult power to steal memories. In its most honourable form, ‘binding’ is a kind of necessary medical intervention – a way for the gifted few to ease the suffering of the afflicted majority. They can take away hurts and pains by simply excising them from memory. At the end, those so treated are better people because, literally, their life experience is edited in a more agreeable manner. As part of this process, a book is created that describes the missing memories. Such books are bound in beautiful covers and locked away in the secure vaults of this strange craft’s practitioners. This is where we find Emmett Farmer, a young man who has become estranged from his family and is sent to learn the Binder’s art – to study under Sedaris, an old woman who treats binding is a sacred activity that helps broken people to live again.
However, there’s a strain of Binding that has less to do with the alarmingly extreme therapy of rewriting personality and has more in common with the titillation of pornography. Binders who capture the abuse of power by wealthy men, effectively lobotomising the victims of trauma so they can be traumatized afresh. Binders who capture the experiences of the desperate so they can be sold on as entertainment. Binders who become very wealthy in the process of serving the excesses of powerful people. This practice enables a particularly horrifying form of abuse. Certain parties fetishise the opportunity to have a ‘fresh page’ papered over the minds of their victims, permitting them to explore infinite variations of their unpleasant appetites.
I’ve sometimes said to people that I think Groundhog Day is one of the subtlest horror movies ever to have been made. Not because Phil gets stuck in a time loop and that’s kind of horrifying if you try to calculate how long he spent in it. More because of what you don’t see in the edited highlight reel of his temporal imprisonment. You just know shit got dark after a while. Living with no consequences, and trapped an existential nightmare from which there is no awakening, I don’t believe for one moment he didn’t explore all the darker impulses of humanity. I’m sure there’s no person in Gobbler’s Knob that he didn’t brutalize in some fashion, at some time. All because – the next day – all sins are forgiven. The only memory is his. When staring at the bleakness of an untextured infinity where nothing new can happen, it seems inevitable that he’d find himself drawn to the increasingly transgressive novelty he can explore within himself.
The Binding is an exploration of what unpleasant people could do with the power to enforce selective amnesia and it’s not exactly optimistic about the contours of the human soul. But also, the thesis it constructs about the nature of abuse isn’t wholly convincing simply as a result of the pragmatics of binding itself. Sure, the victim forgets – but the evidence remains, and the rest of the world remembers. Some can cloak themselves in their privilege and construct extensive vaults of their own misdeeds, but the lack of a victim’s memory is not the same thing as the lack of a victim, and absolutely not the same thing as the forgiveness of a crime.
You see this problem in Emmett himself. No spoilers here, because it’s right there on the back of the book, but Emmett discovers that there’s a book with his name on it in his new mentor’s vault. I won’t say what’s in it, but suffice to say there are a lot of people with whom he has regular contact who have grievances with his conduct. In the act of him being Bound, I don’t understand where those grievances went. Am I supposed to believe that the act of someone forgetting heals the wounds they have inflicted? The ease with which we are supposed to believe forgiveness is a function of memory is a little hard to accept. If someone did me an injury and then went to a Binder to forget it because it hurt their sense of self, I’d likely not rush to absolve them of their guilt.
(Getting into spoiler territory here, so for those that don’t want any hints of what’s to come please stop reading now. The Binding is very good and worth your time, bye! Also avoid any of the tags about the book on Goodreads because they’ll also spoil what I’m about to spoil)
We eventually find that, unsurprisingly, Emmett’s transgressions are not sufficiently grave to make him dislikeable as a protagonist. If they are crimes, they’re crimes of the heart. Or crimes of transgression against societal norms. Of what happens when someone’s authentic self is at odds with what is expected of them. It’s actually a little refreshing in that sense to find a book that is stark enough to remind us what naked bigotry actually looks like – I think that’s important in a society that is increasingly diluting the power of historically effective ‘corrective’ labels. Emmett’s binding is a consequence of intolerance, rather than transgression. But it’s an intolerance that is ingrained into his social context and I fail to see how anyone involved could treat him with any kindness simply because he doesn’t remember. Everyone else does.
That’s part of why I didn’t like the book quite as much as Pauline does. But the other part is that the book is a love story that feels simultaneously critical to the characters and yet ‘emotionally tacked on’. Essentially a large part of the book is about young men swooning and fainting atop each other, like they’ve both got some kind of dangerous balancing problem. Perhaps a side-effect of binding is that it does something unpleasant to your inner ear. Or perhaps, in the style of bodice-ripper romance, everyone in the book is wearing dangerously tight corsets that cause breathing problems. It all feels a bit unnecessarily Jane Eyre, or dredged from the interiors of the Pickwick Papers. All the stumbles and accidental physical contact and long lingering looks are effective storytelling devices, but that’s just it – they felt like storytelling devices. For such a scandalous, passionate affair of the heart it didn’t seem like there was all that much passion involved. We are told that our star-crossed lovers are engaged in a breath-taking love affair. But I don’t think that’s something we should have need to have been told. It’s like the author isn’t confident of her own ability to sell the emotional side of it and is left insisting, ‘No, listen – like, they’re totally hot for each other. I can’t tell you how much they’re into this. Seriously, let me impress this upon you – they’re like, super in love!’.
It’s not that it’s executed upon terribly – we’re not talking Anakin and Padme’s soporific flirting over the coarseness of sand and how it gets everywhere – it just feels inelegant in a book that is, fundamentally, about the power of storytelling. It is a touch reductive to rely on the tropes of archaic fiction to sell the intricacy of the romance. Or at least, that’s how it came across to me.
22 – A Closed and Common Orbit
Becky Chambers is a treasure. There is something so… warming about her books. They feel comforting. They’re soothing. I enthused a lot about The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and I said that it just felt quite cozy, like you’re getting a chance to watch nice people being nice. But the stakes in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet were quite small and the plot – such as it is – was very much a secondary concern. Stuff happens, but that’s not what the book is about. It’s about how people behave when stuff happens. The focus is very sharply on the personal – on the intimate character moments of acceptance and rejection.
That’s not true so much here, because a Closed and Common Orbit is a lot darker in its tone than its predecessor.
Before we get too far into this, I’m going to bring up my only negative point about the book – it is unfair of the author to make us care about the crew of the Wayfarer and then pivot to mostly peripheral characters for the follow-up. This is the second in the Wayfarers series, and so I was expecting to return to the ship of which I had become so enamored. The connection between the two books is very limited though – a shared universe, a thin tenuous personal connection, and that’s it. This isn’t what I was wanting from what I had thought of as a sequel. It’s not inherently a bad thing. It’s just not what I wanted.
The second book carries on pretty much where the first one left off, but it’s like a camera trick in that it pulls away from the scene to hide the transition to a new context. It’s like an unbroken tracking shot that subtly shifts its focus. When it zooms back in, you’re somewhere new and in the company of characters for which you only have a kind of second-hand affection. But fear not – you’re going to like these characters. You’re going to like them a lot.
I had the same reaction every time I opened a new Expanse novel. I’d meet some new bozo I’d never heard of before. ‘Who is this chump?’, I’d fume. ‘I don’t care about them. I don’t think I’ll like this book’. Reliably though by the end of their introductory chapter I was invested in how they were going to intersect with the crew of the Rocinante. Here though it’s a little different, because you’re not going to see your old buddies. They’re off doing something else and they never invited you to come along. They went off without you. Left you behind.
That’s okay, I didn’t want to go on an adventure anyway. I’m not crying, you’re crying.
But stick with our new characters, and you’re rewarded. The first book wasn’t an accident – Becky Chambers can write lovable characters like nobody’s business. And what she’s added in to the second book is a pair of intersecting storylines that set a background context that seems impossible to cohere with her style. It’s hard to imagine how she is going to wrench a feeling of joy from such infertile soil. The story is told in two directions – forwards and in flashback – until the two converge. It’s done very skilfully – it’s a gradual exploration of mystifying motivations that becomes clearer and clearer with every page. Really it’s two stories of a different kind of survival, of two different flavours of trauma, and how at the intersection point both stories end up containing the lessons through which the other can be made whole. Chambers is also very good at titling books, because that’s exactly what our two characters are – in a common orbit as they become ever closer. They rotate together, around a shared experience of being disconnected from their own origins.
It’s an interesting approach in a series of books I’ve heard described as ‘cosy sci-fi’. This book feels a lot less cosy. It never feels cold – it’s too invested in its premise of ‘nice people being nice’ – but it feels sometimes like it’s because it’s never really making you come to terms with the ice in the story. Pepper, one of the main characters, is clearly suffering from some heavy duty PTSD, but you never get brought into that particular orbit. You’re always at a distance, informed only in a throwaway line that she occasionally breaks down into phases of catatonic terror as she recalls her upbringing. That’s not for you, though. You’re held at arms length. You can observe, but you can’t get close to it. Not because the book is patronising you, but rather it’s like it’s trying to shield you. It knows it can’t tell the story it does without at least noting the consequence of childhood trauma. It would be disrespectful to the characters, if nothing else. It doesn’t want you dwelling on it though. It wants you to focus on the positive aspects of recovery, not the occasional backsliding that goes along with any healing.
I don’t know if I like that aspect of it so much, if I’m honest. I think it could be a little bit more frank about how often being ‘well adjusted’ is a mask and how mental scars may heal over but they never disappear. The worst that we see directly in the story is Pepper being a touch snappy at someone else during a conversation. But even then it feels a little manufactured. ‘I’m on your side’, she says, ‘but don’t ever say that to me again’. I’ve said nastier things to people for nothing more egregious than suddenly stopping in front of me in a busy street.
I guess that’s why I’d never make it as one of Becky Chambers’ protagonists.
An excellent, lovely book even if it wasn’t quite the one I was hoping it would be.
23 – The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
This is another book I didn’t like enough for Mrs Meeple’s tastes. I thought it was basically fine – a most okay book that absolutely filled up the time for which I was reading it. A generous three stars, I think.
I think what’s perhaps most interesting for me is how it made me think about how my aphantasia impacts on my reading, and how in a lot of cases I just feel cold with books that leave others delighted.
For those that haven’t heard this term before, aphantasia is the inability to form mental pictures. I found out about it a few years ago. It blew my mind wide open when I was told – for the first time – that people can visualize things in their head. I can’t do that – not in any meaningful sense. The best I can do is conjure brief, transient flashes of colour and shape. If someone says ‘imagine an apple’, with some mental exertion I can get a quarter-second flash of something green and spherical. The more I try to hold it in mind, the more it slips away. And yet, I am told that most people can not only visualise an apple but they can imagine it from different angles, as if it’s right there in front of them. They can change its colour, its freshness. They can imagine things that have never happened and see the events play out in front of them.
Seriously, it’s like y’all have a god-damned superpower and you don’t even know it.
My mind works differently. Almost all of my thoughts are narrative. When I think back on a significant period of my childhood I don’t see it ‘like a video recording’ as it’s been described to me. I perceive it as a series of descriptive elements. ‘Okay, I am standing by a car. The car is red. I have a schoolbag. It looks overcast.’. That kind of thing. I have, in technical terms, ‘poor autobiographical memory;’. It’s all just words. Not a damn thing more.
So, when I encounter a book full of undoubtedly lovely places and enchanting imagery I don’t find it particularly interesting. Pauline asked, when we were talking about the book, if I had an image of the Watchmaker’s studio and all its intricate constructions. Nope, not a bit of it. I got the sense of the location but none of its deeper aesthetics. I’m told, by other people, that when they read a book it’s like a movie playing in their privacy of their heads.
It is genuinely mind-boggling. I can’t do that at all, and neither can around 2% of the population if the scant academic research on the subject is correct. Seriously – ask the people around you in your life. There is a decent chance at least one of them will say ‘Wait, what? You can see things in your head?’
So, when I read a book that tries to sell itself to me on its descriptive text, it’s trying to embed itself within infertile soil. What I appreciate in a book is elegant language and the clever expression of insights and ideas. I like books that try to say something, rather than books that try to transport the reader to somewhere imaginary. I can’t board that train. I just – neurologically – don’t have any means to buy the ticket.
What I’m saying then is that the Watchmaker of Filigree Street is perfectly okay as a book in which some things happen, and a reasonably interesting premise is competently explored. It’s well written, but not to the point I found it remarkable on that score. From my perspective that’s all it was. The imagery that is undoubtedly evocative just can’t kindle anything in my mind. I can understand the glint of light on the cogs of a clockwork marvel, but only abstractly. I don’t see it. I don’t inhabit the scene. If I’m a little urchin boy pressing my nose up against the window of a fabulous place, it doesn’t even matter because the window is painted black and the curtains have been pulled shut.
Also it’s night, and someone has put a blindfold on me.
I think a lot of the really popular books I have read and haven’t liked have probably received excoriating reviews because of this element. I hated Mexican Gothic, for example, because it’s basically all description. A more visual thinker may have gotten more out of it than I did. To be fair, they could scarcely have gotten less.
So I am fairly indifferent to this particular book. It just might not be the book’s fault.
24 – The Unwomanly Face of War
Maybe worth a warning here that this book is a record of trauma, and while the review only ever approaches it through a telescope it might still contain some upsetting content.
‘You ask me: what is happiness? I answer… to suddenly find a living man among the dead’
Some books are going to stay with you for the rest of your life.
You read them, and you come away from the experience changed. Perhaps they’re beautifully written and introduce you to a new appreciation of the power of words. Perhaps they are thought-provoking works of genius, revealing the contours of human experience in greater clarity than before. Perhaps they are instructional and teach you something valuable about how to do something important. In my experience, they tend to be rare but instantly incandescent. They explode into your life, dividing it into two new periods. The ‘before’ and the ‘after’.
Sometimes though it’s not because the book is especially wise, or elegant, or useful. Sometimes it’s because it’s pure and raw and difficult and heart-breaking. It’s something that rings authentically true and as such it’s upsetting and horrible but feels so important that you can’t stop reading. That’s what the Unwomanly Face of War is – a book that feels like it has broken something inside me.
I make no secret of the fact that books often make me cry. Video games too. Some movies. It’s cathartic, but it’s usually a kind of ‘surface’ emotional response. It’s a shallow kind of empathy – a learned reaction to narrative cues that rarely burrows in any deeper. It’s easy to feel attached to fictional characters – they’re designed to fulfil a story goal and they have no need for the complex messiness of the real world. Real life accounts of real world people are – at least to a sociopath like me – more difficult to care about because they have all the ambiguity that comes from living in a complicated context full of compromise. People aren’t flawless heroes or irredeemable villains. Everyone contains multitudes.
So, when I say that I wept at this book I’m not saying it in the same way that I say ‘I wept at Life is Strange’ or ‘I wept at Sayonara Wild Hearts’. Those were laser focused experiences designed around the goal of making my eyes leak. Here, I’m an irrelevant observer – my emotional response is a distant byproduct of real tragedy. It’s just the stories of old women, recounting the exploits of themselves as young girls, in the face of the grinding horror of a destructive war. Each of them telling the story of how, when the Nazis came to invade their country, they picked up arms to defend their motherland. They tell brief, mesmerising stories – few of them more than a page long – about what it was like for them and the people around them. The author, Svetlana Alexievich, won a Nobel prize partially on the basis of this book and it’s easy to see why. In itself it’s a work of remarkable biographical excavation – thousands of hours of conversations with hundreds of women across the length and breadth of Russia and its bordering countries. It’s an important work of curation, serving to give brief flashes of insight into representative moments of horror, and love, and hate and triumph. But it’s also written in stark, clear terms that never shy away from the experiences of the women documented. It is searing in its clarity, and that’s what gives it its phenomenal power.
Alexievich points out in the early parts of the book that the story of war is primarily the story of men. Of facts. Of logistics and statistics. This number of soldiers fought this number of soldiers and took this amount of land thanks to the strategies of this general versus that general. Studs Terkel wrote a fantastic oral history of World War 2 from the perspective of the American troops that fought in the conflict. While that book pulls the focus away from the leaders, it keeps it mostly on the men who went to war. It’s a powerful book – a compelling work of scholarship deserving of study. But it still follows the contours of expectation – that war is the pursuit of men. The first book I read this year was A Thousand Ships, and it purported to tell a woman’s history of the siege of Troy. ‘The casualties of war aren’t just the ones that die’, is the core of its thesis.
But what happens when a woman’s history of World War 2 does focus on the women who actually went to war? Not in terms of serving the larger war effort in the background (such as in A Game of Birds and Wolves) or in terms of serving in largely support roles in caring professions. But women who actually picked up guns and shot Nazis in response to an existential threat against their own country? That’s what this book documents, and the stories are heart-breaking. Even when they’re triumphant, they’re tinged with horror. Even when they are stories of goodness, the context of suffering makes them terrible.
When the British and Americans went to fight in World War 2, it was to strains of ‘Over there’. Over there, over there, send the word over there’.
The thing for these girls though is that it wasn’t over there. It was happening everywhere around them. The war for them was something they had to fight, because the alternative was oblivion. At one point one of the women telling the story talks about how she wanted the war to keep on going, purely because she dreaded finding out what was left behind her. ‘They all wanted to go home, and they were afraid to go. No one knew what awaited them there’.
Many of the girls who volunteered did so out of a hate for the fascists, because they’d watched their families killed in front of them. Houses burned down with the occupants inside. Whole villages slaughtered out of the suspicion that inhabitants had been working with partisan forces. German tanks rolling over children as they tried to escape to the forests. Torture. Rape. All the brutal indignities that could be inflicted by the worst kind of marauding monsters.
At a time when the Russian forces didn’t have guns, or uniforms, or tanks, or ammunition they went out and fought because there was no alternative. When men returned from the front broken and brutalized, these women looked at the gradual emptying of the country and asked ‘Who next, if not me?’. Girls – children, really – of sixteen and seventeen heading out to become snipers and artillery commanders and sappers and surgeons. And then returning as young women, several years later, changed irrevocably and for the worse by the experience and the horrors they encountered. And yet – few regrets. Plenty of sorrows, plenty of sadness, but hardly any of them who wouldn’t have gladly shouldered those traumas again should the same situation come along. Some of it was the naivety of Stalinist fervour, even in a country where heroes are shot for being traitors on a daily basis. Mostly though, many of these young women seem to just be forged from a different kind of steel. Ukrainians, Belarusians, Romanians and more – just tempered better for adversity as a result of the perpetual hard winter of Stalinism.
This is a hard book to read, because you can’t go more than a couple of pages without finding something that forces you to screw up your eyes against the horror. Or a poignant aside that expresses an almost unbearable dignity in the face of the greatest indignity at all. These aren’t boastful stories. There’s no boasting in here. Just… a humanity I don’t think I could find in the same circumstances. One of the women briefly quoted says this:
‘I have no big decorations. Only medals. I don’t know whether you would be interested n my life, but I would like to tell it to somebody’. The author writes of how the more she interviewed these women, the more of them contacted her. Hundreds desperate for the simple honour of having someone listen to their stories and write them down. So many, in fact, that it’s clear the author gets a kind of second hand PTSD from the responsibility of recording them.
As is often the case, the accomplishments of women give way to the stories of men, and the treatment these women received upon returning from the front is predictably awful. They’re scorned as ‘frontline whores’, who ran away to war to tempt husbands with their ‘young c—-‘. They fight with a different flavour of risk – a man who loses a leg in war is a hero and still a viable marriage prospect. A woman in the same circumstances is unmarriable. And remember, these are basically still children – they still dream of boys and nice clothes and chocolates after the war. They gave up their brief innocence to be rewarded by societal scorn. ‘My best years were spent there. Burned up. Afterward I aged quickly’.
One woman talks of her time as a clerk, taking photographs of the battlefields. Journalists would often contact her – they wanted photos of the dead, lined up like cordwood, so they could sell the tragedy of war to their readers. She didn’t have those to give because that wasn’t who she was documenting things for. It was for the soldiers, and they didn’t want that. ‘When someone was killed, the boys would ask me, ‘Have you got him alive?’. We wanted to see him alive… smiling’.
God, this book. I wanted to stop reading it two dozen times, but it always felt disrespectful. These women were brave enough to share these stories, of these experiences. How cowardly would it have been for me to turn away from it just because I couldn’t bear to keep on reading?
I don’t know if I would recommend you read it. It’s too sad. It’s too upsetting. It’s too stark a look into something that is too fucking unfair. But if you do want to read a book that is going to absolutely burn its way permanently into your synapses… there are few books that have left me feeling quite so hollowed out at the end. Unending human misery is here, but so is bravery and valour and the stories of a generation of brave women who have – as is often the case – been written out of the history books.
I’d say this is a five star book… but what would that even mean in this context? Not a damn thing.
25 Matrix
Matrix by Lauren Groff is a book I am happy to describe as ‘intricately written’, but I’m a little less convinced that it’s written in an enjoyable way. It’s a little too avant-garde in its structure and loosey-goosey in its adherence to conventional measures of punctuation. Without the anchor point of quotation marks, I often found myself unmoored in the story – I have probably read this book, on average, twice – as my eyes slid off the text I found it necessary to go back a few pages and begin again. It’s an aggravating indulgence. Cormac Macarthy once said that there’s no need to clutter up your page with marks if the writing is clear. I’ve only read The Road of his books but I’d say that maybe he needs to consider whether his writing is genuinely clear enough to pass the hypothetical threshold at which he ascends beyond the need to adhere to basic norms of readability.
Anyway, Lauren Groff doesn’t use punctuation marks and I really think she needs to. An interesting, maybe even beautiful, book is rendered obnoxious by their absence.
Seriously, what kind of arrogance do you need to think…
You know what, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter!
Anyway, Matrix is the completely invented fictional biography of Marie de France, abbess of a fictional abbey and self-made maven of ecclesiastical intrigue. She is banished to the abbey when she is a teenager, with Elanor of Aquitaine sending her to take religious vows because she is too large and too ugly to be anything other than a nun. She finds herself arriving at an abbey in poverty, drenched in famine and in plague. Marie lacks any belief in God, and has no fondness for the sisterhood in which she finds herself. But eventually she learns to make do with her situation, before eventually taking full control of the institution to turn it into her own personal fiefdom. She builds what is essentially a feminist reinvention of Catholicism within the stone walls of the abbey, protecting it from the degradation of the men beyond through the use of constructed labyrinths, occasional violent defences, and the growing reputation associated with her personage. And amidst it all, there are a lot of horny nuns.
Like, considerably more than I expected when I started reading.
A few years ago I read a Canticle for Leibowitz and it instantly became one of my favourite books – partially because it is exquisitely written but largely because of how it managed to sell the grand work of ecclesiastical service as something genuinely greater than the individual. The core of the Canticle is that the core entity at the heart of a brotherly order of monks is the monastery itself. Matrix is much like that – as Marie grows to accept her fate and eventually becomes willingly bound to it you learn a lot about what might motivate someone – even an atheist – to this kind of lifelong devotion. It’s in the connections between the people and the serving of a grand goal designed to be pursued beyond a human lifetime.
One particularly fascinating passage of the book talks of the power of the prayer room – where the breath of the nuns raised in prayer condense on the walls before returning to the air as mist that is breathed in once more by the sisters. The prayer room, by virtue of these small physical intimacies, acts to purify and intensify prayer – perhaps making it loud enough for God to actually hear. There are a lot of moments like that, looking beyond the narrative to spend a little time brushing up against the philosophy of religion. Marie herself in these asides is something of an iconoclast – perhaps even an apostate – because she doesn’t accept the traditional subservient role of an abbess, and certainly not the expectation that women should in any way be the weaker sex in worship. As her reputation grows, so does her ego and it puts her in constant conflict with the wider church.
Or…
It would do that if Marie was actually written like a believable character. Her fervour is such that families flee in the night to avoid her wrath. Her diocesan superiors cower in fear of her excesses. She has spies everywhere, and they keep her abreast of all happenings before anyone else finds out. The conflicts that she creates are resolved without difficulty because there is never any sense that Marie is genuinely challenged by anything that happens. When she starts giving mass for example, many of the novices and older nuns are furious – but not furious enough to report on it when asked. Elanor warns Marie constantly of the danger she is putting herself in, but that danger never manifests. There’s no… friction… to the story. And as such it never really feels like the stakes matter. And because the stakes don’t matter, it feels to me like the accomplishments outlined don’t either.
I did enjoy reading Matrix – it is a pleasant story told well. But it’s told well because there’s no challenge in its way. There are no great trials or complexities to be navigated. There is Marie, and her iron will, and nothing else.