36 – Gideon the Ninth
‘Lesbian necromancers in space’, is the popular way people describe Gideon the Ninth and it is completely, utterly misleading. There isn’t much in the way of lesbianism except in inference. The fact it is set in space is basically utterly irrelevant. Necromancers, on the other hand – yeah, those are deep into the bones of the story.
If I was going to coin a phrase to sell the book, it would be ‘A black magic murder escape room’, because that’s more than anything else what it is. Gideon is serving as the cavalier of the ‘Ninth House’, an ominous faction of sinister death nuns who serve as the guardians of the Locked Tomb, within which lies a dread enemy of the Necromancer King. He is the first Undying Lord, who raised the denizens of the house from undeath into life. Gideon is the servant of Harrowhawk the Ninth, necromancer prime of the house and a preternaturally gifted worker of bone magic. They solve mysteries! They fight crimes! They hate each other!
I really did enjoy Gideon the Ninth – it is a lot of fun and surprisingly funny for something so gruesomely joyful in its macabre trappings. Gideon is an extremely likable protagonist and her ‘I’m so sick of all the skeleton shit’ personality makes her a great character to show the reader around this weird setting. And weird it is, because like Dune and like Ancillary Justice this is a book that couldn’t care less about settling you into the tale. Even by the end of it I was perpetually confused by the vast cast of characters, the intricate relationship of the nine houses, and the nature of the universe. It’s like how I imagine it feels to start watching the international news for the first time – a mystifying blur of people you’re supposed to know, doing things you’re supposed to understand, with consequences you’re supposed to perceive. Or perhaps it’s more like being dropped into a random episode from season six of an obscure television show that has forsaken popular appeal for sheer density of nerdery.
Yeah, that’s it. Imagine Babylon 5 had fewer aliens and more skeletons, and that its vocabulary had emerged over four complex seasons of political infighting and internal mythology to result in a forensic system of grisly necromantic magic. And then your best friend comes along and says ‘I just got episode s04e18, but it’s in Japanese with Norwegian subtitles. Let’s watch it anyway’.
It’s not an impossible book to get into, but it’s one where you need to accept that you’re expected to feel mystified for large portions of it. The payoff is that Gideon’s own impatience with her surroundings is an effective conduit for you to break into the mysteries of the storytelling.
The nature of its storytelling keeps it from being an easy recommendation, but I did pretty much instantly buy the sequel when I’d finished. So that’s usually a good sign.
Don’t read it for the lesbians though, you’ll only be disappointed. For a book so happy to wallow in some of the most genuinely horrifying descriptions of corpse desecration I can imagine… it is very chaste when it comes to any hint of anything else. That said, as you have probably guessed from this description, there is plenty of boning.
37 – Record of a Spaceborn Few
Becky Chambers has become one of my prized discoveries of this year’s reading project. All three of the books of hers I have read so far are wonderful – hopeful and optimistic. Cosy sci-fi indeed. Chambers seems to love people, which isn’t unusual I suppose. What is unusual is that she can even communicate that love to a career misanthrope. I don’t love people. I don’t even like people. It’s a remarkable talent to cut through that and make me feel optimistic about a shared sense of humanity.
All of her books though do have a feature that might be offputting, and that is ‘barely anything ever happens’. They’re books about an aesthetic, a context, or a moment. They’re books about people, not books about plots. They’re ‘a mood’ as I believe the kids might say. And Record of a Spaceborn Few is, again, a book about a vibe.
In this third book we see the story make its way to the Fleet – an armada of the ancient generation ships that left a dying earth to find a new home amongst the stars. Along the way, the denizens found themselves building a collective society that thrived in the void. Even after encountering alien life and finding possible new homes on new planets, the Exodans (the humans who struck out into the unknown) still preserve their way of life. And that way of life is the focus of the stories within – a set of interlocking vignettes that explore collectivism, belonging, and the occasionally corrosive cultural assimilation that is inevitable when isolated societies interact with more advanced – socially and technologically – cultures. Much of the book has the central theme of ‘holding fast to what we believe’, without the insularity we usually associate with isolationist cultures. And yes, as usual, it is very good and it will warm even the blackest, cynical little heart from the inside out.
The Wayfarers series does though have this irritating habit of abandoning its characters at the point you want to know more about them. It feels weird to spend an entire book coming to see each protagonist in all their broken glory, only for you to never get to see them again. I like that the books do interconnect at the peripheries – a kind of ‘Strength of Weak Ties’ effect that lets it explore a complex universe from multiple viewpoints. But I already live a life of fragile friendships and unforgiving geography. I would prefer if the books didn’t double down on that by making me care about these wonderful characters only for the river of time to sweep everyone away. It gives a melancholy tinge to the books that I don’t think is intentional. I am still yearning to return to the crew I met in the first book and find out what they’re up to. None of the stories in Wayfarers feel finished in a way that permits closure. That’s frustrating.
That’s the price you pay though for a series of books that have an almost magical, soothing, effect on the psyche. I am keeping the final book in the series in reserve for the next time I encounter an Unwomanly Face of War or something similarly upsetting. It’s the literary balm that I keep next to the razor blades, because I know it’s going to make me feel better after I end up cutting myself too deeply.
38 – My Dark Vanessa
Mmmm.
I have never read Lolita, even though I have tried a couple of times. It’s just a book that I have a hard time with because every part of me clenches shut when I make the attempt. Fundamentally I don’t want to read it – I appreciate it is (I am told) a beautifully written piece of genuine literature, but I still don’t want to read a book about the grooming and molestation of a child. I especially don’t want to read it when it takes the form of an extended, self-serving narration from the abuser. There are enough demons in my head already, I don’t need another one whispering in my ear.
But I thought My Dark Vanessa would be worth reading because it flips the script – it’s written from the perspective of the abused as she comes to terms with multiple allegations made against her former teacher (and abuser). For the largest majority of her life she has thought of her (15f) relationship with Stane (42m) as being broadly positive – something that marked her out as special when a grown man of some minor accomplishment sought her out for, essentially, ‘not being like other girls’. What begins with occasional small transgressions progresses into a fully sexual relationship, which eventually comes to destroy Vanessa’s educational career and ultimately derails her life. Even as an adult she stays in contact with Stane, being a voice of support when further allegations regarding his appetites start to emerge on social media.
The problem with the book – and I think this is an issue with telling a story of this nature rather than a fault in the novel – is that any real self-awareness and laying of blame happens as a late epiphany in the tale. The structure of storytelling means that gratification needs to be delayed – the hero’s journey of an epiphany requires the hero to refuse the call before crossing the threshold, making a journey, and returning with new-found wisdom. So Vanessa must refuse the call (when asked to condemn her teacher), before engaging with the faulty sense of her own autobiography (crossing the threshold), exploring the real nature of what Stane did to her (making the journey), and returning changed to where she began (the return to a life where she understands that she was abused). And that’s a trajectory that makes stories of abuse difficult to execute upon properly because in refusing the call she must deny the truth of what happened. And in that, there’s a danger of the book reading – initially – like it is the manifesto of an apologist.
Stane is genuinely odious – an obviously intentional predator who hides his own malfeasance behind a masquerade of consent, and ensures the robustness of the masquerade behind an aggressive campaign of gaslighting. And Vanessa is his mouthpiece, stressing all the usual propaganda points of paedophilia. ‘Some girls are ready earlier’, ‘I consented to everything’, ‘it was about love’, ‘he saw something special in me’. And it makes me so angry – not because of the writing, or the care taken in the story, or because of Vanessa herself– but because right from the start I want to see Stane burn. I want to see his school burn. I want to see his colleagues burn. And I want to see it not just because he’s an abuser, but because he’s a abuser who is a teacher. That part matters to me, as it does when anyone abuses a position of trust for their own gratification.
I don’t wax lyrical about this often because I am not an especially sentimental man – but teaching is genuinely a privilege. You get to spend your time working with young minds, trying to equip them for the future with what wisdom you’ve gleaned from the past. It’s a position of real power even if it’s not always one of real authority. The things you say matter, even when you don’t think they do. The things you do matter, no matter what you may say to yourself.
One of my students at RGU was a very bright, talented girl with dyslexia. She had been told by her schoolteachers that she should avoid doing any computing subjects because her dyslexia meant she’d never be able to keep up with the material. She was in my introductory programming class. I had sat down with her to talk through a solution she was struggling with in an assignment. She was apologetic, as if she was wasting my time even trying to learn this kind of stuff. Offhandedly, I said something to the effect of, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get this. You’re already good at it, and you’ll only get better’. Not a direct quote, but a paraphrase.
That’s when she told me about her other teachers, and I told her some of the best programmers I had known were dyslexic, and some of the most creative solutions to computing problems come from people who see the world a little bit differently. And then I moved on to the next student., I never really thought about that again until four years later, when I sat down with her in an honours project meeting and she brought up that discussion and how much it had meant to her at the time.
I had forgotten it minutes after saying it. She’d held it with her for years.
Those kind of stories are the ones that mean the most to me, such as finding an acknowledgement in a thesis from a former student saying that you were the reason they’d had the confidence to undertake the work. Or an email out of the blue from someone saying they were following a career in programming because of your, now antique and unremembered, encouragement. An ex-student, now head of a department, who tells you that he still keeps a copy of teaching material you had handed out twenty years ago.
That’s power, and its a power of a uniquely abuseable nature. It’s a power borne of trust. It comes with a duty of care. Your students need to believe, more than anything else, that you are on their side – that you are invested in their success. If they don’t believe that, you’re a shitty teacher. It’s that simple. That power shapes lives.
So Stane, who uses that power to coerce an impressionable, unconfident girl into a sexual relationship – it’s a deeper, more manipulative kind of child abuse. It’s not just a physical abuse, but a kind of robbery of someone’s future. Vanessa – gifted, talented, smart as a whip – ends up under-employed and unhappy because someone that should have been her guardian ended up stealing her potential for his own gratification. She becomes someone whose view of relationships are twisted because her teacher mangled her psyche. It’s more than molestation – it’s vampirism. And you deal with vampires with a stake to the heart.
So, My Dark Vanessa is a believable story of trauma, told well, in a way that genuinely does manage to offer a catharsis to the reader through the second-hand awareness that gradually comes to Vanessa. It just doesn’t happen quickly enough, or aggressively enough, for me to consider the book to transcend its topic.
‘My name is Vanessa. I was sexually abused by my teacher. In retaliation, my friends and I daubed our faces in woad then hunted him through the forest at night until wild bears tore him apart in the light of a beautiful dawn.’
That’s what I wanted the story of this book to be, and it’s not.
39 – Gods and Robots
Gods and Robots is a non-fiction book about depictions of robots and artificial intelligence in Greek myth. It takes an extended deep dive into literature and philosophy and religion to explore what artificial life may have meant to a society that was able to conceive of such things without ever being able to build them. The bronze giant Talos, the god-crafted seductress Pandora, the marvellous machines of Daedelus, and the self-sailing ships of Phaecia – all discussed and debated within the chapters of the books. It spends considerable time talking about the inventions of Hephestus, the animating magic and medicines of Medea, and more – all explored in scholarly fashion with academic rigour.
And it is genuinely interesting – for about 25% of the time. And then it repeats that 25% like a malfunctioning spambot choking on an unfamiliar GPT prompt. The rest of the meaningful content of the book is made up of photographs of Greek pottery and references to Blade Runner.
Honestly, I have never before read a book that is so uneven. It is written, more than anything else, like an anthology of academic papers on a particular theme. Whole sections repeated verbatim, seemingly under the impression that the reader of chapter five will not have bothered to read chapter four. Whole arguments re-iterated. Discussions and controversies in the wider literature replicated again and again like a nervous grad student giving their first research talk.
A while ago, I reviewed a book proposal for a publisher. It was a genuinely great piece of work, but it was basically a proposal to turn a PhD submission directly into a publishable monograph. My feedback was essentially that its adherence to the scholarly conventions of the thesis made for a great dissertation but a bad monograph – that the exhaustive evidence expected of academic work was constantly drowning the broader themes in the minutiae of the topic. And that’s what this feels like – a sheaf of papers that got stapled together without any editing to make them cohere as a single piece of work.
And honestly, I think so much of the book is redundant that it should have stayed as a handful of academic papers. And perhaps a supporting article in, say, the New Yorker.
It’s also uneven in its frames of comparison, which is where extension into book form really could have yielded benefits. You’d think, from reading Gods and Robots, that Blade Runner was the only modern movie to exist. It comes across as someone being paid to embed advertising for the movie into context-obscuring text. It’s like product placement. I think there was a lot of value to be had in exploring what ancient myths have influenced modern popular culture, but the way it’s done here makes it seem like the author had been trapped in a bunker with only one single movie to watch. There are plenty of relevant modern examples that would have been better choices to use, and a broader comparison of modern mythmaking would have potentially elevated this book from ‘occasionally interesting’ to ‘regularly fascinating’.
Honestly, this is a book where I think if you read a summary on a blog you’d get just as much out of it as you do from reading the whole thing. It’s the largest differential this year from ‘how much I expected to like it’ versus ‘how much I actually liked it’.
40 – The Woman in the Purple Skirt
It is pretty rare that I don’t have an Opinion about a book. You know that more than most. But I don’t really have an opinion this one. Not even a little one, other than ‘that sure was a book that I read’. But I am going to say stuff anyway because you’re not paying me (thank you, as always) to give up at the first hurdle. I’m a professional academic – lacking something to say isn’t a fundamental barrier to delivering a lecture.
Anyway, this is the book – the narrator wants to be friends with ‘the woman in the purple skirt’, a woman she sees every day but does not otherwise know. She observes the woman – essentially, the narrator is a stalker – to try and divine some understanding of who she is and what she does. When she works out that Purple Skirt is unemployed, she arranges circumstances so that she gets a job working at the narrator’s workplace.
The entire book is a series of observations – many of which seem to be largely fantastical in conclusion – about a relatively mundane person doing relatively mundane things. It’s kind of the Tom’s Diner of novels – unremarkable observations that (I assume) are supposed to coalesce into something grander. The thing is, Tom’s Diner is iconic in how it captures a mundane slice of life and turns it into absorbing art. The Woman in the Purple Skirt takes a slice of life and turns it into a bunch of words.
I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it. It spectacularly failed to make me care either way.