41 – The Atlas Six
One thing that has been aggravating me a fair bit of late is how often I see microtargeting used in the blurb of books. ‘Ideal for fans of Fifty Shades of Grey and the Smurfs’, or ‘A mashup of Schinder’s List and What I Did in my Holidays’. It’s so transparently manipulative and I don’t like feeling like I’m being forced into some demographic segment on the basis of ‘He’ll want to read books exactly like books he’s already read’. But the Atlas Six is definitely Babel crossed with Gideon the Ninth. Minus the lesbian necromancers.
Here’s your premise – six of the brightest minds in the world are recruited as prospects to join the mysterious Alexandrian Society. For a year they are expected to make deep contributions to occult subjects, using the tremendous intellectual resources available as society members. They begin as rivals, continue as rivals, and end as rivals although I get the impression you’re supposed to think they’re drawing together as time goes by. Anyway, they discover that nothing comes without a cost – the book is essentially about how they come to terms with balancing ambition versus humanity.
Now, before I start ripping into it I do want to say that I did enjoy the book and I did pick up its sequel. But it feels very much like a manufactured book, as the intro to this mini-review may have implied. It feels like it was constructed from pre-made parts snapped together like a Lego model. And worse, it feels like the author is trying to convince us of her own cleverness through the cleverness of the characters… when none of those characters come across as particularly clever. They come across as the kind of person you might get saddled with at a bar in a foreign city. Tedious pub bores who have mistaken their neuroses for a personality. It’s like a dinner party full of disaffected sixteen year-olds who haven’t realised yet they are literally the most boring age-group of people on the planet. Nothing has happened to any of you yet, you haven’t earned your ennui or your cynicism.
If you can look past that though, it’s a relatively fun book that sets up an interesting promise for the future but in itself it lacks all that much of a narrative payoff. Its themes are jejune, its insights banal. Its characters unbearable. But there’s something here and while I am not thirsting after the sequel it’s sitting right there on my bookshelf. So consider that something of an endorsement.
Weirdly though, looking at my spreadsheet apparently I liked this a lot more at the time of reading than I do writing this review a couple of months later. I guess its charms fade over time as its flaws exacerbate. So I guess take everything here with a pinch of salt.
42 – The Bear and the Nightingale
This book is a little treasure! Imagine the Tiffany Aching books of the Discworld series. If you haven’t read them, go read them – they’re awesome. Anyway, imagine Tiffany Aching but instead of Discworld she’s in Russia. And instead of luxuriating in the whimsical comic fantasy of Terry Pratchett she’s buried under layers of grimdark misery. That’s the Bear and the Nightingale and it is genuinely wonderful.
As usual, a quick introduction to the premise. Vasilia is a young girl who can see spirits when no-one else can. The embrace of Christianity has turned Russia into a country where the old ways are dying out. Trapped within the conventions of the expectations on a woman, she is intensely jealous of the adventures her brothers are permitted to undertake. Vasilia’s new mother secretly also sees the spirits, and they have driven her both to madness and a kind of desperate evangelism. The arrival of a new priest, determined to make his mark, results in the edges of Vasilia’s world tightening ever more around her even as the spirits of the wood and the winter draw her ever deeper into their world. As the expectations upon her constrict her future, she starts to break out from their constraints.
Honestly, I loved this so much. It is beautifully and evocatively written, drawing deeply from a kind of fanfiction version of Russian mythology to construct a genuinely mesmerising story. The characters are richly observed and convincingly written, and there is an anger at the core of the book that burns warmly enough to keep the bleakness of the winter at bay.
It is though very much like a Tiffany Aching book. The girl with the powers that can see things other can’t. The level headed everyday form of witchcraft that eschews showy rituals and embraces the tending of obligations and relationships. Even the frost demon that takes an interest in Vasilia is like a mashup of the Wintersmith and Terry Pratchett’s Death. In other words, for those who have read the Discworld books often they may find this feels spookily familiar. It’s not unwelcome by any means – the discovery of a parallel university of Tiffany Aching has filled me with genuine joy. I have been missing her intensely since Pratchett’s passing. To find her settled here, in the pages of a book by another author, is a blessing. A marvellous book, that I think will stand up to scrutiny even if you have no idea who Terry Pratchett was.
Seriously, how can you be reading this review and not know who Pratchett was?
43 – The Night Raven
Eh. It’s okay.
This is a book with a much stronger pitch than it has an execution. Lydia Crow is an estranged member of a family of magical criminals. She left ‘the business’ to pursue a career as a private investigator in Scotland, but has to return to London while some Caledonian unpleasantness simmers down. Upon her return to England she finds herself being drawn into the old turf wars of her family. Upon being targeted for death in what seems like an occult hit, she begins to retrace her connections to try and find out what the hell has been going on in her absence.
It sounds exciting, but that’s not how it reads. It reads like a kind of budget version of Agatha Christie crossed with a badly remembered synopsis of the Game of Thrones plot. The magical elements don’t add much, as they are at best incidental ornamentations rather than anything interesting and cool. The setting feels very familiar, without even the promise of real novelty to come. It’s also weirdly shambolic in its framing and its pacing, with lots of nothing happening until nothing really happens and finally it ends without anything of note occurring. It feels a bit like a warm-up exercise that someone might have conducted before they sat down to the real thing.
It’s not terrible. It’s not great. It’s in-between and really that’s a hard place to be in a field as crowded as ‘paranormal urban fantasy’. The sequel was on a 99p deal on Kindle so I picked it up, but I can’t actually envision reading it even if popular opinion is that the series does get better as it goes on. There are plenty of series though that don’t need a whole book to get started, and I’d recommend you read one of them instead.
44 – Dark Places
Dark Places has one of my favourite descriptions of a main character – ‘if someone drew a sketch of my soul, it would be a scribble with fangs’. As a portrait of self-loathing, it’s tremendously evocative. As a description of the character, it’s perhaps a little fantasist. Gillian Flynn does not write likeable protagonists – that’s a point I’ve made before. But Libby Day – the main character – is a surprisingly relatable character given her backstory. Of course, Gillian Flynn also doesn’t write happy stories. Dark Places is, as the title hints, dark more anything else. Libby Day is the survivor of a home-invasion where her mother and two sisters were murdered. She, a small child, runs into the woods and escapes – but not before losing toes and fingers to exposure. Her brother, Ben Day, is fingered as a Satanist and put in prison for the killings. Libby has been surviving on donations that were sent by well-wishers to the ‘poor Day girl’ but those days are gone – so it’s time to work out how to capitalize on her life story in a way that pays her way in the world.
Flynn can spin a story like no-one’s business and few authors can hook me so successfully, so quickly. My usual rule is ‘if a book doesn’t capture me in fifty pages, it goes in the bin’. I think the average for the two Gillian Flynn books I have read is about five paragraphs.
Suffice to say I was deep in this pretty much from the first few words. I say words, because I began with an audiobook and found that I had so few opportunities to immerse myself into the story that it was frustrating more than anything else. I’d arrive at my destination and have to speak to people just as I was getting settled in. I abandoned the audiobook – and honestly, for the time being, audiobooks as a concept. Bought the actual book and devoured it in a couple of sittings.
There’s a lot going on in here – a really compelling mystery framed through an unreliable narrator in argument with a whole pile of other unreliable narrators. There’s an undercurrent of satire in which the weird obsessives of the Internet come into contact with the object of their obsession and let loose all their maladjusted social incompetence. There’s domestic abuse interwoven with childhood rebellion all wrapped up in a neat little package of the satanic panic of the 80s. It’s both an uncomfortable read and weirdly nostalgic. I enjoyed it tremendously…
… up until the final fifty or so pages, at which point the whole thing turns out to pivot on the most ridiculous co-incidence that could be imagined. It’s quite a letdown, I think – the various threads of narrative are all, independently, very well executed. It’s just how they overlay in the end that undermines everything else. It feels like a cop-out – it feels like Flynn was struggling to reconcile everything in a believable way so decided ‘Screw it’. It doesn’t ruin what comes before- the book is strong enough to still be a banger. It just elicits an eye-roll and a kind of deflated ‘Aw, that sucks’ response.
Recommended even despite the cringeworthy ending.
45 – The Song of Achilles
There definitely seems to have been a trend of women authors writing retellings or reinventions of Greek mythology. I don’t know why, but there are so many of them that you can’t really avoid them. At best I can space them throughout the year that I don’t burn out. A Thousand Ships, Gods and Robots, Neon Gods, and now the Song of Achilles. Still on my shelves (real and virtual) are Circe, Stone Blind, Ariadne, Pandora, Galeata and more. I don’t really get it, to be honest.
The Song of Achilles is a good book, I will grant you, but I honestly don’t really see what it gained from its association with Greek mythology. It’s kind of like slash fiction crossed with an Agaean version of Celebrity Heat magazine. Cover story, ‘You’ll never guess who is gay!’ with a photo of Achilles and Patroclus coming out of a night club. At least Neon Gods varied the formula by recontextualising the setting. The Song of Achilles on the other hand is a prolonged exercise in turning the subtext of mythology directly into text. Honestly I just feel like a lot of these books would benefit from looking to the present as opposed to engaging in a burglary of the past.
Anyway, that aside out of the way… yeah, this is a beautifully written book. It’s also a book that does something quite rare in this genre of ‘women writing about gay men’ which is – it makes it actually believable.
There’s a great Twitter thread (I think – I have it blocked so I can’t check) of male authors writing female characters. The best was Scott Baiowulf’s sarcastic parody:
Cassandra woke up to the rays of the sun streaming through the slats on her blinds, cascading over her naked chest. She stretched, her breasts lifting with her arms as she greeted the sun. She rolled out of bed and put on a shirt, her nipples prominently showing through the thin fabric. She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards.
Not being a gay man myself I can’t say whether or not the previous gay romances I have read this year (and there are quite a few) are authentic, or if they at least capture the spirit of what’s involved. All I can say is they read inauthentically, perhaps because of the same lack of lived experience associated with men writing women. But the thing about this book is I was genuinely invested, to an extent, in the relationship being portrayed. Madeline Miller accomplishes something here just by creating a gay romance that feels romantic. The problem in part is that she has to do it by completely reinventing – and undermining – the mythological characters to fit them into the requisite templates by which their relationship can be understood. And so it comes back to – what was gained by drawing from the well of Greek mythology if those waters were just going to be cast aside?
I would have loved this book, I think, had it reconciled the base brutality of Achilles with the more sanguine wisdom of Patroclus. Instead, we see Achilles portrayed as a kindly, sensitive boy in love with a soft-hearted healer who was known primarily for his lack of martial prowess. The story becomes easier to tell, I guess, but only because the interesting conflicts were knocked away.
It’s a lovely book. A well-written love story. It’s just not in the region of what was promised. It’s the version of the Achilles story that Disney might have put out during Pride week. Its very inoffensiveness is its greatest weakness.