Yatterings

GW Dahlquist’s The Chemickal Marriage brings his odd, and at times difficult, trilogy about the Glass Books of the Dream Eaters to its conclusion.

Originally published in 10 part works which became increasingly pale as the series was published before arriving in a fine hardback, the book echoed an older form of publishing. The original version of Dickens’s novels appeared in serial form, meaning that each part had to have an ending which makes the reader come back for more. It was a way of making the work entertaining and keeping the reader coming back before the more expensive book form appeared. The form has continued in comics in their either weekly or monthly episodes, demanding that there is a continuation into the next episode.

This structure has followed through the series and has become a little less stilted in the final volume. That it is a single book perhaps helps with the flow but the first book could be very abrupt towards the reader. This does raise questions about our modern reading experiences and Dahlquist is less of a stentorian stylist than the Modernists or Post-modern authors. The form reminds the reader that linear stories are more a guideline than actual rules.

The sense of play with the nineteenth century novel is more palpable here, something which can be touched. The glass books echo Wilde’s sense of life imitating art. The Comte’s dream is discovered in his painting of the Chemickal Wedding and shows him driven by the dream of making that painting real. The dream of immortality, the true meaning of the Quest, is only discovered in the book within a book. An ongoing theme is the losing of the self in dreams and chasing the illusion which becomes more important than reality. In a fugue state, Svenson is appalled by the vertiginous detail of the painting and asks himself “[h]ow many souls had been dredged to serve the artist’s purpose?” (p137). The background, containing slivers of glass, is akin to the portrait of Dorian Gray but perhaps not just for one person but that strata of society. Its decadence is on show yet its grotesqueness hidden.

When Locarno and Chang discuss the plan and the painting, Locarno suggests that the world contains symbols. Most of these can be decoded by the Adept to reconstruct a story of the world. Perhaps reconstruction is the best phrase since it is another story, another layer of narrative which allows the individual to view the world. It is not only the dream of the Symbolists and alchemists but also post-modernists, like Umberto Eco whose characters deal with intersection of stories. Each is a way of understanding  and viewing but is mutable.

Underpinning the ways of seeing the world are ways of trying to tell and spread the story. Intersecting the art is the way that women are seen and see themselves with a burgeoning sexuality. Miss Temple acknowledges that she is in love with Chang, leading to her beginning to have erotic thoughts about him. The Contessa merrily uses this in her dealing with both her and Dr Svenson before poisoning him, commenting “we are alive for pleasure”(p135) having undressed him. She is far more in control than either of her opponents. She becomes either Mina Harker or Lucy Westenra, a true vamp, who usable to control the world around her to no small extent. Even after her escape, the Doctor will always chase and desire her.

The Chemickal Marriage does come to the thrilling conclusion and is satisfying. Despite the many strands, twists and the depth of detail, Dahlquist delivers a thrilling read which explores the way in which nineteenth century literature might be seen and used. Rather than merely taking the style or using it as this month’s fashion, this series has delved and thought about the ways in which these narratives can be used and reworked. After perhaps a slow start, the Chemickal Marriage brings this all together.

“The sun is always about to rise”(p 1). The opening sentence of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 takes us unwittingly into the heart of this novel and perhaps his work since The Years of Rice and Salt (2002).

After the death of her grandmother, Swan begins a journey which takes her from the relative comfort of Mercury across the universe and a return to Earth. A cryptic message takes her out to Jupiter where she is reminded of the dangers of space, and perhaps leaving comfort zones. Whilst musing on the moon, Io, the narrator comments that “[w]e think that because we live on cooler planets  and moons, we live on safer ground. It is not so”(p 65).  Nature and space may be red in tooth and claw but there is almost a sense that the escape to space will somehow reveal a space which can be made home.

There is a constant questioning of whether First Sf’s dream of uplift through interstellar travel might be realised or is a fool’s errand. This would appear to echo Alastair Reynold’s view in Blue Remembered Earth which treats us to an interstellar archaeology. Space is not intentionally sleek and shiny and neither is it necessarily hostile and alien. Our initial travels, and perhaps bungling, have made the area that way. Yet the move into space is not necessarily a bad thing but the culmination of a dream, the chasing of the dawn.

Robinson’s criticism of the move is that it is short sighted. Largely limited to rich and those helped by them, the social move to space has been one of escape rather than a plan to extend civilisation. The Earth that has been left behind is ecologically damaged and wrecked. In a counter to the dreams of escape, Robinson dares to dream about terraforming Earth and making it habitable again. Wahram and Swan are talking about what needs to be done and comment “I mean out here on Venus and Titan, out here doing everything. … Make it that kind of revolution, one of the nonviolent ones” (p 356). Echoing the maker theme of science fiction and making its argument much more directly, 2312 is moves between the poles of calling for direct action and making something happen.

So are we still chasing the sun? Permanently hiding in the shadow? Perhaps. Robinson’s books move from the idea of small things by individuals can add up but also need those in a position to do so to dare to dream and then act on the dream. In the midst of space junk and a dangerous environment, he moves from the wreckage of First Sf’s dream and into making one for current readers. As with the Reynolds novel, this a book that dares to dream and work on those dreams.

It would appear that, in these Steampunk tinged days, the Victorian world has become the new Medieval world. A fakery of sorts in which the current order is misplaced rather than overthrown and the world comes back to a sort of normality though with some minor changes. There is no real challenge to the world and its assumptions; this might be dangerous.

In God Save the Queen: Book One of the Immortal Empire , the vampire Queen Victoria is still reigning but, perhaps, there is trouble afoot. One of her guards, Xandra, is trying to find a murderer when she hears that he sister has been committed to Bedlam asylum.

In the midst of madness, she finds some sanity of sorts. The loose alliance of werewolves, vampires and goblins exists in careful social balance which is upset when the social veneer is chipped. In part this comes across as a superficially punkier version of the social classes dominated by the ostensibly prettier vampires, in the same vein as Dan Abnett’s comic series, The Deadwardians (though this echoes the more genteel savagery of the Edwardians). Locke does revel in the ordure of the underworld and there is hope that is may come out to upset the Victorian world.

Whilst working on the apparent murder, she discovers a eugenics plot which has been carried out with the tacit knowledge of the vampire elite, in tandem with one that the goblins have been partaking in. Locke, apart from dispatching the progenitor of the programme, does not really engage with the politics of the move and this is frustrating. It does create an unease in liking or trusting the main character when her own secret comes out.

God Save The Queen does have potential to carry out something quite fun and less genteel. It feels slightly caught between revolution and restoration. It does have all the parts of a Victorian fantasy but not quite the feel of one, straining slightly at its own limitations. There is substance underneath the style.

League of Extraordinary Gentleman: Century 2009 brings Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s Century to an end, in true comics style, but blowing up the universe. Looking at recent runs, when a writer comes to the end of their turn in story, it is easier to explode their instance and let the next person start world building. Moore explodes somebody else’s universe; somebody else’s instance of fiction. Perhaps this is what the League was really all about: an attempt to rescue the passion underneath story.

Orlando, moving between being male and female, skulks through the city. (S)he is certain that Mina, who was attacked by Oliver Haddo, must be found The band in the background provides the back story for those who have not read earlier editions but almost echo a prog rock band or a Grek chorus, trying to tell stories within stories. The League requires some assistance from newer bodies such as an analogy to James Bond and Judi Dench as M.

Alan Quartermain has disappeared, no longer the great hunter but the hunted. His imperial past is no longer wanted or fashionable and his former grand stature is reduced to selling magazines to stop being homeless. The post-colonial theorists have found their mark and H Rider Haggard’s story’s no longer represent the world it appears and disappear off shelves. In part Moore began chipping away at this earlier in the series when Nemo abandoned the League in disgust at their own inability to recognise their failures and follies. Instead he is off causing his own independent chaos between India and Pakistan, a dangerous gambit by the invisible idealist, before realising that he must make his own peace with the past.

London, and in particular this version, needs a psychopomp and what appears to be Iain Sinclair makes a wonderful one. As his own writing navigates the psychogeography of our capital, his appearance takes us into Moore’s horror of what lies behind Platform 9 and 3/4s. It is a skewed view of horror, one arguing that Harry Potter itself is an abomination and in dire need of some updating. The naivety of the series is certainly punctured as Harry undergoes a meltdown who is defeated by a version of Mary Poppins who is a deity. The nanny is more aware of her roots and so is more powerful, unlike Potter, and merely remakes the world which has, of course, already moved on.

The world is tied up but it does not seem to have a future; everything is rooted in the past. The present is in need of finding itself and its voice rooted in a past.

China Mieville’s latest novel, Railsea , is at once a return to strident form of his earlier novel tempered with the philosophical sides to his more recent work. He comes back to the Scar and perhaps Iron Council in his exploration of the quest.

In the earlier novels, the lead characters decide not to complete their quest. In part this came from a political belief in the idea that the revolution could not be completed. It is perpetual and any completion is perhaps impossible. The Lovers split in the Scar on this point where the male character cannot complete the journey and the Scar needs to remain potential.

In Railsea, Sham follows various paths and philosophies. It is however Captain Naphi who has the driving urge to find the white Moldywarpe and uses the Medes as a single purposed hunting machine, echoing Herman Melville by way of Joan Aiken’s way of perceiving the world and language. When he gets lost, he stumbles across the Shroakes who also have their own quest: to complete the journey that their parents disappeared on. Although all have driving purposes, Sham is curious but is an outsider to their philosophies. His curiosity drives him to explore the world in some very different ways and encourages him to see the Railsea for what it is and try to escape it. When they reach the edge, after the Moldywarpe seals its own destruction, Naphi joins Sham says

I can’t have mine,… [s]o someone else’s philosophy is better than none (page 350)

Questing is about belief in something, almost taking on Moorcock’s argument that the quest is about the Pilgrim’s Progress rewrought and made new each time. He has a similar conversation with the Shroakes who seem to have lost their way when the rails run out:

You’re here because your parents wouldn’t do what they was told. Wouldn’t shun anything. They wanted to see what’s at the end of the world & you actually did. Do. Are doing. (page 357)

Rather than have existing paths, they are forced to think of a new world, a world of possibilities. Sham is forced to change tenses as the world become something that is malleable. The quest comes to an end but needs to change into being something that is possible. Rather than being a journey to find something, Mieville goes back to the idea of the quest being a journey, one that perhaps does not have an end and should be constantly renewed.

Reaching the edge they comes across the Angels, mechanical beings who run with an absolute logic that humans cannot understand. There is no sense of the world before, it clearly has an archaeology (have we also see this in Embassytown with the warning beacon?) but we are never told what it is. Yet we are given a hint in the mad philosophy of the Railsea inhabitants who present with a bill for services rendered and an expectation that it will be paid. (I do wonder if this, and its short conclusion, is a quiet dig at the way that financial services are sucking money from the world but that may be over-reading.)

Railsea is lighter than other Mieville novels but is no less worth reading. It does raise questions about fantasy and it is a cracking read. It feels like it is completing the earlier books and then moving onwards, exploring their problems and rethinking their endings.

Elizabeth Hand’s Radiant Days is a thematic follow on from her novella, Illyria. Starting in New York in 1978 and Paris in the 1870s, there is a palpable sense of fear and tension, almost as if the cities are waiting for the deluge. All it takes is a spark.

Featuring a pair of star-crossed lovers, Merle and Arthur, both of whom are innocents or raw talented neophytes, Radiant Days becomes  a meditation on how art can change the city and the individual. Elizabeth Hand does indulge in her interest in Outsider Art through the Rimbaud’s poetry and the early graffitti scene. Having arrived in New York for art school, Merle drops out and sees the tags around the city. She begins to learn its new dialect, the implicit rules and regulations of the scene, in its illicit practices.

Meanwhile Arthur Rimbaud runs away from home again and is jailed for vagrancy. Reliant upon members of his family to get him out of prison, he begins writing and doing odd jobs. he is not one for learning by wrote and begins writing his extraordinary poems.

Both cross into each other’s times, meeting and adapting as if time travel was nothing new. It just happens to them in the intensity of their passion. I do wonder if part of this is musing on the idea of influence and how it might be interpreted by passion when artists who work in different areas become influenced by each other. The small body of knowledge and body of work helps Hand to concentrate on these aspects of Rimbaud rather than being caught in a historical novel.

Instead she gets under the skin of reality and sets out her argument for Outsider Art as a force for good. Its passion and rawness reveal more aspects to the world, the urban setting being grey in tooth and claw comes to tolerate it and finds way so muting into somehting it finds more acceptable. When Merle is on the streets, she is housed by Ted Kampfert, a faded homeless musician. After his death, her drawing of him is used on the eulogy as a cover which allows her into the art scene and gives the start to carry on doing what she enjoys until she becomes successful.

Radiant Days is a deceptively slight book, moving on from Illyria’s meditation on how art changes the world. It is less isolated than Generation Loss, moving towards making something. This is a book of makers, just not in the Gibson or Doctorow sense of the term.

Ransom Riggs‘s debut, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children , is a book which mixes media and genres.

After his gandfather’s death, Jason visits a psychologist who shows him how to partially see the worl and encourages the boy to go to Wales after a letter arrives. Jason’s grandfather, having escaped the Nazi’s in Poland to go to Wales firmly believed in monsters. Riggs neatly plays in this allowing us to naturally see the soldiers as the monsters, hiding the truly weird beneath the surface.

Having reached Wales with his father he finds more evidence of the strange world in some vintage photographs. he needs to break the locked trunk which gives him access not only to the remaining photos but also to the shifted world in which the house really exists. Delving into the land with a bog body and barrows, Jacob begins to get an appreciation off the hidden world which his grandfather left and tried to protect. The children he meets introduce him to Miss Peregrine who, in turn, introduces him to the hidden world which he shifts into and out of between his families. She teaches him aout the reality of monsters when she informs him of the hollowgasts and wights, soulless perversions of the fantastic.

Riggs uses the Chekovian idea of introducing the gun in the first act and using it in the third when the psychiatrst comes back. Is Riggs arguing that the world cannot be fully understood or made “safe”? It follows numerous other novels in revelling in the chase towards the dark, that the dragon can be defeated.

What perhaps really lifts this novel are the vintage photographs which interleave the stories and give some shape to the characters. Using what appear to be simple tricks of positioning or exposure rather than digitial manipulation, they make the reinforce the simplicty which he uses in the book. It is a different sort of technique which asks the reader to look at the image again to check whether it is what they are seeing.

This is the beginning of a series, it appears, but is definitely a novel which is worth looking out for. It has a very peculiar twist to it which remind me of Edward Carey‘s novel, Alva and Irva.

Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Troupe continues his exploration and widening of the American Weird Tale. Having mixed Hemingway with the Dust Bowl in Mr Shivers and noir or Metropolis dystopia with a Mccarthy fear of the alien in The Company Man, The Troupe goes back to the heart of America and revisits vaudeville in its touring glory. Bennett seems to enjoy the idea of rushing towards the end, where the real idea of the journey is not to avoid change but to embrace it and then move on whilst remaining in the world.

When George Carole goes chasing after the Silenus vaudeville troupe with a feeling that he should be in it, he cannot imagine why. Following his audition and probation, he is able to join and begins learning about himself and exploring the chaotically colourful world of the stage. He becomes involved in a god game, the rules of which are ever changing and being altered by the supernatural elements. Accessing the supernatural quite by chance or possibly whim on their part and perhaps being braver than the troupe, George more aware of the fantastic nature of the world and the bargains made. If Mr Shivers was about accepting death or change and becoming that change, then The Troupe reverses this where George can become life though only through the acceptance of rage and loss.

Rather than expecting the world or the magic to suddenly end; he anticipates that it will change and move on. Bennett’s approach to the world is simultaneously horrific and fantastic. In Mr Shivers, Marcus Connolly drifts across the rail roads looking for the mysterious Mr Shivers who he blames for murdering his family. Eventually he sees the man fighting a bull in a realisation of duende and understands that this is a time of reckoning. The dust bowl, perhaps the Depression, requires a new god, one that will see the land through into growth taking root and reviving the land. Connolly’s verve and youth make him the ideal candidate to be the literalisation of death. In The Troupe, George’s journey ends up being his own appointment in Samarra and his own version of the duende, looking for a revival from the edge of society. Connolly and George make and accept their appointment but subvert it with their acceptance of it and that it is mutable. Perhaps it is tied to time and death becomes more akin to the tarot meaning of change. If so, then the appointment might be almost relished, a way of forcing necessary change. The new shape of the world is revealed to them as something which they can mould, revealing their horror as being a feeling of loss of control.

The troupe becomes central to the story rather than remaining a travelling sideshow. Reminiscent of Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! (2011) where she explored the idea of dying gods and sideshows in the deep South, Bennett looks at it as a way of trying to revive the world yet perhaps going in ever decreasing circles. Rather than accepting the change, the Weird novel looks at changing it through adapting the existing worlds. It has a changing set of meanings and layers, any of which might take over from the world. In Swamplandia!, we almost know that the journey into the Underworld will end up in death and crossing an individual family’s Styx. Meanings and options are implicitly closed off as reality takes hold and logic is remade to fit it.

Bennett offers the place as one which can be remade and improved. Using the god game, he almost takes an Gnostic view of the world, in which the human may become divine. The grey gods who attempt to run the world find themselves losing more control than originally envisioned. Taking inspiration from the idea of the Angels being disappointed in humans and their free will, Bennett’s grey gods try to control and find the original Song of Creation. Unable to be creative themselves, they want to remove all traces of it even though they are divided. Rather than taking the queue from a world which is turmoil and in need of understanding, where the clashes of light and darkness create uncertainty and the complete possibility of misreading the world such as in the work of William Hope Hodgson or Lovecraft, where the familiar is shifting into fear through a change of angle, Bennett’s take on the Weird is more towards acceptance leading to change. In similar fashion to Jesse Bullington’s argument that the Weird is about the odd being accepted into the world as myth and legend, its facts lost and embellished in the drifting landscapes of the world. World building in the Weird is not about maps or a defined geography, it becomes one of stories which might be interpreted in a variety of fantastic ways and the physical world being made entirely mutable through interpretation.

Rather than the less successful relatively static positioning of the world in The Company Men, a novel which was more reminiscent of a noirish take on the anti-McCarthy work, the expansion and movement provide a place for the story to develop and grow. It could be read as a noir novel of corporate greed and guilt, where the world is for the taking. Equally it might also be seen as a science fictional take on the potential uses of a freely given uplift, in which vested interests would seek to control it for their ends, keeping it secret. The world, if unaware of its alien or supernatural elements is less bright and perhaps this is what the weird is getting towards. An acceptance of not having boundaries. By its nature in the 1920s and 1930s, the Weird tended towards the darker end of the spectrum, more towards horror and is seen as a subset of that subset of the fantastic.

If we accept that the fantastic at that time and moment was less interested in defining a quest or a journey, but in rediscovering the strange, taking direction from Lord Dunsany or Hope Mirrlees, then the Weird becomes more akin the strange and wonderful rather than being expected to evoke emotions of horror. The unease it finds is that if realising that our understanding of the world is woefully incomplete, perhaps can never be completed. The oddness of the world is a projection about our own fears, as George begins to realise when he finally settles down. Although his first novel is more powerful in expressing this with its indetermination, The Troupe finds George discovering the peace with his grey guardian after he accepts his role and changes the god game for this round. There is the uncertainty about how long it might last after his passing. Like the Brothers Grossbart in Bull