Books? Books!
Mar. 3rd, 2019 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
speakingskiesI've finished a couple of books recently which I wanted to share my thoughts about.
I mentioned picking up Fen by Daisy Johnson a couple of weeks ago.
The blurb reads as follows: Daisy Johnson’s Fen is a liminal land. Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with familiar instincts, with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt. This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A woman might give birth to a – well what?
English folklore and a contemporary eye, sexual honesty and combustible invention – in Fen, these elements have come together to create a singular, startling piece of modern fiction.
I was really looking forward to this, as magical realism and landscape are very much My Jam.
The book is a collection of stories set around a fenland and its nearby town and people. It's brimming with magical realism: girls turning themselves to eels, the souls of boys trapped in foxes, a baby formed from clay.
My favourite stories were Blood Rites - a group of three possibly-vampiric women newly arrived in the area who find that the fen-grown men they seduce leave a heavy aftertaste, A Heavy Devotion - which dwells on how words make up our sense of self and the consequences of their theft, and How to Fuck a Man You Don't Know - which chronicles a relationship from breakdown to beginning (and is in second person POV, which I'm always a slut for outside of x/reader fics). I also really loved A Bruise The Shape and Size of a Door Handle, in which a house falls in love with a girl.
The writing is by turns sparse and dense, and is always musky with female sexuality and desire.
As the book went on, I did start to feel that some of the stories became a bit similar. Although each story has its own protagonist, some are more distinct in voice than others. The mother-and-daughter dual narrators of How To Lose It work well, and the women of Blood Rites stand out, but as the collection goes on I found that some of the narrators merged together a little at the edges.
There wasn't as much landscape imbued in the stories as I had hoped for - I'd thought that, given the blurb, we would become immersed in the sucking mud of the fen, feel bewildered by and lost in the uncertain boundary between land and sea. There is some of that, and where it is present it's wonderful, but the majority of the stories seem centred on the unnamed town and The Fox and Hound pub where many of the characters interact: although the fen is "a liminal land" and "the wild is always close at hand", domesticity and social norms seem to rule over everything.
Johnson's Everything Under was shortlisted for the Booker this year, and I definitely enjoyed her writing enough to give it a go.
And also The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley.
I will admit that I have literally just finished this about an hour ago, so some of these points might be a bit rushed or badly thought through, but I have Opinions and I need to share them.
First off, I adored The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - it was slow and careful and just built into this beautiful orchestral swell of a book, with the most delicate but rich understated romance I've ever read. I had heard people say that The Bedlam Stacks was even better, so I was really excited to read it.
The blurb:In 1859, ex-East India Company smuggler Merrick Tremayne is trapped at home in Cornwall after sustaining an injury that almost cost him his leg and something is wrong; a statue moves, his grandfather’s pines explode, and his brother accuses him of madness.
When the India Office recruits Merrick for an expedition to fetch quinine — essential for the treatment of malaria — from deep within Peru, he knows it’s a terrible idea. Nearly every able-bodied expeditionary who’s made the attempt has died, and he can barely walk. But Merrick is desperate to escape everything at home, so he sets off, against his better judgement, for a tiny mission colony on the edge of the Amazon where a salt line on the ground separates town from forest. Anyone who crosses is killed by something that watches from the trees, but somewhere beyond the salt are the quinine woods, and the way around is blocked.
Surrounded by local stories of lost time, cursed woods, and living rock, Merrick must separate truth from fairy tale and find out what befell the last expeditions; why the villagers are forbidden to go into the forest; and what is happening to Raphael, the young priest who seems to have known Merrick’s grandfather, who visited Peru many decades before. The Bedlam Stacks is the story of a profound friendship that grows in a place that seems just this side of magical.
The writing is beautiful as always. Pulley is really good at constructing her worlds and making everything seem real, no matter how bizarre they might be, and this book is an excellent example of this. While Watchmaker was mainly set in 1880s London and felt very real with a few magical-realistic twists, Bedlam Stacks has a greater ambition both magically and geographically. The majority of the action is set in the Peruvian Andes, in a fictional town called New Bethlehem, but there are sections set in Cornwall, London, Hong Kong, and India. Bedlam has an incredibly strange setting which I definitely can't do justice to, but if I mention "obsidian stacks", "glowing pollen" and "exploding trees" you'll get the idea.
Right, I have quite a lot to say about this as it's fresh in mind, so I'm going to break this down into sections:
Writing
To me, the main appeal of this book is in the writing, which is beautiful - it's light but lush with detail. Like Watchmaker, the pace is slow but, unlike Watchmaker, I don't think the story fits that particular style.
BUT although it's set (mainly) in 1860, this writing feels very modern. At times I forgot I was reading a historical novel, as all the characters speak in a very modern way, which was distracting for me. I read historical novels because I like that old feel. As the novel is written in first person this sometimes seems a bit more pronounced. Strangely, though I'm not usually a fan of first person POV, it wasn't a turn off for me in this case.
Characters
Our POV character is Merrick Tremayne, smuggler/botanist for the India Office, née East India Company. Three years ago he was injured and nearly lost his leg, and is struggling to a) recover and b) get used to his new disability. I liked Merrick - he's sympathetic, and his frustration with himself is realistic and not too hand-wringing.
He undertakes the journey with Clem Markham, a jolly but hot-tempered posh boy from the navy, who he's known for years.
Raphael is the priest of Bedlam, a local, strong and still and quiet, with a strange condition that makes him prone to catalepsy. I worked out what was actually happening to him well before it was revealed, which led to a bit of frustration on my part while reading. You can't not like Raphael, with everything he's been through and how kind he is.
Plot
The cinchona plot feels more like a framing device which is forgotten about for chunks of time, and only brought back when something needs to happen to shake everyone up a bit. The Raphael-centred plot takes a bit too long to truly kick in (as mentioned, I worked it out quite early on and spent a lot of the book waiting for them to actually get to it), and is where the fantasy elements of the world truly come into play.
Relationships
This had been billed to me as a similar slow-burn romance to Watchmaker, which was gorgeous and gentle and incredibly loving, and there are some similarities. Merrick and Raphael get to know each other slowly by degrees, and it feels very real and at some points tender, but a relationship isn't actually realised. The way their relationship is written means it could be read ambiguously, friendship or romantic. It definitely is not the Beautiful Canon Queer Relationship I'd heard it advertised as (if you want that, read Watchmaker).
Merrick and Clem read well as old friends who know each other well enough to know exactly how and when to rile each other, and when to leave well enough alone. Clem's hidden-but-latent class superiority over Merrick is subtle and comes out in glimpses, but you can still tell he cares about him.
Annoyances
1 - We find out that Merrick's dad brought back the statue in the garden, but we don't find out anything else about it, which seems like an oversight given the importance of the statues.
2- Keita. Keita honey, I love you, and I get that it's tempting as an author to slip your favourite characters into other things, but his (admittedly small) presence in this just felt a bit shoehorned in. We know it's set in the same universe as Watchmaker, but he didn't really need to make an appearance at all imo. The sections with him in could have worked just as well without him, and I would have preferred it if we hadn't known about his interference.
3 - I've already mentioned the modernity of the speech and narration
4 - We meet Clem's wife at the start and she seems amazing - I would have loved to have seen more of her! Instead, we leave her near the start, and don't see her again until the 20 years later section, where we don't really see her as anything more than a mum when what little we saw of her at the start was so much more than that.
5 - Generally the last chapter tbh. We catch up with things so quickly that it doesn't make much impact. It almost feels like there are great chunks of the book missing, and towards the end I started to wonder if my kindle copy was glitching somehow. Generally, the book has a feeling of skating over things that would be better explained (or maybe my critical thinking was switched off while I was reading it, always possible).
6 - Raphael and Martel: Martel is often described as having some kind of ownership over Raphael. My issue with this is that it's never quite explained how: Raphael is the priest at Bedlam, so I don't know how he ended up where is at the start of the book, locked in a room in Martel's house miles away from the town, especially when he hasn't been there that long.
I might give it a reread at some point in case I'm being a bit harsh on it or missed bits, but I guess I'm just disappointed that it wasn't what I'd expected after Watchmaker. On Goodreads I called it "thinner", and I stand by that.
Sorry if that got a bit rambly, but I'm a bit tired and hungover and just wanted to spew some words out.
I mentioned picking up Fen by Daisy Johnson a couple of weeks ago.
The blurb reads as follows: Daisy Johnson’s Fen is a liminal land. Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with familiar instincts, with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt. This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A woman might give birth to a – well what?
English folklore and a contemporary eye, sexual honesty and combustible invention – in Fen, these elements have come together to create a singular, startling piece of modern fiction.
I was really looking forward to this, as magical realism and landscape are very much My Jam.
The book is a collection of stories set around a fenland and its nearby town and people. It's brimming with magical realism: girls turning themselves to eels, the souls of boys trapped in foxes, a baby formed from clay.
My favourite stories were Blood Rites - a group of three possibly-vampiric women newly arrived in the area who find that the fen-grown men they seduce leave a heavy aftertaste, A Heavy Devotion - which dwells on how words make up our sense of self and the consequences of their theft, and How to Fuck a Man You Don't Know - which chronicles a relationship from breakdown to beginning (and is in second person POV, which I'm always a slut for outside of x/reader fics). I also really loved A Bruise The Shape and Size of a Door Handle, in which a house falls in love with a girl.
The writing is by turns sparse and dense, and is always musky with female sexuality and desire.
As the book went on, I did start to feel that some of the stories became a bit similar. Although each story has its own protagonist, some are more distinct in voice than others. The mother-and-daughter dual narrators of How To Lose It work well, and the women of Blood Rites stand out, but as the collection goes on I found that some of the narrators merged together a little at the edges.
There wasn't as much landscape imbued in the stories as I had hoped for - I'd thought that, given the blurb, we would become immersed in the sucking mud of the fen, feel bewildered by and lost in the uncertain boundary between land and sea. There is some of that, and where it is present it's wonderful, but the majority of the stories seem centred on the unnamed town and The Fox and Hound pub where many of the characters interact: although the fen is "a liminal land" and "the wild is always close at hand", domesticity and social norms seem to rule over everything.
Johnson's Everything Under was shortlisted for the Booker this year, and I definitely enjoyed her writing enough to give it a go.
And also The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley.
I will admit that I have literally just finished this about an hour ago, so some of these points might be a bit rushed or badly thought through, but I have Opinions and I need to share them.
First off, I adored The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - it was slow and careful and just built into this beautiful orchestral swell of a book, with the most delicate but rich understated romance I've ever read. I had heard people say that The Bedlam Stacks was even better, so I was really excited to read it.
The blurb:In 1859, ex-East India Company smuggler Merrick Tremayne is trapped at home in Cornwall after sustaining an injury that almost cost him his leg and something is wrong; a statue moves, his grandfather’s pines explode, and his brother accuses him of madness.
When the India Office recruits Merrick for an expedition to fetch quinine — essential for the treatment of malaria — from deep within Peru, he knows it’s a terrible idea. Nearly every able-bodied expeditionary who’s made the attempt has died, and he can barely walk. But Merrick is desperate to escape everything at home, so he sets off, against his better judgement, for a tiny mission colony on the edge of the Amazon where a salt line on the ground separates town from forest. Anyone who crosses is killed by something that watches from the trees, but somewhere beyond the salt are the quinine woods, and the way around is blocked.
Surrounded by local stories of lost time, cursed woods, and living rock, Merrick must separate truth from fairy tale and find out what befell the last expeditions; why the villagers are forbidden to go into the forest; and what is happening to Raphael, the young priest who seems to have known Merrick’s grandfather, who visited Peru many decades before. The Bedlam Stacks is the story of a profound friendship that grows in a place that seems just this side of magical.
The writing is beautiful as always. Pulley is really good at constructing her worlds and making everything seem real, no matter how bizarre they might be, and this book is an excellent example of this. While Watchmaker was mainly set in 1880s London and felt very real with a few magical-realistic twists, Bedlam Stacks has a greater ambition both magically and geographically. The majority of the action is set in the Peruvian Andes, in a fictional town called New Bethlehem, but there are sections set in Cornwall, London, Hong Kong, and India. Bedlam has an incredibly strange setting which I definitely can't do justice to, but if I mention "obsidian stacks", "glowing pollen" and "exploding trees" you'll get the idea.
Right, I have quite a lot to say about this as it's fresh in mind, so I'm going to break this down into sections:
Writing
To me, the main appeal of this book is in the writing, which is beautiful - it's light but lush with detail. Like Watchmaker, the pace is slow but, unlike Watchmaker, I don't think the story fits that particular style.
BUT although it's set (mainly) in 1860, this writing feels very modern. At times I forgot I was reading a historical novel, as all the characters speak in a very modern way, which was distracting for me. I read historical novels because I like that old feel. As the novel is written in first person this sometimes seems a bit more pronounced. Strangely, though I'm not usually a fan of first person POV, it wasn't a turn off for me in this case.
Characters
Our POV character is Merrick Tremayne, smuggler/botanist for the India Office, née East India Company. Three years ago he was injured and nearly lost his leg, and is struggling to a) recover and b) get used to his new disability. I liked Merrick - he's sympathetic, and his frustration with himself is realistic and not too hand-wringing.
He undertakes the journey with Clem Markham, a jolly but hot-tempered posh boy from the navy, who he's known for years.
Raphael is the priest of Bedlam, a local, strong and still and quiet, with a strange condition that makes him prone to catalepsy. I worked out what was actually happening to him well before it was revealed, which led to a bit of frustration on my part while reading. You can't not like Raphael, with everything he's been through and how kind he is.
Plot
The cinchona plot feels more like a framing device which is forgotten about for chunks of time, and only brought back when something needs to happen to shake everyone up a bit. The Raphael-centred plot takes a bit too long to truly kick in (as mentioned, I worked it out quite early on and spent a lot of the book waiting for them to actually get to it), and is where the fantasy elements of the world truly come into play.
Relationships
This had been billed to me as a similar slow-burn romance to Watchmaker, which was gorgeous and gentle and incredibly loving, and there are some similarities. Merrick and Raphael get to know each other slowly by degrees, and it feels very real and at some points tender, but a relationship isn't actually realised. The way their relationship is written means it could be read ambiguously, friendship or romantic. It definitely is not the Beautiful Canon Queer Relationship I'd heard it advertised as (if you want that, read Watchmaker).
Merrick and Clem read well as old friends who know each other well enough to know exactly how and when to rile each other, and when to leave well enough alone. Clem's hidden-but-latent class superiority over Merrick is subtle and comes out in glimpses, but you can still tell he cares about him.
Annoyances
1 - We find out that Merrick's dad brought back the statue in the garden, but we don't find out anything else about it, which seems like an oversight given the importance of the statues.
2- Keita. Keita honey, I love you, and I get that it's tempting as an author to slip your favourite characters into other things, but his (admittedly small) presence in this just felt a bit shoehorned in. We know it's set in the same universe as Watchmaker, but he didn't really need to make an appearance at all imo. The sections with him in could have worked just as well without him, and I would have preferred it if we hadn't known about his interference.
3 - I've already mentioned the modernity of the speech and narration
4 - We meet Clem's wife at the start and she seems amazing - I would have loved to have seen more of her! Instead, we leave her near the start, and don't see her again until the 20 years later section, where we don't really see her as anything more than a mum when what little we saw of her at the start was so much more than that.
5 - Generally the last chapter tbh. We catch up with things so quickly that it doesn't make much impact. It almost feels like there are great chunks of the book missing, and towards the end I started to wonder if my kindle copy was glitching somehow. Generally, the book has a feeling of skating over things that would be better explained (or maybe my critical thinking was switched off while I was reading it, always possible).
6 - Raphael and Martel: Martel is often described as having some kind of ownership over Raphael. My issue with this is that it's never quite explained how: Raphael is the priest at Bedlam, so I don't know how he ended up where is at the start of the book, locked in a room in Martel's house miles away from the town, especially when he hasn't been there that long.
I might give it a reread at some point in case I'm being a bit harsh on it or missed bits, but I guess I'm just disappointed that it wasn't what I'd expected after Watchmaker. On Goodreads I called it "thinner", and I stand by that.
Sorry if that got a bit rambly, but I'm a bit tired and hungover and just wanted to spew some words out.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 07:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 09:55 pm (UTC)What were your issues with Watchmaker, out of curiosity? I had some with it too.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 07:55 am (UTC)I think my issues were primarily centered around the marriage thing and Grace as a character. I loved the idea and concept of her at the beginning, but felt like her character was so inconsistent, her storyline was rough compared to the others and her "character arc" was just incoherent and slave to the plot somehow. Half the time I couldn't understand her actions at all, and the entire marriage plot idea just made zero sense to me. I just didn't get why she got so hung up about marrying Thaniel of all people (and not, e.g. any of the other male friends she had, or any other random stranger, for that matter) and then it was like that marriage was conveniently used to drum up all the drama out of freaking nowhere. I mean, it was clear from the start that it was going to be about convenience and money and her financial independence, but then she just changed the tune and started to hate on Mori for no apparent reason and do outright cruel things to Thaniel (like cutting down those trees that meant a lot to him just because she could). And then she accuses Mori of turning Thaniel into his clockwork puppet or something, and I was like... and you've been doing what exactly? You knew Thaniel for about 0.5 seconds before you decided he was gonna do just fine as your cardboard husband and now everything about his life is somehow a personal insult to you? It was just hypocritical, and I couldn't understand it nor have sympathy for her, even though I can totally support her wanting to do science and live her life and all. But...???! I couldn't, really couldn't understand why she didn't just decide to get another random dude to marry halfway through the book, and let the rest of us get back to watching Mori and Thaniel drink tea in comfortable silence. It was like Pulley wrote this cool female character that had no reason to stick around, really, but she needed her to stick around and so at some point she just denigrated Grace to doing whatever was necessary to keep the drama going, before it was all tears and "oh, how silly we've been" in the end. And I just... feel strongly about this sort of stuff... (I'm sure you can't tell :P)
no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 01:12 pm (UTC)it was clear from the start that it was going to be about convenience and money and her financial independence
Exactly! It was so weird when all of the conflict was just drummed up seemingly from nowhere. The Grace we first meet would be happy to just be left alone in her lab without even interacting with Thaniel, but suddenly she transforms into the Vengeful Bitch?
The female characters in Bedlam Stacks are better, but not terribly present. I'm starting to wonder if they're something Pulley has trouble writing.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 09:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-04 09:58 pm (UTC)I was going to say that I'd recommend reading Watchmaker before Bedlam Stacks, but the more I think about the more unsure about that I am. The cameo in Bedlam would make more sense if you'd read Watchmaker, but that's the only reference really.