Was digging through my boxes and boxes of books unopened since my move here over a year ago (my home office will be organized and furnished someday!) for a book for the bff when I came across this again and felt, rather contrarily given how slow I’ve been with reading recently otherwise, that I ought to give it another go. My God, has it been seven years since I first read this? (And thank you to Goodreads for helping me chart this information!) No wonder I remembered so little of it. Which isn’t to say it’s bad for being unmemorable, but the experience is so much of hanging out with the ladies, having tea and gossiping — an experience I like to enjoy, often, in real life — that it blends into my every day with only the exoticism of Iranian culture to differentiate it from either my American or Malaysian lives. Still a fast, lovely read, and a fascinating glimpse into life in Iran, but universally resonant in the way women contend with their (in this case, strictly hetero)sexuality and with men and the expectations of society. Marjane Satrapi’s art takes a distinctly secondary role to the vignettes of her narrative, and while this book is slighter than either her Persepolis masterwork or even the moving Chicken With Plums, it’s still a terrific graphic novel.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/17/embroideries-by-marjane-satrapi/
Feb 17 2016
Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames
The bff and I are both big fans of Wodehousian humor, so while trawling a Best-Of list last year, I stumbled across a glowing review of this novel, recently out in paperback, and thought I’d buy us a copy. Gave it to him for Christmas, and he passed it back to me recently to read over my birthday. It is certainly an updating of the Jeeves conceit, with a narrator who is a modern-day, American Bertie. One wonders if the modern-day, American equivalent would necessarily be as neurotic as our protagonist Alan Blair, tho. I found the best parts to definitely be the beginning and end, when Jonathan Ames hews more closely to Wodehousian plot structure, than the middle, where Blair flounders with Questions and neuroses and a rather charmless hyper-self-consciousness. Overall, a satisfying book for a Wodehousian completist, but given the choice, I’d rather read one of John Mortimer’s modern-day Rumpoles, such as this one, instead.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/17/wake-up-sir-by-jonathan-ames/
Feb 11 2016
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
I thought that Lagoon would be the first book I read by Nnedi Okorafor. Or maybe The Book of Phoenix, which a friend had strongly recommended. Turns out the first was Binti, one of a new line of novellas published electronically and on paper by Tor.com. I have it on paper, courtesy of a surprisingly well stocked airport bookstore at Chicago’s O’Hare.
“Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept the offer will mean giving up her place in her family to travel between the stars among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs.”
There is a Himba people in northern Namibia, as Okorafor notes in her acknowledgments, and the customs that Binti describes as belonging to her people closely parallel the present-day Himba, translated to a different time and setting — one with interstellar travel and a galactic university.
Binti tells her own story; at the outset she is sixteen, and about to run away. “… I had scored so high on the planetary exams in mathematics that Oomza University had not only admitted me, but promised to pay for whatever I needed to attend. No matter what choice, I was never going to have a normal life, really.” In the first scene, she is fiddling with a transporter, a small lifting device (Micro-antigravity? It’s never explained, only shown) to carry her personal belongings so that she may leave her home undetected, in the middle of the night. From the desert setting, the run-down device, the fervent desire to leave home, it could be Luke Skywalker in the first Star Wars movie. Except, of course, for every personal detail about the two characters.
That is one of the things that Okorafor is doing with this short, but by no means slight, tale. She is taking the universal story of leaving home to discover the wide world, the science fictional story of escaping a backwater province of a backwater world to head to the big time of interstellar institutions, and telling it through the eyes of someone who is a young woman, who is black, whose ancestry is not the best among her own people (she alludes to a grandparent from the “Desert People,” about whom some stigma is attached), and whose people are looked down on by essentially all of their neighbors. Some of the neighbors, the Khoush, also depend on and covet technological objects that Binti’s family makes; this relationship of dependence and disdain is surely not a coincidence.
In her brief journey to the spaceport, she encounters whispers and pointing, people who want to touch her hair to see if it is real, disapproval. But people being people, not everyone is mean.
When [the officer, an old Khoush man] finished, he looked up at me with his bright green piercing eyes that seemed to see deeper into me than his scan of my astrolabe. There were people behind me and I was aware of their whispers, soft laughter and a young child murmuring. It was cool in the terminal, but I felt the heat of social pressure. My temples ached and my feet tingled.
“Congratulations,” he said to me in his parched voice, holding out my astrolabe.
I frowned at him, confused. “What for?”
“You are the pride of your people, child,” he said, looking me in the eye. … He’d just seen my whole life. He knew of my admission into Oomza Uni. (pp. 14–15)
The next stage is also straight from classic science fiction.
The ship was packed with outward-looking people who loved mathematics, experimenting, learning, reading, inventing, studying, obsessing, revealing. The people on the ship weren’t Himba, but I soon understood that they were still my people. I stood out as a Himba, but the commonalities shined brighter. I made friends quickly. And by the second week in space, they were good friends. (pp. 21–22)
Danger erupts suddenly into this idyll, before Binti has properly had a chance to find herself among those people who are her people. The rest of the book’s 90 pages are about how she tries to survive the danger, and works to salvage something from the carnage. It’s fast-paced and gripping, but also a reminder of how horrible many adventures portrayed in science fiction and fantasy would be to most people.
There’s a depth, too, a point in showing what Binti has to do to survive, where power lies and what she, a young Himba woman, has to do and become when she encounters hostile power in its rawest form. When I first read through the book, my one complaint would have been that she seemed to make the changes too readily, to adapt too easily. But maybe “seemed” is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence, maybe even doing a lot of awful work. Something to keep thinking about.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/11/binti-by-nnedi-okorafor/
Feb 10 2016
The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein by Thomas Ligotti
One of the advantages of picking up twenty books for about twenty bucks in a Humble Bundle is the chance to get to know new authors at low cost. (I’m a long way from a good lending library in English, so no-cost is not much of an option for me.) The Bundle that I picked up and have read about half of the books contained therein introduced me to Ted Chiang, to Elizabeth Bear, and Peter V. Brett. I read Tim Powers for the first time in a quarter century, possibly the first time ever. I’m looking forward to reading more from all three. That’s in addition to getting an omnibus edition of Barry Hughart’s stories of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, as well as a humongous trove of Jack Vance’s work. On balance, the Bundle was a huge win, and I would buy more if not for the matter of the time it takes to actually read the lovely books.
One of the disadvantages, though, is that not every book will be to every person’s taste. I’m afraid that’s what happened with The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein by Thomas Ligotti. The conceit of the book is interesting: take well-known horror classics, and then go further with them. As he writes in his preface, “Why not take Wells’s story [‘The Island of Dr Moreau’] another step or two down the path of pain? … But once this revamping or disfigurement of Wells’s original hair-raiser has been performed, the horror writer may begin to wonder how similar treatments might be applied to other well-known works of the genre. Is the literary artist any less curious or fixed upon an ideal than Dr Moreau?”
Ligotti groups his short stories that answer these questions. There are three scientists, two immortals, leading men, Gothic heroines, loners, and shut-ins. There is a Poe anthology, followed by “The Works and Death of H.P. Lovecraft.” Knowing most of the originals, I enjoyed speculating about where Ligotti might take them. His pastiches capture the style of the originals, as far as I am familiar with them. For my taste, though, they’re just too short, too slight. The stories sketch the ideas, but Ligotti glides past so quickly into the next story that there wasn’t enough time for me to settle in, for the stories to have much emotional heft apart from what they borrowed from their sources. In the end, I found these stories clever (and quick — a mere 128 pages in the phone’s electronic format), but not really any more than that. Perhaps I missed something; perhaps that’s all Ligotti was aiming for; perhaps it’s just as well there were another 19 books in the Bundle.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/10/the-agonizing-resurrection-of-victor-frankenstein-by-thomas-ligotti/
Feb 09 2016
Brayan’s Gold by Peter V. Brett
Brayan’s Gold is a novella that forms part of the back story for the main character in a set of novels by Peter V. Brett, which I have not read. It began as a reference tossed into the first of those, “reminding people that Arlen had a ton of adventures back when he was young and working for the Messenger’s Guild,” as Brett relates in the introduction. He originally had no intention of explaining the reference, but a friend of him convinced him to flesh it out. “Dude,” Matt said. “You’re passing up a chance to write about snow demons?”
And so, in time, Brett seized that chance. Brayan’s Gold is a fun, slight adventure tale that follows Arlen, a young Messenger who is more than he seems. The setting is vaguely medieval, in a world where demons are real and come out every night to rend apart any human they may find outside towns or refuges protected by written magical wards. Few people venture far from home anyway, setting up a niche for Messengers who are fast and reasonably fearless, delivering dispatches and other light items among the feudal rulers of the various territories that Brett describes. The world he shows is sparsely settled, with stretches of wilderness between the protected towns. People make their way along known paths, always making sure to stop at a warded campground overnight, if they cannot reach their destination.
One of the furthest settlements is a fabulously wealthy mining outpost. “Ten nights’ travel from the city proper, it was the sole mine on the third mountain to the west, and higher up than any other.” The delivery? Tundersticks — dynamite for the mine. Naturally, they’re needed in a hurry, and the regular courier for that run is indisposed: broke his leg recently. The reward for a successful run is huge.
Brett gives a quick, economical setup, and moves his young hero out into the wilds with a crusty old Messenger, probably making his last run and planning on retiring into alcoholic obscurity with his share of the fee.
What goes wrong? You name it: bandits, treachery, wind demons, fire demons, rock demons and, eventually, the snow demon that set off the whole avalanche of the story. Is there a fair maiden? Of course there is a fair maiden. Does Arlen win her heart? That would be telling. And also assuming that he even wants to, or that her heart is there to be won, which it’s not necessarily. This is a twenty-first century fantasy after all.
Brayan’s Gold was fun; I knocked it out in an afternoon. The magic system is nifty, the action is fast and occasionally furious, the setting is plausible enough as these things go. I’m glad friend Matt convinced the author not to pass up the chance to write about snow demons.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/09/brayans-gold-by-peter-v-brett/
Feb 08 2016
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
After looking at the power of stories in Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett turns to some of the greatest stories ever told: religions, and, somewhat more incidentally, philosophy. Small Gods, the thirteenth Discworld novel, takes place in and around Omnia, an austere land on the edge of a great desert. The church of the Great God Om dominates life in Omnia. Its Quisition shortens the lives of many Omnians, and its armies work steadfastly to bring the truth of Om to neighboring lands, whether or not those lands have any interest in receiving it.
Omnia functions as something of a mirror image of Discworld’s more familiar city of Ankh-Morpork. The latter has accreted around a river that doesn’t flow so much as ooze, or perhaps subside. It is a freewheeling city in a lush setting, home to myriad gods, where nearly everyone is on the make, or on the take. Omnia ranges around its Citadel on the border of the desert, everything professing devotion to Om and preparing for more conquest of unbelievers. There is a little bit of life that remains untamed, as both a counterpart to Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler and the Quisition’s crackdowns on superstition attest. On the whole, though, Omnia is an oppressive theocracy, bent on conquering and converting any and all of its neighbors.
The novel follows a young acolyte, Brutha, who has been terrified by his granny into unquestioning belief in Om, and whose belief is supported by perfect memory (of Om’s scriptures along with everything else) supplemented by otherwise languid thought processes. On the Disc, gods grow as belief in them grows. Thus Om was able to expand from a patron of desert herders into the moving force behind Omnia’s Citadel and its conquering armies. Unfortunately for Om, gods ebb as belief in them wanes. The real kicker is that sustaining belief has to be sincere, and that is in very short supply in Omnia. In fact, Om is down to just one believer, Brutha, as the god discovers when he is in turtle form and dropped most ignominiously by an eagle into one of Brutha’s gardens’ compost piles.
The god speaks to Brutha, and Brutha wants to believe, but he also can’t quite believe that the god is speaking to someone as far down on the totem pole as he. Before long, a whiff of something comes to the attention to the head of the Quisition, who doesn’t know quite what to make of Brutha either. Rather than applying the usual methods, the chief Quisitor decides to make use of Brutha’s memory in bringing enlightenment to the city of Ephebe, home to philosophers and other heretics but guarded by an impenetrable labyrinth. Brutha does as he is told, up to a point, while also trying to make sure that a certain turtle stays out of the soup.
Nothing turns out as anyone, least of all the gods themselves, has planned. Heresy is not stomped out even in Omnia; the Ephebans have a few tricks up their sleeves; Om has ideas; even Brutha has some unexpected notions.
I’ve seen Small Gods praised as one of the key books that can serve as an introduction to Discworld as a whole, with Brutha and Om as one of Pratchett’s great comic pairs. I’m not quite sure why it didn’t engage my enthusiasm as much. Perhaps because it all felt a bit structured to me, the working out of a premise and a setting, rather than the exploration of what happens when some characters are set in motion. It’s fun, and engaging, and occasionally deep, as all the Discworld books are at this point in the set, but I’m not as likely to return to it as I am, say, to some of the witches’ stories, or of Death’s. Small Gods is a one-off, in its setting; Pratchett did not return either.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/08/small-gods-by-terry-pratchett/
Feb 08 2016
Aylin by Ayse Kulin
First of all, this book is presented as fiction but is really the life story of the remarkable Aylin De Vrimel (Radomisli-Cates, tho she’s never referred to as such,) written by a cousin who clearly hero-worshipped her. The prologue, presenting Aylin’s funeral after her mysterious death, is written in an embarrassingly maudlin way; fortunately, the rest of the book is a much better read. A large part of this is due to Aylin herself. Transforming from an overly romantic young girl who marries a prince to a hippie medical student, and then to a sophisticated psychiatrist with a complicated personal life who finds answers by enlisting in the United States Army, Aylin’s story is one of courage and determination. There’s no doubting that she’s a flawed individual, particularly when it comes to money and romance and how they relate (which, honestly, I found very understandable given her background and upbringing,) but she’s also a pretty awesome person, and you can understand Ayse Kulin’s determination to ensure that her story is told. Ms Kulin does let sentimentality get away with her, particularly in the beginning and end bits, but there’s also a lot of humor to the story, and you get the genuine feeling that something wasn’t right in the way Aylin died. It’s a fast, entertaining, somewhat gossipy read (with names changed to protect from a libel suit, of course.)
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/08/aylin-by-ayse-kulin/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/08/mycroft-holmes-by-kareem-abdul-jabbar-and-anna-waterhouse/
Jan 28 2016
An Interview with James Roberts, author of Pardon Me: A Victorian Farce
Q: Every book has its own story about how it came to be conceived and written as it did. How did Pardon Me evolve?
Pardon Me began life as an idea for a short story. I wanted to invent a rubbish British diplomat whose ineptitude would be the cause of many of history’s real calamities. This would be a man who would almost single-handedly bring down the British Empire and in doing so be inadvertently popular with nationalists and freedom fighters everywhere. The first short story, however, got a little out of hand and ended up being a full-blown novel. As a one time historian I am understandably interested in historical cause and effect. I liked the idea of messing with this a little. Pardon Me brings together the two great crises that knocked Pax Britannica for six in the year 1895 (and New Years Day 1896). One was a badly thought out colonial adventure known as the Jameson Raid and the other was the sentencing of Oscar Wilde. Neither was very funny on the surface, I grant you, but I made the first into a cricket match, the second a severe case of mistaken identity, and both the fault of one badly schooled and heroically inept individual. It’s called ‘Pardon Me’ because the story is presented in the form of an epistolary: a plea for clemency from a condemned man to his queen – with a few telegrams, notes and a play gummed in between the pages for good measure.
Q: Do you write with any particular audience in mind? Are there any particular audiences you hope will connect with this story?
Not consciously, no. Or at least not to begin with. I think as the novel progressed I started to become aware of an imaginary reader who would get some bits, like the historical references, and need other bits signalling and elucidating. I suppose I wrote the book primarily with the aim of entertaining myself and making myself laugh; the hope being that a few other people around the globe would share my poor taste.
Q: What is the first book you read that made you think, “I have got to write something like this someday!”
That’s a tough one, mostly because if I find a book really good I also tend to conclude I could never write anything that good and it puts me off the activity full stop. The first book that I read where the quality of the writing was inspirational was To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, but I soon disabused myself of any pretentions to write that well, or that head-hurtingly metaphysically for that matter. As I’ve got older my favourite novels have been the ones that combine good writing, intelligence and extreme silliness. So I would have to say that anything by PG Wodehouse makes me want to put pen to paper, if only to get somewhere close to his shadow.
Q. How did you learn to write?
I am still learning! I studied history at university and then wrote a thesis so I suppose that’s where the mechanics of writing were drummed into me. But after that I would say trial and error. Although if you are one of my copywriting clients then rest assured I mean inherent genius.
Q: Do you adhere to any particular writing regimen?
I tried to treat writing the novel as I would any other writing task. Start around 9am and work till teatime. My brain goes to sleep a few hours before my body does and even as a young student I found working at night just tended to turn up a pile of unreadable nonsense. So I try to set aside whole days for my own writing, in between the stuff for other people.
Q: Are you a pantser (someone who writes by the seat of their pants) or a plotter? Given the complexity of Pardon Me, I imagine the latter, but I’m prepared to be surprised!
Sorry to let you down, but I plot like hell until I am certain of everything that is going to happen. I am big on plot, which I think is essential to comic farce. I really love the challenge of putting characters into impossibly sticky situations and then somehow rescuing them – or some of them.
Q: Johannesburg and its environs are described with a critical fondness that echoes my own memories of South Africa. What has been your own experience with that part of that world?
Purely from books I am afraid. As a student and as a lecturer I was always really fascinated by the whole colonial set up and that very British habit of trying to replicate home in the strangest of places. I read some old memoires by colonial officers and a few histories that gave the indigenous population’s side of the story. I then decided to exaggerate the rather rapidly thrown up nature of late nineteenth-century Jo-berg and make it a city of tents and corrugated iron huts. Sad to say that some parts of the city still look like that.
Q: My favorite line in the entire book is this:
Where the English public school system had really let the Empire down was in producing a generation of Englishmen that spoke in blasted euphemisms all the bally time!
As half the fun in Pardon Me has to do with wordplay and innuendo, how seriously do you take this cri de coeur yourself?
Well we Brits used to be famous for understatement and euphemisms. Parts of that culture, I think, were quite laudable: the old ‘stiff upper lip’ thing where you bore hardship without making a fuss. But I think there was also an unspoken code which prevented too many imperialists and colonial adventurers from asking “is this really good for anyone else but us?” So they hid their selfishness and occasional brutality behind phrases like “the natives have been getting uppish” when what they really meant was “they were trying to stop us nicking their country so we shot them.” And of course, no one ever mentioned sex, despite the population doubling in a few generations, so somebody must have been doing it.
Q: What can you tell us about your next project?
I haven’t quite got the time at the moment to contemplate another full blown novel and I have been aching to try my hand at radio comedy for some time. So my next project is going to be a script for radio. But I am always writing down nascent ideas and I have this reincarnated rabbit that wants to start an adventure and refuses to go away, so we shall see.
Q: Your website (http://www.jamesroberts.scot/) is a thing of comic beauty. I especially like how you discussed the way you researched writing the lingo of Pardon Me, by reading extensively of books of the period. Any gems you can recommend, both in terms of style and quality, to readers needing something to read while awaiting your next novel?
Thank you, I am flattered. I tried to write a sort of ‘anti-social media’ website, which is bloody hypocritical if you think about it! What I find is that latter Victorian writers could really write. Very leaden, detail rich prose that most readers today would put down after a few pages. But there are one or two that transcend the generations and managed to both paint portraits with words and tell a great story. Oscar Wilde needs no bigging up from me, but Rider Haggard’s Alan Quatermain stories were the inspiration for the hunting scene in my book, the one where the elephant runs amok and Paul Kruger gets his thumb shot off. A hundred years after publication it is amazing how unashamedly condescending and xenophobic the writing now appears. You really get a sense of the unquestioned superiority felt by the English gentleman abroad. It is this attitude that my book tastelessly lampoons.
Q: What are you reading at the moment?
Ben Elton’s Time and Time Again. People who only know his work through his comedy may be surprised to discover that he is actually a very good writer of historical drama (his uncle was a famous Cambridge professor of history as it happens). This is a real page turner and, speaking as an ex-historian, I am fascinated to see what he does with his re-writing of June and July 1914. Prior to this I read Syrup by Max Barry. For my money, nobody rips into the modern world quite like he does and with both humour and intelligence – a really underrated writer.
Q: Are there any new books or authors that have you excited?
The best book I have read in an age is The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir who got Trapped in an IKEA Wardrobe by Romain Puerolas. It is both very funny and very thought provoking and every word sings off the page. A real joy.
Q: Tell us everything about your book and why you love it!
That’s a big question! I am not sure I love it as such. I think when you know the mechanics of a story and all the work behind it, it’s very difficult to enjoy it like a fan. I am very proud of the writing, or most of it, but then I think you always end up thinking something could have been better. Sometimes I read to be enlightened and provoked, sometimes to escape, and I really hope my book helps readers escape awhile. What’s it about? It’s a colonial farce which makes gentle fun of the assuredness and ill-founded sense of superiority that helped our little island govern a third of the globe for a brief moment in time. It’s got real people in it – Cecil Rhodes, Oscar Wilde, to name but two – and one definitely fictitious diplomat called Madagan Rùn (pronounced Rhune) who is spectacularly unqualified for the position and only got the job because he is… Well read it and find out.
Author Links
~~~
Pardon Me: A Victorian Farce was published October 8th 2015 by Mint Associates, and is available both through the author’s site and via all good book sellers. My review of the book itself may be found here.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/01/28/an-interview-with-james-roberts-author-of-pardon-me-a-victorian-farce/
Jan 24 2016
Pardon Me: A Victorian Farce by James Roberts
There are several kinds of reader who will absolutely delight in this book. One is the kind who loves a sex romp a la Benny Hill, all innuendoes and awkward hilarity. Another is the kind who loves British/European/South African history of the Victorian era, particularly as the basis for a bit of speculative historical fiction (think Forrest Gump,) with one knowing eye to modern sensibilities. But most of all, this book will appeal to the kind of reader who enjoys a smart, funny but ultimately and surprisingly sweet tale of a young man trying to find his way at the turn of the 20th century. Reminiscent of a historically advanced Candide, tho without as much heavy-handed philosophizing, Pardon Me is an occasionally grotesque but ultimately fulfilling Anglo-centric comedy of sex, drugs and politics.
Disclaimer: James Roberts offered a copy of Pardon Me to the Frumious Consortium staff for review. After a death match that may or may not have involved stilettos of both kinds and copious amounts of tears and drunken promises, I emerged the victor and got to read Pardon Me first, whee!
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/01/24/pardon-me-a-victorian-farce-by-james-roberts/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire