2014 read #49: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
288 pages
Published 2005
Read from May 27 to May 30
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

As I mentioned here, when literary authors approach the themes and subject matter of genre fiction, they trust the intelligence of their readers rather more than genre authors do. Never Let Me Go is an elegant example of that trust, and how that trust (when in the hands of a masterful storyteller) rewards readers with a story that gets deep inside you and breaks your heart before you even know why. The first hundred pages go by without a single explanation of what's going on, narrating completely mundane events and people, but with just enough wrong to twist you up inside into subtle knots of unease and dread. And once the salient fact of these characters' lives, their very reason for existence, is revealed, the sorrow of it is something I won't begin to describe. I told my book club partner, "It feels like my emotions got punched and then hit with a truck." This book merits a more elegant way of putting it, but I'm sticking to that.

The narration is a marvel, perfectly articulating (showing, not telling) the effects of social isolation, the naivete of a small, insular population never taught -- and never truly needing to be taught -- how to operate in the wider world. It's a strange but involving mix of intelligence and senses dulled by small horizons, where a trip to see a boat stranded in mudflats or a visit to a secondhand store becomes the pivot around which several lives turn. The aching humanity of Ishiguro's narration -- I lack words for it. I don't care that I've already claimed that excuse in this review. I don't know how to express how this book got into me, and I won't even try.

Go read this book.

2014 read #48: The Adversary by Julian May.

The Adversary by Julian May
472 pages
Published 1984
Read from May 25 to May 27
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

After I finished The Nonborn King, I spent a day and a half unable to focus on a new book. It took me that long to realize I was most interested in seeing how The Saga of Pliocene Exile would end -- surprising, given that I put down Nonborn King with the thought that I didn't much care about the story anymore.

Just as surprising was how enjoyable I found the first half or so of The Adversary. All that tedious piece-moving and board-setting in King enabled some brisk, entertaining passages as events finally moved forward, at least until the story got bogged down again in plans of genetic engineering and industrial fabrication. And after all the troubling gender politics in the previous volumes, perhaps it's no surprise that the central conflict is resolved when a powerful female protagonist finally, contentedly relinquishes control and assumes a subsidiary role to a more powerful male. (I get that this is supposed to be the character Elizabeth's need and not archetypal confirmation of a gender "ideal" -- there are, after all, a handful of tertiary characters who are strong women leaders -- but every other main female character is dead by this point, so it's hard to ignore.)

But hey, at least we (briefly) got to follow the adventures of my new favorite character in the series: Mr. Betsy, a badass former spacecraft engineer and test pilot who dresses in sumptuous Queen Elizabeth I drag.

2014 read #47: The Nonborn King by Julian May.

The Nonborn King by Julian May
429 pages
Published 1983
Read from May 20 to May 23
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Here we have a prime example of A Feast for Crows syndrome. All the main characters from The Many-Colored Land are either dead, insane, or ridiculously overpowered, so the bulk of The Nonborn King is spent introducing a new cast (or trumping up third-tier characters who barely entered into the story in previous books) and maneuvering the plot into place for the final confrontation (and its fallout in the concluding volume). Characters are introduced and followed for whole chapters on futile errands, serving no ultimate purpose but to develop one plot-wrinkle or to prop up another fresh nobody's armament. Unlike in the waning volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, however, I am not so invested in the surviving characters or overarching plot to feel much interest in the second half of The Saga of Pliocene Exile. It's a tolerable pulp adventure, but I don't see much reason to care anymore.

2014 read #46: Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler.

Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
365 pages
Published 1998
Read from May 17 to May 20
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Science fiction loves to traffic in religion. Ignoring the sci-fi scribblers who went out and actually founded religions, we're left with an enormous reliquary of star religions, eugenic religions, political religions, most intended to reflect some allegorical or didactic goal of the author's. We often see Campbellian heroes or Randian ubermensch in the process of founding these systems, which, once founded, roll along with irresistible momentum -- and of course every secondary world story will have long-practiced beliefs somewhere in the background. Parable of the Talents is an interesting outlier, sketching the early years of a new and useful belief system as it struggles for survival against a much larger, predatory species of Christianity.

Talents was easier to endure, emotionally, than Parable of the Sower -- partly because the Christian theocracy it depicts, with slave labor "reeducation" camps and uniformed Crusaders killing or uprooting "heathen" families is (just slightly) more remote from the big business dystopia of Sower, but also partly because Talents isn't structured with quite the same skill. There is no rising, inevitable dread as one disaster creeps after another, only a quiet, bucolic interlude of personal and ideological productivity in the first third of the book before Christian America comes to power and (literally) crashes the gates. The plausible horrors of life on the road are replaced with life in a slave camp -- a subject never far removed from the thoughts and experience of a huge number of Americans, but in execution erring a little too near to misery porn. It felt nihilistic, an extended depiction of the evils of what ordinary people (zealots in particular) do with unchecked power, numbing and dreary rather than powerful and sobering. The way Oyamina and Earthseed escape from the camp, and how later Oyamina finally lucks into spreading her message, feel like dei ex machina. I guess it's too hard to write a believable scenario for the origin of a forward-thinking religion in a time of cultural regression.

Butler's writing is absorbing and powerful in its directness, however, and even if outright Christian theocracy is a little bit further away than the libertarian dream-come-true of Sower, it's still a present-enough danger to raise chills. The structure of the narrative as a reluctant hagiography is interesting, but perhaps not fully exploited.

2014 read #45: The Golden Torc by Julian May.

The Golden Torc by Julian May
381 pages
Published 1982
Read from May 10 to May 18
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

I put this book aside in disgust after a one-two punch of shocking transphobia and paleontological inaccuracy. The transphobia, alas, was nothing surprising given the date Torc was published -- second generation feminism was still the going concern, so of course the one transsexual character would be the woman who betrays all of womankind, undoing the surgical infertility required of all time-traveling women and opening them to the depredations and rape of the alien breeding program, and of course she would be bonkers on top of all that. Not surprising, as I said, but tremendously disappointing and off-putting. In the very next chapter, May -- who had been fairly restrained and conscientious in her Pliocene fauna until this point -- suddenly has plesiosaurs swimming the Atlantic, some sixty million years after their extinction. The paleontological errata aren't in the same category of distasteful as the trans* hate, but after those two chapters I tossed Torc in favor of Boy, Snow, Bird. And... welp.

If one were inclined to overlook those things and focus on Torc as a pulp adventure of psychics, faries, and time-travel, it still comes up a bit wanting. (This book is literally as old as I am, so I doubt anyone cares about spoilers at this point, but just in case, here's your warning: Spoilers ahead.) Every one of my favorite characters in the series snuffs it in Torc -- Madame Guderian, Claude the paleontologist, and Bryan the love-lorn anthropologist. Every other human character is either a racial stereotype or a prickly, annoying snit, and the three operant psychics are far too damn superpowered for me to feel much concern for them in any case. Even with the understanding that the Tanu and Firvulag are meant to be Faery, the alien races are still kind of silly. But I do like that, after the too-easy victory at the end of The Many-Colored Land, things don't go well for our protagonists, and while I don't know why I should keep reading now that all my favorite characters are dead, I do like that main characters die in this series. I had my doubts after Land.

One thing that still has me hooked is the setting itself -- I always was a sucker for deep-time narratives, even if the occasional anachronistic plesiosaur swims up. (Maybe there's a whole parallel plotline going on under the waves, with an intelligent race of plesiosaurs building a time-portal of their own to explore the far-future.) After accidentally getting an eyeful of spoilers for the rest of the series on Wiki, I have a feeling that the setting will get less engrossing in future volumes, but eh. I made it through the Prospero's Children trilogy, I can make it through just about any initially promising but ultimately disappointing series.

2014 read #44: Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi.

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
309 pages
Published 2014
Read from May 14 to May 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I'm going to talk mostly about the ending of this book, so if you worry about spoilers, be warned.

The primary difference between genre fantasy (no matter how skillfully written) and literary fiction (no matter most fantastical) is the care taken to spell out to the reader exactly what emotions are in play, who feels what toward whom, and how the reader is supposed to feel about it. Literary fiction leaves everything it can to the reader to figure out. A consequence of this is that, in my limited experience, modern literary novels tend to end in a puff, as if a revery or memory is broken and you're left blinking and trying to catch fragments of what seemed so real and important just a moment before. A haze of impressions and subconscious magic dissolves into something abruptly banal, like when Amal gets on Noman's bike at the end of The Geometry of God, or when Parrot visits Olivier after Parrot's happy elopement in Parrot & Olivier in America, or when Maja simply gets over her spiritual malady at the end of The Opposite House.

Well, let me walk back my "primary difference" talk just a little -- this puff-of-air ending seems to be a modern stylistic affectation, not a necessary concomitant of the category. But anyway. My point is, the mystery and half-seen symbols of even the most potent literary work tend to vanish at some point near the end, as if ending with a decisive and cathartic fulfilment of that imagery is déclassé. That deflationary trend makes me worry when I near the end of a literary novel published in the last twenty or so years. But I never would have guessed what form that would take in Boy, Snow, Bird.

I'm hardly the first to worry that Oyeyemi's choice of direction in the last twenty or so pages is transphobic. After all, I'm a straight cis-sexual man -- if it's obvious to me, it's no wonder "boy snow bird transphobic" is one of the top Google autocompletes when you type the title. The part of me that likes to stick to textual readings feebly tried to argue that Boy is an unreliable narrator, that the rat-catcher is meant to be a specific character and not a sweeping generalization... but after putting The Golden Torc on hold to read this book after some particularly nasty and blatant transphobia made me lose my taste for May's Pliocene Exile, that textual-reading part of me isn't especially vocal. The stereotype of transexualism-as-mental-illness or transexualism-as-traumatic-disturbance is very much alive and very much in any given writer's mind. The Frances/Frank revelation adds nothing to the characters of Boy, Snow, or Bird, and comes as a post hoc addendum to a story far better without it.

And damn it, Boy, Snow, Bird was sooooo fucking good up until that point. Seriously good. If I were writing this later, after I had time to let the ending percolate and poison my impressions of the foregoing narrative, I'd probably rate this much lower, but as it is the good stuff is still fresh in my mind, as if it and the Frances/Frank stuff came from wholly different books, wholly different authors. Such a disappointment.

2014 read #43: The Many-Colored Land by Julian May.*

The Many-Colored Land by Julian May*
429 pages
Published 1981
Read from May 7 to May 9
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

*Denotes a reread.

Memory is a funny thing. (This is a totally original and noteworthy insight, copyright by me.) An old text document, titled "Books of 2005," informs me that I read The Many-Colored Land in its entirety in early June, 2005. Yet I remembered essentially nothing from it. The three chapters of the prologue were vaguely familiar; the end of Madame Guderian's wardship over the time-portal rang a bell; I definitely recalled Aiken Drum's proclamation, "I choose Exile," even though I had zero memory of Aiken Drum as a character. And that was everything I retained from that initial reading, nine years ago. None of the characters, none of the events, and certainly not the split-in-half climax (read the exciting adventures of the other main characters in Volume II of the Pliocene Exile, The Golden Torc!) felt familiar as I read it all again this week.

I hadn't reread a book since late 2010 or so; there's too much out there in the world to waste time rereading the same old stories, an insight I didn't attain until I'd farted away almost 30 years rereading the same old stories. I'm glad I took the time to reread this one, though, and not only because I intend to persevere through the rest of the Pliocene Exile saga for the first time. Land was a tremendously enjoyable pulpy adventure in the best "toss in a bit of everything" late '70s/early '80s style, and I enjoyed it more now than I believe I did back in '05, because reading new things these past few years has educated me on the genre conventions and references May tossed in. A basic fact that I never would have grasped nine years ago: Land is an elaborately disguised tale of Faery. I have a vague vague vague impression that I thought the Tanu/Firvulag "aliens" were silly when I first read it, but now I know their cultural context, and May's conceit seems mildly clever, especially for when it was published.

Of course, Land suffers from other markers of its publication date. The supporting human cast is a textbook example of the Village People approach to diversity. Authors of the time were trying to present a more inclusive sense of humanity, but they can't resist making the Native American say "How" and fight with a tomahawk, or having the lesbian character make unwelcome and aggressive advances on other women. And every single lead human character is of Western European extraction. The characterization of the leads is basic pop psychology stuff, wherein a single childhood trauma is the primary catalyst for all subsequent personality development.

In order to enjoy anything published before, say, 1999, especially in genre fiction, it's always necessary to say "Well, for its time..." And as a white hetero cisgender male [edit a few years later: no, I’m not], I have an easier time than anyone making that hand-wave. I'm looking forward to The Golden Torc, and even have plans now to read the other May books set in the same universe, e.g. the Galactic Milieu series.

2014 read #42: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life by Herman Melville.

Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life by Herman Melville
315 pages
Published 1846
Read from May 5 to May 7
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

I would have eaten up this sort of book as a kid. I loved the 19th century adventure narrative back then, and the questions of authenticity, culturally filtered expectations, and massaging the narrative to move copies wouldn't have bothered me at that age. As it is, with no way to determine how much of the book is fiction, and how thoroughly the "true" parts were caricatured to suit the worldview of author and reader, the book's only commendation would be Melville's prose -- yet here, in his first book, he had yet to fully master the wry, ironic tone that elevated Moby-Dick to the short list of my favorite books. Typee is a historical curiosity, but useless as an anthropological document.

2014 read #41: The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi.

The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi
260 pages
Published 2007
Read from May 1 to May 5
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

My lack of literary education leads me to invent terms and categories that no doubt have satisfactory names of long standing. Today I wish to invent a category of prose style I'm tentatively dubbing the "somatic sympathy cringe." It's the sort of style (most often in my experience employed by upcoming women writers, though I'm sure it's been used by generations of the more cadaverous esthetes) that digs in to bodily responses and savors the gristle and spit of life, a morbid, mortal esthetic that alters your breathing and makes your salivary glands tingle to read it. There will be blood, and bruises, and thin knives, and bony growths like green wood within the ribcage, slick stone behind the teeth. It's uncomfortable and intrusive reading, but also appallingly good.

This is my first exposure to Oyeyemi, my current "must read everything by" author. I can't say I entirely understand everything she conveys in this brisk story, but I'm not sure it's so important I do. The Opposite House is a delicate balance of impressions, ideas shown rather than spelled out, something I must adapt to if I hope to climb out of my genre pit. It's the sort of book that rewards lingering and slow intimacy, yet Oyeyemi's prose is swift and decisive, sliding you to the end before you find your bearings. The best book I've read in a couple months, for sure.

2014 read #40: Eating Stone by Ellen Meloy.

Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild by Ellen Meloy
330 pages
Published 2005
Read from May 1 to May 4
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

The most moving passage in Eating Stone is on the back flap of the dust jacket, which states that Ellen Meloy died three months after finishing it. Awareness of her demise (amplified by Googled obituaries, which add the information that she died suddenly in the night, possibly of an aneurism) percolated and condensed throughout my experience of the book, like uranium ore in Shinarump deposits. Her musings on age, death, loss in both personal and natural contexts, her thoughts and plans for upcoming winters, were weighted by the thought that her frayed neurons would soon cease firing, her sun-frazzled hair would no longer dry thick with San Juan River silt, the home she and her husband built would be half empty, her beloved totemic bighorns would carry on their annual rhythms -- or not -- without her observation. Cliche it may well be, but I feel as if I lost a friend.

Meloy has been one of my favorite authors ever since I picked up The Anthropology of Turquoise quite by chance last August. None of her other works equaled Turquoise's abrasive yet sensual absorption, but now that I've reached the last of her books, I feel a bit poorer knowing there won't be another. It's hard to critique Eating Stone on its own merits, rather than as an inadvertent eulogy. Her thesis that human imagination (an inclusive term sweeping up spirituality, identity, and awareness of cosmic place) requires brushing up against animals truly wild is entirely anecdotal, but finds no rebuttal from me. Rather I wish I could take Jonny and baptize him in red silt rivers and have him wake up to predawn birdsong deep in slickrock country the rest of his formative years. The beauty of Meloy's descriptions, as usual, left me aching, a tender bruise of want sharpened by the loss of her voice forever.