2015 read #16: The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells.*

The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells*
149 pages
Published 1897
Read from March 27 to March 28
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I hadn't set out to reread The Invisible Man. Yesterday's mail delivered a copy of After London by Richard Jefferies, a postapocalyptic novel published at the precocious date of 1885; flipping through it, I found what I feel to be a contender for the most dynamic opening hook from any pre-1900 "scientific romance":

The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.

The only contemporary opening hook that can compete, I think, is from Wells' The War of the Worlds. I can't decide which opening is stronger, in part because the effectiveness of The War of the Worlds has been blunted by familiarity -- I've read the book at least a couple dozen times. But I got to checking out the opening lines of other early sci-fi books for comparison, and before I knew it, I found myself absorbed in reading The Invisible Man on Project Gutenberg. It was one of my favorite books as a young teen, in part because Wells' narration is so immediate and modern. Recalling the book in recent years, I have asserted that The Invisible Man can be seen in retrospect as the first modern technothriller -- Michael Crichton's trademark journalistic narration is anticipated here, and the tension of Kemp keeping Griffin distracted by drawing out his story from him while the constabulary arrives is still effective, all these years (and rereadings) later. The climactic chase through Port Burdock is less effective than I recalled, and I picked up on way more of the period's endemic prejudice and race theory than I caught as a teen, but the book as a whole is still superb -- as can be seen by how I got so hooked that I read the whole thing on my phone almost without meaning to.

2015 read #15: Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy by Karen Abbott.

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War by Karen Abbott
436 pages
Published 2014
Read from March 18 to March 22
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Historical biography is a different animal than capital-H History, a clade intermediate between history and historical fiction. Both history and historical biography have their worth and their points of interest. History (or at least history the way I like it) reports on its own uncertainties and the contradictions between sources, underlining when an interpretation is speculative or a historical source potentially unreliable -- not all historians are meticulous on this point, but the good ones are. Historical biography, on the other hand, goes all-in for scene-setting and detail, drawing sights and smells from various sources, inferring thoughts and states of mind from correspondence and subsequent memoirs when available, frequently approaching the narrative as an experiential third-person-limited point of view. Abbott refers to her "characters" in the acknowledgements, and in general is obviously trying to tell stories to their best effect. Historical biographies, the good ones, can be fully scrupulous about primary sources -- unlike certain chauvinist reviewers, I see no reason to suspect that Abbott faked details or indulged in "women's magazine" frippery, whatever the hell that might even mean in this context. But it is definitely a distinct genre of historical writing, with its own style and its own storytelling expectations.

That's all very broad and open-ended, of course. Basically I'm writing down whatever thoughts occur to me, because I'm too distracted to write a review engaging directly with the book's content in any meaningful way. Not that engaging with content is a habit of mine in this space, but it's more acute these days, for Life Reasons that I won't get into here.

More broad commentary: The American Civil War is fascinating in a dispiriting way, because it never really went away, as any number of bumper stickers and totally-not-racist Tea Party rallies will show you. Likewise, I'm always fascinated by the women who get left out of history books (which is to say, basically all of them), and their various means of asserting agency and articulating with their society. Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy exhibits a good (if small) sample of these stories, or "characters" if you will, each with distinct motives and methods of operation. It's a good (if preliminary) look into a part of history wholly unfamiliar to me, which is all I can ask for.

2015 read #14: The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane.

The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane
330 pages
Published 2007
Read from March 16 to March 18
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

It was Roger Deakin who inspired my interest in books of eccentric (and, seemingly, ineluctably British) adventures in the proverbial backyard. His Waterlog documented his project to swim throughout the British Isles, "dipping into ponds and estuaries, lochs and ocean littoral, trout streams, fens, abandoned moats, canals, flooded quarries, harbors, industrial rivers, hidden becks, a cave, even heated swimming pools," as I put it in that review, while his Wildwood lingered in coppices and took delight in nuts and berries and sunbeams. Knowing nothing of Robert Macfarlane when Amazon recommended this book to me, I seized upon The Wild Places to fill a hunger for domestic exploration that had been maturing ever since I finished Waterlog, a craving Three Men on a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel had failed to assuage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Macfarlane and Deakin had become good friends in the last years of Deakin's life, and much of The Wild Places is imbued with Deakin's presence, his actions directly on the page or his example and inspiration like a warm light through eyelids. I only "know" Deakin through his own two books, and now through Macfarlane's depiction, but the chapters dealing with Deakin's death and Macfarlane's mourning have left me glum and heavy all day today.

Less eccentric, perhaps, than Deakin's quest in Waterlog, Macfarlane's project here is to discover any remnants of wildness left on the long-inhabited, recently-monocultured British archipelago. Beginning with the obvious wildernesses of the remote north, Macfarlane works his way toward more populated areas and a more intimate conception of what wildness might mean, finding (with Deakin) the wild in the limestone gryke microenvironments of the Burren and the forgotten holloways of the chalklands. Macfarlane's narration is also more conventional than what I recall of Deakin's sumptuous digressions, sticking close to his theme with beautiful but efficient prose, making for a faster but, perhaps, less beguiling and lingering read. Macfarlane's text also carries an undercurrent of melancholy, never approaching the gentle delight of Deakin's abbreviated career.

If his other books are like this one (and I've already ordered one more from ILL and one from Amazon), though, I can already tell Macfarlane will quickly become one of my favorite authors.

2015 read #13: The Boy Who Lost Fairyland by Catherynne M. Valente.

The Boy Who Lost Fairyland by Catherynne M. Valente
235 pages
Published 2015
Read from March 13 to March 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

A book-length narrative detour that, as far as I can tell, serves no real purpose to the ongoing story of September, the girl who did quite a lot of things in and around Fairyland. We enter the story with the early childhood of Hawthorn, an ordinary troll boy, shortly before he gets swapped as a Changeling with Thomas Rood, a baby in Chicago. After a rough start, as if Valente herself wasn't quite convinced the series would go in this direction on its own momentum, the book finally gains some traction with some precious scenes of Hawthorn (now Thomas the Un-Normal) attempting to understand mid-century American toddlerhood and grade school from a Fairyland-ish perspective, and meeting with a Fetch or matchstick girl also left behind in a Changeling exchange. This is relatively unexplored territory, as unexplored as any corner of faery lore can be these days, so for a while I was engrossed with a sense of possibility and newness -- there was no telling where the story might go! Alas, even this portion of the tale feels weightless, lacking a certain depth or enthusiasm that Valente ordinarily brings to her work.

The Boy Who Lost Fairyland feels to me like little more than a protracted bout of writer's block nosing head-first into a publisher's deadline.

About halfway through the book, Hawthorn and Tamburlaine and their magically animated friends get kidnapped into Fairyland by a baseball that had been a troll king all along. Not that long ago, I found Valente's Fairyland "charming" and "whimsical" and "fuckin' precious" (from my review of "The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland, For a Little While," anthologized here). The first two books of this series maintained a nice balance of "Grim and Whimsy" (as I put it here), though even by book two I was noticing a creeping tendency for the narrative voice to shift into "Aunty Cathy tells a spooky yarn before bedtime." That finds full flower here, with a heap of Whimsy and a dearth of Grim, which wouldn't be so bad if Valente's heretofore reliable inventive fancy were also at its peak. The outlines of a creative, whimsical story are there -- the aforementioned baseball-troll-king, the matchstick girl designed to destroy but channeling her impulses into creativity, Blunderbuss the yarn wombat -- but for me, at least, the spark feels damped. Valente's descriptions of Fairyland, formerly evocative, have been stripped down to constant reminders of how edible everything looks. Far from fuckin' precious, the net effect is merely a case of the munchies.

And in the end, despite populating a book-length side trip with a whole new collection of characters, Hawthorn and his friends have essentially no effect that I can discern upon the situation of September and the balance of Fairyland. Two hundred pages of buildup and this new gang blunders into contact with September and her pals through sheer happenstance, have a game of brownie backgammon, and then Aubergine the Dodo peeks out over September's shoulder to admit that she's had a deus ex machina in the form of a dodo egg this whole time -- and it's not at all clear how, exactly, the actions of our new band of heroes prompted this belated (and flimsy) resolution. There's enough residual charm to carry the novel, but we seem to be reaching the Land of Diminishing Returns with this series.

2015 read #12: The Innkeeper's Song by Peter S. Beagle.

The Innkeeper's Song by Peter S. Beagle
348 pages
Published 1993
Read from March 4 to March 13
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

After reading all those Year's Best Fantasy Stories anthologies from the 1970s, perhaps it's inevitable that I would pick up on the idea that The Innkeeper's Song is, essentially, a classic sword-and-sorcery tale seen through an intelligent, literate, humane lens. Or in other words, exactly what you'd expect if Peter S. Beagle tried his hand at it. There are battling wizards, extradimensional horrors, wandering heroes with tragic backstories and assassins hot on their heels, a perilous venture into the stronghold of the evil wizard, and much of the story takes place in and around the sort of crossroads inn found primarily in adventurers-on-a-quest fantasy (and hardly ever in history). But the characters feel distinct and well-rounded, fundamentally human in the best Beagle tradition, motivated by their emotional states, growing and changing through interaction. The emotional core of each character feels vivid and real.

The narration is excellent overall, after a forbidding start -- each the first eight or so chapters have a different narrator, relating overlapping sections of story from their own point of view, which felt a bit overwhelming at first, possibly because my brain is still muddy with whatever has been mucking up my reading abilities of late. But once each character established herself or himself in my head, this structure paid off with differing insights and complications, rather than merely spreading the story too thin, as multiple perspectives and main characters sometimes do (as in the later Song of Ice and Fire books). Multiple p.o.v.'s crowding for attention also made for perhaps one of the most memorable and unusual group sex scenes I've read to date, a thirty page opus (or derailment, depending on how you feel about it) bouncing between all four participants, as well as a shapeshifting fox (who, spoilers, turns out to be some kind of ancient extradimensional being later on). Beagle takes great pains to establish the emotional landscape leading to the foursome, and spends the protracted scene exploring ideas of comfort and intimacy and need, so I can't say it felt exploitative, but it was an unexpected tangent, at the very least.

2015 read #11: The Coast: A Journey Down the Atlantic Shore by Joseph J. Thorndike.

The Coast: A Journey Down the Atlantic Shore by Joseph J. Thorndike
234 pages
Published 1993
Read from March 2 to March 3
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

I don't know what I was hoping to find in this book, exactly. I didn't dare hope for ecological eloquence on the scale of Steve Nicholls' Paradise Found, but I did have in mind something of the quixotically domestic adventuring of Roger Deakin's Wildwood and Waterlog. With those examples in mind, I could only be disappointed by Thorndike's tame journalism, which reminded me of nothing so much as a softball profile piece you could find in any issue of National Geographic from the 1960s to the mid-1990s (back when National Geographic put some effort into text-based articles, before it devolved into a monthly picture book for readers with newsstand attention spans), stretched into the size of a small novel. Thorndike's text even follows the pattern of those bygone articles, framing his journey with brisk background description and asides into historical poetry, stopping to get flavor commentary from fishermen, wildlife refuge managers, local conservation leaders, local weekly editors, and the like, without ever examining any particular issue in detail. Add some Sam Abell photographs, and any regional cluster of chapters could be a cover article. I like old National Geographic articles -- I quit my subscription once I divined that the picture-book format was here to stay, a regrettable reality of the new print economy -- but in book form it's merely a pleasant diversion, a quick but not especially memorable read that makes me wish Roger Deakin had written more books.