ash cinema’s first review
by Nicholas Karpuk, from Goodreads:
Edward Rathke walks a tightrope through most of Ash Cinema. I kept waiting for the pacing to collapse, for the stylized writing style to become masturbatory rather than merely indulgent. It was a waveform that seemed perpetually about to collapse.
But it doesn’t.
That’s the damndest thing. He never goes overboard and for all its ambition and need to describe thoroughly abstract concepts it never wallows in any one notion long enough for me to lose my patience. Rathke explores some pretty big concepts, and in attitude almost seems like a tiny dog trying to bite a giant beach ball, and yet you can’t help admire the determination and effort. For a literary novel he does an excellent job of not boring me.
Maybe it’s because of my recent interest in blues artist Robert Johnson, but I can’t sympathize for the issues of all three protagonists, who all have a tie in some form or another to elusive experimental artist Sebastian Falke. Falke’s films as they are described sound like the most utterly squirm-inducing, watch-checking sort of movie experience, but the story really gives you a sense of why these characters are drawn to the work all the same.
It ends on a surprisingly complete note. Normally I just consider the end where the novel stops, so when I actually find myself satisfied at the close of a novel, it’s noteworthy. Mr. Rathke has created a complete work here, one which is well worth the time of any reader.
unaccustomed mercy
My review of Unaccustomed Mercy by DB Cox is up at ThunderDome at the click. I like writing reviews and I may try to expand where my reviews go. But, for now, I just like writing them, putting them up, getting my thoughts out there.
Anycase.
mornings remind me of you
These autumnal days resurrect me in the proper way and all I want to do is sit inside of it, breathe, and close my eyes for days and years, wake up in a new world that was always here.
Molly Gaudry‘s The Lit Pub is back! Click the link and browse around. There are even a few [five] posts by me about my favorite books, which can be found at the click.
Meant to be doing some reviewing, some reading, but all I want is to expand beyond my body and float into the sky, be a cloud.
And then because she’s my favorite ballerina and I love me some Prokofiev:
a tendency to be gone
A Tendency to Be Gone by Pamela Ryder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The stories in A Tendency to Be Gone are stylistically diverse and always powerful, whether they be told in short declarative sentences or long winding passages that stretch across the page. Ryder mesmerises with her prose, which is consistently of high quality, always narrated in first person, but playing with cadence and rhythm, making each story, each narrator, distinct and self-contained.
The collection reminds me of Faulkner and O’Conner, while sounding, really, like neither of them, but they are the names that struck me as I read. There’s the same sense of religiosity within the stories, often dealing with people of a christian denomination, whether it be in modern times or hundreds of years ago. And even the stories without a sense of religion, there is still this sensation of a powerful other, a force beyond human scope.
Settings are strong here and fully imagined, alive. Sometimes overwhelmingly so, even for the characters, as they are lost within their setting, locked there. Ritual is important as is the search for signs, for signification, for warnings and omens, for reasons, for everything, for anything. These are characters in search of what they cannot name or cannot understand in unfathomable settings that are so powerful they can only be examined through their minutiae. The shape of a rock or the edge of a leaf or the sound of a river a mile away take on new life, hold a magnetism, a force unrecognised until one was willing to look and see.
This is a powerful collection with language that surprises and characters that fascinate.
neveryon
Return to Nevèrÿon by Samuel R. Delany
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A fitting ending, bringing us back to where this all started, literally, by repeating the initial tale in the series.
Again, very concerned with language and power, but so much more.
This series is just beyond brilliant to me. It certainly isn’t for everyone, but if you’re interested in the way language shapes and constructs and orders civilizations and peoples and where power comes from, the forms it takes, and deep, erudite plunges into the psychology, not only of sex, but of desire, of lust.
The series is a hall of mirrors, infinitely reflecting itself, and, in this way, it is ever-expanding, partly because it doesn’t end. While the series very clearly deals with certain characters, it is not so much about those characters as it is about the nature of language and narratives. That’s not to say we don’t feel connected to the characters. Nothing could be further from the truth, really. It’s engrossing, not only for its ideas [which are monumental and numerous], but for the sheer pleasure it takes in telling its stories, in giving us these characters, who are drawn meticulously. These are powerful stories in their own right, but, more than that, they’re beautiful. But then when combined with the ideas present: it’s similar to Dostoevsky despite being so obviously different from him in every imaginable way. I think the comparison’s useful. Dostoevsky was a writer of profound ideas, and that same kind of brilliant mind is behind these stories, though maybe more academic, and certainly more playful and lighter in tone.
The series is a constant critique and exploration of itself, too, with the stories deconstructing one another, commenting on one another, even completely undercutting and subverting each other. And, really, it is a retelling of the world we live in now, and so Neveryon is our mirror that we look into, watching our reflection fragment and deconstruct and reconstruct itself endlessly.
It’s truly an amazing literary feat, to do so much philosophically while remaining entertaining. Though, to be fair, these are not the kind of stories that will excite you with action and adventure and daring [though there is that here, too]. More than that, they are very real stories about very real people doing very real things in a world that’s almost real but feels, somehow, realer.
Too, these stories, individually, are much less than them combined. So while one story or the other may miss for you, the overall effect is dazzling. It’s for this reason that I’ve refrained from giving the books five stars, individually. Now that I’m finished and the whole shape is in my head [or at least the small amount I'm able to keep there], it becomes so much more. The stories are good by themselves, but, together, man, they’re truly just something else entirely. And it’s important to count every page of these books together, from the quotes that introduce each story, to the appendices and afterwords and acknowledgements, which are, oddly enough, just as much a part of the overall narrative of the series [which, I mean, even though it's a reflection of our world, it also exists in our world, so the lines really start breaking down to the point that the reflection becomes what the object is, and vice versa: a mirror is a reflection but it is also a mirror] because they all add up, all form a greater whole, something that reaches towards an almost perfect novel, despite, essentially, being a collection of eleven stories over four books.
Highly recommended.
the lost books of the odyssey
The Lost Books of The Odyssey: A Novel by Zachary Mason
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Everyone knows the stories, The Iliad and The Odyssey, the wrath of Achilles and the wandering of Odysseus. Here, Zachary Mason reinvents, inverts, reimagines, and takes apart the stories and characters we’ve known since before we could read. And, somehow, he manages to do it with great wit and elegance and ease. The first Lost Book, I think, sets the rest of the collection’s direction.
–He had spent the days of his exile imagining different homecoming scenarios but it had never occurred to him that she would just give up. The town deserted, his house overrun by violent suitors, Penelope dying, or dead or burned, but not this. “Such a long trip,” he thinks, “and so many places I could have stayed along the way.” Then, mercifully, revelation comes. He realizes this is not Penelope. This is not his hall. This is not Ithaca–what he sees before him is a vengeful illusion, the deception of some malevolent god. The real Ithaca is elsewhere, somewhere on the sea-roads, hidden. Giddy, Odysseus turns and flees the tormenting shadows.–
It is the giddiness that’s most evident in this novel of reshaping old myths, of rewriting the rewritten ones. He takes great delight in turning the myths around, subjecting them to their own flawed logic, to their own fatalism, recasting the characters in different lights. It is at turns funny, surprising, engrossing, and full of interesting comments on what it is to have a story, to tell a story, and what legacy means, what fate is or is believed to be or pretends to be.
–Among the Phaeacians it is believed that each man lives out his life as a character in a story told by someone else.–
I think that bit of logic holds throughout. Odysseus is shown as a coward, a cunning hero, a liar, a malicious manipulator, a pillager, a madman, and also as a reluctant man shoved into a great war, lauded for things he barely did, revered for who he is imagined to be. Too, Achilles is shown as a drunk, a buffoon, a violent psychopath, a marauder, a hero, and a man whose fate has been shoved upon him, but, mostly, he is a child trapped inside the body of a god.
But I think it’s the theme throughout to humanise these people, to show how the gods forced a life upon them, even in the stories where the gods are completely absent, hardly even believed in.
–Inevitably, each particular war is a distortion of its antecedent, an image in a warped hall of mirrors.–
–In the lassitude after love Odyssey asks Circe, “What is the way to the land of the dead?”
Circe answers, “You are muffled in folds of heavy fabric. You close your eyes against the rough cloth and though you struggle to free yourself you can barely move. With much thrashing and writhing, you manage to throw off a layer, but find that not only is there another one beyond it, but that the weight bearing you down has scarcely decreased. With dauntless spirit you continue to struggle. By infinitesimal degrees, the load becomes lighter and your confinement less. At last, you push away a piece of course, heavy cloth and, relieved, feel that it was the last one. As it falls away, you realize you have been fighting through years. You open your eyes.”–
–Odysseusm finding that his reputation for trickery preceded him, started inventing histories for himself and disseminating them wherever he went. This had the intended effect of clouding perception and distorting expectation, making it easier for him to work as he was wont, and the unexpected effect that one of his lies became, with minor variation, the Odyssey of Homer.– [one of the variations on the character Odysseus: one which is often reiterated]
–Now I have taken his throne and read his book and the now-docile devas flit about my shoulders, waiting, perhaps forever, for me to impart my wisdom, which is that I have learned nothing, know nothing, wish I had never picked up a sword, left my hut, been born.– [a variation on Achilles]
–He said, Goddess, who are you, to find me and bear me up when I am lost in the waste? In the sudden stillness she said: Water flowing through pipes, pouring into unlit reservoirs there to eddy in silence. Runes of ephemeral fire. A book of many pages written in inks that vanish and reappear. A twilight forest haunted by beasts, watchful and inquisitive. Steadfast of heroes. An onion, an ocean, a palimpsest, a staccato machine of oiled iron gears. These are among the metaphors with which I describe myself, like a hand trying to grasp itself by reaching into a mirror.–
I’m very impressed with this book, for how quickly paced it is, how easy it is to read, how enjoyable it is, and how funny and unwavering it is in its dissection of who and what we are, because to cut up and rewrite myths is to cut up and rewrite who we are, as a culture, as a history, as a people.
the nimrod flipout: stories
The Nimrod Flipout: Stories by Etgar Keret
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is an utterly fantastic collection. I’ve long been meaning to read some Keret and am so glad that I’ve finally gotten here. He’s capable of doing one of the most challenging things in writing with surprising ease and agility: humor. And not just a smile, but pure laughter, rising on accident, despite suppression and embarrassment at being in public with a bus full of people who don’t speak your language.
He gets there through situations. It’s not a single sentence that makes you laugh, not a one liner kind of thing, but these absurd circumstances and situations that reach this point where nothing can hold back the laughter, especially not the sadness of the characters. And this, I think, is what makes his writing so impressive. He’s not the kind of writer who blows you away with a sublime sentence or even with a singular moment of shocking insight, but he knocks you over laughing, always on the razor, tightroping between tragedy and comedy.
While these are certainly funny stories, there’s so much more to them than funny moments. And though he never tries to capture a life in a single sentence the way so many others do, he reflects life in all its absurd surreality with almost disgusting ease and insight.
I believe that all writers have something small inside them that’s the impetus behind the art. It may be a scene or a sentence or a moment, but it’s there, I think, always, the heart beating in the floor. The humor here, to me, is not a mask, but a lens. It’s the prism through which Keret comes to understand the world, in all its bizarreness. Though the stories are rather short, the characters are the type that tumble off the page, sit beside you when you forget to look.
And there’s a deep sadness in all these stories, characters on the brink of existential crises, imbued with ennui, lost, aimless. These characters are drifters without the drift, locked in stasis. It is this unbearable lightness of being, to steal a phrase and misappropriate it, that’s at the heart of these stories, and why the humor is so essential. These characters are not choosing to keep going, to keep walking despite the pain and the suffering, but just keep going because it seems just as hard to stop, maybe even harder. They accept things, not through rationalisation or through choice, but simply because this new thing is there and to change it is more difficult than to kind of shrug at make room for it.
There’s this feeling that ennui comes and goes with young adulthood, but these characters persist at this stage in life, whether they’re thirty or fifty. They’re caught, unaware of even the trap, and somehow the humor piles around them even as they sink deeper into the mire. These characters are not funny people. They do not make one another laugh, and, I think, it’s what makes their absurd lives so funny, even when it surprises you how funny you’re finding it.
Along with that, there are real tender moments of beauty. The love of a dog, the life of a house, and my favorite: telling a story only to reach a single moment. That last one is summarised by a line within it:
–For three months, a person sits and looks at you, imagining a kiss.–
It’s as if he wrote the whole of the story only to reach that line, and, once reached, the story had to end. And it’s beautiful in its simplicity, in its purity, in its longing. I wrote this story for you because I imagined your kiss, just as the character watches the other for three months only imagining a single kiss.
But, yes, off to track off everything he’s written. Highly recommended.
–A dream is nothing but a strong wish. So strong that you can’t even put it into words.–
gold boy, emerald girl
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories by Yiyun Li
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is one of the loneliest collections of stories I’ve ever read. It’s also remarkably beautiful, if only because it manages to never fall into despair. The will to go on, to keep living, even when all love is gone, even after realising that love was only a word one never could believe in or that one could no longer believe in. But there is so much more here than that.
–I never showed up in her dreams, I am certain, as people we keep in our memories rarely have a place for us in theirs. You may say that we too evict people from our hearts while we continue living in theirs, and that may very well be true for some people, but I wonder if I am an anomaly in that respect. I have never forgotten a person who has come into my life, and perhaps it is for that reason I cannot have much of a life myself. The people I carry with me have lived out not only their own rations but mine too, though they are innocent usurpers of my life, and I have only myself to blame.–
–In one of these revelatory moments she could have said, Moyan, you were not born to us; we only picked you up from a garbage dump–but no, my mother had never, even in her most uncharitable moment, said that to me, and in fact she kept the secret until her death, and for that alone I loved her, and love her still.–
–But animosity is easier to live with than sympathy and indifference leaves less damage in the long run.–
All from the first story in the collection and it sets the tone for the rest. But, maybe most important about these, is that this sentence lies within as well:
–I wished this life could go on forever.–
And I think, with that, this following sentence contain the whole of the book:
–One’s fate is determined by what she is not allowed to have, rather than what she possesses–
There is so much sadness here, but none of the characters give up. They are women battered in the many ways that life can ravage a person. Many of them are old or ageing, stepping through middle age or closer to the grave, and all of them have felt life go by, with its many regrets, its many battles, its endless wars, and I think, too, that it’s fitting that much of the first story in the collection takes place during military service.
Though it’s sad and lonesome, it manages to not destroy you, crush you under its weight. For this is a book that weighs heavy on the heart and may break one, if you have one to break, but there’s this stillness within them, this calming poise, where, even though the world is falling apart or was falling apart or has fallen apart, one can still breath and take that next step, wake up to that next unlikely dawn.
There is a strong sense of fatality, too, as in the first line of the story that the collection takes its name from:
–He was raised by his mother alone, as she was by her father.–
That sense of fatality is the current beneath the surface of these stories, where the generational gaps of Chinese society meet and react with one another, where the elders cannot understand the youth and the youth do not even care.
It’s a great collection, though at times a bit slow and less engaging, and some of the stories miss more than others. They attempt to lighten the mood, I think, but never go far enough, so they tend to wallow more, are somehow less direct and feel maybe out of place.
Anycase, I recommend it.
we make mud
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
–But us brothers, we knew what it meant to be better than dead. We knew that when things die they sometimes just then begin to live.–
It is moments like this within Peter Markus’ We Make Mud that make you read and reread sentences over and over. So simple and so understated, but, in many ways, those two sentences are at the very heart of this novel in stories.
Told in plural first person with the occasional transition to singular, a story about two brothers who call each other Brother, not Jimmy or John, which, as we’re told by them, are their names. There are a few other characters, but mostly it is the brothers. The most noticeable thing about this book, these stories, is the prose. It is not the kind of prose that shimmers ecstatically. It is deliberate and in such a way that it changes what you thought fiction writing could be. Not because it’s maybe somehow the way everyone should’ve always been writing, but because, for the first time, you realise that writing can look like this, can feel like this. There’s a distinct rhythm to the words and the syntax and grammar of the sentences should be awkward, but somehow manage to never be. Repetition is usually seen as a bad thing in prose, but these stories delight in repetition, and it works to a dizzying degree. And the book is built on this repetition of phrases, of scenes, of revisiting variations of already told stories. And that’s part of it, too, not only to repeat, but to vary, in the way that jazz uses variations on a theme to expand upon the initial melody.
And it turns this novel into rituals and prayer. It is a prayer. It is a collection of fairytales in the most serious of ways. There is violence, but it is never for the sake of violence: it becomes ritual. And the repetition is part of this. It is a prayer about childhood and what it means to have a single place, a river, be the entire world. Told by brothers who are children, reality bends and blurs and the impossible becomes common, either as daydream and fancy or actuality, the reader never knows for certain. It is a book that surprises and delights even as it becomes ugly and course but more so as it shimmers and grows, glowing.
–We are brothers. We are each other’s voice inside our own heads. This might sting, us brothers will say to each other brother. Us brothers, we will raise back the hammer in our hand. We will drive that rusty, bent-back nail right through Brother’s hand. Neither of us brothers will wince, or flinch, or make with our mouth the sound of a brother crying out. Good, Brother, Brother will say. Brother will be hammering in a second nail into us brothers’ other hand when the father of us brothers will step out into the back of our backyard. Sons, our father will call this word out. Both of us brothers will turn back our boy heads toward the sound of our father to hear whatever it is that this father is going to say to us brothers next. It will be a long few seconds. The sky above the river where the steel mill sits shipwrecked in the river’s mud, it will be dark and quiet. Somewhere, though, the sun will be shining. You boys be sure to clean up back here before you come back in, the father of us will say. This father will turn back with his voice and go back away into the inside of this house. Us brothers, we will turn back to face back with each other. Us brothers will raise back with our hammer, will line up that rusted nail.–
There are so many more moments I wish I could put in this review as I found myself highlighting almost whole pages. Because it is not the sentences themselves that hit hard, but the images that Markus builds over the course of five or ten or forty sentences: surreal, surprising, dark, beautiful, grotesque, magical.
A great and short book.
open veins of latin america
Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Hughes Galeano
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a powerful and important book. A thorough analysis of imperialism and colonialism in Latin America. He traces their history, not by region or chronology, but by the ways Latin America was bled dry by the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and, finally and currently, the USA.
Galeano traces the influence of the natural resources that Latin America was blessed with, only to find this blessing their greatest curse and the source of these 500 years of exploitation. Gold, silver, cacao, cotton, rubber, coffee, manganese, iron, nickel, oil, and so on. All the things that should have made Latin America rich and powerful are what led to its complete subjugation.
And exploitation is the best way to understand it, as none of the industry or cities that came and vanished were for the benefit of the indigenous people. Everything was taken, nothing given.
The style is commanding and simple, made to be understood by any and everyone, but mixing the political and economic with the imagery of the land. Doing more than simply explaining or listing atrocities, Galeano shows us the reality of the impoverished masses of Latin America, how they were never given a chance, and how every chance is continually ripped from them.
An essential read for anyone interested in Latin American history and especially for anyone curious about the current political atmosphere of Latin America, because much of it starts with this book. All the massive steps forward these countries are currently taking, stepping away from European and American influence, finding their own agency, much of it can be traced back to this book.
An important book and one I’d recommend to everyone, because it should be read. Even forty years later, it still carries its weight.
soul mountain
Soul Mountain by Xingjian Gao
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is not an easy novel to pin down, as it strives to push the boundaries of what constitutes a novel.
Part memoir, part metafiction, part travelogue, part ethnographic exploration, part political, part ecological and environmental, part history of the Cultural Revolution, part the realities of post-Mao China, part folklore, part poetry, part mythology, part nightmares and dreams, part songs and revelries, part seduction, part sexual misadventures, part aphorisms, but, mostly, it’s a profound meditation on life.
I read it on my kindle and was highlighting so often that it became almost ridiculous. So many passages that I wish I could keep in my memory forever. I’d love to post them all in here, but there’s just too much, so I’ll try to pepper in appropriate ones.
The story of four[?] people referred only to using pronouns. There is I and You, the novel told in first and second person, shifting between these nearly every other chapter, and then there is He and She, who are externals. Within the novel, it’s actually stated best, as an entire chapter is, in a way, about the composition of the novel.
–It’s just like in the book where you is the reflection of I and he is the back of you, the shadow of a shadow.–
And that sentence there sums up the whole of the characters. If you can call it a plot, it is the quixotic journey of a wanderer, referred to as I, travelling through the mountains of China, talking to the people of small villages, learning their culture, their songs, their dances. The shift into second person recounts a man wandering through the mountains and the women he encounters and the love he feels, even when he doesn’t. Eventually these narratives, which are sort of free floated and meandering become indistinguishable as the novel quagmires [in a good way] and all the threads loosen and bleed into one another, somehow making it better, making all of life captured more perfectly, more beautifully, more fully.
There are great passages of love, of what it means, of what it is, of what it wants to be and how it tries to get there. Some beautiful and some heartbreaking and some absurd and some frustrating: it’s perfect. It’s one of the most true accounts, I think, of what real love is.
–’Don’t, don’t say anything!’ She holds you in her embrace and you silently merge with her body.–
That is the summation of sex in the novel. There’s no sensationalism, no graphic descriptions of the act, just odd moments of poetry to capture the perfection of the physical manifestations of love.
–’Talk about something,’ she urges by your ear.
‘What shall I talk about?’
‘Anything.’–
And that there, in many ways, is the center of it all, of what love is in this novel. The will to go on, without reason, just to keep talking, to keep holding, to keep being.
And much of the novel is just continuing, even after reason’s run out.
There is a powerful sense of nature throughout and the narrator often begins with a reflection on the scenery and this reflection collapses inward into his own psychology, where the mountain mist that surrounds him becomes the ghosts of his past and present closing in on him. He begins with a completely external description that gradually just kind of falls and collapses upon him. They’re truly beautiful passages and I’ve highlighted so many that it’s too much to sort through at the moment.
Wandering through the mountains alone, there is a great sense of loneliness in the novel and it is in many ways tragic, as it recounts the environmental suicide caused by bad policies since the Cultural Revolution, and then, too, all the displacement and fear caused by it.
It is, in many ways, I think, an elegy for China. The narrator is very frustrated, frustrated to the point of hopelessness, yet he keeps going. He has lost all meaning, and so he searches for it everywhere, endlessly, It is the story of a man who loves his country but has had his country turn its back on him. He is completely alone, in self-exile, partly to save his life from the government, partly because of this loss.
It is beautiful and it is epic. It is one of those rare novels that tries to capture the totality of life, and, maybe, gets there.
–Everyone has memories they treasure.
Not all memories are worth treasuring.–
embassytown
Embassytown by China Miéville
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This, I think, will be a novel that you will either love or hate or land somewhere in between.
But, really, it’s certainly not for everyone, and not even necessarily for those who loved his previous novels [I've only read the Bas-lag ones, which are fantastic for so many reasons]. It’s a book that escapes easy classification. It’s complex and challenging and incredibly ambitious, and, even its failings, are causal and inherent to the style. I’ll try not to compare Mieville to himself until a bit later, but, in many ways, this is a very different book.
I think part of the difficulty of the novel stems from its complete otherness. It takes place in a different time, in a different galaxy [possibly universe--there's a single sentence within that leads me to believe this is about three universe cycles after our own], charactered by some aliens who’re taken more or less for granted as being present, by people who’re, in certain ways, very different than us [post-homodiaspora--self-defined--and so certain of these humans cannot, for unexplained quickly brushed over reasons, have sex with one another (and this is maybe a failing in the characterisation of the novel, excluding this pivotal aspect of human relationship and interaction or at least not treating it with the respect some may assume it demands)], and a certain species–Hosts–who the novel really centers around, who’re so vastly different than any creature created that I’ve ever encountered in fiction of any medium, and then a planet and city so other that defy easy categorisation or analogues. But, yes, so the novel takes place in this world, in this extremely other place populated by extremely other creatures. And what makes this difficult and, I think, what leaves many readers at arm’s length is that Mieville has taken a character perspective.
There’s, of course, nothing odd with telling a story in first person, but when the universe being explored is so vastly incomparable, it puts serious limitations on explanations and explication, which, certainly, Mieville likely has no intention of giving and sees this as a nonissue or at least a necessary risk in telling the story he wanted to tell. But, the practicalities of first person: to keep this narrative going, one can’t get too bogged down in details and explanations, because, as this is our narrator’s–Avice–homeworld, it wouldn’t make sense, internally, to the character, to spend an inordinate amount of time explaining all the intricacies of life in Embassytown. And so it’s a very gradual reveal, with much of the innerworkings dropped throughout the first half of the novel. Also, potentially frustrating are the many terms that go unexplained or undefined, though many of them become quite clear due to context and so on. What gives the narrative a little leeway to explicate and give things to the reader is the tense and the way Avice goes about telling the story. She is, literally, explaining what happened to the rest of the universe, maybe–to herself, certainly. But so we get more from her than would normally be allowed, but it puts the narrative at a distance and also her own self at a distance. The things she glosses over, such as sex and motivations, are not always divulged in straightforward terms, some of them, likely, because she doesn’t know how to explain it to herself why or what or how.
So this leads to further difficulty in relating to the who and the what of the novel. And in many ways, the characters are filled out by what’s not said, by what’s not even assumed or guessed, but by the briefness of their actions, the way they speak, the way they do not act, the tears that fill their eyes, and even the outrage simmering beneath. And, yes, these issues certainly do not make it easy for the reader to understand or to care, but I did.
And I think Mieville should be commended for his bravado here. In choosing carefully what the reader learns and how she learns it, the reader gets a picture that she must fill up or get lost in. The complete otherness of everything leaves all to chance, but it gives the reader that greater sense of agency, where a book is more than an artefact, but something built collaboratively with the author.
And this is a hugely ambitious novel, which, I think, is saying something when considering Mieville’s work [even just the few I've read]. This is a novel about so much. About colonialism/imperialism, about language, about thought, about obsession, about religion, about revolution, and even about the devolution of class and society. A lot of attention is paid to language within the novel, for obvious reasons [or, they'll become obvious once read], but it’s more than simply an interesting concept or a peculiar way to examine language. It’s about culture and how language is fundamental to the way in which we view the world/how the way we view the world informs culture/identity.
The colonial/imperial aspect of the novel is certainly the most curious to me, if only because of its moral ambiguity. This is the only novel written in a long time that addresses colonialism from the perspective of the imperialiser. And that opinion may be my own ignorance, but, in much fiction of the last couple decades, imperialists have only been seen as the evil invader. Embassytown addresses this issue in no clear terms. The Hosts are the culture imperialised, but, in many ways, it’s a postcolonial conscious effort. Meaning, they are deferred to and respected, possibly because of their otherness, and no attempt to really exploit them is clearly evident, though there are certainly some implications early on, but they seem trivial. What the humans gain from the Hosts is vastly superior to what’s traded, but the Hosts seem, in all ways, completely ambivalent of human existence on their planet. They see humans as a peculiar curiosity and, due to their language, can only communicate with specially trained humans called Ambassadors [joint clones, really]. The Hosts have only a vague curiosity for human customs and do not recognise most humans as beings with any agency or thought. So alien to them are we that we barely register. And so the usual paradigm of the invader is, not tossed away, but almost neutralised at the beginning of the novel. Things begin to unravel and then quickly collapse and the humans are forced to make some tough choices, including lethal experimentation on the indigenous population in order to understand how to solve the problem they’ve accidentally [carelessly] made. This act of vivisection is called brave by the narrator, herself a member of the invading population. It’s here where I stopped for a moment and a few moments more, because this is not the kind of action one considers brave. It’s the kind of nefarious predatory actions we’ve come to see as a trope of the imperialists. And so what we know to be true and what we feel to be almost true [that being, we know this is wrong, but we empathise with the human characters, if, for no other reason, because they're human] conflict and collide. And this is where our narrator, Avice, becomes especially important, for all of the limits built into her narration are essential at this crucial point of morality. We, the reader, may–and likely will–see this as monstrous, but we are explicitly told that it is brave. And so who Avice is begins to fill in surprising ways. And that’s not to say we begin to hate Avice or see her as amoral or psychopathic, but we begin to understand [and this is, I think, a truly brave thing, for a writer to challenge us in this way] how ordinary people can do evil while not becoming evil.
This is not the only time these questions are raised to the reader, but it is certainly the most explicit, and maybe the only explicit one, as I can’t seem to think of another one. However, the conclusion of this novel, which I will try not to spoil as I’ve mostly been speaking in vaguery, brings these questions of morality into sharp focus, even as they are pushed deeper and deeper into the narrative, away from the focus of what is happening.
As readers, we’re looking for our conclusion before it gets there, always trying to anticipate it, always hoping to be surprised. And Embassytown succeeds here. And because it’s so casual, we stop questioning what it does, what it truly means.
I would love to address this in clearer terms, but I think spoilers should be avoided in a review. I will say a few things, though.
This is very much about the push and pull of cultures, where both begin to give and take, but, as is usual, the imperialised culture is at the most risk and, eventually, is the one that suffers or changes the most. Both of these are true in Embassytown as they are in reality. What’s important about the change undergone by the Hosts is that its implications are not addressed objectively, ever. We watch a culture become no longer what it was in order to survive what was done to it by bad policy/careless experimentation of the imperialists. But we only ever get Avice’s voice in full. A voice we’ve spent the whole novel with, learning to love and care about, or, at the very least, trust. And so we trust and believe her conclusion, which is a conclusion that doesn’t address the questions about cultural significance and what it means for that culture that it can never actually be what it was originally, even on a linguistic level.
And that, I think, more than the language, is the center of this novel. What and who and how we are, and what those all mean, collectively, individually.
And, like I said, it’s hugely ambitious, even for Melville, but it lacks some of his narrative flair, such as his strong sense of worldbuilding. But, I think, again, that’s completely due to the otherness of the world and the closeness of the narrator to that world. Whereas New Corbuzon and the Armada of the Scar are so clear in the reader’s mind that we can see every nook and cranny, even smell the streets and the sweat [because of our realworld analogues that we've been inundated with visuals of through film and television and histories--because, even though vastly different, these places are very much modelled on the world of the past], Embassytown and its world are so distinctly without analogue to anything we know or have experienced that it cannot be given in easy terms, and the problem is exacerbated by the narration of Avice, who has lived there most of her life. However, we do feel this place as a reality, even if seeing it is difficult.
I’d love to give this five stars if only for its ambition and bravado, just as I’d love to recommend it to the world, but there are some averse affects to all of this. It is not, I don’t think, what we’ve come to expect from Mieville, which, to me, is pushing it further up in value.
It’s a risky novel and it is not always successful. But those risks are important and should be encouraged, because even when failing, they lead to future promises of success.
And so, in this long review, I’ve convinced myself of its five stars. And so there that is.
