Review of Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria

A Stranger in Olondria

Sofia Samatar

Easthampton, MA: Smallbeer Press, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-931520-76-8

303 pp.

This is a strange and often quite beautiful book. It centres on the progress of a young man, Jevick, who is the son of a pepper merchant. This fact, as well as the maritime nature of the society that is revealed, suggest an Indo-Malaysian background to the novel. Yet the author, a poet, spent two years writing the book while teaching English in South Sudan, which suggests an entirely different relationship with the land and with the colonial experience. That she then spent another decade editing the manuscript before having it published adds another layer of complexity to the writing process – the result is a work that is complex and multifaceted – just like real life, as they say in The Skewer. These are all compliments.

Jevick is obliged to represent his late father on a trip to Olondria and its capital city Bain, which he has never previously visited but where there are commercial relations to be re-established and refreshed. However, the text comes only slowly to this stage because first Jevick will have time and space to examine his relationship with a personal tutor, Lunre, who is described as if he were Chinese and has some of the cultural characteristics and practices of a Chinese person. This relationship is particularly important in Jevick’s life in introducing him to a more sophisticated world of letters than anything he had previously experienced. This will stand him in good stead in O,ondria because that is a land of stories and, indeed, stories about stories. Jevick is swept up in a Bacchanalian religious festival and, in its aftermath, is caught in a terrible (and quite unexpected) crime when he admits to having seen an angel. This is a serious offence and Jevick is sentenced to a lengthy period of reading. The daughter of one of the senior priests (she has never been permitted to have any worldly experiences of her own) is assigned to work with him in guiding him through an approved reading list. This is an unexpected custodial sentence but it is real and Jevick comes to learn much about Olondria but, at the same time, learns nothing at all or, at least, not what his minders would like him to learn. There remains a gap between the individual and the individual’s ability to apprehend the world and the world itself as it is able to be learned. This process is punctuated by further adventures orchestrated by another court faction, which has a contrary perspective on the relationship between the mundane and the otherworldly. This creates a sense of tension that helps the plot to drive ahead.

The book is clearly written by an author with a poetic sensibility and it has the great virtue of imbuing its characters with an intellectual hinterland and its locations with life like details. I open the book at random and find page 85. The top of the page is describing the movement of light as evening falls, “… it draws itself in the heavy jade of the Tower of Aloes, where the scribes sit at their desks in the Royal Library.” It goes on to describe Jevick leaving the city “… on one of the barges of the king, a funeral-looking vessel lined with cushions.” The sailors exchange their poles for oars and sing “Long have I carried the king’s treasures. But the corals of Weile are not so read as your mouth.” The barge passes by some uninhabited isles, including the Isle of the Birds and the Isle of the Poet’s Daughters. “‘Fair are the isles of Ithvanai,’ writes Immodias the Historian, ‘but fairest of all if the Blessed Isle itself, the fallen star which all the waters of Ocean could not extinguish, the fragrant island, the asphodel of the sea.’” I find all of this quite enchanting and am minded to look out her other books, notably The Winger Histories, which seems also to be set in Olondria.

There is a sort of resolution to the central conflict of the book, in which Jevick has become intimately involved in the tragic story of a young woman whose remains have been discovered and who is perhaps the angel whose presence he had previously sensed. The connection is made but it is not a happy one. The human existence is real – and only connect, as EM Forster once said.

John Walsh, Krirk University

Review of Esslemont’s Deadhouse Landing

Deadhouse Landing

Ian C. Esslemont

London: Bantam Press, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-857-50284-1

473 pp.

Deadhouse Landing is the second part of the trilogy Path to Ascendancy and follows on from Dancer’s Lament. In the first part, we are introduced to our two heroes, a fighter and a wizard, whose early misadventures denoted youthful learning and endeared them to this reader. In the second part, they – and others who are also introduced (there is a handy list of the main characters at the front of the book) – start their transition into more obviously Malazan characters. Esslemont has been writing books about the shared world he created with fellow writer Steven Erikson which is usually referred to as the Malazan Empire (much of the present book is set on the slightly desolate island of Malaz). Erikson wrote the first ten or so books and they are characterized by a wide range of very diverse characters in diverse settings doing diverse things for diverse reasons, not all of which are explained. There may be multiple expositions of events from different perspectives, there may be unexpected interpolations from unanticipated participants, such as ungulates.

This is all very entertaining and so forth but it does mean it can be necessary to concentrate quite hard so as to keep it all in mind. In Dancer’s Lament, Esslemont allowed himself to tell a much simpler tale with a reduced (but by no means minimal) list of characters and the result was rather refreshing. However, Deadhouse Landing seems to mark a bit of a transition towards the dense prose likely to be found in the concluding part of the trilogy. To a certain extent, this is appropriate to the content, assuming that the name of the series refers to the ascendancy of characters to which we have been introduced and creatures in that divine state presumably have acquired a wide range of experience and intense interactions with the world (we might call this ‘ascendant capital’). At the same time, of course, the world keeps on spinning and everyone else needs to keep body and soul together and, so, they continue with their mundane considerations involved in making a living, whether by tending a bar, threatening violence for money or being an actual pirate. This is the kind of world in which money is always scarce and fortune constantly changing, in part because very few of the characters portrayed seem willing and able to hold down a long-term job and plan in a pragmatic and rational way for what tomorrow might bring.

That Esslemont is writing prequels here brings its own problems – readers familiar with subsequent events will have their own ideas and understanding of what has gone before in order to have brought the world to the state that it has reached. Those early precursors should, therefore, not contradict what would then be the future but, also, characters who are to be encountered subsequently should not be in the same state then as they will need to have changed and change others along the way. It must be difficult to contend with all of this while writing and still remember to provide a compelling plot and entertaining events. However, Esslemont is by now experienced enough to be able to manage all of this with aplomb. The magician, now revealed as Kellanved, drives the main plot of ascension and Dancer is often dragged along in his wake. Kellanved’s relentless (and dangerous) curiosity about the world in its many dimensions is the reason that they are able to link the power of the distant past with the present in a way that will conjure forth the future. Around this, powerful figures such as Dassem Ultor, Cowl, Tattersail and Dujek follow their own paths. It is a good combination.

Now that Erikson has returned to writing more novels about the Malazan Empire, after having made some attempts to strike out in other directions, one wonders whether the two writers will feel at all stifled by what they have created – I have been reading these books for twenty years I believe and their creation must have predated that by a while. Other writers whose writing careers have become defined by a single series – George RR Martin comes to mind – at least have comfort that they wrote well-known books of other stripes beforehand. It must be a somewhat daunting situation to face. Anyway, I will be enjoying the books as they continue to arrive.

John Walsh, Krirk University

Review of Fonda Lee’s Jade Legacy

Jade Legacy

Fonda Lee

London: Orbit, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-356-51059-0

719 pp.

Back to the mean streets of Janloon, home of the fighting Green Bone clans and their manipulation of the mysterious (and eponymous) jade and its magical powers. In previous books in this series, we have been introduced to the No Peak clan – and its nemesis the Mountain clan – but it is the former which provides the principal protagonists through whose eyes we view the world. The leader of the clan, Hilo the Pillar, the Weatherman Shae and the jade-free medical doctor Anden are prominent among these and are joined by a wide range of others, from many walks of life and several different classes of society. That there is a revolving cast of characters reflects the violent nature of clan-based life and the blood does indeed flow on nearly every page. As the action continues, the sense of melancholy about all this loss of life becomes more palpable: “I had a Harry, till a Richard killed him;/ Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard killed him,” complains Queen Margaret in Richard III. The same is true here, although I will not use the names of the characters involved who are killed for the sake of not spoiling the story.

The characterization and the action continue strongly in this concluding episode, although there are some inconsistencies. The dialogue has become clumsy in certain of the scenes in which characters exchange plot-related information and there is one obvious mistake which rather surprised me, given that Lee has, inter alia, a background in corporate strategy. In a multi-person meeting of influential business leaders, the secretary of one of them enters and announces sensitive information to the room at large. This would never have happened in the East Asian environment in which the action is set. Instead, the secretary would have approached the relevant person from behind and whispered into the shell-like. Maybe other readers will think this is not such a big deal and the event does, after all, help to move the plot along but it did strike me then as lacking in authenticity.

There are other issues with the text. Despite occupying more than 700 pages, the action often appears sketchy and hurried. There is more than one set piece episode which would appear to be of such importance that they would bring the book to a close and then transition to the next. It does make me wonder whether there was some to-and-fro between the author on the one hand and editor and publisher on the other as to how many books in this series were to be published. The result is, whether my suspicions are true or not, that these central events are rather diminished in importance and there is a gap of some months and then things start up again. I suppose this is not central to the flow of the text but I would be interested in seeing whether this will have any impact of whatever she decides to come up with next.

All three books in this series pack a great deal of punch and Lee does well to make people who do such dreadful things so sympathetic, at least to some extent. The underlying premise is developed very well and the presence of jade has an impact on all manners of social relations – there could have been more exploration of gender relations with jade-enhanced women dealing with unadorned men but this is a novel and not a treatise. There is recognition of the existence of poor people and an acknowledgement of their role in society but it is clear that the author has the centres of power as her main focus. In any case, the economic basis of society has a more cogent rationale than in most works of fantasy. There is, inevitably, a cinematic feel to certain scenes – it is most clearly set in the Hong Kong gangster movie tradition, where fists and weapons do most of the talking. It would probably make a good show on television or even a feature film but there are very many books about which the same could be said.

I have very much enjoyed reading this trilogy and particularly the maturing of the characters over time and the ways in which they interact with the society around them. This is brought about in both big ways and small ways. The big ways represent the structure of the plot and the unfolding events. The small ways include changes in technology over the years and in details such as Hilo being prevailed upon to give up smoking by his wife. The story is compelling and the background fascinating. I look forward to seeing what comes next.

John Walsh, Krirk University

Review of Fonda Lee’s Jade War

Jade War

Fonda Lee

London: Orbit, 2019

ISBN: 9-780356-510538

594 pp.

Eric Hobsbawm (2016), the noted historian whose grave I saw when I visited Highgate Cemetery towards the end of last year, observed that Bourdieu’s concept of habitus marks the conjuncture of base and superstructure; that is, the base of economic activities that keeps society running and the superstructure of cultural, religious and civic institutions that are used by the privileged class to maintain and sharpen the class system that keeps their position intact. I mention this because Fonda Lee’s green bone factions or clans consist of not just the superstructure of the warriors (fists and fingers, as they are known) and the jade that gives them their power but, also, the base of the lantern people, who are the shop owners and business managers who pay tribute to the clans and enable them to live their gilded lives. As long as the system is closed and the clans protect their members, then the system is quite resilient. However, in Jade War, Fonda Lee’s follow up to Jade City (and presumably the middle part of a trilogy, as tends to be the case these days), the system becomes open – to recreate social relations, the two principal clans must internationalise their activities. This comes about as a result of international relations – the island state of Keon has become embroiled in a war between the larger powers of Espenia and Ygutan. The Espenian ally is something of a friendly tiger which has shown an interest in acquiring a reliable source of jade for its own troops. The outside world can no longer be ignored (China, Japan and Korea all tried to do this by closing their borders at various stages and with reasonable results, given the nature of western colonialism and its effects elsewhere). The No Peak clan, which is the family we follow and so would like to prevail, has started to internationalise its operations according to contemporary management thought (which is somewhat reminiscent of Charles Stross’s Clan Corporate books, which drew praise from the leading economist of the bourgeoisie, Paul Krugman). The Mountain clan, our enemy, chooses a different path, which I will not spoil.

The opening of the system allows us to participate in the overseas Kekonese society in Espenia – the era is before the present, before computers, mobile phones and high-speed trains but with trans-ocean telephone calls possible from a coin-operated telephone box. It could be the 1950s to the early 1980s, without any specific references to real world historical events. There is no mention of the exploration of space, for example or the outbreak of AIDS. The dynamics of this society during an era dominated by gangsters are nicely observed and make an interesting parallel with the original and its focus on individual exploits and responsibilities. This is in addition to the main plot, which follows the family members with whom we will be familiar from the first book. The action is, I think, faster paced than in the predecessor, which took a while to get into its stride. This book seems to have been written by a more confident author – in a note at the back, she observes that following up something which was bigger and more complex than anything she had attempted before was rather a daunting challenge but she has pulled it off very well. The prose is not very memorable but the plotting is deft and the principal characters develop and change in response to events and their own experience – most of all, which I was reading it, I found myself during the day looking forward to the evening when I would have a chance to read more and find out what would happen next. Clearly, then, I am planning to get the third one in due course.

Reference

Hobsbawm, Eric, “Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Sociology and Social History,” New Left Review, No.101 (Sep/Oct, 2016), pp.37-47.

John Walsh, Krirk University, February, 2023

Review of Erikson’s The God Is Not Willing

The God Is Not Willing

Steven Erikson

London: Transworld Publishers, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-5291-7687-2

587 pp.

It is only a few pages into the latest of Steven Erikson’s novels that we are returned to the sense of majestic world-building taking place that is nevertheless focused on the roles of individuals that has made his tales of the Malazan Empire so admired and enjoyed. The glaciers are melting (because of magic rather than climate change) and people living in the once frozen northern lands are forced to return again to the south, where their traditions of duty and honour (and looting and pillage, to be fair) are challenged by the systematic slaughter practiced in their destination. Between the two stand the remaining forces of the Malazan Empire, who are always the real heroes of any of these books (originally ten, with a couple of prequels and now this novel as the first of a series of sequels). Much of the action is centred on the interactions between the squaddies on the ground and their various adventures and misadventures. It is in these scenes that we find the humanism Erikson injects into his work – these are people far from home, among strangers not always well-meaning towards them and required to do their best under trying circumstances. It is easy to draw parallels with recent history – easy but also perhaps a little unfair because these are different lands and people, however much the reader might like to picture them in our own image.

The Malazan Empire has not prevailed and persisted for so long just because of the poor bloody infantry, of course. It also boasts a formidable array of explosive munitions of various types and a corps of wizards or mages. Magic is derived mostly from the veins of the many gods that stud the world and are of a dazzling variety of attitudes and degrees of power. Being a mage, even in peace time, is a very dangerous undertaking and it is not very surprising that they tend to be quite a rum lot, tending towards poor understanding of the risk-reward nexus and a glib way with uniforms and saluting and so forth. We are introduced to another here, Stillwater, who is both assassin and mage and apparently in revolt against the strictures of her noble upbringing and the restrictions on her ability to explore the universe as she would that represents. Together with the Jheck – multi-bodied werewolf-type shapeshifters from the first book – she is one of the high spots of this episode (among a characteristically large and diverse cast of characters).

In terms of the plot, we follow Rant, child (by rape) of Karsa Orlong and an unfortunate local woman. His father casts a dark shadow over the lands he had previously ravaged, including Rant’s home town of Silver Lake. Rant appears destined to follow his father in being a very large and powerful fellow with superior combat and survival skills. It is to be hoped that he differs in terms of character and, in this case, the omens are good to a certain extent. This is characteristic of Erikson’s work: the intentions of the individual may be important but there are larger forces who can take over whenever they feel it is in their interest to do so – like flies to wanton boys, then, are these characters to their gods – and other creatures of power but who have not attained ascendancy to the ranks of the divine and to have their position recognized.

There is, as ever, a fair amount of death and suffering for the guilty and the innocent alike in this book (as well as dark humour) but there are also some welcome moments of respite during which characters are able to snatch a few moments of pleasure for themselves. This makes the world overall a little less forbidding; Erikson’s prose style is also a little less dense than it has been in the past, which I would attribute to a greater level of confidence by the writer in his work and characters. Works of the past could be dazzling but this one gets hold of a good story and gets on with the job of telling it. I hope for more books in this series – I note that there are planned to be two more to make up a trilogy and that other characters from earlier in the series to return. I look forward in particular to meeting Coltaine again.

John Walsh, Krirk University, January 2023

Review of Butler’s Adulthood Rites

Adulthood Rites

Octavia E. Butler

London: Headline Publishing, 2021 (originally 1988)

ISBN: 9-781472-281074

323 pp.

After apocalyptic catastrophes, what was left of mankind was removed from the Earth for its own safety and stored until certain modifications to its DNA and nervous system. These modifications are made by the Oankali, an alien race with a tendency for doing such things. The Oankali call themselves ‘traders,’ by which they mean they will exchange technologies including biology with other creatures they encounter so as to help them improve their quality of life while also improving their own ability to explore the cosmos further and survive new environments and dealing with new lifeforms. They are also, from the perspective of humans, very much the Other: they have, especially in their adult manifestations, numerous tentacles with which they explore each other and the world intimately, they have three genders and they could, at least hypothetically, kill humans with a reflex sting from one of the tentacles if surprised or alarmed. It does not help inter-species relations, although those are asymmetric – the Oankali understand the humans perfectly – that the aliens will not permit the humans to have freedom on their own planet once they have been allowed to return for their own good. In particular, it is strongly resented that human women can no longer have children without the intervention of an ooloi, which is the third gender of the aliens, whose very existence challenges the prejudices the humans have from their experience on Earth and the indoctrination by religious and political figures who benefit from enforcing compliance with their ideologies.

In the first part of the Lilith’s Brood trilogy, Dawn, we met the eponymous heroine who has been restored from suspended animation when it is calculated that she will be one of the most likely humans to be willing to deal with the new reality in a rational manner. In this second book (and I would really recommend reading the first one before tackling this), we follow the journey to adulthood (as the title suggests) of her son Akin. Akin has been born in the Oankali fashion but in his manifestation as a child, he looks sufficiently human to pass as one, in a good light at least and, consequently, is seen as an attractive option as an adoptee by some childless couples. As the first of his kind, Akin is obliged to live on his wits and instincts when he is separated from his family and obliged to spend his childhood in the increasingly violent and nihilistic society of the libertarian human villages. Fortunately, his Oankali heritage makes it possible for him to survive physical rigors which would be beyond the rest of us. His greater problems relate to emotional isolation and missing the extremely important milestones of Oankali development.

It seems hardly necessary to point out the parallels between this world and our own: every day, religious and political figures whose power and income depend on ensuring compliance with their scarcely believable ideologies and who foresee being cast into the rubbish bin of history, desperately search for new ways to whip up hatred and fear of anyone who can be made to represent the Other (currently, the trans communities, among others) and to suppress any form of dissent. It is not the least remarkable aspect of Butler’s oeuvre that she could see this happening so starkly in a previous generation. She is very clear-eyed about her secondary characters – they are not evil, nor are they necessarily shallow and foolish (although some are) but they are inadequate to meeting the challenges they must face. The choices they must consider are difficult and they have, after all, been returned to a lifestyle that does not feature electricity or connectivity (although they are ingenious in finding ways to make ever more deadly guns). Their means of salvation remains anathema to many of them, nonetheless, which means they are surely doomed. How many efforts should be made to persuade them of this and to encourage them to change their course?

While I regret not having read Butler’s work earlier, I console myself with the fact that I still have many of her works to read and I certainly intend to do so. She was, evidently, a wise and very humane human being and I hope that she did not have to suffer too much to have reached that place of understanding, although I rather fear the worst. Look out for the review of the concluding part of the trilogy in due course.

John Walsh, Krirk University, November 2022

Review of R.F. Kuang’s The Dragon Republic

The Dragon Republic

R.F. Kuang

London: HarperVoyager, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-00-823989-3

658 pp.

My life seems increasingly to involve China and Chinese people. I work for a university owned by Chinese people and most of my teaching involves online graduate education with Chinese students. And the, of course, I keep buying books about China in real life or, in this case, in fantasy. I have some others up my sleeve as well.

The Dragon Republic continues the story of Rin and her small band of shamans – people who have such a close and personal relationship with one of the 64 gods that they can borrow their divine elemental power (or let it flow through them, more accurately). They are at the forefront of the civil war convulsing their home country – an analogue of China, while the threat from the analogous Japanese remains potent and that from the analogous westerners is looming. The central characters are all major figures in this convulsion, either because they are the rulers and generals or else they were with Rin at the imperial Sandhurst analogue and have been trained to be the next generation of leaders. There are plenty of spear-carriers and other supporting case around but they do not really interfere with the principals, who are all quite sharply down and capable of change and development.

The novel works on the level of both a personal adventure with excitement, adventure and really wild things and, also, something of a reprise of early modern Chinese history. Rin herself is a Speerly – a member of a much-dismissed ethnic minority from an island (which I imagine as one of the indigenous peoples of eastern Taiwan) with a reputation for regular opium smoking and a propensity for dangerous magic. Her desire to escape from her humble and difficult beginnings (including being orphaned and packed off to abusive foster carers) is so intense that, as I mentioned in my review of the predecessor, Poppy War, she chose to have her uterus burned out to minimize problems in long-term concentration. She faces a grand intersection of discrimination and this soon reappears whenever she is unable to wield the superhuman powers people expect to have at her beck and call. The world in which she lives is dangerous and Kuang is not afraid of killing off notable characters, even if some of them do prove to be revenants in nature. Not only that but there are alternatives to all of the stress and fighting, which is to abandon oneself to the oblivion of the poppy, which appears to be ubiquitous. Life in wartime is really quite grim and few people would be really blamed for deciding to opt out of it all. Then again, the more powerful movers and shakers of this world would be unwilling to allow so powerful a piece to lie idle off the board.

This is a very enjoyable book that zips along at great speed; the tables are turned more than once and there is no clear line to draw between the good guys and the bad guys. One of the main differences between East Asia and western literature (and cultural production generally) is that characters in the latter act, at least over the last century or so, according to elements of their psychology, while characters in the former behave according to different motivations which may not be transparent to outsiders. This tendency is also (pleasingly) present here and the reader may have to question her preconceptions from time to time.

I am looking forward to finding out, in due course, what will happen in the third and, I believe, concluding part.

John Walsh, Krirk University, July 2022

Review of Fonda Lee’s Jade City

Jade City

Fonda Lee

London: Orbit, 2018

ISBN: 9-780356-510514

499 pp.

Imagine Hong Kong of the 1980s or early 1990s, as depicted in numerous gangster films – there are no mobile phones or the internet and so there are many excuses for the various heavies of the different clans to turn up and deliver portentous messages and drive to exclusive restaurants and nightclubs in flashy cars. They do not practice magic but they do have their own martial arts routines and they do have access to green jade (hence the name of the series of books of which this is the first, The Green Bone saga). This jade endows its bearer with superhuman powers of strength and endurance, heightened perception and the ability to deflect unwanted deployment of kinetic energy. Any jade that is owned is best worn and put on display, since it helps with hierarchical relationships and les people know where they stand with each other and besides, unworn jade might be pilfered and used against its owner.

Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – there are side effects to using the jade, known as The Itches, which can drive a person to distraction and beyond and, further, not everybody is suited to wearing jade at all. Since jade tolerating ability is at least partly moderated by genetic, inevitably family-based clans are created. Older family members tend to be stronger than younger ones, partly because they have had more opportunity to accumulate their own jade and have been able to develop immunity to it. The behaviours of the clans has been codified such that hierarchies are rarely challenged and issues of personal honour means most of these doing the actual dirty work (known as fists and fingers) have to spend most of their time practicing their skills and keeping their subordinates in appropriate order and have little time to consider alternative means of arranging social relations. All of this reminds me a little of the Merchant Princes series of Charles Stross, who also used an economic basis to explain the nature of society – perhaps, in a future episode, we might be treated to a widescale confrontation between the two classes, the jaded and the jadeless.

As it is, we follow the No Peak clan in its struggle with the Mountain Clan for control of the teeming streets of Janloon, as the city is known. Violence leads to more violence and the action escalates into a full-sector war, by which time it has become increasingly evident that the action is not going to be wrapped up very quickly. The central protagonists are younger members of the No Peak clan who have been appointed to positions of responsibility rather sooner than they might have expected or, indeed, wanted. It is hard not to compare the progress of this clan family with that portrayed in the Godfather films – but there are so many of these portrayals that there are numerous tropes from which to choose. Jade City manages to keep itself on the positive side of the cliché but, on the other hand, I cannot think of any sentence that was arresting, any description that was illuminating or dialogue that was diverting. The world-building is solid but does take some time to get going and I wondered at one stage whether the whole saga could not have been contained within a single volume of a similar length to this one or perhaps a little shorter. One final thing of which the text did remind me was of a video game – the narrative portrays what people look like rather than what they are thinking (although there is little in the way of cultural production evident in the text or which contributes to the intellectual hinterland of any of the characters. Perhaps that will change as Lee and her style mature). It is an enjoyable entertainment – the book was shortlisted for the Locus and Nebula awards of 2018 so other people have perhaps a higher opinion of it than I do. However, I am well aware how unimportant my opinion is.

John Walsh, June 2022, Krirk University

Review of Tchaikovsky’s Cage of Souls

Cage of Souls

Adrian Tchaikovsky

London: Head of Zeus, Ltd., 2019.

ISBN: 9-781788-547383

602 pp.

Mankind is in retreat and nature has regrown and evolved into inimical species no longer willing to take it vicious feet off the throat. Those few who are left are crowded into the degenerate and degrading spires of the city of Shadrapar and those that fall foul of society are shepherded onto a boat bound for the great prison island from which they are unlikely to return. This situation acts as the basis for the excellent and award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky’s standalone novel Cage of Souls. The title refers to the cage-like structure of cells in which the condemned languish in the prison and brings to mind both the Ship of Fools and La Cage aux Folles, albeit the latter is rather more difficult to interpret meaningfully in this case. In fact, there is a touch of Jack Vance in the story, especially of the Tales of the Dying Earth with the sense that it is very late in the party but, rather than act with dignity and prudence as the end approaches, people prefer to try to make everyone else miserable for the sake of very little. Consequently, despite the fact that there is a whole mostly empty world out there (apart from the innumerable natural and not so natural menaces), people are encouraged to cling together for safety, thereby incurring a sense of claustrophobia.

In this dystopia, we meet our protagonist Stefan Advani, who is a would-be revolutionary, albeit a peaceful one seeking to work through change to the political system (a forlorn hope) who is subsequently sentenced to a life/death term on the island and must learn to survive. That he does so is thanks to a series of small acts of kindness or decency in the face of the grotesquery of the prison and its administration as a whole. Those who are sentenced there have been exiled from human society and so are treated as expendable by the more psychopathic of the guards, although at the same time everyone realizes that it is only through the labour of the condemned that the machinery of the system can be maintained. Consequently, prisoners with some useful skills become valuable and may, in some cases use this to obtain some leverage in the form of minor improvements in their terrible way of life. The system is one of dynamic stability that is rarely more than one misplaced bullet or stroke of a whip away from disaster.

Not surprisingly, then, the people able to survive this situation are either lucky, highly-skilled or, more likely, able to demonstrate a cockroach-like level of survivability in a hostile environment. This does not make them pleasant people to know or, indeed, good conversationists. Every day is a trial. These sections of the book are very successful and conform closely to what one might imagine life would be like under these circumstances based on ingestion of popular cultural media portraying incarceration (e.g. Colditz, Prisoner Cell Block H, Cool Hand Luke and so on (although there are no 50 eggs to eat)). Some later parts of the book are more expansive in terms of time and space and seem to me to be a little less successful as a result. However, it must be difficult having done so much world-building not to be able to use all of it and, besides, the expansions are by no means illogical.

Tchaikovsky’s oeuvre ranges far and wide, from anthropormorphised creepy crawlies to spiders from out of space and no doubt more in other books I have not read. This is a fine addition and some of the more outrageous creations of nature unbound will live long in the memory. I am pleased to see that it seems set to remain a standalone novel, since I have been lured into becoming involved with all too many open-ended series of novels recently.

John Walsh, Krirk University, February 2022

Review of Kuang’s The Poppy War

The Poppy War

R.F. Kuang

London: HarperVoyager, 2018

ISBN: 9-780008-239848

530 pp.

It would have taken Harry Potter 2,500 pages to have achieved what young, unfashionably-skinned Rin manages to achieve in a single, fast-paced volume – and he did not have to have his womb burned out by magic chemicals to avoid the pains of menstruation. There are some similarities between the two in that both pass through a bildungsroman process but poor Rin’s world is much darker and crueller. Indeed, it is unavoidable that the world she inhabits possesses unpleasant parallels with real world China and, in particular, the invasion by the Japanese and the rape of Nanjing. Dealing with the sins of the past is certainly one of the themes of this excellent fantasy adventure (which is, inevitably, the first in a series). Another is the shadow of colonization, which is foreshadowed by the ubiquity of the poppy and, it seems very likely, more interactions with the vaguely western empire which does not feature much in this novel.

Rin must contend with class, gender and ethnic discrimination as an intersectional nexus of barriers that she is able to challenge through her own tenacity and the support of some allies but, more importantly, a gods-given talent to access the realms of magic. She is not alone in this ability and coming to terms with the different ways in which such magic can be used and misused, through the choice of educational masters (just as in the real world, women were not permitted to obtain such positions) in conventional Chinese style. These choices and the characters in which they are embodied serve as a link between the different locations through which the action passes – there are some rather abrupt changes in setting and new casts of characters with whom we have to become familiar quite quickly so it is useful to have some familiar things to which to cling. It is fortunate – well, presumably, it is the result of a good deal of work and thought by the author – that the characters are mostly very memorable and different from each other so the changes can be managed without returning to earlier pages to check on just who this or that guy might be. I would also imagine that Rin will be able subsequently to revisit some of the earlier locations and complete her business there one way or another.

If you have been unfortunate enough to have read others of my reviews here or elsewhere, you will have become perhaps painfully aware that I am wont to judge books such as this on a combination of whether the characters offer some kind of intellectual hinterland and whether there is an economic system that makes some kind of sense. Authors who base their works on Chinese culture and history have, at least to my mind, something of an advantage in this respect because it is an ingrained notion classics exist and episodes from them are brought to mind to help inform any complex decision, while it is equally clear that there must be a huge mass of peasants and subsistence farming households to support the towns and cities in which most of the action takes place. Kuang lays upon this framework her own historical imagination to provide necessary motivations for her characters beyond abiding by the supposedly rational calculations of homo economicus. In particular, there is the destruction of Speerly society (her names strike me as a little strange or, more likely, I do not recognize some of her allusions) in a previous war and the implications of this for the present. This episode is clearly central to the current action and will inform Rin’s decisions when she becomes able to influence events on a macro-social scale.

This is, at time, a very fast-moving and exciting story and I am certainly keen to find out what is going to happen next. There are a few moments when it becomes obvious that this is a relatively young author at an early stage of her career but these can be swiftly skated over as the action hurries along. So far, Rin (and, indeed, the other characters) have experienced no meaningful personal lives, largely because they are so busy dealing with the plot and I wonder whether this will change in future episodes. However, as readers will find out if they do read this book, this might be a little complicated for Rin, given some of her previous decisions. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in listening to me.

John Walsh, Krirk University, January 2022