Interzone #266 - September-October 2016

by Andy Cox [Ed. ]

  Next up is the story ‘Mrs. Stiltskin’, a prize-winning story which also appeared on Podcastle, and which eavesdrops into the questioning of a wife by a police officer about the disappearance of a little boy who wants to know where all her children came from, but this wife and mother can stand up for herself. In ‘Skeletons’, skeletons of extinct animals have a life of sorts, and can be kept as pets, but there are other skeletons out in the wild as a group of friends are about to discover when they go camping. Skeletons in the grass, skeletons in the cupboards of your heart, if you can squeeze past the love you hide there. ‘No Eyes’ appeared last year in PsychoPomp and is a disturbing story about a widow and a skeleton that appears at her door, wanting in. Should she?

  Following this we have selected poems, and given that a couple were honourable mention nods by Ellen Datlow you can expect some creepiness, particularly in the poem ‘Dining with Echoes’. The poems like the stories themselves are inspired by May Sarton’s poem called ‘My Sisters, Oh My Sisters’ where the “ordinary” or expected lives of women as wife, lover, mother were seen to suffer in the eyes of those around them as the women pursued an artistic path and were regarded as “strange monsters” by their families and friends.

  Finally we have ‘Where You Came From’, a story of a werewolf in love – or is it? You decide, but it’s creepy, graphic, Southern Gothic perhaps. I was thinking of Joyce Carol Oates when I listened to it.

  Strange Monsters is something you need to listen to more than once in order to fully appreciate the words and the spaces in between them, not always filled by music. Sometimes the delivery of the words is the percussion, the engine room of the piece.

  Praise has to be given to Brewer’s jazz compositions: eerie and scratching in places, minimalist in others, or simply smoky and seductive when the words are not. The guitar work reminded me of the sonic textures of David Torn in his post-Everyman Band days when he was collaborating with the likes of Jan Garbarek and Eberhard Weber. Good stuff, although I’m sure the CD contains lots of photos of the performers, something my Dropbox version lacked.

  As a fan of Neil Gaiman, I have several CDs of his early work where he reads stories and prose poems with a musical accompaniment, sometimes in the background, sometimes to set the scene or to finish off a piece. Stufflebeam and Brewer don’t have that sort of clout and used Kickstarter to bring this endeavour to fruition. More power to them, and here’s to more cross-media projects from them and anyone else who dares give it a try.

  THE WOLF IN THE ATTIC

  Paul Kearney

  Solaris pb, 294pp, £7.99

  Lawrence Osborn

  Paul Kearney is probably best known as a writer of epic fantasies. His series The Monarchies of God, The Sea Beggars, and The Macht are all excellent examples of that genre. So this new book from his pen will be something of a surprise to readers who come to it expecting more of the same. Instead of another epic fantasy, he offers us a lyrical coming of age story set in Oxford at the end of the 1920s.

  The heroine is one Anna Francis (or Sphrantzes), a twelve-year-old Greek refugee who survived the 1922 sack of Smyrna by the Turks. She is now living in Oxford with her father and is desperately unhappy. She has no friends of her own age and she misses her mother who was killed by the Turks. To make matters worse, in his despair over the loss of his home and family her father has turned to alcohol and become obsessed with campaigning for the repatriation of Greek refugees. Their life is increasingly impoverished, though he somehow finds the money to keep paying for her private education.

  Anna’s story begins in fragmentary manner, reflecting her tutor’s complaints about her dragonfly mind. Snatches of narrative give us her impressions of Oxford and memories of their evacuation from Smyrna. The story is written largely in the first person and in the present tense, giving it a slow, dreamlike quality.

  Anna takes refuge from her loneliness in books and daydreams and long walks around Oxford. One winter’s evening she slips out of their house in Jericho to escape yet another of her father’s interminable committee meetings. She finds her way to Port Meadow where she witnesses a killing, which marks the beginning of her descent into a living nightmare.

  Her life has become linked with that of the killer, a young Romani boy named Luca. A few weeks later near midwinter, she encounters Luca and his family in Wytham Wood. Shortly afterwards, she helps Luca hide from the Roadmen, the ancient enemies of his people. And the next morning her father is found dead – apparently murdered by one or more individuals he had invited into the house.

  Anna, now orphaned and disowned by the Greek exile community, is destined for the workhouse. Instead she runs away, intent on finding her way to Luca’s people. Her quest leads her into an ever stranger world – the Old World, of Romani and Roadmen, of skinchangers and an Oxfordshire farmer, Gabriel, who may also be some kind of native deity; a world in which she faces down the devil and avenges her father’s death. And at the end of it all she discovers what she thought she had lost forever: home, the home of her heart – no longer in Smyrna but in rural Oxfordshire.

  Strangely, though, the novel does not feel as if this is the end of the story. She has come of age and she has attained her heart’s desire (albeit through great loss), but we have been given glimpses of her importance (and that of her relationship with Luca) to the Old World. And these glimpses point to another story beyond this one.

  Also pointing beyond this story are her tantalising encounters with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. They are portrayed sympathetically and both (but particularly Lewis) help her at crucial points early in the story. But that help could have been provided by others, so why drag them into it at all? And why play with the history of Lewis’s conversion to Christianity if his is no more than a walk-on part?

  Then there is the farmer Gabriel. He feels too large a character to be limited to the supporting role he has here. Is this simple countryman in fact some kind of genius loci or tutelary deity? He reminded me of the kind of being Ransome becomes in C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. What is his place in the age old struggle between the Romani and the Roadmen? And what does Anna’s coming mean for him and for that ancient tension?

  At the end of The Wolf in the Attic, I was left with a slew of questions and a sense that Kearney had teased me glimpses of a mythical England about which I’d like to know a good deal more. But this should not be taken as criticism. I thought it was a superbly written book. His previous books have been enjoyable, action-packed fantastical romps. But this is quieter, deeper, more evocative – the kind of book that demands you re-read it as soon as you have reached the end. The Wolf in the Attic is a book to savour. I just hope there is a sequel to answer some of my questions!

  BODIES OF WATER

  V.H. Leslie

  Salt pb, 160pp, £8.99

  Maureen Kincaid Speller

  When we open a horror novel, we expect to be unsettled by what we read; we anticipate some sort of ‘wrongness’ from which the story must inevitably flow. It turns out, however, that horror is not simply created by the introduction of wrongness. It needs to be the right kind of wrongness. The problem with V.H. Leslie’s Bodies of Water is that the wrongness is itself off-kilter.

  We find ourselves in familiarly uncanny territory as the novel opens: a large, forbidding building, with an obscure history. Wakewater House was once an institution where hydropathy – the water cure – was practised. Having fallen on hard times, it is being converted into apartments, one of which has been bought by Kirsten, looking for a new beginning after her relationship breaks up. We can probably make a good guess as to how this story is likely to turn out, more so when we realise that it is a paired narrative, telling the story of two women in the same building, some hundred years apart. It’s not difficult to surmise some sort of connection between their respective situations, nor to suspect that we might be heading into ‘Yellow Wallpaper’ territory, as Evelyn’s cure is distinctly reminiscent of that prescribed for Charlotte Perkins Gil
man’s protagonist.

  The plot points continue to pile up. The strange attraction Kirsten feels for the river flowing yards from the house, the shadowy figures she sees at the water’s edge, strange occurrences in her flat, the neighbour researching the history of drowned women – all of these suggest a classic ‘woman in psychic jeopardy’ scenario. Absolutely nothing is missed. And that, I fear, is a major problem with Bodies of Water. It works so diligently to set up the narrative structure, it never quite gets around to telling the story. Or rather, the story is outlined in some detail – and it is fine if entirely predictable to anyone who has read this kind of thing before – but Leslie seems curiously reluctant to further explore the various possibilities she’s established.

  Given the comparative familiarity of the plot devices already assembled here I was very much hoping she would test the boundaries of these narrative conventions rather more thoroughly than actually happened. Indeed, it is almost as though she is overwhelmed by the story she has come up with, as a result of which she hides behind a barricade of even more ideas rather than engaging more fully with the complex emotional currents she’s already hinting at. Frustratingly, to discuss the one creative decision that did surprise me would be to give away the novel’s ending, but the author makes a very puzzling choice when the United Kingdom’s rivers have their own extremely rich folklore. It’s especially odd when there seems to be such an emphasis on the specificity of place throughout the novel.

  This is a novel filled with potential, in the characters and in the telling, but while the story may be about wasted potential, bogged down in social mores, the story’s potential remains untapped. In the same way, this is also a novel of high passion, yet told in a way that seems to dodge engaging with those passions, even though one strand of the narrative is self-evidently about social conventions insisting on the concealment of passion while the other hints at the existence of a previous abusive relationship. I have seen other commentators praise the novel’s emotional impact but I just don’t find that in the narrative. Even the moments of high emotional tension seem oddly flat. The title does heavily signal what we are supposed to understand about the story but there nonetheless remains a significant gap between intent and achievement.

  Where Bodies of Water really does succeed is in its evocation of atmosphere – the edge of the Thames was never gloomier, the figures lurking at its edge are genuinely creepy, and Wakewater House is everything you’d expect of a semi-derelict building site in the throes of conversion. Here at last the wrongness is absolutely spot on; it is in moments such as these that Leslie displays her craft to good effect, but it is not enough. The narrative lacks sufficient connective tissue to fill the gaps between these acutely observed miniatures in the way that a novel requires. As a result the necessary wrongness of the plot is let down by the fumbled wrongness of the narrative technique. The novel struggles to breathe but never quite comes to life.

  REVENGER

  Alastair Reynolds

  Gollancz hb, 380pp, £18.99

  Jack Deighton

  The first thing that strikes the reader about this novel is that (barring two very small encyclopaedia extracts laid out in a dark green) it is printed in brown ink. This turns out to be no mere presentational quirk but is instead symbolic. Our narrator, Arafura Ness, tells us fairly early on that she has scratched her story in blood onto rough paper. (Just how rough we find out in the last chapter.) This foreshadowing of things to come belies the book’s initial brightness which has some of the tonal qualities of a Victorian Boy’s Own Adventure – except for the female lead. Throughout the book individuals are denoted by the word “cove”, spaceship crew argot abounds and there are quests for hidden treasure. In that sense it might have been a YA title and in accord with that there is first the necessity to be rid of the parents.

  Fura is sixteen, well educated, but her mother is dead and her father has fallen on hard times. Her elder sister, Ardana, leads her astray, into the shady environs of Neural Alley where she is tested for the ability to read Bones. These are only one of many types of artefact left over from before the Sundering and allow Bone Readers to communicate instantly if sometimes unreliably across the reaches of space. Both sisters are of course adept. To gain quoins to help their father’s plight they sign up for six months service on the Monetta’s Mourn under Captain Rackamore.

  Like all the other spaceships in the novel Monetta is a sunjammer with auxiliary ion engines. Rackamore uses her to seek out baubles, closed environments which contain valuable items of ancient tech but which only open at irregular intervals and for irregular times. Along with the Bone Readers the ship’s crew contains an augurer to divine those times, an assessor to determine what any finds are worth, integrators to unseal internal locks plus other specialists. Each bauble (and most of the large habitable environments in the book) has a mini black hole called a swallower at its core.

  The science fictional aspects of this – a degenerate humanity seemingly restricted to a relatively small area of space surrounding the habitats of the Congregation, in an era called the Thirteenth Occupation; cut adrift from its origins in the Old Sun, a history with many gaps, with only barely recalled legends for memories, relying on tech it can use but not understand, tech more or less indistinguishable from magic – mostly lie in the background and lend the whole the feel of steampunk in reverse, while bone reading verges on fantasy. There are also aliens, especially those nicknamed Crawlies who fortuitously turned up just before a banking crash and now oversee the financial system despite claiming to have no interest in money themselves, a question as to just what exactly quoins might really be and hints of shadowy others beyond human knowledge.

  Of course things do not go smoothly. While plundering a bauble the Monetta is attacked by the shadowy ship Nightjammer, captained by the notorious Bosa Sennen. Most of the crew are killed, Ardana is captured and Fura only saved by the selfless action of the previous Bone Reader, Garval. In hiding, Fura is forced to eat lightvine to survive. As a consequence she contracts the glowy, which makes her skin emit light and may affect her brain function. She and the only other survivor, Prozor, eventually gain rescue and form an alliance, which is soon interrupted by what at first seems an authorial misstep as Fura is legally forced to return to her original home. But this becomes a means to underline how much her experience has changed her. Desires for both revenge and to free Ardana have made any thought of returning to her old life intolerable. With the help of Paladin, the family robot (another remnant of ancient tech, a battle robot no less, but with much diminished competence) she escapes – a process which requires the hasty surgical removal of a lower arm to get rid of her restraint bracelet with Fura acquiring an artificial hand in its place, the partial destruction of Paladin and the devastation of her father. She again teams up with Prozor, taking ship on the Queen Crimson and working towards inveigling Bosa into a trap.

  Reynolds tackles it all with brio. Yet he doesn’t ignore deeper concerns. Bosa has a rationale for her depredations. Fura regrets the hardness which has entered her soul, the deceptions she has had to undertake, the decisions made. Revenger asks the question: is the search for revenge worth the price of turning you into what you detested?

  I doubt I’ll read a more engaging work of SF this year.

  SUMMERLONG

  Peter S. Beagle

  Tachyon tpb, 238pp, $15.95

  Maureen Kincaid Speller

  My relationship with Peter S. Beagle’s writing is a long one, and enduring. I read The Last Unicorn in the early 1970s, and was enchanted by it. A year or so later I found a copy of his astonishingly accomplished first novel, A Fine and Private Place, which similarly delighted me. It must be galling for any writer to be remembered best for their earliest work, but there it is. Beagle has written some excellent fantasy novels since, and some wonderful short stories, but somehow nothing has ever quite hit the spot, for me at least, in the same way as those two early novels. Until now.

  Which is
not to say that Summerlong is a faithful replica of either novel. It is quite definitely its own thing but while clearly showing its relationship to A Fine and Private Place in terms of atmosphere, and The Last Unicorn in terms of plot, the latter noted by other reviewers. Abe and Joanna are a long-established couple, she a flight attendant, he a retired professor of history. It’s a comfortable relationship, full of routines that accommodate the fact that they don’t, even now, live together, but one feels that underneath it all they are beginning to ask themselves just how long they can keep going before a change comes about. Joanna is asking herself how much longer she wants to keep flying back and forth between Chicago and Seattle, while Abe is wondering if there is any point in finishing his book on John Ball and the Peasants’ Rebellion [sic]. In the meantime, they stay over at each other’s houses, go out for dinner, bicker amiably, laugh and joke together. It might almost be cloying except that Beagle knows just how far such dialogue can go before it becomes impossibly twee.

  And then, one night, at their favourite diner, they encounter Lioness Lazos, a young woman who looks like Botticelli’s Primavera and who seems to have an extraordinary effect on everyone she meets. Almost before they know what they’re doing, they’ve invited her to set up home in Abe’s garage, although they can’t explain why they’ve done this. Other things seem to be happening, too. Gardner Island, where Abe lives, begins to enjoy the most remarkably lovely weather. Abe, who has long nursed a secret ambition to play blues harmonica unexpectedly finds himself drafted into a band, and Joanna suddenly realises she needs to learn sea canoeing. And Lily, Joanna’s daughter, falls head over heels in love with Lioness.