As the novel unfolds, what we might have taken as longstanding contentment within a comfortable relationship is shown to be at best a compromise, a compromise which is now rendered unstable by the arrival of Lioness. And if by this point we have realised who this young woman is, her mother a nurserywoman, her father a “powerful, mysterious, even dangerous” Greek businessman, and herself on the run from an unhappy marriage, we might begin to comprehend the mythic forces that threaten to entangle Abe and Joanna, forces that themselves are shaped by a compromise. And if we look back to those early novels, we probably know already that while there will be resolution of a sort, there is no guarantee of a happy ending.
And thank goodness for that. For me, one of the attractions of Beagle’s early work was that he really didn’t make it easy for the reader. The real world doesn’t work like fairy tales, and while Beagle offered hope, he did not make promises his fictions wouldn’t keep. Michael and Laura and Schmendrick and Molly Grue stepped beyond their novels’ endings into hopeful uncertainty. In Summerlong we see that hopeful uncertainty maturing while that happy ending is still proving elusive. And that, perhaps, is the point.
The question I have asked myself all along is whether Summerlong is a retreat to an old and reliable formula. However, I don’t think this is the case. While Summerlong undeniably revisits earlier themes, there is much about it that is fresh and new, not least the portrayal of a tender long-term relationship between two older people (a genuine rarity in modern literature, and certainly in modern fantasy writing). The fantastical elements are undoubtedly more evanescent than in the earlier novels but that is perhaps unsurprising given the worldy-wise natures of our protagonists. If, as we are often told, change is the only constant, then Summerlong seems to suggest that while change may be slower to come as one grows older, it will nonetheless arrive, and in the most shocking and inconvenient ways possible. Summerlong reminds us that we can never taken anything for granted, and that includes our assumptions about a much-loved and familiar writer.
SPARROW FALLING
Gaie Sebold
Solaris pb, 384pp, £7.99
Elaine Gallagher
Sparrow Falling is the second of Gaie Sebold’s books about Eveline Duchen, also known as Evvie Sparrow. Following the events of the first book, Shanghai Sparrow, Evvie has started the Sparrow School for young ladies, which houses a secret school in which Evvie and her mentor Ma Pether teach such useful skills as thieving, burglary, con artistry and spycraft. Evvie’s aim is to go legitimate and sell the skills of her girls as security consultants to people who want to prevent their premises and businesses from being robbed, but Ma, a Fagin-like master of thieves, would likely see this as snitching and refuse to help. Evvie’s friend Liu, a fox spirit, is bound up in intrigues between the Dragon King, the Queen of the Folk and the Baba Yaga, and is not around to be of any help to her. The school is not making enough money and the bills are piling up and Evvie is on her own.
The world of the Sparrow stories is steampunk Victorian, with an empire, airships, steam cars and a technical kind of magic known as Etheric science, which Evvie’s mother is adept in. It also has fairies, who live in an otherworld and play vicious games with humans. The machinations of the fairy courts and the schemes of the book’s main antagonist, Joshua Stug, are the major theme of the book where Shanghai Sparrow was more of a steampunk romp. The Queen and her court abduct children as playthings, abetted by Stug, and leave changelings behind. The Dragon court have ornate rituals of honour and obligation and Liu’s father, as whimsical as any fox spirit, expects Liu to pay the consequences of his father’s offence.
I find many of these kinds of books unreadable because the author doesn’t have a feel for the language of the period. Gaie Sebold gets the language of these books spot on. Evvie slips between the ‘drawing-room’ language of her polite upbringing and the argot that she learned when her family were impoverished and she was on the street and under Ma’s tutelage. Evvie’s mother is polite and a little bit unworldly, the language of the Courts is formal without slipping into Chinoiserie or being too mannered but the whimsical nature of the other world comes across in names like Stug and Thripp, which remind me of Lud-in-the-Mist and Lyonesse.
And then there’s Ma Pether. A garrulous, opinionated old biddy who butts heads with Evvie’s mother, and in a wonderful sequence near the end bamboozles an embassy guard with such nonstop chatter that he gives up and lets everyone past.
The book is light and fun but underneath that are serious concerns of character and the world in which it is set, and family is a major theme throughout. Evvie and Liu are struggling to deal with parents or mentors who see them as children and who don’t know how to let them grow up and take charge of their own affairs, or see them as appendages to do as their parents order. Stug is so obsessed with having a son of his own that he enters an unsavoury deal with the Queen.Unlike a lot of steampunk stories the underside of the world is in view; some of the families that rent Stug’ slums are so impoverished and beaten that they will give away their own children.
There are other interesting characters who I feel don’t have as much space as they might have done, while the story concentrated on Evvie’s and Liu’s problems.
Beth, Evvie’s friend and a talented engineer, spends the beginning of the book on the sidelines, and while she comes into her own and learns confidence enough to help save the day, I hope to see more of her in the next book. The School also is in the background of the story for the first two-thirds of the book, and comes out to be led by Ma and Beth in the conclusion. Thripp, an inventor who is fascinated by Evvie’s mother’s etherics work, is the kind of jovial but unsettling character who in a Jack Vance story would turn out to be a villain.
Where Shanghai Sparrow was a self-contained story and tied up its conclusions neatly, Sparrow Falling expects to continue into another book. I see this as an Empire Strikes Back ending; while the main plots involving Evvie and Liu are concluded, they end on a dramatic low and there are major plot threads set up in the book that don’t have a conclusion. Thripp, Beth, the School, and the situation that Liu leaves behind, are all crying out to be continued. I look forward to the next instalment, whether this is a trilogy or an ongoing series.
THE RISE OF IO
Wesley Chu
Angry Robot pb, 424pp, £8.99
Stephen Theaker
This cyberpunk action thriller takes place four years after the end of the Alien World War. Twenty-odd years before that, humans discovered that they had been sharing the planet all along with a secret race of body-hopping aliens, the Quasing, who arrived in a spaceship crash eons ago. Unable to survive unprotected in Earth’s environment, they had lived inside the dinosaurs, then inside the cavemen, and for the last few thousand years – an eyeblink to them – they have lived among us. Despite the Quasing pulling the strings, history played out pretty much how it did in our world.
When the invention of Penetra scanners revealed their foggy existence, things changed forever. At first they were hunted. This particular book, which follows a previous trilogy (The Lives of Tao, The Deaths of Tao and The Rebirths of Tao) doesn’t say how that went, but given the Quasing’s immense political influence one imagines it went quite badly for the hunters. The war then saw the countries of the world taking sides between two Quasing factions: the Genjix, a nasty bunch who think progress comes from conflict, and hence encourage it at all times, and the Prophus, who began to feel guilty about the misery they had caused.
Our brave young hero is Ella Patel, who doesn’t know much about any of that. She knows the war lasted a decade, that it left India shattered, that it took her from Singapore and left her an illiterate orphan in Surat. Unsurprisingly, this has left her rather cantankerous, though not so much that it’d put anyone off reading about her: the way she irritates and needles everyone she meets is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the book. Whether it’s the other inhabitants of Crate Town, a desperate slum built out of shipping con
tainers, or deadly Genjix super-assassins, she’ll do their heads in something rotten; it’s always amusing.
She annoys no one so much as the title character, Io, one of the least impressive of the Prophus Quasings. Long after the others left the Yucatán crash site and swam into the ocean in search of life to glom on to, Io was still trying to get communications working. She’s been catching up ever since, and it doesn’t help that her host humans have a habit of getting themselves killed, from the first sailor she possessed, to General Custer, through to secret agent Emily Curran, leaving Io in need of yet another new host: Ella, who doesn’t even pretend to respect her uninvited new passenger. She thinks Io is boring, full of dumb talk, but if they don’t learn to work together, neither will survive.
It’s a good set-up for a novel. Right next to the shipping containers of Crate Town a secret facility is in development, and, as Ella and Io work to investigate it, the narrative benefits of the protagonist having an onboard frenemy become clear. They can have lots of little arguments, debate the best course of action, and get at each other all they want without any need to explain why no one else acts during the conversation. Ella’s impoverished background means there’s a lot she needs to know, and we can learn it along with her. It also means she’s extremely scrappy and determined, a con artist and thief who leaps at the chance to join the good guys because it pays better.
The other side of it is that she’s not ready to fight. She’s underweight, unhealthy, and still carrying the physical and emotional scars of living a very hard and lonely life. So although there are action scenes, the book has to keep Ella away from the main mission at first. It takes five months of training and over half the book before she goes on her first solo job as an operative: this is very much the first book of a series. It works fine as a jumping-on point for those who haven’t read the previous trilogy, but less so as a standalone novel. Star Wars wouldn’t be the same film if the Death Star was still in one piece at the end of it, and while that isn’t exactly what happens here, the book may leave readers with a similar sense of anticlimax.
However, there is plenty to enjoy before that. The action is well done, Ella is a fine character, and there are signs that after this book’s tight focus on Crate Town and its surroundings the next one may open out a bit more. It sets up plenty of future conflict, and fans planning already to read the entire series will probably be very happy with it.
THE ROOT
Na’amen Gobert Tilahun
Night Shade Books pb, 420pp, $14.99
Wendy Bradley
There’s a lot to like about The Root, Na’amen Gobert Tilahun’s debut novel, the first in the urban fantasy Wrath & Athenaeum trilogy.
Erik is a former child star who has just beaten up the school bullies and is awaiting collection by his mother and her partner. Instead of telling him off, his mother tells him he’s been awakened, because he has berserker powers and is part of a hereditary line of superhero types, the “blooded”, descended from what may well be ancient gods. And that’s just for starters: there are beings leaking through from another reality onto the streets of San Francisco, and they’re carrying off fledgling blooded either with the connivance or not of two different secret organisations.
There are also chapters from the point of view of characters in the alternate reality, such as Lil, a female apprentice in a world that seems to be falling apart under attack from what is essentially a tangible darkness. It’s a rich and strange alien landscape that reminds me a lot of the new weird worlds of, say, a China Miéville novel.
I like the way Lil’s power is, basically, the power of saying magic words: the physicality of this, the necessity of speaking up, speaking out, using your voice and all its opposites – swallowing your rage, holding your tongue – is a subtle and pointed piece of sensitive feminist writing.
Essentially it’s a cake of a novel: Erik’s back story as a child star fallen from grace in a sex scandal is the thick icing-and-marzipan layer that I’d have been happy to pick off and consume on its own. But it’s only the superficial topping on a rich mixture of ingredients that go on and on and on through this world, the secret underbelly of the blood and their organisations and opponents, and then the utter unfamiliarity of Lil’s world… If the rest of the series lives up to the concepts, someone should make the TV series.
What works less well for me…
Well, The Root could have done with another pass by the editor, and, with multiple alien worlds in one fast-paced romp, it seems to me the book would have benefited from a cast list at the back specifying who was who, what powers they had, and which world they came from.
Also, Lil’s world has little patches of darkness that cluster around her in the far reaches of the library where she works, and I was very surprised by the fact that no-one makes any connection between them and the darkness menacing the universe.
And yet there’s something here, clearly. If the Wrath & Athenaeum series has legs, maybe this is its Shards of Honor.
DECADE 1
Edited by John Kenny
Aeon Press pb, 194pp, £9.95
Andy Hedgecock
Decade 1 is a varied and entertaining anthology containing stories on the themes of class, the abuse of power, psycho-sexual development, loss, identity and the creative process. Some of the settings are urban, some rural: most take place in strange but recognisable versions of our own world. The cover art is massively misleading.
Editor John Kenney’s introduction describes the birth of Albedo One in a Dublin pub in the 1990s, and describes the challenges of selecting a set of stories that capture the character and quality of his magazine in its first decade. He mentions setting out the stories in order of publication: I will discuss them in the same sequence.
There are faint echoes of the Fast Show’s Mr Dead sketch in ‘Decline’, but John Hanamy’s satire of corporate manners is sharper and more unsettling. For the narrator, death at the age of twenty is no barrier to succeeding his father as company CEO. A decayed corpse in a deep freeze, his every need is met by servants. I read his decline – and growing awareness of his own uselessness – as symbolic of the slow collapse of late-period capitalism, but other readings of this absurd and oddly affecting fable are available. There’s also a satirical element to Peadar Ó Guilin’s compelling ‘Charly’s Ark’, a weirdly entertaining story which explores notions of class war and decadence. Ó Guilin creates a world ruled by effete, indolent and flabby thugs. His restrained but assured style prevents the whole thing tilting too far towards comedic absurdity.
For me, ‘Antique Flesh’ by Gill Alderman is one of the anthology’s less successful stories. At the heart of this slice of high fantasy are some interesting ideas about the power of creativity, but the narrative is all but stifled by the weight of Alderman’s florid prose.
Robert Neilson’s ‘Lost in an Amber Moment’ posits a whole new tourist industry based on the conceit that experiences and feelings can be captured and exhibited. Neilson’s keen and specific observations create a poignant and enigmatic tale. I wasn’t convinced by Sean MacRoibin’s ‘Anatomy of Resistentialist Induced Matricide’. At first the narrative had a charming energy, but it soon hit a level of ebullient wackiness that left me weary and baffled.
At this stage the anthology seemed a bit of a rollercoaster ride in terms of quality and appeal, but then came a sequence of stories of impressive range, originality and imaginative power.
‘Overload’, by David Murphy, is set in a very near future Dublin plagued by poverty and police brutality. Young barman Ash subjugates his personality and sexuality as a means of survival. Aspects of this disquieting and, ultimately, heart breaking story are open to a range of interpretations. I read it as an elegy for the tolerant and complex nature of urban life and identity. The quiet and contemplative ambience of the pub chain that employs Ash seems aligned to a form of life negating neo-fascism. Murphy portrays a dystopia that is paradoxically fresh and familiar.
Tais Teng�
��s ‘Crowned by Lightning’ reimagines the later years of mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary as he sets out to climb the Tower of Babel as an act of expiation for sins of colonialism and cultural hegemony. Accompanied by Tenzing, his companion from the Everest expedition, Hillary sets out on a physical and spiritual journey from an alternative version of contemporary Iraq. An original and vivid story of guilt and transcendence.
Regular readers of Interzone will not be surprised that Neil Williamson’s contribution ‘The Bone Farmer’ is one of the most powerful stories here. Eerie, touching and crammed with cortex-searing imagery, this post-apocalyptic tale of plague, beleaguered communities and grim struggles for survival gave an early indication that Williamson would develop into one of our finest short story writers.
‘Isolating an Element’ by Dermot Ryan returns to the theme of subjugated sexuality explored in ‘Overload’. Benjamin, a middle-aged music teacher, lives with his mother and leads the life of an early adolescent with sexual fixations to match. His overwhelming obsession with an undergraduate music tutee triggers an event that remixes The Day of the Triffids as a sexual psychodrama. Oedipus wrecks, so to speak. This may sound like a well-trodden thematic path, but Ryan’s take on thwarted eroticism is unique. Ryan’s story is grotesque, disturbing and witty.
My heart sinks when authors ‘repurpose’ titles of favourite books and films, but Mike O’Driscoll’s ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’ is a gripping satire on the importance of art and the absurdities of the art market. The narrator, who begins the story by producing AI-based variations on the work of the figurative cubist Fernand Léger, is a pretentious, grasping wanker, but O’Driscoll somehow enables him to elicit our sympathy. A dark and entertaining rumination on the nature of creativity and the eternally vexed issue of authenticity.
Interzone #266 - September-October 2016 Page 16