by Andy Cox
This is the kind of book that requires several readings and copious note taking to do it justice in a review, but time denies me such strategies. I don’t know what it’s all about, can only hazard guesses. But I do know that Nina Allan has produced one of the finest books I’ve read this year, a novel that is beautifully written, conceptually daring, informed by compassion and a luminous intelligence. Please read it.
THE SEVENTH MISS HATFIELD
Anna Caltabiano
Gollancz hb, 248pp, £14.99
Jack Deighton
In 1954 an eleven-year-old girl named Cynthia carries a wrongly delivered parcel to its correct destination across the road. There she meets Miss Hatfield, who has a collection of portraits and antiques plus a strange clock with unusual intervals marking its dial. Miss Hatfield gives Cynthia a glass of lemonade into which she has poured the last drop of liquid from a vial. Within a few pages – bare minutes of conversation, and no change of scene – Cynthia has become a fully grown woman. The physics of this transformation, the chemistry required, its energetics, are all not so much skimmed over or ignored as seemingly unconsidered. The process is only a means for Caltabiano to propel her narrator into the story she wishes to tell. It does of course also signal Cynthia’s altered reality.
Miss Hatfield tells Cynthia the fateful drop was the last remnant of a bottle filled from a mysterious lake stumbled upon by Juan Ponce de León on his first voyage to Florida. The liquid confers immortality on its drinkers. The Misses Hatfield have been employing it to recruit new versions of themselves ever since it came into their hands. Moreover they use the strange clock – which an early Miss Hatfield just happened upon – to navigate time. Miss Hatfield informs her new protégé time is not a river, but a lake; existing all at once. Quite why a clock would then be a suitable device to use to sail on it is odd. Moreover, how it actually manages to achieve this feat is never divulged. Again, it just happens.
Cynthia accepts the actions of Miss Hatfield, plus her subsequent demands to go to 1904 to steal a portrait, indeed begins to think of herself as Rebecca Hatfield, the seventh such, amazingly readily. In no time at all, corseted and long-skirted, she is rushing off through carless streets to the house of Charles Beauford, who fortuitously takes her for his niece Margaret. There she meets his son Henley who, despite knowing she cannot be his cousin, plays along with the deception. The seventh Miss Hatfield has something of a charmed life, it seems.
This is fine as far as it goes but here the story gets bogged down as Caltabiano’s over-arching fantasy becomes somewhat lost amid the details of the burgeoning relationship between Henley and his “cousin”. True, every so often the new Miss Hatfield (she forgets her past life all too easily) remembers she is supposed to be stealing the painting and also experiences a growing sense of wrongness associated with being out of time but this is all diluted by the routines of daily life in a well-to-do Edwardian household and a preponderance of “playful” dialogue. Even the appearance of the Porter sisters, Christine and Eliza (the first of whom and Henley are effectively promised to each other, the second is by far the most interesting character in the book) does not give Rebecca a quick way back to her own time – or later. Cynthia/Rebecca/Margaret also has a very modern idea of servants’ individuality and sense of self but is annoyingly gauche. Her discovery of what the reader sees as links between the Misses Hatfield and the elder Mr Beauford does not give her pause about her sponsor’s motives.
The accompanying promotional blurb makes much of Caltabiano’s youth. That earns no free pass here; but Caltabiano can write – even if she occasionally employs awkward sentence constructions and lacks quite the necessary feel for the detail of late nineteenth/early twentieth century speech and mores. In their trip to the country, Henley drives the automobile himself. Families like his had chauffeurs for such tasks. And I doubt that, once the car had broken down, an unmarried man and woman at that time (cousins or not) would be allowed to sleep in the same space – even if it was a barn.
There are other details which niggled. Except in the most unusual circumstances would her assumed persona as Mr Beauford’s sister’s daughter still have his surname? The sixth Miss Hatfield refers to being shown a photo sometime in the early 1840s. So early? Eliza mentions that ever since reading Jules Verne she has wondered about the possibility of time travel. (Oh dear. Unless this is an altered universe in which Verne actually wrote any such stories.) The women take part at a burial. In 1904?
Caltabiano’s story of time-crossed love is never entirely convincing, the book’s resolution a touch rushed, the supposed poignancy of the epilogue not fully earned by the preceding pages and the speculative content comes down to trappings. There are two more novels to come, though.
CALIFORNIA
Edan Lepucki
Little Brown hb, 388pp, £14.99
Maureen Kincaid Speller
The publicity material for Edan Lepucki’s California suggests that if you love Cormac McCarthy’s The Road you will also love this novel, which is akin to saying that if one likes Veuve Clicquot, this can of own-brand cola is very similar. While McCarthy’s novel is a powerful and disturbing meditation on the will to survive when all seems lost, California is by contrast a trivial account of a couple trying to survive in a cabin in the forests of Northern California after the infrastructure finally collapses under the weight of one earthquake, one bad winter, one plague too many.
Frida, the focal character for the first part of the narrative, is maddeningly vague about the nature of the catastrophe. We know it took some time to happen, long enough for melted-down gold to become a viable currency (and we also know it took a year for Cal and Frida to save up to buy enough fuel to leave LA) but the truth is that Frida neither knows nor particularly cares. What started out as a romantic adventure has become tedious, possibly because Frida apparently sits at home all day while Cal sets traps and tends their vegetable plots. While Cal digs, Frida mourns the loss of capitalist goodies, represented by her cache of artefacts, including a Device that no longer functions (we infer this is some sort of tablet computer), a ripped shower cap and, bizarrely, a pristine turkey baster. She remembers with particularly deep affection the little pink clamshell case in which her contraceptive pills were kept, though perhaps everything we need to know about Frida is encapsulated in her naming her current existence the afterlife. While Cal is present in the moment, Frida is in hell.
While Frida, clearly not pioneer material, just wants to retreat to the 1950s and be looked after by Cal, the product of a small private college which taught Thoreauvian survival skills and values, has come to realise that self-reliance only works at the community level, but doesn’t really want to admit it as he rather likes the solitude. When Frida discovers she is pregnant, and becomes afraid that they won’t be able to deal with raising a child on their own, the couple finally look for other groups nearby and the nature of the story is such that they don’t have to look too hard (this is California, after all). Except, and this is one of the big revelations of the novel, the community doesn’t want children.
Much of the second half of the novel is devoted to unravelling the mystery of how this edict came into being, where the existing children went, and also the greater mystery of how the community continues to survive. Well, that, and for Frida, marvelling over the delights of more clothes, better shower facilities and the miraculous appearance of cooking ingredients (it suddenly turns out that she used to work as a commercial baker). For Cal, satisfaction comes in being finally able to put his horticultural skills to use now he has the right equipment and earning the respect of the community.
As a traditional science-fiction novel, California is incredibly unsatisfactory. The multiple natural disasters provide the flimsiest accounting for the retreat to gated communities or to the land, depending on your previous economic circumstances – even in post-apocalyptic California, it’s all about the right neighbourhood – yet ask how any of this works and no sensible answer emerges. And
if one chooses to read California as meta-SF, there are too many gaps in the background that cannot be easily explained away. It is difficult too to engage with the foreground narrative of a young and rather ordinary couple, making a rather poor fist of surviving in the wilderness while they try to face up to their own basic incompatibility, with an afterthought of a mystery tacked on.
One could choose to read the novel as a satire on the attitudes of genuine back-to-the-landers. Frida dreams about lattes, and is obsessed with ‘stuff’, while Cal, though he learned to set traps at college, can’t seem able to use his theoretical knowledge to avoid hunger. Yet I don’t think Lepucki intends this novel to be anything other than a perfectly straightforward attempt to imagine the struggles of a young couple in post-apocalyptic America.
And even that might have been interesting had Lepucki gone into greater detail. Alas, her characters are psychologically two-dimensional, staying firmly on the page, voicing the thoughts their author has on their behalf. The only reason they haven’t already starved and been eaten by scavengers is authorial fiat, which keeps the novel moving long after it ought to have quietly crept into a hole and died.
THE REAL AND THE UNREAL: SELECTED STORIES OF URSULA K. LE GUIN VOLUME 1: WHERE ON EARTH
Ursula K. Le Guin
Gollancz hb, 218pp, £16.99
John Howard
Ursula Le Guin has been a fixed point for decades now. Not in the sense of never changing, developing, doing something new – but fixed as a star is. She’s always in view, somehow or another. So many books, so many stories… And now a Selected Stories has been deemed necessary. It is certainly desirable.
In the introduction Le Guin lays out the criteria for her selection: determined to reveal something of the process of “choosing and dividing”. Not surprisingly, the Stories are very Selected. This first of two volumes consists of those for which the subtitle ‘Where on Earth’ could be a relevant question: the real, presumably. (But that main title reads: ‘and’ – not ‘or’.)
So even as Le Guin states that she can do realism, providing plenty of it here, we can still look right past it into that unreal. Or just bump around into both, leaving blood soaking into the stone that seems present, in one form or another, shaped, worked – or natural – throughout these stories, eighteen of them. All are sharp-edged, scented, full of weather, tastes and sensations. There’s so much going on, so many hinterlands. Of course they’re not real, even though they are.
Here are some of the high points.
Orsinia is a familiar (although now fading from memory) sort of Central Europe. Included here are four of the tales from that country in which things not only ‘just happen’ but where men and women still have to learn to be men and women. Each story, although independent, builds on the previous and mixes the mortar for the next. “So it is like a stone of power, and who sets foot on it may be transformed.” It doesn’t come much better than this.
The other real place not quite on any map is the small town of Klatsand, somewhere on the Oregon coast. Again, the stories, each one separate, also interpenetrate. In ‘Hand, Cup, Shell’ a graduate student arrives to interview the widow of a famous educator, but ignores her professor’s prepared questions and embarks on a series of her own. The title – something of the body, a created artefact, a natural object – describes the intensity and existence of the sound to be heard when each is put to the ear, the culminating image when the dead is revealed to be the only reality.
Oregon is (definitely and naturally) the setting for the delightfully, shiftingly, eye-confusingly titled ‘Ether, OR’ in which that town seems to be as restless as its people. No one seems very much bothered, either: perhaps their own wanderings – in time, space, and relationships – are equal to not knowing exactly in which part of the state Ether is, or, when they are there, the precise state of their connections with relatives – actual, potential, past.
Probably the best-known story here is the twice award-winning ‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight’ – where the realism takes on desert tinges as a young girl, lost there, is aided by its ‘people’. We’re sort of in on the secret from the beginning, and it’s an open secret, because all it takes to see is to look the right way, and with the right equipment (not just plain, or even distorted, sight) and attitude.
Le Guin leaves us, still on Earth, with ‘Half Past Four’ – another story that’s inhabited, rather than just read trapped within paper and covers held in front of the eyes. Like several of the stories here, at first it seems to be another family piece, with different generations rubbing along or grazing each other if not actually colliding. But it is actually a mini collection of pieces, a constellation rather than a single star, split or distorted into fragments. Le Guin does realism.
To read Where on Earth is to start out from home, looking for paths and signposts and following the tracks and traces of those who have travelled ahead. There’s no map, apart from what’s been memorised from before, or recollected in something, hopefully, like tranquillity. The landscape is not alien, and there are not likely to be Tygers at large (don’t bank on it, though). Fortunately there are fixed points, recognisable things: a road is a road is a road, a horse is… that’ll do.
The people, though, those inhabitants we meet on the way: they are a different matter. They (usually, probably) do know where on Earth they are – but will they be prepared to tell? Can they? Just be grateful to be in Ursula Le Guin’s company throughout.
SMILER’S FAIR
Rebecca Levene
Hodder & Stoughton hb, 416pp, £14.99
Stephen Theaker
“They say the fair holds one example of all that there is in the world – every food, every spice, every pleasure and every vice,” says nobleman Lahiru, who, though married with three children, will be “hunting the finest boy flesh to be had for many miles” during his visit. Smiler’s Fair is a travelling city, drawn by mammoths from place to place, because no one stays still for too long in this world. Do so and the worm men will get you! The fair, home to scoundrels, scum and psychopaths, takes a daily census of its inhabitants and visitors, and when the first death comes the fair moves on. For our cast, all roads pass through this exciting, squalid, movable feast.
Krish’s birth father, King Nayan, wanted him dead to undo a prophecy. Cut from his mother’s belly and stolen away, Krish knows nothing of that, and lives as a shepherd until a brush with the king’s flying squad sets him on the run. Lady Nethmi has been sent by her uncle to marry old Lord Thilak, but he already has a good woman to share his bed.
Eric is a teenage sellcock, growing too old for the sleazy customers of his owner, Madam Aeronwen. He decides to follow his favourite client home from the fair. Dae Hyo, perhaps the last of his tribe, would avenge the murder of his people and reclaim his homeland; trouble is, he’s also a recovering alcoholic chased out of town after he fell asleep on the job and got a team of miners killed by the worm men.
Smiler’s Fair is very much the first part of a series, and doesn’t work brilliantly as a standalone novel. The protagonists move around the board, but few of their stories progress very far. It feels like threads were added till there were enough to fill the pages, rather than because they were truly needed. There’s a common theme to some of them, of scorned and mistreated wives: the woman who adopted Krish, beaten by the husband she always wanted to leave; Nethmi, an unwilling wife with an uncaring husband; Babi, wife of gay lord Lahiru, humiliated by the lover brought into their home. But with no common catalyst, it feels oddly coincidental that these life-changing adventures all begin at once.
The prose style feels uncomplicated and perhaps even deliberately simplified: in one five-page section I looked at, ninety-five per cent of the text was made up of one and two-syllable words, with only two of eighteen hundred words reaching five syllables. It feels like the language is pitched at someone with the reading age of eleven or twelve, though the content is far too salty for that age group. This makes it an ea
sy and accessible book to read, but once you notice it’s hard not to feel like the book is talking down to you.
Levene’s editorial work on the excellent Doctor Who line from Virgin Books was very well regarded, and this feels rather like a book written by a canny editor who has surveyed the market, thought about what will be marketable (it will appeal to fans of Game of Thrones), and produced a book designed to fit the bill. Some parts are a bit corny – one man becomes the captive of a society of women, who of course require impregnation! – but it’s a solid adventure and I enjoyed reading it. I’m sure it will find fans, though I probably won’t read any sequels: I’m not worried about the characters, nor really intrigued by the trundly setting.