Jeff VanderMeer, Finch. Underland Press, 2009 (US); Corvus, 2010 (UK).

There has always been an awareness of the sequence of history in Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction, an understanding that for any given place and time there will have been someone there before and will be someone there after. An early series of short stories dealt with this explicitly: “Ghost Dancing with Manco Tupac” (1989, expanded 2000), “The Emperor’s Reply” (1993), and “The Compass of His Bones” (2004) were tales of the end of the Inca empire at the hands of Spanish Conquistadors. Veniss Underground (2003), a novel, derived much of its pervasive low-level dread from the uplifted meerkats who saw themselves as the next evolutionary step up from humanity, the heirs of the world in waiting. And most notably, historicity is deeply ingrained in VanderMeer’s best-known fiction, his Ambergris cycle. “The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris” in the City of Saints and Madmen mosaic novel (2001, expanded 2002, further expanded UK 2004, revised US 2006) established the basics: the seizure of the strange city of Cinsorium on the River Moth by a band of whaler-pirates fleeing from an empire’s collapse; the driving underground of the city’s mysterious inhabitants, the gray caps, by the new settlers; the razing of the old city and its reconstruction as Ambergris; the subsequent territorial battles with neighboring tribes and nation-states in its rise as a center of art and commerce. The cycle’s second volume, Shriek: An Afterword (2006), conveys more subtly by its very title that this is a tale that follows another story; the book’s narrative conceit is that one character, the historian Duncan Shriek, is making notes and commentary over a core text written by Duncan’s sister Janice as an {auto}biographical afterword to one of Duncan’s own historical works.

And so we come to Finch, the third and perhaps final book of the Ambergris cycle. We’re a hundred years after Shriek, and Ambergris is a blitzed mockery of its former decadence. The gray caps have risen, long preparation during their exile in the city’s cavernous underground resulting in a swift takeover of the surface. Most humans in the city now live a shell-shocked existence, ameliorated by hallucinogenic mushrooms provided by the gray caps that remind the inhabitants of better times. Rebels exist outside the city, but are under constant threat of discovery and banishment to work camps–or more mysterious forms of disappearance. And a few humans hover in-between, trying to find meaning in a world turned downside-up. Among them is the titular John Finch, one of the pool of human police that the largely-nocturnal gray caps rely on for daytime legwork in criminal investigations.

Finch-the-character is the first of several areas where Finch-the-novel shines. There’s the natural tendency to see Finch as a traitor to his species, a collaborator. The book as a whole serves as an irreducible response to this first impression, an answer to the question of why he is working for the gray caps. As Finch conducts his investigation into a dead human and a bisected gray cap who seem to have materialized together in a deserted apartment as though fallen from a great height, the case more and more requires Finch to revisit his past and the reasons for his present situation. What VanderMeer does effectively over the course of the novel is develop our understanding of Finch as someone trapped by both personal history and cultural zeitgeist, a decent enough man doing the best he can in a world without clear-cut answers. He’s somewhat akin, on the surface level at least, to a hardboiled version of Gene Wolfe’s Severian the Torturer, engaged in a quest to fight a future that he does not fully comprehend at the behest of those whose agenda he does not fully know.

Which is to say, while guns and blood (and other fluids) are involved–copiously–in the tale, Finch is no action hero, and Finch is no fantasy of political agency. While there is plenty of action, it’s generally taken at the behest of the either the gray caps or one or another group of rebels. Finch is a character, to suggest another unlikely but I think useful comparison, in the vein of Yeine Darr from N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms: someone in an environment of complex constraints, physical and cultural, whose actions must be parsed in light of these constraints. What does it mean to live in occupied territory, to have one’s life (and even body) colonized? It’s a question that runs through the novel. Finch, mind you, is by no means perfect in this regard–that is, he’s very human. But he’s someone VanderMeer invites us to consider on several different axes: what is his hierarchy of loyalties to family, loves, friends, and city; how sympathetic is Finch; how likable is he; how worthy is he of respect?

VanderMeer is among the most versatile contemporary shapers of narrative, combining a sense of the right story to tell for any given place and time, with a willingness to experiment–and borrow from the best–in determining the right narrative style for that story. So it’s no surprise that another highlight of Finch is the manner in which this shattered tale is told. We are deep in hardboiled crime territory here, echoes of the staccato, “telegraphic” neo-noir of James Ellroy:

[Finch] shouldn’t even have been on this case. [...] Never do police work anywhere near your own area. Never let the people where you lived know your job. And yet, 239 Manzikert Avenue was only a mile from the hotel [where he lived]. Why had Heretic put him in charge? Didn’t trust Wyte anymore? Or was there some other reason? Leaned forward in his chair. Had to make some progess.

This fragmented prose isn’t an affectation: the noir stylings carry with them a host of characteristics and connotations that perform important work for VanderMeer. The chopped up sentences continue to emphasize that idea of sequence: it’s almost always one distinct, singular action or perception following another. There’s an individualistic quality and an immediacy to this style, the sensation that we’re experiencing the story at street level through Finch’s eyes, with no narrative pauses to see what comes next and then report back later in more complex sentences. It emphasizes that Finch is on his own, and is quite different from the narratives of previous Ambergris novels that were layered in time and voice. At the same time, VanderMeer often uses Finch’s sentence fragments to break the narrative chain of causation, to separate the actions of characters from their results–which all conveys something of the dissociative mood and mindset of the citizenry of Ambergris. The Ambergrisians have experienced events they do not understand, whose cause and ultimate results are unknown to them. As in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the rules of the world have been broken, and the broken grammar reflects the sense of uncanny dread that results. But this is also a textbook example of the dissociation of torture, which becomes clear when the story moves to a scene of torture and the style does not change.

Couldn’t feel his feet or hands. A kind of mercy. Because early on the Partial had cut off one of Finch’s toes. Had busted up his knee again. Cut a slit in his right cheek that bled into his mouth.

“Confess,” the Partial kept saying. “Confess.”

[...]

Finch laughed. An unhinged laugh that ended on too high a note. [...] The Partial crept behind him. Felt a soft sawing around his numb hand. A sudden flowing release. [...] The Partial placed Finch’s bloody pinkie finger on the table. It looked like a white worm.

Indeed, as we realize that the whole novel is interspersed with a recording of this interrogation and torture of Finch, the prose style becomes that much more appropriate. If the textbook definition of a sentence is a completed thought, VanderMeer’s noir-serrated writing conveys a populace–and a character–unwilling to complete a thought for fear of what that thought might be, what it might confess.

As I noted when discussing China Miéville’s The City & The City, however, VanderMeer’s noir takes a somewhat different shape and is put to a very different use than most of the other fantasy-crime hybrids published in recent years–Miéville’s novel, Jedediah Berry’s Manual of Detection, Zoran Živkovic’s The Last Book. These other works adopted noir as a retro-styling, a conception of the world-as-failure dating from the era between the World Wars that, the implicit message is, we’ve never quite been able to overcome. The classic noir they reference was an outgrowth of industrialization and urbanization, combined with subsequent economic downturn, combined with the lesson of Prohibition that trying to legislate morality only makes everyone a criminal. This original noir was an expression of dazed despair over the failure of our dreams, at a world we had created and then seemed to become stuck in. VanderMeer’s noir feels more modern, millennial. His achievement with Finch is to recreate urban noir based on contemporary concepts of post-colonial religious and ethnic conflict, drug culture, the panoptic state, and the post-9/11 (mis)understanding of the world not as something we helped bring about, but as something done to us. Common contemporary fears are more organic than technological–chemical and biological weaponry, disease like swine and bird flu, ecological issues like global warming–or more based in ideology: underground cells rising to unleash horrors, the intersection of terrorism and Lovecraft. Meanwhile, the questions of the day surround a Western world awakened to its colonialist past and now wondering how we would have reacted if what we did to others had been done to us, how then to co-exist with those whose worldview seems truly alien–and so the uncertain tenuousness of hope, of relying on unproven, unprovable narratives that communication, understanding, and living together might be possible; wondering how much miscommunication and conflict are inevitable. Finch reads as if VanderMeer took all these key components of contemporary politics, scrambled the subjects and actions and objects beyond allegorical recognition, laid them out in their new form as a series of fragments very much akin to the novel’s prose, and seeing that they still made sense in their scrambled form and still told a believable story, challenged the reader to decide for themselves what exactly this means.

Finch can nominally be read as a stand-alone story, but it seems important to me to read it as part of the whole Ambergris cycle for reasons not least that it is only in the previous volumes that the falsity of the impression of current circumstances as something done to the Ambergrisians is fully revealed. And a key reason to read the cycle in order–beyond an appreciation for how much groundwork was laid early on, and a greater understanding of various characters, historical events, and mysteries solved and unsolved–is to experience the visceral transformation of the city that VanderMeer has wrought. For as the prose style is different in Finch than in VanderMeer’s previous Ambergris novels, so too the city of Ambergris has been transformed.

Six years and I can’t recognize a goddamn thing from before.

Harsh blue sprawl of the bay, bled from the River Moth. Carved from nothing. The first thing the gray caps did when they Rose, flooding Ambergris and killing thousands. Now the city, riddled through with canals, is like a body that was once drowned. Parts bleached, parts bloated. Metal and stone for flesh. Places that stick out and places that barely touch the surface.

[...]

Beyond the Spit, the silhouette of the two living domes covering the detention camps. Broken by the smoke, hidden by debris. Built over a valley of homes. Built atop the remains of the military factories that had allowed the two great mercantile companies, House Hoegbotton and the invading House Frankwrithe & Lewden, to dream of empire, to destroy each other. And the city with them. Finch had fought for Hoegbotton. Once upon a time.

Between the domes, the fiery green glitter and minarets of the Religious Quarter, occupied by the remnants of native tribes. Adapting. Struggling. Destined to someday be wiped out. He can see the exposed crater at the top of the Truffidian Cathedral. Cracked. All the prayers let out.

We’re again seeing the march of history in VanderMeer’s work, transformation and change. What the quote above also illustrates is how Finch ramps up the intensity across a wide spectrum of urban life: political-economic, military-industrial, racial, spiritual, science fictional. Many horror-tinged works rely on keeping their horror concealed, letting the audience’s imagination fill in the blanks. When the horror is finally revealed, its very corporeality can render it trivial compared to what we imagined. But because Finch distributes its alienation across so many spheres of life, the changes the gray caps have wrought feel unrelenting and powerful.

Here it is also useful to stop talking about thematics and give appreciation for the breadth of visceral, sensorial imagination on display: fungal memory bulbs that extract the last memories of the deceased and replay them when consumed by the living; the gray cap’s pet skery, which seems like a small domesticated black hole; Partials, humans converted by gray caps into walking organic surveillance cameras; and innumerable other uses for mushrooms, spores, and mold. My favorite may be the method by which the underground gray caps communicate with their above-ground human assistants:

A soft, wet, sucking sound came from the memory hole beside his desk. Finch shuddered, put aside his notes.

[...]

Exhaled sharply. Peered around the left edge of the desk. Glanced down at the glistening hole. It was about twice the size of a man’s fist. Lamprey-like teeth. Gasping, pink-tinged maw. Foul. The green tendrils lining the gullet had pushed up the dirty black spherical pod until it lay atop the mouth.

[...]

Finch leaned over. Grabbed the pod. Slimy feel. Sticky.

Tossed the pod onto his desk. Pulled out a hammer from the same drawer where he kept his limited supply of dormant pods. Split Heretic’s pod wide open.

[...]

In amongst the fragments: a few copies of a photograph of the dead man, compliments of the Partial.

And a message.

In this vein, it is also worth mentioning VanderMeer’s rare accomplishment in giving us fully-realized iterations of a fantasy setting at such different times and in such different conditions. It speaks to the excellence of Ambergris as a venue for possibility, a setting open to story–as opposed to many fantasy worlds that seem to exist, as critic Gary K. Wolfe has noted, only to tell a single intended story. It’s one of the good aspects of Tolkien that the Tolkien clone factory always forgets (or like Peter Jackson, can’t bear) to steal. Among recent fantasy, Daniel Abraham takes this long view somewhat in his Long Price quartet; Martha Wells does it, too, in her Ile Rien novels, which begin in a fairly stock medieval setting, progress through the dwindling of magic and beginnings of an industrial age, and ends with her city under siege much like the London Blitz–which makes me wonder what it is about the WWII era that makes it so often a terminal point that fantasy cannot pass through; perhaps it’s the time when it becomes impossible for fantasy to progress any further and still be fantasy.

The few issues I had with Finch were when the imaginative and thematic thrusts seemed to get in each other’s way, where it feels like VanderMeer is trying too hard to enforce a certain reading of the text. “Everyone’s a collaborator. Everyone’s a rebel” is a hard-hitting line to hit readers with on the first page, but its somewhat random insertion on later consideration comes to feel forced; so too does a later line about Finch being a good man in impossible times.

Similarly: roles, the peril of becoming the roles we act out, and our tendency to be fooled by the appearances of roles are concerns throughout the Ambergris cycle. This is true in terms of jobs, in terms of the humanity or inhumanity of the gray caps, and it is true in terms of nearly all of the series’s female characters. From the short story “Dradin, in Love,” in which a newcomer to Ambergris falls in love with a woman seen only through a window, to the triangle in Shriek: An Afterword between Duncan Shriek, his sister Janice, and his lover Mary Sabon, the alientating quality of the male gaze, the difficulty men have of seeing women as individuals (and vice versa) is a recurring pattern. Finch’s lover Sintra is fully a piece with this pattern; what feels conflicted here is when the imagination displayed by the rest of the novel meets the fact that there’s not a word Sintra utters that she didn’t learn in Femme Fatale 101. While VanderMeer isn’t unaware of this and allows Sintra a biting last say, her character is too undeveloped for this to bite as much as it should–instead it is again rather over-blunt and forced, important thematically but dull on a sentence-by-sentence level in a way that the rest of the novel is not. It would be nice to give Sintra the benefit of the doubt as a complex character, to see her as someone who perhaps bought into her assigned role too much and started to become it in her own mind, or used it to justify her actions–I’m not sure her criticism of how Finch saw their relationship was warranted, for example–but she’s too thin a character, her interactions with Finch too limited, to make that reading supportable. This is all exacerbated because the novel’s other female character [edit, see comments: who Finch has any normal interactions with], Finch’s neighbor Rathven, is likewise potentially interesting but never becomes more than a device to keep the story moving.

Of course the inevitability of the story moving forward is, in a sense, what Finch is all about. We return again to VanderMeer’s use of noir. Classic noir tells a tale of entrapment in a cycle of behavior, a fly quixotically bumping against the cage of a screened door, yearning for the unreachable outdoors beyond. Finch suggests that sometimes the door can open–sometimes as the result of our actions, sometimes through the actions of those we choose to act for us, sometimes because of historical pressures we may not always fully understand, or be comfortable with. But openings happen, and they bring change. We cannot change the massive past accumulation of history, but we can choose who we are as individuals in the present: it’s perhaps the only way individuals can interact with the mass of history, ignoring it but at the same time shaping it. In this Finch reads like a plea for engagement with the world.

And it is with this understanding that the dual components of the novel’s conclusion form a perfect summation of all that has gone before, in Finch and in VanderMeer’s Ambergris cycle overall. As the text of Finch is framed by an interrogation, so the novel ends with, quite explicitly, a confession. Yet this has the quality of a religious, or at least spiritual, confession: a true and honest communication between two people that is freely offered and cleansing, rather than the forced result of torture. And this is interesting because the other half of the book’s conclusion is one that has been deployed frequently by more explicitly religious fantasies. There is a leave-taking by boat. There is a sense that, for better or worse, a choice has been made, that history has advanced and some measure of possibility removed from the world. And there is an awareness of the inevitability of this, of change; that history never ends–in the world of fiction at least–and so every ending is really just a new chance to take part in the always-contentious shared decision of what happens next.

* * *

One aspect of fiction that I tend to focus on and appreciate is the sense of play intrinsic to the very unreality of fiction, the delight in human imagination that comes from knowing participating in the creation of a fictional story (in my case, via completing the loop of the story’s creation as a reader and occasional reviewer). On a large scale, that of story groups and genres, this is part of why I enjoy fantastic and speculative fiction, which make no bones about their unreality; it is part of why I enjoy metafiction, stories about the creation of story; it’s part of why I enjoy postmodern fiction, which suggests that all we have are stories. I don’t read fiction because I expect it to be “realistic,” as that word is usually understood; that’s what nonfiction, and in particular journalism, aspire to. Rather, I read fiction because I expect it to be true to our unique and marvelous human need to imagine and share stories; and true as well to the imaginative possibilities of each unique human’s different perceptions of and perspectives on the world.

At the level of individual stories, my focus on the joy of imagining leads me to enjoy those works that make evident that an author is at play; for example, those that feel structured and architected to set up interesting or unusual themes, conflicts, and dramatic situations. However grim and dour the story situation may be–or however complicated the choice between multiple positive possibilities–we can tell that the author enjoyed imagining it and bringing it about in the story. Similarly, I enjoy a strong sense of narrative presence, unreliable or otherwise, that makes plain that a story is being told. This appreciation is also part of why I enjoy elements of prose such as simile and metaphor: these encapsulate the essence of story, how saying that one thing is something else, or is two things at once, can be (or seem) impossible, and yet be true and revelatory in their wondrous connections. Somewhat more prosaically, my appreciation for the sense of play intrinsic to story leads me to appreciate stories that include scenes of play, of games and fun, or that incorporate puzzles for the reader.

These are some of the elements of story that delight me when I encounter them, yet often I see many of them called pretentious, elitist, or simply unrealistic. Allow me to suggest an alternate interpretation: they are there to evoke delight, to be enjoyed, and to communicate a sense of hope in people’s ability to imagine.

China Miéville, The City & The City. Del Rey, 2009 (US); Macmillan, 2009 (UK).

I have written at least four different introductions to this piece on China Miéville’s The City & The City, each focusing on a different aspect of the novel. There is an embarrassment of riches, so much to write about. Which perhaps is itself the best place to begin. There are novels published in any given year over which much is made at the time, but that swiftly fade from memory. In 2009, Lev Grossman’s quite decent The Magicians received nearly equal attention and praise upon release as Miéville’s book; at the end of the year, I don’t recall seeing the Grossman mentioned in any “year’s best” discussions (sorry, Lev). The City & The City, in contrast, is a novel that people have kept talking about, have kept finding new ways and new places to apply its language of and to the world. It’s one of the rare literary works that I feel (not without irony) has added a new lens to the array by which I can see the world.

A personal example:

I am an American; I live in the state named Massachusetts. For most of the first decade of the new millennium, the popular image of the United States of America-as-a-totality, here and abroad, has been various incarnations of the infamous electoral map of red and blue states (see below). I did not much mind this. Whenever I traveled abroad one of the first sentences I invariably uttered to any new acquaintance, immediately after identifying myself as American, was “I didn’t vote for Bush.” It was as if there were two types of Americans, those who did vote for Bush and those who didn’t, and the only way I could feel comfortable identifying myself as an American was with that qualifier. When I traveled within the country, meanwhile, all I needed to say was “I’m from Massachusetts” and people rightly assumed that I was relatively liberal–Massachusetts being long considered the bluest of blue states.

Then more recently Massachusetts held a Special Election to fill the Senate seat left vacant by the late Ted Kennedy; it was an election for a local representative, but it had greater than usual significance across America because of the national health care debate. And amazingly, the liberal Democratic candidate lost. My local friends and I couldn’t understand how this could have happened in our so-very-blue state; we were devastated.

Top: 2008 US Presidential Election.
Bottom: 2010 Massachusetts Special Election.

Watching the Special Election results come in, we saw a map of Massachusetts broken down by county, and it was showing red counties and blue counties. Going online, I found results broken down even further, by city; I was reassured, as much as I could be, by the fact that at least the city I live in had voted 70% for the Democratic candidate. We were blue, even if some of the surrounding cities were red. Watching the results come in, I felt more solidarity with other blue cities further away than I did with neighboring red cities. And it occurs to me that, because of the way we hold our elections in the US, the Democratic and Republican National Committees must have digital maps that can track the red vs. blue voting patterns deeper than state, district, county, city; down to the level of neighborhoods, households, to individual people within households. Which makes me very conscious that I’m living in this shared space called America that in many ways could be seen–is seen, going back to that popular national map–as two different countries, blue-state America and red-state America. Except that unlike that popular conception, the two are densely intermingled at the street level. And frustrating times like the Special Election make me very conscious of the allure of disowning red-state/red-city/red-household/red-pedestrian America; times when I fantasize that if I could, I would.

Us & Them: And who knows which is which and who is who.

* * *

There has, to be sure, been some interesting writing on and discussion of The City & The City already. In particular, I plan on referencing a cross-site discussion that took place between Niall Harrison and Dan Hartland here and here, continuing down into the comments of Dan’s post with contributions from Adam Roberts, and culminating in this review by Roberts. I should also note that I gave a rather hurried summation of what I’m writing here at a book club discussion of The City & The City at 2009’s Readercon; on the presiding panel were, among others, Graham Sleight and John Clute, whose names appear below.

(I wrote the above paragraph in July 2009–yes, I am a slow writer. Since then several other reviews of interest have appeared–Matthew Cheney, Abigail Nussbaum, Jonathan McCalmont, Shigekuni. Good and insightful as these are, none really offers what I’d consider a 360-degree view of the book, and in particular the means and ends of its blending of fantasy and mystery. So I persevere, and the original discussion linked above remains my touchstone….)

In the Harrison/Hartland/Roberts discussion–and echoed by Sleight at the Readercon panel–is the suggestion that The City & The City can be read as containing essentially two layers: the surface level story, and the subtextual layer of the applicability of the story’s ideas to the wider world. Such a dualistic reading is pleasingly apt, given the title of the book. What I’d like to suggest here, however, is that the novel can most appropriately and profitably be read as containing three essential layers:

1. The surface story, the mystery to be solved: the characters and their motivations and actions as characters, that form a plot, enacted in a setting, etc.
2. The way that genre mystery tropes are used to reveal something deeper about the fictional world that is also relevant to our real world. Which is to say, unseeing and all that goes with it.
3. The way that, conversely, the fictional world–designed to mimic our real world in so many details–also deliberately echoes and illuminates genre mystery tropes, and thus the mystery genre overall.

The excellence of The City & The City, to my mind, is the way all three layers are interwoven. I aim to pull some of this weaving apart for ease of examination, but with the awareness that in doing so I’m not merely reducing the novel but transforming it into something it isn’t; representing it as more allegorical than it is, turning it into a purely logical construction rather than an aesthetic one.

All of the following, I should note, presumes that you’ve read the book already–this isn’t so much a review as an investigation.

1. The Scene of the Crime

Miéville’s previous novels have tended to deconstruct genre tropes via subversions of point of view, and to a lesser extent plot. Un Lun Dun worked against the usual hero-and-sidekick roles and their associated plotting. The Scar flipped the standard retrieve-the-stolen-object fantasy quest narrative on its head by being told from the side of the thieves rather than the pursuers, and by backing away from the quest objective at the last moment.

In contrast to these books, The City & The City works its genre deconstruction largely via setting, not character or plot. Indeed, what’s notable about the plot of Miéville’s novel is how true its movement is to the very story of noir, the recirculating interplay between individuals and systems: how individuals take on the characteristics of the systems they live by, and in doing so become complicit in those systems; how individuals are absorbed by systems whose qualities mirror their own self-absorbtions. The prototypical noir character is streetwise precisely because they mirror their environment, because with absorption and loss of self can come knowledge and the ability to work within the grid of the system–if never to actually change it. Yet in many recent noir hybrids with fantasy and science fiction, noir is used precisely to present something for the individual to triumph over, to change or escape: Jedediah Berry’s Manual of Detection, Zoran Živković’s The Last Book, going back to the film Bladerunner. (I could perhaps add Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch to this list as well, but I don’t think VanderMeer is aiming for the pure crime noir in the way someone like Berry is–which may be another post for another time.) It stands out, then, that with The City & The City, Miéville has created a story that is so thoroughly noir, that ends with our protagonist Inspector Tyador Borlú co-opted by the system in exactly the way we’d expect–and yet still has something interesting to say about what this all means.

For such a classic noir story to work, we generally need to care about this co-option, this absorption. And so the classic noir story is typically a novel of character. Well, and so. Our Inspector Borlú is, like any good noir protagonist, very much a product of his system–indeed I think there is a tendency to under-appreciate Borlú as a product of his society. When Borlú declares that the situation between Besźel and Ul Qoma is entirely unlike those in Berlin, or Jerusalem; when he declares that it cannot be understood allegorically: the easy interpretation is that this is Miéville speaking to us, and not what someone of Borlú’s character and in his position would say, authorial agreement or no. And yet, a similar sense of character comes through in many of Borlú’s actions: his behavior at the cities conference, his dual lovers, his patronage of Ul Qoman bakeries in Besźel. It is easy to regard these details as thematic–and of course they are, that’s part of what makes the book so good. But the details he provides–choices, actions, patterns of speech–are not only thematic, not when we consider the reaction of others to these attributes of Borlú, which make it clear they are very much unique to him. This gets at the issue with Borlú-as-protagonist, though: it isn’t that he’s not a believable character, but his matter-of-fact acceptance of the system doesn’t incorporate many of the tensions that we see in others throughout the novel. He is a patriot, but recognizing that his country depends on the system, he is a patriot for the system first and foremost. Borlú begins co-opted in all but name, and so there’s little real drama in his personal transition. The dramatic tension in the system, and the true star protagonist of the novel, is instead found in the setting. Fortunately, the setting makes the strong and complex impression that Borlú does not.

While The City & The City is not, by most definitions, a New Weird novel, its setting has about it something of what M. John Harrison labeled the “pick-and-choose” aesthetic of The New Weird. It is quite conspicuously an assemblage of elements designed to convey an impression–in this case, to build a mystery–and make an argument as much as it is an attempt to construct a plausible real-world location. The very vagueness of the location and history of the cities emphasize this. The text suggests that the two nearest neighbors of the cities are Bosnia and Romania–with Greece and Turkey slightly further away. This would likely put the cities on the border of the Balkans, perhaps in, perhaps out…the uncertain dualism seen so often in the novel. Practically, this general location carries with it a mesh of associations: the borderlands, too, between Central and Eastern Europe, and Europe and the Middle East; the concept of “balkanization”; recent countries with names such as “Bosnia and Herzegovina,” “Serbia and Montenegro” that have the meter of our book’s title.

The question of where the cities are naturally leads to other questions about them, which the novel encourages–it’s another mystery, in addition to the foreground crime, a greater one. It has the air of a puzzle to be solved. There’s a sense, then, in which The City & The City represents a very classic type of mystery fiction, the puzzle story where whodunit and how and when are the most important aspects, Colonel Mustard in the Ballroom with the Candlestick. Over the past several decades, however, the mystery genre as a whole has become more character-driven: not so much puzzling out whodunit as examining the character of those who did do it and those who try to prove what was done. Paralleling the growth of forensics, surveillance, and computer networks, the model for the new crime novel is The Wire: a story where everybody already knows who’s done it, and it’s the construction of proof, and the impact of that construction, that creates the drama. Hartland and Roberts in particular criticize the book for missing the sailing of this ship, but I’m not sure they’re appreciating just how Miéville is twining the two types of story, crime and puzzle, together. The “crime” in crime fiction implies laws, which imply a state, which implies borders and jurisdictions; at least in Western societies, a crime carries with it the premonition of alibis, of dueling stories. Miéville, I think, is trying to get at these core elements that define the genre, the mysteries at the heart of crime, and do to this he needs to do a bit of genre archaeology–and to use a dash of fantasy.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider how the language of the story presents a clue that things will be rather meta: crosshatch, equipoise, alterity, interstitial. Unseeing.

2. Unseeing, Unbelieving

The example everybody uses: the way that more economically fortunate people will often unsee the homeless as they pass by. Expanding on this, John Clute in the 2009 Readercon panel mentioned that the rich, the upper class, perpetually unsee the poor as a class: because to see the poor would force the rich to see their complicity in the systems of poverty. That’s true enough, but I’d suggest that–especially for a Marxist like Miéville–there is also a reciprocal unseeing Western society demands of the poor. If poor saw truly, saw fully, the truth would demand revolution. What is false consciousness but a form of unseeing?

There isn’t a judgment passed on unseeing in the novel, however. Miéville is too sympathetic to condemn, too astute an observer of the world. Unseeing is limiting, restricting; it may also be, in at least some cases, necessary. Certainly preferable to many alternatives. The Besźel/Ul Qoma divide is in many ways profoundly silly, yet it does enable two different cultures to survive, two sets of people to peaceably occupy the same space while making different choices. This is in many ways the very ideal that modern multicultural nations strive for. Indeed it gets at the crisis of contemporary society, the conflict between ideals of integration and ideals of pluralism.

The term “unseeing,” though, seems apt to generate misunderstandings. It sounds like magic. I’ve seen readers criticize the book because they can’t believe that people could truly blind themselves to so much of the world around them. What the text shows us, though, is that unseeing is not an act of ignoring based in ignorance or blindness; it is rather based in recognition and understanding. Borlú is constantly seeing Ul Qoma: his unseeing demands that he be able to recognize exactly what he must pretend not to see, as Miéville makes clear right from the start:

An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling sway. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

With a hard start, I realised that she was not on GunterStrász at all, and that I should not have seen her.

Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent. When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away…

One indeed suspects that, due to the demands of unseeing, the average citizen of Besźel would know a great deal more about the citizenry of Ul Qoma than the average American knows about our contiguous neighbors. But the seeing of unseeing is not literal sight, but rather acknowledgment and all that goes with it.

Which is not to say that unseeing is completely believable, but that its power as a concept stems from existing just beyond the horizon of belief. It is the summation of much that we have seen before. Consider what we know of how people see, the neurology of how people perceive and can be conditioned to ignore significant elements of the world. Consider the tradition of utopian and dystopian novels, and include in that tradition not just the usual dystopias, but also novels of more utopian social conditioning like Skinner’s Walden Two. Consider the quasi-mystical way people have regarded real-life enforcement organizations such as the KGB: all-seeing, pervasive, prone to making people disappear. Consider the power of Foulcault’s panopticon as a method of enforcement. Consider Václav Havel’s famous essay “The Power of the Powerless,” an explication of the post-totalitarian state that is created by individuals following everyday norms. Consider the way individuals from outside the most privileged groups often find themselves unheard, unseen–consider a novel like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a story like James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Women Men Don’t See.”

The beauty of unseeing as a concept, then, is that it captures a certain curve of the world–it is a tangent that approaches that curve. The two may never formally touch, but to read The City & The City is to experience the difference between them becoming smaller. And as the final facet of the novel makes clear, this curve of unseeing describes not only quotidian interactions, but also the larger narratives that we live by.

3. Building a Mystery

In his review of The City & The City, Adam Roberts suggested that the two cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma represented the duality between fiction and the truth of real life. A core problem Roberts had with the novel was that these are two things of different types, not co-equal, and so cannot properly be represented by Besźel and Ul Qoma. But I think it’s fairly clear that this conception of the cities is awry.

The superposition of Besźel and Ul Qoma mirrors the superposition of possible solutions to an unsolved mystery. They are both suspects. Until a mystery is solved, the possible solutions are co-equal inhabitants of the same space in the story. Besźel and Ul Qoma are then both equally fictions, stories: competing, mutually exclusive narratives to describe the past and present of a space. Truth would be the lifting of such narratives. According to the internal metaphysics of the book, then, truth can only be Breach. Consistently in Miéville’s descriptions, Breach is not so much a story as the absence of story:

It was gray, without adornment. [...] Someone stood in the doorway. Light behind him, he was a cutout of darkness, a lack. [...] Their faces were without anything approaching expressions. They looked like people-shaped clay in the moments before God breathed out.

Breach reveals itself as anathema to story in several ways. It has an unparalleled access to raw data, but it cannot make sense of that data, cannot see connections, without Borlú’s assistance. Breach cannot even give a coherent account of itself. There’s a telling narrative shift that occurs whenever it tries to, whereupon Borlú switches from reporting verbatim what those in Breach say to offering his own summary of what was said–his own narrative, because he alone is capable of creating one.

If Breach was not Orciny, what would it be but a mockery of itself, to have let [Orciny's transgressions] go for centuries? That was why my questioner, when he asked me Does Orciny exist?, put it like this, “So, are we at war?”

And later:

I’m an avatar of Breach, Ashil said. Where breach has occurred I can do whatever. But he made me run through it a long time. His manner ossified, that opacity, the glimmerlessness of any sense of what he thought—it was hard to tell if he even heard me. He did not argue nor agree. He stood, while I told him what I claimed.

Committing Breach is, to return to the idea of unseeing, to disbelieve a story; it is a literalization of suspension of disbelief, a rejection of a fiction. Breach can go anywhere, see anything, if only it is invoked: you need only speak it. Once you see it, you cannot go back. But on its own Breach is profoundly empty, unable to generate anything new within itself. This is again very much the essence of noir: the sense that if you pull back the skin of the world, the truth is that there’s nothing meaningful there, just amoral systems to maintain the status quo. Breach contains only pale copies of what exists outside it, needing a constant infusion of new blood in order to do its job, to provide solutions, construct stories.

To solve a crime, in other words, is not to choose between truth and fiction. It is to construct an explanatory narrative, to choose between fictions.

Solution-narratives have scope: to present something as a solution is to delineate what we are willing to accept in a solution, how much truth (or at least, explanation) we need. In this case, when Besźel and Ul Qoma are presented as the two initial leads in the case, the suspects, it’s worth remembering that the two are not just cities but also nations; investigations bring us a further suspect, Orciny, also (potentially, in some narratives) a nation. But like many good mysteries, the suspect most responsible for the crime turns out to be the one that was mentioned briefly and seemingly inconsequentially early in the story, the one that we may have even forgotten was present: the United States.

It is mete that Miéville’s crime novel operates at this level of nations, because the notion of crime is tied up in nations. Crimes are violations of laws; laws are enacted by nations. And nations, in turn, are based on narratives of justice. Nations are fictions that are, as Borlú says, “the skin that keeps law in place.” This gets at one of the thorny issues with crime, of causes. Causes often lie as far back in the past as we’re willing to look; they often do expand to the level of nations, cultures, social systems (one suspects religion, implausibly minimized in both cities, is so because it operates in parallel on the same principles). At a certain point we always have to accept that there are causal elements we won’t be able to know.

There’s a great deal of clever paralleling throughout The City & The City between the old-school puzzle of the cities, that is operating at this meta level of nations and concepts, and the investigation of Mahalia’s murder that’s representative of street-level crime noir. The excavations, of course, the digging into the past; more subtly, the linkage of the individual members of the nationalist groups of both cities as suspects, or the fact that Bowden commits the murder because of a story of a city, a nation, Orciny. There’s again the realization that noir is a mirroring of character and environment. And there’s the overall movement of the methodologies employed as we progress in the book from the classic procedural tone of Borlú’s initial investigations in Besźel, which wouldn’t have felt out of place in a crime novel from the 1930s, through to Breach’s system of networks and surveillance and informers, the technolologizing of the apparatus of truth, the new crime fiction. (My crime fiction guru and colleague in genrethink, Brian Lindenmuth of Spinetingler Magazine, mentioned to me that he experienced the movement to Ul Qoma and the character of Dhatt as an intermediary step in this metahistory of crime fiction, albeit one he was disinclined to credit as consciously intended on Miéville’s behalf.)

An interesting question to ask, given all this, is when exactly do we consider the mystery to be solved? I would posit that for most readers it will be when Borlú apprehends Bowden, a type of final confrontation ubiquitous within the mystery genre. Here is Borlú speaking to Bowden:

“You told Mahalia she was the only one you’d tell the truth. That when you turned your back on your book, that was just you playing politics? Or did you tell her it was cowardice? That would be pretty winning. I bet you did that.” I approached him. His expression shifted. “‘It’s my shame, Mahalia, the pressure was too much. You’re braver than me, keep on; you’re so close, you’ll find it…’ Your shit messed up your whole career, and you can’t have that time back. So the next best thing, make it have been true all along.

[...]

“Did she think you were fooled too? Or did she realise you were behind it? [...] I think she didn’t know. It wasn’t her character to taunt you. I think she thought she was protecting you. I think she arranged to meet you, to protect you.”

What’s fascinating is that here Borlú is again called upon to be a storyteller. Bowden barely says a word, remains equivocal–and so we don’t even know if the story Borlú tells is true. But we accept it as truth, as a solution, because it looks like what we expect a solution to look like. To solve a mystery, even the truth needs a story. Which is why Breach needs Borlú. And Borlú, having seen, can no longer unsee. He is indeed no longer Tyador Borlú, as an avatar of Breach he becomes simply Tye. And I wonder (even though the pronunciation is probably not right) if this isn’t another of the kind of pun that Miéville seems to relish: Borlú is now the Tye that binds the two cities together, and also the Tye that denies ultimate victory to either.

In having Borlú become this avatar of Breach, Miéville achieves a final synthesis of noir and fantasy that makes a worthy finale to the novel’s conceptual fireworks. Borlú has been reduced; he has lost his name, his personhood, become subsumed as an enforcer of the system. This is the very essence of the tragic inevitability of noir. And in the grammar of fantasy, Borlú’s transformation into an avatar is also a movement of becoming. Borlú is moving towards a doppelganger of the fullness of view that the equivocations of his character always strained towards, a sense of his place in the fictional sense–acknowledgment that he is a participant in, and engulfed by, narrative. By the book’s end, the fantasy and the noir have fused into the same understanding. At the very point Borlú is reduced to an avatar within the story, he solidifies into what he always was to the reader outside the story.

Elizabeth Bear, Chill. Spectra, 2010 (US): mass market paperback.

My review of Elizabeth Bear’s Chill, the second volume of her Jacob’s Ladder trilogy, is now online at Strange Horizons. Reviewing the middle volume of a trilogy is an odd and discomfiting business. A review of a complete work allows for something approaching definitiveness–not in capturing an author’s intentions, but in giving one’s own reading of a text. When reviewing the second book of a trilogy, however, that reading becomes highly provisional. I wondered in this review, as an example, at two characters using the same metaphor for the same story element within a few pages of each other. Was this just a slip, a metaphor that had been in the author’s mind and so was used twice inadvertently? Or was it a way of signaling something within the story? I’ve seen similar repetitions used in science fiction to indicate that characters were clones of each other, to give one possibility–in this case, both characters are bonded to symbiont nanocomputers, and so it might also be a way of indicating the manner in which such symbionts shape and constrain thoughts; maybe the shared thoughts are a sign of decreasing bandwidth. Or more prosaically, maybe both characters simply heard another person use the metaphor and it stuck with both of them. There’s no way of knowing at this point. To call it out critically is thus to say, and to say only, that I can’t see a possibility latent in the text that makes the awkwardness of the repetition necessary.

But this assumes I haven’t missed a possibility. And that, of course, is a possibility.

Selected past reviews at other venues:

• Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing
• Avram Davidson, Adventures in Unhistory
• David Louis Edelman, MultiReal
• Theodora Goss, In the Forest of Forgetting
• Brent Hartinger, Dreamquest
• Brent Hayward, Filaria
• David Marusek, Getting to Know You
• J.M. McDermott, Last Dragon
• Patricia McKillip, Od Magic
• Geoff Ryman, Ed., When It Changed: Science Into Fiction
• Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (eds), Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing
• Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, The Man on the Ceiling
• Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest
• Peter Watts, Blindsight
• Robert Freeman Wexler, The Painting and The City
• Zoran Zivkovic, The Last Book
• Zoran Zivkovic, Seven Touches of Music
• Zoran Zivkovic, Steps Through the Mist

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, photo courtesy Wikipedia because I didn't think to bring my camera.

This weekend I was doing some housecleaning and came across notes I had jotted down almost a year ago, before Lingua Fantastika existed, from a discussion between novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón and journalist Chris Lydon to mark the English publication of Zafón’s The Angel’s Game.  With The Angel’s Game just recently appearing in a paperback edition, this discovery seemed too serendipitous to ignore. The event that these notes are from took place on June 22, 2009 at local independent fave the Harvard Book Store. The discussion was broadly focused on Zafón’s career history and goals–which means that a lot of what Zafón said then is still relevant now.  To whit:

• Echoing past interviews, Zafón reiterated the esteem in which he holds Dickens.  Zafón said that he has tried very consciously to figure out what made the classic 19th century novels that he enjoys so good (not, he added, that he is deliberately aiming to write “classics” or bestsellers, but just because he enjoys those works). Part of his answer is that those books tended to include a bit of everything, that they were pre-genre. Another part of the answer is that Dickens and other 19th century authors invented many narrative techniques, which were gradually abandoned by novelists over the 20th century as other forms of media (film, etc.) took prominence. Zafón sees himself as bringing some of these techniques back into literature while tweaking them for a contemporary audience–an audience that if anything is a more cultivated readership than someone like Dickens enjoyed.  Dickens’s readers were seeing many prose techniques used for the first time, as they were invented.
• One narrative technique he used as an example was characterization through dialogue.  Zafón noted that in the 20th century it became more and more typical for prose authors to tell characterization through exposition rather than showing it via dialogue. Yet you generally can’t tell characterization in film, or theatre–and Dickens and other good novelists don’t do it in their novels–and so likewise Zafón tries to show character through dialogue in his own works.  Which is indeed typically considered a mark of good writing; what I found interesting is Zafón’s perception of the historical route this ideal took into his own writing, the positive influence of popular cinema.
• While The Angel’s Game chronologically comes before The Shadow of the Wind and the idea is that the novels can be read in any order, Zafón sees the quartet he is planning as comprising a classical series of acts, and the new novel is very much the prototypical dark second act. The first book introduced the world; the new book deepens the conflicts which will drive the plot through towards the “light at the end of the tunnel” which will be glimpsed in subsequent books.
• There was some discussion of the difference between Zafón’s success in the United States versus in other countries. He made the point that The Shadow of the Wind had sold between 1-2 million copies in the USA, which by the standards of literary novels here, a country with 300 million people, made it a big success.  Yet in the Netherlands, a country of 16 million people, the book sold 800,000 copies–proportionally far more. He talked about how he thinks the US doesn’t do enough to foster reading as a habit, how many people are proud they do not read. He thinks there is a growing disconnect between European countries which are increasingly open, and the US which is increasingly diverging and going its own route.
• He is very fluent in English (having lived in Los Angeles for 11 years); he said that while he had some schooling in the language he was primarily self-taught, by buying and reading cheap paperbacks sold in the Barcelona market for tourists. He said Stephen King’s books did a lot to help him learn English, because they use so much colloquial dialect. He writes in Spanish because he believes that one should write in the language that one learned to read in.
• He had not (as of June 2009) started the third book in the quartet. He planned to take the summer off from writing, then in the fall he would determine whether his next project would be the third book in the quartet or something separate.

N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Orbit, 2010 (US & UK): trade paperback.

There’s a narrative that I think of as “the country mouse narrative,” after the Aesop fable. There’s probably a better critical term for it, and it is at any rate simply a particular form of portal fantasy. In a country mouse narrative, a person from a backwater land goes to the sophisticated city, discovers that its “sophistications” are immoral, maintains their own morality, in doing so attracts the support of the few others in the city with a working moral compass but not enough power/courage to act on their own, often gains a life partner, and together they clean up the joint.

The classic film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a country mouse narrative; so is The Secret of My Success. And it is a narrative that figures large in the fantasy genre proper, not least because one of the projects of popular fantasy (particularly epic fantasy) has long been the moral rehabilitation of the city. In Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris, to pick a recent example, the princess Sarene travels from a small but just kingdom to the ruling city of a large but corrupt kingdom, stands by her principles, makes allies, comes to love and be loved by a living god, and together they avert disaster, mete out justice, and live happily ever after: yay.

This is also a fairly close synopsis of N.K. Jemisin’s debut novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, the first volume of her Inheritance Trilogy. What makes Jemisin’s novel worth considering in depth is its attempt to infuse the standard country mouse narrative–whose rote movements and innate conservatism tend towards mindless amusement, at least for those who can identify with the protagonist–with a contemporary awareness of gender, sex, race, religion, and empire.

Consider the initial setup of the novel. In most modern formulations of the country mouse narrative, the country mouse is eager to go to the city in order to do good, either directly or through exercising some skill that they seem put on the world to exercise (another country mouse example: Roy Hobbs in the film adaptation of Malamud’s The Natural). In The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, however, when Yeine Darr is summoned to Sky, the seat of the world-spanning Arameri religio-political empire, she is reluctant to go; she is compelled to make the journey only out of fear for herself and the Darre people she is chieftain of. The dark-skinned Darre were brought into the empire of the pale-skinned Arameri and converted to the Arameri’s religion centuries ago on threat of obliteration; they’re still considered barbarians. So from the start Jemisin is adding a new layer to the stock narrative: the archetypal city is not immoral because it is full of immoral people and amusements, the archetypal city is immoral because it is the seat of empire. And empire, as a function of the way it exercises power, is immoral.

Here is what the priests taught me:

Once upon a time there were three great gods. Bright Itempas, Lord of Day, was the one destined by fate or the Maelstrom or some unfathomable design to rule. All was well until Enefa, His upstart sister, decided that she wanted to rule in Bright Itempas’s place. She convinced their brother Nahadoth to assist her, and together with some of their godling children they attempted a coup. Itempas, mightier than both His siblings combined, defeated them soundly. He slew Enefa, punished Nahadoth and the rebels, and established an even greater peace–for without His dark brother and wild sister to appease, He was free to bring true light and order to all creation.

At the same time, the narrative underpainting Jemisin is working with isn’t fully amenable to her insights. In terms of drama, while the initial sections of the book turn on Yeine’s gradual realization that the Arameri religion she had learned contains numerous lies and omissions, the narrative structure of the novel tips this hand well in advance. (It’s noteworthy, for example, how quickly the members of a Barnes & Noble reading group guessed several of the novel’s key plot revelations well before they occurred.) Of course the Arameri religion is made up of lies: that’s dictated by the country mouse narrative structure. So while the secrets of the backstory are interesting, the foreground story of Yeine’s discovery of these secrets is less so.

The other early problem area is the role of objective truth in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. The Arameri empire has suppressed religious beliefs which are factually, objectively correct in the world Jemisin has created. That’s a qualitative simplification of one of the much-discussed contemporary problems of empire, the suppression of one culture by another when neither have any objective claims to correctness. It is easy to root for one side when it has an objective claim on the truth; the belief in this, after all, has sustained all sorts of imperialism throughout history. It is odd, then, that this moral calculus is what Jemisin asks of us in her novel. The more relevant and interesting challenge for humanity, after all, is how to deal with cultural conflicts in the absence of objective absolutes. To what degree do people have a right to their own culture regardless of being able to prove that their beliefs are correct; to what degree should others defend that right, even if they do not themselves share the culture’s beliefs? But instead of grappling with these questions, Jemisin falls back on the conservative absolutes of the country mouse narrative: the correctness of the rural as opposed to the urban; the correctness of the old as opposed to the new.

There is more of this as Yeine becomes situated in the city of Sky and resigned to her legacy as granddaughter of Dekarta, the dying Arameri emperor. After rather too much plot thrashing, it is revealed that Yeine has been summoned to Sky in order to choose a successor to Dekarta, herself becoming a sacrifice to the Arameri god Itempas in the succession ritual. Dekarta (file under “incompetent”) has selected two possible heirs to the empire: one, Relad, is a womanizing emo drunkard; the other, Scimina, goes out of her way to terrorize Yeine, knowing full well Yeine will be the judge of her candidacy (file under “incompetent” and “wicked”). Dekarta also shows himself to be the least suspicious person in the world (see above parenthetical), giving as he does no thought to the timing of the assassination of Yeine’s mother–Dekarta’s beloved daughter, who forsook the Arameri to marry a rare male Darre chieftan–shortly before the events of the novel begin.

Two objections need to be raised here. The first is that this rendering of the antagonists of the country mouse as caricatures of wickedness and incompetence is uncomfortably close to the demonization of the adversary that is often used to justify imperialism. The easy equation of they are wrong with they are less than human (or in this case, less than characters) is too hypocritical a tactic for Jemisin to rely on in this narrative. The second objection is that while these characteristics aren’t necessarily unrealistic–history has shown us how empires often rot from within due to wickedness and incompetence–this cast of adversaries in a story simply doesn’t make for interesting drama. These types of characters are common enough in shorter forms of the country mouse narrative, like film, particularly morally simple productions that rely on humor or melodrama (the film examples I’ve used here were chosen for a reason). In a novel they work less well. Incompetence in a character is not intellectually interesting; pure wickedness in a character is not morally interesting. That Dekarta and Scimina are dictates of the narrative rather than characters is an issue for the story thematically; that they are dictates that don’t force Yeine, as the protagonist, to think, say, or do anything interesting is an issue for the story, full stop.

This is a shame, as Yeine is an otherwise engaging storyteller–and indeed, amongst the nuts and bolts of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms’s writing, what I think Jemisin does best is convey Yeine’s character through the right mix of thoughts, words, and actions. When Yeine is angry, she doesn’t dwell on her anger: rather, she speaks angry words. When Yeine is frantic, or fatalistic (or both), we can tell from her actions. When Yeine is feeling alone, we can tell because she seeks company, or thinks of the loneliness of others. There’s much less redundancy to Yeine’s characterization than many epic fantasy protagonists, and a greater range and fluidity to her reactions. This is important because Jemisin is dealing very directly with pillars of fantasy–bondage, masks, recognition, and metamorphosis are just a few terms whose entries in Clute & Grant’s The Encyclopedia of Fantasy read like plot outlines of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms–and there is, in parallel, a very Le Guin-like mapping of the outward fantastic to the psychological interior (in Jemisin’s case Freudian more than Le Guin’s Jungian). Yeine thus always risked being buried beneath symbolism, risked (ironically) having her personhood denied. That Yeine always feels like a person keeps the story readable, even when she isn’t allowed to be actively interesting.

And in truth, Yeine does a great deal for the story even while relatively passive. One of the key potential narrative pitfalls that Jemisin manages via Yeine is the tendency of portal fantasies towards what Farah Mendlesohn has called infantilization (in her Rhetorics of Fantasy), the need for protagonists in strange new lands to have everything explained to them in a mediated interpretation of the world that they–and thus the reader–cannot challenge. Yeine enters Sky with greater than average knowledge of its customs, however, due to her mother’s teachings; further, she’s intelligent enough to wonder at the agendas of (most of) those who do provide her with information, and to seek out alternate sources. [Edit 25 April 2010: I've just discovered that Mendlesohn herself has made this same argument.] But most importantly, Yeine is essentially telling the novel’s story to herself, after the fact. It’s a style reminiscent of J.M. McDermott’s Last Dragon, although less consistently poetic and without the same shifting ambiguities.

I am not as I once was. They have done this to me, broken me open and torn out my heart. I do not know who I am anymore.

I must try to remember.

[...]

I must remember everything, remember and remember and remember, to keep a tight grip on it. So many bits of myself have escaped already.

Yeine is thus able to explain and interpret a lot of the backstory to herself, as it were, rather than having it explained to her. There is a limit to this self-exposition, based on the absolutes that underpin the story. But Jemisin helps make what infantilization does result bearable by giving Yeine strong senses of pride and dignity. Yeine simultaneously doesn’t enjoy knowing that information is being doled out only on a need-to-know basis, refuses to conform if the rules she is told violate her own morals, tries to learn as much as she can on her own, and when justice requires sacrifice on her part, she does not complain about her lack of agency. And in a sense, learning–or rediscovering–one’s own story is a gaining of agency, and can be deeply resonant with those touched by real-world imperialism, making Jemisin’s narrative choice thoroughly in keeping with her novel’s themes.

All of these elements come to the fore in the final sections of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. The conflicts that dragged through the book’s middle chapters are revealed here to be largely elevator music on the climb to the true conflict of the story, that between the gods of the world. There are the expected issues with this. To the extent that the gods of Sky are bound, their availability as engines of agency for others forces the story into some odd contortions. For example Yeine, who grew up in a largely matriarchal society where “only weak women allowed men to protect them,” is confronted with an intricate political challenge in Sky and a military situation back home in Darre. Goddesses of both wisdom and war have pledged to help her. Instead of consulting with them, she keeps her council with, acts with, and is indeed protected by the two enslaved male gods. It feels out of character. On the other hand, to the extent that the gods do have agency, there enters the question of what poor humans are to do–of how responsible and accountable the Arameri can be for their empire. Jemisin muddles the question of responsibility further by introducing the notion of the Maelstrom, which has apparently spat out the three primary gods stamped with their designated aspects and roles. And so with the gods themselves dancing to some unknown tune, the language of inevitability enters the story.

Amazing. How convenient that [he] turned on me.

I prefer to think of it as fate.

[...]

Perhaps she was always meant to die at some point.

This brings the consolation that all acts committed were necessary as part of some extra-divine plan that required them, which runs rather against the ideas of personal responsibility present in the story.

With such strong enforcement of the narrative shape, and with Yeine so constrained as an actor, drama in the story must come from more quotidian character interactions and insights. Fortunately, once we move past the obvious antagonists, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms isn’t entirely lacking in this regard. Sieh, the child god, is a fine evocation of the trickster spirit that seems to grace so many divine pantheons: in him Jemisin captures something true about childishness, the combination of innocence, neediness, curiosity, and unthinkingly-selfish, mischievous cruelty of the child (if there’s a flaw to this characterization, it’s that Jemisin shows us the good but only tells us about the negative). Several of the secondary denizens of Sky–T’vril the steward, Viraine the Scrivener–are also presented intriguingly, with enough disparate details to avoid status as mere plot coupon holders.

But the make-or-break character dynamic in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is the relationship between Yeine and Nahadoth, the enslaved night god. On the surface, this relationship has the contours of stock paranormal romance, of the kick-ass human woman inexorably drawn to the pale, broodingly masculine creature of darkness. Jemisin doesn’t exactly discourage this impression: “Love” is the title of the chapter, barely a quarter of the way into the book, featuring the first private conversation between Yeine and Nahadoth. Yet I think the surface reading is too shallow: here is a narrative that Jemisin does interrogate, at least somewhat. Yeine’s story, and Jemisin’s writing, is often in the language of wish-fulfillment, of ugly duckling specialness, but I’m not sure Yeine’s fate is one meant to be envied. Yeine has none of the typical relationship angst regarding Nahadoth; for the two, god and human sacrifice, can seemingly have no future together. Instead, Yeine’s desire for Nahadoth increases in proportion to the immanence of her sacrifice. In her behavior there is a very Freudian intermingling of the drives for sex and death, pleasure as a respite from troubles. Yeine maintains her concern for moral dignity even here; the sexual relationship between herself and Nahadoth charts her perception of the power relationship between the two, with sex occurring only when she can perceive them both as, if not equals, then at least equally bound. (In contrast, one primary way evil characters show their evil is that they use love or betray love–sexual, familial, patriotic. Scimina’s “favorite weapon is love. If you love anyone, anything, beware. That’s where she’ll attack.”) So there’s a sense that The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms can be read as rationalizing some of the problematic aspects of paranormal romance through tropes of epic fantasy such as dynasty, divinity, and destiny. And in doing so, it brings a welcome awareness of female sexuality to epic fantasy, where women who initiate sex are still only rarely depicted in a positive light.

Beyond their role in characterization, the intermingling of sex and love seem to exist at the roots of Jemisin’s created world. The ruling castle of Sky is magically held above the world by a single pillar, a metaphor of both the Arameri attitude and the source of their power. Jemisin then goes out of her way to add a further simile to this metaphor, equating Sky to a flower–and flowers are sex organs. In parallel, the great death and rebirth of the novel occurs when a seed travels up and out of a large column (killing a man in the process, his actions a sacrifice for love): la petite mort, indeed. This deeply sexualized construction of the world is reminiscent of such fantasists as Jacqueline Carey, Tanith Lee, and Storm Constantine (with whom Jemisin shares several motifs, including love as catalyst for healing, redemption, and rebirth), although not as edgy: no sooner do we learn that Itempas the day god and Nahadoth the night god (both always shown as male in this story) had been lovers, than Jemisin is quick to tell us that Nahadoth could assume a female form as well. Which feels like another over-adherence to the conservative norms of the country mouse narrative.

It does however add an intriguing messiness to the world. Itempas and Nahadoth are positioned as opposites: day and night, light and darkness, order and chaos. Between them, and responsible for the balance between them, was Enefa, the goddess of dusk and dawn. It would be easy to assume that the divinity responsible for balance and transition would be the one most mutable, and an element of interest as the trilogy continues will be seeing Jemisin work through her vision of a balance of power, especially vis-a-vis qualities like gender and sexuality. Similarly, if the gods can say both “We were made to be Three, not two” and “We made you [mortals] in our image,” what does this mean for human relationships in Jemisin’s world? Are marriage dyads an unnatural situation, another of Itempas’s distortions? Conversely, are same-sex relationships possible; are they in some sense ungodly? Are there divinely established gender roles in this world? What has it meant for the world to have the divine feminine so long absent? How much of what is divinely established is changeable for Jemisin’s divinely-created humanity?  And can the world become a place where a woman like Yeine–biracial, capable, dignified, sexually demanding–can live?

Jemisin seems committed to working through at least some of these messy elements: one of the book’s significant points of departure from the country mouse narrative is her acknowledgment that cleaning up the mess left at the story’s resolution will be a long process. It is a beginning as much as an ending, and it seems that the process will figure large in at least the next volume of the trilogy. Towards the end of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Jemisin, via Yeine, lays out for us that the narrative of the next book will be a story of redemption–and further, I suspect we’re given signals of the endgame of the trilogy overall in Yeine’s repeated questioning of whether humanity wouldn’t be better off without these gods. It’s likely, then, that the next books will again rely not on questions of what will happen but on details of how events happen, and against what backdrop. So there’s the possibility of interest, and Jemisin has certainly shown she can sustain narrative drive even with a less-than-ideal narrative. But my sense, after reading this first volume, is that if the series is to reach its potential, it must begin to interrogate the values of its narrative underpinnings with the same vigor as it does the elements of story closer to the surface.

Geoff Ryman (ed.), When It Changed: Science Into Fiction. Comma Press, 2009 (UK): trade paperback.

My review of When It Changed: Science Into Fiction, edited by Geoff Ryman, is now online at the Strange Horizons website.  I’m reasonably happy with this review as a piece of analysis, at not just stopping at judging whether the book does what it attempts to do but considering what in fact it does do.  As a piece of writing, it was an experiment to be a bit more personal: I’m not sure if that worked.  So be it.  While I think I did justice to the book overall, it may be that I didn’t do justice to the individual stories as stories, as worthy of consideration in their own right and not just in terms of how they fit into my argument.  Let me say here, then, that they were all at a minimum competently written: Gwyneth Jones’s “Collision” and Geoff Ryman’s own “You” struck me as the highpoints; Paul Cornell’s “Global Collider Generation: an Idyll” grew on me; and Sara Maitland’s “Moss Witch” was a clever concept deftly executed.

Selected past reviews at other venues:

• Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing
• Avram Davidson, Adventures in Unhistory
• David Louis Edelman, MultiReal
• Theodora Goss, In the Forest of Forgetting
• Brent Hartinger, Dreamquest
• Brent Hayward, Filaria
• David Marusek, Getting to Know You
• J.M. McDermott, Last Dragon
• Patricia McKillip, Od Magic
• Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (eds), Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing
• Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, The Man on the Ceiling
• Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest
• Peter Watts, Blindsight
• Robert Freeman Wexler, The Painting and The City
• Zoran Zivkovic, The Last Book
• Zoran Zivkovic, Seven Touches of Music
• Zoran Zivkovic, Steps Through the Mist

I love how deftly this straddles the border of narrative.  When I watch this, it feels like story.  When it’s over, I’m not so sure: it’s like waking up from a dream.  The sensation of story seems to come not simply from it being a piece of sequential art, having characters and movement, but because of certain key interactions, certain familiar scenes and movements.  Of this, genres are made.