The Next Shelf

Category: Fiction

  • A Court of Thorns and Roses – Sarah J Maas

    A Court of Thorns and Roses – Sarah J Maas

    headphones, denoting audiobook

    Audiobook narrated by Jennifer Ikeda

    ‘Do you have a plan?’

    ‘No.’

    There are good books and bad books and in-between books. There are so-good-you-want-to-make-everyone-read-it books, and there are so-bad-you-want-to-warn-everyone-to-avoid-it books. There good books that you plough through and excellent books that you struggle to find the energy for, books that are unreadably bad and books that are plain dull. And then there is the special category of books that are so bad they’re almost good. A Court of Thorns and Roses is not the worst book I’ve ever read, but it might be the best-worst.

    This title, the first in the ‘ACOTAR’ series, as it’s known within the cult, had been a stalwart in my ‘maybe to read’ pile for a couple of years. I was pretty sure it was rubbish, but it had been recommended by at least one person with some crossover in book-taste and I’ve avoided books before out of snobbery that I’ve ended up enjoying. So when I saw it on the lineup for the excellent ‘The Book Club’ podcast – and mistook a jocular reference to it as one presenter’s ‘favourite book of all time’ as a sincere endorsement – I decided it was worth taking the plunge for what was sure to be an easy listen.

    Jennifer Ikeda, despite her unfortunate American accent, does a decent job of the narration, probably working the source material about as well as anyone could.

    Sarah J Maas wrote her first book, Throne of Glass, at age 16 and has amassed a serious cult following with her ‘romantasy’ series, blending high fantasy with adult romance. The first three-quarters of this book is basically Beauty and the Beast reimagined as a gothic bodice-ripper. Throw in some Fae folklore and a few more mythical creatures, Disney tropes and vaguely sketched Fae court politics (and some slightly more explicit bodice-ripping), and you have yourself a global phenomenon and multi-million copy bestseller. The last quarter or so of this indefensibly long slog feels more like a classic fairy tale with twenty-first century teenagers. But there is actually a fair bit of plot here, so I will try to briefly summarise.

    Nineteen-year-old Feyre lives with her two older sisters and crippled father in a small cabin on the edge of the woods. Armed with bow and arrow, she hunts to keep her family fed. When one day she kills a giant wolf who turns out to have been a faery in beast-form, payment is demanded and she is taken to live a life of imprisonment in the Fae realm of Prythian (modelled on ancient Britain).

    What follows is mostly a parade of confusing mythical creatures who inevitably come after Feyre after she repeatedly ignores instructions for own safety – which of course requires her to be rescued by her captor, the High Lord Tamlin, a shape-shifting man-beast cursed to live under a mask, even in human form. Between them slow-boils a hot-blooded love affair, complete with claws, growling and many uses of the words ‘feral’ and ‘predatory’. But in time, Feyre finds that nothing is what it had seemed in Prythian. To rescue her beloved, she goes boldly into the court of evil Queen Amarantha with no plan whatsoever, and finds the fate of the world balanced in her highly incapable hands.

    Like Dragonflight, A Court of Thorns and Roses is quite good as a plot summary. There’s actually a lot going on, but unfortunately it mostly happens off the page. Most of the consequential events and background are narrated through expositional dialogue – and then further explained, just in case you missed it. It reminded me of the new breed of Netflix content produced under the explicit assumption that viewers will be on their phones throughout and only half paying attention. ACOTAR was published in 2015, but had it come out this year I would have seriously questioned if it was written by AI – especially in the light of revelations that many romance writers are already embracing this new technology to spit out over 200 books a year.

    The writing is incredibly childlike, which is an odd juxtaposition with the ‘adult’ content (although it should be said the bodice-ripping mercifully took up much less real estate than I’d expected). There is no subtlety to be found here; no complexity, no nuance, no subtext. Everyone will tell you exactly what they think, and then go to great lengths to explain what they meant by it. The characters are flimsy and the worldbuilding feels thin. The narrative is riddled with inconsistencies, crater-sized plot holes, baffling decision-making and nonsensical sequences of cause and effect. Though the emotional stakes should be high, I could never take anything seriously enough to feel invested in it. I found myself bemused by the supposedly terrifying monsters and the sheer stupidity of basically everyone and everything.

    “He could have had me right there on top of that table. I wanted his broad hands running over my bare skin. Wanted his teeth scraping against my neck. Wanted his mouth all over me.“

    ‘I’m trying to eat!’ Lucien said as I blinked, the air whooshing out of me.”

    Which leads to my designation of ACOTAR as the best-worst book.

    Despite the atrocious dialogue, the nonsensical plot, the inconsistent world and idiotic characters, there was somehow enough here to have some fun with. It gave me plenty of (mostly unintended) laughs, and I’ve come to believe that a terrible book beats one that is merely uninteresting. If this book has a saving grace, it’s in the pacing, which keeps the story moving along swiftly enough that you always at least feel like you’re getting through it (albeit making use of the speed-up setting in the audiobook and despairing at the number of chapters still to go.)

    I was determined to finish it out of curiosity (and because I’d paid for it) and so that I could follow along with the ‘Book Club’ episode. As soon as I finished, I tuned in to the podcast, eager to hear the hosts mock and tear it to shreds. Imagine my horror and disappointment when they instead tried to be very fair, assessed it for the light fluff that it is, and both rated it 6/10 – one host raising eyebrows by rating it higher than the Steinbeck classic East of Eden.

    Every now and then Sarah J Maas surprises with a sentence, a character arc or a plot twist that makes you think she could probably write something decent if she tried. It’s obvious this book was written quickly, but when I learned Maas had written it in five weeks, I was actually forced into grudging admiration for the output, given just how quickly she slapped it together.

    Many of the most avid ACOTAR readers seem to be people who are just getting into (or back into) reading for pleasure, and if Maas’s work not only brings joy and excitement but also acts as a gateway into a fulfilling reading life, that can only be a good thing. I couldn’t help making comparisons to Australian author Juliet Marillier, whose book Daughter of the Forest remains an all-time favourite of mine, also heavily inspired by Celtic mythology. Although Marillier’s fantasy romance books are certainly formulaic, they are beautifully written with real emotional stakes and well-developed characters. I hope some ACOTAR fans will find their way to her.

    There has long been the kind of commercially successful genre book that worships at the altar of substance and throws style out the stained glass window. There are highly prolific authors like James Patterson essentially running book factories with teams of junior co-authors. I’m not going to argue with the millions of people around the world who have showered adoration on this book and the ACOTAR series.

    Sarah J Maas is clearly onto a winning formula and good luck to her – but having dipped my toe into the world of the Fae, I was left with no desire to become a permanent resident of Prythian and offer up my brain in sacrificial worship to Queen SJM at the ritual bonfire.

  • Dragonflight – Anne McCaffrey

    Dragonflight – Anne McCaffrey

    Audiobook narrated by Sophie Aldred

    Drummer beat and piper blow

    Harper strike and soldier go

    Free the flame and sear the grasses

    Till the dawning red star passes

    Floundering in my endless quest to find great new fantasy / sci-fi / dystopian reads, I recently decided to revisit some fantasy books I had enjoyed in my teenage years and see how they held up to rereading.

    This one did not hold up. I was left feeling somewhat ashamed of my teenage-self, who happily chowed through quite a number of books in this series. I struggle to match up the teenage-self of my memory—who I’m sure was an erudite reader of the classics and a deep thinker with highly sophisticated taste—with the one who enjoyed this drivel enough to return to the library for sequel after sequel.

    First published in 1968, Dragonflight was a pioneer of the genre and has clearly served as inspiration for many other books and series since—including possibly the entire ‘romantasy’ genre. It won McCaffrey both a Nebula and a Hugo award, making her the first woman to win either of those prizes. The story is of a young woman, Lessa, who escapes a life of servitude to become a dragon queen tasked with saving her planet from destruction.

    All of this is a strange precursor to the following statement, which is that this is possibly the most sexist novel I’ve ever read (with the possible exception of Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark.)

    On the distant planet of Pern, far into the future, humans have set up an agrarian colony which has functioned for over 2000 years with just one major problem. The irregular orbit of a neighbouring planet periodically brings it close enough to cause atmospheric changes that result in ‘Thread’ (think acid rain) to fall from the sky, turning fertile soil to wasteland. Cue the dragonriders, who combat the falling Thread with fire-breathing dragons, genetically engineered from an endemic reptile species.

    Lessa is the sole survivor of a noble family killed by a usurper. She survives by disguising herself as a kitchen maid serving her family’s murderers—until one day she is rescued / captured by the dragonrider F’lar, who sees in her a chance to regenerate his declining weyr (dragon commune) in preparation for the next Threadfall, a threat the people of Pern have all but forgotten.

    So far so good. As a plot summary, Dragonflight is excellent. As a book, not so much. It’s hard to believe that such a great premise could be so poorly executed, especially considering that McCaffrey is not an untalented writer.

    Even as I get this all down, my appreciation for the world, the ideas and the premise of the story is almost making me feel like reading it again. It’s the same devil’s voice that keeps telling me I want to watch the Harry Potter movies one more time, only to find that they haven’t got any better in the last decade. It’s that part of me that can’t relinquish the idea of how good something could have been, despite reality having resoundingly proven it otherwise. McCaffrey’s worldbuilding is excellent and her prose is solid and assured, but these can’t redeem the faults in other essential story elements.

    After her forceful translocation, Lessa imprints with the gold dragon queen, forming a telepathic bond, and becomes Weyrwoman of Benden Weyr. It sounds like our girl has risen to great heights, except that it turns out the duties of the esteemed Weyrwoman turn out to mostly comprise cleaning, housekeeping and stocking the pantry. And she’d better do it right, or Weyrleader F’lar will shake her. That’s right, physically shake her. He does this a lot.

    “Oh, F’lar will be so angry with me. He will shake me and shake me. He always shakes me when I disobey him.”

    The story alternates between Lessa’s and F’lar’s point of view, which is one of its key weaknesses as F’lar is about the most unlikeable character ever put to the page. Which is unfortunate for Lessa, because as the Weyrleader bonded to the bronze dragon, F’lar is bonded to her, too.

    The telepathic bond shared between dragons and their riders extends to a seasonal dragon mating flight, during which the dragons’ bonded human pairs get tangled up in the passion. This means the dragonriders don’t choose their romantic or sexual partners, which results in some loose boundaries around consent. This is the way of things at the weyr and generally accepted, but Lessa, an outsider, is inadequately warned or prepared. Worse, F’lar continues to ‘share her bed’ after this event (sans synchronous dragon sex), despite Lessa’s total lack of enthusiasm. While the lack of consent is acknowledged, it’s not judged as particularly problematic, either by F’lar or by Lessa, which makes the story an incredible legitimisation of rape culture.

    He had been a considerate and gentle bedmate ever since, but, unless Ramoth and Mnementh were involved, he might as well call it rape. Yet he knew someday, somehow, he would coax her into responding wholeheartedly to his lovemaking. He had a certain pride in his skill, and he was in a position to persevere.

    Passages like the above are hard to read, and it’s hard to spend so much time inside the head of someone so deeply unlikeable.

    All those years ago I remember being disturbed by an even-more egregious scene in the second Dragonriders book where the love interest of a young, scared female character sexually assaults her to ‘prepare’ her for the dragon-mating experience with another rider—a crime presented and accepted as an act of necessary cruelty with her best interests in mind. I had forgotten how much this scene exemplified the norms within the Pern novels.

    Though she hardly started the trend. McCaffrey feels like an unhelpful instalment in the long line of female writers propagating damaging norms around sexualised violence and coercive control, sold as titillation (looking at you, Fifty Shades of Gray).

    It would have been so nice to see the controlling, arrogant F’lar get his comeuppance in this story, or perhaps a redemptive character arc. But no. F’lar is possessed of a unique foresight and strategic skill. All his unpopular theories turn out to be true. He thinks he can continually rape Lessa until she starts to like it, and guess what…

    All this makes me think of other times I’ve had the discussion: ‘is it a sexist book, or just a book depicting a sexist world?’ Many people point to the fact that the culture around consent and gender norms was very different in the sixties when this book was written, but that doesn’t seem like an adequate explanation.

    No one has ever accused Jane Austen or the Brontes of degrading women in their work, though they wrote in a time far behind 1960s America in terms of women’s standing in society. The female characters in these books were fully realised humans who chafed against their constraints and grew as a result, shaped in partnership or in opposition to the world around them.

    I don’t think it’s particularly hard to distinguish a sexist book from a sexist world. In the former, female characters are poorly developed, often thrown in only as love interests for the male characters, and limited in ways that the narrative does not recognise or address. In the latter, female characters are given equal or greater depth to their male counterparts. Their needs and desires are equally recognised by the narrative, if not by those around them, and form the shape of their character arc.

    And honestly it’s hard to judge Dragonflight by this measure, as all the characters are so flat and one-dimensional that it’s hard to know what any of their needs and wants are. What can be determined is that the book legitimises the treatment of women in the reactions of the female characters, or the lack thereof.

    Where Lessa should be a feminist icon, riding out on her gold dragon to save the planet, she feels more like a mute wallflower, living in fear of F’lar’s temper and the inevitable shaking that ensues whenever he catches her ‘disobeying’ him. Instead of rising up against this or finding ways to grow in opposition to his treatment, Lessa never seems to question F’lar’s right to manhandle and rape her. All she needs is a bit of time for his arrogant charms to work their wiles.

    Riding on plot momentum and curiosity alone, I pushed through to the end of Dragonflight. But if I seem hazy on how the story ends or have got some details incorrect, it’s because I didn’t care enough to rewind if I fell asleep halfway through a chapter or got distracted by a bird and missed a chunk of storyline. I should mention that narrator Sophie Aldred does a great job and her lilting tones probably played a significant role in getting me through the book.

    From an exciting story premise and some strong worldbuilding, McCaffrey is able to extract only shadows of characters, who float through the world lazily pushing the plot along. The decision to tell half the story from F’lar’s perspective steals the spotlight from the female protagonist, who is under-developed and, while much more sympathetic, also just not that much fun. The character interactions are shallow and at times baffling. The readerly jaw, dropped initially by the rampant misogyny, ends up stretched in a giant and ongoing yawn.

    All I can say in defence of my younger self—and the judges who awarded this book the most coveted awards in the science-fiction and fantasy genres—is that it may have been, for both of us, a first encounter with such an elaborately conceived sci-fi world. I was perhaps so bedazzled by the idea of what the book could have been that I forgot to tell the devil on my shoulder to shut the hell up and give me something decent to read.

  • The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie

    The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie

    book symbol, denoting having read this as a physical book rather than in audio

    ‘In the high Himalayas, it is often the case that climbers find themselves being accompanied by the ghosts of those who failed in the attempt, or the sadder, but also prouder, ghosts of those who succeeded in reaching the summit, only to perish on the way down.‘

    I picked up this book some time after the 2022 attack that left the author seriously injured and blind in one eye. Kudos to the bookseller at the Alice Springs bookshop for pulling it out, dusting it off and placing it prominently on the shelf almost four decades after its publication. After the knife incident, buying the book felt like the tiniest act of resistance against the terrorism of murderous thin-skinned religious zealots.

    The story of the fatwa issued against Rushdie for writing this novel, and the ten years he spent in hiding as a result, is fairly well known. Less well publicised were the attacks and murders of the book’s publishers and translators in various countries, including the massacre of 37 people by a Turkish mob.

    Rushdie has been one of my favourite authors since I read Midnight’s Children in my early twenties, and a bit of a personal hero for his determined and courageous response to the threats and acts of violence against him, and his enduring commitment to free speech in the face of it all. Midnight’s Children remains my favourite of his books so far, but I’ve enjoyed all the ones I’ve read: The Enchantress of Florence, East West (a short story collection) and Haroun and the Sea of Stories (a children’s book, I realised belatedly, but a delightful read). I have a couple more on my eternal shelf.

    As such, I was excited to read The Satanic Verses – and surprised to find it a bit of a struggle. I also loved it. And I also wished it were half as long. It is a sweeping, grandiose, chaotic, absurd adventure that is at times enthralling and mind-blowing and at times a bit of a drag. It is a masterpiece, of some kind. This will be a review of conflicted emotions.

    How to summarise what this story is about? It starts with a Bollywood movie star and a (less famous) voice actor falling out of a hijacked aeroplane over the English channel after the aircraft explodes. In Rushdie’s signature magical realist style, the two British-Indians jumble in the air in a tangle of limbs before hitting the ocean and swimming to shore, their destinies now inextricably linked.

    Bizarrely, around the time I was reading this book, an Air India plane crashed after takeoff and, in an almost equally unbelievable twist of fate, one passenger – a British-Indian man – survived the wreckage, walking away with no major injuries. A haunting stranger-than-fiction parallel that makes me wonder if the world isn’t a little more magical and unpredictable than we give it credit for.

    Another storyline in the book follows the fictional prophet Mahound, who ascends Mount Cone to hear the voice of God, only to later become convinced that the words were in fact whispered to him by the devil, Shaitain. The one who whispers the verses is in fact the Angel Gibreel, sort of played by Gibreel Farishta, the movie star who fell out of the plane and acts sometimes in the role of an archangel while Chamcha, his co-survivor, grows devil horns and becomes poisoned with envy over Gibreel’s more successful career. Another storyline follows Alleluia Cone, a mountain climber who remains haunted by her conquest of Everest and cannot help, in between summits, falling into a tangled relationship with Gibreel, the sometimes-angel, who resembles more of a man-child in his waking life.

    This web of insanity is largely set against the backdrop of a racially intolerant Britain as our heroes, Chamcha and Gibreel, must navigate the new ‘immigrant alien’ identities cast upon them by virtue of having washed up on the country’s shores instead of landing at Heathrow.

    After you recover from typhoid, Chamcha reflected, you remain immune to the disease for ten years or so. But nothing is forever; eventually the antibodies vanish from your blood. He had to accept the fact that his blood no longer contained the immunizing agents that would have enabled him to suffer India’s reality.

    All of this makes for rich, and sometimes exhausting, reading. Knowing that Rushdie was inspired by his interest in ancient Islamic texts, and knowing very little about Islamic culture or theology myself, I felt in some ways unqualified to fully comprehend all the meaning contained in the characters, names, references and interlinking stories. I happened to read it around the same time as Rory Stewart’s memoir, The Places In Between, in which he notes that Islamic texts often begin with a contradictory construction: ‘it happened and it didn’t happen.’ It makes it hard to ascertain the literal truth of historical texts, but seems to imply that the story is true in the only sense that matters: it is story-true. This is a perfect allegory to magical realism, and the ‘it happened / it did not’ construction is one Rushdie uses often thoughout The Satanic Verses. I wondered how many other such nuanced references I missed out of ignorance.

    Salman Rushdie is one of those witers who both inspires me to write and fills me with despair by comparison to his brilliance. I hate to use the word ‘genius’, especially about yet another man, but it’s hard to describe the mind of this author any other way.

    The Satanic Verses is incredibly impressive, but I’d say it’s a bit more impressive than it is enjoyable – in fact, it’s kind of hard work. I read another whole book in the middle of it for a reprieve (see Once There Were Wolves) and fell asleep on three consecutive occasions trying to read one sentence that spanned most of a page. The hard work is rewarded with scenes of unrivalled creativity and sentences of sublime beauty. Among those highlights is stopping every couple of pages to look up a word in the dictionary, rereading neverending sentences to try to unravel the meaning, and sometimes feeling that the core of the story remains elusive for all the profusion of words.

    I’ll admit that the longer the reading experience went on (and it went on for a while) the more it started to feel like a chore. While I still enjoyed each reading session, a few pages generally left me sated instead of hungry for more – and there are a lot of pages in this book. Towards the end I was feeling that I had scaled the peak of the book some time ago, and was now just trying not to perish on the way down.

    This left me with the strange experience of wanting to defend The Satanic Verses as an excellent book, yet reluctant to recommend it to many (any?) of my book-loving friends and associates. As I like to do when perplexed by a book, I sought the wisdom of Goodreads and Reddit, and found a similar sentiment among Rushdie enthusiasts that this is far from his strongest work.

    So I guess my advice would be to read all his other books first and if you love them, read up a bit on your Islamic culture and religious history and your Indian culture and your 1980s British politics – and make sure your general history and philosophy is all up to scratch. And then come back and enjoy this book to its fullest extent.

    As to the mobs and zealots, I confess I came away with no strong understanding of what the religious fuss was all about. Rushdie asserts that the vast majority of the book’s opponents have never read it, and this seems highly plausible. If they had tried, they’d likely still be buried in the dictionary, scratching their heads.

  • Blood Over Bright Haven – M.L. Wang

    Blood Over Bright Haven – M.L. Wang

    headphones denoting an audiobook review

    Audiobook narrated by Moira Quirk

    ‘Do not fear the forces of darkness, for God, who promised us this land, is with us – and his will is light.’

    Religion is truly the opiate of the masses in this standalone dark academia fantasy from M.L. Wang – the first work of hers and possibly the first (originally) self-published novel that I’ve read. In fact, although Wang seems to have achieved widespread fame and success, Blood Over Bright Haven is the first of her novels to be picked up by a traditional publisher.

    Sciona is a dedicated graduate student who seeks to become the first ever female High Mage to be admitted to the Academy. You might call her obsessive, but of course that is what drives her to go where no woman has gone before.

    This is a world of distinct haves and have-nots: the colonists and the displaced. Sciona, a mage of unusual talent who has lived all her life in the city of Tiran, is firmly seated among the ‘haves’. Thomil, a refugee from a nomadic tribe beyond the magical barrier of the city, exists on the other side of the coin, having fled from the terrible Blight that ravages his homeland. Thomil’s people, The Kwen, are second-class citizens in Tiran — objects of self-congratulatory charity at best, and walking cockroaches at worst. The book alternates between the two viewpoints, although Thomil never quite feels as much a protagonist as Sciona.

    The combination of magic, academia and fervent religiosity in this story is an unusual one, especially as the magic here is more akin to a science than to traditional magic of the witches-on-broomsticks kind.

    Even within the Academy, the bounds of knowledge are set by religious doctrine based on the teachings of Tiran’s founders. The idea of the academic study of magic (which might as well be science as it runs the trains, turns on the lights and boils the kettle) being underpinned by hardline religious belief is initially jarring. But throughout history scientific understanding has often been constrained, either by religious dogma or by the prevailing theories, politics and groupthink of the day.

    As her studies take her in an unexpected direction, Sciona is forced to confront the unquestionable tenets of faith on which her beloved magic system is based. The sexism and discrimination Sciona faces, the way truth brushes up against convenience and doctrine, the comfortable city life enabled by a servant underclass, and worst of all, the truth she uncovers, all contain clear parallels with our own world — which is the book’s strength and also its weakness.

    When Sciona tries to raise the alarm, she finds that her fellow mages and citizens of Tiran have a strong incentive to keep their blinkers firmly on. If they can choose comfort here at the expense of destruction elsewhere, or destruction here to buy comfort elsewhere, the choice is tragically simple.

    The greatest success of Blood Over Bright Haven, the way it got under my skin, was the way in which the story reveals us to ourselves. Reading it, I had the same queasy feeling I had reading The Hunger Games, when the tributes from District 12 attend a fancy dinner party in the Capital at which vials of potion are provided to induce vomiting so the partygoers can fill themselves with food, then empty their stomachs and keep on eating. In this scene we feel the horror and disgust of the tributes, who have grown up one step from starvation, while the Capital takes their produce and taxes them to oblivion. And we also feel the disquiet of thinking that the potion sounds pretty good and recalling Christmas dinners where we’ve had to lie down clutching our overfull stomachs, while political and economic forces not unlike those in The Hunger Games ensure that others in faraway countries are experiencing hunger, malnutrition and preventable disease.

    In both books, the brilliance is in the just-subtle-enough: making us hate the oppressors for their cruelty and indulgence and selfishness, before the light shifts and the mirror is angled slightly to reflect the image back on ourselves.

    In other areas, though, Blood Over Bright Haven falls a bit flat. While we can in part forgive the heavy-handedness of the feminist messaging because Sciona is living in a world significantly less progressed than ours on gender equality, it does sometimes feel like the hammer is striking this gong a little too loudly.

    Similarly, there is lacking subtlety in some of the character portraits, interactions and dialogue – particularly the largely interchangeable ‘arrogant male scholars’ of the Academy. The conflict between 27-year-old Sciona and her colleagues feels more like schoolyard rivalry and bullying than the passive-aggressive subtle undermining and power games that haunt professional workplaces. And while I’m labouring on the complaints, I felt that the world, while compelling, was underdeveloped so that I never quite got a strong picture of it in my mind.

    So are there weaknesses? Yes, absolutely. Were they enough to slow my compulsive consumption of this book? They were not.

    My only major complaint (and it is quite major) with Blood Over Bright Haven was the ending. Endings are hard. So are beginnings and middles, of course, but so many excellent stories have been ruined by bad endings, there is clearly something singularly difficult about tying all the pieces together in a way that feels satisfying but not trite. This conclusion felt like a rushed attempt to write a certain kind of ending regardless of how it fit with the plot or the internal logic of the story. One comment I read online suggested that the ending didn’t work because the real-world problems highlighted in the book have no clear solutions.

    I think this view is valid, and may have been an area where the parallels with reality let the book down. Perhaps we seek refuge in stories because they simplify the bewildering complexity of life; they make the impossible achievable, let the underdogs win with statistical improbability, and persuade us that evil can be overcome – and indeed, easily identified.

    Disappointment aside, I binged this book, listening over consecutive days as I gardened, cleaned, walked and hung out washing. The narration by Moira Quirk is solid but a tad drone-y, with a tendency to overdo character voices which I think may have exacerbated some of the weaker dialogue. I did feel, as I often do, that it was a shame this book didn’t get one more draft to polish it into the gem it should have been. Nevertheless, it seeped into my bones and stayed with me after I finished (which didn’t take long).

    After a string of disappointments, I was thrilled to finally find a fantasy book I could sink my teeth into. Blood Over Bright Haven is not by any means perfect, but it’s (mostly) very good. I finished hungry for more: Wang’s previous book, Sword of Kaigen, is next up on my list.

  • Katabasis – R.F. Kuang

    Katabasis – R.F. Kuang

    ‘I feel sometimes it is so difficult to be conscious… and I think that anything would be easier. Anything at all.’

    ‘There’s time for that.’ Peter grasped her by the elbow; firm, but gentle. His voice was soft. ‘It’ll always be waiting, Law. But we’ve got things to do.’

    I knew the name R.F. Kuang from her 2023 novel Yellowface, which caused a big stir but felt too tapped into the political zeitgeist to pique my readerly interest. It was only recently that I learned her primary genre is actually fantasy. Having heard positive reviews about her novel Babel, I picked up Katabasis with interest when it ended up in my luggage as the result of a buy-one-get-one-half-price deal at the airport.

    It should also be said that Kuang is a ridiculously successful writer and person, who published her first novel at 22 and has now, at the ripe old age of 29, published six novels, with more in the pipeline, and earned herself a Nebula and a #1 spot on the bestseller list of the New York Times. Somehow, while becoming a prolific bestselling novelist, she has earned two Masters degrees and is on her way to a PhD at Yale. These facts alone might be enough to compel you to pick up one of her books, and from the beginning of Katabasis there can be no doubt that it’s written by a very clever author.

    Some combination of fate and algorithms led me into the dark academia genre, as it often has of late, with this tale of two graduate students on a jaunt through Hell to retrieve their recently deceased thesis advisor. Alice and Peter are fellow students in the Academy of Analytic Magick, specialising in linguistics and logic respectively, and it’s clear they have a history to be teased out.

    A journey through the underworld for the sake of a PhD sounds like a fun premise, and in fact journeying through Hell and back and sacrificing half a natural lifespan seems to function as a fitting metaphor for the process of obtaining this notoriously gruelling credential.

    Katabasis has a lot to say on the state of academia, the tendency of advisors to steal their students’ work, and the role of women within this system that infamously lags behind modern expectations of gender equality. Kuang’s biting, satirical commentary on the quirks of academia and elite universities is fun to read. There is some excellent and nuanced exploration of femininity, sexuality, sexualisation and what liberation means. Desiring to be desired, without desiring back, for instance, or desiring the freedom to flirt with one’s professor, free of the obligation to sleep with him. But the backstory about campus life (which accounts for about half the book) is told as highly narrated flashbacks, which gives it all an unfortunate sense of emotional remove.

    Even so, the university is where most of the interest lies, whereas the Underworld is, ironically, a bit of a drag. Kuang’s vision of Hell seems more closely modelled on the endless trek to Mordor than on the fiery pits of Mount Doom. Alice and Peter wander through the eight courts encountering a big wall, some violent bone-piles and mostly vague and uninteresting dead ‘Shades’, but nothing for the most part to cause much concern. In fact, there was so much of nothing in Hell that when real peril did come knocking, I was too surprised to process what was happening.

    There’s a lot of wit here: Hell in fact takes the form of a university campus, where Shades spend centuries in a purgatorial state, writing essays examining their sins in the vain hope of being granted reincarnation by unknown and unseen deities, putting off a permanent ending to existence. They fuss over minute details of philosophical argument, spending decades trying to get the wording just right, only to acknowledge that they have never seen anyone actually pass this test or receive any feedback on their attempt.

    Peppered throughout are constant references to philosophy thought experiments, paradoxes and logic puzzles, which play an important role in magick – which seems to mostly consist of drawing chalk circles and imbuing them with some combination of equations and language tricks to make unlikely things occur.

    While interesting on their own, these constant references to philosophy probably end up distracting from the story more than driving it. Yes, an obscure thought experiment combined with some magic chalk might be enough to get our heroes out of a sticky situation or two, but ultimately it feels more like hearing an annoying kid in class constantly bringing up Plato and Kant and Heidegger more to show off how much he knows than to add any value to the conversation.

    Because most of these concepts cannot be explained in a few sentences, you really have to be already familiar with them in order for the references to mean anything or their relevance to the story to make any sense – which rather narrows the pool of potential readers suited to this novel. And then, if you are familiar with the concepts, they’re not explored in enough detail or with any real novelty that would make them particularly interesting to read about other than nodding and going, ‘Ah, yes, Monty Hall – ah, yes, Pascal’s Wager. Mmm. Indeed.’

    Once, in school, I took part in a kind of ‘puzzle-a-thon’ where we had to solve maths and logic puzzles as a team against the clock. Reading Katabasis often felt not like participating in one of these, but like standing watching it through a window and having the puzzle-solving activity described to you.

    The story almost suffers more because of all the clever ideas contained within it than in spite of them. The characters never fully came to life for me; the stakes never seemed high enough; the whole concept of magick felt sort of irrelevant. Hell was a bit too sandy and monotonous and the whole thing had some of the feeling of all the late night pub conversations you had with your friends at uni, pulled and pummeled into the format of a novel. It was a much longer book than its contents justified and, while always an enjoyable reading session, ended up being a bit of a grind to get through.

    I guess not all magick has that magical feeling, and Hell might just be a place where nothing ever happens. (But yes, I will still be putting Babel on my reading list. And maybe The Poppy War Trilogy, too…)

  • Once There Were Wolves – Charlotte McConaghy

    Once There Were Wolves – Charlotte McConaghy

    ‘Death gets under your skin, you carry it with you. People can sense that.’

    This was a Christmas book from my father-in-law, who usually chooses well. This book was a particularly good choice for me given the subject of rewilding that forms the basis for the story. In fact, last year I visited the Dundreggan Rewilding Centre in Scotland, which gets a mention in the book, and the Cairngorms, where the story takes place, and will happily chew anyone’s ear off about nature, conservation and rewilding.

    The second offering from Australian author Charlotte McConaghy, the story follows Inti, an Australian wolf biologist leading a pilot project to reintroduce wolves to the Scottish highlands as part of a rewilding effort to naturally control deer populations and restore the balance of the forest ecosystem.

    By some coincidence, this was the third book I read this year dealing with rewilding in the UK. The other two were both non-fiction books that approached the subject from opposing perspectives. The exploration of the topic in a fictional setting was a fascinating blend of the two, because of course nothing is ever so simple in the land of stories (which is to say real life).

    Inti is more an animal-person than a person-person – prickly, brusque, call-a-spade-a-spade – and we follow her as she ricochets around this small rural Scottish town raising eyebrows and making enemies among the local farming population who see the wolves as a threat to their livelihoods and maybe even their lives.

    McConaghy is undoubtedly a talented writer and Once There Were Wolves had more than enough plot and intrigue to keep me engaged – almost too much plot and intrigue, perhaps.

    I read this as a side-quest halfway through Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses after one more late-night reading session in which I found my eyes and my brain simply unable to follow the complex, chaotic magic-realist world. I found myself picking up this book four times out of five over that one until I’d finished it (I’m still only two-thirds through The Satanic Verses). Who among us hasn’t succumbed to the allure of a highly readable book with an intriguing yet simple plot over an undeniably better book that takes up much more brain power?

    Yet it would be deeply unfair to paint this as a mindless page-turner. There’s some beautiful writing and thoughtful consideration of her topics and themes. There is much darkness, which is a big part of its eerie appeal. The wolves aren’t the only danger lurking in this place. Violence is a consistent theme and McConaghy is an expert at foreshadowing and revealing just the right amount at just the right time to keep me absorbed and turning the pages.

    As with a lot of the new Australian fiction I read, I felt that in parts a talented writer was let down by inadequate editing. Parts of the novel read like a near-finished draft to me. Side characters often felt like cut-outs and lengthy passages of expositional dialogue fell flat. I felt there were scenes that should have been summaries and summaries that should have been scenes. I was surprised to learn that McConaghy actually studied screenwriting, especially as I thought the descriptive prose was the strongest aspect of the writing and the dialogue the weakest.

    I wanted more Scottishness from the book, more culture clash, more sense of the place as somewhere Inti didn’t fully understand. It was easy to forget where we were, though the rural highlands setting and Inti as an outsider had promise to be one of the book’s draws.

    I wanted less explanation of rewilding and forest ecology for the reader. While the uninitiated would be going in cold and may appreciate some of this, readers who already understand the basic concepts and arguments will probably skim these passages as I did and wish the author had found a niftier, subtler way to ‘educate’ the reader on the topic as required without making her characters give each other the 101 in awkward monologues.

    Still, sometimes I worry that studying the craft of writing has made me pick things apart that once I would have breezed over. I just came away with the sense that this was a great book that deserved to be a little better.

    As the plot develops it twists and turns, accelerating towards the finish so fast you’ve barely turned a corner before the next curve hits, taking you in another direction. By the end I wasn’t entirely sure what I felt about the resolution and the many revelations, but I appreciated the wild ride. As to whether I’d read another book by this author, once I sink into the first page, I’m guessing I won’t be able to help myself.

    Responses

    1. fullytreefa35a150bc Avatar
      fullytreefa35a150bc

      Hear hear! What are Australian editors doing? Sometimes it’s like the book doesn’t go through that process at all.

      LOVE the photo with Cinna. What a treat. Please don’t rewild Cinna in Scotland!

      Interesting pick up that the author was a screenwriter. Poor dialogue in these types of books is very disappointing. By ‘this type of book’ I mean 300 page long – I am guessing at the length here – modern Australian novels that refuse subtlety and rely on dialogue.

      I’ll likely wait for the ABC miniseries for this one based on your review. Her new book has been getting good reviews so hopefully she’s improved.

      Happy Easter!

      Ps Fatherinlaw book presents are always fun.

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      1. scrthomson Avatar
        scrthomson

        Yes, I suspect it’s all about economics. Having had a couple of stabs at writing novels, I can say it’s a ridiculously difficult endeavour and even books with good bones likely often need a LOT of editing to reach their true potential. I’m guessing that there just isn’t the money in the Australian industry to give the amount of time and attention that’s really needed to the editing process. It’s always a shame when you read a good book that just needed a bit of polishing, but having said that I still found this a really engaging read overall. Oh, and I think Cinna would love to be rewilded in the highlands for a few hours – until she feels like coming back to curl up on her queen bed.

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        1. fullytreefa35a150bc Avatar
          fullytreefa35a150bc

          Can the authors not edit their own work? I would have thought part of writing multiple drafts would be to address structural issues like dialogue. Surely the author knows it is a problem, as good authors generally should be good readers too.

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    2. scrthomson Avatar
      scrthomson

      For sure there would be multiple drafts but as the author sometimes you’re too close to the work to see clearly what is and isn’t working well. I wonder if someone trained as a screenwriter just has a higher tolerance for expositional dialogue as well, because in film you don’t have too many other tools available – although you still need to figure out how to be somewhat subtle about it.

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