Book Review | City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett

Revenge. It’s something Sigrud je Harkvaldsson is very, very good at. Maybe the only thing. 

So when he learns that his oldest friend and ally, former Prime Minister Shara Komayd, has been assassinated, he knows exactly what to do—and that no mortal force can stop him from meting out the suffering Shara’s killers deserve. 

Yet as Sigrud pursues his quarry with his customary terrifying efficiency, he begins to fear that this battle is an unwinnable one. Because discovering the truth behind Shara’s death will require him to take up arms in a secret, decades-long war, face down an angry young god, and unravel the last mysteries of Bulikov, the city of miracles itself. And—perhaps most daunting of all—finally face the truth about his own cursed existence.

***

The Divine Cities series comes full circle in City of Miracles, a positively action-packed fantasy about getting your own back. But revenge is not just what the hardy anti-hero at its heart is after: revenge is also what its both figuratively and literally tortured villain is interested in.

This child of the night, who shall not be named because to identify him is to invite his wickedness in, is not a divinity like the other antagonists of Robert Jackson Bennett's incomparable narrative—at least, not quite. He's really just an angsty adolescent; a "selfish kid who thinks his misfortunes are bigger than everyone else's" and has decided to take his frustrations out on everyone around him.

Unfortunately for everyone around him, this angsty adolescent just so happens to be the spawn of a few fallen gods. To wit, he has a domain—the dark—and some of his mother and father's magic. City of Miracles begins with him flexing his miraculous muscles: by outfitting an assassin to slaughter the former Prime Minister—and the first of this spectacular saga's protagonists—Ashara Komayd.

When news of Shara's shocking death reaches a remote logging range beyond Bulikov, every man around the campfire is taken aback, but only one among them takes it personally. He is City of Miracles' new central perspective, and whilst he hasn't played this role before, he's a figure folks who've followed this fiction will be intimately familiar with; a fan-favourite character, in fact, who has flitted around its fringes but never before been at its fore. That's right, readers: the focus of Bennett's barnstorming finale is finally on Shara's right-hand man, the Dreyling she saved who has saved her so often since. Good to see you again, Sigrud!

Following the death of his daughter in City of Blades, not to mention the mindless massacre that followed, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson has been in exile, none too patiently awaiting the day when Shara can at last bring him back into action. But with his dearest friend so dramatically departed, what does he have left to live for? Nothing, initially, but a need to make her murderer pay.

He does so summarily, racking up a rather improbable body count in the process. As a member of the supporting cast who crosses his fiery path puts it: "You've lost none of your subtlety, Sigrud."

But whilst raining hell on everyone who had a hand or even a hair in Shara's assassination, our daring Dreyling learns about a scheme that gives him a reason to keep on keeping on. In short, "someone is targeting Shara's adopted daughter" Tatyana, and having failed to save his last loved one, the least he can do, he reasons, is ensure that this small part of her legacy lives on.

To do what needs doing, he has to go to Ghaladesh. "Ghaladesh, the capital of Saypur, the richest, most well-protected city in the world. The place with perhaps the most security in the civilised nations—and thus the place that he, a fugitive from Saypur's justice, is most likely to be caught, imprisoned, tortured, and possibly—or probably—executed."

Book Review | Revenger by Alastair Reynolds

The galaxy has seen great empires rise and fall. Planets have shattered and been remade. Amongst the ruins of alien civilisations, building our own from the rubble, humanity still thrives. And there are vast fortunes to be made, if you know where to find them...

Captain Rackamore and his crew do. It's their business to find the tiny, enigmatic worlds which have been hidden away, booby-trapped, surrounded with layers of protection—and to crack them open for the ancient relics and barely-remembered technologies inside. But while they ply their risky trade with integrity, not everyone is so scrupulous.

Adrana and Fura Ness are the newest members of Rackamore's crew, signed on to save their family from bankruptcy. Only Rackamore has enemies, and there might be more waiting for them in space than adventure and fortune: the fabled and feared Bosa Sennen in particular.

Revenger is a science fiction adventure story set in the rubble of our solar system in the dark, distant future—a tale of space pirates, buried treasure and phantom weapons, of unspeakable hazards and single-minded heroism... and of vengeance.

***

Fresh off of finishing the magnificently ambitious Poseidon's Children trilogy and collaborating with fellow science fiction superstar Stephen Baxter on the rather marvellous Medusa Chronicles, Alastair Reynolds returns with a stirring story about a pair of sisters who enlist on a spaceship and set about looting the rubble of a ruined universe. Featuring dollops of derring-do and not a few space battles too, Revenger might be Reynold's most accessible solo effort yet, but there's no dearth of darkness in this light-looking bite of a book.

The universe has seen better days, I dare say. Aeons on from the forging, so many civilisations have risen and fallen that the current population of the Congregation live every day as if it's apt to be their last. Piracy is inevitably prevalent, but rather than stealing from one another, most pirates plunder the remnants of ancient races from the hundreds of thousands of dead worlds distributed in the distance.

Most pirates, but not all. Not Bosa Sennen, who has carved out a terrible legend for herself in the blood and the bodies of those unfortunate enough to have found themselves near the nightmarish Nightjammer: a sneaky little spaceship with black sails, according to the tales, the better to board you before you know it.

Pol Rackamore is one of the scant few souls to have come face to face with Bosa Sennen and survived, though not without paying a perilous price: the loss of his dear daughter. He'll see her again before Revenger is at an end, however—as will Adrana and Arafura Ness, the well-to-do young women at the centre of Reynolds' enticing text.

When said sisters, so long under the thumb of their failed businessman of a father, hear that Captain Rack is hiring, they jump at the chance to crew the Monetta's Mourn for a couple of months. They hope to "go out, just for a while [...] then come back home, and share what we've made." (p.15) Needless to say, dear daddy doesn't agree, but then, he can't stop them, can he?

Book Review | Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa

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A woman goes into a bakery to buy a strawberry cream tart. The place is immaculate but there is no one serving so she waits. Another customer comes in. The woman tells the new arrival that she is buying her son a treat for his birthday. Every year she buys him his favourite cake; even though he died in an accident when he was six years old.

From this beginning Yoko Ogawa weaves a dark and beautiful narrative that pulls together a seemingly disconnected cast of characters. In the tradition of classical Japanese poetic collections, the stories in Revenge are linked through recurring images and motifs, as each story follows on from the one before while simultaneously introducing new characters and themes. Filled with breathtaking images, Ogawa provides us with a slice of life that is resplendent in its chaos, enthralling in its passion and chilling in its cruelty.

***

Consume them independently at your own peril, but taken together, the eleven dark tales contained in Revenge by Yoko Ogawa make for a single, delectable dish. One best served cold, of course.

Behold the beauty of the quote below. Know, though, that there's something very wrong with this picture:

"It was a beautiful Sunday. The sky was a cloudless dome of sunlight. Out on the square, leaves fluttered in a gentle breeze along the pavement. Everything seemed to glimmer with a faint luminescence: the roof of the ice-cream stand, the faucet on the drinking fountain, the eyes of a stray cat, even the base of the clock tower covered with pigeon droppings. 

"Families and tourists strolled through the square, enjoying the weekend. Squeaky sounds could be heard from a man off in the corner, who was twisting balloon animals. A circle of children watched him, entranced. Nearby, a woman sat on a bench knitting. Somewhere a horn sounded. A flock of pigeons burst into the air, and startled a baby who began to cry. The mother hurried over to gather the child in her arms. 

You could gaze at this perfect picture all day—an afternoon bathed in light and comfort—and perhaps never notice a single detail out of place, or missing." (pp.1-2)

So begins Stephen Snyder's sublime translation of Yoko Ogawa's 1998 short story collection, originally published in Japan as Kamoku na shigai, Midara na tomurai, and "Afternoon at the Bakery" is an ideal opener. It isn't about much at all, if the truth be told—an anonymous woman reminiscing about her son whilst waiting in a bakery to buy the strawberry shortcake she always orders on the anniversary of his untimely and doubly discomfiting death—yet this exacting introduction to the motifs and ideas which recur throughout Revenge does a great deal to prime readers for the unsettling efforts ahead.

"Fruit Juice" follows. It chronicles the fleeting first meeting of a distant father and daughter from a characteristically uncertain external perspective. Out of the blue—they're certainly not friends or anything—the daughter invites our narrator, whom Ogawa once more disdains to name, to accompany her to a French restaurant for this excruciating reunion. Afterwards, they hang out near an abandoned post office inexplicably stuffed full of fruit. Kiwis, even!

This is the first of several symbolic threads which run the length of Revenge, though the story it arises in is again fairly forgettable in itself. However the next narrative—namely "Old Mrs. J"—is effective even absent the chilling context of the stories surrounding it. Old Mrs. J is the landlady of a quiet apartment surrounded by gorgeous orchards, and it should come a little surprise to you that the author only allows us to glimpse her from a distance.

(That is to say the author of "Old Mrs. J," not the author who moves into this beautiful building—recommended to her, incidentally, by the editor of an arts and crafts magazine who dies at the outset of the subsequent story—and observes her attending her kiwis.)

Old Mrs. J also grows carrots, if you can credit it: carrots which to a one take the shape of "amputated [human] hands with malignant tumors, dangling in front of us, still warm from the earth." (p.36) Soon enough a reporter is dispatched to the apartment to write an article about these vile vegetables, and in the aftermath of its publication an appropriately depraved discovery is made, the repercussions of which ripple through the remainder of Revenge.

Oh, and the photo accompanying the aforementioned reporter's story proves pivotal to the narrator of a later tale... a narrator who may have appeared in a deceptively incidental role in Revenge already.

As one character wisely advises, "Even if something seems pointless at the time, you mustn't take it lightly. You'll see how useful it is later on. Nothing you study will ever turn out to be useless. That's the way the world is." (p.108)

To wit, almost everything is connected in this incredible collection, to the point that those things which are not seem far stranger for their isolation. As indicated, occasional people reappear, seemingly at random, yet rarely compared to the images the author summons up in one narrative after another. Some of said are sumptuous, others appear absurd; all are in service of the same resounding result, for Ogawa's tendency to delight is adequately matched by her impulse to disgust. See for example the stories at the dark heart of this awesome volume: "Sewing for the Heart" and "Welcome to the Museum of Torture."

Indeed, in a sense, reading Revenge is not dissimilar to torture of a sort.

"For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls, drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead—indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can't sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed." (pp.93-94)

This device describes the overall impact of Revenge: a sterling ensemble of short stories about darkness, death and depression, by way of love, loss and, at the last, blinding new life. As yet another of Ogawa's arrayed narrators notes, "The prose was unremarkable, as were the plot and characters, but there was an icy undercurrent running under her words, and I found myself wanting to plunge into it again and again." (p.148) You should, too.

Though only a few of the stories collected in Revenge impress as individual entities, they gain far greater power and persuasiveness when read together, and recollected afterwards as a single, shocking thing.

It's taken 15 years for the first of Yoko Ogawa's uncanny collections to be rendered into exquisite English, and obviously this is no overnight process. I wouldn't want to lose the lens of Stephen Snyder, either. Be that as it may, I hope you'll join me in wishing that we see subsequent efforts from the rising international star... somewhat sooner.

***

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales
by Yoko Ogawa

UK Publication: January 2013, Harvill Secker

US Publication: January 2013, Picador

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

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