Book Review | Thin Air by Michelle Paver

The Himalayas, 1935.

Kangchenjunga. Third-highest peak on earth. Greatest killer of them all.

Five Englishmen set off from Darjeeling, determined to conquer the sacred summit. But courage can only take them so far—and the mountain is not their only foe.

As the wind dies, the dread grows. Mountain sickness. The horrors of extreme altitude. A past that will not stay buried.

And sometimes, the truth does not set you free.

***

It was on the back of the award-winning, six-part Chronicles of Ancient Darkness that Michelle Paver put out Dark Matter. A ghost story inspired by her lifelong love of the Arctic, it attracted flattering comparisons to the work of such giants of the genre as M. R. James and Susan Hill, and became, before long, a bona fide bestseller.

That the author has now turned her hand to another tale in the same vise-like vein can hardly be seen as surprising; what can is the fact that it's taken her six years and another complete children's series, namely the Gods and Warriors novels. But given the strength of Thin Air, a short, stirring and altogether masterful narrative set on the sheer slopes of the world's third-highest hill, if it takes another decade for Paver to perfect its successor, that's a decade I'll be willing to wait.

It's 1935, and mountaineering has the nation by the nape. Our protagonist Stephen Pearce has always been a keen climber, but he certainly wasn't supposed to be conquering Kangchenjunga this spring. He was meant to be getting married and starting a family, but something about the life he could see stretched out ahead of him—and the death, yes—didn't feel quite right, so when his big brother Kits basically begged him to follow in the footsteps of Edmund Lyell on an expedition up one of the Himalaya's highest peaks, Stephen said yes.

Yet Kits' request wasn't exactly selfless. He needed a medic for the expedition to go ahead, and if securing one meant upending his younger sibling's entire existence, then that was a price Kits was only too happy to pay to win the day. As Stephen reasons:

I know my brother. A couple of years ago, someone came upon Irvine's ice axe on Everest's north-west ridge, and Kits sulked for weeks. Why wasn't he the one to find it and get all the glory? That's what he's after now: relics of the Lyell Expedition; and a chance to complete what the great man began, by being the first in the world to conquer an eight thousand-metre peak—with the added lustre of planting the Union Jack on the summit, and beating the bloody Germans. (p.19)

Brothers they may be, but Stephen and Kits haven't always—or even often—gotten on, and for all that they're on their best behaviour at the outset of the trek, as the weather closes in and things threaten to get grim, the tension between them fairly flares.

Book Review | Bats of the Republic by Zachary Thomas Dodson

Bats of the Republic is an illuminated novel of adventure, featuring hand-drawn maps and natural history illustrations, subversive pamphlets and science-fictional diagrams, and even a nineteenth-century novel-within-a-novel—an intrigue wrapped in innovative design.

In 1843, fragile naturalist Zadock Thomas must leave his beloved in Chicago to deliver a secret letter to an infamous general on the front lines of the war over Texas. The fate of the volatile republic, along with Zadock’s future, depends on his mission. When a cloud of bats leads him off the trail, he happens upon something impossible...

Three hundred years later, the world has collapsed and the remnants of humanity cling to a strange society of paranoia. Zeke Thomas has inherited a sealed envelope from his grandfather, an esteemed senator. When that letter goes missing, Zeke engages a fomenting rebellion that could free him—if it doesn’t destroy his relationship, his family legacy, and the entire republic first.

As their stories overlap and history itself begins to unravel, a war in time erupts between a lost civilization, a forgotten future, and the chaos of the wild. Bats of the Republic is a masterful novel of adventure and science fiction, of elliptical history and dystopian struggle, and, at its riveting core, of love.

***

In a world where the Powers That Be have deemed any and all secrets illegal, Zeke Thomas must go against the flow he's always followed when he inherits a sealed envelope containing information which could sink the system that's kept humanity alive since the Collapse.

Meanwhile, in the year 1843, Zeke's time-removed relative, Zadock, has to leave his one true love languishing in her sickbed to deliver a highly sensitive letter to a legendary general embedded deep in the disputed territory of Texas.

An incredibly presented "illuminated novel" which, like last year's S., blends form and function with history and mystery to realise a reading experience that amazes from the first page, Bats of the Republic comes from the co-founder of a small press specialising in "strange and beautiful fiction and nonfiction" with a sideline in detail-oriented design, so the unusual shape Zachary Thomas Dodson's debut takes shouldn't be such a surprise.

And yet, the metatextual elements that make this reflexive narrative remarkable are so utterly abundant that they create a state of fantastic stupefaction. In advance of the actual start of the story, we're treated to an exquisite endpaper mosaic, two discrete family trees, a meticulous map charting Zadock's ill-fated flight, a selection of handwritten letters, the first of a few newspaper clippings, and the title page of a whole other novel, namely The City-State by E. Anderson—all of which is as good as guaranteed to make one go um. 

And Bats of the Republic has hardly even begun!

Book Review | Little Sister Death by William Gay

David Binder is a young, successful writer living in Chicago and suffering from writer’s block. He stares at the blank page, and the blank page stares back—until inspiration strikes in the form of a ghost story that captivated him as a child.

With his pregnant wife and young daughter in tow, he sets out to explore the myth of Virginia Beale, Faery Queen of the Haunted Dell. But as his investigation takes him deeper and deeper into the legacy of blood and violence that casts its shadow over the old Beale farm, Binder finds himself obsessed with a force that’s as wicked as it is seductive.

A stirring literary rendition of Tennessee’s famed Curse of the Bell Witch, Little Sister Death skilfully toes the line between Southern Gothic and horror, and further cements William Gay’s legacy as not only one of the South’s finest writers, but among the best that American literature has to offer.

***

As his friend Tom Franklin notes in the intimate introduction with which Little Sister Death begins, the late, great William Gay's lost horror novel "is the most metafictional thing [he] ever wrote—it's about a writer, obsessed with a haunting, who moves his family to the site" (p.xvii) of said unearthly events.

Gay, for his part, didn't go quite as far as that, but he had "long been fascinated with the Bell Witch phenomenon in Tennessee, and even had his own encounter with, perhaps, an echo of the Bell Witch herself." (pp.xvi-xvii) That true tale acts at a capstone on the unsettling story at the centre of Little Sister Death, but there's a goodly amount of truth, too, in the several hundred posthumously published pages preceding the author's authentic account of his own eerie experience.

Like William Gay, whose fearsome first novel won the 1989 James A. Michener Memorial Prize, the debut of Little Sister Death's central character David Binder is something of a success. Not necessarily commercially—it's no bestseller—but it wins enough awards to keep Binder and his kin in business.

Sadly, the critically acclaimed young author's second novel does not cement his literary legacy in the way Provinces of Night did in Gay's case. Instead, it's rejected, and rather than redrafting the manuscript, a briefly defeated Binder takes his agent's advice to "write a genre novel [...] something we can sell to the paperback house" (p.22) to heart. A trip to his local bookstore later, he has his subject: the Beale Haunting—Gay's thinly veiled rendition of the so-called Curse of the Bell Witch, which, for what it's worth, The Blair Witch Project is believed to have been based on.

Book Review | The Just City by Jo Walton

Created as an experiment by the time-traveling goddess Pallas Athene, the Just City is a planned community, populated by over ten thousand children and a few hundred adult teachers from all eras of history, along with some handy robots from the far human future—all set down together on a Mediterranean island in the distant past.

They come from all eras of history. The student Simmea, born an Egyptian farmer's daughter sometime between 500 and 1000 A.D, is a brilliant child, eager for knowledge, ready to strive to be her best self. The teacher Maia was once Ethel, a young Victorian lady of much learning and few prospects, who prayed to Pallas Athene in an unguarded moment during a trip to Rome—and, in an instant, found herself in the Just City with grey-eyed Athene standing unmistakably before her.

Meanwhile, Athene's brother Apollo—stunned by the realisation that there are things mortals understand better than he does—has arranged to live a human life, and has come to the City as one of the children. He knows his true identity, and conceals it from his peers. For this lifetime, he is prone to all the troubles of being human.

Then, a few years in, Sokrates arrives—the same Sokrates recorded by Plato himself—to ask all the troublesome questions you would expect. What happens next is a tale only the brilliant Jo Walton could tell—a story of gods and humans, and the surprising things they have to learn from one another.

***

There's a touch of time travel in The Just City, and a rabble of robots that may well be self-aware, but please, don't read Jo Walton's thoughtful new novel expecting an exhilarating future history, or an account of the aggressive ascent of artificial intelligence. Read it as a roadmap, though, and this book may well make you a better person.

A restrained, if regrettably rapey fable with a focus on exposing the problems with philosophy when it's applied as opposed to lightly outlined, The Just City takes as its basis a certain social experiment proposed by Plato:

The Republic is about Plato's ideas of justice—not in terms of criminal law, but rather how to maximise happiness by living a life that is just both internally and externally. He talks about both a city and a soul, comparing the two, setting out his idea of both human nature and how people should live, with the soul a microcosm of the city. His ideal city, as with the ideal soul, balanced the three parts of human nature: reason, passion, and appetites. By arranging the city justly, it would also maximise justice within the souls of the inhabitants. (p.32)

That's the idea, at least. Alas, in reality, justice is far harder to achieve than the great Greek believed.

When a nymph named Daphne opts to be turned into a tree rather than share in eros with the god Apollo, said son of Zeus turns to Athene, the goddess of knowledge, to find out why the woman went to such lengths to avoid his affections. By way of explanation, Athene invites Apollo to participate in a realisation of the Republic. He takes her up on her offer by taking on the form of a mortal boy called Pytheas: one of ten thousand ten-year-olds saved, as their new masters would have it, from a life lacking liberty.

Simmea comes to the just city Athene teases into being with hope in her heart—hope that here, by learning to live according to Plato's principles, she can be her best self. She and Pytheas soon form a fast friendship; a friendship Kebes, who met Simmea at the slave market on the day their contracts were bought, and thinks Pytheas preternatural, simply cannot countenance.

But wait, what's this? Jealousy in the just city, where no one person is to possess, or be possessive of, another? "The ship was barely out of the harbour [and] already the seeds of rebellion were growing." (p.26)

Guest Post | "Stranger Than Fiction" by Sarah Pinborough

I am not a natural researcher when it comes to writing fiction. I find it slows the act of storytelling down—I like to get into a flow with the words and pausing to check facts can be jarring. I love reading historical fiction but I vowed to myself I would never write it. Then I came across the Thames Torso murders, and having read Dan Simmons' The Terror [doesn't get better, does it? — Ed] I felt inspired to give writing a blend of fact and fiction ago. 

I took advice from several friends who've written historical fiction and their universal top tip—which I've since passed on—is not to get bogged down in trying to research everything before you start. You can get lost in it, and by the time you come to need a small piece of information, like for example, what a middle-class late-Victorian family might have for dinner, you've forgotten what your research told you. 

Also, you can get caught up in tiny details and miss big things. While writing Mayhem I very nearly missed the Dockers' Strike of 1889, and given that some of my action takes place in the wharves, that could have been disastrous. When planning Murder the first thing I did was a quick search on major events that happen during each year of the book. Although Murder is quite a claustrophobic story of paranoia, Queen Victoria's diamond Jubilee took place during one of the years of the story. It was a huge nationwide celebration and to not feature it would have damaged the authenticity of the narrative.

Writing a novel set in Victorian London can also be a double-edged sword in that we each have an image of the era in our heads from various film and television adaptations of famous novels. In some respects, that's great in that you don't have to set up the entire world for the reader, but the danger is that your description can become generic. Luckily, if you dig around on the internet (the saviour of the modern writer) you can find some great contemporary accounts of various parts of the city written by journalists and diarists of the time which help with small details and getting the atmosphere of the place right.

Newspaper archives are also great for understanding the feel of the era. I subscribe to the Times Archive (all the newspaper articles in both Mayhem and Murder are authentic), and I searched for murders that made the papers of the day and investigations that both Dr Thomas Bond and Henry Moore were involved in (other than the most famous, the Jack the Ripper case) to use as the backdrop to events in Murder.

When I'd found those I also read other sections of the newspapers to try and get into the mentality of the period—the social issues, the politics etc. in order to make my characters' behaviours more realistic. It's surprising how similar in many ways we are to those who lived at the turn of the twentieth century. We both exist in fast-changing times with huge divisions between the rich and poor and the problems that come with that.

Using real people and events from history creates its own problems when weaving a story around them but I've thoroughly enjoyed it. There's a magic in having written a book about people who you come to think of as 'your' characters and then searching old newspaper reports and learning more and more about their fascinating lives. I love writing fiction, but if there's one thing I've learned from writing these novels, it's that there is sometimes nothing stranger than fact.

Book Review | Balfour and Meriwether in the Incident of the Harrowmoor Dogs by Daniel Abraham

When a private envoy of the queen and member of Lord Carmichael's discreet service goes missing, Balfour and Meriwether are asked to look into the affair. They will find a labyrinth of dreams, horrors risen from hell, prophecy, sexual perversion, and an abandoned farmhouse on the moors outside Harrowmoor Sanitarium.

The earth itself will bare its secrets and the Empire itself will tremble in the face of the hidden dangers they discover, but the greatest peril is the one they have brought with them...

***

In recent years, the adventures of Balfour and Meriwether have been a rare yet redolent pleasure. Daniel Abraham's dashing duo have appeared in only two tales to date — 'The Emperor's Vengeance' and 'The Vampire of Kabul' — both of which I reread this week, the better to be ready to review what is certainly their best and most complex quest yet.

I really needn't have — happily, no prior knowledge is required by The Incident of the Harrowmoor Dogs — though it was a pleasure to immerse myself again in said secret histories, and this novella's revelatory resolution did prove particularly potent on the back of those stories.

Again per the precedent set by its predecessors, there is the sense that The Incident of the Harrowmoor Dogs is but an episode in the larger canon of Balfour and Meriwether's collaborative careers as agents of Queen and country. Here, however, the episode is essentially supersized; to wit, Abraham is able to expand his narrative and develop his characters in a fairly fascinating fashion.

Book Review | The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

For seventy years they guarded the British Empire. Oblivion and Fogg, inseparable friends, bound together by a shared fate. Until one night in Berlin, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and a secret that tore them apart.

But there must always be an account... and the past has a habit of catching up to the present.

Now, recalled to the Retirement Bureau from which no one can retire, Fogg and Oblivion must face up to a past of terrible war and unacknowledged heroism — a life of dusty corridors and secret rooms, of furtive meetings and blood-stained fields — to answer one last, impossible question: what makes a hero?

***

Lavie Tidhar has a theory about superheroes. About what they are and what they represent; about where they come from and why we hardly ever see any British ones. These are questions the author asks and answers on various occasions over the course of his indescribably demanding if accordingly rewarding new novel, though Tidhar's particular position is best encapsulated by the testimony given by a fictionalised version of Joseph Shuster — the co-creator of Superman alongside Jerry Siegel, who also appears — during the trial of Dr. Vomacht, the Nazi scientist whose cavalier prodding of probability resulted in The Violent Century's so-called Übermenschen.

Note that the following quote comes from near the end of the novel, but know, moreover, that The Violent Century plays so fast and loose with clarity and linearity that this is as fitting a fashion as any I can imagine to start talking about a book so bleak and mysterious that any resulting discussion of it is destined to be difficult.

— I specialise in... in a form of dynamic portraiture. [...] Of the changed. Of Beyond-Men. And women. Of... for lack of a better word, Shuster says, I like to think my work focuses on heroes.

— But what's a hero? the counsellor says, again.

— It seems to me, Shuster says, it seems to me... you must understand, I think, yes, you need to first understand what it means to be a Jew.

— I think I have some experience in that, the counsellor for the defence says drily — which draws a few laughs from the audience. On the stand, Schuster coughs. His eyes, myopic behind the glasses, assume a dreamy look. Those of us who came out of that war, he says. And before that. From pogroms and persecution and to the New World. To a different kind of persecution, perhaps. But also hope. Our dreams of heroes come from that, I think. Our American heroes are the wish-fulfilment of immigrants, dazzled by the brashness and the colour of this new world, by its sheer size. We needed larger-than-life heroes, masked heroes to show us that they were the fantasy within each and every one of us. The Vomacht wave did not make them, it released them. Our shared hallucination, our faith. Our faith in heroes. This is why you see our American heroes but never their British counterpart. Our is the rise of Empire, theirs is the deline. Our seek the limelight, while theirs skulk in shadows. (pp.246-247)

In his afterword, the British and World Fantasy Award-winning author admits to modelling this and several of the surrounding sequences on the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Final Solution, for war crimes: a tack which is typical of the way Tidhar reconfigures our own horrible history into a darkly fascinating narrative as ghastly as it is fantastical.

In the beginning, in any event, a glimpse of the end: namely the framing narrative by way of which we learn of the events of The Violent Century. In The Hole in the Wall, "a London pub, hidden under the railway arches" (p.8) of the South Bank, a man known only as Oblivion confronts a fellow called Fogg, insisting that they go together to meet the Old Man, the better to clear a couple of things up. "It's just routine," (p.14) one promises the other, but Fogg knows this is not so. He has his secrets, and he will give anything to keep them.

Thus they travel together to the Farm, where Fogg is interrogated at length by the Old Man, who has no other name. He's in charge, as he has ever been, indeed, of the Bureau for Superannuated Affairs, or the Retirement Service, if you will, which long ago promised Fogg and Oblivion — among a number of others we'll meet in a moment — the opportunity "to serve. To be something. Each of you unique. Every boy's secret dream." (p.64) Be that as it may, these dreams, as we'll see, are more like nightmares for most of the changed.

Following the probability wave which made them, or rather remade them, our heroes, such as they are, were taken to the selfsame farm where the framing conversation takes place in the present day, and trained. "It is a place in which the laws of what is real seem suspended, for just a moment. It was beautiful in the daytime, the bright primary colours of blue sky and yellow sun and green grass and white stone. At night it is more of a chiaroscuro, the play of light and shade." (p.71) There, then, under the guidance of a drill instructor and a doctor — none other than Alan Turing — the changed who hail from the UK learn, little by little, to control their abilities.

And so on a lazy sunny afternoon, the Lost Boys and Girls of Never Never Land. Oblivion, Fogg, Spit, Tank, Mr Blur and Mrs Tinkle. Some we know well, some, less well. it is only the nature of things. There are others, too, though many will die in the coming war and other wars and others still are vanished, missing, location unknown: perhaps gone to their own implausible palaces of ice or bat-filled caved, hidden volcanic peaks on jungle-covered South Sea Island, forbidding chrome-and-metal skyscrapers or remote Gothic castles. Or perhaps more prosaically a cottage in Wales. The records are sealed and obscured. (p.77)

This is the calm before the storm, of course. War is coming, and from the 1940s on, it does not seem to stop. Tirelessly, Tidhar takes us through World War II, Vietnam, the Cold War and Afghanistan. But "there was only ever one war to matter, to Oblivion, to the Red Sickle, to all of them. [...] Everything else is a shadow of that war." (p.248)

A shame, then, that so much of The Violent Century is devoted to these episodic digressions. As readers, we gain little insight from said scenes, except to see our secret service set against the superheroes of other countries, from the picture-perfect poster boys who represent the United States to the long-suffering symbols of the USSR and so on. This juxtaposition certainly serves to emphasise our impression of Great Britain's Übermenschen as shady sorts, though it adds little to the either the overall narrative or the larger arcs described by our central characters.

Eventually, we do get back to what matters — the making and breaking of Fogg and Oblivion's friendship by the machinations of the Old Man — but other difficulties persist, first and foremost Tidhar's peculiar prose, moulded in the mode of Jeff VanderMeer's in Finch. The short, sharp sentences; the minimalist exposition; everything up to and including the dialogue is odd. "Words come out haltingly. Like he's forgotten speech." (p.35) It takes a lot of getting used to; progress through the book is so forth slow, leading to problems with pacing that the story's aforementioned sidesteps only exacerbate.

The Violent Century's fractured narrative does, however, have a heart, and when the author sets his sights on this, beauty both meets and beats the beast:

Through a Latin Quarter alive with revellers; Paris, City of Love, City of Lights, transforms into a magical place with one kiss, a Sleeping Beauty awakening, awash with light and love. Night transforms it into a carnival. Paris! Through open doors the smells of cooking waft out. [...] By a bakery, men queue patiently in their suits and their hats for baguette and demi-baguette; nearby they sell jambons, olives, brie and camembert; an old woman sells flowers on the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Michael and Henry buys a red rose and hands it to Klara, who laughs and tosses it in the air. (p.158-159)

The effect of the narrative's darkness and density, then, is the elevation of simple scenes like this, which are rendered with incredible resonance by dint of Tidhar's stylistic decisions. That they are purposeful doesn't make The Violent Century any easier a reading experience, but sometimes... sometimes you just have to work for your wonders.

At the last, Lavie Tidhar's latest is at once a love story, a tragedy, a spy novel, a memoir of a friendship, an exposé of the horrors of war, and a very serious study of the superhero: the origins of the concept as well as its relative relevance. The Violent Century is a difficult text, yes, but one that gives as good as it gets.

***

The Violent Century
by Lavie Tidhar

UK & US Publication: October 2013, Hodder & Stoughton

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review | The Mouse Deer Kingdom by Chiew-Siah Tei

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

The year is 1905 and Chai Mingzhi, an immigrant newly arrived in the port-town of Malacca, takes Engi, an indigenous boy from the tropical forest, to live with him. Trapped in a realm he doesn’t recognize and finding himself caught up in Chai Mingzhi’s bitter personal affairs, Engi quickly learns to take on the shape of the legendary mouse deer in order to survive in the outside world.

Twenty years later, Engi sets out to unravel the mystery surrounding Chai’s past, his tireless quest for the land where the grand Minang Villa is built, and the tragedy that destroyed him.

The Mouse Deer Kingdom is a tale of love and betrayal against the backdrop of a troubled time when hundreds of thousands of Chinese fled poverty and the Qing Empire for Southeast Asia, where their arrival unsettled native life in their new home.

***

Home is where the heart is, so if you have no home, what happens to your heart?

This is a question Chai Mingzhi will ask himself again and again over the course of the nearly forty years The Mouse Deer Kingdom chronicles. "A run-away official from the Qing Court, which had supported the anti-foreigner rebels" (p.17) during the turn-of-the-century Boxer Rebellion, Chai uses the last tatters of his imperial influence to help his family and closest friends escape to the Malay Peninsula.

At the outset of Chiew-Siah Tei's long-awaited second novel, the travellers trade everything that is theirs to pay for passage on Captain Cochrane's cargo ship, but nothing in Chai's life comes easily, and the journey to Malacca is no exception. As gathering storms lay waste to a vessel never intended to carry passengers, we have, however, an opportunity to meet the Mingzhis.

There's Meilian: a well-to-do second wife, once, before being abandoned by her heartless husband and his hateful father. Left to rot, in short... but she did not. Instead, Meilian and her dear daughter were welcomed back into Chai's foundling family, and though they still struggle, both have new hope for the future. Little Jiaxi fantasises about it, in fact:

Anything was possible in English tales (a frog could become a prince, a maid a princess), anything could be realised in the English-speaking far-off lands, she conjectured, silently harbouring the fantasy. Was that the reason Uncle Mingzhi insisted she should acquire the knowledge? So that she would have aspirations like his? Her mother's descriptions of a determined, diligent brother who worked his way up to shrug off their grandfather's grasp [...] had always fascinated her. The man who became a mandarin at twenty-one was a legend, her hero. (pp.39-40)

Meilian, meanwhile, has attracted another's eye. She and Chai's foreign friend Martin are to be married, in fact. A young British businessman whose know-how helped her benevolent brother through a difficult time, Martin is unfortunately at odds with Chai's other companion, Tiansheng.

A former opera apprentice, "sold to the Northern Opera Troupe as a child by his starving parents," (p.25) Tiansheng was disinherited again because of his formative friendship with Chai, then the heir to a mighty landlord. In the dark days afterward, he murdered a man. Only Chai has stood by him since.

Chai, for his part, "kept only to himself, staying away from his past, the place, the people; their stories were never recounted." (p.221) But though he's put a pin in the past, filed it away for future reference, the present is ever uncertain.

The trip with which the book begins is terrifying, but Chai and his family make it to Malacca at least in one piece. There, they move into a haunted house-on-stilts that the locals want nothing to do with, promising to "find a proper place soon." (p.54) But they do not. They are not wanted in the village, nor would the wilderness welcome them, so they make the most of this ramshackle shelter, turning it into a place they might take pride in with their own spit and sweat. "The way things progressed seemed natural, inevitable," (p.58) such that some months later, the Mingzhi massive are almost happy here.

Could it really be so easy?

I'm afraid not, no. Because one day, their home away from home is taken from them too. The house-on-stilts is burned to the ground by someone with a grudge, and a member of the family dies in the fire, searching hopelessly for the nugget of gold that was to pay for their future.

Torn apart by this tragedy, the survivors go their separate ways after the fire — though Chai stays, vowing that this land the locals will not allow him will be his one day, come what may. He and Tiansheng soon begin a business, with Chai pocketing his part of the profits to invest in an enterprise that will bring him riches. Riches enough to buy back the charred parcel where he lost the one he loved.

Playing this long game leads to loneliness, of course. Chai and his childhood friend become distant and distrustful of one another, thus the former adopts a child from the forest — not as a slave, but as a son of sorts. This is Engi, a boy who becomes a mouse deer of a man, at once quick and cunning, and it is he, as it happens, who narrates the entire tale.

I was born in the forest, so was my father. As was my father's father, and his father. How many forefathers were there before them when the first took his place on the land? That I'm not able to count, but Father told me: 

"It began from the day the world started. When the sun and the moon began to take their turns in the sky, and birds emerged from the horizon, flapping their wings, singing. When the soil spread over the barren land, and green trees and red flowers, animals and snakes, beetles and butterflies rose from the earth and found their territories. Then the land opened up, became a river, and fish and prawns squeezed themselves out from the riverbed and swam freely in the water. [...] There wasn't an outside world during those early days, there was only Our World, the forest that was, and the forest was everything on this land." (pp.2-3)

The Mouse Deer Kingdom is mostly Mingzhi's story, yet Engi attempts, albeit inexpertly, to enmesh his narrative with another's:

I'll let him surface, Parameswara; I'll let him punctuate episodes of the Chinaman's life. On my exercise book, two lines are drawn — one of Chai Mingzhi's life in the early twentieth century; the other, Parameswara's, from the late fourteenth century — with a five-hundred-year gap between them. Only by comparing the similarities between their journeys will the differences in the outcomes appear stark. (pp.8-9)

This is a stretch too far, sadly. The similarities between the pair are unsubtly stressed, and the differences add precious little to the larger narrative. It's a relief, then, that Parameswara's part dead-ends abruptly, just a hundred pages in. As does another potentially fascinating narrative, namely Jiaxi's:

It'd been exhausting, the many roles she played. Like a chameleon, she draped on immaculately tailored skins for the right occasions to perfect her performance, switching seamlessly between a model student, a good team player in the sport field, a patient friend to ignorant school girls, and a demure, well-behaved foster daughter. Rules after rules. What to do and what not to do. [...] What have I become? (p.164)

Sadly, Jiaxi simply disappears at a point. Another story for another day, if I may, for her tale damn-near demands to be told. One can only hope we don't have to wait another six years for it to finally unfold, as we did this sequel of sorts to Tei's multiple award-nominated first novel, Little Hut of Leaping Fishes.

The Mouse Deer Kingdom isn't its equal, I fear. It's episodic, dare I say disjointed. Inelegant in some spots, and in others all too obvious. "The awkwardness of it was equal to that of a forest child in an outsiders' world. Not here, not there. Not this, not that." (p.311) But like Engi, and to a greater or lesser extent the determined man who takes him in, it does discover its purpose before the story's over.

Largely this is thanks to Tei's knack with characters — Chai and Engi, Martin and Tiansheng, Meilian and Jiaxi... all come to life like few figures in fiction do, and develop dramatically over the years The Mouse Deer Kingdom chronicles. The narrative is no slouch either, aside some structural strangeness and an intermittent pacing problem. Indeed, the cruel and unusual denouement squeezed a tear or two out of yours truly.

This is a beautiful little book, to be sure; a tragic family saga along the lines of Kate Atkinson's Life After Life about outsiders in a land that seems set on smiting them. The Mouse Deer Kingdom may be less affecting overall than Chiew-Siah Tei's debut, but it has its heart in the right place: at home with Chai and his fantastic family.

***

The Mouse Deer Kingdom
by Chiew-Siah Tei

UK Publication: October 2013, Picador

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review | The Devil's Apprentice by Jan Siegel

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

The Devil is retiring... but who’s taking over?

When teenage Pen inherits the job of caretaker for a London building with no doors and only a secret entrance from the caretaker’s lodge — which she must never use — little does she know it will lead her into unbelievable danger. For Azmordis, also known as Satan, a spirit as old as Time and as powerful as the Dark, Immortality is running out.

In the house with no front door, a group of teenagers are trapped in assorted dimensions of myth and history, undergoing the trials that will shape them to step into his cloven footwear — or destroy them. Assisted by only by an aspiring teenage chef called Gavin and Jinx, a young witch with more face-piercing than fae-power, Pen must try to stop the Devil’s deadly game plan — before it’s too late.

***

A dead man lives in Temporal Crescent. A Mr. Andrew Pyewackett, to be precise. He passed away seven years before the events of The Devil's Apprentice, but he's stuck around since to be sure that the unholy house he spent his lifetime looking after is left to someone sensible, someone undaunted by its particular... idiosyncrasies.

He has the ideal man in mind — Bartlemy Goodman, of no fixed above — alas, no one has been able to find the fellow, and in the period his lax lawyers have been looking, Pyewackett has gone to pieces. Quite literally. As he admits, "I simply can't go on like this. [...] Flesh and blood won't stand it. Let's face it, they aren't meant to. Look at me, I'm already falling to bits — every time I remove my socks several toes fall off. I need to get out of this body and move on. Arrangements will have to be made." (p.14)

These arrangements are as strange as the circumstances which made them a must. Pyewackett instructs the family firm to appoint Penelope Anne Tudor — Pen to you and me — as interim executor of his remaining estate. She's to move into the adjoining property, which comes complete with a brilliant butler and its very own pair of haunted falsers, the better to continue the search for the lost legatee.

Thing of it is, Pen's only thirteen, and her grandmother will never go along with this madness... will she?

She would never be allowed to stay in Temporal Crescent and do her job. And she wanted to. She wanted it more than anything in her life. It was maturity, responsibility, freedom. She had decided she wasn't worried about the danger element — a house surely couldn't be dangerous, with or without a front door. Whatever might happen, she would handle it. 

If she got the chance. (p.40)

She gets the chance.

Let us pause before we talk about the plot proper to consider this: one of my only problems with what is otherwise a magnificent new novel. Pen's gran is an absolute pushover. She takes precious little convincing in the first instance, is largely absent after the fact, and when there's a murder outside 7A several weeks later, dear old Eve expresses her regrets and then simply goes about her business. Which seems, in short, to be shopping.

This is one of the genre's peculiar problems. Reminiscent of modern horror's struggle to strand its characters in isolated environments in a world where such places are truly few and far between, the YA narrative must arrange, often implausibly, for its pubescent protagonists to be let loose by the adults in charge of their care; adults who would in all probability spoil the fun for everyone. In The Devil's Apprentice, Jan Siegel simply dismisses the need for a decent rationale as to why Pen and her pals can run riot, and that did bother me a bit.

Besides this, though, The Devil's Apprentice is fantastic fun, especially once we find out what the house is all about. No. 7 Temporal Crescent isn't haunted, as it happens. Instead:

"It's something called a space/time prison," Pen said. "I don't know what that is, but all the doors open on different bits of the past, or magical dimensions, and if you go through you'll get lost, sort of absorbed into history. Like if you're in the eighteenth century, that's where you think you belong. It stops people going around changing the course of events." (p.92)

As soon as Pyewackett passes on, Pen sets about investigating No. 7 in earnest. By the time Gavin Lester let himself into the adjoining quarters she's already been attacked by a velociraptor, so Pen is happy for him to help. He's looking for Bartlemy Goodman too — Gavin believes Bartlemy may be the man to teach him how to be Great Britain's best chef — as is Jinx, a little witch who comes a-calling because she's intercepted whispers from double-dealing demons about a unique job opportunity.

No one believes in the Devil any more. He went out of fashion with wimples and witch-trials, made a brief comeback with the powdered wig, the bal masque and the Marquis de Sade, popped up in the London smog somewhere between the crinoline and the bustle, and vanished for good into a world of kitsch horror films in the mid/late twentieth century. Evil went on, of course, but Evil is made by humans; we need no supernatural help for that. But there is someone who feeds off our evil — who feeds it and feeds off it — the Rider of Nightmares, the Eater of Souls, the God of Small Print, and if he no longer wears horns and a tail that is merely a matter of style. Modern thinking belittles him, superstition touches wood for him, children dance around his maypole — but never widdershins, always with the sun. He hides in folktale and fear, in legends and lies — don't speak his name, or he may hear you, don't whistle, or he may come to you. If you believe in fairies, don't clap, for there are darker things than the sidhe in the World Beyond Midnight. Call him a myth, call him a fantasy, for myth and fantasy do no exist. 

He exists. (pp.49)

He indubitably does in The Devil's Apprentice, and indeed, he's looking to train his eventual successor, who he's decided must come from the mortal realm.

To be completely clear, Jinx doesn't want the job: she wants to stop whoever does. Because better the devil you know, you know?

She and Gavin and Pen are in any event a terrific trio of troublemakers who work wonderfully as one. Pen is our resident sceptic. Pyewackett hiring her "was the most magical thing that had ever happened to her, except she didn't believe in magic. Unlike her friends, she didn't read fantasy books — in fact, she read very little fiction at all since she couldn't see the point of it, though her grandmother had ensured she had a basic knowledge of all the classics. But Pen preferred facts. [...] In her view, imagination just got you into trouble." (p.24) Jinx the witch is by definition Pen's polar opposite, though they get on pretty well for all that, whilst she and Martin are at odds with one another from the first, which needless to say leads to some smartly barbed banter.

In Jan Siegel's capable hands the entirety of The Devil's Apprentice is rather smart, in fact. The novel's long chapters are punctuated by ominous interludes set elsewhere and elsewhen which do a great job of enlivening the story's more mundane moments... though there are few of these, in truth. Accordingly, the plot is a joy: the premise all potential — above and beyond what goes on in this novel — and in execution even better, equal parts chilling and thrilling.

Take, say, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman as a base. Fold in a little K. J. Parker, perhaps, and fill with Jasper Fforde a la The Last Dragonslayer. Season to taste with finely ground J. K. Rowling and serve with a generous helping of Diana Wynne Jones' wonderful whimsy. It may be that I've been mainlining The Great British Bake Off in recent weeks, but Gavin — the would-be cook of this delectable new book — would approve, I'm sure.

Jan Siegel has been silent, sadly, since the unceremonious sinking of her Sangreal trilogy in 2006. A young adult fantasy for all the family certainly wasn't what I expected from her new novel, but with a hint of the sinister and a smidgen of silliness, it's such bloody good fun that it's a pleasure most piquant to welcome her back to the business of witty literature.

Don't go anywhere, eh? Pretty please with a temporal cherry on top!

***

The Devil's Apprentice
by Jan Siegel

UK & US Publication: October 2013, Ravenstone

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Recommended and Related Reading

Guest Post | "When I Were a Lad" by Geoffrey Gudgion

As established in previous posts, I don't read a great deal of historical fiction, but every now and then a novel comes along that makes me think I'm missing out on something with the potential to be very special.

This was the case with Saxon's Bane... though it is not, to be completely clear, historical fiction after the fashion of, of late, the likes of Gideon's Angel. Rather, as I concluded in my review, Saxon's Bane is "a terrific thriller made singular by its interaction with the past," a past which comes alive to unsettling effect over its otherwise contemporary course.

So when the opportunity presented itself to borrow the author, one Geoffrey Gudgion, for a guest post here on TSS, my first thought as to a possible topic was to ask for his take on the conversation Clifford Beal and I engaged in about the place of real history in fantastical fiction. Geoffrey, the gentleman, was happy to oblige. I think you'll agree that he raises some pivotal points in the blog post below — particularly as regards the significance of the difference between taught and living history.

Take it away, Geoffrey!

***

“Ee, when I were a lad...”

Elderly relatives used to start their reminiscences like that when, er, I was a lad. I remember folding my face into an attitude of dutiful attention as I wondered how long I’d have to endure some fragment of ‘ancient’ history. After a while, I’d squirm and find an excuse to slip away. After all, I was force-fed enough history at school, fact by repetitive fact. 

“Kings of England, William the Conqueror onwards!” a master would bark. The Norman Conquest was, after all, the date when all history started, as every English schoolboy knows. “Who can tell me?”

“Sir, sir, me sir! William, William, Henry, Stephen, Henry, Richard, John...” 

I don’t think I differentiated between taught history and living history, as a boy. History was all about facts to be regurgitated, not experiences to be felt. What could those relatives tell me? First hand accounts of battles would have been interesting. In my childhood, there were still old folks alive who’d fought in the First World War. One relative had even survived both Flanders trenches and the Russian Revolution. My father fought with the Eighth Army in North Africa. Frustratingly, none of them wanted to talk about their battles, at least not in the heroic language a schoolboy craves. They’d flinch away from a direct question, but as I grew older, fragments of their memories sometimes fell in softly spoken words, and the mood would go still, tightening into itself. In that silence I glimpsed the stuttering terror of close-range tracer fire in the night, or felt the anguish of a survivor of atrocity. But by the time I was mature enough to listen, many of the stories would never be told again.

I think those fragments roused my interest not in ‘what happened’, but in what it felt like to be there while it happened. The perspective of the peasant, not the lord, the common soldier rather than the general. I also came to understand the impact on people, who seem with hindsight rather like trees that have survived the crushing weight of a boulder; take away the stone and the tree may thrive again, but not always in the pure shape that nature intended.

When I were a lad... we were taught the sequence of history. It might only have started in 1066, but that rote learning gave us a framework on which to hang deeper study. It might have been an overwhelmingly English framework, but I feel no need to apologise for my schoolmasters of old. They in turn had grown up in a place and an era of Imperial hubris, a time when God was an Englishman and had commissioned the British to civilise the world in their image. My offspring react with understandable horror to the mores of Empire, since in today’s era of the educational project or module, they have little understanding of trajectory or context. If I try to explain the attitudes of British society in my childhood, during that brief era between the end of Empire and the advent of mass immigration, they react as if I’d tried to deny the holocaust. They can describe immensely important subjects like the slave trade, but have no knowledge of the origins of their own people.

So what has all this to do with writing fiction? 

At the risk of sounding grandiose, history is the backstory we all share. Villages in my part of England can often be traced to a Saxon warlord who chose the spot to ground his spear and plant his generations. That winding country lane has probably been there since an ox cart found the easiest route through the woods. Those invaders, settlers, and opportunists were storytellers, not writers, and they told their stories in the West Saxon tongue that would become the first global language, Ænglisc. They kept their own history alive in legends, some of which yet survive. Beowulf, Weyland the Smith, and Weyland’s brother Egil or Ægl who married the swan-maiden Olrun. Historical fiction was a dominant cultural force millennia before publishers called it genre and eased it into the literary sidelines.

Personally, I like to write stories that have an echo of the past; not so much historical fiction as history in fiction. So I set Saxon’s Bane in a village called Allingley, which would have been Ægl-ingas-leah or ‘the clearing of Ægl’s folk’ in Anglo Saxon, a sleepy village on the banks of the Swanbourne. It was fun to reach back to the origins of the Ænglisc and to bring a legend to life in the present day. They’d have been just like us, those distant ancestors. Their fear would have been the same, even though the aggressor carried an axe rather than a machine pistol. All it takes to go back there and to make history come alive is a framework of facts and a little imagination. The imagination that sees an old veteran, perhaps, who sits by a fire and stares dewy-eyed into his mead, and says to the youth in the rushes at his feet, ‘now, when I were a lad...’

“Nú, hwonne ic waes cnap...”

***

Thank you kindly, Geoffrey, for taking the time to put this post together. And who knows? Maybe this is a conversation about the past we'll continue in the future...

To find out more about the author and his fearsome first novel, check out Geoffrey's website, and here's his Twitter too.

Book Review | Night Boat by Alan Spence

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

My childhood name was Iwajiro, and I was eight years old when I first entered at the gates of hell...

One night in eighteenth-century Japan, at the hour of the Ox, a young boy named Iwajiro sits in a state of pure concentration. At the foot of Mount Fuji, behind screen walls and amidst curls of incense smoke Iwajiro chants the Tenjin Sutra, an act of devotion learned from his beloved mother.

On the side of the same mountain, twenty years on, he will sit in perfect stillness as the summit erupts, spitting fire and molten rock onto the land around him. This is not the first time he has seen hell.

This man will become Hakuin, one of the greatest teachers in the history of Zen. His quest for truth will call on him to defy his father, to face death, to find love and to lose it. He will ask, what is the sound of one hand clapping? And he will master his greatest fear.

Night Boat is the story of his tremendous life.

***

At the foot of Mount Fuji towards the end of the 17th century, eight year old Iwajiro attends a lecture on the Eight Hot Hells, and develops a burning fear of fire that will prove fundamental to his future.

Shaken, he asks his mother if there is any way of escaping damnation. A pious woman herself, she advises Iwajiro to attend the temple of Tenjin, where he is told to awaken each night at the hour of the Ox — that is to say 2 AM — and chant a certain sutra.

In this way, his unsettled soul finds slight respite, but in time his new-found faith divides his family. On the one hand, Iwajiro's mother encourages her son, seeming to believe his devout behaviour will pave the way for something greater. His father, unfortunately — a businessman once poised to become a monk himself, who now neglects his own devotions — thinks it "ridiculous. You'll turn him into a useless layabout, a lazy good-for-nothing with his head full of nonsense about burning in hell." (p.20)

Little does he know who or what his son will one day become.

He should have had a little faith, eh?

Years later, Iwajiro still observes the hour of the ox, but it is no longer enough:

I got up every night, shocked myself awake with cold water, lit incense and sat chanting the sutras. It meant I began each day with a kind of strength and clarity, even if it faded as the day wore on. But lately it had been fading more and more quickly. Some little thing would jangle my nerves, make me angry, and it felt as if all the austerity was for nothing. Then that old fear of hell began to stir in me, and I was once again that frightened child, terrified of burning in the fires. (p.29)

At bottom, Iwajiro has begun to feel the desires typical of a teen, but rather than simply submitting to them — them and the Eight Hot Hells he remains afraid they represent — he resolves to throw himself into the spiritual life. In short order, he leaves home, to apprentice at the temple in town, where the head monk rechristens him Ekaku, meaning Wise Crane.

His studies do not end here, however. Far from it! Before his thirtieth birthday, Ekaku has travelled from one end of Japan to the other, studying poetry, assorted sutras, koans and so on. He has seen the aftermath of a ghastly tsunami, and sat in a state of perfect concentration whilst Mount Fuji erupted around him, spitting fire and molten rock onto his family's land. He has not conquered his fear of the Eight Hot Hells yet, but year after year, he grows closer to his goal.

Night Boat by Alan Spence is a fictionalised account of the legendary Zen master Hakuin Ekaku, whose practices are prevalent even today. You probably haven't heard of him, but I warrant you will have heard of the reflective riddle he originated: what is the sound of one hand clapping?

Any guesses? Anyone?

Well, worry not: assuming there is an answer, months and years of meditation are required before we stand a change of arriving at it — and even then, there are no guarantees. In many ways, this is the basis of the teachings that Hakuin made famous.

Night Boat is of course historical fiction first and foremost, yet it is rich with myth and mysticism. It is "a thing of magic and enchantment [both] terrifying and magnificent" (p.59) in turn. Like its subject, Night Boat is a story "haunted by hungry ghosts and malevolent spirits." (p.47) And yes, there's a quest... though Haukuin's search is for a sense of self rather than some all-powerful bauble.

After an unpleasant run-in with an old priest who believes he is "debasing the Dharma," (p.348) Hakuin reflects as follows:

I thought I could make a story of the incident, tell a tale that might reach some of those very lay followers he had been talking about. The Buddha's message had to spread ever wider. Beat the Dharma drum. 

I would give the story a supernatural element, make it an otherworldly tale of spirit possession, a message from beyond. [...] Another tale from the Night Boat. (pp.350-351)

Alan Spence's latest is a labour of love, ultimately: an account of a life lived long ago, the effects of which are still felt by many. It's episodic, certainly, and at points inherently repetitive, yet the author — an award-winning poet and playwright, and manager in the erstwhile of the Sri Chinmoy Meditation Centre in Edinburgh — manages to fashion a fascinating narrative from a scant few facts.

And unlike the Lotus Sutra — a pivotal text that disappoints Hakuin early on, as he finds "the density and weight of [the words] hard work" (p.44) — the precise prose of Night Boat is reasonably easy to read, plus it's punctuated by soaring poetry and prone, in the moment, to flights of fabulous fantasy.

To be sure, Night Boat is a tall tale, but a true one too.

***

Night Boat
by Alan Spence

UK & US Publication: August 2013, Bloomsbury

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review | Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?

During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath.

During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale.

What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to?

Life After Life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. With wit and compassion, Kate Atkinson finds warmth even in life's bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. Here she is at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves.

***

If at first you don't succeed, try and try again.

Because let's face it: failing is no great shakes. In life, we all make mistakes. If we're lucky, we learn from them as well. Perhaps they even help to make us who we are.

But say the failure state of whatever endeavour was more meaningful than a slight setback. What if you were to die trying?

That's what happens to poor Ursula Todd at the end of almost every section of Kate Atkinson's astonishing new novel: she expires. But there's something even weirder going on here, because after the end... the beginning again—and again and again—of life after life.

What, then, if you could simply travel back in time to give life another go... and another, and another, until you got it just so? Would you be the same person, if you made fundamentally different decisions? (Ursula isn't.)

Would the history books be written in much the same way, or would they, too, be changed? (Depends on the decision.)

And if you were just going to die again anyway, and start the cycle anew, what difference, if any, might it make? (All the difference, I dare say. Every last blasted whit of it.)

Now I know what you're thinking. I thought the same thing myself before beginning Life After Life. But whatever you do, don't mistake this beautiful book for some sort of wartime take on Groundhog Day. The premise bears a certain resemblance, yet in terms of structure, setting, tone and intent, Kate Atkinson's eighth novel is so very far from the tragic farce of that comedy classic that they feel worlds apart.

Life After Life begins with... well, what else but a double helping of death? In the prologue, which takes place in November 1930, Ursula walks into a cafe and finishes the Führer with her father's former service revolver, putting paid to that oft-pondered moral quandary... though the author reiterates it a little later:

"'Don't you wonder sometimes,' Ursula said. 'If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in—I don't know, say, a Quaker household—surely things would be different.' 

'Do you think Quakers would kidnap a baby?' Ralph asked mildly. 

'Well, if they knew what was going to happen they might.' 

'But nobody knows what's going to happen. And anyway he might have turned out just the same, Quakers or no Quakers. You might have to kill him instead of kidnapping him. Could you do that? Could you kill a baby? With a gun? Or what if you had no gun, how about with your bare hands? In cold blood.'

If I thought it would save Teddy, Ursula thought. (p.261)

Beyond this brutal demonstration, Atkinson takes us back. Back to the very beginning of Ursula's existence, in fact: to her birth on the night of February 11th, 1910, which we return to repeatedly. Back, indeed, to her first death, because she's stillborn, initially; strangled by the umbilical cord connecting Ursula to her mother—a connection that is severed in every subsequent section of this harrowing narrative—simply because the doctor got stuck in the snow.

"The snow the day she was born was a legend in the family. She had heard the story so often that she thought she could remember it." (p.180) And perhaps she can; though Ursula is still far from cognisant of the situation she's stuck in, she has lived many, many lives by the time she thinks this.

But in living life after life, inevitably, Ursula has had to die death after death. As is literally the case later, "death and decay were on her skin, in her hair, in her nostrils, her lungs, beneath her fingernails, all the time. They had become part of her." (p.352)

She has, for example, drowned off the coast of Cornwall, only to be saved in a later take courtesy the kindness of a passing stranger. She has fallen headlong from the roof of her family home and split her skull on the stones below, only to abandon the dear doll she had chased into thin air the next time this icy night rolls around. A particularly virulent strain of influenza proves more difficult to outmanoeuvre. This kills Ursula in chapter after chapter, until the phrase Atkinson tends to end these brief sequences with has become a disarming parody: we go from "darkness fell" (p.103) to "darkness soon fell again" (p.112) to "darkness, and so on," (p.119) all in the space of twenty unbearably painful pages.

Thankfully, Ursula's ignorance diminishes—as does her innocence—in the later stages of Life After Life. She begins to have inexplicable premonitions. A strong sense of déjà vu often overpowers her:

"It had been nothing, just something fluttering and tugging at a memory. A silly thing—it always was—a kipper on a pantry shelf, a room with green linoleum, an old-fashioned hoop bowling silently along. Vaporous moments, impossible to hold on to." (p.378)

But hold on to them Ursula must, somehow, if the cycle is ever to cease repeating.

Life After Life is an elaboration of the serenity prayer, essentially, in which Ursula finds the courage to change the things she can, and the grace to accept those things she can't. As torturous a process as this is for her, it's utterly wonderful for us. Let's waste no time wondering what if—what if, for instance, I could reach into the fiction and fix it, after a fashion—because at the end of the day, I would change nothing about this haunting novel. It's exemplary in every which way.

It is structurally superb, and perfectly paced, as the isolated snapshots we see at the outset cohere into a series of living, breathing pictures—portraits of a family in the good times and the bad, the happy times and the sad—before dissolving again at the end.

And that family figures in to Life After Life in a major way. We've hardly touched on them here—there's just so much else to discuss—but Teddy, Izzie, Hugh, Sylvie... even the monstrous Maurice: every one of Ursula's relatives feels fully formed, and though this is first and foremost a family saga—along the lines of several of the author's earlier efforts—her friends as well are redolently realised. Be they central or supporting, Atkinson's characters are among the most memorable and affecting I've encountered in all my years of reading.

The narrative, though harder to get a handle on, is equally appealing. It takes us, broadly chronologically, through some of the most significant events of the 20th century—from the Great War through the protracted Armistice afterwards to the blackout and beyond—but Life After Life does not overstay its welcome in any one period, though each is so expertly and eloquently rendered I'd have happily seen every era extended.

Additionally, Atkinson has occasion to explore the small scale as well as the great: one of the novel's most affecting sections takes place primarily in 1926, and it chronicles nothing so earth-shaking as an affair... albeit an agonising one. Yet the author finds warmth in even the coldest spots. Honesty and generosity enough to carry readers to the book's bittersweet conclusion, which wrought tears from me. Not just because I was glad, or sad—I'll never tell which it was—but because this phenomenal novel was almost over.

At the end of the day, Kate Atkinson's latest is her very greatest by a way, reminiscent of nothing so much as her Whitbread Award-winning debut, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Likewise, Life After Life is a first for the esteemed author, marking her first flirtation with speculative elements. I can only hope Atkinson returns to our genre someday soon, because her inaugural attempt at bringing the fantastic into the field of literary fiction is clearly one of the best books of the year.

***

Life After Life

by Kate Atkinson

UK Publication: March 2013, Doubleday
US Publication: April 2013, Reagan Arthur Books

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Recommended and Related Reading