Book Review | Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

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

Or get the Kindle edition 

"I will tell you a story, but it comes with a warning: when you hear it, you will become someone else."

He calls himself Alif - few people know his real name - a young man born in a Middle Eastern city that straddles the ancient and modern worlds. When Alif meets the aristocratic Intisar, he believes he has found love. But their relationship has no future—Intisar is promised to another man and her family's honour must be satisfied. As a remembrance, Intisar sends the heartbroken Alif a mysterious book. Entitled The Thousand and One Days, Alif discovers that this parting gift is a door to another world—a world from a very different time, when old magic was in the ascendant and the djinn walked amongst us.

With the book in his hands, Alif finds himself drawing attention - far too much attention - from both men and djinn. Thus begins an adventure that takes him through the crumbling streets of a once-beautiful city, to uncover the long-forgotten mysteries of the Unseen. Alif is about to become a fugitive in both the corporeal and incorporeal worlds. And he is about to unleash a destructive power that will change everything and everyone—starting with Alif himself.

***

"G. Willow Wilson was living in Egypt when she started writing Alif the Unseen in 2010. The fictional revolution in the book became a reality in Spring 2011 when ordinary people across many Middle Eastern countries rose up against their rules."

So reads the press release that accompanied my copy of G. Willow Wilson's tour-de-force debut, giving great weight to this exquisite tale of tales wherein a young man from an unnamed emirate comes into possession of an ancient text long thought lost, codes from its pages a program that could change the way we see the world, and becomes, finally, a figurehead in the fight against corruption in the government — all in the name of love.

Love.

Love is at the heart of Alif the Unseen. Love is what makes it so very special. In the first, Alif's love for Intisar, a princess of sorts to his digitally literate street rat. They've been seeing one another for many a moon, as of the outset; courting, of course, in a clandestine sense. But when Intisar is promised to a man closer to her social stature than the grey hat (read hacker) who has fallen for her, their affair comes to a crushing conclusion.

In the aftermath, all Alif has left of the love of his life is the Alf Yeom, literally The Thousand and One Days: a book of stories that is "the inverse, the overturning" (p.96) of The Thousand and One Nights, purportedly written not by people, but magical creatures.

And in the margins, Intisar's fascinating annotations:

The suggestion that the Alf Yeom is the work of a djinn is surely a curious one. The Quran speaks of the hidden people in the most candid way, yet more and more the educated faithful will not admit to believing in them, however readily they might accept even the harshest and most obscure points of Islamic law. That God has ordained that a thief must pay for his crime with his hand, that a woman must inherit half of what a man inherits — these things are treated not only as facts, but as obvious facts, whereas the existence of conscious beings we cannot see - and all the fantastic and wondrous things that their existence suggests and makes possible - produces profound discomfort among precisely that cohort of Muslims most lauded for their role in that religious "renaissance" presently expected by western observers: young degree-holding traditionalists. Yet how hollow rings a tradition in which the law, which is subject to interpretation, is held as sacrosanct, yet the word of God is not to be trusted when it comes to His description of what He has created.

I do not know what I believe. (p.104)

Intisar's crisis of faith is but the impetus behind the majestic vision quest Alif embarks on thereafter: the outcome is still a ways away. And would that it were still further, for this is a fantastic first novel!

I should stress that G. Willow Wilson has been published in the past. In 2010, The Butterfly Mosque - a memoir about her conversion to Islam - attracted an array of acclaim, and her name will be fairly familiar to comic book fans: she scripted the late, lamented Vertigo series AIR, Mystic for Marvel, and her credits also include a couple of fill-in issues for Superman. So Wilson isn't averse to a little seeming silliness, nor to more inwardly meaningful matters, such as class, censorship, fear and belief. In Alif the Unseen, she takes the high road and the low, trading on both areas of expertise to create a story about stories that stands out from the first word.

That said, the Alif is both more and less than a word. It is the first letter of Sura Al Baqara in the Quran; it is the first line of code ever written; it is a state of mind, a suggestion, a symbol that our hero becomes - inasmuch as it becomes him - over the course of this remarkable fantasy narrative. Alif "had spent so much time cloaked behind his screen name, a mere letter of the alphabet, that he no longer thought of himself as anything but an alif — a straight line, a wall. His given name fell flat in his ears now. The act of concealment had become more powerful that what it concealed." (p.3)

Alif the Unseen, too, conceals a great deal. The initial simplicity of the Aladdin-esque romance with which it begins belies the book's more challenging aspects. Seductive as it is, this early section seems fleeting when set against the heady concoction of faith, torture and politics that fuels its unforgettable finale. Indeed, these ends are so at odds that one can only imagine the inevitable clash, yet instead, Wilson shapes a careful, character-driven commingling — a thing both beautiful and terrible to behold.

Speaking of which, as easy as our characters are to grasp at the outset, as Alif the Unseen progresses they resonate with both emotional depth and intellectual complexity. Particularly when Intisar's part is played, Alif and his childhood friend Dina develop majestically, and the people (and the creatures) they meet on their journey - both within themselves and outwith the world they know - are fantastic fancies, finely described.

Alif the Unseen is an extraordinary novel, written with a hypnotic naturalness that reminded this reader of Neil Gaiman, whose blurb adorns the front cover of Corvus' delightfully designed British edition. He writes that "G. Willow Wilson has a deft hand with myth and with magic," to which assertion I would append a few further words about the part of Alif the Unseen that left a lasting impression on me: namely its rightfully abiding interest in matters of the heart.

A book to treasure, truly.

***

Alif the Unseen
by G. Willow Wilson

UK Publication: September 2012, Corvus
US Publication: June 2012, Grove Press

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

Or get the Kindle edition

Recommended and Related Reading

Giving the Game Away | Free Alif the Unseen

Yesterday I posted an excellent excerpt from Alif the Unseen, and tomorrow, I'll run my review. As if that weren't enough, I had a long and involved talk with the author which should hit the site early next week.

Now I don't make a fuss like this about most books, so perhaps you've already intuited that Alif the Unseen is something special. Well, yes — it is indeed. It's "an exquisite tale of tales," truly a "tour-de-force debut," and you needn't simply take my word for it, because today it gives me great pleasure to announce that I have three copies of the gorgeous new Corvus edition to give away to you lucky lovers of literature.

I'm afraid we can't go worldwide with this one, but if you're based in the UK or Europe, all you have to do to stand a chance of winning is send an email to thespeculativescotsman [at] gmail [dot] com with the answer to the this question:

Which letter of the English alphabet is

the Arabic letter Alif equivalent to?

Mark your subject headers "Free Alif the Unseen," please, and remember to include your postal address in the text of your message.

May the odds be ever in your favour, folks!

Quoth the Scotsman | G. Willow Wilson on The Good Old Days

Over the next week, we're going to be talking a bunch about Alif the Unseen here on The Speculative Scotsman. So much so that I bet you'll be sick of this pretty picture before we're through. In our innocence, then, look upon this lovely cover!

For today, I wanted to share with you a short excerpt, taken from a debate between an ancient sheikh and our young hacktivist hero. Between the old, in essence, and the new:

"I know it's common for old people to complain about the modern moment, and lament the passing of a golden age when children were polite and you could buy a kilo of meat for pennies, but in our case, my boy, I think I am not mistaken when I say that something fundamental has changed about the world in which we live. We have reached a state of constant reinvention. Revolutions have moved off the battlefield and on to home computers. Nothing shocks one anymore. We are living in a post-fictional era. Fictional governments are accepted without comment, and we can sit in a mosque and have a debate about the fictional pork a fictional character consumes in a video game, with every gravity we would accord something quite real. [...] It is all very strange indeed."

"I don't think what you're talking about is a modern issue," said NewQuarter. "I think we're going back to the way things used to be, before a bunch of European intellectuals in tights decided to draw a line between what's rational and what's not. I don't think our ancestors through the distinction was necessary."

The sheikh considered this for a moment.

"Perhaps you're right," he said. "I suppose every innovation started out as a fantasy. Once upon a time, students of Islamic law were encouraged to give free rein to their imaginations. For example, in the medieval era there was a great discussion about the point at which one is obligated to enter a state of ritual purity while traveling on the hajj. If you were on foot, when? If you went by boat, when? If by camel, when? And then one student, having exhausted all earthly possibilities, posed this question: what if one were to fly? The proposition was taken as a serious exercise in the adaptability of the law. As a result, we had rules governing air travel during hajj five hundred years before the invention of the commercial jet." (pp.366-7)

Just a tiny taste of what's to come!

Stay tuned to the site for a grand old giveaway, followed by my full review of G. Willow Wilson's wonderful first novel, and finally, an in-depth interview with the author.

I'm so excited to post all this it's silly.

The Monday Miscellany | The Tunnel, Books to Die For, Quantum Conundrum

There's been such a ghastly glut of found footage horror movies of late that it can come as no surprise when a high-quality contender slips through the cracks. That's exactly what The Tunnel is: a shockingly accomplished shoestring spookshow very much in the mode of Paranormal Activity. No prizes for guessing that it was met with an overwhelming meh upon its release, either.

That said, The Tunnel deserves better, particularly considering how little it cost to put together. It's an interesting story, actually. Back before Kickstarter kicked off, the mooted movie's producers went to the public for funding. Enzo Tedeschi and Julian Harvery aimed to sell individual frames of the final film for AUS$1 a pop, but for one reason or another - the aforementioned attitude surely had something to do with it - they only managed to raise a quarter of their budget.

They went ahead and made the thing anyway, for about £25k. Considering this, the result is simply stunning. That isn't to say The Tunnel is without its issues, foremost amongst them an over-reliance on interviews apparently conducted after the fact of the accident - interviews which spoil who survives from the first, in fact - but the performances are uniformly strong, the scares are certainly there, and in a found footage horror movie, these aspects are of paramount importance.

The plot, meanwhile, provides a plausible rationale for the form of the film: when a news and current affairs crew take to the flooded subway under Sydney to report on the homeless living therein, they find more than they had bargained for. They find... monsters! And of course they capture them on camera.

Imagine [rec] meets The Descent. Fancy seeing that? Then The Tunnel is for you.

Oh, and hey: you can download this film for free. Legally, even! 

***

Books to Die For is an odd beast of an anthology, but for what it is, which is almost impossible to quantify, it's brilliant — and beautiful to boot. Hodder & Stoughton's lovely hardcover, out on August 30th, contains a staggering array of essays in which "the world's leading mystery writers [...] come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written."

Co-edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke, Books to Die For is essentially an insider's guide to the genre, featuring a who's-who of its foremost proponents on their favourite mystery fiction, which ranges from ye olde right through to the postmodern, covering authors including Stephen King and Douglas Adams. Joe Lansdale recommends Raymond Chandler, Max Allan Collins goes to town Mickey Spillane, Kathy Reichs writes about Thomas Harris.

Meanwhile: Michael Connelly, Jeffrey Deaver, Charlaine Harris, Minette Walters, Karin Slaughter, Lee Child, Jo Nesbo, Dennis Lehane, Peter Robinson, Elmore Leonard, Eoin Colfer, Michael Koryta, Tana French. And know that this is just a fraction of the non-fiction on offer in this massively ambitious anthology. Books to Die For is in excess of 700 pages long, after all, of which the table of contents takes eight. It even comes complete with an index!

Admittedly, some of the contributors are more immediately engaging than others, but none of the essays in Books to Die For run long at all. This is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it means the dull ones are over in no time; a curse because you get the sense some writers are only just getting into their swing when the word count comes crashing down. I'd have given a lot for a little more leg room in that regard.

All told, though, if you're in the least interested in mystery fiction, Books to Die For really is a book to die for. Now then: can we have a speculative fiction edition next?

***

When I blogged about Portal co-creator Kim Swift's Quantum Conundrum a couple of days before its release on Steam, I wasn't exactly hot on it. I'm still not, but now that actually I've played the thing - from start to finish, because it's the summer, and what else am I going to do? Go outside? - I can speak to the actual experience rather than its lackluster launch trailer.

Then again, I wasn't far off the mark, worrying about Quantum Conundrum's tepid sense of humour. Six or so hours of paltry punchlines later, if I hear Q crack another crappy joke, I'm going to snap a Star Trek: The Next Generation DVD. Don't test me, I'll do it!

Luckily, the puzzles are markedly more engaging than nonsense narrative John de Lancie is saddled with, wherein his mad scientist talks your innocent nephew through a wacky mansion. In short: Professor Fitz Quadrangle is stuck in some strange dimension, full of belly button fluff and other such stuff. It's up to the player to help him escape by powering up generators in three discrete wings, each of which introduces a new dimension.

In the first, fluffy, you can use your magical glove to make the world light and white, thus enabling you to pick up heavy things - like safes - and deposit them on weighted platforms to progress. So far, so simple — and the heavy dimension fails to make things more interesting. But when you gain the power to slow time, and finally to reverse gravity, the puzzle-solving Quantum Conundrum hinges on does pick up.

The only thing hindering your progression through the game's forty-odd test chambers then is the platforming, which is so poorly implemented as to be practically perverse. Jumps are floaty, movement is imprecise, and guys: gravity's a bitch. This is a fundamental fuck-up when the majority of Quantum Conundrum's most promising moments rely on your ability to flit around rooms on top of fast-moving objects. As to that, at least the checkpoints aren't too terrible.

Don't get me wrong: solving the puzzles in Quantum Conundrum is actually a bunch of fun. The kicker is, implementing your answers is an absolute nightmare. Add to that an inane script, a slow start, an uninspired aesthetic, and some outright derivative design decisions... folks, I'm afraid the whole package feels second-rate. Give it a miss unless you're a fan of frustration.

Book Review | The Dirty Streets of Heaven by Tad Williams

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

Or get the Kindle edition 

Bobby Dollar isn't your average angel.

Sure, he takes the occasional trip to Heaven, but his job as an advocate - arguing the fate of the recently deceased - keeps him pretty busy on Earth, and he's more than happy to spend the rest of his time propping up the bar with his fellow immortals.

Until the day a soul goes missing, presumed stolen by the other side.

A new chapter in the war between heaven and hell is about to open. And Bobby is right in the middle of it, with only a desirable but deadly demon to aid him.

***

"This is not a will, but it is a last testament of sorts. [...] What I am about to relate will be unbelievable to many, if not most who hear of it. However, I can assure whoever is reading this that there is nothing wrong with my mind and that I have had proofs that have more than satisfied me of everything I set out here.

"Here is what I now know, which I have seen proved beyond the possibility of debate. There is life after death. The soul does exist without the body. And although most of the narrow, interfering rules of the world's organised religions are just as wrong as I always thought they were, when it comes to the basic facts I must admit that they were right and my fellow doubters and I were wrong. There is a Heaven and there is a Hell." (pp.284-5)

And over the course of genre fiction fixture Tad William's new novel, the first in a series of three, Earthbound angel Bobby Dollar will come into conflict with the forces of both. If he lives to tell the tale, his story is sure to be thrilling... but let's not count our chickens before the fun's even begun.

As what's known in the parlance as an advocate, Bobby's job, mandated from on high, is essentially to defend the dead, for every saint and every sinner shall have his or her judgement day. And on that day, representatives of both heaven and hell will come together, the better to squabble, like lawyers, over the souls of the dearly departed.

Once upon a time, however - for so this fast-paced urban fantasy fable goes - our angelic advocate and his eternal adversary arrive at the scene of an apparent suicide, only to find a startling absence where the late Edward Walker's soul should be. In the many millennia heaven and hell have warred with one another, this is an unheard-of complication, and the resulting shockwaves carry far above, and deep below.

That could be that, but as the blurb boasts, dear Dollar isn't your average angel, so when an insidious scent assails him during his debriefing - in fact something about this whole business smells rotten to Bobby - he goes to ground, puts the moves on an alluring demon queen, and wages a lone campaign against unknown forces, all on an instinct. You know... as you do.

So different is this from his usual epic fantasy fare that I dare say The Dirty Streets of Heaven is hardly recognisable as the work of Tad Williams, though it is not, strictly speaking, the author's first foray into urban fantasy. Published immediately before the four-volume Shadowmarch saga, The War of the Flowers was about one man's mid-life crisis by way of few good fairies and the creatures conspiring against them. In a certain sense, it was like The Never-Ending Story for a new generation — and if it isn't much remembered these seven years on, that's only because The War of the Flowers was then and continues criminally overlooked. It's a fantastic standalone, and if you haven't, you really should read it.

Of course, the more relevant question is whether you should take to The Dirty Streets of Heaven, but it bears repeating that Williams has been here before, or at least somewhere near. This time, however, he means business: almost everything of import occurs in the real world rather than the far-flung fairyland of The War of the Flowers. Indeed, Williams seems surprisingly disinterested in building another imagined kingdom, brick by individual brick.

Bobby certainly visits the titular city on a couple of occasions over the course of The Dirty Streets of Heaven, but both here and at his home away from home - which is to say a pub in the Port of San Judas, southwest of San Francisco - he dismisses almost every opportunity to talk about Heaven or Hell beyond the broad strokes. If it's not "none of your business" or "a story for some other time," it's "not exactly clear" or "hard to explain," and this does begin to frustrate. To properly appreciate The Dirty Streets of Heaven, we must imagine as much about Bobby Dollar's world, if not more, than we are ever informed of.

In terms of character, too, there's something slim about Williams' new novel. Bobby Dollar is a prototypical private eye: a noirish detective type with all the baggage such anti-heroes carry. He won't take a telling, his investigation becomes an obsession, his behaviour is otherwise rarely rational... then he falls head over heels for a femme fatale. And the Countess of Cold Hands isn't even "a woman. Maybe once upon a time, but not for a while. She's part of the ruling class of Hell — a demon, sworn to destruction and the perversion of everything good, and if she's helping you, it's because it suits her. Don't trust a single thing she says or does." (pp.225-6)

That said, a little self-awareness along these lines goes a long way, and eventually Williams' simplistic characterisation gives way to greater depth, if not complexity, as we progress down The Dirty Streets of Heaven. In the interim, Williams moves the conspiracy-driven plot along at a very reasonable rate, punctuating its conversational narration with a wealth of witty interplay between Bobby and his not entirely angelic associates. The action is terrific too, and what with all the monsters and men on our protagonist's path, there's certainly no shortage of that.

At the end of the day, The Dirty Streets of Heaven is a little on the thin side, both figuratively and literally, but for as long as it lasts, it's fine fun. If you've ever read a John Connolly novel, or the Sandman Slim series, you're apt to find it slightly overfamiliar, yet even then the similarities are initial and more importantly superficial. Once Williams finds his feet, and by the end he has, The Dirty Streets of Heaven stands as compelling as any of its many contemporaries, such that its slated sequels - Happy Hour in Hell and Sleeping Late on Judgement Day - will be required reading for this critic.

***

The Dirty Streets of Heaven
by Tad Williams

UK Publication: September 2012, Hodder & Stoughton
US Publication: September 2012, DAW

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

Or get the Kindle edition 

Recommended and Related Reading

Cover Identity | Serene Invasion by Eric Brown

Recently, Solaris unveiled the cover art of Eric Brown's next novel. It's nothing new, but for what it is it's very well done indeed. I'm a fan!

 

 

The evil alien face on the spaceship is a nice touch, too. But it might just be a spoiler, because according to the synopsis, the Serene are supposed to be benign:

It's 2025 and the world is riven by war, terrorist attacks, poverty and increasingly desperate demands for water, oil, and natural resources. The West and China confront each other over an inseperable ideological divide, each desperate to sustain their future. 

And then the Serene arrive, enigmatic aliens form Delta Pavonis V, and nothing will ever be the same again. 

The Serene bring peace to an ailing world, an end to poverty and violence — but not everyone supports the seemingly benign invasion. 

There are forces out there who wish to return to the bad old days, and will stop at nothing to oppose the Serene.

I've had my ups and downs reading Eric Brown's work, all of which I've documented here on The Speculative Scotsman. When he's on, as in Engineman and The Kings of Eternity, hoo boy is he on! But when he's off - see Guardians of the Phoenix and The Devil's Nebula - his prose can be a chore, and that's putting it politely.

 

Still, I soldier ever onward, in the hope of rediscovering the wonder Stephen Baxter speaks of in the quote adorning the cover image above. Serene Invasion could be awful, of course, but it's equally likely to be awesome. I'll be reading it either way... next April.