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The Wolf and the Watchman by Niklas Natt och Dag
Posted by: tchristin at Apr 3rd, 2020, 11:00 am in
TITLE: The Wolf and the Watchman
AUTHOR: Niklas Natt och Dag
GENRE: Fiction > Mystery/Thriller
PUBLISHED: 10/01/2019
RATING: ★★★★☆
...
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TITLE: The Wolf and the Watchman
AUTHOR: Niklas Natt och Dag
GENRE: Fiction > Mystery/Thriller
PUBLISHED: 10/01/2019
RATING: ★★★★☆
...
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
Posted by: sybo13 at Mar 11th, 2020, 2:28 am in
TITLE: An Unkindness of Ghosts
AUTHOR: Rivers Solomon
GENRE: Fiction, Fantasy
PUBLISHED: 2017
RATING: ★★★★☆
PURCHASE
READ
I picked up An Unkindness of Ghosts after seeing it quite well-recommended and up for a few awards on Goodreads; after plunging into the novel, I quickly found that Rivers Solomon has a powerful story to tell.
An Unkindness of Ghosts is set in a generation ship called the Matilda, a ship layered with alphabetically-ordered and hierarchical decks. Whichever deck a person is born on determines their position in society for their entire life, as does the colour of their skin. Yes, the premise at first may seem a little cliché: It’s a ship world that has lost its way in the emptiness of space. But much like N K Jemesin in her Broken Earth series, Rivers Solomon deftly overcomes any genre-orientated predispositions with rich, confident, character-driven world-building, and huge emotional storytelling stakes.
It is a complicated, claustrophobic, terrifying environment Rivers Solomon has created, and we get thrown into the story with very little exposition, which is exactly the experience the author intends. In fact, the shock-entry helps us relate to the characters' own helplessness within the system, forcing us to see their lives through a prism of the sick hierarchy. As one of my favourite tv critics and creators, Andy Greenwald, recently said on The Watch podcast:
As readers of An Unkindness of Ghosts we really do need to throw out our own compasses because the Matilda is disorientating. It is a sharply divided society of rich and poor, master and slave, binary and non-binary, full of diverse humans, with genders very loosely defined, with ‘sovereigns’ who rule through torture and rape, soldiers with little moral accountability, main characters on the autistic spectrum, underground reporters who broadcast over the radio, hidden botanists' lairs, and power rationing that makes the lower decks drop to freezing temperatures. It’s an old derelict world that still boasts newspapers, comics, libraries, parks, wildlife refuges and even a ‘star’ at the centre of the world, which powers the ship at the cost of shortening the lives of those who maintain it through great personal cost of radiation poisoning and cancer.
It might sound like I describe a novel full of info-dumps and exposition, but that would be wrong because An Unkindness of Ghosts is a truly character-driven tale. Each of the principal characters moves the story forward in their own way, through their own desires and mistakes. The world that they live in is so affronting that each of them suffers from some type of mental disposition, illness, or deep internal conflict as a result of the abusive, horrific, oppressive situation they are born into on the Matilda ship.
Aster, the lead character, worries with reason for her childhood half-sister, Giselle. Giselle is a thin, beautiful, wild, brilliant problem solver, and she suffers what Aster calls ‘grief-born madness’, but is what we might call acute mental illness, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and possibly a type of bipolar disorder. These affect almost everything she does and often put her and those around her in danger. The amount of sexual abuse she suffered over her young life, which she has now come to think of as normal and something that she says no longer bothers her, it is no wonder she is as she is. As Aster puts it she is
Unreliable and simultaneously brilliant, Giselle solves coded journals Aster could never understand on her own, she discovers secrets of their generation-ship, and is above all a wild card in dangerous situations, either saving herself and Aster or putting them both in peril.
The effect Giselle has on Aster is profound; her unpredictability is very dangerous to be around, yet she is Aster’s closest ally. Aster knows that Giselle’s mind and life are balanced on a knife’s edge, driving Aster to be both protective and wary. Giselle had grown more and more suicidal, and every time Aster said goodbye, she wondered if it was the last time.
Aster, on the other hand, has managed to compartmentalize her experiences in an extreme way. This compartmentalization, separating her mind and emotions from the events around her, protects her from trauma but also encumbers her ability to properly interact with others, despite her depth of compassion for many of those around her. She receives everything that is said to her quite literally, indicating some form of autism evidenced by the way she thinks and observes the world. She only learnt to speak at 8 years old, yet has a boggling ability to easily collect knowledge of all types. Through this prism of awareness, she is able to gather vast swathes of information, all useful to survival and to eventually making change to her society and world.
The other key character is Theo, a famous eccentric surgeon who struggles with the gender imposed on him. Aster calls him gender-malcontent, otherling. As Theo says,
As a half-caste of the upper decks (read upper-class aristocracy) who seem to be exclusively white, his father was a white sovereign but his mother a lower deck-level brown woman. His father wanted him to make up for his half-caste background by becoming as masculine as possible. Instead, Theo feels feminine, taking self-made serums to lower his testosterone. A brilliant surgeon, he has taken Aster under his wing, who he recognizes as an inbuilt genius, and there is a deep emotional and romantic connection between them. In a sense, Theo’s struggle is as much an internal battle against his body and the expectations placed on him, as it is an outward struggle to save the ones he loves. As his name might suggest his sincere faith in God allows him a stability not many on Matilda seem to be able to obtain.
An Unkindness of Ghosts not only has a rich cast, many of whom I haven’t mentioned but is quintessentially of this decade in that it reaches at the reader with a heavy, brutal hand, forcing us to examine the pressing themes; in this case, themes of race and slavery. Additionally, An Unkindness of Ghosts is a layered story, full of revealing folklore and storytelling. These stories, like all folklore, touch on the deepest unspeakable fears of the lower class, full of girls trying to avoid being married at fourteen, of male gods hoarding light, and exploring the husband and wife dynamic of a racist, misogynist society.
As mentioned, the novel thoroughly explores sexual and physical abuse in a way I haven’t seen done before.
The way the characters cope with these abuses is clearly laid out in its many forms and often drives the story forward when doing nothing is not an option.
Gender is important to Rivers too, and although they present no direct thesis to the reader, it’s clear that Rivers wants us to think about the effects of gender discrimination on a group and on individuals.
With lots of world-building elements needed to tell this story in a way that makes sense to the reader, the novel still manages to be a totally character-driven and suspenseful read. It boasts an excellent plot buildup, a rebellion building upon itself again and again, in the hearts of the characters and in the heart of the downtrodden society itself. There is no censoring in An Unkindness of Ghosts, no numbing down the pain and trauma. Rivers holds us with strong, sharp language, in a robust, yet easy to follow style. I really did enjoy this novel and recommend it. James Tiptree (Alice Sheldon) would be proud.
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TITLE: An Unkindness of Ghosts
AUTHOR: Rivers Solomon
GENRE: Fiction, Fantasy
PUBLISHED: 2017
RATING: ★★★★☆
PURCHASE
READ
I picked up An Unkindness of Ghosts after seeing it quite well-recommended and up for a few awards on Goodreads; after plunging into the novel, I quickly found that Rivers Solomon has a powerful story to tell.
An Unkindness of Ghosts is set in a generation ship called the Matilda, a ship layered with alphabetically-ordered and hierarchical decks. Whichever deck a person is born on determines their position in society for their entire life, as does the colour of their skin. Yes, the premise at first may seem a little cliché: It’s a ship world that has lost its way in the emptiness of space. But much like N K Jemesin in her Broken Earth series, Rivers Solomon deftly overcomes any genre-orientated predispositions with rich, confident, character-driven world-building, and huge emotional storytelling stakes.
It is a complicated, claustrophobic, terrifying environment Rivers Solomon has created, and we get thrown into the story with very little exposition, which is exactly the experience the author intends. In fact, the shock-entry helps us relate to the characters' own helplessness within the system, forcing us to see their lives through a prism of the sick hierarchy. As one of my favourite tv critics and creators, Andy Greenwald, recently said on The Watch podcast:
What it is to engage with someone else's vision (whether in tv, movies, novels,) is to allow yourself to be changed by seeing through his or her viewpoint. You have to sacrifice a little bit. …. if you give yourself over to something challenging or something with intention and purpose, that is saying I'm going to throw out my own compass and use yours. It can be disorientating.
As readers of An Unkindness of Ghosts we really do need to throw out our own compasses because the Matilda is disorientating. It is a sharply divided society of rich and poor, master and slave, binary and non-binary, full of diverse humans, with genders very loosely defined, with ‘sovereigns’ who rule through torture and rape, soldiers with little moral accountability, main characters on the autistic spectrum, underground reporters who broadcast over the radio, hidden botanists' lairs, and power rationing that makes the lower decks drop to freezing temperatures. It’s an old derelict world that still boasts newspapers, comics, libraries, parks, wildlife refuges and even a ‘star’ at the centre of the world, which powers the ship at the cost of shortening the lives of those who maintain it through great personal cost of radiation poisoning and cancer.
It might sound like I describe a novel full of info-dumps and exposition, but that would be wrong because An Unkindness of Ghosts is a truly character-driven tale. Each of the principal characters moves the story forward in their own way, through their own desires and mistakes. The world that they live in is so affronting that each of them suffers from some type of mental disposition, illness, or deep internal conflict as a result of the abusive, horrific, oppressive situation they are born into on the Matilda ship.
Aster, the lead character, worries with reason for her childhood half-sister, Giselle. Giselle is a thin, beautiful, wild, brilliant problem solver, and she suffers what Aster calls ‘grief-born madness’, but is what we might call acute mental illness, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and possibly a type of bipolar disorder. These affect almost everything she does and often put her and those around her in danger. The amount of sexual abuse she suffered over her young life, which she has now come to think of as normal and something that she says no longer bothers her, it is no wonder she is as she is. As Aster puts it she is
"a person with myriad psychological disturbances, the logical outcome of the trauma she suffered.’
Unreliable and simultaneously brilliant, Giselle solves coded journals Aster could never understand on her own, she discovers secrets of their generation-ship, and is above all a wild card in dangerous situations, either saving herself and Aster or putting them both in peril.
“Though her surroundings amplified her fears, Aster knew now, years later, that Giselle’s phobias and anxieties breeched into the territory of psychosis: a paranoia difficult to identify because so many of Giselle’s concerns made sense.”
The effect Giselle has on Aster is profound; her unpredictability is very dangerous to be around, yet she is Aster’s closest ally. Aster knows that Giselle’s mind and life are balanced on a knife’s edge, driving Aster to be both protective and wary. Giselle had grown more and more suicidal, and every time Aster said goodbye, she wondered if it was the last time.
Aster, on the other hand, has managed to compartmentalize her experiences in an extreme way. This compartmentalization, separating her mind and emotions from the events around her, protects her from trauma but also encumbers her ability to properly interact with others, despite her depth of compassion for many of those around her. She receives everything that is said to her quite literally, indicating some form of autism evidenced by the way she thinks and observes the world. She only learnt to speak at 8 years old, yet has a boggling ability to easily collect knowledge of all types. Through this prism of awareness, she is able to gather vast swathes of information, all useful to survival and to eventually making change to her society and world.
Aster loved the way the pages felt, their heftiness, their texture. The paper hummed. Chalked with charts, diagrams, and tables, the book contained what a person could not—an order, a system, a rubric. Grammar textbooks reduced a language to something graphic and chartable, subject to scrutiny. Aster welcomed these straightforward, detailed explanations after dealing so long with Lune. She craved clarity, transparency, and answers. She was tired of wondering. She wanted to get to the knowing part.
The other key character is Theo, a famous eccentric surgeon who struggles with the gender imposed on him. Aster calls him gender-malcontent, otherling. As Theo says,
‘I’m not a man at all’.
As a half-caste of the upper decks (read upper-class aristocracy) who seem to be exclusively white, his father was a white sovereign but his mother a lower deck-level brown woman. His father wanted him to make up for his half-caste background by becoming as masculine as possible. Instead, Theo feels feminine, taking self-made serums to lower his testosterone. A brilliant surgeon, he has taken Aster under his wing, who he recognizes as an inbuilt genius, and there is a deep emotional and romantic connection between them. In a sense, Theo’s struggle is as much an internal battle against his body and the expectations placed on him, as it is an outward struggle to save the ones he loves. As his name might suggest his sincere faith in God allows him a stability not many on Matilda seem to be able to obtain.
An Unkindness of Ghosts not only has a rich cast, many of whom I haven’t mentioned but is quintessentially of this decade in that it reaches at the reader with a heavy, brutal hand, forcing us to examine the pressing themes; in this case, themes of race and slavery. Additionally, An Unkindness of Ghosts is a layered story, full of revealing folklore and storytelling. These stories, like all folklore, touch on the deepest unspeakable fears of the lower class, full of girls trying to avoid being married at fourteen, of male gods hoarding light, and exploring the husband and wife dynamic of a racist, misogynist society.
In stories, girls were brave and played tricks, and won. Aster wanted to be one of those girls.
As mentioned, the novel thoroughly explores sexual and physical abuse in a way I haven’t seen done before.
All the bad that’s happened to you, it was never about you. It was about them. You can’t blame yourself.
The way the characters cope with these abuses is clearly laid out in its many forms and often drives the story forward when doing nothing is not an option.
Gender is important to Rivers too, and although they present no direct thesis to the reader, it’s clear that Rivers wants us to think about the effects of gender discrimination on a group and on individuals.
“It was a sign of youth, folly, and girlishness not to have a beard, and it was surprising that a highdeck man had gotten away with having such a smooth face.”
With lots of world-building elements needed to tell this story in a way that makes sense to the reader, the novel still manages to be a totally character-driven and suspenseful read. It boasts an excellent plot buildup, a rebellion building upon itself again and again, in the hearts of the characters and in the heart of the downtrodden society itself. There is no censoring in An Unkindness of Ghosts, no numbing down the pain and trauma. Rivers holds us with strong, sharp language, in a robust, yet easy to follow style. I really did enjoy this novel and recommend it. James Tiptree (Alice Sheldon) would be proud.
The Wind City by Summer Wigmore
Posted by: sleepwalkingdreamer at Mar 9th, 2020, 12:17 am in
TITLE: The Wind City
AUTHOR: Summer Wigmore
GENRE: Urban Fantasy, Mythology and Folklore
PUBLISHED: November 20, 2013
RATING: ★★
...
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TITLE: The Wind City
AUTHOR: Summer Wigmore
GENRE: Urban Fantasy, Mythology and Folklore
PUBLISHED: November 20, 2013
RATING: ★★
...
Empress of All Seasons by Emiko Jean
Posted by: sleepwalkingdreamer at Mar 3rd, 2020, 11:49 pm in
TITLE: Empress of All Seasons
AUTHOR: Emiko Jean
GENRE: Young Adult, Fantasy
PUBLISHED: November 6, 2018
RATING: ★★★
...
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TITLE: Empress of All Seasons
AUTHOR: Emiko Jean
GENRE: Young Adult, Fantasy
PUBLISHED: November 6, 2018
RATING: ★★★
...
The Dark Dark: Stories By Samantha Hunt
Posted by: sybo13 at Feb 11th, 2020, 2:21 am in
TITLE: The Dark Dark: Stories
AUTHOR: Samantha Hunt
GENRE: Fiction, Literary Fantasy
PUBLISHED: 2017
RATING: ★★★★☆
...
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TITLE: The Dark Dark: Stories
AUTHOR: Samantha Hunt
GENRE: Fiction, Literary Fantasy
PUBLISHED: 2017
RATING: ★★★★☆
...
Bazaar: Vibrant Vegetarian Recipes by Sabrina Ghayour
Posted by: WordDiva at Jan 29th, 2020, 9:10 am in
TITLE: Bazaar: Vibrant Vegetarian Recipes
AUTHOR: Sabrina Ghayour
GENRE: Non-Fiction, Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Regional & International > Middle Eastern Cooking
PUBLISHED: May 7, 2019
RATING: ★★★★☆
...
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TITLE: Bazaar: Vibrant Vegetarian Recipes
AUTHOR: Sabrina Ghayour
GENRE: Non-Fiction, Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Regional & International > Middle Eastern Cooking
PUBLISHED: May 7, 2019
RATING: ★★★★☆
...
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
Posted by: sybo13 at Dec 5th, 2019, 9:17 pm in
TITLE: The Bone Clocks
AUTHOR: David Mitchell
GENRE: Fiction, Literary Fantasy
PUBLISHED: 2014
RATING: ★★★★☆
PURCHASE: Amazon
MOBILISM: Read
"A twig snaps. I am intensely alive."
The Bone Clocks, like Cloud Atlas, is another long, ambitious, post-modern undertaking, a decade-spanning fantasy novel with meta themes throughout, balancing on a pin the battle between good and evil. David Mitchell, the author of both novels, has said he is creating ‘his own Middle Earth’, a meta-fictional, metaphysical universe in which his novels live. And as Mitchell accurately sums up via the narrative of one of his characters: "Think Solaris meets Noam Chomsky via Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Add a dash of Twin Peaks."
Boasting a diverse ensemble cast of both psychic people (prescients) and non-psychic people (bone clocks), the novel is, in a basic sense, about a war between soul-eating psychics and body-swapping, eternal soul guardians. Sound pulpy enough for you? Yet, like A. S. Byatt, Gene Wolfe, or Angela Carter, Mitchell uplifts his material with ease to stunning existential heights, making us care deeply for and understand both the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters and the world they live in. Not only does Mitchell know how to write wonderful prose, how to use an incredibly diverse tone of voice through his characters, how to write snapping dialog, and how to carefully plot a narrative - he also seems to be an expert on breaking his reader’s heart...
Each section of the novel is set chronologically in a different time period, and with a different narrator. We start off in 1984 in the mind of The Bone Clocks’ lead protagonist, Holly Skyes, an Irish teenager who is in the midst of an abysmal attempt to run away from home. With Holly’s stinging, cynical humor we are thrown to a world of internal teenage agony, loves lost, friends found, and mistakes made on an hourly basis. Yet the predictable rise and fall of Holly’s love life and inner rage gives way to the strange string of events that are happening all around her. A sense of dread builds, and then, let's just say, things get paranormally weird.
The story is structured so that through each section of the novel, Mitchell drives us chronologically further into the future using different characters' viewpoints and voices. We jump from Holly’s 1984 to London and the Swiss Alps in 1991 and briefly experience the mind and life of the brilliantly slimy, Hugo Lamb. Then we are off to 2004, then 2015 and onwards, through different character’s perspectives and their experiences. Despite the great differences in the cast, Mitchell manages to find relatability in each point of view, from the fading literary giant Crispin (my favorite), the warzone journalist Ed, Holly at various stages of life (as a teenager, as a young woman, as a mother, and onwards), to Hugo Lamb the wickedly charming opportunistic adaptor, to the perspective of an eternal body-hopping, multi-gender person named Marinus. Within these narratives, each of which could be complete short stories of sorts, we begin to grasp at the underlying psychic war happening between two fiercely different groups. I won’t get into more details in fear of spoiling the experience for would-be readers, except to say let this story build on you.
Having read now a couple of Mitchell’s books, I have noted he enjoys touching on a theme of the timeless connection between souls. Like all our lives, his characters' stories are not told in a moment or through the lens of one decision but instead their stories are told over time. Or in this case, they are told over lifetimes. The teenage Holly Skyes we meet in 1984 is quite different from the Holly Skyes in 2043, the final section of the novel, yet she is still so truly Holly. In fact, all of Mitchell's characters go through such painfully heartfelt changes, each loses so much, learns so much, and are so layered, that a reader could almost believe these people really exist. A few words from one of his characters persist, “People are icebergs, with just a bit you can see and loads you can’t.”
Structuring the novel in the manner he does, Mitchell gives himself space, timing options, and clarity, to expose those hidden parts of his characters in a way that imparts both sympathy and surprise at what we find beneath the surface. One of my favorite sections deals with the life of the end-of-career literary giant, Hershey Crispin, who bumbles his way through relationships and intrigue — his voice is simultaneously entertaining, pathetically snobbish as only a post-modern writer could be - and yet so human, so venerable.
For a psychic fantasy war novel, The Bone Clocks certainly moves at a leisurely pace. There were moments when I felt the story was slowing down as though it were bogged down by time itself. The long build-up pays off in the final 20% of the novel as Mitchell switches gears to a fast-paced, gripping, and sweaty rhythm. The climactic battle, a showdown if you like, is well worth waiting for and hard to describe; a battle of psychic matter-warping power, satanic icons, body-swapping, death, and destruction. The battles are so well written...
The most successful section of the novel is the final part, set in 2043, a vision of how modern society could or will inevitably fall, with power grids and internet access failing, food scarce, and countries falling into lawlessness and violence in the midst of a horrible climate crisis apocalypse. It’s staggering for its believability, and I truly hope Mitchell writes an entire novel set in this believable dystopia. It scared the gallstones out of me and made me want to immediately sign up for weapons training and to begin stockpiling food in my already-full garage, currently full of junk. As one character notes in 1991, “When civilisation shuts up shop, a gun’ll be worth any number of university degrees.”
How very true. And the observation below sums up the dismal state of 2043...
Mitchell presents a devastating future reality for people like us, people who have grown up and lived through an era of almost-boundless cheap resources (electricity, unlimited internet, boundless water, and food). How can we be so aware of and yet simultaneously oblivious to the destruction we are wreaking upon this planet? It’s summed up beautifully in a paragraph that is so relevant today...
Today, in December 2019, we appear to be living in the era when we could have saved the planet but didn’t...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... earth.html
It’s the believability of this future Mitchell proposes that made the novel’s magic and the psychic battles fade in significance set alongside the very normal, everyday havoc humans are wreaking on planet earth, and on each other. Or in another sense, the depraved group of psychics in the novel who consume and destroy human souls as a way to obtain everlasting life can be seen as a metaphor for the way our current human civilization consumes and destroys our finite resources, with very little thought for the future.
The Bone Clocks isn’t just a carefully plotted, character-driven fantasy story revealing subtle truths about power and the destructive nature of humanity — the novel also is beautifully written. Three times longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mitchell’s prose is pristine, whimsical, yet always somehow still relaxed. The dialog is sharp, spot-on, but it’s the brilliant inner moments of observed existential revelation that really tie all of Mitchell’s narrators together to the greater storyline and the greater themes of the novel.
On being human, and being alive...
On Love...
On time and living with change...
On eternity...
Compared to Cloud Atlas, this novel is more plot-driven, but Mitchell is still able to discover and retrieve intrinsic truth, bringing life to his characters and making us marvel at the beauty of the human mind, no matter which mind we are talking about.
Except for a few gripes at Mitchell's slow pacing and the sometimes fussiness of his prose, I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Bone Clocks. I felt for Holly, and the people she loved at various points in her life. It’s a long novel, but it feels like a friend with whom I have spent time, an old friend who has shared their heart with me. Now the book is finished, and the people who populated it are gone. I have lost them, and some part of me wants them back. Because of this, I know I will re-read The Bone Clocks. There are just too many secrets left to discover, and rediscover. To close, I leave you with the following passages...
and
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TITLE: The Bone Clocks
AUTHOR: David Mitchell
GENRE: Fiction, Literary Fantasy
PUBLISHED: 2014
RATING: ★★★★☆
PURCHASE: Amazon
MOBILISM: Read
"A twig snaps. I am intensely alive."
The Bone Clocks, like Cloud Atlas, is another long, ambitious, post-modern undertaking, a decade-spanning fantasy novel with meta themes throughout, balancing on a pin the battle between good and evil. David Mitchell, the author of both novels, has said he is creating ‘his own Middle Earth’, a meta-fictional, metaphysical universe in which his novels live. And as Mitchell accurately sums up via the narrative of one of his characters: "Think Solaris meets Noam Chomsky via Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Add a dash of Twin Peaks."
Boasting a diverse ensemble cast of both psychic people (prescients) and non-psychic people (bone clocks), the novel is, in a basic sense, about a war between soul-eating psychics and body-swapping, eternal soul guardians. Sound pulpy enough for you? Yet, like A. S. Byatt, Gene Wolfe, or Angela Carter, Mitchell uplifts his material with ease to stunning existential heights, making us care deeply for and understand both the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters and the world they live in. Not only does Mitchell know how to write wonderful prose, how to use an incredibly diverse tone of voice through his characters, how to write snapping dialog, and how to carefully plot a narrative - he also seems to be an expert on breaking his reader’s heart...
“Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death.”
Each section of the novel is set chronologically in a different time period, and with a different narrator. We start off in 1984 in the mind of The Bone Clocks’ lead protagonist, Holly Skyes, an Irish teenager who is in the midst of an abysmal attempt to run away from home. With Holly’s stinging, cynical humor we are thrown to a world of internal teenage agony, loves lost, friends found, and mistakes made on an hourly basis. Yet the predictable rise and fall of Holly’s love life and inner rage gives way to the strange string of events that are happening all around her. A sense of dread builds, and then, let's just say, things get paranormally weird.
The story is structured so that through each section of the novel, Mitchell drives us chronologically further into the future using different characters' viewpoints and voices. We jump from Holly’s 1984 to London and the Swiss Alps in 1991 and briefly experience the mind and life of the brilliantly slimy, Hugo Lamb. Then we are off to 2004, then 2015 and onwards, through different character’s perspectives and their experiences. Despite the great differences in the cast, Mitchell manages to find relatability in each point of view, from the fading literary giant Crispin (my favorite), the warzone journalist Ed, Holly at various stages of life (as a teenager, as a young woman, as a mother, and onwards), to Hugo Lamb the wickedly charming opportunistic adaptor, to the perspective of an eternal body-hopping, multi-gender person named Marinus. Within these narratives, each of which could be complete short stories of sorts, we begin to grasp at the underlying psychic war happening between two fiercely different groups. I won’t get into more details in fear of spoiling the experience for would-be readers, except to say let this story build on you.
Having read now a couple of Mitchell’s books, I have noted he enjoys touching on a theme of the timeless connection between souls. Like all our lives, his characters' stories are not told in a moment or through the lens of one decision but instead their stories are told over time. Or in this case, they are told over lifetimes. The teenage Holly Skyes we meet in 1984 is quite different from the Holly Skyes in 2043, the final section of the novel, yet she is still so truly Holly. In fact, all of Mitchell's characters go through such painfully heartfelt changes, each loses so much, learns so much, and are so layered, that a reader could almost believe these people really exist. A few words from one of his characters persist, “People are icebergs, with just a bit you can see and loads you can’t.”
Structuring the novel in the manner he does, Mitchell gives himself space, timing options, and clarity, to expose those hidden parts of his characters in a way that imparts both sympathy and surprise at what we find beneath the surface. One of my favorite sections deals with the life of the end-of-career literary giant, Hershey Crispin, who bumbles his way through relationships and intrigue — his voice is simultaneously entertaining, pathetically snobbish as only a post-modern writer could be - and yet so human, so venerable.
For a psychic fantasy war novel, The Bone Clocks certainly moves at a leisurely pace. There were moments when I felt the story was slowing down as though it were bogged down by time itself. The long build-up pays off in the final 20% of the novel as Mitchell switches gears to a fast-paced, gripping, and sweaty rhythm. The climactic battle, a showdown if you like, is well worth waiting for and hard to describe; a battle of psychic matter-warping power, satanic icons, body-swapping, death, and destruction. The battles are so well written...
Rhîmes spins his hands and makes sort of snapping motions, and Heidi’s body spins too, herkily-jerkily. Snap, crackle, pop, goes her spine, and her lower jawbone’s half off and blood’s trickling from a hole in her forehead, like a bullet went in. Rhîmes does a backhand slap in the air, and Heidi’s mangled body’s flung against a picture of a robin sat on a spade, then lands on its head and tumbles in a heap.
The most successful section of the novel is the final part, set in 2043, a vision of how modern society could or will inevitably fall, with power grids and internet access failing, food scarce, and countries falling into lawlessness and violence in the midst of a horrible climate crisis apocalypse. It’s staggering for its believability, and I truly hope Mitchell writes an entire novel set in this believable dystopia. It scared the gallstones out of me and made me want to immediately sign up for weapons training and to begin stockpiling food in my already-full garage, currently full of junk. As one character notes in 1991, “When civilisation shuts up shop, a gun’ll be worth any number of university degrees.”
How very true. And the observation below sums up the dismal state of 2043...
“I remember the pictures of seawater flooding Fremantle during the deluge of ’33. Or was it the deluge of ’37? Or am I confusing it with pictures of the sea sluicing into the New York subway, when five thousand people drowned underground? Or was that Athens? Or Mumbai? Footage of catastrophes flowed so thick and fast through the thirties that it was hard to keep track of which coastal region had been devastated this week, or which city had been decimated by Ebola or Ratflu. The news turned into a plotless never-ending disaster movie I could hardly bring myself to watch.”
Mitchell presents a devastating future reality for people like us, people who have grown up and lived through an era of almost-boundless cheap resources (electricity, unlimited internet, boundless water, and food). How can we be so aware of and yet simultaneously oblivious to the destruction we are wreaking upon this planet? It’s summed up beautifully in a paragraph that is so relevant today...
“Five years later, I take a deep, shuddery breath to stop myself crying. It’s not just that I can’t hold Aoife again, it’s everything: It’s grief for the regions we deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office—all so we didn’t have to change our cozy lifestyles.”
Today, in December 2019, we appear to be living in the era when we could have saved the planet but didn’t...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... earth.html
It’s the believability of this future Mitchell proposes that made the novel’s magic and the psychic battles fade in significance set alongside the very normal, everyday havoc humans are wreaking on planet earth, and on each other. Or in another sense, the depraved group of psychics in the novel who consume and destroy human souls as a way to obtain everlasting life can be seen as a metaphor for the way our current human civilization consumes and destroys our finite resources, with very little thought for the future.
The Bone Clocks isn’t just a carefully plotted, character-driven fantasy story revealing subtle truths about power and the destructive nature of humanity — the novel also is beautifully written. Three times longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mitchell’s prose is pristine, whimsical, yet always somehow still relaxed. The dialog is sharp, spot-on, but it’s the brilliant inner moments of observed existential revelation that really tie all of Mitchell’s narrators together to the greater storyline and the greater themes of the novel.
On being human, and being alive...
“We live on, as long as there are people to live on in.”
On Love...
“If you love and are loved, whatever you do affects others.”
On time and living with change...
“If life didn’t change, it wouldn’t be life, it’d be a photograph.”
On eternity...
“I put my hand on the altar rail. 'What if ... what if Heaven is real, but only in moments?”
Compared to Cloud Atlas, this novel is more plot-driven, but Mitchell is still able to discover and retrieve intrinsic truth, bringing life to his characters and making us marvel at the beauty of the human mind, no matter which mind we are talking about.
Except for a few gripes at Mitchell's slow pacing and the sometimes fussiness of his prose, I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Bone Clocks. I felt for Holly, and the people she loved at various points in her life. It’s a long novel, but it feels like a friend with whom I have spent time, an old friend who has shared their heart with me. Now the book is finished, and the people who populated it are gone. I have lost them, and some part of me wants them back. Because of this, I know I will re-read The Bone Clocks. There are just too many secrets left to discover, and rediscover. To close, I leave you with the following passages...
“Then the three of us hug, and if I could choose one moment of my life to sit inside of for the rest of eternity... it'd be now, no question.”
and
"I'm feeling erased myself, fading away into an invisible woman. For one voyage to begin, another voyage must come to an end, sort of."
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
Posted by: sybo13 at Nov 20th, 2019, 10:59 pm in
TITLE: This Is How You Lose Her
AUTHOR: Junot Diaz
GENRE: General Fiction/Classics
PUBLISHED: 2012
RATING: ★★★★☆
...
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TITLE: This Is How You Lose Her
AUTHOR: Junot Diaz
GENRE: General Fiction/Classics
PUBLISHED: 2012
RATING: ★★★★☆
...