A night at the circus – Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus

Posted on October 30, 2011 by Iain

The Night Circus sat on the table in Waterstone’s; its starkly designed cover shouting for attention.There is somethign rather strange and terrifying on the novel and it reminds me a little of Gordon Dahlquist’s The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters in its ambition. It is, though, easier to read in its different styling. Like the Dahlquist, this book is about magic though defining it so much more broadly.

Celia Bowen, who takes (though later discards) the nom-de-plume Miranda, is taken in by the magician known as Prospero the Enchanter. Morgenstern announces and uses the Tempest as a backdrop to her novel wherein she takes Shakespeare’s theme of art and artifice and mixes it with the fin-de-siécle. Prospero the Enchanter faes away, little noticed by his crowds until he is believed to be dead.

Meanwhile Chandresh LeFevre is dreaming up the Night Circus with an invited group fo dinner guests. The Circus is more than a three ring affair: it dazzles and maps itself to the visitor’s desires. On opening night, the Twins, Poppet and Widget, are born each with the power of sight in a different direction. Poppet can read the future whilst Widget understands the past. At the centre of the circus burns a cauldron of white fire, anchoring it and giving it a focus point. He, though, loses this focus gaining a convex view of the world and Marco, his assistant and unwilling pawn in the game, helps him to forget either throgh aiding his drinking or fashioning rooms around the house, redefining the space.

Meanwhile, Federick Thiessen falls in love with the circus, following it around and visiting it whenever he can. A clock maker by trade, he designs and gives his wares away so that he might visit it more often. In the process he forms the reveurs, a clique of fellow fanantics, after an article of his is published. His love affair spawns others though love in Morgenstern’s world is a deadly affair unless you know the rules and consequences.

It becomes apparent that the circus is a god game, one where the pawns become aware of their predicament and try to change the rules to avoid the planned ending. It is somewhat tempered when the subjects begin to take on the games and to create their own rules. Perhaps they play it better than Prospero could have imagined and find a way of making it their own arena.

Celia and Marco’s love affair, initially benighted by Isobel’s infatuation with him, allows both of them to explore the memory palace that both create through their own illusions and strengths. They create a labyrinth orthagonal to the real world, much like Prospero has done, and removes themselves having found a new anchor to hold the circus together . I have not seem memory palaces like these since Mary Gentle’s Rats and Gargo

Bailey, the new anchor and Poppet’s love since childhood days, believe while heartely in the place and is able to take it on in the new century. When Celia and Marco remove themselves from the world in the final blaze of the while fire, he is the only one able to relight it as he understands the passion invested it by its denizens and fans. His trek to find the circus and to join it becomes something deeper which he can only understand as takes on the task at hand. In the end he is able to take the circus on somewhere else, magical but not magical. His own belief in the fantastic means that he is ther perfect person to take the story on into the twentieth century, as the timeframe of the novel is the 1890s, a time of experimentation and change.

This is  wonderful novel which involves and draws the reader into its dream. Like Shakespeare’s Prospero, a form of magic is ended but it transmutes into something quite different and subtle. Initially the book struck me as something along the lines of Christopher Priest’s novels in its manipulation of the mundane, or perhaps Audrey Niffeneger’s The Night Library, but it goes beyond that and, I suspect, the initiated would find even more.

I look forward to donning my scarlet scarf for future visits.

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The most human creature – Chris Priestley’s Mister Creecher

Posted on October 22, 2011 by Iain

Cover image for Chris Priestley's Mister Creecher I’ve just finished Chris Priestley’s latest book, Mister Creecher amidst the surfeit of fine reading on my shelves. I picked up his for Tales of Terror book as a curiosity and duly fell in love with his take on darker side of the fantastic and his apparent love of the Gothic in all its styles.

Creecher is Frankenstein’s monster who has come to London and rescuses Billy from  being attacked. In his hideousness, something that mercifully the author does not shy away from, the monster embodies the soul of the Enlightenment, as Mary Shelley began to argue in Frankenstein. His act of reading and caring for somebody who is equally seen as an outsider is apparently a hideous act to the capitalist society. Chris Priestley develops Shelley’s depiction of the monster as the most human person in the novel, whereas Victor Frankenstein is the real monster. Yet this act of self-recognition is ignored for the superficial aspects, his looks,  which is something that Kenneth Branagh and Robert DeNiro tried to get to in the 1994 depiction.

After following Frankenstein and Clerval to Oxford via Windsor, the creature and Billy join Browning’s Circus of Freaks (including more nods to the fantastic including Bradbury,and Kafka) though Bradbury hints out that Billy is far more a monster than the creature. Following Frankenstein’s footsteps, the pair go to the Lake district where Billy assumes a different identity, trying to remake himself.

Getting to the heart of something that the Romantics certainly did, this taking on of disguises and layering of other people perhaps comes to a head when he claims that lines from Keats’s Endymion are his own but ignores the subtle warning given to him that it cannot last. Perhaps Priestley also gets to heart of assuming change, that is must be something from within rather than just affected. Affectations lead to monstrosities, perhaps like his Uncle Montague and the ghost children. Hounded out of Keswick, he and the Creecher go separate ways with their very own stories (a nicely segued set of stories there as well).

The book is a lovestory to Nineteenth century literature and its decided lack of boundaries of genre or place. The type face, shortness of chapters, separation into books and the embedded poetry are so like Gothic novels that Priestley is obviously familiar with and this book is a call or readers to take on Charles Dickens or Mary Shelley; something that I whole heartedly concur with. Equally it goes against the cult of childhood innocence though, that children can go through horror and remain unaffected. Billy’s life is one that takes on the sheen of being a romantic novel and that it will not affect them; something that the monster gets to in his own way.

In the end, the reader should ask: who is the real monster?

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I’ve just finished watching Catherine Hardwicke‘s Red Riding Hood (DVD, 2011) which was interesting. I wasn’t expecting great things along the lines of Company of Wolves (DVD) and to that extent, I really wasn’t surprised.

Hardwicke does reflect on the original tale with the wolf being her true love and her father being the wolf. His selfishness of trying to turn her into a wolf effectively damns him. I do wonder if the playing with the priest was a dig at the evangelism of the Twilight films and its underlying message. Rather than being a tortured person, denying her own desires, Amanda Seyfried‘s Valerie becomes far more aware of the wolf and its meaning.

It might have been more interesting if Hardwicke had followed the line that the grandmother might have been the wolf, or even if Valerie has turned into one. It did not quite go over the top but it was entertaining enough. It does try to break the recent mould towards conservative values but is still caught up in itself and might have been braver.

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Iain | Leave a comment

Using a long spoon – Anne Fine’s The Devil Walks

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Iain


I read a review of Anne Fine‘s latest novel, The Devil Walks, in the Guardian by Mal Peet and picked it up last time I was in Blackwells.  Young Adult literature has re-discovered and invigorated the genre with authors such as Marcus Sedgwick, Michelle Zink and Neil Gaiman amongst others using it to build the atmosphere through out the book. I am reminded of Jose Monleon’s theory of the fantastic as a safety valve, allowing  safe place for the exploration of the darker aspects of the Enlightenment.

So what is Fine exploring in the Devil Walks? It would appear to be familial relationship with orphans and step-families. When Daniel’s mother is taken to the asylum, he is cared for by Doctor Marlow and his family. His only possession from his previous life is a Dolls House which resembles a fine house. He and Sophie, one of the Doctor’s daughters, begin playing with it, exploring it and find a strange Janus like doll which can be either adult or child.

The Doctor tracks down the owner of the house who is Daniel’s uncle, Severin, who invites him to live at the house. Leaving for the house, he sees his uncle’s split personality and begins to make friends with the elderly servants, Martha and Thomas. Both knew Daniel’s mother as a child and see him beginning to explore the same area that his mother did.

Through his sneaking, he discovers that his uncle has made arrangements for the Dolls House to be brought to its larger version so that he can complete the voodoo based ritual started as a child. His greed and lust for the fine things in life means that he created a voodoo to harness his darker side whilst he killed his step family. Daniel is the last offering to Devil that he needs to make.

In contrast to the other books that I’ve read which concern dolls, such as Jeremy de Quidt’s The Toymaker (earlier review), the doll represents Severin’s inner life. Rather than being the unwitting toy, Severin is the puppet master and makes his own choices. Fine’s damnation of the greedy is perhaps a reflection on the excesses of recent times and its lack of compassion in society.

Fine avoids the easy option of Daniel coming back to Sophie but she lays in the expectation that he will go back to her. Whilst the Marlow’s may not have everything, they are close. Daniel begins to dig into his own history and discovers happier times before the doll exerted its hideous pall over those closest to it.

The Devil Walk is a great read which reflects the moth-eaten grandeur of the Gothic, Describing the work of Peter Straub, Stephen King once described it as being like very loud machinery. Fine pulls off the same trick in this book; it is certainly one that could conceivably become a modern classic.

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Coming full circle – Michelle Zink’s Circle of Fire reviewed

Posted on August 20, 2011 by Iain

I’ve just finished The Circle of Fire, the last novel in Michelle Zink‘s Prophecy of the Sisters series. I’ve written about the series before (review of first book and an interview with the author) but I wanted to hold off until I’d read the final book.

Thoughout the series, Zink has posed several questions regarding girls, feminism and making choices which is what captured me initially. That and the superb writing.

Amalia (Lia) and Alice are gathering themselves for the great battle, perhaps finding that they need to set certain affairs in order. With the thinned world, Lia travels to Ireland to find the final pieces and meanings of the prophecy found in Chartres and begins losing the trust of those around her and herself.

Her relation to Dimitri gets closer and avoids the twee panderings around the issue that seems to infest young adult writing at the moment. Whilst avoiding the physical act, Zink fleshes out the relationship and deals with some of the issues without being coy about it and trying to avoid the difficulties. Yet Zink does not ignore the initial relationship with James which Lia ran away from when she left for her travels in the first book and acknowledges the emotions that are there in a way which suggests that Lia has grown up in her travels, as one would hope that she does.

Given this, I am slightly surprised that Alice does not get  a little more coverage. It would be easy to consider the relationship as something along the lines of Buffy and Faith, but the author begins to bring her out as a character. The gothic allows the author to explore the relationship and to pull out the almost empty need for each other that they have. Both need the relationship to cope with their parent’s deaths and the stress of the prophecy. She appears to get into the raw jealousy which festers from Alice’s side and the perception of Lia’s relationship with their father. She moves from being somebody who merely makes the choice to spite her sister to being somebody who reacted badly and compounded some bad choices. Yet Lia also makes mistakes and bad choices when dealing with the people around her.

Drawing from the notion of writing from the perspective of the ‘evil’ person, the series makes the reader consider the notion of choice and how it affects lives. It is easy to forget that Lia could make the wrong decision and to allow Samael through, or perhaps wallow in her own demons and give in if we follow the notion of the fantastic as discussing the internal.

I’ve loved this series and note  that Amazon lists A Temptation of Angels to be published next year. She has thought about the books from her protagonist’s perspective rather than using them for her own perspective. I’m glad that I waited and read the final two books together.

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Down a mine with a laser – James Blaylock’s Affair of the Chalk Cliffs

Posted on July 16, 2011 by Iain

On a recent journey into London, I picked up the latest Langdon St Ives novel from James Blaylock, The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs. It has been a while since I’d read my last Blaylock but I’ll be trying to catch up with these and read his earlier books. Accompanied by JK Potter’s photographs, this is a short but excellent steampunk crime adventure.

After Alice St Ives disappears, Langdon and his friends, Jack Owlesby and Tubby Frobisher, venture into the fiendish plans of Dr Narbondo. As the madness spreads, St Ives realised that he has been tricked before being captured. After Alices’s escape, Jack and Tubby set out to stop the doctor.

Blaylock riffs off Jules Verne, creating some interesting versions of lasers and submarines, and adventure writers. Having mused on the notion of influence in the short story, ’13 Phantasms’, and the debt owed by writers to the pulp writers of the 1930s onwards, Blaylock appears to be doing something similar in this book. Perhaps others but I’m new to this series so will be going backwards shortly to try and catch up. Steampunk takes this backwards to the Victorians and explores the forms, occasionally challenging them. Blaylock is not so much challenging these but going with them to see where they might go.

The images go well with the text adding to the Victorian feel of the novella. Perhaps not a book to start with but ripping yarn nonetheless.

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Hourglasses on the page – Charles Stross’s Rule 34

Posted on July 16, 2011 by Iain

Charlie Stross’s latest, Rule 34, is a fast-paced, discombobulating read. Its near future setting is just in the corner of the reader’s eye though it provides no fixes. There is scant comfort, outside of the brief meetings where the edges of each story collides.

In the strange IT crimes unit, Liz begins investigating a fetishistic sex crime which makes no sense. Her friend, Dorothy, is a corporate psychologist who comes into contact with the Toymaker as the seemingly unconnected shows it to be a deeper sense of togetherness.

Kemal, recently released from prison, is on licence. As a Muslim he shouldn’t be drinking but the Gnome is persuasive which is how he ends up as the consul for a newly created shell state for Kyrgistan. Despite his job, he cannot tell his wife and, for some reason, there is a lot of bread mix.

In the middle of this is the Toymaker, a fixer trying to organise a Gangster 2.0 takeover plan. The problem is that the two new executives appear to be dead before they can be hired.

Sf, at some points, understands this world in ways that the fiction cannot. It slides under the skin and teases out the wires. In some senses it looks at the knitted world of stories and connections that come as and when with globalisation. The macro comes together with the micro as the human stories intersect with the machine’s story. In an essay on Paul Auster’s Leviathan, Kevin Jackson comments that the ‘world remains mysterious, resistant to commentary and narrative’ (p 145)1. Sf as a genre, in particular ‘post-cyberpunk’ and Singularity authors, gleefully render this untrue and they see changing technological narratives of the world.

The Singularity, which may or may not happen, becomes a powerful way of describing this unevenly distributed future. As the Toymaker emerges as the sentient AI that is discovered to be at the centre of the apparent chaos, attempting to write the world in its own image, it tries to see the world in its own way. Its amorality, echoing the recent use of technology in finance, might have been a rueful exploration of a world which is being rushed towards with very little thought about what it might mean for the human inhabitants. Ian McDonald, in one strand of The Dervish House, does explore this in the takeover bid which goes fantastically wrong for the company but explores what it means for the traders involved, who merely move on the next market. Stross does not quite go this far which is slightly frustrating. For Stross, it is the technology, not the people who march onwards.

Despite these reservations, Rule 34 is a thought provoking novel and fast paced. Its mixture of crime and sf sits easily with the narrative. I would have preferred one that stretched itself a little further in its human considerations.

1 The Good of the Novel, Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan (eds) (Faber and Faber, London, 2011)

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Becoming lost and found in Vandermeer’s Ambergris

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Iain

I have to admit that re-reading the ‘New Weird’ authors recently has reminded me why I ell head over heels in love with the weirdness at the time. In a sense, it is like the reminder of a first love or kiss, tempered by time and seen, perhaps, for what it was. I’m reading Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen, a book I read at the time and remember the launch of at a London club with Jeffrey Ford.

In the main, it was China Miéville’s writing whom I gravitated to, giddy and moth like. I suppose I’ve stayed like that for years (including having the pleasurable opportunity to interview him a couple of times). Re-reading VanderMeer’s work, especially the Ambergris books in order and quicker succession, various links become more apparent and resonant.

Dradin, In Love (originally published in 1996 through Buzzcity Press) is strange novella and it begins the collection. Dradin spies a women in red in the window of Hoegbotton and Sons and falls instantly in love. Dvorak Nibeling, the dwarf, promises that he can introduce Dradin to her so Dradin sets to buy her a present, which he determines must be a book. Entering the Borges Bookshop, he purchases a map which is handwritten.  As he pursues his quarry, Dradin goes off into a reverie, reminiscent of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Certain moments remind him of his early life as a missionary, lost in the jungles where he had passionate romance, pulling him out of Ambergris. With a tinge of noir fiction, this might be a nod towards the Symbolist poetry of Baudelaire and fin-de-siécle writing.

The journey itself is constructed from the names of other authors, a knowing wink to postmodernism. Borges and Barth are clearly mentioned as Vandermeer riffs of the notion of influence and stories being constructed from other ones. It is more obvious in Vandermeer’s work than Miéville’s. I think that this comes from differing approaches but this is not to say that either is wrong. When Dradin discovers (bound, naked and in a graveyard) that Dvorak has taken her to pieces, he murders the dwarf and flees to the bookstore only to find her “made of papier mache and metal and porcelain and clay…[a] testimony to the clockmaker’s craft” (p69).

One wonders of VanderMeer is playing with the reader in this, presenting a world of desire and loss. When we see the doll, we almost see the shape of the book as the full realisation of VanderMeer’s plot comes together. Dradin, or the reader, is in love the idea of the doll for sure but Dvorak, the author, revels in knowing the artifice of the quest’s goal. The map, traditional for fantasy, gleefully points us in this direction but the acts of violence to the doll force us to see this and to recognise the strings that created the rope which has led us here. In the act of recognition, we violently remove the author in recognition not as pure creator but also re-manufacturer.

The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris by Duncan Shriek (who will appear in the later book, Shriek) is the story of the founding of Ambergris. Told with extraneous footnotes which take the story in different directions, becoming their own story. So linear narrative is not an issue here. Though it does exist, it is only one way of reading, something that Nicholson Baker or Reif Larsen play with outside the genre. There’s story outside of the story.

That’s not the only level though. In the invasion of the mushroom city, before the Silence, Tonsure keeps a diary which goes missing. When it is found, it becomes an epistolary club story and so we return to the Nineteenth century which appears to influence VanderMeer so much. (And no, I’m not complaining, nineteenth century narratives are often modern and exciting.) I do wonder if the final section was a precursor to the Slake Moths in Perdido Street Station but that’s another session of musing. I do suspect that it might be in there somewhere.

The novella sets in motion the events which will be complete in Finch where the mushrooms are invaded and strike back. There is a certain amount of adventure fiction in this as well, as though the author is cramming as much in to create a deliciously odd story.

As it is being told through two authors,the reader can never be quite sure that what they are reading is artifice or not. It comes back to Dradin, In Love where the reader is shown that everything is manufactured. Rather than doing this VanderMeer asks us to question whether the author, or their interpretation, can be trusted at all. It would appear to come back to theorising about writing and going back to experimentation. Where Miéville took on Tolkien and set about rewriting expectations that the fantastic had accreted, VanderMeer was very much in the Carter or Rushdie notions of bringing elements together that were interesting. Rather than taking on the rules of the genre, he takes on the rules of writing and the very notion of make-believe and its implications, revelling in the make-believe but seeing where he can go with it.

I still have two more novellas and appendices to go in the collection but my “to (re)read” list is getting longer.

City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer (Tor UK, London, 2002)

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Parasols and rapier wit at the ready – Gail Carriger’s Heartless

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Iain

I’ve just been reading the latest Gail Carriger, Heartless, and it really is a return  to form.

Alexia Maccon is a little tied up with the slight matter of being eight months  pregnant. Rather then being able to enjoy some time away from balacing the Supernatural world, she is somewhat bothered by a ghost with a vague warning about the Queen being targeted for assassination. But has she understood which Queen? Meanwhile, Lord Akeldama appears to take an interest in the forthcoming child and a deal which promises some interesting times in future books is brokered.

It is a novel which is a cusp.

Heartless is a book which ties up loose ends and sets up more. Carriger brings us back to microcosm of society London and shines.

The charm of these novels lies in the social observation and it shines in this. Felicity has decided that she is going to suppport women’s suffrage, much to the general disapproval of society and modicum of shock for Lady Maccon, though Felicitiy’s real past time will cause a bigger shock later. Ivy’s reaction is really quite priceless but echoes a deeper issue. Apart from the fearless (and decidely French) Mme Lefoux and, to a lesser extent recently Lady Maccon, women are largely powerless.

London society is still not sure about the Lady Maccon and her child, fearful of what it mght bring. But it is an older child which concerns the action. Madame Lefoux’s adopted child, Quesnel, is kidnapped by Countess Nadasdy, leading her to construct the octomaton. Raining steampunk terror on the city, the inventor forces some changes in the supernatural world.

There is a real sense of crisis and collision of worlds in  Heartless. The previous books have given us a delightful sleight of hand in the direction of this change. The baby presents issues and is perhaps an echo of the age or mirror to something else. Carriger is definitely back on form with this book in revelling in the Wildean wit and poise and good twist.

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Losing my desire – Russell Hoban’s Angelica Lost and Found

Posted on July 2, 2011 by Iain

Russell Hoban‘s Angelica Lost and Found is a quartet of stories which is underpinned by the rescue of Angelica by Volatore, the Hippogriff, in Ariosto‘s Orlando Furioso. Volatore rescues Angelica and then has sex with her, a pursuit that becomes the guiding principle of the chase.

Assuming human form, the creature comes to San Francisco seeking a new start, a new life. Searching for his Angelica, though not knowing what she looks like, he undergoes various encounters as a newcomer to the city.

Hoban dives into the way the stories and fables can be interpreted in this world. The Hippogriff moulds himself to the desires of the ‘Angelica’, the temporarily bound maiden, but speaks to a primal version of maleness. It is one driven by sexual desire, something that Hoban plays with when he suggests the Freudian desire for the father before dismissing it as nonsense.

This is interpretation not of dreams but poems, where the interpretation becomes more potent than the original text. Orlando Furioso becomes lost in this world of readerly rewriting,or retelling as Clute might have it. The world is not made strange but the interloping men and Angelicas are and become increasingly so until they recognise what they are and accept it.

Whilst slight, Angelica Lost and Found is a modern play around myth. It reminds me of Gregory Feeley’s Kentauros, an examination of the Centaur which I recently reviewed for Interzone. It might have had a deeper impact if I knew more about the original text, to which Hoban returns, but a book that makes me very curious.

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