Some Five-Year-Old Titles

Must reviews be bang-up-to-date? Must blog-posts expend their attention upon century-old classics? What about the in-betweens? Here are some brief notes on books published in that dead-zone, five years since. I mean, I say five years ago. Anything from before Covid and Lockdown might as well be a century old to me. But there you are.

Peter Newman, The Deathless (HarperVoyager 2018) 

Some years ago I posted a series of online reviews of the Wheel of Time novels in which, amongst other things, I lamented the awfulness of Robert Jordan's prose. Some fans reacted crossly to this, one memorably telling me that Jordan was a better prose stylist than Flaubert. My suggestion, only half-jokingly made, that novels should be sold like wine—£4.99 for the supermarket plonk of Robert Jordan or Dan Brown, £29.99 a book for the finer flavours of, say, Vladimir Nabokov—was vilified. The prose of contemporary Fantasy was, I was assured, just fine, fit for purpose, a brilliant story-and-worldbuilding-delivering medium.

Which brings me to The Deathless, a chunk of neo-Gothic folderol set in ‘the endless forests of the Wild’, where humanity ekes out a precarious existence protected by magic crystals that ward off the myriad demons of the woods, all watched over by a chilly cast of immortals living in huge crystal castles. It’s quite a promising premise, but Newman assiduously rinses all the negative capability out of it with an unbroken stream of explain-y narrative, shining the torchlight of banality into every last corner of his concept. Still, there are consolations for the reader, not least the ingenuous badness of Newman’s prose: ‘The servant looked familiar in a way that suggested Vasin has seen him before’ [3]; ‘Though the pillars were as dull to look at as the walls, each one was double her girth.’ [46]; ‘She had sprained muscles in her shoulders, thighs and ankles’ [83]. That's: the muscles in her ankles. ‘Pits parted the sinewy hair’ [108]; ‘His face was ripe with anger, his body radiated it.’ [132]; ‘The fear in his voice was palpable.’ [193]. Excuse me for a moment whilst I palpate your voice. And finally: ‘She glared into his armpit, appalled.’ [251]. Well. Indeed.

Peter McLean, Priest of Bones (Ace 2018)

A quick check on Goodreads tells me that McLean's Rose Throne series has a large and enthusiastic fanbase, but it's a not a group to which I can claim membership I'm afraid. Priest of Bones is a sweary, very violent low-fantasy that ticks all the hackneyed grimdark boxes whilst also levering-in a series of, in this context, utterly unconvincing right-on postures about how awful rape is, how unsmiley-face is childhood abuse, how uncool homophobia. I did not buy this latter component one iota: a story that fucking loves its fucking stabby-stabby violence as much as this fucking story fucking does loses the right to pretend to righteousness on the topic of violation more broadly conceived. Story: a gang return from a Fantasyland war and settle into the mafia life in the city, using violence and murder to jockey for their position: a sort of magicland Peaky Blinders, or perhaps a Fantasy Boardwalk Empire. But it's very in your face, crudely written and I bounced hard, hard I say, off it. One final note: as a name, ‘Kant the Cunt’ is not funny the first time it is mentioned, and moves further into negative funny the more it is repeated.

Leslye Walton, The Price Guide to the Occult (Candlewick Press 2018)

A decently-enough written YA story concerning the various adventures of a young witch in the Pacific North West with the unusual name of ‘Nor Blackburn’. The novel charts the ups and downs of youth, a family curse, love etc, but I have to say I found it twee, uninvolving, and often platitudinous. I warmed to neither the magic nor Nor.

Catriona Ward, Little Eve (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2018)

This book won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the August Derleth Prize for Best Horror, so hasn't lacked for plaudits. Two sisters, part of a sect run by their inverted-commas ‘uncle’ on a remote Scottish island, sink deeper into either supernatural terror or perhaps only into the group-psychopathy of their strange, hermetic, violent cultic neo-religion. The whole story is written in a deliberately claustrophobic, vivid prose that alternates the eerie/uncanny with the ultraviolent and repulsive—two rather different modes, I think, that don’t actually mesh well together, such that the latter dissipates the former and the former serves only to mute the shock value of the latter. The descriptions of remote and desolate Scottish scenery are certainly well-written and effective, and the way the story takes us deeper into ‘uncle’s weird beliefs and rituals has a certain grisly power. But overall I found myself not really buying the vibe of this novel, and its twist-ending felt a bit scoobydoo. That said, this is clearly one of those occasions when you can safely ignore my reservations, go with the flow of the widespread praise, and pick up a copy.

Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan (Canongate 2018)

In The Book of Joan we're only twenty years into the future, but wars have rendered Earth a radioactive hell, and devolved genitalless humans have moved to a giant space-station known as CIEL. Cruel cult-leader Jean de Men has turned CIEL into a violent police state, and the novel spends quite a lot of time on the torture, dismemberment, sexualized asexuality and body scarification that goes on there. But then again, there's the titular Joan, a holy child with a blue-light in her head, who sings a song of healing, until she is murdered, or rather until she sacrifices herself Aslan-like (Joan of Arc, you see). 

There is stuff in this novel to like, or at least to admire: some valiant championing of otherness, weirdness and gender fluidity and a general why-can't-we-just-get-along war-is-hell love-the-planet sexism-and-bigotry-is-bad earnestness. But it’s too much of a mess: the various elements in its (schematic, generic) worldbuilding don't make sense, and I wearied of the violence, the underbaked characters, the bloat. It's a short novel but felt interminable, as Sadean torture scene followed Sadean torture scene. 

More, I was struck that Yuknavitch didn't seem to be able to distinguish between expressive, vivid writing (of which there's a good deal in the book) and ludicrous, inadvertently-comical writing of the ‘a pang stings my throat at the memory of pigs’ and ‘as a genital entrepreneur I’d be delighted to talk with you’ kind. Conceivably that is the point: which is to say, conceivably this is a deliberate refusal to abide by the canons of quote-unquote good taste, a deliberate blurring of the beautiful and the crass-and-dumb. Perhaps A pang stings my throat at the memory of pigs is, quite deliberately, an alexandrine (this is a retelling of the Joan of Arc story, after all). Maybe ‘I stare at her little head. Why are young adults’ heads so little?’ isn't a ludicrous thing to write. ‘What kind of population emerges up among the stars? A wad of alabaster meated things driven only by appearance and entertainment’ works as satire, but ‘Jean de Men stares at her. Is his smile losing its sureness, are his eyes starting to boil?’ is just bad writing, surely. Boiling eyes indeed. Of the Saintly Joan's martyrdom one character declares: ‘we'd cry great waves of love and rage for this young woman, whose resistance made our own lives look empty as nadless ball sacks.’ You certainly don't get that in George Bernard Shaw.