The Deep History of Boxtrolls

The key is remembering that whereas Tolkien's Rohan is (of course) a fantasy version of the Anglo Saxon northlands, his Gondor is more medieval than Old English, and draws more on French romance than anything else (the horn of Roland, for instance). Let's say that in the JRRT Middle Ages, Minas Tirith looked like this:

Fast forward to an imaginary early-to-mid 20th-century Middle Earth. The town has been developed:

Its name is now called 'Cheesebridge'. Presumably 'Minas' was modified over time to 'Frominas', and thence to 'Fromage'; just as 'Tirith' softened its initial 't' and mutated into 'férié'. The white tree has long since been lost to the city, but the aristocracy maintain tradition by wearing treetunk-like 'white hats' to signify their authority.

And what of the orcs?

Well, having been repeatedly defeated in battle and subjugated, these beings have lost their more aggressive instincts, taken to wearing discarded cardboard boxes, and now reside in the sewers under the city where they work as garbage men, recycling rubbish into useful equipment whenever possible.

It's at this point that the late Tolkien fanfic movie The Boxtrolls (directed by Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi, 2014) takes up the story. The twist is that, though the cheese-obsessed citizens of new-Minas-Tirith continue to think of the orcs as monsters, said orcs are actually the good guys. The leaders of Cheesebridge agree to a policy of ethnic cleansing, putting the task in the hands of Archibald Snatcher -- perhaps an individual descended remotely from the old Gondorian king Atanatar II. It's a dark story of persecution and misery, with an improbable ending where the citizens of Minas Tirith completely revise their opinion of the Jews Orcs Boxtrolls, and embrace them all. But then again, Tolkien was always fond of eucatastrophic endings.

The only wonder is that the Tolkien Estate hasn't sued.

Marcus Sedgwick, A Love Like Blood (2014)

It’s Paris in late ’44,
and nearly the end of the war.
The novel’s narrator
looks into a crater
and isn’t the same any more.

From that moment on his life’s cursed.
He sees a man slaking his thirst
by drinking the blood
from a girl’s fresh-dead bod,
(we think he’s a vampire at first...)

Fast forward to March '51.
Our guy’s back in France on his own.
He spots the blood toper
whilst eating his supper:
a lifelong obsession's begun.

With dread that he cannot assuage
he follows the haematophage
from café to home
to Cambridge, to Rome
for page after page after page.

In decades that follow he chases
the guy through all sorts of dark places,
past scenes European
both posh and plebeian
pursuing his bloody red traces.

It turns out he’s not Nosferatu,
this diner who likes a-la-carte goo.
I thought about slating
this twist—zero-rating—
but realised I hadn’t the heart to.

The book's a quick read, as a gory
‘blood cries from the ground’ kind of story.
It has no pretensions
to deeper dimensions:
but that doesn’t make it deplore-y.

A grisly and violent gazette, a
purple prose Gothic French letter.
It’s fine, in its way.
though I would still say
that Hannibal does this stuff better.

Graham Edwards, Talus and the Frozen King (2014)

Some time ago, prompted I think largely by the global success of Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael novels, many writers cast about for historical periods into which to embed their investigating detectives. For a while a great many whodunits got themselves written starring Victorian, Tudor, eighteenth-century, Ancient Roman and so on detectives. Then the vogue fizzled out—Peters died in 1995, and the historical whodunit form has largely gone out of fashion (Death Comes to Pemberly style exercises aside). Still, even when this kind of sub-genre was in vogue I don’t think anybody thought of writing a prehistorical detective, conceivably because the elevator pitch sounds, well, stupid. (What's that you say, Mitchell-and-Webb? Ah yes: 'Caveman Detective!’)

Graham Edwards’ Talus and the Frozen King has decided to plug that gap, whether or not you realised it was a gap that needed plugging: ‘Introducing the World’s First Detective’, declares the cover shout-line. Caveman detective, indeed! Now, Edwards is a veteran writer of genre Fantasy, and knows how to put a story together—it’s not Nabokov, but neither does it shirk its storytelling puzzle-box responsibilities. Talus is a sort-of rhapsode, travelling about with his companion, Bran. Once upon a time fire rained from the sky, ruining his left hand; Bran saved his life and now they have a special Caveholmes-and-Wats-ugh! thing going on. In this case, the mystery is a Warrior King frozen to death on a mysterious island called Creyak. The murderer could be any one of the king’s six scheming sons, or perhaps one of the other prominent islanders. Talus investigates. Edwards’ idea here is that detection is a matter of telling oneself stories, and that Talus has a more advanced story-telling lobe in his brain than many of his fellow cavecitizens.

It’s not entirely to Edwards’s discredit that his imagined prehistory feels underpowered compared to a book like Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent Shaman. It’s bound to, of course. This is not a matter of specific historical anachronisms; it is a matter of tone—characters chatting on with one another like Agatha Christie ciphers in bearskins, saying deeply unNeolithic things like ‘is it true what they say, that Love survives death?’ [14] and ‘our work here is done’ [265] or Talus doing a Columbo impression (‘Just as the morning fog was folding itself around Cabarrath’s retreating form, Talus called, “Actually, I have just thought of another question”’ [151]). That’s all fine. Puzzle-whodunits are a game, and it’s boorish to complain about the rules. If you don’t want to play, don’t play. Still: I retain my reservations.

I’m assuming from the style of the title that Edwards is planning a long string of ‘Talus and the …’ murder mysteries set in prehistoric Scotland. Who knows; it could become a Thing. The problem I have with this novel is the problem I had with Brother Cadfael, back in the day. It is, fundamentally, a Foucauldian problem. The structures of detection are part of a larger episteme of mass surveillance and discipline. The lone detective figures, paradoxically, not as a solitary genius, but precisely as the epitome of the larger social forces of industrialisation and embourgeoisification, and the carceral episteme they entail. That’s the name of the game, and it misfits a pre-bourgeois world as glaringly as if Talus rode onto Creyak on a unicycle smoking a cheroot and singing an a capella version of Depeche Mode’s ‘Master and Servant’. The detective—the Holmes, the Poirot, the Rebus—is the externalisation of the principle of imprisonment; he (and usually, it is he, for reasons to do with the close structural connections between patriarchal authority and Capitalist society) intervenes in the free play of libidinal anarchy represented by the murder, and imposes the narrative-deductive grid that is his defining feature. It is entirely uncoincidental, given this discursive logic, that successful whodunit writers end up manufacturing a great quantity of mass-produced items—the seemingly endless production line that churns out Poirot novels, Cadfael novels, Maigret novels, not to mention the myriad ‘Inspector X and the Y’ style novels. ‘Is it surprising,’ Foucault asked rhetorically, in Discipline and Punish 'that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?’

Bethany Griffin, The Fall (2014)

Griffin’s third fourth novel is no great departure, concept-wise, from her first previous two (The Masque of the Red Death and The Dance of the Red Death)—that is to say, it is a novel that briskly spins its hand-whisk in the rich cream of Edgar Allan Poe, producing something recognisably Poe-like that is, at the same time, considerably less dense and rich. (‘Cream of Poe’ is like regular cream, except that is, you know: black. And tastes of mausoleums. Goes well with over-ripe strawberries.)

This aerated and rather temporary concoction is The Fall of the House of Usher turned into a novel-length Gothic-y YA yarn. As such it’s all about the mood; Madeline Usher, our point-of-access beautiful, doomed young heroine, wakes up inside a coffin (‘tears wet my cheeks. I cannot breathe. I cannot breath. Blood trickles down my fingernails and I am choking’ [3]) as per Poe’s original story. Indeed, without a knowledge of this original text it seems to me this rather oddly structured tale wouldn’t make a great deal of sense. The problem is, with that knowledge, it feels a little redundant: why do we need this novelisation, when we have the original? Griffin mixes the timeline up (chapters are all named after Madeline’s age, and hop about: ‘Madeline is sixteen’, ‘Madeline is nine’, ‘Madeline is seventeen’ and so on); but the novel drags its heels. Its stacked, black, vinyl heels. The whole is 420 pages long, and could easily have lost 200 or more from the middle without missing them. But, sure: the rather repetitive plotting isn’t the point. The mood is the point. I readily concede that sour middle-aged male university professors are not the target audience for this book. The most I will say is that I tried, when reading, to unlock my inner emo teenage girl, and failed. On the plus side, props to Griffin for actually opening her novel with ‘It was a dark and stormy night’. (Strictly speaking, this is the start of chapter 2; but that’s close enough for government work, especially since chapter 1 reads like a kind of prologue):

Wind and rain, lightning and thunder, a storm throws itself against the House of Usher, rattling every window, including mine. Thunder pounds the earth and the house groans. [5]

And so on: the whole is written in this rather gnashing manner throughout (it’s less fruity than Poe’s prose, though; which is a good thing. Although more fruity than Poe would be hard to achieve. He is the fruitiest of the fruity. Hence—the cream.)

There ought to be a name for the—I think, genuinely recent—cultural logic by which a short, powerful text is expanded into a longer mode, because ‘we’ respect length in a way we don’t brevity. I’m thinking of things like: the, we can agree, dreadful, movie version of The Cat in the Hat; or the many famous short stories (‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’ pops into my head) made into lengthy movies, and often then translated back into lengthy prose form as ‘novelisations’ of the original movie. What would we call this, I wonder? And what does it say about us? One thing that strikes me is that this cultural-evaluative bias towards length (‘epic’ as a term of praise, and so on) is happening at a time when or attention spans are supposed to be getting shorter, when our online reading is supposed to be shaped by a twitter-esque logic of tl;dr. What’s up with that?

Dave Hutchinson, Europe in Autumn (2014)

Young Rudi is a citizen of a future Europe that has been balkanized into a tessellation of new mini-states, of all sizes and sorts, including a trans-European high speed railway line from Portugal to Siberia that declared itself an independent nation-state as soon as construction was concluded. As the novel starts Rudi is working as a chef. After some argy-bargy in his employer’s Polish restaurant involving a drunken party of Hungarian Mafiosi, he is recruited into the shadowy organisation of ‘Coureurs’, an apolitical group that specialises in moving information, parcels and people covertly across the spider-web proliferation of new borders. We follow Rudi’s training, and then his adventures in a labyrinthine nested set of plots, counter-plots and counter-counter-plots that take him from Poland to Estonia, Germany, former ski resorts that are now nations, to London and elsewhere; from Spy Who Came In From The Cold waiting around in seedy cafes, to more Bondy shootings and explosions and severed heads in lockers.

There are times when being a writer as well as a reviewer can get in the way, rather, of the simple business of Doing The Reviewing. A writer reads slightly differently to the way a reader reads, since she always has a portion of her eye on the technical skill or otherwise with which the job has been done, like a plasterer at a dinner party, slyly checking out their host's walls. In this case, what kept getting in the way of full absorption in the story was sheer admiration at Hutchinson’s chops.

This is my main take-away from the novel actually: that Hutchinson is an exceptionally skilful writer. Europe in Autumn is rendered with impressive fluency, precision and vividness. Hutchinson knows how to write dialogue, how to plot, how to pace, and best of all he writes characters—both main characters, and walk-on figures—that just lift off the page, alive, distinct, believable. He gets inside the variety of European settings in ways that absolutely compel belief. He is good with mood and atmosphere, and he is bold in withholding many of the satisfactions readers come to thrillers for—explanations, loose-end-tyings-up and so on. The whole book, actually, is a masterclass in how to do this sort of thing—this sort of thing being the post-Le-Carré, state-of-the-(European)-union thriller-y, adventure-y, ideas-y novel with a pinch of travelogue. I enjoyed the whole thing immensely. Quite apart from anything, it’s very funny.

Europe in Autumn is also a timely novel, not only because (I’m writing this before the results of the Scottish Independence Referendum are known) national independence and succession movements have become such a prominent feature of contemporary European life, but because it is a book about Europe—and it’s surprising how few such novels are written. I say surprising, because it seems to me that ‘Europe’ is so patently a major subject. We need more art about ‘Europe’, rather than just about individual European nations. Indeed, one of the great strengths of Europe in Autumn is its geographical capaciousness. For a long time the view from Britain has been that ‘Europe’ (to which we regard ourselves as, at best, semi-detached) is basically three things: Germany, France and ‘the South’ (Italy, Spain, maybe Greece). One of the nice things about Norman Davies insanely ambitious attempt to comprise an entire history of Europe in one volume was the attention he paid to Eastern Europe—although his Polish expertise perhaps over-played that one Eastern nation.

Hutchinson doesn’t include scenes in every single European nation in his narrative (it would look forced if he did); but he gives a much wider and more convincing sweep of the whole than most writers or historians. Formally the novel is a sequence of more-or-less closely linked novella-ish chapters, each one approaching the condition of standalone. I liked this, as appropriate to the logic of balkanization the novel explores on the level of content. And the main character is a lovely piece of writing: potentially unlikeable—he is, after all, a loner, a breaker of laws—but actually engaging and fun, without ever losing the capacity to surprise the reader.

If I had to carp (carping? oh -- Muß es sein?), I might say that the book doesn’t generate any great sense of dread. Hutchinson’s instincts as a writer are comic rather than specifically Hitchcockian or Kafkaesque. Even when Rudi’s plans go wrong, and he is captured and tortured, the book still reads as pleasant and funny rather than alarming or horrifying. This is not necessary a bad thing, in one sense. We might say that the geniality of mood Hutchinson creates in this novel is its own reward. But it melds awkwardly, in places, with the conventions of thriller adventure, and the result can feel leisurely and pleasant when it needs to be tighter or sparer. And the ending—no spoilers, now; you’ll have to read for yourself to see what I mean—left me thinking: ‘hmm, does that quite work, now?’ But you know what? Probably it does.

Sibilant Fricative the Book: some reviews

Even though I set this blog up in order to plug this book (look at the title of the blog! Up there, on the masthead! Doesn't that give you a clue?) I'm feeling a little awkward pushing Sibilant Fricative: the Book upon you yet again. That said, it would be remiss of me not to alert you to the existence of some reviews. What does 'Hexed' think?

A great miscellany, filled with sharp, versatile, roving appraisals, of and meditations on, SF & fantasy books and cinema. Shows that the best way to think about the big picture of genre writing is often with a particular specimen right in front of you.

Five stars! Meanwhile, over on his blog, the estimable Ray Garraty considers the collection at length:

Roberts is definitely among the top five British reviewers, stuck somewhere between the genres. He can read the dullest fantasy, and can casually review Booker short list in its entirety. He is always looking for something new in the literature, but not disgusted by musty space opera. Roberts is a heir to John Clute and a colleague of Paul Kincaid, but will compete with Adam Mars-Jones.

He calls it 'this important and necessary book'; and who am I to argue with that? So, heartened, I hereby plug:

1. Amazon.co.uk has the ebook at £3.42.

2. It's $5.58 over on amazon.com.

For those who prefer not to patronise amazon, I'm assured it will soon be available via SpaceWitch.com; though it doesn't seem to be up there at the moment.

Erika Johansen, The Queen of the Tearling (2014)

My review of this title is up on Strange Horizons today. Snip:

The front cover of my copy comes with a "notice me!" big red sticker announcing "soon to be a major motion picture, starring Emma Watson." The flap-copy doubles down on this boast: "film rights have been acquired by Warner Brothers, who will reunite 'Harry Potter' team of producer David Hayman and star Emma Watson." Not that Watson will be well cast as far as this role is concerned. One thing the novel insists upon, with a weirdly insistent repetition, is how plain-looking Kelsea is: tall and dark, but heavy-set and unpretty. The handsome Fetch assures her that he's not romantically interested in her ("You're far too plain for my taste," [p. 66]); and her fencing master is downright rude ("'You require conditioning, Lady. You'll never be as lithe as a dancer, but you'd move faster if you carried less weight.' Kelsea flushed and quickly turned away. She knew she was heavier than she should be, but there was a big difference between knowing something and hearing it spoken out loud" [p. 266]). This is a venerable Jane Eyre-y strategy, of course: dialing down the pulchritude of your heroine the more believably to mary-sue her. And as a strategy it has certain advantages: for since the hero isn't distracted by a pretty face, and falls in love with the true heart beneath the unalluring exterior, it can work to heighten the true love pang with which the story will eventually pay off. (I'm guessing here: The Queen of the Tearling surrounds Kelsea with gorgeously handsome men, but she has copped-off with none of these by the end of vol 1. That will surely have changed, come vol 3.) Hollywood, I suppose, is like US daytime soap operas—simply disinclined to cast actual human beings in key roles. But the point of the red sticker, and flap copy, has less to do with the rather boyish good looks of Watson herself. It is a signal to potential readers. Want more Harry Potter? Buy this! As far as that goes, Potter is a tricky prototype to follow. I don't just mean in terms of its globe-spanning success, or special charm. I mean that Rowling's series starts out Young Young Adult, and ends up, via death, torture and burgeoning sexualities, considerably more Adult Young Adult. If you want to pitch your book to readers who have already worked through all seven of those books, you may feel obliged to plump for the Deathly Hallows rather than the Philosopher's Stone end of this spectrum.