FSF, October-November 2009 Page 5
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The Enchantment Emporium, by Tanya Huff, DAW Books, 2009, $24.95.
Urban fantasy as a genre might seem like a fresh new thing, but it's actually been around for some time now. By “urban fantasy” I mean the sort of book that has a contemporary, usually urban, setting, and owes as much of a tip of the hat to the mystery and romance genres as it does fantasy. The protagonist (or their love interest) has some supernatural origin (they're a vampire, werewolf, witch, gargoyle, etc.). Sometimes their existence is hidden from society; sometimes they've “come out” and are quite established when the story starts. The books are invariably sexy and fast-paced, and the protagonist usually has a distinctive narrative voice, a messed-up love life, and is tougher than her opponents assume she is. (Oh yes, the protagonist is usually a woman.)
An author who's been doing this long before urban fantasy was ever considered a viable sub-genre is Tanya Huff. Her Blood books, pairing a female private eye with a vampire who's a romance novelist, first saw print in the early 1990s and went on to become a TV series under the name Blood Ties. Her Keeper's Chronicles features a witch who runs a bed & breakfast, with a side job of keeping the fabric of the universe intact. The Smoke and Shadows series is a spin-off from the Blood series, set in the world of syndicated television.
What always makes Huff's work so engaging is her characters. At the start of every book, the reader feels as though they're getting together with a group of old friends, and The Enchantment Emporium is no exception. Actually, there are a lot of characters at the beginning of this new book, but stick with it. It doesn't take too long to get them all sorted out.
Most of our new friends this time out are part of the extended Gale family. The easiest way to describe them is that they're witches. They can change the world with charms and spells, and they prefer to keep this ability secret and to themselves. But within the family, there are no secrets, something that our protagonist Alysha Gale can find a bit wearying.
Having just lost her job in Toronto, she jumps at the chance of going to Calgary to look into the mysterious disappearance of her grandmother because it will take her far from the scrutiny and endless commentary of the family. But things are complicated in Calgary.
It turns out the junk shop she inherited there—the emporium of the book's title—services Calgary's fey community and comes with a leprechaun assistant who is anything but diminutive. Clues as to Gran's disappearance are nonexistent, but the more pressing concern is the otherworldly trouble that appears to be coming to the city, starting with a flight of dragons who find it amusing to set various buildings on fire. Then there's the matter of a sorcerer, as well as a persistent—and attractive—reporter with a great interest in the Gale family.
By the time Alysha realizes she's in over her head and should probably call in the big guns—the Gale Aunties—it might well be too late.
The Enchanted Emporium is a delight from start to finish—by turns humorous, romantic (when it's not downright lusty), and dramatic. Huff finds a way to blend all the disparate threads into an engaging whole, which is no easy task.
So far, this is easily one of my favorite books of the year.
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Weird Science and Bizarre Beliefs, by Gregory L. Reece, I. B. Tauris, 2009, $18.95.
Behind the wonderfully garish cover of this non-fiction book is a fascinating exploration of not only Bigfoot, cave people, and brainwaves from outer space (to name a few of the subjects), but also the people who are obsessed with the same.
Reece has done a considerable amount of research, often in the field, and writes with an affectionate and very readable prose style that will offer his book a larger audience than it might otherwise have. You don't have to be a believer to appreciate the characters Reece meets and describes on his quest to find out more about hollow earth theories, sasquatches, Tesla technology, and the like.
If you enjoy some of the eccentrics you're likely to meet in novels by Tim Powers or James Blaylock, then this examination of real-life characters will undoubtedly appeal to you.
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Johnny Hiro, by Fred Chao, AdHouse Books, 2009, $14.95.
My favorite kind of illustrated story is the one in which both the art and writing is done by the same person.
Now I don't mean to belittle collaborations. Most artistic expression is collaborative, especially in the comic book field. You have writers, artists, inkers, colorists, and letterers all working on the same story, and they can produce wonderful results. But the final product doesn't have the same singular vision as something created by one person.
If you need some examples, consider the work of Terry Moore (Strangers in Paradise and Echo) and Jeff Smith (Bone and Rasl). I doubt either's work would be nearly as compelling with the input of anyone else (beyond, of course, inspiration and editing).
And now I can add Fred Chao to that list.
Johnny Hiro opens with the titular hero rescuing his girlfriend from the Japanese monster Gozadilla (I guess there were copyright issues with using the more familiar Godzilla), and in the process, saving New York City. He soon learns that rampaging monsters aren't a new thing, but large cities have included the cleanup and cover-up of such attacks in their fiscal budgets so that no one ever has to know.
I liked that. I also like how Hiro and his girlfriend are sworn to silence by Mayor Bloomberg, so they end up getting sued by their landlord for the huge hole that Gozadilla tore in their apartment wall because they can't tell the truth.
The story goes like that—large preposterous big plot wham-bang elements playing against truly wonderful low-key real-life characterizations of Hiro, his girlfriend, and the other regulars we get to meet as we read the book.
(I should add here that Bloomberg isn't the only real person who appears in these pages. Cameos include everyone from Coolio and Gwen Stefani to Judge Judy, all in character and used to great effect).
Chao works in black & white, producing clean lines with a wonderful narrative flow between panels and from page to page. He's equally as adept at exaggerated cartoon facial expressions and outlandish chase scenes as he is with realistically detailed cityscapes, apartment interiors, and the glimpses we get of the restaurant where Hiro works as a busboy.
I'd never heard of Chao before picking up this book in a local shop, but I'll certainly be keeping an eye out for his work in the future.
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Material to be considered for review in this column should be sent to Charles de Lint, P. O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 3V2.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Department: MUSING ON BOOKS by Michelle West
The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, by Reif Larsen, Penguin Press, 2009, $27.95.
Silver Phoenix, by Cindy Pon, Greenwillow, 2009, $17.99.
Bones of Faerie, by Janni Lee Simner, Random House, 2009, $16.99.
Palimpsest, by Catherynne M. Valente, Bantam, 2009, $14.
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T. S. Spivet is a twelve-year-old boy living in Divide, Montana, on the Coppertop Ranch. He is possessed of: a rancher father, a largely silent man who, in the eyes of his son, embodies the almost mythical Cowboy; a very focused entomologist mother, whom he refers to at all times as Dr. Clair; a very normal teenage sister, Gracie, who dreams of being an actress, or at least living somewhere with a normal family; and the strange and almost uncharted space left by Layton, his dead brother.
Very little in the life of Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet is left uncharted. In fact, the reason I picked up the book is because it is full of deliberate marginalia: maps, diagrams, and small side bars of rumination. Even the copyright page, that bastion of standard form, is annotated in brown. Every single annotation, there and elsewhere throughout the entire book, is done, with deliberation and intensity, by the curious hand of T. S. Spivet, because it's how he sees the world.
Or how he tries to wrestle with what he does see. He considers every diagram a map, and every action of any type worth mapp
ing, and his rooms are covered with small, color-coded notebooks which denote the type of thing he's mapping; every map in the margins bears a number, indicating which of those three books it came from.
He is a peculiar viewpoint character with whom to enter a story, to say the least; he is a twelve-year-old boy with a profound understanding of the meaning of maps, and that understanding—of exploration, of entropy, and of the way maps constantly evolve is some of the most quietly moving writing I've read in a long time.
But that's T. S. Spivet, and not his story. His story, in short, in this: he has been entered, entirely without his knowledge, as a possible recipient for the Smithsonian's Baird Award, and at twelve years old, he has actually won it. The call does not come at an entirely convenient time, but in the end, he makes up his mind: He will travel from Montana to the halls of the Smithsonian itself to accept the award, give a speech, and devote his skills to Science.
Yes, he is alarmingly earnest. He's twelve; it's expected. He doesn't have the money for a plane flight, and he's not willing to ask for help, because doing so would sort of mean he'd have to tell his family. He almost wants to, but he can't quite; he even enters his mother's empty study—and takes one of her notebooks from the desk there. But he keeps his silence, packs his suitcase, dumps it on a toy wagon, and heads down to the UP train tracks, where he intends to travel like a hobo all the way to Washington D.C.
He even reaches Washington, more or less in one piece (well, slightly less), where he finds the idealism with which he has previously viewed the Smithsonian, and the people to whom he is now introduced, don't mesh.
While this synopsis is accurate, it fails to describe the book in any meaningful way. It takes T.S. almost twenty-five pages to answer the phone call that's the opening line of the book. It takes him over seventy-five pages to actually leave the house. If this is the type of thing that makes you impatient, you will throw this book across the room before you hit page fifty. Because while the book is, in its own odd way, a collection of maps about the things T. S sees on a daily basis, it is also a much less easily quantifiable map for the things that he can't see: emotions, love, and loss. To get through one, he wanders through the digressive internal thoughts of all the known things: things he's mapped, and things he understands. He can't cross a room without thinking about them, and he shares.
If you read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and you found Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse compelling, you will adore this book, because the youngest Spivet is very much like Waterhouse, except there's a whole novel's worth. If you spend half your time struck by oddities in conversation, and you find yourself following the internal line of questioning, rather than the external conversation that sparked it—to the point where you almost lose the conversation entirely—you will find Spivet compelling and oddly familiar.
And if you like a book that is both pointed in observation, but almost without judgment, that is quite understated, and in the end fundamentally about the way we interact with the people we love and the people who love us, this book is a small and perfect gift.
If The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet is not Reif Larsen's first novel, I couldn't find, in brief online searches, any others. The reason the online search occurred is, of course, because I wanted there to be more. So now, like all readers who have discovered an unexpected and unexpectedly moving delight, I wait for a future with more Larsen to unfold.
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Cindy Pon's Silver Phoenix is also a first novel, and it has pretty much nothing in common with Larsen's debut. In structure, it's a much more traditional fantasy novel, but its setting is not a generic Europe; instead, it's Asian. Pon's writing is graceful, clean, and assured; she opens with the slightly premature birth of a young boy. His mother is one of the Emperor's concubines; the boy, however, is clearly not the Emperor's son. In order to save the life of a child she will never see again, she sends him away.
Almost twenty years later, the book starts with the very different life of young Ai Ling, who has been dressed and made up as a suitable bride to meet a possible groom's family. It does not go well. Ai Ling is of marriageable age, but she is tall, and her father is not a wealthy man; he is a man who once served in the Imperial Court, and is now living well away from it. In Ai Ling's society, not surprisingly, it is the duty of a daughter to marry well, and while she doesn't actually want to be married, she feels that the rejection is a failure on her part.
Her father is called unexpectedly to Court, and in his long absence, he is accused of owing a monstrously self-indulgent man a great deal of money; the man is willing to forgo the debt in return for Ai Ling's hand. Ai Ling, who can read, and her mother, who can't, know that the merchant is lying—but they also know that in this patriarchal world, it's his word against theirs. So Ai Ling runs away from home in order to retrieve her missing father.
This is a lovely first novel, and the ending is left (I hope) open for more stories about Ai Ling and Chen Yong. I'm looking forward to them.
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Bones of Faerie is post-apocalyptic fiction. Liza was born after the apocalypse in question, and the stunted, small-town world, with its fear of the unknown and its strict, deadly rules, are all she's ever known. Her father is the pillar of her community, a strict, dour man who believes in corporal punishment and no mercy whatsoever—because that's what was needed to keep the town of Franklin Falls alive just after the conflagration that consumed so much of the known world.
One of the tenets: Cast out the magic born among you.
Because in Liza's world, magic was the apocalypse. Magic destroyed the cities, destroyed the technology, and destroyed most of the human population. The practical application of this tenet, however, will have disastrous effects on Liza, because Liza's newborn baby sister has the mark of magic: the near-translucent hair of the faeries. Her father takes the child and exposes it on a hillside. Liza goes to find what's left.
Simner's writing is exceptionally spare. All of the horrors of her world, all of things that are taken for granted by Liza, are subtle. There's very little that's graphically described—but it's there. The crops resist the farmers. The plants can kill. The children who are born with unchecked or undetected magic? They can kill, too.
Magic, to Liza, is death. Sadly, magic, to Liza, is slowly becoming part of her life, and she is terrified. After the death of her baby sister, Liza's mother leaves the homestead and the town, and disappears. But Liza can see glimpses of her mother in still water and other reflective surfaces: a sure sign of magic. She is desperate to hide this magic, but in the end, partly to save her own life but largely to save the life of her people, she ends up fleeing to search for her mother.
However, she doesn't manage to get out of Franklin Falls on her own; she has both her cat and one of the boys who lives in town with her. Neither of them are willing to stay behind, and in the end, that's for the best—because Liza knows that no one survives in the dark of the wilds on their own.
When they're attacked by wild dogs—and wild trees—they're rescued by Karin, a woman who can talk to plants, calm them, and send them away, and she leads them to a different town, one protected by a hedge that she basically grew. Everything that Liza knows about magic, and everything that she knows about survival, is challenged by what she finds in that town, and it forces her to examine her own beliefs and certainties, even as she leaves to search, once again, for her mother, chased by a shadow that has followed her all the way from Franklin Falls.
This is a lovely, quiet, sombre book about fear, war, and the possibility of healing, and some of the magic in the book is not actually magic; it's in the glimpses of abandoned cars and distant, crumbling architecture, the ghosts of a past that are our present. Simner makes it strange, and real, with her economical, graceful prose and her understated world-building.
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The last of the four books is Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente. Her previous two novels, which formed the whole of The Orphan's Tales, were frequently
compared to the Arabian Nights, largely because of the structure of the tale-within-tale-within-tale. There is no similar work that leaps to mind when one considers Palimpsest. You can compare it to other Valente work, because there is a turn of phrase and a poetic vision that is at once both lucid and visceral; it cuts you, and the mental cuts take a while to heal.
Palimpsest is the name of a city that can only be reached with the initial help of someone who has already been there. If you have never been, you're the blank slate; you're the stretched and uninked parchment upon which a destination can be written, and the destination can only be inscribed by the act of sexual intercourse.
Valente's sense of structure, her ability to create small stories-within-stories that are in no way digressions, but have some of that feel, is powerful; it links observations and metaphors that seem almost random, pulling them into the weave of her tale. She starts with four characters, two women and two men: Sei, who works as a ticket-seller for the shinkansen, November, who keeps bees and lists of nouns, Oleg, who is haunted by the ghost of a sister who died before he was born, and Ludovico, obsessed with St. Isidore and the binding of books of the fantastic, and whose only emotional ties beyond that are to his wife.
But all of these four live in their own worlds. They exist in states of isolation. They have no true connection to other people; even Ludo's love for his wife is seen, before the end, as an interpretational error. He is devoted to her without seeing the whole of her; she is some part of his internal obsession. They are lonely without ever stating that they are lonely; they are so alienated, it's their base state. So they stumble, in these odd states of isolation, into brief contact with Palimpsest. It is their first contact, and over the course of the book, they will become obsessed with a return to this otherworld, a dreaming world which becomes, in the end, far more real than a first glimpse might have implied.
Much of the sex in the book—which is billed as erotic—is not really very erotic; it's full of poetic moment, and frankly, when you're dealing with this much isolation, that sex feels almost sterile and cold—except for Oleg's first encounter, because in some ways, when he approaches the stranger to whom he's drawn, he wants to see her as she is; he has no other expectations or needs that she might fulfill. (He's accustomed to seeing a world that literally no one else can see—the ghost of New York City. The metropolis has been written about and celebrated in so many ways nothing of the original remains, just the images other people have left. There is no way to change that, not in New York ... but Palimpsest implies that no one vision can publicize it, no one vision can capture it, and no one vision, spread however far or wide, can destroy what makes it vital and unique.)