Review: Romanitas, by Sophia McDougall

Title: Romanitas
Author: Sophia McDougall
Series/Stand alone: Volume One of the Romanitas Trilogy
Genre: Alternate History/Fantasy
First Published: 2005
Edition Reviewed: Gollancz (2011)
Hb/Pb/ebook: ebook – Kindle
Price: £4.99 on Amazon at time of posting.

Plot:

Rome never died. The Empire is as strong as ever and ruled by the Novious family. Marcus is the son of Leo Novious, brother to the emperor and heir to the throne. But as the book opens tragedy has struck. Leo and his wife Clodia have died in a car crash. Although succession is not guaranteed, Marcus is the tacit favourite for heir in Leo’s place. But Marcus is only 16. He has never liked the grandeur of Rome, he feels intimidated by his more confident cousin, Drusus, and he hates being weighted on by slaves, which his own father had refused to own.

It is with relief, then, that Marcus is called back to his parents’ estate by Leo’s friend and the executor of his will, Varius. But the relief is short lived. Varius and his wife, Gemella, reveal to him that they suspect Leo and Clodia were murdered because of their plans to overthrow slavery once Leo became emperor. As they are speaking, however, Gemella eats a sweet that had been in a parcel given to Marcus by his aunt, Makaria, before he left Rome. Gemella collapses and dies – poisoned by sweets intended for Marcus. Varius helps Marcus to flee, giving him a map to a secret refuge for runaway slaves.

Meanwhile, Una, a slave in Britannia, frees her brother, Sulien, from a prison ship that had been taking him to be crucified for rape. Sulien is not a rapist, but he made the mistake of sleeping with the daughter of his owner, and it is forbidden for a slave to sleep with a free woman. Una and Sulien have unusual abilities: Una can read minds, and to some extent direct people’s thoughts; Sulien can see how the body works, and heal it. Una cannot put a thought into someone’s mind, but she can distract them by bringing some thoughts to prominence over others. This is very useful when you’re an escaped slave trying to keep your fugitive brother safe.

Una and Sulien flee to the continent and encounter Marcus. Their first instinct is to turn him in. A large sum of money has been offered for his safe return, and it is rumoured that the family curse has come upon him, and he has gone mad – a danger to himself. Sulien suggests that they could trade Marcus for their freedom, and a pardon, but Marcus persuades them that he is fleeing for his life, and Una can tell that he isn’t mad. He promises them the money, the pardon, and their freedom if they let him go, and offers to take them to the slave refuge he is going to himself. The slaves and the heir to the empire flee together, heading for a sanctuary they barely know the location of, whilst in Rome Varius strives to protect Marcus by concealing his escape.

How was it?

Bloody awesome, that’s how it was. Stay-up-until-2am-to-finish awesome. Waste-hours-in-the-bath-topping-up-the-hot-water-because-you-don’t-want-to-stop-reading-to-get-out awesome.

Romanitas marked a new experience for me. I follow a lot of authors on Twitter, but I haven’t actually read an author solely based on my social media interactions with them, before. I followed Sophia after I was linked to her Capes, Wedding Dresses, and Steven Moffat blog post. The article included both the full quotation from SM himself and an extensive, accurate, entertaining, and fair take-down of what the Moff had said. It chimed very strongly with my own views about sex and gender, which is something that happens all too infrequently. The more I followed her and the more I read from her, the more she talked very well-articulated sense. Blog writing and fiction writing are not the same thing, and I was by no means sure from this that she would have a fiction writing style that I got on with, but I thought: what the hey? I’m bored of reading books that trip me up on gender issues when I’d much rather get caught up in the action – at the very least I think I can depend on her not to do that.

And oh my, but I’m glad I did. Looking at the reviews on Amazon, there was a surprising split. Lots of people had given it five stars, and lots of people have given it only one star. You don’t see that often, so I was curious. The most common complaints seemed to be either that a) the reader had been expecting an alternate history, and what were these psychic abilities they had found in their porridge?; or b) the reader had found the prose impossibly dense. The first I dismiss – it’s a matter of taste. I love crossing genres and see no reason to be bound by what are, in any case, loose groopings of linguistic convenience and bookshop shelving. If you don’t like fantasy in your alternate history, don’t read a book where the main character can read people’s minds. It’s not the book’s fault.

The second criticism, though, just puzzles me. This is not a dense book. I’ve seen it likened to China Miéville as a compliment, too, but I don’t see that, either. From the reviews I was expecting something either Miéville lush and maybe a bit purple, Stephen King rich and detailed, or Mervyn Peake impenetrable. I suspected not the last, as the positive reviews rebuked this, and I’m a King fan and occasional Miéville reader, so I don’t mind a wordy book if the words are well-used, but I wouldn’t really equate Sophia’s writing to any of the above. The style was clear and it set the scenes well, but at no point did I feel that the description got in the way of the story – quite the reverse. In fact, one of the few criticisms I might make is that first chapter is noticeably weaker than the rest, as it was a bit difficult to visualise the scene. I know very little about the architecture of Rome and was still settling into the new world Sophia was creating, so I had a little trouble placing people within the scene and imagining where they were. The problem did not recur in the rest of the book, however. The only reason I note it is to say that if you’re not immediately captured by the first chapter, keep reading – it pretty much instantly finds its groove and starts moving.

This is a fast-paced novel of disperate threads coming together in culminating tension. The characters are rich and well-rounded. There are plentiful characters of both genders, all of whom have their strengths and their flaws. Una is simply fabulous. Her angry-at-the-world spiky strength, determination, and defensiveness remind me oh-so-strongly of the girl I was at that age. I could have taken on anything, and yet I was crushed by the oppressive reality of how cruel the world could be. It made me closed off and determined, and it didn’t make me a lot of friends, but it helped me to survive. I was stronger then than I ever shall be again. Una is like that, and with greater reason. I can’t describe how wonderful it is to have a female protagonist like this, especially as it is recognised that her strength is also a flaw. To be tough like that is also to shut down on the world, to not make room for others. Moreover, Una and Marcus are given opportunities to save each other. The plotline of the slave girl and the emperor’s nephew could so easily go over into a painful Cinderella story where the tough girl is rescued from her squalid life by the handsome prince, but Romanitas skillfully avoids this without turning Una into an implausible superwoman, leaving a swathe of foolish menfolk in her wake.

The other characters are also rich and diverse. I’ll confess I enjoyed the galdiatrix, Ziye, more than I would have expected. It would be easy to insert a gladiatrix and make her some implausible, cartoon Amazon, but Ziye’s past as a fighter is used lightly. It is something she escaped from, something she doesn’t talk about, but a fact of power and skill for killing that exists in her background and colours the few nice moment where it becomes relevant. Equally, I found the escaped slave, Pyrrha, and her daughter Iris, just as compelling. Pyrrha escaped slavery and took Iris with her, crossing hundreds of miles to find safety, after which she retreated into a shell of despair, convinced that they would never be safe, with patient Iris looking after her. Women in all their weaknesses and their strengths, and men, too. Marcus is intelligent and possessed of that germ of leadership that could make him something one day, but still every inch the sixteen year old boy. Dama, the fiery revolutionary, crippled physically by what happened to him as a slave, but also mentally driven by it into a single-mindedness that is its own prejudice. Delir, the ordinary man who became a leader when he simply decided one day that enough was enough, pulled a slave down from a cross, and went on the run with his daughter in tow.

The exploration of privilege is deftly handled. A story about slavery set in the modern day is crying out for some discussion of privilege, and it could very easily be overdone and heavy-handed. Romanitas does not have this problem. The striking contrast between Marcus’s and Una’s positions produces a thorn in their relationship at several points, but although the narrative never denies Marcus’s privileged upbringing, it does not blame him for it, either. It acknowledges, rather, the difficulty one who has privilege can find in trying to understand the difficulties faced by those who don’t, whilst elsewhere other characters take up the burden of exemplifying casual and unexamined privilege. No one is painted entirely flat, though. Even Gabinius, the business tycoon whose life is founded on the work of slaves, is not a character without humanity. This is the lesson so often missed: the privilege discussion is not concerned with dividing the world into the privileged and the underprivileged. Rather, it calls on all of us to recognise privilege both in others and in ourselves, and to see that each of us is privileged in some ways and not in others. Painting those who, without thought, benefit from the oppression of those less privileged than themselves as evil is no more an answer than insisting that the problems of others cannot be as great as they say simply because it does not seem to be so very bad from the outside. Romanitas does not provide an indepth discussion of these issues – that would detract too much from its story – but it acknowledges and incorporates them; it is written in a way that recognises the complexity of the world and human interactions. I only wish we lived in a world where recognising that a novel has done so went without saying.

The setting is also delightful in its similarities and differences from our world. I haven’t read a lot of alternate history and I’m not a historian, but I enjoyed Sophia’s modernised Roman Empire. To my novice eye it seems well-researched, complete with a timeline of the alternate history at the back. There were only two drawbacks, for me, one of which is not the novel’s fault, but the Kindle’s – or its adaptation for the Kindle, perhaps. I speak of the map in the front. Where the changing political status of nations forms a major premise of your novel, the map at the front becomes more than a curiousity, but in the Kindle edition the map is too small to read, and it’s too cumbersome to jump back to it and then find your place again in any case. I would have loved to be able to flip freely back and forth and was frustrated by my inability to do so. I was pleased with myself for working out that the Sinoan Empire was China, cursed myself for taking so long to realise that Terranova was the US (the New World), and utterly failed to work out that Nionia was Japan.

The other point I’m not sure if I liked or didn’t like. Throughout the novel, many words that would have had Greek origins were shifted to what would have been their Latin alternatives. This is nifty and pleasing at first glance, but upon reflection rankled slightly. The main characters all speak Latin, but I don’t, I’m reading English. The whole novel is in translation, and far more than the Latin/Greek shifts would have changed linguistically as a result of a prolonged occupation of Great Britain by Rome. Which meant that the more I thought about it, the less sense it made for the telephone to be rendered as the ‘longdictor’, or the helicopter as the ‘volucer’. I’m probably over-thinking it – it’s all just colour, after all, a way of portraying how things have changed, and Sophia is clear that her linguistic choices are stylistic in a note at the end – but every now and then it would throw me. I don’t know. I’m still torn between thinking that it adds something to the novel, and that it detracts from it. I suspect that it is a sum game, or ‘worth throwing in overall’. As problems go, it’s very minor.

Lastly, there was an interesting flutter towards discussing religion, as Dama has converted to a monotheism that may be Judaism or Christianity (I wasn’t quite sure*), and it looks like Una might, too. In a world where pantheism has retained its dominance I was curious that monotheism should be given this focus without any exploration of the contrast. Everyone else seems at best apathetic towards the gods and their doings. It feels like a missed opportunity, and the themes surrounding the monotheistic elements left oddly hanging. Of course, not every story has to give quite the tour de force that so delighted me in the remake of Battlestar Galactica, and the character’s reasons for conversion were plausible, it just felt a little lopsided, is all. But still, this was a minor point that barely intruded and made very little difference to the general plot.

Overall this was a deftly executed, thoughtful, fun, engaging read that sucked me in and tugged appropriately on my emotions. I recommend it without hesitation. One of the best books I’ve read in a long time. So refreshing to find a new author that one feels one can trust to deliver. My only decision now is whether to buy the next volume for the Kindle or as a physical book.

* Zoroastrianism, apparently, so I was wide of the mark, there. But the point about monotheism vs polytheism stands.

Read Along with Rhube 25: A Dance with Dragons, Chapters 49 & 50

(Index to previous A Dance with Dragons posts here.)

Back on the waggon again! Sorry for the gap, chaps. Absence of Internet for three weeks in January plus Life equals a bit of a RAWR backlog, and once I got off this horse it was a little daunting to try and get back on again. But I’m not leaving this baby unfinished. I’m still flattered by the number of hits this gets, and I kind of feel I owe it to people not to get 48 chapters through and just stop. So: onwards and upwards!

Chapter 49: Jon

Jon sees Alys Karstark married to the Magnar of Thenn to save her from an unwelcome marriage claim and help cement peace. Jon keeps Cregan Karstark (Alys’s uncle, who would have taken her by force) prisoner in an ice cell under the wall. Jon offers t let him take the black if he yields his claim upon Alys’s holding, but he refuses. Tensions continue to run high between the Queen’s men and the men of the Night’s Watch, and between the old guard of the Night’s Watch and their new wildling brothers and sisters. Lady Melisandre says that she has seen the Queen’s fool in her fires, surrounded by skulls, but when she searches for Stannis all she sees is snow. The same as when she searches for Mance. When she searches for Jon, she sees daggers ever closer. Happy omens all. The chapter closes with the sound of a horn, heralding Val’s return, with what Jon hopes will be a host of friendly wildlings to swell their ranks.

The plot inches onward in this chapter. The wedding saves Alys and will presumably mean something somewhere down the line. Val’s return will be important, but we don’t actually see her safe and sound and backed by a host of friendly wildlings, yet. Mostly, we’re treading water, although there’s a lot going on in Lady M’s visions. Menacing skulls and daggers and an awful lot of snow. And, of course, Snow may have a double meaning – the snow Stannis and Mance are buried by in the weather-stalled conflict to the south, or ‘Snow’ – the last name of a certain significant viewpoint bastard. Is Melisandra seeing snow when she searches for R’hllor’s champion because it is Snow who should be her champion, not Stannis? Everything is much too vague to say much of anything, for now, but it’s interesting that the fool is being highlighted as sinister. Fools have a literary history of unusual significance.

Chapter 50: Daenerys

Daenerys is married, and uncomfortable with the concessions she has made to gain peace. Peace with slavers – slavers who trade directly outside her walls. There’s a recurrent and poignant refrain in Daenerys’s thought ‘If I look back, I am lost‘. It is both her strength and her weakness. She has come as far as she has by pushing ever onward and not showing uncertainty, but there is a weakness, too, in sticking to one’s decisions and never retreating. Staying in Meereen seems to have been an increasingly bad idea. Daenerys is as unyielding as Tyrion is as changeable as the wind. Both are survival tactics, and I become ever more and more curious of what will happen when they meet. Oh God I hope they meet!

Daario had reportedly become wild since the wedding, and likely to kill Quentyn for his betrayal. Daenerys sends him and several others to the Yunkai’i as hostages against the peace. She must also make peace with Brown Ben Plumm of the Second Sons and in talking to him she learns that he betrayed her because he saw her as defeated – because she had chained her dragons, instead of releasing them. She comes to understand, and learns a valuable lesson, but it would be wrong to say that she forgives. Uneasy in her peace, Daenerys plots to reach out to the other mercenary companies, so that she will be ready if betrayed.

She also takes Quentyn to see her dragons, and warns him – she is his only friend in these lands, and she is married. The sellswords would kill him for his betrayal, her husband is not likely to be at ease with another suitor so close at hand, and Quentyn, bless him, is just a boy with two knights and a bit of paper. He says he will stand his ground, of course.

OK, so maybe Quentyn is not made of the same hard iron as Daenerys. Bah. It’s an interesting chapter, but like the one before it, one senses that it is mostly setting things up for the future. The various tensions and potential alliances are outlined for us, and Quentyn meets some dragons, but it’s still a waiting game. No one has come out into the open, yet; it is all preparations and secrecy. It’s well described, but I was hoping for a bit more bang in the 50th chapter. I guess one shouldn’t expect writing by nice round numbers, though.

Tune in next time to see if something actually happens!

What I said, but better…

I don’t often post just to point you somewhere else, but sometimes it’s worth it. Sophia McDougall is one hell of a writer on gender issues in modern SF&F. This was first brought to my attention by her post in response to Steven Moffat’s unbelievably mysogynist comments that half the Internet seems to know all about, and the other half seems blissfully ignorant of and even defensive-about-in-ignorance. To be fair, since the whole Riversong thing there’s been less of the ‘Yes, I’ve heard he’s secretly sexist, but I don’t believe it – he writes such strong women!’. Sophia’s post came out before the ‘My whole purpose in life – becoming an archeologist and a badass, everything – was to catch up with the Doctor because I love him and need him to complete me’ second-half-of-season reveal. When I read it, I felt like the scales fell from my eyes. Now it feels generous.

Given the number of times I’ve seen her post linked to I was surprised to find that no one I spoke to at the SFX Weekender had read it. So, in case you missed it, here, complete with full and damning quotes from the Moff himself, is one post you should read: Capes, Wedding Dresses, and Steven Moffat.

But that’s not the post I started this one to draw your attention to. It’s this: SFX Weekender and the Nudes in the Metropolitan Gallery. She points out a number of things that I had missed, and (again) makes a case I want to put forward better than I could. I didn’t notice the gender disparity in panels, but then I only went to two, one of which was the Q & A with the kickass Eve Myles. But yeah – Sophia really would have been an ideal person to have on a panel, especially when relative unknowns like my mate Dave (who, for all his good qualities, only had his first book come out on the Thursday of the SFX Weekender itself – promotional, yes, but perhaps not an authority) got a look in alongside the obvious choices, like China Mieville.

Anyway, where mine is one person’s point of view, Sophia’s post has breadth, style, and nuance. Go read.

My First SFX Weekender

There were many things I loved about the weekend I spent in Prestatyn, flying the Angry Robot table at the SFX Weekender. There were also a couple of things that were mindlessly irritating, and one thing that was fairly disgusting. This is not how I wanted to begin my account of the weekend. How I was going to begin it until about 15mins before calling it a night on Saturday, was like this:

‘If you’ve not danced in the same room as Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Captain Picard, Tron, and Bananaman, you haven’t lived.’

What changed that was really the last straw of something I’d been trying to grin and bear the whole weekend. I’m talking about the semi-naked women. No, not the slave-Leias – those ladies do that because they want to fulfil their own fantasies, and I respect that, especially when they’re braving the gold bikini on the coast of Wales in February – I’m talking about the women hired by SFX as entertainment, where the entertainment consisted of walking around in little but a thin film of silver spandex, on stilts, trailing men with cameras. I’d heard the complaints about them last year, and was appalled that nothing had been done to even out the score.

Let me be absolutely clear on this: I’m not appalled by the women – they’re doing a job and I imagine they’re extroverted types who are drawn to the work; neither am I appalled by the concept of employing people to dress up in risqué SF and fantasy costumes to entertain the punters. What I’m complaining about is the complete lack of equality. It sends a completely different message to employ only young women to walk around wearing very little with the deliberate purpose of titillating men in a purely objectifying fashion. (They may well have been titillating some of the women too, but I don’t think that was the aim.) It’s clear by such a decision that the organisers neither considered that heterosexual women might want a bit of harmless titillation, too, nor how discomforting it would be for the female attendees to have to endure the constant leering of their male companions without any similar outlet to balance it out.

It was deeply discomforting to have to listen to the constant comments whenever they were around; deeply disappointing that nothing similar had been laid on for me. But I tried to set it aside. I assumed it would be done after the trading room closed and the evening events began. Yet there I was, partying with the Lukes and the Leias, the Picards and the Uhuras, feeling like this was the closest I would ever get to a genuine alien disco, and there were superheroes there too, and I saw them: the same women from the daytime-posing, now dancing on stage wearing nothing but tiny black straps and lightbulbs over their crotches and breasts, reducing them to giant glowing versions of their sexual characteristics.

Instant buzz kill.

I wasn’t the only woman who felt this way. And the thing is this: no one would have minded if there were some semi-naked chaps strutting around for the het ladies and gay fellas to enjoy as well. It’s much less objectifying if the sexual desires of the other genders and sexual preferences are being recognised, too. It was a real shame that something so easy to rectify should sour what had been working out to be one of the best discos of my life.

So, yeah, there was that.

The other problems were fairly endurable. The accommodation was terrible. If buildings had personalities, Pontins would be a little old woman whose grandchildren never visit and who can’t really look after herself anymore, but refuses to have a carer in to help. Most of the windows in our ‘chalet’ didn’t close properly, and one was hanging off its hinges. There was no mirror. The heaters were ineffectual, and the beds were singularly uncomfortable. Oh, and we had no hot water for the first day, so I endured the coldest shower of my life.

But I didn’t come to Pontins for a luxury holiday experience; I came to hang out with awesome people dressed in awesome clothes talking about awesome geeky things. At the end of the day the poor accommodation instilled a sort of camaraderie: ‘Yours doesn’t have a mirror? Ours doesn’t have a microwave! And have you seen our sofa bed?!’ I can’t say I ever want to experience that sort of accommodation again, but for a weekend it was endurable.

My experience of the various panels was limited, due to my duties on the stall, but that’s OK, I come to conventions to socialise, for the most part, anyway. The panels I did get to see were fantastic. I especially enjoyed the Q & A with Eve Myles. Anyone who’s read my reviews of Torchwood: Miracle Day will know that I’m recently converted to Eve Myles fandom. I thought she was absolutely fantastic in TMD, both as an actor and as a realistic female action hero. It was wonderful, then, to discover that she was such a wonderful, open, entertaining speaker, as well. I enjoyed both her stories of Torchwood (including certain amusing and bizarre stories concerning John Barrowman’s ‘little Barrowman’) and her accounts of her own life. I admire a woman who is pleased by the concept of wine in pint glasses and endless buffets. She’s gained status as a sex symbol without ever being tempted to destroy her beauty by starving herself to abnormal thinness. Every moment of her Q & A was an absolute treat.

I also have to say how much I enjoyed the Kitschies, awards presented by the very fine people at Pornokitsch for ‘the year’s most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works of genre literature’. I can’t help but approve of an award ceremony where the winners receive handmade stuffed tentacles and Kraken rum as prizes, as well as monetary rewards. It’s great to see progressive and intelligent genre fiction rewarded, and I’ve noted several of the nominees and winners to chase down and sample myself. You can read more about them, and this year’s winners, at: http://www.thekitschies.com/ . I kind of felt that A Monster Calls deserved the Inky Tentacle for its cover art, but as it won the Red Tentacle for most progressive, intelligent, and entertaining novel I suppose it’s only fair that the Inky went to someone else.

There was a special pleasure, too, to singing along to ‘Once More with Feeling’, the Buffy musical episode, with several hundred other people, at least 50% of whom knew all the words. There’s no doubt that this was a convention for fans, and as such it had a joy and exuberance not quite like any other I’ve been to. The costumes were fantastic. There were Daleks and Aliens and stilt-walking transformers. One of my favourites had to be the wookie, which I first saw being greeted by a tenth Doctor. The wookie called out to the Doctor in wookie, and the Doctor responded in kind (of course, the Doctor would speak wookie), and then they hugged. I also heard tell of a dalek saying to someone who held the door open for it ‘You will be the last to be exterminated’. All in all it was as warm and open and kind as you would hope a bunch of geeks would be when they’re all just enjoying the openness and company of others as prepared to celebrate geek culture as themselves.

My only regret is that I didn’t have anything resembling a true costume myself. I would have loved to join the ranks of the superheroes and aliens. All the same, until my buzz was killed, there was really nothing quite like the costumed disco. I’ve rarely enjoyed dancing quite so much.

And I can’t talk about the weekend without saying how great it was to catch up with people. Conventions are a great way to cross the Internet divide, and I’ve never known so many people coming to the same event. I met up with old buddies like Ros Dando and Natalie Burford, who I know from college; and Dave Moore, who I know from LARPing. I met people I’d previously talked to only on Twitter, like the fabulous Emma Newman and Jenni Hill, with whom I worked on Genre for Japan, but never actually met in the flesh until yesterday. And I caught up with people I’d had the good fortune to natter with at EasterCon last year, as well, such as Anne Lyle, Amanda Rutter, Andrew ‘MyGodItsRaining’ Reid, and Emma Jane Davies, to name but a few. I only wish I could have caught up with everyone I knew who was there, but without wifi to get in touch with people it was impossible to find everyone amongst the thousands of attendees.

Plus, it was a great weekend for the Angry Robot team as well. We sold out of nearly everything and did our best business ever at any con. Loads of authors did signings, including my Twitter mate Adam Christopher (author of Empire State) and my old writing group buddy Dave Tallerman, whose debut novel, Giant Theif, was launched on Thursday. We sold out every copy of each of their books from the stock we had with us, and you can’t ask much better than that.

Thanks again to the Angry Robot team for enabling my convention going. If I’m asked to fly the Angry Robot table again next year I shall definitely accept (although I hope we’re able to get different accommodation, and that the event’s organisers will join us in the 21st century regarding sex and gender).

Review: Kraken, by China Miéville

Title: Kraken
Author: China Miéville
Series/Stand alone: Stand alone
Genre: Fantasy/Contemporary
First Published: 2010
Edition Reviewed: Del Rey (2011)
Hb/Pb: Trade Paperback

Plot

Billy is a curator at the Natural History Museum. His main work is in preserving specimens, and his biggest triumph was the preservation of Architeuthis dux, the giant squid. But one day, as he is giving a tour of the museum – one which always ends in a viewing of the squid – when he opens the door to the big finale… the squid is gone.

Naturally the police are called in, but it’s all a bit of a mystery. There’s simply no way that squid could have been moved without the (conspicuously absent) intervention of cranes and other noticeable paraphernalia. A special branch of the police are called in, the FSRC. They caution everyone present in the museum not to talk about what has happened, but Billy can’t resist. There’s no way such an event could be kept secret anyway, he reasons, so he tells his best friend, Leon, and Leon’s girlfriend, Marginalia. But, you see, he wasn’t supposed to be able to talk. Office Collingswood of the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime unit had ‘knacked’ everyone who had knowledge of the squid’s disappearance so that they couldn’t talk about it. In breaking that knack, Billy has called attention to himself. He is visited by the FSRC again, and they admonish him once more not to talk.

More and more curious, and beginning to understand that something other than natural is going on, Billy decides to investigate the odd sounds he’s always heard around the museum that nobody else ever seems to. In following the noises, he is led to discover something truly shocking: a man sealed into a jar of preservative. A man who had only recently gone missing, but who seems to have been enjarred for decades… in a jar whose neck he could not possibly have fit into. His discovery makes Billy officially a person of interest, and not just to the police, who make efforts to mystically seal his flat from entrance by unwanted individuals. A more substantial ‘knack’ is laid upon Billy not to talk, and the police suggest they can put more substantial protections on him if he comes to work for them.

Billy’s in shock. He doesn’t know what he’s gotten into, but the world’s different today than it was yesterday, and he just saw a man who had been murdered and pickled. He calls Leon, and Leon comes round. Despite the more powerful knack, Billy manages to talk, telling Leon everything, just as two terrifying newcomers find a way around the mystical protections on Billy’s flat: Goss and Subby. Goss inhales Leon before Billy’s eyes, and abducts the stunned curator, taking him to see the fearsome Tattoo – a crime boss whose enemy, Grisamentum, had turned into ink and tattooed onto the back of a hapless man. The Tattoo, like everyone else in London underworld, wants to know what has happened to the Kraken – a powerful symbolic item – and he thinks Billy knows. Billy, the man who preserved the Architeuthis, who first discovered it missing, who found the pickled man. But Billy knows nothing. He only escapes from the Tattoo’s clutches with the aid of some power within him he didn’t know he had and Dane, a cultist who worships the Kraken as a god, and who has been tracking Billy just like everyone else.

Billy is thrust into a mysterious and terrifying world of magic and crime, a world where religions and cults are more various than we in the ordinary world could ever imagine, a world where belief is power, a world where someone has stolen a god, and the precognitive Londonmancers have suddenly started predicting an apocalypse unlike any other – unlike the many and varied apocalypses of the many religions of London. An apocalypse where time itself is unwritten, and there will be no new world to follow. Billy and Dane are in a race against time, and against the police, the Tattoo, Dane’s own church, and possibly even the supposedly dead Grisamentum, to find out who took the Kraken and how to stop the end of the world.

How was it?

Rather awesome, is how it was. This book has a lot of elements aligned to recommend itself to a number of people of my acquaintance: giant squid, not-Cthulhu cultists, supernatual police-procedural, gangsters, and the familiar mix of intensely imaginative oddities we expect from China Miéville. And it delivered on all these fronts, surprisingly well.

I say ‘surprisingly well’ because, having treated myself to this book at EasterCon last year, I then put off reading it. I put off reading it because although I hold Perdido Street Station to be one of the most phenomenally well-written, engaging, and original pieces of fiction to be released in decades, I’ve struggled a bit with China’s other works. I read and liked The Scar, but although I did eventually reach the point of addicted what-do-you-mean-I-have-to-stop-reading-to-eat-things, it did take quite a while to get into. If I hadn’t loved Perdido Street Station so much, I probably would have given up long before the addictiveness kicked in. I also own The Iron Council in hardback, but I haven’t read it. I’ve read the first few pages a few times, but it doesn’t grab me, and it doesn’t help that those I know who have read it report that it is relentlessly slow, overly-political, and only really worth it for what is apparently an awesome tableau at the end.

Why did I buy Kraken, then, given that I haven’t read the last China Miéville book I bought? Well, I was intrigued that it was set in our world (or one very closely adjacent). I speculated that rooting it in the familiar might save on the intensive description that worked so well in Perdido Street Station, but not so much in his other works (and I like descriptive writing, as a rule). Plus, I’d heard good things – people were telling me that it was a much easier read. So I thought: what the hey? And gave it a go.

I’m so glad I did. I really have very little bad to say about this book. It’s swiftly paced and quite a contrast in style to my more recent readings of China’s work. Where I expect a Miéville book to be dense, this book is positively sparse. It was a bit of a jolt, actually, and I’ll admit that in places a little more description might have helped me to visualise what was going on, but these places were few and far between. It read a lot like a slightly more polished Neil Gaiman novel (oh yes, I went there). Miéville is masterful in this light-touch approach. The layer on layer of mystery and intrigue could easily be confusing and difficult to follow, but Miéville avoids such pitfalls, carrying the reader effortlessly along with his protagonist, who is just as out of his depth as we are.

I have just two complaints. The first is a particularly poor use of language that happens very early on in the book. It may well be that this wouldn’t bother most people, but it very nearly put me off completely. It’s just a little piece of dialogue, Leon describing Marginalia: “Convent girl. Hence tiny Jesus-shaped guilt trip between her tits”. I instantly dislike Leon, and I don’t think I’m meant to. I mean, I get it: ha ha, Jesus juxtaposed with an especially crude term for a woman’s breasts. See how I mean that she’s sexy but still weighed down with the remains of Catholic guilt? But ‘tits’ isn’t a sexy word. It’s an ugly, objectifying word – hard-edged, reductive, silly. Like you’ve not only reduced the woman to these wobbling tips on her chest, but also ridiculed her. Using the word ‘tits’ connotes a complete lack of respect for the items designated, and for the person they’re attached to. That’s how I feel about it, anyway. Maybe it is just me – I’ve had men protest that it means just the same to them as ‘breasts’, and they don’t see what’s wrong with it… but I can’t help but note that they don’t seem to use the word in the same way, and I’ve seen countless contradictory statements that equate the use of the word with an extra layer of objectification. At the end of the day I have to admit that I do instantly lose a bit of respect for anyone who uses it, and if that’s just me, then, well, all I can do it honestly report on how I responded emotionally. Part of me feels uncomfortably prudish – haven’t I always argued that no word should be banned, and an author is absolutely right to use a ‘crude’ word if it’s the right word for the context? Well, yes, but it seems to me that ‘breasts’ or even ‘boobs’ would have worked just as well, if not more so. Because it wouldn’t have made me assume that Leon was being deliberately and unpleasantly dismissive of his girlfriend, which I realised after several chapters wasn’t the author’s intention at all.

So, that’s minor point number one. And it is minor, except that it really bothered me, and it took a substantial amount of subsequent good writing for me to be comfortable again with the novel. The other point is philosophical, and not 100% negative. It’s this: one of the plot points turns on an exemplification of a rather neat philosophical point about personal identity. Anyone who’s dabbled in this area of philosophy will have come to realise that on most likely accounts of what it is for a person’s identity to remain the same across time, most of the explanations offered for what transporter pads do on Star Trek entail that that kind of teleportation is, in fact, murder. Or, at the very least manslaughter-cum-suicide. If it’s direct dematerialisation and rematerialisation from different molecules elsewhere there is no spatiotemporal continuity whatsoever, and most accounts of personal identity require spatiotemporal continuity as a minimum. Now, of course, if you include souls or spirits in your ontology, this doesn’t necessarily follow; although an account would have to be given of how the incorporeal aspect of self related to the physical body, and you’d still have to do some fancy footwork to argue that the soul would instantly attach itself to this completely other set of particles in this completely different location. Miéville’s plot point turns on the rejection of such an account; ‘beaming’, in Kraken, is essentially killing.

So, it’s lovely to see a work of fantasy engage with the discussion of personal identity at this level. However, this then contrasts with a rather blasé fudge of personal identity that forms another major plot point. This next bit is a rather spoilery, so you may want to skip on to the next paragraph, depending on how much you care about that sort of thing. Basically, a character has worked out how to render his essence into ink, to escape death. He is then able to exist not only as a single puddle of ink, but as writing on multiple and disparate pieces of paper. Each individual piece of writing has separate consciousness and awareness from the main puddle, yet is regarded as the same individual, capable of returning to be reabsorbed into the whole without difficulty. This seems to fly directly in the face of whatever theory of personal identity rested on the principle of spatiotemporal continuity employed so explicitly throughout the rest of the novel. At the very least it seems to be required that there will be some difficulty or confusion stemming from the re-integration of disparate memories and experiences. Not to mention that it looks like not simply each page of writing, but each letter unjoined to its neighbour will, however briefly, have a disparate identity.

Long story short: two completely different and contradictory theories of personal identity seem to be required for these two key plot points. Perhaps I’m just being niggled by this because I know a bit about philosophy, and if it weren’t a specialism of mine I could ignore it, but I guess the thing is that what I tend to go by is internal consistency. I’m inclined to agree that a literal dematerialisation/rematerialisation-from-different-particles-elsewhere transporter probably would be the killing of one person and the creation of a clone, but it doesn’t particularly bother me when I’m watching Star Trek. That’s partly because there’s just enough fudge around what exactly transporter beams do that it’s not clear that ‘beaming down’ really does fit this model. In one episode Lt Berkeley actually gets attacked by something whilst in the transporter beam, which rather suggests some kind of physical transportation of matter, plausibly allowing for spatiotemporal continuity. On the other hand, other episodes suggest the reverse. The episode where there end up being two Rikers because something goes wrong in transport and Riker rematerialises in two places rather suggests that we do have the destruction and reconstruction out of new particles scenario; as is backed up by the idea (expressed fairly frequently) that replicators and transporters work off much the same principles. But the thing is, Star Trek never really tries to say anything rigorous about this, so I don’t mind. The trouble here is that Miéville goes ahead and makes a significant plot element turn on a rather pleasingly sophisticated account of personal identity and its consequences… and then goes and completely ignores this for one of his other major plot points.

I can’t decide whether this bothers or intrigues me. Maybe it’s less of a problem than a challenge. Maybe Miéville is prompting us to reflect on our own ideas about personal identity by presenting us with two apparently contradictory views and thus poking us to reflect upon what we think about them. Perhaps they don’t have to be reconcilable. Much of Kraken is concerned with the thought that reality is partially dependent on our beliefs concerning what reality is. Maybe both beliefs are permissible (within the world of the book) because people generally don’t reflect significantly hard on the matter to make either concretely true for everyone everywhere. I don’t know. That’s probably the get out clause. It just feels a little… fudgy. Just can’t decide if it’s fudgy-bad or fudgy-provocative.

Like I say, a minor point that stood out for me because of who I am and what I do when I’m not wittering on about fantasy novels. On the whole, this is a rich, sophisticated, and remarkably accessible book. I heartily recommend it to everyone, but particularly to those who like squid, cults, and supernatural police procedurals (you know who you are).

I’m now off to spend some of my Amazon gift certificate on King Rat, as I’ve heard that’s a relatively accessible Miéville, too, and I’m having withdrawal now that I’m done with Kraken.

And so I’m back, from outer space…

… you just walked in to find me here with that sad look upon my face…

Actually, no, that last bit is a lie. I am very happy, now, for I have THE INTERNET at home again.

Apologies for the extended radio silence, which was considerably longer than I hoped it would be, but was FINALLY sorted out this morning. Man, you guys, I have had SO MANY things to blog about, but with having to nab moments of Internet from work at lunch and at the end of the day, there was no opportunity to voice them. I am practically bursting at the seams.

Whilst I compose myself and work out which things to blog about first, you may wish to sample some of the other bits of me that have been going on on other parts of the Internet, which I totally meant to tell you about here, but did not have the time in my limited windows of Internet. The main thing is that I, and the other ladies from The Girls’ Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse, were interviewed by Pornokitsch! So exciting! Adele asked me to write a paragraph on ‘Why are apocalypse and post-apocalypse settings drawing so much attention from female writers and artists at the moment?’ and I, umm, wrote eight. You know me, never short of wind. So you can read the interview here (and please do! I get all forthright about stuff and things in a way I usually try to skim passed over here; I’m sort of chuffed with the results), and I also wrote a post about the interview over on my tumblr, in which I get all Virginia Woolf on its arse (by ‘its arse’ I am referring to the question, the premise of which I challenge, not Pornokitsch, which is awesome).

Oh! And I made a mini ‘So that was 2011, huh?’ post, also. I may or may not attempt a longer one here once I have my bearings again.

So, umm, yeah. Go poke those things. I’ll come back with some reviews later.

Toodle-pip!

Sorry it’s been quiet around here, guys

I’m moving house on 1st January (I know) as well as preparing an application the deadline for which is 31st December. If I weren’t doing these things I’d be working on finishing something I should have completed three months ago, and a presentation of said thing I’m doing on 16th January. INSANE, is the word for where things are right now, and although there’s plenty of stuff I want to write about (over and above Read Along with Rhube) I just don’t have the time for the sort of in depth reviews I like to give.

If you want to read some much shorter squeeings of mine, I have made the odd spurt onto Tumblr, including a bit on open roads, existentialism, and Terminator 2; and a slightly longer bit on why Professor X is awesome, here.

In the meantime, think of me whilst you’re partying tonight. If I manage to finish packing I’l be trying to get an early night whilst the rest of the world is being NOISY.

Toodle-pip!