Cameron's Book Round-Up: 2024, part 2

My re-reading journey continues. Edgar put it best with their last book round-up, so I quote them here:

If you’ve got disposable income, let me once again suggest that you put it towards, for example, eSims for still-embattled Gaza, or if you live in one of a seemingly ever-growing number of states where this might be relevant, a trans support organization. If you’re hellbent on it, though, links to book titles go to our Bookshop unless otherwise noted.

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The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game (Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1 and #2) by Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

(Prior reviews: here and here.)

Last summer, Edgar and I had the opportunity to go to Barcelona with a friend (I bought Otter Liefe’s Conserve and Control, previously reviewed here, at an anarchist bookshop near the Gothic quarter.) As such, I’ve been thinking about revisiting the Cemetery of Forgotten Books sequence since then – there’s something about knowing a place, even if just in passing, that changes fiction set there. While I’m not going to give up fiction set in imagined locations, I have a new appreciation for these books since going there.

Zafón clearly loved his home city, in the way that one might love a family member. Not without frustration or sadness, but with the knowledge that the identity of the loved one is entwined with your own. I’m not going to lie and say that the city that Zafón described is necessarily the same one that I experienced – a good sixty years or more separates the time he wrote about and the time that I was there, as forty years separated the time he wrote about from the time he lived there – but there is a grammar to the city that still shapes how it makes itself known, in the narrow alleys with laundry hanging on lines overhead and in the broad sun-drenched boulevards. In the food and drink and the rhythm of life that was visible when you leave the part of the city reserved for tourists.

I do not know Barcelona as well as I might like, but reading these books, I can now confirm, was an excellent presentiment of the place.

In addition, the story told in the same pages – I once described it to Edgar, who was more familiar with it than I was at the time, and remains so – that it reads like a “soft-boiled noir”. While there’s no whitewashing of the Francoist period or lionization of those who fell in the civil war, for Zafón and the characters he writes, this is simply history, it’s just what happened, there is a gentleness to it that remains within the treatment of the time in question, a conviction that what makes life worth living can be found, in equal measures, in the books that we read and the connections we make with others. This is the background noise of the books, even in the razor-edged moments of The Angel’s Game, the darker and more gothic of the two books.

Fairly soon, as I begin to put more new works back into my reading diet, I will most likely continue with the sequence: Edgar has made it clear to me that the next few books in the sequence begin to knit things together into an interesting whole. Given the fact that these books are only loosely associated, it feels like a rather big task, but we’ll see.

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez.

(Previously reviewed here and here.)

For a variety of reasons, it felt appropriate to hop over and reread Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez. Notably, after I finished The Shadow of the Wind, I used two Borges short stories in a class I’m teaching, and this book in particular was mentioned in an episode of a podcast I listen to, The Darkened Threshold, from The Gauntlet. It seemed providential that this all come up and that I reread the book in question.

The timeline of Our Share of Night is a confused thing – one might describe how it proceeds as starting in the middle of the story and working its way out from there, spreading like a blot of ink suffuses sheet of paper. The two protagonists are Juan and Gaspar Peterson, a father and son who have a supernatural gift that is desired by a group called “the Order”, which is headed by Gaspar’s maternal grandparents. Juan, recently widowed, loved his now-dead wife, Rosario, very much, partially because she worked to protect him within the Order. The Order itself uses Juan as a tool to contact their god, The Darkness, and seeks to use Gaspar to an even greater degree.

The narrative, on the whole, is effectively the story from Juan’s discovery by the cult through Gaspar’s maturation and tenure as their medium.

Read in order, it might be a fairly simple affair, proceeding from A through Z with only marked divergences (the Zañartú Pit sequence, narrated by a person who does not know the Petersons at all, is instrumental to the story, but might seem like a confusing aside to some), but Enríquez does an excellent job of scrambling the plot and presenting the story in a unique way: a linear story is easy to follow, certainly, but individual moments might become lost in the sequence. Stories chopped into distinct sequences like this, on the other hand, can allow you to develop a more developed appreciation for the individual moments that make up the narrative.

Blindsight (Firefall #1) by Peter Watts

(Previously reviewed here and here.)

I almost think that this is too soon to get back to – I read this fairly recently, and it’s not like anything really new jumped out at me this time, though there are some interesting consonances with Angelmaker, one of the subsequent books in this round-up, that occur to me – both are, after all, stories that heavily feature philosophical zombies and the “disenchantment” of the world, as well as fraught father-son relationships and existential threats (though that last one barely counts, honestly) – which I will leave for later discussion.

I am going to skip over the standard ritual of summarizing this book – it’s a horror story about empathy dressed up as a first contact story – and instead simply say that it remains worth reading. I think, in prior approaches to this book, I have not appreciated how dystopian the world depicted at the opening of the book – before any real information about the aliens has been trickled out – really is. Human beings have reduced themselves to mere ballast in spaceship Earth: to remain current in their fields, specialists need to accept more and more extreme prosthetic augmentation, forgoing retraining for repurposing senses and carving the brain into the shape they need it to be to do their job; but beyond them, the great and the good make use of the lazurogenetic vampires as henchmen – paleolithic hominids that are larger, smarter, stronger, and faster than human beings, to the point where they have a fundamentally different perception of time (they do not “remember”, they fully re-experience prior experiences. To them, everything is present), but suffer a grand mal seizure when they encounter right angles, now fixed with a course of “anti-Euclidean” drugs, which isn’t terribly good as they’re obligate predators of human beings without special dietary supplements; but beyond them there are the AI, which do not really appear on the page for a terribly long period of time, and who manage everything – and who have made it their business to seek out and destroy uncertainty, chipping away at the vast unknowns of the universe and deriving more and more information and designing more and more clever interventions based on it. At the top of the food chain is not a hateful monster: it’s an algorithm that can always and forever do your job better than you with (generally) less input of resources.

It’s a world in which human beings are, frankly, unnecessary. Before the aliens even show up, team Earth is gathering to vote to give less importance to human beings – maybe they’d like to just play in virtual reality while the transhumans, vampires, and robots do the actual work? They can’t really hurt themselves in there, and can just sort of be stacked by cord-wood in the meantime. It’s not like they can make more of themselves if they’re just plugged into the machine, or anything. It’ll be less messy, in the long run.

And into this situation crashes something even more horrifying and inhuman, radically other to the point that coexistence seems impossible.

A Lush and Seething Hell by John Hornor Jacobs.

(Previously reviewed here and providing the foundation for this piece.)

Another short-term reread, a duology composed of “The Sea Dreams It Is The Sky” and “My Heart Struck Sorrow”.

The first is a miniature companion to Our Share of Night, concerning a professor, Isabel, from a fictitious South American nation, Magera, who falls in with another expatriate who was once a famous poet, Avendaño. He returns to their homeland to sort something out, and she follows after when she loses contact with him. It parallels, in sketchier detail, some of the general ideas of Enríquez’s work, concerning the overlap of the horrors of the outer darkness and authoritarianism.

The second follows a widower and musicologist, Cromwell, on a government commission studying the bequest of a predecessor, Harlan Parker, a man who traveled the south to collect secular songs during the Great Depression. His particular white whale is a hypothetical ur-version of the murder ballad “Stagger Lee”, which has different modalities in the white community and black community, and which Parker theorizes springs from an unidentified older song.

Both stories drip with a kind of wistful sorrow: something has been lost and cannot be recovered. In an attempt to do so, one might as well be gunning the engine of a car in park: something is expended, but nothing is gained. For Hornor Jacobs’s protagonists, this leads to a greater and greater intensification. The protagonists may escape the horror eventually, but nothing is gained, nothing made the process worthwhile, other than potentially a sense of personal honor.

The narrator’s loss, however, is the reader’s gain: while a little bit of the shine has come off of it since I first read it, the stories in question remain well worth reading: it’s a drop from five stars to four and a half, and I don’t really think that I would reassess it downward any further. Then again, it could just be that I re-read it too quickly. This one might be on me.

Flex Mentallo by Grant Morrison

The only new book on my list this time around – and this one a stand-alone followup to Grant Morrison’s run on Doom Patrol (reviewed here and here), so I’m going to count it as fitting within my mission (and, as I get to later, there’s at least one alternate universe where this is a re-read, because publication history went slightly differently.)

It is not, I will admit, my favorite comic of theirs – in many ways, it feels like a rather typical Grant Morrison outing. There’s an A-plot, following Flex Mentallo, the last superhero, dreamed into existence from a Charles Atlas-like advertisement, hunting down a shadowy group of terrorists who plant fake bombs to spread disquiet and terror. The B-plot is the young boy who created Flex, supposedly dead (in the A-plot), in the process of committing suicide by drug overdose and ranting about his philosophy on life to someone on the other end of a phone call.

The two plotlines converge and mirror and interweave with one another quite a bit, but the narrative split down the middle and then shuffled back together is a bit of a Morrison hallmark. While it is enjoyable at moments, it feels more like a remainder: this story came out on the Vertigo imprint two years after The Invisibles, the series he began to continue his work after Vertigo dropped his run on Doom Patrol. This feels like the remainder, the pomace, from that particular transition, a set of ideas that couldn’t be ported over neatly or cleanly into The Invisibles because it needed a central figure like Flex Mentallo, a trans-ironic parody of a Charles Atlas advertisement evolved into a superman figure in a trenchcoat and tiger-striped short shorts, wandering a world from which all superheroes had departed, the last of the last because he wasn’t ever “real” in the same way as the rest of them.

The beginnings of this plot, in fact, are even contained within the Morrison run of Doom Patrol. Chances are, had the run continued longer, this storyline would have been incorporated into the continuity of that comic in one way or another.

Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway

(Previously reviewed by Edgar here. There are spoilers for this book and Harkaway’s prior novel The Gone-Away World below)

I delayed posting this article to finish reading this book, rushing through it as quickly as I could. I first read this book about a decade ago.

Harkaway has a maximalism to his writing – I first encountered it in his debut novel, The Gone-Away World, which featured a plot twist I can only think of as a “reverse Fight Club” and culminated in a martial arts battle between ninjas and mimes – and Angelmaker very clearly continued along this line. He takes pulp and elevates it to high art in this story of the clockmaker son of a legendary London gangster fighting against an overreaching British government and a supervillain from the early twentieth century who had unnaturally extended his life by transferring his consciousness into a prolific serial killer.

Underneath all of this shine, though, is a well-thought-out story. I get the sense that Harkaway, in this story, is at least partially working through his relationship to his own father, prolific novelist and former British spy John le Carre, real name David John Moore Cornwell. The clockmaker, Joe Spork, lives in the shadow of Matthew “Tommy Gun” Spork, and becomes, over the course of the novel, a synthesis between Matthew and his grandfather, from whom he inherited the trade of clockmaker.

It’s a delightful story. I’m struggling not to describe it as “having heart” or displaying “authenticity” or any of the cliches that spring readily to mind because, while I feel that the first of these is definitely true, it is also, fittingly, a love letter to artifice and craft divorced from the need to emulate real life. This story is about the collision of a certain Londoner fantasy-perception of the self – the sort that’s on display in the Kingsman movies, but without the weird implication that the main character is working for British al-Qaeda – with the gray reality of a world of accountancy and austerity and sick building syndrome. It is a story of imagination falling upon the real world with teeth and fingernails and wrestling it down to the ground and asserting a desire to live in a world enchanted by the possibility of something more than we are allowed to imagine.

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