This book was recommended to me because I’m a pathetic sucker for ‘dark academia’ and books that have the arcane intellectual coterie setting that I lThis book was recommended to me because I’m a pathetic sucker for ‘dark academia’ and books that have the arcane intellectual coterie setting that I loved about The Secret History by Donna Tartt.
What I enjoyed about this book was how intellectually engaged it was, how much of its intimacy and romance and exhilaration came from collaboration and the discussion of ideas. I hadn’t realised that the ‘grand jeu’ is adapted from Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, aka Magister Ludi, but while I don’t think I would enjoy that quite conceptual novel, here I enjoyed the way Collins fleshes out the grand jeu as a form and philosophy and the Montverre curriculum as a means of learning and notating it.
The book made me consider all sorts of embarrassing Rowling-esque worldbuilding questions: if the grand jeu is a national game then why did a de Courcy burn down “the London library”? Are there other academies around the world where the game is studied, and journals and festivals and tournaments where players meet and exchange ideas?
[Edit: speaking of Rowling, I have since learned that Collins has TERF connections, which makes the treatment of gender and sexuality in this novel much more discomfiting and takes away some of the pleasure I took from reading it.]
But while the book conjures the atmosphere of the arcane, it also powerfully creates a sense of mounting dread as you realise it’s also an allegory of fascism and the rise of Nazism in particular, with Christians taking the place of Jews as the scapegoated group.
The protagonist Léo is introduced as a weak, weaselly, self-serving person and I enjoyed the way stories like this are often told from the beta’s perspective. I often ponder my own weakness and failure and mediocrity, and I wonder if that’s why I’m drawn to these kinds of characters. I liked that Léo is not easily let off the hook and allowed to redeem himself in a facile way, but he does find moral clarity.
There’s another character who is meant to be a child or teenager, who gave this book much more of a YA vibe but turns out to be a pivotal character. I saw that plot twist coming but there’s another, much more satisfying plot twist that surprised me.
This book had what I always feel is the mark of a great story: that after finishing it I felt stirred and moved, and didn’t immediately want to read or watch or do something else, but just wanted to sit with it a little longer....more
This was a satisfying example of fae-themed YA. So much YA is really about the intrigue that comes from the main character lThis is more like a 3.75.
This was a satisfying example of fae-themed YA. So much YA is really about the intrigue that comes from the main character learning to navigate complex and hostile institutions; and so it is with the treacherous High Court of Faerie, from which the human protagonist Jude yearns for acceptance, even though all the beautiful faries think she's a pathetic puny mortal.
It's tragic how the more fae-themed books I read, the more intertextually they all operate so that the whole milieu of careless beauty and violence seems familiar.
I love that so many YA novels, no matter their fantasy or sci-fi setting, manage to have a setting that's basically 'high school', where the teen characters go every day to mingle and perform their interpersonal dramas. Here, it's a kind of fairy school where the younger members of the High Court go to learn their lore and practise their fighting skills – but only Jude really pays attention, realising it's the key to her survival. Education really is a lifeline!
Of course Jude finds a way to strategise and defeat her enemies in the Court, as well as handling the cruel Prince Cardan who seems to have it in for Jude particularly. Of course, anyone who's read any romance fiction whatsoever will know that it's, uh, not hate that he feels.
I enjoyed this as a trashy escapist pleasure and would definitely read the sequels if they cross my path....more
I think I read a review of this and added it to my to-read list because I thought it sounded like my speed – and it absolutely is. It begins in an AmeI think I read a review of this and added it to my to-read list because I thought it sounded like my speed – and it absolutely is. It begins in an American contemporary YA mode that had me expecting a YA mystery in the 'clique noir' mode of Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Alice is an angry teen outsider, the estranged granddaughter of a reclusive author who lives at an upstate New York estate called the Hazel Wood. Kind of like some mix of Joan Didion and JD Salinger, this grandmother has a cult following for Tales from the Hinterland, a book of dark fairytales that Alice has never been allowed to read.
Alice and her young mother Ella – who treats her like a fellow adult – constantly move from town to town, plagued by weirdly bad luck. When Ella marries a rich New Yorker, Alice fetches up at a plush uptown school. There she meets Ellery Finch: troubled, biracial, eccentric in a charming, carelessly rich way, and a superfan of her grandmother's book. But then one day, Ella is abducted, leaving only one message: Do not go to the Hazel Wood. So, obviously that's where Alice has to go, with Finch as her guide.
So far, so YA. I was really enjoying the satire on literary cult status and getting ready to snuggle into another story about a plucky outsider in a posh New York prep school. But then the fairytale characters start intruding into this story and, like Alice, I realised that they'd been dipping into her world all along. The Hinterland is a real place – a place of cruel, violent and frequently misogynist storytelling – and because Alice's grandmother published these stolen stories, she inadvertently made a portal between the two worlds.
Albert has said she was inspired by Lev Grossman's The Magicians, which itself is a metacommentary on Narnia, and other stories about fantastical parallel worlds such as Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. I was also reminded of Elizabeth Knox's wonderful The Absolute Book, which like The Hazel Wood begins with a genre bait-and-switch then plunges you into a fantastical world where what happens to the characters has real consequences.
As I read, I felt really excited that I was reading something good, written by an author who's in command of theme and tone and can marshall familiar tropes for her own storytelling purposes rather than indulging in them for their own sake. Like The Absolute Book, the story seemed bigger and more full of wonder than the often oppressively hermetic worlds I've read in fantasy YA where you can feel the author trying to impose orderliness upon a fantastical world like they're playing with dolls or action figures, rather than inviting the reader into an unruly world of imagination where anything can happen and the characters face real risk and loss.
Some reviewers have said they disliked Alice and found her hard to warm to, but I identified with the wellspring of rage inside her – which has a satisfying point within the story. I also enjoyed that Albert introduces Finch as a bog-standard YA quirky love interest, but he quickly becomes his own person and goes on his own journey – he's not just Alice's helpmeet.
This is the kind of stuff I really love to read, and that I aspire to write, too – a sense of being bereft when the story's over and the characters have gone places and done things that felt hard and challenging to read, not just satisfying and escapist. A feeling like you've gone on a huge journey that makes the beginning of the book feel so small by comparison, and that's changed you, too. I was happy to leave the characters there, but I've since learned there's a sequel and I will really enjoy finding it and catching up with these characters again....more
It makes sense to learn that this book began as a PhD project, because it's very conceptual in approach: a series of fragments that experiment with foIt makes sense to learn that this book began as a PhD project, because it's very conceptual in approach: a series of fragments that experiment with form (some more successfully than others) and play with chronology. The overall approach is of trying to capture in prose a musical experience – the kind of analog emotions experienced intensely when listening to favourite songs, and then fixed for posterity by a mixtape playlist.
Each chapter represents a moment in time and a song, and the fragments are told from several different perspectives. I'd been expecting it to be much more closely focused on the Seaview Hotel/Crystal Ballroom post-punk scene in St Kilda; but it's really more about how the echoes of that scene were felt by people just slightly too young to have been its full participants.
The earliest segments are narrated by Benny, a wide-eyed teen suburbanite whose older brother Guy is living in junkie squalor in the hotel. Benny is fascinated by the performativity of the Crystal Ballroom scene and the charisma of Nick Cave and Rowland S Howard. He starts a band and yearns to be famous; but his barely remembered flare of (fictional) '80s new-wave pop success is ultimately less satisfying than his later career as an instrument maker.
But most of the book is dedicated to the extremely Gen-X love affair between Moira, the permissively parented daughter of bolshy lesbian Kaz, and Jimmy, the lost son of a mentally ill mother whom Kaz takes under her wing. Both Moira and Jimmy fall into the orbit of Dodge, an art photographer with a case of the Bill Hensons. They go to gigs, take drugs, have sex. Moira has an abortion. Later, they travel to Europe, settle in Sydney, and Moira becomes pregnant again; but Jimmy can't settle down.
To be honest, I couldn't really get on board with their love-for-the-ages because Jimmy reminded me so much of the various hapless musos my friends have dated over the years – perpetually boyish, bewildered drummers and bassists and DJs and so on. You don't marry those kinds of men. You don't have kids with them. You have your debaucherous youth with them and experiment with your own identity, and then you grow up and leave them to their bumbling with younger women who'll still tolerate their nonsense.
Jimmy seems doomed, predestined to flame out early – but how much is that a narrative he's carefully constructed like a mixtape, based on subcultural fatalism? When a grief-stricken and very pregnant Moira returns home to her mother in Castlemaine, memories of her shared youth with Jimmy are everywhere… but she finds a new sense of comfort and purpose with Benny (who now prefers his Basque birth name Beñat) and in parenting her son Rowland.
The long cultural afterlife of the Ballroom scene looms over them all, like the chandelier on the cover, which gave the venue its name. Krauth depicts the Ballroom as a grotesque place of decay and dilapidation: a kind of Dante's Inferno where you could witness a groupie's onstage strangulation or a bikie funeral, where a Birthday Party videoclip shoot descends into an orgy at a toxic-waste dump, and where needles and syringes are hospitably rinsed in toilet bowls for the next person to use. It doesn't feel like a cradle for music and style as much as a grave.
So, what I liked here is the acknowledgment that even the most mainstream pop, of the kind consumed by sensation-seeking teenagers like Moira, also sprang from this scene. There's an early scene of Flinders Street Station photobooth oral sex between Moira and a member of her favourite band, and a late scene where Moira visits some outer-suburban beer barn where Beñat is playing his old hits alongside a weary roster of former pop idols who are still lust objects for women now in their forties. For everyone here, the real lust is for their own youths, which they hope to recapture through the music.
Loss reverberates through this book – Moira's grief for Jimmy, and adults' grief for the times and places that felt special and formative but that exist now only in memory. Moira starts an art project using Polaroid photos, and there's an almost fetishistic focus throughout the book on analog material history: the care of making, keeping or even destroying talismanic objects. In the final scene, Moira teaches her digital-native son how to use a tape player, and there's so much unspoken. I really liked this ending.
The prose has that same energy of intense analog crafting and selection, and again I wonder if this is what happens when you write a novel as a PhD project – the iterative researching and experimenting and polishing, and the search for pellucid images and phrases, shiny as the crystals in a ballroom chandelier. The writing here is beautiful, and I can appreciate this book as a work of craft. But I'm a little too young for it to really get me in the feels, as lived experience....more
I picked this up from the Little Library at Melbourne Central, drawn primarily by the pun title. Yikes, it was very badly written – which I realised fI picked this up from the Little Library at Melbourne Central, drawn primarily by the pun title. Yikes, it was very badly written – which I realised from the very first, floridly overwritten sentence, but I pushed through the whole book, which was a very quick and easy read. It didn't improve, and indeed it ended on an annoying cliffhanger that left me feeling I'd wasted my time.
I've only just learned it's number 14 in a series and that the character of Ava has appeared in previous novels. Perhaps this accounts for the way she was so aggressively unpleasant and irrational here – the reader is assumed to have some residual goodwill for the character that excuses how awful she is. Ava is not just smug but stupid as well. I thought less of the hero, Russian vampire Dima, for falling in love with her....more
I had this on my shelf for ages and am annoyed I didn't read it until now – I enjoyed this a lot. In terms of historicising feminism – showing the eveI had this on my shelf for ages and am annoyed I didn't read it until now – I enjoyed this a lot. In terms of historicising feminism – showing the everyday misogyny of the past, and the resourceful ways in which smart, sparky women evade the patriarchy – it's absolutely in my wheelhouse.
New York midwife and women's-health pioneer Axie Muldoon's voice emerges engagingly through the way she chooses to tell her story. Manning infuses her with the wisdom of retrospect but also with wry affection for the mistakes made by her younger self. I loved turns of phrase such as referring impertinently to someone as "the old badger", and the use of old-fashioned language never seems forced.
I did notice some readers on Goodreads struggled with the censorship of swear words, etc, but having read the fictional foreword (as well as lots of actual 19th-century fiction) I recognised it as a metatextual editorial decision by Axie's husband to censor her memoir posthumously.
This book is wonderfully compassionate about women's bodies and choices, and absolutely scathing about the hapless, hypocritical or cruel men who face no social or economic consequences for their sexual activities. Axie treats all sorts of clients: lonely bourgeoises who risk social disgrace if their affairs are discovered; working-class and destitute women who can't afford babies; demimondaines and sex workers; mothers worn out from multiple pregnancies; survivors of rape and domestic violence; and heartbroken girls deceived and abandoned by their lovers.
While Axie is inwardly impatient about some, she can never resist helping women in trouble, because she remembers her own and her mother's desperate past. Both legally pragmatic and moral, she will perform early-term abortions ('removing obstructions') and is proud of her skill at this dangerous procedure, but won't intervene in pregnancy after the foetus has 'quickened', and instead will lend her skill and compassion to the task of helping women give birth – which here is depicted with bravery and wonder. Manning herself is a mother, and the censoriousness of Axie's language does not conceal the intensity of her descriptions of her and her patients' experiences.
The character of Axie is inspired by the real-life midwife 'Madame Restell', who like Axie was hounded by the New York press and by the obsessive moral crusader Anthony Comstock, who appears here in scathing terms as "My Enemy". Some real people's biographical details appear here but too much has been changed for this to be, strictly speaking, a biographical novel.
I had actually heard of Comstock before, because as postal inspector he spearheaded the 1873 law that banned the mailing of contraceptives, abortifacients and any other obscene or sexually explicit correspondence or material. For my book Out of Shape: Debunking Myths about Fashion and Fit I researched Bernarr Macfadden, the pioneering woo-woo health nutcase who was one of Comstock's targets; however Macfadden successfully argued that his magazine of near-nudes, Physical Culture, was not obscene because (and I'm quoting from memory here) "for health to be known, it must be seen".
But reading Madame Restell's biography made me appreciate the way Manning used this real story as a springboard for her own distinctive character, and through her to paint a much more panoramic picture of how far reproductive healthcare has come since the 1870s, when most of the book is set.
My Notorious Life is also an enjoyable critique of class and cultural capital in the US. Set around the same time as The Age of Innocence, it's full of Axie's yearning for the trappings of wealth and respectability, and it shows how the Gilded Age barons and showmen like PT Barnum were superseding the old patrician forms of capital by harnessing the media, advertising and salesmanship – the parts of Axie's empire that her husband Charlie excels in running. ...more
This was billed as a modern-day Handmaid's Tale, but it's less a speculative dystopia and much more of a critique of contemporary capitalism, which haThis was billed as a modern-day Handmaid's Tale, but it's less a speculative dystopia and much more of a critique of contemporary capitalism, which has always treated women of colour as commodities and low-paid migrant workers. Here they are both, as Jane, a skilled Filipina baby-nurse struggling to provide for her own daughter Amalia, volunteers as a surrogate mother for a corporation growing custom babies for rich clients.
The novel switches perspective between Jane; her older and wilier cousin, 'Ate', who is working the American system with her own children's needs in mind; Reagan, another surrogate who's an angry, lost, privileged white chick; and Mae, the ambitious executive who runs the surrogacy farm. This structure enables Ramos to tease out multiple intersections of privilege and disadvantage, solidarity and betrayal between gender, race and class.
Much of the novel reminded me of other books about women's stressful juggling to meet social demands, such as The Nanny Diaries and I Don't Know How She Does It. A lot of the time I feel really stressed and outraged on behalf of these characters, who work so hard within a system fundamentally designed to exploit their labour without ever rewarding them with autonomy. I also sometimes felt frustrated by their choices, which seemed short-sighted and self-sabotaging.
One of my cherished New Year's Day rituals is reading a trashy and undemanding genre novel. This fit the bill but I was immediately annoyed b2.5 stars
One of my cherished New Year's Day rituals is reading a trashy and undemanding genre novel. This fit the bill but I was immediately annoyed by the generic cover image, which looks like it's from the 1990s rather than the 1890s. To me that's always such a red flag that a novel is going to tell an essentially contemporary story using period window-dressing.
The plot is much like Edith Wharton's The Buccaneers: the sledgehammer-obviously named Cora Cash is an American new-money heiress whose life has been more gilded cage than Gilded Age. The plaything of her social-climbing mother, who's determined to marry her off to an English aristocrat, she's introduced while strapped to a cruel posture-improving device, like poor old Consuelo Vanderbilt.
Cora's story is pacy but overly familiar – the hometown honey she leaves behind; the cold, mysterious duke she ends up marrying; the way she struggles to adapt to English ways and is always being wrongfooted by malicious toffs and sniffy servants alike – and especially her awful mother-in-law, the Double Duchess. There's some pleasure here in the lavish descriptions of clothes and rituals – very much like The Luxe by Anna Godbersen; but where Godbersen seems in control of her period setting, using it to inform plot and character, here it's pure picturesque.
The plot is silly and predictable, pivoting on Cora's rival manipulating her into posing for a socially ruinous Madame X-esque portrait. (I think this was the book's reference to the Robert Browning poem that gives this novel its title.) However, I did enjoy the parallel romance between Cora's plucky Black maid Bertha and cute English servant Jim, which seemed much more grounded in the realities of race and class than the rote soap-opera antics of the rich characters – more like Longbourn by Jo Baker....more
I first saw this total whopper of an epic novel, which imagines the life of Marilyn Monroe, back in, oh, maybe 2002 or 2003. A fellow Unimelb postgradI first saw this total whopper of an epic novel, which imagines the life of Marilyn Monroe, back in, oh, maybe 2002 or 2003. A fellow Unimelb postgrad had it on a shelf in her office on the sixth floor of the John Medley Building. I was seized by a desire to read it but of course I could not justify a giant chunky tome about Marilyn Monroe when I was supposed to be MacGyvering some kind of theoretical framework to analyse media representations of bogans.
Anyway, fast forward to 2020 when I found this book at Savers Brunswick and decided to read it in my self-isolation. During Lockdown 1 in March–April, the book lived on my kitchen table and I would read it while eating meals, because it is so large that it’s hard to read in other ways. I would sometimes take it to the couch and sit sideways with the book propped up on the back couch cushion. It probably took me a couple of weeks to get through. I had a tough week, mental health-wise, in late March as everything moved online; and I found reading a hard-copy book was a nice way to get out of my head and away from screens.
I had been expecting a novel told from Marilyn Monroe’s perspective that recounted her life as she experienced it, but Blonde is much more ambitious, even mythic, in its scope. Its narrative voice shifts between many different characters and even writing styles, and Oates uses different character names to flag the sense in which we’re viewing the central character.
Sometimes she’s Norma Jeane, the earnest, conscientious girl and woman who’s smart, introspective, perceptive, eager to excel and hungry for love. Sometimes she’s “Marilyn Monroe” (at first always in quote marks), the studio confection that bled through painfully into real life so that many people confused the performance – the suite of subtle performances – with the actual woman. There’s The Blond Actress, the celebrity whose ‘private’ life became public property and is always viewed from outside, sometimes voyeuristically.
And there are the almost Jungian fairytale archetypes of the Beggar Maid and the Fair Princess, which the young Norma Jeane seizes on in her tumultuous early life with a schizophrenic mother who worked within the movie studio system. Left to her own devices to watch movies for hours, young Norma Jeane intuitively understands the stock characters of Hollywood storytelling and seeks to use them to find meaning when so much of how her mother behaves doesn’t make sense.
The book glides effortlessly from interiority to voyeurism, sometimes entering the Greek chorus-like ‘we’ in the same kind of wistful retrospective way as The Virgin Suicides, and sometimes following shadowy, nefarious spies and stalkers who could equally be federal agents or paparazzi. There is a weird uncertainty whether MM is being photographed for the gossip media or surveilled by the state; and I enjoyed this slippage between the different modes of the gaze that characterised a woman whose gift, and curse, was her mastery of to-be-looked-at-ness.
Blonde notes, in the voices of Marilyn’s soon-to-be husband The Playwright and her various film directors, that her magic isn’t theatrical, intended for a live audience; it’s a natively cinematic magic that seems haphazard and undisciplined in real life but absolutely mesmerising on film, where she commands the gaze and steals every second of screen time from her co-stars. And Oates emphasises how wrenching and hard-won this alchemy is. Marilyn is a perfectionist who demands take after take in a way that infuriates her co-stars (especially theatre veterans like Laurence Olivier), and knows instinctively – more than her director – when her performance was perfect.
Like a witch who must sacrifice bits of herself for each spell, becoming weaker as her spells grow stronger, Marilyn draws on her own past, the raw emotions of her traumatic experiences and the people she’s encountered, to craft her characters, and she can’t BE Marilyn until she can summon her shadow self, her fetch, her Friend in the Mirror: a magical persona through whom she does her acting. She sees each role she performs as a distinct habitus – a set of circumstances that produces a particular way of living – and she puts them on and off throughout the novel like clothes – indeed, the chapters are named after her characters.
This was such a sophisticated and intellectually exhilarating approach to the topic; but it also powerfully, empathetically summons the lived, material existence of the girl and woman who would be absorbed into myth and magic. I felt I was living Norma Jeane's life right there alongside her as she struggles to be what everyone around her wants even as she insists on her own intelligence and creativity. I could almost feel her agony as she repeatedly strives and fails, betrayed again and again by people who never understand her because they project their own ideas onto her; I, however, could understand why she behaves in ways that make her seem stupid, fickle or 'difficult' to others.
This book has powerfully shaped how I think about Marilyn Monroe – which is some feat because I had previously done a fair bit of research into her life and career. I recognised how Oates has edited and synthesised the contested 'facts' of Monroe's life and argued, "This is how it was," and I answered, "Yes, of course." Isn't that the magic of really top-notch biographical fiction – to give the sense that this is the definitive account of a life, as that person felt to live it? But the true accomplishment of this book is that it also tells the story of 20th-century American culture – not just the movies, but also sport, politics, religion, literature, theatre, mental health, urban and suburban renewal and decay – through the way that life has been mythologised.
This reminded me of an old-fashioned kind of Australian YA: miserablist realism in which a teen protagonist has to shoulder the logistical and emotionThis reminded me of an old-fashioned kind of Australian YA: miserablist realism in which a teen protagonist has to shoulder the logistical and emotional burden of her family’s crisis. At times it was very stressful to read and I was so angry at the smug school guidance counsellor who has no fucking idea what pressure Anna is under and what a hero she actually is.
But it also sympathetically conveys the cultural values that prevent Anna from seeking outside help and her dad from acknowledging his wife’s major mental illness; instead he tries to soldier on through it and seeks the same kind of stoicism from his daughters.
I felt the relationship between Anna and her Baba was beautifully sketched and showed how through their shared love of food, they’re finally able to meet in the middle. Anna’s sometimes combative, sometimes tender relationship with her sister Lily, and her protective love for her baby brother Michael, were also a joy to read.
What saves the book from being too grim is Anna’s blossoming romance with delivery boy Rory, who acts as a much-needed circuit-breaker for the Chiu family’s bewilderment at their Ma’s illness. He’s an absolute dream: who wouldn’t want their first boyfriend to be someone so funny and caring?
Commendably, Chim doesn’t settle for a cosy happily-ever-after ending; the novel is realistic about how mental health is something that must be managed, and can involve relapses and remissions. The raw depictions of Ma’s illness – the bedbound depression; the mania; the hospital admissions; the psychotic paranoia – were upsettingly familiar to me and so hopefully should have a pedagogical, destigmatising effect for teenage readers....more
This book had been sitting on my parents’ bookshelf for years – probably since it was new in 1993. I never read it because I thought of Blanche d’AlpuThis book had been sitting on my parents’ bookshelf for years – probably since it was new in 1993. I never read it because I thought of Blanche d’Alpuget as Bob Hawke’s biographer and lover, not as a novelist. But my friend Camille recently read it and said it had lots of great stuff about training raptors, and since I loved H Is for Hawk, I decided to give it a go.
I was surprised by how contemporary its eco-thriller themes are: the villain wants to save the world by controlling human population, and the heroine is a wildlife conservationist. The book is told from various characters’ perspectives, and some of their descriptions and ways of expressing themselves felt very dated now in a way that reminds me this is an old book, but the plot is quite gripping and d’Alpuget isn’t afraid to kill characters off. It had the pace and scope of a prestige TV series of the sort that would appear on ABC or Foxtel or Stan; I was sure it must have been adapted to the screen before but I checked IMDb and it doesn’t seem to have, though d’Alpuget’s earlier novel Turtle Beach has.
I feel like 2019 is the year that many people woke up to the fact that the environment is not only an issue for ‘greenies’ and ‘hippies’ but an existential concern in the face of a climate crisis. The nature writing here is evocative, and as I read, I mused that the northern NSW inland lake where the book is set would probably be dry now and the landscape ravaged by drought and bushfire.
My only knowledge of raptors is pretty much H Is for Hawk but it struck me that d’Alpuget writes about these birds with a sense of familiarity and authority. She does the same with lab animals and genetic engineering, and her acknowledgments show that this comes from extensive observation and research with experts.
I finished this book with a lot more respect for its author than when I began....more
Like its prequel ‘Sorcerer to the Crown’, this is more like 3.5 stars. It’s a fun read full of colourful magic and adventures to fairy realms, plus thLike its prequel ‘Sorcerer to the Crown’, this is more like 3.5 stars. It’s a fun read full of colourful magic and adventures to fairy realms, plus the Regency balls and snide social competition to be expected from its setting. A lot of the fantasy worldbuilding is there already, and the main characters of the previous novel – the now-married English sorcerers Prunella and Zacharias, and the delightful Malay witch Mak Genggang – are minor characters here.
Instead the focus is on Muni, a young amnesiac who, with her beautiful, arrogant sister Sakti, is taken in by Mak Genggang, and then sent to England, where two years after taking her staff as Sorceress Royal, Prunella has established a school for magiciennes. Muni means to find out how to lift the curse on her and her sister that has seen Sakti stolen away to Fairy. Muni is a pragmatic and sensitive heroine, and she finds a kindred spirit in Henrietta, Prunella’s mild-mannered but determined best friend and now teacher of magic.
I found the book very cosy, and more at home in its Regency pastiche language and setting – perhaps it seemed less self-conscious because English society is being viewed from an outsider’s perspective? The scenes set in Janda Baik were evocative, as was the language of djinn and naga, and the poetic forms the Asian witches use to cast spells (as opposed to the English ‘scientific’ approach to thaumaturgy).
There are some nice themes about sisterhood and self-sacrifice, and I realised why Muni and Henrietta felt more compelling as characters than Prunella – Prunella was always a very self-satisfied character who never seemed vulnerable or uncertain, whereas both Muni and Henrietta are used to being treated as second bananas. It was rewarding to see them emerge into their powers and their agency. The postcolonial themes that I enjoyed most about ‘Sorcerer to the Crown’ are here too in the decentring of Englishness in a Regency story; and there’s also a very soft-pedalled queer narrative.
The sexual reticence I noticed and found odd in the first book is also here. (“For a time there was no need for conversation.”) There’s no passion or limerence: everyone seems to be at the stage where they just rub along companionably, which makes it hard to perceive sexual tension and attraction in the story. The language of erotic attachment isn’t clearly distinguished here from sisterhood, collegiality, arranged marriage, friendship or the bond of familiars. The book’s romantic resolution seemed to come from nowhere and was wrapped up too perfunctorily to satisfy a sentimental reader....more
Perhaps the length and unwieldiness and digressiveness of this book is the point: Russian novels are mentioned explicitly as is bloody Proust, and forPerhaps the length and unwieldiness and digressiveness of this book is the point: Russian novels are mentioned explicitly as is bloody Proust, and for me it has qualities of the great garrulous Dickensian Bildungsroman novels, like Great Expectations or David Copperfield.
It was never dull, exactly, but there were long stretches of stasis during which I asked myself why Tartt was dwelling on tedium and misery, and then a whole decade of the protagonist’s life would blink past and be referred to off-handedly.
I guess what I’m saying is that it’s an intensely self-conscious, performative book that seems to have prioritised its formal sense of itself over the qualities of storytelling that come from tighter pacing. Boris, who initially annoyed me greatly with his OTT exuberant depravity and corny ‘broken English’ syntax, but later I came to regard affectionately as a delightful enthusiast and optimist, says, late in the novel:
“You read The Idiot, right? Right. Well, ‘Idiot’ was very disturbing book to me. In fact it was so disturbing I have never really read very many fictions after, apart from Dragon Tattoo kind of thing.”
This book is setting itself up as an ‘Idiot’, not a ‘Dragon Tattoo kind of thing’; and it made me realise that I do crave transportive trash in my fiction, not ‘important’ novels. Not to say that I dislike ‘novels of ideas’ but I am not the sort of reader who will seek them out. They are work to me, just as nonfiction is work. I read that stuff like you’d go to the gym: there’s I suppose a pleasure in the workout of it, but it’s essentially labour.
As I was reading it struck me that this book needed to be a TV series, not a film (and apparently the film adaptation is quite unsuccessful – I haven’t seen it but was reading this in preparation to do so). The reason? TV is now where we do ‘the work’ of parsing meaning from culture, and where we look for the stories that ‘reveal’ the big moral, ethical, existential questions of the day.
I am critical of this stance, just as I’m critical of the tendency within literary discourse to minimise the intellectual labour of reading and to suggest that all ‘good’ books are enjoyable, are ‘fun’ to read. It’s possible, I think, to find a book valuable and even to find the time you spent on it absorbing and interesting, as I did ‘The Goldfinch’.
But for me, fiction is my relaxation, and while Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’ is one of my favourite novels, one I can sincerely say I found beguiling and transporting both on a formal and a narrative level, I couldn’t say the same of this one. It felt like too much of a project, and I sort of began to imagine Tartt leaning more and more on what the book ‘meant’ metatextually as she took longer and longer to write it. It was an effortful book....more
I absolutely binged this; I found it gripping and couldn’t wait to find out what happened next. Weirdly it felt like fanfic of the TV series The HandmI absolutely binged this; I found it gripping and couldn’t wait to find out what happened next. Weirdly it felt like fanfic of the TV series The Handmaid’s Tale; Atwood has said she was inspired by Ann Dowd’s performance as Aunt Lydia, and of course I was imagining Dowd as Aunt Lydia here.
Unlike its predecessor which derived a lot of its power from the claustrophobic way it clung to Offred’s perspective, The Testaments follows three POV characters and broadens the picture of life in Gilead for a generation who know nothing else, as well as life in Canada where the guerrilla movement Mayday continues to fight a theocracy whose existence has become grudgingly normalised.
The beauty of the TV series, and especially its Gilead costumes, underscores how aesthetics can be a tool of self-coercion: we discipline our bodies by making them look and move and occupy space in certain ways that give us pleasure. It bothers me a lot that the show looked so good, and that this look has seeped kind of uncritically into pop culture, and people dress up as Handmaids and quote the doubleplus ungood jargon of this oppressive regime. And here we are being flippant about Trumpisms like ‘fake news’.
Likewise there’s something troubling about how much I enjoyed reading about the systems and rituals of Gilead, this time from the outside as the reader was never permitted to do in The Handmaid’s Tale. Perhaps that’s why this book felt like an extension of the TV series: something to watch, not to feel implicated in.
As I read this I found myself being lulled by the monastic lives of the Aunts and reminded that in the pre-modern era, a religious life was often the freest and most fulfilling for women. So here the Aunts are revealed as the true power behind Gilead: the inventors of its symbolic systems, for which the Commanders took credit, and the keepers of its secrets.
Of course, to enjoy this freedom they had to exert violence and embrace a wily animality – Atwood uses a fable of the fox and the Cat to illustrate Aunt Lydia’s ruthlessness. But weirdly I felt like this book wasn’t as savage as The Handmaid’s Tale; it lacked that sense of dread and existential fear. It felt more like an adventure novel and I enjoyed it as such, never really believing anything bad would happen to the main characters because of course they have survived to give testament....more
I was so excited to read this book. I am ‘into witch shit’; I really liked the idea of using witchcraft as a metaphor for women’s solidarity, and all I was so excited to read this book. I am ‘into witch shit’; I really liked the idea of using witchcraft as a metaphor for women’s solidarity, and all the powerful feelings and social effects this homosociality can produce.
In the end I found myself wishing it had been more uncompromisingly witchy. While I enjoyed the chapters individually, I felt like the central thread of witchcraft and magic wasn’t necessarily carried through.
It’s a mark of the book’s success that it did invite me to consider the role of lore and ritual in practices as diverse as makeup application, social work and permaculture farming, and how nuns, elders and midwives become guardians of the watchtowers: magical guides across life’s thresholds. I considered how it’s through collaboration with other women that we can access powerful states of transcendence: through playing music, through teenage fandom, through dance and athleticism.
Implicit throughout is the idea that these rituals, facilitated by these relationships, transfigure womanhood itself into something fluid and mercurial, something felt from the inside rather than a stolid category that can be pinned down from the outside. This is an especially powerful concept in regard to the trans chapter co-authored with Liz Duck-Chong.
But I wish Sam George-Allen had been more explicit, more insistent, that all this IS witchcraft! The power of being completely present in your body and mind, feeling you can change the world, and the feeling of belonging completely to your friends, to your passions, to your work, your community and surroundings, just as they in turn sustain you and lift you up… THIS is what witchcraft is – not just tarot or crystals or spells!
The introduction promised this approach, but then the chapters seemed to get bogged down in memoir, or discussions of patriarchal panic over women’s skills and collaborations. The prose was clean and delightful to read, with a lot of evocative scene-setting and observation, and I had a sense of plentiful research and erudition bubbling below the surface; but there was a lot of rumination on what is and isn’t considered feminist, and how men have sought to atomise and belittle women.
I’ve admired SGA’s essays in the past but this book felt like it was pitched to the entry-level feminism market. Reading it felt like riding in a sports car at 40kmh. The sophisticated level of critical analysis I’ve seen from SGA before, and was craving here, seemed to me like it had been dialled down in order to make the book ‘approachable’ and ‘accessible’.
Maybe my own inner witch wanted a more freaky and nerdy book than the Australian trade nonfiction market can sustain?...more
I thought this would be a quick, fun, breezy read, and was really annoyed to find myself caught up in the angst of cutesily named protagonist Maisie MI thought this would be a quick, fun, breezy read, and was really annoyed to find myself caught up in the angst of cutesily named protagonist Maisie Martin and even shedding tears at her more vulnerable moments. This is a book that understands its format and exploits it to the hilt; and I was annoyed to realise that I had been successfully interpellated by it and identified with Maisie.
I really didn't like the journal format, or the pop-culture references that are clearly those of someone a good 10-15 years older than Maisie. But the prose is breezy and chatty, and Guillaume has captured something real about teenagers. The way your own concerns seem huge while those of parents, siblings and even friends retreat into the background. The acute sensitivity to humiliation; the obsessive awareness of how others might see you; how keenly you feel rejection and experience joy.
Most of the plot twists I saw coming a mile away, and I found the themes of self-love very heavy-handed, but perhaps that's what its audience wants. I've seen it compared to Dumplin', but I hadn't read or seen that so I can't comment on similarities or differences....more
This is more of a 3.5-star book for me. Basically, if you (like me) adored Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, this is an enjoyable buThis is more of a 3.5-star book for me. Basically, if you (like me) adored Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, this is an enjoyable but not nearly as accomplished placeholder. (We must be patient for more from Clarke, who has chronic fatigue syndrome, which has interfered with her writing; even before this, her debut novel took ten years to write.) Shamefully I must also confess that I was drawn to this book by its glamorous gold embossed cover.
It takes a little while to get going and the language feels a little clunky and florid. Cho never truly immerses you in the world of the story as Clarke does; you're never allowed to forget that this is a pastiche. (However, it's miles ahead of the smug trash produced by Gail Carriger.) This did feel like a Regency novel, complete with all the snobbery, political intrigue and sublimated emotions you might expect from the period, along with recognisable institutions such as the London Season and the Napoleonic Wars.
Perhaps the thing I like most about novels set in magical worlds is the intellectual traditions and institutions of their worldbuilding. So I did enjoy reading about the way that magical spells have possessive names, like fauna, flora and medical procedures – which is a nice touch, considering that the Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers pastiches the real-life scientific academy the Royal Society.
I also enjoyed the different levels of thaumaturgy in the book, from witches – common spellcasters of all genders – to sorcerers, who can only be so called when they work with a familiar. Familiars can be any mythological creature (such as dragons, unicorns, sibyls and sirens), and because they shapeshift, there are some fun reveals. There's also a darker side to familiars, too…
Zacharias Wythe, a manumitted African who's clearly one of the most gifted magicians of his time, has been groomed from childhood to be a sorcerer by his guardian, the previous Sorcerer Royal Sir Stephen Wythe. Now, Zacharias has taken up his staff of office – a magical object that, like Mjölnir, can only be held by a worthy person – in the murky wake of his mentor's death. Because of his skin colour and his non-English origins – and because magic seems scarcer and weaker in England, and no new familiars can be coaxed over the border from Fairy – he is facing a brutal leadership spill from his genteel but bigoted fellow thaumaturges.
As Zacharias hustles to placate a government that yearns to use magic against its enemies, to butter up the capricious Fairy King, and to avoid various assassination attempts, he agrees to give a routine guest lecture at a School for Gentlewitches. Previously quite dismissive of women, he now realises to his horror that magically talented girls are being taught not to harness their abilities, but to crush them by casting a modified death curse upon themselves.
More importantly, Zacharias encounters Prunella Gentleman, whose own appearance reveals her biracial subcontinental origins, and who is working as a not-quite-teacher, not-quite-servant at the school. Prunella's sitting on an untapped inheritance of magic.
The best aspect of this book is its intersectional critique of English colonial institutions such as the Royal Society and the East India Company. Both Zacharias and Prunella are caught in ambivalent relationships of loyalty and obligation to white benefactors who aren't truly interested in what their charges might want to do with their lives. The two protagonists represent everything that such organisations disdained and sought to crush: women's intellectual and social freedoms; the sovereignty of non-Western peoples; even class mobility.
By far the most delightful character is Mak Genggang, a wily old witch from the remote but strategically vital island of Janda Baik (alias the author's home country of Malaysia). She's a trickster figure who terrifies and terrorises her English opponents, and she has an important role to play in helping Prunella access her magical heritage. My favourite thing about this book was the way it decentres England and English magic, gesturing towards a wide range of magical traditions from around the world.
But I wanted Prunella's mastery of her magic to be harder-won. She barely reads and is hostile to the scholarly magic that animates Zacharias; her magic is instinctive and improvised. Which is part of the novel's project of showing that feminised, non-institutional approaches to magic have been devalued within this patriarchal, genteel milieu. Still, there's reading pleasure to be had in training montages: in seeing a protagonist consciously develop their talents, work hard at becoming better, and make sacrifices for their goals. Seeing them develop strength of character.
I often found Prunella irritatingly glib and self-satisfied. Again, that's the novel's challenge to the expected self-effacement of women and people of colour. Her job within the narrative is to lead Zacharias away from his own, more thoroughly internalised respectability politics. Yet Prunella herself never seems to learn or grow, to make mistakes and regret them. Her story is really like that of a fairytale princess whose social status is transformed simply by the revelation of her parenthood. By the end of the novel, (view spoiler)[Prunella has become the Sorceress Royal and is set to completely dismantle the old ways, with only a vague feminist shrug that she's "very, very good" at it. (hide spoiler)] Prunella seems more complacent than truly happy.
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