Feminine Wiles: Thoughts on The Good Wife

Looking back at what I've written about The Good Wife this year, it's both surprising and a little embarrassing to see how long it took me to come out as an unabashed fan of this show.  Unlike Community, another of my new favorites which had a so-so pilot and took a few weeks to come into its own, The Good Wife was already firing on all cylinders in its pilot episode.  The problem was in me, and in my difficulty in seeing myself as someone who could become fannish over a lawyer show.  I know I'm not alone in this--many of my friends have expressed shock at their growing affection for the series, and I've even encountered one genuinely resentful response from a fan complaining that their entire internet circle had gone over to a series whose topic they found so completely uninteresting.  But after an entire season in which The Good Wife has often been the TV-watching highlight of my week, it's time to face facts, and ask the more interesting question: why this show and not others?

The fact is that as a lawyer show, The Good Wife is only middling.  The cases of the week are rarely very complicated or interesting, and the writers themselves often seem to share this sentiment, abandoning standalone stories half-told or wrapping them up in a few lines of dialogue (see, for example, the otherwise quite excellent season finale).  But then, most lawyer shows aren't really about lawyers any more than doctor shows are about practicing medicine or cop shows are about protecting and serving.  What these occupations have in common is that they throw their practitioners in the path of many different clients/patients/citizens, each with their own, probably dramatic, story, since most of us don't approach a doctor, lawyer or policeman unless something's gone wrong, and that they are all capable of producing moments of great intensity.  Despite the oft-repeated claim that American TV is obsessed with the workplace, there's really only one series, The Office, that actually describes work as most of us would recognize it.  Most other workplace series simply use that environment to weave together single-serving guest stories with the main characters' ongoing arcs.  Which is exactly what The Good Wife does, so once again, what sets it apart from other lawyer shows?

There are two answers to that question.  The first is that The Good Wife is, quite simply, spectacularly well-written, paying a great deal of care and attention to each of its main and recurring characters (if not, most of the time, to the one-off clients) and featuring sharp dialogue and strong acting (for which we can apparently thank Julianna Margulies's insistence that the show be filmed in New York, making it the go-to destination for moonlighting theater actors who can no longer rely on Law & Order to pay the rent).  The second and more interesting answer is that unlike most workplace series, the overarching stories woven through the client of the week plots aren't primarily concerned with relationships.  Yes, the question of whether Alicia Florrick is going to forgive her philandering, possibly corrupt politician husband Peter, or run off with her old friend and current boss Will, has been central to the show's first season, but even that romantic storyline is inextricable from the story of Peter's legal problems, the still-open question of his corruption, and his political ambitions.  When it comes right down to it The Good Wife is a show about politics, which makes it, I think, the first time this subject has graced the American television screen since The West Wing went off the air four years ago.

This is not to say that The Good Wife is merely Peter's story, to which Alicia provides a window.  Politics extends far beyond Peter's nascent campaign for state's attorney.  As The Good Wife has it, politics is the air that all of the characters are breathing, the water through which they swim.  Politics is the reason that Alicia got a job at Stern, Lockheart & Gardner and the reason she kept it instead of her more productive colleague Cary.  It's the reason that Diane is approached for a position as a judge, and the reason that she's dropped from consideration after helping to expose the corruption of another judge.  It plays a part in every single interaction between defense and prosecution lawyers, and between different law enforcement agencies.  The Good Wife very quickly makes it clear that the division between public and private power in the Chicago it describes is thin and possibly nonexistent, that amassing power and influence in a firm like Lockheart & Gardner can be a means of amassing it in public office, and that having connections to public officials can be a stepping stone in private practice.  As much as it is about politics, then, The Good Wife is about power, and specifically the kind of power that has been, until only a few decades ago and in some places still is, kept out of the hands of women.

What excited me about The Good Wife's pilot even as I scoffed at the possibility of becoming the fan of a lawyer show was that it wasn't simply a show about women, but a show about women in a man's world.  That's still remarkably rare.  It's still very common for television series to field only one female character of any importance, whose job is basically to be The Girl.  If she's the main character and the series takes place in a largely masculine environment, then she's usually explicitly or implicitly special, able to defeat the patriarchy, or simply wave it out of existence, by the sheer virtue of her awesomeness.  Other series focus on a largely- or exclusively-female enclave, whose members might venture into the male-dominated world but always with each other's support (this is no longer such a common approach when it comes to women, but it's still applied to non-white or gay communities).  The Good Wife is unique in that, though it is a story about a woman in a man's world, it surrounds her with examples of other women in exactly the same position, none of whom are super-special, none of whom get a pass on dealing with the patriarchy, none of whom have chosen to band together and leave the world of men behind (there are, presumably, such women in Alicia's world, but her choices mean that she's not exposed to them).  All of these women want the same thing--power--and each of them has come up with a different strategy of achieving it without waiting for men to hand it to her, sometimes working against her femininity, sometimes trading on it.

(The exception is Kalinda, which is the reason that I've started to sour on the character.  When she was introduced Kalinda seemed to represent the confidence of inexperienced youth as opposed to Alicia's knocked-about middle age.  Later episodes skewed the character older--which was a good idea for no other reason than that, lovely as she is, Archie Panjabi simply doesn't look 25--without dampening her confidence.  On the contrary, they increased it and accommodating responses of the people who bump up against it.  The result is that Kalinda is close to becoming the kind of female character to whom the rules, magically and inexplicably, don't apply, which makes her a lot less interesting, and an incongruous figure in the show's landscape.)

The most powerful woman on The Good Wife's cast is Diane Lockheart, a senior partner at Alicia's firm and the only woman on the cast who has gotten where she was planning to go with her career (at this point, the only way up for Diane is becoming a judge--which briefly became an option and was just as briefly withdrawn--or running for office, which she hasn't expressed an interest in).  Between her age and what we've heard about her past, it's a fair guess that Diane got to where she is the old-fashioned, second-wave feminist way--by banging on tables and working twice as hard to be thought half as good as her male colleagues (being the scion of old Chicago political family probably didn't hurt either).  The Good Wife has a lot of respect for Diane--it's probably one of the writers' best decisions that they decided to walk her back from the stern and possibly resentful authority figure she was in the pilot--while at the same time making it clear that her path to power isn't one that a lot of modern women would choose.  For one thing, it leaves room at the top only for extraordinary women, and probably only for those willing to forgo having a family, and for another, it's a method designed to face head-on the sexism that Diane encountered in her youth--a mindset that can't imagine women having any sort of power.  In the circles in which Alicia and the women of her generation move, that kind of sexism has been mostly replaced by a more subtle kind to which Diane's approach may no longer be suited (a point that is brought home when Diane falls head over heels for wannabe Marlboro Man Kurt McVeigh, who has a signed picture of Sarah Palin in his office).

The younger women that Alicia encounters take advantage of sexism as often as it takes advantage of them.  Recurring character Patty Nyholm feigns pregnancy-related distress in order to justify pulling her client out of a deposition that is going badly, and in her second appearance brings her newborn child to an emergency court convened at a hospital, and uses the baby's crying and demands for food to gain continuances.  Another young lawyer amps up her Midwestern wholesomeness to present a figure of naive helplessness, in order to secure leniency from the judge and the sympathies of the jury when she, for example, blanches at the sexual exploits of Alicia's client.  Most interesting is Alicia's new rival for Will's affections, law student Giada Cabrini.  In a mock court presided over by Will, Giada uses feminine wiles to triumph, taking advantage of Will's attraction to her to get him to advise her on her case, then arguing that he should be disqualified for favoritism towards her.  When she pursues him romantically, her tactics are aggressive--she takes him to dinner at a fancy restaurant where she's well known, not-too-subtly drops it into the conversation that she's the daughter of the third richest man in Europe, and later sends him a very expensive gift.  In other words, Giada uses traditionally feminine tactics in a professional setting, and traditionally masculine tactics in a romantic one.  What interests and surprises me about The Good Wife is how ambivalent it is about all of these tactics.  Alicia clearly disapproves of her opponents using their femininity to score points in court (though she's not above it herself--when recruited by the firm's divorce lawyer, she immediately assumes the role of the scorned woman eager to avenge herself on all men in order to scare the opposing counsel into settling), but the characters who do so are so vividly and sympathetically portrayed that it's impossible not to admire them just a little.  Why play fair, the characters seem to be saying.  When the deck is stacked against you, why not use every card in your hand?

But then, that is the central question of The Good Wife.  In the vicious, dog-eat-dog world of private and public politics, where does one draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable abuse of privilege?  Is Cary wrong to drum up support from the firm's senior associates when he learns that Will and Diane are going to choose between him and Alicia?  Is Alicia wrong to ask her husband's spin doctor Eli Gold to help her get the clients that will save her job?  Is Eli wrong to expect quid pro quo for doing this?  When Peter pushes his would-be political supporters to switch their legal services to Lockheart & Gardner, is he promising quid pro quo, and is Alicia wrong to accept these clients?  There's something almost laughable when Cary--young, white, well-educated, obviously born to privilege--complains to Alicia that he doesn't have the advantage of her political connections, and that it isn't fair that she should have gotten the job instead of him because of those connections, but the fact remains that nearly every character in the show is privileged in some ways and disadvantaged in others.  So the question becomes, how does one exploit that privilege, and overcome those disadvantages, in an honorable way?  Is there ever a way of doing so?

The one problem I have with The Good Wife's handling of his question is, oddly, Alicia herself.  I enjoy the show's characterization of her (and Margulies's restrained, layered performance) very much,  but what's missing from it is what every other character, male or female, seems to possess--a thirst for power.  Alicia walked away from a job at a high-powered law firm to raise her children, and given that her two love interests seem to have quite a few character traits in common it could simply be that she's rather be at the side of someone powerful than possess that power herself.  But the choice to make her not only uninterested in power but also the moral center of the series has some unfortunately implications.  It's become a pernicious commonplace, not only of fiction about politics but of politics in the real world, that ambition is always a hallmark of evil, and that the only people who deserve power are the ones who truly don't want it.  It's an attitude that gives us leaders who are either accomplished liars or easily-led fools.  That Alicia feels such disdain for the games of influence and power that surround her (even as she occasionally plays them herself) suggests that the writers don't believe it's ever possible to be both ambitious and moral.  It would be more interesting to watch Alicia try to figure out where her lines fall if she wanted her job for more than just an escape from her tangled domestic situation and a means of supporting her family, and if her much-vaunted saintliness didn't sometimes shade into breathtaking naivete.

Of course, that may very well be on the cards--Alicia has only started to wake up from her long dormancy, and I wouldn't be surprised if some way down the line she begins to express her own political ambitions (for all the Clinton vs. Palin undertones of Diane's courtship with Kurt McVeigh, it's clearly Alicia who is the Hilary Clinton analogue on this show).  There are, in fact, a lot of interesting avenues of story that The Good Wife's characters could go down, and the show's writers have certainly proven that they can handle them well.  That said, despite my finally-confessed fannishness for this show, I don't think that The Good Wife will ever be the sort of show that leaves me desperate to know what happens next (which is why the season-ending cliffhanger, with Alicia caught between joining Peter on the stage on which he's just announced his candidacy for state's attorney and answering Will's phone call, seems like a trite and unnecessary device).  There is no easily conceived end-point for this story that I'd like to see, no outcome I'm rooting for (I don't know, for example, whether I want Alicia to divorce Peter or not).  Instead, what interests me about the show are the unanswerable questions at its core: how to exercise power and privilege without losing sight of your morality?  How to be woman in a man's world?  So long as The Good Wife keeps highlighting the complicated ways that its characters and guest characters try to address these questions, I suspect I'll remain a fan.

A New Coat of Paint

I've made some much-needed changes to AtWQ's layout and functionality.  Not, as this post's title would suggest, to the extent of changing the template--I'd like to, but none of Blogger's other default templates are appealing (I don't even like the default version of my current template, which has a completely different color scheme) and I haven't got the HTML know-how (nor the visual sensibility) to write my own--but still some substantive changes.  Comments, suggestions for further improvements, and other thoughts are welcome.

• I've replaced the blog's search feature with one powered by Google which, unlike the previous one, seems to actually work.  It claims to be able to search outgoing links and the blogroll, but so far these features don't seem to be working and I may remove them.


• I've added a recent comments application to the sidebar (after trying Blogger's default widget, which doesn't have the option to display the post title, I went third party).  It's not as nice as Wordpress's implementation, but I think it'll do.


• The blogroll, which to my shame has been updated maybe once or twice in the blog's existence, has been brought up to date and rearranged.  I may tinker with it some more--for example, right now all my LJ links are covered by a link to my friends page, but this seems unfair to the LJ writers I read and I may replace that link with individual links to their LJs.  I've also removed the links segment, most of which was out of date.


• I've removed the about me segment, which was also woefully out of date--I haven't been a student at the Technion for four years, for example.  I'm also no longer as sanguine as I used to be about providing a link to my old Amazon reviews, most of which are best left to oblivion.  I would have liked to keep a link to my Amazon wish list, but can't quite decide where to put it.


• The Elsewhere Online segment on the sidebar, which linked to my writing on other websites, has been moved to its own page, linked to at the top of the blog. 

Self-Promotion

My review of Kelly Link's YA collection Pretty Monsters appears today in Strange Horizons.  The very concept of a Kelly Link YA collection (and my previous experiences with her YA stories) put me right off, and if the book hadn't been sitting before me at reading week I probably wouldn't have picked it up.  But though, as I conclude in my review, Pretty Monsters is a mixed bag, there are some stories in it that it would have been a terrible shame to miss.

The 2010 Hugo Awards: The Short Story Shortlist

After two years of being a Hugo nominator, I've come to the conclusion that you can have interesting, in-depth discussions of this award and its nominees before they're announced or after, but that there isn't really enough to say to justify doing both.  For example, I've already written at some length about two of the stories on the short story ballot.  Which leaves me not only with less to say but also feeling a little tired of the topic.  After spending several months trawling through a sizable portion of the year's short fiction output, the actual announcement of the shortlists felt like a bit of a letdown.  Even though I have little to complain about, quality-wise, in the short story and novelette categories, the fact that a consensus had been reached about the stories that would be on them some time before the shortlists were announced, and that the shortlists mostly reflect this consensus, takes some of the fun out of writing these reviews.  (The exception, of course, is the novella shortlist, in which I've read only one nominee, but right now the easiest and perhaps only way of getting hold of all the nominated stories is the Hugo voter packet, which would involve becoming a Hugo nominator again next year.  To be honest, I was looking forward to a break, so it's possible that I'll give this shortlist a pass.)  So this year's short story post is going to be shorter than usual, starting with this change: I am not writing about the Mike Resnick story (PDF).  For years I've felt honor-bound to read Resnick's nominated stories, only to end up making the same criticism and expressing the same exasperation at their presence on the ballot, and this year I just haven't got the energy.  So let's just take it as read that I'm going to like least of all the nominees and move on to the others.

The one big surprise on the short story ballot--on any of the short fiction ballots, actually--is Lawrence M. Schoen's "The Moment."  Published in Footprints, a small-press anthology edited by Jay Lake and Eric T. Reynolds, as far as I was aware neither the story nor the anthology had garnered much in the way of buzz or critical attention, and its nomination seemed to come entirely out of the blue.  It would be nice to be able to report that "The Moment" is not only a surprise but a delightful one, but unfortunately reading the story only deepens my confusion at its presence on the ballot.  Footprints's theme is the discovery of the remnants of human civilization by aliens, long after we've died out or left the planet.  It's a neat concept, but Schoen's treatment of it doesn't extend much beyond neatness.  "The Moment" is made of up of a series of vignettes, each describing a stranger and more advanced form of alien life discovering a footprint on the moon, and at some point discovering the remnants of those who have discovered it before them.  There's some potential here, as the story extends to a futuristic setting a known and slightly disorienting fact of archeology--that what's left to us of the vast and complicated civilizations of the distant past is only the faintest and most inscrutable of evidence, which is often obscured by those civilizations' descendants--and Schoen's execution is, for a time, enjoyable, a riot of inventive descriptions as the aliens visiting the moon change and evolve, from a minuscule generation ship populated by identical clones who populate the grooves of the lunar footprint to an empire of sentient plants.  After a while, though, the parade of ever-stranger beings starts to pall and Schoen's inventiveness begins to seem a bit twee, and then comes the very ending, in which the purpose of the entire story turns out to be a mawkish paean to humanity's spirit of exploration.  Hugo nominated short stories are often not much more than vignettes, meant to capture a single impression or idea--a moment--but Schoen tries to sustain this single note for too long, and for too insipid a reason.

Will McIntosh's "Bridesicle" (PDF) is told from the point of view of Mira, who has woken up after her death in a car accident in a "dating center," where lonely men offer to pay for her resurrection from cryogenic suspension in exchange for her hand in marriage.  As I wrote in my Strange Horizons short fiction review, this premise doesn't quite work:

Why doesn't Mira know about the dating centers if she's got cryogenic insurance? Why buy cryogenic insurance at all if she can't afford to be revived? Why, most of all, go to all the trouble of storing and then reviving dead women in a world in which live ones sell themselves into marriage all too often? For that matter, why are there only women in the "dating center"? "Bridesicle" works because it's not at all subtle about paralleling real-world mercenary marriage arrangements, and because, no matter how contrived and manipulative it is, Mira's predicament is too stark and too horrifying to be denied. The bulk of the story is spent in her brief respites from oblivion, which are often decades apart, in which she desperately tries to please her current wife-seeker. Along the way, we learn more about Mira's life before her accident, itself no picnic—guilt-tripped into integrating the preserved consciousness of her domineering, homophobic mother into her own, Mira was unable to mourn the death of her partner or try to find a new one. Again, there's a lot of obvious manipulation going on here, and again, that manipulation is effective despite its obviousness. The story's ending is perhaps a little too neat, with Mira having found a way not only to be revived without selling too much of herself, but to be reunited with her lover, but it's a victory that is just partial and just costly enough to be believable.

For the third year running, Kij Johnson is the author of one of the most talked-about genre short stories of the year, and for the third year running, I find myself left out of the party.  The difference being that in previous years, Johnson's stories--"The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change" in 2008 and "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" in 2009--left me cold because I found them both charming but effervescent, and I certainly can't apply either of those adjectives to "Spar," her story on the 2010 Hugo ballot.  The story's first sentence--"In the tiny lifeboat, she and the alien fuck endlessly, relentlessly."--sets the tone.  "Spar" is the story of a nameless woman who is stuck on alien lifeboat with an alien passenger, the sole survivors of a collision between their spaceships, and its entire narrative is the description of how she and the alien--a non-humanoid, boneless, slimy blob--have nonstop sex.  But is it sex, or rape, or assault, or masturbation?  There is no possibility of communication between the woman and the alien, no way to know if it is responding to her actions, seeking her pleasure or pain, if it recognizes her sentience or even existence, or if it is sentient itself.  I like "Spar" a great deal better than either "Dogs" or "Monkeys" because it is such a well-done, concentrated bit disturbing and disorienting writing (Alvaro Zinos-Amaro has a nice write-up of it in Strange Horizons), but like those two stories, I find myself hesitant to join in the near-unanimous praise of it (it has already won this year's Nebula award) because really, there's so little here.  I'm honestly of two minds here, because on the one hand, "Spar" knows what it wants to do--to disturb and unsettle--and does that job very well--and on the other hand these strike me as if not modest then at least very narrow ambitions, and I'm more interested in stories whose scope is a bit wider.

N.K. Jemisin's "Non-Zero Probabilities" is the perfect antidote to the creepiness of the McIntosh and Johnson stories.  A low-key, deliberately mundane story about a woman trying to live an ordinary life in the shadow of an extraordinary event, the story sometimes seems to go out of its way to be pleasant, an effect it achieves through the character of its protagonist, Adele, a no-nonsense young woman who knows how to protect herself--in this case, from the never-explained transformation of New York into a realm where one in a million chances crop up nine times out of ten--but who is also open to new experiences and new relationships.  As I wrote in Strange Horizons,

"Non-Zero Probabilities" is more a character piece, studying Adele's adaptation to her altered landscape, than a worldbuilding piece, but nevertheless Jemisin does a good job constructing that landscape, outlining the dangers and wonders of this new world—Adele waits for an auspicious day to hire a car to go to Ikea, but on the other hand, cancer and AIDS patients have experienced miraculous recoveries. What's most enjoyable and refreshing about "Non-Zero Probabilities" is that despite describing a New York that has reverted to A Simpler Time—no one drives, everyone eats locally because out of town food supplies are sporadic, people know their neighbors—it is decidedly unsentimental about the city's transformation. It ends with Adele weighing both the good and bad aspects of her altered life, and leaves it to us to decide whether a return to normal would be a good thing.

Given the attention that both have received, I'm guessing that the Hugo will go to either Johnson or Jemisin.  I prefer the latter, but can certainly see arguments for the former.  Either way, there's no denying that these two stories, and the McIntosh, make for an interesting shortlist.  They're very different--two are SFnal, one a fantasy; two are futuristic, one contemporary; two do a lot of worldbuilding, one is a chamber piece; two set out to unsettle, one to make the unsettling mundane--but all three are women's stories, and all are imbued with an ambivalence towards wonder--be it technological or magical--and with a deep-seated doubt about its ability to better our lives, that I'm not used to finding on Hugo shortlists.  I'm not saying that this is the direction I'd like to see the award move in exclusively, but it's a refreshing change, and so long as I can count on Mike Resnick continuing to show up on award shortlists, it's nice to know that other, more thoughtful kinds of genre work also have a place on the Hugo ballot.

Horns by Joe Hill

I picked up Joe Hill's second novel, Horns, with the clear understanding that it would be my make-or-break experience with this author.  Hill wowed me with his debut collection, 20th Century Ghosts, a work that sits alongside Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others and Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners on the shelf of essential genre collections of the last decade, whose stories were both of and about the horror genre, constantly asking what it means to write or consume a genre rooted in misery and fear.  If 20th Century Ghosts skewed towards the literary end of the genre, Hill's first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, leaned towards the pulpy end, touching only lightly and with less nuance on the questions that were at the heart of his short stories.  It was a good book, but not a very interesting one, and with Horns I hoped to discover whether the writer Joe Hill wanted to be was one I would want to follow.  My results are mixed.  Horns is a better book--tighter, better written, more engaging--than Heart-Shaped Box, and though still primarily an entertaining rather than thought-provoking work, it delves more deeply into its central questions, which are here about issues of theology as much as they are an investigation of Hill's genre.  The answers that Hill gives, however, are at best puerile, at worst deeply objectionable.

Hill's crowning achievement in Horns is its beautiful, instantly captivating structure.  The book launches readers straight into its action--the story's opening paragraph tells us that the protagonist, Ignatius "Ig" Perrish, has woken up with horns, and within two short chapters both he and we understand their power.  Under the influence of the horns, the people Ig meets tell him their darkest secrets and most shameful desires, and lose the self-control and better nature that held the latter in check, leaving them open to Ig's influence for better or worse.  Hill also wastes no time in establishing Ig's background--a year ago, his childhood sweetheart Merrin Williams was raped and murdered.  Ig was blamed for the murder, but when the forensics lab processing the evidence from Merrin's crime scene burned down the investigation was terminated, leaving Ig a free man but, in the eyes of everyone who knows him, including his and Merrin's families, a guilty one.  Since then he's cut himself off from his former life and spiraled towards self-destruction, but now, with the horns' power, he sets out to discover the truth about Merrin's murder.  The investigation at the heart of the novel, however, is not a whodunnit--the perpetrator is revealed within less than a hundred pages--but a whydunnit.  The novel moves back and forth through Ig and Merrin's lives, constantly complicating our understanding of them and their relationship--we learn, for example, that hours before her death Merrin broke up with Ig because she felt trapped by a decade-long relationship that had left her with no opportunity to explore other lovers or become her own person--as we close in on the reason for Merrin's death.

There are two issues with Hill's choice of structure.  The first is that Merrin's killer, whose point of view in the weeks leading up to the murder takes over the novel in its later chapters, is such a broad caricature of reactionary, misogynistic evil that one almost senses Hill ticking boxes on a form: he's a former bedwetter, he tortures animals, he hates his mother (and later, when she becomes ill, tortures her to death), he's a racist, he's a homophobe, he's anti-choice, he's a Republican.  This is better, I suppose, than having a villain who is a left-wing, gay feminist, but what it smacks of is an author who is aware that violence against women is the bread and butter of his genre and that there is something creepy and exploitative about this fact, and who overcompensates for his choice to make a rape-murder the crux of his novel by turning his villain's misogyny up to eleven.  It's not that I wanted to sympathize with or understand this character, but Hill's construction of him is familiar from so many other authors who have gone down this path that there were hardly any surprises or revelations in the pages the novel spent inside his head.

The second issue is that though we spend a lot of time getting to know Ig as a teenager and in the last days of his relationship with Merrin, post-transformation the character is something of a blank.  His purpose is to explore the people around him and use his powers to plumb the depths of their souls, but on the question of how, or even whether, he feels about turning into a demon the novel is frustratingly silent. Early in the story, for example, Ig has a hellish meeting with his family, in which he learns that to a one they all hate him and believe that he's guilty of Merrin's murder, and snaps, attacking and seriously injuring his grandmother.  We never learn how he feels about this--guilty, pleased, scared?  This would work if Horns were merely, as the novel's final chapters strongly suggest, a superhero's origin story, tracking the process by which Ig the person is subsumed into Ig the rooter out of sins, who punishes people for the crimes they've committed and tries to steer them away from the ones they want to commit, but it sits less well with a more prominent theme in the novel, Ig's struggle with The Problem of Evil.  Raised a Catholic, Ig had a reflexive and thoughtless belief in the church's teachings until Merrin's death shook it out of him.  In the novel's key scene, Ig hears voices in a fire, and delivers a sermon to a crowd of snakes that encapsulates his new take on religion.

Merrin and I were to each other like man and wife.  But she wanted more than me, wanted freedom, a life, a chance to discover herself.  She wanted other lovers and wanted me to take other lovers as well.  I hated her for this.  So did God.  For simply imagining she might open her legs to another man, He turned His face from her, and when she called to Him, as she was raped and murdered, He pretended He did not hear.  He felt, no doubt, that she received her due. I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be.  The author is unworthy of His own characters.  The devil is first a literary critic, who delivers this untalented scribbler the public flaying He deserves.

Assuming that this is not simply another attempt by Hill to weasel out of responsibility for structuring his novel around the rape and murder of a woman by hanging a metafictional lantern on that fact, what are we to make of this strange passage?  The Problem of Evil is a tough one, and should be approached with an appropriate tough-mindedness, but if we're to take Ig's sermon seriously--and given that the only person who might argue with it, Ig himself, is almost entirely absent from this part of the novel we have little choice but to do so--then Hill's treatment of it is depressingly wishy-washy.  I can respect a character whose suffering leads them to believe that God doesn't exist or that God is evil.  I can even respect a character whose response to suffering is to side with evil--one of the few subplots that really worked for me in Jesse Bullington's The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart was the one about a man whose family is murdered by the title characters, and who is so incensed by the thought that while his loved ones, who died unshriven, are in purgatory, the brothers might see heaven if they confess their sins before dying, that he sells his soul and knowingly becomes a demon.  Ig's response to suffering, however, is not simply to lay all evil in the world at God's feet, but to minimize the devil's wickedness.  In his cosmology, God is a sadistic prig who punishes fornication with rape and murder while the devil has all the best tunes, winks at the sins of the flesh, and throws a good party.  It's hard to associate any depth of grief or rage with such a juvenile moral outlook, which smacks of teenage short-sightedness--Mom and Dad are evil because they set rules and boundaries, while the cool uncle who lets you smoke and drink is the good guy.

Implicit in Ig's take on God is the belief that drinking and screwing are worse sins than murder and rape, and though there are, of course, people in the world who believe this, our glimpses of Ig's upbringing and religious background don't suggest that he was raised in such an environment (in fact, when his parish priest comes under the influence of the horns, the man gleefully confesses to adultery but castigates Ig for Merrin's murder).  So it's unclear why he should have decided that Merrin's death was punishment for wanting her sexual independence (again, this is where a deeper exploration of Ig post-transformation, or even immediately following Merrin's death, would have made for a much stronger book), but to be fair to Hill, the novel's ending explodes this take on the murder when it reveals that at the time of her murder Merrin was ill with the same type of cancer that had already claimed the life of her sister.  In a letter to Ig, Merrin expresses the fear that, like her sister, she will spend the last months of her life succumbing to her darkest impulses, allowing fear and bitterness to take her over and poison her relationships with the people she loves.

I would like very much to believe in a Gospel of Mick and Keith, where I can't get what I want--which is you, Ig, and our children, and our ridiculous daydreams--but at least get what I need, which is a quick, sudden ending and the knowledge that you got away clean.

This is, to put it mildly, a problematic twist.  Again, in all fairness to Hill, he does not use the fact that Merrin was dying or the fact that she desired a quick death to minimize the awfulness of the death she got (though, of course, the devil's progressive acceptance of her right to want other lovers is somewhat undermined by her confession that she only ever wanted Ig).  By the time we learn these facts about her we've already witnessed the rape and murder first hand and know that she fought for her life (on the flip side, we also know that for what it was, Merrin's death was mercifully quick).  But if Horns just barely avoids the creepy implications of making a rape and murder the solution to a woman's problems, it doesn't avoid the complete collapse of Ig's theology under the revelation that Merrin's murder was God giving her what she needed.  If God--not the devil, and not her actual killer--is responsible for Merrin's unnatural death, shouldn't he be held even more responsible for the cancer that caused her to need it in the first place?  And are we to understand that all of the people in the world who suffer fates as terrible as Merrin's, or worse, are getting what they needed?  Ig's construction of God as sadistic and judgmental is immature, but it's replaced by something risible--the notion that all the evil in the world is part of God's convoluted, Rube Goldberg-ish plan to do good.  Hill is by no means the first author to try to solve The Problem of Evil with this horribly over-literal take on the platitude that God works in mysterious ways--see also Signs and the ending of Battlestar Galactica--and like the authors of those works, he only ends up compounding it.  This is why the equivalence he draws between God and a horror writer is so wrongheaded.  Fiction, famously, has to make sense where reality can simply be, and whereas the revelation of a clever underlying plan, however horrific its components, can give meaning to a work of fiction, to overlay that plan on reality is an act of unspeakable callousness.

A glance through the novel's other reviews suggests that for many reviewers, the simple fact that Horns offers sympathy for the devil is innovative enough to set it apart from other works of horror.  Perhaps the reason that I don't share their enthusiasm is that the devil plays almost no part in Jewish tradition, a fact that Hill himself touches on when he has a character point out, near the end of the novel, that in non-Christian religions the devil is sometimes God's ally.  As far as Judaism is concerned, this is putting the cart slightly before the horse.  The word satan appears several times in the Bible, meaning adversary, and in the book of Job--an ancient treatment of The Problem of Evil which Horns quite consciously parallels--he is God's servant, but it was probably much later that the term came to be associated with the Christian devil, who is a force for evil.  What Hill tries to do in Horns is to have the best of both worlds.  The creature that Ig transforms into gets to keep the Christian devil's outer signifiers--horns, red skin, flaming nostrils, pitchfork--while playing the Jewish devil's more mundane, more tolerable role as a heavenly prosecutor.  That, and the forced comparison to the book of Job, which forces its readers to accept their inherent inability to comprehend the universe as God does, only serve to show up the shallowness of Horns's engagement with The Problem of Evil.

This might sound a bit strange given the drubbing I've just given it, but I did genuinely enjoy reading Horns.  It's a quick and absorbing read, and while I was caught up in Ig's adventures and his quest to avenge Merrin the problems with its theology didn't bother me very much.  It was only once I finished the novel and thought about it for a bit that it became so deeply objectionable, and I imagine that for a lot of readers who won't choose to take that step Horns will simply be another enjoyable read from Joe Hill.  For my part, I think I'm going to leave him alone from now on, and wait to see if he's once again acclaimed for something more thoughtful like the stories in 20th Century Ghosts.

Recent Reading Roundup 25

If I finish the book I'm reading right now (J.R.R. Tolkien's collection of essays The Monsters and the Critics) before the end of the month, I will have read as many books in April as I read in the three months preceding it.  That's what reading holidays and volcano-induced delays will do for you.  Of course, this is far too many books to give any of them an in-depth look, so here are some quick thoughts about some of them.

1. Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente - Valente's latest novel, currently on the shortlist for the Hugo award, took a while to win me over.  A portal fantasy in which the fantastic world (the titular city) is reached via sexual contact, with visitors to the city 'infecting' their partners and giving them access to the portion of it that is tattooed on their skin, Palimpsest revolves around four such visitors--a lonely Californian beekeeper, a New York locksmith obsessed with the death of his sister, an Italian antiques dealer infected by his wife, who leaves him soon after to fully pursue her obsession with Palimpsest, and an aimless Japanese woman--who are bound together by their simultaneous arrival in the city, and must find each other in the real world if they want to travel to it permanently.  The first half of the book is understandably concerned with introducing both the characters and the reader to the city and establishing its allure, but Valente's imagery in these chapters is rife with the same writerly tics that were minor irritants in the two Orphan's Tales books and which here, when she's creating her own fantasy world rather than riffing on a familiar mythical setting, become a hindrance to the very immersion she's trying to achieve.  Her imagery relies heavily on words that have exotic associations (lots of spices and herbs, for example), and these seem to have been chosen more for that evocative power than because they make sense in context or create a meaningful image.  I found it hard to believe that Valente herself could picture the places she was describing, much less picture them myself.
   
   In its second half, however, Palimpsest's focus shifts from the city itself to the characters' reactions to it, and the novel became a great deal more satisfying and involving.  Valente's depiction of the main characters' growing obsession with the city, and their discovery of a Palimpsest subculture, comprising everything from support groups to sex clubs, is very well done, and the ambivalence that permeates her descriptions of the determination with which those who are infected by Palimpsest seek to rack up new locations or achieve the holy grail of emigrating to it recalls M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart and Nova Swing.  Also, near the end of the novel the city itself becomes a great deal more interesting, with the various puzzle pieces laid out in the early chapters coming together into a semi-coherent history of the city (this reminded me of the similar process of piecing together the history of Ambergris that is one of the chief pleasures of Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen).  Though I wish that a little more had been made of the hints Valente drops near the end of the novel, that Palimpsest is a great deal less fantastic than visitors to it believe, and that its inhabitants are befuddled and exasperated by the influx of tourists looking for meaning and purpose in what to them is nothing more exotic than their home, I nevertheless found Palimpsest an intriguing and enjoyable read.
   
   
2. A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel - I liked Mantel's universally lauded Wolf Hall but had some reservations with it, rooted mainly in my awareness of how she was twisting and manipulating history to suit the spin she wanted to put on it, and thought that A Place of Greater Safety, which discusses a period and individuals I know a great deal less about, might suit me better.  Instead, I'm forced to contemplate the no doubt enormous skill it must take to make a story about the central events of the French Revolution tedious and soporific.  In part, this is clearly a deliberate choice by Mantel, who tries to stress the fact that the famous events of the Revolution--the storming of the Bastille, the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the Terror--were part of a much larger, more complicated, and less exciting sequence of events, most of which took place in committee rooms and parliaments.  But there have been riveting stories told in such settings (HBO's miniseries John Adams, to name but one) and Mantel, instead of dramatizing history, chooses to focus on her protagonists'--Maximilien Robespierre, Georges-Jacques Danton, and Camille Desmoulins--personal lives.  Instead of facing head on the fact that these three men claimed to be the enemies of tyranny and ended up erecting one, that they overthrew their government for the sake of human rights and then enabled and enacted judicial murder on a scale previously unheard of in human history, instead of trying to make recognizable and perhaps even sympathetic human beings out of such contradictions, Mantel tries to elide over these difficulties by concentrating on the characters' romances, bromances, and difficult relationships with their fathers, all of which we've seen before.
   
   Whereas in Wolf Hall recasting Thomas Cromwell as an ordinary and sympathetic person helped to demystify him and the times he lived in, in A Place of Greater Safety a similar process of demystification renders Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins inert because it forces out precisely those aspects of their character that make them worth reading about.  Like Wolf Hall, which cuts off just before Cromwell's political machinations take an unsavory turn (he was, for example, the architect of Anne Boleyn's false conviction for adultery and treason), A Place of Greater Safety is manipulative, expecting us to sympathize with its protagonists and dread their inevitable undoing, but though the novel's final fifty pages, in which two of the protagonists are sent to the guillotine by the third, are its best and most intense, they also foreground Mantel's manipulation in a way that Wolf Hall avoids.  These men deserve to die, far more than many of the tens of thousands who have gone before them, and for whose deaths they share responsibility, and Mantel hasn't done nearly enough character work to make us regret this clearly-deserved end.
   
   
3. Graceling by Kristin Cashore - the last stop on my not-exactly-whirlwind tour of 2008's most-buzzed YA novels, Graceling proved a sour note to end on.  I haven't loved every single YA novel I've read in the last couple of years, but Cashore's debut is the first that truly made me wonder whether I was too old to be reading in this category.  The novel's premise--it takes place in a fantasy world in which certain individuals, called the graced, are born with innate talents, and Katsa, the teenage heroine, appears to have a grace for killing--has a lot of inherent potential for drama.  Katsa was not only born with a fearsome skill (expressed for the first time when she accidentally kills a visiting cousin at the age of eight) but has been exploited for it from a very young age by her uncle, the king, who uses her as his thug and enforcer while hiding behind the rumors he propagates of her cruelty and bloodlust, even as he exerts control over her every choice and movement.  Its execution, however, is practically benign, downplaying much of the difficulty and horror of Katsa's situation.  The worldbuilding is also much too simplistic, and often casts a shadow on the novel's plot and characters, as allegedly real people are forced to move in cardboard-thin political and social systems.  Katsa, for example, has rebelled against her uncle by establishing a network of noblemen and warriors that spans several kingdoms whose purpose is to promote justice and right wrongs, but in practice it operates like a fantasy-world A-Team.  Later in the novel, Katsa is stunned by the realization that she can take a lover without marrying him, which she then does with hardly any qualms or consequences, when the very fact that such a possibility had never occurred to her before would seem to suggest that she lives in a society in which extramarital sex is forbidden and punished.  There are some nice notes in Graceling--as other reviewers have noted, Katsa is the epitome of the badass female heroine, and her journey over the course of the novel towards independence and self-control makes the perfect counterpoint to her innate skills; her romance with another graceling called Po is a well-sketched portrait of a relationship in which the woman is in almost every way the stronger partner, and there's an engaging sequence near the end of the novel in which Katsa and the young princess she's protecting escape their enemies by traversing an impassible mountain range in the dead of winter--but they don't quite make up for what is, on the whole, a thin and unsatisfying novel.
   
   
4. The Dazzle of the Day & The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss - I've been aware of Molly Gloss since her story "Lambing Season" was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula several years ago, but this was the first time I'd read any of her novels, which range across several genres but have in common an interest with frontier living and with the small, tightly-knit, rural communities that grow on these frontiers.  The Dazzle of the Day is, as far as I can tell, Gloss's only overtly SFnal novel, a family saga that takes place, for the most part, aboard a generation ship whose journey is nearly complete and whose inhabitants have to choose whether to colonize the planet they are now approaching or stay in the safety and comfort of the ship.  The colonists are Quakers, and one of the chief joys of the novel is its exploration of their mores, outlooks, and social structures (though on the latter count I'm not sure how much is Gloss's invention and how much a reflection of real Quaker lifestyle).  The result is a very different kind of space colonization novel, whose characters--thoughtful, reticent, introspective--are constantly questioning the choices that have brought them to this point, constantly on the verge of renouncing the plan to leave footprints on the surface of an alien planet.  This is a low-key, slow novel (a little too slow, and too concerned with the minutiae of Quaker society, in its middle segments), but also beautifully written, and, in its depiction of a space-faring future that is so different from our frenetic, grasping way of life, quietly shocking.
   
   The Hearts of Horses is a historical novel which takes place in rural Oregon near the end of the first World War.  The heroine, Martha Lessen, is a young woman traveling between farms, earning her living by gentling young horses for farm work.  This is the epitome of a low-key novel, told in episodic segments detailing Martha's growing acquaintance and friendship with her clients and neighbors, veering off into their stories, and spending a lot of time on the business of how to gentle a horse, with most tension and high emotion described obliquely and with a terseness that seems to suit the farmers, ranchers and cowboys who make up the novel's cast.  And it is quite lovely, Gloss's spare language illuminating her characters and situations perfectly, and just as the novel's wholesomeness begins to rankle, revealing a dark undertone as she alludes to or outright describes what the characters are unaware of or ignoring--the fact that the reflexive patriotism that has swept over their community is responsible for sending young men to be slaughtered in a pointless war, the anti-German sentiments that rear their heads as a result of this patriotism, the wasteful wartime farming practices that will, in a decade's time, create the Dust Bowl effect and kick-start the Depression.  Still, The Hearts of Horses is not a social or political novel.  At its core it is exactly what it presents itself as--a quiet, beautifully written, moving account of life in a corner of history notable mainly for being ordinary and unremarkable.
   
   
5. Pavane by Keith Roberts - the great-granddaddy of alternate history, Pavane posits a world in which Elizabeth I is assassinated shortly into her reign, causing the collapse of the English Reformation, cementing the Catholic church's grasp over all of Europe, and stymieing social, political, and technological progress for centuries.  When the novel opens in the 1960s, Europe is still feudal, the ruling monarchies are still largely controlled by the church, and the standard of living for most is barely more than medieval.  The novel is made up of a series of linked stories spanning several decades, which do the double duty of illuminating how Roberts's world works and charting a sea-change in it, as some force--perhaps futuristic, perhaps magical--begins moving mankind back towards democracy, humanism, and technology.  The details in Pavane are nicely done and frequently disconcerting--the haulier whose trucks are dragged behind a coal-powered locomotive, the secrets and rituals of the guild of signalers, whose semaphore towers are the only means of rapid communications (one wonders whether Terry Pratchett got the idea for a similar institution in the Discworld from here).
   
   It's on the macro level that the novel falls flat.  It's hard to believe in a church that is capable, much less willing, to hold back technological progress and the geopolitical and economic boons that come with it, or in a Europe that would be prevented from pursuing these for centuries.  To a modern reader, it is also particularly glaring that Roberts's future is so complete Euro-centric.  One would expect non-European cultures to move into the power vacuum created by Europe's stagnation and dominate the planet as Europe did in our history, but besides a passing reference to colonies in North America, the world outside of Europe is hardly mentioned, and global history appears to proceed largely as it did in our world even absent the mechanisms that steered it in this direction.  If Pavane were simply a story springing from an unlikely, even impossible premise it might still be a worthy read, but the novel's whole point is that the stagnation of Europe was necessary for humanity's survival, that the church has been colluding with beings from the future to prevent nuclear war by keeping humanity from acquiring technology it isn't yet wise enough to use.  Which just brings the shortcomings of Roberts's premise into focus, not least of which his assumption that only white people can build nuclear bombs.
   
   
6. Far North by Marcel Theroux - if there's any one reason to be glad that I went on this reading vacation (besides, you know, a week off, in a castle in Wales, with lots of good books, good food, and good friends) it's that it gave me the chance to read Far North, which is currently well in the running for the position of my favorite read of 2010.  Theroux's novel, currently on the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist and I hope, tomorrow night, the winner, shows all those other post-apocalyptic literary science fiction novels (well, The Road) how it's done.  It is narrated by Makepeace, the last inhabitant of what was once a utopian, back-to-nature settlement in the wilds of Siberia.  Makepeace's parents came to Siberia hoping to divest themselves of a technological lifestyle that, they felt, was cutting them off from their humanity, but in the leaner times that have followed--the actual nature and scope of the apocalypse is never mentioned, but it involves hordes of refugees descending on the towns desperate for food, shelter, and safety--Makepeace considers this a foolish affectation.  For some time the town's enforcer of law, she now find herself lonely and eager to discover whether humanity has survived and if so, in what form, and begins a years-long odyssey.  It's strange to say this about a novel like this one, which posits not only the end of the civilization we know but the emergence of a brutal, uncivil one populated by religious fundamentalists and slavers, but Far North is not at all depressing.  Mainly this is due to Makepeace, whose voice is brilliantly realized, and who balances her cynicism about human nature and the future of humanity with a strength of will that sees her determined to live through even the worst of her ordeals.  Which isn't to say that Makepeace is superhuman or a saint.  At various points in the novel she is helpless, craven, and complicit in atrocities, but she also maintains her core of self, her willingness to do the right thing if it's at all possible, and her ability to empathize and connect with others.  The result is a novel that is hopeful through its hopelessness, perfectly positioned between Makepeace's twin realizations that the world is not worth living in, and that living in the world is all there is.
   
   
7. Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding - the consensus on Wooding's novel seems to be that it is the least, and least deserving, of this year's Clarke nominees, but nevertheless a rollicking, fun adventure of a type we should see more often (see: Niall, Dan, Nic).  I beg to differ.  I agree with Dan that the genre landscape (hell, the literary landscape in general) could use more swashbuckling adventures with at least some nutritional value, but I don't think Retribution Falls, which has been universally and quite accurately described as Firefly with airships, is that book, or that the comparison with Joss Whedon's TV series does it any favors.  For one thing, it just isn't that rip-roaring.  It takes a lot more skill to write exciting action scenes and zingy one-liners than it does to script them, and Wooding isn't quite up to snuff.  Retribution Falls is often slack, with the result that its snappy comebacks fall into place with depressing predictability, and its action scenes fail to ignite.  The characters are an even more distressing affair.  Especially for a novel whose point is to follow the process by which the crew of the airship Ketty Jay are transformed from a rag-tag band of outlaws and miscreants with nowhere else to go into a coherent group, Retribution Falls pays surprisingly little attention to most of its characters, allowing most of them to fade into the background while concentrating mostly on its ne'er-do-well captain, Darian Frey, who makes a greedy and short-sighted decision to accept a robbery commission that seems too good to be true, and ends up framed for murder.  Two other characters, aristocrat and dark wizard on the run Grayther Crake and the Ketty Jay's newest crewmember, Jezibeth Kyte, also have points of view, but the novel is anchored by Frey and his growth into the role of captain, which is unfortunate as Frey, who has been described as a more dickish version of Mal Reynolds, is actually something much worse--he is a whiner, and rather stupid to boot, and his growth over the course of the novel just barely brings him to the baseline of functional adulthood.  That Retribution Falls hinges on him thus makes it quite an unpleasant read, at no point as much as when Frey encounters two of his former lovers, both of whom are depicted as pathetic grotesques, made horrible by his betrayal of them and condemned for that fact.  These depictions (and those of the Ketty Jay's two female crewmembers, who aren't, for the most part, humiliated as Frey's former lovers are, but are underdeveloped) make Retribution Falls something much more unsavory than underperforming swashbuckler with an annoying main character, and taken together these faults make for a book that I simply can't love as so many others have.
   
   
8. The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness - Ness's follow-up to the intense, explosive The Knife of Never Letting Go picks up precisely where the first volume left off, with young teens Todd and Viola discovering that the sanctuary they've been seeking from the pursuing army of Mayor Prentiss, who killed all the women in Todd's town and is trying to take over the planet they live on (to which end he wants Viola, the representative of a colony ship on its way to the planet, by his side) has already fallen to him.  They are separated, and, with great reluctance, end up following very different paths as they struggle to survive under enemy occupation--Todd, taken in by the mayor, becomes a collaborator; Viola, who falls in with the town's disenfranchised women, including a charismatic disgraced politician and former warrior, becomes a terrorist--and to reconnect with each other.  The high-pitched intensity that made The Knife of Never Letting Go such an irresistible read is in full effect here, and because issues of gender are less prominent in this novel, the problems I had with the previous volume's handling of gender roles become less of an issue.  Instead, the focus of the novel is on how anyone, male or female, can live honorably while surrounded by evil, and on the compromises that such a life forces on one's conscience.  The Ask and the Answer is plagued by some of the same problems that hobbled The Knife of Never Letting Go--it is manipulative as all get out; the frenzy with which Todd and Viola cling to each other, search for each other when they're separated, and yearn for each other's presence and approval quickly becomes overbearing and repetitive; and there is a tendency to woobify Todd, to expect the reader to feel sorry for him because he feels guilty for having done terrible things, that I found off-putting.  Nevertheless, this is a hell of a read and a hell of a follow-up to The Knife of Never Letting Go, and I'm quite curious to see how, and how neatly, Ness will wrap up the story in the series's concluding volume, Monsters of Men.
   
   
9. The Night Watch by Sarah Waters - my love-hate relationship with Sarah Waters's bibliography continues apace.  After greatly enjoying her most recent novel, The Little Stranger, I decided to give her fourth book, The Night Watch, previously ignored because of my bad experiences with her first and second books, a try, with less than stellar results.  The Night Watch moves backwards in time, beginning in 1947 and skipping back to 1944 and then 1941 as it follows several characters, mostly gay men and women, in wartime and post-war London.  In 1947, former ambulance driver Kay is depressed and out of sorts, lacking the purpose that rescue work once gave her life; office worker Helen's relationship with up-and-coming writer Julia is one the rocks; Helen's coworker Viv is stuck in a relationship with a married man; Viv's brother Duncan, recently released from prison for an unspecified crime, is working a dead-end job in a charity factory and spending most of his time with his elderly landlord.  As the novel moves backwards in time we find out how the characters got in these situations, but the point of the exercise escapes me.  There's something almost malicious in the way Waters forces her characters through the motions of trying to make a better life for themselves after she's already shown us that what lies at the end of all their paths is a quagmire.  It might almost have been more bearable if the 1947 section showed the characters dead or arriving at an irrevocably tragic ending.  The fact that they're all stuck, held in place mostly by their psychological hangups, makes the process of learning how they got to that point, all the while knowing that there will be no extra chapter in which we learn whether they got out of it, almost too awful to bear.  Unless it's this maliciousness that Waters wants to convey, I'm not sure what she was trying to do with the novel, which is otherwise very well observed, describing war-time London and the upheavals the war creates in social roles, especially for marginalized groups like women and gay people, with evocative clarity.  Like most of Waters's novels, The Night Watch is a slick piece of writing, but I didn't find it a very enjoyable read.

Home!

At long last I am back in the holy land, after a seven-leg, thirteen hour trip comprising four different kinds of trains (one of which, the London Underground, very nearly scuttled all my plans when the tightest change of the lot became a great deal tighter due to a mechanical failure on the Circle line), two countries, and one rather pleasant flight from Paris.

Kudos are due to Niall Harrison and Nic Clarke, for opening both their home and their library to me while I was stranded, and to my airline El Al, for handling my (and, from what I've heard, many other passengers') case with impressive grace and efficiency, and making it their priority to get stranded passengers home, or as close as possible to it.  Less praiseworthy are my phone company Orange, who threatened to disconnect my phone due to irregular usage, and did so just as I was traversing France, cutting me off from the people in England and Israel waiting to hear about my progress.  While it's understandable that the huge spike in my phone usage this week should have raised a red flag, the fact that neither I nor my family in Israel were able to get through to the number where said decision could be reversed is not, and the fact that my mother was asked to pay the current balance of my account, more than a week before it's due, in order to reconnect the phone is risible.  Also failing to deal with the crisis were RailEurope, from whom I tried to purchase train tickets several times only to find the task impossible online (no sale of tickets less than seven days in advance), on the phone (constantly busy, no call handling system to put people on hold) or in person (lines around the block of the one location in the UK where tickets for trains on the continent could be purchased, no attempt to manage or inform the crowd).

My plans for the weekend are to rest, catch up on some small part of my huge TV backlog, and try to assess just how much this little adventure has cost me and whether there's any chance of recouping some of my expenses from my insurance company.  Next week I will hopefully blog about some of the books I read on this holiday, and then maybe resume something like a normal blogging schedule.  In the meantime, I leave you with these gorgeous pictures from Iceland, and the obvious response to same.

Asking the Wrong Questions, the Blog in Exile

The plan for today was to land in Tel Aviv at an ungodly hour of the morning, get home, sleep for a bit, and then write a post about my journey in the evening.  Unfortunately, everyone's favorite volcano Eyjafjallajoekull had other plans, and I have joined the ranks of tens of thousands of other stranded travelers all over Europe.  Attempts at securing an alternate route have thus far proved futile--I have a booking for a flight leaving Madrid on Tuesday night, but at present I haven't been able to make train or bus reservations for the London-Madrid leg, and the likelihood that I'll manage to do so grows slimmer by the hour.  Happily, my situation is quite comfortable.  Not only do I have a place to stay, thanks to the kindness of Niall and Nic, but it is stacked to rafters with books, so that if it weren't for the uncertainty of my situation I would quite happily settle in for another reading week.  Plus, if you're going to be stranded in a foreign country, there's something rather grand about being stranded by a volcano rather than a strike or a storm.  I'm already planning how to drop it into conversation--"I had to crash in my friends' spare room... because a volcano erupted!", "I missed my meeting on Monday... because a volcano erupted!", and so on.  And it is, of course, very humbling to realize how completely for granted we take the ability to hop across continents, how vast those distances are in reality, and how helpless we are when some aspect of our technology-driven society is taken away.

Still, though the trip isn't quite over, I thought I'd write a bit about my adventures thus far.  Niall has written a long and detailed report on Eastercon 2010 which describes my reactions quite accurately as well (minus, of course, any previous experience with this convention).  I enjoyed meeting people--those I'd met before, those who have been my online friends and acquaintances for quite some time but whom I'd never seen in real life, and those who were completely unknown to me--very much, and had some lively and enjoyable conversations at the various and rather crowded pubs and seating areas in the Radisson Edwardian Hotel, where the convention was held, but the program itself didn't grab my interest (so much so that I haven't got much in the way of panel notes).  I was on two panels myself, one, arranged at the last minute, about issues of cultural appropriation as they relate specifically to the UK and its history of empire, in which I was the outsider's voice.  I thought the panel went quite well, not least because the audience seemed very clued in and ready to take the discussion past the basics that have proved such a hurdle in previous iterations of this conversation (indeed, the audience may have been more clued in than the panelists in some respects--as in the case of the black woman who spoke about her experiences encountering racism in genre books as a child).

My second panel, about reviewing, raised several interesting points but ended up a rather rambling affair, moving from the changing face of media distribution and consumption to the dreaded print vs. online reviewing discussion to the question of whether reviews should contain spoilers without finding much of a common thread.  Other interesting panels included a discussion of female superheroes, which veered amusingly between the panelists listing their favorite characters and expressing despair at the state of the field when it comes to giving them interesting stories, the Not the Clarke Award panel, whose panelists rather failed to stick to the established format of tossing one book after another from the shortlist--all were agreed that Chris Wooding's Retribution Falls should be the first to go, but after that point every panelist had their own favorites and least favorites, and the ultimate conclusion was that each of the remaining five nominees was flawed but still a worthwhile book--and a panel about Dollhouse, which despite the creepy behavior of one of its panelists (as noted by Niall and expanded upon in the comments to that post by the panelist himself) managed to be thoughtful and intelligent in its discussion of the many issues raised by and surrounding this strange and frustrating show.

After that I continued to Oxford for a few days with friends, which also included some book shopping to supplement the not-unimpressive haul I brought back from the Eastercon dealer's room, and then on to Wales for reading week, a tradition of several years' standing with Niall's group of friends.  There were 18 of us at Wynnstay Hall, and we had a wonderful time cooking, eating, playing board games, having a murder mystery night (at which we all had too much fun getting in character to actually bother with the mystery, especially once it turned out that one of the guests was The Doctor, played with pitch-perfect acerbity by Graham Sleight), and reading many, many, many books.  Notable reads of the week include The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss, a low-key but evocative story about a female horse-trainer near the end of the first World War, Clarke nominee Far North by Marcel Theroux, a post-apocalyptic story with a beautifully drawn main character which has unseated The City & The City as my pick for the award, and the title novella in Kelly Link's YA collection Pretty Monsters, which can best be described as Kelly Link's take on Twilight, and is just as clever and thought-provoking as that description suggests.

Between reading week and constant travel, books have dominated my cultural consumption for the last couple of weeks while an enormous backlog of television episode accumulates back home (I did, however, watch Sherlock Holmes on the flight to London, and though I admit that the conditions might not have been ideal found myself far more engaged by the look of the film and by its soundtrack than by the characters or plot).  An exception, however, had to be made for Doctor Who.  For the first time in my time as a fan of the new series, I found myself watching it among other fans--in Niall's hotel room at Eastercon, on the big screen at Wynnstay Hall, with friends here in Oxford last night.  This has certainly affected my experience of the show--I doubt there will be as many delighted shrieks of laughter at the Daleks' "WOULD YOU LIKE A CUP OF TEA?" in Israel--to the extent that it's a little hard to disentangle my reaction to the show from its rather ecstatic reception here.  On the whole, I like what I'm seeing, without feeling that the new Doctor, new companion, or new showrunner have quite found their footing yet.  What pleases me most is that the three episodes I've seen have all been much plottier than most of Russell T. Davies's stuff, and have stopped to consider how traveling through time affects the characters' lives rather than simply using it as a means of bringing the characters into the story (the manner of The Doctor and Amy's first meeting; Amy, finding herself thousands of years in the future, wondering what she did about a wedding that is still a day away in her personal timeline), but I'm not quite convinced that Eleven is his own Doctor yet, and am even less convinced that Moffat knows what to do with Amy now that he's, apparently, rejected Davies's approach of making the companion the most important person in the Doctor's life.

And that, for the time, is my report.  I suspect it'll be well into the week, at least, before I'm back home, and I may end up doing some proper blogging before then if the spirit so moves me.  But in the meanwhile, this is your correspondent in Oxford, signing off.

The 2010 Hugo Awards: The Hugo Nominees

Coming to you straight from Eastercon 2010, piping hot Hugo nominations--unless you've already got them from one of the people who were tweeting or liveblogging or webcasting the event, which I considered doing before deciding that that would just not be the AtWQ thing, and that I'd much rather add my thoughts about the nominees to the lists.

It has been confirmed that there will be a Hugo voter packet again this year, but I promised myself to cut back on my emotional involvement with this award, and decided I'd only purchase a supporting membership of Aussiecon if there were nominees I truly wanted to see win.  As you'll see in a moment, this has not been the case.  As usual, I will review the short fiction nominees (assuming the ones I haven't read are made generally available).

For those keeping track, there are eight female nominees out of 23 nominated works in the four fiction categories.

Best Novel:

• Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
• The City & The City by China Miéville
• Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson
• Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente
• Wake by Robert J. Sawyer
• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

I certainly can't complain about this shortlist given that three of nominees were on my ballot (though I must say I'm surprised that Palimpsest got on).  The City & The City, incidentally, won the BSFA award earlier this evening, and at Eastercon's famous Not the Clarke Award panel it was the panelists' choice for both the book they thought should win the award and the one they one they thought would win it, and of course it is also on the Nebula ballot.  It is thus positioned to make a clean sweep of 2010's genre awards--of the other Hugo nominees, it seems to me that only Boneshaker represents a serious threat.

Best Novella:

• "Act One" (PDF) by Nancy Kress (Asimov's, March 2009)
• The God Engines by John Scalzi
• "Palimpsest" by Charles Stross (Wireless)
• Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow
• "Vishnu at the Cat Circus" by Ian McDonald (Cyberabad Days)
• The Women of Nell Gwynne's by Kage Baker

"Vishnu at the Cat Circus" was on my ballot, but with the exception of Morrow the other nominees are all writers whose previous work has left me cold, so I can't say that I'm thrilled by this ballot.  It's interesting to note that only one of these nominees came from a magazine, and that three were published as individual volumes.  I noticed a paucity of novellas in my reading of short fiction venues, and it seems that other nominators ended up going further afield for their choices.

Best Novelette:

• "Eros, Philia, Agape" by Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com)
• "The Island" by Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2)
• "It Takes Two" be Nicola Griffith (Eclipse 3)
• "One of Our Bastards is Missing" (PDF) by Paul Cornell (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 3)
• "Overtime" by Charles Stross (Tor.com)
• "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest, Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" by Eugie Foster (Interzone 220)

I'm very pleased for "The Island" and "It Takes Two" (though not quite as pleased as I would have been if Helen Keeble's story had gotten on the ballot), and though I've loved neither the Swirsky or Foster stories as well as others, both are interesting and well written.  So even though the Stross story isn't much to write home about, if the Paul Cornell is decent this will turn out to be quite a strong category.

Best Short Story:

• "The Bride of Frankenstein" by Mike Resnick (Asimov's, December 2009)
• "Bridesicle" (PDF) by Will McIntosh (Asimov's, January 2009)
• "The Moment" by Lawrence M. Schoen (Footprints)
• "Non-Zero Probabilities" by N.K. Jemisin (Clarkesworld)
• "Spar" by Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld)

I didn't even know Mike Resnick had an eligible story out there--I was sure this was the year the Hugo nominations would finally be clear of his name.  Oh well.  "Bridesicle" and "Non-Zero Probabilities" are good stories, and I'm planning to reexamine "Spar," whose ecstatic reception had left me rather baffled.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:

• Doctor Who, "The Next Doctor"
• Doctor Who, "Planet of the Dead"
• Doctor Who, "The Waters of Mars"
• Dollhouse, "Epitaph One"
• FlashForward, "No More Good Days"

Sweet lord.  Given what a poor showing genre TV gave in 2009 this was never going to be a strong ballot, but I hadn't expected it to be quite this bad.  It's really hard to decide what's most depressing about this shorlist: that "Epitaph One" is up there despite being a mediocre hour of television worthwhile mainly for its (by now spoiled) promise, the three Doctor Who specials, only the first of whom was even marginally enjoyable, or the fact that the field was so barren this year that something as bland and unremarkable as the FlashForward pilot gets a nod.  Upon further reflection, what's most depressing about the short form ballot is that the awards administrator took care to stress that the last Doctor Who special, "The End of Time"/"Journey's End," will be eligible for this category next year.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form:

• Avatar
• District 9
• Moon
• Star Trek
• Up

I can't decide whether it's a cruel irony or divine retribution that the only worthwhile bit of writing Russell T. Davies did in 2009, Torchwood's Children of Earth, got locked out of a Hugo nomination by one of the most predictable slate of nominees in quite some time.  I'm please to see Moon and Up, but suspect that both will lose to either Star Trek or District 9.

Best Related Work:

• Canary Fever: Reviews by John Clute
• Hope-in-the-Mist by Michael Swanwick
• The Intergalactic Playground by Farah Mendlesohn
• On Joanna Russ, edited by Farah Mendlesohn
• The Secret Feminist Cabal by Helen Merrick
• This is Me, Jack Vance by Jack Vance

This is quite a remarkable slate of nominees.  I haven't read any, though several intrigue me, but what's fascinating about it is that after several years of leaning in this direction the category has shifted entirely into non-fiction writing, with no art books in sight.  There's also a dominance of critical work (and I suspect that Michael Swanwick's Mirrlees biography also shades into critical writing).  Which is exactly what I'd like this category to be--a place for non-fiction about the field, and an opportunity to recognize excellent critical writing about the genre.

Best Graphic Story:

• Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?
• Captain Britain and MI3 Volume 3: Vampire State
• Fables Volume 12: The Dark Ages
• Girl Genius Volume 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm
• Schlock Mercenary: The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse

Best Professional Artist:

• Daniel Dos Santos
• Bob Eggleton
• Stephen Martinière
• John Picacio
• Shaun Tan

Best Semiprozine:

• Ansible
• Clarkesworld
• Interzone
• Locus
• Weird Tales

Best Fanzine:

• Argentus
• Banana Wings
• CHALLENGER
• Drink Tank
• File 770
• StarshipSofa

Best Fan Writer:

• Clare Brialey
• Christopher J. Garcia
• James Nicoll
• Lloyd Penney
• Frederick Pohl

Best Fan Artist:

• Brad W. Foster
• Dave Howell
• Sue Mason
• Steve Stiles
• Taral Wayne

Best Editor, Long Form:

• Lou Anders
  
• Ginjer Buchanan
• Liz Gorinsky
• Patrick Nielsen Hayden
• Juliet Ulman

Best Editor, Short Form:

• Ellen Datlow
• Stanley Schmidt
• Jonathan Strahan
• Gordon Van Gelder
• Sheila Williams

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer:

• Saladin Ahmed
• Gail Carriger
• Felix Gilman
• Seanan McGuire
• Lezli Robyn

Away, Away

This blog has been quiet enough recently that such an absence might go unnoticed, but for the next two weeks I'm going to be on holiday in the UK.  This weekend I'll be attending Odyssey, the 2010 Eastercon at the Radisson hotel in Heathrow airport, and following that I'll be visiting friends and hopefully charging up on blogging fodder.  I'm participating in a panel, on Sunday the 4th:

Writing Meaningful Reviews of TV Shows and Books.  12PM-1PM.  Room 41.  Too often reviews of TV programmes (or books) are a knee-jerk reaction condemning (or praising) a production while considering just one or two facets. What should a detailed review consider? How can we analyse more deeply? John Clute (mod), Chris Hill, Abigail Nussbaum and Alison Page.

Other than that, I'm trying something new by taking my laptop with me, but will endeavor to spend more time offline than on, so though I may pop up on occasion, normal service won't resume until the middle of the month.  I leave you, in the meantime, with the following links:

• The shortlist for the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award was announced yesterday.  Niall has a roundup of reviews, and of reactions.  I agree with the general consensus, that what's controversial about this year's shortlist is how uncontroversial it is, and confess a preference for the slightly out there choices of previous years.  That said, the solidity of the list can't be argued with, and the three nominees I haven't read (the Robinson, Theroux, and Wooding) all look appealing.  This weekend will also see the announcement of the 2010 Hugo nominees at Eastercon.


• It started with the Tournament of Books a few years ago, and by now March on the internet is wall to wall zany tournaments.  This year's ToB has proved something of a disappointment, due to two rather pointless judgments in its third round, one from a judge who spent more time discussing the contestants' physical appearance than he did their contents, and the other from someone who did not actually appear to care about books in general nor to have read his contestants in particular.  Together, they crossed the line from the irreverence and idiosyncrasy that makes the ToB fun to a seeming randomness that renders it pointless.  Happily, Jezebel has been running a cake vs. pie tournament, which though featuring some baffling decisions (red velvet cake--a cake whose distinction derives from food coloring--has made it to the quarter finals) offers, in the passionate and devoted comments of its participants, some of the best comedy to be found online this month.


• At the group blog Big Other, A.D. Jameson has been writing a multi-part retrospective of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, now up to its fourth installment (1, 2, 3, 4).  I'm not a big fan of comics in general, and when I read it a few years ago I admired The Dark Knight Returns, and realized how important it was to superhero comics and the development of the Batman character, without becoming particularly attached to it, but Jameson's series is nevertheless fascinating.  He discusses the state of comics, both from a storytelling and technical perspective, at the time Miller envisioned the series, and analyzes the physical arrangement of the comic's pages to reveal the ways that Miller took full advantage of his medium's abilities.  It's a fascinating, in-depth reading.