Swamplandia! by Karen Russel

Some years ago, a popular and macabre forward of an encounter between an alligator and a Burmese python found its way into my inbox. The python had overwhelmed a medium sized alligator and swallowed it whole, only to have the ancient reptile claw at the snake's stomach from the inside. The image in the mail captured an enormous dead python with a ruptured belly, out of which hung a deader alligator. Rarely do we know the name of a swamp but the scene of this inter-species battle is famed. The south-eastern portion of Florida holds some of the largest wetlands in the world - the Everglades. Here, quixotic natives fight daily with invasive species to protect their turf or in this case, marsh. The people who call the Everglades home are just as intriguing. The Seminoles, a pastiche of Native American tribes fleeing European colonization once found refuge in the deep dark of the gator infested swamps. The Everglades have always been an 'away place' where the known world ends and the realm of the primeval begins. 

Swamplandia! is about a tribe of sorts. The Bigtrees run an alligator themed amusement park called Swamplandia! on a small coastal island of the same name. The park's museum and gift shop stock gatorish merchandise alongside faux tribal artifacts purchased by pasty mainlanders attracted by the promise and danger of gator wrestling. Their grandfather, Sawtooth Bigtree, was born Ernest Schedrach, the white son of a coal miner from Ohio. "He changed his name to outwit his boss to whom he owed debts. He picked "Sawtooth" in homage to the sedge that surrounded his island; "Bigtree" because he liked its root-strong sound."  Life is predictable if isolated on Swamplandia. I couldn't even deduce which time frame the story was set in. I thought it could have been the 1950s. Only later do you realize that its probably set in times much closer to our own. It is perhaps appropriate because the Bigtree children are completely cut-off from the rest of the world and the death of their mother (the famous Hilola Bigtree who'd dive into a pool full of seths as gators are called on the islands) precipitates events that lead to the heart of what this charming novel is about, the end of innocence. 

Swamplandia! alternates between the beguiling voice of thirteen year old Ava Bigtree (narrated in the first person) who is being groomed to become the next big alligator wrestler and her seventeen year old brother Kiwi, a socially inept genius (narrated in the third person). Kiwi summarizes the family best when he (for the first time in his life) fills out a medical form that seeks information about his family history; "Well, for starters, my sixteen-year-old sister is crazy, she has aural and visual hallucinations ... my youngest sister is an equestrian of Mesozoic lizards ... my father wears a headdress ... my grandfather bites men now ..."  The other Bigtree sibling, Osceola, named for an 18th century Seminole chief becomes infatuated with the spirit world after finding a book that instructs readers how to commune with the dead. Her father doesn't seem very worried about this, remarking that it's probably just a phase despite his other children's best efforts to underscore the seriousness of Ossie's leisure pursuit.  "It's a book for witches, Dad" says Ava. "And the underworld isn't a heaven or hell, it's like a whole separate country. Like a Germany under the world."  Kiwi supports this concern for their enigmatic sister, taking a shot at her choice of boyfriends;  "Did you hear us, Dad? These guys she's dating-they're dead." "Yes," the Chief sighed. "Yes, I'll admit, that is a little peculiar." The fact that we never hear the story from Ossie's perspective accentuates the enigma of her alleged interactions with the spirit world. Russel's approach to magical realism is clever and original like pushing someone into a pool full of alligators only have to be pulled back before hitting the water.   

Ava's voice, simultaneously childlike and adult in its disjointed but profound pensiveness turns this great book into something wonderful. She observes the tourists at her family's parks and confesses "I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn's rings. I whispered to Ossie that I wanted to see the register for Death's aeroplane. Who was boarding the plane in such a stupid order?" Kiwi's experience (he runs away to the mainland and gets a dead-end janitorial job the World of Darkness, a hell-themed amusement park where patrons called lost souls) satirically flogs modern, especially corporate, life. His horrible boss "had a master's degree in some undisclosed discipline - he'd offer these facts to anyone who approached him, like a caterer with a tray of bitter hors d'oeuvres." Kiwi, whose home-schooling and lack of contact with others of his age, makes him both intelligent and incompetent. This weedy boy whose idea of a comeback is the word "troglodyte" quickly learns what the world of the mainland expects of him, swallowing his erudite observations and impressive (if mispronounced) command of English lexicon. His consternation at how the world rewards the stupid and the superficial is a wider comment about the state of American society. Thoughts like  Oh my God, you are not even an original asshole! You are a plagiarist of assholes" Kiwi keeps to himself. Thankfully, his thoughts do not not become any less articulate or insightful. We are informed that he " considered himself a grammarian of human emotion, knew that anger required a direct object. (I am angry at ______. I hate ________.) "To hate" was a transitive verb. Anger needed an anchor, a plug, a wall. (I am angry because of ________.) Otherwise you had a beam of red feeling searching vainly through the universe. You had a heart that shot red light into space."

Swamplandia! is an exceptionally well-written book about characters and settings that are alien and disquieting and yet endearing and enthralling. What a wonderful last read for the year! 

Nights of Villjamur by Mark Charan Newton

Mark Charan Newton is British writer who edited a science fiction magazine before turning to novels. Nights of Villjamur is his second novel and the first in the Legends of the Red Sun series. The book draws heavily from elements and themes in existing fantasy books, particularly China Mieville and maybe Stephen Hunt. At the centre of this epic is the city of Villjamur, ethereally Gothic with its bridges and arches, built into a large rock whose summit is the realm of its rulers and its underside home to the city's disenfranchised. Villjamur is the capital of an empire that rules the Boreal Archipelago. Significant changes are coming to this world. The days are growing colder, heralding an imminent ice age. Mysterious tribesmen launch attacks on the empire's home island. From the far north come tales of massacres and other-worldly interlopers. On this stage, Newton follows a number of eclectic characters. His protagonists come in all sorts of colours, genders and sexualities, perhaps a happy side-effect of Newton's own multicultural origins (his mother is Indian, thus explaining his middle name). The most interesting character is Brynd, a gay albino military commander whose competency on the battlefield wouldn't save him from the gallows if his sexual preferences were disclosed. And being a true albino with red-tinted eyes implies that he is different  both on the inside and out. There is a prostitute-painter named Tuya and  Jeryd, an investigator who belongs to the rumel, a hominid species with think skin and tails; both are well-fleshed out. The other characters aren't developed so well; Eyr, a princess and Randur, a professional philanderer are quite superficial and come across as very silly, which I don't think was intended. 

Villjamur is well drawn creating a dark, moody neo-medieval metropolis. However, the plot is not just about the city. There are those who wield paranormal powers - the cultists - subscribing to a range of rival sects and using bizarre technology to bend nature. One of these cultists is about to set a dangerous plan in motion. Newton doesn't spend too much time on these curious cults or their technology. Maybe, he intends to do that in his next book. There is a bit of a struggle within the plot between urban fantasy and epic fantasy. I think he manages that okay although his bias is clearly towards the former. However, I felt that he could have made the story progress a wee bit faster. It has interesting elements but it's not gripping. One way is to perhaps to cut down on the rumination (his characters love to brood). Another way could be to make outcomes less predictable and not fear killing off characters. 

These trilogies are so bloody addictive; they're going to be the death of me. 

Hayavadana by Girish Karnad

Girish Karnad's Hayavadana is supposed to be a classic of modern Indian theatre. It's based on Thomas Mann's The Transposed Heads which in turn is inspired by a narrative out of an eleventh century anthology of Indian legends - Kathasaritsagara; which means that it's a reinterpretation by an Indian playwright of a work by a Western writer which itself is a reworking of an Indian legend. The play is bookended by the story of a horse-headed man Hayavadana (who although important to the play's themes, is not its subject). At the beginning of the play, Hayavadana seeks out advice from the other actors about becoming somewhat complete. He then only reappears at the end, having become 'complete'. 

The central narrative is about two friends, Kapila and Devdutta who live in classical times. The two are like chalk and cheese. Devdutta is a brahmin, a waif of a man who devotes his time to intellectual pursuits. Kapila is unlettered but his muscular body is renowned from the numerous wrestling events he's won. Devdutta becomes besotted by Padmini, a local lass and with Kapila's help the two get married. Padmini, however, secretly fantasizes about Kapila's Adonis-like physique and spends what seems to her husband, far too much time with him. On the road to Ujjain, Devdutta is overcome with a sense of his own inadequacy and makes his way to a ruined Kali temple where he kills himself. When Kapila finds Devdutta dead, he mourns the loss of his friend by killing himself as well. Padmni, left alone in the forest, finds the path to the temple where she beseeches the goddess to bring them back to life. Kali orders Padmini to put the heads back (they decapitated themselves, don't know how that's possible) on their body. In the dark, Padmini switches heads so Kapila's body gets Devdutta's head. She claims to have to done this inadvertently although later it's hinted that she did exactly what she desired. A struggle breaks out between the resurrected friends. Who gets the girl? Who is the father of the child growing inside Padmini? Is the real husband the one with Devdutta's head or his body? A sage rules in favour of the head ruling the body so Devdutta's head + Kapila's body turns out to be the winning combination; tragically to Kapila's loss who's compelled to stay in the forest with the soft, useless body of a brahmin. Nevertheless, the happily ever after isn't found so easily because each body seems to possess a mind of its own and Padmini retains her polyandrous bent of mind.  

Hayavadana was an involving evening. I haven't see other versions of it so I can't really comment on this interpretation by the Industrial Theatre Co. and Black Boxers. It was surprisingly sprightly though and the actors constantly lightened the mood talking directly to the audience and making real-world jokes (Hayavadana, in search of a divine remedy for his horse head, claims to have approached the church  - the actual church of St.Andrew and St.Columba at Lion's Gate - next door but complains that it's never open). 

The hall at the K.R. Cama Oriental institute made for an interesting venue. The clean lines of this austere white art deco space compensate for its small size. The stage was set in the middle of the hall bordered by cushions. A red canopy with Chinese paper lanterns over this stage lent it the look of a dohyo - a sumo wrestling ring. The overall effect was very intimate as if you were within the scene, among the actors. But, at the same time, I didn't experience the sort of verisimilitude one feels in Privthi - where you become one with the space and the play becomes much more than a performance. Maybe it was because whenever you looked at the 'stage' n the K.R. Cama hall, you'd see a backdrop of faces, chairs and air-conditioning units.

The two strongest actors in this performance, Neil Bhoopalam and Dilnaz Irani, regrettably had marginal roles as narrators. There is a strong tradition of the sutradhar or narrator in Indian drama. I've never quite liked this partiality to explaining rather than acting but it seemed to suit Hayavadana. Irani at least got to briefly show off her incredible talent as the goddess Kali. Each word and movement attested to her sense of control and experience. The others put in a good effort but they were all missing something. Prashant Prakash who played Devdutta had a tendency to be overly dramatic, articulating his lines in a very affected way. Vivek Gomber, as Kapila, had an earnestness that was both a strength and a disadvantage in this role. Preetika Chawla was brilliant at first as the alluring and playful Padmini. But, later as her character develops, becoming increasingly complex - Chawla seemed unable to project herself in any other way than the lissome girl that's second nature to her. All three were missing the maturity and skill that was so palpable in Irani's performance. BTW, Hayavadana's alleged homo-erotic undercurrent doesn't amount to more than some bare-bodied wrestling moves. The play had interesting themes but wasn't as arresting as I thought it would be.

Dilnaz Irani as the Goddess Kali (Image from http://tossedsalad.com)

Shenzen - A Travelogue from China by Guy Delisle

After having thoroughly enjoyed Pyongyang - A Journey in North Korea and Burma Chronicles, I've been on the lookout for Delisle's graphical commentary on his time in China for a while now. Where bookstores have increasing number of shelves dedicated to comics and manga, really good quality graphic novels are hard to find. Delisle, a Canadian cartoonist who lives in France has often travelled all over the world to supervise outsourced animation projects even in a place as unlikely as Pyongyang. Delisle is asked to work on a similar project in Shenzen, China's first special economic zone and certified dragon city. There is no narrative in this book; only vignettes with Delisle's trademark wry but insightful observations. He too recognizes this and remarks in one frame, "If I draw all these anecdotes, one day, it will probably look like I had a great time here. Take out of context, even boredom can probably sublimate itself and seem entertaining. It’s a bit like memory." Much of what he does or doesn't do is spurred on by boredom. Shenzen seems an artificial city with little to do beyond going to the gym or to a restaurant (an adventure in itself where the nature of a dish doesn't reveal itself until you pick out the dripping rooster head from the communal bowl).  He contrasts life in Shenzen with excursions to Hong Kong and Canton (Guangdong), the latter he claims he could get used to.

Like Delisle's other works, Shenzen's key strength is his perceptiveness; the way in which he notices and ruminates over things that we would let pass, whether it's a hotel room or a public lavatory. 

His inability to communicate and connect with people around him drives him up the wall. He wants to desperately to crack the Chinese mind which he finds inscrutable. During his first few days in Shenzen, he resorts to pictorial conversations with colleagues from the animation firm. 

So frustrated that he initiates a patter in his head to pass the time. Unlike Pyongyang and Burma Chronicles, Shenzen avoids commenting on China's political situation, for the most part. This is one of the few panels (at a restaurant that serves dog meat) in the book with overt political commentary and what an image it is! 

I love his ability to use literary allusions to frame his reality like Dante's descent to hell transposed to China! 

Delisle's latest work recounts his time in Jerusalem. This sneak peak drips deliciously with irony. Can't wait to read it. 

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives by Lola Shoneyin

I’ve become a proper little fantasy whore to the lamentable detriment of all other types of fiction. I just don’t feel like reading the sober, reality-bound stuff. I can’t bring myself to finish Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke, once claimed among my pantheon of favourite writers. An excursion into any of these ‘normal’ books currently gives me the sensation of sticking my head into a miasma of mind-numbing emotions and the dreadful tedium of reality. I want to be like (bourgeois remark coming up) those people who watch senseless Bollywood films to vicariously to see the world through the eyes of others whose lives they deem exciting but out of reach. I too want to escape the miasma. Thankfully, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s was a breath of fresh air. These Nigerian writers are remarkably talented; I’ve blogged about how much I love Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s work. Lola Shoneyin comes from illustrious pedigree. Her father-in-law is the Nobel Prize winning writer, Wole Soyinka (I vaguely remember reading Season of Anomy in school although I never thought Soyinka as good as Chinua Achebe). 

The subject of Shoneyin’s first novel is simultaneously contentious and curious. Bolanle, a university graduate in her twenties marries Baba Segi, a prosperous businessman, casting aside criticism from her ever-acerbic mother. The problem is that Baba Segi is an impervious polygamist, already married to three other women, all living under one roof with their seven children in the Nigerian city of Ibadan. His first and third wife, Iya Segi and Iya Femi, draw out daggers to welcome their husband’s newest acquisition. The status quo is very dear to them and the viciousness with which they attack Bolanle would put a Hindi soap opera mother-in-law to shame. The second wife, Iya Tope, beats Bolanle in stoic passivity. It’s perplexing to see someone as intelligent as Bolanle inertly subject herself to Baga Segi’s chauvinism and the other wives’ cruelty. We find out later that she has phantoms to deal with and she explains that Baba Segi’s household gives her some kind of refuge although it’s still hard for me to understand how the caustic environment she finds herself in, could be anything but healing.

The way in which Shoneyin breaks up the story and presents it to us through the perspectives of all the wives, Baba Segi and even the driver Taju, is key to this novel’s success. The wives who we first see as monsters transform into ordinary women with wretched pasts, foregone ambitions, present insecurities and of course their secret lives. Iya Femi is a particularly complex character who finds solace in Evangelical Christianity which she lauds for offering damnation to those who have wronged her. “I have suffered too much in my life to let that rat (Bolanle) spoil it all for me. So what if she is a graduate? When we stand before God on the last day, will He ask whether we went to university? No! But He will want to know if we were as wise as serpents because that’s what the Bible says we should be.” I only wish Shoneyin clarified in whose voice each chapter was narrated because this is not always made explicit. Only two pages in would you, for example, infer that this was the ever-submissive tone of Iya Tope. It’s fascinating how, besides Bolanle, we don’t even know the names of these women and that they are simply named after their first-born. Their identities become subsumed into those of their children although this is also true for Baba Segi (father of Segi) but I think that appellation has different implications for women. 

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives seems so light and effortless that you almost forget that the gravity of its subject. You begin reading with an image of the oppression of African women and you conclude the book, surprised at their ingenuity and dynamism. Shoneyin proves her extraordinary skill in the details, in the simplicity of perceptive turns of phrase like when Iya Tope remarks on her first (and last) trip out of her village, “So this was Ibadan – the big city where all our secondhand clothes enjoyed their first outings.” This was a wonderful detour from all the fantasy and science fiction I’ve been reading and a great segue into Nigerian fantasy writer, Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death which I’ve just started reading. 

Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick

Stations of the Tide is set in the distant future on a planet named Miranda, specifically in an area called the Tidewater. Miranda’s three moons exert a tidal force that causes the oceans move with infrequent but catastrophic consequences.  Once in several centuries, the jubilee tide threatens to submerge all land except the Piedmont. In the midst of this disorderly time, an official from the Bureau of Proscribed Technologies is sent to the planet to investigate whether a former off-planet worker brought back some contraband technology.  It’s difficult to understand the crime when we are introduced to it. Only later when the history of Miranda’s and its struggles against its off-planet rulers become clearer do we understand that the planet has been technologically regressed to keep it weak and poor.

The man who the bureaucrat is searching for, Gregorian, is a self-proclaimed wizard. He features on recurring television commercials where (for a price) he claims to morph people into a form that will let them live under the sea, thus beating the tides. The idea of transformation is a recurrent theme in Stations of the Tide and for the residents of Miranda, reflects continuity from the haunts, the indigenous sentient beings who they displaced. The haunts had the ability to change form, to live on land and in water. They were driven to extinction by human colonisation but people continue to believe that they exist in small numbers, clandestinely living in the lands marked by the tide.  The bureaucrat’s challenging quest to find Gregorian isn’t made any easier by the Mirandans who seem to mechanically conspire against outsiders. And there is a deeper question of what Gregorian intends to do and the scope of the assignment progresses beyond merely the retrieval of technology. 

Stations of the Tide was published in 1991, the year that it also won the Nebula Award. In 1992, the book was nominated for the Hugo Award. The novel represents a fascinating, esoteric approach to science fiction. However, it’s challenging to keep up with the plot. I didn’t understand much of the technology. At times, I had no idea what was going on like the bureaucrat’s encounter with Earth’s agent, a giant naked robotic (I think) woman (pretty sure) and then the bureaucrat walks into her mouth and somewhere inside her, they have an odd, hallucinogenic conversation. I liked the concept of the haunts, the extinct native species of the planet but that theme is not followed through perhaps because they were meant to be a red herring. I also found the Tantric sex encounters between the aging bureaucrat and a local ‘witch’ somewhat incongruous. Was it really necessary in the overall scheme of things?  In fact, many allusions and outright references to Hindu themes find their way into Stations of the Tide. Jehovah has no place in a world where ‘Krishna!’ is the script of exclamations.  Moreover, the ideas of transformation, destruction and creating anew sound like they’ve come straight out of dharmic doctrine. 

Aside from the obfuscation that we could have done without, Stations of the Tide is an oddly involving work.

The City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer

Fans of fantasy frequently rate The City of Saints and Madmen at the top of their lists of favourite books from the genre. I started reading it without realizing that it wasn’t a novel. The City of Saints and Madmen is a collection stories, novellas and even a bibliography, an appendix and a glossary about or set in a fictional city called Ambergris, named for the much-desired substance that comes from the stomachs of whales.  The first story, Dradin in Love plunges you into the world of Ambergris without giving you much context. A missionary comes to the city for the first time and falls in love with a woman he spots at a window. He puts his own life at risk with his ridiculous attempts at getting in touch with her end before getting sucked into the madness of the Festival of the Fresh Water Squid. The city, its outlandish customs and bizarre religious institutions astound and confuse.  The glossary (which you ought to refer to throughout the book, instead of reading it at the very end like I did) is informative and descriptive, written in Vandermeer’s characteristic style composed of erudition and flippancy in equally parts. I particularly enjoyed the entry for the Living Saints, possibly inspired by the Stylites and early Christian orders. 

“Living Saints. The long history of the Living Saints predates the Truffidian religion, which embraced the saints for their own purposes. Based on the premise that bodily functions are the most sacred signs of God in human beings, Living Saints endure solitary lives of poverty. There are four orders: the order of Flatulence, the Order of Ejaculation, the Order of Defecations, and the Order of Urination. The saints spend years perfecting their particular speciality and thus honouring “the God that made us mortal” as the scriptures read.”

In case you don’t bother referring to the glossary, the next piece, An Early History of Ambergris fills some of the gaps in your understanding. Written in the style of a historical narrative, it describes how a group of loutish whalers led by a Cappan or chief named John Manzikert flee an adversary up the Moth River and land at an inviting site. This place is already occupied by a wondrous ancient city peopled by the enigmatic Grey Caps, a hominid race whose civilization is based around the cultivation of fungus i.e. the pejorative, mushroom men.  After gaping at the city’s sights for some time, Manzikert and his men massacre the Grey Caps and destroy their monuments in a scene surely inspired by Cortez’s sacking of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan. Manzikert himself disappears into an underground opening, appearing the very next day, blinded and insane but mysteriously silent about what happened to him in the subterranean city of the Grey Caps. Several generations later, the ruling Cappan and his army return from a two week long hunt of the fresh water squid to discover that every living being in the city had disappeared. The Grey Caps, it seems, subscribed to that old adage about revenge.

The anthology contains eclectic illustrations done by a
number of artists. This one portrays a fireworks festival
where participants don masks.

The stories are not chronologically ordered but the Grey Caps make an appearance in almost all of them. It would seem that some sort of truce is worked out between the residents of Ambergris and the mushroom men. In some stories like The Cage, people live with the alarming prospect of being murdered and mutilated for no apparent reason by the indigenes. In other stories set in what would appear to be more contemporary times, the Grey Caps emerge at night to scrounge the roads clean of garbage. The only signs the leave behind are clean streets, red flags and a fungal fecundity. The unfathomable, sinister and lingering presence of the Grey Caps throughout all the stories is an interesting counterweight to the flippancy that dominates most of the book.

My favourite novella was King Squid which best epitomizes Vandermeer’s playful, rambling style.  I suppose the mating habits of squid are fertile ground for whimsical fax-intellectualism.  Vandermeer references implausibly named books like “Squidologist Enoch Sighly’s and Doctor Bernard Povel’s Journey Up the River Moth by Way of Native Canoe and Indigenous Ingenuity, Culminating in a Boat Wreck, a Near Escape, Alcoholism, and Some Unfortunate Negotiations with the Aforementioned Natives.”  The extensive by which I mean truly extensive bibliography that follows this piece contains some snarky commentary.

“Breitenback, Joseph A., Mating Rituals of the Freshwater Squid (Illustrated Edition), Hoegbotton & Sons. (As debauched a book as one is likely to own. Salacious and steamy – complete with hard to follow diagrams.)”

Another is followed by this remark:

“(I include this misshapen and monstrous text only to provide a balanced biography. Not a word of this book, except for some conjunctions and prepositions, contains any truth.)”

Vandermeer is often like a child who is pleased with the quantity of words available at his disposable and with which he can do as he bloody well pleases. In his writing, daughters are “farctated” simply because it is quite possible for them to be farctated. Sometimes, his style results in robust images like “the ruined aqueduct that divided the two sides of the street like the giant fossilized spine of a long, lean shark.” At other times it turns into a game, “Bibble stank of beets. Lake could not get over it. Bibble stank of beets. He had difficulty not saying Bibble imbibes bottled beets beautifully …” In another of the stories, a woman teases her boyfriend for looking like he’d just had a miscarriage.  In response to which, he thinks to himself, “I wonder if there is something wrong with our relationship; it seems as blanks as my life as an orphan. Besides, ‘miscarriage’ is not the appropriate logic leap to describe the looks on my face. Granted, I cannot myself think of the appropriate hoop for this dog of syntax to leap through.”

   In addition to illustrations, there are advertisements,
cartoons, excerpts from fictional works from the fictional
world of Ambergris, artwork and book covers.

A dominant theme across many of these stories is that of the creation becoming the master, the writer transforming into the written. We see this in The Strange Case of X, which lulled me into the complacency of thinking that I was on the ball until that very last sentence jerked me awake. Other characters in the book reiterate this transaction between the writer and the written. The protagonist in The Release of Belacqua proclaims, “Although he would have liked to be a writer, he had always been written.” So much so that in Learning to Leave the Flesh, the creation takes the form of a manta ray that the writer regurgitates. The manta ray lingers on the ceiling behind the writer, feeding him and in turn being fed by him. “He looked up again at the manta ray. He looked up at the little darkness and he said, “You are dark, and all writers have a little darkness inside them, but not all writers have a little darkness outside them? What are you? Who are you?” But the darkness did not answer. The darkness could only writer. And edit. As if it too were a writer.” Vandermeer describes a strange cycle where the writer becomes a character in his own work. To live on, he must write and by writing he sustains the illusion of having become the written. “Being a writer is addictive. Being a writer is an addiction. All those words. The act of writing is addictive. But the writer didn’t feel like a writer anymore. He felt like a drug addict. He felt like a drug addict in constant need of a fix.”

I wouldn’t rate The City of Saints and Madmen as the best work of fantasy that I’ve ever read. But, it is undoubtedly original and intriguing.

Some of the shorter stories from the book are available online. In the Hours After Death is particularly fine.

1. Dradin, In Love
2. The Release of Belacqua
3. In the Hours After Death
4. The Man Who Had No Eyes

The Water Station by Shogo Ohta

I was at Prithvi last night, watching what TimeOut Mumbai highlighted as its theatre pick for the fortnight. The Water Station is a non-verbal play written by Japanese playwright Shogo Ohta. This Indian production was staged by Theatre Roots & Wings, a Kerala based group in collaboration with The Japan Foundation. 

Here’s a synopsis out of the playbill.

“The Water Station is a two-hour, wordless performance. Walking through a barren landscape, eighteen travellers stop by at a dripping water faucet. They drink, soak, meet, love, fight, weep, separate and in the end, leave, while a man living in junk pile observes their action from above. Abounding in images of fragmentation and decay, the play depicts the decline and fall of human civilization. The play is about loneliness, the need for sustenance and the fragility of love.”

The play begins quite abruptly when you spy a woman taking agonizingly slow and measured steps down a ramp which makes up much of the set. Halfway down the ramp is the water station, a metal pipe, a foot and a half tall which ends in one of those taps you see outside temples in Bombay, the kind that look like the wind-up key from the back of an  old clock. From the tap flows a steady trickle of water that falls into a drum set into the floor of the stage. The woman is still making her laconic way down the ramp. The audience hasn’t settled down yet and why should they? The lights are still on them. People continue walking in. The woman has made more progress down the ramp. You can see her more clearly as the spotlight on her grows brighter (or is it that lights on the audience are growing dimmer?), but like all things in this play – agonizingly slowly. She wears an old-fashioned knee length white dress; the sort that you’d expect to see on a turn-of-the-century doll. A satchel is slung around her person and in her left hand, she holds a wickerwork basket. The lights over your head are dimming more rapidly. Your eyes have a hard time readjusting but the momentary blackness you experience is immaterial because the woman on the ramp hasn’t moved much. She makes her way down to the water station. Her contorted foot movements are a weird pastiche of Noh, Zen and a Japanese tea ceremony.  It’s been 10 minutes, maybe even 15 since you began watching her. The audience around you shift uneasily in their seats. Uncomfortable coughs disturb the silence. Well, the near-silence really but the constancy of the trickling water fades after a while. When she finally makes it to the water station, she takes out a mug, fills it and quenches what appears to a deeply repressed thirst.

She moves off and in ones and twos and at times in larger processions, other characters appear and make their way to the water station. Some attempt to make love, others die. They all share an itinerant, hoboish look with layers of overused clothes, rolled beddings and possessions that cling to their backs. Two tramps who come in early on reminded me of Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot. In what is perhaps the only light moment in The Water Station, they inadvertently kiss while trying to slurp water from the tap.  All share a predilection for excruciatingly slow movements (that we may disingenuously term exquisite if performed by Japanese artists but seemingly awkward and graceless by this group) and convoluted facial expressions that generally involve opening the mouth as widely as possible like a stereotypical slow-motion sequence before a timed bomb goes off. 

In the playbill is a note by Otha which articulates his thoughts on silence and loneliness. He tells us that “a cloudy day is, in essence, a light with its mouth closed. Therefore, (Cezanne’s) expression ‘we can see things better on a cloudy day’ leads us to thoughts which utter words that cannot be told by mouths that are free.”  He goes on to say that “silence may be an absolute affirmation in the end, and may possess self-sufficiency” and that the “use of the word ‘silence’ tends to create a special atmosphere that is at once mystic, awesome and meaningful because of its unique distance from reality and the commonplace." Otha claims, “We utter words for about 2 hours a day ... the remaining 22 hours of the day are spent in silence.” He concludes, “We spend 90% of our lives in silence.”  The Water Station is Otha’s attempt at exploring “the depths of the silence that occupies 90% of all our lives.” Noble thoughts and beautiful words but poorly translated on stage. Even the silence Otha promises to explore is not committed to fully. About 20 minutes into the play, we hear the mournful sound of the duduk, a celebrated Armenian wind instrument. I was so surprised at hearing background music that for a moment I thought the music was coming from outside the theatre. Later, we hear a piano piece, then a baroque arrangement (was it Bach?) and even an Egyptian orchestral number.

In Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide which I’ve just finished reading, two characters debate the difference between conjuring and theatre. “Conjuring is like teaching, engineering, or theatre in that it’s a form of data manipulation, a means of making reality do what one desires. Like theatre, however, it is also an art of illusion. Both aim to convince an audience that what is false is so. Meaning heightens this illusion. In a drama meaning is manipulated by the plot, but normally conjuring has no added meaning. It is performed openly as a series of agile distractions. When a context and meaning are provided, the effect changes.”  This spiel was running through my mind as I watched the play.  The absence of context and meaning produce beautiful but empty visual imagery. How I would have loved to take pictures of some of the scenes. The bare-chested man and his lover embracing, half submerged in the tank of the water station while the tap continues to trickle water over their heads. The three erratically and eclectically dressed women holding a clothes line between them. But, it is an illusion and like conjuring has no added meaning. What interpretation we layer on these surreal scenes are formed by the playwright’s own views expressed in that matt brochure
. 

It’s difficult not to conclude that The Water Station wasn’t profound as much as it was pretentious.   

Mysterium by Robert Charles Wilson

A mysterious object is found on an archaeological dig on an arid Anatolian plain. After several American archaeologists working on the site fall sick and die from radiation poisoning, the object is whisked away by the US military and installed in a purpose-built research lab on the outskirts of Two Rivers, a small town in Michigan. The town’s residents are negligibly affected by the military installation which sits on land leased from an impoverished Native American tribe. The lab’s workers hardly come into town and when they do, avoid mixing with the locals. Everyone goes about their own business until one night when a disastrous explosion takes place at the lab. The people of Two Rivers awake the next day to find that things are not as they ought to be. Electricity is cut off and battery operated radios relay radio plays spoken in an English full of peculiar pronunciation and news broadcasts speak of a war in the west with New Spain. More oddly, all roads into the town are cut-off as if sliced by a diamond cutter. Where the roads end, old growth forest begins as does the mystery at the centre of this novel.

Mysterium is an interesting take on the concept of parallel universes mixing speculative science with metaphysics. The world that Two Rivers finds itself transplanted into isn’t all that different from our world but it seems to have deviated from our own history in the early centuries of the Christian era. Much of North America is ruled by a theocratic bilingual Anglo-French republic, almost like a Canada gone mad. The religion of the republic is Gnosticism, a complicated and esoteric form of Christianity with a pantheon of gods, angels and lesser beings. Charity and compassion are foreign words to the Proctors and Censeurs who govern the land in the name of faith with a Stalinist fervour. The republic is also technologically behind our world by many decades. The discovery of Two Rivers poses a bizarre quandary as the Proctors loot its libraries and shops for knowledge and technology while fearing the town’s population for their deviant ways and the town’s very existence, which jeopardizes their religious set-up.  

Wilson’s central theme about the ubiquity of violence, fascist religion and repression is interesting; that the peremptory need to control the thoughts and actions of others is true in this reality as it would be in all other realities. However, the story doesn’t really work as well as it ought to.  I think this could be the result of the clichéd way in which Wilson portrays both villains and collaborators.  One of the proctors reminded me of a nasty clerical character out of a Spanish Inquisition themed sexploitation film. Also, the explanations for the existence of the parallel reality based on Gnostic beliefs seemed for the lack of a better word, lame. What does work is the ominous atmosphere in Two Rivers and the insecurity of its people. If only the author had explored these aspects more thoroughly instead of rushing towards an evasive denouement. 

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter

This is, by far, the most peculiarly written book that I’ve ever read about linguistics. McWorther wants to upend existing notions about the origins of English best represented by that standard encyclopaedic graphic of a wide river and its tributaries. He brands us naive for believing the pleasant story of how a guttural tongue called Anglo-Saxon came under the influence of French after one Monsieur Guillaume conquered English in 1066, transforming the language’s pronunciation and bloating its lexicon, with healthy injections for Latin, Greek and a range of other languages giving rise to the English of today.  His take on it involves far more convoluted, bastard origins.

Much of his argument rests on the underestimated Celtic influence on English.  English comprises very few words (mostly toponyms) of Celtic Brythonic origin i.e. from the Celtic dialects that were spoken in Britain (as opposed modern Celtic languages like Welsh and Scottish Gaelic) before the invasion by Germanic tribesmen. This is surprising because the process of displacing these Celtic languages ought to have resulted in a stronger influence on Anglo-Saxon through assimilation. As a result, most experts believe for whatever reason that English is not at all affected by its Celtic predecessors. McWorther rues this view and offers us an analogy from India where Indic languages contain a Dravidian substratum despite negligible lexical influence. “It’s interesting – the work that argued that Dravidian languages decisively shaped Indo-Aryan grammar is today cherished as sage, classic, and incontrovertible. Yet a very similar argument about Celtic and English is received as quirky, marginal and eternally tentative.” Therefore, McWorther takes up this cause by portraying English as some sort of uppity transvestite; “English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.” He goes on to explain how English sustains the impact of Celtic syntactic structures particularly with what he calls the meaningless “do” (as in Did you reach on time? vs. Had you reached on time? which is the way most European languages including Old English would have expressed it) and the use of the present progressive in the noun form.  These two examples he does to death and to the detriment of his overall argument. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is unexpectedly concise but McWorther rambles (or is it nags?) on and on, often about the same things, perhaps in the hope that repetition would reinforce and convince us of his views. 

McWorther also theorizes that the Viking influence on English facilitated the simplification of its grammar. “To wit, the pathway from Beowulf to The Economist has involved as much transformation in grammar as in words, more so, in fact, than in any of English’s close relatives. English is more peculiar among its relatives, and even the world’s languages as a whole, in what has happened to its grammar than in what has happened to its vocabulary.” I think this idea is valid. When people complain about the complexity (and more often the irregularity) of English grammar, I am always quick to point its relative simplicity when compared with other languages. He also cautious us against celebrating English as the acme of linguistic openness because according to him “throughout the world, languages have been exchanging words rampantly forever. Languages, as it were, like sex.”  He goes on to tell us that there is nothing special about English. “Over half of Japanese words are from Chinese, and never mind how eagerly the language now inhales English words. Almost half of Urdu’s words are Persian and Arabic. Albanian is about 60 percent Greek, Latin, Romanian, Turkish, Serbian and Macedonian, and yet it is not celebrated for being markedly “open” to new words.”  I accept that English is not unique in the way that it has borrowed vocabulary but I think it is relatively more open than other languages (like French) because it’s not policed. We see this most explicitly since the early 20^th century because of socio-economic and technological changes when languages have been under immense pressure to adopt new words to describe things that are foreign to their culture. The Academic Française banned the word e-mail used widely among native French speakers and replaced it with the Gallic sounding “courriel”. Standard Hindi is particularly obnoxious in this respect producing Sanskritised neologisms to avoid incorporating foreign words including lohpath gamini (iron path vehicle) for train and a range of obscure words for computer. I think English has less of an issue adopting foreigners into its standard form.

McWorther also has an opinion about standard English grammar. “Perhaps the contained disorder of an ideal English garden, where it is considered proper to allow certain plants to ramble here and there, certain flowers to spread, drip, dot, dapple. Call them marks of character.” So, he considers the idea of good vs. bad grammar farcical. “English is shot through with things that don’t really follow. I’m the only one, amn’t I? Shouldn’t it be amn’t after all? Aren’t, note, is “wrong” since are is used with you, we and they, not I. There’s no “I are.” Aren’t I? Is thoroughly illogical – and yet if you decided to start saying amn’t all the time, you would lose most of your friends and never get promotions. Except, actually, in parts of Scotland and Ireland where people actually do say amn’t- in which case the rest of us think of them as “quaint” rather than correct!”  

In the rest of the book, McWorther attacks the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which I am quite partial to). This theory proposes that language affects the way we think. McWorther pooh-poohs the whole idea by saying that the “idea that the world’s six thousand languages condition six thousand different pairs of cultural glasses simply does not hold water.” He provides the following example from French to illustrate his opinion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

“Journalist Mark Abley, engaging writer though he is, falls into this trap in his enthusiasm for Whorfianism. In French and many other Western European languages, there are two words for know: savoir means to know a fact; connaître  means to know a person or to be familiar with something. Abley has it that: My language allows me, somewhat clumsily, to get the distinction across: on the one hand, factual knowledge; on the other, acquaintanceship and understanding. But to a French speaker, that distinction is central to how the mind interacts with the world.

 Really? Is Abley really so sure that the difference between knowing the capital of Nebraska and knowing a friend is more immediate to Gérard Depardieu than to Judi Dench? It’s a cute idea, yes—but does Abley actually have any grounds for supposing that it is true?

How does it sound when it’s French that has one word where English has more, and when it isn’t something as immediately evident as the European know verbs? In French, sortir means “go out,” but also covers what English would express with come out (in the earthquake, le tiroir est sorti de la commode, “the drawer came out of the dresser”), get out (someone is in a hole and says, “Sors-moi d’ici!” “Get me out of here!”), and stick out as in one’s tongue (“Sors la langue,” “Stick out your tongue”).

So—are we English speakers more attuned than French speakers to the difference between leaving home, something slipping out of place, being yanked out of a hole, and sticking out our tongues? I would venture that the answer is no. To be a reasoning representative of Homo sapiens is to understand those four processes as radically different, whether or not your language happens to have the same word for them. The same applies to how your language happens to mark knowing.”

I have to admit that he presents a very persuasive argument but I am not convinced. I still think that language alters perception in some way. This idea is gaining currency again after being out of vogue for decades primarily due to the potential for a chauvinistic or xenophobic interpretation. McWorther too sings this tune, “It’s just so wonderful that people who aren’t like us can think and process reality as richly as we do!”  The original hypothesis had many flaws and to suggest that it’s motivated by a sinister need for ranking languages based on their perception of the world is crude and simplistic. I think languages trigger unique emotional responses best summarized in this New York Times article and I feel that McWorther comes across as unprofessional in demonizing the idea in an effort to discredit it. 

Lastly, what I found really peculiar about Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is its language. In a bid to be accessible to the lay reader, McWorther uses a disagreeably conversational style, which informs and annoys in equal parts. I understand his rationale but it was a case of too much of an allegedly good thing. He starts sentences with “but check this out”. The oddest bit is his penchant for what can only be described analogies for the common man.

“Treating scripture as the only valid or interesting evidence in studying how English changed in ancient centuries risks leaving untold forever an interesting chapter in the saga of English. This is especially unsavory in that treating the peculiarity of Modern English as a matter of chance is like walking past cars parked along a street and happening upon one with the windshield broken in, three hubcaps gone, and no license plates, and deciding that all of this must have happened via ordinary wear and tear.

Maybe lightning did in the windshield. The hubcaps could have fallen off of their own accord and been picked up by trash collectors. But what about the other cars sitting intact? Okay, one car up the street is missing one hubcap. Another one has a hairline crack in its back window. But obviously, someone broke into this particularly smashed-up car. Something happened to it. Attention must be paid. We should report this car. Especially since this happens to be a neighborhood well known as a favored haunt of—oh, let’s just toss the analogy and say Vikings!

Those who are uninterested in reporting this car are playing Monopoly, while those who are interested in reporting the attack on it are the ones bringing in a game of Clue and finding little interest. The Monopoly players like Monopoly; Clue just doesn’t happen to be their bag. But as with the Celtic case, the Clue players happen to be in a better position to identify the truth than the ones enjoying Monopoly.

The Monopoly players are, to bring back the car analogy, like municipal photographers assigned to make snapshots of each street in the city every five years. They have no way of explaining why this particular car is so banged up, and really, they don’t care. They have done their job to depict this car’s state from one moment to the next and that’s all. Photographers document—but historians explain.”

For Pete’s sake! We get it. At times, I felt like I was only reading on to discover what new analogies McWorther’d used to illustrate his diatribe.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is an interesting if idiosyncratic work. 

Lost Empire of Atlantis by Gavin Menzies

1421: The Year China Discovered the World topped bestseller lists when it was released.  I confess that I was one of those gullible readers who contributed to its financial success.  I still have the book somewhere at the back of my shelf. The great Chinese eunuch admiral Zheng He’s epic voyages around the Indian Ocean make for the kind of history that excites and electrifies. Menzies takes it one giant step further by postulating that the Chinese also visited Australia, New Zealand, the Americas, Antarctica, pretty much the entire world. He presents all sorts of spurious archaeological evidence as proof for his runaway theories.  You can read all about it at this site – set up wholly to discredit Menzies. A couple of years later, he wrote a sequel to 1421 about how he believed that a Chinese visit to the Mediterranean sparked off the Renaissance. 

Now, he’s back with The Lost Empire of Atlantis. I was curious about what new academically baseless fantasy he was going to expound.  The book starts innocently enough on Crete, once home to an advanced sea-faring civilization people by the Minoans named for the legend of King Minos famed for his labyrinth within which dwelt the Minotaur.  He goes on to talk about the island of Thera, now called Santorini, where a cataclysmic volcanic eruption destroyed much of the island.  Menzies marvels at the culture, trade and technology of the Minoans and makes remarks that beg you to question his intelligence like “That meant that from around 1425 BC there would have been Minoan travellers in Egypt: a pretty staggering idea.” Why is it a staggering idea that a sea-faring trade-based people would visit the nearest landmass to the south of their island?

However, all of this is just an irrelevant build-up. The full blow of his dodgy hypothesis doesn’t hit you till page 136 when he states “My theory that Minoan ships could cross the Atlantic depended on one thing: navigation.”  And here I’d thought that great sea voyages depended on the quality of calico cats on board.  In a nutshell, Menzies would have us believe that Minoans, headquartered on Crete and Santorini, ran an expansive trade empire that stretched from India to the Great Lakes Region of North America.  True to his style, he bases this on spurious evidence.  Much of his theory rests on the quality (not the chemical composition) of copper found in Cretan sites for which he claims North American origins.  “The copper ingot found at Lothal (a Harappan port in Gujarat, India) was of over 99.8 percent purity. The only mines which produced copper of that purity in 2500 BC were the mines of Isle Royale and Lake Superior. Ships must have brought that copper, crossing the Atlantic to do so.”

Interestingly, Menzies spends a lot more time discussing the Minoan connection to India than directly supporting his hypothesis which is approached from the perspective of “BTW, the Minoans were also in America.” Among some scientific material, he cites some strange sources: “The Rough Guide to Kerala has a very good summary that illustrates that lure Kerala would have had for any enterprising foreign traders.”  He often uses superficial similarities in culture to support his arguments.  “By now I was convinced of the Minoan presence in Kerala during the Middle Bronze Age ... There was some interesting evidence of bull-leaping in the annual celebration of ‘Jellikatta’.  However, though bull-leaping appears an odd and unlikely custom, this in itself could be a coincidence. It seems less so when you consider that this is a Hindu society, where cattle are considered holy, objects of veneration. This custom has clear similarities to those in ancient Crete.” Jallikattu is not bull leaping and it has very ancient origins in India pre-dating the veneration of cows, which is a relatively new phenomenon in Hinduism. Besides, many cultures have traditions that involve manhandling cattle.  Menzies then turns his attention to the stone circles of South India. “How strange that a European-style prehistoric ceremonial circle should have been found in Kerala and that it should be so close to the river that I was sure the Minoans had traversed.” Cairns and stone circles are found at Neolithic sites all over the world from Egypt to China. There is nothing European about them. He then presents us with what he believes to be conclusive archaeological proof. “In India, I’d discovered that beautiful rock art carvings and paintings of American bison have been found on the borders of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, near the point where the Periyar River rises. They were dated to the 2^nd millennium BC. I had to ask myself how Keralan (sic) artists of 4000 years ago had any knowledge of American bison.”  I believe Menzies is referring to petroglyphs close to the Edakkal Caves in Wayanad. They are not images of American bison but of gaur or Indian bison who lived and continue to live in the Western Ghats.

The only bits where I’ll give Menzies the benefit of the doubt are alleged representations of New World flora in Indian religious art. I’ve read about this before and it is quite intriguing.  Menzies cites two examples: a statue of a god holding maize from a Hoysala temple in Karnataka and sunflowers at a Jain cave shrine in Udayagiri in Orissa (both of which are supposed to be native to the Americas and couldn't have been known in India until the 17th century). But, these are in no way proof that the Minoans travelled up the Mississippi to the Great Lakes and mined cooper from its shores!

One of Menzies’ favourite expressions is “solid proof or evidence”.  “By now, I was running to catch up. I’d got solid proof that the Minoans had travelled through most of Europe and that they had explored a large part of North America.” He frequently proclaims that he has “solid evidence” for all manner of things when he really only has conjectures and coincidences. I reckon that he shouldn’t have gone the non-fiction route at all. This is delicious material for a work of fantasy or a paperback of the Clive Cussler variety. 

Instant City by Steve Inskeep

When Google Earth first came out, I recall tracing the coast north of Bombay over a multitude of estuaries, farms and factories. On and on, past the ship cemeteries at Alang,  past the island of Diu, past the bleakness of the Rann of Kutch until suddenly my virtual hand hovered over a large city spreading octopus-like from the coast, its tentacles reaching into the barren brown interior.  The perpendicular orderliness of its seaside districts, the rambling chaos of its suburbs and the orthography of its labels told me that this was no Indian city. Political capitals are rarely the urban heart of a nation. The US, China, Australia and India have New York (or maybe LA), Shanghai, Sydney and Bombay respectively. Karachi, Pakistan’s urban heart is a city loaded with preconceptions when seen through Indian eyes. 

Inskeep’s insightful book is a window for the curious into what is often claimed to be Bombay’s Pakistani topoganger. But with the subtitle Life and Death in Karachi, you know you are going to get more than just a walk in the proverbial park. Karachi is an appallingly violent city with ever-increasing bouts of sectarian strife. Inskeep notes that in 1947 when Karachi’s Hindus and Sikhs fled across the line of partition and the city became ostensibly less diverse, it also became more divisive. “In this expressly Islamic state, well over 90 percent of the populace shares the same basic faith, yet throughout Pakistan’s history, as we will see, that surface unity has masked great diversity and deep divisions. The divisions are especially evident in Karachi ...”

Inskeep attempts to pivot his narrative around a series of blasts on a single day in Karachi. On December 28, 2009, a bomb exploded during an Ashura procession by the Shia minority of the city followed by blasts at other places including a hospital. The suspicious riots that followed the blast seemed less oriented towards revenge and more towards clearing out retail occupants from valuable downtown property. This sets the tone for the remainder of Instant City, exploring Karachi’s history and the events over the last six decades which have led to the political-criminal-sectarian stranglehold over a city that was once supposed to be among the most pleasant in British India. 

Karachi’s growth from just 400,000 in 1947 to over 14 million today makes it a perfect candidate for the label instant city but it is by no means the only one.  Inskeep too draws a comparison with Bombay. “There are also divides between instant cities. Karachi residents know it, and feel it. It pains them. Mumbai has some of the same problems as Karachi, but it is seen as a city on the rise. Karachi has some of the same advantages as Mumbai, but is seen as a city in crisis.”  I don’t see Bombay as an instant city in the same vein as Karachi. Bombay already had a population of 4 million in 1947. And Bombay, despite its diversity, is a poor representation of middle India whereas Karachi seems the perfect microcosm of Pakistan. So much so, that Inskeep can’t refer to the city’s past without talking about the history of Pakistan. 

I found it interesting that the problems shared by the poor and disenfranchised and the lifestyles of the rich are the same across the developing world regardless of nationality.  It’s great to see that Karachi has brave and committed people who work towards protecting its parks and civic spaces although sometimes paying for this passion with their lives. Others whimsically encourage communities to dig their own sewage lines instead of waiting listlessly for the city to provide utilities and infrastructure. What makes Karachi’s problems unique is the extent of corruption and political malaise in Pakistan, even by the standards of those at the bottom of the corruption stats.

However, Inskeep’s initial promise of tying everything in the book to that one day in December fizzles out in execution. He does return periodically to the Ashura bombing but this makes the book choppy and discordant rather than lending is some sort of unifying theme. Inskeep rambles but these deviations are interesting and relevant enough that they don’t detract from the book’s key message about the nature of instant cities.  I also notice, not just in Instant City, but across a lot of different kinds of writing, the tendency to avoid directly criticising Islam while commenting about some aspect of its practice or culture. Usually, this takes the form of a negative observation followed by a positive affirmation about the religion. Inskeep is no exception to this quirk: “He wanted to follow a Muslim ideal of according  full respect to non-Muslims (the implication here is of course the reverse), an ideal that is as old as Islam itself.” Why tag on that skewed aside at the end? Clearly, that’s not something the interviewee said. I feel like there is pressure on writers to portray the religion as peaceful, tolerant and blameless to balance out incidents that show how its followers demonstrate just the opposite. It smacks of something between self-censorship and trying very hard to prove the existence of fraternity and goodness. The number of times Inskeep used “the Hindu temple of Shiva and the shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi” in the same sentence was emblematic of the grasping of the straws I perceived with respect to pushing the case for something that may have been true in the past but no longer is. 

On the whole though, Instant City is a curiosity quenching account of our neighbour’s largest and most intriguing metropolis. 

Cesária Évora

Last year, I blogged about how I was in love with a Morna singer from a tiny archipelago off the coast of North Africa. Cesária Évora died yesterday on Sao Vicente, the island she grew up on, in Cape Verde. She was 70. No singer better exemplifies the universality of music. She sang mostly in Portuguese and very occasionally in Spanish or French and yet her remarkable voice evoked something profound in me. The French called her la diva aux pieds nus - the barefoot diva because she always sang without shoes. Cesária had a difficult life, growing up in an orphanage and scrounging a living by singing in bars to sailors and on passing ships. She was only "discovered" in the 80s. And what a discovery it was - a voice that can melt a hardened heart. Fame brought her some financial security but no relief from a constant battle with alcoholism.  

When I listen to my Évora favourites - Besame mucho, Sodade or Petit pays, I am transformed into someone else. It's not about escape from the real world. Her voice drips with far too much pain for that. Instead, Cesária's music empowers you to stand outside yourself for just a moment and recognize that love, life and suffering are too tightly woven together to beat yourself up every time you trip. 

Sweet dreams my silver-tongued angel. Obrigado por tudo.

Cesária Évora

(1941 - 2011) 

The Affinity Bridge by George Mann

 The Affinity Bridge has been on my wish list ever since I fell in love with all things steampunkish. The first tome in the Newbury-Hobbes investigations was billed as a Victorian steampunk mystery. What could possibly be more interesting than a sub-genre within a sub-genre? In my quest for steampunk stuff, I found this ring at Lady Ghagra, run by a pair of Ahmedabad based jewellery designers. At first glance, the ring seemed incredibly ingenious and cool.  Later, I thought it bulky and bland - sentiments I could echo about The Affinity Bridge. 

The plot plays out in a steampunk version of Victorian London.  The airship is the principal form of long-distance transportation and cobble stone roads are shared by horse drawn carriages and steam powered automobiles. Queen Victoria continues to reign albeit with her life extended on an eerie gothic-industrial avatar of a life support system. Sir Maurice Newbury, a dashing and worldly Victorian gent, is charged with investigating paranormal cases for the crown. When we are introduced to Newbury, he is preoccupied with a spate of murders in London’s East End attributed to a ghostly policeman who glows blue like a smurf on LSD.  London’s also experiencing a plague that (predictably) turns the infected into zombies.  However, the crash of an airship under unusual circumstances results in a diktat from Buckingham Palace which compels him to put his glowing policeman investigation on the backburner, although the law of convergence in mysteries dictates (predictably) that the two cases are branches of the same tree.  He has help from his newly recruited assistant, Veronica Hobbes.  A Victorian lady sidekick?  The things people do to achieve PCness!  I see nothing wrong with correcting historical under-representation of women and minorities. But, why inject one character with feminist Botox when you deemed it appropriate to leave everyone and everything else in the novel wallowing in oppressive Victorian parochialism.

Where faux-Victorian language worked notably for Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Mann’s attempt comes off as a try-hard Doyle wannabe. I reckon the novel would have read better if Mann had separated the narrator from his characters. It’s one thing to have your protagonist spout sycophantic and cringe-worthy dialogue and it’s quite another to have your narrator proclaim garbage like “Newbury had visited Buckingham Palace on numerous occasions over the last few years, yet the grandeur of the place never failed to take his breath away. He was awed by the spectacle of it; looming out of the grey, fog-shrouded morning, its towering facade was an imposing sight, a symbol of Her Majesty’s might rendered in stone for the entire world to see.”  Awed by the spectacle of the ugliest palace in Britain, surely not? Even tiny Holyrood House is more impressive.

The characters themselves are poorly developed, one-dimensional 19^th century caricatures (save Ms. Hobbes, a silly attempt at correcting gender imbalance only to have the woman play second fiddle to the inscrutable Sir Maurice).  Sir Maurice is grievously injured on multiple occasions but fights on scene after scene like a moustached Tamil matinee idol.  And zombies ... you thought you could get away with it by calling them revenants but a zombie by any other name smells just as revolting.  And most odiously, the book (not just the characters, mind you) reeks of an anti-science bias, with a wicked scientist as the villain. “And with genius comes a certain amorality that is difficult to judge” we are told.  It seems that some prejudices don’t die so easily.

The Affinity Bridge is at best run of the mill although a deeper reading may reveal the extent of its absurdity. 

The Golden Acorn by Catherine Cooper

After his mother dies, Jack Brenin moves in with his grandfather who lives in a rural corner of England. He misses his friends and life back in Greece where he'd lived his parents. The village boys are mean to him and don't let him play football with them. It looks like Jack's stuck in a prepubescent rut, that is until he finds something peculiar. In the woods near his home, he discovers a golden acorn. A chance encounter with the village madwoman - Nutty Nora - puts him at the centre of a prophecy where the task of opening a portal to another world is entrusted to him. Jack seriously doubts that he's 'the one' that Nora and her niece Elan keep referring to. He's small and not very brave. But, with some help from his new friends including a ravenous (literally) talking raven named Camelin, Jack attempts to open the portal and save the last dryads in what might be the only remaining sacred grove in Britain. But, to do that, Jack and Camelin must travel back in time to Roman Britain to discover what happened to three special artifacts. 

The Golden Acorn is an earnest and charming diversion. Inspired by Celtic mythology, it has all the ingredients that children will enjoy and a central character who they might strongly identify with. The story also implies an environmental message. Fantastical species such as talking rat guards, tunneling spriggans and a covetous gnome-like race remind you of old picture books rather than novels in the same genre for young readers. I have never quite understood, however, why children's authors play up the victimization card. Do young readers only empathise with a character when he or she is maltreated?

Celtic themes dominate The Golden Acorn and where you have Celts, you must have druids. Camelin, the talking raven, alludes to the massacre on Mona on several occasions. The Roman administrators perceived the druids as a threat to their rule. To escape persecution, the druids fled to the sacred island of Mona (now the Isle of Anglesey in Wales) where they believed themselves immune from attack. But, attack they did. Here's an account from the Roman historian Tacitus:

"He prepared to attack the island of Mona which had a powerful population and was a refuge for fugitives. He built flat-bottomed vessels to cope with the shallows, and uncertain depths of the sea. Thus the infantry crossed, while the cavalry followed by fording, or, where the water was deep, swam by the side of their horses. On the shore stood the opposing army with its dense array of armed warriors, while between the ranks dashed women, in black attire like the Furies, with hair dishevelled, waving brands. All around, the Druids, lifting up their hands to heaven, and pouring forth dreadful imprecations, scared our soldiers by the unfamiliar sight, so that, as if their limbs were paralysed, they stood motionless, and exposed to wounds. Then urged by their general's appeals and mutual encouragements not to quail before a troop of frenzied women, they bore the standards onwards, smote down all resistance, and wrapped the foe in the flames of his own brands. A force was next set over the conquered, and their groves, devoted to inhuman superstitions, were destroyed. They deemed it indeed a duty to cover their altars with the blood of captives and to consult their deities through human entrails."

Sounds like ancient propaganda. The Golden Acorn references the correlation between the Menai Massacre as the slaughter of druids is known and the uprising by the Celtic queen Boudicca. I didn't even know that the two events took place in the same time frame. Apparently, with Roman military attention diverted to Mona, Boudicca of the Iceni, seized the chance to wreak vengeance and began her murderous rampage which culiminated in the burning of Londoninum (London) to the ground. Strange, how a children's book can you teach a lesson out of Tacitus.

Cooper is the first recipient of  the Brit Writers' Unpublished Writer of the Year in 2010 for The Golden Acorn. Well-deserved although the award itself is oddly named.