Books

Writer to Watch: Diana Souhami

/ Carolyn O / 7 Comments

photo (19)Diana Souhami is a debut novelist, but her twelve previously published works of nonfiction arrived to critical acclaim (she has won both the Whitbread Biography Award and the Lambda Literary Award). Given the talent and ambition she shows in her first novel, Gwendolen*, I suspect we’ll be seeing more of Ms. Souhami’s fiction.

First, the ambition: Gwendolen is a re-telling and expansion of George Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda (as you can see in the very clever cover design, the original nineteenth-century cover has been altered). It’s quite a task to take on the formidable Eliot, but Daniel Deronda is perhaps ripe for such interpretations; some critics of the novel thought it could do without Gwendolen Harleth, and some thought that Gwendolen was worthy of her own novel.

That’s what Ms. Souhami gives us. The first two-thirds of Gwendolen recount the events of Daniel Deronda from Gwendolen’s intimate perspective, in the form of a very long letter written to Deronda, but never sent. Gwendolen is beautiful, but self-centered and insensible to the ways of the world:

And so it began: life-changing decisions made by sudden inclinations, vanity, and rash daring. [ … ] I did not stop to consider what it meant truly to know another person or myself. I knew nothing of the world beyond the drawing rooms of Pennicote and the bewildering nowhere places of my childhood travels: nothing of the war in America, the struggles of the suffragists, the suffering of the workhouse, the customs and mores of other societies. And nothing whatsoever of the motivations of men or of the qualities that might matter, beyond chandeliers, paddocks, and diamonds, when choosing a husband. (50)

Gwendolen explains the dire financial straits and over-reliance on her considerable beauty  that led her to marry Grandcourt, a rich but cruel man whom she did not love and whom she knew to be involved with another woman (a longtime mistress with four children). The moral depredations of Grandcourt that Daniel Deronda hints at are fully revealed in Gwendolen.

The remaining chapters of the novel explore what Gwendolen’s life is like after the events of Daniel Deronda, and it is here that Ms. Souhami’s talents are put to best use. While the first two parts of the book are close in spirit to Eliot’s work, they are not satisfyingly different enough from the original. However, when exploring the changes in Gwendolen’s material circumstances and emotional states in her new life, I found myself eager to learn more about Ms. Souhami’s new characters, like the circus performer Julian/Juliette, the painter Paul LeRoy (based on a real person), and the group of suffragists Gwendolen befriends.

I was thrown off by the inclusion of Mrs. Lewes (George Eliot) as a character known to Gwendolen; it didn’t quite work, especially since Eliot’s uncanny knowledge about Gwendolen’s private affairs is never explained. And the notes about real people slipped into the tone of biography, instead of remaining in Gwendolen’s distinctive voice. I wanted the novel to explore Gwendolen’s relationship with her four stepsisters in greater depth instead.

Alas, this last section is far too brief, and doesn’t bloom as it could have, had the proportions of the plot been reversed. However, Ms. Souhami’s talent for sketching lively characters and period settings and her way of framing classic literature to allow readers to think about the social systems of the present ensures my willingness to read her next novel when it appears.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes, which did not affect the content of my review.

Recommended Reading: “The Kingfisher” and The Kingfisher, by Amy Clampitt

/ Carolyn O / 8 Comments

IThe Kingfisher on the couch picked up Amy Clampitt’s The Kingfisher at a used bookstore in Central Square sometime in January. It’s a gorgeous book in more ways than one; originally published in 1983, my copy is from the eighth printing in 1989, and it’s pristine. Heavy, unyellowed paper, gorgeous design. Well done, Knopf.

I came to the book knowing nothing about Amy Clampitt, but it was an utterly delectable reading experience; Clampitt’s facility with aural language reminded me of the fun I had reading Hailey Leithauser’s Swoop last year. (More on the language in a moment.)

As I read, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard more about this wonderful poet, and once I did a bit of research, I started to see why: born in 1920, Amy Clampitt died in 1994. The Kingfisher was her first major book, and remains her most famous.

My favorite poems in the book are those that appear first, largely set along the rocky Maine coastline (of which I am quite fond), but all six of the book’s wide-ranging sections are spectacular. The poems are erudite without being condescending (the poet provides notes after the text), controlled but bursting with language’s multitudinous possibilities. In these pages whales are “basking reservoirs of fuel” (116) and a poem about the Dakota hotel finds the speaker telling us “Grief / is original, but it / repeats itself: there’s nothing / more original it can do.”

Here are some lines from “The Cove”:

Where at low tide the rocks, like the
back of an old sheepdog or spaniel, are
rugg’d with wet seaweed, the cove
embays a pavement of ocean, at times
wrinkling like tinfoil, at others
all isinglass flakes, or sun-pounded
gritty glitter of mica; or hanging
intact, a curtain wall just frescoed
indigo, so immense a hue, a blue
of such majesty it can’t be looked at,
at whose apex there pulses, even
in daylight, a lighthouse, lightpierced
like a needle’s eye.

Stunning, yes?

The only other writer I’ve come across in the last half decade with Amy Clampitt’s command of English vocabulary is A.S. Byatt (who, by the way, Clampitt mentions in this fascinating interview with the Paris Review, which I highly recommend; unsurprisingly, she had great taste in poetry and fiction—she names Alice Munro as her favorite contemporary fiction writer 20 years before Ms. Munro won the Nobel). If (and I hope when) you pick up The Kingfisher, you’ll want a dictionary close at hand for words like these:

  • repoussé
  • pannicled
  • plissé
  • chrysoprase
  • grisaille
  • bizarrerie
  • catalpa
  • peplos
  • aconite
  • sozzled
  • gasconades
  • traghetto
  • curveting
  • loess
  • clepsydra
  • maguey

I could go on. At length.

I was enchanted by The Kingfisher—you can read the title poem here—and I hope you’ll let me know if you read it so we can compare notes, and maybe word lists.

Recommended Reading: Dead Wake, by Erik Larson

/ Carolyn O / 14 Comments
"Enlist" poster by Fred Spear Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, WWI Posters, LC-USZC4-1129

“Enlist” poster by Fred Spear
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, WWI Posters, LC-USZC4-1129

This May will mark 100 years since the Lusitania, a Liverpool-bound British passenger liner, was torpedoed by a German U-boat and sank off the coast of Ireland, killing nearly 1200 people on board. While the United States did not enter World War I until 1917, when unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmerman telegram had finally swayed public opinion against neutrality, the 1915 tragedy was still fresh in American minds, and a century later questions still remain about the sinking.

Erik Larson’s Dead Wake* is the meticulously researched tale of the Lusitania‘s final voyage, focusing on the ship, its passengers, the U-boat that sank it, Woodrow Wilson, and a top-secret British intelligence unit that could have saved the ship.

It’s also a fascinating portrait of 1915 America—its attitudes, tastes, movements, styles of dress, and even writing peculiarities (I was struck by the description of the Arts and Crafts movement, which sounds very similar to the DIY/maker culture that’s floating about today [for parodies, see Portlandia]).

photo (18)Mr. Larson follows several passengers throughout the voyage, including Charles Lauriat, a famous Boston bookseller who was transporting priceless works by Thackeray and Dickens to England; a pair of brothers who joined the Lusitania’s crew at the last minute; Theodate Pope, spiritualist and architect; and families with young children. The Lusitania sailed with an unusual number of children aboard, which makes the account of the torpedoing, sinking, and rescue effort particularly difficult to read, since so many children were killed (of thirty-one infants aboard, only six survived). Some parents were separated from their children, and entire families fell together to the bottom of the sea.

The direct responsibility for this horrible event rests squarely on the shoulders of the U-20’s commander, Walther Schweiger (who had once fired on a marked hospital ship), but Mr. Larson makes the case for other indirect causes of the disaster. A delayed departure, fog, conflicting messages sent to the Lusitania‘s captain, orders that the ship shouldn’t run at top speed—all of these played some role in setting the ship in Schweiger’s path.

And that path was being tracked by British intelligence, though they did not share information with Cunard that could have prevented the sinking—but why? Mr. Larson’s suggestions are intriguing.

The book only falters, in my opinion, in its over-focus on Woodrow Wilson. While Mr. Larson shows how hard Wilson was working to keep the country out of the war (Wilson’s strongly-worded notes to the Kaiser after the sinking were the target of Onion-like satire, and the political parallels with the present day are hard to miss, especially given Wilson’s fondness for golf), I was often taken out of the story’s grip when the book detoured into Wilson’s relationship with Edith Bolling; I felt that story belonged in another book. Wilson’s political maneuverings and diplomatic philosophy could have been more strongly juxtaposed against those of Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty when Lusitania sank. I would have liked to see more focus on Churchill, as well.

Dead Wake is well-written and suspenseful, even though the outcome of the sailing is a foregone conclusion. I found it hard to put down, and I’m happy to have had the opportunity to read one of Mr. Larson’s books.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes, which did not affect the content of my review.

Recommended Reading: The Evening Chorus by Helen Humphreys

/ Carolyn O / 14 Comments

photo (17)The Evening Chorus*, by Helen Humphreys, is a quiet gem of a book. Ms. Humphreys is an accomplished Canadian poet and novelist, and I honestly can’t believe that this is the first book of hers I’m reading. It won’t be the last.

The Evening Chorus follows three people: James Hunter, a British pilot confined to a German prisoner-of-war camp when the book opens; his new and young wife Rose, living in their cottage at the edge of Ashdown Forest; and Enid, James’s sister, who comes to stay with Rose after her London flat is destroyed in the bombing of the city. James’s story is the frame and the touchstone (which honestly makes the book’s US cover annoying, too generic and too specific all at once; the Canadian cover is a better representation of the book).

The novel follows James, Rose, and Enid in turn, though of course they’re all connected, not only by their family ties, but by their appreciation of the natural world. James passes his days in the camp by taking up the study of a family of birds, while Rose learns to love her walks as an air raid warden with only the company of her dog. And Enid, brought low by loss, finds solace in undertaking a study of the heath and forest near Rose’s cottage.

Ms. Humphreys’s writing makes me want to use words like “limpid” and “spare” and “lyrical.” Her language is clear, building images and characters deftly and with a supreme sense of balance. When revelations appear, as they must in a story, they’re not shocking twists, but rather forks in a path that you haven’t noticed being built beneath your feet.

Here’s one passage that I particularly liked:

The minutiae of Ashdown Forest are more interesting than she first assumed. Every little flower has a history and cultural references , is a superstition or a cure for something. Everything in its own world, and if Enid stays there, in these worlds, she won’t have to break the surface of the large, terrifying world she actually lives in (150).

It’s the same impulse that leads her brother to study his family of redstarts, though the realities of imprisonment are naturally less avoidable than Enid’s realities are for her. I appreciated the details of  the POW camp that Ms. Humphreys provides, the portraits of the men passing time and fighting boredom, cold, and filth by finding their own projects: gardening, bird-watching, escaping. While life in a place governed by the Geneva Conventions—even marginally—is nothing at all like the horrors of the death camps, it is frightening, and the men deal with it in their own ways. James’s redstarts are a way for him to make sense of his new world, because he is there, as another prisoner puts it, “for the duration.”

And making sense of the world, in all its cruelty and its flashes of beauty, is the subject of The Evening Chorus. James, Rose, and Enid, with their different paths and personalities, live and grieve through the lens of the natural world, even when they feel removed from it, and from each other.

This is a beautiful, affecting novel, and I highly recommend it.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes, which did not affect the content of my review.

Recommended Reading: Making Nice, by Matt Sumell

/ Carolyn O / 6 Comments

photo (14)When I finished Making Nice*, Matt Sumell’s debut novel-in-stories, I couldn’t stop thinking of it as a bildungsroman, even though the narrator, Alby, is about thirty.

I think that’s because we can come of age not once, but at least three times: when we physically and, to some extent, emotionally “grow up” (the fodder for the archetypal bildungsroman, like Great Expectations or Jane Eyre), when we meet our own children, and when our parents die.

This last sense is speculation on my part, for which I am very grateful, but I can imagine the jarring sense of being alone in the adult world that would accompany the grief over a parent’s death.

Making Nice is about how Alby deals with his mother’s death from cancer—not very well, it turns out—but at the same time, it’s about his whole life, his family, his environment, and his choices. It’s a bruising account of that final and terrible kind of growing up.

On paper, Alby is not a sympathetic character: he drinks to violent excess, he steals pain medication not meant for him, he fights, he’s often contemptuous and belligerent toward women. He’s prone to egregious lapses in impulse control.

However, in Mr. Sumell’s capable hands, he is very much a whole person: studded with flaws more visible than most people’s, but a man of blistering emotions who demonstrates a profound capacity for empathy. The book’s structure—linked stories—is ideally suited to conveying the complexities of Alby’s character. Rage and humor sit uncomfortably close to one another, and the result is great writing, even if it’s sometimes difficult to read. This is a compassionate, humane book, and I recommend it.

(The Paris Review, which published one of the stories now included in Making Nice, has a fascinating interview with Matt Sumell that explores some of the novel’s autobiographical aspects.)

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration, which did not affect the content of my review.

Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: Ben Jonson’s “Inviting a Friend to Supper”

/ Carolyn O / 9 Comments
Sideways jellyfish icicle from the front window.

Sideways jellyfish icicle from the front window.

Unpleasant weather continues here in Boston (this weekend delivered the trifecta of snow, rain, and ice), and even hardened and hardy New Englanders agree that the last few weeks have been miserable. We’ve been staying put most weekends, venturing out for groceries and then settling in between bouts of shoveling.

Luckily, friends, like sunshine, have made brief but welcome appearances, and so in honor of friends who come to dinner, this week’s poem is Ben Jonson’s “Inviting a Friend to Supper.”

Jonson addresses his patron, William Herbert, with what I’d call a tone of amused deference. The feast he describes is quite something, even for a man of Jonson’s epicurean appetites: capers, olives, mutton, chicken, larks, other kinds of available fowl, a bit of salad, lemons, and, most importantly,

a pure cup of rich Canary wine,
Which is the Mermaid’s now, but shall be mine;
Of which had Horace, or Anacreon tasted,
Their lives, as so their lines, till now had lasted.
Tobacco, nectar, or the Thespian spring,
Are all but Luther’s beer to this I sing.

Hilarious (the Mermaid was a tavern, by the way). I’d like to try wine that good.

Now, our friendly dinners are never so grand or so well-appointed, and the wine has never been compared the Thespian spring, but the company, I’ll venture to say, is even better than William Herbert’s, and we are more grateful for our friends than Jonson was for Canary wine.

Ben Jonson
Inviting a Friend to Supper

Tonight, grave Sir, both my poor house, and I
Do equally desire your company;
Not that we think us worthy such a guest,
But that your worth will dignify our feast
With those that come, whose grace may make that seem
Something, which else could hope for no esteem.
It is the fair acceptance, Sir, creates
The entertainment perfect, not the cates.
Yet shall you have, to rectify your palate,
An olive, capers, or some better salad
Ushering the mutton; with a short-legged hen,
If we can get her, full of eggs, and then
Lemons, and wine for sauce; to these a cony
Is not to be despaired of, for our money;
And, though fowl, now, be scarce, yet there are clerks,
The sky not falling, think we may have larks.
I’ll tell you of more, and lie, so you will come:
Of partridge, pheasant, woodcock, of which some
May yet be there, and godwit, if we can;
Knat, rail, and ruff too. Howsoe’er, my man
Shall read a piece of Virgil, Tacitus,
Livy, or of some better book to us,
Of which we’ll speak our minds, amidst our meat;
And I’ll profess no verses to repeat.
To this, if ought appear which I not know of,
That will the pastry, not my paper, show of.
Digestive cheese and fruit there sure will be;
But that which most doth take my Muse and me,
Is a pure cup of rich Canary wine,
Which is the Mermaid’s now, but shall be mine;
Of which had Horace, or Anacreon tasted,
Their lives, as so their lines, till now had lasted.
Tobacco, nectar, or the Thespian spring,
Are all but Luther’s beer to this I sing.
Of this we will sup free, but moderately,
And we will have no Pooley, or Parrot by,
Nor shall our cups make any guilty men;
But, at our parting we will be as when
We innocently met. No simple word
That shall be uttered at our mirthful board,
Shall make us sad next morning or affright
The liberty that we’ll enjoy tonight.

Recommended Reading: The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

/ Carolyn O / 12 Comments

photo (12)Last year, when I was reading Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water, I came across the phrase “Finnish weird,” which is an umbrella term that encompasses the speculative fiction that’s been coming out of Finland for the last couple of decades.

The Rabbit Back Literature Society* is definitely Finnish, and definitely weird, so I’m going to go ahead and say it’s Finnish weird. Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen’s novel is set in contemporary Finland, in the small town of Rabbit Back. The town is known primarily as the home of the famous children’s writer Laura White and her Rabbit Back Literature society, a club of nine children whom she trained as writers and who went on to become some of Finland’s most important and popular authors.

Ella Milana is a young substitute literature teacher in Rabbit Back, living with her mother and dementia-ridden father. After a short story of hers is published in the town paper, she receives an invitation to join the Rabbit Back Literature Society as its tenth member—an honor, as far as anyone knows, that hasn’t been conferred in the society’s long history.

On the day she is to meet Laura White, however, something very strange indeed happens, and Ella falls down the rabbit hole, so to speak.

One of the jacket blurbs compares this book to Twin Peaks and The Secret History, and those are pretty good comparisons, up to a point. Rabbit Back is populated by strange small-town souls and subject to peculiar quirks, like gnome infestations and an epidemic of stray dogs. The members of Ella’s new society play a very strange game that one player describes as “psychic strip poker around a glass table” (181). And there’s a plague infecting books, leading Sonja to murder Raskolnikov, for example, in the copy of Crime and Punishment that Ella confiscates from a student.

I loved the weirdness of this book, the little and large strangenesses, but the novel as a whole does have some limitations (some might be due to the fact that it’s a work in translation). Some phrases repeat without a strong reason to be repetitive, and I caught one editing error (“phased” instead of “fazed”). The ending isn’t neat, which didn’t bother me, but might annoy some readers who like all the answers, or at least a good sense that the answers they come up with are quite possibly correct. And the sexuality in the book tends toward the creepy (with a notable exception at the very end of the book, which I thought was really interesting and good) and uncomfortable, which didn’t quite mesh with the book’s atmospheric weirdness.

Still, if library book theft gets your heart pounding or if you often wonder where your favorite authors get their ideas, you might just love The Rabbit Back Literature Society.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes, which did not affect the content of my review.

Recommended Reading: Excellent Women, by Barbara Pym

/ Carolyn O / 4 Comments

photo (9)A few days ago, one of my very best friends and I talked a little about Philip Larkin, the dean of depressed and depressing (though wonderful) twentieth century poets. While I’ll be happy to revisit Larkin soon, the conversation reminded me of a book I’ve been meaning to review for months: Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women.

You see, Barbara Pym wrote a string of successful novels during the 1950s and early 1960s, including Excellent Women (1952), and then her career came to a standstill. Her publisher, and others, rejected all her manuscripts, declaring them too old-fashioned.

In 1977, however, Philip Larkin and David Cecil (a prominent historian) named her the most underrated writer of the century, and she catapulted back into broader recognition.

It’s recognition I didn’t share, I regret to say; I’d never heard of Barbara Pym until I was browsing through Classics Club lists in 2013 as I put together my own. She kept popping up, and then I found a copy of Excellent Women at a used bookstore in western Massachusetts, and that is the long and short story of how I came to read it.

Set in what was then contemporary post-war London, Excellent Women is the tale of Mildred Lathbury (excellent name, isn’t it?), an unmarried woman living in a flat. Like other “excellent women,” she keeps an eye on her neighbors and the local curate, and the affairs of her small social circle take up much of her time.

I suppose an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties, must expect herself involved or interested in other people’s business, and if she is also a clergyman’s daughter then one might really say that there is no hope for her. (3)

If you’re hearing bells that peal “Jane Austen” now, I’m not surprised; this novel is full of subtle and barbed social commentary, its heroine an Elinor Dashwood figure with no Edward Ferrars on the horizon, and no Marianne to fuss over.

The plot, which involves the disintegrating marriage of a neighboring anthropologist and her rakish husband, a highly suspicious widow with her sights set on a vicar, jumble sales, unsuitable matches, and many cups of tea, is really not so important as the characters and Mildred’s observations, which are simply a treat to read. Here are some of my favorites:

‘Now Julian, we don’t want a sermon,’ said Winifred. ‘You know Mildred would never do anything wrong or foolish.’
I reflected a little sadly that this was only too true and hoped I did not appear too much that kind of person to others. Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing. (44)

On the bus I began thinking that William had been right and I was annoyed to have to admit it. Mimosa did lose its freshness too quickly to be worth buying and I must not allow myself to have feelings, but must only observe the effects of other people’s. (76)

I was so astonished that I could think of nothing to say, but wondered irrelevantly if I was to be caught with a teapot in my hand on every dramatic occasion. (205)

And finally, of excellent women themselves, Mildred says,

‘They are for being unmarried,’ I said, ‘and by that I mean a positive rather than a negative state.’
‘Poor things, aren’t they allowed to have the normal feelings, then?’
‘Oh, yes, but nothing can be done about them.’

One gets the feeling that Mildred was fond of Jane Austen.

By the way, I suspect that a book that’s coming out later this spring (I haven’t read it) would be very interesting to read alongside Excellent Women. It’s called Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, by Katie Bolick.

I’d certainly like to read another of Barbara Pym’s novels, and I’d be delighted if you could recommend one to me.

Recent Reads

/ Carolyn O / 7 Comments

photo (7)The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac*, by Sharma Shields, is an eccentric book, bildungsroman meets family saga meets magical realism meets domestic divorce drama. Once I got past the first two chapters, the book was tough to put down; I loved the way Ms. Shields broke up the text, noting the year before each section; it helped this multi-generational story to move along quickly. The plot follows Eli Roebuck and his family as Eli searches for the Sasquatch his mother abandoned him for when he was a boy. As it turns out, Eli isn’t the only person in his family who sees mythical creatures. Recommended if you’re interested in a lighter, more domestic Neil Gaiman-esque book.

*I received this book through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program, which did not affect the content of my review.

 

photo 2 (1)The Girl on the Train*, by Paula Hawkins, came packaged as the swankiest galley I’ve ever seen. It’s been billed as this year’s Gone Girl, and it is a psychological thriller featuring a missing woman and multiple perspectives, but that’s really as far as the comparison goes. It’s a page turner since Ms. Hawkins has mastered the art of doling out relevant information, but I had the main mystery figured out about a third of the way through the book. The plot: Rachel takes the same train every weekday, and has noticed a particular couple on the route; she goes so far as to imagine lives, names, and personalities for the pair. Then the woman disappears, and Rachel thinks she has information about the case, which leads her deeper and deeper into the lives of strangers, and her own.

photo 1 (1)Recommended for commute reading.

*I received a galley of this book from the publisher for review purposes, which did not affect the content of my review.

Recommended Reading: Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie

/ Carolyn O / 11 Comments

Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice has won essentially every sci-fi award available–and justifiably so. It’s one of the best sci-fi books I’ve ever read, an intelligent, gripping tour-de-force that demands and rewards the reader’s undivided attention.

photo (5)I’m going to say almost nothing about the plot because I’m hoping you’ll read this book and I want you to get the most out of the experience. In brief, two stories run side by side.

Breq is the sole survivor of a twenty-year-old disaster. She’s out for justice, or maybe revenge, but a figure from an even more distant past might complicate things.

The Justice of Toren is an enormous starship, its artificial intelligence nearly omniscient and able to “be” in many places at once, both on the ship and off. The ship serves the Radch, a human empire that has been conquering the galaxy, but Justice of Toren’s mission is one of the last of its kind, and something’s afoot that’s resisting its analysis.

This book is so smart, so original, so interesting. What’s been getting the most play is Ms. Leckie’s take on gender; the Radch do not recognize gender at all, so the only pronouns in use are female. Every character is “she”; it’s jarring at first, and I found myself, ardent feminist though I am, analyzing characters for hints of their “actual” gender, when of course no such “actual” gender exists in the world of the novel. I suspect Ms. Leckie knew readers would do this; it’s a subtle critique of our own gender-obsessed culture, and a commentary on the way in which for many hundreds (if not thousands) of years, humanity accepted “he” as the universal pronoun for people and for God.

[I have utterly no idea how they’re going to make TV series out of this book, let alone cast it. Well, I can imagine Ronald D. Moore doing it, but he’s otherwise occupied right now. The book has been optioned for TV, which you can read about here. Don’t read the last paragraph–spoilers, sort of.]

Gender aside, Ancillary Justice has a great deal to say about consciousness, psychology, empire, and cultural assimilation — we’re talking Battlestar Galactica-level nuance and interest (you knew I was going to bring BSG into this eventually, right?). Thematic concerns aside, it’s action packed and suspenseful, and a treat to read.

Ms. Leckie’s world-building is fascinating — it’s minimalist compared to some of the overwrought work that pops up in speculative fiction. Details are carefully placed, and often mysterious — I can’t wait to read the next book in the planned Imperial Radch trilogy to learn more (saga-phobes, never fear: Ancillary Justice works just fine as a standalone).

I’ll leave you with a few questions from the novel, ones I’m still thinking about, weeks after I finished it:

“[. . .] is anyone’s identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really fiction?” (207)

*Special hat tip to Mr. O, who got me this book for my birthday. Well done, sir.