The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord

The Best of all Possible Worlds is a slightly strange novel. I suspect that I did not quite comprehend everything that's in it. The back story is treated as so incidental that I occasionally felt a little lost.

The novel begins with a bit of a shock: a disaster / genocide has befallen a race of humanoid aliens. One branch of the remnants from the disaster is now starting a colony on an Earth-like planet that is a kind of refuge for races and nations from across the universe. All are human(ish), and they either live in little colonies and settlements on the frontier, or in big urban cities. There, we meet Grace Delarua, a bubbly civil servant / scientist / researcher, who liaises with the newly arrived aliens. After a while, they decide to form an expedition to sample and meet many of the colonies on the frontier, to check for genetic and societal compatibility, in order to start a breeding programme to revive the near extinct race.

All of which sounds bewildering and high-concept and somewhere outside my usual reading zone. But, truth to be told, this is not really a novel about plot. Or rather: I ended up finding the plot incredibly incidental. The start is slow and confusing. Most of the middle is taken up with an episodic "meet culture, experience reaction, move on" or "have travelling adventure, experience reaction, move on" type chapters. It's a bit like watching a slide show or a nature documentary. Curious, but not perhaps hugely memorable. Some people seem to be very taken with the fact that the Fair Folk make an appearance of sorts, but I had no reaction to that chapter whatsoever. I think part of the reason is that our main characters are scientists, and therefore a little detached, even when in the middle of a grand adventure. The mood of the book is, at times, a little like the music video to the song "Little Talks" by the band "Of Monsters and Men": wide-eyed wonder and joyful adventuring, but with a sense of detachment.

Perhaps the best way to sum up the plot is this: it reads like a sightseeing tour, a record of explorers, travelling and encountering people. There are no heroes, no villains, and even though there is nominally a point to the explorations, there is no sense that this is a quest.

Where the book really comes together is in the relationship between the explorers on the expedition. Richly realised, complex, grown up and human. Characters are drawn with a light touch and huge writerly elegance. More importantly, this is a piece without villains, so while there might be occasional tensions, and some characters don't really like each other all that much, they all work together, they're all mostly professional (with occasional human moments), and they all have, for want of a better word, souls.

But even the story of character relationships is not some operatic tale: it is a very mellow book, with very mellow developments and movements. There are many very human moments in the story, little, endearing, amusing moments, and also disturbing and cruel moments. Dialogue sparkles. There is genuine rapport between characters, and authentic frictions that don't always have specific reasons. Occasionally, characters fall under the influence of stimulants or telepathy or other factors, and I can honestly say that I am in awe of the writing skill in creating these scenes, where the narration becomes a little less reliable, and where the reader is left to reconstruct and reinterpret things by themselves after the scenes have taken place. The book trusts readers' intelligence, and it deserves multiple readings.

The prose is excellent. The characterisation is excellent. The plot is not perhaps for everyone - it is quite mellow and never really builds up great tension - but the episodic, exposition-rich nature of it is carried out very well.

There are things I am still unclear about - I don't get the (title) reference to Candide, some of the races and their motivations / characteristics befuddle me (What are the taSadiri again? And who did what to the Sadiri and why?), and some of the mythology towards the end felt a little forced and pointless to me, but despite all that, it is a fantastic novel, showing great craftsmanship in its writing and great humanity.

I am sure that I will re-read this book in future to get a better sense of all the background and references that I did not quite absorb properly in my first reading. But I am also sure that the novel is an acquired taste: it is very subtle and mellow for a science fiction novel. However, rest assured that it is never pretentious and a pure joy to read.

Rating: 5/5

Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord

I don't know whether Karen Lord has read any books by Neil Gaiman. What I do know is that it feels like she has (perhaps accidentally) written one.

Redemption in Indigo is a fairy tale with its own mythology. It does not read like an ornate, pretty, romantic-era literary fairy tale, but a traditional orally told fairy tale that just happens to be quite long. The start and finish allude to this oral tradition.

This is the story of a young woman who's run away from her gluttonous husband, and who is given a strange gift by eternal beings - a chaos stick. The chaos stick has been taken from another eternal being, as punishment for his behaviour, and he wants it back.

The tale is told with great pace (like all oral narratives), with characters sketched in such vivid and economical ways that they manage to own the stage when they're on it, and moments and scenes that could belong in any folk tale. Some bits are episodic: her gluttonous husband has three misadventures when visiting her village, the mysterious eternal lord shows her three things... just like old folk tales, there are elements of repetition and archetypal characters and episodes.

The setting appears to be Africa, but the era is cheerfully uncertain, giving the tale a certain timelessness.

Comparisons with Neil Gaiman's work were occasionally on my mind for a number of reasons. One was the Trickster - the spider, Nancy, the same trickster God that appeared in American Gods and Anansi Boys, who is not a very common character in Western / European narratives and whom not many readers might know about. The other reason is the shadowy eternal beings that are having duties and a conflict and that, in so many ways, are a bit like the Endless from the Sandman series. So the story feels a little bit like what would happen if you squeeze Sandman through American Gods and Anansi Boys and filter it via Stardust (Neil Gaiman's fairy tale for adults): beautiful, sweet, with depth and richness and a real sense of stories and myths. If Karen Lord has not read any Neil Gaiman works, she has somehow managed to distill his lighter essence into a short novel through sheer magic. (Redemption in Indigo is not as dark as some of Gaiman's stories get).

This book turned me into an instant fan of Karen Lord. It was an absolute delight to read and I'd recommend this book to anyone.

Rating: 6/5. It's that good.

The Liars' Gospel by Naomi Alderman

The Liars' Gospel is an intellectual exercise. It asks a very simple question: what might have happened, around 2000 years ago, to cause the later rise of Christianity / to turn Jesus into a mythos and God?

It is a thought experiment. Jesus - Jehoshua - is not the protagonist of this story. He is very present, as all three narratives are tangential to his own, but our protagonists are Myriam (his mother), Yehuda of Qeriot (Judas of Iscariot), Caiaphas the High Priest and Bar-Avo (Barrabas the murderer).

When I started reading the book, I expected those narratives to intertwine, to be interconnected, to pull together and, because of the title, I expected someone to start conspiring, to start forming gospels, to intentionally lie... and in the first story, there is a follower of Jesus (who also makes a brief cameo much later), and so I thought he would be crucial to the book, he'd be the author of the myths.

My expectations were wrong. This novel is comprised of separate narratives. Their intersections are so brief and tangential that they are fundamentally irrelevant.

Our first tale, Myriam's story, starts a year after the crucifixion, allows itself a flashback or two to Jehoshua's life, but is essentially the story of a woman who has to continue living with a certain trauma, and occasional reminders of her dead firstborn son.

Our second tale, Yehuda's story, also starts after the crucifixion, also allows itself some flashbacks, and is the story of a man who has the faith equivalent of bipolar disorder: he is fervently faithful, loses all faith after a crisis, rediscovers faith (as Jehoshua enters his life), has doubts, ... He's a conflicted kind of guy. And he's an intelligent, thinking guy, who does not follow unconditionally. It is his ruminating nature which dooms him to lose faith again and again and again.

Caiaphas is a high priest with marital troubles (jealousy) and a dose of lust for a young girl. His life also intersects with Jesus' very briefly. Mostly it is a story of a man whose personal life is troubled, and whose public life is all about playing politics. He was difficult to like. His story was all about big-picture exposition, and little-picture jealousy. It was the least memorable narrative.

Bar-Avo, meanwhile, is an alpha male, a physical, rebellious lad's lad; a man who knows how to party, how to fight, how to buy friends and how to stir up trouble. He swashbuckles his way through life like a pirate with a cause. His story starts long before Jesus, and the crucifixion episode is merely a brief part of his life story.

Four stories, four lives that intersect with Jesus', but Jesus himself is a shadow, an unknowable character. We hear everyone else's thoughts and interpretations, but we're never invited into Jesus' head. And rightly so, but it means that we are presented with four different Jesuses, each as much of a product of the way he is perceived by our current protagonist as a character of his own. Naomi Alderman's Jesus comes across like he has Asperger's Syndrome, but also flashes of personal magnetism. But they are flashes only, nothing sustained, and so it becomes hard to believe that he would have any following at all, let alone a few hundred followers...

There is a lot to praise about this book. The writing is elegant and slightly ornate - I found the writing voice beautiful. (In my experience, that means some others might dislike the style for being a bit purple prose-y. I think those others would be wrong: the writing here flows with flair. The beautiful phrases do not slow it down). The book is a work of intelligence and thought. Each narrative is quite believable - although Bar Avo gets to have a perhaps somewhat too swashbuckling life.

However, there are also flaws. The biggest problem is that the book is just too self-consciously clever. As beautiful as the writing is, and as interesting as the thought experiment is, this book often feels like it has a bit of a smirk on its face. It's a bit too smug. Bar Avo sounds like any Hamas or Islamic Jihad leader at times. The Romans act in every way like Zionist Israelis today. Such parallels are laid on quite thick. The recurring theme of Jesus' disappeared body is a playful gimmick that never really has any pay-off. We get some quotes from the Bible, used by characters other than Jesus, and we're supposed to cleverly chuckle at the fact that all these different moments and quotes got attached to one man, who said barely anything coherent at all... but there are no chroniclers in the book, no gospel makers. Some of the quotes are out of character to the new characters they are assigned to. I get the literary intention and the thoughts behind these things, but at those moments when the book is cleverest, it also stumbles and chokes and jars a little, because it disrupts the flow of a narrative.

It's like jokes: writers of humorous stories often spend a lot of time and energy setting up a wonderfully witty, spectacularly funny moment. Think Douglas Adams, here. And then, as we wipe the tears of laughter form our eyes, we read the next sentence, and the story picks up again where it left off. Fine. But The Liars' Gospel isn't funny. It spends similar time and energy setting up a moment, but there is no relief through laughter. Instead, there is an "a-hah", but not even with an exclamation mark, not a major plot twist "OMG!", but a sort of polite and clever and mellow "oh, I see what she did there, isn't she a clever one?"... and then the story picks back up, and you feel a little deflated because you just had a literary hiccup, not a guffaw, not a heart-stopping twist, a clever polite little hiccup, and that's what all that lead-up was about?

All in all, an interesting, clever, pleasant thought experiment, beautifully written, but just a little bit too focused on being clever, and a little too disjointed to be fully engrossing. Pleasant, rather than great.

Rating: 3.5/5

Habibi by Craig Thompson

Habibi is a beautiful, beautiful work of art. It is absolutely stunning. But it is also disconcerting.

Set in a fictitious Arab sultanate, this is the story of a young girl/woman and the toddler/boy/teenager/man she adopts. Our heroine is sold into marriage, then abducted by slavers, put in a slave market, where she adopts a black toddler. She escapes with the child, and forms a small family unit in the desert, never quite sure whether she acts as a mother or a sister to the growing boy. She tells the growing boy stories from the Qu'ran and other myths / fairy tales. But their life in the desert is not meant to last forever...

The graphic novel is perhaps the most beautifully illustrated thing I've ever read / beheld. It is clearly deeply in love with its aesthetic, and its aesthetic is mesmerisingly beautiful. In terms of the story, I was never bored reading this book.

But there are some things that are troubling. This book shows the Middle East through a Western prism. We get Middle Eastern aesthetic, beautiful Arabic script, myths from Arabian Nights and the Qu'ran, but we also get sultans, harems, slavery, eunuchs, beheadings, intermixed with mobile phones, dams, electricity and the modern world. The first two thirds of the book could be set in the 1800s and could have been written by a Victorian pornographer. The last third, with its hints of Dubai about it, feels like a somewhat uncomfortable add-on.

As I just mentioned the word "pornographer", it's perhaps worth talking about that, too. Our heroine spends an awful lot of time being naked, and there is a lot of sex in this book (indeed, sexuality is one of the major themes). The book is in love with the sensual aesthetic of harems and silken veils, but not really the modern focus on modesty that Islam tries to stand for. This Middle East is not the Middle East of our 2012; it is the Middle East that James Bond or Lara Croft or Indiana Jones might travel through: an aesthetic, a sensual oasis of lust. It is a comic book, pulp fiction Middle East.

So perhaps it is forgiveable that almost all characters are disgusting scoundrels (if male), or envious and bitchy (if female) or both (if eunuchs). Perhaps it is forgiveable that our heroine oozes sex appeal in every single picture, even the ones where she is a child (with a woman's curves, a woman's legs, posture, lips and hair) or about to be raped. Except, the subtext of the book seems quite judgemental: all (Arab) men are potential rapists, all the oppressed are collaborators with their own oppression, there is no kindness without a demand for something in return. Perhaps I should some it up like this: rape is not an erotic act. Drawing rape so it looks sexy is wrong. Therefore, this book is arguably amoral.

This is a story about abuse, but by choosing to draw all the abuse in the sexiest possible way, it puts the reader in the abuser's shoes, which is uncomfortable. It's a bit as if someone had taken a Todd Solondz movie script, added lots of Neil Gaiman-esque love of mythology, hired Oscar-winning arts directors to create the aesthetic, but given the result to Michael Bay to direct and cast. It's art, it's entertainment, it's rich, it's beautiful, and it's also crass, oversexed, and misogynistic.

Rating: 3.5/5. (Aesthetically, 5/5, but the seedier aspects detract a lot)

Among Others by Jo Walton

I bought Among Others without knowing much about it. I knew it was set in Wales, that it had an uninviting cover, that it had won awards and that it is speculative fiction (it's a magical realist novel about a science fiction enthusiast). So, somewhat put off by the cover, I was surprised at how much I turned out to enjoy this book.

Starting out with a beautifully atmospheric prologue, the novel then skips ahead by some time, and takes the format of a diary. In our prologue, two girls try to do some magic to fight against a polluting factory in Abercwmboi, Wales. The diary, years later, is that of one of the girls, now in changed circumstances.

It is difficult to go into detail: I enjoyed reading through the book without knowing anything about the story, and I don't want to reduce anyone's enjoyment. So, instead of focusing on events and plot, I'll describe the style of the book.

It is a mellow book: don't expect cliffhangers or huge drama. You're reading the (very realistic) diary of a teenage Welsh girl going to an English boarding school. Adjust your expectations to that.

It is a book about growing up, and nervous first encounters with sexuality. But the writing is that of a very academical girl, with a mind that does not tend to over-romanticise. It is never erotic nor pornographic, but neither is it shy.

It is a story featuring fairies and magic, but not in any way I've ever encountered them before. This book is set in our world, not any other, and you may soon find yourself wondering whether it is really a book about believing in fairies and magic, rather than a book about actual fairies and magic. Things are so subtly interwoven and so grounded that I was not sure of my narrator, which made the novel very interesting.

It is a book about someone who loves books, and specifically science fiction and fantasy (and more specifically: post-1960s new wave science fiction above all else). Hundreds of books and authors get name-checked, often with just a single thought about them. It is a book for readers. You know how some novels set in London take you through the city, street by street, turning familiar geography into excitement for Londoners (and frequent visitors of the city)? You know how encountering a street or park that you know in real life in a story can liven it up? Well, Among Others is set in the geography of a voracious science fiction reader's mind, and for other readers, this name-checking makes it a very lively read: almost like a conversation with a fellow reader. It may be a little alienating for those who never or rarely read any sf/f at all.

At the start, I was a bit alienated - the narrative voice sounded slightly American to me, as the only indication of accent / localised speech is the way "grandpa" is written as "grampar", which does not sound Welsh to my (German-born) ears. However, that alienation quickly faded, and I was left reading a wonderfully pleasant novel, which did not hurry but still engaged me because our narrator is just the sort of person I would enjoy spending time around: on the fringes, not popular, but geeky, smart, well-read, cultured, able to hold down a conversation, in every possible way not shallow and not pretentious.

I can't really think of any comparable novel. I thought this was a truly wonderful read.

The novel is not entirely flawless - the very final bits are a little bit weak, but forgivably so.

Rating: 5/5

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

Who Fears Death is a novel set in Africa. In fact, it is a fantasy / science fiction novel set in a postapocalyptic Africa, but to be honest, this only became clear to me very late in the novel.

Our heroine, Onyesonwu, is an "Ewu", a mixed race girl, born as a result of a rape. Permanently an outsider, she is passionate, stubborn, quick to anger, and, it turns out, adept at using magic / juju. She is determined to learn magic and change the world.

The world, meanwhile, is a desert, populated by two tribes / races: Nurus and Okekes. Nurus rule, Okekes are slaves. There's been an uprising by Okekes before Onye was born. Now there is a slow-moving genocide (Nurus killing Okekes), ongoing since before Onye's birth, and continuing, brutally.

There is a lot of stuff in this novel that makes the reader think, and which offers itself for debate and discussion. Much of its core is about the relationship between a group of young people. The novel clearly has a lot to say about women and sex and gender politics. The shifting relationships between our questing youths (four girls, two guys), and the importance of sex, are as much part of the novel as magic and genocide.

Who Fears Death is not a young adult novel (based on the cartoonish cover, and having read only a YA novel by Nnedi Okorafor previously, I had the wrong expectations). It is a novel that feels authentically African (which is an achievement, as the author was born and lives in America). The way the story handles tribes, beliefs in juju / magic, and the strange way in which life can go on while civil war and genocide are also occurring, in close proximity - it all feels authentic, incredibly, depressing and uncanny. We witness female genital mutilation, angry, hateful mobs, weaponised rape, tribalism, execution by stoning to death, incest - at times, this novel feels like a highlights reel of the worst and ugliest sides of Africa (and families in general).

I realise that it is meant to be a novel of hope, of sorts, with a hero who does not readily accept being an outcast for her race, or being seen as a lesser person because of her sex, and who goes on to try to change things. But to me, it was a very hard novel to read. The realistic elements are brutal. The fact that the novel uses magic and prophecy as an agent of change leaves a bitter aftertaste in my mouth. It makes me feel that there is no real hope for Africa at all, and dreaming of a magic solution is the only dream that Africa has left. Along the way, we even briefly encounter an almost utopian society in a dream-like sequence, which is founded entirely upon magic. All the reality in this book is grim, all the hope is carried in its magic.

Who Fears Death is an original novel - who else writes science fiction about Africa? It is also an effective novel, putting some of the brutality that I try not to think about into my life by embedding it in a book I chose for leisure reading. But it is not a book that makes me hopeful, or that gives me any happiness. It made me realise how my image of Africa is already postapocalyptic / dystopian - if it takes me until 80% of a book have passed before I understand that this is meant to be a post-climate-change, post-technological-collapse future, then that tells me something. It tells me I am ignorant, but it also tells me that Africa must be a grim and terrible place, to be so indistinguishable from postapocalyptic dystopias to the ignorant. Most of all, the book tells me that there is no hope for some parts of Africa ever to develop, to become something less brutal, less oppressive, more humane: even in science fiction, it takes god-like magic, and god-like prophets and messiahs for anything to change. To me, Who Fears Death is terrifying and grim.

Rating: 3/5

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

Alif the Unseen is a book unlike any other I've ever read. It is the story of Alif, an internet service provider / hacker, living in an unspecified City, in an unspecified Emirate, somewhere in the Arabian Peninsula.

To begin with, it's just a tale of nerd-has-girl-trouble: his girlfriend is leaving him to marry another man. She tells him she never wants to see him again, never wants to hear from him again. In a fit of angry despair, Alif decides to make her wish come true, and write a programme which can identify her, no matter which computer in the world she uses, and make his own email address, web handles, avatars, phone numbers etc. forever invisible and unreachable for her. Only after some manic coding does he realise that this programme in the wrong hands could be a terrible weapon against any activists.

Soon, things get a little out of hand. Before we know it, the story involves an ancient mythical manuscript, people who seem supernatural (djinn!) and sinister state security forces / persecution.

If you took Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, jumbled it up with The Arabian Nights, injected a little bit of Zoe Ferraris's Kingdom Of Strangers' Middle Eastern atmosphere and setting, sprinkled in a dusting of Islam, and turned it all into a beautifully written novel set in the Arab Spring, then the outcome would be this. It is not a mixture I would ever have thought of. It's thrilling, original, fresh and new. Even the Arab Spring is handled with elegance, deftness and complexity. (I would almost compare it to Ian MacDonald's The Dervish House, but the prose in Alif the Unseen is much lighter and more accessible - it creates a similarly rich atmosphere, but relying less on a barrage of alien vocabulary)

The book is not flawless. For this particular reader, there is something uncomfortable about the way Islam is infused in the mix, especially in the later parts, and how faith in Islam is promoted. I'm never going to enjoy a book where anything is driven away by the power of Faith / God, Islamic or otherwise, but that aside, it's not really fun to detect an author's pet subject / propaganda sneaking into a novel that's otherwise an adventure story.

That aside, buy this book! It's hard to beat in terms of entertainment value: beautifully written, no hint of purple prose, thrilling, and full of the magic of Arabian Nights and the techy dazzle of teh interwebs, in an exotic combination you've never encountered before. A stunning debut novel, brilliant despite a small handful of preachy moments, and unusually current and topical.

Rating: 4.5/5

For another great review of this book, see Sheenagh Pugh's review of Alif the Unseen.