End of year public announcement

Well, here it is, more than a week into 2009, and I’ve still got a longish list of books (17, to be more exact) that I read in 2008 but haven’t had time to write anything about. So, even though some of these were really good books that made me think a lot, I’m just going to post some very short comments on each of the remaining books from 2008, so I can have a chance at keeping up with blogging about my reading for 2009.

Part of what is unfortunate about this is that some of the books still uncommented on are books that I thought were simply amazing or deeply intriguing and wanted to write something significant about, but kept putting it off because I didn’t have the time to do the books justice. But that’s life.

So, over then next couple of days I hope to post some very short comments about the last of the 2008 books, and then do my end of year posts and start 2009 with the best intentions of not falling behind so badly in the coming year.

Elizabeth Bear's Promethean Age Novels

Elizabeth Bear’s first two novels of the Promethean Age, Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water, are, in my mind, absolutely brilliant. These books are to what is often called urban fantasy as Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing is to a Harlequin romance. Not that there's anything wrong with the standard urban fantasy book (I read several series in this subgenre most avidly) or with Harlequin romances (not my cup of tea, but clearly they offer satisfaction to a great many people). But Bear's books, although unarguably fantasy, and clearly set in a modern urban setting (at least those portions that take place on Earth, and not in Faerie), are something quite special indeed.

As with many of Bear’s novels, there’s almost too much going on to even being to state a simple premise, over-arching plot or singular theme, but one can begin by saying that the universe of The Promethean Age is one where Earth and Faerie, Heaven and Hell, are real… places. Dimensions, overlapping and intertwined worlds, or something like that. The Earth is much as we know it, except that in the places that no one ordinarily looks to closely at, there are Magi, many of them members of the Prometheus Club, an organization which has for centuries waged a war with the realm of Faerie for the control of Earth. But neither the human Magi nor the otherworldly folk of Faerie can be said to be monolithic blocs, and there are power struggles between factions of the Magi and factions and courts of Faerie. And of course, various parties have various allegiances with Heaven and Hell – and not necessarily the ones one might expect.

Some reviewers have suggested that Bear has researched her material a bit too deeply. Certainly the more one is familiar with folk ballads, history (particularly the Elizabethan period), world mythology, other literary interpretations of the realm of Faerie and of the relationship between God and Lucifer, Heaven and Hell, Arthurian myths, and sundry other related fields of interest, the more one are likely to find in these books that delights with a fresh perspective on familiar characters and ideas. But the use of all of these stories, of differing degrees of presumed truth and cultural influence, is absolutely key to what Bear is doing with these books, because one of the underlying themes in the Promethean series is all about the consequences of the act of creation and the role of the imagination in creating and shaping reality.

As for me, I thought these two books were among the best things I read in 2008. I'm currently reading the next duology in the Promethean novels, Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth, and if anything, these are even better than the first.

Edit: Since I wrote this brief comment on my reaction to Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water, the racial tropes Bear uses in exploring another of her themes in these books - issues of bondage,servitude and obligation - have been critiqued by several readers of colour as problematic. Bear herself has not handled the critiques or the discussions that spread out from her responses particularly well. (For context on this debate, which has come to be known as RaceFail 09, please see this post by rydra_wong for a very long list of pertinent links, including links to some timelines and summaries.)

I agree that the tropes are problematical. My reading of the text is that Bear was attempting, among many other things, to deconstruct these racialised tropes as part of her exploration of binding and servitude. Speaking as a person with white privilege, I think that she was successful in this to some degree, certainly enough that I was encouraged by the book alone to think about these issues. But I am not a person of colour, it is not bodies that look like mine that are being used in the text to do this deconstruction, so the text had no power to anger or injure me. It was easy for me to read a text written by a white author that made use of these tropes, and wait for her to show me what she intended in making use of them.

Moreover, the author was working primarily with myths that were drawn from my home culture, one in which concepts of binding spells and geasa and other, similar tropes are common and not racialised, and in my privilege I did not think about how the use of explicitly racialised characters and tropes would affect people of colour.

I am not detracting my statement that these books were among the best that I read in 2008, but I am acknowledging that there are serious issues of cultural appropriation and how to write racialised characters and situations to be considered in approaching this text, and that it should not have been easy for me not to see these issues up front. I need to be a more careful reader where race is concerned.

L. Timmel Duchamp: The Marq'ssan Cycle

The final two volumes of L. Timmel Duchamp’s absolutely enthralling and thought-provoking Marq’ssan Cycle, Blood in the Fruit and Stretto are on my list of the best books I read in 2008.

In this series of novels, Duchamp has written not only an engrossing science fictional saga story about the effects of a global intervention by aliens proves the catalyst for meaningful change, and the women who in various ways give their lives to that change, but also a truly masterful analysis of how oppressive and fascist states and organisations (and personalities, there’s more than a whiff of Reich and Marcuse in some of Duchamp’s characterisations of both states and characters in these books) function and respond to resistance, and of the various ways of resistance to oppression, whether it be at the level of the personal, the social, or the state. It’s also a deeply feminist analysis of power relations and how they can operate constructively or destructively, depending on the means, methods and goals.

Reading the series, following the lives and thoughts of the various viewpoint characters in your head, is a curiously multi-layered experience – each book is at the same time a complex political/psychological thriller and a workshop in identifying, resisting, subverting and ultimately, replacing the fascist architecture built up in one’s own mind from years of living in a society where authority is defined as coming from without and from above, difference is used as a tool of control, not a resource to be shared.

This series really is some of the most important feminist and political writing out there at this time.

On the gentle teaching of painful truths

This is the year I discovered Thomas King. King is a First Nations author and a professor of English and Theatre at Quelph University in Canada. He has been writing since the 1990s and has produced a number of novels and several collections of short stories, and in 2003 he was the first Native Canadian to deliver the Massey Lectures, which were published under the title The Truth about Stories, which I read earlier this year.

King has said that "Tragedy is my topic. Comedy is my strategy.” He writes about the Aboriginal experience in white North America, which certainly has many of the elements of tragedy, and at the same time, his work in the short stories I have read – from the volume A Short History of Indians in Canada - is so wisely and wittily funny even as it eviscerates the assumptions, attitudes, perceptions and actions of white North Americans toward First Nations and Aboriginal peoples that this white reader can only thank King for such a happy course of instruction, correction and illumination.

Reading the stories of King the author, and then reading the lectures of King the teacher on what story is and means and does in Aboriginal tradition, has been most rewarding, and I look forward to reading more works by this person who is so kind as to use his talent to make me laugh and think and learn.


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In which I indulge my obsession with Naomi Mitchison

Naomi Mitchison: A Biography, Jill Benton

The more I learn about Naomi Mitchison, the fascinated I am by the woman herself and by her vast (and alas, mostly out of print) literary legacy. Each of the books of hers that I have read so far has been very different, and yet each has spoken to me very strongly. This biography showed me more of the author herself, Mitchison the socialist, Mitchison the feminist and sexual radical, Mitchison the girl coming to womanhood, the woman coming into her own place and power, in the midst of a very highly over-achieving circle of family and friends.

On growing up queer

Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg

Feinberg never pulls punches. This novel, rightfully hailed as ground-breaking when is was first published in 1993 (and still profoundly relevant today), is about growing up as a working class butch lesbian in the pre-Stonewall era and finding a way to survive with your soul not necessarily intact, but still unbowed if badly bloodied. It’s raw and painful and brilliant and heart-breaking in its depiction of the realities of life for Jess Goldberg, who even as a young girl does not “fit” the strict rules of gender performance or the socially mandated directions of desire, and who learns from the very beginning that society polices and punishes otherness with rage, fear and violence. Feinberg’s characters – the butches who work hard hours in factories and face sometimes petty, sometimes violent retaliation from employers, police, and all the other pillars of a comfortable and conventional society, the femmes who can pass more easily but still face the consequences of being women who live outside the roles appointed for them, without the protection of (cisgendered) men – live precariously at the intersection of gender identity, sexual orientation and class, where survival is never a given. Gut-wrenching, but also inspiring, to remember not just how many were broken, but how many survived for so long.

Tariq Ali looks at modern fundamentalisms

The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali has long been a leading voice in leftist political and social analysis, and this book, written following the events of September 11 2001, is both an introduction to the political and social history of Islam – as multi-faceted and diverse as that of any other faith, including the Christianity that Westerners are most familiar with – and a well developed argument that proposes the driving force in modern history to be the opposition, not of Western and Islamic culture as a whole (as argued by Huntington in his book The Clash of Civilizations but rather of the fundamentalism of Islamism and Western (primarily American) imperialism. Rather than privileging one culture/civilisation over the others, as so many West vs. Islam arguments have done, Ali argues that there are similar fundamentalist forces in both Western and Islamic cultures – but which are not in themselves necessary elements of those cultures, and that it is these forces that are in conflict and must be opposed in both cultures to bring about a change in the current world situation.

An important perspective on the current world situation from a writer who has lived in and studied both of the cultures he so thoughtfully examines in this volume.