My life in books

With 20-odd books in the Saint Germain series, by now one knows what to expect - impeccable historical detail surrounding yet another of the ancient vampire's travels and adventures. I love these books, and Night Pilgrims delivers all of the trademarks of Yarbro's successful blend of the historical and the supernatural.

It's 1225, not long after the Fifth Crusade, and Saint Germain is back in Egypt, living as a secular guest in a Coptic monastery while attempting to minister to the medical needs of the community's elder. Political developments, both internal to the monastery (the ambitious monk who seeks to become the community leader and is suspicious of Saint Germain's true nature and intentions) and external (unrest stemming from the advance of Ghenghis Khan) make it necessary for the Count to leave his place of refuge. Fortunately, a party of European Christian pilgrims require a guide in their journey south along the Nile to sacred sites in Ethiopia. The Count, a well-travelled polyglot with great skill as a healer, is the perfect choice.

The novel details the world of medieval Egypt through which the group of pilgrims pass with painstaking detail, and I must admit that this for me is one of the greatest draws of the Saint Germain novels. The other draw is the idea of Saint Germain, the millennias-old being who has seen the rise and fall of civilisations, the best and worst that humans can contrive - and still moves among them with pity and compassion. The vampire healer. The peacemaker (when possible) who needs blood to survive. The eternal contradiction.

I've just finished Kate Bornstein's achingly honest autobiography: A Queer and Pleasant Danger, expansively subtitled The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later To Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today. Before reading this memoir, I "knew" Bornstein as a writer, playwright, performance artist, gender theorist, BDSM practitioner and trans activist, and respected her work and her stance as an out gender outlaw. Now I know more about her journey to becoming all these things, and my respect is if possible even greater than before.

Bornstein's journey contains more than a few difficult turns. She details with clarity the story of her long slow struggle to transitioning, and her realisation of the role BDSM played in her sexuality. She speaks openly about addiction and coming to see the experience of hiding her sense of her real identity as a half-lifetime of trauma that left her a survivor of PTSD. And she traces the thread of performance that runs through her life from her early years exploring acting to the multi-faceted artist and communicator she is today.

She also talks at length about the time she spent as a Scientologist and member of the organisation's inner cadre, the Sea Org, where, while still living as Albert Bornstein, she worked with L. Ron Hubbard. Some of the most moving parts of her memoir deal with the separation from her daughter that she has experienced since being expelled from the Church of Scientology - who remains in the organisation to this day, and holds to the policy that a Scientologist must avoid all contact with "suppressive persons" such as Bornstein. Indeed, the final chapter of the book is an open letter to a daughter who may never read it - and that was heart-breaking to read.

I finished reading this book on the same day that I heard of the death of another great transgender warrior - Leslie Feinberg. And so I close this with thanks to Bornstein, who is still fighting cancer - and kicking its ass - and Feinberg, who has made hir final transition in this lifetime. I learned so much about identity and personhood from both of you, without ever having met you.

And finally, the last few books from 2013.


Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Magnificat

What would happen if, following the death of the Pope, the Conclave met and somehow unanimously elected someone whose name they had never heard or seen before? Who was everything a Pope should never be - a middle-aged magistrate from communist China, an atheist, a woman? Yarbro imagines it, and it is quite wonderful to read.


Simon Clark, The Night of the Triffids

A quite enjoyable sequel/homage to Wyndham's classic The Day of the Triffids, which begins 30-odd years later among the human survivors on the Isle of Wight. The narrator and protagonist, David Mason (son of the narrator of the original novel) is a pilot who hopes to find evidence of other surviving colonies to unite in the face of increasing indications that the triffids are intelligent and have plans to destroy the remaining humans. In the course of his quest, Mason, like his father before him, is harshly reminded that triffids are not the only threats to the survival of humanity.


Ellen Galford, Queendom Come

Galford's satirical, feminist, woman-centred view of the world is in high form in this novel. Set in Scotland during Thatcher's Blue Reign, the narrative focuses on the sudden appearance of an ancient Caledonian war-queen, called upon, like Arthur, to return in the hour of her nation's greatest need, and the near immortal seer/sorceress who was the queen's counsellor centuries ago and has awaited her return. Funny as hell.


R. A. MacAvoy, The Third Eagle

MacAvoy is a brilliant fantasist, but this foray into space opera is, while pleasant reading, not among her masterpieces. The protagonist, Wanbli Elf Darter, a skilled member of a clan of bodyguard/assassins who traditionally serve the landed classes on the planet of Neunacht, leaves his people and culture behind to travel in space. After many picaresque adventures, he ends up on the "revivalist" ship Commitment, which is crewed by survivors of generation starships sent out centuries before. The crew of the Commitment have adopted a mission to hunt down other such sleeper ships drifting through space - whereupon they decant a few of the frozen people aboard. The rest they kill, because there is no place for them to go - the colonised planets won't accept them, and the Commitment can only take on enough to replace crew lost to injury, illness or old age. Wanbli, of course, finds an answer that allows the sleepers to live. Despite the grim situation of the sleepers, this novel is mostly light-hearted and fun.

I did not read a lot of non-fiction this year, and what I did read was mostly personal narratives, biographies, and books about science fiction and fantasy.


Thelma J. Shinn, Worlds Within Women: Myth and Mythmaking in Fantastic Literature by Women
Gwyneth Jones, Imagination/space: essays and talks on fiction, feminism, technology and politics
Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds

Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

Suzie Bright, Big Sex, Little Death: A Memoir
Nancy Mairs, Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith
George Takei, Oh Myy! There Goes the Internet

Jack G. Shaheen, The TV Arab

Alison Weir, The Princes in the Tower
Tracy Borman, Elizabeth's Women
Stacey Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

I did not read much non-fiction in 2010.What I did read, I found very interesting.


Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest

Shiva is an environmental activist and eco-feminist who writes most powerfully on the ways in which the global agribusiness project is negatively affecting the land, the people and the culture


Daniel Radosh, Rapture Ready

Fascinating look at the "rapture" culture among various fundamentalist Christian groups in the U.S.


Barbara Ehrenreich, This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation

Ehrenreich as always delivers provocative insights into the American social, political and economic zeitgeist.

Unquenchable Fire, by Rachel Pollack

Jennifer Mazdan lives in Poughkeepsie, in the house that she and her husband bought before their marriage fell apart. She has a decent job, working for the Mid-Hudson Energy Board as a server. She enjoys her job, tending to the guardian totems who watch over all the various parts of the county energy supply grid, washing them with sanctified cleaning fluid and performing the proper rituals as she re-aligns them so that they always face toward the sun. She once wanted to be a Picture Teller – one of the Living Masters who has the ability to tell the great sacred stories in such a way that they come alive with meaning – but instead, she dropped out of college, got married, and moved with her husband to a respectable suburban hive development.

But on the 87th anniversary of the Revolution, during the annual celebration of the Day of Truth, the most important Recital Day of the year, as the great Teller Allan Lightstorm recites The Place Inside, one of the most difficult Pictures, first told by the Founder LI KU Unquenchable Fire, Jennifer Mazdan’s life is changed forever.

For one thing, she misses the recital. Just as she’s about to get into her car and head to the Recital Mount, she falls into a sudden sleep. And while Allan Lightstorm tells the Picture, Jennifer has a dream that is unlike any dream that anyone has ever reported to the National Oneiric Registration Agency. And although she doesn’t realise it until some time later, Jennifer Mazdan conceives a child, who will bring a new vision of divinity to the world.

Rachel Pollack said of her book Unquenchable Fire, in a 1994 interview, that:

I've been interested in tribal religion and shamanism and prehistoric religion for a long time. But I'd see books about aboriginal people set in the Australian outback written by somebody who lived in L.A., who not only had never been to Australia but had no contact of any kind with aboriginal people.

So for Unquenchable Fire, I thought, what would happen if that stuff was on the streets of Poughkeepsie, and nothing else changed? America was totally into shamanism and story-telling, but was still America. So I had tremendous fun transplanting bizarre rituals from all over the world onto mainstreet. And I would say, how would these people act that if they were total literalists, if they believed everything was real? So none of it is intellectualized.

This is a picture of a society in which the power of ritual, of story, of symbolic meaning, has taken the place of science and materialism. In addition to the story of Jennifer and the people in her life, the book is full of retellings and reshapings of the divine stories and rituals of many different peoples, sometimes recast into modern times, sometimes told in the timeless landscape of myth and dream. This too is part of the incredible wealth of this book.

But it is also much more than these thingst. It is itself a Picture, a teaching tale, and its inner meaning is that Truth must keep changing, growing, always being renewed and reinterpreted for a new generation.

Jennifer lives in a world that many of us would call a world of magic, of wonder, where strange and astonishing things can happen and great truths are constantly being revealed. But most of the people who live in Jennifer’s world have come to take all this for granted. They follow the external rituals without making the internal emotional and spiritual commitment. A generation in Jennifer’s past, the Revolution shook the world and made everything new and fresh and full of meaning, but in the decades since then, form has driven out substance, and the raging fires of the soul have been codified and bureaucratised. Jennifer is the channel through which will come a new revolution that will shake world and its truths again.

What’s also quite remarkable about this story is that it tells the story of the coming of a messiah from the perspective of the woman who is the gateway between the divine and the world – and who isn’t exactly pleased to find herself and her body taken over by Divine Agency. In this sense, it’s the story of every person who has ever been called upon to transcend the ordinary and commit blood, sweat, tears, even life, for the exceptional. It’s the story of Jesus in Gethsemane, of the artist driven to speak what lies within no matter what, of the martyr, the sacrifice, the Dying King, of anyone who asks “why does it have to be me?” – and does it anyway, because there is no other way to act. This is the unquenchable fire, the ecstasy, the “being out of place” that saints and mystics model for us. It can be hidden, for a while, but it cannot be destroyed.

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

The Caged Virgin: an Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam
Infidel

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a highly controversial figure in Europe. Born in Somalia, Hirsi Ali, the daughter of one of the key figures in the resistance against the Siad Barre regime, Hirsi Magan Isse, is a Dutch citizen, a feminist deeply engaged in work on behalf of Muslim women immigrants in Europe, a former member of the Dutch Parliament and an outspoken critic of Islam who has been forced to live in hiding due to threats of violence and death from Muslims outraged by her words and actions.

The Caged Virgin is a collection of Hirsi Ali’s writings on the subject of Islam, and includes the script of the short film “Submission” which she made in collaboration with Theo Van Gogh (who was assassinated for his role in making the film). Much of her writing, like the film script, focuses on the experiences of women within Islam.

Her autobiography, Infidel, explores her experiences growing up as a Muslim, in Somalia, her homeland, in Saudi Arabia, where her father sought refuge for a while, and in Kenya where her mother chose to settle among the Somali refugee community while her father continued his involvement in the increasingly fractured and violent political landscape of Somalia from his faction’s base in Ethiopia. Hirsi Ali’s childhood and adolescence overlapped the time period in which the highly fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic thought expounded by Sayyid Qutb and the Islamic Brotherhood spread through Islamic communities in North Africa (thinks to funding from Saudi Arabia) – she herself notes that when she was a child in Somalia, very few women wore any form of covering, even a head scarf, but that by the time she returned in mid adolescence, hidjab, chadour and other forms of extreme covering were seen everywhere in Mogadishu.

Both books find their primary focus in examining the lives of women in Saudi and North African Islamic societies, and in North African immigrant communities in Holland. Hirsi Ali unflinchingly describes both her own experiences, and those of friends, family members, and the women she meets in Holland, first while living in the refugee community and later while working as an official interpreter for Somali refugees in Holland – experiences which range from genital mutilation and honour killings to forced marriages, marital rape, the isolation and disenfranchisement of women in the Islamic communities she has known, and the limitations placed on women that hold them back from both personal expression and civil life.

It is Hirsi Ali’s thesis that Islam as a religion, moreso than other religions like Christianity, is inherently violent, misogynistic and detrimental to intellectual curiosity among individuals and to the development of Islamic societies. In addressing Hirsi Ali’s central argument – that Islam is inherently “worse” than other religions – I first have to make my own perspective on the issue clear, because it influences how I read Hirsi Ali’s argument.

As an animist, I do not believe in any divine being separate from myself or any other person, place or thing in the universe – and it is my observation that a belief in an all-powerful deity and in the separation of the self, both from the divine and from other aspects of material existence, makes it easier for human beings to accept the authority of others – human or divine – in place of one’s own personal responsibility to determine how to behave rightfully toward the universe and all that it comprises.

Thus, I am not easily persuaded that the submission to Allah demanded by Islam is any more inherently detrimental to intellectual independence and critical thought than the demands of any other theist religion to obey the laws of a deity as expressed by the people who believe themselves to be the interpreters of a divine will.

As for Hirsi Ali’s belief that Islam is inherently more violent and more misogynistic, I can find a great deal of textual and historical evidence in other religions – and particularly in Christianity – to suggest that this argument is debatable.

In my opinion, the difference between the Islam that Hirsi Ali knows all too well and the Christianity she encounters in Holland (and compares Islam to) is more a matter of place and time than of an inherently greater capacity for warlike behaviour, abuse of women and denial of intellectual and ethical curiosity. Seven hundred years ago, it was Islamic culture that was intellectually open, tolerant of other religious beliefs, scientifically advanced and peaceful except when attacked from without, while Christian nations were scientifically backward, intolerant of diversity, and prone to internal violence. What has happened since is that Christianity has lived through the Reformation and the Enlightenment, while the Islamic nations have experienced the ravages of colonisation and imperialism. Christianity – particularly in Northern Europe – has become increasingly secular, while many in Islamic nations, with so much of their traditional culture shattered by colonialism, have increasingly been drawn to a fundamentalist interpretation (which many moderate scholars of the Qu’ran argue is not so much an interpretation as a distortion) of Islam in order to reforge a cultural identity.

I find myself wondering if Hirsi Ali has been exposed to modern fundamentalism in Christianity, which certainly has its share of intolerance of independent thought, extreme misogyny and violence against those who challenge its rigid reading of the Christian Bible. I also find myself wondering why Hirsi Ali so casually rejects the argument that colonialism has had a profound affect on the cultural and economic advancement of the Islamic countries of the Middle East and northern Africa. In her books, she notes that this is a common assertion among liberal and leftist circles in the West, but she does not really engage the argument, but rather dismisses it as an example of Western cultural relativism that fears to acknowledge Islam as a dangerous religion in and of itself.

Hirsi Ali does agree at least in part with other feminist critics of Islam, like Irshad Manji, who argue that Islam needs its own Enlightenment – that in order to meet the needs of Muslims in the modern world, it must become more open to change and to individual questioning and interpretation, and recognise the equality of women.

Hirsi Ali’s writing – regardless of what one thinks about her essential analysis of Islam – is a powerful indictment of the treatment of women and of those who question religious authority in many Islamic communities today. Particularly, her autobiography is a testament to the courage and determination of a woman who is determined to live her life on her own terms, guided by her own judgement, and on that level it is profoundly inspiring.

Her willingness to expose the extent of the misogyny and violence against women that she has seen and experienced raises some serious issues for consideration by Western (and primarily white) feminists. Where and how does one reconcile cultural relativism with feminist action that aims to improve the lives of women around the world? How does one respond to profoundly misogynist practices such as FGM and spousal abuse when they are argued to be linked to the cultural and religious traditions of others – which we are told we must respect? Are we attempting to impose Western values on the women of other cultures when we insist that FGM, forced marriage and other abuses are a violation of human rights that transcend cultural norms. If spousal abuse is wrong in north America, isn’t it also wrong in Saudi Arabia or Somalia?

I certainly don’t have a definitive answer on how to work for women’s rights without being just another white colonist who knows what’s best for people of colour, but it seems to me that the first step is listening to, learning from, and supporting the women from other cultures who are voicing their own feminist/womanist critiques and creating their own movements for social change. And in speaking up about the abuse of women in Islamic communities from her position as a woman who has been raised in those communities, Hirsi Ali is doing that, and deserves our attention.

The Dyke and the Dybbuk, Ellen Galford

I’m somewhat at a loss to describe this book, other than to say that it’s a hilarious and brilliant feminist romp through Orthodox Judaic tradition and contemporary British lesbian culture. The title characters – Rainbow Rosenblum, London taxi-driver, alternative press film critic, and unmarried niece in a family full of matchmaking aunts; and Kokos, a dybbuk recently freed by a stroke of lightning from the tree she was sealed inside for two hundred years by the incantations of a famous rabbi – are brought together because it is Kokos’ long-delayed assignment to fulfil a curse on Rainbow’s maternal line onto the 33rd generation, something she must carry out or face downsizing in a truly disturbing corporate version of Hell.

It’s really, really funny. Really. Funny.

I have recently devoured Lois McMaster Bujold’s three fantasy novels set in the Chalion universe – a fantasy world that appears to draw much of its initial inspiration from medieval Spain.

I can’t recommend these highly enough to readers of fantasy who want a combination of strong and realistic characters, entertaining adventure, and sophisticated exploration of philosophical and religious issues all in a superbly crafted package.

The novels in question are:

Curse of Chalion
Paladin of Souls
The Hallowed Hunt

The first two are set in the feudal Kingdom of Chalion, and deal with what could have been fairly standard fantasy hero-quest adventures involving the breaking of ancient curses and saving the country from supernatural assault by the evil ruler of an opposing kingdom.

But you know that something different is going on when the heroes are, respectively, a middle-aged, worn-out and broken-spirited former courtier who has spent years as a galley slave following a humiliating defeat, and an equally middle-aged and broken-spirited dowager suspected of going mad following the death of her husband. These are fallible people with real aches and sorrows and memories of defeats and guilt and misgivings, who find somewhere inside themselves the will to serve the needs of their people.

This is also a land where the gods – there are five of them, the Mother, the Father, the Son, the Daughter and the Bastard, all seen in their own way as essential to the smooth functioning of the world – are real and attempt to intervene in the lives of humankind in order to bring about balance. But this is a universe where the gods really have given their children free will, and thus when Bujold’s heroes and saints are called to act, they have every right to refuse, to delay, to ignore the hints and promptings of their gods.

The third book, The Hallowed Hunt, is set in Darthaca, several hundred years prior to the two Chalion novels, but like the others, it features heroes (and villains) who behave like real people who’ve have been battered around a bit by life, and are swept up, unwitting, in events that at first seem far too vast for them to cope with.

These are protagonists that it’s easy to identify with, and the stakes are high and the risks seem real, because these are people who could fail, precisely because they are only human and we know from their pasts that they have failed before. And behind the action, there are some very interesting explorations of the nature of sacrifice, redemption, free will and divine providence – and as you may have gathered, I’m a sucker for that sort of thing. Put it all together, and it’s well worth the reading.

I have really wanted to write detailed responses to the last two books still un-reviewed from 2007, but life hasn't been accommodating in that respect. So gentle reader will have to settle for summaries, along with my hearty, if somewhat qualified, recommendations for both of these books.

Maul, Tricia Sullivan

This is a very thought-provoking, but also somewhat challenging book. Sullivan gives us two very different story lines: one set in a future where disease has almost wiped out the male population, and a medical researcher is trying to develop a diagnostic game that is intended to help bolster the immune system - and possibly make men more viable; and one dealing with a gang of more-or-less modern teenage girls caught up in a turf for pride and honour in the perfume aisle of a mall department store which turns violent and deadly. The two plotlines are linked thematically, and perhaps even literally - is what happens to the young women fighting to survive against a rival girl gang and the mall security and police simply a parallel set of events to what happens in the body of the researcher's male lab specimen, or is it the record of an RPG-style medical program?

As one might expect, the near-extinction of males in the future world plotline gives the author a great deal of scope for an examination of gender issues, and what Sullivan does with the by-now classic situation of how to organise a society of many women and a few sperm-producers necessary to continue the species is original, satirical and not to be missed.

You will find a more in-depth review at Infinity Plus, where the reviewer appears to have enjoyed this fast-paced and rewarding book as much as I did.


The Rebirth of Pan, Jo Walton

This book is available online here. Jo Walton posted it online last year in honour of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. It is an early, unpublished work, and it is evident that Walton wrote it before she developed the impressive technical chops she demonstrates today.

But you know, that really doesn't matter. Yes, it defies a great many conventions - there is no main protagonist, a large cast of characters, multiple plotlines, far too many POVs and perspectives, and because it's not a polished and finished work, one has to pay attention so as not to get lost. A lot is left to the imagination.

But what it says about the eternal, ever-renewing condition of the human soul - or spirit, or any other similar word you might prefer - is timeless, and more than enough to carry this reader through the technical flaws. The rebirth of Pan is the rebirth of the spirit, of life itself, breaking out of confinements and boundaries and starting things fresh and new again.

Reading it made me feel hopeful, optimistic, made me believe that there is something in the human experience that can transcend all the pettiness and divisiveness and greed and scrabbling for power over each other and all that we do that makes us less than we can be. And that's a good way to feel.