Anthony Dobranski Online

Category: review

  • A Valentine to The Alexandria Quartet

    A Valentine to The Alexandria Quartet

    In this season of love, I’m posting Valentines to inspirations for my own novel, The Demon in Business Class. This is the second – see them all here.

    It’s impossible to say only one literary work taught me how to create characters, how to make them as deep and maddening as real people, how set them against each other, how to set them in their time and place.

    If I could only pick one, it would be Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.

    It’s not an easy work to explain in this short space: a magnificent, sprawling, story of destructive passions that hide, and enable, political intrigue. Told told over four gorgeously slumming novels (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea), it’s set in Alexandria, Egypt in the 1930s, at the onset of both World War II and Middle-Eastern revolution.

    It’s also not an easy work: elliptical, philosophical, experimental, inconclusive, and rooted in single viewpoints for such long stretches that it really takes until the third novel to see just how wrongly some characters in the first novel misunderstood their situations.

    In flipping through its pages, both in my hands* and in memory, I wonder anxiously (in Harold Bloom’s sense) at its many influences on my characters — of which I was mostly unconscious during my writing, thank goodness. Zarabeth is like Justine in her sensuous character, childhood trauma, and facility with deception, but Zarabeth is an overt trouble magnet, and would bristle at being so pampered and indirect — as, in the end, does Justine herself. Gabriel has both Darley’s callowness and Mountolive’s optimism to mislead him, but happily Gabriel is more violent and less deceptive than either. Walt is wealthy like Nessim, and like him, gets in Missy a wife who, also like Justine, sets his agenda and will never stick to his bed alone.

    If those were the similarities I didn’t intend for The Demon in Business Class, here’s three I did:

    It’s cosmopolitan. The Quartet only has only one setting, unlike Demon‘s dozen, but empires come to Alexandria, and have for two millennia. Few books give one such a sense of meeting our whole world and its history in one place, which is likely why I so responded to it while reading it during my own wanderings across the in-flight map.

    It’s personal. I led this homage by talking about characters, and the Quartet keeps the focus on them, even while so slowly revealing an actual plot that won’t leave anyone unscathed — but there’s no saving or destroying the world here. The story stays rooted in the characters’ lives.

    It’s about the end of youth. I almost wrote that it was about growing up, but growing up is something we do in our teens. 1st Corinthians famously notes the putting away of childish things, but when we first close the toychest, the adult world is new to us. The Alexandria Quartet is about when we start to see just how old and big the world really is, and how little of its time we’ll actually get to take part in.

    In Mountolive, the Quartet‘s third novel, the novelist Pursewarden bitterly calls Jesus an ironist for blessing the meek, given what the rest of us do to their inheritance. In that at least, Demon‘s characters differ in their imitation of Christ, learning by example not statements. As Walt says to Gabriel, “You’re what, thirty? Jesus died at thirty-three. Get cracking.”

    *I have the 1961 Dutton paperback edition, pictured, though not the box. It’s a lovely set I sought across many used bookstores, and the last literary novel I read in mass-market format.

  • Book Review – Under the Skin by Michel Faber

    My vacation book on my family trip to New Orleans was Michel Faber’s elegant, familiar, horrifying novel Under the Skin. I’ve owned the book a long while, and knew very roughly what it was about. I had no idea what a perfect foil it would be for my trip – an escape from my escape, yet apposite too. The Big Easy is vibrant and gorgeous, but its beauty is also painted and its energy pushed with stimulants. It celebrates scoundrels as much as talent, and romanticizes vampires.
    Isserley, Under the Skin‘s narrator, is not exactly a vampire, and her hard life in forbidding rural northern Scotland is far from easy. In Faber’s wry, spare telling, she is as sympathetic as anyone in a lousy job, and a monster in the truest sense – one who sees humans as food.
    (All spoilers ahead.)
    Isserley’s race are intelligent alien ponies with hand-like forefeet, technologically far ahead of us, who live in a feudal-capitalist society  under their world’s polluted surface.
    Once a beautiful mistress to the rich, discarded when she aged, Isserley escaped a short life of toil in deep mines by going to Earth. Radically altered, her face and body both halved, she can pass as human. She drives around rural northern Scotland, looking for hitchhiking men – only men, muscular and not fat, whom she drugs and takes to her farm. Once castrated and bulked up with hormones, her prey are prized meat, sold by her planet’s greatest corporation, each small filet worth a month’s oxygen and water combined.
    Under the Skin is a decadent novel in a hard bitter place, and that is only the first of its many clever subversions. Isserley’s bitter self-pity is thoroughly earned, but she also knows her relative privilege. Even the sleekly beautiful corporate scion of her firm, fashionably vegan and contemptuous of the huge profit his family makes from human meat, envies her the planet where she gets to live, no matter the deformity it required.
    Like all privilege, it will fade, from the most obvious of pressures. Despite the astronomical profit, hunting in northern Scotland is too haphazard. The request has come for Isserley to start taking fertile females.
    Under the Skin does not preach or lament, though Isserley does a lot of the latter. Rather, it admits. This is how we are, and it’s no surprise that this is how they are too. There is no them or us, save our eternal tendencies to seek an us, and a way to profit from those who become them.

  • The Inner Loop reading series

    I had a great evening under twilit stars – and frequent, seemingly aimless helicopters –  with The Inner Loop, a monthly DC reading series for poetry, fiction and non-fiction writers, at Colony Club. The headliner was Jennifer Atkinson, a poet drawn to human disaster, with readings by Joel Goldberg, Matthew Moniz, Alyssa Oursler, Alex Aronovich, Peg Alford Pursell, Alan C. Page, Leila Rafei and Sam Mahone.
    Standing room only!
           
    I’m firmly in the camp that writing is an art for the ear. Studying other languages’ poetry let me hear the latent music in my own writing. I always want my work to sound good aloud and I love to hear other authors reading. It’s a happy time for this viewpoint, with the growing market, and quality, of podcasts and audiobooks. I’ll be fascinated to see how English prose style changes for a world where most of it is heard not read. (Prediction? Dialogue tags will lose “said.”)
    The evening had a warm, friendly feel. I talked shop with other writers, books with readers. A writing event is quieter than a band, with no dancing or chatter and surprisingly little phone use other than recording videos. The vibe remains casual and attentive. Even for the writers – 5 minutes, and you’re back in the audience.
    There will be a bigger market for these. Already the Moth series has spread to live events in several cities. Reading for performance will be the new penmanship.

  • Moorcock’s heir, Gregory D Little (review)

    It’s an article of nerd faith that, before Peter Jackson filmed it with pretty people, the weird kids read The Lord of the Rings. I was a weird kid, to be sure, and I read it. Half. I bogged down at the Ents, skipped ahead to Shelob, and then straight to Mount Doom. None of the appendices.
    Truth? Weird kids read Michael Moorcock. Cruel decadent gods, civilizations in decline, addictions, hallucinations, family betrayal, doomed passion – and, at best, a personal morality jerry-rigged from friendship, adventure, and the faint hope inside a calloused heart.
    In my world of young adult novels with obviously good heroes fighting obviously evil totalitarians – from A Wrinkle in Time through Harry Potter to Hunger Games – someone needed to take up Moorcock’s heavy-metal mantle of trippy morally-conflicted fantasy, where no choices are good and the only victory comes with pain and loss. Someone still needs to write for the weird kids.
    Thank the stars, then, for Gregory D. Little, whose new novel Ungrateful Souls has just been published.

    In Little’s strange, mind-bending fantasy novels, humanity long ago won a ruinous victory in a war against its vicious gods, imprisoning them in the Pit, a great bubble built deep in the hot lava mantle of their planet. The Pit requires constant maintenance, by smiths who still use the gods’ horrid soul-technology of wrightings, iron and crystal devices powered by the trapped souls of the dead.
    Yet the Pit is a privileged place, with clean clothing, cool gear, and a safe space for teen angst. On the surface, humans live a rough iron-age existence in stone and wood huts, their only cities the colonized carcasses of the gargantuan monsters the gods once bred to oppress them. Some humans are still Blazing, their glowing eyes marking them as descendants of the godly, earning them fear and resentment from the unmarked Dims. All live under the heel of the Polistraat, a police force charged with keeping secret worshippers from freeing the gods, but grown self-righteous and brutal after centuries of their paranoid work.
    Ungrateful God continues the harrowing journey of Selestia “Ses” Lucani, the conflicted heroine of Little’s Unwilling Souls series. She began the first book as a conventional young-adult heroine, with awkwardness, a secret destiny and big girl-crushes. She ended in a vastly darker place, betrayed by both her undercover-Polistraat lover and her god-possessed father, but now empowered to free the souls trapped in wrightings, turning these incredible machines into sand and dust. Her unusual eyes, one Dim one Blazing, give her the power to see “demons,” humans like her father in secret thrall to a god.
    In Ungrateful God we find her in humble circumstances, making her way with a small force of Artisan Guild rebels to the remote unpoliced city of Ocypode, built on the shell of a crab so enormous that its barnacles house hotels and taverns – and with its own gravity, so that one lives on it in all planes, like an Escher drawing or the game Monument Valley. In Ocypode, society is breaking down in an uncomfortably godly way; some disappear while many more suffer nightly blackouts, unable to explain why they wake in different places than they went to sleep. When Ses’s fellow Guilders disappear, she must navigate the treacherous city while avoiding both the Blazings and the demons. Her only uneasy allies are Lach, of the insular race of Pilots whose ships bring new souls to power the Pit, and Hadrian, a demon enthralled by a rival god to the one behind Ocypode’s problems.
    A secondary plot involves Murien, Ses’s Polistraat-spy lover, now undercover as a Pit apprentice even as the Polistraat itself has put the Pit’s smiths under martial law. Still faithful to the goal of keeping the gods imprisoned, Murien can no longer gloss over the Polistraat’s brutality. His betrayal of Ses weighs on him, and his attraction to the lovely Brea opens him to questioning what exactly the Gnaeus, the nasty Polistraat commander, has in mind.
    Little writes engagingly, full of sensory details and wry asides. Even as the settings and visuals grow grow ever more hallucinatory – and much larger in scale (I did say, gargantuan monsters) – he always keeps things grounded in the other senses of Ses’s rough existence: the clamor of taverns and markets, the feel of rough cloth, the smell of bad tavern food and unwashed bodies – especially, like any teenager, her own unwashed body. Even the magic of the soul-technology requires believable work to craft and use.
    Little also keeps a tremendous number of plates spinning. It’s impressive to see how this complicated plot, so dependent on multiple histories, comes together into a clear yet phantasmagorical climax. Ses’s despairing awareness of humanity’s dependence on trapped souls offers a theme for today’s reader as complex as the real questions of climate change, without ever being didactic. Ses’s character develops believably, seemingly ever more sensitive to the world after each hardship. I’m not sure even she could say clearly who she fights for, but the reader knows her heart.
    In contrast with the glories of Ocypode, the Pit scenes sometimes let me down. Murien’s anger clouds his judgement too conveniently, as does his devotion to the lovely Brea, who has sparks of intelligence but still seems unworthy of all the adoration she inspires.
    Still, it’s always hard for the sheltered to seem interesting compared to the unsheltered, be they in Hogwarts or the Pit – and at the end of Ungrateful God, there is no shelter left, a greater storm to come, and Ses is not the only one who pays a painful, damaging price.
    If you’re a weird kid, or you used to be, Ses Lucani is the heroine you’ve waited for. Looking for the heir to Michael Moorcock? Check out Gregory D. Little!
    Ungrateful God is available on Amazon, as is the series’s first novel, Unwilling Souls.