What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  “Hush,” said Jan. “It’s all right.”

  “It’s not. How did we meet? How could we? Between the M6 and M33. Think of the odds. In all space and time. I’m scared.”

  If you like this, you will probably like the rest of it. Garner’s most recent book, Thursbitch, is also written like this. I’ve recently read it, just once, and I think I liked it, I’m not sure yet. If Red Shift is Tam Lin, then it is a Tam Lin where Janet does not hold on to Thomas as he changes. If it’s a thing like the motif in Guy Kay’s Ysabel and Fionavar where the pattern repeats and maybe somebody will hold on sometime, then that makes the mention of “next time?” in the coded note even weirder. We also have three pregnant women, none of them pregnant by the men who love them, but it is the men who connect up through time, the men who see the vision of the train that parts Tom and Jan. It’s perfectly possible that the girl on Mow Cop and Madge are Tom’s ancestors, but Macey and Thomas Rowley are not. Yet Macey and Thomas are picking up Tom’s anguish back through time as it’s manifested in the blue-silver blur of the train. But the Tam Lin thing is actually reversed, it’s Tom who doesn’t hold on to Jan, he gives up the Bunty. Macey and Thomas do hold on to their women—Thomas seeing the lights on the cars on the motorway and thinking they are waves is one of the most impressive images in the book.

  I understand the weirdness about Tom’s reaction to Jan’s previous relationship a lot better now than I did when I first read the book, where it was quite incomprehensible to me. I actually understand it better than I did even the last time I read it, because I have been reading Kathleen Norris in between. The whole obsession with female virginity still seems bizarre, but at least I see where it’s coming from. It seems particularly bizarre because it’s Tom that I identify with in Red Shift, and this, significant as it is for the story, is where I can’t follow him. Oh well.

  All three partnerships, in their different times, are across barriers. With Tom and Jan it’s straight-up class, her parents are professionals, Tom’s parents live in a caravan and he is struggling to win a scholarship to university. With Madge and Thomas it’s that Thomas has fits, visions of Tom and the train. With Macey and the unnamed girl they’re from entirely different cultures, and he’s ridden by visions and the whole berserker thing.

  The Romans talk like soldiers, in soldier slang and local dialect. Their names, Face, Magoo, Logan, Buzzard, Macey, are not Roman names. Yet they don’t at all feel like modern people, even with all of that. The lack of distancing in the language and names makes them more different. The things they do—the slaughter and rape in Barthomley especially—are horrific. There’s a wonderful line about Face, but it applies to all of them really: “He has lost Rome and is tribal, far from his tribe.”

  The Civil War episode contains a lot of backstory packed into very few words. Madge has been involved with two men, both called Thomas, Thomas Rowley and Thomas Venables. She is married to Rowley. Venables comes back and rescues them from the general slaughter of Barthomley. John Fowler the Rector’s son has been fighting on the Parliament side. He’s also tangled up with Madge and the Thomases. He has been a thorn in the village’s side for a long time. Civil wars lead to people killing people they know, or sparing them, there aren’t any strangers. There are three locations that link all the times. Most significant is Mow Cop, the hill with its quarries where the Romans retreat, where Thomas Venables comes from, where Madge and Thomas Rowley end up (with the stone axe) and where Tom and Jan visit in trying to find somewhere real. Barthomley village, where everyone gets slaughtered twice in the two historical periods, is a haven of peace and tranquility for Tom and Jan. And Rudheath is where Tom’s parents live, and where the Romans begin and Thomas and Madge end up. Crewe, the city, is modern and unreal; although Jan and Tom spend time there it is constantly described in images of unreality, or being too real.

  “Each of these shops is full of one aspect of existence. Woolworths is a tool shed; Boots a bathroom; British Home Stores a wardrobe. And we walk through it all but we can’t clean our teeth, or mend a fuse, or change our socks. You’d starve in this supermarket. It’s all so real we’re shadows.”

  They find their way to Barthomley by finding a path “older than Crewe” that cuts through and across the city. Crewe is, of course, for most British readers, famous as a railway junction. I have changed trains there thousands of times without ever venturing out of the station. And this aspect of it is emphasised in the novel, not only with meeting and parting at the station but in the tracks they cross following the path and in the views of Mow Cop Jan gets from the train. (It’s actually visible only on the train from the North, not from the London train.)

  The book is also seamed with graffiti—the inscriptions on the bells, the park benches, on the screen in Barthomley church (“Let there be no strife for we be brethren”) and the actual ungrammatical graffiti carved in the house on Mow Cop: “I came back Mary” and “Pip loves Brian: not really now not any more.” These, with Tom’s constant quotations from Tom O’Bedlam in King Lear, serve to root the times and histories even deeper together.

  Red Shift is a sad story of a love that doesn’t work, though the deeper historical stories have happier endings. It says something for the way it’s written that the beauty of the language and the landscape and the depth of resonance shine through sufficiently to make it comfortable reading. I love it. I’m not sure I entirely understand it, even now, but that doesn’t matter.

  AUGUST 27, 2009

  67. Beautiful, poetic and experimental: Roger Zelazny’s Doorways in the Sand

  Roger Zelazny was a demented genius who could squeeze words until they sang. I first read Doorways in the Sand (1976) when I was thirteen years old. It blew my head off. I’ve read it a couple of times since then, but it isn’t in my frequent rotation, like Isle of the Dead (1969) and This Immortal (1966). Like those books, it has a typical Zelazny first-person smart-ass protagonist, like them it has aliens and shiny SFnal ideas, but unlike them it is written in an experimental way, where almost every chapter starts in the middle and then goes back to get you up to speed just in time for a new chapter and a new reverse-cliffhanger lurch. I didn’t like this when I was thirteen, though I thought it was clever, and I don’t like it now. It seems like grandstanding, and it gets in the way of my enjoyment of the story. It isn’t possible to read the book without spending a lot of time thinking, “Huh? How did that happen?” and waiting to find out. It makes it easy to identify with a protagonist who doesn’t know what’s going on either, but it’s irritating. However, the Zelazny I really like is getting too familiar for me to read, so it’s time to turn to the less favourite and therefore still readable.

  The too-clever story shaping aside, there’s a lot here to like. There’s the way Zelazny invented this awesome system of education whereby you can take courses in whatever you like, and learn about absolutely everything without ever graduating and getting a degree. He explains it was invented by a Harvard professor called Eliot, in typical science fiction as-you-know-Bob explanation. I was astounded when I found out (too late) that it was real. Fred Cassidy has been a full-time student for thirteen years without graduating. He has a hobby of climbing on buildings, which he dignifies with the name acrophilia. He knows quite a lot about a vast range of subjects. By the terms of his uncle’s will, Fred gets a comfortable monthly income until he graduates, so Fred has bent the rules and stayed in school. Meanwhile, we’ve discovered aliens and are part of an alien cultural exchange ring—the Mona Lisa and the Crown Jewels have left Earth in exchange for a very odd machine that reverses stereoisomers and the mysterious Star Stone. The Star Stone goes missing and lots of people and aliens seem to think Fred’s got it. Fred thinks he hasn’t.

  Things get weird from there on, but Fred wisecracks his way unflappably through the plot from crisis to crisis, climbing on things from time to time for recreation or escape. It’s a future without technology or social mores having changed much from the mid-seventies when this wa
s written but apart from the way everyone (even the aliens) smokes cigarettes all the time, you almost don’t notice. There’s an alien that disguises itself as a wombat, and another that looks like a Venus flytrap, after all.

  In some ways this is like a very simple adventure story. In other ways, it’s like a story of humanity glimpsing the complexities of a galactic civilization. What it’s really like is the stereoisomer of both of those stories, the inverse inside-out twisted version of them. The whole twisted-chapter thing is a meditation on the stereoisomer theme. It really is very clever, and fortunately, very beautiful.

  Sunflash, some splash. Darkle. Stardance. Phaeton’s solid gold cadillac crashed where there was no ear to hear, lay burning, flickered, went out. Like me. At least, when I woke again it was night and I was a wreck. Lying there, bound with rawhide straps, spread-eagle, sand and gravel for pillow as well as mattress, dust in my mouth, nose, ears and eyes, dined upon by vermin, thirsty, bruised, hungry and shaking, I reflected on the words of my onetime advisor Doctor Merimee: “You are a living example of the absurdity of things.” Needless to say his speciality was the novel, French, mid-Twentieth century.

  Since this is the beginning of a chapter, you have as much context as any reader for why Fred is tied up, and he doesn’t get around to telling you for pages and pages. If this is going to drive you mad, don’t read this book. If you can bear it, then you have the pretty words and the promise of aliens and a machine with a moebius conveyer belt running through it and the taste of bourbon and fries when you’ve been reversed by the machine. Nobody but nobody else could juxtapose all the things in those five little paragraphs and make it all work. Zelazny could certainly be very odd, and this is a minor work, and not where I’d recommend starting. (That would be with his short stories, presently being reissued in gorgeous editions by NESFA.) But it’s short—I read it in about an hour and a half—and it’s got the inimitable Zelazny voice which will keep singing in my mind when all the details and the irritation have sunk back into oblivion.

  There is a man. He is climbing in the dusky daysend air, climbing the high Tower of Cheslerei in a place called Ardel beside a sea with a name he cannot quite pronounce as yet. The sea is as dark as the juice of grapes, bubbling a Chianti and chirascuro fermentation of the light of distant stars and the bent rays of Canis Vibesper, its own primary, now but slightly beneath the horizon, rousing another continent, pursued by the breezes that depart the inland fields to weave their courses among the interconnected balconies, towers, walls and walkways of the city, bearing the smells of the warm land towards its older, colder, companion.

  Yup, that’s definitely one of the ways science fiction can make you long to be there. Nobody ever did it better.

  SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

  68. Waking the Dragon: George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire

  Re-reading these books right now is a mistake. Before I picked up A Game of Thrones again, I had only a calm interest in Jon Snow’s true parentage, I’d forgotten who Jeyne Poole was, and best of all, I only mildly wanted A Dance with Dragons. I sagely nodded when I read that George R. R. Martin is not my bitch. I have every sympathy for this position. All the same, I know that by the time I get to the end of A Feast for Crows I’ll be desperate, desperate, desperate, so desperate for my fix that I’ll be barely able to control myself. I will be A Dance with Dragons–seeky, and is it out? Is it even finished? Like heck it is. And I know I’m not entitled to it but I waaaaaaaaaant it! If I were a sensible person, I’d have waited to re-read until it was ready and I could have had a new installment to go with the old. But now it’s too late.

  So what is it about these books that makes me talk about them in terms of a two-year-old snatching at sweets in a supermarket?

  Firstly, they have a very high “I-want-to-read-it” quotient. This “IWantToReadItosity” is hard to explain, is utterly subjective and is entirely separate from whether a book is actually good. Who can say why Robert Heinlein and Georgette Heyer and Zenna Henderson have it for me and Herman Hesse and Aldous Huxley don’t, despite the fact that Hesse and Huxley are major world writers? I’ll happily acknowledge that The Glass Bead Game is a better book than Job: A Comedy of Justice, but nevertheless, Job has that IWantToReadItosity, and if you left me in a room with both books and nothing else, it would be Job I’d start first.

  Now, even within genre this is something that varies a lot between people. The Wheel of Time books don’t have it for me. I’ve read The Eye of the World and I didn’t care enough to pick up the others. Ditto Harry Potter, where I’ve read the first three. These are books that have IWantToReadItosity for millions of people, but not for me. The Song of Ice and Fire books do, though, they grab me by the throat. This isn’t to say they’re gripping in the conventional sense—though they are—because IWantToReadItosity isn’t necessarily to do with plot or characters or any of the ways we conventionally divide up literature. It’s got to do with whether and how much you want to read it. You know the question, “Would you rather read your book or go out with your friends?” Books have IWantToReadItosity if you’d rather read them. There are books I enjoy that I can still happily put down to do something else. A Game of Thrones is eight hundred pages long, and I’ve read it six times, but even so, every time I put the bookmark in, I put it in reluctantly.

  These books are often described as epic fantasy, but they’re cleverer than that. Most epic fantasies are quests. This is a different kind of variation on a theme from Tolkien. In those terms, it’s as if when Sauron started to rise again in Middle Earth, Gondor was in the middle of the Wars of the Roses. They’re about human-scale dynastic squabbles on the edge of something wider and darker and inhumanly dangerous. The world is wonderful, with a convincing history leading to the present situation. It has good names (Winterfell, Greyjoy, Tyrion, Eddard), great characters who are very different from each other and are never cliches—and Martin isn’t afraid to kill them, nobody is safe in this world because of being the author’s darling. There are mysteries that you can trust will be resolved, everything fits together, everything feels real and solid and full of detail.

  But the thing that really lifts them above the ordinary is the constant balance at the edge of the abyss, the army marching off south to win a kingdom when the real (supernatural) danger is north. There are human problems on a human scale, tragedy, betrayal, honour, injustice, and always the creeping reminder underneath of something … colder.

  If you like history, and if you like fantasy, and if you like books where one page leads you on to the next and you can’t believe it’s that time already, you should definitely read these. Also, if you haven’t read them you’re lucky, because you have four eight-hundred-page volumes to go before you’re reduced to a slavering hunk of waaaaaaaant.

  OCTOBER 14, 2009

  69. Who reads cosy catastrophes?

  Cosy catastrophes are science fiction novels in which some bizarre calamity occurs that wipes out a large percentage of the population, but the protagonists survive and even thrive in the new world that follows. They are related to but distinct from the disaster novel where some relatively realistic disaster wipes out a large percentage of the population and the protagonists also have a horrible time. The name was coined by Brian Aldiss in Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (and used by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction) by analogy to the cosy mystery, in which people die violently but there’s always tea and crumpets.

  In 2001, I wrote a paper for a conference celebrating British science fiction in 2001. It was called “Who Survives the Cosy Catastrophe?” and it was later published in Foundation. In this paper I argued that the cosy catastrophe was overwhelmingly written by middle-class British people who had lived through the upheavals and new settlement during and after World War II, and who found the radical idea that the working classes were people hard to deal with, and wished they would all just go away. I also suggested that the ludicrous catastrophes that destroyed civiliz
ation—bees, in Keith Roberts’s The Furies (1966), a desire to stay home in Susan Cooper’s Mandrake (1964), a comet in John Christopher’s The Year of the Comet (1955)—were obvious stand-ins for fear of the new atomic bomb that really could destroy civilization.

  In the classic cosy catastrophe, the catastrophe doesn’t take long and isn’t lingered over, and the people who survive are always middle class, and have rarely lost anyone significant to them. The working classes are wiped out in a way that removes guilt. The survivors wander around an empty city, usually London, regretting the lost world of restaurants and symphony orchestras. There’s an elegaic tone, so much that was so good has passed away. Nobody ever regrets football matches or carnivals. Then they begin to rebuild civilization along better, more scientific lines. Cosy catastrophes are very formulaic—unlike the vast majority of science fiction. You could quite easily write a program for generating one.

  It’s not surprising that science fiction readers like them. We tend to like weird things happening and people coping with odd situations, and we tend to be ready to buy into whatever axioms writers think are necessary to set up a scenario. The really unexpected thing is that these books were mainstream bestsellers in Britain in the fifties and early sixties. They sold like hotcakes. People couldn’t get enough of them—and not just to people who wanted science fiction, they were bestsellers among people who wouldn’t be seen dead with science fiction. (The Penguin editions of Wyndham from the sixties say “he decided to try a modified form of what is unhappily called ‘science fiction.’”) They despised the idea of science fiction but they loved Wyndham and John Christopher and the other imitators. It wasn’t just The Day of the Triffids (1951), which in many ways set the template for the cosy catastrophe, they all sold like that. And this was the early fifties. These people definitely weren’t reading them as a variety of science fiction. Then, although they continued to exist, and to be written, they became a specialty taste. I think a lot of the appeal for them now is for teenagers—I certainly loved them when I was a teenager, and some of them have been reprinted as YA. Teenagers do want all the grown-ups to go away—this literally happens in John Christopher’s Empty World (1977).