2017 Reading Challenge - We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Book 3 (February, Gothic)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson

Reason for Reading: This one was a recommendation on my original classics challenge. I realised I was very low on female authors (and in fact on American authors,) and my sister suggested that I add We Have Always Lived in the Castle to my Gothic selection. In a way, that was the start of the transformation of the challenge into a way of stretching, albeit only slightly, my cultural horizons.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a short novel, recounted in the first person by Mary Katherine 'Merricat' Blackwood, the younger of two sisters living in splendid isolation with their crippled uncle in their grand old family house. It emerges throughout the story that, six years prior, the rest of the family was murdered when arsenic was mixed with the sugar. Merricat had been sent to bed without supper as a punishment, Uncle Julian took only a little sugar and Constance took none, which resulted in her being tried – and acquitted – of the murders. As a result of these events, Julian was crippled, Constance reduced to an agoraphobic shut-in and Merricat became a half-feral creature, practicing home-cooked sympathetic magic to transform their home into a mystical fortress, into which outsiders intrude only briefly before being driven away by the fear which the Blackwoods purposely cultivate. Then Charles Blackwood arrives, a cousin intent on 'helping', and Merricat's world begins to unravel.

The novel is perhaps most notable for the perspective of its thoroughly unreliable narrator, Merricat, whose fantasies of life on the Moon and the mystical duel in which she engages with Charles to purge his influence from the house border on hallucination. For her, the world is a mystical place, governed by invisible forces that she manipulates through self-created rituals. She views everyone outside her immediate circle with poisonous distain, frequently picturing those around her dead, and shelters Constance even when Constance herself tries to push at the boundaries of their circumscribed world. Hers is a simple, unsophisticated voice, but powerful enough that I barely began to challenge many of her assertions until I had finished the audiobook.

Merricat is eighteen, but acts as if she is still twelve, while Constance is some ten years older, but acts like an ingénue thanks to their near-total isolation from social influences. The narrative depicts Charles as a grasping, conniving bastard, but in his last appearance there is just a shade of doubt to cast doubt on whether this is because he was an irredeemable gold-digger, or because Merricat could see no good – indeed, no humanity – in him. Similarly, the villagers act in a truly monstrous fashion towards the family, seeming to justify Merricat's view of them as subhuman brutes, but when the 'friends' of the Blackwoods insist that they misunderstood events, there is no counterpoint to tell us if Merricat viewed some lesser offence through her own skewed lens, or if rather, after the fact, the other 'good' families of the area simply do not wish to confront the possibility that they live among people capable of harbouring such hatred.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is an odd, dark little novel, with a deceptive and lingering power in its simple prose style and a morbidly compelling central character. There is a film adaptation in post-production, and I am honestly fascinated to see how they bring this to the screen, and sceptical of the ability of the visual medium to do the story justice.

2017 Reading Challenge - Nights at the Circus

Book 2 (January, Magic Realism(1))

Nights at the Circus, by Angela Carter

Reason for Reading: Angela Carter is one of the primary exponents of magic realism in the western world, and one of my mother's favourite authors. Her work is not entirely new to me, having read The Bloody Chamber a time or two since first seeing Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, and I had heard bits of Nights at the Circus on BBC7 as was, but never all of it.

Nights at the Circus is a novel in three parts. In the first, an aerialiste known as Fevvers recounts her life history to an American journalist named Walsher in the closing years of the 19th century. Fevvers performs with a magnificent pair of wings spreading from her shoulders, and claims to be a genuine winged woman. Hatched from an egg, raised by honest prostitutes and briefly ensnared by the rich and venal for their own reasons, hers is the story of a unique being, a freak of nature, and its truth or falsehood remains uncertain.

In the second part, Fevvers, with her companion and foster-mother Lizzie, sets out on a grand tour with an American circus, to St Petersburg and thence across Siberia to sail to America, and Walsher follows, taking up the role of junior clown. Even as the Petersburg performances take them to the heights of stardom, jealousy and madness tear at the circus, and Fevvers is stalked by a wealthy but sinister admirer. In the third part, Fevvers' internal monologue becomes accessible to us as she begins to lose her magical nature. The circus is hijacked in Siberia and the performers cast adrift in a world becoming more magic and less real by the moment.

Nights at the Circus is an extraordinary novel just on a linguistic level. No sentence is functional or throwaway, every one is crafted, whether for soaring poetry or crude vernacular (of which there is plenty.) The book weaves a strange and magical world out of mostly ordinary things; Lizzie manipulates time with a clock, while Fevvers' virtue is defended with a toy sword the loss of which diminishes her. Fevvers herself is a wondrous grotesque; a towering, graceful glutton who gives forth high philosophy in the language of the London street. The other characters in the play are no less fantastical, their circus roles imbuing them with a potent, archetypal magic of their own. Even Walsher, the putative everyman, is eventually disabused of his skepticism through a magic of his own, first as a clown and then as a shaman.

This is an extraordinary, dizzying fantasy of greed and magnificence, envy and liberation, spirituality and carnality. Once more, I have no regrets over choosing this one, although I do wish that Audible had the Kirstie MacColl reading I remember (but which Google appears in ignorance of.)

(1) In one passage of the book, the very world it is set in is described in exactly these terms.

Reading Roundup - January

2017 Reading Challenge
I was halfway through the month when I began my challenge, so it's no big surprise that I haven't finished all of my January targets yet. I have read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I'm about a third of the way through Nights at the Circus. My final goal for January is a poetry bonus, and thanks to my partner Hanna I will be looking at The Rose That Grew From Concrete, a collection of the poems of Tupac Shakur.

The Last Dragonslayer is the first book in Jasper Fforde's Jennifer Strange trilogy, and the recent subject of a Sky Christmas special adaptation. It is the story of Jennifer Strange, a foundling working in indentured servitude as the acting manager of a magical talent agency; a job which involves finding respectable work for half a dozen odd sorcerers and supporting twice as many retired former employees in a hotel full of random old enchantments. Some might consider this work enough for a fourteen year old, but when Big Magic starts to brew and big money is offered for a certified vision of when the last dragon is going to die and leave the Dragonlands open for a land grab, she discovers that she is also the last in the long line of Dragonslayers.

So, the thing I couldn't escape listening to The Last Dragonslayer is of course the differences to the adaptation. It's been a while since I'd read it, so many of them passed me by, including a whole subplot about the impending war between Hereford and Brecon once the Dragonlands ceased to be a constant barrier to invasion. Also the quarkbeast is a lot weirder, the sorcerers of Kazam more numerous and less universally benevolent (Lady Mawgan, the only one whose name made it to the TV, is practically a secondary antagonist.)

I went on from there to The Song of the Quarkbeast, book two in the series. With Jennifer still in King Snod's bad books, Kazam faces the prospect of their arch-rivals at Industrial Magic (newly rebranded as iMagic to be more with it) taking over the firm and becoming the sole authorities on magical practice; a state of affairs that would leave them, and in particular their manager the Amazing/All-Powerful Blix, free to gouge the public to their hearts' content. Yet there is more at stake even than the threat of a hostile takeover motivated by a long-standing feud between Blix and absent Kazam manager, the once-Amazing Zambini, as Jennifer stumbles on a sinister plot to abuse the rarest and most remarkable creature in the world in pursuit of ultimate power.

The Song of the Quarkbeast is an odd biscuit, in that it doesn't always gibe with the first book in the series. Much of this is due to small errors which are fixed in version 1.1 (rolling upgrades via website being a feature of all Fforde's books,) but there are still a few things that don't add up; such as the suggestion that the Price brothers are never seen together being dropped without comment, or the fact that suddenly everyone knows that the Mighty Shandar is alive and has a family of hereditary agents, where previously they had wondered who his agent might have been in his day. By their own lights, however, each book is a delight, full of Fforde's quirky charm and delightfully read by Jane Collingwood.

Finally for this month, Body Work is the first of the Rivers of London graphic novels (formerly comic book limited series,) putting a face to apprentice wizard and police constable Peter Grant well ahead of any adaptation. It's the tale of a killer car which gets broken up for parts, and seeks to exercise a vengeance more marked by passion than by accuracy via the vehicles into which its parts have been transplanted.

Given the constraints of the medium, Body Work is much more straightforward than the average case for Peter Grant, lacking the space for red herrings and side plots. It's got the humour, and the action, and indeed the horror of the original down. Fellow Doctor Who alumnus Andrew Cartmel (he of the Master Plan) gets Aaronovich's style, and the art by Lee Sullivan and Luis Guerrero may not match the pictures in my head exactly, but they'll do and then some (although if I'm honest I always pictured Beverly Brook as a bit more casual, a bit less fetish wear.)