The Alchemist Of Souls – Review

Anne Lyle has written a gem of a first novel. The Alchemist of Souls is the first volume in the Night’s Masque  trilogy. It’s set in an Elizabethan London largely recognizable aside from a few key details, such as Queen Elizabeth’s marriage to Robert Dudley, which has given the throne an heir apparent. Much else that you would expect from the time and place are there, theatre, filth, fops, intrigue, and Shakespearean cross-dressing resulting in the comedy (and tragedy) of mistaken identity.

There is one other difference, though. And this one’s key. The New World has retained the name the Norse gave it when they discovered it circa 1000, Vinland. And Vinland is inhabited by a faery-like people called Skraylings. Now, I poked around online and discovered that Skræling was what the Vikings called those indigenous inhabitants they found in Greenland and North America. But Lyle’s Skraylings are not Native Americans. They’re short. They have silver hair. They paint their faces with blue swirling tattoos. And they’re magical.

The novel’s main storyline (and its best) concerns Maliverny Catlyn. Like the Skraylings, Mal does whisper up at us from history. He apparently was part of  Walsingham’s network of spies. You can find references to him in the book Elizabeth’s Spymaster, for instance, which Lyle points out in the back of the book. But unlike the older, sterner Puritan of history, Lyle’s Mal is a bit of a dashing young cudgel-wielding rogue who gets press-ganged into Her Majesty’s Service as bodyguard to the Skrayling ambassador, who is soon to pay a visit. Here, he gets tangled in all kinds of intrigue, some concerning a theatrical contest (what else?) to be judged by the ambassador, and more concerning his twin brother, Sandy, who languishes in Bedlam. The web grows rather complex, and I found I had to work just a little harder than I wanted to in order to keep the minor characters straight, since they do come to play important roles as the story develops. I could have done with that fabulously useful tool one finds at the beginning of Shakespeare’s plays, and with which Hillary Mantel and George R. R. Martin also provide us—to wit, a cast of characters.

Aside from that, though, I found this to be an immersive and engaging novel. Lyle is at her best when writing about Mal and Kiiren, the skrayling ambassador. Their difficulties with language, how their different cultures and religions are revealed—all of this makes for fascinating and hypnotic reading. Also, I felt as if I walked those smelly Tudor streets as strongly as I’ve felt it reading writers like Mantel or Peter Ackroyd. Here, for instance, is Lyle’s description of Bartholomew Fair at Smithfield.

What hit Coby first was the smell, a thick smoky mix of roast hog, beer, sweaty bodies and of course the mud of Smithfield, permeated by generations’-worth of cow dung and urine. After that came the noise: the clamour of voices, beating of drums, the occasional blare of a trumpet.

I’m growing more interested these days in what alternate history can do with fantasy tropes. I’ve always enjoyed that fantasy best that occurs in the world we already know, rather than in, say, a faux-medieval landscape that needs a map so we know our way around. We all know, pretty much, where London is. Even though this is an alternate London, we still know it enough not to need a map and a long catalogue of made up history behind it to make it seem real. Anne Lyle has given us the Elizabethan London we know from reading history and Shakespeare; but she’s also created a London that has just enough strangeness in its shadows to keep us anticipating wonder. Her bio at the back of the book states she grew up fascinated with history. I do hope that, once the Night’s Masque is complete (Volume Two published in January), she will treat us to another fully realized alternate take on a place and time we thought we knew before we experienced it through her imagination.

Audiobooks and the Dreaming Mind – A Ghost, Some Snow, Some Fairies, and a Lighthouse

After my recent foray into the seedy underworld of pornographic audio recordings, I thought I should write about what I really seek from oral storytelling. Because even though I’m a book mutt, a promiscuous glutton of the written word who at any given time has something like ten to twelve books on the go (at varying levels of commitment), some of which I’ll finish and some I won’t, I’m extremely finicky about what audiobooks I’ll listen to. Here, I’m after something specific: the dreaming mind. Now, all art worth a damn ought in some way to produce a version of this—in that, if you ain’t losing yourself in it, if it ain’t casting a spell on you that whisks you out of whatever mundane world you were inhabiting before, then it ain’t working. Even if it endures for a few seconds only (while, say, you crane your neck looking at that Chagall painting over the shoulder of the other attendees on the final day of the exhibition), worthwhile art of all media ought to produce a kind of trance.

But that’s not the kind of dreaming mind I’m talking about. Not as far as audiobooks are concerned.

Robert Ekirch at Virginia Tech conducted extensive research into the history of night (what wonderful lines of inquiry academics can pursue, eh?) and discovered medieval written references to what were called first and second sleeps. Apparently, one of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims mentions them. According to Ekirch, people used to go to bed a few hours after sundown—they had no artificial light, after all—and sleep about four hours, wake for an hour or so, then have a second sleep for about four more hours. The midnight hour of waking, sometimes called The Watch, was reserved for contemplative practices like praying, reading or writing (or other more sensual activities if you shared your blanket). Some people also used this time to interpret dreams, because at this time of night, dreams stayed with you. This was the visionary hour, the time of prophecy.

For me, though, it just used to be the time of stress. I’d have to get out of bed so my tossing and turning didn’t wake up my partner and cause a needless fight. It was a time for me to sit in the living-room and wonder why my life produced the kind of anxiety that meant I suffered regular insomnia. Would it lead to a heart-attack? A nervous breakdown? Premature baldness?

Then came the MP3 player, and with it, audiobooks.

You see, I could never read once my partner went to bed. Because me keeping the light on kept her awake, and I never got on with those fiddly reading lights you clip to the top of a book. Turning the page always rubbed against it, making an annoying scrape—so I could never manage to read quietly. And don’t get me started on the retinal pain a backlit screen in a dark room inflicts.

I first used audiobooks for long car journeys. I’m in field sales, so my job sometimes means three-hour commutes. (And sometimes half hour tube rides, which I prefer.) So, on these long rides, I got a little tired of listening to Led Zeppelin or Radiohead over and over, so started listening to books instead. I sailed through a couple of Joe Abercrombie’s works. He’s landed a great narrator in Stephen Pacey, possibly one of the best voice actors in Britain. So I got along with audiobooks just fine in the car. I did Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and more. I started listening while doing the ironing, or when doing the shopping (although I soon found it impossible to concentrate on the narrative whilst simultaneously holding the shopping list in my mind and maneuvering the trolley around stressed mums with screaming kids in a crowded Tesco). But, basically, I stuck with listening to books alone in the car on long motorway drives.

Then I came across Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter.

Paver is best known for The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, a series of children’s books set in Ice Age Europe that follow the adventures of a boy named Torak. The books were wildly successful and deservedly so. Her evocation of the ancient European forests is utterly captivating. Dark Matter, her first novel since, is written for adults. It is something far more sinister and unsettling. Written in sparse first-person, it tells the story of Jack and his part in a 1930s scientific expedition to the arctic circle. Summer here is brief, and quickly fades to a darkening autumn that sees each of Jack’s companions in turn have to depart, mostly due to injuries of one sort or another, leaving Jack to man the scientific instruments in the cabin alone. Well, not quite alone. He has a loyal group of Huskies outside, whose daily needs supply Jack with a much needed routine. But there’s something else in the general vicinity of the cabin, too. Outside, in the blowing, snowy wastes. Something that’s not supposed to be there. Something that’s not supposed to exist at all. It walks around in the dark winter night outside Jack’s windows.

Get the picture?

The plot is straightforward as all hell, with a minimum of characters. Which leaves Paver all kinds of room for atmospherics. And at these, she proves herself a master. The audiobook is narrated by Jeremy Northam. He has a tender and gravelled voice, like John Hurt. He knows how to communicate the kind of quiet unease that settles into this narrative once Jack is on his own. He spends the winter there, in total darkness, always fearing to look at the windows. Afraid the howling wind is a voice. Afraid he’s losing his mind.

I don’t know what prompted me to reach for the iPod and headphones when I awoke during The Watch one night, but I did, and instead of stalking off to the couch in the front room to be stressed about insomnia, I laid back and listened to Dark Matter. Boy did it fit. Northam’s quietly disturbed narration of Paver’s prose summoning the lonely and haunted arctic darkness not only matched the particular rhythm of my brainwaves during that bleak hour of night; they enhanced it. The Watch, the time of meditation and dream-reading, became a vivid experience. Each night that I awoke (about three times a week on average) I would lay there and let Dark Matter blend itself with my dreaming mind and soon I’d find myself in that half-sleep state where words take on new meanings and visions encroach. (Later, I’d wake up enough to pause the iPod and drop the headphones to the floor.)

Once Dark Matter ended, I searched out another audiobook I thought might prove similarly suited to The Watch. I chose well: Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child. This one’s set in Alaska in the 1920s. Similarly lonely, and similarly cold. (I wasn’t taking any chances.)  But this story has a gentler feel. Like a fairy story. In fact, it’s loosely based on a Russian fairy tale about a young girl made of snow who comes to a husband and wife who are unable to have children of their own. Transpose this to 1920s Alaska, and you get the gist. Debra Monk’s the narrator here. She has a Midwestern American drawl that, being an Illinois-boy myself, I found comforting in the quiet hours of night. Again, the book has a handful of characters and a straightforward narrative. The snow child appears. The couple keep her secret. She goes away every summer. Each winter, she comes back. Of course, there are complications that I won’t detail here and spoil it all for you. Suffice it to say, the girl grows older, and the couple wonder what they should do. Is she real? Are they crazy? Should they tell someone?

After The Snow Child, I stuck with the fairy tale theme and chose Graham Joyce’s Some Kind Of Fairy Tale. How fortunate for me. Graham Joyce is one of those English fantasists I suspect I’ll return to again and again. Some Kind Of Fairy Tale tells of Tara, who at fifteen accepts a ride in the woods by a strange man named Hiero who rides a white horse and takes her to a magical place that features, among other things, a lake that lives and regularly offers the ultimate sensual pleasure to whomsoever happens to be swimming in it at the time. Joyce depicts fairies as tall, strikingly beautiful, and horny as a beer-fuelled frat-boy. Tara stays with Hiero for six months. She returns to her family one Christmas, only to discover that, fairy-time being what it is, twenty years has passed in this world. What we get with this novel is the unfolding of the consequences of both her absence and her unexpected return, still looking fifteen, to those who have long since given her up for a runaway or for dead. It’s a gentle story, best heard quietly in the headphones at 2 a.m. It’s read by John Lee, who I found rather inexpressive and clinical. The best I can say about him is that he does not get in the way of this touching story. I look forward to more of Joyce’s work.

I’m currently listening to Alison More’s The Lighthouse. This is a tender tale of loss that follows Futh, a middle-aged man who takes a ferry-ride to Germany for a walking holiday to help him cope with separating from his wife. Along the way, small events trigger memories of his married life, and his childhood. I’m not yet finished, but Eve Karpf’s narration, clipped and rough-voiced like a precise middle aged headmistress who smokes, lends a toughness and exactitude to Futh’s wandering thoughts, and to the poetry of More’s narrative.

My search goes on. The Lighthouse is a short book, only four hours’ worth of listening, so I will need to find the next story to comfort me on those lonely nights when I’m faced with yet another Watch, another meditative interval ‘twixt first and second sleep. Any suggestions are welcome. I’ve noticed that Ian McKellan narrates Michelle Paver’s Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series, so it may be time to revisit those in spoken form. I reckon my dreaming mind would welcome Gandalf telling me magical stories set in Ice Age Europe.

Rest well. Dream vivid.

Black Feathers by Joseph D’Lacey – Review

In 2008, Joseph D’Lacey published his first novel Meat. He wrote his heart and soul into it. Its success established him at the forefront of the Eco-Horror genre and prompted Stephen King to declare that “Joseph D’Lacey rocks!” And it introduced readers to Joseph D’Lacey’s great theme, from which he’s never wavered: the damage mankind’s greed and ignorance inflict upon Mother Earth, and the resulting cataclysm when Mother Earth strikes back.

For a while it seemed that Meat was D’Lacey at his peak, that he would not produce a better expression of his imagination. We didn’t see a full-length novel from him after 2009’s Garbage Man, about a landfill that spawns trash-monsters. Then came 2012, and Blood Fugue, which proved D’Lacey’s imagination still packed a gut-punch or two. But, for all I enjoyed that novel, it didn’t come from the same aesthetic space as Meat.

Well, Black Feathers does. No—I’ll go one further. I get the feeling Black Feathers is the work Joseph D’Lacey has been building toward since he first faced a blank page with the intention of telling a story. It outdoes Meat in ambition, scope, poetry, vision, mythic resonance, depth, and execution. Quite simply, Black Feathers shows that Joseph D’Lacey has matured.

The story’s structure is a dual-narrative. The first strand is set in the near-future and follows Gordon Black, a young boy whose family survives an environmental apocalypse that turns what remains of English society into a police-state run by a quasi-military organization called The Ward. Almost all of this happens off-stage and is delivered via standard exposition. I could have used less of this second-hand information, and would have preferred to be more immersed in the sheer drama of the civilization’s collapse. I understand, though, that D’Lacey has a big story to tell, and cannot afford the hundreds of pages it would have cost him to detail this catastrophe in all its glory. And perhaps he was wise not to try. No one’s going to beat Stephen King’s The Stand at that game. Anyway, D’Lacey’s overall concern is not the fall. It’s the aftermath. Specifically, it is the emergence of the character who provides the novel with its mythic heart—The Crowman.

The folklore surrounding this mysterious figure, also known as The Scarecrow and Black Jack, evokes both fear and wonder. Some say his coming heralds the end of mankind. For Gordon, to find The Crowman would be to save his family, and to heal the Earth. If only he can avoid capture by The Ward.

The novel’s second thread, interwoven with the first, is set in the far future. Humanity has recovered, and now lives a kind of pastoral idyll in the green and pleasant medieval landscape that has colored the imaginations of fantasy writers from Tolkien onward, except that hidden away in this landscape are the wastelands of dead cities, where—so the old stories claim—great illuminated towers once stood, and strange machines with lights on the front used to zoom people around at terrific speeds. The passages in this strand are written in present-tense. They are the novel’s Now. Here, we meet Megan. She is about the same age as Gordon, and she also must pursue the elusive Crowman. He has appeared to her, chosen her for the Dark Feathered path under the tutelage of a wandering healer/shaman called Mr Keeper. Megan, too, is to become such a keeper. It is prophesied that the first and only female keeper will be the last keeper. Is Megan the one? I think so. But does this mean salvation or destruction?

Much of this thread concerns Megan’s training, and the wisdom Mr Keeper is able to impart to her along the way. But it is also in this thread that D’Lacey explores his other major theme. While, overall, Black Feathers enhances D’Lacey’s grand idea concerning mankind’s responsibilities to Mother Earth, Megan’s thread also examines the vital importance of the art of story-telling. Mr Keeper presents Megan with a book full of blank pages. In it, she must write the Crowman’s story, as revealed to her in dreams that can strike her at any time of the day or night. This is what Keepers do. They keep The Crowman’s story. For as long as The Crowman’s story is kept, the Earth will stay strong. So keepers through the generations have set The Crowman’s story down afresh in whatever ways The Crowman has seen fit to relate it. Here is where the sacred impinges the profane, where the eternal jolts the passing, and the fantastic touches the everyday. This is the well-spring of inspiration, the deep source of all art. Is D’Lacey saying our greatest inspiration comes from our deep connection with nature? Or is that too simple? What, after all, does The Crowman represent? And how intimately would one wish to be connected to him? One may as well ask what, in Melville’s great novel, does the white whale represent? We know that too intimate a connection with that beast means death, though the novel’s narrator, Ishmael, also on the fated Pequod, undergoes a process of rebirth and salvation.

D’Lacey has served up his most delectable treat yet with this novel. He deftly weaves together its two narrative strands, having Megan’s feet at times tread the same ground as Gordon’s, only far into the future. Both are at times in peril, and subject to mysterious people and powers, so the pace rarely lags. But Megan and Gordon never come together, though I anticipate they will. The Crowman can, after all, manipulate The Weave, which is the intertwining of the events of time, so his keepers can travel back and forth along its warp and weft. At one point, for example, Megan, as one of a murder of crows, witnesses Gordon’s birth, and we get to see the event from both sides. But I’m banking these dual protagonists will come much closer together than that. To what end remains a mystery. Since Black Feathers is only the first half of the story, I will have to wait for final volume to find out.

Elves: Once Walked With Gods (review)

Elves: Once Walked With Gods by James Barclay

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A superb read that lets up only long enough for you to take your next breath before plunging you headlong back into dizzying action. Having said that, some of the fight sequences do at times become so kaleidoscopic as to disorient. Nevertheless, this is grown up fantasy at its best. The characters are fully realized and faced with difficult choices that will challenge your loyalties. And don’t be fooled by the title. These elves have nothing airy about them; unless, that is, they’re leaping into that air to land behind you and lay you waste with a swift kick the head or a blade to the back. Highly recommended.

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Apartment 16 (review)

Apartment 16 by Adam Nevill

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What Adam Nevill does well is to look at how the human imagination, through its interaction with various art media (in this case painting), is capable of allowing access into this world the uncanny and terrifying presences that populate other worlds. Like the best fantasists, Nevill renders the shadowy borders between the here and the elsewhere utterly plausible. I won’t give anything away here. Suffice it to say that what is struggling to enter our own world from Apartment 16 ought to give a genuine chill to anyone who’s ever entertained a shadowy thought. The only reason I held off on giving this a full compliment of stars is that, despite how darkly visionary this novel’s central idea is, the story itself does run out of steam shortly before the final climax.

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Ritual (review)

The Ritual by Adam Nevill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Nevill’s best work so far. It delves into the primeval forests of Europe, reveals the living horror that lurks there, and goes on to explore how this horror resonates in our deepest and oldest instincts. Again, as ever, he examines this (partly, at least) through our psychological and emotional bonds to various art forms, in this case, music, particularly Swedish Death Metal. This is the first of Nevill’s novels that, for me, has a strong enough story to outlast the unfolding of another of his characteristically visionary ideas. Although there was an inevitable sag of a few pages in the novel’s second half, the story quickly picked back up and rode me rough right to the end. Then, with little need for a denouement, and having fully rendered the human response to terror of the most primal kind, Nevill makes a swift exit. Great stuff.

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Meat (review)

Meat by Joseph D’Lacey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A grim, grim, grim novel indeed. This is uncompromising stuff, with little room to avert your eyes. Using the backdrop of the industrialized slaughterhouse (and giving it the kind of sickening twist only a good horror novel can do), the story really explores what participation in such a soulless and mechanized form of taking life does to the psyche. This, then, leads the reader to consider the nature of human cruelty in general. None of this is to say the novel lacks its transcendent moments. Anyone who reads the passages concerning the spiritual – and in some ways biological – evolution our species undertakes in this novel under the leadership of John Collins (okay, I could have done without the JC reference) will be in no doubt that D’Lacey can achieve more than mere shocks. Through this story runs an awareness of humanity’s deep connection to the earth. A promising first novel, and I look forward to reading more.

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