Review of The White Shadow by Andrea Eames

Title: The White Shadow
Author: Andrea Eames
Published: 2 February 2012
Publisher: Harvill Secker
Genre: YA, literary fiction, fantasy, African fiction
Source: review copy courtesy of Tammy at Women24
Rating: 5/10

It began when my father told me that every person has two shadows: a black one and a white. The white shadow mweya, is the soul and the black shadow, nyama – a word which also means ‘meat’ – is the flesh.[...]

The mweya climbs out of the body after you die, in the form of a worm. [...]

The worm will crawl out and into an animal, and the animal becomes an ancestral spirit. (1)

 

It began when the second child was born to our family and my father fell in love. (3)

 

Of these two beginnings, the first emphasises the role of folklore in the narrative, but the second is more significant. The speaker is Tinashe, a young Shona boy from a rural village in 1970s Zimbabwe. When his sister is born, everyone is disappointed that she is not a boy, but his father loves her instantly and names her “Hazvinei”, meaning “it does not matter”. Tinashe himself is secretly pleased because it means he will be the only son in the house.

From the moment of her birth, Hazvinei proves to be a strange but gifted child. She doesn’t cry when she’s born, and it’s years before she speaks, although it’s clear that she’s very intelligent. She has a sharp little teeth and a tendency to bite. As she grows older, she seems to have a connection to the Shona spirit world.

Tinashe begs her not to speak about it. His parents have frequently told him to look after his sister, and he worries that she will be labelled a witch if people find out about her abilities. The two of them grow up in a dusty little village and are occasionally visited by their wealthy cousin Abel who lives in the city. Zimbabwe is fraught with political conflict as rebels fight for independence from the colonists, but for a long time the children experience this only in snippets – officious white men questioning them about guerrillas hiding out in the bush; an injured man in Tinashe’s home in the middle of the night; tense whispering among the adults.

Tinashe takes little notice and happily believes the propaganda he hears on the radio. He just wants to go to school and (if his uncle will pay the fees) attend university so that he may wear a tie to work, own a car and live in a house in the city. In the meantime his cousin Abel longs to defy his father and become a freedom fighter, while Hazvinei believes she might possess the power to save their country.

This is not a political novel, however. For the most part, it’s a portrait of a child’s life in a rural Zimbabwean village. Tinashe grows up playing with the other children in the village, swimming in the river, collecting glass bottles in order to buy cold cokes at the local shop, doing chores for his parents, watching trails of ants go about their business (that last one happens surprisingly often). Tinashe is one of the few children who goes to school regularly, even thought the teacher is simply the only man in the village to have finished high school, and the school’s tiny collection of battered text books means that lessons are frequently repeated.

Since Tinashe knows little life outside his village, he is not particularly bothered by the poverty of his existence, but it becomes apparent whenever his uncle, Babamakuru, is mentioned. Babamakuru is the symbol of wealth to the villagers – he lives in the city, he wears a tie to work, he drives a car. His home includes a legendary indoor toilet, and a refrigerator full of ice cold Cokes. Abel enjoys chicken and potatoes for supper every night, and is initially disappointed when he is given neither at Tinashe’s home. At one point, Babamakuru gives Tinashe a toy truck as a present, and Tinashe marvels over it because it is the first new, clean thing he has ever owned. Village life certainly isn’t what you’d call hygienic, and I have to say that the novel didn’t need quite so many descriptions of urination and other bodily functions.

But what I will remember most about The White Shadow is not the poverty but the culturally ordained misogyny:

Women are dangerous, I was taught. Women have a natural tendency to become witches. Everyone knows this; and witches are the only thing that can break the unbreakable line of family (2)

It’s odd – women are frequently seen as symbolic of family, but in this case they pose a danger to it, regardless of the role they play in reproduction. Men, rather, are seen as the ones who create families:

‘It is good to be a man,’ Baba [father] said. ‘We make children, and children are the greatest wealth.’

Women risk breaking families or are seen to exist outside of the family:

‘A boy makes the family stronger,’ said Baba. ‘A girl is with the family only until she marries. She is a little stranger in the house.’ (5)

Hazvinei, however, is such a wilful, strong-minded child that she defies cultural traditions. As Tinashe notes, “There were certain things girls were meant to do and certain things boys were meant to do, and Hazvinei did neither” (64). Her father also allows her to go to school, even though educating girls is considered pointless.

However, Hazvinei is in no way liberated. Her schooling is ultimately meaningless, and she remains trapped within the dangerously misogynist boundaries of her culture. She questions it, but at her peril. Tinashe’s pathetic attempts at looking after her mostly involve trying to keep her silent or well-behaved.

For the most part, it’s sad and frustrating, but every now and then it’s outright disgusting. When Hazvinei gets older, she develops a curvy figure that titillates the men who hang around the local shebeen (an informal pub/liquor store). They find it disturbing that Hazvinei neither insults nor flirts with them, but ignores them completely. Tinashe is warned that “[m]en complain of their seed spilling in the night [...] Wasted on their blankets when it should go to grow children. Your sister troubles their dreams. She unmans them” (212). He is advised that girls like Hazvinei should be married because it is “dangerous for such a woman to wander alone. [...] Her female essence is not guarded, nor protected. Not guided in the proper way” (211). I hadn’t been keeping track of Hazvinei’s age, so shortly after this conversation I was shocked to hear that she was only 13 at this point.

Although Tinashe is dedicated to protecting his sister, it’s a long, long time before he even begins to question the gendered beliefs he has taken for granted. He simply believes that things are the way they are. It’s no surprise then that Tinashe is not the most exciting of narrators. Although he’s three years older than Hazvinei, he almost always seems like the silly, fumbling younger brother chasing after her. He does well at school, but Hazvinei and Abel both accuse him of being stupid because he tends to be rather dim in social and emotional terms. Even the reader, trapped within his limited POV, will pick up on things before he does. He’s also annoyingly cowardly and incurious. His sister is the most interesting character in the novel, but when it comes to her abilities or ideas, he always tells her, “You must not talk about these things [...] You know what they will say. You know what they call girls like you” (222). Tinashe is not incorrect in assuming that Hazvinei may endanger herself, but it’s disappointing that he doesn’t want to listen to her or learn more about her, which means that the reader can’t either.

After a while I wondered where all this was going. The answer is: nowhere. It’s not that nothing happens – there are many notable events, causes and effects – but it has the random feel of real life where things happen without an overarching plot.

Whether you enjoy this sort of thing is a matter of personal preference. I generally didn’t mind meandering along with the characters’ lives, it gets frustrating because it feels like there should be more. You keep expecting a plot to develop because Eames sows its seeds from beginning to end – the country’s political turmoil, Hazvinei’s mysterious wisdom and power, Abel’s longing to join the guerrillas, Tinashe’s dream of getting a university education and a job where he has to wear a tie.  Each of the three main characters has specific obstacles in their paths – Hazvinei faces the misogyny of her culture; Abel has to defy his father’s wishes; poverty and family tensions crush Tinashe’s hopes of an education. It really looks like it will all combine to form a story of political and social rebellion entwined with folklore and personal achievements. Instead, the building blocks crumble before anything is properly formed.

As a result the book turns out to be fairly depressing. It begins in hardship and never really rises out of that. The most hopeful thing about it is the ambiguous ending, in which optimistic readers could find a glimmer of salvation for the characters. On the downside, it leaves you feeling that the story you were waiting for is floating wordlessly beyond the pages of the book and you will never get to read it. Unless perhaps Eames writes a sequel.

Alternatively, you could read it as grim realism. The fantasy aspects of the novel are never fully confirmed, and can be rationalised as the product of belief, imagination, and Hazvinei’s unique wisdom. The meandering plot, with its lack of successes and resolutions, can be seen simply as the sad reality of a hard life.

Neither perspective is favourable. The White Shadow isn’t a particularly bad novel – it’s well-written and memorable – but I feel that it’s unnecessarily dreary and wastes its potential for a strong plot. I’d recommend it to those with an interest in African fiction, but not the merits of its story or ideas alone.

 

Buy The White Shadow at The Book Depository

Review of The Peculiars by Maureen Doyle McQuerry

Title: The Peculiars
Author: Maureen Doyle McQuerry
Published: 1 May 2012
Publisher: Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS Books
Genre: YA, adventure, steampunk, science fantasy
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 5/10

Since she was a child, Lena Mattacascar has been called Peculiar. She has unusually long hands and feet, and each of her fingers has an extra knuckle. “[S]igns of goblinism”, the doctor said, and her grandmother never hesitated to tell her what a no-good goblin criminal her father was (he left home when Lena was five). Lena tries to pass her strange appendages off as “birth defects” but she’s desperate to know the truth about her father and her own genetics.

On her 18^th birthday, Lena’s mother gives her two gifts left by her father – a small inheritance, and a letter. Motivated by her father’s words to her, Lena decides to use the money to travel to Scree, the supposed land of the Peculiars. She takes a train to the town of Knob Knoster, on the border of Scree, where she will need to buy supplies and find someone to guide her through the wilderness. One man who could help her is Tobias Beasley, an inventor and historian.

However, Beasley is rumoured to be an eccentric who might be involved in strange dealings with Peculiars. A young but determined federal marshal named Thomas Saltre asks Lena to spy on him and report anything incriminating. Lena agrees, and gets a job in Beasley’s library, working alongside Jimson Quigley, a young man she met on the train. It’s a pleasant, fulfilling life, but Lena finds some suspicious things in Beasley’s home, leading her to make decisions that put the people she cares about in danger.

The Peculiars is a steampunk-ish coming-of-age novel about how difference breeds prejudice. The people who believe in Peculiars see them as sub-human, morally decrepit freaks. Scree has a dubious reputation as “the place where they send criminals. They say the forests are filled with hideous things”. “No one’s there but misfits, political enemies, and aliens”, Lena is told. It’s no surprise then, that all Peculiars are lumped together with thieves, murderers and anyone considered socially undesirable. The government uses this for political gain. Scree is rich in mineral resources, and by stating that Peculiars are non-human and playing into people’s fears and about them, the government is then able to declare Scree terra nullius – “a ‘land belonging to no one’”. It makes it easy for them to justify their actions there – stealing the land from the indigenous people and exploiting them as slave labour. It’s essentially the story of European colonialism. Scree is a metaphor for Africa or Australia, and the Peculiars represent the indigenous people of those lands.

It’s quite a while before you really see any of this in action though. The majority of the novel is set in Knob Knoster where Lena is trying to prepare for her Scree journey. As a result many reviewers have complained about the slow pace of this book. The blurb gives the impression that this is an action-adventure novel set in Scree, but in fact Lena doesn’t even get there until the last quarter of the novel. You also don’t get to see nearly as many Peculiars as you would expect – their very existence is portrayed as something of a myth for a while, although it’s obvious to the reader that they’re real.

Luckily, this didn’t bother me. I don’t trust blurbs, and in general I’m fine with slow-moving plots. I would have liked the Peculiars to play a larger part, but at least they’re intertwined with the politics and social views of the time. What really, really bothered me though, was Lena. She’s such a weak, thoughtless girl that she essentially spoiled the novel for me.

Thomas Saltre asks Lena to spy on Mr Beasley for him. In exchange he promises to provide her with a guide to Scree and since he’ll be focusing on Beasley, he’ll take his attention off Lena’s father, Saltre’s other most wanted criminal. Plus, Lena will be helping her country. Lena agrees, although there’s absolutely no good reason for her to do so at this point. She doesn’t need Saltre’s guide if Beasley will help her (which he immediately agrees to do). Saltre didn’t promise to leave her father alone, just that he would ignore him for a bit. It doesn’t even occur to Lena that Saltre could later use her to lead him straight to her father. And since when does Lena care about her country? The government is opposed to Peculiars, and she’s clearly a Peculiar.

It gets worse once she meets Beasley. She’s welcomed into his home, given a tour of his magnificent library, and invited to lunch. Beasley instantly agrees to be her Scree guide, and to help her pay for the expedition he offers her a job in his library and a place to stay in his lovely home. She accepts, and basically begins an ideal life for a young woman in her society. She has a respectable job doing fulfilling work, she has the independence that comes with making your own money, she lives in a beautiful, stately home, all meals are cooked by the housekeeper, and there’s the potential for a bit of romance with her colleague Jimson. On top of that, Beasley has offered to help her achieve her goal of travelling into Scree and finding her father. Beasley has basically given Lena everything she could want at this point. And still the stupid bitch goes running to Saltre with any information she can find to betray Beasley.

Lena actually carries around a notebook and pen just in case she learns something incriminating, and at one point she endures physical pain and great anxiety to go creeping around Beasley’s house in the middle of the night and steal one of his books. Why? Partly because she has a crush on the handsome Saltre, and partly because Lena is easily duped by authority. Saltre is a marshal, and she believes everything he says. The government says Peculiars are bad, therefore they must be bad (even though that implies that Lena is bad too, since she’s obviously Peculiar). If Beasley is breaking the law he must be stopped, even if he is good and the law is designed to exploit people. Lena is such a twit; it takes quite a while for her to think outside the lines.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if the reader had more of a chance to empathise with her, if we could see things the way she seems to see them. For example, if it looked like Saltre might actually have feelings for her, or if there was something potentially sinister about Mr Beasley. But no – while she’s blindly making the wrong decisions, it’s crystal clear to the reader what’s really going on. It’s so obvious that Saltre is a villainous government agent manipulating a vulnerable young woman to get what he wants. He’s going to turn on her the moment she ceases to be useful. It’s so obvious that Mr Beasley, on the other hand, is a good, kind man, and Lena is making a colossal mistake by betraying him. I know Lena is naive, but I just couldn’t take her side when people like Jimson and Beasley are so much more likeable.

Jimson is the one who tells Lena that the government is using the Peculiars for political gain. Although he refuses to believe Peculiars exist, you know he’s right about the government. Lena is critical of Jimson for being too rational and scientific, but he usually comes off as a much smarter person in contrast to Lena’s tendency to dismiss evidence in favour of rumour, assumption, and arguments from authority. Jimson and Lena find things that cause them to be suspicious of Beasley, but Jimson takes into account the fact they’ve only ever seen Beasley act with kindness, so he suspends his judgement until they have the whole story and is careful not to do anything rash. Lena on the other hand, runs headlong into doing something rash. This puts everyone in danger, but she has the audacity to criticise Jimson for doing nothing while she took action!

The crap thing is that if it weren’t for Lena being so damn stupid and ungrateful, the story would stand still. It’s her weakness and poor decisions that jumpstart the plot and finally move it out of Knob Knoster and into Scree. It’s a much better book from that point on, but it’s only the last quarter or so. Lena still does some moronic things, but she at least seems to have learned a little from her mistakes and is able to stand up for herself. There’s more danger and adventure in Scree, and of course we learn more about the Peculiars and the government’s operations. Sadly, it’s a case of too little too late. There’s potential for a decent sequel, but The Peculiars is average at best.

Buy a copy of The Peculiars from The Book Depository

Review of Enormity by W.G. Marshall

Title: Enormity
Author: W.G. Marshall
Published: 7 February 2012
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Genre:  science fiction
Source: review copy from publisher via NetGalley
My Rating: 8/10

What a great book.

Many Lopes is a lonely, miserable American working a government job in Korea. He hasn’t seen his wife in two years, and she finally gives up on their long-distance relationship and leaves him. Manny chose to work in Korea partly to experience another culture, but as a dark-skinned American he tends to be treated as either a celebrity of a freak by the locals, who are fascinated (and sometimes disgusted) by black people. To add to the list of things that make Manny feel like crap, he’s a puny 5 feet 3 inches tall – a “creole shrimp” as he suggests. But that’s about to change…

Also in Korea is Fred Isaacson, a particularly loopy religious fanatic who believes it is his personal mandate to pave the way for Yahweh’s return. Apparently the Lord has chosen the Korean people as the instruments of Armageddon, so Isaacson tries to sell them some experimental quantum technology – a “Little Big Bang” contained in a metal egg. But the deal goes wrong and results in several accidental quantum explosions – one of which turns poor diminutive Manny into a 6000-foot tall colossus. Manny is so massive he doesn’t even realise what’s happened. At his size (he’s far, far bigger than the figure on the cover), humans are microscopic and the landscape looks alien. For the people on the ground however, every one of Manny’s steps causes catastrophic damage. The army does everything they can, first to stop him, but then to use him as a weapon of mass destruction. Manny isn’t really susceptible to that kind of manipulation, but the Americans gain leverage over him when a second giant is discovered – a North Korean assassin.

Enormity surprised me. The giant-man plot sounds like something out of a dodgy old sci fi movie. I figured the only way to pull this off was as a parody, and the whacky blurb seems to suggest that that’s what it is. But while Enormity does have some wonderful bits of oddball humour and is pretty bizarre in general, it’s actually fairly serious. I have to admire W.G. Marshall for taking a pulpy idea and crafting a vividly written, multi-layered and compelling novel out of it.

There’s so much to appreciate here: a glimpse into Korean culture, loads of action, good pacing and plenty of well-crafted characters. The novel shows great depth of character in Manny in particular. He’s an instantly likeable, memorable and slightly tragic figure – a generally nice guy suffering feelings of loneliness and insignificance in a culture he’s trying to explore but that inevitably alienates him. Then he becomes the extreme physical opposite of the person he’s always been, giving him a sense of power he’s never experienced. However, his power also fills him with horror and remorse – he can barely move without causing death and destruction. At the same time, he’s even lonelier than before, since the rest of the human race might as well be an alien species to him. And he knows that he’s going to die soon, because he has no sustainable source of food. Thus, Manny’s unbelievable height gives his a new perspective on life, not only physically, but existentially.

For the reader, Manny’s size also means the novel is also really, really gross at times. The human body at that scale is fucking disgusting. What looks like a layer of dirty snow on Manny’s head turns out to be dandruff. When a military team sets up a communication base inside his ear, they secure the tent in “resinous brown outcroppings of earwax”. An open sore on his forehead is described as

“a crater about twenty feet across; a grisly sump overflowing with lava-like congealing blood. Steam-heat wafted from the hole as if from a volcanic vent. Thirty-foot-tall eyebrow hairs leaned splintered and smouldering away from the breech, and sticky blood cells had been blown everywhere by the wind, resembling gelatinous red condoms.”

And then there are the bacteria from Manny’s body, which are now more like giant flesh-eating bugs:

living jellied beads like masses of frog eggs, squirming and spreading infestation with busy, burrowing tendrils. Queen could see them splitting in two, multiplying as he watched, taking over the victims’ whole bodies like a sticky caul of tapioca. Hideous, flesh-eating tapioca.

The grossness, however, is a necessary part of the story’s speculation. Marshall’s giants are very realistic and it makes sense, therefore, to have giant bacteria and strands of hair as thick as tree trunks. There are other details as well. The increased size of Manny’s brain means that nerve impulses have further to travel and thus he experiences everything much more slowly. To speak to him, speech has to be slowed down and transmitted at a low frequency; if not, it will just sound like indecipherable twittering to him. And of course the book details the catastrophic destruction Manny causes: the air around his moving body is like a powerful storm; the reverberations of his voice can blow up the aircraft shooting at him; flakes of his skin are like shrapnel. It all serves to make the idea of this giant and the story as a whole very very real for the reader.

Some might ask about the technical issue according to which something that size should be crushed under its own weight, but the novel quietly dismisses this with the excuse that “that there’s something about their molecular structure that makes them incredibly robust— it’s as if they don’t quite follow the ordinary rules of physics”. Which is perfectly acceptable to me.

Equally plausible and yet almost as shocking as the existence of such a giant are Marshall’s speculations about the political reactions to it. From the very beginning the situation is complicated by questions of who is responsible, or more importantly, who will be blamed. Once the American military finds a way of communicating with Manny, the president and his cabinet immediately start thinking about how to use him to destroy all the countries and military bases that the USA considers a threat. And of course the North Korean giant is being used in a similar manner. The reader gets to explore some of the political and social turmoil between Koreans and the Japanese, within North Korea, and between America and rest of the world, all of which forms basis for way the giants are manipulated.

There are lots more little things I could talk about, but I wouldn’t want to spoil this book for anyone. I’d put it in the hands of any sci fi fan as quirky gem of top-quality genre fiction. Enormity  is being released on 7 February by Night Shade Books. Get it.

Buy a copy of Enormity at The Book Depository

Review of The Antithesis: Book 2α by Terra Whiteman

Title: The Antithesis:  Book 2α (Two Alpha)
Author: Terra Whiteman
Published: 14 August 2011
Publisher:  1889 Labs
Genre:  genre mash-up of mythology and science fiction
Source: ebook received from author
My Rating: 7/10

Note: this review contains mild spoilers for Book 1 in the series.

In September I reviewed The Antithesis, an indie novel that put a sci fi spin on the war between heaven and hell. In this version there are angels and demons, but they’re not fantasy creatures or forces of good and evil; they’re just two species in a universe with multiple dimensions (the Multiverse). The war is not fought in physical battles; instead a more scientific approach is taken, with religion designed as part of an experiment whose results will decide the outcome of the war.

I had a lot of issues with the Antithesis, but it had a compelling story nevertheless. It also seethed with untold backstories. For example, Alezair is obsessed with Leid, plagued by the feeling that he’s met her before. Yahweh and Lucifer seem to be more like friends who are creating the illusion of being enemies. The whole war began for reasons very different from the biblical ones and is a matter of politics, not good and evil. The Antithesis itself provided little information on these and other backstories, ending instead on a cliffhanger that promised to reveal some of the history. I was curious, so I dove into Book 2α, which turned out to be a very rewarding read.

Book 2α is set 800-900 years before the events of book 1. The great war has not yet begun. In fact demons don’t exist yet and the Atrium isn’t the domain of heaven and hell but the home of beings known as the Nehel. Qaira Eltruan is Commander of the military forces in Sanctum, the Atrium’s great city. For all intents and purposes, Qaira is also the ruler, having taken on the job when his aging father could no longer perform his duties.

Qaira’s greatest concern is the decades-long conflict between his people and the Archaens – the angels. Fifty years ago their ship arrived at the Atrium after the destruction of the planet Felor. Over a million Archaens were stranded, and their commander, Lucifer Raith, begged for sanctuary in the Atrium until they could move on. Qaira’s father granted them space in the upper layers. Fifty thousand Archaen refugees set up camp but then refused to budge.

Unfortunately the Atrium is a small planet and the Archaen presence puts pressure on their limited resources. Qaira, never a gracious or tolerant person, wants the aliens dead or gone, but political considerations and the Archaen’s superior technology prevents him from taking drastic action. The two species continue to exist in an uneasy stalemate until the Nehelian Council hires a Scholar, Leid Koseling, to advise Qaira in the conflict.

Leid and Qaira can’t stand each other, but her contract requires her to stay at his side for the next decade, or until the conflict ends. They gradually warm to each other, and Leid even gives Qaira and his army a massive advantage against the Archaens.  However, combined with Qaira’s temper and his hatred for the angels, Lucifer in particular, the conflict can only end in bloodshed and destruction.

Book 2α was a better read than book 1, largely because the plot is much more focussed. Book 1 dropped the reader into the middle of a conflict that’d been raging for centuries, in a context that’s always been the domain of fantasy but which Whiteman claims for sci fi. The result is fun and interesting, but also confusing, as the reader has break away from some of the usual tropes while absorbing a lot of information. Book 2α however, is more recognisable as sf, and has a more streamlined plot, sticking to the political conflict between the Qaira and the Archaens and the blossoming romance between Qaira and Leid.

The political conflict is a tough one to call. The Archaens might have lost their home, but they also rocked up uninvited at a small planet and expected to move in. The Nehel develop a racist/xenophobic attitude toward the angels, referring to them by the derogatory term “whites” (because of the colour of their hair and wings; the Nehel are darker-haired with black wings) and making it illegal for them to move freely outside of the refugee camp. As a result the angels are forced to live in terrible conditions, to the extent that some Nehel feel sorry for them and are in favour of integrating the two societies. However, it’s not like the Nehel don’t have their own ghettos and social ills, making integration a contentious issue.

Qaira, being the person that he is, openly hates the angels and is determined to get rid of them. The first thing he does in the novel is shoot one in the head. Shortly after he makes plans for attacking the refugee camp. Qaira generally claims that he does things like this for the good of his society, but it’s not hard to see that he’s also driven by extreme prejudice and blinding hatred for Lucifer, the Archaen Commander.

It’s stated several times, in this book and the previous one, that Qaira Eltruan is a monster, and in fact he’s often the one to make that claim. While it can sound a little dramatic when this comes from Qaira himself, it’s not hard to see why he was branded as such. He’s temperamental, stubborn, violent, sexist, arrogant, vulgar and bigoted. Oh, and he’s got a drug addiction What makes this worse is that he’s got control of an entire world and his actions affect the lives of millions of people. Or, more frequently, the deaths of those of people, when his bad temper, prejudice and gargantuan ego lead him to make the most appalling political and military decisions. It’s a good thing that I found Qaira to be a compelling character, because he’s certainly not a likeable one.

Nevertheless, the novel gives you a chance to empathise with Qaira, if only for short periods before he goes back to doing something violent. You see him with his family, and although he is often rude or dismissive toward them, he clearly cares for them very much. His romance with Leid reveals a (slightly) softer side to him. Perhaps the most endearing thing about Qaira is his reluctant friendship with Yahweh Telei. In Book 1, Yahweh is ruler of the angels, and the god-figure of the religions used in the war. In Book 2α he’s still a young boy, albeit a genius who is a qualified physician, geneticist and engineer, among other things. He is captured by the Nehel and held prisoner, but Qaira can’t help respecting and even caring for him, despite the fact that he persists in referring to Yahweh as a white.

Sadly, this story is doomed to end in tragedy, based on the knowledge carried over from book 1. This lends the book a sense of gravity and sadness; you know from the start that Qaira will eventually fail and millions will die, but even though he’s such a bastard it still sucks that there won’t be a happy ending.

To learn the full extent of the tragedy however, you’ll have to read Book 2β. This novel is just the first half of the story, and it ends on a cliffhanger. Whiteman is clearly doing something right because after I finished Book 2α, I immediately bought a copy of Book 2β and started reading. Thank god for ebooks – you never have to wait for them.

Obviously, I had a really good time reading The Antithesis: Book 2α. There’s loads of action, plenty of tension, and a hot-headed narrator with an extremely dangerous temper. You get to see ‘god’ when he was just a little boy genius, and ‘the devil’ when he was ruler of the angels. The simpler structure allows you to get a much better grasp on the world Whiteman has create, preparing you for the books ahead. Admittedly, it still feels a bit unrefined, a bit… wild. As with book 1, I sometimes feel I should be more critical of the novel for some reason, but then I stop and say, who cares? It’s really fun to read.

 

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Review of The Revisionists by Thomas Mullen

Title: The Revisionists
Author:  Thomas Mullen
Published: 28 September 2011 by Mulholland Books, an imprint of Little, Brown
Genre: science fiction
Source: Review copy from publisher via NetGalley
My Rating: 7/10

Zed is a government agent from a future he knows as ‘our Perfect Present’, a semi-utopia built out of the ruins of ‘the Great Conflagration’ – a global disaster that occurs in our own time and begins in Washington D.C. It’s Zed’s job to ‘protect the Events’ – key moments in history that eventually lead up to the Great Conflagration and need to occur if the Perfect Present is to be realised.

Leo too is a secret agent doing morally questionable things in the name of national security. He was kicked out of the CIA after daring to actually ask moral questions about his work, and he’s now employed by a company that handles outsourced intelligence operations.

Tasha is a hard-working young lawyer in a corporation with powerful but shady clients. Her brother was recently killed fighting America’s war with Iraq, and she suspects that the military’s story about his death is just a cover-up for something more sinister and most likely profitable. So when she stumbles across confidential information suggesting that one of her firm’s clients may have let soldiers die just to cut costs, she risks her career by leaking the information to the press.

Sari is an Indonesian immigrant who has practically been enslaved by an abusive South Korean diplomat and his wife. Powerless to do anything about it, she agrees to spy on the couple in return for help.

The stories of these four characters intertwine in Washington D.C., in a post 9/11 world characterised by paranoia, innumerable secret agents, anti-war protests and the question of whether the US government is protecting its citizens or its own power. This plot has the potential to be a dense political thriller, but it turned out to be a sophisticated literary novel about how to deal with the past and the individual’s role in an incomprehensibly complex and powerful system.

In the future world that Zed comes from, the past is both sacred and forbidden. All history is highly classified, and only a few people are given limited access to it when necessary. Even your own past is restricted. When someone dies their loved ones are allowed a brief grieving period before state employees confiscate all evidence of the deceased’s existence from their home and workplace, essentially erasing them from the public mind. The theory is that the past is dangerous. Dwelling on it is psychologically and socially destructive, as proved by the countless conflicts spawned by race, religion, ethnicity, land ownership and anything else with historical roots. When one of Zed’s colleagues suggests that their society should be given access to historical information so they can cease to be ignorant, another protests vehemently:

According to the government of the Perfect Present, the historical Protectors are safeguarding their society’s freedom by protecting the past from any significant change. When time travel was invented, a group of people known as ‘historical agitators’ (hags), tried to use it to prevent some of history’s greatest atrocities from happening.

The hags’ argument is that lives would be saved and tragedies averted, and they’re right in their short sighted way. They choose to overlook the fact that such changes would destroy our Perfect Present, meaning that the Great Conflagration, or some similar event, would still be happening, and the suffering would never end. All the problems we’ve solved, all the broken aspects of society we’ve fixed, all the effort we’ve made to eliminate human meanness and frailty – these accomplishments must be protected, no matter the cost. (p.39)

The Revisionists, trade paperback

Zed clings to this theory because although the Protectors are told constantly how noble their job is, it’s brutal in practice: “We were sent to ensure that awful events unfolded as originally dictated by history, that the hags did not rewrite the final acts of tragedies to make them comedies. [...] Wherever we went, countless people died in our wake.” (p.37). Zed is referring specifically to the millions who die because the Protectors ensure that things like the Holocaust or the World Wars unfold as they originally did, but the Protectors also act as assassins, killing any of the hags they find.

The Perfect Present, I think, parallels America’s view of itself. Not that its citizens or its government could so easily call it perfect, but there is nevertheless the assumption that it is better than other societies and must therefore be protected against change from outside forces, even at the cost of countless human lives.

But The Revisionists constantly debates these assumptions, in both the future and present societies. Is either society really the ideal? The Perfect Present has certainly made some improvements. There is no race or religion, and therefore no conflict or division based thereon. Agents like Zed are cybernetically enhanced to the extent that their brains function like powerful computers, so clearly technology has taken a huge leap forward. We’re told that people, on the whole, are happy. Washington D.C. is similar in some ways – there are social ills, but it is undoubtedly better developed than many societies and life, on the whole, is good there.

It’s the level of government control and surveillance in the two societies that makes them seem more like dystopias than utopias. Can a government whose activities include invading citizens’ privacy and assassinating revolutionaries be a good government? Are they damaging what they supposedly protect? The parallel therefore extends to Leo and Zed, the kinds of agents who do the spying and the killing. Are they really doing what is best for their societies, given that what they do is so despicable? I’ve already mentioned all the death Zed causes in doing his job. Leo isn’t an assassin himself, but the information he provides to his superiors is used to capture suspects who are then tortured and killed. His current assignment involves the embarrassingly dirty task of spying on anti-war protesters and tracking down the creators of knoweverything.org, a website dedicated to informing the public about some of the US government’s unethical operations. Along the way Leo blackmails Tasha, using her decision to expose corruption against her. He is also the person who meets Sari and convinces her to spy on the diplomatic couple who are abusing her, even though he’s not sure if he can actually help her out as promised.

Both Zed and Leo are forced to question the ethics of their occupations although in doing so they lose the meaning that their work gives their lives. Leo in particular has always rebuked himself as someone who “never did anything” (p.47). He signed up with the CIA in the hope of changing that, but ended up doing things he couldn’t live with. A similar crisis befalls Tasha when she realises that she’s working for the kind of people who may have let her brother and other soldiers die in the pursuit of profit. These dilemmas also bring into sharp relief the characters’ own powerlessness. Actions that they believe might have devastating consequences could actually be almost pointless. At the same time, when they appear to have been influential the consequences are terrible and often reveal them to be pawns of far more powerful forces.

Towards the end, the grand plots are concentrated into more personal concerns. Ideas about society and government give way to thoughts on grief, family, the past and a meaningful existence. Politics are by no means pushed out of the picture, but the story becomes more about the effect that government is having on individual lives and how casually it manipulates and discards them. The characters become increasingly unsure of themselves and although we get a few answers to some of the mysteries in the novel, the whole story seems to fracture into uncertainty, leaving you on shakier ground than when you started. The novel even throws its own genre – science fiction – into question in a single conversation, playing a little mind game that is my favourite thing about The Revisionists.

It doesn’t feel like a world falling apart but rather like one being dismantled so that the characters can escape from the personal dilemmas they’re trapped in and build new lives from whatever’s left. Uncertainty flourish rather than die out, but it’s something they come to accept. It’s not the most exciting of stories, especially if you’re expecting a time-travel thriller, but that should not dissuade you. There’s still a good deal of action and tension, and it’s a well-crafted, pensive novel, something better-appreciated with a little pondering.

Buy The Revisionists on Book Depository

Deadlands by Lily Herne

Title: Deadlands
Author: Lily Herne
Publisher: Penguin
Publication date: March 2011
Source: Purchased copy for review
My Rating: 5/10

Buy a copy of Deadlands

It’s been a decade since the zombie apocalypse destroyed Cape Town in the middle of the World Cup. The survivors have established a new but distressingly familiar kind of order in heavily walled enclaves while outside, in the Deadlands, the zombie hordes still lurch. But no one is trying to wipe them out; instead, they’re worshipped.

It’s a brillint, unique twist on the zombie story – zombies are the new religion, revered for ‘cleansing’ Cape Town of its violence and corruption so there could be a better life for all (who survived). Believers are known as Resurrectionists, the zombies are respectfully known as the Reanimated (dissenters just call them Rotters), and the ‘priests’ are the mysterious cloaked Guardians whose faces no one has ever seen. There’s no question now about whether or not there’s an afterlife, because it’s right there in the Deadlands, moaning for your flesh.

Lele (Leletia) de la Fontein sees right through all of this crap. She’s a feisty, rebellious 17-year old, although at times you can be forgiven for calling her a brat. But on the other hand, she’s no doormat and most of the time I admire her spunk. She’s just lost her grandmother, not only to death but to the Guardians, who who take all dead bodies to the Deadlands where the zombies will attack and reanimate them. Now Lele and her brother have to stay with their emotionally distant father and their stepmother, who Lele can’t stand. She also has to go to a new school where, in classic YA tradition, she becomes the free-thinking outcast amidst petty, small-minded popular kids who make fun of her. Like any teenager, Lele thinks that her life couldn’t get any worse, but then she gets selected for the ‘Lottery’ – every year the Guardians choose a few teenagers from the enclaves and take them away, for reasons unknown. And that’s when Lele’s real adventure begins.

Now because Deadlands is the first zombie novel set in Cape Town, my home town, I really wanted to like it. Lily Herne is a psuedonym for SA author Sarah Lotz and her daughter, and as a South African I’m proud to see that SA writers are starting to get published in my favourite genres. At the same time however, my review ethic is to be honest even when I’d rather not be, but more importantly to not be condescending by setting lower standards for certain books as if the authors are mental inferiors who can’t really be compared to their peers. South Africa’s education system is doing that to the country’s youth. I hate it, and I’ve never wanted to do anything similar here. Which in this case means I wanted to like Deadlands, and I think it could have been the novel I was hoping for, but at the end of the day it was disappointing.

There are some really cool things about it nevertheless. Deadlands has an awesome political snarl, particularly in the beginning. Today’s ANC government is there in two different forms. On the one hand it’s followed its current path of corruption and transformed into the embassy – the pro-zombie, authoritarian government of the enclaves, with a firm hand on the necks of its citizens, and institutions like Malema High feeding propaganda to impressionable young minds. Like the ANC it’s also full of struggle heroes, but this time they’re from the zombie war.

Then there’s the ANZ – the anti-zombians – a rebel faction that’s more like the ANC of the struggle years, although they’re criticised for their violent methods which sometimes get innocent people killed. The embassy is of course trying to shut them down, much like the real ANC’s increasing hostility towards dissent and opposition, as they turn away from their own revolutionary ideals towards the racism and small-mindedness that characterised the oppressors they once fought.

Admittedly, I’m not as well versed in politics as I should be, but I can’t deny that it gives sci fi and fantasy the edge that makes for truly fantastic, memorable reads. Unfortunately Deadlands isn’t all that interested in its own political and religious satire. Once Lele gets chosen for the Lottery and leaves the enclave, Deadlands becomes a more conventional action-adventure novel. She meets a group of rebels known as the Mall Rats who turn her into a teen action hero, and the mystery, religious satire and political intrigue gets left behind. The action-adventure bit is the main part of the novel, but for me it was the most boring and it drags on for quite some time.

What I really wanted was to know more about that zombie cult and the Guardians. Who are they? What are they? And what are they up to? These are some of the most interesting and exciting questions in the story, but the answers are predictable, disappointing or just not good enough. It’s not hard to guess why the Guardians are taking teenagers, but you have to wait until the last few pages of the novel for this to be revealed. Having waited so long you expect the secret to be epic; instead my final thoughts for the novel were “that’s it?”. It would have been so much better if Lele had discovered at least part of the truth about the Guardians early on and then gone up against them in the remainder of the story. This could still have allowed for a sequel-ready ending, which is what we get anyway, with a lame line: “this is the end of my story, but somehow I’ve kind of got the feeling that it could actually just be the beginning” (293).

Speaking of lame lines, there are A LOT of them. Almost all of the chapters end with cliched attempts at intrigue:
“But, as I was about to find out, that was way easier said than done.” (15)
“I couldn’t have been more wrong.” (28)
“But by then it was too late.” (106)

To make things worse, there are many, many chapters, most of them bluntly ended with lines like these. Deadlands is only 293 pages long, but it has a whopping 69 chapters. On average they’re just 2 or 3 pages of well-spaced text long. It makes the story feel choppy, and as far as writing goes it seems lazy.

I also feel like the Guardians, the politics and the religion receded from the plot because the author(s) got bored this complex material and wanted to get to the bit about the cute, sexy rebel chick kicking zombie ass, raiding the mall, and trying to decide which of the two hots guys falling for her she can trust. Of course Deadlands is a YA novel so that’s exactly what the target audience wants, but there doesn’t have to be an ‘either or’ toss-up between story and substance. A better novel would have integrated the mystery and social satire with the action and romance.

It would also have sewn up some of the plot holes. Like the mall raids. These are pretty common teenage fantasies – having unlimited access to an empty mall so you can take all the cool stuff you want. For reasons only revealed at the end (very very thin reasons) the Guardians have kept Century City mall up and running, even after destroying all other buildings in the city, and the Mall Rats go there to scavenge for books, toiletries and clothes. There’s a HUGE plot hole here. As far as I could tell, the Guardians don’t restock the shops in the mall (how could they?), but the Mall Rats go there perhaps once a week to fill orders from the enclaves. It’s a big mall, but there’s only so much underwear on the shelf at Woolworths; there’s no way they could still walk in there with a shopping list and get everything on it. I got really, really annoyed when they did a book run at Exclusive Books. I worked at that branch for 3 years and I never, ever saw a copy of the Norton Anthology of Poetry or Rustum Kozain’s poetry collection This Carting Life. The Norton is too academic and expensive for a commercial store, and poetry collections are pretty scarce because they don’t sell. Nevertheless, Lele finds both easily, and it’s the first time since she was 7 that she’s even been in a bookshop.

There are other gaps. Unless I missed it, there’s no mention of what happened to the rest of South Africa or the rest of the world. I can only assume that the zombie epidemic was global, given that there is no mention of help from anyone outside of Cape Town. As I said before, it’s not hard to guess what the Guardians do with the teenagers, but apparently no one in the enclaves has tried. I don’t even want to get into the implausibility of the Guardians keeping a mall as large as Canal Walk open, lights, escalators, cameras all running.

But, as I keep having to remind myself, this is YA and many fans of the genre probably won’t mind the glitches, the way the social critiques give way to action, or the short chapters and sloppy writing. I couldn’t shrug off the fact that I do mind these things, but I also have to admit that there were parts of the novel that I admired. So if Lily Herne produces the sequel implied in the closing lines I won’t hesitate to buy a copy, but I hope it’s a better read than this one.

The Book Ferret: Bookworm fuel on FORA.tv

I don’t get to go to many literary events. There just aren’t that many in South Africa (or in most places, I imagine) and when you do happen to hear about one, chances are it’s not in your province or it’s not of much interest to you. And the likelihood of meeting international authors is slim. So naturally I got over-excited and went download crazy when I discovered FORA.tv, and their Books tag in particular.

On FORA.tv you can watch and download videos (or audio, if you want to conserve bandwidth) of authors giving talks about their works, discussions on books and writing, and lectures on philosophy, culture and politics. All the cool stuff your mind can’t otherwise enjoy because you can’t afford to fly your body all over the world. How did we ever live without the internet?

FORA.tv describes itself as “the leading online destination for intelligent video programs on the people, issues and ideas changing the world”. Check out Neal Stephenson and William Gibson on sci fi, Neil Gaiman on his collection Fragile Things, and authors like Ian McEwan, and Zadie Smith. Find out more about how storytelling is changing in the 21^st century or how journalist A.J. Jacobs tried to follow all the rules in the Old Testament (hilarious!). Salman Rushdie has several FORA videos, and he became one of my favourite speakers after listening to him on FORA.tv. I also discovered how fun and funny Mary Roach can be –she’s the author of books like Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.

Since this is a book blog and I am an unapologetic book nerd, I’ve focused on FORA’s book content, but the website offers far more – videos on politics, technology, music, science, art, the environment, religion… just check out their tags.

FORA was free when I first heard about it, and while you can still watch their content for free, I’m afraid you now have to pay for the privilege of downloading it, in either video or audio. Membership is priced at $4.99 for a month and $49.99 for a year. Which is fair, considering the opportunities you get in return.  FORA’s philosophy is “that there are brilliant ideas expressed everyday, everywhere, and [they] don’t want you to miss them”. I’m not going to say no to that.

The Book Ferret is a weekly feature on Violin in a Void that will showcase a cool or interesting book-related find every Thursday. Notable new releases, great bookshops, events, cover art, websites, gadgets and accessories – anything to make bookworms happy.

If you want to join in, grab the Ferret pic at the top of the page, link it and your post back here, and add your name to the Linky list. WordPress doesn’t allow me to show the Linky list in post, so you can also leave a comment here to say what your post is about.

Click here for The Book Ferret Linky