Margaret Atwood, Year of the Flood

 I have at last gotten around to the sequel to Margaret Atwood's breathtaking Oryx and Crake.  The Year of the Flood is not a temporal sequel.  It does not continue the plot where the first novel left off.  Instead, it runs through the same events, from a different perspective.  Oryx and Crake centers on the masterminds at the center of a massive, intentionally engineered bio-disaster.  The Year of the Flood, instead, narrates the events from the perspectives of a handful of minor characters mentioned at the fringes of O&C.  The main characters are members of God's Gardeners, an eco-vegetarian-religious cult led by the prophetic Adam One and his ancillary Adams and Eves.  Their theology is dopey, conveyed in clumsy rhymes and songs for their youngest members, and yet, as the world falls apart around them, they seem increasingly to be the only people both fit enough to survive in the new world they inherit, and descent enough to deserve it.

Atwood's characteristic creativity is here, but since I had already heard many of the most delightful inventions in O&C, I was less stunned by them as they unfolded.  Similarly, the plot is largely a given.  Individual lives are up for grabs, of course, but the larger, world-changing narrative is not.  As a writing exercise, it is a fascinating idea to write a complete novel twice, from two different points of view (and, according to the cover of my copy, there will be a third in the "MaddAddam Trilogy").  As a reader, though, I think I might have preferred to have the two interlaced together as one hefty novel, switching back and forth between perspectives.  I wonder -- could they be read that way, against Atwood's planning, one chapter of each in sequence, all the way through?

NY Times Article on Novels

I have said it over and over, and here is a nice, short NY Times article corroborating my assertion:  Reading novels is good for you, and makes you a better person:

Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.

So go get a novel and start reading!

Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous

Ok, strictly speaking, this is not one of my regular reviews.  It is an announcement about MY latest book!

The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, co-edited by Peter Dendle and myself.

Advanced reviews are very strong:

'This volume awakens the monster as an academic topic. Combining John Block Friedman's historical-literary approach with Jeffrey J. Cohen's theoretical concerns, Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle have marshaled chapters that comprise a seminal work for everyone interested in the monstrous. Wide-ranging chapters work through various historical and geographic views of monstrosity, from the African Mami Wata to Pokemon. Theoretical chapters consider contemporary views of what a monster is and why we care about them as we do. Taken together, the essays in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous reveal that monsters appear in every culture and haunt each of us in different ways, or as Mittman says, the monstrous calls into question our (their, anyone's) epistemological worldview, highlights its fragmentary and inadequate nature, and thereby asks us … to acknowledge the failures of our systems of categorization.' 

David Sprunger, Concordia College, Minnesota, USA 

'An impressively broad and thoughtful collection of the ways in which many cultures, ancient and modern, have used monsters to think about what it means to be human. Lavishly illustrated and ambitious in scope, this book enlarges the reader's imagination.' 

Professor Lorraine Daston, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany 

Like all such projects, the book had a long gestation, but the authors were wonderful to work with, and I am thrilled with the final volume.  Order a copy for your library, today!  Order one for yourself, two for your parents, three for your kids, and a dozen for the monsters under your beds, in your closets, and creeping down your walls.

Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

Watch your steps.  Keep your wits about you; you will need them.  This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before.  You may imagine from other stories you've read, that you know it well, but those stories flatter you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is you are an alien from another time and place altogether...

Picking up books abandoned in cafes, hotels and guesthouses seems to be an excellent practice.  Doing so has led me to several books I would never have bought, never have even noticed in a shop, including this strange one, and this stranger one.  This time, I was in a guesthouse in Granada, Spain and, having finished the spectacular Spanish novel I brought with me to read on my travels, I rummaged about the common room in search of something to read.  The only English-language book in the place was a massive thing with a fairly gaudy title, The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel Faber.  It hardly looked like something of interest, but just as I must eat daily, so too, I must read, so I picked up my cup of tea, and opened the cover.

The writing of this epic is so lively, so humorous and dark and compelling (and sexy -- at times very sexy) that I was rapidly drawn into the story, and its setting of 19th-century London.  The book begins with a string of red herrings, following characters for a few pages and then dropping them just as they become interesting (somewhat in the manner of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler), so that it is not immediately clear who the book will really be about. Until we meet Sugar, so utterly, clearly, magnetically the star. We find her as a prostitue in the foulest slums of London, but it is clear form her intelligence, and equally from her naked and unabashed ambition, that she will fight her way out of them with any means she can.

This is a book about prostitution, about industry and guts and sex, about the relationship of power and money, and it handles all these subjects masterfully, but it is also a book about writing.  Several of the characters spend time writing texts of various sorts.  Of course, this being a period piece, there is considerable letter writing, but there are also books being written by characters major and minor, none more significant than the violent revenge-fantasy-pseudo-autobiography Sugar is writing, titled "The Fall and Rise of Sugar."

The style of narration is unlike that of any other novel I have read. The narrator acknowledges from the start (quoted above) that we are modern people, reading a book set over a hundred years before we have lived. This anonymous, omniscience narrator speaks directly to the reader, offering to take our hand, to guide us through this unfamiliar and dangerous world, at one point even breaking in to say:

If you are bored beyond endurance, I can offer only my promise that there will be fucking in the very near future, not to mention madness, abduction, and violent death.

And, indeed, there is.  The book as a whole is thick with emotion, evoking disgust as often as sympathy and more rich with unsympathetic characters than likable ones.  But I dare you to start it, and then try to stop.