2022 Roundup

It’s been a pretty good reading year for me, by the number of books I pulled out as favourites from my 2022 reading log. My top ten feels notably topical, much more so than last year: environmentalism, colonialism, capitalism, the rise of the far right all stand out to me as common themes. I guess, like many of us, I’ve been drawn to fiction that works to make sense of our current moment, a moment when we seem to be standing vertiginously on the brink of apocalypse. Perhaps paradoxically, I don’t think this is a particularly downbeat list; there are moments of hope as well as more sombre notes, reminders of the great gift that life is, and of what we stand to lose if we carry on down this path.

So, here they are: my top ten reads of 2022.

Ventriloquism – Catherynne M. Valente (2010). Of course, having just discussed how topical this list is, I start with possibly the least topical book on it. Not that the stories collected in Ventriloquism do not often feel urgent and searching: in particular, there is a strong feminist sensibility running through them. But the best and most playful stories – “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time”, which mashes up advanced physics with creation tales from around the world; “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica”, a catalogue of maps which also explores the rivalry between two cartographers; “The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew”, the precursor to Valente’s Art Deco space opera novel Radiance – are more personal than political. Valente’s long been a favourite author of mine, thanks to her resonant uses of myth and fairytale and her lush, ornate prose; Ventriloquism collects some of her best work.
Notes from the Burning Age – Claire North (2021). This novel, on the other hand, is thoroughly of the moment: set in a future in which humanity has learned to live more sustainably, it tells the story of the rise of an anti-environmentalist movement whose proponents believe that humanity should have dominion over the earth. I place it so high on this list because it was so utterly unexpected: I went in expecting an SF thriller along the lines of North’s earlier Touch and got instead a novel that expresses near-perfectly my own ideas about what a sustainable society might look like and what our relationship to our planet should be. There is a thriller element, which sometimes drives the book in a pulpier direction than I’d like, but its core ideas have stayed with me and will do for a long time.
Ammonite – Nicola Griffith (1992). Setting aside the problematic nature of the novel’s central premise – it’s set on a planet where only women can survive, which indicates that there’s some rather reductionist thinking about gender going on somewhere – this is another delightfully quiet story about living in harmony with one’s environment, building community through mutual aid and complex chains of allegiance. Again, Ammonite was a book that came as a surprise to me: an ostensibly science-fictional text that reads in some respects more like fantasy.
Babel – R.F. Kuang (2022). I will be very surprised if this is not one of this year’s Hugo nominees. I’m not convinced that Kuang’s magic system, which runs off the losses and shifts of meaning involved in translating texts from one language to another, harmonises perfectly with what she has to say about colonialism and appropriation; but she captures so exactly what it feels like to be at Oxford, the heady golden days of intellectual pursuit coupled with the uneasy knowledge of the damage the institution has done and is still doing, that I can forgive her that. Her ending, too, is impeccably pitched; the kind of ending that feels, with hindsight, inevitable. Big, ambitious, exciting.
Downbelow Station – C.J. Cherryh (1981). A classic work of SF, and one I’ve been meaning to read for a while. There are things that…are not great about it (I doubt we’d see anything like the hisa in published SF today, or at least one would hope not), but for the most part it’s a satisfyingly dense and chunky novel, broad in scope and more grittily realist in approach than I was expecting. I’ll be interested to read other books in the series, if I can find them in hard copy.
In Other Lands – Sarah Rees Brennan (2017). Originally published online, this is a heartfelt coming-of-age novel that isn’t trying to be anything more than that. I’ve wept more at the utter teenage despair of its snarky, socially awkward protagonist Elliot than I have at any other work of art for a long time. Like Notes from a Burning Age and Babel, it’s a novel that just seems to get a part of me that I’ve barely been able to explain to myself.
The Past is Red – Catherynne M. Valente (2021). Again, it’s Valente’s prose that wins this one for me; that, and its heroine’s conviction, in the face of all available evidence, that she lives in the best of all possible worlds. Valente’s critique of overconsumption and the heedlessness of the super-rich feels a little too on the nose; but the book’s last page is perfection.
Market Forces – Richard Morgan (2004). I’m not a fan of Morgan’s depictions of characters who are not white men, but I always find his ideas, and the dynamic cyberpunky prose he uses to express them, invigorating. Here, he literalises capitalism’s metaphor of competition, making his City financiers and consultants fight to the death as a matter of course. It’s a compelling study of complicity and guilt that chimed in interesting ways with a lot of my reading this year.
Red Pill – Hari Kunzru (2020). The experience of reading this novel encapsulates in miniature the experience of existing as a liberal in this present moment: the sense of disorientation and confusion as what appeared to be the long arc of progress collapses into reactionary conservatism; as what seemed to be the basic facts of the world are unmoored and overturned. Its protagonist’s inability to find answers to the far-right discourse he sees erupting around him feels deeply and terrifyingly relatable.
Bewilderment – Richard Powers (2021). I’m not terribly satisfied with this novel’s treatment of the protagonist’s autistic child, who is used more as a plot device than as a character with agency of his own. But Powers is very good at describing the miracle of the world we see all about us: the complexity of something so simple as a fallen leaf, for example. And his melding of the science-fictional with the realistic is skillful and resonant.

Spreadsheet stats

I read 88 books in 2022; one fewer than last year.
The longest book I read was Donna Tartt’s sprawling The Goldfinch, at 864 pages; the shortest was Michael Bockemühl’s study of J.M.W. Turner, at just 96. In all I read 33,641 pages this year, down from last year’s 35,787. (I’ve obviously been reading shorter books.)
The oldest book I read in 2022 was Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, first published in 1848. The average age of the books I read in 2022 was 16, down from 19 last year. (I’ve obviously been reading newer books, too.)
Genre: genre distinctions are of course fuzzy and contested, but by my rather idiosyncratic rubric 36% of the books I read in 2022 were science fiction (up from 19% last year); 26% were fantasy (down from 43% last year); 22% were litfic, the same as last year. I wonder if the switchover between SF and fantasy as my favoured genre has something to do with my seeking out more topical fiction. (I should note, as well, that my “litfic” category includes several novels with speculative elements that didn’t feel solidly genre.) I’ve also read five novels that I classified as “contemporary” (mostly romances), four non-fiction books, a “classic” (the aforesaid Tenant of Wildfell Hall), a crime novel (Un-Su Kim’s The Plotters), a horror novel (Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians) and a mystery (Elizabeth Kostova’s The Shadow Land).
Just 7% of the books I read in 2022 were re-reads (down from last year’s 29%; that figure was only so high because the libraries were closed for a good proportion of 2021). Incidentally, all of those re-reads were by J.R.R. Tolkien, except for Rainbow Rowell’s Attachments, which I had forgotten I’d already read.
58% of the books I read in 2022 were by people who are not men, slightly down from last year’s 60%.
28% of the books I read in 2022 were by people of colour, up from last year’s 19%.
And 22% of the books I read in 2022 were by queer authors – up from last year’s 19%.

Review: A Marvellous Light

Freya Marske’s debut novel A Marvellous Light (2021) joins a slew of recent novels that introduce magic into historical English milieux, using it as a device to comment on the hoarding of power by aristocratic elites; which is to say, white, straight, upper-class men. Susanna Clarke’s magisterial Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004) sets this critique in the early 1800s, examining the effects that the warring ambitions of the last two English magicians have on the women, working-class folks and people of colour around them; Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown (2015)and The True Queen (2019) lean more heavily on the structures of Regency romance, bringing postcolonial and queer dimensions to her discussion of English society in this period.

Marske’s novel takes place later than Cho’s and Clarke’s, but the premise is very similar. It’s the first decade of the 20^th century and civil servant Robin Blyth is accidentally assigned a post that makes him responsible for liaising with a secret network of English magicians of which he has, hitherto, been entirely unaware (as his punning surname suggests). The appointment throws him into the path of Edwin Courcey, the magical scion of an aristocratic English family, who is investigating the disappearance of Robin’s predecessor in the post and who plans to wipe Robin’s memory of magical society as soon as that predecessor is found. Things of course don’t quite go to plan, as the pair find themselves growing increasingly attracted to one another, and as Robin begins experiencing magical visions, in the course of their uncovering a sinister magical conspiracy that threatens all England.

Class, then, is the key vector for power in Marske’s world: as in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Sorcerer to the Crown, upper-class white men are the only people in whom the pursuit of magic is considered acceptable. Marske uses the conspiracy that Robin and Edwin spend the novel chasing down as a device to critique this state of affairs, and British class structure in general: something is rotten in the state of England. That rottenness, as one of Robin’s most disturbing visions shows, threatens to bring about an apocalypse that will end the genteel vision of Englishness that Edwin’s landed relatives inhabit once and for all: on one of the novel’s most powerful scenes, Marske gestures forwards towards the spectre of the First World War.

But this critique is limited by the fact that both of Marske’s viewpoint characters are in fact upper-class white men. (Robin’s parents managed to fritter away the family wealth – hence the need for him to take employment with the government – but he is still officially Sir Robert.) Their queerness is, of course, a point of marginalisation for them both, but in fact Edwin’s connections ensure that neither of them face any real persecution or consequences for it. There are more interesting characters around the edge of the narrative: the Indian Miss Morrissey and her sister Mrs Kaur; the elderly and unexpectedly powerful Flora Sutton; but none of them get much play, and the novel is certainly not principally interested in how the concentration of magical power in men’s hands affects them structurally.

As a result, the novel suffers in comparison with its more incisive forebears. In many ways that’s a shame: taken by itself, it’s a delightful read, with a queer romance whose intensity (and explicitness) rivals that of a Sarah Waters novel, and a plot that’s satisfyingly resonant without being overwrought or overworked. This is to be the first installment in a planned trilogy; perhaps its sequels will go further in examining the corrosive power structures underlying our conceptions of Edwardian Englishness. But as it is, A Marvellous Light feels too slight.

Notes on Telegraph Avenue

A novel about fatherhood, friendship and music, Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue failed to move me, despite its Pynchonesque joie de vivre. Nat and Archy, co-owners of faltering Oakland used vinyl store Brokeland Records, attempt to fend off competition from a corporate chain threatening to move in on their market; their wives, Aviva and Gwen, deal with the ignorance, racism and misogyny of doctors opposed to the home-birth midwifery business they run together; and their sons become involved in a rather one-sided romantic relationship.

I didn’t dislike the novel exactly, but it felt complacent to me. Archy, Gwen and Archy’s son Titus are Black, and one of Chabon’s aims is clearly to evoke and examine the multiculturalism of his real-life milieu; but his handling of race lacks teeth and nuance. The only racism the Black characters face comes from obvious bad actors; there’s little acknowledgement of the structural oppression that’s still very much alive in America today. (I’m not saying that every Black character in literature must face racism and oppression, but if you’re writing a novel that is in part about race in America – you do need to take account of the fact that racism goes beyond individual bigotry.) Chabon’s gestures at including queer characters feel similarly unconvincing: he never quite manages to get into the head of poor Julius, whose affection for Titus is met only by selfish curiosity, and his transgender character Kai is presented as basically a confused lesbian. (I don’t think I’ve ever read a fully-realised trans/non-binary character in a mainstream literary novel.)

Sure, Chabon’s prose is fun, and his characterisation – at least of the two men at the heart of the novel – is expansive in a Dickensian sort of way; these are flawed, larger-than-life folks that anchor a community, and there is some pleasure in that. But overall the urgency of the novel’s concerns is masked. The sense is of a best-selling author firmly in his comfort zone; coasting a little, self-indulgently. It’s fine, but not great.

Doctor Who Review: Eve of the Daleks

This was good, actually!

Broadcast on New Year’s Day 2022, The Eve of the Daleks is pretty much everything one could want (or, at least, everything I could want) from a Doctor Who special. Taut, focused and propulsive, it makes compelling use of that old sci-fi plot device, the time loop, ratcheting tension up nicely before releasing us into a seasonally appropriate feelgood ending.

Hoping for a relaxing beach holiday after the events of Flux, the Doctor, Yaz and Dan instead find themselves in a run-down Manchester storage facility on New Year’s Eve, in the company of the building’s bitterly sarcastic owner, Sarah (played by the wonderful Aisling Bea), and its only customer, Nick, who, naturally, has a crush on Sarah. When the group’s members, separately, come face-to-face with a murderous Dalek, and, crucially, wake up alive after the encounter, they figure out that they’re in a time loop that’s inexorably shrinking: each time round they go they lose one precious minute. With no resources and no way to escape the facility, can they defeat the Daleks before the time loop collapses at midnight?

This, then, is almost a bottle episode: no far-flung locations, relatively little in the way of special effects, a plot that puts characters under stress and looks at how they react. It works beautifully: no detail is wasted, as we get an insight into the relationship between the Doctor and Yaz, courtesy of Dan playing the part of impartial third party, and watch Sarah and Nick grow into a better understanding of what they want from their lives. None of it is particularly cutting-edge, but this is Doctor Who: cutting-edge is not really in its remit. But it is fun, watchable and full of heart – all things that very much are in its remit, and which have been sorely missed in recent years.

Notes on The Mere Wife

Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife is an energetic, muscular update of the Beowulf story, one which articulates the original poem’s guiding tension between Beowulf and monster, civilisation and wilderness, as an issue of class. Thus our protagonist is not Beowulf but Grendel’s mother, here named Dana, the abandoned veteran of a bloody modern war in a desert country that has left her traumatised and pregnant. Her son, Gren, is raised in the wild countryside overlooking Herot Hall, a gated community built on land Dana’s family once owned whose inhabitants strictly police each other’s compliance with 21^st century middle-class American social norms. Dana naturally admonishes Gren to stay away from Herot; Gren, equally naturally, sparks up a secret friendship with one of Herot’s scions, Dylan, the son of the development’s architect, and thus a particular focus of Dana’s ire. The results are tragic, bloody and messy: misunderstandings breed violence, which begets more violence, as the people of Herot viciously seek to defend a way of life which the novel explicitly shows us to be parasitic, capitalistic and evacuated of meaning.

I don’t often enjoy fiction that’s as committed to unrelieved bleakness as The Mere Wife is – Dana, and thus by extension Gren, spends her life in the thrall of a mental illness she acquired in service to a military that later repudiated her – but here it works to evoke the brutality of the world in which Beowulf takes place, a world in which constant war, constant violence, is necessary to maintain one’s position and protect one’s people. By transplanting Beowulf into 21^st century America, in other words, Headley reveals the violence both actual and metaphorical at work in modern life, and particularly in the maintenance of contemporary class structures. It’s a savage, messy, angry novel, one to save for periods of mental fortitude; but worth a read, for anyone interested in the original poem.

Film Review: Zootopia

This review contains spoilers.

How do you talk to children about racism? It’s a question that appears to have been on the minds of the creators of the 2016 animated Disney film Zootopia, and their answer to it is, perhaps not surprisingly, faintly unsatisfactory.

The film follows Judy Hopps, a rabbit from a town way out in the sticks who moves to the eponymous big city to become Zootopia’s first bunny police officer. Despite scoring top marks at police academy, she’s assigned to traffic warden duty owing to her colleagues’ discriminatory misconceptions about the kinds of work rabbits are capable of doing. But when she overhears a distraught lady otter begging her superior for help finding her missing husband, Judy sees an opportunity to prove her quality. The chief of police presents her with an ultimatum: solve the case in 48 hours, or resign.

First, the good things. The city of Zootopia is beautifully rendered: the intricate detail of its street scenes is charming in the same way a doll’s house is charming, the things of real life depicted in aestheticised miniature. An early montage depicts an urban environment that has been consciously designed to accommodate animals of all sizes and shapes, allowing everyone to participate fully in its life: a utopia of accessible design. I like, too, how these beatific first scenes are undercut by the depiction of the racism at work in the city – not only in the police force’s failure to recognise Judy’s abilities, but also in the way deuteragonist Nick is denied service in an ice-cream shop because he is a fox, and therefore obviously a criminal. (The fact that Nick is actually a con artist – on the principle that he might as well do all the crimes people assume he does anyway – is a nice touch, an acknowledgement of the trap racist stereotypes set for oppressed people.) Utopia is, in most cases, untrustworthy: what darknesses is that aestheticised surface hiding?

It’s when the main plot gets going that things start to fall apart a bit. In the course of her investigations, Judy discovers that predators who have previously lived quiet and civilised lives in the city have been “going savage” and attacking prey animals. Eventually, it comes out that the city’s assistant mayor, an apparently harmless white sheep named Dawn Bellwether, has developed a psychotropic drug that causes predators to act in this way in order to provoke fear and anger among the prey population and turn them against the predators. After a dramatic showdown in the city’s natural history museum, Judy and Nick lure Bellwether into a confession, have her arrested, and cure the drugged predators, and thus the film’s version of white supremacy is more or less solved.

It’s not that this is an entirely mendacious view of how racism works, and there are some nice, thoughtful touches. Making the villain an apparently harmless white sheep, and the racist characters prey animals who are typically associated with gentleness and companionship, plays on the respectability politics that’s often at work in racist discourse. It’s just that the film falls down in its understanding of racism as a structural force whose effects go beyond the efforts of a few bad actors. In Zootopia, racism is something that can be combatted by a few plucky individuals – Judy and Nick, mostly – working outside social institutions (in this case, the police force). And, although Judy clearly faces discrimination from within the police force, the film also fails to reckon fully with the looming spectre of racist police violence.

Additionally, there’s a glaring problem with the film’s central metaphor: the prey animals’ fear of the predators is not irrational, as racism is, because predators are actually dangerous to prey. (One question that Zootopia doesn’t seem to want us to ask is: what do all these anthropomorphised obligate carnivores eat?) The film is at pains to establish a parallel between the damaging rhetoric that Bellwether promulgates about “predatory biology” and the essentialist stereotypes that real-world white supremacists repeat and disseminate, but these things aren’t actually analogous, because predatory biology is real. So the film ends up inadvertently reinforcing essentialist stereotypes that cast the racialised Other as intrinsically violent/threatening, rather than rebutting them as it intends to do.

This is a trap that a fair amount of speculative fiction that attempts to tackle themes of institutional oppression falls into, particularly in the field of paranormal romance: all those novels about vampire liberation tend conveniently to ignore the fact that vampires do actually pose a physical threat to human populations. So it’s not especially surprising that an animated Disney film directed by two white guys fell for it too. Zootopia has its heart in the right place, and some of the points it has to make are, for a mainstream would-be blockbuster, genuinely insightful. But as a film about real-world racism it fails, finally, to hang together.

Review: Free Food for Millionaires

There’s something gleefully indulgent about Min Jin Lee’s debut novel Free Food for Millionaires, a bildungsroman of sorts focusing on a young Korean-American woman named Casey as she attempts to navigate landscapes of ambition, greed and cultural alienation in 1990s New York. The book’s Goodreads reviewers describe it as, variously, a “reverse-engineered telenovela”; “lit fic with a soapy edge”; a “soap opera of a novel”: like the 19th-century social novels it’s seeking to emulate, it sprawls across plotlines, interrogating American consumerism, institutional misogyny and the pressure exerted by both Korean and American cultures to succeed financially and, more importantly, to be seen to exceed financially.

Wealth and luxury – the outrageousness of the millionaire’s lifestyle – are of course perenially fascinating topics, and Lee handles them with insight and pathos: Casey’s ever-mounting credit card debt as she tries to keep up with the impossible standards set by her well-to-do peers at business school, and later at the prestigious professional firm where she manages to land a job, is a tangible source of tension within the narrative, illustrating the dangers of Casey’s desire for luxury goods and thus counterpointing the aspirational consumerist desire that portrayals of wealth can evoke in their audiences.

It’s true that nothing the novel does is particularly revolutionary: that’s part, I think, of what folks are getting at when they liken it to a soap opera, and familiarity is an effect that the book itself generates in its references to 19th-century literature. It’s also a reflection of its subject matter: despite the fact that it does create some tension around Casey’s unsustainable spending habits, it’s also a story set in a world in which wealth works to sustain itself; it makes sense that a narrative about capital, which seeks always to maintain the neoliberal status quo, would possess a conservative, consolatory form. That, perhaps, is part of Lee’s point: that wealth exists as a structuring force in our society regardless of how we each individually relate to it (by, for example, aspiring to it or eschewing it). But its familiarity is also a limiting factor: it never goes beyond the strictures of 19th-century realism to imagine how we as a society might change our relationship to material wealth, restricting its discussion to how Casey as an individual navigates the various pressures that capital imposes upon her. Within the constraints it’s imposed upon itself, it is, nevertheless, an engaging and well-crafted read; having read Lee’s wonderful second novel, Pachinko, back in 2018, I’ll be interested to see what she does next.

Doctor Who Review: Flux

Over the last half-decade or so of Doctor Who-watching I’ve been slowly and reluctantly coming to the conclusion that the kinds of stories the show wants to tell are not the kinds of stories I’m necessarily interested in watching. (A case in point: I am apparently the only person in the world to have genuinely adored spin-off series Class, which was cancelled after one season.) Ever since Steven Moffat took up the reins as showrunner in 2010, the show’s tone has shifted from the monster-of-the-week, metaphor-driven storytelling of the Russell T. Davies era to something much more frenetic and self-referential: to me it often felt like each episode was stuffed with enough ideas to power a series, with none of them getting the breathing space they deserved. Some of Chris Chibnall’s early episodes for Thirteenth Doctor Jodie Whittaker seemed to indicate that a reversal of that trend might be on the cards: with their focus on characterisation, sparing use of speculative concepts and unity of place, “The Tsuranga Condundrum” and “Demons of the Punjab” were some of my favourite Doctor Who stories of recent years. But Chibnall’s second series returned, unfortunately, to form: its opening story Spyfall was packed with competing ideas and poorly paced, and later episodes turned increasingly inward to focus on Whovian lore – at the expense of atmosphere and coherent narrative.

So, when the BBC announced that, for the first time since 1986, we’d be getting an entire Doctor Who series dedicated to a single story, I was optimistic. Perhaps now all those ideas would be given space to breathe, to generate atmosphere and resonance; perhaps, with the survival of the universe at stake, we’d get some real poetic grandeur going.

Alas, no.

The series’ premise is appropriately dramatic: a sort of cosmic storm called the Flux is sweeping across the universe, destroying everything in its path. Meanwhile, a pair of powerful beings named Swarm and Azure are attacking the Temple of Atropos on the planet Time, presumably not for philanthropic reasons; a Victorian industrialist frantically digs a network of tunnels beneath Liverpool, muttering dire prophecies; and a pair of lovers travel the universe in an attempt to find each other.

There’s some brilliant material here. Add the Doctor and her companions, wind the story’s mechanism up, and let it run: that’s all Chibnall and the writing team needed to do. But they seemingly can’t resist the urge to add extra bells and whistles in: more navel-gazing about the Doctor’s parentage and history; a Sontaran invasion; some timey-wimey shenanigans courtesy of the Weeping Angels. Once again, it’s all too overstuffed; and inevitably, with so much going on, some of the payoffs are fluffed. What happens to Peggy, the child who lies at the centre of the plot of the fourth episode, Village of the Angels, and then is never seen again? Why do the Weeping Angels need to transform the Doctor into one of them to take her to her mother? What’s the deal with the Temple of Atropos?

There are high points, of course, in which it’s possible to detect what Chibnall’s Who might feel like if it was paced a little more sedately: Vinder and Bel, the star-crossed lovers; the make-up and costuming on Swarm and Azure; the appearance of Mary Seacole in the Crimea (one of a series of marginalised people from history who have made their way into the Thirteenth Doctor’s story). But overall, it’s hard to detect much thematic coherence beyond “many apocalyptic things are happening and it is Very Bad”.

Have I learned my lesson vis-a-vis placing my faith in the hands of Doctor Who writers? Of course not. Hope springs eternal, and Russell T. Davies is taking back the reins. Perhaps we’ll see monsters of the week again yet.

Review: A Desolation Called Peace

Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace picks up soon after the events of its predecessor, the critically acclaimed A Memory Called Empire. Mahit Dzmare, ambassador from the small mining colony Lsel Station to the spacefaring empire, Teixcalaan, that is threatening to assimilate it, returns home from the empire’s capital only to find herself an object of suspicion in the eyes of the station authorities – both for her Teixcalaanli sympathies and for the fact that her imago-machine, a uniquely Lsel technology that carries the memories of the previous ambassador to Teixcalaan, is malfunctioning; in fact sabotaged. Meanwhile, Mahit’s former cultural liaison in Teixcalaan, Three Seagrass, dispatches herself to a sector of space that’s uncomfortably near Lsel Station where the Teixcalaanli imperial fleet, led by commander Nine Hibiscus, is facing down an incomprehensible alien threat; and the eleven-year-old imperial heir apparent Eight Antidote attempts to navigate the byzantine corridors of power and prevent nuclear warfare.

So, whereas A Memory Called Empire spent a lot of its time, narratively speaking, in Teixcalaan itself, A Desolation Called Peace is more interested in what lies outside of it. If the subject of Memory was the culturally seductive power of empire, the subject of Desolation is the working-out of imperial violence. As such, it leans much more heavily on the tropes of military SF – particularly that of the beleaguered captain (Nine Hibiscus) and their trusty second-in-command (here the detail-oriented Twenty Cicada) – than its predecessor. It also repeats the earlier novel’s interest in subtle political manoeuvring, the delicate art of manipulation, but the way it shifts the context of that manoeuvring from a dangerous but outwardly “civilised” imperial court to the explicitly violent military sphere blunts, to my mind, the force of Martine’s critique of empire. The civilisation/barbarism dialectic is key to Memory: it’s a novel that’s literally about the way in which the politeness and gentility cultivated at the heart of empire is a veneer disguising its brutality, and Mahit’s highly-charged conversations with imperial representatives – outwardly proper yet also always encoding the threat of violence – are how she navigates that duality. But in Desolation, that coded threat is made explicit, no longer cloaked in the conventions of politesse and diplomacy: here, we see the military force that maintains and perpetuates imperial hegemony. In this context,the political dance many of the characters engage in – particularly Nine Hibiscus, as she attempts to get her troops on board with her approach to warfare with the aliens, which is rather more cautious than her subordinate officers would like – loses its thematic force. This no longer feels quite like a story about the cultural seductions of empire. In fact, because narrative convention encourages us to sympathise with Nine Hibiscus as a point-of-view character (and with Eight Antidote, who is also a point-of-view character and a child), it can feel uncomfortably like an apologia for Teixcalaan.

That effect is only amplified by the fact that A Desolation Called Peace is, on a narrative level, extremely well-crafted. Its settings – Teixcalaan, the Teixcalaanli fleet and Lsel Station – are vividly and plausibly imagined; they’re places that feel like they go on existing even when they’re not being depicted on the page. The mutual incomprehensibility of Mahit and the Teixcalaanli characters to each other and to the aliens rings very true to the minor communication hitches and difficulties that we experience every day as humans, and is dramatically satisfying as well. The prose, although it adopts an idiom that is recognisably, unchallengingly modern American, nevertheless has an elegance that rhymes with Martine’s depiction of Teixcalaanli culture as obsessed with rhetoric and literary reference. It seems odd to criticise a novel for being too well-made; but I think Martine’s technical successes make her portrayal of Teixcalaan and those who maintain its power over-favourable. In writing about empire’s seductions, Martine seems indeed to have fallen prey to them.

Review: The Echo Wife

This review contains spoilers.

What if human beings could create life – reliably, wholesale, from scratch, none of this messy and uncontrollable futzing about with genitals and wombs and meiosis? It’s a question we’ve been asking since at least 1818, when Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, that archetypal mad-scientist narrative in which a pieced-together human is brought to life through the seemingly promising new technology of galvanism. Published more than 200 years later, Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife treads similar grounds, asking us, like Shelley, to consider the nature of monstrosity and of scientific and social power. It’s a smart and urgent read which nevertheless fails to achieve the timelessness of its literary forebear.

Our protagonist is Evelyn, a genetic scientist at the height of her career who has developed a method for creating full human clones and conditioning their personalities (and their bodies) to create exact doubles of the people from whom they were cloned. Despite her professional success – as the novel opens she is in fact collecting an award for her work – her personal life is in ruins: her husband Nathan has left her for another woman. It takes a few chapters for us to discover that this other woman, Martine, is in fact Evelyn’s clone, her personality tweaked and altered to suit Nathan’s desires. Of course, the trope of the artificial woman made for the male gaze is not a new one (indeed, it has an antecedent in Frankenstein itself: that novel’s lonely creature asks his creator for a mate made in the same way as himself); but having Evelyn and Martine actually meet breathes new life into it, as Evelyn is forced to confront in the differences between herself and Martine all the ways in which Nathan clearly found her deficient.

This is not, however, a tale of female solidarity. The two women do become uneasy co-conspirators: Martine has murdered Nathan, and in order to stop her work becoming discredited (Nathan having secretly created Martine from Evelyn’s notes, and even worse given her the ability to become pregnant, which is supposed to be impossible), Evelyn helps her cover the murder up through yet more cloning. But even as Evelyn introduces Martine to freedoms she’s never known – reading about the workings of her own body, making small choices about how to spend her time, nurturing the beginnings of an intellectual life – Evelyn continues to think of her as a test subject, something that will, in the nearish future, become no more than biomedical waste when it use is finished. She is, in this respect, no better than Nathan, as the novel demonstrates.

But Nathan isn’t the only man whose violence overshadows the narrative. In fits and starts we discover that Evelyn’s father abused both her and her mother for years, until he too was murdered by his seemingly pliable wife. Evelyn’s father is thus an obvious double of Nathan’s, of course – but his legacy of abuse is continued too in Evelyn’s own objectification of those around her, and especially of Martine. This is underscored by the novel’s ending, which sees Evelyn manipulating Martine into moving into her old family home – where her father lies buried under the rose bushes – there to remain a virtual prisoner, in exchange for Martine being able to keep her baby daughter Violet with her. As the novel closes, Evelyn, Martine and Violet occupy the same positions as Evelyn’s parents and Evelyn herself once did, the cycle of misogynistic abuse repeating itself in a way that Evelyn is too damaged to recognise. Thus Evelyn becomes, like Victor Frankenstein, the very thing she fears and hates.

It’s decidedly chilling, which is exactly its intended effect. And its limited sphere of action – as Kevin Guilfoile points out here, “there are basically only four characters in this novel, two of whom are genetically identical” – lends it an intense claustrophobia that evokes the way in which abuse and misogyny restrict the agency of their victims. By the same token, though, I think it’s this very narrowness of focus that makes the novel less than wholly memorable. Shelley’s Frankenstein encompasses multitudes in its tale of rivalry, revenge and wrongdoing: it asks searching questions about the ethics of experimentation, about social ostracism, about attitudes to the body, about the reliability of our own perceptions; its capaciousness and ability to sustain multiple different readings have given it an unshakable position in the Western literary canon. The Echo Wife, on the other hand, is really only about one thing: the cyclical nature of gendered abuse. On that topic, it is evocative, insightful, propulsive; it’s a strongly-constructed, appropriately dark thriller. But – as with many thrillers – its work is done in a single read. Once its point is made, there is very little else to say. In other words (and honestly I think this is what many of my reviews here boil down to): The Echo Wife is a good book. But not a great book.