Tanith Lee, ‘A Bed of Earth’

Tanith Lee is one of those authors who occupy a strangely vague place in my memory. Every so often, I’ll find one of her books in the library and spend a moment trying to remember whether I liked the last book of hers that I read. This is usually inconclusive, but she seems to be labelled ‘interesting’ and ‘worth a try’ in my mind, as well as ‘dark’ and possibly ‘Gothic’.

A Bed of Earth fits all the above labels, but left me dissatisfied. It didn’t connect. It’s atmospheric, macabre, and gently melancholic but somehow distant. It reminded me of looking at an exquisite tapestry, whereas what I wanted from it was full 3-D immersion, messy and emotional.

I was also mildly irritated by the setting of the novel in an ‘alternate’ Venice, called Venus (not a name I can really take seriously for a city, for some reason). The author explains in an introductory note that the reality of the novel differs from our own in that Cesare Borgia does not lose power with the death of his father, Pope Alexander VI, in 1503. I may well be missing something, either from an incomplete knowledge of Italian Renaissance history, or because this is the third book set in her alternate reality and there were things explained in the first two, but it seemed to me to be largely irrelevant whether Cesare Borgia retained power after 1503 or not. The story could have been played out with little alteration in our own ‘real’ history. The fact that she sets the book in ‘Venus’ seems to me either to be an excuse to play around with names (like ‘Chesare Borja’, which I find irritatingly distracting, leading me to wonder what else is different in this world and what caused the language differences), or to suggest that if you’re going to introduce ghosts and other elements of the supernatural you have to create a fantasy world to do it in. Which is just daft.

The other problem I had with this book came from the prose style. She has a tendency to use paragraph breaks with alarming frequency,  so that her paragraphs often consist of just a single sentence. This is irritating if you hear the rhythm of the text in your head as you read. Paragraph breaks, and punctuation, are there to show the rhythm and flow of the prose. Too many paragraphs makes it choppy and disjointed. If you were to read this book aloud, pausing between paragraphs in what I’d consider the normal way, then it would be full of strange gaps, indicating more significance than the text actually holds.

Having said all that, there are one or two vivid images I’ll remember from this book (death by possessed flamingo… wow), so the next time I find a Tanith Lee in the library I’ll probably give it a go.

Which ones to buy

This blog is about books, without which my student overdraft would have been smaller. You might assume that I was staggering under the financial weight of buying all the key texts from the reading lists, but no: I was lucky enough to be attending a university with lots of well-stocked libraries. But there were many times when the overwhelming pressure of my social life got together with the nagging feeling that I ought to be writing an essay, and in an effort to escape from the pair of them I would walk for the ten minutes it took me to arrive at a large high street bookshop.

I know many people who say they never read any fiction while they were at university because all their reading time and energy went to their course books. Most of them I even believe. For me, this wasn’t an option. Abstaining from fiction for the duration of each term would have been like abstaining from food. I did without TV and barely noticed. Books were different.

There was, of course, the local public library. It wasn’t a bad library at all. But what I usually wanted was fantasy or science fiction, and every public library I have ever come across suffers from one major flaw in this area. The rule is: if it looks interesting, they will only ever have Volume Two. This happily saved me from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series (for Volume Two here read Volumes Four, Seven and Ninety-One) but also meant that if I was in the mood to immerse myself in a very different world for a while the bookshop usually won.

The book-buying habit persisted once I graduated, fuelled by the exciting arrival of a (small) monthly wage, but I began to realise I needed to develop some rules, in order to avoid frustration, a renewal of the overdraft, and being lumbered with numerous volumes of complete drivel. So, sixteen years after the start of my university and splurge-book-buying careers, here are those rules. I usually even stick to them.

1. Only buy paperback.

This helps the bank balance. I know hardback books can be a lot more visually satisfying, but there are a number of reasons other than the economic one for sticking to paperback. They’re a lot easier to read in the bath, for one thing, and less likely to give you postural problems if you’re lugging them around in your bag all day.

The only exception I’ve made in recent years to this rule is for Harry Potter, on the grounds that for the last few books of the series it would have been impossible to avoid hearing all the major plot spoilers while you were dutifully waiting for the paperback. I rather resent this.

Oh, and a message to those publishers who insist on bringing out the larger ‘trade paperbacks’ first: please don’t.

2. Wait till the author has finished the trilogy/duology/other -ology.

There are two reasons for this. The first is related to the title of this blog. I get through a lot of reading, so my memories of things I’ve read aren’t always very clear. This means that when I buy a new instalment of a story I feel I need to re-read all the previous instalments in order to do it justice. Applying this to a trilogy therefore means that if I buy each book as it’s published, when I get to the end I will have read the first volume three times, the second twice, and the third once. It gives me a strange, unbalanced view of the whole.

The second reason is that you don’t know how long the whole thing is going to take, or sometimes if it’s going to be finished at all. I’ve had frustrating experiences with Melanie Rawn’s Exiles series (tantalisingly left when for entirely understandable personal reasons the author had to take a break), and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (for some reason I thought the first three books (in four volumes) were all there were going to be). Kate Elliott’s Crown of Stars series took a long long time before it was all published (again understandably: there’s a lot of it). I’m just an impatient bugger and I hate being left in the middle of a good story.

I’ve just thought of a third reason, which is that waiting on tenterhooks for the conclusion of a gripping saga can tempt you to break Rule 1. This happened with Dorothy Dunnett’s House of Niccolo series.

This only applies to anything with a continuous plot. A series of novels by the same author featuring the same characters (e.g. Terry Pratchett, Lindsey Davis) is fine: I just go ‘hooray’ when a new one appears. In paperback, that is.

3. Only favourite authors get bought new unseen.

This is the rule I break most often, sometimes because a book has rave reviews from an author I trust, sometimes just because I’m in the basement of Forbidden Planet and I get carried away, and occasionally because I’ve nothing to read on the train. But in an effort to stop spending money on things I didn’t like and won’t read again I’m trying to become a bit more canny.

If I get organised, I can use the library to sample things I think I may like. If you follow Rule 2 and wait till a trilogy is complete, then the chance that your local library will still be stocking Volume One is small, but you can at least get them to order it up for you. Charity shops are another source for me: I’ll test something out, and if I like it I’ll buy subsequent books new.

I’ve tried reading reviews online, with varying success. There’s a problem with new fantasy and science fiction, which is that amateur reviewers rarely seem to notice the quality of the writing, and professional mainstream reviewers only review a fraction of the genre literature published. The only solution seems to be to subscribe to a specialist site. I would love to be proved wrong about this.

(Disclaimer: No-one should pay any attention to any reviews they read on this website.)

About fantasy and science fiction

This blog is not just about fantasy and science fiction. But some of it will be. So I’m going to get this off my chest right from the start.

It’s sometimes hard not to feel shy about admitting you read fantasy novels.

The most depressing phrase I’ve ever heard uttered by an intelligent adult was “Oh, I don’t read that sort of thing”.

I can understand (if I try) that people can find it hard to relate to a world which includes magic and monsters, or laser guns and aliens (same thing), or time travel, or protective forest spirits. I can appreciate that if you can’t relate to the world you’re reading about you’re unlikely to enjoy the book. Fair enough. What makes me want to howl is the phrase “that sort of thing”.

The same intelligent adult, if they think about it, will admit that by “that sort of thing” they weren’t necessarily including Frankenstein, 1984, Gormenghast, The Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World, The Picture of Dorian Grey, The House of the Spirits, Beowulf etc.etc. Or The Time Traveller’s Wife, or Beyond Black, or Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, or The Lovely Bones to give more recent examples.

That’s a start. Now if I could only persuade more of them to go and read an Iain Banks Culture novel, or Mary Gentle’s Rats and Gargoyles, or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, or Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, or Julian May’s Saga of the Exiles, or Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon…

Adults are allowed to read fantasy novels too. This is important. The proponents of the theory that fantasy is for children seem to think that on reaching adulthood we should all put away our belief in fairies and concentrate on the real world. What they’re missing is that most children don’t believe in fairies either. They just have no trouble with the idea of a good story which happens to include fairies. We don’t have to prove our adulthood by rejecting the imagination. Our adult ‘real world’ has always been laced with the not-quite-possible. Once it was myth and magic; now it’s urban legends, ghost stories and horoscopes.

Yes, there is sword-and-sorcery dross out there and yes, some science fiction authors come up with improbable tentacled green aliens. There is also chick-lit. I rest my case.

(For more eloquent and interesting versions of the above, please see Ursula Le Guin in the New Statesman, and Audrey Niffenegger writing in the Guardian).