bloodygranuaile

I have committed myself to reading one book each month of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, so that I can be prepared for Readercon 2026 when we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first publication in the series. Ordinary you’d think enthusiasm for this would be left to people who are already fans of the series, but I love a reading challenge and I do not love being left out of whatever the hot topic of discussion is at Readercon, so I’ve got a lot of books to read, only most of which are in my library’s network! I read Shards of Honor several years ago, which I remember was fun although I don’t really remember what happened in it other than that there was lots of escaping from hostage situations. The next installment–chronologically, though not in publication order–is Barrayar, which follows the adventures of Cordelia Vorkosigan, nee Naismith, as she arrives on the militaristic, feudal planet of Barrayar with her husband and her natural pregnancy, and is immediately besieged by the plot happening.

On Barrayar, the old emperor is dying and the new emperor is a four-year-old boy. Cordelia’s husband, Aral Vorkosigan, is chosen by the old dying emperor as Regent until Emperor Gregor reaches his majority at age twenty. This puts Cordelia, Aral, and the unborn heir to the Vorkosigan countship in the middle of a very volatile political situation, which Cordelia frankly has very little respect for, since she thinks the traditional Barrayan attitudes toward class and militarism are both thoroughly idiotic. Cordelia has to learn about Barrayar quickly whether she likes what she finds or not, though, both because she lives here now, and because plot keep happening to her that will require her to assume a variety of disguises, build alliances with people she didn’t already know, cut deals, execute plans on the fly, and other adventure shenanigans where cultural incompetence could prove very, very costly. A couple assassination attempts on Aral and Cordelia, an emergency surgery to transfer Cordelia’s unborn baby into an artificial uterus so that it can be subjected to emergency medical experiments, and a political coup by one of the douchey super-conservative counts sends Cordelia into a sequence of planetary wildernesses that she’s not used to–hills, caves, the poor neighborhoods of cities. Much of these shenanigans involve very young children–at one point Cordelia is responsible for hiding the young Emperor; at another point she has to rescue an also-pregnant friend and help her have her baby in the least convenient time and place Bujold could think of; late in the book she has to heist her own baby out of the city before the artificial uterus fails from lack of maintenance.

Despite the bad dreams it gave me about babies with fucked-up bones, this was overall a pretty fun set of “competence porn” action-adventure shenanigans. Cordelia is smart and resourceful and gathers up a ragtag band o’ misfits whose various competencies are either ignored or rejected due to Barrayar’s very narrow ideas of appropriate behavior, and together they survive various horrors and eventually show everybody who exactly it is they’re messing with, that sort of thing. Fun and satisfying, and I hope the rest of the series remains as enjoyable even though I understand we are ditching Cordelia as our main character and will be going most of the rest of the series with the medical experimentation baby as the protagonist. So we’ll see how that goes.

I’d been meaning to do this for a while but I finally got around to reading my mother’s favorite novel, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. The only other Wharton I’d ever read was Ethan Frome in high school, which I hated, and was only willing to give Wharton another shot because Ethan Frome is also my mother’s least favorite novel.

The House of Mirth follows two years in the life of Lily Bart, a beautiful woman from an “old-money” New York family that has run out of said money. Lily is nearly thirty, which, for a class of women who exist entirely for the purpose of getting married, means she is nearing old hag territory, although for now at least she’s still got her looks and her impeccably trained social skills. Being short on money, Lily lives off various friends and relations, although being continually hosted at one person’s mansion or another comes with its own expenses that she can’t really afford, like dressing fashionably and joining in games of bridge.

Lily is a tragic figure in that she has just enough self-respect to want to maintain her integrity, but is too much a creature of her upbringing to deliberately leave “society” and go do something useful with her life, like her plain and independent friend Gerty Farish. As a result, she winds up continually self-sabotaging–making moves towards getting what she wants, and then either actually sabotaging herself, or merely failing to be ruthless enough to defend herself from Bertha Dorset when Dorset sets out to sabotage her. Early in the book we see her trying to “land” the wealthy but boring Percy Gryce, even going so far as to pretend that she goes to church regularly, but then sleeping through church and instead hanging out with Lawrence Selden, a lawyer, and clearly the guy she actually loves although she can’t possibly entertain hi as a marriage prospect because he only makes normal people money and not stupid money. This gives Bertha Dorset time to tell Mr. Gryce that Lily plays bridge, which Gryce disapproves of (and which Lily mainly does because her other friends disapprove of people who don’t), and Gryce promptly fucks off to go marry somebody else. Later, we see Lily reject an offer of marriage from the “new money” Mr. Rosedale, who she personally dislikes for what are frankly quite stupid and prejudiced reasons at the beginning of the book, but whom she sort of comes around on only when it’s too late and she wouldn’t be a useful wife to him anymore. At one point she asks her friend Judy’s husband, Gus Trenor, to help her invest her money better; this turns into a major scandal because Gus just starts giving her money in the hopes that she will become his mistress. Lily is naive enough to think it’s her money for quite a while, and while she eventually turns Gus down, the damage has already been done–word has gotten out that Gus has been paying her bills, and Judy is furious. Lily flees this scandal by going on a cruise with Bertha Dorset, who basically has Lily there to distract her husband while she carries on an affair with an idiot young poet. This eventually blows up and Bertha puts it out that Lily was having an affair with her husband instead. Not everyone actually believes Bertha, but it’s too tough swimming against the social current and too risky to stand up to Bertha. Lily then also gets disinherited by her aunt. Lily has material with which to blackmail Bertha if she wanted to get her reputation back that way, but the material would also implicate Lawrence Selden, so she balks at using it. After a lot of indecision, changing tacks, rejection of help, taking of help and then losing it, moving social circles, getting into arguments, and generally becoming increasingly poor and miserable, Lily finds herself in extremely reduced circumstances–socially isolated, unemployed, dependent upon chloral for chronic insomnia, and awaiting one last payout from her aunt that will be just enough money to cover her debts and bring her net worth back up to zero. She maintains only her integrity, and a fat lot of good it does her.

This novel is, first and foremost, insanely depressing. It’s also one of those books where everyone sort of sucks–there are outright villains like Bertha Dorset, and people who turn out to be not quite as bad as they were introduced as, like Sim Rosedale and Carry Fisher, and people who manage to be correct about one thing or another, like Selden. The only actually nice person in the book is Gerty Farish, who is portrayed–partly through the filter of Lily’s perception, but also just in the novel’s perception, I think–as sort of naive, too trusting, unrefined, and basically sort of un-perceptive in a way that both allows her to suck up living in a shitty little apartment and also not notice what a douchebag everyone else is. In many ways this probably renders Gerty more resilient than our fragile little butterfly of a heroine but it is definitely portrayed as essentially a type of being dumb, and Gerty is more than a little a figure of ridicule in the book. Selden is the one who, to me, is the most relatable, in a way that I’m not sure makes me think well of myself–he’s pretty content to do his thing and hang around the rich weirdos and sort of half be actual friends with them and half observe them like they’re some sort of nature documentary, and he has enough moral sense to judge them but not enough commitment to it to stop going to their parties when invited. Then he goes home to his little comfortable book-filled bachelor pad and has some tea.

Lily is both sympathetic and frustrating. Her little core of what might be pride and what might be self-respect can’t be condemned, I think, but because it’s not paired with any greater rebellious type of strength or any sort of practical skill, all it does is mean she can’t ever quite bring herself to do whatever shitty thing she would need to do to actually get out of her predicaments. The result is that she never gets out of any predicaments, only into new and worse predicaments, and she is also too weak to survive said predicaments, so she just kind of gets blasted into oblivion by having to do anything a normal person does, like a beautiful tropical flower planted outside of its hardiness zone. It’s very tragic, even though she is a thoroughly useless and entitled person. The fact that she’s aware that she’s useless makes it harder to hate her than it is to hate all the other useless people she’s surrounded with, who all seem to remain convinced from beginning to end that they’re all terribly worthy people and that is why God and the stock market have given them all the money.

This book also has quite a lot to say about gender, which I’m sure 120 years of feminist literary critics have discussed more intelligently than I am able to. The one thing that really struck me the most was how well this book illustrates some half-remembered feminist/queer theory kicking around the back of my head about heterosexuality as an organizing principle for people’s entire life, which is why some people cannot just chill the fuck out about non-heterosexuality. Lily is female and, being an upper-class female, her job is to marry. Therefore, literally every single interaction she has with a man in any way, shape, or form, at any time, is analyzed by everyone else through that lens, and getting caught having a single conversation with a guy apparently means marriage is imminent. Meanwhile, snuggling in bed together is apparently just how female friends hang out, even ones that don’t actually like each other very much. It’s like how the most irritating, hormonally addled adolescents thought when I was in school, except that these are entire grown-ass adults with vast amounts of money, and also they can materially ruin people’s lives with their inane comments about “I saw Man Y and Woman X having a conversation in the park, YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS WINK WINK NUDGE NUDGE SAY NO MORE SAY NO MORE.” I hate that sort of shit more than just about anything else in the world and if I were Lily I don’t think I would have been able to bring myself to actually marry any of these assholes either.

Anyway, this book is great and I loved it, I just wish that the entire cast of characters had died at the end, except maybe Gerty.

About ten years ago, someone I knew through my writing group had a book published, and they had a book event in conjunction with a few other authors. In an abundance of social awkwardness/wanting to be supportive I bought the book being advertised of each of the four authors, the other three of whom I had not heard of. One of these books was The Wrath and the Dawn, a YA fantasy (they were all YA fantasies) from then-debut author Renee Ahdieh.

My honest to god opinion is that I should have read this book when I first bought it ten years ago, because I would have had a much higher tolerance for its general YA-ness at the time.

The book is, roughly, a retelling of the tale of Scheherazade, although in this one our heroine Shahrzad only has to tell about one and a half stories before other plot stuff intervenes to keep her alive. Shahrzad volunteers to become the bride of the murderous boy-king Khalid because he married and then killed her best friend, and Shahrzad intends to stay alive long enough to figure out how to kill the king. This gets derailed because Shahrzad also falls in love with the king, and figures out the secret reason he had been killing all those girls, in that order. There is much heterosexual angst when Shahrzad finds herself falling in love with her best friend’s killer, who doesn’t seem like a psychotic madman. This might have sat better with me if it didn’t take all of three days to happen, but whatever. If this were message fiction we would have to be very concerned about what message we are sending to young girls about handsome young men who do terrible things but don’t seem like total psychos, but this is not message fiction, this is a heterosexual power fantasy about the power of teenage love (and not really storytelling, which is odd for a Scheherezade adaptation) to overcome all obstacles, presumably including breaking curses in the sequel. Shahrzad is also a master archer, although this doesn’t end up being quite as relevant to the plot as I’d hoped.

The writing style is a bit overwritten in the way that YA so often is, where there are too many descriptive words but the result isn’t writing that’s dense, just sort of loose. I had more patience for this before spending years as a copy editor and now it’s hard to turn off the part of brain that wants to cut the extraneous words from every sentence, so at least for the first few chapters I had a constant running internal monologue that was just like “You don’t have to say ‘grains of sand,’ you can just say ‘sand,’ the default way sand comes is in grains” but once I got more engaged in the action-adventure stuff that voice moved more to the back of my head. The book is nearly 400 pages long and took me about half a day to read, so it’s fair to say the extra description didn’t slow me down too much.

Apart from our feisty but easily seduced heroine, the only other female character in the book who shows up for more than three pages is her Greek handmaiden, who appears to exist mostly to be more normal than Shahrzad but they’re still friends so we can show that this author doesn’t hate women, despite the otherwise all-male cast. We are not going to resolve the age-old question of “Is feminism when you chase boys” in this book review, so I will only say that this book was a bit too heterosexual for me personally, which is why I don’t read as much straight people romantasy stuff as I used to.

Overall this book isn’t bad for the type of book it is, but it doesn’t exactly transcend the genre, and this is no longer quite my genre the way it used to be. It is unlikely I will read the sequel unless it basically falls into my lap, but I wouldn’t particularly object to reading it if it does.

From the “This has been sitting on my shelf for entirely too long” files, I picked up Greer Gilman’s Cry Murder! in a Small Voice, a chapbook from Small Beer Press that, according to the inscription on the title page, I bought at Readercon 2014. Whoops.

This is a weird little murder mystery for very serious Elizabethan theater nerds. I am not a very serious Elizabeth theater nerd, but I know enough about the period to be interested in it, and can at least sort-of follow most Shakespeare-adjacent historical fiction.

This one I can definitely only sort-of follow. Gilman writes the whole piece in allusion-laden Elizabeth English, and the effect is marvelously immersive. I spotted not one but two uses of my new favorite word “hirpling,” if that gives you a sense how little Gilman is bothered about Being Accessible To A Wider Audience. But the work of prying open this closely sealed pistachio of a tale is rewarding, because, if I have read it rightly, the story being told here is a Gothic magnificence, in which a corrupt serial killer aristocrat makes young theater boys participate in bizarre rituals of bad theater and then kills them, and famous playwright and poet Ben Jonson has to travel to Venice to meet up with a shady character in a church and acquire poison, which he then brings back to England so that he can team up with one of the theater boys and exact revenge upon the villainous Lord for his twin crimes of serial killing and writing very bad plays. It’s really quite a lot of fun, and there’s times when you can really hear and see and smell the crowded nastiness of early modern cities in a really vibrant, textured way. I could probably stand to read it a second time and look up more words, but it is more likely that I will try to see if any of Gilman’s other work is a little easier to read.

Spent more of the long weekend sitting around rereading Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy, which is the further adventures of Breq Mianaai, formerly the troop carrier Justice of Toren. Most of this one is still spent in and around Athoek Station, although for civil war reasons quite a lot of it is also spent hiding out in gate-space, between Athoek System and the Ghost System. Gate-space is more fun than you’d think since it allows us little breathers to hang out with all the insane people Breq has collected on her journey, including Presger Translator Zeiat, who likes to drink fish sauce and is so glad she’s not Translator Dlique; an ancillary from the long-lost, pre-Radch spaceship Sphene, who is rude and snarky to everybody except sometimes Zeiat; Mercy of Kalr, who is learning things from Breq that are emotionally difficult for Breq to deal with; and cross-class lovers Lieutenants Ekalu and Lieutenant Seivarden, who are on a long and painfully slow journey toward Seivarden being ever so slightly less of a self-absorbed asshole. There’s also a single instance of the shittier Anaander Mianaai, who manages to royally piss off Athoek Station, to satisfyingly funny results. The ending definitely feels like a setup to further books, and also makes extremely explicit that the Point (with a capital P) that Leckie is making here is that “endings” are just the beginnings of other things and politics is never over, but it does appear that Breq did succeed in her mission of absolutely fucking up Anaander Mianaai’s whole deal, so that was nice. Overall, still a great, fun entry in the “Disaster Queers in Space” subgenre of space opera. I’m very glad I reread it.

On a recent trip to Vermont I indulged myself in the purchase of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, and my girlfriend indulged me with buying the two sequels to read herself and then to promptly hand over into my possession so they could stay together and I wouldn’t blow up my books-purchasing count.

Ancillary Justice is a big fun space opera from the point of view of an AI, which is a type of science fiction that I have a big weakness for (see also: my beloved Murderbot). “Breq” used to be a big ship but is now only one human body. This reduction in stature has not stopped her from being on a mission of revenge against the many-bodied ruler of the Radch empire, Anaander Mianaai. This mission of revenge brings her to an ice planet full of (justifiably) cranky provincials where she on purpose finds a scientist with a useful antiquities collection and accidentally finds a former lieutenant of hers named Seivarden, who is herself an antiquity, as she once got stuck in a suspension pod for a thousand years and then woke up to find everyone she’s ever known dead. Seivarden didn’t handle this well and wandered off out of the Radch to do drugs for a bit before Breq scoops her up and saves her life, basically against her will. Breq pretends to be a foreign tourist until she maneuvers herself into a position to get an audience with Anaander Mianaai, or at least some of Anaander Mianaai. Breq ends up being suborned into a bunch of inter-Anaander Mianaai politics even though if she had her druthers she’d just shoot all the Anaander Mianaais on both sides of her internal conflict.

At the time this book was published it was subjected to a lot of discourse and now, with the discourse in the back mirror, I was wondering if it would hold up. I think it does. Without a bunch of discourse about people bugging out about pronoun use in the Radch… well, you get used to it after a few pages and then it’s a fun space opera about a bunch of traumatized military goons doing revenge and intrigue and hinting at the threat posed by bigger, weirder, more powerful forces than the Radch, although of course we don’t meet the Presger yet because that is what sequels are for. There is explosive space combat and fussy imperial shit about manners and tea. It’s a great time.

This year I decided to reread The Silmarillion! I have not read it in about… twenty years. Jesus, that makes me feel old. Anyway, I decided to break it up into chunks and read a bit each month for the first 6 months of the year. This meant reading about 60-odd pages each month, which is plenty for a book this dense.

I must admit that my first thought is indeed “Oh wow, this book is very dense.” I remember having a difficult time with it when I first read it in ninth grade–so many names! Such archaic language! So little dialogue!--but I am older and wiser now and have a whole English degree under my belt, so I figured it was largely an issue of it being Above My Reading Level when I was 15.

Alas, no, this really is a very dense and busy book. It’s actually four books, of which the Valaquenta (or Quenta Silmarillion) is the biggest one, and it covers many hundreds or possibly a few thousands of years and several generations of Elf shenanigans. Everyone has five names and is given a full genealogy of people who also have five names. All the places have five names too. In keeping with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of which Tolkien was a scholar, families frequently repeated name elements instead of having family names, so you get whole families whose names all start with Fin- or Ea- or El- or whatever. It is! So! Much!

That said, the language, while often hard to follow, has a grave and archaic regality to it, thus fitting the type of story it is exactly. And the stories, once you can get past the language and its reliance on abstractions (the thing I find most difficult as a modern reader, honestly–I’m not only used to much more concrete writing, but in many sectors of my life, that type of thing is a huge red flag for bullshit), are great–epic tales of fighting dragons and stealing gems and exploring the world, with doomed love and giant spiders and all sorts of extremely cool shit that other fantasy authors have been ripping off lo these past fifty years. We get the tale of Feanor’s bad decisions and his unfortunate family; the heroic exploits of Beren and Luthien; a short version of the Tale of Turin Turambar; and many other individual episodes that would probably each bear up a whole movie trilogy if someone with a huge budget and a sense of restraint could wrestle the rights away from the Tolkien Estate, which I’m kind of glad they won’t actually. This is not cinematic writing so you’d have to make up a whole bunch of new material and that would then annoy Tolkien purists, probably including me. But there’s a great sense of vastness here, a really impressive feeling that you’re looking at merely a sliver of a whole world long gone, and there’s something incredibly compelling about that.

Given that I have only read this book once, but in the intervening twenty years I have listened to Blind Guardian’s album Nightfall in Middle-Earth approximately infinity times, one experience I kept having was sudden tiny bursts of familiarity. I’d be reading these long dense pages trying to remember what I had read on the previous page, and suddenly a sentence or a turn of phrase would jump off the page and bonk me in the teenage nostalgia part of my brain, and I’d know exactly where in the album we were. Then I would have the relevant song stuck in my head for a bit.

Anyway, now that I’ve finished the book, I… kind of want to immediately go back and reread it again? There’s just so much going on in it that I didn’t retain; I need to do it again and maybe find a study guide this time.

For some reason I had been under the impression that Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent was a big sprawling Gothic novel, but it is, in fact, a satirical little novella, which is also a great type of book to be. Written shortly before the Union was enacted in 1800, it chronicles four generations of the fictional house of Rackrent, a Protestant Ascendancy landowning family as ill-governed and exploitative as the rental practice they are named after. (“Rack-renting” in British Ireland was a practice by which lazy absentee landlords would rent out all their land at once to a land agent at a reasonable price, and the land agent was charged with finding tenants for the individual lots, which he could sublet out at whatever extortionate rent he could get for them.) The story is told from the point of view of the aged house steward, Thady Quirk, whose son Jason becomes a lawyer and eventually manages to scoop the entire Rackrent estate and title from its profligate fourth heir, Sir Condy.

The novella features a lot of gently humorous digs at the culture and folkways of the indigenous Irish tenantry, alongside a lot of absolutely savage humorous digs at the uselessness and destructive tendencies (self- and otherwise) of the Anglo-Irish landowning class, of which Edgeworth was a member. The book is safely set just a generation or so back so that Edgeworth’s contemporaries could laugh at their predecessors’ folly and not be insulted themselves, and if they did see themselves at all in the terrible behavior of the four generations of Rackrent lords chronicled, well, they were clearly behind the times and should get with the progressive paternalistic program that Edgeworth’s father was an advocate and practitioner of (mainly, that the Anglo-Irish lords should live on and manage their own estates and live within their means and not engage in rack-renting).

The four generations of Rackrent upper-class twits chronicled are thus:
Sir Patrick O’Shaughlin, who changes his name and presumably his religion to become Sir Patrick Rackrent and be a lord under the English regime. Sir Patrick was much beloved in the countryside for adhering to old Irish norms of lordly hospitality, which did not actually pair real well with the newfangled English laws and customs around keeping a property solvent.
Sir Murtagh, an extremely litigious man with a very pick-and-choose attitude around older Irish customs. Spent so much money litigating around keeping bits of the estate that he ended up selling bits of it off to pay the legal fees anyway.
Sir Kit Stopgap, a classic absentee landlord, who gambled away all the estate’s money in Bath, married a rich Jewish woman and locked her up for seven years when she wouldn’t hand over a particular diamond necklace, and was generally terrible.
Sir Condy Rackrent, who was educated in the law but very bad at it. He wasn’t absentee but continued his forebears’ traditions of running up huge bills and not paying them. He eventually runs out of people to sponge money off of, especially since he pissed off his wife’s family by marrying her so they won’t help, and runs for Parliament to avoid being put in jail, but Parliament has its own set of expenses he can’t pay. He ends up selling first one property and eventually the whole shebang over to Jason Quirk, who he had gone to school with and who had been his land agent for many years. The tale of Sir Condy takes up the biggest part of the page count, being about as long as the tales of the other three guys put together.

The story is told in first-person style that we are assured is the unvarnished, unembellished verbal account of Sir Condy’s old steward, and it is quite a feat of colorful Irish storytelling. Footnotes, a glossary, and other commentary for the benefit of the “English reader” are provided in a voice known only as the Editor, who can be hilariously judgmental about the Irish. The place-names are a mix of cartoonishly on-the-nose English terms (such as Rackrent and Stopgap) and cartoonishly long stereotypes of Anglicized Irish place names, such as “the bog of Allyballycarricko’shaughlin,” which Thady cannot for the life of him figure out what the third Lady Rackrent finds funny about.

While there is a lot of stuff about English property law and Irish country customs that may not be immediately familiar to a modern reader unless they already read a lot about those sorts of thing, it’s still overall a very fast and funny read, and a well-deserved takedown of one of the most useless and exploitative groups of dimwits to walk the earth (not necessarily to walk Ireland, though, as half of them never set foot there).

Sad Irish Literature Month, Part II, continues! I read Claire Keegan’s Foster last night, the novella that excellent Irish-language film An Cailín Ciúin is based on. So I already basically knew the story.

The one thing I’m not sure I was prepared for was quite how short it is. I read the whole thing in about ninety minutes, which might be less than how long the movie is (OK I just checked and the movie is… 96 minutes. So pretty much exactly how long the movie is, actually). A big (relatively) chunk of the physical book I was holding in my hands was actually a preview of the first few chapters of Small Things Like These, which I only skimmed because I had in fact read just that text yesterday. Foster itself is 92 pages.

Foster is from the point of view of an unnamed nine-year-old girl (she’s called Cait in the movie but not here) from a dysfunctional and very chaotic household–shiftless dad, continually pregnant harried mom, several siblings and another one the way–who is unceremoniously dumped with her mother’s childless cousin and her husband for a summer, essentially for the family to have one less person to look after while her mother is dealing with having the latest baby. The story is basically about her learning to be less stressed out and to trust that she is in fact being taken care of. There is not a whole lot of plot per se; things happen, but they are all small and domestic things. The girl runs down the drive to the post box and back, and learns to help out around the house. They go shopping in town. A neighbor die and has a wake; another, very nosy and unpleasant neighbor interrogates the girl and gossips about the Kinsella’s (the couple the girl is staying with–they’re Edna and John here, though they’re Eibhlín and Séan in the film version); the girl falls in the well and catches a cold. It’s all drawn in very observant, understated details; none of these characters are expressive people.

I did find myself once again struggling with wanting to know what happens next but I think that is on me as a reader being fundamentally a big-fat-novel type of person. This is a little character-driven novella and it’s good at being that.

Continued my Irish History Month reading with one of the few remaining volumes out of the Katrine Fitzgerald Memorial Collection, i.e. the books I picked out of some big storage bins full of my aunt’s literary possessions. I have very distinct memories of sitting on my dad’s back deck picking out all the most interesting-looking Irish literature from the bins. Despite the name of this collection of books in my head, my aunt was still alive at the time; we were going through the possessions that were being offloaded as she had to downsize to move from her house into an assisted living facility, which was 2015 or earlier because I brought some of the books from this collection with me when we went to Ireland for Easter 2016, and my aunt did not pass away until the following November, ten days before my thirtieth birthday. All this is to say I tend to have some big feelings around actually reading the books I inherited from my aunt because I will feel bad if I don’t like them.

To that end, now that I had found myself assured by multiple parties that Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds was a justified classic and a very funny satire, and also because it was short enough that I figured I could read it in less than a week, I was after nearly ten years of it taking up a whole quarter-inch of precious shelf space finally ready to read it. So I did.

At Swim-Two-Birds is about, and from the point of view of, an insufferably pretentious and lazy college student who writes a novel in part to keep himself mentally occupied and also in part to avoid having to either do work at college or interact with his uncle, whose house he lives in. The students’ other main pastime for avoiding his responsibilities and family is to go out with one or another of his college buddies and drink entirely too much porter, as has been the custom of college boys since colleges were invented, or thereabouts.

The college student’s novel is about a weird old guy who lives in a hotel and is writing a novel. All the characters in his novel come to life for the purposes of being in the novel, and have to live in the hotel with him. A few of the characters are original but most are hired out from other works of literature. They are in general displeased with their assigned roles in the novel, especially the guy who is supposed to be the villain, a Mr. Furriskey. The characters discover that their author can only control the while he’s awake, so they begin drugging him so that he’s asleep most of the time, and they have plenty of time to plot their revenge, and also to sit around in the hotel telling each other stories and reciting poetry and generally being chatty old guys. At some point there is a pooka whose wife is probably not a kangaroo. There is also a good fairy whose name is Good Fairy, and he is an arsehole.

I’m not very good at reviewing modernist experimental stuff and this is definitely that. The book has three different beginnings and several layers of metafiction going on. It’s the sort of book that doesn’t use any quotation marks, which is something I tend to find too self-consciously literary, but when done well does give everything an extra layer of disorientation, and here it’s done well. The voices of the different characters writing or speaking at different times are usually pretty distinct; the shifts in style when the author or speaker or, sometimes, subject of a scene changes are very effective. There is no even remotely rational “straight man” to be the readers’ cipher; the college student seems to believe he is reasonably normal (if somewhat better than everyone else), but his prose style feels like injecting high-octane autism directly into your eyeballs. Every character appears to be under the delusion that they are perfectly normal except occasionally Mad King Sweeny. The actual sanest character is probably the pooka MacPhellimey, who is literally a devil, but takes on the role of occasionally trying to keep the other characters somewhat on track with what they are supposed to be doing.

The book is extremely funny and I am sure I do not get all the jokes just as much as I know I do not get all the literary references. It for sure contains one of the funniest portrayals of Learned Discourse as written by an idiot that I have ever seen, consisting essentially of random facts culled from a series of out-of-date, moralizing encyclopedias that the unnamed frame-story student has in his bedroom. It also contains the line “My name is the Good Fairy, said the Good Fairy. I am a good fairy” which I found inordinately funny. There is some very goofy poetry that I am sure someone has since set to music. The looping, long-winded, daft-old-man dialogue of various stripes was often funny in the way that Uncle Colm in Derry Girls is funny, where the characters are being insufferable and boring but the reader is far from bored. The book made me really want to dig into much of the older Irish poetry and folklore that O’Brien is satirizing, although it did not particularly inspire any desire to read any of the Westerns parodied that have American-West-style cow-punchers plying their trade in urban Dublin, guns bouncing.

I think this book was good for my brain because afterward I had the brain equivalent of sore hamstrings. It definitely makes me more excited about possibly reading more difficult Irish literature, like Joyce or weird ancient poetry, which tends to be stuff that I feel I ought to read more than stuff I am excited about reading. We shall see if that feeling wears off after a bit or not.