Author Archives: Josh Melican

August 4, 2013

‘The Rook’ Review

By Josh Melican

(Continuing my re-posting of reviews I have written and previously published elsewhere. Here is my review from last year on Daniel O’Malley’s debut novel)

In the interests of full disclosure I received a free copy of ‘The Rook’ in a greeting bag at Genrecon Australia last year. Every attendee received a book, randomly, from a selection of books by panellists at the con. I got lucky.

This is modern Urban Fantasy with a healthy sprinkling of absurdist humour.

O’Malley gives us a protagonist as unaware of her world as we readers are, having woken up in a park, surrounded by gloved corpses, with no memory, and a letter in her pocket.

“Dear you,

The body you are wearing used to be mine…” And so we begin.

The technique here is to have a narrative in which a series of letters from Myfanwy Thomas provide back-story and exposition, while we follow our amnesiac heroine (and newly made Myfanwy Thomas)as she discovers the strange world into which she has awoken.

And what a strange world it is: a

  •  secret government agency (The Checquey) with super-powered agents combat m

anifestations of the weird, the malevolent and the unusual to keep safe an unwitting British public. The hierarchy of The Checquey borrows heavily from the chessboard, and in this hierarchy Thomas is a Rook. She also discovers that the previous Rook Thomas has been betrayed, by a colleague, and so can trust no one.

O’Malley does a great job of balancing the different strands of the story he tells: The becoming of the new Rook Thomas, the mystery of the betrayer, the conflict with The Checquey’s old enemy. He is also adept at introducing fresh concepts (a multi-bodied consciousness, a restless contortionist, crazed Belgian flesh-sculptors), while giving new life to hoary clichés (A vampire, an amnesiac, a dragon), and keeping everything from taking itself to seriously (with lashings of goo, prognosticating ducks and unintelligible Japanese bodyguards in tartan).

It was certainly a page-turner. Despite it not being a great time for me to be reading at the moment the book kept drawing me back, and I became invested in the characters, particularly the two Myfanwies Thomas, who are well fleshed out and nuanced.

Recommended Reading

(Spoilery critical detail below. Proceed with caution…)

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There was a lot to take in early in the novel, and at times this necessitated info-dumps.  Particularly in the introduction of so many characters so rapidly, it was hard to distinguish the primaries from the secondaries and tertiaries, and so the reader is left trying to store a series of names, connection, descriptions, super-powers, etc… without any real organic introductions. Of course the letters and folder explain all this but…

The technique of having the letters was effective early, when they were short interludes – a page or so at most – but as the letters got longer (whole chapters) I felt they dragged down the pacing of the main narrative. This was especially true in the third act as the new Thomas was coming fully into her power and meeting high stakes, and the shift of gear to the old Thomas’ reminiscences was jarring. I also found at times the coincidence of the letters providing just the salient information at just the right moment was, while necessary, a strain on credulity. I can accept characters who can turn their skin to steel, or who can emit tear gas from their skin, but I struggled to understand why the new Thomas wouldn’t read everything in detail as soon as she could, rather than apparently choosing the letters fortuitously over the course of weeks. I do understand the need for it to be so, but it is perhaps a weakness of the structure that it was.

I really liked the ending, the slight miscalculation of time-frame destroys so many well-laid plans, and if it does all come together a little too neatly (centuries of enmity were put aside a little too quickly, a little too easily) I was prepared to accept it because I like Rook Thomas and was hoping she would succeed.

I was initially a bit sceptical of how the humour would be used, but O’Malley handled it quite well I thought: absurd without being stupid, off-beat without resorting to desperate wackiness.  The fate of the duck was a particular highpoint (though I felt that that chapter should have come earlier, being that it was a long(ish) letter and I just wanted to get back to the main narrative where the new Thomas was imperilled).

All said I enjoyed the book and it drew me in, I came to care about the main character and wanted to keep reading to see her succeed. What better measure of success for an author than to affect a reader so?

I look forward to the rumoured sequel gestating away in O’Malley’s mind. He sure does have some interesting places to go.

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July 24, 2013

The City & The City Review

By Josh Melican

I’ve decided to shift some reviews I wrote on another blog and have them up here as well. The first of those is of Miéville’s “The City & The City”, which I read last April. More to come.
(Minor warning on the potential for spoilers, but I think I’ve avoided any obvious ones).

China Miéville has always been an author with an ambiguous relationship to genre. He is often to be found in the Fantasy sections of the bookstore (where they still have bookstores), but this isn’t an exact fit. (His most famous ‘Fantasy’ novel – “Perdido St Station” – has a scientist as its protagonist.) He is also an author far more comfortable with urban environments than the bucolic pastoralism of more traditional Epic Fantasy (in the Tolkein tradition). The first question one may ask of “The City & The City” is then which genre it belongs to. It’s an answer I’m not sure I can give.

The title refers to Beszal and Ul Qoma, cities which, for reasons never fully explored or explained, share the same physical space. These two separate political, judicial and social entities overlap and intersect each other, the citizenry of each share physical spaces, streets, parks, weather, even traffic, but they are distinct. They have different laws, authorities, governments, bureaucracies, airports… To call a house physically next door but existentially in the other city would require international calling codes. To pass from one to the other requires a passport and visa. Through an ingrained psychological process of ‘unseeing’ they have learnt to disregard each other and the city they should not be in. This ‘unseeing’ is enforced by the mysterious power of ‘Breach’, but presents obvious difficulties for tourists and the foreign academics coming to study the unique archaeology of the area.  In this element you might suggest that “The City & The City” is a Fantasy, but the label doesn’t really fit. Both Beszal and Ul Qoma are very definitely in our world, even if it is an alternative version. They are located somewhere in Eastern Europe, or perhaps the Balkans, and interact with neighbours as well as with Canada and the US. While the setting feels fantastical there’re no definite indications that the separation between Beszal and Ul Qoma is anything other than a human social construct. Some technologies exist which seem difficult to understand, but whether this is Science-Fiction or Futurism is again ambiguous.

Being a China Miéville novel there is inevitably a political aspect to the sociology of these cities. Both Beszal and Ul Qoma have Nationalists who are prepared to fight to keep their city separate from its spatial twin. Likewise there are Unificationists fermenting a rebellion that will see Besz and Ul Qoma made one. Economically, and in terms of foreign policy, the two cities are diverging and the influence of extra-national forces is felt by both populations. Readers of Political Thrillers will be familiar with the subplots of multi-national corporations and foreign ambassadors. Miéville is explicit in denying that this is a simple allegory of any existing or historical city (Borlú specifically states that this is not like Jerusalem or Berlin), nor is this an easy dichotomy of Capitalism/Communism or East/West. More than political allegory the division between the distinct citizens is a metaphor for almost any major city in the modern world, where our physical space is distinct from our social space, and where we may live next to the same person for decades without having a conversation, but have a close relationship with someone who lives suburbs away. In this way Miéville’s metaphor seems to be for the manner of modern urban socialisation, though he actively discourages any limited reading of meaning in the text.

At its heart though “The City & The City” is a detective story in a highly unusual setting. The narrative follows the investigation of Inspector Borlú of the Beszian Extreme Crime Squad. A body has been found dumped: a Jane Doe. Quickly Borlú’s investigation begins to hint at a larger conspiracy. Mysterious and anonymous tip-offs are phoned in, slim leads are followed, forensic tests are done on the body. In many ways the narrative has all the features of Crime Fiction, perhaps with a Noir element. Borlú runs in to the jurisdictional problems which are a familiar trope of this genre, but with significantly different challenges. His investigation uncovers more possible victims, and perhaps evidence that would call in the absolute powers of Breach. Borlú’s own understanding of his world, his city, Ul Qoma and the unique relationship they share is challenged, and the novel invites you to keep turning pages as the narrative twists and reverses and opens up to an extraordinary denouement.

Miéville channels the earlier Detective SciFi of Philip K Dick, the political fear of George Orwell, the hard-boiled detective of Raymond Chandler, and the Noir imagery of “The Third Man”. Although the publishers (and The Times) make a comparison to Kafka this is not absurdism. The concept of Beszal and Ul Qoma seem surreal, but it is really an exaggeration: a hyperbole of our border jurisdictions and the real examples we can find in places such as Stanstead, Coolangatta, or  Baarle-Hertog.

Miéville is an obviously intelligent writer, and though his vocabulary here is far more accessible than in some of his other work, his ideas and imagination are evidence of this great intelligence. In lesser hands the conceit of this setting would be fragile, or slippery, of overwhelming. In “The City & The City” it is none of these things. Miéville handles the subject matter with confident assurance and never loses control of the beast he has created. The narrative itself is weaker and at times takes a second place to the setting, and the characters, while well drawn, are simplistic.

His greatest ability though is to present us with the utterly implausible and make us believe it. He brings us along with him as we tour the streets of the preposterous cities, and we go along without objection, accepting and enjoying the world as he gives it to us.

Highly Recommended

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June 6, 2013

Weddings, Beheadings and narrative risk

By Josh Melican

(Warning that the following post contains spoilers for the Game of Thrones TV series up to episode 9 of Season 3, and for the Song of Ice and Fire novels up to the equivalent events)

The HBO, Benioff/Weiss, adaptation of George Martin’s books reached the pivotal moment known to readers of the series as The Red Wedding… and the internet went into meltdown.

In my house I approached the ‘Rains of Castermere’ episode with anticipation, which unfortunately gave my wife (a viewer who has not read the books) the misapprehension that this would be a joyful episode. That only compounded her reaction.

“How could you have been so excited?” she asked. “How could I have wanted so much to watch that episode, to have been looking forward to that wedding?”

They are legitimate, and difficult questions.

Most tellingly she asked why I didn’t warn her. But of course I couldn’t… could I? That would have been spoiling, and in truth part of what I was looking forward to was seeing her experience the Red Wedding for the first time. I wanted to see her reaction, unspoiled, to the twist. I wanted to re-live, vicariously, that moment of shock that I experienced as a reader several years ago.

In attempting to explain to her why I approached the episode as I did it occurred to me that, as a writer, I wanted to see how an unsuspecting audience reacted. I wanted to see just how George Martin’s narrative hand-grenade would go off in this adaptation. I wanted to watch as the writers brought to a close the stories they had set up, cut short the character development they had so invested in. I wanted to see  how they used Robb’s proposed march on Casterley Rock itself as the hide, from behind which they would fire the shots. Three quarters of the way through the episode, and knowing what was to come, I doubted anyone could have made the prediction of what would follow. That, of course, is its strength. That the audience is aware that some betrayal is possible, even that Frey might do something untoward, but that the totality of that betrayal was so unexpected.

The immediately available comparison is of course to the death of Ned in the first book (and season 1). I could not parse that moment in my first reading. All my knowledge of narrative, all my familiarity with genre, was attuned to imagining how Ned may be spared that fate, even how he might return even after that fate was enacted upon him. That beheading was a bold stroke (pun intended – sorry) and one which set Martin’s writing apart from his contemporaries long before people had started to throw ‘grimdark‘ around as either perjorative or descriptor. The Red Wedding re-establishes the brutal fact of Westerosi life – that anyone can die. Ned, Hand to the King, Warden of the North, betrayed and beheaded. His son Robb, King in the North, betrayed and beheaded. Who then is safe?

Other comparisons present themselves, most notably Janet Leigh’s demise in Psycho. Hitchcock murders the top-billed actress, a shining star of her generation of Hollywood, the protagonist of the narrative until the point of her fateful shower. Indeed, with her, he ends that narrative entirely, and shifts to the story of a damaged boy and his ‘mother’. These are not so much twists in a narrative, as they are narrative derailments. The story is not changed by these events, stories are ended, and new stories begun.

Compare this with other ‘shock’ deaths – Samuel L Jackson in that shark movie Deep Blue Sea, Marvin in Pulp Fiction, Sonny in Godfather. As much as these were unexpected twists, they didn’t alter the very fabric of the narrative in the way Martin has twice done. These deaths significantly alter the stories being told, they are essential plot events and disruptive, but Deep Blue Sea continues to be a story about people trying to avoid a killer shark (or something), Pulp Fiction remains a story about Jules and Vic, Godfather remains the tale of Don Corelone.
But when Marion Crane dies, the story of a woman embezzling from her boss dies with her. When Ned dies the story of an honest man investigating a mystery dies too. The new story that begins is of a civil war in which there are several claimants to the throne: ‘The War of the Five Kings’. Now, largely due to the Red Wedding, this story has ended, and a new one will begin which is not about rivals who all claim to be kings. That war is finished, the Starks have lost, and without them the result is an inevitability… or so it would seem.

The risk in this narrative technique is that you lose your audience. Martin has suggested that he had that response from some readers. My sister has spoken of throwing the book across the room, and not picking it up for a week. Twitter and Tumblr has shown that the risk is very real, perhaps more so, from a TV audience. But the reward for taking the risk is that the reader can never be certain, the threats the author levels at his characters are very real, and thus the narrative tension in the text remains effective.
Next time Joffrey raises his bow at Sansa… she really could die.
Next time Arya threatens the Hound… she might really go through with it.
Next time Tyrion goes into battle… he may end up with worse than a scar.
Is Varys safe? Is Cersei? Jon? Sam? Bran? Could even Dany be killed? If the King of the North and all his plans can be bled out on the Frey’s floor, we cannot assume anything.

And that is a great place for a writer to have his audience.

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May 7, 2013

Craft v Platform

By Josh Melican

There is a tension in some, it would appear, between two apparently opposing forces: the practice of one’s craft, and the building of one’s platform.

I’ve discussed this before, but really, I have never thought of this – what I’m doing here – as ‘platform’. The concept that blogging, maintaining a site, setting up a page, being active on twitter, attending cons… that all of that could be merely some effort to ensnare potential readers, that always struck me as slightly nefarious. Dishonest at worst, a mistake of priorities at best.

I always figured on doing all those things because I like doing them. I like here tapping away and throwing my words out into the churning void of bandwidth and opinion that is the internet. I liked going to Genrecon and meeting a community of people who shared my passions, or gave me new insights into passions related but different, or even new insights into my own. I like interacting with people on Twitter, on Facebook, wherever else it might be. So I hadn’t really felt the tension between these things and the craft of writing, other than the obvious mismanagement of time that could occur.

But Jane Friedman’s post on Writer Unboxed got me thinking about this tension anew last month, and as a result I went away from the website here, I left neglected my Facebook Page, I went away from Twitter… ok. That last one’s not true. Twitter is a difficult thing to shake. I did though take a more passive role on twitter, allowing those I follow to guide me to links and such, but not tweeting (much).

What then has been gained from this month of social media ‘sabbatical’? What gained from a month devoted to craft rather than the building of ‘profile’?

  • I finished writing my draft of Old Man Madigan. It comes in at 10,000 words and I’m wondering now whether I submit it to a market which may be prepared to serialise it, or whether I go in hard with the editing shears and cut.
  • I started expanding some ideas for other short stories, tentatively entitled: Pareidolia, Watchers, Melange. They run a gamut of weird urban/psychological, scif-fi futurism, alt world Fantasy.
  • I wrote a draft of ‘The Witch Way’, a Fantasy short story  at 5,000 words and in need of an edit.
  • I completed a draft of ‘Leaving the Farm’ which had been kicking around in my head and on my computer for years, never really having much structure or purpose. It’s 2150 words and not really genre fiction at all to be honest, straight up Lit Fic with a rural bent.
  • I did a heck of a lot of reading: Chuck Wendig’s Bad Blood, Shotgun Gravy, Bait Dog, Blackbirds, and Mockingbird; Joe Abercrombie’s Red Country; Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns (and currently reading King). Reviews to come.
  • And I sent out a query email for Exile, in the hope that an agent may be interested.

An agent was, and requested chapters, and so I’ve sent them now. I’m cautious and nervous and excited and apprehensive and uncertain and hopeful and worried and blasé… all at once or vacillating between the states. In one sense it’s not a step I haven’t reached (and stumbled upon) before, but I feel it’s progress. The last time an agent requested chapters it was on the basis of a face-to-face meeting, not so in this case. The agent currently considering my submission asked to see more based solely on the few paragraphs into which I distilled my novel. So that’s a good thing, to know that the query email worked, to know that I can pique the interest.

All in all a productive month, especially as I look back on it now. So what’s in store for this month? I hope to edit those two stories that are complete drafts, and to send them out. I have a list of markets to which I can submit (thanks Peter M Ball and  Alan Baxter) and I intend to put that list to use… and of course to check my emails obsessively, in the hope of good news.

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April 2, 2013

Grimdark

By Josh Melican

So I’ve basically played the role of a vaguely interested observer in all this, but something Joe Abercrombie tweeted today – a piece by Daniel Abraham in Clarkesworld – has finally motivated to reach into my proverbial pockets and draw out two-cents, which I now humbly submit to the debate.

As Abraham notes the moniker “Grimdark”  is taken from Warhammer 40,000 (affectionately known as 40k). I played the game as a young fella. I had my armies (Eldar predominantly, but I did put a bit of an Orc Horde together and was compiling some Imperial Guard when I gave it all away. The miniatures  including some incredibly carefully and poorly painted Banshees and Scorpions, were sadly lost in a house-fire) and would spend long afternoons plotting the fractional movements required for victory or poring over a codex seeking some tactical advantage. I didn’t get too much into the surrounding mythology of the 40k universe, but it grew exponentially whilst I played and subsequently. I am aware now that entire novel series are devoted to the expanded universe, in much the same way you’ll find with Star Wars and Dragonlance and such.

I am familiar with the line from which “Grimdark” apparently comes: In the grim darkness of the future there is only war.

Two of my favourite modern Fantasy authors (Abercrombie and Richard K Morgan) have been labelled as writing Grimdark, as well as Mark Lawrence,  an author highly recommended to me and near the top of my to-read list (after I finally finish Red Country, which I am powering through at amazing pace). Judging by Abercrombie’s thoughtful response, and Richard Morgan’s, neither of them are thrilled at the assignation (though Joe seems to have embraced it with his twitter handle), but more on that latter.

Mark Lawrence’s response basically summed up my own, but seeing as we’ve made it this far, let’s unpack it a bit.

Genre is a fraught concept. At its best it’s a useful framework for understanding tropes and narrative archetypes, at its worst it’s a cage, a ghetto, a straight-jacket. Mieville’s reference to Tolkein as the “Big Oedipal Daddy” of Fantasy is perhaps a starting point in identifying how the Fantasy genre came to be seen both from within, and from without. Fantasy was escapism for nerds. It was largely derivative to its progenitor (and “Author of the Century” no less) and it operated within variations of his British agrarian idyll being threatened by malevolent forces.

Arguably this continued until recently, arguably very recently, arguably it continues still. Many would point (as Abraham does) to Thomas Covenant, and fair enough. Others would point to George RR Martin, whose Game of Thrones was published in 1996 and featured many of the traits now assigned to Grimdark: the amorality, the incest, the rape (so much rape, so casually put to the page), the murders, the attempted (and successful) infanticides, regicide, ultimately (spoiler alert of sorts) the death of the apparent protagonist before the end of the first book.

But Grimdark seems a more modern label than either of these. Perhaps it is the HBO effect and GRRM’s ever-growing fanbase, but even that is older than Grimdark, being in place for two years at least. And so the finger is pointed at Abercrombie (whose First Law books were published in 06,07 and 08), Mark Lawrence (Broken Empire 2011, 2012…), and Richard K Morgan (A Land Fit For Heroes 08, 10…).

Morgan is particularly interesting, because it’s his Fantasy books that see him labelled as Grimdark, but his previous series (published between 2002 and 2005 and focussed on Takeshi Kovacs) wears a label of sci-fi/noir. As Morgan himself points out it is the elements of Noir that he brings to Fantasy which are most likely what is used to label his work Grimdark. The Kovacs novels have been credited with reviving Cyberpunk (the genre spawned, or at least identified, by William Gibson‘s Neuromancer) by grafting “the Gibsonian subgenre” back onto pulp fiction, and I think particularly in this Noir Pulp. It’s a link Abraham makes as well in his Clarkesworld piece, though by Abraham’s distinction I personally see Kovacs as more Hard-boiled than Noir. Kovacs does make moral decisions that go against his self-interest, the difference perhaps is that Morgan makes his protagonist pay the cost of those decisions. Kovacs gets no free pass for having done, or having tried to do, the “right thing”.

Likewise with Abercrombie’s flawed “heroes”.  Logen Ninefingers has a past he wants to escape, but can’t. In much the same way as Morgan’s protagonist Ringil Eskiath (who shares a name with a Tolkeinian sword), Ninefingers isn’t given the freedom to just put aside the consequences of his past acts. He wants to be a better person, but it’s not going to be easy to change, and will be harder still to convince others of the change. Shivers suffers even more-so. The change in the Northman is pronounced, from when we first meet him during the final stages of the First Law, through his Styrian experience and his final, decisive, blow in The Heroes. It is not a change for the better. And yet it is a change we, as readers, can understand, perhaps even sympathise with. Is it enough to mean well, even if your actions bring ill consequences? Can we redeem our wrongs by good acts? Would I not too struggle to maintain the finer parts of myself if I had suffered as he suffered? I think these are essential questions for readers of this sub-genre, whatever we decide it should be called. I think these are essential questions for readers of all literature. Especially that last one.

Is it not this question that we ask ourself as Casablanca ends? Would I send the woman I love away, on a plane with another man? Would I risk something of myself for others, even if there was little hope of personal gain and a genuine risk of personal suffering?
When Harry Lime, atop the ferris-wheel in The Third Man, asks how much money it would be worth for one of those specks to simply stop moving, are we not being asked how much we value human life, being challenged to explain that value, or at least to respond in some way to a character who values it little at all?

Certainly in gritty stories, in amoral characters – or just overly pragmatic ones – we are challenged. I enjoy as a reader that I am. I enjoy as a writer exploring those questions and developing ways in which I can use characters to provide different perspectives on these questions and others like them.

The problem then with Grimdark is that it is used so often pejoratively, and often by those who are seeking to define what they dislike about a certain type of story. Abraham sub-titles his piece “Literatures of Despair” – a phrase he explains, but which I don’t accept. Morgan’s response dialogue is telling. The complaints (of the straw man) become ones of taste and of subjectivity. Some blood, but not too much. Some danger posed to the protagonist, but don’t kill him. Some hint of the enemy being evil, but no rapes or torture. A little military-based murder is ok, but no gore please.

I think allowing anyone – even a readership – to define a genre in such a way, to set up boundaries and borders in which writers should (or must operate), is a stultifying influence. Even more so if those arbitrary borders are then policed by self-appointed guardians, wielding indignation and harking back to a supposed Glorious Age.

If Grimdark is Noir come to the Fantasy worlds then it is no new thing. Indeed it’s taken a generation or two to move from the mainstream into Fantasy. In 1991 Silence of the Lambs swept the Oscars:  Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Picture. The cinema-going audience were ready for a story in which the secondary character, an advisor to the FBI (and thus in some way on the side of the ‘good guys’ even if reluctantly) was a cannibal serial-killer. Lector’s escape was celebrated, anticipated not as a defeat of the ‘good’ but as a victory for a character with whom the audience had become fascinated.

On television we watch Dexter, the serial-killer with a ‘Dark Passenger’ and a mission, and hope he doesn’t get caught. We admire Omar Little, a man we have witnessed murder and steal. We hope that Walter White can keep cooking and distributing crystal-meth, because doing so doesn’t make him a bad guy… not exactly… kind of… I don’t know. And that’s the point. These characters are fascinating and exciting and wonderful precisely because I can’t answer that question.

Is it any wonder the audience of modern Fantasy is ready for similar characters? Is it not a good thing that I started questioning why I should still be barracking for Monza to get her revenge, that I should question whether the world wouldn’t be better off if the ‘bad guy’ had’ve just killed her off in chapter one? I want characters who are flawed, who make mistakes, who do things I would never do, who suffer in ways I hope never to suffer. If it serves the story, put those guys through the wringer. Carve them up, piece-by-piece, and let’s examine what’s left at the core of them.

All of that’s fine. All of that means that I – now only two chapters into Red Country – honestly don’t know if I want Shy South to catch up to the bandits who took her brothers or not… and surely that uncertainty, that hesitancy, surely that’s a powerful narrative force.

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