ergative's reviews
925 reviews

Natasha Pulley's writing is characterized by four things, in my mind, which have until now combined to make her an auto-buy and even an auto-pre-order for me:

1. An elegant fantasy conceit
2. Exquisite, beautiful, evocative images
3. Queer romance, expressed with a very light touch
4. An unhurried, restful narrative style

This book only displayed about one and a half of these characteristics. There is a queer romance--although it is much more explicit than usual*--and the narrative style is so engrossing that I read this entire book in a single day. But the first two characteristics are entirely absent. This is purely historical fiction, with not a hint of fantasy about it (which makes me feel a bit silly, since my SFF book group is reading it on my recommendation) and perhaps because of that, there are none of those images that made The Bedlam Stacks and The Lost Future of Pepperharrow so beautiful. I noticed that they were sparser in her most recent book but one, The Kingdoms, but that at least satisfied the other three characteristics, and did have a couple of lovely images. But this lacked even that much.

So, athough I gobbled this book down in a single day, I found myself disappointed. It was not what I was looking for in a Natasha Pulley book.

Also the final bit at the end felt a little bit forced in its attempt to acknowledge what the Soviet Union did well in comparison to Britain. I don't disagree with the claim; it just felt forced and somehow tacked on. Not justified by the narrative.

*I hasten to add that 'explicit' means 'the characters kiss on the page, rather than look at each other longingly and then appear the next morning in pyjamas'

 Well, it kept me entertained, but it sure took them a LONG time to decipher that mysterious note (I'd figured it out ages before they even though of it), and the forced romantic tension was really forced and tedious. 

Also, and this is specific to the audiobook version, the narrator had a WEIRD accent. Like, part of it was probably  a realistic representation of how an American woman who'd lived in Britain for a decade would probably sound, but then she does things like say 'valay' for valet, when SURELY someone who's lived in British high society, where all the gentlemen have valets, would know that it's not pronounced that way.

 I wanted to like this a lot--murder mystery, university setting, roaring twenties, poison--and maybe it's a bit harsh to subtract as much as I did, but I'm really fucking OVER books that try to emphasize that a villain is villainous by making him a sexual predator.  It's a lazy, tropey, irritating approach to characterization. The book would have been FINE without the harassment and rape attempt. 

Well, that was a ton of fun! I think it wasn't quite as much fun as the first--not because the execution of the conceit was weaker, but because the freshness wasn't as fresh in Book 2. The instantiation of the Internet on Jupiter was, I think, an attempt to introduce something new, but it didn't quite work, because its manifestation in human reality didn't have even the absurd tenuous explanation that the other elements of the world-building had. Although, I have to admit, creating exotic matter by teaching subatomic particles exotic dancing was very nicely done. That was exactly the correct amount of zaniness there. The commentary on society was, I think, a little less playful and a little more pointed, as you would expect when the issues start encompassing fascism, genocide, and the reintroduction of slavery into a society that had banned it. I don't think that was the wrong decision, but it also contributed to a reduction of the fun relative to the first. 

Nevertheless, the rest of the book shows all the hallmarks of McCrudden's wit and wordplay--a wonderful one-liner about nominative determinism--and the way he juggles the moving pieces of plot construction is second to none. It's like watching a slow motion replay in reverse of an explosive demolition: all the bits and fragments of shrapnel start off flying in all directions, but then zwoop back into a coherent whole by the end of the book. 

 A perfect ending to a perfect series. It's a reasonably frequent trope to have the last sentence or last line in a long sago circle back around so someone is telling the story that started it all off, but I think this book set it up in such a way that it was not just a tidy bow, but something beautiful and resonant with everything that had happened before. Reeve has mastered world-building, character, plot, and wordplay in equal measure. Everything he does is set up so that it makes sense; everything that happens is both right and hard, and I was whimpering and crying throughout the entire last chapter because everything was coming out exactly as it needed to. 

 Gailey is really leaning into their new, darker style. You know how The Echo Wife sets itself up to offer something that might be a comfortable family close-out, right at the end, and then in the last sentence twists it into something dark and horrible? This book does the opposite: Everything is dark and horrible, until the dark and gruesome ending, which somehow twists itself into something comforting and familial. Brilliantly done. It's a good thing Gailey had already won me over with The Echo Wife and Magic for Liars because this is NOT a book I would pick up if I didn't already know and trust the author, and although I now trust Gailey a little more uneasily than I did before, they're really, really good at what they do. Yikes. Well done. 

 Really powerful meditation on hate and resentment, and what happens after a conflict has been resolved--for a given value of resolution. Wonderful world-building involving weird-as-fuck eldritch horrors, too. I was almost disappointed at the end that the Little Brothers operated according to human notions of reason. 

You can read my full review on Nerds of a Feather here: http://www.nerds-feather.com/2023/04/review-unraveller-by-frances-hardinge.html

 ‘Yes, but is it good?’ This response is one of those ear-grating reactions that you tend to hear a lot when you mention a book that is notable for something related to wokery (aka the radical idea that people who are not like you are, nevertheless, also still people, and entitled to the same rights and respect you accord people who are like you). Any book can be notable for any characteristic that is itself neutral with respect to quality of execution: This book is a retelling of Vanity Fair but in a modern day tabloid newspaper office! This book reimagines the life of Hilary Clinton if she hadn’t married Bill Clinton! This book explores what the universe would be like if the speed of light were not constant and a planet of shape-shifting aliens needed to develop space travel very fast. All of these books have hooks or conceits that can be well or poorly executed, but you don’t tend to hear people follow up with ‘Yes, but is it any good?’ It’s taken for granted that these books are as likely to be good as any other book that is recommended for its plot or conceit or foundational premise.

‘Woke’ books are not granted this assumption. When the plot or conceit or foundational premise engages with race or identity in some way that irritates dominant groups who dislike the appearance of non-dominant groups in their previously reserved sandbox of prestige, that’s when people start asking, ‘Yes, but is it good?’ A book about a trans superhero? Well, that’s clearly only worth noting because it engages with trans issues, so it’s a tokenism book, not a real book, so I have to ask: is it any good? A book written by a Black woman, 120 years ago, 60 years before Wakanda first appeared in the pages of Marvel Comics, and it’s about a hidden country in Africa, peopled by Black people who possess wealth and learning and astonishing technology? YeS, bUt iS iT aNY goOd? The very premise of the question is rooted in bigotry.

And yet! And yet and yet and yet. A stopped clock is right twice a day (analogue, at least; a digital clock flashing 88:88 is never correct). A book that is as likely to be good as any other book is also as likely to be bad as any other book. And in the case of Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood, a book featuring a hidden country in Africa, peopled by Black people who possess wealth and learning and astonishing technology, it is very, very bad. It is just a bad book. It is not bad because of any of the quite awesome Wakanda-ish bits (indeed, those are the best bits it has to offer). It is not bad because its treatment of race and politics and identity is didactic or overblown. Rather, it is bad independently of those features. It is bad in the same way that any other ‘non-woke’ book could be bad. The plot makes very little sense, and indulges in absurdly melodramatic flourishes. The treatment of women is appallingly misogynistic. (yes! Even though it is written by a woman!) Hell, even the treatment of race is problematic. (yes! Even though it is written by a Black woman!)

The plot follows the actions of one Reuel Briggs, a medical student in Boston who is very broody about—well, it’s not really clear about what. Just vibes, I guess. He’s big into mysticism, too—never entirely clear how he got into it or why—but it does lead him to develop a tendency to see floating lady ghosts all over the place. The ghost ladies eventually become plot-relevant, in a way, but to be honest the whole mysticism ghost-vision stuff never really ties in with the rest of the events in any satisfying or thought-out way. In truth, it just feels more like that late-19th/early 20th century obsession with mediums and seances making its way into the book. Like glitter on crafting day, mysticism has a tendency to show up everywhere in books of that era. The Dorothy Sayerses of the literary world incorporated it with healthy skepticism (see Strong Poison), but unfortunately it seems that Pauline Hopkins took it seriously.

Reuel’s friend Aubrey shows up and takes him to a musical concert, which features a troupe of recently freed Black slaves who are singing the songs of their people to the privileged white folks up north, bringing home to them in a more personal and immediate way how horrifying slavery was, and the extent of the evil that was done to them. This is all done very powerfully:

Melodramatic, sure, but not in a bad way. I was fully on board here.

The singer in the above excerpt is one Dianthe Lusk, who happens to have the face of one of Reuel’s floaty vision ladies. Later, in one of his visions, she tells him that he’ll be able to help her in some way. Then, the next day, Dianthe Lusk shows up at Reuel’s hospital, dead, from a train accident. Except, not dead! Because, as Reuel explains, ‘As I diagnose this case, it is one of suspended animation. This woman has long and persistently subjected to mesmeric influences, and the nervous shock induced by the excitement of the accident has thrown her into a cataleptic sleep.’

In vain do his fellow doctors make the quite reasonable point that rigor mortis has set in and she’s most definitely dead. No no, it’s mesmeric catalepsis, Reuel insists, and because he is the main character, he is correct, and he manages to revive Dianthe from her rigorously mortised sleep. Except when she awakens she has lost her memory.

So far, so goofy. More turn-of-the-20th century melodrama, yes? Except, in another melodramatic twist that has aged VERY POORLY, Reuel decides not to tell Dianthe anything about what he knows of her identity and not to look for any of her friends or family (Aubrey does a bit of research, but very quietly, so that doesn’t absolve Reuel for neglecting it.) Instead, he installs her in the household of Aubrey’s fiancée, who looks after her as an act of charity.

But then he falls in love with her and asks her to marry him. His patient! His patient who has no memory or sense of identity, his patient who is entirely dependent on him for survival. He asks her to marry him! And here’s her reaction:

But she agrees to marry him, of course, because, remember, she is dependent on him. She does not have the freedom to say no, regardless of what she feels for him.

Now, at this moment you might be saying, ‘But, Ergative, isn’t the book engaging with this? Isn’t it making it clear that she has no power to say no, even though she doesn’t love him?’ And, at the time, I thought so too. I was enraged, but I was enraged at Reuel, not at the author. Because I thought the author was doing a Discourse about power imbalances in romantic relations, and how women aren’t as free to say no as they should be. But then I got to lines like this, where Dianthe tells Reuel that she’s beginning to get fleeting glimpses of her previous life:

At first glance, this looks like a bit of complication in Reuel: a good doctor, the hero of the book, and yet subject to unworthy impulses, such as the desire to ensure that his wife remains a compliant amnesiac. And yet, that’s not what Hopkins is doing here. First, remember that Dianthe is a Black woman, first introduced as a member of the traveling troupe of freed slaves. But she is very pale-skinned, so pale in fact as to be white-passing. This is why she’s welcome in her new home: everyone except Reuel and Aubrey think she’s white. The danger about her memory returning, according to Hopkins, is not that it would give her the full knowledge of her self and her history and her wants and desires, and maybe lead her to think twice about this marriage. No, the danger of her memory returning is that it will reveal to her that she is not a white woman, but in fact a Black woman passing as white among a white family.

This is what Reuel is so worried about: ‘What if memory suddenly returns?’ he frets at one point. ‘Is it safe to risk the unpleasantness of a public reawakening of her sleeping faculties?’ Aubrey gives him some line of bullshit about deception being necessary for the sake of science, and Reuel returns, ‘Is deception justifiable for any reason? Somehow it haunts me that trouble may come from this. I wish we had told the exact truth about her identity’ (pg 45).

See? It’s about race. It’s only about race. Hopkins is so caught up with the question of race and passing—which, to be fair, is a very important conversation to have—that she ignores the fact that her hero is trying to have sex with a woman under his care, who lacks sufficient information to make an informed choice about whether she wants to consent to have sex with him.

‘But, Ergative,’ you might say, ‘What about intersectionality? Can’t Hopkins be talking about race and passing and also make a point about power relations and gender?’

And, I mean, she can, but she isn’t. Because remember that bit where Dianthe definitely doesn’t love Reuel romantically? You know why that is? It’s not about women being forced into marriages because they lack the power to say no.

It’s because she’s his sister.

(Also Aubrey’s his brother, and a villain, but that’s not the point here.)

So, even though Reuel and Dianthe get married, they don’t have a chance to consummate the marriage before Reuel has to go off to Africa for Reasons, which are entirely contrived to ensure that the siblings don’t accidentally fuck. Phew! But also, that‘s why Dianthe doesn’t love Reuel. At least, not like that. So in the end, Hopkins isn’t actually making any type of goddamn point about power imbalances in marriage when she has Reuel conceive this passion for his medically fragile patient. Rather, she’s just taking care to make it clear that Dianthe hasn’t got any yucky incestuous feelings for her brother. As far as Hopkins is concerned, the problem with the whole marriage thing isn’t anything to do with medical ethics and informed consent; it’s because Reuel and Dianthe are secretly Luke and Leia. If Dianthe hadn’t been Reuel’s sister, the whole marriage would have been A-okay.

Ew.

Moving on, now, let’s follow Reuel to Africa, where he’s travelling with a group of English archaeologists as a medic. With him comes Charlie, a white man who serves as the white perspective on the whole adventure. Upon learning of the grandeur of ancient Babylonia, and the works of Nimrod the Ethiopian, Charlies responds, ‘Great Scott! You don’t mean to tell me that all this was done by niggers!‘ (pg 112) And here, as with the introduction of the traveling singers, Hopkins does some very good things with race. See, the chief archaeologist is English, and so his outlook is not so poisoned by the history of slavery as Charlie’s is. For this reason, he has no difficulty pursuing the evidence that leads him to conclude that Black Africans (not the Egyptians, who are sort of Black-lite in the eyes of the general European/American establishment, but in fact Ethiopians) have a foundational claim on civilization and architecture and culture and history. And so, through the legitimacy and prestige that comes from the mouth of a white English professor, Hopkins is able to present her point, that African history is actually not just the traces of a bunch of jungle savages*, but its own mighty civilization, built by cultured, educated, skilled people.

*Or maybe desert savages. There’s a lot of wonky ecosystems here. Lions and leopards roam the Sahara freely, which is not something I ever saw on David Attenborough.

Later, when the expedition eventually meets the secret descendants of these mighty ancestors, hiding in Wakanda the city of Telassar, they challenge Charlie about American racism. ‘There are people who count it a disgrace to bear my color; is it not so?’ asks Ai, a government official. And Charlie thinks, ‘Great Scott Is it possible that the ubiquitous race question has got ahead of the expedition! By mighty, it’s time something was done to stoop this business.’ Yes, the people of Telassar are too woke for Charlie! But fortunately, he has just the response for them: ‘My venerable and esteemed friend, you could get there all right with your complexion in my country. We would simply label you Arab, Turk, Malay, or Filipino, and in that costume you’d slide along all right; not the slightest trouble when you showed your ticket at the door’ (pg 174).

So here again, we have this question of passing: how Black is too Black? Dianthe is not too Black. Ai is not too Black. But Jim Titus, a former slave traveling with them as a servant, has dark skin and crisp hair, and he is too Black to get along all right in America.

And here we get to the bit of this book’s treatment of race that bothers me profoundly. See, for all that this book is about how Black people are mighty and powerful too, there seems to be an awful lot of colorism. Dianthe is ethereal and exquisite and beautiful, and she’s so pale as to be white-passing. Reuel, too, the hero of our book (and also the lost king of Telassar, because melodrama) is, like his sister, so pale as to be white-passing. Ai, a powerful government official in Telassar, but still below the white-passing Reuel in rank, is pale enough to be ‘Arab, Turk, Malay, or Filipino’. And Jim Titus? Well, he’s a former slave who still likes to serve his ‘massa’, and part of that service involves murder. Then, when he and Charlie run afoul of some snakes, Charlie lives and Jim dies.

It’s not a great look, Hopkins! Colorism is a thing!

There are other, various plot-related problems. Remember how Reuel is the lost king of Telassar? How did that come about? What happened to break the line of kings? It can’t be colonialism and slavery, because Telassar is hidden from all white knowledge, so instead we just get some hand-wavey something something pride and sin and divine punishment something something. But that whole divine punishment is, itself, very odd, because on pg 143 we get this, as Ai explains why Reuel must be the king, and also his name is Ergamenes, because apparently the name his mother gave him doesn’t count.

So far, so Christian. Very Christian. Much Jesus. So why, then, on pg 148, do we have Ai explaining the religion of Telassar, which leads Reuel to ask,

Ai, dude, buddy, you just explained your FOUNDATIONAL GOVENRMENT PROPHECY five pages ago, and it was very Jesusy. Do you not remember how Jesusy it was? Do you not recall that the order of events was first accept Jesus, and only then do you get the new birth of Ergamenes? Have you been struck by a touch of Dianthe’s amnesia? Do memory problems run as a genetic inheritance through the people of Telassar?

I’m skipping over a lot. There are disappearing plot threads; there’s casual misogyny that I haven’t mentioned here; there’s more colorism; there’s more really, really dumb melodrama involving Aubrey. There’s more ghosts and mysticism.

Yes, but is it good?

No. No, it is not good. But fuck you for asking. 

 This book did an excellent job at what it intended to do. I think it crystallized a lot of the problems with practices and uses of statistical modeling and interpretation that I've thought about quite a bit--especially through the covid years--but not quite been able to put into words. Unfortunately, I doubt that the people who most need to read this book--that is, the people who build the models and see themselves as maximally rational makers of science, or the policy makers who (ostensibly) use those models to inform their decisions or (more usually) pick and choose the models that support their pre-determined decisions in the name of 'following the science'--are actually going to read it and benefit from it through changing their thinking. 

More likely it's going to be read by people who already mostly agree with it, and who will like it and nod and say, 'Ah yes, that's what I've always felt but couldn't quite articulate.' (Which, in a way, is almost like politicians choosing the models to 'support' their decisions by finding which models give them the results they like.)

I could be wrong, of course. I hope I am. But I doubt it. 

 I zoomed through this in a day. I really enjoyed The Way of All Flesh so naturally I was thrilled to pick this up for £2 in a second hand shop. Very moody, good mystery, terrific details about historical medicine and MURDER and POISON. Full of gushy ways to die. Will make a point of buying and reading Book 3 new, so the author (husband and wife pair, in fact) get the royalties and write more in the series.