wot i red on my hols by alan robson (italicus dominus)

Once You Know The Truth You Will Discover That You Don’t Know The Truth

Until the recent scandal over the 2023 Hugo Awards became a matter of very public discussion I had never heard of R. F. Kuang and her novel Babel. But once the scandal erupted, it became necessary for me to read the book, if only to see what all the fuss was about. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that I’m not alone in that sentiment – history has proved time and time again that the more scandal and gossip a book attracts, the more people will line up to read it. I’m sure Ms. Kuang is laughing all the way to the bank. And good on her for that! I wish her well.

The 2023 world SF convention (where the Hugo awards were voted on) was held in Chengdu, in China. By all accounts it was a well run convention and a good time was had by all. But after the convention was over and the awards were scrutinised more closely, it became clear that something was not quite right. The (non-Chinese) organisers of the awards had declared that Babel was not eligible for a Hugo and they withdrew it from consideration. When questioned about their decision, they refused to give any concrete reasons for withdrawing the book. Closer investigation suggested that the awards organisers were so terrified of upsetting the Chinese government that anything that even mentioned China (no matter how favourably or how briefly) was removed from the ballot. Just in case.

Such ignorant and uninformed political paranoia is, of course, stupid, unethical and completely beyond the pale. Those people responsible for the débâcle have all been forced to resign from their various administrative positions and good riddance to them. But their stupidity, not to mention their political naivety, has left a nasty taste behind and the 2023 Hugo Awards will be forever tarnished as a result.

So, what generated all the fuss? What is Babel all about? That really depends on what level you approach it from. At the top it’s a rather clever fantasy novel set in an alternate and vaguely steampunkish nineteenth century. The British Empire is flourishing. Its boats and trains and carriages, its factories and indeed all of its industries are powered with silver. Small silver bars engraved with words translated from other languages provide the energy that drives everything. There is great magic and power to be found in the ambiguities that lie within the words that cross over the barriers between languages, and the translators of those words ride high in society for, of course, everything ultimately depends upon their skill. It’s an intriguing conceit and who cares if it violates the laws of physics? I loved it.

Illustrating this premise is the story of Robin Swift. He is an orphan scratching a bare living in Canton. He is rescued and brought to London by one Professor Lovell. On arriving in London he is set to the study of Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, in order to prepare himself to enrol in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation (referred to colloquially as Babel). Should he succeed in becoming a translator he will, of course, become the heroic epitome of a traditional rags to riches tale.

Behind Robin’s story lurks a diatribe about the evils of colonisation as exemplified by the rapid expansion of the British Empire and the ruthlessness with which the British exploit their colonial subjects. And lying underneath this, and tying all the threads together, is a discussion about the very nature of language itself, that phenomenon upon which all of history (and society) depends. I was really rather taken with that structure – I thought it was clever and thought-provoking. Unfortunately its implementation in the novel leaves much to be desired.

R. F. Kuang is a full time academic. She holds a masters degree in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford and a masters degree in Chinese Studies from Cambridge. She is currently studying for a doctorate in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale. Possibly as a result of her academic background, the novel itself is way overstuffed with tedious lectures (infodumps, is the usual SF term for this terrible habit) about history, about linguistics and about pretty much anything and everything else that drifts into her mind while she explores the larger ideas that make up the story’s backbone. The lectures go on forever and they are opinionated, dogmatic and generally very, very boring. They take great pains to dot every scholarly i and cross every philosophical t and then, just for good measure, they ice the academic cake by drawing the reader’s attention to a footnote that is usually yet another mini-lecture about some completely unimportant cultural reference that the author is anxious to clarify. And then, just in case you didn’t get the point the first time round, she says it all again. And again. The repetition is very frustrating – I’m sure at least a couple of hundred pages, if not more, could be dropped from the story by simply removing the duplication of ideas. Not that the ideas, in themselves, are always bad – often they are rather clever, not to say stimulating. She just says them far too many times.

And as if this wasn’t enough, there are also way too many occasions when her lectures make her sound like a very passionate and extraordinarily judgemental prude. She sees the world in very black and white terms. Grey has no place in her world view. Right is right and wrong is wrong. Convinced by her own intellectual arrogance, she always knows what is right and she’s damn well going to tell us all about it. So there!

As an example, at one point in the story Robin Swift reads and greatly enjoys a novel by Frederick Marryat (1792 - 1848). He gets so wrapped up in the excitement of the story that he loses track of time and so he misses his daily Latin lesson. Kuang reveals that the shame of missing something so important makes Robin decide that he will never again read anything by Marryat. Such an extreme reaction makes it clear, to me at least, that Robin is an idiot. Hands up everyone who would rather study Latin than read a novel.

Odd! I see no raised hands at all...

Kuang, having no time whatsoever for frivolity, very much approves of Robin’s decision though the reasons for her approval go well beyond the triviality of just missing a Latin lesson. She explains that nobody should ever read Marryat’s books anyway because he is a disgusting racist. She then gives us several examples of Marryat’s racism. Clearly she does not like Marryat’s point of view at all and I got the distinct impression that she would be quite happy to ban (or burn) all of Marryat’s books because of the wrong attitudes they portray.

I actually read and enjoyed several of Marryat’s novels when I was a teenager. I think I must have read Mr Midshipman Easy and Masterman Ready at least half a dozen times each. So I can easily understand why Robin fell so firmly under Marryat’s spell – he knew how to tell a damn good story and of course that’s all that really matters. Did I notice the racism as I was reading? Yes, it’s fairly overt, though I doubt if Marryat’s contemporaries would have noticed anything out of the ordinary in the story; historical context matters a lot in these kinds of analyses. Would I myself refuse to let other people read Marryat’s novels? Of course not. The world is large, it contains multitudes. Kuang, it seems, would much rather that was not the case. Only one opinion reflects the real truth. Her opinion. As a result, not only is Babel full of long lectures, it is also crammed with supercilious condemnations of opinions with which the author disagrees and of which she disapproves.

The full and formal title of the novel is actually Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution which is itself a reflection of, and a huge clue about, the internal structure of the book. The two colons are a dead giveaway. Don’t say you haven’t been warned. It’s all right there on the title page...

Quite honestly I feel that the story withers and dies under the suffocating weight of all the intellectual baggage that has been shoe-horned into its pages. It turns what could have been a fascinating story into a series of soporific presentations – I kept expecting powerpoint slides to pop up in front of my eyes.

In short, this is an extraordinarily dull book.

Would I have voted for it had I been eligible to vote in the 2023 Hugos? No, I wouldn’t, for obvious reasons. Should I have been allowed to make up my own mind about its worthiness? Yes, of course I should. Should the awards organisers have declared the novel ineligible? No, of course they shouldn’t. That goes without saying. Would the Chinese government have been offended by the book if it had appeared on the list of eligible novels? I don’t know, but in all honesty I very much doubt it. The book itself is quite scathing about the effects of colonialism and it paints a very sympathetic picture of the sufferings of the Chinese people under the British colonial expansion. To that extent it reflects a very Chinese view of history. Also, pragmatically (and make no mistake about it, the Chinese are a very pragmatic people), the Chengdu convention was a wonderful propaganda vehicle for the Chinese government – not only did they make a ton of money from the convention, they also got a lot of very positive publicity out of it as well. As a result, I find it hard to imagine them throwing away all that good will and positivity for the sake of a dull little novel that is mostly on their side anyway.

Rock, Paper, Scissors is the second of Alice Feeney’s novels that I’ve read and I’m starting to come to grips with the way that her extraordinarily convoluted mind works. Not only does she have unreliable narrators, she’s a whole unreliable novelist in her own right. Nothing in her novels is what it seems to be – people, places and things are all mutable, subject to change without notice as the situation demands. And every time it happens, you will nod happily and say Aha! as yet another clue that has been hiding in plain sight all along pops into place and you finally realise exactly what has been going on before your very eyes. And then she does it again and you realise just how wrong you were…

Alice Feeney is a genius.

As the story opens, we meet Adam, his wife Amelia and their dog Bob who are all on their way to stay at a converted chapel somewhere in the back blocks of Scotland, miles from anywhere. It’s the middle of winter and they are driving through a severe snow storm. It seems an odd time of the year to be taking a holiday, but as they struggle on through the storm we learn that the chapel holiday was the first prize in a contest that Amelia had entered at work. So of course they have no real choice about the date – they have to take what they have been given. We also learn that their marriage is slowly coming apart and both of them view this vacation as possibly their last chance to heal the rifts in their relationship.

When they finally arrive at the chapel they are very disappointed to find that, except for an ancient fireplace, there is no way of heating the building. Most of the rooms in the chapel are locked apart from their bedroom and a well stocked wine cellar. There is also a freezer full of food. Clearly they can eat, drink and make merry to their heart’s content. If only it wasn’t so cold…

Adam is a successful screenwriter. He is a workaholic, a narcissistic and very self centred man who suffers from Prosopagnosia, or face blindness, a neurological condition which means that he cannot recognise people’s faces. He can’t identify his wife in a crowd and he doesn’t even recognise his own face when he sees it in a mirror. He can never find himself (or anybody else) in a group photograph. His struggles with this disability are a large part of the reason for his introverted and seemingly uncaring personality. It explains why Amelia fears that their marriage is breaking down. She feels that Adam has no interest in her. He never talks to her about her job or about her friends. Counselling hasn’t helped.

Bob the Dog just seems happy to be with them. Dogs are like that.

Once they get settled in, strange things begin to happen around them. The electricity goes off, they hear weird sounds, the phones stop working, a face looks in through a window, doors that once were locked become unlocked and doors that once opened easily are now locked tight shut. It’s all rather unsettling.

At about this point in the story we meet another character, Robin. Initially she is just an observer though it soon becomes clear that she is responsible for much of what is happening around Adam and Amelia. Her motives, however, remain obscure until very late in the story.

The story is told in alternating chapters from the individual points of view of Adam, Amelia and Robin. Interspersed between these chapters are letters that Adam’s wife has written to him. She has never shown him these letters – she writes one letter a year on the anniversary of their wedding and in each year’s letter she muses on the events of the past twelve months, putting into context the nature of their relationship and the reasons for its slow disintegration. Then she hides the current letter away with all the others and gets on with her life.

That’s it, that’s the whole story. But remember, this is an Alice Feeney novel. Everything happens for a reason and the reasons are never what you think they are. Only Bob the Dog really knows what is going on and why all these odd things are going on, and he’s not telling. The twists and turns come thick and fast. Again and again and again the reader’s understanding of the nature of the story is turned on its head as all the many changes are rung on the situation. The final revelations are breathtaking.

Let me repeat what I said at the start – Alice Feeney is a genius.

Working Class is the second book in Nathan Lowell’s series about the trials and tribulations of providing an education to people who are at one and the same time both students and part of the working crew of a spaceship. Theory and practice collide and all that remains is to pick up the pieces and hope that they aren’t too broken.

Nathan Lowell has done it again. He has written yet another novel in which pretty much nothing at all happens. There are lots of mundane events going on, of course; the minutiae of everyday spaceship life. And people talk to each other interminably. This is a novel by Nathan Lowell, after all. Describing it as flatly as that makes it sound terribly boring, but somehow it isn’t. As always I found myself glued to the page and I was sad when the story came to an end (at least for now).

Because the book is about the development of a curriculum designed to serve the best interests of both the students and the Academy to which they will return when the voyage is complete, many of the discussions are about the pros and cons of this, that and the other theory of education and the means by which students learn and (more importantly) retain their knowledge. I spent the last twenty five years of my career addressing that very problem and as a result I have various strongly held opinions about how the whole thing works. I was pleased to find that, by and large, Nathan Lowell and I agree with each other about the nature of the beast. It’s always nice to have your own biases confirmed!

Be warned, this is not a stand alone novel. You really do need to start with the first book, School Days, in order to appreciate what is going on in this one. Furthermore you need to be prepared for a little bit of a cliff hanger at the end because some of the plot threads (such as they are) are not yet completely resolved. I must confess I don’t really know if Nathan Lowell will be able to wrap everything up nicely with only one more novel. Perhaps he will need a fourth book. But if he does, that’s OK by me. I’m always happy to read one more Nathan Lowell novel.

I’ve never been a big fan of books that re-tell classical fairy tales. It has always struck me as being a rather pointless exercise. After all, the story has already been told. Why do you need to tell it again? I suppose these days they might call it a reboot…

Consequently I was a little reluctant to read Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher. The blurb suggested it was re-telling of Sleeping Beauty and, of course, that’s a story that everybody is very familiar with. But there were intriguing references to a toad and anyway I’ve never yet found a T. Kingfisher story that I didn’t like. So I picked it up and started to read.

Thornhedge has all the ingredients of the classical tale – the princess asleep in the tower, the thick hedge with thorns as sharp as swords that keeps the tower inviolate – but these are really a very minor part of the tale that T. Kingfisher has to tell. Thornhedge is really the story of a very sweet almost-fairy whose name is Toadling and whose aspect (most of the time) is, as you might expect, a toad.

Toadling, we eventually learn, was stolen by fairies on the day that she was born. They raised her in the waters of faerie-land where the Greenteeth taught her their ways. She loved it there, it was her happy place. But when Toadling reached maturity she was asked to return to the human world where she was tasked with the blessing of a new born child. She felt very nervous about this and unfortunately her nerves got the better of her. She garbled the words. The blessing turned into a curse. Centuries later Toadling is still there, still trying to do her duty, as she perceives it, still trying to turn a curse into a blessing.

One day a knight approaches the hedge of thorns that protects the tower where the princess lies sleeping. He has heard the story and he has come to investigate it. Toadling is shocked to find how far the tale has spread out into the world. All she really wants to do is persuade the knight to go away and leave her alone, but that proves to be impossible. Furthermore, against her better judgement, Toadling and the knight become friends and eventually they start to confide in each other and tell each the stories of their lives. As a result of this exchange of confidences, we learn what fairies really do with their changelings and we learn just why the knight feels so compelled to hack his way through the hedge of thorns that Toadling guards so fiercely.

The story of Toadling and the knight reaches a very unexpected climax and not everybody lives happily ever after. But there are good reasons for this and I thoroughly enjoyed the clever plotting that turns the well known story of the sleeping beauty completely on its head. But it is the life story and the character of Toadling herself that makes this magical tale such a page turner. If you don’t fall in love with her then truly you have no heart.

Footnote

I am amused to find that this month I have read two books in which a character called Robin plays a major role. One Robin is male and not very nice, and one Robin is female and not very nice. Fortunately my wife Robin is a much nicer person than either of them.