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Matthew Keeley

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book reviews

Jeffrey Ford’s Big Dark Hole Offers Stories to Fall Into

Thu Jul 8, 2021 2:00pm 3 comments 3 Favorites [+]

In the title story of Jeffrey Ford’s new collection Big Dark Hole, a young boy crawls into a sewer pipe and never emerges. The narrator, who witnessed David Gorman’s fateful act, reflects forty years on: “In another five years or so, what’s left of the story will have completely decomposed, fizzed away, fallen back into a big dark hole.” Perhaps that oblivion is the fate of all stories, tales, and memories, but Ford’s stories will linger longer than most. They may not scare or shock, but they rarely fail to disquiet.

book reviews

B. Catling’s Hollow Is Abundant and Excessive

Thu Jun 3, 2021 12:00pm 3 Favorites [+]

“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” So runs one of William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell. Judging from his novel Hollow, Brian Catling, who made Blake a character in his earlier Vorrh Trilogy, seems to have taken the poet’s infernal proverb to heart. He has followed Blake’s path as far as it goes: Everything about this novel is excessive, sometimes ludicrously so, but it achieves an ungainly beauty and a crooked wisdom.

Brian Catling, stylized “B. Catling” on his book covers, first came to genre readers’ attention when Alan Moore wrote an introduction to The Vorrh, which he labeled a “landmark work of fantasy.” Two further novels concluded the story begun in The Vorrh. Hollow is the first Catling novel to receive wide U.S. distribution since the trilogy’s concluding volume.

book reviews

The Murky Waters of Courttia Newland’s A River Called Time

Tue Apr 6, 2021 2:00pm 1 comment 2 Favorites [+]

If the novel’s composition matched the author’s conception, Courttia Newland’s A River Called Time would constitute a major accomplishment in speculative fiction. Newland creates a radically different Earth, devises a complex world-beyond-the-world of astral projection, and then, in the novel’s second half, sends his overwhelmed protagonist on an odyssey into further worlds.

book reviews

Elizabeth Knox’s The Absolute Book Arrives at Last

Mon Mar 1, 2021 2:00pm 3 comments 5 Favorites [+]

The Absolute Book arrives in the United States more than a year after its initial publication with New Zealand’s Victoria University Press. Although Elizabeth Knox’s books have always been critically acclaimed, most of her titles have never escaped the Antipodes. Happily for American readers, a rave review by Dan Kois, a Slate critic briefly resident in New Zealand inspired a bidding war for U.S. rights, and now any American can open The Absolute Book. As someone who has been looking forward to it since the Slate review, I’m happy to report that the novel was worth the wait.

book reviews

The Swallowed Man Reflects on Art and Family From the Bottom of a Whale

Tue Jan 26, 2021 3:00pm 4 Favorites [+]

I hadn’t expected to see a new Edward Carey novel for a few years yet, but here is The Swallowed Man, just two years after the publication of Little, his big book about the waning and waxing of Madame Tussaud’s fortunes in the French Revolution. That massive novel took fifteen years to write; to receive another book so soon is a pleasant surprise. Little was an epic about the obscure story behind a familiar name; The Swallowed Man, in contrast, is a compact retelling of a familiar story from an obscure perspective.

book reviews

A King Arthur Tale for the Brexit Era: Lavie Tidhar’s By Force Alone

Tue Aug 11, 2020 2:30pm 8 comments 6 Favorites [+]

The Matter of Britain, the cycle of stories relating to King Arthur and his knights, is as capacious a set of legends as the world possesses, and so the tales have received a staggering range of interpretations. From Tennyson’s pious odes to Victorian Britain, through Mark Twain’s declaration of Yankee independence, from Wagner’s promotion of the German volk and Edwar Burne-Jones’s self-consciously old-fashioned paintings to T.H. White’s tragicomic elegies, King Arthur has accommodated every vision or concern that artists have attached to him. Perhaps each era gets the Arthur it requires.

Lavie Tidhar’s By Force Alone gives us an Arthur for the Brexit era: A tyrant in lieu of a king, brute violence in lieu of gallant feats, undisguised venality in lieu of chivalric ideals. This is the Matter of Britain become the Matter with Britain.

Hugo Spotlight

Hugo Spotlight: P. Djeli Clark’s The Haunting of Tram Car 015 Offers a Short Glimpse of a Fantastic World

Tue Jul 28, 2020 1:00pm 4 comments 4 Favorites [+]

In the lead-up to the 2020 Hugo Awards, we’re taking time to appreciate this year’s best novella Finalists, and what makes each of them great.

The Cairo of P. Djèlí Clark’s novella The Haunting of Tram Car 015 is in a state of perpetual, and productive, flux. It is 1912, but in Clark’s world, “it had been some forty years since the wandering Soudanese genius—or madman, take your pick—had, through a mix of alchemy and machines, bored a hole into the Kaf.” The mysterious al-Jahiz—perhaps a time traveler, perhaps a prophet, perhaps a harbinger of doom—disappeared but left a world transformed. Djinn and other once-mythical beings openly walk the land and have contributed to an explosion of technological-magical growth. Egypt has become a great world power, while European colonialists have retreated to their homelands, expelled by magic and forced to reevaluate the “superstitions of the natives and Orientals” they once despised. No religion has sole dominion over magic, so religious tolerance laws have been enacted, though biases remain: Many still distrust the new adherents of the revived old religions. And, spurred in part by the role women played in the great anticolonial struggles, suffragette and feminist movements have begun agitating for equal rights. It’s a multiethnic, multicultural, and generally civil society, but, like all societies, not without its tensions and contradictions.

book reviews

Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll Meanders, Mocks, and Moves

Fri Feb 21, 2020 1:30pm 6 comments 3 Favorites [+]

Background photo by Annie Spratt [via Unsplash]

You might not expect a novel about the Thirty Years’ War to be entertaining, much less funny. Those three decades of massacre, starvation, plague, and pillage littered central Europe with eight million corpses; it wasn’t until the twentieth century that the European nations once again achieved such sheer horror. And yet, despite its grim subject and despite its jacket-copy endorsement from Michael Haneke, bleakest and most depressing of bleak and depressing German directors, Daniel Kehlmann’s new novel Tyll is a rollick and a delight.

book reviews

Chilly Stories From the Author of Ice: Anna Kavan’s Machines in the Head

Thu Feb 20, 2020 4:00pm 2 Favorites [+]

She wrote Ice and then she died. She used prescription heroin for half of her life. She took the name she’s remembered by from one of her own early novels. If you’ve heard of Anna Kavan, and most likely you haven’t, chances are that these are the few things you know about her. Though she wrote more than a dozen novels and collections, though she was a journalist and a painter, Kavan is remembered for a single book and for the dramatic or disreputable portions of her biography.

This month, New York Review Books issues Machines in the Head, a volume of Kavan’s selected stories. It’s a slim book of weighty emotion that will leave readers perturbed. I admire it, but I can’t say I enjoyed it.

book reviews

John Crowley’s Reading Backwards Offers More Than a Decade of Brilliance

Fri Dec 6, 2019 1:30pm 2 comments 4 Favorites [+]

John Crowley’s readers have great capacities for patience. Twenty years passed between the first volume of his Ægypt series in 1987 and its last entry in 2007; after his realistic historical novel Four Freedoms appeared in 2009, Crowley’s fans waited seven years for another major publication. With the 2016 publication of The Chemical Wedding, Crowley’s translation of an obscure seventeenth-century hermetic allegory, something changed. Whatever the cause — Perhaps the author’s retirement from teaching at Yale — Crowley has become prolific. A year after Wedding, he published Ka, a thick historical fantasy, alongside Totalitopia, a slim volume that combined fiction, essay, and criticism. And this month Crowley has released two thick hardbacks. The first, story collection And Go Like This, I reviewed a few weeks ago. Now Subterranean Press has released Reading Backwards: Essays & Reviews, 2015-2018.

movies

Discovering Journey to the Beginning of Time, Karel Zeman’s Classic Sci-Fi Film

Fri Nov 22, 2019 3:00pm 7 comments 5 Favorites [+]

Screenshot: Second Run

Jurassic Park appeared in theaters in June of 1993, when I was five years old. I was dinosaur-obsessed to an intense degree; I played with toy tyrannosauruses, ate dinosaur-themed candy, and read dinosaur picture books. Somehow I contrived to learn the Latin names of various saurians; I figured it was good training for my inevitable career as a paleontologist. In pursuit of that future, I even dug up the backyard in search of dino bones. Given this level of obsession, I was heartbroken to learn that my parents would not let me go see the new dinosaur movie. I didn’t quite understand that Spielberg’s film was about people running from dinosaurs that wanted to eat them. Who needs menace and suspense when there were dinosaurs? I would have been perfectly happy watching a dinosaur movie where nothing went wrong and no one was imperilled. I just wanted to see dinosaurs in motion. It took more than twenty-five years for me to discover that the movie five-year-old Matt really wanted to see was Czech director Karel Zeman’s Journey to the Beginning of Time.

book reviews

A Modern Fairy Tale: Nina Allan’s The Dollmaker

Fri Nov 8, 2019 3:00pm 1 comment 4 Favorites [+]

If pressed, I’m sure that Nina Allan would say that her new novel, The Dollmaker, takes place in the here and now. I don’t know that I would believe her. The book’s world looks like ours, complete with smartphones and Google Earth, but it’s a planet where trips are still planned by surveyor’s maps, where hotels are selected according to a printed almanac’s recommendations, and where long-distance relationships are conducted by page upon page of handwritten letters. Fairy tales are a motif. “What,” Allan asks her readers, “if a long, long time ago were today?”

book reviews

John Crowley’s And Go Like This Was Worth the Wait

Thu Nov 7, 2019 2:00pm 3 Favorites [+]

The quality of John Crowley’s short stories is inversely proportional to their quantity. His two brief collections, Novelty and Antiquities, were combined and expanded into Novelties & Souvenirs in 2004; one collection, not unduly thick, collected thirty years of short fiction. The publication of a new collection by John Crowley is a rare occasion; I’m happy to report that his new one, And Go Like This, was worth the fifteen-year wait.

book reviews

Playful Metafiction: Paul Park’s A City Made of Words

Fri Aug 23, 2019 1:30pm 1 comment 2 Favorites [+]

Background image: Scott Webb [via Unsplash]

Paul Park’s A City Made of Words is the latest volume in PM Press’s Outspoken Authors line of short science fiction collections. We’re now twenty-three volumes into the series, each of which combines an interview with the author, a bibliography of varying completeness, and some combination of new and reprinted writing—and until I read this new book, I thought I knew how they worked. There were, on the one hand, the collections that might serve as introductions, books like Elizabeth Hand’s Fire or John Crowley’s Totalitopia, concise proofs of the author’s value. On the other hand I counted such books as Samuel Delany’s The Atheist in the Attic and Michael Moorcock’s Modem Times 2.0 as essential reading for the committed that would challenge, mystify, or scare off neophytes.

With A City Made of Words, Park eludes my categories. I can’t decide whether this book is a perfect entry to the author’s work, or written for committed Park readers only. I suspect that the author intends this. Let me explain.

movies

Ikarie XB 1, Based on the Fiction of Stanislaw Lem, Is a Fascinating Obscurity

Fri Aug 9, 2019 9:00am 9 comments 3 Favorites [+]

Screenshot: Barrandov Film Studio (Remastered by Second Run)

The myth of Icarus isn’t about flight; it’s about falling. Daedalus’s callow son flaps too close to the sun; the glue of his wings melt, their feathers flutter away, and Icarus plummets seaward. He is the first to soar through the sky, but also the sky’s first victim. Personally, I wouldn’t name the first ship to traverse interstellar space after our fallen predecessor, but perhaps the people of the year 2163, as depicted in Czech director Jindřich Polák’s 1963 Ikarie XB 1, have conquered superstition. Or perhaps they’re tempting fate.