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Matthew Keeley

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book reviews

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

Tue Aug 11, 2020 2:30pm 8 comments 4 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.

book reviews

The Iron Dragon’s Mother Is Michael Swanwick’s Triumphant Return to Faerie

Tue Jun 25, 2019 2:30pm 9 comments 2 Favorites [+]

“She didn’t know that the dragons were coming for her.” With good reason: Dragons rarely intrude into American hospital wards, but it’s in that incongruous setting that Michael Swanwick begins his new novel, The Iron Dragon’s Mother. We meet Helen V. at the end of an interesting—she’s “gone scuba-diving in the Maldives [and] found herself inexplicably judging an air guitar competition in an unlicensed slum bar in Johannesburg [and] spent a summer trying to convert a rusty old Ferrari to run on vegetable oil because she’d fallen in love with a boy who wanted to save the world”—but ultimately unsatisfied life. She’s dying in a hospital with no visitors, little grace, and few consolations. She derives her scant pleasures from tormenting her caretakers with snark and allusion; they retaliate by delivering sermons or withholding morphine. She’s a lifelong walker-out and escaper-from; since she can’t leave the hospital, she’s immersed in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which posits “an instant of freedom” at the very moment of death. She doesn’t believe, but she’s willing to try: “Crap and nonsense” it may be, but “still, escape is escape.”

And so Helen dies, and Helen leaps, and Helen finds herself in another person’s head in another person’s world.

movie reviews

Liu Cixin’s The Wandering Earth Is Now a Striking SF Film on Netflix

Fri Jun 14, 2019 10:00am 58 comments 7 Favorites [+]

Screenshot: Netflix

When Chinese science fiction film The Wandering Earth appeared in U.S. theaters earlier this year, very few people saw it, but just about all of them liked it. Critics lamented that this movie, which grossed nearly as much as Avengers: Endgame worldwide, received only a few days’ booking in the more discerning arthouses and the most diverse big-city multiplexes. Now that The Wandering Earth has made its way to Netflix, it has a new chance to find a wider audience. Many lesser films have thrived on the streaming service—let’s hope Netflix helps this movie find the American viewership it deserves.

The Wandering Earth is adapted from a novella—though some say it’s more a long short story—by Liu Cixin, author of The Three-Body Problem. Since this particular work isn’t yet available in English translation, I can’t vouch for the faithfulness of the adaptation. I can merely express my admiration at Liu’s audacity in fitting such a large story into such a small space.

Gene Wolfe

Remembering the Great Opening Sentences of Gene Wolfe

Fri Apr 19, 2019 9:00am 1 comment 2 Favorites [+]

The Fifth Head of Cerberus cover art by Richard Bober (Orb, 1994)

The King of Hearts, not the wisest of monarchs, gives this advice on reading in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Begin at the beginning […] and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” That advice has never served Lewis Carroll’s readers, who delight in re-reading the Alice books and solving their puzzles, and it serves just as poorly for Gene Wolfe’s readers, many of whom don’t count a Wolfe book as read until it’s been re-read.

Still, whatever failings the King of Hearts might have had, there’s something to be said for beginning at the beginning, and so here follows my examination of Gene Wolfe’s opening sentences.

book reviews

Haunting Puzzles: Leanne Shapton’s Guestbook

Fri Mar 29, 2019 1:30pm 1 Favorite [+]

What are we to make of the line illustration on the cover Leanne Shapton’s Guestbook: Ghost Stories? You’re unlikely to guess the subject, as the image is an uneven blob somewhat resembling an unmarked and upended Texas, or perhaps an untalented child’s first attempt to trace their hand. In fact, the image is a drawing of the iceberg that sunk the RMS Titanic, made by George Rheims, a survivor of the disaster. Paradoxical though it may be, sometimes an old cliché is the best way to describe something new. Icebergs are proverbially ninety percent underwater; ninety percent of what makes this new collection so remarkable is what occurs off the page, in the blank places between its sparse text and its abundant images.

book reviews

A Future in the Author’s Backyard: The New Edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home

Fri Mar 15, 2019 2:00pm 11 comments 7 Favorites [+]

However believable you find Ursula K. Le Guin’s imagined worlds, you cannot visit the planet Gethen and cross its frozen plains, nor can you join the commune on Anarres or sail the archipelagos of Earthsea. The town of Klatsand, from Searoad, has an address in Oregon, but you can’t drive or fly there. You may, however visit where the Kesh people “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now.” They’ll perhaps live in Northern California, in the Napa Valley, and one of their towns might sit where the Le Guin family had a summer house. In Always Coming Home, her longest and strangest novel, just reissued by the Library of America, Ursula K. Le Guin built a utopia in her backyard.

A warning: If you read solely for plot, Always Coming Home might seem an exercise in Never Reaching the Point, and I’d encourage you to read The Lathe of Heaven or a volume of Earthsea in its stead. This novel represents a culmination of the anthropological or societal bent in Le Guin’s fiction. Le Guin’s first three novels were republished as Worlds of Exile and Illusion—worlds, not tales or stories. The Left Hand of Darkness alternates plot chapters with bits of Winter’s lore and excerpts of its stories; while The Dispossessed, “An Ambiguous Utopia,” announces its social interests in its very subtitle. Always Coming Home doesn’t abandon narrative, but it comes close: This is a book that aspires to placehood.