First up, Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker looks at why fantasy novels are so popular with teens.  Alyssa Rosenberg at Think Progress responds here.

Poet Jaswinder Bolina’s father reckons he should use a pseudonym, one of many anecdotes in this essay Writing Like a White Guy, which explores race, writing and the importance of language and voice.

Also on the topic of poetry, the LA Review of Books gives us this essay on British poetry and riot.

Philip Pullman calls time on the present tense in the Guardian.

Believer Mag is posting extracts from their interview with Joan Didion during her tour promoting Blue Nights. Parts Two and Three.

Asymptote is an online journal dedicated to literary translation, and the most recent edition includes this interview with Max Lane, largely on his translation of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s works. His Buru Quartet are the only works of Indonesian literature I’ve read, and it was, of course, through Lane’s translation.

And finally, book reviews demystified: “ambitious: I did not finish this book… gritty: someone gets murdered with a tire iron… darkly funny: the word cripple appears more than once.”

And as a postscript, this beautiful stop motion video from Toronto bookstore Type. Enjoy.

Straight from writing about Holden Caulfield I finished reading about another wonderfully realised teen character from another time and halfway around the world. Sybylla Penelope Melvin.

Franklin’s turn of the (last) century novel is a classic, and rightly so. This short semi-autobiographical coming of age tale was a best seller, both in Australia, and back in England, but the scandal it generated caused Franklin to request that it not be published again until after her death.

I picked up this book as part of Meanjin Tournament of Books late last year, and am pleased that it will be the first of my reviews for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Sybylla is a cocky teenage girl, all slang and rebellion. She is stubborn, intelligent, and uncompromising. When her impoverished farmer parents can no longer afford to maintain their ever expanding brood she is shipped off to her grandmother’s at Caddagat to live in relative middle class comfort. It is here she meets, and is fallen in love with by, Harold Beecham.

A life of relative married ease is not however part of Sybylla’s ambitions.

Girls! girls! Those of you who have hearts, and therefore a wish for happiness, homes, and husbands by and by, never develop a reputation of being clever. It will put you out of the matrimonial running as effectually as though it had been circulated that you had leprosy… A plain woman will have nothing forgiven her. Her fate is such that the parents of uncomely female infants should be compelled to put them to death at their birth.

This is not an Austenesque romance tale, in which after much trial and tribulation, the precocious young lady finally marries into love and comfort. Sybylla’s bravery in turning down her suitor, in refusing to compromise, is heart breaking. She refuses a life of relative ease with Harold to remain with her unloving mother, in the monotony and grind of their poverty.

It is not marriage that is Sybylla’s crowning achievement, the act which secures her place as one of the most compelling of Australian heroines, but her refusal to be anyone but herself, and that self is a writer, not a wife. The book ends with her writing her masterpiece, that we know, even if Sybylla does not, will be an enduring classic of the Australian literary canon.

This book is also notable for its stunning descriptions of the Australian landscape, and turn of the century rural life:

A few light, wind-smitten clouds made wan streaks across the white sky, haggard with the fierce, relentless glare of the afternoon sun. Weariness was written across my mother’s delicate careworn features, and found expression in my father’s knitted brows and dusty face. Blackshaw was weary, and said so as he wiped the dust, made mud with perspiration, off his cheeks. I was weary – my limbs ached with the heat and work. The poor beast stretched at our feet was weary. All nature was weary, and seemed to sing a dirge to that effect in the furnace-breath wind which roared among the trees on the low ranges at our back and smote the parched and thirsty ground. All were weary, all but the sun. He seemed to glory in his power, relentless and untiring, as he swung boldly in the sky, triumphantly leering down upon his helpless victims.

Franklin brings to life the heat and dust, the strain and hardship of the 1890s drought and recession. While her descriptions can tend to the parochial they are not mawkish or overblown.

This is a passionate and precocious book, but most of all is Franklin’s brutal honesty and stunning bravery that strikes me most. This is a book that deserves to be read, and I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me so long to do so.

So here are a few reading related resolutions that I’d like to make for the year ahead.

1. Read a book a week (at least)

I’m currently working a fairly hectic job, but I want to continue to find time for reading in my life. Over at GoodReads, I’ve entered 75 as my annual reading challenge.

This will be the usual mix of classics and literary, and genre fiction, although I’d like to widen my tastes a little, hence…

2. Read more non-fiction

Most of my reading consists of fiction of all sorts: literary, young adult, short stories, crime, fantasy/sci fi. Very few genres escape my gaze. Except non-fiction. Now that I’m reading more on my iPad and kindle, I want to try and fit in more non-fiction. Let’s say one a month to start?

3. Continue blogging

Having started up this blog a few months back, I’ve been trying to post consistently for my few but faithful readers. Because reading can sometimes feel like such a solitary pursuit, I want to be able to capture and share my thoughts about the many books I read before they disappear again under the allure of the to-be-read pile.

4. Australian Women Writers Reading and Reviewing Challenge

2012 is the Australian National Year of Reading.

Australia’s women writers are entertaining, thought-provoking, diverting, engaging, intelligent, verbose, clear, challenging, readable, provocative, innocuous, stimulating, humourous and frightening – they are all these things and more, because most importantly, they are legion.

And yet, in the list of Australian books over at the National Year of Reading’s, Love2Read “Our Story” campaign, only 18 of the 48 books selected are written by women.

As such, the good people over at Australian Women Writers have issued a challenge to Australia’s readers and book bloggers: to read and review books by Australian women.

I am signing up for the intermediate level of this challenge (the Miles), which will involve reading six, and reviewing at least three, books written by Australia women. I’ll see how I go in the first half of the year, and may even upgrade to the Franklin-fantastic if I’m feeling up to it.

At this stage I haven’t thought much about genre or contemporary vs classics, but we’ll see how we go.

Let’s go, shall we?

First up is a piece in the Atlantic Cities: How the plummeting price of cocaine fuelled the nationwide drop in violent crime. Growth in meth-amphetamines and prescription drugs, away from crack cocaine, is reshaping urban and rural economies and communities alike. (via @mpesce)

Born Svetlana Stalina, Lana Peters, daughter of Josef Stalin, died in Wisconsin, November 22, aged 85. The New York Times has this orbituary.

Ms. Peters was said to have lived in a cabin with no electricity in northern Wisconsin; another time, in a Roman Catholic convent in Switzerland. In 1992, she was reported to be living in a shabby part of West London in a home for elderly people with emotional problems.

(via @brainpicker)

Edward Tufte writes about the role Power Point presentations played in the NASA Columbia disaster of 2003. He finds that an over-reliance on the ‘deck’ led NASA to seriously underestimate the magnitude of the situation they were facing.

Worried about the retreat from empiricism in the 21st century? Yearning to return to a ‘facts-based’ reality? Then the Denier Debunking Handbook is for you.

Chris Wilson looks into the quest for extraterrestrial life, and wonders why we haven’t found any yet. In Part 2 he looks at how to help the aliens find us.

Returning to the topic of drug use in America, Marisa Meltzer writes about her experiences with the South American drug ayahuasca in Shamanism and the City. (also via @brainpicker)

Longreads gets meta, with the Awl’s list of best long reads from 2011.

And finally, Foreign Policy summarises the big stories you missed in 2011. From India’s military build-up to the camel shortage in the Middle East, they chronicle some important things that happened while we were all busy watching the European economy implode and climate change continue unabated with little to no hope of concerted global action to avoid. Fun times everybody!

The Sense of an Ending

This year’s winner of the Man Booker Prize is small, but perfectly formed. I read it across two sittings, each no longer than an hour.

We meet Tony Webster and his friends, Alex, Colin and Adrian while they are still at school. They are young, smart, yearning for knowledge, adulthood, sex:

If Alex had read Russell and Wittgenstein, Adrian had read Camus and Nietzsche. I had read George Orwell and Aldous Huxley; Colin had read Baudelaire and Dostoevsky. This is only a slight caricature.

Yes of course we were pretentious — what else is youth for?

Veronica comes along later, (Tony’s ex-wife calls her the Fruitcake), as Tony’s college girlfriend. She reads poetry, he reads philosophy. He dances to the Moody Blues on his own in his bedroom. She doesn’t dance.

Tony is our guide through this story, told from his perspective as an old man, having lived a comfortable, unremarkable middle-class life. One marriage, one daughter, one divorce. This long slow slide into old age is disrupted by the arrival of a lawyer’s letter. Not trusting his own memory of events 40 years on, he goes in search of witnesses, of corroboration. Who did what when? And to whom?

This book deals with the fallibility of memory, and the lies we tell ourselves in constructing our sense of self. The further we are from the events as they occur the hazier the truth can seem.

We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixture, rather as a solvent. But it’s not convenient — it’s not useful — to believe this; it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

The character of Tony is a perfect example of what I consider the primary joy of fiction — getting inside the head of another person; experiencing the world as they experience it. Tony is sketched so briefly, with such economy, but for those two hours I spent reading this, I could easily have been across the table from an old friend in a pub, reminiscing about about the past 40 years since you had last seen them.

I was hooked. I wanted to know more about where Veronica had been all that time. What did sensible, clear-edged Margaret think about the truth once it was revealed? What happened to Colin and Alex? And Brother Jack?

While in some ways this book left me wanting more, but I was glad for its brevity. At the end of the day, this wasn’t their story. It was about one man, and his reconciliation with his past. With memory, regret, guilt, remorse. Forgetting and remembering. Secrets and lies. And ultimately what he needed couldn’t be provided through external validation, but by looking within himself in search of the truth.

Evan Hughes, over at the Awl, writes about Larry David’s rough night out with Richard Yates, the author of American classic, Revolutionary Road. Seinfeld character Elaine Benes was loosely based on Monica Yates (daughter of Richard), and this encounter made it’s way into the Seinfeld episode “The Jacket”.

Julian Barnes (author of the wonderful 2011 Booker winner The Sense of an Ending), reviews one of the giants of French literature: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Barnes is particularly interested in the challenges of translating such a well-known and loved book, with translation being required not only between languages, but also between times, in the context of the new translation by American writer, Lydia Davis.

But then translation involves micro-pedantry as much as the full yet controlled use of the linguistic imagination. The plainest sentence is full of hazard; often the choices available seem to be between different percentages of loss.

This is a book I have read, and loved, many times in the original French. The only translation I have read is Margaret Mauldon’s — one of the few not discussed here, unfortunately.

Not everyone likes Murakami. In this now notorious review in the New York Times, Janet Maslin suggests we save ourselves the bother of reading his new magnum opus 1Q84 and read Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past instead. I’ve never really gotten into Murakami, although many many of my friends adore his work. This ambivalence is mostly laziness on my part — I will give him a proper go one of these days. I am, however, a big fan of Proust, which I am determined to finish.

Andrew Anthony talks to Norwegian crime writers about the future of their craft in the wake of the massacre on Utoya Island earlier this year. Despite having extraordinarily low crimes rates, Norway has always had a healthy imagination for murderers, psychopaths, serial killers and every type of violent criminal possible. The brutal execution of so many young political activists by Anders Behring Breivik has shaken this small, prosperous nation from its quiet complacency.

This extended interview with Salman Rushdie in Haaretz is fascinating. Long, but worthwhile. Go read it. (via @senshreya)

In conversation: Neil Gaiman talks to Shaun Tan. Neil Gaiman interviews the wonderful Shaun Tan, writer, artist, and filmmaker of the Oscar-winning The Lost Thing.

In reviewing Patricia Meyer Spacks’ memoirs, Nathaniel Stein over at the New Yorker asks the question: Are rereadings better readings? As an inveterate and compulsive re-reader of books I can sympathise with both Nabokov and Spacks on this matter:

For Nabokov, another reading was always constructive. But for Spacks, rereading—though satisfying for pure literary analysis—can reveal unwelcome truths about our past selves, and cause disenchantment—in the most literal sense—with the books we used to love.

Amanda Nelson, over at Book Riot, also weighs in.

Another reflection on translation, this time by Stephen Mitchell, who decided to do his own translation of Homer’s Iliad, having found all other translations wanting.

Catherine Lacey, at html giant, considers whether writers owe their readers anything.

A few readers acted as if Ben Marcus had personally come to their home and punched them in the face when he published a story in The New Yorker that didn’t look much like their favorite Ben Marcus stories.

If Tolkein were black looks at the emerging black writers in epic fantasy. NK Jemisin and David Anthony Durham are now on my TBR list.

Based on Hemingwayt’s experiences in Paris and Spain in the 20s, this novel follows the journey of a group of American and British expatriates, led by Jake Barnes, a journalist living in Paris. This group of expats include Brett Ashley, the woman he loves, her fiancé Mike Campbell, one of her former lovers Robert Cohn, and Bill Gorton, an America recently arrived in Paris. Jake’s passion for Brett, cannot be consummated due to an unspecified war wound that has left him impotent.

The  book opens in the dissolute, louche Paris of the 20s, a town of endless parties, drinking, dancing and sex. They are indolent and selfish, living off inherited money, partying their lives away. The exception here is Jake, who at least earns his living as a journalist.

The novel shifts to Spain, when the group led by Jake travels to Pamplona for the Fiesta de San Fermín, the annual running of the bulls and accompanying bull fights.

For me, it is in the descriptions of Spain, and the bull fights that Hemingway truly excels. Short, sharp sentences conjure up a sense of building tension under the hot, languid Spanish sun. I can feel the hot sun, the dust, the noise, the sweat, the excitement and fear engendered by the brutal contest between man and bull. It is rhythmic, and hypnotic.

I leaned way over the wall and tried to see into the cage. It was dark. Someone rapped on the cage with an iron bar. Inside something seemed to explode. The bull, striking into the wood from side to side with his horns, made a great noise. Then I saw a dark muzzle and the shadow of horns, and then, with a clattering on the wood in the hollow box, the bull charged and came out into the corral, skidding with his forefeet in the straw as he stopped, his head up, the great hump of muscle on his neck swollen tight, his body muscles quivering as he looked up at the crowd on the stone walls. The two steers backed away against the wall, their heads sunken, their eyes watching the bull.

The bull saw them and charged.

The title, The Sun Also Rises, is taken from Ecclesiastes, which serves as epigraph highlights the major theme of this book: the impermanence, meaninglessness and falsity of their lives, particularly as lived in Paris. The authentic passions of Spain and the bullfight, however, are set in stark contrast to their false, superficial lives.

The sour notes for me were the female characters, and the casual anti-Semitism.

The only woman of substance in the story is the twice-divorced, newly engaged, Lady Brett Ashley. Representing the modern, sexually liberated woman, I found her deeply unbelievable as a character. Perhaps the kindest interpretation of this is Jake’s lack of understanding of her and her motivations.

The anti-Semitism is most present in the treatment of Robert Cohn, with many casual and derogatory reminders that he is a Jew. I found this jarring, and it prevented me from letting myself simply enjoy the beauty of Hemingway’s writing.

Quack Prophet, by Colin Dickey (via @TMNHeadlines)

Dickey picks through the web of misinformation and conspiracy to give us this biography of one of the most famous soothsayers and so-called future-tellers: Nostradamus.

he tried to make his name first through more traditional means, spending his early years attempting to combat the Black Death, which ravaged Europe in the fourteenth century, and continued to flare up throughout the continent in brief, deadly bursts. He had early on developed an interest in medicine and enrolled as a teenager in the University of Avignon in 1519. A year later, though, the town was stricken by plague, and the university closed down, advising its students to flee to the countryside. Unmoored, Nostradamus became a traveling apothecary, roaming throughout France, Italy, and Spain.

Prior to becoming a prophet of doom, Nostradamus was a pharmacist and apothecary, desperately trying to treat the Black Death which was devastating Europe at the time. He remained relatively obscure as a prophet until his patronage by the superstitious Queen Catherine, wife of Henry II.

The Meaning of Zombies, Naomi Alderman, at Granta

The zombie apocalypse is the death of civilization, the moment when all that becomes important is: do you have food? Do you have guns? We want to practise this in fantasy, to imagine it all the way through, especially in times of economic crisis. We live in cities now; far from sources of food, not knowing our neighbours. Zombies are the horrifying crowd of the urban poor, the grasping hands reaching out for something which, if you gave it to them, would destroy you. They’re the interchangeable anonymous people we encounter on our daily commute, those whose humanity we cannot acknowledge.

Alderman ponders the origins of zombies and their resurgence in popular culture.

Diary, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, London Review of Books

Abdul-Ahad writes this moving essay from Somalia, a small country wracked by drought, war, and seemingly endless interference by world powers.

Badbaado means ‘salvation’ in Somali. It’s the name of a stretch of ruins and wild scrub on the outskirts of Mogadishu a few hundred metres from the closest al-Shabaab position. Thousands of tents fill the area: it is now the biggest refugee camp in Somalia.

Somalia holds endless fascination for me, and if I had stayed at university to finish my honours year, I would’ve written on the stateless Somalia. Did you know, that despite the fact that there has been no functioning state in Somalia since the early 1990s, the Somali Shilling remained in circulation there for years, along with the US dollar and cattle?

In more recent years, on top of the ongoing civil conflict, drought has lead to a terrible famine, which Abdul-Ahad details in horrifying detail.

The Great Schism, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic

Coates (who is one of the best writers going round at the moment) investigates the split between the early suffragettes and the abolitionists in the United States in the 19th century.

After the War, with abolition achieved, the movement turned to broadening the franchise. It was generally agreed. among the reformers, that universal emancipation — for black men and all women — was the ideal. But the old abolitionists split on the matter of timetables. On one side you had activists like Julia Ward Howe, Antoinette Brown, Lucy Stone and ultimately Frederick Douglass who favored the enfranchisement of black men as a first step. On the other side stood  Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who argued that the incrementalism was bankrupt and that the franchise should be expanded to include black men as well as black and white women.

The subsequent fight destroyed the old antebellum alliance and eventually sent both movements into a (short) dark age. Anthony and Stanton, the leaders of the revolution, would eventually make common cause Southern racists.

While you’re over there, read through the comments – it will give an idea of what a respectful, intelligent, throught-provoking discussion might look like on the internet.

My Child, The Murderer, Interviews by Christopher Goodwin and Simon Hattenstone (via @TMNHeadlines)

Three disturbing interviews with the parents of convicted murderers.

In 2000, we moved to Twentynine Palms, California. He did real well at the junior high. He was the lead in the Charlie Brown play – he played Linus. We have the videos and you can see what he was like as a kid. Almost exactly a year later, he’s in the bathroom shooting people…

Andy was getting badly bullied in school. He had his skateboard stolen twice. The kids would come up with cigarette lighters and burn him in the neck, throw his books in the toilet, take his bags, hit him, do sucker punches. But when he’d come home he’d just say, “Oh, I fell off my skateboard.”

How do you spell Ms., Abigail Pogrebin (via @brainpicker)

Ending on a happier note, this New York Times magazine essay details the birth of the iconic feminist magazine, Ms., on the occasion if its 40th anniversary.

Jane O’Reilly (contributor, 1971–90s): People were sitting on the floor, on chairs, hanging from rafters. When it came to all the topics proposed, it struck me as being like your first trip to Europe: You think you have to go to every single country because you might never get to go back.

---

Article Ideas From a Confidential Memo 

Some Notes on a New Magazine (4/71):
*THE POLITICS OF SEX
*DON’T BELIEVE HIM WHEN HE SAYS POLITICS BEGIN IN WASHINGTON. POLITICS BEGIN AT HOME.
*HOW NOT TO GO THROUGH MENOPAUSE
*A SECRETARY IS AN OFFICE WIFE
*SOMEONE SHOULD HAVE LIBERATED PAT NIXON
*“OF COURSE, I’M ALL FOR EQUAL PAY, BUT … ”
*HOW MARRIAGE KILLS LOVE

Norton Juster’s childrens’ classic was one of my favourite books as a child, and there still exists a dog-eared, stained, sorry-looking copy waiting for me at my mother’s place.

Along the way, each new experience makes funny and concrete some familiar idea or turn of speech: Milo jumps to Conclusions, a crowded island; grows drowsy in the Doldrums; and finds that you can swim in the Sea of Knowledge for hours and not get wet. The book is made magical by Juster’s and Feiffer’s gift for transforming abstract philosophical ideas into unforgettable images. The thinnest fat man in the world turns out to be the fattest thin man; we see them both. We meet the fractional boy, divided in the middle of his smile, who is the “.58 child” in the average American family of 2.58 children.

This is tale both magical and prosaic, forcing us to see the beauty and wonder behind and beneath the every day. It’s a book that doesn’t talk down to smart kids, and for that reason it holds a special place in my heart.

Spike Jonze, Mourir Auprès de Toi

This beautiful, stop-motion short film tells the story of the skeleton on the cover of Macbeth, who falls in love with Dracula’s Mina, and sets out across the bookstore (the famous Shakespeare and Company in Paris) to find her.
http://www.nowness.com/media/embedvideo?itemid=1640&issueid=1691

Spike Jonze: Mourir Auprès de Toi on Nowness.com.

The Devilish Art, Damon Young, at Meanjin

Like Iris Murdoch, I don’t read many biographies (although I’ve read some wonderful ones – Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice is one I highly recommend). Biographies are hard to get right – it’s not enough to have an interesting subject, the writing must be good enough to tell a story that contains, in most cases, few mysteries for the reader.

For example, we might reject Nietzsche’s ideas on pity, because of his inability to live up to them. ‘Pity,’ wrote Nietzsche in his notebooks, ‘is a squandering of feeling, a parasite harmful to moral health … If one does good merely out of pity, it is oneself one really does good to, not the other.’ Yet the self-confessed ‘warlike’ writer collapsed in tears when he saw a man whipping a horse. But if it’s true that pity moved Nietzsche to protest and faint on that Turin street (and this is by no means proven), this simply means Nietzsche was a tragic, contradicted creature—like all of us.

In this essay, Damon Young explores the tension between the ideas and the philosopher, and ask which gives greater insight.

Avice Benner Cho is a resident of Embassytown, a strange settlement on the edge of the known universe. The planet Arieka is a very long way from anywhere, accessible only via the dangerous immer, the high seas of the universe. The settlement goes months between visits from the ‘out’, with no contact with their nominal imperial capital.

Avice is an immerser, one who can travel this immer. Having left Embassytown, Avice returns, knowing that it is unlikely she will be able to leave again. She returns at the behest of her husband of her fourth marriage, the linguist Scile.

I was born in a place that I thought for thousands of hours was enough of a universe. Then I knew quite suddenly that it was not, but that I wouldn’t be able to leave; and then I could leave. You hear the same all over the place, and not only among the human.

With the rare ability to travel through the immer, Avice is both insider and outsider upon her return to Arieka. This dual sense of citizenship and exile is something to which I can relate. I grew up in the isolated Perth, and left as soon as was decently possible. At 17 I left to travel, and only infrequently return. You find both you and the city changed, things discomfortingly familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

However deftly drawn Avice may be, the narrative really kicks into gear when we get deep into the mystery that is the indigenous inhabitants of Arieka, the Ariekei, also known as the Hosts. Scile develops an increasingly unhealthy obsession with the Hosts, who are alien in the truest sense, so completely unlike their human with whom they share the planet.

At the heart of this difference is the language spoken by the Hosts – denoted by Mieville as Language. The Hosts can only speak the truth. The words in Language contain no symbolism, and they do not represent the things to which they refer: they are the referent. Very simply, they cannot lie, because there are no words for that which is not. It is not possible.

The only communication between the Hosts and the humans is via the Ambassadors, specially chosen pairs of humans who, when speaking together, are able to make themselves understood.

If evolution was morality they would be unable to hear lies, too, like two-thirds of the fabular monkeys, but it’s more random and beautiful, so that was only the case for those few who managed to speak them, of their own little untruths. Unbacked by signifieds, the lies of Language were just noises to their own liar. Biology’s lazy: if mouths speak truth, why should ears discriminate between it and its opposite? When what was spoken was, definitionally, what was? And by this hole in adaptation, though or because they were not built to say them, the Hosts could understand lies. And either believe them — belief being a meaningless given — or, where the falsity was ostentatious and the point, experience them as some giddying impossible, the said unthinkable.

The innocent Hosts are almost like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In this light, the arrival from the out of a new Ambassador, is the snake, introducing temptation. Words themselves here are the fruit of knowledge, but not any specific knowledge, anything this Ambassador speaks, even the most nonsensical, has a toxically addictive affect on the innocent Hosts.

Having lovingly constructed this world, Mieville proceeds to destroy it in the most ruthless fashion. But even in the depths of despair and destruction, there is hope and redemption, but only if the Ariekei can do the impossible.

An interesting aspect to this novel is the treatment (or non-treatment) of gender. Kirsten Tranter wrote a fascinating essay on this for Overland that crystallised my general feeling of unease, and I suggest you go read it in full.

This is a complex, subtle, sophisticated and intellectual book. Despite its complexity, it is thought-provoking rather than dense or obtuse, and its intellectual rigours deserve more than one reading.