What Makes This Book So Great (12 page)

S. P. Somtow’s
Jasmine Nights
(1994) is one of my favourite books. It’s funny and sweet and clever and awesome. It’s about growing up, and sex, and racism, and magic, and life and death, reincarnation, and identity. No, it’s more complicated than that, and better too. It’s about all these huge wonderful things, but really, it’s about this little boy.

Justin, or Little Frog, or Sornsunthorn, is twelve. He’s an upper class Thai boy who has been left by his parents to live with his very odd Thai extended family. For the last three years he’s been refusing to speak Thai and insisting on eating bacon and eggs for breakfast. He’s been living two lives: in one of them he has servants and aunts and is a child, and in the other he has made a fantasy game for himself in a ruined house based on his reading of Homer and science fiction. (“Homer is a god, but he only wrote two books.”) It is also twisted through with Thai mythology of spirits. In the ruined house one day he meets his great-grandmother:

There is an enormous leather armchair in the room. It rocks. It faces away from me. Poking up from behind the chair’s high back is a tuft of silvery hair.

There is someone there. The lightbulb sways. My shadow sways. The cobwebs sway in the wind from the electric fan.

I have seen
Psycho
fifteen times. I have visited the fruitcellar of the Bates house in my dreams. I know what is to be found in leather armchairs in abandoned houses. I feel my heart stop beating.

Will the armchair suddenly whip round to reveal the corpse of Norman Bates’s mother? I step back. My Homeric drapery slides to the floor. “Who is there?” The chair has not moved. The voice is as ancient and as gravelly as the stones of Troy. It speaks in Thai. “Come on, who is it?”

Before I can stop myself I say “It’s me, Norman.”

His great-grandmother is dying, and he is on the verge of growing up. They become friends. She tells him he has a year to find out who and what he is, and the book is the story of that year, the discoveries he makes inside and outside himself, the friends he makes, and the adventures he has.

It’s the books I love best that are the hardest to write about. I don’t want to take one angle on them, I want to dive into them and quote huge chunks and tell you everything about them, and it just isn’t possible.

Jasmine Nights
is written in the first person of a child who lives mostly in his own head but who is just beginning to step outside it. The magic that is interwoven through this story he entirely takes for granted. Justin (it’s his preferred name for himself, though he’s made it up himself) doesn’t quite know what’s real and what isn’t, and neither does the reader. His pet chameleon, Homer, dies, and his great-grandmother tells him that he has to take the spirit of Homer into himself and become like a chameleon. Homer appears in his dreams as Yama, god of death, and later he visits a magician who becomes Homer and continues the conversation from the dream. The magician’s love potions work. All the magic we see unquestionably works—and yet this is one of those books where you’re not entirely sure whether it’s fantasy until the very end. It walks a very subtle line, very cleverly.

Also, it’s laugh-out-loud funny. And it manages to be funny about very serious subjects, like race and sex. It’s very interesting about race, too. S. P. Somtow is himself from Thailand. The book is dedicated to his four grandparents, one of whom was Queen of Siam. Justin is Thai, but his first language is English, his passions are Homer, Asimov, Shakespeare and Hollywood movies. He sees himself as an unmarked inheritor of Western civilization … and he has definitely inherited it. He has to find his Thai identity, like his ability to speak the Thai language. He’s between two cultures, one of them not quite real.

The first two friends he makes are a servant boy, Piak, and an African-American neighbour, Virgil. In Virgil’s treehouse, Virgil announces, they are in America and Piak isn’t a servant. It’s an idealised America, because this is 1963 and in the real America Martin Luther King has only just announced his dream. The race issue that first impinges on Justin isn’t to do with the question of his own race (when he experiences racism against himself it pretty much goes straight over his head because he doesn’t have the context for it) but the question of racism towards Virgil when they interact with white Americans and with a South African. To begin with, Justin and his Thai family have no context for black people. When Virgil says Thais are too superstitious, Justin counters:

“What about you people with your cannibals and your voodoo? You sit around worshipping King Kong for God’s sake! You strangle your wives, too,” I added, learnedly.

He’s perfectly prepared to go on from that naivety to being friends, and fortunately Virgil’s response is to roar with laughter. But when, during a rehearsal for Justin’s play about the fall of Troy the South African and the European-American try to lynch Virgil, Justin comes to a consciousness of race, and of race in the context of Western culture which is all the more clearly seen against the background of Thailand. His solution is to write a play about Orpheus that will reconcile everyone. But it takes Kennedy’s death to make Justin’s dream of having all the boys in the treehouse come true. And Somtow sees that this is a limited dream, that the girls (white, black and Thai) are left out, and the climax of the book concerns them.

Jasmine Nights
seems pretty thoroughly out of print, but fairly easily available used. I’d love to see it in print again, but in the meantime do seek it out. Somtow has written lots of books, some horror, some SF, some fantastical. My favourite of his other books is
The Shattered Horse
(1986), a sequel to Homer. If you’re new to his work, the collection
Dragon’s Fin Soup
(1998) seems to be available. The short story “Dragon’s Fin Soup” is just brilliant. I keep hoping one of his books will be a big bestseller and all his older books will come back into print so I can recommend them in good conscience. Meanwhile, he’s the director of the Bangkok Opera, which seems entirely appropriate.

MARCH 18, 2009

31.
Lots of reasons to love these: Daniel Abraham’s Long Price books

Last August I asked for suggestions for different cool fantasy that I ought to be reading, and I’d like to thank everyone who recommended Daniel Abraham to me. Wow, these are good books. And they’re a perfect example of what I wanted—they look like generic fantasy books, but they just happen to be brilliant. They are
A Shadow in Summer
(2006),
A Betrayal in Winter
(2007),
An Autumn War
(2008) and the forthcoming
The Price of Spring
(2009).

For those of you who haven’t yet picked them up, I thought I’d point out some things about them that make them different and exciting, with absolutely no spoilers at all.

First, there are four books, and they’re all written. The fourth one won’t be out until July, but I have an ARC right here. It’s written, done, ready to go to press. No interminable waiting.

Also on the “no waiting” front, each of these volumes has unusual amounts of climax and closure. They’re all part of one thing, but each volume has its own story, which is complete in that volume. There’s fifteen years between each book. They’re one evolving story of a people and a world and their problems, and after reading one I definitely wanted the others ASAP, but they don’t end on cliffhangers and they didn’t leave me unsatisfied.

It’s a great world. It borrows things from a lot of different history from around the world, but it doesn’t slavishly imitate any one culture. Also, the magic is totally integrated into the history. It’s more like science fiction in many ways. It’s a consideration of the consequences of having the world work that way. There are poets who can capture “andat,” which are the perfect expression of an abstract idea. For instance there’s one called “Stone-made-soft” who can make stone soft and has made some famous mines. The andat are people, are solid, are characters in the books, but they’re also held in the world by the poet’s constant struggle. They have enormous and very specific powers, and they have an agenda, and they keep their cities safe because the threat of them is enough to stop anyone thinking of attacking them. There was an empire once that had andat and it was destroyed, and what’s left now is a set of cities ruled by Khai. The Khai are allowed to have only three sons (subsequent sons go to train to be poets, few of them make it) and those three sons struggle to kill each other to become Khai. The rest of the world, lacking andat, look on jealously.

There’s no struggle between good and evil. There are good points on both sides. Good people do terrible things for what seem like sensible reasons, and live with the consequences. Good people become awful people. Awful people do good things. People compromise. People change. The issues are really murky and some people are really twisty. Oh, and while we’re talking about people—there are terrific female characters in a world where women have to make more effort to achieve things. There are also very different female characters, and very different male characters too. The characterisation generally is such a strength, I almost didn’t mention it. Great characters.

The world keeps expanding as the books go on and actions have consequences, but there’s no retconning. Things that are throwaway mentions in
A Shadow in Summer
are seen to have great significance later. The plot and worldbuilding and history are rock solid. I hate it when I can’t trust that kind of thing, it’s like leaning on a wall and the house falls over. Here I feel I really can. The technology and the magic and all the details of how the world works make sense and integrate.

This may seem like a strange thing to say, but these are post-9/11 fantasy. I’ve read post-9/11 SF already, but this is the first fantasy that had that feel for me. I don’t mean they have allegory, or even applicability. They’re their own thing, not a shadow-play of our world. But they have that sensibility, in the same way that Tolkien was writing about Dark Lords in the shadow of Hitler and Stalin and Marion Zimmer Bradley was writing about Free Amazons during the seventies upswell of feminism. This may eventually make them seem dated, or very much of this time. But right now is this time, and I found this aspect of them interesting to observe.

They’re rattling good stories of the kind that are easy to sink into and pull over your head. I dreamed about that world every night while I was reading them. If fantasy is Tolkien’s “history, true or feigned,” here’s some really solid feigned history of just the sort I like best. I wanted to know what happened. I wanted to keep reading them through meals. I’m sorry to have come to the end of them and I know I’ll be re-reading them before too long. I’ll let you know more about them when that happens, and my considered reflections on them. For the time being, if you like fantasy at all you almost certainly want to read these.

Thank you again for recommending them to me.

MARCH 24, 2009

32.
Maori Fantasy: Keri Hulme’s
The Bone People

Keri Hulme has, according to the little piece about the author, “Maori, Scottish and English ancestry” and has always lived in New Zealand.
The Bone People
(1985) is a book rooted in the physical locations of rural littoral New Zealand and in the mythological and folk traditions of the Maori people. The very specificity of the places and details make the magic, when you get to it, feel real and rooted and entirely believable. This is above everything a story about a colonised people getting their spirit back, and getting it back in a way that is itself uniquely theirs but does not exclude. In Hulme’s vision of cultural renewal, the New Zealanders of European (“Pakeha”) origin are included as also belonging now to the land. The book takes you slowly into the heart of it and it takes you spiralling out again. This is a story about three people, and in their three points of view, the part-Maori woman Kerewin who is an artist who is blocked, the Maori man Joseph who has wanted so much and failed at everything, and the mute child Simon, who is all European and who washed up on the shore from a wreck. Terrible things happen to them, and wonderful things, and things that are very hard to read about.

The Bone People
is a wonderful book, and one it’s definitely a lot more fun to re-read than it was to read for the first time. There’s a lot in the book that’s very disturbing, and there’s one passage that in many re-reads I’ve never seen without tears coming between me and the words. It’s a story where halfway through the first time I almost felt I couldn’t go on, except that I had to, and yet knowing the well-earned ending it has, over time, become a comfort read for me. The present edition says it was the most successful book in New Zealand’s publishing history. It won the prestigious Booker Prize sometime in the mid-eighties, and the award did its job by attracting a lot of attention to the book, including mine. I first read a library copy (on a train to Skegness) and then I bought a new paperback, and then I read my paperback to death and I’ve recently replaced it with another paperback. I love it. I love the fish and the food and the magic, I love the people, I’ve read it so often that I can read the Maori phrases without looking at the translations at the back, and yet the only way I can get through the book is knowing that in the end there is redemption. I think Hulme knew that, because she put the end at the beginning, just as a little incomprehensible prologue, to let you know they come through.

I think this is a book most people would really enjoy. There’s the unusual perspective, the interesting culture, the deep-rooted magic, the wonderful end, but I have to say it isn’t an easy book. Joseph Gillayley drinks and beats his foster son, Simon. And yet he loves him, and Simon loves Joe, and Kerewin thinks at one point, “What kind of love is it that has violence as a silent partner?” and that’s what the book goes into, in more detail than you might be able to take. It does not romanticise the situation or shy away from it. Terrible things happen to Simon, but the worst of them for him is that he loses his home. The hardest thing to read is not Simon being hurt but Joe hurting him. Getting into the point of view of a man beating a child, understanding where that comes from is a major writing achievement, and deeply upsetting.