Some more books I have read recently

‘Black Sun’ by Rebecca Roanhorse

A fantasy novel, set in a region known as the Meridian. There are three strands of story, all leading up to the Tovan day of ‘convergence’, a coinciding of the winter solstice with a solar eclipse.

Strand 1: in the Obregi Mountains

The story opens on a scene between a twelve-year-old boy, Serapio, and his mother Saaya. After making him drink some poison to serve as a painkiller, Serapio’s mother carves an image of a crow on him, sews his eyes shut and then jumps to her death. So far, so normal. We later revisit Serapio a few times, as he grows up in more-or-less isolation with crows as his constant companions, aside from a series of “tutors” he is sent, who teach him various skills (before he kills them). To compensate for being blind, Serapio has a supply of a drug (“star pollen”) which enables him to throw his mind into a nearby crow and see things via the crow's eyes (“farseeing”). We learn that Serapio’s mother and some loony associates have used Serapio as a vessel for the crow god, to exact vengeance for the Tovan Watchers’ (we’ll get to them) past wrongs. Serapio’s destiny is to be the “Odo Sedoh”, the Crow God reborn.

Strand 2: in the city of Cuecola, and afterwards on the Crescent Sea

We meet Xiala, a sea captain who is in jail after a night of heavy drinking. Xiala is Teek, but has been driven out of her Teek homeland. Xiala is tasked by a Lord Balam with ferrying a human cargo across the Crescent Sea to Tova in time for Convergence. The human cargo turns out to be Serapio, who needs to be transported to Tova for a confrontation with the Sun Priest (see below) on the Day of Convergence. The Teek, seemingly an all-female race, have some sort of special affinity with the sea: Xiala can control the sea with her Song, and swimming below a certain depth to try to rescue a member of her crew triggers her to briefly change into a mermaid, to the consternation of the crew, who lock her up and plot to kill her. Thankfully Serapio’s on hand and gets his crows to gorily slaughter them all. Continuing the remainder of their journey together, Xiala and Serapio become fond of one another.

Strand 3: in the holy city of Tova

In Tova’s celestial tower dwells the Priesthood of Watchers. Tova is a strictly hierarchical society, divided between the four Sky Made clans (the nobs) and the Dry Earth folks (the peasants). Within the Watchers, there are four priestly societies. The current Sun Priest – i.e. head – is Naranpa. The previous Sun Priest named Naranpa as his successor, but her humble Dry Earth origins mean that she was a controversial choice; to add to that, Naranpa has made some reforms that are unpopular with traditionalists. The Sky Made clans hold civil power in Tova and the priesthood is facing a challenge to stay on top. Additionally, Naranpa is fighting a direct challenge to her authority by Abah, one of the other priests. There are also ongoing rumblings of discontent in the district of Odo, the home of clan Carrion Crow. Clan Carrion Crow were subjected a while back to a brutal killing rampage – the “Night of Knives” – ordered by a former Sun Priest, to deal with emerging heresy and worship of the Carrion Crow’s old god. A cult – the Odohaa – has grown up centred around the prospect of the Crow God returning.

It took me a few chapters to engage with this – probably standard with fantasy novels where the reader not only has the cast of characters but also whole slews of made-up city and country names to deal with, plus whatever else the author throws in. However, once into it I did enjoy it. The ending left more loose ends than I’d been expecting and had the distinct air of being set up for a sequel – at which point I discovered that Black Sun is, in fact, the first of a trilogy. I may be sucked in to reading the next one, which apparently is called Fevered Star.

Even allowing for its being the first in a trilogy, there were some frustrating things left unresolved at the end, a few too many for fairness given that some readers would be intending to read Black Sun as a one-off. Examples: we never discover who murdered the Carrion Crow “matron” Yatliza or who made the first assassination attempt on Naranpa’s life, beyond its being implied that it was not, in fact, anyone from the Carrion Crow clan. Also, even though Serapio was supposed to have died in the course of exacting his revenge, he seems not to have done. As Serapio is a bit of a disaster area, albeit through not much fault of his own, it struck me it would be better if he had done.

Black Sun was published in 2020. The Wikipedia entry on Rebecca Roanhorse currently has a lot of detail around the reception of her first novel Trail of Lightning, as well as information on Roanhorse's background.

The quote on the front cover from a Ken Liu ‘Roanhorse is the epic voice of our continent and time” fits in well with the tradition of fulsomely OTT cover quotes.

‘Cover Her Face’ by P D James

PD James' first detective novel, introducing the recurring character of Adam Dalgleish.

The story is set in and around an English country house, Martingale, in the village of Chadfleet. Martingale is the home of the Maxie family: Simon, a bedridden invalid (it’s not really clear what’s wrong with him); his wife Eleanor; their grown-up children Stephen, a “rising young surgeon” at a London hospital and Deborah, widowed (I don’t think it’s made clear what she does for a living, if anything). Additionally, there are family friends and weekend guests Catherine Bowers (a nurse; holding a candle for Stephen Maxie) and Felix Hearne (war hero, now part of a publishing company, fighting inner demons, keen on Deborah). Also in the household are Martha Bultitaft, cook and general housekeeper-type, and Sally Jupp, newly-arrived house-parlourmaid, an unmarried mother until recently resident at St Mary’s Refuge for Girls.

The annual fête is held at Martingale and the following morning Sally Jupp is discovered dead in her bed, apparently by strangulation, though it quickly becomes evident that some sort of sedative had additionally been slipped into her nightly cocoa. Her bedroom door was bolted from the inside and it seems as though the killer must have escaped out of the window (fictional killers, and fictional people in general, being implausibly adept at climbing out of upper-storey windows and nimbly making their way to the ground with the help of drainpipes and ivy, as opposed to the undignified slipping, cursing and breaking of ankles that would seem more likely in reality). Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgleish duly turns up, plus a lower-rank colleague, to investigate the crime. (As in The Private Patient, the other of James’ novels I’ve read thus far, it’s never made clear why The Yard has been called in over the local constabulary; there’s at least a hint of a suggestion in the PP that it was because the victim was reasonably well known, but there’s nothing in the murder of Sally Jupp that would equate.)

The person who eventually turns out to have done it was probably the one we as the reader had learned least about as they blended into the background rather. I suppose they had certainly been provoked though going to the lengths of killing seems a bit far-fetched – though it is held to have been a sudden and unpremeditated attack. I felt that there were other characters who would have been more plausible killers. The sedative turns out to have been unconnected with the murder; turns out Martha had been slipping it into Sally’s nightly cocoa so that Sally would persistently oversleep and thereby get herself into trouble.

The bit at the end, where an off-duty Dalgleish decides to take a diversion through Chadfleet on a drive home to London, in doing so encountering Deborah Riscoe and offering her a lift home to Martingale, seems a bit odd. AD’s feelings for Deborah? “he knew with sudden and heart-lifting certainty that they would meet again”. Did they? I guess I’d have to read more of the AD series to know whether this is followed up.

It’s a pretty good story and proved a good holiday read. It’s not too bad in terms of tying up the various potential red herrings and loose ends. One possible inconsistency that bugged me was that I was sure there had been a suggestion at one point that the way the strangulation had been carried out indicated that the murderer knew what they were doing, something that seems implausible given the identity of the killer - but I gave up trying to find the page I'd seen this on.

Cover Her Face was first published in 1962. My copy was the Sphere Books Ltd 1970s re-issue. The unpleasant cover art has no connection with the story; Sally dies through strangulation and the telephone plays no significant part in the story. The first edition cover, shown on the Wikipedia page, is clearly meant as an image of Sally Jupp and makes more sense in terms of connection with the story.

‘The Vegetarian’ by Han Kang

Korean novel that won the International Booker Prize (or the Man Booker International Prize, as it was then) in 2016. Even though I complacently consider myself reasonably bright, knowing in advance that a novel has won a major literary prize doesn’t necessarily fill me with optimism as to its likely readability, but I was encouraged by this one being blessedly short, at less than 200 pages.

The Vegetarian is centred on a woman, Yeong-hye, whose sudden decision to become vegetarian (vegan, in fact, though I don’t think the term is used) is the catalyst for the rest of the events in the novel. The story is divided into three parts: the first is told from the perspective of Yeong-hye’s husband, “Mr Cheong”, the second from that of her unnamed brother-in-law and the third from that of her long-suffering older sister In-hye. The story narrates Yeong-hye’s descent into ever more severe mental illness.

In Part 1, The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye’s husband wakes up one morning to find his wife throwing all the meat in the house into rubbish bags. She will give no explanation other than saying “I had a dream”. Short, italicized passages from Yeong-hye’s perspective relate the dreams she is having, disturbing dreams filled with blood and violence. She develops the idea that there is a lump in her stomach, caused by all the meat she’s eaten: “Because of meat. I ate too much meat. The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there.” At a strained family lunch, Yeong-hye is given a general berating by her whole family, and her father attempts to force-feed her, resulting in her slitting her wrist in front of the family. She is admitted to a psychiatric facility, where she spends several months.

In Part 2, Mongolian Mark, it’s two years later. We learn that Yeong-hye's husband, Mr Cheong, has divorced her, deciding that his wife will never be normal again. In-hye’s husband, an occasional artist, has come to fancy Yeong-hye more than his wife, and this grows into an obsession with her after learning from his wife that Yeong-hye may still have a birthmark – a “Mongolian mark” – somewhere in the region of her buttocks. This develops in his mind into an image of an entwined couple with their bodies covered in painted flowers, and he becomes fixated on recreating this image in video art. Unknown to his wife, he asks Yeong-hye if he can paint her naked body and film himself doing it. This spirals a bit and leads to him painting himself and filming himself having sex with her. Unfortunately, In-hye discovers the tape and has them both committed to a mental hospital.

Part 3, Flaming Trees, is set a year later than Part 2. Yeong-hye is now resident in a psychiatric facility, somewhere in the mountains. She would seem to have been diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia. Only In-hye visits her. All of In-hye’s family seem to have abandoned Yeong-hye following the “scandal” (presumably meaning the sex tape with her brother-in-law and its aftermath) and her sister alone cares for her. In-hye’s husband has left her. It becomes apparent that In-hye, like Yeong-hye, is suppressing a lot of anger (and emotion more generally). In-hye (no doubt, because she was the eldest daughter and didn’t have the option of falling apart) instead chose the path of working hard to appear the perfect working woman, wife and mother. Is In-hye’s extremely mild rebellion of “abandoning” her son in their apartment for a few hours while she wanders into the forest, supposed to signal that she could go the same way as her sister, if it weren’t for her self-control?

Verdict? Interesting, and also: huh? In-hye is the most sympathetic character in the novel, by some margin. Of the two men, I did have a certain amount of sympathy for Yeong-hye’s husband; not so much for her brother-in-law although he seems intended to appear the more sympathetic character of the two. Reading the book, I was expecting part of it, probably the last part, to be told from the perspective of Yeong-hye herself – but this does not happen. This makes it harder for the reader to gain greater understanding of where Yeong-hye is coming from, and harder to sympathise with her.

So what on earth is wrong with Yeong-hye, and what’s all the tree stuff? In the few glimpses of Yeong-hye’s thoughts in the earlier part of the book, she seems to be thinking that she might harm someone, and there are some suggestions that YH is suppressing violent urges; “on occasion, her eyes would seem to reflect a kind of violence … which she would appear to be struggling to suppress”. There is a suggestion that Yeong-hye showed signs in childhood of being disturbed (“In-hye remembered moments from their childhood when Yeong-hye’s face had worn the same expression as it did now… moments when [her eyes] would narrow and turn completely dark”). In the novel's later stages, Yeong-hye has become dangerously anorexic and appears to have become convinced that she is a tree and can therefore get the nourishment she needs by exposing her naked body to the light. But then, close to the end of the novel, In-hye also seems to have a tree thing (“In-hye hadn’t been able to find a tree that would take her life from her. None of the trees would accept her.”) And the ending? Frankly, who knows.

The Vegetarian was published in 2007, and was translated into English by Deborah Smith.