I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
More numerous of Windows—
Superior—for Doors—
Of Chambers as the Cedars—
Impregnable of Eye—
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky—
Of Visitors—the fairest—
For Occupation—This—
The spreading wide of narrow Hands
To gather Paradise—
Emily Dickinson
Fathom, by Cherie Priest, Tor Books, 2008
If Sam squinted, he could make out a shape at the top of the steeple; but it was difficult to identify. He was just concluding that it was the strangest rendering of the Virgin Mary he’d ever seen when the front door creaked open and a tall, gray-haired man emerged.
Fathom (p 148)
Summer’s coming, and it’s time for those summertime reads. You know the ones—the big splashy adventure books, perfect for a few hours out on the deck, in the folding chair on the camping trip, or on a towel by the pool or at the beach.
May I recommend Fathom, by Cherie Priest? Oh, wait, perhaps Fathom is not the perfect book for the beach or the pool, since the antagonist is a powerful water elemental determined to destroy life as we know it on this planet. Arahab, the water witch, can manifest wherever there is standing or running water, so maybe this isn’t the perfect beach or poolside book.
The point of inspiration for Priest is the Bok Singing Tower, an actual Florida landmark in Lake Wales, set atop the state’s one, 243-foot mountain. She sets the book in the 1930s, and follows two female cousins. Aside from the bloodline, and missing fathers, the two young women have little in common. Nia comes from poverty, working with her mother and grandmother in the family orange grove. Bernice, wealthy and spoiled, grew up in New York and has only recently returned to Anna Maria Island in southern Florida.
The women come to Arahab’s attention in a dramatic manner, and she offers them power and immortality. One accepts and one rejects the elder god’s offer, setting the stage for the inevitable confrontation.
Arahab intends to waken the Leviathan, another elder god who slumbers. She needs a human agent to do this. She recreates Bernice as a companion and partner for her earlier minion, a sixteenth century pirate named Gaspar. Once before, Gaspar tried and failed to rouse the Leviathan. When they are paired, Arahab sends them on a mission, which at first seems to be merely to wreak havoc at a Tampa street festival, the Gasparilla, a mocking homage to the pirate himself.
Nia, meanwhile, is enveloped in rock for four years. During this time she is conscious, in some way, and counseled by a strange entity that might—or might not—have humanity’s interests at heart. We have met this demi-deity before, at the beginning of the book, when he persuades a wealthy eccentric named Edward to build a carillon bell-tower in the center of the state.
Sam, a fire inspector and regular guy, gets dragged into the action. He runs afoul of the island’s cult of Arahab worshippers, and is forced to go on the run with Nia, who has emerged from her stone cocoon.
The relationships of the elder gods are lightly sketched rather than fully developed, (or maybe I just missed them). I can’t tell if Leviathan is the father of the Arahab and the others, the first-born, or just Arahab’s favorite sibling. I also can’t tell if he’s a water god (Leviathan, yes, surely?) or an earth god. The gods seem drawn from equal parts Greek mythology and H.P. Lovecraft. The demigod who mentors Nia clearly has a history with Arahab, and it’s not a good one. They have issues.
In a similar way, the relationship between Gaspar and Bernice is done in short-hand rather than fleshed out. Gaspar thinks that he loves her because she is “wicked and wild” but there’s no emotional spark between the two, so it’s odd that he agrees to her mad scheme near the end. This is not serious flaw in the book though, because the crucial relationship is between Bernice and Nia.
Once we get past a few clunky plot points at the beginning, the book takes off. It feels like we’re riding on Sam’s shoulder as he explores the history of the strange statue he’s found, meets the duplicitous pastor Henry, and makes a run for the ferry landing, statue in tow, in an abandoned fire truck.
Priest’s prose is crisp, descriptive when it needs to be without being prettied up with curlicues and furbelows. The dialogue and rhythm of speech conjures up the south. Her use of detail paints the landscape perfectly, like here: “. . .a puddle pooled beneath it, and sparrows took the opportunity to bathe themselves, flipping their wings and splashing happily. A tin tub filled with water held stalks of sugarcane, submerged by a screen to keep the flies off them. Two little boys poked at the screen.”(p 147) When the action moves to the mysterious tower, Priest creates a landscape filled with beauty, strangeness and ghosts.
While the place is exquisitely limned, the time isn’t. The book is set in the 1930s yet the impact of the Great Depression is not addressed. Clothing, slang, street scenes—nothing stands out as uniquely 1930s. She uses President Coolidge’s dedication of the Bok Tower to timestamp the book but the period does not infuse the story the way Priest’s “clockwork century” infuses Boneshaker.
I have a final quibble. Arahab is a water witch. Several human characters complain about the oppressive humidity, yet Arahab cannot command the water in the air to coalesce and help her manifest. Why not? This is not a criticism, just a question.
Anyway, I recommend Fathom. Just put it down at least an hour before you go into the water.
The Glister, by John Burnside, Anchor Books, 2009
“. . . They should pull everything down and start over, maybe in shacks or mud huts, so that people could learn how to live again, instead of just watching TV all the time and letting their kids run wild. They should move people farther along the coast and teach them to fish, give them little plots of land to look after, little allotments, and some tools and a few bags of seed, and they should leave them for a generation, learning how to live, and how to teach their children. It wouldn’t take any more than that. In one generation they would have new homes, new skills, new stories. They could start moving out from there, a few at a time, moving out into the world to teach others, beautiful nomads, moving from place to place, making it good to be alive again.” (p 213)
You’re in a strange place, maybe on a business trip, maybe a vacation. You stop at a yard sale or a small antique shop, and you find a box. It’s a nice box, sleek, compact. Maybe there is a fancy etching on the top, or perhaps the plain polished wood is satiny smooth under your fingertips. Inside, you find a set of components, nestled into velvet the color of cognac. The components are all different shapes, made from different materials. Some look like blown glass and shimmer with all the shades of the rainbow. Others gleam with brass and copper. Some look like carved ancient wood, or bone, and some glow like gemstones.
You’ve found boxes like these before and you love assembling the components into the larger shape they comprise. You buy this one and carry it home. As soon as you have some time, you remove the pieces one by one and try to fit them together. Some pieces have grooves, others tongues. Some have tabs, some notches. They ought to fit together. With other boxes, the pieces have fit together, forming a larger sculpture or device; clockwork, or glass, utilitarian or fanciful. Try as you might, though, you can’t get these pieces to connect. You check the box, sure that there’s a piece missing, but there isn’t. You even pry up the velvet lining in the hope that there will be instructions, or a key, something, but there is nothing.
After a while, you reluctantly conclude that these elements do not connect to each other, they do not merge into a bigger coherent shape. They look nice in their velvet nests, but they are not part of a greater whole.
This is what reading The Glister, by John Burnside, is like.
Burnside is a master stylist. It is completely intentional that the title makes you think simultaneously of “glisten” and “blister.” Open the book almost anywhere, at random, and you will fall headfirst into rich, vivid prose, whether it is the description of the poison wood, of the morally compromised constable’s garden of atonement, or of the kitchen in the house where Leonard, a bitter fifteen year old boy, lives. Burnside’s concept of the “chemical plant” that has blighted the land is exquisitely rendered. The voices of Leonard and the constable, Morrison, are pitch-perfect.
Burnside has a strange and wonderful idea here, and when he is merely exploring that; describing the ruins of the chemical plant, cataloguing the many symptoms; physical, psychological, and spiritual, that the townspeople face; and even inventing the strangely mutated (or perhaps alien?) animals that inhabit the poison wood, the book is compelling. It is the plot elements that trip him up. He sets up a fine horror mystery with the death of a teenaged boy in the opening pages, and tells us that every two years or so another boy—a boy about Leonard’s age—goes missing. Missing is not the same as dead, and one overarching mystery about the book is why people do not leave this poisoned town and its poisoned land. There is a hint that they can’t. Are the boys, then, finding a way out? Or is it more sinister than that?
Perhaps there is a mortal agent taking the boys. Perhaps there is a supernatural element at work. Perhaps it’s both. Instead of sprinkling the breadcrumbs for the reader to follow, Burnside prefers to explore the tainted lives of other people in the village of Innertown (the wealthy homes on the hill, presumably above the poison, are called Outertown. Great economy.). The book crackles with energy when Leonard reminisces about his loved/hated mother, who left them when his father got sick, or when he gets entangled with one of the local gangs of kids, or when he visits the old plant by himself. It is bland when we are forced to spend time in the head of Morrison’s mentally ill wife, for example.
Burnside drifts from one plot element to another; the disappearances, the deterioration of Leonard’s dad; the gang; and then brings everything back to the plant and wraps it up with a series of explanations and a dramatic, if ambiguous, ending. Plainly he had some idea where he was headed the whole time, but he does not connect his ending to the previous events in the novel. Plots points are dropped or just fade away. There is an act of violence against the town loner. Where are the consequences of that act? How does it tie into Leonard’s final realization and his visit to the heart of the plant? How does what happens to Morrison provide balance for what we’ve known about him from the first pages? And what does it mean for Alice, his wife? Where did Elspeth go? Was she killed? Did she hitch-hike out of town? The connections in the book are dream-connections; the connections of image and theme, very much in the literary tradition, and they make, ultimately, for disappointing story-telling.
After I finished the novel, I made a guess that John Burnside was a poet and a new novelist. I was half right. He is an award winning poet, and that side of him shows here. He has published two other novels. He seems to approach a novel the way a master cabinet-maker might decide to build a house. Cabinet makers work with wood better than anyone; they understand seams and joins. They don’t always understand load-bearing walls, the importance of a foundation, or cutting a roof.
I am drawn by the dark, frightening and seductive concept of the “the Glister.” This idea might have played out better as a series of connected short stories.
Where I work, there’s a signal that gets used in the women’s restroom whenever one of the paper towel dispensers runs out of paper. A scrap of paper towel (presumably the last scrap) is stuck on to the handle of the dispenser. It’s been this way for twenty years at least, and everyone, even the janitorial staff, knows its meaning. It makes sense; it’s not like you’re necessarily going to have a notepad and a pen with which to write a note. This evolved organically; there’s no section in the department manual or memo on our intranet about it. Believe me, I’d know.
The other day I went into to restroom and saw that on the door of the far stall, a scrap of paper towel had been tucked into the door. I looked at it for a couple of seconds. I mean, the stall doesn’t have a towel dispenser. Unless this is a way to let us know that there is no toilet paper.
Aha!
This is the quote I originally planned to use, from Endless Things:
“. . . For readers, time in a novel goes only one way; the past told of in the turned pages is fixed, and the future, nonexistent till read. But actually the writer, like God, stands outside of time, and can begin his creation at any moment in it. All the past and all the future are present in his conception at once, nothing fixed until all of it’s fixed. Then he keeps this secret from the reader, as God might keep his secret from us: that the world is as though written, and erasable, and rewritable. Not once but more than once; time and again.
” Which isn’t so, of course; which isn’t so. Only in here.” (p 190)
After the farmers’ market I stopped at Milk and Honey, the goddess store. Yes, the town has a goddess store. What can I say? In an earlier post I mentioned that they were going to start serving tea and coffee and expressed some skepticism about it. Apparently my pattern is to publicly express skepticism, and then go check it out, because this weekend was the grand opening of the “elixir café” and I stopped by.
They serve tea, coffee, chocolate, coffee drinks and a series of elixirs that have gemstone and various herb essences in them. I’ve seen the brand around town in a few places and never tried them, and didn’t try them today. One of the choices has kava in it, but Milk and Honey doesn’t offer that. Oh, they also serve milk and honey! Clever, and somewhat intriguing.
I ordered a small lavender hot chocolate (the sizes are Maiden, Mother and Crone, the barista/clerk showed me, grinning). I ordered Maiden size. I had my choice of organic whole milk or coconut milk, because the owners believe that soy milk is not the best for you. That was interesting. I tried the coconut milk. I have to say it was a pretty good drink. The lavender was an after-note, which was good, and conjured the impression of drinking chocolate while sitting in a spring meadow. The coconut milk makes the beverage lighter and less rich than dairy milk does, and since I had consumed a mocha drink about half an hour earlier, that was a good choice. There wasn’t a strong coconut flavor. Overall, I liked it. I like what they’ve done with the space. I asked the counter person how the grand opening had gone and she said they had over 100 people for the event on Friday, and so far business had been flourishing if not actually booming.
While I was waiting for my drink I read the bulletin board and came across a flier for “Feminist Witchcraft in the Dianic Tradition.” The flier was nicely laid out with a photo of a bronze statue of Diana with her bow in the center. I read down past the picture and came to this:
“. . .classes are open to all women-born-women.”
Wow. I said, “That’s interesting.” Apparently, that is the goddess-y way of saying “No transsexuals.”
My server asked what was interesting and I read her the sentence. She nodded. “You know what that’s about, right?”
Right, no transsexuals.
She said, seriously but not defensively, “Some women don’t feel safe in a space with men, even men who have changed, especially if they’re pre-op and still have their penises. So you’ll see woman-themed events that say women-born-women. It’s to create a safe space, but then, where’s the tolerance?”
“That’s what I was wondering.”
She said that at the annual women’s music festival in Michigan (I think), they had decided to limit attendance to women-born-women, and there had been an outcry from the trans population.
They came to a compromise; the transsexuals have an encampment outside the festival, and there is a day when they have a parade through the festival grounds. This way they get to participate but are separate and apart from women-born-women.
Yeah. . . because that’s always worked out so well. Who were those people, back in the medieval days, who were allowed to live in the city but were made to be “separate and apart?” Oh, yeah. The Jews. And in more recent, North American history, separate-but-equal ended up being only one of those things.
On the other hand, I know that many women have been wounded—and not only in an emotional or metaphorical sense—by men, and turn to Wicca or witchcraft as a way to find healing and empowerment. It’s important to have a safe place where you are not confronted by the people who are like the people who hurt you. Then how do we ever get to inclusion?
I guess the answer is that for many of us, the basis for prejudice is fear. When we move beyond fear, maybe we can move beyond exclusion. I don’t know.
This quote came from a Huffington Post article about the Goldman Sachs thing. Do they mean you shouldn’t sell products that you know will fail, or that you shouldn’t sell to investors you know will fail? You be the judge.
“Knowingly selling junk to investors that you’re expecting to go bust is fraud.”
I have a hybrid Toyota Camry. I really like it. I like the gas mileage and how little I spend in a month for fuel. I like gliding through a parking lot like a silent silver shark. I like knowing that when I’m stuck in gridlock I’m not polluting. I like how the car handles and how it feels.
Unfortunately, according to both the news outlets and my Toyota dealership, my Camry was a Car of Death. The campaign (none dare call them recall) notice advised me that apparently my floor mats, which had seemed so helpful and humble, were in reality vicious entities ready to attack my accelerator pedal at any time and send me hurtling into oncoming traffic. I took my car in for the fix last week.
A nice dealership employee I’ll call Carl (his name wasn’t Carl) took my key and printed out the paperwork I needed to initial and sign. He explained that the process took about 45 minutes, acknowledged that I had an appointment but explained that because there were cars ahead of me they would probably need the car for most of the morning. This wasn’t any different from what I’d been told when I made the appointment. They offered me a shuttle ride and I asked if they could drop me off downtown.
I said, “Carl, isn’t it pretty obvious that these problems are not mechanical? They’re in the computers, right? Isn’t that what everyone thinks?”
Oh, my gosh. That got a reaction.
Carl’s responses reminded me of the Defcon levels, and he cycled through the responses with alacrity.
Level One Response: Denial. “No. It’s not the electronics. No, no,no.”
Level Two Response: Experts Say. “Some experts say that Toyota is a scapegoat, because everyone used this technology.” (I don’t know which experts, but I do believe that most American car companies are using Toyota’s technology.)
Level Three Response: User Error. “A lot of these incidents are user error,” he said. “They are.” I could only conclude that he had seen my facial expression change. I hate “user error” as an excuse. Carl’s own face turned faintly pink. “People hit the wrong pedal. They do it all the time. All the time. That guy in the Prius, he admitted it. And the family who was killed—well, no one knows what caused that one.”
Level Four Response: Dealership Error. In some cases, in some cars, the dealership installed the wrong floor mats, leading to, and here I quote, “Floor mat accelerator pedal entanglement.” He said, “I had a guy in here, he put a Welcome mat on the floor. A Welcome mat! Two inches thick!” Okay, I could see how that might lead to, um, “Floor mat accelerator pedal entrapment.”
Level Five Response: It just can’t happen. We spiraled all the way back to denial. “It can’t happen. It’s designed so if something goes wrong the car would stop before it would accelerate. It would have to. It can’t do what they’re saying it does.”
“Why not?”
“Because there are two frequencies, separate frequencies, two separate frequencies and both frequencies have to interact and—and if one didn’t the car would stop before it would accelerate.”
I forebore to state the obvious; it would stop if the technology were working.
He said he’d heard they were thinking the problem was cosmic radiation. I asked if he were joking, and he said he was not. Since then I have heard that one proposed theory is the impact of solar flares.
A couple of things were immediately clear. The first thing was that these campaigns were personal to Carl. Plainly he doesn’t work at Toyota just for a paycheck. He’s loyal, proud of his vehicles and he’s personally affronted by this whole business.
It’s also clear that there has been a lot of discussion about this issue—and I don’t mean on-break or water cooler discussion. Obviously, Carl has been to more than one meeting—and obviously, talking points have been distributed.
The most important thing I learned was that Carl has no idea what is causing the problem.
I still like my car. I still trust my car. I admire loyalty, so I feel sorry for Carl, struggling to defend something he’d proud of, when deep down inside he knows something’s wrong. And something is wrong. We just don’t know what.
Someone at work asked me what John Crowley’s Aegypt quartet was about, and I gave the answer I’ve always given, no matter where I was in the cycle. I said, “I have no idea what these books are about. I love them, but I have no idea.”
I decided I’m being a little hard on myself. I do know some things the books are about. Here’s a short list.
Astrology, alchemy, angels; books, bible stories; Catholicism, clockwork, colleges, cults; demons, dementia, dominance games; Egypt, epilepsy; fathers, family, fear, failure; Gnosticism, gypsies, ghosts, Giordano Bruno; humanity, history; imagination, isolation, illusion; jesters, Jews, John Dee; knowledge; love, lies, loneliness; magic, mysteries, manipulation; nature, numinous places; oracles, old gods, origin myths; Prague, passages, poison rings; questions, quests; Rome, Romania, revelations; sex, secrets, seekers, sheep; time, thresholds, the end of the world; underworlds, unfinished works; via negativa; wizards, worlds within worlds, women named Rose; xenogenesis; youth, yearning; zealots.
