Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand

A novel that is as messy as the Goddess it portrays.

It's the end of the world, as we know it. Patriarchy has been in the driver's seat for over 3,000 years. The Benandanti, an ancient order of dudes, have been suppressing the goddess ever since. But now the Goddess is back with a vengeance and Kate Sweeney Cassidy is in the middle of a mystic triangle between the two chosen ones who have been bred to combat the coming threat: Oliver Wilde Crawford (an eccentrically brilliant pretty boy) and Angelica di Rienzi, a pre-Raphelite beauty with a ferocious will, trailing a scent of sandlewood and oranges.

While I think the book has some major problems, Hand's writing, subject matter and some of her characters make me want to try more of her work.

The first third of the book is really slow - I had to wade through it. The descriptions of the university and the portentous details slow the story going forward. We also get flashbacks from Magda Kurtz, the catalyst character who sets the wolf amongst the pigeons. Magda's ill-fated expedition is necessary to the story but where it is placed further slows down getting to know Kate, Oliver and Angelica. Add to this that whenever anything mystical/magical happens everything in the real world seems to freeze and you get a very slow pace to the start of the book. The narrative finally does get going, Magda fulfills her purpose and goes on her way, but it takes a damn long time to get going.

I wonder if the first half of the book - 1975 - couldn't have been folded into the second half of the book - 1995. That way Hand could have slowly revealed what had happened in the past and thus prevented readers from guessing what seemed to me to be the obvious fate of one of the characters from 1975. Not to drop any spoilers, but when a mysterious figure shows up in 1995 it was instantly obvious to me that this was a character from 1975. If 1975 events had been slowly mixed with 1995 events it would have made it much harder or at least would have greatly delayed me guessing the 'big reveal' that doesn't happen until the final climax.

The novel's plot centers around a ritual. The problem I often have with mythical stories, a problem I had with 'Waking the Moon', is that I didn't feel like Kate had any vital human choice or action to push the plot forward. In a novel I want the main character to do something. Here it felt like a bad Christmas dinner where your alienated family invites you to dinner to 'act' your part for the feast and then go away again. Kate had her part in the climax, but it felt generic and not particular to her character.

The only reason I know that Kate is the main character is that the book alternates between her first person narration and a third person limited narration that switches between other characters in the book. But Kate's character, while engaging in someways - I like her romance later in the book - is so passive that she needs a first person 'I' to let the reader know she is special.

I really like that Hand uses a thriller structure with a dark Goddess villain to deal with a subject matter that would usually turn readers off: the patriarchal basis of Western culture for the past 3,000 plus years and the return of matriarchal ways. Usually this type of binary thought would be pretty dreadful for a work of fiction, but Hand isn't either/or and in the tradition of true artists wants to chart an individual and messily organic path. Her method doesn't work for the structure but there is lots of good stuff in this brew.

Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

Wow! Now that I've finished the final book (so claimed by Vandermeer) in the Ambergris cycle I'm looking forward to waiting a while and then going back and re-reading all three books at once (this one, City of Saints and Madmen, and Shriek). I'm really all over the place on Finch and have a feeling that I need to jam all three of these mind-altering shrooms into my brain at once now that I know how it ends... If 'ends' is the right word to use. Anyways here are some preliminary notes...

Finch is both a departure and a return in comparison to its two predecessors. Ambergris is an occupied city and title character John Finch is a uneasy collaborator working as a detective for the gray caps, a terrifyingly uncanny fungal race. (Though as with most myths of 'evil' natives, VanderMeer is careful to note that humans, not the gray caps, started the butchery.) While CoS&M was a collage of texts and Shriek was an argument between two writers (brother and sister), Finch is a noir detective novel who's required reading list of clues is in the first two books. (Vandermeer claims the books are independent, but interdependent portals all leading to the same cavern might be more accurate.) The book is a detective novel that by the usual conventions should aim to solve the mystery that VanderMeer has so artfully created behind the many fictional author/characters who quarrel with each other. Yet the book resists a neat resolution, which in the end both disappointed me and made me happy that the author hadn't killed the mysteries that flow through his books like life blood.

The first twenty? pages of the book's choppy noir sentences were a chore for me. I've got a bad history with sentence fragments. A local sports writer decided this was the bees-knees to dramatic reportage. It. Was not. But give VanderMeer a chance. He isn't some naive hack. My advice to anyone who doesn't like the hard-boiled sentence fragments of his prose is to persevere until Finch eats the brain-bulbs. Once you've gone down that rabbit hole, if you still don't like the trip then it might be fair to drop it. For me, the hinge scenes of the bulb visions is where I got the grin, stopped continually noticing the craft and began to imbibe the story.

Some of my disappointment about the end of the novel stem from John Finch being a passive character. This is the danger when an author has created such a vivid and deeply textured world. In the end it feels that John Finch isn't an active agent who's actions effect the plot of the story. He is ultimately just a tool of the world (and the author). At least this is my preliminary report. I re-read the last thirty or so pages of the book trying to pin down what I was feeling. It may be that the first two books in the Ambergris cycle avoided this sense of passiveness because the author-characters did do something: they 'wrote' their texts. In contrast John Finch gets swallowed by Ambergris and then is spat out at the end.

Ah, but John Finch is an author! As a detective he writes reports for the grey caps -- a viable text in VanderMeer's collage. But what happens to Finch's final report? (Flip-flip.) He writes an evasive report, not giving away anything to his gray cap overlords, puts that aside, then writes, in part: "YOU'LL ALL GO DOWN WONDERING HOW IT HAPPENED. I'LL NEVER UNDERSTAND YOU, BUT YOU'LL NEVER UNDERSTAND US, EITHER." Then everything is ripped up and shoved down the ghastly sphincter that the gray caps use for communiques, along with whatever broken shards of refuse Finch can smash and shove down the protesting hole. The more I write about it the more I love that VanderMeer insists on the mutual incomprehensibility of human and gray caps. That feels far more real than the anthropomorphic characters that usual populate our safe and self-satisfied comfort food fantasies. The universe is weird and unknowable. Each one of us is unknowable. These odd marks on paper (and computer screens) are our only clues.

Oh and let me quickly note the amazing grossness of Finch's gun. The drippiest phallic symbol ever inflicted on a noir novel. And that Philip K. Dick moment early on in the novel when I wondered just who the hell John Finch was, and did he even know who he was. It is a tribute to VanderMeer's craft that he could have such a discombobulated POV character and still manage to evoke the complex world of Ambergris.

So despite the difficulties and initial dissatisfactions, it is because of the high level of writing and scope and ambition that I feel compelled to take Finch so seriously and to think about this book far longer than any other book I've read in a while. If you take your fantasy/sf serious, if you want to be challenged and step over the bounds of the mundane, this is a book for you.