Some Sunday Distractions

At Strange Horizons, I reviewed Aliya Whiteley’s new novella Greensmith. Whiteley is one of the most fascinating authors working in SFF right now, with stories that combine horror and science fiction in ways that never fail to surprise. Greensmith, which follows a middle-aged bio-librarian as she’s whisked off on a mission to save the Earth by a mysterious stranger, is all this, but it’s also an extremely funny and biting satire, whose pulp sensibility conceals a ruthless skewering of one of science fiction’s most beloved franchises.

From here on out, Greensmith becomes a psychedelic adventure in time and space, with Penelope following Hort to different planets on an intergalactic scavenger hunt, searching for information about the Vice—which is clearly alien in origin—and about the genesis of her father’s project. Along the way, she rubs elbows with revolutionaries, criminals, and space whales. Except not really, because through the same technology with which Hort has created the Penelope neural copy, he can also influence her perceptions. Everything Penelope sees and experiences is filtered through several layers of metaphor. Aliens look to her like flamingos. Place names are translated into the names of Earth plants, like Rampion or Calendula. When she and Hort travel to a prison planet to visit a master-criminal who is also a plant, Penelope perceives him—an elderly, introspective, repentant prisoner—through her vague memories of watching The Shawshank Redemption

I’ve also been writing a lot on my blog. First, I wrote a long piece about my complicated feelings towards Jane Austen’s Emma, and examined three adaptations of it—Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, which celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary earlier this year; Autumn de Wilde’s Emma., the first feature film adaptation of the novel in more than two decades; and Mahesh Rao’s novel Polite Society, which like Clueless retells Emma in a modern setting, this time upper class Indian society. The last one, in particular, gets at a lot of my difficulties with its original novel, specifically its attitude towards class. I highly recommend it.

This is not to say that Polite Society wants us to see Ania as a poor little rich girl. Rather, it constantly gestures at an emptiness to her that explains, at least in part, her frantic attempts to reinvent herself as a matchmaker. Unlike Emma and Cher, Ania lacks a core of goodness that might point her in the right direction, and stop her from seeing others—and especially her social “inferiors”—as toys to be played with. Another way of putting it is that Rao is being more realistic as to how a bored, shallow rich woman with few mental and emotional resources to draw on might choose to spend her time—as when Ania, determined to detach Dimple from Ankit, invites them to one of her parties, plies Ankit with alcohol, and then gets him to make a fool of himself in public. Austen may have said of Emma that she was “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like”, but Rao feels freer to expose Ania at her most monstrous, and to leave us wondering whether we really want her to find a happy ending.

Second, I reviewed The Haunting of Bly Manor, the second installment in Mike Flanagan’s haunted house anthology series. I had extremely mixed reactions to his version of The Haunting of Hill House, and Bly Manor is at once better and worse than that series—it doesn’t reach Hill House‘s heights, but neither does it plumb its depths. Partly this has to do with the fact that I’ve always been more ambivalent about this series’s source material, The Turn of the Screw, than I was towards Shirley Jackson’s Hill House. But in both cases, Flanagan’s approach to the material takes it in a cuddlier, friendlier direction than the original. The results in Bly Manor‘s case are less discordant than Hill House, but also miss out on a lot of interesting things that could have been done with Screw‘s premise.

unlike Hill House, Bly Manor doesn’t start out as one thing and end up as another. Like the novel, Bly Manor opens with a framing story in which a nameless woman (Carla Gugino, one of several Hill House alumni who return here, which is nice enough even if it results in some comically awful fake accents) regales an audience with a ghost story. But here, the audience are assembled on the night before a wedding—hardly a time for tales of religiously tinged child abuse. When we meet our governess—Victoria Pedretti as Dani Clayton, an American teacher who, in 1987, is hired by Lord Henry Wingrave (Henry Thomas) to be an au pair to his orphaned niece and nephew—she is clearly damaged and running away from something, but also plucky and no-nonsense. In her interactions with the children, she strikes a perfect teacherly balance between kindness and firmness, never losing her temper or indulging in sadistic punishments. From the outset, Bly Manor wants us to know that whatever danger lies within the titular house’s walls, it doesn’t come from its main character.

And third, I reviewed Susanna Clarke’s long-awaited second novel Piranesi. I really can’t heap enough praise on this novel, which is exciting and invigorating in a way that few reading experiences manage to be. It also forces one into a reevaluation of Clarke’s career, which until now has seemed defined by the Austen-ian trappings of her debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Piranesi makes it clear that this was merely a costume, one that Clarke can put on and take off at will, always reaching for deeper ideas even if her style is completely different.

Now, however, we have Piranesi, which somehow manages, in a swift, sleek 250 pages that flow like water, to make Strange & Norrell seem like merely a preamble. I have no idea if Clarke is now about to embark on the career we all anticipated in the mid-00s (according to this interview, one reason that it failed to materialize at the time was Clarke’s years-long struggle with illness), but Piranesi demonstrates, if nothing else, that she is an author of far greater breadth of interest and topic than her debut suggested. The two books clearly draw from the same well (more about this later), but they are also entirely different. Where Strange & Norrell was fussy and full of detail, almost clogged up by the self-important, overbearing personalities of its human and fairy characters, Piranesi is full of echoing silences. It is a novel about alone-ness, its narrator moving through cavernous spaces, regarding deep pools of still waters, communing with animals. Its soundscape is the blowing of the wind, the crashing of the waves, and the cries of birds. Strange & Norrell was a book about men trying to overpower their environment (and being overpowered by it in turn). Piranesi is a book about a man becoming one with his.

Finally, over at my tumblr, I’ve been reviewing the recently-concluded second season of The Boys. I reviewed the show week-by-week, but you can probably just read my thoughts on the season finale, which encapsulate my frustration with the show. The Boys continues to be great at worldbuilding, and frustratingly terrible at plotting (or at giving its putative main characters anything to do). I think the reason for this is that it has bitten off more than it can chew—if superheroes are a metaphor for the military-industrial complex and American society’s growing militarism, it will probably take more than a plucky band of criminals to do anything about that. The Boys clearly realizes this, but because it has no option but to keep telling its story, it opts for simplistic solutions that can’t help but ring false—and especially in the most recent season, in which the superhero antagonist represents the US’s flirtation with fascism, and somehow ends up being less scary than the real thing.

The thing is, The Boys has a pretty serious problem. It can’t be a pure superhero story, because that would very quickly expose the hollowness of its critique of superheroes – you can’t mock corporate girl power posturing in episode 3 and then revel in it yourself in episode 8 without revealing how little you actually have to say. But when it tries to be political, it keeps running up against the problem that the ills it uses superheroes to expose – capitalism, racism, militarism, evangelical christianity – are a hell of a lot scarier on their own than the metaphor that’s being used to expose them. 

That’s a thorny problem in its own right, but the show’s response to it is positively glib. Not only does blowing the whistle on Stormfront immediately shut down that entire storyline, but the show then wastes no time in pivoting to set up next season’s story arc, “what if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a supervillain?” The implied equivalence isn’t just galling, it retroactively makes everything that worked about the Stormfront storyline seem shallow and insincere, the show posturing rather than making a genuine political critique.