La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust - Volume One

My second great read has caused me to rethink a statement I made in an earlier book review.  I wrote that I had little time for 'magical realism' and 'fantasy' writing.  That would be true for a large part of the body of literature in this genre.  But when it is good, really really good, then the genre can enthral and transport the reader into a world of surreality which feels plausible.  So it is with: 

La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust (Volume One) by Philip Pullman
This is a fantasy novel, a prequel, the first volume in a planned trilogy named The Book of Dust. Set around 12 years before the start of His Dark Materials, Pullman's previous trilogy, the story covers the events leading up to Lyra Belacqua's arrival as a six-month-old baby at Jordan College, Oxford. 

Amazon says:  

Malcolm Polstead's Oxford life has been one of routine, ordinary even.

He is happiest playing with his daemon, Asta, in their canoe, La Belle Sauvage. But now as the rain builds, the world around Malcolm and Asta is, it seems, set to become increasingly far from ordinary.

Finding himself linked to a baby by the name of Lyra Belacqua, Malcolm is forced to undertake the challenge of his life and to make a dangerous journey that will change him and Lyra for ever . . .

Setting

The setting is a world dominated by the Magisterium, also commonly called "the Church", an international theocracy which actively suppresses heresy. In this world, humans' souls naturally exist outside of their bodies in the form of sentient "dæmons", in animal form which accompany, aid, and comfort their humans. An important plot device is the alethiometer, or symbol reader, of which just six are known to exist. By setting three of the alethiometer's hands to point to symbols around a dial a skilled practitioner can pose questions, which are answered by the automatic movement around the dial of a fourth hand. 

Interestingly Pullman conceived The Book of Dust before the publication of Lyra's Oxford in 2003, originally as a single volume. Writing was under way by 2005, but by 2011 Pullman said that he was considering splitting the novel into two volumes, one set before His Dark Materials and the other set afterwards. In February 2017, Pullman announced that The Book of Dust had become a 'companion' trilogy.

Reception

The novel received positive reviews. The Guardian described it as "worth the wait", calling it "old-fashioned and comfy". The Independent said that "La Belle Sauvage has the feel of an extended preface; thrillingly entertaining and beautifully written, but ultimately something of an introduction to the story proper we know follows thereafter". The Washington Post was extremely positive, stating that "too few things in our own world are worth a 17-year-wait: The Book of Dust is one of them". The A.V. Club said that "even without the deep well of context of those other books of Dust, La Belle Sauvage stands on its own as a singularly beguiling work of fantasy. It's sure to be devoured by readers young and old alike". 

The New York Times felt the book to be "full of wonder" in spite of some longueurs and long stretches of flat dialogue. While acknowledging that "as a tale of flight and pursuit, it’s altogether enjoyable", The Spectator suggested that Pullman's larger aspiration — 'to see off Christianity' — was an impediment to his storytelling, and that the metaphysical ideas around which the narrative revolves were its least successful part.

Postscript: It is a rare thing these days for reviewers in periodicals to be quite so unanimous in their largely unqualified praise for a book.  After all, a 17-year wait brings huge expectations.  That La Belle Sauvage has proved to be a delight to readers is accolade indeed.

The Night Circus

The Night Circus by Erin Morgernstern

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. The black sign, painted in white letters that hangs upon the gates, reads:

Opens at Nightfall
Closes at Dawn

As the sun disappears beyond the horizon, all over the tents small lights begin to flicker, as though the entirety of the circus is covered in particularly bright fireflies. When the tents are all aglow, sparkling against the night sky, the sign appears.

Le Cirque des Rêves
The Circus of Dreams.

Now the circus is open.
Now you may enter.

The Plot

The Night Circus is a phantasmagorical fairy tale set near an historical Victorian London in a wandering magical circus that is open only from sunset to sunrise. Le Cirque des Rêves, the Circus of Dreams, features such wonders and "ethereal enigmas" as a blooming garden made all of ice, acrobats soaring without a net, and a vertical cloud maze where patrons who get lost simply step off and float gently to the floor. The circus has no set schedule, appearing without warning and leaving without notice; they travel in a train disguised as an ordinary coal transport. A network of devoted fans styling themselves "rêveurs" ("dreamers") develops around the circus; they identify to each other by adding a splash of red to garb that otherwise matches the characteristic black and white of the circus tents. The magical nature of the circus is occluded under the guise of legerdemain - sleight of hand; the illusionist truly transforms her jacket into a raven and the fortune teller truly reads the uncertain future, and both are applauded for their ingenuity.

The circus serves a darker purpose beyond entertainment and profit. The magicians Prospero the Enchanter and the enigmatic Mr. A.H— groom their young proteges, Celia Bowen and Marco Alisdair, to proxy their rivalry with the exhibits as a stage. Prospero teaches his daughter to hone her innate talents by holding ever larger and more complex magical workings in her mind. Celia takes her position on the game board as the illusionist who makes true transformations, adding tents and maintaining wondrous aspects from the inside. Mr. A.H— trains his orphan ward with books in the ways of glyphs and sympathetic magic and illusory worlds that exist only in the mind of the beholder. Marco takes a position as an assistant to the producer of the circus; he works from the outside in, connected to the circus via a magical link to the central bonfire, but not a part of it. The two beguile the circus goers and each other with nightly wonders, soon falling in love despite being magically bound to a deadly competition with rules neither understands.

As the competition continues, both competitors become strained with no sign of a conclusion in sight, nor inclination of how a winner will be determined. Others within the circus start to notice strange events connected to it: the blueprints disappear from the designers' offices, and the performers appear bound to the circus and can never fail, leave permanently, have accidents, or even age. Two children--Poppet and Widget--born to a performer on opening night, have developed magical powers. The producer of the circus has his memories erased, and one of the initial investors is murdered by Mr. A.H- when they begin to discover the underlying truth. When the building tensions between Prospero and A.H- and the jealousy of Marco's ex-girlfriend spurned for Celia result in an innocent "rêveur" being accidentally stabbed in a circus tent, Celia begins to search for a way to end the game as quickly as possible while preserving the circus and those involved with it.

Celia learns from Prospero that the game must continue until one of the participants is unable to go on, which usually means their death. She also learns the circus contortionist, Tsukiko, is not only a magician herself but the winner of a previous contest in which her opponent committed suicide. After Celia and Marco's negotiations with their mentors fail, Tsukiko believes the competition is putting the circus and its members at risk. She plans to magically kill Marco to end the contest, believing him to be less important than Celia because he was not part of the circus. At the last moment, Celia rushes to save him, resulting in both of them being ripped from reality and becoming incorporeal spirits bound to the circus.

With its magical keystones removed, the central bonfire goes out and the circus environment begins to break down. Celia and Marco preserve the circus by magically rebinding Poppet, Widget, and their new friend, a keen circus-goer called Bailey, back to the circus, relighting the fire and bringing back the spirit of the circus.

With Celia and Marco both existing only as ghosts, unable to compete but content to haunt the circus together forever, the contest is declared complete via stalemate with no winner. Poppet and Widget negotiate the release of the remaining circus properties from the former producer and Mr. A.H-, and the book ends with the revelation that Poppet, Widget, Bailey and the circus still exist in the modern day, preserved for a century and more.

What I thought:

As the foregoing outline of the plot conveys, this is a complex tale of magic, circus politics and performer interactions.  Tracing a trail of happenings and events, identifying a story, is not easy.  I  listened to this novel as an audio book.  It might have been more coherent if I had read a print copy but I am not sufficiently engaged to give the time to that.

Orkney

Orkney by Amy Sackville

I saw this book and liked the title, because I have been there, and the cover looked interesting.  It showed promise of things marine, maybe mermaids.  But, what a strange reading experience this was.  Once I got into it and worked out what I thought was 'going on' I read it as one sort of story to find that most other people (reviewers) have taken the narrative, as it were, at face value.

On a remote island in Orkney, a curiously matched couple arrive on their honeymoon. He is an eminent literature professor; she was his pale, enigmatic star pupil as much as forty years his junior.

Alone beneath the shifting skies of this untethered landscape, the professor realises how little he knows about his new bride and yet, as the days go by and his mind turns obsessively upon the creature who has so beguiled him, she seems to slip ever further from his yearning grasp. Where does she come from? Why did she ask him to bring her north? What is it that constantly draws her to the sea?

Here I thought was a novel about the professor's imagination, his fantasy, his delusion.  There he was in the rented cottage and everything that transpired was a dream born of an infatuation he had developed for his student.

I quite expected this to be revealed to the reader, in some very subtle way but unless I am rather dense, the ending resolved with the disappearance of the young woman, with no hint of explanation as to where, how, why.  The ending was very unsatisfactory indeed.

What I could commend the book for is a narrative frequently interwoven with evocative descriptions of the maritime beauty of the setting for the novel, the ever-changing faces of the beach, the shore, above all the sea.  That is a milieu in which I have spent many many hours pursuing my passion for conchology.  Sackville has received appreciative review of her lyrical use of language but as a novel I could neither believe in it as a fantasy, nor as a poetic and enigmatic account of a honeymoon on a remote island.

Published reviews:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/review-orkney-by-amy-sackville-8498004.html

https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/2013/01/oxygen-by-amy-sackville/

Ingo

Ingo by Helen Dunmore

Ingo is a delightful story full of beautifully serene imagery and magic. It’s a children’s book, yes, but it captured my imagination .........

Master storyteller Helen Dunmore writes the story of Sapphire and her brother Conor, and their discovery of INGO, a powerful and exciting world under the sea.  Sapphire’s father told her the story of the Mermaid of Zennor when she was little. She fell in love with a human, but she was a Mer creature and so she couldn’t come to live with him up in the dry air. She swam up the stream to hear him sing, then one day he swam down it and was never seen again. He became one of the Mer people…When her father is lost at sea she can’t help but think of that old myth; Sapphire is convinced he’s still alive.

The following summer her brother Conor keeps disappearing for hours on end. She goes to the cove to find him, but instead meets Faro, an enigmatic and intriguing Merman. He takes her to INGO and introduces her to a world she never knew existed. She must let go of all her Air thoughts and embrace the sea and all things Mer.

After her first visit she is entranced – merely the sound of running water makes her yearn to be in INGO once more. INGO blood runs strongly in Sapphy, and Conor fears she will leave the Air world for good. He pleads with her to ignore her craving for the sea and stay safely in their cottage up on the cliff.  But not only is Sapphy intoxicated by the Mer world, she longs to see her father once more. And she’s sure she can hear him singing across the water…
“I wish I was away in Ingo
Far across the briny sea…”

As it happens I was doing a jigsaw during the same interval in which I was reading Ingo.  This jigsaw has probably been made on more occasions by us than any of our other puzzles.  It's subject is close to the heart.  Within the small frame of the illustration you see representatives of most of the key invertebrate groups.

The Daydreamer and The Daylight Gate

The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan

I try and stay 'au courant' with the writing of my favourite authors.  And Ian McEwan is up there in my top 5.  Periodically I google to make sure there are no titles that have slipped me by.  I was intrigued to find this book listed and investigated further.  Well, I really loved this book.  You could view it as an adult book for children, or a children's book for adults.  The boundary between the two genres is completely fuzzy.  One story, The Cat, stands out as the celestrial gem around which the other astral bodies of this small constellation of stories cluster...... 

Peter Fortune is a quiet boy with a busy head. His teachers think he's dull, staring off into space all day, but he has nothing worse than an excessive imagination. He is a daydreamer, a quiet ten year old who can't help himself from dropping out of reality and into the amazing world of his vivid imagination.  His world seems limitless - think of infinity and double it. In his dreams he fends off wolves, wrestles with dolls and exposes burglars with the aid of that perfect wonderland haven - a real mousehole. He can magically become a cat, or a baby; he even spends a few traumatic moments as a grown-up. Trying on all these lives for size is both flighty and educational: when he infiltrates the black fur of the family cat - after a brilliant unzipping scene in which the pair swap bodies - he enjoys a day of gorgeous feline laziness and fierce nocturnal vitality. As a baby he drowns in banana and plastic toys and comes to see the narrowness of the huge little boy (himself) who is being so unfriendly.  These imaginary journeys leave Peter bruised but wiser.

In the end the book ends well, with an uneasy waking-up scene that both embraces and celebrates an authentic adult impulse. In a parody of Kafka's Metamorphosis, Peter wakes after a night of troubled dreams to find himself transformed into a 21-year-old. This happens during the holiday in Cornwall where the children - the Beach Gang - have been having adventures while their parents plan the barbecue. The Kafka echoes reinforce the sense of alienation: it is as if all adult life were a treacherous setback. And, at first, Peter is bemused. But then, in a lovely turnaround, he finds himself trembling in a railway tunnel with a 19-year-old girl called Gwendoline ('Morning sunlight, broken by the leaves of the apple trees, bobbed about her shoulders and in her hair'). Unimaginable pleasures rush upon him, and he hits on a big truth: that even adults have secret dreams. Suddenly the grown-up world, which all along has seemed a diminished version of the fantastic imaginary places, doesn't seem so bad after all.

Acknowledgements to The Independent review of The Daydreamer.

The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson
"This novella began as a Dare.
Hammer Horror used to be a part camp part scary British Horror Movie outfit that made Draculas and Frankensteins’s and classics like My Wife The Zombie.
Hammer dropped down dead for years and was assumed buried, but was lately revived by entrepreneur Simon Oakes who made Woman in Black and Let The Right One In.
They decided to start a publishing deal with Random House. Simon said to me: You lived near Pendle Hill didn’t you? Write me a novella about the Lancashire Witches.’
Nuts, I thought. And then I did."  Jeanette Winterson.

Good Friday 1612. Pendle Hill.
A mysterious gathering of thirteen people is interrupted by a local magistrate. Is it a witches’ Sabbat?
In Lancaster Castle two notorious witches await trial and certain death, while the beautiful and wealthy Alice Nutter rides to their defence.
Elsewhere a starved child lurks. And a Jesuit priest and former Gunpowder plotter makes his way from France to a place he believes will offer him sanctuary.
But will it? And how safe can anyone be in Witch Country?

Brilliant writing, spare yet descriptive and so full of atmosphere and chill.  Loved it.