Tonight we party, for tomorrow we die November 20, 2022
Posted by dolorosa12 in reviews, tv shows.Tags: babylon berlin, oh if tomorrow comes, reviews
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Babylon Berlin has a quiet appeal: it sneaks up on you, unassuming, until you’re hit with the sudden realisation of its power and profundity. The German TV series, which has just concluded its fourth season in the UK, is an adaptation of a series of mystery novels by Volker Kutscher. It’s a lavish, noirish historical crime drama, set in the volatile interwar period in Germany’s Weimar Republic, with all the intensity, trauma, and tragic inevitability that entails. Its central characters — Berlin police inspector Gereon Rath, and ambitious slum-dweller-turned-police-clerk Charlotte Ritter — are chameleons, moving between genteel coffeehouses and the city’s seedy underworld, slipping from their offices in the police station to frenzied nightclub dance floors with ease, keen observers everywhere, at home nowhere. Over the course of the series, they deal with spiralling crimes that stretch from Berlin’s criminal syndicates to Soviet spy rings, and from the most desperate, destitute slums to the upper echelons of the country’s political and business elite. Everything is interconnected, and everything is laced through with corruption — the more Gereon, Charlotte and their allies uncover, the bigger the scale of the problem becomes.
The show is infused with a terrible sense of desperation, not just in the face of the considerable current difficulties faced by the characters, their city and their country (corruption, poverty, hyperinflation, trauma from the individual and collective experiences of the First World War, intense political instability that sees rival armed gangs of fascists and communists used as private armies on behalf of their political leadership), but also it is as if they fear what we, from our vantage point of the twenty-first century, know is to come, even if the characters themselves have idea of the specifics of these horrors. There’s a painful futility in their attempts to bring the order of justice and equality under the law to this chaos, while we know that just around the corner there will be another, crueller attempt to bring supposed ‘order’ and to restore supposed ‘justice’ which will find greater favour with the German public. We know that everything Gereon and Charlotte do — every scandal brought to light, every crime solved, every life saved — will be swept away as if it meant nothing, in the face of the overwhelming wave that was Nazism and the Holocaust. There’s something unbearably sad about witnessing the frantic, beautiful, strange life that existed in Weimar Berlin’s interstitial spaces — jazz nightclubs filled with dancers of all ethnicities and sexualities, the easy democracy of the backstage areas of cabaret clubs, smoke-filled bars, the offices of dissident lawyers overflowing with books and papers — while knowing that this fragile ecosystem is only (at the point of the fourth season) two years away from being destroyed by those who never saw its value. The show is very careful, too, to allude to numerous real and fictional moments when Germany could have pulled itself back from the brink, and some combination of human fraility, individual self-interest, complacency, and sheer bad luck combine to prevent that from happening, and force things to carry on towards their dark conclusion. The implication, of course, is that we are faced with such moments at various points in our own lives, and we are equally incapable of recognising the weight of them as the oblivious Berliners of 1931.
Babylon Berlin is apparently Germany’s most expensive ever TV series, and it is in part the work of Tom Tykwer (who co-writes and co-directs it), the screenwriter of Lola Rennt — and both of these things show. It’s gorgeous to look at, drawing heavily on the cinema of the era in which it is set, in terms of how scenes are composed, and in the presence of sweeping, elaborate song and dance numbers. The two embedded videos, of a sequence from the first season, and another from the fourth, should give a clear picture of the look and feel of these types of set-pieces — dark in tone, full of a frenzied, desperate sense of life and survival.
The show’s music is incredible, and the whole thing is just a feast for the eyes, as dazzling in its own way as the music video-esque loops of Lola Rennt.
The dazzle will, at some point, have to come to an end. Volker Kutscher, the author on whose books the show is based, has said recently in an interview that he will conclude the series in 1938, at the point of the Kristallnacht pogrom. The show has always been shot through with bleakness, but I’m not sure it will even continue as far down that road as the books intend to travel. The Gereon of the books is apparently a more apolitical character, and possibly more capable of continuing to operate within a police service under the control of a Nazi government than the TV show version, who was seen in this season sternly warning his young nephew about the cruel indifference to human life that is part and parcel of fascism. Whether Babylon Berlin carries on past 1933 or not, it is already an incredible achievement — a perceptive and empathetic study of the ingredients, both societal and individual, that can combine to lead human beings to their darkest moments, and all the little unnoticed choices that might have prevented them from getting to that point.
And doing so kindly January 8, 2022
Posted by dolorosa12 in books, reviews.Tags: ada palmer, oh if tomorrow comes, perhaps the stars, review, speculative fiction, terra ignota
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Ada Palmer’s dense, intense, and complex four-part Terra Ignota speculative fiction series is very hard to summarise, and although I loved it from the very first book, I’ve shied away from reviewing it until this point, as there is so much going on. The series is set several hundred years into the future, in a world that feels at once suitably strange and distant, and a believable consequence of our own current times. Climate change has been solved, and people live long, fulfilling lives (160 years is the norm) free of major illness, hunger, poverty, or the need to labour for hours on end at work whose only purpose is to provide the means to survive. For the most part, nation-states have been abolished, with people instead choosing membership of a ‘Hive’ whose values align with their own, or remaining ‘Hiveless’ and adhering to a mimimum set of laws. There is a recognition that a household unit consisting of one or two adults is insufficient to meet all the emotional, economic and labour needs of most human beings, and so most adults form larger households consisting of multiple likeminded individuals. This system is further sustained by the abolition of the notion of gender, and the banning of collective religion — the two things, along with the nation-state, seen as responsible for past wars, injustices, and inequalities. In addition to this complex worldbuilding, the series is written in the bombastic style of an Enlightenment-era philosophical treatise, with vast passages in Greek, Latin, French (and sometimes Hindi, Spanish and Japanese), dialogues with various philosophers and the personified reader, and extensive allusions to classical Greek literature. And it is an understatement to say that the narrator is unreliable — extremely and increasingly mentally unwell would be more accurate. As I say, this series is a lot, and it’s hard to summarise in a way which conveys the full scope of its ambition and complexity.
As the narrative progresses, it becomes apparant that all is not as utopian as it seems. There are various rots at the heart of the system, and over the course of the series, it collapses under the weight of its unacknowledged flaws, throwing the world into the first war it has seen in several generations. There are two problems with this: first, with this distance, war seems as remote and fictional to these people as jousting knights in medieval tournaments seem to us — and the only models for how to conduct a war are literary works of the past. The second problem is that these people have come up with really hideous weapons and ways of fighting. And in a world with no geographical boundaries, people on different ‘sides’ in the war live right next door to each other.
The fourth and final book, Perhaps the Stars, is an account of the war in all its fraught, terrifying, tragic horror. The book is filled with moments that broke my heart, because it hurt to see these people — so intense and sincere in their beliefs, so ingenious in the ways they approach every problem — find those beliefs challenged, battered, and shattered at every turn as their world falls to ruin.
Palmer does a terrific job of conveying this global war in all its terrifying intensity. The horror at a world — which previously had universal instantaneous virtual communication and speedy travel taking one from Brussels to Tokyo in a matter of hours — returning to the tyranny of distance, with communication networks going dark or subverted with disinformation, was visceral, and hit harder in these pandemic times. (The parallels I felt as an Australian immigrant living in Europe were intense and personal.) And the war throws all the hypocrises of the Hives individually — and the Hives as a system — into stark relief.
The conclusion, when it comes, is both relief and agony. When the dust has settled, and the survivors looking around in guilt and horror at what they’ve done, the conditions are ripe to remake the world. It’s neither a complete replacement of what came before, nor a patchy reform of the old imperfect system, but rather an honest look at the flaws in the old world — where the weaknesses lay, and who was left behind by the smug assumption that their enlighted world was a flawless utopia. Gender, religion, the Hive system itself, and what is morally permissable for a species which wants to consider itself rational and social beings: all need rethinking. There is a recognition — both within the text, and, I would argue, by the author herself — of blinds spots in previous thinking, and a genuine sign that work will be done, immediately, and for as long as it takes, to fix them. I’m left, having completed the series, in awe at Ada Palmer’s ambition, and at the fact that her talent is equal to the scale of that ambition in this, her first published works of fiction. The series is a staggering, compassionately human piece of writing. Those who have read it will know why this is the highest praise I could give.
All the walls of dreaming, they were torn wide open January 31, 2021
Posted by dolorosa12 in books, reviews.Tags: all my dangerous friends, oh if tomorrow comes, paved with bones and good intentions, reviews, samantha shannon, the bone season, the mask falling
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The first question a lot of people will be asking about The Mask Falling, the fourth novel in Samantha Shannon’s dystopian fantasy Bone Season series, is was it worth the wait? As a fan of Isobelle Carmody, who took more than thirty years to complete her own series of dystpian science fiction (and who had a gap of ten years in between some books in the series!), I have to laugh a bit at anyone who feels that a gap of less than four years (with an epic doorstopper, and multiple novellas, published during this time) is an interminable wait! But yes, it was worth the wait. The Mask Falling is an accomplished, twisty, emotionaly wrenching story that plays to Shannon’s considerable strengths as an author.
I’d been wanting two things from The Bone Season books for a while now: a look at the wider world beyond the islands of Britain and Ireland, and a deeper exploration of Paige and Arcturus’s* relationship. With the pair dropped into Scion Paris as fugitives on an undercover mission, I got both things in The Mask Falling. The book sees Paige trying to navigate treacherous waters, pulled in different directions by the criminal clairvoyant syndicate in Paris, the demands of her own syndicate back in London, the mysterious Domino resistance network, and other groups with agendas of their own. The book takes place against a backdrop of increasing crackdowns and violence against voyants, an aggressive militaristic expansion of Scion’s borders, and various dystopian horrors spreading into formerly safe places.
Each book in the series so far has tackled a slightly different genre — The Bone Season was a prison break, The Mime Order was a murder mystery, and The Song Rising was a heist. The Mask Falling is a spy novel, and, perhaps as a nod to its French setting, is influenced in part by real-world accounts of World War II-era spies operating in Vichy France. Many such spies were women, a pattern reflected in Shannon’s novel. She did a grat job of depicting the rather callous treatment of such operatives by their handlers and wider network — the scale of the threat they face means that all operatives (even those as supernaturally gifted as Paige) are by necessity somewhat disposable, and the handlers cannot afford to accommodate operatives’ physical illness or deep, unresolved psychological trauma.
The book’s depiction of trauma recovery was extraordinary, and one of its strongest features. Shannon does a great job of depicting Paige’s intersecting traumas — not just those caused by her recent experiences of torture in The Song Rising, but also the wounds in her childhood caused by the invasion of her country by a totalitarian regime, the violent reprisals against its resistance movement, and her long exile at the heart of a hostile enemy country. It’s not just that she has a fear of water and a ruptured relationship with Arcturus due to her more recent expeirences — she reacts badly to Scion invasions of free countries due to her childhood in Ireland, and oscillates widly between instant, all-in trust of people, and guarded, cautious distancing from potential allies due to a lifetime of exile, exploitation and betrayal. In particular, because her few experiences of community and (a veneer of) protection came in situations where she was viewed as an asset, a weapon to be wielded, she struggles to trust that anyone could value her for herself, rather than for her powers, role in the syndicate, or political symbolism.
This combination of traumas means she responds badly to danger and crises — tending to either leap into situations all dreamwalking guns blazing without cautiously considering the consequences, or otherwise be easily manipulated by enemies who know exactly how to push her buttons. There were several such moments in The Mask Falling, and they broke my heart. As a fellow survivor of (very different forms of) trauma, I applaud the care, compassion, and empathy with which Samantha Shannon has written Paige’s story in this book.
The Mask Falling is a perfect midpoint to this brilliant dystopian series. It broadens and deepens our understanding of this richly imagined world, and every new corner explored feels lived-in and redolent with history. Old characters return after several books’ absence, and we have a clearer view of their roles and motivations. We meet new characters who draw Paige’s story forward. She and Arcturus finally have the time to think about their relationship — shared traumas, deceptions, power imbalances and all. And the book ends on a cliffhanger that had me both cursing Shannon’s diabolical genius, and applauding her skill at drawing so many different threads together into such a intriguing tapestry. I cannot wait for the next book!
*Arcturus is the name of the character Paige — and the narrative — has previously referred to as ‘Warden’. But as he points out early on in The Mask Falling, Warden is a title, and he and Paige share an intimacy that makes her use of his name, rather than his title, far more appropriate. As Paige switches to referring to him as Arcturus in this book, I do the same in this review, and in any future discussion of the series.
Short and sweet(ish) July 14, 2020
Posted by dolorosa12 in books, novellas, reviews.Tags: aliette de bodard, dominion of the fallen, of dragons feasts and murders, oh if tomorrow comes, samantha shannon, the bone season, the bone season series, the dawn chorus
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I am very happy with this new trend of authors publishing novellas set in the same universe as their series of novels. It seems to lead to works which explore relationships, characters, or corners of their imagined worlds that there just wasn’t space for in the novels — and therefore gives their fictional worlds and characters more space and three dimensionality. This kind of novella can be used to make space for missing moments in the preceding narrative, or — my very favourite kind of story — show what happens after the final page is closed. I’m a nosy reader: I want to know what happens after the story ends, and what the characters do in their downtime, in moments of cosy domesticity.
The answer to that in Aliette de Bodard’s novella Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders is ‘solve a murder mystery.’ Her characters certainly don’t get much in the way of downtime! The book sees Thuan and Asmodeus — dragon prince and fallen angel respectively, joint heads of the fallen House Hawthorn — return to the kingdom under the Seine to celebrate Tết with Thuan’s family. But any hope of a peaceful, pleasant holiday is shattered almost immediately, when the pair uncover a murder, a potential coup, and a court rife with tension, plotting, and corruption. One of the things I loved most about this couple in the preceding novels in de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series was their contrasting — and conflicting — ways of dealing with problems: Thuan preferring to work within existing systems and come up with a diplomatic solution, his husband Asmodeus preferring to blast his way through any impediment with threats and violence. These contrasts are on full display in Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders, to excellent effect — but what the novella also shows is how those contrasts are complementary, and when these two formidable supernatural husbands work together, things have a way of working themselves out. I really appreciated this element of the story: for all that it is a fast-paced whodunnit (as well as an exploration of the poisoning effects of institutional corruption), it’s a relationship study as much as it is a murder mystery, written with exquisite subtlety.
Samantha Shannon’s The Dawn Chorus also brings its central relationship to the fore. This novella has two interwoven strands: flashbacks to missing moments in the earliest book in Shannon’s Bone Season dystopian series, and scenes which take place in the immediate aftermath of the third novel. The series really doesn’t give its characters much time to breathe, and in some ways The Dawn Chorus represents just that kind of pause — it gives the narrator, revolutionary Paige Mahoney, and her friend, former captor, and sometime lover, the Rephaite Warden — the space to work through the various tensions, traumas, and sheer overwhelming emotions generated by their terrifying existence and complicated relationship. It’s a story about recovering from trauma (and fiercely independent, untrusting Paige letting Warden help her recover) — its action picks up just after Paige has been rescued from weeks of torture and her impending execution — but in spite of this heavy subject matter it’s also a rare chance for the two characters to be alone for almost the first time since they met. Theirs is a relationship that carries a lot of baggage — they met in seriously unequal circumstances, and the novella is in part a way for them to finally address that openly — and matters aren’t helped by the fact that Paige’s torturer constantly brought up this relationship as yet another weapon to wound her. But here, for once, in their safe house in Paris, Warden and Paige’s relationship doesn’t have to be a performance for either their enemies or their allies. Now they simply need to work out what that relationship does look like, away from the eyes of others.
I really hope to see a lot more such novellas from both authors, set in their two respective dystopian universes. I particularly appreciate that in these kinds of books, both de Bodard and Shannon can give a lot more prominence to emotions, romantic relationships, and self-reflection than is possible to give the characters in either main series of novels. The novellas both flesh out, and give further emotional context to, characters’ actions in the wider series. I’d been stuck in a bit of a reading slump, but reading these two novellas in quick succession has made my next choice of books clear: a reread of both The Bone Season and the Dominion of the Fallen series!
Bearing witness January 26, 2020
Posted by dolorosa12 in books, reviews, Uncategorized.Tags: margaret atwood, oh if tomorrow comes, the handmaid's tale, the testaments, we are not things
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I have to admit that I was a little bit cynical when I discovered that Margaret Atwood had published a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. On the back of a successful TV series (and, more pointedly, a global political context in which the ideas explored in her original book were front and centre in the popular consciousness) which had renewed interest in her dystopian story, it felt like cashing in. Or, if not cashing in, perhaps an attempt to close the conversation by providing definitive answers to the ambiguous questions with which The Handmaid’s Tale novel closed.
Unfortunately, I have to say that I was proved right. The Testaments is an engaging and competently told story, which, were it an unrelated novel about resistance to a dystopian regime, or a piece of fanfic written in the world of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, I would find very good indeed. It weaves the stories of three women bound up in the struggle against Gilead and all it stands for, showing how their actions, independently and together, hasten the demise of its iniquitous regime. But the choice of which three women Atwood has chosen to illustrate this revolution is very telling: Aunt Lydia, the instigator of the entire programme responsible for codifying and implementing the legalised rape of women designated Handmaids, and the two daughters of June/Offred, the original novel’s narrator. Her older daugher, Hannah, is raised in ignorance of her origins to be the perfect Gilead Wife, while her younger, Nicole, has been spirited away in secret to Canada and raised in ignorance of her origins by people leading the anti-Gilead resistance movement. All three, ultimately, work against the regime, and the novel shows us clearly how their actions are enough to bring the dictatorship down.
And that, I think, is my first problem with The Testaments. The overthrow of Gilead feels too easy: it takes only a mere decade or so, and although Atwood is careful to show how the resistance is operating in secret under the very noses of the authorities, conducted in plain site through quiet moments of ‘women’s work’ that the men in power don’t notice, in the end the regime’s demise seems to have been mainly the result of the actions of three very heroic individuals. Atwood was very clear when writing The Handmaid’s Tale that all elements of the abusive situation in which women in Gilead found themselves were drawn from an amalgam of real-world precedents, including purely US American phenomena such as the fundamentalist, patriarchal Christian Quiverfull movement. These real-world injustices were (and are) deeply entrenched, and those that were overcome were done so only after the work of decades, centuries, and incalculable numbers of people. Ending Gilead in less than a decade felt unearned, unrealistic, and, to my mind, unjustifiably hopeful.
But by far the deeper problem with The Testaments is its ending of ambiguity. Atwood writes in an afterword that she wrote the novel in the main to provide answers to the many questions readers of The Handmaid’s Tale have asked her over the years. But it’s the ambiguous ending of The Handmaid’s Tale that is, in large part, responsible for that novel’s power: readers leave that book knowing that the regime ends, but not how, and not after how long. We’re left uncertain of its narrator’s fate, and even the identities of many of the people about whom she writes: the book is limited in space and time by design, the bounds of its world mirroring the experiences of the woman who gives voice to the way her own world has become narrowed and constricted. Did we really need to know that she escapes to join the resistance in Canada, or that Nick, the driver whose loyalties are uncertain, was working against Gilead from the beginning? Did we need to know that Aunt Lydia was always working to undermine the regime from within? The whole thing felt to me like an attempt to restore clarity to a story — and characters — whose strength had always been a kind of fuzzy uncertainty, more realistic to the way most people live with, and within injustice. People in The Handmaid’s Tale were not blazing, unafraid revolutionaries, or cartoonish villains (although of course many of them did horrifically terrible things) — mostly they were terrified, just trying to survive, or alternated between being sources of respite or violence for the people whose lives were in their hands. It was a quieter story that redefined what resistance looked like, which at once remorselessly condemned progressive North American women for being asleep at the wheel to the dangers posed by US Christian fundamentalism, assuming their rights would be safe and assured once it became somewhat socially acceptable for women to work in positions of authority, and spoke with compassion for people rendered powerless by oppressive, violent regimes, showing that sometimes mere survival is its own kind of heroism.
The Testaments does shine a light on the minds of women growing up immersed in a violent, patriarchal society, and there are some devastating moments, such as the acknowledgement that extreme patriarchy which renders all men as constantly beset by violent, lustful thoughts (and all women responsible for men’s behaviour) while keeping girls completely ignorant of sex for the sake of their ‘purity’ will result in nothing other than creating a generation of women so repulsed by and terrified of sex that they will refuse to the the one thing required of them: to marry and bear children. For the most part, however, it forgoes these quiet moments of connection with the terrifying, real-world effects of fundamentalist patriarchy for clear answers which readers shouldn’t need, undermining the devastating power of The Handmaid’s Tale itself. Sometimes, readers don’t need clarity: ambiguity is not just sufficient, but desirable.
Out of the abyss August 1, 2019
Posted by dolorosa12 in books, reviews.Tags: aliette de bodard, dominion of the fallen, oh if tomorrow comes, the house of sundering flames
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If I had one word to describe each book in Aliette de Bodard’s magnificent, gothic Dominion of the Fallen trilogy, the first book’s would be survival, the second hope, and the third, justice. It’s a cautious, qualified kind of justice that we find in The House of Sundering Flames, but the seeds of a better future are there.
In this final book of the series, several different strands of story intertwine. The Fallen Houses of Paris are struggling to make sense of an unknown power that’s attacking and destroying their kind. Philippe and Isabelle live with the Houseless community of Vietnamese migrants, where eking out a living and refusing to get drawn into the political conflicts of the Houses is the best they can hope for. And the dragon prince Thuan struggles in the face of racism and hostility to settle into his new role as husband to the Fallen Asmodeus and co-head of House Hawthorn.
Atmospheric and dark, this is a book by an author at the top of her game. It’s tricky work, balancing explosions, intricate political manoeuvrings, several love stories, and the fierce, communal will to survive of a downtrodden but determined group of dispossessed people, but de Bodard pulls it off brilliantly. My favourite moments would have to be those focused on the Asmodeus-Thuan romance — a careful, cautious dance by two powerful beings used to guarding their thoughts, and to the lone exercise of authority. Their slow journey towards trust is a microcosm of the larger theme of the book: survival built on compromise, but not at the expense of justice.
The other moments in which this book shone brightest for me were those which highlighted parenthood, family, and community. Aliette de Bodard never writes about lone, isolated heroic saviours — and I love her books all the more for it. Hers are always worlds in which adventure is a family affair, raising a child is the work and responsibility of a community, and the everyday labour of parents — especially mothers — is imbued with heroism and celebrated accordingly. The House of Sundering Flames is no different. Her characters may be fighting for survival, but they always have time to feed a child, learn recipes from a grandmother, or check in on a neighbour. Without this, it’s clear that survival would be worthless.
As the tension builds and the threats grow greater (including one truly gothic moment in which ancient houses quite literally begin to devour their own), de Bodard’s feuding factions of mortals and immortals, powerful and powerless must make a decision: die alone, or stand together. It’s a chance to right ancient wrongs, and take the first, difficult steps towards a world in which everyone in this brooding, scarred, post-apocalyptic Paris might have a chance at a future.
Geata Póeg na Déanainn 