Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys (A)
Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume (B+)
Sean Stewart, The Night Watch (B+)
J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (A)

Adam and Eve frolicked free and easy in the garden, knowing God, but not knowing what he knew. “Eat this fruit,” said Eve, “and we’ll be animals no more.” Gilgamesh took Enkidu aside, shaved his shaggy ass down and got him to the temple prostitute. When Enkidu was properly deflowered, Gilgamesh told him, “now you are a civilized man.” It is a tale as old as tales. But the fertile crescent is merely the beginning of civilization. We dropped down from the trees and started chattering at each other well before we settled down in those blocky cities.

Neil Gaiman takes the conceit (and it’s a conceit I dig) that humanity started somewhere in west Africa, and if anything sets us different from the animals it ain’t the speaking, it’s the telling of the stories.

Surely the oldest gods were animals and monsters. Anansi the spider is (though you no doubt have to take some liberties and change some names along the way) the oldest of the lot of them. At any rate, the tricksy god of fiction, no doubt feels he’s got some license to the claim; his earliest stories, as he’d tell you, rescued us from the savage and hairy jungle. In the more recent past, he came across the Atlantic Ocean on a slave boat and whispered his stories into the ears of chained men and women on the Caribbean islands and in the American south. Modern times have diminished Anansi, like many gods, to folklore, and these days you can catch him whiling his time in southern Florida, fishing off bridges, charming women much too young for him, and otherwise having a good old time.

These anthropomorphised spirits were the subject of Gaiman’s award-winning and popular novel American Gods (which had charm and character but misfired badly in terms of the divine mechanics and in terms of its American-ness), in which Anansi had a supporting role. In Anansi Boys he’s (obviously) more central. Like any deity worth his name, the spider sprouts off a maladjusted demigod every now and again, and the novel follows one of his rather mundane and indecisive sons. As you may imagine, trickster gods don’t make the best of fathers. Fat (the old man could make a nickname stick) Charlie Nancy has just found out he has a brother, one who takes after their father much more than does Fat Charlie himself.

Gaiman has his moments, but he’s not into prose gymnastics as a rule, and he’s better at clever allusions than he is at deep uniting themes. (What I did miss from his other novels is the exquisite visual–or graphic–sense that Gaiman usually leaks into his stories. That felt attenuated here.) What he is damn skilled at is unwinding a good yarn, finding room for a light heart and for dark dread, pitting characters you love to like against villains you love to hate. Here, he doesn’t attempt much mythological heavy lifting, but swings around just enough magic to lend a fairy-tale whimsy and just enough legendary heft to make it feel nontrivial. The result is a story appealing in much the same way as any of the Anansi fables you may remember reading as a child (or even hearing, if you’ve the proper ancestry), which is a lovely thing to encounter as an adult.

Eat this fruit, or else eat your vegetables. I didn’t realize when I picked up Jitterbug Perfume that I was getting a contemporary fantasy (I grabbed it on the basis of author recognition, from a recommendation of sorts, from one of my favorite online personalities), although it certainly made it easier to establish a theme. It’s got some of the elements that fit here: the nature of immortality; a humanity that’s both fleeting and indomitable; and the relationship of gods, men and belief. It also has a healthy and welcome dose of irreverent humor, plenty of sex, and it’s drenched in the engineering and philosophy of scent.

The immortality story (taking my points roughly in order) centers on the journey of Alobar, a medieval Bohemian king who experiences an awakening of individuality on the eve of his own ritual sacrifice. In an era when life is cheap, fertility is quotidian and lewd, death is a friend and beets are good eatin’, he discovers, ahead of his time, an urge to fill the human experience to its most copious brim. In flight from the locals he’s betrayed, Alobar encounters the Greek god, Pan a divine being that embodies animal lust (eats, shoots, and leaves) in a most rank, gamy odor. The god, already old in the middle ages and dying from lack of followers, represents the old animal nature of man, the old-world philosophy of death. Alobar represents a new man, a complete bridge between the old ways and the new ones, free from death, better than the old gods, and also quite nice-smelling. Meanwhile, in modern times, three parties are racing to independently develop a perfect perfume, but the lack of a “base note,” an elusive aroma component that should unite the fragrance, eludes them.

Both the modern and ancient stories are filled with sex, but Robbins leaves the animal rutting behind with the gods, and manages to relish the life-affirming parts of the act (which, you know, is nice). The scent, taken as an enabler of higher thought (when he finally summarizes the uniting philosophy, it’s more than a little silly), is a metaphor for this. This perfect aroma that the characters seek is the only thing that can cover Pan’s Herculean B.O. problem. The author has a lot of fun throwing around metaphors and playing with the language, and while the tone is overall humorous, he scores points for honesty in there too (and shows off some real erudition, however breezily).

In all, half seriousness is a challenging undertaking. You have to establish yourself as either sincere or funny, or risk failing at both. Though Robbins is better at the humor, he tries to succeed at two tasks simultaneously, and rather than making it a doubly good book, he just makes it twice as long. The bigger problem with Jitterbug Perfume was one of pacing. There was a lot of thematic development and character positioning, but at the end, the dramatic tension went slack. The events of the plot just kind of happened. The revelation of the base note was anticlimactic, as was the philosophical info-dump, as were the denouements of the various love stories. Which isn’t to say it’s not a good read for the fun of it alone, but it kept me away from a higher grade.

If ancient Bohemia was a land of virile beet-eaters, future Edmonton is a place of frigid ones. Sean Stewart has, over a handful of novels, created a world in which the earth has woken up to find the source of its ancient divinity. If we human animals managed to walked out of the jungle a few millania ago and settle down as men, the trees didn’t were reluctant to loose their tendrils. The Wild Wood, the forest primeval (to scatter my sources), held our primitive thoughts in its sway for many centuries. Taming it has made us (arguably) better than amimal-men, but what if the earth reasserted itself? (Well, it’ll be pissed off, for starters.)

Dormant for half a millenium, from (as Stewart belabors) the sixteenth century until the end of the second world war, the old-world magic has returned in The Night Watch. It was a horrible thing too: it turned great men into terrible gods, stirred the dead, and transformed the lesser of us into ghostly deformed creatures that fed on fear. The awakening, in Stewart’s universe, was slow at first and then climaxed in a Dream that, but for the efforts of a noble few, nearly wiped humanity off the map. Some communities survived the Dream intact, through guidance and grit, and this novel looks at two of them, the south side of Edmonton, that made it through with stark denial, and Vancouver’s Chinatown, which persisted with considerable more flair.

From this palette of earth powers and the living supernatural, a good writer can paint some gorgeous and haunting scenes, and this indeed is Stewart’s strength. (He describes his own work as happening “at the confluence of Faulkner and Tolkien, Dostoyevsky and Enid Nesbit, Joseph Conrad and Lloyd Alexander and Ursula Le Guin,” which, neglecting Nesbit whom I’ve not read, isn’t a bad description at all.) He’s got a splendid eye for detail, whether it’s detail of setting, detail of emotion, detail of character. And they’re wonderfully rendered: his vignettes and snapshots range from frightening to fulfilling to poignant. The primitive forest of Vancouver, grown to near sentience, the magical depths of Chinatown (where’s Jack Burton when you need him?), and the cold gods of the freezing prarie that demand sacrifice…they all seethe from the page.

My only wish is that he could have expended a little more expository detail. To turn all those scenes into a novel, you have to, you know, connect them, and what’s more, you have to generate some faith in the reader in the causality of events, that one thing leads to another, that there’s a purpose to grouping them in such a fashion for display. You need to to have a consistent setting, and a few words as my second paragraph here (necessarily better written) would have gone far if applied near the beginning. Stewart’s early info-dumps were, unfortunately, not terribly relevant, and I was damn confused on how his world fit together. Technology has advanced nearly to artificial intelligence, but fuel and other chemicals must be scrounged. How was that possible? The “barbarian” and many of the other magical threats were so unclear at first as to be non-alarming. They got told eventually, mostly, and by the end, I was tempted to re-read the first half to verify that I wasn’t the problem. But it wasn’t me: for all that beauty the individual plots never mesh quite well enough. A shame, but hardly a damning one.

Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee’s novel does more than complete this theme of men and animals and gods: it lays the concepts out, dissects them, discusses them at length, from half a dozen viewpoints, conventional and otherwise, as a nearly academic exercise.
Elizabeth Costello is a series of abbreviated formal lectures and less-formal followup discussions which take place around the aging Ms. Costello, the famous (fictional) writer. It’s a pretty ballsy effort, at least if your goal is to sell books, to make a story about lecturing writers and blathering academics. It’s brazenly self-aware and self-referential from page one. It commits the storytelling faux pas of using characters as nothing more than expository vehicles–the novel is less about people (some character details between chapters don’t even mesh, probably to flag anyone who’s paying too much attention to the “plot”) than it is about a novelist’s ideas of people, not to mention animals and gods, rattling the bars of their hypothetical cages. Without genius, it would be laughable to package something like this as a novel. But Coetzee fascinates. I hope he teaches a class somewhere. I wish I could take it.

The opening “lesson” in Elizabeth Costello discusses Realism as an ugly modern movement, condemning it, as the characters in the novel condemn very much, as anthropocentric. Elizabeth Costello’s discussion on realism selects Kafka’s talking ape, Red Peter (that’s realism, really?), as a fulcrum for discussion, and it’s a good enough launching point for the greater theme of the novel, asking from a scholarly perspecitve (which honestly enough is one with which I’m less familiar), the age-old: what’s so great about these human beings anyway? Does the focus on human-style reasoning as a distinction from the beasts ultimately lead to the answers we want to hear (that dude, we rule because it’s, you know, us)? What is wrong, the characters ask, with Red Peter’s ape-ness, his animal being? Who are we to impose our reason on these creatures? Who are we to impose our brutality, our inhumanity as it were?

Coetzee explores our relationship to the gods as well, asking whether gods are superior reasoning beings (like Swift’s Houyhnhnms) or superior aesthetic beings, like the Greek gods or as the ennobled savages the colonial powers of a hundred years ago found everywhere. Once, we communed with animals as gods in this second sort of worship, and echoed it among the later Christian poets and scholars, what with their burning tigers and all. The rejection of the hunt, the war with animals (as the titular character would say) is recent. Interestingly, Coetzee takes the notion of gods as superior compassionate beings, such as the tortured Christ, more lightly. I found this a strange approach after he spent so much effort lampooning our clumsy empathy for the lesser beings. He’s not, I should note, looking for a unified perspective so much as looking to showcase the argument.

I suppose one is not very likely to win a Nobel, especially if you’re a middle-aged white guy, by effetely touring American and European traditions. (Coetzee wryly points out that Elizabeth Costello the character was helped a great deal by her Australian heritage.) Elizabeth Costello the novel spends a good amount of time in Africa in it’s exploration of human exceptionalism. He takes the time to explore the oral tradition of the continent, and though he criticizes it a little, on the meta level the reader can see an unintentional tip of the hat to Neil Gaiman’s conceit: it’s not the reason, it’s the telling of the stories. After all, who else can get inside the head of an African, a woman, a bat?

Only the storyteller.

[my own index of reviews]

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