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cyphomandraReally, I should just give up on entry titles. Two books with remarkably little to do with each other, both good. I have a few more books after this that I'm still thinking about, but I'm also working on my pre-July 21st Harry Potter series re-read.
I re-read this because of Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George, and Dennis Burges’ Graves Gate, both of which feature Arthur Conan Doyles whom I like much less than this one. Dark, good and intriguing. The Night Calls, David Pirie. Re-read. Pirie’s books have a youngish Doyle, finishing his training at medical school, dealing with a difficult family situation (his father is unstable and alcoholic; his mother has taken in a lodger, a man only a few years older than Doyle himself, who now runs the family and pays for Doyle’s education), working with Joseph Bell, a doctor and lecturer with an interest in crime, and the science of observation. I imprinted on the Holmes stories at a young age, and what I love about this series, in addition to Doyle (who is believable, damaged and real) is finding hints of the stories throughout; not ham-fisted and obvious inserts, either, but references that are genuinely part of these stories as well. The first book, The Patient’s Eyes, involves chunks of The Speckled Band and The Solitary Cyclist; the next two are less immediately mappable, but you can see in the life of this Doyle the stories he will write in the future. It would be obvious (and clumsy) for example, to make Bell addicted to something; instead, Doyle himself takes to laudanum, in increasingly large amounts, and Bell is violently disapproving. When I read this I can see this future Doyle displacing his own addiction onto his mentor character, out of shame and the desire to equalise things between them.
The main plot of The Night Calls is difficult to discuss without giving away things, but it manages to incorporate a lot of actual history as well, and ends with a particularly painful cliff-hanger. I have picked up the third one, as well, but I’m putting off re-reading it because I don’t remember things getting any easier, and there isn’t a fourth one out.
A Fistful of Sky, Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Gypsum is the middle child in a family of five growing up in California, a family where all the children, around puberty, go through transition and develop magical powers – except her. In addition, she’s overweight, plain, and uninterested in changing either of these states, something which her mother – beautiful and a little too fond of doing things for her children that are “for their own good” finds very difficult. But Gyp does transition, eventually, after her family have given up on her ever being other than ordinary – only to find that, like other people in the family who have transitioned later, she has one of the unkind powers, the power of curses. And if she doesn’t use it, the power will kill her.
The family dynamics in this book are great, and the working through of Gyp’s power – how she can use it, and what it means – is fascinating and thorough. There’s a great bit where she curses a grapefruit, resulting in a giant grapefruit taking up the whole kitchen and growling at intruders, and then there are other curses, particularly those where Gyp tries to make them beneficial, that are terrifyingly unnerving in their subversion of her intent.
My only problem with this book, which I liked a lot, is that I appear to have missed a whole bunch of lesbian subtext… which is slightly worrying. And yet, going back through it, I still don’t know quite how the connection between Gypsum and Altria is intended to be read. This may sound like a wilfully stupid avoidance of textual evidence – they kiss, there’s a bit where they’re sitting next to each other on the couch that feels to Gypsum as if she’s announcing something to her family, and in the last chapter Altria proposes marriage – and yet. I feel like the reverse of a slash reader (“it’s all metaphorical! It’s about accepting yourself! Feeling hot and tingling when you kiss someone is about knowing who you really are!”), but something keeps kicking me out of reading this as a sexual relationship, and skimming reviews on Google suggests everyone else reads it this way as well. (I should point out that Gyp also acquires a nice normal boyfriend, who she kisses as well – described as “a brief touch of lips on lips”, with no tingling). I am sure that if Gyp and Altria were both guys this would not be the case. So why? Is it how we – how I – read interactions between women, or is it the text itself that's the problem? And how?
I re-read this because of Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George, and Dennis Burges’ Graves Gate, both of which feature Arthur Conan Doyles whom I like much less than this one. Dark, good and intriguing. The Night Calls, David Pirie. Re-read. Pirie’s books have a youngish Doyle, finishing his training at medical school, dealing with a difficult family situation (his father is unstable and alcoholic; his mother has taken in a lodger, a man only a few years older than Doyle himself, who now runs the family and pays for Doyle’s education), working with Joseph Bell, a doctor and lecturer with an interest in crime, and the science of observation. I imprinted on the Holmes stories at a young age, and what I love about this series, in addition to Doyle (who is believable, damaged and real) is finding hints of the stories throughout; not ham-fisted and obvious inserts, either, but references that are genuinely part of these stories as well. The first book, The Patient’s Eyes, involves chunks of The Speckled Band and The Solitary Cyclist; the next two are less immediately mappable, but you can see in the life of this Doyle the stories he will write in the future. It would be obvious (and clumsy) for example, to make Bell addicted to something; instead, Doyle himself takes to laudanum, in increasingly large amounts, and Bell is violently disapproving. When I read this I can see this future Doyle displacing his own addiction onto his mentor character, out of shame and the desire to equalise things between them.
The main plot of The Night Calls is difficult to discuss without giving away things, but it manages to incorporate a lot of actual history as well, and ends with a particularly painful cliff-hanger. I have picked up the third one, as well, but I’m putting off re-reading it because I don’t remember things getting any easier, and there isn’t a fourth one out.
A Fistful of Sky, Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Gypsum is the middle child in a family of five growing up in California, a family where all the children, around puberty, go through transition and develop magical powers – except her. In addition, she’s overweight, plain, and uninterested in changing either of these states, something which her mother – beautiful and a little too fond of doing things for her children that are “for their own good” finds very difficult. But Gyp does transition, eventually, after her family have given up on her ever being other than ordinary – only to find that, like other people in the family who have transitioned later, she has one of the unkind powers, the power of curses. And if she doesn’t use it, the power will kill her.
The family dynamics in this book are great, and the working through of Gyp’s power – how she can use it, and what it means – is fascinating and thorough. There’s a great bit where she curses a grapefruit, resulting in a giant grapefruit taking up the whole kitchen and growling at intruders, and then there are other curses, particularly those where Gyp tries to make them beneficial, that are terrifyingly unnerving in their subversion of her intent.
My only problem with this book, which I liked a lot, is that I appear to have missed a whole bunch of lesbian subtext… which is slightly worrying. And yet, going back through it, I still don’t know quite how the connection between Gypsum and Altria is intended to be read. This may sound like a wilfully stupid avoidance of textual evidence – they kiss, there’s a bit where they’re sitting next to each other on the couch that feels to Gypsum as if she’s announcing something to her family, and in the last chapter Altria proposes marriage – and yet. I feel like the reverse of a slash reader (“it’s all metaphorical! It’s about accepting yourself! Feeling hot and tingling when you kiss someone is about knowing who you really are!”), but something keeps kicking me out of reading this as a sexual relationship, and skimming reviews on Google suggests everyone else reads it this way as well. (I should point out that Gyp also acquires a nice normal boyfriend, who she kisses as well – described as “a brief touch of lips on lips”, with no tingling). I am sure that if Gyp and Altria were both guys this would not be the case. So why? Is it how we – how I – read interactions between women, or is it the text itself that's the problem? And how?
