The Orphan's Tales by Catherynne M. Valente

Secreted away in a garden, a lonely girl spins stories to warm a curious prince: peculiar feats and unspeakable fates that loop through each other and back again to meet in the tapestry of her voice. Inked on her eyelids, each twisting, tattooed tale is a piece in the puzzle of the girl's own hidden history. And what tales she tells! Tales of shape-shifting witches and wild horsewomen, heron kings and beast princesses, snake gods, dog monks, and living stars -- each story more strange and fantastic than the one that came before.

The Orphan’s Tales is seriously ambitious – ‘the Arabian Nights for our time’ according to the blurbs. The book combines myriad individual stories with an over-arching plot fit for an epic novel of the world’s creation, fallen stars, journeys across oceans and through dangerous cities, and one girl’s discovery of her true identity.

Not only does Catherynne Valente revel in great story-telling, she remakes ancient myths and fairy tales to express bold, modern ideas. This is a feminist re-imagining of the heroes, heroines and monsters we all grew up hearing and reading about, and Valente’s sympathies are always with the outcasts. To take a simple example, a maiden trapped in a tower with her abundant golden hair turns out to be dragon-winged and deer-legged. No Prince will rescue her, but a Witch finds her a perfect place in a pirate ship full of monsters.

The stories are nested one inside another, so a prince setting out on a quest will encounter an old woman who tells her tale, in which she encounters a wolf who tells hers and so on. Some stories fill just one chapter, others spill over into many. It’s a real feat of writing that the stories stay clear and memorable, but also that Valente maintains the tension and suspense while growing so many plots. Overall, I found the books beautiful, serious and enjoyable at once.

For me the first volume, In the Night Garden, was fresher and more exciting than the second, In the Cities of Coin and Spice, although the two connect well. My main problem with the second was that there were some very disturbing scenes of cruelty to children. Valente is drawing on a tradition of fairy stories dependent upon mistreated and abandoned orphans so I understand why she wrote these things, but they were hard to read. Also, I started to feel the lack of strong male characters in this book, but that’s a very minor complaint. The books are challenging, but they’re also very special, a unique voyage for the imagination.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

Murakami has narrative magic I can’t resist. He once quoted John Irving as saying that reading a good book is a mainline. Once your readers are addicted, they’re always waiting. The analogy with drugs is a cold one but it makes sense. His novels open up the strange spaces in the world and I fall right in. Having said that, I was worried at the start of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World that this novel might be just a bit too (can I say it?) weird. I love The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore best of the Murkami novels I’ve read, but their strangeness is always rooted in a world I recognise. While superficially ordinary narrators cook elaborate meals, go to the dry cleaners or the gym and look after cats pretty well, I’m ready to accept dry-well portals and magic flutes made of animal souls. But Hard Boiled Wonderland gives the reader no home ground.

The story takes place in two different worlds. Odd chapters tell a sci-fi espionage story of a man figuring out a data-encryption experiment in the sewers below a Tokyo-like city, and within his own consciousness. Even chapters take us to the End of the World, a walled, perfectly ordered city where (another?) narrator finds himself severed from his shadow and set to work reading old dreams in a library full of skulls. There’s a reason why the book cover has no plot description – it’s pretty tricky to sum up. I took a while to find my feet but as the two stories began to draw closer together and I began to understand a little bit better what was at stake the novel became not just pacy but also poignant and thoughtful.

There’s a great summary of Murakami’s stories by John Wray, interviewing the author for The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER: Few novelists have written and rewritten their obsession so compulsively, I think, as you have. Hard-Boiled Wonderland, Dance Dance Dance, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Sputnik Sweetheart almost demand to be read as variations on a theme: a man has been abandoned by, or has otherwise lost, the object of his desire, and is drawn by his inability to forget her into a parallel world that seems to offer the possibility of regaining what he has lost, a possibility that life as he (and the reader) knows it can never offer. Would you agree with this characterization?

MURAKAMI: Yes.

That deadpan response to Wray’s analysis makes me smile. Among his other virtues is that Murakami is a funny man, and he combines this with an obsessive, deadly serious narrative search that Wray describes just right. It’s hard for me to love Hard-Boiled Wonderland in the way I do The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It’s so cerebral. But I’m definitely still fascinated, and waiting for the next shot.

(I read this novel as part of the Japanese Literature Challenge.)

Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente

Palimpsest is the story of a fantastic city reached only in sleep, filled with human-animal hybrids, ghost trains and living buildings. Four travellers arrive together one night: November, a beekeeper from California; Oleg, a Russian locksmith living in Manhattan; Ludovico, an Italian bookbinder; and Sei, a Japanese girl who sells train tickets. In their waking lives they have lost loved ones and no longer belong, but in Palimpsest they are thrown bewildered into wild love affairs haunted by painful memories. Valente shows us the city as a powerful intoxicant, a place of desire, imagination and revelation.

It’s a hard book to describe by plot because it is most of all an inventory of Palimpsest. Valente’s imagination is vivid, bold and endlessly fertile, and I enjoyed reading the novel as a ride through a strange place. The characters, unfortunately, are secondary to inventiveness so the fantastic city at times feels more real than these people. All the main characters are searching for ways to return to the city and finally to stay there. Initially the way into Palimpsest is only through sex with a stranger who has been there themselves, so there are a fair few descriptions of one-night stands. It’s never really made clear why sex with a stranger should provide access to Palimpsest, but those are the rules...

I felt the book would work best if it found the reader in the right mood; perhaps it needs someone to be longing for escape or feeling deserted to immerse in the baroque prose. For me, it half worked but I still felt the lack of characters in whom I could really believe.

The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien

I’ve kept The Silmarillion on the shelf for years but put off reading it because I had the vague idea that it’s supposed to be unreadable stuff, the Finnegans Wake of fantasy fiction. This isn’t true at all. I finally picked it up this week and raced through it, daft elf-names and all. It starts with a beautiful musical creation myth and then tells the history of the races of elves and men up to the time of The Lord of the Rings. The book is more a chronicle than a novel, many different stories pieced together from Tolkien’s lifetime of work inventing the histories and language of Middle Earth. Okay, so there are some fairly dry genealogical bits, but it’s also bursting with doomed warriors, gothic love stories and the fight against evil.

The overall tone is melancholic – Tolkien’s heroes are great men and women living under shadows too dark to dispel entirely. There’s something here of Tolkien’s own experience fighting in the First World War trenches, as well as the heavy influence of Beowulf and the Old Norse Edda. Probably I would never have read this if The Lord of the Rings hadn’t been such an important book for me in childhood. That would have been a loss. Together with Tolkien’s novels, The Silmarillion is a journey into a beautiful, haunting other world.