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Dec. 29th, 2023 11:35 am
Books I Read in 2023
The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron — What happened to Molly Doran and Jackson Lamb in Berlin? We’re given hints of some tragedy in Herron’s earlier spy novels, a failed assignment that ended with Doran losing her legs and Lamb turning cynical and slovenly, or more cynical and slovenly, happy only when he’s insulting people. Finally, after eight books and a number of novellas, we learn their story.
In 1994, Alison North (a code name) is sent to Station House in Berlin. The Wall has fallen, and Station House interviews spies from East Berlin and evaluates the secrets they’re trying to sell. Alison is there to make sure the station is “running according to official protocols,” but she has another job as well. Brimley Miles (another code name) is high up in the station hierarchy; rumors have come to London about some questionable actions and she is supposed to find out what he’s up to. Unfortunately she’s a near-novice, in over her head — and, she starts to suspect, deliberately placed in Berlin because of her inexperience.
In the present, some people are trying to expose Alison’s story, which has been covered up and exists only as a file in an ancient archive. Other people are desperate to prevent it from coming to light, among them MI5’s First Desk Diana Taverner, who keeps a firm lid on any criticism of her domain.
Even after the long wait, the story satisfies on every level. We see why some of the characters act the way they do, and we learn more about some of the others (one in particular turns out not to be as benign as I’d thought). The plot is as fiendishly twisty as always in a Mick Herron novel. It has less of Herron’s trademark humor, but then what happened to the agents isn’t all that funny.
I wanted more about Berlin after the Wall came down, the whole spy-vs.-spy atmosphere. Alison goes to the Alexanderplatz, but we don’t get a picture of the absurd TV tower looming over Berlin like a giant disco ball. Or there’s the Adlon Hotel, a staid, fusty relic of the Soviet era: what had the old fossilized spies of the East thought when their domain was invaded by flashy tech bros from the West? I just visited the city, though, so this might be more a desire to go back than a criticism.
Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, by R. F. Kuang — This came out in 2022 but I only read it this year and wrote about it here. It works on a lot of levels: as an exciting story, as a novel of parallel history set in 19th-century England and China, as a fantasy with a coherent system of magic, as a critique of imperialism. I was surprised it didn’t win the Hugo.
Yellowface, by R. F. Kuang — Is it possible to read an entire book in a state of cringe? The protagonist does so many stupid, objectionable things, and is so oblivious about them, that you can barely continue reading. And yet you can’t stop.
Yellowface is a mainstream novel; I read it because I was so impressed with Babel. June Hayward and Athena Liu are writers, but while June has published one book that sold poorly Athena’s novels are literary bestsellers, with all the accompanying perks: photo spreads and Netflix options and invitations to conferences. June is envious, and her envy takes some toxic forms; for example, she thinks Athena’s success is partly due to the fact that she’s Asian. (June is white.) I can even feel sorry for her, just a bit; every author knows how soul-destroying that kind of envy is.
June and Athena are together when Athena dies suddenly. Athena writes her books on a typewriter, not a computer, so it’s easy for June to take the latest manuscript and pass it off as her own. Soon she’s living in Athena’s world of huge advances and lunches with editors and high-level marketing discussions. (As a writer, I couldn’t help celebrating a little during this part. I mean, it looks like so much fun. I kept thinking, So this is what it’s like.) There’s just one tiny flaw: people are starting to wonder how a white woman could write so authentically about Asian lives.
Then her foolish decisions come back to haunt her. For this book she decided to use the name Juniper Song, her real first and middle names. (Her mother was a hippie.) But Song is also an Asian surname, and so, of course, readers think she’s Asian, even though she doesn’t hide the fact that she’s white. Other problems are cropping up as well. Athena’s mother has some questions. Someone on social media implies they know something. June can’t come up with another novel to follow her breakout success. (This, to me, was one of the cringiest parts. She actually asks people what the Asian experience is like. No one can possibly be that clueless, can they?) She thinks she sees Athena’s ghost.
You want her to fail, because she shouldn’t be allowed to profit from someone else’s hard work, and because she remains so lacking in awareness. You want her to succeed, because exposure would destroy her life. Can someone who is white create a true portrait of a culture not her own? Is it cultural appropriation for a white person to write about characters of color? What constitutes authorship? (June rewrites some of the novel, another cringe moment.) Don’t all writers, in a sense, steal from other people’s lives? If June succeeds in the same way Athena did, doesn’t that mean that Athena being Asian had nothing to do with her achievements, and why doesn’t June realize this?
Julia, by Sandra Newman — This is an “Oh, yeah?” book, one where you hear the premise — in this case, George Orwell’s 1984 told from viewpoint of Julia, Winston Smith’s lover — and think, “Oh, yeah? And how’s that going to work?” And yet, amazingly, Newman pulls it off.
Julia has her own agency here, something that isn’t really true of Orwell’s novel. She’s more down to earth than Smith, more capable of enjoying herself, more adroit at navigating the system. “I’m rather good at staying alive,” she says in 1984, but Orwell never showed how much she has to compromise to survive, and how morally questionable some of her compromises have to be. She enjoyed sex in the original novel, but there it was presented as a rebellion against Big Brother; here it just means she enjoys sex.
You begin to realize how pallid the original Julia was, how much she existed just to listen to Smith’s mansplaining. And Smith turns out to be a doubleplusgood mansplainer. “If there is any hope… it must lie in the proles,” he says sententiously to Julia, talking about the great mass of people who aren’t in the Party.
“Julia said, ’So you’ve spoken to a great many proles?’
“‘How could I?’ Winston said, affronted. ‘I risked a great deal by speaking to that one old man.’
“At this, Julia dropped back and stooped to fiddle at her bootlaces so he wouldn’t see her laughing. Poor Winston! He’d talked to single prole, and felt he knew all there was to know about them! She didn’t have the heart to tell him how many proles she’d dealt with over the years.”
Julia was the only female main character in 1984. Newman makes up for this by populating the world with more women, as well as a few gay people and people of color. When only men are in power, when there is only Big Brother at the top of the hierarchy, the outcome for women is never good, and in Julia their experiences are often worse than those of men.
Orwell’s Oceania is a dreary, shabby, circumscribed place, a mirror of England after WWII. Newman’s world is larger; you can even have fun there, if you keep to the margins and don’t call attention to yourself. It’s a vision informed by the breakup of the Soviet Union and knows that everything must end, that the future isn’t “a boot stamping on a human face forever.” The boot lets up every so often, even if, unfortunately, it sometimes comes back later. 1984 was a necessary book, a brilliant examination of what makes up a dictatorship. Julia fills in the parts that Orwell overlooked.
My Brother’s Keeper, by Tim Powers — Here’s another “Oh, yeah?” book, coming just after Julia thanks to the magic of alphabetization. In this case the premise is even more dubious: “What if Emily Brontë fought werewolves?”
But… Well, Emily and her brother Branwell were both bitten by strange-looking dogs. Emily spent a lot of time wandering the moors, and who knows what she got up to there? Why did Branwell have to leave London in a hurry? What kind of name is Brontë, anyway?
My Brother’s Keeper draws you into this twilight parallel world, and after a while all of your objections fall away. You feel the loneliness of the Brontës and the desolation of the moors all around them, a solitude that heightens the terror when they’re attacked by supernatural forces. Emily is a great character, as tough and independent as a woman could be in that time, fighting unnatural creatures and protecting her family. There’s also a possible werewolf inspiration for Heathcliff and — one of my favorite characters — a terrific dog.
If you’ve read anything about the Brontës you know that the story didn’t end well, but Powers somehow turns their tragedy into victory. I’ve seen reviews that grouse about the Catholicism in some of Powers’s books, but I figure that if you don’t like the religious elements you can always think of them as part of the fantasy. And I remember what Charles Brown of Locus once said: that Catholicism is (more-or-less) coherent within itself, and so Catholic writers — J.R.R. Tolkien, Gene Wolfe, Tim Powers — are terrific at world-building. That certainly works to Powers’s benefit here.
Adrian Tchaikovsky — This was my year to discover Adrian Tchaikovsky. I can’t review each of the six books I read, so I’ll just say that Tchaikovsky’s aliens are truly alien, and that he deals with deep time better than almost anyone. In the series comprising Children of Time, Children of Ruin, and Children of Memory, humans have nearly destroyed the Earth. Just in time they send out spaceships to seed life, along with an uplift neurovirus that can speed up evolution, hoping to leave some remnant of humanity somewhere. Things do not go as planned, and the books follow the long, long evolution of several species, watched over for all that time by a semi-sane woman whose personality has been uploaded to a computer.
In these books various species meet and nearly fight each other, but they usually reach an understanding with both sides coming out richer for it. After all that rationality, the books of The Final Architecture — Shards of Earth, Eyes of the Void, and Lords of Uncreation — are surprisingly bloodthirsty. Aliens called the Architects blow up planets that host intelligent life, including Earth, and the humans who are left make uneasy alliances with other aliens who have also lost their planets. There are Intermediaries who can sometimes communicate with the Architects but who mostly die or go mad; there are aliens that leave some humans with the overwhelming desire to worship them; there are women soldiers created by parthenogenesis who look more or less alike; there are people who, partly as a reaction to these soldiers, want to stop all genetic modification and Make Humans Great Again. And there is another universe with different rules, the Unspace; going through it allows you to travel to other planets, and it could also hold the secret to why the Architects are so fixated on destruction. Unfortunately, something terrifying lurks there, keeping the Intermediaries from finding the ultimate answer.
In 1994, Alison North (a code name) is sent to Station House in Berlin. The Wall has fallen, and Station House interviews spies from East Berlin and evaluates the secrets they’re trying to sell. Alison is there to make sure the station is “running according to official protocols,” but she has another job as well. Brimley Miles (another code name) is high up in the station hierarchy; rumors have come to London about some questionable actions and she is supposed to find out what he’s up to. Unfortunately she’s a near-novice, in over her head — and, she starts to suspect, deliberately placed in Berlin because of her inexperience.
In the present, some people are trying to expose Alison’s story, which has been covered up and exists only as a file in an ancient archive. Other people are desperate to prevent it from coming to light, among them MI5’s First Desk Diana Taverner, who keeps a firm lid on any criticism of her domain.
Even after the long wait, the story satisfies on every level. We see why some of the characters act the way they do, and we learn more about some of the others (one in particular turns out not to be as benign as I’d thought). The plot is as fiendishly twisty as always in a Mick Herron novel. It has less of Herron’s trademark humor, but then what happened to the agents isn’t all that funny.
I wanted more about Berlin after the Wall came down, the whole spy-vs.-spy atmosphere. Alison goes to the Alexanderplatz, but we don’t get a picture of the absurd TV tower looming over Berlin like a giant disco ball. Or there’s the Adlon Hotel, a staid, fusty relic of the Soviet era: what had the old fossilized spies of the East thought when their domain was invaded by flashy tech bros from the West? I just visited the city, though, so this might be more a desire to go back than a criticism.
Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, by R. F. Kuang — This came out in 2022 but I only read it this year and wrote about it here. It works on a lot of levels: as an exciting story, as a novel of parallel history set in 19th-century England and China, as a fantasy with a coherent system of magic, as a critique of imperialism. I was surprised it didn’t win the Hugo.
Yellowface, by R. F. Kuang — Is it possible to read an entire book in a state of cringe? The protagonist does so many stupid, objectionable things, and is so oblivious about them, that you can barely continue reading. And yet you can’t stop.
Yellowface is a mainstream novel; I read it because I was so impressed with Babel. June Hayward and Athena Liu are writers, but while June has published one book that sold poorly Athena’s novels are literary bestsellers, with all the accompanying perks: photo spreads and Netflix options and invitations to conferences. June is envious, and her envy takes some toxic forms; for example, she thinks Athena’s success is partly due to the fact that she’s Asian. (June is white.) I can even feel sorry for her, just a bit; every author knows how soul-destroying that kind of envy is.
June and Athena are together when Athena dies suddenly. Athena writes her books on a typewriter, not a computer, so it’s easy for June to take the latest manuscript and pass it off as her own. Soon she’s living in Athena’s world of huge advances and lunches with editors and high-level marketing discussions. (As a writer, I couldn’t help celebrating a little during this part. I mean, it looks like so much fun. I kept thinking, So this is what it’s like.) There’s just one tiny flaw: people are starting to wonder how a white woman could write so authentically about Asian lives.
Then her foolish decisions come back to haunt her. For this book she decided to use the name Juniper Song, her real first and middle names. (Her mother was a hippie.) But Song is also an Asian surname, and so, of course, readers think she’s Asian, even though she doesn’t hide the fact that she’s white. Other problems are cropping up as well. Athena’s mother has some questions. Someone on social media implies they know something. June can’t come up with another novel to follow her breakout success. (This, to me, was one of the cringiest parts. She actually asks people what the Asian experience is like. No one can possibly be that clueless, can they?) She thinks she sees Athena’s ghost.
You want her to fail, because she shouldn’t be allowed to profit from someone else’s hard work, and because she remains so lacking in awareness. You want her to succeed, because exposure would destroy her life. Can someone who is white create a true portrait of a culture not her own? Is it cultural appropriation for a white person to write about characters of color? What constitutes authorship? (June rewrites some of the novel, another cringe moment.) Don’t all writers, in a sense, steal from other people’s lives? If June succeeds in the same way Athena did, doesn’t that mean that Athena being Asian had nothing to do with her achievements, and why doesn’t June realize this?
Julia, by Sandra Newman — This is an “Oh, yeah?” book, one where you hear the premise — in this case, George Orwell’s 1984 told from viewpoint of Julia, Winston Smith’s lover — and think, “Oh, yeah? And how’s that going to work?” And yet, amazingly, Newman pulls it off.
Julia has her own agency here, something that isn’t really true of Orwell’s novel. She’s more down to earth than Smith, more capable of enjoying herself, more adroit at navigating the system. “I’m rather good at staying alive,” she says in 1984, but Orwell never showed how much she has to compromise to survive, and how morally questionable some of her compromises have to be. She enjoyed sex in the original novel, but there it was presented as a rebellion against Big Brother; here it just means she enjoys sex.
You begin to realize how pallid the original Julia was, how much she existed just to listen to Smith’s mansplaining. And Smith turns out to be a doubleplusgood mansplainer. “If there is any hope… it must lie in the proles,” he says sententiously to Julia, talking about the great mass of people who aren’t in the Party.
“Julia said, ’So you’ve spoken to a great many proles?’
“‘How could I?’ Winston said, affronted. ‘I risked a great deal by speaking to that one old man.’
“At this, Julia dropped back and stooped to fiddle at her bootlaces so he wouldn’t see her laughing. Poor Winston! He’d talked to single prole, and felt he knew all there was to know about them! She didn’t have the heart to tell him how many proles she’d dealt with over the years.”
Julia was the only female main character in 1984. Newman makes up for this by populating the world with more women, as well as a few gay people and people of color. When only men are in power, when there is only Big Brother at the top of the hierarchy, the outcome for women is never good, and in Julia their experiences are often worse than those of men.
Orwell’s Oceania is a dreary, shabby, circumscribed place, a mirror of England after WWII. Newman’s world is larger; you can even have fun there, if you keep to the margins and don’t call attention to yourself. It’s a vision informed by the breakup of the Soviet Union and knows that everything must end, that the future isn’t “a boot stamping on a human face forever.” The boot lets up every so often, even if, unfortunately, it sometimes comes back later. 1984 was a necessary book, a brilliant examination of what makes up a dictatorship. Julia fills in the parts that Orwell overlooked.
My Brother’s Keeper, by Tim Powers — Here’s another “Oh, yeah?” book, coming just after Julia thanks to the magic of alphabetization. In this case the premise is even more dubious: “What if Emily Brontë fought werewolves?”
But… Well, Emily and her brother Branwell were both bitten by strange-looking dogs. Emily spent a lot of time wandering the moors, and who knows what she got up to there? Why did Branwell have to leave London in a hurry? What kind of name is Brontë, anyway?
My Brother’s Keeper draws you into this twilight parallel world, and after a while all of your objections fall away. You feel the loneliness of the Brontës and the desolation of the moors all around them, a solitude that heightens the terror when they’re attacked by supernatural forces. Emily is a great character, as tough and independent as a woman could be in that time, fighting unnatural creatures and protecting her family. There’s also a possible werewolf inspiration for Heathcliff and — one of my favorite characters — a terrific dog.
If you’ve read anything about the Brontës you know that the story didn’t end well, but Powers somehow turns their tragedy into victory. I’ve seen reviews that grouse about the Catholicism in some of Powers’s books, but I figure that if you don’t like the religious elements you can always think of them as part of the fantasy. And I remember what Charles Brown of Locus once said: that Catholicism is (more-or-less) coherent within itself, and so Catholic writers — J.R.R. Tolkien, Gene Wolfe, Tim Powers — are terrific at world-building. That certainly works to Powers’s benefit here.
Adrian Tchaikovsky — This was my year to discover Adrian Tchaikovsky. I can’t review each of the six books I read, so I’ll just say that Tchaikovsky’s aliens are truly alien, and that he deals with deep time better than almost anyone. In the series comprising Children of Time, Children of Ruin, and Children of Memory, humans have nearly destroyed the Earth. Just in time they send out spaceships to seed life, along with an uplift neurovirus that can speed up evolution, hoping to leave some remnant of humanity somewhere. Things do not go as planned, and the books follow the long, long evolution of several species, watched over for all that time by a semi-sane woman whose personality has been uploaded to a computer.
In these books various species meet and nearly fight each other, but they usually reach an understanding with both sides coming out richer for it. After all that rationality, the books of The Final Architecture — Shards of Earth, Eyes of the Void, and Lords of Uncreation — are surprisingly bloodthirsty. Aliens called the Architects blow up planets that host intelligent life, including Earth, and the humans who are left make uneasy alliances with other aliens who have also lost their planets. There are Intermediaries who can sometimes communicate with the Architects but who mostly die or go mad; there are aliens that leave some humans with the overwhelming desire to worship them; there are women soldiers created by parthenogenesis who look more or less alike; there are people who, partly as a reaction to these soldiers, want to stop all genetic modification and Make Humans Great Again. And there is another universe with different rules, the Unspace; going through it allows you to travel to other planets, and it could also hold the secret to why the Architects are so fixated on destruction. Unfortunately, something terrifying lurks there, keeping the Intermediaries from finding the ultimate answer.
