A Great Story for Younger Readers from Grace Mirchandani

 

Mitzi Clark & the Keepers of SHUT – Grace Mirchandani (2021)

 

            One of the best outcomes from writing this book review blog has been the steady emails from authors and publishers requesting I read and review their book.  As a life-long reader, this is a dream come true.  Often, the books sent to me do not fit neatly with the types of books I have focused on here at RXTT’s Book Journey.  I must admit that I do not read much fiction these days.  Sometimes the requests involve a book I just do not have interest in reading.  Other times the subject matter is too far from my interests.  I respect authors and publishers, so I always make sure to communicate with them, whether or not I do read and review their book.  Sometimes I read the book, and write up a full review, only to email it to the author for them to use as they see fit, even though I do not publish the review on this blog.  Occasionally however, I am sucked in either by the language, or by the first few pages, leading to a thoroughly pleasant reading experience.  This is what occurred as I started to read Grace Mirchandani’s "middle grade" novel, Mitzi Clark & the Keepers of SHUT.

            I must start by stating that I would have LOVED this book if I had discovered it around age 10-13.  The language in books aimed at a younger audience (10-13) is often stilted, basic, or just plain turgid.  This is not the case with Mirchandani’s work.  Like the best Encyclopedia Brown stories, or the great Nancy Drew mysteries (both of which I adored as a kid), this story draws you in quickly.  Before I knew it, I had devoured ten chapters and found myself fully entrenched in the world Mirchandani created.

            Mirchandani does not “write down” to her audience.  She sets the stage and the players with ease.  The details she provides add to the characterization and setting, without slowing the narrative.  We are introduced to Mitzi Clark, our protagonist, her family and friends.  Odd occurrences and small details in what should be a normal day stir up Mitzi’s curiosity.  She discovers a buried item on her parent’s property, which leads her to recruit her friends to what Mitzi thinks will be a fun scavenger hunt, something to liven up the boredom of the summer day. What they find only increases the mystery, and leads to a very satisfying story.

            As usual, I do not like to give away plot details from the fiction I read.  Those are better left for the reader to discover.  I will say that Mirchandani writes clear, descriptive prose and dialogue.  The kids talk like kids, and the parents talk like parents.  This is harder to accomplish than it may seem.  Like the best stories, The Keepers of Shut keeps the reader engaged, invested, and turning the pages.  This is the first of a series of "middle grade" novels involving Mitzi Clark and her friends.  The second volume, Mitzi Clark & The Covenant Cube, continues the tale. 

            I highly recommend this novel to all young readers, or anyone who wishes to read a story to a young person.  It is not a story heavy with terror or grief, although there are tense and suspenseful parts, and the protagonists do face dangers.  Grace Mirchandani has a great facility with storytelling, and I am sure she had as much fun writing this book as I had reading it.  I hope for great success for this series.  It deserves a wide readership.

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/Mitzi-Clark-Keepers-Grace-Mirchandani/dp/B09M2XQC2N )

My first visit to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast will not be the last

 

Titus Groan: Vol. 1 of Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake (1946)

           

            After almost 400 pages, and two years in the life of the title character, I have completed my first foray into the weird, wild, and oppressive world of Gormenghast.  This nearly 80-year old epic begins with the birth of Titus Groan, the heir to the current Earl of Gormenghast, a man whose family line has ruled this walled city-state for millennia.

            What let me know I was in for an unusual story was the initial section of this novel, as Mervyn Peake takes several pages to describe the walled city of Gormenghast, introducing us to the real main character of this tale, the city itself.  Mountains on one side and a forest lake on the other surround the ancient sprawling castle, if it can be rightly called a castle.  Inside the walls of the massive city, its denizens spend their every waking hour in the pursuit of their labors, dictated purely by ritual and birth.  Those born to kitchen workers will be kitchen workers.  Those born to the unfortunate people that live outside the castle, the mud dwellers, are destined to remain outsiders.  The individual duties and positions within the castle being determined not by human decisions but by the countless precedents set by previous Gormenghast Earls and their families.  Every single action is either part of a daily ritual, or mirrors some ancient rite, the reasons for it obscured by time and generations.  No one asks questions.  No one seeks to change his or her position in this world.

            Nowhere in this work does Mervyn Peake specify how many people live within the confines of Gormenghast.  It could be tens of thousands, or just a few hundred.  Either way, the vast expanse of this sprawling city-state lays mostly deserted, with rooms, towers, dungeons, and hallways remaining unused for decades at a time, until some event or dictated ritual requires it.  The people we are introduced to come mostly from the retinue of the Earl himself, Lord Sepulchrave (the characters all have such evocative names!).  There is the Head Cook, Mr. Swelter, a fat, slovenly man that runs a small army of servants and kitchen workers whose task is to prepare meals for the citizens as well as the various cyclical feasts and formal events in the castle.  There is Lord Sepulchrave himself, who spends most of his time away from his family, absorbed in books found within an ancient, massive library, of which only the Earl seems to frequent.  There is the Earl’s wife, Countess Gertrude, a very large woman whose sole interests lay in the cats and birds of Gormenghast.  There is the daughter and eldest child of the Earl, Fuschia Groan, a young woman with little purpose in life, and her nanny, Mrs. Slagg, an old, tiny woman who has essentially raised the Earl’s daughter, and will be tasked with the care of the infant Titus. 

Another critical character is introduced, a young man by the name of Steerpike who, after manipulating his way out of what would have been life-long servitude in the Gormenghast kitchens, begins to worm himself into the world of the top servants and the rulers of the castle.  This Steerpike will drive the plot forward as his ever more grand plans start to take shape.

Most novels introduce the characters and dive right into plot.  Not these Gormenghast books.  I venture that around 70% of the novel consists of detailed, meaningful descriptions of the castle buildings, walls, towers, plazas, hallways, rooms, and the surrounding countryside.  Initially this distracted me, as I am so used to the standard plot formats of 20^th century fantasy fiction.  However, once my mind adapted to Mervyn Peake’s prose, it all made much more narrative sense.  The castle is eternal, or may as well be, having seen the rise and fall of dozens and dozens of generations, each one living and dying within the city walls, each one just a small blip in the lengthy life of Gormenghast castle itself. 

The lives of the Gormenghast residents mirror the lives of every heir to any throne in human history.  Their entire existence dictated by ritual, and formal decrees, forcing them to live by codes of honor, with no individuality allowed for it would disturb propriety.  If they are fortunate they end up handing the throne down to their children, who hand it to their children, etc.  There is always someone trying to take what is yours.  There is always some conniving relative attempting to either discredit or outright murder someone in order for his or her progeny to take the throne.  How many members of the British Royal family, for example, count as their only confidants and friends those who serve them?  This is the way of royalty, of entrenched ritual for ritual’s sake.  It is everything I despise in human governance.  Mervyn Peake seems to despise it as well, for the manner in which he details the people of Gormenghast is far less respectful than the way he describes the castle itself.  The castle has dignity, wisdom, and must be respected, whereas those who live within its walls are buffoons, dullards, and inbred.

The book ends with the title character, Titus Groan, reaching his 2^nd birthday, and the formal celebrations that will mark him as the new Earl of Gormenghast.  Those most sensitive and perceptive can sense a great change coming.  Change is the ultimate evil in Gormenghast.  Change effects everyone, seen as unnecessary and unwanted.  The next book in this trilogy is titled Gormenghast.  I fully expect to immerse myself once more within the dark, sullen masonry and the weird, desperate characters that make it their home.  I already feel as if I will walk the halls and rooms of Gormenghast for the rest of my life.

Gene Wolfe Ends the Book of the New Sun

The Book of the New Sun, Vol. 4: The Citadel of the Autarch – Gene Wolfe (1982)

            It is complete.  My tour through the mind of Gene Wolfe, and Urth, the world his protagonist Severian inhabits, has run its course.  I am not the same person that began this journey.  Neither is Severian.  In fact, neither is anyone or anything.  Permanence is an illusion.  Change is the only true constant of our existence.  Change is so constant and so pervasive that we flow through countless cycles unnoticed as we toil in our second-to-second existence.  The theme of change, or wholesale and wide-ranging change, and the ways that change can actually bring about order and stability, are at the core of the Book of the New Sun.

            The genius of Gene Wolfe helps facilitate this through his use of a narrator whose memory, he claims, is eidetic.  This narrator, Severian, is the writer of the tale, and also the hero.  Through the course of 4 novels, he tells his own story as he progresses from a know-nothing young apprentice, to a full Master Torturer, then into a world-weary traveler, and finally to his ultimate destiny as a leader of men.  While Severian may indeed possess an eidetic memory he does make mistakes and omissions in the telling of his tale, and later admits them to us, the reader.  If this did not complicate the story somewhat, the fact that Severian ends up absorbing the consciousness of various people throughout the tale increases his inner confusion, for he cannot tell whether the memory he experiences is his own, or one of the people whose memories he carries within him. 

            This is a neat literary trick to show how humans actually think.  We assume we are ONE BEING, but we have two brains.  We have multiple personas.  We all have multiple “selves” we carry within us.  The 6 year old me is still in there somewhere, as is the angry 19 year old me, and the depressed 30 year old me.  Not only that, but by virtue of their constant presence and nurturing, I carry my father and my mother and their voices within me as well.  Change does not erase.  It aggregates.  The same is true of our narrator, Severian, and every one of us.

            (I began this journey through Urth at the behest of a pal from the Sonic Youth Gossip Forum.  His screen name is Severian, and he has championed these books to me for EVER.  I first posted my review of Volume 1, The Shadow of the Torturer, on April 4, 2016.  It took me a couple of years to get back to the Book of the New Sun, and Severian let me know of his displeasure.  Now I have read the final three volumes, one a month, for the past three months and I am all Wolfe’d out!  What a story!  WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!!! )

            When I last visited Urth, Severian had become embroiled with people who showed him the true age and mystery of his world.  Urth is very very old.  So very old.  Not only is Urth old, but the universe itself is exceedingly ancient.  The mores and dogmas that hold this society together are a bizarre combination of their access to high technology with no awareness of the science that makes the tech function, and of the descent of humanity into a strict feudal system, similar in rigidity to the old Hindu caste system.  In a world like this, the powerful are like gods, like magicians, and the regular people are solely there to feed the mill of life.  No questions are asked, and everyone knows their place.  Into this world, a young torturer’s apprentice is thrust, forcing him to question everything he has been learned, and yet reinforcing everything he has been taught.  It is as complex as real life.  Each human is doing their best to survive with what means they have at hand.  Life is too hard to worry about the big picture, or the bigger issues.

            In this type of world, war is constant.  Pain is constant.  Death is so pervasive that an entire Guild of Torturers exists to dole out punishments and executions.  Everywhere Severian travels death shadows him, or has been there before.  What is shown in this last volume is that Severian, a personification of death, grows to understand that absolute rule means that everyone is short-changed.  As he progresses through his final understanding, Severian realizes that the biggest change he will bring about will be to re-craft the rules of the world that made him who he is, to create a better world for all. 

            As with all fiction I review here at RXTT’s Intellectual Journey, I do not want to give away too much of the story.  That is the single greatest joy of fiction, the way the story is revealed to the reader, and I hope you get to experience the sublime literary and imaginative joys that gene Wolfe has crafted into The Book of The New Sun for yourself.

Gene Wolfe can't stop messing with my mind, Vol. 3

The Book of the New Sun, Vol. 3: The Sword of the Lictor – Gene Wolfe (1981)

     My real-life “Severian”, as opposed to the person narrating the Book of the New Sun, would be so happy.  This guy has been hassling me (kindly) for a while now to finish reading the Book of the New Sun, and I put it off due to my mind being pulled to other topics and books.  However, having picked up and read the 2^nd volume of Gene Wolfe’s masterful tetralogy, I found myself unable to pull away from the ancient world of Urth, and the lives of the people that Severian runs into and becomes part of as he sets off toward his destiny.  I had to pick up the 3^rd volume, and start in on it as soon as I had finished The Claw of the Conciliator.

Our narrator, Severian, has experienced and grown much since we first met him as an Apprentice to the Guild of Torturers.  He has become a Master Torturer, and his services have been put to use as he travels through Urth.  He has glimpsed through the myths and tales of his world, and begun to see the truths underlying everything he thought he knew.  Urth is a very, very old place, seemingly a far-future Earth, one in which, as Severian finds out, humanity left for the stars and returned from the stars a long time ago.  Much of humanity exists in a feudal system, with a few ruling groups and most of the masses just working hard at staying fed and alive.

Gene Wolfe is such a clever writer.  His narrator claims to have an eidetic memory of sorts, being able to recall any and all events that have occurred in his life, but this is not exactly true.  He doubts his memory at times, due partly to the fact that his mind has “absorbed” the mind of an aristocratic Lady named Thecla, which causes him to recall memories that are not his own.  To add another level to this, Gene Wolfe writes this tale as if it were his translation of an ancient text recounted by Severian himself.  This allows Wolfe to keep the reader on edge, wondering what new revelation is to come next, and whether it will even be recognized as that.  As Severian works to unlock this puzzle he experiences the disjointed state that comes from the knowledge that every new revelation actually leads to more confusion, much like reality. 

Most science fiction/fantasy books do not work this way.  As their protagonists progress in their stories the world around them becomes clearer, and their knowledge of it more secure, leading to a great apex where the truths of that fictional world are revealed to the characters and the reader.  I am unaware of where Gene Wolfe is taking this tale, but that makes for a more thrilling ride!  The real world, the world we all live in, is exceedingly complex, and the more you seek the more complexity you find.  It is true, as the wise man is claimed to have said, that the more you learn the more you realize you know nothing. 

We are victims of our personal reality tunnels, and seeking any answers will always lead you to more questions.  In this sense, consciousness and reality appear to be fractal systems.  Maybe Gene Wolfe was somehow innately aware of this, even before Chaos Theory and fractal geometry were studied and understood as they are today.  The best writers and artists are the ones that can pull truths from our collective experience and share it with the rest of us, sometimes encapsulating past experiences in novel ways, and at other times seemingly predicting the future state of humanity as they gather from the clues all around us.  Gene Wolfe was a master at both of these, and it is what makes the Book of the New Sun such gripping reading.  One more to go…

(This book can be read here: THE SWORD OF THE LICTOR )

Sometimes the idea for a book is better than the finished product

Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century – Marina Warner (2008)

            As an artist, I have always been interested in the way we humans perceive the world around us.  Most people take it for granted that what they see, hear, touch, etc. is corporeally real.  They assume that our brains are just receptacles, containers for the input our senses provide.  This is a very limited view of our minds.  Every single one of us is living in a world that exists solely in our minds, filtered by our personal experiences, beliefs, and prejudices.  Where some people see images in clouds, others never bother to look at all.  Our human culture, literature, and especially religion, has been reading into the visions of the mind since before we have record of it.  Marina Warner explores the many different ways that humans have tried to visualize the ephemeral.

            One thing that Ms. Warner does so well is to combine what appears to be a shit-ton of research and information into a concise accounting.  Each chapter describes human’s explorations into the meaning of ephemeral visions, such as clouds, shadows, fata morgana, mirror images, etc., from ancient times to the modern day.   This makes the book a very valuable resource from which to find other material that further explores the topics at hand.

            There is one big problem though.  I read such books to encounter new analysis and new insights into these subjects, as I am already well-versed with all these topics through my own personal research and reading.  This book does not have such analysis or thought.  After a few chapters it begins to read like a thesis by a graduate student, one that contains too many examples and too little substance.  Too many examples are cited with no context, just to pad out some of the thin chapters.  That is a shame.  I think a wonderful book could be written using this material, if it was more carefully edited and if it included more original insight.

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.amazon.com/Phantasmagoria-Visions-Metaphors-Twenty-first-Century/dp/0199299943 )

Borges' stories are indeed like labyrinths constructed out of words.

Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings – Jorge Luis Borges (1964)

           

There are a few giants in the world of short-story writing.  Edgar Allan Poe is one of the first, having essentially created both the modern detective story and the modern horror story through his demented tales.  Poe’s stories are not in the vein of the gross-out, blood-filled, carnage-laden tales which are seen as horror these days.  They instead were more of the meditative, eerie, unnerving type of story.  These are the kind of tale that pull you in and haunt your thoughts afterwards, if done right.  Jorge Luis Borges is just such an author.  He made his name with short stories, poetry, and essays, and in doing so changed the world of literature. 

            Borges’ stories are like minimalist puzzles. They are the epitome of the old short-story writing axiom that nothing should be in the story that does not propel the story forward.  While novels allow the author countless pages to explore motivations, digressions, and setting, short stories, especially Borges’ very concise stories, need to get their point across as fast as possible, without feeling like pure plotting with no emotional connection for the reader.  Using a rich vocabulary gleamed from his far-ranging and esoteric reading Jorge Luis Borges writes short stories that feel almost holographic, as if all parts contained the whole.  His work feels like stepping into an alternate reality where the wisdom of the ancients is meshed with the troubles of the modern world.  They are not quite mathematical, as much as rigorously constructed.

            Borges wrote in Spanish, and while I can read Spanish I do not have the education in Spanish needed to understand Borges’ writing without constantly interrupting myself to check a word in the dictionary.  Therefore, I have read him in translation.  This collection, Labyrinths, has made me appreciate Borges’ mind and his ability to aggregate the wisdom he encounters in his readings into his stories.  Borges was, like me, someone who preferred to read the fringes of literature, seeking and studying ancient writings, near-forgotten philosophers, and the classics of ancient antiquity.  He sought to explore the world of the Gnostics, of the Greek Idealists, of the Persian scientists, etc.  I too seek out old books and old ideas to read, and to see what wisdom or entertainment may be found within.  I enjoy learning for learning’s sake, something else I share with Borges.

            Jorge Luis Borges went blind around age 47 and never learned to read Braille.  What a horror for someone whose whole life was about the joy found in reading.  I can imagine that he found it pointless to do so, as the books and literature he sought was of a type not to be found in Braille editions, which are usually just the classic canon and more modern fare.  Losing that connection to the ancient world that literature gave Borges must have been quite rough.  Someday, if my Spanish gets better, I will attempt to read him in our native tongue.  Until then, I am glad that good people took the time to translate these cool stories for me.

(To read Borges' Labyrinths in PDF format, click here: 
https://wizchan.org/hob/src/1449201237263-0.pdf )