Boxing the Werewolf: Black and Blue and Genetically Modified All Over

Santa Olivia

by

Jacqueline Carey

rating: 5 of 5 stars
One thing that amazes me with this novel is Carey’s scope as a writer. With the Kushiel sextuplet she was graceful and highly engaging with her intelligent main characters, spinning sentences like colorful and erotic thread; with this book, her main character is more physical and so her writing takes on a greater physicality and brevity. Parsed phrases create intense moments, highlighting the fearless nature of her heroine, the simplicity that she brings to bear in her worldview.

Unlike the shadowy origins that much of urban fantasy uses as a suspenseful trope, Carey makes us witness to the events leading to the birth of the girl who will enliven the myth of Santa Olivia. Occurring in a slightly off future Texas where the threat of rampant disease in Mexico has caused the U.S. to seal the border claiming rebel Mexican forces are threatening to overrun the States, focusing in on the town once known as Santa Olivia but now converted into Outpost – disappearing from public awareness as the entire town becomes locked down – Carey introduces us to a genetic experiment of human scale: men who were bred to be stronger and faster and more resilient.

It is one such man, fleeing his U.S. captors, who succumbs to a tryst with a local girl, causing the improbable pregnancy that leads to the birth of Loup (pronounced Lou, French for wolf, told with a somber yet tongue-in-cheek werewolf reference and not the overripe gravitas crappy romance novels would give to the name).

Born gifted with the same genetic alterations engineered into her father, life is rather challenging for Lou. But then, life pretty much sucks for all the residents of Santa Olivia cum Outpost. Not allowed to leave by the U.S. Army, able only to serve as the working class servants of the soldiers, stuck between warring factions of Outpost gangs trying to scratch the crumbs the Army leaves, the scene becomes ripe for an avenging angel – Zorro style. Carey could have thrust her novel into the trenches of high action/adventure with swashbuckling and ass kicking, creating a comic book heroine in Loup. She does not. There is plenty of action, but Carey does not allow her action sequences to spin out of proportion to the story, despite Loup’s heightened abilities. In my opinion, this makes the story more realistic and rich, for the true heroic aspects arise in the only sport allowed the town of Outpost: boxing.

Loup’s older brother Thomas grows to be the heroic ideal of the town, training wholeheartedly and single-mindedly. Loup will get her turn in the spotlight, but the trajectory that Carey takes her on – growing and learning amongst orphans under the protection of the unorthodox Church, shadowing her older brother in the local boxing gym, performing “miracles” more akin to pranks as the original namesake child saint of the town, butting heads with the local bad boy tough who could easily be a stereotypical gang leader but in Carey’s hands becomes much more – plays alongside her brother’s development, benefiting from the comparison and example she finds, fleshing out the hopes and dreams of a small town forgotten and trapped.

Santa Olivia, as a novel of urban fantasy, pushes through many of the boundaries reinforced by previous novels of the genre. Carey continues to expand her craft and seduce her readers into her worlds just slightly askew of our own, spinning characters of coarse fabric and fine patterns, threading sexuality into her tales with skillful aplomb, and interweaving literary merit with the excitement of the genre and a subtle social commentary. Punches are not pulled, pelvic thrusts fully expressed. Santa Olivia packs the wallop of her main character.

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Waiting for Her Ship to Come in: Penelope’s Perspective

The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus

by

Margaret Atwood

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Amongst the weed-encroached fields of literary resuscitation of another author’s characters, Atwood’s usurpation of Penelope from the tallow-smeared hands of Homer proves to be the olive tree growing amid the nettles.

Acclaimed as the most faithful wife, awaiting for twenty years the return of Odysseus, Penelope in Atwood’s hands takes umbrage at being used as a measuring stick used to delineate and beat a woman into obedience and ever-faithful wifery. Providing a counterpoint to The Odyssey by filling in the home-bound gaps of the epic, Atwood regales us Greek-style with a fleshed out and out-of-flesh Penelope and the Chorus of her twelve hanged maidens, shades that sing – sometimes in an idyll or ballad, but also as an anthropologic lecture and courtroom drama – against their brutal slaying at the hands of Odysseus. Displaying the cleverness attributed her, but also the emotional wreck that Odysseus left in his wake to pursue glory and keep a vow, Penelope provides a posthumous look at her story; wading through fields of Asphodel in Hades, commenting snarkily or with a note of lament, she weaves the happenings that were overlooked or misinterpreted in Homer’s epic back into the story, all the while, her hanged maidens rant and rhyme comedically and rather viciously about all who had a hand in their demise, but especially their executioner.

Atwood’s style is engaging, humorous, a tad bit acerbic, but she never lets Penelope drift into a serious bout of woe-is-me or shrewishness, even when being compared and overshadowed (even in death, as much as shades can generate a shadow that is) by her cousin Helen of Troy. The chorus of hanged maidens is downright funny, as is Penelope’s limited perspective on the changing times, not to mention the acidic commentary she occasionally directs at the gods. Atwood’s syntax and tale construction astounded me with their complexity and clarity and ingenuity. Any reading of The Odyssey would benefit from this supplemental interpretation, if not for the previous reasons, then for the burlesque commentary it offers after engaging with one of our foundational literary works.

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A Sortie into Myth: Reaffirming Our Mythic Roots

A Short History of Myth

by
Karen Armstrong

rating: 4 of 5 stars
From whence did myth come? What did they entail, explain, engender? When has a myth slipped into obscurity? Why are they so desperately needed? Will we be able to survive their loss?

Karen Armstrong engages these nigh unanswerable queries in her chronological overview of the mythos of humanity. While being a perhaps oversimplified progression of mythic time periods – progressing from the Palaeolithic stirrings of hunter-gatherers to the agrarian revolution of human understanding, stopping to investigate the budding civilization building and continuing to the Axial age of burgeoning human spirituality, dwelling upon the receding movement of the Post-Axial age, until arriving at what she refers to as the Great Western Transformation – Armstrong manages to ponder some ineffable matters within a short space. As an overview of periodic mythology, her short history is useful as a sort of guidepost, but it is the deeper questions she ponders that elevate the book beyond a typical mythologic atlas.

Of particular note are the open-ended musings she introduces that wonder whether the modern lack of a sustaining mythology can be partially or even fully abetted by the surge in art, and specifically the novel, as a form of mythic source. While she believes that for a myth to truly do its work it must be encountered within a sacred space, being rendered merely prosaic by profane settings, she also seems hopeful that art will “step into this priestly role” and provide a way, as myth does and did, to enable us to see from a multitude of perspectives, to achieve a transcendent understanding beyond self-interest, to circumvent the ennui and lethargy that has enveloped the modern experience. Her short history was a stirring reminder to my personal mythos of how transportative myth has always been for me.

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Notes from a Siege, in G Minor

The Cellist of Sarajevo

by
Steven Galloway 

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book should be depressing. I should be plumbing the depths of evocative despair and heart-twisting grief and soul-wrenching sympathy at the condensed suffering of the Siege of Sarajevo as presented by Stephen Galloway. And yet I’m not. And yet, it feels beautiful, achingly so. It’s not that Galloway did not evince searing emotions from me, he did quite ruthlessly, but rather, he did not let me wallow in self-pity by way of comfortable distance. I felt the struggles of the three Sarajevans who guide us without being blinded by forgetfulness that such things very likely happened during the nearly four-year siege. Galloway thrust me into the daily occurrences of his characters, their trepidation at stepping into any exposed area, however, I never lost the sense of place and historicity, albeit fictive but factually based, never got lost in the story in a way that was safe. The looming malaise of brutal threat and attack that pervades the novel – the constant shelling and sniper bullets and seemingly random death – involved me in another way; this is not a novel that comfortably carries you away, but rather an escort (with one hand lingering warningly on its weapon) into a fearful world, made more electric and remorseless and shattering because this happened. The characters are distant in that I cannot relate to what they experience, being in my snug little American world, and yet Galloway breaches this wall, at times like one of the ever-present shells, and leaves me standing at the precipice of the scarred fragments of a once beautiful city. For having the distance of not experiencing the savagery and chaos of war, I could not stop imagining my own city in such a state, beholden to hate and fear, struggling to retain the torn remnants of its pride and beauty and joy.

Then there is the cellist. He is real. He really performed as presented, amidst shelled remains of a market where twenty-two people died and many others were injured. Playing Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor for twenty-two days, Vedran Smailović performed on the site where the shell landed. One of the themes that Galloway explores centers on heroism and its permutations. I found one here. Smailović did not seek such an assessment out I am sure; yet it is from his performance that Galloway crafts his exploration of a city under siege and the internal lives of those who survive within its razor boundaries.

Heroism simmers in the three characters we follow. Perhaps the more dramatically and classically heroic would be Arrow and her defense of the city. Through the lens of her sniper rifle, she explores the dynamics of hatred; indeed it consumes her world, but not in the enflamed embrasure of its easy perspective of “them” and “us.” Instead, she revolts against allowing hatred to guide her trigger or her thoughts.

Contrastingly, Kenan and Dragan evoke heroism on a smaller scale, Kenan in the diligent quest to bring clean water to his family and his crotchety neighbor despite the spine-melting fear he feels every time he must venture through the ravaged streets of Sarajevo. Dragan is perhaps the most difficult to assign a heroic signifier, presenting many occasions that belie the qualification, yet his was the perspective that resonated most soundly for me. His heroism lies in putting one foot in front of the other, each step laden with the city he chooses to bring into existence.

I do not think that heroism is often a conscious or cognizant decision, nor one that must be heaven-rattling in scope, but as Galloway illustrates through the three characters whose lives are touched by the cellist’s playing – be it through the scope of the counter sniper Arrow, or the family-bound scope of Kenan, or Dragan’s scope of what kind of city he wants to live in and recreate moment by moment – the effects of unintentional heroism on a personal level can reverberate through a community, war torn or in peace, like the throaty vibrations of a cello’s strings.

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A Rose Grows in Brooklyn

Brooklyn: A Novel

by
Colm Tóibín

rating: 4.5 of 5 stars
Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn gracefully bespelled me. He did it with ease, less prone to showy flair than to subtle intimation. After finishing the novel, letting this Irish immigrant to Brooklyn in the 1950’s perambulate in my thoughts, I realized that her naiveté should have stricken me at some point as annoying or distracting or hand-wringing at the very least. Eilis Lacey never evokes a negative response from me however. Instead Tóibín manages to usher me in as a confidant to Eilis, following her bildungsroman as if learning details from a close friend. However even the best of friends reach a place of frustration at times with each other, but Eilis and I never quarreled. I never found her snappish or irritating or, that teetering abyss of the maturing protagonist, whiny. She has a composure and quietude, not born from confidence, though that she slowly develops, but rather from a simplicity of spirit and purpose. The machinations and hyperactivity around her do not seem to cultivate a similar responsive blossom; her Irish roots continue to send up calmly swaying green shoots even amidst the hustle of burgeoning Brooklyn.

Perhaps to say that her blossom does not hybridize with her surroundings is erroneous; rather, we might say we are altered in the same sun as she, drinking the same newness of place and peoples and earth, moving at such a pace that the changes that actually do unfold – a slight change in petal color and fragrance – are so natural and unhurried that it is not until a return trip to her home of Enniscorthy that the comparative growth can be witnessed.

Mayhap too contributing to this obnubilated sense of change is the knowledge that Eilis did not seek out this uprooting relocation to Brooklyn. Her sense of order and the path of her life never enfolded a replanting in America; indeed, her Enniscorthy roots were quite well grounded, entwined with her mother’s and her friends’, not seeking out new ground like a free-wheeling and voracious nettle. Yet, new ground Eilis was given, and part of the beauty of this book comes at the very end, when her choices are arrayed before her, not so dissimilar in isolation, yet contextually divergent, like a rose graft taken from its home and grown in different terroir.

Behind the friendship with Eilis that Tóibín elicits from me there is also a sense of historicity that nudges me on a deeply personal level. When Eilis meets and begins an affectionate courtship with the boyish Italian-American Tony, I felt recalled to the stories that my grandparents told of their own courtship, as if I was reading a more inclusive narrative from one of them, reliving with them the sensations and joys they would have experienced.

That Tóibín crafts a patient and tender maturation for Eilis, compelling and believable without treading within angst, and the sense of familial remembrance he evokes left me rather awed and with a lingering feeling of peace, like I’d just put my nose in a rose bloom and inhaled deeply, forgetful of the thorns that usually await, but, finding none, return to inhale once more.

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What’s That Smell?: When Gods Go Bad

Gods Behaving Badly

by
Marie Phillips
 

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Artemis, great huntress, ravager of defiling men, chaste guardian of the moon, leader of the hunt amidst the unspoiled and serene wilds, wears a track suit and walks inbred dogs. At least, in modern times she does. She and her Olympian family have been forced to relocate to a crumbling house in London, expelled by the rise of Christianity from their Greek homeland and the minds of humans. To make ends meet, the gods must labor like the poor schlubs they would torment in the good old days. Aphrodite works as a phone sex operator; Apollo, when not transmogrifying rebuffing conquests into trees, tries rather vaingloriously and unsuccessfully to be a TV psychic. Hermes is a workaholic, having been drafted in earlier times as the god of money, he never gets to stop in the modern age of financial worship. Demeter is withering like the plants she struggles to tend, and nobody has seen Zeus or Hera in some time. To say the Olympian family has fallen from lofty heights would be something of an understatement.

However Gods Behaving Badly is not just about the pouting and insouciant downward plunge of faded deities. It is a love story. A love story of the grandiosely small scale. The main characters are pathetically human, not so very gifted with looks or wealth or power, even if the female is an absurdly astute Scrabble player. Such verbose acumen does not prevent her from being a pawn of the gods, cast into schemings and vengeance different from times past only in that the scale of power is significantly less (all the gods are a bit paranoid about wasting what little power they have left, not withstanding Apollo’s retribution when his vanity is snubbed).

How is it then that the fate of the world comes to reside in one rather innocuous mortal’s ken? The gods screwed up…again, that’s how. One would think that immortal beings on the verge of becoming not-so-immortal would harken to a greater sense of…well, something other than petty jealousy and revenge. One would think. And be wrong.

Full of wit and snark and joyous mythological winks and groans, Phillips has crafted a tale in the very spirit of the Greek myths, layering the blatant narcissism and self-interest of the gods over the poor humans who populate their shrinking playground. Anybody have the number for Aphrodite’s direct line?

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