Star Rangers, Andre Norton (365 Books, Day 339)

Read August 3rd.

This is an odd book for Norton, because it's an ensemble cast from the beginning and it stays that way; it never slips into what I think of as her default, which is the single person with telepathic animal having to trek across rough country to avoid some kind of nasty threat.

No, this is an entire spaceship's crew, wrecked, and they remain, basically, one party, and a lot of the conflict in the book is factionalism in the party and the difficult relationships in it caused by differences in rank, species, and ability. The ship is split down the middle into Patrol officers, who are human, and who are aristocratic and have a tendency towards xenophobia and are good at tech, and Rangers, who are sometimes human and sometimes other sapients and are good at things you do on a planet when you get there and need to survive. The protagonist is sort-of-human and a Ranger, so he's in an odd position where he has firm sympathies and friendships in the direction of his affiliation, but is also uniquely equipped to get concessions and decent behavior out of the other side (and feels obliged to try to keep them alive).

Things I liked: when I say sort-of-human, I do mean sort of; he's believably psychologically not-quite in ways I haven't seen Norton do before, mostly focused around his telepathy. I liked his Ranger team, who are snarky as hell and also think that most human priorities are pointless when you could be, you know, sitting on a rock and estivating. I liked that there are times the infighting can be set aside for survival and times it cannot.

However, plotwise this was trying to be about seven books at once. I mean, it has that much plot. There's the thread about where they've crashed, and the one about who else has crashed there, and the one about who else might crash there, and the one about the possible natives, and about three different things related to the infighting, plus it's a book where every single character has an arc, which is usually a good thing but here feels... crowded, because, as I said, about twenty-seven things going on every second. One of those books where nobody ever sits down, and you the reader do not, mentally, either.

I am therefore of two minds about it, because on the one hand the thing where it's ninety pounds of plot in a twenty-pound container and the complex three-dimensional character interactions are not standard Norton and mean that bits of this are good in directions that she doesn't usually hit. It also means that bits of it are bad in directions she doesn't usually hit. It was an early-fifties book, which Baen has just reprinted in one of those omnibuses they've been so nice with lately, and I can't tell whether I'm sad that this isn't a direction she really ran with or not. I mean, if she'd gotten control of the ensemble-cast-plus-complex-outer-plot thing that would have been awesome. On the other hand Norton is one of the great writers I know on the subject of people alone or in small groups or with animals surviving in hostile landscapes and it's one of the things I read her for. So... well, as with all roads not taken, I don't know. This book was fun, although fun in that way where it is frustrating to be able to see exactly what I would have changed in edit.

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace WIth Marriage, Elizabeth Gilbert (365 Books, Day 340)

Read August 4th.

After being pleasantly surprised by Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, a book which has been fundamentally misrepresented by the forces which made it into a bestseller and a bad Julia Roberts movie, I decided it was worth seeing if her second would also be better than one expects of A Bestselling Memoir, Subtype: Vaguely Inspirational.

And it is. Gilbert and her lover, who had both gone through nasty divorces, were cohabiting cheerfully enough in a bi-continental relationship sustained by her lover's ninety-day work visas. The U.S. government does not like people to do this indefinitely, and deported him. (She says that the legal word is not deportation, but that no one has ever been able to tell her a different word that would cover it.) This meant they needed to get married if he ever wanted to be able to go back to the U.S., a country in which he had substantial business interests, and out of which she did not want to move permanently.

So, facing what registered emotionally as a governmentally-sponsored shotgun wedding, she decided to do a whole bunch of research about marriage, past, present, and future, and see if she could shake her persistent divorce-caused phobia.

The thing I appreciate about Gilbert's writing here is that it has the same strength her last book had: she admits cheerfully that she is not qualified. She is not a historian, she is specifically not a historian specializing in matrimony, she will give you the names of the books she read and you have her permission to fault her research methods all you like, because this is not an academic text. This is the author, specifically, as a private person, trying to cope with marriage, the public institution, and using anything she can find to help herself do it. She also cheerfully admits that the things that frighten her and interest her about marriage, and the method she finally found to reconcile herself to it, are totally individual and almost certainly do not apply to anyone else. And when she stumbles across giant questions, as, of course, she does every other second, she does not claim to answer them for anyone but her, and sometimes she doesn't have answers for herself either.

So if you're looking for answers to those questions-- you know, the ones like 'why should I, personally, get married?' or 'what role does the patriarchy play in how I view the involvement of the state in marriage?' or 'why in the name of Margaret Sanger do people try so hard to defend something called 'traditional marriage' as an institution when as far as anyone can tell it is less than a century old?', well, this book is specifically not about answering that. It does, however, bring up those questions, and it's a pretty comprehensive list of questions, especially for female-gendered persons who have significant qualms about financial and personal autonomy (qualms which are statistically totally justified and worth consideration).

Gilbert ranges over her own past, the lives of women she knows, and the lives of her extended family in her attempt at reconciliation. Marriage for her is not only undesirable at the start of this book, but a force intruding where it doesn't belong, a symbol of people telling her and her partner that they have to do xyz or they cannot be socially acceptable. She always knows she will do it: she really doesn't want her lover to lose his business, she really doesn't want to move to Australia. What she needs to figure out is how to do it and maintain her self-respect, so that she doesn't feel like they've sold out, and so the whole thing doesn't damage their relationship.

And I have a lot of sympathy for that. That's a real problem, because it does sometimes feel as though when you get married they send you a list of Things People Assume About You Now in the mail (actually, they do, if you are female it begins with the shape of your name on the envelopes) -- and I'm in a same-sex marriage, where theoretically one would think it might be harder for people to make that list. I mean, I'm all for marriage, I desperately want my rights about it and I got married at eighteen and I'm delighted, but I look at the state of marriage as a civil contract every so often and boggle, you know? She is right to fear the things she fears.

So this book doesn't have much in the way of structure, in some ways, because she's wandering from theme to theme and coping strategy to coping strategy (and physically all over Southeast Asia doing miles and miles of paperwork), but I don't see that as a flaw, because this is not a tidy narrative she's in, here. The point is that she doesn't want it to be a tidy little narrative. And there's a fair bit that's funny in it, and a fair bit I sympathize with (I completely understand her total inability, after having gone through said mountains of paperwork, to be okay with the concept of having to organize anything at all by way of a wedding ceremony). The problems with the book are, of course, that she isn't a historian. There are always those moments where, if this is a field one reads in, it could have gone a little deeper. There is the urge to send her a list of further secondary sources. And there is the urge to suggest that she not try to make mental models of the state of marriage in, say, Vietnam, even if she is standing in Vietnam, because she doesn't speak the language and is there for like a month and is operating from a position of very well-meaning and privileged ignorance. Fortunately there is not very much of that. Also, there is a turn of phrase once which annoys me somewhat, in which she says that she thinks that just about everybody attempts some kind of deeply intimate monogamous bonding at some point whether it is sexual or not, and I'm like, no, I have never ever tried to be monogamous and neither have lots of people I know and it does not affect the intimacy of my bonding; you don't know very many poly people, do you, O Author.

But overall, this continues the theme: Elizabeth Gilbert, Better Books Than I Expected. Which is a good thing, and I'll take it.

Living Alone, Stella Benson (365 Books, Day 341)

Read August 5th. Via nineweaving, who heard about it at Readercon.

This 1920 novel is an odd and beautiful thing. It reads as fantasy from some kind of parallel dimension. If I had to give it a subgenre, I would call it 'urban fantasy', but that term is too loaded nowadays in a lot of directions I don't want. It is fantasy about the city of London, set during a Great War that has gone on a bit longer, so that it's a book that happens both when it was written and during the time that just ended. It is a book in which women are so central that it's hard to remember how central they usually aren't in fantasy from that time period, and its slantwise epigrammatic good-humor hides a remorseless subversion-- hitched oddly with an unironic love for the numinous.

Here the protagonist has been handed the prospectus of a roominghouse run by a witch:

The name of this house is Living Alone.

It is meant to provide for the needs of those who dislike hotels, clubs, settlements, hostels, boarding-houses, and lodgings only less than their own homes; who detest landladies, waiters, husbands and wives, charwomen, and all forms of lookers after. This house is a monastery and a convent for monks and nuns dedicated to unknown gods. Men and women who are tired of being laboriously kind to their bodies, who like to be a little uncomfortable and quite uncared for, who love to live from week to week without speaking, except to confide their destinations to 'bus-conductors, who are weary of woolly decorations, aspidistras, and the eternal two generations of roses which riot among blue ribbons on hireling wall-papers, who are ignorant of the science of tipping and thanking, who do not know how to cook yet hate to be cooked for, will here find the thing they have desired, and something else as well.

There are six cells in this house, and no common sitting-room. Guests wishing to address each other must do so on the stairs, or in the shop. Each cell has whitewashed walls, and contains a small deal table, one wooden chair, a hard bed, a tin bath, and a little inconvenient fireplace. No guest may bring into the house more than can be carried out again in one large suit-case. Carpets, rugs, mirrors, and any single garment costing more than three guineas, are prohibited. Any guest proved to have made use of a taxi, or to have travelled anywhere first class, or to have bought cigarettes or sweets costing more than three shillings a hundred or eighteenpence a pound respectively, or to have paid more than three and sixpence (war-tax included) for a seat in any place of entertainment, will be instantly expelled. Dogs, cats, goldfish, and other superhuman companions are encouraged.

Working guests are preferred, but if not at work, guests must spend at least eighteen hours out of the twenty-four entirely alone. No guest may entertain or be entertained except under special license obtainable from the Superintendent.

There is a pump in the back yard. There is no telephone, no electric light, no hot water system, no attendance, and no modern comfort whatever. Tradesmen are forbidden to call. There is no charge for residence in this house.

"It certainly sounds an unusual place," admitted Sarah Brown. "Is the house always full?"

"Never," said the witch. "A lot of people can swallow everything but the last clause."

There have been times in my life when this would have been a desperate blessing. That is, of course, the point. Sarah Brown is over-committeed, over-committed, put-upon, and unaware of her own imposed-on condition. The witch keeps that house, and cannot imagine why anyone would live any way else.

The book is walking a thin line, of course, between irony and twee, between parody and cutesiness. I do not think it errs much, though I could understand finding it occasionally oversweet on a sentence-by-sentence level. But on a plot level, it has fairies doing Land Work like anybody else, and enchanted ham sandwiches, and True Love in its finest form for the protagonist (one-sided, in her head, and never mentioned to anyone, exactly as she always wanted). And the witches of the war duel over London, though the English witch can't figure out what the point is; and the noise of the bombs is loud enough to wake the dead.

I mean, this is the sort of book in which one of the characters has an accent so posh that she refers to her son, at all times, as Rrchud. For the first half, until someone else addressed him, I could not figure out whether that was actually his name. (Thankfully, it is Richard.) It reminds me equally of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Cold Comfort Farm.

This is the sort of novel that has fallen through the cracks of the histories of fantasy, because it is so little related to the things that got into the histories. It deserves to be read more, now that it has all unknowing produced sideways children-- as I said, I'd call this urban fantasy, except that those words don't mean what I want anymore.

And hey, it's at Gutenberg, so you can go read it whenever you like.