I was surprised to see The Scar being recommended as a book about “love overcoming obstacles”. Well, to be sure, almost any story involves or mentions love, but I’ve always heard of Miéville as writing dark, gritty, political stories. Still, it meant that I kept a particular eye out for the love story hidden in the plot, and I was rather fascinated by the two characters he created. They weren’t the protagonists of the story by any means, but their dynamic was incredibly interesting.

A quick summary: Terpsichoria, a ship carrying prisoners from New Crobuzon (city-state and major mercantile power in Miéville’s world of Bas-Lag) to the colony of Nova Esperium, gets taken over by pirates, who turn out to belong to the floating city of Armada. Armada is built from stolen ships and boats lashed together and survives by, yes, piracy, while keeping its identity and location hidden by press-ganging the sailors and passengers. These eventually become the new citizens of Armada; the city is a diverse throng of people from every country in Bas-Lag. Many of them are former prisoners who have been Remade, that is, their bodies have been surgically and magically altered with grafted mechanical or biological parts. One of the prisoners on the Terpsichoria for example has two tentacle limbs grafted onto his abdomen. The Remade are former criminals and slaves in New Crobuzon, but in Armada, they are equal citizens. So are other humanoid species, such as the cactaceae, who are pretty much like human cactuses, and vampir, who are “photophobic haemophages”: they can all live openly in Armada where they can’t anywhere else. A city of outcasts, misfits, deserters, criminals…Miéville does a fantastic job with worldbuilding and describes the landscape and cultures of the city.

The novel feels rather steampunkish in that it combines magic with an industrial setting: New Crobuzon seems rather reminiscent of Victorian England, with names like Johannes Tearfly and Bellis Coldwine. The latter is the principal point-of-view character, though we get interludes from other characters as well. She left New Crobuzon unwillingly and out of necessity, and she is horrified to find herself trapped in Armada, from which she will never be allowed to escape. Her love and loyalty to New Crobuzon resonated with me—in her initial depression, she refuses to get to know Armada and believes that it can never compare to her city—since I feel much the same way about my own home city. But she eventually gets caught up in the political changes that are sweeping through Armada, and that’s where the Lovers enter.

Bellis never learns their real names, and neither does the reader, but they are the rulers of Garwater, the largest and most powerful district in Armada. They are always referred to as the Lovers, and they have mirror-image scars covering their faces and bodies. They are always in agreement and continue each other’s sentences as if they were in fact one identical person. The Lovers are ambitious: they have plans to trap an enormous beast, called the avanc, and harness it to make the city mobile. (And it turns out, over the course of the novel, that it’s merely the beginning.)

Bellis becomes involved in the project to summon the avanc, since she is a linguist who specializes in High Kettai, the language used by the only living person to summon one. She ends up learning the meaning behind the Lovers’ scars: initially, the Lover (male) had intended it as a mark of possession, since it was used in his original culture as a way to prevent other men from desiring one’s wife. She however, surprised him by cutting an identical mark on his face, and since then, it has become their ritual of lovemaking. Bellis overhears the Lover (female) at one point cutting herself while she is separated from her Lover. When they reunite, the Lover (male) has an identical fresh cut on his face. As if they were trying to “bleed into each other” to become the same person.

Against all odds, the Lovers succeed in all their plans, but uneasiness grows in the city, and at the moment when the city turns against them, the Lovers’ connection to one another snaps. As one leaves, with a new cut on her face that now marks her as different from the other, it becomes apparent that the illusion of identity was indeed a delusion. The one left behind on Armada continues to rule but remains broken.

I’ve completely glossed over the meat of the storyline here: I haven’t mentioned, for example, how Bellis for all her guarded detachment and defensive walls ends up being manipulated by others, or the still-mysterious character of Uther Doul, who is the Lovers’ bodyguard and was born in a near-mythical zombie city. I haven’t said more about Tanner Sack either, who is the other principal protagonist, although he doesn’t interact very much with Bellis at all, and how he embraces life on Armada by becoming amphibious. I doubt that any review can really cover the richness of details that Miéville embeds in his world—without infodumping either, which means the reader has to work to piece together the picture—or the extensive cast of characters or for that matter, the suspense of the plot, which involves at turns political intrigue and at others high seas adventure. Nor all the allusions and references built into the names, e.g. one ship named the Aronnax, after the captain of the submarine in Jules Verne’s 20,0000 Leagues Under the Sea.

It’s an epic book but without the trappings of your typical fantasy epic. I saw a lot of elements of horror fiction as well: Miéville apparently loves inventing monsters, although he doesn’t make any of them really monstrous. (That being said, I did find the descriptions of anophelii women—basically mosquito humanoids—really repelling.) Miéville also experiments a lot with different narrative techniques: he interrupts his limited third-person narrative with first-person “stream of consciousness” and epistolary excerpts. I think he’s better at some than others (I thought the grindylow passages were a little overdone and the first-person interlude from the perspective of the Brucolac read as unnecessarily melodramatic), but I do find it impressive how he manages to supply us with all this information and multiple perspectives but still keep the plot exciting and surprising. The pace took a little time to gain some momentum, but once it did, I couldn’t put the book down at all until I finished.

I’m definitely going to go find Perdido Street Station at the bookstore.

The narrator is a fictional character, Nikeratos, who was born to the theater and lives his life as a traveling actor. His success is closely linked to Dion of Syracuse, brother-in-law to the tyrant Dionysios and friend to Plato. Dion is charismatic, honorable and educated: to the eyes of Plato and his Academy, as well as Nikeratos himself, he is the embodiment of the philosopher-king ideal. Dion’s chance to implement the principles of Plato’s political philosophy comes when Dionysios dies and his son, Dionysios the Younger, takes the throne. Plato is invited to Syracuse and wins the favor of the young ruler; unfortunately, the intention to influence the tyrant to institute rule of law is sabotaged by power struggles and Dionysios’ own jealousy of Dion.

I emphasize the politics, but what drew me into the story was Nikeratos’ everyday life in the theater. The aesthetics of Greek theater seem rather alien to my modern eyes: there’s a point when Nikeratos and his fellow actors learn that the Etruscans put on performances without wearing any masks, and they think the idea is radical and even a little obscene. Three actors share the burden of multiple roles in the play, with the help of extras (who don’t speak) and the chorus. The actors, while not being considered entirely respectable, do take their profession quite seriously, and performing a play is in a way a religious ritual. The devotion that Nikeratos shows towards theater is his guiding moral code, and his faith in the power and demands of his art is symbolized in the eponymous mask.

As Nikeratos observes the drama that unfolds around Dion, Plato and the young Dionysios, he brings an actor’s psychological insight that these characters lack. Dion, Plato and the other philosophers of the Academy believe in promoting their ideas through rational argument; Nikeratos knows however that the best way to move an audience is through emotional appeal. Plato and Dion debate the morality of an art form that shows gods and men at their worst—as bestial slaves to their passions—while also acknowledging that theater also shows men as heroes, ideals to which the ordinary man can aspire. Nikeratos though knows better: the dualism is at the heart of theater itself, and it is perhaps Plato and Dion’s inability to recognize human weakness that becomes their own downfall in the end.

The tragedy of this novel is also dual. First, there is Dion himself, who as tragic hero succumbs to the fatal flaw of his pride. Then secondly, the perhaps more poignant tragedy comes at the end, when Nikeratos meets Alexander, many years after Plato’s death, and recognizes in the boy the potential for the philosopher-king that Plato hoped for. The novel ends by saying, “No one will ever make a tragedy—and that is as well, for one could not bear it—whose grief is that the principals never met.” And I think indeed, Renault succeeded in writing that tragedy: Plato and Dion as heroes who are undone by the failure of their ideals, bringing personal disaster to them both, with Nikeratos’ role as chorus and commentator.

I hadn’t known much about the history of Catholicism in Japan, and the translator’s introduction proved to be helpful in providing some background information. Missionaries, mostly from Portugal, had achieved considerable success in establishing themselves in Japan and had built churches and seminaries with the approval of local daimyo before Japan went through political upheavals that changed the attitude of authorities to Western influence and culture. Foreign priests were banned from Japan, and any Catholics caught were tortured until they denied their faith. Silence thus tells the story of a young Portuguese priest, named Rodrigues, who secretly enters Japan in order to find out what happened to his former teacher, Ferreira, a missionary to Japan who has apostatized. (Ferreira is a real historical figure, while Rodrigues is not.)

As a Korean Catholic, I’m familiar with stories of martyrdom: I’ve heard all my life about the forty Korean martyrs who were executed by the government during the Yi Chosun dynasty, not to mention read my share of hagiographies of early Christian saints under the Roman Empire who died in pots of boiling water or by arrows or on spiked wheels. But the description of tortures in Silence seemed particularly alien and cruel: being tied to wooden posts in the middle of the sea or hung upside down in a pit filled with excrement with holes cut behind the ears to let the blood drain. The goal was not to kill them for the crime of being Christian but rather force them to deny their faith in front of their families and neighbors.

Rodrigues enters Japan with a fellow priest, Garrpe, and spends some time ministering to the Christian villagees he finds, while hiding from authorities. He is, however, eventually betrayed by the guide he hired, Kichijiro, whom he (arrogantly) considers as his own personal Judas. Rodrigues sees the Japanese villagers who helped hide him undergo torture and eventually die, while clinging steadfastly to their faith; he however is spared any suffering. He begins to doubt his faith, wondering and even raging at God’s silence while Christians die ingloriously without any sign from the universe that their martyrdom has been acknowledged. Only in the moment of his own apostasy, as he is about to step on an image of Christ, does he hear God’s voice again: “Trample! Trample! It is to be trampled on by you that I am here.”

Rodrigues’ anguish at the silence of God reminded me of some of the post-Holocaust literature that also asked how could a benevolent God let such atrocities happen. Of course, I don’t equate the persecution of Catholics in Japan with the Nazi attempt at systematic genocide, and perhaps that was why I felt impatient at times with Rodrigues’ self-absorption: what right did he have to be angry at God when he hadn’t suffered nearly as much as those who did undergo torture? (Then again, what right do I have to judge Rodrigues, when I myself have never experienced what he has?) I think though that Endo intends Rodrigues to come across as a priest who has always been somewhat complacent in his faith, who has never been so challenged until his trip to Japan. Rodrigues anticipates hardship and expects to at least be given the chance at a glorious martyrdom: it is all the more dramatic when he apostatizes without even being tortured. It strikes a deliberate contrast coming after his patronizing albeit compassionate attitude towards the Japanese villagers, as well as his wholesale condemnation and judgment of Kichijiro. Rodrigues is human and imperfect and weak—weaker, perhaps, than Kichijiro. The novel moves from a first-person voice in letters to a limited third-person narrating from Rodrigues’ point-of-view to a series of documents recording what happened to Rodrigues after his apostasy. Is the outward progression in perspective meant to mirror Rodrigues’ own progression in self-awareness about himself and his faith? Or is it intended to detach the reader from Rodrigues’ character, giving us space to draw our own conclusions as Rodrigues is forced to grapple with more and more contradictions?

On a final note, Endo questions whether Christianity can truly exist in Japan, whether the Japanese can really be Christian. It seems to be an extremely personal question (Endo himself is a Japanese Catholic) to which he has no answer. Ferreira tells Rodrigues:

This country is a swamp. In time you will come to see that for yourself. This country is a more terrible swamp than you can imagine. Whenever you plant a sapling in this swamp the roots begin to rot; the leaves grow yellow and wither. And we have planted the sapling of Christianity in this swamp. [...] But in the churches we built throughout this country the Japanese were not praying to the Christian God. They twisted God to their own way of thinking in a way we can never imagine. If you call that God [...] No. That is not God. It is like a butterfly caught in a spider’s web. At first it is certainly a butterfly, but the next day only the externals, the wings and the trunk, are those of a butterfly; it has lost its true reality and has become a skeleton. In Japan our God is just like that butterfly caught in the spider’s web: only the exterior form of God remains, but it has already become a skeleton.

I’m not certain why Endo believes that there is a fundamental incompatibility between being Japanese and being Christian—or for that matter, what that incompatibility consists of—but it does become clear that Rodrigues drastically redefines his image of Christ in his moment of apostasy. Can he still claim to be a priest, a Catholic, a Christian? I don’t know, but I can relate to him more in that moment than in any previous part of the book because I too find it easier to believe in the Christ who suffered than the Christ who saved us.

Maurice, by E.M. Forster: Maurice draws a portrait of the eponymous protagonist, in the process of self-realization of his homosexuality while struggling with the taboos and social restrictions of his time. I’ve read Forster’s A Room With a View and Howards End a while ago, and somehow I felt the prose style in Maurice was rather different from what I remembered of Forster. (Or perhaps my memory’s just foggy?) Maurice is almost deceptively straightforward; the novel almost has the quality of a psychological case study, albeit with a more sympathetic touch.

In the beginning, Maurice is very much unaware of his desires, which express themselves confusedly in dreams and the usual cruelties among boys at public school. He only begins to “awaken” when he arrives at Cambridge and meets Clive, who is more self-aware but also conflicted about his sexuality in a way that Maurice, for all his obtuseness, is not. Clive tries to channel his attraction to Maurice into a sort of transcendent Platonic relationship, in what he interprets as the ancient Greek fashion, without allowing any physical consummation. Maurice easily follows Clive’s lead at first, but Clive abruptly decides after a trip to Greece that he no longer has any homosexual feelings and loves only women.

I found this part of the story to be the most bewildering and difficult to interpret. I was under the impression that most people who identify as gay or lesbian speak of their sexuality as something that they’re born with, something that they can’t just change or will away simply by wanting to. So is Clive simply going back into the closet? Or was his flirtation with “the Greek vice” merely an adolescent phase, the result of over-romanticizing classical times? How do you suddenly wake up one day and realize that your sexual identity has changed?

It’s interesting though how Clive and Maurice’s relationship starts in Cambridge and ends after they leave: the university as this highly artificial environment where Maurice comes to know himself but is unable to find fulfillment. It is only when he moves on from Cambridge and from Clive that he starts being an individual. At first he tries to ignore his desires, then tries to “cure” himself by consulting a doctor and even a hypnotist. But in the end, he does finally end up becoming sexually involved with Alec—Clive’s gameskeeper and a social inferior—and despite Maurice’s ambivalent reaction, one gets the sense that he has stopped trying to deny himself.

The ending felt a little abrupt—what happens to Maurice and Alec?—and there were quite a few unresolved issues left. Maurice and Alec are no ideal couple, and though their attraction seems much more tangible, they don’t seem to communicate any better than Maurice and Clive had. Forster wrote a terminal note, which made me wonder if the novel is unresolved because the larger social issue was unresolved at the time.

The Invention of Love, by Tom Stoppard: The play is set at the death of A.E. Housman, known for being a classical scholar as well as poet. As he crosses the Styx, ferried along by Charon, he sees moments from his life as a student at Oxford, where he met Moses Jackson, for whom he developed a lifelong unrequited love. Housman was also the contemporary of Oscar Wilde, whose shadow slips in and out of the play before making one appearance at the end to converse with Housman’s younger self.

I loved reading the play: Housman’s obvious passion for the classics delighted me, and I enjoyed the neurotic squabble of the academics who are his professors and colleagues. I really regret not being able to see an actual performance though, and I think I would have had a better appreciation for the play if I knew more about Housman himself (e.g. if I had read his famous cycle of poems, A Shropshire Lad). I got the sense that Stoppard quoted extensively, though I could only really note the quotes he attributed, and I think I would have a better understanding of the play’s structure and direction if I knew the references.

Stoppard’s language is delightful. There’s a particularly funny dialogue among Oxford academics, which incidentally makes for nice commentary on education and the purpose thereof:

Pattison: The modern university exists by consent of the world outside. We must send out men fitted for that world. What better example can we show them than classical antiquity? Nowhere was the ideal of morality, art and social order realized more harmoniously than in Greece in the age of the great philosophers.

Ruskin: Buggery apart.

Jowett: Buggery apart.

Pater: Actually, Italy in the late-fifteenth century…Nowhere was the ideal of art, morality and social order realized more harmoniously, morality and social order apart.

Ruskin: The Medieval Gothic! The Medieval Gothic cathedrals which were the great engines of art, morality and social order!

Pattison (at croquet): Check. Play the advantage.

Pater: I have been touched by the medieval but its moment has passed, and now I wouldn’t return the compliment with a barge-pole. As for arts-and-crafts, it is very well for the people; without it, Liberty’s would be at risk, in fact it would be closed, but the true Aesthetic spirit goes back to Florence, Venice, Rome—Japanese apart. One sees it plain in Michelangelo’s David—legs apart. The blue of my very necktie declares we are still living in that revolution whereby man regained possession of his nature and produced the Italian Tumescence.

There’s something particularly poignant about Housman’s love for Jackson. As in Maurice, Oxford becomes the place where Housman first discovers love but is unable to realize it; unlike Maurice, he returns to the academic world, keeping his passion suppressed by burying himself in classical scholarship. A lifetime spent loving one person without hope of ever being loved in return, and the way Housman preserves his love by remaining in the timeless cloister of academia appeal to my romantic sensibilities I suppose.

The Big Over Easy, by Jasper Fforde: I chose to read this book first because it was the only title to appear on two different lists. I’d read the first two books of the Thursday Next series before and found them entertaining, but I did find myself fed up with the character of Thursday Next herself as well as Fforde’s occasional lapses into awkward prose. Reading The Big Over Easy though convinced me that I should give Fforde another chance and finish reading his other books. I think Fforde struck the perfect balance between being entertaining and unexpectedly serious (one of my main objections to Next was her tendency to grow self-pitying) in The Big Over Easy: Jack Spratt has problems, to be sure, but he takes them for the most part with a laidback good humor that makes him an easy character to like.

But I should probably first introduce the premise of the book first. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Jasper Fforde, he writes what are essentially mystery novels set in an alternate Britain. I don’t think the Thursday Next series and the Nursery Crimes series (of which The Fourth Bear is the first novel) belong to exactly the same universe (although The Eyre Affair is mentioned in the book), but they share many similarities: both protagonists are detectives investigating “literary crimes”. In the Thursday Next universe, where books still dominate most people’s everyday lives, reading is much more than a passive activity: you can enter books and change the storyline or steal characters. Fforde takes this idea one step further for the Nursery Crimes series: here, characters from children’s nursery rhymes and fairy tales actually exist, although they are unaware of being “characters”. Hence, Jack Spratt (yes, from this rhyme, as well as “Jack and the Beanstalk”), Detective Inspector and head of the Nursery Crime Division with the Reading police, is assigned to investigate the death of Humpty Dumpty with his new partner, Mary Mary (who is not so quite contrary as I would have expected). The Nursery Crime Division is considered a laughingstock unfortunately, and Jack is snubbed and ignored by his former partner, Friedland Chymes, who is the star of the police department.

It’s particularly appropriate to read this book for this theme because the Jack Spratt universe is set in a world where detectives are adored as celebrities, and solving a case is as much a matter of creating publishable cases (serialized in Amazing Crime Stories and often turned into TV dramas) as they are about finding the culprit. Friedland Chymes is the worst example, and in his pompous, self-congratulatory accounts of how he solved his latest case, Fforde parodies the mystery genre at its most contrived:

“It was the small traces of pastry around the gunshot wound on Colonel Peabody’s corpse that turned the case for me,” began the great detective, his sonorous tones filling hte air like music, “minute quantities of shortcrust whose butter/flour ratio I found to be identical to that of a medium-size Bowyer’s pork pie. The assailant had fired his weapon through the tasty snack to muffle the sound of the shot. The report heard later was a firecracker set off by a time fuse, thus giving an alibi to the assailant, who I can reveal to you now was…”

Every detective, who is registered with the Guild of Detectives, also has an Official Sidekick to record his adventures, à la the grand tradition of Watson and Hastings. Detectives are expected to drive fancy cars, be confirmed bachelors (preferably with a dark and angst-ridden past), and have interesting character quirks, all the better to amuse the audience. The celebrity detective trend seems to have begun with Holmes himself, whose legacy was continued by Hercule Porridge, Miss Maple, Lord Peter Flimsey and Father Broom (I wonder why only Holmes got to keep his name?), as well as of course, Friedland Chymes, who not surprisingly turns out to be a total fraud.

The mystery itself is well-constructed, with several suspects wanting to kill Humpty Dumpty and (spoiler ahead) each one of them turning out to have made a real attempt, although all but one were unsuccessful. The process of investigation however isn’t exactly a standard for deduction: Jack Spratt and Mary Mary are pretty much swept along from obvious clue to obvious clue until they finally find the real culprit. What’s entertaining however are all the nursery rhyme and fairy tale references that one encounters along the way (I was almost tempted to start writing down all the ones I recognized), and the amusing twists that Fforde puts on each one. Humpty Dumpty for example was a philanthropist and notorious playboy (playegg?), the Gingerbread Man was a insane psychopath, and Giorgio Porgia (better known as Georgie Porgie) is the head of the mafia. Fforde also makes sure to touch on a lot of film noir conventions, from the angry, jilted wife to the washed-up film star. And let’s not forget the crazy architecture of Spongg Castle (a parody on crumbling Gothic mansions?), the mad scientist Dr. Quatt, and Prometheus (yes, the actual Greek Titan) meeting Jack Spratt’s daughter Pandora.

Fforde is very inventive and funny, and despite his seemingly endless stream of clever puns and asides and references, he never loses track of the central story either, and we get a nice, tidy ending with all plot points resolved (not such an easy task given how many plot points there are!). Which, if you think about it, is what we’ve come to expect from a mystery novel.

Cards on the Table, by Agatha Christie: I think I’ve only read one Poirot mystery before, since whenever I looked for an Agatha Christie novel, I always looked for her Miss Marple mysteries first. I wasn’t very familiar with the character himself—I barely remembered his trademark reference to “the little grey cells”—and I hadn’t realized that his method of choice was constructing a psychological profile of the suspects to decide who would be the most likely culprit. It’s an interesting method!—but limited in approach. It’s particularly well-suited though for drawing-room murders, where there are a finite number of suspects and the means of murder is known.

Naturally, Cards on the Table features such a murder: the victim is Mr. Shaitana who invites four sleuths (a Scotland Yard inspector, a mystery writer, a secret service agent, and a private detective—namely Poirot) and four murderers whom he believes to have gotten away with their crimes. Shaitana is found dead, presumably killed while all eight guests were playing bridge, and the four sleuths combine forces to solve the crimes. Everyone has their own approach and personality of course: Mrs. Oliver, the novelist, relies on her “woman’s intuition” and jumps to unsupported conclusions based on what she thinks will make a good story; Superintendent Battle, the Scotland Yard inspector, investigates the suspects patiently and thoroughly, according to the book; and Colonel Race, who actually doesn’t feature much in the novel, pops in to share information via his contacts about one of the suspects. Poirot is the most “unorthodox” and asks the suspects about their bridge game and what they remembered from the room, rather than anything directly related to the crime itself. I was rather pleasantly surprised to find that Battle got his fair share of respect—ever since the much-abused Lestrade, it seems that the Scotland Yard don’t usually get much respect in detective fiction—and his “hard work over genius” approach wasn’t considered futile, even if it was Poirot who solved the crime.

As for the four suspects, they all proved to be rather likeable, even Anne Meredith, although I found her well-suppressed envy and vindictiveness to be unnerving. Mrs. Lorrimer was my favorite though, with her passion for bridge and exact personality, and I have to admit that I was left a little curious about the murder she got away with, since only her crime remains incompletely solved. (All of the four suspects have murdered before, so the four detectives essentially end up investigating five crimes instead of just one.) Major Despard remains the only one that escapes serious suspicion, although I would have thought him the most likely suspect myself, if I hadn’t remembered that a similar sort of character in And Then There Were None ended up being innocent. (Guessing the right culprit seems to usually be a matter of how well you can read the author’s mind.) I was a little disappointed with the solution—I’m not sure if it’s the one I necessarily anticipated or not, so I can’t make any conclusion about my self-esteem—because it turned out to be a lot simpler than I expected. That’s the problem with the drawing-room murder: the method of murder is fairly straightforward. I did rather like Poirot himself though and plan to read more in the future.