Nice notice for Jenn

In its brief review of the new sci-fi anthology Warrior Wisewoman 2, Library Journal chose Jenn’s story (the first in the collection) as one of two that received a positive mention.

Warrior Wisewoman 2. Norilana. Jun. 2009. c.272p. ed. by Roby James. ISBN 978-1-60762-028-0. pap. $11.95. SF

In “The Executioner,” Jennifer Brissett tells an eerie tale of a woman randomly chosen to serve as a one-time bringer of death, while in Jennifer R. Povey’s “Working the High Steel,” a Mohawk woman defies her gender to traverse the “high beams” of space construction. Other contributors include Ian Whates, Ardath Mayhar, Jeff Crook, and Kate MacLeod. VERDICT The 15 original stories in this theme collection explore the many roles of women in the future, as warrior, nurturer, or sometimes both. A good selection for larger sf collections.

The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble

I was pleased to see Roger Angell’s appreciation of The Garrick Year, an early novel by Margaret Drabble, in a recent issue of The New Yorker.

It’s a short, romantic novel about actors and the theatre and marriage and sex and babies, written when Drabble was twenty-four years old… [T]his book belongs to Drabble’s heroine, Emma Evans, who is married to the dashing, muscular Welsh leading man David Evans, and the mother of their very young children, Flora and Joseph.... Emma, the daughter of a theologian, is tall—taller than David—and sometimes works as a model, and she is extremely, extravagantly intelligent. The book is told in the first person, her first person, which means that there are many unsparingly critical and deliciously bitter views of the vanity of actors and the babyish needs of actors’ lives and, in many cases, their stupidity.

I picked up The Garrick Year for the first time in years, and was pleased to find that it’s as good as Angell says. Though the canvas is smaller than those Drabble worked on later in her career, it is just as sharp in language and psychology as any of them.

What’s more, it features several characteristic examples of unpredictable events that seem to come out of nowhere, and that people nonetheless adjust to. Angell mentions the episode in which Emma’s little girl Flora accidentally turns on the gas in the kitchen. Another (none of them proves fatal) comes late in the book, when Emma is helping guide the car of her sort-of lover out of her garage, just as her husband’s car can be seen approaching down the street. Emma ends up pinned against the garage, and the combined efforts of her husband and her lover to rescue her lead to an odd sort of reconciliation.

Gimli was Welsh

Thinking about landscapes in Tolkien reminded me that Margaret Drabble spent a page or so discussing Tolkien in her book A Writer’s Britain. But whereas I was struck by the realistic, everyday landscapes in The Lord of the Rings, Drabble focuses on the more dramatic landscapes of war and environmental devastation. Drabble notes that Tolkien’s “many descriptions of wasted and ravaged lands are clearly drawn in part from his personal memories of trench warfare on the Somme in the First World War, but they also remind me irrestibly of scenes such as the slate quarries at Blaenau Ffestiniog and the burning mountains of slag in the Neath valley described a century earlier by George Borrow.”

She continues…

From childhood on, Tolkien was entranced by the Welsh language; even the names of Welsh railway stations on passing coaltrucks—Nantyglo, Blaen-Rhondda, Penrhiwceiber—seemed charged with magic and beauty, and his later studies of Early and Middle English literature reinforced his feeling for the landscapes that this language evoked. His woods of birch and alder, his Misty Mountains and Iron Mountains with their narrow passes, lonely meres, memorial cairns, and frowning walls of sheer rock cut by ancient road-builders, are very Welsh. The dwarves, ‘stone-hard, stubborn, fast in friendship and in enmity’, are the hard-working underground engineers and craftsmen of Middle-earth, called ‘Naugrim, the Stunted People, and Gonnhirrim, Masters of Stone’. They are the good spirits, as it were of the Industrial Revolution, and have ‘marvellous skill with metals and with stone; but in that ancient time iron and copper they loved to work, rather than silver or gold’ (The Silmarillion, Chapter Ten). The orcs and goblins, under the leadership of the wicked Sauron or Melkor, are the bad spirits, responsible for the hideous wasted plains of Gorgoroth, pocked with great craters, for the smoking chasms, and reeking furnaces of Mount Doom.

It seems very appropriate that the Welsh actor John Rhys-Davies was chosen to play Gimli in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy—even though Rhys-Davies is actually taller than the actors who played Aragorn, Legolas, and Gandalf.

Tolkien’s landscapes

I’ve been rereading The Lord of the Rings at bedtime recently, and have been noticing how well-written and carefully drawn Tolkien’s landscapes are. You can easily overlook them while you are following the action, but they supply a completely convincing environment that makes it easier to suspend your disbelief about the elves and dwarves and orcs and hobbits who are moving through it.

Here is just one of many examples, from the second to last chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring. Frodo and his companions have reluctantly left the forest of Lorien and its powerful and seductive queen, and are traveling down the river Anduin, not yet sure whether to strike toward the east or to head toward the tower of Minas Tirith in Gondor.

The weather was still grey and overcast, with wind from the East, but as evening drew into night the sky away westward cleared, and pools of faint light, yellow and pale green, opened under the grey shores of cloud. There the white rind of the new Moon could be seen glimmering in the remote lakes. Sam looked at it and puckered his brows.

The next day the country on either side began to change rapidly. The banks began to rise and grow stony. Soon they were passing through a hilly rocky land, and on both shores there were steep slopes buried in deep brakes of thorn and sloe, tangled with brambles and creepers. Behind them stood low crumbling cliffs, and chimneys of grey weathered stone dark with ivy; and beyond these again there rose high ridges crowned with wind-writhen firs. They were drawing near to the grey hill-country of the Emyn Muil, the southern march of Wilderland.

Raw Silk by Meena Alexander

After meeting the poet Meena Alexander at this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, I read her memoir Fault Lines, which includes her memories of a childhood divided between India and Sudan. I followed that up with Raw Silk, a collection of poems largely written in the aftermath of 9/11. Alexander combines glancing references to the attack in New York with allusions to outbreaks of ethnic violence in India. The joining of gorgeous, tactile language with scenes of violence—as well as the South Asian settings—reminds me of Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost, about a forensic scientist in Sri Lanka.

Here’s the first section of “Blue Lotus” from Raw Silk. The Pamba River runs through the state of Kerala in India. The image of a severed hand recurs in Alexander’s work.

Twilight, I stroll through stubble fields
clouds lift, the hope of a mountain.
What was distinct turns to mist,

what was fitful burns the heart.
When I dream of the tribe gathering
by the red soil of the Pamba River

I feel my writing hand split at the wrist.
Dark tribute or punishment, who can tell?
You kiss the stump and where the wrist

bone was, you set the stalk of a lotus.
There is a blue lotus in my grandmother’s garden,
its petals whirl in moonlight like this mountain.