My preferences for the 2011 World Fantasy Awards for Best Novel

Over the past week, I've written reviews for four of the six novels on the Best Novel ballot for the World Fantasy Awards (the other two were written last year soon after release).  Below I'll post the titles and provide links to my reviews, then I'll discuss briefly why I chose the order of preference for these novels.  Hopefully, those who disagree (or even agree) with my opinions will weigh in with their own.  It is my regret that I have not had enough time to read all of the entrants in the other categories before the awards or announced or that I lack the time (at the moment, anyway) to write reviews for them all.  Maybe another year.

Lauren Beukes, Zoo City

N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms 

Graham Joyce, The Silent Land 

Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven
 
Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo 

Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death 


As a whole, this shortlist is very solid, if not uniformly spectacular.  I can understand why each of these novels will appeal to quite a few SF/F readers, yet most are not anything that I would call "consensus picks;" most contain elements that will not appeal to a sizable percentage of readers. 

For myself, the novel that struck the best balance between prose, characterization, theme, and plot was Joyce's The Silent Land, with Lord's Redemption in Indigo a close second.  These were the two novels that I enjoyed without reservations and thought were genuinely among the best SF/F that I've read over the past two years.  A slight step below them were Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and Okorafor's Who Fears Death.  I did enjoy each when I read them back in 2010 and thought each had several strong points, yet I do not find myself thinking as much about my emotional reaction to them as I do with the Joyce and Lord.  Beukes' Zoo City was promising yet ultimately frustrating to read, for reasons that I note in the review I posted earlier tonight.  Kay's Under Heaven I could easily see as appealing to the most readers and being the favorite to win the award, yet, as I noted in my review, it just did not tickle my fancy.  These things happen and that's not an indictment on the novel in particular as it is just a confession that tastes are truly a fickle matter.

What about you?  Which novels on this shortlist have you read and what are your thoughts on them?

2011 World Fantasy Award finalist: Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

Amid the ten thousand noises and the jade-and-gold and the whirling dust of Xinan, he had often stayed awake all night among friends, drinking spiced wine in the North District with the courtesans.

They would like to flute or pipa music and declaim poetry, test each other with jibes and quotes, sometimes find a private room with a scented, silken woman, before weaving unsteadily home after the dawn drums sounded curfew's end, to sleep away the day instead of studying.

Here in the mountains, alone in hard, clear air by the waters of Kuala Nor, far to the west of the imperial city, beyond the borders of the empire, even, Tai was in a narrow bed by darkfall, under the first brilliant stars, and awake at sunrise.

In spring and summer the birds woke him.  This was a place where thousands upon thousands nested noisily:  fishhawks and cormorants, wild geese and cranes.  The geese made him think of friends far away.  Wild geese were a symbol of absence:  in poetry, in life.  Cranes were fidelity, another matter. (p. 21)

Normally, a passage like this, well-written and full of potential symbolic meaning for the novel ahead, would appeal to me.  But sometimes, for some readers at least, a story can appear to check off each of those imagined boxes of enjoyment and still fail to engage and satisfy.  Sadly, Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven was precisely that sort of novel that I could choose any particular element and say it's the sort of thing that I'd want to read, yet when examined as a whole, it fails to please.  Perhaps some might think it unfair to review a book solely on how the critic engages with it, but in this case, I think indulging myself in exploring just why it failed to work for me might provide others, those more inclined to love this work, more insight into the novel itself.

Most of Kay's novels recast events and locales from our histories.  In the only two previous novels that I've read, the two volumes of The Sarantine Mosaic, I noticed that Kay was perhaps a bit too faithful to the source material (early 6th century Byzantium during the reign of Justinian I).  The saying "bad artists borrow while great artists steal" comes to mind in this situation and also for the current novel, which is an analogue of Tang Dynasty China.  Kay is not a "borrower," but neither does he "steal."  Rather, he appropriates the historical material, which leads to several occasions where it felt to me that he was too true to the real historical setting when setting up the narrative tensions and plot developments for Under Heaven.

This, of course, might be too subjective of a criticism for many readers.  For others, knowing that there are dynastic struggles fought out through means very similar to those of this period of Chinese history creates anticipation that, for them at least, will be amply rewarded by the novel's end.  Yet for myself, this felt a bit too antiseptic and derivative, perhaps due to seeing early events falling too neatly into expected places because of my casual awareness of this period of Chinese history.

Kay is a lyrical writer; the passage quoted above evokes mood nicely.  Yet his characterizations did not appeal to me precisely because they felt a bit too far polished and remote for the situation at hand.  It is not often that I read gorgeous prose and feel as though I were reading something antiseptic rather than something vibrant and alive; I did in this case, however.  I can appreciate what he does with the narrative and how it feels as though this were a chronology of a time that never was, at least not under those names, yet I do not feel moved by what I have read.

These criticisms perhaps give the impression that I found Under Heaven to be a poor, derivative work.  Although I did find elements to be too similar to actual historical events and personages, the novel is the sort of story that would appeal to a wide range of people:  those looking for a sad, beautiful story; readers who want a well-constructed plot leading toward a definite end; and those who value distinct and dynamic characterizations.  However, for myself, Under Heaven just was less than the sum of its parts and my enjoyment was dampened considerably by the flaws that I note above.  I can understand why it was chosen as a World Fantasy Award nominee and I would not be angry if it were chosen as the winner, yet I just cannot help but marvel at how a novel can contain so many elements that typically appeal to me as a reader and yet as a whole fail to make a favorable impression.

2011 World Fantasy Award finalist: Lauren Beukes, Zoo City

Morning light the sulphur colour of the mine dumps seeps across Johannesburg's skyline and sears through my window.  My own personal bat signal.  Or a reminder that I really need to get curtains.

Shielding my eyes – morning has broken and there's no picking up the pieces – I yank back the sheet and peel out of bed.  Benoît doesn't so much as stir, with only his calloused feet sticking out from under the duvet like knots of driftwood.  Feet like that, they tell a story.  They say he walked all the way from Kinshasa with his Mongoose strapped to his chest.

The Mongoose in question is curled cup like a furry comma on my laptop, the glow of the LED throbbing under his nose.  Like he doesn't know that my computer is out of bounds.  Let's just say I'm precious about my work.  Let's just say it's not entirely legal. (p. 7)

Africa has been the setting of choice for several of this year's World Fantasy Award nominees for Best Novel, yet in fiction as in reality, it is not a uniform, monolithic entity.  Whereas Karen Lord's Redemption in Indigo is an adaptation of a Senegalese folk tale and Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death touches upon the lingering (and to most Westerners, barbaric) tradition of female circumcision and gender imbalances in an Africa that struggles to reconcile modernity with traditional beliefs, Lauren Beukes' Zoo City inhabits an urban Africa of 419 email scams, urban crowding and violence, while through it all showing glimmers of booming economic sectors that too often are not highlighted in literature concerning the second-largest continent.  It makes for a heady yet uneven read.

Zoo City is at its heart a crime/mystery novel with near-future technology and bizarre animal familiars.  It is told from the perspective of Zinzi Lelethu, an occasional 419 operator who displays a talent for finding lost things.  Along with her sloth, she is charged with finding out what happened to the person likely responsible for the death of an elderly woman. 

The action is fast and almost too furious at times.  Beukes takes great pains to construct a modern South African setting that is in turns familiar, exotic, and threatening for readers who hail from other environs.  The earlier scenes in which we see Zinzi at work, writing her carefully-crafted missives to gullible charitable folk or as she interacts with other denizens of her neighborhood, are to me the best scenes in the book.  Beukes imbues these scenes with vivid local color, making the South African urban setting captivating for readers.

Then she proceeds towards the tracking down the nefarious figures involved in the mysterious death.  Here is where the narrative felt a little rough at times.  Beukes attempts to meld the quick-hitting demands of the hard-boiled detective novel, replete with short, staccato prose bursts that zip the plot along while depending upon the setting being firmly established, with an atmospheric story in which the exotic animal familiars (many of whom can talk and in which those who bond with these animals are conferred a social status relative to the animal's viewed place in the food chain) are purportedly to play more than bit roles.  The problem I encountered with this is that there was a sense of herky-jerkiness to the narrative.  At times, the story felt bogged down with details and at other times there seemed to be too few elaborations; very uneven.

This is not to say that Zoo City was a bad or even mediocre novel.  Rather, it is a flawed second novel in which several of the ideas introduced in the opening scenes are not fully developed.  This sketchiness does not ruin the novel, but makes the scenes leading up to the conclusion less powerful, which in turn makes the conclusion less dramatic than it otherwise could have been.  Although there is much within Zoo City that would appeal to those readers who like a combination of fantastical creatures and near-future SF, it just is too uneven of a novel for me to believe that it merits the awards and award nominations that have been bestowed upon it over the past year.

2011 World Fantasy Award finalist: Graham Joyce, The Silent Land

Jake took off his sunglasses and thumbed his still-bloodshot eyes.  Zoe kept asking him questions, as if he knew, as if he had the faintest idea of the answers.  If this were an afterlife, would it last forever?  Did it fade?  Would other people come into it?  Could they die inside this death?  Why was time there measured by the movement of the sun and the moon but not by the burning of a candle?  She had a hundred such questions, and Jake would say:  All I know is that there is sun and sky and snow and me and you, that's all I know.  And she would rage against him, until he felt obliged to try to answer the questions for her, even though he admitted now that he'd spent all of his life pretending to know the unknowable, pretending to be able to outstare the man in the hood. (p. 87)

Graham Joyce's The Silent Land is a hard novel to describe without resorting to describing much of the book's central elements.  It is in turns a love story, an exploration of relationships, a confrontation with death, a horror novel, a poetic dual soliloquy, and a story about life and life's memories.  Yet it is more than the sum of its parts or what any summary could attempt to explain with a few pithy paragraphs.

The Silent Land is set in the French alps.  A British couple, Jake and Zoe, both in their thirties, are vacationing there.  On their way down the slopes, an avalanche is triggered and both are trapped.  Joyce describes this harrowing scene and their apparent escape in precise, almost too minute, detail.  As they make their way back to the village, they begin to notice that things are oddly different:  there are no people, candles stay lit for days, and if it weren't for the movement of the sun and moon, time itself would have seemed to have stayed still for him.

Joyce plays with reader expectations that this might be a sort of romantic ghost story:  we see the couple pondering if they are trapped in a sort of Limbo, where there is no Heaven nor Hell, but only the two of them.  We discover their flaws, their conceits, and their secrets.  At times this is stereotypical detail for a romantic story that some readers might expect.  Yet there is more than this to Joyce's tale.

Little details, such as the sudden, flitting appearances of a man wearing a black mask or hood or the inexplicable ringing of a hotel phone and the incomprehensible (French?) voice on the other side, make the reader reassess what she might have assumed to be the novel's point.  What Joyce does with these seemingly innocuous details is create something that is more haunting than a love story and more profound than any possible expounding on life (and death)'s mysteries could hope to attain by itself.

There are flaws to this narrative, however.  At times, the narrative threatens to become too treacly, too focused on the complex love/lust relationship of Jake and Zoe, to rise above the stereotypes associated with stories and movies like Ghost.  Ultimately, however, Joyce's narrative manages to twist these built-in reader expectations subtly enough that there ends up being much more than a surface afterlife love tale.  The key turning point is when Jake and Zoe share stories of their fathers' dying moments; of the confusion, stress, heartbreak, and acceptance found within remembering what their lives were and how their deaths reinforced those memories.  It is in these tales that Joyce unites several themes that he had only tentatively explored in the main narrative:  trust, love, hope, fear, confusion, and ultimately acceptance.  When their true fates are known, these two entwined tales, along with several small and yet important clues buried within the text, serve to create a narrative that is achingly heartwarming.   

The Silent Land is the most lyrical and evocative of the six World Fantasy Award nominees for Best Novel.  It slowly builds, despite a few false notes in its prose and structure, to a very powerful and poignant conclusion.  Its characterization is top-notch and long after the final pages are read, its themes will haunt readers.  It might just be the most well-rounded of the finalists and it certainly is my current favorite out of the five that I have read to date.