Mayra Montero
Translated by Edith Grossman
Ecco Press ($22.95)

by Kristin Thiel

Although there is something troubling about giving audience to a pompous male as he recounts his past sexual exploits—which a reader must do for Deep Purple's narrator, classical music critic Agustín Cabán—author Mayra Montero's point is a melancholy one to which we can all relate: Every phase in life comes to an end, as does life itself.

Cabán, retiring after years on staff at a Puerto Rican newspaper, has reached such a threshold. As he ponders writing his memoirs, we learn that he didn't attend concerts simply for the music, but for the sex as well, and that the two were inextricably linked in his mind. Among his conquests are Virginia Tuten the violinist, who pretends to faint in her bathtub to make Cabán think she is overwhelmed by the bullying of her brother and her lesbian manager; Manuela Suggia the violinist, whose mother would make her freeze in the cold German winters until she played what her mother demanded, and whose learned cruelty surfaces during her intimacies with men; and Clint Verret the pianist, who is both angrily embarrassed and passionately aroused by his sexual feelings toward Cabán.

Cabán pursues these musicians for several reasons. He is moved by their passion for their work: noting the bruise a violin leaves on a violinist's neck, he says "Seeing it up close, on skin that for a moment was neither yellow nor white, neither a man's nor a woman's, I longed to smell and kiss the mark of the violin, the damage it had done." He is excited at the thought of having played a role in their passion: "I had often relished the sensation of watching the performance of a soloist whose body, hands, and mouth had been at the mercy of my hands, my unscrupulous lips." And he cannot understand how he could criticize music without becoming intimate with the musicians:

I know how to gauge musicians from the first moment I see them. With a woman, I look at how she raises her shoulders, or the manner in which she purses her mouth. With a man, I always notice his crotch, and in particular how he moves his thumbs...Besides listening to their music, I smelled them, I heard them speak, I listened to the rumble of their intestines. It may sound prosaic, but one's musical soul lies in their guts: I could confirm this on the spot by placing my ear there and listening carefully.

Amid the rampant sex in Deep Purple, there are occasionally quiet lines that let you catch your breath, as when Cabán pauses his coital frenzy to realize his feelings for a male pianist ("I went out to the street and inhaled as if I were coming out of the water. As if the hand of God had pulled me up to the surface"), or when he takes pleasure in the small joys of being married ("Toward daybreak my wife would begin to snore; the only snoring that has always filled me with tenderness has been hers"). Ultimately, the book is about an old man bidding a fond farewell to his life: aware of the ghosts bumping around the newspaper office, he realizes he must take charge of his stories before it is too late. As Cabán puts it, "It isn't worth pretending: one dies twice. Or rather, our first death has to be organized in our own way, with our memories and our odds and ends, setting aside a single moment that's the key to everything. And when we have that, the other death can't touch us."

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Elizabeth Costello
J. M. Coetzee
Viking ($24.95)

by Michael Sayeau

The newest Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee is back with a novel that follows the life of an aging female Australian novelist and which takes the form of a series of public lectures and the stories that surround them.

Or: the newest Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee is back with a series of essays that take the form of fictional scenarios, complete with an alter-ego, an aging Australian female novelist.

However we label it, Elizabeth Costello is a formally innovative work that is unafraid to tackle big questions: animal rights, the relations between the Third World and the First, obscenity and censorship, and the afterlife of the concepts of good and evil in an increasingly secular world. Coetzee's technique, however, is far more than merely a decorative accoutrement for bland polemicizing. The medium, here, is in a significant sense the message.

At first glance, the subject matter of the novel might seem an improbable plot source for an entertaining read. After all, when we search out portraits of the artist to read, it is not usually the artist as a graying lecturer we are after. It takes monumental self-discipline at times to divorce our taste for fiction from our voyeuristic interest in the stuff of authors' lives, especially the juicy stuff—the bohemian beginnings, the sexual intrigues, the whole morality play of virtue alternately trumping and being trumped by vice. But Elizabeth Costello is made of less promising stuff: the honorariums and the jetlag, the contract lectures for the lumpen-bougeoisie on a cruise ship, and daughter-in-law problems.

Thankfully, Coetzee avoids putting his chosen form—the juxtaposition of the lecture with the life of the lecturer—to any of the banally stereotypical uses that we might expect. We can imagine easily the lessons we might have learned from a novel of this sort: the vicissitudes of everyday life expose the shallowness hiding behind the idealism of intellectual endeavor; the non-coherence of life and art shed light on the inescapable hypocrisy of attempting to state things as they really are; what matters in the classroom is something altogether different than what matters in the dining room or bedroom.

Elizabeth Costello offers something much more subtle and profound. The heart of the work takes the form of two lectures that Elizabeth is invited to give at fictional Appleton College, entitled "The Philosophers and the Animals" and "The Poets and the Animals." (These chapters are reprinted from Coetzee's 1999 work Lives of the Animals, and Coetzee himself delivered them in 1998 as the prestigious Tanner Lectures at Princeton University.)

In the first lecture, a polemic on behalf of the rights of animals, Elizabeth proffers a controversial ethical equation: that of the Holocaust and "what is being done to animals at this moment in production facilities (I hesitate to call them farms any longer) in abattoirs, in trawlers, in laboratories, all over the world." At issue in her lecture is not simply the raw brutality of the industrial efficiency of slaughter that occurs in both cases, but the mental and emotional attitudes of the bystanders that allow it to happen, who choose not to know and thus not to empathize and resist. As she says:

The particular horror of the camps, the horror that convinces us that what went on there was a crime against humanity, is not that despite a humanity shared with their victims, the killers treated them like lice. That is too abstract. The horror is that the killers failed to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else.

In other words, what we find when we dig toward the psychological foundation of the most horrific crimes is not so much hate as a failure of the imagination, a failure to think of oneself in the place of the other—which is exactly the practice at play in the writing and reading of novels. "What is it like for X to be X": there could be no more fundamental formula for the formative moment of novel-writing or, perhaps, ethical thought.

But Coetzee, true to form, does not stop here; the equation only gets more complicated as new terms are added. The conclusion of the lecture elicits only scattered, hesitant applause, and at the dinner afterward—where the Appleton organizers have chosen a safe but not entirely conciliatory menu of "red snapper with baby potatoes and fettucine with roasted eggplant"—she parries with the faculty in attendance as well as her daughter-in-law, no straw opponents, to be sure. We as readers are left hanging in the middle, baffled about what to think about animal rights, Elizabeth's rhetorical tactic, and the motivation of her beliefs.

Other chapters follow a similar form, each centering on a lecture that puts a received idea to the test, and then encasing that lecture in a storyline that obscures the lucidity of the lecture in the murkiness of interpersonal affairs. In one chapter—one in which Elizabeth is in the audience rather than at the podium—she attends the conferral of an honorary doctorate to her sister, a Roman Catholic nun who administers a children's hospital in Africa. This sister, born Blanche but now Sister Bridget Costello, gives a talk that accuses the humanities of having lost their raison d'être at the moment they became "humanist," secular. Elizabeth in turn counters, after the fact, with a letter to her sister that describes an act of sexual charity that she once performed for a dying, elderly man—a letter she nonetheless never sends.

In another brilliant chapter, "The Problem of Evil," Elizabeth delivers a lecture to an international conference that is, if not an endorsement of censorship, at least a defense of the concept of obscenity as that which should not be written. The paper is centered on a scene from a contemporary novel in which Hitler's would-be assassins are themselves put to death in a horrifically cruel manner, and which Elizabeth finds obscene

because such things ought not to take place, and then obscene again because having taken place they ought not to be brought into the light but covered up and hidden forever in the bowels of the earth, like what goes on in the slaughterhouses of the world, if one wishes to save one's sanity.

How can we read this charge in light of the lecture on animal rights, which certainly seemed intent on bringing to light "what goes on in the slaughterhouses of the world"? The chapter further complicates our reception of Elizabeth's presentation by calling to light an obscene occurrence drawn from her own story, an episode of sexual violence when she was a young woman. What, exactly, is at stake for this writer in this sudden suitability of the word "obscene"?

Coetzee's novel is a catalogue of political and ethical equations, starting from the formula of sympathy—"What is it like for X to be X"—and twisting into greater and greater levels of complexity. And perhaps none is so difficult to cipher out than Elizabeth Costello herself. We only receive the barest of details about the woman and her background—she was born in 1928 in Melbourne, lived in Europe for a time, was married twice with two children, and achieved a level of fame with the publication of The House on Eccles Street in 1969, a feminist reworking of James Joyce's Ulysses. But this is much to the point. Ultimately, Elizabeth Costello's reader must perform the ethical operation proposed throughout the book upon the central character herself: "What is it like for Elizabeth to be Elizabeth?" We have quite a bit of data, but it doesn't quite form a coherent whole; the equation is tough to solve, as in life.

And this is ultimately the message of Elizabeth Costello. Beyond and above grappling with the knotty intricacies of animal rights or the grounding of idealism in a secular art, ethical thought and behavior depends upon our persistence and patience in thinking ourselves in the place of the other. Since this version of ethics is a fictional ethics, it is not a surprise that Coetzee would deploy it. As we hear in the first chapter:

Realism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as here, realism is driven to invent situations—walks in the countryside, conversations—in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them. The notion of embodying turns out to be pivotal. In such debates ideas do not and indeed cannot float free: they are tied to the speakers by whom they are enounced, and generated from the matrix of individual interests out of which they speakers act in the world.

Just as fiction—and all fiction is to some degree "realism"—is forced to turn its concepts and themes into human flesh, philosophy (whether political or ethical) must temper its dependence on ratio with some consideration of the sides that resist pure thought: the physical, the situated, the felt. A fictional ethics is an ethics of ideas embodied, put to the test of real life or the something like it that takes the form of characters, situations, and plot. Precepts and principles are crowded into the unventilated room of reality, forced to mingle, forced to negotiate with each other. And while sculpting concepts and beliefs in human flesh, endowing them with skin and gray matter and genitals, is not without risks for the author—above all the risk that the fleshy matter will hang awkwardly, unconvincingly—it is a far greater risk to take them up clothed only in the vapor of antonymous, intellectual existence.

In short, then, Coetzee attempts a bold and convincing answer to a question of real pertinence in these dark times: "What can fiction still do?" But another question rises up immediately upon the solution of the first in this pseudo-narrative, this work almost but not quite denuded of the conventional trappings of the novel form: "Can Coetzee—and can we—still do fiction?"

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Jorge Amado
Translated by Barbara Shelby Merello
University of Wisconsin Press ($16.95)

by Alicia L. Conroy

The songs of the samba circle and Afro-Brazilian candomblé rites, scents of rose perfume and fish frying in palm oil, the whirl of drunken camaraderie and violent police raids, cigar smoke in boardrooms and whispers in bedrooms—welcome to the parti-colored, engrossing world of Salvador de Bah’a, Brazil, the seaport setting of Jorge Amado's 1969 novel Tent of Miracles. The region's juxtapositions of class, ethnicity and religion—legacy of a more distinct African/Yoruba presence than in other parts of the country—provide Amado's favorite laboratory for exploring cultural and individual identity. Of course, there are the eponymous miracles, too: of love and friendship, and of the convergence of opposites. These temper the tart social commentary of one of Brazil's most popular authors, who died in 2001 at 89.

Many of Amado's books are anchored in his beloved Bahía, and they have a Dickensian sprawl, exploring myriad character types, denouncing or satirizing various failings of social justice, and unraveling plots that enfold the individual drama in institutional and national events. Tent of Miracles, recently restored to print, follows this form. It reveals the life of Pedro Archanjo, a boy raised in the streets of late 19th-century Bahía, who becomes a self-taught ethnographer and social critic. But he is also Ojuobá ("Eyes of the King"), candomblé cult practitioner, good-natured womanizer and rum-drinker, and defender of the poor. Importantly, he is also racially mixed, as are so many of his fellow citizens. The pains and hypocrisy of racism are contrasted to a heralded, multi-layered culture of "miscegenation, mixtures, mestizos, mulatas" as a major theme of the tale.

The "tent of miracles" is the workshop of Archanjo's friend Corró, painter of miracles and printer of Archanjo's books, a place that serves as ad-hoc community center. The friendship between the two men and their loves and extended "families" forms one pole of Archanjo's life, the other being the fight for justice for the disenfranchised. Pedro Archanjo is both an oddity and an emblem of Bahía: "the conversationalist and the bookworm . . . and the one who kisses the hand of Pulquéria the iyalorixá [priestess]—are they two different people, the white man and the black, perhaps? ...There is only one, a mixture of the two. Just one mulatto," Archanjo explains.

The book takes two tacks to explore how heroes and pariahs are created. One storyline unfolds a biography of Archanjo, while the other takes place in the 1960s, a century after his birth, and shows how the all-but-forgotten man is elevated (or invented) from a minor footnote to local genius by the attentions of a foreign intellectual. "They're building him a monument, all right," says one character, "but the Archanjo they're building it to isn't our Archanjo but another, far prettier, man."

Along the way, Amado engages in social satire, often with one-liners that skewer poet-wannabes, pompous civic leaders, or lustful dowagers. Particularly hilarious exchanges take place as modern ad men try to capitalize on their newfound local hero. At the other extreme, the populist hero faces down racist professors and police who presage Hitler with a chilling similarity.

It's hard to resist the generous and good-natured spirit of Amado's writing—no character is entirely free from the author's ridicule, yet there's a warmth and poignancy, something deeply humane, about his vision. A tinge of romance reminds the reader that spirit-magic is as real as poverty and prejudice: deities come when asked by initiates, women of all ages are luscious seductresses, men like Archanjo are unfailingly potent. Yet Amado's perspective on the legacy of colonialism and slavery also reflects and contrasts how those issues play out in other New World nations.

A slight obstacle for non-Brazilian readers are the many references to candomblé religion and other Brazilian cultural practices, often using Yoruba and Portuguese words; a glossary is provided, but the process interrupts reading. This 1971 translation by Barbara Shelby Merello occasionally sounds stilted, and lacks the sparkle of Gregory Rabassa's 1993 translation of another Amado work, The War of the Saints. These are quibbles, however; this life-affirming tale sees the world with open eyes, and shows that our salvation lies in love—all kinds— and in right action.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2003/2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003/2004

Nelly Reifler
Simon & Schuster ($21)

by Neil Kozlowicz

Reading Nelly Reifler's debut collection of short stories, See Through, you'll feel an impulse to avert your gaze, as from the adrenaline-shot scene in Pulp Fiction—but you can't. Averting your gaze, in this case, means missing out on the dark unspoken thoughts and actions of characters who must be real, must be out there, or how could they feel so authentic? Didn't your neighbors just buy their son a Dagger bicycle, or was it a Schrade knife? Your niece won't neglect to feed your cats while you are gone for two weeks, will she? She certainly would never walk up to the door and watch them, then turn away...

Such musings are inevitable in a fictive universe where there's no skipping the "bad parts." Reifler's spare stories demand that the reader piece the whole together; you are not carried to the next scene, but allowed to wait and wonder about who these people are. The answer is the one you fear most: They are you.

With a microscopic eye focused on the sympathetic nervous system, Reifler shows the bad parts of her characters and their lives. From the first lines of "Teeny," the opening story, something is clearly awry:

There they were.

Through the window, she could see them, one on either arm of the sofa.

They seemed to be asleep.

She had her instructions, written on a piece of lined notebook paper. She had reviewed them earlier. Now the paper was cinched in her fist, blank side out, words hidden. Her hand was sweaty.

Reifler's minimalist prose signals an imminent wreck, and depending on your disposition (or your love of cats), you'll be sadistically cheering her pathology or cringing through every deliberation and failure that Teeny makes. Reifler also shows herself to be a master of playing with readerly expectations, as in the story "Memoir," in which Reifler's narrator tells of her time in a mythic village where a hideous disease and mutations haunt the villagers. "Memoir" shares stylistic similarities with Shirley Jackson's classic "The Lottery"; though it features a different nemesis, the matter-of-fact address and attention to the beat of the village evoke Jackson's tone of eerie dread:

So the baby came. The trees turned scarlet and yellow, and leaves piled up like a moat around the house; apples fell to the ground and changed into wine, and drunken field mice dragged them home to their nests. And the baby came. By that time, my father couldn't move at all.

All of See Through's stories view disturbing situations with a cool eye, but it's important to note that the deviants in Reifler's fiction—squirrels and sparrows included—are celebrated for their struggles, their need to exist as they are. These characters know the rules, but because of some compulsion or desire or lack, they no longer have room to follow them. Sometimes Reifler offers explanations, but mostly, we follow a body, an id, a libido, to a twisted victory.

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Edited by Christian Bök
House of Anansi ($22.95)

by Nicholas Birns

The reader's eye may be drawn first to John Riddell's four-page comic-book riff on the possible verbal permutations of "Pope Leo"—but this volume's triumphs are verbal, not visual. Ground Works, an anthology of innovative Canadian fiction, is worth its price for two remarks alone: Margaret Atwood's comment, in her introduction, that the term 'experimental fiction' itself is "a tribute to the early twentieth century's reverence" for science, and editor Christian Bök's warning that Canadian fiction is in danger of sinking into overly mimetic orthodoxies at the very moment when it has begun to "receive unprecedented international acclaim." Atwood reminds us that we can no longer have the naive confidence that avant-garde procedures "get it right" more than realistic ones do. She also brings home the extent to which Canadian avant-garde writing, to a great extent a post-1955 phenomenon, wasn't so much belated modernism as modernism that entered the stage in the middle of the journey. It was also, she points out, confected with Canadian nationalism, and not in an operatic way, but in a mode of quizzical, self-ironizing uncertainty. Bök's warning is especially valuable for the US reader, who has seen much Canadian fiction since the High Ondaatje Era began, but who tends to be seeing those works and writers which most echo conventional novelistic forms—a situation this anthology seeks to rectify.

The contributions of the world-famous novelist Atwood and the dazzling young concrete poet Bök should not, however, eclipse the selections themselves, all from avant-garde writers active over the past 35 years. The cracked love story of Lucan and Vera by Graeme Gibson is a perfect example of how nonrepresentational writing can be a faithful rendering of primary experience. Leonard Cohen is represented by an except from Beautiful Losers, as much a contemporary classic in its own genre as "Suzanne" or "Famous Blue Raincoat" are in theirs. Christopher Dewdney exudes knowledge both scientific and asynchronous, exploring layers of sedimentation and of perception, states of knowledge where we know we are not ourselves but rather programmed by larger networks, which yet solicit "on a personal & individual level only." Andreas Schroeder provides a surreal algorithm in which the protagonist finds his name continually changed as he is propelled into even more remote lands. Daphne Marlatt takes up this idea of displacement in space standing for disordering of perception, and measures how gender provides a further variable. George Bowering, as always, is flat-out funny, this time writing on the Black Mountain School and what Bowering, a baseball fan, might term its first-round playoff clash with Canadian nationalism.

If only Francophone writers such as Nicole Brossard had been included, this would be a truly comprehensive look at the Canadian avant-garde. Even so, it is still a valuable resource for anyone interested in contemporary Canadian writing.

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Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers ($16.95)
Eden, Eden, Eden ($13.95)
Creation Books

by Rod Smith

You think you've read them all—all the writers with powerfully wicked imaginations, that is. Maybe you caught the bug in high school: there you were in English class, slumped on your desk, cuffing The Ticket That Exploded like a Playboy inside a rented copy of Catcher in the Rye. Or maybe it started on an unusually cool and foggy Saturday morning in July, when you fished that grocery bag out of a dumpster and let your friend have all the stuff with pictures while you kept Blood and Guts in High School. Eventually you got to the point where Hubert Selby and Lautremont are old hat to you; Sade, simply clunky. You wonder why no one other than Bernard Noel has yet to try pulling Bataille's sword out of whatever it is he left it in. You're still waiting for The Story of P. In short, nothing on any page in the world fazes you. The above comparisons are here for one reason: if any of what you've read above strikes a chord, you've come to the right review. If not, avert your eyes and move to another piece without delay, for we are about to enter the most desolate, the most brutal, the most unabashedly depraved realm in the history of the printed word: the world of Pierre Guyotat. Here's a typical scene, both savage and poignant, from the "First Chant" of his deliciously debased work Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers:

—Buy me, buy me, or I will die torn to pieces, yesterday they seized me and sewed me inside the horsehair of a mattress, cutting a hole in the cloth at the place of my thighs and everyone could then fuck me choking inside the horsehair, eyes pricked by the sweat, and the cloth, around the hole, blackens and sticks to my belly; I can't see them, I recognize them only by their cocks. Set me free, I'll work for your living.

The guard strokes the hair, the temples, the slave's forehead, strokes, soothes the restless forehead, the quivering neck, his belly touches the belly still wet, the stain on the dress called "slave's stain," his wooden leg crushes the foot of the now silent slave, motionless and quivering against the guard. Originally published in 1967, Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers is one of two Guyotat titles published in translation by the reliably insurgent folks at Creation Books this year. The other is Eden, Eden, Eden, originally published in 1970 and banned in Guyotat's native France until 1981. Of the two, Tomb provides the easiest point of entry into Guyotat's realm by far; plotless for all intents and purposes, the novel at least provides a modicum of description cumulatively over time, and approaches conventional narrative a good deal more closely than Eden, Eden, Eden, a single sentence in which one action immediately follows another with absolutely no intervening description or reflection for 181 pages. Both of these editions contain useful introductions by Artaud scholar Stephen Barber which help situate Guyotat's "supremely resilient and innovative body of work" for English-language readers.

While Tomb conveys some notion of time's passage, albeit strangely, Eden's temporal perspective is completely exploded. Ostensibly the book presents the story of an increasingly degraded male prostitute, but its language is pared to bare essentials, each page different from the next only in the exact composition of the scenes and sentences upon it. Whether it's "Wazzag crouching alongside apprentice, licking cold sweat pearling on forehead, on navel" from early in the book or "vipers, in warm cavity of laterite covered by rustling almouz, copulating, striking jaws, horn, entwining" from near the end, Guytotat's torrentially presented lines and images are all but identical in tone and rhythm. In the preface to the book, Roland Barthes champions it as "a free text... outside all categories and yet of an importance beyond any doubt." Structural particulars and challenge factor aside, the novels have much in common. Each consists entirely of concatenated vignettes situated in a world constantly at war, inhabited only by masters, slaves, and beasts—basically a 150-proof version of the world around us. Each is about sex, death, cruelty, and little else, excepting the occasional glimpse of potential for transformation on a purely animal level. To some degree, personal experience inspires and informs both. Guyotat, born in 1940, has seen time on both sides of the gun—as a child during the Nazi occupation, as an occupier in the French army during the Algerian uprising. He's written and spoken extensively about the relationship between writing and masturbation, apparently a familiar combo for him in real life. He's been hospitalized in the midst of long writing binges during which he neither eats nor sleeps. Guyotat transforms writing (his) and reading (ours) into physical acts. He pitches, we catch, again and again—if we're up for it. Tomb for 500,00 Soldiers translator Romain Slocombe and Graham Fox, his Eden, Eden, Eden counterpart, have both demonstrated great courage simply by tackling these monstrous entities. The fact that each has successfully wrestled his monster to the ground and pinned it—wriggling, kicking, growling, and hissing, all simultaneously—only sweetens the deal. Despite Guyotat's obsession with death (or maybe because of it), each translation brims with raging life; each retains the sense and the savagery of the original, if not its exact rhythmic constituents. For Guyotat, those constituents are of paramount importance, albeit far more in his post-1970 work than in Tomb or Eden. By all reports, his more recent fiction, written in heavily phoneticized colloquial French with innumerable convolutions, seems all but untranslatable, meaning these two epic prose poems posing as novels might be all we Anglophones see of his work for a while. To paraphrase Martin Luther, it is no great matter. There's more than enough here to keep us busy.

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Volume 1: The Tower, $22.95
Volume 2: The Delta, $21.95
Volume 3: The Magician , $21.95
Volume 4: Shadowland, $14.95
Hampton Roads Publishing Company
Colin Wilson

by Kris Lawson

In the acknowledgements to Shadowland, the brand-new installment of Colin Wilson's science fantasy Spider World, Wilson—noted author of more than 80 books ranging from criminology to metaphysics—writes to "express my gratitude to Roald Dahl, who in 1975 said to me casually over dinner, 'You ought to try writing a children's book.'" Wilson has more than answered his friend's challenge with this pleasurable series, though like precursors such as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy, the ideas within aren't only for children. Called "visionary fiction" by his U.S. publisher, the series begun in 1985 with The Tower ended on something of a cliffhanger with 1992's The Magician. More than a decade later that story line now concludes in Shadowland (though Wilson hints that a follow-up volume titled New Earth may be in the works), and the entire series has been restored to print.

Spider World is at first glance a harsh study of evolution, a key concept in Wilson's oeuvre since his groundbreaking debut The Outsider; the conflicts of intelligence versus might and entitlement versus inheritance predominate as the novels worry the question of what determines a species' survival and what kind of survival it might be. But Spider World is also a classic quest tale: the hero, Niall, possesses special abilities and the courage to achieve his potential. He goes on journeys, both mystical and physical, and overcomes mental and corporeal obstacles in order to achieve his goals: to gain control of his supernatural abilities and to realize the power to change the world around him. On this level, the term "visionary fiction" fits very well; densely packed with layers of meaning, this futuristic tale invokes the inner resources of human consciousness as much as it does science.

Wilson's prose is deceptively simple, even repetitive at times. Like other science fiction writers, Wilson not only has to introduce his characters, he also has to set up his universe and explain it for the reader. He does this in graphic, sometimes stomach-turning detail, vividly demonstrating the animal-like qualities of his human protagonists through their senses of smell and taste. Here, Niall and the other boys in his family keep watch on a giant ant colony:

In the branches of the tree and in the roots of the bushes lived large green aphids, looking like fat grapes, which ate leaves and sap. Periodically, an ant would approach an aphid and stroke the bulbous abdomen with its antennae; then a large globule of a clear, sticky substance would emerge...Niall and Hrolf were finally persuaded to try the experiment and were agreeably surprised; it was sweet, syrupy...they found nothing repellent in the notion of eating the product of a green fly's digestive system.

The imaginative setting of the series title is the result of a catastrophic change in the earth's biosphere. Virtually all of human history, including the knowledge of when and why the earth changed, is lost except for vague legends. Insects and spiders have evolved into giant creatures and are capable of varying degrees of intelligent thought; spiders, having previously used their mental power to cow and control their prey, have evolved into the top species of this new order. They believe themselves perfectly justified in this role, since they see humans, with their inherently violent tendencies, as inferior; they also remember how humans used to treat them. A few groups of free humans exist, dwindling under the combined threat of hunting spiders, the less intelligent but just as hungry predators of the insect world, and even many plants which have now grown to a size and malignancy that can kill humans easily.

The first book in the series, The Tower, introduces Niall, a child in a small clan of humans who live in primitive, post-apocalyptic squalor in the desert. Hiding in caves, venturing outside with small, furtive motions, the humans of Niall's clan are defined as "prey" in the food chain of their world. They scavenge, living like parasites on the excretions of plants and insects in the desert when hunting goes badly or is thwarted by a squad of spiders flying over the desert in silk balloons. Niall and his family are losing their struggle to survive: successive crises have worn them down and a desperate gamble to save the family ends in tragedy. After a visit to a hidden city of humans, Niall does the unthinkable: he confronts and kills a spider. Bent on rooting him out, the vengeful spiders eventually enslave him and his family, taking them to the spider city.

The spiders and their neighbors, the bombardier beetles, have created social systems with one major area of commonality: humans, being naturally destructive if not outright evil, are set firmly at the bottom of the social and natural order. The beetles, who allow their human workers some freedom, have signed a peace treaty with the spiders, and so have no qualms about letting the spiders treat their own humans as fodder, as long as nothing disturbs beetle territory. Only when Niall and his rebels obtain Reapers—ancient human weapons of mass destruction—do the beetles take them seriously, first ordering them to give up the weapons, and when that proves ineffective, actually negotiating with them to prevent the spiders from declaring an all-out war. Wilson demonstrates skillfully that politics remain the same, even if the species participating in the civilization has six legs and antennae.

As Niall searches the spider city for a way to escape, he discovers the White Tower, a mysterious building with an impenetrable shield. Thanks to his curiosity, he already possesses a talisman he found in the desert while exploring, and this is the key that will unlock the shield. The Tower reveals to Niall the lost history of the human race, the knowledge to use the power inside him, and a hint as to how the spiders might ultimately be defeated. Armed with aggressive mental powers and the aforementioned Reapers, Niall sets about building a power base, discovering along the way that the thrills of rebelling and violence are far outweighed by their negative consequences. As the book ends, Niall ignores the peace treaty negotiated by the beetles and, echoing his father's desperate choice, decides to follow his instincts and travel to the Delta in order to destroy the source of the spiders' power.

The Delta details Niall's journey through an antagonistically aware jungle to the mysterious Source behind the evolutionary changes on Earth. Despite the journey's uncertain outcome, Niall's friends accompany him, confident that their Reapers will protect them from the increasingly predatory plants and animals. As they get nearer to the Source, Niall realizes that it is more powerful than he suspected, and as his physical journey progresses, so does his mystical path; he stretches the limits of his mind and communes with the different levels of mental energy, learning that his perceptions are evolving into something more than human.

By the time he reaches the Source, he has to make a choice. A human victory demands that the Source be destroyed, which will lead to the eventual restoration of human civilization dominating the earth. But Niall now wonders if another kind of human victory may be possible. He decides that humans, based on their history and violent instincts, are not entitled to be the sole dominant species, but he believes they deserve to have another chance at coexistence. In order to establish humans as worthy of evolution, side by side with the spiders and beetles, Niall has to convince the Source that humans can change. In doing so, he must risk his mind and his physical safety in two separate shows of faith.

Niall returns to the spider city, where the conflict over the neglected peace treaty is raging. He struggles to explain to his fellow humans the outcome of his journey, which to them seems to have accomplished nothing except losing the Reapers that lend them power against the spiders. Bent on his mission from the Source, Niall confronts the spiders during a meeting of their council. As they try to force Niall to submit, the Source manifests itself to protect Niall, and the spiders, who revere the Source as a goddess, accept Niall as their new leader.

The Magician picks up on this interesting plot twist, as Niall and the other humans try to figure out how to free the humans without losing the evolved efficiency of the spider city. A crisis erupts immediately when a much-hated spider, Skorbo, is found murdered. Niall and Dravig, a spider lord, work together to solve the mystery, while at the same time learning startling new ideas about each other's species.

As Niall tries to track down the murderers, he finds himself facing a psychic opponent—a mysterious dream figure called the Magician, who has sent strangers to the spider city for some unknown purpose, and can kill his minions from a distance. Armed with deadly weapons, the Magician's assassins manage to wound Niall's brother, Veig, who begins to die slowly from the poison infecting him. Desperate to save his brother, Niall decides to find the Magician and force him to heal his brother.

In Shadowland, Niall begins his journey to the mountain stronghold of the Magician. Soon his physical journey becomes much more of a mystical one, as Niall encounters the chameleon men, who teach him to travel without his body, and the trolls, who help him attune himself to a crystal power source that the Magician covets. In the company of Captain Makanda, an exiled spider, Niall finds the Shadowlands, an underground city mechanized to perfection by the Magician, who tries to control his human subjects as thoroughly as the spiders did. Niall realizes that the Magician has poisoned Veig as a means of luring him to the city, in order to discover and steal his powers. Yet despite vast resources, the Magician's fatal weakness is his reluctance to innovate, and Niall finds this is his only hope as he confronts the most powerful enemy he has ever faced, to save himself, his brother and his city.

Wilson, whose many books include several that explore psychic and occult phenomena, has created a mystical hero in Niall, who fights his battles not in the physical world but in the astral plane. Against the physically massive spiders and their brawny, bred-for-perfection human bodyguards, Niall has no chance to save himself or his family except by moving the battle to another field.

It is Niall's willingness to experiment, to try new things and open his mind to new perspectives, that places him above other humans, as well as the spiders and insects, who have no capacity for imagination. Niall's journey is replete with spiritually symbolic terms: The Tower, which in Tarot represents change or destruction, engenders a revolution. It also represents an ivory tower, since Niall's new knowledge limits him to a certain extent, turning him away from developing his mental powers and toward gaining political power. In The Delta, the Source is Niall's goal—a balancing, nurturing force, a goddess to go with the warlike domineering powers he has already subsumed. After he achieves the balance, Niall himself is a "magician," an adept who has accumulated power and is now learning how to wield it. Niall chooses to forge bonds between himself and the spiders, as well as with his family; his enemy, the other Magician, chooses to kill and destroy. And finally, in the Shadowlands, Niall walks not just in shadowy caves, but also in the shadowy lands of the astral plane. Leaving his body behind, Niall's mind travels to even more distant destinations.

Founded on a fascinating philosophical bedrock, Wilson's Spider World is a dense read, full of vivid descriptions of insect and spider behavior, as well as a mystical tale that takes its main character from fugitive to magician. Niall is one of a few humans willing to use his brain for something more than mere survival. His sense of wonder and curiosity carry him into a different world: the one he carries inside his mind. As he struggles not just for survival but also to master the growing power and knowledge he accumulates, Niall's search takes him to the heart of the power that informs the new evolutionary order.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2003/2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003/2004

Bandula Chandraratna
Black Sparrow Books / David R. Godine ($24.95)

by Christopher J. Lee

The story behind this novel is almost as good as the story within it. Bandula Chandraratna self-published Mirage in England in 1999, only to find his book go on to be a favorite in that year's Booker Prize competition. The merit of such acclaim is quickly recognized as one progresses through this story of unexpected love, marriage, and tragic misfortune. Displaying a deep empathy for his characters along with a sharp eye for social commentary, Chandraratna's achievement reminds one of Chekhov, as both writers feature characters searching for a semblance of happiness under conditions not of their choosing.

Mirage begins in the wee hours of the morning, in a shantytown on the outskirts of an unnamed city. Sayeed, the novel's protagonist, awakens for a drink of water, and from this opening scene, both sleepless and dreamlike, Chandraratna conjures a world not often captured in contemporary writing. Taking place in a country that approximates modern Saudi Arabia, Mirage follows the life of Sayeed as he makes his way as a recent immigrant to the city. This transition from rural simplicity to urban uncertainty is further complicated by an arranged marriage to Latifa—a much younger woman who is also a widower and mother—upon a brief visit home to his village. Despite Sayeed's preparations, Latifa and her daughter Leila discover life in the city to be difficult, and their attempts at coping with their new urban environment form a fitting backdrop to Latifa and Sayeed's gradual adjustment to married life.

Sayeed forms an unlikely character to drive such a narrative. In his early forties, working at a hospital as a low-level laborer, living in conditions of impoverishment, he resembles little of what might be expected of a new husband and father, let alone the central character for a novel. However, it is Chandraratna's sympathy for him, displayed through a descriptive and supple prose style, that imbues him with qualities of persistence and modesty that the reader grows to admire. Latifa also possesses such traits, and as their relationship develops through gestures of responsibility and tenderness, their characters increase in depth—not through grand action but through the simple tasks of ordinary life.

The tragedy that unfolds at the end comes as a surprise, and is in many ways magnified by the author's measured approach throughout the majority of the book; the social context of Islamic law combined with an instance of transgression serve to unravel the intimacy and understanding Sayeed and Latifa have achieved. The human dimensions of this novel, so quietly rendered, underscore the heartbreak of Chandraratna's conclusion. Mirage is a work of found love and solitude, of ephemeral connection and everyday wonder, and its emotional resonance extends well beyond its immediate locale.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2003/2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003/2004

Edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts
Night Shade Books ($24)

by Justin Maxwell

The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases—let's call it The Guide for short—showcases the fictive imagination unencumbered by plot or protagonist. An engaging and humorous read, The Guide virtually abandons the traditional tropes of conflict, climax, and resolution, opting instead to use the wit contained in its quickly shifting entries to keep the reader moving from one page to the next. The result is an idiomatic chimera; each author's entry is a separate-but-dependent part that allows the whole to become a subtextual free-for-all, with healthy doses of subversion and cultural analysis. Contributors (ranging from science fiction stalwarts such as Michael Moorcock and Rachel Pollack to literary experimentalists like Brian Evenson and R.M. Berry) have infested The Guide with diseases like "Delusions of Universal Grandeur," which entails "a severe delusional belief that the universe is ever more gigantic. Sufferers assert with great confidence that the universe is expanding continuously to absurdly large dimensions," and "Wife Blindness," initially diagnosed by "a failure to observe significant dates," but eventually progressing to the later symptom of "spousal nudity oblivion."

The bulk of The Guide is its listing of diseases, which include three subsets: infectious (the reader might catch the illness from the entry), quarantined (the author of the entry is clearly afflicted), and discredited (disproved or in doubt by Guide staff). The entries feel unified because they are cross-referenced with one another, generally follow the same format, and frequently engage other fringe (and equally fictitious) medical publications such as The Trimble-Manard Omnibus of Insidious Arctic Maladies; The Journals of Sarah Goodman, Disease Psychologist; and Doctor Buckhead Mudthumper's Encyclopedia of Forgotten Oriental Diseases. These false works are interspersed with references to real texts, giving The Guide a surprisingly authentic feel. Illustrations accompany the entries, and these—along with the superlative design of the book throughout by British artist John Coulthart—help to advance the tone of the writing and make the whole of The Guide a sumptuous treat for the eyes.

Alphabetically arranged from "Ballistic Organ Syndrome" to "Zshokke's Chancres," a long catalog of diseases might risk overwhelming the reader with its premise, but just at the right time The Guide changes. The disease entries are followed by a selection called "Reminiscences," in which a sampling of The Guide's doctor-authors recount their experiences with the amazing Dr. Lambshead, a sort of medical Indiana Jones who's only now slowing down at age 102. These reminiscences are as unique and pleasing as the disease entries, hewing to the traditional construction of fiction a little more faithfully and thus offering the reader the pleasures of story. Following that is a third section called "Autopsy," presenting choice entries from some of The Guide's previous (and of course non-existent) eighty-two editions. This section is also replete with illustrations, including fabulous diagnostic sketches of "various head diseases" by one Dr. Rikki Ducornet, and covers to Borges-edited versions of a "Metaphysical Disease" Guide.

The originality of this book and the sincerity of its presentation helps to give The Guide a feeling of importance and even utility—after all, despite being a beautifully produced hardcover it's a "pocket" guide, so readers can take it with them just in case they stumble upon an outbreak of "Fungal Disenchantment" or "Female Hyper-Orgasmic Epilepsy" (which, by the way, is fatal). And in case one doesn't believe the real usefulness of this fiction, look at Dr. Neil Gaiman's hilarious "Diseasemaker's Croup"—listed, quite correctly, as infectious—a disease in which people who begin to think about fictitious diseases then begin to feel the need to create them. (I myself am now suffering from Compulsive Book Review Myopia.) Risky though it is, this book is a delightful carrier of such sicknesses.

Driven by its own ironic sense of self worth, The Guide creates its own value. By combining the self-righteous pretense of medical knowledge and the pleasures of investigating the arcane, the book satirizes our cultural blind faith in the scientific and the reasonable. Simultaneously, The Guide mocks its literary pretensions by nonchalantly exploring its own troubled history; this, the 83rd edition, makes its own tradition by including samples from the previous editions and a publishing history. On several occasions The Guide was self-published by Dr. Lambshead; although it also spent thirty years being published under the auspices of the "Jolly Boy Publishing and Soap Company of Bombay" with covers "influenced by the rise of Bollywood." The book has, according to its own legend, taken on many forms before its current incarnation at Night Shade Books, establishing the real world publisher as part of the text's mimicry.

The Guide exemplifies a successful use of wit and parody, much like the best writing of The Onion. Editors Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts, in fostering the independent collaboration between fifty-four talented artists, have created a unique text—one capable of holding so much in its pages that there is easily room for the paradox of "independent collaboration," as well as all the seeming contradictions traditional fiction tries to smooth over. In the words of Dr. Lambshead himself, "it appears to apply logic to otherwise illogical situations."

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2003/2004 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003/2004