City of Saints and Madmen: (Ambergris)

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One of the things I like most about fiction is the concept of world building. To create an alternate reality so captivating & fully realized that it not only feels like a real place, but a place almost preferable to reality. It's why I've been drawn to fantasy & sci-fi writing, it's why I'm such a huge D&D nerd & it's certainly a part of why I love video games. Worlds like Ed Greenwood's Faerûn, Terry Pratchet's Discworld, William Gibson's Sprawl & video games like the Suikoden series are places where my mind has often wandered & wondered what it would be like to actually live within them. I'm sure I'm not alone here & this collection of short stories of VanderMeer's Ambergris only proves that. In VanderMeer’s eyes, desire influences and distorts our perception. It can result in an illusion or self-delusion. Sound strange? It isn't. Not really. Each tale is a low-grade fever dream couched heavily in the normal, the regular, the banal. Things only get odd at a slow rate, kinda like being boiled alive and not understanding this fact until it is far too late. Of course, that makes us lobsters. Not squid. My metaphor breaks down.

The title character of Dradin, In Love is typical of such, being an obsessive creep who fantasizes about a woman he's never spoken to. Dradin is an ass of a character, but this isn’t the worst crime--many such asses in fiction offer amusing, insightful depictions, even as we roll our eyes at their foolishness or cringe at their cruelty. We laugh and even sympathize with figures like Flashman or Steerpike. Dradin’s true sin is that he’s both unpleasant and dull--I don’t mean merely unassuming, like Chekhov or Kafka’s quotidian characters, but flat. Excellent, excellent,” Dradin said, and, after a tic of hesitation—for he was much closer to penniless than penniful—he added, “but I shall need two,” and as the clerk’s eyebrows rose like the startled silhouettes of twin sea gulls upon finding that a fish within their grasp is actually a shark, he stuttered, “A-a-and a map. A map of the city. For the festival.” They are experts at the art of cataloguing passion, with this grave distinction: that when I say to you, sir, ‘passion,’ I mean the word in its most general sense, a sense that does not allow for intimacies of the kind that might strike the lady you wish to know better as too vulgar. It merely speaks to the general—the incorporeal, as one more highly witted than I might say. It shall not offend; rather, it shall lend to the gift-giver an aura of mystery that may prove permanently alluring.”Clearly, there are different styles, subject matter and perspectives. However, what is important is the accretion of detail. We readers can synthesise it into an understanding of his world. These tendencies occur within relatively normal behavior, but they can also constitute either neurotic or psychotic behavior.

Weeks ago (this reviewer discovered), strange rumors abounded through the Ambergrisan literati that an unusual new figure arrived on the literary scene in a most unusual way. Vandermeer, a patient at the Voss Bender Memorial Mental Institute, has been entertaining a team of psychiatrists and staff of the institution. For those of you who are familiar with the general modern fantasy (often SF) field, the closest writers to this wonderful novel would happen to be Christopher Priest's Dream Archipelago sequence. Alan Moore's Jerusalem is also wonderfully close to it. But I won't fail to add, to a lesser degree, China Mieville. :)It's not that I don't see it--the book certainly has the right markers: the self-awareness, the meta-fictions, the ironies and self-contradictions, the allusions and in-jokes, the big, rearing ugliness of modern literature. And yet to say that it has those markers doesn't mean much--it's like saying that a math book has equations, it doesn't mean that they add up to anything. The New Weird genre as we see it in Vandermeer, started off with the works of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. Lake ’s tones are, as Venturi has noted, ‘resonant rather than bright, and the light contained in them is not so much a physical as a psychological illumination.’" Such lunacy is, of course, tragic and sad in a personage of such raw literary talent, but it is an ancient axiom that genius and madness are the most loving of bedmates. They all start off pretty bland and unexciting, and then suddenly, the atmosphere totally changes - especially the Dradin and the Lake stories so far. Suddenly they become surreal and in the case of the abovementioned story, it's a breathless, totally out there mixture of horror and weirdness.

Yet this is a book that people say is challenging, is intellectual and mysterious, something you have to put together yourself, piece by piece. My idea of a challenging book is one that trusts the reader to come to their own conclusions, to figure out the themes for themselves, and to find humor where it lies, not one that leads them along by the hand. Sure, sometimes his instructions are contradictory--we're told at first that something is important, and later that it's not trustworthy--but the real problem is that we're being told outright at all, that even irony and contradiction are not allowed to play out, but must be explained and noted. For me, a simple juxtaposition is not enough. You don’t sit two or more characters together, unless you expect some chemical reaction to occur and your expectation is satisfied.In a sense, what is important here is not so much a hero and their journey, but the comprehension of a world, and perhaps the manner in which and extent to which it consists of saints and madmen.