Michael Alec Rose

FictionInspirational Fiction

A mysterious curse in a Blue Ridge holler

Review by Michael Alec Rose

The line between mainstream and Christian fiction gets thinner and thinner. That’s because the quality of writing by identifiably Christian authors gets better and better. There has always been a strong thread of Christian theology running through mainstream fiction, from Flannery O’Connor to Marilynne Robinson. The ironic key to this successful wedding of religion and high art has always been the subtlety of the moral of the story, which must be subordinate to the storyteller’s art. The same principle elevates the novels of Virginia author Billy Coffey (The Devil Walks in Mattingly). 

In the first line of the book, Coffey’s hillbilly narrator invites his accidental guest (that would be us, the readers) to “come on out of that sun” and set a spell. The spell is immediate. We are altogether bewitched by the teller, by his lyrical telling and by the tale itself, whose darkness is infernal. How is it that Coffey convinces us that the tiny population of Crow Holler, Virginia—nestled in the remote depths of the Blue Ridge—possesses so much significance, not only as a microcosm of humans as a whole, but as a prime example of the essential flaws and virtues of human nature? The tides of events and emotions running through the book pull us right under as Coffey tells the story of a small town where young girls begin suffering from mysterious symptoms. 

The fate of the daughters of Crow Hollow—cursed by the witch Alvaretta one night, up at her bad place on the mountain—becomes our own fate. What happens to Sheriff Bucky, or to that preacher’s boy John David, or to the witch herself, becomes a moral obsession to us over the course of reading The Curse of Crow Hollow. Everything is at stake in this battle between good and evil—including the identity of the narrator, revealed at last. To Christians and non-Christians alike, this roaring tale will leave a powerful mark.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The line between mainstream and Christian fiction gets thinner and thinner. That’s because the quality of writing by identifiably Christian authors gets better and better. There has always been a strong thread of Christian theology running through mainstream fiction, from Flannery O’Connor to Marilynne Robinson. The ironic key to this successful wedding of religion and high art has always been the subtlety of the moral of the story, which must be subordinate to the storyteller’s art. The same principle elevates the novels of Virginia author Billy Coffey (The Devil Walks in Mattingly).
FictionLiterary Fiction

A bond beyond the waking hours

Review by Michael Alec Rose

When an author begins a novel with “And then there was the day”—as Kent Haruf begins Our Souls at Night, a brief, final testament completed shortly before his death last November—you know he knows we know what he’s talking about. This is Holt, Colorado. 

Over three decades, Haruf has given us six novels counting up all of Holt’s days, beginning with The Tie That Binds in 1984. That title is a principle that covers a lot of ground, straight through to this last one, which brings us to the day “when Addie Moore made a call on Louis Waters.” Addie and Louis are old neighbors, both widowed, children grown and gone, both lonely but used to it. Addie asks Louis if he’d like to sleep with her. Just sleep, that’s all, to keep her company, and maybe talk about things, too. Louis agrees. It becomes an amazing tie, full of unexpected grace, a chance to go back with each other over their ordinary and extraordinary lives. Their pact binds others to them as well—an ancient neighbor, the troubled grandson of a broken home and a sweet dog from the county pound. 

Townsfolk and family members don’t much like the idea of Addie and Louis sleeping together. This happiness, arrived so late, is a scandal to those others. Haruf is our finest observer of the conflict between duty and love, making goodness almost impossible. It’s the little space inside the “almost” that counts the most, though. We are blessed to have such an excellent final book from this great writer. 

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When an author begins a novel with “And then there was the day”—as Kent Haruf begins Our Souls at Night, a brief, final testament completed shortly before his death last November—you know he knows we know what he’s talking about. This is Holt, Colorado.
FictionShort Stories

Explorations of the unfamiliar

Review by Michael Alec Rose

Steven Millhauser is our patron saint of elsewhere. He is the bard of an Arcadia we long for (but also dread), a sorcerer who can materialize phantoms in our backyards, where they’ve been standing all along, just there, behind the bushes.

Three of the glories in Voices in the Night—Millhauser’s set of magic spells, masquerading as a collection of 16 new short stories—go by the names “Elsewhere,” “Arcadia ” and “Phantoms.” They belong to a fugal set of variations on a theme running through about half the tales, a pattern as variously realized as it is stringently upheld. In this handful of accounts, the storytelling takes the shape of objective reportage. The narrator presents a chronicle of unusual occurrences—or traumatic psychological conditions—going on in a familiar place, a town just like ours, a vicinity we recognize, someplace we gravitate to, as home.

In “Elsewhere,” there are random and terrifying outbreaks of reality’s collapse. The phenomenon starts small—in the dark corners of rooms—but soon evolves into a shift of consciousness, a general unease shared by the entire neighborhood, rising at last into a moment of such transcendent wonder that it ought, by rights, to be apocalyptic. But Millhauser’s genius (it’s not too strong a word) is a determination to keep us firmly in the poetic region that refuses resolution of any kind, especially of the religious kind (which makes a potent cameo in the title story).

“Phantoms” is the best thing the author has ever written. Its journalistic record of ghostly sightings—together with proposed “Explanations” and “Analyses”—never rises above the emotional level of a mezzo piano. It is on account of this restraint that the tale’s impact reaches its heights of spookiness and heartbreak. Who are these phantoms? Why do they withdraw from us, even at the moment of their visitation? There can be no answers.

The remaining stories in the book also work as a set of variations. In each case, Millhauser transforms himself into a sublime “parrot” of a given literary voice—fairy tale, Indian myth, baseball radio announcer, American tall tale, etc. The well-trodden scenario and conventional language of each story become the ironic foundations for its stunning strangeness.

Look to your heart when reading Millhauser! Just like the baseball hit by McCluskey in “Home Run,” you can kiss that baby goodbye.

Steven Millhauser is our patron saint of elsewhere. He is the bard of an Arcadia we long for (but also dread), a sorcerer who can materialize phantoms in our backyards, where they’ve been standing all along, just there, behind the bushes.
Mystery & SuspenseFictionMystery

A murder mystery with a walking corpse

Review by Michael Alec Rose

In this, the 11th of Christopher Fowler’s superb Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries, it’s clearer than ever that the real hero of the series is London herself. If you’ve never visited the city, you could ask for no better education—or pressing invitation—than the one you’ll receive by reading the entire series. Fowler not only tells delightfully lurid tales of both famous and well-hidden landmarks, but also provides clear warnings about neighborhoods you should avoid (after all, these are murder mysteries).

Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart finds detectives Arthur Bryant and John May tackling the bizarre case of a reanimated corpse seen rising out of its grave in a forgotten corner of a Bloomsbury public garden. Both high-school punks and high financiers are implicated, along with morticians, necromancers and medical-school dropouts.

Apart from the elusive murderer(s?), the villain of the piece is the bureaucratic nightmare of the London Constabulary, personified by a barely-human being with the implausible name of Orion Banks, who . . . but no, I shall not give that away.

Bryant embodies all the peculiarity of Fowler’s narrative gifts. There is great goodness and camaraderie at the heart of the story. It’s so much bleeding fun.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In this, the 11th of Christopher Fowler’s superb Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries, it’s clearer than ever that the real hero of the series is London herself. If you’ve never visited the city, you could ask for no better education—or pressing invitation—than the one you’ll receive by reading the entire series. Fowler not only tells delightfully lurid tales of both famous and well-hidden landmarks, but also provides clear warnings about neighborhoods you should avoid (after all, these are murder mysteries).
FictionHorrorHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

A haunting Gothic debut

Review by Michael Alec Rose

Warning to the reader: It is impossible for this review to proceed without a number of spoilers. In case anyone still holds the charming belief (as I do) that the mechanics of plot have a bearing on our enjoyment of a novel, the reviewer feels obliged to perform his task up front. I shall do it The Quick (pardon the pun) way: If you are a fan of literary Gothic—think Susanna Clarke or John Harwood—buy this book. You won’t regret it.

Now to details. Debut author Lauren Owen possesses the delightful knack of devising the bleakest possible permutations of the vampire myth. It is as if she made a checklist of the most abysmal variations on Bram Stoker’s blood-pounding themes in Dracula. Owen is explicit about the connection. The Quick is set in the same decade as Stoker’s masterpiece, and in a number of the same places, right down to the London-Yorkshire axis. There’s even a reprise of the sweet-cowboy-turned-vampire-hunter (duly embittered, thank goodness).

These connections with Dracula only enhance the originality of Owen’s much darker vision. On every score, this brilliant young novelist (now pursuing her Ph.D. in English Literature at Durham University) trumps Stoker in nightmarish excess. As a late-Victorian author, Stoker could barely touch upon the grisly anatomical facts and sexual overtones of vampirism. Owen wallows in all these unsavories. What is most disturbing about the novel—and thus most satisfying for dedicated fans of horror—is the fragility, astonishing painfulness and absolute contingency of every human and creaturely emotion.

Yes, that’s right: The creatures have feelings, too. The ordeals of the quick (“human”) can have all the more purchase on the reader’s imagination in contradistinction to the acute sufferings of the undead (or “undid”).

A long gallery of beautifully drawn characters makes the many pages of The Quick turn as swiftly as those of a Wilkie Collins novel (Collins is Owen’s obvious and acknowledged stylistic model). The loving ties that bind the quick and the undead—like the heroic Charlotte and her brother, James—are all clotted in blood. The final image of the novel promises a sequel. Let it come quick.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read an interview with Owen for this book.

Warning to the reader: It is impossible for this review to proceed without a number of spoilers. In case anyone still holds the charming belief (as I do) that the mechanics of plot have a bearing on our enjoyment of a novel, the reviewer feels obliged to perform his task up front. I shall do it The Quick (pardon the pun) way: If you are a fan of literary Gothic—think Susanna Clarke or John Harwood—buy this book. You won’t regret it.
Science Fiction & FantasyFiction

Witches gather, a stunning story unfolds

Review by Michael Alec Rose

Our author can’t seem to make up her mind on a fairly important issue: Is she “Mary Rickert” or just plain “M. Rickert”? Under the abbreviated M., she has published a set of haunting short stories considered to be among the very best of fantasy. With The Memory Garden, her first novel, she makes her bid to enter the literary mainstream, enlarging her name and her imaginative landscape in one grand stroke. Best of all, in a brilliant alchemical turn, Rickert transforms the lead-weight problem of indecisive identities into storytelling gold in this bewitching marvel of a book.

“Bewitching.” Yes, there be witches here. Indeed, the opening line of Macbeth might well serve as an epigraph for this novel: “When shall we three meet again?” Here, the three crones are Nan, Mavis and Ruthie, brought together for the first time in 60 years, split apart all those decades ago by a deadly tragedy for which they feel (for which they were) responsible, a horror that has determined the course of their lives.

And there be ghosts aplenty, wandering Nan’s back garden, together with much herbal lore and a child left on a doorstep as in a fairy tale, born with a magic-bestowing caul over her face. Shakespeare applies once more: To be a witch, or not to be? That is the question. Bay (a powerful herb) is the name of that child abandoned on the doorstep. She becomes a young woman racked by doubts and fears about her own identity. Like all adolescent girls, Bay just wants to be “normal.” But as Nan’s charge—and on account of that uncanny veil over her newborn face—that can never be. Bay can see the ghosts in the backyard without even knowing that they’re ghosts, so natural is her supernatural gift. She must confront the burden of her elders’ knowledge, at long last conjured into wisdom.

Bay has to decide who she really is. A witch? Or not a witch? No matter. Not when you have discovered your true place in the world. In this poignant motion of the spirit, Rickert stays alongside her own fictional creation every faltering and courageous step of the way.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Our author can’t seem to make up her mind on a fairly important issue: Is she “Mary Rickert” or just plain “M. Rickert”? Under the abbreviated M., she has published a set of haunting short stories considered to be among the very best of fantasy. With The Memory Garden, her first novel, she makes her bid to enter the literary mainstream, enlarging her name and her imaginative landscape in one grand stroke.

NonfictionHistory

Tracing the rich written record of Jewish experience

Review by Michael Alec Rose

No burning bushes need apply, nor any partings of the sea, and definitely not any tablets of the Law given to Moses at Mount Sinai, written (as the Torah reports) by the finger of God Himself. For historian Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews belongs only and literally—splendidly and literately—to what can be found written down in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic or any other of the languages spoken and written by Jews over millennia of wandering. This record of Jewish writing (overlapping with the Bible itself, of course) is so significant, so astonishing in its testimony of the daily lives of Jews for 3,000 years, it would be perverse, Schama implies, to confound the powerful narrative of Holy Scripture with the ample and still-growing documentary evidence we have about the real lives of real Jews from very early on.

Whether it’s papyrus or potsherd or parchment (the trinity forming the title of Schama’s magnificent volume, the first of a planned two-volume set), stone inscription or scroll or codex, archaeologists have worked together with historians to piece together an account of early Jewish history that neither refutes nor essentially undermines the Bible, but rather illuminates and complicates that unmanageable pile of sacred books. Schama’s unique achievement as our best public intellectual—a presenter in the great company of Kenneth Clark and Jacob Bronowski, and who (walking sandal-shod in their footsteps) can be seen on PBS this spring, doing the film version of this book—springs largely from his flawless intuition about which stories to relate, those telling anecdotes that open up entire worlds of historic relations. For instance:

The presence of Jewish mercenaries in the 5th century BCE, living not in denial, but in the Nile (on an Egyptian island), just a century after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, defies (but does not deny) Biblical history, most of all in the striking evidence it gives of a pattern of symbiotic coexistence between Jews and non-Jews that endures for many centuries, until (alas) a new pattern of persecutions by Christians begins in the Middle Ages.

Up to the horrific expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, each of Schama’s accounts becomes more vivid, and gorgeously illustrated, than the last, as the material evidence grows thicker with the passage of time. Jews may not have invented writing, but we certainly invented the idea of writing as a very heaven upon earth, against severe odds. You will find a great and habitable corner of that paradise in Schama’s book.

No burning bushes need apply, nor any partings of the sea, and definitely not any tablets of the Law given to Moses at Mount Sinai, written (as the Torah reports) by the finger of God Himself. For historian Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews belongs only and literally—splendidly and literately—to what can be found written down in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic or any other of the languages spoken and written by Jews over millennia of wandering.
Fiction

A strange and beautiful tale of its own design

Review by Michael Alec Rose

“Fantasy” would be too weak a word to describe Kathryn Davis’s transgressions against realistic storytelling in her seventh novel, Duplex. “Horror” would miss the point of her sustained assaults against any semblance of normal or peaceable life. Neither would “surrealism” do the trick, for her page-by-page devastations of the reader’s expectations are the stuff of nightmare, not art. “Fairy tale” perhaps comes nearest to the case, but any analysis offered up in an attempt to categorize Davis’s prose must (alack for the reviewer!) weakly fail to account for the supreme disorientation this novel generates in the reader’s imagination.

Meanwhile, not one weak word exists in this author’s arsenal. Every word of Duplex, every doomed character, every fractured timeline, drops in the ear, on the mind, in the troubled heart, like a Rain of Beads—those horrific beads of blood that rain from the sky when an entire generation of girls on a neighborhood street (laid out like a “Twilight Zone”set) are lifted up and then ravished to death by robots at a cotillion in the sky. The unspeakable facts of the matter (robots infiltrating and monitoring hapless humanity, stealing their lives quite literally from them) are not anywhere near as disturbing as the void of meaninglessness underlying the facts, the implacable, duplicitous logic of Davis’ Duplex universe that eludes her own understanding.

Did I say “eludes her own understanding”? You bet I did. There is never any question of our understanding what the bloody hell is going on in the novel; but it is far worse (better!) for any reader attuned to Davis’ diabolical music to realize that the author herself has relinquished ultimate control over the liturgy of unholy rituals hypnotically recited throughout the novel, the discordant fugue of The Rain of Beads, The Descent of the Aquanauts, The Great Division, and so on. This most awe-inspiring aspect of the writer’s achievement—her own cloud of unknowing—rubs very close to the bone of her primary literary inspiration, the fairy tale, the one genre Davis herself has invoked time and again as the source of her daemonic delights. In the end, Davis’ technique is entirely traditional, a well-turned page out of Hans Christian Andersen’s book: You enchant your reader, you lift them up . . . and then you killingly knock their socks off.

“Fantasy” would be too weak a word to describe Kathryn Davis’s transgressions against realistic storytelling in her seventh novel, Duplex. “Horror” would miss the point of her sustained assaults against any semblance of normal or peaceable life. Neither would “surrealism” do the trick, for her page-by-page devastations of the reader’s expectations are the stuff of […]
FictionFantasyDebut Fiction

A supernatural love story

Review by Michael Alec Rose

Turn off the cell phone, shut down the computer and settle down in your comfiest chair. You’re in for the most exciting fantasy debut since Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell a decade ago. Helene Wecker must be a born writer; there is no other way to account for the quality of her prose, as phenomenal as any of the supernatural wonders she delivers in the glorious The Golem and the Jinni.

Through turnings of fate typical of the history of our immigrant nation, two uncanny beings from overseas wind up in New York City at the turn of the 20th century. One is a creature from Jewish folklore made out of clay—no, not a dreidel, but a golem, a monster animated by mystical secrets of rabbinic lore. The other is a jinni, belonging to that volatile race of spirits who ride the winds of the Arabian desert, until he was captured by human wizardry and confined to a copper flask for a thousand years.

The ensuing narrative is so intricately wrought that it resists the reviewer’s effort to bind it in anything like a copper flask . . . but I’ll try. An insane rabbi-sorcerer bestows upon his female golem Chava the demure and quick-witted nature of a Jane Austen heroine, and she comes to works in a kosher bakery on the Lower East Side. Meanwhile, the jinni Ahmad possesses all the wickedness and charm of a supercharged Don Juan whose irresistible power over human girls becomes fraught with terrible consequences.

At the heart of the novel burns the two creatures’ evolving friendship with each other, and the risks they take in order to grope towards an understanding and transcendence of their own dangerous natures. When released from human control, both the golem and the jinni tend inevitably towards the pitiless destruction of humanity. But the fateful encounter of Chava and Ahmad changes all that. Is it conceivable that two such beings could ever come to love each other?

Wecker’s imaginative coup of wedding Jewish to Arab mythology—and transporting all of it to lower Manhattan—is so brilliant that it ought to be considered at the next round of Middle East peace talks. The Golem and the Jinni is a surpassingly wonderful tale for our time.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE
Read our interview with Helene Wecker for The Golem and the Jinni.

Turn off the cell phone, shut down the computer and settle down in your comfiest chair. You’re in for the most exciting fantasy debut since Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell a decade ago. Helene Wecker must be a born writer; there is no other way to account for the quality of her prose, […]
FictionShort Stories

The strange horrors in Karen Russell’s world

Review by Michael Alec Rose

In Karen Russell’s universe, by the time a story sets itself in motion the worst has already happened. You may be a bloodless vampire who has lost the taste for anything but the tang of lemons. Or you could be a young woman sold into slavery so complete that it literally dehumanizes you. Or perhaps you are the president of the United States who awakens to find himself metamorphosed (among other former presidents) into a farmyard horse. In any case, things certainly seem like they could not get worse, for your very self has been ripped away, leaving you with nothing left to lose.

These ordeals—three among the eight lying in wait for you within Vampires in the Lemon Grove—happen to “you” because Russell’s language is so vivid and sensuous that they become breathtakingly real experiences. This is horror fiction at its playful and unflinching worst . . . and therefore best. No wonder Stephen King expressed his delighted recognition of a worthy young colleague when Russell’s first novel, Swamplandia!, came out last year.

Just because the worst already appears to be a matter of record, events in each story tend to get suddenly much, much worse, making the former “worst” look stupid by contrast. That’s what happens in the collection’s finest tale, “Proving Up,” which won this year’s National Magazine Award for Fiction. The denouement of this startling fable of pioneer hardship belongs spiritually to Willa Cather’s darkest nightmares, chilling to the last horrific sentence.

The strange predicate offered in the first sentence of this review—the notion that a story “sets itself in motion”—is as precise as I can make it. Russell’s short tales—like the acclaimed Swamplandia!—have the feel of autonomous creatures: The author gives a wicked little push and they’re off and chomping. If the worst has already happened; if, Job-like, you’ve got nothing left to lose, then the whirlwind best is yet to be—as in the last, haunting story of the book, “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis,” where you are a boy who has been dreadfully cruel to another boy and now the time has come for your comeuppance. You can hardly wait.

In Karen Russell’s universe, by the time a story sets itself in motion the worst has already happened. You may be a bloodless vampire who has lost the taste for anything but the tang of lemons. Or you could be a young woman sold into slavery so complete that it literally dehumanizes you. Or perhaps […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

The power in the cards

Review by Michael Alec Rose

The “Octavo” is a set of eight cards that, when dealt by an expert, provides all the clues the subject will need in order to chart a successful path through life. One such expert is the visionary Mrs. Sparrow, who runs the Octavo for her well-heeled friends (including King Gustav himself) in the upper room of her famous Stockholm tavern. One fateful night, the subject of the Octavo is neither aristocratic nor regal, but the book’s dashing, scrupulous narrator, Emil Larsson. A customs official for Stockholm’s great port, Emil is doing his best to climb the complex and intrigue-ridden social ladder of 18th-century Swedish society. Mrs. Sparrow has had an urgent vision: She must lay out Emil’s Octavo immediately. The future of the nation itself is hiding somewhere in his cards.

Even the most stalwart fans of the genre would admit that historical fiction often relies on stereotyped characters. In The Stockholm Octavo, debut author Karen Engelmann turns a nifty card trick, transforming this convention into her novel’s supreme virtue. The Octavo encompasses every conceivable type, each one fixed in place within the mystical pattern: The central Seeker, the obscure Companion, the crafty Teacher, the suppliant Prisoner, the all-important Key, etc. Right at the start, through the medium of Mrs. Sparrow’s dealings, Engelmann literally lays her fictional cards on the table. The fascination of the cards’ unfolding gives way to even greater narrative magic, when Emil must wield all his intelligence and resources to identify the actual persons who embody the eight figures of his Octavo.

With flawless instinct, Engelmann conflates mystery and romance, as circumstances conspire to withhold from Emil the cards’ real-life counterparts. Most elusive of all—and most page-turning for the reader—is the identity of the woman he is meant to love and to wed. Misstep follows upon misdirection; it is not even clear which Octavo position his beloved will assume. The only certainty is that if Emil does not act quickly, the treasonous element in King Gustav’s court will have its dark way, sending Sweden, like France, into its own revolutionary nightmare. Is this historical, or is it fiction? The answer—the ace up Karen Engelmann’s sleeve—is yes.

RELATED CONTENT
Read a Q&A with Karen Engelmann about The Stockholm Octavo.

The “Octavo” is a set of eight cards that, when dealt by an expert, provides all the clues the subject will need in order to chart a successful path through life. One such expert is the visionary Mrs. Sparrow, who runs the Octavo for her well-heeled friends (including King Gustav himself) in the upper room […]
FictionDebut Fiction

A ferocious new voice in fiction

Review by Michael Alec Rose

“Sometimes anger is the pure and determined light that shows you the way forward.” With these introductory words, author G. Willow Wilson sends her ferocious and joyful debut novel into the world—more accurately, her debut text-based novel, for Alif the Unseen comes on the winged heels of her award-winning graphic work. As with every comic-book artist turned author, the critical question is this: Can her talent for vivid characterization translate from image into text?

The answer, in Wilson’s case, is a resounding “yes.” The main reason for her success is her anger. It’s a courageous matter for a Muslim woman to express rage to a Western readership that has come so readily to equate Muslim rage with the horrors of 9/11. But a decade after that catastrophe, the fragile Arab Spring has given a new face to Muslim anger: not a murderous hatred, but a fine outrage against tyranny; a gutsy and spontaneous resistance against various regimes who have falsely equated freedom with apostasy.

Computer technology, and the social networking it has engendered, has been the most powerful tool for this painful process of liberation. It is inevitable, then, for the hero of Alif the Unseen to be a computer hacker, that most “unseen” of antiheroes. Alif only wanted to use his geeky skills to be with Intisar, his unattainable beloved. Instead, he finds himself at the head of a vast political storm—at first inadvertently, but then with whole heart. He is a modern-day Aladdin who rubs not a magic lamp, but a mouse pad, thus loosing chaos into his unnamed Arabian city, including genie (properly spelled “jinn”), demons and “The Hand,” who seeks to control the fate of his people.

At the center of the tale stands the figure of Dina, the “unbeautiful” maiden who hides her light under a bushel of Muslim veils. Dina points Alif to the redemption of his world through love—the unseen first principle of every great faith tradition.

Whatever the critical response may be to Wilson’s unique and unruly literary gifts, there is no question that Alif the Unseen is one of those rare events in the history of publishing, when an ancient pattern of storytelling (The Arabian Nights) is grafted onto an up-to-the-minute world crisis. This synthesis has great spiritual authority, thanks to the vision of G. Willow Wilson.

“Sometimes anger is the pure and determined light that shows you the way forward.” With these introductory words, author G. Willow Wilson sends her ferocious and joyful debut novel into the world—more accurately, her debut text-based novel, for Alif the Unseen comes on the winged heels of her award-winning graphic work. As with every comic-book […]
FictionClassics

A rediscovered classic, with a literary touch

Review by Michael Alec Rose

Do you enjoy screwball comedy movies from the 1930s?  Then you’ll love this novel, a lark in almost a literal sense, flying high above the English countryside, taking in the whole parade of human folly with chirping delight and impartial wisdom.  So sure-footed a writer was Eric Linklater in his day, that when editor Allen Lane launched Penguin Books in 1935—inventing the cheap quality paperback and revolutionizing the literary trade—Poet’s Pub was among the first books he commissioned. 

At the Bacchanalian core of the novel is its good-natured satire on bookselling, book collecting, book reviewing (mea culpa!), and book writing, especially the silliness of the bad poet. In this case, he bears the improbable name of Saturday Keith, that species of mediocre, self-deluding Orpheus who used to go by the name “poetaster.” With flawless chaos, Linklater’s villains mix up the manuscript of Keith’s latest epic poem with a memorandum containing a secret method for extracting fossil fuel. The absolute equivalence of the two documents epitomizes the subtle hilarity of Poet’s Pub.

As with his great contemporaries Wodehouse and Waugh, the humor of Linklater springs uncannily from the catastrophic shadow of the Great War.  If you or your dad weren’t blown to bits in the trenches, then you might as well write poems, fall in love and learn to laugh at yourself. If you can’t sell copies of your poems, then you may as well run a pub.  If you don’t buy this wonderful novel, you’ll never know what joys you’re missing.

Do you enjoy screwball comedy movies from the 1930s?  Then you’ll love this novel, a lark in almost a literal sense, flying high above the English countryside, taking in the whole parade of human folly with chirping delight and impartial wisdom.  So sure-footed a writer was Eric Linklater in his day, that when editor Allen […]

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