the as-yet/probably-always unpublished fantasy novel i wrote is very nearly a Terrible Thing We Did That Summer book, and i think i can say with some authority that it's a hard thing to pull off
I immediately read (and loved) The Course of the Heart after you mentioned it. Some of the descriptions of the rituals reminded me of another all-time favorite: A Dark Song. Both the weird little details like old postcards, artificial flowers, and stuff in jars and "places of power" (what was the deal with the quarry!?)
I got the sense, too, that the characters' struggle was as much about trying to understand what happened as it was about trying to get back to what happened (either the "place" or the feeling).
I really enjoyed The Sunken Land too. I found it genuinely unsettling! I had to take a break after the section where Victoria moved into her mother's house.
it's kind of amazing to me that at least three people that I know of read The Course of the Heart bc of that Carpenter post because… looking at the post I didn't even put its name in there!
I also love A Dark Song but hadn't thought of it… I'll have to think about this when I read it again.
The stuff with the mom's house felt genuinely emotionally heavy! Part of what makes the whole odd structure work I think (instead of just being annoying) is that the things going on in the foreground are all real problems. Having a mom with dementia, having to sort through the accumulated stuff of a parent you weren't too close to, etc. It's just that, you know.… there's something in the water.…
The situation you're talking about used to be a common one for me when I would read comic books as a little kid. In the '70s, Marvel comics all had multi-issue storylines, so if you picked up a copy of a comic about a favorite Marvel character, it was more likely than not it would be referring to events that happened in the past. They actually had little footnotes that told you which previous issue the events had happened in, but there were no comic book stores yet, so there was no way to read those issues.
I did end up finding the earlier issues of favorite story lines over the years, but they were often something of a let-down, since my ignorance was a stimulus to my imagination. These days I tend to read books about history, religion, and philosophy as if they belong to a massive novel that current events also belong to. The plot of the novel is the correct arrangement of all the facts that are contained in the non-fiction books, but the books themselves are written by unreliable narrators who may have made incorrect interpretations of the facts they cite. So my imagination of the events may be closer to what happened in the novel than the books I read.
I keep thinking that this experience may be interesting to others, and that there should be some way to write that communicates the experience, but I'm not sure what it would be.
you might like this M. John Harrison not-a-memoir if you haven't read it! I feel like it dovetails with this a bit and might give you some ideas. I have been reading it in small portions in the evening because that feels how it's designed to be read.
me [while reading Pat Barker's The Ghost Road without realizing it's the third book in a trilogy]: wow she is NOT explaining who any of these people are!
I’ve said this elsewhere, but TSH (as much as I love it) would have been better if it were more about Richard reacting to the outré WASPy stuff off campus. The stuff with Bunny’s funeral is leagues ahead of the parts everyone talks about imo.
I was unable to read TSH because the book portrayed life on a state-school campus and discussions of ancient Greek in ways that made no sense if you had been to a state-school or read ancient Greek. It was clear that Tartt had no real idea who her narrator would have been or what it was like to study classics, and wasn't really interested.
This was not a common reaction among the classicists in my grad school program at the time, as they were all raving about it.
Yeah I don’t think I have it in me to write a “I hate TSH” post but I think Tartt is a novelist who is interested exclusively in surfaces & so the students are all students who want to be “doing Greek” and “reading Plato” but their actual intellectual life is nonexistent. That’s fine but there’s no interesting tension there ultimately.
I do think it’s funny that the American version of Brideshead (yet another book I don’t like) skips over the part where those characters are barely students and is instead like: what if we studied so hard and cared so much that we did a murder…
i actually read this novel because i saw you mention it in the carpenter post and remembered "oh, that's one of my unread harrisons..."
i've been a harrison enthusiast for a long time, although talking about him with others has read me to realize that he has certain aesthetic and political limitations (but what writer doesn't?) this book, in particular, zeroes in on those limitations: the way he treats women has always been vaguely but unmistakably contemptuous, which i think he tries to reckon with in this book. pam stuyvesant is another in a long sequence of harrison's neurotic, prophetic, doomed english housewives, but the narrator's attachment to her, which he tries to conceal until the very end, must be a proxy for how harrison feels about his own female characters: sympathy mixed with repulsion mixed with self-hatred. i still have not made sense of what happens with yaxley and lawson's daughter in the middle of this novel, or the final scene with the goddess, but i feel surely that they must be related to this theme of his own blindness to femininity.
the technique you mention about writing sequels to books that don't exist figures more heavily in the viriconium and light books, which are sort of the classic IYKYK reference at this point for unfixed chronology and narrative in genre fiction. light is great but i've seen people say it was tough to start with, which i can definitely see: he throws you into the deep end of all his neuroses with that one. i can't really imagine what reading this one first was like though.
Yes I think you're right about the femininity stuff in Course of the Heart—it feels like a piece of the puzzle. The part with the daughter you mention is really disturbing but like so much of the book it just seems like a road to nowhere. What happened, why was it happening… just feels like the answer is… "who knows?" And yet I can't really rest there.
I didn't really have a problem with the main woman character in Sunken Land but I believe you on the larger body of work (which I will continue to read sloooowly).
i am definitely overstating the case a little, the misogyny has never reached unbearable levels for me (except in the very early books which are unbearable for mostly unrelated reasons) and it's not even necessarily separable from his New Worlds brand of miserabilism in general! but it's pretty tough to not read light as a book where he's going I Have A Problem With Women and trying to work through that. i haven't read sunken land so maybe he really has worked through it by now.
well while I think the leading lady is OK you might pick up on things with the side characters that I read as "quirkiness"… if you read it let me know!
oh also while i was poking around afterwards to try and see what others thought of the novel i found this interpretation (https://rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com/413552.html), which i don’t agree with entirely but which i find remarkably helpful in resolving certain questions (e.g. how exactly the narrator can write so confidently from pam and lucas’s perspective.)
I recently read one of those Terrible Things novels (The Paper Palace) and there were so many terrible things that I stopped caring. This is a great characterization, thanks!
This reminds me a bit of Ada Palmer's introduction to the recent rerelease of Book of the New Sun. It's not precisely the same thing, but it's about the genre-reading skill of being able to not-worry-about "weird" worldbuilding and unreliable narrators.
As someone perennially bad at dealing with unreliable narrators, my love of both BotNS and Terra Ignota is maybe a bit odd - but also, part of it, I think, is that it reminds me of what it was like to be a child reading books that assumed context that I lacked.
Feels like Borges belongs in this melange as well.
This is something that I've poked and prodded at in my own writing.
I was going to comment here about Book of the New Sun because I just finished it for the first time! Especially re: them being like a mystery novel, but not exactly, because you aren't going to puzzle out a "correct" answer, but they are quite rewarding to explore and think about that way.
Book of the New Sun is in my TBR (like so many things). Not sure which edition I have.…
Borges definitely achieves things like this but I think the form is also very different. Short stories are already compressed and mysterious a lot of the time.
I eagerly await your Book of the New Sun thoughts whenever you hit that point in the stack. It's not my favorite work, but I wonder some if our differing backgrounds might give you insights into it that I didn't have. (I listened to a podcast, "Shelved By Genre", that covered it maybe a decade after I first read it, and it was really interesting hearing the perspectives of some folk who were noticing things that I completely missed. Flip side is that there were one or two things that I thought were obvious which they never touched on!)
I'm afraid it's been long enough since I listened that I don't remember the specifics, just that once or twice I thought "Huh, I thought [thing] was obvious, and they never even mentioned it". Which isn't surprising about podcasts in general (they often elide a few things if they aren't relevant to the specific focus of the podcast) but was a bit odd in a podcast where episodes are regularly VERY long and VERY detailed.
beautiful reflections! thank you for reminding me about A COURSE OF THE HEART, a book that's been on my to-read list forever but somehow always sneaks past my attention.
And here's Harrison on his blog, basically like patting the Weird Studies' guys on the head, saying "aw, I'm flattered and how cute, but I don't really believe there's a God or another reality out there, I just use glittery words!" https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/the-core-of-the-heart/
I am not a big podcasts person (I basically use them to fall asleep) in general, but I listened to the Weird Studies episode a bit ago. I did find it really helpful just listening to other people puzzling the book out. But I haven't even heard of the other one… thank you!
“we’re essentially following some depressive early middle-aged people as they live out their hot and cold romance against what certainly looks like the takeover of England by a race of fish people” slapped me in the face like a wet fish(-person)
there's an aspect of Sunken Land that reminded me a bit of a novel premise I keep taking out and putting back again, which is sort of like, "what if you had a really boring dead end job you barely paid attention to at a place that was actually an occult conspiracy which you would have noticed if you ever paid attention to your job," but while in my head that's a halfway through the book twist in Sunken Land it's like… "no, that's the whole book" lol
the as-yet/probably-always unpublished fantasy novel i wrote is very nearly a Terrible Thing We Did That Summer book, and i think i can say with some authority that it's a hard thing to pull off
I immediately read (and loved) The Course of the Heart after you mentioned it. Some of the descriptions of the rituals reminded me of another all-time favorite: A Dark Song. Both the weird little details like old postcards, artificial flowers, and stuff in jars and "places of power" (what was the deal with the quarry!?)
I got the sense, too, that the characters' struggle was as much about trying to understand what happened as it was about trying to get back to what happened (either the "place" or the feeling).
I really enjoyed The Sunken Land too. I found it genuinely unsettling! I had to take a break after the section where Victoria moved into her mother's house.
it's kind of amazing to me that at least three people that I know of read The Course of the Heart bc of that Carpenter post because… looking at the post I didn't even put its name in there!
I also love A Dark Song but hadn't thought of it… I'll have to think about this when I read it again.
The stuff with the mom's house felt genuinely emotionally heavy! Part of what makes the whole odd structure work I think (instead of just being annoying) is that the things going on in the foreground are all real problems. Having a mom with dementia, having to sort through the accumulated stuff of a parent you weren't too close to, etc. It's just that, you know.… there's something in the water.…
Yeah and everybody in your mom's hometown is in the know (except half the story is your mom's social life, the other half is... fish people)
The situation you're talking about used to be a common one for me when I would read comic books as a little kid. In the '70s, Marvel comics all had multi-issue storylines, so if you picked up a copy of a comic about a favorite Marvel character, it was more likely than not it would be referring to events that happened in the past. They actually had little footnotes that told you which previous issue the events had happened in, but there were no comic book stores yet, so there was no way to read those issues.
I did end up finding the earlier issues of favorite story lines over the years, but they were often something of a let-down, since my ignorance was a stimulus to my imagination. These days I tend to read books about history, religion, and philosophy as if they belong to a massive novel that current events also belong to. The plot of the novel is the correct arrangement of all the facts that are contained in the non-fiction books, but the books themselves are written by unreliable narrators who may have made incorrect interpretations of the facts they cite. So my imagination of the events may be closer to what happened in the novel than the books I read.
I keep thinking that this experience may be interesting to others, and that there should be some way to write that communicates the experience, but I'm not sure what it would be.
you might like this M. John Harrison not-a-memoir if you haven't read it! I feel like it dovetails with this a bit and might give you some ideas. I have been reading it in small portions in the evening because that feels how it's designed to be read.
me [while reading Pat Barker's The Ghost Road without realizing it's the third book in a trilogy]: wow she is NOT explaining who any of these people are!
gotta keep up Ralph!!!!
I’ve said this elsewhere, but TSH (as much as I love it) would have been better if it were more about Richard reacting to the outré WASPy stuff off campus. The stuff with Bunny’s funeral is leagues ahead of the parts everyone talks about imo.
I love your love of TSH Colin…
reading it the first time: wow, I wish I was dressed like an Oxbridge student and studying the Classics in New England.
reading it the fifth time: wow, I wish I did coke with an aerobics-obsessed Californian in the parking lot of a rural Burger King.
I was unable to read TSH because the book portrayed life on a state-school campus and discussions of ancient Greek in ways that made no sense if you had been to a state-school or read ancient Greek. It was clear that Tartt had no real idea who her narrator would have been or what it was like to study classics, and wasn't really interested.
This was not a common reaction among the classicists in my grad school program at the time, as they were all raving about it.
Yeah I don’t think I have it in me to write a “I hate TSH” post but I think Tartt is a novelist who is interested exclusively in surfaces & so the students are all students who want to be “doing Greek” and “reading Plato” but their actual intellectual life is nonexistent. That’s fine but there’s no interesting tension there ultimately.
I do think it’s funny that the American version of Brideshead (yet another book I don’t like) skips over the part where those characters are barely students and is instead like: what if we studied so hard and cared so much that we did a murder…
i actually read this novel because i saw you mention it in the carpenter post and remembered "oh, that's one of my unread harrisons..."
i've been a harrison enthusiast for a long time, although talking about him with others has read me to realize that he has certain aesthetic and political limitations (but what writer doesn't?) this book, in particular, zeroes in on those limitations: the way he treats women has always been vaguely but unmistakably contemptuous, which i think he tries to reckon with in this book. pam stuyvesant is another in a long sequence of harrison's neurotic, prophetic, doomed english housewives, but the narrator's attachment to her, which he tries to conceal until the very end, must be a proxy for how harrison feels about his own female characters: sympathy mixed with repulsion mixed with self-hatred. i still have not made sense of what happens with yaxley and lawson's daughter in the middle of this novel, or the final scene with the goddess, but i feel surely that they must be related to this theme of his own blindness to femininity.
the technique you mention about writing sequels to books that don't exist figures more heavily in the viriconium and light books, which are sort of the classic IYKYK reference at this point for unfixed chronology and narrative in genre fiction. light is great but i've seen people say it was tough to start with, which i can definitely see: he throws you into the deep end of all his neuroses with that one. i can't really imagine what reading this one first was like though.
Yes I think you're right about the femininity stuff in Course of the Heart—it feels like a piece of the puzzle. The part with the daughter you mention is really disturbing but like so much of the book it just seems like a road to nowhere. What happened, why was it happening… just feels like the answer is… "who knows?" And yet I can't really rest there.
I didn't really have a problem with the main woman character in Sunken Land but I believe you on the larger body of work (which I will continue to read sloooowly).
i am definitely overstating the case a little, the misogyny has never reached unbearable levels for me (except in the very early books which are unbearable for mostly unrelated reasons) and it's not even necessarily separable from his New Worlds brand of miserabilism in general! but it's pretty tough to not read light as a book where he's going I Have A Problem With Women and trying to work through that. i haven't read sunken land so maybe he really has worked through it by now.
well while I think the leading lady is OK you might pick up on things with the side characters that I read as "quirkiness"… if you read it let me know!
oh also while i was poking around afterwards to try and see what others thought of the novel i found this interpretation (https://rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com/413552.html), which i don’t agree with entirely but which i find remarkably helpful in resolving certain questions (e.g. how exactly the narrator can write so confidently from pam and lucas’s perspective.)
Oh that is interesting but I feel like the prologue makes it not work. Hm.
I recently read one of those Terrible Things novels (The Paper Palace) and there were so many terrible things that I stopped caring. This is a great characterization, thanks!
why is it always the summer!
Or the summer house
This reminds me a bit of Ada Palmer's introduction to the recent rerelease of Book of the New Sun. It's not precisely the same thing, but it's about the genre-reading skill of being able to not-worry-about "weird" worldbuilding and unreliable narrators.
As someone perennially bad at dealing with unreliable narrators, my love of both BotNS and Terra Ignota is maybe a bit odd - but also, part of it, I think, is that it reminds me of what it was like to be a child reading books that assumed context that I lacked.
Feels like Borges belongs in this melange as well.
This is something that I've poked and prodded at in my own writing.
I was going to comment here about Book of the New Sun because I just finished it for the first time! Especially re: them being like a mystery novel, but not exactly, because you aren't going to puzzle out a "correct" answer, but they are quite rewarding to explore and think about that way.
Book of the New Sun is in my TBR (like so many things). Not sure which edition I have.…
Borges definitely achieves things like this but I think the form is also very different. Short stories are already compressed and mysterious a lot of the time.
I eagerly await your Book of the New Sun thoughts whenever you hit that point in the stack. It's not my favorite work, but I wonder some if our differing backgrounds might give you insights into it that I didn't have. (I listened to a podcast, "Shelved By Genre", that covered it maybe a decade after I first read it, and it was really interesting hearing the perspectives of some folk who were noticing things that I completely missed. Flip side is that there were one or two things that I thought were obvious which they never touched on!)
Ooh also curious what you think they miss out on because I'm listening to that as well now that I've finished.
I'm afraid it's been long enough since I listened that I don't remember the specifics, just that once or twice I thought "Huh, I thought [thing] was obvious, and they never even mentioned it". Which isn't surprising about podcasts in general (they often elide a few things if they aren't relevant to the specific focus of the podcast) but was a bit odd in a podcast where episodes are regularly VERY long and VERY detailed.
beautiful reflections! thank you for reminding me about A COURSE OF THE HEART, a book that's been on my to-read list forever but somehow always sneaks past my attention.
I don't know if you're a big podcast person, but there's a series of podcasts (and M. John Harrison's response to one of them) about A Course of the Heart as an example of the blurry line between art and magical invocation itself. Here's Duncan Barford's on art as a "near enemy" as magic, where he ultimately decides Harrison is an artist rather than a magician: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/occult-experiments/oeith-216-near-enemies-of-_exFiP9Wt8v/?srsltid=AfmBOopYKVpeqHl4Lkt8dYSzhQTVayDFpfi_RdcZOJaMss31wGcU9-nt
Here's the Weird Studies' podcast on the gnostic transcendent in A COURSE OF THE HEART: https://www.weirdstudies.com/81
And here's Harrison on his blog, basically like patting the Weird Studies' guys on the head, saying "aw, I'm flattered and how cute, but I don't really believe there's a God or another reality out there, I just use glittery words!" https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/the-core-of-the-heart/
I am not a big podcasts person (I basically use them to fall asleep) in general, but I listened to the Weird Studies episode a bit ago. I did find it really helpful just listening to other people puzzling the book out. But I haven't even heard of the other one… thank you!
“we’re essentially following some depressive early middle-aged people as they live out their hot and cold romance against what certainly looks like the takeover of England by a race of fish people” slapped me in the face like a wet fish(-person)
you should totally read the book… I feel like it would have had a cult SJC following during our day.
Yeah you kinda sold me on it with that line!
there's an aspect of Sunken Land that reminded me a bit of a novel premise I keep taking out and putting back again, which is sort of like, "what if you had a really boring dead end job you barely paid attention to at a place that was actually an occult conspiracy which you would have noticed if you ever paid attention to your job," but while in my head that's a halfway through the book twist in Sunken Land it's like… "no, that's the whole book" lol