It starts with the title. That’s a great title. It starts with the title, and it grows with every page. ‘The Narrows’ is one of the most effective horror stories I have ever read. It made me despair.

It’s not uncommon when  reading horror stories to experience repulsion, sometimes shock, suspense if the author’s good at what they’re doing, and at times they can leave you utterly, utterly drained. However, this is the first time a horror story has ever driven me to despair. Despair not just for the characters in the story, but for all of us.

‘The Narrows’ is about a small group of survivors of a nuclear attack, three teachers and the pupils they got out of their school. They take refuge in an underground system of canals and the adjoining caves and passage: the Narrows.  Of course, they find more than they were expecting down there.

What Bestwick does so wonderfully here is to draw out the hopelessness of their situation. There is no good way out. There is no way out. On the surface, there’s only radiation sickness and death; in The Narrows there is something else, perhaps something worse. As he draws you through their story, as more options are cut off, as more goes terribly wrong, you cannot help but despair at realising that even if the best happens for them, the characters will still never see sunlight again.

And this, I think, is the core of what is so effective about the story. It forces you to confront the fact that, even if everything goes your way, you’re still going to end up dead. You’re going to have a probably painful, undignified and lonely death. If you’re lucky.

This story has traditional horrory scares, and things that slither in dark corners, and lightless passages that won’t let you back to where you came from, but it is the all-pervading sense of doom, unavoidable doom, that makes this story truly horrifying. This is one of the best short horror stories – no, one of the best short stories I have ever read.

I found the story in Best Horror of the Year 1, but it’s also available in this anthology from Pendragon Press, edited by Gary McMahon. The Ellen Datlow anthology I found to be patchy (entertainingly so), but it had some really good stuff from Nicholas Royle, Glen Hirshberg, Steve Duffy, Daniel Kaysen, Ray Russell, and Margo Lanagan. It’s great value, and you’re sure to find something you like (although I think ‘The Narrows’ is worth the price of entry on its own).

The Fade To Grey anthology has other stories from Paul Finch, Mark West, Gary McMahon, and Stuart Young, all of whom are up-and-coming British horror writers with some great stories under their belts. If they are all as good as this story it will be £7.99 well-spent.

One. Tender Morsels is not a short story. This is stating the obvious, but it bears repeating for any reader of Margo Lanagan who, like me, has had their expectations of her fiction shaped by the work collected in White Time (2000), Black Juice (2004), and Red Spikes (2006). There is a temptation, after a particularly striking encounter with a writer working in one form, to be disappointed that their work in the other form does not have the same zing of newness: to feel that, say, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl “merely” explores in greater depth a future already presented in stories collected in Pump Six; or, in the other direction, that Ian McDonald’s Cyberabad Days “merely” adds a spectrum of perspectives to the world of River of Gods. I do not claim to be immune; I feel the lure of both those opinions, though I try to resist them. And in that sense, Tender Morsels is “merely” another fairytale retold with an emphasis on the grit and grim of the real. But, you know, longer.

Two. Re-reading “Snow White and Rose Red” once done with Tender Morsels, it is a real joy to discover how clever, and how sly, Lanagan’s revisioning is. The spine of the Grimm tale – two girls, living with their mother in a cottage in the forest, have encounters with a friendly bear and a wicked, treasure-hungry dwarf – is retained in Tender Morsels. But in Lanagan’s novel, the realm in which this takes place is a secondary world, a personal heaven to which the mother, Liga, escapes from a horrific childhood in a “real” world: this is both a necessary escape, and the sort of sanitisation of reality performed by the Brothers Grimm on the later editions of the tales they collected. The bear (multiple bears, actually, in the novel) and the dwarf are intrusions from the “real” world, and eventually harbingers of heaven’s end; and, most importantly, the novel shows us the story before and after the fairytale.

Three. Lanagan remains an extraordinary writer of action, of things happening. Her language itself can create unease; it is only very carefully euphonious, far more often tending to beauty of a guttural, earthy sort, particularly in dialogue or first-person narration, suited to action and discussion. (Less suited to description and reflection, which occasionally seemed to me a weakness.) But this is not to say she is explicit. Much attention has been lavished on the first few chapters, which cover Liga’s upbringing. She is repeatedly raped by her father (leading to several forced abortions, and eventually to Branza, the novel’s Snow White); after her father’s death, she is raped by a gang from a nearby village (leading to Urdda, Rose Red). Reading about this is even more harrowing than it may sound, in part because it does not seem to be leading anywhere (perhaps because a direction would mean a hope of escape), but primarily because Lanagan writes around the terrible events so effectively. Miscarriages endured by Liga are covered (“She tried to stop the baby, but it had been poised to rush out, and so it rushed out, with a quantity of wet noise”, 15), as is the aftermath of rape (how Liga “washed and washed her cringing parts”, how “to walk was to hurt”, 47); but the rapes themselves are not. That’s left to us to imagine.

Four. The novel seems to me to be built around a series of stark contrasts, set up early in the book. Most obviously, there is the contrast between Liga’s two worlds: that defined by her father – “he had run the world for her” (37) – and that defined by her own desire. The former is a place of relentless brutality, the latter somewhere Liga can be utterly trusting of everyone and everything around her. The tranquillity of this world is equally relentless in its way, and bold Urdda, in particular, grows to chafe against it, and eventually leaves. Men and women are divided by perspective: every scene told from a man’s point of view is first-person, while every scene told from a woman’s point of view is third-person. The logic behind this division never quite became clear to me; it could be an effective way of underlining the privilege accorded the male gaze in the novel’s “real” world, but the first-person perspectives persist even when the men are in Liga’s heaven; and a mild criticism of the novel might be that we are never given access to the perspectives of the men who actually commit the worst acts. But perhaps the argument should be that the perspectives we are given access to confirm that not all men are beasts, because man and animal are also contrasted, as young men taking part in a local ritual intended to “civilise” them find themselves transported to Liga’s heaven and transformed into bears. One such is noble, the other rather less so. And so on.

Five. The final section of Tender Morsels – when both daughters and Liga are back in the “real” world – is, I think, the best, but not without its perplexing moments. There are two points in the novel at which Lanagan seems to give her characters a freebie. The first is Liga’s salvation, when she is given the means to access her heaven by a force that is never explained; if the characters were religious, it would be an act of God. The second comes in the latter stages of the book, after Liga tells Urdda how her daughter was conceived. Urdda becomes (not surprisingly) incandescently angry; it is revealed that she has magical talent; in her sleep, unconsciously, she causes five voodoo dolls to go out into the village and gang rape each man involved in her mother’s ordeal; and in the morning she wakes, unknowing, and “fresh of it all”; “Yesterday”, she says, “I thought I would burn with that rage for the rest of my life. Today – well, I have no particular feelings about it at all” (407). She acknowledges that this is “not natural”; but it still feels far too consoling. Life does not provide vengeance so clean, or so easily.

Six. Urdda’s vengeance stands out all the more because most of the second half of Tender Morsels is devoted to questioning and — partially — deconstructing its earlier dichotomies. When the family are first reunited in the “real” world, there is a sense of right finality, as though the story is ending; yet at the same time you can feel, between your thumb and forefinger, the thickness of pages still to go. And so you conclude, because you are back in the world where Liga was so abused – because that horror, as Urdda puts it, is sitting “lumped in the past … impossible to ignore” (389) – that something bad is going to happen. It never does. But the expectation leads to some scenes of almost unbearable tension, often revolving around Branza. Unlike her sister, Branza never chafed against Liga’s heaven. She is desperately unworldly; in Gwyneth Jones’ resonant phrase, a true veteran of utopia, confused by the tragic distance between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. So when she goes for a walk on her own – having been warned against such excursions by her sister – we fear for her. And, sure enough, she is menaced; yet she stands her ground, and bites one of the boys, and the rest are cowed. She walks home safely. Liga is delighted by the sight of her daughter’s accomplishment — “In some way, she had bested them; they were afraid of her, look!” (337) — but another character, standing at Liga’s shoulder, remarks that there’s nothing like being raised in heaven to give someone false confidence. The moment is punctured: we have to agree with that. And yet, Branza walks.

Seven. As Gary K Wolfe puts it in his review, the central theme of Tender Morsels is “the balance between the brutal abuse Liga herself has suffered and the overprotectiveness of the world she has made”. For Abigail Nussbaum, this leads to the novel’s major flaw: that it tells two stories, and that the morals of those stories clash:

Tender Morsels starts out as a story about a character who endures terrible injustices because she lives in a world arrayed against her, and who escapes into another world. It ends as a story about that character learning that life in the real world, though fraught with dangers, is worth more than life in a dream. The problem is that the lesson learned from the second kind of story–acceptance of the inevitability of heartbreak and pain–is precisely the lesson one shouldn’t learn from the first kind of story, which strives to elicit rage and indignation. It’s one thing to say ‘unhappiness and misfortune are the risks you take if you choose to live in the world,’ but it’s quite another thing to say ‘being made into a sex slave by your father and then gang-raped by men who think that having been impregnated by him makes you fair game is the risk you take if you choose to live in the world.’

I don’t entirely disagree with this, as the discussion above of Urdda’s vengeance – which I think can be read as existing to address the rage and indignation produced by Liga’s story, and sweep it under the carpet – may suggest. But it does strike me as risky to draw such direct morals from a novel which is, at base, about revising one of the most moralistic forms of literature there is, and which seems to me to so carefully manage the possible meanings of its events, inviting interrogation. Still, the novel has a happy ending, or something very close to it, despite the well-established darkness of the world — Wolfe writes of “a note of almost astonishing sweetness”, while Meg Rosoff describes a book that “celebrates human resilience” with “audacity and grace” — and a reader does have to be able to accept this as honest. For my part, the security the women achieve, while limited by the nature of the society in which they live, seems convenient but not tenuous. As the novel closes, Urdda is (thanks to the revelation of her magical talent) well on her way to being a powerful witch, Branza is marrying the story’s most noble man (who she met, as a bear, in Liga’s heaven), for love, and Liga is sharing a good house with another witch, who (thanks to the dwarf’s trips to Liga’s heaven) is independently wealthy. As to lessons, if we must have one I think I’m closer to David Hebblethwaite: neither Liga’s childhood nor her heaven makes a good guide to living in the world; neither should be trivialised, but they must not be the whole of the story. Or as Rosoff asks: is it possible to return to life from unspeakable trauma? Answering that question without seeming patronising is a tricky needle to thread, but I’d say Lanagan manages it much more than not; and that if you’re looking for a guide to living in the world, you could do worse than look at Tender Morsels.

Bowen Press / Harper Teen, 2009      ISBN: 9780061154980

Editor Michael Cart has collected twelve stories about LGBT youth identity in the form of short stories, graphic fiction, and verse, by well-known young-adult, and adult authors including Francesca Lia Block, Gregory Maguire, Jacqueline Woodson, Ariel Schrag, Emma Donoghue, and others.

There is something for everyone in this collection: stories of ghosts and girls trapped in walls serving as metaphors for transgendered teens trapped in the wrong body; handsome highway men and soldiers for a stable boy to lust after; stories of first love; and of first making love. One graphic short story is about two teens who make conflicting wishes when they meet a genie, leaving all three of them tortured; the other is about the San Francisco Dyke March.

While there is some sex, most of it is left to the imagination, good as in Julie Anne Peter’s “First Time,” and unsettling, as in William Sleator’s “Fingernail,” a disturbing story about the sex trade between older western men, and young boys in Thailand. In this particular story, the Thai “boy” is already a young man of twenty and thus technically legal, unlike much of the sex trade that actually takes place there between men and underage boys. But the abusive relationship that he finds himself in is almost equally disturbing.

Some of the stories may actually be of more interest to older readers than to teens: in particular, David Levithan’s “A Word from the Nearly Distant Past,” in which Levithan recounts the experiences of generations past as they dealt with being in the closet, dealing with the AIDS crisis, etc., and exhorts the younger generation to make sure that they live for future generations, as much as for themselves. Emma Donoghue’s “Dear Lang,” is a letter from a lesbian mother who has been denied access to her now sixteen-year-old son by his biological mother, in which she tells the story of how she came to be barred from his life, and how she is just now taking the chance of having another child with a new partner.

One of the best stories is Jacqueline Woodson’s insightful “Trev,” about a transgendered child, and the struggles he has with his family and at school to be who he really is. Trev’s mother both reassures him that he isn’t the reason his father left, and yet whispers her wish to him every night at bedtime, that Trev will wake up “my sugar and spice, and everything nice.”

Recommended for all teens.

Bowen Press / Harper Teen, 2009      ISBN: 9780061154980

Editor Michael Cart has collected twelve stories about LGBT youth identity in the form of short stories, graphic fiction, and verse, by well-known young-adult, and adult authors including Francesca Lia Block, Gregory Maguire, Jacqueline Woodson, Ariel Schrag, Emma Donoghue, and others.

There is something for everyone in this collection: stories of ghosts and girls trapped in walls serving as metaphors for transgendered teens trapped in the wrong body; handsome highway men and soldiers for a stable boy to lust after; stories of first love; and of first making love. One graphic short story is about two teens who make conflicting wishes when they meet a genie, leaving all three of them tortured; the other is about the San Francisco Dyke March.

While there is some sex, most of it is left to the imagination, good as in Julie Anne Peter’s “First Time,” and unsettling, as in William Sleator’s “Fingernail,” a disturbing story about the sex trade between older western men, and young boys in Thailand. In this particular story, the Thai “boy” is already a young man of twenty and thus technically legal, unlike much of the sex trade that actually takes place there between men and underage boys. But the abusive relationship that he finds himself in is almost equally disturbing.

Some of the stories may actually be of more interest to older readers than to teens: in particular, David Levithan’s “A Word from the Nearly Distant Past,” in which Levithan recounts the experiences of generations past as they dealt with being in the closet, dealing with the AIDS crisis, etc., and exhorts the younger generation to make sure that they live for future generations, as much as for themselves. Emma Donoghue’s “Dear Lang,” is a letter from a lesbian mother who has been denied access to her now sixteen-year-old son by his biological mother, in which she tells the story of how she came to be barred from his life, and how she is just now taking the chance of having another child with a new partner.

One of the best stories is Jacqueline Woodson’s insightful “Trev,” about a transgendered child, and the struggles he has with his family and at school to be who he really is. Trev’s mother both reassures him that he isn’t the reason his father left, and yet whispers her wish to him every night at bedtime, that Trev will wake up “my sugar and spice, and everything nice.”

Recommended for all teens.

Yes, it’s my turn to blog for the QWC Blog Tour, mine, mine, all mine! Bwahahahahahha!

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I am blogging atchya from the QWC Hachette Manuscript Development Program being held at O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat – which is at the very top of a mountain, at the end of a VERY TWISTY TURNY ROAD. When the driver said ‘Just another 11 km to go’, we discovered exactly how long 11km can feel. No one threw up except the driver! But it’s all good – lovely surroundings, quiet and relaxed, the perfect writers’ retreat. Participants are AWESOME, the Hachette Folk (Bernadette Foley, Kate Ballard, Rachel Donovan) and Cameron Cresswell agent Sophie Hamley, were all superb, and our ‘writer-in-residence’ Bec Sparrow is generous,  knowledgeable and an excellent avatar of the space coyote*.

And so, to the questions QWC have asked me to answer:

Where do your words come from?
Erk. I don’t know. I guess when something catches my imagination/interest I start telling myself a story in my head. I see it like a film, then translate it into words. That’s the part I like, that translation process, thinking to myself how can I best describe this to capture how it appears to me? How can I communicate that to someone else? A great experience I had recently was seeing the stills from a short film that’s been made of one of my stories – and one of the charactcers looked exactly as I’d imagined her in my head. Could have been a coincidence, but I like to flatter myself that I did my job as a writer right in the first place.

Where did you grow up and where do you live now?
I was born in Cairns, grew up in Ipswich, Longreach, Cairns again and then Brisbane. I’ve lived parts of my adult life in Brisbane, London, Sydney and the Negev Desert. I currently reside in Brisneyland, which is a pretty river city. I live in a leafy suburb, in an old house with a back deck and a giant jacaranda tree in the backyard, and an overgrown jasmine bush on the front fence that smells great when it’s in bloom and looks delightfully unkempt.

What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?
My short story collection: “Why are you so dark, Ella?”
My novel: “They buried the Damascene Witches in the sand.”

What piece of writing do you wish you had written?
Aaaaahhhh. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber? Wilbur Smith’s The Sunbird? Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners? Margo Lanagan’s Singing My Sister Down? Anything from Steve Almond’s My Life in Heavy Metal. Richard Brautigan’s Coffee or The Weather in San Francisco.

What are you currently working towards?
At the micro-level? Finishing Sourdough and Other Stories and getting it off to a publisher; rewriting the novel, Well of Souls and starting to shop it around. At the macro-level, arranging my life so I can be a fulltime writer.

Complete this sentence… The future of the book is…
Mysterious and exciting. We’re seeing the book in so many news forms: ebooks, mobile phone downloads, interactive or augmented reality novels. The content is the same, but we have new ‘containers’ as well as the old version of the book as artefact. It’s books, Jim, but not as we know it!

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening October to December 2009. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog The Empty Page.

Hyperlink: http://www.qwc.asn.au/Resources/TheEmptyPageBlog.aspx

* Yes, it’s a Simpsons’ reference … I see the world through a Simpsons’ filter … and sometimes a Star Trek filter.

In her acceptance speech at the World Fantasy Awards ceremony this year, Margo Lanagan paid tribute to a blog post by fellow Aussie writer Justine Larbalestier about how to write a novel. Given I’m meant to be doing just that at the moment (writing a novel, that is), I looked up that post, and found it helpful indeed. Here it is. I’ve used the spreadsheet tracking method and it’s uncomfortably illuminating!

I also thought her expurgated version held quite a lot of truth.

Enjoy, and then get to it…

I’ve been reading a lot lately. Much of it is YA fantasy, which I’ve grown sour of in recent years. What the Inheritance Cycle didn’t destroy, Twilight obliterated. Yet lately I’m regaining faith in the genre. Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan, which I’ve just reread, is a tale of trauma and healing that I found devastating, thought-provoking, and hopeful in ways that so-called “adult” fiction like The Lovely Bones doesn’t come close to reaching. It certainly tears down the idiotic idea that a book for children or teenagers should be dumbed down and sterilized.

I’ve also picked up The Difference Engine, which was co-written by William Gibson. I think I’m slowly edging my way into reading Neuromancer. Possibly.

I just finished Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan today. It’s a slippery, fairly devastating novel, one that requires more than one read to dig into the rich symbolism. I think I may love it, but I’ll have to mull over it a few days to know for sure.

Flash fic time, something I cranked out in fifteen minutes. Consider that a fair warning.

Dusk
So I killed a star. What of it? There are billions of the buggers gleaming down at us each night. What’s one less?

How? I’m not spending my last day revealing secrets like I’m some cruddy magician. Let ‘em figure out how I did it. You said you had interesting questions, new questions. I’ve been hearing “How?” since it first started fading. Why? Christ, just as bad. My mother ate too much sugar when she was pregnant. I watched too many disaster movies as a kid. My head’s not screwed on right. Make up your own reason.

Look, it doesn’t matter why I killed the sun. What matters is what you’re all gonna do now. These are the last hours of sunlight, you know… I hope you’re not scared of the dark.

Okay so we all know that I have a tendency to go overboard when it comes to books. Whether it’s my library loot, buying binges, or signing up for reading challenges, it always seems to be all or nothing. My current reading pool for the read-a-thon encompasses almost every genre and ranges from a mere 32 pages for many of my picture books to almost 500 pages for Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels. Maybe instead of thinking of this stack as just my read-a-thon picks, we should also think of it as my October/November even possibly December reads.

Plays I started reading plays during last year’s read-a-thon. I found so many wonderful playwrights that I’ve started slowly reading as many as I can especially Pulitzer prize-winning plays. Plays are usually no more than a hundred pages long and contain memorable characters and great settings. For the upcoming read-a-thon, here are a few plays I plan on reading that won the Pulitzer for Drama.

I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright. 2004 Pulitzer.
Wit by Margaret Edson. 1999 Pulitzer.
Angels in America by Tony Kushner. 1993 Pulitzer

not shown: August: Osage County by Tracy Letts.

Short Stories The great thing about reading short stories during the read-a-thon is that you can dip in and out of collections and still feel as though you’re accomplishing something.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie.
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros. I read this collection years ago and I think it’s really time for a re-read.
Dedicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff.

Graphic Novels

Britten and Brulightly by Hannah Berry.
Amulet 2: The Stonkeeper’s Curse by Kazu Kabuishi.
Maus by Art Spiegelman

Not shown: The Professor’s Daughter by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert

Fantasy

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
Tigerheart by Peter David
The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan

Other Notables

Peter and Max: A Fables Novel by Bill Willingham
Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau
A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle
A Wish After Midnight by Zetta Elliot

Books not shown:

Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith
Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan
B.P.R.D. series by Mike Mignola
Sprout by Dale Peck
Uglies by Scott Westerfield
The Year the Swallows Came Early by Kathryn Fitzmaurice
Little Brother by Cory Doctrow

You see how crazy I went? This is why I’m calling this pile my October-November-and-possibly-December pile. I have a ton of books on hold at the library that will be coming in sometime next week. I can’t wait for the read-a-thon to start but I’m not going to wait to start reading some of these great books.

Have you read any of these graet books? Which ones do you think I should save for the read-a-thon? Are there any that you think I should move to the top of the pile? Have you thought about what books you’re going to read for the big event?

I’m reading Noir by K.W. Jeter and am not enjoying it at all. While I’m intrigued by some of the concepts, I don’t know what the hell is going on most of the time. Now, I’m all for writing styles that let the reader infer the situation rather than explain it through exposition; Margo Lanagan’s short stories are an awesome example of how well it can work. But, this style requires absolute clarity and precision; the clues left for the reader can’t become muddled or lost in other information or it all goes to hell. This is what happens in Noir, to the point where I’m left frustrated and ready to dump it, unfinished, and begin reading another book.

Still, it’s made me realize how important it is to choose details carefully while immersing the reader in a world. Technical jargon is just that unless the reader can glimpse the concept behind it, and coyness is plain annoying.

103. Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan (2008)

Read By: Anne Flosnik and Michael Page
Length: 14h 19m (448 pages)

Genre: Fantasy; ostensibly Young Adult, although I wouldn’t give it to anyone younger than 15-16 or so.

Started: 17 August 2009
Finished: 23 August 2009

Where did it come from? The library.
Why do I have it? Nymeth has mentioned that it’s in the running for her favorite read of the year, and her recommendations rarely lead me astray.

(Unrelated, but interesting: Nymeth is also one of the people I “know” who shows up in my Top 50 Similar Libraries on LibraryThing – along with Memory, Meghan, and Rhinoa – so even the computers think we’ve got similar tastes in books.

The real world can be
quite nasty and dark, but we
all have to live there.

“You are pure-hearted and lovely, and you have never done a moment’s wrong. But you are a living creature, born to make a real life, however it cracks your heart.”

Summary: Liga Longfield has had to endure more suffering than most 15-year-olds can even begin to imagine: her father keeps her shut away in their cabin in the woods and subjects her to the most horrific physical and sexual abuse. The rest of the world seems no better; after she is gang-raped and impregnated by a group of local boys, she runs away, fleeing with her elder daughter (by her father), and intent on killing herself and the child before either can endure any more misery.

Before she can go through with it, she is saved by a glowing moon-bab and sent to her personal heaven, where she can raise her daughters Branza and Urdda in complete peace and safety. However, her isolated heaven cannot last forever… A local mud-witch has accidentally sent a greedy dwarven man into Liga’s heaven, and that rash act has weakened the boundaries between fantasy and reality, allowing the occasional interchange between the worlds – most often during the Bear Day festival, when men dressed in bear-skins run through the town, pawing at whatever women they can find and celebrating the return of spring. Even with these incursions, Liga’s content to stay put, although her daughters secretly yearn for the wider world. But after living so long in the blissful safety of heaven, how will any of them be able to handle the harsh truths of reality?

Review: I loved almost everything about this book, with one big exception. I’ll start with the good stuff: First, I absolutely love good fairy tale retellings, particularly ones that recognize the more disturbing aspects lurking in most stories. And, if I wanted a retelling that comes at a familiar story from a completely new (and dark) angle, I don’t think I could have done much better than Tender Morsels. The bones of the Snow White & Rose Red story are there, but they’re fleshed out in a way that’s thoroughly original and yet still manages to maintain an other-worldly fairy tale feeling.

The message of the story, too, is one that I haven’t seen addressed in fantasy often – or at least not this well. The real world is depicted as so brutally horrible that you can’t fault Liga for retreating into her heaven, but the reader is slowly drawn out and convinced of the benefits of living in the real world, even when it’s a world in which most people have to struggle to achieve a happiness that they may never find. The writing and the language used throughout is gorgeous; lyrical and lovely and completely in line with the magical-yet-real folktale feeling of the worlds it was creating.

The *one* thing that kept this book from being excellent was the length, and the pacing. Stories have a kind of inherent rhythm and pace (and I’d argue this is particularly true of fairy tales.) Read enough of them, and you start to be able to pick out where you are in the story, and roughly how much should be left before the end. During Tender Morsels, however, when we reached the point where I was thinking “Okay, this is about halfway through the story”, I was only on disc 4 of 12. And, similarly, we reached the point where I was figuring we were closing in on the end… and it was only disc 9. From there, multiple places where the book could have ended satisfactorily flew past, but instead it stopped abruptly with a scene which didn’t feel like a proper conclusion. I think an editing knife could also have been taken to some parts in the middle to improve the flow – for example, the third Bear Day plotline could easily have been sacrificed without affecting the main story at all.

I also had a minor problem with the point-of-view jumps. Not with the multiple POV format itself; I think that actually added to the story. My problem was mostly with the audiobook production and readers, who would go from one character’s POV straight into another without any demarcation or change of voice, which often wound up being rather confusing.

In any case, while the off-putting rhythm and pacing problems were enough for me to dock this book some points in the final analysis, I never stopped listening, and I was always completely absorbed by the story, even if I never quite got a handle on where it was going. 4 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: This book is most emphatically NOT for everyone. Particularly in the early chapters, it is brutally and intensely dark – we’re talking incest, physical abuse, forced abortion, gang rape, some implied-if-not-explicit bestiality, etc. If any of that stuff is an automatic deal-breaker for you, then you’re best off passing this one by. For those who can deal with the nastiness, though, there’s a disturbingly beautiful, fascinatingly complex, and lyrically written story here that shouldn’t be missed by fans of fantasy and fairy-tales.

This Review on LibraryThing | This Book on LibraryThing | This Book on Amazon

Other Reviews: Bean Bag Books, Books and Other Thoughts, Books I Done Read, A Comfy Chair and a Good Book, E. M. Reads, Eva’s Book Addiction, My Favourite Books, Neth Space, Never Jam Today, Page 247, Reading Rants!, Stephanie’s Confessions of a Bookaholic, Things Mean a Lot, Vulpes Libris, YA Fabulous!, YAnnabe
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First Line: There are plenty would call her a slut for it.

Cover Thoughts: I love it – the somewhat bleak palette; the man just barely visible inside the bear; the green, budding, living trees inside the girl to contrast to the dead, harsh thorns out in the real world – all gorgeous.

I also really like the cover treatment of the paperback… it brings out the Snow White & Rose Red aspect a lot more, although the girls are the wrong coloring for Branza and Urdda. But I really like the shadow-y bear back in the trees, contrasting with the golden sunlight… is the bear peaceful and protective, or stalking and menacing? Are the girls skipping alongside, or running away? Very evocative.

by Margo Lanagan

Basic Summary: Once upon a time, there was a girl, Liga, who only got to be a girl for a short while. In exchange for the terrible horrors forced upon her, Liga gained access to her own version of heaven for herself and her two girls. A safe world, far from the harm she had grown accustomed to in her youth. While there she was able to raise her two girls happily, develop skills and travel without fear. But Liga’s perfect life becomes startled by Bears that seem almost human and daughters that have dreams of their own.

Kell’s Chatty Review: This book had depth. I cannot put it in any other way. It’s slow to develop and remarkably dark, but Lanagan explores the ideas of relationships (in a ridiculously heartrending way) and ideals in a way that has you thinking about its suggestions for days.

This book is not meant for everyone.: It was not easy to get through, due to both the dialect, plot development and the dark scenes of the book. I, personally, had to fight my way through it. And honestly, at page 350 (my copy was 436 pages) I still wasn’t sure if I actually liked the book. But when I finished it, I knew I wanted to own it. The ending was bittersweet, but rewarding for those who stick with the characters and story and understand what Lanagan is trying to accomplish with this book. I’m sure I don’t understand most of it, but I glimpsed enough to realize it will be even better after a second reading, or three or ten.

Okay, I admit it: I almost cried twice at the end. Read it and see if you can guess which parts made me cry and why.

On Snow-White and Rose-Red: This story is also a retelling of a Grimm’s Brother fairy tales. Don’t be fooled by Snow White’s feature in the title, this isn’t the story Disney based its character on (that would be Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs. Same name, different story. Not sure it’s the same character.). Even so, as I was reading Tender Morsels, I could not see how it related to a fairy tale (that I had never read). So I went to my trusty anthology of Grimm’s fairy tales and read it and was amazed by the similarities. Lanagan flushed out the story at parts that made it seem natural to the fairy tale. Almost like the Grimm version is the tale that was left after Lanagan’s had been handed down orally through generations. (I’m positively gushing at this point.)

Most of all, I was thrilled my copy of the fairy tale had the same translation Lanagan used to draw the title from. I got a chill when I saw the words “tender morsels” used by the translator.

What this book taught me about life: That I am ridiculously lucky.

What I most wanted to do after reading this book: Read the Grimm version (check). And go out and tame wild animals to my beck and call (not likely).

Re-Readability Rating: 3. It’s very heavy, dark material, so it’s not something I’d seek out normally. But I do already feel the draw to re-read it, so for me 3 is a pretty sure bet. Like I said, though, this book is not meant for everyone, so others may rate it higher or lower.

Where this book came from: The library!

Quick and dirty visit to Melberlin (actually, not dirty at all, not even slightly soiled; very, very clean and pristine visit).

Arrived Thursday night, checked into hotel at 9.30pm, ordered room service, sat in front of tv for a few hours channel surfing as my brain wound down like the clockwork monkey it is … kept thinking how I should take the chance to transcribe the notes in my Moleskin for the final draft of Gallowberries … and yet could not get my ass out of the chair. This, I think, is the universe’s way of saying ‘Y’know, you’re tired. Why don’t you just rest, dumbass?’

Friday: woke up at 4am – so unfair. Went back to sleep until 9am. Had late breakfast, wandered down to Federation Square – which is a great space filled with some tremendously ugly buildings. Buildings so ugly it’s quite breathtaking and, in a way, admirable. Awesomely, defiantly ugly buildings. The BMW Edge lecture theatre is quite cool though, looking out over the river and this is where I went to the first of the two sessions I attended.

The Future of Fiction with authors Stephen Amsterdam (Things We Didn’t See Coming, winner of The Age Book o’the Year – http://www.stevenamsterdam.com/Things_We_Didnt_See_Coming_by_Steven_Amsterdam.html), China Miéville (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, The City & The City, etc) and the able and amusing Ronnie Scott (editor of The Lifted Brow http://www.theliftedbrow.com/?page_id=14) as the moderator. Some very interesting discussion about whether books will survive and in what form. I’m still reeling after hearing Dr Miéville had recently scanned in about 80% of his book collection and then recycled the bodies. The book-loving luddite in me screams ‘Vandal!’ and gets a nervous rash. I’m trying not to think about it.

It was the night of two dinners – first one was with my colleague, friend and all-round clever clogs Meg Vann, she of AWMonline, at The Quarter in Degraves Lane (which, for some reason, keeps coming up in my brain as ‘Gravesend’). Then there was a brief stop at the Sofitel 35 (fabulous bar on the 35^th floor) and meeting Harvest editor and poet, Geoff Lemon and poet Josephine Rowe (http://harvestmagazine.wordpress.com/contributors/words-and-art-issue-three/). Next, dinner the second at the Melbourne Wine Bar with Ronnie and Pete. V nice!

Saturday: lunch with fellow Clarionite, Suze Willis, at Blue Train – much noise and laughter and very good food (bacon makes everything better). Then a wander across the bridge, back to Fed Square and into the line for the next session, Visions of the City, starring China Miéville (awesome), Margo Lanagan (awesomer) and Jack Dann (awesomest), and moderated by talented spec-fic writer Rjurick Davidson. Some interesting stuff, but a little meandering … and as usual, there are the members of the audience who ask questions that aren’t really questions, but incoherent burbles with a subtext of ‘This is actually about me, I really, really want to hold a microphone!’ A dead giveaway is when a question starts with ‘This is a two-part question’ … There was also the horror of the city councilor who had apparently not seen her speech before she read it out; did not seem to know the word ‘renaissance’ and, I’m pretty sure, pronounced ‘version’ as ‘virgin’ … it was a bit hard to swallow the trumpeting of Melbourne as a city of literature at that point. Maybe that’s just me being cruel and unreasonable (it happens), but I do think public officials should be better at speaking in public. Call me crazy …

Good to see some other fellow Clarionites, Amanda Le and Steve Mitchell; and then to go for a far-too-brief drink with Kirstyn McDermott (amazing writer, soon-to-be Picador author and general cool chick http://kirstynmcdermott.com/). And then to the MWF launch party with Meg V once again – met lots of people, drank passable wine, ate some great finger food … and then back to Sofitel 35 to discuss writing with the Steel Megnolia. Listened to outgoing festival director, Rosemary Cameron talk – and she’s wonderful. She used to direct the Brisbane Writers Festival and it’s great to see she brought the same energy and vibrant life to MWF that she did to BWF.

Sunday: off to the airport, arrived early in order to sit through a 2 hour delay. Huzzah. Back home about 5.30pm.

I’m not sure I had a real festival weekend … but I had a weekend and it involved a festival and there were writers …

I know we’re some way past the halfway point of 2009, but I wanted to do a mini-review of the year so far, as I’ve read so many great books this year that I’d like to highlight the best once again. So these are my top five reads of the year so far (all had their first UK publication in 2009), in alphabetical order (click the titles to read my reviews):

Keith Brooke, The Accord

Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal

Rana Dasgupta, Solo

Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels

Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia

An honourable mention goes to Ken Grimwood’s Replay, which is my favourite pre-2009 book that I read for the first time this year. All six books are excellent, and I woud urge you to seek them out.

(Of course, I don’t just blog about books on here; so, for the sake of completeness: my favourite fiilm of the year so far is Franklyn; and favourite album of the year so far is Kingdom of Rust by Doves, which I will get around to blogging about eventually…)

The Guardian Weekend had another fiction special yesterday:

• Dave Eggers: ‘A Fork Brought Along’
• A M Homes: ‘All Is Good Except The Rain’
• David Mitchell: ‘The Massive Rat’
• William Boyd: ‘Snapshots’
• Julie Myerson: ‘The Wave’
• Lisa Blower: ‘Broken Crockery’

I’ve read the Mitchell and the Boyd, neither of which are very special; they are both character studies of mild existential crisis. I might read the others, although probably not the Myerson.

Elsewhere in the paper, Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels gets a rave review from Meg Rosoff and Eric Brown provides his pointless monthly round up of recent SF titles. It is a thankless task: four hundred words on four novels, striking a balance that manages to avoid being either comprehensive or informative. Even given this though, the column is not as useful as it could be. Consider this review of Child of a Dead God by Barb Hendee and JC Hendee which I will quote in full:

Magiere the dhampire (half human, half vampire) and Leesil the elf, accompanied by Wynn the sage and Chap the canine protector, leave the elven territories on a quest to discover a mysterious artifact concealed in a castle in the ice-bound southern mountains. The object in question – a magical orb – is a powerful relic from the times of Forgotten History, and Magiere must find it before it falls into the clutches of her evil vampire half-brother Welstiel, who follows her with a pack of feral vampires.

Already half the word count has disappeared in synopsis but, fair enough, Brown conveys not just the plot but its essential lameness. Who is this review aimed at though? “Chap the canine protector”? How many Guardian readers were likely to have any interest in this novel? With such limited space available for SF it would be nice if the coverage was more target at books that might conveicably hold some interest to anyone beyond the most generic of genre readers. Next we get a sentence of criticism:

Book six in the Noble Dead series treads standard fantasy territory, with cliché piled on cliché, and too much travelogue between set-piece confrontations.

An almost text book assessment of the problems of commercial fantasy and one that is already evoked in the reader’s mind as soon as they have read the synopsis. It is unusually negative for Brown but only reinforces the lack of any need to review this book in the first place. Book six, indeed. There is just time for one more sentence of analysis:

But the Hendees go about their business with obvious affection for Magiere and Leesil, who are portrayed with a depth rare in formula fantasy.

For the first time I must take issue with Brown himself, rather than his editors. Obvious affection I can ignore as irrelevant but rare depth? Considering the previous three sentences, does anyone believe this? I don’t, even taking into account the slightly paradoxical “formula fantasy” caveat. This reads like the false evenhandedness that says every piece of criticism must be tempered with a piece of praise. This sort of “fair and balanced” assessment is common in SF reviewing but here, as usual, it rings false.

(WARNING: This review contains discussion of adult concepts. Judge for yourself whether you wish to continue reading.)

There has been something of a stir about Tender Morsels in the British press recently (in the Observer and the Daily Express and the Daily Mail), mainly over the sexual content of what has been perceived to be a children’s book. First of all, let’s clear up some misconceptions: Tender Morsels is not a book for children — it is addressed to adults (be they old or young), and expects its readers to reflect on uncomfortable issues. Furthermore, though the book does include many harrowing events, it treats them far less frivolously than these write-ups suggest . But, in a way, it’s apposite that these issues should be raised; because one of the central themes of Tender Morsels is how far we should shield children from ‘difficult’ issues.

Margo Lanagan’s latest novel is an interpretation of the tale of Snow White and Rose Red, and unflinching from the very start. As a teenage girl, Liga gives birth to two daughters, one the result of sexual abuse by her father (who is  subsequently killed), the other of a gang-rape committed by boys from the village (these are depicted obliquely — the latter taking place entirely ‘off stage’ — yet not in a way that skirts around them; later harrowing scenes may be less oblique, but are still not treated lightly). Unable to face life in a world that has done all this to her, Liga prepares to throw herself from a cliff; but is rescued by some magical agency that transports her to the world of her heart’s desire — a world much like her own, but idyllic. There she raises her daughters: Branza, fair and calm; and Urdda, wild and dark.

However, others eventually find their way into this dream-world: first a dwarf, who finds that he can turn things there into precious gems and metals; then a young man, dressed in a bear costume for a festival in his village, who turns into a real bear in Liga’s world. And the traffic is not all one-way. Urdda, having known only Liga’s heaven, stumbles into the real world and finds it much more to her liking. Ten years pass in the dream-world, and one in the real, before Urdda finds a way to bring her mother and Branza through; how will they cope in reality, with all its complicated, messy realness?

Before I get into the issues, let me say that Tender Morsels is a beautifully written book. For example, this, narrated by the boy-turned-bear:

From [Liga] and around her were all the smells of warmth, of home, of women. Fire and food, cloth and cleanliness. In my own house — my father’s house, but only me and Aran in it — no matter how I swept and scrubbed, all it smelled of was grief yet. I did not know what to do with it to make it a home again.

Lanagan is skilled evoking joy, mystery, and profound horror, all within the same narrative voice. And it’s a voice that feels right for telling fairytales (her first-person narrators ring similarly true) — because Tender Morsels is still a fairytale in many ways: magic causes trouble; wishes have drawbacks; those who do wrong are punished; there is a happy ending (though it’s not a neat one), and a strong moral heart.

What is the message of this story? It’s about facing reality head-on: Liga comes to realise that. by raising her daughters in her heaven-world — by trying to conceal the real world from them — she has deprived them of the opportunity to truly live. Life in the real world may be uncertain and dangerous, but it’s where people belong. (Lanagan labours this idea a little too much, but not so much that it disrupts her story.)

Does this mean, then, that the author is saying that sexual violence is everywhere, that it’s just a fact of life? I don’t think Lanagan’s message is that bleak, though it is honest and complex, and not necessarily comforting. I’ll explain my reasoning.

First, Lanagan stylises even the ‘real’ world of her novel: no hints of political structures, for example — no sense that this world would function as an actual place; therefore, I think she’s not saying that this is how reality is, but using sexual danger as a metaphor for danger in general. (Why sex? Perhaps because it’s an aspect of pre-industrial European societies that was there, but which we don’t often include when we think of them. I should also add, in case I’ve given the wrong impression, that Lanagan does include some positive portrayals of sex — it’s not always violent and brutal in the world of Tender Morsels.)

Even if we’re talking in generalities, then, does that mean the book is saying that children should just face up to the bad things in the world? Not necessarily — finding out the truth doesn’t automatically make life much easier for Lanagan’s characters; and Tender Morsels acknowledges the argument in favour of Liga’s raising her daughters in the dream-world: she was protecting them — what’s wrong with a mother wanting to do that? So I don’t think Lanagan is saying we should race to discover the many distressing aspects of life — just that we shouldn’t try to pretend they don’t exist.

It seems to me that a key issue behind the three articles I linked to above (and this related one from the Guardian books blog yesterday) is about trying to have some control over the manner in which children learn about ‘difficult’ issues. I don’t think it’s unreasonable per se to want to do that; I do think it’s unreasonable to expect books automatically to be a space conducive to that aim.

As for Tender Morsels, it’s a wonderful piece of writing that leaves one thinking deeply about the issues it raises. But it’s not for children.

Results of the Ditmars are below … more comments will follow about NatCon, but that will be tomorrow when my brain is talking to me again … I only got off the plane an hour ago.

A. Bertram Chandler Award
Rosaleen Love

William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism and Review
Kim Wilkins, an article about Australian fantasy fiction in the Journal of Australian Studies

Best New Talent
Felicity Dowker

Best Professional Achievement
Angela Challis, for Black, the Australian Dark Culture Magazine

Best Fan Production
ASif!, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Gene Melzack

Best Fan Artist
Cat Sparks for Scary Food, Paul Haines Cancer is a C*NT fundraiser!

Best Fan Writer
Rob Hood, for Undead Backbrain

Best Professional Artwork
Shaun Tan, for Tales from Outer Suburbia

Best Collected Work
Dreaming Again, edited by Jack Dann

Best Short Story
Tie between Margo Lanagan “The Goosle” and Dirk Flinthart “This is not my story” (ASIM #37)

Best Novella/Novelette
“Painlessness” by Kirstyn McDermott

Best Novel
“Tender Morsels” by Margo Lanagan

Peter McNamara Award
Sean Williams

Pam Brown, True Thoughts (Salt Publishing 2008)
Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels (Allen & Unwin 2008)
Peter Steiner, Le Crime (Thomas Dunne Books 2003, 2008)

Apart from the conviviality, the food, the cards, the ever expanding list of draconian (and largely ignored) rules, what I love about our book club is that it makes me read things I might otherwise not have touched – books about secret rendition and Guantanamo Bay, someone else’s favourite detective novels, intimidating poetry.

One of the welcome consequences of my self-imposed task of blogging something about every book I read is that it pushes me to reflect on my reading.

So with Pam Brown’s True Thoughts I’m doubly blessed: without the book club I doubt I would have read it, but here it is with an affectionate inscription to one of the club members; without the blog my mind might not have lingered on it any longer than it took my initial bemusement to fade. But here I am, remembering that poetry usually requires the reader to do a little work, and knowing that I would be revealing myself as an unforgivably lazy reader if I just wrote something like, ‘I don’t get it,’ or even, ‘I don’t grasp how these pieces hang together to make poems — I can barely tell where one ends and the next begins.’ (By pure serendipity, after I’d written that para I heard a Poetry Off the Shelf podcast in which Matthew Zapruder talks about immersing himself in John Ashbury’s poems because they moved him somehow even though he didn’t understand them at all, so I’m clearly in good company, and I imagine Pam Brown would be happy to be discussed analogously to Ashbury.)

So, in spite of feeling that I needed someone to take me by the hand and explain how to read Pam Brown’s poems, I went back, took my time, ruminated, savoured, absorbed and, eventually, enjoyed. It was a fascinating process. At the start I was like a colour-blind person looking at one of those red-and-green patterns, then with sustained, though not strained, attention it was as if the colour-blindness healed and the formless array of dots and squiggles reorganised themselves before my eyes into elegant shapes. For example, ‘Peel me a zibibbo’ begins:

I could go [extra characters are spacers &  meant to be invisible]
oooooooin any direction
but it’s best that ooohere and now
ooI remain lesbian,
ooooo keep my vanishing cream
sealed.

On first reading, this seemed little more than verbal noise, a bit like the start of an Ern Malley poem. And in the middle of the poem, there’s this:

imperfection in kindness
ooooooocomes with the void,
oyou need to
ooooochoose
ithe ‘I’m feeling lucky’ google option.

To which I said, ‘Huh?’

I still don’t really get this second quote, but now that the green dots and the red dots have sorted themselves out, I do get that the first quote is meant to tease, and not meant to yield its meaning until the last line, where she addresses the poets and others whose names have cropped as the poem meanders with apparent aimlessness through a day in the life of the poet, and we realise they are all men:

Hi Kurt, ooooooo oooooooooohi John T,
oooohi Nick, oPaddy, oooohi Shakespeare,
ooooooo opeel me a zibibbo
ooooooo ooooooo ooooo would you,
ooooone of you guys?

(A zibbibo, as a note up the back tells us helpfully, is a delicious kind of grape.) The first lines suddenly yield their meaning. The busy-busy Lesbian poet, after making workaday contact with male poets and artists alive and dead, indulges for a moment in a fantasy that she’s some kind of Mae West femme fatale surrounded by male attendants. And I am amused.

Tender Morsels an exception as book club books go: I would have read it with or without the BC’s agency. In fact, I’ve been wanting to read it since it came out nearly 12 months ago. I gave it as a Christmas present to one of our members, secure in the knowledge that it would come to the table at one of our meetings. When it did surface, I was a little taken aback when the person offering it, she to whom I’d given it for Christmas, said she’d stopped reading at about 40 pages because she didn’t want to go on reading a litany of suffering. And I confess that when it was my turn, I was close to giving up on page 40 myself. But I read on, and can report that on page 42 everything changes!

This is a wonderful book, and the gruelling first movement is absolutely essential. We need to know just how much the heroine suffers, so that we understand her need to escape, and when other characters (and possibly the back cover blurb as well) make assumptions about what she is avoiding, we know that they completely fail to grasp the strength of character that has enabled her to survive and function as well as she does. The fairy tale ‘Rose Red and Snow White’ plays through the story beautifully. The use of language is exhilarating. Though in one sense things are resolved by about the two thirds mark, there are unexpected twists and turns right to the very last page. Margo Lanagan walked across in front of my car when I was stopped at lights in the city recently. She looked like just another person on her way to an office job. I wondered how many of those others crossing the street were also total geniuses in disguise.

Le Crime’s cover quotes compare Peter Steiner to John Le Carré, Len Deighton, Peter Mayle, Agatha Chsitie, Robert Ludlum, Alan Furst and Graham Greene. I have no idea how embarrassed the quoted reviewers are to see their phrases taken out of context like that. The book is not in the league of any of those writers. It creaks, its psychology is implausible, the plot is completely silly, and the structure barely holds up – but it’s a quick, enjoyable read. I liked it mainly for a flashback that lasts for three of the 26 chapters, in which the hero goes on a long walk through the French countryside, starting at Charles De Gaulle Airport and finally crossing the border into Spain (though we don’t go all the way with him). P and I have just booked in for a much shorter walk in France later this year, supported as befits our ageing selves, and these thirty-odd pages make it seem like a very good idea.

Ready for the next Book Club meeting now, I am.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve read a fantasy.  I’m not sure why this is – I loved Lord of the Rings and read the whole trilogy one memorable Easter – but something I read by Jean Auel that came highly recommended just didn’t interest me at all.

Anyway, I picked up Tender Morsels from the library on one of my ‘greedy days’ there and have worked my way through the pile to it, tucked between A House Unlocked and Graham Greene’s The Captain and the Enemy- which I may have already read long ago, but I hope I can get to it before it’s due back. (That’s the trouble with being greedy at the library; the pressure to get through the stack before options to renew run out means that library books ‘push in’ on the TBR like naughty children in the canteen queue.

I digress, and of course it’s because Tender Morsels isn’t quite my kind of book but I don’t want to criticise it because it’s actually very well done.  The character Liga enlisted my sympathy from the outset – she leads a truly terrible life until her merciful escape to the un-named fantasy world, and I like the way Lanagan has created dialogue with daughters Branza and Urrda that cleverly captures adolescent irritation, affection and growth into maturity.  The girls are a tad too good to be true here and there, but I don’t much mind that.  An invented kind of earthy language is used to show the natural innocence of the characters, and it’s interesting to see how the author dextrously manipulates this language to show that similar words uttered by evil beings have entirely different meanings.

For the fantasy genre to work, the alternative world/s must always be credible, and Lanagan achieves this, not least because Liga does not live in some escapist dream.  Although she recovers and feels safe most of the time, minor incidents can trigger her fear that ‘they’ will discover she is a ‘bad girl’, take everything away from her and send her back to her old life.  Her memories of abuse go with her always, and the touching scene where she tentatively explores a potential relationship with Joseph the Lathe shows just how fragile her confidence is.  This is why she clings to the artificial safety of her own world, and why she returns to reality only at Branza’s insistence.  The scene where she ‘confesses’ to Old Annie is touching in its veracity, and the release she feels is powerful indeed.

And then Liga could not think of any further let-outs or mitigations for [her father], and the bald, cruel truth of what he had done to her, and repeated on her time after time, bab after bab…fell in on her like the roof of a cottage whose pinnings have slumped just a little too far.  She crouched there, small and tight as she could possibly hold herself, and while the wormy rafters and the rotted thatch threw up their dust and vermin around her, she sobbed rage and grief in the little old lady’s arms. (p267)

Lanagan’s theme is that the real world, for all its cruelties, petty and tragically otherwise, is a better place than a bland idyll. 

You are a living creature, born to make a real life, however it cracks your heart.  However sweet that other place was, it was not real. It was an artifact of your mam’s imagination; it was a dream of hers and a desire; you could not have stayed there forever and called yourself alive.  Now you are in the true world, and a great deal more is required of you.  Here you must befriend real wolves, and lure real birds down from the sky.  Here you must endure real people around you, and we are not uniformly kind; we are damaged and impulsive, each in our own way.  It is harder.  It is not safe.  But it is what you were born to. (p299)

At a time when ‘helicopter parents’ imprison their children under constant surveillance and governments spend vast amounts of money on homeland security, this is a brave proposition to challenge.  Young adults, ever stretching the boundaries, will identify with wilful, adventurous Urrda; parents sick at heart during the early hours of the morning waiting for a child to come home will feel less sanguine.   Liga is broken-hearted to learn that her daughters were less open with her than she had dreamed:

And then Liga’s own daughters, both of them, and for years! – and this pained Liga deeper than anything….had not betrayed her, exactly, but they had kept things from her; they had had secrets! (p246)

Lanagan herself has surely known this loving, disabling fear:

How could Branza sleep, [Liga] wondered, how could Urrda run her errands in the town, and not be aware how their mam was being attacked, beaten, crushed by her own loving fear for them?  She hardly knew what to do, it had been so long since such strong feelings had borne down on her.  It was like carrying another creature inside her, and nothing so benign and natural as a baby.  Undamped, untamed, the pain and exultation of her attachment to them blew through Liga like a storm-wind carrying sharp leave and struggling birds.  How long she had known her daughters, and how well, and in what extraordinary vividness and detail!  How blithely she had done the work of rearing them – it seemed to her now that she had had cause for the towering, disabling anxieties about them; that what had seemed little plaints and sorrows in their childhoods were in fact off-drawings from much greater tragedies, from which she had tried to keep them but could not. (p265)

Blithe, innocent Urrda asks ‘Are you happy with all this, Mam?’  and what can poor Liga say?  Her daughters have made their choice in ignorance of the world’s dangers.  All she can do is to lie, to cover up the shame of their begetting, and in doing so her identity shifts as she takes on a new name so that no one will link her with the past.  (Here a bit of clever time-shifting helps, and this seems a bit of authorial cunning rather than credible but it has a purpose which is revealed in the surprise ending.)

Lanagan explores ideas about what it means to be human (which reminded me a little of ideas in Peter Hoeg’s The Woman and the Ape) and the importance of truth.

Comfort is not the aim, Branza, said Urrda with a laugh.  Comfort is what we had.  Here we have …Well Miss Dance calls this the true world.  Here we have truth!’  (p261)

Miss Dance represents the kind of woman that daughters should aspire to.  Urrda chafes at the advice given to her by Todda, to make herself a small target because dominant males have power without impunity to torment her, and worse.  She is never to walk alone; she must dress prudently.   Neither of the girls takes this advice: Urrda’s choices lead her to Miss Dance as mentor because she wants to use her powers wisely; the more compliant Branza stares down her tormentors and walks tall.

This is a fine, well structured novel, beautifully written, but for me, the breaking down of the borders between one world and another didn’t quite work.  Ramstrong’s adventures as a bear seemed bizarre, and the fairytale allusions (evil dwarf, beauty-and-the-beast) strained credulity, though there isn’t any fairytale redemption for Collaby Dought, nasty creation that he is.  Lanagan has no mercy for her evil characters, especially not the Five who suffer punishment and humiliation no less than their crime.  An eye for an eye is a very Old Testament way of looking at the world…

I don’t much care for magic realism, and this fantasy is a step too far for me.  Still, I have no hesitation in recommending this title for those who like the genre – it is surely one of the best. Tender Morsels was shortlisted for the 2008 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and there is an excellent review at Locus Online.

One of my problems in the beginning of Clarion (and, some might say, in the middle and at the end), was having novel-brain. Now one might think that any kind of writer-brain enables you to write … not always. There is a very big difference between novel-brain and short story-brain. It took me three weeks to remember what it was.

You see, I’d spent my eight weeks in the lead-up to being embedded at Clarion trying to finish a first draft of the Crusades novel. This involved learning the art of novel-brain, which on the most basic level (if you are a passably accomplished short story writer), is planning a lot and adding more in. Layers are required, like an onion or a parfait. So, I had spent MONTHS learning to layer so that my novel didn’t (oh, sweet mother of crap, I hope) read like a flimsy piece of tinsel, as insubstantial and likely to blow away in the breeze as a Dr Who set circa 1972.

And then I went to Clarion and found I had forgotten how to write short stories. My short story-brain had deserted me and gone to lie on a beach in the Bahamas. It spent its time sipping on a drink that was bright pink in colour, with at least three of those tiny umbrellas in it. This, needless to say, left me in something of a pickle. My short stories had too long a lead-up – I mean, Appian Way kind of lead-up. There was too much telling and not enough showing; too much passive and not enough active. In short, as short stories, they both sucked and blew. As chapters of novels, they may well have sucked and blown far less – but I wasn’t writing novels, was I?

It took me three weeks. Sean Williams in weeks one and two gently tried to prod me in the right direction. Hell, I even came up with the Three C’s for him. A short story is about crisis, choice and consequence. Good, innit? Do you think I could put it into effect? Nah. We had a chat about how the short story is about avoiding the ‘brown’ – the brown being the extraneous ‘stuff’ – and that the short story is all about the ‘gold’, the highlights, the facets of the story that make it shine.

In week three, Margo Lanagan gave me a pitying look. She said “You know how to do this, Angela”. And she was right … that’s when I thought out my next handy hint: the short story begins just before, in the middle of, or just after the crisis.

So, then I wrote The Navigator for Jack Dann’s week four – which seemed to do all of those things right. Jack read it and said if he was buying stories, he would have bought that one. Yay.

The short story is about Impressionism; the novel is a Renaissance painting in which you see every brush stroke. In the novel, the brown is okay – it is the workman-like fiction that carries the narrative along and it also carries the golden boats that are your brilliant ideas. The short story must be light, you’re showing a slice of something; there’s no room for brown.