Review: Changing Places, by David Lodge

Review: Changing Places, by David Lodge 

a review by Rich Horton

David Lodge was born in 1935, and died, less than a month short of his 90th birthday, this past New Year's Day. His first novel was published in 1960, and he published a total of 15 novels, as well as plays and short fiction. He was also an academic, primarily at the University of Birmingham, with a couple of interludes in the US, including at Cal Berkeley. He wrote a lot of nonfiction as well, primarily criticism, and some memoirs late in life. I read a few of his novels a number of years ago, with considerable enjoyment, and also some of his critical works, particularly The Art of Fiction. Upon his death I realized I should continue and read his best known three novels, the so-called "Campus Trilogy". The first of these is Changing Places (1975). 

Changing Places opens with the two main characters on airplanes flying in the opposite direction. Philip Swallow, a lecturer at Rummidge University, a "redbrick" institution in the industrial town of Rummidge (obviously modeled on Birmingham) is heading to Euphoria State in Plotinus, near Esseph (even more obviously based on Berkeley and San Francisco) to spend an academic year as a visiting Professor. This is part of an annual exchange between the two universities, and Swallow's counterpart, Morris Zapp, is thus heading to Rummidge. We learn about their motives -- Philip had been feeling stuck -- hadn't published anything in years; while Morris, a much more successful Professor (modeled on Stanley Fish) is having marriage problems: his wife wants a divorce, and he thinks perhaps a year in Europe might give her time to reconsider.

Both of them are at first very much struggling to adapt to their new positions. Philip has no idea what to teach in his assigned classes -- one being on writing a novel (something he has never done.) Zapp is amused and to some extent horrified by the looseness of the teaching at Rummidge, and by the mostly somewhat grimy and underheated accomodations.

One prime mover of the plot is the late '60s student unrest, which has completely engulfed Euphoria State. Swallow never seems to do much teaching, partly because the students go on strike. But he gets involved in their protest movement, sort of by accident, and becomes a surprisingly popular figure. One of the leaders is an old student of his, Charles Boon, who had caused all kinds of trouble at Rummidge and is now heading a late night call in radio show. At the same time Morris gets heavily involved in campus politics at Rummidge, which is also mildly affected by student protests but also affected by such things as who will get the next promotion and who will run the English department after the retirement of the previous rather superannuated leader.

The other issues are more personal, and turn somewhat on their precarious housing arrangements. Philip's house is in a mudslide area, and is subdivided into two flats -- one for him, and the other for three young women, one of whom turns out to be Morris Zapp's daughter thought Philip doesn't know that. They introduce him to pot, and he sleeps with Zapp's daughter before she takes up with Charles Boon. Morris, on the other hand, has vowed to stay celibate while away from his wife (though he had never been faithful before) and he has to deal with the extremely eccentric Irish doctor who lets him the upstairs of his house. And won't say much more except to note that things progress to the point where each of Swallow and Zapp are offered jobs at the university they are visiting ...

The real interest of the novel isn't in the plot, to be sure, but in the comic elements. Lodge has great fun with the academic maneuvering at each college, and also of course with what might be called sex comedy elements. He plays some formal games, too -- each of the six sections is told in a different fashion, including one entirely in letters between the Swallow and Zapp and their respective wives; another uses found text -- newspaper excerpts and such, another is in screenplay form. This is the book in which Lodge introduced the game Humiliation, in which each participant (typically literature academics) cites a very well known text that they have not read, and gets points for how many of the other participants HAVE read it -- so that you do better the more you humiliate yourself by confessing to not have read something everybody else has. 

I liked the book, but found it a bit uneven. Some of the sections were outright hilarious, but some dragged a bit. The student unrest part, and the entire portrayal of what people in those days called the "hippie subculture" seems dated. The academic maneuverings, on the other hand, and the sexual politics, are both essentially timeless, and they work pretty well. Lodge is an enjoyable writer -- often very funny indeed -- and I'll be reading at least the two loose sequels to this novel (Small World and Nice Work) -- I'd already ready a good sampling of the rest of his work.

Review: Euphoria Days, by Pilar Fraile

Review: Euphoria Days, by Pilar Fraile

a review by Rich Horton

Pilar Fraile Amador, who writes as Pilar Fraile, is a Spanish poet and a writer of short stories and novels. Euphoria Days was published as Días de euforia in Spain in 2020, and the English edition, translated by Lizzie Davis, appeared in 2024 from Great Place Books. It is her first novel to be published in English, though there have been several short stories and at least one book of poems.

Euphoria Days is science fiction, taking a satirical look at corporate culture, and at sexual relationships, and at the entanglement of those two things, in a near future setting. There are five central characters: María, Angélica, Blasco, Diana, and Carlos, and the novel weaves its way through their interconnected lives. They are all youngish -- from their twenties to perhaps 40 as the novel begins, and working in the sort of typical jobs you might expect in the near future. María's job is the most overtly SFnal: her company is working on algorithmic ways to optimize "happiness", and one thing they do is assign sexual "matches" among their employees. As the book opens, María's match with Roger is disintegrating, and her projects to improve happiness seem to be foundering, as she is haunted by nightmares about worms. Angélica works in a fertility clinic, and she discovers a notebook from a previous worker that seems to show a continuing decrease in fertility. Blasco and Diana are married, and Diana is a high-powered boss. Blasco is obsessed with online videos of pretty women, and he and Diana's marriage is foundering. Carlos is rather a player, and sort of an outlier in the general group.

Over time these people interact, sometimes without quite knowing it. Relationships form and dissipate. Jobs change. Two of the women have children via IVF (with a fairly open secret about how this in a way tangles their relationships even further.) Over a decade passes, and we get a sense of the world changing -- perhaps disintegrating -- just a tiny step out of notice of the characters, even as their lives oddly mutate. The conclusion is purposely inconclusive -- these are somewhat self-deluded characters, living in a self-deluded milieu.

The novel is effectively satirical, and at the same time an effective portrayal of its characters. Though it's SF, it's not really too interested in its extrapolations. The future is a decaying future, and in the background we hear of severe economic trouble, radical political reorganization, fertility decline, corporate dysfunction, but in the foreground the characters are living lives not too different from today. I might have been interested in further discussion of the happiness optimization algorithm mentioned at the start, but that's not really the intention here. The story suggests that algorithms certainly won't lead us to happiness -- but that our own trendy approaches to life hacks (if you will) are likewise doomed. Euphoria Days is a fine novel, well-written (and well-translated), well-characterized -- recommended.

Review: The Fixed Period, by Anthony Trollope

Review: The Fixed Period, by Anthony Trollope 

a review by Rich Horton

This novel was serialized in 1881/1882, with a book version published the latter year. It is Anthony Trollope's only science fiction novel. I love Trollope's work, so I had to try it. I'll say up front -- it's a pretty minor piece. Only for SF fans and Trollope completists, I'd say, and possibly only for people in the intersection of those sets!

The Fixed Period is set in 1980 on the fictional island of Britannula. Britannula has been independent of England for a few decades, and has established a prosperous and comfortable society. Their laws have one peculiarity: a "fixed period" of life: anyone reaching the age of 67 will be "deposited" in comfort for one year, then humanely put down. The idea is to preserve people from the ills of old age, and  to remove the burden of unproductive people from the economy.

This law was passed when no one neared that age. The novel is narrated by the President of Britannula, Mr. Neverbend (a typical Trollope name with a meaning), who spearheaded the movement for the Fixed Period. But he tells us from the start that the law has been suspended, and that Britannula has lost its independence, and is again a colony of the British Empire. He is writing this account in order to promote his ideas, and to complain about England's actions.

The trouble starts when the oldest resident of Britannula is approaching the age of 67. This is Mr. Crasweller, who is a wealthy man, and who is also Mr. Neverbend's best friend. Mr. Crasweller was a supporter of the Fixed Period legislations, but as he approaches the age of "deposition" he is increasingly reluctant. After all, he is quite healthy, in both mind and body. And, indeed, several of the older residents are beginning to make it clear that they too have changed their minds. (Hardly surprising, I say, as I'm 65 myself!) But Mr. Neverbend, true to his name, insists that the law must be enforced, and expresses his disappointment with his friend's weakness. (He is about 10 years younger -- who knows what he'd think if he was the same age!)

Mr. Crasweller's beautiful daughter Eva is another factor. Naturally, she doesn't want her father to be killed. But whoever married her stands to gain control of the Crasweller estate. One of her suitors, then, is quickly revealed as a opportunistic troll who will be glad to see Eva's father die ... but another suitor is the President's son, Jack, who, for the sake of Eva, takes up against his father's beloved Fixed Period. Another complication is a cricket match between a team from England and the locals ... and one of the Englishmen falls for Eva as well.

It's ultimately rather weak, though Trollope is an engaing enough writer that I wasn't bored. The philosophy of the Fixed Period and its opposition are both weakly argued -- the novel would have been more interesting if it was more deeply discussed, though I suspect Trollope didn't have his heart in that. (I do think Trollope is satirizing the notion that a person's only worth is his productivity, his direct economic contributions to society.) The first person narration is an issue as well -- Trollope was an absolute master at the omniscient, author-centric, point of view, and here, with Mr. Neverbend narrating (and controlling the discourse about the Fixed Period) we lose something valuable. The romance plot is paper thin, to boot, and neith Jack nor Eva really draws our interest (except perhaps for Jack's cricket exploits.) Trollope does throw in some very modest extrapolations: a war in which England and France oppose the US and Russia, a super weapon, steam bicycles, a sort of (wired) telegraph, and, most amusingly, cricket played with mechanical bowlers. 

I wondered if this was the first fiction to posit a polity with mandatory euthanasia at a fixed age. The idea has been used since in SF, of course, with the most famous examples being Isaac Asimov's Pebble in the Sky, in which the far future Earth mandates euthanasia at 60, and William Nolan and George Clayton Johnson's Logan's Run, in which the age of euthanasia is 21 (though elevated to 30 for the movie version.) Offhand I can't think of any SF with that concept earlier than 1950, when Pebble in the Sky was published, but I wouldn't be surprised if a story or two from the pulp era had posited such an idea. That would still leave primacy with Trollope -- but it turns out he actually got the idea from a Jacobean-era play! This was The Old Law, by Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, and Philip Massinger, probably dating to the 1610s. In this play, men are to be killed when they reach the age of 80, and women at the age of 60! (As one character says, "There was no woman in this Senate, certes".) It turns out this law is a fake, designed to test the virtues of the citizenship -- those who do not resist the law are deemed to be bad people. Thus, the play doesn't QUITE portray a society with mandatory euthansia -- but it certainly portrays the idea.

One final irony: shortly after this novel was published, Trollope died -- at the age of 67.

My Reading and Writing Summary: 2024

My Reading and Writing Summary: 2024

by Rich Horton

Last year I read a total of 102 novels, 6 collections, 3 works of non-fiction. Fifty-one of the novels were by men, and fifty-one by women, as close to even as you can get, mostly by accident. Nine of the novels were from 2024. Six novels were translations -- two from the Japanese, two from Russian, one from Italian, one from French. 

The best novels I read last year were Anna Karenina, Harriet Hume, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and The Last Samurai. The most sheerly enjoyable were the four Anthony Trollope novels I read. Other really good novels included Peace, by Gene Wolfe; The Lonely Girl, by Edna O'Brien; Leaping Man Hill, by Carol Emshwiller; Doting, by Henry Green; and Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, by Rivka Galchen. The best SF novel was Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. The best SF/F novel from 2024 was The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley, with honorable mention to Aliya Whitely's Three Eight One, Kelly Link's The Book of Love, Paolo Bacigalupi's Navola, and Mark Rigney's Vinyl Wonderland. The best novellas from 2024 were A Mourning Coat, by Alex Jeffers; and The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar; with The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler also a contender. My favorite non-fiction and favorite recent collection were both by E. Lily Yu: Break, Blow, Burn & Make; and Jewel Box, respectively. 

I published reviews of almost all of those novels either here or at Black Gate, with a review of Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia in Bruce Gillespie's SF Commentary #118, and a look at Frederik Pohl's SF from a labor perspective in a special issue of Journey Planet edited by Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk, and a Curiosities piece for F&SF on Una Silberrad's 1911 novel The Affairs of John Bolsover. I also published a disheartening quantity of obituaries, all at Black Gate. And I did a few other posts, including lists of favorite SF novels, and of favorite short fiction, from roughly the last 30 years. Following are links to my favorite pieces:

General

"Iconic" SF novels of the 21st Century

SF Hall of Fame 1989-2018

Anthologies I Never Got to Publish

Hugo Novel Nominees, 2024: Review Summary

The Stories and Novels of T. L. Sherred

The Novels of Carol Emshwiller

Pseudonyms Quiz

The Second Inquisition

Obituaries

Barry N. Malzberg

Vernor Vinge

Brian Stableford

Christopher Priest

Terry Bisson/Howard Waldrop/Tom Purdom

Reviews

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Harriet Hume

The Game

Anna Karenina

Peace

The Ministry of Time

Edges

Doting

Love's Shadow

Hester

Framley Parsonage

Vinyl Wonderland

Jewel Box

Break, Blow, Burn & Make

Galactic Gambit

In the Hands of Glory

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch

The City and Its Uncertain Walls

A Mourning Coat

Orbital

The Last Samurai

The Constant Nymph

Always Coming Home

An Infinite Summer

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Review: The Lake, by Yasunari Kawabata

Review: The Lake, by Yasunari Kawabata

a review by Rich Horton

Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) was the first Japanese winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I have previously read a few of his novels, including his most famous one, Snow Country, which I think is a remarkable novel indeed. (My review of Snow Country and Thousand Cranes is here.) I happened across a paperback edition of the English translation of The Lake, a 1954 novel translated in 1974 by Reiko Tsukimora. (This edition was published by Kodansha International, in a series called Japan's Modern Writers.) I had not heard of this novel, which I think is generally ranked as a lesser Kawabata work. It was made into a movie called Woman of the Lake by Yoshishige Yoshida in 1966, but the plot of the movie diverges in quite significant ways from that of the novel.

As with many of Kawabata's novels, the story revolves around the failure of a lonely man to establish a true relationship with any woman. Kawabata's male characters tend to be almost listless, drifters through life. And his women tend to be rather sad, perhaps unhappy with the men they encounter, perhaps themselves too listless, drifters in their own ways. The Lake is like that with a key difference -- the main character, Gimpei Momoi, is darker and creepier than other characters in the Kawabata novels I've read.

We meet Gimpei at a bathhouse in a rural town -- with him wondering if he is a wanted man. He is washed and massaged by the young and pretty attendant -- routine treatment in Japan at that time (a few years after the Second World War) -- but we get a sense right away of Gimpei's awkwardness. He's obsessed with his ugly feet, and he makes mildly inappropriate comments to the attendant, though nothing terrible happens. We also realize he has stolen 200,000 yen from a woman in Tokyo who threw her purse at him because he was following her.

Gimpei, apparently, was a high school teacher who had been fired for having a relationship with one of his students. Throughout the novel we learn somewhat more about that relationship, and also about Gimpei's youth, his father's accidental death (or murder?), and his attraction to his slightly older cousin. We also learn about the woman, Miyako, who lost the purse -- she is the mistress of a wealthy older man, and she is convinced that she is throwing her life away, but ... can't help herself. There are other threads, all eventually cohering and building up Gimpei's sad life story -- his treatment of a prostitute during the War, the late resolution of his affair with the high school girl, and his obsession with another young girl, perhaps 15, who is seeing a friend of Miyako's brother. The story drifts -- on purpose -- as Gimpei drifts, and it's clear that his life is going to remain what it is, unless he is driven to another criminal act. But he doesn't have, say, Humbert Humbert's murderous drive ... (The book was written at more or less the same time as Lolita.)

I enjoyed reading the novel -- Kawabata's writing is elegant and affecting, though I didn't think this translation as well done as the Edward Seidensticker translations of earlier books I read. (There are some odd bumps, and some odd word usages, such as (multiple times) using the word "scaring" where "scary" was wanted.) The state of postwar Japan is acutely portrayed (a common Kawabata theme, I think) and the lost characters are believable. It is a bit difficult to fully engage with a character as lumpen and creepy as Gimpei -- but surely that's entirely Kawabata's intention. 

Kawabata was a truly great writer, and I strong recommend his work. But I wouldn't start here.

Review: The English Understand Wool, by Helen DeWitt

Review: The English Understand Wool, by Helen DeWitt

a review by Rich Horton

Having read and loved Helen DeWitt's first novel, The Last Samurai, I immediately checked out her other work. This includes a 2011 novel called Lightning Rods, which seems very satirical SF of the sort that Galaxy used to publish in the 1950s, except that due to its subject matter it certainly couldn't have been published in Galaxy in the 1950s! Her other fiction comprises a forthcoming collaborative novel, Your Name Here (with Ilya Gridneff), and some shorter work, including the collection Some Trick, and also The English Understand Wool. I bought the collection, and this short book. That latter is published by Storybook ND, a project of New Directions, which has become DeWitt's primary publisher (after some difficulty with her previous publishers.) The Storybook ND editions are intended to be quick reads -- novella length or less (The English Understand Wool is perhaps 12,000 words) -- presented in attractive slim hardcover format.

The English Understand Wool, published in 2022, is a delightful tricksy work. It's narrated by an adolescent girl named perhaps Margeurite, or perhaps something else beginning with G. She lives with her mother, only seeing her father on rare occasions. Her mother is very wealthy, and they live primarily in Marrakech, but, not being Muslims, they take Ramadan off and travel. In luxury, of course. Her mother has very strict notions of behavior -- of avoiding "mauvais ton". Her daughter must learn to ride, must learn to play the piano, and to practice strictly. And, of course, must learn how to be truly fashionable -- as in understanding that only the English know how to make an outfit properly out of wool. (The French, though, understand linen.) 

All this comes to us in DeWitt's narrator's gloriously deadpan voice. And over time we realize that something else is going on. What are these letters addressed to "Marguerite" from someone named "Bethany" (surely that name by itself is mauvais ton!) We do quickly learn the reason for this -- "Marguerite" is writing a memoir, and her publisher's representative in unsatisfied so far with the amount of herself the author seems to want to reveal.

I myself won't reveal more -- the story is short enough you'll be glad to find out on your own. But it's slick and clever and twisty and very funny in a very dry way. It takes on the foibles of the very rich, of the publishing world (a DeWitt bête noire, it would seem), and of celebrity. It's really a delight, and though the book might be a bit pricy for its length, I was glad I got it.

Review: Navola, by Paolo Bacigalupi

Review: Navola, by Paolo Bacigalupi

a review by Rich Horton

Navola is Paolo Bacigalupi's eighth novel, and his first in seven years. His previous novels were relatively near future science fiction, with rather dystopian themes, focusing on environmental damage and corrupt corporations and politicians. Navola is something of a departure -- it is pure fantasy, set in a clear analogue of Renaissance Italy -- the title city perhaps most nearly resembles 15th Century Florence. (And the very language is clearly Italianate in flavor.) This strategy of building a fantasy setting by taking an historical location as a close model reminds me of many of Guy Gavriel Kay's novels. I will add that while Navola doesn't have an environmental focus, nor is it quite "dystopian" or post-apocalyptic, like much of Bacigalupi's previous work, but it is very dark in tone, and absolutely features corrupt politicians and scheming bankers, and a lot of brutality. And, not to bury the lede -- I loved it. It is an immensely entertaining novel. It is quite long, somewhat over 200,000 words. And it's the first of a series -- there will be at least one more book.

The story is told by Davico di Regulai da Navola. He is telling it to an unidentified person -- I have a guess as to who this person might be, someone we do not meet in this book, but I could be entirely wrong. Davico is the son of Devonaci di Regulai, who heads the Banca Regulai, an extremely influential merchant bank. The di Regulai are not technically aristocrats, and claim to be apolitical, but they are of the "Archinomi" -- a leading family of Navola, and their financial influence, bolstered by Devonaci's behind the scenes scheming, gives them immense power. Navola is nominally semi-democratic, with a 100 person council called the Callendra, and a sort of mayor, the Callarino. And there is a good deal of dissent, much from the "nomo anciens", or the old names of the city, who resent the loss of power to the likes of the di Regulai, and especially to the lower classes, the vianomae.

Davico grows up fairly happily. He learns his father's trade, though he despairs of ever equaling his father's skill, and especially his fathers ability to plot. He has friends among the other high families. His father's mistress, a slave named Ashia, serves as essentially his mother, who had died when he was very young. He is taught arithmetic and writing by his father's chief numenari, Merio; and the use of weapons by his father's guardsman, Aghan Khan. He remains rather an innocent, even after an attempt on his family is made by some other jealous families, and brutally beaten off. One of the guilty families is exiled, with a daughter just about Davico's age kept with the di Regulai as a hostage. This is Celia, who becomes in essence Davico's sister. Other key characters include Cavezza, Devonaci's stilettotore, a dangerous man who enforces punishments Devonaci commands, and who spies on the di Regulai enemies; Siena Furia, the only woman who leads an Archinomi family; and of course the ancient dragon eye that Devonaci keeps in his library, and which seems linked somehow with Davico.

The story proceeds from there, as Davico grows to adulthood. Davico remains rather innocent, even as intrigues wind around him -- another uprising, suppressed even more brutally than before; a plan revealed by his father to extend Navola's power, by both military means and by strategic marriages -- and Davico realizes that he does not wish to marry anyone but Celia, but of course this is impossible. Davico takes part in commercial and political negotiations, often to his father's disappointment. He learns that people he considers friends are ready to betray him. He realizes that his future is largely determined for him -- and he is increasingly frustrated; especially as he is forced to help arrange a key marriage for Celia, to a man he considers a fool. And then -- well, I will tell no more, except to say that his entire life and the lives of everyone close to him are utterly upended, and the novel takes a truly horrifying turn.

I found it all intensely involving. I can't say it is precisely new -- this sort of thing is a familiar fantasy trope, but very well executed here. The fantastical elements themselves are relatively slight, though important. The political maneuvering is believable and interesting. Davico is a likeable character, generally a good man but also often obtuse, blind to the needs and feelings of many about him, and unwilling to make a stand against injustice at times. The villains are terrible but in a very human way. The depictions of Davico's world -- of his city, the countryside, the buildings, the political divides -- are effective, sometimes lovely, sometimes dark. 

Navola is a very fine fantasy novel, and I am eagerly looking forward to its sequel.