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.

Review: Three Eight One, by Aliya Whiteley

Review: Three Eight One, by Aliya Whiteley

by Rich Horton

Aliya Whiteley has been publishing interesting short fiction for a couple of decades, and novels for about half that time. I've reprinted one of her stories in my Year's Best series ("Fog and Pearls at King's Cross Junction" from 2020) but I  hadn't yet read a novel. But at a glance her most recent book, her sixth, from 2024, looked intriguing, so I have read it.

Three Eight One is quite strange, both in structure and content. It is framed as a personal project by Rowena Savalas, begun early in the 24th Century. Rowena tells us she's 17 years old physically, but 663 years old "streaming", and we gather that people live in digital form primarily, but may incarnate themselves into a physical body. Rowena's project is to research a digital document from the "Age of Riches" -- digital reaches, thus extending from late in the 20th century to early in the 22nd century, we are told. Rowena's era, the "Age of Curation", spends some effort trying to understand the quintillions of bytes of online date from our time. And Rowena is studying something called The Dance of the Horned Road, created July 23, 2024.

You probably have questions. I certainly did! The Dance of the Horned Road is the first person narrative of a young woman named Fairly, living in a walled village. She is about to go on a "quest", a common effort for young people of her village. This quest involves periodically pressing a button on a Chain Device, and attempting to follow the "Horned Road", as the Breathing Man follows. The sections of Fairly's narrative are each 381 words long. They are often glossed with footnotes by Rowena. 

This structure obviously somewhat resembles that of Geoff Ryman's 253, but really there is little resemblance between the two novels save the similarly sized sections. As far as this narrative goes, despited that fact that it was ostensibly created in 2024, neither Fairly's home nor anywhere she visits on her quest can plausibly be recognized as present day places, though the technology is vaguely current (or perhaps a few decades before now.) Rowena's footnotes acknowledge this, and often try to define aspects of Fairly's milieu, while also discussing her own responses, and something of her own life.

Fairly's journey takes her to a variety of places -- tending bar for a while at the nearby big town; a trek into the mountains where she is hosted by strange animals called cha (which is also what the three pieces of money she's been given for her quest are called); into a cave; across the sea; working on a pig farm -- or are they cha?; in a city of treehouses with a group of brothers who claim to have been royalty; joining a caravan that seems analogous to her quest; up in a balloon; and finally on a starship heading for a newly colonized planet; and finally drifting in a spaceship's lifeboat back to Earth and home. She makes friends, takes lovers, and encounters the cha in various forms, including repeatedly humans in cha costumes. Are the cha, as rumored, aliens who have taken over Earth and forced humanity into this odd sociality? Are they simply symbols? And what of the humans in cha costumes? To say nothing of the Breathing Man, who never stops following her, but in the end seems especially close to her. Things only get odder when she returns to her village.

Behind that there are the hints of Rowena's life. Her project is interrupted by a decades long period of "Lived Experience", which in some way seems similar to Fairly's quest. We learn that her people only live in bodies for 70 years, and then must die -- yet return to digital life. Her commentary on Fairly is -- interesting but perhaps not wholly trustworthy?

In the end I'm not sure what the novel means, but it's very interesting and very thought provoking. And it's astonishingly new -- original. I wonder -- how much of everything we read is simulations, or digital life, or simply story. That seems the only way to explain the strangeness of much of Fairly's quest. Or the way Fairly's curious life, allegedly in or before 2024, aligns with our own 21st century. And what are the cha, really? Is the space travel real? Is digital life a way to remove humans from Earth's ecosphere? A radical way of living lightly on the land? Is the village life Fairly grows up something to aspire to? Or a misstep? Is it all a metaphor for constructing a life? Or a story?

I don't have answers. But I'm glad to be able to ask the questions.

Review: The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt

Review: The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt

by Rich Horton

Helen DeWitt's first novel was published in 2000, and became something of a sensation, at least in the haut-literary world. I think it sold OK, but for publishing company reasons, it went out of print, and was only republished in 2016 by New Directions. I will confess I had not heard of this book, and I need to thank Naomi Kanakia for bringing it to my attention. It has been named the Best Novel of the 21st Century, which I admit that annoys me, because it was published in the 20th Century, admittedly in its last year. 

And you know what? Maybe it is the best novel of the period 2000-2024! Or, at least it's in the conversation. (I'd offer Piranesi as another candidate.) The Last Samurai is a very funny novel built on a rather desperate, and at time tragic, substrate. It is profoundly clever without sacrificing depth. It's well written, unconventionally punctuated in an effective fashion, constantly readable and engaging, and when it wants to be, profoundly moving.

The novel is told by two characters. Sybilla Newman is an American who came to Oxford for college, got her degree and went on to postgraduate studies, and realized that her research subject is worthless. She needs a job to stay in England -- the thought of return to her family is insupportable -- her father is a motel magnate and her mother a permanently frustrated musician. She manages to get a job at a publishing company, and at a reception for one of their authors she ends up in bed with him, and has a child. And now she's telling us about her efforts to teach her precocious son, who is named Ludovic or Steven or David. Sybilla's experiences with education have convinced her that schools are all terrible, and she is teaching her son in between a job retyping old magazines, and more or less simultaneously watching Kurosawa's classic film Seven Samurai over and over again.

Essentially the book follows Ludo's learning process from the age of 3 or so to about 12. Sybilla's strategy is mostly to teach him languages and let him read anything he wants, and this more or less works except he is always asking questions, which makes it hard for her to do her job. But he is -- or seems to be -- utterly brilliant. By the time he reaches school age he is quite unsuited for conventional instruction and soon drops out ... and then decides he wants to know his father. But Sybilla refuses to tell him anything about the man -- who was a one night stand, after all, and who doesn't know that he has a son. And the rest of the book follows Ludo's search for his father, which morphs after a while to a search for any suitable father. 

But of course that doesn't really say much about the novel. The key is the telling, of course. The voice. Both Sibylla and Ludovic have recognizable and plausible voices. There are typographical tricks, but really not terribly exotic ones. There are many languages, none of which besides English and a tiny amount of French I know -- and that doesn't matter. The day by day events are eccentric to some extent -- constantly riding the Circle Line, sitting in museums to do homework, tracking down potential fathers and spying on them -- but they are also mundane in a sense, and confined to London. There are running jokes -- the chicken places named after a state that is never Kentucky, for example. The depictions of the potential fathers' lives are strange and intriguing -- they are travel writers and crusading journalists, diplomats and avant garde composers, Nobel Prize winnters, fantasists and honest men. 

What is the novel about? Education, of course. Motherhood and fatherhood. Art. Music. Writing. Marriage. What it is to be a good man, or a bad man. Suicide. Language. Boredom. Seven Samurai. There is art criticism: Sybilla has severe tastes. (Lord Leighton (whose Flaming June graces the cover of one of my books) comes in for a lot of derision, as does the man who got her pregnant, and Seven Samurai imitations like The Magnificent Seven.) It all works -- it's laugh out loud funny at times, wry at times, wrenching at times. It's a novel of and about the 20th Century, that still feels ragingly original, and yet in a curious way, despite its experiments, despite its postmodernity, seems as ambitious and comprehensive as the great Victorian novels.

Review: Bird Isle, by Jack Vance

Review: Bird Isle (aka Isle of Peril, aka Bird Island), by Jack Vance

by Rich Horton

Bird Isle is one of the least known of all Jack Vance books. One reason is that it's not science fiction -- it's a crime novel, one of the first two he ever published (in 1957), both under different one-off pseudonyms. Bird Isle was published as Isle of Peril, by "Alan Wade", and the other 1957 crime novel was Take My Face, published  as by "Peter Held". Mystery House, at that time, was an imprint of Thomas Bouregy and Company, formerly Bouregy and Curl. As far as I can tell, Bouregy and Curl was a rather low end house, best known in SF for publishing the first book edition of Charles Harness's The Paradox Men (as Flight Into Yesterday.) (Samuel Curl got his start in publishing working with Alan Hillman, who published Vance's first book, The Dying Earth.) Mystery House had been an imprint of Arcadia House, Samuel Curl's earlier publishing venture, which Curl retained when he joined with Bouregy, and which Bouregy retained when Curl sold out to him in 1956. At any rate, I doubt Isle of Peril earned Vance much money, nor did it likely sell well. Copies of that edition are rare and go for quite high prices.

Bird Isle was reprinted under that name in an Underwood Miller edition in 1988, and then again, along with Take My Face and the 1985 crime novel Strange Notions in the Vance Integral Edition in 2002 -- this time retitled Bird Island. (Take My Face was retitled The Flesh Mask, and Strange Notions was called Strange People, Queer Notions. The VIE was prepared with Jack Vance's approval, and his preferred titles were used throughout. More recently, Spatterlight Press, run by Vance's son, has reprinted most or all of Vance's oeuvre, generally using the VIE titles (and texts) but for some reason reverting to Bird Isle in this case. (I do think Bird Isle is a better title than either of the other two.)

Well, that's a lot about the publication history. (I am generally intrigued by such details, and in this case I was very happy to discover the Spatterlight Press editions, which look nice and often have contemporary introductions (though the introductions don't seem to appear in the ebook editions.) But what about the novel? I have to say that Bird Isle is somewhat disappointing -- it's very definitely one of the weaker Vance novels. I will say that Vance's later crime novels, often published as by "John Holbrook Vance", are viewed as considerably better, and I personally am very fond of the two Sheriff Joe Bain mysteries, The Fox Valley Murders (1966) and The Pleasant Valley Murders (1967).

The novel is set on the title island, which is a short way off the coast near Monterey. There is a rather ramshackle hotel there, and a girls' finishing school, and nothing else. (The choice of the name "Bird Isle" seems partly a nod at the "birds" in the finishing school.) The owner of the hotel, realizing he needs more money to make his hotel more attractive to guests, decides to sell off the real estate he owns on the island, which is everything but the part where the school is. And quite quickly he manages to dispose of the several parcels he subdivides the island into. The buyers include Mortimer Archer, a retiree who dabbles in photography; the Ottenbrights, a lawyer and his wife; Ike McCarthy, a rough-edged Alaskan fisherman, with a plan to farm whales; and Milo Green, a young man who makes his living writing light poetry for newspapers; and Miss Pickett, headmistress of the finishing school, who buys a packet to keep the new neighbors away from her girls.

Things seem to go swimmingly for a bit, as the hotel's business picks up nicely, Milo starts building a house, and also meets Miss Pickett's very lovely niece. One of Miss Pickett's new students kicks up her traces a bit, and looking for for excitement, finds a way to make some money -- a way involving Mortimer Archer's photograpy skills, which not surprisingly are more aimed at women au naturel than at nature per se. There's an Eskimo love potion, too. And there's a rumor that the island was used by the Mob in Prohibition days, so there might be a hidden treasure ...

Much of this is potentially pretty fun. Alas, only some of it actually is. Things like the love potion are both implausible and bit distasteful. The humor is played rather too broadly, and much falls flat. The major crime aspect is a bit too obvious, and resolved a bit too easily. I think were Vance to have addressed this set of ideas a decade later, and with more time to develop the story, and more experience as well, it could have been nice enough. But as it is -- and presumably with Vance not at full motivation, given the pseudonymous nature of the book, and the presumably tiny payment -- the end result doesn't stand anywhere close to prime Jack Vance.

Review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami

Review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami

by Rich Horton

Haruki Murakami is one of the most celebrated contempory Japanese writers, and a large portion of his work is SF or Fantasy or just weird. As such I have been meaning to read him for a long time, but only now have I got around to it. I will note that The City and Its Uncertain Walls may not be the best place to start with him -- or, rather, my reaction to it may be different that that of readers who have read a lot of his work. One reason is that the book reworks some material first published as a novella with which Murakami was unsatisfied, and then revised to form one thread of his 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I am also told that the protagonist is a somewhat typical Murakami male lead -- lonely, a love a books and music, and somewhat obsessive in his love affairs. Indeed, one book club friend of mine immediately asked if the book features a nerdy solitary man (almost an incel, she suggested, though not really) who at one point falls into a deep hole. And, yes, this novel does!

Outlining the plot of this novel really tells one very little about how it works. So I'll be brief. A nameless narrator tells the story in three parts. The first is written in second person, addressing the girl he fell in love with as a teenage. When he was 17 and she 16, they spent a lot of time together, walking and talking, occasionally kissing, writing long letters to each other, but nothing more. Much of what they talked and wrote about was a strange walled city. The people in the city have no shadows. The girl seems to believe that she is actually the shadow of a girl who lives in the city. Over time it seems that the city is actually an invention of the two -- but an invention that is oddly real. The two are desperatly in love -- then the girl disappears -- or, at least, becomes completely unresponsive to the boy's letters. He goes to college, gets his degree, has brief relationsship with other women, but never forgets the girl. Then, in his mid-40s, he finds himself mysteriously transported to a city -- a walled city. He gains entry at the cost of his shadow, and gets a job as a dream reader at the library -- and the librarian is the girl he had loved as a teenager, still seeming only 16 or so. Over some time he learns to read dreams, and becomes friends with the girl (in a nonsexual way -- and she does not recognize him at all) -- but when he realizes his shadow -- forced to remain outside the city -- is dying, he faces a choice: reunite with his shadow so that it can survive, and then return to the "real" world, or stay in the city.

The next and longest part follows the narrator's life back in the real world. He remembers his time in the city, but not really how it ended. No time sseems to have passed in the "real" world while he was in the city. He has become dicontented with his rather mundane job, and he has enough money (having lived a somewhat spare single life since college) that he can take some time off, and, inspired by some strange dreams, he decides to look for a job in a library. He finds one in a mountain village some distance from Tokyo, and somewhat to his surprise, is hired as head librarian. The situation there is a bit strnage, especially the previous head librarian, who continues to give him advice. But the narrator adjusts, and eventrually forms a tentative relationship with a woman, and then gets involved with a teenaged boy who seems to be on the spectrum, and comes to the library to obsessively read, and eventually tells the narrator that he wants to escape to the walled city -- somehow he learned of the city despite the narrator telling no one but the mysterious former head librarian. Which leads to the events of the third part -- which I'll leave untold.

All this is indeed mysterious, but by itself perhaps thin gruel for a 500 page novel. (And in all honesty the middle part could probably have been cut a bit.) But for me it really worked. The novel casts a real spell. The narrator’s teenage love affair is affecting. The city itself is convincingly strange, with unicorns, clocks without hands, the everchanging walls, the gatekeeper, the old dreams the narrator reads. The mountain town he moves to seems in its isolation to somewhat mirror the otherworldly city. The narrator’s adult relationship with a woman who owns a coffee shop is affecting as well, and more mature than the narrator’s earlier affair. His friendship with his predecessor, Mr. Koyasu, is amusing and involving and at another level, rather sad. Most of all, there is everywhere an air of mystery. There is also a sense of emptiness, and a concomitant loneliness. There are really very few characters of any significance, and one senses that all the characters that matter to us – the narrator, his teenaged girlfriend, Mr. Koyasu, the perhaps autistic boy he meets late in the book, the woman in the coffee shop – are ultimately very lonely, very isolated, and so the importance of the connections we do see them form is enhanced.

As for the prose -- I am of two minds about it. Murakami has an exceptional may with striking and original images. And I was not ever bored, despite his habit of almost obsessive description of mundane things like clothes, and with his almost pedantic rendering of dialogue. All this, in the end, really works. But I did have trouble with some aspects of the writing, that just possibly lie more at the feet of the translator. Occasional phrases in English are outright clichés, and I don’t know if these are direct translations from the original or an example of the translator using an English cliché in place of a perhaps less trite Japanese expression. Some of the phrasing is stilted in a way that suggests possibly a too literal rendering of the structure of the sentences in the Japanese, when a slight reformulation would have read more smoothly. And there are curiously annoying bit such as rendering dimensions in English units in a slightly unnatural way -- something is described as "about 6 and a half feet tall" when the original probably read "two meters", for example, or a square room is described as about 13 feet by 13 when, again, the original likely said 4 meters on a side.

The above quibbles are minor, though. I was enchanted by the novel, at times transported. There are passages of unexpected beauty, of pathos, and of deep mystery. Perhaps  it is not a great novel, but it's a very good one.

Review: Alibi, by Sharon Shinn

Review: Alibi, by Sharon Shinn

by Rich Horton

Sharon Shinn's new novel, Alibi, features, as it says right on the cover, "Romance. Teleportation. Murder."  I confess I had thought of Shinn as mostly a fantasy writer. (I've read her novel General Winston's Daughter, which I quite enjoyed, and I have a couple of her Elemental Blessings novels on my TBR pile, and those are all fantasy.) But this book is nearish future science fiction, and quite effectively so. The words above suggests it's at once a romance novel, a murder mystery, and SF -- and that's fair enough, but I think the SF part dominates. (Well, and the character interactions -- not just the love story but an extensive network of family, friends, students, etc.) 

The novel was published in November 2024, by Fairwood Press. I bought my copy at World Fantasy this year, and was able to have Sharon Shinn sign it for me. (Sharon and I both live in St. Louis, and we have known each other for some time, and indeed we both did a writing workshop for philosophers at Saint Louis University a couple of years ago.)

The book is set some decades in the future. The main novum is teleportation -- the whole world seems connected by an enormous network of teleportation booths. Air travel is as far as I can tell nonexistent (perhaps there are cargo flight?) and the airports have become hubs for longer distance teleportation, but the cities are webbed with booths as well, and sufficiently wealthy people might even have booths in their homes. And, very skillfully presented in the background, there is a good deal of subtle speculation about just how this technology changes people's lives.

The first person narrator is Taylor Kendall, a thirty-something native of Chicago who now teaches at a private school in Houston. She lives in Houston and teaches in person there, but because of the teleportation, she can keep in constant touch with her best friend in Atlanta, and her family in Chicago. After a brief prologue establishing that there will be a murder, and that Taylor will be a suspect, we go back a few months, when Taylor is offered a job as a private tutor to the 19 year old son of Duncan Phillips, an extremely rich man who lives in Chicago. Taylor takes the job, and begins to teach Quentin Phillips, and quickly comes to like him. The kicker is that he suffers from a degenerative disease, and isn't expected to live much more than five more years. But he's an eager and engaging boy, and Taylor becomes very invested in his life.

Quentin's father is mostly absent, and so Taylor's interactions are with his staff -- Francis, the steward, Bram, the head of security, and Dennis, Quentin's physical therapist. It is quickly clear that all three men love Quentin and hate his father. Soon Taylor becomes part of sort of a circle of protectors of Quentin -- and when she meets Duncan Phillips, she realizes why the others hate him -- and also realizes that he is particularly dangerous, and creepy, to women. 

The novel then follows Taylor's tutoring of Quentin, her interactions with the three men on Duncan's staff (especially Bram, as sparks quickly fly between he and Taylor -- different people but both wary of relationships after unsuccessful marriages); her professional life as an English teacher (with some crises involving her students,) and her social life, centered on her friend Marika, her brother Jason, and his friend Domenic. All this is in a way mundane, but it's very enjoyable, and all along we get glimpses both of the teleportation-affected society, and of Quentin's prospects and how they are affected by his distant father. There are romances for a few of the characters, and hints of hope for Quentin's future.

And then, surprisingly late in the novel for a murder mystery, the murder happens. And from there things rush towards a conclusion. There is some nice misdirection about the killer, with of course teleportation involved in providing -- or removing -- alibis for the characters; and an exciting (if just slightly convenient) resolution, with a surprising (but not unfair) solution to the mystery.

I really enjoyed Alibi. It's fair to say that the opening is a bit of a slow burn -- but appropriately so -- and before long, even while in a curious way little happens but ordinary (future) life, the novel becomes quite absorbing. We root for the characters, we care about them, and we believe their interactions. And the conclusion is quite satisfying.