Strange Horizons, July 4 & 11, 2016

Strange Horizons, July 4, 2016

“Sweet Marrow” by Vajra Chandrasekara

Reviewed by Eliot Fintushel

Vajra Chandrasekara’s short story “Sweet Marrow” has admirable wordsmithing and very clever compositional elements. The rhythms of sentences, especially in the opening, neatly reflect the rhythms of the life they depict: frenetic strings of clauses and complex sentence structures track the Byzantine work of protagonist Ulna in her covert information gathering for “the Department.” The whole is organized into sections with tongue-in-cheek titles including a running gag, “Interludes,” a sort of comic relief in which the protagonist is shown taking a variety of online quizzes. Some sections are only a few sentences long, and the form itself is made the subject of comic self-reference: the protagonist, we are told, has a background in journalism that has predisposed her to write all her reports in sections.

In the world of the story, governments change, but the Department of Psychosocial Monitoring and Evaluation, for which Ulna works, endures. (Think of the longevity of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI through a succession of politically various governments.) The Department, feeling the pulse of society, actually instigates crimes and a degree of disorder in order to stabilize the country, a sort of process of social inoculation; aware if the constant possibility of regime change, however, it knows how to cover its tracks and change its cover story.

The story seeks to view all this through the lens of Ulna’s relationship with her housemate and bedmate, the eponymous Marrow, a journalist. Their sharing or withholding of information from each other comprises the essential movement of the plot.

It is a problem, then, that the author actually gives us no relationship and no persons at all but only schemata, ciphers. There are, it is true, some very astute gems of psychological insight—e.g.: “‘I’m going to have a migraine later,’ Ulna says, in the tone that means I’m teasing but I’m a little bit not teasing, and do you see how I’m putting myself through something unpleasant because I love you and that means you owe me.”—but because there is no palpable character to which these insights might adhere, they are wasted. The author conveys no feeling of the life of a character, the life of a relationship. The entire story seems to take place at arm’s length, through summary narrative, with the characters, detailed as they may sometimes be, never amounting to more than vectors for an idea.

Mr. Chandrasekara’s is a good idea, I think, and cleverly conveyed—the machinations of an organization of ancient lineage to preserve its own power by manipulating information and allegiances, sometimes through murder and other crimes. Also interesting is the examination of the tension between the press and the government as instantiated in the relationship of the two main characters. However, in the end, though there is much to admire in the thinking and in the compositional scaffolding of “Sweet Marrow,” there is no sweetness in it.

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Eliot Fintushel’s newest novel, Zen City, is available from Zero Books, online, or from your neighborhood bookseller.

Strange Horizons, July 11, 2016

“Water, Birch, and Blood” by Sara Norja

Reviewed by Eliot Fintushel

Sara Norja’s is a good story on a very old, very popular theme—the tension between, on the one side, the deep world of archetype and myth, and on the other, our everyday life. William Blake wrote poetry about it. The Grimm Brothers collected folktales about it, and Joseph Campbell did his exegeses. The genre of fantastic fiction is full of such tales, and let’s not forget Walter Mitty.

A woman, Elna, with her wife and son, visits her childhood home, where her sister and old mother and father still live. Birds and oppressive heat are omnipresent, both of them messengers from another world. Despite her efforts, at first, to forget her past, a magpie’s gift of a stone to her child and the impact of a dive from a jetty, remind Elna of a childhood excursion into an enchanted land, where she had been drawn to help save the Bear Queen. The crows, messengers of the other world, have clouded her memory, and Elna herself has dissembled and continues to dissemble whenever her angst at the separation from the supernal realm is noticed by anyone, including her bedmate. But now the Bear Queen is dying, and Elna wishes, through the spell of water, birch, and blood, to re-enter the other world to help save her—which may involve an apparent suicide.

It’s a compelling tale, but the telling is mediocre. The writing is embarrassingly clichéd, often awkward or plodding. It’s full of missed opportunities for vibrant moments—every time an image or extraordinary circumstance presents itself, it is dispatched with a summary phrase or another cliché. “The birds are noisy in their celebration of the dawn.”

The turning phrase of the whole story, the Bear Queen’s teaching, is only given near the end: “Find the magic in your own world, small one. Be brave and live.” But given at the end, it feels ad hoc; the proper way would have been to give that quote—or some adumbration of it—earlier on, so that its statement near the end would have the feeling of verisimilitude.

Around the fire, one would surely enjoy Sara Norja as a storyteller, but as a writer—in English, anyway—she is wanting.

There may be a psychological layer to this story that I’m not completely getting. Elna’s emphatic declaration of her relief at her mother’s approval of her girlfriend may indicate that the couple’s being same-sex is somehow to be viewed as an issue; then the other world and the death throes of the Bear Queen may be on some level metaphorical. And Elna’s own this-world mother is very old, possibly near death.

In any case, this good story wants better writing.

Eliot Fintushel once did pantomime under the anti-aircraft gun of a German training ship in NY Harbor for a party of UN diplomats.