If you've been reading this blog for any length of time you'll probably know that my tastes can be quite specific. My relationship with Fantasy & Science Fiction has been a turbulent one: large scale booms and slumps in interest triggered by particular authors or movements lead me on to investigate contemporaries writing comparable material, earlier writers that influenced them, and so on. This is how I read: I rarely go for new works by new authors because I'm mostly too busy with books written twenty or thirty years ago whose echoes, I have been told, can be found in the works of authors I'm already a fan of. Miéville sent me in the direction of Moorcock and M. John Harrison (to name but two) who in turn brought me to Clark Ashton Smith. Vandermeer brought me to Borges and Italo Calvino, who then sent me off after the Thousand and One Arabian Nights. I tend to go backward in time more than forward. I don't often go out on a limb. I couldn't tell you who the top five best-selling Fantasy writers of the moment are - I don't have a clue.
We have a pact, new Fantasy fiction and I: I'll read you if you'll show me Something A Bit Different. To explain what I mean by "different" (although at times I'm not sure myself) I'll put it in context: the advent of the New Weird early this decade changed everything for me. I can't really read the George R.R. Martins of this world anymore, the Joe Abercrombies (even though I'm told he's quite good) and so on - my bearings and landmarks have now been irretrievably altered, and the appearance of words like Epic, High or Heroic beside Fantasy is more likely to make me put down a book than pick it up. After the New Weird, traditional Fantasy just doesn't really do it for me anymore - or rather I don't see it as a continuing, living genre in which I should invest my attention. "Show me something a bit different!" I cry. "Well, you know what I mean..." They shrug, as if to say "feudal intrigue and swordfights: what more could you want?" I reread 'Perdido Street Station' for the trillionth time instead.
This brings me to 'Nights of Villjamur'. I heard about Mark Charan Newton early this year and the Internet hype for his second novel (although the first from a major publisher) has been absolutely deafening. As I said, I tend to do a lot of my book buying via references and influences, and as such I read a few interviews, took a look at his blog and all seemed mighty promising. So, aside from slight misgivings about appearances of the word Epic in relation to the book, I went ahead and preordered with appetite whetted and expectations set.
When I finally read the novel I wasn't disappointed. One major factor in my enjoyment was the subgenre/tradition in which it is placed: the Dying Earth. There's something very cool about Newton's resurrection of this form of fiction, one that originates from the pulp Weird days where Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Horror were still all the contents of a great glorious melting pot rather than being neatly divided and subdivided into marketing categories. Mark has stated in interviews that he previously attempted to write New Weird but turned away from it because editors nowadays won't touch it with a barge pole. I have a suspicion, the same one that arose when reading 'Thunderer' and 'Gears of the City' by Felix Gilman, that the author's trying to smuggle in some of that inter-genre, New Weird, a bit different goodness on the sly. There's enough swashbuckling swords and sorcery, machiavellian machinations of powers and dominions, and so on here to keep the readers of the Fantasy mainstream on board, yet when you take a closer look you realise that the "magic" might well actually be salvaged high-tech of a ravaged future long past and that the characters and society of the novel are, below the surface, more akin in many ways to the inhabitants of a real-world modern city than those of days of yore. Indeed, this is no mere stale tale of the grand destinies of the great and the good, rather at times we see relatively ordinary people with their relatable worries about careers and relationships, working and living in what comes across as a real city rather than a hackneyed Fantasy backdrop. This is one of the things that I liked in Miéville's Bas Lag novels. It's one of the things that keep me reading in the genre at all.
This sense of Villjamur as a working city full of individuals and their lives as opposed to a broadly sketched stage for big events comes across in Newton's handling of its numerous non-human inhabitants. He takes their unique characteristics, with their advantages and drawbacks, and shows (with evident thought) exactly how they fit into society, for instance showing us why the rumel might be particularly suited to police work, why garuda are found in particular sections of the armed forces, or how a banshee might assist in a murder enquiry. They aren't just quasi-human monster-folk there for the sake of it. It is a coherent and expansively imagined world.
I'm quite glad I read 'Nights of Villjamur' shortly after finishing Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun'. I picked up a few things in the former that I'm pretty sure are references to the latter, for instance a certain token given by one character to another in exchange for a helping hand by chance (no spoilers here!) or the colour of a garment. It's nice to recognize these things, reinforcing as it does the sense that the author is drawing from such an excellent tradition and showing an endearing and infectious fondness for it. I would even venture to describe this as an updated Dying Earth, one for a new century in the wake of the New Weird event. Rather than greeting the sun's waning with fatalism or mysticism as in other works, the world of Newton's creation is characterised by a grounded pragmatism - the powers of Villjamur take calculated steps to prepare for the coming ice-age as opposed to treating it as an abstract doomsday that they are resigned to or hope to be saved from by higher powers. It is hard to imagine the inhabitants of Zothique stockpiling firewood.
The novel kicks along at a fair pace, never dawdling unnecessarily, with no temptation on my part to skip ahead at any point - a page turner certainly. Newton's is an assured tone, with solid and polished prose, but at times I felt as if it was perhaps a little too clipped and focused upon driving the plot forward, sometimes relishing more the quieter, thoughtful moments of introspection or description. There's a vein of good humour running throughout - the characters are forever exchanging snappy quips, making wry observations, and there are moments of touching humanity that brought smiles to my face or tugged at heart strings. An interesting thing to note is that I actually related the most, and felt the most attached to, one of the novel's non-human characters - although I never lost sight of the fact that the character wasn't human. In a way that's quite an achievement really.
In conclusion, I'd recommend 'Nights of Villjamur'. Mark Charan Newton's definitely doing Something A Bit Different. From whatever perspective you're approaching it and whatever your requirements from a Fantasy novel I think it'll tick a lot of boxes. It did for me.
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