K. J. Bishop, The Etched City
Apr. 11th, 2005 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienWell, that was strange. I'm not saying it wasn't good, but it was definitely unusual. This ambitious first novel is not your standard genre fantasy. For the first two thirds to three-quarters of the book, I wasn't quite sure it was fantasy at all, and I was seriously wondering if there was actually a plot. The world is surreally vivid, the characters distinctive if not exactly sympathetic, but nothing to any great purpose seems to be happening, and there's no evidence of actual magic.
Towards the end a plot of sorts emerges, and so do some phenomena that challenge and eventually confound the characters' rational understanding of how the world works. There are strong hints that it isn't so much that reality has changed as that the characters have gradually migrated into a different kind of reality. I've seen this compared to Mieville: it certainly has its share of grotesque images, but rather less in the way of oozy secretions. There's also some very esoteric vocabulary, the kind that isn't in my Concise Oxford Dictionary. Thinking about it now, I'm tempted to draw a parallel with Gene Wolfe, but that isn't quite it either; the plot isn't convoluted enough. The structure might be the same kind of ascending spiral that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
papersky identified in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but the cone this spiral winds around seems shallower, too broad at the base for its height so that too much of the story seems merely to wander in circles, and the climax frays off into a deliberately inconclusive, distancing ending that seems to leave no room for sequels.
Towards the end a plot of sorts emerges, and so do some phenomena that challenge and eventually confound the characters' rational understanding of how the world works. There are strong hints that it isn't so much that reality has changed as that the characters have gradually migrated into a different kind of reality. I've seen this compared to Mieville: it certainly has its share of grotesque images, but rather less in the way of oozy secretions. There's also some very esoteric vocabulary, the kind that isn't in my Concise Oxford Dictionary. Thinking about it now, I'm tempted to draw a parallel with Gene Wolfe, but that isn't quite it either; the plot isn't convoluted enough. The structure might be the same kind of ascending spiral that
papersky identified in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but the cone this spiral winds around seems shallower, too broad at the base for its height so that too much of the story seems merely to wander in circles, and the climax frays off into a deliberately inconclusive, distancing ending that seems to leave no room for sequels.