The Valley at the Centre of the World by Malachy Tallack

Published in Great Britain by Canongate Books in 2018; paperback edition published on April 7, 2020

Life in an isolated rural area, the choices people make to embrace or abandon such a life, and whether they have the power to make choices at all, are the animating themes of The Valley at the Center of the World. The novel explores the complexity of people who live simple lives, reminding the reader that no life is ever simple. A character in the novel, reflecting on how things are changing in the valley, thinks about how things have become complicated and how she wants them to be simple again, but the changes she sees involve people, not landscapes, and people are never simple.

Two primary characters, David and Sandy, are a study in contrast. David has the serenity of certainty. He is the only remaining resident who has a long history in the valley. He knows his place in the world and that place makes him happy. Unlike his wife Mary, who viewed home as the place from which she would escape when she became an adult, David has never wanted to leave the valley. Mary admires and depends upon the stability that her husband brings, but she can’t help wondering whether she might have lived a different life, one that was not so fixed by her husband’s contentment.

David’s greatest fear is that the valley’s few remaining residents will move away, as did their daughters, Kate and Emma. Kate, like David, figured out what made her happy. She moved away, but not far, dropped out of college, got married, had kids, and causes no worries. Emma, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to know what she wants.

In that respect, Emma is like Sandy. They met in Edinburgh but Emma wanted to come home to the valley, feeling “we’re tied to the islands by elastic.” Sandy didn’t feel the pull but he went with her, moving into the house next to David’s, a house that David and Mary owned, and lived there for three years. Then Emma decided she had to go away, leaving Sandy to wonder whether he wants to stay, whether he even has a choice. Unlike David, Sandy is not certain of anything. He doesn’t know whether tending sheep offers the promise of a satisfying life. An inevitable conflict between David, who wants to bind people to the valley, and Sandy, who doesn’t want David to control his life, is the initial source of the story’s dramatic power.

Other characters, the only other residents of the valley, add to the novel’s understated drama. Terry drinks too much, sometimes with Sandy, and feels sorry for himself, bringing everyone down with his bitterness. Alice, a mystery writer whose husband died, moves to the valley as a means of escaping into the past, to a place where she used to vacation with her husband. Alice is working on a book about the valley but she can’t quite decide what she wants to say, what she wants the book to be. She’s trying to understand Maggie, who lived a long life in the valley, but the letters Maggie wrote are all about work and weather. According to David, “wark and wadder”sums up her life. Perhaps thinking of her own life, Alice wonders whether that is enough.

Sandy’s confusion heightens when, after he moves into Maggie's old house, a young couple moves into the house he formerly occupied with Emma. His attraction to Jo, Ryan’s wife, is mutual and uncomfortable. He feels torn when Liz, his mother, suddenly reappears after a four-year absence from his life. He resents her presence as much as he craves it. Liz’s backstory explains why she found it impossible for her to stay with Sandy’s father or to be a proper mother to Sandy. She loves Sandy, “just not in the way that was required of her.”

Characters who grew up in the valley have their own way of speaking. When Alice asks David what kind of stories Maggie told, he replies: “Well, du kens, juist stories aboot fok. Aboot da valley. My parents, her parents, idder fok at used to bide around here.” Malachy Tallack provides a glossary of Scottish dialect, but it’s not really necessary. If you can hear the voices in your head, you’ll understand what they’re saying. Hearing those voices is one of the pleasures of reading the novel.

Much like the book Alice is writing, The Valley at the Centre of the World is as much about the place as the people who inhabit it. The valley sees little change. It is a place that will endure, as it always has, untroubled by urban bustle, until its few sheep farmers finally die or move away. Yet it is the depth of characterization that makes the novel special.

The novel is quiet but eventful. The story encourages readers to get inside the skin of each character, to wonder what will finally become of them. Mary might wonder about alternative lives, but she knows she is fundamentally happy with what she has. Terry is passive, “as though his whole movement through life had been guided by decisions were not his own,” and unlikely to change. Sandy and Alice have the strongest temptations to leave, but will they? “I’m no sure what I want, exactly,” Sandy tells Jo. “I used to ken, but now I don’t.” Alice’s family wants her to come home. She isn't sure she has any reason to stay, but the more she works on her book about the valley, the more it feels like home.

The valley never changes, but people do. Some people fear change, others see no need for it. Whether the characters will find ways to be content with their lives, by embracing or rejecting change, is the fascinating question that invites the reader to imagine how the characters' lives might turn out.

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The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

Published by Del Rey on January 14, 2020

The Vanished Birds is a contemplative work of science fiction. The story involves a miraculous boy with the power to revolutionize interstellar travel, but it is really a story about connections that grow and endure in the face of hardship.

Captain Nia Imani owns a cargo ship that travels in Pocket Space between the Federated Worlds. She has a crew of four, including Nurse, her best frenemy, whom she rescued from the fringe region years before the story begins.

During the first part of the novel, Imani takes a lover on a world that is part of her trade route. Kaeda is just a child when she first sees him. He is a young man when she first sleeps with him. He ages fifteen years between encounters, while she ages only eight months. Simon Jimenez allows their relationship to unfold slowly, focusing on Kaeda and the life he lives between liaisons with Imani. Relativity teaches Kaeda that time is not on his side, that “the best-case scenario of a well-spent life was the slow and steady unraveling of the heart’s knot.”

During his last meeting with Imani, Kaeda introduces her to a boy of about twelve and implores her to take him on her ship. The boy was apparently on a vessel that crashed on the planet. Kaeda and his wife raised the boy. Now he wants to give the boy the life for which Kaeda always ached, a life that would allow him to see different sunsets. The boy’s name is Ahro.

Imani takes Ahro to Pelican Station where its designer, Fumiko Nakajima, offers her a new contract. She must take the boy to the fringe region, keep him safe for as many as fifteen years while he develops, and then surrender him to Nakajima. Nakijima suspects Ahro has a gift, an ability to manipulate quantum entanglement, that will one day allow him to think of a place and travel there instantly. Nakijima’s backstory is developed in depth before she disappears, only to resurface near the novel’s end. Ahro’s backstory is less detailed and more mysterious.

Imani doesn’t warm to people easily, although there is something about the boy and his fascination with a flute that speaks to her. They spend years together on their ship. The journey gives the reader time to learn about Nakijima’s representative, Sartoris Moth, who was sent along to keep an eye on the boy, and Vaila, who was Nakijama’s personal pilot. Both characters seem to play stock roles until the reader discovers that they are capable of surprises.

Relationships in the book tangle and untangle, sometimes ending with real or perceived betrayals. By the time the novel approaches it end, the beginning seems to have lost its relevance. Then Jimenez deftly circles back to the novel's start, giving it new meaning in light of all the years (both temporal and relativistic) that have passed. The ending suggests a connection between characters and generations that is bridged by music, and while I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the mechanics of how that worked, the story is so appealing that I didn’t fret about it. In fact, a good many explanations are wanting (how does Ahro’s blood make instantaneous travel possible, and how can it be used to power a fleet of ships?), but I guess some things need to be accepted on faith for the sake of enjoying a good story.

Characterization and relationship development are the strengths of The Vanished Birds. For that reason, this is probably a good science fiction novel for readers who are not fans of science fiction. Imani holds herself responsible for the loss of a sister she left behind. She prefers the isolation of constant travel, but her willingness to look after the boy reflects the hope that she might be able to bond with someone she will not lose. Ironically, making that choice causes the loss of friends and crew members who do not want to spend fifteen years in the fringe territory. And whether she will lose or regain Ahro is the source of the novel's dramatic tension.

I would need to read The Vanished Birds again to appreciate all its nuances. It is certainly a novel that would bear rereading. Jimenez constructed it with skill, ultimately tying together its disparate sections (some of which would stand nicely as short stories) to create a unified whole. For its detailed characterizations and evocative descriptions, The Vanished Birds is an award-worthy example of science fiction that breaks the boundaries of the genre.

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The Dominant Animal by Kathryn Scanlan

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD x FSG Originals on April 7, 2020

Stories like Kathryn Scanlan's seem to be in vogue in literary circles. They are praised for being astutely observed; whether the observations are worthwhile seems to be less important than the writer’s ability to capture a moment or sensation, or to illuminate or at least illustrate a shared human experience. Plot and characterization are secondary, indeed unimportant, to stories like these.

This is hardly a new trend. In a couple of recent books, Sam Reese quotes an observation that A.L. Balder made in 1945, when he described the (then) “modern short story” as “plotless, static, fragmentary, amorphous — frequently a mere character sketch or vignette, or a mere reporting of a transient moment, or the capturing of a mood or nuance.” That’s pretty much how I would describe the stories in The Dominant Animal.

I have picked up and put down several story collections in recent years, unable to make it to the end both because the stories seem pointless and because nothing about the way they were written grabbed me. I made it to the end of The Dominant Animal because, although it is packed with stories, each can each be consumed in a minute or two. Many of the stories have an ambiguous meaning. A surgeon who cares about animal rights traps mice that are destroying his expensive cars by using glue boards, inadvertently kills one while trying to free it, and then closes the eyelids of the woman to whom he is relating the story. What’s that all about?

The picnickers in another story eat their hands while waiting for a pig to roast. In her mind, a woman compares baby squirrels to human babies. A man who awakens his neighborhood with a chainsaw every morning is arrested and quickly released, both for reasons unknown. In the title story, a woman disowns a dog that kills her other dog, then goes walking with a man who makes a strange sound. Dying pets and disagreeable men are recurring themes.

Maybe these stories will make more sense to other readers than they did to me. To be fair, I did appreciate a few of the stories. The story I most enjoyed is “Mother’s Teeth,” perhaps because it is slightly longer than the rest. While waiting for her mother’s chemo session to end, a woman eats ice cream and has sex with an elderly man in the locker room of a recreational facility. Later she endures her mother’s criticism, but the ending is happy (in the narrator’s view) because her mother dies.

A story about a woman who brazenly misappropriates another woman’s dog is interesting. So is an ambiguous story about two children who seem to be fending for themselves. A story about a disastrous casino and golfing vacation has something to say about the importance of changing patterns, just like clouds that are “tired of the same old thing.” A story about Scandinavian dieting is amusing. A story about untraining a trained dog would have been amusing but for the darkness that surrounds it.

So that’s about a half dozen of the forty stories in this collection that did anything for me at all. The ratio is just too low to recommend the volume as a whole.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Jane Goes North by Joe R. Lansdale

Published by Subterranean Press on March 30, 2020

In these troubled times, we take joy where we can find it. I always find it when I read Joe Lansdale. When he isn’t scaring the crap out of me in a horror novel, he’s making me laugh out loud, a reaction that few authors can consistently provoke. Jane Goes North is a perfect respite from gloomy reality.

Jane is in her thirties, living alone in Texas. She was recently fired from her job in a laundry. She was nearly arrested after a night of drinking, when a backseat dalliance with a preacher in a church parking lot sent her sprinting naked into the woods to avoid inquisitive police officers. That’s how her life goes.

Jane has been invited to the wedding of her snooty sister near Boston. She’s not sure she wants to go, but spite motivates her to make the trip. Her car, on the other hand, is certain it doesn’t want to move another mile. A ride sharing notice on a bulletin board brings her to Henrietta, a tough old lady who calls herself Henry. She has one working eye and a car that runs. Henry is going to Boston for a medical appointment, but since she has a tendency to collide with things she can’t see, Jane insists on driving. The two women instantly dislike each other but bond over the course of the novel.

The road trip turns into an adventure that includes an improbable kidnapping. The women are pretty much unfazed by their ordeal because random crap happens in life and they’ve gotten used to it. The trip becomes more pleasant after they meet a washed-up country singer who uses her two hit singles as fuel for a career playing music at dives filled with drunken audiences.

The three women are loaded with personality — they’re sort of like Thelma and Louise with an extra friend — but collateral characters add to the humor with conversations that spin off in amusing tangents. My favorite is a desk clerk’s discussion of roaches that get stuck in toasters (“I call them Roach Toasties”).

Jane Goes North offers at least one laugh per page, often two or three. Here’s Jane talking to her sisters: “You wouldn’t be interesting, none of you, if you had propellers up your asses and could fly around the room with them.” An East Texas summer is “so damn hot during the day a lizard needed a straw hat.”

Jane is changed in a positive way by her road trip. Henry faces a change in Boston that the reader won’t expect. The ending is warm and heartening, reminding us that friendships, however unlikely they might be, are just what we need in difficult times. So, for that matter, is Joe Lansdale.

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Providence by Max Barry

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on March 31, 2020

Mashing together themes are that are common in science fiction, Max Barry crafts a fun and interesting story in Providence. The themes include the danger of allowing Artificial Intelligence to supplant humans in making important decisions, the risk of corporate officers becoming indistinguishable from military officers, and the likelihood that the military industrial complex will manipulate public opinion so it can fight a profitable war.

The war is being waged with aliens who look like (and are therefore referred to as) salamanders. Salamanders have the ability to expel a force from their mouths that blows a hole through just about anything. The first human explorers to encounter salamanders tried to communicate with them, but ended up with holes in their bodies and ship. Hence the war.

Humans decided to take it to the salamanders, devoting more than 20% of their GDP to the production of weapons and ships. After humans were defeated in battle, the company that manufactures the AI that runs the ships’ systems blamed the humans for not recognizing the threat quickly enough. The blame could just as easily have been placed on the AI, but that wouldn’t have been profitable.

The new Providence class of ships is controlled entirely by AI. Humans are along for the ride, primarily to make propaganda videos showing their success at destroying salamanders. Propaganda is also designed to convince the public that salamanders hate humans, when in fact humans have no clue about what motivates a salamander. Nor are humans likely to learn, since their goal is to eradicate salamanders as a species.

Four characters are on a ship that is the novel’s focus. Jolene Jackson was the lone survivor of the defeat that sparked the decision to put AIs in charge of the war. She reluctantly agreed to become the ship’s captain, although the job gives her little to do beyond trying to make the crew appear to have discipline. Isiah Gilligan (“Gilley”) is a civilian who works for the company that made the ship and its AI. Gilly is in charge of maintaining the ship’s systems, but since the ship maintains itself, he spends his time trying to solve puzzles, including the nature of the enemy. Gilly is driven by curiosity.

Paul Anders is a claustrophobic loner who doesn’t respond well to authority. He is in charge of weapons, but since the ship decides for itself which weapons it will fire, Anders spends most of his time throwing ninja stars at Gilley. Talia Beanfield is essentially a psychologist who is charged with promoting the crew’s mental welfare, but her primary function is to assure that the crew produces upbeat propaganda films that viewers will appreciate.

In the tradition of science fiction novels, characters confront their fears, make sacrifices, puzzle out solutions, and persevere. Unlike traditional science fiction, however, Providence avoids a predictable ending, the kind where a few brave humans outsmart and outfight vast numbers of aliens. Instead, Providence reminds us that any aliens we eventually encounter are likely to be truly alien, so different from us that we won’t be able to understand them. Well, except for the curious among us, who might eventually work out the truth by making intuitive leaps that would escape an AI. In this case, the truth is a perfect blend of awesome and awful.

Max Barry tells much of the story in a light tone, finding humor in human foibles. As the humans come to grips with their true role on the ship — giving Earth something to cheer about so they won’t gripe so much about the cost of a seemingly futile war — they begin to bond with each other. Like all good fiction, the story is more about relationships than destroying aliens. Some of the novel come across as filler, but for the most part, Barry creates action and suspense that keep the plot in motion, while generating genuine excitement near the novel’s end.

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