[Review] "Endurance" - Jay Lake
A few months ago, my impeccable wit, and a lack of substantial competition, scored an advance/uncorrected proof copy of jaylake's second fantasy ninja novel, Endurance. The events of the first book in the series (Green) are referenced liberally, so even though I hadn't read that, it wasn't difficult to figure out the backstory (though I have no firm idea what book three has in store).
This being the case, there's a certain amount of middle book syndrome happening - all the ends can't, of necessity, be tied up too neatly (or at all), so even though there's a climax and a denouement, there's a lot of unresolved threads dangling off the end of this particular tapestry. It's solidly New Weird-flavored, with more than a whiff of China Mieville about it (The other of Jay's books that I've read also hew to this form and texture, with the suggestion of plenty of history leaning on things without necessarily poking through. It's not handled in quite the manner I best prefer seeing it done - Jay's got a thing for Portentious Capitalization Like Whoah in some places - but I think that's a conscious choice by him as an author to convey the way that the people of this world have come to interact with it (though this is a trait that's shared across all three alternate world-universes of his that I've seen in his books, so... maybe that's just His Stylistic Thing).
Less easily overlooked and understood is why it took more than 200 pages to point out that the one subculture present and prominent in the book are not even human. Maybe this was made clear in the first book, and was taken as given, but when it's hinted that the "Pardines" are different from the two main human races (one light, one darker), it's not made clear that they're CAT PEOPLE until late in act 2. So, uh, yeah... that might have changed how things were visualized and interpreted a bit earlier on.
Jay's doing some interesting-to-me gedankenexperimentwerk with these books, in that he's as vigorous an atheist as I am, yet this world (and especially the protagonist) is visibly and nearly constantly afflicted with the divine. It's a touch like Steven Brust's Dragaeran take on divinity, where the gods are beings who have just amassed power and presence beyond that of mere humans, but are still limited, and can be harmed, changed, or killed outright. It plays to the strengths of a non-believer's reading, since when a god animates or manifests in front of a character, it's kind of hard to deny their existence... though the gods here are flavored strangely and their motivations (as well as those of most of the characters) are an uneasy mix of "unclear" and "subtle." The motivations for most of the characters are fairly easily understood, if not always easy to sympathize with or grasp in quite the same way the characters do.
The narrator, Green, is a tough character to like. I don't think that's an accident; she thrives on self-sufficiency, and the erosion of that as the story progresses is a recurring theme. It might make some folks not feel particularly sympathetic to her (though even the most hardened reader is apt to smirk when she's concussed into being polite, even though it seems... neurologically implausible, shall we say), which is a hurdle that's tough to overcome in a protagonist. There's no shortage of interesting characters, in both senses of the word.
As for the plot, such as it is, there's an interesting conceit used to present it from the perspective of a character who is in the process of pulling her head out of her own ass, with varying degrees of success, as she lurches reluctantly towards motherhood (I won't call it "maturity," because there are frequent asides made to remark on the youthful stupidity of the narrator by, presumably, her older and wiser self in the voice of the retelling; I found these to be unwelcome interruptions, since I was having a hard enough time getting into the flow of the narrative without being reminded that the narrator was oh-so-wrong about something, with the implied sighs of exasperation). The plot doesn't so much reveal itself as wait patiently for Green to see that it's been wearing a pair of Groucho Marx glasses and waiting for her to recognize it, at which point, hijinks re-ensue.
If I'm making Endurance sound silly or boring, that's because I pretty comprehensively don't get it. It's neither silly nor boring in the telling; it's an attentively-crafted piece of work that doesn't fit anywhere in my head, except as an example of what a writer who is challenging himself can create. Basically, Jay has written the equivalent of what I recognize as pretty good lasagna; I just hate ricotta cheese.
This being the case, there's a certain amount of middle book syndrome happening - all the ends can't, of necessity, be tied up too neatly (or at all), so even though there's a climax and a denouement, there's a lot of unresolved threads dangling off the end of this particular tapestry. It's solidly New Weird-flavored, with more than a whiff of China Mieville about it (The other of Jay's books that I've read also hew to this form and texture, with the suggestion of plenty of history leaning on things without necessarily poking through. It's not handled in quite the manner I best prefer seeing it done - Jay's got a thing for Portentious Capitalization Like Whoah in some places - but I think that's a conscious choice by him as an author to convey the way that the people of this world have come to interact with it (though this is a trait that's shared across all three alternate world-universes of his that I've seen in his books, so... maybe that's just His Stylistic Thing).
Less easily overlooked and understood is why it took more than 200 pages to point out that the one subculture present and prominent in the book are not even human. Maybe this was made clear in the first book, and was taken as given, but when it's hinted that the "Pardines" are different from the two main human races (one light, one darker), it's not made clear that they're CAT PEOPLE until late in act 2. So, uh, yeah... that might have changed how things were visualized and interpreted a bit earlier on.
Jay's doing some interesting-to-me gedankenexperimentwerk with these books, in that he's as vigorous an atheist as I am, yet this world (and especially the protagonist) is visibly and nearly constantly afflicted with the divine. It's a touch like Steven Brust's Dragaeran take on divinity, where the gods are beings who have just amassed power and presence beyond that of mere humans, but are still limited, and can be harmed, changed, or killed outright. It plays to the strengths of a non-believer's reading, since when a god animates or manifests in front of a character, it's kind of hard to deny their existence... though the gods here are flavored strangely and their motivations (as well as those of most of the characters) are an uneasy mix of "unclear" and "subtle." The motivations for most of the characters are fairly easily understood, if not always easy to sympathize with or grasp in quite the same way the characters do.
The narrator, Green, is a tough character to like. I don't think that's an accident; she thrives on self-sufficiency, and the erosion of that as the story progresses is a recurring theme. It might make some folks not feel particularly sympathetic to her (though even the most hardened reader is apt to smirk when she's concussed into being polite, even though it seems... neurologically implausible, shall we say), which is a hurdle that's tough to overcome in a protagonist. There's no shortage of interesting characters, in both senses of the word.
As for the plot, such as it is, there's an interesting conceit used to present it from the perspective of a character who is in the process of pulling her head out of her own ass, with varying degrees of success, as she lurches reluctantly towards motherhood (I won't call it "maturity," because there are frequent asides made to remark on the youthful stupidity of the narrator by, presumably, her older and wiser self in the voice of the retelling; I found these to be unwelcome interruptions, since I was having a hard enough time getting into the flow of the narrative without being reminded that the narrator was oh-so-wrong about something, with the implied sighs of exasperation). The plot doesn't so much reveal itself as wait patiently for Green to see that it's been wearing a pair of Groucho Marx glasses and waiting for her to recognize it, at which point, hijinks re-ensue.
If I'm making Endurance sound silly or boring, that's because I pretty comprehensively don't get it. It's neither silly nor boring in the telling; it's an attentively-crafted piece of work that doesn't fit anywhere in my head, except as an example of what a writer who is challenging himself can create. Basically, Jay has written the equivalent of what I recognize as pretty good lasagna; I just hate ricotta cheese.