Carnival by Elizabeth Bear...

[fajrdrako]

Friends whose taste I trust really like the writing of Elizabeth Bear. A while back I read Ink and Steel and had mixed feelings - "mixed" meaning, mostly I didn't like it. It was about two historical figures I love - Shakespeare and Marlowe. It had intrigue and all sorts of things I like, but... It was one of those cases where, because I have strong preconceptions about the characters, setting and theme, I had difficulty settling in to enjoy her depiction.

The problem lies almost entirely in her writing style, which strikes me as cold. It's as if her style of writing and my style of reading don't quite meet as they should.

But then I read her wonderful short story Botticelli, which I loved so much, so I decided to try reading her novels again. On the suggestion of deakat, I read Carnival. I liked the title.

It turns out really not to be about the Carnival much at all, although it's set at Carnival-time on the planet New Amazonia. The title has more subversive meanings and nuances, including the eating of meats as opposed to vegetarian habits, and the wearing of figurative masks. I was hoping for actual masks, but no, it wasn't that kind of Carnival. Most of the characters are hiding important secrets, and the protagonists are two men who love each other.

My kind of story.

Again, I had many problems with the writing. Again, the style seemed cold. Again, I found myself puzzled to know what I was supposed to make of certain scenes and situations. And yet... I enjoyed the story, the themes, and the suspense. I found myself thinking about the story when I wasn't reading it. I liked some of the SF themes - a sentient city, a non-physical alien, a world where men are second-class citizens, another where the population is ruthlessly culled to save the ecological balance. I like the question it poses, about the needs of a civilization in contrast to the freedoms and rights of an individual.

1. I found the women of New Amazonia most interesting, and the society. I would have liked to have seen more about the lifestyle and characters of the men. We really only got to see Robert and his son Julian - they were never given a voice.
   
   
2. The ideas were more interesting than the action.
   
   
3. Sometimes - okay, often - I didn't know how to read Bear's tone. For instance, the heroes have technology that creates and recreates their clothes around them, acting as a shield and armour - rather like a self-generated force field. At a fairly tense point of the action, one of them is hurt in an incident which damages his technology, and Bear refers in passing to this as a 'wardrobe malfunction'. I had to reread the passage to figure out whether she was joking. If she was, it undercut the tone of the passage. But how could she not have been?
   
   
4. What I liked, what I really and totally liked, was the theme of trust, or lies and truth. One of the heroes is a spy and a professional Liar, the other a diplomat with special skills in reading body language and microexpressions. They are ostensibly on a certain mission, but each has secret motives to undercut that mission. They love each other, but for many reasons can't confide in each other. When they finally tell each other the truth, I was cheering. I love such themes.
   
   
5. There are numerous allusions to the back story - and I found myself wishing that there was a novel covering that, too. I wanted more details, more fleshing out. I wanted to see how Vincent and Angelo met and fell in love; not that I'm under any illusions that Bear would give me anything very romantic. But I felt as if we were getting the second half of a continuing story.
   
   
6. I didn't like the ending for two reasons. One was that it seemed truncated, sudden, and short. The other was that while the novel starts with their arrival on New Amazonia and has a delightful unity of place and sense of location, the last bit suddenly shifts the action to other planets and places. I found this jarring and unnecessary. It felt as if Bear didn't really know how to end the story.
   
   
7. Chapter 19 begins with the words, "Lesa woke cold..." The rather famous Dragonflight by Anne McCaffery begins with the words, "Lessa woke, cold." Again, I found myself wondering at Bear's purposes here... Did she use the words subconsciously and accidentally, or in tribute, or as a wry joke? I couldn't tell, and it jerked me out of the story trying to guess why she used the phrase, and what connection it had to the story. New Amazonia wasn't like Pern in any way I could see. I'm not saying that Anne McCaffery does or should have any monopoly on these words, just that it puzzled me.
   
   
8. I loved it that the women on New Amazonia were gunslingers, who settle disputes with duels.
   

I certainly liked it enough to read another of Elizabeth Bear's novels - after all, good science fiction is hard to find, even more so when it mixes social, political, and technological themes. Maybe I'll overcome my problems with her style, maybe I won't, but there's enough substance there that it will be fun trying.

So I requested Undertow at the library.