Two Book Reviews - Jesmyn Ward and Laura Jean McKay

 Two recent reviews which I made notes of and have no other connection to one another.

Laura Jean McKay jumps the divide between literature and sci-fi again comes from The Brisbane Time's book review and is another exhibit in my case of genre bending works.

Laura Jean McKay’s novel The Animals in That Country won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Fiction and the Victorian Prize for Literature, but also the Aurealis and UK-based Arthur C. Clarke awards, which are given to the best science-fiction work of the year. What makes her selection interesting is that it signals a broadening of what contemporary science (or speculative) fiction means.

In this time of accelerating technological change and diminishing global climate, a subset of Australian writers, including James Bradley, Jennifer Mills, Claire G. Coleman, Jane Rawson, and McKay, are publishing fiction that defamiliarises the real by way of speculative tropes.

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She inhabits or blurs the lines between human and non-human consciousnesses. These imaginative endeavours are acts of empathy and transferral. In Those Last Days of Summer we inhabit the mind of a chicken in a factory farm, while King embodies the alpha mentality of a kangaroo as it fights for supremacy. Cats at the Fire Front is an amusing inverse of domesticated and farmed animals in which sheep are great with kids and kept in the house while cats are farmed for their pelts. An insect bite in Flying Rods causes a woman’s metamorphosis into a giant mosquito. At one point, in Come See It All the Way From Town, rocks communicate their spiritual worship of human light. But amid these stories of animal-impersonation, metamorphosis, and clever reversals lie deeply human portrayals of ordinary suffering.

As for Jesmyn Ward, I just have a crush on her writing, and The Guardian's Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward review – a plantation hell does not diminish my crush:

In every novel since, she has looked that reality more squarely in the face. In Salvage the Bones, where Hurricane Katrina bears down on a pregnant teen and her fiercely protective, daily hustling, extremely poor family; in Sing, Unburied, Sing, whose first pages are a litany of difficulties (prison, drug abuse, mental illness, poverty, violence, absent men and the women and children who pick up the pieces). Her achievement so far, rewarded by two National Book Awards, has been to do this while also insisting on her characters’ individuality, autonomy, dignity and complication; their tenderness and love in the face of overwhelming odds. Her new novel, Let Us Descend, goes back to the beginnings of the reality Ward has lived and written about, to the arrival of the slave ships, and the plantations where those slaves were put to work; a reality so dark it is like being taken by the hand and led into hell.
And that is how the novel is explicitly structured. Annis is the mixed-race daughter conceived through rape; she and her mother are slaves in the rapist’s house. Her grandmother, born in west Africa and given to the king of Dahomey for his army of warrior wives, was herself sold into slavery by that king when she fell in love with someone else. Annis, in between dodging the attentions of “the man who gave me the middle-mud of my skin”, eavesdrops on her white half-sisters’ education, thus “taking a thing for myself”; she learns of Aristotle and his bees, and listens to their tutor read The Divine Comedy. Then her mother, in punishment for trying to protect her budding daughter, is sold on; then Annis, for having the temerity to love another slave, a woman, is sold on, too.

“Now, let us descend,” Virgil said to Dante, “into the blind world below.” Chained to one another as they sleep, wake and walk, chained even when fording rivers, the slaves descend, down through the Carolinas and Louisiana, through alligator-infested swamps (echoing Dante’s swamp), down into the city of woe, here an eerie, foggy New Orleans, populated by slavers, by bright, freed women who wander the streets blind to their sisters, by ghosts; and from there into the infernal reaches of a sugar plantation.

sch 12/22