Book Thoughts

Let me start by saying this: The city of Ambergris has become one of my new favorite locales.  Jeff VanderMeer has created something truly amazing in his book City of Saints & Madmen.  City is presented as a collection of short stories, articles, and even travel guides printed within the fictional city of Ambergris, named for “the most secret and valued part of the whale.”

Ambergris is inhabited by humans and a race of sinister mushroom like people known as the “gray caps” or “mushroom dwellers.”  We don’t learn too much about the gray caps though it is inferred that they are plotting to attack the humans that live above-ground.  VanderMeer brings the city to life by giving it little quirks and idiosyncrasies that are stranger and more vivid than I have ever seen.  China Miéville may set his city, New Crobuzon, beneath the bleached ribs of some long dead beast and drape it with slime and ooze, but all of that is still static description.

Ambergris is obsessed with squid.  So weird.  So simple.  So brilliant.  I think every single short story or travel guide in City mentions the Fresh Water Squid at some point in their narrative.  One of the stories is a scientific essay completely devoted to the wonders possessed by the King Squid.  The writer goes on and on about the beauty and near-human intelligence of the King Squid.  It is well written and hilarious, but more importantly, it brings the city to life.

One of the short stories, The Transformation of Martin Lake, is probably one of the best short stories I’ve ever read.  The style and structure left me speechless when I finished reading it.  Part of it is written in “the present” by an art critic who was a good friend of the now late painter, Martin Lake.  She explains how she is going to try and interpret the transformation that ocurred in Lake’s work that marked him as one of the premier painter’s in Ambergris’s history.  After each passage written by the critic comes a narrative set “in the past” following Martin Lake and the events that changed him and his artwork forever.  He receives an invitation to a beheading (actually more of a throat slitting but close enough).  It was absolutely enthralling to see the actual events unfold and then to read a passage by the art critic attempting to interpret the paintings.  Being a reader set outside this system we can see where she is right and where she is wrong.  From her descriptions of the paintings we can catch glimpses of the past and see what Lake is referring to.  It is almost darkly comical to see how wrong some of her interpretations are when we, the reader, knows the entire truth.  The power of omniscience is overwhelming and fufilling at the same time.

I wished the rest of the stories in City were all as good as that one.  However, some are stronger than others.  Strangely, I find the story that most reviewers focus on, Dradin, In Love, to be one of the weaker stories.  The plot is pretty much a rehash of the short story The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffman.  Dradin tells the story of a young man, Dradin, who falls in love with beautiful girl he sees through a window.  The big twist is that the object of his affection, the object he risks his life for and commits murder for, isn’t real.  Unlike Hoffman’s story where the protagonist commits suicide after finding out his beloved is little more than a sophisticated clockwork doll, Dradin commits “quasi-suicide” by sailing off for parts unknown with his mannequin’s pieces.

The only parts that were interesting in Dradin that set it apart where the Ambergris flavors interspersed within the narrative.  We catch fleeting glances of the Festival of the Fresh Water Squid and the Religious Quarter, a location that frequents many of the stories.

Taken as a whole, City of Saints & Madmen is a brilliant collection of fantastic stories set in a decadent yet corrupted city living under a shadow of fear.  The question of the gray caps is never fully settled, but there is more than enough present to let the reader draw their own conclusions.  City of Saints & Madmen has been placed in a special place on my bookshelf, among my favorites.

Score: 4.5 / 5

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