To Take a Latitude

The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue
Read this because a) I'd been meaning to, b) it was a yuletide EPH (which obviously I didn't fill, but you know... good intentions).

In the past, I've found Donoghue rather bleak, and preferred her non, fiction. (Maybe it was just that I read the one where everyone died of Spanish Influenza?)

This takes place across several hours, on a train that runs from the coast of Normandy to Paris, where it will famously fail to brake and blast through the wall of the train station (this was re-enacted in the movie Hugo, and captured in a tonne of contemporary photographs). Which is not what the book's about, other than as a driving sense of inevitable ruin. The book is about a few dozen characters, including the train itself, a slice of life as the world teeters on the edge of a new century. Many of the characters are historical figures, some of whom were on the train that day, a bunch more who might have been. There's an anarchist with a bomb, the railway employees, a painter, a secretary, several politicians, a sex worker, a medical student, some children, a variety of day labourers, all forced to into each other's company for the course of several hours. Many of them are some flavour of queer, several are not white, each has their own story. All have a complicated relationship with the racing pace of technological and cultural change, at a time when France has only been a Republic (again) for a few decades, and it's (again) not at all clear if this time will stick.

I often get confused by books with this many characters, especially when there's not much in the way of plot, and the book jumps between them pretty fast, but Donoghue makes them all so distinct, with their own voices, that I didn't have trouble this time. I also appreciated her deft touch at making the characters feel of that moment in history, rather than being stand ins for the contemporary reader. We hear about the Dreyfus Affair, for example, and mostly people just believe he's a traitor, even the anarchist, who theoretically should know better. If there's any author stand in, it's an elderly Russian lady's companion, who mostly seems to have things figured out, and is also a cranky weirdo. Actually, a lot of characters are cranky weirdos, and not necessarily good people, but also not the kind of vile that are terrible to spend time with.

I'm perhaps not at my most articulate explaining why I liked this, but mostly that it scratched my brain as a deeply considered idea of how life might have looked at another time, when people were like us, but also different.


"Mr Rowl" by D.K. Broster
I'm not sure if this is the second most popular one after The Jacobite Trilogy, or if The Wounded Name is. Anyway, another 1920s book by a lesbian author, about plausibly deniable Historical Gays. This one is set during the Napoleonic wars, and centres on a French officer who is a prisoner of war in England. He's initial held on parole in a bucolic town, but following Events, he ends up in a prison stockade, then on the prison hulks (de-masted ships floating in the English Channel). He has a low-key romance with one of the girls from the original town, and a series of oddly intense interactions with English officers (one of whom appears to be canonically queer). There's also crossdressing, and quite a bit of hurt/comfort.

Having come in to Broster on The Flight of the Heron, I was expecting the same kind of emotional romance plot, with the pivot of the story being around the relationship between the two main male characters. Thus was initially discombobulated by how meandering the plot ended up being. We follow "Mr Rowl" (the English pronunciation of Raoul) across a series of misfortunes as he wanders about England, not meeting either of the other significant male characters until half way through the book. The most intense action is packed into two chapters in the last third, which makes the structure a little lopsided; however, the plotlines that have been building do come together rather neatly, which I enjoyed.

I started watching the new Star Trek show not long after I finished this, and was immediately struck by the connection between how Broster writes honour-obsessed men in the 18th and 19th century, and the Klingons. Some of the "I must do this Because Honour" choices in this book—though they more or less made sense—did feel a little load-bearing in terms of plot. And the heroine did spend some time going, "Um, holy shit, why?" at a few of those choices. It does also lead to several of the most tropy h/c scenes, however, so I suppose I shouldn't complain.

I like that the main antagonists of the book were a) the controlling asshole boyfriend, and b) the British penal system.


Orbital by Samantha Harvey, narrated by Sarah Naudi
Firstly, I remember some debate about this when this came out: this book is not science fiction. It's literary fiction set on the International Space Station. If you wanted to have an argument for why it was SF, you could say, "Well there's an ongoing Moon mission, which there wasn't at the time of this writing." But there being a Moon mission has been on the books for a decade, so setting it slightly in the future so that the mission could be happening at the same time as the book is, frankly, not science fiction, and I don't know why people thought it was.

Secondly, oh my god why? I guess this was so popular because most people haven't really thought about what life on the I.S.S. might be like, and this was more or less informative on that point. If you've never even one time thought about the space program. It rapidly became clear that someone who's read multiple astronaut biographies may not be the target audience.

There were several neat scenes! I liked the bit about the cosmonaut talking on a HAM radio with random Earthlings, for example. However, the majority of the book was poetic reflections on either inane details of space life, or just looking at the Earth being pretty. Eventually the Astronauts go to bed, and then we just close out with long descriptions of the Earth being pretty. I may not have gotten the point of this book.

(While writing this, I discovered that www.HowManyPeopleAreInSpaceRightNow.com is no longer being maintained, which makes me sad.)

The queen is back! Long live the queen!