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And based on the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray.

This assumes you have seen the film or at least read reviews, and if not, I have left some things unexplained and it may contain spoilers.

My first thought was that we saw Frankenstein's monster reimagined as Bella. Brian points out that no, her father, God(win) is a mix of Frankenstein's monster with Baron Frankenstein himself, which puts a slightly different frame on the whole thing but leaves my comments here intact. Bella is an adopted girl, named, beautiful, loved and secure, and raised among some of the poor things that are the living products of her father's genius. Bella knows and loves her father.

When Bella is grown enough to recognise her situation and develop her own purposes she goes forth to adventure but not to escape - she intends to come home and resume her life. She becomes a Candide (though her Lisbon is not destroyed), learning the world in all its glory and horror, adventuring through a fantasy late nineteenth century industrial (steampunk) Europe of cities, civilization and peace rather than Voltaire's eighteenth century post-war desolation or Shelley's early nineteenth century villages in the wilderness. Along the way Bella reads lots of books, and is loved and shown and shows love in a variety of different modes, some of them healthy and others mingled with abuse and exploitation. She comes home to learn something of who she is, and compelled to leave again to find out more, but once again returns home. In the end, knowing and understanding who she is and why, she comes to acceptance, love and learning. The film ends among the poor things in a garden.

The reviews and reactions are very mixed and I can see why. There is cruel caricature, particularly of some of the men. There are depictions of abuse and sex enough to see it as horrific, pornographic and exploitative. It could be a feminist* film in its depiction of relationships, or a patriarchal* film in its erasure of mothers and foregrounding of a woman's identity primarily in her sexuality+. There's lots of topics I haven't mentioned that would make whole essays in themselves. I think it's mostly talking about love, but I'm not sure whether it wants to show that love redeems all kinds of horrors or that all kinds of horrors are rooted in love, or even both, and I'm not sure everyone would agree with me  anyway. But it is fascinating, and beautiful, and will be worth watching again.

Addendum: Brian and I have had several conversations already that influenced this note, and we will have more in due course I suspect. I want to go and read the book now: I own the very beautiful first edition, signed, which I may or may not have read as it was published in 1992, and although the cover art is referenced in the film on first inspection the book has a rather different emphasis. There is a trade paperback edition published in 2002 that has a strapline on the cover boasting 'soon to be a major motion picture'. It had to wait a while.


* I am not educated in literary theory and am not using these terms with any kind of theoretical precision.

+ Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written by Tony McNamara, based on the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, none of them women. But I think about Angela Carter here and am sure it's not as simple as that.

A slight novella, a pleasant change of pace and tone from Ada Palmer.

There seems to be a lot of Arthuriana about these days, probably as ever. I am looking forward to reading the long-awaited sequel to Hild, which is due out later this year, but Griffith took a break to mash the round table into the Mabinogion and recast the tale of Bedwyr, companion to Arthur and finder of the grail, as a fairy tale. She also provides a very thorough and interesting appendix on her sources for her tale, in a way I wish more fantasy writers would emulate.

I enjoyed this, but not in the enthusiastic way I did Hild, and am struggling to define why. The writing is beautiful, the tale entertaining. Bedwyr, Ber-hyddyr, the spear enduring, is an engaging character, with a story pleasingly developed from their bare name. Perhaps the issue is that Griffith's Bedwyr's magic makes everything too easy, effortlessly overcoming almost every challenge along the path. For whatever reason I did not gulp it down. I think I may have read too much Arthuriana and other high fantasy in my lifetime, and need some other style of working of the root material to fully engage. (Both Kari Sperring and T. Kingfisher have given me closer to my current taste in story telling.)

None of this will stop me reading Menewood when it is published in October.

Library ebook.

Judy is out and about her ordinary business as an environmental chemist checking out water quality in the Chesapeake watershed. Unusually she has her wife and their nursing baby with her. Judy's life purposes involve healing the earth from the ravages of pollution and global heating to make it safely habitable for her children. So when they discover the alien spaceship polluting their local river they immediately have a complex of issues to deal with. And it wasn't exactly in Judy's plans that day, or year, or even decade, to become Earth's accidental ambassador to an alien civilisation, or to find herself, her family, and her community having to deal with the issues involved in the human race's first contact with interstellar travellers.

The Chesapeake watershed is governed by a co-operative community that manages itself and the land and waters under its care using a dandelion network to communicate and make decisions. Dandelion networks are social networks to which all watershed communities have access, with tooIs and values built in to facilitate meaningful communication and good decisions. There are many co-operating dandelion networks managing most of the planet's surface. There are also remnants of nation states and corporate enclaves that have inherited different modes of organisation and attitudes to the planet. There is plenty of human diplomacy and conflict to be managed and navigated while exploring the new possibilities offered by the alien presence.

This book is grounded in Judy's life, her family relationships, the care of the children, her job, her community, her worldview, her care for the planet Earth and its future. Every decision she makes, every goal she sets, every encounter with others, must consider all of these. And of course the same is true for all the human and alien characters she encounters along the way, whether they acknowledge it or not.

Emrys handles all this complexity with a light touch, in lucid prose, telling an interesting story with engaging characters. SF stories often deal with these questions and dilemmas, but rarely is such complexity, so many possibilities and so much hope woven so deftly through a rollicking good read. I really enjoyed this book and will be nominating it for a Hugo next year.

There is something else as well, that might not strike a new reader of today's SF. I think this book is a very explicit response to Robert Heinlein's Have Space Suit, Will Travel. That book, published in 1958, also told a story of first contact and humanity at cross purposes with an ancient and superior interstellar civilisation.

You may find this bit contains spoilers.

I think the key comparisons are these.

In 1958 Heinlein was writing for young adults, but in 2022 Emrys writes for adults. Both write in the first person. It's perhaps not surprising that in Heinlein's story human adults and their relationships play little part, and the story is very tightly centred on the adventures of geekish kids: teenage Kip and eleven year old Peewee. It does not surprise me when a modern writer follows suit (consider, for example, Naomi Novik's Scholomance series), but Emrys casts Judy as her protagonist, a busy woman juggling her many responsibilities in the heart of her community. The social relationships among the adult characters are not taken for granted but are challenged and negotiated even as the adventure unfolds, while the children are not traumatised, isolated and alone in their adventures, but are nurtured and cared for by their families and have their share in the story as the children they are.

Heinlein's Kip and Peewee are child geniuses, unusual in their own worlds, unusually educated and skilled, and focussed on their own personal goals. Emrys' characters are adults who work with their peers to deal with the complexity of the world and wield the tools needed to do their work.

We only ever meet Heinlein's aliens from Kip's and Peewee's point of view; the aliens are essentially all powerful, and while Kip and Peewee have some autonomy, they have no power or status. Emrys shares the adventures and the challenges among all the participants, human and alien, and the equal significance of the individuals concerned is established from the outset. Moreover, the characters are not isolated from their homeworlds and communities, but engaged with them, acknowledging the complexity of their history, uncertainties and distrust as they learn to deal with each other.

Finally, and most crucially to my argument, both books culminate in a council where the future of the human race will be debated by the aliens over whom the humans have no power. Both place their human characters at the crux of that decision, with the responsibility to argue on behalf of the human race for their futures.

In Chapter 43 of *The Half-Built Garden *(a book of many short chapters) Judy walks out into the forum: "In a crisis, we still look for the big ape. So I'd imagined the Grasping Families as some prototypical council up on a dais, Shadowed spider and pillbug figures gazing down in judgement while I argued humanity's case with a crick in my neck."

And Heinlein, in the same place at the start of Chapter 11 of Have Space Suit, Will Travel: "We walked out onto that vast floor. The further we went the more I felt like a fly on a plate. Having Peewee with me was a help; nevertheless it was that nightmare where you find yourself not decently dressed in public."

The basic argument is the same in both cases: humans have the right to determine their own futures; the aliens have no right to exercise their superior power to any other end. The contrast lies where it has lain for the whole book: Heinlein casts Kip and Peewee as witnesses with bit parts in an inter-species contest in which their future is incidental to aliens who have total power over them. Emrys' characters of all species have been concerned from the first encounter with how they will relate to each other both ethically and practically, and Emrys, deftly, makes an altogether more complex set of arguments about mutual interdependence and self determination.

Perhaps the differences between the two books are a measure of the differences between Heinlein and Emrys, or between young adult and adult fiction, or perhaps between science fiction then and now. More likely a mix of all three. Whatever, this has been fascinating.

This book's subtitle is: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.

Which sums it up nicely. Kimmerer is a botanist and environmental scientist whose family is Potawatomi, one of the first nations. She uses the practical and symbolic uses her people have for sweetgrass to talk about attitudes to the natural world, and the pressing need to reset our relationship with the plants that created and sustain us. The prose is poetic and melifluous, the theoretical considerations of science are grounded firmly in the personal and the traditional, and the exploitative operations of capitalism that have served to sunder us from our heritage and our own nature as human animals are laid excruciatingly bare. I learned lots. Recommended.

NB Ebook borrowed from library.

The Globe Theatre is the modern replica created by Sam Wanamaker of the original Elizabethan theatre where some of Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. It opened in 1997, just on the cusp of our (Brian’s and my) lives. Before that year we were keen theatre-goers, and we would have gone to see something there shortly after opening. But during and after that particular year…well, suffice to say this was our first ever visit. I’m wondering if I can take this as a symbol of our new post-parenthood life to come…but anyway, back to Emilia.

            Tempted to check out the play by an offer of tickets in the pit for £5, but distrusting August weather (the stage projects into an unroofed pit where spectators stand, surrounded by roofed galleries with bench seats; you can hire raincoats, cushions and blankets for the duration of the performance, which tells you something too), we paid £25 for seats in the gallery. And so we went to see Emilia, a new play by a playwright, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, that neither of us had ever heard of. The night we went it rained, hard, and the play ran two-and-a-half hours long, so there were two reasons to be glad for that decision (and glad it wasn’t colder too, for as it was we drank Starbucks hot chocolate in the interval to warm ourselves for the second act). Our assigned seats towards the centre of the gallery from the stairs of the East Tower had a very good view, and we could hear well too. Which was good, because the play had an all-female cast, and some of the lighter voices strained the limits of audibility.

             The play was based on the life of Emilia Bassano Lanier, an Elizabethan Londoner and poet whom some have identified as Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. The historical Emilia was christened in 1569, grew up embedded in the theatrical life of Elizabeth I’s court, was a published poet, teacher (or at any rate owned a school), mother, and feminist. She was also a merchant, and lived through all of James’ reign to die in her mid-Seventies in 1645, the year Cromwell defeated Charles 1 at the Battle of Naseby. She probably wasn’t Black – her father’s family came from Italy – but the play played with the notion that she might have been in several important ways.

            The play was commissioned from Morgan Lloyd Malcolm by Michelle Terry, the Artistic Director of the Globe, as part of a season of work devoted to Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. It was written for the specific theatre space, in Elizabethan dramatic mode, with music, dancing, mime, high falutin’ soliloquy, political conflict, the comedy of rude mechanicals and interaction with the audience in the pit all contributing elements of the whole. Women play all the on-stage roles (and almost all the backstage roles too), and casting is partly colourblind, although three different versions of Emilia are played by Black women and all the speaking men are White. Malcolm uses the fruits of current literary scholarship as the basis for her imagined version of Emilia’s life, with a ton of literary reference and some hefty dollops of intersectional feminism. I’m not sufficiently au-fait with Shakespearian work and scholarship to credit all the references and quotes, but there were lots, both direct and indirect, and a knowledgeable audience appreciated them. Meanwhile the text’s engagement with the ideas of intersectional politics chimed very well both with the audience, and with this week’s online conversations about N.K. Jemisin’s third Hugo Award for Best Novel.

            There was a lot to like about this play, although overall I wasn’t entirely convinced by it. I’m quite sure that this reflects my own failings as its audience, as well as or instead of than the production itself, but still…

The running time (two-and-a-half hours) seemed long for the content. This is partly the Elizabethan form with embedded entertainments giving value for the audience’s money. Partly because some of the conversations laboured with overmuch literary exposition and insufficient wit (I feel spoiled for these kinds of longeurs now by the super-efficient dialogue found in shows like Hamilton and Game of Thrones).

Detailed engagement with Shakespeare’s characters and texts was much of the point, I feel, for Terry and Malcolm, and obviously worked well for the knowledgeable regular audience for Globe productions, but meant that women’s feelings about their own lives were deflected somewhat through a Shakespearian lens. This was or wasn’t – according to taste! - helped by having Shakespeare himself as a character personally involved with Emilia’s life and work. Meanwhile, while the script looked at these aspects, an interesting thread about women’s responses to Emilia’s poetry and resistance to patriarchy was short-changed, and the matter of the play ends in 1611, only a little over half-way through Emilia’s long life.

The all-female cast, with every actress playing several parts, was a nice conceit, which worked well in itself, but within that I didn’t feel that the casting of individuals was strong. The play was framed by Emilia 1 (Leah Harvey) who gave a passionate and authoritative performance, but the younger Emilias 2 (Vinette Robinson) and 3 (Clare Perkins) were not well distinguished, and I have trouble understanding why there are two (maybe because one of them sings, the other doesn’t?). The play was framed by an older Emilia, Clare Perkins, who gave a passionate and authoritative performance, but the younger Emilias, Vinette Robinson and Leah Harvey were not well distinguished, and I have trouble understanding why there are two (maybe because one of them sings, the other doesn’t?). Margaret Clifford (Sophie Stone, who also played five other parts) has an important role as Emilia’s mentor and protector, but is played with a lisp that made her words hard to hear. Two of the four speaking men - Emilia’s lover and controller, Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey (Carolyn Pickles); and James’ patriarchal Lord Treasurer, Thomas Howard (Sophie Russell) – are caricatured with delightfully funny but threatening speeches by two slight and physically very similar actresses whose presence conveys no threat (I suppose this could be making a different kind of point, but I just felt confused). The river women studying at Emilia’s school (rude mechanicals, played by Sophie Stone and Amanda Wilkin among others) are delightful, varied and convincing in a way that those playing the major speaking parts are sometimes not, and made me wish some of the roles could be swopped around. Overall I would give the star for acting to Amanda Wilkin, who played the minor role of Emilia’s husband, Alphonso Lanier, as well as one of the river women and other parts, with verve and relish, and did not outstay her welcome on the stage. But I don’t feel that this set of reflections speaks well of the casting overall.

I’d like to give a special shout out to the designer of the Programme booklet, which provides the information that allowed me to write this review, but without providing any examples of Emilia’s poetry.

I’d say go and see the play, and form your own opinion, if you can, but its three-week run ends on 1^st September, so hurry.

Edit: I got the names of the actresses who played Emilia the wrong way round, hence the edit.