Seventy Eight miles to another universe

[threemonkeys]

Christopher Fowler and urban fantasy set in London. They just go together. Except that Calabash is set in a small seaside resort town which has a gateway to another universe. It is almost like Fowler wants to write a Charles De Lint novel. The "almost" is that this is one of those stories where the reality of the other world is in question. Is it real or is it a creation in the mind of the map obsessed* main character. It is a pretty good book. I enjoyed it. I just didn't enjoy it as much as other Christopher Fowler novels. The missing element is London. The city has always been a presence in his books. The seaside town is evoked nicely but does not have the impact that London brings.

*The main character is withdrawn and obsessed by ancient civilisation as well as maps but I thought that "map obsessed" might draw russellk's attention. :-)

Comments

[stephanie-pegg.livejournal.com]

I tried reading Roofworld recently. It made me uncomfortable, and eventually I had to give it up because the writing got most vivid when he was writing about incredibly cruel and sadistic ways to kill people that used occult symbology. And the death scenes just got worse and worse and worse.

I agree with you about London as a living character. That was the coolest part about the book.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

His novels pretty much all contain brutal death - not always cruel and sadistic but pretty nasty nevertheless. In times gone by he might have been labeled "horror" but everybody is avoiding that these days and trying "dark fantasy" on for size. His more recent work has featured a couple of detectives trying to solve violent and supernatural killings and thus tying into the nasty end of the "crime" fiction market too.

[russellk.livejournal.com]

*opens one eye*

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

Did you ever draw maps of ancient civilizations? Ones were only very sketchy info is available. It seems a sort of middle ground between real maps and maps of completely fictional landscapes.

[russellk.livejournal.com]

No, not really. I did sketch explorers' paths on to the maps in school atlases (but the teachers never found out, because I stole the atlases). It would be interesting to map a civilsation in which locations were speculative: would, for example, one use blobs of increasing density to indicate the increasing likelihood that a particular city was located in an area? Would boundaries become zones of uncertainty? Hmmm.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, have I triggered another distraction for you.

Actually, that idea sounds dangerously close to the probability diagrams that chemists have tried to use to define molecular orbitals. I don't think they ever really worked for me. I don't think I was alone in treating either the centre of the blob or the whole envelope as the entity and not properly appreciating the probabilistic nature of the diagram. But that is quantum mechanics for you.

[russellk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, fuzzy logic diagrams. I have done some work on applying fuzzy logic to areas of uncertainty in mapping - for example, contrasting the European cartography that commodified Maori land, with Maori notions of whenua tautohetohe (shared zones and no-man's land) which, instead of a hard boundary, gets a fuzzy line or zone. Tie this in with changing kinship connections and one arrives at a map that looks like an octopus with a fuzzy body. I've yet to decide how much more meaningful (if any) it is than a European representation of Maori land (the maps they argue over at the Waitangi Tribunal, for example).

Oops. Now that's how to go off at a tangent.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

Tangents are a real danger of blogs. I expect I will spend odd moments reminiscing about electron density diagrams for the rest of the day.