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chime_detroit's reviews
7 reviews
The Sins on Their Bones by Laura R. Samotin
2.5
Why are "inspired by x folklore" authors so scared of doing anything interesting and status-quo disrupting. People are already going to hate you for being Jewish regardless of if you prize rightful-heirdom and normalcy or not. Alexey and your batshit insane demon army and death-defying inhuman thing-ness, we barely knew ye. (Okay that's a lie, just, well. Who in the 2020s cares about Tzars??? God bless and keep both these Tzars far away from us.)
Many Waters by Madeleine L'Engle
informative
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
This is a love-hate sort of book and and old haunter of mine. L'Engle's messaging and portrayals of sexuality is both intensely erotic, dignifying, and thought-provoking; and intensely distressing and insulting. On some level the violent narrative misogyny and brutality with which the daughters of men, such as Mahlah and Tiglah, are treated with as a result of their relationships with Nefilim increase the eroticism, especially for a fascinated preteen reader, and the emotional poignance and descriptive honesty of what a 'price' for these desires incur. However, the disingenuous twisting of situations that explain the motivations behind precocious sexuality (precocious both in young age and in the level of ambition of desire, as seen here in not only Mahlah and Tiglah, but also the dynamics between Yalith being torn between Sandy & Dennys vs the Nephilim, and the approaches towards human women of the Nephilim as opposed to the Seraphim, is far more infuriating.
Regarding this last point, the narrative seems terrified and cowed -- rather than uninterested -- in properly exploring female sexual desire for the more-than-human. It couches these girls' desire in terms of expectations of human-like love and a hope of ennobling from worthlessness, and their attempts to overreach past 'normal' relationships with 'normal' men in intensely patriarchal social structures as something that they could have been easily avoided and which if avoided, could have allowed them to attain normal satisfactory happiness instead. These are the structures that feel contrived and manipulative, in a way that eg the emotional and physical consequences of a sexual relationship with Nephilim do not. Neither of these are believable, though the blend of desperation and predatory deception the Nephilim treat the human girls with, and the casual misogyny Sandy and Dennys are saturated with, is.
But given the structures the author sets up, the emotional poignancy and electric soup of sexuality, awakening, unreadiness, tenuous self-control, and clashing inequalities of Knowings -- Sandy & Dennys's knowing of the future and the biblical story of Noah and the fates of these people in the Flood, their inability to know why it is happening, their struggling between their hunger to Know carnally and their instincts to hold back in the face of temptation due to their youth and many other conflicting factors, the things Tiglah knows that Yalith doesn't, and vice versa -- are all explored in a fascinating, aching, way. In the sexuality and the depictions of unnamably complicated emotions, surrounding desire and power and knowledge, L'Engle provides by depiction and narrative infliction, the reminder that desire is an emotion and experience in its own right, rather than the mere indication of a gap to be filled. Sandy, Dennys, and Yalith are able to luxuriate in this, and preteen readers are able to sit with and get used to without pursuing knee-jerk repression or fulfillment to immediately quench the desire before it's fully felt, before tasting the pleasure and flavor of experiencing and being able to identify one's own experience of desiring. L'Engle projects an honesty and respect for middle-grade audiences that I doubt many middle-grade books provide.
But I honestly think the bar for treating preteens and young teens like people is so low that's not as strong a compliment as it could be. I think kids could do better still -- something that admits what kinds of societal unbearableness can shape and justify desires, and that focuses on reminding what the prices of desires are, rather than policing the internal experience of desires.
Regarding this last point, the narrative seems terrified and cowed -- rather than uninterested -- in properly exploring female sexual desire for the more-than-human. It couches these girls' desire in terms of expectations of human-like love and a hope of ennobling from worthlessness, and their attempts to overreach past 'normal' relationships with 'normal' men in intensely patriarchal social structures as something that they could have been easily avoided and which if avoided, could have allowed them to attain normal satisfactory happiness instead. These are the structures that feel contrived and manipulative, in a way that eg the emotional and physical consequences of a sexual relationship with Nephilim do not. Neither of these are believable, though the blend of desperation and predatory deception the Nephilim treat the human girls with, and the casual misogyny Sandy and Dennys are saturated with, is.
But given the structures the author sets up, the emotional poignancy and electric soup of sexuality, awakening, unreadiness, tenuous self-control, and clashing inequalities of Knowings -- Sandy & Dennys's knowing of the future and the biblical story of Noah and the fates of these people in the Flood, their inability to know why it is happening, their struggling between their hunger to Know carnally and their instincts to hold back in the face of temptation due to their youth and many other conflicting factors, the things Tiglah knows that Yalith doesn't, and vice versa -- are all explored in a fascinating, aching, way. In the sexuality and the depictions of unnamably complicated emotions, surrounding desire and power and knowledge, L'Engle provides by depiction and narrative infliction, the reminder that desire is an emotion and experience in its own right, rather than the mere indication of a gap to be filled. Sandy, Dennys, and Yalith are able to luxuriate in this, and preteen readers are able to sit with and get used to without pursuing knee-jerk repression or fulfillment to immediately quench the desire before it's fully felt, before tasting the pleasure and flavor of experiencing and being able to identify one's own experience of desiring. L'Engle projects an honesty and respect for middle-grade audiences that I doubt many middle-grade books provide.
But I honestly think the bar for treating preteens and young teens like people is so low that's not as strong a compliment as it could be. I think kids could do better still -- something that admits what kinds of societal unbearableness can shape and justify desires, and that focuses on reminding what the prices of desires are, rather than policing the internal experience of desires.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Pregnancy, Injury/Injury detail, Misogyny, and Sexual content
there is a graphic depiction of a difficult childbirth involving vaginal tearing, and of severe full-body burns
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
0.25
Pure doormat-ly affirming, validating garbage. Both of the authors earned my lifelong contempt by their clear conviction that there was a whisper of anything pushy or clever or subversive in this shlock, and so did legions of readers.
The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
While I, like almost every American who doesn't live in New York City, wishes that US immigrant stories of the turn of the century could take place more often in literally any other city, this was an incredibly moving and absorbing read from start to finish.
The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.75
Write more stuff like this.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Antisemitism and Torture
The Birds that Fly at Dusk by Ivana Skye
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
This book is odd as hell, and one of the psychologically strangest and most divided against itself I’ve read recently. It’s definitely of the category of ‘odd, half-formed, and weaker middle installment of a trilogy’ but in a way that’s extra odd in this series, because the most crucial plot and world building information of the entire series is contained in mostly the last 1/3rd of this book (and in a single throwaway phrase around the mid-point), only after it does its best to bore the audience into dropping it. I’ve heard this is a tactic Umberto Eco employed deliberately, to whittle the readership down to only those who’ve gotten through it, but I doubt it was deliberate here. The weakness is closer to what I’d call ‘boilerplate’ — except for the parts of the book that are absolutely not boilerplate in any way shape or form, and are in fact some of the best writing, of any kind, I’ve ever seen in my life. Are in fact things I’ve never seen stated anywhere else, in any manner. Maybe never in the history of religion.
We open with Eshva, a demon, who is 12 years old. As clarified but not elaborated on in The Stars That Rise At Dawn, demons in Sehhinah are people who were taken from their families as young children by the entity Lilith, who queers the human/inhuman binary by making herself immaterial and immortal due to a never-repeated-again machination of extremely creative Theurgy and interlocking of God’s power. However, the reason children are stolen from their homes and made into demons is to rescue them from abuse and abandonment. No one in Sehhinah quite comments on this — after all, it’s completely normal to them and has been for millennia — but in dialogue with the real world family institution and real world legend of Lilith (and global ubiquitous stories of baby-stealing entities), it ranks as one of the most clever comments I’ve seen in a long time. The fallibility of such a system — placing the power to decide who should be taken from their families or not in the hands of a single woman who lived millennia ago in an age and society totally unlike the current one — is never quite meditated upon either, but in a somewhat odd choice, exploring demonhood and the demon system is not even close to a main subject of this book.
But demons are the main characters. Eshva, the 12 year old demon, does an impressive feat of Theurgy in the prologue, creating a conflagration of electric sparks and arcs around their hand, which increase in intensity the harder they focus on their sense of themself. Immediately afterwards, the joy of this creation and impulse is shattered, as it turns out, which they didn’t anticipate (being 12 and all), that this means they are a walking electrocution hazard, unable to touch anyone without seriously injuring them, and dangerous to be near if they are not dissociating from themself. Quite impressive in the elegance of its horror.
Ten years later, a different demon, from the same region but a different settlement, named Celyet, is 17 (so an adult). Also a gifted Theurgist, she has created a highly realistic creek, only for her fellow demons to bathe in it, unaware that it is her soul, or that it is Theurgy at all. Broken up by this, she flees the camp for the nearby city of Akal-ne. Where, as it turns out, Eshva is working as a coffeeshop barista, having somehow manifested a glove that suppresses their electricity, and rather halfheartedly dating a regular human woman, Yairen, the quietly browbeaten and insecure youngest daughter of a prestigious trading family. Yairen suddenly asks Eshva to teach her Theurgy, bringing up their old trauma in full force.
After a bewildering day of trying to figure out the social systems and bureaucracy of human society, Celyet tries to recover in a coffeeshop — the one Eshva works at. Here comes an odd, long, and fascinatingly tender scene, where Celyet does something that ought to be routine and casual to most people — tries to order a drink at this shop. Somewhat in the vein of Yenatru and Eliya’s strangely and unexpectedly tender interaction over the revealing of Yenatru’s manifestation back in Stars. The pacing slows to a careful, blow-by-blow sequence of emotions and thoughts, turning on Celyet’s exquisite sensitivity, neurodivergence, alienatedness, and terror of being misinterpreted; combined with Eshva’s paranoia, forced distancing of themself, and clumsy desperate kindness. It’s a surprisingly engrossing and intimate sequence of writing, and does a lot of literary work in infusing depth into the first two thirds of the book. This type of scene does not recur in this book, but does to some extent in the third book.
Soon after, this is interrupted by the angel Jibril, who is the owner of the coffeeshop (named “Jibrew”) strolling in. This kind of thing is really a delight of the series. Everyone knew Jibril owned it, but they’d been off-planet for years, and none of the main characters had ever seen them. The over-the-top, ostentatious, and sharply-precise and carefully-considered attention to every detail and design choice of their design is truly magnificent:
…and there’s places where [the skin] glows, somehow. There’s something shifting under there, almost: for a second Yairēn can almost catch the shape and glow and feel and even slight blueness of a lick of flame under their neck.
And with a last step—bells, bells—this person’s hair, some shade of light gold and straight, wafts forward, almost over the counter as if drawn there. And Yairēn manages to look up, away from the hair and hand and the fingers coiled against the counter, at moments seeming too to glow, and at their face.
That’s a mistake, because she makes eye contact.
The eyes are too bright—not glowing, but just bright and sharp and clear in a way that doesn’t make sense, doesn’t seem possible, like when a camera lens is perfectly focused on one thing to the exclusion of all else but Yairēn isn’t looking through a camera, she’s looking through her eyes. And this person’s eyes, some clear and perfectly smooth shade of light orange, are more in focus than just about anything in the world ever seems to be.
Jibril immediate starts to talk, and slowly makes everyone, especially Celyet, irritated beyond belief, but with some extremely interesting worldbuilding and cosmological history details for the readers:
“— Still can’t believe They of all people couldn’t imagine how to fix how flaming sad Lucifer was for so long! A couple of times I even tried to tell Them like, hey girl, I mean not really girl because You have no idea what a gender is, but girl all the same—“
Something else. Anything else. That river, flowing so gentle. The feel of clay in her fingers. Softness. Softness under her feet…
“—girl, there are some flaws in how You’ve set things up. And They were just kind of like, shrugging with Their mirrors and fire like what’s better? I guess I thought that was rhetorical, you know how it is with Them and words, though of course you know me, or you’re getting to know me, so I did try to answer anyway but I guess my thoughts just weren’t as impressive an answer for Them as what Lucifer did, you know how it is with Them and arguments.”
While desperately trying to tune out Jibril’s endless monologuing, Celyet starts focusing on her own soul, her own calm and rich flowing river-ness, and then, by accident, so easy is this for her, she manifests a river of her soul in the middle of the coffeeshop. Theurgy cannot be undone, so now she’s stuck with the horrifying prospect of her soul being permanently and uneradicatably plopped in the middle of a public place of business. Jibril however, persuades her that they will protect it, and her, from disturbance, and hints to her that there’s something unusual about her.
After Eshva and Yairen’s respective personal issues continue, accelerated and fueled by Celyet’s manifestation event that happened before their eyes. Pondering herself makes Yairen dissolve into tears and self-loathing, and pondering Celyet’s beautiful, non-dangerous manifestation makes Eshva stiff with envy and a different type of self-loathing. Eventually that night, Jibril bullies Eshva into taking a trip up to a mountain so that they can ‘chat’ about their issues. This isn’t over any more interesting than the stuff that has been happening since the strange tender magnifying-glass-eye view of the coffee-ordering sequence, but it casually contains a passage that blew me out of my chair:
“Y’know, that sounds pretty ironic, since I’m guessing that’s not your problem, thinking you’re too little. It’s not worth it, you know that, right? Being afraid of yourself, I mean. Because—do you know why God, maker of Something-out-of-Nothing, stretched themself to the absolute limit to make something not from Their soul, to break the rules of Theurgy more than anyone has since, only possible for Them because Their nature is Something-out-of-nothing—why They, famously lazy, put so much effort into inviting entirely other souls to exist, first the angels and then you humans? Do you know why?”
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this idea for the creation of people/souls in any other fiction, nor in any jewish or christian or muslim theology or philosophy I’ve read. Things partial and slightly overlapping with this yes, but not this particular combo. Unless it was phrased in so different a manner that I forgot the earlier one and therefore can’t compare it to this. The way it fits in with the worldbuilding of Theurgy is insane. Yet it’s presented quite casually, and responded to without any amazement or confusion — as if society already has a long, surface-level familiarity with the concept, such that people rarely if ever stop to contemplate how astonishingly full of wonder and implications this is.wonder and implications it is.
While this is happening, Yairen decides that she’s too worthless to make anything of herself, and that somehow, a possible way out of this is to become a Holy. Comparing each sentence her thought process and motivations and the entire sequence of her reactions, beliefs, and desires; to Tamar’s in the previous book, is fascinating, right down to the fact Tamar desires to ‘see God’ while Yairen desires to ‘be made Holy’. God makes this one appearance in this book, and it’s to be deeply unimpressed with Yairen’s motivations and refuse her. They make attempts to communicate Their reasoning to her, but a two-fold communication barrier is instantly hit — the difficulty of understanding Their complex, nonverbal communication, and Yairen’s hair-trigger projections and jumping to conclusions that seem to hit every flavor of misinterpretation that Celyet was so afraid of being directed at herself earlier in the book. After a long sequence of meandering, bogged-down attempts at explanation and persuasion, God finally gives up and withdraws in a temper while Yairen explodes in a rage.
And then immediately after this, consumed by panic and suicidality, Yairen decides that the only thing that will calm her down is to bathe in Celyet’s soul. She doesn’t really seem to notice this is almost the same thing as being made a Holy, just as neither Yenatru nor Eliya nor Lucifer ever made the connection between it and the scene of Eliya being kissed by Yenatru’s manifestation. But it’s an incredible description of Celyet’s soul.
The book continues rather normally weaving in between these occasional shockingly intense scenes whose implications go unnoticed by the characters, but setting up a fast-moving, yet natural-feeling polyamorous romance between the three main characters. Until finally, it’s established: these connections are not unnoticed. Jibril has been brewing these connections in their mind for a long long time, maybe centuries, but for some reason has been refusing to announce the idea to the world at large. The answer is, that there are gods besides God. Specifically, some people — mostly normal people, humans, such as Celyet — have souls that, through the logic of Theurgy that has been getting set up in this and previous book, identify them as gods by their nature. This is revealed in two conversations, one where Celyet talks to Lilith, trying to understand what God is and why They are special/supposedly one-of-a-kind:
That sounds almost as if….someone else could have been that first person, and it just happened to be Them who was. But no, that doesn’t sound quite right.
Is who They are, Celyet asks, because of Their being the first to exist?
Lilith considers that with a hum that is also the wind through trees, and then says: Perhaps it is the other way around.
So if another existed first, instead of Them. If another… another… like God…? But no, no, it’s not really about who was first. It’s about—about something else— something which could allow one to be the first to exist—
A quality, that God has.
And then one between Celyet and Jibril, where Jibril informs Celyet of their theory and the logic behind it. This is the location, finally, of what I mentioned at the beginning of this review — some of the best writing, of any kind, I’ve ever seen in my life. Are in fact things I’ve never seen stated anywhere else, in any manner. Maybe never in the history of religion.
It’s not very informative to excerpt explanatory elements of this second conversation, however, because it’s so tightly bound up, and already pretty much is the minimum amount of explanation required to convey this info — a full chapter, an evocative but still incomplete part chosen at random:
I think you’ll understand when I say that it is possible for a soul not just to be what it is, but to be itself a creation of the conditions for its own existence. And though it is hard to say exactly what makes it so, you seem to do and be this in the very same way that God is the sourceless shining fire that is forever in the act of searing through me.
Her heart racing, racing, racing, she reads another sentence, and another.
I wonder if the sense of power in you is the same.
I wonder if your way of being is the same.
She stops to catch her breath. There are implications here, but she cannot believe them. Yes, there is an intensity to her, in all its gentle and soft senses, in the muchness of all she is and has manifest … but what Jibril is implying is plainly impossible.
And yet.
And yet, the impossible opens far too wide and visible in Celyet’s heart.
She turns back to her square, where more words shine. God is not a name, they read, and there’s already tears in Celyet’s eyes. Because she knows, she knows, entirely and exactly, in every drop of her soul, where this is going. Even some commonly-spoken curses mention God’s names, and the implication there is entirely true: God is not the name of God. Not even one of them.
The final parts of the book need less analysis, since being a middle book, it ends without much being wrapped up, but more open to suspense.
As stated before, this book is really weird. If Stars is geologically layered and full of spurs of different types and densities of rock thrusting through one another, Birds is like huge hunks of pure gold dumped in a lake of concrete. Excavating the gold is not difficult, neither to find nor to dig out, if someone tells you there’s gold in there, but it is basically completely unsignalled and there’s plenty of concrete under and between the hunks of gold too. Like a guilty criminal’s ploy to hide their gold from the cops.
In particular I don’t understand the character of Eshva. I don’t mean that I don’t understand them as a person — that is entirely understandable and realistic. But as a choice for a written character. Their trauma, their issues, and their arc are as obviously and tritely telegraphed as that of Elsa from the Disney movie Frozen; despite how terrifying the backstory impetus for these in the prologue is. The focus on the surface level, most obvious issue with their manifestation — the danger it poses — is in fact treated as the full problem and analysis of their issues. Not, for example, a thin veneer covering a genuinely deeper issue, like, say, ‘who the hell am I, that such a thing as this is my soul in the first place?’ Yairen is more deep and meaty, but a part of her arc — when Celyet teaches her Theurgy — engages in a similar surface level solution. Her terror is that when she tries to feel her soul, she feels nothing but howling emptiness. Her eventual manifestation winds up being a pair of wings she can fly upon. But the bridge between these is not a clever leaning into this emptiness — perhaps your soul is a howling open gap full of empty air, the necessary conditions for flight — but a more simple ‘no just reach further, and you will find a spark instead of this empty space’, and she does. I bring these specific ideas up because both these deeper hints — the flutter amid emptiness, or the horror of what their manifestation proves about their soul — are present. But unlike in Stars, where the many facets of different angles and possible frames and speculations that Eliya thumbs through about her soul all build and jostle together to form a larger structure, and the less-fraught reflections in Birds of successful Theurgists Celyet and Jibril seem to emphasize that such intricacy is to be expected in all souls, the deeper hints of Eshva and Yairen in Birds feel like they’re competing with much more simple and straightforward explanations.
In particular I don’t understand the character of Eshva. I don’t mean that I don’t understand them as a person — that is entirely understandable and realistic. But as a choice for a written character. Their trauma, their issues, and their arc are as obviously and tritely telegraphed as that of Elsa from the Disney movie Frozen; despite how terrifying the backstory impetus for these in the prologue is. The focus on the surface level, most obvious issue with their manifestation — the danger it poses — is in fact treated as the full problem and analysis of their issues. Not, for example, a thin veneer covering a genuinely deeper issue, like, say, ‘who the hell am I, that such a thing as this is my soul in the first place?’ Yairen is more deep and meaty, but a part of her arc — when Celyet teaches her Theurgy — engages in a similar surface level solution. Her terror is that when she tries to feel her soul, she feels nothing but howling emptiness. Her eventual manifestation winds up being a pair of wings she can fly upon. But the bridge between these is not a clever leaning into this emptiness — perhaps your soul is a howling open gap full of empty air, the necessary conditions for flight — but a more simple ‘no just reach further, and you will find a spark instead of this empty space’, and she does. I bring these specific ideas up because both these deeper hints — the flutter amid emptiness, or the horror of what their manifestation proves about their soul — are present. But unlike in Stars, where the many facets of different angles and possible frames and speculations that Eliya thumbs through about her soul all build and jostle together to form a larger structure, and the less-fraught reflections in Birds of successful Theurgists Celyet and Jibril seem to emphasize that such intricacy is to be expected in all souls, the deeper hints of Eshva and Yairen in Birds feel like they’re competing with much more simple and straightforward explanations.
These takings of a road more well-traveled rather than jumping at the opportunity to dodge it and/or to leapfrog it into a much more interesting and odd psychological thicket are a bit at odds with basically everything else in the series, including all the characters, very much including Celyet and Jibril. None of this was handled or written poorly, but it felt strange and almost feint-like coming from this author, to spend so much time on such trope- and genre-conforming storylines. It also felt less psychologically interesting and revealing than any of the uncomfortably wrestling twisting and turning characterization in Stars coming from the author struggling to let her ideas exist. Or for that matter, in the character of Celyet. Perhaps there was some extent to which Celyet and Jibril are the clear core characters of the main thematic point of the book, but either holding to this extremely tiny cast, or expanding the cast to strange peripheral characters that appear in the book only briefly, like Tan Coat Guy and his unnamed sister, or young children, or Lilith, was not in the cards for this series’ unusualness at the time of writing.
Speaking of Lilith, I was somewhat let down by how non-central to the plot the demon system and its impact on society and theological place in the world was. It means that demons remain one of the most significant loose ends to the worldbuilding; the other one being the history of this world and the evolution of its society over the many millennia of theologically ‘status-quo’ development. Neither of these are exactly essential for the core arc of the series or its fulfillment in the final book, but elaboration on them would have likely made a better use of middle-book pagecount than a couple of the supporting character arcs that those pages were spent on instead.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicidal thoughts
Moderate: Emotional abuse
Minor: Child abuse
The Stars that Rise at Dawn by Ivana Skye
The quote I come to is one of James Baldwin: It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
Continuing to go through the plot of this book is perhaps a losing battle, as I'm not willing to spoiler what this book's definition of a fallen angel is, and it becomes increasingly hard to discuss the book without it, so I will end it here. But a structure which I collated while doing my best to gather some thoughts on this bizarre novel by combing social media for its small scattering of devoted fans:
But the most interesting character in the book isn't Tamar, Yenatru, Elīya, Lucifer, or even God. It's the author, Skye. There may not be a frame narrative in this book, but parts of the narrative are so strangely put-upon on the content that the author's presence kicking and screaming and fighting with something that never quite makes it onto the page here (not fully until the last book in the series, The Lives That Argue For Us), is an entirely parallel narrative of its own, glinting and hinting, in the redacted gaps between revisions, in the gap between narrative and depiction, made of the things that are forced in and the things she can't force herself to take out.
Another James Baldwin quote is something I’d partially-assign and partially-deconstruct in light of the author's continual self-soothing lapses as she digs herself and falls back into the hole that is not her grave and sternly tells herself to get out of the hole, this is not her grave: It starts with “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart;” And then continues “and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”
emotional
funny
informative
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.25
I’ve never seen such a geologically-layered example of an author going through it, where ‘it’ is neuroses and insight impressed and pushing through each other like pegmatite igneous rock spurs pushing through each other — hard insight piercing through thick layers of neurosis, and crystallized neuroses unable or unwilling (perhaps due to affectionate loyalty to the author’s past self) to melt itself down even in the sharp pressure of insight.
The quote I come to is one of James Baldwin: It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
The entire novel reads as proof of this quote. Not as a full process of the vomiting, nor a securely backwards-looking reflection of how the vomiter went through this process, with careful assurances that the writer knows full well that the vomiting-of-filth had happening and is simply reflecting on it. But something more like a several-stage epistolary presentation of an event: the base text as a woozy and unpleasantly self-abasing, unselfaware, neurotic, and in-denial discord liveblog of a short snapshot of time with the vomiting sufferer slumped over the toilet, starting well after the vomiting has begun, and ending long before the vomiting has ended; then a subsequent screenshotting of a pared down collation of the most interesting parts of the liveblog in a blog post, with fascinated reflective presentation of the insights the live blogger failed/refused/lied about looking at; and then finally, the final text, as a collaged remix of the liveblog and its collation, but without ANY smug commentary or ego-stroking parading of self-awareness — prizing emotional honesty to the liveblogger of that past snapshot, including honesty to the persistent dishonesty of that liveblogger. Most of the text examines the vomit, little of it is concerned with pointing out that it is vomit, or that it’s being vomited, much of it comments on a distanced-from-the-liveblogger Someone Else’s process of ignorance and realization and eventual understanding that has little resemblance (but does have relevance) to the vomiting depicted in the the novel.
And interspersed, reluctantly a center of gravity while denied to be, are the vomiting liveblogger’s intrusive dazzled intermittent thoughts that maybe, perhaps, it might be possible to walk on the earth as if they have a right to be there, which flicker in and out, the central line yet repeatedly shied-away-from, repeatedly looked at and looked away from. Much like the burned-out flaming eye-prices of Tamar that flit through a story whose word count is textually dominated by strange narrative treacles.
And interspersed, reluctantly a center of gravity while denied to be, are the vomiting liveblogger’s intrusive dazzled intermittent thoughts that maybe, perhaps, it might be possible to walk on the earth as if they have a right to be there, which flicker in and out, the central line yet repeatedly shied-away-from, repeatedly looked at and looked away from. Much like the burned-out flaming eye-prices of Tamar that flit through a story whose word count is textually dominated by strange narrative treacles.
I’ve read three editions of this novel and it’s given me a huge amount of ideas about storymaking. But I’ll focus on the most recent edition. The points, driving force, of the novel goes something like this:
Two years ago, Tamar, just turned 17, an impulsive and arrogant skater/biker girl type, motorbikes alone and without telling her friends Elīya and Yenatru, out of the middle-eastern-coded fantasy city of Ennuh and into the desert, propelled by an intense passion and curiosity even she can't quite understand. And at the top of Erezel Plateau, which has inexplicably loomed in her heart entwined with this desire, tell God, who is a bodiless entity of laughter and fire and harshness right out of Sinai of Exodus, that she wants Them to show her Their soul. After a moment of warning and wrestling, They do, and in glee and shock, looking at a sky of cresting and rippling stars that is the entire soul of God, Tamar's eyes burn out forever, leaving them still burning.
This is the prologue, and is around 5 pages, which really puts into perspective some things about the next half of the book. The pacing is very uneven, and many of the longest scenes are the emptiest, and the shortest the most powerful.
The time skip of 2 years is heralded and punctuated by a epigrammical quote that both sharpens the two personalities in the preceding prologue, and overhangs and mockingly dogs what is to immediately follow:
Once, Heaven expected; all after death to wake to fire. Now understood desires many. One day at world end, all resurrect to more choices. Which choices? What you wish; I the flame know not. Yet. Your lives will argue for you.
-Evian translation of God's Covenant, originally
delivered without words, 0 A.C. (After Covenant)
Because in the current day, it immediately cuts to Elīya and Yenatru, Tamar's old friends from high school, who are in college, drifting apart and aggravated by their lukewarm education and experience of life. For the hundredth time, they discuss how Tamar broke a promise the three of them had made to share everything interesting that happened with each other, because after the event of the prologue, Tamar never talked to them again, but moved away to a neighboring but a good day's-drive-away ancient desert city of Eden. (The technology level of the setting is ambiguously early-20th-century: electricity and printing are established and widespread; motorcycles, old-fashioned landline telephones, radios, silent movies, and the like are newer tech; there are no computers let alone internet or smartphones, nor commercial airplanes or cars, and as far as I can tell, no trains either, at least not passenger ones.) The two of them can't understand why Tamar did it, and can't quite put their finger on why it haunts them still, but the loose end and riddle looms large in their unsatisfying lives, where neither of them have any feelings about anything about life or the world strong enough to even guess at Tamar's. Instead, they have college.
This college is quite USAmerican-coded, which is somewhat odd as a choice but the scenes are viscerally and unpleasantly believable. I could almost smell the old classrooms and dull quad, not to mention hear the pointless, busywork questions and group-discussion instructions of the professors. From this we get a couple of interesting details: 1) angels are well-known-enough appearances and personages to be referred to in the way that, if this was a different genre, established superheroes might be referred to. 2) Elīya is a philosophy major, and is much smarter and more invested in her work than her classmates, which mostly just makes her insufferable but is also embarrassingly relatable and sympathetic. 3) The aforementioned quote -- the Covenant -- is a core element of society and theology, as it marks a shift, which happened nearly 6,000 years ago, where due to the actions of two historical and elusive but immortal figures -- Lilith and Lucifer -- God announced to the world that They didn't know what all the choices, desires, and possibilities of other people might entail, yet, but is promising to learn what they are and give the world these possibilities in the afterlife, if people will use this life as an opportunity to teach Them what these possibilities might be.
Suddenly, the momentum of the pacing drops, though with several fascinating worldbuilding concepts. Elīya complains bitterly to her Exposition-Deposit BFF who is...a demon. What's a demon? Nothing special, or even cool looking: a horned human, much more normally human and far, far less demonic than any Homestuck troll. As the book doesn't get to that until later, I won't either. Yenatru, in the massive college Library (I can also almost smell this, but it's a better smell), begins to practice Theurgy from a small mysterious book written by the angel Israfil (the Islamic form of Rafael). What's Theurgy? Oddly, looking up the definition of theurgy in real world historical magical practices yields almost the opposite definition to what it means here. The dictionary definition of Theurgy:
Two years ago, Tamar, just turned 17, an impulsive and arrogant skater/biker girl type, motorbikes alone and without telling her friends Elīya and Yenatru, out of the middle-eastern-coded fantasy city of Ennuh and into the desert, propelled by an intense passion and curiosity even she can't quite understand. And at the top of Erezel Plateau, which has inexplicably loomed in her heart entwined with this desire, tell God, who is a bodiless entity of laughter and fire and harshness right out of Sinai of Exodus, that she wants Them to show her Their soul. After a moment of warning and wrestling, They do, and in glee and shock, looking at a sky of cresting and rippling stars that is the entire soul of God, Tamar's eyes burn out forever, leaving them still burning.
This is the prologue, and is around 5 pages, which really puts into perspective some things about the next half of the book. The pacing is very uneven, and many of the longest scenes are the emptiest, and the shortest the most powerful.
The time skip of 2 years is heralded and punctuated by a epigrammical quote that both sharpens the two personalities in the preceding prologue, and overhangs and mockingly dogs what is to immediately follow:
Once, Heaven expected; all after death to wake to fire. Now understood desires many. One day at world end, all resurrect to more choices. Which choices? What you wish; I the flame know not. Yet. Your lives will argue for you.
-Evian translation of God's Covenant, originally
delivered without words, 0 A.C. (After Covenant)
Because in the current day, it immediately cuts to Elīya and Yenatru, Tamar's old friends from high school, who are in college, drifting apart and aggravated by their lukewarm education and experience of life. For the hundredth time, they discuss how Tamar broke a promise the three of them had made to share everything interesting that happened with each other, because after the event of the prologue, Tamar never talked to them again, but moved away to a neighboring but a good day's-drive-away ancient desert city of Eden. (The technology level of the setting is ambiguously early-20th-century: electricity and printing are established and widespread; motorcycles, old-fashioned landline telephones, radios, silent movies, and the like are newer tech; there are no computers let alone internet or smartphones, nor commercial airplanes or cars, and as far as I can tell, no trains either, at least not passenger ones.) The two of them can't understand why Tamar did it, and can't quite put their finger on why it haunts them still, but the loose end and riddle looms large in their unsatisfying lives, where neither of them have any feelings about anything about life or the world strong enough to even guess at Tamar's. Instead, they have college.
This college is quite USAmerican-coded, which is somewhat odd as a choice but the scenes are viscerally and unpleasantly believable. I could almost smell the old classrooms and dull quad, not to mention hear the pointless, busywork questions and group-discussion instructions of the professors. From this we get a couple of interesting details: 1) angels are well-known-enough appearances and personages to be referred to in the way that, if this was a different genre, established superheroes might be referred to. 2) Elīya is a philosophy major, and is much smarter and more invested in her work than her classmates, which mostly just makes her insufferable but is also embarrassingly relatable and sympathetic. 3) The aforementioned quote -- the Covenant -- is a core element of society and theology, as it marks a shift, which happened nearly 6,000 years ago, where due to the actions of two historical and elusive but immortal figures -- Lilith and Lucifer -- God announced to the world that They didn't know what all the choices, desires, and possibilities of other people might entail, yet, but is promising to learn what they are and give the world these possibilities in the afterlife, if people will use this life as an opportunity to teach Them what these possibilities might be.
Suddenly, the momentum of the pacing drops, though with several fascinating worldbuilding concepts. Elīya complains bitterly to her Exposition-Deposit BFF who is...a demon. What's a demon? Nothing special, or even cool looking: a horned human, much more normally human and far, far less demonic than any Homestuck troll. As the book doesn't get to that until later, I won't either. Yenatru, in the massive college Library (I can also almost smell this, but it's a better smell), begins to practice Theurgy from a small mysterious book written by the angel Israfil (the Islamic form of Rafael). What's Theurgy? Oddly, looking up the definition of theurgy in real world historical magical practices yields almost the opposite definition to what it means here. The dictionary definition of Theurgy:
- the operation or effect of a supernatural or divine agency in human affairs.
- a system of white magic practiced by the early Neoplatonists.
or:
the art or technique of compelling or persuading a god or beneficent or supernatural power to do or refrain from doing something
or:
A form of magic designed to allow for worship or conjuration of, or communication with spirits or deities.
The definition of Theurgy in Šehhinah, meanwhile, is the art of creating a permanent physical manifestation of one's own soul. In Yenatru's case, he creates first a permanent lipstick made of his soul, which when touched in a kiss, conveys knowledge of the nature of his soul (safety, healing, and comfort).
I have no idea if the author knows or cares that calling this 'Theurgy' is deranged and bewildering, but I'll get to that.
In any case, while doing this Yenatru meets Lucifer. Who's Lucifer? A Fallen Angel. Oh Chime Detroit, you say, that's a perfectly familiar description of Lucifer! Well no. What's a fallen angel? What's an angel, and what is falling? In any case, Lucifer is not only definitively not Satan, they also are not at all cool, ambitious, demonic, evil or even morally gray, feared, hated, a leader, or even in possession of any mission or role. They're famous, but only because of the Covenant. In fact, they're casually affected and chatty, and generally seem like they walked off the page of a Neil Gaiman book.
Lucifer befriends Yenatru. This is well characterized but honestly, I can not only now smell the college, but feel the black cloud of college depression and bleak loneliness descending on me out of the past. Yenatru's reaction to being Befriended, his gratefulness at being noticed and liked, is excruciating in familiarity. Lucifer's squirmy, OCD self-conscious Gaiman-ness is excruciating too, but more thought-provoking, as this is a person who is supposedly as old as the universe who acts exactly like a college kid.
Their loneliness and arrested development both do get some contextual elaboration in the next chapters, as they complain to Yenatru that they only make friends with humans, as other fallen angels want them to be an important leader or spokesperson of some sort, and are shown reading a fiction book about a cult forcing a girl into doing what Tamar did, and Lucifer's exaggerated demonstrations of disgust at the concept of anyone doing this elicit neither reaction nor even thoughts from Yenatru. It's difficult to tell if hearing Tamar's choices framed as brainwashed tragic mistakes is spinelessness, agreement, or thoughtful nonjudgmentalness from Yenatru.
Elīya of course, finds out about Lucifer, and somehow manages to decide: this qualifies as an interesting thing that has happened, so she's clearly obligated to tell Tamar. Wouldn't Lucifer please go track down Tamar and tell her to come meet Elīya, who is keeping her promise?
Understandably, Lucifer doesn't agree -- but then relents, and says they will but only under the condition that Elīya agrees to do Theurgy too. Their teachings of Theurgy are fascinating scenes, albeit sometimes uncomfortably veering towards contemporary witchy meditation woo in tone (this decreases significantly over the course of the book). But it's much more convincingly as if from an angel as old as the universe than they ever do with Yenatru, though both in pedagogically-inconvenient intimate ease/familiarity with soul manifestation and marked amounts of long-calcified non-receptivity to the potential of a novice's fresh eyes, when they talk like this:
"So, to say it another way, your soul's your self. Who you are. Everything that makes you you."
"Others may identify me by my body. If it's what makes me identifiable, isn't that part of what makes me me?"
Lucifer sighs. "Okay, I get what's going on here, which is that you're not even halfway on the same page as me. I think a way I could say this that connects more to your perspective would be, your soul's what makes you identifiable to you. The experience of being you, maybe."
Elīya gets a great deal out of these lessons, but what actually really changes things for her, speeding her progress way faster than Yenatru's (!) is when she finally catches Yenatru out in his lie-by-omission and realizes he's been learning Theurgy for over a year as well. And then, Yenatru kisses her hand, with his lips that are covered in a manifestation that is his soul, and Elīya is for the first time in her life, thunderstruck and world-shaken by the presence of an existence of a person that she can't misunderstand or filter away. She realizes what Theurgy actually means and is, and that she had never known a thing about Yenatru before, in all her years of talking to him. Now, she finally starts to get it. And Yenatru, the immensity of his understanding that he has been seen pushes him into hysterical overwhelmed tears. I don't know whether to be surprised or appreciative of the way the author did not choose something evocative of Tamar's seeing God as an epigrammal quote, it might have made the analogy too obvious.
But it begs the question for me: did God feel the way Yenatru did, to be seen?
Some of the most interesting material yet on the form of Theurgy, rather than the experience, comes now, with Lucifer describing how their own Theurgy works to Yenatru: a body that shape shifts to a form that holds an expression of one of Lucifer's infinite genders upon eye contact with another person. Hence Lucifer is referred to as 'she' by Yenatru, 'they' by Elīya, 'he' by Tamar (later). Lucifer becomes more and more accidentally hilarious, noticing neither the parallel between what Yenatru did to Elīya, nor the parallel between the way their soul and God's soul reacts to the act of being seen. Their traumatic dissembling becomes less funny though, when they desperately hope that Tamar is a deluded or forced victim of someone else, rather than someone who looked at God willingly (and Yenatru again does/thinks nothing).
Let's get back to demons, just before we return to Tamar. What's a demon? Demons are people who are raised communally after being kidnapped as children from abusive families by Lilith, another former human who, 6,000 years ago, did exactly what Tamar did but to an even greater extent: demanded contact with God, which immolated her (but not only her eyes, as with Tamar, but her entire body, rendering her -- unlike any other holy however -- immortal and ghostlike) and gave her deep access to God's knowledge and very narrow (but in Lilith's specific case, immense and practical, due to the kidnapping/horn-granting ability) access to Their power. As with with Tamar, this alchemical, bizarre, smoky, bloody, black magical, Old Testamental, almost Satanic rite -- oh let's not beat around the bush shall we? Jewish. It's Jewish, and deliciously so -- is called, ironically and satisfyingly, becoming a Holy.
And so we return to Tamar, she is blind, her eyes gone and in their place is fire, she can see only God's flames but is absolutely anything other than disconnected or prophetlike. Rather, she is blistering, just as swaggering as before if not more, and metal in her amoral, frightening, sensuous aliveness; with more luxuriation in the non-sight sensory experience of her surroundings in a few paragraph than the other, sighted, pov characters have in their many chapters. No college for Tamar -- she's a street merchant, selling motorcycle batteries charged by her eyes, scandalizing her customers. God is visually and communicatively linked to her, though still a deep riddle even to Tamar, but is full of reactivity and curiosity, flames ruffling and sparking as They drink in the feeling of the minds of the whole world, try to explain something fun about a carved graffito Tamar touches, or wonder at her about why customers are shocked.
As I said about Theurgy, I have no idea if the author knows or cares that calling this 'Theurgy' is deranged and bewildering. On the other hand, who on earth defines words like 'demon' or 'holy' or even 'god' as defined here? A bit of receptive and reparative reading here immediately opens up far, far more fluidity of cultural touchstones and assumptions among the characters and world than a skeptical reading does.
In any case Tamar encounters Lucifer at her door, and Lucifer is incredibly contemptuous and hostile at her, disappointed that she isn't miserable and wounded by her choices. This rolls off Tamar's back -- too many other people direct feelings like that at her. For amusingly, the narrow power siphoned from God that the callous and rude Tamar has gained as a side-effect of her state is the ability to pick up on other people's emotions. Clearly it hasn't softened her or made her more empathetic in any way. If her older friend Safirah, another holy, who first piqued her curiosity in holies, is anything to go by, a hard, blistering self-possession is in fact a commonality among holies.
And when she agrees to meet Yenatru and Elīya back in Ennuh, she's sharpened to an intensity of this that's almost unbearable to look at the page:
"I know what you mean, Tamar says matter-of-factly. "I broke a promise to you
"Yes." Eliya's hands are clenched so tightly it almost hurts.
Tamar tosses her head. "I'm sure you'd like to hear that I regret it, but I don't. And you like honesty too, so I'm not gonna say I do if I don't."
Eliya's mouth twitches. What she wants to say is flame you, but she knows well as fire that this might actually be her fault. So instead she just takes a breath through clenched teeth
Yenatru's eyes widen a little; he shifts his weight, trying to look anywhere but at his two old friends.
"Why did you do it?" Eliya finally asks
"Because I wanted to," Tamar says in a voice so low it could almost be mistaken for sad or regretful--but it isn't, and Eliya knows it. "I wanted to badly."
"Which would not have in any way prevented you from saying something beforehand."
"Wouldn't it?" Tamar tilts her head. "I had to do it, Eliya. Before there was any chance of the impulse fading.
"You became one of the Holy on an impulse?" Eliya's eye is outright twitching now. How could anyone-flames, she can't even believe this.
"It wasn't exactly a quiet or subtle impulse, if that's what you're thinking. And I've never regretted it once, so I wasn't wrong."
"You were wrong not to tell us. The whole point of a promise is that it is wrong to break
Yenatru rubs his arm a little.
"Sure," Tamar says with another flick of her head and a small shrug. "But it would've been
worse to not do it."
As the epigrammal quote for this chapter goes: desert-burned | the river its sand | bright as salt.
After this, Tamar and Elīya argue as Elīya motorcycles them off on their camping trip with Yenatru and Lucifer — the mode of forced proximity that Lucifer decided to use to facilitate the reunion of the friends, in a show of their characteristically abysmal imagination. But the long, tense conversation between Elīya and Tamar is engrossing — infuriating — relatably dysfunctional and unskilled and emotionally volatile. I’m pretty sure these two have some repressed lesbian thing going on, especially in light of the prequel short story that provides a truly surprising but in hindsight very believable glimpse of their dynamic before Tamar’s desire was awoken. That context is unnecessary here, though, because the bitterness and frustration feels like an irl conversation transcribed verbatim. In any case, Elīya ends it emotionally destroyed and dislocated by Tamar’s taunt that she has nothing about her or in her life that has a substance or meaning other than ethicality or lack thereof. The book, and the whole series, contains many surges of distaste for goodness-for-the-sake-of-being-a-good-person and for transactional sympathy based on a sliding scale of faultlessness, even while this book (and the second book) also backslides and falls back on it as a emotional operant or excuse repeatedly, in a self-intimidated manner, like the many failed attempts of a victim to leave.
the art or technique of compelling or persuading a god or beneficent or supernatural power to do or refrain from doing something
or:
A form of magic designed to allow for worship or conjuration of, or communication with spirits or deities.
The definition of Theurgy in Šehhinah, meanwhile, is the art of creating a permanent physical manifestation of one's own soul. In Yenatru's case, he creates first a permanent lipstick made of his soul, which when touched in a kiss, conveys knowledge of the nature of his soul (safety, healing, and comfort).
I have no idea if the author knows or cares that calling this 'Theurgy' is deranged and bewildering, but I'll get to that.
In any case, while doing this Yenatru meets Lucifer. Who's Lucifer? A Fallen Angel. Oh Chime Detroit, you say, that's a perfectly familiar description of Lucifer! Well no. What's a fallen angel? What's an angel, and what is falling? In any case, Lucifer is not only definitively not Satan, they also are not at all cool, ambitious, demonic, evil or even morally gray, feared, hated, a leader, or even in possession of any mission or role. They're famous, but only because of the Covenant. In fact, they're casually affected and chatty, and generally seem like they walked off the page of a Neil Gaiman book.
Lucifer befriends Yenatru. This is well characterized but honestly, I can not only now smell the college, but feel the black cloud of college depression and bleak loneliness descending on me out of the past. Yenatru's reaction to being Befriended, his gratefulness at being noticed and liked, is excruciating in familiarity. Lucifer's squirmy, OCD self-conscious Gaiman-ness is excruciating too, but more thought-provoking, as this is a person who is supposedly as old as the universe who acts exactly like a college kid.
Their loneliness and arrested development both do get some contextual elaboration in the next chapters, as they complain to Yenatru that they only make friends with humans, as other fallen angels want them to be an important leader or spokesperson of some sort, and are shown reading a fiction book about a cult forcing a girl into doing what Tamar did, and Lucifer's exaggerated demonstrations of disgust at the concept of anyone doing this elicit neither reaction nor even thoughts from Yenatru. It's difficult to tell if hearing Tamar's choices framed as brainwashed tragic mistakes is spinelessness, agreement, or thoughtful nonjudgmentalness from Yenatru.
Elīya of course, finds out about Lucifer, and somehow manages to decide: this qualifies as an interesting thing that has happened, so she's clearly obligated to tell Tamar. Wouldn't Lucifer please go track down Tamar and tell her to come meet Elīya, who is keeping her promise?
Understandably, Lucifer doesn't agree -- but then relents, and says they will but only under the condition that Elīya agrees to do Theurgy too. Their teachings of Theurgy are fascinating scenes, albeit sometimes uncomfortably veering towards contemporary witchy meditation woo in tone (this decreases significantly over the course of the book). But it's much more convincingly as if from an angel as old as the universe than they ever do with Yenatru, though both in pedagogically-inconvenient intimate ease/familiarity with soul manifestation and marked amounts of long-calcified non-receptivity to the potential of a novice's fresh eyes, when they talk like this:
"So, to say it another way, your soul's your self. Who you are. Everything that makes you you."
"Others may identify me by my body. If it's what makes me identifiable, isn't that part of what makes me me?"
Lucifer sighs. "Okay, I get what's going on here, which is that you're not even halfway on the same page as me. I think a way I could say this that connects more to your perspective would be, your soul's what makes you identifiable to you. The experience of being you, maybe."
Elīya gets a great deal out of these lessons, but what actually really changes things for her, speeding her progress way faster than Yenatru's (!) is when she finally catches Yenatru out in his lie-by-omission and realizes he's been learning Theurgy for over a year as well. And then, Yenatru kisses her hand, with his lips that are covered in a manifestation that is his soul, and Elīya is for the first time in her life, thunderstruck and world-shaken by the presence of an existence of a person that she can't misunderstand or filter away. She realizes what Theurgy actually means and is, and that she had never known a thing about Yenatru before, in all her years of talking to him. Now, she finally starts to get it. And Yenatru, the immensity of his understanding that he has been seen pushes him into hysterical overwhelmed tears. I don't know whether to be surprised or appreciative of the way the author did not choose something evocative of Tamar's seeing God as an epigrammal quote, it might have made the analogy too obvious.
But it begs the question for me: did God feel the way Yenatru did, to be seen?
Some of the most interesting material yet on the form of Theurgy, rather than the experience, comes now, with Lucifer describing how their own Theurgy works to Yenatru: a body that shape shifts to a form that holds an expression of one of Lucifer's infinite genders upon eye contact with another person. Hence Lucifer is referred to as 'she' by Yenatru, 'they' by Elīya, 'he' by Tamar (later). Lucifer becomes more and more accidentally hilarious, noticing neither the parallel between what Yenatru did to Elīya, nor the parallel between the way their soul and God's soul reacts to the act of being seen. Their traumatic dissembling becomes less funny though, when they desperately hope that Tamar is a deluded or forced victim of someone else, rather than someone who looked at God willingly (and Yenatru again does/thinks nothing).
Let's get back to demons, just before we return to Tamar. What's a demon? Demons are people who are raised communally after being kidnapped as children from abusive families by Lilith, another former human who, 6,000 years ago, did exactly what Tamar did but to an even greater extent: demanded contact with God, which immolated her (but not only her eyes, as with Tamar, but her entire body, rendering her -- unlike any other holy however -- immortal and ghostlike) and gave her deep access to God's knowledge and very narrow (but in Lilith's specific case, immense and practical, due to the kidnapping/horn-granting ability) access to Their power. As with with Tamar, this alchemical, bizarre, smoky, bloody, black magical, Old Testamental, almost Satanic rite -- oh let's not beat around the bush shall we? Jewish. It's Jewish, and deliciously so -- is called, ironically and satisfyingly, becoming a Holy.
And so we return to Tamar, she is blind, her eyes gone and in their place is fire, she can see only God's flames but is absolutely anything other than disconnected or prophetlike. Rather, she is blistering, just as swaggering as before if not more, and metal in her amoral, frightening, sensuous aliveness; with more luxuriation in the non-sight sensory experience of her surroundings in a few paragraph than the other, sighted, pov characters have in their many chapters. No college for Tamar -- she's a street merchant, selling motorcycle batteries charged by her eyes, scandalizing her customers. God is visually and communicatively linked to her, though still a deep riddle even to Tamar, but is full of reactivity and curiosity, flames ruffling and sparking as They drink in the feeling of the minds of the whole world, try to explain something fun about a carved graffito Tamar touches, or wonder at her about why customers are shocked.
As I said about Theurgy, I have no idea if the author knows or cares that calling this 'Theurgy' is deranged and bewildering. On the other hand, who on earth defines words like 'demon' or 'holy' or even 'god' as defined here? A bit of receptive and reparative reading here immediately opens up far, far more fluidity of cultural touchstones and assumptions among the characters and world than a skeptical reading does.
In any case Tamar encounters Lucifer at her door, and Lucifer is incredibly contemptuous and hostile at her, disappointed that she isn't miserable and wounded by her choices. This rolls off Tamar's back -- too many other people direct feelings like that at her. For amusingly, the narrow power siphoned from God that the callous and rude Tamar has gained as a side-effect of her state is the ability to pick up on other people's emotions. Clearly it hasn't softened her or made her more empathetic in any way. If her older friend Safirah, another holy, who first piqued her curiosity in holies, is anything to go by, a hard, blistering self-possession is in fact a commonality among holies.
And when she agrees to meet Yenatru and Elīya back in Ennuh, she's sharpened to an intensity of this that's almost unbearable to look at the page:
"I know what you mean, Tamar says matter-of-factly. "I broke a promise to you
"Yes." Eliya's hands are clenched so tightly it almost hurts.
Tamar tosses her head. "I'm sure you'd like to hear that I regret it, but I don't. And you like honesty too, so I'm not gonna say I do if I don't."
Eliya's mouth twitches. What she wants to say is flame you, but she knows well as fire that this might actually be her fault. So instead she just takes a breath through clenched teeth
Yenatru's eyes widen a little; he shifts his weight, trying to look anywhere but at his two old friends.
"Why did you do it?" Eliya finally asks
"Because I wanted to," Tamar says in a voice so low it could almost be mistaken for sad or regretful--but it isn't, and Eliya knows it. "I wanted to badly."
"Which would not have in any way prevented you from saying something beforehand."
"Wouldn't it?" Tamar tilts her head. "I had to do it, Eliya. Before there was any chance of the impulse fading.
"You became one of the Holy on an impulse?" Eliya's eye is outright twitching now. How could anyone-flames, she can't even believe this.
"It wasn't exactly a quiet or subtle impulse, if that's what you're thinking. And I've never regretted it once, so I wasn't wrong."
"You were wrong not to tell us. The whole point of a promise is that it is wrong to break
Yenatru rubs his arm a little.
"Sure," Tamar says with another flick of her head and a small shrug. "But it would've been
worse to not do it."
As the epigrammal quote for this chapter goes: desert-burned | the river its sand | bright as salt.
After this, Tamar and Elīya argue as Elīya motorcycles them off on their camping trip with Yenatru and Lucifer — the mode of forced proximity that Lucifer decided to use to facilitate the reunion of the friends, in a show of their characteristically abysmal imagination. But the long, tense conversation between Elīya and Tamar is engrossing — infuriating — relatably dysfunctional and unskilled and emotionally volatile. I’m pretty sure these two have some repressed lesbian thing going on, especially in light of the prequel short story that provides a truly surprising but in hindsight very believable glimpse of their dynamic before Tamar’s desire was awoken. That context is unnecessary here, though, because the bitterness and frustration feels like an irl conversation transcribed verbatim. In any case, Elīya ends it emotionally destroyed and dislocated by Tamar’s taunt that she has nothing about her or in her life that has a substance or meaning other than ethicality or lack thereof. The book, and the whole series, contains many surges of distaste for goodness-for-the-sake-of-being-a-good-person and for transactional sympathy based on a sliding scale of faultlessness, even while this book (and the second book) also backslides and falls back on it as a emotional operant or excuse repeatedly, in a self-intimidated manner, like the many failed attempts of a victim to leave.
Continuing to go through the plot of this book is perhaps a losing battle, as I'm not willing to spoiler what this book's definition of a fallen angel is, and it becomes increasingly hard to discuss the book without it, so I will end it here. But a structure which I collated while doing my best to gather some thoughts on this bizarre novel by combing social media for its small scattering of devoted fans:
Another Baldwin quote: "Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant, superbly contemptuous of all that is not itself, and, as the very definition of passion implies the impulse to freedom, it has a mighty, intimidating power. It contains a challenge. It contains an unspeakable hope. It contains a comment on all human beings, and the comment is not flattering."
The passion is Tamar’s, perhaps also it is God's to Tamar, or the world's to God, especially Lucifer and Lilith's to God millennia ago. And the one who hears a comment and challenge is Elīya. And the other characters? Well.
The biggest weakness of this book, but a very curious one when viewed in context, retained through the versions in a pleasing geological-layering that enriches the book's strengths through this element's very weakness, is in the narrative-surroundings of Yenatru and Yenatru's relationship with Lucifer. According to the structure I've outlined in the first paragraph of this review, this novel cannot quite bring itself to let Yenatru be unflatteringly commented-on -- or more specifically, be admitted to be in a position that needs commenting-on. He hears it and is not allowed to notice it hit himself. The text insists he is self-knowing, self-actualized, undeluded, and on the right track, and therefore the text demands, albeit with slip-ups, that he not be a co-recipient of the highly-productive scathing critique aimed at Elīya. Yenatru is no such thing that the text insists, Yenatru managed to be a more harrowing horror subplot I have seen in most horror novels. But he is, at least, soft and feminine, which clearly at some point in the geological pressure process of this novel, was of highest importance.
The biggest weakness of this book, but a very curious one when viewed in context, retained through the versions in a pleasing geological-layering that enriches the book's strengths through this element's very weakness, is in the narrative-surroundings of Yenatru and Yenatru's relationship with Lucifer. According to the structure I've outlined in the first paragraph of this review, this novel cannot quite bring itself to let Yenatru be unflatteringly commented-on -- or more specifically, be admitted to be in a position that needs commenting-on. He hears it and is not allowed to notice it hit himself. The text insists he is self-knowing, self-actualized, undeluded, and on the right track, and therefore the text demands, albeit with slip-ups, that he not be a co-recipient of the highly-productive scathing critique aimed at Elīya. Yenatru is no such thing that the text insists, Yenatru managed to be a more harrowing horror subplot I have seen in most horror novels. But he is, at least, soft and feminine, which clearly at some point in the geological pressure process of this novel, was of highest importance.
I'm absolutely FASCINATED by this character. On every reread moreso, from my vague boredom/annoyance the first time I read it to the increasing overwhelming obsession by the most recent time I read it. The depth to which Yenatru -- not according the lies of psychiatric tales of pure nature-based disorder -- but by his negotiation with the surrounding world, has a level of a constellation of traits one could label 'personality disorder' for convenience, is intense and yet completely counterintuitive, and utterly convincing, perhaps because it's unintentional.
But the most interesting character in the book isn't Tamar, Yenatru, Elīya, Lucifer, or even God. It's the author, Skye. There may not be a frame narrative in this book, but parts of the narrative are so strangely put-upon on the content that the author's presence kicking and screaming and fighting with something that never quite makes it onto the page here (not fully until the last book in the series, The Lives That Argue For Us), is an entirely parallel narrative of its own, glinting and hinting, in the redacted gaps between revisions, in the gap between narrative and depiction, made of the things that are forced in and the things she can't force herself to take out.
Another James Baldwin quote is something I’d partially-assign and partially-deconstruct in light of the author's continual self-soothing lapses as she digs herself and falls back into the hole that is not her grave and sternly tells herself to get out of the hole, this is not her grave: It starts with “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart;” And then continues “and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”
The last bit of this quote has always deeply disagreed with me, a dismissal and incuriosity that disappointed me coming from Baldwin. The first part of the quote is excruciatingly true. But it is far, far less likely to be 'the signal of secret violent inhumanity' than to be the signal of a depression, repression, and denial: the roaring water of real feeling squirting through the dissembling channels of sentimentality that are the only ones society deems socially safe. Channels that, if subjected to mockery from either readers or the expresser’s own self-scrutinizing brain, ensure that the mockery will never quite touch the expresser’s true feelings or heart, and therefore leaves the expresser unwounded and intact.
Or: How long will you sit here in this room, eating your heart out? Judging by the publish dates of the next two books, the author only sat in that bathroom eating and vomiting her ate-out wounded heart for two or three years at most. By The Lives That Argue For Us, the geologic layering is not only volcanically cohered, not only protostar-igniting, but primordial-soup-life-sparking. That's a lot more than I can say of myself.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Injury/Injury detail, Ableism, and Abandonment
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