Review of The Mountain in the Sea

The Mountain in the Sea

Author: Ray Nayler

Publisher: Picador

Date of Publication: May 30, 2023

 

                  A few specifics first: this story involves octopuses, creepy corporate bosses and henchmen, and pirate ships. Now a little more meta. People sometimes incline to notice the bizarre and miss the obvious. The Mountain in the Sea takes this idea and applies it to our current social structures and belief in what we know. It points out how we willfully fail to learn much of what is readily apparent and most critical, how any growth can become cancerous, and how people can withdraw so deep into themselves that they lose track of their actual center. Don’t give up! Just like my review, this story just takes a little bit of time and attention to get truly interesting.

                  The world in the book exists vaguely as it does today. Nations govern. Technology corporations increasingly blur the lines between business and government. People fight to save the planet and to kill each other, depending on the day and place. In this quasi-modern era, the massive tech company DIANIMA has sealed off the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where a species of octopus has been discovered that may have developed its own language and culture. A small team forms around the mission of studying them: marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent half her life researching cephalopod intelligence; a battle-scarred security agent; and the world’s first (and possibly last) android. Their efforts are complicated by forces larger than DIANIMA attempting to seize the octopuses for themselves.

                  The concepts that inspire Nayler’s worldbuilding are well tailored to the story he tells. As technology leads to the development of more specialized jobs, new tech is as likely to be used for abuse as for enrichment. There is the feeling that both governments and non-governmental international organizations are either dictatorial or on the verge of losing control, and that people’s control over their own lives grows scarcer as well. Threats to survival grow even as resources diminish. These concepts, rooted in contemporary social experience, provide a solid departure point for Nayler’s advancement beyond our current inventions and discoveries. Where the story threatens to overburden itself is Nayler’s messy worldbuilding. The first portion of the book is filled with a number of novel technological creations, fictional corporations and their unnamed actors, and the required character development. The amount of novel items and social organization without sufficient elucidation is distracting. Excessive worldbuilding is sometimes paired with over explanation of Nayler’s characters. The characters are thought exercises as much as people – a quality I personally enjoyed – but the more a character is a vehicle, the less it is a person. Nayler’s alternating between the perspectives of several characters can also complicate how he uses those characters. They often feel more separated than connected due to the extreme variations between who they are and the circumstances that challenge them. As the story focuses more directly on the complicated thought processes of those characters, it clarifies in both its primary points of interest and its emotional heft. However, that focus on experience rather than place needs to occur a little sooner. I was most captivated by this book when I could picture the forehead wrinkles of a scientist frustrated by the impotence of her knowledge, or when I could feel the sadness of a person stuck in a place where they don’t belong. That re-connected me with the story. The problem was I often needed re-connecting because the writing had interrupted my connection.                   

For all of my gripes about the distractions of this book, there were some key elements that I liked. I look for books that make me both think and feel. Nayler inverted the typical linkage of those two things: The Mountain in the Sea made me feel because I was thinking, and not the other way around. I loved the choice to manifest our ignorance in the form of the endangered, knowledgeable octopuses, and the fact that the various actors in the book went to extremes to seize, understand, and use those octopuses. The ending is left entirely open, and that becomes surprisingly satisfying once the dilemmas and mental processes of the characters become the true focal point. I would suggest that readers regard this book as an otherworldly thought exercise to get the most out of their reading experience.

Review of Cloud Cuckoo Land

 Cloud Cuckoo Land

Author: Anthony Doerr

Publisher: Scribner

Date of Publication: September 2021

I am still catching my breath, emerging from this story. So my beginning offering is a collection of thoughts, harvested from my reading experience.

For the last 200 pages of Cloud Cuckoo Land, I felt as if I was preparing to fall. The story builds upon itself like a great tsunami, each word sucking me in reverse up to the crest of the wave.

We use the word “amateur” to refer to someone who is yet a fool in the field in which they play. Amateur has spiraled out from the Latin “amator,” lover, from “amare,” to love. To be a fool is to love is to do as we should and as we often must.

To know one thing is to be aware of ten other unknowns. Knowledge is power and knowledge is fear, and that is a dangerous combination.

To tell stories is not just a diversion, or a game, or a conjuring from rarefied air. Stories are survival, repeated survival. All of them, real or imagined, are underpinned by a hope that something formed through the words will capture and lift and submerge the reader in a whirl and depth of feeling that they have not yet experienced and may not yet comprehend. Maybe from that lack of solid knowledge, an amator will emerge, look onto the world anew.

And now, for the characters.

In the fifteenth century, an orphan named Anna lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople. She learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds what might be the last copy of a centuries-old book – the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the army that will lay siege to the city. His path and Anna’s will cross.

In the present day, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno rehearses children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege.

And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of paper the story of Aethon, told to her by her father.

They are grappling with adulthood in worlds in peril, and they find resilience, hope, and an improbable, improbably preserved story.

To create a character is an intimidating task. To create five different main characters, each with their own separate stories, is difficult on yet another improbable level. Like all the best storytellers, Doerr has a level of mastery that lets the reader disregard the effort and fully inhabit the tale. Each adventure, each setting, each nuance of those five characters, is so transfixingly tangible that they are near impossible to forget even over the course of 574 pages. The book does not feel burdened by the weight of the numerous times, tales, and emotions it recounts. Instead, it feels oddly, definitively, complete. The compendium of the characters’ collective lives creates a mounting sense of need to read the book, not simply to get to the end, but because the characters are quite literally the past, present, and future: Constantinople, modern-day Idaho, and interstellar odyssey. They are not always pretty people. They are always changing, and always seeking constants that will help them abide and preserve the places that make them. But they grow, and they hurt, and they love, and they come to feel so familiar that I grieved parting from them.

That delicious grief owes to Doerr’s gift for the linguistic mechanics of storytelling, allowing a collection of words to become a single current, one that carries and coheres. Each sentence is an artful, thoughtful construction that urges the reading of the next. Each paragraph or section within a chapter is a story in miniature. He leaves no detail up to chance, be it the weight that a name holds, the feeling a sound instills, the motion in a particular moment. The imagination of the book is directed by Doerr’s words instead of being contained by them. The links that ultimately appear between the stories his words create are firm enough to solidify the similarities between his characters’ trials, but light enough to let those stories exist independently as well. In that way, the shape and fluidity of the words compares to the structure of the book itself.

To those who enjoy fantasy, history, intrigue, and a dynamic invention, this book is for you. To the poets, the curious, the ones who feel everything frighteningly deeply, the existential thinkers, the adventurous, and the bold, this is for you as well. Please. Dig in.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of The Road

 The Road

Author: Cormac McCarthy

Publisher: Vintage

Date of Publication: September 2006

McCarthy gives his readers hell. Literally. America is burned and pillaged. Roads lie caked in ash and corpses. Dying trees burn on a vast, hopeless altar to an absent god. Cities are pinnacles of fear rather than civilization. And – if they want to survive – people themselves see others as the last incarnate form of evil. In this wasteland, a man walks with his son. Their only goal is to reach the sea, and their only permanent possession is a gun. They survive because surviving is the only purpose they have left.

There does not yet exist a common conception of mass extinction that can match the scale of death The Road. The relationship between the man and his son is the easiest – almost the only – part of the world with which to empathize. The son doesn’t want to disappoint his father by giving up, and the father is incapable of relinquishing his responsibility to protect his son. The boy becomes godlike to his father, a beacon of purity and decency that, even if physically and emotionally sullied, is not yet corrupted by the horrors the pair face. In return, the care and effort that the father invests in both the pair’s survival and their continued humanity enables the father to be a similar figure of goodness to his son. This loop of investment and inspiration gives the pair the sense that they might be “good guys”, that they might yet glean something worthy from destiny, even if that destiny itself is bleak. Even if forsaken, man is not yet purposeless.

McCarthy allows his readers to see easily that the man and the boy find purpose in doing what’s right, despite desperate circumstances. What he doesn’t give away so easily is what to do with that purpose when it seems so utterly futile in a world that’s inexorably dying and unrelentingly destitute and depraved. Such is one of the many questions raised by the book: what is the purpose of seeking and protecting a sense of self when the only accomplishment is another miserable few moments of survival? This question is asked and unanswered. . At the utmost surface level, readers embark on a relatively monotonous journey with a relatively predictable end. The writing itself becomes tiring, lacking punctuation and speech tags, blending the pseudo stream of consciousness narration with description of the bleak surroundings. And yet, hundreds of thousands of readers have chosen to accompany the man and his son on their journey. We want to believe that even if all we knew of society and humanity vanished, purpose, hope, and virtue can survive as long as we do. 

The Road asks readers to consider at what point we are no longer human, and whether there is a point at which we can no longer recover humanity. It is beyond a depressing read. It is disturbing, haunting, and filled with a longing for beauty expressed in arcane language to feel as though that beauty is only a taunting memory. The freedom of the readers is to take on the world of the novel willingly – and be able to leave it for a better one.

- D. K. Nuray

Review of The Overstory

The Overstory

Author: Richard Powers

Publication Date: April 2018

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

          Monuments are traditionally created for that which is past. The Overstory is a monument to that which currently surrounds us – sentience, in thousands upon thousands of forms. This is a novel full of people, but truly peopled by trees. And trees talk a lot. They warn each other about infectious species. They share food. Old trees even help new seedlings grow. This is a novel about how trees survive, and how we fail to learn from them.

          Powers’ story alternates between the viewpoints of nine characters. Each character enters the story with an inclination for detachment, and experiences a life-altering form of fundamentally displacing root shock. There is Adam, the psychology student who knows everything and believes nothing. Nick loses his entire family. Patricia loses her calling and community. Everyone has an identity crisis; everyone, at some point, feels lost, alone, is temporarily blinded by fury or despair. What brings them together is trees, and what forests show them is the necessity and authority of time. 

          Environmental stewardship is immensely challenged. Telling people to behave differently implies that they are behaving wrongly. In The Overstory, by placing human motivations in the context of “tree time,” the concept of the individual breaks down into a sum of largely selfish and unimportant actions. Social hierarchies and material values appear as irrelevant and petty when a tree as old as Christianity is butchered to put money temporarily in pockets. Creating empathy so far removed from our sense of want, immediacy, and personal relevance is difficult. So Powers utilizes the lens of greatest possible empathy – that of his characters. He creates characters that are fundamentally broken, and then heals those characters with the patience, dignity, and generosity of trees. Each person pours themselves into that new form of life they discover in a mutualistic relationship between their own salvation and that of the trees. It is this mutualism that makes the loss of trees devastating, and that enables the weight of each non-human death to impact readers. Ironically, the magic of the characters is that they allow us to empathize not just with their excruciating experience, but also with their ultimate insignificance in comparison to the trees they each come to love.

          Through his storytelling, Powers delivers something more powerful than any polemic manifesto. As much as any activist, Powers illuminates the reciprocities of nature. He is both a romanticist, believing in and striving for harmony, and a student of potential apocalypse, advocating the transformation of human relationships. The effect is more comprehending and resigned than hopeful. He devastates readers into responsibility, into idealism, and into the combination of the two that must exist to save the forests he imbues with a life richer than our own.

- D. K. Nuray