perlmonger::metalog

English delapidation was... the blistered formica on the tables of a seafront cafe. Derelict gift shops and thrift shops with whitewashed windows. A pub with steel plates over its doors. Cracked, pebble-dashed sheters along the promenade, roosted by gulls. [loc. 168]

I've enjoyed Hurley's previous novels (The Loney, Starve Acre, Devil's Day -- I note that I read all those in the space of two months!) but found Saltwash thoroughly depressing: bleak, nihilistic and devoid of joy. The setting (the eponymous Northern seaside town in November, delapidated and down on its luck) is dispiriting, and the protagonist is dying of cancer and raddled by guilt.( Read more... )

There are genuine ruins (beware tourist traps) here and there. Thin pillars soaring, levelled foundations crumbling, cracked urns whispering of spilled dusts -- all the Martian dreams that old Mars denied to mankind. [loc. 53]

Another reread, when I was (unsuspectingly) coming down with a migraine: I last read this in the last millennium, and had forgotten much of it. It's a short novel, an SF vampire romance set on Novo Mars -- like original Mars, but pink rather than red, with rapid sunsets and mutated earth-import flora and fauna. 

The novel opens with Sabella Quey receiving an invitation to her aunt's funeral. There's an ominous bequest (her aunt was a devout Christian Revivalist, and knew about Sabella's unsavoury youth) and a gorgeous young man who tracks Sabella back to her isolated home, and does not question her about her aversion to sunlight, or the bottles of red juice ('pomegranate and tomato juice... my physician makes it up for me') in the fridge.

"Gideon and I have nothing to be ashamed of. Or perhaps I do. Perhaps all of us Wyckhams are murderers, by Act or proxy or inaction or just heredity..." [loc. 2943]

Zebedee Wyckham is invited to visit his cousin's remote country house. Expecting a warm welcome from a cousin he only vaguely remembers, Zeb is horrified to find himself thrust into the company of his relations: his estranged brother Bram, Bram's wife Elise, Zeb's cousin Hawley, a new-found young cousin called Jessamine -- and, worst of all, Zeb's own ex, Gideon, who he hasn't seen since they both lost their jobs due to Zeb's behaviour. 

...the Mutehekau Shipu’s mode is, surely, purely flow, I think, and its grammar of animacy is one of ands and throughs and tos and nows, of commas not full stops, of thens not buts, aura not edge, of compounds and hyphens and fusings, silver-blues and grey-greens and mist-drifts and undersongs, process not substance, this joined to that, always onrushing, always seeking the sea and here and there turning back upon itself, intervolving, eddying in counterflow to cause spirals and gyres that draw breath into water, life into the mind, spin strange reciprocities, leave the whole world whirled, whorled. [loc. 4333]

If a corporation can be treated as a person, why can't a river? Macfarlane explores three river systems -- the Rio Los Cedros in Ecuador, the Mutehekau Shipu in Canada, and the three rivers braided through Chennai -- and combines poetry, spirituality and adventure in a philosophical discussion of what constitutes 'life' and how a river is part of the 'polyphonic world', important and valuable not just for how it can be exploited but for its own intrinsic qualities.