Size / / /

Looking back over my reading for the past few years, I realise it's taken on a distinct annual shape. It's not an absolutely strict division, but in general spring is for catching up on award nominees that I missed, summer is for exploration outside the present and beyond the genres, autumn is for getting down to that year's reads in earnest; and winter divides neatly into a post-Christmas rush to cram in as many books as possible and have some sense of the shape of the year, and a post-New Year languorous sampling of the books I didn't get to in time, but everyone tells me I should have done. Which means that the first few weeks of January can be some of the most satisfying reading time of the year, with the added benefit that by this point other people have usually done the hard work of writing about the books I'm reading.

Case in point, two of the books I've read so far this year: The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht and Osama by Lavie Tidhar. A pair of satisfying, accomplished novels that have been written about at length and deserve the attention; and a pair of novels that deal with how narratives about the world are constructed. In The Tiger's Wife the contrast is between public grand narratives of states and wars, and personal intimate narratives of life and love; each informs the other, and in particular the public narratives make necessary the private narratives -- to the point of fantasy -- as a form of coping. Dan Hartland is good on that aspect of the book, although a little strict about the novel's manneredness; the contrast between the fables and the reality struck me as effective. See also Victoria Hoyle's thoughts. Osama, meanwhile, is about the narrative of terrorism, set in an alternate reality structured by noir conventions in which the adventures of Osama Bin Laden, Vigilante, are told in a series of pulp novels whose style approximates documentary realism. It felt to me like an extremely disciplined book, barely a word out of place, taking Tidhar's propensity for pastiche and turning it into a potent comment on how the geopolitics of the last decade (and longer than that) has been sold and internalised. Adam Roberts' brief writeup is good on that point, I think; for a more detailed consideration see Mike Levy's review in these pages.



Niall Harrison is an independent critic based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He is a former editor of Strange Horizons, and his writing has also appeared in The New York Review of Science FictionFoundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books and others. He has been a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and a Guest of Honor at the 2023 British National Science Fiction Convention. His collection All These Worlds: Reviews and Essays is available from Briardene Books.
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25 Mar 2024

Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
to work under the / moon is to build a formidable tomorrow
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.
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