elektra

I never got around to writing up Anne McCaffrey's The Mark of Merlin when I read it last year, but I've been thinking about McCaffrey a lot recently due to blitzing through the Dragons Made Me Did It Pern podcast (highly recommended btw) and osprey_archer asked for a post on my last-year-end round-up so now seems as good a time as any.

The important thing to know about The Mark of Merlin is that -- unlike many of the things I've read recently! -- it is not, in any way, the least little bit, Arthuriana. They are not in Great Britain. There are no thematic Arthurian connections. There is absolutely zero hint of anything magical. So why Merlin? Well, Merlin is the name of the heroine's dog, and he's a very good boy, so that's all that really needs to be said about that.

Anyway, this is McCaffrey writing in classic romantic suspense mode a la Mary Stewart or Barbara Michaels, and honestly it's a pretty fun time! Our Heroine Carla's father Tragically Died in the War, so he asked his second-in-command to be her guardian and now she's en route to stay with Major Laird in his isolated house in Cape Cod. Tragically scarred and war-traumatized Major Laird has no Gothic-trope concerns about this because Carla's full name is Carlysle and her dad accidentally forgot to tell him that the child in question was a daughter and not a son; Carla is fully aware of the mixup and but has not chosen to enlighten him because she thinks it's extremely funny to pop out at Major Laird like "ha ha! You THOUGHT I was a hapless youth and wrote me a patronizing letter about it, but INSTEAD I am a beautiful and plucky young co-ed so joke's on you!"

There is an actual suspense plot; the suspense plot is that Someone is hunting Carla for reasons of secret information her dad passed on in his luggage before he died, and also his death was under Mysterious Circumstances, and so we have to figure out what's going on with all of that and eventually have a big confrontation in the remote Cape Cod house. But mostly the book is just Carla and the Major being snowed in, romantically bickering, huddling for warmth, cooking delicious meals over the old Cape Cod stove, etc. etc. Cozy in the classic sense, very little substance but excellent for reading in a vacation cottage while drinking tea and eating a cheese toastie.

As a sidenote, I did not know until I started listening to Dragons Made Me Do It that McCaffrey's Dragonflight preceded The Flame and the Flower, the book that's credited as being the first bodice-ripper romance novel and launching the genre of historical romance as we know it today, by a good four years. It's interesting to place this very classic romantic suspense novel -- which was published almost a decade after Dragonflight, but, at least according to this Harvard student newspaper article I turned up, at least partially written in 1950 -- against the full tropetastic dubcon-at-best dragonsex Pern situations, which clearly belong to a later moment. And speaking of later moments, it's also a bit of a mindfuck for me to think very hard about McCaffrey's place in genre history and realize how very early she is. I was reading McCaffrey in the nineties, against Lackey and Bujold. Reading her in conversation with Russ and LeGuin is a whole different experience.

But this is all a tangent and not very much to do with The Mark of Merlin, a perfectly fun perfectly fine book, very short on the wtf moments that have characterized most of my experiences with McCaffrey, and if anything comes late to its moment rather than early.

Syr Hayati Beker's What A Fish Looks Like is perhaps the weirdest/coolest/most interesting thing I've read so far this year -- an apocalyptic collage novel(la), told in letters, posters, angry breakup notes, and a series of strange fairy tale riffs about breakups and loss and change and transformation on both the personal and the planetary level.

In the frame story for What A Fish Looks Like, a queer radical collective in a city living through massive climate collapse has gotten its hands on 100 tickets for the last big trip off-planet. It's T minus ten days: who's going? Who's staying? Who heard the gossip about Jay and Seb making out on the dance floor, even though they had a really messy breakup and Jay has a ticket out and Seb has no interest in leaving, and who wants to use the Saga of Jay and Seb to distract themselves from the fact that the oceans are rising and the skies are red and this year's bad fire season never ended?

In the interstitials, a community outlined in personal letters and party invites and notes on the bathroom door of a favorite bar counts down to the point of decision. In the stories themselves, a person has a bad break-up and and takes on some polar bear DNA about it; a closeted teacher loses a student to a big wave in the new and frightening ocean, and meets a mermaid about it; a stage manager forges ahead with a production of Antigone in a burning city and turns into a spider about it. The people who appear in the stories also appear in the interstitials, part of the community; the book is slippery about to what degree the stories are meant to be read literally as an accounting of events and to what degree they're metaphors, wishes, retellings. The interstitials make it clear that there is certainly a theater and a fire. Probably nobody actually turned into a spider about it, but who could say. The world is getting weirder, and who knows what's possible or plausible anymore?

I'm including a screenshot of one of my favorite pages of the book -- most of the stories are text but a lot of the interstitials are in images like this one -- which I think gives a good sense of the kind of community portraiture that makes What A Fish Look Like stand out so much to me.



Highly recommend checking this one out: you might be confused, you might be depressed, you might be inspired, you absolutely won't be bored.