Caught In A Still Place: A Novel by Jonathan Lerner
I enjoyed this short novel so much I bought a copy for my cousin for Christmas! For readers interested in environmental fiction, literary fiction, and poignant, reflection, Caught In A Still Place delivers on all points. This novel deserves a come-back.
The story revolves around a small community, reeling from some kind of environmental and social fall out. The world has come to an end. Not the end, for people continue to live, though not as they used to. For this small enclave of neighbors in Florida, they are learning to manage. This is the tale of how they begin to navigate the same needs and desires in new circumstances, new contexts; humanity has changed, humanity remains the same. This is a story about how everything and nothing changes.
As a reader, I am left wanting more — but I do not think this is a detraction. Rather, this left me feeling immersed in the lives of its characters. I felt like the characters must feel at the end of each day: a little hopeful, mostly uncertain, but inevitably alive.
This was, by far, the most imaginative novel I have read this year. This is speculative fiction at its very best. Perilous Times will keep you hooked from start to end.
The novel opens with a strange awakening. Kay, an Arthurian knight emerges from the earth, no longer a corpse, but alive and tasked with a mission to save Britain – only he has no clue what this means or what he has to do. Immediately, he becomes entangled with a young woman, Mariam, who is on her own mission: to rid the world of corrupt corporate leaders who are poisoning the world and leading its few remaining inhabitants closer to environmental ruin.
The novel is set in the near future, when our climate has been so altered that most of Britain is now underwater and our environment is a grey wreck. Small bands of people live in squatter-like conditions and even smaller bands of rebels have formed to bring order to the world.
Fracking and profit-greedy corporations run public operations. A magical cadre operates on the highest level of corruption and government, and they have a secret weapon: King Arthur and the immortal knights of his roundtable.
But… this all it seems? This is a world stripped of romance and chivalry, and the knights of this mythic time are no less human than those they are tasked to save.
I will leave my description there. If this has not intrigued you yet, well… Hmph.
The ending will also put you in a spiral.
Lee also delivers the story with tremendous skill, the right dollop of humor, and the perfect dry drip of British snark. This novel is a joy to read on multiple levels.
Everything the Light Touches: A Novel by Janice Pariat
Lyrical, poetic, and ephemeral as its title suggests, Pariat’s novel Everything the Light Touches is an opus-like work of literary fiction. Readers who enjoy historical fiction that spans generations, speculative fiction like Cloud Atlas where the narrative leaps from one place and time to another, and botanical themes will find Everything appealing.
The novel begins in the present, and is set in India — Shillong — a region tucked between Bangladesh and Myanmar. Readers will find that this novel of India encompasses cultures and communities beyond the typical novel set in India; these are the borderlands, an India not usually seen or heard in literature or popular media. Pariat uses this site of unexplored India to their advantage. The result is a novel and mysterious India which does not resort to orientalism to achieve a sense of exoticism.
Everything straddles multiple sites and periods, setting the reader down in India’s high colonial period, taking a step back into 18th century Europe with Goethe, and bringing the author back to the present. We see Shillong through multiple eyes, filtered through multiple histories, both Indian, indigenous, and European alike.
This wide range of periods and foci make it difficult to pin down what exactly the book is about. As its title suggests, it is about “everything”, but of course, it can’t be literally. The novel is about the metaphorical and physical connection between that which light touches: the soil and earth, plants, leaves, and humans. Across space and time, the characters of Pariat’s novel are connected together, sometimes loosely as though through a vine of time, sometimes tightly as a result of proximity or intimacy. Each of the main characters is searching for something, a connection to someone else — marriage, love, parent, child — and also to the earth and its progeny, plants.
This botanical theme vines through each section of the novel. In the present it is about conservation, resource management, and exploitation. In the past it is about botanical science and the essence of growth and life. It is about humans and humanity finding a place for ourselves in the jungle mess of our lives, and about many of us finding that the jungle mess is more orderly than we thought — if we just pay closer attention, the answers are so simple: love, loyalty, and love again — in its myriad of forms.
The prose of the novel mimics the wilderness it highlights; Pariat’s text is sensuous in parts, alluring and floral and fern-like in its delicacy. Yet, simultaneously, Pariat’s prose is structured as a plant cell, symmetrical as a leaf. Some parts are even wild in being tangential and unexpected. There is a section devoted to poetry, but poetry is written all through it. This is a novel for the literary fan; while it is propelled by a plot and a structured narrative, the novel is also deeply rooted in its characters’ flaws, desires, and personalities.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 