City of Saints and Madmen: (Ambergris)

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City Of Saints and Madmen is made up of a series of stories connected by their setting. There’s a depth to Ambergris, a heft that only comes from a fully-realized world. Middle-Earth has it, as does Arrakis: a sense that the craziest things make perfect sense because you’re so grounded in the world the author has created.

Such a city would have a thousand, no, ten thousand stories to tell. It's as rich a fantasy city as Iest, or Tar Valon or Ankh-Morpork, and any writer could spend his life writing stories in it.The Transformation of Martin Lake" intertwines two narratives: excerpts of Janice Shriek's essay entitled "A Short Overview of the Art of Martin Lake and his Invitation to a Beheading", and a third-person omniscient narration of a few days in the life of Martin Lake, and the events that transformed him from decent but unoriginal artist, to the iconic and celebrated Ambergrisian painter known for having best captured the city in his works. The dual narratives both complement and contradict each other as the grotesque cause of Lake's stylistic evolution is slowly revealed. City of Saints and Madmen” is his first visit to the city of Ambergris; a city unlike anything I can think of in the modern world, that plays mix and match with references of geographical locations and eras that should have logically never met each other, and yet blend together artfully in this strange place. The book is constructed as a collection of stories of wildly different formats. From traditional novella to diary entry, historical pamphlets and detailed bibliography, we get to know Ambergris little by little, as a strange and experimental literary tapestry is woven in front of our eyes. I wish I had the mind for proper literary analysis because there’s probably a lot to dig up thematically too, but alas, I do not.) VanderMeer's Ambergris is certainly different, if not vividly so; his fantasy city isn't medieval, but roughly Victorian, or even early 20th century. He's as likely to look to other novels for inspiration over old folk tales or mythologies. It, too, is a collage of different historical periods, different cultures, and different books, all served up with a self-conscious postmodernism (if that isn't redundant) that proves VanderMeer ain't Delany. Mostly, it's the urban setting that turns VanderMeer's tales away from heroic quests and into the realm of the personal and interpersonal. And that strikes me as the right direction for fantasy to be going in. Voss Bender is everywhere; he is a sort of Mozart-like figure, or a Shakespearean figure; the popular culture that ties all of Ambergris, and possibly all the city states, together.

The Silence. I didn’t find it as chilling as I was, perhaps, supposed to, but I found the telling of the Silence compelling. VanderMeer as Shriek has a voice that rivals the best historians in our supposedly real world, and I find myself not wanting this history nor Shriek’s commentary to end. COSAM” is an assemblage or collage of disparate elements that VanderMeer works into something luminous. If we do bad things, we will feel guilt or remorse, and we will want to relieve or assuage our guilt. The detail in the stories is lush and rich and entirely believable, and amazingly, it doesn’t get in the way of the main action. But self-deprecation is only effective when it is honest, when it acts as a genuine reveal of character, not just a sarcastic defense mechanism--a schoolyard dodge, 'if I say it first, then they can't make fun of me for it'.The Strange Case of Mr. X" is the last of the novellas from the original version of the book. This one is VERY funny, very weird, and also provides a much needed tonal change from "Martin Lake." It ends on a very strong note, and I was still very enthralled after finishing this novella. What remains obscure, even to those of us who knew him, is how and why [Martin] Lake managed the extraordinary transformation from pleasing but facile collages and acrylics, to the luminous oils—both fantastical and dark, moody and playful—that would come to define both the artist and Ambergris." In VanderMeer’s eyes, desire influences and distorts our perception. It can result in an illusion or self-delusion. While he draws the cityscape with precision, he also draws its emotional landscape with expressionist accuracy.

I suppose all fantasy worlds are collages of some sort. Your standard derivative Tolkien stuff, your D&D and high fantasy, is all a vaguely medieval Western Europe, with some drastically altered Eastern Europe folk tale stuff added (I'm thinking trolls and elves and whatnot), with an altered form of Greek deities added. But that format has become so widely used that it seems homogeneous and normal. Hoegbotton & Sons? No, sir. Not a son of Hoegbotton. We do not deal with Hoegbotton & Sons (except inasmuch as we are contracted to carry their guidebooks), as their practices are … how shall I put it? … questionable. With neither Hoegbotton nor his sons do we deal. But where was I? The Truffidians. The window looked down on the city proper, which lay inside the cupped hands of a valley veined with tributaries of the Moth. It was there that ordinary people slept and dreamt not of jungles and humidity and the lust that fed and starved men’s hearts, but of quiet walks under the stars and milk-fat kittens and the gentle hum of wind on wooden porches.I started out not liking this chapter. First I was annoyed, then I was angry, but then I was captivated, and I kept going until the wee hours until I finished it and loved it. I could say more, but I don’t want to for fear of revealing too much of myself. This is excellent stuff. Jeff VanderMeer takes influence from the baroque, surreal fantasists of yesteryear, such as Mervyn Peake, Lord Dunsany, or even H.P. Lovecraft (in his less horrific moments), and combines this influence with the more modern elements of steampunk and urban fantasy that can be seen in authors like China Mieville. Out of this mix, he has created his own world, which mostly focuses on the city of Ambergris, a sprawling riverside land that has fallen into functional anarchy after decades of benign neglect by its rulers. In these four novellas, Ambergris is the true main character, rather than any of the people who appear in the stories, and it's the unique elements of Ambergris--the "mushroom dwellers", Albumuth Boulevard, famous composer Voss Bender, Hoegbotton and Sons, etc.--that give this book its narrative unity, despite focusing on completely different characters from one story to another. "Dradin In Love" starts things off with a tale of an apostate priest who has come to Ambergris in search of a job and finds love, in the form of a woman he spies through a third-story window. We are first introduced to Ambergris through the naive and quite possibly insane eyes of Dradin, and what we see colors our opinion both of the city and of Dradin himself. The second story, "The Hoegbotton Guide To The Early History of Ambergris by Duncan Shriek", is completely different in tone, purporting to be a historical overview of Ambergris and maintaining that tone throughout the main text. Said main text is subverted, however, by copious footnotes in which we learn more and more about the character who authors the historical overview, Duncan Shriek. His feuds with other historians and personal place in the history of Ambergris is slowly illuminated through these footnotes, and they make an already interesting fictional history far more entertaining. The third story, "The Transfiguration Of Martin Lake", combines elements of the first two stories, switching as it does from art criticism penned by Janice Shriek, giving a detailed analysis of the major paintings of Martin Lake for yet another Hoegbotton Guide, to a narrative about the life of Martin Lake, specifically an episode that sheds light on why he painted the things he did in the first place. Finally, we end with "The Strange Case of 'X'", a shorter story with an atmosphere of creeping horror and an entertaining if somewhat predictable twist ending. This is the least substantial of the four stories here, and although it is entertaining, it's not as fascinating as the world-building and the mysterious twilight atmosphere of the three preceding stories.

I was already pulled in by the first story, "Dradin, In Love", but when I noticed the next story was a heavily footnoted "history", complete with referential glossary, I knew I had found an author who gets as lost in the worlds he creates as I do as a reader. Then I continued reading... There is no escape. You have to return to or remain in the world of Ambergris. It is our cage. And we can either sing or scream. If Proust had been a hella Dungeon Master and then dropped all the monsters and sword play…you might end up with something like City of Saints and Madmen.VanderMeer is an exhibitionist, he is so incredibly, no, fantastically, talented, and these bits and pieces are the pictures at his exhibition.