Mmmm-mmm!

While I rarely found myself sitting beside friends in classes where the teacher decided to place us in alphabetical order, I do find myself in exceptionally good company in the “M” section on the bookshelf. Three of my favourite authors are Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami and China Miéville. If you don’t already know them, come meet my neighbours!

Alice Munro has a bunch of short story collections that I keep expecting to get bored of and never do. Most of her stories are about the inner lives of older women who’ve been divorced or who’ve otherwise made a break from the status quo. But instead of being repetitious, her subtle human touches gives each story a life of its own.

I’m grateful to her not only for her stories but because my excitement about her writing shows that I don’t dismiss the entire Canadian Literature canon out of habit. She won the Governor General’s Award a few month’s back, which delighted me — I’m not a big believer in literary awards, but anyone who can write about sex into her seventies as relevantly and unflinchingly deserves all the accolades we can give her.

China Miéville has gotten me excited about fantasy again. The British novelist’s second book, Perdido Street Station, begins with a morning-after breakfast between a fat man and an insect-headed woman. The mythical world they live in is a familiar but deftly detailed and believable mix of steam-powered tech and eldritch charms. It’s an urban, if Dickens-era urban, template that separates it so sharply from the rural quests and whatnot of conventional fantasy.

His followup novel, The Scar is also set in a city–but a secret pirate city. Made of all the commandeered boats lashed together over the years, it’s grown organically into an unusual kind of urban sprawl. This whimsical idea is given real form and heft when Miéville describes how a city made up of outlaws functions: each neighbourhood, or protectorate, has its own protector who maintains order in exchange for a tax. Usually the strongman in the neighbourhood gets his buddies together to form an ad hoc police force, but one neighbourhood has a vampire for a protector and things operate a little differently. Instead of paying the normal piece of eight they have Gore Tax, a pint of blood per month is drawn. The rest of the city is disgusted at this, but most of the people from that neighbourhood are fine with the situation: not only do they not have to pay in real money, but they’ve got the safest neighbourhood–being vampires as well, their cops are the toughest in the city. Not only does this manage to get an original twist out of one of the most hackneyed myths going, it also had an interesting political dimension: a clever leader can drain the populace and they’ll thank him for it.

And this by no means is a big plot point in The Scar–it’s just one of the hundreds of tiny and brilliant surprises waiting in Miéville’s writing.

“I was looking for Haruki Murakami when your book caught my eye,” quite a few emails have mentioned. I don’t feel guilty–the Japanese writer’s been a best-seller in his home country since his debut Norwegian Wood. It’s a great read, a charming and bittersweet depiction of being young and in love in contemporary Japan. I didn’t start there, however–it was the short story “Sleep” in The Elephant Vanishes that originally hooked me, where a woman realizes that she doesn’t have to sleep. She eventually comes to despise the sleeping form of her husband and even her child, going on drives by herself and contemplating her superiority. I particularly loved the ending. Underground, created from a collection of interviews around a gassing of the Tokyo subway, likewise resonates with his compassion–the first hand accounts of survivors who must live with lung problems because of the attack are given equal space beside the Aum cult members themselves.

Murakami, being a bit of a westernophile, has a style that meets westerners half-way–and anyone interested in contemporary Japan will find his work particularly fascinating.