City of Saints and Madmen: (Ambergris)

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And VanderMeer set a monumental task for himself--there are a lot of moving pieces here, and keeping them all spinning is a master's work. The structure itself is obsessed with metafiction, all of these 'in-world' documents that are supposed to come together and produce a greater whole: a scientific article about squid, a series of art critiques, a pamphlet about the history of the city, an asylum doctor's interview, letters, a story written in secret code, &c.

But what, then, to do? Dradin’s thoughts tumbled one over the other like distraught clowns and he was close to panic, close to wringing his hands in the way his mother had disapproved of but that indicated nothing unusual in a missionary, when a thought came to him and left him speechless at his own ingenuity. Vandermeer's Ambergris is one of the most underrated settings I think I've come across. He's just an unfathomably underrated writer in general, especially of his not-explicitly SF stuff (even if he doesn't take up the mantle of a true-blue SF writer. Disappointing, but I forgive you, Jeff!) like what speed Ambergris coasts in.Also, I'll let him choose the sheer physical size of his canvas or board. Size doesn’t matter when it comes to building worlds. Such lunacy is, of course, tragic and sad in a personage of such raw literary talent, but it is an ancient axiom that genius and madness are the most loving of bedmates. Again, VanderMeer suggests that we should not rely on just one view to establish the truth of the matter.

They all start off pretty bland and unexciting, and then suddenly, the atmosphere totally changes - especially the Dradin and the Lake stories so far. Suddenly they become surreal and in the case of the abovementioned story, it's a breathless, totally out there mixture of horror and weirdness.I also noticed that most of the short stories are attributed to fictional authors who reside in the city. This shifts things again - did any of the events in the stories actually take place in this fictional world?

Sound strange? It isn't. Not really. Each tale is a low-grade fever dream couched heavily in the normal, the regular, the banal. Things only get odd at a slow rate, kinda like being boiled alive and not understanding this fact until it is far too late. Of course, that makes us lobsters. Not squid. My metaphor breaks down. Much of the self-awareness takes the form of a jokey, silly tone, and much like in Iain Banks, it seems to be an ill fit for otherwise dire and serious stories. More than that, VanderMeer is constantly harping on it without much payoff--there are some truly clever pieces of wit, here or there, but for every one that hits its mark, we have to wade through ten others that don't.

Clearly, there are different styles, subject matter and perspectives. However, what is important is the accretion of detail. We readers can synthesise it into an understanding of his world. It's not that I don't see it--the book certainly has the right markers: the self-awareness, the meta-fictions, the ironies and self-contradictions, the allusions and in-jokes, the big, rearing ugliness of modern literature. And yet to say that it has those markers doesn't mean much--it's like saying that a math book has equations, it doesn't mean that they add up to anything. In all the world, Ambergris stands as a beacon of hope and mystical wonder; built on the ruins of an ancient conquered paradise by the first of the great Cappan John Manzikerts, whose lineage would rule Ambergris for generations.