The Corpse Brigadier

Through rigorous use of alarm clocks, I have righted my sleeping schedule.

Fonda Lee, Untethered Sky (2023) -- In a Persian-esque fantasy kingdom, a young woman trains a giant roc to hunt and kill manticores.

This novella audiobook was a random find from rooting around in my public library's offerings, and it was terrific. It feels (and I mean this as a profound compliment) like a spiteful middle finger, both to the larger genre of "plucky horse-girl tames a magical creature, and they have jolly adventures together" and the more specific genre of Pern novels. (I was wondering as I listened if Fourth Wing's sappy dragon-friends were also in the author's crosshairs, but since both books were published in 2023, probably not.) The protagonist of Untethered Sky is fundamentally aware that her giant raptor does not think like a human, has no social instincts or affections, and only listens to her trainer's commands because her trainer routinely has raw meat to give her. The satisfying tension in the novella comes from the protagonist's self-conscious self-deception: she repeatedly reminds herself that her big bird is a "monster" who does not care about her, but she cannot help ascribing human-like motives and thoughts to her "partner" as they travel the wilderness and look for man-eating manticores to slay (and, for the roc, to devour). Similarly, her fellow roc-trainers have sublimated all desires for human connection into a single-minded focus on the roc that they have each raised from a fledgling. Bad times obviously result from their obsessive adoration of giant flying predators who do not care about them. I found the world and the characters of the novella extremely fucked up in the best possible way.

Josephine Tey, Miss Pym Disposes (1946) -- Invited to give a lecture about her hit psychology book at a teacher's college, Miss Lucy Pym allows herself to be cajoled by the charming students into staying longer and longer. But as final exams and graduation approach, the stress and anxiety and exhaustion of the students starts to curdle Miss Pym's pleasure in the idyllic surface of the college. And then a student dies under suspicious circumstances.

Before reading the novel, I was vaguely aware of Miss Pym Disposes as being very gay -- and it is, though it's all subtext. All the major characters in the novel are women, and they all have intense and peculiar relationships with one another. I was not aware of the novel as being a deconstruction of the mystery genre, but I think that is part of Tey's intention: the murder happens in the eleventh hour of the book, and everything up to that point is pretty much just Miss Pym drinking tea and taking baths with the female students. (Very gay.) I was into that slow and careful development of atmosphere, which Tey also does to great effect in Brat Farrar. The actual events on the page are so sunny and harmless and wholesome, but Tey has been cranking the levers of irony and foreshadowing in the background. With each page turned, you-the-reader are left with a disorienting and exhilarating sense of rising dread. The shortcoming of this method, of course, is that the incredibly long build-up is followed by a climax-denouement-ending coming in one big breathless rush. And then the whole novel is over. If you're expecting a "normal" murder mystery, the pacing and structure of Miss Pym Disposes is going to leave you bewildered. But as a psychological portrait of multiple women making emotional and ill-advised moral compromises for one another: it's good stuff. (Unfortunately, the novel is unusually saturated with the casual racism typical of mid-twentieth-century English literature -- which makes it a hard novel to recommend to anyone not already familiar with that period's general vibe. I do not remember Brat Farrar having that problem.)