Shrieking

Picking favourite reading out is always a difficult task – there are a lot of exceptionally good novels, comics and graphic novels coming our way each month. Of course, I’m going to pick one out anyway! As regular readers will know, Jeff VanderMeer’s new novel Shriek has just appeared on the bookshelves in the UK. As with the collection in hi highly-praised City of Saints and Madmen, the setting is once again the wonderfully bizarre city of Ambergris. New readers will be able to take to this without first reading City quite easily, although having read both I think that if you have read City it will add another lens to the fractal telescope which Jeff gives to the reader.

The book is presented as a form of memoir (an afterword of sorts), by Janice Shriek, narrating the story of her life, her brother Duncan and the third major character in the story, Ambergris itself. The city is as much a character as a setting here, as, arguably, it is in many of the better novels (for example Paul Auster and New York); you can feel Ambergris with its mix of the hedonistic and the decayed, grand yet rotting from fungus, like an old Southern plantation mansion.

The narrative avoids the strictly linear as Janice often changes direction or begins a section of memoirs once more from another angle as one memory suddenly illuminates another. The fragmentary nature of personal memory and the inherently subjective view a person naturally has of events is highlighted by the fact that Duncan has found his sister’s memoirs and appended his own observations and edits to it. Since much of what Janice has written is drawn from memories of Duncan and from his old journal he is in effect editing her story of him which she has edited from his own words – and yet we are left with the impression that perhaps neither sibling ever quite understood the other, at least not until the writing of the memoir (and perhaps not even then). This dual narrative could be irritating but fortunately we are in skilled hands.

The novel has a wonderfully dream-like appeal to it; the fragmented memories of Janice, her narrative forever re-starting from differing points, builds a half-remembered familiarity with some of the events, but you are left with that slight dislocation that comes from thinking ‘do I remember these from an earlier part of this book, or is this a half-recalled dream?’ It really is a work which gets under the skin and infiltrates the synapses, colonising the memory like the fungi of the Gray Caps so that you know that images and moments from the book will be repeating in your mind long after you’ve finished reading it (always the mark of good writing in my opinion).

In fact, like the best books, you never really finish as such with Shriek; little pieces will pop into your mind afterwards and you know that you are going to have to return to those pages and re-read them, confident that they will impart something new. Again, like the best of works, it will inspire you to read other authors before returning; personally I found Shriek, like City, inspired me to re-read the great Borges, while Duncan’s slow transformation, both physical and mental, brings to mind Kafka and another famous change. Even the cover image and the description within by Janice of her typewriter slowly altering as the ever-present fungi of Amerbgris invade it reminds me of William Burroughs.

Add in a good sense of humour (after all, we all know personal life, even at its worst, often throws up the ridiculous and Duncan’s post-written comments to his sister’s manuscript are often amusing) and you have a well-tempered work, balancing narrative, character, themes of identity, memory, relationships and the enduring mystery at the heart of this city, which, thankfully, Jeff has his characters hint at but never fully explains (it is too good a mystery to be fully explained). There are fantastical elements aplenty – not least a little more murky light shed on the Gray Caps, but not too much – and action – a war, no less – but at its heart this is a book about people and their lives, easily the equal, or better, of many mainstream ‘literary’ works. You can read what Jeff himself has to say about Shriek on our website entry.