Review - Soft Core by Brittany Newell

Soft Core

Brittany Newell
4th Estate, 13 March 2025
Available as: HB, 352pp,  audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780008670382

I'm grateful to 4th Estate for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Soft Core to consider for review.

In Soft Core, Ruthie goes by several names. She is "Baby" in the club where she strips, "Miss Sunday" in the Dream House dungeon. As she remarks herself, she's almost never called Ruth. The image of a ghost pops up repeatedly, as though Ruthie is merely haunting her world. "I was an affable ghost, too shy to speak up when someone cut me in line..." Passing from bar to bar, she is "both a ghost and an archangel".

It's not clear how her missing ex, Dino, refers to Ruthie as he's, well, missing through most of this story. Indeed the story seems occasioned by his disappearance since, as a slice of Ruthie's life, the book begins when he vanishes. While she waits for Dino to reappear, or not, Ruthie goes about her day - and nightly - business, recalls her earlier life and muses on the city around her.

Through it all, she is, though, gradually coming apart. To call Dino her ex understates what the two meant to each other, I think. "To me, [Dino] was San Francisco embodied, misty, bookish and debased". Also "I didn't need anything other than what [Dino] gave to me; he was my nightlife, my superstore, all the books in the world" and 'I'd felt like this during my wild years too, until Dino had managed to calm me". 

Ruthie's meeting with Dino ended a restless period of her life, both in terms of employment and relationships ("My body was a friendly ghost, causing trouble just because. I dealt with it as one must deal with a poltergeist; I didn't take its hijinks personally and tried to ignore what it did after dark. That's when I went out, got horny and stupid", "After the line cook, I went on a spree. I began my weekends on Thursday and slept with a different man every night... suddenly I had a hobby... Mazzy [Ruthie's friend] put it succinctly: You've found something that you're good at. She would know, she was a prodigious slut... she would go on to blow the father of the family she babysat for." Even though they've split (for some hard to understand value of "split" she still lives in his house and the book paints a touching picture of the complex relationship between them. 

Food is a central preoccupation in the book. Dino, a drug dealer, had been a professional cook and cooked for Ruthie. "...vast Dominican feasts; we played chess while we digested". When the pair first met they "sat on the deck and ordered like tourists in love". Dino's  ominous absence is marked by Ruthie's reversion to scrappy, irregular meals. She is conscious of the change. "At twenty-five I knew enough to know that my silly little body was far from enough. This was not self-deprecation, just brute fact. Thus I had to always be prepared for [Dino], my pantry well stocked, deli meats and sliced cheeses and sour pickles on hand. 

In Dino's place, Ruthie forms friendships with work colleagues from the club Ophelia and Emeline. Both friendships are problematic, Ophelia in an-again, off again relationship with her boyfriend, Emeline the only daughter of wealthy parents and seemingly obsessed with Ruthie.

Told in episodes that hop back and forward, less a continuous narrative then a testimony, a recollection guided not by time than but by theme, Soft Core (the name comes from a perfume that Ruthie's find of) is beautifully written, with prose that flows. As well as ghosts, death, and specifically suicide, are preoccupations - Ruthie's mother went off the rails after Ruthie's father died: he may have killed himself - and Ruthie is also I think marked by that death ("There was a very small yet ferocious girl inside me that was prone to throwing drinks in men's faces"). Ruthie has an unfinished thesis on "surveillance, ghosts and reality TV".

Dino's disappearance shakes Ruthie. She begins to think she sees him everywhere. She even approaches some of the men she thinks might be him. Realistically, Dino's profession is one that might lead to his vanishing, either in dispute with other figures in his world or his flight from danger. Perhaps looking too closely into this isn't just unwise for her wellbeing ("At this point in my decline...") but also for her safety? Nevertheless Ruthie persists, even getting into relationships with some of them. Likewise she gets closer than she ought to one of her customers at the dungeon, a collector of dolls' houses with whom she has long text conversations about suicide. 

Ruthie's life as a dancer, meeting the desires of the (mostly male) customers ("Men would do anything to feel less alone; why couldn't they be like women, humming through the pain, too shy to ask for mercy?" is a significant theme in the book. She's blunt about the work "Danger was an elemental part of our job, even if we never got hurt", her place in it "The most marketable thing about me was that I was new and white" and its impact on her "Since I started dancing I had forgotten how to look nice without also looking slutty." 

But she also notes positive changes, invisible to the men watching - dancing makes her physically stronger "a change in my body that the men couldn't discern" and she notes that in the club "all women were my sisters" (although also "All men present were my daddies" which with her father dead also recalls the themes of death and ghosts). This ghost states that "I was only visible when I took off my clothes in a dark room at night".

Soft Core is a melancholy read, at times, for all its evocative language. Ruthie's time after Dino's disappearance, her season alone, is beset by thoughts of darkness, by dangers more intuited than plainly seen. One evening the San Franciscan fog "followed me home like a man". Ruthie had "the marks of men all over me".  She's lost in some way, or Dino's absence has revealed a loss that had already existed "I missed who I was when [Dino] and I had got together, that twenty-five year old fool. She'd never given a lap dance. She's never had a mai tai. She believed in her thesis on cameras and ghosts." It's hard to feel that, if he reappeared, she'd be safer - happier, perhaps, better fed, for sure, but safer? I suppose the fact that I was concerned for her shows that Newell has made this weird ghost sympathetic and certainly Ruthie's story is immersive but it's hard to see a good resolution coming here!

I'd certainly recommend Soft Core, though its themes will not be to everyone's taste.

For more information about Soft Core, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Agency by William Gibson

Agency
William Gibson
Viking, 23 January 2020
HB, 416pp

'Observe, orient, decide, act'.

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance e-copy of Agency via NetGalley.

Sequel to Gibson's The Peripheral, Agency is a book that can be read as a standalone, although that leaves the reader with a  a job of catching up to do. Still, we are brought up to speed pretty quickly.

The book takes place across three alternate timelines - our world, albeit in 2136, and two versions of 2016, including one where the results of the UK's Brexit referendum and of the US's presidential election were different. With its events taking place in San Franciso, the latter timeline gives some quiet signs of hope in the US: a mural celebrating "the President's" courage, for example ('Her opponent loomed behind her, as he once actually had'). We don't see the outcome in the UK in this scenario. But Gibsons insists that people are generally no happier, not knowing what they've been saved from - and the "jackpot", a horrible future featuring decades of catastrophe, is still coming. Nothing immediately hangs on the difference in political outcomes and we don't see the longterm effects. Rather the conflict that motivates the book takes place under the radar and at a more personal level.

Gibson's conceit is that "our" timeline is the "real" one from which the others are "stubs", branches formed when somebody in "our" world communicates back to inhabitants in the distant past.. How such communication is possible isn't explained (I think that's where reading The Peripheral, which I hadn't, may help) but Gibson uses the idea with gusto, having the inhabitants of 2136 London intervene in 2016 for a variety of reasons - one is malicious and enjoys causing trouble, others see it as a hobby, while our main protagonists - a Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer and her sidekick, Netherton - seek to help. In particular, they're trying to prevent alt-2016 perishing in a nuclear war, and therefore seek traction in that world. (This is challenged by an indignant resident of one of the other timelines as simply colonialism)

At the other end of this process is Verity Jane, a young woman renowned in the tech world as the "app whisperer" and in the tabloids as Stetson Howell's ex. Howell is a powerful force in tech and having broken ups with him, Verity is of great interest to social media. When the book opens she's just about to take a new job evaluating an AI personal assistant for startup Tulpagenics - something that will change her life for ever.

The AI, Eunice*, becomes key to this story and the relationship between it - her - and Verity both touching and intriguing. As chapters alternate between San Francisco and London, we gradually see a more complete picture of what's going on, but to achieve that you need to get your head round some complicated setups involving tele-presencing between the two timelines (and occasionally, all three).

So you can have a character (generally Netherton) living in 2136 London but virtually occupying a drone in 2016 alt-San Francisco, interacting with the inhabitants there and observing that reality through a game-like interface while occasionally exchanging words with someone with him in the (2136) - the conversation also including other characters who are effectively dialled in to the events, from one or other of the timelines. I found it really confusing at times ('...his phone's feed provided by her device's camera. She couldn't see him, though he could show her what he was seeing'), and the descriptions of what was being seen on that virtual display sometimes took a lot of effort to interpret.

There is also a lot of tech speak. 'She's an intermittently hierarchical array, complexly coterminous' for example, or 'a locus of clonic indeterminacy' or 'competitive control areas'. The book is in one sense a lot of extended conversations, undertaken as characters run for their lives. But, new words to learn! At least now I know what "noetic" means.

I realise this may sound as if I didn't like the book. That's not so at all. I really enjoyed Agency and look forward to reading more Gibson. The stuff above doesn't really hold up the narrative or make the essentials hard to follow. And he has some mind-bending concepts - see the character who has had her animated tattoos removed and installed into the hide of an indoor yurt, so that as she sleeps she's surrounded by moving animal figures. Or the idea of an electronic privacy filter created by a circle of dancing bots swirling shawls made of a smart fabric. And there is some really smart, even beautiful use of language here ('Her eyes and chartreuse lips seemed to float there, a disembodied Cheshire goth...', '"...something like Uber," Eunice said, "but for following people"', 'that horror movie feel of any unoccupied cam feed').

Above all, the characters feel real, part of a community, a family, at home ion their places - whether that's Verity sofa-surfing in San Francisco or Netherton with his wife Rainey and his son of even Lowbeer in her preposterous mobile situation room. The book feels deep, these characters care for each other, they have history and have made compromises and they know better to raise certain issues or to do certain things, and Gibson communicates all this subtly, he shows it, for which I can forgive him any amount of tech speak and mind-bending multi-way situations.

It was great fun. But do read The Peripheral first.

For more about the book, including links to buy, see the Penguin website here.

*Untethered Noetic Irregular Support System

Review: Passing Strange by Ellen Klages

Image from Tor.com

Passing Strange
Ellen Klages
Tor.com, 24 January 2017
e-book/ PB, 160pp

San Francisco is a city well-suited to magic...

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book via NetGalley.

Helen Young went into her bedroom. She changed into a pair of blue silk pyjamas, brushed her hair, and put on a touch of lipstick. Then she got into bed, turned out the light, and went to sleep for the last time humming a Cole Porter tune until she and the melody simply drifted away.

So ends one of the characters is this hauntingly beautiful tale of life in the queer melting pot of 40s San Francisco.

Helen is one of a group of young women who work or socialise in Mona's, a club where girls can be boys. Whether working as entertainers not only for their own circle but for the plump mid-west tourists who come to gawp, or simply drifting among like minded exiles from straight society, they stand by each other, providing rooms when needed, meals, cover from the police and moral support.

Haskell is at the centre of this circle. She is a talented artist who makes her living drawing pictures for pulp comic books: the kind of thing where a scantily dressed woman is chained down and menaced by a purple monster. Why does she draw such pictures? Well, it's where the money is, but she has other reasons, as we - and Emily, newly acquainted with the little group of friends - gradually learn. Haskell's life hasn't been easy and she is in a sense perhaps still on the run from her past.

There are others in the group too, including some with startling abilities (like being able to shrink space - but only in that misty city of magic, San Francisco) and we see their joys and sorrows, but it's Haskell and Emily that this lovely, romantic book focusses on. Everything seems against them: the law, society, the looming war (deftly illustrated by the presence of a refugee girl from England), an abusive husband. But they have good friends.

How this setup leads to that ending, to Helen's ending decades later, I won't say because the tension of the story hangs upon it. It's a taut, well-contsructed plot, one of those books where no word is superfluous. And there are some beautiful passages (see especially the parts describing the 1940 World's Fair, taking place on an island in the Bay, just as the rest of the world went to pieces).

I hadn't read any Klages before but I will be looking for more of her writing after this. (You can find a bonus story by here.) An excellent book that features well drawn characters, abounds in atmosphere and celebrates a period and setting I was completely unaware of. (Oh, and look at that beautiful cover!)

If you want to know more about the book, listen to this episode of the Coode Street Podcast where Jonathan Strahan and Gary Wolfe discuss it with the author. It's a good listen.