Review - Ruby by Nina Allan

Cover by Julia Lloyd

Ruby
Nina Allan
Titan Books, 6 October 2020
Available as: PB
Source: Advance PB copy
ISBN: 9781789091724

I'm really, really grateful to Titan Books for an advance copy of Ruby to consider for review.

Nina Allan is one of the authors who, when I see they have a new book coming, make me silently shout "YES!" (or sometimes not so silently). Her blending of the mundane and the fantastical, her referencing whole alternate worlds - sometimes bizarrely alien, sometimes only subtly different from ours - makes her books into wonderful, almost holographic puzzles, where the detail and the big picture contain the entirety of each other and every page is a joy to read.

So it is with Ruby. Told as a group of seven stories, this certainly IS the story of horror actress Ruby Castle even though at the same time, many of the stories say every little about her. Or seem to. Actually I think the less that's said, the more she may be present.

For example, I'm reasonably sure - though Allan doesn't say so - that one of the stories is actually one of Castle's films. It is a horror story, and the actress isn't mentioned - where would she be other than in plain sight? Alternatively, it may be that Castle's films are interacting with our world - which is to say, Allan's fictional world - there is a reference in that story to an escaped Nazi war criminal who features obliquely in another story seemingly set in Allan's "real world", one that mentions Castle's grandfather.

The stories can all the enjoyed in their own right and independently of the rest, but the more of them you read, the more links you'll see both in content (persons, events) and themes. Some are naturalistic and some contain (possible) elements of the supernatural - so for example The Lammas Worm is perhaps an (MR) Jamesian sort of horror, with a hinted at monster, but also establishes Castle's background and early years in a travelling show. The carnival life is a recurring theme, as it is in others of Allan's books (which have also I think explored the relationship between reality and films). Other, darker themes include the disappearance of children or young women. Some of these Arte explained or we can easily guess a link to the presence of predatory men, sometimes there may be other, more esoteric reasons.

Even where there is no death or disappearance, or it's hinted that the woman in question turned up again later, Allan often evokes a sense of menace, a feeling that something isn't right, an atmosphere of suspicion and misease. Indeed sometimes the manner of the "turning up" only fuels that unease, which is also underpinned by the timelines of the various pieces. Both between and within the stories there are jump cuts, flashbacks (and, in the case of one story set in 2029 onwards, forwards) and narratives in narratives. The result is, indeed, like a hall of mirrors, with events seen from different perspectives some (or all) of which may be distorted, and characters who keep secrets from each other. How unsettling it is for example to see a reunion between old friends after many years, but to have been told by one, the narrator, that he'd had an affair with the other's wife?

Reading over these last few paragraphs, I think I should emphasise that Allan's writing isn't all - indeed it is hardly at all - weird, shock horror stuff. Even when dealing with the eruption of the grotesque into real life, she writes carefully, restrainedly and, as a result, utterly convincingly. In London, a woman keeps meeting the ghost of her schoolfriend, missing some ten or twenty years. Two tourists witness a horror when stranded one night on a mountain: the next morning they reason it away and go on with their lives. A girl on a train discovers men who ought to be dead: she, too, simply accepts it as one of those things. The stories, even the shortest, tell us enough about what went before and what happens after (and sometimes other stories add to this) to give a sense of their characters' longer lives, of what sort of people they are where they came from, so these moments of strangeness never define the whole life or the person -  except, ironically, for Ruby who does commit an act that will frame the rest of her life.

Ruby is simply awesomely, jaw-droppingly good, and will be one of my top reads of 2020. Don't delay, get this on your TBR pile (and right at the top).

For more about Ruby, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Carnivalesque by Neil Jordan

Carnivalesque
Neil Jordan
Bloomsbury, 23 February 2017
HB, 288pp

I'm very grateful for an advance copy of this book via NetGalley.

This was a strange book to read and review. At times I liked it a lot. At other times - especially in the final quarter - I felt I was reading a different book, still excellent but taking a different direction. It was though a rewarding and different book that took me to new places and combined the fantastic and the personal in a fresh and engaging way.

The carny world - fairgrounds, carnivals, circuses - is always a good setting for a novel: the self-containedness of the travelling show, the shifts in scene as it moves across a country, a continent, the garishness, the front, the glimpses behind the scenes. Above all the contrasts between what you're meant to see and what's really going on.

Jordan combines all this with a good dollop of creepiness: there's an ancient mystery at work in this carnival, which has become home to... let's say unusual performers, who draw with them unusual enemies. All this is told allusively, through hints and guess: even the carnies, we understand, have forgotten the details, such is their age and so scrambled have their origins become. But certain terms are avoided - and when a boy starts asking questions about them - well, he'd have been better off not.

It works really well, as we explore the carnival through the eyes of Andy, an Irish teenager who persuades his parents to stop at the carnival one day. Then he walks into the Hall of Mirrors... and comes out again. Only it's not him, not exactly. Everyone has a reflection, after all - so part of Andy remains in the carnival and part rejoins his parents. Are they two different sides of him, like Dr Jeykll and Mr Hyde? or has the mirror made a new Andy? If so, which is it - the boy in the carnival or the one who returns home?

This part of the novel works well for me as a metaphor made real - the essence of science fiction - for Andy's, Dany's growth into adolescence. This is a central theme of the book (later we meet Andy's mother surveying the teenage girls who have blossomed over a summer, reappearing in fake tan, high heels and short skirts). We see, as it were, two sides to the boy: on the one hand a sullen young man, on the other a person filed with wonder at the sights and events and mysteries of the carnival and of its performers - especially Mona the acrobat who finds him in the Hall of Mirrors. This Andy - rearranged as Dany - grows in the fertile soil of the carnival, becoming a different sort of man. Growing up. The other takes up with one of those girls, getting up ton who-knows-what in the sand dunes ands setting the rumour mills whirring. Growing up.

Flitting back and forth between the carnival and Andy's home, we see and can compare the two men/ boys, as well as learning about Andy's parents who had already grown chilly with, distant from one another. It's never clear why but there are flashbacks to their attempts to conceive and strange events around that, as well as hints of myth - Irish as well as classical. Indeed the whole book is suffused with a mythological atmosphere, drawing on Milton and abounding in symbols such as hawthorn trees, mounds, changelings and, of course, all those mirrors, which are another central theme.

In a sense the history of the carnival is a jagged, mirrored, shattered history, touching on emigration from Ireland to America, the development of the moving picture - an improvement on the mirror, surely? - and the encroachment of the modern world on the ancient. The carnival is at the centre of all this, but for how long? Whatever the origin of the carnies, they can't reproduce and in the end they succumb to the Fatigue. So they have traditionally snatched children, unwanted children from families struggling to support them, and taken them into the business, as it were. But this is now barred by modern watchfulness. And with an ancient enemy waking, how long can the carnival carry on?

All of this is gradually teased out alongside Andy's story, the picture slowly forming as though a mirror were being cleaned. Then we come to the final part of the book which suddenly shifts into something much more like horror. And that was where, I felt, the delicate way that Jordan had built his structure and slipped it into the gaps of our world, suddenly came adrift. The carnival had been painted as something elusive, something you'd come across by accident and forget afterwards. Then, suddenly, it can be tracked on the Internet, and events there take a turn that can't, surely, be forgotten - though we're not told, in the end, exactly what does happen. Indeed a crucial scene is almost completely missing: Andy plays a key role in events but, a role he seems to have been preparing for right through the book but - unless I've missed something - we never learn exactly what he does.

I debated with myself whether this actually matters. Andy's role in things is signposted and by the time we reach that point, we know what to expect of him. Isn't that enough? I couldn't decide in the end whether this is very clever of Jordan or simply annoying. Perhaps it depends what genre you think you're reading: the ending is possibly more in keeping with the early, allusive part of the book than the later parts. I'm just not sure.

Overall, then, a fascinating if rather frustrating book. Perhaps the mirror metaphor is appropriate here, too? Which is the reflection - and which the reality?