City of Saints and Madmen, Vandermeer
2.0 Stars
7-15-2022
A much, much, much ... much, much lesser Vandermeer. This is one of his earlier works, where he decided he wanted to create his own version of Perdido Street Station/Etched City/Viriconium and fully realize the life and history of the fantastic city of Ambergris. It doesn't work. This is mostly due a combination of slowness and triteness.
The book is broken up into a number of novella length stories, where each story changes the genre/time period/perspective on the city. So you have the story of a shattered priest returning to the city after failed missionary work, you have a highly parenthetical popular history of the city's founding, you have a key moment in the lives of several famous artists in the city's modern period, you have a meta-text with the author in a psych ward because the city became too real for him, etc. etc. And there are numerous links between the stories, e.g. the popular history has a brief mention of the lasting psychoactive effects of the jungle-poison on the dart that the priest was pierced with, e.g. the famous artists (Voss, Lake) are mentioned in almost all other stories, etc. etc
The problem is that the quality of the work is not sufficient to keep the reader's interest. The world building is often ... bleh. It's not fan-fic level, but it is also not creative enough or original enough or beautiful enough to justify itself. Instead it's just this long slog through mediocre world building & nice but also quite slow storytelling. And there are easter eggs and cross references and sub-texts and subversions there for you to find, except that if you do not care about the work to begin with these rewards are not very rewarding. As an example, let's dig into the story of the artists (which is one of the better ones). The main thread of the story is about an artist who makes mediocre art and is perhaps wasting his talent, he has a big dramatic traumatic experience, and then after that experience he makes good art. As plot goes, this is trite & unrealistic. The second thread of the story is about an art historian writing about the artist's paintings during this time, and getting things wrong in a confidently bullshitty way. This has also been done before, many times, since artists love to turn their art on the critics who criticize them. It's a super common sub-genre, and often quite cutting and hilarious. And this story-thread is just a mediocre example of that sub-genre. At most it gets some gentle chuckles. The novella isn't worthless, some of the physical descriptions and scenes are excellent, but that quality alone isn't enough to support the novella. If the art-history thread had been dropped, then the pace of the story doubles, and that might have worked fine. As is though the book is too slow, and the shifts in perspective regularly kill any momentum that the reader has managed to build up.
Anyway! I quit around the 300 page mark, as I couldn't deal with another psychiatric hospital scene where it seems like the hospitalized person is insane, or are they?! Perhaps my favorite thing of the whole book was the (apparently) real life talk about Vandermeer's own personal experience with a hummingbird as a symbol of piercing and awakening beauty, which he would later expand into his Hummingbird Salamander. Neat.
I'm not sure how to rate this book, as it's not offensive or incompetent, but I also can't think of any situation in which I would recommend it to someone. I'm going to call that "2 stars" in recognition of Vandermeer's past services.