Alex Pheby

If Mordew was the buzz of a bright wine, Malarkoi was the next morning's headache. I've never been more disappointed in a sequel; still not certain these two were written by the same author. Where Mordew was sparse, Malarkoi was redundant. At first I thought the issue was mine, perhaps my middling intelligence simply couldn't keep up with Pheby's world-building, but upon reading other's reviews I see my experience was not isolated.

What happened? Mordew was action-packed, delicious with show more language. Malarkoi languished in a bog of inner dialogue, each moment of activity a gasp of fresh air before the reader is sucked back into the narrator's mire. show less

Gothic fantasy written by a British professor? I should've known I'd fall in love with Mordew. There were moments I squirmed with discomfort, there were moments I felt my toes curling with enjoyment from the language and setting Pheby weaves. Imagine if Dickens had written Harry Potter and you have something of an idea of the journey you're about to embark on with Mordew.

Now this is a silly little caveat but if you are going to read it, see if you can order the UK edition from Waterstones. show more I found the US edition from Tor to have too thin of pages for any necessary underlining or marginalia. show less

This novel tells the story of Lucia Joyce, daughter of James, and someone who led an extraordinary and troubled life. She was a dancer, who took on a small role in a Jean Renoir film. She was friends with Samuel Beckett (with whom she may have had a short affair), had a relationship with Alexander Calder (who was teaching her drawing) and was treated by Carl Jung, but was diagnosed with schizophrenia in her late twenties and spent much of the rest of her life in institutions, until she died show more at the age of 75.

There is a controversial theory that Lucia was sexually abused by her brother as a child: Pheby picks this up in this book, as well as including similar mistreatment by her father and many other men she comes into contact with. He tells her story elliptically: many of the chapters are told from the point of view of unnamed men, and you have to watch out for the one sentence or reference which tells you how their lives intersected with Lucia's. But in almost every story there is something about the general cruelty of the world to the powerless, reflected in but much larger than Lucia's own life.

The chapters are also interleaved with a short story about an archaeologist discovering an Egyptian tomb, which appears to have been desecrated before it's been sealed. He concludes that this is because the dead woman in the tomb was believed by her family to have been cursed, and so they didn't want her to have the usual protections in the afterlife. This is a reference both to the family's destruction of papers relating to Lucia Joyce, and to Pheby's own efforts in writing this book.

So it's all very clever. And I do think in principle it's possible to write a clever book about someone who is treated appallingly without losing a sense of that person as a human being (for example, The Clocks In This House All Tell Different Times which is similarly a 'clever' book about an abused child, which doesn't forget the person at the centre of the story). But I don't think that Lucia does that.

That is troubling in a human sense. But after a while it also started to make the book a bit boring. As I started each new chapter I knew that it would be about someone who is treating other people badly, but told through that character's self-justification. I knew that there would be one detail which was really gross, but told in the same bloodless way as the rest of the chapter. And I knew that the whole thing would appeal only to the intellect and not the emotions. show less

Having very much enjoyed Pheby's first book Playthings, a brilliant fictionalisation of the classic schizophrenic case of Daniel Paul Schreber, I was excited to check out his swerve into epic fantasy. Unfortunately it's a swerve too far. There's a ton of entertaining worldbuilding in Mordew, with "Living Mud", energised by the presence of the corpse of God, spawning unholy, flapping, gibbering "flukes" and even "mud-born" people, ships propelled by giant fish-like things confined within the show more keel, a fun magical-medieval vibe throughtout, and subtle hints of a pre-apocalyptic world recognisable as our own. But there's also a 13-year old protagonist — and I never like stories with child protagonists — and a dreadfully cheesy YA-style plot in which our slum-child hero, born with innate magical talent, reckons with his parents especially Dad, joins a gang of urchins for thievery and general capers, falls in love with the first girl he meets, comes under the influence of a sinister authority-figure, goes on a quest, comes home, learns the terrible secrets of his origin (hint: he never really belonged in the slums), and ends it all with an almighty ding-dong in which he learns to fully unleash his awesome powers. Magic in this world is insanely overpowered, and although I did enjoy the total chaos of the last fifty pages or so, I enjoyed it the way I'd enjoy watching a warehouse full of fireworks ignite from a safe distance. Elegant it ain't. show less