Microreview [book]: The Heart of the Circle by Keren Landsman, translated by Daniella Zamir

Emotionally driven queer romance set against a backdrop of magically-driven political unrest in alternate Tel Aviv

Cover design by Francesca Corsini

The Heart of the Circle, by Keren Landsman, was originally published in Hebrew last year, but this month it's coming out in an English translation from Angry Robot. Finding english-language urban fantasy that takes place outside of American or British locales is pretty unusual, and with its promise of an unusual social role for magic coupled with the Tel Aviv setting, this was a book I was intrigued to pick up.

The main character, Reed is an empath, also known as a "moody": a type of sorcerer living in a world where magic powers are regularly manifested but treated with different levels of discrimination. Living in Tel Aviv, in a society that's apparently known for being more tolerant of sorcerers while still forcing segregation and exclusion on most aspects of their lives, he's torn between the increasing political unrest affecting the city, and wanting to live his life along with his (mostly sorcerous) friends and ("normie") family. Tension in the city is ramping up as sorcerers become the target of murders by the Sons of Simeon, an extremist group, and Reed becomes increasingly embroiled in their plot. Complicating the whole thing are the presence of "damuses" - seers - on both sides, with the Sons of Simeon attempting to manipulate the streams of his future and force him into sacrificing himself and the movement for the sake of his friends. Living with all this, and trying to care for his damus best friend Daphne, would be hard enough if Reed's ex hadn't shown up with an attractive single "moody" ex of his own in tow, who comes with his own extensive baggage about the treatment of sorcerers in this world's equivalent of the USA, and misgivings about starting a relationship with a doomed man.

It's that romance between Reed and Lee which forms front and centre of the plot of The Heart of the Circle, and if the fact that its a doomed relationship between two empaths didn't clue you in, let me explicitly note that there are quite a lot of feelings involved from start to finish. There's the trauma of long-term oppression and their short term situation; complex webs of guilt around their respective powers and, in Lee's case, socialisation around not sharing emotions in general; pre-emptive grief over the Reed's impending doom and the predictions about what it will do to Lee's own life; and obviously all the giddy romantic stuff you could ever possibly want. Because Reed and Lee can feel each other's feelings - and Reed can directly manipulate emotions in others, although this comes with its own taboos - everything gets amplified and dissected and the emotional impact of their situation is generally at the very core of everyone's response. It makes for difficult, slow reading at points, particularly towards the end, but it also feels like an interesting take on its subject matter, placing the character's emotional arcs front and centre while still maintaining the fantasy aspects as a core part of the experience.


Because its told through a narrator who is completely wrapped up his own feelings and direct situation, worldbuilding is delivered in a way that's often painfully subtle. Offhand remarks, meaningless to the characters, clue us in to the existence of a "Confederacy" in North America, or the craters across the entirety of Europe, or the fact that sorcerer's can't vote in Israel despite its reputation as a "safe" city for them - which show how commonplace they are to him, while coming as a complete surprise and shakeup to a reader in our world. The general effect is of a world that's even more wartorn, unstable and unequal than our own, but it's deliberately left in the background, brought up by a character who doesn't find these elements particularly remarkable. The lack of focus on areas of worldbuilding which are commonplace to Reed but novel to the audience also stretches to the magic of this world, which is split into elemental sorcerers (not super explored but in control of air, water, fire and earth respectively) and psychic empaths and seers. Psychics in particular seem to have a lot of weapons at their disposal for altering reality and there's some fairly complex scenes where powers end up weaponised either for practice or in a real life-and-death scenario. Although Reed and Lee's different backgrounds allow for some time exploring different talents and introducing some of the verbal and gestural slang used by the sorcerer community, the mechanics of a lot of what they do is left deliberately vague. Of cousre, there's a sense that this is true for the characters as well as the audience: the use and development of magic powers has been greatly constrained by society's prejudice and fear, so while Reed can hone his abilities to project emotions onto the printed word, there's clearly a great deal of untapped potential which sorcerers are unable to openly share despite the support mechanisms in their communities.

Reed and Lee's romantic relationship is backed up with a nuanced though occasionally uneven group of characters forming that wider community, including said awkward ex Blaze, his new girlfriend River, and a group of younger sorcerers who Reed volunteers as a mentor for, as well as more distant Providing a counterweight to much of the group is Reed's non sorcerous brother Matthew and Sherry, a police officer he's (possibly) in the early stages of dating, and who happens to be a "pebble" or earth sorcerer. Both offer a link to the more "mainstream" - Matthew because of his status as a "normie", Sherry because she has successfully broken in to a more mainstream job despite being a sorcerer - and the book does a reasonable job of showing, almost entirely through sympathetic characters like Matthew and Reed's colleague Daniel, why the prejudice and fear against sorcerers exist in the first place.

Treating magic as a stand-in for other marginalisations is not a politically neutral act, and I suspect The Heart of the Circle is going to raise some eyebrows in translation over its treatment of segregation (introduced in the form of bus seats, which to an English speaking audience is about as real-world-US-South-racism-coded as it gets) in a narrative which otherwise doesn't have anything to say about race. Some sorcerers share talents with their family members, but others, like Reed, have "normies" for relatives and are even more reliant on the "found family" of the sorcerer community. There's no stigma attached to Reed an Lee's same-sex relationship either, meaning that the fantasy angle is carrying the full weight of the oppression storylines here - not to mention the religious discrimination angle which the Sons of Simeon bring to the table. To unpick what this means would go beyond the scope of this review, but it's a narrative choice I feel many readers might want a heads up on beforehand. Of course, as a translated work, The Heart of the Circle was not written with English-speaking readers or context in mind, and that's very much worth noting too.

Ultimately, I don't know that I enjoyed reading The Heart of the Circle. It's a hard story, and fraught romantic feelings tend not to be my personal jam. That said, it's a book that's absolutely stayed with me afterwards in its portrayal of everyday life under oppression and trauma. As a reader, what you take out of The Heart of the Circle is going to very much depend on the extent to which you care about the things Reed cares about - his romantic life, his close friends and family, taking care of himself in an oppressive society that has wrung him out while still being invested and trying to help with the future of the next generation. Despite his absorption in his own life and future, its hard not to sympathise with his position and that of the wider community, and it makes for an intriguing, emotionally-driven fantasy of the kind I'd like to see more of.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 Effortless creation of an alternate, urban fantasy Tel Aviv

Penalties: -1 Feelings on feelings on feelings can get a bit much; -1 Some of the secondary characters deserved more

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reference: Landsman, Keren tr. Daniella Zamir. The Heart of the Circle [Angry Robot, 2019]

Microreview [Book]: Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar

In the beginning of Lavie Tidhar's new novel Unholy Land, it seems like the book is based on one big politicohistorical What If: What if the Jewish state of Israel (which is called Palestina in the novel) was established in Eastern Africa instead of Middle East?

What if the displaced people who had to make room for the new state were the inhabitants of a strip of land between Kenya and Uganda instead of Palestinians? What if there were illegal Jewish settlements beyond the Green Line and "a separation wall" being built on the disputed territories of Nakuru instead of West Bank?

This poor man's promised land, featuring human rights abuses, ethnic tensions, civil unrest and suicide bombings, is not all there is to the novel, however.

The book begins with Lior Tirosh, a troubled novelist, returning to Palestina, catching up with old acquintances, getting worried about a relative of his, and running into trouble with the state's brutal security operatives. Then the whole tale becomes something else: it's not a politically charged alternative historical thriller but something much more fantastic.

I was first a little taken aback by the inclusion of Kabbalistic slash quantum mechanical explorations of parallel realities very reminiscent of Miéville's The City & The City, but when you get your mind around it, the metaphorics do work.

Unholy Land discusses Israel, and in everything related to Israel, people live in different political universes. They look at the same thing but see completely different realities, as if there were different worlds on top of each other, not completely aligning. In Unholy Land, the borders between realities are porous, but once you get settled to one of them, its logic takes hold and its harder to see things in any other way. I feel there's a profound point that the novel is trying to make here, although occasionally it tries quite hard.

The execution is a bit tangled in places, but Tidhar manages to keep the narratives of the third-person Tirosh, a first-person security spook Bloom and a second-person reality-hopping literary scholar and some sort of a (non-literary) agent Nur under control. Especially the latter two narratives deliver some very quirky and enjoyable prose.

Some chapters describing Tirosh's dealings with different characters feel a bit contrived here and there. Certain characters he meets seem little more than mouthpieces for different ideas and worldviews which Tidhar wishes to discuss, not real people with real personalities, and that's a bit disappointing.

In one of the more heavy-handed instances, Bloom even invokes some Nuremberg logic when defending to himself and to the reader the horrible things he must do: "I was merely doing my job!" Not very subtle, eh? In the novel, there are so many comments made about how the persecuted have themselves become persecutors that Tidhar really doesn't leave the reader uncertain of how he feels about the current situation in Israel.

However, despite a couple of unplausible-sounding exchanges, Unholy Land still manages to hold my interest quite well. I especially enjoyed the poignancy of its worldbuilding and the inventiveness of the narrative levels – fans of more straight-faced fantasy are probably not going to enjoy it as much.

Tidhar throws in a heavy dose of metafictionality into the mix as well, mentioning several of his own previous novels as works by an alternative-dimension Lior Tirosh. Depending on whether you are into that sort of thing, maybe you ought to give Unholy Land a go. There's quite much going on at times and Tidhar struggles to keep all the balls simultaneously in the air, but it is an engaging book with something worthwhile to say.

***

The Math

Base Score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for poignant worldbuilding, +1 for metafictional shenanigans

Penalties: -1 for occasional ham-fisted characters, -1 for metafictional shenanigans

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 – "an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws"

Reference: Tidhar, Lavie. Unholy Land [Tachyon 2018]
***

POSTED BY: Spacefaring Kitten, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018.