Review: Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes

Vintage body-swap, with vintage sensibilities

 Body swapping is a well-used trope, familiar in modern media, but dating back farther than you might think. F. Anstey had a father and son switch bodies, in his 1882 novel Vice Versa; and in 1931 Thorne Smith did it again with a husband and wife in Turnabout. In these cases—and in most of the more modern Freaky Friday versions¹—what makes the story work is that the swappers know each other. Indeed, body swapping is a useful narrative tool by which two acquaintences can further develop a high-stakes relationship by learning what each other’s lives are like from the inside.

Maud Cairnes’s Strange Journey (1935) does something different: The swappers are complete strangers. They’ve never met. There are no stakes to their relationship, because they haven’t got one. So instead what we have is a relationship that is created by the body-swap, and in fact could not have been created without it, because the two swappers come from decidedly different walks of life.  

Our narrator is Polly Wilkinson, a middle class housewife with an affectionate husband, two lovely children, and a whole haul of domestic, family, and social responsibilities that go along with such a life. Her partner in swappage, Lady Elizabeth Forrester, is a wealthy aristocrat with a strained marriage, living a life of unimaginable (to Polly) luxury. A country house; a town house; horses and jewels; cabinet ministers and internationally famous concert pianists swirl around her social circle. Throughout their repeated unintentional swaps, Polly and Elizabeth find themselves in a position to either cause trouble for the other, or perhaps smooth over difficulties that the other doesn't have the ability to handle. Polly finds herself determined to figure out what's wrong with Elizabeth's marriage and fix it, while Elizabeth uses her superior social acumen to help Polly organize events that are important for her husband’s career. In the end, everything resolves itself in this book exactly as you might expect from a respectable novel of this era.

If you allow yourself to take this book for what it is, which is a fluffy, light, quite surfacy romp, then there is a lot to enjoy here. The social circles of Polly and Elizabeth are very well realized, and each woman’s fish-out-of-water behaviour in the other’s body makes for some excellent situational comedy. For example, Polly and Elizabeth have different artistic taste: Elizabeth is refined, and adores atonal, discordant music and foreign theater, while Polly is basic: She likes Ronald Coleman and romantic comedies. So Polly in Elizabeth’s body ends up snubbing a concert pianist quite badly when she insists he play show tunes; while Elizabeth in Polly’s body makes a dreadful hash of things when she tries to organize a group outing to the theatre and selects a Romanian play that ends up being inappropriate for unmarried ladies.

The best of these hijinks take place during the middle portion of the book, when Polly is convinced that Elizabeth is responsible for controlling the timing of their swaps. After one particular swap that causes Polly to miss Christmas with her family, she grows indignant about it all, and decides to cause mischief for Elizabeth. Not much mischief, because remember that this book doesn’t go very far in any particular component, but certainly enough to pep things up entertainingly, if you’re in a mood to find a high-stakes bridge game sufficient excitement.

The most interesting components of this book lie in the treatment of class. Polly and Elizabeth are fish out of water not just because they are strangers to each other, but because they are from such distinct social classes. Elizabeth’s high-handed manner in Polly’s body surprises her acquaintences, but has many benefits: she puts overbearing relatives in their place; she can talk comfortably with Polly’s husband’s boss without being overawed. She’s not shy about extending invitations and being socially bold in ways that Polly would never dare to be. Polly, by contrast, makes repeated errors of behavior that are rooted in class, which Elizabeth’s acquaintances at first think are jokes, but later leaves them equally confused. When Polly is presented with Elizabeth’s jewel box while dressing for dinner, she is so gobsmacked by all the sparkly pretty things that she puts on as much as she can manage, resulting in much commentary at dinner that reveals she has dramatically overdone it. She doesn’t know that the correct term of address for herself is ‘Lady Elizabeth’ instead of ‘Lady Forrester, and she calls her father ‘Dad’ instead of the more refined . . . ---actually, I’m not sure what she should have used instead. Papa? Father? I’m not posh enough to know, but it’s clear that ‘Dad’ is incorrect.

(I am struck, however, by the fact that Elizabeth’s importation of upper class manners into Polly’s life has a general tendency to the good, while Polly’s importation of middle class manners into Elizabeth’s life does not.² This asymmetry of the class-based manners is, perhaps, less of a surprise when I reveal that the author’s full name is Lady Maud Kathleen Cairnes Plantagenet Hastings, daughter of the 15th Earl of Huntingdon. Plantagenet Hastings, good grief. )

 More striking still is a revelation that I think the book doesn’t take nearly far enough: namely, that Polly in her own life has no time to call her own. Every minute of her day is taken up with obligations to the house, the children, the social circle of neighbors and relatives who see everything she does and will be bound to ask questions if she needs to step out for an afternoon to arrange a clandestine visit with an aristocratic body-swap partner. She used to write to her friends from school, but over the years has had to give that up, too. She can have no secrets, no privacy, no life of her own—but it’s not until she tastes the freedom of Elizabeth’s life (a freedom made possible by a neglectful, straying husband who doesn’t care what she does, to be sure) that she realizes what she lacks. This is a very touching moment, and afterwards it is entirely dropped. It’s as if this description of Polly’s constrained life is only important for what it means for the plot’s requirement that Polly find a way to have a private meeting. The revelations about the concessions Polly’s made to her tidy domestic comfort are almost inadverdently revealed, and never explored.

Another consideration that is hampered by the ethos of its time is the ethics of sex in other people’s bodies. If the closest you want to come to mentioning the existence of sex is to say that a ‘foreign’ play is inappropriate for unmarried ladies to watch, it’s going to be hard to give adequate consideration to how Polly and Elizabeth must handle their relations with their husbands. When Elizabeth wakes up in Polly’s bed next to Polly’s husband, she immediately leaps from the bed and runs from the room. When Polly tries to reconcile Elizabeth(‘s body) with Elizabeth’s husband Gerald, she has to tread a fine line of signalling her openness to further intimacy, while taking great pains never even to kiss him. (This sends some extremely mixed signals to poor Gerald). She frets a bit about whether it counts as unfaithfulness to her own husband, given that her own actual body remains decidedly uninvolved in the potential romantic interaction, but in the end remains firm about never actually taking any action, even in Elizabeth’s body. And given the period and intended readership of the book, I don’t think she could have done any differently.

What concerns me more about this dilemma, however, is not whether such an action would count as cheating (yes, obviously it would), but whether it would be rape. And if so, of whom? Of Gerald, who most certainly did not consent to sleep with Polly, whatever she looks like? Probably.³ But also of Elizabeth, who is not on terms of sexual intimacy with Gerald and would not consent for her body to be used in this way if she were in it. Her absence from her own body is pretty parallel with being drugged or unconscious, or otherwise unable to consent to sex.

In sum, then, this book is decidedly of its time, which results in a lack of depth in its treatment of the quite deep issues it raises. It’s a light frolic, and enjoyable for what it is, as long as you don’t mind the author covering your eyes and putting her fingers in your ears at the difficult bits.

1 Star Trek has quite a few body swap plots: TOS Turnabout Intruder swaps Kirk and Janet Lester, an old lover; VOY Vis A Vis swaps Tom Paris and an alien of the week (although in this one the swappers aren’t well acquainted); SNW Spock Amok swaps Spock and T’Pring. ^↩
2 The asymmetry is also reminiscent of Star Trek TOS Mirror Mirror, in which Spock immediately detects that mirror universe counterparts have taken Kirk, McCoy and Uhura’s places, because, as he says, ‘It is far easier for […] civilized men to behave like barbarians, than for barbarians to behave like civilized men.’ ^↩
3 Once again, I would like to point to Star Trek’s mirror universe, this time in the context of the the DS9 episode Through The Looking Glass, in which Sisko is abducted into the mirror universe to impersonate his mirror self and convince his mirror wife to join a rebellion. The Women at Warp podcast was pretty quick to note that any sex between prime!Sisko and mirror!Jennifer would be rape, because mirror!Jennifer would think she is consenting to sleep with mirror!Sisko, not prime!Sisko. ^↩

^--

Highlights

Nerd coefficient: 6/10, still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

• Body swap
  
• Class-based manners
  
• Hijinks and high-stakes bridge
  
• Missed opportunities for deeper thoughtfulness
  

References:  

Anstey, F, Vice Versa: or, A Lesson to Fathers [Smith, Elder & Co., 1882].
Cairnes, Maud, Strange Journey [The British Library, 1935/2022]. 
Smith, Thorne, Turnabout [Doubleday Doran, 1931]

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

Vintage Review: Crown of Stars Series by Kate Elliott

Adventures in Medieval Space and Time

I started on Kate Elliott's seven book Crown of Stars series in summer last year, for a couple of reasons: I (partly) wanted to read more Kate Elliott, having only experienced her Spiritwalker trilogy so far and (mostly) was trying to increase my "score" on Lady Business' "60 essential reads" list from 2 years ago. This may not have been the best idea, because Elliott has lots of newer books that I'm equally, if not more, interested in (Court of Fives and Black Wolves are sitting on my Kindle and my physical TBR shelf respectively, judging my choices). For a while, getting through this septology of dense, expansive high fantasy felt like an impossible task - a reading feeling which is reflected in the flashes of writing experience we get in the preface notes, where a trilogy becomes five, and then six, and then, finally (and fittingly) seven. Unlike certain other fantasy series that have taken up more space in popular imagination, though, Crown of Stars does end, presenting a reader with a huge but ultimately achievable and satisfying experience to get there.

The series begins with King's Dragon, a volume which initially invests us in three storylines. Liathano, a young, highly educated woman living in relative seclusion with her father, has her life thrown into disarray when her father is murdered and a deeply unpleasant presbyter named Hugh takes an interest in his materials and in Liath herself. Alain, a boy whose adoptive family have sent him for a monastic life he doesn't want, is visited by the Lady of Battles and ends up instead at the court of Count Lavastine and his selectively loyal dogs immediately before an invasion from the north. And, in the court of King Henry, questions are being asked about the line of succession: Henry has three legitimate children from whom his heir ought to be come, but has always instead favoured his oldest, bastard son Sanglant, born to a mother who is quite literally not from this world. To make matters worse, Henry is also facing internal dissent from his sister and her rival faction for the throne at the same time as said northern invasion should be occupying his attentions.

On their own, the adventures of Liath, Alain and Sanglant could easily fill multiple volumes of high fantasy, with the Eika - alien, stonelike creatures whose invasion of the north involves widespread killing and slavery - as an antagonist group whose motives slowly become more complex (ideally to an extent that questions the problematic elements of having a racially-delineated antagonist group). We'd also expect some plot-relevant repeat appearances from the Aoi (read: fae-elven) people from whom Sanglant is part descended. And we do get all of this this, but it comes alongside so much more: religious heresies and rebellions; a near-unstoppable invasion of nomadic raiders from the east and questionable alliance building with the Queen in the south; discovery and rediscovery of ancient bloodlines through ancient cultish conspiracies; magical trips thousands of years back in time, into the realms of the outer spheres, and through territory deep underground; a cataclysmic natural disaster borne of an ancient magical mistake; spirit summoning; pyromancy; griffins and centaurs; unnaturally ageing children; a cast of minor characters which, in my copy of In the Ruins (book 6, the only one to contain a character list) spans 20 pages, and constant exclamations of "Ai! Lady!" which only stopped being annoying around Volume 5. Only the well-realised medieval-ish setting prevents there from being a kitchen sink thrown in there somewhere: there's literally every plot element you could want from an epic fantasy series somewhere in here, along with a few I'd be happy never to read about again (i.e. rape. Sigh.)

What makes the Crown of Stars series so interesting is that it incorporates all these elements while also being very consistent about the concept of distance, and the amount of time which this continent-spanning, world-changing quest would require in a setting with inconsistent magic and low technology. From the moment the characters start spinning off into different plots, there's a sense of overwhelming division between them, and regular detached references are made to the fact that years are passing within these books, although the narrative only focuses on plot relevant moments with very little in the way of "downtime" (I dread to think how many volumes this story would have taken if it included the static character banter of Stormlight Archives). These distances also make the limited capabilities of even the elite characters very clear: around the mid-point of the series, Henry makes the choice to travel to neighbouring Aosta in order to support a deposed queen and pursue marriage alliances, rather than addressing any of the other threats to his regnancy, and this choice literally cuts off his communication with his own land with enormous consequences. When magical sight comes into play, we have characters watching pivotal moments with no chance of influencing what is happening, and the powerlessness this creates even amongst the series' most powerful individuals is very well conveyed.

Committing to the realities of this distance, and the information gaps this creates, also means Crown of Stars presents quite a high difficulty setting for its readers when it comes to remembering the happenings of the series' characters. Unless someone has literally been there to witness an event, information can take entire books to reach them, and the shifting limited third person voice means that their mistaken assumptions are regularly presented as fact by the narrative. I find myself hoping some benevolent tech genius will fall in love with this series and create some kind of "character networking app" that breaks down, section by section, where everyone is and what they're doing, so if I ever reread this series I can consult an omniscient guide to remind me what's actually happening and what misinformation the characters are working from. Elliott makes other style choices that also compound the difficulty for readers with imperfect recall. Each book is divided into sections and then subdivided into (sometimes short) numbered chapters, but each section can contain multiple alternating points of view, and Elliott has a consistent habit of not name checking the character the narration has switched to until several paragraphs into the chapter. It's honestly just too much to keep straight at times, and the plot is complex enough that some help from the author or editor on these small elements (e.g. chapters named by POV, or character-specific glyphs in the chapter headers as in Stormlight Archives or Shattered Sands) would have greatly enhanced my comprehension without detracting from the text or style.

With a cast of 20 pages, there's inevitably going to be some characters you care about more than others. For me, it's Liath by quite a wide margin, with Alain in distant second for the first half of the series, while other characters are more or less compelling depending on their distance from Liath. Despite being thrown directly into the middle of world-changing political events, Liath keeps her interest and her personal motivations fixed on the cosmological quest of understanding. While Sanglant saves the Regnancy, Liath is in the business of saving the world, and when she does find herself forced to play the political game, she inevitably gets outplayed by everyone else. On the antagonist side, mothers play a huge, ambiguous role, both in the literal and, through religious elites, metaphorical sense (the church is female-led), and there's a lot of powerful, complex women whose interests align more or less with the heroes at any given point. Unfortunately, because of the challenges outlined above, most of the extended cast fell very much into "meh" territory for me: I just couldn't muster much interest in the fate of characters like Blessing, or Heribert, or Wolfhere, or anyone in the Eika plotline, despite the pivotal roles these secondary characters play in the emotions of the main cast, because I couldn't keep straight where they were supposed to be and what was happening to them at any given time.

If you can keep your head around all the character comings and goings, however, Crown of Stars is worth sticking with to the end. With political complications and plot developments piling up all the way through the sixth book and into Crown of Stars, the final volume, it's initially hard to see how this series could come to anything approaching a satisfying end, but by halfway through it becomes clear exactly what sort of story this is going to be: there's no chance of a huge, multilateral political settlement that would tie together all of the geopolitical threads in one easy bow, because that's not how geopolitics works, but there's a satisfying "beat" to most of these, including a development for the Regnancy of Wendar and Varre that I had wanted to see since King's Dragon. However, the sense of closure in the end of Crown of Stars really comes through the way the characters' journeys come to an end, and - in a neat twist I didn't even realise I wanted until it started happening - who among this enormous, scattered cast finds each other again. It's such a neat way of tapering things off, and feels very true to the series as a whole that, ultimately, satisfaction is found not in political victory but in coming back to those you love, perhaps with a better understanding of why that love is so important.

In a story that, as noted above, contains everything except the kitchen sink, it's an enormous storytelling feat to stick an ending that relies so much on the small things. If this huge, messy, tricky series is an example of Elliott's relatively early work, I'm extremely excited to move on to the more recent books and see what those worlds have in store. Crown of Stars is expansive, frustrating, and will test your ability to remember character names to its absolute limit, but it's well worth the experience in the end.

Score: 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.

Vintage Review: Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith

A stunning science fiction novel of family, choices, and a quarantined planet

The incidence of infection of Company personnel was one hundred percent. Eighty percent of Company’s female personnel recovered; all of the men, including Courtivron, died. The planet was closed; no one on, very few off.

Welcome to Jeep, the setting of Nicola Griffith’s debut novel Ammonite. The opening pages give a sense of claustrophobia as Marghe Taishan, in a quarantined part of a station orbiting Jeep, readies herself to be inoculated with a vaccine against the virus. Marghe is an anthropologist working for the Settlement and Education Council of the Durallium Company. Her contract is to travel to Grenchstom’s Planet and “study over a million people who had been out of contact with humanity for two or three hundred years” (pg 6). Jeep was a former colony planet, but the virus closed the world and the people of Jeep are now unknown quantities to the Company. The Company, perhaps as any company would, sent Marghe as a test subject for the vaccine and probably to find what Jeep can be worth to the Company. Marghe is there for the opportunity as an anthropologist. She carries some emotional baggage with her relating to her previous stint working for the Company. Nicola Griffith explores Marghe’s history as a natural part of the storytelling of Ammonite, and manages it without infodumping the reader.

Now, it would be perhaps an attempt to avoid the elephant in the room if I didn’t bring up the fact that this is a novel featuring a planet populated entirely by women – and moreover, that all female population manages to reproduce without males, and further – that all men die from some strange virus on the planet.

I don’t wish to diminish Nicola Griffith’s intentions and accomplishments with Ammonite to call the gender issue “window dressing”, but the fact is, when you read Ammonite you’re probably not going to pay too much attention to the fact that there isn’t a single male character in the novel (excluding a flashback). What you’re going to pay attention to is the fact that Ammonite is entirely populated with “people”. What you’re going to pay attention to is the story Griffith is telling. What you’re going to pay attention to is everything you pay attention to when you read.

It is only after the fact that we realize just what it is that Nicola Griffith did here. She twisted a number of conventions of science fiction and she did it so skillfully that if you don’t look closely, you might have missed the mechanism because you were caught up in the show. This “sort” of novel of discovery and exploration tends to be male focused and male dominated and here, the women are not simply men with female names. They are women. The idea of the all-female society doesn’t look like the various cultures and tribes of Ammonite because the idea of the all-female society is a broken cliché that doesn’t treat women as actual people. Griffith gets at this in the essay that follows the novel. If you think this was all some great accident that Griffith just happened to write into the novel, think again. This was intentional and it was skillful and it was seamless with the actual storytelling.

We will feed you, and clothe you, share everything that’s ours with you, without reservation, without condition. You in your turn must do the same. Will you do that?

As much as it is about anything else, Ammonite is a novel that questions what family and identity really means. To Griffith, or more accurately – as presented in Ammonite, family is about what is chosen and what the responsibilities and consequences of that choice are. Most novels don’t really get at this in such a clear way. There are families, and sometimes characters get to choose a family, but seldom does what that acceptance of family means come across so succinctly. Sometimes it takes different cultural norms to spell it out and have it not feel like a lesson. Taken out of context, the above passage is a good explanation of what a family is. Taken in the context of Ammonite, it is a beautiful and powerful moment.

Ammonite is filled with such moments. As a collection of individual moments Ammonite would probably still be a powerful novel, but Nicola Griffith does so much more than just string together moments with string. Ammonite is a complete novel, strong and whole, with depth and layers I’m sure I haven’t seen yet on a single read. This isn’t to suggest that it is dense and impenetrable, because it isn’t at all. It is to suggest that Ammonite is filled with richness of storytelling and is a novel that should sit with the reader long after the last page is turned and the cover closed. It is to suggest that Ammonite features oh so very real characters who all have their own agendas and needs and wishes, and that I may not have parsed them all correctly the first time through. It is to suggest that Ammonite is, without question, one of the best novels I have read so far this year.

You know those books you finish reading and you know you must read everything else the author has written? Ammonite is that book.


Score: 9/10

This review was originally published on June 9, 2009 at Adventures in Reading.

Reference: Griffith, Nicola. Ammonite [Del Rey, 1993]

POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 & 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.