City of Saints and Madmen: (Ambergris)

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Jeff VanderMeer is a very clever, very talented guy. But I feel that sometimes, he lets his cleverness get in the way of a good story.

City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris is a collection of fantasy short stories by American writer Jeff VanderMeer, set in the fictional metropolis of Ambergris. The setting was further explored in the novels Shriek: An Afterword (2006) and Finch (2009). Before we reach the "beautiful cruelty" of the book’s end, we’ve gotten a tour of various parts of the city, we’ve met the mysterious original inhabitants of Ambergris, the gray caps, we’ve taken a peek at religion in the city, and we’ve seen the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, which is beyond anything you can imagine. We’ve met cantankerous academics, slumming in tour guide footnotes. We’ve been treated to a scientific monograph where a whole ‘nother story emerges if you read all of the notes. We’ve seen a story entirely in code. And we’ve met X, an author with a history very like VanderMeer’s, who is being held in a psychiatric ward because he thinks he has actually seen the fantasy land (called Ambergris) that he writes about (the ending is a delightfully vicious little thing). This is essentially a fully immersive, highly self-referential collection of stories about the city Ambergris, the Freshwater Squid in the river that passes by, the mushroom people that are its original inhabitants, and the humans that try to make the city their own. There are glossaries, bibliographies, and all sorts of other bits, each with a story to tell. Some of the stories appear to be previously published (it's a little hard to tell from the credits). There is a point, in any piece of art, when to add a further stroke would worsen it, making it too busy, destroying the careful balance of fluidity and gesture. Every artist knows this point exists, but for most of us, we only recognize it once it has passed, once we have already ruined it, and it becomes abundantly clear that we should have stopped a moment sooner. Included in the collection is the adorably perverse short story “Draden, In Love”, the maddeningly sinful and infuriatingly irreverent but lovable story “The Transformation of Martin Lake”, and the over-hyped but pleasant-enough “King Squid: Being a Brief Monograph Explaining Both the Phenomena of the Giant Freshwater Squid and of Related Squid Folklore (Including the Festival of the Freshwater Squid), While Also Containing Much by Way of Personal Experience, in Four Parts---Part I describing What the Squid Is Not, Part II What the Squid Is, Part III Expounding with Brevity on the Peculiarities of Squid Lore, and Part IV Divulging a Accurate Scientific Theory that Explains a number of Otherwise Puzzling things that Have Long Preyed Upon the Mind of this Writer (And a Vision)---and Concluding with a Bibliography (Intermittently Annotated)”.

And the second point that I didn’t like—that I’ve vaguely alluded to previously—is that this book is in fact a collection of short novellas rather than a single novel. I am just not a fan of short stories; they never have the meat to satisfy me. This book is close to being the exception to the rule, but I would have preferred an interweaving long narrative about Ambergris. Instead, COSAM presents a somewhat chaotic (like the city itself) series of varied scenarios featuring Ambergris. The first, and longest, story features a missionary just returned to Ambergris from the jungle where he failed at his mission. He is suffering a sort of post-traumatic stress syndrome and jungle poisoning. The second novella is a detailed telling of the history of Ambergris (as best as it can be known) from the perspective of a crotchety old historian who doubts he really knows what happened. The third features the tale of a mediocre artist in Ambergris invited to a “beheading” that leaves him forever altered. The fourth novella is the aforementioned writer in the psyche-ward. Ps. The creative impulse and writing itself are two of the major themes explored herein. In the Hours After Death: Is Nicholas Sporlender the Ambergris manifestation of X? Possibly. But that doesn’t go far in helping me discern the meaning of In the Hours After Death. This is the only story where I feel cut adrift. They hyperreal elements are undeniable, coming as they do from a literary magazine, but what of the walking dead, the adrift soul? Perhaps that is what it means. I wonder if it will come clearer next time I read City of Saints and Madmen. Whatever, VanderMeer has created a novel and a world that are "both fantastical and dark, moody and playful". Women are largely absent, except as objects of desire. We're not allowed into their heads, to see their point-of-view, we aren't asked to explore their struggles or concerns. Even as objects of desire, there's never any relationship or intimacy, just distant, creepy obsession. Indeed, the only genuine, long-term romance represented in the book is between two men. An insidious web of conspiracy and secret societies, reaching out and attaching itself to inhabitants of the real world and, inevitably, engulfing the reader. Reference to Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus Trilogy, in describing this aspect, would be unavoidable.

One of the things I like most about fiction is the concept of world building. To create an alternate reality so captivating & fully realized that it not only feels like a real place, but a place almost preferable to reality. It's why I've been drawn to fantasy & sci-fi writing, it's why I'm such a huge D&D nerd & it's certainly a part of why I love video games. Worlds like Ed Greenwood's Faerûn, Terry Pratchet's Discworld, William Gibson's Sprawl & video games like the Suikoden series are places where my mind has often wandered & wondered what it would be like to actually live within them. I'm sure I'm not alone here & this collection of short stories of VanderMeer's Ambergris only proves that. The following year, a deluxe edition of City of Saints and Madmen appeared in hardcover format from Prime Books. All four novellas from the first edition were revised, and new material was added as an appendix to the book: The rest of the stories not specifically mentioned in this review, tend to be written in a whimsical, playful tone, and serve to expand the world of Ambergris. A lot of them flesh out the setting that the earlier stories play out in. For several years now, I’ve almost exclusively read books as research for my second novel. With few exceptions (when the books were short), I’ve been committed to that focus religiously. (As religiously as an atheist-buddhist-jew can be.) Not all the books I’ve read were chosen for concrete research, per se—such as, “I’ve invented a character who survived a botched lobotomy so I’m going to read books by Ann Coulter”—but sometimes I choose books to get a taste of stylistic influences that might be complementary. In this case, City of Saints and Madmen gave me the impression of a sensuous style and fantastical weirdness. Tastes great, more filling. I started out not liking this chapter. First I was annoyed, then I was angry, but then I was captivated, and I kept going until the wee hours until I finished it and loved it. I could say more, but I don’t want to for fear of revealing too much of myself.What remains obscure, even to those of us who knew him, is how and why [Martin] Lake managed the extraordinary transformation from pleasing but facile collages and acrylics, to the luminous oils—both fantastical and dark, moody and playful—that would come to define both the artist and Ambergris." I'm there again. There's something in it reminiscent of the moment after a car accident, where you're sitting in disbelief, trying to make sense of it, half laughing, half shaking your head. Yes, the history of Ambergris is seeped in tragedy and blood and potentially carnivorous fungi, but it remains the cultural, religious, and political hub of the mostly-discovered world, the global headquarters of the one true religion, Truffidism, as well as a scientific haven for squidologists world-wide (many of whom are escaping persecution and ostracism from other realms, perhaps justly deserved). Undaunted, Dradin sprang to his feet, his two books secure, one under each arm, and smiled to himself. Sound strange? It isn't. Not really. Each tale is a low-grade fever dream couched heavily in the normal, the regular, the banal. Things only get odd at a slow rate, kinda like being boiled alive and not understanding this fact until it is far too late. Of course, that makes us lobsters. Not squid. My metaphor breaks down.

While the apparent object of both artists was something else (a novel, song lyrics and music), both collections or anthologies add up to a snapshot or a mirror image of the soul of the artist, which in turn is a mirror turned around and focused on our souls. The stories of City of Saints and Madmen are set in Ambergris, an urban sprawl named for " the most secret and valued part of the whale" and populated by humans after its original inhabitants—a race of mushroom-like humanoids known as "gray caps"—were violently driven underground. These creatures, though removed from the eccentricities of daily life in Ambergris, continue to cast a shadow over the city with their unexplained nocturnal activities. The New Weird genre as we see it in Vandermeer, started off with the works of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. It is written in the form of excerpts from dairies and history books, complete with "clashes of opinion by historians" to add to the fun. Also, the mushroom plot deepens. This reviewer, in pursuit of truth and fact rather than gossip and rumor, thoroughly investigated the strange case of Vandermeer, who (it is true) simply arrived one night, “out of the blue”, as they say, in a most untoward section of the city and was brought to the Voss Bender Institute at the behest of the Ambergrisian police.In all the world, Ambergris stands as a beacon of hope and mystical wonder; built on the ruins of an ancient conquered paradise by the first of the great Cappan John Manzikerts, whose lineage would rule Ambergris for generations.