(no subject)

[skygiants]

Nisi Shawl's Everfair is an alternate history in which a group of British socialists and African-American missionaries form an unlikely partnership to buy up a parcel of land and found an independent Utopian nation in the Belgian Congo. Unsurprisingly, things do not go 100% Utopian from there. On the downside, the colony has to deal with international intrigue and attacks by hostile Belgian forces as well as internal conflicts about race and religion and governance; on the upside, everyone does get mechanical limbs and mechanical airships!

The book covers about 30 years of story-time, beginning in the 1890s and progressing up past the end of WWI. Some things change as a result of the existence of Everfair, and others don't. As a thought experiment, it's extremely compelling and well-thought-out. As a story, I found it interesting to read but a little difficult to fall into completely -- the story progresses as a series of brief chapters from a variety of POVs, and often skips ahead months or years in between chapters. This allows for a thorough and complex picture of the whole colony, but, on the flip side, made the individual character arcs feel really choppy (at least to me).

The only character thread that really spans the whole book is the fraught romance between Daisy Albin (AU E. Nesbit -- most major characters are AUs of historic figures, but she was the only one I could recognize without looking it up because I am not an expert on the Fabian Socialists but I am an expert on E. Nesbit's Life Choices) and Lisette Toutournier (AU Colette, whom I feel I ought to have recognized, but did not, because I have never actually read any Colette.) For twenty years they conflict in a very realistic fashion over Daisy's oblivious upper-class unconscious racism ... which is then fixed by Daisy having a surprise epiphany as a result of drinking a magic potion rather than actually having to do the work of confronting her issues.

Anyway. Everfair is worth reading, and I'm glad I read it, but I did not like it as much overall as Shawl's short stories, which I now want to reread. Along with a lot of E. Nesbit.

Comments

[hebethen]

I had no idea that E. Nesbit was a socialist until I listened to Nisi Shawl's interview on Midnight in Karachi. What a delightful thing to find out; I may have to read up a little on that, really.

Anyway, I wasn't a big fan of the skips myself -- I don't know how it ought to have been done instead, but I do know that as a reader I was curious about how exactly affairs proceeded from point A to point G, and would have liked to see it played out on the page.

[skygiants]

I read a biography of her years ago and it was FASCINATING. I think my favorite part was when H.G. Wells attempted to elope with a household daughter (I forget if it was E. Nesbit's daughter or the third member of the unhealthy triad's daughter) and ended up getting in a fistfight with her husband on a railway station platform.

The trouble I think is there were so many stories requiring major character change and development, any one of which would have been fodder for a book. A year in the life of Everfair could have been plenty of fodder for a book. I think maybe if it had been me I might have picked three or so key points and focused very closely on them, rather than maintaining the steady pattern of skips, but that's just one possible way to do it.

[rushthatspeaks]

My reaction to this is 'wow, cramming anything about the life of E. Nesbit and the life of Colette into a single novel means you'd barely have room for anything else already, so maybe not so much in a book which has a great deal else to get done'. But it could probably be made to work, it just sounds as though here it didn't quite?

Colette, well, I've only read a very little Colette but I know some about her life, and it is just as eccentric as Nesbit's if not more so. We are talking here about a woman who continued to be a striptease artist well into her seventies, when by that point it was pretty much just to piss off the Académie française. (It did.) The thing I've read of hers was the short story that got made into the musical and movie Gigi. I don't know how they continue calling her short story the source material with a straight face, as they removed all the scathing cynicism and class analysis and prettied up the downbeat ending, so basically the characters have the same names. Sigh.

What I'm saying here is that E. Nesbit and Colette should definitely have had a madcap romance and I am now vaguely annoyed at reality for failing to provide this, but I'm glad Nisi Shawl thought of it.

[skygiants]

To be fair, 'and then they both go found a Utopian colony in the Belgian Congo relatively early in their careers' puts quite a SHARP turning point into the lives of both E. Nesbit and Colette, but there is still a great deal of stuff to get through! (Including Colette's affair with AU Josephine Baker which apparently is a thing that really did non-AU happen?)

I went and Wikipedia'ed Colette after reading Everfair and was like "Gigi? She wrote Gigi?! Are we talking about ... the same Gigi?" because I might not know very much about Colette but I KNOW ENOUGH that this mad for some severe cognitive dissonance.

[rushthatspeaks]

Oh good, Shawl left in Josephine Baker, I am pleased to hear that. Honestly, there's a universe not very far from this one in which Colette and Josephine Baker settled down together in a huge collapsing chateau in the French countryside with a bajillion (adopted) small children, several big cats in post-circus retirement, and an interchangeable succession of beautiful young men doing yard work-- and if Colette's third husband hadn't blown all her money, so she had to keep on the lecture-and-nightclub circuit in her old age, it could well have been this universe.

It's probably just as well Colette did not live to see the musical they made of Gigi. I've never seen an adaptation so adept at turning the source material completely on its head and arguing exactly the opposite of the intended moral. In the musical, Gigi's grandmother is upset that Gigi has compromised herself publicly because there might be a scandal, and is delighted to find that the man will marry her; in the story, Gigi's grandmother is upset that Gigi has compromised herself publicly because Gigi did not actually sleep with the man and therefore there is a significant chance that he will decide not to cough up cash if blackmailed because it is harder to make people sufficiently ashamed of things they did not do. The moral of the musical is that love conquers all, and the moral of the story is that if everyone is going to mistake you for a prostitute anyway, it's a very good idea to take the cash.

It's a shame, because the film of the musical gets all the actors who could have done justice to the short story, and instead it's just a travesty.

[evewithanapple]

This is ringing a few bells- did Nisi Shawl have a story in Steam-powered 2? Because I definitely remember a short story in there with the basic premise of "people with mechanical limbs in a colony in Africa." Come to think of it, it also had the problem of jumping around too much to be cohesive.

[skygiants]

To be fair, I believe the character in question is actually a mash-up of Josephine Baker and Zora Neale Hurston, but, I mean, that doesn't make it worse.

I've never actually seen the musical film of Gigi, but I read extensively about the making of it in Alan Lerner's The Street Where I Live and that was enough to convince me that I am probably past the stage in my life where I would like to see the musical film of Gigi, even with the stellar cast. Somehow I could not see Colette earnestly and straightfacedly writing a manic pixie dream courtesan.

[skygiants]

Yes, she did! The story in Steam-Powered 2 is in fact an excerpt from the book, though I don't remember which bit it actually covers because my contributor's copy is home with my parents. >.>

[sovay]

The only character thread that really spans the whole book is the fraught romance between Daisy Albin (AU E. Nesbit -- most major characters are AUs of historic figures, but she was the only one I could recognize without looking it up because I am not an expert on the Fabian Socialists but I am an expert on E. Nesbit's Life Choices) and Lisette Toutournier (AU Colette, whom I feel I ought to have recognized, but did not, because I have never actually read any Colette.)

That could be a book on its own! Even without the mechanical-limbed AU.

[larryhammer]

Somehow I could not see Colette earnestly and straightfacedly writing a manic pixie dream courtesan.

Er, cough. No. Not even close. I've only read, um, about eight or nine novels/short novels of hers, but that gives plenty of material to indicate that she would write anything but.

Worth the reading. My mother's fond of her short stories, but they rarely engage me. The Claudine pentalogy (so many sources claim it's a tetralogy, but there's a fifth book, Retreat from Love, that makes a required wrapping up) is my favorite.

[skygiants]

RIGHT? As it is, it probably makes up about 1/4 of the book, which is more of the book than anybody else gets on their own but is still not nearly enough!

[skygiants]

Good to know! I've never really had a good idea where to start with her.

[larryhammer]

Be aware: the first Claudine books are her first books ever, and have many typical first-novel flaws.

[sapote]

If I ask. About E. Nesbit's life choices. Will you tell me?

[skygiants]

INDEED I WILL. OK. OK.

So E. Nesbit and her husband, Mr. Hubert Bland, were ardent Socialists who lived in a permanent household with their children + E. Nesbit's best friend Alice + E. Nesbit's best friend's children with Mr. Hubert Bland, whom E. Nesbit and Mr. Hubert Bland adopted as an infants without telling her that their biological mother was actually the secretary/housekeeper. This arrangement caused some discord, especially since Bland + Alice did not tell Nesbit that Bland was the father of Alice's baby when Alice FIRST came to live in the house.

E. Nesbit also had a brief affair with George Bernard Shaw while they were all involved in Socialist business and remained obsessed with him for some time after he decided the affair was over, some minor stalking included (they stayed friends, but that did not stop him from writing an unfinished satirical novel about it.)

Nesbit ALSO had a string of younger lovers, one of whom ended up marrying her niece; I don't remember if the niece knew at the time but it did cause some awkward family dinners down the line.

But anyway after Bland died Nesbit married a salty sea captain, which allowed her to look cool and Bohemian about class differences well into her sixties.