skygiants

Speaking of the devil, I've just finished Katherine Arden's The Warm Hands of Ghosts, which has at last genuinely satisfied my eternal craving for haunted WWI books after several near misses and semi-disappointments.

The Warm Hands of Ghosts begins shortly after the 1918 Halifax Explosion, in which Canadian nurse Laura Iven -- recently invalided out of war service due to shrapnel in the leg -- has also just lost both her parents. When she receives the notice that her brother Wilfred is Missing Presumed on the front, at first it's just one more blow through which to soldier grimly on. But the notice she got is frankly a bit weird -- if he's missing, how did someone come by his jacket and dog tags? -- and the elderly and definitely fake mediums who have hired her to do some nursing service for them are also being a bit weird, so when she gets the opportunity to go back to the front, she decides to take it. She has no real expectation of finding Freddy alive, but if there's anything more to know, she wants to know it.

Meanwhile -- or rather, several months earlier, but meanwhile in the structure of the book -- Freddy has gotten trapped in a buried guard-post with an enemy soldier. They get each other out, and keep each other alive; in fact they each come to depend on the presence of the other to have the strength and will to keep on staying alive. This is a problem, under the circumstances.

Over the course of the book, Laura and Freddy's stories keep moving towards each other through a landscape full of sad but familiar stories, and unpleasant but necessary practical tasks, and dark jokes, and ghosts, figurative and maybe literal. It may be the end of the world -- it's certainly the end of the world that was before; it certainly bears an unfortunate resemblance to the apocalypse -- but the end goes on not being the end, and there's still and always more to do.

Unless (speaking of the devil) you happen to run into a mysterious individual with a violin, who has a bargain to offer.

Sometimes adding another level of supernatural peril to WWI can feel like Just Too Much -- there's already so much there already! -- but this book knows very well that there's already so much there; starting with the Halifax Explosion is really smart, IMO, because it immediately establishes the way the horrors reach literally everywhere. It's not just the front, but Laura's mother standing at her window at home who's killed by munitions in the harbor, and the flu that Laura catches at dinner with a staff officer, and the old familiar world that's been violently destroyed in every direction. ANYWAY. My point is, making the supernatural peril an ambivalent yet unequivocally terrifying Lucifer who himself is somewhat overwhelmed by the Rapid Developments in Human Horrors worked extremely well for me on a thematic level.

Freddy and Hans' intense soulbond-by-circumstance also worked really well for me; conversely I had absolutely no objections to Laura's romance with [Dr. Bones McCoy], but her relationship with Pym had so much more weight to it that [Dr. McCoy I'm sorry I CANNOT remember his real name] sometimes felt a bit ancillary ... on the other hand, it would have been awfully bleak if all Laura's non-Freddy emotions were tied up in Pym, so I do understand why Arden wanted to give her a nice acerbic yet supportive young man, goodness knows she deserves something reasonably non-fraught after All That. But I LOVED that the book turned on Pym, the beautiful middle-aged widow -- that she impresses everyone as a glimpse of another world outside the horrors, but they're inside her the same way they are in everyone. Themes!

(On an extremely small and petty note, I did not like that Laura was reading reams of locked-room mystery novels in 1918 when the first Agatha Christie did not kick off the golden age of this sort of book until 1920.)

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blotthis

this sounds wonderful and also your small and petty note is making me laugh so much

skygiants

it just would have been so easy not to do :(((

(but the book overall is good! it is very good!!)

genarti

YEAH IT'S SO GOOD

I did actually like her relationship with Jones! (Stephen Jones, I believe, is his actual name.) It felt plausible to me in a way a more emphatic romance wouldn't; they both had more important things to be about but a growing bond nonetheless, and it did feel like an important counterbalance. I liked her relationship with Pim a lot, but, hmm... I liked Laura and I liked Pim and I liked what Pim meant to Laura but I can see Laura and Jones building a future after the war in a way where I felt like Laura and Pim would probably have drifted apart fairly quickly without the immediate shared circumstances? So, like, I like what Pim meant to the book but I was so, so glad Laura got someone who wasn't Freddie (desperately codependently intensely tied to Hans) or Pim ([spoilers] but also see previous). As usual I would've been as happy with a friendship as with a romance, but I'd've had trouble believing that in this era that friendship wouldn't've gotten ICly obligatorily romance-coded anyway, so nice to have it confirmed that they're into each other.

(Also: hey now, it wasn't a locked-room mystery specifically, was it? Your broader point stands, though. That one didn't bother me as specifically because the title was genre-flexible enough for me to read it as an earlier kind of mystery, but mostly because there were so many things Arden DID get right that I was willing to overlook the occasional continuity/timeline bobble, of which... there were a few, yeah.)

But anyway, to your broader point about the themes: YEAH YEAH YEAH it's just SO layered and so good.

I said this to you in person too, but the other thing that really impressed me about this one is that... okay, lots of us have The WWI Narrative in our heads, and it's grinding unrelenting misery and savage bitterness, all Wilfred Owen poems all the time. And that's extremely real! But that's also not what it was every day to live it. This really felt like it captured the horror and the humanity and the everyday gruesomeness and the black humor and the way it was both apocalyptic and something you lived through one day at a time: the Wipers Times, the injuries, the banter, the black-as-death ritual your squad gets into the habit of, the day you first get to try out a motorcycle, etc, etc. And that's incredibly hard to do! It was a really impressive balancing act.

thank you for remembering the poor man's name, I felt bad forgetting it especially since you know I DO love a Dr. McCoy. No shade to Stephen Jones! I liked him as a character and I liked him as a partner for Laura, but (as I said to you last night) I think I'm somewhat reacting here to the fact that I've seen this book described as 'an m/m romance and an m/f romance' in a way that makes it quite easy not to mention Pym when Pym is by far the most important non-Laura character in Laura's plot. No shade, again, to Dr. Jones; he's a very nice side romance for her but that's not the relationship that's pulling at the plot and themes and causing interesting narrative tension and density in the way that Pym is.

(I was thinking of the way they joke about 'found dead stabbed with scissors' but you're right, it is only implicitly and not explicitly locked-room!)

IT REALLY WAS. I loved so much that Wipers Times was in it. (Did you know that there's a Wipers Times movie? We ought to watch it sometime.)

sovay

(Did you know that there's a Wipers Times movie? We ought to watch it sometime.)

YOU TOTALLY SHOULD.

I DID NOT AND WE SHOULD

To expand on this, because I said it to Becca last night, a thing I was really impressed by and enjoyed in the book is how well it depicts a generally homosocial society. It doesn't talk about it explicitly or lean hard on it; it's just woven into how everyone interacts across gender lines vs within gender lines, and it's REALLY visible in the differences between how Laura and Pim and Mary interact vs how Laura interacts with Jones and how Pim interacts with men in general. And that doesn't mean Laura can't be friends with a man! She's friends with Jones first, and there's a lot of overlap between how she acts towards Jones and how she acts towards Mary early on! But still, it's there and it's subtle and unthinking and informs everything, in a way that felt very right and is very hard for modern authors to get right. Good work, Katherine Arden.

Unless (speaking of the devil) you happen to run into a mysterious individual with a violin, who has a bargain to offer.

I feel I was on board with this description right up to the literal Devil after which point I would like to know the ratio of default Christian metaphysics to attractive black comedy and ghost-mediated bonding.

As far as metaphysics go, it's very light -- there's no heaven or hell as such in the book; the violinist, is never explicitly named as anything other than his go-by name of Faland, and except for one or two Paradise Lost allusions could easily be any kind of dangerous magical figure offering devil's bargains in the face of a greater terror than himself. It's a folk-horror kind of Lucifer, not a pulpit kind. (That said, it's a light but constant theme in the text that Laura and Freddy's parents were extremely religious and Believed in the Literal Apocalypse in a way that Freddy and Laura absolutely don't with their rational brain but still can't help but think about when faced with what's happening in the war.)

is never explicitly named as anything other than his go-by name of Faland

That's right out of Goethe/Bulgakov.

It's a folk-horror kind of Lucifer, not a pulpit kind.

My tolerance for default Christian metaphysics kind of went off a cliff in the last few years and it affects a lot of novels with spiritualism in!