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Aug. 15th, 2024 07:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsSpeaking 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.)
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.)
