Jeff Vandermeer's "City of Saints and Madmen" is sort of like finding a chest full of gold in a house fire: you've got to be quick to filch out the treasure in this awkward collection of often gripping, typically ghoulish little tales desperately searching for some order among the chaos---much like the boys and girls of Ambergris, the teeming city in which all this dastardly stuff takes place.
That's too bad, because half-hidden beneath this obtuse, strangely skeletal, self-satisfied wreck of a book are five juicy little stories, nuggets of unmitigated grue and wonder that Vandermeer has clearly invested his mind and imagination and soul. The stories suggest a writer with tremendous promise and some magic in his keyboard.
I first encountered the noxious "The Cage" in an obscure horror anthology. It is a shivery little morsel of pure dread concerning the fate of a stout descendant of the auspicious Hoegbotton clan. But it's what the story doesn't say---the dark things it hints at---fungus! dwarves! Truffidian priests!---that intrigued me, and led me, at long last, to Ambergris.
Try "The Cage": you'll like it. Upon my first reading, I found wicked, brimming with subversive, infectious evil. I wanted more.
Alas, Vandermeer never fashions a crown for his crown jewels. Expect an Ambergris any fuller or richer than that glimpsed in the five main short tales? Expect to be disappointed.
But those short gems do gleam in the darkness, and for them Vandermeer merits a chance. I have written already of "The Cage". "The Transformation of Martin Lake", about the strange life and stranger death of the prolific and powerful Ambergrisian composer Voss Bender, reminded me quite a bit of Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut": it is all about secret assignations, and night-haunted fog-shrouded alleyways, and dead men telling no tales.
Then there is there is the apocalyptic "Dradin in Love", which is all about madness and obsession and disease and death, and the short and deadly "Learning to Leave the Flesh". The moral of both tales, if there is one, seems to be to avoid talking to strange dwarves with tattoos. The nasty "In the Hours After Death" brings an entirely new meaning to the phrase "dead on his feet". All of them are masterpieces of excellent storytelling: all of them leave the reader begging for more. All reek of ancient horror, of all too finite and feeble human lives, and of melancholy and madness, in equal doses.
Why couldn't Vandermeer have worked this kind of magic over the course of a book, in which these stories really do interweave and suggest something larger---rather than merely cleverly self-referencing?
The book also suffers from preciousness in presentation: like most collages, the book uses physical gimmicks as an alternative to cohesive storytelling. Alexandre Dumas used the power of his words alone to tell the tale. J.R.R. Tolkien aided his story merely with a map.
Vandermeer, by contrast, needs the aid, presumably, of a full-time graphics SWAT team: "City" uses dozens of fonts and typesets, encryption, baroque chapter heads, all manner of squidy illustrations. This is not storytelling, it's graphic design.
"The Early History of the City of Ambergris" is a prime example of padding which could have served its purpose of unifying the five tales---but instead makes a point of using a war-fleet of footnotes and teensy tinsey marginalia to assault the reader's eyeballs. Ugh. And please, don't get me started on "The Strange Case of X", in which the author unforgivably inserts himself into his own creation like some sci-fi version of Woody Allen.
Worse, Ambergris itself is largely a clone of Byzantium (modern day Istanbul): a chaotic pastiche transplanted out of space and time to the "River Moth", cobbled together of place-names and battle-sites and historical figures Vandermeer has intellectually grave-robbed from the tomb of Byzantine Imperial history. When Conan creator Robert E. Howard was creating his absorbing, living, breathing *world* of Hyperborea and cobbled together or corrupted the names of actual kings and kingdoms of antiquity, he was called a hack. In our less demanding age, Vandermeer does this and is called "brilliant".
Recommended, though, if only for these wondrous little short nuggets of terror and melancholy nearly buried in the offal of the overall book. The little glimpses we see of an Ambergris---the fungal growths, the constant patter of rain on Albumuth Boulevard, the grisly and carnal orgies that accompany the Greater Festival of the Freshwater Squid each year, the menacing Grey Caps---all of these things make me wish Vandermeer had been more ambitious, and truly wrestled with his creation to give us a living, breathing city.
