Customer Reviews

Memoranda (The Well-Built City Trilogy)

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Jeffrey Ford's previous novel, The Physiognomy, won the 1998 World Fantasy Award. If The Physiognomy is as good as its successor, it's easy to see why it won that award. Memoranda is an extremely impressive novel, at times reminding me of Borges, at other times of John Crowley, and throughout striking and original. The bulk of the novel takes places in the strange memory palace, or memory island, that the villain Drachton Below has constructed. Unlike conventional memory palaces, Below has populated his island with his memories of real people, who have some form of independent life, and who conduct experiments. Thus, in a sense, the memory island is actually thinking for Below. The hero, the former Physiognomist Cley, makes a strange journey into Below's mind, and his memory palace, meeting the four people with whom Below has poulated his memory, and falling in love with the one remembered woman, Anotine. But the memory island is falling apart as disease ravages Below's mind, and Cley must enlist the help of the "residents" to try to save Below, and his memory, long enough at least to find the antidote to the disease.

This whole landscape is original, and odd, and often beautiful. The form and setting of the novel provoke thought about the nature of memory. Ford also considers the nature of love, and addiction, and how a wholly evil man can still engender good. The plot is interesting enough, and fairly well resolved, but it's a minor source of pleasure. The prose is very fine, with many excellent images. I found the names of drinks and drugs especially memorable: shudder, sheer beauty, Rose's Old Sweet, Tears in The River, and more. Some of the horrific images, such as the Delicate and the Fetch, creatures Below uses to control his memories, are also very memorable. The characters are nicely realized and affecting, particularly the lost demon Misrix.

Even though this is the middle book of a trilogy, it has a self-contained story that is finished in this volume. That said, you will want to read The Physiognomy once you've read this book, and so it would probably be best to read it first, in the order published. And while the central story of this book is concluded, Cley's life story is definitely left hanging at the end, and I for one eagerly anticipate the third volume, The Beyond.

A rich and haunting tale--by turns horrifying,heartbreaking and hilarious, but always surprising. Ford is an eloquent tour guide of inner worlds; his vivid characters, thrilling journeys and impossible landscapes engage us with the startling elusive logic of dreams. A worthy successor to the excellent THE PHYSIOGNOMY, MEMORANDA stands on its own as a beautiful meditation on memory--that most familiar and mysterious inner world. Bravo!

Jeffrey Ford is one of the few writers in fantasy-scifi who writes about ideas instead of events. If you like the pity and catharsis of authors like Hawthorne and Melville, the decadent symbolism of Poe, or the logical precision and impassive sadness of Kafka, then I highly recommend Ford as he is their contemporary successor. Those who criticize the plot and characterizations of The Physiognomy and Memoranda do so from misapprehensions regarding the appropriate style and substance of the allegorical genre of fiction which is not to be evaluated by the same criteria as the psychological realist school. Not because it is inferior, but because it is alien and has different goals.

I found Ford's "The Physiognomy" to be dark, but utterly fascinating. This sequel continues the very strange tale of the main character Cley as he tries to make amends for his grotesque previous life and tries to understand life itself.

He has established himself in the remote settlement of Wenau as a healer, and feels that he is finally on a good path when his evil master Drachton Below attempts to destroy Cley and the town by infecting it with a deadly sleeping sickness.

Trying to return to Below to extract the cure from him, Cley learns that Below is himself infected with the same sickness and is slowly dying. The only way left to find the cure is to make a perilous journey directly into the mind of Below where he will hopefully discover the answer before Below dies taking Cley with him.

As with "The Physiognomy", the writing is gripping and extraordinary. The concepts are totally new to me and add fascinating possibilities to the ongoing question of how reality may be truly perceived.

Fascinating characters clearly wrought, and an astounding plot expertly presented in stunning language leave me, as before, with an intense desire for MORE!

If you enjoyed "The Physigiognomy", this sequel is a must. I strongly recommend reading them in order as "Memoranda" relies heavily on the history of the previous tale.

Highly recommended.

"In waking from a dream, we obliterate worlds, and in calling up a memory, we return the dead to life again and again only to bring them face to face with annihilation as our attention shifts to something else."

After the destruction of the Well-Built City (detailed in The Physiognomy), Physiognomist Cley has been living in a village in the wilderness, acting as herbalist and midwife. One day a mechanical bird, obviously built by evil Master Drachton Below, arrives in the village, explodes, and releases a gas that puts many of the villagers to sleep. Cley is the only person who's equipped to find the antidote, so the villagers supply him with an old dog and an older horse and off he goes (looking a bit like Don Quixote) to the ruins of the Well-Built City.

The City is a real-life construction of Drachton Below's Memory Palace, which is based on the mnemonic device called the Method of Loci. Everything in the city represents something he wants to remember, but the city has been destroyed, so Master Below has started a new Memory Palace in his mind. Unfortunately, Below is now unconscious because he's been infected with his own poisonous gas, so Cley must enter Below's mind and search there if he wants to find the antidote. When he gets in, he finds that he's not alone in there and that there's more going on in the Memory Palace than mere storage of Drachton Below's memories.

In my review of The Physiognomy, I said it was "sometimes brilliant and always bizarre" and the same holds true for Memoranda. It's got an original and fascinating setting, interesting symbolism, and thought-provoking ideas about memory, time, love, addiction, and evil.

The villain Drachton Below doesn't quite live up to expectations here, since he's asleep for most of the novel, but I liked the other characters better this time. Physiognomist Cley, who used to be an arrogant bigot, is now quite pleasant. The best characters, though, are Drachton Below's adopted demon son who wears spectacles because he thinks it makes him look smart and has eschewed raw meat for salads, and a creature called The Delicate who is similar to J.K. Rowling's Dementors, except that he's exceedingly polite while he sucks out your soul. This was very funny, especially as narrated by Christian Rummel whose voices had me laughing frequently.

In general, the plot of Memoranda works better than The Physiognomy's plot (which kind of fell apart at the end). Don't look too close, though. I sincerely doubt that it all made sense, but a tight plot is hardly the point of these books. It's supposed to be bizarre, a little bit silly and, perhaps more than anything, ironic.

If you do audiobooks, you definitely want to read Memoranda that way. Audible Frontiers' production is flawless and Rummel's narration is brilliant and adds quite a bit of humor.

I am rarely effusive, but it is difficult to praise this book too much. Everything about the writing, from its style to its visual imagery, is superb. Together with its predecessor it represents a remarkable tour de force and it leaves the reader wishing for more. This is the sort of book you pick up and four hours later you look up at the clock and realize that by golly you're going to go ahead and finish it in this one sitting.

Jeffrey Ford is a highly unique novelist with ideas that stretch fantasy into the realms of psychological exploration. This novel builds upon its predecessor, "The Physiognomy," but also works pretty well as a stand-alone story thanks to Ford's skill in weaving flashbacks into the narrative. Building on the strange meta-science of mnemonics, the story here takes place in an evil villain's memories and their wavering connections to reality, with stability and realism created by the man's subconscious even as the dream world disintegrates in frightful ways with the onset of mental incapacity. Ford's settings and dreamscapes are disarmingly surreal and haunting, giving the book a very Kafka-esque vibe of fear and melancholy, but somehow love and hope survive the inner-space horrors. The reader might have trouble getting through some awkward action sequences and dialogue, and the intertwined plot elements can get confusing, but Ford brings everything back together impressively and flawlessly. Readers looking for standard fantasy quests and dramatic action might be bored or befuddled by this book, but those who appreciate the depths of psychological exploration and the darkness of inner space will be amazed by the unique powers of Jeffrey Ford's imagination. [~doomsdayer520~]

Book Two in the Well-Built City trilogy, wherein Cley, the "hero" of The Physiognomy, struggles to find meaning and redemption in a new life as a healer. This struggle ultimately launches him back into the Well-Built City and into the surreal memory palace of a madman, led on by a tamed demon, to find the cure for a terrible plague.

A vivid and bizarrely imagined book, but full of feeling and the struggle to define the nature of love, humanity, sacrifice and redemption.

Memoranda is the second part of the Well-Buitt-City trilogy
and is a far better book than his predecessor.This time Ford uses the idea of Memory Palace to marvellous effect and the journey of Cley through Dracthton Below's mind is simply breathtaking.
Memoranda is full of original ideas and abounds with invention and the characters are not as shallow as in The Physiognomy.
Memoranda is at turns, humane, profound, weird, bizarre and hilariousy funny, less dark and more romantic than his predecessor and Ford's clear prose flows like a river, a joy to read.
Memoranda is a kepper.

this is a great book by a new writer that I think will be going to some bold new places. The book is funny, horrific, exciting, and devilish in its style. The ending is alright, but if you read it you will see that the story is not over. Give it a try,