City of Saints and Madmen: (Ambergris)

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Before we reach the "beautiful cruelty" of the book’s end, we’ve gotten a tour of various parts of the city, we’ve met the mysterious original inhabitants of Ambergris, the gray caps, we’ve taken a peek at religion in the city, and we’ve seen the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, which is beyond anything you can imagine. We’ve met cantankerous academics, slumming in tour guide footnotes. We’ve been treated to a scientific monograph where a whole ‘nother story emerges if you read all of the notes. We’ve seen a story entirely in code. And we’ve met X, an author with a history very like VanderMeer’s, who is being held in a psychiatric ward because he thinks he has actually seen the fantasy land (called Ambergris) that he writes about (the ending is a delightfully vicious little thing). And yet, a true and accurate historical account has never truly been attempted, perhaps owing to the virtually impossible and uncapturable nature of the city itself. Any author of any literary merit, in the humble opinion of this reviewer, has simply never succeeded in capturing, pinning down, dissecting, chewing on, digesting, suffering gastrointestinal distress from, and regurgitating violently the majesty and glory of Ambergris. City of Saints and Madmen” (“COSAM”) not only explores a world of New Weird author’s Jeff VanderMeer’s creation, it gives a detailed insight into the method of his creativity.

Vandermeer's Ambergris is one of the most underrated settings I think I've come across. He's just an unfathomably underrated writer in general, especially of his not-explicitly SF stuff (even if he doesn't take up the mantle of a true-blue SF writer. Disappointing, but I forgive you, Jeff!) like what speed Ambergris coasts in.In all the world, Ambergris stands as a beacon of hope and mystical wonder; built on the ruins of an ancient conquered paradise by the first of the great Cappan John Manzikerts, whose lineage would rule Ambergris for generations. The book concludes with an Appendix almost as long as all the previous novellas that features twelve different sections ranging from an amateur squidologists research on squids to a glossary of Ambergrisian people, places and things. All written from unique points of view. Although I admire and appreciate the connected quality of these stories, it’s not what I generally seek out. (And if you don’t think the glossary was written by someone who was once a personal friend of E. Gary Gygax, then you don’t know your saving throw from your +2 long sword.)

All writers write,’ he whispered. ‘All writers edit,’ he muttered. ‘All writers have a little darkness in them,’ he sobbed. ‘All writers must sometimes destroy their creations,’ he shouted. Whether or not “X” is an alter ego, he has written works with the same titles as components of COSAM.It explores just how much desire, lust and love occur within the head of the Subject, regardless of the existence, knowledge, awareness, consent or encouragement of the Object. He also seems to have committed a crime for which he has been charged and exonerated by a jury, which believed his “story”. Now he is being interviewed to establish his sanity. Voss Bender is everywhere; he is a sort of Mozart-like figure, or a Shakespearean figure; the popular culture that ties all of Ambergris, and possibly all the city states, together. An embarrassment of wealth becomes a wealth of embarrassment so easily when we overreach ourselves, when we are striving for something but cannot shake the feeling that the thing we desire is too far beyond us even to approximate it. VanderMeer's work is full of reaching, and full of self-corrections, of tiny modifications in the course--because he is steering by the bow of his ship, not by the horizon.

I once read that a group of mystery writers including Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, and G.K. Chesterton formed a detection club and swore to abide by a code of authorial ethics to ensure fair play for their readers. This seems like such a good idea that I wish writers in other genres would consider forming a similar club and that Jeff VanderMeer, in particular, would be a member. Jeff VanderMeer's first book of Ambergris is a complex, humorous, awesome, inspired, boring, redundant, over-foot-notey, groundbreaking, self-absorbed and very pretty book. I can't quite call it a novel, nor a book of short stories: it's more of a patchwork, novellas and fake historical pamphlets and short stories and other bizarro little experiments that succeed at times with flying colors. At other times, they crash and burn. The New Weird genre as we see it in Vandermeer, started off with the works of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.Whether the entire story is an expression of Dradin’s psychosis or Dradin is merely psychotic within a crazy story, madness, as the title of VanderMeer’s book suggests, is an integral part of Ambergris. I can’t wait to move on to the History. VanderMeer extends the concept to interpretation in "The Transformation of Martin Lake", a story that consists of art criticism, on the one hand, where the critic draws inferences about the motivation of the artist, while, on the other hand, a separate narrative strand reveals what their true motivation was.