City of Saints & Madmen [Paperback]

On the surface, City of Saints and Madmen is a collection of short stories set in the fantastic city of Ambergris, stories suffused with sorrow and wry humour, some of them straightforward, others told through various metafictional conceits and devices. On the surface, we have four novellas and an appendix of sundry shorter delights. But apart from the fact that each story is an absolute nugget in its own right, there's much more going on here in the way these tales relate to each other. As the novellas progress, various fake historical glossaries, academic footnotes and art history interpolations are used to make Ambergris far more rounded and real than most fantasy backdrops, building VanderMeer's city of musicians, poets and sinister mushroom-dwellers in the reader's imagination until in the last of the four novellas we are taken right through the looking glass. In an insanely ambitious move reminiscent of Alasdair Gray's Lanark, or a writer such as Borges, fact and fiction are flipped inside-out and the reader is plunged deep into a world all the truer because it is given to us through the artefacts of Ambergris --illustrated chapbooks, monograms, bibliographies, magazine clippings or lunatic's notes. Metafiction can be tricky in its tricksiness, but VanderMeer pulls it off wonderfully. In a way this becomes a novel with the reader himself as the protagonist, a traveller wandering through VanderMeer's strange, dark, literary vision. And, lit with flashes of sheer brilliance, VanderMeer's Ambergris is more than just worth a visit. This is a must-read book, a delightful treat for the fan of fantasy as a genre, for those who enjoy Angela Carter, Gabriel Garcia Marquez or any of the Magic Realists. In the end this book is for anyone who likes their books intelligent, playful, comic, tragic and with a vision just a wee bit skewed from the norm.

Come and see a city, one like no other, filled with more madmen than saints.
You'll find no farmboys possesing magic talents here, no buff warriors or mighty sorcerors... instead the beautiful yet darkly secretive Ambergris is populated by out-of-work missionaries, struggling artists, unhinged marinebiologists (and at least one slightly unhinged author) and other still more curious individuals. Each is led into the darkest corners of both the city and the human consciousness, and every tale is woven through with the silent question that no Ambergrisian can answer - the darkest of all the city's secrets.

Not only does VanderMeer present his readers with finely crafted, delicately sculpted prose on every turning page but as the readers are propelled into appendices and glossaries, footnotes, bibliographies they are continuously rewarded with the most imaginative and most fully-realised fiction being written today.

It may also be the most beautifully presented artifact of fiction you could hope to possess - painstakingly designed from cover to cover, filled with illustrations and diagrams, each designed to draw the reader further down the rabbit hole.

By turns darkly horrific, emotionally charged and hilariously comic, City of Saints and Madmen is a wonderfully clever, crazed and adventurous collection of experiences you cannot miss out on.

By turns this book has delighted and annoyed me, which has compelled me to write this to try to understand why I have had this response.

The first story is a delight, beautifully written and it slowly introduces the reader to the unusual city that is Ambergris. The story is that of an outsider who falls in love with a woman in a window, and the way that he tries to get her to notice him and reciprocate his love, against a backdrop of a very strange culture.

The second is the story of the origins of the city, written long after the event, with numerous footnotes and scathing comments about the interpretations put on events by the writer's fellow academics/competitors. This is where the mushroom dwellers role in Ambergris is considered, although even so they remain a shady presence.

The third story is the story of a painting, told through the story of the artist from different sources. Each source seems to have a slightly more or less accurate appreciation of the actual events, as revealed by the central narrative. Another outsider, a struggling artist, who is unwittingly pulled centre stage. The story is a little slow to unwind but has some beautiful images within it.

The final story explores the potential links between our real world of Chicago and the imaginary world of Ambergris, through the interrogation of X. I found this the least satisfactory of the four stories, perhaps because there was less room for the delights of Vandermeer's writing, and perhaps because after a little while the outcome becomes rather predictable.

And then there is the AppendiX, which are the writings that X has in his possession in the fourth story. Some of them are interesting and humorous, but parts are rather self-indulgent; do we really need an annotated bibliography of writings about the King Squid that goes on for twenty-odd pages. It's a generalisation I know, but when a book suddenly starts using different fonts I think that it's a bit of a danger signal. There are different fonts and page borders aplenty in the AppendiX.

The frustration comes because each piece of work opens a tiny window onto the big picture that is Ambergris, but ultimately all you have are several tiny windows showing certain aspects in greater or lesser detail, but the full picture remains hidden. Imagine a vast picture over which someone has positioned an advent calendar. Each story opens a window, but by the time you've finished the book you have only revealed a tiny fraction of the picture.

So I suppose what I'm saying is that I want more about Ambergris, I want to know more about the people who live and work there, not just a few outsiders and fanatics. I want to hear about different areas, different roads, the harbour and the government.

I suppose that this would have been an absolutely cracking third or fourth book about Ambergris, had the earlier books put the basic city in place. Since those earlier books don't exist it is really frustrating. But it is also really good.

Update - I have now discovered Shriek: An Afterword and Finch which are set in Ambergris and follow on from this collection of stories. Finch especially is an intriguing cocktail of a book, but I haven't finished Shriek yet. Reviews will follow in the respective places.