Two Books I Read This Fall

Hit with a full load of responsibility in September, when I was unexpectedly appointed team leader at my job, I really didn't expect to have enough energy for much leisure reading this season. Too often I come in from work, make a large cup of coffee, and open a book, only for my eyelids to start dropping after a few pages. Where did I find a special reserve of oomph to concentrate on two decent-sized works of fiction? Sometimes I amaze myself.

In September I started the fantastical, darkly inclined fiction of China Miéville. I've read several of his novels before this. They all feature something gruesome, at least one grim aspect that forces readers to take stock and, as though standing at the mouth of a poorly lit alley, to ask themselves, "Is this really where I want to go?" With Miéville, one proceeds at one's own risk.

There are alleys aplenty in Looking for Jake, Miéville's story collection from 2003. We find literal dark alleys in "Reports of Certain Events Around London," his captivating story in which a narrator named China Miéville learns of a secret society devoted to finding and studying feral streets, which move from place to place, roaming wild and free in the world. It's a mind-bending notion that I think only Miéville could've dreamed up. Here, too, are stories about temporal rifts, punitive surgery, the ugly lives of witches' familiars, and children's ball pits that just happen to be haunted. How could I not love this stuff? Unfortunately, I found The Buried Giant: A Novel, by Nobel Prize- and Booker Award-winning Kazuo Ishiguro, less lovable. I didn't think I had any preconceived ideas when I picked it up, but apparently Ishiguro's previous success with breathtaking books like The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go subconsciously set me up for something greater. This is always a danger when reading the work of a writer you believe can do no wrong.

Arthurian legend meets contemporary ambiguity in this one, set a few short years after a war between the Britons and the Saxons. An aging couple leave home to reunite with their estranged adult son in a faraway village. The whole land seems afflicted by a kind of amnesia — a fog, they call it — rumored to be caused by an old she-dragon. The doting couple don't even clearly remember their own years together, but as their journey unfolds, memories threaten to surface and expose transgressions from their past. Along the way are ogres, hellhounds, dragons, and a creaky Knight of the Round Table, but the story wears its elements of high fantasy lightly. So much here seems just out of reach. The Buried Giant is a good book by a great writer — the one black mark against it.