Reading: Under the Pendulum Sun
May. 5th, 2019 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartAll I knew about Jeannette Ng's debut novel, Under the Pendulum Sun, was that it was about a Victorian missionary who, instead of spreading the word in Africa or Asia, was attempting to make converts in Fairyland; that, and reading a handful of positive reviews, was more than enough to convince me to buy it without seeking any more information.
When I eventually got round to picking it off my virtual to-read pile, I was expecting social realism in the vein of George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell or Dickens, with the fantasy setting used to subvert colonialist ideas and tropes. In fact, it's high Gothic melodrama, as if the Brontës' novels had been blended with Richard Dadd's fairy paintings and rewritten by Neil Gaiman. Under the Pendulum Sun is narrated by Catherine Helstone, a young Englishwoman who has travelled to Arcadia, the home of the fae, to join her missionary brother Laon (Catherine and Laon's Yorkshire childhood is very clearly a nod to the Brontës' childhood, even to the names of the imaginary realms they invented). The novel is set almost exclusively within the crumbling castle of Gethsemene which Laon has been assigned for his mission, and which provides a suitably eerie and claustrophobic background for an exploration of both external and internal horror.
The novel is fantastically atmospheric and has some wonderful descriptions of Arcadia and the fae, as well as an interesting theological strand and lots of subtle nods to the Gothic genre (far more than I picked up on, I suspect). I thought the pacing was a bit odd - it starts slowly, builds to a dramatic climax halfway through and then slows again before a smaller build to the end - but that may at least in part be simply that the plot never took the turn I expected it to take, so I constantly felt wrong-footed by it. It's stunningly original; I'm not sure I've ever read anything else like it, and it is deeply, hauntingly creepy and rather disturbing. Possibly a bit too disturbing in places for me to be able to say that I really enjoyed it (including one of my biggest relationship squicks), but it's an incredibly impressive debut and I will be looking out for Ng's next book.
When I eventually got round to picking it off my virtual to-read pile, I was expecting social realism in the vein of George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell or Dickens, with the fantasy setting used to subvert colonialist ideas and tropes. In fact, it's high Gothic melodrama, as if the Brontës' novels had been blended with Richard Dadd's fairy paintings and rewritten by Neil Gaiman. Under the Pendulum Sun is narrated by Catherine Helstone, a young Englishwoman who has travelled to Arcadia, the home of the fae, to join her missionary brother Laon (Catherine and Laon's Yorkshire childhood is very clearly a nod to the Brontës' childhood, even to the names of the imaginary realms they invented). The novel is set almost exclusively within the crumbling castle of Gethsemene which Laon has been assigned for his mission, and which provides a suitably eerie and claustrophobic background for an exploration of both external and internal horror.
The novel is fantastically atmospheric and has some wonderful descriptions of Arcadia and the fae, as well as an interesting theological strand and lots of subtle nods to the Gothic genre (far more than I picked up on, I suspect). I thought the pacing was a bit odd - it starts slowly, builds to a dramatic climax halfway through and then slows again before a smaller build to the end - but that may at least in part be simply that the plot never took the turn I expected it to take, so I constantly felt wrong-footed by it. It's stunningly original; I'm not sure I've ever read anything else like it, and it is deeply, hauntingly creepy and rather disturbing. Possibly a bit too disturbing in places for me to be able to say that I really enjoyed it (including one of my biggest relationship squicks), but it's an incredibly impressive debut and I will be looking out for Ng's next book.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-06 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-07 11:26 am (UTC)