City of Saints and Madmen

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully Magical
Review: 'The City of Saints and Madmen' is easily my favorite collection of 2001. Comprised of four stories, each more deliciously exotic and fascinating than the one before, this attractively priced trade paperback is sure to entrance all readers willing to immerse themselves in VanderMeer's brilliantly conceived world.

VanderMeer's Ambergris is easily the most lavish and enticing fantastic world that I've yet to encounter. Articulating the brilliance of this book would require writing skills on a par with VanderMeer himself. I can only point to the book and insist that it is excellent. Truly excellent.

Taken by themselves, the stories are small gems...but when looked at as a whole, as part of the wonderful Ambergrisian tapestry, they become more than the sum of their parts. I anguished with the title character in 'Dradin in Love' as he realizes that his passionate longing for a mysterious woman is unlikely to be consummated. The fascinating history of Ambergris as told in 'The Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris by Duncan Shriek' is surely one of the most complete histories of a fictional world ever conceived. The World Fantasy Award Winning 'The Transformation of Martin Lake' tells the amazing story of a humble artist who is transformed into a master through a harrowing and bizarre experience. Finally, 'The Strange Case of X' blurs the lines between fantasy and reality as an author whose life appears analogous to VanderMeer's undergoes rigorous questioning concerning the substance of reality.

Under VanderMeer's watchful eye, Ambergris is a thriving and exotic landscape. I devoured this collection in a matter of hours. Hungry for more I jumped onto the internet and searched out more VanderMeer. Ambergris is so fascinating and richly exotic that I could see VanderMeer writing about its Living Saints and Graycaps for decades without running out of stories to tell.

Immerse yourself in Ambergris. The land is hauntingly beautiful and terrifyingly real. I can see myself re-reading this brilliant collection several times a year. This masterful collection belongs on the bookshelf of every fan of speculative fiction. I'm eagerly looking forward to the Deluxe edition which supposedly contains 30,000 more words about this wonderful place and is supposed to be released Real Soon Now.

This volume, exciting and beautiful, is easily one of my all-time favorite books. Try it yourself. You won't be disappointed. Highly Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Unpredictable twists and turns
Review: Along side the River Moth, a city called Ambergris rose. Founded on the blood of its original inhabitants shed in its making and evolution, and steeped for centuries in the aftermath of a calamitous struggle, the cruelly beautiful and complex metropolis of Ambergris is a place of artists and composers, thieves and murders. Enhanced with an introduction by Michael Moorcock, City Of Saints And Madmen: The Book Of Ambergris, is a bizarre, eclectic, and unique science fiction narrative enhanced with appendices of "reference" documents, written by Jeff VanderMeer, a mysterious, reclusive, and brilliantly talented author. The unpredictable twists and turns, fantastic setting, and exciting narrative make City Of Saints And Madmen: The Book Of Ambergris an engrossing read for those seeking something fresh and different by way of a literary experience. Highly recommended for a sophisticated readership, City Of Saints And Madmen: The Book Of Ambergris is also available in a paperback edition (Wildside Press, 1587154366, $amount).

Rating:
Summary: Ah, the perfume of Ambergris!
Review: Did you ever start a book and think --about two paragraphs in-- that you'd just discovered the literary equivalent of Shangri-La: a paradise heretofore undiscovered by man? If so, you'll know the feeling I had when I started this book.

VanderMeer's writing just soars off the page. This is not a page-turner, but fiction to be savored like an old single malt scotch. Not only that, but the stories are wonderful and fully-fleshed in every way. The piecemeal and referential introduction to the world of Ambergris was also quite affecting, and contrary to a previous review of this as being a detraction, I thought that this actually enhanced the reading experience. Hell, there are a thousand other novels out there that postulate their own world and exploit them to the fullest. This book takes the opposite tack, touching on some of the salient points and the lives that happen therein, and letting Ambergris bleed through the spaces.

For me, this is a book to keep --and reread-- for life. A marvellous experience. "Martin Lake" and "Dradin, In Love" are some of the best stories I've ever come across. Did anyone mention humor? Yeah, there's plenty of that, too: the laugh out loud kind. And the hardcover (which I bought after I'd read the paperback) is incredible, with additional features and stories; "The Cage" is a masterpiece, I think. If you happen to be a demanding reader, this just may be the gold at the end of your rainbow.

Rating:
Summary: A detailed and thought provoking collection
Review: Great Book-
Mr. VanderMeer's writing is eloquent and thought provoking. I would give this collection more stars if I could. Ambergris will Haunt your mind long after you turn the last page.

Rating:
Summary: It was OK
Review: I dont' want to be harsh on this book because it is quality fantasy. In other words, it's not of the epic fantasy genre. The biggest problem was that I never fully grasped Ambergris. Its like Ambergris was a giant painting and I only saw small slices of it. It feels more like a hastilly published companion piece to a successful novel that takes place in Ambergris. The stories themselves didn't stand out to me. Martin Lake was my favorite story but I found it predictable in some ways and thus a let down. Drabin, in Love was OK but not exceptional. And Mr X was poor. The early history was good but it needed something more to go with it than the 3 other stories.

Rating:
Summary: Amazingly fantastic
Review: It has been a long time since I've been this excited about being introduced to an author. Indeed, VanderMeer reminds me of the last author to get me this excited, Gene Wolfe. VanderMeer displays the same fine mastery and appreciation for the language as Wolfe, delights in weaving atypical plots as Wolfe does, and for making unexceptional people the focus of a story -- again, as Wolfe does.

Now, if you haven't read any Gene Wolfe (you should do that as soon as you get done with this book), let me explain what that means: pure and absolute delight. Every piece (and it is hard to determine how many there actually are) is stunning in its complexity and richness. Prose like this comes along about once a decade, and I'm glad to be participating in it.

Read this book!

Rating:
Summary: Perfectly realized body of work
Review: Its difficult to know where to begin describing Jeff VanderMeer's remarkable "City of Saints and Madmen"; with it's interweaving plot lines cutting across stories, one is never sure where one section begins and another leaves off. Moreover, the world of Ambergris is so fully realized, and yet so willfully fanciful, one can never quite find one's footing. In the hands of a less skilled writer, all of this would add up to a bizarre mish-mash, but VanderMeer somehow weaves it together into one unified work.

Moreover, this is a book for booklovers; the arrangement is a work of art in and of itself. The use of fonts, illustrations, footnotes, even the binding adds to the illusion. The cover itself is remarkable, as it contains both a short story and a hilarious fictional biography of the author. VanderMeer and his publisher have succeeded admirably in creating a volume that harkens to an era when books were not only repositories of writing, but valuable for what surrounded the writing.

And what writing it is! VanderMeer flashes descriptive powers that border on the hallucinogenic; the pages absolutely drip with the essence of Ambergris. From the giant squid that inhabit the River Moth, to the serenely vicious Grey Caps, the author has produced a world that is both bizarrely foreign and completely believable at the same time. One of the keys to this success is VanderMeer's wise decision to left some things unsaid; for every piece of information about Ambergris that he doles out, he holds back ten, leaving the reader craving more, but also making his world believable because of its very complexity. In this regard (at least), he is the equal of China Mieville, who has likewise created a world that is both foreign and familiar.

As for the stories themselves, I could spend the entire review on any one of them, but given the constraints of the medium, I'll just touch on some of the highlights. First off is the cover story, which I mentioned above. Although necessarily brief, it immediately introduces the reader to VanderMeer's talent with descriptive phrases like "muscular water". Moreover, it reveals two key things about VanderMeer's writing. The first is that while Ambergris may be fanciful, it is still every bit as brutal (and as beautiful) as our own. The second is VanderMeer's fascinating penchant for self-reference; he seems both fascinated and puzzled by his creation. The result is a desire to nurture it, but a fear of being defined, or even consumed, by it.

Next is "Dradin in Love" which reveals Ambergris in all its glory and horror. Detailing the angst of the eponymous Dradin, it is by turns touching and horrifying. This is by no means a conventional love story; its conclusion questions whether benign illusion is preferable to brutal truth. As with most of these stories, there are illuminating facts dropped elsewhere in the book, particularly one about Dradin's time as a jungle missionary.

Next is a fictional history that details the founding of Ambergris and which is perhaps my favorite story. It is incredibly detailed, richly textured and deftly written. VanderMeer uses this "historical" approach to write a story that is maddeningly incomplete, yet which provides the foundation for much of the rest of the book.

After that is "The Transformation of Martin Lake" which is perhaps the strongest story in terms of message. In it, VanderMeer seems to be commenting on the futility of not just criticism, but history itself. Essentially, since all human action is informed by the mind, and since the mind of another is inherently unknowable, there is a sort of transitive effect whereby all human action, and hence history, is at best a confused muddle. At worst, it is either an ignorant or willful sham perpetrated by those with an agenda or those too stupid to interpret even the limited snapshot into other lives that we are granted.

The second half of the book falls under the bailiwick of "The Strange Case of Mr. X" which is an account of VanderMeer's stay in an Ambergrisian mental hospital. It sounds horribly contrived, but VanderMeer pulls it off nicely. Each story in this latter half is ostensibly an item found in the author's cell after his puzzling disappearance. But far from being distinct, they rather from a whole that can only be appreciated once one has read all the way through them.

They range from an hysterical monograph on the King Squid that inhabit the River Moth to an encoded story. What they all have in common is a bizarre symbiosis that offers insight into each story at the most surprising moments. For example, the aforementioned squid study rewards the reader of the footnotes with a rather poignant glimpse at the "author's" life. Likewise, the coded story isn't just a gimmick; the rather gruesome circumstances of its origin mandate a brutal decoding that mirror the words revealed on the page.

In the end, there's not much more that I can except that "City of Saints and Madmen" is not only one of the most beautifully rendered books I have encountered, but one of the most supremely written. Not since reading Bradbury's collections of short stories have I encountered a collection that feeds off itself so effectively. It reads like a novel even as it sucks the reader into maddeningly brief glimpses of Ambergris. This is a must read, and ranks at the top of the list of books I've read in the last year.

Jake Mohlman

Rating:
Summary: Fungus Among Us
Review: Jeff Vandermeer's "City of Saints and Madmen" is sort of like finding a chest full of gold in a house fire: you've got to be quick to filch out the treasure in this awkward collection of often gripping, typically ghoulish little tales desperately searching for some order among the chaos---much like the boys and girls of Ambergris, the teeming city in which all this dastardly stuff takes place.

That's too bad, because half-hidden beneath this obtuse, strangely skeletal, self-satisfied wreck of a book are five juicy little stories, nuggets of unmitigated grue and wonder that Vandermeer has clearly invested his mind and imagination and soul. The stories suggest a writer with tremendous promise and some magic in his keyboard.

I first encountered the noxious "The Cage" in an obscure horror anthology. It is a shivery little morsel of pure dread concerning the fate of a stout descendant of the auspicious Hoegbotton clan. But it's what the story doesn't say---the dark things it hints at---fungus! dwarves! Truffidian priests!---that intrigued me, and led me, at long last, to Ambergris.

Try "The Cage": you'll like it. Upon my first reading, I found wicked, brimming with subversive, infectious evil. I wanted more.

Alas, Vandermeer never fashions a crown for his crown jewels. Expect an Ambergris any fuller or richer than that glimpsed in the five main short tales? Expect to be disappointed.

But those short gems do gleam in the darkness, and for them Vandermeer merits a chance. I have written already of "The Cage". "The Transformation of Martin Lake", about the strange life and stranger death of the prolific and powerful Ambergrisian composer Voss Bender, reminded me quite a bit of Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut": it is all about secret assignations, and night-haunted fog-shrouded alleyways, and dead men telling no tales.

Then there is there is the apocalyptic "Dradin in Love", which is all about madness and obsession and disease and death, and the short and deadly "Learning to Leave the Flesh". The moral of both tales, if there is one, seems to be to avoid talking to strange dwarves with tattoos. The nasty "In the Hours After Death" brings an entirely new meaning to the phrase "dead on his feet". All of them are masterpieces of excellent storytelling: all of them leave the reader begging for more. All reek of ancient horror, of all too finite and feeble human lives, and of melancholy and madness, in equal doses.

Why couldn't Vandermeer have worked this kind of magic over the course of a book, in which these stories really do interweave and suggest something larger---rather than merely cleverly self-referencing?

The book also suffers from preciousness in presentation: like most collages, the book uses physical gimmicks as an alternative to cohesive storytelling. Alexandre Dumas used the power of his words alone to tell the tale. J.R.R. Tolkien aided his story merely with a map.

Vandermeer, by contrast, needs the aid, presumably, of a full-time graphics SWAT team: "City" uses dozens of fonts and typesets, encryption, baroque chapter heads, all manner of squidy illustrations. This is not storytelling, it's graphic design.

"The Early History of the City of Ambergris" is a prime example of padding which could have served its purpose of unifying the five tales---but instead makes a point of using a war-fleet of footnotes and teensy tinsey marginalia to assault the reader's eyeballs. Ugh. And please, don't get me started on "The Strange Case of X", in which the author unforgivably inserts himself into his own creation like some sci-fi version of Woody Allen.

Worse, Ambergris itself is largely a clone of Byzantium (modern day Istanbul): a chaotic pastiche transplanted out of space and time to the "River Moth", cobbled together of place-names and battle-sites and historical figures Vandermeer has intellectually grave-robbed from the tomb of Byzantine Imperial history. When Conan creator Robert E. Howard was creating his absorbing, living, breathing *world* of Hyperborea and cobbled together or corrupted the names of actual kings and kingdoms of antiquity, he was called a hack. In our less demanding age, Vandermeer does this and is called "brilliant".

Recommended, though, if only for these wondrous little short nuggets of terror and melancholy nearly buried in the offal of the overall book. The little glimpses we see of an Ambergris---the fungal growths, the constant patter of rain on Albumuth Boulevard, the grisly and carnal orgies that accompany the Greater Festival of the Freshwater Squid each year, the menacing Grey Caps---all of these things make me wish Vandermeer had been more ambitious, and truly wrestled with his creation to give us a living, breathing city.


Rating:
Summary: Excellent, but I wish it were longer
Review: Really enjoyed this book, Jeff has a wild and coherent imagination. Only wished the book contained the stories I later learned were only available on the extended edition.
I suppose in the end I'll end buying the other and give my copy to a friend who also appreciates good literature.

Rating:
Summary: Very strange but very good
Review: This is a book aimed at a highly specialized and sophisticated audience but one that can have far-reaching effects. We don't think it will change the face of speculative fiction-despite its brilliant moments and the impressive things it has to say about the nature of art-but it may find a long life in the academic community from whom many of the tricks in the narrative were generated and whose population will offer an audience that will enthusiastically embrace its subject.

WHO SHOULD READ THIS:

Any graduate student in English or Fine Arts or Cinema or any such field of study should acquire this in some fashion and read it (we say some fashion because those parties are usually far too poor to purchase a $40 deluxe edition of an obscure book). They will be greatly rewarded in intellectual capital which is their currency. Others of you-especially those who enjoy the short story form-should heed the unspoken message of Moorcock that this is a true work of originality and it should be read if that is what you're looking for.

WHO SHOULD PASS:

The thing is weird! If strange, weird things confuse you (take for example, Naked Lunch, Existenz, or some of the stranger moments in the Matrix trilogy) then you should have deep reservations about delving in to this thing. People who are creeped out by camping in the wilderness overnight or traditional Catholics watching The Exorcist will find themselves deeply frightened and disturbed from reading The Early History of Ambergris. Aspiring writers may quit their profession after reading The Transformation of Martin Lake. This book is strange and deeply unsettling in many ways. Avoid if these things are a bother to you!

READ THE ENTIRE REVIEW AT INCHOATUS.COM