The Bodhisattva

Second time I’m participating in this (again a group of bloggers choose Friday to highlight a book that should get more cred). I kind of dig it because I can talk about a book in a non-review format and without the stress of having to be awesome. Again, not a review, not lengthy, just a nudge toward a book by an author famous or less famous that not only doesn’t get talked about enough, but isn’t in my usual catalog of writers/books I throw out (I’m going to have to go to the Wheel of Fortune route where R, S, T, L, N, E* are taken off the board for me to pick) and that all the uncool speculative fiction kids know about. Sometimes it may even be a  popular book we just talk about enough in our own little circles. This time I picked a book by an author whose collection was on my Top 100 of the last 10 years list. She is actually a bestselling author now, and thus you’d expect not qualified as a candidate, or perhaps - me being a SF/F fan - would choose to disown her as she shares shelf space with the less talented and widely known.  After all, I could get more hits and links doing so and this is why most SF/F blogs exist (and fail at). The Bodhisattva is not a place of idiocracy, however, and even if it was invaded and overtaken by those that followed that prevalent doctrine, Karen Joy Fowler’s credibility is unassailable. A founder of the prestigious Tiptree award, Fowler came into this game already at a point where people bitch and moan we could all be at if we progress at something call genre. Writers like Fowler just left us behind from the beginning, and around that beginning was Sarah Canary. I recently saw an argument made by an comic writer stating something along the lines that a reviewer must understand and feel authorial intent to conduct themselves and because that is impossible an indie book should not be the subject to criticism. In the book market (in any market) we know this to be quite absurd (as it sounds) but one of the books that really rang as a stanch argument to such a claim was Sarah Canary. You see, Fowler I am told has given her interpretation of primary character - Sarah Canary - but the book is crafted in a manner that the possible identity of that character, the who or what, can change on the perceptions of the vantages we are offered - it is a mystery, but not really - Fowler isn’t lazy, our conclusions are part of the process, part of the craft, there are no misconceptions there is only art. Who is this  woman who walks - materializes - out of a Northwest forest in the 1870’s? She doesn’t tell us, she does not communicate with people, but the book is about how people translate themselves through her. Those around her find themselves in their search to fin where Sarah fits in the puzzle of the world. She does not fit, she is free, an anomaly for it, an anomaly that allows others anomalies to be set free by her presence. There is an awful review at Entertainment Weekly of this novel that includes:

the identity and fate of Sarah Canary seem inconsequential, a mere construct to keep Fowler’s rambunctious novel in motion. Readers who don’t mind questions without answers and mysteries without solutions will enjoy the riches of Sarah Canary

How often do we see our best SF/F described in a very similar fashion? The largest gate’s sentries are those who only have one idea of how fiction is told, or worse how SF/F should be told. We don’t find out that Sarah’s father is a Sith Lord, but there is point to this journey, and at it’s end is brick that is part of the bridge where literary fiction and SF/F meet and are one - where aliens meet aliens and see each other. Sarah Canary walks the path of perception and the message she gives is not one that blurs lines but instead asks us what exactly do we do with those lines, again?? This question takes on more weight when you remember I told you she does not communicate (you forgot). So who asked us again?

It is all that however, and not a drag. It’s actually humorous, well paced, and while Sarah is a plot device, she is oddly (odd in many ways) the human spirit allowed to walk free. The book is two-faced, it exists in both worlds literally and all worlds figuratively. To some it’s about contact to others it’s just context - it thrives in both worlds but it truly belongs to us.

Sarah Canary, as well as many of Fowler’s earlier works may now be the subject of stronger second looks due to Ms. Fowler’s more recent successes in the real world, but in a way, while being a significant and well known commodity to the SF/F heads, she has seemed to have somehow skipped the phase of being the subject of conversations of the more pop-SF community on her way to commercial success (Jane Austen’s Book Club) and, because I exist in all those worlds, this was my choice on this most Forgotten of Fridays - a post-Civil War whimsical western, first Contact story that doesn’t have to be, but delightfully and thankfully is.

_{*Rhys Hughes, Steve Aylett, Tamar Yellin, Thomas Ligotti, Nick Mamatas Brian Evenson - just go buy their books}

Previous Forgotten Fridays: Brittle Innings by Michael Bishop