City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff VanderMeer ***

This was my first VanderMeer, but it will almost certainly not be my last. He is one of the few writers who successfully mixes genuine comedy while still invoking fear and awe at his characters and situations. I love the format of this book, which is really a collection, though the whole of the book works to explain the magical and extremely strange world of Ambergris. It contains probably four novellas, several short stories, some of which include lots of drawings, and a couple of lists including a glossary. All of these items together exist as a fake historical account of Ambergris, featuring a number of through-lines and characters that add up to a lot more than the sum of their parts. In that sense, this book is a masterpiece in terms of the conception and the manner of presentation. I also loved several of the novellas and stories all by themselves, which consistently featured both comedy and tragedy. Quite simply, there is nothing else like this.

Unfortunately, this book starts to become too self-referential at a certain point (during the "Strange Case of X"), and this dragged me out of what had until then been a wonderful world in a manner I didn't like at all. It's unfortunate, because to me this is really the only mistake with this book, but it's a big one - an entire, long story that I didn't like that left a pall hanging over the remaining few hundred pages. I could have done without the lengthy glossary as well, and really the second half of the book isn't as good as the first three novellas anyway (with only one exception), but all of this would have been fine without the self-referentiality brought about in "The Strange Case of X" that then persisted throughout the rest of the book. Despite this, I can forgive this unfortunate digression because VanderMeer, through the diverse forms employed throughout the book, creates a unique and mesmerizing experience both in Ambergris itself and through the process the reader undergoes to put this space together in his own mind. In this sense, I find VanderMeer guilty simply of overreaching, and although I wish he hadn't, it was undoubtedly this spirit that helped to create the good parts of this book in the process.
(Summer 2006)

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