Queen of Clouds
QUEEN OF CLOUDS by Neil Williamson
PART TWO OF REVIEW CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/04/13/queen-of-clouds-neil-williamson/
NewCon Press 2022
My previous reviews of Neil Williamson: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/neil-williamson/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
TEN
Clouds as party balloons below the ceiling? Decorative butterflies on a lady’s veil that really fly? These represent only a minuscule part of a teeming chapter in the ballroom, where Jane Austen seems to meets Jack Vance in a unique and breathtaking way. Characters galore, discussion on ‘art’, Artisans, Artificers, Articulations, even an Actuary. And the plot intrigues continue to fascinate as we meet the real Queen, “a deadly cane, planted on the tiled floor as if it connected her to the core of the earth”, and realisation as to the true nature of Kim as Handmaster. (In John Bello’s ‘Agra Aska’, he would have been Headmaster.) This review itself is now ‘under judicial review’ (an expression this chapter uses) regarding spoilers, so beware, but I was especially intrigued by mention of diluted ink in a bloodline, dances, not rucks that Billy shared back home, but something far more refined, well it’s more what I imagine Bridgerton to be than Austen (or even than Elizabeth Bowen’s fantastical Grand Ball chapter in ‘A World of Love’) as dance refinement later fades and thoughts of his youthful ‘fumbles’ here become, in private, today’s more vigorous ‘tumbles’!
Cross-referenced since with the Mark Valentine work here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/mark-valentine/#comment-2457
ELEVEN
“Billy swallowed drily and gripped the canework even harder,…”
From an earlier cane that seemed to short-circuit the Earth’s core, to a Lightning Rod today that did likewise, by sparks, to the motes as motal force in the conscious skies?
“The even purr of the engine, the creak of canework.”
“She cracked her cane to punctuate that last assertion and sparks scorched the tiles beside her chair.”
As she listened to Crane…
You know, I very much look forward, each time, to the experience of reading this book, and this chapter is an important enlightening one for various reasons, making me realise that I like to share with others my constructive ‘burden’ of reading, brimming with it as I become with each episode, but eager not to spoil anything, yet to get it off my chest, and here the expansive skies and their ‘seeding grounds’ are breathtakingly of some relief, as I accompany Billy (“fool of all seasons”?) and Para in her dirigible, whereby every precarious skyride needs someone called Para, I guess, to accompany you! In the ‘capricious’ and ‘bellowing’ winds.
But soon I now leave this awesome expansiveness to enter the cerebral — the talking shop where queues of refugees are as if discussed with some inefficient Pretty Petal…politicians as jealous toddlers, too.
Yet I love the character-building of Para, and now Jelena, and they help me shrug off such mean-mouthed considerations of mine, Lewis as Loess with exuberant literary éclat. Even the seasoning of plot by a memorable tattooed cat. And the unforgettable list of ingredients in ink.
Vistas of close-ordered information about motives and even AI considerations regarding clouds and sylvans, amid the politics of Karpentine. ….
And it suddenly dawns on me that this book itself also displays and contains the very ‘motal resonance’ that it describes within its plot! And it is the reader’s job to complement, if not too easily compliment, this novel by helping to seed its own textual weathermaking?
“Paper and ink are the twin safeguards of integrity.”
Cross-referenced again with the Mark Valentine work.
Cross-referenced with THE ARGONAUTS OF THE AIR by H.G. Wells: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2022/04/26/penguin-books-of-british-short-stories-2/#comment-1616
TWELVE
“Vern nudged his elbow.”
If not Verne? Whatever the case, this is a teeming paraphernalia or panoply of characters and plots and rivalries and conspiracies, as Billy does various errands for “our maestra” Para… about her taunted suitors, and about refacers, too, and Billy’s amnesia amid an ostentation of buildings and mosaic patterns and structures toward any bespoke reader’s gestalt that might encompass them, including the dripping-pen sign of the Inksmiths, and a bag of glories of beetles’ shellac for such ink, and a cartoon caricature of Billy in the newspaper print that uses ink for propaganda purposes (as we use social-media electronics?) whatever the glasses one uses to see such ink through, I guess. A city maze, a political plot maze, too, where refugees partake of such implications, as Billy sadly seldomises as well as sadly knowing now he can control those clouds of poignant party-balloons inside the ceiling: “….weak breezes of something like hope.” A skill worth Billy having? — while asking whether we all should now resort to the Pinnacle pub to drown out our own mazy amnesias in competition with the many other intriguing bits that I missed out above. No spoiler alerts thankfully here, because they already lost themselves in their own maze, I guess.
THIRTEEN
“…you’ve achievements enough not to require a lie laid so deep inside you that you’d believe it yourself.”
Yet I somehow believe fiction truths. And this chapter is a genuine tour de force of them, Sister Sin and Sister Skin, in a house we wander through like the next part of a journey in a special rollercoasting ghost house of suspended disbelief, after a “sullen sky” that somehow needed unlikely umbrellas to hand, sullen as seldomising, in my own head’s book of blackest ink, I guess. Money or ink? — which the prime cursor of life here? And if the ink, ‘compellants’ or ‘allurants’? — most likely the latter, as Billy, amid the intrigues of Seldom’s residua as ingredients in something intrinsic, also becomes involved with a sort of hard scrimshaw sex that you will not forget, alongside pretty petals unfolding into a sororal red flower, as a step up from the softer tattoos on cat and the other tattoos Billy’s amnesia did not prevent him remembering seeing applied. I feel that I just bathed in black ink, and later there are the oppressed Dickensian children, and an ‘impossible column of black cloud’, and a ‘brooding silence’ to match the ‘broodingness’ weather in the concurrent Valentine book. As I sense authorially intended and unintended things evolving,,, “…the more Billy stared the more he began to see patterns and shapes.”
…the more he began to see patterns and shapes:
FOURTEEN
“…he found himself staring deep into the heart of the churn.”
…into ‘the bludgeon of cloud’, almost a gestalt tornado of mob clouds as one, while — through the onward plot machinations — we try to see the arrival of an old man’s burden now, like a rabbit in headlights, allegorically ‘slender and nervous’, if not now seldom, and able to take off like a hare, though, with its expected whimper, alongside the unique conceit of ‘voice thoughts’, this perhaps represents the Id against the Ego, Billy against the violent elements of rain sheets at waterfall’s edge hissing like a ‘nest of rock adders’, flooding our now universal refugee camp as archetype. But better than drying it to a scorched cinder, I guess? Dust to mud, gneiss to loess? Our ego divIDed? Not adders or readers at all? Our egos repAId? Queen of Souls, Queen of cLOUdS?
Yet the plot wins: I do inexorably follow the plot, perhaps fully at last, as the weather engineers fight a possibly losing battle against the cruelty of nature outdoing our own cruelty to it.
FIFTEEN
“Slight as it was, its weight bent the old man double…”
The old man’s burden had indeed been that upon a defiant life’s journey, more than just a piligrim, but a precursor of sylvans and their upgrowth rebellion …“‘Well then, what moves them?’ / ‘The same as any other wood. The sun, the earth, the rain.’”
…Versus…
“but the walls and ceilings were all part of the same interconnected machinery as the exterior of the building.”
A machine that does adders out of the job of adding. Or a microclimate like the famous dome in the reader’s own world as an inner dome to such an awesome vista of a machine’s workings? Crazed or simply fazed by its description here, we readers reach another breaking storm outside after more brooding generational recriminations of alternate Gaia …?
An utter poignancy of sylvan qualities in the reader’s general sense of the word ‘sylvan’ and what the inner machines need from each individual sylvan as part of the mulching of all matter, not only of loess? — “…peered at its joints, stroked its limbs and tapped its skull.” A reader’s brainstorming perhaps inadvertently engendered by this book amidst its plot’s onward entertaining inner thrust?
This review continues here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/26614-2/