The Blue Place — Nicola Griffith

Cover of The Blue Place


The Blue Place
Nicola Griffith
308 pages
published in 1998

I can’t remember the last time I’ve been as frustrated with the ending to a novel as I am with The Blue Place. I had seen it building up from at least halfway through the story, hoping that its seeming inevitable conclusion would be subverted at the last minute, the same way Nicola Griffith did earlier in the novel, with another plot point that seemed to descent into hardboiled cliché until it didn’t. But the ending wasn’t subverted, was hardboiled cliché, did upset me and yet fitted perfectly with what is an incredibly smart, engaging novel by a writer who has never gone for the easy route in her stories. So what’s going here? To try and find out will take some effort and certainly some spoilers.

Let’s start with Nicola Griffith herself first. Yorkshire born, she moved to Seattle to live with her wife, the writer Kelley Eskridge. Her first fiction was published in the late eighties, her first novel in 1993. So far she’s written six novels, of which I have now read half. As you may have guessed, The Blue Place is a hardboiled detective novel, her third, the first two being Ammonite and Slow River, both science fiction. she would go on to write two sequels to the The Blue Place, while her latest novel, Hild, is a historical novel about 7th century CE saint Hilda. So far all her novels have had lesbian protagonists and The Blue Place is no exception.

Aud Torvingen is an ex-cop now working as a security consultant in Atlanta, more for having something to do than for the money, as she’s independently wealthy. The daughter of an American father and a Norwegian mother, the ambassador to the court of St James, she was born and raised in the UK, as well as Norway, the country she identifies the most with. Tall, pale, blond and with “eyes the colour of cement” she comes across as supremely confident, strong and perhaps a little bit scary; more than a little bit in the right circumstances. That cover image above fits her to a t.

We’re in her head throughout the book, the story being told through her eyes. From the inside she seems as capable and competent as she looks from the outside, but it’s clear from the start she has her demons, is haunted by some of the thing she saw as a cop. It’s this that drove her out for a walk in the warm Atlanta evening, stepping out wide across a corner only to collide with another woman running out from the other side, also taking the corner wide. The sudden encounter last only a few seconds before Aud continues on her way, but barely a few steps later a huge explosions slams into her, coming from the direction she came out of and the woman had been running towards. Turning back, Aud is just in time to see a house go up in flames, the fire clearly started through the use of explosives.

Other than giving an eyewitness statement to the police Aud doesn’t plan to get involved, but the woman she ran into has different ideas. Not only did she report Aud as the possible arsonist to the police, but she then shows up in the gym Aud trains in. They spar, she asks Aud to go for a coffee and after a bit more sparring, verbal this time, Julia, as her name turns out to be, asks Julia to find out who had killed her friend in that explosion. It’s to her own surprise that Aud agrees to do so.

She doesn’t have to. Independently wealthy, Aud really only takes assignments because they’re interesting or because she feels obliged to take them, for one reason or another. She’s always in control, always aware of her own skills and powers, whether it’s safeguarding the daughter of a Spanish diplomat and giving her some self confidence or seducing baby dykes in nightclubs, yet she doesn’t know why she let Julia persuade her to take the case.

As readers who know how stories work and are well aware of the clichés of hardboiled detectives falling in love with their vulnerable clients, we do have some inkling of why Aud — so efficient, so controlled, so menacing — has an instinctive soft spot for Julia, but it takes a long time for Aud herself to find out. Julia breaks through her defences, touches a part of her she’s barely aware exists. This is a hardboiled cliché, but it’s so well done, evolves so naturally that you don’t mind this. Aud’s slowly falling in love with Julia and the way their relationship develops is the heart of the book.

As for the reason that Aud is so controlled and menacing, the reasons for her demons, that looks for a long time as it will be a hardboiled cliché as well, that of the overwhelming trauma in the detective heroine’s past that has caused her to close up and built a shell around herself. Basically I was afraid that Aud had been raped at some point. Rape and sexual assault are of course things that far too many women have to deal with in real life, but in fiction this has been overused as a cheap way to gain sympathy for your protagonist, or give her some motivation for revenge (in the worst case, give her boyfriend or lover reasons to seek revenge). But I trust Nicola Griffith and she didn’t disappoint me. The reasons for Aud’s personality being the way it is are partially rooted in one particular accident in her past, but it isn’t rape.

Actually what Aud found out in that incident was that she liked violence and the control she has over it, her power to hurt or kill, the feeling she gets when it all goes well and which the title refers to:

It’s the adrenalin. When everything slows down and my muscles are hot and strong and the blood beats in my veins like champagne I feel this vast delight. Everything is beautiful and precious, and so clear. Light gets this bluish tinge and I feel like a hummingbird amongst elephants, untouchable.

It’s this capability for controlled violence that gives Aud some (much) of her confidence. And it was only when I read Aud’s paean to violence that I realised that her personality, her background, her competence, including her ability to either pick up or comfort women, all basically make her Batman. It’s why that cover image fits her so well; she is very “butch” in a way that feels completely natural to her character, uber competent without ever getting in Mary Sue territory and supremely confident in her confidence.

Which is where the tragic ending comes from, as she and Julia visit Norway to let Aud show her her birth country and family after they think they’ve put all dangers behind them and resolved Julia’s case. This is when The Blue Place really sparkles, but the idyllic doesn’t last, as the people after Julia finally catch up with her and she’s gunned down in front of Aud’s eyes. She’d been too confident, too sure that her knack for violence could save Julia that she gambles, a gamble that ends with Julia’s death.

As said, I saw this coming from the moment that Aud and Julia started becoming a couple and I was hoping against hope that Nicola Griffith would subvert it in some way, would not kill Julia. But she didn’t and despite the fact that I saw it coming, it still hit like a gut punch. And that’s because despite it superficially adhering to the cliché of getting the detective’s girlfriend killed as motivation, this death has consequences, isn’t forgotten by the next scene. Aud is devastated by her death, as we’ll see in the next book in the series, Stay.

In essence then, Nicola Griffith took the hardboiled story and made it real. But that still doesn’t make me like seeing Julia getting killed.

My favourite books of 2014

As always I will do a post looking at the statistics of my reading habits this year in early January, over at Wis[s]e Words, but for now I’d like to lift out the books that stood out the most for me in 2014, in no particular order.

Cover of The Martian

The Martian was one of the books with a lot of buzz behind it this year. Originally self published in 2011, it was picked up by a mainstream publisher (Random House) and rereleased with some alterations. It’s, with one exeception, the most heartland science fiction novel I’ve read this year, set smack in the heart of the genre. There have been other novels about astronauts losts on Mars before, other Robisonades. but the ones I’ve read tended to be dull and badly written. The Martian is the first one that had the same excitement as Robinson Crusoe offered in finding clever solutions to how to survive a hostile climate, but without devolving into wish fullfilment like the latter part of Crusoe did. Weir also doesn’t fall into the trap of making his stranded astronaut a Heinleinesque superman able to save himself entirely true his own efforts; instead it does take the full resources of NASA to save him.

Cover of Ter Ziele

In August I went to my first Worldcon, in London, which left me buzzing with excitement and a renewed interest in science fiction and fantasy fandom. It also spurred me on to get back into reading Dutch language fantastika, so I started off following various Dutch SFF people on Twitter, as you do. It was thanks to this that I got to know about Esther Scherpenisse’s Ter Ziele, a chapbook collection of two short novellas. The first story in particular hit me, dealing as it does with death, grief and letting go. It’s no surprise it won the main Dutch prize for science fiction/fantasy, the Paul Harlandprijs. I hope Esther Scherpenisse will write and publish more before long.

Cover of Ancillary Sword

Ann leckie’s Ancillary Justice was one of the best if not the best science fiction novels I’d read last year, so my expectations for the sequel, Ancillary Sword were high. Leckie didn’t disappoint me. Paradoxically it both took place on a smaller stage than the previous novel and concerned itself with bigger matters. Most of Ancillary Justice revolved around Breq’s struggle to come to grips with her own identity and her quest for vengeance, her inner turmoil, but Ancillary Sword has those struggles if not entirely resolved, so much so that she’s in full control here. And whereas the focus of the original novel, thanks to its novel use of pronouns, was mainly on gender, here it is on the impact of colonialism, something science fiction as a genre direly needs to come to grips with. Too often after all it views things from the perspective of empire, rather than its victims; Leckie firmly reverses this.

Cover of Otherbound

Corinne Duyvis is another Dutch SFF writer, but one who writes in English. Otherbound is her début novel, a young adult fantasy. What sets it apart from the hundreds of other young adult fantasies are several things. First, there’s the ingenious concept of the protagonist, Nolan, being forced to live somebody else’s life, see through a stranger’s eyes, every time he closes his. Second, Duyvis makes this into a disability more than a superpower. If every time you blink you see through somebody else’s eyes, it’s bound to distract you from the real world. And that has consequences. It’s not the only way Otherbound deals with disability; all three main characters are bound together by their disabilities, their lives interwoven because of it. Third, she has also seriously thought about the consent issues of being able to share someone’s life so intimately. And she manages to do all this and write a gripping adventure story too.

Cover of The Mirror Empire

I read Hurley’s first novel, Gods War, last year and that had been a good if flawed novel. The Mirror Empire is a cut above it. Hurley’s first venture into fantasy, it’s one of the novels, with Otherbound and Ancillary Sword that immediately made it on my Hugo shortlist for next year. In some ways it is a traditional epic fantasy, complete with a Big Bad that needs to be defeated, but what makes it special is its worldbuilding. The world of The Mirror Empire is one of the more fully realised, interesting and novel I’ve read in a long time and she manages it without “the great clomping foot of nerdism” stomping down on the story. Hurley supported The Mirror Empire with a promotional blog tour which is also worth reading to learn more about the background to which it was written and which explains some of her choices.

Cover of The Steerswoman
The Steerswoman series I knew about from other fans raving about it since the mid-nineties at the very least, but I never encountered the books in the wild, until James Nicoll linked to Rosemary Kirstein’s post offering the ebooks for sale. So inbetween walking from one panel to another at Loncon3, I bought the entire series. I was glad I did. What at a first glance looks like fantasy and starts out feeling like a standard if well written fantasy quest story, morphs gradually into the hardest science fiction series I’ve ever written. Because what you have here is a woman finding out the truth about the world she lives in through deduction and induction, through doing thought experiments and practical confirmation of them, without ever cheating, without being fed clues by better informed characters, without using magical technology or jumping to conclusions she shouldn’t be able to make. It’s a brilliant series too little known because for various reasons it took Kirstein over three decades to write the first four books of it and it’s still not finished. But don’t let that stop you: each book stands on its own and each is better than the last.

Cover of Dhalgren

Question: what are the two places man will never reach? Answer: the heart of the sun and page 100 of Dhalgren. An old joke, but one that indicates Dhalgren‘s reputation as a difficult book. Which didn’t stop it from being one of science fiction’s first runaway bestsellers. Personally I didn’t find it that difficult to read, just long, because I just let myself flow along Delany’s narrative. If you go looking for a proper, standard sf, story, you won’t find it here. But it is about cities and independence and queerness and the gloriousness of our bodies, ourselves and all sorts of weird seventies shit. This is one of those books that are hard to review or recap, require some investment of time and effort to get the most out of it, but do reward you if you do so. Delany is such a good writer that I wouldn’t mind reading his interpretation of the Manhattan phonebook, as long as he keeps off the booger sex.

Cover of Lagoon

I also read Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death this year, but Lagoon was the better book, another Hugo candidate for me. Written out of frustration with the South African sf movie District 9, this is her version of an alien invasion, set in Lagos, Nigeria. That setting already sets it apart from the ordinary run of invasion stories, usually set in the States or sometimes Europe. But there’s also Okorafor’s unapologetic use of Nigerian English rather than “standard” English. For somebody like me not used to it, this made it slightly more difficult to read at times, but no more so than when some fantasy writer has put made up Elfish words in his fantasy. Then there’s the genre breaking Okorafor cheerfully commits here as well, as one chapter frex is told from the perspective of a spider trying to cross a tarmac road, a self aware and evil tarmac road looking for new victims to devour…

Cover of Zero Sum Game

Zero Sum Game is S L Huang’s début novel, a fast paced technothriller, which I only discovered because of her post about last year’s SFWA controversies. That got me reading her blog, curious for her novel, so I bought it when it came out. What I most liked about the book was its heroine, Cas Russell, a math savant who can e.g. calculate the paths of a stream of bullets shot out by a semi-automatic in realtime quickly enough to dodge them all. If you think too much about this power it gets ridiculous, but Huang moves the action quickly enough to not give you the chance to do so. Cas is also, as becomes clear quickly, somewhat of a damaged individual, somebody with no sense of morality but not a sociopath, who has to rely on other people’s sense of what’s right and wrong, which doesn’t always end up well. Currently I’m reading the sequel, Half Life, coming out soon. Expect a review in early January.

Cover of Ascension

Jacqueline Koyanagi’s Ascension was a book I completely discovered by accident, on the sales rack of my favourite Amsterdam bookstore. What pulled me to it was the woman on the cover, as black women don’t often feature on sf covers, not even when they are the protagonist. And it turned out this was the protagonist, a lesbian, disabled woman of colour working as a starship engineer in a dead end job in the middle of a depression caused by a new technology that makes starships almost obsolete. This is a book about sibling rivalry, love, both romantically and otherwise and the difficulties of living true to your own life when you’re poor and almost powerless. It’s also about making choices and having the courage to stand behind them. It’s a brilliant novel, one that should’ve been a contender for the Hugo and Nebula Awards together with Ancillary Justice, but which sadly didn’t get the buzz that book got.

Cover of The Blue Place

Finally, I need to mention two of the books I found the hardest to read this year, Nicola Griffith’s The Blue Place and Stay, the first two novels in a crime thriller trilogy. What made it hard for me was that these books revolved around a death, a death I saw coming throughout The Blue Place and hoping Griffith would find a way to avoid it, while Stay deals with the fallout with that murder. The grief and sorrow in the latter were so real that I had to set it aside the first time I read it, in August, because it reminded me too much of my own loss, the death of my wife three years ago. But if it was hgard for me to read, it was harder for Nicola Griffith to write, twelve years after her little sister died, with her older sister dying through it. It’s no wonder it caught grief and sorrow so well.

Other books I could mention here as well: Sarah Tolmie’s The Stone Boatmen, for me another Hugo candidate. Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book so Great, an enthusiastic anthology of book reviews. Fly by Wire, William Langewiesche’s great explenation of just why captain Sullenberger could put down his Airbus 320 down safely on the Hudson after being hit by a goose. A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar and Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone, both read for the John Campbell Award, both very good in their own way fantasy stories. Tobias Buckell’s Hurricane Fever a great near future technothriller romp. Seanan McGuire’s Velveteen vs the Junior Super Patriots/The Multiverse: maniac superhero fanfic that hits all the feels. Aliette de Bodard’s On a Red Station Drifting: family orientated flawed but interesting space opera. N. K. Jemisin’s Dreamblood duology: Egyptian inspired, but not derivative fantasy. Richard Penn’s The Dark Colony: a near future, non cheating hard science fiction police procedural set in the Solar System. Oh, and of course there’s all the Norton I read this year, none of which disappointed.