R. A. MacAvoy, Tea with the Black Dragon

[oyceter]

I don't know how to talk about this book at all. It's not really an Asian-inspired fantasy, although there is an Asian dragon in it. It's not that much of a fantasy, despite the dragon. It's not really a mystery, or thriller, although it has elements of both, nor is it a romance, although it has that too.

I'm trying to paint what it's not to leave an outline of what it is, but it's not really working so far.

It's a very little novel, not very long, and nothing very big happens, although, I could also argue that everything that does matters happens. MacAvoy has a way with words that isn't an obvious style; it reminds me a bit of LeGuin for some reason. She (MacAvoy) writes so that everything is perfectly transparent and obvious, not quite like Diana Wynne Jones' matter-of-fact humor, but in a way that gets to the very essence of things. It feels like there is nothing extraneous about her prose.

It's about Martha MacNamara, who fears her daughter is in trouble, and Mayland Long, a man who is sometimes Chinese and sometimes English and sometimes neither, and how he became such a man.

It also is about Silicon Valley and computer crime in the early eighties, which amused me, because a lot of the action takes place in Stanford and San Francisco -- I got a huge kick out of reading about Rengstorff St. and University Ave, places I live around (do NY people get a kick out of stuff like this?).

And there's a dragon in it, a black dragon whose name makes perfect sense but took me even longer to get, because Oolong is automatically "tea" for me. And of course he was a five-toed dragon. Oh! And the dragon was in Taipei!! Sorry.

Anyhow, the book is still quietly steeping in my mind and sending little tea-scented tendrils everywhere.

Links:
- gwyneira's review

Comments

[jcalanthe]

I get a kick out of books & such set in familiar places too - the Bay Area cuz that's where I live now, but also around DC cuz that's where I grew up. I'll have to check this one out.

[oyceter]

It's so fun because it's set exactly around the Bay Area where I live (well the Stanford bits at least).

It's just so weird and so nifty ^_^. Reminds me -- need to watch A Beautiful Mind still, just so I can point at the screen and yell: "This scene made me late for class!"

[dherblay.livejournal.com]

I remember reading the MacAvoy during my high fantasy period somewhere between 6th and 8th grades; I have absolutely no recollection of the book, but do remember that it wasn't quite what I expected!

I don't know of any good books set in Cleveland, but when I lived in New York I enjoyed the sense of place I found in the novels of Lawrence Block. I remember trying a couple of times to walk to significant addresses he mentioned, only to find out that the street would disappear just for the block specified; I remember finding that Attorney Street between Rivington and Stanton, where Block's protagonist had been stomped to within an inch of death, was in fact a high school. I can't remember what was supposed to happen on East 28th between 2nd and 1st, but it does not exist. I think he stole this habit from Rex Stout, who would give Nero Wolfe a variety of street addresses which would by Manhattan's standard of numbering the east-west blocks in terms of distance from 5th Avenue, be located somewhere in the Hudson River.

[oyceter]

It wasn't what I expected either, but I liked it.

Oh that must have been fun, doing "tours" of the city with books in mind! I think this is why London has always had a kind of golden patina in my mind -- so many of the greats of literature have written about the city that I feel it must somehow be populated by the ghosts of fiction past.

As a Londoner, I must stick up for the other side

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

If you want the other side to the "golden patina" of London, read Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and Alan Moore's From Hell. Nasty, but in the same way that BtVS wouldn't be BtVS if it was all The Zeppo and no Dead Things.

I like living in a city with a complex personality ;-)

Re: As a Londoner, I must stick up for the other side

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Or Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White.
And, more generally on the nature of the living city:

Any city that is capable of teaching urbanity and tolerance must have a hard edge. Cleaned-up, tidy, purified disney-land cities (or sections of cities) where nothing shocks, nothing disgusts, nothing is even slightly feared may be pleasant sites for family outings or corporate gatherings, but their public places will not help to create cosmopolitans.

Lyn H. Lofland 'Urbanity, tolerance and public space: The creation of cosmopolitans' in L. Deben, W. Heinemeijer, D. van der Vaart (eds), Understanding Amsterdam: essays on economic vitality, city life and urban form (http://www.Amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/9055891487/leslehallswebp07) (2000)

Re: As a Londoner, I must stick up for the other side

[oyceter]

Mmm, been meaning to pick that up for some time...

Thanks for the quote -- reminds me of Giuliani's campaign to clean up Times Square. I love cities, particularly Tokyo and Hong Kong and New York, which are the three I've spent most time in... Taipei unfortunately doesn't have much of a personality, and I don't quite "get" San Francisco yet.

I miss Hong Kong the most.

Re: As a Londoner, I must stick up for the other side

[oyceter]

Well, From Hell (haven't read the other) and those other ones about the "other side" also kind of contribute to the patina, imho -- just the sense of age, and of people and places and things being there. Kind of like New York, with Fifth Avenue and Upper West Side on one hand, and dirt and squalor and grit on the other, or Tokyo -- neon and bright lights and dirty bars and mizushobai (water trade/prostitution).

Neil Gaiman had a great little bit on cities and their personalities on his site (here).