The Reporting Rolls On …

That July 31 deadline for final voting on the Hugo Awards is coming up very fast now—that’s the bad news. The good news is that I have now read all the short story and novelette finalists and nearly finished all the novels, with half of Connie Willis’ All Clear (definitely the ‘fattest” of all the contenders) to go. Today I am doing my report back on Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House.

Before starting, I will also briefly reiterate the evaluation criteria I am using for all the Best Novel finalists:

– the use of genre elements in the work, i.e. its strength as a work of speculative fiction, given that the Hugo Award is for excellence in this field;

– whether the book works for me as a story, i.e. is it compelling, well written, and engaging, with particular regard to the emotional depth to the story telling and interesting ideas (although not necessarily for their own sake.) Consistency of both characters and plot is really important to me. And I do rate good use of humour in the story.

– It has also emerged through my previous reports on both The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and Feed, that I appreciate a good ‘twist in the tale’, although I don’t actively require it to enjoy a book—good characters and a good tale well told are my baseline.

So on to the report.

The Dervish House by Ian McDonald.

The Basic Story:

From the back cover: “In the sleepy Istanbul district of Eskikoy stands the former whirling dervish house of Adam Dede. Over the space of five days of an Istanbul heatwave, six lives weave a story of corporate wheeling and dealing, Islamic mysticism, political and economic intrigue, ancient Ottoman mysteries, a terrifying new terrorist threat, and nanotechnology with the potential to transform every human on the planet.”

I think that probably satisfactorily encapsulates the book. The six central characters are: Necdet, a ne-er do well turned visionary; Can Durukan, a sheltered nine-year-old boy with a heart condition who experiences life through the medium of his computer; Georges Ferentinou, an ethnic Greek and retired economist; Adnan Sarioglu, a commodities trader; Ayse Erkoc, an antiquities dealer; and Leyla Gultasli, a commerce graduate looking for a career in marketing.

The Report:

I began reading The Dervish House with some trepidation, because earlier in the year I had been unable to complete Ian McDonald’s River of Gods. You may recall that this puzzled me at the time, as River of Gods checked many boxes for the kind of story I like: cyberpunk science fiction, a complex plot, and diverse cultural elements within the story. I thought at the time that it might just have been too demanding a read following the February 22nd earthquake and its aftermath. It was some time later before I realised that I hadn’t really liked any of the characters, so found it hard to engage with any of their intersecting stories.

Hence my trepidation with The Dervish House as I could see it was the same kind of story, following the six characters mentioned above and their intersecting lives over the five days referenced in the excerpt from the back cover—a similar story premise to River of Gods. The difference, although the complexity of the plot was still challenging and took time to get into, was that I quickly found myself engaging positively with the characters. I either outright liked or was at least strongly interested in the characters, their backstories, motivations and current situations. I also believe that there is a seventh character in the book, arguably the most engaging and compelling of them all, and that is Istanbul itself—an early positive for me as a reader who has always been fascinated by the portrayal of the city in literature, so I was probably always going to be hooked by those wonderful, poetic lines from the opening page:

“It is after the hour of prayer, but not yet the hour of money. Istanbul, Queen of Cities, wakes with a shout.”

In terms of genre, this story of near-future Istanbul where nanotechnology—and also nano-terrorism—is the face of the future, is undoubtedly science fiction. And the kind of SFF I love, with cyberpunk morphing into nanopunk. But the focus on Istanbul itself as character, and the nearness of that future, also makes The Dervish House very close to magic-realism in genre, especially with elements such as Ayse’s quest for “The Mellified Man” and Necdet’s encounter with Hizir, the Green Saint, as a spirit guide. Although these two elements could potentially sit uneasily together, in The Dervish House the juxtaposition works and is part of the richness of the story.

There are many interwoven elements within the plot of The Dervish House, including historical and political twists and turns, but another element added to the cyber-nanopunk SFF and magic-realism is that this is also a “caper” story (in the same way that The Sting and Ocean’s Eleven are “caper” movies.) So plenty of twists and turns for a gal who enjoys a good dose of twisty-turniness in her reading. This also makes The Dervish House into something of a melange, story-wise—and I was very aware of the risk, when reading the first half to two-thirds of the book, that the extent of melange had the potential to overwhelm the story. But in the final half to one-third of the novel, Ian McDonald really pulled it off. The disparate threads of the melange came together into a coherent whole that really worked for me as a reader. I closed the covers and felt both satisfied and as though I wanted more, which is a great feeling. A very big part of that coming together for me was the emotional engagement with the characters.

In terms of quibbles, my main reservation about The Dervish House was that I did have to push myself to get into it. This is storytelling with layers of complexity and McDonald’s style is lavish, with a fair bit of description, which I did find difficult, especially when I was still warming to the characters and overall story arc. A little like the stork in the opening passages, I felt that we spent a fair amount of time “circling” the story—but as I have indicated above, both plot and characters definitely came together for me in the latter part of the book and repaid that earlier perseverance.

One thing I found myself really liking about this book was that the ending is upbeat. Possibly because of everything we have been through in Christchurch with earthquakes and their aftermaths, or perhaps because of simply looking at everything happening in the world right now, but I found myself really enjoying the fact that the story came together in an overall positive, upbeat, hopeful way.

So for me, The Dervish House is currently another very strong contender for the top spot on my Hugo Award ballot.

—

To reiterate, the finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, by book title, comprise:

• Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra; Allen & Unwin here in AU/NZ)
• Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
• The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
• Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit) – you can read my report here
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit) – again, you can read my report here.

I hope to bring you my report on Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold tomorrow.