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City Of Saints And Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer
01/01/2005 . Source: Donna Jones 
pub: TOR. 496 page enlarged illustrated paperback. Price: £12.99 (UK). ISBN: 1-4050-3396-7. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.toruk.com and www.jeffvandermeer.com
'City Of Saints And Madmen' is a book in five parts, comprising four novellas and a bountiful appendix spanning several hundred pages. To review this book and do it justice, look upon this review as a five for one deal. Each part is its own entity, deserving its own synopsis and review opinions and yet needing its four conjoined quadruplets to hold meaning for itself!
In 'Dradin In Love', we meet a wholly unsaintly priest in Dradin. Recently back from a missionary visit to the jungle, he spies a beautiful woman in the window of a business, high above a street named Albumuth Boulevard. Dradin determines that his only goal in life is meeting with this rare beauty and enticing her into love and carnal acts between a man and a woman.
Enlisting the help of a strange man covered in tattoos of the maps of Ambergris, he sends her two gifts: one a book on illicit lovemaking (a sort of Ambergris Kama sutra) and the second a piece of jewellery. For his sins, Dradin's plans go just a tad wrong and he ends his stay rather awkwardly and with some haste!
This first novella is in the same trend as its cohorts of this book, weird! Dradin is quite the most unholy of priests and turns my stomach just thinking about, but what I think is the most stand-out point of this story is the way in which it seems to spiral into a concoction of real and deep unswerving madness. It reminded me of the engravings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder 'Desidia: Sloth' and 'The Fight Of The Moneybags And Strongboxes'. It has a really fabulous ending, darkly ominous and unrelenting in its conclusion. Was Dradin in love? Or was he just in the ravings of insanity?
The second novella is 'The Hoegbotton Guide To The Early History Of Ambergris'. It states from right at the beginning that the footnotes are the most noteworthy of the text and missing them would be detrimental to the hardened reader. Like wha...? This starts as a hard to read portrait of the Ambergrisian founding fathers and reads like something out of 'Blackadder'.
The mushroom dwellers, whom you have met in the previous novella, have their part in the City of Ambergris expanded upon. Thus opening your eyes, slightly, to the reasons of their violent characters.
With a footnote count of 137, you really do become cross-eyed from reading all the unmissable small print. It constantly extracts the urine of those historical figures involved and on occasion the footnotes provide an erotic draft of innuendo. Not an easy novella to read but highly entertaining and full of sardonic quips and 'mushroomisms'. You'll understand what I mean when you read it!
Third in the line-up was 'The Transformation Of Martin Lake', a rather charismatic portrayal of a painter's half-talent being changed by a dramatic and, what has to be said, a deeply distressing event that plays out during the story.
The focus shifts its attention from a critic's viewpoint of the artist Martin Lake to the man himself and the events that lead to his subsequent paintings that take on a new vision that his previous work not only lacked but failed to convey much of anything.
Again, the very fresh style of writing was hard to get into reading but the story was captivating and once it unfolded in all its gruesome glory, you truly see a piece of valuable and emotive writing. Evocative right to the end, I found this to be possibly my favourite novella out of the three I had read so far.
The last novella, 'The Strange Case Of X', has to be the best out of all four, although without the supporting acts this subject matter would have no bearing and lose its meaning.
X is, as far as you can tell, Jeff Vandermeer in the unreality flesh. His character is in a mental institution for believing that Ambergris is a creation of his writing and nothing more.
Some truths about the detriment of a swiftly selling book emerge and the weirdly confusing tale of where the character of Janice Shriek (the art historian who writes the critique for 'The Transformation Of Martin Lake') comes from make this one of those stories that you never quite grasp whether it is truth, half-truth or complete unadulterated fiction!
Greatly amusing to me was the notions that 'Saints And Madmen' was in production as a Disney movie with cartoon mushroom dwellers and hugely entertaining quips about life as we know it as a writer. Role-playing games that follow the Ambergrisian story and Giant squid screen savers, all mentioned as very funny nods to modern life. I found everything about this story right, just perfect!
All roads not only lead to Albumuth Boulevard, but are Albumuth Boulevard and yet that seems perfectly normal for one road to dominate in a city so immersed in madness.
All the numerous appendices are too numerous to mention and perfect little-sculpted gems in themselves. All from the belongings of X and stored within the asylum, they include pamphlets and stories about Ambergris, expanding ever broadly on the City. Fundamentally, though, they are all shorts set in Vandermeer's richly textured world.
Varying fonts uses everything writing should be, artistic and smart and convey their own meaning just by changing the way that the tales are presented.
Vandermeer uses so many tools of writing that he could almost write a book about them. Blending different character perspectives to tell the story to its fullest and changing the style of writing to an almost non-fiction factual text is but two of these stylish but thought-provoking techniques.
I rattle on a bit about never judging a book by its cover, however in this case judge, JUDGE! The cover has another story written on its front and behind. The spine of the book has Ambergrisian artwork and Vandermeer whimsy about words of interest from Dr V. Even the last novella mentions Tor UK as a kind of 'vanity operation' and spells it as 'Toruk'.
I did feel, once I got to the end of this book, as though I had entered a book-opening into the twilight zone. (Please see 'Never Ending Story' for graphic/theatrical embellishment of this opinion!)
To describe this as my 'favourite book' would be a shameful lie, for any book that finds an Anchorage upon one of my shelves must be a favourite to survive the charity-shop chop. But this is an inspirational book which continues to reinvent itself with more life and vigour than its previous incarnation/print-run. It is beautifully written, like a painting that you never quite see all of, it beguiles me that such a work isn't read the world over by English students and writing circles alike for its sublime complexities.
So, in short, 'City Of Saints And Madmen' is exceptional. It will never be anything but exceptional unless we find some sort of grey island between sanity and insanity. Maybe the only boundlessness left in this existence is how far we let our imagination roam from its baby safety harness and reins! Weirdly erotic with a shit load of darkness to twist the soul, filled with a glass-edged wittiness, this book defies criticism.
Read it!
Donna Jones
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