Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I found Ammonite astonishing throughout. It hooked me from page one, which is always a delightful sensation. It reminded me of Jean M. Auel‘s The Plains of Passage and Ursula Le Guin‘s The Dispossessed while being something completely different all of itself.
I’m not going to do justice to the story in my synopsis, but here goes… the planet Jeep, colonised centuries ago has been rediscovered by the Company. The entire population is female, and when the ‘Mirrors’ (soldiers) arrive they quickly contract a virus that kills all men, about 30% of women and leaves the world in quarantine. Enter Marghe Taishan, employee of the Company, anthropologist visits the planet while testing an experimental vaccine which might be the only hope of leaving Jeep for the Company employees quarantined there. It’s clear that Marghe can’t learn anything about the people if she stays in the Mirrors’ isolated base so she sets off into the wild.
From there it would be incredibly simplistic to say that she ‘goes native’ given the depth and complexity of the world she adopts and is adopted by. The women of Jeep live in tribes connected by an intricate system of trade, obligation and duty – ‘trata’. It’s into this web that Marghe is soon bound, bringing the women of the Company into trata too. And that’s just the start – explaining much more is a frightful spoiler show.
What we get is rich, interesting and intensely human characters presented in a familiar yet wholly new and refreshing social context. Marghe goes through a hell of a journey to understand Jeep, the women who live, have babies, farm, go to war and fall in love, and most of all to understand herself. At times the book veers between fantasy, science fiction and cultural exploration. It’s a synthesis I found very satisfying and intriguing. Once she finally settles and begins to learn how reproduction and cultural heritage work the whole story unfolds in another dimension entirely.
Apparently this was Nicola Griffith’s first novel – it’s superb. I found it by spotting the SF Masterworks livery. Sometimes that collection feels like it’s just every sci-fi book ever written, but this is definitely a gem that deserves to be in print constantly.
I’ve no doubt that there’s a host of essays covering the gender and sexuality themes running through Ammonite – they’re interesting and well explored and ever so interesting. That and the story and the characters that kept me reading. It’s one of very few books that went straight onto my ‘re-read soon’ stack.
Go and buy and read it now.
0 thoughts on “We Have A Problem With Books”
I’m with you on all counts.
This is an amazing post and one that I feel I could have written, minus the humor, readability, and references to A levels. Interestingly, we also have very similar reading tastes and opinions. While I haven’t read everything that you have, I agree with all you said about those I did read. The only place we diverge is that I live in an apartment and had I not decided long ago to get rid of some books when the sheer volume of them reached a critical mass I would surely be dead, crushed under a huge pile of heavy tomes. Although I do miss certain editions I once had, overall it has worked out pretty well for me.
A couple of notes. The Doctor Who book was likely Planet of the Spiders (a less inspired title I can not imagine) and while you’re right about the later Hitchhiker books, the sequence at Milliways in the 2nd book is my favorite part of the “trilogy.”
And lastly, I also still have my copy of the Hardy Boys Survival manual and once tried to make a survival kit like they describe in the book. However, I much prefer an earlier Hardy Boys spinoff, The Hardy Boys Detective Manual, in hardcover, which came out a few years earlier, and had so many great detecting tips. all sadly useless now in the internet era.
We clearly are the finest of people! I have recently declined the opportunity to take all the books I left at my Dad’s house when I left home. It was difficult, but partly from not having seen them for years I managed to get it down from 400 or so to a mere hundredish. I don’t know where I’m going to put them…
Ah yes, that sounds exactly as terrifying a title as I recall. I seem to remember that the cover of Planet of The Spiders was too horrible for me to even want to touch. You make a good point about Milliways. It’s possible I’m conflating several of the THGGTTG books into one.
Ah! I had no idea they did more manuals. I don’t know where I got the Survival Manual, but I suspect it was a marvellous second hand bookshop in Burton on Trent that had a charming Dachshund named Carl who would bark until stroked.