Gabrielle (Reading Rampage)'s Reviews > City of Saints and Madmen

Jeff VanderMeer is a very clever, very talented guy. But I feel that sometimes, he lets his cleverness get in the way of a good story.

“City of Saints and Madmen” is his first visit to the city of Ambergris; a city unlike anything I can think of in the modern world, that plays mix and match with references of geographical locations and eras that should have logically never met each other, and yet blend together artfully in this strange place. The book is constructed as a collection of stories of wildly different formats. From traditional novella to diary entry, historical pamphlets and detailed bibliography, we get to know Ambergris little by little, as a strange and experimental literary tapestry is woven in front of our eyes.

It was the first time I’d ever seen world-building structured that way. I felt like someone who came upon the relics of a long-lost civilization and had to put disparate evidence together in order to understand the sort of place this once was. It was challenging, and very demanding – which was a bit more than I had bargained for the first time I read it, and I confess I found the exercise ponderous at the time. Nevertheless, my interest was piqued: I knew I had to revisit this strange book at some point. The city was a fascinating place, the idea of sentient mushrooms was so intriguing, and the writing was just way too good to ignore. Also, squids!

What you need to know when you crack open this book is that there is no exposition: you are thrown in the deep end and you sink or swim. The themes of madness (as implied by the title) and the nature of reality are omnipresent through every vignette and you need to pay attention to details because every story is intricately linked to the other, with hints of things to come (or things that have passed) dropped tantalizingly here and there. It can easily make one dizzy, especially with the very creepy, ominous atmosphere that permeates many of the stories.

“Dradin In Love” is a novella about love at first sight gone off the rails in the midst of a city-wide festival, during which citizens reach an uncontrollable frenzy that often ends in spilled blood and ripped limbs. The protagonist is adrift on unfamiliar streets, and has a shaky relationship to sanity; things spiral out of control and it is impossible to say when exactly the poor man takes the plunge into madness. I found this story elegant, unsettling and tinted with just enough eroticism (albeit super weird eroticism) to go “Oh, my!”. Dradin’s old-fashioned ideas and propriety are in such stark contrast to the almost savage debauchery of the city that you can’t help feeling sorry for him while snickering as he blunders his way to the enigmatic lady at the window.

“The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris” is just what the title promises, but VanderMeer’s humor definitely shines in this particular story. Writing this booklet as celebrated historian Duncan Shriek (with whom adventurous readers can get more familiar in “Shriek: An Afterword” https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), he explores the settlement of the site now known as the city of Ambergris by pirate John Manzikert I, how he purged the existing city of its mushroom-dwellers and founded a dynasty. But Shriek is a cantankerous man, and doesn’t hesitate to point out inconsistencies in the historical record and judge the immoral actions of the founders of his city. His text is liberally peppered with footnotes about the events and the characters, which makes this story look like a demented academic document. It also introduces the readers to Ambergris’ troubling history, a history soaked – not quite in blood, but in violent colonialism and conflict with the city’s original inhabitants: the mushroom people eventually known as the Gray Caps.

"The Transformation of Martin Lake" intertwines two narratives: excerpts of Janice Shriek's essay entitled "A Short Overview of the Art of Martin Lake and his Invitation to a Beheading", and a third-person omniscient narration of a few days in the life of Martin Lake, and the events that transformed him from decent but unoriginal artist, to the iconic and celebrated Ambergrisian painter known for having best captured the city in his works. The dual narratives both complement and contradict each other as the grotesque cause of Lake's stylistic evolution is slowly revealed.

"The Strange Case of X" is a wonderfully meta story, about a doctor working at the Ambergris asylum. He is charged with a patient who suffers from the troubling delusion that Ambergris doesn't exist, that he created it, imagined it down to its most trivial detail and that he is in fact a writer from a city named Chicago. Clearly, VanderMeer had a lot of fun writing this one, but it does raise the intriguing question of what happens when a writer gets lost in his own fictional universe.

What follows this story is almost 300 pages of appendix, composed of documents “found” by the attending doctor who treated the aforementioned X. They are short stories, monographs of various kinds and are laid out in different fonts, with beautiful engravings and illustrations. I won’t summarize all of them, but they are entertaining and creative.

As I revisited this collection of stories, I found myself enjoying VanderMeer’s lush prose even more than the first time. There’s something sensual and enveloping about the way he writes, and this strangely seductive vibe is a powerful hook. The bits and pieces of the history of Ambergris scattered through the stories are surprising, disturbing and quite simply fascinating. Even long after you put the book down, those squalid streets will still be around the corners of your mind.

But where the book loses steam is in the gigantic appendix section, which is basically the last half of the edition I have. I think that while the post-modernist experiment can be fun – probably more for Jeff than for the reader – it doesn’t really add to the stories or the world-building. I admire him for pushing the meticulousness that far, but frankly, I just ended-up skimming that section, especially the bibliography and glossary. This makes rating the book tricky, because if you just focus on the first 300 pages, I would be tempted to give it 5 stars. But the rest of the book is more like 2 or 3… Having said that, the full experience of “City of Saints and Madmen” requires at least a few glimpses into the appendix, so that leaves me with mixed feelings about the entire book. I settled on 4 stars just because it really is a brilliant work of art even if it’s a hard one to digest.

Surrealist, post-modern, baroque, darkly funny and bizarre. VanderMeer can only be accused of one thing: trying a bit too hard. I still prefer China Mieville’s work to his, but you have to appreciate the mad inventiveness and gorgeous prose. For the very patient New Weird fans and uber nerds who like elaborate puzzles.