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The bravest thing I ever did was agree to go nowhere tonight
Francesca Forrest's The Inconvenient God (2018) starts like a bureaucratic joke. Venerable Nando University is decommissioning its least consequential and most embarrassing god, a dropout divinity by the name of Ohin whose deadbeat devotees leave him offerings of bongs, bottles, and lingerie; toward this end it has summoned Decommissioner 37 from the Polity's Ministry of Divinities and scheduled the ceremony between campus construction jobs, as if expecting it to take nothing more than a scattering of incense and a few minutes' trance to finalize the natural decline of a god no one but slackers and stoners honestly, half-ironically believes in anymore. It's a usual thing. The official religious program of the Polity promotes abstract expressions of the divine over localized deities with names and personalities, who are gradually folded into the relevant Abstraction over time; the apple-goddess Amaya of the Northwest is one of the holdouts, but even she will soon be worshipped in the capital as just one more emanation of Abundance. Perhaps there are edges on this joke. There are certainly depths, as the decommissioner begins to discover when the god that manifests in response to her ritual is exactly as louche and lazy as she was led to expect from her Ministry briefing, but also something that absolutely no one prepared her for: once human. But who deifies a dropout? And why should the region's ancient apple-goddess care if they did? And if he's a usual thing, why can't she get a straight answer from anyone about the circumstances that led to his elevation? The longer she stays in Nando City, the clearer it becomes to Decommissioner 37 that Ohin's inconvenience is more than a matter of a condom-littered shrine; he threatens to expose fault lines in the university's history, the history of the Northwest, the region's relationship with the Polity as a whole. Even a god's memory is malleable, so easily lost—or altered. By the time the narrative is exploring questions of imperialism and assimilation, how much can be lost with a language and how much can be recovered with the right story, without losing an ounce of humor or compassion or numinousness the matter of Ohin has ceased to be a joke at all.
I love this novella. It is probably obvious that the mystery of Ohin resolves at ground zero of a number of issues I care about (I picked up my copy of this book on my way home from chorus rehearsal in my relearned familial endangered language), but the story is more than the sum of its ideas. The style is a graceful, often funny first person that catches the reader up on the shape of the world without lecturing or mistaking its narrator for an unbiased lens; the multi-ethnic, technologically contemporary Polity is not presented as a dystopia, but there's a chill to the distinction drawn between delinquency and sedition or a casual mention of the national language chased with the qualification "There are regional dialects, of course, and in isolated areas or recently incorporated territories, people may speak other tongues." That said, I would cheerfully read further novellas or even a novel featuring Decommissioner 37, the government official who has to find a humane and perhaps literally unorthodox way out of a dilemma as old as imperium and never shares her name on assignment, even with an ally, offering a childhood nickname in place of her impersonal title. I have a thoroughly unsurprising soft spot for Mr. Haksola, the high-strung university administrator who knows more than he's telling; he resembles "an anxious heron" and can't lie without spilling tea all over himself, guaranteeing my affection even when he was doing his best abstract expression of obstructive paper-pushing. The gods are richly evoked and not human even when they used to be and we are dropped some fascinating hints about their mutable natures ("Other decommissioned gods tell me that living as mortals is quite relaxing"). Even minor human characters are drawn clearly and generously, whether they have names or no. I was reminded not unpleasantly of Le Guin, in particular her novel The Telling (2000) and in general her habit of not drawing her secondary worlds from late antique to early modern Europe. The cover art by Likhain is even more beautiful and resonant with knowledge of the story, but even in isolation is the sort of thing you might want as a poster. I was left wondering where around here I could get persimmon wine.
I am reliably informed that the genesis of this novella can be traced to a six-year-old post in which I discussed the Roman concept of exauguratio, which facetiously makes me feel good about being pedantic at people and more seriously feels appropriate to the theme of keeping ancient knowledge alive. In the interests of local memory, I point out that the City of Boston Archaeology Program will be holding a ceremony for the dead of the Great Molasses Flood on Tuesday morning and the Boston Globe just gave an obituary to Durgin-Park.
The goddess smiled, and the gold that clad her became an apple-blossom-scented radiance that enveloped me, then spread outward, thinning and fading.
I love this novella. It is probably obvious that the mystery of Ohin resolves at ground zero of a number of issues I care about (I picked up my copy of this book on my way home from chorus rehearsal in my relearned familial endangered language), but the story is more than the sum of its ideas. The style is a graceful, often funny first person that catches the reader up on the shape of the world without lecturing or mistaking its narrator for an unbiased lens; the multi-ethnic, technologically contemporary Polity is not presented as a dystopia, but there's a chill to the distinction drawn between delinquency and sedition or a casual mention of the national language chased with the qualification "There are regional dialects, of course, and in isolated areas or recently incorporated territories, people may speak other tongues." That said, I would cheerfully read further novellas or even a novel featuring Decommissioner 37, the government official who has to find a humane and perhaps literally unorthodox way out of a dilemma as old as imperium and never shares her name on assignment, even with an ally, offering a childhood nickname in place of her impersonal title. I have a thoroughly unsurprising soft spot for Mr. Haksola, the high-strung university administrator who knows more than he's telling; he resembles "an anxious heron" and can't lie without spilling tea all over himself, guaranteeing my affection even when he was doing his best abstract expression of obstructive paper-pushing. The gods are richly evoked and not human even when they used to be and we are dropped some fascinating hints about their mutable natures ("Other decommissioned gods tell me that living as mortals is quite relaxing"). Even minor human characters are drawn clearly and generously, whether they have names or no. I was reminded not unpleasantly of Le Guin, in particular her novel The Telling (2000) and in general her habit of not drawing her secondary worlds from late antique to early modern Europe. The cover art by Likhain is even more beautiful and resonant with knowledge of the story, but even in isolation is the sort of thing you might want as a poster. I was left wondering where around here I could get persimmon wine.
I am reliably informed that the genesis of this novella can be traced to a six-year-old post in which I discussed the Roman concept of exauguratio, which facetiously makes me feel good about being pedantic at people and more seriously feels appropriate to the theme of keeping ancient knowledge alive. In the interests of local memory, I point out that the City of Boston Archaeology Program will be holding a ceremony for the dead of the Great Molasses Flood on Tuesday morning and the Boston Globe just gave an obituary to Durgin-Park.
The goddess smiled, and the gold that clad her became an apple-blossom-scented radiance that enveloped me, then spread outward, thinning and fading.
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It suits the story very well!
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Enjoy if you should read it! I recommend it, obviously.
Thanks for sharing your review and congratulations to the author!
The author publishes infrequently, but every time she does it's good. This for me, though, was a particular home run.
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Thank you! The book deserves it.
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You have leveled me, knocked me out in one blow.
Thank you.
(And we got persimmon wine in Machida, Japan--a local specialty of the city nearest where we lived when we lived as a family in Japan. It has a beautiful color and flavor.)
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Thank you for writing this story I wanted to write so much about. It's truly worth it. I hope lots of people notice.
(And we got persimmon wine in Machida, Japan--a local specialty of the city nearest where we lived when we lived as a family in Japan. It has a beautiful color and flavor.)
(That's lovely! I always associate persimmons with my mother, who loves them and used to bring them home in winter.)
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I would like that. I said on Facebook, it deserves all the attention it can get.
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Enjoy! I thought it was.
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I'm already halfway through!
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And done--and that was awesome! Thank you so much for the rec.
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You're very welcome! Yay.
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I love everything about it except that there isn't more.
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I'm glad people are talking about it outside of Boston! And, yes, the class-action lawsuit is part of the story I know.
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But a lot of places have a Northwest.
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Are apples native to the region at all, or is it the maintenance of orchards rather than wild trees that causes the problems?
But a lot of places have a Northwest.
It is definitely not our Northwest, but I hope you enjoy visiting it.
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That makes sense. I believe our crabapples are indigenous, though.
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Oh, wonderful. Enjoy!
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You're welcome! I'm very glad.
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Thank you!
Persimmon wine does sound good.
The internet appears happy to tell me how to make it.
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You're welcome! I'm so glad.
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I won't complain. The results are always so good.
Thank you.
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I really do recommend it.
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I think so!
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w00t!
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Nine
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Enjoy!
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I very much hope you enjoy it! I think the book is better than my review.