The Watermark by Sam Mills

 Mills's The Watermark is billed as a "quirky, literary love story" but it's a lot weirder and less romantic than that would imply. Rachel and Jaime are two Brits who are captured by a famous author (Augustus Fate) who forces them to drink a magical tea that keeps them trapped inside one of his novels; he's decided that having real people as his characters makes his writing better. In an attempt to escape the author's clutches, the pair flee into other novels hoping to find a way back into the real world.

So it's obviously metafiction, and it brings to mind both Jasper Fforde's delightful series and literary works like Miguel de Unamuno's Nieblas (Mist in English), where the main character gets into an argument with Unamuno himself (see also the romance novel Hero Worship, where the heroine finds herself in a historical novel and decides she can improve the story). The mechanism by which Jaime and Rachel are able to travel from book to book doesn't make complete sense, but that's not really the point; it rarely is in metafiction.

Instead, Mills is focused on the way stories, and art in general, can be controlled -- manipulated, commodified, and politicized. From the Fate's manuscript, a Victorian novel where tradition, religion, and capitalism are used to tightly control people's behavior, the duo move into a fictional novel written by another of Fate's victims; he promises to let the characters do what they want, but they run up against the limits of that when a world is not fully thought-out. From there it's a dismal novel about the tension between communism and fascism, two systems notoriously averse to artistic and literary freedom. A later section takes place in a quasi-dystopian future, where widespread use of robots with artificial intelligence forces humans to wrestle with who can make art and what its purpose is.

In a novel about stories and control there are, unsurprisingly, numerous references to the idea of the author as God (Fate's name is a little too on the nose), an attitude Jaime, a fervent atheist, especially latches onto. This, of course, ignores the fundamental Christian concept of free will -- God rather famously lets us do what we want (hence the Problem of Evil), which is the opposite of how Fate behaves as he tries to bend Jaime and Rachel to his will. But despite the references to God as author and Fate himself (that name!), not much time is spent on the influence of the supposed authors of these novels within novels. Instead it's more about breaking free of the stories we tell ourselves that can limit and even trap us.

This isn't the only concern of the narrative. With Rachel in particular Mills illustrates the way stories can also be an escape, and how that can be its own trap. When the novel opens, Rachel is struggling with grief, artistic block, and depression, and is not sure she wants to keep going. The idea of being in someone else's story and ceding control is deeply tempting, and it puts her in conflict with Jaime, who is desperate to get back to the real world. Complicating matters is the fact that there is no way for them to predict who remembers what every time they enter another story. One of the lovely parts of this book, then, is watching Rachel find purpose and meaning over the course of her journey.  

When they finally escape for good, it's into the Covid pandemic. Coming to in the midst of a bewildering lockdown environment adds a dreamlike quality that causes them to wonder if they really did escape. The novel ends on a somewhat melancholy note -- they've escaped, but the future is uncertain. It's not a traditional "happily ever after," but their love and their commitment to life is strong. Not everything worked about this novel, but I liked a lot of it, and I will be looking at more of Mills's writing.

CoDex 1962 by Sjón

Sjón's post-modern novel is comprised of three novels he wrote over twenty years: Thine Eyes Did See My Substance ( a love story but not really), Iceland's Thousand Years (a mystery but not really), and I'm a Sleeping Door (science fiction but not really). All three are narrated by Jósef Loewe and purport to be his autobiography, but in the tradition of Tristam Shandy, he is not even born until the end of the second part. Instead, the bulk of the narrative is focused on his father's trials as a Jew who escapes Nazi Germany and settles as a refugee in Iceland. 

The story itself is a metafictional narrative that plays with storytelling, weaving together folktales, history, Biblical stories, and fragmented accounts. And like a lot of metafiction, it's about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives and the world around us. Maybe Jósef is the child of a desperate woman so mired in grief and alcohol she has lost track of where she's been or who she's been with. Or maybe he is a golem, lovingly sculpted from clay by his father and mother and brought to life with the word "truth" and the seal from a gold ring. 

Just as the bones of a patient afflicted with Stone Man Syndrome react to blows by swiftly forming a new layer of bone tissue over the site, so Jósef's mind wove a story every time he encountered a painful thought or memory.

Images and ideas recur throughout and characters are connected in surprising ways. Iceland is a small nation, but this is also a story being told to a listener. These elements, and the frequent interruptions from the listener, remind us of the unreliability of the narrative -- not to distance us from the characters,  but to remind us that there is a storyteller behind the story.

Parts -- especially during the section that takes place in Germany -- can be quite vulgar and upsetting, and in that way it reminded me of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, but this book is far more humane. Despite the prevalence of evils like anti-semitism, greed, and violence, characters display kindness towards each other and a determination to make the best of what they have. The novel ends on a melancholy note, but also the recognition that whatever else is lost, the stories live on.

All stories have their origins long before humans discovered a means of storing them somewhere other than in their memories, and so it doesn't matter if books are worn out by reading, if the print-run is lost at sea, if they're pulped so other books can be printed, or burned down to the last copy. The vitality contained in their loose ends and red herrings ... is so potent that if it escapes into the head of a single reader it will be activated, like a curse or a blessing that can follow the same family for generations. And with every retelling and garbling, misunderstanding and conflation, mankind's world of and and stories expands.