Sustained whimsy

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A City Dreaming
by Daniel Polansky.
Hodder, 2016.

New York City is the setting for this picaresque fantasy, its episodic nature following the centuries-old tradition of listing the various adventures of a loveable rogue we’re introduced to simply as M.

The reader will soon come up with a list of suitable adjectives for this laid-back antihero of A City Dreaming – moody, morose, a mage who self-identifies as misanthropic but who’s also seen as ‘muscle’, simply because he seems well able to take care of himself. Well, most of the time.

And then there’s the Management, the backroom staff with whom M needs to stay the right side of lest he runs out of vital credit. Oh, and the pair of rival Maenads who treat the city like a pair of chessboard queens determined to achieve dominance. But is there more to this novel than what appears to be an exercise in sustained whimsy?

New York City, 1926

There was a bar nearby. There usually is, that’s one of the things about living in a city.

M is a man with a shady past and a timeline the length of which we can scarcely guess at; an apparent drifter (we first meet him in Paris) he lives by his wits when he’s not imbibing copious amounts of alcohol, rolling interminable cigarettes or enhancing his mind with drugs. In fact it’s his wits that seem more frequently to get him out of trouble than his reputed magical abilities, though we do see some of those in action.

He has a few friends, some closer to casual acquaintances than being bosom pals, but the ones who feature most often are a former squeeze, a girl with a mohawk who’s called Boy, Stockton who affects to be English but isn’t, Andre who’s French, Bucephalus who’s a shire horse of a being, oh and a few others such as young Flemel who wants to be M’s apprentice. Then there’s Celise and Abilene, the so-called queens of NYC, sorceresses maintaining a fragile truce when they’re not feuding over their respective turfs, enchantresses M tries to keep the right side of.

In fact we bump into a lot of people who aren’t always what they seem. ‘Wizards,’ we’re told, are ‘a factitious and untrustworthy lot’, what with

‘wonder workers, necromancers, illusionists, diviners, cantrip makers, artificers, channelers, chronomancers, psychics, half-holy men…’

Like many another urban fantasy A City Dreaming treats the conurbation as an additional character, with M’s quixotic adventures wandering the mean streets doubtless offering a mental route map for those familiar with New York City, past brownstones and through parks, libraries, metro stations and the like. But this is an alternative metropolis that M, like an only marginally more proactive Alice in Through the Looking Glass,  negotiates his world-weary way through, and we soon begin to feel that it’s playing cat-and-mouse with him. How soon will he tire of being a pawn on this particular board and move on?

I was, early on, disinclined to like this, a narrative that seemed to consist of a series of unrelated self-contained episodes spread over little more than a year. Then I realised I was starting to warm to certain features: turns of phrase (like M walking “with the even rhythm of a session musician”), echoes from other fantasies (Discworld, Wonderland, The Ministry of Magic), passages invoking wonder (“Magic is as old as the word, and the word is very old, passed down mouth by mouth during humanity’s long adolescence…”).

And more and more M’s grumpy cynical demeanor is exposed as a mask for his humanity and compassion, a hint of which is evident early on when, on his return to the city, he hopes to “remember and discover, to take pleasure in the surfeit of human possibility which is New York’s defining quality.” It’s that appreciation of human possibility that, despite the sustained whimsy, Polansky chooses to depict as M’s redeeming feature, one that ultimately leads him to the heart of the Big Apple, the dreaming city.

I mentioned Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass earlier. It won’t surprise you to know that in a novel that includes unwitting pawns and unholy bishops, and queens both white and red, that the number of chapters with the addition of an epilogue equals the number of pieces on a chess board. The novel turns out to be an extended metaphor for the game that is life.

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#WyrdAndWonder 2024: Ariana @ The Book Nook, Annemieke @ A Dance With Books, Jorie Loves A Story, Lisa @ Dear Geek Place, and imyril @ There’s Always Room For One More

A final fantasy review for May’s meme Wyrd & Wonder, and another addition to my thread of literary cities, Bibliocity.

Cité du Livre and Bibliothèque Méjanes, Aix-en-Provence. © C A Lovegrove.