The Glamour (1984) by Christopher Priest: Priest is best known for his novel The Prestige, made into a movie by Christopher Nolan, and for taking the piss out of Harlan Ellison with his non-fiction screed The Last Dead-Loss Visions, a.k.a. The Book on the Edge of Forever. Here, he writes a tricky novel that spans the gap between urban fantasy and literary metafiction.
An unnamed narrator begins the book. At other points, we follow the story of an amnesiac London film journalist who's been sidelined for months by injuries sustained in an IRA bombing. Then we follow the story of the girlfriend he doesn't remember. Who is the unnamed narrator, though?
Tricky, though, right? The journalist's memories may be faulty or altogether invented. The girlfriend claims that the two of them possess the power of the Glamour, the ability to make themselves invisible in all ways to other people. She describes a wainscotting society of people with the Glamour, no longer able to make themselves visible to anyone without the Glamour. Is this true? And is her former boyfriend shadowing them at every turn, possessed of a Glamour so powerful that no one is aware of him unless he wants them to be aware of him?
Well, read the novel. It's curiously gripping and repeatedly bewildering in its play with narrative expectations. I suppose if Philip K. Dick and Robert Aickman had embarked on an unlikely collaboration, it might have read something like this. Recommended.
King Rat by China Mieville (1998): The prolific and gifted China Mieville's first novel is an urban fantasy that's about as subterranean and cloachal as they come. It's also a clever, subversive riff on that overused fantasy and science-fiction trope of The Chosen One and his Journey to Adventure.
Saul Garamond, a somewhat aimless 30-something living in London with his left-wing, widower father, wakes up to discover that his father has been murdered and that he's the prime suspect. The police lock him up. And then Something rescues him from lock-up and reveals his True Nature to him.
He's a rat.
In the universe of King Rat, the various animal species all have their avatars, avatars that can appear to be human but are ultimately (supernatural) animals. But Saul is a hybrid of rat and human, his lost mother a member of the Rat's ruling family. He's Prince Rat.
And so off Saul and King Rat go, with King Rat showing Saul a rat's eye view of London and Saul beginning to learn the powers and abilities he has as Prince Rat. Saul sometimes sees these abilities as super-powers, but they're not the sort of powers with which King Arthur or Luke Skywalker or Neo are blessed. Saul flourishes and gains strength by eating rotten food. He moves through the sewers and cracks of the city with ease. And being covered in muck and filth doesn't bother him -- indeed, he enjoys it.
King Rat has partial allies among the other animal kingdoms, though we meet only the bird and spider kings here. And all three have an Ancient Enemy who's come to London, and against whom they must unite or die. Saul is needed for the war, for reasons that are revealed about halfway through the text.
As a left-wing subversion of traditionally right-wing or conservative fantasy tropes, King Rat is a delight. It's a satisfying read with surprising shifts and turns, and an unusual protagonist in Saul Garamond. The Ancient Enemy's plan for world domination is off-beat but, given the Enemy's real identity, perfectly logical.
There are some problems -- Mieville's postmodern aversion to closure ends up looking a lot like a plan for a sequel, or at least a young writer's aversion to killing his darlings even when they need to be killed. But it's a grand, effluvium-covered adventure in any case. Recommended.
