City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where a grocers’ warehouse might become a palace, and an antique bank is hidden beneath a department store.
Want to make carnitas without all the fat? Bolognese without the wait? Why? Why when there are so many pork dishes that are not confited, so many Italian pasta sauces that don’t require hours of simmering. If “that” is to be avoided for whatever reason, it feels like a failure of the imagination to stay stuck on “this.” We, editors and readers alike, are all drinking the same very contemporary, very American flavor of Kool-Aid, keeping up the charade that we can have everything we want and nothing that we don’t, even as our lives feel harder and tighter.
The existence of the murals had leaked out of the rail yards by the late 1940s. “Art blooms in strange places but in all Portland perhaps the strangest is under the Lovejoy ramp to the Broadway bridge,” the Oregon Journal offered in passing.
A reporter at The Oregonian took a wrong turn coming out of downtown one evening, dodged an oncoming freight train, and unexpectedly found himself “surrounded by birds and animals” as well as “a fantastic half-tree, half-human that grappled with the night.”
This is a truly magnificent passage and we see in it Eddison’s similarities to Tolkien, Peake, and earlier pre-genre fantasy writers who understood landscape—and the artful rendering of it in literary form—to be absolutely integral to making their fantasy worlds, in some sense, real or real-seeming, and a key aspect of the verisimilitude so many fantasy writers use at the same time to denaturalize readers’ from their own world, rendering “reality” in new, critical perspectives. The scene begins with a moment in the changing of the seasons that quietly transitions readers from the big reveal at the end of the first chapter, and from there pulls the reader almost as a camera might move slowly through a forest in the opening scene of a film, lingering on tiny images and small happenings that each seem so delicately real and together prove the hapticity of this fantasy world.
Photographs scattered over the folding table, silvery black, ivory, muddy sepia, that one there tinted almost red, creases burring the corners and a long fold right through the middle of a group of men, their shapeless suits a black gone rusty brown. A stolid doorway behind them, columns rising up past a lintel carved with simple Gothic letters, Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. One of the men is tall and broad, his hatless hair bright white, and the younger, slighter man beside him laughs under the brim of a neat derby hat. The third of them’s quite somber in a simple jacket buttoned up to his throat, and something in his hands, but there the photograph’s been scratched, the ruddy tones of it scraped away.
Out under fluorescent lights, Ysabel approaches, wrapped in a filmy gown, feet bare on polished concrete. In one hand a glass half full of milk. “Jo?” she calls. “Jo?” Laying a hand on the high-backed black desk chair pulled up to that folding table, starting back at a bubbling grunt of a snore. Jo’s slumped over the photos, one folded arm a pillow, and a bottle there beside her, almost empty. Ysabel picks it up, brow quirking at the stylized yellow bee on the glass of it, the label that says Evan Williams Honey Reserve.
She sets the milk where it had been, and strokes Jo’s wine-red hair. Presses a kiss to her cheek. Straightening, she looks over the boxes stacked up against the back wall, regular banker’s boxes white and brown in mostly regular columns, four or five high, and some on the floor before them, and by the table, lids loose or propped open, and within them, so many more photographs.
“It is fast, funny, sexy, and sometimes violent—”
“…a flicker of sharp impressionistic scenes skittering atop a deeply imagined alternate present.”
“I think it’s the only time I’ve fallen in love with a city through a novel.”
