Jake Casella Brookins Reviews Rose/House by Arkady Martine
Rose/House, Arkady Martine (Subterranean 978-1-64524-033-4, $45, 125 pp, hc) March 2023. Cover by David Curtis.
Arkady Martine’s Hugo-winning novels are delightfully huge, sprawling affairs. It’s a different kind of delight to see her approach some of the same themes and influences in a new style, as she does in her latest: the tight and unsettling novella Rose/House. Against the backdrop of the near-future California desert, two small-town detectives find themselves embroiled in a particularly strange case when the AI of the seemingly uninhabited Rose House – final creation of world-famous architect Basit Deniau – announces that it contains a dead body. Investigating this possible murder leads them to the late Deniau’s former student, to a strange and possibly-nefarious group of international art dealers and urban planners, and, most ominously, to the strange intelligence of Rose House itself.
The procedural homicide investigation is one of the most tried-and-true plot vehicles, and one that maps well onto genre setups far more outlandish than this. All too easily, these plots tend to double as copaganda, and an excellent if quiet part of Rose/House is how it distances itself from that – partially through plot, partiallythrough implied social changes. Alongside all the usual-but-devastating near-future details, such as water rations and accompanying desperation in the American Southwest, Martine includes hints of actual police reform. Precisely because these reforms read as boring and infrastructural – neither detective is armed at critical junctures, because of the “hours of check-out paperwork” – they read as encouragingly achievable.
Martine hat-tips William Gibson fairly early in the investigation, and Rose/House reads, in part, like a riff on the underexplored creepiness of his work: the uncanny closeness of inhuman technology, the hauntology of artifacts and built environments, both the promise and the threat of technological expanse and evolution. The nebulous larger plot behind the murder – of which our detectives descry only the vaguest of outlines – is one involving digital archives, legally and ethically fraught urban planning, and, as the novella somewhat self-consciously reminds us, weird architects: it all combines for a story that’s stylish, discomforting, and strangely believable.
Cyberpunk might be one influence I’d bring up in discussing Martine’s Teixcalaan novels – particularly if pulling on the interesting loose thread about the fused AI/human police force in A Memory Called Empire, a theme intriguingly revisited here. But a more likely comparison would be to C.J. Cherryh, whose political and psychological approach to space opera clearly informs Martine’s work. Rose/House, with its narrower focus – wholly terrestrial, unearthly as the house may be – is still digging into themes that Cherryh fans will appreciate: the artist’s desire to bend reality of Wave Without A Shore, the AI-assisted posthumous grasp for control of Cyteen.
My favorite bit of homage, though, is the superbly well-done nod to Shirley Jackson – Rose/House has a deeply satisfying set of recurring phrases and images that kind of rhyme with The Haunting of Hill House – in a different pitch, under different lighting. Nothing about this feels derivative. It’s Louis Kahn’s idea of ‘‘Silence and Light’’ as a prompt for a murderous ghost; it takes the house as seriously as the haunting. Rose/House is a freaky love letter to architecture, weird and otherwise.
Jake Casella Brookins is from the Pennsylvania Appalachians, and spent a fantastic amount of time in the woods. He studied biology, before switching over to philosophy & literature, at Mansfield University. He’s been a specialty coffee professional since 2006. He’s worn a lot of coffee hats. He worked in Upstate New York and Ontario for about 8 years. He’s been in Chicago since 2013; prior to the pandemic, he worked for Intelligentsia Coffee in the Loop. Starting in 2021, he’s been selling books at a local indie bookstore. He lives with his wife, Alison, and their dogs Tiptree & Jo, in Logan Square.
This review and more like it in the April 2023 issue of Locus.
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