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Christopher Wild

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https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2215640451

I follow Kathe Koja so I knew that she was working on a Christopher Marlowe book. I sorta expected it to be historical fiction, a fictional biography of the playwright. I was wrong. Yes, part of the book is historical fiction but the rest is genius.

Christopher Wild is separated into 3 segments that somehow manage to elegantly flow into and compliment each other.

The first section is "The Skinner's Trade" and it's about the period of time leading up to Christopher Marlowe's death. This section reminded me of the her Under The Poppy trilogy. I loved the Rufus character and this whole section, and really the whole book, will probably prompt a deep dive into Marlowe after the holidays.

The second section is "Night School". First, I love the connection to the infamous Night School that met during the Elizabethan age. This section takes place during an unnamed time that has resemblance to the McCarthy era. I don't know if there's a proper word for it but Kathe Koja is brilliant at building up the tension that comes with the seedy world of backroom negotiation and governmental black ops. This section reminded me that, not too long ago, homosexuals were deemed to be high level information clearance risks and a governmental career could be stifled if you were found in a gay bar. This section served as a reminder of how fear of the other hasn't really gone away.

The last section, "Quod Me Nutrit", was probably my favorite. Koja creates this futuristic society that isn't too far from reality. In her world, borders have been closed and people live a few steps away from an Orwellian 1984 state. The industrial "villain" from the "Night School" section is name checked. This section really speaks to the power of words and poetry and in a time where the CDC is warned to not use certain words in order to get funding, it becomes a foretelling of what could happen if things remain unchecked.

The language of "Christopher Wild" is as ornate and beautiful as Poppy was and reviews I read seem to focus on how it's too much. I don't think it's too much. Literature should make you reach for a dictionary now and then to look up a word. Kathe Koja includes people I know of but also has me looking up people I have never heard of. For me, when I'm inspired to look further into things a work of fiction has brought to my attention, it rises that work to a new level.

The only thing I dislike about this book is that it cuts close to home and my own personal experience with same sex relationships. This book has me thinking about past loves which is never a good thing when I'm currently not dating. It's not Kathe Koja's fault that she has the ability to make the relationships between her Marlowe and his lovers ring with truth. But Rufus and Tomas has me pondering on my own Rufus and Tomas.

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Synopsis: Three lives. One man.

Marlowe lives three different lives in this story, each time awakening in an dark alley, living a new life. I am afraid that for me, the narrative did not work; it was incoherent and disjointed (each paragraph begins with a dash symbol). I could barely follow the dialogue - was it all in his head or was he actually speaking the words aloud (hint: all dialogue is in italics), and thus I struggled at times to work out who was actually narrating the stories.

For me personally, the character portrayal, the editing and punctuation (or lack thereof), writing style and storytelling put the author firmly on the back foot with me. Marlowe was a complex character - poet, spy, heretic - there is so much that you could do with him in a fictional context.

And as much as I love Marlowe, I was not a fan of this, and sadly, I would not recommend it.

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Christopher Wild
by Kathe Koja

What an interesting novel!

To give a rough summary of the story, this novel follows playwright/poet Christopher (Kit) Marlowe through three different time periods and geographic locations. In each, we meet him during a particular time of his life and he relives this part of his life in 16th century London, 20th century USA and in a future, European location.

I loved Koja's character of Marlowe. He's charismatic, dangerous and sexy. He's reflected as a gay man, though, of course, homosexuality wasn't really understood or reflected in the UK in the 16th century in the same way it is now. He has several lovers in each period and, as a reader, you root for Marlowe even though you know his destiny. It's clear he has enemies from the state (he may have been a spy) and as a result of his criticism of organised religion. More than anything though, it's clear Marlowe's words have power in these complex worlds.

Personally, I loved the worlds of 16th century London and the future periods above the 20th century US part. To me, the characters and the worlds were more vivid, though, as a Brit, it figures that this would be the case. Marlowe's relationships seem stronger and the peripheral characters seem more fleshed out, somehow. And, Kit himself shines brighter in those spaces.

Koja's style is emminently readable. The first section is, by necessity and in relation to the time period, perhaps denser and more complex to modern ears. But I enjoyed that complexity. To me, it shows the muck and sleazy glamour of the period in the same way that "Shakespeare In Love" did at the cinema. Although the second period was also quite easy to picture, I can't put my finger on quite why I liked it less than the others. The modern period is clearly a not too distant future and, like the Elizabethan era, it's political climate seems stark with treachery around every corner.

Overall, I thought this was a well-paced novel that reflects a truly fascinating character.

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I was waiting for the right moment to read this book.
Beautifully written, with a charming main character, Koja's work definitely stands out.
I am absolutely interested in reading more from the author.

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Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for this review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Alright, time for the confession, I picked this up because I'm an English major and I got into TNT's now canceled show on Shakespeare. I wanted to like this but found myself struggling at times even if this novel is beautifully constructed.

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This is the book equivalent of super rich chocolate; delicious, but best eaten in small doses. After just a few pages my mind would be reeling from the onslaught of details and images and information and I would need to put it down for a while. There is a breathless quality to the pages that translated across to me, reading the almost stream of consciousness prose made me feel breathless. So a challenge at times, yes, but worth it. This book is beautiful, sumptuous and overwhelming, and gets as close to the line where prose and poetry meet as a book is able. I recommend it, but let yourself be in the right mood for it. Also be prepared to develop a crush on Christopher Marlowe. Just saying.

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Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5

“All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools.”

Poet, spy, atheist, smoker, badass: Christopher Marlowe loved whom he pleased, said what he thought, wrote plays that turned London upside down (and blazed the trail that Shakespeare followed)—and was killed at 29, in what the government rushed to call a drunken tavern brawl.

But can a voice so passionate ever die?

Kathe Koja’s literary love affair with Christopher Marlowe takes her fiction across genres and in a whole new direction.

​Go wild.

Christopher Wild by Kathe Koja is a book whose writing exemplifies the phrase "too clever by half".   Divided into sections, the first part of the tale is Christopher Marlowe's plague ridden England, where he's an agent during Elizabethan times, writing his plays and spouting off his views about religion. Oh and having copious amounts of dangerous sex, especially with his boy, Rufus.  All told from Marlowe's perspective in his Elizabethan English language, dense verbiage and all.  If you are a word aficionado and a lover of Marlowe or English major, then this section and story is written with you in mind.  His poetry, his beginnings, a mystery play supposedly written at the behalf of the Secret Service and his death.  It's all here...in excruciatingly slow, dense language.  As I read, I swear I despaired of ever getting past a certain percentage.

Part of my issue with this is that I connected more with poor Rufus than I did with Marlowe.  And yes, I'm a fan of Shakespeare.  Not that it should have anything to do with it.  It was that nothing served to connect me emotionally to Marlowe the character.  I could look at the writing intellectually and think, 'clever, very cleverly done' and admire the narrative style.  Yet all the while bemoaning the fact that I had to drudge through the rest of the story like so much sludge.

The language only changes moderately when Christopher lands in the future. The prose flows in much the same style, however, letting one admire the phasing, yet still removing the reader from any emotional connections to the storyline. And again, it was so slow going that I  thought I was never, ever going to finish.  Felt like double the length.   War and Peace felt moderately short compared to this at points.

I think with Christopher Wild, it will depend on what you expect out of this story.  If you as a reader are looking for drama and emotional connections, as I was, this is definitely not the story for you.  If on the other hand, you love history, consider this an imaginative exercise in what might have happened to Christopher Marlowe and his literary works and can appreciate over 300 pages done in this style of writing, well, then, this is certainly the story for you.

I don't know.  I'll put this away and perhaps, try to tackle it some other time.  But for now I'm onto other lands and escapades!

Cover art is nice.

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CHRISTOPHER WILD is Kathe Koja's love letter to the great Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe wrote some of the finest plays of the 1590s, rivaling anything Shakespeare wrote at the same time. His plays are beautiful: extravagant, lurid, with larger-than-life heroes/villains, and drunk on poetic language. Marlowe was also in his own life a larger-than-life character: an irascible brawler, an atheist at a time when frankly avowing such lack of religious belief could lead to torture and execution, and with a sexual preference for boys (this latter was true of Shakespeare as well; but in Shakespeare's case there is enough "plausible deniability" for conservative scholars to try to wriggle out of it, while Marlowe's record is completely unequivocal). In addition -- or despite all this -- Marlowe is known to have carried out missions for Queen Elizabeth's secret police for at least part of his career. (Elizabeth was the first ruler to establish something like a secret police in the modern sense; the degree of spying on members of the public, of people induced or bullied into spying on one another, and of anonymous reports of wrongdoing, blackmailing by the security services, etc., was -- allowing for differences in technology -- about as ubiquitous in Elizabethan England as it was in East Germany under the Stasi). Marlowe was murdered at the age of 30, in circumstances that still remain mysterious.

Koja's novel gives us three iterations of Marlowe. The first is a reimagining of Marlowe's actual final days. We get a vivid sense of what Elizabethan London was like, with all the dirt and stench and crowds and continual scheming and plotting. His murder turns out to be a political one, which is entirely plausible (though we will never know for sure). The second places Marlowe in an early to mid 20th century industrial city, with its slums and pollution. The third is a science fiction extrapolation: Marlowe in a near future society with its ubiquitous surveillance via drones and mobile phone monitoring.

In all three settings, Marlowe is a man of intense passions -- for boys, alcohol, and tobacco, and above all the drive to write subversive verse. He is from a humble background, but highly educated, but he has abandoned his prospective higher social and economic status because it would interfere with his freedom. He doesn't really belong anywhere, due to his unique imagination and literary drive -- but he is more comfortable with the outcasts, the hookers and druggies and urban poor, than he is with more elite and posh segments of society. In all three cases, he struggles to resist being suborned to assist the ruling class through his writing -- he is too stubborn, proud, and honest to himself to give in, but in all three worlds his chosen precarity (which he cannot function without) leaves him open to intimidation by the powers that be.

What really makes the book work is the intense, gorgeous, restless onrush of Koja's prose (third-person, but staying closely with Marlowe's perceptions and thoughts -- what literary critics sometimes call "free indirect discourse." A character who never willingly stops for anyone or anything is conveyed to us in languafe that also never stops. Koja gives us an intensely romantic vision -- one that is entirely appropriate for Christopher Marlowe, the man turned legend due to his words, and to the life that we cannot help imagining behind those words. The novel is deeply inspirational today, when the political problems that the novel depicts in past and future scenarios is also very much a feature of the present moment, and when the kind of passion and sensuousness that the novel revels in is in short supply.

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I found this novel a riveting, transporting read, taking me from the streets of Elizabethan England to an early fascist America, and on to a near-future dystopia. With each incarnation of Kit, the entourage and ensemble of his first life follow him to work out their karmic destiny—to betray, bear witness, or save him.

Kit’s love of words, tobacco, and men; his wit, genius, and exasperating tendency to gravitate toward subversion and trouble through a heartbreaking triptych of lives are captured in a rush of raw, brilliant, riotously gritty prose that nailed me to the page.

post on 08/06/2017

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Having always been interested in anything to do with Christopher Marlowe this book sounded right up my alley. Bit of a surprise to find this such a terrible read. The overall layout of the book and the words contained within were both completely unappealing to me. Found myself wondering if anyone actually looked at this book or read it before publishing.

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Christopher Wild is an imaginative historical novel, a menacing dystopia, and a grimy city tale in one. It tells a raucous life, a claustrophobic life, a poet’s life, three times over: the trajectory of Elizabethan poet Christopher Marlowe in his historical setting and beyond. The first third is Marlowe as he faces danger from the Service for his role as an intelligencer, his famous plays, and his infamous pronouncements about religion and beyond. The second part is a twentieth-century tale of a gritty poet’s life, tied up in gay bars and covert investigation. The final section is a near-future dystopia of intense surveillance, where the poet known as X04 is fighting for his freedom.

Koja’s book puts an unusual spin on a historical figure who has been the focus of plenty of written works previously, from conspiracy theory novels claiming that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare’s works to Burgess’ delightfully playful A Dead Man in Deptford. The first section reads like another in this line, the fan fiction about the outrageous life of an apparent gay atheist spy turned poet and playwright from the late sixteenth-century. The fast-paced prose hurtles forward and the references are piled in, meaning that it can feel like a whistle-stop tour of every mention that needs to be made about Marlowe’s life. For fans of him and novels about him, this feels a bit too obvious, but the references are necessary for less knowledgable readers to be able to appreciate the later two parts.

The remaining two thirds of the novel tell two other stories, other outspoken Christophers who also write poetry, fight the authorities, and sleep with a complicated tangle of men. Koja takes advantage of the looseness of Elizabethan spelling to create new versions and echoes of characters and scenarios in a way that will probably delight some and annoy others. Every version reads Ovid and Lucan (the real Marlowe translated works by both of them), smokes tobacco (as per the infamous ‘all who love not tobacco and boys are fools’ line from Richard Baines’ list of accusations), and writes poetry. The prose style that captures a tumultuous Elizabethan London doesn’t slow down, and whilst it is slightly less effective in the later sections, it allows for a poetic style and an overlaying of words that matches the way the narrative and characters are overtly replicated.

This kind of transformative work is nothing new (and indeed there are plenty of examples in literature and on the internet of people doing similar not only with Marlowe, but with a whole range of historical figures), but Koja’s combination of the settings does feel fresh, particularly the final scenario in which the dark web and digital surveillance give a new meaning to the spy-intelligence-based drama of Marlowe’s probable life. Marlowe fans are likely to enjoy the ride, even if some of the ideas (like that he was forced into writing a new play about the secret service that led to his death) are somewhat out there. As novels, TV shows, and films about Shakespeare continue to proliferate (and often reduce Marlowe to a bit part), it is always good to see more attempts to present elements of Marlowe’s life in new fictional ways.

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Excellent! Scheduled for publication date .

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