What do you think?
Rate this book
Christopher Wild
“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
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
310 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2017
2 people are currently reading
98 people want to read
About the author
Kathe Koja
131 books939 followersKathe Koja is a writer, director and independent producer of live and virtual events. Her work combines and plays with genres, from horror to YA to historical to weird, in books like THE CIPHER, VELOCITIES, BUDDHA BOY, UNDER THE POPPY, and CATHERINE THE GHOST.
Her ongoing project is the world of DARK FACTORY https://darkfactory.club/ continuing in DARK PARK, with DARK MATTER coming out in December 2025.
She's a Detroit native, animal rights supporter, supporter of democracy, and huge fan of Emily Bronte.
Her ongoing project is the world of DARK FACTORY https://darkfactory.club/ continuing in DARK PARK, with DARK MATTER coming out in December 2025.
She's a Detroit native, animal rights supporter, supporter of democracy, and huge fan of Emily Bronte.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
August 4, 2017
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.
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.
July 12, 2017
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.
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.
August 22, 2017
The will is honed, trained, playful, relentless, the mind its twin in dark exuberance and nerve; and the body breathes in and out, one with the breathing world,rapt and glorying in even the smallest things -- the feel of breeze on bare skin,the vagrant scent of smoke, pink glitter of rain on a neon sign,the humble heat of bodies massed together on the train -- and all the vehicle and joy and habitation of Chris Marley, Christopher to his friends, his name a dare and a beacon, symbol and sigil, the poet's name, X04. [p. 195]
Any new novel about Marlowe is relevant to my interests, and Kathe Koja's more so than most. I'd seen the trailer and read the blog posts ... but I wasn't sure what to expect apart from poetic, visceral prose.
The first third of the book ('The Skinner's Trade') covers Marlowe's known life. He's working on a play, 'The English Agent', that the Service has requested, though they are unlikely to be happy with the results: his fellow intelligencers are thinly disguised, inept, corrupt. But Marlowe is trying to write himself a door, a way out.
The middle third of the book ('Night School') has Christopher Wyle, or Wild, tutoring a Miss Sloan in poetry; the setting is an unnamed American city in the middle of the twentieth century. A time of war, of subterfuge -- Chris becomes involved with the Free Speechers, resists recruitment by a shadowy import/export company (or do they have some deeper purpose?) and works on a poem about Icarus and Orpheus.
The final third ('Quod Me Nutrit') is set somewhere in Europe in a dystopian near future, a surveillance state where Chris Marley, tracked by the cuff on his wrist, goes by the tag 'X04': he's a poet, an activist, something akin to a rapper. State Security -- 'the Red House' -- would like him to write for them. He's disinclined.
Each section starts with the words 'he comes to himself in the alley'. He's been beaten, but doesn't recall his assailant. There are other resonances: the month of May, a song about mermaids, thunderstorms, birds in flight, Saint Sebastian. Resonances of names, too: a fellow named Deering, or Reeder, or Reed; a lover named Rufus or Rudy or Ruby ... they're caught up in the resonances, too. 'Why did you call me Kit?' 'I ... don't know.'
The poet -- he is always a poet -- writes by hand, one knee propped up; smokes tobacco; can't, and won't, be controlled by the men who think he serves them. He lives light, always ready to run, to move on: his only treasures are his own words, the notebooks in which he's written. He is, by his own admission, not a careful man.
This is a book that rewards a second reading, not least because the final quotation (from Marlowe's own translation of Lucan's Pharsalia) alters our perspective on the tripled selves of the novel. That said, I suspect this is a work I'll be returning to again and again.
April 15, 2022
Kathe Koja has always been several steps ahead of the rest of us. This is a staggeringly ambitious, futurist study of literature as love, action, politics. The dizzying combination of narrative density and constant story-motion positions it as a companion piece to Koja's newest, Dark Factory.
April 20, 2018
Read the review at: https://roofbeamreader.com/2018/04/20...
December 26, 2017
As much as I love Marlowe, I was not a fan of this.
August 4, 2017
A Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words review
Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
For the full review visit http://wp.me/p220KL-beD
From that review: " 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. "
For all our reviews, author interviews, and such, visit us at http://scatteredthoughtsandroguewords...
Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
For the full review visit http://wp.me/p220KL-beD
From that review: " 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. "
For all our reviews, author interviews, and such, visit us at http://scatteredthoughtsandroguewords...
May 10, 2019
This book is so gorgeous and devastating, it deserves a five page essay. Kathe Koja certainly has this effect on me, I find myself quoting passages from this book to my fiancee while screaming about how it's all so very unfair and how very dare she.
How can I describe this homage to Christopher Marlowe. It is both ode and fanfiction, in the best possible ways. It's an Icarus allegory. It's a meditation upon the power of the word. It's a romance that weaves and blurs lines between alternate universes and reincarnation while staying close enough to our reality to be incredibly disconcerting. It makes you highlight passages and look up words. It makes you cry. It makes you fall in love and it breaks your heart. It lifts you up and throws you down, much like the eponymous main character. In the first part of the novel, the one that takes place during Marlowe's canonical lifetime, he speaks of wanting to write himself a door. I think Kathe Koja did just that. A multitude of beautiful doors.
How can I describe this homage to Christopher Marlowe. It is both ode and fanfiction, in the best possible ways. It's an Icarus allegory. It's a meditation upon the power of the word. It's a romance that weaves and blurs lines between alternate universes and reincarnation while staying close enough to our reality to be incredibly disconcerting. It makes you highlight passages and look up words. It makes you cry. It makes you fall in love and it breaks your heart. It lifts you up and throws you down, much like the eponymous main character. In the first part of the novel, the one that takes place during Marlowe's canonical lifetime, he speaks of wanting to write himself a door. I think Kathe Koja did just that. A multitude of beautiful doors.
August 22, 2017
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.
August 23, 2017
Dare I say that this is Kathe's most intelligent novel to date? Her most passionate? You can feel the heat rise from the pages; she's totally in love with Mr. Marlowe, as we all should be!
The book is broken into 3 parts, like three past lives. First we are in Elizabethan England, and then we are transported to two modern day cities that remain nameless, but if you read closely, you can pin them down. We move through the book with Marlowe, who faces key struggles from each time period. Spies, religion, free speech, homosexuality, words used like weapons, and then some. This sort of narrative is intriguing and addicting, the only downfall being that we lose characters we grow to like rather too quickly.
There is no shortage of sex, boys and drinking. So if that's not your thing, move along. But in order to learn about Marlowe, you have to understand his sexuality and his view points on free speech and art.
Overall Christopher Wild is Koja's most ambitious novel to date. Buy a copy. Read it. Read it again. Learn. I know I did.
The book is broken into 3 parts, like three past lives. First we are in Elizabethan England, and then we are transported to two modern day cities that remain nameless, but if you read closely, you can pin them down. We move through the book with Marlowe, who faces key struggles from each time period. Spies, religion, free speech, homosexuality, words used like weapons, and then some. This sort of narrative is intriguing and addicting, the only downfall being that we lose characters we grow to like rather too quickly.
There is no shortage of sex, boys and drinking. So if that's not your thing, move along. But in order to learn about Marlowe, you have to understand his sexuality and his view points on free speech and art.
Overall Christopher Wild is Koja's most ambitious novel to date. Buy a copy. Read it. Read it again. Learn. I know I did.
September 6, 2017
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.
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.
November 21, 2018
I'd give this 3.5 if that were possible. This is an odd but ultimately affecting telling of the life of Christopher Marlowe in three acts and three time periods: his own time, the 1950s, and an unspecified dystopian future.
July 7, 2017
Excellent. Scheduled for publication date .
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 29, 2017
Loved this! Review to come...
February 23, 2021
It was good,it just did not keep my attention.Joshua Saxon was a very good narrator.I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.'
March 5, 2023
This book is written in three sections. I really enjoyed the Renaissance chapters, found the 1950's chapters sort of tolerable, and then couldn't stand the futuristic ones at all. YMMV
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 28, 2017
okay, so, look, I know: once again I pop back on here after months of inactivity just to randomly scream at you about a book that was so good it made me log onto this website so I could scream at you about it. but you guys.
you guys.
I have a problem, and the problem is this: kathe koja is a goddamn literary rockstar, but very few people seem to know or acknowledge this. every time I try to yell with someone about her books, I can't find anyone who's ever heard of them before. and this, my friends, is CRIMINAL, because she's truly an incredible writer and she blows me away every time and I just wish that more people could experience the sheer velvet rush that is her writing. reading one of her books is like being swept away in a river while around you the sun sets and gorgeous vistas pass by as you're carried to your doom. I realize that this sounds very silly and dramatic and maybe not analogous to many reading experiences, but that's just what it feels like, okay! I'm just trying to tell it like it is!
I found kathe koja from her under the poppy trilogy (which you guys should all read, oh my god, read it, please, READ IT) and I've followed her ever since, and I was so excited when I heard she was writing a novel about christopher marlowe. and this book did not disappoint!!! it is a tempest of passion, both the author's and the characters', and it's impossible not to be moved by it.
it's difficult to explain the plot - there isn't really one, unified plot - and it's difficult to explain even the story. it is really three connected stories, all with the same basic story-frame, though each embellish it very differently, and all of course are centered on marlowe - the first is set during his actual historical life, the second places him in an unidentified city somewhere in the mid 20th century, and the third takes place in a futuristic, although not wildly futuristic, sort of dystopia. characters flit between the stories, wearing different names but the same faces, serving different roles here and there, each tied to a certain kind of destiny which revolves around marlowe, who is such a delight to watch through each incarnation, in each era. I think my favorite story was possibly the second one, but they all lean on each other and come together to form an emotionally cohesive whole. I cried, I underlined, I fought the contradictory urges to speed through the pages and also to take it slowly and bask in the gorgeous lyricism of koja's prose. it was an Experience, as her novels always are. it's almost something that you seem to take in with all of your senses, even though physically the act of reading is the same - I closed this book exhausted, wrung out, and still utterly compelled by it.
idk how to tell you to read this book in a way that will make you want to read it, especially since her writing can take a little getting used to. and maybe not everyone will love it as much as I did - everything that hits kathe koja's buttons hits mine as well, I think, we share a very similar taste, and that's probably a large part of why her books are so dear to me. but there is also something undeniably and immutably special about her work, something which is impossible to find anywhere else, and something which I think everyone should sample at least once. and this wonderful, sad, turbulent, feverish, wild, and wildly felt little book is a great place to start.
original review from 11/25/17
OHHHHH MYYY GOOOOOOD, i will review this later when i get home from work but ohhhh myyyyy gooooooodddddddd it was so good.
you guys.
I have a problem, and the problem is this: kathe koja is a goddamn literary rockstar, but very few people seem to know or acknowledge this. every time I try to yell with someone about her books, I can't find anyone who's ever heard of them before. and this, my friends, is CRIMINAL, because she's truly an incredible writer and she blows me away every time and I just wish that more people could experience the sheer velvet rush that is her writing. reading one of her books is like being swept away in a river while around you the sun sets and gorgeous vistas pass by as you're carried to your doom. I realize that this sounds very silly and dramatic and maybe not analogous to many reading experiences, but that's just what it feels like, okay! I'm just trying to tell it like it is!
I found kathe koja from her under the poppy trilogy (which you guys should all read, oh my god, read it, please, READ IT) and I've followed her ever since, and I was so excited when I heard she was writing a novel about christopher marlowe. and this book did not disappoint!!! it is a tempest of passion, both the author's and the characters', and it's impossible not to be moved by it.
it's difficult to explain the plot - there isn't really one, unified plot - and it's difficult to explain even the story. it is really three connected stories, all with the same basic story-frame, though each embellish it very differently, and all of course are centered on marlowe - the first is set during his actual historical life, the second places him in an unidentified city somewhere in the mid 20th century, and the third takes place in a futuristic, although not wildly futuristic, sort of dystopia. characters flit between the stories, wearing different names but the same faces, serving different roles here and there, each tied to a certain kind of destiny which revolves around marlowe, who is such a delight to watch through each incarnation, in each era. I think my favorite story was possibly the second one, but they all lean on each other and come together to form an emotionally cohesive whole. I cried, I underlined, I fought the contradictory urges to speed through the pages and also to take it slowly and bask in the gorgeous lyricism of koja's prose. it was an Experience, as her novels always are. it's almost something that you seem to take in with all of your senses, even though physically the act of reading is the same - I closed this book exhausted, wrung out, and still utterly compelled by it.
idk how to tell you to read this book in a way that will make you want to read it, especially since her writing can take a little getting used to. and maybe not everyone will love it as much as I did - everything that hits kathe koja's buttons hits mine as well, I think, we share a very similar taste, and that's probably a large part of why her books are so dear to me. but there is also something undeniably and immutably special about her work, something which is impossible to find anywhere else, and something which I think everyone should sample at least once. and this wonderful, sad, turbulent, feverish, wild, and wildly felt little book is a great place to start.
original review from 11/25/17
OHHHHH MYYY GOOOOOOD, i will review this later when i get home from work but ohhhh myyyyy gooooooodddddddd it was so good.
December 21, 2017
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.
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.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews