Freddy and Mr. Camphor by Walter Rollin Brooks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Freddy the Caretaker, Rat Art Critics, Patriotic Insects, the Man with the Black Mustache and his Dirty Faced Boy, a Rich Man and His Butler, and Proverbs “It’s because you’re too fat,” said Jinx, the cat. “Golly, it makes me hot just to look at you, pig, sitting there grunting and mopping your face.” Freddy the Pig wants to escape a hot spring and his duties as Editor of the Bean Home News and President of the First Animal Bank, so he leaves the Bean farm for a cushy summer job as caretaker of the wealthy Mr. Camphor’s estate: for keeping an eye on the place, Freddy will get fifty dollars, meals, and lodging in a well-appointed houseboat on the lake. Furthermore, as Mr. Camphor and his butler Bannister hope to write a book disproving proverbs like “a rolling stone gathers no moss,” the rich man will pay Freddy $10.00 for every saying he can test by experiment. This leads to humorous moments like when Mr. Camphor complains, “Money is the root of all evil,” only to have Bannister point out, “If you really believed money were the root of all evil, sir, you’d get rid of all your money!” It all goes well for caretaker Freddy, lounging on Mr. Camphor’s houseboat (“I’m a lucky pig!”), until some old antagonists from previous books show up. Simon the rat and his clan have moved into Mr. Camphor’s mansion and don’t take kindly to his attic-stored “family” portraits (“Why, it’s our artistic duty to chew ’em up”), while the Man with the Black Mustache and the Dirty Faced Boy drive noisily in and try to muscle (and frame) Freddy out of his job (“It needs a man around the place”). A WWII subplot runs through this eleventh of Walter R. Brooks’ Freddy the Pig books, Freddy and Mr. Camphor (1944). As the patrons of the First Animal Bank are withdrawing all their money to invest in government war savings stamps, the spider Mr. Webb is holding patriotic mass meetings to persuade insects to refrain from eating farm vegetables for the duration of the war: “we are still all good Americans… Are we not?” Threatening the spider’s campaign is an obnoxious horsefly called Zero who points out that spiders don’t eat vegetables and scoffs at the patriotic agenda. A few other Freddy books also reveal their WWII era provenance, but less earnestly and intrusively than this one. The fate of Zero after losing a political debate (in which “calling names is entirely permissible”) is disturbing because the novel approves of it. Most villains in Freddy books, from needlessly destructive rats to animal-hating robbers, are defeated, humiliated, exiled, arrested, and/or reformed. But because Zero (a reference to the Japanese fighter aircraft?) is “unpatriotic,” his epitaph is “So perish all traitors!” And maybe because I dislike patriotism, the busybody Mr. Webb, who spreads his patriotic no-vegetable eating movement from farm to farm, and calls his wife “Mother” (even though they apparently have no children), is irritating, and I found myself unusually not wholly enjoying the novel. The story also has some loose ends. Brooks never explains how Zero became able to spin webs and leaves the proverbs sub-plot unfinished. Luckily, there are plenty of the usual virtues of the Freddy books here: humorous scenes and conversations, concise and vivid descriptions, quirky wisdom, nonsensical animal “facts,” formidable foes, savory friends, and, of course, the protean pig Freddy, who, while serving as Mr. Camphor’s estate caretaker, finds time to don a smock and beret and do a little painting restoration on the side. I love Brooks’ quirky nuggets of wisdom, like “For pigs understand boys pretty well, perhaps because they are so much alike. If fathers and mothers who have trouble with bad boys would consult pigs oftener, they would profit by it.” And his straight-faced animal facts, like “Even a cat cannot see anything in complete darkness, although all cats pretend that they can,” and “Fleas are so nearly invisible that they find it easy to get away with things that wouldn’t be tolerated for a moment in larger creatures.” And his wide range of registers, including Jinx the cat’s demotic English (“Hi, old pig! … We thought the old sausage grinder had got you at last”), Simon the rat’s unctuous English (“Well, well . . . fancy meeting you here, pig! What a small place the world is, to be sure. Well, don’t you recognize me? Haven’t you a warm handshake for your old friend, Simon?”), and Breckenridge the eagle’s “high-flown” English: “Your young friends, with a fortitude out of all proportion to their size, descended by way of the chimney. They found much to criticize in the housekeeping, I am given to understand. But after a prolonged search they discovered large quantities of plunder—much of it merely heaped up in the bathtub. Which indicates quite sufficiently, I feel, the character of this Mr. Winch and his offspring.” By the way, as I’m reading my way through all twenty-six of Brooks’ great, too much forgotten Freddy the Pig books, I realize how much adult targeted verbal humor they have and recall that when I read several of them as a boy, I thought they were serious talking animal adventures and never dreamed they were funny. But now! Brooks was writing children’s novels for adults. Another interesting point in this novel is a minor touch that, I believe, E. B. White took and flew with in Charlotte’s Web: a spider writing English messages in its web! Here it’s Mr. and Mrs. Webb writing signs in their webs announcing the patriotic rallies. Both E. B. White and Brooks worked at The New Yorker, and I’ve been noticing other things from the Freddy books that may have inspired White with his classic children’s novel. The illustrations by Kurt Weise are top notch: monochrome; more realistic than Disney; showing choice moments from the text (like when a troop of fleas attack some pesky rats or like when Freddy dresses in some of Mr. Camphor’s clothes to pass for a burglar). I did notice a few typos in the Kindle version. Anyway, if you can stand the patriotic subplot, this novel should be amusing for you, but Freddy the Detective, Freddy the Politician, and Freddy and the Poppinjay are much better. View all my reviews
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The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades by Roger Crowley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars If only-- If only the self-serving Genoese, Venetians, and Pisans weren’t always fighting each other and trading vital martial slaves and material to the Mamluks. If only the military orders (Templars and Hospitallers etc.) weren’t always treating each other like rivals. If only the heads of the Crusader states could all get on the same page. If only the European countries were not always at loggerheads with each other and or the different Popes. If only the Mamluks were (finally) less organized, less united, and less proficient at treaty loopholes, military logistics, and drum and trumpet walls of sound. Then maybe Acre might've carried on Christian for a few more years (but THEN what?). The catchy main title of Roger Crowley’s The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades (2019) conjures up images of repeated foiled Muslim attempts to take a particularly stubborn and vital tower, but actually the final siege of Acre, the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land does not really hinge on this one tower among the many defenses of the city, and the “accursed” appellation doesn’t really have any particular application to the history Crowley relates. Really the book is about its subtitle. The first seven chapters—occurring from 1200 to 1290—set the historical and cultural context for the siege, including Crusader debacles in Egypt, the influential advent of the Mongols, and the increasing importance of the Mamluks of Egypt, with the Outremer Christian cities and castles getting captured or sacked one after the other in the thirteenth century, till the siege of Acre ends the two-hundred-or-so-year Crusader attempt to maintain a Western Christian presence in the Holy Land. The next six chapters relate the last siege of Acre led by the Mamluks from about April 10 till May 28 of 1291. The fourteenth chapter cleans up the last loose Crusader ends thereabouts, and the Epilogue gives a glimpse at the Acre of today superimposed over the Acre of a thousand and more years ago. I found this book less suspenseful, absorbing, detailed, and informative than Ernle Bradford’s The Great Siege: Malta 1565 (1961), but I did get some interesting points from it: --The disastrous disunity among the Christians. Through much Crusader history, the Muslims were not much more unified, but they got their act together in the latter half of the thirteenth century under Mamluk sultans like Baybars. --The effective use by the Mamluks of religious fervor, booty lust, defenses mining, trebuchet engineering, Greek fire, kettle drums (mounted on camels!), and treaty loopholes. --“A sixty-day siege [by an army of 25,000 men] would need the removal of a million gallons of human and animal waste and 4,000 tons of solid biological waste,” which is probably one reason the Mamluks catapulted their waste into Acre! --The inherent unsustainability of Crusader satellite states so far away from Europe, and the precarious way they lasted as long as they did via trade with Muslim states. I appreciated that Crowley quotes from a fair number of Muslim sources and seems even-handed in his depiction of the attackers and the defenders of Acre. His Epilogue made me want some day to visit Acre (in today’s Israel…) About the audiobook… If only a better reader than Matt Kugler read it! Although he reads clearly, he also reads like a sensational documentary narrator, too often overly dramatically emphasizing what he sees to be key words or syllables, such that he numbed me to the impact of the truly important key words: “the Sultan’s SENior engineer” (why is it so important that we know this is “the Sultan’s SENior engineer”?) “the equally imposing COMpound of the Knights Hospitallers.” (why is that syllable stressed so much there?) Etc. In short, Kugler is no Simon Vance! (Vance intelligently reads The Great Siege: Malta 1565, which must be one reason why I so prefer it to Crowley’s book.) I’m not sorry to have listened to The Accursed Tower, but I didn’t learn enough or have a good enough time to recommend it highly, and probably other books by Crowley like 1453 and Empires of the Sea (read by better readers) would be better. View all my reviews
Gallant by V.E. Schwab
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “The stuff of fairy tales or something darker” Fourteen-year-old Olivia attends and lives in Merilance School for Independent Girls, “an asylum for the young and the feral and the fortuneless. The orphaned and unwanted.” The matrons of the school try to give the girls a “practical” education to help them survive in a society that doesn’t want them. Olivia has taught herself her most useful skills: drawing and picking locks. Partly because she is the only mute in the school and has a bad temper (when angered, she’s capable of breaking things and throttling foes), Olivia is friendless, feared by the other girls and disciplined by the matrons. She is a sensitive girl; in fact, she’s the only person in the school who can see ghouls (ghosts), which does raise the question (for a while) as to whether they are real or products of her imagination, whether she can see them because she has heightened sensitivity to them or is suffering from mental delusion. Olivia’s prized possession is her mother’s cryptic journal, written to her father, whose untimely death while her mother was pregnant with her apparently drove her mother mad. The last page of the journal is addressed to Olivia and says, “You'll be safe as long as you stay away from Gallant.” Thus, it is with happiness and dread that Olivia learns that her uncle has located her after long searching and has written a letter summoning her “home” to Gallant. The bulk of V. E. Schwab's Gallant then features a rambling old mansion, a family curse or duty, a hostile cousin (“I am the last Prior!”), a pair of kind mixed-race lover-caretakers, a lot of melancholy ghouls (ghosts), an intricate clockwork sculpture featuring a replica of Gallant and a kind of shadow replica of it, a big garden invaded by creepy gray weeds and punctuated by a disturbing ruined wall with an ominous iron door, and a malevolent white-eyed “Master” from the other side of the wall. Despite the fraught secret history, unpleasant cousin Matthew, and her new scary dreams, Olivia desperately wants to have found a true home at last. The story is, then, a Gothic YA horror mystery, as Olivia gradually learns the deal behind her parents, her family, Gallant, and so on. Perhaps Schwab gets a bit too much into YA short sentence/paragraph/chapter cliffhanger page turning mode as the novel progresses. It belongs to the current stylistic trend of much young adult fiction (it’s even narrated in the present tense, though blessedly not first person). And I wish the clock-house sculpture did something integral to the story instead of just looking cool. And as is usual with horror stories and mysteries, this one is more interesting before we find out what’s going on and what kind of evil monster Olivia must contend with. If in her orphanhood and unique sensitivity, intelligence, and isolation Olivia seems like a typical YA heroine, the book does interesting things with dreams and death and ghosts and communication, her muteness is affecting, and it’s nice that there is no romance angle for her. And Schwab is a good enough writer of vivid and tight enough prose to make us care for the girl and so to feel great suspense on her behalf. And there is lots of neat writing in the novel. Neat creepy fantasy: “Not a ghost, exactly, just a bit of tattered cloth, a handful of teeth, and a single, sleepy eye floating in the dark. It moves like a silverfish at the edge of Olivia’s sight, darting away every time she looks. But if she stays very still and keeps her gaze ahead, it might grow a cheekbone, a throat. It might drift closer, might blink and smile and sigh against her, weightless as a shadow.” Vivid similes: “Something wriggles inside her then, half terror and half thrill. Like when you take the stairs too fast and almost slip. The moment when you catch yourself and look down at what could have happened, some disaster narrowly escaped.” Neat descriptions: “… the raspberries bursting brightly in her mouth.” “They [some drawings] are strange, even beautiful, organic things that shift and curl across the page, slowly resolving into shapes. Here is a hand. Here is a hall. Here is a man, the shadows twisting at his feet. Here is a flower. Here is a skull. Here is a door flung open onto—what? Or who? Or Where?” I am thankful that Schwab apparently wrote this as a compact stand-alone novel and not as the first in yet another trilogy or longer series, and I will probably read another book by her, although I'm not eager to embark on one of her young adult fantasy trilogies. View all my reviews
La Louve de France by Maurice Druon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The body of France was sick Yikes! Maurice Druon sure doesn’t coddle his reader. At the end of the fourth novel of his Les Rois Maudits (The Cursed Kings) series about the early 14th century decline of superpower France, the time of “punishment” is coming, partly because Prince Philippe (son of Philippe Le Bel) has benefited from two regicides to become King of France. The prologue to the fifth book in the series, La Louve de France (1959), then skips forward five years to announce that Philippe is dead! Despite Philippe being good king material and having a solid enough position vis-à-vis his barons and the Pope, his reign ran into a buzz saw of adversity, ranging from famine to a Templar-inspired pillaging of towns and churches by huge bands of roving youths. In short, after being the main, mostly appealing player in the fourth novel, Philippe is forgotten in the fifth, for which Druon shifts his focus to thirty-three-year-old Queen Isabelle of England, nicknamed by her foes the She-Wolf of France (la Louve de France) because she’s the feisty daughter of Philip Le Bel. In the first novel, Isabelle was already estranged from her husband, Edward II, who preferred spending his time and love on men, and by the time of the fifth book, things have gotten so bad that Isabelle is being kept under a rotating house arrest, spied on and isolated and stolen from by the King’s favorite Hugh Despenser and his people. She fears for her life. This fifth novel introduces new historical figure-characters, like the feckless and irrational Edward II, doomed to become kingly only after it’s too late, and Roger Mortimer, Edward’s ambitious and implacable foe and Isabelle’s would be lover, who begins as a political prisoner in the Tower of London (much of this book takes place in England), while reacquainting us with various remarkable characters from past novels: --Robert d’Artois the giant nephew and Mahaut d’Artois the giantess aunt, STILL locked in their bitter long-running family feud and still formidable political players; --Charles Valois, younger brother of Philippe le Bel, ambitious and reckless, would be Holy Roman Emperor and de facto ruler of France through his weak nephew King Charles IV; --Spinello Tolomei the wizened Lombard banker, who for many years has funded most of the disastrous wars waged by France; --his nephew Guccio Baglioni, still resentful that Marie Cressay rejected him and still ignorant that she had to in order to raise the heir to the throne of France as if he were their son; --Hugues de Bouville, rotund, soft, sensitive, and in need of a good Confession about sacrificing the baby of Guccio and Marie to save the heir to the throne and hiding his identity; --and Pope John XXII (Jacques Dueze), no fool, wise to Valois’ extortionary practices and curious about Guccio and Marie. Druon often changes our perceptions of such characters. We begin this novel loathing Edward and Hugh and sympathizing with Isabelle (for the first time) and Mortimer and Robert and end by sympathizing with Edward and Hugh and loathing Mortimer and (to a lesser extent) Isabelle. Druon doesn’t achieve this simply by making characters suffer (though that helps), but by writing their points of view and ennobling them via suffering. Even the self-serving Valois, who, after diverting a Crusade to free Armenians from Turkish oppression in the holy land to a French invasion of a French populace in Aquitaine, just the latest instance of his life-long ambitious scheming, is forced to confront his mortality earlier than he’d imagined and more movingly than we’d expected. Soon Valois is talking with, praying for, and loving Enguerrand de Marigny, whom in an earlier novel he had executed on false charges: “Each man who dies is the poorest man in the universe.” The overall effect is to show that people, even famous historical figures, are people. “The saintly are never as saintly, nor the cruel ever as completely cruel as others believe.” Druon’s eye for irony is ever keen, as when Guccio takes “his” son to see Clemence, widow of the poisoned King Louis Hutin, and the woman has a pang of envy at seeing “Guccio’s” healthy boy, while neither she nor Guccio have any idea that the child is Clemence’s and the rightful King of France. Or in a line like this: “One went from war to tournament and from tournament to war. Ah! What pleasures and noble adventures!” Nothing alienates us from medieval France and England so much as the horrific public humiliations, tortures, and executions they performed on criminals: “And all these knights who had sworn by Saint George to defend ladies, maids, the oppressed and orphans, rejoiced, with much laughter and joyful remarks, at the spectacle offered to them by this corpse of an old man cut in two halves.” Though their disposal of the parts of an important deceased man is also exotic: “The entrails, as Valois had disposed of them, were transported to the abbey of Chaâlis, and the heart, enclosed in an urn, given to his third wife to await the moment when she herself would have a burial.” Druon, as ever, however, makes many dry, incisive insights into human nature that resonate with us today, like “Nothing is more repugnant to a woman than the sweat of a man she's stopped loving,” and “But the proud easily have a pure conscience.” And he writes wonderfully vivid, historically transporting descriptions: “La Réole, built on a rocky spur and dominated by a circle of green hills, overlooked the Garonne. Cut out against the pale sky, enclosed within its ramparts of good ocher stone gilded by the setting sun, displaying its bell towers, the towers of its castle, the high framework of its town hall with its openwork bell tower, and all its roofs of red tiles pressed one against the other, it resembled the miniatures which represented Jerusalem in the Books of Hours. A pretty town, truly.” One thing to keep in mind when reading Les Rois Maudits is that Druon may sometimes present rumors as facts. For instance, in the third book Mahaut poisons King Louis Hutin and his baby son, when Wikipedia (for what it’s worth) says Louis probably died of illness and doesn’t say anything about how his son died. Similarly, in this fifth novel a red-hot poker fatally shoved up a royal anus is now seen as propaganda by historians. So Druon is writing historical FICTION, not history. That said, his novels make psychological sense and are absorbing and powerful. View all my reviews
The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Are you ever likely to have a normal life?” Have you heard? Frances Crawford of Lymond is back in Scotland! You know, the villain guilty of “reaving, ruttery, and all manner of vice and treason,” the woman-hating scoundrel who blew up his sister and a bunch of nuns, sold intel to England to cause a devastating Scottish loss on the battlefield, and spent the last five years in the “stews and alleyways of Europe” womanizing and drugging and thieving! What’s Lymond (with a big price on his head) doing back home? Well, about the first thing he does (with his merry band of sixty outlaws) is to crash a party his mother is hosting in the family castle, rob forty ladies of their jewelry, throw a dagger into one of their shoulders, steal the family silver, flirt with his older brother’s nineteen-year-old wife, and set fire to the castle. Surely, there must be some extenuating circumstances to his supposed crimes? Well, he does, apparently, shoot his brother in the shoulder with an arrow at a Robinhood-esque archery contest and send his sister-in-law numerous pieces of jewelry, involve a blind young noble woman in his machinations, and adopt (corrupt?) as his protege young Will Scott the eldest son of a Scottish lord… Part of the pleasure of reading Dorothy Dunnett’s The Game of Kings (1961) is gradually and suspensefully finding out what Lymond is really up to and how much of his reputation is accurate and how much false. As he rides around Scotland and Northern England scheming and banditing and spying and seducing (?) in his attempt to interview three Englishmen while causing as much trouble as possible to the English army, his honest and resentful big brother Richard, the third Lord Culter, is obsessively trying to catch him to make him stand trial in Edinborough for his manifold crimes. All that personal and family stuff is going on in the 1547 historical context of the Game of Kings of the title, whereby post-Henry VIII France, Spain, and England (at least) are using dinky feisty backwater Scotland to jockey for advantage over each other, sending there a variety of mercenaries from other countries (Italy, Germany, Denmark, etc.) as well as their own countries’ soldiers. Scotland has been walking a tightrope between France and England and will probably need to choose one or the other to be its master in the near future. Five-year-old Queen Mary of Scotland is a valuable prize to win to cement an alliance for either France or England. In that interesting historical international and political situation, Dunnett writes compelling characters. Substantial, strong, and interesting female characters are numerous, from little girls like ten-year-old English girl Philippa Somerville (who can’t quite forgive Lymond for interrogating her in front of her somewhat terrorized parents) to old women like Lymond and Richard’s sixty-year-old mother Sybilla (who knows at least as much about what’s going on as anyone else). Christian Stewart, the open-minded, independent, red haired blind young lady, is great, a match for Lymond. Even Agnes Herries, at first an obnoxious and unpleasant 13-year-old heiress warped by romance stories, becomes a neat character. Lymond, aka the Master, is a wonderful protagonist! He’s charismatic, enigmatic, brilliant, educated, knowledgeable, strategic, tricky, bawdy, witty, playful, and bold. He quips, quotes, and sings in French, Spanish, Latin, German, and (of course) English. He plays a mean guitar and a divine harpsichord. He’s a crack bowshot and an accomplished fencer, wrestler, and brawler (don’t fight him if he’s in boots and you’re in slippers). He can outdrink and outthink anyone. He confesses to a woman at one point that one reason for his bad reputation is that everyone hates a person who excels at too many different things. He has cornflower blue eyes and blond hair. “Every line of him spoke, palimpsest-wise with two voices. The clothes, black and rich, were vaguely slovenly; the skin sun-glazed and cracked; the fine eyes slackly lidded; the mouth insolent and self-indulgent.” Is Lymond too perfect? Well, when he dons a black wig and a Spanish accent to pose as a mercenary captain, it’s a bit too much, but he isn’t invulnerable, capable of being knocked out or seriously wounded or having his spirit obliterated. And the interactions and relationships between all the characters are involving, with many intense conversations and suspenseful action. After numerous raids, skirmishes, battles, duels, bargains, treacheries, interrogations, fortune tellings, alchemical experiments, quarrels, debates, secret meetings, disguisings, hostage takings, and the like, the novel climaxes in an intense courtroom drama. Throughout, Dunnett’s writing is prime: vivid, tight, witty, and elliptical. Bantering lines: “A fine, capable hand. Line of life—hullo! You appear to have died at the age of seven.” “The embalmers are exceedingly skilful nowadays,” she said gravely. Witty lines: “Have you ever lost your memory?... It's an experience pleasant but precarious, like the gentleman who sat under palm trees feeding fruit to a lion.” Cool lines: “God knows I've been wrong politically, legally, conventionally and any other way—in judgments before. But these always seemed to me the more irrelevant aspects of human decency.” Savory lines: “Well; in comes this fellow ordering gloves, and as fussy as a flea in a bathtub over the pattern…” Keen lines: “Patriotism is a fine hot house for maggots. It breeds intolerance.” Vivid, evocative descriptions: “High on the hilltops, among the wet scrub by the burn, a blackbird was singing. The notes, round as syrup, melted into the raw air of dawn and coaxed the cold, reddened sun to its day.” As Dunnet has Lymond speak multiple languages, especially French and Latin, and her characters use some Scottish or archaic English words here and there, it’s probably not possible to understand everything fully in the audiobook. But it’s always entertaining or moving or exciting etc. And audiobook reader David Monteath does superbly with different moods, voices, accents, and characters, without overdramatizing. And listening to the Scottish accent is a great pleasure: “Wait noo, I’ll be doon.” Dunnett brings an exotic past time and place to life with apparent accuracy and authenticity, while working in universal themes that resonate with us today (like family conflict and bad reputation and political scheming). I’m looking forward to the next novel in the series. View all my reviews
Night's Master by Tanith Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Parables of Sex, Cruelty, Beauty, Humor, and Fantasy Tanith Lee’s Night’s Master (1978) reads like The Thousand and One Nights crossed with an occult Bible (or any demonic play on the Christian myth) filtered through Tanith Lee’s distinctive fantasy vision: compact, meaningful, unpredictable, controlled, imaginative, and erotic. Its three “Books” (Light Underground, Tricksters, and The Lure of the World) are each comprised of two “Parts” made of three short story chapters each. It all coheres as a composite novel oriented around an enigmatic satanic anti-hero, the demon king Azhrarn, “Lord of Darkness, Master of Night, Bringer of Anguish, Eagle-Winged, the Beautiful, the Unspeakable,” and his relationship to humankind and the world. The wicked, playful, and vengeful Azhrarn is irresistibly (devilishly?) beautiful and charismatic, and to see him is to love him, often to one’s cost. He manifests as male (usually) or female (occasionally) and is catholic in his amours. The parable-like interconnected stories relate the often-unintended results of Azhrarn’s or his minions’ interference with mortals, including his adoption of a beautiful boy, his challenge to a blind poet, his makeover of a mutilated sorceress-queen, and his three attempts to seduce a virginal bride. The Master of Night likes to present himself as icily detached, but there are moments like this: “If Azhrarn heard that last cry, who knows. Perhaps he was watching in some magic glass for the end of the youth, and saw him drown; perhaps for a moment some of that awful pain hurt his own throat, and in his mouth, which spoke so wondrously and with such charm, perhaps there came, for the moment of a moment, a taste of green salt water.” For this first book of her Flat Earth Series, Lee envisions three realms: the Underearth of the demons, the Flat Earth of human beings, and the Upperearth of the detached gods who made the earth and people and have long since regretted and tried to forget the mistake, leaving humanity to the whims of the demons. (Of course, Lee makes it clear that people don’t need interference from demons to do awful things to each other: “The snake had learned the speech of man centuries before, for hatred and jealousy must find a tongue; only the creatures which never feel these things have no need to talk. Therefore, the snake spoke.”) Some stories feature lesser demons, like a great one where an ambitious bottom feeder worker demon called Viya crafts an exquisite necklace with tears for jewels, which Azhrarn sends to the Flat Earth, where it plays on human weakness to tally a high body count: “A collar constructed in ambition and pride and jeweled with sorrow could only stir up greed and smiling fury, and bring weeping after.” In addition to that necklace of tears, Lee conceives other fine fantastic things, like love-sick demonic groans that turn into bats, a Chair of Uncertainty, cursed diamonds, a bitter sorceress-queen, a wizardly cold war, a cloud of Hate, a woman made from a flower, a tree with flowers of ash… She does interesting things with gender, too, as in depicting people’s souls as half female and half male, or as in making the gods of Upperearth genderless, or as in having a raped princess get a fitting revenge. The book is, as the original (best!) DAW cover says, “an adult fantasy.” Lee writes lots of varied sex: male-male; male-female; demon-human; demon-spider; snake-snake; comical-horrible; etc. The stories are funny and terrible, exquisite. Lee’s prose is terse, lush, controlled, poetic, and savory, reminiscent of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth and prefiguring Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, but all her own. I love the tone of her narrator, an unblinking but winking serpent’s eye, with an ironic delivery of beautiful images and a no-nonsense approach to cruelty. She thinks nothing of killing her heroes, innocent or villainous, but she allows (occasionally) for redemption or resurrection. Here is one of my favorite passages embodying the appeal of this book: “In those days a curse or a blessing was like a bird. It had wings and could fly. And the stronger the blessing or the curse, the stronger the wings and the farther the bird could go. The curse of Bisuneh was very strong, for everything in her, who had once been named Honey-Sweet, had turned as bitter as gall. And the bird of the curse, which was of a color never seen by mortals save with an inner eye--the vivid color of pain and the dark color of brooding--flew unerringly towards the earth's center... and perched upon Azhrarn’s shoulder, he both saw and felt it. Azhrarn smiled. Perhaps winter smiles when it bites dead the leaves on the trees. ‘Some mortal has cursed me,’ said Azhrarn…” View all my reviews
The Trouble with Peace by Joe Abercrombie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “Only the mad could be steady here.” The Trouble with Peace (2020) is another dip into Joe Abercrombie’s grim epic fantasy world, where there are no good heroes or altruistic mages but plenty of hard choices, treachery, and graphic ultra-violence. This second book in the Age of Madness trilogy takes place right after the first one, A Little Hatred (2019), and about twenty-eight years after the events of the First Law trilogy (2006-08). As in his other books, third-person narration rotates among a varied set of flawed point of view characters in different locales and situations, often outside their comfort zones. Newly-crowned ex-party prince King Orso sits the Union throne uncomfortably, aware that he’s hated by both nobles and commoners and that the Breakers and Burners are fomenting rebellion—the Great Change—from among the lower classes. And he’s still feeling dead at having been dumped without explanation by his quondam lover Savine dan Glokta (we know it’s because she learned they were siblings). Must he let it all be handled by his Closed Council (including Savine’s spy master father Arch Lector Glokta and the First of the Magi Bayaz, no Gandalf but a terrifying free-market banker puppet master)? Savine is still snorting up pearl dust and trying to get over having been caught in an uprising in Valbek, when she had to flee a mob at one of her factories, shave her head, live among the poor, and scrounge garbage to survive. Her business interests are suffering, and she’s pregnant with a bastard. Is her only solution to marry Leo dan Brock, the Young Lion, the current hero-darling of the Union? With her connections and his fame, what might they not accomplish? “If the world had to lose so she could win, so be it.” Leo is the new Governor of Angland (the northern land of the Union), but he’s still afflicted by the festering leg wound he received when besting the Great Wolf of the North, Stour Nightfall, in a duel. When Leo visits the capital city of the Union to try to get King Orso to understand Angland’s plight, he’s invited by treasonous nobles from the Open Council to help them “free” King Orso from the corrupt Closed Council. What’s a brave, brainless hero who’d rather lead a cavalry charge than strategize to do? “No corpses, no glory.” Rikke, the daughter of the Dogman, the leader of Uffrith, a Northern protectorate of the Union, is ever more plagued by the fits attendant upon her raging Long Eye gift/curse of prophetic vision, leaving her unable to eat and often unable to distinguish between past, present, and future. Is her only solution to visit a verboten mountain lake to meet an undead witch whose face is stitched together with gold wire? “What use are straight answers in a crooked world?” Jonas Clover is a grizzled Northerner who follows survivor precepts like it’s better to stab a sleeping enemy than fight him in a battle, and it’s better to stand with the winners. Thus, when Stour Nightfall murdered his uncle to become King of the North, Clover stabbed his old friend Wonderful in her back to (appear to) stand with Stour. How can he stick to his policy of avoiding battles when given a troop of Northern fighters to lead onto Union soil? Victorine “Vick” dan Teufel, the loyal spy-pawn of Arch Lector Glokta, arrives at the border crossroads city of Westport to prevent its aldermen from voting to leave the Union to join its bitter enemy Styria. Will she find the right balance of favors, threats, and violence? Will her scrawny right hand boy Tallow ever touch her conscience? Finally, the hulking veteran Gunnar Broad is living in uncomfortable luxury with his beloved wife and daughter while thugging for Savine to improve “labor relations.” (Don’t stand near him when he removes his spectacles!) Will he ever act on his feeling that the workers he intimidates would live and work better with higher pay and safer working conditions? The way Abercrombie manages those point of view characters and their predicaments and sets them on collision courses is page turning, if not enjoyable. It's challenging when point of view characters you like do things you dislike, but it becomes intolerable when they unconvincingly do them for plot contrivance, and it’s worse still when they repeatedly rationalize their behavior, all of which gets irritating with Savine, Leo, Vick, and Broad. Abercrombie similarly mistreats supporting characters like Glokta and especially Leo’s mother Finree. In A Little Hatred, she’s a calm, informed, wise, brave, and effective leader, Governor and General of Angland, controlling Leo’s worst heroic inclinations. Here, she’s suddenly pathetic, blind to what her son’s up to and then pleading and shrieking with him about it when it’s supposedly too late. I didn’t quit on this book because Abercrombie nonetheless made me need to find out what would happen to his characters, and because Rikke and Orso and their friends are so surprising and appealing. And because Abercrombie skewers heroism (“Heroes are defined after all not by what they do or why but by what people think”), mocks war (“farting bugles and bumbling drums”), and shows its horror (utter madness in which only insane people are capable). However, he writes exciting and suspenseful war scenes, so that despite their awful absurdities and graphic violence, we do read them on the edge of our seats. He's NOT writing a truly anti-war war fantasy akin to the likes of Red Badge of Courage or All Quiet on the Western Front, which deny the reader any kind of morbid thrill. I enjoy his wry humor, as in lines like “It occurred to him now, the way the slaughter man occurs to the pig.” I get a kick out of his characters’ cynical wisdom, like “Hoping for a thing often seems to be the best way to bring the opposite.” And he writes biting banter, like: “Being your father is the only thing I’m proud of.” (Glokta) “And you’re not even my father.” (Savine) “That should tell you about everything else I’ve done.” (Glokta) And Leo’s homosexuality and homophobia are a potentially neat development. I like Steven Pacey's reading of the audiobook, especially his ever-surprisingly high voice for Orso’s herculean ex-hero bodyguard Gorst. Finally, the novel contains two prime surprises, and it ends with enough closure and enough juicy loose ends that although I don’t need to rush to the last volume in the trilogy, I will read it to find out how everything will end up. View all my reviews
The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “What had become of us?” OR Growing Up in a Declining Athens OR Love During Wartime The Peloponnesian War makes the Trojan War look like a brief walk in the park. In Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine (1956), fifty-year-old Alexias recounts his youth, first love, and early manhood in Athens during its devastating, nearly thirty-year war with Sparta. Alexias begins by relating how when his mother was pregnant, his father decided to name the baby—should it be male—after his beloved younger brother, and that because the baby was prematurely born small and ugly—not fit to bear the name Alexias—his father wanted to have him exposed on the mountain, for on that birth day the twenty-four-year-old brother had taken hemlock to die with his plague-killed lover, tipping over his cup to write the youth’s name, Philon, in the dregs, “as one does after supper in the last of the wine.” Baby Alexias was spared being exposed when a Spartan attack on Athens called his father away. That opening initiates the themes of the novel relating to the effects of war on everyday life, the depth of male-male love, the fraught relationship between Alexias and his father, and the melancholy awareness of the passing of time. After telling of his natal brush with death—ironically saved by the war—Alexias narrates the story of his youthful education in philosophy, politics, war, and love against the backdrop of Athens’ decline through its long conflict with Sparta. Building a loving relationship with his young step-mother; meeting Socrates for the first time at school, being caught by his ugliness, wisdom, and charisma, and becoming his lifelong student/friend; seeing off his father on the ill-fated Sicilian Expedition (a debacle that speeded up the decline of Athens); meeting the love of his life, Lycus, son of Democritus (with Socrates playing Cupid!); fighting alongside Lycus against Spartan raids; winning the foot race at the Games in Corinth; working through his resentment of Lycus’ jealousy; joining the Athenian navy; surviving Sparta’s siege of Athens by any means necessary, including posing as a sculptor’s model/lover; and much, much more. To reiterate: as Alexias grows, Athens decays, and he and Lycus lose their youthful innocence, grace, and beauty. Sadness, then, underlies the story. As Alexias learns what is important (to balance freedom with responsibility and democracy with individual excellence and to know oneself before attempting to know anything else), his wonderful city forgets what is important, changing from a proud beacon of culture, democracy, and liberty to a cruel empire, to an oligarchy, and finally to a vassal of Sparta. Alexias is writing the book as a still grief-stricken middle-aged man; recalling one’s youth is ever a nostalgic activity. The novel, however, is much more than sad, for as Alexias says, “There is a beauty of the soul that works out through bitterness like a vein of marble through earth.” And his love for Lycus is luminous: “Here’s to life. You gave it me.” And the novel has so much interesting and exotic ancient Greek culture and LIFE! Sports, festivals, plays, music, philosophy (Socrates and the sophists!), politics (democracy vs. oligarchy!), education (pedagogue-chaperons!), trade, war, gods, superstitions, statues, gender roles, class divisions, and love. Alexias’ class prized love between men (especially young ones) more than that between men and women, looking on the former as the noble stuff of poetry and romance and the latter as the mundane stuff of marriage and reproduction. His father gives Alexias advice on how to handle the importunate suitors he’ll attract as he comes into his youthful beauty (one shows up at his house with serenading hired musicians), and Alexias notes that his friend Xenophon was a little strange for not being interested in men. It was no homophobic culture. Although Alexias and his family and lover are fictional, Renault writes convincing supporting historical characters like the wonderfully charismatic and enigmatic Alcibiades, Xenophon, and Plato. Socrates is the philosophical and moral compass here, making everyone who interacts with him question preconceived assumptions and think for themselves, such that whoever happens to be in power in Athens hates him, whether democrats early or oligarchs late. He teaches his students (from whom he accepts no money and insists on calling “friends”) things like “Who can do good without knowing what it is?” And “Know thyself first.” Renault writes lots of such wisdom, like “The soul is the surfeit dream of a man with enough to eat.” And intense psychological moments, like “I had made his memory live for him, and he had made it live for me, so we stared both of us with an inward eye, seeking blindness again.” And powerful love, like “Always from my first remembrance, whether he rode or walked or ran or stood talking in the street, I knew him apart from all other men.” And vivid descriptions, like “Spring was here. On the terraced hills below us, new barley bloomed the earth with green, and the black vine stocks were budding. We were sunning ourselves with the lizards on the great warm stones…” And potent, culturally appropriate similes, like “I saw him on the wall leaning upon his spear with firelight on him like a warrior done in red on a black vase.” Renault is an excellent historical fiction writer, telling an absorbing and moving story while immersing us in Greece such that it’s alien and alive and resonates with us. Barnaby Edwards gives a fine reading of the audiobook. Lovers of historical fiction and or of ancient Greece should read this novel. View all my reviews
The Between by Tananarive Due
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An African American Family Horror Novel Thirty-eight-year-old Hilton James is productive and caring, giving back to his community by effectively running Miami New Day, a hospital for recovering addicts. His beloved wife Dede has just been elected the first African American judge in Dade County, and they have two cute and intelligent children, Kaya and Jamil. But all is not well. Dede has started receiving ugly racist death threats, and Hilton has started having vivid nightmares he can’t remember but that make him wake up screaming and sweaty and reluctant to sleep. Still more. Weird daily life discontinuities start popping up, as when, for instance, Hilton realizes that although the Dolphins were beating the Colts 14-0 at halftime, they ended up losing while scoring only thirteen points, or as when a doctor in his hospital brings him some patient forms to fill out that Hilton knows he just filled out. Is Hilton suffering from a sleep disorder? Or becoming schizophrenic? Or being haunted by ghosts? Or slipping between his real world and other alternate realities? Or being persecuted by a white racist military-veteran who starts taking over his dreams? Can Hilton’s psychiatrist friend Dr. Raoul A. Puerta help him, or is his approach too scientific and by the (consensus reality) book for what ails him? Tanarive Due’s The Between (1995) hooks us from the intense prologue depicting key events from Hilton’s boyhood: “Hilton was seven when his grandmother died, and it was a bad time. But it was worse when she died again.” The main action of the novel in the present alternates past tense waking action chapters with present tense nightmare ones. As the vivid and horrifying nightmares start leaking into or informing the waking action, and as Hilton continues to be unable to remember anything from them upon waking, Due creates a powerful ironic suspense—which unfortunately also makes Hilton’s inability to remember his dreams begin to feel contrived and frustrating. The novel kinda reads like a Stephen King story, starting out slow in terms of the supernatural and building up verisimilitude with very human characters and situations so we’ll get more scared when the scary supernatural stuff really gets going. Because Hilton and his family feel so real and appealing, the novel becomes increasingly painful as he becomes increasingly unable to control his nightmares, and his waking behavior at work and at home starts distressing his staff and family. (Perhaps because the nightmare chapters start hinting at what’s happening to Hilton, I started losing patience with his obtuse if not stupid behavior in the waking world.) As in many Stephen King novels, the supernatural is scarier in this one before we learn what’s going on with it. And after all, as is also often the case with Stephen King, the real horror is family horror—when family members change strangely or hurt us or seem like to die, etc. The audiobook version—capably read by Kevin Kenerly—features an interesting 2021 preface by Due, about how she got started writing speculative fiction as a black woman, how she published her first story—this novel—how she was inspired to write what she knew and not to pretend to understand things she didn’t know by Hurricane Andrew (1992), her mother (interest in monsters), Stephen King (horror), Anne Rice (unwitting advice), Gloria Naylor (Mama Day), and how back in 1995 she thought at first that maybe having a white racist villain wouldn’t wear well after civil rights activists like her parents had apparently achieved what they’d set out to achieve—only to watch the Oklahoma bombing, the election of Trump, the January 6 insurrection, and so on. I did like this early African American horror novel, especially things like White or Black Jesuses, the dark mocha complexion of Dede and the red-clay brown of Hilton’s, and the racism still alive and well in America) and will read more books by Due. View all my reviews
Elric of Melniboné by Michael Moorcock
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Fate was teaching him strange lessons.” The Elric Saga Volume 1: Elric of Melniboné (2022) presents in internal chronological order the following compact novels: Elric of Melniboné (1972), The Fortress of the Pearl (1989), The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (1976), and The Weird of the White Wolf (1977). Each novel features Michael Moorcock’s surreal imagination, bleak vision, vivid description, violent action, and pulpy characterization. The albino wizard warrior Elric broods over it all: self-exiled, self-loathing, philosophizing, peripatetic; hating his decadent Melnibonéan home but unable to fit into the barbaric Young Kingdoms; asking existential questions; existing in an unhealthy symbiotic relationship with his moaning, singing, shrieking, and soul-eating Chaos-forged sword Stormbringer (don’t be standing next to Elric when he draws it). Without the vitality gained from rare drugs and his demonic blade, Elric wouldn’t even be able to lift the sentient sword, which he talks to “as another might talk to his horse or as a prisoner might share his thoughts with a cockroach in his cell.” As he says in one way or another more than once, “I am nothing without this blade,” and “I am not fit to live.” The collection begins with an odd introduction-story by Neil Gaiman, “One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock” about a loner book worm suffers boarding school while idolizing the consummate outsider Elric for living in “real” stories. Elric of Melniboné introduces Elric, the physically weak, magically strong, and inappropriately thoughtful Emperor of the 10,000-year-old Melnibonéan Empire, now reduced to its capitol city Imrryr, the Dreaming Isle, and subject to the aggressive envy, hatred, and lust of the up-and-coming human Young Kingdoms. Elric loves his beautiful cousin Cymoril, while her ambitious brother Yrkoon loathes Elric (because he’s not cruel enough to rule) and yearns to replace him on the Ruby Throne. Sea and land battles, treachery, mercy, magic, a mirror that steals memories, another plane, Elric’s patron deity Duke Arioch of Chaos, and—finally—Stormbringer. The Fortress of the Pearl begins with Elric dying in the city of Qvarzhasaat, which is at least as decadent and proud as Imrryr, when he’s “saved” by being made to agree to steal the Pearl at the Heart of the World for the ringleted, lipsticked, and giggling Lord Go. A trip to a desert oasis, a holy girl in an enchanted sleep, a dangerous dream quest with a beautiful dream thief through various realms of dream, and questions about reality and dreams. Finally, “More than pearls can be conceived in dreams.” Sailor on the Seas of Fate is made of three novellas that could almost happen in any order. In the first, Elric joins Team Eternal Champion to try to prevent sibling sorcerers from consuming all the energy of our universe. In the second, he cruises around in a Limbo world with Count Smiorgan trying to solve the mystery of a stallion with an invisible rider, an obsessive love-sick Earl, and the daughter of a merchant’s daughter. In the third, Elric and Smiorgan join an adventurer to sail on his yacht to a legendary western continent to find a legendary city which may have a legendary statue with legendary jewels for eyes. Elric hopes to learn the origins of his people and their madness. The Weird of the White Wolf is also comprised of three novellas. In “The Dreaming City,” instead of trying to reform his people (his mission hitherto), Elric has decided to lead a fleet of 500 reaver ships to sack Melniboné’s capital, ostensibly to get revenge on Yrkoon and to save Cymoril. In “While the Gods Laugh,” Elric agrees to accompany a beautiful “wingless woman of Myyrrhn” (an outcast among her winged people) on a quest for a “holy and mighty book” so he might learn whether or not an ultimate God exists. The third story, “The Singing Citadel,” features a tower that plays irresistible music, a charismatic queen, a vengeful wizard, the Jester of Chaos, and the Duke of Chaos. Samuel Roukin reads the audiobook fine, with a pleasing voice and sensitivity to the text, but he does tend to too often pause pregnantly in places without punctuation to warrant pausing, as in “You Prince Yrkoon (pause) will be the first to benefit (pause) from this new rule of mine.” Finally, I have mixed feelings about the Elric stories. On the one hand, Moorcock coolly subverted the sword and sorcery genre, writing an anti-Conan the Barbarian. (Can you imagine Robert E. Howard’s black-maned muscle-bound hero accidentally killing his friends or lovers, castigating himself, uttering pick-up lines like, “I should tell you that I scream at night sometimes,” relying on drugs and a demonic sword for energy, summoning aid from elementals and Chaos Lords, or speculating about an ultimate god and the meaning of life?) On the other hand, it isn’t often much fun hanging out with the white-haired albino “nigromancer” and his sentient blade. Too many of his quests are too dreamlike, with too many action scenes that get too boring too soon. Furthermore, Moorcock’s female characters are unimpressive. Una the ace dream thief is rather interesting, but Elric’s great love Cymoril is a cypher, only warning the obtuse Elric or being kidnapped or sleeping enchantedly. Shaarilla loses heart during her quest with Elric. The ruthless queen who wants Elric can’t hang onto him. Etc. In short, I found the Elric books less impressive and more contrived than when they enchanted junior high school me. That said, I am glad to have reread the books, for their great lines, like-- “…for it is only about things which concern us most profoundly that we lie clearly and with profound conviction.” “Attempts to make [legends] real are rarely successful.” “In his wisdom he had chosen to cross the desert in a time of drought.” And their great creepy fantasy, like-- “The fly settled on Elric's forehead. It was a large, black fly and its buzz was loud, obscene. It rubbed its forelegs together, and it seemed to be taking a particular interest in Elric's face as it moved over it. Elric shuddered, but he did not have the strength to swat it. When it came into his field of vision, he watched it. When it was not visible he felt its legs covering every inch of his face. Then it flew up and, still buzzing loudly, hovered a short distance from Elric's nose. And then Elric could see the fly’s eyes and recognize something in them. They were the eyes—and yet not the eyes—he had seen on that other plane. It began to dawn on him that this fly was no ordinary creature. It had features that were in some way faintly human. The fly smiled at him.” View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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