Shower of Stones by Zachary Jernigan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars "Boredom drives gods to extraordinary measures" In Shower of Stones (2015), Zachary Jernigan's potent sequel to No Return (2013), Shavrim Coradin, the divine son of the god Adrash, recruits the warrior monk Vedas Tezul, his lover Churli "Churls" Casta Jons (a tough female mercenary), her daughter Fyra (a unique ghost girl), and their friend Berun (a magical construct made from a thousand brass spheres) to attempt to save the world of Jeroun from impending destruction and to deal with Adrash once and for all. Along for the ride are some of Shavrim's divine siblings. Opposing them are a dormant species of immortal super beings (the elders) predating the rise of interloping humanity, some mages loyal to Adrash or inimical to humanity, and Adrash himself. The strengths of this book (as with the first one) are the compelling characters (doubting Berun trying to learn to be autonomous, uptight Vedas trying to learn to be a man, guilty Churls trying to learn to be a mother, cute Fyra learning just what she can do, thousand-personalitied Shavrim learning how far he's willing to go against Adrash), the vivid imagining of epic fantasy genre tropes (gods, dragons, magic, named weapons, the end of the world, etc.), the humor (dry and drier), the style (concise, sensual, poetic, muscular), and the intense themes (about families, love, life and death, and human nature). There are wonderful moments in the novel: Churls trying to rescue Vedas and Berun; Shav showing up with his dragon; Vedas trying to control the god inside him; the elderman mage Pol finding a sacred valley where immortal idiots mine magical elder corpses; Berun meeting his creator/master/father under the sea; Berun communicating with the androgynous god Sradir inside himself; Fyra introducing Vedas and Churls to the land of the dead; Adrash and opponents meeting for the climactic showdown in a colossal colosseum. . . There are many lines to savor and re-read and remember: --On detecting a god inside you: “Vedas allowed himself several heart beats of reflection, shining a torch around the interior of his skull, searching for the interloper he knew to be hiding there.” --On Berun’s eyes: "His eyes flared on and off in the darkness, pulsing from brief star to cold stone, over and over again." --On joy: "Men deluded themselves when they believed in better days, some bygone era when the sun shone brighter. Better days had never existed. Joy had always been stolen, and sweeter because of that fact." --On death: "Once acknowledged, it could not be unseen." --On power: “. . . appallingly easy to create division, to build walls instead of bridges. . . as if all history had been as meaningless as children arguing over the rules of a game, as if failure were an inescapable taint written into the souls of mankind.” --On child-rearing: "How maddening it was to raise a child. It had always seemed to consist of such awkward moments. Where an errant word could tear everything apart." --On siblings: "His brother waited for him with folded arms under a broken sky." In most fantasy novels the prologues and epilogues are really just the first and last chapters, but here they are something else, and re-reading the prologue after finishing the novel is a moving and horripilating experience. I did think that the sublime dragon introduced early in the novel and then forgotten is underused and perhaps unnecessary for the story and themes, the only flaw in the novel I could find. Audiobook reader John FitzGibbon does a fine job reading Jernigan’s exotic names, beautiful and brutal descriptions, and savory conversations. I especially love his Fyra, Berun, and Shav. He enhances the novel. Although Shower of Stones may be read by itself, reading it as the conclusion to a diptych of novels with No Return is best, because the first novel is also great and makes it easier to understand and appreciate the second. Luckily, Jernigan is not one of the many contemporary fantasy writers given to long series comprised of 800+ page tomes. He follows the more is less fantasy aesthetic, focusing on the highlights of the core part of the lives (and deaths) of a small set of main characters while efficiently evoking a sublime history of millennia and many cultures. He uses fantasy in the best way: entertaining us via the epic doings of warriors, mages, ghosts, and gods while searchingly exploring themes about the human condition. His fantasy feels real because of his complex and convincing characters, his vivid and sensual metaphors, and his careful attention to how people would think and feel and use their bodies in the extreme situations he imagines, as when Vedas realizes the value of positive thinking: “Was it necessary to view events through such an uncharitable lens? What did it profit him . . . to greet each day with a wary eye? He had always been dying. The world had always been dying. It would all end one day, and what would be left of Vedas Tezul?" View all my reviews
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Treason's Harbour by Patrick O'Brian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I am an urinator.” “Really, Stephen. Recollect yourself.” or Espionage, temptation, and "secret" missions in the Mediterranean and Red Sea The first chapter of Treason's Harbour (1983), the 9th novel in Patrick O’Brian's wonderful Aubrey-Maturin series, brings readers new to the saga up to speed by profiling Jack Aubrey and his bosom friend Stephen Maturin via the narrative trick of having Stephen observe Jack while a French intelligence-agent (Lesueur) observes Stephen. Jack is a 100% English, blond, ox-like, noisy, open, good-natured, music-loving Royal Navy Captain who's heroic at sea and foolish ashore, while Stephen is a half-Catalan, half-Irish, dark, small, discreet, mordant, music-loving surgeon/spy/naturalist who's clumsy at sea and masterful ashore. By the end of the 8th novel, The Ionian Mission (1981), Jack and Stephen had scored big wins for the Turks and Brits in the war against France (Stephen hating the tyranny of Napoleon while turning a blind eye to England's own tyranny of India for example), and as this one begins they're still in the Mediterranean, stuck on Malta while Jack's ships are being repaired by "Slow devious stupid corrupt incompetent officials, tradesmen and artificers." The capable governor of Malta has been replaced with a dangerous fool, the island is teeming with spies, and Andrew Wray, who, ever since Jack once accused him of cheating at cards has been strangling Jack's career, has come to the island as the acting second secretary of the Admiralty. The friends' entertainment revolves around a beautiful Neapolitan woman, Mrs. Laura Fielding, who is teaching Jack Italian and flirting with Stephen and hosting both at her musical evenings. In fact she's working for the French, who have pressured her to get close to the friends by reminding her of her Royal Navy lieutenant husband being kept in a French prison under threat of death. In addition to efficiently introducing Jack and Stephen, their adversaries, and the political situation, the first chapter provides interesting thoughts on mood and culture, humorous scenes involving Stephen and a horsefly and Jack and a giant dog, and vivid descriptions of the shining cityscape of Valletta on Malta. And the novel continues that way, an enriching and entertaining pleasure: Napoleonic Age of Sail adult comfort food with historical accuracy, human insights, interesting events, and savory characters. Here are some examples of O’Brian’s witty, literate writing on --sailing: “the frigate's wake streamed away and away from him, dead white in the troubled green, so white, that the gulls poising and swooping over it looked quite dingy." --human nature: "Maturin, when playing cards, was not the most amiable of mortals." --fauna: “camels as composed as cats.” --climate: “Now they had slowed to a walk, the air was still and the heat reverberated from the shimmering walls of the town, while the climbing sun, low in the west but still ferociously strong, beat full on his back.” --culture: “Some of my best friends are Englishmen. . . Yet even the most valuable have this same vicious inclination to make a confused bellowing whenever happy. It is harmless enough in their own country, where the diet deadens the sensibilities, but it travels badly.” Readers impatient for exciting action (especially naval) may not enjoy O’Brian’s leisurely pacing, as Jack and Stephen spend the majority of this novel ashore and engage in more conversation than battles. Readers who enjoy character and style and details about early 19th-century nautical affairs and espionage, here in the Mediterranean and Red Sea, with strong flavors from the Ottoman Empire and the Arabic world (Janissaries, Ramadan, sherbet, water tobacco, cushions, camels, ghouls, sand, heat, etc.), should enjoy the novel. Moreover, although action scenes are rare, when O’Brian writes them they are cinematic, suspenseful, and unpredictable, as in a brief, climactic fight involving a coast, rocks, ships, canons, and sailing. And O’Brian does write scenes of sublime or exhilarating or meditative seas and skies and sails and ships. But this book is very much about espionage, taking its simple principle--to obtain information and deny it to the enemy--and complicating it with human nature, the uncooperative and proliferating state of the French and British intelligence organizations, and the tricky web of international relations between the two powers and the many other countries caught up in their war. Indeed, the flaw (for this reader) in the novel is related to the matter of intelligence. It may be due to O’Brian revealing Wray's perfidy to the reader early on, but I kept thinking that given Stephen's experience, wisdom, keen observation, and suspicious nature he'd surely suspect Wray more than he does. O’Brian’s series reads like a single composite novel. Therefore, although the books more or less stand on their own, they do benefit from being read in order as a set, and some are less independent than others. Among the first nine novels in the series I've read so far, I’ve found a few story-arcs oriented around different theaters in the war between the UK and France and different stages in Jack’s career, and this 9th book ends in the middle of a developing arc, leaving some issues unresolved: Will Stephen discover “the Judas” leaking secret mission details to the French? Will Jack get a big ship to captain in the American theater? Thus readers who like the series will quickly want to go on to the 10th novel and readers new to the work should probably start with the splendid first book, Master and Commander (1969). Ric Jerrom continues to be the only reader I can imagine for the audiobooks, effortlessly doing Jack and Stephen’s very different voices as well as those of a host of other characters, whether male or female, English or foreign, young or old, coarse or cultured, cool or slimy, angry or happy, speaking or singing, etc. View all my reviews
Boneland by Alan Garner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I'm for uncertainty” As Alan Garner's Boneland (2012) begins, a man called Colin Whisterfield discharges himself from a Cheshire hospital, gets into a taxi driven by a solicitous down to earth guy called Burt, and goes home to Church Quarry and his kit-made hut, where he falls asleep. The story then shifts to an anonymous stone-age man watching stars, carving a bull in a rock, finding a woman and a child encased in ice and exposing them to the birds, and having visions of riding Grey Wolf. Is the man Colin's dream, or Colin's ancestor, or Colin time slipping, or simply (!?) a man doing things 10,000 years ago that are thematically equivalent to Colin in the present? Shifting back to Colin, the story depicts him trying to return to work during sick leave (he's an astrophysicist using a cutting edge radio telescope array called MERLIN and a computer nicknamed Arthur to investigate the Pleiades) and starting to see a psychologist called Meg, who has a quick wit, a warm sympathy, and an eclectic library. Colin has been diagnosed by his previous doctors as "an immature, uncooperative, hysterical, depressive, Asperger's, with an IQ off the clock," but Meg reckons his problems stem from missing twin syndrome and selective amnesia possibly due to some head trauma in his past. And when Colin starts hearing his long lost twin sister's voice while listening to the telescope and Meg starts asking challenging questions (like "have you ever been struck by lightning?") and giving scary advice (like, "go to where it hurts most"), and the stone age man starts realizing that he's aging and alone and better carve a woman into the world to bear him a child to whom to teach the vital dancing, singing, and stone carving to ensure the continuance of the world, the novel moves into intense terrain. Boneland is the long-delayed (50 years!) concluding volume in a trilogy that Garner began with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963), in which Colin and his twin Susan experience scary and exciting adventures involving an important stone, a quarry, a witch, a wizard, dwarves, crows, tunnels, Arthurian sleepers in a mountain, and the like. But the later novel is not a simple continuation of the plot and surely not of the style, genre, or narrative technique of the earlier ones. Instead, it feels closer to Garner's Stone Book Quartet (1976-78), in its terse, poetic, vivid, elliptical, and challenging style and narrative technique and its emphasis on the persisting power of place and craft and stone and stars. But Boneland is much more openly interested in psychology and psychiatry than his earlier Cheshire books. As I read Boneland, in addition to the connection between the stone-age man and contemporary Colin, I wondered about things like, What happened to Susan, with whom he adventured in the first two books? Why can't he remember anything from before he was 13 (Garner's effective, if perverse way to avoid easy linking of this third book to the first two in the "trilogy")? Why did Garner decide to write this third book so many years after the second one? I feel that this novel cannot comfortably stand on its own, but also that it is so different from the first two that it seems another animal. It is bold to complete a children's fantasy trilogy by writing an adult third book about the child protagonist as a middle-aged man who fears he is mad and can't remember his childhood experiences! The prose is amazing, especially in the hypnotic stone-age passages like this one: “He sat up on the shoulder. The Grey Wolf struck the damp earth and ran, higher than the trees, lower than the clouds, and each leap measured a mile; from his feet flint flew, spring sprouted, lake surged and mixed with gravel dirt, and birch bent to the ground. Hare crouched, boar bristled, crow called, owl woke, and stag began to bell. And the Grey Wolf stopped. They were at the Hill of Death and Life.” And there is plenty of great writing in the present passages as well: neat lines ("Similes are for cowards"), fine emotion ("Wrench by wrench Colin's tears turned to dew on his cheek"), savory Cheshire dialect ("You've got a right cob on"), and vivid descriptions ("Stone thrust out. Below the scarp was tumbled with boulders to the land beneath. The brindled fields stretched to the hills"). Garner's compact novel also features plenty of content, interesting ideas about science and art, mythology and psychology, memory and time, the connection between past and present and place, the truth of fairy tales (and legends and myths), the loss of something precious in contemporary life, and so on. In addition to the visionary poetry of the stone-age passages, there are many sublime moments in the present, like when Colin shows Meg some goblin gold or gazes into a half a million or so years old black stone axe that contains stars and creation and is the first step towards the radio telescope. Colin, Meg, and Burt are all appealing characters. The audiobook reader, Robert Powell, is superb. The audiobook production uses a slight echo effect for the stone-age passages, to make them sound sacred. I recommend the novel, but warn readers who loved the first two books not to expect a typical trilogy continuation and conclusion. I did find the Stone Book Quartet more satisfying. It's as if finally in Boneland we're being told the adventures in the first two books may or may not have happened, depending on our viewpoint. Perhaps because Colin and presumably Garner are "for uncertainty," believing that "all discovery is play" that "never finishes," that "there are no final answers," that time is multi-linear, and that "faith is the only truth, belief the only reality," the ending of the novel is ambiguous and difficult (for this reader) to pin down. But it does end with Meg's grail questions ringing in our ears: "What is this thing? What does it mean? Whom does it serve?" View all my reviews
Iron Council by China Miéville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “They are always coming.” “We were, we are, we will be.” Following Perdido Street Station (2000) and The Scar (2002), China Mieville's third Bas-Lag novel, Iron Council (2004), occurs at least 20 years after the events of the first book. All is not well in New Crobuzon, the powerful, vast city-state featured in Perdido Street Station. The city has been locked in an endless war against Tesh, a rival city-state on the other side of the world where the laws of physics and magic are different; horribly wounded veterans are sapping morale; the brutal militia are clamping down on insurrectionists; factions (like the xenophobic bowler-hat wearing Quillers) are attacking inhabitants they dislike (like the scarab-headed Khepri); and gangsters are ever active. What is the Iron Council? It takes many pages to find out. That's because we first read a lot about a merchant called Cutter in the wilderness leading a small band of insurrectionists on an epic journey trying to catch up with the man he loves, Judah Lowe, a powerful golemetrist seeking the Council, and then about a naïve laborer called Ori in New Crobuzon leaving his all talk and no action ("too much yammer, not enough hammer") dissident group to join the rebel crime lord Toro. Then we plunge into a lengthy flashback (the best part of the novel) relating how about twenty years ago Judah became an idealistic autodidact golemetrist. Eventually we learn that a visionary New Crobuzon tycoon was pursuing his holy mission to push his Transcontinental Railroad Trust across the continent from coast to coast when the workers (including Remade slave laborers), camp followers (including prostitutes), and assorted TRT scientists and mages, mutinied over absent pay, took the train, and turned it into a “feral perpetual train,” pulling up track behind and laying it down before, unbuckling the past and making the future, making a contingent moment of railroad, “a rolling democracy. A Remade arcadia”: Iron Council. The novel is full of Mieville’s fertile imagination, usually at work making monstrous chimera, whether natural or artificial. His chimerical imagination drives his approach to genre, as this novel combines genres like epic fantasy, science fiction, horror, western, exploration adventure, political fable, crime caper, and same-sex romance. Technology rubs shoulders with thamaturgy, “normal” humans kiss Remade humans, and divine and semi-divine beings show up now and then. I like his exploration of the science and magic of golemetry (an intervention in the natural still state of inanimate matter so as to shift it into another form that moves with a kind of sentience), his conception of the perpetual train “renegapolis,” his audacious attempt at a climax interruptus, his politicizing of things like love, theater, war, justice, and capitalism, his avoidance of cheap sentimentality, his refusal to make his readers feel good, but instead to challenge them and provoke them and stir them up in constructive ways. Mieville can write. When he gets going on a poetic riff, whether sublime or profane, he really goes: "Elsie remembered the air burials she had heard of among northern tribes, women and men of the tundra, who let their dead rest in open coffins under balloons, sent them skywards through the cold air and clouds, to drift in air streams way above the depredations of insects or birds or rot itself, so the stratosphere over their hunt lands was a catacombs, where explorers by dirigible encountered none but the frost mummified dead." He fashions myriad cool, grotesque, and or beautiful things, like a monk who literally trades something he/she knows in return for something hidden or lost, the Stiltspear marsh people who chant their prey still, a "susurrator" who controls people by whispering in their minds, five-fingered military handlingerer parasites who wear animal or human bodies, elementarii who command elemental monsters, kinetiphage motion demons who gorge on sounds, and golems made of shadow, light, air, sound, and time. Mieville details all those and many more with a feverish poetic flair. In fact, that becomes a problem. As Cutter muses at one point when he’s traveling through the Cacotopic Stain, a dread unmapped region where land and air and time are sick, “where monsters are made . . . a viral landscape . . . of pathological parturition," "We don't even see it no more. . . You can get used to the most monstrous absurdity." So Mieville's profligate imagination for monstrous chimeras begins to numb, as when he describes a sublime and scary moonlight elemental and then botches it by making it a fish-bear-rat-horned-firefly-deathmoth thing. Moreover, although New Crobuzon is a vivid creation, a vibrant and decadent city with districts, towers, trains, repressive government, and motley population comprised of garden variety humans, arcane races (including cactus people, aquatic people, and beetle people), the Remade (criminals sent to punishment factories to gain all manner of grotesque animal, insectoid, and machine appendages), and singers, scientists, thamaturges, laborers, dissidents, merchants, militia, and so on we have been there before in Perdido Street Station, and its coolness wears a little thin here. And although Cutter and Judah are great (and sf-fantasy novels could use more homosexual or bisexual main characters like them), Iron Council hosts fewer compelling characters than Perdido Street Station and The Scar. People who like Mieville’s first two Bas-Lag books should like this one. People new to Mieville should start with either of the earlier books. People who like weird sf that melds multiple genres, who like to view the world as a political creation, and who appreciate rich prose should like this book. The audiobook reader Gildart Jackson does a professional job voicing all the many different kinds of characters in different kinds of moods. 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...
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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 ...
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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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