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
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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
Butcher's Crossing by John Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “You’re no better than the things you kill.” Imagine a compact, undigressive Moby-Dick about buffalo hunters instead of whalers. Both Melville’s epic and John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing (1960) depict an obsessive leader who takes men with him away from civilization to kill impressive wild creatures. A big difference between veteran buffalo hunter Miller and Captain Ahab is that the former hasn’t been mutilated by a bull buffalo, and his holocaust of a hunt has nothing to do with revenge. In that way, Williams’ novel is more terrible than Melville’s, because Miller is not existentially struggling against “whiteness” etc. but is merely a man with enough powder, lead, and endurance to kill thousands of buffalo. After twenty years in Boston and three years at Harvard, William “Will” Andrews, whose Unitarian lay minister father encouraged him to read Emerson more than the Bible, arrives at the aptly named Butcher’s Crossing on the Kansas prairie. The “town” is an inchoate collection of six shabby structures and a few tents, reeking of manure, dust, heat, and buffalo hide brine pits. What on earth is Will doing there?! He wants to leave cities to experience wilderness and nature and become a transparent Emersonian eyeball, a free and clean part of God. Will his expectations be fulfilled when he goes on a buffalo hunt with the experienced, laconic hunter Miller, his Bible reading, whisky drinking, one-handed right hand man Charlie, and the unpleasant, pessimistic, skilled buffalo skinner Schneider? Miller claims to know a pristine hidden valley in the Colorado mountains where they will find thousands of prime wild buffalo, the hides of which ought to be bring thousands of dollars. All they need is a little capital with which to outfit their team, which Andrews, having received a bequest from an uncle, is eager to provide. The novel, then, has some usual western genre features. A young, innocent, sensitive guy from the east goes west to experience nature and hooks up with a seasoned, capable hunter and his grizzled sidekick. A shrewd businessman and a good prostitute appear. A handful of Indians make a miserable cameo. A quest ensues for an elusive mountain valley sheltering a vast herd of buffalo. But in its philosophical underpinnings and questionings, the novel is not a usual western. The story is introduced by a pair of epigraphs, one by Emerson from “Nature” (nature blessing people with the sanctity of religion) and one by Melville from The Confidence-Man (nature freezing people to death or making them idiots). The dueling epigraphs and novel remind me of Melville’s annotated copy of Emerson’s essays on microfilm I read in graduate school, where he wrote in the margin at one point something like, “I pity the fool who subscribes to this!” Williams (I believe) is more in Melville’s camp regarding nature. And at times the book doesn’t feel like a usual western: “In his mind were fragments of Miller’s talk about the mountain country to which they were going, and those fragments glittered and turned and fell softly in accidental and strange patterns. Like the loose stained bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, they augmented themselves with their turning and found light from irrelevant and accidental sources.” The novel is sensual. Williams writes vivid details involving the five senses of activities like smelling a rotting buffalo carcass, being thirsty, climbing a steep mountain too quickly, being lost in a blizzard, submersing oneself in a fast cold river, shaving after eight months in the wilderness, looking at a woman’s nude body, and so on. Concise, poetic writing: “A patch of turning aspen flamed a deep cold in the green of the pine,” and “The sip of whisky seared his throat as if a torch had been thrust into it.” Many vivid details, too, about the “craft” of buffalo hunting: making bullets, sharpening knives, shooting buffalo, skinning buffalo, dressing buffalo, stacking hides, thawing frozen thongs in a bucket of pee, and, of course, plenty of details of the buffalo’s body, like “His head lowered, his upturned curving horns, shiny in the sunlight, bright against the dark mop of hair that hung over his head.” It is at times an awful novel. Miller’s knowledge that Indians use every part of the buffalo, even down to making beautiful and clever and fine bone toys and implements from them, does not prevent him from becoming “an automaton” in a non-stop orgy of killing them for nothing more than their hides. Far from using every part of the buffalo in the service of life, they sprinkle strychnine on the myriad carcasses to kill wolves. Although Charlie hates wolves as the devil’s brood, Miller’s destruction of the buffalo is a cold, mindless response to the life in which he has immersed himself. I regret that the point of view character and moral center of the novel Will doesn’t evince a little more discomfort with the holocaust of over 4,000 buffalo, but I suppose that just makes him a 19th-century rather than a 21st-century man. The novel shares with Williams’ historical academia novel Stoner (1965) his careful writing and psychological insights. Butcher’s Crossing is a literate western, and it must be quite disturbing to anyone who loves animals alive more than dead. View all my reviews
Graceling by Kristin Cashore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “Mercy was more frightening than murder because it was harder” Eighteen-year-old (or so) Katsa is a Graceling, possessed of a special gift (Grace) like a superpower in X-men or Heroes, in her case, a preternatural ability for killing. She is far less subject to fatigue, pain, hunger, thirst, cold, sickness, injury, and so on than normal (Graceless?) people and far quicker and stronger and more dexterous, resourceful, and creative etc. in fighting, hunting, swimming, etc. Not having any parents, she has been exploited for several years by her uncle King Randa as his attack dog-thug, being sent on missions to intimidate and physically punish any lord or commoner who dares cheat or diss the King. But lately she’s started chafing at that service, refusing to harm basically innocent people for Randa and starting the Council, a secret society spreading throughout the Seven Kingdoms to protect powerless people from the powerful. And such is the virtue of her cause that she has brought into the Council King Randa’s own spy master Oll, his own son Prince Raffin (a cool possibly gay guy into science, medicines, and his assistant Bann), and one of his most important young lords Gidden. When the first novel in Kristin Cashore’s Graceling Realm series, Graceling (2008), begins, Katsa is on a Council mission (unknown to King Randa) to rescue this Lienid grandfather prince from the dungeon of the King Murgon, so we get a good glimpse of her formidable fighting skills as she easily knocks out several dungeon guards and a dozen or so castle guards—until she almost meets her match in the person of Greening Grandemalion (call him Po), a handsome, be-ringed young Leinid prince not much older than she and apparently Graced with fighting ability (because he sure knows where each of her lightning-fast blows is going to land and act accordingly to avoid them…) The novel will develop the relationship between Katsa and Po in rather convincing, interesting, and moving ways as the plot (full of concise world building, exciting action, surprising reveals, complex romance, grueling adventure, and a boss villain with a scary Grace) puts them through the wringer and challenges Katsa’s understanding of herself, her Grace, and her lover. Interestingly, although the novel was published in 2008, the audio book version didn’t get made til 2022, so it is another example of a book that was first published before audio books were so popular and that has benefited from the popularity of audiobooks. Reader Xanthe Elbrick really enhances the story. The novel recalls Robin Hobb’s earlier Assassin’s Apprentice. A young highly trained, skilled, and effective killer for a king; the conflict between doing the dirty work for a demanding master and wanting to be free to live your life; the ethics of killing; etc. But of course Katsa is a she, and everyone knows what she is and what she can do, which is part of why they shun her, while in Fitz's case it's because they know he's a bastard without having any idea he's a highly trained spy assassin. And Fitz doesn't start his own "Council," but stays more a tool of the Farseers. It also reminds me a bit of The Murderbot Diaries, because although Katsa refers to herself as a monster, she’s really a human survivor-savior. Cashore’s novel indulges in a bit of YA Special Princess Heroine Overkill, in that Katsa is a beautiful orphan, she complains of having no friends but really has several good ones, she has a really cool love interest, she’s basically not one princess but two, she’s a great fighter (the best in her kingdom), and (so far) her unique Grace is countless Graces rolled into one. Because there is (so far) no explanation for the Grace system, where the abilities come from, how they actually work, who gets one, why it manifests as it does in a person, why Graced people have one eye one color and one eye another (apart from being cool), and so on. This permits Cashore to come up with any kind of Grace with any kind of rules needed to suit her plot. And the climax is over too quickly. However, I had such a great time listening to the audiobook, which was funny, exciting, suspenseful, moving, surprising, and so on (and has some great stuff re to marry and have kids or not and how it'd be to be close to someone who can basically read your thoughts), so that I really had to kind of flog myself to find flaws because I just wanted to enjoy the ride to the end. I also appreciate that apparently each Graceling book can stand by itself. Will I go on to listen to other books in the series? Hmmm…… View all my reviews
The Enchanted Castle by E. Nesbit
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Comical, Scary, Sublime, and Imperfect Fantasy The heroes of E. Nesbitt’s fantasy novel The Enchanted Castle (1907), Gerald (Jerry), Kathleen (Kathy/Cat), and James (Jimmy) are three British West Country siblings who go to unisex boarding schools and can only meet on the weekends at some house where they can't play (“You know the kind of house” says the narrator). Luckily one thing leads to another, and the boys get to spend the holiday at Kathleen's girls’ school in Littlesby while all the other girls are gone. The kids are wanting an adventure—Kathleen even suggests writing a book, but the boys refuse that fatiguing work—when out hunting caves in the woods they stumble upon (and into) one that leads to what appears to be an enchanted castle with an enchanted garden with an enchanted princess lying there waiting to be kissed awake. Princess, garden, and castle all turn out to be not exactly enchanted in the way the kids (and reader) were expecting. The ensuing plot has the kids making a good new friend in Mabel Prowse, the daughter of the housekeeper of Yalding Towers, the estate the kids found, and getting to know through increasingly fraught trial and error the properties of what turns out to be a tricky magic ring. Is it a ring of invisibility? Or a wishing ring? Or whatever one wants it to be? Like certain other later more famous magic rings, this one has a tendency to drop off your finger at unexpected moments and to seduce you into using it the wrong way. **You can see the influence Nesbit must have had on C. S. Lewis here: two boys and two girls having fantastic adventures driven by magical artifacts, marked by the interface between the “real” world and fantasy, and flavored by pagan deities (though Nesbitt blessedly is not writing Christian allegory). There’s lots of fantasy in the novel! Comedy scenes, like Gerald disguising himself in brown-face to become an India Indian conjurer at the town fair (this is offensive today). Disturbing horror developments, as when an audience fashioned from coats, pillows, broomsticks, and hats comes to life as “Ugly-Wuglies,” or as when to prove a point Mabel (foolishly!) wishes the ring made people four yards tall, or as when Kathleen (foolishly!) wishes she could be a statue, or as when James (foolishly!) wishes he were rich. Interspersed through the disturbing moments shine sublime ones, like a celestial picnic featuring animated statues of pagan gods and a moment of total revelation and understanding outside time and space and without need of words, when it seems “that the whole world lay like a magic apple in the hand of each listener and that the whole world was good and beautiful.” Throughout all of the fantasy, Nesbit runs her “realism,” which involves giving plenty of money and food details, demystifying or mundaning certain fantasy elements (like sleeping beauties and enchanted castles) while freshly and imaginatively utilizing others (like magic rings), and frequently addressing her readers to for instance challenge them to do things like make their own Ugly-Wuglies to see how scary they can really be and generally to pose as a real person who’d met the siblings and gotten their story from them (she archly tells us that she believes everything she’s been told, including the story we’re reading). She also uses relatable similes, like “... looking as unreal as the wrong answer to a sum in long division.” And she has her kids use then current British slang, like “I've had a rum dream,” and “What a ripping book!” and refer to then popular literature like Sherlock Holmes. She also inserts at one point an American millionaire who, suitably, likes saying “great” and shooting his gun (which he lovingly carries on his person). Gerald is a neat character, good at currying favor with adults by being attentive and polite to them, a natural born general who takes charge of the other kids and bucks them up when their morale flags, an articulate lad who likes narrating their activities as though he’s the narrator of an adventure novel as well as its hero, with the other kids being his minions. The other kids are not as interesting but still individual enough. There are points where they do unbelievably stupid and out of character (the kids are anything but stupid) things with the ring to create suspenseful complications. Johanna Ward gives a fine reading of the Audiobook. Unfortunately, Nesbit shoves into the story an unconvincing and excrescent fairy tale-like romance involving the French governess “Mademoiselle” who’s supposedly keeping an eye on the kids during their holidays. And, like Gerald posing as an Indian conjurer, some things don’t wear well today, as in lines like, “Even though you’re French you must know that British gentlemen always keep their word.” But the novel is worth reading for psychologically interesting and true moments like when the kids reveal their awareness that grownups play with them to please them without knowing that kids play with them to please them, and for some potent fantasy writing, like this: "There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs forever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real. And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in that curtain which are marked by magic rings, and amulets and the like, almost anything may happen." And like this: “The two little girls kissed in the kind darkness, where the visible and the invisible could meet on equal terms.” View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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