→ November 3, 2023
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Nettle & Bone.

T. Kingfisher (the nom de plume of writer Ursula Vernon) won this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel for Nettle & Bone, a light fantasy novel that subverts many tropes of the genre while adhering to others as it follows its protagonist on a quest to save her sister, the Queen of the North Kingdom. It is a blast to read, with some wonderful side characters alongside our hero and a great balance of humor and darkness, although I’m not sure it has the thematic depth of some of the best winners of that honor.

Our hero is Marra, the youngest of three sisters in the tiny Harbor Kingdom, a city-state located around the midpoint of the coast between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms, protected by its strategic location and the desire of both neighbors to avoid having it fall into their rival’s hands. As the story begins, Marra’s eldest sister, Damia, is married to the young Prince and heir to the throne of the Northern Kingdom, but she dies in an equestrian accident before she can produce a son, so the Prince then marries the middle sister, Kania. When Marra goes to see Kamia as her sister is about to give birth, however, Kania gives her a cryptic warning, and subsequent events cause Marra to realize her sister is the victim of a violent husband. She finds a dust-witch to try to obtain a way to kill the Prince, which ultimately leads her on a journey across two kingdoms with a party that grows to four, not counting the chickens, and ends with a showdown in the royal chambers.

Nettle & Bone is a quest novel, and we get a classic adventuring party of a cleric, a fighter, and a couple of mages, roughly speaking, where the pleasure is in the interplay between these characters as well as the world-building. Kingfisher has a Gaimanesque knack for crafting weird and creepy magical realms, with more delightful settings here than I can count – very reminiscent of a well-crafted RPG campaign, but with the detail of a Neverwhere or Among Others, where you’re immersed in the scene even as the writer asks you to believe any number of impossible things. The goblin market is an obvious homage to Gaiman’s work, among others, but Kingfisher gives it enough unique flourishes that it stands on its own merits.

I absolutely tore through this book, and I’ve already recommended it to two strangers who asked about it when I was reading it in public. That said, I have two major criticisms of the book, although only one of them affected my enjoyment of the work. That one is straightforward – Marra is not that interesting of a character. Kingfisher sure as hell tries to give her some personality, but beyond making her a worrywart, she doesn’t have much to distinguish herself. She’s the observer of the action, a Nick Jenkins (from A Dance to the Music of Time), but all three of her companions on the quest are more compelling characters. Marra’s whole family is boring, honestly; Kania’s a cipher, her mother doesn’t even have a name, I think, and her father is somewhere else. Kingfisher’s strength may lie in creating side characters, which is a real skill and not something I wish to diminish, but the time we spend with Marra alone forms some of the least interesting pages in the book.

My second criticism of Nettle & Bone is an academic one, which is that I don’t see much of a theme here – and for many readers, that won’t matter at all. It didn’t affect my pleasure in reading the book, either; it’s great fun, I laughed quite a bit, and I enjoyed a lot of the time I spent with these characters and in this world. I usually don’t think much about deeper themes or meaning until a book is done, after which it’s often all I think about – what is the author trying to say? What might they want the reader to take away from the book? Marra is a strong female lead, and her world, like ours, is patriarchal, while two of her three companions on the quest are also women, so there’s no question the book has a feminist bent. Beyond that, however, I couldn’t discern any greater themes here. That’s fine for the average reader, maybe for the vast majority of readers, but if we’re comparing books for the purpose of an award like the Hugo, I think questions of theme and meaning do matter. That said, I haven’t read any of the other nominees yet, so I have no opinion on whether this book was worthy other than to say I loved every minute while I was reading it.

Next up: Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a self-published, Kickstarted novel from 2014 that has spawned three Hugo-nominated sequels. I’m on page 10.

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→ October 24, 2023
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Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

I’m a bit of an oddball for my age bracket when it comes to Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve played the pen and paper game, while in middle school, and liked it but found the actual process kind of slow, and of course when you put a bunch of teenaged boys together in a room, they will begin to act like idiots at some point and the game becomes secondary. (They didn’t stay idiots, though; that group now has two successful lawyers, one of whom has defended death-row inmates; a senior VP at a big insurance company; and whatever I am.) I loved some parts of it, including the character creation, and thought others were slow. I did get very into video role-playing games, both within the D&D universe, such as the Pool of Radiance (which I never completed – I couldn’t beat the final boss, even when I tried to play the game again in my 20s), and without, like the Bard’s Tale and some Ultima Games. Regular readers know I became obsessed with the original Baldur’s Gate trilogy about twenty years ago, and I won’t try the newest game because I’m afraid I’ll disappear into it for days or weeks. So I have some nostalgia for the game, but it’s limited, and when people ask if I was a D&D player I generally answer with something like “not really,” because I don’t know the lore or the rules anywhere near like dedicated players do.

Thus I approached the Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves movie (free on Amazon Prime) without any particular bias towards or against the film; I don’t think I was predisposed to like or dislike it, or to criticize it for any lack of fidelity to source material. I did worry it would be too fan-servicey, or corny, or maybe just boring because plenty of video-game stories lack the depth required for a two-hour film. D&D: Honor Among turned out to be a lot of fun, witty, fast-moving, a little too silly at times, but very enjoyable, and the rare film that left me hoping we’ll get a sequel.

Chris Pine plays Edgin Darvis, a bard who begins the film in prison with his comrade Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), a barbarian fighter, after the two were part of a large robbery gone very wrong, which also led to Edgin’s daughter Kira going with one of the members of their crew who escaped the authorities, the thief Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant). We see their parole hearing, where Edgin dissembles at length, waiting for one particular judge to arrive, allowing the script to give us Edgin’s and Holga’s back stories – he was part of the peacekeeper group the Harpers until a Red Wizard they’d arrested killed his wife, after which he teamed up with Holga, who became a sort of surrogate mother to Kira, and later Forge and the elf Simon (Justice Smith), a young mage who, like low-level magic users in D&D, isn’t good for much because he’s so inexperienced. When Edgin and Holga finally get out of prison, they find out that Forge is now Lord of Neverwinter, and perhaps not the welcoming old friend they expected to find. They reunite with Simon and draft the tiefling druid Doric (Sophia Lillis), a shapeshifter who, we find out quickly, Simon is rather sweet on. Hijinks, magic, and combat ensue as they try to find the missing magic item they were after in the busted burglary that landed the two in prison, while also rescuing Kira and uncovering whatever Forge’s game is.

The story’s fine, although you can see in general where things are heading and the film doesn’t rely too heavily on big twists and plot surprises. It’s the characters and the actors who make this so much fun, notably Pine, who wisecracks like Michael Bluth with a bit more savoir-faire and less befuddlement at what people around him are doing. Pine sets the tone from the rambling monologues he gives to stall for time at the pardon hearing, making it clear that the script is going to lean heavily on humor and his personality, and less so on the lore of the source material – which is good, because I don’t think anyone needs a film about the 5e core rules set or lengthy soliloquies about critical hits and saving throws. His interplay with Rodriguez is very strong, as she’s doing a sort of Rosa Díaz/Cara Dune mashup that contrasts nicely with his “I’ve got this under control” smartass vibe. Smith has his moments as a supporting character whose importance increases as the story moves along – again, thematically consistent with the rules of the game – and it seems like the script sets his character and Lillis’s up for bigger roles in any future installments. Grant is a complete ham, but it works, and having some knowledge of his behavior over the years, including on the set of this movie, well, perhaps it wasn’t that big of a stretch for him.

Combat in role-playing games can be a slog for players, and even in the best of circumstances it’s still driven by probabilities whether through dice or cards or some other similar mechanism, which would not translate very well to screen or page. The combat sequences in Honor Among Thieves dispense with all of that – the characters just fight, mostly Holga, who can take out a whole army, although Simon plays more of a role as the party gains experience. It’s a subtle nod to the way the game is played without ever slowing down the overall story; the fights are entertaining, well choreographed, and, most importantly, quick. (There’s also very little blood or actual on-screen violence – it’s all cartoonish or out of sight, less violent than a typical Marvel movie.)

There are some clear plot conveniences here and a visit to the Underdark that raises all sorts of questions about architectural stability and sanity. I also wouldn’t call any of the character development or overall themes “deep,” as the script is happy to give us these four adventurers and allow their chemistry to keep things light and fun, which is this film’s greatest strength. I laughed quite a bit, and I was reasonably invested in the plot, even though I think anyone can guess the general outline of the conclusion. It’s a great, not too serious adventure film in a genre that doesn’t often get this treatment.

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→ January 17, 2023
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Elder Race.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race made the shortlist for this year’s inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, which first brought him to my attention even though he’d written twenty-odd novels before this and won a few awards along the way. It’s a quick read with a clever conceit at its heart: what if the person who’s supposed to be a great wizard is, in fact, just a human who possesses sufficiently advanced technology that it appears to be magic?

The ’wizard’ Nygroth Elder is, in fact, Nyr Illim Tevitch, an anthropologist left in stasis to keep an eye on this colonized planet while the remainder of his crew has long since left to return to Earth – which may or may not still be a going concern. Lynesse Fourth Daughter, a princess so junior you might call her a spare to the spare, believes there’s an existential threat to her people, so she treks to Nyr’s tower to try to enlist his help to fight what she calls a demon, which her own mother thinks is a fabrication to try to gain attention or glory. Nyr reluctantly agrees to help, even though his directive is to observe but not interfere, even if refraining might cause harm to the people he’s watching, and they set off on a quest to find and defeat the threat. Along the way, the culture clash between the two emerges through their languages, as Nyr can’t even explain what a scientist is, and the translation engine he uses makes everything sound to Lynesse like some sort of magic.

Elder Race is a quest novel – or novella, which is how the Hugo Awards characterized it, giving it a nomination in that category in 2022 – but one with a metatextual component as well that, in some ways, is the more interesting of the two. Tchaikovsky tells the story by alternating narration between Lynesse and Nyr, thus presenting both sides of most of their conversations, which operates as a commentary on fantasy literature and works that try to blend fantasy and science, as well as a more humanist look at the challenges of communicating across cultures. The fact that Lynesse’s language lacks so many words that Nyr takes for granted and finds himself unable to express even through translation recalled Samuel Delany’s classic novella Babel-17, which takes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – that the structure of a language influences how its speakers view the world – and turns it into an entire story, where a language is a weapon that alters speakers’ minds. Here language is less insidious, but stands as a concrete example of the difficulty of communicating across all of the boundaries that separate people, not just language but culture, history, religion, and more. Language is the visible manifestation of what amounts to a religious difference between Lynesse’s people and Nyr; what her family and subjects believe is magic is just technology they’ve lost in the centuries since humans colonized this planet.

Nyr is the more interesting and developed character of the two, in part because Lynesse is, by design, depicted as naïve – she’s young, but also not very worldly even within the confines of this civilization, and her faith in Nyr based on a historical anecdote is almost charming in its innocence. Nyr, meanwhile, has to grapple with both his role as potential savior, or as a failed savior, to Lynesse’s people, while also facing the fact that he might be severed permanently from his own civilization, condemned to a lonely existence where he enters long periods of suspended animation and can’t forge enduring relationships with anyone. He encounters crippling depression and covers it up with the help of embedded tech that takes the old trope about men compartmentalizing their emotions and turns it into software; he can just push it aside and deal with it later.

Tchaikovsky – who spells his name Czajkowski outside of his writing, as he’s of Polish descent rather than Russian – packs a lot into the 200 pages of Elder Race, without skimping on the quest part of the story, which is the real narrative that drives the book forward. You could probably just read this as a straight-up quest without giving the larger themes a second thought and still enjoy it. I found those themes gave this novel more heft and staying power in my mind after I finished. It’s to Czajkowski’s credit that he managed this in such a brief novel that revolves almost entirely around just two core characters.

Next up: I’m many books behind in my writeups, but I’m currently reading Brian Clegg’s Gravitational Waves: How Einstein’s Spacetime Ripples Reveal the Secrets of the Universe.

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→ December 4, 2020
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Piranesi.

Has any novel been as long-awaited as Susanna Clarke’s sophomore work Piranesi? Her first novel, 2004’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, is one of the best books I’ve ever read, perhaps the best written this century so far, a brilliantly rendered epic about rival magicians in the 1800s, complete with the funniest footnotes I’ve ever seen. Clarke fell ill after writing it, and other than one book of short stories, published nothing until this year, when Piranesi appeared, as if from another world, in September. While it’s quite unlike her first novel, Piranesi is remarkable – brilliantly rendered, again, but in a completely new way, with a new voice and an atmosphere of mystery and dread throughout.

Piranesi is the name of the narrator, although we come to learn that his story, and his name, are more complicated than they first appear to be. He lives alone in a gigantic castle of hundreds of rooms, some sort of labyrinth, and the only person he ever sees is one he calls the Other, who seems to be conducting some sort of research on Piranesi and the house. As the story progresses, though, it becomes clear that there’s far more to Piranesi than even he realizes, as his memories start to come back to him in dribs and drabs, and he realizes there are other people in the world besides himself and the Other.

The less said about the story, though, the better. This is book about memory and loss, and it’s best to recover Piranesi’s memories, and learn the truth about him and the House that he treats as a sort of god, along with him. Clarke has, once again, created an immersive, dreamlike otherworld that will pull you in, even though this one is as nebulous as the world of Jonathan Strange was clear and familiar. It was easy to look at her first novel and see her influences in 19th century British literature and to understand where she was gently parodying the books she obviously loved from that era. Piranesi, however, is unlike any novel I’ve ever read. The closest comparisons I can think of – David Mitchell’s Slade House came to mind – aren’t really that close.

While the mystery of who exactly Piranesi is and what he’s doing in this house – which floods often, and doesn’t appear to have any exits – unravels, Clarke gives the reader ample time and fodder to consider his plight. He’s alone most of the time, yet oddly at peace with his situation, even though he’s in frequent peril from everything from the rising waters to lack of food. (The Other brings him gifts, including food, although Piranesi largely seems to live off dried seaweed and fish he catches.) There are the bones of 14 other people in the House, and Piranesi seems to think they speak to him, somehow, as do the various statues. Was he always mad? Did solitude drive him to madness? Why isn’t the Other trying harder to help him? And who is 16, the person whom the Other warns Piranesi to avoid at all costs?

The House is a character of its own in the book, especially given how Piranesi interacts with it, and could stand as a symbol for any of several real-world analogues. It’s a dream world, in the sense of the endless structure of dreams, but even more resembles the human imagination – a fractalized rendition of the world of our minds in a series of rooms that might be changing each time Piranesi visits them, in a total space that might have an end that Piranesi hasn’t actually found. There’s a sense of incompleteness within the House that feels like the sort of dream you get when you’re not completely asleep, but where impossible things creep into your mind enough that you know after that you weren’t completely awake, and how within those semi-dreams you can also feel trapped by your own confusion. I’ve had more of these experiences during the pandemic, for some unknown reason, and while Piranesi was in progress long before COVID-19 existed as a pathogen in humans, it takes on a different meaning eight months into the ongoing plague.

There might be a bit too much exposition in the middle of Piranesi, where Clarke has to break the spell a little bit to explain to the reader just how Piranesi got to the House and what might be coming next, but the resolution is gripping and veers from the expected in multiple ways, not least in the timing of events towards the novel’s end. It isn’t Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell because nothing could be, and perhaps it’s for the best that Clarke’s follow-up isn’t in that same universe, as she’d once promised. This new creation of hers is just as magical as the first, but in its own, memorable way.

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→ August 14, 2020
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Or What You Will.

Jo Walton’s Hugo-winning novel Among Others   is one of my favorite novels of any genre, a beautifully written story around two incredibly compelling characters that just happens to have a slight element of fantasy to it. It’s an exemplar of genre fiction in that the fantastical parts of the book accentuate the plot but don’t define it. That book led me to pick up her 2019 novel Lent, which delves into Renaissance and Roman Catholic history and, again, uses a fantasy-like twist to tell a better story, but where the main character is the real star. And that, in turn, led me to her brand-new novel Or What You Will, which seems like an even more serious novel while drawing on the great history of metafiction in literature, going back to Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler… and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds to explore life, death, and meaning in new ways.

Or What You Will gives us Sylvie, the author, in her 70s, widowed, writing her new novel while visiting Firenze, which serves as the inspiration for her fictional duchy of Thalia and a series of novels set in the equivalent of the Renaissance, featuring several characters borrowed from Shakespeare’s plays (notably The Tempest and The Twelfth Night, the latter of which gives this book its title). The narrator and protagonist, however, is a voice in Sylvie’s head who has become many characters within her novels, and who realizes that when Sylvie dies, he will too, so he hatches a plan to make them both immortal through her writing – not just through fans, but a form of actual immortality in a Thursday Next-like world inside her books.

The chapters alternate, roughly, between scenes from within this new Thalian novel, which include Orsino and Viola (The Twelfth Night), Caliban and Miranda (The Tempest), Geryon (Dante’s Inferno), and the real-world Marsilio Ficino; and conversations between Sylvie and the narrator that unfurl the former’s life story, including an abusive first marriage and an idyllic second one, a brutal and unloving mother, and a late-blooming yet successful literary career. Those introspective chapters, which I assume at least draw a little from Walton’s own life (she didn’t get her first published novel until she was 35), are clearly the superior ones here, implicit meditations on life and legacy, unfolding a fascinating personal history of a three-dimensional character. The chapters set in Thalia are strongly reminiscent of Lent, which was set in Firenze during the Renaissance and featured Ficino and Pico della Mirandolo, who also appears in this book, but there are a couple of twists to life in Thalia versus that of real-like Italy that put it strongly in the realm of science fiction or fantasy. The characters in Thalia are aware that their world is different, and that other worlds exist, although they only know Sylvie as a god. It becomes a bit like Lisa Simpson’s “I’ve created Lutherans!” experiment; we’re looking down at these people, waiting for them to figure out what we already know, and knowing that they’ll have to figure it out for the book to end. There’s a separate intrigue around the rivalry between Orsino and Geryon, and the sudden appearance of Caliban from beneath the ground, which is moderately interesting but takes a clear back seat to the main storyline.

Walton manages to keep the narrator’s specific plan to save Sylvie’s life, and thus his own, out of the novel until close to the end, and introduces a clever wrinkle for the narrator to surmount for the entire plan to work. The conclusion is a bit beside the point, however, since it doesn’t work in our world and thus prompts you, the reader, to think about your own mortality and legacy, something that has at least been on my mind more than ever this year, between the pandemic, friends losing loved ones, and changes in my own life. That’s really why the novel works even with its implausible fantasy elements – that, and Walton’s typically lovely writing, especially when it comes to describing our world’s Firenze, a city she clearly loves – these themes are universal and timeless, and the way she presents them is both novel and still as comfortable as the familiar routines of Sylvie’s writing life.

Next up: I’m halfway through Emily St. John Mandel’s newest novel, The Glass Hotel.

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→ April 6, 2020
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Lent.

Jo Walton’s Among Others was one of my favorite novels from my reading of (nearly) all of the Hugo winners, a perfect use of fantasy elements to elevate a brilliant story, rather than relying on the fantasy (or sci-fi) bits to provide the entertainment. Her latest novel, Lent, goes a bit further in leaning on a single fantastical quirk to take the real-life story of Girolamo Savonarola, a martyred monk in 1490s Italy who was believed to have the gift of prophecy, and turn it into an extensive meditation on how small choices in our lives can have extensive, long-lasting effects on our world.

The first third or so of the book seems like a straightforward telling of the last six years of Girolamo’s life, from 1492 until the infamous “bonfire of the vanities” that led to a turning of public sentiment against him and his eventual imprisonment, torture, and hanging at the hands of the “do as we say, not as we do” Catholic Church. Girolamo preaches against corruption and secular art, gets under the skin of the Pope and other powerful clergy, and eventually they manage to win the political battle and execute him. After his death, however, we learn something about Girolamo before he returns to earth, back in 1492, to try it all over again – but this time with the knowledge of what transpired in his previous life, as well as that new bit of information, and thus can alter his choices to see if he can get the outcome he ultimately desires. He’ll fail again, return to earth, make new decisions, fail again, and so on until the final chapter where we will learn if he gets it “right” in the last attempt in the novel.

That conceit itself isn’t new, but the reason Girolamo gets to play life as a sort of role-playing game where he restarts from his last save is a new twist that provides a stark backdrop to the choices he makes – and, in many ways, makes some of them more selfless than before. Walton thus gives us a meditation on free will and chaos theory within a story about grace and salvation, one that upends traditional Catholic theology while playing around within its borders. There’s a slow build in the first section, but once you see what’s going on, and Girolamo himself is armed with the same knowledge, the entire concept becomes more interesting, and every subsequent decision that he makes carries much more weight, even when you know that it’s going to ultimately fail and lead him back to restart the cycle from some point in his past.

Girolamo himself makes for a fascinating protagonist as Walton writes him, although I think she’s softened his character a little to emphasize his generosity of spirit and belief in the church as a way to spread the religious and mundane philosophies of Jesus Christ in the world, thus deemphasizing to some extent his puritanical beliefs and attacks on secular art and culture. There’s one scene of a burning of secular or “profane” works, although even within that Girolamo is presented as more resigned to the event than the fanatic he appears to have actually been. He becomes friends with more than one character who is committing adultery, including a woman who would certainly have been seen as “fallen” in that time, which seems like it may not have been consistent with the actual Girolamo (although it’s a reasonable use of poetic license).

The magic of Walton’s writing seems to be in the getting there more than the destination itself, as I think it’s fairly clear where Lent is likely to end; it’s how Walton gets to that point that captivates. I wish she’d been able to give a bit more depth to the panoply of characters around Girolamo, many of whom are interesting even when a bit two-dimensional and just required more page time to help flesh them out, but the main character is so fascinating – as is the side character Crookback, whose real-life identity may be apparent to astute readers – that the book still soars without it.

Next up: José Saramago’s The Double.

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→ August 19, 2019
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The Golden Compass.

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is about to get a new adaptation this fall, with the BBC and HBO distributing a television series based on the three books, starting with The Golden Compass (also known as Northern Lights). That book also appeared on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels ever written that I’ve sort of been working my way through, which seemed to make this an apposite time to start Pullman’s work with this book, which is a cold, dispassionate counter to the very fantasy novels Pullman seems most apt to criticize. It appeared on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels that I’ve been working my way through the last few years.

The protagonist is Lyra Belacqua, around 11 or 12 years old at the start of the book, whose somewhat idyllic life in a castle in England in a universe parallel to our own is interrupted both by the mystery of children vanishing around London and the arrival of an enigmatic woman, Mrs. Coulter, who takes a specific interest in Lyra’s future. In this universe, all humans have familiars known as “daemons” who can shapeshift while their humans are young but who eventually take on a permanent form when their persons reach adulthood. The mystery of the children, which of course eventually merges with the story of Mrs. Coulter (and more), appears connected to something known as Dust as well as to the phenomenon of aurora borealis, colloquially known as the northern lights. The quest to solve the mystery takes Lyra on a voyage north to the archipelago Svalbard, which (in our universe) hosts the northernmost permanent human settlement on earth, on board a vessel filled with “gyptians” (essentially Roma), some of whom have lost children to the kidnappers.

Everything in this book is cold, including the setting and the weather. Svalbard sits at 74 to 81 degrees latitude, so in the winter it’s dark and average temperatures are below freezing. Much of the book’s action takes place there or on the trip there, and it is perpetually dark and cold in the prose, which mirrors everything about the main characters. Lyra, the ostensible star of the book, has very little charm or character of her own; she has the drive to find her missing friend, and believes she’s on a mission to help her uncle Asriel and thwart Mrs. Coulter, but she’s surprisingly inert compared to the child heroes of other classics of YA fiction. None of the gyptian characters is memorable, and even Mrs. Coulter is on the dull side for a villain in either YA fiction or in the sort of sci-fi/fantasy genres in which Pullman is treading. Great YA genre fiction endures because of readers’ connections with the main characters as much as the plot, and The Golden Compass misses on that point entirely.

The plot, however, has much more going for it, although much of the question at its heart remains unresolved at the end of the first book. The conceit involves the many-worlds hypothesis of quantum physics, although the exact mechanism by which it works in the books isn’t revealed in the first part of the trilogy – discovering that is tied into the various mysteries of the missing children and Mrs. Coulter. Pullman abjectly despises C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, writing in a 1998 essay of “the misogyny, the racism, the sado-masochistic relish for violence that permeates the whole cycle” of Lewis’ books, and at the very least he’s right about the violence part. There’s some violence in The Golden Compass, but it’s secondary to most of the action and is never glorified. What Pullman doesn’t mention in his essay is his antipathy for Lewis’ specific version of Christianity; in response, his novels rely not on myth but on science, trading elements of fantasy for the grounding of science fiction, but in the process he loses some of the whimsy of better fantasy series like the Harry Potter novels or even the more mature Magicians trilogy.

The second book in the series shifts the setting to our version of earth, and the third combines the two to finish the story. I’m mixed on whether I’ll continue; I’m a completist by nature and hate dropping series without finishing, but I’m also not driven to complete Lyra’s story or see how Pullman resolves the Dust mystery.

Next up: Hilary Mantel’s first Booker-winning novel, Wolf Hall.

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→ May 13, 2019
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Good Omens.

I’m a definite fan of Neil Gaiman’s work, having loved American Gods and also enjoyed Anansi Boys and The Graveyard Book, but have yet to get into any of Terry Pratchett’s output, including his famous and very popular Discworld series. With amazon about to release its adaptation of their joint novel Good Omens on May 31st, I picked up the novel a few weeks ago to prepare myself for the impending apocalypse. For a book written by two authors, it’s remarkably fluid and consistent, and, as you might expect given their reputations, it’s quite funny.

As the marketing campaign for the series has probably told you, the end of the world is nigh and someone has misplaced the Antichrist – more specifically, the forces of good and evil have discovered that they’ve lost track of the infant spawn of Satan, who was switched at birth with another baby thirteen years previously in a swap that went awry without anyone noticing. The ads sell the book a bit short, at least, as there’s much more going on than that particular mix-up; the book focuses far more on the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, who turn this book into an unlikely buddy comedy as they try to get the eschaton back on track even as events spiral beyond their control and, in Crowley’s case, various other agents of the devil come after him for possibly screwing up the apocalypse.

The Antichrist, meanwhile, grows up as Adam in an unsuspecting family, and gathers a few friends around him in a little gang of mischief-makers called “Them” by the adults in their community, a group of four mirrored later in the book by the appearance of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (although Pestilence has been replaced, a gag I won’t ruin here). The novel’s subtitle refers to an old book of prophecies by a witch named Agnes Nutter, the only truly accurate such book ever published, which of course means it has been summarily ignored throughout history – but one of her descendants arrives in the novel with an annotated copy and index cards referring to specific prophecies with attempted interpretations. There’s a modern-day witchfinder general (not this one), and his helper, Nelson Pulsifer, no relation to Bill, and the witchfinder’s dingbat landlord, a self-proclaimed medium (and, naturally, a fake). The narrative bounces around these different threads as they all converge, for whatever reason, on Tadfield, which is to be the epicenter of the eschaton.

Despite the quasi-religious underpinnings of the book, its best aspect by far is the interplay between Aziraphale and Crowley, who sit on opposite sides of the dualistic divide but appear to be longtime friends who, in this case at least, share a common interest in moving the plot along while encountering many obstacles, mostly of the physical variety. The book is substantially funnier when they’re on its pages, and, while never boring without them, it definitely lags a bit when neither of them is involved in the action. Their banter is snappier, and Gaiman and Pratchett clearly had more fun writing these characters and twisting their personae so that they appear to be acting on the ‘wrong’ sides of the good/evil dichotomy. There are various running gags around these two characters, notably around Crowley’s car, that work extremely well and, like any good running joke, get funnier the more they appear.

For a light farce like Good Omens, sticking the landing is helpful but not quite mandatory; the point is to enjoy the ride, and if the resolution is satisfying, so much the better. Gaiman and Pratchett do stick the landing, however, especially since we know from the start of the book the world isn’t actually going to end – I mean, mild spoiler, I guess, but it’s obviously not that sort of book – and they have to write themselves out of that predicament. It’s a well-crafted ending that doesn’t feel cheap or contrived; I didn’t predict it but after seeing the resolution I could see in hindsight how the authors had set it up. Given how well Good Omens delivers its laughs – and I laughed a lot – a solid ending feels like a bit of a bonus. Now I can’t wait for the TV series to arrive.

Next up: I bailed on James Kelman’s Booker Prize-winning novel How Late It Was, How Late after about 80 pages and around 200 uses of the c-word, so I’ve moved on to Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Killing Commendatore.

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→ June 14, 2018
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The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

Catherynne Valente first published her young adult novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making online, in installments; the book was a huge success online, winning the Andre Norton Award for young adult science fiction/fantasy, given by the Science Fiction Writers’ Association, and is still the only self-published novel to do so. It’s now the first novel in the five-book Fairyland series, which covers the adventures of a young girl named September who lives in Omaha and is visited one day by the Green Wind, who whisks her off to the parallel world known as Fairyland. Hilarity and peril ensue, as they would. I bought it for my daughter to read, but last month decided to give it a whirl myself, and it is witty, sweet, and written at a very high level for YA literature.

September is your typical YA fantasy heroine, a precocious child whose life is boring (to her) and whose family isn’t perfect (her father is away at war, her mother works long hours at an airplane manufacturing plant), so she is the ideal target for a being from Fairyland to come and rescue for a series of adventures – although Valente has a knack for making these adventures go sideways often enough that they’re not totally predictable. September then meets a series of eccentric characters from Fairyland after the Green Wind, including a wyvern who’s convinced his father was a library, a young ifrit named Saturday, a conjured servant made of soap, a sentient paper lantern, and plenty of others, leading up to the Marquess, a young girl who has become the evil queen of Fairyland after the death of the benevolent queen who preceded her. September ends up on a series of quests that generally don’t end well for her but instead lead her on a crooked path toward an eventual confrontation with the Marquess and a revelation about the true connection between Fairyland and our human plane.

Valente’s imagination is impressive, with crazy characters and amusing plot twists, but she writes in a high style that recalls 19th and 20th century British literature, from Lewis Carroll to P.G. Wodehouse, similar to the writing of Susanna Clarke but just a half-grade lower in difficulty. Reading it as an adult (by age, at least), I never felt that the prose was written for children or in any way condescending to the reader through simpler vocabulary or syntax. I’m unfamiliar with Valente’s other work – she’s a prolific author – but if this isn’t a near approximation of her natural voice, I’d be shocked. It’s perfectly calibrated to appropriately challenge a young reader without turning her off, and to appeal to an adult reader without seeming trivial or dumb.

There’s also quite a bit of wordplay within Fairyland, perhaps not quite as much as you’ll find in The Phantom Tollbooth or in the Harry Potter series, but a similar mix of straight-up puns and double meanings along with twisted loanwords from folklore and mythology. September meets a wairwulf, who is a wolf 27 days a month and a man the other three, and is married to two witches, one of whom gets the wolf days and the other the human days; the witches are named Hello and Goodbye, and the wairwulf Manythanks. There’s a quest for a spoon (alas, not the runcible variety), a dictum to avoid eating any food in Fairyland that quickly goes awry, an argument over the shape of the earth (“roughly trapezoidal, vaguely rhomboid, a bit of a tesseract”), and plenty of sly jokes about bureaucracy, pseudoscience, and air travel.

My daughter read this when she was 11 and both enjoyed it and said she had no real trouble with the prose; she read it on her Kindle, which, despite my affinity for dead-tree editions, does have the benefit of allowing you to click on a word and get an immediate definition. (And then you read a paper book and come across a word you don’t know and put your finger on the page and press and then look around and hope nobody saw you do that. Or so I hear.) Valente has hit that perfect sweet spot between writing for a young audience and keeping it smart enough to hold an adult’s attention. I ripped through the entire book in just a few hours while on a flight back from Europe last month, because I wanted something light for the long trip, but this was fun and sharp enough that I decided it was worth reviewing and recommending too.

Next up: I’m way behind on book reviews, but I’m currently reading Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood, which is just $3.55 for Kindle right now.

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→ August 27, 2017
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Dreamsnake.

My omnibus post on all the new boardgames I saw at GenCon this year is up at Paste.

Vonda McIntyre won the sci-fi Triple Crown for her 1978 novel Dreamsnake, taking the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for best novel, yet the book appears not to have the legacy those honors might have indicated. I’d never heard of the book before starting to read the list of Hugo winners, and it was probably two years before I stumbled on it in any bookstore, new or used. Combining elements of fantasy novels and post-apocalyptic stories, Dreamsnake reads today like an advanced YA fantasy novel, maybe a little too mature for younger readers, but with timeless themes and an emphasis on the protagonist finding her identity.

Snake is a healer in what we later learn is Earth after a nuclear war has ravaged the globe and left large swaths of land uninhabitable. She plies her trade with three trained snakes whom she can use to produce medications through their venom, including one, a “dreamsnake” known as Grass, whose bite induces morphine-like effects in dying people and allows them to die without pain and to dream through their final hours. In the first chapter, however, Snake’s dreamsnake is killed by fearful peasants whose child she’s trying to save, starting her on a quest to go to Center, a feudal city hostile to healers, to try to obtain another dreamsnake. The journey brings Snake into contact with a young girl, Melissa, who becomes important in the resolution of the story, and has two men following them across the landscape, one out of love and one with unknown (but presumably sinister) intent.

The quest itself is unorthodox, and doesn’t end with the usual Kill the Big Foozle climax we expect from fantasy novels (and almost every fantasy RPG ever), which may be part of why the book doesn’t seem to have the following of some other acclaimed sci-fi/fantasy novels of the era. Snake is a fascinating protagonist, however, attuned to her own feelings and those of others, while the setting’s combination of lost civilization and scientific progress (genetic modification is common, for example, with no anti-GMO zealots in sight, probably because they’re dead) is a novel one. Melissa’s subplot is hackneyed – stuff like this exists, but it’s a familiar trope in fiction – and I expected her role in the conclusion to be more significant given the time spent on Snake’s relationship with her. The clarity of McIntyre’s prose breaks down in the final three chapters, when Snake approaches and enters the “broken dome” in search of a new dreamsnake, with more abstruse descriptions of both setting and action standing in contrast to the evocative writing of the first three-fourths of the book.

Dreamsnake also tackles a lot of themes that may have been out of the norm in the 1970s but would be unremarkable today – birth control and LGBT rights among them – that make it seem more like a young adult novel forty years later. I hesitate on that description because there is some sex in the book, nothing explicit but also enough that I wouldn’t let my daughter read this until she’s older. By the time she’s in high school, she’d be mature enough for the content, and the book does feature two strong female characters (although a male character does come and save the day at the end, alas).

Next up: I’m reading John T. Edge’s The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South and am also about 80% through the audiobook version of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. The latter is narrated by the same actor who played state attorney Rupert Bond on The Wire.

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