A tree of immense girth grows from a tufted shoot; a terrace of nine levels rises from a clump of soil; a journey of a thousand miles begins under the first tread.
--Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 64
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Slow month last month, for what seemed to me good and sufficient reasons. About time to get back in the saddle again and see if I can't make an appreciable dent in the rather daunting TBR pile sitting next to my desk (and those are just the physically present specimens; the mental list is truly scary). I finally got around to signing up with blogtracker, so those among my readers who use that service can follow updates more precisely, assuming I remember to ping after updating....
| The Serpent Garden | Sharpe's Revenge | Flashman |
| Empire Falls | Pavane | White as Snow |
| Why Me? | 1633 | Bones of the Earth |
The Serpent Garden, Judith Merkle Riley (1996), 467 pp (tpb).
Let me start out with the positive before commencing the kvetch session. The front cover blurb of The Serpent Garden calls it a "highly enjoyable romp," and taken as a whole, that's a reasonably apt description. By the standard of "did it keep me reading; was I actually interested in turning the pages, rather than doing so out of some sense of duty?" the book is a success. It was fun, and I was interested. So why this lingering feeling of disappointment after fininshing it? Well, this is a pretty good case of "could have been"; of raised expectations not met. This book could have been more than what it is, and I really wanted it to be that more.
The Serpent Garden opens in Tudor England (early 16th century, ca. 1514) during the first years of Henry VIII's reign. The historical/political backdrop that creates the stage for the plot is the marriage of Princess Mary Tudor (not "Bloody Mary"; this is Henry's younger sister, not his daughter) to the aging King Louis XII of France. Louis is desperate to produce a male heir, so the throne doesn't pass to his cousin Francis. Naturally, Francis and his partisans, particularly his sister and his dowager dragon mother, are opposed to any such disinheritance. (I have to confess that, historical illiterate that I am, about this period anyway, I cheated and looked up what happened. It's not that much of a spoiler, since the historical events are more akin to mileposts between which the actual course of the narrative has latitude to run). Within this framework, the main plot has to do with...well...it's complicated. See, there's a secret-society off-shoot of the Templars, devoted to wiping out the current French ruling dynasty. And then a group of shady occultists looking for a dark-arts sort of manuscript, which manuscript just happens to spill the beans about said secret society. And a portion of the manuscript falls into the hands of a recently widowed young lady. Which brings us to our protagonist...
Susanna Dallet is the daughter of an accomplished Flemish painter who has trained her in his methods of painting and portraiture. A young innocent, she finds out about her new husband's philandering only after he is abruptly killed in his mistress's bed. Left without resources, she's led into doing titillating Adam-and-Eve-in-the-Garden pictures--a sort of acceptable soft core porn for the religiously repressed set--and passing them off as her deceased husband's work. Eventually she's found out and engaged to do miniature portraits, at which she excels, for the rich and powerful, and is then attached to the English delegation that goes with Princess Mary to her wedding in France. Susanna is an enormously engaging character; Riley has hit just the right mix of artless naïveté and down-to-earth practicality. Here's a fairly good example of her inner patter:
...I was hardly out of the room when a lady in waiting came pattering after me and told me the Duchess Marguerite wanted to see me for some great honor, and I should come and wait in the antechamber to her bedroom without talking to anybody because, of course, the honor was much too big to let anybody know about. Some honor, I said to myself, thinking about that hangman's noose, or maybe some dreadful French oubliette somewhere. And I can't even say goodbye to Nan, or she'll get the same honor. Then I thought, well, maybe this is what happens to people who think unkind thoughts about husbands and then take money for lewd Bible pictures from wicked monks. It all catches up with one.
The book's voice alternates between third person narrative of what the conspiracy is up to and other broad events, and first person observation by Susanna. Therein lies much of the problem, because the third person narration is much less successful and interesting than the other. I would have gladly tossed it all out in favor of having the entire tale from Susanna's perspective. Be warned, also, that there is a sub-plot involving real, live demons and angels of the classical medieval/Catholic theology variety. They're sketched fairly lightly, and I could accept it once I got used to the idea, but ultimately I think that element fell kind of flat and detracted more than it added to the story for me.
A nice touch is that the book is divided into sections, each of which are preceded by a description of a given period picture or portrait, culled from a museum or gallery catalogue. The conceit is that each of these was actually painted by Susanna, and immediately after the dry catalogue description, she gives the low-down on how she came to paint the picture. It would have more impact being able to see the actual pictures that are being described, but it's still kind of a fun bit.
The Serpent Garden is a light and entertaining bit of historical fiction. It is, alas, not all that I think it could or should have been, but it's definitely a decent read, and enough to put me on the lookout for the several other historicals that Riley has penned.
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Sharpe's Revenge, Bernard Cornwell (1989), 346 pp (tpb).
The Napoleonic wars are finally winding to an end, and with them, the narrative steam of the Sharpe series. Or maybe my taste for the characters and their situations is waning. Either way, I wasn't particularly engaged by the story in this volume.
The prologue has Sharpe fighting a duel with Captain Bampfylde, the incompetent naval officer who left him and his men in the lurch back in Sharpe's Siege. This has the effect, mostly, of making his young wife Jane unhappy, and sending her back to London to wait out the rest of the war. The first third of the novel is spent on the battle around Toulouse, France, the Emperor's abdication, and France's surrender. It's kind of anti-climactic, really. Most of this section seems to be spent on Sharpe dwelling on his new-found fears of battle and mortality. Yawn. Meanwhile, his old enemy Pierre Ducos, formerly of Napoleon's secret intelligence service, has gathered a band of renegade soldiers, heisted a goodly portion of the Emperor's ill-gotten booty, and framed Sharpe for it.
The bulk of the novel covers Sharpe, Harper, and Captain Fredrickson (Sharpe's subordinate and friend) escaping Army custody, trying to find a French officer who can clear them, and then looking for (and eventually finding) Ducos. Mixed in there is a sub-plot about Sharpe's wife having an affair and absconding with his money, and Sharpe getting involved with the sister of the (unfortunately deceased) French officer, which causes a rift with Fredrickson, who also fancies her. All of this was only mildly interesting, to tell the truth. One more book to go to satisfy at least my more basic completist tendencies....
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Flashman, George MacDonald Fraser (1969), 252 pp (tpb).
I'd heard about Fraser's Flashman books through the years, but I'd always been just a bit reluctant to give them a try. I've claimed to like a bit of "dark" in my reading, but at heart I suppose I'm at least a bit of a romantic, and at the end of the day, I tend to like to see Good Triumph (allowing, of course, for a reasonable latitude in definition for both "good" and "triumph"). So I was somewhat skeptical about getting involved with a story where the protagonist is not at all sympathetic; is, in fact, a rogue and a bounder. And make no mistake, Harry Flashman is a right bastard.
There are different flavors of rogue, of course. Often, the word seems to be used in reference to the Han Solo type--dashing and wayward, with no patience for formal rules, but really a fundamentally good guy when the chips are down. It would be a stunning mistake to try to cast Flashman in this mold. He's a cheat, a scoundrel, a lecher, and a coward. Reading a first person account of what purports to be his long undiscovered personal memoirs has what I take to be two redeeming features: he's completely open and honest about being a moral pygmy, and he tells a really interesting story.
The tale starts in 1839, when Our Hero is expelled from school for drunkeness. His father buys him a commission in a cavalry regiment, where he soon becomes embroiled in a duel--which he manages to fix by paying his friend to make sure his opponent's pistol isn't loaded. Sent north to Scotland, he quickly seduces the young daughter of the strict religious family with which he's boarding (and to his chagrin, is then forced to marry her!). The core of the story, however, is the British Army's disasterous experience in Afghanistan, when they are forced to retreat from Kabul back over the passes to India, and incompetent leadership ensures a massacre at the hands of the various tribes. Harry is sent to India and then Afghanistan, so he's (unwillingly) caught up in the whole affair, with a bird's-eye view of the disaster. And naturally, absurd sequences of events combine to cover Harry in glory and make him out a hero (usually it's a case of any credible witnesses to his cowardice or perfidy managing to be killed before they can tell the true tale). Here's the bit describing the seduction of his future spouse:
...after a mile or two I suggested we stop and ramble among the thickets by the waterside. Miss Elspeth was eager, so we left the pony grazing and went into a little copse. I suggested we sit down, and Miss Elspeth was eager again--that glorious vacant smile informed me. I believe I murmured a few pleasantries, played with her hair, and then kissed her. Miss Elspeth was more eager still. Then I got to work in earnest, and Miss Elspeth's eagerness knew no bounds. I had great red claw-marks on my back for a fortnight after.
When we had finished, she lay in the grass, drowsy, like a contented kitten, and after a few pleased sighs, she said: "Was that what the minister means when he talks of fornication?"
Astonished, I said, yes, it was.
"Um-hm," said she. "Why has he such a down on it?"
It's worth pointing out that there's some karmic justice in store, since after Flashy returns to England a hero, is introduced to the Duke of Wellington and presented to the young Queen Victoria, he discovers his artless young wife is stepping out on him with various swains, and he can't do anything about it; his father having become bankrupt, he is entirely beholden to his wife's rich family for his maintenance.
There's little question that Harry Flashman is a cad and a villain, but damned if he isn't kind of fun to read about in spite of (because of? surely not) it.
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Empire Falls, Richard Russo (2001), 483 pp (tpb).
I've been having this nagging feeling that I should get a bit more high fiber into my literary diet, so in a bid to quell said feeling, I latched on to this year's Pulitzer Prize winner in the fiction category. Possibly a misguided impulse; I'm at least a little bit ambivalent about the notion of literary awards as an arbiter of quality, but I think they're a nice idea, and likely to provide at the very least a good first cut in pointing out quality reading material. So does it work in this instance? Yeah, although I'd say Empire Falls is very good rather than truly excellent; a pleasure to read without completely blowing me away.
Empire Falls is the name of the small, fading town in central Maine where most of the novel's action is set. Were I a certified professional reviewer, here is probably where I'd devote a paragraph or two to winkling out the various symbolic associations of the title as revealed in the events of the book. Nah, not that interested, and besides, not convinced that said associations are all that significant, anyway. Empire Falls is a decent portrait of somewhat hardscrabble life in a down-on-its-luck small town, and more importantly, a conglomeration of character sketches of a few of the people living in the town. Although not overtly a "comic novel," it has a wry, humorous voice that pops up over and over again, as in this representative passage describing the young parish priest and his exile to Empire Falls by the powers that be:
In addition to teaching and pastoring at the university's Newman Center, Father Mark had also hosted a Sunday evening radio show, during which he had drawn his bishop's ire by counseling loving monogamy for a young male caller "regardless of the boy's sexual orientation" and further advising him to trust God's infinite understanding and mercy. Apparently, what happened to young, overeducated, rumored-to-be-gay priests who'd landed cushy campus gigs and doled out liberal advice was that they got packed off to Empire Falls, Maine, probably in hopes that God would freeze their errant peckers off.
Empire Falls was once a company town, home to several mills owned by the powerful Whiting family. The mills have closed, but most of the land in town is still owned by Francine Whiting, the widow of the last heir to the Whiting fortune, and she wields an inordinate amount of influence over the town and the characters in our story.The central character in Empire Falls is a fellow named Miles Roby, manager of the Empire Grill, a cafeteria owned by Francine. Twenty years ago, Miles was set to fulfill his mother's dearest wish and escape from Empire Falls. He was doing well in his senior year at an exclusive private college when his mother fell terminally ill with cancer, and against her wishes he returned home to take up a job at the Grill. Now he has a teenage daughter, a reprobate father, a recovering addict brother, and a wife who's stepped out with a health club owner and is seeking a divorce. The book is an exploration of these characters' lives, with periodic flashbacks to flesh out the nuances of some of the relationships.
Fortunately for a work that hangs its hat on its characters, they're mostly well done. Miles is a nice, decent guy--too decent, in fact. The blowhard his wife has run off with has taken to coming in to the grill for lunch and adopting a hearty "we're all friends" pose, and Miles just takes it all in stride. When, near the end, Miles breaks the guy's arm and gives him a concussion, it's almost a stand-up-and-cheer moment (of course, he feels remorseful about it later). Part of Russo's achievement rests in the fact that, although decent, Miles isn't bland or uninteresting. His father Max, seventy years old ("I may be sempty...but I can still climb like a monkey") is a self-interested, utterly amoral rogue. His daughter Tick (everyone, including her parents, calls her Tick; we only learn her formal name by chance, when the principal calls her "Christine" in passing), a sophomore in high school, is a smart, artistic girl, and may well be the most interesting character in the book.
If I were looking for something with which to quibble, it would probably be the scene of violence near the end that punctuates the conclusion. Russo handles it about as well as it could be handled, but I still can't help thinking of it as stereotypical and ultimately unnecessary. That aside, the prose is smoothly enjoyable, almost a necessity when the focus is so much on the people in the story. It doesn't feel like a burden to read about them, for the most part. I'm not quite convinced that Empire Falls is great, but it is quite good.
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Pavane, Keith Roberts (1966), 277 pp (tpb).
Pavane is invariably spoken of as a classic of speculative fiction, of the alternate-history persuasion (although in yet another sign of my impressive ignorance, I'd never heard of it until recently). I'd say its reputation is largely deserved, as it serves up a tale that is rich and strange and generally quite compelling.
In accord with its title (referring to a formal renaissance dance), Pavane is divided into six main sections (slightly longer than normal chapters) and a coda. Each of the sections tells a different story, with a different main character, and although at first there doesn't seem to be any relationship between the sections, the later sections begin to relate back to characters and events in the earlier sections. It requires some patience, particularly in the opening section, to stay with a narrative that feels so slow and unfamiliar, but patience is rewarded; the second section completely sucked me into its spell, and I never really looked back.
Pavane takes as its central conceit the proposition that Queen Elizabeth the First of England was assassinated in 1588, and the Spanish Armada successfully invaded and subjected England to Catholic rule. The Church Militant reigned supreme, imposing strictures on technological development. The book opens in the 1960s, when the rivers of commerce are carried on great convoys pulled by steam engines (trains without tracks, essentially), information is propagated by a pervasive network of semaphore towers, overseen by a secretive, autonomous Signallers Guild, and five main languages are spoken in England:
...in this Catholic England of more than a thousand years after the Conquest bloodlines of Norman, Saxon, and original Celt were hopelessly mixed. What distinctions existed were more or less arbitrary, reintroduced in accordance with the racial theories of Gisevius the Great a couple of centuries ago. Most people had at least a smattering of the five tongues of the land: the Norman French of the ruling classes, Latin of the Church, Modern English of commerce and trade, the outdated Middle English and Celtic of the churls. There were other languages of course; Gaelic, Cornish, and Welsh, all fostered by the Church, kept alive centuries after their use had worn thin. But it was good to chop a land piecemeal, set up barriers of language as well as class. 'Divide and rule' had long been the policy, unofficially at least, of Rome.
The first section centers around a young haulier, driver of one of the great steam engines, newly come into his inheritance as head of the hauling firm his father built. The second section is about a young man newly inducted into the Signallers Guild (much of this section describes details of the signalling system, which I found fascinating for some reason). The third section is about an artistic young man in a monastic order mainly devoted to crafts and artisans, and his fateful assignment to sketch the proceedings at a sitting of the Court of Spiritual Welfare (the re-named Inquisition). The fourth section returns to a daughter of the hauling firm from section one, and her romance with one of the hereditary lords in the area. The fifth section follows a young woman on the southern coast, and her involvement with a smuggler's boat. In the sixth section (fittingly, the most stirring and absorbing), the daughter of the principals in section four, assuming her deceased father's feudal position, refuses to send a levy of grain demanded by the Church, and so kicks off the latent Revolution. It is her musings that contain the most explicit statement, perhaps, of the theme underlying these disparate stories:
"You know," she said, "it's strange, Sir John; but it seemed this morning when I fired the gun I was standing outside myself, just watching what my body did. As if I, and you too, all of us, were just tiny puppets on the grass. Or on a stage. Little mechanical things playing out parts we didn't understand.... It's like a...dance somehow, a minuet or a pavane. Something stately and pointless, with all its steps set out. With a beginning, and an end.... [S]ometimes I think life's all a mass of significance, all sorts of strands and threads woven like a tapestry or a brocade. So if you pulled one out or broke it, the pattern would alter right back through the cloth. Then I think...it's all pointless, it would make just as much sense backwards as forwards, effects leading to causes and those to more effects...maybe that's what will happen, when we get to the end of Time. The whole world will shott undone like a spring, and wind itself back to the start...."
Pavane isn't simple and straightforward, but it is very good. I was a bit dissatisfied with the conclusion advanced in the coda, but not enough to wipe out the impressive foundation built in the body of the work. As I said, a tale requiring patience at the outset, but rich and strange and fulfilling in the end.
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White as Snow, Tanith Lee (2000), 319 pp (hb).
This book and I were never on the same wavelength. This is a recent addition to the fairy tale series published by Tor, and its front cover promises "a dark, sensual retelling of 'Snow White'." Well, okay, taking those in order, it is definitely dark. As a general rule, I tend to like dark--character flaw, or holdover from a typically angst-ridden adolescence, I'm not sure which--so it's a bit surprising for me to conclude that this is really too dark for my taste. For calibration purposes, I'm attentively (albeit with enforced patience) following the course of G.R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" epic, which is often tagged with the "dark" descriptor ("gritty," "realistic" say its fans), and there isn't really anything in White as Snow that exceeds the Red Wedding in A Storm of Swords, or portions of Dany's Eastern travelogue, for that matter. It's just that the flavor of darkness, or perhaps the dark tone in combination with other factors, such as characterization (on which more anon), works in a way that I don't find particularly attractive or interesting.
As for sensual, in the inherently subjective realm of personal taste, few things are more subjective than what any given reader will find "sensual." The word sensual, of course, can stand for different things. Dispensing with what I take to be the most obvious first--sensual as a synonym for erotic--White as Snow doesn't really make my cut. It has a fair amount of sex and sexual overtones, not including rape and coerced congress, of which there are also several instances, but none of it struck me as very moving on any emotional level. The book comes closer to meeting the mark when considering a more general meaning of sensual, as "pertaining or appealing to the senses"; it contains quite a lot of imagery and some detailed descriptions of landscapes and scenes, some of which are even pretty evocative. In that sense, I'd concede that it's successfully sensual.
White as Snow is a re-telling of the Snow White tale. The introduction, by Terri Windling--far longer than it needs to be were it just a simple introduction; it is, in fact a mini-essay on fairy tales in general and this one in particular--advances the argument that this re-telling is a welcome correction to the hijacking of the story so successfully carried out by the Disney version. That's as may be; certainly the dwarves in this version don't merrily whistle while they work, and the prince is a self-absorbed psychotic. Most of the broad elements of the traditional tale are present, and in addition, Lee has woven in elements from the Demeter-Persephone myth. Which rather highlights one of the two further criticisms I'll conclude with.
In an attempt to make the tale so fraught with mythic and folkloric weight, Lee has overshot the mark. Multi-faceted, many-levelled stories can be great, of course, but when everything seems to be a symbol, and there's an archetype lurking around every corner, it tends to bury the story; one wonders sometimes whether one is reading a fairytale or a classroom primer. Which leads to a second criticism: characterization. Making these characters, particularly mother and daughter, into archetypes reveals precious little of their actual humanity, to me at least. I just didn't care about any of the characters. The book has a nominally happy ending; I didn't care about that, either, when it finally arrived.
Lee's writing isn't bad; in general, the prose is quite good. But as a re-imagination of the Snow White tale, White as Snow doesn't really work for me. For my money, a far superior, and just as dark, twist on the old tale is Neil Gaiman's short story "Snow, Glass, Apples". Go read it now, if you haven't already. That's the way to tell a dark fairy tale that plays against type.
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Why Me?, Donald E. Westlake (1983), 229 pp (pb).
My second Westlake, and second Dortmunder novel. I still don't know that I could be described as an unabashed fan just yet, but I think I might be warming up to the style on display here, because I found Why Me? to be light, amusing entertainment. Westlake has a firm grasp on his character types--the uptight, perpetually clueless G-man; the hard-ass, street-wise, discreetly corrupt NYPD top cop; and of course, the unlucky, can't-get-a-break, working-stiff burglar.
Dortmunder has a line on a job, a nice little jewelry store heist. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has decided to turn over the Byzantine Fire, a ring adorned by a massive ruby, to the Turkish government, and Greek partisans have undertaken to disrupt the transfer and stash the ring temporarily in the safe of a certain jewelry store owned by a Greek immigrant. When Dortmunder obliviously makes off with the ring as part of the swag, it doesn't take long before everyone is well and truly pissed--the feds, the NYPD, the criminal element that's feeling the heat, the various foreign terrorist factions that want the ring--and all are trying their hardest to scare up the identity of the thief and location of the Byzantine Fire.
I almost had a Kate moment while reading, though; the cops come to Dortmunder's apartment and take him to the station for questioning, which had me practically hopping up and down and yelling "warrantless arrest of a suspect in his dwelling is presumptively unreasonable, and therefore illegal." Of course, they try to cover their asses a couple chapters later by telling Dortmunder that he "volunteered" to come with them, and that he's not under "arrest" at all. Feh. Doesn't matter what they call it, it's still a custodial arrest, and still illegal. But that's probably at least part of the point....
Anyway, Dortmunder does eventually manage to pull his cookies out of the fire, and get the heat re-directed such that all sides no longer think he's the one whose neck they want to slowly wring. Westlake has a good ear for dialogue, and although he did annoy me by riding one particular joke (involving the spelling/pronunciation of the Irish top cop's last name) far longer than it warranted, Why Me? stands up well as quick, enjoyable entertainment.
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1633, Eric Flint & David Weber (2002), 595 pp (hb).
This book is the sequel to 1632, for which Flint has recruited a co-author, David Weber (of "Honor Harrington" fame--military sf, of the "Hornblower in Space" variety, for those who don't recognize the name). Flint actually has an afterword in this sequel that devotes some space to addressing the prejudice against co-authored works of fiction. As a (mild) holder of said prejudice, I'm willing to be convinced, but I'm not sure that this is the book to do it. 1632 was never in contention to be considered transcendant literature, but it had a fun, albeit wacky, premise, and told a reasonably entertaining story. Its sequel creeps no closer to transcendance, while unfortunately not quite rising to the same level of entertainment value as its predecessor.
When last we left our heroes, the inhabitants of the temporally and spatially displaced town of Grantsville, West Virginia, they had beaten off the initial attacks of various Spanish and Germanic enemies, and made a political accomodation with Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. This book opens with the newly reconstituted United States having sent out envoys to the various princes and powers of the age--Richlieu in France, the Dutch, Charles in England--while working furiously back home to get their industrial capacity up to speed and build a naval force and munitions pipeline for Gustavus. And so it goes, for pretty much the entire book. There's a minor naval battle or two, but the bulk of the material is infrastructure building and political maneuvering, well-larded with historical info-dumps and (as per the first installment) a fair bit of authorial editorializing . Novels about political machinations can be fun, but the machinations here mostly aren't.
I don't mean to be too harsh, because I did read it through and experience a mild sort of enjoyment. 1633 isn't entirely bereft of entertainment value. It just lacks a good deal of the exuberance and story-telling momentum that characterized its forerunner.
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Bones of the Earth, Michael Swanwick (2002), 335 pp (hb).
It's a truism that most kids--boys, at least--go through a "dinosaur phase." I certainly did. I had my extensive dinosaur planet play set, complete with a good-sized terrain of plastic rock formations (cliffs (even one with a cave), arches, etc.) and a number of representative species, with a decent predator/prey mix. And then I grew out of it, and into my zoologist/naturalist phase (which I also eventually grew out of). Faint echos of that early obsession must linger on some level, though, judging from the fact that not only did I happily read the literarily insignificant Jurassic Park and its sequel several years ago, but also watched, in spite of plotting and characterization that sucked the moldy root, all three Jurassic Park movies with something approaching satisfaction. All of which is by way of explaining that I didn't require much arm-twisting to pick up Bones of the Earth. Time-travelling paleontologists head to the Mesozoic to study the terrible lizards up close and personal? I'm there.
Time travel stories have their own unique taxonomy, of course (pause to smirk a moment over the clever diction...moving on), revolving around how the story constructs its time travel paradigm and the possibilities that flow from it (can one meet one's past/future self without consequence? can one go back and kill one's grandfather, and if one does, will one be snuffed out like a soap bubble? etc.). In the paradigm that Bones adopts, there is no problem with meeting a future or past self, but the possibility that an allegedly catastrophic paradox might arise exists. It is also the mysteries of time travel that lead to its open-ended, somewhat confusing, and in some ways unsatisfying ending. Swanwick's use of time travel also trips him up just a bit on the narrative level, I think, as he stitches together a linear narrative out of a temporal patchwork--by that I mean the action jumps around (present, near future, far past, far future), which is fine, but because the characters that appear at any given point may be from any point along that character's temporal life-span, it takes close attention to stay on top of what they know, what they've already experienced (or not), and how that impacts on the now of the story. It's a bit confusing. Or maybe I'm just slow.
But I'm backing into the discussion even more than I usually do. The book opens in the office of Richard Leyster, a gifted young paleontologist at the Smithsonian who has just directed the excavation of a great new fossil track out in Wyoming. He's just settling down to do some serious science, when a mysterious visitor shows up to make him an offer he can't refuse--and proves it by leaving him an honest-to-gee-golly Stegosaurus head in a cooler. After that bang-up opening, I felt like Bones bogged down somewhat in the first third, getting various players on stage and frittering around with what seemed to me not-entirely-necessary set-up. Swanwick eventually gets it back on track, though, and there's a lot of good stuff to follow, including a healthy dollop of dinosaury goodness. Leyster leads a group of grad students on an expedition back to the Late Cretaceous (ca. 65 million years BCE), where various wacky and interesting things happen, including this gem:
It was then, as he was thinking no particular thought and experiencing no particular emotion, that a most extraordinary sensation came over Leyster. It was a feeling very much like awe. He felt the way he had on occasion felt as a child sitting in the pew in church on Sunday morning, a profound and oceanic inward shiver, as if suddenly made aware that God were peering over his shoulder.
Slowly, Leyster turned.
He froze.
At the very top of the ridge--it must have been there all along--stood a tyranosaur.
It dominated the sky.
The beast's skin was forest green with streaks of gold, like sunlight streaming down through the leaves. This, combined with its height, its immobility, and Leyster's distracted state, had rendered it invisible to him. He had simply failed to notice it.
Bones of the Earth has a lot going for it, in spite of my quibbles. There's scientific rivalry and politics, time travel mystery, adventurers lost in the wilderness, a faction of Creationist terrorists, and much much more, including some suprisingly moving passages on a human level (as when the aforementioned adventurers return to the "present" from the far past):
Then somebody stepped forward with a bouquet of Mylar balloons, and presented them to her.
Nathaniel laughed and crowed at the sight of them.
The modern world didn't faze him a bit.
She was completely involved with her son's wonderment when a tall and lanky young man walked up to her and said, "Hi, Mom."
He enfolded the astonished Lai-tsz in his arms and kissed her on the forehead. "My little mother," he said fondly. Then, "Hey, is this me?" He scooped up Nathaniel and hoisted him into the air, the both of them laughing. "I sure was a cute little fellow, wasn't I?"
(Three other reviews of Bones of the Earth, all quite good: Chad Orzel, Rich Horton, and Aaron Bergman)
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