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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| The Wasp Factory | The Anvil of the World | The Phoenix Exultant |
| Kushiel's Avatar | Royal Flash | The Element of Fire |
| Scaramouche | The Golden Age |
The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks (1984), 184 pp (hb).
This is Iain Banks's first novel, and it's a decently notorious debut effort. It's told by Frank, a young man living with his father on a deserted (save for them) islet off the coast of northern Scotland. Frank has grown to his mid-teens without being part of the system--not reported to the government, and so never gone to school or anything like that. Frank has an involved relationship with the territory he wanders over every day; he's given different parts of the landscape names, and set up various...markers, which he visits periodically. He also has various rituals and habits, bizarre and cruel in nature. Frank's older brother Eric went crazy and was committed to an institution down south several years ago. Soon after the novel opens, word comes that Eric has escaped, and over the course of the story, Frank keeps getting phone calls from Eric as he makes his way back up north.
I'm almost tempted to blow the twist at the ending, but although it's not as hit-you-between-the-eyes-with-a-two-by-four as the twist at the end of, say, Use of Weapons, also by Banks, it's still a bit of a revelation. Not sure that it changes much, for me at least--again, unlike Use of Weapons. This is a book not for the squeamish, or for those who get upset with depictions of cruelty to helpless creatures. I don't care for them that much, myself...said depictions, that is. I dunno, this didn't do much for me...just never on the same wavelength.
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The Anvil of the World, Kage Baker (2003), 350 pp (hb).
Kage Baker is currently in the middle of a series about time-traveling cyborgs, called the Company novels. This book is not part of that series. Instead, it's something completely different and apart. It's a fantasy novel about a guy named Smith--a pseudonym, if you can believe it--who used to be a professional assassin but is now trying to escape from his old life and look for something else to do. He gets put to work by a relative who owns a shipping company, serving as a caravan master for a departing caravan. The jacket copy alludes to this cast of characters having grown out of Baker's early short stories, and it kind of shows in that the narrative is fairly episodic. The first third is Smith and friends traveling from city A to city B; the second third is Smith and friends setting up a hotel and restaurant in city B; and the final third is Smith and friends getting entangled in a sort of half-assed save the world quest (it doesn't look like that at first, but that's what it ends up being).
It doesn't really hang together particularly well, and the save the world element that kind of swoops in near the end is pretty lame. On the other hand, Baker does have a way with understated madcap humor, if there is such a thing, and there are at least a couple of characters that are both pretty well drawn and pretty funny. She also has flashes where she gets a really evocative atmosphere just right, although it doesn't really get sustained for any length. So on balance, not great, shows some promise here and there...flawed but readable.
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The Phoenix Exultant, John C. Wright (2003), 304 pp (hb).
This is the sequel to The Golden Age, and as I noted there, the middle book of a trilogy. In order to have anything useful to say about it, I suppose I'm going to have to let a cat or two out of the bag regarding what happened in the first book. Over the course of the first installment of our story, protagonist Phaethon had come to learn that he had spent centuries preparing a mighty spaceship, the Phoenix Exultant, a ship capable of traveling near the speed of light. He intended to travel to a nearby star system, site of humanity's earlier and only interstellar colonization effort, which had inexplicably fallen to some sort of catastrophic disaster millenia ago. His various plans, and the hubris couched therein, had caused the moral and cultural arbitors of his utopian society to demand that he have his memory redacted or be permanently exiled. At the end of the book, Phaethon had opened his memory box, regained his memories, and been exiled.
The Phoenix Exultant, then, is about Phaethon's attempt to move on from that particular set-back. He has come to believe that some unknown outside entity is attempting to attack him, although it is so well hidden that the pervasive surveillance appartuses of his quondam society claim to perceive nothing. He eventually stumbles onto an enclave of bedraggled misfits and outcasts that eke out a meager existence outside the bounds of the society from which he's been exiled. He sets about trying to figure out who's after him and what he can possibly do next. Simplifying enormously, by the end of this volume, Phaethon has simultaneously regained control, more or less, of his ship, confirmed the threat, although not its every particular, from the nearby star system, and been enlisted in a military expedition to go see what the nature of the threat involves. Presumably book three will tell us all about it.
This is an enjoyable book. It continues in the vein of its predecessor, in that it winds from the unknown to the known, tripping from revelation to revelation as the protagonist fills in various mysteries. And it's likewise somewhat discursive...but in a good way. All in all, I'd say the first two books are pretty impressive accomplishments, and I'll be looking forward to the concluding volume, some time next year (I assume).
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Kushiel's Avatar, Jacqueline Carey (2003), 702 pp (hb).
The concluding volume of a trilogy, begun with Kushiel's Dart and continued in Kushiel's Chosen. As with both of its predecessors, this book is a lot of travelogue, as our heroine, the masochistic whore Phedre, gallivants to new and exotic locales in pursuit of her quest. Or actually, her quests, because fairly early on it becomes evident that Our Lady of Whips and Chains has two separate, although tangentially linked, quests. The first involves her main goal--way back in volume one, her childhood friend Hyacinth sacrificed himself in Phedre's place to become bound by a geas as the Master of the Straits, and she's felt guilty about it ever since. In the ten years since then, she's been looking for a way to release him...to make a long story short (these are hefty volumes, each one) she's convinced she needs to find the True Name of the One God. Before she can really go haring off on that particular wild goose chase, she learns that the concealed son of her old nemesis Melisande (see the first two books) has been kidnapped, and Melisande extorts Phedre's promise to find him.
Off she and her warrior consort Joscelin go...this time, they drop by the book world's analogues of our Egypt, then to the shores of the Caspian Sea via the Persian Empire, where Phedre has to employ her peculiar gifts--reveling in depravity, basically--to bring down an insane, and insanely dangerous, upstart warlord. This she does, and puts hands on Melisande's son, roughly half-way through; the second half is devoted to what amounts to a search for the Lost Tribe of Israel by the shores of Lake Victoria to find the Ark of the Covenant and with it the name of God (no, I'm not kidding).
If I sound a wee bit mocking, it's because I can't help myself. Actually, this was a fairly entertaining story. The action gets off to a fairly quick start, but it takes a while to really get interesting (for one thing, I never cared that much for Hyacinth, Phedre's remorse over his loss, or, consequently, her need to rescue him). But once it settles in, I found it pretty engaging. I probably enjoyed this more than the second book, maybe on par with the first. It's an enjoyable conclusion to what's proved to be a nice little (well, at over 2,000 pages total, not exactly little) trilogy. Worth reading.
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Royal Flash, George MacDonald Fraser (1970), 244 pp (tpb).
After what I would characterize as a mildly positive reaction to Flashman, the first book of this series of historical novels by George MacDonald Fraser, it took me some time to get around to the second volume. Perhaps I have managed to better acclimate myself to Flashy's roguish ways, because I found this to be a hoot. Harry Flashman is newly back in England after his heroic deeds (pause for ironic wink) in Afghanistan. Playing young stud about town, he runs into a young Otto von Bismarck, at that time a complete unknown on the international stage. Jump forward five years, and Flashman is offered a goodly sum of money, which he could really use, to go meet up with an old flame in Munich. Once there, he's kidnapped by minions of Bismarck, and before our Flash can blink, he's caught up in the thick of the "Schleswig-Holstein Question." It turns out that Flashman is an absolute dead ringer for Prince Carl Gustav, nephew of the king of Denmark, who is about to marry the young Duchess of Strackenz, a small duchy in northern Germany. It suits Bismarck's intrigues to have someone he can control married into said duchy, so before Flashy can blink, he's impersonating royalty and marrying a duchess. A fun adventure. Flashman's a cad, but he has a breezy, honest style of narration that's never really self-serving--after all, he doesn't care who knows he's a coward, since he tells us himself that he is often enough--and makes it a lot of fun to read.
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The Element of Fire, Martha Wells (1993), 413 pp (pb).
This particular book happens to be really hard to find, even in libraries and used book stores. Fortunately, Kate Nepveu happens to be both indefatigable about tracking such things down, and generous about sharing the swag.
The Element of Fire strikes me as being a little bit of a quirky amalgamation on the world-building front, which I suppose is a back-handed way of saying it's not the standard quasi-medievaloid fantasy setting. It has a roughly seventeenth or eighteenth century technology level, with muskets and gunpowder, but it also has sorcerers who do magic. And it has an otherworldly element, in that world of faerie, complete with the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, plays a central part in the drama, intersecting with and affecting the mundane human world. This amalgamation of different parts doesn't completely work for me, but it's not bad and it does allow for an interesting story to emerge.
The protagonist of the tale is Thomas Boniface, Captain of the Queen's Guard in the kingdom of Ile-rien. He's also the lover of Dowager Queen Ravenna, who runs the show with a combination of competence and more than a touch of ruthlessness. Things go south in a hurry when a malevolent sorcerer from a neighboring kingdom makes common cause with the Unseelie Court, circumvents the wards on the castle complex, and stages an invasion. Adventures ensue, as Thomas and an unlikely ally or two have to pull the kingdom's bacon out of the fire (yeah, so I'm abusing every threadbare metaphor I can think of at the moment. Cut me some slack, here).
I don't think I love this quite as much as Kate does, but it is a pretty entertaining adventure, and worth grabbing for a look if you happen to run across it in a library or used bookstore.
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Scaramouche, Raphael Sabatini (1921), 347 pp (hb).
Scaramouche is one of the better known titles from Sabatini, a writer in the adventurous, swash-buckling line. It's set during the time of the French Revolution. A young man, Andre Louis Moreau, of unknown parentage (at least at the beginning of the novel), has been raised by provincial gentility in Brittany, and trained to be a lawyer. He himself doesn't care a fig for all the talk of the Rights of Man and so forth that's sweeping among the student population, but when his close friend in cold-bloodedly manipulated into a duel and surgically cut down by a powerful noble in order to remove his eloquent voice against privilege. Andre vows to take up his friend's cause, and gets involved in inciting popular riots in a couple of cities, which forces him to go undercover a step ahead of the provincial gendarmes. He falls in with a traveling theatrical troupe who are doing Italian comedy--hence the title of the book, as Andre eventually plays the role of Scaramouche, the scheming, machiavellian manipulator.
There's swordplay, revolution, not-particularly-compelling romance, and fairly cliched revelations near the end. I don't know, this was okay, but it didn't really grab me. The characters weren't that sympathetic and the story wasn't that interesting. Decent but not great.
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The Golden Age, John C. Wright (2002), 395 pp (pb).
I grabbed this because I recalled John Novak giving it a fairly positive review several months ago (I'd link to the review itself, except I don't have the patience to thumb through his archives). This belongs to the sub-genre of far-future techno-utopia extrapolations. The story centers around Phaethon, a gentleman who, when the curtain rises on this tale, doesn't know a great many things about his own past, and what's more, at first he doesn't even know that he doesn't know them. Early on, he begins encountering people and clues which lead him to believe that there's a lot of stuff missing from his memory. It turns out that in the not-too-distant past, he did something so momentously upsetting to his utopian society that the powers-that-be gave him the choice of having his memory redacted (as well as the memory of him and his chain of upsetting events redacted from all the citizens of the society) or of permanent exile from the society. The story, then, is of Phaethon trying to figure out just what happened without directly accessing his redacted memories, which would trigger the ban and lead to his exile.
One of the real tests of the future techno-utopia story is how cool the gadgets and new institutions are, and I think The Golden Age comes off pretty well. It's chock full of nifty and interesting inventions and innovations. It requires some real patience in the early going, as these sorts of stories often do, because it doesn't spoon feed the reader with bald explication. So patience and attention is required to get all the players and the different types of entities and personalities in place. Patience is rewarded, though, because it is an interesting story. It's also a fairly "talky" story, in that there's a lot of discussion between characters on points of philosophy and such. Again, I found it interesting. I was impressed by The Golden Age, and enjoyed reading it.
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