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 Paths of the Dead | The Briar King | Hybrids | Flashman and the Mountain of Light | The Emperor of Ocean Park |
The Paths of the Dead, Steven Brust (2002), 388 pp (pb).
A continuation of Brust's KhaavrenRomances; in keeping with his tracking of Dumas, The Paths of the Dead is the first volume of the three volume novel "The Viscount of Adrilankha." The eponymous Viscount, who makes his appearance several chapter in, turns out to be...the son of Khaavren, one of our friends from the first two books. Following the disaster that concluded the last book, a disaster that in fact destroyed the capital city, brought down the empire, and kicked off the interregnum, Khaavren and his wife Daro have removed to coastal Adrilankha, where he has sunk further and further into melancholy. His young son Piro, though, is just getting to where he's ready for action and the chance to make a mark on the world.
He gets that chance when forces and powers decide that it's time to bring the interregnum to an end by rescuing the Imperial Orb from the Paths of the Dead (I know, probably none of this makes sense if you haven't read at least some of Brust's Dragaera stuff before). As it happens, Piro's childhood friend Zerika has just what it takes to get the Orb back.
Written in the same style as the first two Paarfi novels, and with more authorial meta-narrative japery (Brust has roped a couple of friends into the joke, persuading them to write a foreward and afterword), this is another fun adventure. Its stylistic differentness makes it a nice change from the run-of-the-mill adventure. Oh, and this is where we get the chance to glimpse a young Dragaeran witch (who thinks, at first, that he's just a really tall Easterner) named Morrolan.
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The Briar King, Greg Keyes (2003), 552 pp (hb).
The opening book of YAM-VEF ("yet another multi-volume epic fantasy"), and you would think I would know better by now than to start something that isn't finished yet. I find that I've been losing my taste for cookie-cutter epic fantasy over the years, but old habits sometimes die hard, and I guess I keep holding out some sort of vague hope that I'll hit on just the right combination of sweeping, epic plot, compelling, larger-than-life characters, and rich, absorbing prose to enthrall and delight me. This isn't it, but that said, it's actually fairly decent, and at least interesting enough that I'll probably go to the trouble of getting volume two out of the library whenever it gets published and becomes available.
Jacket copy to the contrary, The Briar King doesn't really have much in innovation or deviation from the bog-standard fantasy--it's got your ancient evil about to awake, your rough-hewn ranger with the heart of gold, your feisty adolescent princess upon whose shoulders the fate of the world unknowingly rests, among other tropes we might name--but it pulls off the execution with sufficient skill to make it a page-turner. I found the multiple thread nature of the narrative to be actively irritating at points--in a left-hand-compliment sort of way, I guess it shows that the author did a decent enough job of building to chapter-ending climaxes--but to be continually left on a cliff-hanger only to jump to a different strand of action was starting to annoy me.
At any rate, a fantasy with reasonably interesting plot and reasonably interesting characters. Not a world-beater, but not a bad read.
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Hybrids, Robert J. Sawyer (2003), 368 pp (hb).
The concluding volume of Sawyer's "Neanderthal Parallax" trilogy, following Hominids and Humans, and in my opinion, the most tendentious and least enjoyable of the lot. Sawyer has been juggling various themes--the high incidence of male violence in our world, our degredation of the environment, the neurochemical basis for religious belief--and his treatment of these themes only intensifies in his concluding volume. Since said treatment isn't very deep or interesting (in my opinion; shouldn't even have to attach that rider, but I will anyway), I was fairly bored and mildly annoyed by this book.
Plotwise, it's about Ponter and Mary exploring their new relationship, deciding to have a child together (with digressions into all the obstacles that will entail), and thwarting a dastardly plot by one of those morally-stunted, power-mad white males to wipe out the Neanderthal population and seize their pristine alternate Earth for humanity to expand into. The first book in this trilogy was decently entertaining just on a story level. The second, and particularly this one, not so much.
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Flashman and the Mountain of Light, George MacDonald Fraser (1990), 338 pp (hb).
Another adventure from the life of the distinguished Victorian soldier, Sir Harry Flashman. We get a brief framing chapter, in which Sir Harry and his lovely Elspeth are taking tea with the Queen not long before her diamond jubilee, and she asks his advice whether she should wear the fabled Koh-i-Noor diamond (also known as the "Mountain of Light," hence the title of the book) at her celebration. That casts Sir Harry back on a reminiscence of when he first encountered the diamond, back in the great Sikh uprising in the Punjab region of India in 1845-46, and away we go.
Harry has just "rescued" Elspeth at the end of Flashman's Lady and is ready to sail back to England when he gets shanghaied by a troop ship heading the opposite direction with news of trouble out in India. Before he can say "boo!", our man Flash is set up as a spy cum diplomat at the court of the Sikh rulers in Lahore, whose army, the Khalsa, is large, well-trained, and just spoiling for a fight with British forces. Harry being Harry, he's up to his old tricks in no time, although he takes pains to inform us that he does actually draw the line at some things, at least in theory, if not in practice:
Now, you may not credit this, but I'm not much of a hand at orgies. I ain't what you'd call a prude, but I do hold that an Englishman's brothel is his castle, where he should behave according--as many flash-tails as he likes, but none of these troop fornications that the Orientals indulge in. It's not the indecency I mind, but the company of a lot of boozy brutes hallooing and kicking up the deuce of a row when I want to concentrate and give of my best. A regular bacchanalia is something to see, right enough, but I'm with the discriminating Frog who said that one is interesting, but only a cad would make a habit of it. Still, evil associations corrupt good manners, especially when you're horney as Turvey's bull and full of love-puggle....
Who ever said old Harry has no scruples? At any rate, another twisty, humorous romp through momentous historical events.
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The Emperor of Ocean Park, Stephen L. Carter (2002), 652 pp (hb).
I had my eye on this one as being potentially interesting reading since it first made a bit of a splash when it came out in 2002. Unfortunately, that "bit of a splash" part, which subsequently included a reasonable stretch on the best-seller lists, as I recall, meant that it was never available at the local library, and the waiting list was really long to boot. A year and a half later, lo and behold, there it is--not one copy but two sitting side by side on the New Books shelf in the Mountain View Public Library.
At any rate, enough meta-commentary. Stephen Carter is a professor at Yale Law School, and so it's not much surprise that his protagonist, Talcott (Misha) Garland, is likewise a professor at a nameless (fictional) elite law school. The book is a mystery, but it's also an exploration of, among other things, upper-middle class African-American society, law school politics, family dynamics, and Misha's slowly disintigrating marriage. The Emperor of the title is Misha's father, "the Judge," a long-time D.C. circuit appellate judge whose failed Supreme Court nomination casts its long shadow over the events and characters of the book, and whose death opens the story and sets Misha on his initially unwilling search for answers to the central mystery: just what was the Judge up to in consorting with a reputed crime boss right before such visits went public and torpedoed his nomination? It's a long and winding path getting to the bottom of that question, since intertwined in there are subplots involving Misha' wife's potential nomination to a federal appellate court, Misha's sister's paranoid conspiracy-theory flights of fancy, and Misha's academic travails back at the old law school, but he eventually gets his answers. It shouldn't be much surprise that corruption in high places is involved....
I did have one strange take-me-out-of-the-story moment while reading this, when a minor plot point of one of the various sub-plots hinged on some law student uncovering a heretofore unpublished monograph manuscript in "some sub-basement at UCLA law school," and my immediate reaction was "wait, there are no sub-basements at UCLA law school," followed shortly thereafter by "wait a minute! did they neglect to issue me the secret decoder ring to that level?" Anyway, this is a lengthy, complicated, but for the most part quite interesting book. I think it wanders in places, and gets bogged down here and there where it doesn't need to, but it's mostly engaging. I foisted it off on my wife, who was casting about for something to read, and she got pretty absorbed in it and at the end wanted "another one like that." So, I think she recommends it even more than I do, but I thought it was pretty good, too.
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