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 Anubis Gates | The Young Lawyer's Jungle Book | The Dying Earth |
The Anubis Gates, Tim Powers (1983), 387 pp (tpb).
This is the second book by Tim Powers that I've read, following Last Call some years previous. As is my wont, I'm going to discuss the plot in some detail, so be warned. This starts off with a youngish American professor of 19th century English poetry, Brendan Doyle, being contacted by a very eccentric tycoon to perform a particular service. The service turns out to be chaperoning a group of clients on a time travel trip back to the early nineteenth century to hear Samuel Taylor Coleridge give a lecture at a tavern in London. It seems that a very powerful Egyptian sorcerer has been fooling around with a spell that affects time, and punched "holes" in the river of time, which others can then jump through and come up somewhere in the past. As it turns out, the tycoon has ulterior motives, and the Egyptian's servants have an agenda, too. End result, Brendan Doyle is stuck in the nineteenth century, trying to stay alive while figuring out just what the hell is going on, on several different fronts.
I quite enjoyed this book, probably even more than Last Call, in fact. The large majority of the tale is told in the early nineteenth century, and if that weren't a different enough setting, well, let's just say that weirdness gets piled on weirdness, with several factions of seriously creepy villains--with the odd free-lancer thrown in--and some interesting twists and turns. I take exception to the epilogue, which I thought entirely unnecessary, but other than that, really a very enjoyable, and enjoyably strange, fantasy.
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The Young Lawyer's Jungle Book, Thane Josef Messinger (1996), 226 pp (tpb).
I've had this one kicking around on my shelves for a year or so, but seeing as how I had actually just started working at a law firm in mid-April, it seemed a decent time to pick it up and see if it had anything useful to say (yes, yes, the hazards of twisting up my verb tenses that arise from being three months behind in my logging duties. Alas! the newlywed state is tough on timely booklogging. Also, I'm a lazy bastard.). As to whether it has anything useful to say, the answer, I suppose is a qualified "yes." Although a lot of it is rather "inside baseball" sort of advice, in the end I'd say that a lot of it can be boiled down to maxims like "don't be a putz," "stop thinking you're hot stuff, because you ain't all that," and "don't piss off the partners." All of which are words to live by, to be sure.
This purports to be a sort of "insider's guide," tell-it-like-it-is survival manual for the newly minted young lawyer. It has chapters on what the first few years are likely to be like, things to do and to avoid when dealing with seniors, peers, and staff, becoming a functioning member of the profession, etc. The author's breezy, chatty approach mostly comes off reasonably well, although it wears thin in a few spots, and palls over the course of an entire book. It would be nice to think that a lot of what he's saying is just common sense, which although true, doesn't mean that sometimes it's not nice to have it laid out in black-and-white, or that little nuggets of common sense aren't always immediately obvious to the neophyte. Still and all, I wouldn't really call this essential reading even for a new lawyer, although it might well be useful. For everyone else....what, you're still reading down this far?
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The Dying Earth, Jack Vance (1950), 130 pp (tpb).
This is one of Vance's earliest and, I believe, best known books. It's a misnomer to call it a novel; what it more closely resembles is a collection of short stories that share a more-or-less common setting and a shifting cast of characters (the main character of one story will make a cameo in another, or be briefly referred to, perhaps). The setting these stories all share is the earth millions of years in the future, and the characters wander through a strange, alien landscape. Strangely, these stories reminded me of nothing so much as some of the tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs--Tarzan in the lost city of Opar, or John Carter in one of the abandoned cities of Barsoom--saving only that Vance is more wildly inventive and about fifty times the prose stylist Burroughs is.
As for the stories themselves, it's a little hard to describe their plots. There are magicians questing for new bits of magic lore; adventurers looking for power and fame; thieves and rogues on the make (one really should read the tasty little chapter "Liane the Wayfarer" for the story of how the nasty Liane encounters Chun the Unavoidable and receives his just desserts). These stories, and the milieu in which they are set, are strange, but strange and wonderful rather than strange and distasteful. And as always, Vance's prose is a treat. Well worth reading.
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