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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| These Old Shades | The Master of All Desires | A Scattering of Jades |
| Fables & Reflections (Sandman VI) | Black Projects, White Knights | Genpei |
These Old Shades, Georgette Heyer (1926), 362 pp (hb).
This is the second Heyer romance I've read (following The Foundling) that has a Duke as the protagonist. This is also a fairly early Heyer, which I would speculate might account for its containing what seems like almost every cliché in the Regency Romance book. Okay, that's actually not very fair, one because maybe they weren't clichés back when Georgette was writing them, two because I don't actually know the Regency Romance playbook all that well to begin with, and three because this isn't, technically, a Regency Romance at all. It's a Georgian. (Which is to say, it takes place two or three generations before the actual Regency--if I knew my English history a little better, I could probably pin down at least the decade in which it occurs from the historical figures that are alluded to in the text). Back to the cliché part: they don't actually make it bad, really, since Heyer handles them with her characteristic light touch. Nevertheless, there is hidden parentage, infants switched at birth, plucky and just a bit saucy young heroines who win the heart of the jaded older nobleman, etc. etc. There are at least a couple pieces of misdirection tossed out in the opening couple chapters; one that I picked up on fairly quickly, and one that I confess caught me a bit by surprise, much to my chagrin, since I should have picked it up just as quickly. (Hint: I was wondering how I was going to write this log entry so as to tastefully allude to the really astonishing level of homoerotic subtext in the opening chapters, until wallah!, it suddenly became clear that that wouldn't be necessary).
Anyway, These Old Shades starts off with Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon, strolling through Paris one evening and bumping into (literally) a young gentleman trying to escape his tyrannical older brother. The Duke offers to buy the gentleman from his brother, and then installs him as his page. The page, Leon, soon becomes the Duke's ward, Leonie, and gets caught up in assorted intrigues, including a kidnapping and a central role in the Duke's revenge plot against an ancient rival.
I have mixed feelings about These Old Shades. On the one hand, it is quite entertaining, and it barrels along with a fair amount of manic energy. On the other hand, as I think I've observed before, reading Heyer requires wearing certain rose-colored filters, and I found that to be even more necessary here than usual. In addition to the usual class issues, there's also the larger than usual age gap between the romantic leads--early 40s to 19--and the stereotypically "Frenchified" speech of the plucky young heroine (meant to be endearing, it works well enough in minute doses, but definitely becomes entirely too much of a good thing before long). So. It was fun; recommended, with reservations.
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The Master of All Desires, Judith Merkle Riley (1999), 386 pp (hb).
Another of Riley's historical novels, and, like The Serpent Garden and The Oracle Glass, packed full of devious scheming by those in high places, lots of occult shenanigans, and containing a clever and resourceful ingénue for a protagonist. The Master of All Desires takes for its setting the court of Henri II of France, thus mining the same historical vein as Dorothy Dunnett's Checkmate, the sixth and concluding volume of Dunnett's Lymond series. Dunnett is really writing in an entirely different key than Riley (darker, weightier, far more layered and allusive), but the two novels do share a number of historical characters: Henri II of France, his wife Catherine de Medici, and mistress, Diane de Poitiers, as well as everyone's favorite fortune teller and prophet, Nostradamus. I'm more than half convinced, in fact, that Riley has snuck a few subtle homages to Dunnett into this book: the protagonist of Master is named Sibille, while Lymond's mother's name is Sybilla; Master makes several references to the Hôtel de St. Pol in Paris (St. Pol being the French origin of Sybilla's maiden name Semple); for much of Master, Sibille and her aunt stay in a house on the Rue de Cerisée, and of course it's the Hôtel des Sphères on the Rue de la Cerisaye that is a location for significant events in Checkmate.
Idle speculation aside, The Master of All Desires is the story of Sibille Artaud de la Roque, eldest daughter of rural gentry and aspiring poetess. Saddled with a profligate father and an unscrupulous fiancé, she soon manages to escape to the welcoming arms of her Aunt Pauline, who happens to be estranged from her brother (Sibille's father), very wealthy, and correspondingly eccentric. In the course of her flight, Sibille manages to inadvertantly take possession of the head of Menander the Undying, a magician who sold his soul to the devil over a thousand years ago in return for immortality (which, as per most deals with the devil, didn't turn out quite like the wisher probably hoped). Menander is an evil bastard, and his whole schtick is that he will grant the wishes of his possessor, but twist them so they come out in the worst possible way. And he won't leave one's possession until the possessor is dead, either at their own hand, or through the misfortune brought about by their wishes. How will our heroine escape? Here's the first encounter between Aunt Pauline and Menander:
"Shut up, you, I'm thinking," said Auntie, and gave the box several sound raps with her walking stick. She was so engrossed in her thoughts, she never noticed how she had dented and scuffed the lid of the rich metal coffer.
"Don't damage my box," said the thing inside. As I watched in horror, the dent and the scruff marks from Auntie's stick slowly vanished, and the coffer was exactly as it was. Auntie didn't seem to notice.
"A talking box," she said. "These things are worth money. Doubtless going to court as a curiousity. No wonder it got stolen. Tell me, in there, are you good for anything else besides chattering?" There was a long silence. I had the distinct feeling the thing in the box was sulking. "I say, wake up!" said Auntie, giving the box another couple of whacks. There was a low, sinister whine from within. At last a voice spoke, faint, irritated.
"In all the seventeen centuries since I was put to death, I have never encountered a more monstrous female. You, woman, are an abomination above all abominations."
"I would hope so," said Auntie. "I've learned a few things since I married my late husband for his money. And one of them is never to put up with bad-mannered spiritual phenomena. Tell me--are you good for anything? Otherwise, into the cellar with you. Deep. And don't think to curse the house. It's absolutely crowded with walking spirits and cursed objects already. They followed my husband home from his work. There's hardly room for you as it is."
Notwithstanding Auntie's fortitude, Sibille is in rather a pickle, and it's going to take some timely assistance from Nostradamus and a besotted banker's son, among others, as well as a lot of luck, before she can arrive at her happy ending. The Master of All Desires is a light, fun read. Like its predecessors, it shares a weakness in its male romantic lead--I've pretty much come to the conclusion that Riley just doesn't write male love interests very well. Since her protagonists are all female, and much more interesting than the guys they end up falling for, it's a minor point.
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A Scattering of Jades, Alexander C. Irvine (2002), 428 pp (hb).
A Scattering of Jades is a debut novel, and for someone's first novel, a pretty good one. Two of the four blurbs on the back cover (yes, I know they're generally useless, but I read them anyway) make mention of Tim Powers as a comparison. The only Tim Powers I've read (a situation I keep meaning to rectify) is Last Call, but the comparison strikes me as fairly apt, if only in this way: both Last Call and Jades powerfully sketch a tale of a man, to all appearances ordinary, nondescript, and very much down-on-his-luck, struggling to succeed in a personal quest that turns out to involve powerful mythical/magical forces that are intent on utterly disrupting a mundane, everyday world that is totally oblivious to what's going on. That's a run-on sentence that probably doesn't make a lot of sense unless you've read either of the two books, but it's the best way I can think of to encapsulate the similarity in feel. The divergences are much easier to point out. For instance, Last Call is set in more-or-less modern day Las Vegas, and involves Fisher King mythology; while A Scattering of Jades is set in the mid-1800s and involves Aztec mythology.
I have very little familiarity with Mesoamerican mythology of any flavor, so at times it was a little bit confusing to follow who was opposed to whom, and why, but by the end I think I managed to retain a fairly reasonable grasp on what was happening. The set-up is agreeably wacky: Aaron Burr (yes, that Aaron Burr) got his hands on an ancient Aztec text that predicted the end of the world at the hands of one of the gods (and the subsequent re-shaping of the new world), and assembled a loose conspiracy to try to create conditions to fulfill the prophecy. The Aztec calendar is picky about when big events can take place, and for various reasons, the conspiracy missed its shot. The novel really opens when one of Burr's satellites in the earlier conspiracy, a nasty fellow named Riley Steen, makes a second attempt several decades later. He has to have a sacrificial figure, so he chooses a young girl who meets all the requirements, and causes her to be marked and kidnapped during a fire that burns down her tenement and kills her mother. Her father, Archie Prescott, believes his wife and daughter to be dead, and wanders through an alcoholic haze for several years until the time of sacrifice approaches and events begin to come to a head.
From there, it's a loopy ride to the show-down, as resurrected avatars of gods try to manipulate events, re-animated zombies pop in and out of the narrative at unexpected moments, and Archie tries to find his daughter, who he's finally figured out is still alive. It's a pretty fun story, and quite well written. It didn't absolutely reach inside and grab hold of me, but it kept my interest piqued and came to a satisfying conclusion. All in all, I'd say it's a laudable first effort.
Chad Orzel has a nice review of this book also, which I largely agree with, save that I don't really have the same aversion to historical figures making cameos in fictional works....
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Fables & Reflections (Sandman VI), Neil Gaiman (1993), 258 pp (gn).
This Sandman compilation breaks the recent trend of following a continuous story arc throughout the entire volume. Instead, it collects a variety of largely self-contained stories. Which is fine, because there are definitely some good ones here. The art is mostly quite good, too; the only place I really didn't care for it is in the short little prologue vignette. This compilation also continues the custom of getting a "big name" author to do the introduction--Gene Wolfe has the honor here.
The first chapter tells the story of Emperor Norton, a historical figure whom, not having grown up in San Francisco, I first learned about in the pages of Moore's Bloodsucking Fiends (although I don't recall if the Emperor is ever referred to as "Norton" there). I happened to actually be in San Francisco--beautiful city--when I read this, which was nice. This story casts the history of Joshua Norton, down-and-out inventor and entrepeneur who declares himself Emperor of the United States in the 1860s--as part of a contest between Dream and his siblings Despair, Desire, and Delirium. The contest involves which of the Endless Norton will turn to, and sparks this observation from Delirium: "He's not mine, is he? His madness... His madness keeps him sane." Mark Twain even has a cameo. It's a great story, well worth reading, and once again, Death gets the best line in at the end:
I've met a lot of kings and emperors and heads of state in my time, Joshua. I've met them all. And you know something? I think I liked you best. [...]
I must confess, I have always wondered what lay beyond life, my dear.
Yeah, everybody wonders. And sooner or later, everybody gets to find out.
There are other great stories here: "The Hunt," which has all sorts of legend-y goodness stirred in, including an appearance by Baba Yaga; "Thermidor," wherein Dream enlists the aid of Lady Johanna Constantine, a character who briefly crossed his path in "Men of Good Fortune," from The Doll's House, to smuggle his son Orpheus's living head from out of the chaos of the French Revolution; "A Parliament of Rooks," where Cain and Abel and Eve take turns telling stories to a toddler who has wandered into the dream realm (this one's also notable for the amusing depiction of Dream and Death as children). The largest chunk of the compilation is several chapters devoted to the legend of Orpheus in the Underworld; this bit also marks the first appearance of the Endless's missing brother Destruction (who hasn't gone missing yet, obviously).
The final story is "Ramadan," and although unlike some, I'm unable to say it's the best single issue in the series (not having read the whole series yet), it is a very, very fine piece of work. The art is wonderful--precise, vivid, perfectly colored and beautifully lettered--and the story itself is enchanting, with a kick at the end that was piercingly topical when it was written, and still holds some currency today. Much worth reading.
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Black Projects, White Knights, Kage Baker (2002), 288 pp (hb).
This is a compilation of short stories, many of them previously published in SF magazines, set in Kage Baker's Company milieu. I hadn't read any of the stories before, but I have read the four novels that she's written thus far in that setting, and am actually kind of looking forward to the fifth, which Tor's newly revised publishing schedule puts as coming out sometime next summer.
The fictional world of the Company takes as its premise the idea that sometime in the next couple centuries, scientific breakthroughs make possible both time travel and cyborg-like augmentations that can create certain individuals (who meet strict physical requirements) who are effectively immortal. These breakthroughs are proprietary to a single powerful company (hence "the Company") called, among other names, Dr. Zeus Incorporated. The Company has hit upon a great scam: It has combined time travel with immortality to create a group of cyborg worker/slaves. It then takes various orders from patrons way up in the 24th century, and maintains field outposts sprinkled through the past to fill those orders, basically looting the past (want a scroll from the Library of Alexandria before it burned? Not a problem). The only caveat is they can't violate recorded history...but so much is unrecorded or misunderstood, that that's not much of a bar. The Company novels and stories are centered on these immortal operatives, as they go about their various tasks throughout human history.
It sounds a little goofy, maybe, but it's written with a light touch, a certain verve and flair and a good leavening of humor. My only real complaint with the novels so far has been that I find Mendoza in love really tedious (Mendoza is a central character, and she has her first adolescent love affair in the opening novel, Garden of Iden). Mendoza as disaffected cynic, on the other hand, is actually kind of fun. The characters from the novels are present in these stories: Mendoza, Joseph, Lewis, and so forth. Each story is a little anecdote of one or more of the operatives on a mission somewhere in time. Here's a snippet from a story where Mendoza happens to be recuperating from injury, and runs into an augmented hominid:
"What the hell are you?" I inquired, fairly politely under the circumstances.
"I'm the answer to your prayers," he replied. "You want to come upstairs and see my etchings?"
"No," I said.
"It's because I'm a monkey, isn't it?" he snapped, thrusting his face forward in a challenging kind of way.
"Yeah," I said.
"Well, at least you're honest about being a bigot," he said, subsiding.
"Excuse me!" I slammed down my magazine down in my lap. "Anyway, you aren't a monkey. Are you? You're a member of the extinct hominid species Australopithecus afarensis."
"I love it when you people talk like computers," he mused. "Sexy, in a perverse kind of way. Yes, Afarensis, all right, one of Lucy's kindred. Possibly explaining my powerful attraction to ditzy redheads."
"That's an awful lot of big words to keep in such a teeny little skull," I said, rolling up my magazine menacingly. "So you think cyborgs are sexy, huh? Did you ever see Alien?"
These stories were light and fun, the perfect prescription for winding down at the end of the day after seeing my sweet baboo. Recommended, particularly for those who've already read one or more of the novels and thus have some background in the characters and setting.
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Genpei, Kara Dalkey (2000), 445 pp (hb).
The title of this book is an excellent example of why the Japanese language can be so confusing. It focuses on the Genpei wars, a major turning-point in medieval Japanese history that marked the end of the Heian period and the ascension of the first Minamoto Shogun in Kamakura. The struggle was between two provincial warrior clans, the Taira and the Minamoto, and more broadly, between the warrior clans themselves and the more reclusive, inward-looking imperial court. The characters that make up the names Taira and Minamoto have alternate "Chinese" pronunciations (onyomi rather than kunyomi, for those who care about such things): the "moto" from Minamoto is also pronounced "gen," while the "tai" from Taira is also pronounced "hei" (same hei as in Heian, incidentally). Put those two together, and you get "Genpei" ("h" usually shifts to "p" when preceded by "n" in Japanese). So the title is just a description of the two clans that dominate this story. Nowhere that I recall was this made explicit in the text of the book; aren't you glad I just explained it?
Wow, that was tedious. Anyway, Genpei is not just a straightforward retelling of the sketchy historical details of that time; Dalkey instead attempts to answer all the unanswered questions and fill in the unknown spaces of the historical record by interpolating using a fantastic gloss. That is, she brings in ghosts and demons and kami (gods, loosely) and so forth to tell the story of what happened almost a thousand years ago. Early in the tale, Taira Kiyomori, a young Taira clan scion of burning ambition, makes a deal with the Dragon King of the Sea, wherein Kiyomori will rise in power and influence, eventually become grandfather of an Emperor, and in return steal the Imperial Sword Kusanagi and return it to the Dragon King. From there, it's a lot of twisting and winding as the Taira rise to the heights of power, suppress the rival Minamoto, become more dictatorial over a couple decades, and then are eventually eradicated by the resurgent Minamoto.
Genpei is a decent achievement, but for some reason, it simply failed to really grab me. It felt too dry, like it was stylistically modelled on historical epics such as the Heike Monogatari (which it was, actually). I suppose it's admirable to come so close to one's historical model, but I always found those historical epics kind of dry, too. Genpei is an interesting novelization of several decades of Japanese history, but it just fell short of compelling reading for me.
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