August 2010 Reading Summary

Again, a tardy post. I've been a bit busy, with some writing appearing at Blackgate.com and at The Rover. In particular, I've had a long critical piece being serialised at Black Gate over the past few weeks, as I talk about fantasy worlds and uncover who the first writer was to set a novel entirely in a fantastic otherworld; the big wrap-up, in which I name that writer, goes this Sunday.

I've also been reading a fair bit. I read eleven books in August. Two of them were library books, and one was borrowed. I also added one book to the apartment. So seven up on the month. Year-to-date, I'm looking at eighty-one books read so far this year, twenty-four fewer unread books about the apartment.

It has occurred to me that if I accept that I've got about a thousand unread books, then if I whittle that figure down at the rate of twenty per year I can get through them all in fifty years. I'd be eighty-seven. That sounds about right. What I really ought to do is make a precise count. Maybe next month.

June 2010 Reading Summary, and Future Blogging Activity

I read eleven books in June, which is good, but added fourteen—which is good in most ways, but does mean that I now have three more unread books around the apartment. Twenty-seven fewer on the year, sixty-two books read so far this year.

In other news, I do intend to start posting here more frequently. For some reason, I've been stuck coming up with thoughts about Thornton Wilder's book The Cabala.

In other other news (and more important news, too), I'm going to be posting regularly on the blog for Black Gate magazine. I've got two posts up already, here and here. I'll be posting every other Sunday, writing about stories and fantasy. I am quite looking forward to this.

And, speaking of things I'm looking forward to:

This and this, coming on an album next spring; but first, there's this from an album coming out in fall. Good days ahead.

Briefly Noted

My review of Guy Gavriel Kay's new book, Under Heaven, is in today's Montreal Gazette, and up at the Gazette's web site.

Readings — Eric and Enid [Four Arthurian Romances]

Eric and Enid

by Chrétien de Troyes

translated by William Wister Comfort

A prose adaptation of Chrétien’s four completed Arthurian romances, this book is highly readable, capturing the romance — in all senses of that word — of Chrétien’s work. Now, Comfort seems, to judge from his introduction, to have been most interested in, or saw Chrétien as most interested in, just that; the pleasing narrative, the excitement and adventure. In the past century, though (for these translations are now a century old), I have the sense that scholarship has re-examined these works, with more of an eye for social aspects and thematic coherency. Indeed, according to Wikipedia, some scholars are now calling Chrétien the inventor of the modern novel.

That last seems a bit of a stretch to me, but I do find that this book hints at psychological acuity in the stories that doesn’t always entirely come across in Comfort’s words. I don't know if that’s a function of the translation or not. I do know that the stories all broke down very nicely into a tripartite structure. And that the theme of love seems to bind the stories internally, as well as each to each (some of them, notably Yvain and Lancelot, link up on a plot level as well).

The stories themselves are excellent, as you might expect. They twist and turn, and develop in intriguing ways. There’s a wealth of imagination here, as well, and coming near the beginning of the Arthurian tradition, some things happen that you don’t expect. More to the point, there’s a feel to these stories, in Comfort’s translation, that’s quite evocative. The details of dress and heraldry are described precisely; it seems logical to presume that they contain a wealth of meaning or references that are missed by modern audiences. Or, at least, by me.

When you read works from centuries past, especially eight centuries past, you have to be aware that writers and storytellers had different conventions, and different ideas of what they were doing and how they were doing it. Certainly some aspects of narrative are consistent across human experience. But perhaps fewer than you’d think. So Comfort translated Chrétien with his own expectations in place; reading these works now, trying to be more open to different conventions, it’s tempting to try to guess at what the translator missed. But that’s ultimately pointless. The texts are the texts. Take them for what they are, and draw from them what you will. Chrétien’s tales have lasted this long; they’ll last some while further, and be reinterpreted in each age to come.

Readings — Nifft the Lean

Nifft the Lean

by Michael Shea

A collection of fantasy short stories in the Vancian mode, characterised by elaborate diction and a decadent mood. Like Vance, the diction isn’t quite supported by a style as smooth as that of, say, Clark Ashton Smith (whose work this sort of thing otherwise recalls). On the other hand, Shea’s work is probably more intensively plotted than Smith’s, and the volume’s tied together by ‘introductions’ that help situate the stories in their subject’s overall career. There’s an abundance of imagination on display, and the sort of cheerful refusal to take itself wholly seriously that can result in characters with names like Vulvula, the Vampire Queen.

But as you might imagine, it is a bit rich. I found the whimsy of the book, along with its richness of diction, made it best absorbed in small-to-mid-size doses. Which was a bit of a problem, in that one of the stories is a long novella in which Nifft and an associate wander through Hell. It’s not a particularly clever Hell, in the sense of presenting new spiritual tortures; but it’s quite spectacular, in the sense of presenting new physical tortures and gothic imagery. Still, it does start to become repetitive, and I at least needed some time away from the story by the mid-point in order to return later with refreshed eyes.

This is actually a bit odd, in that much of what makes Shea’s style (and Vance’s style, and Smith’s style) work is its novelty. That is, what really makes them stand out is not the ostentatiousness of the words they use, but the whimsy. The unexpected word that’s not only right, but arch, and throws a new light or an ironic tint across the whole scene or story. Shea does that, but while with Smith I’ll joyfully immerse myself in his wordplay for hours at a time, Shea’s prose tends to push me out. I think this speaks to a slight difference in the type of irony he uses; a little bit less profound, or else a little bit more prone to contrast itself with reality, I think (though, oddly, his world’s more fully-developed in terms of history and geography than anything I know of by Smith). Well worth reading, then, but the ultimate effect will likely be determined by your personal reaction to Shea’s tonal choices.

Media Linkage

Wandering around the internets, I found the Muppet Wicker Man. Which is quite brilliant. Technically, I suppose that's actually a mash-up that could have occurred back in the 70s — but it took today's modern technology (in the form of Photoshop) to make it happen. Good job, modern technology.

And the other day HBO officially announced that they're ordering nine episodes of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones. In more peculiar media announcements, there's this.

Readings — Tales From the Vulgar Unicorn

Tales From the Vulgar Unicorn

edited by Robert Asprin and Lynn Abbey

This is the second of the Thieves’ World anthologies, the books that essentially created the shared-world writing form, in which different writers set their stories in the same fictional universe. There had been predecessors of a sort, in the form of things like the King Arthur stories or H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos — and of course Marvel and DC Comics had been doing this sort of thing for ages — but these are the books that really created shared-world writing, as we have come to know it, in print. I read the first six or eight or so when I was very young; let’s say, oh, ten or twelve. A couple of years ago I happened to pick up a used copy of the first one; rereading it, I was surprised, and impressed, to see how much it was of a piece with traditional swords-and-sorcery pulp adventure. My recollection, shaped by the later books, was of something more inbred and elaborate, with more graphic sexuality and gender-based themes — and an annoying tendency to soap opera and excessively powerful characters.

You can see that sort of thing beginning to develop in this second book. The stories aren’t bad, as such, but the apparently-immortal character of Tempus seems strangely out of place in the low-magic setting. Which may be why series editor Robert Asprin tried (unsuccessfully, as I recall) to write him out in the book’s last story. At any rate, you can see a tendency to angst in the stories revolving around Tempus, while the earlier stories in the book seem to me much more in the vein of Frtiz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories. Which, given the choice, I prefer.

Overall, these are competent pulp adventure stories, probably better as individual pieces rather than as a sequence. The shared-world aspect is useful, but not dominant; you certainly get the sense that anything could happen at any point — wars starting, Gods descending, you name it. Which is really the problem. If you try to look at the book as a unit, it starts and stops in peculiar ways and shifts from character to character in an inelegant manner. What you gain in unpredictability is offset in shapelessness. And one of the virtues of good pulp is cleverness in form (not brilliance, necessarily, but a clever play with plot structure). I think, all in all, that this and the first anthology were interesting experiments, but more notable in conception than execution.

Readings — Zastrozzi

Zastrozzi

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

It’s perhaps unsurprising that Shelley’s gothic novel written at age eighteen suffers in comparison to his future wife’s gothic novel written when she was eighteen. The latter, after all, is one of the classics of the form, and arguably one of the great modern myths (depending on how one defines myth). So there’s a sense in which Zastrozzi is most useful as a way to throw the greatness of Frankenstein into stark relief. Comparatively, Zastrozzi is flat, and its prose more mannered. It never really touches on the primal fears that Frankenstein does, and seems much more of its era. Largely a violent soap opera, filled with lies and stabbings, its plot moves in fits and starts, and its conception of character is broad and simple.

But it’s not unentertaining, if you like the gothic. Specifically, if you like early gothic — Ann Radcliffe-style gothic, which was light on supernatural events but heavy on crumbling castles, sublime scenery, and villainous Byronic figures in the south of Europe conducting elaborate vendettas. It has been said that the gothic novel, in its original form, was in part defined by its anti-Catholic bias, its exoticising of Catholic societies, and you can see that in Zastrozzi’s wild Italian killers. That said, anti-Catholicism doesn’t seem to be a focus of the book, the way it seems a conscious interest of Maturin in Melmoth the Wanderer. In fact, other than the introduction of the evil Inquisition, there’s surprisingly little anti-Catholic sentiment here from such a noted atheist as Shelley.

You could probably read the book as an interesting contrast to Shelley’s own Cenci as well as a contrast to Frankenstein, or to Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest. Like The Cenci, it’s about thwarted love and heightened emotion, with aristocratic Italian characters. On a technical level, you could probably argue that it’s better than Radcliffe's Romance in its dramatic technique, and particularly in its concision — the book presents itself as a fragment, a favourite technique of the Romantic era as it is now, and so begins in the middle of things with background filled in along the way. It’s almost terse, in structure if not in style, and gains a real power from the extreme compression with which the material is treated. At its best, it’s almost hallucinatory in its intensity. Which is a good and fitting thing in a true gothic novel.

Readings — The Books of the South, the Return of the Black Company, and the Many Deaths of the Black Company

The Books of the South

The Return of the Black Company

The Many Deaths of the Black Company

by Glen Cook

The second through fourth collection of Cook’s Black Company novels features the titular hard-bitten mercenary company heading into the south of their world in a search for their origins — which we find are darker than even they might have suspected. Cook broadens his storytelling techniques here, playing with new perspectives and voices; he also introduces a host of new cultures into his world. These things help keep the momentum of the series going, preventing the sag that often afflicts long fantasy epics, until quite near the end of the fourth collection.

And it’s questionable even then whether that sag isn’t deliberate. Cook catches a kind of entropic feel in the story — it grinds on, through battle after battle, death after death, until almost without realising it the Company (or what’s left of it) has run out of enemies. But they still have promises to keep, and, indeed, miles to go before they sleep. It does feel like it captures something of the weariness of the surviving company members after a long and brutal campaign. Still, the relative laxness of the plot, with groups of characters making unusually bad tactical choices, makes it seem like the series is ending at just the right point — on the brink of a potential decline.

(Incidentally, the last book in the second collection, The Silver Spike, is a one-off that shows what happens in the north after the Company heads south. Unsurprisingly, it isn’t pretty. The story's a good exercise in balancing story threads and multiple tones, though. The odd thing is that despite the extravagant and often sudden plot developments, the most difficult bit to swallow is that one of the characters, notable for being particularly adept at violence even among the Company, twice gets his ass handed to him by a character with no particular military or martial training.)

All that said, in general Cook seems to expand his aims and techniques throughout the series. For example, for first two or three omnibuses, the world of the Black Company is a world of louts. That’s what gives it its charm, though it also comes to seem a limitation. You can say that there’s a kind of blue-collar ethos to most of the characters, sure, but the books never present a credible picture of somebody who lives for the intellect — not even when a wizard’s the POV character. The closest you get to something like that are scheming politicians. After a while, you do start to notice the absence; granted that the Company is pretty much the exact opposite of anything civilised or intellectual, you begin to wonder whether there’s something missing here, some alternative unexplored. Something that might cast the Company into starker relief. So when some scholars are introduced as minor characters in the first book of the last omnibus, it’s refreshing. Of course the Company doesn’t know what to make of them, and manipulates and uses them as they do everything else around them — but they’re there, and credible, and help broaden the world.

But the most notable way Cook plays about with his world is through point-of-view. Different books in the series are narrated, or compiled, by different annalists in the company; the story works itself out in ways such that we come to understand how the annalists can gather the information that makes it into the books. Now, the annalists don’t have voices that are tremendously different one from another — a few minor differences in vocabulary, most notably. But that works, because it reinforces the idea of the brotherhood of the Company, of a group mentality that shapes the individual perspective and personality. The annalists also compare notes with each other, and critique each other’s work, which helps bring out the individual differences while also bringing a charming self-awareness.

At any rate, Cook’s writing is terse, and moves like a shot. The overall darkness of the work is leavened by an appropriate black humour. This is the kind of writing that’s good enough that you think it understates things somehow to say it’s a great adventure story. But that’s what this is: some of the best adventure writing I’ve read.

Readings — The Golden

The Golden

by Lucius Shepard

At a convocation of aristocratic vampires in a vast castle in Europe, a girl bred for generations to serve as a blood sacrifice is found dead, torn apart. A newly-converted vampire, a former inspector in the Paris police, must find her murderer.

This sounds simple enough; the merit of the book is that Shepard consistently pushes every element of the story into more elaborate, more gothic, more sensual, more sublime detail than you might imagine. Start with vampire lore; his vampires don’t just burn up in sunlight, they have illuminations, and die ranting out prophecy. In becoming a vampire, you don’t just die; you pass through Blood Judgement, into Mystery, and then (perhaps) return. Or consider his setting: Castle Banat is a Gormenghast-like edifice, apparently the size of a mountain, containing massive shadowy gulfs, sprawling libraries, and mazes of secret passages. All of it based on Piranesi’s Carceri drawings, and partaking of that hallucinatory quality.

Which last drawings seem to me to suggest the book’s themes; as the Carceri drawings illuminate a fantastical prison, so the book’s main characters come to an end by leaving the castle behind. It’s a kind of vampiric bildungsroman, as we follow Shepard’s undead inspector through a series of encounters which grow progressively more outré and which lead him into increasingly metaphysical terrain. These things change him, but not always in a way which is immediately obvious in terms of character. Overall, though, you can see the progression: he loses his connection to the human world, he becomes increasingly heedless of others, he generally becomes more wicked. But if this is intended, the climax betrays this progression; not that he has any turn of heart, but simply that this tendency toward the psychopathic is given no clear way to manifest.

Discussion of the book often centres about its elaborate style, and I’ve seen the name Clark Ashton Smith invoked a couple of times. To me, it doesn’t read quite as smoothly or as extravagantly as that; I’d go more for Jack Vance, who anyway is not a million miles away from Smith stylistically. And it is quite taut, moving swiftly despite its extravagance of vocabulary and sentence structure. My concern is that I don’t really see the link between style and theme. Style and setting, style and plot, yes, certainly. It’s a gothic style for a gothic tale. But what’s the tale about? On the one hand, by the end, the European vampiric aristocracy, the castle/prison, and the Patriarch who rules both these things, are all abandoned. On the other, it appears a new vampiric colonialism is about to be born. So the political angle seems mixed. Perhaps that’s the point; that power and evil are necessary companions, that power always corrupts. Certainly even the best of the vampires are needlessly brutal and cruel.

A detective story can be about truth, and the search for same; it also can be a way to bring an investigator into contact with a world, giving a character a reason to go from point A to B to C to meet a series of interesting individuals. The Golden certainly follows the latter course. Its mystery is cursory, and committed by the person you suspect early on; and there isn’t really a series of clues suggesting a logical deduction of a chain of events, so much as a lucky stumbling-upon of large arrows pointing in a single direction. The plot, then, is not the point. But the investigator’s motive for solving the crime seems unclear, if not absent; he risks his life (or unlife) repeatedly, but there’s not much of a sense of desperation. There’s the sense that he’s on one of those tours fantasy characters take, shuttling around the world, occasionally getting involved in some episode of violence or another, reaching ultimately some sort of conclusion you can see looming off in the distance from quite a ways away. Still, that being said, The Golden is at least an enjoyable tour. I’m not sure whether it’s ultimately enlightening, but it is definitely engrossing.

Readings — The Golden Helix

The Golden Helix

by Theodore Sturgeon

I want to start off by saying that this is a good book. That said, this collection of Sturgeon’s favourites among his short stories draws heavily on tales from the 1950s, and to me largely reads that way. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though it left me personally cold. I find there’s a specific style and sensibility to American writing in the 1950s, especially commercial writing; there’s an odd balance between a desire for directness of address on the one hand and a tendency to conventionalisation on the other. So, for example, you find attempts to write out of a street argot, but the language lacks obscenities and sounds — to my ears — stilted.

More significantly, there’s an attempt, particularly I think in SF of the era, to depict a humanistic world, in which people overcome their differences through communication and learn how practically to live together. It’s liberalism in a very genial, non-political, form; indeed, it’s a liberalism that tends to undermine politics and political viewpoints — if people end up in agreement the more they communicate, then clearly the differences in ideology were never that significant. I find this liberalism difficult to accept, even when it’s well-written (and Sturgeon does write well); I don’t think people are all fundamentally alike, I don’t think disputes can all be solved by communication, and I do think there are problems in the human psyche with the drive for power.

(To give a concrete example of what I mean: One of the stories, “The Skills of Xanadau”, has to do with a paradisiac society on an alien world. Except, to me, it’s an unconvincing paradise. People are unconcerned with privacy, and go around almost naked; so how does that work with the human sex drive? I dunno. The story’s curiously sexless. Or take “And Now the News”, which ends up being driven by a man’s exasperation with the news presenting a constant parade of “damn foolishness,” which includes “people all the time pushing people around” and “Everybody hungry for a fast buck”. To me, calling these things — examples of the will-to-power, if you like — foolish is simply evading them, dismissing them without understanding them. Without understanding why humans act this way, and considering whether they’re a major part of the human condition. It’s the limit of that liberal viewpoint I’m trying to identify.)

I’m painting here with a broad brush, and I don’t want to say that that’s the only thing going on in these stories. As I say, Sturgeon’s technically a good writer. He writes in a range of different styles; probably the best story in the book, “The Man Who Lost the Sea”, plays with point-of-view and creates a memorable, hard voice. His prose is always readable, and set with memorable images. Notably, Sturgeon most often seems a tale-teller in these stories; there aren’t any obvious oral story-telling tricks, but the sense of a narrator’s personality is very strong even in the third-person stories. They’re good pieces. They happen not to touch me. Your mileage may vary.

Readings — Elantris

Elantris

by Brandon Sanderson

According to the cover of this book, Orson Scott Card has called it “the finest novel of fantasy to be written in many years.” I really don’t understand why. It’s not a terrible book. It does what it does, tell a fantasy adventure story, and does it reasonably well. But its prose is gravely ordinary, the political world it creates is perplexing, subplots are left hanging (no future books seem to be planned), and characters are flat and unsurprising. It’s an efficient book, and people who like this sort of thing will like it, but I’d have no problem thinking of any number of finer fantasy novels in recent years.

The basic story has to do with the eponymous city of Elantris, once the centre of a powerful kingdom, struck down ten years ago by some kind of curse or blight. Its glory is dead and decayed, a parody of what it was, and its citizens, once elf-like beings of great magical power, are now zombies who cannot be killed and feel pain eternally until their hurts cause them to sink into catatonia. These Elantrians are not necessarily those born in the city; in fact, humans who live in the surrounding lands are unpredictably ‘elevated’ to become Elantrians. That was great when being an Elantrian meant becoming a powerful wizard; not great when it means becoming a cursed zombie. So the new Elantrians are forced into exile in the ruined city, where they’re left to rot with no food or fresh water. Oh, and meanwhile, an evil theocratic empire is planning to add the kingdom formerly ruled by Elantris to its domains.

The story unfolds through the points-of-view of three characters. Raoden is a prince of Arelon, the land Elantris once ruled; as the book begins, he’s just become an Elantrian, and so is exiled to the zombie city, where he sets to work building a community and trying to find a way to reverse the damage done to Elantris. Hrathen is a priest of the theocratic empire, trying to convert Arelon before his masters sweep in to invade; the idea seems to be that he starts off as a villain, but circumstances conspire so that he’s working with the good guys by the end of the book. Sarene is Raoden’s fiancé, a princess of a neighbouring country who comes to Arelon to marry Raoden only to find him gone (his father’s hidden his true fate, so everybody believes him dead.).

I found Raoden a bit bland on the page for someone as charismatic as he’s supposed to be; and he builds his new society with surprising ease. Moreover, he has a habit of not telling certain other characters, notably Sarene, certain vital bits of information — such as his true identity — until it’s particularly dramatic. Hrathen’s a bit of a muddle; the early chapters which establish him don’t really set him up as an effective character, as he stumbles around in a not-particularly-intimidating fashion and is generally a fanatical priest out of central casting. Then he undergoes an ordeal, and is retroactively revealed to have an interesting backstory. Sarene, meanwhile, suffers from a galloping case of spunkyprincessitis. Symptoms include being an intelligent liberated (but not sexually liberated) princess in a patriarchal and patrilineal society who is unmarried due to her independent spirit; nevertheless having other characters, including the priest of the male-dominated religion, fall immediately in love with her or otherwise treat her with constant affection and deference; having a romantic interest (Raoden) who is the nicest and most intelligent male character in the book but who she nevertheless (in a case of mistaken identity) at one point physically fights and defeats; being faced with a stupid king/father figure who at first is intimidating but who she immediately and comprehensively gets the better of when a confrontation occurs; and, most crucially, meeting no real opposition and living in a world which generally unfolds in such a way that things go easy on her. For example, easily besting a high-ranking priest of a religion not her own in a public theological dispute over doctrine — because he wasn’t expecting her questions, you see.

So it may be fairly said that I had some problems with the book. On the flip side, the best thing about the book, its readability, is not something that I can easily illustrate. I can’t even really use a quotation to show it; the quality I’m talking about is not something that you can see in a short passage, it’s something that becomes apparent as you read the book, and turn pages, and turn pages, and it’s easier to keep reading than to look away, and the pages flip by and you realise the thing’s moving you along faster and faster. This is nothing to be sneezed at, this quality. It’s an aspect to prose that I rarely see mentioned, and never quantified. It’s got something to do with rhythm and diction, though the drawback may be excessive simplicity. At its extreme, it makes the Harry Potter books bestsellers. Elantris isn’t quite at that level, but this is the sort of thing we’re talking about: a smoothly-written pop fantasy. It does what it does, and there you go.

I just think there’ve been better books written in recent years.

Readings — Reluctant Voyagers

Reluctant Voyagers

by Élisabeth Vonarburg

translated by Jane Brierley

This is the story of a woman in an alternate-universe Montréal who begins to have strange visions, and embarks on what turns out to be a quest into the north of Québec to uncover the truth behind her world. It’s a book dense with images and speculation, but at the same time presents a fast-paced narrative.

You can look at the book from a number of different angles. As being about identity, for example. Or about the mediation of differing realities. Or about views of deity. Or about gender. Or how these things interrelate. Published in 1995, it’s tempting to view it as a creative response to the political tensions of Québec at the time. You have Separatists (in the English translation; I don’t know what term was used in the original French) who have nothing to do with Québec sovereignty as we know it; you have suspicion of a Canadian government nothing like our Canada’s; you have a tense language situation nothing like our own. The ending of the book has largely to do with the peaceful resolution of a longstanding quarrel between a couple who have certain differences but nevertheless have more in common with each other than with anyone or anything else. So ... there are certain resonances, one might say.

I thought the book was exceptional and rewarding. Vonarburg’s writing is tight, direct, and yet also resonant. If science-fiction can be understood as visionary literature for the modern world, then Reluctant Voyagers is one of the more successful visions I’ve read.

Readings — The Complete Book of Swords

The Complete Book of Swords

by Fred Saberhagen

On the one hand, this is a collection of a solid three-book fantasy adventure series. On the other hand, it’s an infernally frustrating piece of writing that never quite rises up to its potential.

You can’t really fault it. The ambition, or lack of same, of the series is plain enough from the beginning. It’s readable, exciting, and that’s it and that’s enough. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all. The setting’s vivid in its little details, annoyingly vague or peculiar in its large scale. Names are generic, even everyday; Gods are (mostly) named for Greco-Roman myth, and it’s not clear why that is. But the plots are engaging, and vary in nature from book to book, and the scale does open out a bit as the series goes on.

But, damn, what a concept Saberhagen came up with. Those Gods created a dozen magical swords, somehow more powerful than the Gods themselves. Each sword has its own distinctive power, which tends to operate according to specific rules. And each sword has a name. So Coinspinner brings good luck — but tends to vanish when its needed most. Inevitably, the series becomes in part about the discovery of the secrets of the swords. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all. There is, really, quite a lot that’s right.

In fact, the constant presence and mystery of the swords gives the series a real touch of mythic power, of wonder; and makes you wish the three books were better equipped to take advantage. You can’t help but think that the machinations of Gods and the mystery of deep magic and the resonant imagery of the swords should have added up to something truly memorable. Instead, there’s just ... a solid fantasy adventure series. Nothing wrong with that at all.

You just wish it had been a bit more right.

Readings — Castleview

Castleview

by Gene Wolfe

I’ve noted before that Wolfe is a master of playing about with perceptions, those of his characters, and those of his readers. This novel sees those gifts in full effect, in telling a tale that’s largely about perception, and about the parts of a story we don't see. In essence, this is a narrative about a seasonal war of faerie taking place in the near vicinity of a midwestern town; but exactly what’s happening, and exactly what the stakes are, are left deliberately vague, lost in the interstices between the overlapping awarenesses of the point-of-view characters.

The novel follows the shape of a familiar myth, then, a seasonal conflict, an archetypal battle between kings, between the day and night, the summer and the winter ... though it’s not quite clear who’s playing what role. The small-town setting is almost too real, the characters too purely human, to be reduced to bit parts in a romance. Or, put another way, they're too large; from one point of view they're one character, from another another. Still, the structure of the myth takes over, and guides the story along; the characters are caught up in it, each seeing only a part of what’s actually happening. The story works because the characters are fundamentally believable — simple, many of them, but each with their passions and interests and emotions and moments of transcendence.

The mythic apparatus is well-handled, as are the full-on incursions of fantasy. Wolfe modulates, as it were, the fully human and fully fantastic by including certain of his own archetypal characters — notably, a Merlin-like wise man figure (or is he Mephisto-like?), seeming now malevolent and now benign. It all comes together elegantly at the end, and leaves you with much to think on; much to try to understand.

Readings — Objects of Worship

Objects of Worship

by Claude Lalumière

Claude’s a colleague and friend, so of course this review isn’t going to be impartial by any rational standard. I mean, I do think this is an overall excellent collection of stories. I tend to prefer the super-hero stories to the zombie stories, but then that’s my attitude toward stories in general. So make of that what you will.

That being said, there are a couple of observations that occurred to me. One is that the title of the collection is very well-chosen; the stories tend to revolve around beliefs and Gods. If not Gods, then Heroes, super or otherwise. Literally, objects of worship. The point I want to make about that is this: usually, in writing about these subjects, writers tend to delve into myth. Obviously, there’s some of that here — but the stories here are at least as much about ritual. Rituals of worship, of eating, of hunting and loving and death. The myth that provides the text for the ritual act may or may not be present, characters may or may not take on mythic roles (the son succeeding the father, the child who renovates — makes new — the world), but the rite itself seems to me to provide the focus for most of these stories. Which in turn means a concentration on the physical, the visceral, the body, in a way that much myth-centred fiction, especially fantasy fiction, seems to me to avoid.

The second thing, linked to the above, is that most of these stories derive power from a deliberate incompleteness in their form. Of course a story is defined as much by what it leaves out, or leaves for the imagination of the readers, as what it gives explicitly; but I find a recurring structural principle here to be the sense of partial understanding of a text. The stories give us a glimpse of meaning, a hint of a world, a suggestion of background. We have the rite, but maybe not the myth; or we can deduce the myth from the rite, instead (as is more usual in fantasy, I think) of the reverse. This limited-information technique lends itself to horror — the lack of total understanding, the suspension of normative physical laws, the sense of being caught in something, indeed the inchoate sense of something greater than the quotidian which has overwritten reality, a something which defies expression in words and therefore is not put into words. But, crucially, all those things also may apply to the experience of the divine.

So that is what we have here, I think; stories aiming at unmediated connection with the source of myth. ‘Unmediated’ not only because the myth itself is not present, being for us to construct (so the stories force us or elevate us into the position of mythographers, being therefore mythopoeic in the purest sense), but also because of the absence of any personified sense of deity. There’s no actual God or Gods at the core of the fiction; only what you might call the sense of the divine, but what you could also call (if you are of a materialist bent) a perception of the scope of the universe. One could view this as a transcendence of the human; or one could view it as the culmination of the human. Either way, to return to my first point: that sense is the opposite of what is traditionally considered mystical, because it is of the body. It is, literally, sensuous. Overall, then, there’s a sensibility here unlike any others I can think of.

Readings — The Magicians

The Magicians

by Lev Grossman

At first glance it seems almost precious: a novel about a young man who’s inducted into a secret university for wizards, and the schooling he gets there, and then also about the series of children’s books that inspired said young man with a love for magic and what he finds out about them. But this isn’t a sterile exercise in post-modernism. Grossman’s characters live, his prose catches real magic — something that’s a necessity for a book about magic, and a book about books of magic — and there’s a fertility of imagination and invention that convinces. The imagery of clocks and fountains, suitably redolent of Narnia, is worked nicely into the overall structure of the book.

Where the book seems to have a problem, in fact, is in the excessive debt to C.S. Lewis. While the structure of it seems like a parody of Harry Potter, with sexually and pharmaceutically aware college-age students in place of oddly asexual high-schoolers, in fact the heart of it tries to enter into a dialogue with Lewis and the Christian beliefs that are at the heart of the Narnia books. The difficulty is, Grossman’s characters don’t really carry the philosophical or experiential heft that they need to really struggle in a meaningful way with Lewis. They don’t have the intellectual equipment or life experiences necessary to engage with him. That could be intentional; this would then be the ultimate parody of children’s fantasy, a story in which the protagonists are too small to really matter, and, only half-aware of their lack, throw trivial complaints against the architect of their destiny. But it seems unlikely.

The magcians who we follow in the book seem meant to represent people of talent, if not of genius. But none of them seem to think deeply; none of them seem aware of, or moved by, art or philosophy or religion or anything else on a profound level. In that sense, the central conceit of Grossman’s book works against itself: These characters are all linked by their love of a fictional series of children’s books, but none of them seem to have the mental or spritual equipment to move beyond that. I don’t mean leaving children’s books behind for some more “adult” literature; I mean reading in an adult way, whether what is read is nominally for adults or not. It’s that evolution in the reader that really, I think, reveals the quality in a good children’s book — the fact that you can come back to the book as a different, older, person, and still find the book worth reading.

Of course, the experiences the titular magicians undergo in the book are presumably meant to depict the process by which they come to maturity. It’s just that I wasn’t entirely convinced. Certainly the characters, by the end of the book, are older; it’s difficult to tell if they’re wiser. In a sense, the facility of Grossman’s writing is a drawback here; it sometimes seems glib, 'facile’ in the usual, negative, sense. That said, it’s far more often perceptive, gentle, thoughtful, and unexpected. So in the end, the journey here is worth following. It takes you places you wouldn’t imagine, and keeps you involved and engages as it does. I just wonder whether more profound travelling companions would make the experience richer.

Readings — The Folk of the Air

The Folk of the Air

by Peter S. Beagle

When Grace loaned me this book, she mentioned that she didn’t know why it wasn’t in print. Casting about online, I found out that Beagle is in fact in the process of rewriting it. Which disappointed Grace, as the book is a favourite of hers, and she likes it as it is. I can her point, but I can also see Beagle’s. The novel’s a fine tale about a wandering musician who gets involved with a group not wholly unlike the Society for Creative Anachronism, and then also with magic and old Gods and time-lost souls. But it’s slightly loose, the plot maybe not so perfectly constructed. Yet there’s no doubt that overall, it’s a very strong book.

What anchors the novel is its sense of emotional reality. On the one hand, it’s about fantasy and the fantastic impinging on and shaping reality; so it’s about a sense of transcendence, about being touched by extraordinary powers. But it’s also about real life, about mundanity, if you will, in the various senses of the word, about love and lost love and moving on from lost loves. It’s genuinely realistic, in that sense. And it has a heft, a credibility, that many attempts to mix fantasy into reality don’t attain.

But, yes, I can see why Beagle would want to rewrite it, if only to reshape its plot; the novel sometimes doesn’t seem to build in any obvious way. There are payoffs at the end, but the book seems to wander into them, with incidents not quite building on each other in the ways they perhaps ought to. The atmosphere of the book is strong, but becomes somewhat diffuse as a result.

Still, this is a fine book. The character work is fine, the prose exceptional. A lesser writer could be quite happy with having produced this novel; I have to think it says something about Beagle that he’s determined to do better.

Readings — 26th Annual World's Best SF

26th Annual World’s Best SF

edited by Gardner Dozois

This is a thick book, and a good one. It almost goes without saying that enough science fiction is published each year that any year’s-best collection ought to be at least a solid read, Sturgeon’s Law be damned; Dozois has assembled a book that’s a lot better than solid. He’s also, as per his usual practice, included an extremely comprehensive and useful introdfuction, looking back on the sf/f field as a whole for the year previous, investigating trends and presenting all kinds of solid data — number of magazines, number of books published, you name it.

So, what is there that we can gather trend-wise from this collection of over 30 stories? Where’s the cutting edge of science fiction? In general, the prose is very strong, contrary to general prejudices, and covers a lot of different styles. Characters are front and centre. In terms of content, there seems to be a strong tendency toward multiculturalism, towards sf explorations of different cultures. Or, putting new cultures in new contexts. Space opera of one sort or another is surprisingly common, but not space opera per se — large-scale events, but viewed from other, more marginal perspectives. It’s a strong collection, and one of the best sf anthologies I’ve seen.

Readings — Prince of Stories

Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman

by Hank Wagner, Christopher Golden, and Stephen R. Bissette

A kind of bibliographical commentary on Gaiman and his work to date (actually, to the date of the book’s publication), this volume is not what you’d call seriously critical. What it is, though, is comprehensive. Gaiman’s written a lot of fiction over the years, in a lot of different places. I’m genuinely impressed by how much of it the book’s authors were able to dig up.

The book also scores points for clarity. Its discussion of the incredibly convoluted copyright situation surrounding the Marvelman character is excellent. And the interviews that conclude the book, with Gaiman and with Gaiman’s assistant, are fine.

It’s just a bit cloying, at times, and a bit reluctant to really look critically at Gaiman's work. I would have liked to see more clarity about Gaiman’s connection to the authors; he’s a friend and former collaborator with at least one of them. And, friend or no, when you see a statement like “It is our contention that Neil Gaiman is one of the premier fantasists writing today,” you’re already starting to list off other writers in your head to figure out if that’s true; to follow with “perhaps even the premier fantasist” is almost asking for trouble. I mean, I like Gaiman’s work a lot, at least the best of it, but the next sentence after that is ranking him with Tolkien and Borges, and the odd-couple pairing alone makes you wonder what kind of criteria the authors are using.

Still, issues of critical practice aside, the comprehensiveness of the book makes it a valuable resource for anybody interested in Gaiman; and, as noted, the Marvelman section is useful for comics scholars trying to work out that thorny history (which has already moved on since the book’s publication). Overall, valuable, within its limits.