Year: 2009

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Fox, Daniel: Dragon in Chains

I have extremely mixed feelings about Daniel Fox’s Dragon in Chains, the first book of a fantasy trilogy. A teenaged emperor flees from a rebel army all the way to an island at the edge of his empire. However, the island is the source of the empire’s jade and thus vital to control of the empire. Meanwhile, a dragon lies chained under the straits separating the mainland from the island—but her chains have been broken and only hastily and weakly reforged.

On one hand, I found the book’s prose lovely, much more distinctive than many books I enjoy. (An excerpt is on the author’s website.) The prose, situations, and many of the characters kept me reading steadily, to the point that, three-quarters of the way through, something happened and I said, “Oh! There’s the plot!”—but I hadn’t missed it until then. And it’s nice to have something other than a bog-standard medievaloid European world.

On the other, the author is a British writer who fell in love with Taiwan and wanted to write about Taiwan’s history and relationship with the People’s Republic of China, except with empires and magic (see this interview). First, this immediately raises questions of cultural appropriation in my mind, and I just don’t know enough about Chinese culture generally or Taiwan specifically to spot anything subtly problematic. I do think that there’s a good range of characters and a distinct lack of outside saviors; the portrayal of the dragon strikes me as possibly unusual for Chinese-derived mythologies, but there may be more about her in the next books that would clarify.

Second, my first reaction to the story, prior to knowing the author’s inspiration, was that the political aspects were disappointingly black-and-white. The emperor is benevolent and tolerates a great deal from his peasant concubine, while the rebel leader is mustache-twirlingly ruthless; I felt that they collectively were the least nuanced characters in the book and drained the overall plot of complexity. Now I’m wondering if I was supposed to bring real-world politics into the story and view it through that lens, and indeed if the story only works for readers who do that.

Another issue I had is that there are at least three major relationships where one person had no choice about entering into the relationship. Two of these are sexual, and all of them, to me, display varying degrees of Stockholm syndrome—which I don’t feel the narrative presents as being as much of a problem as I consider it. Again, this may be resolved by later books, but I don’t know how much trust to place in this new-to-me author.

Finally, there are several points at which the trilogy-opening nature of the book is quite apparent. There’s one excellent sequence of a woman trying to get her family out of a city that’s being overrun by soldiers, which I found hard to look away from and harder to shake mentally, and which then more-or-less vanishes in what I hope is a “watch this space for the sequel” kind of way. The book also ends by wrapping one arc and diving headlong into another. Your tolerance for this kind of thing may vary.

So, like I said, very mixed feelings. There’s much that’s good about this book, and there’s much that could be good or could be awful, depending. I guess I’ll just have to see what my tolerance for risk is like when the sequel is published, or maybe just wait for the whole thing to be done and decide then.

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Christie, Agatha: Elephants Can Remember (radio play)

I’d gotten so far behind in logging BBC radio play adaptations of Agatha Christie novels that I just gave up and stopped putting them on the blog. But I just finished Elephants Can Remember, an adaptation of the Poirot novel where a prospective mother-in-law asks Mrs. Oliver whether her god-daughter’s mother killed her father and then committed suicide, or was it the other way around? And I had to warn people that it contains not only an absolutely infuriating view of adoption, but a remarkably stupid position on nature v. nurture, not that any of the characters seem to notice. Emphatically not recommended.

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Buckell, Tobias S.: (03) Sly Mongoose

Tobias S. Buckell’s Sly Mongoose is set after Ragamuffin and is perhaps a bit more of a series book than previous installments. Like Ragamuffin, Sly Mongoose is a solidly fun SF story with some interesting things to say about power, prejudice, and responsibility.

The book opens with Pepper, a character in the prior two books, de-orbiting the planet Chilo with nothing more than a spacesuit and a personal heatshield. He brings warning of the Swarm, which he calls “groaning, stumbling, dumb-as-fuck, old-school zombies.” Except, well, they’re actually even more dangerous than that.

The other point of view character is Timas. Chilo’s population live in cloud cities, floating above the killing temperatures and pressures at the surface of the Venus-like environment. His ancestors were Azteca on New Anegada who Reformed (disavowed human sacrifice) and left when it was revealed that their gods were actually aliens. Timas’s city survives on materials mined from the surface, but because they’ve fallen on hard economic times, they cannot afford new powered suits for the surface work. Only young men like Timas can fit into the equipment that remains, a position of honor, privilege, and overwhelming responsibility. But that doesn’t ensure that anyone in his xenophobic society will listen when he thinks he sees an alien on the surface.

So: deorbiting without a spaceship, cloud cities, zombies, Reformed Azteca, and mysterious hidden aliens—and that’s just in the first two sections. There’s lots more fun SFnal goodness along the way, plus the aforementioned thematic considerations, and a sense that the universe is continuing to expand and complicate. And lest this summary give the wrong impression, there are two major female characters whose portrayal I was eventually quite pleased by.

My only negative comment is that Pepper occasionally gives me an appeal of the lawless elite twinge of misgiving. Yes, it’s quite clear that he’s not a nice person, but I think it’s also clear that he’s supposed to be cool, so . . .

I’d say read Ragamuffin first, but if you liked that, definitely read this one too.

Crossposted to [info]50books_poc, a LiveJournal community for people who are attempting to read fifty books by people of color in a year. My reasons for participating are the same as Rachel M Brown’s, given here. I will tag books read for the challenge and also provide links to the cross-postings, because I am anal-retentive like that.

Also, I have decreed that this series is to be known as the Forty-Eight Worlds series, because I have to file it under something, until the author says differently.

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Brockmann, Suzanne: (14) Dark of Night

Suzanne Brockmann’s latest hardcover, Dark of Night, finally wraps a long-running arc in a way that I enjoyed quite a bit. It is a tight follow-up to Into the Fire, and as a result, I’m not sure how much to say about it. I mean, yes, its jacket copy does contain the big spoiler from the end of Fire—so don’t read it if you haven’t read Fire yet!—but Fire only came out last summer and isn’t out in paperback yet. I think I can say that the arc in question is the one that started in Flashpoint, which, really, is probably sufficient for fans of the series. And the action plot is very hard to put down, even though I suspect it doesn’t actually make sense in spots. (Also, I didn’t believe that certain characters were in genuine jeopardy, because the number of pages devoted to said jeopardy was not proportional to the characters’ importance in the series, which is one of the downsides of long open-ended series.)

As for non-plot issues: I was impressed that I finally liked Decker, who I’ve previously found tedious. I think the prologue is one of Brockmann’s more effective pieces of writing. And even though this is the book in which Dave gets to be a bad-ass, I wish all the characters didn’t take it on faith that he would never betray anyone under torture, since it’s my understanding that no matter how bad-ass you are, eventually you talk, whether or not you actually have the information being sought.

I suspect Brockmann is getting a lot of flack over certain developments in this book, but I thought they worked very well and continue to appreciate her determination to write the stories she wants, rather than the ones she thinks people expect.

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O’Brian, Patrick: (18) The Yellow Admiral (audio)

I returned to listening to Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series with the eighteenth book, The Yellow Admiral. This is a relatively low-key standalone episode, with an extensive land-based section early that sets up the plot for the rest of the book. The characters continue to change in response to personal obstacles, there’s a few nice set-pieces, and the ending promises interesting things to come. (Since I only have two full books left in the series, I exercised willpower and did not immediately start the next one.) I will say, though, that the extensive speeches in praise of a particular kind of traditional English life struck me as unusual for the series, almost intrusively so. But then, I tend to be suspicious of nostalgia.

A spoiler post follows.

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Banks, Iain M.: (06) Look to Windward

Iain M. Banks’ Look to Windward is unusual as a Culture novel in that nothing much happens. It’s also unusual as a novel in that I still really, really like it; in fact, it’s my favorite of the series to date.

In the near past, one of the Culture’s rare mistakes resulted a vicious civil war among the Chelgrians. In the far past, two stars were destroyed by the Culture in the war chronicled in Consider Phlebas. The responsible Mind now runs an Orbital, to which two things are headed: the light from the stars’ destruction, and a Chelgrian emissary with the stated mission of persuading a political dissident to return to Chel. As the Chelgrians tour the Orbital, the emissary’s backstory is gradually revealed. And (with the exception of a minor side thread) that’s pretty much it, at least in terms of plot.

Thematically, the book is about ways of approaching loss, dying, and death. As it showcases different approaches, it’s grounded by the ever-present, painfully beautiful love of the emissary for his wife, killed in the civil war. The elegiac quality of this thread is what makes the book a coherent and moving whole for me. This is not to say that it’s all about grief or that the net effect is crushingly depressing—this is the book that contains silliness such as a two-page conversation conducted solely in Culture ship names—and while I’m not sure how the book manages that bittersweet balance, I’m terribly impressed by it.

I have no idea if this would be a good place to start reading the Culture books. It’s the book most about the Culture proper since Excession, and yet it’s not exactly representative of the series. On the other hand, if you’re only going to read one Culture novel, it might as well be the best, so if this description sounds interesting, go ahead, and be sure to let me know what you think.

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McWhorter, John: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

I enjoyed The Power of Babel so much that when I saw that John McWhorter had a new pop-linguistics book, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, I put it at the top of my Christmas list. This is much less dense than Babel, but seems to be carefully argued as best I can tell, and is still an enjoyable read.

McWhorter argues that the traditional story of English’s evolution is much less interesting and complex than the real thing, which in his telling has two under-recognized components. First, because English co-existed with Celtic languages for centuries, weird things happened to English’s grammar like having to use “do” in questions and negative sentences. Second, because the Vikings showed up and learned English as a second language, they knocked a lot of the embellishments off of English, leaving it the least complex of the Germanic languages. (And even Proto-Germanic, McWhorter argues, is less complex than other languages descended from Proto-Indo-European. He hypothesizes that this may have been because Phoenicians learned it as a second language, but notes that so far this is just a hypothesis.)

After these two under-recognized components of English’s history, McWhorter draws broader lessons about language. English’s bastard grammar shows that, from a linguistics point of view, there’s no such thing as “errors”; arbitrary rules are just that, arbitrary. And from the reduced complexity of English after the Vikings got through with it, McWhorter argues that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that language strongly channels thought) has to be wrong, because we aren’t less able to deal with complexity today than Anglo-Saxon villagers were.

None of this will be hugely surprising to those who’ve listened to his lecture series on historical linguistics, but the additional detail and the handy print nature of the book nevertheless make it worth reading. Just don’t expect anything as detailed as Babel, and you’ll be all set.

February 21, 2009: belatedly crossposted to [info]50books_poc, as discussed here.

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Westlake, Donald E.: (02) Bank Shot

Bank Shot is second in the Donald E. Westlake Memorial Dortmunder re-read. This is the one in which they steal a bank. Not rob a bank, steal a bank.

(It’s in a trailer while the usual building is under construction.)

This was the first one I read: Chad and I were in the cavernous warehouse branch of Second Story Books in the D.C. area, back in 1998, and he came up to me with a copy and said, “You have to read this.” “I do?” “You do.”

And I did. And the rest was history.

Obviously, this worked well as a starting point for me, but on this re-read, I found myself again cataloguing the ways it is and isn’t like the series as it became firmly established. It’s the first book with May, Dortmunder’s faithful companion, for instance, and the first time there’s a (semi-)absurd overheard conversation at the O.J. Bar and Grill—but those having the conversation aren’t identified as the regulars yet. There’s no Max yet, and for possibly the only time we see a financier outside the gang, and May and Murch’s Mom have a more active role than usual.

Only two other things of note: there’s a character named Herman X who appears to be a semi-parody of a very specific type of Black radical. Since I don’t have the context, I can’t say whether I thought the portrayal was reasonable, but it made me twitch a little pre-emptively. (Herman is a person as all Westlake’s characters are people; it’s the political components that I wonder about. Also, they probably make the book more dated than others.) And second, I really like the way the tension and absurdity of this escalates. It’s not as over-the-top as The Hot Rock, but it’s still a lot of fun.

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Walton, Jo: (202-203) Ha’Penny; Half a Crown

Ha’Penny and Half a Crown are the concluding books in Jo Walton’s Small Change (or Still Life with Fascists) series, which began with Farthing.

Farthing was not written with sequels in mind, but I can’t remember if Ha’Penny was planned as a single sequel or the middle book in a trilogy. Regardless, reading it now after the publication of the complete trilogy, I couldn’t help but find it an example of middle-book syndrome; that is, I expected ultimate resolutions to wait until the last book. For me, this was exacerbated by its being set only a couple of weeks after Farthing. Inspector Carmichael, who investigated the country house mystery of Farthing, is now confronted with the explosion of a bomb at the home of a London actress. In the other narrative thread, Viola Lark finds herself trapped in a plot to kill Hitler and the British Prime Minister.

Though I had the aforementioned middle-book problem in reading this, I recognize that it contains as much of an arc as possible. I was also impressed by the way my sympathies repeatedly shifted as things kept getting more complicated. And on an aesthetic level, I appreciated the unreliability of Viola’s narration; it can’t be easy to do first-person narration of someone who thinks she’s much saner than she actually is.

Half a Crown is set in 1960 and again juxtaposes Carmichael’s third-person narration with the retrospective first-person narration of a woman, this time his teenaged ward Elvira. She is by far the least aware of the series’ narrators at the start, and part of the book is how she progresses from thinking that a fascist rally—complete with tied-together Jews to throw things at—is “jolly fun.”

Elvira is just one example of what seems to me is the central concern of the book, people’s individual breaking points: what they will or will not betray and how far they can be pushed or will go themselves. And because politics is composed of people, this drives the plot through to the series’ end.

As the concluding volume in a trilogy, it’s hard for my opinion of Half a Crown not to depend heavily on my opinion of that conclusion. And I have very mixed feelings about the ending, which strikes me as a peculiar mix of deep cynicism and optimistic deus ex machina. Which in one sense is not entirely fair, as the d.e.m. bits have, in retrospect, been set up as much as possible given the limitations of narrative structure; and yet I can’t seem to shake the feeling of abruptness that I got on the first reading.

Unfortunately I can’t be more specific without spoiling the whole thing, which I’m not willing to do. It’s one of my personal truisms of narrative art that questions are easy and answers are hard; that is, a work that sets up fascinating mysteries or difficult problems is almost certainly going to do better at that part than at revealing the answer or fixing the problem. (Dan Simmons, I’m looking at you.) In other words, Farthing may remain the book in the trilogy that people like best, or at least find most satisfying. But if you appreciated Farthing, I think it’s worth reading the rest of the series.

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