Author: katenepveu

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Highsmith, Patricia: Strangers on a Train (radio, text)

I listened to Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train as a one-hour BBC radio play (currently available for download at M Radio), and enjoyed it up until the end, which prompted me to get the book out of the library. The book is better, in my opinion, but hard for me to assess objectively because much of my reaction to it is in relation to the radio play, about which more in a spoiler post.

Anyway, the premise of Strangers on a Train is brilliant in its simplicity: two strangers meet on a long-distance train. [*] They have dinner and get drunk in a private compartment, and find that they have something in common: their lives would be much improved by the death of one person. One proposes that they should swap murders, but the other doesn’t take him seriously until their one person turns up murdered. Then what?

[*] The book is copyright 1950, which reminds me of John M. Ford’s comments in From the End of the Twentieth Century about how certain plots are no longer possible with the demise of trains as a major form of transportation.

The BBC version is a very tense listen, if a bit compressed, and kept me metaphorically on the edge of my seat until the end. (It’s metaphorically only because I was driving.) But the ending surprised me in one aspect and puzzled me in another. And the play also had a very peculiar view of love—at one point, one character says to another, “I don’t love you because you’re good, I love you because you’re mine.” Which, when it’s murder at issue . . . ? So I was curious if these aspects were originally part of the book.

The book, it turns out, has a different ending. (And the Hitchcock movie has a third.) I much prefer the book’s ending, but as I said, I can’t really see it in isolation, because I was reading it in dialogue with the radio play (and to a much lesser extent, the movie, which I have not seen). I can say that the first half really pulled me in, but the second half seemed to drag and the head-hopping omniscient became distracting—which is especially unfortunate given the complex and claustrophobic psychological portraits the book is built around. I certainly recommend it to those who like their thrillers dark, twisty, and internal.

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Torkells, Erik: A Stingray Bit My Nipple!: True Stories from Real Travelers

I requested a review copy of A Stingray Bit My Nipple!: True Stories from Real Travelers, by Erik Torkells and the readers of Budget Travel, from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. (This review is, alas, not early; the book was published in April.)

This paperback consists of single-page anecdotes from readers, mostly of international travel, and often accompanied by their pictures. Because I find it very difficult to turn off my analytic tendencies, I found myself wanting to categorize the stories: weird food, mistranslations, sexual boundaries, toilets, animals . . . (I also found it difficult to avoid forming opinions about some of the people recounting these anecdotes, which is perhaps less than charitable of me, but probably more understandable than wanting to chart the distribution of story types. I will note on the evidence of the pictures, the readers of Budget Travel are quite overwhelmingly white.)

There are some good stories and pictures in here. I particularly like the pig drinking a beer and the camel drinking a Coke—they both look very happy about it. I envy the woman who bathed in a mineral spring pool with flames dancing on the surface. And I laughed at the hand-painted sign on St. John that reads, “Tourist Info: You Are Lost” (they were, too) and the guy who bought a T-shirt that accurately labeled him, in Swahili, as a white boy tourist.

This is a good book for flipping through, either to get a feel for whether you want it or someone you know would, or just to browse on occasion. Reading it straight through, the way I did, is probably not the best way to experience it.

A minor note: the book’s pages are thickish, and I found it easy to skip pages without realizing it.

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Banks, Iain M.: (04) Excession

I skipped to Excession in my intermittent re-read of Iain M. Banks’ Culture books, one sunny weekend day when I wanted to be outside and I saw a random mention of a black-body object, which always reminds me of this excellent back cover copy on my edition:

Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back.

I’d remembered Excession as a fun book and the one most about the Culture proper, at least until Look to Windward. I’d forgotten that it involves Dajeil Gelian, a woman who deliberately remains nine months pregnant for forty years. So, as you might imagine, when I opened up the book in my sixth month of pregnancy and encountered her, I blurted out, “The hell you say!”

A moment’s reflection told me that the same level of bioengineering that let her halt her pregnancy must also give her the ability to ameliorate all the many physical side-effects of being pregnant, which allowed me to just barely suspend my disbelief. Still, as Chad put it when I mentioned this to him, the Culture, which has pregnancies, is written by Iain M. Banks. In contrast, the Vorkosigan universe, which is much less technologically advanced, nevertheless has uterine replicators, and is written by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Anyway. The Excession appears and plots immediately spring up around it, which end up affecting a number of vastly self-absorbed individuals such as Dajeil. The wide-angle stuff is fine, just as entertaining as I remembered, with the minor exception that the Affront (Banks really has a flair for names) is maybe too similar to the society in The Player of Games. But the small-scale stuff ends up being mostly about Dajeil, and because I can’t get a handle on her, it ends up falling flat for me. I first read this in college, and then I barely thought about whether she made sense. Now, I spent a lot of time trying to construct any sympathetic or sensible model of her in my head, and I just couldn’t do it.

So, not as successful a book for me on this re-read, but I am now in the mood for the rest of the series, if only my free time would cooperate.

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Urushibara, Yuki: Mushishi, vol. 1

The first volume of the manga Mushishi, by Yuki Urushibara, is somewhere between a collection of mysteries and mood pieces. It’s not for everyone or all moods, and I’m not sure I feel the need to own subsequent volumes, but it’s quite well done.

Mushi are very primitive forms of life. When they interact with humans, they can cause drawings to come to life, or eat the sounds the humans would hear, or provide premonitory dreams. Mushishi are those humans who have a talent for sensing mushi and make a career of dealing with them. The manga follows Ginko, a young mushishi with only one eye, as he travels around Japan and confronts mushi-related problems.

In this first volume, there’s little in the way of narrative momentum, as each chapter tells a self-contained story. I understand that in later volumes, hints are given about Ginko’s back story, but it’s not clear to me whether the series does or is meant to have any overall arc. Since what-happens-next is normally a major motivation for me, this is part of the reason I’m not rushing out to buy the next couple of volumes. Character is my other major motivation, and I don’t have enough of a feel yet for Ginko’s character to be really invested in his story.

However, the individual stories in the first volume are imaginative, affecting, and occasionally even a little haunting. The art suits them well, though I sometimes had trouble with the panel flow—perhaps just a sign that it’s been a while since I was reading right-to-left. The overall atmosphere strikes me as on the contemplative end, for all that there are moments of urgency. If you’re in the mood for atmospheric mysteries, this is worth looking into.

(There is also an anime that I understand follows the manga very closely.)

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Kirstein, Rosemary: (03) The Lost Steersman

The third book in Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series, The Lost Steersman, is as excellently absorbing as the prior books. It’s true that it doesn’t much advance the plot set up to date, but I enjoyed what it does do so much that I don’t actually care. Mileage may vary, of course, especially for those who waited more than a decade for this book and didn’t have the fourth sitting on their shelf waiting for them.

Rowan is looking for clues to the location of the mysterious wizard Slado. In the town of Alemeth, she finds three things: a Steerswomen’s archive in shambles; a community attacked by acid-spraying demons on an increasing frequency; and Janos, a former Steersman who resigned suddenly and is now under ban for refusing to explain why.

I have some reservations about the plot of this book, but they are overshadowed by the wonderfully strange and difficult turn it takes in the last quarter or so. First, it manages a remarkable tone shift to an almost dream-like state, which I found impressive by itself. And then its revelations complicate things so well and so fascinatingly that I’d forgive quite a bit more in the way of plot issues. Certainly Kirstein is making an eventual resolution to the series more difficult for herself, but for now I admire that and am willing to take the chance that she’s bit off more than she can chew. (Reports that she has discovered the need to write another book between the published fourth and what was to be the fifth, the completed City in the Crags, do cause me some concern, I admit.)

The other thing I note about this book is that, like the first, it incorporates another point of view. Steffie is a villager who helps at the archive and gives more insight into how Steerswomen are perceived by outsiders. His point of view is more successfully integrated that the one in the first book, but I still found it mildly jarring.

What else can I say? If you like speculative fiction, you should be reading this series.

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Marks, Laurie J.: Fire Logic

I read the first book in Laurie J. Marks’ Elemental Logic series, Fire Logic, a couple of months ago, and have been putting off writing it up because I know I’m going to have a difficult time doing justice to it. But the queue behind it is getting long, so it’s time to try.

The book is premised on two pieces of worldbuilding, one magical and one political. On the magical end, some people have elemental talents. These do not give them the ability to literally manipulate fire or water, but are linked to ways of understanding the world. For instance, fire bloods deal in possibilities and passions, and may have flashes of prescience or unexpected insights; earth witches deal in realities and physical sensations, and may heal or work with crops. On the political end, there’s the country of Shaftal, which is ruled by an earth witch titled the G’deon (an unfortunately clunky name that I half suspect of being left over from a very early conception of this world). However, the last G’deon refused to choose a successor, and when he died, the country was conquered by Sainnites.

Fire Logic opens with the news of the G’deon’s death and the destruction of the ruling house by the invaders, as experienced by two of the main characters. One is Zanja, a fire blood and a representative of the Ashawala’i, a people allied to but not part of Shaftal [*]. The rest of the first section follows her over the next fifteen years, as she experiences the effects of the invasion, culminating in the destruction of her people and her captivity.

[*] They are also dark-skinned, and the people of Shaftal tend to be fair; I like that Zanja is a protagonist from a racial/ethnic minority, though wish she wasn’t the last of her group. While I’m talking about diversity in characters, I’ll also note that same-sex relationships are entirely unremarkable in the societies of the novel.

I found this section somewhat difficult to fall into, because it jumps over large periods of time and is often grim. The jacket copy did me a favor, at least, by highlighting the characters in the first chapter who I would meet again, thereby giving me a framework of expectations, but still: somewhat difficult.

Zanja is eventually rescued by Karis, a powerful earth witch who is also addicted to smoke, a drug brought by the invaders (when under the influence, its users have no volition; and after a certain point, they must keep taking it or die from withdrawal). After Zanja is healed, she joins the resistance against the invaders. From here, the book coheres much more successfully, as Zanja makes some discoveries with the potential to change the course of Shaftal.

None of which sounds very different, I’m afraid, and the most interesting things about the plot are all spoilers. (Possibly they are not very surprising spoilers, but I read this on a plane on the way back from vacation, which was not conducive to insightful reading on my part.) What distinguishes this book, to me, is the careful way it complicates its characters and worldbuilding. It is fundamentally rooted in its characters being three-dimensional, meaning both that there are no mustache-twirling villians and that its principal theme is people finding ways to become their fullest selves. Which probably doesn’t sound very interesting either, but which made for a rich and satisfying reading experience.

Two sequels, Earth Logic and Water Logic, have been published, and the author is reportedly working on the concluding volume, Air Logic. I hear good things about the series as a whole and look forward to continuing it.

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Robb, J.D.: (26) Strangers in Death

One more in the fluff catch-up, J.D. Robb’s latest novel, Strangers in Death. This is a pretty straightforward one: Eve, and the reader, know whodunnit quite early, and the tension comes from whether she can figure out how and then prove it. This works quite well to propel the book along.

From a feminist standpoint, the interesting thing is how completely the setting governs one’s sympathies. The character portrait Eve draws in chapter 12 could, in certain historical settings (say), approach a justification instead of being an indictment. But because of this book’s setting, the little bit of grayness is saved for a different character. (Less gray than sometimes, it seemed to me, but I may have been overly sensitive to that because the book had already been extremely judgmental on the topic of monogamy.)

As a final note, the book contains a jarring and unnecessary point-of-view shift to further a subplot which, if Robb wasn’t a gazillion-seller, would have been one of the darlings her editor suggested she kill. I hate it when authors do that.

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Liu, Marjorie M.: (01) Tiger Eye

When I noticed that Oyce was tearing through Marjorie M. Liu’s books at a remarkable pace, I went back and looked at her review of the first book, Tiger Eye. It sounded entertaining, so I picked it up one day when I wanted something light.

All hail word of mouth, because the cover would certainly never have led me to pick it up. The series, as you may imagine, is shelved in romance. I was less interested in the romance than Oyce, but that may be because I’m getting extremely picky about my romance plots: I want them either to catch me right away, or to receive a lot more development than is usual. However, I read this through in one sitting anyway, because I liked that the female character was a smith, there was a decent amount of action and urban-fantasy worldbuilding, and it gave me “fluff” vibes that almost entirely turned off my brain. As a result, I can say that I noticed that the pacing went odd toward the end, but not whether I think the book as a whole was actually any good. Which is fine with me, honestly; there are times when fluff is what’s needed, and I’m probably stockpiling the rest of the series against future need.

This series seems to be generally well-reviewed, and so my reaction quite likely says more about me than the book. Also, I agree with Oyce that the blatant series-establishing was not annoying, which is rare.

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Williams, Walter Jon: Crown Jewels, The; House of Shards; Rock of Ages

Another quick re-read, Walter Jon Williams’ Drake Maijstral trilogy: The Crown Jewels, House of Shards, and Rock of Ages. These are sf caper novels, whose setup I briefly described in my review of House of Shards. I still like that book the best, possibly because I read it first. On the other hand, I don’t find the first book’s climax very interesting, and the third book’s treatment of gender makes me a little twitchy. Despite that, however, the series served admirably as light fast re-reading on a cranky weekend.

These were also collected in a SFBC omnibus, Ten Points for Style.

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Kagan, Janet: Hellspark (re-read)

In memory of Janet Kagan, I quickly re-read Hellspark recently. I liked it better than the first time I read it, perhaps because I’ve been very much in the mood for books about the joys of figuring things out. I wouldn’t say that this was as good as the Steerswoman series, but it scratches a lot of the same itch.

The book is juggling more threads than I remembered, and as a result the pacing is occasionally odd. But the characters (and, I admit, being in quick-read mode) pulled me through. And I was delighted to serendipitously discover the existence of Earth languages in which the evidentiary basis of a statement is an intrinsic part of the grammar—instead of reducing my admiration at Kagan’s invention, it just increases my overall sense-of-wonder. Language is so cool.

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