Author: katenepveu

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Sayers, Dorothy L.: (11) The Nine Tailors

Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors is almost infinitely re-readable and got me through some tough times over the last few weeks. It is an unusual combination of precision and otherworldliness that results in remarkably human characters, gorgeous prose, and haunting descriptions. Like Murder Must Advertise, it’s Peter very much out of his usual habitat, but even more so: not in a city, not among witty feverishly-intellectual striving copywriters, but in a small town where life is slower (but not simpler). The Nine Tailors is notable to me for its humanity, the roundedness of its characters; which are set against impersonal forces like the weather and the bells of the title.

Practically everything else that I can think to say about this theme and structure is a spoiler, so I’ll just pass on to a few small things I noted on this re-read. First, a minor criticism: though it’s taken me I-don’t-know-how-many readings to notice, Potty Peake doesn’t quite—I nearly wrote “ring true to me.” I’m not sure his speech patterns are psychologically plausible, and wonder if he’s based on observation or is a rare descent into stereotype.

(However, I will forgive far more than Potty for the exchange of telegrams late in the book, which manage to be beautifully characteristic without a single instance of punctuation.)

For all that Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey are both called Mary Sues, there’s only one time that I’ve heard the author speaking through a character, when Peter is talking to fifteen-year-old Hilary Thorpe after an unidentified corpse has been found in her mother’s grave:

“You see, I’m wondering just exactly how the—the——”

“How they got the body there? Yes, I thought you’d be wondering that. I’ve been wondering, to. Uncle doesn’t think it’s nice of me to wonder anything of the sort. But it really makes things easier to do a little wondering, I mean, if you’re once interested in a thing it makes it seem less real. That’s not the right word, though.”

“Less personal?”

“Yes; that’s what I mean. You begin to imagine how it all happened, and gradually it gets to feel more like something you’ve made up.”

“H’m!” said Wimsey. “If that’s the way your mind works, you’ll be a writer one day.”

“Do you think so? How funny! That’s what I want to be. But why?”

“Because you have the creative imagination, which works outwards, till finally you will be able to stand outside your own experience and see it as something you have made, existing independently of yourself. You’re lucky.”

“Do you really think so?” Hilary looked excited.

“Yes—but your luck will come more at the end of life than at the beginning, because the other sort of people won’t understand the way your mind works. They will start by thinking you dreamy and romantic, and then they’ll be surprised to discover that you are really hard and heartless. They’ll be quite wrong both times—but they won’t ever know it, and you won’t know it at first, and it’ll worry you.”

“But that’s just what the girls say at school. How did you know? . . . Though they’re all idiots—mostly, that is.”

“Most people are,” said Wimsey, gravely, “but it isn’t kind to tell them so. I expect you do tell them so. Have a heart; they can’t help it.”

(I can’t help but think of Hilary as a stand-in for the daughter Peter and Harriet never had—and why not, I ask? But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

What is it about Peter and improbable things with water? I mean, the swim he takes at a certain point is very symbolic and all, but when I’m reading slowly and actually visualizing things, I just can’t believe it.

Finally, I should note that Chad read this at my urging a while ago, and found one part of the mystery so obvious that it ruined his enjoyment of the book. I am unable to comment on this, because as previously noted, I don’t try and work mystery solutions out while I’m reading, and I no longer remember how I felt when I first read this book. Even if I had found it obvious, I might have been willing to forgive it for the sake of the book’s structure, but I’ll never know.

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Pratchett, Terry: (35) Wintersmith

Terry Pratchett’s latest Discworld book, Wintersmith, is the third Tiffany Aching book and something I’ve been slavering after since 2004, when I heard him read from it at Noreascon. He ended his reading an evil cliffhanger; I think he’d intended to read another section, but decided against it when the audience burst into applause at the aforementioned cliffhanger.

Probably very few books could live up to two years of eager anticipation. Wintersmith is a very enjoyable book. But I find odd a few things about its structure; not necessarily bad, just odd.

Tiffany Aching joins a dance that’s not meant for her and inadvertently fascinates the Wintersmith, who wasn’t exactly the personification of winter until this interesting human catches his attention . . .

It’s not easy, when a season has a crush on you.

Okay, the structural oddities, in no particular order.

  • The book is in something of two parts, the Wintersmith plot and the further education of the young witches Tiffany got to know in the prior book. In a general sense, they relate, in that Tiffany becoming a better witch helps her deal with the Wintersmith; but the connection is much less prominent than the witching stuff was to the hiver plot of the last book, and the resolution of the Wintersmith plot seems a bit simple. Fitting, but not quite the thing to wait a whole book on. I really like the witching stuff, mind, but it doesn’t quite seem to cohere with the rest.
  • The evil cliffhanger is from quite late in the story chronologically, but is chapter one of the book. I’m not quite sure what it’s doing there. There’s nothing actually wrong with it being there, but it’s a bit odd. What I actively, though mildly, dislike, is the narrative comment after the evil cliffhanger, which sets up an unfulfilled expectation.
  • There’s a subplot with Roland, who Tiffany rescued from Fairie in the first book. I like this subplot very much (possibly my favorite line in the book is the comment Rob Anyway makes about sandwiches), but it comes in late and feels a little unbalanced thereby.

I like the book, I do. It just puzzles me.

Pratchett has said in the past that there may be a total of four Tiffany Aching books. There feels like there’s more story to be told about Tiffany to me (in the same way that there felt like there wasn’t more story to be told about Granny Weatherwax after Carpe Jugulum, and since then she’s appeared only as a supporting character). I have no knowledge about Pratchett’s present intentions, but I hope there’s another; there are some interesting possibilities opened up by this book.

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Christie, Agatha: Mystery of the Blue Train, The

Library book sales are a good thing. I picked up The Mystery of the Blue Train, by Agatha Christie, at our library’s bag sale last month, and then just days later discovered that the radio play version of it cast someone other than John Moffatt as Poirot. Words are insufficent to describe just how wrong the actor was, so we’ll just move right on to the book itself, which I picked up after I turned the radio play off to protect my poor innocent brain.

(I am, I should note, just a little sleep-deprived.)

Anyway. A sensible woman has just inherited a lot of money unexpectedly and decided to go to France. She meets an arrogant, unhappy rich woman who’s threatening to divorce her husband. When the rich woman is strangled, the sensible woman finds herself helping Poirot solve the mystery, with some unconvincing romance along the way.

I immediately suspected the correct person when listening to the radio play, but didn’t work out, when reading the book, how that suspicion translated to the solution. Of course, the solution strikes me as pretty far-fetched, but I just don’t have time to work out mystery solutions in books, because I’m reading fast enough to occupy all of my conscious mind.

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Wrede, Patricia C., and Caroline Stevermer: (02) The Grand Tour (re-read)

I re-read Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer’s The Grand Tour because the third book, The Mislaid Magician, is out but I didn’t have enough functioning brain cells to read anything new and didn’t remember anything that happened in this book.

My initial reaction was that the plot wasn’t very surprising; now I just think there wasn’t that much of it. Since we’re getting one set of events told two different ways instead of two sets separated in place, as in the first book, this makes sense, but I still regret it. Also, Cecilia gets kind of short shrift, since she’s only writing a narrative for evidentiary purposes while Kate is keeping a diary: we get to know a lot less about her.

Finally, I have a shameful confession to make: I am incapable of remembering which name goes with which major male character. In the first book, I didn’t have to remember: one was with Kate, one was with Cecy, and the two didn’t appear together. But now they’re all traveling together, and every time they show up I have to stop and remember which of them is married to Kate or to Cecy. “James” and “Thomas” don’t look alike as words, so I really don’t understand what my problem is.

Still a fun book, but I admit I have somewhat high hopes of the third, which is apparently a return to a letter format.

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Lackey, Mercedes: (04) Aerie

I snuck Mercedes Lackey’s conclusion to her series about dragons, Aerie, in little bits over lunch over the last couple of weeks. It has to go back to the library, so I’m sneaking out a little more time to write it up.

This book is a somewhat odd and unfortunate hard left turn in the series, introducing two additional viewpoint characters—one we’d met before, and one who appears to have been created just so we can use her eyes during the big climax—and a new threat. Okay, technically the threat is re-introduced, but since it was only mentioned during book one of this four book series, it felt like it was being introduced fresh here. The book also goes highly myffic [*] at the end, which is a jarring departure from the previous concrete things like training dragons and creating a new society.

[*] TM Nanny Ogg. “With extra myff.”

Speaking of which, I’m inclined to think that if an author is going to wholesale import ancient Eyptian deities into her otherworld fantasy novel, she should either change the names completely or keep them the same. Changing one letter is just silly, and leads to decidedly mixed images: “Siris” for “Osiris” looks at first glance like the Dog Star has been spelled wrong, and “Iris” for “Isis” brings up Greek mythology instead.

All that and a sad lack of training neep. Oh well, at least I got it from the library.

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Sayers, Dorothy L.: (10) Murder Must Advertise

Though Murder Must Advertise was Dorothy Sayers’ next novel after Have His Carcase, Harriet Vane is completely absent; her single mention isn’t even by name. Despite that, I’m very fond of this book, in which Peter goes undercover at an advertising agency. It is an affectionate but precise look at life in an English advertising firm between the World Wars, written from personal knowledge—Sayers was a copywriter for nine years, until just two years before the publication of this novel, in fact. The creation of advertising campaigns, the dealing with clients, the office gossip and rivalries, the annual cricket game, plus Peter working for a living: I find it all highly enjoyable to read about. (There’s also a tedious and improbable drug-running subplot, but nevermind that.)

The book’s theme is hierarchy, as Sarah Monette points out in a post full of SPOILERS, though I think the book does a bit more undercutting of the hierarchy than just the cricket game (which I love, even though I understand hardly a word of it). On several occasions, the characters who went to the big-name schools tell the characters who didn’t that they shouldn’t dwell on it, it doesn’t matter that much, and I think they’re presented as saying this sincerely. Of course, it’s easy to say that the structure of the hierarchy doesn’t matter when you’re higher up on it—but there are other places where concerns over hierarchy are shown to lead to bad results, I’d argue, and the conversations about education are just the most explicit example.

Anyway, this is my second-favorite of the novels without Harriet Vane. I don’t know if the full effect would be appreciated by someone new to the series, but it might be worth trying out as a starting point. (My favorite is The Nine Tailors, and again I wonder about appreciating how thoroughly Peter is out of his usual habitat.)

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Sayers, Dorothy L.: (09) Hangman’s Holiday

For the next Dorothy Sayers collection in my re-read, Hangman’s Holiday, I actually read the original collection rather than the stories reprinted in Lord Peter (the library had a copy). I am not impressed by any of the four Wimsey stories in this collection, namely “The Image in the Mirror,” “The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey,” “The Queen’s Square,” and “The Necklace of Pearls.” I found the first predictable, the second condescending, the third uninteresting, and the fourth—well, my reaction to the fourth isn’t actually the story’s fault, I just lacked a particular piece of knowledge that would have made the story an “ah-hah!” rather than a “huh.” (ROT-13 spoiler: V unq gur inthr vqrn gung zvfgyrgbr oreevrf jrer erq, abg juvgr.)

This collection also has several stories featuring Montague Egg, travelling salesman of wine and spirits. I find, on a re-read, that I don’t like Montague Egg. This may not be his fault. His name conjures up a bald smarmy man in my mind’s eye, and though he is actually young and fair-haired, some of that smarmy image carries over to my reading of his dialogue, fairly or unfairly.

There are two other stories in the collection, “The Man Who Knew How” and “The Fountain Plays,” both of which are kind of unpleasant.

What it comes down to is, I don’t principally read Sayers for the puzzles, so I’m just not going to like her short stories very much.

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Ford, John M.: From the End of the Twentieth Century

John M. Ford’s From the End of the Twentieth Century is a 1997 anthology from NESFA Press; it overlaps only slightly with the recent Tor anthology Heat of Fusion (having in common “Preflash” and “The Lost Dialogue”). Ford died this week (many links and tributes at Making Light), and I’m writing this from memory, to complement Rachel Brown’s posts about his novels (Part I, Part II (forthcoming)). As this is by way of being a memorial post, I am breaking with my tradition and cross-posting it between my booklog and LiveJournal, where my other comments were posted.

You can get an idea of the breadth of the collection, and of Ford’s work generally, by reading Neil Gaiman’s Introduction. As a way of organizing my own thoughts, I’m going to approach the collection by type of piece.

Essays first. The opening essay, “From the End of the Twentieth Century,” is subtitled “A Discursion on Trains, Theatre, and Fantasy,” which tells you a great deal about what’s to come: connections all over the place, sometimes surprising ones, and an interest in approaches to storytelling. That interest is further developed in “Rules of Engagement,” which considers how readers approach words on a page and provided me with a lasting metaphor for my experience as a reader: “Every book is three books, after all; the one the writer intended, the one the reader expected, and the one that casts its shadow when the first two meet by moonlight.”

Trains are another interest demonstrated by the opening essay and then expanded upon, in “To the Tsiolkovsky Station: Railroads in Growing Up Weightless” (a hard sf novel set on the moon). I don’t think one would need to have read Growing Up Weightless to understand the essay, as Ford sets out his assumptions and extrapolations clearly. I’m not particularly interested in trains, but I found this an interesting read.

Finally, I’m going to lump “Roadshow” in with the essays. Ford also designed role-playing games, and “Roadshow” is a scenario for a science fiction game where the players bodyguard an incredibly-famous rock band. I don’t role-play and am thus not qualified to comment on whether it’s a good scenario.

I’m going to pass over the song lyrics completely, because I am incapable of judging song lyrics in the absence of music. They’re there; if you can read song lyrics and evaluate them, let me know what you think.

In contrast, I do have a lot to say about the poems, which is unusual because it’s a genre where I’m much, much more likely to miss than to hit. But any fame Ford gained outside the SF and RPG communities was probably through his September 11 poem “110 Stories”, and one of his two World Fantasy Awards was for the poem “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station” [*], so it’s not just me.

[*] I suspect this was the first thing of his I read, in a Datlow-Windling Year’s Best anthology. It’s in Heat of Fusion and itself justifies the purchase price. (I haven’t finished Heat of Fusion yet, which is why it’s not here.)

One of my favorite pieces in the collection is “All Our Propogation,” regarding which I can’t improve on Neil Gaiman’s description in his Introduction: “A prose-poem meditation on the dreams of satellites, moving and transcendentant, very high over Milk Wood.”

You can read another of my favorites, “Troy: the Movie,” at Strange Horizons. Obviously given the dates, it has nothing to do with Brad Pitt, but is instead an imagining of episodes from the Trojan War as movie scenes: Achilles and Hector as a Western showdown, the duel of Paris and Menelaus as a silent comedy, and so forth. It’s brilliant. In a similar vein, equally as good, is “A Little Scene to Monarchize,” which condenses Shakespeare’s version of the War of the Roses into—well, I think they’re all Gilbert and Sullivan parodies as done by Elizabethan playwrights, but I am (a) sadly ignorant of musical theater and (b) reluctant to re-read. Ford posted one section to a comment thread at Making Light (what turned out to be his last comment). Anyway, I’m sure my appreciation would be increased if I recognized all the layers of parody instead of just the top one, but Ford’s writing is like that.

I have less to say about the other two poems, “The Lost Dialogue” and “Restoration Day”; I remember liking them, but they didn’t hit me as hard as those three. Which, considering the length of this already, probably causes a sigh of relief rather than disappointment. Any particular partisans of those two are welcome to sing their praises in the comments.

And at last, we come to the short stories. These are a little more mixed for me, but still contain a very high percentage of things I really like. For instance, I don’t usually hear “1952 Monon Freightyard Blues” talked about, but it always makes me tear up. I can’t even give a coherent description of it, not having read it for a few years, but I know: always makes me tear up. So does “The Dark Companion,” about an astronomer who’s losing his sight. It sounds cutesy or contrived, I know, but there’s no melodrama to it.

Then there are some stories I respect but don’t love: “Amy, at the Bottom of the Stairs,” which is another take on the death of Amy Robsart (though I suspect it, with its focus on meeting death, might read differently to me now that I know Ford expected to die young, much younger than he did); “Riding the Hammer,” which is a Liavek story, and I just keep bouncing off every Liavek story I try; and “As Above, So Below”, a dialogue with a dragon about paradigm shifts. And there’s “Preflash,” which I’m sorry to say is the one story in the collection that I don’t understand. Anyone who knows what’s going on is invited to comment (in ROT-13, please).

Two of the stories I quite like are retellings of much older stories, though alas to say which would spoil the plots: “Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail,” which I suppose might be thought of as a trial run for The Last Hot Time, one of my favorite novels, and “Walkaway Clause,” which I find particularly moving. (In retrospect, and this may just be recent preoccupations colliding, I feel it has a faint whiff of something Stephen Maturin-like. Or possibly I’m making it up.)

Another two stories, “Mandalay” and “Intersections,” are linked, part of an incomplete “Alternities” series about a company that created (or found) pocket universes for vacations, until the system broke down. (Two more were written (bibliography by NESFA), and according to Neil Gaiman’s Introduction another three would have completed the cycle.) They’re very good, I’m getting bogged down again in contemplating the fact that there won’t be any more of them, it’s time to move on.

Last, there are two stories that strike me as similar in tone, first-person tales that feel somehow loose, improvisational riffs on a theme—though I suspect I wouldn’t find an extraneous word. In “Waiting for the Morning Bird,” our author watches a shuttle launch along with some figments of his imagination, archetypal science fiction characters. Which completely fails to do it justice, but I don’t know how to. Maybe if I go on to the next one, “Scrabble with God,” which is just what it sounds like:

I made OXYGEN, and got a triple word score. He made a grumbling noise. Outside, a cloud blotted out the sun . . . .

“It’s oxygen,” I said. “It’s all around us.”

He said, “You sure about that?”

I took a couple of deep breaths, just in case. (You think I’m kidding, right? Do you remember when the sky was dark with skazlorls? Double word score, fifty-point bonus, phfft. And then He challenged me on it.)

(I’m quoting this bit rather than the zweeghb bit because then I can link to Jo Walton’s Skazlorls post.)

I’ve hand-sold a couple of copies just by handing people a copy open to this story. And if I can do the same virtually for just one person, then I will count this as a job well done.

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O’Brian, Patrick: (10) The Far Side of the World (audio)

The novel The Far Side of the World is really very much different than the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. I greatly enjoyed the movie, but I think it was a poor decision to burden it with that subtitle; not only is it unwieldy in the extreme, but it creates some odd expectations. As far as I can tell, the filmmakers took the very general skeleton of The Far Side of the World—a journey into the Pacific after an enemy ship that’s preying on whalers—and fleshed it out with episodes from Master and Commander. (And the hapless Hollom, though his entire story is different as well.)

In itself, The Far Side of the World feels much more exciting than the past couple of books. It’s a return to the single-voyage, single-mission volume that was last seen in Desolation Island, which I think I may have a slight preference for as a structure. Or perhaps I just happen to like this book a lot; I’ll probably have to finish the whole series to really decide. At any rate, it has lots of exciting things happen and a fine rhythm and range of emotion. It even withstood a couple hours’ worth of listening late, late at night while waiting for tests to be run in the emergency room (I’m fine, don’t worry), which I doubt would be true of a lot of books.

In closing, I like this mini-portrait of Jack Aubrey:

There were two chief reasons for this steady preparation: the first was that Jack Aubrey thoroughly enjoyed life; he was of a cheerful sanguine disposition, his liver and lights were in capital order, and unless the world was treating him very roughly indeed, as it did from time to time, he generally woke up feeling pleased and filled with a lively expectation of enjoying the day. Since he took so much pleasure in life, therefore, he meant to go on living as long as ever he could, and it appeared to him that the best way of ensuring this in a naval action was to fire three broadsides for his enemy’s two, and to fire them deadly straight. The second reason, closely allied to the first, was that his idea of a crack ship was one with a strong, highly-skilled crew that could outmanoeuvre and then outshoot the opponent, a taut but happy ship, an efficient man-of-war — in short a ship that was likely to win at any reasonable odds.

Have I said recently how much I like Jack and Stephen?

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