Author: katenepveu

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Alexander, Lloyd: Westmark

Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark is the first book in a much-loved trilogy of the same name. I didn’t love this book, and while I’ve been warned that it’s not as good, I suspect that I don’t love it for different reasons that most people.

This is a YA Ruritanian fantasy set in a country where the king is ill with grief over the death of his only child, and his chief minister (a power-hungry manipulative bastard) is plotting to take control of the country in name as well as fact. Theo is an orphan apprenticed to a printer, and the plot happens when the chief minister’s oppressive policies turn him into a fugitive who encounters con artists and would-be revolutionaries.

The way the book handles the political side of the plot is admirable. As Rilina says in a thoughtful and spoilery discussion, “Westmark is distinguished by its refusal to offer anything close to a definitive answer to the questions it raises.” I genuinely could not tell what path the book was going to take or wanted us to approve of. That’s a hard thing to do.

But while I admire this book, I don’t love it. I found the prose a barrier: I was constantly feeling that the sentences were a little short, the rhythms a little choppy, the descriptions and characterizations a little sparse. (Maybe I was off form today, but I completely missed the romance until it was explicitly stated, for instance; I think I mistook the ages of the characters in question.) My overall impression was of an excellently-constructed skeleton, which is nevertheless not entirely satisfying in the absence of muscle and skin. Put another way, I’m not too old for the content of Westmark, but I felt too old for the way it was expressed.

Somewhat like The Ordinary Princess, I suspect I would have loved this if I’d found it when I was young. Everyone says that The Kestrel is excellent, and I own it thanks to a mistaken purchase, so I will read at least that one; perhaps the expected jump in content-quality will pull me past the prose (I’m expecting that the prose stays constant over the series, which may not be correct). At any rate, I would certainly recommend this to kids in late-elementary and middle school.

[Originally posted at my LiveJournal while this booklog was down; there are comments there.]

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Macdonald, James D.: (04) The Apocalypse Door (re-read)

A couple of weeks ago, I needed to fully unwind, sink all the way down into a book and completely lose myself in it. I’d recently had the pleasure of recommending James D. Macdonald’s The Apocalypse Door to someone looking for chaste Catholic priests in action novels, so it was on my mind and just what I was looking for.

I’d talked in my original booklog post about Crossman and Sister Mary Magdalene, but I’d not really mentioned much about the new Knight, Simon B. LaRouche, who is also fun to read about and had a larger part in the book than I’d remembered. And since then, I’ve learned a thematic thing about the backstory thread that I didn’t know enough to spot then; I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler, but I’m going to ROT13 it just to be safe: fgngvbaf bs gur pebff.

Finally, I was surprised to find that some people had different opinions on the substance of the plot; in my opinion, the last three pages make it crystal-clear, but perhaps they tend to get overlooked in the adrenaline rush.

Anyway, still a great book and just what I needed when I was stressed out.

[Originally posted at my LiveJournal while this booklog was down; there are comments there.]

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O’Brian, Patrick: (07) The Surgeon’s Mate (audio)

Rather like the prior book, The Surgeon’s Mate is very closely connected with its predecessor in the Aubrey-Maturin series, in this case The Fortune of War. It opens quite soon after that book, and part of the plot springs from managing the aftermath of their doings in America. In structure, I think of it as something like a criss-crossing two-parter. The book’s first half covers non-naval doings in Canada and Europe, and strands from it cross over into the second half, a mission in the Balitc Sea.

(This is the book where Jack and Stephen see Elsinore and Jack reminisces about being one of the Ophelias. I giggled quite immoderately, in-between reminding myself to look at a map of the Baltic (which I never actually got around to).)

I did not find this book quite as striking as The Fortune of War, but it has its fair share of good moments. I do like the way O’Brian develops consequences in and across books; secondary characters act as it’s in their character to act, even (or especially) if that creates useful plot.

[Originally posted at my LiveJournal while this booklog was down; there are comments there.]

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Novik, Naomi: (01) His Majesty’s Dragon

Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon is being talked of as “Patrick O’Brian with dragons,” which may, combined with the first chapter, give a slightly inaccurate impression. It’s not a naval story, but is instead somewhere between “if Patrick O’Brian were writing about dragons instead of ships” and “if Stephen Maturin were a dragon.” It’s set in an alternate history where dragons have been domesticated from early days, and “now,” in the Napoleonic Wars, are used as an air force: everything from scouts to bombers, with crews of an appropriate size. The dragons are sentient, articulate partners; and Temeraire, the dragon partnered with our human point-of-view character Will Laurence, holds anti-authoritarian political views rather like Maturin’s, which sit uneasily with their military service. In short, this isn’t about ships, but has a great many of the virtues of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels all the same. (Indeed the overall feel is fairly concrete and low-key; there may be some magic necessary to the dragons’ functions (hand-waving about airsacs aside), but if so, that’s about the only place for magic that I can see.)

It has virtues of its own, too, the most obvious of which is the dragons. They are a bit like Anne McCaffrey’s in that they bond with one person upon hatching; but they communicate orally not telepathically, can outlive their first handler, and are generally smarter and have more personality. The largest can also carry quite sizable crews, including riflemen and bombers; and generally speaking the Royal Aerial Corps doesn’t feel far off from the Royal Navy in its professional aspects.

It is different in some of its social and personal aspects [*], which serves two purposes: it makes the company more palatable to present-day tastes, and it pushes Laurence even further out of his entrenched habits of thought and helps him grow. Laurence’s development individually and as a partner to Temeraire is one of the book’s strands; the other is their training and first engagements in the Corps.

[*] I have a minor quibble about one of these aspects, but I’m not sure whether something that comes on page 145 should be counted a spoiler or not. I’ll put it in a separate post just to be safe.

I enjoyed this very much, finding it a solid, thoughtful, entertaining and absorbing creation. I’m looking forward to the next two, which will be released at the end of this month and the end of next; I believe, judging from advance reviews, that they are largely set out of England as relatively stand-alone stories. I do hope that we’ll get some exploration of the alternate part of the alternate history; things start diverging in this book, and I’m quite curious how important those divergences will be. On the whole, unless you’re absolutely allergic to both the nineteenth century and dragons, I’d say to check this out.

[Originally posted at my LiveJournal while this booklog was down; there are comments there.]

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Davis, Lindsey: (01) Silver Pigs

I checked Lindsey Davis’s Silver Pigs out of the library based on LiveJournal recommendations. Without that high praise, I might not have stuck with it, but I did and ended up enjoying it enough to request the next volumes from another library branch (the early ones are currently out of print, but will be coming back soon).

The prefatory Dramatis Personae list started promisingly:

Vespasian Augustus: A jovial old cove who has jumped up from nowhere and made himself Emperor of Rome.

But in the novel proper, it wasn’t two full paragraphs before I was knocked right out of the book:

When the girl came rushing up the steps, I decided she was wearing far too many clothes.

It was late summer. Rome frizzled like a pancake on a griddle-plate.

I read that and said, “Wait—it’s A.D. 70, did they have pancakes then? Or griddle-plates, for that matter?” Possibly they did and this is the “Tiffany problem” [*], but all the same, my chain of association goes something like “pancakes — maple syrup — Laura Ingalls Wilder.”

[*] Coined by Jo Walton. Tiffany is a genuine medieval name, and yet no reader of a historical novel would put up with it.

Pancakes aside, it took me a while to feel that the style and content worked together. The first-person narrator is very much your archetypal private eye, all mocking cynical patter shielding wounded chivalry. I think of that as a very modern idea, and so I had some trouble suspending my disbelief about such a narrator living in ancient Rome.

Eventually the characters caught me, though, and I fell through the page. Marcus Didius Falco is our narrator, a low-level private informer (apparently a historical position, though probably less P.I.-like than Davis portrays). A beautiful young woman in distress runs into him one day; he investigates a bit, finds a plot against the new Emperor involving stolen Imperial silver (hence the title), backs off, but of course is drawn back in against his will.

I was trying to figure out if I liked this, not whodunnit, so I can’t really say how difficult the mystery is to a new reader. In retrospect, it seems both fairly well-constructed and fairly obvious. There’s one bit towards the end that struck me as superfluous even at the time, but otherwise I don’t have many quibbles with the plot. The real pleasure is in the people: Falco, the partner he finds, and the various strong secondary characters. I like the way the characters have established relationships, histories that matter, and problems that aren’t easily solved. And the combination of a more-idealistic-than-cynical P.I. and tough, sensible, kind women is generally a good one.

(I do enjoy the historical setting, but it’s not the principal attraction because I don’t know how far I can trust it. I was telling Chad about the book, and he said he’d heard it mentioned on some con panel or other; the panelist said that there are three detective series set in ancient Rome, and they sell in inverse relation to their historical accuracy. He recalled Davis as being on the high-selling end of that relationship. Me, I’m just surprised that there’s as many as three series with this premise.)

I’m quite looking forward to seeing how the characters develop over the next volumes.

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O’Brian, Patrick: (06) The Fortune of War (audio)

Patrick O’Brian’s sixth Aubrey-Maturin book, The Fortune of War, opens with something a little unusual for the series to date: explicit recaps of the prior book’s events, in the form of Jack and Stephen making oral reports to others. This is slightly tedious to someone who’s just finished Desolation Island and thus remembers perfectly well what happened in it, but it signals how closely connected this book is to the last. There were Americans aboard the horrible old Leopard, you see, with whom Jack and Stephen had consequential interactions; and now it’s the War of 1812.

In terms of highs and lows, this book is shaped like a U: it gives Jack and Stephen a time of rest, relaxation, and happiness, and then plunges them (with shocking abruptness) back into tension and danger, which continues for a good while before swinging upward again. The balance between Jack, Stephen, and other characters, which I think of as another distinguishing characteristic of the shape of these books, is fairly even between Jack and Stephen, I would say, with Diana Villiers (yes, she’s back) as a strong secondary character.

The other non-spoilery thing I want to say about this book is that it’s the first book whose substance made me aware of being an American while I was listening—though I don’t know that my reaction was necessarily because of my nationality, since Jack and Stephen are somewhat conflicted as well. The war with America is thought by both of them to be a stupid war caused by foolish actions of the British government, and so on one hand, it makes sense for the listener to root for the Americans, because more victories might end it sooner. On the other hand, Jack especially gets so damn depressed when the Royal Navy loses that a listener sometimes roots for the British just so they’ll cheer up. Anyway, I found the ambiguity interesting.

(I’m often aware of being an American when it comes to the language. This book it was listening to Patrick Tull talk about Captain Brook and then finding that the text calls him Captain Broke. Do the British really say “I’m sorry, I broke your toy by dropping it in the brook” with both words sounding the same, or is this just one of those funny family name pronunciations?

A spoiler post follows.

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Adams, Douglas, and Mark Carwardine, Last Chance to See (audio, text)

Last Chance to See is Douglas Adams’ non-fiction book about trips to look for endangered animals around the world. Mark Carwardine is a zoologist who went with him; he’s listed as a co-author and contributed an epilogue, but the main text is classic Douglas Adams and just as entertaining as his better novels. For sheer emotional effectiveness, in fact, I think it surpasses his fiction with its remarkably horrifying description of a Komodo dragon eating a goat. Perhaps I was particularly suspectible because I was listening to Adams read it while I was in stop-and-go traffic, which tends to make me sick to my stomach anyway—but all the same, I don’t recommend it to the squeamish. (If you’re not, the text of the Komodo dragon section is online at The Digital Village.)

(I listened to most of this as an audiobook read by the authors. It’s very hard to find and the quality of my copy is quite bad in spots, which is why I only listened to most of it. If you can find a copy, though, I recommend it as I recommend Adams’ readings of all his works. Well, except for that fifth Hitchhikers’ book, because that doesn’t exist in my universe.)

Anyway, this is as much about the traveling to see endangered animals and the people who are working to save them as about the animals themselves, and thus is a good mix of tales about quirky people, strange creatures, and the weird things that happen to you when you are Douglas Adams. I can’t quite imagine that someone who liked Adams’ novels wouldn’t like this, though I suppose anything’s possible.

The blog Another Chance to See provides updates on the animals visited by Adams and Carwardine, which makes me wish again that Blogger supported categories (actually, I think I’ll offer space on steelypips and a MT blog to the maintainer).

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