Author: katenepveu

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Westlake, Donald E.: (12) Road to Ruin

As well as a new Dortmunder collection from Donald E. Westlake, there was also a new Dortmunder novel, Road to Ruin. Unfortunately, the novel isn’t nearly as good as the collection. I fervently hope this is not the start of the decline of the series: the prior Dortmunder novel, Bad News, was enjoyable but pretty low-key, and this one is both low-key and unsatisfying.

(Put a Lid on It was the intervening book, a non-Dortmunder; I just read it this weekend and I’d put it about the same level as Bad News. However, there are over twenty books before it in the queue (eep! I didn’t think it was that bad until I counted), so detailed discussion will have to wait.).

In Road to Ruin, Dortmunder and the gang set out to relieve an Enron-executive-type of his collection of classic cars. That much is set up in the first two chapters, presently available online. What those don’t indicate is that there are other people with plans for this executive, and their plans end up colliding with Dortmunder’s to create an incredibly unsatisfying ending. I know nothing about the way Westlake writes, so this is not to be taken as anything but a way of describing my reactions—but it felt to me as though, either Westlake wrote himself into a corner and couldn’t or didn’t rewrite to get out of it, or his characters took the bit in their teeth and refused to cooperate. It did not feel like a Dortmunder plot.

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Stevermer, Caroline: (03) A Scholar of Magics

I’ve been stuck on writing up Caroline Stevermer’s A Scholar of Magics for an unreasonable time now. I don’t know why doing it justice is giving me such trouble, but the queue behind it is getting quite frightening, so I will do my best here. Insert fangirl squees liberally for full effect.

A Scholar of Magics is a semi-sequel to A College of Magics; it’s just as delightful but a little smoother. Greenlaw was the eponymous college of the prior book, a school for women that also taught magic; Glasscastle is its counterpart for men, located in England to Greenlaw’s France. (They have interestingly different approaches to teaching magic, however.) At the opening of Scholar, one of our protagonists is having tea with the wife of one of Glasscastle’s scholars:

Samuel Lambert, all too aware of his responsibilities as a guest, saw with dismay that there were loose bits of tea leaf in the bottom of his cup. Lambert was not easy to alarm. He had no objection to tea leaves as such, but their presence made it probable that his hostess would once again try her dainty, inexorable hand at telling his fortune.

Fortunately, Jane Brailsford, his hostess’s sister-in-law and a major character from College (who later helpfully sums up all the reader needs to know about College, though in an unfortunately clunky passage), arrives unannounced:

Grateful for the unexpected reprieve, Lambert used the precious minute or so of solitude after Amy’s departure to conceal the contents of his teacup in a brass pot that held a substantial aspidistra. When his sleeve brushed against the foliage, he roused a beetle from its afternoon nap. The insect flew low over the table, rose to an altitude just out of swatting range, and set itself to veer around the room for the rest of the day. After watching its erratic flight for several circuits of the room, Lambert helped himself to a few sugar cubes from the bowl. He wasted two shots before he got the hang of the insect’s abrupt changes of speed and direction, but the third sugar cube closed its account. Lambert nailed the beetle on the wing at three paces, exactly over the tea tray. The corpse missed the milk pitcher with half an inch to spare and landed, legs to the sky, between the teapot and the sugar blow. Uncomfortably aware that no etiquette book covered freelance insect extermination, Lambert retrieved the evidence. He deposited the dead beetle and the sugar cubes on top of the tea leaves in the aspidistra pot and resumed his seat.

Lambert is an American sharpshooter assisting studies of accuracy for a government-funded research project vital to the imperial interests. (Early-twentieth-century alternate Europe with magic setting, in case you didn’t follow the link to the College review.) In the six months of work, the only event of note was internal: Lambert fell helplessly in love with Glasscastle, which he thinks won’t have him. Things change rapidly, of course, else we wouldn’t have a book; both Jane and a mysterious man in a bowler hat are very interested in Lambert’s roommate, a scholar named Nicholas Fell.

It might help the unfamiliar reader to know that Stevermer’s books in this world [*] (besides College, there’s the very brilliant When the King Comes Home, set in the Renaissance-equivalent) start out with relatively low and explicable levels of magic; then the characters take a physical journey, and the magic gets a lot less explicable. The magical dilemma of Scholar continues to elude me, I have to say; I briefly thought it had to do with modern physics, but, well. Fortunately this doesn’t ruin the book for me, as the things that I did understand are more important to the story and are more in the foreground of the plot. In addition, the movement of the story felt smoother to me than in College, perhaps because Scholar isn’t structured as a three-volume novel, or perhaps because I was expecting it this time.

[*] Which is not the same world as that of Sorcery and Cecelia, which Stevermer co-wrote with Patricia C. Wrede (sequel coming out soon, yay!), per a post from Lois McMaster Bujold.

While speaking ever-so-vaguely about the shape of the book, I should add that if you had the same reaction as I did to the opening material, fear not—one need not actually read Comus to understand what’s going on, as the interactions are text rather than (or in addition to) subtext. (I’m sure it would enrich the experience, and I’ll be getting to it Real Soon Now.)

For the longest time I could never keep the plot of College in my head, but I didn’t care because I read it for the characters. I don’t think I’ll have the same problem with this one, but I’ll still read it for the characters. It’s lovely to see Jane again, and I was extremely pleased to meet Lambert, whom I have a strong urge to hug and send ginger stem cake. Their interactions simply made me smile all the way through the book, not a unique occurrence but one to be treasured all the same. The supporting characters are nicely rounded, and I was rather amused that two minor characters, advisees of Fell, move the plot by their determination to get grades out of him—well, it made this faculty wife snort, at least.

Those who liked College should certainly read this. It might be a good place for people to start reading Stevermer as well, despite its quasi-sequel nature, as I think it’s a touch more polished than College (people seem to split sharply on When the King Comes Home, which rather surprises me, but it is first-person with a very distinct voice). I would strongly recommend this book to people looking for any or all of the following in their fiction: non-mechanical magic, non-medievaloid fantasy, academia, fantasy of manners, sensible women, sensible men, affectionate characterization, wit, and charm.

(I suppose I managed some fangirling after all.)

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Sayers, Dorothy L.: (05) Lord Peter Views the Body

Next up in my Sayers re-read was the first short story collection, Lord Peter Views the Body (reprinted as the first twelve stories in Lord Peter [*]). I realized, reading this, that my backbrain doesn’t consider these stories canon. Obviously they are, but I think my backbrain sets them aside for two reasons. First, I don’t recall that there’s any reference to the events of these stories later on, and at the least people ought to comment on the spectacular and improbable events of “The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba.” (Maybe they do and I’ve forgotten. I will be looking for that when I get back to the re-read.) Second, with the exception of “The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps that Ran,” which is chronologically the earliest canon story and shows Peter’s shell-shock in a different form, there’s very little character development or movement in the stories. I’m not sure that this lack makes the stories bad, considering the constraints of the form, but it does make them less interesting to me.

[*] My edition of this omnibus has a smarmy introduction by James Sandoe which gives me hives. You won’t miss anything if you skip it.

I do quite like the first story, because I’ve liked clubs whose members tell tales since I first encountered the idea (probably in Arthur C. Clarke, possibly in Stephen King’s Different Seasons). (I’m going to pretend that the technological bits aren’t dubious, as claimed by the online Annotated Wimsey.) Some of the stories are interesting because of their underlying cultural assumptions: the story whose crucial clue is in untranslated French, for instance, or the story that is basically an excuse for a British-style crossword. I’m guessing that Sayers thought she was playing fair with her intended audience, which was pretty clearly not me. The longest story, “The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention,” is dreary and tedious in a way that reminds me of one of the later novels, the name of which I have blocked from my memory—possibly The Five Red Herrings, the Scottish dialects of which are given a trial run in “The Piscatorial Farce of the Stolen Stomach.” Oh, I suppose I should mention “The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head,” which does actually illuminate Peter’s character through his dealings with his nephew, St. George.

Hmm. I should dig up the Montague Egg stories and see what I think of those: is my relatively low opinion of this collection a matter of comparing the stories to the novels, or is just that mystery short stories (as opposed to the crime short stories of Westlake) don’t work for me? At any rate, I wouldn’t recommend that someone new to Sayers start here (I’m going to reserve my opinion on where I think someone should start until I finish my re-read).

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Westlake, Donald E.: (11) Thieves’ Dozen

When I saw that Donald E. Westlake had a new collection of Dortmunder short stories, Thieves’ Dozen, I said, “Oooh! I didn’t know there were Dortmunder short stories! I must have this.” And I did, and it was good.

I’d never read Westlake in short form before, though I believe we have at least one of his collections. I certainly didn’t expect him to be bad at it, considering his level of craft and the frequently episodic nature of the Dortmunder novels—I’d just never gotten around to it. A few of these stories are slight, but none are bad, and “Too Many Crooks” and the one where Dortmunder meets a horse are particularly good.

In some ways, actually, the one non-Dortmunder story is the most interesting: at some point, Westlake recounts in the Introduction, it looked like he might lose the rights to Dortmunder to someone in Hollywood. So he settled on a pseudonym for John Dortmunder, just in case: John Rumsey. As he says, “Fortunately, the evil empire’s shadow receded from my peaceful village, so Dortmunder could go on being Dortmunder after all, and once that happened, I could admit to myself that even Rumsey wasn’t a completely satisfying substitute. The problem is, John Rumsey is short. John Dortmunder is of average height, but John Rumsey is short. . . . Don’t ask me how I know; I know.” When Westlake wanted one more story to round out this collection, he decided to see how the doppelgangers of Dortmunder and the gang would play out in their own story: and how about that, they really aren’t the same. I’m sure this would say a lot about Westlake’s writing processes to someone more experienced than I.

If you like the Dortmunder novels, you should absolutely read this collection. If I’ve been pushing the Dortmunder novels on you and you haven’t read them yet—pick this up in the store, read “Too Many Crooks,” and if it amuses you, buy one of the novels for the full effect, but get this one too.

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Brust, Steven: (205) Sethra Lavode

I read Steven Brust’s Sethra Lavode, the concluding volume of The Viscount of Adrilankha (prior volumes: The Paths of the Dead and The Lord of Castle Black), quite a while ago. I’d planned to post about it just as it was released, to remind all six people who read this that it was time to buy it—and, of course, when our published copy arrived, I only had time to flip through it, not to re-read or post. These good intentions just aren’t working when it comes to delayed posting; next time I read something pre-publication I’m going to put it directly in the posting queue. After all, I often get far enough behind that I’d end up posting around the time of publication after all . . .

Anyway, Sethra Lavode. Interestingly, three of the four titles in this sequence are names, and none of the eponymous characters really dominate. Each named character is in the book, but the story is spread out among many different characters and the balance stays fairly constant over the series. (This is not a criticism, just an observation.) In particular, I think the reader learns more about Sethra Lavode in the Vlad books, or even in Five Hundred Years After, than in this book. This book is also tied much more closely to the Vlad books, specifically Issola, than the other Paarfi novels, to the extent that I think it would seem rather weird to someone who hadn’t read Issola.

As an individual book, this was a very enjoyable read. I have a quibble or two, but I turned pages rapidly, I smiled and sniffled and gasped and cursed Paarfi, who at one point opened a chapter with, roughly, “Surely you’ve been panting to know what happened—with something completely different than the shocker I just dropped in your lap? Right, let’s go talk about that, then.” As a conclusion to a three-volume work, and to the Paarfi books overall, well, unfortunately I can’t really say, because I haven’t had time to re-read the books as a whole. There were certainly series-long payoffs that I noted, but other things Paarfi appears have to left as unrealized dramatic irony (or something). Personally, while I liked the Viscount and his friends, my truest affection remains for Khaavren and co., who we started with all the way back in The Phoenix Guards, and it’s them I’m sorriest to leave behind. On their behalf, I’m glad that the very end of the novel, with its wrapping-ups and goodbyes, was very satisfying.

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Johansen, Iris: Face of Deception

I got bad guys fueling an incredibly out-there conspiracy thriller in Iris Johansen’s Face of Deception, an random paperback exchange selection by another ex-romance-genre author. This is the first in an apparent series about a forensic sculptor; in this one, she’s bullied into reconstructing a skull’s face by a rich alpha male, with unexpected results. The forensic stuff is interesting, and the plot certainly moves briskly, carrying me past the “oh come on” moments, of which there are many. This is actually fairly far from the genre romance conventions, as there’s an implicit love triangle that isn’t resolved in this volume. I was at the library just after I finished this and actually checked out the next; I got it home, picked it up, and only then came to my senses: I don’t actually like either of the two guys in the triangle. I skipped to the end, just to see if it turned out the way I guessed (it did), and then put it aside to be returned.

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Roberts, Nora: Birthright

Another lunchtime read: Nora Roberts’ Birthright. I’d basically stopped reading Roberts’ mainstream hardcovers, as she’s best at people forming relationships and living their lives, and I found the ObVillains distractions from that. (Her mainstream paperbacks have lately tended towards dopey New Age plots, alas, so I haven’t read the latest sets of those either.) Somewhere I saw a favorable review of Birthright, however, and when it turned up in the paperback exchange, I decided to give it a try.

It started out fairly well: there were only two couples instead of the three Roberts tends toward, which kept the focus tighter; and the fallout from one character’s secret adoption is nicely nuanced, even to my hyper-sensitive reading. But the villain is really just tedious. Can’t I please get some rational bad guys for a change?

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Brockmann, Suzanne: Heart Throb

Here we go with the catching-up. First, a batch of trash read at work [continued to two next posts for import into MT]:

Heart Throb by Suzanne Brockmann is a genre romance that was re-issued with a special $3.99 cover price. I saw it at the grocery store one day, recalled that I’d heard the author’s name before, and said “Why not?” So, publishers, this stuff works—except you want to make sure it’s a good book you’re trying to get people to pick up. This is not, and I will be strongly reluctant to try other Brockmann novels as a result.

Heart Throb does have its strong points. It is a romance of the “force characters into close proximity by any means possible” type, and the proximity-forcing device sounds completely idiotic when summarized (movie producer desperately needs star for movie, must stay with star every waking moment to make sure star doesn’t relapse into addiction); however, the book does put a fair bit of effort into making the premise a teeny bit plausible, kinda-sorta. It has an actual interracial romance—as a secondary plot, granted, but still.

Unfortunately, the central relationship—well. Bujold readers, remember when Ekaterin asks Miles if he’s trying to one-up her dead? All the central protagonists do is one-up each other’s angst; it’s what passes for relationship development, the constant revelations of even deeper levels of angst. I might have loved it when I was younger, but it’s astonishingly tiresome now. Not recommended.

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Sayers, Dorothy L.: (04) The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

I’m almost pleased that I didn’t like Dorothy Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club much better on this re-read; I was starting to be afraid that I’d gone all uncritically fangirlish or something. It’s a clever mystery, and does some very nice riffs on veterans and wars, and continues to move Peter’s character forward as a character, and is generally pretty good. But I simply cannot believe that part of the ending is happy, and the narrative fairly clearly wants me to. [*] For some reason, I’m not willing to forgive this the way I’ve forgiven the plot holes and unpleasant social bits of prior books.

[*] It’s only one sentence, so I’ll rot-13 the spoiler: v fgebatyl qvfyvxr eboreg sragvzna naq pnaabg pbaprvir bs naa qbeynaq orvat unccl jvgu uvz.

Random other comments:

  • I read by recognizing word shapes and beginnings/endings, not phonetics, especially with names. As a result, I always think of this book as taking place at the Belladonna Club.
  • One of the wills in this book is a really excellent example of a reasonable-seeming will with hidden defects. Consider every contingency when drafting your will, no matter how remote: every permutation of gains and losses of property, of births and deaths, marriages and divorces.
  • Before this re-read, I hadn’t disliked any recurring character but the Duchess of Denver. I didn’t want to agree with some disparaging remarks about Parker that I’ve seen here and there, but his limitations are more apparent to me now, alas.
  • I think I read this wildly out of order the first time, because somehow I hadn’t noticed that Ann Dorland is kind of a trial run for Harriet Vane. And Peter’s patronizing to her, too.
  • I think Peter must have had a shell-shock attack after the end of the case, because of the line “He sent you all sorts of messages, by the way,” in the epilogue; at least, it seems the best explanation of why Peter would have been unavailable.

Obviously, I was mistaken when I thought that a short story collection came before this one; short stories next, and then Strong Poison—Harriet at last, and more Miss Climpson!

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Heyer, Georgette: Foundling, The

Last Sunday was the changeover to Daylight Saving Time, and after running some errands in the morning, I wanted nothing so much as to sleep. But as that would have been a terrible idea, I picked up Georgette Heyer’s The Foundling as something undemanding, and it worked very well indeed to keep me awake and amused for the afternoon.

I’m going to be extremely lazy and refer you to Trent’s post for a description, because I’m behind on booklogging and I couldn’t improve on his description. I didn’t like it quite as well as Trent; part of the romance element rubbed me the wrong way (this has romance in it, but isn’t a romance novel, unlike the other Heyer I’ve read), and I had the feeling, looking back on it, that the frothy lightness was precariously balanced and could have popped at any moment. However, it served its purpose very well, so I shouldn’t be too critical of it.

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