Author: katenepveu

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Fforde, Jasper: (01) The Eyre Affair

And now that the bar’s over, I get to read for actual long periods of time. Talk about luxury—I read an entire book yesterday, Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, which I’d started over graduation weekend but never had the time to finish.

I really wanted to like this, but it ended up feeling somewhat flat. Granted, that may be my fault; I was really tired, since my grand plan to sleep until noon yesterday was foiled by, first, waking up on the uncomfortable living room couch (apparently it was so hot that night I slept-walked to a room with a ceiling fan), and second, smelling Chad’s toast and realizing I was too hungry to sleep, even though I was back in bed. Also, it was still really hot—it’s no coincidence I finished this in the doctor’s office, which was air-conditioned. At any rate, I think the problem is that the narrator is the wrong kind of deadpan for me to feel involved in the story. There’s still great silly bits in the background, but overall I never cared all that much. I’ll read the next one when it comes out, but I was still distinctly underwhelmed.

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Westlake, Donald E.: (08) Don’t Ask

Well, the bar’s over, thankfully, and now I have time to both write and read. Though, actually, I got an entire book read during the bar itself, Donald E. Westlake’s Don’t Ask. They at least give you long lunches on the two exam days, and a Dortmunder novel was just right to keep me relaxed during that time. Chad describes it at length on his book log, and the only thing I have to add to his post is that this is also one of my favorite Dortmunders (though I think my favorite is still What’s the Worst that Could Happen?).

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Stout, Rex: (16) Three Doors to Death

So there I was, minding my own business, dutifully doing practice bar exam questions, when I come across this one:

When Sandra graduated from high school, her elderly Aunt Mildred asked her to come and live with her in the large, three-story brownstone owned by Mildred in Manhattan. Mildred . . . needed assistance in caring for the several thousand orchids she cultivated in her rooftop greenhouse [and orally promised Sandra that she would leave Sandra everything if Sandra came and helped her].

At which point I put a little (!) in the margin.

Two paragraphs later, I read

Mildred had devised her orchids to a Nero Wolfe, also residing in Manhattan, and [everything else to Mildred’s daughter]. When Sandra refused to vacate the brownstone or surrender the orchids, Cramer, now representing Mildred’s daughter, brought action for possession of the house.

Which, clearly, was A Sign that it was time for me to take a break and write up the most recent Wolfe anthology I’d read, Three Doors to Death. (Or maybe I was just sick of law. The last days of studying for the bar exam seem to consist, for me, of wild veering between confidence, panicked despair, and being so sick of law as to not care any more. Never fear, I’m not going to chuck it all; I will be brief.) Alas, these are not actual New York bar questions, but ones written by a bar review course.

Three Doors to Death is far more satisfactory than Trouble in Triplicate, fortunately. Ignoring the slightly awkward introductory note, it opens with “Man Alive,” in which a man who faked his suicide comes back to life and is promptly murdered (of course). It features a truly lovely bit of pure deduction by Wolfe, who figures out the solution and browbeats proof out of a witness in something like half an hour, with impressively little in the way of facts to go on. We are also given Archie’s age: 32 in 1947; that would make him sixty in the last book, A Family Affair, published in 1975. He’s a very sprightly sexagenarian . . .

In “Omit Flowers,” the second story, a once-brilliant cook has been charged with murder, and Marko Vukcic has enlisted his friend Nero to get him cleared. It has a great Archie-being-clever section, which makes up for the forced title, and the very Archie line,

Never to find yourself in a situation where you have to enter a big department store is one of the minor reasons for not getting married. I guess it would also be a reason for not being a detective.

(I was moderately traumatized by the whole wedding registry experience.)

The last story, “Door to Death,” is in my opinion only so-so. It takes considerably less genius to solve a murder by poking a stick into an ant hill, and I’m not as amused as I used to be by Wolfe’s reaction to the outdoors. I was interested to note that it isn’t just Wolfe who believes in keeping people in the dark, though. For all that Archie bitches when Wolfe won’t tell him what’s going on, he was perfectly happy to leave us unenlightened about the plan until it was executed. Not that there’s very much suspense about what’s going to happen, but I found it amusing nevertheless.

Oh, in case you’re wondering: the answer was “C”, “The Statute of Frauds will not bar enforcement of Mildred’s promise because her promise induced Sandra to perform, and injustice can be avoided only by enforcement.” Right—back to the grind.

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Hall, A.J.: Lust Over Pendle

[Split for import, originally part of the prior post; see that post for comments.]

I should mention that the Draco trilogy is not slash, though Harry/Draco seems to be popular. Actually, Draco seems to be popular; I suspect a lot of people feel that he ought to be more interesting than he is in the books so far. One work that also manages to make Draco interesting is A.J. Hall’s Lust Over Pendle, which was just completed and is, accordingly, the reason I’m writing this now.

Lust Over Pendle is slash, and Draco/Neville, of all things. I should say that I’m generally not inclined towards slash, for two reasons. First, I don’t comprehend the impulse. Why heterosexual female fans would want canonically heterosexual male characters falling into bed with each other—nope, sorry, don’t understand. Second, I just don’t find reading about sex between men very interesting. (I also don’t understand something else I’ve encountered poking around HP fandom, which is “ships,” or people rooting for a specific character pairing. As far as I’m concerned, there’s not enough in canon for me to have any opinion; they’re barely into puberty, after all. I’ll buy a relationship if Rowling or any other does a good job of it, and that’s all. [2])

Lust Over Pendle doesn’t push my dislike-of-slash buttons for a couple of reasons. It begins with the relationship already in existence, several years after Draco & Neville, we are told, came out (separately). It’s far less work for me to believe that the sexuality of minor characters, who we last saw at fourteen or so, might not be what it appeared then. (There’s an interesting discussion of the interaction between slash and homosexuality on Mahoney’s LiveJournal.) Also, as the author says in the rating, “non-explicit sexual situations occur, but I would hate to disappoint anyone who is misled by the title into expecting anything really racy on that front.” And beyond all that, it’s a lovely and believable relationship. We aren’t told that much about how they got to be the people they are today, but you can see the traces of their canon selves, and it works.

There are a number of notable things about this novel. For one, anyone who’s complained that sf needs more cranky old women really ought to check this out. The main thing, though, is the tone, which is impressive in a very baffling sort of way—because I have no idea how the author pulls it off. The summary of the initial chapters describes it as

A comedy of manners, in the Golden Age detective thriller genre, set in the year immediately after Voldemort’s fall. . . . [A] Daily Prophet paparazzo manages to take a sneak photograph on the beach at an exclusive Indian Ocean hideaway resort, and the families of both Neville Longbottom and Draco Malfoy find themselves Very Startled Indeed. . . .

It is indeed a comedy of manners, and a clever and light and funny one. At the same time, it convincingly portrays Voldemort’s defeat as a war, an actual modern war with allied commanders, sweaty moments on urgent missions, people being stuck doing necro-cryptography during the mopping up phase, and combat flashbacks—very different from the mythic one-on-one confrontation I imagine Rowling to be working up to. (There is a passing reference that suggests it did come down to Harry at the end, but the full backstory isn’t given; I’d love to read it if the author wanted to write it.) Quite nasty things happen during the story as well, and yet it manages to preserve the light tone while treating the nasty things seriously. I can’t really think of anything that pulls off quite the same effect; Barry Hughart, for slightly different values of light tone, but that’s all that comes to mind right now. It’s quite an accomplishment.

I could quote pages from this; I shall try to spare you. (I read this because of Morgan’s recommendation, which is worth reading and has some more quotes.) Here’s part of the section from the first chapter that convinced me to keep reading:

During what wizards and witches were now coming to refer to as Recent Events Voldemort had had a simple initiation test for those recruits who – depressingly – had flocked to join him after his initial successes. If they wished to become a Death Eater they must kill a victim selected for them at random, within twenty-four hours, without assistance. Furthermore, if Voldemort’s star should fall, it would be clear to the whole world that the individual’s decision to take the test had been one of pure free will: no hope this time of sheltering behind Imperius.

Dying in the attempt was a honourable end (and, of course, neatly weeded out those whose incompetence might embarrass the Dark Lord later). Failing to carry out the test and surviving was not an option. Refusing the test, warning the intended victim, and then walking back to Voldemort’s HQ to inform his second in command that one had done so was an act of such spectacularly suicidal stupidity that a depressed lemming would have earnestly counselled against it.

Even if the second in command concerned was the recruit’s own father. Especially if the second in command was the recruit’s own father.

Naturally, in the aftermath of Recent Events, when the wizard world had leisure to think once more, the question of Why? tended to arise. Various far-fetched theories were spun as to what exactly had happened the night Draco Malfoy went out to murder Hermione Granger, and returned some hours later, to tell his father that, actually, he thought becoming a Death Eater was a rotten idea, and he’d rather be excused.

Perhaps the best explanation was, after all, the simplest: Voldemort, whose grasp of his own psychology was, by that time, slipping considerably, had simply failed to appreciate that dislike, even intense dislike, is much further from hatred than it appears. Killing someone whom you have seen across the breakfast table for nearly half your life cannot be comfortably classified as mere garbage disposal, or the clinical negativing of a subject, however much you may have cringed inside at every bite of toast they ate for every breakfast of every week of that time.

Why, in any event, was not a question that occurred to Lucius Malfoy. His main objective was damage limitation. Thirty-odd years in the Dark Lord’s service had polished his ability to regard people as things to a high degree.

Twenty minutes later Draco was lying in a deserted quarry forty miles from Voldemort’s headquarters, already feeling the first effects of the Death in Life Potion his father had forced down his throat. . . .

Some time later that evening, it appears, Lucius Malfoy mentioned to his wife that he had dealt with a potential family embarrassment.

This was a tactical misjudgement possibly never equalled since that of the general whose last words had been

“Don’t worry, they can’t possibly hit an elephant at this dist-“

It has great characters and dialogue as well, of which one of my favorite bits is this exchange between Draco, Neville, and Melanie, a Muggle working near Malfoy Manor (who has, at this point, had rather a difficult night):

“You think you might be being stalked by a homophobic werewolf?”

Her voice went up into an uncontrollable shriek. Draco shrugged.

“Well, weirder things have happened.”

Her brain analysed this sentence for perhaps two seconds. She threw her head back with sheer disbelief.

“Weirder things have happened? In what universe are we talking about here?”

Neville and Draco exchanged glances.

“She’s right, you know. That one would be a bit weird, even for us.”

My only complaint about Lust Over Pendle is that it ends a touch abruptly, though the Epilogue addresses some of that. You know, one of the reasons I consider myself an optimist is that I assume the corollary to Sturgeon’s Law is, “10% of everything is pretty good.” That doesn’t necessarily follow; but whether it’s 10% or much less than that, some of everything is truly excellent. It’s nice to have my optimism rewarded with these fics. (My only general complaint is that I hate reading long things on the computer, and I wish for digital paper or personal print-on-demand or something like that, to save my poor eyes—being unable to justify printing out hundreds of pages on any printer I have access to.)

(I’ve been mostly reading things that I found recommended in people’s LiveJournals, which probably accounts for the prevalence of novel-length, Draco-featuring works. I did find a short story, “6 Ways of Unpinning a Butterfly,” by Serious Black, that’s worth a look: a very nice narrative voice from Cho’s point of view.)

[2] For example: also on Morgan’s recommendation, I took a look at Telanu’s work, which is Harry/Snape. Not something I would have looked at on my own, as it sounds deeply improbable, but it’s extremely well done. Most of it is not my kind of thing for reasons beyond the writer’s control—but I was very impressed by two pieces set after 70-odd years of marriage, “War Begets Quiet” and its prequel, “Noise” (as usual, I recommend reading in publication order). Okay, “Noise” made me bawl like an infant. Hey, us newlyweds are allowed to be soppy about things like that. Not cheery reading at all, but short, elegant, and powerful. [back]

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Claire, Cassandra: Draco Trilogy

Belated edit: for reasons set forth succinctly here, I am convinced that Claire plagiarized several other works of in fiction in this trilogy. I therefore no longer recommend that anyone read it.

A preliminary note. A while ago, I was surprised to discover that my mother was reading this book log, since Mom and I have almost no overlap in our fiction tastes. It’s not just that we don’t read the same things; except for Tolkien, the appeal of speculative fiction is mostly a mystery to Mom, and if I were in that position, I wouldn’t find most of this log very interesting. So, Mom, if you’re reading this now: you might as well go do something else, because you’re going to find this really strange . . .

On Monday, I saw that some online fiction I’d been reading was complete. After bouncing in happiness, I said, “Oh, hell, this means I have to write it up for the book log, and that means that I have to explain about how I started reading it, and I don’t have time for that.” And really, I still don’t. But I’m very happy with a big practice test we just took, so I deserve a reward (besides, after this weekend and a day next week set aside for roller coasters, this is it for free time until the end of the month).

So. I’ve been reading Harry Potter fan fiction. Some of it’s slash.

Don’t look at me like that—I’ll put the stuff I’ve been reading up against, say, John Ringo, any day . . . (Sorry, Trent.)

It’s true, I am not a tremendous Harry Potter fan—I enjoy the books, but as I mentioned when the movie came out, I don’t spend a lot of time on them. Some explanation is accordingly in order.

It starts with Cassandra Claire’s Very Secret Diaries (start with the first one on her LiveJournal and go forward), which began as a spoof of bad LoTR slash and ended up being wildly popular around the beginning of this year. They’re extremely funny and, like a number of people, I started haunting her LiveJournal to see when a new one would come out. Then, a few months ago, she mentioned that she had a separate journal for Harry Potter things, and, being curious and ever-willing to procrastinate by mucking around on the ‘net, I went and had a look. And then had a look at the “My Website” link, which led to her Draco Trilogy, Draco Dormiens, Draco Sinister, and Draco Veritas. And then I was hooked.

The Very Secret Diaries are, indeed, very funny. But they started as short spoofs and they remain that; there’s no place in the current format for much else. The Draco Trilogy is also very funny. But it’s made up of novels; the shortest, Draco Dormiens, would print out at something well over a hundred pages, and the other two are considerably longer. And they’re good.

True, the series uses some rather well-worn plot devices of fantasy and romance—it kicks off with Ye Olde Body Switch, and later on we get prophesied heirs (which confirms what we all knew, that Hermione is really a Ravenclaw), love spells, more mistaken identities, and people being Not Dead After All. But what comes out of this is worth it: fabulous dialogue, complicated characters, and tangled emotional relationships. The characters sound like, not the people in Rowling’s books, but what those might grow up to be. And Draco is made interesting, which at the time I found really impressive, even if it does take temporarily putting him in Harry’s body to manage it. (There are also a number of references to other works that indicate that the author has good taste in reading, including an extended reference to Pamela Dean’s Secret Country trilogy (I didn’t know that The Secret Country and The Hidden Land were originally one book).)

There is a fair share of angst among the silliness, particularly Draco Veritas, which promises to get even more angsty as it progresses. Tasty angst, it’s true, but it might be too much for some people. (I do admit to occasionally wanting to hand all of them copies of the alt.poly FAQ and say, here, now will you all go set up house somewhere and be quiet?) As a work in progress, I’m enjoying DV slightly less than the others: it’s a mystery and a lot of the characters are hiding things, both of which would be fine if I were reading it all at once, but when it’s spread out over months, it makes it harder to stay involved. (Also, there is a legal maneuver in that latest chapter that, well, let’s just say that the wizarding world has a really screwy legal system, to take something that would be a perfectly good default rule and make it an absolute one . . . )

At any rate, it’s been a while since I read the rest of the series, so I can’t quote pieces for you now. Well, I could, but that would mean scanning through it for good quotes, and then I’d get sucked into re-reading the whole thing, and did I mention I really don’t have any time right now? (Besides, this is turning out to be long enough as it is.) Trust me and go read it, anyway.

[continued]

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Crusie, Jennifer: Fast Women

Yay, mini-vacations. We didn’t have class after Tuesday last week, and no assignments either, so I used the break to catch up, both on the work that I fell behind on because of this whole getting-married thing [1], and on my sleep and leisure time. (The sleep was actually a problem: it seemed that once my body got into AC and realized it could sleep, it decided it ought to sleep—all the time.) Jennifer Crusie’s latest paperback, Fast Women, was perfect mini-vacation reading: funny and quick and engaging and non-stupid.

In my very first post to this book log, I talked about how genre romance novelists tended to move to mainstream by throwing in gratuitous dead bodies and ghosts and whatnot. Crusie is an exception. Her earlier novels were often rather plot-full, particularly with mysteries; she’s mostly added characters to make her mainstream novels longer. She also manages to keep the plot of Fast Women towards the forefront throughout the book, making it feel less lumpy than many similiar efforts. However, the plot, mysterious goings-on in a detective agency, does feel a bit forced in its connections to the book’s story, marriage—which the book is none too subtle about. The relationship of the main characters is also resolved a bit quickly for my taste.

Reading this over, it sounds a bit perfunctory, for which I apologize. I enjoyed this a lot, and it engaged me enough that I spent time thinking about it instead of tossing it aside; but I’m already back in the grind, and I don’t have time to do a more thorough job of it.

[1] A few pictures are now up, in case anyone cares.

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Gaiman, Neil: Coraline (audio)

Another audio book, this one Coraline, written and read by Neil Gaiman. On Wednesday, during our escape to air conditioning, we stopped in at our Local Independent Bookstore (hey, we were in the plaza anyway to do a couple of errands). They didn’t have the book of this yet, but did have it on cassette; since we’d heard Gaiman read the first few chapters at Boskone and knew he was a good reader, and since we had a couple of hours’ driving to get to the air conditioning, we said why not.

Coraline and her family have just moved, into a big old English house that is divided into flats. There is a crazy old man living in the top flat, who says he is training a mouse circus (hence the URL of the official site; it’s Flash, according to Gaiman’s journal (which appears to not do permalinks, annoyingly), so I haven’t bothered going there). There are two old women on the bottom floor, who drink tea and read the leaves and walk their Highland terriers and talk about when they trod the boards. And in Coraline’s flat, there is a locked door that opens onto a brick wall—except when it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it opens into a dark passage that smells of something very old and very slow. The passage leads to a flat very like Coraline’s, where her other mother and other father live. They look and sound like her parents, and love Coraline very much, and want her to stay forever . . . but their skin is paper-white, and their eyes are shiny black buttons.

I enjoyed this very much, though I can’t say whether I enjoyed it more for hearing it first. There are few definite pluses to hearing it first. For instance, I picture the button eyes (a positively brilliant bit of creepy imagery) differently than Dave McKean illustrates them (yes, we bought the book too, later), bigger and sewn cross-wise, not parallel. Some of the characters call the other mother the “beldam,” which I heard as “belle dame,” as in “sans merci”; since I usually don’t pronounce things in my head as I read, I probably would have mis-read or misunderstood. More generally, Gaiman does the voices really well (and it’s a treat to hear his soft English-corrupted-by-America accent says things like “weird”), and the rat songs by the Gothic Archies (Stephin Merritt’s band), are terrific, though I don’t care for the theme song.

Audio books are, by their nature, a slower way to experience a novel, which can both heighten and deflate suspense. I commented about this in relation to The Reptile Room; though Coraline has more plot than The Reptile Room, I still found myself trying to tell Coraline “Don’t you remember this,” or “Didn’t you notice that,” or “What about this other thing?” It’s not that she’s an annoyingly stupid protagonist—she’s really quite sharp—but that’s the format again. (There was another point where something bad happened and then I had to turn over the tape, during which time I figured out, “Oh, of course, X will happen and take care of it.” And it did. Had I been reading, I would have gasped, barrelled on, and been surprised by X. The only point of which is that in an ideal world, audio books would be arranged so that they broke at chapters.)

On the other hand, I think I was considerably more creeped out by hearing this than by reading it, again because of the slower format. When I’m hearing something, I put a lot more effort into visualizing it than when I’m reading, and there are some lovely creepy bits here to visualize. I believe, at one point Wednesday night, I insisted that black rats with little red eyes were staring at me when I shut my eyes. In my defense, I must say that by the time we arrived at the air conditioning I was extremely car sick, and consequently fell face-first into bed and went to sleep almost immediately. Chad woke me up to change for bed, and thus when I said that, I was still quite sick and about 85% asleep. (But they were, all the same.) There’s a dash of something Stephen King-flavored (short stories, not novels) to Coraline; perhaps it’s something about the tunnel, and the mist, and the cocoons. It is, undoubtedly, a strange little book.

It is also a fairy tale, and accordingly runs on some of the logic and conventions of fairy tales. For instance, Coraline is given clues and tools along the way, and the how and why of those clues and tools isn’t important next to how she uses them to prevail. (I mention this because I found myself wanting to know more than we’re told, and had to remind myself what genre we were in.) There are also a couple of set-piece conversations which I heard as Gaiman attempting to subvert certain children’s stories/fairy tale conventions, which don’t work as successfully; again, perhaps it’s because I was hearing it, but I found them slightly awkward and obvious. (Terry Pratchett can pull stuff like that off in his Discworld books, but when he hits A Message, it’s inherent in the story from the start.) It’s a small point and one that doesn’t really affect the rest of the story.

Anyway: good stuff, which I found considerably more satisfying for what it was than Gaiman’s last novel, American Gods. I frankly don’t know whether to recommend the text or the audio book, but either would probably do just fine. (If you get the book, though, check that you got the regular edition; Borders was selling a limited edition, which had just a few pages of extra material at the end for something like eight bucks more.)

[Update: per Gaiman’s journal, which still does not do permalinks [entry for July 8], the more expensive edition was “produced for comics stores as a ‘retail incentive,'” and why Borders is selling it is a mystery. So, Stupid Bookstore Tricks, not Stupid Publisher Tricks.]

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Eager, Edward: (02) Magic by the Lake

I stopped by the local used bookstore yesterday and picked up a fairly odd assortment of things: Edward Eager’s Magic by the Lake, Jennifer Crusie’s Fast Women, and a second edition Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. A children’s book, a novel that (judging by past Crusie books) will include either literal or figurative headbanging sex, and a dusty reference work. I was almost disappointed that the store’s owner didn’t say anything when he rang them up . . .

Magic by the Lake is the sequel to Half Magic, which was one of my favorite books as a kid. I have no idea why I’d never read this, but I rediscovered Half Magic a few years ago and have been vaguely meaning to read more of Eager’s other books since. I read Magic by the Lake last night, justifying it to myself as a reward for doing reasonably well on the first of the simulated exam sections in the bar review course; really, though, I was just too hot and tired to do anything useful by the time we got home from dinner and errands.

Like Half Magic, ’tis a silly book. Four children are vacationing at a lakeside cottage for the summer; one of them sees a sign by the cottage that says “Magic by the Lake,” and another wishes it were true—unfortunately, in the hearing of a turtle, who grants the wish rather grumpily (apparently all turtles are magic).

“You had to be greedy and order magic by the lake, and of course now you’ve got a whole lakeful of it, and as for how you’re going to manage it, I for one wash my hands of the whole question!” . . .

The four children stared, transfixed.

Every bit of the lake’s surface seemed to be suddenly alive, and each bit of it was alive in a different way. It was like trying to keep track of a dozen three-ring circuses, only more so.

Water babies gamboled in the shallows. A sea serpent rose from the depths. Some rather insipid-looking fairies flew over. A witch hobbled on a far bank. A rat and a mole and a toad paddled along near the willowly shore, simply messing about in a boat. A family of dolls explored a floating island. On the other side of the same island, a solitary man stared at a footprint in the sand. A hand appeared in the middle of the lake holding a sword. Britannia ruled the waves. Davy Jones came out of his locker. Neptune himself appeared, with naiads and Nereids too numerous to mention.

The two younger children shut their eyes.

“Make it stop,” said Martha. . . .

“And you needn’t go asking me to take it back, because it’s too late. Magic has rules, you know, the same as everything else.”

“Yes, we know,” said Mark, “but you’d never think so, to look at it now. It’s all every which way.”

They all looked at the lake again. Some Jumblies had appeared, going to sea in a sieve. A walrus and a carpenter danced with some oysters on a nearby shore. In the distance Columbus was discovering America.

There is something ineffably English about these. For instance:

“We could take our lunch,” said Katharine.

“What kind of sandwiches?” said Mark.

“Jam,” said Martha thoughtfully, “and peanut-butter-and-banana, and cream-cheese-and-honey, and date-and-nut, and prune-and-marshmallow . . . “

A time passed.

Their mother came into the kitchen. “What’s all this mess?” she said. “Nobody leaves this house till it’s cleaned up.”

And nobody did.

I read this bit last night as a prime example of “the English have weird ideas about sandwiches,” something I’d learned from experience. Of course, on the back porch, racing to finish before dark fell completely, I managed to miss the line right before that said “Let’s explore our own territory. See America first,” making a later reference to Indiana quite the rude shock.

It’s a bit dated now in its assumptions about gender roles, but not in too objectionable a way. Half Magic is better, but this is light, fun, amusing summer reading.

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Stout, Rex: (14) Trouble in Triplicate

I decided last week that I needed to be reading something that lent itself to small chunks, since during the time I was nominally re-reading Freedom & Necessity, I was really mostly flipping through old Discover magazines, because Freedom & Necessity was too likely to consume time and energy I didn’t have to spare. None of the anthologies we had at the time looked appealing (or they were, you guessed it, in boxes somewhere), so I thought I’d work my way through the Nero Wolfe collections in order because, well, why not?

I’d recently read both the first, Black Orchids, and the second, Not Quite Dead Enough. Both are two story collections; the next, Trouble in Triplicate, sets the pattern for the rest by having three stories and some reference to “three” in the title. (The only exception is And Four to Go.) Later collections sometimes have a theme, which is indicated by their title (for instance, Three Witnesses); this book’s theme is apparently “stories Kate doesn’t like.”

I began reading the first, “Before I Die,” and partway through said, “Oh look—legal stuff!” (In case anyone is curious: I’m almost certain the legal maneuvering at the end wouldn’t have worked then. It would be much easier to achieve that purpose now, but with a different method.) This is the one where Wolfe gets involved with the Mob because he’s craving meat and there’s a shortage. It was on A&E recently, and I passed up watching it because it’s frankly a silly premise.

“Help Wanted, Male” was on A&E last night; someone’s out to kill Wolfe and he hires a decoy. It does have Archie in uniform, being the third World War II story (the other two are in Not Quite Dead Enough), but beyond that I think it has little to recommend it, turning on a deeply absurd plot point. (Chad tells me that I missed seeing Fritz trying to look menacing while holding a gun on people, which I admit could have been worth a look.) I’ve never liked this one and still don’t.

“Instead of Evidence” has a nice subtle, though not very distinctive, title, and that’s about all. I don’t understand the series’ apparent obsession with explosive devices, and the longer I read these, the more annoyed I get at Wolfe’s cavalier attitude towards methods of justice. Also, I refuse to believe Archie could be as stupid as he appears, even for the moment described in the book.

As Wolfe would say: Pfui.

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Brust, Steven, and Emma Bull: Freedom and Necessity [re-read]

In my re-read of Freedom and Necessity, by Steven Brust and Emma Bull, I’d been stuck about forty pages from the end for a week or two. I knew that I’d want to read the rest all at once, but I didn’t feel able to justify taking even that much time to read fiction. (I have been taking non-study time, just mostly with Chad; among other things, providing minor technical support for his new weblog, Uncertain Principles. Go read it.) Monday, though, I promised it to myself as a reward for cleaning the bathroom, and I assembled most of this post in spare bits of time since.

Freedom and Necessity is another of those books it’s oddly difficult for me to write about. Unlike The Last Hot Time, I know why I like it so much; but I also know that some of those reasons are nearly irrelevant for these purposes (the extent to which I do or do not identify with certain of the characters being of no use at all to those of you who are, well, not me). Other reasons are more objective but hardly universal. If you’ll pardon a slightly silly anecdote as an analogy: I won’t let Chad read A.S. Byatt’s Possession, because I’m virtually certain he wouldn’t like it, and I don’t want him to actively dislike a book that’s important to me. (Not that I could actually stop him from reading it, of course. But he really wouldn’t like it.) Similarly, I hesitate to praise F&N too highly here, in case someone reads it as a result and doesn’t like it (and then complains). So, if I sound strangely subdued for someone talking about one of her favorite books, that’s why.

F&N opens in England, in 1849, with a letter from James Cobham to his cousin Richard:

My Dear Cousin,

I wonder how you will greet these words; indeed, I wonder how you will receive into your hands the paper that bears them, as I think you cannot be in expectation of correspondence from me. . . .

In short, I have been given to understand that I am believed dead by all my family and acquaintance—that I was seen to die, in fact, or at least, was seen to sink beneath the water a last time, and my corpse never recovered, though long and passionately sought for. You may imagine the fascination with which I heard this account, though you will imagine, too, that my fascination is accompanied by horror, which is far from the case. I cannot tell how it is, but though I know the thought of myself as a corpse should by all rights cause me distress, I find it holds only the interest, raises only the feelings, that such a thing might in verse or fiction.

What should distress me yet more, and what may, as my sensibilities recover somewhat from the curious flattened state they are now in, is that, for all I can recall, I may indeed have drowned. I have no knowledge of any act, any word, any thing at all that occurred between the conclusion of that pleasant luncheon on the lake shore, and my discovery—rediscovery—of my wits and person at the bottom of the garden behind this respectable inn at an hour when almost none of the respectable inhabitants of it were conscious. I have read, I suppose, too many fables and fairy-tales, for the first thing I asked of the good landlord, upon gathering my straying thoughts and finding my voice, was the month, day, and year. How relieved I was to find I had not been whisked away for seven times seven years, but for a scant two months! And yet, how and where were those two months passed? For anything I could tell, I might indeed have spent them happily in Fairyland, but for sundry signs about my person that it might not have been an unalloyed happiness. . . .

Finding out what happened to James, and what is going to happen to James, is the core of the rest of the book.

I tend to think of books as having both a plot and a story (ideally, that is). There are probably more technical terms for that, but to me, the plot is what happens in the book, and the story is what the book’s really about. For example, in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Memory, the plot is that Miles screws up royally, gets fired, and then finds himself playing detective when his old boss is disabled. The story is that Miles grows up (somewhat). I tend to think of story as being mostly character-based, though in some cases it’s mixed with theme; to me, the story in the Sarantine Mosaic is learning (or not) to live in the world of time and change, love and loss, intellect and emotion, and art and history.

Apropos of the Sarantine Mosaic, the plot of Freedom and Necessity is in some regards not far from byzantine. Its form contributes to its apparent complexity; it’s an epistolary novel, and the letters and diary entries are virtually note-perfect as letters and diary entries, which ought not to surprise readers of Brust’s Agyar, a perfectly brilliant novel-as-journal that everyone ought to go out and read, now. But for quite a while its components are being written by people who only know part of what’s going on, or are keeping things from each other, or are talking about things that they expect each other to know about, so they don’t bother to explain them to us. Eventually large chunks of the plot do get revealed, though Brust & Bull usually give the reader a chance to figure it out for themselves, which is nice. However, because of the form, a number of smaller questions stay unanswered, which can be a touch frustrating. (For the longest time, none of the plot would stay in my head; every time I would re-read, I would be wondering again who the man with the ginger moustache is and the like. It appears to have stuck now, but the characters and the prose have always been more important to me.)

Some of the questions that stay unanswered would help resolve the perennial question of whether this is a fantasy novel or not. Some people get very exercised over the whole issue—either they think it’s definitely one thing, and thought they were getting the other, or they want to know which it’s supposed to be. The closest thing to a definite word on the subject is from one of the authors, who said that it depended on which character you asked. I don’t really care; it’s a damn good novel and I’m happy to leave it at that, but if such things matter to you, be warned.

Really, because of the epistolary form, I feel that saying almost anything about the plot would be an unfair spoiler. So I shall talk about the story instead, which is hardly a spoiler because it’s right in the first letter: the book is about the resurrection of James Cobham. Oh, okay, it’s also about means and ends in one’s political and personal life, and there are other characters and other events of importance, but at core it’s about James in the same way that Dunnett’s Lymond books are about, well, Lymond. (Not a comparison generated at random. Can’t you just see Francis Crawford of Lymond, being asked to pick one word to describe himself, coming up with “agile”?) I’ve had James taking up space in my head for nearly a month now, along with a number of his relatives; it hasn’t always been comfortable, but their taking up so much space for so long should indicate how vividly complex the characters are.

I appear to have rambled my way to a close, or at least to a point where the only things I have left to say are spoilers of the worst sort. (I shall post those to Usenet and put the link in a comment, for those who’ve read the book already.) I remember the time I was re-reading this on D.C.’s Metro on the way home from work; my deep absorption was apparently so obvious that the stranger sitting next to me felt moved to comment on it, observing that I was reading very fast and had not looked up once. I muttered something about re-reading and put my head back down; he, undeterred, added something about how it must be really good, huh? I wanted badly to point out that if it was, did he think I would thank him for interrupting me? (I have no idea what I said—or how I looked—but he did get the hint after that.) Even during the miserable days of studying for the bar (please don’t ask me how miserable, or I might tell you, and then neither of us would be happy), Freedom and Necessity can still generate that level of absorption in me.

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