Friday Review, 8/12/2011

Four books this week.

Pierre Pevel - The Alchemist in Shadows


This is the sequel to last year's The Cardinals Blades. Pevel is a French writer, and these books are translated. I don't know how much of what troubled me about the book is due to the translation and how much is due to the fact that Pevel is French. At any rate, although I really enjoyed the book, I had two fairly significant problems with it as well.

First, some plot. The story revolves around the same group of rapier wielding swashbucklers as the last book. The Cardinal's Blades are a small group of elite soldier-types who serve Cardinal Richelieu as spies and troubleshooters and all the sorts of things small groups of elite soldier-types are generally used for. Doing things that no one else can do, that sort of thing. Anyway, at the beginning of the book, there is a woman, a woman who has spied for many nations, including France and Spain (where the dragons are, you know) and England. She works for herself, and sells information to the most interested party for the highest price she can get. She has evidence of a plot against the French throne, and will only give it up in exchange for formal protection by the Cardinal, which would require a formal pardon by the king, which the king is unlikely to give, because it would piss off the Parlement, the traditional Parisian court system. The main story is about the Blades unraveling this plot.

That's my first problem with the book - it feels like a series of loosely linked vignettes - short stories which have been patched together with some interstitial bits to make a novel. It's even possible that this is the case - the first story about how the Blades fight the nasty Spanish dracs (dragon type things that walk like men) the second story about how they track down some subversive elements in the French aristocracy, and the third story about how they save the French throne - but the patches seem a little shaky. It was jarring.

The second problem I had with the book is that the pacing is odd. That may actually be due to the short stories bolted together aspect - each story has rising action and a climax - but for most of the book, it felt like everything was dragging very slowly. Lots and lots of talking, not a lot of action. And then, in the last few chapters, BOOM, action all over the place, so much it was hard to keep track of who was where, doing what to whom with what implement.

All that aside, the book was quite enjoyable. The characters were interesting, the plot was compelling, everything worked, mostly. Just, you know, don't read it right before bed, unless you're suffering from insomnia.

China Mieville - Embassytown


This is a book about postmodern linguistic theories about the meaning of language. What is language? Do words mean anything in and of themselves, or are they just convenient tags we hang on things we observe? Mieville attempts (with considerable success) to wrestle with these ideas. What is reality? To what extent do we define reality by the way we use language? That is the other major concept in this book.

Setting. Humans have traveled far away from Earth (Terre) by tapping into a sort of sub-space. There are some humans who can manipulate this sub-space - the immer - which, Mieville contends, is the reality which underpins the universe. The universe in question is the third universe, but the immer does not change. Immersers, who can manipulate the immer, can manipulate reality in the universe as well - a skill that immers call "floaking". Avice Benner Cho - the heroine of the book - is moderately skilled at floaking - twitching the universe just a little so that she doesn't have to work very hard. Convincing authorities (for instance) that she has permission to be places where she does not, in fact, have permission to be.

Avice lives in Embassytown, a small human settlement on Ariekei - a planet on the fringes of explored space, quite difficult to get to via the immer, and inhabited by the Hosts (or, to non-Embassytown dwellers, the Ariekei). The Hosts are a strange alien race who speak with two voices simultaneously, and who cannot understand people who do not also speak with two voices (but only one brain). Embassytown breeds Ambassadors, perfectly identical cloned twins who are trained to speak as one. Through the Ambassadors, humans can speak to the Hosts, exchanging Human technology for Hostish bioengineering.

In addition to their strange speech, the Hosts have no concept of figurative speech. The words in their language have intrinsic meaning. In order to make use of figures of speech such as similes, they must construct complex situations to which they can then, at a later date, refer. For instance, there is a rock outside of town which has been split in two and then cemented back together. The Hosts did this so that they can say "this situation is like the rock which was split apart and the put back together" - if the rock did not exist, the Hosts literally could not think of concepts which were like that rock.

Everything comes to pieces when the government of Bremen - theoretically in charge of Embassytown - attempts to make a power-grab by sending their own Ambassador in. From there, things become increasingly complex and dense and complicated. But, in the end, the book is about language, and meaning, and reality. Do words mean things? If so, do we alter reality by using specific words for specific things? Hard to say, but interesting to explore.

This book was a little tough to wrap my head around. There was a strong feeling of Mieville being smarter than his audience, being "more postmodern than thou," but it wasn't overwhelming, and it didn't make the book unreadable (as linguistic games often do). It wasn't, however, a puzzle like Kraken - there was no sense of Mieville inviting his audience into a shared exploration. It was more straightforward in its narrative structure, even as it was more abstruse in its content. So, it might make your head hurt, and it will probably make you think, but it's a good story, and you may enjoy it despite all of that.

Robert Allison - The American Revolution


I grabbed this because I wanted to see how you could possibly cover the American Revolution in less than 100 pages. I'm sorry to say that, frankly, you can't. Allison gives it a valiant effort, but the event was such a nuanced thing, with complex meanings and sub-events and twists and such, that to pack it all into a tiny book like this means you are stripping away too much. Frankly, when I finished, I was disappointed. Not so much in Allison, or even in the book, but in Oxford University for publishing the book. Oxford has been publishing some huge, 900-1000 page historical bricks, each detailing a small time period in World or European or Asian or American history. These are invaluable to the historian. They are frequently written in engaging prose, such that the layperson could, with only a little effort, read them - even enjoy them. This book is like one of those books seen through a telescope the wrong way around - tiny, and not very helpful.

I did think of one use, though. Say you needed to appear knowledgeable (but not TOO knowledgeable) about the American Revolution, but only had an afternoon to get that way. I'm envisioning something from Mission:Impossible, where you need to infiltrate a cadre of, I don't know, college freshmen, with only a limited amount of time to prepare everything. This book would be invaluable in that case. Or, I suppose, if you needed to take a test on the American Revolution, and had been sleeping through the first half of the semester - this book might help there too. Otherwise, don't bother.

N.K. Jemisin - The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Ok, I don't know why I didn't think I would like this book, because it has stuff in it that I like a lot. It has complex politics. It has strong characters (especially the heroine,  Yeine). It has complicated religion. It has backstabbing, and a castle on the top of an impossibly tall stone spire. It has a compelling world which is well crafted (although we don't see much of it in this book). It has a delightfully convoluted plot (not aided by the fact that Yeine does not know how to tell a story. Note, it is Yeine who lacks this skill - Jemisin is a fine story teller, but her narrator is woefully unreliable.) and a satisfying conclusion (although it is the first of a trilogy). I don't know why I didn't think I would like it, but I didn't, and I was wrong.

Yeine is summoned to Sky, the ruling city of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Her grandfather, patriarch of the Arameri family (to which Yeine is related through her mother), and also (sort of) ruler of the Kingdoms, and also (sort of) high priest, has summoned Yeine. When she arrives, she discovers that Dakarta (her grandfather) wishes her to be his heir. Sort of. One of three, and thus part of some byzantine contest to determine who will take Dakarta's (sort of) throne. Yeine discovers things about her family that she does not like, things about herself that she does not imagine, and things about her gods that she almost cannot comprehend. In the end, everything comes out sort of ok.

I'm really looking forward to the next book, which will present its narrative from the point of view of someone antagonistic in this first novel. I suspect that Jemisin will attempt to rehabilitate this character, both in terms of the world and in the eyes of the audience - making hir sympathetic to the audience while zie repents of hir sins from the first novel. I love that sort of thing!

Some potential triggers - there are some mentions of rape, and some consensual sex which borders on rape. There's some torture as well. Yeine's family is not very nice, and her world is not all that pretty, on a lot of levels (largely because her not very nice family has been running things for quite some time).

Friday Review Post, 6/17/2011

My girls have left to spend their week further south, and my hosts are out celebrating Father's Day (Happy Father's Day, incidentally, to any fathers, new or established), so I think that counts as downtime. Here's the expanded reviews.

Bernard Cornwell - The Archer's Tale


This is the first of Cornwell's "Grail Quest" trilogy (although Cornwell has a notorious habit of sneaking back and filling in bits he feels he left out, so it may well turn out to be much longer than a trilogy). It's Sharpe's Rifles, only in the Hundred Years' War, with long bows instead of rifles. Pretty good, but not very deep.

Weeeeell. It was a little deep in places. Cornwell does some nice things with villains and redemption. His protagonist is no saint, although clearly he has some admirable qualities. Cornwell does excellent character building in his primary characters - once you get past second tier characters, however, they become pastiches. Some interesting musing on the nature of war, and how it really hasn't changed all that much, and on the importance of competent leadership.

One thing that Cornwell has always done very well is the inclusion of an author's historical note. Cornwell is scrupulous in pointing out where he has taken liberties with the historical record in order to insert his character into the fray. He is also very good at not altering any major events in order to get the desired effect. This book is certainly true to that tradition. It needs maps, however - several of the Sharpe's Rifles books have excellent maps of the battlefield, with troop movements carefully displayed. This book, not so much. Since the book concludes in one of the very few set piece battles of the 100 Years War, a battlefield map would seem to be lacking.

Perhaps a trigger warning is in order - Cornwell's character muses on the use of rape as a weapon, and concludes, eventually, that it does more harm than good to the invaders, and acts to prevent it, as possible. This realization comes as a result of nursing a rape victim back to mental health. The rape scenes are not graphic, but they are present; if that bothers you, I'd say read with caution.

Elizabeth Adler - The Property of a Lady


I didn't finish this one - Adler kept introducing new characters, and it wasn't what I thought it was going to be at all. I thought it was going to be a novel about a Russian princess struggling to survive in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Instead, it was a heavy handed spy novel set just before the fall of the Soviet Union. Except Adler didn't know the Soviet Union was going to fall, so. Ultimately, I didn't care much about any of the characters, and I know how the history ends.

As mentioned in the comments, the book looks like a romance novel, and it certainly has elements of romance in it - handsome male spies, a beautiful news reporter, an attractive young woman with an aristocratic background who, in her old age, claims to have been married several times (it seems clear that Adler intended to introduce us to the woman's husbands over the course of the novel). Ultimately, I think the book was trying too hard to do too many things - is it a spy novel? Is it a novel about the television news business? Is it a romance novel? Is it a memoir? Hard to say. I think, had it been properly billed as a spy thriller, and the memories of the old lady been left out, it would have worked quite well. Equally, had it been billed as a recounting of the life of a remarkable woman, it would have worked well. Smooshing those two novels together, though, was a big mistake.

China Mieville - Kraken


This was a truly delightful novel. It was dense, with multiple story lines weaving in and out of each other, pulling the reader deeper and deeper into the murky plot. Mieville leads his readers down a branching path of a story, teasing them with false resolution after false resolution until he, and his readers, arrive at a pleasantly satisfying ending.

The premise - the theft of a preserved giant squid from the Darwin Center in London seems to have triggered an apocalypse of some sort. As Billy Harrow, Mieville's principal protagonist soon discovers, the squid is just the tip of an increasingly weird iceberg. Harrow finds that London is a remarkably complex city, with various cults vying for attention, each with an agenda and an apocalypse of its own. This web of Armageddonim - a lovely plural ("I find I need to know the plural of apocalypse," Riley Finn) makes the various cults fractious - clearly, only one apocalypse can be THE apocalypse - and so the London police have a special branch devoted to keeping the cults from each others' necks. This branch also handles all the weird stuff - the magicians and mystics of various ilks who, it becomes clear, inhabit the netherworld of London (and most other major cities, it is implied.) This netherworld includes magical villains such as Grishnamentum (who may or may not be dead) and the Tattoo, who has a warped and twisted sense of humor to match his warped and twist band of henchmen. It includes people who do origami on things other than paper - people, say - and people who can transport objects with magic, and people who can connect you to the magical protective power of music. It also includes cult collectors - an odd bunch of religion geeks who become members of cults in order to show off to their peers - and several unusual actors - the Ocean has an embassy in London, as does Fire. This is all delightful stuff.

As my on going love of Charles DeLint should indicate, I am fascinated with the idea that there is a world which operates in a state of "un, sub, or supernatural" being - just over, or under, or slight off from our own. Mieville is clearly playing with this idea here, as do authors like Neil Gaiman and Tim Powers. However, where DeLint's work presents that world as largely ... I don't know - harmless is not the word, because there's plenty of menace in DeLint's fantasy world, but, somehow, lighter than our own world? ... Anyway, Mieville's parallel world is dark, moody, heavier than our own world. The writing is not straightforward either - Mieville clearly delights in teasing his readers. He is playing a game with us; he is smarter than us, but, at least in this book, he doesn't come across as smug. He is inviting us into his joke, into his complex game, and hopes we enjoy what he has to offer. And I did. I will, perhaps, seek out something else by him - I understand that Perdido Station is not un-readable.

I will note that Mieville's London has coloured my dreams to some greater or lesser extent for the past week or so - I can't remember them when I wake up, but they are rambling, complex things, full of blind alleys and trap streets (and trap streets - I can't believe that Mieville is the first author to use them to narrative effect. Trap streets are streets that cartographers include in their maps in order to prove that they were the author of the map - they don't exist in the real world. Mieville posits that they DO exist in the real world, but that you can't find them unless you're in the right frame of mind. This is a simply brilliant bit, and I'm sure someone else has had the same brainwave, but I've never seen it before). If you don't like that sort of thing, perhaps you should read the book with caution.