Deeds & Words

Black Water Rising, Attica Locke

Harper Perennial, 2009

I just finished Black Water Rising, by Attica Locke.  Terry Weyna on Reading the Leaves did a detailed review of this book, so I’m going to suggest you click the link, but here’s a capsule review.  I liked the book, and the main character, a bit more than Terry did.

At the heart of the book is a character whose moral compass has begun to gyrate, and the suspenseful part, for me, was whether he would regain his true north.  Jay Porter is an African American lawyer in 1980s Houston.  He is barely making it, and he and his wife, Bernie, are expecting their first child.  Jay also struggles with the ghost of his past. In 1981, discrimination and abuse of power is alive and well in Houston, and when Jay and his wife rescue a young white woman from drowning, this action creates a trainload of troubles for them both.

Locke writes about the civil rights and the black power movement with authority.  In her acknowledgments she calls out her father for his stories about the time and the movement.  Her eye for period detail is good, especially in scenes like the one at Gilley’s Roadhouse, and her ear for dialogue is pitch-perfect.  The book nods to film noir; the truth may be revealed, but justice isn’t always done. The big question is whether Jay will find his voice and his courage again, after a devastating betrayal when he was in college.

If anything, Locke brought in too many plot points.  The mystery of the nearly-drowned woman and the old man in High Point might have been enough.  A story about union-busting, and the first woman mayor, who was also Jay’s secret (white) lover in the 70s and who may have betrayed him to the FBI, was more than the book needed.  The elaborate plot and back-story require exposition and explanation, slowing the book down. The problem is, without the union story, we would not have met Reverend Boykin, Jay’s wonderful father-in-law, a character who must be there to aid Jay’s development.

The issue with Black Water may just be the management of the disparate plot lines.  Locke’s writing gifts are obvious, and Jay has the potential to become an appealing series character.  These problems are purely technical, and I am sure we will see them disappear in subsequent books.

The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi

Nightshade Books, 2009

There is a lot that’s good about Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Windup Girl. 

There is a lot that’s wrong with it, too. 

The Windup Girl won the 2009 Nebula Award.  I understand why.  This is a novel of Big Ideas, a bold move and an interesting premise.  Bacigalupi’s reach exceeds his grasp, but a flawed, risky work of art often has more value than a success that played it safe. 

I recommend The Windup Girl but I didn’t exactly like it.  I understand why it won the Nebula, but I don’t necessarily agree. 

In a vividly realized Bangkok of the future ( 100-150 years from now) Anderson Lake, an undercover “calorie man” who works for the mega-conglomerate AgriGen, schemes to get access to the rumored Thai seedbank, believed to hold genetic material of vegetables and fruits long extinct, which the Thai are cautiously reintroducing.  AgriGen and one or two other companies have a monopoly on the world’s seeds and grains; and their stock grows more and more susceptible to plagues and opportunistic viruses like blister rot.  This bio-homogenization has led to starvation around the world. The calorie companies are in a constant race with the viruses, and constantly searching for new (old) material they can mutate and patent.  Lake’s mission criss-crosses with the machinations of Hock Seng, an ethnic Chinese Malaysian refugee—a “yellow card” with precarious immigration status—and Jaidee Rojjanasukchai, a Thai folk hero who works for the Environment Ministry. 

In this post-petroleum world, computers are powered by foot treadles and kink-spring technology creates mechanical batteries.  Lake uses a kink-spring factory as his cover, and Hock Seng is the factory manager.  Lake is on the trail of a new fruit he found in the market, and in the course of his search, he meets Emiko, the “windup girl,” a genetically engineered sex-toy, programmed to be beautiful and submissive, longing to be free.  Emiko is a vat-grown geisha trying to be Pinocchio.  

Other reviews, including this excellent one at Strange Horizons, have explored the weakness of Emiko as a character more eloquently than I can.  She was not a plausible person to me. Her alleged struggle between genetic programming and her desire for free will never rang true.  Despite the name of the book, the “windup girl” is not a very important character.  She isn’t even much of a secondary character.  Emiko is a toy to the characters around her who exploit her, and a tool to the author, who needs her to do one particular thing near the end of the book.  Her apparent struggles, shown through the same interior monologue she repeats several times during the course of the book, are unconvincing. 

This sounds as if it is a problem with character, and I did not find most of the characters to be compelling, but the real problem is with the plot.  The first half of the book is slow, and the characters are passive.  Things are put in place that are needed later in the book, but they are disconnected from the actions of our protagonists. The only exception is Jaidee.  Jaidee’s actions have consequences and resonance, and that may be why he is the most memorable character, and seems to be the most effective, even when he fails. 

In the first thirty pages of the book, Lake shoots a rampaging elephant-mastodon.  This is a wild, breath-taking, suspenseful sequence.  Then Lake does nothing much else for a very long while.  He is supposed to be secretly looking for the origin of the mystery fruit.  Instead, he hands them around like oranges.  He goes to the bar where the foreigners—the farang– hang out, sips warm whiskey and complains about sipping warm whiskey.  He could pretend to run the kink-spring factory, but if he did he would discover something, so he doesn’t.  Hock Seng engages in a lot of interesting activities that highlight his growing desperation and his hatred of the White Devils, but do not advance the story. 

This slack plot, so early in the book, when so many characters are being introduced, left me with too much time to think, to grow irritated with Emiko, who seems not tragic and noble but merely whiny. Despite her constant internal protestations that she would like to be “free,” the book slants her story in such a way that it is clear she does not want freedom.  She just wants a new position, a better patron.  Anyone would. 

These problems continue for more than half the book.  Suddenly, on page 207, a strong woman character emerges.  Suddenly, betrayals happen.  Suddenly, the streets are alive and dangerous.  Suddenly, fortunes are reversed, and reverse again, and things start to happen. People get shot. Things explode. The book lumbers off the runway and wobbles into flight. 

The book tends to read like three separate novellas that were broken into chunks and interleaved. The actions of our three main characters, all male, should create some tension and opposition for the others, and they don’t.  Bacigalupi is primarily a short-story writer, with several stories written in this universe, and I put some of this down to inexperience with the longer form.  There is enough here to reassure me that we will not see these kinds of structural problems in his later novels. 

I will not, however, let him off the hook for the disparity in his treatment of his characters.  The book is very brutal, with cruel deaths, beatings riots and massacres. The book has a lot of violence, much of which happens offstage or is described after the fact.  A beloved (male) character is killed and his body horrifically mutilated.  The reader discovers this through the safe, distancing veil of another character’s recollection.  A mahout is crushed into jelly by the rampaging megodont, but we don’t see it.  Losses in battle, stacks of bodies after a riot, are given a phrase or two, sketching in the horror without lingering.  

The exception is the depiction of the twin rapes of Emiko.  These happen almost as bookends, the first very early in the book, the second close to the end.  We understand that rape is a nightly occurrence for Emiko.  It is, in fact, part of the floor show at the club her master owns.   The first rape scene is described in words that are intentionally erotic; water glistens on her naked skin like jewels, she bends like a willow, her breasts are described.  As the two-and-a-half-page scene progresses the language becomes a little harsher but still eroticized.  This is not accidental and not meant to be strictly salacious.  The author is trying to tell us something about Emiko.  Two hundred pages later, in the same club, Emiko is raped again.  Again, the scene lasts two and a half pages, with exact, precise physical detail.  The language is rougher here, and Emiko’s emotions are more consistent.  Both scenes happen in real time, not softened as flashback or recollection.  Emiko is not protected from the horror the way the male characters are.

The point of these two scenes is supposedly to show us the difference in Emiko’s reactions.  In fact, the second scene is the catalyst for the thing Bacigalupi needs Emiko to do in order for the plot to work.  Still, this much careful, attentive detail, and this much space, twice?  It’s disturbing.  If we had seen character growth in Emiko, if Emiko’s next act really were to assume control, rather than lose control, the second rape would seem a little less like pornography, and maybe the first rape would, too. 

The Windup Girl is a book worth reading for the world Bacigalupi built, and the story he tries to tell.  It was a bold move and an interesting premise.  The Nebula judges, however, had another book with a unique world that was a bold move with an interesting premise.  That book was Palimpsest.  Palimpsest took chances, and it succeeded without the seams showing.  So why didn’t it win?  I have an idea.  I think Palimpsest’s literary virtuosity intimidated the judges.  Windup Girl is more accessible; an easier read. 

So go read it.  If you like war-games and boys’ club science fiction, you’ll like it better than I did. Get your conservative friends who don’t understand what the fuss about climate change or genetically modified food is all about to read it too.  Then be prepared for a lively discussion that’s going to go on late into the night.

UPDATE:  Jeremy Lassen of Nightshade Books left a comment below explaining how the Nebula winners are chosen.  It’s not a panel; the entire membership votes.  He thinks it’s unlikely that they all fled en masse from the terror of a literary novel and took refuge in a more science fictional book, and I certainly see his point.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest; Stieg Larsson, Knopf,2010

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is, when all’s said and done, a paper chase, but it is still hold-your-breath exciting.  Part of this is because Stieg Larrson invites us to root for the underdog, to join his characters vicariously in their fight for justice, but also because by book three we care about his characters, especially the strange, anti-social, violent and deeply vulnerable Lizbeth Salander.

 This is the last book Larrson completed before his death and some call the three together the Millennium Trilogy.  Rumors continue to surface about an incomplete 4^th book (he planned a series of ten) or an outline and sample chapters.  This will keep the Internet chattering and helps maintain Larrson’s mystique, but what we actually have are these three.  Certain themes and clues in Hornet’s Nest, such as Salander’s missing sister and Blomqvist’s new love interest, give us some ideas about where Larrson was headed, but these are mostly grace notes in this book.  

As the story opens, Salander is the most vulnerable we have ever seen her; fighting for her life in a locked ward of a hospital, a few yards down the hall from her murderous father who put a bullet in her head and buried her alive.  As the story progresses, Salander’s jeopardy becomes, if possible, even more dire.  Arrayed against her is a cadre of Cold-War-inspired secret police operatives, a shadow government, basically, corrupted by their own arrogance and willing to do anything to retain their power.  Fighting them; Salander, recovering from brain surgery; Mikael Blomqvist and the staff of Millennium Magazine; Blomqvist’s sister, an attorney; a retired children’s advocate weakened by a severe stroke; and the anarchist citizens of Hacker Republic.  At risk is not merely Salander’s life, but her autonomy and freedom.  

The book abounds with official secrets, outright lies, doubled identities and falsified reports.

 A subplot involving Blomqvist’s business partner Berger and the psychopath who is harassing her slows the action somewhat.  Berger is facing a battle of her own, as she tries to turn around the big-name-daily paper that hired her as managing editor.  This struggle against an ossified patriarchal system would have been enough of a B storyline, but again, it seems that Larsson had plans for future books and some groundwork was being laid here. 

Each section opens with a quotation about women warriors and Amazons.  The point seems to be that regardless of whether Amazons themselves existed, there have been women soldiers since there have been wars.  Salander, in the first two books, has been practically an Amazon herself; more, an amine or manga super-heroine.  At just over five feet tall, weighing less than 100 pounds, Salander can fight her way out of any situation.  She can out-think, out-remember and out-hack anyone.  With a bullet in her brain, she can dig her way out of a grave.  In
The Girl Who Played With Fire, we learned some of Salander’s background.Now we see the price Salander has paid for her avenger status.  We knew Salander had been dealt a bad hand, and in Hornet’s Nest we discover the details.  Whatever genetic or neurological predispositions Salander might have for some of her behaviors, ultimately it is the shadow-government spooks, putting her needs second to their careers, who made her what she is. 

Salander faces the world with her shield up and her weapons drawn.  Since childhood, the people who were supposed to help Salander, parents, doctors, police and the government, have lied to her and betrayed her. In the egalitarian universe of the Hacker Republic, where favors are currency, she has no trouble with quid pro quo, but in the living world, in this book, she is forced to rely on people, to accept their help and to trust them.  This is torture for Salander.  Part of the reason for the Berger-psycho storyline is to give Salander a way to reach out to Berger, a person she has distrusted. 

The suspense mounts because Salander has put her trust in others.  They won’t betray her, but will they let her down? Are the governmental forces arrayed against them too powerful? 

At the end of the book, the resolution is more personal.  Salander  is still standing.  She must reach out to Blomqvist.  Finally, cautiously, she lowers her shield.

Hart and Boot and Other Stories.  Tim Pratt, Nightshade Books, 2007

20^th Century Ghost.  Joe Hill, HarperCollins, 2008

Harrowing the Dragon. Patrician McKillip, Ace, 2006 

I don’t usually read short fiction.  It’s an attention-span thing.  I like to immerse myself, soak in a story, and short stories are more like the morning shower than an evening in the hot tub.  I’m also a big fan of complex characters and elaborately designed worlds, and most short stories seem to be more about ideas.  It’s just a preference. 

It’s kind of surprising, then, that in the past month I read three short story collections.  One I happened upon by accident, and the other two I had heard about, and found the books on sale tables or other places. 

Wandering through Copperfields Used Books one day I reached up to pull down a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel I haven’t read.  While I was reaching, I turned my head to say something to the clerk about the store’s charming new cat, Sally.  My fingers touched the spine of the book but when I looked back, it wasn’t the Pratchett.  It was Tim Pratt.  I opened it and read:  “The man’s head and torso emerged from a hole in the ground, just a few feet from the rock where Pearl Hart sat smoking her last cigarette.  His appearance surprised her and she cussed him at some length.  The man stared at her during the outpouring of profanity, his mild face smeared with dirt, his body still half-submerged.  Pearl stopped cussing and squinted at him in the fading light.  He didn’t have on a shirt, and Pearl, being Pearl, wondered immediately if he was wearing pants.”(p1) 

He is not wearing pants, but he is wearing cowboy boots.  Pearl Hart and Joe (or John) Boot were actual historical characters.  In Hart and Boot, Pratt weaves a fabulous, fantastical tale about these old west desperados. The plot is a “how-done-it,” with a charmingly understated (and never explained) magical element. 

Pratt has three stories dealing with Greek mythology.  “The Terrible Ones” combines an actress who temps as a dominatrix, the Erinyes and a production of Medea.  Is it a fable?  A gallows comedy?  Whatever it is, it is delightful, with just the slightest sting in the tail—or the tale. “Living with the Harpy” is strange and sweet.  All the dramatic action takes place off stage, which adds to the suspense. “The Romanticore” also features characters from Greek myth, although you may not recognize them.  At the heart of this story is Ray, the “average guy”, recovering from another breakup, who gets more than he bargained for in the rebound relationship. 

Pratt’s characters, even supernatural hitmen, are accessible and sympathetic.  The short story is the right length for him, and this is a collection of gems. 

                                                                                                   *

Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son.  Good, now that’s out of the way.  20^th Century Ghosts is a prime collection of short fiction.  Some stories are horror, some are literary horror and some aren’t horror at all.  Hill has a strong style, a distinctive voice, and a willingness to indulge in post-modernism.  This means that the conclusions of some stories are left up to the reader.  This is not the undisciplined writing of someone who can’t commit to a resolution, but done with intent and skill.  “Best New Horror” and “In the Rundown,” readers must decide for themselves what comes after the final paragraph.

“Best New Horror” is a familiar tale, and a tasty mélange of tropes; bits of HP Lovecraft, Stephen King, The Hills Have Eyes, and even the Serial Killer Convention in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, all spiced with a sprinkling of sinister glee that makes the whole thing work. 

Pop Art is one of the better stories about friendship and loss, with an original element perfectly introduced into the story.  The story has resonance with the last novella in the book, “Voluntary Commital.”  “The Black Telephone” is an exercise in desperation, with a grounding in the real world that is palpable. 

“20^th Century Ghost” is a sweet tale about a ghost that loves movies, and a decaying movie palace.

 “You Will Hear the Locust Sing” blends Kafka with the 1950s vintage B-movie Them, about giant ants.  I found the physical details to be spot-on, although I’m not sure I really understood the story. 

By far the most surreal and disturbing work in the book is “My Father’s Mask.”  I finished this story and thought, “Whoa, that’s shocking.”  A day later when I was pulling weeds the story finally clicked for me and I thought, “Oh, my God!  It’s going to happen again!” Because clearly, it is what always happens. 

Terry Weyna of Readingtheleaves.com recommended Joe Hill and I have to thank her.  I look forward to more of his work.

                                                                                           *

When I first read Patricia McKillip when I was in my early twenties.  I loved The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, but The Riddlemaster of Hed captivated me.  

These stories span nearly twenty years of McKillip’s career.  Some are re-told fairy tales of the variety Ellen Datlow anthologizes.  Many seem to be set in a world similar to the world of Riddlemaster of Hed.  In several stories, the magical or quasi-magical women at their centers save, or change, their world. The Fellowship of the Dragon follows five women, friends of the queen, on a quest to find the queen’s missing harpist.  The cost is high, and once he is found, the harpist does not seem worth it. 

The Witches of Junket I had read before.  Even though the story is not successful for me, I love how beautifully the Oregon coast is evoked, and the story always makes me nostalgic for Haystack Rock. 

A Matter of Music is complicated but worth the effort.  Here is a story of history and secrets, where none of the characters is evil but each one is weighted with the events of the past.  And there is music. 

The Lady of the Skulls is a hopeful, touching take on a familiar trope. 

There is nothing in Harrowing the Dragon that struck me as deeply as “My Father’s Mask” but the book is pleasant, a perfect companion to a glass of white wine on a deck on a summer evening. 

These collections showcase their writers.  All three collections were enjoyable, but the big discovery was Joe Hill.  I will have to look for his novel now, Heart-Shaped Box.

Cast in Shadow, Michelle Sagara

Luna Books, 2004

May contain spoilers.

I always find books from Luna-Books, apparently an imprint of Harlequin, at the used bookstore.  From the few I’ve seen, they seem to print fantasy that’s one step away from paranormal romance, usually with a woman protagonist, often with a woman writer.  This may be a philosophical choice, astute niche marketing, or a canny blend of both. 

Cast in Shadow by Michelle Sagara is a book about outgrowing a victim mentality, finding your strength and embracing your purpose.  It would be a nice book to give to a 12 or 13 year old girl, especially one who may be struggling with identity or self-esteem issues.  Two things would stop me from sharing it; inadequate world-building and poor writing. 

Kaylin is a  “Grounded Hawk,” a human in a law enforcement/espionage unit controlled by the winged race the Ariens, in the city of Elantra.  Kaylin’s sergeant is a Leontine, a lionlike humanoid, and two of her friends are Barrani, a virtually immortal race.  There are also dragon lords, although they look human—or humanish—most of the time.

 Surrounding the city center is a series of slums or mean streets called fiefs.  Kaylin grew up in one such, the fief Nightshade.  She was orphaned, but a streetwise boy named Severn took her in.  Kaylin and Severn took in two more orphans and created a family, but then mysterious glyphs began to appear on Kaylin’s skin, marks like tattoos, rising spontaneously.  Children in the fief began to die, their bodies found later, missing organs, marked with glyphs like Kaylin’s.  After Severn committed a horrifying act of betrayal, Kaylin fled the fiefs, and found her way into the Hawks. 

Seven years have passed, and now the murders have started again.  Against her will and her better judgment, Kaylin is teamed with Severn, who now belongs to the cadre of government assassins called the Shadow Wolves, and a dragon lord named Tiamaris.  She trusts neither of them, but is determined that no more children will die. 

Together Severn, Kaylin and Tiamaris cycle back and forth between the Hawk tower and the Nightshade fief.  Kaylin also visits an orphanage run by a Leontine female.  Despite their constant shuttling from place to place, the plot feels static.  This continues to be a problem throughout the book, even up to what is, or should be, an exciting climax. 

Kaylin has healing powers, a rare gift that seems connected to the marks on her body.  She has not kept her gift particularly secret but Grammyre, the Hawklord, has protected her. She’s something of a pet of his.  It is not clear whether this is because she is a wonderful person or because of the marks, and his sense that she is something strange and powerful.  The Barrani outcast, Nightshade, who rules the fief, is also interested in her, and the marks on her skin.  He says they are words, words in an ancient tongue that even he cannot decipher. They may, in fact, be names, names of the ancient dead. 

Sagara explains the variety of sentient species by implying strongly that magic somehow drew some of them to Elantra from different dimensions.  She is trying to give us a police-procedural-style fantasy mystery, creating a city full of diverse citizens, but the beat-cop part of the story simply does not work.  Of her different species, her conception of the dragon lords seems the most complete, although it is obvious the Leontines are her favorite.  Because so little of the world and the city is revealed in the book, the cultural development of the Leontines glitched for me.  Leontine cultural mores seem more canine than feline, and Sagara confuses this even more by throwing in the Wolves without telling us whether some of them, like the Hawks, are actual wolves. Instead of showing us the cultures, she wastes prose with tepid jokes about how Kaylin’s always late.  The Hawklord and others use magical mirrors to call up images of past events, excavated memories or autopsies. It’s just magical video, about as fantastical as something you’d see on Criminal Minds. Marcus, the Leontine sergeant, grouses throughout the book about “paperwork” but there is no pay-off to that set-up either because there is no paperwork.  This is all supposed to evoke the feeling of the bullpen, the overworked urban cop setting in our world, and it fails.  This isn’t supposed to be our world.

Small but grounding details are never given.  How big is Elantra?  Is it a port city?  Are there farms surrounding it, or do they import food?  Does it have parks?  Does it have sewage plants?  How did the Ariens become trusted enough by the dragon-lord emperor to be his “eyes on the street?” Is there any kind of transport except walking?  The fiefs are somewhat better drawn, but this city never comes to life. 

One thing works extremely well; the backstory of Kaylin and Severn, and the thing Severn did that drove Kaylin from him.  Kaylin’s account of the events is harrowing, and Severn’s motivations are quickly made clear to the reader, making his character complex and compelling. 

I suspect from the forward that Sagara also writes romances or paranormal romances. Paranormal romance, like urban fantasy, tends to be easier to write than fantasy, since it is set in the contemporary world and issues like transportation and information sharing are already known to the reader.  Sagara has let her imagination out to play in Cast in Shadows, but it takes a disciplined writer’s mind to conjure the concrete details needed to make a place seem real, and I do not see evidence of that discipline in this book. 

Many modifiers.  Choppy sentence fragments.  For emphasis. Annoying.  Really. When she isn’t chopping up sentences, Sagara employs a conversational, discursive style that works well for a first person narrator in a light, romantic book, because we like to think our protagonist is talking right to us, but fails in third person, in a book about children being sacrificed. 

The ideas here, though, are good.  If you find the books used and inexpensive there’s no reason not to pick one up, especially if a long wait or an airplane ride is in your future.

The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly; Washington Square Press, 2007

A vulnerable boy makes his way into an alternate world filled with magic and danger.  To return to his own world he must find a talisman held by the land’s king.  He is beset by dangers, unsure who to trust. 

So far, this sounds like many other books and stories; myths, fairy tales, Thomas the Rhymer, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, The Wizard of Oz, the Chronicles of Narnia, even The Talisman by Steven King and Peter Straub.  It is like them, like all of them—and unlike. 

Connelly is known mostly for mysteries and thrillers, bringing the darkness in way the Irish are renowned for.  I think this is his first pure fantasy novel.  The plot follows traditional children’s fantasy, but this is not a children’s book. 

David’s mother dies after a long, slow illness.  David resorts to magical thinking to save her—composing rituals of touching and straightening things into certain alignments—but these rituals do not work.  When she dies she leaves him with his father.  David idolized his mother, who taught him the love of books and stories, but he also loves his father and even with her gone, it seems that the two of them will be okay. 

But David’s world is about to disintegrate. His father remarries.  They move out of Blitz-torn London into a county house owned by Rose, David’s new stepmother, who is pregnant.  In the meantime, David has begun to hear his books whispering to themselves—or perhaps to him—and begins to suffer blackouts. 

His father works as a codebreaker and is gone for long hours, leaving David alone with Rose, the usurper who took his mother’s place, and the new baby Georgie.   There is plainly no place for him in this life.  Soon, David finds his way into the magical realm, a dark, forbidding wood with trees that appear to leak blood.  He is befriended by the Woodsman, who tells him that only the king can help him get home.  The king has a book called The Book of Lost Things, that holds the secret to David’s return. 

The wood has been invaded by an army of wolves, led by the half-wolf, half-man Loups.  The strongest of these has named himself Leroi and plans to kill the king and rule the kingdom.  Pursued by the wolf army, David and the Woodsman start out for the king’s castle. 

This is the pattern of the story.  David meets mythical and fairy-tale characters along the way.  Some help, and some do not.  All along he is pursued by the Crooked Man, who tells David he can return him home for a small favor.  He just wants to hear the name of David’s baby brother from David’s own lips. 

It is clear that something is deeply wrong in the kingdom.  Most of David’s allies describe the king as weak and say that the monsters they are facing have only appeared during his reign.  These monsters are twisted and wrong, and some things just cannot be explained, like a World War I tank.

The feminine principle has been the most warped and perverted.  Our first clue is when David meets the seven dwarves, a wickedly comic interlude that would fit nicely with Monty Pythons’s Holy Grail.  The dwarves, who now call themselves the Socialist Worker Brotherhood, and are in legal thrall to Snow White.  This is because they tried to poison her with an apple and blame her stepmother, but the stepmother had an alibi. (“Seems she was off poisoning someone else at the time.  Chance in a million, really.  It was just bad luck.” p127.) A prince came along and woke Snow White, but after ten minutes with her he headed for the hills, never to be seen again.  Snow White is a gluttonish harridan who bullies the dwarves.  She isn’t very bright though, and so the seven Comrade Brothers do manage to keep things from her, as we see when David innocently asks them what they mine: 

“Only Brother Number One seemed willing to try to answer the question.

            “Coal, sort of,” he said.

            “Sort of?”

            “Well, it’s a kind of coal.  It’s stuff that used to be, sort of, in a way, coal.”

            “It’s coalish,” said Brother Number Three, helpfully.

            “David considered this.  “Er, do you mean diamonds?”

            Seven small figures instantly leaped on him.  Brother Number One covered David’s mouth with a little hand and said, “Don’t say that word in here. Ever.” (p 136) 

For the most part, the humor in the book ends when David leaves the dwarves and continues on his quest.  The fairytale women become more grotesque as the book progresses.  He meets the Huntress, who magically grafts the heads of children onto the bodies of animals, and hunts them for sport; then a wyrm-like creature called the Beast, gravid with her ravenous offspring; and a ghoulish, vampiric enchantress.  It is not a coincidence that David is confronted with images of the horrific feminine; he was lured into this realm, after all, by a voice he thought belonged to his dead mother.  It is also no coincidence that the Loups, who are the worst of men and the worst of wolves, are also growing stronger.  David’s mother taught him that stories long to be told, that they must be shared, and in this place stories have taken root and borne fruit.  

David starts the tale as a clever boy, well-read and well-schooled by his mother, but he has the chance to become a true hero at the end of his quest.  The suspense never slackens; David is too honorable  to give up Georgie’s name through malice, but he can be tricked, and the Crooked Man is a consummate trickster. In some places, David trusts the wrong person, in others, he withdraws his trust when he should not.  These are the mistakes a real person makes, and the same mistakes David made in his home world, with Rose.  

Despite the darkness and the horror, this is a book about hope.  Despite the carefully followed pattern of a children’s fairy tale, this is a book about loss, grief, and growing through the grief.  Readers can debate whether the ending is a happy one. Connolly uses simple language and simple sentence construction to tell a tale about complicated human emotions, and he succeeds.

 Connolly does not appear to have a religious or political axe to grind, here.  He uses the story to explore grief and growing up.  As he says in an interview at the back of the book, he did not set out to write a children’s book but a book about a child. He also shares some of the original fairy tale versions, before they were sanitized and made PG for everyone.  They remind us how close we still are to that dark wood.

Book of Lost Things, John Connolly; Washington Square Press, 2007 

(Warning:  May contain spoilers.)

 As she disappeared the creepers began to wither and die, and the remains of the dead knights fell clattering to the ground.  David ran to where K_______ lay.  His body had been almost drained of blood.  David felt like crying but no tears would come.  Instead he dragged K___’s remains up the steps to the stone bed, and, with some effort, laid him to rest upon it.  He did the same for D___, placing his body by K___’s side.  He put their swords on their chests and folded their hands across the hilts, the way he had seen dead knights laid out in his books.  He retrieved his own sword and placed it in its scabbard, then took one of the lamps from its stand and used it to find his way back to the stairs of the tower. The long corridor with its many rooms was no more, and only dusty stones and crumbling walls remained in its place.  When he got outside he saw that here, too, the creepers and thorns had withered away, and all that was left was an old fortress, ruined and decayed.  Beyond its gates, Scylla stood waiting for him by the ashes of the fire. She neighed with joy as she saw him approach.  David put his hand upon her brow and whispered in her ear, so that she might know what had befallen her beloved master.  Then, finally, he climbed into the saddle and turned her toward the forest and the road east. 

All was quiet as they passed through the tress, for the things that dwelled there heard David coming and were afraid.  Even the Crooked Man, who had returned to his perch among the topmost branches, now looked at the boy in a new way, and tried to work out how he might best use this latest development to his advantage. (p 256)

I don’t like how my comments on books have been going lately.  They’re too long and I don’t seem to have much to say.  To jump-start myself I gave myself a writing challenge:  A ten-minute capsule review.  Here are three books in thirty minutes: 

Rude Mechanicals: Kage Baker, Subterranean Press, 2007 

The book is a beautiful artifact with a great cover and delightful J.K Potter illustrations.  I can’t tell if they are photorealism or just very good pencil drawings but they enhance the book.  This is the first Subterranean Press book I’ve purchased and it makes me anticipate my copy of “Clementine,” which I’ve pre-ordered, even more. 

Unfortunately, like movies or plays, excellent production values cannot always save a performance.  Rude Mechanicals is billed as a “short novel of the Company.”  At 114 pages and a large font size it is more accurately described as a novella or even a long short story.  People who have not read previous Company works, and who do not understand about Baker’s immortal cyborgs and their mission to go back in time, find objects of value, and hide them so they can be “discovered” in the future, should not start with this story.  While I love Lewis, the Roman immortal who collects works of art and literature, and always enjoy the wily Joseph, this story is too determinedly madcap, too episodic.  Baker tries to make each adventure, as Joseph attempts to retrieve a legendary lavender diamond, spring organically from the last mishap, to up the ante and heighten suspense, but it doesn’t work.  By far the best part of the story is Lewis’s relationship with Max Reinhardt.  Even at the end, Baker convinces us of her love for Shakespeare, but doesn’t convince us why we should love it.  Baker’s trademark humor and love of the golden age of Hollywood stand out here. For people who are captivated by the “Company” books, this would round out the collection, but it’s not for the casual reader. 

Split Image: Robert Parker, Putnam, 2010 

The latest and probably last “pure” Parker book is a Jesse Stone novel.  Jesse Stone is Parker’s flawed character, a man who wrestles with his devotion to his faithless ex-wife and his addiction to alcohol.  In Split Image, Sunny Randall, another Parker series character, joins Stone in the town of Paradise and they work on parallel cases.  Hers involves a pair of social climbers whose daughter has joined a religious organization, while Jesse’s has a murdered Russian mobster in the trunk of a car.  Jesse’s search leads him to a pair of retired gangsters and their gorgeous identical twin wives, while Sunny and gay-guy-pal Spike break the daughter out of a draconian “de-programming” center.  Appearance is not reality; Jesse uncovers some startling truths about the twins, and Sunny discovers that the religious cult is not as benign as it first seemed.  Both Jesse and Sunny struggle with their feelings of attraction and their issues with the fantasy of a relationship versus the reality.  I breathed a huge sigh of relief at the end of the book, because Jesse’s ex-wife Jennifer did not ever make an appearance.  The book is slight, but has that great Parker dialogue and the usual “Desperate Housewives” suburban hijinks that mark the Stone novels.  Since it will be the last book written entirely, solely by Parker, I was pleased to see an ending that was, at least, optimistic. 

Wings to the Kingdom:  Cherie Priest, Tor, 2006 

This is the second in the Eden Moore trilogy.  Reviewers have called the trilogy urban fantasy and Southern gothic.  Take your pick. 

I liked Eden better in this book than I did in Four and Twenty Blackbirds, where her callousness got a little hard to take.  The book has its flaws.  It is too long for the plot, and unless they exist to set things up for events in book three, several characters and events (Malachi and his crazy friend Kitty, for example) don’t need to be here.  It is an axiom of writing that the stronger and smarter you make your villain, the stronger and smarter your hero becomes by comparison.  This is bad news for Eden in this outing, because her villain, while probably realistic, is pathetic.  Eden’s do-it-because-I-can morality gets called into question by another character, the professional ghost hunter, but nothing in the plot forces Eden to confront the logical consequences of her beliefs.  There’s a scary moment for her, but then it turns out everything’s all right, so never mind. 

Balancing out those problems, however, is a wonderful supernatural character called Green Eyes, and a terrifying, suspenseful run through a haunted Civil War battleground, that is as strong as Priest’s work in Boneshaker. I plan to read the third book, in spite of my irritation with this character, because I want to see if Eden Moore, gifted with virtual immortality and the ability to see ghosts, will ever put aside childish things and live up to the power of her supernatural gifts.

Caution:  Spoilers.  Everywhere.  It’s a whole convention of ‘em.

Cathedral College is an elegant, castle-like edifice located adjacent to the National Cathedral.  The College of Preachers, as it was originally envisioned by the first Episcopal bishop of Washington, was founded to provide ongoing education for clergy after their ordination.  Today, the college offers a wide variety of programs on theology, global justice, healing and spirituality.

The Lost Symbol,Dan Brown;Doubleday, 2009 

There’s only one standard to use with a Dan Brown book.  Is it entertaining?  Measured against this scale, The Lost Symbol fails. 

I’ll pause here to discuss the good things, and there are some.  I had never heard of Albrecht Durer’s Melancolia, before I read the book, so I looked it up on the Internet.  What a cool engraving.  Thanks, Dan Brown!  It was nice to be reintroduced to magic squares, even though I’m not mathematical at all.  The guidebook-style descriptions of various buildings were very good; in fact, if Brown wants to take a break from novels, he could write Langdon’s Guide to Rome and Langdon’s Guide to Washington DC, and they’d sell like crazy. 

The puzzles were so elementary that even I could figure them out, which made me feel really smart. . . for about five minutes.  Dude, if I can figure out the puzzles, so can third-graders. 

Oh, and there’s a clever scene with Langdon and the Smart Gal Pal in a taxi. 

Okay.  That’s what I liked. 

Brown’s prose is poor.  His plots depend on any number of implausibilities and coincidences. So, what’s he got?  Why is he so popular?  Well, in the Da Vinci Code, at least, he had a great what-if scenario. 

Miracles don’t always happen twice, however.  The what-if premise of Symbol is just not that exciting.  The ultimate secret of the Freemasons, hidden in Washington DC?  Yawn.  Wake me when you find it. 

I’m sorry. . . are the Masons supposed to be scary?  I just can’t see it.  In the movie of Angels and Demons, the Illuminati seemed powerful and scary—even though they weren’t the bad guys, it was that other guy.  In Code, the Opus Dei seemed powerful and scary—even though they weren’t the bad guys, it was that other guy. In Symbol, the Masons seem. . . kind of staid, Ivy-League and boring. The Boy Scout honor camper society, Order of the Arrow, would have been a more mysterious secret society than these guys were. 

Brown doesn’t really have characters, but he has named people who perform functions.  Here are the functions in Symbol: 

Antagonistic Law Enforcement Presence:  Sato

Smart Gal Pal:  Katherine

Physically Freakish Villain:  Mal’akh

Wise Man/Magical Helper:    Bellamy and Galloway 

Brown writes short chapters and sets the action in multiple locations in an attempt to ratchet up the tension, but for some reason all this did was pitch me out of the book.  Langdon and Company seem to roam around the Capitol Rotunda forever while Langdon flashes back to endless mini-lectures about the Masons; while several miles away the Physically Freakish Villain models his tattoos for us and mulls over his evil plan; while a few blocks away from there, Smart Gal Pal wanders haphazardly around her gigantic storage unit/laboratory worrying about her brother and flashing back to her meeting with the Physically Freakish Villain, who was cleverly disguised (she doesn’t know he’s the PFV). It seems to go on like that for a very long time. 

Brown also sacrifices the chance to create a real character for short-term “gotcha” payoffs, and in this book these sputter and die.  Sato, the CIA Bureau Chief (spoiler alert) is Japanese!  And a woman!  And four feet tall!  Hahahaha!  Betcha didn’t see that coming!  What a shame some of that joke’s-on-you energy didn’t go into making Sato a real character.  How does a four-foot-tall Japanese American woman make her way to upper management in the CIA?  That might be an interesting little back-story. The Solomons, Katherine and her older brother who is a) Langdon’s friend; and b) a Mason; and c) missing, take up a lot of space in the book.  The Solomons are Rich and Powerful.  How did they get rich?  Peter and Katherine inherited the money; Solomons have been wealthy for generations.  How did the family get its start?  Brown doesn’t care.  Brown doesn’t know, or care, that it is background detail and not cute Mickey Mouse watches or Sumatra coffee beans that create character. 

The true identity of Mal’akh (spoiler alert) will come as a shattering revelation to the reader; at least the reader who somehow managed to skip pages 220-225, where it is made perfectly clear who he is. To put that in perspective, the book is 509 pages long. That’s a lot of time spent drumming your fingernails waiting for The Big Reveal that you already know. 

Oh, and Mal’akh has created a national security crisis—really—by threatening to show bootlegged video of real Masonic ceremonies on the Internet.  Oh, no!  Imagine our shock and horror as we. . . see grainy, poorly shot wig-cam footage of rituals we’ve already seen re-enacted on the Discovery Channel.  Has Mal’akh ever seen the Internet?  Oh, but it reveals that important people in government are Masons!  Somehow, I can’t seem to care. 

The work here is so poorly done that I have a conspiracy theory of my own.  Brown conspired with his hard drive and the bottom drawer of his file cabinet to pull out an old manuscript he wrote before the Da Vinci Code, tried unsuccessfully to update the technology and the science, and passed it off to an undiscerning public as a new manuscript.  Oh, ye who have eyes yet will not see. 

So, if you want an entertaining, challenging romp through our nation’s capital, solving historical puzzles, racing to beat the bad-guys, forget this book, and rent the DVD of the first National Treasure movie.  Yes, I’m recommending a DVD over this book.  It’s that disappointing.

Lots of research about a strange or obscure topic?  Check. 

Famous or exotic location?  Check. 

Moderately attractive woman who is a success in her (usually scientific) field?  Check.

 Guidebook-quality descriptions?  Check. 

Physically freakish villain with implausible motivation?  Check. 

Very short chapters?  Check. 

Mysterious talisman/amulet/puzzle/manuscript/jigsaw puzzle/ piece of jewelry?  Check. 

By carefully reviewing the legendary Checklist of Seven, a true adept who has risen beyond the status of initiate will see the Truth Revealed.  For the rest of you; I’m reading a Dan Brown book.  I’d tell you more, but it’s not for innocent ears.  This knowledge must be protected and guarded by the few, the select, the chosen, lest it fall into the hands of ordinary mortals, like the highly unlikely CIA director.