December Books Update 1

Some Books I read earlier this year

**** 

 1. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler

The main character and narrator of this novel is you, the reader, trying to read Italo Calvino’s book If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler. However the copy is misprinted, repeating pages (the sixteen page signatures have been bound in). Returning to the bookstore you encounter Ludmilla, who has had the same problem. Getting new copies they are different entirely. Attempting to track down the original you discover more openings to books, translated, swapped, plagiarised, faked, uncovering an interlocking set of international conspiracies to hide and reveal texts.

Sometimes reflecting on these sections are the extracts from the books being read. These are parts of different books, from different genres, attempting different things. A walk through a world where publishing and books are fallible things that can go wrong or be made wrong or be entirely obscured, yet still the text exists.

Read This: Unsettling classic asking if we can know what a book is
Don’t Read This: Too many starts, too few endings

2. Naamah’s Curse

At the end of Naamah’s Kiss Moira had found herself in the empire of Ch’in (China) having saved the princess and the empire from civil war. To save Bao, the boy she loved, had taken the life of his master. More intriguingly it also had shared her own life spirit, her diadh-anam, her destiny, her connection with the bear god. Bao had mixed feelings, left her to try and find his father amongst the Tatar nomads beyond the empire.

She decides to go after him, refusing any escort. Stranded out on the steppe over the winter she’s saved and befriends a tribe of Tatars. In the spring they go to the gathering place. She’s re-united with Bao, only to discover he found his father, a general to the Great Khan and has married a daughter of the Khan.

After a few days of trying to sort it out Moira is betrayed by the Khan, and locked up in magic chains by a pair of Vralians (Russians). She’s taken to a Vralian city where the Patriarch attempts to convert her to the Yeshuite faith. There has been a schism in the church due to the events in Kushiel’s Justice; the Patriarch hopes the conversion of Moira – magician, D’Angeline and libertine – will prove his point and let him lead a crusade against Terre D’Ange. He has a particular interest due to D’Angeline association with Yeshua, and also because his sister was seduced by a D’Angeline giving him a half D'Angeline nephew.

After much confession and penance Moira won’t convert and is sentenced to death; she escapes thanks to the Patriarch’s sister and nephew. After some adventures she catches up with the Khan’s daughter who was not part of the plot; she reveals that they lied to Bao, claiming she was taken by the Falconer, a notorious lord of assassins with a stronghold high in the mountains.

As she travels there she learns more; the Falconer has a consort, the Spider-Queen who has a jewel from one of the gods of Bhodistan, a jewel that creates overwhelming desire. In the valley below the stronghold is a tiny kingdom, ruled by the Rani on behalf of her young son after the king was killed by one of the Falconer’s assassins. Bao, believing Moira dead, has been ensnared by the power of desire. There’s also a bit of class warfare; the Spider Queen was one of the untouchable caste, and Moira gets involved with their liberation too.

Having found love and lost it the first volume, Moira goes through this again (and again – no wait, that was the oracle for Imriel). Even if she doesn’t know for sure where her destiny is leading she always has an objective – though she’s kept prisoner for the largest and most important section of the novel. Still, I didn’t find it especially enlightening. The dogmatic, certain priest is bad, will try and wipe out our cool, free-love angelkin? Oh dear.

Read This: More fantasy adventures across (not) Central Asia
Don’t Read This: Meandering middle volume with a woman unjustly imprisoned, interrogated and condemned to death

3. Bloodstone (David Gemmell, 1994)

After the events of The Last Guardian Jon Shannow retired from gunslinging, his returned youth disguising him. For the last twenty years he has been a Preacher. The new government has banned wolvers, the small wolf-people mutants but he continued to minister to them. When his church is burned down he takes up his guns and goes after the raiders – disguised crusaders – but is injured and loses his memory. He reverts back to being the Jerusalem Man, the violent, upright gunman.

In those twenty years much has changed. The airliner trapped out of time from before the fall landed. Although most of the people aboard died from the harsh conditions, they managed to pass on much knowledge, and several of them, led by the Deacon, established a government. This has turned repressive under the ambitious acolyte Saul, with people required to take oaths and be vouched for by other members of the community.

The Deacon found sipstrassi stones, the magical stones that can make wishes real, and gave them to his Acolytes. Saul has been gathering them when they die, and later arranging for their deaths. He seeks not just power but immortality, and the growing intolerance is his gambit for seizing control. The Deacon has vanished and he’s ready to step into the empty spot.

The recovering Jon Shannow meets Amazingha Archer, whose husband was killed in part due to his actions. The Guardians are gone, but she has access to the gateways and a stone to open them. She’ll help him save his friends if he helps her. The trick is this, that the gateways open across worlds and time. In another world the leader of the Guardians won and took the great sipstrassi, defiled by blood, into himself, becoming a creature who feeds on blood and fear. There is another version of her husband and with Shannow’s help she can save him.

This conclusion to the Jon Shannow novels suffers from having a lot of side characters from the previous two novels hanging about along with new ones. They’re mostly scattered over the countryside seeing as things get worse as gunmen get bolder and more violent, and finally monster come in. Like the Hawk Eternal it wraps up with some time-and-space bending resolutions, here much more successfully. The biblical imagery and language keep paying off right to the end.

Read This: Satisfying ending to a post-apocalyptic weird-west trilogy with a few clever twists
Don’t Read This: Gemmel’s best with action and determination and building stakes, the checking in with a dozen different characters and putting time-turns in do not play to his strengths

4. Hamlet

One

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is approached by the ghost of his dead father (also called Hamlet). Hamlet’s uncle Claudius is now king, married to Hamlet’s mother Gertrude. Told by the ghost that Claudius has not only married Gertrude with indecent haste, but in fact murdered Hamlet’s father he is struck by indecision. Claudius’s advisor Polonius has a son, Laertes, a rival to Hamlet, and a daughter, Ophelia, who has been courting with Hamlet. Laertes and Polonius advise her to break off the relationship.

Hamlet feigns madness, to the consternation of the court, only letting his friend Horatio know that it’s an act. He puts on a play that mirrors the murder method (poison poured in the ear). His relationship with Ophelia is damaged by his madness. Seeing the reaction he considers killing Claudius at prayer, but that would send him to heaven. Called to explain himself by his mother, Hamlet and Gertrude argue, with Polonius hidden behind a curtain. Hearing a noise Hamlet kills Polonius and hides the body.

In swift succession Ophelia goes mad and kills herself, Laertes challenges Hamlet to a duel, and various people attempt to poison each other at the duel, with almost all the main characters dying. Horatio is left to explain what has happened. So much for the plot of Hamlet.

Two

Why re-read Hamlet is on the one hand an obvious question, on the other a redundant one. Why would one want to read one of the best, most quoted and referenced and commented on plays from the English language’s greatest playwright?

I had a particular reason; last year at Emily Carding’s Richard III: A One Person Show I was assigned Sir William Catesby and spent several minutes trying to figure out who the hell Sir William Catesby was. Going to see their Hamlet: An Experience, I wanted to be up to speed on who was who and the details of what happened.

In neither show is any of this necessary; in Richard III Richard will happily tell you what to do. In Hamlet: An Experience Hamlet is putting on a play of which we are the players. Sometimes Hamlet is the director of the play, sometimes the lead actor. When needed Hamlet-the-director will clearly explain in character what’s needed.

Still I was glad to do so, to see what’s moved – Hamlet’s instructions to players moved to the start and addressed to us – and of course what’s removed. No Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern in this version, sorry Tom Stoppard*. No comic gravediggers. Much of anything that is not Hamlet is removed – Hamlet’s self-absorption coming to the fore. And the misogyny of the play, perhaps not one of Shakespeare’s best for female roles in any case, that’s made clear in the instructions with Ophelia and Gertrude both coming in for abuse and criticism and with no chance to respond – or at least not in words. Ophelia’s instructions are almost revelatory, in part because…

Hamlet sits in the circle of chairs with us, or performs in the centre, or directs us to act in the middle. There’s nothing between us, no stage, no rows of chairs (my experience of Shakespeare being mostly from high up in the gods), no fourth wall dividing us. We are within the fiction and right next to the action, even when we take no part in it. For Hamlet to make changes to the play makes sense, yet when the other characters come forward and act in ways that comment on the play as written and often performed, it offers unexpected insight.

Three

I don’t know what I’m doing here. This is one of the best known, criticised and studied works in the English language. My comments don’t add to it in any way.

But a review is as much about the reviewer as the work, and every reading unique. So don’t let this be your final thought. Go and see the play performed, on stage, by amateurs, on the TV, in whatever way you see fit (go and see Emily do it!) Maybe do a reading! Put on a performance! Or read it quietly to yourself.

There’s a lot in it worth considering.

Read/Watch/Perform This: Absolutely foundational play
Don’t Bother With This: Murder, betrayal, suicide, a rat’s nest of awful people

* RIP 

5. Saturnalia

It’s approaching Saturnalia, the Roman New Year, the traditional time for family arguments. This has an early start as Falco’s brother-in-law has argued with his wife and left home. It turns out that Veleda, a German prophetess who he was involved with (see The Iron Hand Of Mars) is in Rome; worse than that she’s escaped the house she was being kept in and is on the loose.

Searching for clues Falco discovers he’s ten days late on the case. The day she vanished one of the family members died, was beheaded and the head put in the house fountain. They’ve been in formal mourning until now. Falco investigates the family, each of whom has a doctor from a different school of medicine, from surgeon to dietary adviser to dream interpreter. Veleda herself was ill, and they brought in yet another doctor, from the temple of Aesculapius. Her charity works takes her out to the homeless and escaped slaves.

Falco uses his contacts with the vigils and learns that mysteriously dead slaves are something that has happened before. Meanwhile his nemesis the Chief Spy is also after Veleda, and his plans involve the notoriously brutal Praetorian Guard and using people as bait.

Rome inevitably has a community of Germans – there's one of every people Romans are in contact with. Learning of trouble – Veleda’s escape was triggered when she discovered she was due to be executed when the general who captured her was granted an Ovation (a lesser Triumph) – the merchants have fled or closed up for the holiday. Of course there are others – veterans of the former emperor Nero’s bodyguard, dangerous men.

Falco has to try to solve the murder and find the escapee, to seek justice while avoiding the dangerous other hunters. To try and sort out his family (impossible) over the winter holiday. A solid detective story with several layers of Roman history as part of the plot.

Read This: Search through 1^st century Rome for truth, family and an escaped prisoner
Don’t Read This: Farce runs into tragedy over pages of pedantic historical detail

6. Conan

Editor L Sprague de Camp was not content to reprint the published, or the un-published but complete, Conan stories of Robert E Howard. For his 12 volume series he included explanatory material, and arranged the stories in internal chronological order*. He then expanded on the stories to fill in perceived gaps in Conan’s career. Some of these used fragments or outlines from Howard’s papers, expanded on by de Camp or his collaborator Lin Carter (also Björn Nyberg in one volume). Some were non-Conan Howard stories that they Conan-ised. And some they wrote as pastiches.

I make this tedious introduction in part to explain the varied sources of the stories in this volume, and in part to offer something of the flavour of opening up this book; we get the contents, a map, de Camp’s introduction, a letter from Howard to P S Miller talking about a chronology and map, and Howard’s outline of the history of the Hyborian Age – the fictional lost pre-historic period the Conan stories are set in – before we get the first story. And this story is by de Camp and Carter, not by Howard, with the under-inspiring title The Thing In The Crypt, a workman-like story of a teen Conan on the run, taking shelter in a tomb (or crypt) and dealing with the thing there.

Things improve with the next story, credited to Howard alone, The Tower Of The Elephant. A young Conan learns about an evil magician that even the king fears, and the great jewel he keeps in his tower. Asking why no one has stolen it, the tale teller in the tavern insults him; Conan kills him, escapes and decides to rob the magician. As it happens the greatest thief in the city is also robbing the place; he gets them past several dangerous guards and traps, with Conan also saving them. Within, the thief over-extends himself, leaving Conan to discover a much stranger mystery than we would expect. One of the foundational texts of Sword & Sorcery fiction and hugely influential of Dungeons & Dragons and roleplaying games, a place with a treasure, traps, monsters and a villain – all a bit weirder than it needs to be.

The other two Howard stories The God In The Bowl and Rogues In The House are slightly less weird though still strong. In Bowl Conan is discovered in a museum with a dead body and a whodunnit occurs around him before he’s called on to deal with things – having been betrayed by an employer. Rogues opens with a nobleman threatened by an evil magician. He recruits an imprisoned Conan to kill the magician, only to find himself betrayed and decide to do the job himself. Conan meanwhile escapes partly due to the nobleman’s actions, thinks he’s indebted and enters the magician’s house – only to find that something very strange is going on and the three have to make an uneasy alliance.

The Hall Of The Dead (Howard and de Camp) is fairly standard, Conan on the run, heads to a ruined city to discover a weird monster and have to make an uneasy alliance with the guy chasing him. The Hand Of Nergal (Howard and Carter) feels a little quest like, Conan has stumbled on a magic amulet which is the counterpart to an evil magic artefact. The early battle scene where he finds himself on the losing side – before both armies are put to flight by dark magic – is pretty good. The final story The City Of Skulls (Carter and de Camp) takes Conan into a strange mountain kingdom for some slightly confused princess rescuing.

In between de Camp offers some generally unnecessary bridging paragraphs – after each adventure Conan decides to leave town and head for another one hoping not to run into weird magic. It doesn’t work! In a later one it notes he spends some time in the army of Turan, learning archery and horsemanship. Perhaps of interest if you wanted to stat up Conan for your D&D game.

Read This: Some classic stories, quite a bit of interesting material on the background within and without the stories
Don’t Read This: Quite a bit of filler and the background has been better and more comprehensively detailed elsewhere

* The first two Conan stories published in Weird Tales had Conan as the new king of Aquilonia, contending with plots and magic aimed at the throne. The third, included in this volume, has a much younger Conan intending to rob a magician…

7. Crooked Kingdom

After the events of Six Of Crows, the crew are back in Ketterdam looking for revenge against Jan Van Eck. Van Eck hired them to retrieve the inventor of jurda parem, a drug that enhances the powers of the Grisha – magicians. He then betrayed them (they were partly successful, they got Kuwei Yul-Bo, the son of the inventor, a good alchemist in his own right, and his notes; Kuwei is hoping to find a cure for jurda parem addiction).

They’re holed up in Kaz Brekker’s most secret hideout, a tomb on a graveyard island. Most of the crew’s secrets came out during the previous adventure, but they’re dealing with the fallout. And more, those secrets involve others and now they’re back in Ketterdam those others are on the scene. Still, they want revenge and they want the thirty million they were promised. And Kaz Brekker has a plan to get them.

These involve conning Van Eck’s lawyer, sabotaging the sugar siloes Van Eck has an interest in, running a jurda fields scam, and using the iron-clad laws of Ketterdam where it comes to contracts, auctions and money to manoeuvre their various enemies. Enemies? Yes, as well as Van Eck – wealthy, powerful, one of the ruling council – there’s Kaz Brekker’s arch-rival in the criminal underworld, Pekka Rollins; a world-famous assassin hired in to counter Inej Ghafa, the Wraith, Brekker’s spy and climber; plus the Shu who have used jurda parem to create flying Grisha-kidnappers; the Fjerdens who they took Kuwei from; and the other council members of Ketterdam who are increasingly dubious about Van Eck’s machinations.

There’s heists, fights, cons, rigged games of chance, magic, strange magic, alchemy, impossible shots, impossible stunts, betrayals, setbacks, explosions, break-ins, tricks, double-crosses and last minute improvisations. Exactly what’s going on becomes increasingly hard to follow. Brekker plays his cards very close to his chest, and the one thing you can be sure of is that any plan he lays out won’t go that way. Is this exhausting? Not quite. The characters have laid themselves bare to each other and now they have to decide if they’re actually going to trust, fall in love, make recompense or whatever. And often they can’t because there’s a city- or world-spanning plot that aims to squeeze this crew in particular.

Read This: Mismatched heist team bounce from ambush to betrayal, trying to figure out what they want if by some miracle they succeed, also magic gets out of hand
Don’t Read This: Sometimes eight short chapters in a row end with a shocking reveal or cliffhanger

8. The Years Of Rice And Salt

The titular years are explained, somewhat late in the book, as the years after marriage and children, but before old age. The years of hard work, of raising the family. This is from a Chinese periodisation of life stages.

The book itself takes place in a world where the plague of the 14^th century* is somewhat more virulent in Europe than it was in our history; in fact Europe is essentially depopulated. This changes the future that develops, as expressed in the ten sections, each written in a slightly different style to reflect the styles of the period.

We’re moved through the history by following characters. Our first viewpoint character Bold, is a Mongol scout in the army of Timur, who explores the empty Europe before being captured by other explorers and sold as a slave to a Chinese trading fleet. Later, after many adventures he dies and meets several of the characters he met along the way in the Bardo, the Buddhist afterlife. There they remember that they’ve done this before, been born and re-born; more that there is a group of them bound together, a jati. In each incarnation they have a name that starts with the same letter, so Bold is reborn in the next section as Bihari, an abandoned girl in an Indian village, and after she dies in childbirth he returns again as Bistami, a Sufi mystic. Bistami gains the favour of Akbar the Great, the Mughal Emperor, then falls out of favour and goes on Haj to Mecca, there to set up a Mughal embassy. Made unwelcome he travels on to Al-Andlus, now being re-settled from the Maghrib. Joining yet another caravan of exiles he falls in with Katima, a sultana, who has a progressive view of Islam. After her husband dies and the Caliph tries to take control they flee still further beyond their control, eventually founding Nsara in Firanja (Navarre at the mouth of the Loire, France).

The developments in technology and culture sometimes mirror those of conventional history, sometimes are alternatives. In the New World, Chinese fleets cross the Pacific, colonising the coast, invading Inka for the gold. On the Atlantic coast various Islamic states start colonies. However the slow pace and various diaspora groups, especially the Japanese who were invaded by China, leads to the Native American Hodenosaunee league being able to resist, and also offer alternative political alternatives.

In the Bardo the jati sometimes rebel, sometimes futilely, sometimes more cunningly (overwhelming the gods who try to give them the potions of forgiveness, including pouring them in the river so the enforcers crossing forget to prevent them). They’re making progress B, who has love and faith suggests, though K, who always fights, rebels, struggles, is not so sure. But they do make progress, modernity, the status of women, religious tolerance, freedom and democracy. The horrors of the Long War, when the characters are not sure if they are alive and fighting or in the Bardo suffering for their actions, lead to overthrowing the old orders. Maybe there’s a better way forward. And all it took was the destruction of Europe!

Read This: Fascinating alternate history digging into ideas of inevitability faith and progress
Don’t Read This: The science just sort of happens, on the one hand waves away a lot of religious differences, on the other makes them one focus of a grotesque world war

* Christianity becoming a minor religion practiced by small groups, the date more usually uses the Muslim dating, Buddhist dating, Chinese dating and later a New Dating system