Reviews! I don’t think I can call them weekly anymore, huh? But I’ve finished a lot of books of late, so here you go. Tomes brimming with romantic girl-cooties (sorry, fellas). Two of them made me cry! In this edition:

The Spymaster’s Lady by Joanna Bourne
Miss Wonderful by Loretta Chase
Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner
Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner
Peeps by Scott Westerfeld
Deed of Paksennarion by Elizabeth Moon

The Spymaster’s Lady by Joanna Bourne

This was shockingly good. I say shockingly just because though I attempt romance novels with semi-regularity, I rarely find them a satisfying reading experience (even on their own terms). Usually there’s far too little genuine tension between the romantic leads, and some sort of tossed-on external plot with a Snidely Whiplash villain and a generally unsatisfactory resolution. But I got lucky this time. For one, the writing is several notches above the average historical romance novelist’s. There are moments of banter, especially between Adrian and, well, anyone else, that feel within kissing distance of Austen. Her approach to sex scenes was occasionally refreshingly cerebral (I mean, they talked). My real quibble is that the resident love interest– the titular spymaster, Robert Grey– is far too Stock Romance Hero, and rather out of place given the excellent characterization of Annique and his fellow spies. He has many what I’ve decided to call “God’s Blood” moments. This goes something like:

“God’s blood, but her saucy beauty was enough to make the saintliest man’s thoughts turn carnal, and Sir Randy was far from a saint…”

If you ever read a historical romance, go ahead and count how many of these you find from the hero’s perspective. It makes a fun drinking game.

But really, it is a romance novel, and it does a great job of elevating the genre to a level it ought to achieve more often. Annique’s blindness is particularly well-handled. Even better, the spy plot holds its own interest! I can’t wait for the next few books in her spymaster world…especially if she writes one for Adrian.

Miss Wonderful by Loretta Chase

This is the second novel I’ve read by Loretta Chase. I can’t remember the title of the first, but it was a more strict Georgette Heyer regency, with very arch banter and distant (to omniscient) third person. This is more in the voice of a modern historical romance, though it’s still in the regency period, and the two main characters’ dispute is, I think, far too vulgarly about politics for Georgette Heyer to have ever touched. Which of course makes it interesting, and Loretta Chase is clearly one of the solid standouts of the genre. Still, it never quite thrilled me the way a good Georgette Heyer does, and it didn’t go far enough into its politics to achieve something notably different. Also, she used one of those regency tropes I’ve come to despise, whereupon you learn at the very end that the blissful couple’s romance was in fact Engineered By A Lady of Quality (possibly in collusion of her husband). This lady of quality is generally a meddling aunt of greater pedigree than the hero/heroine. It makes me want to shoot her.

(Incidentally, my hatred of this trope is what makes Georgette Heyer’s The Grand Sophy so wonderful).

Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner

Wending my way from novels explicitly indebted to Georgette Heyer to one more obliquely influenced. Privilege of the Sword is a novel of manners set in a time that one might reasonably interpret as the Georgian or Regency period (though in a fantasy world), and it’s pretty hard to write something like that without a nod in Heyer and Austen’s direction. But Kushner has taken it far, far beyond these sources.

Let me say first that I adored this book, it’s possibly the best thing I’ve read all year, and that after finishing it at Wiscon I had to force myself to stop crying so I could go to dinner. It affected me profoundly. On some level, it does things without any apparent effort that I’ve always striven for in my own fiction. Among other debts I’m sure I can’t guess, it clearly has been strongly influenced by Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles. So, it’s nominally a coming of age story about a young girl forced by her mad uncle, the Duke, to dress as a boy and train with the sword in exchange for him saving her destitute family from ruin. Dialogue where everyone talks rings around each other, saying one thing and meaning something entirely different; exquisite descriptions of clothing and mannerisms splashed starkly against moments of extreme cruelty and violence; bi, hetero, homo and pan sexual encounters; gay prostitution as a pastime (lovingly indulged by the prostitute’s female girlfriend); a panoply of recreational drugs, and, of course, music. In particular, there is an interlude in the middle of the novel, where she is training deep in the country with a master swordsman, that was filled with such quiet, taut beauty I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.

I can’t really say more without spoilers, so essentially: if you haven’t read this, get thee to a bookstore.

Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner

While in Madison, I purchased every other Ellen Kushner book available in the bookstore. Having recovered sufficiently from Privilege of the Sword, I started on this. I can’t quite tell if this is supposed to be a retelling of Tam Lin or not, but it clearly echoes and references the tale. I loved this, too. It was an especially marvelous touch to use the perspective of the old farming couple who mentor young Thomas and observe the progress of his strange courtship with Elspeth. I love the idea of telling the tale of a famous harper who has traveled to Faerie without once showing him in the courts and being glamorous and beautiful in front of the king and queen. No, instead we see Thomas plucking sheep from the muck and making hilarious mis-steps as he falls in love with Elspeth. The descriptions of Faerie are not terribly surprising for someone who’s read a lot of this type of story, but very deft and beautiful. I especially loved the nuances in Thomas’s relationship with the Fairy Queen. She had enchanted him, and yet she hadn’t. He loved her, but he loved Elspeth too.

And, once again, the end made me bawl like a baby. At least it wasn’t quite as abject as Privilege of the Sword. I swear, I caught tears leaking out of my eyes the day after.

(Yes, if you haven’t gathered by now, it doesn’t take much provocation to make me cry.)

Peeps by Scott Westerfeld

Hooked from the first line and then just along for the ride. Not like anyone needs me to tell them to read this, but I LOVED it. My favorite of his books so far. Any book that spends so many pages talking about toxoplasma, mind-control wasps and other parasitic lovelies has my devotion (what’s hilarious is that I’d heard of at least half the critters he mentions already because my sister has an obsession with parasites that rivals his main character’s). Not sure that I buy the reveal/True Purpose at the end (nuclear bombs, anyone?) but, whatever, it’s a quibble.

Deed of Paksennarion by Elizabeth Moon

Tried and failed to finish more than a hundred pages. Why, again, would anyone like this? Done, and done better, by Tamora Pierce.

Since I posted earlier about the controversy surrounding Jonathan Strahan’s TOC in Eclipse Two, I am now linking to his apology about the matter.

It seems heartfelt and well thought out. I really commend him for giving it. I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea for certain other editors to read it and take it as an example.

Oh my god. This photo is from the 1930s. The man depicted is a slave. In the 1930s.

From a book (Slavery By Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon) about a chapter in history I’d never heard of before: slavery after the civil war, continuing until WWII. From the description:

Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries and farm plantations.

Read about the rest here.

For those of you who have not heard, anthology editor Jonathan Strahan recently announced his final TOC for the upcoming Eclipse Two anthology, published by Night Shade Books. Now, you might have thought that given the brou-ha-ha surrounding the cover of Eclipse One, those associated with the project would now be very sensitive to gender issues and disinclined to repeat the spectacle. Well, apparently not.

The TOC is (as far as I can tell) entirely made up of white men, with one white woman. I’m with ktempest: I find this sort of thing wholly unacceptable. And no, I refuse to look at some sort of long-term trend to confirm bias when it comes to an anthology. Anthologies are books, meant to be consumed as single projects. It’s not like a magazine, with subscribers, a regular production schedule and an expectation of future issues.

I’m re-posting here what I just wrote in the comments section of the original SF Signal announcement:

Jonathan,

So, you have created an anthology of white men and one white woman. The publisher’s copy for Eclipse One reads:

“Set to become a major event on the science fiction and fantasy calendar,Eclipse: New Science Fiction and Fantasy gathers together new science fiction and fantasy stories by the best writers working today.”

This is a general interest anthology. It’s being promoted as some sort of compilation of exciting new talent. And yet, that talent is as race and gender limited as anything that would have been published 30 or 40 years ago. I bet those editors thought they were gender/color blind, too. 13 white men and 1 white woman represent the best writers working today?

Honestly, when the women dropped out, did it occur to you to cast a wider net and ask more women for stories? To open a few more slots from the open call or extend it? To recruit a few of the dramatically underrepresented pool of writers of color (especially female writers of color), very few of whom ever seem to break through to the relative mainstream of our genre?

No one is saying you should accept a story by a woman or a writer of color just because you need to fill a quota. But a solicited anthology is only as good as the writers whose stories you solicit, and judging by this TOC (no matter what unfortunate first-round dropouts you had), you need to broaden your list. Any editor of a magazine or anthology not only considers the internal quality of each story but ALSO their relationship with each other. I hear all the time that a story might get rejected not because it was bad, but because, say, Peter S. Beagle beat you to the unicorn story slot. If you have a preponderance of AI stories, you might reject one you would otherwise have accepted. This type of “not just the quality of the story, but the quality of the market” balancing is an accepted and, indeed, *expected* part of the job of the editor. When Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling put out their fairy tale anthologies, no one wanted to read six sleeping beauty re-tellings, no matter how good they might individually be.

So HOW is it any different to consider another “not just the story quality” valence when weighing the effect of the balance of an anthology? How is it “affirmative action” or “quotas” or any of those other bogeymen to look at your TOC and think, “gee, I seem to have stuffed this with a lot of white guys. My readership might not like that anymore than an anthology with 7 romantic zombie stories, so let me try to balance things a little.”

There are so many excellent women and writers of color working in the field today that I find it astonishing that (when the first round of women dropped out) you could not have solicited several other excellent stories from them to help round out your anthology in all the ways people clearly care about.

Because I’m with Stephanie: I’ve seen enough of these all-male anthologies to last my lifetime.

I’d really appreciate thoughts/comments about this. This sort of thing frustrates me so much I never quite know what to do, but interaction is always good.

And if you know exactly what I’m going to talk about already, I’m either your friend or need to become so immediately!

I spent about six hours last night re-reading choice bits of the end of The Ringed Castle (’I reserve the right,’ said Lymond, ‘to change the metre.’) and Checkmate (’Don’t be surprised: your sire loved me also?’) and have come away with an even deeper appreciation of just how seriously. fucking. good. Dorothy Dunnett was.

In a hundred years, if we haven’t destroyed ourselves in some nuclear apocalypse or global warming induced natural disaster, the Lymond chronicles will still be read by generations of precocious readers and writers of certain romantic sensibility. And a fraction of them will go on to a lifetime of admiration and informed, coy, clever emulation. The fact that I can read a book now and predict with what seems (anecdotally, at least) to be an uncanny degree of accuracy if the author has read the Lymond chronicles speaks to just how much of a nerve those books hit with people. And what I mean is, they change lives.

Sometimes I think of Lymond as the literary version of the Velvet Underground…not many people bought the record, but everyone who did started a band.

I have some vague ideas about how to turn this secret cabal of Lymond-lovers into a more public (and surely fascinating) discussion at a con, but I first need to figure out how many of them are going to be traipsing around Calgary come November.

In the meantime, as an all-too-brief illustration of the many, many layers of meaning that Dunnett was capable of infusing into every word, I give you this from Checkmate:

[WARNING: SPOILER AHEAD!!]

Around the middle of the book, there’s a scene where Philippa is discussing Lymond’s headaches with Adam Blacklock. In the previous few pages, Philippa has been berating herself internally for her miserable devotion to Lymond and, parenthetically, her bad internal habit of referring to him as “Francis” instead of “Mr. Crawford.” But Adam’s news has disconcerted Philippa– her control is off and she’s tired. How do we know this? Because, in referring to Lymond, she stumbles over his name. But where a normal writer would have written: “Fr…Mr. Crawford,” to indicate her unacceptable mental familiarity, Dunnett writes: “F…Francis.” Thus conveying the same thing AND that Philippa caught herself doing it AND was smart enough to just go through saying the name once she’d started so as to call less attention to it. Which of course doesn’t work at all.

[END OF SPOILER]

I LOVE these books.

“It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child. I remember the days, sittin’ on the porch with my family, singin’ and dancin’ down in Mississippi.”
– Steve Martin, The Jerk

So it turns out that some WASPy middle class white girl figured out the whole New York memoir publishing racket (i.e. whatever you do, don’t actually tell the story of your life) and wrote a memoir while sitting in Starbucks about her life growing up as an “original gangsta” in Compton. Luckily for the publisher, after spending hundreds of thousands on the advance and surely a couple million on production and publicity, they “discovered” that this supposed gem of street-wise realism was, in fact, an act of stereotyped racial tourism so egregious they had to pulp the books before they ever got shipped to stores. There was just no way to know, according to the publisher and the agent. The author was just so good at her hoax. That’s the way it always is in these stories, isn’t it? You’d think that after years and years of these hoaxes being discovered that these industry professionals would make a bit more of an effort when some cheesy movie script falls into their laps claiming to be a memoir. I mean, come on, a woman escapes the Holocaust and is raised by wolves? A man leaves rehab and immediately goes to a bar and sticks his nose in a beer to prove he’s manly enough? And at least those are original movie scripts. This woman literally updated the plotline of The Jerk, didn’t realize it was supposed to be an ironic exploration of race relations, and got a publisher to make her rich for it.

Lovely. Well, it’s not like it’s news that racism can still move a few books.

My favorite take on this mess comes from the AlterNet story:

In the world of Internet fan fiction — in which amateur fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other shows imagine new adventures, they have a derisive term, the “Mary Sue Story,” for wish-fulfillment that crosses the line. That’s when a certain kind of fan breaks the rules and makes herself the hero, fascinating everyone, saving the world.

This story, about a white girl who makes black people happy by escaping from their ghetto, is a Mary Sue story about race. And people ought to be upset that it passed for realism.

You should read the whole article, but…

Word.

I will never understand how it is that perfectly reasonable, intelligent, precocious and curious children can grow up into timid, hidebound, ideologically paranoid adults who feel the need to police every errant word that might pass their precious babies’ dewy eyes. And by this I mean: by what reasonable standard can an eleven year old child not be allowed to understand what the word “scrotum” means (especially in reference to a dog’s genitals, and in the most clinical manner possible)? Why is it that sexually curious (and possibly active) fifteen and sixteen year olds shouldn’t be able to read about teenage homosexual relationships (Boy Meets Boy)? What on earth are we trying to “save” these children from? Reading, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, is an act of discovery, one that in some way uncovers some heretofore unknown aspect of our world. Writing is humanity’s best method of conveying all sorts of knowledge, including the bewildering complexity of our human interactions. And reading is perhaps any person’s best chance of entering another person’s head, and really experiencing the world from their perspective. So, to me, it seems like it should be a crime for some wrong-headed adult to restrict any child capable of understanding the material from reading anything they wish to. Yes, I am opposed to censorship of any kind because I at least remember the joy of reading as a young teenager. I know that if my parents had decided to vet my choices before I was allowed to enjoy them, many of my fondest reading experiences would never have happened. Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to read the Alanna series when I was twelve because she gets her period and falls in love with a much older man.

By book four, in fact, the Alanna series is rather singular among YA fantasy novels, which tend to be dramatically more conservative than their “realistic fiction” YA shelf mates. Judy Blume was telling young girls about their periods and (possibly ill-advised) sex with boys while YA fantasy authors were cleaning up after dragons and vain wizards. Now, I adore Patricia C. Wrede and Diana Wynne Jones (ask anyone), but at a certain point in my youth I had to wonder: where on earth was the sex? The periods? The sexual uncertainty? Why was it that these issues never seemed to make it into YA fantasy, but were staples of many realistic YA novels? And I think the reason goes straight back to these self-imposed gatekeepers of Young People’s Pristine Minds: librarians, parents and editors. For some reason, fantasy was always seen as skewing younger than more realistic YA, and thus much less adult content was tolerated. (I wrote an essay for Beatrice about the amorphous distinctions between YA and adult fantasy, but those distinctions of qualitative focus are, I think, a little separate from the sex, etc. I’m discussing here.)

But this is all ridiculous. Tweens and teens are perfectly capable of understanding and appreciating the subject matter of Boy Meets Boy or The Higher Power of Lucky. I treasured every morsel of truly adult content I gleaned form my reading in middle and high school. Every serious (not titillating) explanation of a sexual act or interaction was to me a valuable window into a world I wanted to know more about. And when I see adults struggling to board up these windows for kids far more isolated than I ever was, I get furious. Not every child is willing to rebel. Some willingly go along with their parents’ or librarian’s well-meaning (I suppose) damming of their intellectual outlets.

And even when the parents and librarians don’t censor, I sometimes feel like there is far too much self-censorship on the part of authors and editors, especially in fantasy. I mean, why is it that twenty years after Alanna had some decently explicit sex with Jonathon and George do we still see so little in YA fantasy? Why do we have to turn to realistic YA for some decent homosexual relationships? Why are we so afraid of “polluting” young minds with information that we all know, and could benefit ourselves from exploring further? What amazing condescension to these people we were, not so very long ago.

Yes, teenagers know about sex. Yes, they’d like to read about it. Yes, they know what prostitutes are, what drugs are, what death is, what war is, what disease is…THEY ALL KNOW. It isn’t some big fucking secret. Authors should write what they feel compelled to write, without the pinpricks of self-censorship, about subjects they feel are interesting to the people they want to reach, and that audience should in turn be able to read whatever the fuck they want. Does something make you feel uncomfortable? Then stop reading it. Or, even better, keep going. But for god’s sake, don’t you dare tell me or anyone else, no matter how young or impressionable you think they are, what you think they should read.

Sorry I haven’t been posting much lately. Scrambling to write a few short stories and finish editing a novel. Something more regular should resume soon. But in the meantime, I thought I’d direct you to particularly moving post about the intersection of a very personal loss and the more abstract knowledge of the loss several orders of magnitude larger occurring right now in Iraq. It’s a much noted facet of the human condition that while we are capable of profound empathy for those close to us and with whom we share certain in-group bonds, we are also adept at distancing and dehumanising those with whom we don’t share ties. Thus, the million-plus Iraqi deaths are disputed and trivialized and the death of the 4,000th American soldier is met with appropriate solemnity and mourning.

But before you think humans are hard-wired into this destructive combination of in-group empathy/out-group demonization, read IOZ’s post. We’re capable of overcoming the tendency with enough self-examination.

I once had an idea for a (dys/u)topian science fictional society where the Great Overlords simply enforced empathy on the population, thereby ensuring that they’d be reluctant to fight bloody, tragic, costly things like wars. A little like in Buffy, actually, when Spike’s chip zaps him every time he feels predatory. Would that be a free or fair society (terms of arguable use, but fine)? If every time you hurt somebody you felt that same hurt, would the choice to abstain be your own? But maybe I’m being too Puritan. What does Personal Responsibility matter when countless millions are dying in wars across the world, and billions are starving and suffering in the kind of extremity I can only imagine? If most humans can’t extrapolate their own pain onto others, then maybe it’s to the greater good to make them.

But then, I’ve always had this thing for benevolent tyranny.

First, drop absolutely everything you may be doing, and listen to this.

I mean it.

Really.

Back? Yeah, sorry, I should have warned you that it might induce stomach cramps due to uncontrollable laughing. “Now I’m jerking off and I know why…” Whew, I’m wiping tears from my eyes.

Speaking of dissolution, I should mention that I have become so addicted to that website (online karaoke called Singsnap) that I think I might have to quit cold turkey. There is something sadly seductive about karaoke, let me tell you. I actually hauled my laptop into the bathroom this morning just so I could get some manual reverb on my microphone. Yes, I’m that sad.

But I’ll have a new round of reviews up soon, since I’ve also been reading. It’s the writing that’s taken a bit of a hit for the last week, but I’m gonna have to get back on that saddle immediately (finally got a due date for Book 2 of Spirit Binders). Way too much to do, as usual. I almost like deadlines, because they give me a last minute to project myself against. Otherwise it’d be nothing but singing joints and eating…chocolate snickerdoodles.

In case you were wondering where I’ve been.

A large review installment to make up for missing the last two weeks. I’ve been on the road and so didn’t have much time to sit down and read. But now I’ve had a chance to catch up, and for some reason all of these books made me loquacious. Perhaps because the theme of this batch (excepting Lord of Light) seems to be the ever-frustrating Disappointing Romance. Well-done romance reads effortlessly, but it’s incredibly hard to write. Brandon and Dianora in Tigana, Mating by Norman Rush, The Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee…maybe I should create a big list of my favorites. And I’d adore any suggestions, of course.

Inside this issue:

Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier
To Feel Stuff by Andrea Seigel
A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcombe
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
The Winter Mantle by Elizabeth Chadwick

Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier

I happen to hold Juiet Marillier responsible for making spend an inordinate amount of money importing the second book in one of her trilogies from Australia, only to discover that it contained a romance plot so abysmal it makes Danielle Steel look like Franco Zefferelli. It was the most egregious variety of the “star-crossed lovers” plot, wherein neither party has the barest spark of originality or interest that would make a real person fall in love with them, though I suppose they’re beautiful to make up for it. I mention this because after I fiished that book, horrified, I was about as inclined to read another Marillier romance as I was to pluck out my fingernails with hot pincers.

But my friend recommended Wildwood Dancing to me, and when I heard that it was a retelling of my absolute favorite fairy tale, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, I knew that I had to give her a second chance. And actually, I’m pretty glad that I did. I don’t want to spoil the experience, but suffice it to say that the primary romance featured characters interesting and realistic enough to sustain the narrative. I also really enjoyed the specific setting of Romania (as opposed to generic fantasy-land)– it fit very well with the mythological elements of the story she created and rooted the characters in an actual culture that constrained (and compelled) their actions.

Unfortunately, this book also confirmed what was on more egregious display in that earlier trilogy: Marillier is far from a subtle stylist. In fact, her narratives have all the emotional (and plot-functional) subtlety of the ending of Titanic. In illustration: at one point the main character gets a minor injury from a bramble bush. Her romantic lead kisses the cut, and asks “Does that make the hurt all better?”

Entirely sans irony.

And the secondary romance is a lite version of the unbearable star-crossed lovers thing I so hated in the trilogy. But if you like simple fairy tale retellings, and especially if you like The Twelve Dancing Princesses, this is worth reading. It won’t take up too much of your time ,and it left a smile on my face.

To Feel Stuff by Andrea Seigel

I was incredibly excited to read this, because I loved the author’s first novel, Like the Red Panda. This has the same sort of feel– deeply cynical narrator in a situation like a dark, twisted mirror version of your normal chick lit “girl meets boy,” careening towards an ending you’re almost sure will have more bitter than sweet. In Like the Red Panda, the main character was a so-called “perfect” student about to graduate from high school and go to a great college. Over the summer, she has problem with her foster parents, her friends, and gets back together with her drug-dealing ex-boyfriend she’s still sort of in love with. The snag? Well, she’s planning to kill herself. And no, it’s not that kind of novel. It’s snarky, it’s funny and at its best it isn’t so much sad as painful. So, you know, To Feel Stuff had a pretty high standard to rise up to.

And it did, for the most part. The similarities between the two novels are in sensibility and feel, not in plot (which is good) and therefore retained a lot of what made me love Like the Red Panda. The darkly cynical main character in To Feel Stuff is Elodie, a chronically ill student at Brown, so sick that she’s had to start living in the campus infirmary just to finish the school year. She’s not sick with anything specific—just a dozen different diseases of varying seriousness that it’s statistically impossible she could have contracted at the same time. And she’s seeing ghosts. A doctor interested in the medical mystery of her serial illnesses narrates part of the story as well, and is gradually convinced that her ghost-sightings are connected to her illnesses. The third narrative strand is completed by Chester, a wealthy, a-cappella singing jock anyone who’s spent any length of time at an ivy league institution would recognize. His life is changed dramatically when a random attacker smashes his knees with a crowbar, and he has to live in the infirmary as well. The romance between the two of them is incredibly deft and nuanced. At its best, this novel evokes the profoud ways that illness and injury, by removing the physical capabilities most of us take for granted, changes one’s perspective. It’s clear that neither Elodie nor Chester could have fallen in love had they met as their previously healthy selves. It required the strange world-apart of illness and the infirmary to bring them together.

The ending was bizarrely pat for such a subtle, nuanced story, however. It kind of left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Like the Red Panda is better, but To Feel Stuff is still a great book.

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

So, notwithstanding certain caveats about old-school gender politics detailed here, I thought this was a really excellent book. I liked it because it seemed to play around with the fantasy genre in a way completely different from the modern batch of New Weird writers, but with an equal amount of self-awareness and intelligence. I suppose you might chalk up some of my admiration to my general ignorance of the New Wave SF from the sixties, and I’m certainly going to find some more of it. In some ways, I think this is one of the most subtly subversive SF novels I’ve read, because of the way it plays around with the structure of its narrative. I’ve read critiques online that argue even though Zelazny took his mythos and pantheon from the East (Hinduism and Buddhism), his characters and story are essentially Western. I take the point. It’s disconcerting for characters who have decided to reincarnate themselves as Hindu gods make references to “It’s a long way to Tipperary.”. It was never really explained why these obviously white Westerners picked the Hindu pantheon for their planetary subjugation–just because they happened to be on a ship called “The Star of India” and it seemd like a good idea at the time? And incidentally, this lack of explanation makes the Christian-Hindu battle of the frame story seem like an utter non-sequitur.

BUT, all of this attention to the characters misses the fact that the structure of the story itself is extremely Eastern and subverts all sorts of subtle conventions of heroic fiction. For one, the frame story is strangely incidental to the plot, and yet reveals its resolution in the first thirty pages. The whole business with the reluctant, trickster hero is very Western, but he’s not much of a hero. His callousness in the face of mass death belies his protestations of ordinary humanity. He tramples on humans like a god, even when he professes that his entire object is to “accelerate” (read: uplift) them to his own status. And if I take a further step back, the Eastern influences are more obvious: there are hints of stories within stories never told (his mother weeping over his death is mentioned in a parenthetical). His first dramatic demise is told not as a heroic battle, but as an afterthought to a wedding party never explicitly described. The battle the reader is led to believe from the beginning will be the final, major confrontation is a deliberate anti-climax that barely matters in the juggernaut of history. Sam’s ultimate fate is cloudy– there are other, perhaps self-contradictory, epics waiting to be told, but don’t we already know them? Haven’t we heard the story of Mahatsamatman, Tagaratha, Siddartha, Kalkin, Sam a thousand times by our fires? And that of the cat that hunted him, and his mother who wept and the witches with whom she or he might or might not have shared another adventure? Lord of Light is vaguely science fictional in its technology, but its literary aims are mythological.

Which is to say: really great. Worth reading, without equivocation.

A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb

Another of my YA novel binge– this time a peculiar love story involving century-old ghosts posessing the bodies of teenagers at a suburban high school and helping each other deal with the griefs that have bound them to this world. I’m generally not a fan of the afterlife in fiction– not a priori, but because I find that authors frequently make them at once ponderous and facile and always totally unbelievable. Take Aice Seibold’s The Lovely Bones as a case in point. For most of A Certain Slant of Light, the author avoids these traps. Her afterlife is intangible, wistful, constrained and only faintly hopeful. Her ghosts have difficulty remembering their previous lives, though they know they are dead. Helen, the narrator, has evaded hell since the mid-19th century by attaching herself to various “hosts” who are all related in some strange way to her first host, Emily Dickinson. She has never seen another ghost. Her sole pleasures come from reading over shoulders and encouraging her hosts to literary creativity. Her current host is an English teacher at a high school, and Helen is struggling to suppress her growing jealousy over his loving relationship with his wife.

And then, suddenly, a boy in the class stares straight at her, and she knows that the barrier of her invisibility has somehow been broken. He is James, another ghost, who has managed to take possession of the body of a boy who almost died of a drug overdose. The boy’s own spirit has fled, and the body was therefore “hollow.” There is some vague talk of the danger of evil spirits infiltrating these vacant bodies, but the particulars of both types of possession are only hazily explained. The speculative fiction lover in me thought this was a bit of a cop-out (since if you’re going to introduce these elements into a story they should at least make internal sense), but it probably won’t detract too much from other’s reading experiences.

My main issues with this book comes from, strangely enough, the characterization of Helen and James’ romance. It’s strange because on a surface level the book is very beautifully written and it sucked me in completely. And yet I ended it feeling entirely unsatisfied. Part of this was the pat, Pollyanna resolution to the metaphysical dilemma. But I could have forgiven that if the author had ever truly grounded Helen and James’ relationship with more than her say-so. It’s one of those romance plots that is rarely done well: boy and girl meet, they fall in love immediately, circumstances entirely outside their own control keep them apart. But why do they fall in love? We get to know Helen because this is in her POV, but James’ attraction to her is immediate and always unjustifiably assumed. Around him, Helen behaves like a stupid, frightened, lovesick teenager. Her growth from this position at the end of the book does not go far enough, and anyway, he already loves her. And this is strange, because on so many levels Whitcomb demonstrates a masterful command of these characters. They are charmingly, resolutely anachronistic in the modern world, no matter how good they have to become at blending in their possessed teenage bodies. They are also obviously older in spirit than the nominal adults in their new lives. And yet, their relationship felt just as imposed as the clunkiest of Magic Maguffin plot devices in a by-the-numbers fantasy novel.

So I don’t know what to make of this. It’s worth it for the evocative, wistful narrative, but I can’t say it left me with the best impression.

The Winter Mantle by Elizabeth Chadwick

A very strong medieval historical novel that follows actual historical figures—and to those who know my reading habits, I usually hate that sort of thing. My kind of historical fiction is much more in line with Judith Merkle Riley than Sharon Kay Penman, but this was pretty great. It has some romance novel leanings (including two, count-em, TWO Deflowering The Virgin love scenes) but makes up for it with meticulous period detail, interesting angles on historic events and really solid characterization. And for all its capital-R romance, this book is certainly not beholden to that genre’s mandatory Happily Ever After. In fact, this caught me running to the bathroom for tissues halfway through.

It follows the real-life story of Waltheof, a Saxon lord taken prisoner by William the Conqueror after the Battle of Hastings, who falls in love with Judith, William’s niece. Judith is strong-willed and has glimmerings of happiness with Waltheof, but she’s held back by emotional damage inflicted by her domineering mother. Instead of allowing herself unsettling happiness, she takes refuge in duty and convention and propriety, and comes to hate her big-hearted husband. Waltheof is none too bright (politically) but is a very likeable, good character. Their marriage falls to spectacular ruin, involving a betrayal Judith will always hold on her conscience. Fast forward a few years later, and it seems that the whole sorry tale is going to be played out again with her daughter, Matilda. But perhaps she and her husband, Simon de Senlis, can find a way through the minefield of their pride and sensitivities to truly love each other.

Judith is so cruel and closed off, she can be hard to take as a narrator, but Chadwick does such an excellent job with her story that I couldn’t put it down. My real problem was that beside her mother and grandmother, Matilda is a shade of a character. She weds Simon literally the same day she meets him, and though there are believable reasons given for this (the need to get from under her mothers thumb, ambition, liking the set of his breeches), the one that seems to matter the most is a thoroughly unlikely Love. Not that she wouldn’t think it love at the beginning, but you never see the real thing blossom between them in a meaningful way. Even though Waltheof and Judith’s courtship ended tragically, at least you saw it happen and could believe every step of it. I feel almost like Chadwick wanted Matilda to thematically expiate her mother’s mistakes, without realizing that first she had to feel her mother’s love.