rather belated books for June


Mark Gatiss, The Vesuvius Club; Reread. Lucifer Box is one of the Edwardian era's foremost portaitists, a dashing seducer comparable to a bisexual Flashman, and also an assassin on one of His Majesty's more secret services. The Vesuvius Club is a loving and mostly successful light-hearted pastiche of period pulp fiction, with a plot concerning the disappearance of eminent vulcanologists and a suitably over-the top bit of villainy to foil; it aims for a particular balance of silly which occasionally tips over into too broad, but on the whole it's a lot of fun.

Naomi Kritzer, Freedom's Gate; First in the Dead Rivers trilogy. Lauria, a half-Greek freedwoman, is despatched by her commander to infiltrate the Alashii barbarians, in a world where a cult of sorceresses commanding djinn has risen into a post-Alexandrian Greek empire holding sway far into the East, and the Tigris and the Euphrates have been mystically restrained from flowing in order to keep the locals down. It's a fascinating world, and Kritzer's people are very well drawn and sympathetic; the plot of this first part follows a familiar pattern of protagonist living among barbarians who learns to understand and value said barbarians and thereby to doubt their own home culture, which for some reason it feels I have read rather a lot of with female protagonists and horse barbarians in the last while, which is not the most interesting shape in the world, but it's a fast and entirely enjoyable read and more and more interesting things clearly follow. Recommended.

Mike Carey, Vicious Circle; Reread of the second Felix Castor book. Six months after The Devil You Know, Castor is now billing himself as "spiritual services" rather than an exorcist, and finds himself caught up in a suitably convoluted set of circumstances, as a couple approach him to retrieve their dead daughter's kidnapped ghost, his best friend Rafi comes out from under the demonic possession that Castor believes to be in large part his own fault, and his quasi-apprentice, the succubus Juliet, calls in his help in the matter of a peaceful London church haunted by something terrifying. The common thread that links all of this is not unduly hard to figure out, but Castor gets it quickly enough to convince, despite lots of running around and detective-type stuff. Castor's world opens up a bit more in this one, with more seen of the peculiar social circles of exorcists run in, and more of the responses to the abrupt increase in number of the returned dead, from academics determined to apply the scientific method to a wing of the Catholic Church convinced these are the End Times and fire should be met with fire. Vicious Circle is an excellent book in its own right and a very satisfactory continuation of the larger story; very highly recommended.

Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club; A bestseller picked up at a bookstore sale for fifty cents, at which it was somewhat overpriced. The Dante Club is set in 1865 Boston, in which Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and some of his colleagues, professors, poets and publishers, have formed the titular club with a view to providing the first American translation of the Divine Comedy, despite strong opposition from the ruling body of Harvard, dedicated to the classics and opposed to pernicious foreign influences such as living languages; the city is then perturbed by a series of grotesque murders which it takes rather a long time for people to notice are inspired by the sinners' punishments in Inferno, and the literary gentlemen organise to track the killer down, realising they will themselves be prime suspects once anyone but them does notice. The Dante Club is clearly a labour of at least strong like, though suffering a bit from the need to put as many as possible of the cool things the author found in his research in; the writing is mostly passable, with occasional flashes of good; the POV is egregious best-seller omni, hopping around without a care in the world in a manner not to my taste at all, which is also the case for the whole purity of literature/culture/public morals theme. Mildly not recommended, when there are so many better books in the world.

Stefan Zielinski, Bad Magic; Reread, and yes, it's becoming a comfort read already. Thank you again j4. Bad Magic is the story of a group of mages, all working in different paradigms, fighting against all manner of nameless horrors in a magic-laden hidden side to our world visible only to those with open third eyes, up and down the west coast of the US (with a brief excursion further south to capture a jaguar). The novel is manic, inventive, geeky, action-packed, and hysterically funny, with some rather nice character moments in there too. Very highly recommended.

Tim Severin, Corsair; Present from my Adoptive Big Sister. Supposedly the first in the Adventures of Hector Lynch, a young man abducted from the west coast of Ireland in the late seventeenth century by some particularly wide-ranging Barbary Corsairs, along with the sister for whom he then spends the rest of the book searching. Severin appears to know his contemporary navigation and seafaring technology rather well, but his prose quite a bit less so, it's mostly pedestrian and sometimes less than that, being irritatingly awkward about its frequent small infodumps. There's the feeling that at any moment Jack Shaftoe could appear over the horizon and knock the book sideways into something interesting, but it never happens. Not recommended.

Roger Zelazny, Roadmarks; A minor Zelazny which I could not recall whether I had read before. There is a Road, travelling back and forth through time, which certain individuals can access from more mundane roads, and which can be altered to lead to different versions of history; there are police on this road, and wanderers, one of whom, Red Dorakeen, is the nominal protagonist, repeatedly trying to interfere in the Battle of Marathon to restore the history he came from; there are any number of opponents, mages, martial artists, robotic aliens and so on, set against him; and it all works out about as reasonably as such a surreal premise can. Definitely minor but still a lot of fun.

Liz Williams, The Demon and the City; Present from dr_jen. Second of the Inspector Chen books, and significantly superior to the first, in large part because Inspector Chen is absent for almost half the story; which therefore focuses on Zhu Irzh, a seneschal from a Confucian Hell who has now been assigned on a long-term basis to the Earthly police force of Singapore Three. There are some nasty murders, hiding some even nastier experiments that draw in the forces of both Heaven and Hell, and hint at the existence of other culture's metaphysical cosmoi; Zhu Irzh's early investigation, while a number of people suspect him, is somewhat more entertaining than the resolution, but it's still a book with a much firmer grasp on its world and its people than Snake Agent. Recommended.

Iain Banks, Espedair Street; A lovely sweet mock-rock bio which I have not read in ages. Danny Weir, aka WeirD, former bassist and songwriter for late-seventies supergroup Frozen Gold, lives in relative obscurity in a fake church in Glasgow; the book alternates the events of a week in its mid-eighties present with Weir's reminiscences of the Frozen Gold story, from affectingly depicted poverty through rock-star excess to realistically bizarre tragedy. The book is full of Banks' unique inventiveness, and while some of the relationship dynamics fit with themes reiterated several times in later work, here they are notably fresh and touching. Highly recommended.

Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park; Reread also for the first time in years, prompted by recently rewatching the film. This novel introduces Arkady Renko, at the tail end of the Seventies, as a senior homicide investigator for the Moscow militia, faced with three disfigured corpses found in Gorky Park, an investigation which he initially wishes to hand over to the KGB, represented by the brutish Major Pribluda, whom he is pretty sure have to have been involved and has no desire to go any nearer than he can avoid. The case becomes more complicated than it looks, connections go in odd directions, and Renko, protected to some extent by being the son of a hero of the Great Patriotic War, finds himself motivated to dig deeper after all, in a reluctant quasi-partnership with a New York detective with a connection to one of the victims. While Gorky Park is an excellent film, it is an excellent film of a little over the first half of the novel, plus a cleverly reworked ending; a quite sensible decision as it is really quite a long novel, but the later parts, with Renko under ill-defined custody and then in the alien world of New York, are equally as interesting as the deceptively simple murder-mystery shape of that first half, one which magnificently echoes a complex milieu in its complex central character, melancholic and romantic and cynical by turns. Very highly recommended.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Sharing Knife: Legacy; The second part of Bujold's latest fantasy series. Fawn Bluefield, from the settled farmer community, has married Dag Hickory Redwing of the nomadic Lakewalkers, charged with the sorcerous defence of the land against life-draining malices, about which her family and community were less than thrilled, and here they face a similar sort of situation reversed when they return to the Lakewalker camp. There is a malice attack, with new and surprising information about the nature of this threat to be determined, to break up the culture-clash story, but on the whole my reaction to this is much the same as to the first; it is an interesting post-apocalyptic fantasy world, the characters are well drawn and Bujold's writing is sharp as ever, I just find it a lot more interesting when she focuses on relationships other than standard-model romance.

Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency; Reread. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy in its various forms may be what Adams' name will always be first associated with, but this book is his masterpiece, replacing tall-tale momentum with a perfect Swiss watch of a plot layered with subtle interconnections in which scarcely a word could be moved; said plot combines time travel, ghosts, an Electric Monk, the eccentricities of Cambridge colleges and the fascinating titular detective, an unshamed charlatan by nature haunted by the unnerving tendency of his more complicated deceptions to turn out absolutely true. My highest recommendation.

Charlie Huston, Half the Blood of Brooklyn; Reread. Third of the vampire noir Joe Pitt novels, in which the complicated and very tense balance of forces among the different Vampyres of Manhattan is threatened by small Clans from outside seeking to move in; in the aftermath of the bloody murder of a blood dealer, Pitt is sent by the Society to escort a diplomatic overture to one such Clan, a carnival freakshow making a particularly gruesome selling point of Vampyre physical resilience, and discovers the force that is driving them from their ground, the Chosen of Gibeah, militant Orthodox Jewish Vampyres, which notion works better than one might expect, granting Huston's tendency to somewhat broad-brush characterisation in general. Meanwhile Pitt's HIV-positive girlfriend Evie's health is in free fall, forcing him into a sharp confrontation with the dilemma that has underlain their relationship from the beginning; he can save her, but only by making her a monster like him. Consequences are drastic and pleasingly surprising, tying in elements from Already Dead and No Dominion, and the projected two more volumes are among the books I await most eagerly; highly recommended, modulo a tolerance for the bloody.

Walter Jon Williams, Implied Spaces; Williams' new novel opens with protagonist Aristide crossing a desert in a world reminiscent of an Arabian Nights-themed D&D module, complete with lethal magic sword, and talking cat companion. This world, however, turns out to be one of many pocket universes in an AI-heavy future, now threatened by a mysterious avenger, and Implied Spaces turns out to be a gleeful romp through much of the furniture and consequences of Singularity-era New Space Opera, a colourful virtuoso set of riffs on themes if not notably full of new ones, nor really coming together into anything greater than the sum of its parts. There is a faint echo of Aristoi in that Implied Spaces seems to suggest that generally happy and stable worlds of great physical richness and power admit of few options for storytelling outside of the pulp adventure. Recommended.