Lord of the Wolfyn – Jessica Anderson

This was an ebook preview of a book to be released October 25, 2011 received from Netgalley - thank you.

I’ve always been baffled by books that are put out with spoilers in the blurbs – like mysteries telling who the victim in chapter 5 is going to be – or even in the jacket art. Putting one in the title, though, is even less wise than having a title which actually means little to the story (thinking of Across the Nightingale Floor here – review coming soon). On page 172 of Lord of the Wolfyn (about which title I wondered, since the main character is many things but not Lord of the Wolfyn), something happened which made my eyes flick up to the title, and I thought “Ah. Well, I know how that’s going to come out, now, don’t I.” At which point I rolled my eyes and skimmed for awhile.

Apart from that, it was an, I think, above average paranormal romance (PNR), though surprisingly undersexed if anything. That is not, I should add, a complaint. It has an interesting premise, and interesting worldbuilding – I actually love and am intrigued by the concept of the three worlds linking, intrigued enough that I may one day seek out the other books in the series (one for each sibling – this was #3). Each seems to be a take on a different fairy tale, this one being Red Riding Hood.

It has a cop (or former cop) for the female main character, which is not so successful: I don’t buy it. She’s one of the tiny-and-damaged breed of romance heroine, and I simply don’t believe that the character as presented would have met either the physical or mental health requirements for the job even before the incident that damaged her further. In the story she is a former cop because of a terrible incident in which she froze in the middle of a crisis and cost a life (and, incidentally, let a criminal get away), and that for me doesn’t make it easy to either warm up to her (she shouldn’t have been on the job in the first place) or believe in the near-miraculous turn-around she undergoes when her new beloved needs her.

There are three worlds: ours, the dull world of science and no magic; Dayn’s, the one with magic and no science; and the wolfyn world, with borrowings from both. Dayn was a “guest” in the halfway world for 20 years, and picked up some earth-y slang. However, throughout the book there are references to “another fitting human saying” (that one was “Damnation” – which I suppose he shouldn’t even understand the meaning of) or “a particularly fitting human idiom”. Yet shortly after these there’s a mention of “the deer-in-the-headlights freeze” … considering the man’s never, unless I’m very much mistaken, seen a car, that’s careless. I don’t even want to get into “bad fur day” or “You’re it for me”. *shudder*

It was cute. I used it as a diversion from a larger, denser, more difficult book, and it sufficed. It was, as I said, a great over-arching idea, another one (rather like Alchemy of Desire) which I can only wish had been written as a straight fantasy, without the concentration on mating rituals. But it is what it is, and it’s adequate for its intended purpose.

 

Dog Days – John Levitt

Sometimes, I find to my annoyance, I allow myself to be swayed by others’ opinions. For example: a while back I tentatively suggested John Levitt’s Dog Days for a group read on a GR group I used to belong to, and one comment the suggestion received was that it “sounds really bad”. There was a little support, too, but I actually allowed my preconception of the book to be swayed by others’ concentration on the possibility of cheesiness in the concept, and I dropped the idea and moved on to other books.

But it filtered back up to the upper stories of my TBR skyscraper. I seem to be trending right now toward urban fantasy: here and now and with at least one foot in reality. So I settled down with Dog Days, set in present-day slightly-alternate San Francisco.

Moral: I need to not let myself be at all influenced by others who have not read a given book.

I loved it.

Was it perfect? Of course not. Did it inspire Dresden-like feelings? No – but then, neither did Storm Front, really. Was it cheesy? Not at all. Is it ill-served by a somewhat questionable cover and over-abundance of canine puns in the title and marketing? Oh, my, yes. Whoever had the idea to put the series titles’ focus on the dog and choose some fool’s punny comment as this edition’s cover blurb should be flogged (even if the titles were Levitt’s idea). The packaging gives every impression of just another annoying entry in the Animal Companion subgenre, a book and series throughout which the hero will be having many conversations with his smart-alecky or wiser-than-he-is or what-have-you TelCom (Telepathic Companion).

It’s really not.

The world where this takes place is one in which a small percentage of people are Practitioners: witches and wizards, though they are never called that. What little has been said so far shows this as a nice system of magic, and there was not a great deal of onus on Levitt to explain it yet given the first-person narration by Mason, a young man of what all the teachers always like to call great potential, but who (as the teachers like to say) Does Not Apply Himself. He doesn’t know or care to know a whole lot, so he can’t tell the reader everything. He would rather play his guitar than work on becoming a better practitioner – and he’d rather just noodle on the guitar than practicing with an aim to improve his skills there either. He is, as he is often told by concerned friends and as he often admits to himself, lazy, and does not seem to believe in all that potential the same friends keep telling him about. Whether or not this is true of the character, he sounds like someone who has had either a lot of small failures or one stupendous and miserable failure and has been left with a massive barrier of skepticism and unconfidence regarding his capabilities.

A small percentage of this small percentage of people who are Practitioners have been found by ifrits. These are what are known in folklore as witches’ familiars – supernatural creatures which take the forms of cats and dogs and other small animals and which, for reasons known only to themselves, attach themselves to Practitioners as assistants and, yes, companions. Thing is, though, while they are clearly Other, they are also very much what they appear to be.

Take Mason’s ifrit Louie for example. To most people he appears to be a pretty ordinary miniature Dobermann. He chases squirrels and begs for treats like any common dog. But he’s a few steps beyond a common dog. I was constantly a little surprised at how few steps; I had prejudged, and expected something along the lines of Misty Lackey’s Companions. And ifrits are not, at all. They seem to understand what is said to them – but their attention is as prone to wander as any creature’s. They do not speak, not aloud nor psychically. They may have more to communicate than ordinary animals, but they have the exact same means of communicating as ordinary animals: Louie can bark and whine and use expressive ears and tail to put his point across, but he has no way of coming out and saying “I found what you’re looking for. Dig here.” Ifrits do not seem to be Practitioners themselves – they do not use magic: they are magic. Many spells do not affect them because of what they are – but they still have many of the vulnerabilities and constraints of the forms they take. The main thing they have in common with Companions is deep and unstinting loyalty: however they choose their people, once an ifrit has a person it’s a long-term (though not always permanent) relationship.

I loved the voice of the book. Mason can be a smart-ass, including at inappropriate times; he occasionally admits to the reader that he has had second thoughts about things he said and did – he knows better, but he still keeps shooting his mouth off. There were times when comments in the narration – like a tossed off “revolting development” bringing the shade of Daffy Duck into the midst of a life-or-death battle – were jarring, but they were infrequent. Mason’s external appearance is that of the gifted slacker; the reader sees a man who is fully aware that he’s not a kid anymore and he may need to grow up sometime soon, and who is a bit terrified of the idea: he has no idea how to go about it.

One of my favorite things about the POV, I think, is Mason’s disinclination to let the reader listen in on a romantic interlude. That non-love-scene was one of the best love scenes I’ve read in recent months.

The story begins with Mason attacked leaving a gig, with no idea of who or why, and ends only after he’s gone into pitched battle against the who, having learned that the why is nothing he or his allies ever considered. Along the way there is a great deal more grimness and tragedy than I expected – the enemy here is truly ugly, and, unfortunately, pretty believable, and capable of atrocities I did not expect. It’s definitely the beginning of a journey, and one I look forward to taking.

 

The Prince of Ill Luck: Susan Dexter

I loved most of this book.

I loved Leith.  Born under a curse which causes misfortune to follow him like a huge and malevolent shadow, he absolutely can’t catch a break.  The ill luck is his – he is constantly bumped and bruised and broken, and is living proof that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.  But the ill luck is also that of those around him: wherever he goes, calamity follows.  Cattle plagues, fishing hauls dropping from bumper crop to empty nets … earthquakes … Whatever he does, wherever he goes, terrible things happen.  Finally, his father the king sends him off to marry a distant princess.  Unfortunately Leith+ ship = shipwreck, and he – possibly the only survivor – is washed onto an unknown shore, and has to decide whether to seek out people, and thereby endanger them, or figure out some lonely alternative.  In his wanderings, he comes upon a horse, also wandering loose: a beautiful black stallion, small but perfect.  (Valadan, the horse somehow communicates to him.)  Leith– eventually – captures him, not only for the simple reason that riding will be easier than walking but also because the money from selling the horse might make the difference his life needs.  When he arrives on a certain beach, however, he decides to try something different with the amazing little horse: there is a competition going on, young men attempting to take their horses up a hill of glass to claim a gold ring at the top.  A gold ring is worth money – maybe, he thinks, he can take advantage of the weird communication he has with Valadan, and the stallion’s extraordinary agility, to claim the ring – and sell it instead of the horse, which he is more and more reluctant to do.

And it works.

Sort of.

The fly in the ointment is that the ring isn’t the real prize; it is only the immediate proof that the task has been accomplished.  The real prize for accomplishing the task is the hand of the Lady Kessalia in marriage. Leithis dismayed – this is not what he had planned – but not nearly as dismayed as Kess: she has no intention of marrying.  The whole competition was meant as a distraction, as works out her plans to go off in search of her mother, who disappeared years before; her father went to look for her, and has not been seen since.  And now she just can’t shake offLeith.  He is a man of honor – he will not let a young (very young) woman go off into the unknown by herself … and, too (mostly), once he learns that Kess’s mother is a witch, he wants to meet her. Maybe she can alleviate, or even remove, the curse.

And here’s where the book lost a lot of love.  Valadan, of course, is as always wonderful.  The story is grand, or begins so.  Leith is steadfast and cheerful in the face of the most abysmal happenings, but not to a degree where I wanted to drown him myself.  He has had a horrible life from the moment of his birth, and has managed to reach adulthood scarred (internally and externally) but generous, devout, and surprisingly optimistic.  As I said, I love Leith.  Kess, though … She’s shockingly awful.  She’s spoiled, is part of it, but she goes well beyond simple brat.  She is self-centered, self-absorbed: anyone else in her vicinity only exists insofar as they can serve and obey her.  Otherwise they need to just shut up and get out of her way.  Or else.  When Leith comes into her vicinity and refuses to leave it even when ordered, even when shrieked at, even when she tries stealth to escape him, she takes to abusing him.  He is a gullible sort, so desperate for a way to turn his luck and spare not only himself but those around him that he will do anything she suggests, not suspecting for a good long while how evil she is.  When finally he realizes that she is telling him to do painful and humiliating and ridiculous things just to inflict pain and humiliation and ridicule on him, he stops listening, finally – but he still refuses to leave … why, then she simply resorts to poison.  I hate Kessalia.   Her behavior is extreme, inexcusable, and unredeemable, she quickly became one of my most-hated characters in all of fiction, and not very far into the book I made a note that this would be a wallbanger if Leith and Kess ended the book married.  (Wallbanger: book which makes a bang when flung against the wall.)   I won’t spoil the ending, but it was not what I would have chosen.

The writing is excellent.  The characters, even the hateful Kess, are well-drawn; I couldn’t hate Kess with such a passion if she hadn’t been given life by the writing.  The plot never does just what is expected, which is good, and the story as a whole is lovely, weaving fairy tale elements into a realistic and heart-felt tale.  If only the female lead wasn’t a sadist.

 

It’s been an interesting month

I’ve started this blog post several times, and my brain just hasn’t been up to it (or any post, obviously).  And time hasn’t been on my side, either … I wrote “It’s been an interesting week”, and that line sat there for a few days, all alone.  Then I changed it to “It’s been an interesting month.”

And it has been.  It’s been an interesting month.  On a global front there was a royal wedding (I know, that was in April, shush), Bin Laden was killed, and there was a prospective apocalypse last weekend.  In the US, plenty has gone on (the moron governor of California, for example, and the perv from the IMF), culminating in a heartbreakingly brutal series of tornadoes in Missouri and states surrounding.

Closer to home, it’s also been interesting.  This post started out handwritten in one of my notebooks on the ninth floor of the New Haven Superior Court building as I whiled away the day on jury duty.  That’s another story… Suffice to say I told my sister what I had to do today and where, and the first word she said was, “Komisarjevsky.”  I said “No!  They picked the jury!  Oh, crap, they need alternates…” And so they do. Badly, if this bastard’s partner’s trial is anything to go by; they blew through almost all the alternates on that one. My sister, as it turns out, was dead on: I spent part of this morning in the same room as evil. What a bizarre day. Again, that’s a whole ‘nother post.

Prior to today, the most interesting part of this month on a personal level was … well.

When I love something, I have a tendency to champion it, and once I realized it might mean something I started spreading my review around anywhere I could think of. A while back I bought a book called “The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published”, and one of the actually good pieces of advice was to create an online presence, so I started branching out into the groups on Goodreads.

I need to say here and now that there are a lot of people who have written something – story, book, blog, published or self-published – who are heeding this advice.  My idea was to post here and there, now and there, to this one and that one (I just can’t stop quoting Harvey), and make some acquaintances, and then down the line when I have something of my own to talk about I can be diffident and say “Hey, you might be interested”.  I was lucky; one of the reasons I haven’t been here as much as normal has been that I clicked with one community, with a loud click: Fantasy Afficionados.  (Love ya, guys. I haven’t been part of something like this in years; it’s almost everything I’ve missed, the brilliant silliness and the kindred spirits, and while I’m doing my best to avoid all the pitfalls the Other Place had, I am enjoying myself. It feels good to be part of the group.)  I will never be one of those people who joins a group, makes one post saying “Hi, I’m — and I have a book out please buy it.”  I started out on Goodreads with no intentions of getting involved anywhere, but instead planned to just proceed with as little obnoxiousness as possible (as opposed to quite a few writers who don’t seem to realize they’re shooting themselves in the feet).  I’ve found another online family.

Back on topic.

I don’t have anything to promote yet, obviously, but I thought I saw an opportunity to do a little bit for Adam Schell and Tomato Rhapsody , because I like him, I love the book, and they both were royally shafted. So I’ve been bringing up the book in conversations about favorite books, and adding it to lists, and trying not to be obnoxious, and at a certain point I figured I’d shoot him an email, kind of nudging him to come and put his hand in.

He wrote me back saying he had an idea, and could he call me.

My eyes went all wide, and I said sure.

Here I should say that at some point in conversation it had come up that I’m a Tolkien geek, and he told me that as a yoga teacher he has Orlando Bloom as a student. Once he threatened to call me next time they were together. (And immediately, I’m sure, forgot he said it, which is fine.) I’m not a Legolas girl, but I would still pass out cold … Anyway.

He called (Orliless), and said he had an experiment to propose. The short version is that he proposed that I take a little more time and do more of what I’ve already been doing, and try to spread the word of the book a bit more online, and see what kind of reaction I can spark in, say, a season. (He recognizes that it needs doing, but because of circumstances he’s working three jobs – AND his wife is expecting a baby in July.) Then, with results good or bad or indifferent, in the fall we will compile an article about the experiment, and pitch it to literary magazines – which is, seriously, a fantastic idea.

In return – wait for it – he will read give my book an “editorial pass-through” and, if he can do it with confidence (if he doesn’t hate it and think it’s birdcage liner), hand-walk it to his agent (who had nothing to do with the fiasco the book went through) and work to help me get it published.

All this because I wrote an honest positive review of his book two years ago.

Wow.

Now I just need to a) figure out what to do for him and b) finish my book.

Related articles

• What is a Goodreads Author? (debsanswers.wordpress.com)
• Are you a Goodreader? (lindacassidylewis.com)

 

LTER: One Was a Soldier, Julia Spencer-Fleming

I do get lucky with these LTER’s.  Oh, not all – there was one self-published ESL fantasy that I doubt I’ll ever finish, and the book about writing which was extremely uneven, and Roma was not something I’d ever have bought for myself (and would have been right not to).  But then there were Chesterton and Schell and McKinley – and now, just received last week, another book I might not have bought for myself: One Was a Soldier by Julia Spencer-Fleming. 

The only reason I read this one so soon after receiving it was that I finished a couple of books, and I do always feel a subtle pressure to hurry with books I’ve received for review.  And – - What a book.  What a superlative book.  (Like how I did that?  I couldn’t decide on a superlative, so I sort of used them all.)  I’m actually a little surprised, in retrospect, that I put my name in for it, and so very glad I did.  But it doesn’t sound like me: the jacket description is interesting, but not my usual cuppa: an Iraq war veteran, Grace Fergusson, comes home after 18 months out, and finds coming home isn’t so simple as stepping off the plane.  And when a fellow vet is found dead, she won’t believe it’s suicide.  By no means does this sound bad or uninteresting – just not usually what I would pick up and spend time with.  Idiot.  

The above is the kernel of the story – but the book is a great deal more.  It *is* a story about coming back from war, and the good and wonderful and bad and ugly and impossible of readapting to being a civilian.  It’s about PTSD, and coping with it (or not), and coping with someone who has it (or not).  It’s a story about a romance, a love.  It’s a story about a murder, perhaps, and a theft, perhaps – or perhaps more than one of each.  It’s a police procedural, with a grain of cozy mixed in as amateurs get in on the detecting – which isn’t because the police are stupid or any of the other clichés.  

That’s one of the main things the book is about: avoiding clichés.  Yeah, one of the amateur detectives is Clare Fergusson, the girlfriend of the town’s chief of police (Russ Van Alstyne) – a trope you’ll find in a good half dozen series I could put my hands on.  But Clare is a helicopter pilot, is just coming home from Iraq at the start of the book, is an Episcopalian priest, with genuine faith in God if not the details of the Episcopalian rites used to honor Him, and is suffering from PTSD and dependency on assorted substances.  And she is deeply in love with Russ, a good man who is 14 years older and a Vietnam vet and an agnostic (or atheist; I don’t know how deep his disbelief runs), and who is deeply in love with her. 

The pattern of disdaining the usual ruts a story with these basic bones might fall into runs true throughout: the setting is real enough that I could call the Realtor who hopes at one point to sell Clare a house and start looking for a home in Millers Kill, New York (great name).  (Heh – there’s a community on Livejournal called “Would you really want to live in Millers Kill?”  Well, maybe not – although some of the danger of the place is effectively offset by a terrific police force…)  And the characters … There are a lot of them, and introduced rapidly enough in the beginning that I had a little trouble processing – there was some flipping back of pages as the people introduced in the first mini-chapter showed up again in the primary timeline, and as I matched Russ and Clare to the main protagonists listed on the cover.  But once I had them, I had them, and never lost track of any of them again – which is an accomplishment for a writer.  And by the end I not only knew who was who, I cared who was who and who was with whom and where and why, from Clare and Russ (on whom I’m developing a healthy crush) to the secondary and tertiary characters.  I was inwardly hopping up and down when one second-tier character was offered a wonderful opportunity.  I muttered a dismayed curse when a character only tangentially involved in the book died off-screen.  I was delighted by the main characters’ delight, and felt a cold, disappointed, sympathetic horror at the terrifically stupid and yet nastily understandable choice a secondary made – one which wounded what may be one of my new heroes.  That scene is going to haunt me – along with several others, but maybe that rejected possibility most of all.  I hate that that happened to characters I truly like – and I love that Julia Spencer-Fleming made the choices she did and made me care.  One of the greatest gifts a reader can receive is a book – or, even better, a series – in which the characters become friends, people I look forward to visiting with in rereads and catching up with in new books.   It’s pretty rare. 

I’d never read Julia Spencer-Fleming before, or heard of Clare and Russ.  I hate starting a series in the middle; it would have been fun to follow the two of them from their first meeting to One Was a Soldier.  I’m absolutely buying the preceding books in the series (possibly new: income tax refund!), but this book was one huge spoiler for the story, and seems to have resolved a lot of plotlines that run through the others.  This is a setting and these are characters which grow and change, and it will be interesting to see what things were like when this all began.  Interesting? I can’t wait. 

There may be flaws in this book, but I can’t think of any.  Any hiccups I had with it were flaws in my reading of it, not in the writing; I didn’t read the first pages with enough attention and felt foolish when I realized I had skipped the second part of a descriptive phrase, proceeding with the belief that Clare was a black woman, not “black-clad woman”.  (That’s part of the peril of starting a series at the end: I would have known Clare if I’d started at the beginning, and been as glad to see her as her parishioners.)  The non-linear story-telling used until real-time catches up with counseling-session-time threw me for a loop until I caught on and started paying close attention to the dates at the head of each section; it was not a frivolous use of time-hopping.  It took a few minutes for me, Roman Catholic born and bred, to adapt to not just a priest who is a woman but a priest who is a woman who sleeps with her boyfriend (and her homecoming both scandalized and tickled me), and also a priest who was an Army officer and helicopter pilot before her ordination and whose function in the Army isn’t as chaplain.  (Come on – is there a more fascinating character anywhere in the genre?)  I loved it.  I absolutely loved it.

 

Susan Dexter: The Sword of Calandra

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The second book in the Calandra trilogy is The Sword of Calandra.  I had memories of this one, because this book has (I don’t think this is a spoiler) a detailed and fascinating account of the forging of a sword, which was something I knew nothing about, and which I remember being engrossed in.  I enjoy learning about where things come from and how they’re made, and especially things as dear to my heart and yet present-day-exotic as swords. 

Tristan is in residence in the delapidated castle at Crogen, and preparations are ongoing for his crowning, amid a worsening of the weather – I feel for them, I really do; I’ve been beginning to suspect Nimir’s hand in our winter  - and constant threats from just about everyone in the surrounding countryside.  Elisena has located the royal regalia, and everything is present … Nearly.  They discover that over time and generations of kings and wizards the crowning has become thickly woven through with spells and rituals which must be followed.  And they discover – Tristan being Tristan, the hard way – that trying to take the throne without heeding every detail of the accretion of ceremony could be fatal.  The problem is that they don’t have the king’s sword.  And they very much need the king’s sword.  And therefore this is the quest for this book: locating a blade which has not been seen in centuries, possibly since the last king of Calandra fought the Duke of Esdragon.  It could be anywhere – or nowhere, though they hope that’s not so likely given its lineage and properties.  Once more Tristan finds himself with no other choice but to set out on Valadan – with Thomas at his saddlebow – to try to learn more. 

It’s fun to see how little Tristan expects to be missed when he leaves the castle, apart from Polassar and Allaire and, mostly, Elisena and Minstrel; few enough of the people of Crogen recognize him as their king as yet, especially when he wears what he has always worn and physics old ladies’ cows for them.  He has no real purpose there, and the mission is almost as much to be useful as it is to find the sword. 

They go to Kovelir, in hopes that the old wizard they met last time they were there - Cabal, who knew Tristan’s master Blais - will be able to help them, or at least to sponsor their search through the magic academy’s library.  Instead, through his soft-hearted reluctance to hurt the old man, who has aged and sickened in the months since Tristan last saw him, he finds himself apprenticed.  Which is awkward, at best.  He doesn’t have the heart to break the truth to Cabal, His days are spent with Cabal, and his nights in the library and on the streets searching for first Crewzel’s son and then Crewzel herself, the street magician who befriended him (in her own way) the last time they were in the city. 

All of his spells of seeking seem to come to naught.  Some information turns up in the library, but not enough, and time is running out – and Tristan finally decides his only course of action is to go to Kinark, legendary for its swords and the place where the king’s sword was made, and commission a new blade to the exact specifications of the ancient one.  It’s risky – but there’s no other real choice.  And that is how he meets Jehan, a smith with some very large and very painful demons.  (Given that it’s a fantasy I should specify they’re metaphorical demons…) 

Swords are pretty common Quest items, but this is an uncommon quest.  It’s one man, relatively ordinary in many ways, trying to accomplish something he feels is greater than he is.  Others may have confidence in him, but he doesn’t; he is so very human, believing he is well able to do many things but incapable of a huge number of other things, knowing from experience that however perfectly everything seems to be going it could all blow up in his face at any moment.  Sometimes literally.  He is befuddled at having been pushed to the throne; he is uncomfortable with ceremony and leadership on such a scale; he is scornful of his own abilities as a wizard.  He’s real. 

In Calandra Ms. Dexter continues to present flawed, human, real characters.  They don’t necessarily behave or react as the reader expects them to, any more than almost every human in any of our lives always lives up or down to expectations.  I love the characterizations, and the plots, and the story-telling.  The only thing I don’t love about Susan Dexter’s books is that there hasn’t been a new one in years.  And there’s no information out on the ‘web about her, so far as I can find.

 

Anne of Avonlea (BBC)

Anne of Avonlea  (TV mini-series 1975)

Director: Joan Craft
Writers:  Lucy Maud Montgomery (novel), Elaine Morgan (adaptation)

I guess I never looked very hard for other Annes than the Kevin Sullivan/Megan Follows, because I never knew this version existed.  I’ve seen the first three episodes, with the rest next in the Netflix queue.

I yo-yo wildly on this, from “Oh, no no no” to “Nice!”.  I believe on the whole I like it quite a bit, mostly: the short version is that it’s extremely faithful and the actors are, while not spectacular, growing on me, once the strangeness wears off.  There are “howevers”, however.

There was apparently an “Anne of Green Gables” prior to this (1972) – there would have to be, wouldn’t there?  But according to imdb it is considered “lost”.  Pity … How lovely if it turns up one day.  That would be why I’ve never heard of that, though…

My original main problem with the mini-series is the accents.  (There’s another main problem which was slower to develop; I’ll come back to it.)  I thought I had a fairly good ear, but these accents baffle it.  I know Newfoundland, and Ontario, and even Montreal pretty well, but this is … odd.  Anne and Marilla, at least, say the Scots “ennathin’” for “anything”, and Anne drops her G’s like maple leaves in autumn, which makes my hair stand on end just a bit.  I can’t believe that of Anne.  Dora sounds Very British, while Davy sounds much less so, but while he’s more “Canadianish” or “Americanish” than others he definitely isn’t Canadian or American.

Ah – I didn’t see anything on the Netflix sleeve and didn’t look too hard beyond that to indicate where this was made; my assumption, oddly I suppose, was Canada.  It wasn’t: it was a British mini-series, for the BBC.  Which makes all kinds of sense, suddenly.  I’ve long been astonished at Brits’ appalling American accents in shows, particularly from the 70′s and 80′s, like PBS’s Mystery! – that’s where it has struck me the most.  There can be a very nice Holmes or Agatha Christie – or Lord Peter – with the most absurd pretend American plopped in the middle … Well.  That’s pretty much what Anne is, only they’re trying to be Canadian, and apparently to be Canadian one drops one’s G’s.   (I write this bearing in mind just how pitiful faux-Brit accents must sound to *them*, of course!  But … dear lord, some of the Mystery! accents have given me the grues.)

My main delight in this series is the faithfulness to the books.  Almost everything is in here, from the fireworks in the stove to Davy’s Indian headdress to the echoes at Echo Lodge, and that’s wonderful; anything missing isn’t missed (except for the Allans, and they are, admittedly, not prominent in AofA).  I loved the beginning of the Megan Follows Anne, but it’s around this point in the Kevin Sullivan films that the rot begins to set in.  Miss Lavendar is one of my favorite characters in the Anne books, and it’s great fun to “meet” her here; I’m pleased, so far, with her and Charlotta the Fourth.

“Now laugh, Charlotta. . .laugh loudly.”
Charlotta, who would probably have obeyed if Miss Lavendar had told her to stand on her head, climbed upon the stone bench and laughed loud and heartily. Back came the echoes, as if a host of pixy people were mimicking her laughter in the purple woodlands and along the fir-fringed points.
“People always admire my echoes very much,” said Miss Lavendar, as if the echoes were her personal property. “I love them myself. They are very good company. . .with a little pretending. On calm evenings Charlotta the Fourth and I often sit out here and amuse ourselves with them. Charlotta, take back the horn and hang it carefully in its place.”

“But Miss Lavendar Lewis is hardly a spellbound princess,” laughed Diana. “She’s an old maid. . .she’s forty-five and quite gray, I’ve heard.”  Forty-five.  Oh dear.  There’s one of the problems with continuing to reread a book beloved in childhood.

Sadly, another of my favorite characters, Paul Irving, is not served so well here.  I never thought I’d see the day when I’d prefer Davy to Paul, but … Nicholas Lyndhurst (who looks extremely familiar, I suppose from his turn, years after, as Uriah Heep in the David Copperfield with (Worlds Colliding) Daniel Radcliffe and Alun Armstrong) is purely wonderful as Davy.  For a boy of 13 it’s pretty remarkable that he did one of the best jobs at the accent, as well as turning in a very sweet limb-of-Satan-who-just-needs-love performance.  Davy, never someone very dear to me in the books, is one of the things I love best about this mini-series – the little flax-haired hellion one minute and the next utterly irresistible.  I love him (especially when he says, as he’s supposed to, “I want to know!”).  While Paul, played by Keith Steven … Put it this way.  From a quick internet search, Master Steven did not continue in acting (film, at least), and that may be just as well.  I think it would take an extremely special – not to say mildly spectacular – young actor to be able to pull off the young poet-dreamer Paul Irving.  This performance just makes me feel a little uncomfortable.  He is, I think, older than he ought to be, which doesn’t help – and the scene of him creeping through the undergrowth watching Anne on her picnic with Davy and Dora was a terrible idea.  I find myself completely on Davy’s side.
It doesn’t seem as though they make any effort at all to present Davy and Dora as twins, which is wise; they work very nicely here as simply brother and sister, very close and very, very different.  They’re older than they ought to be – they’re six at the beginning of the book – but it doesn’t trouble me; the characters are undamaged.  Dora is supposed to be prim and proper and ladylike, and wee Annabelle Lanyon delivers.  She’s lovely, despite the inexplicable (plotwise) accent.

The rest of the more minor characters:

I wouldn’t have remembered Barbara Shaw if I’d been asked, but Simone Krieger does a nice job with what she’s given, and suddenly the klutzy hapless Barbara comes back to me.  Ian Allis as Anthony Pye is genuinely threatening early on – and seeing the performances drives it home that Anne is only a little older than he is, and he’s much, much bigger; it’s a little scarier on film than in the book, maybe because of a 21st-century outlook.  And then of course after his 180-degree turn he’s adorable – poor confused Anne.  A quick skim of the book indicates that he’s much older than he ought to be, but it works.

I got a chuckle out of the line near the beginning where Mrs. Lynde ascribes all of Mr. Harrison’s oddities to his being a New Brunswick man – partly because it’s funny, and partly because that accent is so not NB.  I’m not sure about the take on some of the scenes, now that I’m reading the text online; the bit with the walnut cake was awkward, for example: Anne might have stooped to bribery, but it somehow wasn’t so blatant.  His was one of the most wildly unusual accents.  And I do not like that Anne was at his house during the great storm – hair down and drying, wearing his trousers (complete with suspenders).  No.  No, no, no.  Absolutely not.

They made Jane into a fairly well-rounded person, if seldom seen, but injected her into some odd scenes and gave her some odd lines; for something that tried to get everything in they made some peculiar changes (e.g. – to Gilbert regarding “mortally offending” both her and Anne over the subject of corporal punishment).

Charlie … Ick.

Diana (Jan Francis) should not be a minor character, but she is.  I hated the line they gave her about Anne’s Dolly being related to the cow that jumped over the moon – it sounded bogus, and lo and behold it is.   Still, she’s sweet and pretty (if too slender) and a nice actress; she’ll do.  Fred Wright, though… Blegh.  Sorry.  I do not want my Diana married to that person.

I don’t much like Gilbert (Christopher Blake), either.  He seems an awful stick, more bent on reforming Anne of her dreamy ways than on loving her for what she is.  In the book, he and Anne together wrote the Avonlea Notes – he was her pal, her dear friend, her comrade.  That’s how she could love him.  This stiff isn’t someone the Real Anne would bother with.

Anne had no sooner uttered the phrase, “home o’dreams,” than it captivated her fancy and she immediately began the erection of one of her own. It was, of course, tenanted by an ideal master, dark, proud, and melancholy; but oddly enough, Gilbert Blythe persisted in hanging about too, helping her arrange pictures, lay out gardens, and accomplish sundry other tasks which a proud and melancholy hero evidently considered beneath his dignity. Anne tried to banish Gilbert’s image from her castle in Spain but, somehow, he went on being there, so Anne, being in a hurry, gave up the attempt and pursued her aerial architecture with such success that her “home o’dreams” was built and furnished before Diana spoke again.

Mrs. Rachel Lynde (Madge Ryan) is, like the rest of the production, a combination of pretty great and pretty awful.  She’s natural (except for, you know, the accent), and she’s made me laugh out loud, but … She called Marilla “Mariller” a few times.  She “pffft”ed a few times; that’s not very ladylike.  But she does a nice job as the Town Crier best friend to Marilla; she’s not perfect, but she’ll do.

My first thought on seeing Marilla (Barbara Hamilton) was “there’s no way Marilla should have a double chin”.  Sorry, but it’s true – Marilla ought to be angular and rail-thin.  But after a little while, it really doesn’t matter.  She’s the other best thing about this mini-series – she’s wonderful.  She’s utterly deadpan, but there’s a sense of humor in there (thanks to the years with Anne).  And she does know her Anne.  I’m very fond of this Marilla.

The latter two play off each other very well –

Mrs. Lynde: You’ve only got to see the spoony way she looks at him to see what’s up…
Marilla: Spoony, indeed.  Good heavens above, I’ve seen her look like that at a bunch of violets.  You don’t understand that girl, Rachel, and you never will
Mrs. Lynde: I won’t argue, Marilla – but there’s others sweet on Gilbert besides Anne.  Ruby Gillis for one.
Marilla (scoffing): Ruby Gillis.
Mrs. Lynde: Well, she doesn’t have to be told the difference between a young man and a bunch of violets!

And

Mrs. Lynde: He could be burying dead bodies under the flagstones for all we know.
Marilla: Not unless he brought them with him.  Nobody around here has been missed.

- These are exchanges not in the book, though the sweet-on-Gilbert is distantly related to text.  These I liked.

And as for Anne herself (Kim Braden) … She’s the largest reason why I yo-yo on this.  I really like her – except when I don’t.  She looks the part.  Every now and then there’s a moment when her eyes light up and she looks just about right … but then she’ll deliver something akin to one of Anne’s lines and drops every “g” and between the accent and the tone it doesn’t ring true.  I begin to suspect that it’s just as well that I can’t watch the AoGG miniseries; I have the feeling that the extreme precociousness of Kim Braden’s Anne might get on every last nerve I own.  Megan Follows hit all the right notes as young Anne, but I don’t have that kind of faith in Kim Braden.  She overdoes, overplays.  And she says things like “uh huh”, which is – rather like Rachel’s snorting – not ladylike, not something that she would do.

Obviously, there were a number of changes from the book; there will be, any time a book is adapted.  I get that.  Some were nicely done – BBC!Anne’s spiel to Marilla about one of her students becoming prime minister was taken from the book’s very first page, Anne’s reverie as she sits with her Virgil in her hand, just before Mr. Harrison comes storming in (“Anne had certain rose-tinted ideals of what a teacher might accomplish if she only went the right way about it”).  BBC!Anne didn’t know Mr. Harrison; Anne did – but it makes sense in the film for it to be that way, as his introduction to her becomes an introduction to the viewer as well.  Davy’s “apology” to Rachel was awesome, even though it was new – it was an excellent piece of filling-in, of shorthanding his whole character.

Anne: I can’t imagine what’s keeping them, Mrs. Lynde, but Davy will apologize as soon as he comes in.  I had a long talk with him last night, and told him that he must.
Mrs. Lynde: Well I hope you haven’t coached him, that’s all.
Anne: What do you mean?
Mrs. Lynde: I remember the time you apologized to me like it was yesterday.  And if Davy’s going in for that style of speech it’ll have to wait till tomorrow.  I have to be home in an hour.
Anne: Oh, there’s the gate – that must be them -
Marilla: Don’t prompt him, Anne.  See if he’ll do it of his own accord.
Dora: That woman’s here!  You’d better do it now!
Davy: Mrs. Lynde?
Mrs. Lynde: Yes, Davy.
Davy: Anne said bossy people don’t like other people sayin’ they’re bossy.  So I’m sorry I said you was bossy.  And there’s another thing I might as well say sorry about now before somebody tells me to.
Anne (aghast): What’s that, Davy …
Davy: Sorry I been bleedin’ all over your dress.

Also not in the book was the whole situation of Davy and Dora being so afraid that they were an imposition on Anne and Marilla, and Davy’s attempt at running away to work in a salmon cannery in Nova Scotia.  That was a really wonderful scene, although I don’t really understand the emphasis throughout on the shortage of money; the real Green Gables wasn’t well off, but its denizens weren’t scrimping and scraping, either.

Marilla’s longing for Matthew was a beautiful touch – not so explicit in the book (I believe it’s original to the screenplay).  Brilliant.

People talk about widows.  Funny – there’s no name like that for losing your brother.  Yet with a husband chances are you’ve only had him half your life.  Matthew and I had never been separated more than a week from the day I was born.

In the Other Version, a terrible number of Mr. Harrison’s lines were given to Mrs. Rachel (as Mr. H was excised entirely) – which is just Wrong.  One that wasn’t so bad: “from center to circumference”, which I need to remember.  One that was: “red-headed snippet”.  The BBC version reassigned one of my favorite lines to Marilla: “If you went to your own room at midnight, locked the door, pulled down the blind, and sneezed, Mrs. Lynde would ask you the next day how your cold was!” – only they didn’t get it right: “You could go to bed at midnight, draw the curtains, lock the door, sneeze, and the next day Rachel would be on your doorstep askin’ how your cold was.”  Besides just the dropped “g” (they really do bug me), the change to that, though minor, makes it less.

They did that rather a lot in this.  It was odd to me that Jane was invited to the luncheon for Mrs. Morgan, and even odder that Mrs. Lynde barged in.  It should have been Miss Stacy (not in the film) and the Allans (ditto); I’m a little fuzzy on why anyone else had to be added at all, except to accentuate Anne’s humiliation.

Davy had finished ravelling out his herring net and had wound the twine into a ball. Then he had gone into the pantry to put it up on the shelf above the table, where he already kept a score or so of similar balls, which, so far as could be discovered, served no useful purpose save to yield the joy of possession.

- The use of that and the sugar in the peas was well done.

One thing that was strange was the tying of the timeline into interesting knots.  Thomas Lynde’s death, Paul’s father, quite a few other bits came out of order.  Avonlea Notes and the storm and the arrival of Mrs. Harrison – the chronology was utterly off.

One of the changes I did not like – at all – and which is a prime example of what I don’t like about the whole project is the story of Hester Grey.

Anne (pointing): Look!  There’s the little dell where Hester Grey used to live.  Remember tellin’ me about her?  How she died so young, and her grief-stricken husband carried her out into the garden so she could die among the roses?
Diana: I remember.  It was the same day I fell headfirst into the rain barrel.
Anne (dreamily): I believe her husband’s spirit is hovering there this very minute – over the garden where he buried his beautiful young bride.
Diana: No, Anne, it can’t be.
Anne: Oh, Diana, you just have no imagination – how can you possibly be sure that it can’t be?
Diana: Because he sold up and moved to Boston. He keeps a butcher’s shop there.
Anne: Oh.

While I admit I chuckled the first time I saw it … that is a travesty.  The real story is in Chapter 13 of the book, as the girls – Anne and Diana and Priscilla and Jane – go off on a picnic and stumble on the narcissi of the Grey farm; Diana tells the tale.  And Hester becomes a posthumous kindred spirit to Anne, who makes a habit of leaving roses on the young bride’s grave when she visits Matthew’s.  It’s a beautiful part of the Anne story – and I hate what these folk did to it.

Some few of the additions in the screenplay were good, as I’ve noted above – but too many weren’t, like the Hester Grey.  In several places they tried to smooth the surface and match the paint where they had to patch holes between areas that are true to the text.  They try to match the tone of the book, try to make Anne sound like Anne – and they fail; it falls quite flat when the words are not L.M. Montgomery’s.   One example is Anne’s impassioned speech about having the hall painted; that didn’t sound like Anne.  It sounded silly.

The other main problem I referred to earlier is that all throughout the series people smile at and roll their eyes at and make fun of Anne’s … Anneishness.  Even Gilbert, as above; his attitude is very much that of a superior adult trying to curb the excesses of a child.  Patronizing.  Even Diana quashes her.  Ruby says at one A.V.I.S. meeting “She’s off again”.  She’s a nasty little piece of work, that one – which is actually about right; this is Ruby Gillis I’m talking about.  Angling for Gilbert, then committing about six kinds of sexual harassment on poor Joshua Pye.  But the problem is that the marked lack of respect on every side for Anne is that it pretty effectively makes the whole story a farce.  Anne goes from being a beautiful spirit with a poetic soul and a large vocabulary to being a laughing-stock.  And maybe she was in the book as well – but in the book she was surrounded by people who loved her for her Anneishness: Marilla, and Diana, and Miss Stacy and the Allans, and Gilbert especially; even Mrs. Lynde.  None of them in the book would have wanted to change a word of her vocabulary or a single bubble of her dreaming.  On first watching it I wasn’t extremely bothered by all of this… But the more I think about it the more it devalues the whole thing.

Too, the accent – yes, it really, really does bother me – just strikes me as condescending.  It’s something that took a minute to pin down, but now that I have it bothers me more and more.  Once it became crystalline that those were put-on accents (I know – but I didn’t twig to it right away.  Sorry: stupid), it began to feel more and more as if the direction for the actors was to portray their characters as hicks, entirely lacking in any sophistication or class or education.  And while the folk of L.M. Montgomery’s Avonlea were farm folk, and many weren’t so very well educated, still the women were expected to be ladies, and to behave as such, and keenly conscious of class.  This felt like Brits telling a cute little rustic story set in one of the primitive colonies.  Lack of respect for PEI, of Avonlea, and of Anne – I don’t like it.   It’s one thing the whatshisname AoGG had: it gave every appearance of being a labor of love.  I don’t know what gave birth to this..

(Also, Mrs. Lynde did not make a snarky remark about Marilla’s black cloak on her way back from the twins’ mother’s funeral – “There she is comin’ back from the funeral – she’s got the same black cape she wore for Matthew’s and she’d had it 15 years then”.  That’s … mean.)

I was going to say that this mini-series would be fine for someone who did not know and love the books… But then again, part of the attraction of the mini-series is the parts that are faithful.  So I don’t know; it’s not, imho, for the diehard Anne-lover, the kindred spirit, but then again it’s not for the stranger to Avonlea.  Maybe it’s for someone who has read the books but doesn’t care about that world … except then why would that person be watching?  It is a conundrum.

Well, shut the front door – imdb:  “David Troughton  …  Jonas Blake”.  We haven’t had Jonas Blake yet, have we??  Oh – no, next disc: episodes 1.5 & 6.  Excellent.

Continuing the When Worlds Collide motif, Kim Braden was two characters in Star Trek: TNG - in 1994 in Star Trek: Generations she played Elise Picard, Jean-Luc’s alternate-dimensional wife (a bell just went off); in the series in ’90 in “The Loss” she was Ensign Janet Brooks.  What fun.  I’ll have to try to remember this when I one day watch again.

Postscript: It bothers me inordinately that anneofgreengables.com belongs to Kevin Sullivan.  Though Anne of Green Gables was wonderful, after what he did to the rest of the books, that isn’t right.

 

Librarything Early Reviewer book: Roma

Currently Stephen Saylor’s Roma, the Early Reviewer book I received a couple of weeks ago from Librarything, is my “work” book, and The Lions of Al-Rassan is my “home” book; saves having to schlep one volume back and forth and up and down.  This is the only way I can be happy about reading the former, if I have something extraordinary to look forward to.  Roma is certainly not bad … but if I didn’t feel the obligation to finish it I think I would have quit a couple of centuries ago.

Roma is, as the title indicates, a history of the city following the tangled thread of two families’ stories through (usually) the eldest male child of the clan(s): the possessor of the amulet known as Fascinus, of which I can’t post a picture without being reported.  The book begins in 1000 BC (not BCE; huh), when what is now Rome was simply a campsite among the used by salt traders and other migratory groups on their trade routes, follows the amulet and the families, united in marriage now and then, as they have the brainstorm of creating a settlement on the campsite, as the settlement grows and the name Roma becomes more permanent, as Romulus and Remus rise and fall and Roma becomes a city, as the city expands – all the way up through the first century BC and the murder of Julius Caesar and the reign of Octavius/Augustus.  I find it a bit odd, some of the things that the rocks skip over – Caesar’s entire reign, for example… 

The Potitii and Pinarii are never the largest figures in their stories, moving in the shadows of such as Scipio, Coriolanus, the twins … Hercules… The chapters are like stones skipped across a lake (or the Tiber), touching down every few years before they drop out of sight and the next one launches out, starting a few dozen or score years later than the last.

I’m learning a great deal, I have to say.  Assuming that I can take information about the city as fact, that is, and I believe I can based on the writer’s bent for research.  Rome, Roma, derives from an ancient word meaning, basically, “teats” – because of the seven hills the city grew around, resembling breasts or the teats of an animal.  Romulus and Remus weren’t literally raised by a wolf (something which is fairly obvious to a modern reader, but which was a point of debate Before the Common Era); “wolf” was a derogatory term for a loose woman or prostitute, and the wife of the man who found them and adopted them had that reputation – but even in their own lifetime the debate began.  I now know their story better than I ever have, even after having taken Latin for a couple of years.  And now I know the story of Coriolanus, which I’m afraid has only been a name to me before now, and that the name of a play by Shakespeare.  I’ll stick a bookmark in that chapter for when I get to Coriolanus in my Shakespeare posts (years from now at this rate).  I learned about a Gallic invasion of Rome I’d never heard of, a bit more about Pyrrhus (of the pyrrhic victory) and Hannibal… The last chapter I knew pretty well already, thanks to HBO’s Rome.  I can’t help wishing Saylor had taken a few pages from HBO’s book.
I’ve also learned about a weird and wild poisoning ring in the (500′s) in which a rather large number of respectable Roman women knocked off husbands, lovers, brothers, fathers, all by various types of poison and all for various motives, and went undetected (everyone believing the gods were visiting the men of the city with some terrible plague, though no one knew why) until, after nearly 200 men had died, a slave from one household involved couldn’t take it any more and went to the authorities.  Over 100 women were implicated, and ended up dying by drinking their own potions (“Well, if it really is a medicinal potion, prove it: you drink it”).  Amazing as this story was – I wonder if it’s unique in history – I found myself wondering as the current Potitius lad studied the facts of it whether this, a strange little flashback to a time between chapter jumps, was included merely as something strange and fascinating or whether it was relevant.  In a book of 500+ pages, it could be either. 

Depite the fact that Roma spans centuries and takes in not only wars and mass poisonings and invasions, and the formation of a city from a handful of huts to a thing of concrete and marble, and the rise and fall and rise of a blended clan with rape and battle and incest and monsters and all … still, at one point it seemed like more happened in thirty pages of Lions than in the couple of hundred pages of Roma I had read at that point.  It’s one of the reasons I generally steer clear of “prehistorical” historicals, which is the manner of storytelling that dominates the sub-genre.  It’s stilted, as the writer struggles to avoid words that didn’t yet exist and simultaneously works to delineate a setting most readers are least familiar with.  The other aspect I dislike about books set hundreds of years BC is that I always find myself distanced by a skepticism that isn’t there with any other time or place setting: “Oh, yeah?  And you base that on what?”  Case in point: the second stone to be skipped across the pond involves a liaison between the young lady of the clan and a stranger who defeats a monster … The young lady of the clan having been raped first by the monster, which was actually a badly deformed young man who had been sent out from his village as a sacrifice, and then (almost willingly) by the stranger, whom the clan decided was Heracles.  Which name evolved into Hercules. 

Which makes it slightly hilarious to me that for the rest of the book the family proudly claims relation to Hercules, as Romulus and Remus did to Jupiter with no firmer basis.  That guy could have been Hercules – or he could have been just some ridiculously strong fellow passing through.  By the end of the book, no one remembers why they do most of what they do, even to the wearing of the Fascinus … It’s kind of sad.  As well as slightly hilarious.

I also found it funny that the story is told straight in that chapter, rather than via word of mouth of someone whose uncle was there; the deeds attributed to “Hercules” are absurd.

Prehistory’s a peculiar area between fantasy and history; there usually isn’t enough solid data to do more than speculate about the setting, given the fact that it’s called prehistory because it occurred before any of it could be written down … Five scholars could look at the same evidence from digs and later written sources and such and come up with five very different conclusions.  This is speculative fiction at its, for me, least attractive.  (I guess I’m just not a huge fan of stone knives and bearskins.)

Gladii and togas (togae?) aren’t my favorite, either, but fascinating when done well.  And this isn’t done badly at all.  The book is necessarily choppy as the stones skip over decades and centuries over 555 pages and 999 years, with the only constants being the place and Fascinus.  The writing is stiff and sometimes redundant – almost unconfident, in the effort that is taken to make sure some points get across, which is strange in that a volume like this had to have taken a lot of sheer dogged confidence.  “Show, don’t tell” is largely nonexistent here.  The dialogue is fairly natural, but also fairly homogenous.  I don’t think there’s much difference to be found between the dialogue of the early Potitii and the later ones, except in what they talk about.  The characters … I don’t so much enjoy a book in which I can’t warm up to the characters, and I couldn’t here, between the brief rock-skips in which they appear and the fact that they mostly just (whether it’s the different mores and such of ancient Rome or simply a reader-writer disconnect) aren’t very likeable.  Which in a way I suppose is just as well; it would be awful to love one set of characters only to be wrenched away to another set, and another, and another … So it’s not a bad thing that I just simply do not like these people. 

The main thing I can’t enjoy is the sheer bloodthirstiness of the times.  It’s easy to lose track of just how civilized we are now, until immersed in something like this.  Two thousand years ago, apparently, it was perfectly fine to reassure a child by telling him that his uncle had escaped from the nasty pirates and then hunted them down and crucified them.  It was also considered unfortunate but pretty much okay that three hundred men were executed here, a couple hundred men, women, and children there, heads placed on spikes and thousands enslaved.  That’s the thing – it’s not only the blood and slavery and rape and mutilation – it’s the attitude toward all of this.  It’s all normal. 

The format of the book is much like Peter Ackroyd’s London, which I’ve heard of (I think I owned it once and never read it, because I really do prefer the history of a person to the history of a place in a novel) and Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, which I read last year and … felt very much the same about as I do Roma.  I have a hard time looking at a book like this as a novel; but it isn’t a history either, despite what I’m learning.  It’s an instructive time-travelogue.

 

Alternate 1800′s – Swordspoint

I’ve been too engrossed in reading, lately, to write about what I’ve been reading.  (It’s Shakespeare’s fault, too.)  It’s good, I think, that I’ve received another LibraryThing Early Reviewer book, and feel obliged to read that next, or I’d have to comb Amazon.com trying to find/spending money I shouldn’t be spending on more books in this flavor.  If there are any; I think there are a small handful I haven’t read, and a smaller I have.

It all started with pulling Ellen Kushner‘s Swordspoint off the shelf.  It’s something I’ve thought about rereading now and then, but never did – till now.  I found its sequel, The Privilege of the Sword, at Books & Co., happily, and ordered the third book, written with Delia Sherman: The Fall of the Kings.  While I was waiting for the latter I reread something I knew was in a similar vein, except more steampunk: the two volumes of Carolus Rex, The Shadow of Albion and Leopard in Exile, by Andre Norton and Rosemary Edghill.  Also in there was Shana Abe’s Smoke Thief, another Books & Co find which I had tried to start before unsuccessfully, and had better luck with this time.  I am going to hate being done with these worlds, this sub-genre of alternate 1800′s England.  (I could continue with the Regencies Sorcery and Cecilia/The Enchanted Chocolate Pot, but I need the sequel, The Grand Tour … There are also Wrede’s Mairelon the Magician and Magician’s Ward, which I read not so very long ago … Maybe after Saylor’s Roma, my Early Reviewer book…)

Swordspoint tells the tale of Richard St. Vier, who is a swordsman in a society where the nobles hire swordsmen to fight their duels for them, sometimes to the death.  In fact, St. Vier is the pre-eminent swordsman, respected and not a little feared.  He can be found living in the gilded slums of Riverside (where the nobles used to live before they crossed the river and raised the property values on The Hill) with his lover Alec, a somewhat mysterious scholar who is not quite dealing with a full deck.  I don’t know exactly what a modern diagnosis would be; manic depression (or whatever it ought to be called), I suppose: he migrates with great speed and no warning from sharp and sardonic and relatively stable, to barely contained and horrifyingly reckless (in which state he taunts the most dangerous elements of a dangerous neighborhood until Richard has to defend him with steel), to a still and angry bleakness (in which state he cuts himself and destroys precious objects and fights, bitterly, with Richard).  Those around him simply consider him mad.

The writing is frighteningly intelligent, as rich and dense and decadent as pure shortbread, with, perhaps, as deceptively few ingredients but with just the same complexity of flavor.  And it seems just as bad for you.  The story and the characters teem with vice, but God in heaven are they fun.  The fantasy element of Swordspoint lies not in magic or even in its lack (as in the later book), but in its location in a fairy tale unnamed city, beginning with an image out of fairy tale and carrying the aura through.

The plot spirals inward and inward, with politics and sex and intrigue; everyone knows part of what’s going on, and no one knows everything.  Including, sometimes, the reader.  It’s complex and intricate, like lace made of steel mesh.  And so good.  The book is fantasy purely in the sense of an undefined setting, swords and swordsmen and horses and nobles.  There is no magic, but it’s not that that makes this a fantasy either (unlike The Fall of Kings).

Well, and the writing.  The writing is magic.

 

Matthew Pearl: The Dante Club

Over the weekend, unable to put my hands on Dear Theo or To Kill a Mockingbird (there must be a box of books somewhere) and not quite up to committing to Song for Arbonne or Lions of Al-Rassan, I picked up something I received a while back through paperbackswap.com … Why on earth I was yelled at once for sending a book that had a little yellowing of the pages, but it’s perfectly fine for people to send out ex-library books with pages falling out (it’s happened a few times), I don’t get.  Still, the book sounded intriguing, and it fit my requirements.

Except … My strong recommendation is: read this, but do not eat rice at any point directly before, during, or after reading it.  And especially don’t do as I did, which was to put rice on to cook, open the book and start to read the first chapter – about the discovery of a body covered and filled with thousands of blowflies and their maggots – and then sit down to a dinner of said rice and scallops.  Really.  Don’t.  Did I mention the maggots?

(Spoilers follow regarding deaths, but not the killer…)

The book takes place in 1865 Boston.  The Civil War is only months over – Abraham Lincoln is only months dead; the city is filled with returning soldiers in all conditions.  And in the heart of the city, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is translating Dante.  There never has been an American edition of The Divine Comedy, and any British ones have been (for kind of obvious reasons) unavailable.  The translation was something Longfellow worked on periodically – until his wife, Fanny, died in a terrible accident, and it became almost a therapy for him; he has worked on the translations solely for years.  One of his friends speculates that if he were to return to his own poetry, he would not be able to not write about Fanny, and she would become just a word.

- – Pictures taken, with gratitude, from Matthew Pearl’s site. No pictures of Greene are immediately to be found.

As the translation has progressed, Longfellow has formed a Dante Club, along with George Washington Greene, Oliver Wendell Holmes,  James Russell Lowell, and their publisher, James Thomas Fields (also a poet).  At meetings each Wednesday a canto of the piece is discussed, and the translation is perfected, and then dinner.

Holmes, as a professor of medicine at Harvard, is tangentially involved when the body of a murdered man is brought in.  It is that of a chief justice, who was supposed to be away and therefore had not been missed for several days, and was at the last found naked under a blank white flag by a servant out in the house’s grounds – still, if her testimony was to be believed, alive, though barely.  No, say all of the pathologists – impossible, for he was the one who was horrifyingly infested with flies and maggots and wasps – these only eat dead flesh, so therefore he must not have been alive.

Except he was.

The lives of the men of the Dante Club incorporate and move past this murder of a man of their set, but with whom none of them were particularly close.  And then there comes word of a second death – this one of a minister, who was found in the crypt of his church, buried naked upside-down up to his waist … with his feet on fire.

Again Holmes is one of the first to see the body – and it strikes him in a horrible blow that this death, and in fact that first one, bear a very strong resemblance to punishments meted out in Dante’s Inferno.  He flies back to his Dante Club to discuss this, and the first impulse is to take it to the police – but they are stopped by the fact that Longfellow’s translation is already meeting with opposition.  It’s too Catholic a poem, it’s too graphic, it’s not fitting for a Protestant country or state or – most importantly – city or college.  There are those who feel it their duty to fight Dante – along with other heretics like Darwin – tooth and nail.  And any adverse publicity – such as “Dante inspired horrid murders” – would be the end of the project.  This isn’t, to their credit, important because of the potential lost investment (though that’s never so far from Fields’s mind), but for Dante’s sake: they want him to be known.  Shakespeare lets men know themselves; Dante lets men know each other.

At that point it becomes a four-way race – among the Dante Club; the police, who are a new body and not exactly Boston’s Finest at this point; Nicholas Rey, a mulatto police patrolman, the first black cop in Boston (at least), who is not exactly having an easy time of it among much the rest of the police force or the criminal element; and, of course, the killer, whose timeline seems to be connected to the Dante Club’s: the murders seem to be taking place just days before the cantos to which they pay tribute.

I knew little about any of the poets involved; Longfellow’s work, of course, is an old friend, but I knew nothing about the poet.  I  don’t think I knew Oliver Wendell Holmes was a poet; I have his Autocrat of the Breakfast Table on hand (though I have not yet read it), and honestly I think I thought he was a lawyer – which is a little ironic.  I wasn’t at all familiar with Lowell, or with Fields, their publisher – and this was a fascinating look at poetry and publishing in 19th century Boston.  I’ve said before that real persons’ appearances in fiction make me a little uneasy, but in truly well done historical fiction – when the people themselves are gone and hopefully their heirs are on board – isn’t objectionable.  (Although there was one centering on Poe – oh, and P.T. Barnum, I believe? – which I did not enjoy at all … Can’t remember title or author.)  In fact, I enjoyed this a great deal.  I believed the author’s depictions of the characters, both real and fictional, and believed the weaving together of real and fictional.  And the mystery was lurid and intriguing: I guessed the killer, but only by using the old “which named character in the cast could be the one” method; there was no way for the reader to deduce the killer’s identity logically, nor his motivation, not all of it, but this is never a great priority with me.  Also, of course, the chapter which takes us inside his head was powerful – all else is forgiven after that.

This was a rich book, deeply enjoyable on many levels – biography, history – of Boston, of Harvard, of publishing; mystery, thriller, literary pastiche … It was dark chocolate: a bit decadent, but – anti-oxidants!  Good for you!

The end result of a book like this, blending fact and imagination, is always that I want more – I want to know more about the real people involved, and I want to (in this case) read their poetry.  I never knew Longfellow translated Dante, and I want it.  (Also, I find, he translated Michelangelo – I want that too.)  And does it need saying I want the rest of Matthew Pearl’s books – and that I hope he writes many more?

Along with everything else, I love the jacket of the book: an etching of Harvard University, dotted with droplets of blood …