Zoraida Córdova's THE INHERITANCE OF ORQUÍDEA DIVINA

"What is it?" he asked. "And don't say nothing because you look like you've seen a ghost and we've seen too many fucking ghosts to be scared of them."

At what point does Magical Realism cross over into fantasy, genre-wise? A lot of people trot out the former term whenever they're dealing with supernatural literature that has been written by and/or about LatinX people, but for me that term is more subtle than that. You can't just ignore the realism in Magical Realism; the adjective "magical" is a modifier of the noun that follows it. Magic, spells, the undead, afterlife, etc are elements of more than the whole driver of the story. Grace notes, maybe, or that pinch of salt. The story is fine without them, but just enough makes the rest of the ingredients (usually, in my experience, quality social drama and/or historical fiction) really stand out.

I've seen The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina called Magical Realism, but I'd argue that what Zoraida Córdova has created for us here is fantasy. Which is just fine with me, thank you, because it's neither Epic nor Urban; it might be called historical fantasy, but really, it's its own thing. The magical elements aren't just an expressionist touch or a metaphor, but rather fully as important and integral to the tale of the Equadorean-American Montoya clan as its exploration of their founding matriarch's journey from unwanted "bastard daughter of the waves" to a seemingly omnipotent bruja in the process of metamorphosing into a tree.

Said matriarch, the titular Orquídea, was born in Ecuador to an unwed mother who had a fling with a sailor who disappeared after Orquídea was conceived. Mother and daughter have a hardscrabble life in the city in the early 20th century until Orquídea kind of accidentally catches mom a husband, on the advice of a petite crocodilian river monster who is the little girl's only friend and with whom she has made a deal to always share half of her catch of fish in return for the river montster's agreement to stop interfering with same. Did I mention that the magic is absolutely integral to the story? Because it is. Orquídea's life is brimful of magic even before she grows up, turns up in the United States in a place called Four Rivers, and brings the valley there back to life from barrenness, turning it into a lush and fertile garden of a place complete with a beautiful house that magically appears on the land overnight, along with the proper documentation to prove that Orquídea is the legal owner of said valley. But that's much later in her life, though it's the first thing that happens in the novel. Orquídea has to have a place to which to summon her numerous children (by four different husbands) and grandchildren to accept their inheritance from her and get the modern day plot going, after all.

The novel thus tells two parallel stories, of Orquídea's childhood (in which she gets to play Cinderella for her mother, new stepfather and a passel of half-siblings in addition to catching a lot of fish and befriending a river monster) and of several of her grandchildren's journey to Four Rivers from New York City, Oregon and other far-flung locales to which they moved when Orquídea banished them all from their idyllic childhood home, for reasons she didn't bother explaining. Their homecoming is bittersweet; Orquídea is fascinating and charming and beautiful, even as an elderly woman, but she's got so many secrets she can seem cold and inhospitable. How is she so powerful? Why is she so secretive? And what is she bequeathing to her descendants?

We find out at a leisurely pace that lets us get to know the three most important (story-wise) of her grandchildren, cousins Marimar, Reymundo and Tatinelly, each the child of a different one of Orquídea's children, with Marimar and Reymundo being orphaned before adulthood, their parents dying tragically young due to a mysterious curse on the family that Orquídea has always hinted about but never explained. As they gather in adulthood in answer to Orquídea's summons, Marimar and Reymundo are both feeling lost and somewhat wayward, while Tatinelly is very happily married to a guy named Mike Sullivan and expecting their first child very soon. And yes, Chekov's baby gets born on the dramatic night that really gets the dual plots in gear, and yes that child, Rhiannon, winds up being magical AF when the dramatic night's events leave Marimar, Reymundo and Rhiannon with rosebuds growing from the base of Marimar's throat, one of Reymundo's hands, and baby Rhiannon's forehead! This after they've seen the ghosts mentioned above, of course: Orquídea's four husbands and all of the adult children who have since died and been buried with the husbands in the family graveyard on Orquídea's land, and Orquídea, well, I mentioned the tree already.

It's then left to the cousins to sift through a tiny store of clues Orquídea has left behind about her remarkable life before she created the idyllic valley at Four Rivers. As the mystery deepens, so does the sense of responsibility that Marimar and Reymundo feel for each other and the rest of their family, even their unpleasant uncle Enrique and Orquídea's long-lost half-siblings (who only get one scene in the novel but do their very best to channel Lobelia Sackville-Baggins despite there being no silver spoons). There is lots more magic, more than a little romance, some first-rate scenery porn, and enchantment aplenty. 

The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, then, is one of those books that most confound what I want out of reading: it's impossible to put down and thus impossible to prolong as a read, and at the same time one I was very sad to see end, even if very satisfyingly. I've never had much of an urge to read the author's Brooklyn Bruja novels, as for me a little witchy goes a long way, but I might be persuaded to change my mind if they're as lovely, engaging and affecting as this one. Go see for yourself!

Janelle Monae's THE MEMORY LIBRARIAN AND OTHER STORIES FROM DIRTY COMPUTER

The summer of 2018 was a challenging one for me. Due to a medication I'd been put on for a chronic health condition, the slow growing cataracts we'd first discovered in both of my eyes when I was in my early 30s (it's mostly caused by frequent/long-term steroid use and nobody ever talks about this as a consequence so educate yourself on this before it happens to someone you know and care about) were suddenly maturing like crazy. An operation I'd been told I'd maybe need someday when I was in my 60s was suddenly necessary very, very soon -- except I also had glaucoma that wasn't responding to ordinary treatment measures. The cataract surgery couldn't happen until this was brought under control. Meanwhile, my world was disappearing in, not so much a cloud as a blinding refraction that multiplied every image by five. I wasn't just seeing double, I was seeing quintuple.

The last thing I remember watching on TV was the Emotion Picture Janelle Monae & co. made to accompany her then-new album, Dirty Computer. I might have seen a baseball game or something as the actual last thing, but I watched Dirty Computer over and over and over again. It wasn't just great music and beautiful visuals, it was really good, fully imagined science fiction with a fully realized world, intensely believable characters and incredible high-stakes tension. Plus, the imagery employed made it feel like it was made just for me, even though I'm a cisgender ace woman from White-oming, aka someone with very little in common with the divine Cyndi Mayweather. Even as I watched for the 14,000th time, even as I listened with delight to the album (which I bought on physical media because someday some jackwagon is going to buy up the streaming services that host it and delete it as too controversial or whatever), I wanted to know more about this world Janelle and her co-creators had dreamed up, which is a dystopia every bit as terrifying as the fucking Handmaids but is fully inclusive of the BIPOC/LGBTQA+ people of the world in a way dear old Atwood never quite is.

Anyway, the divine Mayweather heard my prayers and had already pretty much answered them, only book publishing do take its own sweet time to get stuff into my hot little hands, don't it?

The stories in The Memory Librarian are collaborations between Monae and a small cadre of award winning writers of speculative prose fiction, and while each co-writer has a resume that should impress any critic, their individuality disappears in service of the whole work; each story shares not only a world and a handful of characters drawn from Dirty Computer but also a clear and straightforward prose style that makes The Memory Librarian feel like the work of one amazing hive mind. Ordinarily I'd find this a little disappointing; I look to anthologies in part in order to find new-to-me-writers to stalk from afar and I usually end up with a favorite whose works I then move forward to devour greedily. In this case, though, well, I'm just going to have to follow them all like one of the creepy surveillance droids that loom in all of these stories. Except I'm hoping I won't be noticed, that they won't run away. I'm not really an NDR (New Dawn Robot, I think is what that stands for?), I just look like one, really! Hello...? 

That being said, I do have a favorite story, the longest entry, "Nevermind," which functions the most as a direct sequel to Dirty Computer as it expands on the themes and imagery -- and the fates of its principle characters -- of Monae's original Emotion Picture. "Nevermind" finds Monae's character, Jane, resident of the Pynk Hotel (the scene of the music video with the infamous vagina pants), where a motley assortment of the kind of marginalized/minority characters that are most at risk of being abused and wiped out in both our world and that of Monae's imagined future, in which a techno-dystopian power known as the New Dawn has seized power in the United States (or maybe all of North America? Or maybe the whole world?) and put a terrifying combination of surveillance technology that can penetrate even into a person's thoughts and memories and a gas called Nevermind that can be used to erase those thoughts and memories, the better to re-program a person into a perfect "clean" citizen of the New Dawn's Orwellian world. At the end of Dirty Computer, Jane, her girlfriend Zen, and their boyfriend Ché escaped from a facility in which all three of them had undergone various degrees of Nevermind treatment and brainwashing; the last hopeful scene has the trio clearing the exit and leaving the New Dawn behind, hopefully forever.

As "Nevermind" (co-written with Danny Lore) opens, we learn that it was to the Pynk Hotel that Jane and Zen escaped (we don't hear much about Ché), and that the Hotel is a hidden location in the desert where BIPOC/LGBTQIA+ and any other misfit women can make a life and all the art they want as long as they contribute some of their talents toward keeping the place running. But there is trouble in paradise: there are hints that New Dawn has come close to sniffing them out, and some of the residents of the Pynk Hotel don't have quite as inclusive an idea of who is welcome there as Jane et al would like. The story takes Monae's original work's focus on the endless struggle of the individual against the forces of society who want conformity at any price and both expands and contracts it, broadening its inclusiveness while narrowing in on the experiences of one resident at Pynk who has become a protege of reluctant not-officially-leader Jane but is treated with suspicion by a faction within the community in a sad analogy of, say, 21st century feminism's internal debates (which, how is this debate still even happening, you guys?) over who, exactly, counts as a woman.

Other stories bring us into the world of a high official of the New Dawn. "The Memory Librarian" (co-written with Alaya Dawn Johnson),  is a bit of a taller poppy than she at first would seem but is struggling to keep that a secret even as she secretly tries to help others like her survive in the city she guides and keeps Clean for the New Dawn. When her mission and her heart come into irreconcilable conflict, the tension over how she will handle it becomes almost unbearable and doesn't quite resolve as the story nonetheless comes to a satisfying conclusion. As I said, Monae chooses her co-creators wisely (witness all of the incredible music videos she's unleashed over the years).

Another stand-out is "Timebox Altar(ed" (co-written with Sheree Renée Thomas in which a group of children, many of whom have been effectively orphaned by the New Dawn's habit of kidnapping non-conforming adults for "Cleaning" without much regard for the welfare of any offspring they may have, follow a series of incredibly subtle memory-clues to find an all-but-enchanted locale that gives them each a glimpse of a better future in which each of them has, as adults, helped to create, a message of hope that reaches beyond The Memory Librarian's pages to all of us as we watch our kind-of, almost pluralistic, wannabe egalitarian maybe someday society come under threat, not from fancy sci-fi gadgets and gases, but the same bullshit intolerance and bigotry that's always held us back. While we probably shouldn't ever get too comfortable with the idea that these forces can be defeated forever (as isn't quite suggested in the world these kids get to glimpse but could be), sometimes it's nice to at least think about how a better world can still be possible and might even be in our reach.

Someday, though? We really need to stop just believing that the kids are going to fix things. We were the kids once, did we?

Anyway, I hope this collection isn't the last we see from these creators and in this world. Monae has tapped into some powerful, powerful veins that still have plenty of good ore in 'em.

Emily St. John Mandel's SEA OF TRANQUILITY

Ok, friends, I'm calling it: I'm officially over the Simulation Theory. It was interesting, even diverting, for a while, but now the Zoanthropes who can't be trusted to tell the difference between fact and fiction have gotten hold of it have added it to their quiver of arguments in favor of not being their brothers' keepers and they're thus absolved from giving a fuck about anybody else despite what their holy books tell them* and I just can't anymore. 

Ware spoilers for the book, by the way. I 

But it do keep coming up in the books I'm reading and even if it wasn't just a gussied-up version of "characters who know or realized they're in a novel" it's come up TOO MUCH and the next time I see it, even if it's a fucking prize-winning Instant Classic, I'm not gonna bother finishing that book. 

Anyway, Sea of Tranquility. Which commits another sin-in-my-book regarding books in that the main point-of-view character is a novelist.

I realize that I already sound like I hated this, but I didn't. Author Emily St. John Mandel has created a cast of characters, living in different periods of history and the Future, that I felt like I understood and quickly came to care about, and put them in interesting situations within their own timelines and experiences that kept me caring even when I realized that they were really just parts in a familiar Simulated machine, and the book is pretty short (by my standards anyway) so I didn't feel the need to put it aside or drop it altogether at the time, though about 2/3 of the way through it I started feeling like I'd read it all before fairly recently.

The book takes place in, in chronological order, frontier British Columbia, present day New York City, a book tour around the world in the 22nd century, and a colonized Moon in the 23rd, with the Moon being home to three domed cities (one of which is charmingly dilapidated to represent the diminished glamor of life on the moon when other planets in our solar system and in another solar system are now also settled by humans) and a Time Institute which, yes, is a giant time travel bureaucracy (yay!)... tasked with gathering evidence to finaly prove or disprove the Simulation Theory, because An Anomaly has crept up (yawn) which allows all of the aforementioned points in space-time to connect and bleed into each other, but just for a moment -- an arresting moment that has inspired, again in chronological order, a letter home describing a wilderness encounter with the Anomaly, a musical-composition-cum-video installation featuring a glimpse of the Anomaly, and a vividly described passage in a novel that can only be describing an enounter with the Anomaly (but written by someone who grew up on the Moon!).

The Time Institute has noticed these artistic coincidences, sent Time Travelers to investigate them, and has concluded that this strongly indicates a Glitch in the Simulation (yawn) that needs further investigation. Enter one Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a somewhat wayward divorced man in his 30s who was named after a character in the Novel and whose name also appears in the initial stories of the other encounters with the Anomaly. Yawn. Of course he's going to be a Time Traveler. But, to Mandel's credit, for a long time this looked like it was going to be a different kind of coincidence -- a family name passed on to descendants, perhaps? 

*Which, those same holy books seem awfully prone as it is to persuading their adherents that this fragile little planet whose surface we cling to was given to us to dominate and so we don't bear any responsibility for taking care of it or making sure its habitable for other life forms who aren't of immediate economic utility to us. Why, yes, it drives me crazy that so many people consider these texts to be the Ne Plus Ultra of morality when they actually seem to demand the bare minimum of same of The Faithful. And that The Faithful, even as they scream for everybody to adhere to their idiosyncratic interpretations of holy writ, seem in their own conduct to regard these texts more as guidelines than absolutes. Slavish enforced obedience for others, freedom to cherry pick for me...

Herve Le Tellier's THE ANOMALY (Tr. by Adriana Hunter, Narr. by Dominic Hoffman)

A phrase that repeats often as Herve Le Tellier's The Anomaly gets going is "Maybe this is happiness," usually describing something banal and material, or at least basic, implying that if this is what happiness is, it's been oversold, at least to the cast of characters whose mini-biographies form the first part of the novel. Among these are a novelist who wrote a book called The Anomaly and committed suicide (this is not much of a spoiler; it happens early in the book and it's one of the pivotal issues that touches off the many philosophical conundra that pepper Le Tellier's The Anomaly as the fictionalized author of The Anomaly achieves a posthumous level of fame and respect he never enjoyed in life and if you're thinking of Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, you're supposed to; the book gets an explicit name check in the account of the dead author's success.)

But the fictionalized writer of that other The Anomaly is far from being the most important character in this The Anomaly. After all, as far as we get to know, his The Anomaly is not, in fact, the text we are reading here. That would be almost too Borgesian, no?

Anyway, there are lots of other characters more interesting and more important to the story than this author. Like a professor of statistics and probability who, in his undergraduate days at M.I.T. cooked up something called "Protocol 42" as a set of guidelines to follow when something truly unexplainable, unpredictable or unprecedented happens -- when there is an anomaly that can't be handled by any normal means. He chose 42 for its name because Douglas Adams, of course -- a signal that he and his friends who cooked it up together never in a million years expected it ever to be taken seriously, let alone actually employed by the U.S. Government, even after U.S. Gov made them all sign contracts requiring that they be permanently available to be called on at any time, no questions asked, if it was ever deemed necessary to activate Protocol 42. Which, of course, is what The Anomaly, as in the Le Tellier novel, is actually about.

In March of 2021, an Air France plane traveled through some very adverse weather but fought through to JFK International Airport, sporting considerable hail damage but otherwise all right, and its several hundred passengers disembarked and went on with their lives.

Then, in June of that same year, the exact same plane, with the exact same crew and passenger manifest and serial numbers, the exact same everything, emerged from a similar storm and sent a Mayday message to JFK because the damage was a bit more severe this time around, only to be diverted to a New Jersey military base under fighter escort because all this had already happened three months before and this was too weird to allow the plane to come to JFK and disembark, etc. Yes, this all feels very familiar. We've seen the TV show, etc. But this is a French novel, you guys, and it's the Frenchest thing I've read since I finally got tired of Michel Houellebecq's shit (and yes, this includes the terrific Vernon Subutex trilogy I enjoyed last year), so, buckle up, there's going to be a whole lot of philosophical speculation going on. Starting with a lot of attention being paid to how this manifestation of a duplicate, a perfect copy in every way, of the plane and all of its contents, including a few hundred passengers, is an almost incontrovertible argument in favor of the Simulation Theory, which, in brief, states that our entire phenomenological cosmos is actually a computer simulation, none of us are real, we're all just programs running in a vast godlike computer system called Deep Thought, wait no, not that, but all the other stuff? Yes.

But again, the novelist isn't the interesting passenger. Not when there's an honest-to-Ludlum international assassin who had been traveling from Paris to NYC on his latest assignment (but left behind a wife and children and charming double life in Paris -- double lives are a theme here, my friends)! Except, we don't get to see him much, just enough to see how he handles coming home to Paris and finding another version of himself living the aforementioned charming life with wife and children and reacting the way a guy like him might react, since he alone of all the passengers is the only one who didn't get the memo about what was going on because he escaped from US Gov too soon to get in on the briefing and counseling sessions. D'oh!

There's also a Nigerian rap star who, between March and June, wrote a song that went batshit viral on the internet and catapulted him to fame on the level of being invited to collaborate with Sir Elton John on a song, because our Nigerian, stage named Slimboy, is actually gay in a country that still considers homosexuality a serious crime, see, double life again! How he -- the he's, the Slimboys -- handles the sudden dopplegangery is one of my favorite bits of The Anomaly along with...

And also there is the issue that suddenly hundreds of people who have been going about their ordinary lives in this world suddenly have perfect doppelgangers, exactly like them in every detail except they are three months younger and have no knowledge or memory of the three months that have elapsed since the original plane landed. Among the passengers on this plane were the novelist who wrote the in-book novel The Anomaly and then committed suicide; suddenly the novelist is alive again and ready to resume his life just as if it were still March 2021, except, of course, he doesn't even have the germ of the idea for The Anomaly yet so whatever experiences led to the writing of the novel and the author's suicide are quite beyond his ken.

Slight digression time. This book was written and translated and published at a very specific moment in 21st century history, and the President of the United States is very much a character in The Anomaly, only it's pretty obvious from tons of context clues and the POTUS' general behavior and way of speaking that Le Tellier assumed the United States would be dumb enough to re-elect our most embarrassing POTUS and sketches us a pretty merciless portrait of that man without ever naming him. It's sort of darkly fun to imagine that guy handling a philosophical crisis like this story poses, almost as much fun as it is to watch Le Tellier's merciless skewering of American pop culture in the person of Stephen Colbert and The Late Show, an episode of which is depicted in minute detail when Colbert et al land an interview with a pair of doppelgangers who are very attractive young women willing to go along with the producers to create some Fucking Great Television with, uh, unfortunate results.

OK, back to the others. Like the aging French architect who finds himself with a second chance at saving his relationship with his much younger girlfriend, or rather, in learning from his March self how the March self ruined said relationship with the girlfriend's March self and making a plan not to make the same mistake. And the girlfriend herself, who is a single mom with a young son who suddenly has, not just two mommies, but two absolutely identical mommies except one of them doesn't remember anything since she took a trip with her boyfriend in March.

What I'm saying is, Le Tellier took a rather tired trope -- airline experiences mysterious event and passengers lives are weird forever -- and turned it into a specific way to examine a lot of different solutions to the problem of What If Suddenly There Were Two Of Me on both a personal and a worldwide scale. Being a French novelist not unlike Houellebecq, Le Tellier does not think the rest of society, especially not American society, will handle the advent of a few hundred duplicated human beings well, let alone the news that potentially one of the less hopeful ontological interpretations of our existence is proven pretty much true, and I wish I could say I thought he took this too far but unfortunately, as events just this last week or so have proven all over again, I think Le Tellier was right on the money about how badly a lot of us would behave.

All of this is conveyed beautifully by the smooth voice and precise diction (as in consonants so crisp they sound almost British) I last enjoyed in the gigantic audio edition of Chuck Wendig's Wanderers (co-narrated with fellow audio narrating superstar Xe Sands), who performs the difficult feat of giving each character their own voice and flavor without pushing through into voice acting, meaning he also gives female characters the right hint of femininity without falling into caricature that I so appreciate.

As for translator Adriana Hunter, I have nothing to say about her work, which in my book is a compliment in that it's pretty great when a translator does so well that they seem to disappear into the translated work, where often I notice a translator for a weird word choice that sends me down rabbit holes to find out if the weird phrasing originated with the author or the translator. No, here there were only philosophical rabbit holes, and that was enough.

Maybe this is happiness. 

Olga Tokarczuk's THE BOOKS OF JACOB (Tr by Jennifer Croft)

"Literature is a particular type of knowledge, it is --" he sought the right words, and suddenly a phrase came ready to his lips -- "the perfection of imprecise forms."

This book's actual, complete title is The Books of Jacob: or, A fantastic journey across seven borders, five languages and three major religions, not counting the minor sects. Told by the dead, supplemented by the author, drawing from a range of books, and aided by imagination, the which being the greatest natural gift of any person. That the wise might have it for a record, that my compatriots reflect, laypersons gain some understanding, and melancholy souls gain some slight enjoyment. So before we even hit the table of contents, translator Jennifer Croft has already earned her no-doubt inadequate fee for bringing Olga Tokarczuk's latest to the English language reading public... although the table of contents reads similarly to the title, with chapter names like "Of the Bishop of Kameniec Mikolaj Dembowski, who doesn't realize he is merely passing through this whole affair" so, yeah, Croft got a workout there, too.

And now I'm just sitting here wondering what high falutin' pseudo-18th-century Polish sounds like, and how much of an extra effort that would have posed to Croft. A better literary detective than I, though, will have to answer that in full; I can just say that, thank goodness, Croft chose not to render the prose in high falutin' pseudo-18th-century English. I just had my year's dose of that and then some, yannow?

Anyway, now you know why I've been mostly absent from this blog of late, having tackled several monster books (others being the second volume of Michael Moorcock's Pyat Quartet, The Laughter of Carthage, Ada Palmer's Perhaps the Stars on dead tree and Alan Moore's Jerusalem in audio format) that... have all turned out to have very similar scope and themes, actually. Ow, my brain. 

Anyway, The Books of Jacob. Deep breath. 

At its heart, The Books of Jacob is a great big hunk of quality historical fiction of the Edward Rutherford/John Follett variety, except Eastern European instead of Anglocentric, and also including a tinge of magic realism in the form of a character, Yente, whose slow decline and psuedo-death we witness early on and then whose afterlife as a pseudo-ghost is woven deftly into the account of larger events in 18th century Ukraine/Poland, in which Catholic priests, Orthodox presbyters and Jewish rabbis all have their long-winded and deeply flawed say as they wander in and out of village life, agriculture and commerce. I was brought to recall bits of Eugene Vodolazkin's Laurus at times; at others the experience of reading The Books of Jacob made me really want to re-read Sjón's magnificent CoDex: 1962 for something like the fourth time, for CoDex 1962 could almost serve as a sequel to The Books of Jacob.

Anyway, Jacob, known to history as Jacob Frank but born with a completely different name just as almost everybody in this massive tome was. Jacob Frank... not so much presented himself as a reincarnation of the last guy a small population of the Jewish population of 18th century Poland and Ukraine thought was the Messiah as allowed everybody to continue thinking he was that Messiah after they'd all convinced themselves, is the only character whose perspective on things we don't get in these 900+ pages; Tokarczuk gives us multiple third person narrators with the points of view of Jacob's parents, cousins, grandparents (of whom the aforementioned Yente is one), wife, lovers, children and nephews, all of whom at various times try to break out of Jacob's orbit and live their own lives but are always drawn back into Jacob's tight little world of theological, ethical and existential problems as he tries to keep his small sect of True Believers from dying in various conflicts or from being executed in various pogroms and threatened pogroms as their mostly-Polish homeland is on the verge of being partitioned into three pieces, given to Russia, Prussia and Austria to rule when its hereditary rulers proved ineffectual against stronger neighbors' territorial ambitions and internal strife within its commonwealth, and if this sounds like a weak-ass description of the historical background of this novel that's my fault and not Tokarczuk's or Croft's; this is a huge bolus of unfamiliar history and culture for a Wyoming girl to try to get down and I wound up letting some of the details wash over me because there was so much else going on in the Frankist sect and among the assorted nobles, religious figures and occasional Turkish officials and merchants who at various times sheltered, aided, persecuted or barely tolerated the Frankists and their antics.

Among said antics being a checkered record of converting to other faiths as directed by Jacob or his predecessor Messiah and then, to curry favor with their new co-religionists, confirming some of the nastiest prejudices about the Jewish faith their new brothers in Allah or Christ (Orthodox OR Catholic, though it's mostly their mass-conversion to Catholicism that gets focused on here) have. Like the Blood Libel. Yeah. It's a warts-and-all portrait of the sect that Tokarczuk is going for here.

I had to put the book down for a while when I came to that, since I read it in the late spring of 2022 while a whole bunch of my own fellow citizens have decided it's in their interests to revive crap like the Blood Libel while also insisting that Jewish Space Lasers are responsible for Californian wildfires, etc. And, of course, my experience of reading this book was colored by the other stuff I was reading at the time, such as the second Pyat novel with its own Antisemitic smorgasbord of content (if you TL;DR'd my post on The Laughter of Carthage, I'll just say its main character is a Jewish Ukrainian who nevertheless decides Tsarist Russia was better Russia and, fleeing to the United States, becomes a traveling rabble rouser for the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s) and the finale of Terra Ignota with its Messianic character who, like Jacob Frank, had a tendency to glop up his polyglotism to the point where only his closest acolytes could understand him. And there were plenty of cosmic and theological speculations in Jerusalem, too, of course. I did not choose to combine these reading experiences deliberately; that's just how it worked out, but it was a very, very interesting combination that might have broken my brain forever except phew! I'm an atheist. Now more than ever.

But anway, The Books of Jacob. It's almost but not quite entirely unlike my prior Olga Tokarczuk experience, the delightfully odd and dark Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, a book I'm planning to read again as one of those that promises to be a fundamentally different book once you know Who Dunnit. I'm probably not going to re-read The Books of Jacob, though, because, having had to look up so many historical references and personages, I feel like I already read it twice. But everybody should read it at least once. Possibly without the company of the other books I had going on, but you do you, friends.

Ada Palmer's PERHAPS THE STARS

Blogger's note: This post concerns the fourth novel of a quartet so it might not make a lot of sense if you haven't read my posts on the other three books. 

 We are the instruments that carve the path from cave walls to the stars.

And so I come to the very satisfying end of Terra Ignota, Ada Palmer's astonishing and astonishingly weird and unexpectedly timely quartet of 18th century-styled science fiction novels,  with Perhaps the Stars. Suddenly, Palmer has decided that there is no time to waste and turns the story arc into the incident-crammed War Story it's always threatened to become, with one huge change: [REDACTED] is understood to be dead with his place taken up by a character who has never gotten a name and who has barely appeared in the prior three novels unless one has been watching for them carefully, but is this really a new character? Or is it actually somebody else? Or possibly somebodies else? We sort of find out later, but can we trust what we're told? These kinds of puzzles are why I like these kinds of books, and why I consider Ada Palmer to be the literary love child of Dorothy Dunnett and Gene Wolfe.

There are lots of reasons why I now consider this the most satisfying series ender I've encountered in yoinks. And yes, that includes the one you're thinking of. It might, over time, come to be considered on a par with that one, but then again, it might end up ranking as better, for me.

The most exciting thing I have to say going into this post is that, at long last, we get to start learning about that most mysterious seventh hive, which has only gotten passing mention so far: the mostly-Moon-dwelling Utopian Hive, which has been busily engaged in a generations-long project to terraform Mars as so many "small u" utopian types long to do in so many other science fiction stories. Unlike any of those I've read (with the sort-of-exception of the Expanse novels), though, this terraforming project has always dwelt in the shadow of war, because on Earth another hive, a bizarre hybrid of the good old Mitsubishi corporation we know from our reality and the good old Greenpeace organization that we also know from our reality, has been steadily buying up every scrap of land on Earth for the entire life of this post Church-War 25th century civilization. Land, the Mitsubishi Hive believes, is the ultimate repository of wealth, and an individual's power within the Hive is directly related to how much land they own -- but what happens when suddenly there is a whole new planet's worth of land available that is not really within Mitsubishi's easy grasp? Won't its Earthly holdings lose value? And won't that be a swell casus belli? To, uh, go with all the other casus belli we've encountered in these books? 

This background is of paramount importance in the other three books in that it is inextricably intertwined with the lot in life of primary narrator Mycroft Canner, who alleges that he committed his crimes at least partly to avert a deliberately planned war his adopted family was committed to provoking -- on the grounds of war being better now, while Mars is still a project and not yet a reality, than later, when a war would be an interplanetary disaster that could actually annihilate the entire human race. Despite the importance of all of this, though, Utopia has been a cypher, until Perhaps the Stars, in which we finally get to hear U-Speak spoken, encounter its vast diversity of U-beasts (strange and fanciful hybrids of genetic engineering and cybernetics) and get to know at least one actual character from that Hive. And his awesome invisible black lion!

It's about time!

Meanwhile, War. Of course, we have since seen that nothing so drastic or exotic as a sudden glut of Martian land on the market in the distant future is needed to touch off conflict in this world that has only managed to stay peaceful through a secret program of precisely targeted assassinations over its hundreds of years of history. The prior three novels have explored the much more mundane causes that will actually bring war to this idyllic-seeming world. All it has really taken is one jilted lover (and never mind they'd been jilted for a weird kind of faithlessness) with access to the right information and the will to expose that the leaders of this world have feet of clay, and the appearance on the world scene of a would-be dictator who might wind up a benevolent one but who really wants to take that chance except for fools and people who have been conquered by the dictator's personal anti-charisma?

And speaking of J.E.D.D. Mason, thank goodness for the Utopian Hive, and one character, Huxley, in particular. Huxley has been guarding our new/old narrator invisibly throughout the chaos, and in a moment of bared souls explained that there is a very good reason why J.E.D.D. Mason's sobriquet in their culture is The Alien; as far as Huxley is concerned, he is one:

 I believe we had no reason to assume First Contact would come to us in a ship of steel across the darkness that we happened to have senses tune to see. Why not a ship of flesh? Why not across a darkness as unknown to us as Starlight to the creatures of the deep sea? I believe a Being boundaryless and unfamiliar with time, accustomed to an existence where everything within Its perception is directed by Its thoughts, would find it very hard to understand our physics and experience, hard to explain Itself to us. And I believe that, if the first humans to teach this being language were Madame's it might well learn from them the word God.

For much of the novel, though, J.E.D.D. Mason is really just a J.E.D.D. Mason-shaped hole in the narrative, because an early salvo in the war was a masterful dual attack on the planet-wide system of flying cars, conveniently centrally controlled in order to maintain a truly impressive safety record, and the global communications system. Suddenly every human on earth has to confront the reality of Distance* again, and everybody is stuck where they were when the initial attack took place. J.E.D.D. Mason was in the Masonic capital city of Alexandria; most everybody else we're still concerned with (and mercifully a whole lot of characters that I have disliked thoroughly in the prior three novels have kind of dropped out of this one) is in the Alliance headquarters city-complex of Romanova on the island of Sardinia, or has been trapped elsewhere by circumstance or design. But without the ability even to make the 25th century's equivalent of a phone call, J.E.D.D. Mason is stranded and all but mute (remember, he speaks all languages and none, and only Mycroft Canner can understand him well enough to interpret his speeches for everybody else).

Meanwhile, Mycroft's fellow J.E.D.D.-fanboi and one of the series' enduring villains, Dominic Seneschal, made on J.E.D.D.'s suggestion the interim head of Mitsubishi since the previous one is under arrest for the crimes of the targeted assassination program that blew up and was exposed earlier in the series, is stuck in Japan, but that's not going to keep him from his idol. Seemingly the whole of Mitsubishi's resources have been bent to the single goal of "rescuing" J.E.D.D. Mason from Alexandria -- whether J.E.D.D. wants that or not -- and suddenly Mitsubishi has a huge and powerful naval force and, for all that the Hive owns most of the land on earth, suddenly controls the seas as well, commandeering other ships, interning their crews in prison camps or forcing enemy personnel to adopt one of a handful of other, rather ingenious means of guaranteeing their cooperation**, and generally terrorizing everybody. And that's not all!

A fact of this world that I've not talked much about before looms as potentially as big an issue for it as the existence and will of J.E.D.D. Mason, and that's the existence of a new type of human, created rather than born, very different from the standard model, known for reasons that I'm not going to get into here as a "Set-Set." Set-Sets are raised from infancy to interface directly with the intricate and omnipresent technological web that runs the world; for instance, two members of the family-unit that controls the global flying car system are Set-Sets as that is the only way a human being could manage the levels of complexity required to do that. Anyway, Set-Sets' biological senses are stunted in favor of the adapted ability to accept a much greater range of inputs via their interfaces with technology; their bodies are attenuated and weak. They're not regarded as cyborgs, but functionally, they are cyborgs. And a faction within this society is as angry about their existence as 21st century fundamentalist types are about abortion; to them the whole practice of raising Set-Sets is an abomination that should be outlawed and severely punished. And as Perhaps the Stars gets going, this faction, called the Nurturists, has greatly expanded its definition of what counts as a Set-Set. All of the people who grew up in Madame D'Auroet's brother, for instance, have been branded "Gender Set-Sets"*** -- but these, at least two of whom have grown up to lead or co-lead Hives, are not being targeted for "rescue" as they are to be regarded as irredeemable. They're to be put down.

Under cover of War, this can be pretty easily accomplished, they come to realize. If they can just get someone into proximity with the targets.

The other element that has really made this final volume of the Terra Ignota quartet stand out for me above the prior four, though, is none of the above. What stands out is its willingness -- indeed,  insistence on -- dealing with a fundamental question at the heart of science fiction that usually seems, very carefully and deliberately, to be ignored: is it worth it? Is the dream of space and discovering and settling other worlds, which is, after all, an experience that won't be open to us all or even to very many of us, worth the commitment of effort and resources and time and agony it would take to achieve? And, just because our ancestors thought so, or at least acted like they thought so, does that definitely bind us and our descendants to continuing in that costly endeavor? Life on earth is already no picnic, even in this idyllic 25th century, even before materiél and intellect and energy and, eventually, personnel that could be devoted to trying to improve the lot of humans already born and growing old and suffering and getting ill and making art and dying and mourning the dead... is diverted towards a dream that none of the billions from whom they're diverted will get to enjoy? Is Space the ultimate Sunk Cost Fallacy for the human race, at least as it now exists?

This tension is enacted as a secret war within the War that J.E.D.D. Mason terms "the Trunk War", the analogy describing the choice between exploring and colonizing Space or using our resources to make Earth better now for everyone as two great branches on a decision tree, each battling to become that tree's trunk. Utopia, of course, represents Space, and seems to be leading humanity in its direction with everybody's blessing,  but we discover in this last novel that many of the anomalies Mycroft and the gang have been encountering are very much due to the machinations of those who want Paradise on Earth Now. A whole Hive's worth of somebodies has been throwing incredibly subtle but devastating spanners into the works since even before the War began. Intrigue!

Only - need this be a zero-sum game, everybody realizes late in the novel? Doesn't the existence of J.E.D.D. and the Miracle Child Bridger and a bunch of cool stuff Bridger did before turning into Achilles maybe give everybody a chance at both? Especially since these mcguffins have put things like biological immortality for everyone very much within our reach? Which, wouldn't colonizing the stars be a lot less painful if we could attempt it as immortals instead of, for instance, sentencing several as yet unborn generations to living out their entire lives as passengers/cargo on spaceships, never even to know planetary life for even a moment?

As all of these thorny issues get careful consideration and occasional actual battle scenes occur, Perhaps the Stars attempts one more semi-innovation in genre fiction: making the transfer of power from one generation to the next an equal concern to all the other story elements; Mycroft is not the only major chess piece to be swept off the board for considerable periods of in-narrative time, and several key resolutions to crises are developed and executed by promoted pawns, as is emphasized in a fantastic instance of near-gloating when a narrator realizes that series villainess Madame's quartet-long plot to rule the world by bringing back Patriarchy was defeated by a whole bunch of, uh, decidedly not Patriarchs. And more explicitly, while 25th century society had already greatly empowered young people through things like creating a class of legislators that can only be minors but by giving the 25 Minority Senators the power of veto over any decision made by the Romanova Alliance Senate if all 25 of those Minor Senators agree, as "Peacefall" in its many forms begins the work of remaking society, the Minor Senators, who were raised with absolute faith in the institutions of their society and the infrastructure that made it a near-paradise and then watched their elders almost destroy it, get final say in how the perpetrators of the war are to make amends for what they destroyed. And the category of "perpetrators" includes both faction leaders and actual combatants, with even J.E.D.D Mason (himself still a minor while this whole epic takes place) sharing in the (incredibly fair and wholesome) sentence the young people mete out. Among the many, many ideas for thinking our way, as a species, out of our myriad of existential threats and dilemmas here back in the 21st century that Ada Palmer has suggested in this quartet, this last one -- empowering the kids to have a real say in how things are run -- is the one that makes me the most wistful, because probably the least likely ever to get implemented. And so I end this series and this post on a sigh. And the sinking feeling that I'm probably going to have to read this quartet again sometime.

Bravo!

*Personified by Palmer-as-Mycroft as the Greek god Poseidon, whose realm was the oceans, since it is the oceans that are the hardest for humans to cross and also most of the biggest stretches of distance we encounter, at least until we start thinking between planets or stars -- and by the way, brush up on your Greek and especially your Homeric mythology before starting these books, if you can, because this is a device Palmer/Mycroft just LOVES, just as the 18th century author/philosophers she and her characters look to as Authorities on Everything loved to do.

**A whole intriguing and imaginative thread in this narrative is how various factions come up with ingenious technological and sociological ways to mitigate the inherent cruelty of warfare. Some of them seem like they could actually be real someday, even if we don't ever get a Miracle Child who can wish things into existence. 

***There are lots of different kinds of Set-Sets already, based largely on how they're raised to understand the world that their interfaces show them, so this isn't quite as big a stretch as it first seems.

Indra Das' THE DEVOURERS (Narr by Shishur Kurup & Meera Simhan)

After spending what felt like months entangled in some very long 18th-century styled doorstop fiction, it's pretty refreshing to return to what mostly feels like a straight-up monster story, though there's a lot more going on in Indra Das' The Devourers than that, of course. 

The subject/object of the story has a dramatically weird entrance as a stranger approaches a lonely college professor, one of our twin narrators, Alok, with an arresting declaration -- "I am half-werewolf" -- and says he wants to tell the professor a story. His compelling announcement and first teaser serving of that story have an uncanny and hypnotic impact on Alok that seem more like the powers of a vampire than a werewolf, but as we soon learn, this Stranger sort of started self-identifying as werewolf for complex cultural reasons that started off when he saw,  in his third century of life, An American Werewolf in London. So, uh, buckle up, this is a strange'un.

The novel's overall premise takes more from  Interview with the Vampire, than from any werewolf story I've heard as The Stranger's tale unfolds over several intense encounters with Alok, but it goes Anne Rice one better. Or several - what if Louis were not merely one of Lestat's metaphorical children but his actual biological child by a human mother? And what if most of the story concerned that human mother's epic quest across the length and breadth of Mughal-era India to find her rapist (because of course he was) and give him a good talking-to? And that her traveling companion was one of the werewolf/rapist's ex-packmate, who is pursuing the rapist not out of a quest for justice or to help the newly-pregnant victim, but basically to berate the rapist for having sex with a human, and a female human at that, eww gross, that would be like if a human had sex with a chicken or something because humans are prey. I mean, it's already way more interesting than the pseudo-gothic whining of Anne Rice's sexy but self-pitying characters, right?

The story unfolds in two narratives, one told by Alok, chiefly in the form of intervals in which he tries and fails to make any headway in his relationship with the Stranger who has appointed Alok to transcribe and type a manuscript about the Stranger's shapeshifter people. As with the other narrative, of Cyrah, the Mughal rape victim, there is some sexual tension in Alok's scenes with the Stranger but that's really not the point of the story, any more than it is when we travel with Cyrah and her rapist's friend Gévaudon. Both stories are more concerned with the ineffability of the predators who have made humans their prey, while looking just like them, holding out as a tantalizing mystery, rather than a lore-established certainty, that these shapeshifters were once full humans and that the same transformations they've undergone can happen to Alok or Cyrah as well.

Or, perhaps, the Beasts can regain the humanity that they only think they've lost?

Of course, the Stranger could just be pulling Alok's leg and extorting free editorial services from him, a possibility which is also carefully kept in play as the two intertwined stories unfold.

As often works brilliantly with dual first-person narratives, the audio book edition's producers chose to use different narrators for the two stories, with Shishur Kurup giving Alok exactly the kind of precise diction and haltingly thoughtful speech we'd expect of a lonely college professor who maybe should be questioning his sexuality a little more carefully than he has been, while Meera Simhan gives Cyrah a forcefulness and, yes, bitchiness, that a character like hers would need to survive in a world that is already plenty hostile to a lone, uneducated Muslim woman who has had to turn to sex work in order to survive and has barely done so even before crossing the paths of three slavering monsters who would ordinarily just think of her as a midnight snack. If they are what they think they are. But even if they aren't, Cyrah would have been doomed without that strident willfulness Simhan gives to her every syllable. As her rapist, who claims to be Fenrir from the Norse pantheon just to make sure this story is weird enough, observes, his and Gévaudon's kind are to mere humans as human men are to human women: predators.

Yeah, it's a bit simplistic, but this is the 1650s in India. I mean, an early bit of Cyrah's account describes a partially completed Taj Mahal surrounded in scaffolding. 

Michael Moorcock's THE LAUGHTER OF CARTHAGE

 Do I hate myself? Sometimes I'm pretty sure I hate myself. Or at least the imp of the perverse sitting on my shoulder really hates me, because I had the terrific idea that now, while Ukraine is dealing with a Russian invasion/occupation effort and state legislatures all over the U.S. are trying their hardest to roll back every bit of social progress our country has made in my lifetime and before, I somehow decided it would be an interesting time to read the rest of Michael Moorcock's sprawling, challenging and really hard-to-handle Pyat Quartet, also known as Between the Wars, being the continuing first person account of pretty much the whole of the 20th Century by a narrator so unlreliable as to make Severian seem like Walter Cronkite.

I first encountered the character of Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski , aka Colonel Pyat, back in 2015, back when The Former Guy was just an annoying game show host and we still believed in things like the political norms we'd come to take for granted like peaceful transfer of power and presidents getting to nominate and confirm supreme court justices no matter at what point in their terms vacancies occurred. The first novel in the quartet, Byzantium Endures, took Pyat from his birth in Kyiv on January 1, 1900 (Julian calendar), through the Russian Revolution and a little beyond. It introduced us to the thoroughly unsavory (as in self-aggrandizing, lying, womanizing, alcoholic, cocaine-addicted, anti-semitic, racist, paranoid, etc.) figure, first as someone the author (Michael Moorcock's self-insert-stand-in) met late in Pyat's life in London and to whom the author promised to see Pyat's memoirs into print, sight unseen, sure they'd be fascinating. But as the fictionalized Moorcock takes great pains to explain to us in a vast prologue to the text of the novel, Pyat's memoirs were really just a mess of ramblings in multiple languages, newspaper clippings, blueprints for inventions he claimed to have come up with first and other messy and barely legible ephemera, i.e. we're already pretty annoyed by the very idea of Pyat before we see a page of the novel's actual text. Furthermore, Moorcock took even greater pains to create a text as a sort of afterword to give us a glimpse of what the fictionalized Moorcock had to work with to produce the work in our hands, and it's a masterpiece of the kind we'd expect more from Philip K. Dick than Michael Moorcock. I compared it in my original review to Confessions of a Crap Artist and to that I still hold. Jack Isidore, eat your heart out.

Volume 2, The Laughter of Carthage, picks up more or less right where Byzantium Endures left off, in about 1920. After a long ship voyage as an exile/refugee from Odessa to Constantinople in which Pyat has shared a cabin with the future mother of Eternal Champion Jerry Cornelius but established a torrid shipboard romance with a widowed Russian Baroness, Pyat lands in Constantinople and starts debauching himself, continuing to see his Baroness, who hopes he'll run away with her and her exquisite daughter to Berlin, but also finding a young Romanian sex worker who is a dead ringer for his childhood sweetheart, Esmé, Pyat takes a while to get back to his career as an inventor.

Before we know it, though, he is rescued/taken prisoner after almost getting to try out his flying machine, in which all the parts, including a fuel tank and propeller, are strapped onto a human being, somewhere in Anatolia. Pyat bullshits his way into getting a free ride back to Constantinople, where all he has are lady troubles and a healthy dose of paranoia that Carthage (his synechdoche for, confusingly, both the Jews and the Muslims and, for good measure, the Catholics -- basically everybody who isn't "Byzantium", which, as he established in the first novel, he considers to be, basically, Tsarist/White Russia and whomever else he can convince himself is Protestant and White enough to be worthy of continuing to bear the Torch of Civilization) has never stopped pursuing him in the form of Bolshevik spies. Before escaping Constantinople, Pyat has to do some unsavory tap-dancing to avoid getting reported to the local authorities as a pedophile, ending by complicating his situation still further by convincing the Baroness that "Esmé" is actually a spy in whose trap he is haplessly caught. As he plots to "rescue" Esmé, the Baroness plots to rescue him, and it's all vintage Pyat. Whatta jerk. But there's so much worse to come.

Within a year I would become so famous the matter of one small factory and an insignificant municipal airport would seem a petty concern indeed. I had been given the opportunity to conquer the entire new world with my genius. A strong, scientifically advanced America would be the most powerful country on Earth. Once celebrated here, I would automatically come to influence the world. Then at last Russia, my old spiritual Russia, could be rescued from the Bolshevik scavengers. The steppe would grow green and beautiful again; the wheat-lands would bloom, the forests retain their tranquil profundity and the new golden cities would arrive, the cities of reborn Byzantium.

Such are our man's thoughts as he escapes from his latest collapsed effort to make his fortune from his "genius" invention of a slightly better airship and the development of Memphis, TN as the airship capital of the U.S., if not the world, rescuing the American South from its economic woes endured since the Civil War. Alarm bells should be ringing at this. And they should ring even louder when I tell you this scene takes place in 1922. And that our man Pyat's favorite movie is Birth of a Nation.

That's right, Pyat's new path to fame, fortune and influence is gonna be as a traveling rabble rouser for the second version of the Ku Klux Klan (hilariously exposed and lampooned by Robert Evans and friends as a proto-Multi-Level-Marketing grift in this episode of Behind the Bastards. Indeed, this second volume of Moorcock's most despicable anti-hero contains a murderers row of main characters from that podcast, with even Old Shatterhands and his creator, Karl May, getting name checked here. We could almost call The Laughter of Carthage "Behind the Bastards: The Novel" except it was published way back in 1984, likely before anyone involved with that show was even born. But I mean, Pyat even found the White House "disappointing" compared to the Klankrest in Atlanta, GA). But first we have a charming interlude in Europe, in which Pyat spoils Esmé rotten in luxury hotels, going to movies and clubs in 1920s Rome where he rubs shoulders with lots of actual historical figures who eventually become close friends/supporters of one Benito Mussolini, of whom Pyat already approves, of course, and then makes a stop off in Paris, intending next to join Mrs. Cornelius in England but only after he's extracted some profit for his genius airship ideas which, of course, come to nothing when "Carthage" strikes again and bankrupts the nascent airship company he and several French speculators have formed, and his French partners have all naturally made poor, innocent Pyat the scapegoat and never mind that he was living entirely off money he borrowed from an old friend from his Odessa days who, of course, has a disgusting homosexual crush on Pyat (never mind that Pyat is himself quite comfortably bisexual, and his joyful reunion with a Russian Prince from the first novel quickly turns into an affair as passionate as what he continues to have with the underaged Esmé, whom he has convinced everybody is his sister) and is thus pretty much yet another avatar of "Carthage", and it was only the extravagance with which he spent and "invested" his borrowed money (mostly on cocaine) that convinced the French partners that he was sound enough to trust with their capital and credit in the first place... 

Anyway, soon he has to get out of France quick, but can't swing a trip to England yet OR afford passage for both Esmé and himself to his next destination, the USA, where he pretty much repeats his French adventure except this time it's down in Memphis, and instead of escaping to another country to try again with his airship schemes (which again have blown up through no fault of his own), he falls in amongst the upper echelons of the Ku Klux Klan, who  bring him aboard a fancy paddle steamer on the Mississippi to give a special briefing to the colorfully hooded and gowned elite of the KKK about the dangers of Bolsheviks, Muslims, Catholics and International Jewry from his first-hand knowledge. His remarks are so entirely to the Klan's liking that he gets booked for repeat performances all over the country in the company of a formidable and sexy-yet-mature woman who chaperones him about the nation and fucks his brains out in train cars and hotels from coast to coast while he spreads his message of Peace and Love but only if you're "Byzantium." Along the way, Pyat manages to continue to learn nothing until this, too falls apart and he now has the Invisible Empire on his tail, another set of enemies that should be pretty hard to square as "Carthage" but he kind of starts framing them that way in his head anyway because Pyat and then, wonder of wonders, he is once again rescued by Mrs. Cornelius, who made her own way from Constantinople but also got sidetracked into the USA as part of a dance troupe of British Beauties entertaining in vaudeville-type theaters up and down California with the vague hope of being Discovered and made into a Movie Star, which is where we leave her and Pyat, who is absolutely convinced that he can make her dreams come true and never mind his track record on bringing his own fantasies to reality. Hey, he's only 22.

Many reviewers have complained that this second volume of the Pyat Quartet is not as interesting as the first, and they have a point in that Byzantium Endures is set against one of the most dramatic backdrops 20th century literature had to offer: World War I and the Russian Revolution. It also gave us genuine pathos in the stories of Pyat's mother and their neighbors, including the sad fate of Esmé the First, who only ever wanted to become a nurse and save the lives of Ukraine's brave fighting men, but, in Pyat's absence while he was off fighting and getting lost and getting conscripted as an agent by both sides at various times, got herself raped multiple times when the triumphant Red Army invaded and did what conquering armies do best in the early days of conquest. The Laughter of Carthage continues with the painstaking research and recreation of bygone days that made the first volume even more special, but replaces the drama with mere movement -- a picaresque -- in which we watch Pyat comically misunderstand his place in the world, the nature of his companions, and, as I said, fails ever to learn from his experiences, choosing at every failure to simply blame it on "Carthage" and shake his fist at enemies who barely know he exists.

Where the book, like its predecessor, succeeds enough to be worth the comparative tedium, though, is how brilliantly it achieves Moorcock's primary goal in telling us his ultimate anti-hero story here in our mundane real world: helping its readers to feel at last like they understand how capital H Hate happens, how people who seem perfectly ordinary and might even be ok to have a beer with once in a while are actually monsters who think the only people who count as people and deserve to share the Earth are able-bodied, well-educated, fair skinned, Protestant, cocaine-snorting fascists like Maxim Pyatnitski. It's an understanding that isn't pleasant to have, but is necessary for us in this dumb century -- a care package full of survival tips from the dumb century that came before it. Anyway, I really just want to see what kind of ridiculous adventures Pyat has had -- or believes himself to have had, or expects us to believe he had -- before he winds up a cranky old fart running a junk shop in Portobello Road. According to the blurb for the third volume, Jerusalem Commands, he's going to Egypt next. I'm down.