Leo Vardiashvili's HARD BY A GREAT FOREST (Narr by Luke Thompson)

Combining elements of a classic fairy tale and a desperate defense strategy the author assures us has been an unfortunate necessity for his people for as long as their land has been settled, Leo Vardiashvili's first novel, Hard By a Great Forest is a devastating read, but one that is more than worth the emotional pain it induces.

The great forest of the title is both metaphorical -- the forest in which a witch awaits Hansel and Gretel and also in which Baba Yaga dwells in her famous chicken-legged hut -- and the all too real region of Ossetia. If you're like me, you'd only ever heard of Ossetia in 2008, when Russia and Georgia went to war over it, resulting in the creation of a partially recognized (by only five countries as of this writing) nation-state in an area that most everybody else still considers to be part of the nation of Georgia.

That war and an earlier civil war fought in Georgia not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 form the very intensely still-felt background informing everything the novel's characters do and feel in every moment, even before our protagonist arrives in Tblisi in search of missing family members. 

Saba Sulidze-Donauri (and really, I urge you to listen to this novel in audio book form if you can; the proper nouns are amazing. Luke Thompson is English but he must have had help from the author or someone) is the last member of his little family to return to Georgia, from which he, his father Irakli (see?) and his older brother Sando fled during the civil war in the 1990s. The mother of the family, Eka, was supposed to come with them, even though she had divorced Irakli some time ago, but was forced to stay behind. Saba and Sandro were just old enough to know something had gone wrong but not what, and spent the rest of their childhoods in their eventual new home of London asking Irakli (they almost never call him "Dad" or "Father"; Eka, too is only ever Eka) where Eka was and when would she be joining them.

Irakli, meanwhile, worked ridiculously long and hard hours at jobs in their new city, leaving his sons to all but raise themselves, trying to earn the money to get Eka out of Georgia but his plans for achieving this never succeed, usually through trusting the wrong people to help him make it happen; Eka has died without ever seeing any of them again long before the events of the novel begin.

As things get started, we learn that Irakli has, after a lifetime of trying and failing to make the trip, finally traveled to Georgia  -- and has disappeared. As, it seems, has Sandro, who followed Irakli sometime later, trying to pick up the trail, only to himself fall out of contact with Saba, who feels he has no choice but to follow his family into his homeland, confronting the mysteries of his family members' fates and a lot of painful memories. 

The Tblisi to which Saba returns is the evolving tourist destination of 2015, experiencing some unique growing pains in the aftermath of a famous flood that, among other things, destroyed the city's zoo and let loose a host of exotic animals, mostly to grim fates, but occasionally also to amusing and heartwarming scenes, like when a hippopotamus named Begi, whose dilemma is depicted in the novel, caused a traffic jam and was helped to safety by a group of caring citizens. A Bengal tiger named Artyom has another cameo in a tense and retroactively kind of funny scene in the old botanical gardens when Saba finds himself pursuing a clue there.

The humor in that scary scene is communicated to us by a taxi driver of sorts named Noldar, who spotted Saba looking bewildered in Tblisi's airport, chivvied him into hiring his cab (an old Volga that becomes itself almost a character) and then, for good measure, talks Saba into staying in his very informally rented out spare bedroom. Noldar and his wife, Keti, adopt Saba almost immediately, but it's not all smiles; they are refugees from Ossetia, who were separated from their little daughter when their home came under attack. Noldar holds out hope that the girl is still alive; Keti maintains otherwise, and has forced Noldar to buy a cemetery plot and erect a gravestone so they have something to visit on the anniversaries of their loss. The broken state of their family is still palpable as they team up to help Saba try to repair what's left of his.

Noldar is a gruff old bear of a man, loud, hard drinking and -- vitally necessary in a novel this tragic -- funny. His version of Saba's encounter with Artyom delights many, including the reader, who witnessed it happening a bit differently than how Noldar loves to tell it.

Saba gets answers, visits old haunts, is haunted by a host of ghosts from his past, is hunted by a sinister detective who seems weirdly fixated on Saba's "case" and is possibly even more interested in finding Irakli than Saba is, encounters other vaguely menacing figures hostile to his mission, and has some touching -- and gut-wrenching -- reunions. It's all told with skill, immediacy and emotional honesty; in other words, keep some tissues handy if books ever make you cry.

You may also find that you really want to visit Tblisi, which sounds like a fascinating city. Just, if you go, know that tragedy is everywhere and memories close to the surface, so be kind. 

Of course that's true everywhere, though, isn't it?

Roberto Bolaño's 2666: The Part About Amalfitano (tr. by Natasha Wimmer)

(Blogger's note: this is Part 2 of a [probably] five-part post about Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Click here to read Part 1, if you haven't already) 

This entry is where it's going to be a bit absurd to be devoting a post to each of the five parts, as "The Part About Amalfitano" is a whopping 68 pages long, but Roberto Bolaño packed a lot into those 68 pages of 2666.

We learn right away a thing or two about our hero, that Oscar Amalfitano (a Chilean professor with an Italian name to go with the mysterious German writer with the Italian name) whom the Critics snubbed but whose help and company they accepted in northern Mexico as the closest thing they were going to get to a Native Companion in the David Foster Wallace sense: that he has a daughter, and that the weird book of poems about geometry that was hanging from the clothesline at his house was there for rather more interesting reasons than we might have suspected. Also, he has an entertainingly eccentric ex-wife. And he might be a semi-closeted gay man with a lot of internalized self-loathing about that. Which the Critics kind of suspected, but for the wrong reasons.

First, the daughter. Rosa, by the time the Critics come to Santa Teresa, is a teenaged girl who has been raised almost exclusively by her father, who seems to have done a creditable job in that she has grown up into a competent and capable young woman with a healthy social life and a bottomless well of patience to draw on as she gets sucked more and more into the role of housekeeper in her father's book-infested household. Her mother left when she was just a baby, came back once when she was about ten years old, and both times left her without saying good-bye. She has a half-brother, her mother's little son by some man other than Amalfitano, somewhere in the world, probably Europe, whom she seems unlikely ever to meet. And also, because her mother was Spanish, Rosa has a European passport, while her father's is South American, meaning when they travel together they have to go through separate lines at airports' Customs and Immigration areas, resulting in a few slightly traumatic scenes in both of their pasts. Rosa is also, of course, just the right age to be targeted by the serial killer whose existence was only hinted at in "The Part About the Critics" but is started to emerge as a full-blown matter for concern in "The Part About Amalfitano." Gosh, I can't imagine why...

The geometry/poetry book is a tome that turned up in one of Amalfitano's many boxes of books when he moved from Barcelona, where he'd held a faculty position on a contract that ran out right around the time he met an appealing woman professor from the university in Santa Teresa and let her recruit him. He can't account for its existence in his collection at all, has never been to Santiago de Compostela, let alone to its bookstore whose label is on its cover, claims to know next to nothing about the poet who wrote it, one Rafael Dieste, who was an actual person and not a Bolaño creation. As I'll discuss in a moment, Amalfitano, with Bolaño's help, might be obscuring a more personal connection to this poet from us, but for the moment we must simply accept that he has no idea why he owns a copy of Testamento Geometrico (not a real book, but similar to a maybe-real book*). He has no intention of actually reading it, nor can he persuade Rosa to give it a try, so he does what any self-respecting Chilean-sea-bass-out-of-water would do, he uses it to recreate a Marcel Duchamp "Readymade"**, in which a geometry textbook was hung from a clothesline and exposed to the elements. Amalfitano decides to do the same with his unwanted poetry book, and expresses hopes that the book, full of idealizations about abstractions about the world, will learn something about the real world, or perhaps that the wind riffling its pages will learn something about geometry, and thus about the artificial structures it blows around and through in cities like Santa Teresa.

As for the poet, Dieste, while the dates of Dieste's actual life don't really match up, I can't stop thinking about the possibility that Dieste could be the poet with whom Amalfitano's wild thing of a wife, Lola, becomes obsessed to the point of ditching her husband and baby daughter to go off and hatch a screwball plan to break The Poet out of a Spanish mental hospital and begin an itinerant lifestyle with him in France and have his baby. Despite The Poet being gay. Now, since I know nothing at all about Rafael Dieste, I don't know if he was gay or if he spent time in a mental hospital -- it doesn't seem, from a few minutes googling, that either was true of him, but I kept running into articles in Galician and my straight up Spanish is terrible, so I'm not prepared to make a firm statement about what I found. HOWEVER...

If Dieste and The Poet are the same person, that would be one reason right there for Amalfitano to have a subconscious hostility toward Dieste's book, of a kind that would let him justify mistreating it as an homage to Duchamp***. His wife's obsession with The Poet ruined his family, after all.

BUT... 

Amalfitano may have a hand in all this himself. For while Lola insists that she met The Poet long ago and even had a one-night-stand with him at a party hosted by "the gay philosopher" with whom The Poet then lived (and which the philosopher and two other friends allegedly watched), Amalfitano's version of the backstory to her obsession is very different: she had never heard of The Poet before Amalfitano introduced her to The Poet's work. Lola is a free spirit, to say the least, and very liberal with her embroideries on the truth, and is perfectly capable not only of appropriating another's story as her own but on embellishing the hell out of it, which then brings up the question: since the alleged sexual encounter with The Poet can't actually have happened with Lola, could it have actually been Amalfitano's story originally? One of which he is deeply ashamed, as his extensive internal dialogue (we'll get to that) with himself, laden as it is with expressions of internalized homophobia, strongly suggests?

Did I mention there's a lot packed into these 68 pages? There's a lot.

But so, some more about Lola. We get her whole back story before we've learned anything, really, about Amalfitano or his daughter, via a series of rambling and unfiltered letters she sent to Amalfitano during her rampages through Spain and France. She is a deeply unreliable narrator so it's impossible to tell what, if anything, is true, but these letters are some of the most entertaining storytelling in all of 2666. Lola has no shame, nor much sense of self-regard; she doesn't mind looking filthy or being used as a prostitute or sleeping rough in a cemetery, will tell any lie she needs to in order to achieve a goal and comes up with some whoppers. I would read a whole novel about Lola. But I'll take what I can get.

Later on, after Lola has sashayed into the sunset and Rosa has grown into a teenager, Amalfitano has developed some odd habits that may well grow out of his internal issues with regards to The Poet, whether or not The Poet is Dieste: he's started making strange geometric doodles in which he tries to visually map the relationshps between various philosophers and other famous thinkers, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Jacques Lacan and Doris Lessing and including both Harold and Allan Bloom. And he's started hearing a voice in his head that claims to be his long-dead grandfather, but later admits merely to being his father. And his head-father is obsessed with boxing (which will be a big part of the next book "The Part About Fate") with the idea that all Chileans are homosexuals (except dad mostly says "faggot" because dads gotta dad) and that he, Amalfitano probably is one, too, and dad's feelings about that possible fact are conflicted. Twice in this section someone muses about the idea that madness is contagious; with these aural hallucinations it seems that Amalfitano has either caught it from his wife, or might have been the Patient Zero in this relationship. This section, after all, starts with him asking himself a few rhetorical questions about why the hell he's even in Santa Teresa.

Meanwhile and elsewhere in Santa Teresa, they keep finding dead bodies of teenaged girls and young women in vacant lots near the edge of the desert, because 2666 gotta 2666. And while Rosa is mature for her age and very capable, she sure tends to get home late a lot...

One last bit of interest, here, though it may be nothing. We get to see a bit of the true relationship between Amalfitano and the son of the Dean of the university, Miguel Antonio Guerra -- a rather unpleasant young man with a habit of going to rough clubs in the city and pretending to be gay, the better to pick fights, and whom the Critics in "The Part About the Critics" at first suspected of being Amalfitano's highly inappropriate paramour. Guerra seems intended to be an early red herring candidate for being The Killer in that he is the only person we've encountered for who actively seeks out violence and goes armed.****

And... I still don't know what to make of Amalfitano's Part-ending dream in which Boris Yeltsin "the last of the Communist philosphers" (would Yeltsin, who presided over the fire sale of state assets to a bunch of would-be oligarchs that allowed them to become actual oligarchs, agree to this title, I wonder?) reveals to him the true economic formula of our times, which is apparently "supply+demand+magic" where magic is probably actually just advertising, or, as Amalfitano reckons magic to be "epic and also sex and Dionysian mists and play," which sounds like advertising to me and now I'm thinking once again about one of my favorite films of all time, based on a novel by one of my favorite writers, the blisteringly awesome Generation P***** (which, actually, prominently features one Boris Yeltsin in its phantasmagoria) and I can think of no better way to end this post and this section of 2666 than by embedding the film in its entirety here, just to be stupid, but really, you should just fire up YouTube on an actual television and bask in its glory properly (I got to see it on the big screen and chat with its director for a bit afterwards because once upon a time I got to do awesome things like go to the Toronto International Film Festival). Go forth and marvel at the film that predicted Deep Fakes by more than a decade, my lovelies!

And then watch this space for more 2666, coming very soon.

*As in it's hard to tell. One can google Dieste's Nuevo Tratado del Paralelismo, and get a few hits that even show a charmingly worn copy in a photograph, complete with a table of contents, but since most of the sites that link to it are actually dedicated to 2666, I'm not sure if it's a real book either. I mean, I myself own a hoodie that celebrates my "visit" to Oakland, CA's entirely fictional Telegraph Records from Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue, after all. But clearly, Rafael Dieste sounds like an interesting man and an interesting poet I look forward to learning more about someday.

**Kind of a spiritual ancestor to Yoko Ono's "Instructions" maybe?

***Who, by the way, entitled his work exposing a geometry book to the elements the Unhappy Readymade, and by the way, Duchamp didn't actually do this to a book but told his sister to do it. She did, and later made a painting of the book after it had been exposed. Only this painting of the original project survives now.

****Of course, I think we've already had a glimpse of the person who will be determined is the most likely suspect in the killings, in another bar, in "The Part About the Critics", where Espinoza drinks alone the day they've dropped off Liz. All Espinoza notices about him is that he is very tall, tall like Archimboldi is said to be just exceedingly ridiculously tall, but this man seems too young to be Archimboldi. Is this [REDACTED]? As usual, I don't effing remember if this is a dot that gets connected or not.

*****Based on Victor Pelevin's terrific and criminally underappreicated novel Homo Zapiens. It's a very faithful adapatation.

Doctor, Doctor: James Goss' THE BLOOD CELL

And so now my first cycle through the extant Doctors as of this writing is complete with this, The Blood Cell, a novel featuring the Twelfth Doctor (hooray!) and Clara (eh). Do please pardon me while I have some feelings.

OK.

The Blood Cell, part of an early spate of novels featuring this duo -- officially published in September 2014, it appears to have hit NetGalley before most of us had even seen a full episode with Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. And yet author James Goss had figured out exactly what the Twelfth Doctor was going to be like, and did so long before the TV writers seem to have done! And this is not to say that Goss just binged on episodes of In the Loop and projected Malcolm Effing Tucker onto the character of the Doctor; he got a lot more right, too, as I'll discuss in a moment.

Nor is this the only thing to admire about The Blood Cell, which also features two other things that I just love when they are done well: a locked room mystery, and an unreliable narrator. I mean, who's been peeking at my Christmas list, right?

The Blood Cell opens in an extremely high security prison, wherein a prison official is interrogating the newest inmate. There is some nice ambiguity in the first page or so as to which of them might be the Doctor, and I'm going to try really hard not to spoil that for you, but...

One of the things that really makes the Twelfth Doctor shine is his perfect self-assurance, which is so perfect that the man genuinely has nothing left to prove. He so absolutely does not care what anyone else thinks of him that he is perfectly free to disappear into the roles he assumes, with utter conviction, even if they are the lowliest of figures (yes, I'm thinking of "The Caretaker" here). He doesn't mind being completely misunderstood, even reviled, and that aspect of his character, which I tend to think is unique to this iteration of the Doctor (but am willing to discuss*) really shines in this novel. Everybody but Clara (and this is a fairly Clara-lite story, though the bits that do have her are way less annoying than I'd ever have suspected they would be) is working under the misapprehension that the Doctor is a truly reprehensible figure, with a past not so much checkered as nearly completely black. And he just rolls with it.

Meanwhile, of course, mysterious stuff is happening. Dead and broken bodies start turning up while the prison -- which is on an asteroid at the edge of a star system -- and its cobbled-together-by-the-lowest-bidders operating systems start going on the fritz in ways big and small. What's behind it? Who's hiding secrets? Who's to blame for all the chaos? Is it the same person or persons to blame for the bodies?

Some of the answers are telegraphed from the very beginning, but there are still some nifty surprises, and the final act is genuinely horrifying, making The Blood Cell yet another great page-turner of a Doctor Who novel.

And so the Aribtrary & Mercurials do shift a bit, with, for instance, Clara debuting on the companion list at a much higher spot than she might have otherwise. When she's good, she's very very good, and she's at her best -- challenging, a bit mysterious, no-nonsense, executing her tasks perfectly -- here.

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds
Una McCormack
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss

James Goss
Terrance Dicks
Gary Bulis
Mark Morris
Jonathan Morris
Justin Richards
Gary Russell
Keith Topping

Doctors:

Twelfth

Ninth
Sixth
Eleventh
Third
Second
War
Fourth
Eighth
Seventh
Fifth
First
Tenth

Companions:

Ace
Amy
Romana II
Rory
Jamie

Ben and Polly
Tegan
Jo
Barbara
Clara

Nyssa
Samantha
Martha
Bernice
Vicki
Adric
Rose
Peri
Ian

Next, I'm reading one of the "extras" -- in this case, the War Doctor novel I mentioned last time. Will he hold on to his place just above the universally beloved Fourth Doctor in my A&M rankings? Tune in soon....

*But really, can you see the First Doctor, say, cleaning up vomit with that pink sawdust stuff? The Tenth? The Seventh? Any of them? No.

Howard of Warwick's THE DOMESDAY BOOK (NO, NOT THAT ONE)

If your favorite bit of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was phrases like "the ships hung in the sky in exactly the way that bricks don't", have I got a book for you.

If you love the Blackadder series but don't think it was quite farcical enough, have I got a book for you.

If you love the History Channel's drama Vikings but think the characters depicted aren't stupid or violent enough, have I got a book for you.

If you love The Hallelujah Trail but wish it could have been set in the days of the Norman Conquest of England, have I got a book for you.

Howard of Warwick, famed for the Brother Hermitage books, a series of comic medieval mystery novels I'm definitely going to have to have a look at sometime, is your man, and The Domesday Book (No, Not That One) is your book. Set in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings and featuring a ridiculous cast of historical and made-up figures, it's a deeply silly read that can easily be described in one choice excerpt:

From the north of Wisbech a cart load of Vikings. From the south a cartload of Normans. In the middle a band of wounded Saxons riding hell-for-leather. Well, riding as fast as most of their injuries would allow, which was actually pretty slow.

The Vikings have been dispatched on, of all things, a rescue mission; the Normans on one of capture; the Saxons, including a man of high repute wounded in the eye-or-thigh, are the targets of both. Because, you see, the knight who triumphantly brought King Harold's body to William the Conqueror's tent after the Battle of Hastings brought the wrong body, but this was not noticed until a lot of crowing and woofing had been done, and now the demented and homicidal William is demanding the real thing, loudly and violently... but in complete secrecy. Of course.

The story is mostly told from the points of view of two Saxons, Mabbut, drafted to act as a local guide for the Normans even though he's not really ever been to England, having grown up in France in the mistaken belief that his family are hostages (actually, his parents just like France better); and Siward, a village idiot and "filth man" kidnapped by the Vikings for the same purpose, even though he's never been a mile or two from home. Hilarity, mostly in the form of death threats and impatience with ignorant rustics, ensues in both storylines.

It's all deeply silly, though not quite in that Monty Python way you're probably hoping for. There's fun to be had here, but the fun is mostly for history nerds, I suspect.

I am one of those, so I laughed, often.

Doctor, Doctor: Jonathan Morris' DOCTOR WHO: FESTIVAL OF DEATH

First and foremost, let us contemplate the glorious awesomeness of the title: Festival of Death. Is that not the pulpiest pulp that ever pulped a pulp? Even before we throw in the goofiest of Doctors, Number Four, and his robot dog, K-9, and his best straight-man-cum-Time-Lady, Romana?

Then the reader quickly realizes that author Jonathan Morris was rather more ambitious about this project than these pulp promises portend (heh), because this is a proper time travel story of the kind that modern fans like to refer to as "timey-wimey"; even as the TARDIS crew arrives at the setting for this story (about which more anon) they come upon the aftermath of a terrible disaster -- and crowds of people clamoring to express their gratitude to the Doctor, Romana and K9 for saving them.

But so, look at the cover art, here. Look at the expression on Tom Baker's face. Isn't that exactly how a person reacts when he's congratulated for deeds of derring do he hasn't performed yet? Um, whut. And yes, you could say that he should maybe be used to this, being a time traveling hero and all, but generally he and his friends are locked into the progress of a linear narrative as soon as the TARDIS lands because they thus become "part of a chain of events," so I say he is legit stunned, here.

Festival of Death really, really wants to be the perfect Fourth Doctor novel, and really could have been except for how hard its author tried to make it so. There is so much plot crammed into this novel that there's really not room for anything else, but Jonathan Morris had to cram in as much as he could of what he understands the Fourth Doctor to be all about -- namely the oeuvre of one Douglas Adams -- so that the reader is constantly being distracted by all the rib-digging cleverness of recycled Adamsiana (there is even a character named Hoopy, for Bob's sake), to the detriment of her being able to enjoy the plot. This is a terrible shame because it's quite a good and clever plot, one that sends the TARDIS crew back into their own time stream many times over, so that they are having constantly to avoid meeting themselves and destroying the Web of Time. Which is awesome.

Equally awesome is the setting: a hundred-plus spaceship pile-up crash, trapped in a hyperspace bypass (sigh) and turned into a tourist attraction called G-Lock (short for "gridlock"). Which tourist attraction has become a bit old hat and is seeing a decline in visitors until a mad scientist shows up to put his demented life's work in motion to revitalize the G-Lock's reputation and economy. Which demented life's work allows tourists to lie down in a coffin and have, not merely a near-death experience, but an actual death experience, and then come back forever awed and changed by it.

So this should be a great Doctor Who novel, but it winds up merely being a good one. My assessment of this one might change on subsequent re-readings, which this intricate and crazy plot kind of cries out for, but that might not ever happen because to re-experience the plot I'll have to re-experience all the eye-rolling, and who wants to do that when so much other fun fiction yet beckons?

And yes, some of it by Jonathan Morris, who is going to be impossible to avoid because he's written a great deal of Doctor Who for every medium but television, including quite a lot of Big Finish audio plays, some of which I have already heard and enjoyed so... Hmm. But for now, my Arbitrary and Mercurial Author Ranking after Festival of Death is:

Alastair Reynolds
Mark Gatiss
Terrance Dicks
Jonathan Morris
Justin Richards
Keith Topping

But my A&MDR is unchanged:

Ninth

Twelfth

Sixth

Third

Eleventh

Second

War

Fourth

Eighth

Seventh

Fifth

First

Tenth

As for companions, I'd forgotten just how much I like Romana II. She's right there after Evelyn with Donna and Jo.

Now, onward to a Fifth Doctor novel, which I've already chosen, and about which I am super excited. Stay tuned!

Gene Wolfe's THE LAND ACROSS

Gene Wolfe novels should come with a set of cheat codes, I sometimes think.* For The Land Across (a literal translation of the storied place name of Transylvania, kind of, except I think a better translation of that name would probably be The Forest Across, but hey), the text would then be full of useful hints embedded in the text like "this is probably Dracula" and "whoa, do you think that's the disembodied hand doing stuff again?" and "hey, dummy, if you haven't guessed, this guy's name pretty literally means town of the Count so he might also be Dracula or a close relative."

So yeah, in lots of ways, The Land Across is Gene Wolfe's Dracula story. And that's reason enough to run and go get it right away, right there. But there's more.

The Land Across starts out threatening to seem like a Kafka pastiche/homage. Our (as usual, unreliable) narrator is (supposedly) a travel writer who has decided to write the definitive guidebook on a tiny, unnamed, formerly Communist Central or Eastern European country that no one from the West has really visited yet (damned hipster!) but who gets arrested on an unknown and never explained charge right at the country's border, whisked off his train and forcibly billeted on a local married couple whose lives are to be hostage to his cooperation and good behavior. For good measure, the town (called Puraustays, a name I'm still reckoning with) has no street names and these nameless streets are not exactly straight and there's not much in the way of transportation aside from the good old shank's pony unless you're the cops, which, get ready for the cops in this story by the way.

And that's before things get weird. Because remember, Dracula is involved, although to what degree the individual reader will perceive his involvement/to what degree Dracula is supposed to actually be involved is, I think, going to vary wildly with the individual reader and the amount of interpretive work, discussion and digging he/she is willing to do for the sake of seeing just what the hell ol' Pringle's Face is up to this time.

Soon our narrator is involved in several efforts to unravel several conspiracies, some involving the police/secret police, some involving allegations of Satanism, some involving a long-ago murder that may have had direct consequences on our daffy, impatient narrator's own personal life, some involving the creation, dissemination and marketing of various voodoo supplies, and possibly some involving the overthrow of the government, or of Dracula, or of both because Dracula and the government might well be one and the same, or maybe Dracula is trying to stage a coup d'etat? Maybe? Kind of?

Further confusing matters is a whole new level of Wolfe messing around with language; if the reader is to believe the surface interpretation of the narrative, our narrator is an American abroad, writing in English for an American audience and just doing his best, as he relays the speech of the characters he has encountered in his adventures, to convey the flavor of their speech and the effect said speech has on his doubly-translating brain. The other characters mostly talk in their own language or German, and our narrator has tried to preserve the cadence, word choice and order of their speeches, resulting in things like "that would be most good" instead of "fine", for instance. That's a paltry example of what is saturating this novel and making it a strange read even before the dual ideas of the narrator not being who he claims at all and of machine translation are introduced. We might, in other words, be reading an extensive propaganda piece, imperfectly translated into English by a mystical or mechanical gadget. Oy.

Then there is a whole 'nother theme of possession. We meet one important character who, it turns out, is an exorcist, and lots of passages might sneak by the inattentive reader until he or she realizes that our protagonist doesn't always seem to be in control of himself, fearing, for example, to fall asleep at one point because he might shoot the lady he's in bed with if he does. Um, whut? But you know, what's a voodoo/vampire tale without a little of that here and there?

So, big surprise, this looks like another book that is going to reward careful re-reading. Just like all the rest of Wolfe's stuff. I'd better start researching longevity therapies, because I need a whole lot of time yet. Hurry up with those cheat codes, children.

*And if you think that would spoil the fun, well, don't look at the cheat codes, dur. Cheat codes aren't for everyone. Cheat codes are for people who want to experience the game's story fully but who lack the manual dexterity/time/skill to jump through all the hoops and overcome all the impediments (driving levels are my Achilles' heel, personally) to get to the end in their own lifetimes. Or who have a lot of other books to get through before the bucket at the end of the list gets kicked, yo. But yes, I like figuring some stuff out for myself also. So I took great pleasure in SPOILER ALERT seeing the possible metacommentary inherent in the name of one of the novel's many cafes, Cafe Tetrasemnos, being as it's located near the Church of St. Barachisius. Tetrasemnos basically would mean "four revered things" and St. Barachisius was martyred for refusing to worship four things: the sun, the moon, fire and water as the King of Persia commanded. I haven't had that much fun with researching weird religious ish since my first time reading Foucault's Pendulum, yo.

C.S. Harris' WHEN GODS DIE

Old Yellow Eyes is back. Well, this is Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, whom we first met in What Angels Fear, and not Lt. Data, but I still demand that Brent Spiner play the guy in the inevitable film adaptation.

In When Gods Die, Devlin, he of the startling yellow eyes that give him supernaturally awesome night vision (note: my grandmother had yellow eyes, truly yellow, like a freaking tub of fresh butter yellow, and her night vision was crap, but hey) and the, I dunno, Spock ears that give him super hearing as well, has landed in the middle of another murder mystery, involving another famously luscious young beauty, but this time he's not the prime suspect. Oh no.

The prime suspect this time is the about-to-become Prince Regent of England, George Hanover, son of the mad George III, who has a certain way with the ladies despite being a fat, flatulent git, as Blackadder would tell you:


Am I really going to throw in a Blackadder the Third clip every time I read a Regency novel? Yes, yes, I probably am.

Someone passed George a note at a musical evening in Brighton. Supposedly, one Guinevere, Lady Anglessey, a buxom black-haired bombshell he's had his eye on for a while. Only when he arrives at the secret rendezvous, she is half out of her dress, provocatively posed, and, as "Prinny" realizes after he wakes up from either a drunken stupor or a drugged one, dead as disco with a jeweled dagger sticking out of her back.* Yeah, it's that classic murder mystery chestnut, the (presumably) innocent dude who wakes up next to a dead hooker, except, you know, these are aristocrats so it's not quite so sordid. Or is it?

Devlin of the Yellow Eyes**, who is of course also in Brighton with the rest of the Quality, is immediately drawn into the effort to cover it up find someone else to blame it on solve the case. A case which winds up involving everything from latter-day Jacobites hoping to re-enact the Gunpowder Plot (but without the fail, thank you very much) to a strange heirloom necklace once given by a Welsh witch to a certain James Stuart (aka James II) and a century or so later passed on to Devlin's mother, who supposedly drowned wearing it when Devlin was eleven but suddenly this very same necklace turns up around the neck of the corpse of Lady Anglessey????

It's all a perplexing and intricate mystery, and a very satisfying one.

Overall, then, When Gods Die is a pretty brisk and romantic and adventurous fun once again, though if I have real complaints they would be 1) Too many sexytimes with Devlin and Kat Boleyn, his actress-lover who can't marry him because of REASONS OKAY and 2) Too little Lovejoy and Tom. But perhaps these will be redressed in future novels in the series?

One continues to hope...

*And yeah, trigger warning again. Not quite as much violence against women this time around but it's still a bit rough. Ditto the outrageous sexism Harris is hell-bent on presenting in all its In the Company of Men caliber nastiness. This is leavened by passages that explain why the upper class sexist assholes that keep seizing center stage are dead wrong, but still, prepare to spend a good bit of your time being kind of outraged. But that's historical fiction, the genre that really seems to be all about how much it has sucked to be a woman throughout history. Sigh.

**Seriously. We are reminded of his eye color every few pages, it seems like. At least once a chapter. But since all the chapters are at most six pages long (always ending with a drama button), yeah, every few pages.

C.S. Harris' WHAT ANGELS FEAR

First off: trigger warning: this book contains lots and lots of conversations about rape and necrophilia and violence against women in general. Not for everybody; barely for me.

This is another one I poached off my mother's wish list when I got her an ebook reader for her birthday/Mother's Day. She has good taste in diversions, my mother, so when she wishes for a book it's usually something I'm gonna wind up wanting to read, too.

What Angels Fear, the first of a nine-books-and-probably-counting mystery series set during the Georgian era, is certainly diverting, especially in its choice of hero, one Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, whom I would describe as half Francis Crawford of Lymond, half Richard Sharpe, in that he is a larger-than-life aristocrat who is also a veteran of a particularly horrific tour of duty in the Napoleonic wars. But with, you know, all but bionic senses. Dude hears and sees really, really well, you guys.

Also much like Lymond, he spends most of his first novel working under a cloud of suspicion: a beautiful and somewhat famous young actress was found brutally raped and murdered -- or, actually, murdered then raped, as it turns out -- in a church, the corpse still in possession of one of St. Cyr's distinctive duelling pistols. Justice in pre-Regency England being what it is -- constables are paid a bonus of forty pounds for every conviction, for instance -- everyone seems to regard that coincidence as enough to convict him, and soon our man is on the run and his own only hope to clear his name and remain free.

St. Cyr's books do not look to much resemble Lymond's in any other respect, though, nor are they meant to. These look to be straight up cozy mysteries that just happen to be set in a historical setting; dynastic/political struggles are an element of the plot, but the intricacy and subtlety and dazzling erudition of a Dorothy Dunnett would be out of place here. Instead, we have the single, straightforward plot, full of action, description, and a tour of Seedy London with a street urchin named Tom as St. Cyr's and our guide. And a woman named Kat who is an actress/courtesan just like the victim was, who just happens to be St. Cyr's ex-lover and  has rather a lot to do with the murder so is very torn about exactly how much she should help our hero.

What's really refreshing about this book, though, is its sort-of antagonist, the investigator officially in charge of this murder, Sir Henry Lovejoy. Where a lot of wrongly-accused-man-must-find-real-killer tales feature our innocent hero being stalked by boobs (or by outright enemies of the hero who are hell-bent on seeing him hang/fry/rot in jail), What Angels Fear features a magistrate-cum-detective who is as committed to finding the truth as is St. Cyr. Sir Henry Lovejoy is a former businessman who chose to become a magistrate to make up for his childlessness, not in the sense of filling a void in his own life, but in the sense of contributing to his society and its future. He appreciates the scientific method and strives to apply it to his own work, making him a figure who would be at home in what I still consider the greatest historical mystery novels of all, those of Caleb Carr. His side of the narrative is every bit as engaging as St. Cyr's, in its quiet and methodical way. I could have used a lot more of Sir Henry Lovejoy, really.

Without Lovejoy, this is very much a by-the-numbers mystery story, complete with sorta-exciting climax that felt like a level of Arkham Asylum, one of those where Batman has to grapple from gargoyle to gargoyle to find the right angle of attack (and now that I think of it, there's something ever so slightly Commissioner Gordon about Sir Henry Lovejoy). And the boss battle is good except, except, ah, I'm not sure how to complain about this without committing spoilers so go read the footnote if you don't care about spoilers.*

But in defense of all of this, mystery isn't really my genre. Like spy novels, mysteries are at best an occasional indulgence for me. I'll read the rest of the St. Cyr books sometime, but they're not knocking anything off the precarious top of my to-be-read pile.

Bet my mystery-loving mom is going to love this, though.

*Dude. I hate, hate, hate it when the ultimate bad guy turns out to be someone who hasn't even appeared as a character in the story. There have been oblique references to the person but he doesn't get any actual "on camera" time until the very end, when All Is Revealed. I call shenanigans. Shaggy dog shenanigans, even.

100 Books #115 - Aliette de Bodard's MASTER OF THE HOUSE OF DARTS

The Aztec godpunk trilogy that began with Servant of the Underworld and continued in Harbinger of the Storm comes to its Obsidian-y and Bloody end in this last volume but as should be the case in any good mystery series, Master of the House of Darts stands perfectly well on its own, even though we take up the thread of the story very soon after the conclusion of Harbinger.

The middle volume was all about the struggle for succession, and ended with the more or less expected victor emerging as Revered Speaker (in a bizarre and unique way), but his rule was not yet cemented, for various reasons. To do that, Tizoc-zin must lead his warriors in battle (his "coronation war"), capture physically perfect prisoners, and sacrifice them to the gods to ensure the continuation of the world as the Mexica knew it.

As we begin the action in Master of the House of Darts (the title given to the heir apparent to the Mexica throne, usually the Revered Speaker's younger brother), that battle has been fought and won, but a paltry 40 prisoners are brought back to Tenotichtitlan -- so the new Speaker's rule is already on shaky ground.

And then one the victorious warriors and one of the would-be sacrifices die unexpectedly and mysteriously.

And others suddenly aren't looking so good either.

Enter our hero, Acatl, the Death God Gumshoe, solver of crimes, defender of innocence, and High Priest of the Dead. He is by now a most seasoned solver of supernatural crime and has the scars and scabs to prove it.* Quickly, he determines that the sacrifice, an honorable warrior of a faraway kingdom now lying dead and leaking pus, died of most unnatural causes, namely a supernatural disease, as did the warrior who claimed credit for capturing him.

Uh and also oh.

Soon the plot is thicker than clotted blood as various candidates for the caster of the malign spell that has caused what threatens to become an epidemic are brought up and eliminated. Is it the merchant from a previously conquered city who turns out to have been a member of that city's Imperial Family? Is it the High Priest of the storm-god Tlaloc (a vicious frenemy of Acatl's -- and hey, the diseases's symptoms mimic suffocation or drowning, so this hypothesis immediately volunteers itself to the seasoned Obsidian & Blood fan)? The titular heir-presumptive, who happens to be a devotee of Tlaloc's wife Jade Skirt? All of them? None of them?

Acatl goes through all of the usual detective motions, trading hypotheses, interviewing suspects, raising the souls of the victims to ask what they remember of how they died... all the while stubbornly clinging to his faith in a person who has pretty much been the Archie to Acatl's Nero Wolfe. As the story and the mystery all finally come together, the roots of the later holiday, Dia de los Muertos, become evident and the reader suddenly feels a compulsion to re-read Malcom Lowry. As one does.

One also feels a need to go back and read the trilogy from the beginning, all in one go, to catch all the stuff she obviously missed. And knowing that she needs to read on an empty stomach.

And since a lot of elements in these stories are inspired by actual events, actual history -- the emperors, the inter-city politics, and yes, the epidemic -- one wants to do some non-fiction reading as well. As one does.

Damn fine stuff, this.

*Aztec spell-casting and other acts of propitiation and divination requiring that the supplicant donate quite a lot of his own as well as other animals and people's blood to the cause.

100 Books #21 - Anetta Ribken's ATHENA'S PROMISE

I was pretty much primed from the beginning to enjoy this book, early chapter drafts of which I was privileged to see because the author is a good internet friend of mine -- but not only because of that.

Set in a hotel on the edge of the questionable part of town, Athena's Promise concerns the struggles of its front desk manager, Pallas (and the naming is no coincidence, there, but I'll get to that in a minute), made all the more difficult as the story kicks in by two unwelcome events: a murder that has taken place in one of the guest rooms, and a new, unlikable and unpleasant "guest services manager" imposed on the hotel by its owners to beef up the "numbahs" and make sure it retains its corporate flag.

This new guest services manager, by the way, is a werewolf.

And he's far from the weirdest thing in this hotel or this world, for Athena's Promise is, in addition to being what is termed a "cozy mystery", an exploration of what life would be like if somehow the old Greek gods and goddesses came back (she doesn't bother explaining how that has happened, just refers to "The Crossing" and leaves it at that) and brought the whole stable of mythological creatures along for the ride. Thus one front desk clerk at Traveler's Haven is a pixie and the night auditor is a vampire, the hotel manager is Medusa (yeah, that Medusa) and the housekeeping staff consists of a lot of very kind-hearted and well-behaved and hard-working zombies. Zombies, of course, being all of those things naturally, at least before they "Turn" and become the shambling brain-eaters of familiar lore.

And the guests make the staff look plumb dull: randy centaurs flashing trashy bling and showing up demanding rooms by the hour, the better to ravish their too-willing groupies; Elementals for Environmental Protection in town to supervise work on cleaning up the Mississippi River (the city of St. Louis is never explicitly named as the locale for this story, but it is Ribken's home and the novel has the feel of St. Louis throughout); and mermaid divas who travel from city to city and strip club to strip club putting on shows and mezmerising men who then abandon wives, families and girlfriends to become the mermaids' too-devoted followers and, incidentally, steady guests at motels like Traveler's Haven.

And that isn't all, for Pallas herself, bustling around trying to maintain order AND solve the murder, is not an ordinary girl, either, and her mystery is expertly teased out in little doses throughout the novel, complementing and beefing up the neatness of the main plot.

She is, too, the narrator, and it's her unique, fierce, feisty voice that really makes this novel enjoyable. Her protectiveness towards her staff, especially the much-misunderstood zombies, her impatience with the foibles of centaur studs and barely competent cops and Guido the cheesy werewolf who thinks he's the boss of her, is wickedly fun to read, and even if you think you know her secrets from reading between the lines and applying your own meta-knowledge of Greek mythology, you really don't, not quite, but it all works very well.

This is a self-published paperback and it does have a few flaws in formatting that might bother some: the page numbers on the left-hand pages are in the wrong corner, and there are a few passages of text that, bizarrely, are centered instead of left-justified, but I urge anyone who thinks he or she might enjoy a story like this to forgive these. Ribken is a one-woman operation (except for her cover artist, Rebecca Treadway) and an original, amusing voice in fiction writing who deserves to be read.

Bring on Athena's Chains, the sequel to Athena's Promise!

100 Books 14 - Caleb Carr's THE ITALIAN SECRETARY

I have not taken the time to become an expert on Sherlock Holmes like so many have, but I may call myself an enthusiast. I have read all of the original stories and novellas at one point or another, have enjoyed all of the great detective's cinematic and television incarnations up to and including the brilliant re-imagining that was last year's Sherlock and even took a stab at writing Holmes fan fiction as a little girl. But I cannot quote the tales chapter and verse, have never donned Victorian drag and played at being a Baker Street Irregular, have not written minute analyses of Holmes' methods or literary antecedents or linguistic patterns as some have done.

No, I do not claim to be an expert on Sherlock Holmes, but I still feel justified in observing that if there was any living writer whom I would want to try to tackle writing more of this oeuvre, that writer would be Caleb Carr, and I was clearly not alone in this, for it was no less a person than Jon Lellenberg, the U.S. representative of the Conan Doyle estate, who set to work persuading Carr to do so.

I'm so very glad he did!

The Italian Secretary is that rarest of books, one that delivers precisely what the reader most hopes for an expects. It is a further adventure of Sherlock Holmes in every way, right down to the proud bafflement of its narrator, Dr. John Watson, M.D., who spends much of the novel trying not to put too much stock into Holmes' declaration of his belief in the power of ghosts but is bothered by it all the same as the famous duo unravels a double-murder at Holyrood House, the Scottish palace that was, in the heyday of Mary, Queen of Scots, the scene of a grisly murder of one David Rizzio, an Italian secretary to the palace. Has this modern killer or cabal of killers taken this famous old murder as inspiration for modern misdeeds -- or is it, as many locals believe, the work of a vengeful ghost? A mysterious presence seems to haunt the older parts of Holyrood House at night and is heard plaintively singing in Italian -- but Holmes quickly discovers that the aria are from Verdi, whose life and work occurred centuries after the Italian Secretary's murder.

So yes, there is an inevitable Scooby Doo quality to the unraveling of the mystery even as the story also takes on some high gothic overtones -- as how could it not, in such a setting? We are not only solving a pair of murders and preventing more, as we tag along with Holmes, Watson and Holmes' brother Mycroft, but also doing a fair bit of mythbusting. I can imagine Carr winking at us all and daring us not to think of a certain Great Dane and his friends as the criminals' ghastly modus operandi are revealed.

I'm a big fan of Caleb Carr. I even sort of liked his mostly ill-received foray into science fiction, Killing Time, which was imaginative and entertaining if also flawed and didactic. But of course, it's for his first two novels, The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness that I really celebrate him, for in them he created mysteries and narratives every bit as compelling as Conan Doyle's but narratives that were every bit as deeply and informedly American as Conan Doyle's were British, and which, in many ways, plumbed the very idea of crime in much greater depth; while Conan Doyle's Holmes is a scientist and observer of outward minitiae, Carr's Dr. Laszlo Kreizler is all of these and more -- a psychologist marvelously unafraid to explore the inner workings of depravity and compulsion that Holmes and Watson would likely never even consider. Carr benefits, of course, from a century's advances in all of these fields (and a thorough study of them, as well as a profound knowledge of American history and law -- he is now a professor of same at my own alma mater, Bard College; I regret that he joined the faculty just a few years after I graduated!) as well as an increased hunger on the part of his reading public for just the kinds of inner and outer details his hero reveals. He succumbs to the common historical fictioneer's temptation to attribute a vast array of innovations and discoveries to his protagonist-detective's invention, cooking down a vast and varied array of individuals' contributions to the field of what we now know of as forensic science to the solitary brilliance of one pioneer, but I'm inclined to forgive him this as he's done so in such compelling surroundings (as you will probably see in my next entry, I do not always give writers this pass).

I imagine writing The Italian Secretary was rather a refreshing exercise for Carr, therefore. It is pure Holmes, an exploration of physical and circumstantial evidence only, an exercise in observation and deduction and of motives no more depraved, really, than greed. After the archetypal horrors of the Kreizler books, and the need to re-create the world of 19th century New York out of raw research, dabbling in this other canon has, I think, to have been an easier and very pleasant experience. Dare I hope he will undertake it again?