Ian Tregillis' NECESSARY EVIL

So, here's me, tucking into the third volume of Ian Tregillis' Milkweed Triptych after having thought for two volumes that I was reading a trilogy of cool Lovecraft-flavored alternative history where bio-mechanically engineered Nazi uberpeople were pitted against heroic British warlocks, only to finally, finally penetrate the fact that what I've really been reading this whole time is the ultimate Phildickian exploration of what it would really mean to the world as a whole if an actual honest-to-Yog pre-cognitive had surfaced in our midst, by whatever means, ca the early 20th Century. Well, that and a little time travel thrown in, so said pre-cog can correct some things she missed the first pre-time pre-around. As it were.

Gretel, Gretel, Gretel. The Romany girl who was warped into being able to see all of time, but was so warped by the very people who were busily exterminating entire races of people, including her own, so developed an extreme instinct for self-protection and so searched every possibility in all of World War II for the best possible outcome for her except WHOOPS there was one WORLD ENDING WHOOPS end result that she hadn't really seen (or hadn't really taken seriously) and so for her last trick she manipulates another of our main characters, poor old Raybould Marsh, into making HIS last trick a trip into a whole new universe that... Look, I'm spoiling bits of the first two books here, but like the warning on the very top of this blog says, WARE SPOILERS.

Anyway, suffice it to say that in this new universe, it is World War II all over again, and, in this universe, there are now two Marshes, the one "born" in this universe and the much older, spectacularly scarred, embittered, sad, lonely and really kind of hopeless Marsh that survived Bitter Seeds and The Coldest War. To assist the reader, sad old Marsh's passages are told in the first person, while era-approriate Marsh stays in the third person. But to further twist the reader's brain, we get long passages from Gretel's multiplied points of view -- a difficult narrative feat that Tregillis pulls off very well, which is good because otherwise this book would just be a hot mess instead of a satisfying conclusion to this series.

What really sells me on this last book is that this brave new world is pretty much exactly our world, as far as historical events go. In Gretel's and Old Marsh's world, for instance, the Little Ships never happened, and Britain lost an entire army at and around Dunkirk. Which means that we really are seeing that the world Gretel couldn't mess with is the "real" world*. I dig this. I dig this right to the hot melty bits.

*Except there are still warlocks and Enochian and Eidolons and stuff in it. They've just been circumvented by, uh, [REDACTED]. He.

Ian Tregillis' THE COLDEST WAR

I was hoping that The Coldest War would at least be as much about the Cold War as Bitter Seeds, Ian Tregillis' first Milkweed book, was about World War II (I mean, look at this cover!), but, well, we don't always get what we hope for, do we?

Unless, of course, we're Gretel, the Nazi-engineered precog whose machinations are at the heart of this second book (and, I guess, the first, more than seemed the case at the time), about whom this book is much more deeply concerned than about any mere historical backdrop, alt- or otherwise. She pretty much always gets what she hopes for. She just doesn't really hope for that much. Or so it seems. As such.

A lot of this novel wound up being a bit of a tough slog for me, to be honest. I even put it aside entirely to devour the previous novel covered in this blog, and returned to it more out of a sort of determined resignation than any real desire to see how it ended. Gretel's sparse but significant scenes aside, the first half, perhaps even two-thirds, is bogged down in a lot of dreary domestic soap opera as we see some of the more quotidian consequences of the events of Bitter Seeds. Marriages and families have fallen apart. Glamorous damaged antiheroes have found redemption in the love of good women to whom they get forced to lie. Etc. And just the tiniest soupçon of the promised hints of good old Cold War secret service drama, but not enough to flavor anything.

The Sandbaggers with warlocks this ain't*. But man, it could have been. Ah, me.

Fortunately, there is Gretel, whose motives remain inscrutable and whose near-omniscience remains irritating as hell as she flaps her greying be-wired braids through an escape from a Russian magic-gulag (yes, as hinted would be the case at the end of the prior novel, the Soviets are mighty keen on continuing Westcarp's work, but no, there's not much of that stuff in this novel, except as something from which Gretel and brother Klaus can escape, and as can function as a sort of paper tiger-cum-red herring when things finally get going) and back to England, where she was once a prisoner of war and now hopes for asylum (and, of course, gets it, because duh, omniscient precog precogs her way out of everything).

And there is what's left of Milkweed, when it's not having sad little kitchen sink tantrums at home. It's been no more idle than the Soviets, but just as the Soviets have sort of out-Westcarped Westcarp, the New Men of Milkweed have found an even crueler and creepier way to raise a new generation of warlocks.

Which leads us up to the last third, in which things finally start happening, and boy do they happen. I'm still not sure if this last section redeems the earlier plodding. It certainly would have had there been, say, even one Soviet character in the book, even a cardboard baddie, to provide some actual tension and, you know, villainy beyond the faceless, unknowable threat of the Eidolons**. As it was, well, while the very ending is plenty interesting and satisfying and does give a certain poignancy to all the tedium that preceded it, The Coldest War wasn't really what I'd wanted it to be at all.

That being said, I'm still keen to read the third book, Necessary Evil, sometime soon, just to see where all this is finally going.

I just hope it gets beyond the drawing room a bit sooner.

*But DUDE I WOULD READ THE SNAPE OUT OF THAT SO SOMEBODY PLEASE MAKE IT A THING.

**The Lovecraftian Old One analogues who are the source of all magic and have to be cajoled and bribed-with-bloooooood by batshit crazy human wizards into letting pesky little humans break the laws of physics.

Ian Tregillis' BITTER SEEDS

If Tim Powers and H.P. Lovecraft somehow managed to reach out to one another across the dark and malevolent vastness of time and space to write a cosmic horror story set in World War II, the result might be something very like Bitter Seeds, the first volume of Ian Tregillis' Milkweed trilogy (or triptych, as the marketers of these books seem to insist on calling it).

Of course, Powers did write a World War II novel all his own, the wonderful spies-and-genies romp Declare, of which it was difficult not to think while following the adventures of Milkweed (itself so very reminiscent of Mike Mignola's Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, of Hellboy fame) and their unspellable (I'm lazy and lacking bandwidth so I'm not gonna look it up) Nazi German counterparts. Fortunately, I was not making the comparison to Tregillis' detriment; Bitter Seeds is as enjoyable as any Powers novel, and as well written, even though it's telling a very different tale.

The story begins at the tail end of World War I, when unsavory types are scouring the battle-ravaged countryside of Belgium and surrounding lands, harvesting orphans like so many rotting cabbages. Some weird doctor, one Westcarp, is paying good money for young children delivered to his orphanage. Several children, including a brother and sister, Klaus and Gretel, are so delivered to their sinister and mysterious fate.

Meanwhile in England, a boy about their age is subjected to mysterious and unsavory experiences under the supervision of his noble grandfather, a duke, whose son one presumes was a casualty of war but at least died with the requisite heir and a spare. The boy getting experimented with -- Will -- being, of course, the spare.

The Germans, led by Westcarp, it turns out, are trying in their mechanized and industrial way, to duplicate the magical milieu of Will and his grandfather, who, we learn, are warlocks. Warlocks being humanity's self-appointed negotiators with the Eidolons*, who arrange the "blood price" that has to be paid whenever somebody wants to break the laws of physics. Usually it's just a fingertip, occasionally it's your sanity, etc. -- really just depends on how big a violation you're wanting to effect.

The negotiations are carried out in a terrible, mind-bending language called Enochian, which you can only learn if you start really, really, young -- hence Will's weird childhood.

But Westcarp is not down with that ish. Westcarp has decided that electricity can take the place of Paranormal Pimsleur. And so Gretel and Klaus and their fellows wind up with wires surgically implanted in their skulls, connecting their brains to batteries they have to tote around in order to use the powers they have honed through years of unspeakable experimentation.

So yeah, English wizards versus Nazi cyborgs. What's not to love?

And I'm not even touching on the character drama, of course, which is where Tregillis comes closest to Powers' style and substance. If you love Powers' stories, you're going to love this. If you love mid-century settings. If you love wizardry. If you love war stories. If you love Nazi Weird Science schlock. There's something for pretty much everybody here.

And it's all set up for the next novel, in which, naturally, the Soviets are obviously going to be much more involved. They want to violate the laws of physics too, you guys. Which path will they take? Or will they forge a new one as we head into a Lovecraftian Cold War.

I'm so down to find out. So very down.

Many thanks to the wondrous Paul Weimer (@PrinceJvstin on Twitter), who told me about these books over a cup of coffee on a whistle stop visit last summer.

*This is where the Lovecraft comes in, of course, in that the Eidolons are basically Great Old Ones, unknowably vast alien inimical Others who exist on such a scale that we are like bacteria to them, and they're pissed off because they're all out of hand sanitizer.