Rick Harsch's THE MANIFOLD DESTINY OF EDDIE VEGAS

Did you ever wonder what kind of books our culture would have to enjoy if, instead of ho-hum Europe, the Old World, James Joyce had spent his expat years in the United States? Specifically the western United States? Specifically specifically the years when this part of the world still mostly belonged to its indigenous inhabitants and there were no railroads or interstate highways or even JC Penneys? Which, sure, that means Joyce would have needed access to a time machine, but I'm already deep in the realm of counterfactual conjecture here, so, why not?

But so anyway, did you ever wonder that? Because I think I have the answer. So, did you? Wonder that? No?

Oh dear. 

Well, anyway, I want to tell you about Rick Harsch's The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, a book that I've already mentioned twice on this here blog, which I was insanely excited to read while awaiting my copy but, yes, also dreading a bit because it's another maximalist  chonk of a novel that is only available in print. Meaning yep, another On-Dead-Tree-Despite-The-Pain read for Your Humble Blogger.

I first learned of the existence of this novel, of author Rick Harsch, and of the cult publishing phenomenon, corona/samizdat, when I saw a few BookTube videos about Philip Freedenberg's and Jeff Walton's America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic, which, on the most pathetic level of reality at least, is about what happens to a writer and illustrator while they are waiting for a copy of The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas to get shipped to them from faraway Slovenia.

Which means I was expecting another heavy dose of crazy, extremely post-modern meta-fictional shenanigans. But that's not quite what I got.

Not that I am in any way disappointed by what I did get. Far from it!

Because this is not the quintessential American experience, for that is too grand a theme. This perhaps is the quintessential endangered American experience. Canada, Mexico, the entire south - that will define the American experience over time. This will all be seen as excrescence, rude corruption of being hyper-aware, vapid, utterly disconnected from enduring life. This America, this United States of, has been making last stands from the beginning, practicing the last stand until they get it right and finally can indeed stand for the last time. No, this scene here, this man and his undershirt oiling his gun before a silent television, this scene has nearly been perfected to extinction.

The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas is a much more conventional narrative, more in the vein of, say, Cryptonomicon than of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots or any of the other, weirder fare I tend to favor. Like Cryptonomicon, the narrative is more or less divided into two sections, taking place in different eras of history. We get a lot of background on some of one of our main characters' ancestors, who had colorful and thrilling adventures in the USA's frontier/Old West period (and one of whom was an Indigenous woman) in one narrative, while the other traces that character's, Donnie Garvin's, travels with his brand-new best friend, Drake Fondling, in early 21st century Europe and the United States, while also following a bit of Donnie's father's efforts to catch up with the duo. And since a decent amount of the novel takes place in and around good old Las Vegas, there's also more than a little bit of a more grounded/mundane Last Call here, too.

There now, I've mentioned two of my favorite, most fun reads of all time, so that must mean that Eddie Vegas* is fun, too, right? Well, yes and no. As I said, the narrative is pretty straightforward, even mundane, for all that at one point one of Eddie's ancestors gets lifted into the air and bodily flung at a grizzly bear, whether as a weapon or as a distraction doesn't really matter, and somehow survives to become one of Eddie's ancestors. But what one really reads this novel, and, I suspect, most of Harsch's work for, is the over-the-top wordplay. I have a lot of examples of this, and the text includes several lists that other reviewers have correctly categorized as "Rabelasian", but here are some passages that I marked with my little book darts (one of the pleasures I'd almost forgotten of reading a physical book that I own is using these cunning little tools) and then more or less just flipped to at random.

For instance, raw recruits looked at him and thought "Sure is rough out thar"; Douglas Stompett, Chief Factor and father figure for future factoti for a fee (fie!) (Foe of fumblers) and Friends of the Hudson's Bay Company...

And

On the walls of the spaces where the politics of his parents and their friends were diminished by upright plastered scorn were thematic reproductions, a Chinese room, a surrealist room, an impressionist room -- What of a childhood that renders Dali trite? a Dalit rite? a trolley ride, a trollop's rights, a flop all right, a polite oversight, a maggot white, a dollop bright, a scallop of shite, a pallette of, a mallet of... on the fucking head...

And

The Sick Man of Europe was such a healthy metaphor, diseased body parts still being sold off a century later, the moribund fellow fascinating in his decrepitude, shrinking as they do like healthy verdure under a too intense dry sun, the regimen of the new model of health was ignored until it was too late, the doctors all gone psychotic like any Freudian subject over-thrilled with the death of the other.

That last passage is from a whole chapter of profoundly insightful musings Harsch attributes to the character of Ethel Gravel, another of Eddie's formidable female forebears (I couldn't resist), a woman of profound historical imagination whom one might fear is going to waste in a still-backwater-ish Reno, Nevada of the early 20th century, but whose business acumen, general intelligence and indomitable will have assured her descendants' the kind of start in life that will allow sons to become dilettante scribes and professors who marry improbably named poets and have children whose own potential seems poised to be harnessed to ridiculous business ventures by heirs to mercenary company fortunes and oh, you just have to read this book to see all of the unlikely but compelling goings on. I haven't even begun to describe the compelling small figure of Nordgaard, or of Setif, or of Hermione, or of...

But as this all comes to an end, what The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas is really about is just plain old love, especially that between a son and a father, against whose relationship the entire world has seemed to conspire but who have chosen to care about each other anyway, to share their thoughts and feelings in the least toxic example of masculinity I've encountered in this sort-of-genre of maximalist "Brodernism." Even if the hundreds of pages preceding the novel's satisfying denouement weren't as entertaining as they are, it would all be worth it just to enjoy this at the end. Bravo, Mr. Harsch. I'm already looking forward to my next read from you.

*Eddie Vegas is the name a character assumes in the novel, but we don't know which character takes on this alias until about halfway through. This adds the pleasing note of ambiguity that perfects many a book, in my opinion.

Adam Levin's THE INSTRUCTIONS

The rest of the crowd booed. Not so much at Maholtz as the implications of the anticlimax he and I had just provided them. To see an oppressor felled without a hint of violent struggle can’t help but tarnish the shine on your victim badge. To see Maholtz made to cower so easily had to make those who would have otherwise cheered wonder how they, for so long, could have cowered so readily before him. They were booing themselves.

If Michael Pemulis, the very best character in Infinite Jest who is neither in drag nor in a wheelchair, were about five years younger and a student at a Chicago area day school instead of a Boston area tennis academy, he would be Gurion ben-Judah Macabee, the criminally, the messianically precocious hero of Adam Levin's big honking fiction chonk, The Instructions. Except instead of a tennis racket, our boy is packing a weapon of his own devising called a penny gun, and a pocketful of tiny metal wing nuts.

And a brain, an insight into humanity, and an advanced understanding of ethics that would shame any of the Incandenza family, would probably shame a Dostoevsky character. 

I am a middle aged Wyoming woman, neither a 21st century middle schooler, nor a child of the suburbs, nor even a little bit Jewish* so I'm about as under-equipped a reader for this novel as one could ask for, but I read it with admiration and delight anyway.

I was as charmed by its depictions of actually healthy and loving family dynamics as fascinated by its eternal school day themes of intra- and inter-clique politics, petty and serious rebellion, unjustly wielded authority, unbearable boredom, grandiose plans for the future, philosophical speculations both juvenile and profound, concerns earthly and spiritual and, of course, young love. 

But what young love it is: 

Above all, June and I were in love. I wanted reassurance because she’d gotten winked at, but it wasn’t her fault that she’d gotten winked at. It was Berman’s fault. He shouldn’t have winked. He shouldn’t have gotten me wanting reassurance. Especially because there could be no reassurance. That’s what was chomsky. To think that a hand-squeeze would reassure was chomsky. Had June squeezed my hand, I wouldn’t feel reassured; I’d only wonder why she thought I wanted reassurance. I’d worry that she thought I wanted reassurance because Berman’s wink was, in fact, worth worrying about. = If June had squeezed my hand, I’d want more reassurance. And I saw it was good that she hadn’t squeezed my hand. Which isn’t to say I stopped wanting reassurance, but that all at once I saw what needed doing, not to me or for me, but by me: I had to tell Berman not to wink at my girlfriend. Had he not been an Israelite, I’d’ve thought of that sooner, gone straight to confrontation. Instead of burning sweaty seconds lamely sorting useless feelings, I’d have risen to my feet and said, Don’t you fucken wink at her.

A big thinker as well as an over-thinker is Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, who is already infamous when he first shows up for classes in a new middle school, where his prior record of fights and rebellion lands him immediately in the school's special disciplinary unit called The Cage, in which every student is confined to an individual carrel and is closely monitored by a beady-eyed Australian disciplinarian with a name, Botha, that I associate with South African apartheid (I'm sure not accidentally am I so reminded). He doesn't teach, doesn't do anything but watch the students like a hawk and enforce the Cage's infinitely long list of behavioral standards while other teachers nervously present lessons to around 30 fifth through seventh graders, which Gurion is, I think, the only fifth grader by age but, as compensation for his immediate entry to The Cage, the school also agreed to honor his prior promotion to seventh grade on account of his intellect. 

Classic, this. 

But so, Gurion is very, very concerned about justice (and his father is a renowned civil rights attorney), about studying the Torah and about promoting the welfare of his co-religionists to whom he refers as Israelites rather than as being Jewish students. One of his many acts prior to his advent at his current school was to invent a punk little weapon constructed from the top of a plastic soda bottle and a rubber band, and to write out minutely detailed instructions on its construction and use, as well as to design a strict ritual for how this knowledge is to be taught and disseminated., starting with: Only to Israelites. His goal is to arm every Israelite boy in Greater Chicago and beyond with a weapon easily broken down into disposable trash, but capable of launching a small projectile (he uses a penny and calls it, thus, the Pennygun, but we encounter a sort of co-inventor who came up with the same device independently but uses it to fire fountain pen nibs and thus calls it the Pengun). This weapon has achieved a mythic status among devotees of The Instructions as evident from this YouTube clip explaining it.

Gurion also has a loftier project going on than merely helping young Jewish boys to defend themselves from antisemites and school bullies, however; he has been drafting for some time a work he fully expects will one day be regarded as scripture. And many of his former schoolmates, forbidden though they are by their parents from associating with him ever again, consider him a wise leader and teacher, even to calling him Rabbi, and agree that his writings will indeed become scripture. Two of whom, we learn, have even served as translators, necessary because Gurion chose to write about half of the original in Hebrew.

So is this book a very long marriage of The Books of Jacob and Heathers? Certainly more so than it is a descendant of Infinite Jest, for all that I invoked that book at the start of this post. Gurion does feel a bit like Pemulus, but differs vastly from that yachtsman-capped mischief-maker in that, for starters, the closest he ever comes to mind-altering substances is a cigarette or two he is deftly manipulated into sharing with the school's Golden Boy as Golden Boy seeks to co-opt Gurion's growing authority as an outcast leader. Which Gurion only figures out later, but don't you worry. Everybody gets their due in this massive work. Justice is served, like revenge, a bit cold... Or maybe not so cold?

For, on top of everything else, we find that author Adam Levin can write the best kind of action scenes, in which every shot, punch, kick, launch and thwack is clearly delineated, precisely described, but the pace is never allowed to lag. I say this as someone who often skips long flight scenes because I find them boring. But I mean...

By my side, on his knees again, Desormie gripped my face by the jaw and started squeezing. I bonked him with the megaphone. He squeezed unfazed. I got the bell to his ear and flipped on the siren. He threw himself backwards and I started getting up, but my hurt wrist kept folding beneath my weight and Desormie returned and he kicked me in the stomach.

The above is even better if you know who Desormie is. Neener.

And this, from a special sub-plot we can call the Revenge of the Band Kids, in which Levin shows us the weapon in everything:

Their brass scarred from teeth and their padcups askew, the bandkids were blitzing in squads of fours and fives, walking through the mini-riots, mowing down anyone. Cymbalists alternated neckchops with headclaps. Flautists pulled their flutes apart for double-fisted piking. Tubas and euphoniums remained strapped to players who held them under-arm to ram with like jousters. Splinters poked from fractures in oboes used for skullshots. The buttons jammed forever on trumpets gone knuckleduster.

Which is to say that, at heart, The Instructions is a war story at least in as much as the famous Pillow Fort vs Blanket Fort episode of Community was. Well, except instead of blankets and pillows we have actual blows exchanged and projectile pennies, wing nuts and pen nibs fired by Gurion's small army, the Side of Damage (and their junior auxiliaries, Big Ending and The Five, which, get ready for those five scene-stealing Best Buddies**) at their foes, the Arrangement. What, you thought that cover art was symbolic? This is middle school.

But so, my readers may well ask, is this a tale that really needs so many hundreds of pages to tell? Oh, yes. But are they really so satisfying, those pages? Also yes.

And I haven't even gotten around to all of the terrific character drama, the terrific characters, like Gurion's brand shiny new girlfriend, the fierce and fiery and newly-converting-for-his-sake June Watermark. And his best friend Benji Nakamook. And the one they call Brooklyn, as newly arrived as Gurion with even more dramatic a back story, with whom Gurion bonds immediately and who challenges him in ways Gurion usually only experiences with adults. If it weren't for the buddies of The Five, Brooklyn would be my favorite character in the book. 

And there are so many more. By the novel's climatic combat scene, the reader knows most of the Side very well, has watched a few of them fall in love (mutually!) and others learn for the first time that they have power. Usually for the better. Usually.

And yes, like so many books I'm reading now, this one seems to be more important to the present moment than to the one in which it was written, for all that it is a tale that could only take place then (2007), could only feature characters born just before 9/11 and raised doing active shooter drills in school. More than ever I am convinced that the Zoomers, largely the children of my own Generation X, are fundamentally different beings from those of us who remember not having to take off their shoes in public in order to board a plane and when phones were fastened to walls and History supposedly had an End, in whichever way you choose to define that word. Theirs is a fundamentally different world and they are prepared to live in an even stranger one. 

Too, lots of us have been promulgating the "gonna tell my grandkids" meme for years. What if they were to believe us? Because they don't really care? Because they have real problems, but have also at least solved the problem of what to do with all of those pennies lying around everywhere. It's a better idea than CoinStar or whatever. 

We damage we.

All great books command re-reading, but you can’t ever read the same book twice. Knowing, as you do, from the second reading forward, that A will lead to B, to Y to Z, your post-first readings are far more concerned with what exactly happens between those events, far more concerned with those parts you scanned (or even skipped) the first go-round in your rush to discover what would happen next.

Yeah, that's pretty much Gurion, and by extension, Adam Levin, equating their own book with the other great ones. But here's the thing: it is their equal. And I'm already looking forward to reading it again. I underappreciated some of these kids the first time. Including, possibly, Gurion himself!

Damn.

*My nickname at Bard among my soon-to-be dining companions for four years of mealtime shenanigans was "Blond and Blue" as in "Uh oh, Blond and Blue is giving me shit" -- at least until one way discovered that my name rhymes with a famous Dinah Shore ditty that serves as the theme song to, coincidentally, the movie "Heathers" thus guaranteeing me four years of hearing my name sung out loudly and not very tunefully before every meal I ate in Kline Commons. I was a member of an all-gentile cast of the Purim play one year, though...

**I've quoted too much from the climax, but I have to add just one snippet of The Five in action:

The Five were fine too; didn’t need coverage either. Bored with Shlomo, who no longer convulsed, and glimpsing Eliyahu between heads and shoulders, they gamboled toward the south wall, the better to see, a capering troop that undermined its native cuteness shooting mystified kids in the eyes at close range, stepping on crotches and faces on purpose, vociferating multiple Yiddish vulgarities.

These are little guys, maybe ten years old (like Gurion himself, actually, which is part of why, maybe, he takes them seriously where others would pat them on the heads and imagine them in propeller beanies), who have already had enough of bullying but quickly learned that if they can count on each other, they count. And since one of their number got pasted in the halls earlier in the week, they have their own little vendetta against the aforementioned Shlomo, who forfeited his Israelite status when he picked on the shrimp in order to commit a hate crime by proxy. And I mean, one of them even gets to rescue a cheerleader from a groper, with masterful fifth-grade aplomb. Egads, these kids are the greatest!

Winston Graham's THE ANGRY TIDE

As I joked recently on Twitter, I can always tell when a new batch of episodes of Poldark hits American or British TV because all of a sudden the page views for all of my prior Poldark book reviews shoot back up into the stratosphere (well, for this blog). I still haven't seen any of the latest series that is just now airing on PBS in the States, so I can't speak to how it compares to the books yet, but I figured the least I could do was take a break from all the Doctor Who and Gene Wolfe and give the Poldarkies something new to look at here at Kate of Mind.

The Angry Tide, the seventh "Novel of Cornwall" in the Poldark saga, starts earning its title right away. As is always the case in these books, the state of the sea reflects the emotional state of the characters living near it, and there's plenty of tempestuous wave action and passionate melodrama in and around Nampara, where our hero and heroine, whose marriage took another near-fatal blow last novel, reside.

And   they're getting used to other changes as well, are Ross and Demelza; last novel saw Ross getting elected to replace adversary George Warleggan as a Member of Parliament, and so has to spend at least some of his time in London now. A bit awkward, that, because of course last novel also saw wife Demelza tempted strongly to have an adulterous affair, and everybody knows that the best way to patch things up after a conflict like that is to put a few hundred miles between husband and wife.

But this is Demelza, though a very subdued and somewhat uncertain Demelza, who has learned some lessons since back in the day when she meddled freely in other people's love lives. She got mostly good results, granted, but at the cost of more than a little pain and awkwardness, so she's not so eager to plunge into that again, except....

Except her poor brothers! Both of them are in love with girls who seem pretty much perfect for them, but Sam's girl is intimidated by the prospect of marrying such a very ardent Methodist when she herself has a bit of a jolly past, and Drake, Drake's beloved was way above his social station and was pretty much forced into a marriage within her class but to a truly odious garbage person.

The course of this marriage, between Morwenna Chynoweth (a cousin of Ross' first love, Elizabeth, who is herself now married to that troublesome George Warleggan but went into said marriage with open eyes and strength) and local vicar Ossie Whitworth, is a big topic in the first half of The Angry Tide, though for most of the first half it's the one plot that doesn't have a lot of ebb and flow to it. Morwenna is a "plain girl with a beautiful body" as her husband thinks of her, while Ossie is your standard puffy, self-righteous C of E man who is also more than a bit of a lecher, and starts trying to manipulate the local medical community into agreeing with him that if Morwenna doesn't want to sleep with him (and she really, really, really doesn't, especially after reluctantly having a son by him), it MUST mean she's insane and should be put away somewhere so that Ossie can get on with his proper churchman's life with the help of, say, a reasonably attractive "housekeeper" to attend to his "needs."

Pardon me while I go and shower now.

Seriously, if you don't hate Ossie already (assuming you've read these books or seen the 1970s era Poldark TV adaptation or something), I'm not sure we can be friends, you guys.

Fortunately, there's the second half of the book, largely concerned with Demelza's first visit to London, its causes and consequences. As I mentioned before, Demelza has changed over the course of these books; there is very little of the poor miner's scraggly, boyish daughter left in her. So her time in London is not merely spent gawping and wide-eyed as once she was intimidated by a house party among the local gentry in Cornwall. She's still not entirely sure exactly how to behave, but she's learned to trust her instincts, and actually makes fewer mistakes than Ross.

She also gets a chance to shine at home, when a banking crisis forces quick thinking and quicker action while Ross is away. We've always known that Demelza is quite intelligent, but here we see that she has become shrewd. It's truly wonderful to see, especially when she is contrasted with the Chynoweth women, who are born to higher stations but who never really develop beyond that. You're not going to see, at any rate, a Novel of Cornwall named after any of them; Demelza's name was on the very second book!

As for the rest of The Angry Tide, well, it's a Poldark novel. Lots more political/military issues come to the fore as we are now contemporaneous with Napoleon's capture of Alexandria and Cairo and with Admiral Horatio Nelson's famous defeat of Napoleon at the famous Battle of the Nile (where, of course, our beloved Captain Jack Aubrey of Patrick O'Brian fame got his medal). There's lots more stuff to make fans of Blackadder the Third smile as George Warleggan strives to acquire a "robber botton" of his very own, and the prose continues to a delight. Seriously, you guys, if all you're doing is watching the new TV adaptation (or the original one, in which the guy who occasionally cameos as Dr. Halsey in the new show played Poldark) (but mostly kept his shirt on, admittedly), you're missing out. These novels are absolutely delightful, and they only get more so as the story moves on beyond what's been covered in (to date) either TV adaptation. Most of them are now available as ebooks; I'm sure eventually all will be as the new TV show creates new fans.

Here's hoping!

For now, I'm almost into dead tree reading, which I have difficulty doing due to chronic hand/arm/shoulder problems, but I'M GOING TO SUCK IT UP when the time comes, because these books are worth it!

Doctor Doctor: George Mann's DOCTOR WHO: ENGINES OF WAR

While I'm never now, thanks to Justin Robinson, going to be able to look at the War Doctor without thinking of the kind of old man who has definitely bought alcohol for a teenager at some point in his life (it's the fauxhawk), I loves me some War Doctor. His appearances have been slight -- one and a 100th of a TV episode, some great Big Finish audio stories, and now this novel -- but he's distinctively awesome, and not just because he's portrayed by the great John Hurt.

So I went into Engines of War with a bit of trepidation, because I just wasn't going to be able to bear it if it wasn't awesome.*

I needn't have worried.

A War Doctor story that's not just going to be another Doctor Who story that happens to feature this incarnation is a tall order, if it's going to be done at all decently. Where the 50th anniversary TV special that is still the only thing most people have encountered the War Doctor in went horribly wrong was in portraying the Time War as a shooting conflict seemingly taking place on just one planet. But this is supposed to be war on an unbelievably massive scale, in which "all of time and space are burning." How the hell do you portray that?

George Mann did a better job of it than the TV writers did, at least.**

The novel opens with a terrific battle scene, in which a giant fleet of "battle TARDISes" (think of a TARDIS with guns, basically) dukes it out with a Dalek stealth fleet that has been quietly waiting to ambush anything that passes through its part of the Vortex, and actually, to a certain degree, uses those battle TARDISes as TARDISes! Meaning time travel is a bit of a factor in the skirmish. Cool.

The War Doctor is the field commander for this conflict, more or less, but in the process he takes a hit and crashes onto a planet that is... Kind of special. Modox is one of a dozen or so human-colonized worlds in a system dominated by a strange-but-beautiful space-time anomaly referred to as the Eye of Tantalus, and the Daleks wanted it very badly.

Soon our man is exploring its secrets with the help of a don't-you-dare-call-her-plucky young Dalek hunter named Cinder (who is the most badass teenage girl in the history of ever, and a more than suitable companion for him, and even tougher than he has become) and what he finds is terrifying, gross and has huge implications for the Time War.

Which means, alas, we end up spending a good chunk of the novel on Gallifrey, which you know I find a tiresome proposition at best, but there you go. Borusa, a former teacher of the Doctor's who later made an ill-advised power play and got trapped for eternity as an embellishment on the tomb of Time Lord founder Rassilon, makes his third appearance in my personal novel-reading time line (he was also in Divided Loyalties and The Eight Doctors), but at least this time he's interesting. Ish.

Look, I find the Time Lords kind of one-dimensional and tedious, and think it's a mistake to base too much of a story on their society, politics or deliberations, but I get why we had to do it, here; it's nice to actually see them through the War Doctor's eyes and see that they more than live up to the hindsight glimpses we've had of them in wartime via the Doctor's later incarnations. As this novel's tag line says, war changes everything, even the Doctor. But, well, the Time Lords don't seem all that different to me, except in that they are now talking about deploying some truly heinous weapons and wreaking destruction on a truly heinous scale. Because Delenda est Carthago the Daleks must be stopped or the whole universe yada yada.

But still no Nightmare Child, etc. Which is both smart, in that they could never live up to the build-up those things get when the Tenth Doctor rants about them on TV, but also a tiny bit disappointing.***

What does get deployed, though, is fully timey-wimey, as is the way the Doctor deals with it, which is very, very satisfying.

And so, ultimately, is this book, Gallifrey scenes aside. And even those Gallifrey scenes? Way better than those in The Day of the Doctor.

As for my Arbitrary and Mercurial rankings, they're maybe not living up to that second adjective so much, for little changes.

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds
Una McCormack
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss
James Goss

George Mann
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

Cinder
Ben and Polly
Tegan
Jo
Barbara
Clara
Nyssa
Samantha
Martha
Bernice
Vicki
Adric
Rose
Peri
Ian

Next time: another First Doctor novel! Can Ian possibly redeem himself enough to at least move ahead of Peri in my companion rankings? Where will Susan land on this list? And what about the First Doctor, whom I always want to like but who always annoys me and lets me down? Stay tuned.

*And because author George Mann has written more Torchwood fiction than anything else. Torchwood! I mean come on, except for Children of Earth, that's just foolishness!

**I know, I know, he's got the unfair advantage that all novelists have over makers of  film and TV, an unlimited special effects budget. But still.

***Though it lets me hang on to my pet theory that that creepy and tantalizing phrase, The Nightmare Child, might actually be a reference to the Doctor in this incarnation. I thought maybe it would be a new appellation for him bestowed by the Daleks, for instance. But the one used by them in this novel is fine.

Tim Butcher's THE TRIGGER: HUNTING THE ASSASSIN WHO BROUGHT THE WORLD TO WAR

Not since I first encountered Simon Schama's wonderful Landscape and Memory have I experienced a book that so powerfully evokes the power of place as Tim Butcher's The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin who Brought the World to War. For while the book is ostensibly concerned with Gavrilo Princip, whose murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 touched off the First World War, I would argue that the region itself -- the lands occupied by Princip's beloved "southern slavs" that would be united (more or less) as Yugoslavia for much of the 20th century -- is the real "trigger" for World War I and many subsequent conflicts.

It's Butcher's uniquely haunted perspective on the region that lets the brutal realities of the landscape eclipse the story of its most famous son. The result may disappoint seekers after a mere biography of Princip (but hey, details on the man's life are scant enough to where such seekers should be used to disappointment -- but should be delighted by Butcher's encounter, early in the book, with Princip's modern relatives, who cherish a sort of folk memory of their famous great-great uncle that is, as far as I know, all new-to-us material), but readers who can get over that small disappointment will still be rewarded by a remarkable book.

Butcher was a journalist on assignment in the Balkans during the horrific conflicts that broke out after the Warsaw Pact gave up the ghost and the nation of Yugoslavia (the name means essentially, southern Slavs, implying a union of same that might have been dear to Princip's heart, though one wonders what he'd think of Tito as a replacement for the Hapsburgs/Ottoman Turks/etc) dissolved into bloody ethnic conflict. As he follows Princip's journey from his poor and remote home village to Sarajevo, Belgrade and back to Sarajevo, Butcher can't help but recall how the vistas he encounters and the people he (re-) connects with in 2012 looked back in the 1990s, even as he tries to imagine his way back to the early 1910s.

This sounds like a recipe for maudlin mourning or peacenik preaching, but Butcher doesn't let either flavor spoil the dish. For every scene of survivor's guilt or tragic and harrowing story behind a destroyed building or a desecrated monument, there is a scene of enduring charm (Fishing with the Imams) or of newly adopted, moving and meaningful rituals (the march commemorating the escape of thousands of Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica).

The result is a difficult but rewarding read, and one I would recommend to absolutely anyone.

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.