Henry James' THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA

It's been a while since I spent some time with good old Henry James, America's greatest social novelist.* And it's only because I stumbled across a nifty-looking biography of the man when Open Road Media had a 24-hour free-for-all on Amazon that I realized I hadn't read any James since Portrait of a Lady. But which to read, which to read?

Then I encountered, somewhere I don't remember, an observation that Princess Casamassima was likely an inspiration for Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, probably my favorite Conrad after Nostromo, and so there I went.

But so anyway, stop me if you've heard this one: Boy meets Princess. Boy falls head over heels for Princess.  Princess loves communists. Boy pretends to be communist to get closer. Princess sees through him but figures she can get him to bring her some real communists. Boy complies and brings her tiny half-French bastard bookbinder. Princess will love bookbinder and pet bookbinder and hold bookbinder and squeeze bookbinder and she will call bookbinder George. Exeunt Boy, with blue balls. Exeunt bookbinder, by his own hand. As such.

Which is to say that neither the Princess Cassamassima, nor the bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, is the driver of this plot, even though the book is named for the former and the latter is the point of view character. Hyacinth is so passive that even his choice of profession only comes about via the vigorous exertions of others; the Princess is equally passive, at least until someone finally brings her what she wants and she must work a bit to keep it. 

Doing all the actual work of the novel is a character who hardly appears in it, at least at front and center: the gentlemanly, the cosmopolitan, the conventional Captain Sholto (the Boy), who manipulates everything behind the scenes: he's even partly responsible for the radicalisation of Hyacinth, who might have stayed a drinking dilletante himself had he not been presented with Sholto's annoying example of same. 

And the romance- and- radicalization plot isn't even the only thing. James has at least as much fun with two other stories, both of which would be right at home in a modern high school dramedy: The competition between Hyacinth and Sholto over who a picturesquely poor family " belongs" to (settled, inconclusively but forever, when the Princess sails in and takes it over. They're hers.  They were always hers. You boys were just keeping the sofa warm for her), and the even more brittle-ly funny one between the Princess and one Lady Aurora, better born than the Princess but a middle aged spinster, whose lifetime of actively visiting and nursing and spending her meager allowance on the genuinely poor is somehow made to look amateurish and gauche when the Princess announces that actually, she owns nothing  ( probably because her estranged husband took it all away?) and "when thousands... haven't bread to put in their mouths, I can dispense with tapestry and old china." 

Straight out of, say, Clueless, or maybe Mean Girls, am I right?

What this all amounts to seems to be James' version of social satire,  a take on the class war that doesn't take it very seriously. James' socialists don't really seem to understand socialism, and spend most of the novel trying to hide this from one another while also trying to simultaneously impress each other with how aware and committed they are, and to discreetly pump each other for information as to what they should be doing to further their cause. Thus there are moments of actual humor, genuine laugh-out-loud moments, that I did not expect from James.

Does that mean a re-assessment is in order? It may. But I've got a lot of other stuff going on, so don't hold your breath for one, K?

*Indeed, the last time I took him up, I was just beginning to have joint problems and thought recording audioboo blog posts was a temporary solution until they got better, ha ha ha ha ha ha sob...

Jack Vance's EMPHYRIO

Despite its originally having been penned in 1969, it's really hard not to see Emphyrio as a sort of allegory of our current predicament, you guys, so I'm not even going to try. Hey, it's not like this is the first time. Remember how I read Philip K. Dick's The Penultimate Truth in terms of the 1% versus the 99%? Yeah, like that.

Only more so.

Emphyrio is a coming of age story set in a world not very much like our own except in all of the ways that it is, or could be. A world in which a populace of extremely skilled and worthy artisans are required to craft only one-of-a-kind originals and sell them via their guilds for a pittance, which is pitched to them in the language of a Welfare State but is really just starvation wages the artisans are indoctrinated to believe could become, if managed correctly, Financial Independence, but let's be honest, are just enough to keep them slavishly creating astonishing works of art that middlemen can get rich on. A world in which a really, really silly religion (as in prayers are performed as intricate, acrobatic dance routines that no one ever really masters but everyone feels more or less obligated to keep trying to learn) combined with a Welfare administration that is slavishly following regulations laid down by a government that no longer exists (and thus can never be amended or updated, no matter what changes in the rest of the universe) and ruled over by a parasitic elite that is still profiting from "investments" made centuries ago, investments in basic infrastructure that was destroyed by war and mismanagement on the part of the government that no longer exists and... See where I'm going.

Enter Ghyl, son of an especially talented artisan who is also a bit of a sneaky non-conformist, who enjoys a rare free-range childhood before settling into the family craft, who is raised on legends of an ancient non-conformist named Emphyrio who once exposed lies, spoke truth to power, saw the universe, and then... Well, that part of daddy's ancient manuscripts didn't survive the centuries so, really, who knows how that story ended?

Ghyl's story, then, is mostly a gentle coming-of-age, but also the story of how a myth can become a self-fulfilling prophecy that can repeat in ways no one imagined. Ghyl follows in Emphyrio's footsteps as he strives to learn how Emphyrio's story ends and to find out if Emphyrio ever really existed, and winds up changing everything, just like Emphyrio maybe did.

That's all great right there, but this is also Jack Vance, whose Dying Earth novellas are not only gorgeous prose masterpieces in their own right but are also major inspirations for an obsession of mine, yep, Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle, which means tons of heady ideas, extravagantly beautiful prose, wry and satirical observation, and sensual details of color and aroma and tactile sensation and longing and all of the good stuff that one reads quality escapist literature for.

And it's a book that is (barely) older than I am. Yet it still resonates perfectly. Truly, it is an SF Masterwork, and one I'm kicking myself for only reading now (and that only because my good pal Jonathan Green asked me recently if I've read much Vance and I realized that it's been a LONG time since I read those Dying Earth novellas but I'd bought tons of Vance on the strength of those, only to have them just languishing on my e-readers unread).

Near damned perfection.

James S.A. Corey's CIBOLA BURN

"Apocalyptic explosions, dead reactors, terrorists, mass murder, death slugs, and now a blindness plague. This is a terrible planet." -- James Holden

After three novels taking place inside asteroids and moons and space stations and vast bizarre alien artifacts, and aboard spaceships plying the void between all of these things, at last we come to the surface of what most people would think of as a planet. There's breathable atmosphere, sort-of-normal gravity, a close-to-normal day/night cycle, something like plants and animals, and even buildings and food.

Only it's not Earth. Or Mars. Or something settled via a generation ship like the Mormons were building in the first Expanse novel. Oh, no.

It's in another star system altogether. Only we don't really know how far away it is. Or how the technology that gets us there works.

So now we're sort of in Frederick "Heechee" Pohl territory as events unfold in Cibola Burn, the fourth Expanse novel by the two-headed alien we call James S.A. Corey. And we have the protomolecule that has wreaked havoc in three prior novels back in our good old Sol system to thank for it, but that's all we know; we done passed through the gate that was built for us, but when we got to where it led us, there was nobody home. Ruins that might be described as Lovecraftian if not Cyclopean, yes. Aliens (except for the flora-and-fauna analogs found on the first planet we settle), no.

It's refreshing, this being on a planet business. But lest we think this is just going to be a novel of exploration and discovery... Have you read the other books in this series? Or at least the epigram above? Yeah...

So this planet, called New Terra by the Earth-based corporation that claims to own it but Ilus (as in an early name for the city of Troy) by the people who first settled it* is quite a place, but not a great one for human habitation for all its abundant clean, breathable air and fresh liquid water. The local life forms' biology is incompatible with ours, for a start (much is made early on of bugs that persist in biting people, only to drop dead minutes after feasting on human blood). Crops have to be grown in soil imported from our system, etc. All in all, seems like more trouble than its worth, except for two things: scientific curiosity and mineral wealth in the form of vast and easily mined deposits of lithium (the stuff that makes the batteries in most of our consumer electronics work).

Before you can say "space opera", Ilus is at the center of a major conflict, as the colonists try by various and violent means to fend off the corporate/scientific mission that is just landing there as the novel opens. The colonists don't want to lose their colony; the scientists don't want to lose the opportunity to study a fresh and uncontaminated new ecology (oops); the corporation wants to assert ownership and control.

Ut oh.

Enter the crew of the Rocinante, whom our old friends, UN muckty-muck Crisjen Avasarala and Outer Planets Alliance honcho Fred Johnson, have dispatched to mediate between these parties because Holden is the only moral high-horse riding uncompromising asshat for the job, they both agree. Holden is not thrilled with this, but the protomolecular ghost of [REDACTED] wants him to go, too, and is capable of haunting even Holden's dreams, so yeah, off they go.

All this alone would make for a pretty interesting story, especially with its two new viewpoint characters, colonist-turned-reluctant-terrorist Basia, corporate security dick and former partner of [REDACTED] Havelock, and brilliant biologist Elvi** keeping things interesting, but this is an Expanse novel, so it's never just going to be about human politics. The protomolecule is still very much a thing, and the long-vanished aliens who made the protomolecule also made the gate through which everyone gets to Ilus -- and left a lot of ruins on the planet.

And a lot of stuff inside it as well. Stuff that is triggered by the arrival of Holden and protomolecular puppet [REDACTED].

Cue epic shitstorm eloquently described by Holden above. It's a terrible planet, you guys.

I'll confess to having occasionally been annoyed at some aspects of Cibola Burn, most notably how the vast world of the Expanse still seems to contain a paucity of characters. Did [REDACTED]'s old partner really have to be the guy on the corporate spaceship? Wouldn't it be more probable that an entirely new guy held that role, since there are billions and billions of humans out there now? Of course, by that same argument, mightn't that vast human Expanse also contain someone more qualified and capable than Holden, Amos, Naomi and Alex to handle the powder keg of politics on Ilus? Not that I don't love these guys. It's just getting increasingly less probable that these same four people are at the center of every major develop in human history, over and over again. But I accept that this is a probably a bow to the necessities of series writing; few readers, I expect, would want to read a series that realistically kept throwing new figures into the forefront with every plot development. We read sequels for the characters, most of us, way more than for the world-building. What happens to so-and-so next is more important to us than what happens to all of humanity next. We're just wired that way. Dickens knew this without having been told by science. So do we.

Now the Rocinante and the rest of humanity is poised for yet even more difficulty and adventure. That gateway didn't just offer up Ilus to us, but thousands of other planets. All of which, as Avasarala points out, don't need to be terraformed to be habitable, like poor old Mars. Who's going to want to stay there now that it's so easy to go somewhere with free air and water and shelter from radiation? But then, what happens to Mars' formidable arsenal of heavily armed spaceships and missiles and nukes when there's just a skeleton crew left behind on Mars to govern them and their use? Collapse of the USSR anyone (insert your favorite Red Planet joke here)?

So yes, onward to Nemesis Games very, very soon.

*Who are themselves refugees from the disaster on Ganymede that was the centerpiece of the second Expanse novel, Caliban's War, refugees who were turned away from every human population center they tried to stop and and so finally just sailed on through the gateway and started their own illicit colony on this new planet.

**Which, I've run into a lot of reviews online in which people complain very loudly about Elvi, because she is portrayed as falling hard for Holden and letting it cloud her judgment to a dangerous degree. They don't like that she has this weakness and regard it as regressive and anti-feminist that so much of her story seems to revolve around this. And I can see their point, as I rolled my eyes a bit at her, too (even though she fully recognizes her feelings as dangerously distracting and unprofessional). But I say this rounds her out nicely. AND I'll point out that, as a friend of hers correctly diagnoses, what is really going on isn't that she's fallen in love with Holden, but that she's spent two years on a spaceship without receiving any physical affection (by her choice; she's declined to participate in the partner swapping and teepee creeping behavior of her fellow scientists) before crash-landing on an alien planet just in time for ALL THE CRISES TO HAPPEN and, being a mammal still, what she really needs is some intimate human contact. Which her friend is happy to provide. Which clears her head just in time for her to do the important work, have the important breakthroughs, that basically save the day. In conclusion, I'd like the point out that this is pretty much exactly the same situation Randy Waterhouse finds himself in, in Cryptonomicon, and nobody complained about sexism or stereotypes or regressive gender attitudes in that book.

Alastair Reynolds' REVENGER

I had a few false starts with Revenger, I won't lie. I think it was mostly because my brain insisted on trying to turn it into a Revelation Space book, even though it patently is not. There were just enough similarities between the superficial character traits Reynolds gave to his red shirts and those of characters from his earlier books to make that a temptation, though. Any of the crew of Monetta's Mourn could fit right in on board the Nostalgia for Infinity, is what I'm saying.

But there are no Ultranauts in this universe; the setting is very much our own solar system (I think), although it is changed beyond recognition by thousands (millions?) of years of natural processes, alien invasion and re-engineering, decay and resettlement. Humanity lives on a system-sized version of the Glitter Band/Rust Belt; lots of space stations and somewhat terraformed asteroids and planetoids -- but, apparently, no planets like you and I know them. There have been at least 13 "occupations" and all of them were long ago. Valuable and bizarre and bizarrely useful relics of all of those occupations can be found inside chunks of rock surrounded by force fields that open up an somewhat predictable intervals. Some people make a living exploring these "baubles" and selling off what they find.

Among the weird Roadside Picnic-esque treasures to be found are alien bones and skulls, which, studded with implants, can be "read" by young people with certain neurological traits and used as a kind of system-wide radio communications system.

Enter our protagonist, Fura, a young woman who, along with her slightly older sister, is found to have the talent for reading these bones and thus has a chance to escape her privileged but kind of creepy life on one of those barely terraformed rocks by signing on to read the bones for a crew of bauble miners.

So, I mean, of course she does.

And then terrible things happen. Terrible, violent, pirate-y things. Some people aren't into doing all the work to get loot to sell; some would rather lie in wait for other people to do the work and then rob them. And some like to get all Reaver-y about it.

The rest is the story charts Fura's journey from helpless fugitive to cold-blooded embodiment of revenge. We get to explore a little more of the world she ran away from and see more of the creeps who wanted to keep her there, spend some time on a brand new but less ambitious ship that she and a fellow survivor decide is their best vehicle for vengeance, and see Fura's plan unfold. It's all by turns creepy, exciting, violent and might remind you more than a little bit of a Jack Womack novel. Don't want to cross this young lady, no, no.

So this is an Alastair Reynolds who is exploring something new. Absent his galaxy-spanning atmospherics, the story is very tightly character driven, with mixed results. We get to know Fura very well, but no one except her friend Prozor gets terribly well-developed -- but I, at least, didn't mind this a bit. The tight focus on Fura's teenaged single-mindedness felt like the right way to go. No distractions, no stupid romance plot, just Find My Sister and Make Those Bastards Pay.

Hey, the Count of Monte Cristo didn't develop a lot of characters beyond Dantes, did it?

Justin Robinson's FIFTY FEET OF TROUBLE

The best Halloween present a pulp/noir/monster fiction fan could possibly get is a new Justin Robinson novel, and that is exactly what happened this year.* A sequel to his almost-illegally-too-fun City of Devils, it's Fifty Feet of Trouble.

Once again, our guide through the madness is Nick Moss, the last human private eye in Los Angeles, finder of missing persons, encounterer (sure, that's a word. Now.) of the titular trouble.** Which starts off in sort of the same vein as last novel, but has with it a whole weight of emotional baggage that you just don't have to deal with when a doppelganger of no previous acquaintance asks you to find her missing mummy husband.

This time around, Nick's quarry is human (Still. We Hope.), but not only is she human, she is a little girl, and not only is she a little girl, but she is the daughter of two close and dear friends who fought with him in the Night War (the conflict after WWII when the Monsters Took Over), and not only are they his close and dear friends but they already lost a child to the monsters and... see where this is going? There are several sub-plots that tie into this main one, but the missing little girl quest is the armature on which all of the other stuff hangs like a fifty-foot [REDACTED] off a giant floating stone [REDACTED].

So where City of Devils was mostly a slapstick romp with some moments of hilarious danger, there is a mature and emotionally powerful undertone to our hero's quest this time around. Be assured, though: this doesn't detract from the fun of reading it; it enhances it. And yes, there's still silly monster stuff. For instance, one of Nick's other assignments is finding a magical missing toad, so a witch friend of his can continue casting spells.

So, as I said on GoodReads, I wasn't expecting this to be Justin Robinson's best novel yet, but it's his best novel yet. The comedy and tragedy set each other off to perfection (a paragraph after a line that makes you howl with laughter and want to read pages aloud to some hapless stranger, there's a gut punch ready to knock you out cold), the new characters are beautifully realized, and the new over-the-top villains are used with admirable and judicious restraint,*** and no plot thread is left dangling. Like Nick and not-his-lady-friend off a giant floating stone [REDACTED].

So, if you're anything like me, you'll want to set aside a block of time to just utterly devote to this novel. Have some snacks ready. And some holy water. And some garlic. And some silver. And some salt. And a camera. And a bullhorn. Useful things, bullhorns. You just never know when you'll have to talk down a giant rampaging [REDACTED].

And, psst, best of all, Nick Moss has more adventures coming Not Soon Enough. Werewolf Confidential. Okay.

*What. Halloween presents are totally a thing. Where have you been? Well, yes, this first time I did have to buy it for myself, but I trust that this won't always be the case. Right? RIGHT?

**Now that I know Justin better -- he even blurbed my upcoming book -- I know exactly how much he loves words like "titular."

***You'll be glad of this. Reverend Bobo. I need a brandy.

Doctor, Doctor: Christopher Bulis' CITY AT WORLD'S END

I'm not a huge fan of the First Doctor, on television or in prose, so my enthusiasm was on the low side as I started City At World's End, though the premise looked good: the TARDIS crew land on a planet that is doomed to utter destruction when its moon, recently knocked out of its proper orbit by a passing asteroid, crashes right into it. It looks superficially like the world's inhabitants are prepared. Superficially.

All is not as it seems, of course, as if ever the case in a Doctor Who story. The city, Arkhaven (nudge nudge nudge NUDGE NUDGE NUDGE NUDGE), has indeed built a giant spacecraft that can take a huge number of people to safety, and there seems to be an orderly evacuation plan, BUT, as the Doctor quickly susses out from his unfortunate position as an internee in a refugee camp, there's an awful lot about this situation that doesn't make sense. At all.

Wait, refugee camp? Yes. Wait, you didn't think they were going to evacuate the entire planet, did you? Save everybody? Give everyone an equal chance? Ha ha ha ha ha ha, then why would the Doctor be there?

For this doomed planet is hopelessly class-ridden, in so many ways. There's a hereditary aristocracy. There is a seriously powerful religious institution. There have been terrible wars that have driven the population to drastic measures that made for refugees even before the meteor showers began to randomly devastate huge swathes of the planet. And there are nasty secrets. All over the place.

So this is a perfect early Doctor Who-era story. Even the rocket as described just screams 1960s sci-fi. The social criticism, too, is of its era: no concerns about racism, sexism or ableism, just about how the Elites and the Church are so myopically concerned about preserving their privilege that they're hampering the technocrats' efforts to save the human race.

Meanwhile, the TARDIS crew. Of course they get split up early, so that Susan can get borderline fridged (but only for a little while) and Barbara can get put through hell. This launches both of them into pretty admirable Self-Rescuing Princess routines (though Barbara's is unquestionably the harder road) while the Doctor harumphingly Consults with the rocket builders and Discovers Secrets and Ian, well, to Ian's credit, at least this time around (unlike in the first First Doctor novel I read, Byzantium!) he spends most of his time trying to rescue one of the women (whom this novel persists in referring to as girls, I guess because history, or something?).

Like a lot of Doctor Who stories of any era, this one suffers a bit from just having too many adversaries/complications stirred into its plot. A setting of inherent jeopardy and difficulty, which is already hiding layers and layers of secrets, is also stalked by a weird monster called The Creeper, AND there is a weird but ultimately satisfying sub-plot around Susan's fridging, which sub-plot winds up being what propelled me through some of this novel's duller bits in the middle. Kudos to author Christopher Bulis for pulling that off! This lands him just above the middle in the Arbitrary & Mercurial authors list:

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds
Una McCormack
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss
James Goss

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

As for the Doctors, no change. The First Doctor is going to have to show me something more before he budges ahead of the Fifth. Or the Fifth is going to have to really tick me off. Time will tell (hee hee).

Doctors:

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

And the answer I know you've all been waiting for, did Ian redeem himself out of last place? And the answer is, yes, to a degree. It's good that he actually went looking for Barbara (and later, Susan), but before he had that to do he was useless and really kind of a worry-wart spoil-sport, but that's not enough to leave him below Perpigilliam. In fact, he nudges ahead of Rose, Adric and Vicki! Woo! As for Susan, she didn't get to show me a whole lot, but what she did was pretty excellent, so she debuts on the list right after to Barbara, whom I picture emerging from the storm sewers and rubble with her fantastic 60s helmet hair perfectly unmussed and just the mandatory artful smudge of dirt marring her fantastic 60s make-up, because Barbara.

Companions:

Ace
Amy
Romana II
Rory
Jamie
Ben and Polly
Tegan
Jo
Barbara

Susan
Clara
Nyssa
Samantha
Martha
Bernice

Ian
Vicki
Adric
Rose
Peri

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!