As I’ve been fairly absent from my blog in the past six months, to say the least, I thought I’d post a quick summary of any recommendable books — and not only novels this time – I’ve read since I was last observed round this neck o’ the woods. Also, I’ll include some not-so-recommendable books, just to warn you away from them in case you’d happen to be desperate some day.
We’ll do this in a manner approaching the chronological, of course, beginning with January and then working our way towards the present.
Trudi Cavanan – The Black Magician Trilogy
I got this recommended to me by one of my flatmates, whose tastes I honestly thought better of. To be fair, he didn’t hail it as a highlight in modern fantastical fiction, but he did claim it had some interesting characters (especially a rogue-like one) and enough wickedly powerful magicians to make it quite entertaining. Unfortunately, he was wrong on both counts, and I was stuck there reading some of the most boring, two-dimensional fantasy I’ve ever come across. The characters did indeed have some potential, but it was so unfulfilled, I almost cried. Characters were characterised by others as “fiercely intelligent”, but the readers were rarely treated with scenes where this became apparent. As for the magic, it did have a fascinating limitation, but this only made it too obvious what magic served as a metaphor to – and for someone used to the standards of Jordan, Erikson, Goodkind and, er, Rowling and D&D, the power level of the magicians were pitiful. And as ridiculously powerful magicians are one of my favourite fantasy tropes, I feel this matter.
Also, the world felt flat and totally failed to engage me, and most of the narrative read like some hack rehash of the first couple of Harry Potter novels. This was tripe. Stay away from it.
Fritz Leiber – The First Book of Lankhmar
Did I review this here? I think I did. Anyway, I quite liked it. I would have loved reading a longer story with Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser in leading roles, but these short stories were satisfyingly enough. And more so from the perspective of my “fantasy archaeology” project, which is kinda the reason I’m reading “old” stuff like this.
Steven Saylor – Three novels from theRoma Sub Rosa series
Detective novels aren’t quite my cup of tea, and while I had hoped that these detective novels set in ancient Rome would prove to be more so, they weren’t, really. While interesting enough, as one historical novelist’s take on these famous incidents and personalities from the Roman Antiquity, I felt the plots of the novels lacked the necessary tension required to be successful. The only Dan Brown novel I’ve ever read actually managed it better than this, I am afraid to say. Still, I’ll most likely pick up more volumes of the series later, as they’re decent introductions to the historical events around which they revolve.
Guy Gavriel Kay – The Lions of Al-Rassan
Now, this, on the other hand, most certainly was my cup of tea! Granted, Kay isn’t exactly noted for his hordes of ultra-powerful magicians, but what he lacks in deicidal thaumaturgic megalomania, he more than enough makes up for with powerful melancholia and sentimentality.
Yes, you heard me right the first time: sentimentality. Kay is in fact one of the few fantasy authors I know of who can pull off scenes, characters and plotlines so sentimental it shouldn’t be possible to be touched by them in this post-ironic age. Yet he does. Time and time and time again. In novel after novel. Both the other Kay novels I’ve read, Tigana and A Song for Arbonne, were the same, but The Lions of Al-Rassan outdid them both. Granted, it lacked any single one scene with the impact of, say, The Red Wedding or Beak’s Sacrifice (to spontaneously name the most poignant scene from one of the more recent Erikson novels). But the sheer amount of it, present throughout the novel, was staggering. It also took on a vast array of forms: the deaths of minor or major characters, slaughter of civilians, the relationships between the characters, the way Kay took us inside the heads of even the most loathed character and showed us a side to pity before he killed that character off – Kay’s vehicles of sentiment were too many to count.
But one deserves mention, and that is the way the whole plot of the novel, based on the poem of El Cìd as it, radiates the inevitability of endings. Its nature as the tale of how one great civilisation almost annihilated another, while fanatics of every kind cheered from the sidelines, is evident from the first page, and this feeling of the death of something larger than life permeates the whole novel, rendering it almost painful to read.
In addition, I should probably also mention that Kay is a very efficient writer, who doesn’t spend more time than he has to (and often that is no time at all) on such frivolities as battles and combat; these are only described more than in passing when their relevancy to the characters is pressing. I don’t think I could recommend this novel warmly enough, although those of you who know me and my ways will probably be a bit wary, as I tend to get carried a bit away by things I really enjoy.
Joseph Conrad– Heart of Darkness
What to say, other than that I can truly understand why this is a classic. The novella has such an evocative prose and such a caught-in-headlights-fascinating take on its subject matter, I am bereft of words. Simply amazing, in spite of some duller parts towards the ending.
Karl Galinsky – Augustan Culture. An Interpretative Introduction
In Augustan Culture Karl Galinsky attempts to modify the predominant image the age of Augustus was given by Sir Ronald Syme in the 1930s, when he in his The Roman Revolution saw Augustus and his regime as a predecessor to those of Mussolini and Hitler. Galinsky sees Augustus and his age as less totalitarian and more polyphonic than has been the norm in the past sixty years, and draws on a wide spectre of historical and archaeological evidence in his argumentation.
It could be because I’ve always found the comparisons between Augustus and totalitarian despots to be laughable – totalitarianism has as one of its main prerequisites mass communications of a certain speed, something the Roman Empire for all its virtues sorely lacked* – but I fell for Galinsky’s hypothesis. His claims that it would have been fairly impossible for Augustus and his clique to have dictated the main themes of much of the period’s poetry, say, seem fairly obvious to me, as does his central tenet that the reason why Augustus’ programme and such works as Livius’ histories or Virgilius’ The Aenid tend to have a lot of ideas in common probably has to do with the fact that they’re all products of the intellectual environment in the Late Roman Republic.
He is a bit repetitive, and after having read a chapter or three it becomes fairly easy to predict his arguments in the remaining five or six, but it is very much worth it. I have some problems understanding why our lecturers in Rome put Galinsky on our curriculum, though, for while they mostly described the book as “splendid”, they only occasionally and pointlessly referred to him during lectures, and always presented Augustan works of art as the product of some monolithic tentacled monster of an intrusive and dictating state. Which was kinda frustrating.
*Comparisons with modern authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, I’m fine with. But describing pre-democratic societies as “authoritarian” is a bit like pointing out that people tend to have noses.
Tor Åge Bringsværd – Griseprat
A Norwegian non-fiction book by one of Norway’s foremost fantasists, Griseprat (literally ”pig talk”, more figuratively ”dirty talk” ) is an laid-back examination of the cultural history of the pig. Most central to the discussion between Bringsværd and his own take on A.A. Milne’s Piglet, is the topic of why pigs are considered unclean in Judaism and Islam, but he (or they) also talk about how the pig has been treated, both in real life and in culture, in Western Europe since the Middle Ages. And of course it wouldn’t have been a Bringsværd text if he didn’t include some perspectives on the mythological aspects of pigs.
Bringsværd is, as always, a quick read. (Which is fortunate; I probably have to plow through most of his dementedly long bibliography this summer, as it looks as if I’m set to interview him in front of an audience during this fall’s Bjørnsonfestival. I am quite obviously psyched out of my mind, as Bringsværd is just about the only Norwegian author I admire as much as I do people like Neil Gaiman.) I think I finished the book in about five hours or less, which could have been too short a time to spend on such an important book as this one. Bringsværd gives the impression that he’s only a flanneur in the human history of pigs, and he is careful both to stay away from any explicit discussions of animal rights and to state that he isn’t a vegetarian (or that’s how I interpreted him, anyway; he seemed a bit ambiguous on the subject, frankly, mentioning Hitler when Piglet claimed that vegetarians were “nice people” ). But it is still quite obvious that this charming, funny little book is also a sad and deeply serious examination of how we humans treat our fellow inhabitants of this Earth, and that his conclusion resembles Forrest J. Ackerman’s short story “Cosmic Report Card: Earth” – supposedly the shortest SF story ever written, consisting only of the title and the sixth letter of the alphabet. (Thanks to David Langford for never letting us forget about the history of our genre, by the way!)
Keith Roberts – Pavane
And speaking of SF history…
A few days before I picked up Pavane, I tried to get started on Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter, as I felt I’d been dawdling too much with my project lately. Unfortunately, Dunsany’s tale was too much of a fairytale for my taste, with characters who don’t deserve the title; characters for whom you couldn’t develop much affection if your life depended on it. (Surreal as that may sound.)
But then, as I said, I picked up Pavane. And instantly fell in love. Pavane is not so much a novel as a series of short stories built up around the premise of what would have happened if Queen Elizabeth had been assassinated by a Catholic zealot in 1588, England had been thrown into chaos and civil war, thus leaving the way wide open for the Spanish Armada (and their Inquisition) and papal exploitation of growing English might in their eventually successful Counter Reformation.
Set about four hundred years after the assassination, Pavane follows a series of characters in their lives beneath the pontifical yoke, and Roberts’ characterisations are actually good enough almost to eclipse the premise as the novel’s main attraction. As the novel progresses its short stories become meshed together in a web (or, if you will, a dance) of causality and thematic relations, until it all is kinda turned on its head in the epilogue. Brilliance from one end to the other, I can heartily recommend Pavane to anyone interested in SF, England, the Catholic Church or, frankly, people.
20 Comments
Hey, I think —
Wait a minute, I have nothing to comment about, since I haven’t read a single one of these books. Boo! That’s boring. Try to do better next time?
Like getting the year correct. That would be nice
I’m only kidding, of course. Well, not about the year-thing. That’s pretty grave
He’s right about the year, you know.
Pavane, Heart of Darkness and The Lions of Al-Rassan all added to my ever-growing Amazon wish-list. Which is, admittedly, increasingly a wishlist for time and energy more than for actual books.
What can I say? Forgetting what year we’re in is, sadly, so much like me, I’m hardly even surprised. In fact, I believe I shall comfort myself that I only missed by one.
Yes, we’re all very impressed you didn’t write 1999.
Well, yes, years are all such ephemerally transitory things, aren’t they?
I believe an actual ephemera would take issue with that and consider a year a very long, very unimaginably constant thing indeed.
Good thing most ephemeral things can’t read, then, so we won’t have an armed ephemeral uprising on our hands. Ehem, ephemeral event though it would have been…
They’d pass it on to further generations. A legacy of hatred against the Eternally Lived Bipeds.
Also, if insects were ever to take up ARMS, gods help us, as they have SIX EACH.
There’s actually a thirty issue Vertigo series called “the Exterminators” (it’s quite good, too) that deals with this, as well as egyptian mythology and what-have-you. It’s not Loki’s alley, methinks, but it may suit you, Terje.
Insects are far too disgusting to be outweighed merely by some Egyptian mythology being involved, so yeah, you got me pegged on that one.
Luckily, Loki, a short month would have been for them the equivalent of 900 years for humans. Which is… er… just, umm, 200 years longer than the, eh, Balkans have been simmering.
Yay, us…
On the other hand, two months would bring us up to 1800 years, and I can’t say I remember any racial or ethnic (gods, why are those two concepts even separate?) animosity that has laster for that long.
This would be a feud between SPECIES though, not races or ethnicities. You’d think the added abyss of space between the sides would also add time before the kiss-and-make-up-phase.
True enough. However, I remain skeptical to the duration of the conflict. Man has proven to have a true genious when it comes to brutal and effective ruthlessness, even while fighting members of its own species. Once the sympathy inherent in us for members of our own species is put out of play, I wonder just how long it would take us to eradicate any flimsy little species we perceived as a threat to our survival. Add to that that many insects are seen as hardly constituting a form of life at all, and being on their way to being wiped out now, when we don’t really have any beef of consequence with them, and things don’t look too bright for our armed ephemeral friends. Or foes, as it might be.
On the other hand, though, as our experiences with literature dealing with cultural differences between species with markedly disimilar life expectancies (ie. fantasy; Tolkien’s humans and elves is a classic example) ought to have taught us, shorter-lived species tend to be more efficient and adaptable than longer-lived ones. So maybe the bugs would have had a fighting chance after all.
“when we don’t really have any beef of consequence with them”
The Africans apparently do, this old book on African kingdoms I’m reading puts huge amounts of blame for the Europeans and Asians winning the development race on three or four species of insects the Africans had to struggle with. (The locust, the tse-tse fly, the malaria mosquito, etc.)
Hmm, well, those’re probably part of the problem, yes, but the general tropical climate and probably has something to do with that too; Africa’s a difficult continent on which to build up the population density required for cultural and technological development.
But the insect problem is so intertwined with that, I guess the distinction matters little.
Well, yes, he didn’t put all the blame on the insects. But the general agenda of the book is sort of “look how incredibly awesome cultures and complex societies the Africans developed IN SPITE of everything!”, so you kind of almost walk away with the impression that the author feels like just with any single one of their natural hindrances less, they’d have been world powers. (I’m overstating, of course, but…) And the insects were certainly presented as one such major obstacle.
It’s a pretty cool book, actually, for me who knew literally nothing of African history before the colonial period. It’s pretty cool to read about all these ancient states that had (to me) surprising amounts of contact with the Mediterranean through Egypt or even every now and then with China (likely through trade with India).
Sadly, that’s one of the many areas of world history where my knowledge is sorely lacking, as well. I know that the Romans traded with the kingdoms in West Africa, and that there are theories about the Justinian Plague(s) making its way up from the area around Lake Victoria when the East Romans had to start importing grain and other merchandise from that area after their own agricultural output declined sharply after a volcanic eruption in East Asia somewhere. And then there’s the Ndebele migration, of course, but apart from that, there’s hardly anything.
Problem is I’ve been reading it all consecutively, without taking notes, so I’m mixing cultures and civilisations, but I remember there was one pretty big state in the east of Africa that at one point sent emissaries to the court of emperor Nero, and another, later Muslim state in the west, that both received Arab emissaries (our majority of sources to their society is apparently these guys’ writings) and even at one point are supposed to have had their own king go on a pilgrimage to the Middle East. I remember this latter point because the king apparently threw gold around him on his trip to the extent that the Egyptian economy was thrown into havoc for decades after simply because of his trip taking him through their realm.
Just because I can’t keep out of things not really my business, I’d like to point out that the monarch in question would be Mansa Moussa (or King Moussa) of the Mali empire, who ruled in the 14th century. The former civilization mentioned may probably be Axium, which was situated in Ethiopia.
It was indeed a civlisation somewhere in today’s Ethiopia, but I’m unsure if it was the one named Axium or not. You are of course spot-on about Mansa Moussa of the Mali empire, though, so you’re likely right there as well. Thank you very much for refreshing my uselessly vague memory!