Review: My Ántonia , by Willa Cather

Review: My Ántonia , by Willa Cather

by Rich Horton

When I was younger -- even just 20 years younger -- I don't think I'd ever have thought that my two favorite American writers might end up being Edith Wharton and Willa Cather -- two near contemporaries (Wharton about a decade older) and two otherwise very different women, and very different writers, to each other. As that time I had a completely false view of Willa Cather's fiction, assuming it was dour, dreary, and message bound; and I had read nothing by Wharton save Ethan Frome, which is a novella I like but which is not characteristic of her work. My eventual entrée to Cather was also a novella: A Lost Lady (which is actually somewhat characteristic of much of her work.) I loved A Lost Lady (much as I also loved Wharton's The House of Mirth, which I read at about the same time) and I've since acquired many of her books. But I hadn't had time to get to her masterful "Prairie Trilogy": O Pioneers!, Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. (I consider A Lost Lady a sort of pendant to those books.) But the time has finally come!

My copy of My Ántonia is a Houghton Mifflin Sentry Edition, a trade paperback, probably from the '70s. It's signed inside by (I suppose) the first owner, one Susan Caine. The illustrations, by W. T. Benda, are included. (Apparently, in the first edition, Cather had to fight to get them added as loose inserts.) I also listened to parts of the books in audio form, narrated by Andrea Giordani. And finally, I should credit a truly wonderful website, the Willa Cather Archive, maintained by the University of Nebraska, which has the text of her books (sometimes multiple editions) along with critical commentary, textual discussion, illustrations, etc. 

Willa Cather was born in 1873 in Virginia. Her family moved to Nebraska in 1883. Cather published pieces in the Red Cloud, NE, newspaper early, but planned to become a doctor. But at the University of Nebraska she continued to write, and switched to an English major, graduating in 1894. She moved to Pittsburgh in 1896, and taught school while also working for magazines and newspapers, and publishing occasional stories. She moved to New York to join the editorial staff at McClure's in 1906. (I encountered some editorial correspondence between Cather and a McClure's contributor, H. G. Dwight, when I was writing about Dwight's collection Stamboul Nights.) McClure's serialized her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, in 1912, and the "prairie novels" soon followed. She won a Pulitzer in 1923 for her World War I novel One of Ours.  (Wharton, in 1921, was the first woman to win the Pulitzer for Best Novel, and Cather was the second.)

Cather lived in New York from 1906 (summering in New Brunswick eventually), and from 1908 she lived with Edith Lewis. Her only other close relationships were with women, and so it is (plausibly) assumed by many that she was a Lesbian, but she never so identified (publicly.) Of course that last is easy to understand given societal pressures. 

My Ántonia is introduced in (we presume) Cather's voice, as she recounts a meeting with an old friend from her Nebraska childhood, Jim Burden. Jim is now a successful New York lawyer, but they discuss their childhood, and especially the remarkable woman they knew, Ántonia Shimerda; and Jim proposes a dual memoir of her. A few months later, he dumps the manuscript on Cather's desk, and she confesses that she hadn't had time to write her half -- so the rest of the book is Jim Burden's story of his relationship with Ántonia.

(And already I have to make a comment -- that introduction is from the first edition, and from the audiobook version I listened to. I also have a print version, and the introduction is quite different there -- it's somewhat shorter, it lessens some critical (and rather snarky) comments about Jim Burden's wife, and it is not written so as to imply that the narrator of the introduction is Cather herself (for example, it removes a line that identified the narrator as a young girl when they knew Ántonia.) The critical consensus seems to be that the changes -- which occurred in the 1926 reissue -- are an improvement; and I can see the point, but I have to say I was intrigued by the paragraph or so about "Mrs. James Burden", and I didn't mind the identification of the narrator of the introduction as probably Cather.)

The novel (that is to say, Jim Burden's story) has five sections: "The Shimerdas", "The Hired Girls", "Lena Lingard", "The Pioneer Woman's Story", and "Cuzak's Boys". The first tells of Jim's few years on his grandparents' farm, of other local farmers and hands, in particular the Shimerdas, Bohemian immigrants who arrived with their daughter Ántonia (or Tony), who is 14 to Jim's 10, but who becomes his close friend (in part because at first she is the only Shimerda with any English.) The second is set after Jim and his grandparents move into town, followed soon by Ántonia and a number of other girls (most or all also immigrants) who work in town to make money for their families. The third follows some of the career of one of those girls, Lena Lingard, who moves to Lincoln around the same time Jim goes there to university. The fourth concerns Ántonia, and her disastrous "marriage" to a train man everyone but she knew was a cad, and her subsequent return, pregnant, to her family farm. And the final part is set around the time of Jim's meeting recounted in the introduction, when he had, for the first time in many years, visited Black Hawk and caught up with Ántonia, now truly married and the mother of a large family.

The story is centrally about Jim Burden and Ántonia, but there is a horde of further characters. The Shimerdas: Mr. Shimerda -- a skilled weaver and musician but a terrible farmer -- who has a hard time adapting. His elder son, Ambrosch, is surly, not terribly intelligent, but strong. The other son, Marek, is mentally disabled. The cranky and suspicious mother and her youngest daughter, Yulka. The Shimerdas' crooked countryman, Peter Kraijek, who lured them to Nebraska. Two Russian men, Pavel and Peter, who are trying to establish their farm near the Burdens. The Burdens' two farmhands, Otto Fuchs and Jake Marpole, who serve as sort of archetypes of the kind of lonely men who headed West to try to make a life, without the resources to really thrive, despite some real skills. All the "hired girls": Lena Lingard, Tiny Soderball, the "Bohemian Marys". The Harlings, who employ Ántonia when she moves to town: the father a successful businessman, his much admired son, who will go in the Navy, his impressive elder daughter, Frances, who becomes his business partner, Mrs. Harling, indulgent but rigid in some ways. Ántonia'a other employer, Wick Cutter, the crooked moneylender, and his wife, who hates him. Gaston Cleric, the professor at the university who becomes a mentor to Jim, and who is obviously coded as gay. (Jim's sexuality is less clear -- he marries, but there are no children and perhaps the couple are not close, his only other extended relationship with a woman is with Lena, and seems mostly or entirely platonic, he clearly adores Ántonia but there never seems a question that they'd be romantically involved (though at least to begin with that's explained by their age difference.)) The Widow Steavens, who buys the Burdens' farmhouse and is there to help Ántonia through her first pregnancy. Ántonia's eventual husband, Anton Cuzak, and their huge family, especially Ántonia's favorite, Leo.

There is little conventional plot but much in the way of incident. The Shimerdas' early struggles. Jim and Tony's encounter with a huge rattlesnake in a prairie dog colony. The horrifying story of the reason Pavel and Peter had to leave Russia. Controversy over the cow the Burdens sell the Shimerdas, and Ambrosch's careless ways with harnesses they lend him. Mr. Shimerda's suicide, and Otto making his coffin. Lena being attacked by Crazy Mary, who is convinced Lena is corrupting her husband. The sudden fashion for dancing in Black Hawk, when a couple of dancing instructors come to town. The story Ántonia tells of a tramp who convinces the men operating the threshing machine at harvest to let him help, then purposely falls into the machinery to commit suicide. The blind black piano player who comes to perform at the hotel in town. Ántonia nearly being raped. Ántonia running off to Denver on the promise of marriage to the slimy Larry Donovan, who soon deserts her. Her return, to go back to work on the farm and have her baby. Tiny Soderball's adventures -- running an inn in Seattle, then heading to Alaska for the Klondike Gold Rush, and returning, a wealthy woman, to live in Salt Lake City and San Francisco, with Lena nearby to keep her dressed even as Tiny makes sure Lena takes care of her own money. And finally Jim's visit to Ántonia -- which provides real closure.

So much to admire here -- so much to love. The characters are all completely real (and, to be sure, many were based to some extent or another on people Cather knew as a child ... with Jim Burden, arguably, being based somewhat on herself.) Ántonia is a wonderful character, though neither a saint nor a prodigy. (Unlike Alexandra Bergson, from O Pioneers!, who though flawed in many ways is truly a farming prodigy.) The novel is profoundly feminist, it seems to me -- so many of the major and minor women characters are powerful women making their own way: Ántonia of course, and Frances Harling, and Tiny Soderball, Lena Lingard, Mrs. Gardener (the innkeeper in town.) The book is also a story of immigrants -- who face problems including language, finance, homesickness, prejudice; and who sometimes surive heroically and sometimes fail. It's tremendously moving at times. And it's beautifully written. 

A few short passages:

At Mr. Shimerda's funeral: "Years later, when the open grazing days were over, and the red grass had been plowed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie, when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines; Mr. Shimerda's grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross."

Ántonia and Jim watching a sunset: "All those fall afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's death — heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.

"How many an afternoon Ántonia and I have trailed along the prairie under that magnificence! And always two long black shadows flitted before us or followed after, dark spots on the ruddy grass."

The prairie under snow: "The sky was brilliantly blue, and the sunlight on the glittering white stretches of prairie was almost blinding. As Ántonia said, the whole world was changed by the snow; we kept looking in vain for familiar landmarks. The deep arroyo through which Squaw Creek wound was now only a cleft between snow-drifts -- very blue when one looked down into it. The tree-tops that had been gold all the autumn were dwarfed and twisted, as if they would never have any life in them again. The few little cedars, which were so dull and dingy before, now stood out a strong, dusky green. The wind had the burning taste of fresh snow; my throat and nostrils smarted as if some one had opened a hartshorn bottle. The cold stung, and at the same time delighted one. My horse's breath rose like steam, and whenever we stopped he smoked all over. The cornfields got back a little of their color under the dazzling light, and stood the palest possible gold in the sun and snow. All about us the snow was crusted in shallow terraces, with tracings like ripple-marks at the edges, curly waves that were the actual impression of the stinging lash in the wind."

Jim at the end, following the track of the first road he and Ántonia took to their farms, as children: "On the level land the tracks had almost disappeared -- were mere shadings in the grass, and a stranger would not have noticed them. But wherever the road had crossed a draw, it was easy to find. The rains had made channels of the wheel-ruts and washed them so deep that the sod had never healed over them. They looked like gashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the slopes where the farm wagons used to lurch up out of the hollows with a pull that brought curling muscles on the smooth hips of the horses. I sat down and watched the haystacks turn rosy in the slanting sunlight.

"This was the road over which Ántonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is. For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."

Truly, Cather has no equal in depicting the great landscapes of the prairies. My Ántonia is a masterwork, one of the great American novels, on one of the most central American themes.

Review: Agnes Grey, by Anne Brontë

Review: Agnes Grey, by Anne Brontë

by Rich Horton

My latest Victorian novel is Anne Brontë's first novel, Agnes Grey. This was Anne's first novel, published simultaneously with her sister Emily's only novel, Wuthering Heights, in 1847. I had read Charlotte's first published novel, Jane Eyre, long ago, and quite liked it; and I read Wuthering Heights for a high school class, and hated it. But -- to some extent because I accepted the long held notion that Anne was the least of the three sisters as a novelist, I hadn't read either of her novelsI think this notion is less accepted these days, or, at least, Anne's novels (perhaps particularly her second, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) are held in much higher critical esteem now than in the past. (Perhaps this can be laid in part at the feet of Charlotte, at least in the case of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, of which she wrote it "had an unfavourable reception. At this I cannot wonder. The choice of subject was an entire mistake." Charlotte also prevented republication of Wildfell Hall after Anne's death in 1849.)

I had determined I should read Anne's work, and also Charlotte's later novels. I bought copies of both of Anne's novels, and decided to read Agnes Grey first, primarily because it is significantly shorter, at perhaps 70,000 words. I have a copy of the Oxford World's Classics edition, edited by Robert Inglesfield and Hilda Marsden, with a useful introduction, and endnotes, by Sally Shuttleworth, as well as a copy of Charlotte Brontë's somewhat notorious "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell" (signed as by Currer Bell,) written for the second edition (1850) of Wuthering Heights/Agnes Grey.

The novel is told in first person, from Agnes' point of view. She is the younger of two surviving daughters of Richard Grey, a clergyman. Agnes' mother is from a richer family than Richard Grey's, but she was disinherited because her father disapproved of the marriage. However, they live happily enough until Richard decides to make a risky investment (out of guilt over his poor circumstances relative to those his wife grew up in) and inevitably loses all his money. Eventually the two sisters try to make some additional money to help the family make ends meet -- Mary, the elder, is a talented artist and will try to sell some paintings, and Agnes resolves to become a governess.

Her first situation is with the family of a Mr. Bloomfield, a wealthy man, though but a tradesman. There are three children, all quite young. The mother is convinced they are angels, but of course they are utterly horrible. The boy is a bully, tortures small animals, etc., while the older girl is incorrigibly lazy. Neither will attend to their lessons, and both know very well how to complain to their parents about Agnes' efforts to correct them. Both parents are quite horrible to, as are the grandmother and uncle, and before long Agnes is dismissed.

After a little while back home, Agnes determines to get another position, taking care to insist on higher pay, and on clients of a better class. The new family, the Murrays, live at the excellently named Horton Lodge, rather further from her home than she has yet been. There are four children, all somewhat older than the Bloomfield children. Mr. Murray is described as a "roystering country squire", while Mrs. Murray is a handsome woman, apparently much interested in fashion and parties. The elder Miss Murray, Rosalie, is a budding beauty of 16, a pleasant enough girl but vain and shallow. Her sister Matilda, at 14, is a hoyden, something of a tomboy, rather impolite and inconsiderate but not quite terrible. The two boys are 11 and 10 -- the elder a somewhat normal boy, though not much of a scholar, the younger being more of a piece of work, an habitual liar. But with a year or two both are bundled off to boarding school.

So most of Agnes' efforts are to educate Rosalie and Matilda. And both girls are capricious, not much interested in learning, and not willing to hew to any schedule, so that Agnes is required sometimes to be up very early, only to have them sleep in, and otherwise put to much inconvenience. Still and all, this situation proves a bit better than at the Bloomfields, and Agnes stays for a few years, and thus we see the main action of the novel.

This concerns a couple of things ... Rosalie's "coming out" and eventual marriage (with sad results); and in the interim her very unwise flirting ways with numerous local young men. Secondly, there is drama at the church: the vicar is a youngish man, very conceited and not terribly religious, and soon he gets a new curate, Mr. Weston, a poorer man, but devoted and virtuous and very religious. The vicar takes an interest in Rosalie -- but is not rich enough for either she or her mother. And, the reader soon realizes, Mr. Weston is just the man for Agnes Grey. The novel quite nicely wends it ways through various complications and misunderstandings -- Rosalie setting her cap at Mr. Weston just to be mean, Agnes and Mr. Weston both help some of the poorer and older members of the parish but sometimes this becomes awkward, and eventually Mr. Weston gets a new position, and Agnes also leaves Horton Lodge, as her charges age out and, more importantly, her father dies, and she decides to open a school with her mother.

It's a fine novel, if not a great one. Honesty forces one to admit that Agnes can be a little prosy, and rather prudish (if in response to true provocations.) Brontë's prose is just fine. Her depiction in particular of Rosalie's fate, very much driven by her character (and that of her mother) is effective, and Agnes' love story is nice. On the whole, I enjoyed the novel but didn't love it. I understand that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a different animal, more challenging, more modern, and I will get to it sometime. 

I should add that there are very distinct autobiographical aspects to Agnes Grey, particularly as to the two governess jobs Agnes holds. Both are apparently based to some extent -- a very considerable extent, it seems, in the case of the first one -- on Anne's own experiences as a governess. (I wonder if the models for these characters read the novel and were embarrassed or enraged.)
In addition, the novel appeared at a time when the general mistreatment of governesses had become, or was becoming, something of a national issue, and this novel certainly contributed to that conversation.

Review: The Count of 9, by "A. A. Fair" (Erle Stanley Gardner)

Review: The Count of 9, by "A. A. Fair" (Erle Stanley Gardner)

by Rich Horton

A few months ago I read and reviewed my first "A. A. Fair" novel. "A. A. Fair" was the pseudonym Erle Stanley Gardner used for his books about Cool and Lam -- that is to say, Bertha Cool, a rather portly 60ish woman who owns a detective agency, and her partner, Donald Lam, a scrawny ex-lawyer who is pretty much the brains of the outfit. That book was Crows Can't Count, and it didn't fully work for me. This book is somewhat later in the series than Crows Can't Count, and I have to say it didn't quite work for me either. I have a couple more Cool and Lams, and I'll try them some time.

I have two copies of this one, actually. I bought the Hard Case Crime reprint at Worldcon last year, with a nice Robert McGinnis cover. And a few months later I was at an estate sale and there were some '60s Gardners on sale for a buck apiece, and why not? So I bought the 1962 Pocket Books reprint (in the 5th printing, from 1969), with a very nice Mitchell Hooks cover. I note for the nitpickers that the Hard Case Crime edition claims "First publication in 50 years", but as it appeared in 2018, it was really only 49 years!

Gardner wrote an introduction to this novel, urging a more humane approach to penology, especially the treatment of prisoners, and better efforts at rehabilitation. He dedicated the novel to Douglas C. Rigg, warden of the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater, and apparently a leading light, as of the late '50s, in that movement. (The novel itself does not really touch on those themes.)

As the novel opens, Bertha Cool is arranging for some publicity for their detective organization, via some photographs, conveniently featuring the new and quite attractive filing clerk. These pictures have been arranged by the publicist for Dean Crockett, a rich "explorer" type. In exchange, Crockett wants Bertha to handle security at an upcoming party, where he'll be discussing his latest trip, and also showing off some of his collection. But a jade Buddha figurine had recently been stolen, so he figures he needs protection.

Bertha is only too dazzled by the prospect of a magazine article about her, and she agrees. (The file clerk, as well, is perhaps only too dazzled by the photographer's compliments, but that's another story, sort of.) But Donald has concerns, and they are justified when Bertha calls in the middle of the night, demanding he come to Crockett's penthouse. And when he gets there, he finds that another Buddha figurine has been stolen, and also a poison dart blowgun Crockett had acquired in a trip to Africa.

What follows is a dizzying sequence, concerning things like Donald cleverly recovering both stolen items (which seems to be not wholly satisfactory to Crockett,) Donald uncovering the photographer's sleazy side business, some intrigue with the latest Mrs. Crockett, a beautiful woman, a painter, who's on the outs with her husband; more intrigue with Mrs. Crockett's also lovely friend and sometime model; the murder of Dean Crockett; dealings with a noted fence; questions about the nature of Crockett's business; and a lot of sometimes strained examination of the security at the penthouse (including an x-ray machine in the elevator), and of the murder itself, and the weapon -- the recovered blowgun. Donald gets badly beaten (apparently a common occurrence,) the police get involved and bungle everything except that Donald saves them ...

It's pretty fun, but also a bit implausible. It's a very fast-moving book. Donald's techniques are outrageous -- he plants evidence, lies all the time, frames people he knows are guilty, but of course he gets results. He deflects the attentions of the bad women who want to use their wiles on him; but (it's implied, not shown) that he's happy to sleep with innocent women if they want it (though he seems to have on ongoing relationship with his secretary, Elsie Brand.) (All the sex in these books is implied, not at all shown, and I waver between thinking that's effective, and thinking that a bit more directness (as I think would have been the case not much later) would be nice.) As I said above, I don't think it wholly successful -- a bit too pat in some ways, and a bit too implausible. 

Review: Travel Light, by Naomi Mitchison

Review: Travel Light, by Naomi Mitchison

by Rich Horton

This weekend, at the Montreal convention Scintillation, I bought a book from the Montreal bookstore Argo Books (which is Scintillation's bookdealer) -- a book I'd never heard of. This is Travel Light, by Naomi Mitchison. I have known of Mitchison for a long time, but only for one book, the 1962 SF novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman. But this book, first published in 1952, looked enticing -- a fantasy about a girl who is saved from her evil stepmother by her nurse, who turns into a bear and spirits the girl away to live with the bears. This edition is from Small Beer Press's Peapod Classics line, and was published in 2005.

First a bit about Mitchison. She lived a very long time -- from 1897 to 1999. She was born in Scotland, and her maiden name was Haldane -- and, yes, the great scientist J. B. S. Haldane was her older brother. The longevity may have been in her genes -- three of her children, all prominent biologists, lived to be 98, 94, and 89. Her husband, Dick Mitchison, was a Labour MP, later named a Life Peer as Baron Mitchison. In her own right, Naomi was named a Commander of the British Empire. Mitchison was a very prolific writer, publishing over 90 books, and is considered one of the giants of Scottish writing. She was a committed Leftist, though she was frustrated by such things as their defense (or at least avoidance of criticism) of the Moscow Show Trials, and by the end results of the Russian Revolution, and she was good friends with J. R. R. Tolkien, and indeed helped edit The Lord of the Rings. She also worked with her brother on some genetic experiments, so she had scientific chops as well. She was a regular visitor to Africa, especially Botswana (which may account for me thinking at one time that she was a South African writer.)

Her best novel may be The Corn Kings and the Spring Queen (1931), though Memoirs of a Spacewoman is also highly regarded (especially in the SF community), and I suspect there are likely many neglected jewels in her oeuvre. She's probably best known for her historical fiction, but she wrote a lot of Fantasy, some SF, and some contemporary fiction (including the notorious We Have Been Warned (1935), which was censored (more, I gather, for the controversial treatment of sexual issues that for its warning about fascism) and which nearly got her publishers prosecuted.

As for Travel Light ... Halla is the daughter of a King, but when the King remarries her stepmother insists that "the brat must be got rid of." And so her nurse, who is part bear, takes her away to live with the bears. Quite soon, however, she encounters a dragon, who offers to adopt her himself (thus avoiding the issue of hibernation.) And for some long time, Halla lives with the dragon, and considers herself a dragon as well. She learns to hate human "heroes", who only want to kill dragons; and to covet treasure in the dragonish way. But she won't ever grow wings ... and when her dragon father is killed, she is off again (rescued from the murderous hero by a Valkyrie).

Then comes her traveling time, for she comes across a wanderer, whom she recognizes as Odin, the All-Father. And he gives her some advice -- travel light -- as she has decided to go to Micklegard (Constantinople) where she thinks the dragon emperor might live. On her journey she joins with a small band of men who have a petition to bring to the Emperor, concerning a corrupt Governor. As Halla can speak all languages (human and animal) she offers to interpret for them. In Micklegard they encounter more troubles -- a complicated bureaucracy, and more corruption, and lack of money. Here Halla's ability to speak to horses comes in handy ...

And things do resolve themselves, but with complicated results. For one of the man, his hometown is not worth returning to, so he and Halla head up the river to Holmgard (Novgorod), and a final resolution, again with ambiguities, and violence and sadness mixed with hope; and with some revelations about Halla as well.

This really is a delightful book. It is often funny -- the attitudes of bears, and horses, and the Valkyrie, and especially dragons are amusing. The syncretic mixing of myths and fairy stories is very well handled. But it's no pure comedy -- there are very dark events, real pain, real growth. It's also effectively "out of time". It's honest and deep when it needs to be, extravagantly imagined, morally affecting, and at the core optimistic despite depicting much tragedy and human wrongs. The (unsigned) introduction is quite good, but its opening claim -- that, with luck and the right illustrator, Travel Light could have become one of the last century's most popular children's books. That's all fine except -- I don't think it's a children's book. It's an adult book (though fine for children to read.) But I do endorse this comment from the introduction: "more than just a story: it is a map for living."

Review: The Burning Air, by Eugene Mirabelli

The Burning Air, by Eugene Mirabelli

a review by Rich Horton

Eugene Mirabelli was born in Massachusetts in 1931 -- same state, a month earlier than my father. He became a professor of literture, and wrote his thesis on Faulkner, and taught for a few years. His first novel, The Burning Air, was published in 1959, and a few more followed. He married Margaret Black in 1959, and they had three children, and Gene published three novels. She worked as an editor, and after Gene stopped teaching he worked for a left wing weekly, and returned to academia later. More novels such as The Language Nobody Speaks (reviewed here) and The Goddess in Love with a Horse followed. Margaret died suddenly in 2010, and Renato the Painter was published soon afterwards. In 2003 he had published a very fine story in F&SF, "The Only Known Jump Across Time", and several other SF and Fantasy stories followed, in F&SF, Asimov's, and Not One of Us. (I reprinted three of these stories, in my Best of the Year volumes and in Lightspeed.) Gene is still alive at 92.

I think his SF/F stories from the decade between 2003 and 2013 are remarkable and deserve a collection. I decided to explore his non-SF work a few years ago, and I read The Language Nobody Speaks (1999), an erotically charged and quite effective book, reviewed here. Just a couple of months ago I saw a post about the paperback edition of The Burning Air, which, not unusually for paperbacks in that era, emphasized the erotic aspects of the novel (which are present, but hardly in a sleazy way.) (The cover, which is really not sleazy at all, is by the great Robert McGinnis, and it's fairly faithful to the novel except giving Giulia blond hair.) I looked for a copy to try, and bought the first edition, and I've finally read it. 

It's a short novel, just under 40,000 words. It's told by a young man named George, who is visiting his girlfriend Giulia Molla's parents for the first time, with the intention of getting their approval for the couple to marry. But the novel's first sentence tells us how it's going to end: "The last time I saw Guilia was at the train station in Bayfield." The rest of the book tells the story of a seemingly rather nice weekend, but over it all hangs a sort of dread as the reader knows that George and Guilia's relationship is doomed.

Both young people are Italian-Americans, nominally Catholic, well-educated. There may be hints to fissures early in some of that -- does George's name as opposed to Giulia's hint his family is more assimilated? (After all Giulia's grandmother insists on calling him Giorgio -- but also, Giulia's teenaged brother is named Michael. And, we learn eventually, the Molla's have been in the US much longer than George's family.) George may have been raised Catholic, but he never goes to Mass, and indeed Giulia conspires to skip Mass this weekend. As for education, George is working as a free-lance journalist, but vows to get a teaching job if his finances remain vulnerable; while Giulia has a chance for a graduate fellowship in Italy, which her mother desperately wants her to attend. But there are other issues -- the couple have been dating for about three years, but for a period they had broken up, and Giulia had had another boyfriend, of whom George is very jealous. They are sleeping together -- and they take the chance to make love a couple of times over the weekend -- but it's clear they feel a bit guilty about doing this knowing that Giulia's mother and grandmother, at least, are very opposed to premarital sex.

The weekend involves some awkward conversations between George and the rest of Giulia's family -- as he helps her father do yard work (and fixes the lawnmower), as he washes some dishes, goes to the beach with Giulia and Michael, visits with married friends of Giulia, shares a big family dinner, and as the two tell Mr and Mrs Molla of their plans to marry. Mr Molla gives his approval though Mrs Molla is clearly against it. But Giulia and George are determined, almost to the point of eloping. And in the end -- which is ambiguous in a sense but clearly a true end as the first sentence indicates -- it seems that the real problem is with George himself.

This is a fine first novel, though I'd say clearly a first novel, and not wholly successful. The structure is elegant, but the long middle does drag just a bit, though the events portrayed are all important. The conclusion is strong and moving, as George seems to ultimately shy away from trusting himself. This isn't by any means Mirabelli's best work, but it's a good debut that presaged a strong and varied career -- though I'm not sure Mirabelli's novels ever had broad commercial success.

Review: Clovis, by Michael Fessier

Clovis, by Michael Fessier

a review by Rich Horton

A couple of months ago I read an issue of F&SF with a story by Michael Fessier, an author with whom I was completely unfamiliar. I read up on him, and learned that he had written a couple genre or genre-adjacent novels, and, especially after I enjoyed his story in that issue, I decided I'd track down the novels. And here then is Clovis, a very short novel (about 33,000 words), published in 1948. (It was reprinted as recently as 2000.)

Fessier (1905-1988) published several SF or Fantasy stories (three of them reprinted in F&SF and another anthologized by Murray Leinster) and a couple of fantastical novels. He's better known as a screenwriter, with credits including the Fred Astaire/Rita Hayworth musical You'll Never Get Rich and even an episode of Gilligan's Island. In the '30s and '40s he worked in Hollywood, writing a couple of dozen produced screenplays, then he moved to New York and wrote for television, with his final contributions being six episodes for The High Chaparral, ending in 1969. From 1961 until his death in 1988 he was married to the actress Lilian Bond, but he must have been married at least once before because the jacket copy on this novel states that as of its publication in 1949 he is married with two children. (The 1940 census shows that his wife was named Suta, and he had two children, Josephine (3 years old) and Michael (10 months old).) He also wrote a good deal of short fiction -- not just the SF but a fair amount of crime fiction and some fiction for the slicks. He wrote at least one other novels: Fully Dressed and in his Right Mind, a noirish novel with fantastical elements, from 1935. His papers are at the University of Oregon, and their catalog claims manuscripts for three novels -- I can't find the third unless it is Nessuno l'avrebbe detto, published in Italy in 1949 (but in translation). That means "Nobody Would Ever Say", and I'm inclined to believe it's a translation of Clovis.

Clovis is an intelligent parrot, the result of hundreds of years of breeding by the von Lerner family. The last of the von Lerners is August, and Clovis is the last of his line of parrots. They live in Brazil. Clovis is remarkably intelligent (much more so than August) and he is cynical, and he is tired of his life. He decides to leave August, and find some parrots, and give them the benefit of his greater knowledge. He also might get some female action. But of course, as he learns to his displeasure, life in the jungle is harder than he had realized, and the parrots don't have any interest in his intellectual discourse.

He is captured by some local Indians, who are ready to roast him when an American named Thad rescues him -- only to cage him and put him on a boat to New York, figuring a talking parrot will fetch him a tidy sum. But Clovis escapes, and ends up in a pet shop. He manipulates his potential buyers until he ends up with a nice-seeming old lady, but of course that doesn't go well either. And his adventures continue -- he uncovers a plot to murder a young heiress, cures her cousin of alcoholism, and ends up back in the hands of Thad, who has fallen for the heiress, and she for him except she is convinced she has no sex drive and frustrated when Thad won't confirm the diagnosis by giving in to her attempts at seduction. Thad's moneymaking schemes come to nothing until he runs into a crooked evangelist -- and suddenly Clovis' cynicism and ability to talk have an outlet. But ...

Well, I won't say more. The book is out and out satire, though mostly somewhat gentle (except in the treatment of the evangelist.) And it is often very funny. The romance plot with Thad and the heiress, and the drinking cure, are almost Wodehousian. Clovis' cynical utterances are quite amusing as well. The murder plot is very light-hearted, and doesn't come off quite as amusing as the rest of the book. The book doesn't outstay its welcome -- though it probably reaches the limits of its welcome! Fun stuff on the whole, and I have to say I'm glad I read it.

Old Bestseller Review: The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas

The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas (with Auguste Maquet)

a review by Rich Horton

This is one of the most famous 19th Century novels, and has never stopped being read, and adapted. The central story has been the basis for any number of works, including one of the greatest SF novels of all time: The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester. I myself have known the vague outline of the story for a long time, partly due to osmosis, partly due to such fractional adaptions as the Mr. Magoo cartoon version. I found a free audiobook version, from Librivox, and figured it would be a good thing to listen to for the next 54 hours of driving! It's read by David Clarke, and he does an excellent job, if on occasion his accents get a touch hammy. (That said, his versions of the Count's many voices are very nice.) I should mention that I complained about the last Librivox audiobook I tried, because the narration was pretty amateurish. This is much much better. (I will note that there's at least one other Librivox reading of The Count of Monte Cristo, and the reviews of it suggest that it is not nearly as good as the one I've read.) I don't know which translation Clarke is reading, but I also have the 2003 Penguin Classics edition, translated by Robin Buss. I believe the Buss translation is better than the one Clarke is reading, but that one is not bad. (I suspect it may be the earliest English translation, from 1846; or one of the later translations that were largely based on that one, such as an 1894 version that Robin Buss mentions a few times in his introduction.)

Alexandre Dumas was born in Picardy in 1802. His father was born in Haiti, the illegitimate son of a Marquis and an enslaved woman. His mother was an innkeeper's daughter. Dumas was his grandmother's family name, adopted by Alexandre's father after a break with his noble father. Alexandre's father was a successful general under Napoleon, but died of cancer in 1806. Dumas's family connections got him a decent position with Louis-Philippe, future King of France. Dumas soon began writing articles and then plays, and after a couple of successes became a full-time writer, and turned to novels. His most significant works appeared in quick succession between 1844 and 1847: The Three Musketeers and its sequels; The Corsican Brothers, and The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas died in 1870. His son, also named Alexandre, also illegitimate (the elder Dumas had multiple marriages and many affairs) became a successful writer as well, by far best remembered for La Dame Aux Camellias, the source material for Verdi's La Traviata, one of the greatest operas of all time. The father is often styled Alexandre Dumas père, the son Dumas fils. 

I have above given co-credit to August Maquet. Dumas, incredibly prolific, ran a sort of fiction factory, employing other writers to plot his books and to research them. It does appear that Dumas, in most of the books, did the bulk of the page by page writing. But Maquet, his most common assistant, eventually sued him for credit, and while Maquet did not get credit, he did get a considerable financial settlement. In the case of The Count of Monte Cristo, Robin Buss suggests that it was Maquet who insisted on adding the early chapters in which Edmond Dantès is framed and thrown in jail.

So, what to say about the story itself? Any kind of detailed plot summary seems silly -- to say too much might give away some of the pleasure, and would take a while -- it's a long book. And most everyone knows the basics. I'll quickly summarize them anyway. The novel tells of Edmond Dantès, a young sailor just returned from a voyage on which his Captain died, leaving him in charge. He is chosen by his employer to take the permanent position of Captain -- and thus he can marry his beloved, the Catalan girl Mercédès. But the jealousy of another Catalan, Fernand, who loves Mercédès, plus that of Danglars, supercargo on his ship, who dislikes Edmond, leads to them accusing him of Bonapartist sympathies. (This part is set in 1815, just as Bonaparte is leaving Elba for his last "100 days".) Villefort, the prosecutor in charge of the resulting case, realizes that Dantès is innocent but has him imprisoned in the Chateau D'If anyway, as it will benefit his political advancement and also because his own father is a Bonapartist.

Dantès remains in jail for 14 years, and befriends another prisoner, the mad monk Faria, who, over many years, gives him a remarkable education, and also reveals the location of a fantastic treasure, on the island of Monte Cristo. Dantès finally escapes (in a wonderful sequence), and manages to locate the treasure ... and, nine years later, he emerges, first in Rome, then in Paris, as the Count of Monte Cristo. In the mean time, he has learned, his enemies have reached high positions (partly through additional corrupt actions): Villefort is the Crown Prosecutor, Fernand has become the Comte de Morcerf, and Danglars is now a Baron. The Count makes a sensation, partly because of his money, partly his mystery. But his goal is revenge on those who betrayed him -- and all three of the main villains begin to see their luck strangely turn ...

Well, that's rather skeletal, and it misses a lot. But that's OK! The fun is in the discovering. I will mention as many other key characters as I can: Maximilien Morrel, son of M. Morrel who owned the ship Edmond worked on; Albert de Morcerf, son of Fernand; Franz d'Epinay, a close friend of Albert's; Haydée, a beautiful young Greek-Albanian woman, the companion or slave of the Count of Monte Cristo (Haydée's back story (which is loosely historically based) is central to the book, but I'll leave it for the reader to learn); Valentine de Villefort, the daughter of M. de Villefort by his first wife; Mme. de Villefort, Villefort's sinister second wife; Eugénie Danglars, the daughter of one of Dantès' betrayers, and a rather sympathetically portrayed Lesbian (some people nowadays suggest she is a trans man) who is unwillingly supposed to marry Albert; Caderousse, a baker and neighbor of Edmond's father, who by inaction abets Fernand and Danglars' plot against Edmond, and whose greed sends him on the path to ruin; Luigi Vampa, a Roman bandit; Mme. Danglars, a beauty who married Danglars for his money, and who has carried on serial affairs, including one with M. de Villefort which leads in the end to tragedy; Bertuccio, the Count's faithful Corsican servant, who coincidentally is entangled with the lives of Villefort and Danglars and thus the Count himself (though, as becomes clear, almost every seeming coincidence in the novel is the result of the Count's knowledge and planning); Benedetto, an habitual criminal who the Count hires to portray an Italian nobleman as part of his plans of revenge; and Noirtier, M. de Villefort's father, who ends his life horrifyingly paralyzed, with only his granddaughter Valentine to care for him.

This list of characters, most of whose stories are significantly and entertainingly elaborated, is one reason the novel is so long -- and also never boring. And there are many more minor characters -- the newspaperman Beauchamp, Caderousse's sickly and shrewish wife La Carconte, Major Cavalcanti, Maximilien Morrel's sister Julie and her husband Emmanuel, the Count's mute Nubian servant Ali, to say nothing of such pivotal but secretive people as the English Lord Willmore and the Italian cleric Abbé Busoni; and even such minor characters as the telegraph operator who appears only in the chapter with the delightful title "How to Rescue a Gardener from the Dormice who are Eating his Peaches".

The novel is well-written if not beautifully so (as always, I should caution that I am basing such an evaluation on the translation(s) I read and heard.) Dumas was a very witty writer. The characters are nicely limned, if (as Buss argues, and I agree) it is somewhat difficult to square the early depictions of Fernand and Danglars with their later incarnations as the Comte de Morcerf and the Baron Danglars. It is clearly a work of popular fiction in that the plot is far from realistic -- that said, the depictions of 1830s Paris and Rome seem pretty solid (and Dumas sprinkles in mentions of things like a couple of his favorite inns and hotels.) And for all the unrealism of the plot, and the near magical nature of the Count's powers and his fortune, the central themes: corruption, vengeance, and the ultimate dangers of living for vengeance (especially with regards to collateral damage) -- all leading to a paean to forgiveness -- are quite powerful.

The bottom line is simple: this novel has been extremely popular since it first appeared in 1844. And it wholly deserves this -- it is glorious, sometimes delirious, fun. It is first of all entertainment, but entertainment with some depth behind it. It is a very long novel -- roughly half a million words -- but always interesting, never a slog. And you know what -- a long TV adaptation -- in a dozen or twenty hour long episodes, say -- could be really wonderful. 

Another Victorian Novel: Orthodox, by Dorothea Gerard

Review: Orthodox, by Dorothea Gerard

by Rich Horton

I found this slim novel at the St. Louis County Book Fair. It is a British Library facsimile reprint of the first edition, from Longman's, Green and Co., in 1888. I could not resist a Victorian novel by a woman of whom I had never heard. And it is quite short (not quite 40,000 words) so it wouldn't take up much of my time anyway.

Dorothea Gerard was born in Scotland in 1855. Her father was a Colonel, and maternal grandfather a somewhat notable inventor, Sir John Robison. She spent several years in Austria as a child, and upon her mother's death in 1870, moved there again to live with her sister, who had married a Polish cavalry officer. The two sisters began collaborating on novels in 1877, and had some success with Reata and The Waters of Hercules and other books, written as by "E. D. Gerard". (Emily also published non-fiction, notably a couple of books about Transylvania, and its legends, which are said to have inspired Bram Stoker when he wrote Dracula.) Dorothea also married a military man, an Austrian officer who eventually became a Major General, and was given the title "Longard de Longgarde", so that some of Dorothea's later novels were published as by "Dorothea Longard de Longgarde". 

Dorothea largely stopped collaborating with her sister upon her marriage; and she was a very prolific author in her own right. Her novels were often, not surprisingly, set in Eastern Europe where she lived; though she always wrote in English. According to Wikipedia, her later books often were published by the German firm Tauchnitz, and marketed to English travelers and expatriates. She died in 1915, having lived in seclusion for many years after the death of her husband and her sister.

Her novels often seem to have been romances, apparently set among the Eastern European upper classes. She was politically conservative, but had a reputation for addressing controversial subjects, in particular prejudices across divides of class, nationality, and ethnicity, and also antisemitism. This is interesting in the context of the novel at hand.

Orthodox opens "I propose to tell the story of how my friend and comrade, Rudolph von Ortenegg, fell into the hands of the Jews ..." This did not seem terribly promising. The narrator is a 23 year old Polish officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, stationed in Poland. His friend Rudolph is the only son of an old German aristocrat, and he grew up in near isolation, so his social skills are minimal, and he has some ideas that the narrator thinks are foolish. Among these is disgust at the mistreatment of the local Jews -- which disgust the narrator finds shocking, for in his view why shouldn't one treat vermin like vermin.

Things get worse when, by chance, they encounter an astonishingly beautiful young Jewish woman, Salome. Before long Rudolph is smitten, and so too, it seems, is Salome. Against his friend's advice, Rudolph and Salome begin to plot a way for them to marry -- which of course will involve Salome converting to Catholicism. Naturally her family are aghast at the thought of this (and so too will Rudolph's father be) -- their only ally is Salome's spunky younger sister Surchen. But Rudolph manages to spirit Salome away to a nearby convent. All seems to be going well -- but Salome's father has different plans.

As I've described this, it seems nice enough, and arguably a somewhat "anti-antisemitism" book. But -- it's not, really. (Maybe it is relative to many of Gerard's contemporaries, I suppose.) Although Rudolph is quite sincere in his belief that the abusive behavior of the Polish Christians towards Jews is terrible, his primary motive for improving their lot is to convert them. And the book itself -- and its narrator -- lean in a wholly unchallenged way fully into the most offensive descriptions of the Jewish characters. They are all money grubbers, and sinisterly clever, and dishonest. Salome's sister Surchen is perhaps the most appealing character in the book -- she is as I said spunky, and quite intelligent -- but she is depicted as doing everything she does to make a bit of money. There are constant slurs as to hygiene and so on; and even the praise of some of them (for example, of Salome's beauty) is heavily tinged with Orientalist cliches. Add to that the character of Salome herself -- she is weak and really sort of a cipher -- Rudolph appears to care only about her looks. I don't know how accurate Gerard's depiction of Orthodox Jewish customs in Poland at the time is -- perhaps it is quite accurate, and as such the women seem quite oppressed -- only, I think the same could likely be said about Christian women in Poland in that era.

All in all, not a book I can recommend. I will say that Gerard could write, and with considerable wit. I dare say some of her other novels might be more palatable, but this one was -- well, offensive is the main thing.

Review: Granger's Crossing, by Mark W. Tiedemann

Granger's Crossing

a novel by Mark W. Tiedemann

Blank Slate Press (an Imprint of Amphorae Publishing), St. Louis, 2023, Trade Paperback, 376 pages, $17.95, ISBN: 978-1-943075-75-1

a review by Rich Horton

Mark W. Tiedemann is a St. Louisan, a photographer and was a long-time bookseller at Left Bank Books. He has published ten science fiction novels and dozens of short stories. Granger's Crossing is his first venture into historical fiction. (He's also a friend of mine of long standing, and the leader of an SF book club in which I participate.)

Granger is introduced as a Lieutenant in the Continental Army in 1780, having crossed into St. Louis -- then a Spanish territory -- to investigate the disappearance of his friend, Ham Inwood, who had come to a certain Don Diego Cortez's property to investigate reports of a man hiding out there. What Granger finds is his friend's murdered body, and some further mysteries involving Cortez's horses, his brother, and some gold. Back in St. Louis after another man is shot, Granger meets an intriguing married woman named Martine, and vows to return -- either to solve his friend's murder, or to see if there's a future with Martine. 

But the War intervenes, and it is not until it is over, and the United States are officially independent, that Granger can return. He sets up a business in Cahokia, and before long is dealing in St. Louis. He tries to reconnect wtih the now widowed Martine, but she is acting oddly distant. His attempts to investigate Granger’s friend's murder meets resistance, suggestions he should go back East, and even threats. Don Diego Cortez's fiancée arrives from Spain, and questions arise about Diego's identity -- could he really be his twin brother instead?

Granger -- still a young and somewhat callow man -- realizes he needs to make some decisions. He becomes a Spanish citizen so he can move to the St. Louis side of the river. He lets Martine know of his interest in her, even as she is being courted by another man, and as she is about to lose her home, as her husband's sons from a previous marriage will get her property. Granger ends up buying Martine's house, but realizes Martine needs space to make her decisions. And Granger doubles down on the search for the reasons for Ham's murder.

This is a compelling novel, mixing a fascinating historical background that is not widely known --St. Louis under Spanish rule -- even to a long-time St. Louisan like me. There are a couple of interesting mysteries to resolve, and an alluring romance. St. Louisans will recognize a number of names: Gratiot, Chouteau, Cerré, etc; and some of the geography, including nods to towns like Cahokia and Cape Girardeau. I was invested in Granger's quests -- for Martine, and for Ham's murderer; and the solutions are satisfying. This is a novel about American history, and St. Louis history, that fascinates on those grounds, and Granger's personal story is also involving.

Resurrected Review: Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold

Here's another review resurrected from my old website and the SFF Net newsgroups. This one appeared back in 2004.

Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold

Eos, New York, NY, September 2003, 464 pages, Hardcover, US$24.95, ISBN:0-380-97902-0
a review by Rich Horton

Paladin of Souls is Lois McMaster Bujold's latest novel, her third fantasy, and a fairly direct sequel to The Curse of Chalion. It seems that Bujold's energies are now focussed on her fantasy secondary world, centered on the Royacy of Chalion, which has certain similarities to Renaissance era Iberia. At any rate, I understand that her next novel will be another Chalionese book. This seems a good choice -- I liked both The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls better than her most recent Vorkosigan book, Diplomatic Immunity.

Paladin of Souls is the story of the Dowager Royina Ista of Chalion, mother of the new Royina Iselle, and widow of the late, cursed Roya Ias. The Curse of Chalion covered the events leading to the lifting of a terrible curse on the royal family of Chalion. Ista, who bore bravely years of living under the curse, with a terrible load of guilt and fear, as well as the burden of a loveless marriage and possession by a god which made her essentially insane, is now free of that. But her family and retainers are very protective of her -- her regained sanity remains in doubt, and she has lived a very circumscribed life. As the book opens she is chafing under what is in essence imprisonment, and she conceives the notion of a pilgrimage, ostensibly to pray for the birth of a grandson, but in reality simply to get out of her household for some time. She recruits, partly by accident, a new attendant who is actually a not very wellborn young woman named Liss,distinguished mainly by her horsemanship (she is a courier); and a priest of the Bastard to guide her pilgrimage: a young, fat, irreverent, and rather lusty fellow. She also accepts the protection of a group of soldiers led by two brothers, Ferda and Foix.

What she had hoped would be an interesting journey rather quickly turns dangerous. There are rumors of a great outbreak of demons, and disastrously one soon possesses Ferda. Then they run into a raiding party from the neighboring princedom of Jokona, who are adherents to a (mutually) heretical form of the Chalionese religion. They are rescued by a local nobleman, a great fighter and very handsome man named Arhys. At Arhys's castle, Ista finds a very jealous wife, and a severely ill half-brother, and, worse, indications of more aggression from the Jokonans. All this is surely tied to the infestations of demons ...

I thought it quite well done. Ista is an affecting character. The magic system/religion that Bujold has worked out remains interesting and a good source of plot conflicts. Perhaps Ista's powers seem to scale just a little conveniently to match the needs of the plot -- ever a problem with fantasies. But I enjoyed reading the novel, and I was surprised at several turns (if at other times things worked out a bit routinely). It is another fine story from Bujold.

Old Bestseller Review: The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni

Review: The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni

by Rich Horton

Not all countries have a "national novel", but apparently Italy does -- Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi, 1827, revised 1840.) This was its author's only novel, though he also wrote poetry, plays, and nonfiction. He had a rocky life in some ways -- his mother apparently had little to do with him, and left his (much older) father when Alessandro was 7. He did rejoin his mother, in Paris, at age 20, and made a happy marriage to a Swiss Protestant woman. But against this happiness, an apparently happy second marriage after his first wife died young, the success of his novel, and the birth of nine children, one must set the fact that seven children died before adulthood, both his wives predeceased him, and his health was poor for the last few decades of his long life. He wrote nothing more after the revised version of I Promessi Sposi appeared, and died in 1873 at the age of 87.

The Betrothed is considered Italy's "national novel" for a few reasons -- one is its sprawling plot, set during a few eventful years in the early 1600s; and its themes: the depredations of local tyrants, the folly of rulers, the ravages of war and plague. In addition, it was published as the desire for Italian reunification (that would culminate in the Risorgimento in the 1860s) was growing, and it was a major influence in the coalescence of the various Italian dialects into an accepted national language, based on the Tuscan dialect in which Manzoni's revised version was published. At his death, he was so celebrated that Verdi's Requiem was written in his honor.

I read the novel in Bruce Penman's translation, from 1972. I also read passages on my Kindle from Alexander Colquhoun's 1951 translation. Not long after I bought the Penman book, used, a new translation appeared, by Michael Moore. I have only sampled that one briefly -- it seems fine, if perhaps leaning a bit more into 21st century turns of phrase than I might prefer. The general feel of the prose is not dissimilar from Penman's, suggesting that both have captured at least to some extent Manzoni's Italian prose. The Colquhoun was less successful, to me -- for one thing, it seemed (mildly) abridged; for another, Colquhoun made the curious choice to Anglicize some names -- so for example the chief villain, Don Rodrigo, is called Don Roderick in his version. (This was a disappointment, for I am a great fan of Colquhoun's translation of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard, which I would think another candidate for the "Great Italian Novel" (and also its author's only novel, and, indeed, about the Risorgimento.))

The Betrothed is the story of two peasants, from the village of Lecco (near Milan), Lucia and Lorenzo (called Renzo), who wish to be married. There should be no bar to this union -- the families are happy with it, and Renzo has a good job. But the most powerful man in the area, Don Rodrigo, decides he wants Lucia, and he pressures the weak local priest not to perform the wedding. With the help of a worthy nearby monk, Father Cristoforo, the two lovers are able to evade a plot of Don Rodrigo's to kidnap Lucia, and the two escape to different places: Lucia to the protection of a convent, and Renzo to Milan. 

Don Rodrigo is still searching for them, and they have their own troubles. Renzo reaches Milan as a famine continues, and he gets involved in riots, as starving people are convinced that the bakers are hoarding bread. He ends up framed as an inciter of the riots, and has to escape to Bergamo, which is under the rule of Venice. Meanwhile Lucia is working for a nun called the Signora -- an unhappy woman who was forced into the convent by her parents. This all ends up badly as the Signora betrays her location to Don Rodrigo.

Events of wider significance intervene -- in particular, war comes to Milan, and in its wake, the Plague. Meanwhile Don Rodrigo has hired a notorious criminal, here called "The Unnamed", to kidnap Lucia, with the unfortunate aid of the Signora. And Renzo has found a good position in Bergamo. But Renzo is still threatened with arrest if he enters the territory of Milan. Their relationship is further complicated by the circumstances of Lucia's escape from the Unnamed -- which seemed to her (and probably was) an answer to a prayer, which included a promise to the Virgin Mary that she would remain a virgin. Renzo and Lucia -- both unlettered -- exchange communications which are amusingly confused.

The climax of the novel is several wrenching chapters detailing the effects of the Plague. As has been noted by many readers, some of the responses to the Plague depicted here resemble only too much some of the responses to COVID. But the Bubonic Plague (at least prior to antibiotics) has far worse effects than COVID, with fatality rates on the order of 25%. And Milan is hit hardest. Manzoni is darkly satirical in portraying the political responses, and affecting in portraying the ravages of it, and the heroism of some, including Father Cristoforo. And towards the end Renzo, having survived his own bout with sickness, comes to Milan in search of Lucia ...

The Betrothed actually only covers a smallish amount of territory in Northwest Italy. But its real scope is vast. Manzoni observes the abuses of the powerful, the follies of those in the middle, the occasional stupidity of everyone. He also portrays people of great courage and virtue, many of them churchmen -- such as Father Cristoforo and a major character I haven't mentioned, Cardinal Federigo Borromeo. (Borromeo is an actual historical person, the nephew of St. Carlo Borromeo. There are many churches named for Charles Borromeo, including one just a couple of miles from my workplace. There are numerous other historical figures portrayed in this book, including the Signora (aka the Nun of Monza) and the Unnamed.) Manzoni views with his sympathetic but satiric eye the folly of politicians, and of mobs. It must be said that Renzo and Lucia are thinnish characters -- sweet and honest but not all that interesting. But Manzoni's portrayals of a host of other characters are fascinating, often hilarious, often piercing: Don Rodrigo, the Unnamed, Don Abbondio and his housekeeper Perpetua, Father Cristoforo, Donna Prassede (the silly and meddlesome woman who takes in Lucia after her rescue) and Donna Prassede's pompous husband. Like many great novels, The Betrothed mixes comedy and tragedy seamlessly, and in the end, I think, achieves its apparent goal of portraying a nation aborning, a people coming to consciousness of a possible unity that wouldn't happen for more than two centuries.

Review: Ledoyt, by Carol Emshwiller

Review: Ledoyt, by Carol Emshwiller

by Rich Horton

Carol Emshwiller (1921-2019) was one of the greatest of SF writers, though she never quite got the recognition I felt she deserved -- and much of that she did get came late in life. There are many reasons for that -- she didn't start publishing until in her mid-30s, she stopped for a few years when her kids were young, her vision was very individual, and thus hard for many to get a grasp on, she wrote a fair amount outside the SF field. Another reason, though, is that she wrote mostly short fiction. She published only six novels, the first (Carmen Dog) in her late 60s, in 1988. Her last three were published in her 80s. All too often, it's novels that get the attention.

What about those other two novels? Well -- there's a story there too. Ledoyt and Leaping Man Hill were published in 1995 and 1999, respectively. (In Emshwiller's 70s.) And -- they are not SF. They are Westerns, and not really conventional Westerns. Ledoyt is set in the first decade of the 20th Century, and Leaping Man Hill is set after the First World War. And they aren't shoot 'em up Westerns -- they are about families, about making a life in remote parts of California before anything much like modern technology had arrived. All this is not to say there's a lack of action -- there's plenty. There are fights, shots fired, rape, people dying. There's also sex and partying and honest work and weather and childcare advice from the 19th century. And that's just in Ledoyt.

The novel is set mostly between 1902 and 1910. We begin with Lotti, a 14 year old girl, writing in her journal, dated 1910, "it all began in the spring of 1902." What began? Well, that's when Beal Ledoyt, whose brother T-Bone is a neighbor to Lotti's mother, Oriana Cochran, shows up looking for work. T-Bone suggests he help out Mrs. Cochran, who came from the East a few years before with her young daughter. It's clear that a) Oriana comes from money; and b) that she's fleeing something traumatic. And, very quickly, Mrs. Cochran and Beal Ledoyt are in love. Oriana, who is about 30, is something of a beauty, and has been courted by several men in the neighborhood (I say neighborhood but there's no city, just people farming) and has shown no interest in them. Ledoyt is a few years older, has never stayed in one place for long, is very ugly, often drunk -- and also pretty capable. Lotti takes to him at first, but gets weirdly jealous when he and Oriana, unexpectedly to most everyone, marry. And Lotti's jealousy propels much of the plot.

The point of view jumps between Lotti and Oriana and Beal and eventually Lotti's new brother Fayette. It also jumps back and forth in time, though it's not entirely non-linear. (The 1910 thread, in particular, always moves forward.) It's clear from the beginning that both Oriana and Beal are severely scarred from their childhood, and in bits and pieces we learn why and how. Lotti, too, is a piece of work -- she's convinced she was adopted, and wants to find her real family. She is unsure of her mother's love, in part because of how hard her mother has had to work, and in part ... well, we see why. She takes to Beal right away, tries to help him, decides she'll be a better man than any male ... and also she fancies Beal in a childish way so is furious when he marries her mother. In their tiny house she sees what they do in bed and that confuses her too. After Fayette is born, he follows her everywhere, and she's not exactly nice to him.

Oriana and Beal both have a hard time trusting themselves -- neither sees themselves as worthy of the other. Each believes their dark histories (not at all their own faults) have ruined them somehow. And they react in different and painful ways to the children they end up losing -- a normal part of frontier life, I suppose, but no less difficult. 

I'm making the story sound like a dreary Theodore Dreiser novel or something -- and that's not at all true. Yes, there is pain, there are deaths, there is violence. But there is at bottom love, and much happiness, and family being family. Ledoyt's family -- T-Bone and his wife Henriette and their children and other relatives -- are stable and helpful and loving. The voices of everyone are wonderfully captured, and the novel is suffused with humor. As I said too, there's plenty of action, culminating in a desperate winter trek over the hills (mountains?) in terrible weather, and an encounter with a violent criminal ending with a courageous rescue. And ... well I won't say what's next, but this in the end a realistic and moving account of frontier life -- and love, very much love -- in the early 20th Century. And it's Carol Emshwiller, so it's witty when it needs to be, profound when it needs to be, and wonderfully written.

Emshwiller's novels have in one sense been very well served by their publishers, in the sense that the books have been nicely presented -- but with one exception, each one first appeared from a small press: The Women's Press, Mercury House, Small Beer, and Tachyon. (The one exception, Mister Boots, marketed as YA, appeared from Viking, and was reprinted by Penguin/Firebird, which also reprinted The Mount.) All those small presses are, if you'll forgive the word, classy, and to some extent prestigious -- but there books still probably don't sell quite as well. And Ledoyt and Leaping Man Hill are out of print. This is a complete shame and I hope some wise publisher rectifies this situation soon.

(There is a wonderful review by Ursula K. Le Guin of Ledoyt at Strange Horizons, written back in 2000. I didn't read it until after I wrote the above. But it's very much worth reading.)

Review: North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell

Review: North and South, by Mrs. Gaskell

by Rich Horton

Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born in 1810. Her father was William Stevenson, a Unitarian minister and writer on economic subjects. (Stevenson, by the way, resigned his position as minister on conscientious grounds: remember this in view of events in North and South!) Elizabeth married a Unitarian minister, William Gaskell, in 1832. They eventually settled in Manchester. She wrote and published poems (with her husband) and some non-fiction beginning in the 1830s. Her first short story was published in 1847, and her first novel, Mary Barton, in 1848, which made her name as a writer. Other important works are Cranford, Sylvia's Lovers, Cousin Phillis, and her last novel, unfinished at her sudden death in 1865, Wives and Daughters; as well as the first biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë. 

North and South was first published in Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words, in 20 parts between 1854 and 1855. Dickens is supposed to have suggested the title (Gaskell was calling it Margaret Hale, after the heroine -- in this case if perhaps no other regarding the novel, Dickens was right.) The preceding serial was Dickens' own Hard Times, and both Hard Times and North and South are "industrial novels", and are set in lightly fictionalized versions of Manchester. This caused Gaskell some concern, as she didn't want to duplicate any of Dickens' plot points. Gaskell also battled Dickens over the length -- she thought it would be in 22 parts and felt that she was forced to rush the ending, and the book version not only extended the ending and added bits throughout, it also added chapters at the front. It is MUCH the superior version. I have the print edition pictured above, but I actually "read" the novel by listening to it, in Claire Wille's effecting narration.

The novel begins as preparations continue for the wedding of Margaret Hale's cousin Edith. Margaret is now 18, and has spent the last several years in London with her mother's sister, Mrs. Shaw. Margaret has been happy enough there, but in general she is impatient with the rather shallow and fashionable life her aunt and cousin lead. She is ready to go back to her parents' place, in the small country parish of Helstone. Her only intellectual equal in her social circle is Edith's soon-to-be brother-in-law, Henry Lennox, an ambitious young lawyer. The wedding goes off well, Edith and her new husband head to Italy where he is posted, and Margaret returns to Helstone, where her father is Vicar of a small church. Mrs. Hale is a pleasant if rather inconsequential woman, given to complaining that her husband has not been given a more prestigious living. Margaret, however, loves the town of Helstone, and its people, and quickly settles back in. Two events disturb her peace, however: Henry Lennox comes to visit, and he asks her to marry him. Margaret is taken aback -- she has not thought of him as anything but a friend. He is abashed, but vows to try again after some time, as there is no one else Margaret cares for in that way. Then, more shockingly, Mr. Hale announces that he has decided, for reasons of conscience, that he must resign his position -- he has become a Dissenter. (It's not clear if his inclinations are Methodist or perhaps Unitarian (like Mrs. Gaskell's father and husband.)) This will result in even further reductions in their income, and, it soon becomes clear, a move to the industrial northern town of Milton (in a fictional county called Darkshire -- a name perhaps a bit too much on the nose.) This move has been recommended by Mr. Hale's old college friend, Adam Bell, who has property in Milton, and who believes that Mr. Hale can make a living as a tutor to some of the ambitious young men in town, or their children.

The move is accomplished (mostly through the efforts of Margaret and of Mrs. Hale's redoubtable maid Dixon.) Life in Milton is less pleasant than in Helstone -- the air is smoky, the people are constantly bustling -- all what Margaret calls "shoppy people", and the Hales' finances are less certain. Mr. Hale has one particular favorite student: John Thornton, who rents the property on which he has built a cotton mill from Mr. Bell. Mr. Thornton is a truly self-made man -- his father had lost all his money and committed suicide, and his mother had by pure force of will brought up John and his younger sister Fanny. John started as a draper's clerk and was eventually able to take over the cotton mill and make it a success, and he, conscious of his lack of education, is reading the classics with Mr. Hale. They become friends, and sometimes discuss their differing philosophies of life -- Margaret joins in these discussions occasionally, somewhat  repulsed by the commercial ambitions of Mr. Thornton but slowly realizing that his ambitions are more than simply to make as much money as he can.

Margaret also makes the acquaintance of a Nicholas Higgins and his sickly daughter Bessy, who live not far from the Hales' place. Margaret befriends Bessy, who is dying because of the cotton fluff she inhaled while working in one of Milton's many factories. Margaret comes to realize something of the conditions of life for the working class -- and makes friends as well with the prickly and irreligious Mr. Higgins. And she learns that the workers in Milton have formed a union, and that they plan a strike. Margaret hears as well from Mr. Thornton that he and his fellow mill-owners know of the strike, and are determined to resist it -- in part because their businesses are suffering. 

Thus the mainsprings of the novel -- a depiction of life in the industrial North, and its effect on those who live there (with an implied contrast to the more bucolic South); and also the (obvious to the reader) growing attraction, both intellectual and physical, between Margaret Hale and John Thornton. (A love story that has been compared, in a slightly inverted way, to that of Pride and Prejudice.) The strike comes to fruition, and a climactic event involves Margaret, by accident at the Thorntons' home, protecting John from violent strikers. John misinterprets, or at least overinterprets, her actions, driving the love story in one direction. Meanwhile, a series of at least six deaths convulse the personal lives of the main characters -- beginning with Bessy Higgins ... and, well, I'll not list the rest. There is another major plot point involving Margaret's older brother Frederick, a Navy man who became involved in a mutiny, and as a result is living in exile in Spain. This leads to a nearly catastrophic action by Margaret which severely impacts her relationship with John Thornton; and also to the re-entry of Henry Lennox, who tries to help Frederick clear his name.

The novel unspools beautifully ... Margaret needs to move back to London, after a cathartic reacquaintance with Helstone. Henry Lennox is back in the picture. Nicholas Higgins finds himself in a curious way again a parent; and also, in a curious way, an ally of sorts to John Thornton, as John's business is severely threatened. Margaret and John both labor under the burden of realizing they have seriously wronged the other (at least in their heads) with no way of resolving that. Henry's efforts to clear Frederick's name bring him back into Margaret's orbit -- but not quite as he hopes.

I won't say the novel is perfect. There is an array of coincidences, each in itself plausible enough but in toto a bit of a stretch. The optimism about labor/management relations that eventually arises is -- let's just say, the way one might hope things could be but not entirely the way things have worked out (though, to be honest to some extent they have worked out this way, just more slowly.) And the ending -- even with Gaskell's revisions -- was just a tad abrupt for me. But -- I absolutely loved it.

To begin with -- Margaret Hale. I don't know if this is just me drinking Gaskell's Kool-Aid, but I admired Margaret about as much as I have ever admired a novel's protagonist. She is -- and I believed this, that's the point -- supremely intelligent, morally upright, beautiful (and it's hard to truly portray this in prose, but I bought it), willing to recognize when she's wrong and to change, hardworking, not at all egotistical. I think she's one of the great women in fiction, and not well enough known for that. The novel is also socially conscious, and at the same time inquisitive -- willing to present two sides of an issue, willing to tolerate ambiguity. It is honest. It is generous. As much as we like the main characters, we like others -- Nicholas Higgins, justifiably bitter but also honest and willing to learn; the cranky maid Dixon, jealous of her rights but amusing and true -- and the likewise cranky Mrs. Thornton. Adam Bell, the lone truly comic character in the book (though Dixon has her moments) -- but also a deeply loving man, aware of his weaknesses but not really willing to change. Henry Lennox -- a brittlely intelligent man, constrained by his social milieu to limit his sympathy for those not his equals, and perhaps by the end understanding this. 

Gaskell engages, perhaps not as deeply but still intriguingly, with religious differences as well. Of course there is Mr. Hale's crisis of conscience at the heart of things. With Margaret remaining a convicted Anglican. And Frederick, her brother, converting to Catholicism, perhaps for the love of a Spanish girl he meets. While Nicholas Higgins is unable to turn to God, given the unjust conditions he lives under, and especially how they impact his beloved daughter. 

(A minor point -- the chapters are headed with quotations from poems, some from anonymous writers, and many from Gaskell's contemporaries, such as Landor -- and George Eliot, whose first novel appeared a couple of years after North and South -- a useful reminder that Eliot was first known for her poetry (and criticism), much respected at the time but almost unread now.)

North and South grabbed my attention from the outset, and never let go. I looked forward to reading (hearing) it desperately. Gaskell's prose is impeccable, if never as perfect as Eliot's, nor quite as clever as Mary Elizabeth Braddon could be. I was brought to tears over and over again -- at acts of heroism, at tragic events, at inspirational moments. Every character seemed real, though some were perhaps less deep than others -- Margaret's cousin Edith, and indeed her mother, were perhaps a bit too much types -- but believable types. It's a wonderful novel, and in recent decades it has claimed its deserved recognition at last -- I can only say, if you like Victorian fiction at all (and you should!) -- you must read this novel.

Review: Death and the Chaste Apprentice, by Robert Barnard

Review: Death and the Chaste Apprentice, by Robert Barnard

Scribner, 1989, ISBN: 0684190028

a review by Rich Horton

(This resurrects a review I wrote for my SFF Net newsgroup back in 1997. I don't cover the mystery writers I read often enough, so I figure posting this one would be nice. It's been slightly updated.)

I seem to read mystery writers in clumps: that is, I find a writer I like, read most of his or her output over a period of a year or two, then move on to someone else, possibly keeping up more or less with the previous favorite, possibly letting the previous favorite drop. I don't think I do this in any other genre: I couldn't say why. Perhaps it is because mystery writers tend to be somewhat prolific, and to write series of novels featuring the same characters. At any rate, in the past I've run through Robert B. Parker, Rex Stout, Ellis Peters, Anne Perry, Peter Lovejoy, Georges Simenon, and others. And my mystery writer of the moment (1997) is now Robert Barnard.

Robert Barnard (1936-2013) was an Englishman who spent time as a lecturer in English Literature both in Australia and Norway (and both locales have turned up in his books). He wrote an academic volume on Dickens. Beginning in 1974 he published some 40 mystery novels and many short stories. The novels are characterized mostly by their dryly satiric tone. They are very funny, and very biting. For the most part, he seems to have eschewed the continuing series format, although he has published several books featuring Scotland Yard's Perry Trethowan, and a couple more featuring a character first introduced in the Trethowan books, Charlie Peace. Given that the non-series books feature one-off detectives, he is more free than usual to turn his sights on the foolishness and incompetence of the crime-fighters, as well as that of the criminals, and in several of his books a main object of satire is the police.

The latest Barnard novel that I've read (as of 1997) is Death and the Chaste Apprentice. This is not particularly recent, and while not his best, it's a solid book, and also a bit less savage than some of his works. It's not really part of any of his series (as far as I know), though Charlie Peace does turn up (and Wikipedia cites it as the first Charlie Peace novel.)

The Chaste Apprentice of the title is also the title character of a fictional Jacobean comedy which is being staged at an arts festival near London. The arts festival is held in part in an old inn, and we are introduced to the cast of the play, staying at the Inn, a couple of classical singers who are also performing at the festival, and the manager of the Inn, a rather odious, snoopy, Australian (Barnard really seems to have it in for Australia). Barnard spends some time setting up the complex dynamics of the characters: a young actor who seems to be falling for the Russian singer, an alcoholic actress, the leading couple of the play, who are married to each other but engage in very public adultery, the incredibly self-centred Indian singer and his manager, the tyrannical conductor of the opera, the eccentric director of the play, and of course the Inn's manager, who alienates everyone with his snooping and his know-it-all attitude. Then, as the play opens, a murder occurs, and the police have to investigate. Naturally, the investigation reveals a variety of unpleasant secrets which don't have anything to do with the murder, before finally ending with a slight twist and a nicely logical solution. (Actually one of Barnard's stronger mystery plots: many of his books, while still thoroughly entertaining, have very strained solutions.)

The true pleasure of this book, as with all Barnard, is the sly sarcastic asides which pepper the descriptions of the characters and events. At the same time, the characters are mostly rather sympathetic, even when somewhat flawed: this is not always true with Barnard, as I have read books of his which feature literally no likable characters. This book is also interesting for the snippets of information about Jacobean drama as well as 19th century opera.

Review: Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Review: Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

by Rich Horton

Adrian Tchaikovsky* made his name with a long fantasy series, Shadow of the Apt, then began writing SF with this novel, published in 2015. Along the way he's published a fair amount of short fiction, and I reprinted one of those, "Dress Rehearsal", in my 2017 Best of the Year volume. So Tchaikovsky was on my radar -- and when Children of Time won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, I knew I needed to read it. But -- I sometimes have a hard time getting to novels! I recently bought the third book in the trilogy, however (it was at a convention, and they didn't have the first two!) -- so I finally got the audio version of this first book and read it. (By lucky coincidence it turns out that the book is even my book club selection for next month -- something I didn't realize until after I started it!)

The audiobook is read by Mel Hudson, very capably. I always enjoy hearing an English accent (especially for a book written by an English person) -- kind of emphasizes the whole "separated by a common language" thing. With an English reader, I usually find words pronounced differently from the American way, sometimes almost comically -- there really is NOT a second "i" in the word "specialty"! Except -- apparently in England "speciality" is an accepted alternate spelling! 

Children of Time opens in a star system 20 light years from Earth. Dr. Avrana Kern has been leading a terraforming effort, and now she is ready to release her crowning achievement -- a set of monkeys to inhabit the planet, and a virus engineered to accelerate the monkeys' evolution into an intelligent species. But at the last moment, the effort is sabotaged, and Kern ends up marooned in orbit, the rest of the terraforming station destroyed, her monkeys having burned up in atmosphere. But we soon learn that the virus did make it to the planet's surface, and, having no monkeys to infect, instead it finds some other species -- particularly a variety of spider. Kern uploads herself into a computer, and her physical body goes into suspension. And down on the planet, the spiders begin the process of what we might has well call uplift.

Some two millennia in the future, civilization on Earth is all but finished. War destroyed the Old Empire -- driven by the same political rift that motivated the saboteur of Kern's project. The few survivors of the succeeding ice age have managed to patch together a few "Ark Ships", sending the crews (in suspension along with the "Cargo" -- the potential colonists) to the worlds they believe the Old Empire terraformed. The Gilgamesh has arrived at "Kern's World" -- but Avrana Kern awakens to meet them -- and warn them off, for she wants her world preserved for what she thinks are "her" uplifted monkeys. By this time her physical self is insane, and her uploaded copy more or less constrained to obey the insane part. Holsten Mason is the "classicist" assigned to the Gilgamesh's crew -- an expert on the old Imperial languages they expect to find at the terraformed sites. So it is Holsten who learns to understand Kern. His best friend becomes the head of Engineering, Isa Lain, whose job it is to understand the Imperial tech they encounter (and to maintain the the Gilgamesh.) Antagonists (of a sort) are the Captain, Guyen, who has a barely sane Messianic streak of his own, and the head of security, Karst.

Down on the planet, the spiders have achieve a fairly high level of intelligence, and are beginning to build societies. Tchaikovsky uses an interesting device to maintain continuity with the spiders over their many generations -- he calls three main characters the same names generation after generation: Portia, the adventurer/explorer; Bianca (or "Bee-anker" in Britspeak!), the scientist; and Fabian, the revolutionary male. (In spider society, females are larger and dominant -- and they often eat their mates -- one of the crusades of one of the Fabians is to make that practice illegal.) 

We follow the growth of spider society -- increasing use of technology (especially biotech); increasing social cooperation and organization; a battle with ants for territory followed by harnessing the ant colonies for various technological uses, such as a biogical computer; and, crucially, contact with Avran Kern, whom they call the "Messenger", a god who for centuries has been transmitting mathematical equations, hoping to hear the correct solutions from what she believes will be at last "uplifted" monkeys. More or less in parallel we see the struggles of the Gilgamesh -- an attempt to evade Kern's quarantine of "her" world, an attempt to travel to the next terraformed world down the line, which fails terribly; and a return to Kern's world for a last ditch effort of take possession of the world now owned by the spiders. All this leads to a desperate final battle, as the human history of ecological disaster and genocide threatens everything the spiders have built, with only Mason dimly realizing how wrong this is. And it leads to a striking and quite moving conclusion.

The novel is really cool old-fashioned SF. There is effective use of some traditional SF ideas -- the Gilgamesh becomes in essence a generation ship, and some familiar generation ship tropes are nicely deployed. Even better is the speculation about spider society, and the really neat ideas about how they think and use tech, etc. They do come off, perhaps inevitably, as a bit too human in some ways, though Tchaikovsky tries to avoid that. (The wonderful revelation of what the character is Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky are really like doesn't happen in this case.) But that isn't a big problem, and in a way is key to the resolution (and, I presume, to the sequels.) It's a lot of fun, and I'd say it deserved its Clarke Award.

*(I love the story of Adrian Tchaikovsky's penname -- he's English, of Polish descent, real name Czajkowski, but his publishers wanted a name English people could pronounce -- so they suggested Tchaikovsky, pronounced the same (I assume) as his real name, but easy for English readers to recognize because of the composer.)