Another not so old Non-Bestseller: The Walled Orchard, by Tom Holt

Another not so old Non-Bestseller: The Walled Orchard, by Tom Holt

A review by Rich Horton


Tom Holt recently made a fair amount of news when he outed himself as the man behind the "K. J. Parker" pseudonym. This was not exactly a major shock -- Holt was by far the name most commonly suggested as being behind the Parker name. There were those who though Parker might be a woman (a notion I always thought unlikely, not because of any sense that the writing was "ineluctably masculine", but because of the treatment of men, women, and their relationships in Parker's books). Others were thrown off by stunts like Holt's publishing an "interview" with "Parker" at Subterranean a few years ago.

As for me, in the December 2010 issue of Locus I wrote the following: "I had more pleasure reading K J. Parker’s Blue and Gold than just about anything I've read all year. It features a beautifully constructed plot, plenty of cynical jokes and even some worthwhile commentary on man as a political beast. The story is set in what seemed to me something of an alternate Rome or Byzantium, perhaps a bit like the Rome of Avram Davidson's Vergil stories or his Peregrine stories. It concerns one Saloninus, who opens the book by telling someone "In the morning I discovered the secret of changing base metal into gold. In the afternoon, I murdered my wife." Whether either or both or neither of these claims is true is much of what the story is about, as well as what to make of his relationship with his city’s ruler, Prince Phocas. This is an extremely funny story through and through. The humor, and some of the darkness behind it, reminded me a good deal of Tom Holt's masterpiece, The Walled Orchard, which is close to as high praise as I have in me." Obviously that put me in the Holt=Parker camp, and after that I stayed silent on the subject at request, in order to keep a confidence.

Blue and Gold was one of the first "K. J. Parker" stories I read, and I have read many since, including several novels, among them the Engineer Trilogy, possibly his most famous work. I like them all, for the voice, yes, and for the intricate plots, and for the intriguing details of ancient technology and politics, and for the neat magic systems (when magic is present, that is), and for the dark but not quite despairing view of human nature.

I daresay most readers know Tom Holt best for his humorous fantasies, which began appearing in 1987 with Expecting Someone Taller. These are very funny and clever, and I read them happily for a while, but they began to seem a bit samey-samey after the first few. Since then I've sampled a couple more, with modest but not tremendous enjoyment. Holt also wrote a couple of sequels to E. F. Benson's series of books about Lucia and Mrs. Mapp (which I have not read because I tried the first of Benson's Lucia novels and disliked it), and, famously and (to Holt) embarrassingly, a collection of poems published when he was 13. I am not sure that I would ever have thought that K. J. Parker and the Tom Holt of the humorous fantasies were the same writer.

Parker's stories are all nominally fantasies, but many of them lack explicit magic, and all are set in a quasi-historical past, seeming to resemble Earth of some centuries or a couple millenia past. Names often echo Latin or Greek. Thus they have a distinct feeling of being historical novels to some degree. As it happens, in 1989, Holt published an historical novel set in Classical Greece, the time of Pericles, Socrates, and Euripides. This novel was called Goat Song, and its sequel, The Walled Orchard, appeared the following year. The two books really form a single novel, and they were later published together under the title The Walled Orchard. Holt has published several further historical novels, set in Hellenistic and later times: Alexander at the World's End (a loose sequel to The Walled Orchard), Olympiad, The Song of Nero, and Meadowland. Eventually he decided to publish these historical novels as by "Thomas Holt". These novels are all darkly comic, cynical, and full of plausible detail about the history and politics involved.

Of one of Parker's stories I observed that it is about the problems caused by both love and war, and in fact that theme runs through a number of his stories, including most obviously the Engineer Trilogy. And that theme is utterly central to The Walled Orchard, which I consider his masterpiece, both in the correct sense (the work that proved his ability as a master craftsman), and in the more common contemporary sense: his best and deepest story. The Walled Orchard is very very funny, but in the darkest of ways, and it is ultimately a true tragedy (after all, the title of the original first volume, Goat Song, means tragedy), and very moving indeed.

The novel is told by Eupolis of Pallene, a Greek dramatist, a writer of comedies, and a rival of Aristophanes. He is writing the history of his times, which ends up being the history of the fall of Athens from its place of importance. It's also of course the story of his life, and the story of his love for his wife, Phaedra, whom he loves desperately and also cannot stand, cannot live with.

I won't go into much detail about the plot. It concerns Eupolis' playwrighting, the contests Athens had every year for plays, as well as Athenian politics, and the original democracy. But ultimately it concerns the Athenian adventure at Syracuse on Sicily, during the Pelopennesian War, which ended in complete disaster for Athens. Eupolis is conscripted to fight at Syracuse, and he is one of the few survivors, hence this history. There's much more going on that that of course, but much of the burden of the novel is the horrors and folly of war, especially as experience at the walled orchard on Sicily.

As I said, it's a truly powerful and moving novel, both in its depiction of war, and also in the terribly sad love story of Eupolis and Phaedra. But it remains blackly funny as well. In the end, very true. And ... I will say, rereading passages of the novel, the connections with K. J. Parker's work, and voice, seem extremely obvious. To conclude -- one of the great historical novels of the past few decades, and a somewhat neglected one, I suspect because Holt's name is stereotyped as a writer of light comedies.

Newish, Not a Bestseller, hopefully not Forgotten: Remains, by Mark W. Tiedemann

Remains, by Mark Tiedemann

A review by Rich Horton


Not ready to post about the last Old Bestseller I've read, so I'll post a review of a fairly recent novel, from 2005, Science Fiction, certainly not a bestseller (alas) … and hopefully not forgotten, but a novel that really never got a lot of notice. I say not a lot, but I should note that it was shortlisted for the 2005 Tiptree Award (which frankly surprised me (and the author) as gender does not strike me as a particularly front and center concern of the novel – that said, I'm happy it got the nod). At any rate, however, the novel in question, Mark Tiedemann's Remains, was published by a small press, BenBella , which is best known for “smart pop” books (examples include an Adam-Troy Castro book on Amazing Race, the TV show; and a Mad Men cookbook; as well as books on True Blood, Divergent, etc.). To put it simply, the novel qualifies as a prime example of the phenomenon called “Death of the Midlist”.

Full disclosure here – Mark Tiedemann is a friend of mine, a fellow St. Louisan, and I regularly attend a book group he hosts at Left Bank Books in the Central West End of St. Louis. This month we (the group members) had decided to read one of Mark's books, as he had to miss last month's get-together due to arm surgery. And the book we chose was Remains.

Remains is a pure Science Fiction novel, and also a mystery, and a love story, and it integrates all those elements quite seamlessly. It is set in the 22nd Century, mostly on Aea, an O'Neill cylinder at the Earth/Moon L5 point. Earth has first shunned its space colonies after they asserted their independence, and subsequently they seem to have experienced some apocalyptic disaster, leaving the colonies essentially isolated, with a combined population of only a few million. These colonies are on the Moon (Lunase), in Earth orbit (Aea and others), on Mars, and in a few other places.

The novel opens with Mace Preston, a security professional for PolyCarb Corporation, investigating a disaster at Hellas Planitia on Mars, where a PolyCarb manufactured shield was destroyed in a dust storm. Mace has shoehorned himself into the investigation because his wife Helen was at Hellas Planitia. But before long he is shouldered aside, forced to concede his wife's death, even as the corporation denies she was at the site, and even as her body was never found.

A few years later he is back at Aea, having retired and living quite comfortably off the proceeds of his wife's life insurance as well as some settlement money PolyCarb has given him. After some time privately trying to find out what really happened on Mars, he has largely given up, but has not precisely recovered from his wife's death. A friend, a high-level PolyCarb employee, throws him a party, and he surprises himself by having a good time and going home with Nemily Dollard, a fairly recent immigrant from Lunase.

Nemily, it turns out, is a cyberlink: due to a congenital disorder, she has a mental handicap that is cured by a variety of implants in her brain, that she can switch out as desired: one for mathematical assistance, one called “sensualist”, a synthesist, etc. This is the most Sfnally interesting part of the book: it's an interesting idea on its own, and it's used well to portray Nemily's own difficulty with accepting her individual identity – most notably, she has a hard timing believing she can love. (And an earlier career included “ghosting” – taking on other personalities via her cyberlink for prostitution (a career which does not seem to be held in particular disdain in Aea's culture, I note).)

In rapid order, Mace and Nemily are falling love, while both their pasts begin to intersect. Nemily was used by someone from Lunase to smuggle in some contraband when she emigrated to Aea; and it begins to seem that this person might be related to a series of disasters on various space habitats. It also begins to seem that these disasters might be related to the one on Hellas Planitia that killed Mace's wife – only, is she really dead?

That sets up a pretty neat thriller plot, which has a good and slightly (plausibly) messy resolution. The central love story – or pair of love stories, because the question Mace's marriage to Helen, and whether or not she loved him, is also critical to the book – is quite nicely handled as well. And the book is also full of nice Science Fictional ideas.

I don't think it's fair to call the book forgotten, after only 10 years. (And it is still available from BenBella, and at least at a couple of St. Louis bookstores, including Left Bank Books.) But it is a book that never seemed to me to get the attention it deserved on first release, and it's a book that still deserves a look.

Old Bestsellers: Love Insurance, by Earl Derr Biggers

Old Bestsellers: Love Insurance, by Earl Derr Biggers

a review by Rich Horton


Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933) was an Ohio native, educated at Harvard, who worked for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer before turning to fiction and plays. He had a fair amount of success early on, and a number of his novels were filmed, but his real success came somewhat late in his shortish life, with a series of books about a Chinese-American detective in Honolulu, Charlie Chan. (Chan was based on an actual Hawaiian detective of Chinese descent, Chang Apana.)

Love Insurance comes from earlier in Biggers' career. It was published in 1914. Like a surprising number of the books I cover in this series, it turns out to have been the basis for a fairly significant movie. In this case the movie was One Night in the Tropics (1940), the first film to feature Abbott and Costello. (The two have a fairly minor role in the film, but apparently stole the show, among other things doing an abbreviated version of "Who's on First?") (Love Insurance was also twice made into a silent movie.)

The book opens with a British aristocrat, Lord Harrowby, visiting Lloyd's of London's New York office with a proposition: he wants them to insure the prospect of his marriage to an American heiress. It seems he needs her money to settle his debts, and if for some reason the marriage doesn't go off, at least the insurance policy will clear what he owes. Lloyd's sends a young man, Dick Minot, down to Florida where the wedding is scheduled to keep an eye on Harrowby, and on the others involved, and make sure the wedding goes through.

On the train to Florida, Minot chances across a very pretty girl; and indeed after the train breaks down, he and she engage an automobile to take them the last stage to their destination, San Marco, FL. Of course it turns out that the girl is Cynthia Meyrick, and she is headed to San Marco to marry Lord Harrowby. (San Marco is a real place, now a neighborhood in Jacksonville, but back then apparently a separate town.) It will hardly come as a surprise that Minot has already fallen for Cynthia, and that he is now faced with the agonizing duty to honorably fulfill his mission for Lloyd's and resist the temptation to let the wedding fail to come off and leave him free to court Cynthia.

And so he does, even as a whole variety of occurrences conspire to interfere with the wedding: a jewel thief, blackmailing newspapermen, a rival claimant to Lord Harrowby's title, Lord Harrowby's apparent cold feet, etc. etc. There are other comic bits, most notably a friend of Minot's who makes money by selling jokes to a rich old lady so she can get a reputation as the wittiest woman in San Marco.

We all know pretty much how things will conclude. The novel gets there bouncily enough, though often in quite preposterous fashion. It fits into the category of books that it doesn't surprise me were once popular, but which don't seem destined to ever be read much again, and which don't seem to deserve a revival.

My edition seems to be possibly a first, from Bobbs-Merrill. It was illustrated, pleasantly enough, by Frank Snapp. The 1940 movie, by the way, is a loosish adaptation, though it does retain the fundamental plot devices. But for example San Marco has become a South American country instead of a Jacksonville exurb. And the Abbott and Costello characters are not to be found in the book (though they may be vague amalgams of a few different characters). Still and all, seems like a movie that might be worth checking out.

Old Bestsellers: Bound to Rise, by Horatio Alger, Jr.

Old Bestsellers: Bound to Rise, by Horatio Alger, Jr.

A review by Rich Horton

Back to the later middle 19th Century, and one of the most famous American popular writers of that time. Horatio Alger is best known for “rags to riches” stories of poor young men making their fortunes through hard work.

Horatio Alger, Jr., was born in 1832. His father was a Unitarian minister, of old American stock (several Pilgrims were among his ancestors), but not well off. Young Horatio was a good student, and ended up graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard. He became a minister himself, but was eventually dismissed after allegations of overfamiliarity with the young boys in his congregation. Alger had published occasion stories, poems, and articles to this point, and he turned to more active writing. A few books for adults followed, with limited success. His métier was established with the publication of Ragged Dick in 1868. Most of the books that followed (around a hundred by the end of his life) were very similar: a poor boy, through hard work (and often enough the fortuitous financial assistance of an older wealthy man who the boy might impress through courage or honesty), attains respectably middle class status. Later in his life Alger’s books became a bit more sensational in content, in response to changing public taste. Though his books sold reasonably well, his financial position was never secure. He never married, and that, coupled with the early accusations that cost him his ministerial career, along with veiled references attributed to Henry James, or discovered in some of his books, leads to the assumption by many that he was homosexual, though no hard evidence is available. (Not too surprising, given the views of the times, and the likely affect any such revelation might have had on the sales of his books for boys.)

Alger’s reputation was probably at its highest in the decades just after his death, when reprints of his books sold very widely. But by the middle of the century he was no longer much read, and frankly I doubt he will ever be much read again.

As far as I can tell the book I read, Bound to Rise, is from 1872. It is a reprint, from at a guess somewhere around 1920, published by M. A. Donohue, as part of a series of very inexpensive reprints.

Bound to Rise seems entirely typical of Alger's output. As the story opens, Harry Walton is 14 years old (though the first page says 12 … but 14 is soon after established as correct). His father is a poor farmer in New Hampshire, with six children, just barely scraping by until his cow dies. He is forced to buy a new cow on credit from miserly Squire Green. Harry, after finishing school as the prize student, decides to go off on his own and find a job, hoping to pay back his father's debt.

He spends some time work in a shoemaker's shop, and earns some decent money, while virtuously refusing to waste it on clothes or pool or cigars or any other vice. Thereby he makes an enemy of a dissolute fellow worker, who is always in debt to his tailor. Harry's first catastrophe is when he loses his pocketbook and the other boy steals it … but that is soon rectified. Then the shoe business slows, but Harry finds a place with a magician. Soon he's making even more money – enough to pay off his father's debt, but disaster strikes again when Harry is robbed at gunpoint. In this case he is saved by an even more fortuitous event (the thief steals Harry's fine overcoat, but leaves him his own shabby one in recompense, and forgets that his (the thief's) pocketbook, with even more money than was stolen, is in the overcoat). The novel ends, somewhat abruptly, as the magician, having fallen sick, releases Harry to his next job, his dream job, working for a printer. (Harry is fascinated by Ben Franklin, and eventually wants to be an editor.) Before taking up his new position, Harry returns home to pay off his father's debt, to the discomfiture of the evil Squire Green.

There's little enough action there, to be sure. And if the novel seems incomplete – it was: there was an immediate sequel, Risen from the Ranks. It's really not terribly interesting. Alger's style was quite prosy, and moralizing. He also had the habit of half-describing something interesting, then saying something like “but our story need not dwell on this detail ...” and going on. Women are not very present in the novel, and there is never a suggestion that Harry even notices girls, nor that he ever thinks of a relationship with one. And Harry's path is quite straightforward … he is a hard worker, and thrifty, but otherwise opportunities are thrown willy-nilly in his path, and difficulties are overcome with sheer good luck. All in all, just not a very good book, but it is possible to see why it and its fellows were once very popular.

Old Bestsellers: I Love You, I Love You, I Love You, by Ludwig Bemelmans

Old Bestsellers: I Love You, I Love You, I Love You, by Ludwig Bemelmans

a review by Rich Horton

I dare say most of you have heard of, and indeed have read, at least one and possibly several books by Ludwig Bemelmans. He was the author of a delightful series of children's books about a little girl named Madeline, who went to a boarding school in Paris. The opening lines are widely remembered: "In an old house in Paris all covered with vines/lived twelve little girls in two straight lines/and the smallest one was Madeline." My mother read those books to me when I was young, and I read them to my children when they were young. Indeed, I read them to my daughter probably dozens of times.

By now I think that is all Bemelmans is remembered for. But in his prime he was an active writer of mostly humorous short stories, published in places like Harper's and the New Yorker. He wrote movie scripts as well, and a well-received memoir of his experiences as a not fully trusted volunteer in the U. S. Army during World War I (My War with the United States).

Bemelmans was born in the Tyrol, in what was then Austria-Hungary (it is now Italy), to a Belgian father and a German mother, in 1898. After his father ran off with Ludwig's governess, his mother returned to Germany, which Ludwig disliked. He eventually took an apprentice position at a hotel, but after shooting (though not killing) a waiter, he chose to be deported to the US in lieu of reform school. He worked in hotels and restaurants in the US, spent time in the Army, as noted above, and tried to make it as an artist, among other things briefly writing a comic strip. His friendship with a children's book editor at Viking, May Massee, seems to have been his big break.

I Love You, I Love You, I Love You was published in 1942 by Viking. My edition is a paperback from Signet, published in 1948. There are 12 stories included, all quite short, probably totalling no more than 30,000 words. The stories are "Souvenir", "I Love You, I Love You, I Love You", "Star of Hope", "Pale Hands", "Watch the Birdie", "Bride of Berchtesgaden", "Chagrin D'Amour", "Head-Hunters of the Quito Hills", "Vacation", "Cher Ami", "Camp Nomopo", and "Sweet Death in the Electric Chair". They are illustrated liberally by the author, in a style immediately recognizable to readers of the Madeline books.

Bemelmans, as noted, worked in hotels and restaurants for much of his life. He also owned a restaurant (later a cabaret); and he travelled very widely. So it is no surprise that the bulk of the stories here concern travel, such as the opener, "Souvenir", which has almost no plot as it tells of a trip to France (and back) on the Normandie, one way in a luxury suite, then in third class on the way back. The narrator usually seems to be Bemelmans himself, and very often his daughter Barbara is an important character. For example, "I Love You, I Love You, I Love You" opens suggestively, with a girl slipping into bed with the narrator ... but soon we realize it's his very young daughter. In the end it's about her wheedling ways, and her friendship with a small-time thief named Georges. "Camp Nomopo" is about Barbara again, this time her unhappiness at summer camp. Georges appears again in the following story, "Star of Hope", complaining that the French aren't allowing him to make a dishonest living, and wishing he could be in America, where things are much better. Georges, possibly the same character, shows up again in the next story, helping an art dealer smuggle a painting out of the hands of the Nazis. That is one of a couple of stories that balance the generally light-hearted tone of the collection with mention of the war -- the stories remain humorous but not inappropriately.

"Watch the Birdie" concerns a photographer of nudes and his unsuccessful attempts to practice his art on a beautiful American model, after which he ends up in the US and is chagrined when his agent offhandedly reveals his fortuitous success with the same young woman. "Chagrin D'Amour" feels just a bit dated ... it's set at a Haitian hotel, and turns on a supposed twist, when it is revealed that the local policeman who is in love with a pretty lady's maid is black. "Head-Hunters of the Quito Hills" is another amusing travel story, in which the narrator visits Ecuador, only to be repeatedly importuned by offers to sell him shrunken heads ... he finally learns the secret of their manufacture.

The stories as a whole are a rather slight lot, and very much of their time. But they are an easy, pleasant, read. They are humorous, but not uproariously funny. I wouldn't go out of my way to find more "adult" Bemelmans, but I'm glad to have run across this little book.

Old Bestsellers: The King's General, by Daphne du Maurier

Old Bestsellers: The King's General, by Daphne du Maurier

a review by Rich Horton

"TheKingsGeneral" by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TheKingsGeneral.jpg#/media/File:TheKingsGeneral.jpg

Back to a true Old Bestseller this week. The King's General was the bestselling book in the United States in 1946 according to Publishers' Weekly. (One review I saw called it a "modest bestseller" which makes me wonder what it would have taken for that person to call it a big bestseller?)

Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) was a very popular author and playwright. Her best known novel, by far, was Rebecca (1938), but novels such as Jamaica Inn, Frenchman's Creek, The Scapegoat, and the book at hand, The King's General, also attracted plenty of notice. She was treated very well by filmmakers, especially Alfred Hitchcock, who filmed Jamaica Inn, Rebecca (Best Picture winner in 1940), and The Birds (from a novella). Another movie often called "Hitchcockian", Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, comes from a du Maurier short story. Other significant films from du Maurier novels include Frenchman's Creek (starring Joan Fontaine), The Scapegoat (starring Alec Guinness), and My Cousin Rachel (starring Richard Burton and Olivia de Havilland).

Du Maurier came from a literary family: her grandfather George du Maurier wrote the notorious 19th century novel Trilby, which introduced the term "Svengali" for a behind the scenes manipulator of another's career; and her sister Angela was also a writer. (Her father Gerald was an actor, and her other sister Jeanne was a painter.) She was also a cousin of the Llewellyn Davies family, whose boys were the inspiration for Peter Pan. Du Maurier became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, styled Lady Browning.

Du Maurier's critical reputation suffered because of her popularity, it seems to me ... at any rate, she seems to have felt that. Of Rebecca, for example, V. S. Pritchett said it would be "here today, gone tomorrow". Pritchett got that prediction rather spectacularly wrong. She was stereotyped as a romance novelist, though most of her novels have sad or ambiguous endings. Jennifer Weiner would probably have a field day analyzing her reviews.

For all that, I hadn't read any of her books, though I have copies of at least Jamaica Inn and The Scapegoat on my bookshelves, in addition to The King's General. I read the latter because the historical setting seemed interesting.

It's a story of the English Civil War. Du Maurier tells it from a deliberately unpromising viewpoint: the narrator, Honor Harris, is a crippled woman, remembering in 1653, shortly before her death, the events of the Civil War, from more or less the late '30s to 1648. She's a Royalist, but fully aware of the shortcomings of King Charles I, and of the mistakes and wrongs perpetuated by her side. As of 1653 Cromwell's tyranny (as she (and I, mostly) would see it), is at its peak. So we know that the novel will end badly -- Honor's side loses, and, because of her injuries, she never marries and dies fairly young.

Her respectably Cornish family becomes entangled with the more prominent Grenvile family when she is 10 (about 1620) as her older brother Kit falls for and marries Gartred Grenvile. Honor, even at that age, dislikes Gartred from the start, and her dislike is proven correct as Gartred is unfaithful to Kit, who soon after dies. A bit later Honor falls for Gartred's brother Richard, a brilliant soldier with a nasty temper and reputation, and they become engaged, but the engagement is broken off when Honor is paralyzed after a nasty fall from a horse, partially caused, it is suggested, by Gartred.

Years pass, and Richard Grenvile makes a disastrous marriage for money, fathering a son and a daughter before the marriage founders. Honor lives quietly at her family's home. Then the Civil War starts, setting family against family, even in mostly Royalist Cornwall. Honor stays with her sister's family at Menabilly (where du Maurier herself lived, and also the model for Manderley in Rebecca). She ends up saving Richard Grenvile's son from the Roundheads using a secret passage she discovers, even while dealing with more bad faith acts by Gartred.

Honor and Richard, despite her injuries, and Richard's mercurial temper, become closer than ever (though it's not clear they are actually lovers -- she may be unable, actually, because of her injuries). Richard is a key general in the Royalist Army, portrayed in the book (fairly accurately, it seems) as probably the most talented Royalist soldier but fatally flawed because he, er, doesn't play well with others. Richard has many other flaws, most notably his inability to deal with his son Dick, whom he hates because he is not very brave, and because he hates his mother. Honor, however, becomes close to Dick. Richard and his cause fail (as he would have it, because of the incompetence of the King and his advisers as well as some of Richard's officers), and he goes into exile, only to return for the abortive rising of 1648 in Cornwall, which fails, as this book has it, because of a truly wrenching piece of treachery by someone close to him.

The novel is, really, a true tragedy, portrayal of a brilliant but fatally flawed man. And du Maurier's portrayal works, in good part of because we end up believing that Honor truly loves Richard, but also sees his terrible failings. Honor herself is an involving protagonist, and an affecting case. Despite the mostly inactive main character, there is a plenty of action; and a pretty legitimate-seeming portrayal of the war in the West, and of the atrocities committed by both sides.

I wouldn't call it a masterwork, but it's enjoyable and interesting, and the decision to end it in 1653, at the lowest ebb, more or less, for its characters, is effective. (The real Honor Harris did die in 1653, and Richard Grenville (as the name is usually spelled) died in 1659, just before the Restoration. But his nephew, Jack Grenville, was a major supporter of Charles II, and was created Earl of Bath after the Restoration, so in the end Honor and Richard's side, in a sense, did make out OK.)

An Appreciation of John Crowley's Engine Summer

I prepared this for an April 1 book group presentation at Left Bank Books in St. Louis. For those coming to this from Patti Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books, I'm not really suggesting it's forgotten (if perhaps a bit eclipsed by Little, Big and by Aegypt). And it certainly isn't old, nor, alas, a bestseller.

Engine Summer, by John Crowley

Doubleday, 1979

 an appreciation by Rich Horton

"Ever after. I promise. Now close your eyes." So ends John Crowley's Engine Summer, one of my favorite SF novels of all time. I think that's one of the most affecting last lines I've ever read, but I have to admit, on its own, its impact is pretty minimal. Probably that's a feature of great last lines ... they are great because of what came before. So, what came before?

Well, first, two previous novels: The Deep (1975), and Beasts (1976). I found The Deep not long after its publication, and, expecting nothing much, was really impressed. Beasts probably got more notice, but though I thought it just fine, it wasn't as mysterious and original (to my mind) as its predecessor. Then came Engine Summer, which just detonated in my soul. Apparently it was Crowley's fourth novel, Little, Big (1981), which detonated in everyone else's soul, however. I don't want to denigrate that lovely book, but it is still Engine Summer which is first among his books in my heart. (Crowley followed up Little, Big with the four volume Aegypt sequence (which had a difficult path to print) and two unrelated novels, The Translator and Four Freedoms. Neither should his short fiction be forgotten: the novellas "Great Work of Time" and "The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines", as well as the short stories "Snow" and "Gone", are thoroughly magnificent, and almost everything else he has published is nearly as good.)

But I digress. (Snakes' hands, maybe. Which is an Engine Summer reference.) What is Engine Summer, then? In a way it is a bildungsroman set in a society which has abandoned even the possibility of a bildungsroman. In another way it is a post-apocalyptic elegy, resembling at a distance perhaps Edgar Pangborn's Davy. It is impossibly bittersweet, and at some level I can't say why, except everytime I finish it I am in tears. Perhaps the question is, tears for what, or who? For the main character, Rush that Speaks, who has lost his love? For the main character, who is doomed to endless repetition of his story, never knowing how it ends? For the person the tale is told to (either in the story, or, I suppose, me), who lives in a world separate from Rush That Speaks' world, a fragile and isolated world, a world, it would seem, doomed by its reliance on high technology. For humankind?

The story hinges importantly on its frame ... it opens with the narrator, in conversation with another person, denying that he was asleep – he has only closed his eyes. He opens them, above the clouds, below the sky, talking to an angel, who asks him for his story. "Shall I begin by being born? Is that a beginning?". How those lines resonate when the story is over!

The narrator is a young man named Rush That Speaks, who grew up in a commune of sorts called Little Belaire. The first section tells of his young life in Little Belaire, of his Mbaba (his mother's mother), who raised him, and of his cord (Palm cord) and his mother and father ... The customs of Little Belaire, which seem long established and little-changing, are introduced. He meets a girl named Once a Day (the names of characters in this story are one of its many wonders), and falls in love with her (over years) and she leaves to join the wandering Dr. Boots' List. I have of course elided a great deal.

We slowly gather a bit about this future ... it is centuries (probably) after an apocalypse called the Storm. (This is never clearly described, but it seems more an infrastructure collapse than the result of a war or of an overt catastrophe.) Most people died, but the Long League of Women had been planning how to cope for a long time, and they, it seems, enforced some sort of return to living lightly on the Earth for the survivors. It's never clear how many people survived, but quite few. Little Belaire seems to be the descendant of a group, Big Belaire, that came together towards the close of industrial civilization, before eventually leaving their home (in a city?) to wander (a time they call "When We Wandered") until somehow founding Little Belaire. They call people in their history with important stories to tell "Saints". And along the way, Rush That Speaks decides he wants to become a Saint. The people of Little Belaire have one critical characteristic: they are Truthful Speakers (a Heinlein allusion?): "they say what they mean, and they mean what they say".

This being a bildungsroman of sorts, Rush must leave his home. And so he does, first spending a year or so with an hermit who Rush thinks might be a Saint, a man called Blink. Then he wanders further, trying to find Dr. Boots' List, the group Once a Day joined. There are other wonders: the Planters, source of the unearthly psychotropic fungus that Little Belaire harvests and sells; the mystery of the silver glove and the ball; the mystery of the letter from Dr. Boots; the avvengers; and the Four Dead Men. And, of course, the question of where (and who?) Rush That Speaks is as he tells his story.

The story is magnificently written, not in any ostentatious way, but supremely gracefully. The choices of names, as I've said, are lovely. The simple descriptions of things – some familiar to us, some new – are beautiful; and we see things like "Road" newly as Rush That Speaks describes them. And the mysteries are made – if not clear, at least perceptible – in good time, and in a very satisfying way.

Engine Summer is one of my favorite SF novels of all time, and this reread reinforced my view. (Not a new view – my votes in the Locus Poll of a few years ago for Best SF Novels of the 20^th Century are public record, and Engine Summer was on my Top Ten list.) It is heartbreaking in one sense but arguably nothing terribly bad happens to Rush That Speaks (except the girl he loves goes away – but to how many teenagers does that happen, anyway?) It is suffused with a sense of loss, but its world could possibly be called utopian (from some angles, anyway).