Birthday Review: The Serial Garden, by Joan Aiken

The Serial Garden, by Joan Aiken (Big Mouth House (an imprint of Small Beer Press), 978-1-931520-57-7, $20, hc, 328 pages) October 2008.

A review by Rich Horton

I grew up reading all sorts of children’s (and YA) books of course, and among my favorites were Joan Aiken’s Wolves novels, set in an alternate 19th Century England. But I was not an organized reader, and I never encountered her short stories. She wrote many of them, however, and among the best-loved were the Armitage stories, sprinkled throughout several of her collections. Now these stories, with four new ones completed prior to her death in 2004, have been assembled into a single book.

The stories concern a family in a village in England, Mr. and Mrs. Armitage and their children Harriet and Mark (with baby Milo turning up rather later). A Prelude tells how the Armitages arranged, on their honeymoon, that they would never ever be bored. These tales, published over some 50 years or more, are set in sort of an eternal present – a village that in flavor never really changes, though somehow the time of the action tracks the time of writing. And it is an ordinary English village (I assume) except with magic, magic accepted rather straight-facedly by all the characters. Of course, many of them are witches! And, happily, the magic is real and had enduring consequences – so for example the unicorn Candleberry that the Armitages acquire in the first story ("Yes, but Today is Tuesday") remains with them throughout the book.

The stories are entirely charming, and yet not cloying. Importantly, the tone varies, acts have consequences, and not everything is sweetness and light. For example, the title story, and one of the best, concerns Mark’s music teacher, Mr. Johansen, and his long lost love, who has vanished into a rather unusual place. It begins charmingly with Mark collecting a cardboard garden from a somewhat unpleasant sounding breakfast cereal – and defies expectations with its ending. (Happily, it is hinted later that Mr. Johansen may have another chance to find his inamorata.)

Other favorites of mine include "The Ghostly Governess", in which Harriet and Mark end up taking lessons from a long dead lady; "Harriet’s Birthday Present", in which Mark’s search for a special present for Harriet lands him in hot – well, not water exactly (and I do wish I knew what he ended up getting her); "The Land of Trees and Heroes", in which the children visit their grandmother and then the title land, where people can be lost forever in certain special trees; "The Stolen Quince Tree", an amusingly sharp treatment of a fraudulent gardening columnist; and really all of the new stories, perhaps most notably "Don’t Go Fishing on Witches’ Day", a bit of a time travel story as Mark gets ensnarled in an ancient curse. But really, that’s the current set of favorites – were I to think again I might choose a half-dozen different stories – the book is a delight throughout.

My only recommendation would be -- at least this worked for me -- to read the stories in small chunks, two to four at a time. They are by and large of a length and of a voice, and while the tone does vary as noted above it does tend to return to the same level. So read in a rush the book might wear on one. But that’s not how they first were written, or first appeared, and read individually these are quite lovely. And in the best of senses, without, I think, any condescension, these are stories to please all ages.

Birthday Review: Signs of Life, by Cherry Wilder

Signs of Life, by Cherry Wilder

a review by Rich Horton

Cherry Wilder was the name used for her SF by Cherry Barbara Grimm (1930-2002). Grimm was born in New Zealand, and died in New Zealand, but spent much of her adult life first in Australia, then in Germany. She was a very interesting writer at her best, though she didn't ever quite get wide recognition. That said, her YA Torin series, beginning with The Luck of Brin's Five, was fairly popular. I thought her late short stories, in places like Interzone and in some of Jack Dann's Australian/New Zealand themed anthologies, as well as the short and brilliant "Aotearoa" in Asimov's just before her death, were quite impressive.

Today would have been her 88th birthday, so I am resurrecting a fairly brief review I did of Signs of Life for my SFF.net newsgroup way back then.

Signs of Life appeared in 1996. (Another novel with the same title came out in 1997 from M. John Harrison. Totally different novel, quite excellent.) Wilder's novel is a sequel to her 1982 novel Second Nature. It's pretty good.  It tells the story of a starship which crashlands on an Earthlike world.  The thing is, another starship had crashlanded there a couple of centuries earlier, and the world has been "colonized" by descendants of the original crashees.  (This is the story told in Second Nature.)

The two main strands of the story follow the efforts of the complement of one of the Capems (sort of lifeboats) to survive in the first few weeks after landing, and the crew of a sailing ship which happens to be visiting the island on which the Capem has crashed.  This allows Wilder to compare and contrast, a bit, the new society of Rhomary (the name of this planet) with the Earth/Arkady folk of the newly crashed starship.  The viewpoint characters are very likable, and very human (even the androids, or Oxpers (auxiliary persons: Wilder has a very engaging way with neologisms)).  The only villain is rather stereotypical, and a little hard to believe: Wilder postulates that the only military-style organization to survive in the future is the maintenance crews of starships, and the leader of the maintenance crew which happens to come down in Capem Five, the focus Capem, rather predictably becomes a militaristic paranoiac (I hope I'm not misusing this word) under the stress of the crash.

I really did enjoy the novel. It's involving and engaging. The plot is a little vague, little more than a narration of events for the first month or so after crash.  There is closure, it's just that the plot doesn't have much structure.  As I intimated, the villain is somewhat overdrawn.  There were a couple of implausibilities, mainly the near complete lack of language difficulty between the Rhomary colonists and the starship folk.  Wilder throws in some gratuitous (to me) telepathy, but to be fair, this seems to be part and parcel of her "future history". I recall being vaguely disappointed that it didn't come out in 1997, so that I could have added it to my Hugo Nomination ballot along with Harrison's novel (as a kind of joke, of course). (That was a year that I didn't read any of the actual Hugo nominees until much much later -- I think I had only read seven 1997 novels by the time of the nominations, and probably only Harrison's would have been a truly deserving nominee.)

Old Bestseller Review: The Four Feathers, by A. E. W. Mason

Old Bestseller Review: The Four Feathers, by A. E. W. Mason

Michael Dirda recently reviewed this book in the Washington Post and I thought "that book looks like it would be right up my alley!" So I bought a copy and read it -- and Michael was right.

Alfred Edward Woodley Mason lived from 1865 to 1948. He was at time an actor, a playwright, and even a Member of Parliament, of the Liberal Party. But his major success was as a novelist. His best known novel by far was the novel at hand, The Four Feathers, from 1902, which was filmed multiple times, most successfully in 1939 by Zoltan Korda, starring John Clements and Ralph Richardson. He was also known for several detective novels about Inspector Gabriel Hanaud of the Surete, created as a reaction to Sherlock Holmes and said to be an inspiration behind Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot.

My copy of The Four Feathers is a 1905 edition from Macmillan. It is inscribed inside by Dorothy A. Kern, of Chicago, presumably the first owner. A note on the first page states that the main character first appeared in a short story published in the Illustrated London News.

Harry Feversham is a sensitive 14 year old when we first meet him, the only child of the widowed General Feversham. He is allowed to stay up with the General and a few of his army friends on their annual meeting on the anniversary of a critical battle. He hears tales of courage and cowardice, and the General's crippled friend Lieutenant Sutch (who, it is suggested, had an unrequited passion for Harry's dead mother) notes the fear that Harry shows at the tales of cowardice and the sad outcomes of the cowards. Harry, Sutch fears, is too intelligent and too imaginative, unlike his rather dull father. But there is no alternative -- all the Fevershams have been military men, and so must Harry be as well.

The action jumps forward 13 years, to 1882. Harry has been in the Army for some time, and he is having dinner with his fellow officers Trench, Willoughby, and Durrance. He announces his engagement to an Irish woman, Ethne Eustace. This caused Durrance some pain, for he is also in love with Ethne. Then Harry receives a telegram, and throws it in the fire. Soon thereafter, he resigns his commission. It becomes clear to Trench, Willoughby, and to Castleton, who sent the telegram, which indicated their regiment was to be called to active duty, that Harry has resigned his commission for fear of the danger of active duty. So they each send him a white feather, symbol of cowardice. And, shortly thereafter, Harry confesses as much to Ethne, and in a passion, she tears a feather from her fan and gives it to him as well, the fourth feather, and their engagement is broken.

Much of the rest of the story is told via Durrance. On duty in Egypt and the Sudan, he follows the careers of his fellow officers, and each encounters terrible dangers. One crisis is the loss of some letters from General Gordon that had been hidden in a town overrun by rebels. Miraculously, these letters are recovered. Durrance realizes that the strange man who effected the recovery was none other than Harry Feversham. At about that time, a strange accident striked Durrance blind, and he is forced to return to England, invalided out of the service. There he again strikes up a relationship of sorts with Ethne, while his curious friend, the widow Mrs. Adair, who it is immediately clear is hopelessly in love with Durrance, is also involved. Durrance hopes to marry Ethne -- but is it fair that she marry a blind man? Only if she truly loves him. And, of course, he is honest enough to realize eventually that she still loves Harry. Meanwhile, Harry is in North Africa -- having discovered that another man who sent him a feather is imprisoned in a hellhole, and having decided to get himself sent to the same prison, and to effect his former friend's release. It is clear that his hope is to redeem each of the four feathers -- only so that he will be worthy of Ethne's respect (not love) when again they meet in the afterlife.

And so things go -- a curious love quadrilateral of sorts between Harry, Durrance, Ethne, and the tortured Mrs. Adair. Acts of desperate heroism in North Africa. The kind intervention of Lietenant Sutch. Durrance's struggles with life as a blind man. Ethne's music. It's all highly pitched romanticism, insisting on a thorough obsession with honor -- but not revenge. It's not really quite believable, of course, but it's fun and involving. Not a great novel, but an enjoyable novel, and well written as well. Dirda was right.

Birthday Review: Jade Tiger, by Jenn Reese

Jade Tiger, by Jenn Reese (Juno, 978-0-8095-5674-8, $12.95, 239, tpb) January 2007.

A review by Rich Horton

Jenn Reese was born on this date, and so I've resurrected a brief review I wrote for Locus back in 2007 of her first novel.

Jade Tiger is Jenn Reese's first novel. (She has published a number of fine short stories in the past few years.) This is an extremely fast-paced story about a half-Chinese half-American martial artist. The fast pace is both a benefit -- it's a quick, exciting read, hard to put down -- and a shortcoming -- plot steps and character motivations are kind of glossed over, and the prose is often a bit careless as well, as if the pace of the plot was echoed by the pace of the writing.

Ian Dashell is a Professor of Archaeology at Risley University. One night he encounters an Asian man breaking into the artifacts room and destroying precious objects, apparently at random. The man seems ready to beat Ian to death, but a young woman suddenly invades, saving Ian’s life and preventing the man from stealing his actual desire – a jade crane. The woman is Shan Westfall, whose Chinese mother was part of the Jade Circle, a group of five women martial arts experts. But her mother was killed and several of the jade artifacts – objects of some power – possessed by the Circle were stolen, and Shan returned to the USA with her American father. Now she is running a small martial arts studio – and still searching for the lost artifacts.

It is clear to Shan that the man who nearly killed Ian is a key to tracking down still more artifacts – Shan already has the tiger, and now the crane. And, it turns out, Ian also knows where to find one more of the animals, the dragon. He insists on accompanying her in quest of it, and so does his colleague, Daniel Buckley. And they’re off! Just like that – a breakneck trip to France to track down the dragon. But the bad guys seem to know where they are going, and there is a scary encounter in France, followed by a different kind of scary encounter with Ian’s parents in England. (Ian and Shan, of course, quickly fall for each other.) Then off to an island near Hong Kong, owned by a rich collector with sinister plans of his own.

The action never stops – which, as I have implied, is both good and bad. There is little time for plot logic, and not much more time for character and relationship development. (Though that works OK – Ian and Shan are engaging people, and while I could have used a bit more focus on their developing attraction, it comes off well enough.) There are several scintillating martial arts fights, and some nice plot twists, and lots of danger. I had fun reading Jade Tiger. It’s not a masterpiece, but it shows plenty of promise, and its failings don’t get in the way of its exciting story.

Birthday Review: The Cunning Man, by Robertson Davies

Birthday Review: The Cunning Man, by Robertson Davies

Copyright: 1994 (published in 1995 in the USA)

This was one of the very first reviews I wrote for the World Wide Web -- as I recall it was posted on one of the very first online bookstore sites. I can't even remember the name of the site just now. It had an interesting discussion forum, alas all long since gone.

I'm reposting it today because Robertson Davies was born 105 years ago.

I wrote, in December of 1995:

It was already my plan to review this book here, simply because it is the last book I finished, and it is a significant book by one of my favorite authors. However, I learned some very sad news today: Robertson Davies died December 2, so this review will take on a somewhat valedictory tone.

For me personally, the news of Davies` death is quite depressing, doubly so because now two of my three favorite non-SF writers have died within a few weeks of each other. (Kingsley Amis having died in late October.) My third favorite non-SF writer, Anthony Powell, is older than either Davies or Amis (Amis was 73, Davies 82, and I believe today is Powell`s 90th birthday. [Actually, Powell was born on 21 December 1905.])

Oh well, on to the book. Robertson Davies was a Canadian author, arguably the finest Canadian writer ever, who wrote plays and novels on generally Canadian subjects. The novels fit generally into trilogies: The Salterton Trilogy, The Deptford Trilogy, and The Cornish Trilogy, in order of composition, represent his first nine novels. All his novels, however, can be read independently (although at least The Deptford Trilogy probably reads best in order.) To say, as I have said, that his novels are "about Canada" is a laughable understatement, however. I tried to summarize the subjects which Davies covered once for a friend, thinking it would be a tidy list, and I kept going and going: Theatre, Music, Vaudeville, Toronto, Hagiography, Jungian Psychology, Art (particularly "The Old Masters"), aging, medicine, Canadian politics, war, finance, schools (both Canadian "boarding schools" and Universities), and on and on. Suffice it to say that his novels are fascinating, hypnotic, works, usually centered on an artist of some kind. Perhaps the best place to start with Davies is his first two books: Tempest-Tost and Leaven of Malice, as these are somewhat lighter in tone than his later works (though all Davies` work is full of comedy at some level.) In my opinion, his best novels are Fifth Business, the first of The Deptford Trilogy, and What`s Bred in the Bone, second book of The Cornish Trilogy.

I am going on. Pardon me, obviously Davies is an enthusiasm of mine. Anyway, his last two novels (barring a posthumous work) are Murther and Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man, which appear to be the first two parts of another loose trilogy [now generally called the (unfinished) Toronto Trilogy), although both are capable of being read completely independently. The Cunning Man is the story of Jonathan Hullah, a Toronto doctor of somewhat unusual reputation. Hullah narrates the book, and tells his own life story beginning in about 1920 in a very isolated part of Northern Ontario, and continuing through early experiences with the local doctor, and also a Native American healing-woman, boarding school, medical school, World War II, and his postwar establishment of his own rather unusual medical practice, which is treated as a court of last resort for cases other doctors have considered hopeless. The key elements of the book are Hullah`s relationships with various people, in particular his school friends Charlie Iredale and Brocky Gilmartin (the latter the father of the narrator of Murther and Walking Spirits), his English lesbian landladies, called The Ladies, and the community surrounding the Very "High Church" Anglican church of St. Aidan`s, next door to Hullah`s practice. At the heart of the story is the mystery surrounding the death of the pastor of St. Aidan`s, Father Ninian Hobbes, and the attempts of Charlie Iredale, now an Anglican priest and Fr. Hobbes` assistant, to have Hobbes declared a saint.

As usual, the main interest of the book is in the characters, and in the curious subjects which come up as a result of the story: medieval saints tales, Anglican ritual and especially Church music, acting, a somewhat psychosomatic theory of disease, church politics, some Freudian psychology, and a great deal more.

For me, this book ranks in the middle range of Davies' work, which of course still makes it highly recommended. However, my interest flagged at times, and the book failed to completely involve me in the way that Davies' very best books do. Also, the central story is less compelling than in most of Davies` books, so the interest devolves even more to the characters and the somewhat arcane knowledge and theories that Davies discusses. These are interesting indeed, but a real gripping story would be still more interesting.

Birthday Review: House of Meetings, by Martin Amis

Birthday Review: House of Meetings, by Martin Amis

A review by Rich Horton

Martin Amis turns 69 today. I've read most of his work -- he's been a favorite of mine since I realized that the son of another of my favorite writers (Kingsley Amis) was also a writer. So I'm resurrecting this review of his 2006 novel House of Meetings.

Martin Amis's new novel is House of Meetings. Obviously making use of some of the research associated with his previous non-fiction book, Koba the Dread, which was about Stalin, he has written a novel about a "survivor" of the Gulag. But of course the novel is in great part about the ways in which this man didn't really survive the Gulag.

The narrator is a Russian born in 1919. He is telling his story, in what seems to be a long letter, to his stepdaughter, an American girl, sometime in 2004 or so. In the present he is taking a trip back to the location of the slave labor camp in which he spent ten years from about 1946 to 1956. It becomes clear he intends to die soon, and this narrative is a confessional.

The fulcrum of the story is a love triangle, involving the narrator, his ten years younger brother Lev, and a beautiful young Jewish girl named Zoya. Just after the War (in which the narrator, in his words, raped his way across East Germany -- in company, to be sure, with the rest of the Russian Army), Zoya moved into their neighborhood in Moscow, and immediately established a reputation as a woman of little character. But a very beautiful woman. The narrator, a war hero of sorts, handsome, used to having his way with women, becomes obsessed with her, but is rejected. And ends up being sent away to a labor camp. And he is astonished to learn that his rather ugly younger brother has taken up with Zoya, and indeed married her. But then Lev too is sent to the camps -- the same camp. And the two men spend several years there -- though Lev is a pacifist, and refuses to become involved in fights against the camp bullies, or the administrators. Which leads to something of a rift between the two men -- a rift exacerbated in the narrator's mind by his jealousy. But something changes horrendously when Zoya is allowed to make a conjugal visit -- in the "House of Meetings". And when soon after that, the camp is closed and the inmates freed.

The later life of the three is also described. The narrator is fairly successful, in Russian terms, eventually emigrating to the U.S., while Lev's marriage disintegrates, and he marries another woman, and has a son, destined to die in Afghanistan. But all is leading to a final confrontation between the narrator and Zoya, and to a final revelation in a long buried letter from Lev to the narrator. All this incident is skillfully unfolded, if to be honest the final letter isn't quite the explosion we have been led to expect.

Much of the interest in the novel is in the quite compelling descriptions of life in the labor camp. Besides being a portrayal of slave camp life, and a portrayal of a ruined man, it is to some extent a pained depiction of a dying country. It is very well written. A bit less "bravura" in prosody than earlier Amis books, though still often arresting. And very moving, quite believable, quite profound. One of Martin Amis's best novels, I think.

Birthday Review: A. S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale

Birthday Review: The Biographer's Tale, by A. S. Byatt

a review by Rich Horton

I wrote this review back in 2004, and I'm resurrecting it in honor of A. S. Byatt's birthday. She is a magnificent writer -- I'm a particular fan of Possession, and of the utterly brilliant short story "Sugar", as well as the novellas of Angels and Insects. Much of her work if fantasy, or borderline fantasy. This novel is one of her less well-known books.

The Biographer's Tale, from 2000, is one of those books A. S. Byatt seemed to produce as a break from her "Frederica Potter" series. (I suppose one shouldn't call The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and The Whistling Woman the "Potter" series -- might cause confusion!) It's an enjoyable novel, fairly short, fairly amusing, with a number of surface similarities to Possession, but a very different overall feel.

Phineas G. Nanson is a very small Englishman, a graduate student in postmodern literary theory. (I say very small -- his description of himself is not specific, but I don't think he is meant to be a "dwarf" or "midget" or whatever the correct clinical term is -- rather, a very short, slight, man, perhaps 4'9" or 4'10".) One day he decides to chuck that branch of study, and a professor suggests as an alternative a study of biography, or, specifically, the three volume biography of Sir Elmer Bole, by Scholes Destry-Scholes. This biography turns out to be indeed fascinating, and Bole himself an incredible person, a Victorian polymath, who among other things married two women, a somewhat typical Englishwoman and a Turkish woman. Nanson decides to try to do a biography of Scholes Destry-Scholes. But he runs into trouble quickly -- Scholes is long dead, or at least disappeared, he isn't even really named "Scholes Destry-Scholes", and very little is known about him.

At this juncture the book seems ready to become a spiraling mystery built around curious small facts, and an elusive subject. Nanson discovers some papers left at his publishers by Scholes, that appear to be sections of contemplated biographies of other famous people, real people this time: Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton, and Henrik Ibsen. But these prove problematic as well, as much of these accounts turn out to be invented. Nanson digs deeper, and at the same time gets a job, working at a curious travel agency run by a couple of gay men. The travel agency concentrates on unusual tours, thematically linked -- which corresponds fairly well to the inventions of Scholes re his subjects. Nanson's other diggings lead him to meet two intriguing but different women: a Swedish ecologist, or more specifically a bee expert, whom he meets at a museum dedicated to Linnaeus; and a radiologist, the niece and closest surviving relative of Scholes Destry-Scholes.

The rest of the book swings to "autobiography", as the subject becomes not Bole, or Scholes, or Linnaeus, Ibsen or Galton; but rather Nanson, in particular his relationship with the two women he has met, and his difficulties and successes at his new job. It's all pretty interesting, and fun, and generally unexpected. Some of it -- much of it -- has a distinct air of unreality. Byatt is always prone to fantastical writing even in her most mainstream stories, and here she is certainly brushing against the border of realistic fiction with -- what? I guess that's part of the question -- a question naturally posed when we consider a fictional biographer with an assumed name writing about a fictional person, but also writing about "real" people, though making up stuff about them. And so on -- consider the radiologist's art pictures -- X-rays presented as art -- are these bones the real people? Or Francis Galton's composite photographs ... or Henrik Ibsen's ideas about character ... or Linnaeus' classification schemes ... in many ways this is a "light" book but it is also an obsessively intellectual book (as usual with Byatt), and a fascinating read.