Birthday Review: Take a Girl Like You, by Kingsley Amis

Birthday Review: Take a Girl Like You, by Kingsley Amis

a review by Rich Horton

Kingsley Amis was born 16 April 1922. He was one of the great comic novelists of the 20th Century, and also a long-time proponent of SF (and a writer of a number of SF novels and short stories.) In his memory, here's a review I wrote some time ago of one of his best novels.

Kingsley Amis opened his career with the novel that remained his most famous work to the end of his life: Lucky Jim. His next two novels were generally regarded as disappointments, at least relative to Lucky Jim. It is with his fourth novel, Take a Girl Like You, that Amis again hit his stride. This is as with almost all of Amis's works a comic novel, but much darker than Lucky Jim, with a cad for a leading man and a rather sad (morally) ending. (Spoilers will follow, but none that I think would interfere with a reader's enjoyment.)

The protagonist is Jenny Bunn, a 20 year old girl from the North of England who has come to a middle class town near London to be a schoolteacher. Jenny is an extremely beautiful woman, a bit naive, and brought up with fairly conventional notions of sexual morality. Which have been a bit of a burden to her since about the age of 14, when she noticed that all of a sudden she was constantly the object of not always welcome male attention.

Soon enough at her somewhat depressing boarding house she meets a very charming and handsome man named Patrick Standish. Patrick is breaking up with her fellow boarder, a somewhat ramshackle Frenchwoman named Anna Le Page. Patrick immediately notices Jenny, the way all men seem to, and not long after he has asked her on a date. Which is quite a lot of fun, until Patrick closes the evening by rather insistently trying to seduce her.

Patrick is a schoolteacher himself, at a private school for boys, and apparently rather good at his job. He has the same problems with his bosses that every Amis leading man seems to have: his headmaster is pleasant enough but ineffectual, and another teacher is a very nasty piece of work. But we slowly gather that Patrick is far from blameless: most egregiously, he is not trying very hard to resist the head's 16-year-old daughter's pathetic attempts to sleep with him. He also cruelly torments the clumsier and stupider people around him.

The novel portrays Patrick's courtship of Jenny, over roughly a year's period. This includes attempts to persuade her that her moral views are outdated, a long period of trying to be "not a bastard", failed attempts to resist having sex with other women he encounters while away from Jenny (the dates are a good thing, see, to prove to himself he really loves Jenny ... but he still has sex with the women) ... and finally an ultimatum to Jenny to sleep with him or end the relationship. When Jenny wavers, he breaks it off, then rapes her after she gets drunk. (It's what we now call date rape -- possibly at the time it would not have been regarded as rape, quite, though in no way does Amis seem to approve.) At the end Jenny is resigned that she will stick with Patrick -- she likes him too much, and she has no virginity left to protect. This is all rather dispiriting, though quite true to her character I think. As it happens, this is the only novel to which Amis wrote a sequel: Difficulties With Girls, a couple of decades later, in which Jenny and Patrick are married, but Patrick is still philandering. That book ends a bit happier, with Jenny gaining the ultimate upper hand in their relationship.

I think this is an excellent novel. The various characters are thoroughly believable to me, and a varied and odd lot. Amis's comic eye for dialogue, and internal dialogue, is sharp as ever. The novel is funny when it needs to be, and honest and sad when it needs to be.

In Memoriam, Gene Wolfe (1931-2019)

In Memoriam, Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe died yesterday, April 14, 2019 (Palm Sunday!) His loss strikes me hard, as hard as the death last year of Ursula K. Le Guin. Some while I ago I wrote that Gene Wolfe was the best writer the SF field has ever produced. Keeping in mind that comparisons of the very best writers are pointless -- each is brilliant in their own way -- I'd say that now I'd add Le Guin and John Crowley and make a trinity of great SF writers, but the point stands -- Wolfe's work was tremendous, deep, moving, intellectually and emotionally involving, ambiguous in the best of ways, such that rereading him is ever rewarding, always resolving previous questions while opening up new ones.

It must be said that for me Wolfe lived primarily through his fiction -- I can't really say I knew him, though I did meet him a few times, and I think (unless my memory betrays me) we shared a panel once at an SF convention. But we never spoke at length. I'll tell a couple of personal stories, though -- one of which isn't really mine.

This first story concerns his magnificent early novel The Fifth Head of Cerberus (curiously, originally published as "Three Novellas by Gene Wolfe".) I worked at Waldenbooks in 1976-1977, and I ran the SF section. My manager loved SF too, and she insisted we stock The Fifth Head of Cerberus, even though it was well past its sell-by date (it first appeared in 1972.) I certainly didn't complain -- but she told me a story. At her previous store, at the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, IL, she had kept the book on the shelves past when it would normally have been stripped and returned. And one day she saw a somewhat chubby middle-aged man looking at the book, with an expression of gratitude. This was Gene Wolfe, who then lived in Barrington, not far from Woodfield Mall.

My slightly more personal story concerns the first time I met Wolfe -- at an autograph table at Archon, the St. Louis area SF convention. I asked him to sign a copy of one of my first anthologies, Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2006 Edition, which included his story "Comber". He happily complied, then asked, with a certain sharpness (feigned, I think!) "Why didn't you put my story "Memorare" in the new book?" I didn't have an answer (though, really, "Memorare" is pretty long, and it wasn't easy for me to fit novellas in those first, slimmer, books.) I did reprint his story "Bloodsport" in my 2011 book.

The stories, though. The stories. He's best known, I suppose, for his novels, specifically the four volume Book of the New Sun, which completely wowed me when it appeared between 1980 and 1983. I remember voting book one, The Shadow of the Torturer, first in a poll run by the Champaign Urbana Science Fiction Association for Best SF Novel of all time, presumably in 1981 (after all, that's when I graduated from the University of Illinois.) The rest of his so-called "Solar Cycle" is also exceptional -- The Urth of the New Sun, and two more series, the tetralogy The Book of the Long Sun and the trilogy The Book of the Short Sun. There were a few short stories in that series as well, and one of them, "Empires of Foliage and Flower", is truly remarkable.

Other novels are unmissable as well. My personal favorites include the very early Peace, The Fifth Head of Cerberus of course, and the fairly late novel The Sorcerer's House.

Likewise he was wonderful at shorter lengths. Among the short stories I truly loved "La Befana", "The Other Dead Man", "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories", "How the Whip Came Back", "How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion", "When I Was Ming the Merciless", "Straw", "The Rubber Bend", "The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton", "Suzanne Delage", "The War Beneath the Tree", and "All the Hues of Hell".

But, then -- there are the novellas. SF is home to many fantastic writers of novellas -- Ursula K. Le Guin, Damon Knight, and Kim Stanley Robinson come immediately to mind. But nobody matches Gene Wolfe. I'll just list them -- the three from The Fifth Head of Cerberus first ("The Fifth Head of Cerberus", "'A Story', by John V. Marsch", and "V.R.T."). Plus "Forlesen", "Seven Americen Nights", "The Eyeflash Miracles", "Silhouette", "Tracking Song", "The Death of Doctor Island", "The Ziggurat", "Golden City Far", "Memorare". I mean -- what a list, what an incredible list of fabulous stories.

I feel that I'm not getting to the heart of what made Gene Wolfe so great. For some of that, you just need to read him. But -- what was he about? Part of it was playfulness. Simple things, like his collection The Castle of the Otter, named after a Locus misunderstanding of the title of the fourth Book of the New Sun novel (The Citadel of the Autarch.) Or like his "Island Doctor" stories: "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories", "The Death of Doctor Island", "The Doctor of Death Island", "Death of the Island Doctor". Or the secret of the name of the family in The Fifth Head of Cerberus (and the cute nod to Vernor Vinge in that passage.) All that is fun -- sometimes serious fun, but fun. But what was he really after? Virtue. Identity. Truth. The slippery nature of truth. So -- the shapechangers in The Fifth Head of Cerberus. The various Silks in the Long Sun and Short Sun books. The secret of the life of Alden Weer in Peace. The quest of Able in The Wizard Knight.

I'll leave with a quote -- thanks to John Kessel for this -- from the end of "Forlesen", one of Wolfe's greatest, and least appreciated, novellas: The main character, having died, asks:

"I want to know if it's meant anything . . . if what I suffered -- if it's been worth it."

"No," the little man said. "Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. Maybe."

Birthday Review: The Stepsister Scheme, by Jim C. Hines

Birthday Review: The Stepsister Scheme, by Jim C. Hines

Today is Jim C. Hines' birthday. And in his honor, here's a short review I did for my previous blog some time ago, of his novel The Stepsister Scheme. (I reviewed its sequel, The Mermaid's Madness, at Fantasy Magazine, as well.)

Jim C. Hines's The Stepsister Scheme is the first in his new series concerning the adventures of Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty. The lead character is Cinderella -- Danielle Whiteshore -- who is adjusting to her new "happily-ever-after". She really is in love with her Prince (which turns out not to be the case for Snow White or Sleeping Beauty), and is pretty content, when all of a sudden one of her stepsisters shows up and tries to assassinate her. Her stepsister, the prettier and stupider of the pair, has learned some magic, but with the help of a handmaid who turns out to be Talia, also known as Sleeping Beauty, and also with the help of Danielle's animal friends, the assassination attempt fails. But her stepsister gets away.

Danielle quickly learns that her mother-in-law has secretly taken in Snow White and Talia (aka Sleeping Beauty) after the two fled intolerable home situations. (Snow White is wanted for the murder (in self-defense of course) of her evil stepmother -- her "Prince" turned out to be no help, and her true lover was the huntsman who saved her life. Talia, on the other hand, resents the fairies who gave her the gifts -- and the curse -- and she hates the "Prince" who wakened her by raping her while she slept and making her pregnant -- she only woke because of the pain of childbirth.) The two young women act as spies for the Queen. Snow White is magical adept, and Talia a martial arts adept. Now, it seems, Danielle's husband, the Prince, has been kidnapped by Cinderella's stepsisters and taken to Faerytown. The three young women go on a mission, where their three complementary talents (Snow's magic, Talia's weapons skills, and Danielle's ability to talk to animals, plus her innate niceness) all combine to, after much difficulty, uncover the nature of the stepsisters' plot, and the nature of their allies.

On the surface it seems it might be a romp. And there are aspects of the romp to it -- a fair amount of light jokes, some fun playing with the details of the "true stories" behind the fairy tales. But there's a lot of serious intent, and dark details, behind everything, as the details I mention above about the true stories of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty might indicate. The characters of the three princesses are well-portrayed, and each is quite different to the others. The plot involves real pain, some moral ambiguity, and a less than easy resolution. But it's never dreary -- it's a fun and adventure-filled story to read. Good work. I'm reading the second one, The Mermaid's Madness, now -- which adds the Little Mermaid to the mix. (Presumably the third book, Red Hood's Revenge, will bring in Little Red Riding Hood.)

Birthday Review: Short Fiction of Rachel Swirsky

Today is Rachel Swirsky's birthday. In the last decade or so, Rachel has produced some of the most exciting, thoughtful, and original fiction in our field. Here's a selection of my Locus reviews of her short fiction:

Locus, August 2007

The June Interzone features an original feminist parable from Rachel Swirsky, “Heartstrung”. The arresting central idea has girls removing their hearts and sewing them to their sleeves as they pass to adulthood – and in the process (differently than the figure of speech “heart on one's sleeve” implies) become distanced from their emotions.

Locus, February 2008

At Electric Velocipede for Fall  ... Rachel Swirsky has really made a splash with her first few stories, and “How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth” is another strong outing. It is a story of the far future, when the trees unite to eliminate humanity – though humans change in unexpected ways.

Locus, June 2008

Rachel Swirsky is a very exciting new writer, and at the March-April Weird Tales she offers another of her short, intense, stories – and each I’ve seen from her has been unique. “Detours on the Way to Nothing” is a very odd account of a strange sort of creature arranging an encounter with a man. Everything about her is odd: feathered hair, voluntarily removed tongue, mysterious sudden appearance – but “her” story, or lack thereof, is the philosophical center of this piece. One of those stories I’m not sure I understood at all, but that still fascinated. Which is a specific kind of “weird”, and one that seems definitely a goal of new editor Ann VanderMeer.

Locus, September 2008

In June’s Fantasy Magazine ... Rachel Swirsky is as ever interesting, and as ever original, and as ever trying a different tone, as she too looks at a human woman marrying a god. But “Marrying the Sun” is not dark, but an amusing and deadpan look at the problems of a relationship with the Sun – things like your wedding dress going up in flames.

Locus, June 2009

At Tor.com in April one oustanding piece is Rachel Swirsky’s “Eros, Philia, Agape” (March), which retells an old tale: an intelligent robot (here created to be a lover for a rich woman) yearns to be free. Where the story shines is the sort of freedom he craves – Swirsky depicts the protagonist magnificently, convincingly a created intelligence, and yet his own person, and yet not a human, exactly.

Locus, January 2010

If Baen’s Universe is closing, another publisher-associated site, though with a quite different structure and business model, seems to be doing quite well. Tor.com continues to feature excellent work, including in November an atmospherically sad Rachel Swirsky story, “A Memory of Wind”, which tells the story of the sacrifice of Iphigenia from her point of view.

Swirsky is also impressive at much shorter length at Beneath Ceaseless Skies for October 22. “Great Golden Wings” is a lovely little story, very simply told – a “cinematographist” trying to get financing for his invention against the resistance of people like magicians – who think movies might be competition for their illusions – is showing his early film (of dragons) at court. One court lady is enchanted – others merely hope to gain social points. I liked the introduction of a technologist into a fairly standard-seeming fantasy world, and I liked the depiction of the wonder felt by Lady Percivalia, and her trapped characterization.

Locus, September 2010

Rachel Swirsky has also not published a novel, and I don’t know of any forthcoming. But her short fiction continues to excite readers, and indeed two separate novelettes from 2009 ended up on award ballots (“The Memory of Wind” for the Nebula, and “Eros, Philia, Agape” for the Hugo). Through the Drowsy Dark is a strong mix of fiction and poetry. Several of the stories are new to this volume, and are well-done – but not SF or Fantasy. The story unfamiliar to me that most impressed me may be unfamiliar to many readers: “The Debt of the Innocents” first appeared in the 2007 UK anthology Glorifying Terrorism. It’s strong SF, positing a future in which energy shortages doom many poor babies to unnecessary deaths because of lack of incubators. The viewpoint character is a nurse who joins a terrorist movement to resist this. The story doesn’t really insist on taking a side, though it presents its arguments in a curiously asymmetric fashion. The effect in the end is quite powerful.

Locus, November 2010

Rachel Swirsky contributes a novella to Subterranean Magazine’s Summer Issue, their “Special Novella Issue”. “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” is, as far as I can recall, her longest published story (and longest title!). It does show signs of structural strain: it has a decidedly episodic structure, a common solution, I think, used by writers extending to greater lengths than they are used to. But it still works. The title character, Naeva, is a loyal servant (and lover) to her Queen, but she is killed in the Queen’s service. However she is preserved as a spirit, to be brought back magically to give advice, at first to her Queen, but eventually to future – even very far future – generations. This is a bitter pill for Naeva to swallow, not least because of what she learns about her Queen. It becomes still bitterer as the future changes, and as her culture is forgotten, and she must put up with such abominations as cultures in which men have status, and indeed in which women love men. The story slingshots farther and farther into the future, lightly touching on a variety of fantastical (and even rather SFnal) cultures, and touches at transcendence by the end. Excellent work.

Locus, May 2011

In Eclipse 4, I really liked Rachel Swirsky’s “Fields of Gold”, about a young man who finds himself in a strange afterlife, complete with famous people, and a few people he knows. He quickly gathers that one of the people there is his estranged wife, who may have murdered him, but perhaps more important to him is his cousin and childhood best friend. The story is part about why and how he died, and why and how he more or less wasted his life; but it’s also about what really made him happy, and the ending is quite moving and ambiguously hopeful.

Review of Life on Mars (Locus, May 2011)

Rachel Swirsky’s “The Taste of Promises” is a again about a kid putting himself in extreme danger. Tiro runs away from his Martian city with his brother – who we quickly learn has been uploaded due to a disease – and ends up at another city. He hopes to find a way to get his brother a body, but he must learn to understand what his brother might really want. And deal with pirates, too.

Locus, November 2013

Finally, there's a new horror magazine out, The Dark, edited by Jack Fisher and Sean Wallace. The first issue features four well-written stories, all by women, the best and strangest of which is Rachel Swirsky's “What Lies at the Edge of a Petal is Love”, which is more “weird” than “horror”, about a man who finds his wife (and children) becoming plants.

Locus, October 2014

In the Summer Subterranean, Rachel Swirsky's “Grand Jeté (The Great Leap)” is perhaps her longest story yet, and very good, about Mara, a girl dying of cancer, and her reactions (and her father's, and her replacement, called Ruth) to her father's making an android version of her, into which her personality is downloaded. Seems creepy, but by the end the story – and the characters – come to terms with this. It's a powerful story of character, interleaving Jewish themes (the golem, Jewish festivals and prayers, the Holocaust) with the ballet (Mara's mother was a ballet dancer, and the story alludes strongly to Coppélia), and with science fiction and AI and identity.

Locus, February 2016

The best fantasy in the December Lightspeed is a playful take on Alice in Wonderland by Rachel Swirsky, “Tea Time”, about the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, lovers in a time-stopped Wonderland. The main interest in this case is the extended and effective prosodic whimsy.

Locus, April 2016

Also interesting in the February Clarkesworld is “Between Dragons and Their Wrath” by An Owomoyela and Rachel Swirsky, told by Domei, a 14-year-old in a war-torn land, gathering dragon scales despite the danger of uncontrolled changes. Change – forced and unforced, and otherness, and of course the detritus of war is central to this moving story.

Birthday Review: Mister Boots, by Carol Emshwiller

Mister Boots, by Carol Emshwiller

a review by Rich Horton

Carol Emshwiller died two months ago, just short of her 98th birthday, which would have come today. She is one of the key, yet underrated, figures in SF over the last several decades. (Underrated because she was not terribly prolific, and because so much of her work was short fiction, as well as because she had a very individual voice.) I wrote about her short fiction at the time of her death, here: In Memoriam, Carol Emshwiller. So, today, on her birthday, here's my rather brief review from back in 2006 or so of her novel Mister Boots.

Mister Boots is a YA novel from Carol Emshwiller, published in 2005. Emshwiller's late in life flowering continues to be one of the remarkable stories of recent SF. (Not that she hasn't been a brilliant writer from the late 50s -- but she has never been so prolific as in the last few years, and she is as good or better a writer as she has ever been, even in her 80s.)

This book is about a girl named Bobby Lassiter, who has just turned 10 as we meet her. She is living in the California desert with her mother and her 20 year old sister. The depression is just around the corner, but this family knows poverty just fine -- they barely scrape by on the proceeds of the older women's knitting. The father, who was evidently terribly abusive (physically -- whippings of all three -- not sexually) left them when Bobby was very young. Bobby (full name Roberta) is apparently called Bobby because the father wanted a boy -- and, indeed, no one but her sister and mother knows she's a girl.

She meets a man on their property one night, who tells her he is really a horse, named Mister Boots. He too has been abused by his human owners. Bobby feeds and clothes him, and eventually takes him home. Events follow quickly from their. The mother dies. Mister Boots and the older girl, Jocelyn, fall in love. Their father, Robert Lassiter, returns and the abuse begins again. He wants Bobby to become a magician, just like him -- and she finds she is good at that, and wants to do it. They head to LA (Bobby dressed as a boy -- which her father still thinks she is), and become a successful magic act, despite Mister Boots's refusal to turn into a horse onstage. Bobby makes her first ever friendship with a girl her age: a similarly bereft Mexican girl named Rosie whom she meets in a sort of hobo camp. They meet their father's long time mistress -- or is she really his wife, and are they illegitimate? But then the Depression hits, and the money dries up, and things get worse and worse, until a final revelation and a final horrible act.

It's a charming and hopeful story in one sense, with a delightful narrator in Bobby. (Yet a real seeming narrator -- not a prodigy, for instance, and far from a perfect person.) Yet it is also quite dark -- the depression, the abuse, and a somewhat tragic denouement. Which I think means it's really pretty much like real life. A very fine little novel.

Birthday Ace Double: Lord of the Green Planet, by Emil Petaja/Five Against Arlane, by Tom Purdom

Ace Double Reviews, 29: Five Against Arlane, by Tom Purdom/Lord of the Green Planet, by Emil Petaja (#H-22, 1967, $0.60)

by Rich Horton

Today would have been Emil Petaja's 104th birthday. I've already posted other Ace Double reviews about Petaja, and about Tom Purdom, so I won't go into biographical details here, but just get on with the review, as I wrote it about 15 years ago.

(Covers by Kelly Freas and Jack Gaughan)

A fairly obscure Ace Double this time. I read it mainly because I'm planning to read all of Tom Purdom's novels. And I figured I ought to give Emil Petaja another chance. Five Against Arlane is Purdom's third novel, and his third and last Ace Double. It's about 48,000 words long. Lord of the Green Planet is about 41,000 words long. It's one of 8 Ace Doubles by Petaja, and it's the first of a pair of linked novels, the other being Doom of the Green Planet (1968).

As I've mentioned before, Tom Purdom has had a rather bifurcated SF career -- he published a passel of stories and five novels between the late 50s and early 70s, then was all but silent for almost two decades before returning with an extremely impressive array of recent stories. His previous two novels, The Tree Lord of Imeten and I Want the Stars, were both interesting stories, not entirely successful but worth reading. Much the same can be said of Five Against Arlane.

The story opens in medias res as Migel Lassamba kidnaps a couple of people at gunpoint, desperate to get a heart to transplant into his lover. Interesting perhaps, but there must be more going on than that? And we soon gather that Migel and his lover are part of a group of five people trying to unseat the ruler of Arlane, David Jammet. Eventually we learn that Jammet is an idealist who believes that humans are essentially evil, and that he is trying to breed a better race. In the interim, he uses mind control devices to keep the population in line.

Migel is successful in gaining the heart, but at the disastrous cost of one of his group's high-tech patrol cars (flying cars with armor and heavy guns, basically). His group returns to their sort of guerilla war against Jammet's forces. The other theme of the book comes forth -- in this future people have extremely extended lifespans, and as such are extremely risk-averse. Their battles are presented as computer controlled events, where action is taken only with 20-1 or better odds of survival. Inevitably, in the crisis Migel has to decide to defy those odds.

I found the book very exciting, very fast moving. I freely admit that the mind-control villain pushes my buttons pretty forthrightly. Purdom also introduces plenty of moral ambiguity, as the good guys are forced to kill a lot of innocents, while the villain is given at least a hint of a high moral purpose, however perverted in action. And the ending is very mixed -- good people die, the hero's success is tainted, the villain's failure is not complete -- all quite interestingly done. It should be added that the general machinations of the plot aren't terribly convincing, and the five against a planet battle, while given some rationale for potential success, still seems a bit preposterous. Certainly not a great book, but a book that uses the conventions of the form to pretty good effect.

I didn't much like the previous Emil Petaja book I read, Seed of the Dreamers. I hoped that that was a low point, and maybe it was. Lord of the Green Planet is not a very good book, but it's rather better than Seed of the Dreamers, and in particular it's a more involving book to read.

It's set some 1200 years in the future. Human colonies extend all the way to the Magellanic Clouds, and Diarmid Patrick O'Dowd is exploring one of the Clouds when he runs afoul of a mysterious green web in space. He finds himself marooned on a pleasant planet, and soon threatened with death by a thuggish Lord named Flann. Diarmid's life is saved by Flann's beautiful red-haired green-eyed fiancée Fianna, who arranges for him to be deposited with a sympathetic member of the planet's indigenous race.

Diarmid soon gathers that this planet is controlled by a creature called the Deel, who seems obsessed with maintaining a social structure consistent with the songs and stories of old Ireland. Flann is a cruel sadist, and very bad to his subjects, and Fianna hates him, but the Deel has decreed they must marry. Diarmid is already in love with Fianna, and agrees to work against Flann and the Deel, which must start with recovering the mysterious Talisman he carried when he arrived -- a high tech device to enable him to analyze the situation on the one hand -- on the other hand consistent with the legends about a hero from the skies who will save the people of the Green Planet.

And so it continues, Diarmid valiantly retrieving the talisman from quasi-mythical beasts, with the help of other quasi-mythical beasts like silkies; and fighting Flann for the love of the lovely Fianna; and eventually confronting the Deel in his home: T'yeer-Na-N-Oge. All this is given a quasi-plausible Science Fictional rationale. It's not all that good -- not as good as Five Against Arlane, to my mind -- indeed not very good at all. But I will say that it's a lot better than the last Petaja book I read, and that I read it through swiftly, without much of a struggle. Not high praise -- but all the praise I have.

Birthday Review: Sabre Tooth, by Peter O'Donnell

Birthday Review: Sabre Tooth, by Peter O'Donnell

Today  is the anniversary of the birth of Peter O'Donnell (1920-2010), author of the Modesty Blaise comics and novels. Here's a review of one of his Modesty Blaise books. I also reviewed his romance novel Stormswift, written as by "Madeleine Brent", some while ago.

I read a Modesty Blaise novel by Peter O'Donnell several years ago, indeed I think it was the first novel (though I understand the whole series began as a comic strip): Modesty Blaise.  I enjoyed it, but hadn't encountered another one.  Last fall at Archon Glen Cook had some used editions, so I bought a copy of Sabre Tooth, which seems to be early in the series.  I just now read it.

The books are fairly clearly written to fit the James Bond spy thriller genre, with the key difference that the hero is a woman, Modesty Blaise.  Also unlike Bond, she's a former criminal, and she's only unofficially attached to British intelligence.   But such aspects of the series as love of neat gadgets, sex, and a certain romantic view of intelligence work, especially British intelligence work, definitely recall the Ian Fleming books. 

Modesty's backstory is that as a child (she was perhaps born in Greece) she was orphaned and forced to walk thousands of miles to survive, along the way encountering hunger and rape and learning to rely totally on herself.  While still a teen she founded an international crime organization called "The Network", and later she rescued a brilliant criminal from a Thai jail, Willie Garvin, and brought him back to psychological health.  At the time of the books, Modesty is somewhere in her late 20s, and Willie a few years older. They have retired from crime with a fortune.  They remain a dedicated two-person team, and Modesty loves Willie, while Willie worships Modesty (whom he calls Princess).  In neither case is the love sexual at all, however.  Both are brilliant athletes and martial artists, Modesty is the better with firearms, Willie with knives, Modesty the better schemer, Willie the genius tinkerer.  Though they are portrayed very well, they are clearly "superheroes", not realistic.  But that's OK.

The other main recurring character seems to be Sir Gerald Tarrant, an obscure British bureaucrat who actually heads a certain branch of UK intelligence.  Tarrant is able to get Modesty and Willie to assist him, partly by being a friend, and honest, and partly by offering challenging work. In this book a mercenary team is being assembled in a remote valley in the Hindu Kush.  The team is run by a merciless leader called Karz, and we are introduced to several of his conscience-deprived deputies, most notably a pair of Siamese Twins, called "The Twins", who are formidable fighters as a team, but who hate each other when they are not fighting.  (This too echoes Fleming: the mastermind with his brutal henchman).  Tarrant gets wind of a possible plot to take over Kuwait, to loot the oil money.  He doesn't know who's doing it, but he does notice that a lot of well-known mercenaries have disappeared, so he assumes they are being assembled into an army.  He intuits that the army will need leaders, who are very rare, so he manages to convince Modesty and Willie to feign a desire to get back into the "business", as their capabilities are so well-known that they will surely be approached. They do so, but they miscalculate the types of persuasion Karz will be able to use on them, and they find themselves in a situation where they have a terrible choice: they may have to actually go through with Karz' plans.

It's terrifically exciting stuff.  Thoroughly unrealistic, in character, technology, and in the over-the-top villainy and pride of the bad guys which of course contributes to their ultimate failure. (I hope no one thinks that a spoiler!)  But that's all part of the genre -- and this is a wonderful example of the genre.  I was gripped from the start, and there are numerous delightful scenes, and some real tension.

(One thing I noticed was how much time O'Donnell spent describing clothes, especially Modesty's.  This is something eluki bes shahar was discussing a couple of years ago, in relationship to romance fiction. Spy stories are supposed to focus on gadgets (and this does that too), but the clothes description was striking to me.)