Review: Miss Pickerell and the Geiger Counter, by Ellen MacGregor

Review: Miss Pickerell and the Geiger Counter, by Ellen MacGregor

by Rich Horton

One of the juvenile SF-adjacent writers I missed during my formative years was Ellen MacGregor. She was the originator of the Miss Pickerell series of books, involving an elderly spinster having adventures, occasionally involving clearly science fictional concepts, as with the first of the series, Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars. These were evidently important to a number of readers as a gateway to SF -- Harry Turtledove is apparently one example. But I never saw them.

Ellen MacGregor was a librarian. born in Washington state in 1906. She got her Bachelor's degree from the University of Washington in 1926, and got her Masters from the University of California at Berkeley. She had librarian and research positions in multiple places -- Hawaii, Key West, and the Chicago area, which seems to have been her primary residence. She didn't start writing fiction until 1946. Her first book, Tommy and the Telephone, appeared in 1947. The first Miss Pickerell book, Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars, began as a short story, "Swept Her Into Space", published in Liberty in 1950, but appeared in book form in 1951. Two more Miss Pickerell books came out in 1953, but MacGregor died, only 47, in 1954. She had finished Miss Pickerell Goes to the Arctic and it appeared later in 1954. Three more non-Pickerell novels, presumably found in her papers, appeared in the next three years. A decade or so after her death, her publisher engaged Dora Pantell to write more books about Miss Pickerell, beginning with Miss Pickerell on the Moon in 1965. Pantell wrote a total of 13 Miss Pickerell books, the last appearing in 1986. The first 11 of these were published as by "Ellen MacGregor and Dora Pantell", and the last two by Dora Pantell "in the spirit of Ellen MacGregor", but it seems likely to me that all of these books were entirely written by Pantell, except just possibly for the first one or two. 

Miss Pickerell and the Geiger Counter is a very short book, around 13,000 words. It is illustrated nicely by Paul Galdone. In this book, Miss Pickerell and her nephews, and of course her cow, are headed to the state capitol for the state fair, and for the boys to see an Atomic Energy exhibit. Miss Pickerell will take her cow to a veterinarian for a routine checkup. Alas, however, the steamboat captain kicks her off the boat because of the cow, but not before mentioning that people are prospecting for uranium in the area. 

Miss Pickerell lets the boys continue to the exhibit, while she hopes to catch the train with her cow. But stuff intervenes -- her cow is kidnapped, the local sheriff gets the measles and insists on deputizing Miss Pickerell and assigning her the job of looking for the uranium, and Miss Pickerell misses her train. But she does recover her cow, and find out the truth behind the uranium search, and also learns what the sheriff really wants to do with his life. And the boys are fine, too!

It's not bad, but not special. Still, I think I'd have enjoyed it if I found it when I was 10 or so. Also very notable is the didactic side -- MacGregor definitely seemed to think her job was to educate young reader in science, and there are a lot of mini-lectures, about geology and radioactivity and such. I can't really recommend these books for adult readers, but they are amusing enough, and Miss Pickerell is a nice character.

Resurrected Review: King's Shield, by Sherwood Smith

Back in 2009 I wrote this shortish review of Sherwood Smith's novel King's Shield, the third in four novels from DAW about a man named Inda. These are part of a very extended series of series, if you will -- stories set in the same fantasy world, over millennia. Some of these are YA -- of which my favorite are a diptych called Crown Duel and Court Duel; and some are aimed at an adult audience, of which my favorite is the opening book in this series, called simply Inda. They are all enjoyable novels -- traditional secondary world fantasy, I suppose, but expertly done, and lots of fun.

King's Shield, the third novel in the Inda series, is essentially the story of the invasion of the seagoing Venn (they are Norselike, and indeed I believe explicitly descended from Norsemen who happened into the world of this book) into Iasca Leror, the home of Inda, and a generally warlike culture but not one much given to either magic use or sea travel. Inda has learned of the coming invasion and has returned home after years in exile during which he became known as a pirate though in fact he was instead a scourge of pirates. Inda's return is a gamble -- he could technically be imprisoned for breaking his exile -- but in fact his enemies have been ousted from the throne, and the new King is his childhood friend, Evred. Soon Evred makes Inda his warleader, and they plan resistance to the Venn invasion. And the story then tells how they fight off the Venn.

That doesn't in a sense seem like much story for a very long book (it's about 250,000 words). And indeed the book starts slowly -- but it gathers momentum and is very exciting and involving by the end. Part of this is simply that the action is shown in considerable detail, and from several points of view -- not just Inda's, but also Evred's, and a couple of Venn, and a couple of Inda's friends from his pirate days, and Evred's wife, and some other key women, and a band of children ... And besides that the action is complicated and involved. Indeed, though the battles are important, and the outcome of the war is important, the book is really most closely focussed on the characters. On Evred's hopeless attraction to the thoroughly heterosexual Inda. On Inda's friend Tau's search for a purpose in his life. On Inda's betrothed Tdor's reaction to Inda's Venn lover. And so on ... 

The book also examines the role of duty and loyalty in advancing a war good people know to be unjust. The use and misuse of magic in war is an issue. I've enjoyed this series immensely. That said, I think I would rank King's Shield only third of the three books to date -- partly this is due to its middle-bookness, and to the previous book featuring some really critical developments (such as Evred's ascent to the throne) that this book has little chance of topping. Also, as the series gets longer, there seems a temptation to linger on side issues -- to keep us up to date with characters we know -- so that for example this book features several essentially unnecessary chapters dealing with Inda's former shipmates, who are still sailing -- these are not uninteresting, and may prove important in the next book, but they have nothing to do with this book's plot. But for all that, the main point is that the Inda books continue to be some of the most fun fantasy reading I've had in years.

Review: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar

Review: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar

by Rich Horton

This is a new novella, perhaps 23,000 words, from Sofia Samatar. It should go without saying that anything by Samatar is in the must-read category. This book certainly is. It's strange, dark, depressing but hopeful. Excellent work.

The story centers two characters, one a teenaged boy who has grown up in the Hold of a mining spaceship, the other a professor of the "Older Knowledge" at a school in the more privileged levels of that spaceship. We learn over time that the ship is part of a fleet of ships, in which live what seem to be the survivors of a ruined Earth. They maintain themselves by mining necessary material from what seem to be asteroids. 

The boy has some artistic talent, which brings him to the attention of the professor, who has him freed from the Hold, and from the chain that the people in the Hold always wear. She is the daughter of a man who was also brought up from the Hold to be educated, during a brief period when scholarships were offered to some Hold denizens. The professor has fought to reestablish the scholarships, and the boy is the first attempt at making this work.

The boy has a hard time adjusting to life on this new level. In particular, he misses a friend of his, called the Prophet, who preaches a religion (with Christian echoes) to the people down there. He has dreams, even visions, especially of some of the people in the Hold who were killed due to the negligence and cruelty of the Ship's leaders. The professor, too, has difficulty. She has to spend time helping the boy catch up with his studies, which affects her own work. And it becomes clear that her status in her school, in her whole society, is fraught, due, clearly, to her father's origins. And, too, we realize that she, and the boy, and other people in her orbit, called the Ankleted, are in a sense in chains as well -- an electronic device around their ankles, which helps them communicate with others, turns out to have additional uses.

The book, then, slowly reveals a truly awful and hypocritical society. The professor's treatment by her colleagues, at the same time a satirical depiction of academic politics and a searing depiction of class prejudices, is dreadful. The boy is treated as a sort of pet, though his innocence allows him to overcome this in the way the professor really can't. The story finally turns on the boy's realization of some unexpected abilities, and a reunion with the the Prophet, and an attempt to rescue the Prophet's daughter. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, is presented as SF, but it's more a sort of parable, and a dark commentary on class and power hierarchies in our world. It's an effective and powerful story.

Review: The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley

Review: The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley

by Rich Horton

The Ministry of Time is Kaliane Bradley's first novel, though she has published a number of short stories, including the winner of the 2022 V. S. Pritchett Prize. As the title hints -- with its resemblance to John Brunner's Society of Time, or Jack Williamson's Legion of Time -- the novel is unabashed SF, and it is a time travel/alternate history story. It seems perhaps in conversation with stories like those mentioned above, or like Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, or Fritz Leiber's Spiders and Snakes. I don't know if Kaliane Bradley is particularly an SF fan, though apparently she's a fan of Terry Pratchett, but she does use this trope expertly and effectively.

The narrator (who is, perhaps significantly, never named) has just taken a job for the Ministry of Time as a "bridge". Her assignment is to help a person who has been rescued from the past (someone who is known to die, so that taking them to the future won't change history) adjust to the present day. (The novel seems set just slightly in our future -- maybe!) Her assignment is Graham Gore, who was a member of the doomed Franklin Expedition which attempted to find a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The expedition set out in 1845, and became stuck in the ice in Northern Canada. By 1848 all crewmen of the two ships of the expedition had perished. Gore was "rescued" by the Ministry in 1847.

The other time travelers -- or ex-pats, as they are formally called -- are Thomas Cardingham (died in the Battle of Naseby in 1645), Margaret Kemble (died in the Plague in London in 1665), Anne Spencer (died in the French Revolution in 1793), and Arthur Reginald-Smyth (died in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.) These are all fictional, I think, though Google tells me there was a somewhat noted landscape painter named Arthur Reginald Smith who was a near contemporary of this character (about ten years older), though while the painter did serve in the Great War (in the Artists Rifles Regiment! -- I had not heard of that,) he survived the War, dying in somewhat mysterious circumstances (drowning) in 1934. The time travelers call each other by their dates of recovery -- typically just Forty-five, Sixty-five, Ninety-Three, Forty-Seven, and Sixteen.

The first part of the novel is focused on the narrator introducing Gore to the 21st Century -- and in addition we see the other time travelers and their bridges. Much of this is funny, with Gore's stiff upper lip and general Victorian nature battling to understand this new century. The other two time travelers we get to know best are Margaret and Arthur, who are both gay. Margaret adapts enthusiastically to the freedoms of this time, and particularly enjoys movies, while Arthur struggles with PTSD, and with his (as he realizes) hopeless crush on Gore. Thomas Cardingham is a disagreeable person, particularly sexist and otherwise violently disapproving of 21st Century morés -- I'm not sure if he was a Cavalier or Roundhead, though perhaps the former as he has long hair and, after all, the Royalist side lost decisively at Naseby. And Anne Spencer, rescued from the Terror*, wholly resists adaptation to this future.

We also learn a lot about the narrator -- she's the daughter of a Cambodian woman who barely escaped the Khmer Rouge, and an English man. Her biracial status, and her family history, are significant, and it's significant that her mother, like the time travelers, is an expat. (Bradley, I should note, is also Cambodian-English.) And in short interludes between chapters, we get a direct narrative of the desperate lives of the crew of the Franklin Expedition over the two years and more they are stranded, with some key insights into Gore's character.

But we begin to realize that there are strange things happening, of which the narrator is mostly unaware. There's the picture Gore (an accomplished artist) draws of a weird machine he sees. There's Quentin, the narrator's "handler", who is convinced there is something rotten in the Ministry. And Arthur's bridge, Simellia, a Black woman, is much more radically inclined than the narrator, and she too raises doubts. Time travel seems to have some weird effects, such as the expats suddenly not showing up on scanning equipment. The leader of the project, a sinister-seeming woman named Adela, is constantly changing in appearance. And what about this unusual person, the "Brigadier", who seems to be lurking round the edges?

The plot develops in expected ways -- the narrator and Gore falling in love, most obviously -- but also in some very unexpected ways. If at first it reads like a convenient use of the time travel device to tell a love story, and a story about the experience of expatriates (either in time or space), with some cli fi mixed in, by the end it's all of those things plus a book that gloriously and whole-hearted buys into the strangeness and paradoxes of time travel. There is a wild twist at the end, which I only guessed half of in advance. The love story is beautifully handled. The depiction of near future life is fraught and believable. The examination of the expat experience, the depiction of the horrors of the Franklin Expedition, and the intricate plot are very well done. There are some truly wrenching -- tragic -- happenings, which hit home. It's well written -- Bradley in particular has a way with striking images and metaphors. I did have some quibbles -- time travel stories are always weird when the paradoxes are acknowledged, but some of the effects of this version of time travel seemed contrived to me. Some of the political business (and busyness) towards the end felt flat to me (and a bit "tick the boxes" obligatory.) I'm not sure I quite bought a couple of characters' transformations, and some of the motivations driving the climax didn't quite work. That said, in the end I loved the novel, and the very end is a honest and very moving indeed. The book made me laugh, made me think, made me go wow! -- and brought me to tears.

I've complained a bit about what seems a great many first novels winning major SF awards recently** Having said that, I won't be surprised in The Ministry of Time wins major awards, and as of now it's my choice as best SF novel of 2024 (noting that there are plenty I haven't read.)

*The Terror, of course, is also the name of one of the ships of the Franklin Expedition, so in a sense Gore was also rescued from the Terror, though he was First Lieutenant of the other ship, the Erebus.

**I suppose I should survey the history of the awards and see how often in the past first novels have won Hugos -- the first two Hugos for Best Novel, after all, went to first novels (The Demolished Man and "They'd Rather Be Right"), and other still acclaimed first novels such as "... And Call Me Conrad"/This Immortal, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Neuromancer and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell have won. (OK -- I have taken a look! Only three first novels in the past 11 years have won (Ancillary Justice, A Memory Called Empire, and Some Desperate Glory.) Six first novels in the first 60 years won. So possibly the rate is a bit high recently, but for a relatively small sample size it's really not that strange.)

Review: How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It, by K. J. Parker

Review: How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It, by K. J. Parker

by Rich Horton

K. J. Parker's stories are known for their romantic cynicism, their fascination with how things work (mechanically and politically), for depictions of war, for an abiding almost hopeless view of relations between men and women, and for their dark humor. Most of his stories are set in a vaguely Byzantine world, with no pretensions to consistency between stories, sometimes with magic and sometimes without. K. J. Parker, of course, is a pseudonym for Tom Holt, who also write rather lighter comic fantasies under that name, and brilliant historical fiction as by Thomas Holt. I will especially recommend, as I always try to, Thomas Holt's novel The Walled Orchard, first published under the Tom Holt name in two volumes as Goat Song (1989) and The Walled Orchard (1990) -- this is about the Sicilian Expedition, a drastically failed military campaign by Athens in the fifth century BCE. It is, I think, one of the very best historical novels of the past half century, blackly funny, ultimately tragic, and really moving -- about a Greek playwright, his horrible marriage to a woman he loves and hates, and his terrible experiences in Sicily.

A few years ago I read Parker's novel Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (2019), in which the capitol city of an Empire is besieged by an army of what they think of as barbarians. The novel was in many ways one of Parker's stories about How Things Work, and it brilliantly depicted an engineer leading the effort to foil every effort of the besiegers to breach the walls of the city. All those details were fascinating. And the character story was effective is well, and nicely mordant.

How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It, from 2020, is the sequel. The siege has settled into a stalemate. Notker, our narrator, is an actor, impressionist, and playwright. He's also the son of a gang enforcer -- the City has two primary gangs, or Themes, the Blue and the Green, bitter rivals. And the city's leader, Lysimachus, a man regarded as a hero for saving the city (though we all know the real hero was the engineer in Sixteen Ways) has been killed. Mention is made of some popular plays, with names like The Prisoner of Beloisia and The Man in the Bronze Mask. Not to mention that one of Notker's most popular impressions was of Lysimachus. Any reader can see where this is going. 

So, yes, Notker is maneuvered into assuming Lysimachus' position, and impersonating him. In the process he must get himself a mistress, to keep up appearances, especially as Lysimachus' sexuality was in doubt ... and he chooses Hodda, an actress and impresario with whom he is in love, though she is basically indifferent to him, despite them having a previous relationship. (There's an echo here of The Walled Orchard, with a playwright involved in an unsuccessful relationship.)

This sets up the situation for the rest of the novel -- Notker/Lysimachus takes control, and eventually truly takes the reins, leading several efforts to keep the invaders at bay, and in the process unifying the Blue and Green gangs, and making other improvements in the City's organization, as well as harrying the enemy. Plague threatens as well. Meanwhile Hodda desperately wants them to escape to safety, and Notker assures her that that's the plan, but only when it's feasible. There is some of Parker's beloved engineering, mostly involving attempts to stop the besiegers from breaking through a seam of granite and getting to the city walls to undermine them. It's clear Notker -- now crowned Emperor Lysimachus II -- is tempted by power, but he realizes that power leads to abuse of power and atrocities. And he comes up with a plan to sort of have his cake and eat it too ...

It's enjoyable enough, but nowhere near Parker at his best. The engineering bits are OK but not as absorbing as he can be. The relationship between Notker and Hodda just doesn't have the emotional heft some of the other doomed quasi-romances in Parker's novels attain. The darkly comic tone is well maintained, but it's not as funny as he can be. The ending falls just a tad flat, though as this is a middle novel of a trilogy that's not entirely unusual. (The third novel, A Practical Guide to Conquering the World, appeared in 2022.)

Review: Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and Seymour, an Introduction, by J. D. Salinger

Review: Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and Seymour, an Introduction, by J. D. Salinger

by Rich Horton

I read J. D. Salinger's most famous novel -- only novel, really -- The Catcher in the Rye, back in high school -- the right time. I liked it, and at more or less the same time, I read Nine Stories, and I thought that was pretty good too. But I didn't read his third book, Franny and Zooey, until just a few years ago. I thought that book was fine but not brilliant. I kind of knew I'd eventually read his only other book -- the one at hand -- though I'd gathered the impression that his fiction was somewhat linearly declining in quality. So when I found a copy of RH&S (as I'll abbreviate it) for a dollar at an estate sale, I figure, why not?

Like Franny and Zooey, this book comprises a shorter story plus a novella or short novel. In this instance, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" is the shorter one, at some 22,000 words; while "Seymour, an Introduction" is the longer, some 29,000 words. The stories appeared first in the New Yorker, in 1955 and 1959, respectively. (All of Salinger's work except for The Catcher in the Rye appeared there after "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" in 1948 -- the New Yorker gave him a contract in which they had right of first refusal for any fiction -- for a price, I assume.) Both these books, plus three of the stories in Nine Stories ("A Perfect Day for Bananafish", "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut", and "Down at the Dinghy") concern the Glass family -- seven children (two of them dead) of two vaudevillians. Salinger's last published story, "Hapworth 16, 1924", which occupied nearly the entirety of the New Yorker for June 19, 1965, is also about the Glasses, and by repute, Salinger wrote additional stories and novels about them after he stopped publishing.

This is, I think it's fair to say, a problem. Salinger's obsession, the Glass family, is wearing. In particular, the eldest child, Seymour, becomes an improbable object of devotion -- an absurdly precocious boy, a saint, really. And the last two published stories are similarly long pieces curated (or written) by the second Glass child, Buddy, but wholly about Seymour. The thing is, Seymour committed suicide in the very first, and best, Glass story, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish". Salinger's development of the Glass mythos ended up requiring his stand-in, Buddy, to claim, in "Seymour, an Introduction", that in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (supposedly, in this context, written by Buddy) was not really about Seymour but about Buddy. 

(A couple words about the titles of these stories and the book -- the proper punctuation is not clear. I have rendered the titles in the form I think most sensible.)

So, the stories themselves. "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters", is about Seymour's wedding day, in 1942. It is told by Buddy, two years Seymour's junior. For reasons -- wartime reasons, mostly -- Buddy is the only Glass who can make it to the wedding, though he had to get leave from his army camp to do so. But the wedding doesn't come off -- Seymour has seemingly left Muriel, his fiancée, at the altar. Buddy ends up in a car with members of the bride's family, heading to what will be a gloomy quasi-reception. The story follows Buddy's endurance of the protests of the Matron of Honor and her husband, and a certain Mrs. Silsburn, about the caddish behavior of Seymour. His only ally is a dwarfish elderly deaf-mute. The drive is interrupted by a parade, and in the end Buddy invites them all to his and Seymour's nearby apartment (abandoned to their sister Boo-Boo when they join the military), and makes them drinks while finding Seymour's diary. It turns out that Seymour funked the wedding because he was "too happy" -- and that he and Muriel ended up eloping. 

This is actually a decent, if overlong, story. Salinger's eye (and ear) for amusing details is fully present. The story is more about Buddy than about Seymour, which is fine. It's a nice presentation of a fraught wedding at a difficult time -- the early months of America's entry into the Second World War. (Salinger served on the European front, was there on D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, was present at Dachau shortly after its liberation, and was cleary and understandably severely affected by this.) The title, by the way, is from a fragment of Sappho: "Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man."

"Seymour, an Introduction" is Buddy's attempt, in 1959, to describe his beloved elder brother to the world, on the occasion of the prospective publication of Seymour's poems. (Seymour, besides being remarkably talented at everything else except for some sports at which he is very bad but in a very special way, is supposed to be a great poet -- in Buddy's estimation, clearly the greatest poet of the 20th Century, working in a form called "double haiku" -- sometimes in Japanese, sometimes in English, presumably occasionally in Latin or Sanskrit or Proto-Indo-European.) This introduction is incredibly discursive, and is as much about Buddy as it is about Seymour. We learn a fair amount about their shared childhood, and a lot about Buddy's state of mind and health as he is writing this. (He is a teacher at a women's college in far upstate New York.) And we do learn about Seymour. Not much about his poems, which are never quoted, just described, but a lot about his physiognomy, and about his early life with Buddy. 

The thing is, there is some good stuff here. But it's to a great extent buried in the endless, self-indulgent, divagations; and it's to a great extent weakened by the glorification and sanctification of Seymour. (Yes, I suppose his name is meaningful too!) The Seymour we saw in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is an affecting character -- clearly damaged by his experience in a terrible war, clearly unhappy in his marriage (though I think the portrayal of Muriel, in retrospect, seems unfair.) The later revisionist approach to his life and fate is, well -- self-indulgent. I understand that "Hapworth 16, 1924" is mostly a long letter from the seven year old Seymour, written at camp, in which we learn of his lust for a much older married woman, and of his admiration for the likes of Anna Karenina. Hmmmm. 

(I was intrigued to see references to Betsey Trotwood and the donkeys, and to Anna Karenina's being painted in Italy, in this story -- references that would have meant nothing to me had I not read both David Copperfield and Anna K in the past year or so.)

So -- a lesser story in this case. Still, I'm happy enough to have read this book. I don't know that I'll attempt "Hapworth 16, 1924", though I guess I'll get to it sooner or later, mostly later. And I must confess I have little optimism about the supposedly voluminous material Salinger left behind at his death -- surely it means something that his heirs have not seen fit to publish it.

Resurrected Review: The Cutting Edge, by Penelope Gilliatt

I decided for eccentric reasons -- and because the latest novel I read (The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley) deserves a more thoughtful treatment -- to post a very short review I did of a fairly obscure novel, that I read a couple decades ago. I chose this novel because Joachim Boaz just acquired Penelope Gilliatt's SF novel, One by One. (I had not known she'd written any SF!)

Resurrected Review: The Cutting Edge, by Penelope Gilliatt

by Rich Horton

Penelope Gilliatt was an English novelist, short story writer and screenwriter (Sunday Bloody Sunday) who was also well known at the film critic for the New Yorker whose columns alternated with those of Pauline Kael. She was married to the famous playwright John Osborne. I got her 1979 novel The Cutting Edge for a quarter when my local library deaccessioned it -- I bought it because I recalled her name from the New Yorker, and because it looked interesting, and because how wrong can you go for a quarter?

And in fact it is a pretty enjoyable novel. It's the story of two eccentric sons of an eccentric English professor. The elder son is eventually named Peregrine, the younger Benedick (I say eventually because the professor initially called them Brother A and Brother B). They grow up, and Benedick gets married, and for a while live together in the ancestral house, along with Benedick's wife, and the Professor, and his second wife, and the boy's half-brothers, and their nurse ... then Benedick's wife, Joanna, leaves him. Which precipitates the main action of the novel.

The two end up in Istanbul. Peregrine is a writer and a Benedick a musician, but neither makes much money. When Peregrine gets in trouble for an affair with a 14 year old, he's off to Italy and then Paris, meanwhile becoming somewhat famous in England for his criticisms of his country, which come apparently from an old-fashioned (as in Samuel Johnson old-fashioned) Tory sensibility. Meanwhile Benedick is writing music with some success, missing his wife, and missing his brother even more perhaps. A series of brittlely funny short chapters detail their, er, peregrinations, leading inevitably to Joanna showing up in Paris and shacking up with Peregrine.

And that's pretty much it. It's a short novel (perhaps 40,000 words) and a fast read, and funny in rather brittle fashion (as I said). It's populated by briefly and effectively sketched eccentrics who wander into and out of the brothers' life. The whole thing is nice if minor work.