Birthday Review: Short Stories by K. J. Parker

Birthday Review: Short Stories by K. J. Parker

a compilation by Rich Horton

Today is K. J. Parker's birthday, so I figured I'd do another of my compilations of Locus reviews of short stories by the birthday boy (or girl).

K. J. Parker, of course, is a pseudonym for Tom Holt, and in that context, I'm happy to point you to the review I did in December 2010, long before the name behind the pseudonym was revealed, of Parker's Blue and Gold.

Locus, October 2010

Issue #45 of Australia’s Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine has a very strong story by K. J. Parker, "Amor Vincit Omnia". (This story appeared more or less simultaneously in the Summer issue of Subterranean Magazine.) A young wizard is sent investigate a case where an ignorant villager is rumored to have gained the power called "Lorica" -- immunity from any attack. Such power would be very sinister, but it has also been proven impossible. Nonetheless, something awful has clearly happened ... The story very nicely sets the scene, shows the somewhat creepy methods the wizard reluctantly uses to gain power, and convincing depicts the confused local who certainly has stumbled on something scary ... then springs a neat trap to close things.

Locus, December 2010

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.


Locus, April 2011

Better still is "A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong", by the mysterious and remarkable K. J. Parker. It is perhaps not really fantasy, except for being set in an imagined world (which much resembles ours of some centuries past). Parker manages to meld black (and very funny) cynicism with truly wrenching moral and emotional themes. Here Parker tells of a distinguished composer who had realized he is just an accomplished mediocrity, mainly by the example of one of his students, a morally damaged man who seemingly effortlessly composes works of real genius. As the story opens, the genius composer is awaiting execution for a careless murder, and he importunes his old teacher to help him escape. The teacher does, of course ... but the story doesn’t end there. It twists on us a couple more times, following the result of the curious payment the genius gave his teacher, and then the future life of both these men. I’m not sure I quite buy the theory about artistic creativity behind this story, but given that the consequences are worked out brilliantly -- and as I said, the working out is both wrenching and bitterly funny.

Locus, April 2013

Another Australian magazine is Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Issue #55 includes a new story by K. J. Parker, always a cause for celebration. "Illuminated", as with many of Parker's recent stories, looks cynically at a magic user trying to take advantage of an obscure spell. Here, an man and his younger female partner investigate an ancient watch tower and discover the remnants of the work of an ambitious mad wizard ... and, just possibly, a remarkable, if very dangerous, "form" (or spell). Just who, or what, holds the real power in dealing with this discovery is part of the question, darkly answered -- the "form" itself is a scary invention as well.

Locus, September 2013

Two stories stood out for me in Jonathan Strahan's Fearsome Journeys. K. J. Parker is a regular in Strahan's books, and appears here with "The Dragonslayer of Merebarton". This is in Parker's familiar rather deflating voice. The story is told by what seems to be a kind of small time local lord, getting on in years a bit. There are reports of a dragon killing the local livestock, and he knows it's his duty to try to kill it. So he tries to come up with a fairly sensible approach, with help from some of his friends (and retainers and villagers ...) As I said, the tone is one of deflating fantasy traditions, but this story is not quite cynical -- almost warm; also realistic; believable. Good stuff.

Locus, January 2015

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, in its Sixth Anniversary Double Issue, features as usual four stories, the best being "Heaven Thunders the Truth", by K. J. Parker. (One wonders if the demise of one of Parker's primary markets, Subterranean Online, has led to an appearance in BCS.) This is the Parker we know and love, cynical and knowing, about a young wizard hired to deal with a girl who has got herself pregnant by the wrong sort of young man. It turns out worse than that for everyone involved, especially when it turns out kings (and deposed kings) are tied up in the whole mess. I liked the source of the wizard's power, and his unhappy bearing of the burden of his power, and the guessable but satisfying ultimate secret.

Locus, April 2016

No sooner had I read Interzone that I proceeded to Beneath Ceaseless Skies for February 4, and I read K. J. Parker’s latest, "Told by an Idiot", and immediately Rahul Kanakia's "Empty Planets" had a rival as my favorite 2016 story to date. This is probably his best story since "A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong". For a change, this isn’t set in Parker’s infinitely useful fantasy world, but in what seems our world, Elizabethan England (with perhaps slight changes). Put simply, it’s the story of a lucky man from Wales, who, partly because he finds things, has become rich, and the owner of a playhouse. Then he finds a bottle with, it is said, a demon inside. And what if it is? Parker works out the implications effectively, and besides we get some cool local color, especially including lots of Elizabethan drama neep ... with of course plenty of subtle Shakespearean references.

Locus, October 2017

My favorite Tor.com novella this year to date is Mightier than the Sword, by K. J. Parker. This is told by the nephew of the current Empress, who is pretty much in charge of the Empire as her husband’s health fails. She sends her nephew, a surprisingly capable general, on a mission to figure out why raiders are ransacking monasteries. At the same time our protagonist is trying to save the whore he loves to distraction ... while he slowly realizes, to his horror, that he might just be the most logical heir to his uncle’s throne. It’s pure Parker, cynicism married with a certain offhand idealism -- and featuring desperate love of a perhaps unworthy woman (this theme goes back at least to Tom Holt’s incomparable diptych The Walled Orchard, one of the great unrecognized historical novels of the past few decades). Somehow amidst all the cynicism this is quite a moving novella.

Locus, June 2018

The standout this month, however, is by K. J. Parker. "The Thought That Counts" is one of Parker’s morality tales, and like so much of his work turns on the potentially ruinous effects of love. The narrator, anonymous (but, it seems, a familiar figure in a Parker’s fantastical history, a certain brilliant but unscrupulous philosopher) tells of his encounter with a woman, an artist, escaping her farming family to become a portrait painter in the big city. When a number of her subjects turn up mysteriously mindless, the narrator ends up defending her in court -- and then remembers another woman he had known long ago. It’s blackly funny, in the usual Parker mode, and mordantly reflective of the nature of evil.

Birthday Review: Sewer, Gas, & Electric, by Matt Ruff

Birthday Review: Sewer, Gas, & Electric, by Matt Ruff

Matt Ruff turns 53 today (damn kids!). He's one of the really first rate writers of our time. His works often straddles genre borders. My favorite of his novels is Set This House in Order, from 2003, but I can't find anything I wrote about it. So instead I've resurrected a rather brief review I did for the SF Reader site at about that time about his second novel. (The SF Reader post is here.)

There are plenty of wonderful older books that may not have received their due notice. I won’t venture too far into the past: Sewer, Gas, & Electric is a long, inspired, hilarious but not frivolous SF novel from 1998.

The novel is set mostly in 2023, with flashbacks as far back as the Civil War. We open with Joan Fine battling mysterious creatures in New York’s sewers. Harry Gant, her ex-husband, is erecting yet another tallest building, while fretting over the fact that his company’s androids are being called "Electric Negroes". Philo Dufresne, the blackest African still alive (a plague has killed most black people in the world) is unsuccessfully writing a novel and successfully practicing "benign eco-piracy" in his polka-dotted submarine, the Yabba-Dabba-Doo. "None of this is all that unusual", writes the author. Neither, apparently, are a surviving female Civil War vet from Canada, an AI version of Ayn Rand, a conspiracy to refile pornographic books in libraries so no one can ever find them, or talking Volkswagens that love Janis Joplin.

Obviously, this book is a bit different. The central plot is fairly straightforward, involving a plan to destroy the world. Harry Gant, Joan Fine, and Philo Dufresne end up mostly on the same side, trying to save the world. It’s hard to say much more about the plot, because identifying the villain would be a spoiler. But the book is packed with incident, and with ideas that are sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, and usually thought-provoking.

Somehow Ruff mixes up alligators in the sewers, a plague that kills all the black people in the world, boy scouts, Ayn Rand and a serious discussion of her works (including a beautiful plot summary of Atlas Shrugged), J. Edgar Hoover, Artificial Intelligence, Disney, a parti-colored submarine, and a series of "ironic murders" into an absorbing read, very funny but very serious. It’s still in print, and I recommend it highly.

A Great and Somewhat Neglected SF Novel: A Mirror for Observers, by Edgar Pangborn

A Great and Somewhat Neglected SF Novel: A Mirror for Observers, by Edgar Pangborn

a review by Rich Horton

Edgar Pangborn (1909-1976) was a prominent SF writer when I was young, regarded as significant if somewhat minor -- writing in a somewhat Sturgeonesque mode, but I think his star has dimmed in recent years. His sister Mary (1907-2003) was also a writer, less prolific and less successful. Edgar was apparently gay, though as far as I know he was never "out", and Mary at least denied this in later years. (To the extent one can deduce a writer's sexuality from his fiction, I would agree that Pangborn's work suggests that it was written by a closeted gay man.)

Pangborn was a writer from early days -- his first novel, a mystery called A-100, published as by "Bruce Harrison", appeared in 1930. He apparently published regularly in many genres in the pulp magazines, always pseudonymously, for the next couple of decades. Only in the 1950s did he find his true metier, science fiction, and only then did he abandon his pseudonyms. (Though two of his very best novels under his own name, The Trial of Callista Blake and A Wilderness of Spring, are not SF.)

One reason Pangborn's reputation has flagged may be that some of his later work, mostly stories set in a slowly recovering, somewhat bucolic, post-Apocalyptic future, descends into a distinctly cloying sentimentality, married with a certain unconvincing lecturing tone. But it's never fair to judge a writer by his worst work, and in Pangborn's best work the sentimentality is still present, but it does not cloy; and the lecturing is muted into warm philosophical musing. This is true of Davy, and of several of the late tales, and so I regarded Pangborn with much affection. But for one reason or another I had never read his best early SF novel, A Mirror for Observers, despite having had a copy since 1975. It's not that the book was uncelebrated -- it won the International Fantasy Award in 1955. (It certainly should have won the Hugo that year, but in one of the hard to explain stumbles of the Hugos, the award went instead to Mark Clifton and Frank Riley's They'd Rather Be Right. It's interesting to think of how different Pangborn's later reputation might have been had it won.)

At any rate, having finally read the novel, I find myself really impressed, really moved. This is not to say it's a great novel exactly -- there are missteps and occasional clunky aspects. But its great moments transcend its weaker moments -- just as we should judge Pangborn's career by his best work, A Mirror For Observers gains its impact from its peak moments.

The novel opens in an underground city underneath Canada's Northwest Territory (as it was called at that time). Namir the Abdicator is talking with Director Drozma. The two are Martians, or as they call themselves, "Salvayans". They are humanoid (enough so that with some plastic surgery and "scent reduction" they can pass as human), and very long lived. Most Salvayans abandoned Mars for Earth some 30,000 years prior to the action of the novel, because of the drying, and they have been guiding human development ever since, with the goal of "Unity" -- a hope that they will be able to reveal themselves and live in human society. The optimists among them believe that time is close -- the pessimists believe that time will never come, and such events as the accidental destruction of one Salvayan city that happened to be under the ocean near Bikini Atoll have only intensified that feeling. Namir is a pessimist (he has "abdicated" his role as a human Observer), and he is living among humans, trying to encourage the destructive impulses of certain promising people. (The hope of the Abdicators is that humans will destroy themselves, leaving Earth to the Salvayans.) At this time he is trying to influence a brilliant 12 year old boy, Angelo Petrovecchio, who lives in an exurb of Boston called Latimer.

The rest of the book is in two parts, reports from another Salvayan, the Observer Elmis, to Drozma. Elmis has been assigned to observe Angelo, and to try to extract him from Namir's influence. The first part deals with Elmis, calling himself Ben Miles, living in Latimer, in the boarding house run by Angelo's mother. Ben is much taken with Angelo, who is a very intelligent boy (with a bum leg), given to reading the classics; and also with a neighbor girl, Sharon Brand, who declares herself in love with Angelo, and who has a great imagination and a tremendous musical talent.

Ben soon recognizes Namir in the area, and also a boy named Billy Kell, who leads a local gang, and who treats Angelo nicely, hoping to lure him into the gang. It soon becomes clear that Namir is working through Billy Kell (and there is another secret there ...), and Ben and Namir begin to fence, leading to a suspicious crime, and a disastrous confrontation, which Ben, too much the pacificist, fumbles. And then Angelo, enmeshed in Billy's gang, gets involved in a gang fight with horrible consequences. And he runs away.

The second part sees Elmis, now calling himself Will Meisel, 9 years later, still trying to find Angelo. In the mean time he has provided for Sharon's musical education, setting her up with her blind piano teacher and establishing a school. The political landscape is fraught -- a nativist party, the Organic Unity Party, is planning a takeover. The leader, Joseph Max, is transparently an amalgam of Hitler and Joe McCarthy, but in today's environment it's impossible to avoid seeing parallels with our current President. Elmis realizes that Joseph Max's deputy Bill Keller is Billy Kell, and he decides to investigate, and soon learns that Namir is also involved, and then, to his shock, encounters an Abraham Brown, not a Party member but an associate, and recognizes him as Angelo.

Sharon turns up again as well -- making her American debut as a concert pianist. Elmis/Ben/Will meets her, and she knows him. She is a genius (of course) (playing among other composers Andrew Carr, a major composer as well in Pangborn's "The Music Master of Babylon", which otherwise does not seem to be in the same continuity as A Mirror for Observers). They renew their friendship, and soon they are meeting with Angelo/Abraham, and trying to extract him from the clutches of the Organic Unity Party. All this is successful, but Namir's scheming, and Billy Keller's, and the weakness of Joseph Max, leads inexorably to an apocalyptic event.

The results are truly wrenching (and inevitable in a way clear partly from the thematic course of the novel, which does seem a bit too programmed at times). The book achieves true tragedy -- and yet is also optimistic. In this, really, it reflects the Davy sequence -- again, an apocalyptic event is followed by horrible hardship, but leads to a newly pastoral future, and considerable hope.

It's really very powerful stuff, even though there are the missteps I mentioned. Part of this is the perhaps over-idealized portraits of Angelo/Abraham and Sharon. They are people we love and root for -- but perhaps we don't quite believe in them. (Angelo in particular -- Sharon is a more complete and affecting portrait.) Elmis is the character who truly lives. His intense love for specific humans (Angelo and Sharon), humans in general, and the Earth as a whole, completely informs his narrative. That's what makes it sing. Pangborn always had a tendency towards sententiousness, and that does manifest itself at times here -- but his love for people, and for the pastoral, was real, I think, and it shines through honestly in the best passages of this novel. It brought me to tears, more than once -- and it may be that sometimes those tears were jerked manipulatively, but mostly they were honest, and tears of awe and love as well as sadness.

This novel was discussed at Worldcon, at a panel run by John Hertz, who has done a series of discussions of Classic SF at various Worldcons. This con also featured discussions of Heinlein's Red Planet and Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon. (I attended the latter.) I thought the discussion of A Mirror for Observers was particularly good. John's view of the novel is acute and sensible, and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (who I must credit for spurring me to finally read the book) made a number of insightful comments as well. Indeed our discussion spilled over to an impromptu additional session after the panel, with Alvaro, myself, John Hertz, and others considering this book as well as stuff as diverse as The Tale of Genji.

What conclusions did we reach? I wish I could remember everything more clearly. One thing that strikes me as important is the depiction of the Martians, who think of themselves as a superior race, as just as deeply flawed as humans. (Morally, of course, but also in such ways as having little musical ability.) The Salvayan dream of unity is just as important for their development as it is for human development.

One other thing we noticed -- I think this was Alvaro's observation -- is that central to the story is Elmis' love of humans -- individuals and the whole -- and also of Earth, and that how that was most abundantly illustrated in his descriptions of nature, of natural scenes. Pangborn's love for the pastoral is both a strength and a weakness -- he could be terribly sentimental about it -- but in this book, which is mostly set in cities, the descriptions of the country are truly effective.

Another key element of the book is the slight distancing effect of Elmis' being unhuman, but nearly human. He is just enough separate from the main characters, and from humanity itself -- and believably so -- to give his perspective an effective angle. This is a common enough SFnal device, but I thought used effectively here.

There's the question of the Mirror -- which is an actual object, a bronze mirror from the Mycenaean era. It is presented as having near magical effects (never explained): one who looks in it sees something surprising, perhaps shocking -- and we assume (we are never told) that one sees something like a true vision of one's own character. I'm not actually sure this was necessary to the book, actually.

It's a grave book and a warm one; a sweet book and a bitter one. I loved it -- I wish I had read it back 40+ years ago when I bought my copy, but perhaps it's as well that I didn't. I imagine I'd have liked it then, but I wouldn't have read the same book, so to speak, and maybe it's a better book from my older perspective. It can't be called forgotten, but is does seem neglected. I really do wonder how differently it would be regarded had it won the Hugo. I hope it gains a new audience in these later years.

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.