Review: The Artistry of Magic, by Helen De Cruz

Review: The Artistry of Magic, by Helen De Cruz

by Rich Horton

Helen De Cruz is a Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University, and a writer of SF and Fantasy. She is also one of my collaborators on a forthcoming anthology of science fiction stories with philosophical themes. We know each other quite well, and have worked together not just on that anthology but on a writing seminar for philosophers, so calibrate this review as you will! The Artistry of Magic is a novella, about 18,000 words, her longest story to date, published by an intriguing South Africa based concern, The Pink Hydra.

The Artistry of Magic is set in a version of Belgium, in the late 18th Century. It is told in two threads, one from the point of view of Maarten, an unhoused man; and the other from the point of view of Johanna, a middle-aged librarian. Maarten is an unlicensed magician (having been born to a sheep farmer) and Johanna discovers him drawing pictures and enhancing them with magic outside the library. This is illegal, ostensibly because the magic might interfere with the powerful magic contained in some of the books, so Johanna must stop him. But she too came from a lower-class background, and had to battle to get her position, and she feels sympathy for Maarten.

Soon they are meeting regularly for coffee, which serves partly as a way to feed Maarten somewhat unobtrusively. Their relationship grows more personal, and soon they are lovers. And Johanna, learning of Maarten's ambition to learn more about magic and to gain a license, lends him a book from the library.

In the background, we begin to realize that there are knottier social issues impacting the characters' lives. Some of this we see through Maarten -- his life on the streets, with two friends, the three of them helping each other, as they travel from city to city depending on the attitude of the law towards unhoused people. Some we see through Johanna -- her somewhat tenuous position at the library, and her awareness of the revolutionary sentiments in neighboring France. And we see how both Maarten and Johanna don't really understand the other's positions.

Eventually Maarten learns enough, and earns enough, to get a ring to help with his magic, and to get licensed. But this puts some tension in his relationship with his friends -- and, too, there are problems with Johanna -- the missing book, and Maarten's wandering ways. There is also a sense that both Maarten and Johanna need their consciousness raised about social issues -- and the way magic in this story mirrors to an extent class divisions. All these aspects are interesting and well presented. The one weakness here, I thought, is that the story is concluded rather quickly, leaving certain questions unanswered, and resolving the central story a bit conveniently. Still, this is a sweet and enjoyable story, with the magical art a nice background, and with the sympathy for the lives of unhoused people front and center and believably conveyed.

Review: Evelina, by Frances Burney

Review: Evelina, by Frances Burney

by Rich Horton

Frances Burney (1752-1840) was the daughter of Charles Burney, a musician, composer, and writer. She was a writer from a very early age, and eventually wrote novels, plays, a biography of her father, and diaries. She also had a rather remarkable personal life -- for example, "Keeper of the Robes" for the Queen; a significant supporter of the French revolution (not the violence, but the political changes), married a French refugee, had a mastectomy -- without anesthesia! She wrote four novels, and several plays though only one was produced in her lifetime, besides her diaries, which when published posthumously were much admired, though now I think her novels are the foundation of her repuation. She was often called Fanny Burney; and Madame D'Arblay after her marriage.

Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778) was Frances Burney's first published novel, though curiously it is a sequel. As a teenager Burney wrote a novel called Caroline Evelyn, about Evelina's mother. But at the age of 15 she burned all her early writing efforts, apparently out of doubt that it was proper for a woman to write for publication. Happily, she had changed her mind by her 20s, though she did bow to her father's wishes and did not seek public performance of any of her plays save one. The plays survived in manuscript, but her juvenilia obviously did not. So it's hard to say whether Caroline Evelyn was any good -- my guess is, probably not that good! -- or even how long it was. It was surely tragic, however, for at the beginning of Evelina we learn that the title character's mother was abandoned by her dissipated husband, Sir John Belmont, after she became pregnant, and that she died bearing Evelina, who has been raised to the age of 17 by her grandfather's close friend, the Reverend Arthur Villars.

Arthur Villars is a good if very morally conservative man, and has given Evelina an excellent education. She is a very beautiful young woman, very shy, and very moral. Mr. Villars only hopes to find her a good husband before he gets too old, and for her to have a happy life in the country. And he hopes to keep the secret of her birth a secret, for her father has long refused any contact, and has even refused to acknowledge that he was married to Caroline Evelyn. As the novel opens, he sends her to visit a close friend of his, Lady Howard, and eventually accedes to Evelina accompanying her friend, Lady Howard's granddaughter Miss Mirvan, to London. As Caroline Evelyn's rackety French mother (who had disowned Caroline and only recently learned of Evelina's existence) thinks Evelina is still with Mr. Villars, and Sir John Belmont is supposedly in France, there should be no trouble in the visit.

In London, Evelina and her friend go to a couple of social events, and Evelina creates something of a minor sensation with her great beauty. She is the object of unwelcome, and often quite rude, attention from various young men, including a foppish M.P., Mr. Loval; and a handsome Baronet with questionable manners, Sir Clement Willoughby. She also meets Lord Orville, a much more decent-seeming man, and dances with him. But trouble arrives when her Grandmother, Mme. Duval, tracks her down in London, and insists Evelina stay with her. This forces her to spend time with some exceedingly boorish social-climbing cousins, the Branghtons, who insist on her accompanying them to some much less savory places, where, indeed, Evelina is violently accosted by some young men. At last she manages to return to Lady Howard's, though in the mean time she has had further encounters with Sir Clement and with Lord Orville, as well as meeting a very sad young man named Mr. Macartney. Sir Clement makes more unwelcome advaances, while Lord Orville remains the perfect gentleman. But as she leaves London she sends Lord Orville a letter of thanks, and is shocked to receive an unpleasantly insinuating reply.

Now convinced that a life in the country is all she wants, she still must deal with Mme. Duval's importunities, which include a plan to sue Sir John Belmont to force him to acknowledge Evelina -- which would be fine in its way except that Mme. Duval hopes to marry her off to the loutish Tom Branghton. Captain Mirvan, meanwhile, Miss Mirvan's father, a very coarse Navy man, acts with absurd rudeness to Mme. Duval, as he hates all things French. After additional tribulations (some of them quite comic in the telling) Evelina returns to Mr. Villars, but having fallen ill is sent to Bristol to recover. And there again she encounters Sir Clement Willoughby and Lord Orville, along with some additional mostly comic characters, and over time finally gets to meet her real father, learn a secret of Mr. Macartney's, and resolve her issues with Lord Orville and with Sir Clement.

The novel is really very entertaining throughout. There is plenty of implausibility and coincidence, to be sure. Evelina's otherworldly beauty has long been a staple of romance novels, so it's hardly a surprise. Her virtue is so carefully held that at times one wishes she (and Mr. Villars) would be a bit more tolerant. Also, her dislike of causing too much of a fuss led me to wonder why she didn't give Sir Clement, or Tom Branghton, or any of a number of other men, a ringing slap from time to time. There are two threads to the novel, in a sense -- the love story, combined with the mystery of Evelina's birth (which ends up entangled with Mr. Macartney's story) is one; and the other is the lightly satrical and often quite funny observation of English social life. Both are interesting, though it's the satirical parts that make it special.

Review: Martin Chuzzlewit, by Charles Dickens

Review: Martin Chuzzlewit, by Charles Dickens

by Rich Horton

To be honest, I had planned for Great Expectations to be my next Dickens novel. But a friend had decided to attack Martin Chuzzlewit, so I figured I'd read along. I got impatient, though -- and read it through faster than advertised. I listened to much of it on my commute, but of course I also have a print copy, the Oxford World Classics edition originally from 1982, edited and with an introduction and notes by Margaret Cardwell.

Martin Chuzzlewit was published in 1843. Dickens was by then an extremely popular and financially successful novelist, and was very proud of his achievement in this book, apparently because he spent a lot of effort making the book work as an examination of a consistent theme -- that of selfishness. For all that, the novel was a comparative failure commercially -- though it must be said it still sold well. It's interesting to note that around that time Dickens turned to his Christmas novellas, with A Christmas Carol appearing in 1843, The Chimes in 1844, and The Cricket on the Hearth in 1845. 

Dickens was very open about his aim in this novel, and said aim is pretty clear. He was portraying the effects of selfishness on people, and showing the harm -- to others and often to themselves -- that selfishness does. With four exceptions (not counting minor characters) everyone exhibits selfishness -- of differing kinds. Two characters reform (not necessarily convincingly) -- these are the two title characters, Martin Chuzzlewit and his grandfather, who shares his name. The other significant selfish characters are all punished, though, again, there's reason to believe that some of the punishment is wielded by the author, and might not have resulted in the real world.

In brief terms -- hard to do for such a long novel (Martin Chuzzlewit is about 700 pages in my edition, around 340,000 words) -- this is the story of Martin Chuzzlewit, the grandson of a rich miser of the same name. Martin the younger offends his grandfather by falling in love with Martin the elder's ward, the orphan Mary Graham. Martin is disinherited, and in the process loses his position as an architect in training working for Seth Pecksniff, another relation of the elder Martin. Martin the younger travels to America to try to make his fortune, in company with his friend Mark Tapley. Meanwhile, the other parts of the Chuzzlewit family are angling for the elder Martin's good will -- the egregious hypocrite Mr. Pecksniff, the vicious Jonah Chuzzlewit, the, er, slimy Chevy Slyme. Mr. Pecksniff tries to up his odds for a piece of old Martin's fortune by dangling his somewhat unpleasant daughters in front of Jonas. Mr. Pecksniff's much put upon assistant Tom Pinch, nearly saintly in his self-abnegation, does his best to  help his friends, particularly Martin and Mary Graham, until he finally realizes Mr. Pecksniff's villainy. Jonah and Mr. Pecksniff are both entangled in the doings of the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company, a pretty overt Ponzi scheme (before Ponzi!) run by Montague Tigg, or Tigg Montague, who was also involved with Chevy Slyme. Martin and Mark return from America, completely unsuccessful, and everything starts to unravel ... There are murders, thefts, terrible marriages, multiple fraudulent schemes in both England and America, plague, even an early literary detective ...

The novel is baggily structured, and there is a lot of coincidence driving the plot. The supposed main character, young Martin Chuzzlewit, isn't terribly interesting, and his romance with Mary Graham is very flat. Martin also takes up very little of the book for a protagonist -- perhaps a fifth of it. Dickens does not seem to have been able to portray love interests well -- the two virtuous young women in this book, Mary and Tom Pinch's sister Ruth, are both cyphers as characters, much like Dora and Agnes in David Copperfield. The conversion of the nice but unthinking and quite self younger Martin Chuzzlewit and the repentant elder Martin are both more convenient than believable.

All of the above are reasons why this is not one of Dickens' more highly regarded novels. But for all that -- it's really a very entertaining book. There are longueurs of course -- but there are longueurs in the much greater David Copperfield. The joys of this novel lie primarily in two areas. One is Dickens' prose, full of extended and strange but apposite descriptions of just about everything -- people, nature, buildings, schemes. The other, of course, is the characters, especially the villains. Mr. Pecksniff is one of Dickens' great creations, one of the most obscenely hypocritical of humans, full of borrowed aphorisms and borrowed ideas, constantly presenting a facade of virtue while keeping an eye on the main chance. Jonas Chuzzlewit is less interesting -- he's simply so horrible a person one can only gasp. The nurse Mrs. Gamp, not so much a true villain as a hopelessly almost innocently self-involved person, along with her imaginary friend Mrs. Harris. The various Americans don't get much space, but they are in their brief compass satisfyingly mean. Montague Tigg is in his way a somewhat conventional fraudster, but still holds the interest. There is a variety of less villainous but still involving characters -- Mark Tapley, ever convinced that for him to gain "credit" in life he must maintain jollity in the face of terrible circumstances, and who finally gets his wish in America; Mr. Nadgett, the almost invisible detective; the lugubrious Augustus, the much persecuted fiance of the elder Pecksniff girl; the energetic and ambitious boy Bailey and his friend Mr. Sweedlepipe, the barber and bird seller. There is always (well, almost always) something going on in the book, so one's interest doesn't flag. Is this a great novel? By no means, but it's a demonstration that Dickens had the magic gift of entertainment.

Hugo Nomination Thoughts, 2025, Novels and Novellas

Hugo Nomination Thoughts, 2025, Novels and Novellas

by Rich Horton

This will be a shorter Hugo nomination post than usual for me, as I really haven't read many novelettes or short stories this year. Too many 800 page novels I guess!

Novels

1. Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford. This is first on my list by a wide margin. Brilliant alternate history set in a world where the Mississipian culture of native Americans survived long enough to form their own state -- it's a murder mystery, a political thriller, a love story, and has some of the best writing about the experience of music I've seen.

2. The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley. A really neat time travel story about people rescued from the past, wrapped around a love story between a man taken from the disaster of the Franklin expedition and his "bridge" in the near future. 

3. Three Eight One, by Aliya Whitely. A very strange story that hardly bears explanation in a paragraph -- mostly it's about the sort of coming of age journey of a young woman from an oddly retro community across a strange nearish future world (maybe?) -- but it's much weirder than that.

4. Navola, by Paolo Bacigalupi. This one is not so weird. It's a lovely fairly traditional quasi-historical fantasy (sort of in the Guy Gavriel Kay mode) set in analog of an Italian city in the early Renaissance era: a coming of age story about the scion of a powerful family. Nothing much is new here, but it's beautifully done.

5. Euphoria Days, by Pilar Fraile. Near future SF about the intertwined lives of several people, satirizing corporate culture and investigating relationships in a slowly disintegrating world affected by some algorithmic meddling with love.

Also:

 The Book of Love, by Kelly Link. This is a good book but it falls short of great. Probably longer than it needs to be. Kelly Link will write a great novel at some time, I'm sure, but this is well worth reading but not up to the level of her short fiction.

 Vinyl Wonderland, by Mark Rigney. A fine novel about a kid making a mess of his life after his mother's death and his father's decline, as he encounters a strange landscape behind the "Elvis door" in a '70s used record store.

Novellas 

1. A Mourning Coat, by Alex Jeffers. A really lovely story about a man mourning the death of his father and forming a new relationship. The fantastical elements are minimal but they enhance a moving and convincing small scale narrative.

2. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar. A dark parable of class structures in the society on a group of mining spaceships.

3. The Tusks of Extinction, by Ray Nayler. Searing story of a woman with her consciousness uploaded into a mammoth's brain, and her efforts to keep them from being hunted as elephants were.

4. Haunt Sweet Home, by Sarah Pinsker. An enjoyable story about a young woman struggling to find her way in life who gets a job with the title home improvement show, and finds some of the "haunts" more real than expected.

Review: Spring List, by Ralph Arnold

Review: Spring List, by Ralph Arnold

by Rich Horton

I picked this up at the annual St. Louis County Book Fair (same place and time that I picked by my copy of The Ante-Room, reviewed here.) It was cheap and I like books and am interested in book publishing and I figure this would be a comedy about a publisher trying to assemble their spring list of books. It turns about to be something a bit different, though it's still a comedy about publishing, and quite entertaining. 

Ralph Arnold (1906-1970) was for a long time in publishing with Constable and Co., rising to Chairman in 1958, and retiring in 1962. He was also a writer, of light fiction (such as Spring List), detective novels, memoirs and history. He was at school briefly with Ian Fleming, and was a good friend of Fleming's brother Peter. He was related to novelist Edwin L. Arnold, though I'm not sure in what way exactly -- likely a nephew, great nephew, or cousin. (Edwin L. Arnold was the author of Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation, a Martian story that seems a likely direct influence on Burroughs,)

Spring List, published in 1956, is told from the point of view of Arthur Lynsted, who has a senior position at the firm Southease and Piddinghoe. Arthur has a wife who is a successful writer of what seems to be women's fiction, and a teenaged son. Elizabeth's bestsellers bring in a good deal more money than Arthur's salary, but Arthur insists that he support the family entirely. So Arthur is in just a slightly discontented mood when his childhood friend Diana comes by to talk about the novel she had submitted to the firm. Diana is married to another childhood friend, General Sir Alured Flowers, who had had a notoriously brilliant Second World War. Diana's novel is a light mystery, and surprisingly good for someone who had never shown any interest in writing.

There is some other publishing talk, particularly about Arthur's rival Edward Sligo, whose firm publishes Elizabeth Lynsted's books (Arthur having refused them for ethical reasons), and who also published a hugely successful novel by one Jas Cobham, who alas hasn't written a second book despite a large advance. Arthur's firm reluctantly decides to publish Diana's novel, though they're unlikely to do much more than break even, in the hopes of convincing her husband the General to write a memoir of his time in the Army, which will surely be a bestseller.

This all comes to a head when he goes to visit Diana, in their old home town. Ostensibly the visit is to finalize the contract, but Arthur is supposed to try to get Alured Flowers to write his memoir, and privately he's just slightly tempted to make time with Diana. But he soon learns that Alured has disappeared, and also that Jas Cobham is around too, having bought Arthur's childhood home with his advance money. Then Edward Sligo shows up, clearly on a similar mission to Arthur's ...

It's a very light novel, but it's pretty fun. The plot has some convolutions which are nicely done, of the sort that the reader likely will guess but will still enjoy seeing play out. The hints at "inside publishing" are pretty minor, though they probably do reflect some truths about how it was conducted in England in the 1950s. By no means a deathless masterpiece, this is still a nice book. As far as I can tell it was never reprinted after the UK edition, from John Murray in 1956, and the American edition, from Macmillan the following year. 

Review: Haunt Sweet Home, by Sarah Pinsker

Review: Haunt Sweet Home, by Sarah Pinsker

by Rich Horton

Sarah Pinsker's latest book is this short novel/novella from Tordotcom. (My quick and dirty word count -- certainly vulnerable to errors -- indicates that it's between 40,000 and 45,000 words, which actually makes it eligible for the Hugos in either the novel or novella category -- I'll put in novella myself for my nominating ballot purposes.)

The story is told in first person by Mara Billings, the youngest of her generation in a large extended family, and it's quickly clear that she a) hasn't done much with her life so far (she's about 30, still working barista-type jobs after a few half-hearted stabs at community college), and b) is pretty sensitive about how her family seems to regard her. The best known members of the family are her cousin Jeremy, who is a successful model and has a gig as the host of a cable show about remodeling haunted houses called Haunt Sweet Home; and her Oma, who was a quite successful wood sculptor until her hands gave out. Jeremy offers her a job as a Production Assistant on his show, and after some hesitation she takes him up on it. (The particular season the story covers involves houses in Western Massachusetts, an area I'm mildly familiar with as my Dad was born and raised there.)

She learns she's assigned to the night shift, which is charged with prepping things for the actual shoots, which are in the day. And part of that prepping is arranging for the "haunts", which to no real surprise are faked. The work is strenuous, and it messes with her sleep schedule, but she finds she enjoys it, even if she's still not sure she's accepted by her fellows. There's one house worked on per week, and we see a couple of these. She ends up with a tree branch salvaged from a "haunted" woods, that she starts carving in imitation of her Oma. And a couple of houses in she meets a day shift person, Jo, who has volunteered to help with the haunting, and who seems very good at it. (And a reader's antennae should perk immediately!) Jo and Mara become close enough friends that Mara invites Jo to a family get-together during some off-time -- and then Mara becomes annoyed again that Jo is -- to Mara's eyes -- immediately welcomed by her family in a way Mara doesn't feel about herself.

Then we come to Cleaveland House, which has a haunted library -- or which will once they get done with it! This episode is described in script snippets shown between the chapters, and it involves books flying around the library at night. This is Mara's job, of course -- but then somehow books that Mara was nowhere near also go flying ...

Well, I won't tell the rest, though it won't come as much of a surprise, and at any rate it's not really the point of the story. The point of the story is Mara beginning to figure out what she needs to do with her life -- and the particular help she gets in that effort. This is nicely handled and believable. The story does have a supernatural element, though a slightish one, and that works nicely too. I don't rank this with Pinsker's very best work, but it's a fine and effective story, and a good example of using supernatural elements without cheating or diminishing them -- but also to fundamentally tell a pure character story.

Review: The Ante-Room, by Kate O'Brien

Review: The Ante-Room, by Kate O'Brien

by Rich Horton

Kate O'Brien (1897-1974) was an Irish writer, of plays, novels, travel writing, criticism and biography. She was born in Limerick, but moved to England in 1919 after graduating from college. She spent much of the rest of her life in England, and some time in Spain, but most of her fiction is set in Ireland. She was a Lesbian (though briefly married), and had relationships with E. M. Delafield and Mary O'Neill. Her fiction apparently often has sympathetic portrayals of gay people (though there are none (that we know of) in The Ante-Room), and is definitely feminist. At least two of her novels were banned in Ireland. Throughout much of her career she was quite successful -- sufficiently enough that the heroine of the movie Brief Encounter mentions reserving "the new Kate O'Brien" from the library. But by the end of her life she was somewhat forgotten -- but has been restored to her place as a major Irish writer in recent decades.

My edition of The Ante-Room was published in 1984 as part of the Virago Modern Classics series. The novel first appeared in 1934. The Virago edition of the book includes an Afterword by Diana Madden, which I have to confess I didn't much like. The novel itself is excellent, however.

It's set in 1880, at the estate of a wealthy family in Mellick (O'Brien's stand in for Limerick.) The central character is Agnes Mulqueen, the second daughter of the family. The mother, Teresa, is dying of cancer, and her husband, Danny, is fairly ineffectual. The only son still in the house is Reggie, his mother's favorite, a syphilitic mess at the age of 36. Agnes is 25, a very beautiful woman, but somewhat stuck for a few reasons -- she needs to run the house as her mother dies; she is a woman and doesn't have the opportunities men have for independence; and, perhaps most importantly, she is desperately in love with her older sister Marie-Rose's husband Vincent, and he with her. But Agnes is a devout Catholic, and also loves Marie-Rose very much -- they had been inseparable as children -- so any physical relationship is impossible.

The action takes place over three days -- The Eve of All Saints, The Feast of All Saints, and The Feast of All Souls. (Or, as we'd say these days in the US, Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day.) Teresa Mulqueen's illness seems to have come to a crisis. The local doctor, William Curran, has somewhat reluctantly agreed to consult with her cancer specialist, Dr. Coyle, and a specialist from London, Sir Godfrey Bartlett-Crowe. Meanwhile Marie-Rose, who has had another of many fights with Vincent, is coming to visit and spend time with her sister; and Vincent will accompany her, ostensibly for the shooting but primarily to see Agnes. Teresa is ready to die except that she can't bear to leave the feckless Reggie without emotional support. Canon Considine, Teresa's brother, is coming to give her a special Mass. Add to the mix the new day nurse, Miss Cunningham, who may have designs on Reggie despite his illness. 

The opening of the novel is a bit programmatic, as O'Brien sets the scene in a slightly forced way. But once things are in place, the novel is beautiful. It's mostly tiny crises. Agnes hasn't been to confession because she believes her passion for Vincent is a sin, but she feels that she must take Communion at the Canon's Mass. Dr. Curran, a very fine man, is himself very much in love with Agnes, who likes him a good deal but can't forget Vincent. Marie-Rose, sort of an opposite to Agnes, is likewise beautiful, but short where Agnes is tall, blond while her sister is dark, and rather less intelligent -- but she's a nice if flighty woman. Vincent and she torture each other -- they have realized they are wholly incompatible but are trapped. Vincent himself is arguably the least likeable person, clearly spoiled by his good looks, and perhaps feeling himself stuck not just in a bad marriage but in a staid upper class position. Sir Godfrey is immediately taken with Marie-Rose and begins a flirtation -- apparently something normal for him. Miss Cunningham, gently maneuvering for Reggie's affection, is held in contempt by the Mulqueen sisters -- but she herself, having been poor her whole life, and having learned that the doctors she works with will fool around with a pretty young woman in her circumstances, but won't marry one, is sensibly proposing a fair bargain -- a lifetime of caring for an ill and dissipated man in exchange for a security. 

The writing is lovely, and the characterization intense. (Perhaps only Vincent comes off a bit unconvincingly.) The reader truly cares for Agnes, and Marie-Rose, and Dr. Curran and even Nurse Cunningham, even Reggie and poor despairing Danny Mulqueen. The novel moves swiftly through a sequence of heavily weighted scenes: Mass and Confession, dinner, encounters and kisses, songs, fights, and an agonizing extended conversation between Agnes and Vincent. It leads to a perhaps a bit too melodramatic final scene -- but for all that it's a powerful and effective novel. The pain and loss the characters feel is real, and behind that there's a tiny hint of hope. Kate O'Brien was not a believing Catholic, but was certainly raised in the Catholic tradition, and this strikes me as a profoundly Catholic novel, in some ways reminding me just a bit of my favorite Graham Greene novel, The End of the Affair. First-rate work, and I'm very glad I stumbled across this book. 

Review: The Book of the Night, by Rhoda Lerman

Review: The Book of the Night, by Rhoda Lerman

by Rich Horton

I mentioned recently that in looking to see if this particular book -- recommended by Tim Walters -- was available in audio form, and instead I stumbled across the Campbell Memorial Award winner Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman (no relation.) For The Book of the Night I had to read a physical copy! Which I have now done. (I should note that I read physical books at about a 10-1 ratio over audiobooks, and also that yes I do consider listening to an audiobook "reading" it.)

Not to bury the lede -- The Book of the Night (1984) is an astonishingly weird novel. It is set at a monastery on the island of Iona, in distant history, about 900 A.D. But from the beginning, with the monks rescuing an enormous (some 200 feet tall) woman being rescued (temporarily) from the ocean, which also yields a World War I soldier and Coca-Cola caps, it's clear that very strange things are going on. The woman warns of war in heaven before dying. And then the narrative shifts to a young girl, Celeste, who lives as a boy (women being forbidden in the monastery) with her insane hermit father; and it's no more "normal" from there forward. Besides the unstuck in time narrative, the prose is fascinating, playing linguistic games throughout. 

Rhoda Lerman (1936-2015) published six novels in her lifetime, with a posthumous work appearing in 2023. She was quite successful: her first novel, Call Me Ishtar, from 1973, which has the goddess in contemporary times wreaking havoc for feminist purposes, was shortlisted for the Pulitzer; and her later novels seem to have gotten consistently good notices. Most of her other novels seem to have been antically and often bitterly comic, such as The Girl That He Marries (1976), about a woman who figures out the tricks of getting a man to do her bidding -- and perhaps regrets it; and Jewish themes seem important, as with God's Ear (1989), also apparently a comic novel about a dead rabbi. Her most successful novel seems to have been Eleanor (1979), which also became a one-woman play -- it's about Eleanor Roosevelt and to me it seems by a long stretch her least interesting work. Later in her life she wrote a couple of memoirish books about her dogs.

Back to The Book of the Night. The main thread concerns Celeste's life on Iona. Her father, Manuel, left her mother (whom Celeste misses even as she still loves her rather dreadful father) and game to the monastery, presenting Celeste as a boy named CuRoi. The Abbot -- who turns out to be her grandfather -- is a mystical sort of Irish Christian, and there is a rival who wishes to hew closely to the leadership of Rome. So at one thematical level the book is about the clash between an older, more mystical Irish religion, with significant syncretic elements, and Roman Catholicism. (All of this arguably a strange choice for a seemingly very Jewish writer.) But the book is much weirder than that seems -- Rome has an army made up of Carthaginians, plus modern weapons like submachine guns, and seeminly airships as well. There are Ethiopian Catholics as well. 

Manuel's religion (or lack thereof) is even stranger. And he teaches Celeste strictly but oddly, and here again we see the timelessness of the book, for "non-linear thermodynamics" and "the uncertainty principle" are among the subjects; and too the strangeness: "What is the effect of the uncertainty principle on the fugue?" One of his methods -- repeated to great effect throughout the book -- is to string together eccentrically related words and phrases: "Zeus, Deus, juice, Jews, Yid, Druid, druse." "Methuselah, Medea, Medua, Medusa, Madonna." As Celeste grows, Manuel becomes more obsessed. A female Cook is hired, with consequences, and the Abbot's sister (armed with a submachine gun) visits as well. Celeste, or CuRoi, takes up duties in the monastery, mostly copying. And then some shocking events: a fire, killings, a transformation into a cow, a flying man, a new Abbot, too much more to mention, leading to a wild and transcendent conclusion.

It's a really remarkable effort. The linguistic inventions, the mystical speculations, the sex and death (I wonder if Alice Sheldon read this book -- at times it seems in sympathy with her work), the sheer wildness, the gods. It's unexpected everywhere -- not like any other novel I've read, not, unless I miss my guess, very much like anything else Lerman wrote. It can be a bit hard going at times, to be sure, but we shouldn't regret the work, for there are rewards. 

Review: This Shape We're In, by Jonathan Lethem

Review: This Shape We're In, by Jonathan Lethem

by Rich Horton

A little while back John Kessel mentioned this slim book, which was published in 2001 by McSweeney's Books. I had completely missed the book when it appeared. I greatly enjoyed Lethem's early short fiction and his first few novels, which were science fiction but with a distinctly different voice, and different objectives than most genre SF writers. (Indeed, I wrote a review of his first novel, Gun With Occasional Music, and sent it to a free distribution newspaper sort of thing -- perhaps it was BookPage? I'm not sure anymore. They didn't take it though their response hinted that they came really close. That's the first attempt at (semi)professional reviewing/criticism I ever made.) It wasn't, then, precisely a surprise that he moved out of the genre pretty much at the turn of the millennium, and, not really for that reason, the last of his books that I read was his 1999 detective novel Motherless Brooklyn. His next novel, The Fortress of Solitude, was still ambiguously genre (and got savaged in the New Yorker by James Wood, who is an excellent critic when he is in sympathy with a book, but has a completely blind eye, it seems to me, for genre.) But that book was long and about Superman, and I didn't get around to it, after which I was actively reviewing for Locus and my time for novels was much diminished.

This Shape We're In is a very short book -- about 13,000 words long by my estimate. It's narrated by Henry F., a middle-aged man whom we meet at a backyard barbecue, when the neighbors' son Balkan tells Henry F. and his wife Marianne that he's been in the eye and seen their son Dennis, who has been away for a while. And soon we realize that this refers to a real eye -- maybe -- as it seems that everyone lives in what they call the Shape. The Shape seems to be an enormous body of some sort, with eyes and a neck and bowels and liver and so on. While Mr. F is skeptical about Balkan's testimony, his wife insists that he and Balkan try to find Dennis.

And so Henry and Balkan begin their journey, up the spine towards the eye. There are problems, of course -- which eye was it? Could it have been the theorized "third eye"? Or was it a fraudulent creation? Things get stranger and stranger, confrontations with paramilitary groups, and religious groups, along with a visit to a clearly false eye, and references to Central Command, which can be contacted by red phones except that those phones always seem connected to a phone sex channel. This is all transmitted through Henry's voice -- that of a disappointed, heavy drinking, middle aged man, who seems to have had a military past but now is merely a "garbage hider". The science fiction reader will come up with hypotheses -- at first this seems perhaps a generation starship, for example -- and other readers will probably take everything as satirical surrealism. I'll just say that Lethem doesn't really disappoint either reader -- the story is certainly satirical and much of it can be read as sort of surrealistic, but in the story world the "Shape" is real, and its nature is, to an extent, eventually revealed. In the end, I think, it is truly a case of using SFnal imagery and allusions (though there are allusions to many other fictions) in the service of a commentary on present day life

It's quite effective. Much of this is propelled by Lethem's writing, which is very clever, imaginative and quite funny. John Kessel compares it to Kafka, and I can see that, though Lethem's prose and tone are not precisely Kafkaesque. I wish I'd seen it back in 2001. I'm not saying it would have got a Hugo nomination (it wouldn't have, but not for any reason having to do with its worth) but I think it would have been on my list. (Though looking at that year I'm reminded that Ian MacLeod wrote arguably the two best stories at novella and novelette length, both pure SF, and neither nominated: "New Light on the Drake Equation" and "Isabel of the Fall", neither of which ended up on the Hugo ballot either!)

Review: Tanner's Twelve Swingers, by Lawrence Block

Review: Tanner's Twelve Swingers, by Lawrence Block

by Rich Horton

Lawrence Block was born in 1938, and began publishing in the late '50s. He's written some SF, some romance, a fair amount of erotica, and other things, but he's been primarily a crime writer. He's probably best known for his Bernie Rhodenbarr and his Matthew Scudder series, as well as four novels about Chip Harrison, the first two comic soft porn, the other two crime novels. But his first series character to gain traction was Evan Tanner. Tanner appeared in seven novels between 1966 and 1970, with an eighth coming out in 1998. These novels are not crime novels, but lightly comic spy thrillers. (Based on the one book I have, they were packaged as titillatingly as possible, despite content that never really reaches event the softest porn (though there are mild sex scenes.))

I say "lightly comic", but I don't think that gets the tone quite right, based at least on Tanner's Twelve Swingers, which was the third in the series, coming out in 1967. There are definite comic bits, mind you, and in some ways it's kind of a sendup -- the action is implausible, and we're not supposed to believe in it, and the CIA, as well as political and other authorities in any number of countries, come in for plenty of mockery, but it's not really a funny novel. The character interactions feel real (if idealized, especially as to the way beautiful and good women keep wanting to sleep with Tanner), and the political commentary is often quite pointed. (Tanner is cynical about the US, the Soviet Union, China, and dictators everywhere -- his ideal is, really, a world of many more independent polities. It's striking to see him advocating strongly for the dissolution of the Yugoslavia into at least five different nations -- which of course happened (not without a terrible war) about a quarter century later.)

Evan Tanner fought in the Korean War, and a piece of shrapnel hit him in the head, and destroyed his sleep center. He has a disability pension, and has used his extra 8 hours of wakefulness to learn a lot of stuff -- different languages, lots of science and other knowledge, memberships in all sorts of organizations from various revolutionary groups to the Flat Earth Society.) He writes term papers and even Ph. D. theses to make extra money. And, he does a bit of work on the side for a government organization without a name, which seems to allow him lots of latitude in his assignments.

In this book he has promised a Latvian friend to rescue his lost love from the USSR. (Yes, another thing Tanner advocates is the breakup of the Soviet Union into its constituent states. (Also, he's intrigued by the idea of 50 independent American states,)) Alas, he thinks the job is impossible. But when the organization he works for wants him to go to Colombia for what he thinks is a bad reason, he uses his mission to Latvia as an excuse to decline. He begins in Macedonia though, where it turns out he has a young son (presumably conceived in a previous book?) So he sees his son, and on the way out of Yugoslavia finds himself further burdened with a Montenegrin who has written a book calling for the splitting of Yugoslavia. The two proceed through Hungary and Poland to Lithuania and Latvia -- and somehow by the end he's picked up a 7 year old girl who is the rightful Queen of Lithuania, 12 extremely beautiful Latvian gymnasts (a package deal including his friend's lover) and eventually even a jazz-playing Russian pilot. All this of course further complicates his mission.

Does he succeed? Well, there are sequels to come! The means he uses to cross borders and foil the police and so on are, as the book goes on, increasingly absurd. He sleeps with a few women -- most of whom would be happy if he'd settle down with them, though in the end he has the one son, the prospects of perhaps another child but who knows?, and an adopted daughter. We don't have to believe in much of this -- but it's entertaining throughout, a truly professional but affecting performance.

Review: Endangered Species, by Gene Wolfe

Review: Endangered Species, by Gene Wolfe

by Rich Horton

Gene Wolfe (1931-2019) was without question one of the greatest SF writers of all time. And he was notably excellent at pretty much any length -- he wrote great short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels, novel series -- and even an extended series of series of novels. And he kept writing short fiction even after he had great success with his novels. By my count he ended up with eight "primary" story collections, and about as many that variously shuffled the stories, or included only a few shorter pieces, or were otherwise offbeat. The consensus view might be that his first collection, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980), is his best -- and I probably would agree, but all the collections are worthwhile. I had occasion to reread his 1989 collection Endangered Species, I was delighted throughout.

The collection, not surprisingly, focuses on stories published in the '80s, but extends back to stories from very early in Wolfe's career, in the late '60s, and has some '70s pieces as well. Wolfe was a master at the novella length, but only one of these stories is a novella -- "Silhouette", which closes the book. There are several novelettes, but this book is really dominated by short stories. In a way, this was a revelation -- I've so long adored Wolfe's novellas and long novelettes that this made me realize that his best short stories are quite as brilliant.

Speaking generally, all the stories here show off the elegance of Wolfe's prose. Most of them are mysterious in some way or another -- the very property captured by the adjective "Wolfean". They display Kipling's influence in the way Wolfe tells you just enough to make the story comprehensible -- but no more. They are sometimes impish, sometimes romantic, sometimes just plain cool. A surprising number of the stories can be called horror -- this is a very important part of Wolfe's repertoire, but I don't know that it's emphasized much.

The longest story here is the novella "Silhouette", a dark story about a starship reaching a potentially colonizable planet, and the internal battle over what to do. Other longish stories include "The Rose and the Nightingale (and What Came of It)", an Arabic-flavored story about a beggar boy who agrees to help a storyteller retrieve a treasure from inside a Pasha's garden -- it's nicely told, with the expected twists, and a romantic flavor, but it's more conventional than I expect from Wolfe. "The Other Dead Man" is one of his better, and creepier, stories, in which a spaceship is severely damaged and the Captain is fatally injured, but the medical bay is programmed to resuscitate him at all costs. This moves slickly to the inevitable horrific conclusion. "The Detective of Dreams" is about a Frenchman hired to investigate who might be sending some people in a German city terrifying dreams -- the reader might recognize the content of the dreams the victims describe, from which the detective can deduce the surprising identity of the haunter.

Most of the stories are rather shorter. There a few instance of linked stories. "The Woman Who Loved the Centaur Pholus" and "The Woman the Unicorn Loved" are about a professor who is part of a group devoted to protecting genetically engineered creatures who have been abandoned by their makers (in this future DNA alterations can be done with a home kit.) Many of these creatures are based on myth, and in these two stories the professor befriends women who form, let's say, closer relationships to the title creatures -- increasing the need to save them from the usual fate discarded beings receive. There is a set of four linked stories that were published in one of Roger Elwood's more interesting projects, Continuum, a set of four anthologies each containing installments of a longer project that continued through the books. Wolfe's stories are "The Dark of the June", "The Death of Hyle", "From the Notebooks of Dr. Stein", and "Thag". They tell of a future in which people can choose to be uploaded into a virtual existence, and the first one is about a man whose wife has died and whose daughter is contemplated upload. As the stories continue, things get stranger, with what seems like time travel, and a malevolent creature called Thag. Interesting work. 

Three stories are related to Wolfe's Solar Cycle. "The Map" and "The Cat" are set in Severian's time. "The Map" is one of the best stories in the book, as a man hires a boat to travel down the river Gyoll to a deserted part of the city, near the Old Citadel familiar from The Book of the New Sun. The boat's captain Eata (one of Severian's fellow apprentices, though by this time Severian is the Autarch) lets the man out but waits to pick him up -- and when he does we learn a little lesson about the map the man carries, and an ironic bit more about what Eata knows of maps. "The Cat" is a story told during Severian's reign about events decades prior, about an exultant girl and the strange cat she had, and what happened to her when she got in trouble with an older man. The other Solar Cycle story is "The God and His Man", a short fable apparently from the Brown Book that Severian encounters. In this story, the God of a certain world summons a Man whom he sets a task -- to live among the different people on his world and learn how they differ from each other and in what ways they are cruel. What the Man learns, in the end, may not be precisely to the God's benefit.

Of the other short stories, I'll mention a few particular favorites. "The Cabin on the Coast" opens the book, and it's a lovely dark story of a man and a woman in love -- but the man is the son of a prominent politician, who is not happy that his son wants to marry this woman. Then the woman disappears -- and the man is convinced a mysterious boat he sees off the coast has something to do with it. Can he go there and get her back? The ending is perhaps what readers expect -- but still very nicely turned. "Our Neighbour by David Copperhead" purports to be a story told by the title character during his period as a journalist, in which he observes a man lurking about his neighbour's house, and learns the man's story -- he's investigating what the neighbour does in the house, at the request of a woman who feels that her daughter may have been somehow mistreated there. And the man ends up learning about the neighnour, who is a scientist involved with phrenology and mesmerism -- and whose investigations lead him to a mordant moral discovery. "The War Beneath the Tree" is a long-time favorite of mine, about a group of a young boy's toys who come to "life" on Christmas Eve. And they stage a battle -- for a reason, which the boy learns. And in that reason is buried a delightful stinger. "The HORARS of War" is an affecting story of a journalist "embedded" in a group of robot soldiers fighting a Vietnam like war against an unnamed Enemy. The journalist must impersonate the robot soldiers, which means sharing their battles -- and perhaps their fate? The story twists a little on its way to a moving conclusion. "Suzanne Delage" is another longtime favorite -- a simple story in a sense, in which the narrator tells of the title woman, with whom he went to high school but never really knew, and had lost track with. Until a commonplace but odd encounter brings her to mind. 

I could go on. Not all of the stories are masterworks -- a few are clever but trivial, and a couple don't quite work. But there is always something intriguing there. And, really -- instead of the stories I discuss above perhaps I should have mentioned "Lukora", or "The Last Thrilling Wonder Story", or "Kevin Malone", or "In the House of Gingerbread", or "All the Hues of Hell". And each reader will have their own favorites anyway -- so just read them!

Review: Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman

Review: Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman

by Rich Horton

Sometimes I have plans in advance to read a certain book, and sometimes it's all but random. Looking for my next audiobook last week I thought, hey, someone recommended Rhoda Lerman to me a while ago, maybe I'll see about her? A search on Audiobook turned up nothing by Rhoda Lerman. But they did have Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman. And I remembered that it had won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel several years ago, somewhat surprisingly. The year was 2016, actually, and other finalists included work by the likes of Nnedi Okorafor, Kim Stanley Robinson, Linda Nagata, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Neal Stephenson. I was in the audience for the presentation, and the presenter more or less begged the us to give this unexpected jewal a try. (Or so I remember things.) And I did put the novel on my "try sometime" list, but that was all -- so seeing it show up last week was enough for me to go ahead and read it (or listen to it.) 

Eleanor Lerman was born in New York in 1952, and was raised in the Bronx and in Far Rockaway -- which turns out to be imporant to this novel! (And in a strange coincidence I just discovered, the writer whose work I was looking for, Rhoda Lerman, was born in Far Rockaway! Lerman was Rhoda's married name, and I don't think Rhoda and Eleanor were related at all. Rhoda Lerman was born in 1936 and died in 2015, and her most SFnal novel is called The Book of the Night.) Eleanor Lerman published a book of poetry, Armed Love, in 1973 that got a lot of attention -- good and bad -- and a National Book Award nomination. (A poet and novelist I recently wrote about for Black Gate, X. J. Kennedy, reviewed Armed Love harshly in the New York Times, giving it an XX rating because he found the subject matter (drug use, Lesbianism, etc.) offensive.) The attention turned Lerman away from writing for a quarter century, but since the turn of the millennium she has published regularly, both poetry and fiction. One other novel, The Stargazer's Embassy (2017) was a Campbell finalist.

Laurie Perzin is a woman in her 40s, in 2002, very shortly after 9/11. She's working night shifts as a bartender in the JFK Airport. One night she calls in to a late night radio show while a psychic, Ravenette, is the guest, and to her shock the psychic narrates an incident from Laurie's childhood, when she was with her Uncle Avi, and saw a mysterious sort of shadow man. Laurie ends up need to figure out how this could have happened, and she gets in touch with the radio host, a man named Jack Shepherd, who is both a skeptic about woo-woo stuff, and fascinated by it. He gets her in touch with Ravenette, who turns out to be a member of a cult called Blue Awareness, which is transparently based on Scientology. 

It turns out that without quite realizing it Laurie has been somewhat entangle with Blue Awareness her whole life. As a child, Avi took care of her fairly often. Avi was into ham radio, and to other radio based activities such as listening the signals from satellites. The childhood incident the psychic had sensed was when Laurie and Avi were at an apartment building on the Rockaway peninsula, where he did some maintenance, and also listening to signals from Sputnik 10. Not long after, Laurie's mother died, and Laurie fell out of touch with Avi, who died fairly young. Laurie had wild teenage years. But she had encountered Blue Awareness, partly because while in the Navy during WWII Avi had worked with the founder of Blue Awareness, and had heard his story of an encounter somewhat similar to Laurie's. The founder begins by publishing pulp SF, then starts his cult, which by the time of the novel is run by his son, Raymond Gilmartin. And Raymond, along with Ravenette, are very interested in both the radio Avi used and another device Avi made which is similar to the "blue boxes" Blue Awareness uses in treating its members.

The plot follows Laurie as she tries to stay away from any involvement, but is forced to deal with Blue Awareness and the Radiomen in various ways: a burglary in which Avi's equipment is taken from Laurie's house, a "Dogon dog" Laurie is given thank to her Malian neighbor, a kidnap attempt on Laurie, foiled by her new dog, Jack Shepherd's increasing interest, and finally another encounter with what she realizes must be her Radioman. The novel is rather discursive -- in some ways it's a New York (or perhaps Queens) novel, going into plenty of detail about Laurie's everyday life and her wanderings between her apartment, her job at the airport, Jack's office, and Rockaway. It takes its time getting to the climax, but doesn't bore us along the way, and the ending is, almost surprisingly, quite powerful, quite moving. It is definitely a science fiction novel -- it doesn't cheat or play literary games with its content -- but it may not be the sort of SF that appeals to lots of SF readers. (An SF story on the same subject would have been half the length or less, and would have had a more transcendent and yet less moving ending.) I really enjoyed the novel, and it strikes me as a novel that it's good to see an award committee bring to wider attention.

Resurrected Review: Horizons, by Mary Rosenblum

Resurrected Review: Horizons, by Mary Rosenblum

by Rich Horton

Mary Rosenblum (1952-2018) was a fine writer of both SF and mysteries. I greatly enjoyed her short fiction, and I reprinted her story "Search Engine" in my first Best of the Year volume. Alas, she died far too soon in an airplane crash. (She was a pilot.)

I wrote this review back in 2007 when this novel, which turned out to be her last SF novel, appeared. I'm resurrecting it now.

Mary Rosenblum's Horizons is a near future SF novel with a somewhat old-fashioned shape and set of concerns. And I liked it for that -- it's very exciting, fast-moving, with some nice speculative elements. And with an engaging heroine. And really nasty bad guys. (Who espouse a philosophy I personally find repellent -- but which many might have at least some sympathy for.)

The heroine is Ahni Huang, daughter of the head of an influential Taiwanese commercial family. The opening sequence was originally a story in Asimov's ("Green Shift"), and in it she goes up to the North American Alliance's orbital platform, NYUp, to avenge her brother Xai's murder. But there she learns that Xai is actually alive, and acting against her family. She also discovers a secret on NYUp: a group of apparently illegally modified humans are living in microgravity, under the leadership of Dane Nilsson, the still "normal" chief "gardener" for the orbital.

After a confrontation with her father and mother, who are acting at mysterious cross-purposes, she returns to NYUp. The platform is under increasing tension. There is an independence movement, lead by Dane, but it is spiralling out of control, moving too rapidly, apparently as a result of external agitators. Possibly these are controlled by Xai, who may be working with Li Zhen, son of the Chinese leader, and the man in charge of the Chinese orbital platform.

All this moves very rapidly to a confrontation -- the World Council military is pushed to act against the people of NYUp, particularly Dane. So Ahni must figure out who is really behind all these problems, and how or if she can get sufficient cooperation between Dane's allies on NYUp, between an asteroid-based pilot/smuggler, and between Li Zhen to prevent a true disaster from destroying everybody's hopes for the future.

I quite enjoyed the novel. At the same time it shows some of the weaknesses of the genre ... some due to commercial considerations, and some more specifically SFnal. The commercial weaknesses lie in such aspects as the convenient brilliance of the heroine and hero and their associated, and in their routinely exalted social positions. Also, the resolution of the plot is quite convenient -- it is exactly what we as readers want, but it comes too rapidly, too easily, but also after (I felt) somewhat implausible raising of the stakes, increasing of the danger to the characters we care about. By which I mean that I think the end state could have been plausibly arrived at, but somewhat more slowly, and without the life-or-death confrontation towards the end, complete with dramatic courtroom intervention. But that would have been hard to make work novelistically. In the end it is lots of fun, good solid SF -- not a lasting masterpiece but nice work.

Review: Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford

Review: Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford

a review by Rich Horton

Francis Spufford is a much-admired UK writer who began writing nonfiction, then wrote a sort of amalgam of nonfiction and SF called Red Plenty (2010), and since has published three novels: Golden Hill (2016), Light Perpetual (2021), and Cahokia Jazz (2023). (It would appear that he considers the proper number of words for a title to be exactly two!) I bought Golden Hill when it came out, but still have not got to it. (Though I will soon!) And I saw enough about Cahokia Jazz that I knew I had to read it, and so I have.

Cahokia Jazz is an alternate history murder mystery doomed love story political thriller. And all of those elements work. It is urgently readable, speculatively involving, full of action, with a profound moral center, and tremendously moving. It is also very well-written. It is my second favorite SF novel from 2023, after the very different Booker Prize winner Orbital. As Cahokia Jazz was not published in the US until 2024, it is eligible for the 2025 Hugos, and it will definitely be on my nomination ballot.

The novel is set in Cahokia, the capitol of the state of the same name, in the US in the 1920s. Cahokia is located roughly where the present day city of that name is located -- just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, though St. Louis is a small village in this alternate history. It seems that the Mississippian Culture of Native Americans (the Mound Builders or their immediate descendants) survived in Cahokia in until the coming of French missionaries around 1700, at which time they converted to a syncretic Catholicism. (In our history the Cahokian civilization had mostly dispersed by the end of the 14th century, and the remaining natives in that area were decimated by smallpox. The afterword to this novel posits a less severe strain of smallpox arriving first and conferring some resistance while causing far fewer deaths.) The natives, here called takouma, remain the political leaders of Cahokia, though they became a state during the Civil War. The city itself has a very roughly equal population of takouma, takata (whites), and taklousa (blacks). Joe Barrow, the main character, is mixed race, part takouma, part taklousa, and grew up in an orphanage in Iowa. He came to Cahokia with Phineas Drummond, whom he met in a military hospital while both were serving in the Great War. Now they are partners, detectives on the Cahokia police force. And their latest case is horrifying -- a man has been murdered on the roof of a major city building, in a way that resembles Aztec sacrifices, complete with the heart cut out of his chest.

It's quickly clear that the murder has political implications. The first suspects are a small radical group of takouma, who believe that they are descended from the Aztecs. And Joe and Phin begin to follow up on this notion. But Joe is summoned to meetings with the two major political leaders of Cahokia: Cuauhtemoc Hashi, the Man of the Sun, and Couma Hashi, his niece, the Moon. The Man of the Sun (called simply The Man throughout) is the true hereditary leader of the state of Cahokia, though the politics of statehood complicate his position. Hereditary succession is to nephews (or nieces if necessary) instead of to children, so Couma's brother is nominally the heir, but he has run off to Hollywood to be a movie star, and thus Couma acts as the Moon. This too is complicated, because women in Cahokian society have a specific role, different to that of men though quite as powerful. The Man is an admirable if devious person, and Couma is a very beautiful woman -- though also devious, and Joe is soon under her spell, though any sort of relationship is clearly impossible. The Man urges Joe to seriously investigate the case, and not to accede to a politically convenient solution.

So the story follows the investigation, which leads the Joe and Phin in unexpected directions. It's quickly clear that the murder was more of a false flag operation, but proving this and finding the real culprit will be tricky. Many of the whites in the city (including the murder victim) are under the influence of the Ku Klux Klan, which hates natives (and Catholics) as much as it hates blacks. And there are some takouma who are intrigued by the Aztec myth. There are powerful political figures involved, many of whom clearly would like to wrest power from the takouma. Throughout the course of the investigation we get to see a wide spectrum of city residents -- rich takata and poor, rich and poor takouma, and mostly poorer taklousa, including the jazz musicians with whom Joe -- a brilliant pianist -- likes to associate. We see the politics of the police department. There are some magical scenes with Joe playing piano in a couple of bars -- Spufford's writing about the music is exceptional. We meet laborers in a meat packing plant, and the middle class family of a takouma woman who works with Joe in the department, and takouma farmers out in the country, and the upper crust at parties -- at one of which Joe meets a certain anthropologist named Kroeber. (This book is set before Kroeber married Ursula's mother, and Spufford dedicates the book "In respectful memory of Professor Kroeber's daughter".) We get a fascinating look at the culture and society of Cahokia -- a plausible alternative to our own, though reasonably well integrated with the US society of that era, and presented as different -- neither especially better nor worse.

The story takes place over about a week, and the murder mystery -- though it is eventually and wrenchingly solved -- is less important than the political story. The fate of Cahokia truly hangs in the balance. Joe's fate, and that of his partner, and of the Sun and Moon, are intertwined with all this, of course. The events depicted are exciting, with some terrific action scenes, and some tragedy, some betrayals, some realpolitik. There is a host of characters, most sharply even if briefly portrayed -- besides the major ones I've mentioned there are newspaper reporters -- Mickey Casqui and Miss Anderson; and policemen: Doyle and Hanunu, plus Miss Chokfi, the capable and surprisingly deep office administrator (to use the current term); and a Klan-linked gangster; also Lydia Lee, the taklousa woman who runs the bar above which Joe lives; Sammy Noukouwa, a nasty takouma who has wholly bought into the Aztec myth; and the various members of a jazz band with whom Joe plays. One of the most beautiful things about the book is the descriptions of Joe while he's playing jazz -- writing about music is hard, I think, and these scenes are just wonderful -- they get the emotions of both playing and listening spot on. I wanted to be there! 

This is a first rate novel, and it succeeds in multiple ways -- as a mystery, as a political thriller, as alternate history, and as a love story. It's involving throughout. It's both optimistic and pessimistic -- a tragedy perhaps, but with elements of triumph, a hopeful story that we know might resolve years in the future either happily or darkly -- but most likely a mixture, just like the real world. Highly recommended.

Review: In Memoriam: A Novel of the Terran Diaspora, by Fred Lerner

Review: In Memoriam: A Novel of the Terran Diaspora, by Fred Lerner

by Rich Horton

Fred Lerner is a long-time SF fan, and I've known him for several years, meeting him once or twice a year at conventions. I read and enjoyed his story "Rosetta Stone", which appeared in Ian Randal Strock's Artemis way back in 2000, and I was happy when he told me a few years ago that he was writing a novel set in that story's future (though not really directly related.) That novel appeared last year -- In Memoriam, from Fantastic Books.

It's narrated by David Bernstein. As the novel opens, he's finishing his final year of school before going to college. And he's attending a performance staged by the alien race that is native to the planet on which he lives. We learn quickly that these aliens, the Wyneri, rescued the survivors of the Cataclysm, which wiped out humanity on Earth, a couple of centuries prior to this story. The couple of thousand who were rescued have been fruitful enough that the human population is about 30,000 -- living in small chapters embedded among the Wyneri. The humans have been gifted one island, on which they have built a University, and to which they go once each year for the Ingathering. And this Remnant, as they style themselves, devote themselves to preserving as much knowledge of Terran history and culture as they can. 

Their relations with the Wyneri appear cordial enough, but both populations appear mostly to ignore each other. So David's interest in Wyneri art, and, soon after, his close friendship with a Wyneri girl named Harari, are considered decidedly unusual. The Wyneri are very humanoid (indeed, it's hinted that David and Harari are tempted to have a sexual relationship, but they decide not to go that far.) It turn out that many among the Wyneri are disgusted by David and Harari's friendship -- and so are many of the humans.

There are some shocking instances of violence, before and after David and Harari go to their separate universities. But the two of them have already discovered something very surprising about the Cataclysm and the Wyneri rescue operation. David, at his university, forms close relationships with many fellow students, and realizes that there are factions in the human Remnant who are pushing for Terran's to disassociate from the Wyneri, perhaps even to return to the Solar System. And there are increasingly active factions among the Wyneri that are hostile to Terrans. The situation becomes terribly threatening -- and David finds himself forced to a fairly prominent position, especially regarding the information he and Harari have found. The results will profound change both societies.

The novel is consistently interesting, and the society Lerner portrays in intelligently put together. David and his friends are characters we root for. Lerner's Jewish background contributes to much of this -- not just the fact that David and his family maintain Jewish traditions, but the obvious analogies with the "Terran Diaspora" of this novel, and the Jewish Diaspora, not to mention the Terrans situation as "strangers in a strange land" among the Wyneri. There are certain aspects I thought a bit underdeveloped, and I will say the dialogue doesn't always convince -- the characters speak as if reciting essays at times. But these are quibbles -- I enjoyed the novel, and cheered for its humanistic message.

Review: Nadja, by André Breton

Review: Nadja, by André Breton

a review by Rich Horton

Last year at Windy City Pulp and Paper convention, I got a copy of André Breton's Nadja, a surrealist novel first published in 1928. I hasten to add that Nadja is in no way a "pulp", not even by the debased criteria that labels paperback novels with salacious content "pulp". Instead it was a gift from a friend, another attendee of the convention. This copy is a recent Grove Press printing of a 1960 translation by the fine poet Richard Howard. (It turns out that, shortly after Howard's translation appeared, Breton produced a revised version of Nadja, that has not yet been translated into English.)

André Breton (1896-1966) was a French writer and the leader of the surrealistic movement in literature, author of the Surrealist Manifesto. He studied medicine, worked in a mental hospital, and, after the first World War, started a magazine, Littérature. He wrote prolifically for the rest of his life: poetry, novels, criticism (of literature and art), theory. He was a prolific art collector. He spent much of the Second World War in the US, as his politics and artistic attitudes were distasteful (to say the least) to the Vichy Regime.

Nadja remains, as far as I can tell, Breton's best known novel, though Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), with Philippe Soupalt; and L'Amour Fou (Mad Love) also have a reputation. Nadja is quite short, a bit less than 25,000 words in the English translation, though there are also 44 black and white photographs (including reproductions of drawings supposedly by the character Nadja). Surrealtistic writing supposedly includes "automatic writing", but I don't really see evidence of that here. And, at risk of forfeiting my avant garde membership card, the novel didn't really do a lot for me.

The book is narrated by a man named André, clearly the author himself. It opens with a long section discussing his life in Paris in the 1920s, the milieu, his friends, and his theories about surrealism and literature in general. Some strange movies are discussed, particularly one set at a grils' school, seeming to depictg the murder of one of the girls by the headmistrass and her friend. The actress, a friend of his, is mentioned. This is all a tad rambling though of some interest.

The long middle section is about Nadja, a mysterious and pretty young womman with whom the married narrator has a brief romance. Their affair consists of several rendezvous at restaurants and such, of discussions of their philosophies, and eventually of a revelations about Nadja -- that she is having mental problems, due to a death in the family, and that hshe is under pscychological care. After which the narrator abandons her, apparently because her oddly surrealistic philosophy of life is revealed to be a sympton of her mental illness. The final section concludes by discussing the narrator's continued devotion to his theories. 

If I had more sympathy with surrealism as a theory of life and art, rather than a sometimes interesting method of displaying reality at on odd angle, I might have enjoyed it more. It is well written, and the translation seems good. I also find surrealism more interesting in visual art, and in poetry, than in prose fiction. But that's just my taste I suppose. I'm glad I read the book, but in the end it's not quite my thing.

Old Bestseller Review: Belinda, by Rhoda Broughton

Old Bestseller Review: Belinda, by Rhoda Broughton

a review by Rich Horton

Rhoda Broughton (1840-1920) was a very popular writer in the last third of the 19th century, and continued publishing until her death. She was born in Wales, the grandaughter of a baronet, and her uncle was Sheridan LeFanu, the great writer of supernatural stories, including Carmilla, one of the earliest vampire stories. Her first two novels were serialized in Dublin University Magazine, edited by LeFanu. Her early novels were popular, but were denigrated as "sensation novels", with plots such as having a married man kill his mistress and himself in despair. Along with Mary Elizabeth Braddon, she was one of the "Queens of the circulating libraries". Belinda was part of her attempt to rehabilitate her reputation with less sensationalistic works. Happily, both Broughton and Braddon have experienced something of a revival in the last few decades.

Belinda's heroine is Belinda Churchill, a young woman (20 at the outset of the novel) who lives with her grandmother and with her younger sister Sarah. They seem to be in comfortable financial circumstances, though their parents must be dead. We meet them in Germany on an extended visit. Sarah, a vivacious and flirtatious girl, has become engaged, for about the seventh time, this time to an aging Professor named Forth. And Belinda meets a young man, David Rivers, whose father is wealthy but, unfortunately in the eyes of Belinda's family, in business. And soon David and Belinda are deeply in love, while Sarah is trying to extricate herself from her inappropriate engagement. The characters are quickly established -- Sarah is effervescent and friendly, Granny is profoundly lazy, Belinda is internally passionate but externally rather cold, hard to get close to. Professor Forth is a bore, and an hypochondriac. David Rivers, it must be said, is a very thin character. The other recurring character is an impossibly rude and pushing woman named Miss Watson, who will not take no for an answer, and in so doing thrusts herself into any social situation at the most unpropritious times. 

David and Belinda's relationship proceeds slowly, due to Belinda's shyness and coldness, and when Sarah finally pushes her to maneuver him to proposing, just as they are about to return home, David leaves suddenly, even as Belinda as arranged a rendezvous. Belinda and Sarah return home, and for some reason David never contacts them. Belinda is thrown into a deep depression, and after the vile Miss Watson reports having seen David Rivers in the company of a young woman, Belinda decides -- against Sarah's desperate opposition -- to agree to marry Professor Forth, with the understanding that it's a loveles (and presumably sexless) marriage, and that he shall teach her Greek and suchlike while she acts as a secretary to him. And so they do marry, and the Professor turns out to be an abusive taskmaster, while Belinda finds that she doesn't find a classical education inspiring (at least not the way the Professor does it) and begins to hate him. And, of course, we learn that David's absence was for a very good reason, and so he's back in the picture,but of course any relationship is entirely improper.

This summary mskes the novel sound downright dreary, but it isn't. Part of this is that though this situation is objectively terrible for Belinda, the novel remains oddly lighthearted, and often funny. Part of this is due to the character of Sarah, who really is a delight. Part is the comic relief -- the awful Miss Watson and the horrible Professor Forth are awful and horrible in quite comical ways. Belinda and David do eventually meet again and are tempted into a technically improper relationship, though of course they never cross boundaries. There is a portrait, clearly drawn from life, of the Professor's college, here called Oxbridge though it's openly based on Oxford, where Broughton was living by that time. There is a climactic trip to the Lake District, after the Professor's insistence on overworking Belinda drives her close to death. And the reader can see all along the only solution -- which comes as no real surprise.

It's not a great novel. The plotting is exiguous, and the key events are implausible. (For that matter, Sarah's initial engagement to Professor Forth makes no sense at all -- it's inconsistent with her character, and clearly just an initiating plot device.) But Broughton is a fine writer, with an eye for appropriate images, and she's effective in characterizing those people she wishes to depict. (Though as noted, when she isn't really interested in close observation, as with David Rivers, the character is essentially a placeholder.) So -- Sarah, Belinda, Miss Watson, the Professor ... all do come to life. The novel is written in present tense (apparently a habit of Broughton's) but that doesn't distract the reader. So -- if not a great novel, this is a pretty good novel, and quite enjoyable.

The reader will probably have noted a distinct echo, in the marriage of Professor Forth and Belinda, to that of Casaubon and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, which appeared a bit more than a decade earlier. The similarties can't be missed, but the two novels are quite different, and certainly Belinda and Dorothea are much different characters. Having said that, it is reliably asserted that Professor Forth is based a rather well known academic, a one time friend of Broughton's, Mark Pattison, the Rector of Oxford's Lincoln College. Pattison was notorious for having married a much younger woman, who refused sexual relations with him after a few years of marriage. And he was considered a bit of a fussy academic -- though, unlike Forth, he was apparently a well-respected teacher. Pattison's friendship with Broughton deteriorated after he began an affair with another much younger woman. Interestingly, one of Pattison's research interests was a man named Isaac Casaubon, about whom he wrote a biography. Casaubon from Middlemarch has also often been associated with Pattison, though this position is controversial. 

Resurrected Review: The Balmoral Nude, by Carolyn Coker

Here's a review I did for my old blog back in 2009, published unrevised. I understand that the author died not too long after that, in 2011. It's a minor work, but so be it!

Resurrected Review: The Balmoral Nude, by Carolyn Coker

by Rich Horton

Back in the early 90s I joined a paperback mystery book club on a trial basis but quickly cancelled my membership. One of the books I received and didn't then read was Carolyn Coker's The Balmoral Nude, a 1990 novel reprinted in paper in 1993. I picked it out of my bookshelves for hard to understand reasons this weekend and figured I'd read it. And it's not too bad, though nothing earthshaking. The heroine, sort of, is Andrea Perkins, an American art restorer who I believe appeared in other Coker novels. [She did -- some five books total.] In this book she is in London doing some work for the Victoria and Albert Museum. She bumps into an old boyfriend, Clayton Foley, who has married a rich Englishwoman, Deborah Fetherston. Deborah's ancestor, Cecil Fetherston, was a second-rate Victorian painter who was executed for murdering a prostitute. Fetherston started a gallery that remains in the family, and they have recently found some old drawings by Fetherston, which they believe can be sold for a tidy sum, particularly the one called "The Balmoral Nude". Clayton and Deborah hire Andrea to restore the drawings before the sale. It soon becomes clear that there are two major bidders: an American nouveau riche couple, and an English academic who wants to use the drawings in his new book about William Gladstone (who was a witness to Fetherston murdering the prostitute). 

It soon becomes clear that someone plans to acquire the drawings by foul means -- one is stolen from Andrea's lab, and another attempt is made which results in the accidental death of a woman who resembles Andrea. And behind the scenes, as it were, we learn that a shadowy woman is being urged by her lover to kill someone in order to get ahold of the drawings -- or perhaps for some other reason? There are three women who seem to be suspects -- the American couple's rackety daughter, who is fooling around with Deborah Fetherston's rackety son; a TV producer who seems to be trying to sleep her way to the top, and who gets embroiled in some controversy about the potential sale of the pictures; and the manager of the Fetherston gallery. Plus Clayton is a shady figure -- already putting moves on Andrea despite having long before rudely ended there previous relationship, and also caught in an embrace with the American daughter. 

It's one of those mystery novels where the main murder doesn't occur until perhaps 3/4 through the book (in fact, in a sense it doesn't occur until perhaps much later, as the victim ends up in a coma). And it's also one of those mystery novels -- all too many, for my taste -- where the murder isn't resolved until the criminal gives it away by committing another murder. I found it breezily readable, but not great. Andrea is far too passive ... she has little to do at all with solving the crime. (In fact, no one does, really -- as I said the murderer gives it away by committing another murder.) There is one nice touch -- a cute resolution to the mystery of the drawing itself, the "Balmoral Nude".