Helen of Sparta

Once upon a time there was a girl named Helen, a princess who married a great king, ran away with a prince and so started a war the like of which the world has never seen. This is the bit of the story that a lot of people gloss over.

Amalia Carosella, in her desire to give Helen her own voice (although seriously, she's been given at least two others that I found just image searching the cover - The Memoirs of Helen of Troy and the apparently less sympathetic Memoirs of a Bitch) presents the story of her abduction by Theseus of Athens as a grand and tragic romance, in which Helen flees her abusive and resentful mother and a planned alliance-marriage to childhood friend-turned-abusive rapist dick Menelaus, but basically finds her life being continually fucked up by the anger of the gods.

Helen of Sparta is an okay book with a couple of specific flaws. Firstly, it's just... really quite rapey. As decent as Theseus is in the novel, it's hard to see how Helen can be intimate with anyone given that she's basically been dreaming about being raped in the ashes of Troy by just about every other man she knows and isn't related to since puberty. I know Greek myth is brutal, but damn. Also, turning the abduction of the prepubescent Helen into the elopement of a young woman, there is sex, and then a child, and because she has no place in the later narrative the daughter is exposed on the hillside at the will of the gods*.

Again, it's not a poor representation of the heroic age of Greek myth, but I'm not okay with little girls being sacrificed**.

Overall, however, the book manages to balance adherence to the broad structure of the mythological tale and the romantic narrative it wants to convey. It ends on a downer which hints at a part two, and in all honesty, I'd read part two if and when.

Which is a lot better than the last couple of Kindle First offerings.

* My own theory is that Athena pulled some switcheroony which will be revealed in a later book, possibly in Egypt, but it still made for upsetting reading.
** Which is not to say I am okay with little boys being sacrificed, but I can work with it as an earnestly horrible part of a narrative in a way I can't with girls, simply because I have a daughter and not a son.

Good Omens

About six months ago I posted a list of ten books that had affected me, one of which was Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens. With the recent passing of Sir Terry from this mortal coil to the etheric whisper of internet headers, I decided that I wanted to hit the canon again, and to start with one of my favourites.

At some basic level, Good Omens is a pastiche of The Omen (the original one,) complete with a Satanic conspiracy replacing the son of a US ambassador with the antichrist, filtered through a comedy of errors that is forever hovering one legs akimbo sight gag from a Carry On movie. An angel and a demon, both of whom have gone rather native, strive to save the world, while a moment of distraction leaves the antichrist to grow up as a perfectly normal boy. As the preordained moment approaches, the forces of Heaven and Hell, of England's once-proud Witchfinder Army, and of the well-informed descendants of Cromwellian prophetess Agnes Nutter, descend on the Oxfordshire village of Tadfield to do battle (because anyone who considers themselves to be a force is inevitably looking for a fight.)

Pratchett and Gaiman occasionally talked about a sequel - the title 668: The Neighbour of the Beast was touted sometimes - but in the end it never happened; partly because Gaiman moved full-time to the states, and partly because they never settled on the story. I'm rather glad of that, because Good Omens is something of a perfect storm, uniting two authors who were really just getting started in such as way that I believe it tempered both of their styles and signaled a sea-change in their individual writing, while at the same time producing something priceless.

Seriously; about 70% of all images resulting from a search for
'Good Omens' returns fan art of Aziraphael and Crowley, and
perhaps a quarter of that is explicitly shippy. I'm sure you
wouldn't have to look far to find one of those intertwining wing
and no clothes poses so popular with people who ship winged
humanoids and have any ounce of artistic ability.

Good Omens is a very character-driven apocalyptic narrative, and the characters are rather wonderful, from Adam's small and disorganised 'pack of ringleaders' to the bikers of the Apocalypse, and of course the fandom's favourite ship, Crowley and Aziraphael*. The authors also manage to slip in some social commentary - much of it a little dated now** - and even to get in a dig at people who wear sunglasses when it's dark, which in 1990 was only just starting to be a thing.

It is also unashamedly funny and, and this is important, doesn't pretend not to be or to have been during the big, dramatic denouement. It doesn't go all grimdark, and yet manages to have a sense of peril for characters the reader has grown to like. It may also count as one of the first truly transatlantic novels, its wry footnotes peppered with explanatory notes for the American reader which poke fun at the American and British people in more or less equal part.

In case I'm being too oblique, I love this book: always have done, still do. The only disappointment for me on this reading was the audiobook version I switched too while I was walking. It wasn't bad, but they did a Radio 4 adaptation just before Christmas*** and so I was disappointed to only get the one voice. All in all, I think I'm more of an audio play kind of guy.

* Because nothing gets shippers hot for a couple more than adversity, and what greater adversity can there be than explicitly stating that they are sexless beings? For myself I can see the sense behind the pairing, but they are more of an old married couple, rather than a white hot sexy pairing.
** Similarly, any technical references are pretty antiquated, from the wonder of a car with a phone in to printed manuals, and British fast food has come a long way since 1990.
*** Which is well worth checking out.

The Gemini Effect

A long-abandoned bioweapon is reactivated by dumb luck and apathy. Within twelve hours, Kansas City is dead, and the plague is spreading in a tide of mutated killer rat monsters. The President must act quickly, but cautiously, while his advisers pull in many directions at once. Cold war bio warfare, rats, plague, KGB sleepers, sexy sexy scientists and dear Lord does anyone in this story have eyes that aren't piercing?

The basic concepts of The Gemini Effect aren't bad, and the self-replicating death rats are creepy as hell even before they start infecting people. Grossart's writing shows signs of academic training, especially when he gives a name in full followed by the acronym in brackets (and since he's talking about GPS it has to be habit,) and as far as I can tell his bio-science is accurate, if wildly speculative. It's the people that are the real problem. Grossart struggles with the show, don't tell concept and backstory is dumped in agonising passages of internal monologue. Oh, and they're all sexy, even though only the bad ones are so unprofessional as to be intentionally sexy.

There is in fact a scene in which the two incredibly stupid ex-KGB sleeper agents who have decided that a plague of unknown origin and potential is a kick-ass time to plunge the world into international communistic revolution attempt to question the captive President. One is being a super-slutty honey trap and the other is puffing on a cigar; subtle they are not. Neither, in all honesty, are they necessary to a narrative about giant, killer plague rats.

This is how you react to the silencer.

Still; they're not alone in being stupid. The War Cabinet apparently fail to realise that when the newly appointed Chief of Staff attaches a silencer to his pistol it indicates an end to regular protocols. The same scene also flags another problem: The Chief of Staff attaches a silencer in seconds to a sidearm I'm pretty sure he ought not to be wearing in the war room (in which, as we know, you can not fight) and then shoots two people with all the disruption of a particularly prissy cat with allergies. I can not count the number of ways in which silencers don't work like that.

Okay, I can; it's two. I'll throw in scoring a perfect headshot against someone trying to push past him for free, and all in all I begin to suspect that while his biology may be wild yet sound, Grossart's weapons knowledge probably comes mostly from first person shooters. This flaw is also particularly egregious when the President moves from conventional weapons to chemical and nuclear options without recourse to the daisy cutter, the fuel-air bomb which not only is designed to deal with situations much like the ones presented, but has besides become a staple of infection thrillers since Outbreak.

Oh; did I mention that the President periodically breaks off to internally monologue about cowardly, rag-headed mullahs cowering in caves and ordering the deaths of innocent Americans just for being Americans? The clash of hyper-patriotism and apocalyptic nihilism in this book is actually kind of weird.

So I figure fuck it. I'll chalk this up to another Kindle First failure and re-read Good Omens instead.

Don't think of it as dying...

This is easily one of the most recognisable
portrait shots of my generation.

"HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE."

For a while, my brother in law ran a pub in Headington. He had a standing rule, never - alas - enacted, that if the relatively local author Terry Pratchett ever came into the White Hart, he could drink for one signature per pint.

Terry Pratchett has been a fixture of my life since I was bought a copy of Guards! Guards! in... I don't want to think when. I was living with my parents. I mean, I was a long way from even thinking about not living with my parents. I think the book was new out in paperback, so depending on whether it was ever release in hardback this would have been my birthday in '90 or '91. I was a youngish teen, I'd missed Lovecraft, and heroic fantasy was starting to pall. It was the right book at the right time, and I was hooked.

I picked up the back numbers of the Discworld series within the year and until a very few years back, when I stopped being able to read as much as I had for various reasons, any new Pratchett was snatched up in hardback. Good Omens introduced me to Neil Gaiman and remains one of my all-time favourites. The Science of Discworld transcended the popular science genre and combined an intriguing short story with truly thought-provoking scientific philosophy. It was the series that introduced me concepts like lies-to-children and Pan narrans; humanity, the storytelling chimp.

"Imagination, not intelligence, made us human."

The dude was a wizard; there's no denying it.

To say that Terry Pratchett has influenced me, my writing, my thinking, is practically to say that I sure do breathe a lot of oxygen. The news of his death, while to some degree expected, is bittersweet for me. On the one hand, he is gone; there will be no new books, no more ideas from that wonderful mind. On the other, he was writing pretty much to the end, and he has said since he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's that his greatest fear was no longer being able to write. I can relate to that fear.

My parents got me Guards! Guards! because the books weren't numbered. If they had got me The Colour of Magic, I would have probably not got into Pratchett for years, but as it is, I have a set that has traveled with me to University and to every house I have lived in since. At one point, my flatmate and I realised that something had gone awry, because we had two copies of every Pratchett book except for Carpe Juggulum (both missing) and Jingo (which despite being our mutual least favourite, we had three of.) My favourite book that he wrote is probably still Good Omens; my favourite that he wrote alone is probably The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. 

"LET ME PUT FORWARD ANOTHER SUGGESTION: THAT YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A LUCKY SPECIES OF APE THAT IS TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CREATION VIA A LANGUAGE THAT EVOLVED IN ORDER TO TELL ONE ANOTHER WHERE THE RIPE FRUIT WAS?"

They say that no-one is gone who is remembered. If that is true then Pratchett will be here for a long time. I'm sure there are those who would sniff at the notion that a writer of comic fantasy be regarded the equal of Dickens or Shakespeare, and indeed I would note - mostly with affection to all parties - that Pratchett never wrote five books with the same plot about twins, nor took a character on a tedious digression through a bizarrely caricatured America. Genre is a blinker, and while he wrote in a fantastical setting, Pratchett wrote about the human condition, even if some of the humans in question were trolls, talking dogs or the anthropomorphic personification of Death. His protagonists were always complex, his antagonists embodiments not of cosmic evil, but of the petty evils of human excess, shortsightedness and selfishness. He himself once explained that the joy of the Discworld was that all life was there, and he could write any sort of book he wished within that setting, from showbiz satire to police procedural.

We have not lost a fantasy author today, nor a comic author. We have lost one of the philosophers of our age, and a man with an often profound understanding of what it was to be human. We are poorer as a species for his loss, yet infinitely richer that he was a part of our lives.

Something Rotten

After serving two years as the head of Jurisfiction, Thursday Next feels ready to return to reality and try to have her husband reinstantiated by the treacherous Goliath Corporation. She comes back to Swindon to discover that Britain's most sinister multinational corporate behemoth is in cahoots with fictional fascist politician Yorrick Kaine, and that their bid to seize power while switching to a faith-based business model could have dire implications for the world.

On top of all that, she's got a two year old who only speaks Lorem Ipsum and a certain literary Dane to safeguard though a self-examinatory sabbatical.

The fourth book in the first Thursday Next trilogy was in many ways Jasper fforde's first foray into the dazzling light of superstar publishing. It was also something of a test, with many readers feeling that the madly conceptual The Well of Lost Plots had been a step down from Lost in a Good Book. The result is, for my money, pretty damn good, and certainly holds up to a second reading. It is particularly interesting (if you're me) to look out the changes made since book one. (For example, various chapter headings have referred to the assassination and later attempted assassination of President-for-Life George Formby, who here dies of natural causes.)

Something Rotten brings the story to a fairly natural close, sufficiently so that I was surprised to see Thursday reappear a few years later in First Among Sequels. In many ways it is the conclusion of a trilogy beginning with Lost in a Good Book than a narrative sequel to The Eyre Affair, which comes across as a slightly tentative proof of concept in retrospect, and that is a good trilogy. Once I buy the remaining books on Kindle, I'll give my thoughts on the next Next trilogy (including a first reading of The Woman Who Died A Lot, and perhaps more importantly a second reading of One of Our Thursdays is Missing.)