The Barest Branch

In the late 9th century, Danish fisherman Dagfinn leaves his village to join one of the Viking crews sailing for England to join the great army of Guthrum in the conquest of Wessex. He finds England to be a strange land, and is never quite at home among the English, or indeed among the other Danes. Then, on a tax raid to the coast of East Anglia, Dagfinn and his mates encounter a village with an absurd fortune in gold. Where does it come from and how did they get it, and what price did they pay?

James Holloway is perhaps the greatest, possibly the only, proponent of the Gonzo style of history, which consciously abandons any attempt to portray people in history as basically like us but with better hats. At the same time, Gonzo history embraces the modern vernacular as preferable to coarse or flowery approximations of antique language or the dry language of science.In his own words:

"...fuck all attempts to portray the past in this reassuring light, because your ancestors were not just like you. They were in some ways, but in other ways they were huge fucking weirdoes, and the sooner you begin the process of trying to get your head around that, the smarter you’ll be, especially if you’re able to come to the conclusion that you also are a giant weirdo and half of what you do makes no sense whatsoever."

And that's basically the same approach Holloway's first novel takes, not just to history but to its other influence, the work of HP Lovecraft. Holloway's Vikings are brutal killers and - in some cases - casual rapists, but speak in a rugged modern dialect, while the first person narrative eschews the intellectual asceticism of the Lovecraftian voice in favour of the same tone, while maintaining the thematic hallmarks of alienation, isolation and identity.

While at first glance an axe-happy, weatherbeaten, foul-mouthed Viking sailor seems as far from Johnny Lovecraft-Protagonist as you could get, Dagfinn's origin as a beardless, slave-born bastard set him apart as much as a sense of obsessive historical romanticism, and the early sections of the book in which he contemplates with awe the cyclopaean relics of the Romans (not that Holloway resorts to using any of the touchstone words - cyclopaean, squamous, non-Euclidean) are actually more effective in terms of creeping, cosmic dread than the later sections with the actual monsters, although in the latter he does a good job of maintaining the appropriate sense of desperate futility in the face of armed and physically capable protagonists.

The Barest Branch is not going to be for everyone. It will not appeal to anyone who likes their Vikings pseudo-Shakespearean or their history clean, and it defies both of the predominant classes of Mythos protagonist - the wilting victim and the muscular hero. It is also very seriously not for anyone who has a problem with the word fuck. It could also use a final pass from an editor, but that's the nature of self-publishing. With those provisos, it is a well-written novella which manages to be effective both as Lovecraftian horror and as Gonzo history, and it's only a couple of quid on Amazon or DriveThru.

The Aeronaut's Windlass

With the surface of the world a lethally hostile place, the civilised nations of humanity live in towering spires of imperishable stone while bold aeronauts ply the skies between them. Captain Grim, privateer of Spire Albion, is caught up in the machinations of an ambitious rival Spire when he is retained to transport a team of inexperienced young guards, a cat and a mad Etherialist in search of saboteurs. Unfortunately, war is just the tip of the iceberg, with a swarm of lethal surface monsters and a sinister rival Etherialist manipulating events while being manipulated herself by... something else.

I've read a few of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. I quite liked them, but I hit them at the last wind of my paranormal mystery period and there just seemed to be so many of them. The Aeronaut's Windlass is the first book in a new series (like, super new; I had no idea how new and now I'll have to wait if I want to read the next one) so doesn't have the terrifying prospect of trying to catch up with a jillionty titles, which is an advantage. Loosely it's somewhere between actually steampunk and conventionally steampunk, with Spire Albion (Britain) on the brink of war with Spire Aurora (clearly Spain, but also a bit Napoleonic France) in a world of titanic towers and technomagic. Oh, and intelligent, insufferable cats.

There is a lot to like about The Aeronaut's Windlass. Butcher writes good action and has created a neat system of technomagic in the etheric crystals and Etherialists which power the plot. There's a satisfying self-contained plot and plenty of hints at the longer arc story. The aerial combat scenes in particular showed both a deep love of naval extravaganzas and a fair degree of thought as to the implications of taking such a battle to three dimensions. The cats are brilliantly written; insufferable bastards the lot of them, but very convincingly cat, especially in their diplomacy. On the downside, Butcher is a bit patchy on the subject of tea - I will accept a world where the same pot is used for heating and brewing, but the idea of anyone, especially the pseudo-British, putting cream in tea is just wrong - and I began to regret after the first quarter that I wasn't keeping a tally every time someone ground their teeth (I do know that it happened a lot.)

I've caught a few fairly so-so audiobook readings, but Euan Morton (you may know him as the male Sith inquisitor in SWtOR) did an excellent job with this one.

I Shall Wear Midnight and The Shepherd's Crown

In 'I Shall Wear Midnight', Tiffany Aching is the fledgling witch of the Chalk, but the ancient revenant of hatred known as the Cunning Man is stalking to her. Born of twisted zeal and thwarted desire, the Cunning Man is the malevolent spirit of the witch hunt and hatred and strife follow in his wake. He brings the burning, and Tiffany will have to learn not to fear the fire and how not to fear the fire if she is to defeat him. And in 'The Shepherd's Crown', the death of a friend leaves Tiffany with too much to do and an old enemy pressing at the walls of reality trying to get in.

There's something decidedly melancholy about the conclusion of the Tiffany Aching series. Released in 2010, some suggested at the time that 'I Shall Wear Midnight' had something of the goodbye about it, but 'The Shepherd's Crown' is the farewell. It's Terry Pratchett's last completed novel - although the afterword notes that 'completed' is a strong term and it does feel as if Sir Terry had yet to perform the final pass at the last - and, taken with the later volumes in the main Discworld series, ushers in the last stages of a sea change on the Disc, the final transition from its roots as high fantasy parody in The Colour of Magic to something more akin to Downton Abbey with wizards. Cohen the Barbarian never met Granny Weatherwax, but it's certainly hard to think that his brand of unstoppable masculine senility would cut much ice with Tiff.

It's almost as if the Discworld has at last grown up, which is perhaps ironic for books aimed at younger readers, or perhaps not. The faeries are gone, the vampires have all taken the pledge and the barbarians are dealing with their problems like grownups. It's not just the setting either. 'I Shall Wear Midnight' opens with Tiffany intervening to prevent first the lynching and then the suicide of a man who has beaten his pregnant daughter so hard that she miscarried. The Discworld of Tiffany Aching is a tough, earthy place and Tiff is a tough, earthy girl.

And then 'The Shepherd's Crown' deals a great deal with loss, and in its way with the loss of its own author. The death which begins the novel leaves a gaping hole in the Discworld, as if the whole crazy place can't sustain without a rational centre, and it probably couldn't.

Am I rambling? Perhaps so. Perhaps I don't want to finish this review, because it feels so final. Perhaps I don't want to say that I felt that the rough edges showed a little too much in 'The Shepherd's Crown', or perhaps I only felt that way because I wanted it so much to be something sublime and it was only good.