Reading Roundup - October 2017

Zacharias Wythe was seen as a novelty by the Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers, a freed slave taught to perform magic, until he became the Sorcerer Royal. Now, he is beset by accusations of foul play, accused of the murder of his mentor and benefactor, and of doing away with the traditional familiar of his office. Worse, British magic is in an apparent state of terminal decline, the flow of power out of Faerie all but halted, a state of affairs for which his jealous rivals are quick to blame Zacharias. These problems are soon cast into the shade, however, as he becomes reluctant mentor to Prunella Gentleman, a magicien of unusual - the Royal Society would say improper - proficiency and peerless stubbornness.

Sorcerer to the Crown is a Regency-set novel of gentleman magicians, written by a Malaysian woman and featuring as its protagonists a black former slave and a half-Indian girl of questionable birth, which immediately marks it out from the crowd. It has an inventive approach to magic and a pair of sympathetic, if not exactly likeable leads to compete with a set of sneering, elitist antagonists. Also Malaysian lamiae in a diplomatic subplot which sets Zacharias firmly at odds with the Government. It's a book with substantial strengths, but not without flaws, including a tendency for Prunella to tip over from wilful rebel to gold digger to some sort of bloodthirsty egomaniac(1), and a weak romantic thread.

In truth, I would probably have enjoyed it more if it had not been so enthusiastically recommended, but while it may be all that, it falls short of the accompanying bag of chips.

Next up is Warlock Holmes: A Study in Brimstone, which is as you might expect, a parody of Sherlock Holmes with magic in it. Dr John Watson, a half-pay army surgeon with a keen observational and deductive mind, is forced by circumstances to take rooms with the eccentric Warlock Holmes, whom he eventually learns is a form of consulting detective, an occult powerhouse of limited brain, periodically possessed by the spirit of his defeated foe Moriarty.

Through a series of short stories spoofing different Holmes adventures, Warlock Holmes strikes a rich vein of humour in pairing off Watson's deductive genius - very like that of Sherlock - against the totally illogical world into which association with Holmes and his Scotland Yard associates - vampire Lestrade and... ill-defined man-thing Gregson - thrusts him. Somewhat less successful are the more absurdist elements - the cause of the revenger's crusade in the title story is the consumption of a doughnut - and the occasional interjection of unrelated parody - such as references to 'Nexus 7' magical automata.

All in all, it's a less substantial read than Sorcerer to the Crown, itself a fairly light novel as these things go. It isn't the better book, and in its adherence to the form of the originals coupled with a slightly blokish line in geek humour has a woeful shortage of strong, female or minority characters - unless we count werewolves and vampires as minorities, which in Denning's defence, he kind of does - but in the short term is possibly more fun, if only because we aren't expected to like and admire the characters.

Ghosts are making their presence felt on the London Underground... and then shattering in a most improbable way. Police officer and apprentice wizard Peter Grant is on the case, ably assisted by Sgt Jaget Khan, British Transport Police's own resident whipping boy of the weird, Peter's occult-hacking cousin Abigail, and Toby, the increasingly reluctant ghost-sniffing dog. It soon becomes clear that someone is using ghosts to send a message. Someone is in trouble, and someone wants to help, but who? and how? and why can't they just use email?

We're probably at least another year from the next full Peter Grant release, but in the meantime there's The Furthest Station, advertised somewhat disingenuously as 'the first Peter Grant novella', in an attempt to make a half-novel seem more exciting than a full release. In fairness, this is a pretty exciting release. Like Body Work, the first of the Rivers of London comics(2), the trimming of subplots and removal from the arc narrative of the series results in a simpler, but punchier storyline. The blending of mundane crime with occult crimesolving is an interesting twist, it adds a new feature - British-to-American explanatory notes framed as footnotes for the benefit of the FBI's occult pointwoman, Agent Reynolds(3) - and lest anyone worry that the narrative has become too simplistic, there is a little digression in which Peter makes first contact with a neophyte river god. It's not a full novel, but it's a satisfying addition to the Rivers of London canon.

This month saw me finish up the Audible's Definitive Sherlock Holmes, read by Stephen Fry. Alas, it is the nature of the beast that any Holmes collection read straight through leaves the most underwhelming for last. His Last Bow includes such notable takes as 'The Adventure of the Cardboard Box', 'The Adventure of the Dying Detyective' and 'The Adventure of the Devil's Foot', but is more notable for its elaborate, often grotesque, scenarios than for the quality of its Holmesing. Many of the stories borrow heavily from earlier offerings - 'The Adventure of the Red Circle' has much in common with 'The Adventure of the Dancing Men', including mob connections and secret codes, while 'The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax' borrows The Hound of the Baskervilles device of Holmes purporting to send Watson as his proxy while following in disguise, and like 'The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton' includes Holmes affecting a singularly inelegant - not to say illegal - solution to a problem that resists pure deduction.

And then there is the title story: 'His Last Bow: An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes' sees the great detective called out of bucolic retirement to engage in intelligence work at the dawn of World War I. It's not remotely his forte, and honestly he's a poor spy. For reasons of maintaining tension, it is also told in the third person, which makes for a weird deviation from the established norm.

The same criticisms and more can be applied to The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. This last collection of stories is heavily derivative, most notably in 'The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone'. A reworking of a stage play based on elements of earlier stories, including 'The Empty House', it is told in the third person, and introduces the character of Billy the page, one of a number of informers to appear for the first time in this collection, each referenced as if they were long time regulars. Holmes's expanded network is actually an interesting twist, and it's a shame only to see it here instead of being given a less sudden introduction throughout the canon.

Other oddities include 'The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier' and 'The Adventure of the Lion's Mane', both narrated in the first person by Holmes himself. Sadly, Doyle was not able to create a truly distinct narrative voice for Holmes, and I occasionally found myself surprised that it wasn't Watson narrating. For my money, a truly definitive collection should have flown Hugh Laurie in to be Holmes. 'The Three Garridebs' is a retread of the 'Red-Headed League', and while 'The Sussex Vampire' flirts with the Gothic, 'The Creeping Man' pitches us into science fictional grotesquery with a man transformed into a kind of lycanthrope by injections of monkey glands.

The Josh Kirby cover era. Note Twoflower, depicted with four
eyes, instead of glasses.

All told, His Last Bow and Case-Book are a disappointing conclusion to the canon, and a vindication of the author's belief that he maybe should have left his most famous creation dead. That may sound a little harsh, but these last two collections definitely smack of something written more to make the mortgage than because Doyle had a head full of great ideas.

I'm still running slow on Order of the Phoenix, but I've made a good start on a re-reading/listening to of the Discworld stories of Terry Pratchett, beginning at the very beginning with The Colour of Magic.

The Colour of Magic is a bit of an oddity in the series. It is, as Tolkien might have said, merely an essay in the craft, consisting of a series of loosely connected short parodies: 'The Colour of Magic', 'The Sending of Eight', 'The Lure of the Wyrm' and 'Close to the Edge'. The narrative follows Twoflower, the Disc's first tourist, and his reluctant guide, the failed wizard Rincewind, from the twin cities of Ankh-Morpork, out into the wider Disc(4). 'The Colour of Magic' is a parody of the grubby, street-fantasy of Fritz Lieber, in which Twoflower introduces fire insurance to the venal citizens of the Circle Sea's greatest city and thus inevitably brings about its latest incineration. 'The Sending of Eight' takes our heroes - if you will - into the wilds for a clash between barbarian swordsmen and an ancient, elder god, rather in the vein of Robert E Howard's Conan the Barbarian. 'The Lure of the Wyrm' takes a poke at Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, and features one of the only female characters in the series to legitimately dress like a Boris Valejo cover, while 'Close to the Edge' is a more generic parody and revolves more around the specific nature of the Disc.

Within the text, Harenna the Henna-Haired
Harridan is explicitly described as not dressing
the way she is drawn on the cover.

It is this last part that segues directly into the first 'true' Discworld novel, The Light Fantastic, in which Rincewind and Twoflower are returned to the Disc in order to return a critical piece of magic to the Unseen University in Ankh-Morpork. It introduces the wizards who will come to play a major part in future novels - albeit in a form that is substantially less 'weird, occult hierarchy' and more 'weird, academic hierarchy' than we see here, and not yet including any recurring characters besides Rincewind and the Librarian - features the transformation of the University's Librarian into an orangutan - in a scene so brief that many readers, myself included, assume that the accident was just backstory for a long time - and hints at the future 'phasing out' of the Disc's barbarian hero workforce with the figure of the ancient-yet-spry Cohen the Barbarian, greatest and oldest hero in the world, whose acquisitive desires are now more focused on hot baths and back liniment than on gold and precious jewels.

The Light Fantastic is also the first of many Discworld novels in which the Disc faces total annihilation, in this case from the near-fatal interruption of Great A'Tuin's spawning cycle by arrogant, power-hungry wizards.

The general theme that ninety percent of wizards are, at best, useless and, at worst, a liability, is continued in the last of this month's Discworld novels: Equal Rites. Arguably the first of Pratchett's political novels, rather than examining and parodying fantasy tropes in themselves, it uses those fantasy tropes and their parodies as a lens to examine a contemporary issue, in this case that of gender roles. It also introduces the woman who is, again arguably, the most iconic of all Discworld characters, Granny Esmerelda Weatherwax.

Again, it's made explicit that Granny deplores her lack of
suitably cronish features.

Equal Rites follows Eskarina Smith, the first daughter and eighth child of an eighth child, who thanks to a mix up with a piece of prognostication inherits the staff and powers of a dying wizard, which would normally be reserved for a child with a Y-chromosome. Surprisingly little of the actual narrative involves the jaded institution of the Unseen University gatekeeping wizardry against Esk. Instead, the focus is more on a more general perception of the limit, beginning with Granny Weatherwax, who has some very set ideas about gender roles... just as long as some long-bearded fool isn't trying to tell her what they ought to be.

If The Colour of Magic is an oddity, The Light Fantastic and Equal Rites kick off two of the major subseries in the Discworld canon - the Rincewind series, and the Witches. While the first may be a bit of a test case, the others are surprisingly strong for early works and already show the potential of the Discworld to assume the influential position it now holds in modern culture. They also remind me how much I miss having Terry in the world and new Discworld novels to look forward to(6).

Finally, I read the dead tree edition of Liz Braswell's As Old as Time. This is the third in Disney's Twisted Tales series, but they aren't linked and I like Beauty and the Beast, so I started here. The Twisted Tales are what if stories which reimagine classic Disney tales with, unsurprisingly, a twist. What if Aladdin never found the lamp?(7) What if Sleeping Beauty never woke up?(8) What if Ariel wasn't a self-absorbed pill?(9) And in this instance, what if the Enchantress who cursed the Beast was Belle's mother.

The book begins with a fairly straight reiteration of the opening of Beauty and the Beast, with Gaston pursuing Belle and culminating in the ambush wedding, but interleaved with the courtship of Maurice the inventor and the enchantress Rosalind in a small kingdom where magical beings live alongside normal humans. As the two fall in love and marry, les normales begin to persecute les charmants, and magical individuals begin to disappear. At last, Belle's mother curses the prince in punishment for his parents' tacit support for the pogroms, but is then abducted and held in a terrible prison. Because of their connection, Belle triggers an intensifying of the curse, nearly trapping her and the Beast in the castle, before they return to discover that les charmants were being held captive in the very asylum to which Gaston seeks to condemn Maurice.

This is probably the first Beauty and the Beast story to name drop the Necronomicon, and if nothing else provides an explanation for the bookseller in the animated film(10), as well as offering the same explanation for some of the inconsistencies as the new film (a memory charm.) Belle is reasonably convincing as a conflicted adolescent - she likes books, yearns for adventure, but a part of her still would like to have friends, and as much as his coarser qualities repel her, she is aware that Gaston is a looker - and the Beast's curse draws much more on an emergent animal nature than the mere physical transformation.

It's been a somewhat surprisingly fruitful month, which is nice to see. It's been fun getting back to Pratchett, and I've found some new authors to enjoy as well. It was definitely a stronger field than last month.

(1) Honestly, this would have bothered me less if the overall impression had not been that we were supposed to find her in all ways charming.
(2) And presumably the others, but I haven't read those for budget reasons.
(3) I do love the fact that, as the story progresses, more and more agencies are appointing those caught up in Grant's investigations to carry the can on the cases they'd rather not acknowledge more than is absolutely necessary.
(4) It's telling of the influence of the series that I feel not the slightest need to explain that the Discworld is a flat world, riding on the backs of four giant elephants turning circles on the shell of the star turtle Great A'Tuin(5).
(5) Apparently my geek level lies somewhere between being able to spell A'Tuin from memory (having only heard it on this run through,) and knowing offhand what the elephants are called.
(6) On this run-through, I will be finishing up with Making Money and Raising Steam, the last two that I haven't read yet, as well as revisiting some of the more recent ones - and Jingo - for the first time since the first time.
(7) A Whole New World.
(8) Once Upon a Dream.
(9) Okay, I made this one up. 
(10) He is a charmant watching over Belle and her father.