Reading Roundup - September 2018

The village of Kilsgard expects little of Alva, but she has plans beyond being just another Viking wife. With the aid of her tracker wolf Fen, she aims to become an investigator, seeking out truth like her uncle Magnus. When strangers come to the village, bearing tales of a hidden treasure, and tokens which link them to her father – long absent a-viking – Alva sees her chance to prove her worth. The village is in turmoil, however, as mystery disappearances and assaults ramp up the tension and patience with Magnus’ methods wears rapidly thin.

Riddle of the Runes is written for much younger readers than I and makes a decent fist of authentic-ish pre-Christian Norse adventure (although points off for Lindisfarne; the Lindisfarne raids are such a cliché in this genre.) Alva is an appealing lead, and while I’m not sure that Magnus’s rationality over superstition, CSI Oseberg schtick is exactly legit, or that 'the real treasure was the family bond we reignited along the way' is a conclusion that would have appealed to anyone at the turn of the 9th century, it all makes for a fun mystery with a feelgood ending. Like The Apprentice Witch and A Witch Alone last month, its simplicity doesn't really transfer its appeal out of its target readership well, but I can see its virtues even if I don't entirely appreciate them.

Now adapted for TV.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any classic novel in possession of a substantial and enduring readership must be in need of a sequel. In Death Comes to Pemberley, PD James continues the narrative of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with a murder mystery, as George Wickham finds himself accused of the murder of his friend, Captain Denny, in the woods of the Pemberley estate; and of course it would be social death for the Darcys if their brother-in-law were to beat a man to death on their property. Clearly, there is no alternative but for Elizabeth to cast propriety to the winds and exercise her quick wits in the investigation of the crime.

Or, you know, Darcy could mope around trying to get his testimony perfect until an eleventh-hour twist resolves the case without the direct involvement of any of the main characters.

Okay, so… I may have spoiled this one for myself, because I might have got more out of it if I hadn’t been waiting for Lizzy Bennett, PI to kick off, because this book is not Lizzy Bennett, PI. It’s not anyone, PI, and while I suspect that I would not do well if I got into it about the definition with PD James, it isn’t what I would consider much of a murder mystery. People are really concerned about the social implications of Wickham killing someone in the woods or analysing their own motivations in the original novel(1), but none of our viewpoint characters really give a flying fuck what actually happened, so long as the Darcy name isn’t dragged through the mud.

So, yeah; didn’t get on with this one; probably my fault, at least in part, but it’s also just not as much fun as Austen’s original writing.

The Queen is Dead! Long Live the King! 

In the wake of Victoria’s assassination (in Anno Dracula,) the lord of the undead has tightened his iron grasp on Britain. Penelope Churchward is assigned to coordinate the Regent’s jubilee celebrations, while Kate Reed plots insurrection as part of the anarchist Council of Days; the Lord of Strange Deaths and his criminal council plan to use the great occasion to their own advantage, and the gender politics of the post-Victorian age are about to take a shoeing.

Anno Dracula 1895: Seven Days in Mayhem is a coda to Anno Dracula in comic book form, drawing on – among so many other sources, and in addition to the vast panoply of the Dracula extended canon and other fictional and factual individuals featured in the original – The Man Who Was Thursday (see below.) The matter of the Fu Manchu novels of Sax Rohmer also gets an increased focus(2). While for the most part vampires are depicted as a different kind of human, Newman resists the urge to humanise Dracula himself, depicting him as an inhumanly vast presence, both here and in the second full novel in the sequence, The Bloody Red Baron.

At the height of the Great War, Dracula – Supreme Commander of the Central Powers and architect of the Kaiser’s industrialised battle strategy – has created JG1, a unit of the greatest flying aces in Germany, led by the ‘Red Battle Flyer’, Manfred von Richthofen. Charles Beauregard’s protégé, Edwin Winthrop, joins the elite allied flyers of Condor Squadron (including Archie Ball, Captain Midnight and Biggles) to counter JG1’s success, while Kate Reed pursues a dual calling with the VAD and the independent press. As control of allied intelligence slips from the hands of the dwindling Diogenes Club and into the control of Lord Ruthven’s vampire cabinet, a desperate gambit is launched to blunt the expected big push, but is Dracula’s plan really what it seems?

The Bloody Red Baron was basically the novel that cemented Anno Dracula as a franchise. It’s a strong entry, with its mix of espionage, high-flying heroics, vampire spies and the mud and blood hell of war, and extends the alternate history of Anno Dracula forward to consider the implications of vampires in a global conflict (or at least in the European theatre of said war.) It’s interesting that it’s Dracula, in this story – who, in his own book, was characterised as utterly trapped in his traditional modus operandi of conflict – who sees the way the wind is blowing and takes the lead in adapting to a more modern style of warfare, but who also creates too great a cult of personality around himself. It’s at this point in the sequence that I kind of fell in love with Kate Reed, and it still bothers me this time around that she doesn’t have a huge amount of agency, acting more as an observer – aptly enough – and enabler for other characters, although she is definitely stronger and more defined than in Anno Dracula, and gets a very strong outing in Seven Days in Mayhem.

My re-reading with Arya has now reached Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and I can clearly state that she is well into Hagrid’s Care of Magical Creatures lessons, because we read the chapter ‘Teacups and Talons’ like a dozen times. Since starting The Philosopher’s Stone the improvement in her listening comprehension and focus is just staggering, and part of that is her involvement in the characters and story. She's currently - as we head into Goblet of Fire - very sad that Scabbers is no longer present, as she loved 'the little mousey', and despite my assurances that Scabbers was, in fact, a rat in every respect. She also misses Professor Lupin, so Hallows is going to be a rough ride.

We followed that up with the Alice books: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which Arya really enjoyed. I think it helped that she first hit Wonderland in pop-up book form (a rather wonderful pop-up book, with an abridged version of the original text.) Both her big, full-colour hardbacks and the pop-up use the original, Sir John Tenniel illustrations, which makes me happy. There's a current trend to re-illustrating the text which sometimes feels like a cheap way to get your own pictures on the shelf, although I think there's also a Chris Riddell version, which I really can't bring myself to criticise.

Speaking of Chris Riddell, as I was, while we were in the FLBS to pick up a book for Arya, I grabbed a signed, first edition copy of Once Upon a Wild Wood.

Little Green Rain Cape is out for a walk in the woods. Practical and sensible, she avoids the dangers of the woods, and does her best to help out the people she meets - like a lost harp, a lonely beast, and a group of dwarfs destined to be a witch's dinner - on the way to Rapunzel's party. Short, simply told and gorgeously illustrated (of course), Once Upon a Wild Wood is a delightful little gem. Arya is also very taken with it, and after initially resisting the suggestion of reading this instead of The Fairytale Hair-Dresser and Repunzel, her own choice of book on the same outing, seems determined to persuade me to give the book to her. I'm resisting, because she needs to understand that Mummy and Daddies get to have their own stuff, although the two taken together cost less than either of the pop-up books - the Alice in Wonderland and a Paddington 2 tie-in with pop up London landmarks - she has previously bought as a reward for doing her bedtime routine quickly and well.

Re-reading for myself, I’ve finished off Reaper Man and Moving Pictures in my Discworld re-read, which I’m fairly sure puts me way off the official order.

In Reaper Man, Death has his first run in with the Auditors, the faceless bureaucrats who don’t so much run the universe as manage reality in such a way as to ensure its essential function at the cost of draining every last speck of joy or imagination from it. It continues the narrative begun in Mort, in which Death’s growing fascination with life impairs his ability to fulfil his cosmic purpose, and begins to ask the question ‘is that a bad thing?’ Mort put the proposition that existence is without inherent fairness. ‘THERE’S NO JUSTICE,’ Death tells his apprentice, ‘THERE’S JUST ME(3).’ Reaper Man softens this somewhat, as Death ultimately challenges the demand that he do his job without caring for the lives he ushers to their end by asking: ‘WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?’  It’s a key instalment in Pratchett’s ongoing examination of the fundamental importance of stories and myths to the human condition.

Moving Pictures, on the other hand, uses the lens of the Discworld to examine the nature of fame, and in particular of that evergreen topic: the Hollywood studio system of the 1950s. Okay, I kid, but in fact, he takes the trappings of the studio system and the accelerated lifecycle of any development in the Discworld and uses them to muse more generally on fame and the way that it changes people (represented here as the extradimensional force of ‘Holy Wood dreams.’) The focus on the one-shot characters Victor Tugelbend and Ginger Withel makes me miss Death. They’re not bad characters, but at this point in the series I guess I’ve become accustomed to recurring characters; not just Death, but the Watch and the now permanent faculty of the Unseen University (which has itself shifted from a cutthroat occult order to a more mundane academic establishment, where the backbiting is largely metaphorical.)

I’m in Pratchett’s golden period now. His early work was grounded mostly in parody, but by this point in his writing he’s moved into producing some of the strongest satire of the turn of the century. His female characters still aren’t great – with the exception of the witches, who aren’t in these novels – but he’s come on leaps and bounds from The Colour of Magic, and I’m now onto Soul Music, and another of the great women of the Discworld.

Off the back of Seven Days in Mayhem, I reread The Man Who Was Thursday. One of GK Chesterton’s weirder efforts, subtitled ‘a Nightmare’, it follows the bizarre adventures of a detective infiltrating the ‘supreme anarchists’ council for Europe.’ The seven members of the Council are known by the names of the days of the week; philosophical detective Gabriel Syme is Thursday, and the leader of the Council is the monumental individual known only as Sunday. The Man Who Was Thursday is a strange tale, a meandering narrative with near-constant philosophical digressions, and it’s a lot of fun.

And finally, I picked up an electronic version of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, which I only really knew from the Big Finish audio adaptation featuring a then largely unknown actor named David Tennant. Luther Arkwright first appeared in mid-70s underground comics, and this graphic novel is one of the most 70s things to come out of the 1970s. Psychedelic, experimental, graphically violent and in places explicitly sexual, its narrative combines new age religion, eastern mysticism, transhumanism and multiversal science fiction in a manner perhaps most closely paralleled in the work of Michael Moorcock. The first half switches back and forward in time(4) as it establishes the threat of the extradimensional Disruptors and the Firefrost opal, before switching to a more linear structure. The resulting narrative is an epic, philosophical adventure that epitomises its time and place, for good and for bad.

Because it’s not all good. There is a certain amount of orientalism in the co-option of Eastern religion and mythology. The story is full of horrible characters on all sides, with a hell of a lot of incidental rape(5) and child-abuse-as-backstory. There’s a woman in the comic who is raped to death to prove the wickedness of the villain, and whose face is never shown. On the other hand, the lead female character is a polyamorous bisexual badass, who is motivated by anger at her country’s culture of rape, but doesn’t have rape as a personal part of her backstory.

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright is an important milestone in British comics history, but the trappings of its era are a mixed bag. It’s well worth reading, but not one I’m likely to go back to.

(1) Seriously, there’s a whole chapter and a number of other sections in which Elizabeth and Darcy talk about what they were thinking during their courtship, because apparently Pride and Prejudice was just begging to be fixed.

(2) Although the man himself is unnamed for legal reasons.

(3) And seriously, I didn’t get this for, like, a decade, until I heard Mort’s version (there’s just us,) in a stage play.

(4) Interestingly, I’m not sure that the audio adaptation actually got the timelines right.