Reading Roundup - May and June

Another twofer, covering May and June.

Found Horizons
Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri
Okay; you know the drill. 'Ordinary' girl, secret powers, moody sexy man of mystery. So snowflake, such been there.

Except that we haven't; not really.

Mehr is the daughter of two cultures. He father is a noble and official in the in the all-conquering Ambhan Empire, while her mother is one of the Amrithi, a nomadic culture persecuted by the Empire. She practices her mother's customs at the indulgence of her father's authority, putting her at odds with her stepmother, and ultimately bringing her to the attention of the Mystics, the religious fanatics in the service of the Maha, immortal founder of the Empire. Her Amrithi blood gives her rare powers, but also comes with a burden that she does not understand until it is used against her.

The balance of power and frailty is just one of the ways in which Empire of Sand stands apart from the crowd of lesser efforts with which is shares some rudimentary plot beats (The Hundredth Queen, I'm looking at you here.) Others include a romance which builds out of shared horrors, not some instant attraction to a pair of dreamy eyes (her husband Amun is far more complex than just being a love interest, and has somewhat scary black eyes,) and a willingness to sacrifice both life and love for the good of the world, rather than vice versa. Mehr acknowledges her early naivety and struggles to learn from it, and succeeds by understanding other people, rather than by simply denying their position until the world validates her.

In short, Empire of Sand is notable both for its atypical setting - a secondary fantasy world based on Mughal India, rather than the conventional mediaeval European model - and for taking a whole bunch of tired and/or unhealthy tropes and doing them really well.

New Novels
Provenance, by Ann Leckie
Ingray Aughskold is going to show them all. She has a plan. The only problem is that it's a terrible plan, which involves paying a vast sum of money to have a criminal extracted from not-prison-honestly to embarrass her adoptive mother's political rival on their homeworld, Hwae. It's a plan that will ultimately involve her in a murder mystery, a fake identity scandal, a diplomatic incident and an attempted interstellar insurgency, all revolving around Hwae's obsession with vestiges, the physical artefacts associated with historic events.

Set in the same universe and shortly after Leckie's Ancillary trilogy, Provenance departs the single-gender Imperial Radch for the single-world polity of Hwae, where identity hinges on proof of one's family history, favourite children share their parents' name and personhood, and children become adults when they feel ready to choose a grown-up name and a gender (male, female or non-binary(1).) It's a lot less epic than the previous novels, but likable characters, and interesting setting and a bucket of intrigue make for an engaging read nonetheless.

Whereas the singularity of gender identity in the Ancillary series is an intriguing deconstruction that is kind of adjacent to the main story, this is a book all about identity: the self-determined gender of the Hwaeans, their fixation on - slightly questionable - physical artefacts to define their history, and that history to define both their cultural and personal identity, and the personal struggle of the various characters to discover or define who they really are.

Bloody Rose, by Nicholas Eames
Tam Hashford is the daughter of a mercenary and a bard, and longs to have adventures of her own, but her father has decreed that she spend her life at home, where it is safe. But then Fable, the greatest band in the world, come to the tavern where she waits tables, and Tam has a chance to become their bard, and join them on the road for their last tour, and at the end of it, the greatest gig in history; something that will put even the reputation of Golden Gabe into the shade.

The sequel to Kings of the Wyld follows the band led by the titular Bloody Rose, the daughter of Saga's lead singer Gabriel, and that's just the start of the band's daddy issues. In fact, if there's a glaring flaw with the novel it's the focus on Rose's struggle to rise out of Gabe's shadow when the rest of the band's paternal units are a monstrous tyrant, a violent abuser, and the kind of emotional fuck-up who can't get his own head out of his arse. Still, it actually makes sense that these similarly damaged folks would find each other in an emotionally complex world of touring stadium gladiators.

Like Kings of the Wyld, Bloody Rose is probably a better book than it has any right to be, given that it's basically a one-joke concept - a world right out of fantasy RPGs, in which PC parties are effectively rock stars - as Eames puts in the humour and character work to make the whole far more interesting than the sum of its concepts. It has a few inherited diversity issues - one of the leads is a humanoid rabbit, but none are people of colour, because fantasy Europe - but there is at least some gay and bi representation and plenty of complex female characters. Rose may struggle to measure up to her dad, but that's because his life has almost accidentally made him a legend in the golden age of the mercenaries, not because she's a woman.

Deadly Desert, by Marcus Sedgwick
Elf Girl and Raven Boy are on a quest, but the truth is that they aren't very good at it. They need to find the artefact that will save their forest from ultimate evil, but they're not very qualified for heroism, lacking greatly in the fields of courage and badassery, and being a little too loose-lipped when it comes to the question of wishes. Still, they're all there is to prevent the forest becoming a barren waste like the Deadly Desert.

The third part of the Elf Girl and Raven Boy series - first I've read; the joys of library reading - is a fun, light-hearted little adventure with actual stakes. Sedgwick's usual metier is gothic bleakness, but he manages the shift of tone neatly, and the result is weird and sweet and yet with a bit of weight to its events, despite having a villain who never actually puts in an appearance. It also features one of the more self-aware 'three wishes' scenes I've read; good enough I was willing to give a pass to assigning three wishes to a genie (whose traditional bit is 'your wish is my command', which is a whole different scope than the fairy godmother thing.)

Very simple. Good stuff.

The Questing Knights of the Faerie Queen, by Geraldine McCaughrean
In the land of Faerie a queen rules, Gloriana, mistress of a court of chivalry and virtue, who dispatches her knights on quests to reaffirm the rule and role of virtue in the world: George Redcrosse, seeker after holiness; Sir Gunion, in need of temperance; Sir Campbell, in want of friendship; Britomart, chaste champion of true love; Sir Artegall, champion of justice; and Calidore, the courteous. Their stories overlap, with each other and with the quest of Arthur, king of legend and knight of all virtues, in a mosaic of courage, combat and romance.

Prolific children's author McCaughrean presents a lavishly illustrated retelling of Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene is a witty effort, although it does from time to time struggle with the source material, especially in Sir Artegall's misogyny and transphobia(2). The result is a diverting enough read, although if sharing it with childrne, this is on the 'complicated conversations end of the bedtime reading spectrum (see also Peter Pan, below.)

The illustrations by Jason Cockroft are bright and striking, although a little excess of enthusiasm with the rosy cheeks of Gloriana make the Faerie Queen look like she's gone a little heavy on the booze for the past eternity.

The October Man, by Ben Aaronovitch
A mysterious death, potentially supernatural means, and a problem that seems determined not to go away. This looks like a job for Peter Grant, jobbing copper and apprentice wizard... but it isn't. It isn't, because the death occurred in Trier, which puts it square in the bailiwick of Tobias Winter, sole apprentice magician in the German equivalent of the Folly, and his local liaison Vanessa Sommer.

The two main criticisms of The October Man that I've seen are 1) that it's too short, and 2) that the protagonist is a little too like Peter Grant in his dry, sarcastic first person narrative.

Point one is... fair. Novellae(3) by established authors are a bit of a racket in sales terms, but if they tend to be priced to give less bang for your buck in terms of solid page count, they also provide a welcome uptick in the old release schedule without turning your author into a desperate shell of humanity, plagued by the fear of 'going Jordan' and leaving the TV finale as the only one there is(4).

On point two... I actually don't know. This is one area where it makes a huge difference that I was listening to an audiobook. Once I'd recovered from the fact that a Rivers of London story wasn't being read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith(5) that fact in itself transformed the narrative voice for me. It also seemed to me that, alongside a different set of cultural references and hobbies, Toby was... well, a bit less of a dog than Peter, describing the women he meets in more practical terms. While he always respected them, especially in his early outings, Peter kind of had the hots for every woman he met, whereas Toby and Vanessa come across as colleagues with a natural working rapport. I liked that.

Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions - Mission 1: Salvage Trouble, by JS Morin
I don't make a habit of picking up books based on recommendations on the Facebook, because they usually look terrible (she's cool, she's hot, she hunts demons for the Vatican, but she isn't religious or anything(6).) The Complete Black Ocean - or possibly the Complete Galaxy Outlaws, I'm a little confused as to the title of this collection - has something different. Specifically, it's an omnibus with like, eighty-five hours of listening for a credit.

Carl Ramsey is an ex-Navy pilot running a mostly-legal freight and salvage operation on his ship, the Mobius, with his nails-hard ex-Marine ex-wife, a hard-drinking uplifted chimpanzee mechanic, an alien cat-woman who is more apex predator than fanservice, and a beatnik wizard. In this first story they lose their communications tech rescuing a stranded lifepod, and take on board a priestess and her charge, a young boy with secrets. As a result of this, and Carl's need to showboat, they quickly end up on the wrong end of a lot of heavily-armed attention. Fortunately, the crew of the Mobius know how to look after themselves.

The opening of this series has some interesting ideas - FTL travel is literally magical, an old wizard family called Brown uses the traditional middle name The to add grandeur(7), religion is alive and well, but distinctly altered - and some interesting twists on stock character archetypes, but the stock is very visible, and there aren't a lot of surprises for the veteran reader. Since I've got another eighty hours, I'll probably listen to at least the next story, but I'm certainly not going to do it all in a oner.

Audio Plays

Criss-Cross (Big Finish)
Leading WREN Constance Clarke is the leader of a group of hard-working ladies, crunching numbers at Bletchley Park to help break the German Enigma code, the silent muscle behind the male academics; academics like Doctor Smith, with his particular interest in a German agent named Spark.

The first of four Big Finish plays I worked through this month, Criss-Cross revisits familiar territory (actual Bletchley Park being ironically reminiscent of the Highland ersatz Bletchley from The Curse of Fenric, which the Doctor won't actually visit for another lifetime,) and introduces a new companion in the form of Mrs Constance Clarke, who is exactly the kind of no-nonsense travelling companion who complements the Sixth Doctor's excesses.

The plot manages to both celebrate the work of Bletchley and throw some shade on the moral ambivalence of intelligence work in general, with the eponymous Agent Criss-Cross hailed as a hero by various factions while betraying most of them for his one true loyalty to himself. The specific alien threat is a little mechanical, however, serving primarily to give the Doctor his interest in the earthbound events.

Planet of the Rani (Big Finish)
There is a prison, where the worst of the worst are held, and where the worst of the worst of the worst... has been rehabilitated. When Constance finds an email inviting the Doctor to attend the Rani's parole hearing, they discover that the renegade Time Lord is running the show. But that's not what she's really after; what she wants is to go back to the planet she made her own, and the child she created to be the progenitor of a master race under her command, and she doesn't care who gets hurt in the process.

As often happens, especially with a new companion, this run of three plays follows a close chronological sequence, and focuses on the development of the new character. Constance has joined the Doctor to take care of 'personal business,' and with every intention of returning moments after she left, because she ain't no deserter. We also learn that life in wartime has made her harder than many companions, not afraid of a little rough stuff and willing to encourage a more aggressive course of action than the Doctor might prefer.

Siobhan Redmond brings the requisite overwhelming arrogance to her performance as the Second Rani, and her co-option of a thoughtless childhood experiment of the Doctor's plays up the chilling childishness of her unsympathetic ambition.

Shield of the Jotun (Big Finish)
In the not-too-distant future, the Sixth Doctor and Constance stumble upon an ancient Viking burial mound in the central United States, at the heart of a site intended for development of a climate-saving terraforming engine. But there is something terrible buried with the Vikings, a device at the heart of a plan for the Earth to become a frozen paradise for alien colonists fleeing their own doomed planet.

Classic Who this one: Bit of environmental message, aliens bent on world domination, and an earnest attempt at compromise by a Doctor who is doomed to eternally being not angry, just disappointed. Constance has mostly settled into her companion mode for this one, but I expect to see her through plot reappear in the next set of three.

Shield of the Jotun is probably the weakest of these three, with some gorgeous soundscapes but a fairly simplistic motivation for its antagonists. Still, even weak Big Finish tends to be pretty solid stuff.

You are the Doctor and other stories (Big Finish)
The Doctor is teaching Ace to pilot the TARDIS, and it's going about as well as you might expect. She's looking for sun, sea, sand, and presumably not too many personal revelations. What she finds is a trash ship where she and the Doctor are caught up in a choose your own adventure, a murder mystery weekend in time and space, a hotel where they are caught up in a heist, or a revolution, or both, and a space tourist vessel, where they are caught up in an attempted real estate scam. Pure bad luck, or is there a connection?

Somewhat ironically, given my regular lambasting of the single-episode-story approach of nuWho, I've always rather enjoyed the four-story collections in the Big Finish main range, and this is no exception. You get a good spread of stories, and it helps that this uses my favourite classic pairing of the Seventh Doctor(8) and Ace. A good finish to the month's Who.

Alien III, by William Gibson
Alien3 had a famously troubled production, not least due to its reason for existing being 'Aliens made a tonne of money, this franchise is bank,' rather than 'and this is the next story we want to tell in this universe.(9)' Many fans of the franchise and critics of the eventual film - whichever version of it you want to consider canonical - have long hewed to the touchstone that 'the original script' would have been better. Written by Neuromancer scribe Gibson, this script has since seen the light of day as a comic book, and now as Alien III, an Audible-produced audioplay(10), starring Michael Biehn, Lance Hendricksen and the American residents of producer-director Dirk Maggs' contacts list.

Do you remember when Biehn was a hot young talent, fresh from playing the love interest in The Terminator? When his star was rising and he looked set to be the kind of leading man not even the box office poison of Navy SEALS could stop? Those days are long past, and to be honest between this and Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, I don't think he was ever that great at voice acting. Still, an Alien story only calls on him to be gruff, protective of Ripley, and vaguely paternal towards Newt(11), and he can do that.

The script almost immediately eliminates Ripley(12), which probably saved a major bit of recasting, since Sigourney Weaver still has a movie career, and instead follows Hicks as he recovers, sees Ripley and Newt to safety, and then tries to protect as many members of the crew of a science station as he can after Weyland-Yutani once more try to re-engineer the Alien. Meanwhile, an entirely parallel and as-yet largely unmade movie is taking place on a Communist station, and I kind of wanted to hear more of that one, if I'm honest.

It's very short for a full credit, but it helps calm the franchise completist in me that knows I will never be able to get all of the comics.


Re-reads

Peter Pan
All children grow up, except one.

An established classic to which I came late, I remain impressed by the book's awareness of its titular characters glaring flaws, but it's still a highly problematic work; less for the massive of indescribably gruesome violence obliquely referenced throughout the text than for its depiction of Wendy, a character so utterly indoctrinated into the Edwardian patriarchy that motherhood is for her not merely a goal but a sacred purpose. Also, it has the redskins in, which I had to explain to my six year old daughter are not aliens, but instead a racist caricature of native Americans.

Old stuff. It's got challenges.

(1) I totally stole this idea for the elves in my D&D setting, by the by.
(2) TLDR, Amazons upset the order of his world by making him wear a dress, so he murders them all.
(3) Novellas? I don't know; this isn't a hill I'm prepared to die on or anything.
(4) If that's not too specific.
(5) For the record, I don't think he should play the part in the TV series if and when it gets made. His voice is Peter for me, but on screen they need to cast someone younger.
(6) Paraphrased, but not made up. The synopsis is written in first person and uses the phrase 'put on my big girl pants' with no sign of irony.
(7) The Mobius's wizard is thus legally known as Mordecai The Brown, for example.
(8) Don't @ me.
(9) See also the entire Alien vs. Predator subfranchise, which despite a few successes very much a product of 'wouldn't it be profitable cool' thinking.
(10) Audible are getting really into Alien spin-off material; I suppose they must have secured a deal of some sort.
(11) Honestly, I can forgive a lot for not just writing out Newt for the sake of convenience. 
(12) This is not one of those things.

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.

Reading Roundup - August 2017

Nothing on the Reading challenge this month. I've got through a double bill on my Harry Potter re-read/listen, however, with arguably the strongest entries in the series: The Prisoner of Azkaban and The Goblet of Fire.

The Prisoner of Azkaban introduces us to the Night Bus and the Dementors, expands on the backstory linking Professor Snape with Harry's parents and their friends, and presents us with the first concrete example of Dumbledore being wrong about something; he changes his mind when presented with evidence, but he and McGonagall are initially as sure as anyone that Sirius Black was a murderous traitor. This was also the book which first described the Quidditch Cup in a way that makes any kind of sense (see also The Goblet of Fire.) Whereas previously it seemed as though everyone but the Seeker was extraneous, here we meet the idea that accumulated total score is important. Yes, the Snitch usually determines victory in the match, but to win the season the other players need to rack up the score as well.

Probably the most memorable addition to the canon are the monstrous Dementors, who serve as putative protectors, antagonists, and as foreshadowing that not all is well in the wizarding world if law and order is in the hands of such creatures. Similarly, the prejudice against muggle-borns rears its ugly head again, accompanied by anti-werewolf prejudice as represented by Professor Lupin, the first decent Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher in the series.

The Goblet of Fire begins with scenes set at the Quidditch World Cup, which initially provide a light-hearted opening – and show that in professional matches, the Snitch is not the sole arbiter of victory – before seguing into one of the darkest moments in the series. Actually, I say segue, but the fact is that there is an undercurrent of darkness from the first, with Arthur Weasley being one of the only wizards at the Cup who makes any effort to try to hide his family's wizarding nature from the mortals who own and manage the campsites around the pitch, rather than just magicking their way about and occasionally zapping someone's memory rather than inconvenience themselves. Coupled with the bureaucratic bulldog that is Barty Crouch, and the continuing influence and good name of the Malfoys, it is clear that the wizarding world is no more utopian than the muggle one.

And then comes the Death Eater rally, which was just uncomfortably apt to current events. Usually I go to sleep listening to my audio book, but even the dulcet tones of Mr Fry couldn't lull me to slumber around a subject so reminiscent of the real-world horrors of Charlottesville. There are many who say that JK Rowling should stick to writing children's books and stay away from politics, but between the Death Eaters at the world cup, tormenting Muggles for fun, the poisonous Rita Skeeter, and the seemingly affable Cornelius Fudge(1), it is apparent that even when writing children's books she has and always has had a keen pen for a bit of political satire. Even her heroes come in for some schtick, especially in this instance Hermione, whose well-meaning attempt to liberate the Hogwarts House-elves is the rankest patronisation, regardless of her good intentions.

Prisoner and Goblet represent for me the pinnacle of the series, representing a significant maturation over Stone and Chamber, and preceding the bloated misstep of The Order of the Phoenix. Actually, I say that, but I've been surprised by enough as I listened to the first four volumes of the series(2) that I am not going to write off Order just yet. I do find it chilling that the Death Eater rally seems so much less over the top than it did in the faraway past of the year 2000. Also notable in the re-read is just how many characters have much longer careers in the series that I remembered, just because their names didn't register so much in early appearances.

As a side note: Avoid Pottermore if you don't want to lose hours of your life.

The Remnant is the final volume of the Oversight trilogy, although at times it doesn't feel like it. Beginning with a fractured Final Hand, beleaguered on all sides, things rapidly go downhill for London's magic police. Even by the standards of the previous instalments, this is a pretty bleak prospect, and the more interesting as the characters are given the space to wonder if they didn't fuck up a generation past by not giving the whole thing up as a bad job and falling back to lick their wounds and rebuild their numbers. It is unusual in many ways, not least for the primary villain, the man behind the curtain who has motivated the entire plot, dying largely by accident without ever having met most of the protagonists.

Perhaps more impressive is that the series concludes with the apprentices genuinely seeming to get the point better than their mentors, and the ancient order overturned, but not entirely for the worse. Even the sluagh, the trilogy's particular take on the faerie(4), embrace some aspects of change. Moreover, those of our heroes who survive the climactic battle do so as much because of their willingness to show mercy and compassion as because of their skill and strength. All this makes The Remnant an interesting book, although in all honesty it does not feel like the conclusion of a trilogy. There are too many fleshed-out side characters whose stories and actions are left unresolved, in particular those of Caitlin and her American associates, not to mention the somewhat sinister implications of the East Coast Remnant's seemingly cult-like process of 'regulation' and John Dee's designs on both the mirror world and the West. The novel certainly leaves one wanting more, but the palpable threat that there won't be any presented by that 'trilogy' designation makes the degree of that wanting less than comfortable.

Giant Days Volumes 1 & 2 collect issues 1-8 of John Allison's virtual dead tree university opus. Following the academia-bound adventures of Tackleford's Goth princess 'Dark' Esther de Groot, grounded Northampton lass Susan Ptolemy, and the whimsical, homeschooled Daisy Wooton. The three wrestle with illness and romance, struggle with the spectres of boyfriends past, contemplate their sexuality, do battle with the forces of internet-enabled toxic masculinity, and even, on occasion, find time to study. Daisy even finds time to fall victim to a psychological condition which dissolves the boundary between reality and fiction, binging on Friday Night Lights until she becomes a down-home Texas gal, much as Shelley Winters once believed Homicide: Life on the Streets to be the true reality(5).

Giant Days is somehow both bizarre in the best way, and very down to Earth, much like its siblings in the Allison stable. It's a little odd to see that style and humour delivered with a different style, but really no more so than looking at decade-old SGR strips or – heaven help us – Bobbins. I admit I was reluctant to get into it at first, in part because damnit Esther/the Boy was my OTP and then the Giant Days webcomics turned him into a bit of a jerk, but honestly I think it's helped in that regard by providing further context to Esther's life after the Boy, in particular by going to immediately after, whereas Eustace Boyce didn't appear again until he was all growed up into a barely likeable man-child(6), which did little to endear the break up to me as a plot development.

The world might be a very different place if more people
spoke boot.

Finally for the month, the Sherlockian odyssey continues with His Last Bow, ironically the penultimate collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, including the titular oddity in which our hero is brought out of retirement on the eve of the Great War to do battle with a German spymaster. It's an oddity in part because it is narrated in the third person, and in part because it departs the familiar ground of robbery and murder to embroil Holmes in an espionage thriller. It's not really Doyle's forte and, as a result, is far from his strongest work. It's a little reminiscent of The Secret Adversary, Agatha Christie's foray into the world of spies, in that regard, the trappings of a whodunit proving ill-at-ease with the less forthright lexicon of the Great Game.

The collection also includes the two-part 'The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge' and the bait-and-switch of 'The Adventure of the Dying Detective', which has its impact somewhat lessened for its inclusion in a collection which asserts in its preface that Holmes is alive and well in 1917. 'The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax' takes our investigators across Europe for perhaps the first time since 'The Final Problem', and sees Holmes nearly defeated. 'The Adventure of the Devil's Foot' and 'The Adventure of the Red Circle' both see Holmes allowing or excusing acts of murder which is considers justified by survival or retribution. A number of these stories contain elements familiar from earlier entries in the canon, but then could Doyle really have been anticipating, even at the height of Sherlock mania, the kind of scrutiny and longevity that his work has since enjoyed?

(1) Who it turns out is actually much more sinister than I gave him credit for the first time around. Mostly he is ineffectual, but he embodies subconscious privilege with his unthinking deference to blood purity, even while notionally against pureblood supremacy, making him a classic liberal bigot.

(2) And I know enough people who reckon that Jingo(3) isn't that bad at a second glance.

(3) Once I've got through Potter, I might have a bash at revisiting the Discworld series.

(4) Or at least those of the masculine persuasion.

(5) I like that the weirdness is consistent.

(6) He got better.

Reading Roundup - July 2017

2017 ReadingChallenge

Just the one book this month, with Carpentaria actually taking until the 3^rd of August to finish. Both a first look into a culture that is almost completely new to me and a weird parallel to One Hundred Years of Solitude, it blends oral storytelling with magic-realism to great effect.

This month past saw me through three more books in the Complete Sherlock Holmes.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is the third, and probably most well-known, of the Sherlock Holmes novels. Set during the earlier years of the partnership of Holmes and Watson, it was presented during the period of the great detective's death as a means to stave off pressure to return the character full tie. It pits Holmes against an apparently supernatural foe, and features some of the classic moments of the canon, as well as some prize examples of Holmes's dickery. He lies to Watson, and despite knowing who the killer is from the get go, holds off in search of evidence so long that his client is almost mauled to death and a young woman brutally beaten (in as much as the narrative cares after she has been revealed as the killer's – largely unwilling – accomplice; Watson is Judgey McJudgerson on this one.)

Conversely, the final novel – The Valley of Fear – is perhaps the least known and regarded of the four, despite featuring the second and final appearance(1) of Professor Moriarty in the canon(2). Similar in structure to A Study in Scarlet and, like Hound set before the fatal confrontation at the Reichenbach Falls, it swaps Mormons for Masonic trade union mobsters terrorising honest mine owners and opposed by the brave men of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, based loosely on the case of the Molly Maguires. As with many of Doyle's inclusions of contemporary secret societies or fringe groups, the depiction is startlingly black and white to modern eyes, but would have represented the first and all that many of his readers might have heard of such things. It is also of note that the main narrative doesn't even feature an actual murder until the epilogue, and that it features a police detective whose skills almost rival Holmes's own.

Finally, The Return of Sherlock Holmes was Doyle's capitulation to market pressure for more Sherlock Holmes' stories. It begins with 'The Adventure of the Empty House', in which Holmes returns to London and reveals his survival to Watson, before bringing down Moriarty's lieutenant, Colonel Sebastian Moran.

'The Adventure of the Norwood Builder' and 'The Adventure of the Abbey Grange' both feature cases in which the accused client reaches Holmes in a state of dishevelment having been set up, in the one case to take the fall and the other to provide an alibi for murders that are not, for one reason or another, ever actually committed. 'The Adventure of the Dancing Men', on the other hand, belongs to that subset of Holmes stories in which Holmes' preference for intellectual rigour over action arguably results in the death of his client, a category from which 'The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist' escapes by a matter of moments.

'The Adventure of the Priory School' sees Holmes claiming his biggest ever payday when he uncovers a plot to manipulate an aristocrat's will. Also of note, ' The Adventure of the Second Stain' brings Holmes into affairs of national importance, and features a twinkly-eyed Prime Minister of no given name and peculiar perspicacity.

'The Adventure of Black Peter' is a fairly routine terrible history case, ' The Adventure of the Six Napoleons' sees Holmes tangle tangentially with the Mafia, and ' The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez' has a bit of both, as a murder leads to the uncovering of an academic's secret past in a Russian revolutionary brotherhood. Comparatively speaking, 'The Adventure of the Three Students' and 'The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter' are light fare, although the latter's seemingly trivial case of a missing rugby player resolves into a tragic denouement with no criminal component.

Perhaps the most remarkable story in the book is 'The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton', not least for Holmes's singular failure to resolve the case in hand for himself. Tasked with recovering compromising material from the titular master blackmailer, Holmes makes a reckless attempt to strong-arm the villain before finally deciding to break into his house, quite by chance on the night that he happens to be murdered by another party. It's a rare show of fallibility, with Holmes operating out of his comfort zone and stuffing it almost completely.

I've sometimes had mixed success with the work of Cornelia Funke(3), but Ghost Knight is a cracking read. It's nothing all that new – boy sent to boarding school after friction with potential stepfather, threatened by ghosts, makes a friend in the local eccentric, resolves the problem(4) and in so doing finds a way to resolve his personal issues as well – but well told and wonderfully pacey; I finished the short novel in a day.

Rosie Revere, Engineer is a book that I bought for my daughter and which, in her inimitable style, she flatly insisted that she didn't like until I practically forced her to listen to me read it, after which she asked for it every night for a week. It's a simple, but affecting, tale of young Rosie, who hides her desire to invent for fear of being mocked. Then her Great Aunt Rose – who is implied to be the original Rosie the Riveter – assures her that it's great to try and okay to fail, so long as each failure leads to another, better failure on the road to – maybe – success.

For my bedtime listening, I've been going back to the Harry Potter series(5), and have so far got through Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. My biggest takeaway from this – besides the fact that I find it odd that Stephen Fry doesn't give Professor McGonagall any kind of Scots accent, and puts the stress on the second syllable of Malfoy – is that damn those books were dark. I'd sort of blanked out just how horrid the Dursleys are, and had forgotten that even in book one we have Voldemort suckling on unicorn blood while living parasitically in the body of another human being. Then book two has children being stalked by an unseen monster, giant spiders trying to eat the protagonists, and a young girl's soul being consumed by a possessed book.

Never mind bringing a generation to reading, I'm amazed it didn't bring more of them to therapy.

These first two books are what Tolkien might have called essays in the craft, with Rowling not yet the accomplished writer she ended up. As a result the prose is a little hit and miss, but overall they hold their own among the crowded field of children's fiction, even if they aren't quite up to the standards later set by their successors.

My actual copy of this is as old as dirt and
looks like the opening credits of The Time
Tunnel.

Finally this month, A Wrinkle in Time was another re-read, and a slightly disappointing one. The opening volume of Madelaine l'Engle's Time quar/quintet is chock full of interesting ideas, but in retrospect the dialogue is somewhat stilted and the 'love conquers all' finale is a little bit pat in a novel of cosmic good and evil. Or perhaps it's the only ending that makes any sense?

Still, it's got a lot going for it and a strongly humanist theme(6) that I approve of, and I especially like that the young protagonist Meg learns to recognise that her father is not omnipotent – and that that's okay – as well as that her 'flaws' – the 'unladylike' traits of anger and stubbornness – do not have to be weaknesses.

(1) Well, he's never 'on screen', as it were, but his actions directly affect events, rather than simply being referenced at a distance.

(2) An appearance which, notably, contradicts some of the details of 'The Final Problem' by implying that Watson and others of Holmes's associates knew of his pursuit of the Professor.

(3) Her more YA-oriented fare, such as the Inkheart trilogy and the Reckless series have generally gone down better than those aimed at younger readers.

(4) In this case by undertaking an apprenticeship with a long-dead knight.

(5) I wasn't quite an early adopter, but started reading the series around the publication of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, so I beat the absolute Pottermania that kicked in for the fourth book.

(6) The series doesn't get really Christian for a while.

2017 Challenge - Trainspotting

Book 6 (March, Mad People)

Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh (read by Tam Dean Lin)

Reason for Reading: Set primarily in Leith before its late-80s revival, Trainspotting is as alien to me as anything I've yet approached, and the madness which marks it for March reading (and, yes, I actually read it in late April,) relates to heroin addiction, which is also something alien to me.

The striking thing about comparing novels that have achieved classic status to those which have not and likely will not is the language. Your run of the mill fantasy epics, milporn SF and airport potboilers, even the best of them, use language as a simple medium, a means to convey meaning from the author to the reader, and yes, that's what language is, but... But a great book doesn't just do that; a great book contains language that both conveys meaning and is aesthetically striking in its own right, and this is true no less of the profanity laden, idomatic invective of Trainspotting than of the lyrical flow of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel contains more uses of the c-word than any, probably every other book I've ever read, but it is never gratuitous, even when it is. If that makes any sense.

Trainspotting is an angry, hard-to-like book about angry, hard-to-like people being angry and hard to like. It's tough going, but it's supposed to be, and it is the triumph of the novel that even if you don't like its various protagonists, you end up kind of getting them. The shifting narrative voice provides multiple perspectives on each character: Of particular note is the tension between self-styled idealist Renton and self-styled man of the world Sick Boy, and the juxtaposition between Spud's rambling speech and more coherent narrative voice. Franco Begbie is a monster for the ages, and Renton's musings on the group's communal creation of the legend of Begbie the hard man, the stand up mate, is one of the most interesting threads of the book.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted, and it's not a book to be approached casually, especially by those not familiar with the Scots - and specifically Leith - vernacular. I went with an audio book, which probably helped, but it still had to go off when I was tired (and of course could not be listened to in bed for fear that my daughter would wake up, wonder in and start calling people doss c&*$s.) Leith-born actor and professional reader of Irvine Welsh novels Tam Dean Burn runs around every conceivable variation of the Leith accent in the course of the book, infecting the listener's inner monologue with the best variation it can manage - in my case, not very good - and an urge to call people radge bastards. That alone speaks to the power of language.

Did I like it? No, but then it's not a book that wants to be liked. It's a very good book, possibly a great book, but you wouldn't want to hang out with it all the time.

Reading Roundup - March 2017

2017 Reading Challenge

Once more I've hit my two book target, so I'm a steady one book behind. I may rethink the Big French Summer idea. In March I wrapped up Gothic with White is for Witching and began Mad People with The Bell Jar, which proved to fall alarmingly within my existing headspace. Still no poetry.

I kicked off Audible's Definitive Sherlock Holmes collection, written of course by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and all excellently read and foreworded by national treasure and fellow Old Queen(1), Stephen Fry. It’s fascinating coming back to the Holmes canon as an adult, steeped in the various western traditions of detective fiction, because as detective fiction they are actually a little unsatisfying. It’s the character who is fascinating; his deductions appear more in the manner of a parlour trick, or perhaps the half-technobabbled reasonings of a CSI CSI. A substantial chunk of many of the narratives – especially the first two novels – is given over to the criminal’s own account of their life, and in this too the stories are notable: That a good half of the perpetrators are as sympathetic as their victims, if not more so.

Naturally, the collection begins with A Study in Scarlet, the first of the Holmes novels. This initial foray into the world of the great detective serves to highlight some of the limitations of the formula, especially when it comes to the longer stories, with almost half of the narrative given over to Jefferson Hope's story, and a number of Holmes' deductions based on information not made available to the reader (a complaint which Doyle later owns, with Holmes making the same criticism to Watson, albeit from his perspective of wishing a clear elucidation of his methods.) The story also hinges on a perception of the Mormon faith which buys into pretty much every ill its early detractors thought of it.

A Study in Scarlet is followed by The Sign of the Four, which wraps up the story of Holmes and Watson with the latter going off to get married after what is very clearly only their second case together, whatever later entries may say. Conan Doyle is on firmer ground with the Indian mutiny than the founding of Salt Lake City, but while his Indian characters are very well-drawn for the time, dear lord but the Andaman pygmy Tonga is something else entirely, a near-bestial creature with the same alien ugliness Conan Doyle ascribed to dinosaurs in The Lost World.

This is followed by The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the first of the short story collections, including such classics as 'A Scandal in Bohemia', 'The Red-Headed League', 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band' and 'The Adventure of the Copper Beeches'. Even at this stage in the proceedings, a certain repetition was apparent in the stories. The Speckled Band and 'A Case of Identity' both feature women grievously misused by stepfathers to control their fortunes, with the latter featuring one of the cruellest devices in the canon, while 'The Five Orange Pips' is notable for featuring the Ku Klux Klan in much the same role as the Mormons in A Study in Scarlet, as a ruthless secret society employing mysterious, inescapable assassins to punish deserters.

'The Boscombe Valley Mystery' is one of the stories in which the conceit of the narrative most conflicts with the narrative itself. It refers to events which Holmes conspired to conceal, as the guilty party was dying and the innocent not at threat, which feels odd given that Watson is apparently publishing this well within the lifetime of most of those involved. It is especially noteworthy as on several other occasions he refers to matters that he cannot discuss, and the untimely death of Helen Stoner freeing him to speak of the events of the Speckled Band.

'The Man with the Twisted Lip', 'The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle' and 'The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor' are lighter affairs, with no murder involved in any of the cases. 'The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb' is the first of a number of stories in which Holmes addresses a problem before ever visiting the scene (arguably; he never leaves London in 'The Five Orange Pips' either, but he had planned to.) It is also referred to as one of only two which Watson brought to his attention, although this is soon overturned in the next collection, and features a gang of villains who get away while Holmes is rallying the official force. This is another feature we will see again.

Finally, 'The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet' is notable for having a female villain (‘The Engineer’s Thumb’ has a female member of the gang, but she breaks ranks to aid the victim.) As is often the case with such characters in the Holmes canon, she gets away scot free, but with predictions of future unhappiness as her comeuppance.

I also managed to clear up The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes this month, which means everything up to the death of Sherlock Holmes is covered. As The Adventures begins with the unequivocal classic ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ and “the Woman”, so The Memoirs opens with ‘Silver Blaze’; perhaps a less known story overall, but featuring the original curious incident of the dog in the night time. ‘The Yellow Face’ has a similar deal to ‘The Noble Bachelor’, with a young widow and a second marriage, although here it is a half-black child whose appearance disrupts the happy routine, and I can’t believe that it wasn’t pretty progressive that not only Holmes and Watson but the husband in the case accept the child completely. Similarly, ‘The Stock-Broker’s Clerk’ treads similar, but not identical, ground to ‘The Red-Headed League’, with a gang providing a too-good-to-be-true job as a means of getting someone out of the way for a time.

‘The “Gloria Scott”’ and ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ treat of early cases. The first is notable for the solution being entirely provided by the written narrative of the victim rather than by any deduction of Holmes’, while the latter once more features a female villain who vanishes into the distance to a presumed life of doubt and fear. ‘The Adventure of the Reigate Squire’ pits Holmes against the country set, while another classic, ‘The Crooked Man’ returns to familiar territory with an old offence from India leading to a tragic ending. ‘The Resident Patient’ and ‘The Greek Interpreter’ each feature a puzzle that Holmes successfully solves, but too late to save a life, and the lack of sympathy for the dead man in the latter story is quite shocking. In both cases, the criminal gang involved vanishes into the wind; by this point it is clear that Conan Doyle has a limited interest in arrest and trial scenes.

‘The Naval Treaty’ sees Holmes act for the good of Queen and Country, and his client, and features one of the strongest puzzles in the canon to this point, with pretty much every step of the deduction available for the reader to follow. Finally, in this collection, Fry brings the vital catch in the voice to the closing lines of ‘The Final Problem’, as Holmes gives his life – or so it seems – to end the career of the Napoleon of Crime, Professor Moriarty. Given that it recounts the crowning glory of his career as a detective, ‘The Final Problem’ is notable for not giving any details of the chain of reasoning which led Holmes to his nemesis.

In between chapters of Holmes, I caught a couple of short stories by Neil Gaiman which follow the protagonist of American Gods, Baldur ‘Shadow’ Moon. ‘The Monarch of the Glen’ sees our hero in Scotland on a roundabout return route from Norway, walking the walks and seeing the sights, when he is offered a lucrative job acting as bouncer for a bunch of posh folks from England having a party in a local manse. The locals are an odd bunch and Shadow is having weird dreams, but he chooses to take the job, against the advice of the enigmatic barmaid Jenny and finds himself caught up in an ancient struggle between men and monsters, with no-one to say truly which is worse. Then ‘Black Dog’ brings him to England, and a rural couple with a secret to keep.

The two shorts have many similarities: The rural settings, the old traditions, and of course Shadow’s relentless bad luck with women. Critically, Gaiman captures the difference of feeling between Britain and America. Assuming by its popularity there that his depiction of the roadside faith of America is accurate, he does the same for British folk beliefs, especially those in ‘Black Dog’, practiced slightly furtively by unassuming folk, almost more as habit than anything else. As always, Gaiman as author and reader is an excellent storyteller and the stories are easy to listen to several times over.

The last book for this month is Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, which is one I’d been meaning to read for a while. This was the audiobook, but it’ read by Peter S. Beagle himself. As in the Rankin Bass adaptation, it tells the story of a nameless, ageless unicorn who realises that she is the only one of her kind left in the world. She goes in search of the others and learns that a cruel king has imprisoned them all with the aid of a supernatural bull, and with the assistance of an erratic wizard, a cynical romantic and a larval hero she clashes with the King for the fate of magic and her people. In fact, one of the things that really strikes me about the book is just how faithful the animated adaptation (screenwritten by Beagle) actually was. The main difference is Beagle’s cheerfully anachronistic narrative language. Reminiscent of TH White, it takes the novel’s setting from mediaeval fantasy to the same sort of timeless Neverland as The Once and Future King.

Within this Neverland, the story of The Last Unicorn is one of a world of failing wonder. The disappearance of the unicorns leaves a world that, for all its dragons and ogres and heroes, lacks a certain sparkle. Heroing is a job; the tropes of romance are performed in a perfunctory fashion. It’s fantasy as mundanity, and beautifully done; the book is a classic for a reason.

(1) I maintain that this is the correct term for an alumnus of Queens' College.