The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle

It is the height and heart of the Industrial Revolution, Victorian London, a city of iron and steam. Horatio Lyle, inventor, detective, special constable and unwilling dog lover, is the embodiment of the brave new world, and as such is called in by Lord Lincoln, aide to Her Majesty herself, when a cultural treasure is stolen. Aided by Thomas, a young gentleman with a connection to the case, and Tess, a girl whom he caught breaking into his house, and Tate, the canine who long ago insinuated himself into his home, Lyle will find his scientific rationality tested by confrontations with things that man was, perhaps, not strictly supposed to wot of.

A Victorian urban fantasy with elements of steampunk in Lyle's advanced use of roughly contemporary science, The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle certainly features and unusual cast of characters. Lyle is a skilled observer and inventor, but is physically weak and afraid of heights, while his more robust young cohorts lack social polish and education in the one case and experience of the real world in the other. The plot is a pretty breakneck affair, and there were points where I could have stood a bit of a breather, but I certainly never found it dragging.

Stardust

"There was once a young man who wished to gain his heart's desire."

When a novel opens with the kind of line that you just know is going to appear at the top of just about every review or description written of it, you know that you have something special. So begins this review, and so begins the tale of Tristran Thorn in Neil Gaiman's Stardust. It seems almost disingenuous to go into the details of a book that is, if not universally acclaimed, then certainly pretty well loved and certainly known by most of the people likely to be reading this blog. The book has been out for years and I own three copies (original UK paperback, Charles Vess illustrated paperback and now Kindle,) so it's not exactly new to me, but there's a virtue all its own to a book you can reread time and again.

The most important, and perhaps most controversial thing I have to say about the book is that I like it better than the film. I like the low key, bittersweet ending and the fact that the girl Tristran runs off to fetch a star for isn't a worthless, preening snob. I adore the way the book wraps magic around old tales and rhymes far more than the film's Babylon Candle, and the inextricable blending of love and loss speaks to me in a way that the films genuine ever-after never has done.

But then I'm the kind of guy who likes the original ending of The Little Mermaid better, although truth to tell my own preferred version is the one where she shivs the prince for being a dick ('Oh, hey there girl who winces with every step; dance for me.')

Stardust. If you're only ever going to like one affectionate reconstruction of the fairy tale milieu, this will be the one. If you're going to like more of them, you've probably already read this.

Fire & Chasm

There are two great, primal forces in the world. The Fire is the warmth of creation, the Chasm the abyss of unmaking. All humans are given a gift by the fire, a singular magical ability that they can employ at will, unless they sacrifice that gift for the power of the many spells that can be drawn from the chasm. The Church worships the Fire, the Wizards' Guild studies the Chasm. The two clash politically all the time, but Az is the Church's weapon in a more secret war. Able to control the intoxicating power of obsidian - where fire and chasm meet - he is an assassin, a wizard killer, and an enigma even to himself.

Fire & Chasm is a fairly short YA fantasy novel with a decent bit of world building. Unfortunately, it has two major problems:

First, Az spends a lot of time bemoaning his lot, although overall he comes through lightly given how many people he has killed during the course of the narrative, including about a dozen wizards who were just trying to stop him breaking into their house in a fugue state. I guess we're supposed to forgive him because of the fugue and the horrors done to him, but in all seriousness these deaths are basically never mentioned except for their impact on the political landscape. After the immediate aftermath, they seem to prey on precisely nobody's conscience, ever. The other main characters are the wizard who made him this way, the wizard's daughter Leora, whose romance with Az has little conflict even when his fugues are revealed to her, and a cartoonishly diabolical High Priest.

The second problem is that the plot wants to be political, but the characters essentially exist within a bubble. The wider ramifications of their actions are reported, but never shown, and more importantly involve characters that we are not allowed to know and thus have little reason to care about. We never see anything of the political sphere besides the High Priest, who is a hands-on kind of guy and is never seen at court or engaged in subtle diplomacy and manoeuvring, just setting things on fire and torturing Az for shiggles.

Fire & Chasm isn't terrible, but an unengaging protagonist and an emphasis away from what feels like the more involving part of the plot mean that it fails to distinguish itself from the crowd.

The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

In a post-national world of primarily economic tribes, a young tribeless girl named Nell receives a stolen book as a gift. This book, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is in fact a dazzling work of nanotechnology which guides Nell's education as she lives through a period of upheaval in China and its artificial neighbour, the manufactured islands of New Chusan. The book was created by an engineer named John Hackworth, and as Nell's star rises so his falters, setting him on a ponderous quest to find a man called the Alchemist.

Like many of Neal Stephenson's books, The Diamond Age - which I got as an audio book, read by Jennifer Wiltsie, is less a single narrative and more a collection of stories building towards a conceptual conclusion. It is as much about the nanotechnology of their world and the potential revolution embodied in the development of a 'seed' which would permit unmonitored nanotechnological use as it is about Nell and John, and much more about the potential political ramifications of such technologies than their technical specifics. It has many more discussions of cultural and philosophical mores than of emotions, and in many places reads more like a history than a novel. Consequently, it is always more interesting than involving.

As with Snow Crash, I was struck by the 90sness of Stephenson's cultural portrayals, in particular a China more regressing into the 19th century than emerging from Communism, and a slightly piecemeal depiction of Confucianism. I don't think it can be called racism, especially given that the same regressive tendency is depicted in the Anglo-American Neo-Victorians; it is more that Stephenson appears to see a return to pre-information age social structures as a natural consequence of the collapse of the technologies which made them obsolete.

Wiltsie's reading is good. Many audiobook readings suffer from a coolness necessitated by maintaining a clear reading voice, but the nature of this book means that wild emotionality would be out of place anyway. For me, the decision to pronounce primer as 'primmer' was distracting, but that's personal.

The Last Changeling

There has always been a secret history, existing alongside that which everyone knows. There have always been the fairies, wreathed in mystery and hidden from sight, dark and malevolent. Now, something has changed, and the 'metahominids' of Britain are coming in from the country, flowing like foxes into the city. What has brought this on, and where will this change of habit lead? For the man known as D and his Department, a group so secret that even their own government doesn't really know what they do, this is not merely a mystery; it is a prelude to war.

The Last Changeling is a tale of fairies, the dark and terrible sort that people used to warn their children about in the days before the otherworld became cute. It is also a kind of social satire, with D9 - the government taskforce which monitors and contains fairy activity - hampered by swingeing budget cuts, and the fae themselves cast as immigrants from the dying countryside.

The novel has an interesting set-up, but feels like too much world-building and not enough narrative. The flashbacks into the secret history tie too obscurely to the main thrust and theme of the story, and the characters are barely given room to breathe. For a narrative built around a crux of betrayal, this is a serious weakness, as it is hard to feel the necessary outrage, particularly as so many of the key characters do not even find out who the traitor is until the epilogue.

This is essentially an establishing narrative given the status of self-contained novel, and suffers from a lack of development. For my money, it could have stood to be half as long again with a lot more character building; a flashback to each main character's first encounter with the fae would have gone a long way towards illuminating their personality with more show and less tell.

Also, as a personal niggle, it felt odd that the fairies were vulnerable to silver, rather than cold iron.

The Invisible Library

Irene is an agent of the Library, a literary superspy trained to work undercover in a multitude of worlds to retrieve unique books for the Library's collection. Assigned a new apprentice, Kai, and a new assignment, she is startled to find that the world she is to retrieve an 1812 Grimm manuscript from is riddled with chaos, the force which opposes the Library's philosophy; hardly the right place to break in a new Librarian. Before long, Irene has made a local ally in amateur sleuth Vale, but is faced by a rival Librarian and the Library's near-legendary renegade operative, Alberich.

The Invisible Library is the first book in a series, and the sense of worldbuilding is palpable. Lapsing occasionally into tell-not-show, overall the nature of the Library is explored organically and - deliberately - incompletely. This first volume establishes that it exists between dimensions, has apparently sole access to the fundamental Language of creation, and secures its links to the many worlds of the multiverse by means of the books in its collection. Irene states that its purpose is 'to protect books', but there are hints that there is more to it than that.

Aside from anything else, the Language - and thus the Library - is the intrinsic enemy of Chaos, a force which manifests in the form of supernatural entities and a creep from physical laws to those of narrative. This is one of the most intriguing aspects of the story, that the Library is all about books and not about stories (although clearly the Librarians themselves, all of whom take literary or folkloric pseudonyms, are as romantic as anyone.)

Overall, I enjoyed The Invisible Library, although it did seem odd that a book so hung up on text and grammar should harbour quite such a grudge against run-on sentences. Cogman rattles out the prose in a machine gun stutter of simple sentences, reminiscent of the staccato stylings of Dashiel Hammett and suggestive of some early trauma involving semicolons. Other than this, my only real criticism is that neither Kai nor Vale ever seemed significantly dangerous or untrustworthy, even when the narrative was concerned with whom, if anyone, Irene could trust.

A Darker Shade of Magic

This is a much better cover than the Kindle image,
although there's something disingenuous about
adding 'a novel' to your cover these days.

There are four Londons. Red London lies at the heart of a world filled with magic and wonder. White London is the centre of a starving world, where power-hungry sorcerers wrestle the vestiges of magic wherever they may be found. Grey London has no magic, just a mad king named George and an empire of iron and steam. And Black London went rotten with wild magic and had to be locked away for all time. Only a few people possess the power to move between the worlds. Kell is one, a servant of the Red Throne; Holland, servant of the White is another. As far as they know, they are the last. Delilah Bard is just a thief in Grey London, but when Kell is tricked into throwing the balance of the worlds out of equilibrium, she may have a key role to play in setting things right.

A Darker Shade of Magic is a crossworlds fantasy about magic, deception and crossdressing wannabe pirates. It has a neat bit of worldbuilding and some interesting ideas, but ultimately feels like an incomplete part of a larger whole (as perhaps indeed it is*,) and seems to fail to break out of some of its more conventional moulds.

Red London is depicted as the prime world, the best of Londons. It is hinted that there are flaws in its apparent perfection, that not all are happy in this seeming-Utopia, but the unmitigated vileness of the Dane twins, gleefully sadistic rulers of White London and its empire of bones, serves to mask the flaws. Likewise, when Holland is controlled by a bolt of magic through his soul, it papers over the fact that Kell appears to have been taken from his family as a child and 'claimed' by the royal family of Red London, an issue that is raised, but never resolved. The threat of rogue magic rears up in various places, but particularly in Grey London never really materialises into anything but a red herring.

Delilah Bard skirts a number of very irritating tropes without ever falling into them, but her story feels unfinished. It is strongly hinted that she is a third Traveler (which would place one as native to each of the realms, and suggest that maybe there is one in Black London as well,) her identity concealed by the fortuitous loss of her distinctive black eye, but that too is never resolved. It would in part explain her wanderlust, and the innate sense of responsibility that she appears to share with Kell (and to an extent, Holland.)

It's not a perfect book, but is a good start to a series, and I would certainly be interested in future installments.

* Edited for new information, although the book makes no such indication, the slightly arch 'a novel' on the cover actually suggesting away from a series.