Dave Duncan: Future Indefinite (1998)

Edition: Corgi, 1998
Review number: 436

The culmination of Duncan's Great Game trilogy, Future Indefinite tells how Edward Exeter does what he has been prophesied as doing, what he has vowed never to do: challenging the god of death himself. This leads his friends to believe that he has lost his mind. In the magical system of Duncan's world, the easiest way to collect power (mana) is through the sacrificial suffering of others. This is the way in which Zath has managed, as a psychopath becoming tutelary deity of death, to collect mana fast enough to become a danger even to the ancient established Pentatheon, who have been acquiring power for millennia. The only way that Exeter can hope to win is by becoming a greater monster, and after he does so, an even more significant threat to the Pentatheon. They, of course, are keen to remove Zath, but not at the expense of losing their own position.

Future Indefinite is necessarily (for the sake of suspense) told from the point of view of those who know Edward rather than by 'the Liberator' himself. They are desperately trying to work out whether or not he is sane, whether he has come up with some way around the difficulties that led him to take his vow, whether he has any chance of winning, and whether the Pentatheon can do anything about it. The reader, too, is not supposed to know these things until the end of the novel.

The trilogy as a whole is excellent, ringing the changes on one of the most venerable basic plots in the fantasy genre, the messianic hero. (Prominent examples include Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series and David Eddings' Belgariad, just to choose among the most popular works in the genre.) Like the heroes of many of these stories, the career of Edward Exeter is modelled on that of Jesus Christ. Unlike most of them, Exeter consciously follows this model, as he preaches a new ethics and a challenge to the established religious order. The closest parallel is perhaps John Barth's Giles Goat-boy, though Duncan escapes the accusations or irreverence and blasphemy that have been levelled at Barth simply by omitting the element of parody. The unpleasantness of the religion imposed on Nextdoor by those seeking to exploit the way that magic works there is an important part of the novels, and helps to raise them above the general level of fantasy. The third is also the best written and most gripping of the series, which as a whole could become one of the classics of the genre.

Philip Roth: Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

Edition: Penguin, 1986
Review number: 435

It took me a long time to get into Roth's novel. Despite the endorsements on the back telling me it was one of the most hilarious novels ever written, it didn't make me laugh for over a hundred pages. Unease was a better description of the reaction caused in me by the over the top stereotyped Jewish family background.

Portnoy's Complaint is ostensibly a transcript of Alexander Portnoy's sessions with his therapist, an attempt to cure the complaint of the title (defined in medical dictionary form on the first page). He spends his life desperately chasing woman after woman, only to find that each sexual encounter is terribly unsatisfying.

The hideous Portnoy family are basically a Jewish joke taken to an extreme, particularly the deliberately stereotypical mother. They are meant to be caricatures, but I found them distinctly uninvolving and repellent. Basically, Portnoy's Complaint did not live up to its reputation.

Anthony Powell: The Military Philosophers (1968)

Edition: Mandarin, 1991
Review number: 434

The third trilogy in A Dance to the Music of Time comes to an end with the end of the war. The Military Philosophers is the story of Nick Jenkins' posting to the unit which maintained liaison between the British military and the governments in exile of the occupied countries. The international nature of this work leads to absurdities rather like those in Lawrence Durrell's Antrobus stories, and they are by far the most memorable aspect of this novel.

Of the series characters, the most interesting to play a part on The Military Philosophers is Pamela Fitton, niece of Charles Stringham, now grown up and keen to seduce as many men as possible. Assigned as ATS driver to Nick's unit, she has to be transferred because of the disturbance she causes to relations with the allies.

George Bernard Shaw: Plays Unpleasant (1898)

Edition:  Penguin, 1946
Review number: 433

The three plays in this volume, Widowers' Houses, The Philanderer and Mrs Warren's Profession, are Shaw's earliest plays. Considered extremely daring at the time - it proved impossible to produce Mrs Warren's Profession for over twenty years - they can still in places shock us today. Each play is a blatant attack on Victorian society, on the hypocrisy of those who believe themselves morally blameless yet condemn the poor to live in degrading squalor and then live off the money this produces. This is clearest in Widowers' Houses (about slum landlords) and Mrs Warren's Profession (prostitution); The Philanderer is about attitudes to women, and has dated rather more.

The plot of Widowers' Houses is the simplest. Harry Trench falls in love with a girl he meets on holiday in Germany. Accepting her father's description of the source of his income as the respectable "property", they get engaged. Then Trench discovers that the property in question is one of London's most unpleasant slums and is horrified, and eventually he is astounded when it is revealed that his own wealth comes from the interest on a mortgage on the property. The idea is that even the most respectable are not far removed from the immoral and degrading, and this is also the central idea in Mrs Warren's Profession.

Though today most of the Victorian slums in Britain have long been cleared, prostitution is still a surprisingly important part of the economy. Shaw's message, though, is perhaps better applied in other areas. In the West, our relatively affluent lifestyles are to an extent dependant on the poverty of the Third World. People starve not just while our supermarkets are full, but to keep them full. Without the arms trade vital to the economy of many Western nations, much suffering would be eased. Pornography continues to degrade both those involved in making it and those addicted to it, while making fortunes.

Shaw manages to avoid the pitfall of preachiness which traps so many who write fiction to support a campaign, except perhaps in The Philanderer. The central location of this play is the fictional Ibsen Club, which stands for everything progressive in society. Today Ibsenism is an obsolete word, and it is clearer that Ibsen wrote about far more than Shaw thought, blinded as he was by his own social agenda. But at the turn of the century, plays like An Enemy of the People, Ghosts and (above all) A Doll's House seemed iconoclastic attacks on injustice in society. Ibsen was the subject of violent denunciation for the immorality seen in his plays (to the extent that he had to write an alternative happy ending to The Dollshouse before it could be performed in Germany), and this is what attracted Shaw the social campaigner. These plays are far simpler than Ibsen's, and much more obviously making a non-dramatic point. Their effect was much the same, and Shaw (unlike Ibsen) revelled in it.

William Congreve: The Way of the World (1700)

Edition: Nick Hern, 1995
Review number: 432

Congreve's play has the theme of hypocrisy and deceit in society, as even some of the characters' names indicate (Fainall, for example). Even Mirabell, the hero (his name indicating that he is admirable), uses a deceitful scheme to bring about the happy ending. Only Millamant, the object of his desire, does not pretend to be anything other than what she really is, though her capriciousness towards Mirabell infuriates him.

Millamant is unable to marry who she pleases, since half of her fortune is controlled by her aunt, Lady Wishfort. (Congreve doesn't explain why half her fortune. Perhaps it is to muddle the motives even of Mirabell and Millamant, for the half that would pass to her should provide enough to live on comfortably - why go to so much effort to win the fortune, if love is supposed to be your driving passion?) In order to gain her consent, Mirabell conceives a complicated scheme. His servant, Waitwell is to pretend to be Mirabell's rich uncle, and court Lady Wishfort; when she discovers the truth, she will be forced to allow the marriage, to avoid the shame of public exposure. To make sure of Waitwell's loyalty, Mirabell marries him to Lady Wishfort's maid, so that any marriage between him and Lady Wishfort is invalid.

The plot is clearly related to the commedia plots of Marivaux and Molière, though there are variations. The rascally servant, though still making his sarcastic observation of society, is not just the tool of his master, who has taken on his cunning. The intrigue is not directed at the heroine, but at her aunt. The father figure that is the butt of jokes has gone, but instead we have the other suitors. Congreve has taken the traditional plot structure and developed and twisted it.

Ann Granger: Call the Dead Again (1998)

Edition: Headline, 1998
Review number: 431

Another Mitchell and Markby novel; once again, the usual strengths and weaknesses of Granger's series are repeated. The unreasonable coincidence by which Meredith Mitchell becomes involved in the murder takes place once again - here, she picks up a hitch-hiker who becomes the main suspect.

The night after a strange, beautiful girl hitch-hikes to Bamford, the rich Andrew Penhallow is found murdered at his own back door. As Kate Drago's purpose in coming to the town was to visit Andrew, she is naturally suspected. When the police question her, Andrew's double life is revealed: she is his illegitimate daughter rather than the mistress that others thought her to be.

I do have an additional word of criticism. Granger uses the device of the extra thin skull, useful to crime writers because it reduces the force needed for a fatal blow and so widens the field of suspects. I'm pretty positive that there is a passage in a Dorothy Sayers novel in which this idea is dismissed as too hackneyed to use in a modern detective story (but I can't remember quite where), but here it crops up again sixty years later.

Anthony Powell: The Soldier's Art (1966)

Edition: Mandarin, 1991
Review number: 430

More engrossing to read than the earlier volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time (because events start to move a little faster), the eighth novel in the series sees Nick Jenkins working as assistant to Kenneth Widmerpool. This means that instead of seeing, as before, just the results of Widmerpool's activities in his successful career, we experience the under-hand manipulation and self centredness which produce these results. Still in a battalion in Northern Ireland (this is not explicitly stated, but a deserter escapes across a land border), Nick is almost too far from the action of the war to be practising the soldier's art in any traditional form, but Widmerpool's scheming provides the reason for the title. This is the first book in the series in which the origin of the title is made explicit; it comes from a line in Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, which says that the soldier's art is to "think first, fight afterwards". It seems to me, particularly as I read this book just after rereading John Keegan's The Face of Battle, that thinking is what front line soldiers really need to avoid doing. However, it describes Widmerpool's unscrupulous scheming quite well, and Powell obviously seems to think that it brought success for a wartime officer.

The most bizarre event in the novel is the reappearance of Charles Stringham, who volunteered following his cure from alcoholism. However, rather than becoming an officer like others of his social status, he is the waiter in the officers' mess. Embarrassed, Widmerpool pulls strings to get him reassigned to the battalion's Mobile Laundry, which he happens to know is about to be moved to the Far East - a long way to move someone just to save a little embarrassment. Stringham turning up is exactly the sort of coincidence which mars the plotting of A Dance to the Music of Time - why should he be assigned to the officers' mess in Nick's unit out of all the possible billets in the wartime army?