Michael Moorcock: The Revenge of the Rose (1991)

Edition: Orion, 1997
Review number: 1157

The longest and most recent Elric story, The Revenge of the Rose is much more complex than the earlier books featuring this hero. Like most of them, it reflects Moorcock's concerns at the time of writing, and is much more literary in flavour as were the other novels he wrote around this time. It takes the same familiar fantasy genre form as the others in this particular omnibus (they are all quests), but it has a twist.

The plot stems from a Hamlet-like meeting between Elric and the ghost of his father, who commissions him to recover his soul, taken by a trio of warrior sisters. This quest is part of a power struggle between two Lords of Chaos, one of whom is Elric's patron Duke Arioch, and takes place across several planes of the multiverse (these elements coming from the common background to all the Eternal Champion stories). He joins together with a group of characters from these planes, including the fictional Victorian poet Wheldrake, who appears in several Moorcock novels, and, most interesting, a bizarre family of psychics who are wandering the multiverse. (The character from this family, Mother Phatt, bears a striking resemblance to how one imagines Jerry Cornelius' mother would become if she went senile.)

The most interesting part of the novel is the first, which takes place mostly in the fascinating Gypsy Nation. The background to this section, with its rolling cities, must be one of the most unusual in the fantasy genre. The rest of the novel seems to pale by comparison, but this section alone would make it worth reading. I've never really been a fan of the Elric stories, which seem to me to lie at the most hackneyed end of Moorcock's writing; but The Revenge of the Rose is the one which I would choose as the best of them.

Laurell K. Hamilton: A Kiss of Shadows (2000)

Edition: Bantam, 2001
Review number: 1156

I have for some time been a slightly guilty fan of Hamilton's Anita Blake series (the guilt from the feeling that I shouldn't enjoy something as violent where the violence is quite sexual and the sex quite violent as much as I do). Kiss of Shadows is rather more serious as a fantasy novel, while it has similarities to Hamilton's earlier work.

The setting of Kiss of Shadows is basically the modern world, except that Celtic folk myth is true, and so there really are creatures such as brownies and pixies, but, most importantly, the Sidhe are real. The main focus of the novel is on their politics and relationship with humanity, to whom they are glamourous and dangerous. The central character and narrator is a Sidhe princess, not particularly gifted with magic by her people's standards, who has deserted the court to avoid her cousin's assassination attempts, and who is working secretly as a private detective in Los Angeles (a place where the amount of steel around in skyscrapers makes it difficult to track her down magically).

I tend to rather like books which marry magic and technology; here, because of its current setting, the technology is basically taken for granted. (The main aspects of modern culture which affect Meredith are things like paparazzi interest in Sidhe royalty.) There are obvious similarities with the background of the Anita Black novels, which is also the modern world plus magical elements, there vampires, werewolves and zombies; and it is likely that a fan of these books will enjoy Kiss of Shadows as well. (There are other similarities, including aspects of the characters and the tone used by the narrators.) Hamilton is adept at blending her two worlds, and while perhaps not the most significant piece of fantasy, Kiss of Shadows is exciting and enjoyable.

Leslie Charteris: Meet the Tiger (1927)

Alternative title: The Saint Meets the Tiger (Buy from Amazon)
Edition: Ward, Lock & Co., 1927
Review number: 1154

Before changing publishers to Hodder and Stoughton, a move which coincided with his writing career suddenly taking off, Leslie Charteris wrote about half a dozen thrillers for Ward, Lock & Co. Meet the Tiger is one of these, and is a Saint book, written three or four years before the novel which Hodder designated as the first in that long series, Enter the Saint. It's gone on to be comparatively forgotten ever since, with fewer reprints making it harder to track down. (I've been collecting Leslie Charteris for about twenty years, and this was the first copy I'd ever seen.)

Meet the Tiger derives much of its character from the juxtaposition of two widely separate worlds: the Chicago gangster culture and a sleepy, tiny Devon fishing village (these were the days before mass car ownership brought tourism to such picturesque settings). The Saint has come to Baynscombe on the trail of a massive hoard of stolen bullion, but has to work out which of the village characters are members of the Tiger's gang (known as the Cubs) and, most importantly, who is the Tiger himself. The situation is complicated by his first meeting with Patricia Holm, destined to be a part of many of the novels which eventually followed.

The most interesting question any Saint fan has about Meet the Tiger is how the series characters in their earliest manifestation match up with their later versions. (As well as Simon Templar and Patricia Holm, Meet the Tiger also introduces the Saint's manservant, Orace.) In fact, there is not all that much difference; the facetiae are not quite as polished and lighthearted, and it would be odd to describe the later Saint as "inexperienced with women". Orace is given a big part, in contrast to the way that he later fades into the background as other sidekicks come along. Patricia is much the same, the beautiful young woman who is nearly as competent an adventurer as Simon; it is nice to read the story of their original meeting at last.

It is in the plotting that Charteris shows his inexperience, a flaw which Meet the Tiger shares with the other pre-Hodder books that I have read. Like many thirties thriller writers, Charteris consistently shows a liking for the fantastic - incredible disguises, villains leading double lives as respectable citizens, and so on. Later on, he can make it seem believable (The Saint in New York being an outstanding example), but here the creakiness of the plot is quite clear.

Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)

Edition: Futura, 1988 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1153

Out of all the editions of all the books I have ever read, the second and later printings of Iain Banks' first novel remain unique as far as I can remember for at least one reason. It is of course common to put good reviews on display, but here some of the really bad notices received by The Wasp Factory are also reprinted. The common feature they all share is a passionate response to the novel, which even after two decades (and on a third or fourth reading) is not one to be read with total equanimity.

Since 1984, Iain Banks has become established as one of Britain's most important novelists of his generation, and combines critical acclaim with a loyal cult following through his engagement with the science fiction genre. Reviewers of his writing today are inevitably going to be really careful before panning one of his novels. More importantly, though, The Wasp Factory seems far tamer and less controversial now, post Quentin Tarantino (among others). The extreme violence has become almost commonplace, and is no longer restricted to the grimmer types of genre novels. (It seems that what was shocking in The Wasp Factory was the presence of such violence in a novel with obvious literary pretensions.)

The narrator of the novel, Frank Cauldhame, has at sixteen settled into a bizarre existence on the small Scottish island owned by his reclusive father. His life there is a strange combination of unpleasant rituals of his own invention; these are designed to proclaim and extend his supremacy over the animals living on the island and to protect him against the outside world. Their centrepiece is the eponymous Wasp Factory, a monumental clock face rescued from the local town (just over a causeway on the mainland) dump which now has traps installed behind each numeral; a wasp is introduced into the hole at the centre and Frank uses the random death "chosen" by the wasp to predict the future. The story begins as Frank and his father receive a warning that Frank's elder brother Eric has escaped from a secure mental hospital, to which he had been committed after incidents including setting fire to dogs and forcing local children to eat worms. Eric's gradual approach to the island defines the duration of the novel and creates its suspense.

The effect of The Wasp Factory's violence on the reader is not just ameliorated by the time that has passed since publication. Because Frank's actions are mainly part of rituals, Banks is able to make him feel most of the time that what he does is regrettable though necessary (which affects our perception too, as he is the narrator). It is also invested by Banks with a kind of fantasy air, the unreality coming from the religious air which surrounds his actions when they are rituals or their flagrant unbelievability when they are not (as in the case of the rabbit attack, for instance). The most disturbing scene is the flashback to the experience which pushed Eric over the edge of insanity, and it is told in a much more straightforward style than the descriptions of Frank's activities. One thing is certain, and that is that The Wasp Factory never descends to the level of violence as pornography; everything which happends in the novel has its part to play. It is a lesson by which some more recent science fiction writers could benefit.

The Wasp Factory is neither as great nor as sordid as its quoted reviews imply. As a debut, it showed that Banks was a gifted writer, and most of his subsequent work has of course confirmed this. It is not by any means a fun read, but remains fascinating.

Jack Finney: Time and Again (1970)

Edition: Gollancz, 2001
Review number: 1152

Because of the famous film, Finney is best known for (Invasion of) The Body Snatchers, but he wrote a dozen or so novels over about four decades; Time and Again is probably the next most famous. It is still, after thirty years, a time travel novel with many differences from the ideas on the subject which have become commonplace in the science fiction genre, and thus it remains worth reading for any fan despite its obvious flaws.

Si Morley is an artist, but feels as though his current job in advertising (drawing bars of soap) is a dead end. So he is interested when approached by a stranger with an interesting proposition - how would he like to become involved in a government project so secret that Si can't even be told what it is about until he joins it?

The secret is, of course, time travel. The discovery has been made that position in time is a subjective thing, that it is the knowledge we have of past events that determines when the present is. (For example, knowing that Kennedy was assassinated places the present after 1963, knowing I'm 34 means it's 2003.) The point of this is that by appropriate training and self hypnosis time travel becomes possible; if you can forget everything which happened after a particular date and will yourself into the mindset of a person of that time, then suddenly that date becomes the present for you. Si uses this method to travel to the New York of the early 1880s, before the skyscraper, before the automobile. There, he investigates a minor (invented) historical mystery, and is strongly attracted to a young woman of the time.

There seem to me to be serious flaws in the premise by which this method of time travel is supposed to work, starting with the philosophical one that it makes the fundamental nature of time simultaneously subjective and objective - position in time depends on our knowledge of events, and yet the relative orderings of these events is given by their position in time, which is determined by what? Even if we allow the passage of time to be subjective for a conscious being and yet objective for an unconscious object, it seems to me that it is impossible for such changes as are required for time travel to occur in our minds, particularly given our consciousness of alterations in our own bodies. A good example of this problem is that Si grows a beard to fit in to the male fashion of the 1880s, and surely he would have been unable to get away from realising that it was only a few weeks old.

More seriously, to travel in time leaves the traveller on a tight rope, surely to be bounced back as soon as any conscious thought of future events intrudes. For the sake of the plot, Finney must ignore this, so that Si is constantly aware of who he is and of the changes due to take place in the century he has travelled - he even makes a sketch showing how one of the streets will look. Finney is also self indulgent, in that he is unable to resist displaying some of the fruits of his research, which makes Time and Again seem in places like a guide book complete with photos and drawings.

Having catalogued some of the flaws, what are the strengths of this novel? The main one is that Finney conveys far more of how different the world of even the relatively recent past would seem to a time traveller; in its usual Wellesian, machine driven mode, time travel fiction is often very blase about how easy it is to fit in, and certainly about how little culture shock the traveller would suffer even from the details of their new environment. The open acknowledgement of two different times being involved gives Finney an advantage over the traditional historical novel, too; Si can comment on things in a way not possible outside the science fiction genre.

The two foci of the novel are the rapid pace of change since 1882 as exemplified by Si's reactions to nineteenth century New York, and the character of Si as narrator. Little room is left to flesh out the other characters, who are left as ciphers. The interest of the novel is rather along the lines of collections of old photographs of landmarks, as commonly seen filling up space in local papers; this lessens the impact of the novel for someone with no particular interest in New York.

Time and Again could be better, even if most of its flaws are integral to the way that Finney has set up his mechanism for time travel. It is, as I have said, of interest to aficionados, but is not really going to convert anyone not already interested in the science fiction genre.

Joseph Heller: Good as Gold (1979)

Edition: Black Swan, 1993 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1151

Heller's third novel reads almost as though it were the book of a Woody Allen film. It is about the Jewish experience in the US in the late seventies, and contains much of the same kind of bitter sweet humour so common in Allen's work. Good as Gold centres around a second generation American Jew, Bruce Gold, who is entering middle age and who is desperate to be taken seriously - as a writer, as a family member (particularly by his irascible father and brother), as someone who could make a mark in the world. Most of the story is about his desperate pursuit of a job in Washington, once he hears that the President was impressed by one of his essays. The question is, how much of his principles and his life is he prepared to sacrifice?

It is pretty familiar ground, and much of Good as Gold now comes over as dated. It naturally received the standard Joseph Heller review: someone described it as "his best since Catch 22". Other novels since have taken that title, but Good as Good is still funny and occasionally disturbing as a portrait of a man becoming overwhelmed by ambition.

Tom Holland: Deliver Us From Evil (1997)

Edition: Warner, 1998
Review number: 1150

Deliver Us From Evil, a historical horror novel, starts at the end of the Cromwellian Commonwealth in England, just before the restoration of the monarchy and the reign of Charles II. Captain Foxe, an officer in the militia based at Salisbury, begins an investigation into a series of ritual murders at ancient monuments (the cathedral and Stonehenge are the best known), and becomes convinced that they are connected to strange events in his home village of Woodton. There, the manor house has been abandoned, as many are, by exiled supporters of the king; but in Woodton the gentry were rumoured to have been involved in black magic.

When Captain Foxe and his wife are killed by the evil he has been seeking out, his teenage son Robert begins a quest to gain revenge, to be able to face and destroy the evil power which has taken over the manor and possessed the villagers of Woodton. To this end, he spends the remainder of the book travelling through a Europe beginning to recover from the Thirty Years' War and to the American colonies, and spends much of his time in the company of 'blooddrinkers' (vampires).

Though Deliver Us From Evil could never be described as a conventional historical novel, it quite naturally needs to excel in many of the same ways that a member of that genre does - notably in terms of its background. It must feel accurate once the horror elements are removed (and it is helpful if even the supernatural side respects seventeenth century ideas on the subject). Deliver Us From Evil succeeds admirably in this respect, particularly in the way it uses well known people of the time (the Earl of Rochester and John Aubrey are particularly prominent).

As a horror novel, it lies squarely within the traditions of the vampire story, particular debts being owed to Bram Stoker and Anne Rice. Holland rings enough changes to make Deliver Us From Evil original within the tradition, and he is also occasionally much nastier than eithe Stoker or Rice (for example in the description of the anal rape of Robert Foxe by a demon wrhich ends part one). If you can cope with the nastiness, Deliver Us From Evil is a fascinating novel, well worth reading.