Orson Scott Card: Hart's Hope (1983)

Edition: Tor, 1988
Review number: 1165

There is an immense number of ways that fantasy authors have used to depict magic. Usually, particularly in writers who are just re-using the standard accoutrements of the genre, it is basically an alternate way to perform actions, or a way to do the impossible. This reduces it to a narrative convenience, which is not in the end terribly interesting unless it makes it possible for the author to concentrate on other things. There are few novels which present magic as something innate in the world yet disturbing; Hart's Hope is one of their number.

The plot of Hart's Hope is basically similar to that of many fantasy stories, a tale of magic and an usurped throne. A king, himself an usurper, is deposed by the daughter of the man he ousted. She was raped and discarded by him as part of the legitimization of his rule, but now, taking the name Beauty, she uses dark and forbidden magic not just to take her revenge but to submit the whole kingdom to an regime of unprecedented rigour - generally just by heaping obscene torments on the former king and his friends. She is even able to chain up the gods, rendering them virtually powerless. (Of them, the Hart is the symbol of masculine power, the Sisters of the feminine, while God has certain aspects of Christianity as it must have seemed to the pagans of northern Europe in the early Middle Ages.)

What makes Hart's Hope different is its atmosphere, which is cruel and dank, brutal and sordid. The nature of the magic in Card's world is part of this atmosphere; it is about the shedding of blood - by cutting oneself or by using menstrual blood, or, in the case of Beauty, by the sacrifice of a child carried to a ten month term. I was recently reading John Sutherland's book about puzzles in nineteenth century fiction, Is Heathcliff A Murderer?, and one of his articles comments on how strong a taboo there was against mentioning menstruation. Even in the twentieth century, with so many taboos broken that some writers seem to transgress for the sake of it, it is unusual to find a novel where menstrual blood has such an important (and uncontrived) place. This means that it provides a large part of the disturbing nature of magic in Hart's Hope.

This is quite early Orson Scott Card, and his work since has been more accessible and mainstream. Hart's Hope display at least as much imagination as any of Card's later writing, even if it is more difficult to get into.

Iain Banks: Walking on Glass (1988)

Edition: Macmillan, 1988
Review number: 1166

Though the prose is recognisably by the same writer, Iain Banks' second novel is very different from the first. The Wasp Factory is about psychology, particularly concerning itself with the boundary between sanity and madness and the origins of religious ritual; it is basically a straightforward first person narrative in structure. Psychology is still a part of Walking on Glass (paranoia, whether deluded or not, plays an important role), but the structure of the novel is its central feature.

Apart from the last, each of Walking on Glass' parts is divided into three sections, which seem to be independent stories. In each part, the first is about the infatuation of a young man for a beautiful and slightly strange girl he met at a party; the second is about a roadmender who believes himself to be an admiral from a galactic war imprisoned in the body of an Earthman; and the third is a combination of Mervyn Peake and Franz Kafka, in which a pair of war criminals from opposing sides in a galactic war are imprisoned in an enormous castle and forced to play impossible games until they can solve the riddle "What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?"

At the beginning, of course, Banks' aim it clearly to make it as hard as possible for the reader to perceive any connection between the three narrative threads, and trying to work it out is the main pleasure of Walking on Glass, at least on first reading it. (None of the characters, for example, are likeable enough to become enjoyable acquaintances, though all are interesting.) Even though Walking on Glass is not among Banks' most successful novels (something due in part to the lack of sympathetic characters), it must be admired for its ingenuity.

David and Leigh Eddings: Regina's Song (2002)

Edition: HarperCollins, 2002
Review number: 1164

Most people are fascinated by the intimate relationship which exists between identical twins, and this forms the basis of the most recent novel from David and Leigh Eddings, one which edges into the horror genre - a new departure for the pair.

Regina and Renata Greenleaf were identical twins, who continued to use a private language between themselves long after most pairs have given it up - right through high school. (I was surprised not to find any references to this cryptolalia - use of a secret language - online; may be it's not as common a practice as the Eddings imply.) Then, on the point of graduation, their car broke down returning from a party and when one of them went to find a phone, she was attacked, raped and viciously murdered. The surviving twin is so traumatised by this, that she reverts to their secret language, and it is only following six months in an asylum that she recognises anyone or returns to speaking English. Even so, she cannot remember the past, making it impossible to tell even which twin she is (or even to tell her that she had a twin sister).

To the chagrin of her parents, the person she recognises is a family friend, Mark Austin - also the narrator of the novel. His is a graduate student at Washington University (the whole novel, like all of the Eddings' non-fantasy, takes place in Washington State). A major part of the novel is about Mark's attempts to help the surviving twin (now insisting on being known, rather nauseatingly, as Twink) rehabilitate to the real world by auditing some of the courses at the university, including the basic English one he teaches. This means that Twink moves away from her parental home to stay with an aunt, who has a job which means that she is out a large proportion of the time - surely a situation which a psychiatrist would be unhappy about for someone only recently released from a mental ward. And then strange things begin to happen...

The main idea is strong, though it could be the basis of a far more bleak novel offering more insight into how it feels to be a twin and the nature of mental illness. (This could be done most easily by improving the essays that Twink hands in, which Mark somewhat bizarrely thinks are brilliant - they're nothing like that good.) Such a tale would be a radical departure for the Eddings, and the impression I got was that his was something they kept moving towards and then shying away from to produce something more lightweight. (After all, they don't want to alienate all their fans.) This desire makes the second half of the novel poorer than the first, and also means that some of the cute phrases and ideas which fill so much of the Eddings' recent writing appear once more. It may also explain an interesting change of attitude: all of the Eddings' fantasy involves the killing or disabling of a god, but here the role of religion as represented by a Roman Catholic priest is overwhelmingly positive.

Regina's Song contains a crime investigation and a (rather unconvincing) courtroom drama as well as the twin psychology and horror elements, and this is something of a mistake from a structural point of view, as it makes the novel seem somewhat overcrowded with strands from different genres. Nevertheless, Regina's Song is consistently entertaining (if you can ignore the cute turns of phrase) and the use of identical twins at the centre of this kind of story is fascinating.

James Branch Cabell: The Silver Stallion (1926)

Edition: Unwin, 1983 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1163

Many readers of fantasy today basically assume that it is a genre which originated with J.R.R. Tolkien; this is not at all the case, and the best of the earlier writing is, in my opinion, well worth resurrecting. James Branch Cabell is today almost completely unknown, even with the occasional cheap reprint in some "fantasy classics" series, and he has a charm and humour almost totally lacking in most post-Tolkien fantasy. In the second half of the twenties, he wrote a loosely connected trilogy set in the kingdom of Poictesme, of which this is the second. It was attacked at the time as blasphemous and indecent, two charges which would hardly be made today even though it is still just about possible to understand why people reacted in this way.

The Silver Stallion is the best of the volumes in the trilogy. Figures of Earth lacks the ingredients which mark out The Silver Stallion from just about every other fantasy novels, and Jurgen sometimes reads as though Cabell is trying too hard to shock the reader. The reason this novel is different is that it is about what happens after the end of the quest, during the living "happily every after". It starts with the death of Dom Manuel, central character (if not exactly hero) of Figures of Earth. The fellowship of nine companions who fought under the banner of the Silver Stallion ("rampant in every member") is disbanded, and his widow sets about turning his reputation as the liberator of Poictesme into that of a national saviour and redeemer, sort of a cross between Christ and King Arthur. (It is Cabell's appropriation of Christian ideas and even Biblical quotations to his manifestly false redeemer and in particular what is said about the survival of any religion in Part IX which provoked the charge of blasphemy.) The Silver Stallion is about both how the cult of Dom Manuel becomes established and the ageing of his former companions. These nine men find it hard to fit in with the changes in Poictesme, partly because they remember better than anyone else what Dom Manuel was really like, and partly because they miss the old days of fighting and wenching.

The them of the ageing heroes makes The Silver Stallion pretty unusual in the fantasy genre, even today. (In this era of debunked heroes, fantasy has generally continued to depict the old fashioned superhuman goodies.) The closest parallels I can think of are the world weariness of some of Michael Moorcock's heroes, the character of the aged Bilbo in The Lord of the Rings and Cohen the Barbarian, who has a minor role in several of the Discworld novels. Reading the novel reveals, however, that stylistically Cabell is not like these authors stylistically, reminding me instead of L. Sprague de Camp and Tom Holt. It is a pity that Cabell is not still widely known, and this trilogy at least is well worth seeking out.

Will Ferguson: Happiness TM (2001)

Edition: Canongate, 2002
Review number: 1162

It is easy to ridicule the self help book; every Christmas parodies just as forgettable as their subjects appear to take advantage of the seasonal sales of humour before disappearing in their turn. Happiness TM (a great improvement on the original title) is not this kind of parody; instead, it is a novel about a self help book.

The central character, Edwin de Vallu, works as an editor in a soulless American publishing house. He is in charge of their self help line, and a disastrous editorial meeting leads him to praise a manuscript from the slush pile, written by one Tupak Soiree who claims to have based it on years of meditation on a Tibetan mountain top. To Edwin it reads as though it is a disorganised mixture of bits of other similar books, but when it is finally published, something amazing happens - everything in it works. The methods for losing weight, improving your sex life, giving up smoking, becoming rich and so on all succeed, and when Edwin discovers this he also realises that What I Learned on the Mountain is evil: it turns the whole of America into a nation of happy, brainwashed idiots.

The humour in Happiness TM has three fertile sources, in the main: the absurdities of office life and the publishing industry in particular; the fatuities of the self help book; and Edwin's unlikely quest to save the world. All of these provided moments which made me laugh out loud, and yet between them Ferguson has something to say about why people are so keen to read self help books. Edwin, though a ridiculous character, is one whom the reader comes to care about, which gives more depth to the novel than would otherwise be the case.

Val Gielgud and Holt Marshall: Death at Broadcasting House (1934)

Edition: Chivers Press, 1992 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1161

Throughout the twentieth century, crime novels with unusual settings or backgrounds have been consistently popular with both authors and readers, offering something a bit different to stimulate the imagination. (Dorothy Sayers wrote some particularly well known examples.) Death at Broadcasting House is in this tradition, being about the murder of an actor during the production of a BBC radio play in the thirties. (That is when this novel first appeared, but this edition is no more specific about the date than that.) The writers both worked for the BBC at the time (and, yes, Val Gielgud was John's brother), and so the background is described from a position of understanding rather than being learned for the purpose of writing the novel.

An actor has a part in a radio play which ends with a death scene played alone in a seventh floor studio of Broadcasting House. Initially, the producer thinks he has performed better than in any rehearsal but then it is discovered that he was killed at the moment of his character's death, so that there are millions of witnesses to the killing (radio plays being performed live in those days). The police are lucky that the performance was recorded at all (it was to be re-transmitted on the "Empire wavelength" that later became the World Service). The question of who the murderer is amounts to a whittling down of the fairly short list of people who might have had the opportunity to kill the actor. The police investigation is constantly being second-guessed by the attempts of some of the suspects to play amateur detective, something which provides amusement (as Inspector Spears repeats yet again that he thought of the most recent suggestion already) and is almost certainly more true to life than the majority of crime novels in this respect.

A lot of the charm of Death at Broadcasting House comes from its period quality. It is full of references to obsolete equipment (the Blattnerphone, for example) and working methods (no one would be likely to broadcast a play live today). Occasionally, it seems like a spoof of itself, containing phrases which would now only be found in a parody - the chapter heading "Topsy does her bit", for example. Sometimes elements jar on the modern reader, as when the narrative demonstrates the seediness of a bar by describing it as "frequented by negroes and tarts", but generally it fascinates. The puzzle is not really difficult, though it is fairly well constructed.

Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)

Edition: Orbit, 1988
Review number: 1160

Despite the literary origins of its title, from The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot, the first of Banks' Culture novels is his least sophisticated. It is set in a war between the Culture and another major galactic power, the Idirans; even though most of the characters are either neutral or on the Idiran side, Banks' interest and sympathy clearly lie with the Culture. The central character is a Changer named Horza, member of a genetically engineered race who can counterfeit the appearance and mannerisms of humans - clearly based on the Face Dancers of Frank Herbert's Dune series. At the beginning of the novel, he is about to be executed by drowning in a sewer, but is able to escape to take on a mission to travel to the planet Schar's World to try to find a Culture Mind (one of the artificial intelligences which run Culture society) which escaped seemingly certain destruction to take refuge there. For Schar's World is a monument, a commemoration of its native people who destroyed themselves in a holocaust, and it is conserved by a guardian who is very choosy about who is allowed in. Horza has already been there, and so the Idirans hope he will be permitted to land again.

Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction which has had mixed fortunes over the years, often being derided for overblown and ludicrous scenarios and unbelievably heroic central characters. Banks is one of the authors involved in attempts to revive space opera from the late eighties onwards, seeking to add more literary ideas while taking advantage of one of the genre's richest collections of standard ideas and the immense grandeur of scale offered by such fiction. In each Culture novel, certain ideas from the sub-genre are re-used; in this case, huge empires of worlds, linked by faster than light travel, and the quest for some object of tactical significance (many space operas use military scenarios). The main change from older works by authors such as E. E. "Doc" Smith is that Horza is in no sense a heroic figure. In fact, his quest for the mind is more a series of disasters than the traditional crescendo of successes, and the main superhuman aspect of his character is his ability to survive these debacles. (Such changes would form an ideal part of a parody, but Consider Phlebas appears to be more serious in intent than that.)

The novel never really grabs the reader, unlike the space opera it is based on (which tends to emphasise excitement given a sufficient readiness to suspend disbelief) or the later Culture novels. It has some nice touches; the nature of space opera and the fact that a large proportion of the Culture's population is human leads the reader to make the assumption that it is an Earth-derived civilisation, but then the appendix reveals that the events described took place in our thirteenth century - Earth humanity is clearly a less developed offshoot of the species in Banks' scenario. This detail seems quite a neat if slightly contrived subversion of the genre. It is also the only clear piece of humour in Consider Phlebas, which is really the most po-faced of Banks' novels, and that makes it a much less interesting read. Banks turns the genre around, but here doesn't offer a convincing alternative.