Edition: Severn House, 2002
Despite earning an engineering degree, Jill Allbright is unable to get a job in the chauvinistic oil industry, except as a cleaner in the offices of an Aberdeen subsidiary of a US oil firm. While working in the executive offices in the middle of the night, Jill answers an insistently ringing phone, and is told by the billionaire owner of the company in Florida that she will need to sort out a crisis: a strike at a depot has been called to coincide with a major delivery of pipes. She organises storage with local farms, and as a reward is taken on as a troubleshooter. The British division of the company isn't doing as well as the Americans think it should be, and they want to know if this is incompetence, or sabotage by a rival firm. So Jill is thrust into a difficult and potentially dangerous role, but with the added problems of being a woman in a man's world, being viewed as a spy for the company's owners and a symbol of a lack of trust toward the local management - not to mention antagonism from those who might be shown to be incompetent or corrupt.
The Dirty Dollar is a quirky, enjoyable thriller (even if it could have a more apposite title without too much difficulty). It is well written, though without pretensions to being anything other than what it is. Even though I like the more complex literary novels too, sometimes I just want something to relax with. Jill is a good central character, and is almost one of those onmi-competent heroes found in old fashioned thrillers, except for the diffidence brought on by the rejection she has experienced from chauvinistic oilmen.
At the same time, Hammond has produced something a little different from the well worn (even if less used in recent years) formula of a heroic thriller. The tone may seem to come straight from the thirties, but having a woman as a hero makes The Dirty Dollar very different from the thrillers of that time - even Patricia Holm was just a sidekick to the Saint. Even today, it is still a little unusual in a thriller. Hammond's writing has a light, insouciant touch, to me reminiscent of Leslie Charteris at his best. This is also evident in the other novel by the author that I have read, Grail for Sale. So it is clearly not an isolated example, and suggests that others from his dozens of novels would provide similar enjoyment.
I would rate The DIrty Dollar at 8/10.
Saturday, 7 March 2009
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
Philip Hensher: The Mulberry Empire (2002)
Edition: Flamingo, 2003
What does the First Afghan War mean to people today? Like many colonial conflicts, it is almost totally forgotten, but it had a big effect on the history of British rule in India, and so influenced the formation of one of the great powers in today's world. The purpose of the war was basically to determine whether Britain or Russia would dominate Afghanistan, but it turned out to be one of the biggest military disasters ever experienced by a colonial power. The sixteen thousand men of the army of the Indus marched on Kabul, and one man returned. It has appeared in literature elsewhere, and I am probably not alone in being more familiar with the war from George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman than from Hensher's 2002 novel. The Mulberry Empire is a much more serious affair than Fraser's; The Mulberry Empire intends to be literature rather than entertainment, on the surface a more ambitious aim,
The Mulberry Empire - so called because Pushtu has a multiplicity of words for the fruit - is not so much an analysis of the war as a depiction of several lives caught up in the events which led to the British invasion. The central character is Alexander Burnes, who visited Kabul in the 1830s and wrote a best selling account (raising concerns which partly prompted the fears about Russian intentions which led to the war).
The story is told in the third person, which has the effect of diluting the immediacy of the narrative as compared with Flashman, told by a great character in the first person. (And his blunt judgments of those involved in planning the invasion of Afghanistan as "old women" and "fools" are much more entertaining than a book where the reader is left to try to assess the characters themselves, when they are drawn so sketchily as here.) Indeed, there is a major problem with characterisation here. Reading the novel, it seems to be populated by wraiths moving around a foggy nowhereland: but it is a depiction of some fascinating historical people in fascinating places at a fascinating time. The most interesting character is Bella, an unconventional London debutante who is fascinated by Burnes: but her role in the action is best described as peripheral.
As entertainment, I greatly prefer Flashman's account, for the edge and humour his narration gives Fraser's novel. The artifice here is more obvious (Fraser was a cleverer writer than he appears to be, deliberately). Hensher describes colourful scenes and people (though oddly almost skips the harrowing of the British forces on their retreat from Kabul), but is very detached, and actually manages tt be less interesting than a straightforward non-fictional historical account would be, and certainly less interesting than Fraser, whose zest for life comes over in almost every sentence he ever wrote.
On the face of it, this is an odd impression of the novel with which to end up, because I really enjoyed the first section of The Mulberry Empire, telling of Burnes first visit to Kabul and the fuss made of him on his return to London: this, I thought, was a book which would actually live up to the hyperbole of the reviews. But 150 pages on, it had palled. Perhaps retention of more of the history would have helped, or re-setting the story at a time when there was a less dramatic series of events going on, as that is clearly not his forte as a writer. From what Hensher says in his afterword about the relationship between the events and characters in The Mulberry Empire and what the historical accounts say, there is no particular reason why the novel had to depict any real people or relate to anything that really happened; it is more about the concept of the Afghan kingdom in the first half of the nineteenth century than its actuality. He acknowledges that "this is a pack of lies, though the outlines of my imaginary war occasionally coincide with a real one". Take away the coincidences, and improve the novel, as truth is here not just stranger than fiction, but more interesting and not as monochromatic.
My rating for The Mulberry Empire is 4/10, mainly for the first hundred pages.
What does the First Afghan War mean to people today? Like many colonial conflicts, it is almost totally forgotten, but it had a big effect on the history of British rule in India, and so influenced the formation of one of the great powers in today's world. The purpose of the war was basically to determine whether Britain or Russia would dominate Afghanistan, but it turned out to be one of the biggest military disasters ever experienced by a colonial power. The sixteen thousand men of the army of the Indus marched on Kabul, and one man returned. It has appeared in literature elsewhere, and I am probably not alone in being more familiar with the war from George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman than from Hensher's 2002 novel. The Mulberry Empire is a much more serious affair than Fraser's; The Mulberry Empire intends to be literature rather than entertainment, on the surface a more ambitious aim,
The Mulberry Empire - so called because Pushtu has a multiplicity of words for the fruit - is not so much an analysis of the war as a depiction of several lives caught up in the events which led to the British invasion. The central character is Alexander Burnes, who visited Kabul in the 1830s and wrote a best selling account (raising concerns which partly prompted the fears about Russian intentions which led to the war).
The story is told in the third person, which has the effect of diluting the immediacy of the narrative as compared with Flashman, told by a great character in the first person. (And his blunt judgments of those involved in planning the invasion of Afghanistan as "old women" and "fools" are much more entertaining than a book where the reader is left to try to assess the characters themselves, when they are drawn so sketchily as here.) Indeed, there is a major problem with characterisation here. Reading the novel, it seems to be populated by wraiths moving around a foggy nowhereland: but it is a depiction of some fascinating historical people in fascinating places at a fascinating time. The most interesting character is Bella, an unconventional London debutante who is fascinated by Burnes: but her role in the action is best described as peripheral.
As entertainment, I greatly prefer Flashman's account, for the edge and humour his narration gives Fraser's novel. The artifice here is more obvious (Fraser was a cleverer writer than he appears to be, deliberately). Hensher describes colourful scenes and people (though oddly almost skips the harrowing of the British forces on their retreat from Kabul), but is very detached, and actually manages tt be less interesting than a straightforward non-fictional historical account would be, and certainly less interesting than Fraser, whose zest for life comes over in almost every sentence he ever wrote.
On the face of it, this is an odd impression of the novel with which to end up, because I really enjoyed the first section of The Mulberry Empire, telling of Burnes first visit to Kabul and the fuss made of him on his return to London: this, I thought, was a book which would actually live up to the hyperbole of the reviews. But 150 pages on, it had palled. Perhaps retention of more of the history would have helped, or re-setting the story at a time when there was a less dramatic series of events going on, as that is clearly not his forte as a writer. From what Hensher says in his afterword about the relationship between the events and characters in The Mulberry Empire and what the historical accounts say, there is no particular reason why the novel had to depict any real people or relate to anything that really happened; it is more about the concept of the Afghan kingdom in the first half of the nineteenth century than its actuality. He acknowledges that "this is a pack of lies, though the outlines of my imaginary war occasionally coincide with a real one". Take away the coincidences, and improve the novel, as truth is here not just stranger than fiction, but more interesting and not as monochromatic.
My rating for The Mulberry Empire is 4/10, mainly for the first hundred pages.
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
Steven Saylor: Roma (2007)
Published: Constable, 2007
Steven Saylor is best known for his series of ancient Roman detective novels featuring Gordianus the Finder, and his other works have also been crime fiction until now. Roma takes him out of the genre confort zone, being an ambitious attempt to contain the history of Rome from its earliest origins to the end of the Republic, a period of about a thousand years, within a single novel. Saylor makes his task more manageable by structuring the history as a series of episodes around the best known stories, and linking them by a simple device. The central character in each story, who is never the focus from the historical point of view, is the current owner of an amulet passed from generation to generation.
Writing a novel about the development of a great city is not a new idea. Peter Ackroyd's London comes to mind, though it's not a useful comparison for me as I haven't read it, but it shows that Saylor was not the only writer with this idea. But for there's one really important precedent for Roma: the histories of Livy. While not a novel in the modern sense, it is a highly dramatic version of the events covered in Saylor's book (and what went on in between). Livy added pro-Augustan spin to the disregard for evidence and acceptance of the supernatural common to most ancient historians, but makes up for this by the quality of his writing and the interest of his tales. In his acknowledgment of his debt to Livy in the afterword, Saylor describes his histories as "one of the great reading experiences of a lifetime", which is perhaps overdoing it a bit, but suggests just how difficult it would be for Saylor to live up to his source material. And that isn't even mentioning the other writers who have taken stories from Livy over the last two millennia, including Shakespeare, whose play Coriolanus and poem The Rape of Lucrece describe two of the same stories used by Saylor. (Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra take place off stage from two of the last tales).
The first stories are set before the city existed, and tell of the origin of the amulet. They juxtapose modern ideas of the reasons for the foundation of the settlement (on salt trading routes) with myths associated with the area of the seven hills (a fight between Hercules and the monster Cacus). As with other supernatural events throughout Roma, the latter is rationalised by Saylor, in line with modern sensibilities outside the fantasy genre about magic, monsters and demigods. Then each tale skips a couple of generations to end a millennium later in the reign of Augustus.
There's plenty of action, and the stories are good. Accuracy is another issue, but obviously problems in this area are more due to the sources than to distortion by Saylor, and he actually uses the form of Roma to show how oral history becomes altered within only a few generations, as people in later stories discuss the events that have already been covered more directly, and the timespan between the stories about Romulus and the lifetime of Livy is a lot greater than a century.
While the inspirational quality of Livy's materlel cannot be doubted, Saylor's versions do suffer from the episodic structure he has adopted. He doesn't really succeed in making the reader feel that this is one story, that of the city, rather than a collection of short stories about individual moments which happen to be arranged by their internal chronology, though he does his best with numerous back references and through the device of the inherited amulet. Perhaps reading Roma is best followed by finding a good translation of Livy, who didn't need to fit his work into a pre-existing form; for the restrictions of the novel - particularly those imposed by the length requirements made to fit in a single volume - have led Saylor to produce a gallant failure. So my rating for Roma is 5/10, though I'd rate most of the individual tales at about 7/10.
Steven Saylor is best known for his series of ancient Roman detective novels featuring Gordianus the Finder, and his other works have also been crime fiction until now. Roma takes him out of the genre confort zone, being an ambitious attempt to contain the history of Rome from its earliest origins to the end of the Republic, a period of about a thousand years, within a single novel. Saylor makes his task more manageable by structuring the history as a series of episodes around the best known stories, and linking them by a simple device. The central character in each story, who is never the focus from the historical point of view, is the current owner of an amulet passed from generation to generation.
Writing a novel about the development of a great city is not a new idea. Peter Ackroyd's London comes to mind, though it's not a useful comparison for me as I haven't read it, but it shows that Saylor was not the only writer with this idea. But for there's one really important precedent for Roma: the histories of Livy. While not a novel in the modern sense, it is a highly dramatic version of the events covered in Saylor's book (and what went on in between). Livy added pro-Augustan spin to the disregard for evidence and acceptance of the supernatural common to most ancient historians, but makes up for this by the quality of his writing and the interest of his tales. In his acknowledgment of his debt to Livy in the afterword, Saylor describes his histories as "one of the great reading experiences of a lifetime", which is perhaps overdoing it a bit, but suggests just how difficult it would be for Saylor to live up to his source material. And that isn't even mentioning the other writers who have taken stories from Livy over the last two millennia, including Shakespeare, whose play Coriolanus and poem The Rape of Lucrece describe two of the same stories used by Saylor. (Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra take place off stage from two of the last tales).
The first stories are set before the city existed, and tell of the origin of the amulet. They juxtapose modern ideas of the reasons for the foundation of the settlement (on salt trading routes) with myths associated with the area of the seven hills (a fight between Hercules and the monster Cacus). As with other supernatural events throughout Roma, the latter is rationalised by Saylor, in line with modern sensibilities outside the fantasy genre about magic, monsters and demigods. Then each tale skips a couple of generations to end a millennium later in the reign of Augustus.
There's plenty of action, and the stories are good. Accuracy is another issue, but obviously problems in this area are more due to the sources than to distortion by Saylor, and he actually uses the form of Roma to show how oral history becomes altered within only a few generations, as people in later stories discuss the events that have already been covered more directly, and the timespan between the stories about Romulus and the lifetime of Livy is a lot greater than a century.
While the inspirational quality of Livy's materlel cannot be doubted, Saylor's versions do suffer from the episodic structure he has adopted. He doesn't really succeed in making the reader feel that this is one story, that of the city, rather than a collection of short stories about individual moments which happen to be arranged by their internal chronology, though he does his best with numerous back references and through the device of the inherited amulet. Perhaps reading Roma is best followed by finding a good translation of Livy, who didn't need to fit his work into a pre-existing form; for the restrictions of the novel - particularly those imposed by the length requirements made to fit in a single volume - have led Saylor to produce a gallant failure. So my rating for Roma is 5/10, though I'd rate most of the individual tales at about 7/10.
Saturday, 31 January 2009
Simon R. Green: Into the Nightside (2008)
Published: Solaris, 2008
Omnibus edition containing Something from the Nightside (2003) and Agents of Light and Darkness (2003)
I'm not sure why it is, or exactly when it happened, but the horror genre has changed. Possibly it's the influence of TV programmes like Buffy, which blended horror with other genres and made the scariness less of an integral part of the experience. But there are now lots of these genre crossover books around now, from the really bizarre (say, the chick-lit vampire of Mary Janice Davidson' Betsy series) to this more obvious pairing of hard boiled detective with horror. It is not even unique in choosing that combination, which is also used in the Harry Dresden series. In general, these work by taking well known horror ideas (such as vampire lore) and using them more as plot elements than for their frightening qualities. After all, it becomes much harder to be frightening with something as familiar to a modern reader and as frequently satirised as a vampire.
John Taylor is a sleazy private detective with a unique talent: he can find any object. But to do so he must go from the everyday London which holds his office into the Nightside, where his magic becomes a beacon attracting the enemies from which he fled five years earlier. So business is not good. Then a rich beautiful woman asks him to help find her daughter, lost in the Nightside, and he accepts the commission, charging only double his usual rates. Once into the Nightside, the tone changes, and there's much less of the hard boiled detective as the story becomes a more standard fantasy/horror tale, rather like a milder version of Anita Blake in a crossover with Neverwhere.
The Nightside series is not Green's only crossover of this sort; there is also The Man with the Golden Torc, which (as is obvious from the title) blends horror memes with James Bond. This, and the series which follows, is much less serious in tone than the Nightside stories, though both are amusing in places rather than fully satirical. But enjoy one and you'll enjoy the other. They are too good to be considered a guilty pleasure (unlike Anita Blake, which I find contains far too much dull sex), but not quite good enough to be in my novels of the year. Unusually for the fantasy genre today, Green's novels are quite short, which makes them ideal for an hour long train journey - light to carry, and fun to read.
I've decided that it would be a good idea to have ratings for the novels in these blog entries, starting here. I'd give Into the Nightside 7/10.
Omnibus edition containing Something from the Nightside (2003) and Agents of Light and Darkness (2003)
I'm not sure why it is, or exactly when it happened, but the horror genre has changed. Possibly it's the influence of TV programmes like Buffy, which blended horror with other genres and made the scariness less of an integral part of the experience. But there are now lots of these genre crossover books around now, from the really bizarre (say, the chick-lit vampire of Mary Janice Davidson' Betsy series) to this more obvious pairing of hard boiled detective with horror. It is not even unique in choosing that combination, which is also used in the Harry Dresden series. In general, these work by taking well known horror ideas (such as vampire lore) and using them more as plot elements than for their frightening qualities. After all, it becomes much harder to be frightening with something as familiar to a modern reader and as frequently satirised as a vampire.
John Taylor is a sleazy private detective with a unique talent: he can find any object. But to do so he must go from the everyday London which holds his office into the Nightside, where his magic becomes a beacon attracting the enemies from which he fled five years earlier. So business is not good. Then a rich beautiful woman asks him to help find her daughter, lost in the Nightside, and he accepts the commission, charging only double his usual rates. Once into the Nightside, the tone changes, and there's much less of the hard boiled detective as the story becomes a more standard fantasy/horror tale, rather like a milder version of Anita Blake in a crossover with Neverwhere.
The Nightside series is not Green's only crossover of this sort; there is also The Man with the Golden Torc, which (as is obvious from the title) blends horror memes with James Bond. This, and the series which follows, is much less serious in tone than the Nightside stories, though both are amusing in places rather than fully satirical. But enjoy one and you'll enjoy the other. They are too good to be considered a guilty pleasure (unlike Anita Blake, which I find contains far too much dull sex), but not quite good enough to be in my novels of the year. Unusually for the fantasy genre today, Green's novels are quite short, which makes them ideal for an hour long train journey - light to carry, and fun to read.
I've decided that it would be a good idea to have ratings for the novels in these blog entries, starting here. I'd give Into the Nightside 7/10.
Sunday, 23 November 2008
Michael Stephen Fuchs: The Manuscript (2006)
Published: Macmillan New Writing, 2006
Sir Richard Burton was one of the most interesting Victorians - best known as a linguist and explorer, he translated the Arabian Nights into English and made the pilgrimage to Mecca forbidden to the infidel in disguise as an Arab, and co-led the expedition which discovered the source of the Nile. He is also well known to science fiction fans as the main character of Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series. Here, though, he appears as the author of "The Manuscript", a description of a trip he took into the Andes, discovering a remote tribe who possessed the answers to life's questions. Apparently lost when Burton's widow burnt his papers after his death, rumours suggest that The Manuscript is secretly hidden on an Internet server.
So far, so Da Vinci Code. A similar mixture of absurd and unlikely conspiracy theory and treasure hunt with a spiritual secret to be found. This is mixed in with the Internet thriller, along the lines of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and is written by someone who knows what he's talking about. Fuchs also thankfully writes in a far less clunky style than Dan Brown, who for this reader breaks the suspense every couple of paragraphs with some poorly phrased infelicity.
That is not to say that everything is wonderful in The Manuscript. The most glaring problem is the occasional lengthy and poorly integrated "info dump", notably in the early pages where Burton's biography is shoehorned in. It would help the flow of the novel if the details are revealed as characters need to know them, with a much shorter summary at this point, and the presentation would be more elegant than it is. It's excusable because Burton is made to be so important to the story (though the authorship of the Manuscript turns out to be almost irrelevant to both its contents and the treasure hunt: it's just that an origin can be fitted into Burton's already crowded life story).
Although i haven't mentioned any of the characters so far, the central figures are well enough drawn to hold the interest, if rather glamourised. These are nerds as portrayed by Hollywood, people who prefer to work out than watch Star Trek re-runs.
The Manuscript is a successful techno-thriller, even with its absurd premise. Perhaps the geekiness of the Internet content will put some people off, butt you won't need to have heard of awk, sed or perl to enjoy the story. It works: there's tension and suspense, and the rivalry between the various groups searching for the Manuscript is well handled.
Sir Richard Burton was one of the most interesting Victorians - best known as a linguist and explorer, he translated the Arabian Nights into English and made the pilgrimage to Mecca forbidden to the infidel in disguise as an Arab, and co-led the expedition which discovered the source of the Nile. He is also well known to science fiction fans as the main character of Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series. Here, though, he appears as the author of "The Manuscript", a description of a trip he took into the Andes, discovering a remote tribe who possessed the answers to life's questions. Apparently lost when Burton's widow burnt his papers after his death, rumours suggest that The Manuscript is secretly hidden on an Internet server.
So far, so Da Vinci Code. A similar mixture of absurd and unlikely conspiracy theory and treasure hunt with a spiritual secret to be found. This is mixed in with the Internet thriller, along the lines of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and is written by someone who knows what he's talking about. Fuchs also thankfully writes in a far less clunky style than Dan Brown, who for this reader breaks the suspense every couple of paragraphs with some poorly phrased infelicity.
That is not to say that everything is wonderful in The Manuscript. The most glaring problem is the occasional lengthy and poorly integrated "info dump", notably in the early pages where Burton's biography is shoehorned in. It would help the flow of the novel if the details are revealed as characters need to know them, with a much shorter summary at this point, and the presentation would be more elegant than it is. It's excusable because Burton is made to be so important to the story (though the authorship of the Manuscript turns out to be almost irrelevant to both its contents and the treasure hunt: it's just that an origin can be fitted into Burton's already crowded life story).
Although i haven't mentioned any of the characters so far, the central figures are well enough drawn to hold the interest, if rather glamourised. These are nerds as portrayed by Hollywood, people who prefer to work out than watch Star Trek re-runs.
The Manuscript is a successful techno-thriller, even with its absurd premise. Perhaps the geekiness of the Internet content will put some people off, butt you won't need to have heard of awk, sed or perl to enjoy the story. It works: there's tension and suspense, and the rivalry between the various groups searching for the Manuscript is well handled.
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
Karen Miller: The Innocent Mage (Kingmaker, Kingbreaker Book 1) (2005)
Published: Orbit, 2007
When Asher heads for the city of Dorana to make his fortune, he is apparently like many others. But there the Circle is waiting for him, as they and their ancestors have been for centuries. For their prophets tell them that Asher is the Innocent Mage of the magic-less Olken race, herald of the Final Days. They cannot inform Asher of his destiny before the right moment, or even tell him that he can work magic (hence "Innocent"), so they need to manipulate his life into the path they want him to follow. Asher's own talents and their work mean that he is appointed to the royal stables on his first day in Dorana, and soon afterwards he is asked by Prince Gar to act as his advisor on Olken matters.
The Innocent Mage, as the summary probably suggests, is not groundbreaking, innovative fantasy. The plot elements - young man marked out by prophecy especially - can be seen in many works of the genre, from the well loved (David Eddings' Belgariad) to the unbearable (the truly awful recent TV series Merlin). Here, Miller's take on the standard ideas of the genre works well, partly because of the character of Asher. Asher comes from a fisher family, one of the very small section of the population who go ouut beyond the weather magic controlled by the royal family that covers the land. This means that his background is tough, something which is reinforced by the northern English dialect he speaks, a useful trick from Miller, using a familiar stereotype from the real world to help the reader understand her fictional one. His usefulness to Prince Gar is that Asher has a straightforward attitude, and refuses to be another royal today. This is not always welcome to the prince, and the abrasiveness of their relationship is the backbone of the novel, and provides a great deal of humour. And it means that the characters are well enough drawn and familiar to the reader for them to be cared about when things get darker towards the end of The Innocent Mage (and then draw the reader on to the concluding The Awakened Mage).
Fantasy as a genre is still generally filled with characters from the nobility, one of the traits derived from medieval literature via the novels of William Morris. Even where peasants and other lower class characters appear, of minor importance or there with humorous intent, particularly when they use dialect, or all three (David Eddings' embarrassing yokels being a case in point). (The reality of medieval Europe, with limited travel, would have been that local dialects and accents would have been strong and verging on the mutually incomprehensible.) Asher isn't like this; he is a much more rounded character, important to the plot, and the humour comes from his relationship with the prince not from making fun of a yokel accent.
In terms of marketing, there is something extremely unusual about The Innocent Mage: this edition is completely free of endorsements and review quotations. Any fantasy novel, no matter how poor, seems to be able to find some writer willing to imply it is the most important work in the genre since The Lord of the Rings; I suspect that few readers pay much attention to them any more. So this could hardly be because the publishers could find no one to write something nice about the novel (it is better written than many that are covered in endorsements), and must be a deliberate marketing ploy. I can't quite see where it's trying to go, though.
The Innocent Mage is not a classic, not innovative, but better-than-most genre fantasy.
When Asher heads for the city of Dorana to make his fortune, he is apparently like many others. But there the Circle is waiting for him, as they and their ancestors have been for centuries. For their prophets tell them that Asher is the Innocent Mage of the magic-less Olken race, herald of the Final Days. They cannot inform Asher of his destiny before the right moment, or even tell him that he can work magic (hence "Innocent"), so they need to manipulate his life into the path they want him to follow. Asher's own talents and their work mean that he is appointed to the royal stables on his first day in Dorana, and soon afterwards he is asked by Prince Gar to act as his advisor on Olken matters.
The Innocent Mage, as the summary probably suggests, is not groundbreaking, innovative fantasy. The plot elements - young man marked out by prophecy especially - can be seen in many works of the genre, from the well loved (David Eddings' Belgariad) to the unbearable (the truly awful recent TV series Merlin). Here, Miller's take on the standard ideas of the genre works well, partly because of the character of Asher. Asher comes from a fisher family, one of the very small section of the population who go ouut beyond the weather magic controlled by the royal family that covers the land. This means that his background is tough, something which is reinforced by the northern English dialect he speaks, a useful trick from Miller, using a familiar stereotype from the real world to help the reader understand her fictional one. His usefulness to Prince Gar is that Asher has a straightforward attitude, and refuses to be another royal today. This is not always welcome to the prince, and the abrasiveness of their relationship is the backbone of the novel, and provides a great deal of humour. And it means that the characters are well enough drawn and familiar to the reader for them to be cared about when things get darker towards the end of The Innocent Mage (and then draw the reader on to the concluding The Awakened Mage).
Fantasy as a genre is still generally filled with characters from the nobility, one of the traits derived from medieval literature via the novels of William Morris. Even where peasants and other lower class characters appear, of minor importance or there with humorous intent, particularly when they use dialect, or all three (David Eddings' embarrassing yokels being a case in point). (The reality of medieval Europe, with limited travel, would have been that local dialects and accents would have been strong and verging on the mutually incomprehensible.) Asher isn't like this; he is a much more rounded character, important to the plot, and the humour comes from his relationship with the prince not from making fun of a yokel accent.
In terms of marketing, there is something extremely unusual about The Innocent Mage: this edition is completely free of endorsements and review quotations. Any fantasy novel, no matter how poor, seems to be able to find some writer willing to imply it is the most important work in the genre since The Lord of the Rings; I suspect that few readers pay much attention to them any more. So this could hardly be because the publishers could find no one to write something nice about the novel (it is better written than many that are covered in endorsements), and must be a deliberate marketing ploy. I can't quite see where it's trying to go, though.
The Innocent Mage is not a classic, not innovative, but better-than-most genre fantasy.
Tuesday, 23 September 2008
Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)
Published: Millennium, 1999
In the military subgenre of science fiction, there are two major classics, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and this, less well known but classic enough to be chosen as the first in Millennium's SF Masterworks series of reprints. Starship Troopers is not a book I like very much, not among Heinlein's best, and with something of an old fashioned feel to it now. It is a novel which is really about comradeship, and which ignores many of the more unpleasant aspects of warfare. The basic plot of The Forever War, describing the training and deployment of soldiers from the first person perspective of William Mandella, is shared with Starship Troopers (and a lot of other military fiction), but the attitude behind Haldeman's novel is very different.
The basic reason for this is that The Forever War has its roots in Haldeman's Vietnam War experiences. While some details are obviously different (even allowing for the science fiction aspects, few sixties US army camps would not only be mixed but encourage sleeping with different partners every night, for example), The Forever War is a more ruthless, brutal novel in which the enemy aliens are far more like us than Heinlein's giant bugs, so that killing them seems more like the death of a person to the reader than the extermination of vermin which is what it feels like in Starship Troopers. Heinlein, whose military service as a naval officer was during peacetime and was thus very different, does not really make any attempt to deal with moral issues, partly because he is so securely convinced of his own personal philosophy, while Haldeman is keen to try to get the reader to feel what he felt. This makes The Forever War far more ambitious than Starship Troopers, and fits in with the trend in literary depictions of war in the twentieth century, following from All Quiet on the Western Front.
The main concept in The Forever War, which gives the novel its name, is that the soldier on active service becomes increasingly distanced from his or her civilian contemporaries. Haldeman uses the idea of relativistic time dilation to give a physical aspect to this psychological affect, one which particularly affected Vietnam veterans because the eventual unpopularity of the war affected the welcome they expected when they returned to the States, and made it hard fort them to be reintegrated into civilian life. From the genre point of view, the use of time dilation makes The Forever War one of a fairly small number of space-based science fiction novels to take build relativistic restrictions into the plot. Each mission lasts weeks to William Mandella, while decades pass on earth. So each time he returns, he is more a fish out of water, and Haldeman gives over more pages to describing this than to the description of the war itself (which is reasonable, as interstellar warfare is going to be pretty confusing to a soldier on the ground). Many of the changes to human society come about because of the massive effort required to prosecute the war, so veterans are an object of curiousity, but as Mandella points out, "The most important fact about the war to most people is that if it ended suddenly, Earth's economy would collapse".
The culture shock goes both ways, too. When Mandella is appointed to a command, the new recruits have almost to learn a new language, the old fashioned English of a four hundred and fifty year old man: as far from them as Shakespeare is from us. Haldeman seems to have thought about this future in some depth, but oddly seems to have missed the possibility that during the next four centuries English may be replaced as the principal world language, say by Mandarin, Hindi or Spanish. And that is perhaps less problematic than changes in technology would be. As a commander, Mandella surely needs to understand something of the changes in technology that have happened during his life in order to be able to fight effectively, but instead of the total incomprehensibility that would be seen by a sixteenth century cavalryman asked to command a modern stealth air bomber squadron using satellite imagery for targeting, he has only to cope with improvements to the basic technology used in the early years of the war.
Space warfare faces some serious difficulties, particularly the space marines style scenarios which form the main part of Haldeman's narrative, where groups of men attack fortified positions on the ground from spacecraft orbiting the planet. (The basic issues stem from the overwhelming advantage that gravity gives to the attackers, an edge which goes away if they land on the planet.) Haldeman brings in a far greater problem with the vast timespan of the war as perceived from Earth, and the resources required to prosecute the war over huge distances. The closest historical parallel is the Hundred Years' War, shorter in duration, far less organised, intermittent rather than continuous, involving far smaller proportions of a far smaller population: yet the economic and political stresses it caused proved a major factor in the formation of the English and French states which proved so influential in the development of the modern world.
By concentrating on one confused individual participating in a remote war, Haldeman increases the impact of The Forever War at the expense of a broad picture of the future of the human race. The resonances with Vietnam perhaps make the novel seem a little dated, particularly with the setting of the initial chapters at a time now in our past (the date being chosen by Haldeman to make it possible for some of the soldiers to be Vietnam veterans). Yet it remains a powerful picture of what it is like to fight a war that alienates the soldiers from the non-soldiers, and it could be argued that with America involved in another unpopular overseas war, it is more relevant than ever.
In the military subgenre of science fiction, there are two major classics, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and this, less well known but classic enough to be chosen as the first in Millennium's SF Masterworks series of reprints. Starship Troopers is not a book I like very much, not among Heinlein's best, and with something of an old fashioned feel to it now. It is a novel which is really about comradeship, and which ignores many of the more unpleasant aspects of warfare. The basic plot of The Forever War, describing the training and deployment of soldiers from the first person perspective of William Mandella, is shared with Starship Troopers (and a lot of other military fiction), but the attitude behind Haldeman's novel is very different.
The basic reason for this is that The Forever War has its roots in Haldeman's Vietnam War experiences. While some details are obviously different (even allowing for the science fiction aspects, few sixties US army camps would not only be mixed but encourage sleeping with different partners every night, for example), The Forever War is a more ruthless, brutal novel in which the enemy aliens are far more like us than Heinlein's giant bugs, so that killing them seems more like the death of a person to the reader than the extermination of vermin which is what it feels like in Starship Troopers. Heinlein, whose military service as a naval officer was during peacetime and was thus very different, does not really make any attempt to deal with moral issues, partly because he is so securely convinced of his own personal philosophy, while Haldeman is keen to try to get the reader to feel what he felt. This makes The Forever War far more ambitious than Starship Troopers, and fits in with the trend in literary depictions of war in the twentieth century, following from All Quiet on the Western Front.
The main concept in The Forever War, which gives the novel its name, is that the soldier on active service becomes increasingly distanced from his or her civilian contemporaries. Haldeman uses the idea of relativistic time dilation to give a physical aspect to this psychological affect, one which particularly affected Vietnam veterans because the eventual unpopularity of the war affected the welcome they expected when they returned to the States, and made it hard fort them to be reintegrated into civilian life. From the genre point of view, the use of time dilation makes The Forever War one of a fairly small number of space-based science fiction novels to take build relativistic restrictions into the plot. Each mission lasts weeks to William Mandella, while decades pass on earth. So each time he returns, he is more a fish out of water, and Haldeman gives over more pages to describing this than to the description of the war itself (which is reasonable, as interstellar warfare is going to be pretty confusing to a soldier on the ground). Many of the changes to human society come about because of the massive effort required to prosecute the war, so veterans are an object of curiousity, but as Mandella points out, "The most important fact about the war to most people is that if it ended suddenly, Earth's economy would collapse".
The culture shock goes both ways, too. When Mandella is appointed to a command, the new recruits have almost to learn a new language, the old fashioned English of a four hundred and fifty year old man: as far from them as Shakespeare is from us. Haldeman seems to have thought about this future in some depth, but oddly seems to have missed the possibility that during the next four centuries English may be replaced as the principal world language, say by Mandarin, Hindi or Spanish. And that is perhaps less problematic than changes in technology would be. As a commander, Mandella surely needs to understand something of the changes in technology that have happened during his life in order to be able to fight effectively, but instead of the total incomprehensibility that would be seen by a sixteenth century cavalryman asked to command a modern stealth air bomber squadron using satellite imagery for targeting, he has only to cope with improvements to the basic technology used in the early years of the war.
Space warfare faces some serious difficulties, particularly the space marines style scenarios which form the main part of Haldeman's narrative, where groups of men attack fortified positions on the ground from spacecraft orbiting the planet. (The basic issues stem from the overwhelming advantage that gravity gives to the attackers, an edge which goes away if they land on the planet.) Haldeman brings in a far greater problem with the vast timespan of the war as perceived from Earth, and the resources required to prosecute the war over huge distances. The closest historical parallel is the Hundred Years' War, shorter in duration, far less organised, intermittent rather than continuous, involving far smaller proportions of a far smaller population: yet the economic and political stresses it caused proved a major factor in the formation of the English and French states which proved so influential in the development of the modern world.
By concentrating on one confused individual participating in a remote war, Haldeman increases the impact of The Forever War at the expense of a broad picture of the future of the human race. The resonances with Vietnam perhaps make the novel seem a little dated, particularly with the setting of the initial chapters at a time now in our past (the date being chosen by Haldeman to make it possible for some of the soldiers to be Vietnam veterans). Yet it remains a powerful picture of what it is like to fight a war that alienates the soldiers from the non-soldiers, and it could be argued that with America involved in another unpopular overseas war, it is more relevant than ever.
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