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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yvonne Jerrold: A Case of Wild Justice? (2008)

Published: Troubadour, 2008

The essential idea of A Case of Wild Justice? is fairly simple. It picks on something that has become more and more commonly reported in the UK's national and local papers: an increase in anti-social behaviour in young teenagers, both vandalism and threatening behaviour to adults. Indeed, from some local papers, it would seem that it should be impossible to go out at all without getting hassled. And it certainly seems to residents that the police are helpless, that those responsible are never caught and convicted of any crime (despite the huge numbers of cameras on the British streets today). In the novel, a group of old age pensioners forms, known as the Silver Bees, who booby trap themselves with the intention of taking their tormentors with them if the worst comes to the worst. Not quite suicide bombers (they don't go out of their way to get into situations where they will die) and not quite vigilantes (they don't actively seek to attack the teenage delinquents), the aim is to make delinquents think twice because it is now dangerous to harass pensioners.

I remember going to see the David Mamet play, Oleanna, some years ago in London. The play has two characters, a university lecturer and a student, and concerns accusations of rape made by the student against the lecturer. In this particular production, with David Suchet and Lia Williams, it seemed pretty clear that rape, in the literal sense, did not happen, but in the mind of the student, it had done so in a different sense. During the interval and on the way out at the end of the play, my partner and I were struck at how all the snatches of conversation overheard were about the concept, and not about the play as a play or even the excellent performances (both actors were mesmerising). People did say that it was a good play, but that seemed to be more because they were stimulated by it than by any virtues of the text itself.

A Case of Wild Justice? is a novel with a similar feel to it. As a reviewer, I should really discuss how it is written, but I find myself wanting to talk about the ideas it contains and take issue with some of its positions on its emotive subject. Generally, I was impressed; this is a well-characterised story. However, I do feel that some of what it appears to be trying to do is undermined by the approach it takes.

The story is told from the point of view of one elderly woman, and how she begins to consider becoming a Silver Bee, after hearing about the group and seeing the activities of the children in her village street. The leader of these delinquents is her grandson, a sociopathic individual loathed by all adults except his mother, who thinks he is a perfect angel. A lot of the novel - perhaps actually more than half - is taken up with Hannah's background story, which is given in some detail and makes it clear that the message of the book is not that everything was alright until the current generation of teenagers came along. To me, this is one of the two major problems with the book. It certainly seems that the publisher wants to market the book as a novel about the Silver Bees, but the inclusion of so much of Hannah's life story undermines this theme. The reader wants to get to the bits that they were told the book was about; after all, that is why it was picked up in the first place. I'm not sure how much this is a case of a misleading blurb - a publisher's marketing department picking up the most controversial element of the novel - and how much it is the author becoming interested in the characters and writing a novel about them rather than keeping to the theme.

The second problem is with one of the characters, Hannah's grandson Billy. He is the leader of the local teenage gang, and at the start of the novel is serving a short prison sentence, being released near the end. The problem is his portrayal. I have no general objection to villains being sociopathic, but in this case it surely undermines what Jerrold has to say about the problem of teen violence: not every teenager who vandalises a bus stop or mugs an old lady is a sociopath or influenced by one. My feeling that the way Billy is handled makes it impossible for A Case of Wild Justice? to have a serious point: it effectively makes out that teenage delinquency has no social cause, and so can have no social solution. (Preventing children growing up like Billy would be the only way to stop it.) By not paying attention to what might be causing teenage delinquency in society at large, the issue at the centre of the novel is trivialised.

Despite this, A Case of Wild Justice? is an enjoyable read, well written and with believable characters. After all, it is a novel, not a sociological treatise. To me, Oleanna was not successful as a play; A Case of Wild Justice? succeeds as a novel.

Tobias Hill: The Cryptographer (2003)

Published: Faber and Faber, 2004

In all the history of literature, the number of central characters in novels who are tax inspectors can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. And of these, four will be satirical, leaving The Cryptographer unique as a thriller with a tax inspector heroine. Anna Moore is good at her job, and when the UK Inland Revenue discovers discrepancies in the accounting of John Law, the richest man on the planet, she is chosen to investigate. The novel is set a little in the future, and John Law became rich beyond even Bill Gates' wildest dreams after inventing the electronic money software that caught on. So why has he set up a clumsy accounting scam for what is by his scale peanuts, a few million dollars? Her investigation seems to be successful, the money owed to the Revenue paid, butt with the question about motive unanswered Anna herself is left unsatisfied, and she becomes as fascinated by Law as he seems to be by her.

Billed as a thriller, The Cryptographer is far more gentle than that suggests. While the plot is basically that of a science fiction thriller, it is not really what the novel is about; Hill is much more interested in the characters. This interest is shared by Anna herself. She wants to understand Law to the extent that she loses satisfaction in her work. It is clear from the way the novel is written that the author was an established poet as well as - and indeed before - a novelist. However, The Cryptographer is not as self consciously literary as the work of another author where this is also apparent, Lawrence Durrell; it is actually reminiscent of recent work by William Gibson, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country.

The title most clearly refers to the way in which Law made his fortune. The architecture for his software currency is, to someone who works with computers, not particularly convincing, on either the security or usability fronts. There is no provision mentioned, for example, for a portable equivalent to cash, just software that is installed on each user's computer. The software is supposedly kept secure by periodic updates which change the security, distributed from a central server which updates the security without human intervention. This immediately suggests attacking the central server, and finding a way to subvert the update process as a means of breaking the security. Alternatively, work on persuading your own local client software to accept a spurious update, because then you have another way to subvert the updating mechanism. It is unlikely that such a system, when at the centre of something as high profile and valuable as a widely used currency, would stand up to large scale hacking for long.

This literal interpretation of the title is not the only possibility nor the most important. The Cryptographer is not a book about technology, but about the connections between people, like an Iris Murdoch novel. Language is itself a kind of code, a representation of what we mean to say that is decoded by our interlocutor, and this is especially the case when the discussion is not really about what we want to talk about. In this case, both Anna and Law have professional lives intimately connected with money, even more so than is usual, and yet neither is particularly interested in money itself. Their initial contact is entirely professional, yet each is drawn to the other. And they quickly understand each other well, even though there are important aspects of their lives that the other does not know: when Law goes missing, Anna is able to find him even though she doesn't know that he is divorced from the wife he was still living with.

Overall, I found this an impressive novel, though I am at something of a loss to explain why. Gentle, with hidden depths and attractive central characters, it is not a demanding read but still a genuine work of literary art.