Better as a Novel?

7 Mar 2004
The Queen's Conjuror - Benjamin Woolley - Flamingo 2002
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Although the title sounds like a Big Commercial Fantasy, this is in fact a biography of Dr John Dee. In many ways, though, the subject matter isn't too different and might have benefitted from a more novelistic treatment.

The problem with biographies is that the biographer is limited by the source materials available, and this can lead to a less than satisfying portrait. This is very much the case here. The majority of the book covers a relatively short period of Dee's life and focuses on his relationship with the admittedly fascinating Edward Kelley, a medium of dubious reputation who was probably part schizophrenic and part fraud. Dee's early life is briefly sketched and only tantalising glimpses of the young man are offered (the giant scarab beetle that Dee, aged twenty, caused to fly about the stage during a performance of Lysistrata is mentioned, but Woolley refrains from speculating on how he caused it to happen - why not have a discussion of theatrical effects of the time?). Similarly we hear next to nothing of Dee's first two wives and his domestic arrangements before he moves to Mortlake. Presumably this is due to lack of source, which is fair enough. However it has led, I think, to inclusion of material which is of only peripheral relevance - for example there is a detailed description of Frobisher's ill-fated expedition to find the North-West Passage, to which Dee's only contribution was advice on navigation.

Things improve when Edward Kelley enters the picture and the pair travel to Bohemia and Prague. Woolley duly recounts the "actions" (seances), the various spirits whch manifested themselves and the writing of the "Enochian books". Unfortunately, he gives very few clues as to how twenty-first century readers should interpret these. From the quotations given, it looks extremely unlikely that the whole thing was a fraud perpetrated by Kelley - there must have been easier ways for him to make a living than dictating page after page of Enochian characters, especially after Laski, their rich patron, proved not to be so rich after all. Probably Kelley was a schizophrenic of some sort, and it is a shame that Woolley does not explore the sorts of psychosis he could have had.

I do entirely concur with Woolley's explanation for Dee's apparent trajectory from rigorous logic and mathematics to out-and-out mysticism. Although Dee is regarded as the archetypal renaissance scholar, he wasn't actually a great thinker. Today Dee is remembered chiefly for his library, his calculations (both astrological and navigational), and his scandalous relationship with Kelley (culminating in the infamous "cross-matching" or wife-swapping). He is not known for any original discoveries or startling insights. From his reading in his early years, Dee foresaw that the new knowledge of the renaissance would serve to displace religion as the central explanation for the universe just as the earth was displaced from the centre of the universe by Copernican ideas. Because he lacked the imagination to go with the new ideas, he instead spent the rest of his life trying to put the old order back, first by the application of mathematics and logic, which he thought would prove the existence of a rational mind behind creation, and when that failed, by relevations from "angels". Basically he was a conservative and had a second-rate mind (I know because I have a second-rate mind myself - when at college I was good at scholarly summaries but not so hot at coming up with ideas of my own).

I am led to wonder whether Woolley's refusal to provide at least some speculative explanations for the more puzzling aspects of Dee's life is the sign of a second-rate mind or merely that of a good biographer (I am not a great reader of biographies, so I can't really compare). I didn't feel I really understood John Dee and as a result, despite the lengthy list of sources and other scholarly paraphernalia, the book felt rather superficial. Perhaps Woolley should write a novel in which he can cut loose and really get inside the mind of his subject. Or perhaps Peter Ackroyd (in "the House of Dr Dee", which I haven't read) has already done so...

A Surfeit of Sub-Plots

13 Mar 2004
A Body in the Bath House - Lindsey Davis - Arrow 2002
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It must be said at the outset that Lindsey Davis has never been a writer of great detective fiction in the Agatha Christie/Dorothy L Sayers sense. The reader can generally figure out the murderer about thirty pages before her frankly rather thick hero, and ingenious methods of murder or fiendishly labyrinthine setups are not her stock in trade. The strength of her books lies in her terrific depiction of the first century Roman Empire and the ongoing soap opera that is the lives of Falco's and Helena's families and friends. These strengths are very much to the fore here, which is just as well because the detective plot is unusually incoherent.

The book starts with a bang, or rather a smell. Falco and his father Geminus discover a corpse in the hypocaust of Geminus' new bath house. Suspicion soon falls on Gloccus and Cotta, the forever absentee builders, who have fled abroad. At the same time, Vespasian asks Falco to investigate some mysterious deaths and financial irregularities at the building site of a new palace for Togidubnus, a client tribal chieftain in Falco's least favourite province, Britain. And Falco's sister Maia is being menaced by Anacrites, the slippery spy, who has not taken kindly to her rejection of his romantic advances, and needs to be got out of the country quickly.

So Falco and his family up sticks and travel to Britain's south coast, along with Helena's two brothers Aulus and Quintus who have both decided that they want to continue to be Falco's assistants despite the fact that one of them stole away and married the intended bride of the other (I hope you're keeping up at the back there). One would have thought that their senatorial parents would be a little concerned that Falco now seems to have charmed all three of their children into abandoning the Patrician lifestyle, but apparently not. Falco investigates the mysterious deaths and uncovers some ingenious building scams. More murders occur. Everything is (more or less) resolved.

All this is fine, but none of the major plot elements fit together. The Gloccus/Cotta subplot, which I think was the one that Davis originally intended to be the main storyline, gets shunted into the sidelines after Falco and co. arrive in Britain. The scams and the murders turn out to be parts of largely unrelated sub-plots. With so much to be resolved, it is not surprising that the denouement feels rushed and unsatisfactory (in the case of one of the murders, Davis doesn't even get round to telling us precisely who the murderer was). I was particularly disappointed with the revealed identities of Gloccus and Cotta, one of which is obvious and the other implausible.

Fortunately, the book has its compensations. The depiction of what a Roman building site must have been like is splendidly done, and the descriptions of the professions and logistics involved are convincing. The characters are as strong as ever, with Helena getting to do a gratifying amount of the detecting whilst posing as a demure Roman mother. I am particularly getting to like Aulus, who though arrogant and truculent is so put upon that it's hard not to feel sorry for him, unlike the charming but slimy Justinus (the fact that I am an elder brother has, I am sure, no bearing on my attitude to these characters). There are signs that he is beginning to learn from his experiences with Falco and I hope that Davis will give him a break. Sadly we don't see much of the splendid Petro, which allows his unresolved attraction to Maia to be spun out for yet another book.

This book was undermined by having too many plot ideas which were insufficiently thought through. Hopefully Davis will regain her focus in future books and bring the plots, setting and characters into better balance. I'll certainly be reading them to find out.

Lost in a World of Her Own

21 Mar 2004
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J.K. Rowling - Bloomsbury 2003
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One has to admire the woman. There can't be many authors living today who could persuade millions of people, young and old, to read out of choice a book which rivals some of the more substantial Dickens novels in length. With a bit of luck they'll be less afraid to tackle a long novel in the future. Just as well, probably, as at the rate that the length of the Potter books is increasing , the last one will be well over a thousand pages.

Having said that, the length of the book is not a bonus. A sort of heaviness comes over one when faced with such a monster which a book of, say, four hundred pages doesn't engender. Reading it is still enjoyable, but the enjoyment is tempered by the thought that there are other things that you should perhaps be doing. In the case of a Dickens novel, this is made up for by the wonderful characters, the witty dialogue and the sharp observations about what it is to be human. "Order of the Phoenix" offers all of these to a certain extent, but it is certainly not in the Dickens league.

There's another problem. When you've waded through all 760-odd pages, you realise that actually there is no more plot than there was in the previous books. The result is that the build-up to the big climax takes longer and there is a fatal diminution in the energy and pace of the plotting. Compared to the previous books, this one felt enervated, and it never really became a page-turner for me.

So why is it so long? One reason of course is the "Big Name Author" effect, which means that editors become scared to cut a word of their cash cow's output or to suggest that some scenes might need a little trimming. This has been the undoing of a number of authors - Tim Powers, for example, having written some extremely good books that were four hundred pages or so long (The Anubis Gates, Dinner at Deviant's Palace), was evidently told by his publishers to up the length to six hundred pages. The result has been a series of mediocre books which had some good ideas but which all felt two hundred pages too long. To be fair, I don't think that this is the chief reason for this book's length - with my editor's hat on, I can say that the book lacks energy in the plotting, but I am hard pushed to say what, precisely, could have been cut to improve the pacing.

The seond reason why the book is so long is Rowling's increasingly desperate attempts to break the formula with which she saddled herself from book one. She painted herself into a corner by basing her books on the school year, which means that they all follow the same sequence - Harry has a hard time at the Dursleys, goes somewhere in the magical world, goes to Hogwarts, autumn term, christmas, spring and summer terms (curiously there doesn't seem to be much of an Easter break), Voldemort manifests in some new form, Harry defeats him, Dumbledore says how well he's done, Harry goes home to the Dursleys, the end. Rowling tries to disguise this by increasingly elaborate world-building. This is reasonable as Harry gets older and his horizons expand, but the increasing amount of background dump slows everything down, especially early on. In this book, Harry doesn't even get to Hogwarts before page 200, whereas in the first few books he was more than halfway through the school year by the same point.

Rowling's other trick for distracting us from the formula is to increase the complexity of the characterisation. If you assume that children's characters are simpler than those of adults (a common though rather patronising assumption), then this again makes sense as the characters get older. Unfortunately, the more mature he gets, the less convincing Harry becomes. Forgive the indelicacy of this point, but he must be the first fifteen year old male in the history of the world to be apparently totally unaware of his genitals. Nor do spots or breaking voices ever become a topic of conversation or comment in the classroom. Now it was obviously a deliberate decision to avoid dwelling on the more icky bits of male adolescence (and Rowling does do a good job of conveying the moodiness and the embarrassment of being attracted to someone that teenagers suffer), but not even to hint at Harry's sexual development firmly relegates the book to the children's shelves and makes the justification for investing so much time in reading it less strong, at least for adults. I could be wrong of course - perhaps we'll discover in book six that Harry is a late developer. But somehow I doubt it.

As for the plot - well, compared to the others, it was disappointing. It relies heavily on several important people behaving like idiots - Cornelius Fudge, Dumbledore, Sirius and Harry himself. Whilst all are given justifications for what they do, the reasons are weak. Even Voldemort behaves like a bit of a fool - the maguffin he is after turns out to be a let-down, and the direct attack in which he engages to get it feels out of character compared to his previous sneakiness, and would, at least on the face of it, appear to have been a major tactical blunder in his ongoing campaign to take over the world. Presumably Rowling will turn this around in book six, but whether she can do it plausibly remains to be seen.

Lest this seem too negative a review, let us finish with the good points. The imaginative inventiveness of Rowling's magical world is as rich as ever, the humour and characterisation are still great, and for adults there is the pleasure of seeing Rowling's satirical commentary on modern Britain becoming ever more overt. I would love to know who the Ofsted inspector was who so got Rowling's goat that she created the wonderfully dreadful Dolores Umbridge, who with the pink ribbons in her hair and the awful kitten plates on her study walls is possibly the best villain that the series has yet had. Whilst the multi-cultural nature of Hogwarts clearly indicates Rowling's liberal credentials (though no overtly gay characters as yet), she is clearly no fan of the present government's educational policy of diktat from the centre. I look forward to seeing her take on President Bush and the war in Iraq in the next book.