Holiday Reading

[mtvessel]

May/Jun/Jul 2016
Last year I spent seven weeks travelling in Australasia with only an e-reader for company. Here is what I took with me.

The Hallowed Hunt - Lois McMaster Bujold - Tor, 2005 (Kindle edition)
* * *
This is the third novel set in Bujold's world of Chalion but you would hardly know it. None of the characters or locations from the previous books appear - the only connection is the five-fold religion of Father, Mother, Son, Daughter and Bastard, and even this is subsumed into an older belief system involving animal spirits.

The story is engaging enough - a lady in waiting (Ijada) kills a prince when he tries to rape her, and a lord called Ingrey with a wolf problem is sent to escort her to trial but finds himself trying to murder her instead. The reasons for this are to do with an exceptionally complicated magical plot that I must admit I could not really follow in the jetlagged state in which I read it. The ideas were nice but the characters were very much stock Bujold romantic leads and overall I found the thing unmemorable.

SPQR - Mary Beard - Profile Books, 2015 (Kindle edition)
* * * *
It's long past time that Mary Beard gave us her definitive popular history of ancient Rome and this is it. The title comes from a famous catchphrase Senatus Populusque Romanus (the Senate and People of Rome) and the people and their government are its chief concerns. As anyone familiar with Beard's previous works might expect, it is witty and iconoclastic, with a pleasing focus on everyday life. The iconoclasm starts with its beginning and end points which are Cicero's successful prosecution of Cataline in 63 BCE and Caracalla's declaration that every free inhabitant of the Roman Empire was a full Roman citizen in 212 CE, Beard's point being that the origins of Rome were just as much a myth to the ancient Romans as they are to us (they had two conflicting accounts of the foundation of Rome - the disturbingly fatricidal tale of Romulus and Remus, and the only slightly more noble one of Aeneus the love-rat). Instead, she identifies the defining characteristic of ancient Rome that allowed it to dominate the known world as being its tolerant attitude to its foreign-born citizens. Trump and May, take note.

Smiler’s Fair – Rebecca Levene - Hodder & Stoughton, 2014 (Kindle edition)
* * *
I bought this one because I liked the title and the suggestion that it would be a fantasy about travelling folk, like Diana Wynne Jones’ wonderful Cart and Cwidder. Sadly, it is nowhere near as good as that marvellous book, or indeed its spiritual successor, The Night Circus. Instead it is a by-the-numbers grimdark fantasy which uses the eponymous fair as an occasional location.

There are some interesting ideas – for example, no-one lives in a permanent home because to do so attracts the subterranean worm-men, who emerge and slaughter anyone they find – and to a certain extent they are followed through, but I found it all humourless and uninspiring. If you like fantasy where horrible things happen to good and bad people alike, you will probably enjoy it more than I did.

Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier - Hachette Digital, 1938
* * * *
Yup, it's a classic, though I found the protagonist rather annoying. She's so wet. I suppose she has to be to make the psychological drama work, but still. There are some impressive authorial feats of skill performed here, including the way in which the protagonist remains unnamed without the reader noticing (which of course is the point - the novel's major theme is strong versus weak women). But the most outstanding of them all is that of the five main characters, one is dead, and one is a house, and it is still a gripping read.

The Jennifer Morgue – Charles Stross - Hachette Digital, 2006
* * * *
Another fun outing in the Laundry series, I particularly enjoyed this one for its take on the James Bond thriller genre. And full marks to Stross for anticipating and subverting my criticism of it. I still wish that the female characters had more to do, but this is definitely moving in the right direction.

Do No Harm – Henry Marsh - Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2014 (Kindle edition)
* * * *
This is a warts-and-all account of the life of a neurosurgeon in the NHS, the agonising choices they must make about whether to operate on a sick patient, and the fantastic and occasionally dreadful consequences that result. Everyone should read it, if only to be reminded that doctors and their teams are not superhumans and will sometimes make mistakes or give bad advice. That said, if I had one of the horrible brain illnesses described here, I would definitely want someone with Marsh's kindness, honesty and bravery as my consultant.

Career of Evil – Robert Galbraith - Sphere, 2015 (Kindle edition)
* * *
The conventions of ongoing crime series more or less dictated that this book needed to be written, but it is a mild disappointment nonetheless. The plot revolves around three characters from Cormoran Strike's past who may have been responsible for a parcel sent to his assistant Robin containing a woman's severed leg. They have interesting back stories and Rowling pulls off the difficult trick of writing from the villain's viewpoint without quite revealing who it is. However the soap opera elements (Robin's wedding and her fiancé Matthew's jealousy of Strike) are rather too prevalent, perhaps because the main plot is so thin.

The Elements of Eloquence – Mark Forsyth - Icon Books, 2013 (Kindle edition)
* * * *
This is another wonderful book by the author of The Horologicon about the figures of rhetoric, the techniques discovered by the Greeks (and developed by the Romans) for making a phrase striking and memorable. He covers the entire gamut from alliteration ("the boy stood on the burning deck") to tricolon (the rule of three - "sun, sea and sex"), to scesis onomaton (scene setting without verbs, as in "space: the final frontier") to that subtle use of referring pronoun before noun, prolepsis. I am very annoyed that I was not taught these essential tools of effective prose at school. As Forsyth points out, modern English teaching is more obsessed with what poets and authors thought ("as though that were of interest to anyone") than with the techniques they used to express their ideas. No wonder that there is so much ugly writing.