mtvessel | Recent Entries

Feb 2023
Ocean's Echo – Everina Maxwell – Orbit, 2022
* * * *
This novel is set in the same universe as Maxwell's previous book Winter's Orbit, though apart from the cultural convention of gender identification (wood for male, flint for female) and the presence of the space-lane-controlling Resolution, there is very little connection. Well, other than the two main characters, who personality-wise are cookie-cutter copies of the protagonists of the earlier novel. Fortunately, the new situation that Maxwell puts them in is interesting and well worked out, and the story is pleasingly unexpected.
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Jan 2023
Midwinter of the Spirit – Phil Rickman – Corvus, 2011
* * *
This is the second volume in the sequence starring Merrily Watkins, a Church of England vicar with a talent for the uncanny. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first – the plot, which involves possible satanic worship, took a while to get going, and keeping Merrily and her potential love interest Lol on parallel tracks for so long was perhaps not the wisest decision – but the cathedral town setting is well done and the depiction of the ecclesiastical sexism that Merrily has to deal with is, I suspect, still somewhat true to life.

Nov 2022 – Jan 2023
Regency Buck / A Civil Contract / The Grand Sophy – Georgette Heyer – Arrow, 2004/2004/2005
* * * / * * * */ * * * * *
So here are three more Georgette Heyer novels recommended by my friends. They are all good fun and all subvert the romance formula in interesting ways. But for me there was a definite order of enjoyment, and that order was linked to the agency of the female protagonists.
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Nov 2022
The Galaxy and the Ground Within – Becky Chambers – Hodder & Stoughton, 2021
* * * *
Having set her previous book in a location almost entirely populated by humans, Chambers has now gone to the other extreme and has written a novel in which none of the characters are Homo sapiens. Not that you could tell from their emotions and relationships, which include a mother and her adolescent son, an artist returning from exile to see his children, and someone secretly visiting her lover. Adding shells, beaks, and long ape-like arms to the characters doesn’t really make them alien, but nonetheless this is not a bad book.
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Nov 2022
A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles – Random House, 2017
* * * *
In the eyes of the western world, Russia has always had an interesting and troubling double nature. On the one hand, there are the incomparable contributions of Russian artists and scientists to world culture – Mendeleev, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Shostakovich to name but a few – but on the other, there is its brutal and inhumane politics, from the oppressive reigns of the Tsars to the horrors of Stalinism. This book has that dichotomy at its heart. The friend who recommended this to me really liked it, describing it as "joyous" despite its portrayal of a Russian aristocrat who, at the height of the 1917 revolution, is sentenced to life-long incarceration in a swanky hotel in Moscow, on pain of being shot if he ventures outside it. And it is – Nicolai Rostov's response to his situation is full of wit and grace despite the unending humiliations that are heaped upon him. But I read it some months after the start of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which meant that for me it landed rather differently.

This was particularly acute in the discussions concerning the destructive urges of the Russian state. Rostov's poet friend Mishka remarks that "we Russians have proven unusually adept at destroying that which we have created", which the official Osip subsequently argues is the necessary cost for achieving progressive goals such as universal literacy and industrial development. Which is at least arguable when it is elements of your own culture that you are destroying. When it's someone else's, that's very different.

Oct 2022
The Left Handed Booksellers of London – Garth Nix – Gollancz, 2020
* * *
Not a lot to say about this one as it hasn’t lingered in my mind. It's a young adult fantasy set in an alternative 80s London, where Susan Arkshaw, daughter of a loving but vague and useless mother, is looking for the father whom she has never met. She visits her uncle Frank Thringley, a minor crime lord, only to discover that he has just been killed by a flamboyant young man called Merlin because he was a sipper, a type of vampire, who had gone bad. This is the introduction to the Susan Cooper-ish dark forces that are trying to break through into the modern world, who are opposed by an organisation of not-quite-human warriors (left-handed) and scholars (right-handed) that has decided to run a set of bookshops as a cover. It’s a nice conceit but, like so many young adult novels, substitutes pacy plotting for plausible characterisation.

Sep 2022
Troubled Blood – Robert Galbraith – Sphere Books, 2020
* * *
This novel sees Strike and Robin take on a standard rite of passage in detective fiction, the cold case. While visiting his sick aunt in Cornwall, Strike is approached by Anna, a woman who wants him to investigate the disappearance of her mother Margot, a London GP, forty years previously. The police think that she was abducted by a now-incarcerated serial killer, Dennis Creed, as she walked from work to see a friend, but he is refusing to say. And there are other suspects and witnesses; the staff at Margot's GP surgery, her husband Roy, who married Anna's nanny suspiciously soon after Margot was declared dead, and an obsessive patient called Steve.

The case itself is fine and has a satisfying resolution, but as in Lethal White, its progress is sandwiched between big dollops of the soap opera of Strike's and Robin's personal lives and their increasingly tedious romantic tension, fatally weakening the pacing. This means that the books are becoming ever more unwieldy – this one is over 900 pages. As, I note, is the next. At least with the Potter series there was a fixed ending. I think it may be time to get off this particular train.

Sep 2022
Alliance Rising – C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher – Daw Books, 2019
* * *
Here's a mildly depressing fact: the Alliance-Union universe, one of my favourite SF settings, is now over 40 years old. I first came to it through the Chanur quartet, a first contact story told from the perspective of cat-like aliens. It was fun but I enjoyed the grittier SF psychodramas that followed - Downbelow Station, Cyteen, and particularly Rimrunners and Hellburner - rather more. These books dotted around the history of the rise of the Merchanter Alliance and its conflicts with the technically advanced but quasi-Nazi Union without ever resolving it one way or the other; this unfinished quality is clearly intended by the author as being closer to the messiness of true history than the neat narratives of epic fantasy or space opera, but is a little frustrating for the reader, who just wants to know what happens next. Sadly, this book, the first Merchanter-Alliance novel for many years, will not tell you.
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Aug 2022
Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel – 4th Estate, 2019
* * * *
Historians and soap opera writers share an obsession with storytelling, which is why history as soap opera is a fertile ground for novelists and playwrights. Nowhere is this more evident than in the life and times of Henry VIII and his court. Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons depicts one episode of this history – the downfall of Thomas More – in crude but dramatic terms as a saintly man brought down by his calculating evil nemesis, Thomas Cromwell. But of course real history is much more complicated, knotty and ambiguous than that. Hilary Mantel clearly understood this and it is to her credit that her portrayal of Cromwell and the circles he moved in is consistent with the historical facts while retaining a compelling soap operatic drive.
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Jul 2022
Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir – Del Rey, 2021
* * * *
I have read two of the three books that this author has published, and both of them have starred wisecracking men who find themselves stuck alone in a dangerous situation in space and have to science their way out of it. Which leads me to to suspect that he may be something of a one-trick pony. Luckily, it's a really good trick.

I don’t want to say anything about the plot since it involves the hero, Ryland Grace, waking up with amnesia and having to figure out from first principles what's going on, but suffice to say that this much more science fictional than The Martian and comes with all the virtues and faults that hard science fiction has as a genre. So you have to accept ideas that blatantly contradict science as we understand it (but get to enjoy how they are logically developed), and identify with a character who is somewhat bland and underdeveloped in their human relationships (but whose rational approach to problems, humour and compassion make extremely likeable). Traditional this book may be, but I enjoyed it a lot.

Jun 2022 / Oct 2022 / Mar 2023
The Grove of the Caesars / A Comedy of Terrors / Desperate Undertaking – Lyndsey Davis – Hodder & Stoughton, 2020 / 2021 / 2022
* * * / * * * * / * * *

These three recent entries in the Flavia Albia series show a darkness of tone that suggests that their author may have been excessively influenced by the Scandinavian noir detective subgenre. They all include elaborate murder scenes described in rather too much detail. Her depiction of Roman life is still amazing, but they are not for the faint-hearted.

The Grove of the Caesars is an unusually heavyweight entry revolving around a serial killer operating in the imperial gardens where Faustus' building firm is doing some renovation work. The status of women is a major theme – there are clear echoes of the me too movement - which perhaps explains the unusual vehemence with which Flavia pursues the case. It's a shame that the clues for the mystery don't dovetail as neatly as they usually do.

By contrast, A Comedy of Terrors is much more lightweight. Set during Saturnalia, the Roman Christmas, it introduces two foster children for Albia and Faustus (I knew that Davis would find a way around the plot awkwardnesses that pregnancy would cause…) which allows for plenty of comic home life scenes in between the investigations into a dangerous gang selling toxic nuts and a woman trying to get away from her criminal husband. There's not much mystery but the comeuppance for one of the villains is particularly satisfying.

Despite its title, Desperate Undertaking is not about the Roman funerary industry, but is set in the many theatres and halls of the Field of Mars where a series of grotesque murders takes place, each based on a famous Greek or Roman play. It will come as no surprise to learn that both victims and suspects include members of the acting profession. Unusually this story has strong connections with one of the earlier Falco books, which is nice, but meant that some of the revelations didn't land properly due to my foggy memory of something I read 25 years ago. I also wasn't fond of the gruesomeness with which Albia imagined the victims' travails, and couldn't quite shake my disbelief that no-one would notice an elaborate murder scene being set up in a public place.

Apr-May 2022
Behold, Here's Poison / The Toll-Gate - Georgette Heyer – House of Stratus, 2001 / Arrow Books, 2005
* * * / * * * *
Somehow, I have managed to reach my advanced age without having previously read a word of Georgette Heyer. This is odd because both my parents and my grandmother were enormous fans and we had around twenty of her novels sitting on a bookshelf in the house in which I grew up. At the time I probably thought of them as soppy Mills and Boon-style stuff that was not worth bothering with. Anyway, a friend kindly leant me these two as exemplars of the two genres in which she wrote; regency romance and golden-age detective fiction. Both books have a lively set of characters and perfectly adequately structured plots. But The Toll-Gate has an energy of language that easily elevates it above its rival.
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Mar 2022
Black and British - David Olusoga – Pan Books, 2016
* * * *
This book should not, of course, exist. In a rational, humane world, there would be no reason why the very diverse people with deep brown or black skin coloration who live in the British Isles should be lumped together into a cultural classification about which a history can be written. But in reality, there is a distinctive story to tell. It is not so much about black people themselves – though black individuals have of course contributed enormously to British history and culture – but about the various forms that white racism has taken down the centuries, from straight-up slavery to the more subtle othering, exclusion and denigration that many black people continue to experience to this day. Depressingly, black people have their own label and their own history because it has been defined for them by their oppressors.

That history is not well known and until recently has not been well taught, at least if the lessons I had at school are anything to go by. They skipped the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which even at the time I thought was odd, but now seems like a deliberate attempt to avoid topics such as colonialism and the slave trade that might have caused young minds to question the moral rectitude of the British state. This would support the author's assertion, as indicated by the book's subtitle, "A Forgotten History", that the slave trade and its effects on the subsequent economic and social development of the country have been airbrushed out of official historical narratives, along with the contributions of black individuals to commerce, culture, the armed forces and other institutions, but I am not sure that that is quite right. Racism can be a sin of omission as well as commission. For white people of my generation at least, black history was not forgotten - it was never remembered in the first place.
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Mar 2022
Sunvault - Ed. Phoebe Wagner and Bronte Christopher Wieland – Upper Rubber Band Books, 2017
* * *
If science fiction has a problem, it is that it tends to the downbeat. While novels with utopian backgrounds are not unknown (Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series comes immediately to mind), it must be said that the majority of societies depicted in recent SF are not ones in which any rational person would actually want to live. In the past few years there has also been a rush from reality, with many writers preferring to explore what are in effect fantasy settings with technological trappings rather than the classic SF approach of worldbuilding based on plausible or satirical extrapolations of current trends. Both of these developments most likely derive from a single common cause – the progressive loss of faith in a positive future for humanity due to seemingly intractable problems such as global warming, environmental degradation, and political and social injustice, that has been an ongoing trend of my adult life.

Trends, however, beget reactions, and one such has been the rise of solarpunk, a literary and artistic subgenre that seeks to depict societies where humanity has solved, or at least learnt to live with, the very serious problems that we currently face. So what I hoped to get from this solarpunk collection was some SF stories with plausible backgrounds but an optimistic tone. Sadly, with some exceptions, that's not how they came across.
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Feb 2022
Gideon the Ninth - Tamsin Muir – Tor.com, 2019
* * *
If it turns out that the author didn't use the title of this review as her one-line sales pitch when hawking this book to agents and publishers, I shall be seriously disappointed. Though it is not, of course, an entirely accurate summary. This is a dark science fantasy thriller based around an inventive necromantic magic system, and the characters, though admittedly largely women some of whom are attracted to each other, are much too busy doing plot stuff to engage in significant sapphic steaminess. And the protagonist is not a necromancer at all.
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Jan 2022
Hurdy Gurdy – Christopher Wilson – Faber & Faber, 2021
* *
Got this on a whim because I liked the title and it was, supposedly, a hilarious take on the current Covid situation. I can see what the author was aiming for - a young and naive monastic novice survives an outbreak of the Black Death and becomes convinced that he is a healer - but the constant nods and winks to the present day became tiresome, and the occasional funny line doesn’t leaven the underlying nihilistic message that humans are gullible idiots.

May 2021 / Jan 2022
A Dead Djinn in Cairo / The Haunting of Tram Car 015 - P. Djeli Clark – Tor, 2016 / 2019
* * * / * * *
After the generally splendid steampunk stylings of The Black God's Drums, I thought these two novellas were fun but a bit lightweight. They are set in an alternative early twentieth-century Cairo where djinns and their magic are a thing. As its name implies, A Dead Djinn in Cairo is a mystery in which one of these highly magical beings is found dead and exsanguinated in the middle of a magical working fashioned in its own writing. Did it commit suicide? Was it ghuls? And why is there an angel's feather amongst the djinn's effects? Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha'arawi of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, a woman who dresses in English tailored suits and carries a walking cane, investigates. It's a well-told story that rises to a nice climax, but the short format and the necessity to shoehorn in a mass of worldbuilding mean that Fatma's eccentric taste in clothing, and her struggle to be given the respect she deserves by her sexist colleagues, are her only distinguishing features.

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 is similar but has a more original premise. Hamed Nasr, another agent of the Ministry of Alchemy etc., is called in to fix a problem with Cairo's djinn-built aerial transit system, which is that one of its autonomous tramcars has developed a ghost problem. Assisted by eager rookie Onsi Youssef, Hamed has to identify what manner of spirit it is, what it wants, and most importantly, how to get it out without breaking the departmental budget. The story has a pleasing feminist sub-stratum to balance out the two male main characters, and the writing is light and humorous, but again there is no real opportunity for the characters to develop.

Dec 2021
Doughnut Economics - Kate Raworth – Random House Business Books, 2017
* * *
It is evident from the subtitle - "how to think like a twenty-first century economist" - that this is an attempt to update the Dismal Science for the concerns and priorities of the new century. It is something of a mixed success. As an iconoclastic attack on the scientistic models and assumptions that underlie traditional economics it is generally brilliant, with well-argued and evidence-supported lines of reasoning that should give even its most ardent proponents pause for thought. The proposed alternatives, however, have a certain element of woo, and seem to me to be based on ideas that are, at best, unproven.
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Nov 2021
Thebes - Paul Cartledge – Picador, 2020
* * *
I know it's unfair, but this is a book that I really wish had been written by Mary Beard rather than the author. Beard's style is brilliantly balanced between academic authority and chatty friendliness. Cartledge tries something similar, but when he tries to to be humorous it comes across as painfully awkward, and when he doesn't, the dry style of a university academic is all too obvious. This is a pity because the subject matter is interesting - a history of classical Greece told from a different perspective from the usual sources (Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon). For there were many other polloi (city states) than Athens and Sparta, and their interactions tell a story of ongoing conflict between oligarchic tyranny and democracy that has become terrifyingly relevant to the current day.
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Oct 2021
Venice - Jan Morris – Faber and Faber, 1993
* * * *
This is a dreamy portrait of a city that I visited while backpacking round Italy as a second year undergrad. It reads like a particularly well-written guide to a fantasy roleplaying setting. It is as full of detail and richness as Venice itself, from the atmospheric evocation of the buildings to the colourful historical stories. I found it rather too hopscotch in structure for my taste, and Morris has one small fault, which is to characterise groups of people with sweeping generalisations; she makes statements like "The women of Venice are very handsome, and very vain" which are good sound-bites but clearly generally untrue. But as someone who has been denied the opportunity to directly experience other cultures for almost three years, I was very glad to re-visit one of the most extraordinary cities in the world, if only in the imagination.

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Mark's Booklog

Twenty years of arguing with books

Recent Entries

Reading and Writing

Sexist Ecclesiasticals

The Importance of Agency

Blandification

Landing Differently

The Origin of Foyles?

Too Much Will They, Won't They

An Old Star

A Tudor Soap Opera

One-Trick Pony?

Roman Scandi Noir

The Energy of Language

Defined by the Oppressors

Solarpunk Blues

Lesbian Necromancers in Space!

Pandemic Nihilism

Agents of the Ministry of Alchemy

The Pictures Matter

On the Wrong Side

A Real-world Fantasy City