Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews

by John Grant

  Lost Stories is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of the crime-fiction genre; as Emery points out, Hammett practically singlehandedly invented the literary style that we now call noir. But even that is to underestimate the importance of this book: it offers a substantial insight into the development of American literature as a whole. Thank you, Mr Emery.

  —Crescent Blues

  A Caress of Twilight

  by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Ballantine, 326 pages, hardback, 2002

  I have to confess that, the last time I tried to read one of Ms Hamilton's many novels, I got about halfway through and then threw it across the room. The book in question was called Narcissus in Chains, and was the umpteenth volume featuring Ms Hamilton's series heroine Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter. I had fought my way through about two hundred pages of badly written soft porn (I have no aversion at all to well written soft porn) and had come to a section where various of the loathsome characters were discussing adoringly the genital endowment of a particular historical vampire. This vampire, we were told salivatingly, had been the possessor of a penis so doughty that his erection was a full six inches thick.

  That's right: thick. Not six inches long. Not even six inches in circumference. But thick.

  This reviewer did not, as might have so many other men, rush straight to the nearest mirror to gaze at and weep over his own deficiencies. He did not even accidentally turn the ruler to the centimetre side while frantically checking. Instead he threw the book across the room and then, remembering the principles of academic rigour, asked a couple of congenital experts on matters penile if such a weapon might be of any practicable use other than being waved around proudly to impress the rest of the guys in the locker room.

  Gentle reader, they laughed so hard I wondered if I should call an ambulance. And the book stayed thrown.

  A Caress of Twilight is not about Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter. It is the second in a series of novels about Meredith Gentry, a princess of Fairyland who is also a private detective in our own world, it being the rather charming conceit of this series that the USA has offered a home to refugees from the Realm of Faerie. Meredith – "Merry" – is somewhat of a fugitive from the politics of the royal courts of Fairyland, some of whom wish to murder her and with others of whom she maintains at best a relationship of mutual distrust, powerbroking chessplay and hostile alliance. She is guarded by a bunch of other elementals, all male and all of them possessed of six-inch ...

  Well, no, not quite. At the start of the book, Merry has just finished a threesome with two of the guards, and as the tale – such as it is – progresses she samples the rest of them, in each instance for several drooling pages. Two of them prove to be endowed with members of such enormity that, while not six inches thick (oddly, Ms Hamilton gives no precise dimensions concerning such important attributes, neither in US Customary units nor in metric), our heroine has, to use technical phraseology, some considerable difficulty cramming the damn' things in.

  Now, I wouldn't want to give the impression that this book is nothing but nonstop writhing. There's a plot as well. It's rather problematic to remember what the plot actually is, because it appears only intermittently among the couplings, among lengthy and tedious character descriptions, and among interminable scried conversations with various royals that seem to have little point except to show what complete bastards they all are except our Merry – who might well be just as much a bastard if she could ever stay upright long enough, but that's only a wild speculation on this reviewer's part, you understand.

  Lemme think, now. The plot has to do with a criminal investigation that Merry and her studs are attempting to carry out. There's this ex-goddess of Fairyland who decided years ago to come to Hollywood and be a screen goddess in the human world instead. Someone's out to get her. Someone's also mass-murdering people in all directions, and the police – one of whom, the lieutenant in charge of the case, is really, really stupid and doesn't think Merry and her pals will be at all helpful, whereas we wise readers know of course that she's the only hope – the police, as I say, are getting nowhere. The screen goddess wants to have a baby by her mortal husband, but he's at death's door so Merry and one of her gang have to do some detailed proxy banging for the luckless couple. Someone in Fairyland has let loose an ancient terror which is responsible for all the bad things that are going on.

  Case solved, out with the measuring tape and back to the fun.

  Merry is not the only fun- and dimension-lovin' female in the book's cast, although she's the only one whose fun is described in gratuitous detail. Here's a sample of one of the others being unusually subtle:

  "I also never thought you'd be so blessed down below." [The Queen] sounded wistful now, like a child who hadn't gotten what she wanted for her birthday. "I mean, you are descended from dogs and phoukas, and they are not much in that way."

  "Most phoukas have more than one shape, my Queen."

  "Dog and horse, sometimes eagle, yes, I know all about that. What does that have to do ..." She stopped in mid-sentence, and a smile crooked at the edges of her lipsticked mouth. "Are you saying that your grandfather could turn into a horse as well as a dog?"

  He spoke softly. "Yes, my Queen."

  That's in fact one of the better-written parts of the book; elsewhere we find such delights as "He had managed to keep just enough cover over his groin so that he was covered", to isolate just one. Late in the book we encounter the minor character Bucca, who is supposedly Cornish; in order to prove that he's Cornish his speech is rendered in dialect that veers excitingly between Irish, Scottish, Yorkshire/Lancashire and who knows what else. And so on.

  There are also, unless this reader is being even stupider than usual, some puzzling inconsistencies. To select a single example, on page 25 we're clearly told that the penalty for a Raven (a member of the Queen's personal guards) who touches – I assume this is a euphemism – any woman other than the Queen is death by torture, yet this is clearly forgotten later on when there is no thought of making it secret from the Queen that our Merry discriminates not one whit against the Raven seconded to her personal entourage.

  As stated at the outset, this reviewer has no particular prejudice against reading soft porn (so long as it's well or at least competently written). There is a point of unease, however, when one begins to sense – probably completely incorrectly – that a text has teetered from consciously created erotica (or attempted erotica) into the writer's personal masturbatory fantasies. Within fantasy, one strikes that point frequently when reading some of Anne Rice's early, pseudonymous, overtly erotic novels, such as her Sleeping Beauty sadomasochistic cycle; one runs smack into it as into a brick wall in the works of John Norman; and one encounters it again here. It is almost certainly, as noted, a misleading sense, but that doesn't make the reading experience any more pleasurable: one squirms not with lasciviousness nor even a delectable feeling of minor guilt, but with sheer embarrassment, as if a stranger had just asked you to fumble through their used underwear.

  What, leaving such considerations aside, of the status of A Caress of Shadows as a straightforward fantasy? Well, of course, there's not much room for yer actual non-erotic fantasy in among all the rest, and most of what there is is pretty mundane stuff: you've read these imaginings many times before, drawn as they are from the genre-fantasy writers' common stockpot. That initial conceit, however – that the denizens of Faerie are the new refugees in an alternate-reality USA – is genuinely a pleasing one. It's a great pity the rest of the book can't live up to it.

  But then that is perhaps not the purpose of Ms Hamilton or her publishers.

  —Infinity Plus

  A Time Gone By

  by William Heffernan

  Akashic, 290 pages, paperback, 2005

  Back in 1945, Jake Downing was a rookie NYPD cop – fast-tracked as a homicide detective because of a leg injury received at Pearl Harbor that saw him discharged from the army – when Judge Wallace Reed was mu
rdered. A prominent Democrat marked for future glory by his party, a highly respected judicial figure, married to an astonishingly beautiful and much younger wife, Judge Reed seemed to have everything to live for. As Downing and his vastly more experienced partner, Jimmy Finn, started digging, pressure was built upon them by the city's political boss, Manny Troy, to opt for the easy solution – that Reed was murdered by a small-time gangster, Louie Grosso, who was intent on stopping the judge from bringing Grosso to richly deserved justice.

  The truth, of course, was much more complicated than that – this is, after all, neo-noir. Behind the benign, reputable mask of the dead man, the two cops soon discovered, lurked a corrupt sadist who was involved in all sorts of sleazy manipulations and who brutalized his young wife. They quickly found, also, that the cut-and-dried evidence against Grosso had been manufactured, and clumsily manufactured at that. Matters were complicated by the unmourning widow, Cynthia – Cyn – Reed, the femme fatale of the piece, who swiftly enmeshed the young Jake Downing in her wiles and bedsheets. At last, and after many intricacies, the two cops yielded to the pressure and permitted Grosso to go to the electric chair for the crime he didn't commit, consoling themselves with the knowledge that he was certainly guilty of a half-dozen other, Mob-related murders.

  But twenty years later Jake, now Chief of Detectives Downing – a position he owes in part to his acquiescence to political "reality" two decades before – decides to reopen the case. Fighting against new pressures to let the dead past simply stay buried, he enlists the retired Jimmy Finn and Jake's own lover, an assistant coroner, to revisit old territory, painfully reliving his torrid affair with the ambiguous Cyn Reed.

  This book triumphs on many different levels. One is its evocation of the genuine noir spirit. Fittingly, even the good guys are not exactly spotless, as Jimmy Finn engaged in habitual police brutality (along with most of the rest of the 1940s NYPD) and Jake's affair with Cyn was not only adulterous but conducted while Jake's wife was in the final stages of pregnancy with their first child. The out-and-out bad guys are of course sleazebags of the scummiest kind; a second of Heffernan's skills is in the brilliant creation of ghastly characters like Manny Troy, union leader and mobster Owney Ryan, and Cyn's petty-hoodlum brother Oliver. After an extended encounter with any of them one finds oneself desperately yearning for a shower. Cyn herself, as befits a femme fatale figure, has a murky past that her public veneer of respectability insufficiently covers. A third success of the author's is in the creation of genuine ethical problems Jake must face during his later investigation that go far beyond the crime itself and his part in the cover-up.

  Deliciously convoluted and neatly written (I especially liked the use of first- and third-person narratives to distinguish the 1940s and 1970s Jake Downings), A Time Gone By is a top-notch piece of work.

  —Crescent Blues

  Empty Cities of the Full Moon

  by Howard V. Hendrix

  Ace, 441 pages, hardback, 2001

  Not too many years in our future, scientists researching into immortality – or at least extreme life-prolongation – investigate the possibilities of prionoids. ("I think of a prion as a protein whose altered shape is contagious to other proteins," explains one of the characters early on. "Sort of like a cross between the games of Go and dominoes. Each protein, once altered, can now alter the shape of those other protein molecules it was itself originally shaped like. A cascade effect.") Because treatment with prionoids can have beneficial effects on certain mental illnesses, it is not difficult to find "volunteers" among the clients of charitable institutions dealing with the poverty-stricken of the streets.

  However, at around the same time, though at first seemingly unconnected, there is a sudden, disturbing but apparently harmless craze for rhythmic drumming and dancing. This craze spreads like wildfire, and it slowly dawns on all concerned that it is less a fashion than some sort of psychological infection. More, some of those infected begin to display other symptoms, such as "somnia" – the converse of insomnia – whereby people fall asleep for very protracted periods of frenziedly REM-rich sleep, the while displaying religiously rooted (not necessarily Christian) stigmata. Most dramatic of the symptoms, however, is a temporary transition into animal form – into various were-creatures.

  The end result of all this is a pandemic that kills about 98% of the Earth's human population, many of the scant remainder being shapeshifters/were-creatures.

  That's the beginning of one main strand of this book.

  The other main strand, intertwined with the first, is set some thirty years later, when Christopher Spires – an industrialist who played a large part in the prionoid-based research into promoting longevity – has gathered a goodly percentage of the non-were population into a colony in the Bahamas, conferring upon his adherents the longevity treatment. The people of this colony seem to have an arcadian existence, troubled only occasionally by attacks from without by the envious shapeshifters, whose life expectancy is short. Another problem is that the best and the brightest of the colonists tend to become defectors ("abjurers"), rejecting the rule of Spires and the longevity treatments alike and willingly accepting exile in order to continue their own researches into the exact cause of the pandemic.

  Naturally, our focus of interest is on various of the abjurers as they travel around the devastated American South in search of each other and the answers to their many questions.

  Playing a part in both strands, and complicating them yet further, is Johnny Drisan, a space pilot suddenly snatched from an alternate universe into this one.

  This is not a novel that is easy to synopsize – indeed, it's extremely difficult to do so, or even to follow exactly what is going on while one's reading it. One of the reasons will already be evident: it is jam-packed full of ideas and plot elements – normally something creditworthy in an sf novel but here done at the expense of readability and character development. Of the 30+ chapters, most begin with extended infodumps or back-stories that on occasion occupy 50% or more of the chapter's length; on one occasion only the final page or so of the chapter concerned actually contains any action that advances the plot. This can be intellectually exciting – and on occasion it is – but it does make Empty Cities of the Full Moon somewhat less than involving: once you've put the book down at the end of a session, there's no great emotional incentive to pick it up again, no pressing need to find out what happens next. In short, for all its fine intellectual qualities, Empty Cities of the Full Moon suffers from an emotional aridity that very nearly defeats its whole purpose as a novel.

  Yet some of the intellectual excitements should not be underestimated. Here, for example, is a very lovely quasi-scientific model, as described by one of the more enigmatic characters, of psi:

  If you analyze the waves of even the ordinary ocean of water, you'll find that they're information-rich. As long as a wave pattern persists, it can tell you about the passage of ships, wind direction, shoreline effects, lots of things. Boats, for instance, don't just make waves as they pass through the water – they're also rocked by the waves they themselves pass through, which includes the wakes of other vessels. The ocean interconnects the motion[s] of all vessels on its surface... . [S]o too the quantum ocean interconnects the motion[s] of events that occur in space and time. The quantum ocean functions as a holographic field, encoding the particulars of the motion[s] of events and transmitting those particulars to "inform" the motion[s] of other events... . The information in the quantum ocean is holographic – distributed and simultaneously available at multiple locations. Propagation of the holographic wave patterns is essentially instantaneous because they are scalar waves: longitudinally propagating waves of information rather than force. Fluctuations below the energy threshold of particle-pair creation... . Look at the branches above us [of the trees among which the characters are strolling] and think of the whole canopy as a "green brain". Think of the branches as dendrites. In the brain there are an awful lot of branching dendrites – far
more than the leaves of this tree. Those dendrites release ions, and each of those ions is a tiny electric field vector. There are ten billion neurons in the brain, each with an average of twenty thousand connections. Action potentials within the neural nets are significantly affected by the scalar topology of the quantum ocean – much the way the gentlest of breezes from the ocean of air affects the leaves of this tree. Our cerebral hemispheres act as specialized scalar interferometers, responding to the presence of scalar waves much the way the leaves of this tree respond to that gentle breeze ...

  A friend once said, deliberately self-deprecatingly, of a story that likewise suffered the coagulative effect of a surfeit of complicated ideas: "I have a very small mind, and this story is simply too big to fit into it." Reading Empty Cities of the Full Moon I felt exactly the same way. I am certain this is an exceptionally good book; but I believe it fails at what it set out to do, which was to be a good novel. To repeat, it offers intellectual stimulation galore – but the same could be said of something like Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which no one in their right minds would describe as a good novel, or any kind of novel at all. Where Empty Cities of the Full Moon falls down, or indeed apart, is in the matter of story: the plethora of ideas and expositions effectively kills the storytelling and all its usual appurtenances, like (as noted) emotional drive and involvement with the characters. Three-quarters of the way through the book I was still getting mixed up between the two major female characters, Trillia and Tomoko, despite the fact that they are described as different in every conceivable way (aside from gender) and serve entirely different functions in the convoluted plot.

  If you seek a science-fiction novel that presents a fearsome intellectual challenge – a chess match against a Grand Master – then Empty Cities of the Full Moon may very well be the book for you. However, if it's a novel you're after, then you'd probably be better to look elsewhere.