49. Atlan by Jane Gaskell (Book 2 of the Atlan saga)

After reading Atlan, the second book in the Atlan Saga, I am somewhat reluctant to recommend it.  I still need to complete the series to decide, but this one wallowed too long in elements less interesting to me.  It had its moments for sure and the ongoing world building of Atlan continues to be imaginative and intriguing as hell.  It's just that Cija spends pretty much the entire book being passive.  Her agency is almost entirely her own psychological processing as when she is not held against her will (which is most of the book), she is fleeing, hiding or lost.  Adding to the sense of futility is that she really doesn't seem to get beyond processing and come to any conclusions.  So a lot of the book is her in the (admittedly excellent) continent of Atlan and thinking about what is happening to her and how she is responding to it.  

Narratively, things move quite quickly in the beginning, as Zerd almost immediately becomes emperor of Atlan (the boy-emperor being so enamoured with him and decadent, he just cedes his power to Zerd).  Unfortunately, this brings the mainlanders over to Atlan and they immediately spoil it, taking the naive women, hunting the unicorns and introducing industrial farming (Gaskell makes an explicit point about chemicals in the foods in this and the first book).  The depiction of the colonization of Atlan is disturbing and realistic in the context of the world she has created.  As painful as it was to read, I wish we could have had more of that.  It felt like Gaskell rushes through the larger plot to get as quickly as possible to the internal stuff.  

She spends the first half of the book trapped in a remote inn, abused by the proprietress.  She is then rescued and spends most of the rest of the book trapped in an abandoned Atlan castle now given over to Zerd.  This is a bit gothic as the place is mostly unexplored and hostile to her.  There is a really great creepy ass wizard/necromancer here.  She ends up after being cast adrift and then wandering deeper into the continent in the camp of Sedili, Zerd's first wife sometimes enemy, sometimes ally.  Oh yeah, she also has two kids, son Nal and baby daughter Seka.  Most of the time, Zerd's forces, the north and the southern armies and the bandits are in various states of winning and losing against each other. 

The excellent Ken and Robin Talk about Stuff podcast had a great overview of melodrama that gave me a helpful framework to analyze and appreciate books where the emphasis is on passive and the internal (coded feminine) versus the active and external (coded masculine).  The melodrama was originally a play with music in it (melody drama), which in the 19th century became associated pejoratively with working class and female audiences.  In melodramas, the protagonist tends to have the world act on them.  The drama is in how they persist and then overcome (or not).  

This lens helped me to move away from my "why isn't she kicking ass" stance and accept that shit was going to be bad for her and let's see how she evolves in reaction to all this. The problem is that much of her internal stuff was being in various states of coercion with different at first creepy, then ambivalent, then rapey, back to ambivalent men.  I get a sense that Gaskell, who was a minor cultural celebrity was working through some of her own experiences with 1960s British men.

I'm hoping for the best in the next book, but I suspect this may be her groove.  I'm fine with some passive melodramatic internalizing, but would appreciate more of a balance with the cool world and larger plot (which is complex enough). 

 

48. The Serpent by Jane Gaskell (book 1 of the Atlan saga)

Once again, I can not remember where I learned about Jane Gaskell. She is an early British woman fantasy author who seems to have slipped into obscurity.  I wonder why, male-dominated nerd publishing industry.  It took me quite a while to find all the books in this series and then I had them sitting on my pre-on-deck shelf (where I hold books in series until they can be moved into the on-deck shelf) for quite a while before I got the desire/courage to take them on (there are 4 books in total).

This was a fascinating, mostly enjoyable and at times thrilling fantasy epic.  It is the diary of a young princess, Ciya (pronounced Kee-ya) who begins the story locked up in a tower until she is married off to a conquering general that she must assassinate.  This premise launches Cija into a rocambolesque bildungsroman across the pre-Atlantis lands of the western hemisphere.  It really goes all over the place, very adventurous.  It is also quite dark and political in a rich kaleidoscope feeling very much of its mid-60s time.  Near the end, I felt that it kind of went on too long.  I was still enjoying it but there is a lot of brutality told in a very matter of fact way that kind of wears you down.  It's also not super tightly plotted, the narrative is inconsistent in pacing and there is too much coincidence at times (that may or may not be some kind of destiny).  Despite all that, it really took me into another world, while making me think and have some feels.  I was always very much invested in the fates of Cija and the world around her.  I really want to read the second one, but currently debating if I should take a little break with something lighter between courses.

The sexual and gender politics are also really interesting.  On the one hand, it feels very progressive on gender.  There is much gender confusion and switching in Cija's journey.  One of her friends is a straight-up transsexual woman and she is loved for this in the book.  On the other hand, sexual coercion is portrayed ambivalently and even dismissed or accepted.  You would almost think it was written by a man if the heroine's inner personality wasn't so richly and complexly expressed.

There is some really cool fantasy stuff in here, like the warrior birds the Northmen (and Cija quite soon) ride, the insane decadent feast in the city climaxing in a roasted dinosaur on a platter, the route across the ocean to Atlantis (no spoilers), all the underground locations.  This book should be a second-tier staple of the genre.

Addendum:  found this promisingly long essay on Gaskell that I will read after I finish the Atlan series. 

 

47. The Scotch by John Kenneth Galbraith

Before I read this book, John Kenneth Galbraith was really just a name that I knew was associated with politics in the 50s and 60s.  After having finished this book, I read his wikipedia page and have since learned that he was a towering figure in post-WWII American economics and politics (and during WWII as he is credited with managing price controls and maintaining reasonable inflation during the massive war production boom).  He seemed like a very smart guy who also held on to his values and ideals right to the end of his life.  And most importantly, Canadian!

The Scotch is probably best considered as a minor appendix to his life's work.  It is, though, a very well-written and even fun appendix and especially interesting to me.  I guess I am slowly continuing my studies into the region east of Windsor which is more and more becoming an area I'd love to visit.  I don't think it is all that exciting, but there are lots of long agricultural roads which hide quiet but important chunks of Canadian history.  Oddly, the only other book I have read is The Narrative of Fugitive Slaves, many of which take place not far from the area where Galbraith grew up and yet the only mention of diversity in his book is the English! 

The Scotch is basically Galbraith's ode to his childhood and in particular to the Scottish immigrants who moved to the north shore of Lake Erie near the end of the 19th century and took up farming.  The book is structured in very light and brief chapters, almost like an anthrophological monologue.  He doesn't take himself very seriously and there is no real research.  Most of the knowledge is drawn from his own upbringing.  The descriptions of the land, which he admits is somewhat dull, are still evocative, especially the seasons.  He is an excellent writer, with short, readable sentences that are still often somewhat complex and rich in construction.

He goes through the farming, the social relations, their culture, religion and approaches to education.  The penultimate chapter is particularly funny as he basically rips apart the principal of the high school he went to.  It sounds like the guy thoroughly deserved it as he was ignorant and mean and even worse particularly biased against the country students versus the ones who live in town.

This was a very enjoyable read and gives one an insight into some of the roots of today's Canadian culture, both political and social, with some tiny snippets of actual history, such as the brief period when the United Farmers of Ontario were in power in Ontario.   

 

46. Death is a Lonely Business by Ray Bradbury

This was a total stinker.  I hate to come out swinging like this, but I just went on the internet to see a bunch of people calling this noir and in the style of Hammet, Chandler, etc.  Holy fuck are people really that stupid and uncritical?!  Now to be fair, this book may stand on its own merits (though sure as hell not for me), but it is not in the style of those masters at all.  It's all endless sentences, excessive sentences and that weird 80s style poetry writing.  I guess the story is sort of noir-ish, but it's really hard to tell under the cloying layers of verbiage.   I feel bad being so critical because I have a lot of respect for Bradbury and was a big fan of his work back in high school. Maybe I should go back and read some of his earlier stuff to see if his style was always like this and I just didn't recognize it back then.  I sure hope not.

I guess this is supposed to be sort of autobiographical, about Bradbury's early days before he got The Martian Chronicles published.  The protagonist is a young man living in Venice, struggling to write and missing his love who is traveling in Mexico.  This Los Angeles, though, is one of melancholy, decay and despair (jebus, it's contagious).  He hangs around the sad old people of Hollywood past, watches as the amusement park slides off the pier into the ocean.  Slowly, various characters he meets are being killed off, though it takes forever for us to figure this out as it is page after page of him going to some place or visiting some person with tons of extra metaphors and allusions stretching them out.  I had to put the book down halfway through and almost gave up.  I picked it up a year later and just forced myself to finish it.

He's Ray Bradbury and a great writer so some of the metaphors hit but that's like saying Mr. Creosote had a delicious flavour of desert at a few points during his meal. How can you even tell?  This entire book if written by Hammet would have been maybe 80 pages. I'm glad it's over.

What's weird is everywhere it says this book was published in 1985 but mine says 1999.   

45. All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby

First of all, if you are into contemporary crime fiction, S.A. Cosby is one of the best right now.  This is the third of his 4 books that I have read and they have all been excellent.  I had some personal issues with the second half of the story that I'll get into later, so it brought it down somewhat from the heights I was holding it in the first half.  But wow there are straight up moments of reading joy here where I was reminded why I love reading and why I love this very masculine genre of tough guys fighting against evil.  The hype is real with Cosby.  It's a bummer that he is one of the few Black writers in the crime genre, but he's there and he is kicking fucking ass.

The story here takes place in semi-fictional (actually purely fictional but I'm guessing much of it is pretty accurate) Charon County, Virginia.  The protagonist is Titus Crown, the first Black sheriff in the county.  Ex-football star who made it out to University and then a solid gig with the FBI who returned to his hometown ostensibly to look after his aging father but really to lick the psychic wounds of a white nationalist terrorist showdown that went bad.  Already the set up is rife for drama, with a history and structure of racism and a suggestion of evil in the soil that is almost supernatural (reminiscent of Stephen King's It here), Crown's job is already tough.  He is holding it down and good at it until a disturbed young man shoots a favourite teacher during school hours and then gets himself killed by Crown's deputies on the way out.

The kid was Black (and son to one of Crown's close friends and old high school football buddy) and the teacher loved by generations of townsfolk.  At first the shooting of the kid is lauded by many of the white townsfolk while the Black and white progressive contingency, led by a young, hip preacher, consider it another unjustified murder of a Black man.  Crown is of course in the crosshairs.  Of course as I'm sure you suspected, the teacher was perhaps not as good as we thought and we are off and running into an intricate investigation both into the teacher himself and his behaviours and the dark heart of Charon county.  This part was an absolute joy to read.  Cosby is skilled at both the police stuff but also the human stuff and the complex racial element (though not ethically complex at all; which is the stance we all should be taking) makes for a rich mix of reading pleasure.  There are a couple moments where we get a bit too blatant moralizing and some telling and not showing right at the beginning, but they are quickly swept away by the much deeper and more human telling in the rest of the book.  Crown is awesome, he has issues but he doesn't fuck around and he is a total badass when challenged.  Just a great hero for our time.

[SPOILERS BELOW; though not a huge one nor in detail.] 

 

 

As I mentioned above, while the rest of the book was great (I basically read it in 36 hours), the ending lost a bit of steam for me.  Ultimately, there is a serial killer and that as a concept for crime books is just not interesting to me.  It's been played out, the idea of the elite killer who is totally nuts but also a bit of a mastermind and it is only his arrogance that allows the cop to find him.  There are only so many ways we can show their inventive deaths.  Cosby does manage to add a racial element, which does give depth and make it fit with the overall theme of a country and county still fighting the evils of the Confederacy, but it wasn't enough to keep me as riveted in the first half.

As I was reading this, I was thinking this has to be a TV series or movie and it already is in production with some good names behind it.  I will definitely watch this and I'm hoping Cosby will be getting the big bucks he deserves.

44. The Warden by Anthony Trollope

Trollope was deep on the bench until a convo on a gaming discord convinced me to read The Warden.  It's one of his shortest books (possibly his shortest) and is the first book of the Chronicles of Barsetshire (of which I've regrettably already read the second and best known, Barchester Towers).  I say regrettably because now I wish I had started with The Warden and read it in order.  Turns out the major characters in the second one are introduced and feature heavily in this first one.

The Warden is about Mr. Harding, a gentle old man who is the preceptor and warden, meaning he is responsible for church services and for administering a small "hospital" which had been set up generations before by a medieval wool merchant for retired bachelor wool pickers to have a place to live and die in relative comfort.  They are known as bedesmen and their duty is to pray but basically they are poor working-class older guys with nobody to take care of them.  Mr. Harding receives a lovely cottage and garden and £800 a year for his work.  He is a super nice old guy and does both his duties at the church and the hospital diligently and with heart.  

However, this is the time of reform against the excess control and power of the Church of England and specifically corruption around these kinds of appointments.  They are big news items in the 1840s and 50s when Trollope was writing.  Mr. Harding's daughter is in love with a Mr. Bold, a nice, well-to-do young doctor with too much time on his hands and an idealistic bent.  He learns that in the original will for the hospital, it was ambiguous how much the warden should keep of the money and how much should be given to the poor bedesmen.  He quite likes Mr. Harding as well (and definitely doesn't want to harm his future father-in-law), but in his youth and fervour starts a lawsuit to expose the supposed exploitation of the legacy.  Meanwhile, Mr. Harding's other older daughter is married to the archdeacon, Dr. Grantly, a traditionalist and strong defender of the church. This sets these two men in conflict, with Mr. Harding in the middle.  It becomes a minor cause celebre, amplified across London by powerful and manipulative editorials in The Jupiter (proxy for the London Times).

At first, I found Trollope's writing a bit less refined and the plot setup to be somewhat simplistic (relatively speaking) and I wasn't super caught up in the story.  It's more polemical than his other books, so he spends a chunk of time parodying Carlyle (a popular essayist at the time), dissing Dickens and really going after the people behind The Times.  These were quite interesting and not unentertaining but were a bit strong and took away from the story for me.  However, as the book continues, Mr. Harding's character both deepens for the reader and solidifies for himself in his outstanding resistance to all the pressures around him. He becomes incredibly lovable and sympathetic.  The hallmark with Trollope is he never forces drama on to the reader and it is on full display here, but you really don't know what the outcome will be and find it difficult to see how it won't be either a brutal tragedy or a sentimental victory.  So you are turning the pages quicker and quicker by the second half.  It's very moving and complex by the end.

This was the Penguin edition I guess for undergrads and had annoying end notes.  Some of them were helpful but many were just distracting and depressing in how badly educated in general young people are (like I don't need a footnote to tell me who William Pitt was or what triste means).  However, the essay at the beginning by Robin Gilmour (which I read at the end) is excellent and provided excellent context on the controversies around church reform and the role of the newspaper, particularly the Times, in this period.  It's really instructive, because much of what Trollope is lamenting is still very much with us today in an even more aggressive and accelerated form with social media and the internet.  The voices of people with strong theoretical opinions on issues are amplified with powerful effects that then impact real lives where the situation is much more complex than these ideologues can understand.  As always, plus ca change...

 

43. The Keep by F. Paul Wilson

For some reason, I thought this book was a big deal in the Paperbacks from Hell world, but it turns out to get only a passing mention (and a photo of the cover).  I guess it's infamy in the film world is more likely where I heard about it.  The movie adaptation by Ridley Scott was a famous production disaster and bomb, though of course, now somewhat more appreciated for its efforts.  I've seen it and it really is a mess and it's too bad too because the book if done well would make a great movie.

This book has a minor history for me as well.  It was quite hard to find a copy and I finally came across one at The Monkey's Paw in Toronto.  I was pleased because The Monkey's Paw is a unique little used book store that sells more "antiquarian" books and the genre books are extremely curated.  Unfortunately, I was with my sister, a chaos agent and after I had gotten about a quarter of the way through, I somehow lost the book on a trip to an estate sale with her.  I never lose books! It was quite vexing and took me a while to get through it psychologically and several years before I found another copy.  I made sure I was not travelling and kept this one only at home and am quite satisfied that I finished it.

The setup is excellent. A troop of wermacht have been sent to occupy a stone fortress in the remote mountains of Romania.  It is built into such a steep environment, across a gorge from a small village, that it only gets a few hours of sunlight a day.  Even more odd, it is in pristine condition and utterly abandoned.  Captain Klaus Woermann, an old soldier whose loyalty is to the army and Germany and not to the Nazis, is growing sick of the war and questioning their leadership. When he arrives, the caretakers warn him that nobody is allowed in the keep.  Things go bad fast as each night, one of his men is brutally murdered by something that seems to walk through walls.  After much agonizing, he sends a request to Germany to be allowed to leave, but instead they send an SS Major Kaempffer, an old colleague (and adversary because Woermann saw that he was a coward) from the previous war.  Kaempffer is on his way to Romania to set up a big new location for a concentration camp, a significant step up in his career but he first has to deal with this issue in the keep to demonstrate to his superiors that he is competent.

So we have an old German soldier with some honour squaring off against a cowardly and sadistic SS officer in an ancient redoubt with some supernatural power that is killing them all.  It is very satisfying to watch the Nazis go from sneering, sadistic arrogance to shit in your pants fear (and getting their throats ripped out).  As an aside, this book was written in 1981 when I was an adolescent and while there was much anti-Semitism back then, it was an era where WWII and the evil of the Nazis was still very present in Canadian culture.  I think part of this is why so many older people were (and are) still sympathetic to Israel and buying into their propaganda that their behaviour towards the Palestinians is somehow justified.

The Nazis learn of a scholar in Bucharest who may be able to decipher the writing scrawled in Nazi blood on the wall and the history of the keep in general.  He is super sick with some degenerative nerve disease and so his beautiful and resourceful daughter also has to come along. They start to figure out what is going on and try and use this against the Nazis.  The father also wants his daughter to flee out of Romania because he knows what is coming, but she refuses out of love and loyalty to him. Finally, we get brief snippets of a guy who was working as a fisherman in Greece when he suddenly has to leave, digs up a long package and a money belt full of various gold pieces and starts making his way across war-torn Europe to Romania.  All these exciting elements come together in an epic clash that will decide the future of mankind!

I quite enjoyed The Keep, especially the first 3/4.  It's always tough to end these sorts of supernatural books, because we now have so many narratives in all media of some great evil that has to be put down.  The Nazis and the context of being in Romania in 1941 make it quite interesting.  There are enough details and history to make it all fit well.  The ending was well done but didn't totally rejoice me as it possibly could have.  Overall, it's a well-constructed 1980s page-turning horror adventure.