Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews Read online

  It may seem unkind to keep harping on this point but, precisely because Bell has done such a good job otherwise of creating the aliens, it keeps slapping at the reader. We are completely convinced by Wurrul, a member of a somewhat catlike species, and then we're hit by "the astonishment on his face rapidly giving way to careful control. Only the flicking tip of his tail revealed tension." (This book was read as an uncorrected proof, so the particular passage may, like others below, have been amended.) How could Ahvren read those emotions on Wurrul's face? And, although Wurrul looks a bit like a giant cat, why should he reveal tension by tail-twitching in the manner of a terrestrial moggie?

  At the same time, there is so much to praise about this book as a work of the imagination. The multicultural mix of alien species is ambitious, and Bell has done really well here. The Vivitare culture is well painted. Ahvren and some of the other characters, notably his foster-sister Sabri, leap off the page as real people. It is also highly praiseworthy that some pretty tough issues are tackled head-on in a way not normally associated with novels for this age-group. The main plot is less invigorating, for the most part, and involves frequent interjections – from a T'chin – that even George Lucas might have thought twice about putting into the mouth of Yoda: "A turtle encountering a rock thinks it a very slow creature." (And again, how would an alien know about turtles?) Yet often there are glowingly vivid pieces of prose: "She must have been pretty once, and she was hanging on to the voluptuous remains of her charms."

  This is certainly not an inconsiderable novel: it is of serious intent, and it decidedly merits reading. But it's also a bit of a curate's egg. Good, bad or indifferent? Bad it isn't – it has too many virtues for that – but, as noted at the start, this reader at least can't make up his mind about the other two.

  —Infinity Plus

  Thief of Souls

  by Ann Benson

  Dell, 496 pages, paperback, 2002

  This long book (623 pages) is really two novels in one. In the first, set in 15th-century France, the widow, now abbess, Guillemette correlates the many rumors circulating the countryside that one of France's great heroes, Gilles de Rais, who fought alongside Joan of Arc, is a serial sex killer of young boys. Guillemette's quest to find the truth is both spurred and complicated by the fact that, in the long ago, she was Gilles's wet nurse; he was the playmate of her younger son, Michel, who disappeared one day, supposedly gored and dragged off by a wild boar, with Gilles as the only witness. Now Gilles relies on his power and status to protect him from the consequences – even the suspicion – of his crimes. However, with the support of prelate-politician Jean de Malestroit, Guillemette uncovers the revolting truth about the man whom, in a way, she still loves, and vindictively, because of her long-dead son, pursues him through trial and punishment.

  The second novel, told in alternate chapters, has parallels. In modern Los Angeles, cop Lany Dunbar uses good detective work to ascertain fairly swiftly that renowned movie special-effects man Wilbur Durand is the psychopathic killer of a series of adolescent boys. Like the Gilles of Benson's story, Durand was grossly sexually abused as a child by older relatives; the origins of his psychopathy are not hard to understand. Pinning Durand down and bringing him to justice are, however, not such simple tasks for Lany as one might expect, for he is to a large extent protected by the shields of our modern US hierarchy, notably money and prestige. And soon Lany's own son is threatened, so the matter becomes even more personal ...

  Of the two slightly related novels, the historical one is the more successful. Medieval France was a barbaric place to be, and Benson captures the ambience with a somewhat plodding skill, drawing us into the mores of that society. In particular, she manages well the matter of cultural relativism; for example, we can recognize Jean de Malestroit as an intelligent and sensitive man even though he is, in accordance with his era, quite ready to call in the torturers of the Inquisition to facilitate the gathering of evidence. Likewise, Guillemette's bloodthirsty desire for vengeance – she is near-grief stricken when the court decrees Gilles will be hanged before burning, rather than suffer the agonies of being burned alive – seems well in keeping with her time.

  The mechanical alternation of chapters between the two tales – if it's an odd-numbered chapter we must be in medieval France – does little to help the modern-day story, but its real problem is that, unlike the historical one, it is nowhere near strong enough that it could stand up on its own as a solo novel. The detection element of its plot is clever, but over fairly quickly; the rest is somewhat formulaic. Perhaps in an attempt to underscore the loose parallels between the two tales, or perhaps just to emphasize the notion that defensive mothers have a spitefulness that transcends the passage of centuries, Benson has Lany, with apparent auctorial approval, coldly arrange for the torture murder of Durand in prison – this despite Lany's acceptance that Durand was a killer solely because mentally ill. Torture murder as a fitting response to the sick? We're left with not resolution but revulsion.

  —Crescent Blues

  Lazy Bones

  by Mark Billingham

  Morrow, 384 pages, hardback, 2003

  I read and was much impressed by Mark Billingham's previous Inspector Tom Thorne thriller, Scaredy Cat, although I had reservations about the clumsiness of the writing. This time around, that clumsiness has disappeared, as if by magic – or by editor – and we're left with a marvellously slick piece of police-procedural noir. My only reservations concern the plotting.

  Thorne and his crew at Scotland Yard's Serious Crimes Group perhaps shouldn't have been called in for something so banal as the torture murder of recently released rapist Douglas Remfry, but it's lucky they are because the killing proves to be the first in a series. Someone is cultivating pen-friendships with convicted rapists and then, on their release, luring them with pornographic photos and promises of S&M sex to their painful dooms. As with other serial cases, the likelihood is that the source of the murderer's rage lies somewhere in history, but at first the SCG doesn't know where in history to look. A search of past murders reveals a couple of unsolved cases that are tantalizingly similar, but the similarities aren't quite strong enough and anyway there's no obvious connection.

  But then at last one of the employees of the recently formed Area Major Review Unit – which brings elderly police officers out of retirement to analyze cold cases – starts probing the long-ago murder of an accused but acquitted rapist, and this leads her to a ghastly 25-year-old murder-suicide that may hold the key to Tom Thorne's latest problem.

  Meanwhile the body count continues to rise, and through it all the flinty hearted Thorne is trying to cope with the blossoming of the first romance to come his way in years ...

  The mortar in Billingham's thrillers is the joyous facility with which he creates vivid, interesting, complex secondary characters. Outstanding in Lazy Bones are Phil Hendricks (from previous cases), the gay, punk forensics expert who just happens to be the seemingly ultra-conservative copper Tom Thorne's best friend; and especially Carol Chamberlain, the police retiree who looks like someone's not-necessarily-very-nice, overweight granny but who brings unbridled enthusiasm and a mind like a laser to her duties at the Area Major Review Unit. Even if the main plot itself were not so powerfully gripping, we'd be kept reading compulsively by the urge to follow the fates of these and the other characters.

  In the case of Lazy Bones, it's good that this is so, because the plotting makes it a bit thunderingly obvious to us, from about two-thirds of the way in, who it is who's committing the murders. Since Thorne has almost the full gamut of the same evidence in front of him as we do, it's somewhat implausible that his masterful detective mind doesn't at least share the same suspicions. In fact, the book otherwise has such a strength to it that the pages keep relentlessly turning anyway, but it means that one finishes Lazy Bones with a sense of slight disappointment that the denouement's anticipated reversal of expectations never happened.

  If you've not encountered Tom
Thorne yet, you most certainly should. He's a worthy counterpart to Ian Rankin's Edinburgh cop, John Rebus. And that's high praise.

  —Crescent Blues

  Sarah's Landing 1

  by Elena Dorothy Bowman

  iUniverse, 310 pages, paperback, 2002

  As I've remarked in these pages before [Yawn – Ed.], the recent boom in vanity publishing through the technology of print-on-demand (PoD) has had both advantages and disadvantages.

  The advantages centre on the fact that self-publishing writers don't have to consider the commercial preconceptions of editors and publishers. It matters not one whit to them if their novel fits snugly into any predefined marketing niche. This opens the door not just for a flood of the direst writing but also for a steady and sometimes quite strong flow of the very best, most exciting and most adventurous writing – certainly within the imaginative genres. To be sure, you might have to put up with some interesting spelling; but among these books you can find new ideas, new experiments ... and a lack of the formulaic approach that is killing stone dead so much of the supposedly speculative fiction being issued by the major commercial houses.*

  [* 2011 note: Matters have improved a little in the years since this review was written ... or maybe they haven't altogether: a few months ago I looked idly at the YA section of the local big-box store and discovered the selection of books there consisted entirely of Twilight wannabes.]

  The disadvantages centre on almost exactly the same fact.

  Time after time, reading the output from such vanity presses as iUniverse and xLibris it is extremely obvious why no commercial house would touch one or other book with a bargepole. But let's leave such cases to the side. Instead let's think of the books where the primary disadvantage of self-publishing is most evident: those where, as you read them, you have the maddening sense that there's a pretty good book struggling to be set free, and that what it needed to set it free were the attentions of an editor and copy-editor.

  Sarah's Landing 1 is such a book.

  At the copy-editing level it contains untold examples of spelling errors, typographical errors, repetition and downright clumsiness, while the punctuation appears to have been applied with a clogged salt cellar – stingily in most places, with a sudden rush in a few others, but never with very much semblance of intention.

  But it's at the editing level that it suffers most, as we shall see ...

  In the year 2055 Joshua Morgan is the astronaut who was left behind – because of a sudden unexplained ear infection – when, a few years before, the starship Earth Star-1 set off on its maiden voyage. Powered by a brand-new and little understood hyperdrive, Earth Star-1 vanished in a burst of light just after entering hyperspace. No one at home can now remember the details of the hyperdrive's workings, and all the plans for its construction have disappeared. Occasionally people wonder if Allen – the inventor of the hyperdrive, who vanished with Earth Star-1 and whose credentials no one at SICOM (read NASA) thought to check when they employed him because he was such a genius an' all – might have had something to do with the mystery.

  Well, of course he did. He was a member of an alien species, the Theonians, who're so astonishingly humanoid that they can even breed with us. The Theonians have long been in a state of cultural and psychological moribundity. For ages they've been purloining humans – including many of the crew of the Eldridge, the ship that had all that trouble as the subject of the Philadelphia Experiment – and carting them off to the planet Theon for intermarriage and interbreeding: the Theonians may have incredible mental powers, teletransporting themselves here and there at will, but Earthmen, you see, bonk better. "The women are certainly happier these days than before the arrival of our first visitors," pronounces alien leader Heron.

  Joshua, investigating mysterious disappearances, is drawn to the coastal New Jersey small town of Sarah's Landing, from where a disproportionate number of people have gone missing. In fact, as the locals say, the vanishings all seem to happen from one particular building, in which Joshua promptly rents himself an office – but not before he and rangy redhead telepath Alexandra have become lovers.

  When Alexandra hops off to New York for a few days, Joshua discovers where all those missing persons have gone: to Theon. In Theon he discovers he can do things like fly before being dragooned into Theonian society and told to forget Alexandra, whom he already knows is his true love: after all, Heron's daughter, Adrianne, is now of age to become his new lover. Since she's if anything even more heart-wrenchingly sensational than Alexandra, Joshua dutifully acquiesces ... although able to maintain sporadic telepathic contact with Alexandra, even managing on one occasion to teleport himself home for a quick night of passion.

  The net result is that both women become pregnant by him roughly simultaneously. Moreover, their fetuses are capable of telepathic communication as well ...

  Oh, did I forget to mention that all this while Earth has been in radio-type contact with another alien species, the Crlllions, of planet Crlllion? That's because the author does as well, until page 243, where the fact is introduced almost as an aside. Indeed, although we aren't told this until even later in the book, it was to Crlllion that Earth Star-1 was sent, at the suggestion of the Crlllions. Obviously (by now) the starship vanished from human ken because the Theonians nabbed it – indeed, they were responsible for it in the first place, because Allen's commission was to deliver home a nice big consignment of Earthlings all in one fell swoop. But that wasn't the only reason the Theonians seized the vessel: late, late in the book they tell Joshua that they were saving humanity from itself, because all the Crlllions really want to do with the other species they contact is lure them to Crlllion and eat them, to make up for the food shortages there.

  (As an aside, think of the name "Crlllion". Since it must be a phonetic rendition of the name the aliens call themselves – unless, miraculously, they use the Roman alphabet – where the hell did that triple-"l" come from? Wouldn't the name, in English, be spelled "Krillian", or something like that? Perhaps the author thinks giving the aliens a real weirdo unpronounceable name will make them seem somehow more alien.)

  So you see the disadvantages of not having an editor? The genetics, economics and logistics of all this plot – not to mention the astronomy – are completely haywire. The technology of the year 2055 is a bizarre mixture of incredibly futuristic (viz the ftl starship) and 20th-century: videophones have only just recently been introduced to the world of 2055. When the starship is somewhere at the edge of the solar system preparing for the transition to hyperspace, there's no time lag in the radio messages to and from Ground Control in Houston. The Crlllions are described as cannibals because they'll eat humans; of course, they're not – they'd be cannibals if they ate other Crlllions. And anyway the Crlllions must be crazy to think importing a few hundred Earthlings, even as breeding stock, will solve a planet-wide food shortage; and wouldn't it be a whole lot cheaper and easier to grow more cows? The beautiful and sensuous Alexandra, aged 24, is a virgin when Joshua meets her. Humans and Theonians have identical anatomies, physiologies and even DNA. And so on, and on, and on.

  Perhaps the epitome of the torrent of scientific illiteracy comes when Joshua first sets eyes on the Theonians' big central power-generating unit. Not long arrived from an Earth whose technology is little different from today's, he takes one glance and thinks:

  This must be the ultimate in fluid mechanics and matter anti-matter power generation ever conceived. The Theonians must be tapping the core of the planet Theon.

  Well, if you can recognize a matter-antimatter power generator at a glance you're a whole lot cleverer than I am. If you can conceive a generating system that combines fluid mechanics and matter-antimatter reactions you're a whole lot cleverer than I am. If you can work out how to mine antimatter from the core of your planet you're a whole lot cleve ... oh, actually you're not, because either your planet doesn't have any antimatter in its core or it's a rapidly expanding cloud of incandescent gas.
>
  The ending of the book is entirely arbitrary. It just stops, more or less in mid-sequence, with none of the plot-threads resolved. There are, apparently, three further volumes in the saga to come; even so, this abrupt closure is unforgivable. To be sure, it's fair play to end one volume of a series such that the reader is left gasping for more; to leave the novel effectively unfinished is not.

  With a plot that holds together with about as much conviction as the hypothetical antimatter-cored planet, with an enormous amount of clumsy writing, and with much more besides, by all the rules Sarah's Landing 1 should be an out-and-out bad novel, and I wouldn't be wasting my time reviewing it.

  But the curious thing is that it's not. Fairly frequently, while wading through all the rest, one realizes that bits of it are working quite well. Joshua's discovery of the massive alien complex seemingly under the building in Sarah's Landing is really quite absorbing, as are the early stages of his training in Theonian-style mental powers. Alexandra emerges as a real person, and so to a lesser extent does Adrianne; one begins to care about both of them. It's quite fun that the Philadelphia Experiment is thrown into the soup. Just every now and then there's a nice coup of the imagination, or a sweetly perceptive turn of phrase. In short, the very fact that I got to the end of the book says something for it – more than that, it would actually make the basis for a pretty good skiffy movie. (And low-budget, too, since you'd not need to spend anything on rubber suits for the aliens!) Given the attentions – the very diligent and extensive attentions – of a competent editor to paper over all those plot inconceivabilities, Sarah's Landing 1 could perhaps be better than just rescuable: it might actually turn out very well.

  As for the lack of a copy-editor (and proofreader)? Well, although one can blame vanity publishing for much of this, Bowman herself must not go completely without criticism. This text seems not to have been checked by anyone – not even given a read-through by its author.