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

  —Crescent Blues

  The Curse of Chalion

  by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Eos, 442 pages, hardback, 2001

  Bujold is of course extremely well known for her science fiction: her mantelpiece must groan under the weight of all those Hugos. Yet this particular reader – and it's perhaps an embarrassing confession – has always had deep reservations about her sf novels. They have seemed to be no more than enjoyable light entertainment: books to be picked up and read quickly, mildly enjoyed, then forgotten about just as quickly. If some of them have a deeper-rooted agenda, then they have been among the ones I've not encountered. Nevertheless, the decision of a writer of such prominence in the sf genre to shift to the high-fantasy genre is an event of some significance; moreover, the very softness of the themes that characterize to their (debatable) detriment the sf novels might be a positive advantage when deployed within genre fantasy.

  Well, yes ... and no.

  As the book opens we encounter its central character, Cazaril, making his way on foot from the distant land of Ibra back to his homeland of Chalion. A soldier by profession, he is now a disfigured, frail remnant of his former self, having spent a while in the brutal environment of the Roknari galleys, into which he was betrayed by the vile Jironal brothers. When he gets back to Chalion he discovers that the elder of those brothers is now Chancellor and virtual proxy for the ailing king, Orico. In short order Cazaril finds himself detailed to escort Orico's half-siblings Iselle (girl) and Teidez (boy) to Cardegoss, Chalion's capital city, for Orico has fathered no children and so Teidez is the heir presumptive. Cazaril and his charges are immediately pitched into all kinds of derring-do, for the Jironals plan to take over the kingdom ...

  I've been using words like "king" pretty freely here. I shouldn't have indulged in this sloppiness. Because this is a fantasy, Orico is called not a king but a "roya". His queen – oops, another taboo word – is a "royita", while Iselle and Teidez are, respectively, a "royesse" and a "royse" rather than the princess and prince you might take them for. Such silly tricks of vocabulary, presumably utilized solely in order to persuade us that the story is occurring in an imagined, fantasticated otherworld rather than the real one, are actually profoundly irritating: they reach their nadir in the universal use of the word "nuncheon" to describe a meal that takes place around the middle of the day ...

  The reader does, in fact, need rather a lot of persuading to believe this is a fantasticated otherworld, because great stretches of the novel seem rather to be set in the sort of haphazardly remembered history still lingering in the mind of someone who's read superficially about the Middle Ages a long time ago – a very long time ago, and perhaps only in the pages of Reader's Digest. There is much for the likes of Sarah Palin to recognize here.

  One could of course make similar snide remarks about 99% of other generic fantasy novels, some of which are excellent fantasies for all that; but here it is particularly obviously the case because there's not a great deal of fantasy to divert the attention. Indeed, with an exception that could be explained as a matter of the characters' belief rather than as a manifestation of the supernatural, the fantasy part of the novel doesn't really get started until about page 175, over one-third of the way through this long novel. Bujold's focus up until that time has been on the burgeoning romance between Cazaril and the scrummy Lady Betriz – a high-born virgin half his age – and on setting up the various intrigues and character-clashes that will drive the rest of her tale.

  The romance aspect should be stressed. This humble reviewer has long maintained that most of the high fantasy published today should be considered not as part of the fantasy genre at all, but as a subgenre of the romantic novel. The Curse of Chalion fits this classification to a tee: it is stuffed to the gills with Harlequinesque tropes. There's another significant romance in the tale, but, sticking with that between Cazaril and Betriz for now, we have the classic older-and-somewhat-disabled-man/younger-woman scenario in which neither, for several hundred pages, dares come out into the open and Speak Their Love. Anyone for Jane Eyre ...?

  The fantasy elements, when they do finally shuffle to centre-stage, are actually quite a lot of fun. The younger and viler Jironal brother, Dondo, is foisted onto Princess (dammit, I mean Royesse) Iselle as a husband, as part of the Jironals' plans for domination. The thought of wedding and bedding him makes Iselle puke. Loyal Cazaril decides to stop the marriage by use of "death magic": this involves persuading one of the five gods, the Bastard (I'm not being pejorative: that's the god's name, and it's one of the brighter features of the book that this be so), to send a demon to scoop up the soul of the enemy and cart it off to hell, the only trouble being that the demon always takes the soul of the magic-worker at the same time and to the same destination. Cazaril, however, survives the experience, thanks to the unwitting prayers of Iselle, but Dondo's soul ends up quasi-tumorously in Cazaril's belly, as does the demon, where both make their resentful presences felt. Thereafter Cazaril has a form of second sight that enables him to see not only ghosts but the auras of others who have been, like himself, god-touched ... including the dark, malevolent auras that shroud all members of Chalion's ruling family, who inherited the curse of the book's title when one of their ancestors used the death magic to save the kingdom.

  Of course – I'm giving away no secrets here, for this is a romantic novel – Cazaril foils the surviving Jironal brother's ambitions, lifts the curse, and gets the gal.

  If the destination of the tale is predictable, what of the journey to get there – its telling?

  In keeping with the vocabularistic tricks referred to earlier, Bujold also often makes use of ye olde antiquated vocabulary and grammatical constructs, plus dialogistic forsoothery in order to keep reminding us that we're in fantasyland. Aside from that, however, the telling is delightfully slick (no criticism intended): The Curse of Chalion is a genuine page-turner, primarily perhaps because the character of Cazaril, unlike most of the others (there are some nicely portrayed minor characters, though), is so well delineated – in fact, one could almost say that it is concern for Cazaril's fate that keeps the pages turning rather than his adventures themselves.

  Viewed as a light entertainment, then, The Curse of Chalion is a definite success: it does everything a romantic adventure novel should do, and does it well. Yet is it really a fantasy?

  Obviously the answer is "yes" in terms of the shelf in the bookstore where you'll find it placed. But otherwise? That's a lot less certain. Throughout my reading of The Curse of Chalion I was constantly reminded of Judith Merkle Riley's excellent novel In Pursuit of the Green Dragon (1991). The point is that Riley's novel is a historical fiction; essentially it is a yarn rooted in genuine history. It does, though, have fantasticated elements (the "green dragon" of the title is an alchemical reference, for example), but these fit well alongside the more straightforward elements. What made my mind revert so frequently to In Pursuit of the Green Dragon was that Riley's historical novel has as much fantasy in it as has The Curse of Chalion. The only real difference is that Bujold's tale is set not in a real history but in a cobbled-together one where kings are called royas. In effect, she has written a historical novel without all the pain of doing the necessary but boring research.

  So you pays yer money and you takes yer choice. As a jolly way of whiling away a long train journey, The Curse of Chalion will amply, and expertly, satisfy you – it could even keep you reading in bed long past official lights-out, as it did me – but if it's fantasy you're after you'd be better off looking elsewhere; and the same, obviously, is true if your taste is for historical fiction.

  —Infinity Plus

  Saturday Morning Fever

  by Timothy Burke and Kevin Burke

  St Martin's Griffin, 247 pages, paperback, 1999

  In his book The Mechanics of Wonder (Liverpool University Press, 1998) and elsewhere Gary Westfahl puts forward an alternative explanation to the usual one for the dramatic improvement in the qua
lity of sf published during the early years of John W. Campbell's tenure as editor of Astounding. It is Westfahl's suggestion (and he acknowledges that it is not entirely original to him) that the credit should be accorded not to Campbell but to Hugo Gernsback. For, Westfahl argues, it was Gernsback who published the sf magazines that the authors of the "Campbell stable" read during the formative years of their early adolescence; Campbell was just the editor who was lucky enough to be there when those writers hit maturity.

  You don't need to agree entirely with Westfahl's argument (although in this instance I probably do) to recognize that he is pointing to something that is largely overlooked in critical studies of science fiction and fantasy: critics may talk of the influence of the works of Writer A on Writer B but in fact the most important influences on the latter are much more likely to have been Kemlo, or sf children's stories by Captain W.E. Johns and Patrick Moore, or the Dr Who novels, or ...

  Or children's tv series. If Writer B is an American, the chances are high that her/his sciencefictional perceptions will have been early moulded by exposure to the programmes screened during those hours on Saturday mornings when kidvid took over the schedules. Secure in a world where no adult dared to tread – and, indeed, of whose nature few adults can have been aware, to judge by the inanities enunciated by those who made a profession of denouncing the Saturday morning output – the imaginations of the watching kids were stimulated and shaped. The fact that many of the series involved were junk is irrelevant to their importance (who would in adulthood defend Captain Johns's The Death Rays of Ardilla as a work of literature, or even as a competent piece of storytelling?), in particular because most of the watching kids were perfectly well able to discriminate between the gems and the crude ore: even the junk was liked as junk, and most of it served its imagination-stimulating purpose far better than the occasional self-consciously "educational" programme that the networks were bullied by the lobbyists into broadcasting.

  I was talking recently to a 21-year-old who reads very little fantasy or sf, but what little she does read, she was telling me, is as a result of watching series like Bagpuss and Willo the Wisp – not to mention Disney animations – in childhood. So it's not just writers who owe something to children's television but readers as well.

  The Burkes' Saturday Morning Fever is thus a far more important book than it might on the surface appear; if we are to understand modern fantasy and sf aright then it, or something like it, should be required reading. It is also among the most entertaining books I have read recently, and certainly far more entertaining than any "significant" book has any right to be. Here, for example, is the Burkes' initial statement of its thesis:

  Saturday morning cartoons are regarded by most American adults over the age of forty as having marginally more redeeming social value than hard-core pornography ... but perhaps not quite as much value as an episode of a television talk show dealing with incestuous anorexic biker Rotarians. "Saturday morning" has long served as a shorthand epithet for culture judged to be juvenile, low-quality, moronic, mind-numbing, or cut-rate.

  We have two words to the folks who think this way: Piss off.

  Elsewhere, in their synopsis of the sf series Land of the Lost – in which a family falls through a time portal into an alternate world populated by strange creatures including the monstrous Sleestaks – the Burkes note that there was more than one flaw in the series' visualization:

  The family should have looked like refugees from Lord of the Flies by their third year, given that they were running around in a swampy, humid climate being chased by dinosaurs and lizard people. However, everything stayed neat and clean, including the characters' psyches. You'd think by year three that the main human characters would be going a bit bugshit, particularly given that the son was right smack-dab in the middle of adolescence and was probably giving some thought to putting the moves on a female Sleestak once he could figure out which ones were female.

  The majority of the fantasy and sf series discussed in the book were animations, with Hanna-Barbera the major producers in terms of bulk if not of either general or genre-specific interest. To the fantasist the most important single stable was Sid and Marty Krofft Productions, which generated series that must technically be described as live-action, although the frequent surrealistic use of bizarrely costumed characters makes the term seem somehow inapposite. Prime among such productions was H.R. Pufnstuf, whose title character was a mutant yellow dragon, H.R. Pufnstuf himself, mayor of Living Island, the alternate world into which youthful hero Jimmy plus his pal Freddie the Talking Flute were cast by the machinations of a sorceress called Witchiepoo, who desired the talking flute for herself (useful things, talking flutes?) and one of whose sidekicks was named, wonderfully, Stupid Bat. Is it any wonder H.R. Pufnstuf devotees still roam the land (the UK too) as adults? And is it any wonder there's a quasi-rumour that the eponym's enigmatic initials stood for "hand-rolled"?

  It was on Saturday mornings that many more widely recognized fantasy and sciencefictional characters made their screen debuts or knew their finest hours. Hours, anyway; maybe not finest. Among them were Superman, Batman, the Addams Family, GI Joe, Godzilla, Dr Dolittle, Casper, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to name just a few. The company in which they mixed included lesser and since largely forgotten shows like Goober and the Ghost Chasers, The Groovie Goolies and a series whose title character baffles comprehension, Rubik the Amazing Cube; but Star Trek and Planet of the Apes (in both cases the animated series), The Flintstones, The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show, Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Jonny Quest were in there as well.

  The Burkes' book does not serve well as a reference guide to these and many other shows that have, as noted, indirectly played such a significant role in forming today's fantasy and sf: here you will find little by way of rigorous data on running times, seasons aired, production credits, etc. But that is not the Burkes' purpose. Instead they seek to convey the sensation of being a Saturday morning kid during the Golden Age of the 1970s and 1980s, and in this they triumph superbly. Consider: I was reared in Scotland rather than the United States, and in fact my home did not possess a tv set until I was anyway a little too old to appreciate what I would by then undoubtedly have dismissed as "kids' stuff", yet, thanks to the Burkes, I now have a fairly clear impression of (and here I wish to choose my words carefully) what I would now remember it felt like had I spent my formative years as an American Saturday morning tv kid. That is no mean achievement. And the experience has opened my eyes to the why of some of the sf and fantasy (art as well as the written word) of the 1990s.

  There are minor cavils. The index is not 100% reliable and the copy-editor might wisely have read through the text one extra time. But otherwise this gloriously irreverent, gloriously partisan, gloriously affectionate text offers a splendid insight into one of the foundation stones of the modern fantasy/sf edifice.

  —Samhain

  Voice of the Violin

  by Andrea Camilleri

  Translated by Stephen Sartarelli

  Viking, 256 pages, hardback, 2003

  Every time I came to the end of a session of reading Voice of the Violin, my introduction to the writing of Andrea Camilleri and his character Salvo Montalbano, I found myself grinning all over from sheer pleasure.

  Which is odd, because it's a full-blooded detective story whose subject matter is not always especially pleasant. A minor traffic accident draws Sicilian cop Montalbano into discovering the naked, murdered body of a beautiful young woman, Michela Licalzi; immediately before death she has had both vaginal and anal intercourse, but there are no secretions within her body for forensics to work with, and all her clothes and personal belongings have been removed from the scene. Some of those personal belongings were valuable – notably her jewelry, in the handbag she kept with her – but where was the sense in her murderer removing all the rest? Unless, of course, the other items might in some
way offer a clue to his identity ...

  Montalbano has to work through not only the mystery but also Sicilian police politics, the complexities of Michela Licalzi's romantic and other liaisons, and a pair of linked crises in his own emotional life – these latter two problems exacerbated by the immediate attraction between himself and the dead woman's best friend, Anna Tropeano.

  This might sound as if it all makes for Voice of the Violin being a weighty, somewhat worthy, somewhat gruelling novel, a reader preconception that is perhaps not helped by public comparisons between Camilleri's Montalbano and Georges Simenon's Maigret. Such comparisons are actually well justified – if you like Maigret (or Mark Hebden's Pel series, or Janwillem van de Wetering's Amsterdam Cops series, or Sjowall & Wahloo) you'll love this – but they obscure the astonishing lightness of touch that Camilleri achieves. He's a master of creating character or conjuring up a scene with just a few deft brush-strokes, while Montalbano's rather quirky morality and passion for good food, both very lightly and often humorously depicted, manage to become almost additional characters in their own right.

  This is really quite a short novel – the publisher has released it in a small format to bump up the page-count a bit – but it's an immensely satisfying one. It's also a very complete one. It's customary to say of good novels that one was disappointed to come to the last page, but in the case of Voice of the Violin the telling is so well crafted that in fact this wasn't – at least for this reviewer – true: as with one of those meals Montalbano so much enjoys, the last mouthful perfectly satiates, and even a morsel more would be a surfeit.

  —Crescent Blues