Category: Blog

The joke is on you, the reader! I have only read more books since coming off parental leave!

The Ionian Mission – Patrick O’Brien

The Master & Commander books are well into a single continuous, roiling narrative at this point. A couple of classic-faire, tense boat-to-boat action scenes where O’Brien excels, and plenty of opportunities for the smiling boat-men of the Royal Navy to do boat-things described at length. There’s a particularly fun sequence where a large rope is tied up so a cannon can be lifted up a hill, which you wouldn’t believe is something that could be described as ‘particularly fun’. The handling of Ottoman politics and the depiction of the Ottomans we meet can be fairly easily described as ‘orientalist’ though, I fear.

Heir to the Empire – Timothy Zahn

[Kirk Voice] Zahn!!!

After my experience with Splinter of the Mind’s Eye last time I was baited into reading the ‘Thrawn Trilogy’, which seem really to be the foundational texts of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. As a one-time reader of 90s Doctor Who novels which were very much happening in the margins of this sort of thing there was a warm familiarity to the slightly askew style of 90s sci-fi writing and Thrawn – the titular Heir – is but one of several fun additions to the Star Wars cast alongside the pleasantly distinct rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold Talon Karde and his first officer Mara Jade, who manages to escape the gravity well of her ridiculous backstory.

Treason’s Harbour – Patrick O’Brien

“It’s treason then.” Wait, wrong series. We’re back with the boats, and despite – as the review quoted on Wikipedia says – this being a book where nothing really happens, it remains a fun read. Maturin is engaged in carting a diving bell around, after his success in the previous book Aubrey is assigned more wildly unsuited political work, and surely one of fiction’s all-time least fired Chekov’s guns takes place as the interpreter assigned to the ship by the secret French agent takes a short bath in the Red Sea.

Dark Force Rising – Timothy Zahn

We can’t rule anything out when this book has a Grand Admiral in it. Well, maybe we can. Zahn (who by all accounts was hammering these out at the time) totally misfires and ends up writing the same book again but worse. The parts which do distinguish this one (Leia’s adventure on the planet of honourable assassins) are tedious in the extreme. Even the title gets in on being misconceived, with the ‘Dark Force’ in question being no relation to the mystic, luminous force the setting is primarily concerned with, but instead referring to the nickname for some missing robot starships.

Samurai Detectives Volume 1 – Shotaro Ikenami

Bought this primarily on the strength of the cover, as with most books I buy. That’s my motto: strength of the cover. Despite being referred to as a ‘volume’ and being made up of nominal short stories there’s one continuous narrative that shifts back and forth between retired Samurai master Akiyama Kohei and his voluntarily celibate son Akiyama Daijiro. Set in the Edo period, there’s a fantastic realisation of what it would mean to travel and investigate in such a place. If only so much emphasis were not placed on Kohei’s, uh, passionate relationship with a woman forty years his younger.

The Last Command – Timothy Zahn

Zahn just about brings it home – not at all sure about the late-in-the-game decision to rework insane clone Jedi Master C’Boath into an Emperor-type (an heir… to the empire?!) just so the climax can be the throne room scene from Return of the Jedi, again, but this time Lando is also there for some reason. One of the problems Zahn has writing these is that his original characters end up being breaths of fresh air in the narrative because they’re not constantly thinking about or referring to the events of the movie trilogy. This means that Mara Jade’s bits are generally the best parts of the books and it’s annoying to have to go back to Luke fondly reminiscing about-

Hey, nothing ever happened with that remote control Luke found on Dagobah!

The Far Side of the World – Patrick O’Brien

Hey, that’s the name of the film! A bit of a patchwork effort, this one, which concludes with the real whiplash of going from the intolerable sequence where Jack and Stephen are taken aboard a Pacific Islander boat which hates the penis to a 10/10 do-over of the climax of Desolation Island, wherein an outnumbered but technologically superior group of stranded Englishmen have to maintain a precarious peace on a desert island they share with a large group of nominally defeated American sailors.

The Hollow Man – John Dickson Carr

Bought this based on Daniel Craig flapping the book about on-screen in Wake Up Dead Man. It’s good fun, and Carr’s penchant for having a gaggle of detectives hang around operating in various different styles is distinctive, even if Chesterton-esque author insert Prof. Gideon Fell always takes primacy. Carr also has a strong line in making his witnesses useless or needlessly antagonistic, it’s something of a revelation the contrast to the usually pliable and cooperative characters you wind in murder mysteries – e.g. the killer in The Red Room would always answer questions even if he didn’t like to hear them.

The Black Spectacles – John Dickson Carr

I felt this was slightly less effective than The Hollow Man just because it increases the contrivances – in that book the mystery boils down to two bullets and two dead men, where here there’s two dead man, a poison pill, a movie camera, and that’s basically before things have got going. Slightly less enamoured with Fell’s theatrics here too. We get it Mr Fell, you think the killer is eeeeeevil. We know. Despite this, it is a meticulously constructed mystery and I was constantly kept guessing.

The Reverse of the Medal – Patrick O’Brien

“And then everyone stood up and clapped [for Jack Aubrey, unfairly placed in the pillory just for trying to do some insider trading].” I will note the bizarre manner in which O’Brien reminds the reader that Wray is a French trader, taking care to do it at the beginning of every book he features in after the decision to rework him from land-based duelling threat to craven Admiralty man. Feels like it would work just fine to have it be a surprise within each book where it’s relevant. Alas.
I’m going to take a break from Master & Commander books after this one; not because I’m sick of them, but because the ones after this are an eye-watering £6.49 on Kindle. Outrageous.

Death-watch – John Dickson Carr

I was wondering why Dickson Carr isn’t more fondly remembered as a writer of murder mysteries; there’s a potential answer in Death-watch, which not only has the proclivity for complexity that was present in Hollow Man and Black Spectacles, but is also staggeringly misogynistic. At one point Fell, in full-on bloviating author stand-in mode, has a digression on why woman can’t be good barristers however intelligent they seem at university. Similar to Black Spectacles, there’s no final collapse of the contrivances here either, so while it’s satisfying how it all unfolds it’s difficult to hold the whole thing in your head to assess it.

Another chunky list of books read. I’m off parental leave now so expect the pace to slow somewhat.

Desolation Island – Patrick O’Brien

The first of three whole entries for Aubrey & Maturin here, my appreciation of the books having flowered into a beautiful obsession for the month of September. This is the best of the three, with the dynamic duo being faced with overwhelming odds that somehow never seem contrived nor the escapes ridiculous.

The Priory of the Orange Tree – Samantha Shannon

I grew very frustrated with this around the halfway mark, as it became clear that what I found interesting in the book was not the material which was going to make up much of the rest of it. The root of the problem was me just not being enamoured with the core romance, but it’s also a book that suffers heavily from not really engaging with the conditions of its setting; say what you like for old man GRRM, he’d never treat the institutions of feudalism this lightly. Beyond that the climax borders on incoherent, and there’s a comical aspect to the one good dragon repeatedly getting the Worf treatment every time it turns up.

Tower of the Swallow – Andrzej Sapkowski

The light is at the end of the tunnel for Sapkowski, who in his torturous writer’s block has broken the glass over the big “non-linear storytelling” button. The result is a book that moves at least, even if it nakedly skirts the edge of resolving the grand game stuff and Geralt pretty much remains in statis for another book. Exiled philosopher Vysogota is a great addition to the cast, irritating naif Angoulême not so much.

The Fortune of War – Patrick O’Brien

Some slight straining of credulity here, both in the string of catastrophes that Aubrey and Maturin escape from unharmed, and then in the odd light-touch experience of being interrogated on suspicion of spying; it’s all a bit more silly than the series has been so far, if not unenjoyable. Despite an interminable foot chase, when Maturin does turn into Solid Snake over the course of the final chapters, God forgive me I did love it.

The Surgeon’s Mate – Patrick O’Brien

A very strange beast this one, with the characteristic naval action dominating the middle section, bookended (no pun) by Aubrey unwisely getting involved in an affair and Maturin unwisely leaning on the international neutrality of science, and a lengthy prison break from an infamous French castle. A clear improvement over The Fortune of War – you get the impression that O’Brien was much happier writing French villains than Yankee ones – and a delightful romp despite credulity now receding into the distance.

The Red House Mystery – A. A. Milne

A. A. Milne, of “Pooh” fame, tries his hand at writing a locked-room murder mystery. I don’t know if it’s my familiarity with the genre but I guessed te resolution almost immediately, but Milne’s dilettante detective Gillingham is charming enough that I didn’t skip ahead to find out, even if his Holmes and Watson bit is altogether too pleased with itself. Raymond Chandler famously raked this one over the coals for its purported authenticity; it is indeed quite silly, but a fun read regardless.

Fictions – Jorge Luis Borges

A collection of short stories that I confess I have been reading for years at this point. Glad to have finished it, Borges’ ability to conjure an entire setting in a handful of pages is utterly stunning and I’m a big fan of ‘magical realism’, whatever that is supposed to mean.

Splinter of the Mind’s Eye – Alan Dean Foster

An alternative sequel to Star Wars (1977) for a world in which it wasn’t enough of a success to justify the budget to do more space nonsense, or possibly even bring back Harrison Ford. The result is a fascinating historical artifact and an utterly terrible book, a tedious slog through some definitionally low-budget environments (in a book!) and the now unnerving experience of having Luke constantly noting how dazzling various parts of Leia’s anatomy are. Vader falls down a well.

Lady of the Lake – Andrzej Sapkowski

Sapkowski brings it home in style, though the final waffle about what was REALLY going on with the war, multiple-twist ending and all, is a bit much. Sapkowski’s ennui has matured into some intense misanthrophy by this point and it leads to some unique and measured views on (fantasy) wartime and prejudice. The number of abortive plot resolutions in the earlier books pays off here, a layered onion of competing intrigues over young Ciri being unravelled and confounded.