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.
