Another plate of books served at the great banquet of reading books:
Eight Detectives – Alex Pavesi
Vaguely po-mo succession of detective yarns with a framing story about a reclusive writer of the stories in question. Always a risk with the high concept that the high concept part will fail to be as compelling as the low concept muck that it’s supposed to be above, and that’s the case here – the book is by far at its weakest at the end when it’s all supposed to be coming together. That said, the short stories themselves are compelling and memorable, with great atmosphere.
A Memory Called Empire – Arkady Martine
Curiously close in concept to The Traitor Baru Cormorant, even if all the specifics are different. Really enjoyable intrigue and fairly unique depiction of being an enthusiast for a culture that is trying to consume your own. I don’t know if the chauvinism of the Imperial subjects is ever totally convincing – everyone’s very buddy-buddy even when the heat is on. But it’s fun regardless. I haven’t picked the sequel up yet because I’m too worried it will be totally different, which is a slightly ridiculous concern.
The Letter of Marque – Patrick O’Brien
The Thirteen-gun Salute – Patrick O’Brien
The Nutmeg of Consolation – Patrick O’Brien
These really do form one continual narrative at this point, despite O’Brien paying lip service to catching new readers up at the start of each one, so I’m not going to bother trying to divvy them up for review. That said, it’s a great narrative, with Aubrey and Maturin setting off in a tacitly approved privateer after Aubrey was unfairly struck from the Naval lists. The ensuing string of missions are as good as anything else in the series, with Maturin’s visit to a sadly fictional crater ecosystem a real highlight. Also, O’Brien really hates Australia.
The Truce at Bakura – Kathy Tyers
Another entry in my big journal of Star Wars sequels and prequels, this is the book that infamously starts the moment Return of the Jedi ends, by having fan-favourite X-Wing pilot Wedge Antilles trip over his shoelaces and hit his head on an exploding Imperial Droid. Hijinks ensure.
Tyers has a much looser grip on the Star Wars atmosphere than Zahn did, and the mid-nineties sci-fi pulp mood that you might also see in Doctor Who novels of that era is very much in evidence: Skywalker et al must contend with the threat of a vast empire of oddly sexy dinosaur-men. That’s not very Star Wars, but the constant diplomatic back-and-forth with the newly-minted Imperial remnant, who aren’t entirely convinced that the Emperor is dead, certainly is, and Tyers does a decent job of depicting power struggles in a very febrile situation. Takes a while to hit its stride, but an enjoyable read once it does.
Samurai Detectives Vol 2 – Shotaro Ikenami
More of the Samurai Detectives. Sadly less of the austere son character Akiyama Daijiro in this one, with the focus almost entirely on Akiyama Kohei and his Sherlock Holmes-esque network of spies and investigators. It’s still fun, and you can tell the author is loving being fully immersed in the Shogunate era in much the same way O’Brien is for the Napoleonic, but the always-on-top escapades of Kohei start to blur into one another a little bit. I want to see him (or his son) on the ropes a little bit here. Even Holmes has stories like Adventure of the Copper Beeches where he just fucks everything up a bit.
After Hours At Dooryard Books – Cat Sebastian
Has the unusual quality of being a story where most if not all of the major events occur off-page before the book has begun – perhaps this is what earns it the epithet ‘cozy’, though there’s rather more referencing of CIA misadventures during the Vietnam War in this one than I was anticipating given the remit. I don’t know how cozy I felt coming away from it, although the characters are very well realised, to the point where when things get a little steamy it almost seems prurient – leave these poor guys alone to it, they deserve some privacy after all that.
The Great When – Alan Moore
I do struggle with Moore as a prose writer, the great swamps of description that make him well-suited to comic book writing were very much an obstacle to enjoying Jerusalem a few years back. The Great When is both easier to digest and shorter than that tome, and selfishly I’m more familiar with the streets of London as a setting for psycho-geographic fantasy than I am those of Northampton. Much rueful musing on the nature of Britain’s relationship to the Second World War and the Blitz. Four sequels still to come, apparently, which will hopefully mitigate the feeling you get of seeing an extremely small slice of the larger world Moore is dreaming of here.
Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather
God, this was stunning. Crisp, simple prose belies a sketch of two muddling Priests in nascent New Mexico that is overflowing with compassion, exhilaration at the beauty of the natural world, and yet at the same time a level view of America and the construction thereof, winners and losers and all. A fascinating companion to something like Wolf Hall, historical fiction that is dreaming the characters of these real people, or Wittgenstein’s Nephew, artful and audacious meddling with minor characters of recent history. In the public domain, too.
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