The Cabal Strikes Back: The Dark Volume by Gordon Dahlquist

I so thoroughly enjoyed Gordon Dahlquist's Glass Books of the Dream Easters that I'm not quite sure why it took me so long to read the follow-up, The Dark Volume.

As the title implies, a pall hangs over the proceedings here. This would seem to be The Empire Strikes Back for the series. There is still plenty of action featuring our heroes squeezing out of perilous situations just in the nick of time, but there's also more introversion on their parts with each of them mining their souls and finding sadness.

Just as in the opening of the first book, The Dark Volume begins with Miss Temple finding herself abandoned. Instead of a husband gone AWOL, she awakens in a strange room in a strange house with neither Doctor Svenson nor Cardinal Chang present. She discovers that the three of them along with Elöise Dujong, tutor to the children of cabal member Arthur Trapping, all washed ashore on the Iron Coast after the events on the dirigible which closed out the first volume. Although Miss Temple survived the sea, she fell ill and came ashore unconscious.

The party was taken in by local villagers and they bided their time until Miss Temple awoke and was in good enough health to move. During this time the village was beset by a series of ghastly murders. Chang investigates but discovers soldiers who were likely sent by whomever in the government remains that is in league with the cabal. However, his unconventional appearance draws suspicion from the locals and he is forced to flee. Svenson also investigates and discovers traces of the indigo clay at the murder scenes and on the victims as well. It would seem that some members of the cabal had survived the dirigible crash as well. He pursues the killer trusting that Elöise will care for Miss Temple.

The book proceeds in chapters which alternately focus on one of the three main characters. Eventually everyone makes there way to a town where they can catch a train back to the city. Along the way Miss Temple runs into the Contessa and we discover that Francis Xonck is alive though decidedly not well. He used some of the blue glass to deal with the bullet to the chest delivered by Doctor Svenson. The glass saved his life but it has sickened him and he is obviously not long of the earth.

As I noted earlier, The Dark Volume delves inside the heads of our protagonists much more than did The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters. For her part, Miss Temple is plagued by salacious visions and urges that she received after an encounter with a glass book and which she, at times, cannot contain. She is disturbed at how she has been transformed from a proper lady who enjoyed, nay, demanded the finer things in life into a killer. At one point, however, she realizes that she cannot return to her former life no matter how much she wished to do so. In possession of a blue glass book that survived the dirigible wreckers and which the surviving members of the cabal seek, she plunges her hand into it and absorbs even more memories.

Doctor Svenson finds himself a wanted man by the authorities in his home of Mecklenburg as well as by those in the home country of the cabal which he visited as attendant to the prince. He has feelings for Elöise but she is not wholly able to return them. She had some of her memories drained away by a glass book and, like Miss Temple, is in the midst of an identity crisis. In addition, it would seem that she was in a relationship with another which drives Svenson away despite his attraction to her.

Cardinal Chang is still bogged down by his unrequited feelings for Angelique. Previously she had been turned to blue glass by the Comte and there is a rather doleful scene here in which Chang returns to Harschmort House and walks over her shattered remains. He makes his way back to the city and contemplates escaping to his old ways of being a denizen of the night who lives on the fringe of society. But a run-in with two old enemies from the streets convinces him that he cannot just melt back into the shadows and that he has no choice but to see his campaign against the cabal through to its end.

Indeed, this realization comes to Miss Temple and Doctor Svenson as well. Eventually everyone is back in the city, including the Contessa and Xonck. There it is discovered that the machinations of the cabal did not come to an end that fateful day out on the sea but rather that they continue. The Comte's machinery was taken from Harschmort House destined for a new home and the powers of the indigo clay to be harnessed by a new villain.

While the character development is most welcome The Dark Volume is, like its predecessor, just plain fun. Our heroes are frequently on the run as they learn the truth of the forces they face. They are captured and escape by the skin of their teeth. I liked how Dahlquist would present a scene from one character's point of view and then reveal in the next chapter that one of the other characters had been there as well. Plus he has a great talent for slowing down the action and ratcheting up the tension. For example, in one sequence Chang is chased from the Stropping train station into a tunnel which has a siding where rests the Comte's personal train car filled with his grim machinery for the Process. He takes refuge in the car and, when he hears people about to enter, hides in the coffin-like apparatus which transformed Angelique into a glass woman. Will they discover him or will Chang make a lucky escape?

A wholly different kind of tension is built up in a scene where Miss Temple and the Contessa are hiding out in a freight car on a train heading back to the city. We learn a bit more about the Contessa including that she is not totally without honor. However, this doesn't prevent her from toying with Miss Temple in a wonderful sexually-charged moment. Will Miss Temple be able to control the erotic urges spawned by the memories from the book that are trapped inside her mind? Or will she be able to release the tension?

The book ends with a clear setup for the third and, sadly, final volume The Chemickal Marriage. I, for one, will be sad to bid farewell to Miss Temple, Cardinal Chang, and Doctor Svenson.

Dracula Is Alive and Well and Living In: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

I was about half way through Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian before I started making comparisons to The Da Vinci Code. And this wasn't a good thing.

The story begins in 1972 with our nameless 16-year old narrator briefly introducing herself to us. Her mother died when she was very young and her father Paul, a former historian, now works for what I presume is an NGO called the Center for Peace and Democracy that he founded. One day the girl is looking through her father's extensive library when she comes across a very old book with a woodcut print of a dragon on the cover that held in its claws a banner which read "DRAKULYA". It is stuffed with papers and letters, the first of which includes the mysterious greeting, "My dear and unfortunate successor".

Slowly she begins to tease the story behind the eldritch tome from her father. It turned up one evening when he was a graduate student studying in a university library. Intrigued, he approaches his mentor Professor Bartholomew Rossi for help only to have Rossi reveal that he too had received a book just like it under very similar circumstances. Rossi spent a not inconsiderable amount of time tracing the origins of the book and became obsessed with the historical figure who became of the basis of Dracula, Vlad Ţepeş, a.k.a. – Vlad the Impaler, the 14th century Wallachian prince. Not long after this, Rossi disappears, his office stained with blood.

Our narrator proceeds to tell us of Paul's adventure in seeking out his mentor. He meets a beautiful young woman named Helen Rossi who not only has a keen interest in Dracula, but is also the professor's estranged daughter. Together they scour Eastern Europe piecing together the life and death of Vlad Ţepeş as they find clues pointing to Rossi's whereabouts and this is where The Historian begins to feel like The Da Vinci Code.

Thinking that Rossi was kidnapped and taken to Vlad's tomb, the pair begin by going to Istanbul to search the archives of the sultan who ruled during the prince's day. There they meet Turgut Bora, a professor who is knowledgeable about the archives and Vlad as well as just all-around helpful. Then it's off to Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. The first two unsurprisingly are home to professors who provide more info what Helen's mother lives in Romania and her folks tales about Dracula add even more helpful information to the mix.

This pattern of heading to another location and always finding someone who has the contacts and just the right information Paul and Helen need to take the next step in their investigation got tiresome. Someone can always ensure that two Americans can travel around behind the Iron Curtain unimpeded and someone always has just the right tidbit of legend, lore, or history to get our heroes moving again to another destination and goes on great, long discourses about it. This approach seemed all so cookie cutter.

On the other hand, Kostova has woven a good yarn. The mystery is intriguing. What happened to Vlad's body? What is up with these people being attacked and having their necks bitten? The story also includes a lot of history and detail here which help keep the book interesting even when in Dan Brown mode. (I assume that the history is largely accurate.) Paul and Helen discover a letter describing a trek made by monks with a mysterious cargo just after Vlad's death. Could they have been transporting his corpse? Even an academic paper on this subject is reproduced in full here.

Kostova can build some good dramatic tension but, unfortunately, certain elements get lost in the exposition. For instance, the threat of what we assume is a vampire on the loose going around sucking blood is used to chilling effect but then the menace disappears because Paul and Helen have to catch a train for Hungary.

The Historian has a fine mystery at its core but it gets bogged down in the repetition of the characters going from one place to another and having felicitous meetings with history professors who lecture the reader. This would have been more acceptable in a book of 900+ pages had Kostova liberally sprinkled some distractions but they are far and few between here with Paul and Helen's growing mutual affections being the only one applied consistently.

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

A few months before starting this book I listened to Cat Women of the Moon, a radio documentary about sex & gender in science fiction. In the program China Miéville talks about interspecies relationships and noted that he had paired up a human male with an insectoid female in one of his stories. I wasn't many pages in when I realized that he had been talking about Perdido Street Station.

The world here is one in which magic is no fantasy and steampunk is a reality too. The protagonist, Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, is a resident of the metropolis of New Crobuzon. New Crobuzon is a gritty place which resembles our own metropolises in many ways but also has a fantastic dystopian feel as well. There's a corrupt mayor with a heavy-handed police force that repels down from zeppelins. Neighborhoods are populated by the various races. Humans live side by side with Khepri (humanoid beetles), Garuda (humanoid birds), Cactacae (humanoid cacti), and others. Plus there are the Remades, beings whose bodies have been modified. Sometimes they have mechanical bits grafted onto their bodies while other times organic matter is.

Grimnebulin is a scientist who pays the bills by doing some work at a university but spends more time in a shared laboratory pursuing his whims, the major one being chaos energy. He is in love with Lin, a Khepri who is also an artist. At the beginning of the story Grimnebulin is approached by a Garuda named Yagharek who wants to hire the scientist to replace his wings which were hacked off in a sad episode of Garudan justice. Meanwhile Lin is hired by the drug lord Mr. Motley to create a sculpture.

The pair is doing well with each being paid to do what they love. As part of his research into flight, Isaac sends the word out onto the street that he's interested in creatures of flight and soon his lab is inundated with them. He also acquires a strange caterpillar-like creature which he discovers only eats a new hallucinogenic drug called dreamshit. It grows and eventually matures into a very large and very dangerous creature called a slake moth which feeds on the consciousness of sentient beings. It frees its brethren who are being held captive at a government research lab and all hell breaks loose in New Crobuzon.

Much of the story involves Isaac and Yagharek banding together with a rotating cast of other characters to kill the slake moths. In addition to teaming up with various rogues, Isaac also encounters some steampunk AI in a scrapyard. The scramble against time makes for some great reading but Lin is kidnapped by her benefactor and is thusly out of the picture for most of the story. This is unfortunate because Miéville takes some time at the opening of the story to get into her psyche where he examines her relationship with her fellow Khepri as well as how her interspecies relationship with Isaac is seen in the community at large. He also plumbs the depths of her obsession with art.

While one character study is set aside, we get another which is equally enthralling. New Crobuzon is a wonderful creation with its mixture of species, magic, and a steampunk take on the Industrial Revolution. There is political intrigue within the halls of power there while out on the streets the poor of various races assemble in neighborhoods and eke out an existence. Magic is the common thread which binds the city and its inhabitants together. Thaumaturgy is an academic subject at the university but it is also an engine of industry. It is used to punish criminals by transmogrifying them into Remades but it is also practiced by some striking dock workers. Miéville also spends a fair number of words describing the inhabitants of the city and their cultures – what they are like, their homelands, and how they adapt to life in the city. He really spared no expense in trying to make New Crobuzon as vivid as he could.

While I think that taking Lin out of the picture was a misstep, Perdido Street Station was still a brilliant novel. It's part action & suspense (the scene with our slake moth hunters entering the creatures' nest had me on the edge of my seat) but it's also an engaging peek inside the heads of various characters and a sociological examination of the weird yet wonderful fictional metropolis of New Crobuzon which bears more than a passing resemblance to our own world.

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters was recommended to me on the basis of it being an historical mystery but I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that it was a massively fun mash-up of genres in a Victorian setting. Historical mystery, yes, but also some Jane Austen romance, steampunk, horror a la Machen/Le Fanu, and the action and adventure of Saturday matinees from the days of yore.

The story begins with Miss Celeste Temple receiving a letter from her fiancée Roger Bascombe stating that their impending marriage has been cancelled and their relationship ended. We go right into the Jane Austen stuff.

Such rejection had quite simply never occurred to her. The manner of dismissal she barely noticed – indeed, it was just how she would have done such a thing (as in fact, she had, on multiple galling occasions) – but the fact of it was stinging. She had attempted to re-read the letter, but found her vision blurred – after a moment she realized she was in tears.

Miss Temple deals with the shock of someone of her standing being treated so poorly by following Roger in order to find out whatever could be the matter. Her cloak and dagger routine leads her to discover that he is going to attend a masked ball and so she decides to find an appropriate costume and crash the party. This involves a train and a carriage ride during which Miss Temple is unable to gather much about the ball.

She finds herself at a very large mansion and in the middle of something not too far removed from Eyes Wide Shut. Instead of pure carnality, this soiree also involves an infernal machine which seemingly brainwashes its victims who are, in this case, all comely young women. Our heroine affects a narrow escape through her wit and a large dose of derring do which sees her wandering the mansion and witnessing even more oddities including a man who appears to be some kind of military attaché passed out on a bed with very odd marks that look like burns around his face.

Miss Temple catches a train back to the city (the location is never divulged but would appear to be a steampunk version of London). Her fellow passenger is a greasy man clad in an ostentatious red leather topcoat and tinted spectacles. This is Cardinal Chang. Chang is no Oriental but rather got the name from the scars on his eyelids with the "Cardinal" bit coming from his red leather. He is, however, a rogue and a villain.

...his working week was divided into a reliably Spartan routine: the Library, the coffeehouse, clients, excursions on behalf of those clients, the baths, the opium den, the brothel, and bill collecting, which often involved revisiting past clients in a different (to them) capacity.

It just so happens that he was also returning from the very same mansion that drew Miss Temple and her investigation.

Chang, however, was there for a very different purpose, namely, to murder someone. He'd been hired to killing one Arthur Trapping by a fellow military officer of the 4th Dragoons, a military regiment that had recently been mysteriously reassigned to various domestic duties. After introducing us to Chang, Dahlquist then recounts the events of the night he spent at the mansion from his point of view. This fills in some of the gaps in Miss Temple's account and introduces us to more of the bad guys.

Our third hero is Doctor Abelard Svenson from Macklenburg, presumably some fictional Hanseatic city. He is a chain-smoking intellectual who is fiercely loyal to his lord. He finds himself part of the retinue of Prince Karl-Horst von Massmarck, who is heir to the Duchy of Macklenburg. His job is to keep the drunken lout in good enough health to marry Lydia Vandaariff, daughter of a powerful and very rich aristocrat.

Svenson was at the mansion, which belongs to Lord Vandaariff – Lydia's father, that night as well and we get to witness events from his point of view which fill in even more details surrounding the alliances that Karl-Horst's marriage to Lydia would forge.

This trio eventually ally themselves with one another and set out to defeat a sinister cabal of aristocrats and highly-placed government official which is intent on – what else? – taking over the world. The dastardly plans involve the infernal contraption above derived from the painting of a mad alchemical artist. It works with a mysterious indigo clay that has some remarkable properties. Together they have the ability to read and record people's thoughts in the titular tomes as well as unleash the mental powers of those in its grip. The device and the books also set their victims on the primrose path, which I wasn't expecting. While we're not talking pornography here, there are some decidedly salacious moments that are at loggerheads with the prim and proper Victorian facade.

Setting aside the conspiracies and the steampunk trappings, what you have here is a great adventure story. Dahlquist had packed his tale full of close calls, cliffhangers, and narrow escapes. The pattern is set in the very first chapter. One of our heroes sets out to investigate and finds him or herself ensnared by the cabal but is able to escape just in the nick of time before being dispatched with by one or another villain. Miss Temple uses her wits and gets a little bit of luck to escape the clutches of two assassins after she is discovered at the ball; Chang sildes down an exhaust stack just in the nick of time; and Svenson perilously holds onto a rope for dear life dangling from a zeppelin. While this sounds boring and repetitive, Dahlquist writes a very good Victorian English and has given us three interesting characters who slowly uncover the full extent of the danger before them. And since most of the text finds them working alone, it's something of a puzzle to piece together exactly how all of their discoveries fit in with those of their colleagues.

All three of our heroes are outcasts in their own way and all have a lost love. Miss Temple hails from an unnamed island and Roger Bascombe was her ticket to a stable life and respectability. Because of his scars, Chang takes up a life on the fringe of polite society and has feelings for a whore whom he can never truly possess but, unfortunately, the evil cabal can. Svenson is basically a dutiful servant, not a member of the Macklenburg aristocracy, and he has only memories of his love who passed away. They all grow and change in their own way as well. While Chang is used to the rough'n'tumble stuff, Miss Temple and Svenson have to find the courage to take on evil and even kill. For his part, Chang must get used to operating in concert with and to trust others.

In between all the chases and fights, Dahlquist allows his characters moments of introspection and even throws in some humor such as when Miss Temple witnesses the memories of a woman engaged in sexual intercourse via one of the glass books and questions whether she has lost her own virtue. She is perhaps the most complicated character. Having seen the least of the world, she is the most shocked at the evils that men (and women) do. And while she still feels bound to propriety, needs must when the devil drives.

Despite being 800+ pages, I zipped through The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters and now must find the sequel, The Dark Volume.

The Domino Men by Jonathan Barnes

The Domino Men is a semi-sequel to Jonathan Barnes' debut The Somnambulist which I finished reading recently. I say "semi-" because it takes place in the same world as The Somnambulist and features a handful of the same characters but the events happen 100 or so years later and one needn't have read the first book to understand its successor.

Edward Moon and his giant associate are gone. In their place is a young man by the name of Henry Lamb, a file clerk at the Civil Service Archive Unit. The story begins in the manner of a Lovecraftian confession like "The Statement of Randolph Carter": "I'm horribly aware, as I sit at the desk in this room that you've lent me, that time is now very short for me indeed." This narrator goes on to recount the hideous fate that befalls a young woman in the Tooting Bec area of London in 1967, which will be familiar to readers of The Somnambulist. The scene then changes to the present where Lamb's grandfather falls into a coma and, since his mother constantly refers to the old man as a bastard, Henry is the only family the slumbering patient has. With the looming threat of losing his grandfather, Henry makes sure to visit him in the hospital. On one visit as he's leaving, a window washer plummets to ground at his feet and gasps, "The answer is yes."

This incident begins to become comprehensible once Henry is recruited by The Directorate, that shadowy, Torchwood-like organization that led by Mr. Dedlock who has been a loyal member for well over 100 years now. Dedlock recruits Henry because of his grandfather and a whole chapter of Lamb family history is slowly revealed. Dear old grandpa was formerly in Dedlock's employ and The Directorate has been locked in a game of cat and mouse with the House of Windsor for well over a century. Queen Victoria made a Faustian bargain with a baleful power which came to her in a dream and now the time has come to pay the piper with the fate of London and all its inhabitants at stake. Hawker and Boon, the supernatural hit men from The Somnambulist, return and are in the thick of things.

While I missed the gaslight and the gentle, enigmatic giant of The Somnambulist, The Domino Men was still extremely enjoyable and mysterious in its own ways. Barnes does a good job of invoking some Lovecraftian terror while he slowly lets the mystery unfold with a dash of gleeful sadism thrown in for good measure as torture scenes and many gory deaths can attest to. Hawker and Boon didn't get many pages in the previous book but are wonderful here with their gruesome Loki act. Much to Barnes' credit, he doesn't offer much in the way of explanation about them. Instead suspense around the pair builds as various members of The Directorate talk about how evil they are until the murderous twins are free to go on another psychotic rampage. Dedlock is very old here and, curiously enough, now sports gills and directs his organizations activities from a rather large tank of water. Again at no point are we offered explanation for his state.

The ending was something of a surprise for me. It ties the opening together with the unconventional narrative style that Barnes adopted. Henry's telling of events is often interrupted by a malevolent narrator. This unknown fabulist commences by saying, "Henry Lamb is a liar." Our protagonist tells of the Windsor vs. Directorate conflict from the agency's side while this other voice details events from the Windsor viewpoint. We learn of how Prince Arthur – heir to the throne – is conscripted into the battle to carry on the Windsor part of the bargain. I found this stylistic device to be fun although one can surely make an argument that it is superfluous and that Henry could have uncovered this same material himself.

The problem with this is that Henry Lamb is perhaps the least interesting character in the book. He reminded me of Bob Howard, the hero of Charles Stross' Laundry Files series in that both characters are fish out of water and thrust into roles by secret organizations which force them to be heroes. The big difference is that Henry has no hacking skills. Another contrast is that Bob's skills imbue him with an air of authority and a sense that he's better than most while Henry suffers from being a passive-aggressive figure that's annoying too often. Some of the time he uses his brain and asserts himself while at others he is like a bumbling, awkward teenager that is being taken along for the ride. Edward Lamb was a mysterious fellow who had a fetish for bearded women and kept some interesting company. Henry Lamb, on the other hand, is rather plain and interesting only by virtue of those around him.

Despite having an uninspiring protagonist, Barnes manages to make The Domino Men fun through his willingness to methodically drop clues to a harrowing mystery and to surround Henry with more interesting characters. Plus there's some dark humor provided by the Domino Men themselves and some jabs at life working in an office.

While I liked The Somnambulist more, I am very hesitant to call The Domino Men a misstep and am very much looking forward to hearing Barnes' take on Sherlock Holmes.

Keeping It Cool

I recently began reading Arnaldur Indriðason's Hypothermia thinking that a murder mystery set in Iceland during the cooler months would be a good way to mentally beat this 90+ degree weather we've been having. Unfortunately, there's precious little about cold weather and snow so far, although that looks to be changing with a storyline a la Flatliners. This being the case, I've been thinking of other bits of entertainment that can make things frosty in the brain box. Since my attempt involved a book, I'll start with those.



You can always start with the adventure of Miskatonic University's Willian Dyer at the mountains of madness, but for sheer cooling power the first tome that comes to mind is The Terror by Dan Simmons. It is a fictional account of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition of 1845 to find the Northwest Passage. His two ships, the HMSes Terror and Erebus, got stuck in pack ice and there were no survivors. Ergo this book is all about men struggling to survive is sub-zero weather. With nearly 800 pages of ice, snow, blizzards, terror, frozen bodies, and more ice and snow, this book will keep you cool in desert conditions.

If you're looking for a quicker fix, may I recommend Jack London's "To Build a Fire". It begins:

Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a dim and little-travelled trail led eastward through the fat spruce timberland.

And chronicles a man hiking the Yukon Trail in bitter cold and his desperate attempts to build a fire before settling into his chilly fate.



More good cyro-fiction in the graphic novel arena is Whiteout by Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber. There's a murder at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica and Deputy U.S. Marshall Carrie Stetko is on the case. It's a good, solid murder mystery with lots of blizzards. It was turned into a feature film a few years ago starring Kate Beckinsale. While it certainly has cooling power, it was a pretty bad film.



Moving over to the realm of video games we have Alpha Polaris a horror adventure which takes place at an oil research station in Greenland. (I see a theme here.) I've played the demo and it was pretty good, although you don't really get much of a sense of the lurking terror that the Finnish game designers promise. Still, the game should inspire icy thoughts.

There are probably a country ton of movies (besides the dreadful Whiteout) to put you in a glacial state of mind. The first one I thought of was John Carpenter's remake of The Thing, though don't be afraid to watch James Arness in the original from 1951. I've not yet seen the prequel from last year but I don't doubt that it would do the trick.



Next, I'll thrown in a couple audio dramas.

First there is some Doctor Who.



I recall listening to Winter for the Adept for the first time and feeling more than a little chilly as Nyssa finds herself alone in the Alps.

However, for sheer frigid audio, check out Simon Bovey's Cold Blood.





This is the aural equivalent of The Terror. Biotech and oil companies are exploiting Antarctica in 2014 and someone is willing to kill to keep a discovery to herself. Not only does it take place in the freezing cold so you get to hear the wind howling, the characters are always talking about incredibly cold it is. The fact that the story takes place in a bitter, frigid land is never far from your mind. I listened to this story a few summers ago and had to cover myself with a blanket because I felt so cold.



Gamers can get in on the action here too. I don't know of any board games that take place in the ice and snow but, if you're into RPGs, there's always Beyond the Mountains of Madness. Helm the Starkweather-Moore expedition to find out what happened to Professor Dyer and company.

Lastly, there's music. I always think of "South Side of the Sky" by Yes as being a good way to cool things down as it's about the terminal fate of a polar expedition:

A river a mountain to be crossed
The sunshine in mountains sometimes lost
Around the south side so cold that we cried
Were we ever colder on that day
A million miles away
It seemed from all of eternity


So, dear reader, there my tentative list. I suppose I could have catalogued stuff like radio adaptations of At the Mountains of Madness, for example, but figured a couple iterations was enough. Any further suggestions?

Regardless of what entertainment you choose during these hot summer days, you'll need a drink. Might I suggest a Stiegl Grapefruit Radler? I bought a six-pack of it last weekend and it is might tasty. The mix of grapefruit soda and a light lager was extremely refreshing and, at 2.5%ABV, you won't get drunk nor dehydrate yourself.

The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes

I was quite looking forward to reading The Somnambulist after having read about it. Then I heard that Jonathan Barnes had written a Sherlock Holmes audio drama called The Adventure of the Perfidious Mariner and that he was a big Doctor Who fan which made me want to read it all the more.

“Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever,” admonishes the narrator in the first paragraph. Describing his own tale as “nonsense” and “wilfully bizarre”, he doubts the reader will believe a word of it. Having warned us, we learn that our humble narrator is less than reliable as he warns, “I ought to admit that I shall have reason to tell you more than one direct lie.”

With such an introduction we are thrust into Edwardian London. The story here concerns Edward Moon, a magician whose fame is fleeting and also a detective who assists the London constabulary on occasion. His partner on and offstage is the titular character, a giant of a man with no hair, cannot speak, and is impervious to attacks with edged weapons. Oh, and he loves milk. The pair are enlisted, or perhaps drawn, to investigate the death of an actor who went up to the see the etchings of a lady of the night but ended up seeing an apparition of his mother and being defenestrated by an eldritch lizard creature.

As odd as all this sounds, things only get stranger. Moon is aided in his investigations by an elderly woman who works at the British Museum. Known only as The Archivist, she furnishes Moon with plenty of information and knows more about things than she lets on. He also meets up with a gentleman named Thomas Cribb who is much older than he appears and seems to have the gift of time travel. There's also a mysterious cult, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his legacy, a mysterious chthonian dreamer, an X-Files-like branch of the British government called The Directorate, two “Prefects” who are summoned from a black address book and are perhaps the ultimate assassins, and more.

I suppose this makes The Somnambulist Victorian fantasy or some such thing. Some readers may be put off by the fact that most of these characters are never fleshed out nor are their fantastic natures explained. There just seems to exist this phantasmagorical shadow world which is known only to a few select individuals. I didn't mind the lack of explanation, for the most part, and was content on letting Barnes construct his world as he saw fit. However, I was disappointed that The Somnambulist himself got rather short shrift. The book bears his name yet he is absent from most of the story. When he is present, he's like Gromit, asking some questions but mostly rolling his eyes at his friend. In Barnes' defense, The giant does return at the end of the story in what is surely an open ending.

I'm reluctant to divulge much of the plot but will say that the mystery of the defenestrated man becomes plural and leads to a grander scheme into which Moon is thrust. The Directorate forces his hand. Cribb seems to know rather a lot and attempts to push Moon in the right direction but ultimately cannot come clean owing to his rather unique temporal position. There's also a Hannibal Lecter type character in Barabbas. Locked up in Newgate Prison, he offers up a clue or two but he also adds to the mystery of our protagonist. Like most of the characters here, we don't find out a lot about Moon. He and Barabbas have a history and there are multiple references to a case of Moon's that apparently went awry but his life is, for the most part, shrouded in mystery. Oh, we do learn that he frequents a brothel with fetish appeal. For Moon, a bearded lady does the trick.

I should also mention that Barnes does eventually divulge the identity of our unreliable narrator in a nice, if unexpected, twist. He gives the reader occasional asides which remind us that the narrator is somehow involved in the plot but we are never truly pointed to the identity of the fabulist. At one point this person admits to having lied to the reader but the trick seems absent from most of the story. I suppose that I could have missed some prevarications but I tend to think that Barnes just decided to leave the ploy mostly unused. This doesn't hurt the book by any means but I'd rather have liked it if there was more unreliability.

If I were to be critical of Barnes then I suppose it would be because his narrative style doesn't seem linked to a theme. Sleeping and dreaming are the most obvious motifs. We have the chthonian dreamer, the narrator's dream in the final chapter, and the title character. But there is also the dream which is not a movie that plays in our heads while asleep. There's the dream as a goal and here the cult dreams to change the world to fit its vision. I suppose having an unreliable narrator can be commentary on this latter type of dream since they are consciously directed.

Regardless of any disjunction between style and theme, The Somnambulist is a wonderful journey into a rather seedy world where the supernatural bleeds into our reality. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who, especially stories penned by Robert Holmes, Mary Shelley, and H.P. Lovecraft stick out as influences. Barnes' follow-up, The Domino Men, is reputed to be a very indirect sequel to The Somnambulist so that's the next book for me.

The Istanbul Irregular

Since I've been listening to a lecture about the history of Byzantium I thought it only fitting to read Jason Goodwin's The Janissary Tree which takes place in Istanbul in the year 1836. Goodwin studied Byzantine history and has written non-fiction on the subject and so I figured that some of this would figure in his fictional work.

The Janissary Tree features Yashim, an investigator who also happens to be a eunuch. Our hero is favored by the imperial court in more ways than one. To begin with, he is in the confidence of the sultan, Mahmut II. Not having gonads means that he can access the royal harem. Furthermore he is friends with the sultan's mother who lends him French novels. These connections are immensely helpful but he lives out amongst the proles and has as friends an assortment of people outside the royal realm.

Yashim is called to investigate a trio of crimes: two murders and a theft. One of the sultan's concubines met her end the night she was to have her first carnal encounter with Mahmut. The other death was of a soldier in the New Guard, the new military service established to replace the Janissaries who were a bit like the Praetorian Guard of Rome. And like their forebears in Western Europe, the Janissaries accumulated power and took it upon themselves to determine the ruler of the Ottoman Empire. But in 1826 the sultan had had enough and dealt with them in what became known as the Auspicious Event wherein thousands of them were killed with the rest dispersed. The final crime that Yahsim is charged with solving is the theft of Mahmut II's mother's jewels.

The body of the soldier was found in a large cauldron. A visit to the master of the Soup Maker's Guild reveals that one of their cauldrons has gone missing and that the master is a former Janissary. Another solider turns up dead and Yashim is left with no doubt that the Janissaries were not destroyed 10 years ago. Instead they went into hiding to plot their next move and the time has come for their plan to come to fruition. There is a special urgency to solving these murders as in 10 days the sultan will announce a new edict which will begin the process of modernizing the empire and catching up to the Europeans.

Yashim's investigation takes him to various corners of Istanbul including the palace, the Russian embassy, baths, a bazaar, etc. Goodwin does a good job of bringing the 19th century city to life. There are the horrid smells of the tannery and the aromas from the food stalls. Ascending a fire tower affords a view of virtually the entire city. The book throws in a few historical asides as well such as an explanation of the Auspicious Event and the tale of how the city fell to the Ottomans. In one chapter Yashim arranges for the Russian ambassador's young wife, Eugenia, to visit the harem where she meets the concubines and indulges in a bath with some of them. This was a rather sensual interlude that, much to my surprise, didn't stick out like a sore thumb.

As for our investigator, he is something of a mysterious character. He is in the sultan's good graces and is friends with his wife. Yet he is also friends with Preen, a fellow eunuch and köçek dancer which makes her (she dresses as a woman) a practitioner of the, shall we say, vulgar arts. Yashim also counts the Polish ambassador, Palewski, as a confidante. A man with a title but he is really down and out. A man without a country who is basically kept and provided for by the sultan. And he likes his vodka. Our hero is equally comfortable with high and low culture and people from both sides of the tracks.

While we learn a fair amount about the company Yashim keeps, we never find out much about his past or his present station in life, for that matter. How did he get to know these people? From where does he derive his income? The reader is left in the dark on these matters. I personally didn't find these unanswered questions a bother and they may answered in the book's sequels.

One thing we do know about Yashim is that he likes to cook. Goodwin tells us that "he'd grown disgusted with his own efforts to achieve a cruder sensual gratification and resigned himself to more stylized pleasures." He then proceeds to tell us of how Yashim prepares rice with "a handful of currants and another of pine nuts, a lump of sugar, and a big pinch of salt." These little asides about food, descriptions of clothing, and other things are why I found Eugenia's excursion in the harem to be agreeable. Goodwin appeals to our imaginations to arouse our senses. This is a very sensual book in its own way.

While I enjoyed the historical setting, found Yashim to be an intriguing protagonist, and appreciated the sensuality, there was just something about The Janissary Tree that didn't cut the mustard. It is by no means a bad book but I finished it feeling unsatisfied for reasons I can't quite pin down. Was there action? Yes. The scene at the tannery where an assassin is hiding out in the drains below was a lot of fun. Was the mystery interesting? Yes. All three crimes proved to spring from the same plot. So what was it? The best I can come up with was that the sleuthing itself just wasn't all that to my liking. Much of the time Yashim's investigation seems to be less about shedding light on the crimes and more about introducing the people in his life and getting to know them. I liked it when Goodwin would go off on tangents such as when he explained köçek dancing but I felt that much of the middle of the book simply lacks sleuthing. Too few clues are uncovered and so the picture of the truth remains bare until the end instead of it being gradually filled in.

I suppose that solving a mystery in a measured way isn't always necessary but I would at least expect thematic development in return. There's a modicum of that here but I'd like more. Modernizing the empire is the fulcrum for events here yet Goodwin doesn't go into it far enough. It's a springboard for giving the reader history but I wish there was more follow-up on the effects it might have had and perhaps a discussion of how societies and their traditions change.

As it is, I'll probably read the next book in the series, The Snake Stone, but I'm in no hurry.

Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed

Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo is one of the most difficult novels I've read in a long time. I suppose you can label it post-modern or avant-garde by virtue of his use of different typestyles to offset certain passages of text, the use of cardinal numbers instead of words (e.g. – "1" instead of "one"), footnotes, quotes from other texts, and even asides signed by the author himself. In addition to the mish-mash of stylistic elements, the book pulls in a lot of history and mythology making it a dense read despite being only about 220 pages long.

The story starts in New Orleans in the 1920s with the mayor enjoying a glass of bootleg gin along with the company of a floozy when he gets a call giving him some bad news. The city is ground zero for the Jes Grew plague in America. With this prelude over, the book then acts a bit like a movie with the copyright and title pages following.

What is "Jes Grew"? Well, it's black culture and cultural identity, generally. It manifests itself in jazz, blues, ragtime, &c. A page of quotes just before the dedication page explains the origin in a quote by James Weldon Johnson: "The earliest Ragtime songs, like Topsy, 'jes grew.'" People struck with Jes Grew dance, sing, speak in tongues, &c. They act like they're possessed. The most proximate patient zero of this plague is basically the collective population of Haiti and it spread to New Orleans, made its way to Chicago, and is now threatening to take over New York.

Directly at odds with Jes Grew are the Atonists, white folk who act as guardians of mores and propriety in the name of preserving their staid, puritan hegemony. Their "aesthetic is thin flat turgid dull grey bland like a yawn." (Reed doesn't go for serial commas.) And they are pissed. The higher ups enlist the Wallflower Order to stamp out Jes Grew. Leading the Wallflowers is Hierophant 1, i.e. – the Pope. Opposing them is PaPa LaBas. He is a Houngan Voodoo Priest who keeps the old ways alive from his Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral.

During the 1920s the United States occupied Haiti and this not only forms certain plot elements, but also stands as a good high-level summary of the conflict, of whites lording over blacks. Reed has a long digression late in the book in which he utilizes mythology to explain the background of Jes Grew. Back in ancient Egypt you had Osiris and Isis in conflict with Set. At this time Osiris demonstrated his dances which helped preserve the fecundity of the land and ensure healthy harvests to Thoth who captured them in The Book of Thoth. Osiris, Thoth, and their ilk were eventually banished leaving Set in charge. He established his own religion based around Aton, "the sun's flaming disc". The old ways of linking people to nature as set out in The Book of Thoth went underground and Christianity arose. Jes Grew needed the book lest it "be mistaken for entertainment". As Reed asks, what good is a liturgy without a text? (He references Helena Blavatsky in this section whom I read about recently.)

One Hinkle Von Vampton brought the book to the United States in the 1890s. Von Vampton is immortal and a Knights Templar. Although he and the KT were turned away and persecuted by the Church back in the dim and distant past, he fought Jes Grew then and continues his battle. He sets up the Benign Monster, a magazine, although populated by the writings of black authors, is actually a set-up. It's real purpose to devalue the Harlem Renaissance and halt the spread of Jes Grew into New York.

And so you have two sides, the pro-Jes Grew and the anti-Jes Grew, out looking for The Book of Thoth for their own purposes.

As a satire, I thoroughly enjoyed Mumbo Jumbo. You've got some Dashiell Hammett thrown together with a mythological backstory which would make the writers of LOST proud, and some great, funny elements such as a group of men liberating non-European art from the Center of Art Detention, i.e. – art museums, and returning them to their native countries. As satire, it was fantastic stuff and ranks up there with similar works that I love such as Dr. Strangelove.

But I finished the book not quite knowing what Reed was saying. Did he really think that black culture was predicated on emotion and entwined with Nature while white culture was staid and artificial? In terms of his critique of how the white majority deals with blacks and black culture, I think I get it. White attitudes perceive black culture as lewd and unrestrained. It's "primitive". The book was written in the late 1960s and/or early 70s so is Reed promoting a kind of Black Nationalism? Is he trying to get all Marcus Garvey/Stokely Carmichael on our asses here?

My guess is that he is. Reed's critique doesn't seem to simply be one of America. He describes a prelapsarian paradise in ancient Egypt which permeated the globe. And then came along Set and Christianity. Humanity distanced itself from nature and thought itself above it. Slavery saw the white man not only subjugate the black man but also grind the culture of the slaves into the ground; white men assumed the burden of divorcing blacks from their native culture and traditions. The book talks about how Jes Grew's gleeful aspects were transmogrified into defects by Freud. Ecstasy became hysteria, for instance. Reed takes some swipes and capitalism such as when LaBas dismisses the Atonists as being another species - Home economicus - which lays down another critique: whites are individual while blacks are communal. There's just too much history involved for this to be a narrow attack. Reed's not lobbing guided missiles, he's dropping an atom bomb.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

My copy of The Sparrow is one of those enhanced versions with a set of questions for reading groups as well as an interview with author Mary Doria Russell. In the latter we find that Russell returned to religion (converted to Judaism) shortly before writing this book. This isn't surprising since The Sparrow is all about religious faith.

It concerns the Job-like Jesuit priest named Emilio Sandoz. The book opens in December 2059 with Sandoz being released from the hospital and transferred to a private residence to continue his recovery. He is the lone survivor of a Jesuit-sponsored mission to the planet Rakhat and he returned to Earth scarred physically and mentally. Scurvy and malnutrition wreaked havoc on his body during the long voyage home but his hands were mutilated on Rakhat and he is unable to use them. Sandoz is withdrawn as well as angry and bitter. He rebuffs attempts by the Jesuit hierarchy to get his testimony about just what happened on the mission to Rakhat.

Chapters relating to Sandoz's recovery more or less alternate with those that tell the story of how the mission came about and the events that transpired on Rakhat. In 2019 Sandoz, whom we discover is quite adept at learning new languages, is back in the land of his birth – Puerto Rico. Considering that he is a priest, he doesn't seem particularly pious. He has become good friends with Anne and George Edwards who retired there to do some good. Anne works in a hospital while George helps out at the Arecibo Observatory. Also at Arecibo are some friends of the Edwardses': Jimmy Quinn and Sofia Mendes.

One day Jimmy discovers a signal coming from a distant planet and it is revealed to be music of some kind. Sandoz is transformed and becomes convinced that it is a message from God so he approaches the Jesuit higher-ups about funding a mission to the planet which is the source of the transmission. They agree to his plan. Sandoz will be accompanied by Quinn, Mendes, the Edwardses, and a few other Jesuit scientists.

Because what happens on Rakhat is a central mystery of the novel, I won't go into exactly what left Sandoz in his pitiful state. But, the short, (mostly) spoiler-free version is thus. The crew land on the planet and discover that it is rather Edenic with lush, verdant vegetation. This section is on the hard sci-fi side of things with Russell detailing the missionaries' first tentative steps on a new planet and adjusting to a new diet and whatnot. Soon they discover a village inhabited by being known as Runa. However, they are rather "primitive" and not the ones broadcasting music into space. Eventually another alien named Supaari visits the village. Supaari is of another race called the Jana'ata and he is a businessman. After some time of getting to know one another, Supaari brings the humans to Gayjur, the great city where he lives and plies his trade. It is a Jana'ata individual whose singing was heard on Earth.

To paraphrase Marvin the Paranoid Android, the mission ended in tears. Much of what happened was the result of cultural misunderstandings but Sandoz emerges from the horrors visited upon him and his companions hating God, perhaps having lost his faith, his belief in God. At the beginning of the book his faith was intact but it was based on rather nebulous footing. Anne and George are atheists and Anne amicably discusses spiritual matters with Emilio. He wrestles with his faith. He questions it and basically comes to detente with doubt. Then the music from across the cosmos is heard and he takes it as a sign from God. This is the purpose of his life as ordained by his deity. Then it all comes crashing down.

I don't think Sandoz lost his faith because of the hardships he endured, per se. As it is noted in the book, Jesuits have been tortured and killed in the past while spreading the word. Rather it's the sense that the mission to Rakhat was not divinely inspired or his life's mission that causes Sandoz to lose his faith. It's that he was wrong and that others paid for his mistake.

Russell's take on faith here was, for me, like the wishy-washy BS that Karen Armstrong purveys. She seems to be saying that, at its core, faith is about engaging and being entangled with mystery. Or, perhaps more cynically, faith is the Sisyphean task of attempting to reconcile the unknowable and the unreasonable with reason. As an atheist who has never really had religious devotion – the kind of faith on display here – I find this conclusion to be unsatisfactory. On one hand, I can appreciate that this vision of faith is something that that the faithful struggle with. It's one element of our humanity. But on the other hand, as an atheist, it seems tragic to wrack your brain over what a mythical deity may or may not do or want of you.

Despite my misgivings about the concept of religious faith, I enjoyed The Sparrow immensely. The mystery of what transpired on Rakhat is carried to the end and Russell keeps the reader wanting to know. Plus she creates some great characters. Anne, a godless heathen, is tremendously likable. She is perhaps the lynchpin of the mission and of the group of friends. She holds things together and offers advice. And she can really turn a phrase. Being a godless heathen, Anne presents her own challenge to Emilio. Anne is a good person. She helps others and she is happy. But she doesn't worry about an afterlife or feel compelled to reconcile her existence with an enigma called Yahweh whereas Sandoz does.

Sophia Mendes presents a mirror image of faith. In the future, there are brokers who pick out intelligent children from poor families. The kids are taken away, cared for, and educated. Their sponsors recoup their investment and more over the course of several years when the child has become an adult with a good job. If faith is about dealing with an unknown and unknowable force in your life, then Sophia's predicament is about dealing with a known person who rules over you in very transparent ways. Her salvation, so to speak, comes when her sponsor is paid off. How is her servitude qualitatively different from that of Sandoz's?

Personally, I find these inverted representations of faith more interesting than the predicament of our Jesuit priest.