Some March books

[redbird]

This is some of what I read in March and didn't already post about:


Ellen Kushner, The Privilege of the Sword. This is set in the same milieu as Swordspoint, a generation later. This time out, Kushner gives us a viewpoint character it's possible, even easy, to sympathize with: Katherine is summoned to the city by her uncle, the mad duke Tremontaine [he's "the mad duke" the way Allende was "Marxist President"]. She goes, hoping this means her family's fortunes will be restored, and is surprised and dismayed that her uncle intends to have her trained as a swordsman, and to talk to her as little as possible. I found the depiction of an adolescent pushed into something, and getting both good at it and eventually proud of it, plausible. This is emphatically not a romance, even in the way Swordspoint can be seen as such, in its depiction of an ongoing relationship between two men who love each other. The plot turns in part on Katherine's attempts to save a friend from an engagement to a man she discovers is quite unpleasant after she accepts his proposal. Despite being called "the mad duke" and not really part of "Society," Alec's approach to how to handle the wealth and power that go with the dukedom is far more sympathetic than that of most of the socialites who despise him, and vice versa. Despite his high-handed approach to Katherine, he listens when she wants things other than to stop the sword lessons.

It hardly seems fair to say "This didn't wow me the way Swordspoint did," especially given that it's not trying to do the same things. Part of that reaction, I think, is that while I don't think I'd want either Alec or Richard over for dinner, it was much easier to like Richard, and this book is mostly Alec and Katherine. At the same time, Alec in this book would be a much safer acquaintance: associating with him might still ruin a person's reputation, but he's no longer starting fights over trivia so he can watch someone die. (Swordspoint is an excellent example of enjoying reading about, and rooting for, fictional characters who I would dislike as well as disapprove of if they were in my world rather than in fiction.)

Pat Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, The Mislaid Magician. Another sequel, this time to Sorcery and Cecilia. The authors return to the epistolary style of that book (in between is one done in large part as journal entries, which didn't work as well), and take advantage of a ten-year gap to give both Cecilia and Kate children, already settled in and cared for in large part by nurses. Wellington is Prime Minister, and James is once again being called on to identify and fix problems for him. I like the idea of railroads affecting, and being affected by, ley lines, but the voices seemed slightly off. In Sorcery and Cecilia I rarely got confused about which letter was from which character; this time, James and Thomas are also writing back and forth, and whle I could generally tell the men from the women (the men's letters are usually shorter and more formal), I had intermittent but annoying difficulties telling either pair of correspondents apart. I'm wondering whether, this time out, rather than play the letter game such that all letters from a particular character were by one of the two collaborators, they shared the work around more; that hypothesis assumes that at least some of the style differences between Kate and Cece in the first book were differences in the two authors' styles.

Peter Beagle's The Line Between is a short story collection. The cover boasts that it contains a sequel to The Last Unicorn. This one works. It's not necessary…the novel stands on its own, and is not altered by the events here…but it works. "Two Hearts" puts us in the sort of magical world where not only do kings answer the requests of poor villagers beset by monsters, but they have greater abilities than their knights because of the role/fact of kingship. I cried at the end of this one, and was surprised to do so: even as I was weeping, I was thinking that it would have made more sense if I'd cried a page earlier. The last story, "A Dance for Emilia," is about art, and friendship, and mourning, and I'm not sure whether it's exactly the right thing for elisem to read now, or all wrong, but something about the connections, the conversation, and the sense of not enough time reminds me of her and Mike.

"Salt Wine" is the tale of a sailor who strikes it rich after helping a merman, and what happens afterward. It's told by his friend and sometime business partner. The narrative voice was very plausible as a sailor, though I'll leave it to someone from England to judge the details of origin and dialect: he's not particularly attached to his homeland, and willing to operate out of Velha Goa or Argentina, if there's a berth to be had. He doesn't believe his friend at the beginning, who goes to rescue a merman (here called "merrow") from a shark because if you save a merrow, he has to give you all his treasures. It turns out to be only half-true: he has to give you the one thing he values most, in this case a recipe for a drink called salt wine, which seems to be an intoxicant with some of the properties of both strong narcotics and psychedelics. Those who try it either never want it again, or decide it's the perfect drink; the latter half are enough to support a fine business, for a while. Like many magical gifts, the salt wine turns out to have a high, and strange, price.

Not everything here is dark, or likely to bring tears. The story starts with "Gordon, the Self-Made Cat," about a mouse who decides that he'd rather be predator than prey, and what happens when he goes to cat school. There are four fables, in the style of James Thurber's "Further Fables for Our Time." To my mind, the only one of these that works for that is the first, "The Fable of the Moth." "The Fable of the Octopus" is a charming tale about a philosophically minded octopus that doesn't fit with the other three and might have worked better in a different context (even later in the same book), and without the little "moral" at the end. Thurber may well have been one of a kind, and I'd rather have Peter Beagle being himself than trying to be someone else, even someone else much of whose writing I like.

Sandra Scoppetone, This Dame for Hire, is an oddly toned WWII detective novel. I think she's trying to play with the whole hard-boiled thing, and it might work better for people fonder of that subgenre. The viewpoint character is a stenographer-turned-PI, who took over her boss's one-man detective agency when he joined the army during World War II. The detective part works well enough, though slowly. It was interesting as a tour of a very different New York City, back when the well-to-do could seriously go down to Greenwich Village to spend an evening with someone they didn't want to be seen with, and think of it as "slumming," when Fourth Avenue was still full of used book stores and NYU was tucked in on one side of Washington Square Park. For continuity, we get not only street names [where Rex Stout carefully made up several of his], but Reggio's and Village Cigars. This was a whim from the library, and I don't think I'll bother with the sequel advertised at the back of this volume.