Jun 03 2020

Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined (Stephen Fry’s Great Mythology #2) by Stephen Fry

Greek myths have been my jam since I was a little girl. I knew the entire pantheon by heart by the time I was 8, and to this day feel that two of the best gifts I’ve ever received were an illustrated version of The Odyssey when I was 14 and the Penguin Classics translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from my mom just after college. I’ve devoured modern updates, with undoubtedly the best being the child-friendly Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan and, for adults, Ted Hughes’ incomparable, bloody-minded Tales From Ovid. So when Chronicle Press, out of nowhere, offered me an advance copy of Stephen Fry’s Heroes, there was no way I was saying no.

Having dealt with said pantheon and the creation myths in his first volume, Mythos, Mr Fry turns his eye to the mortal Greek heroes (or at least the ones who started out as mortals) pre-Trojan War, whose names and stirring exploits continue to echo down the centuries. I appreciated the fact that “hero” is used in a gender-neutral fashion, as Mr Fry notes that it was originally a female name anyway, and that Atalanta gets her own chapter here. Aside from the fleet-footed princess, Perseus, Heracles, Bellerophon, Orpheus, Jason, Theseus and Oedipus all have their adventures narrated, or reimagined rather, in Mr Fry’s distinctive voice. The tone is so very British, with droll wit and a view of heroism that is by turns stirring and self-effacing. It’s well-researched, with terrific footnotes, an index and a pages-long cast list of characters. The illustrations are gorgeous and appropriate. Younger me would have loved this book so hard.

But older me can’t help reading even this modern adaptation and thinking of the damage these myths, so foundational to Western civilization, have done to millions of people over the centuries. Actually, I should say that that dread influence never really hit home till I read this book in particular. From heroes threatening each other with the wrath of their daddies; to the excuses given for crimes including murder; to the casualness with which rape is handled, contrasting with the pervasiveness of the false rape claim, it’s hard to read these stories of Greek heroes, these paragons held up for generation after generation of classical education, and not shudder at the way that toxic masculinity has been enshrined, through them, from an early age in the bosoms and brains of Western readers. I’m not sure if it was Mr Fry’s intent to underscore how really shitty classical Greek culture could be, and how millennia later we’re still suffering from the nonsense mindsets it espoused, but that was absolutely my main takeaway from reading this.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/06/03/heroes-the-greek-myths-reimagined-stephen-frys-great-mythology-2-by-stephen-fry/

May 29 2020

Infernal Machines by John Hornor Jacobs

Now this is more like it! John Hornor Jacobs concludes his trilogy of cowboys and Romans with style and panache, picking up the pace, tightening the narrative, and never losing the joy of pulpy adventure even as he delivers more complex characters and greater depth in this alternate world. As Infernal Machines begins, longtime partners Fisk and Shoestring have just barely made it out of a demonic attack on Harbour Town, the equivalent of a nuclear detonation, complete with flash burns on people and animals that were many miles away from the explosion. Meanwhile, his wife Livia and her sister Cornelia are on their way back to Rume to face the imperial displeasure caused by their failed embassy to far Kithai. Things are looking bad for our heroes, which means that they are about to get worse.

Infernal Machines

Jacobs tells the story in alternating first-person narratives, with Shoe continuing in the role he has played since the beginning of the trilogy, and Cornelia stepping in as a fully fledged narrator in the third book. In the second, Foreign Devils, she had been an epistolary narrator, writing back to Fisk via a sort of demonic telegraph. In the current book, imperial orders ban her from using the device, leaving her with the habit of relating what has happened to her, leaving readers with a new narrator, and leaving Fisk with considerable anxiety about why he has suddenly stopped hearing from his wife who is half a world away.

Jacobs speeds up the action with short initial chapters, each one ending in a small cliffhanger and getting a set of characters deeper into trouble. Fisk and Shoe are in the odd-numbered chapters; by the end of their third appearance, they have laid an ambush, barely survived a shoot-out with the renegade engineer Beleth and his demonic minions, and been forced to join a band of dvergar who have their own ideas about what to do with Rumans and the half-dvergar like Shoe who work with them. Livia and Cornelia have the even-numbered chapters, and by their fourth appearance, they have returned to Rume, been told that the emperor has decided husbands for both of them (imperiously dissolving Livia’s marriage to Fisk without further thought), escaped their family’s villa with an infant in tow, confronted the emperor’s praetorian guard who had come to Kithai with them, fought him, and accepted his help in making their escape. In their next chapter, they resolve to steal a demon-powered navy ship to make their way back to Occindentalia.

Eventually the breakneck pace slows a bit, but only to give greater depth to the characters and the conflicts that they are smack in the middle of. War has come, and not only to Occidentalia. After burning Harbour Town, the Madierans look to use their armies and their superior seapower to banish the Rumans from the continent entirely. Across the Western Ocean, the Madierans’ newfound knowledge of demonic possibilities will bring the war home to Rume in devastating fashion.

Fisk is a man of the Hardscrabble Territories, but he had a full life in Rume before he lit out for the west, and parts of that life catch up with him in Infernal Machines. His commission to capture Beleth grows into a larger role, as Rume’s position in Occidentalia grows desperate. Shoestring helps him make contact with dvergar bands who mean to assert their own interests while the great foreign powers make war. More importantly, Shoe has gained new insight into the nature of the vaettir, the fearsome indigenous giants of the new world. They have no love for the Rumans, but the demonic terrors the Madierans are unleashing may be even worse.

Livia is a woman of Rume, shaped by the journey shown in The Incorruptibles, and her resourcefulness comes to the fore as she is determined to escape the emperor Tamburlaine. Cornelia, who started as a spiteful viper in the first book, has matured into a determined fighter and quick study of machines even while retaining a girlish spark of unpredictability. Infernal Machines is pulpy adventure, but its women have their own stories to tell and every bit as much agency as its men.

As in any good adventure, things get out of hand and stay that way. Victories prove short-lived. Fisk and Shoe capture Beleth, for example, but other considerations prevent them from killing him immediately, and he may be able to persuade the dvergar to set him free to benefit from his knowledge of engineering and binding demons. Livia and Cornelia capture the ship, which turns out to be highly automated and designed by a man who bears more than a passing resemblance to the chief engineer of the Titanic. But a successful act of piracy creates even more problems than it solves, and even if they can cross the ocean, they still have to find Fisk who could be nearly anywhere on the continent.

And as in any good adventure, when the end comes it is solid and satisfying. Along the way, the worst of the villains have gotten what they deserved until finally the surviving heroes (not all of them, alas) can look back with a mix of joy, relief, and sadness. Infernal Machines is still a Western, though, even if it is full of Rumans:

Gynth came to me. “You will never return, will you?”
“No, hoss,” I said, looking up at the big bastard. “I don’t think we will.”
“I would have you stay,” he said. “[Cousin.]”
“Pard,” I said. “You’ve got a good deal here. This is where you belong.” (p. 359)

There is a sunset, and characters sail into it. With one last surprise at the end.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/05/29/infernal-machines-by-john-hornor-jacobs/

May 28 2020

Well Met (Well Met #1) by Jen DeLuca

I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to Pro and Con a book more than this one, at least in recent memory!

Pro: the writing is really terrific! The book flows so smoothly, the events and timeline make sense and the prose is both modern and pretty. You feel like you’re really in Emily’s head as she navigates her new life in Willow Creek, Maryland. Which, unfortunately, leads to the first

Con: Emily is kind of a ninny. I get it, she’s 24 and just got out of her first serious relationship with a guy who was, unfortunately, a complete asshole, but that should only mean that she’s gun-shy about romantic relationships, not every relationship. I literally had no idea why she was being crazy about her sister April not charging her rent, when her entire reason for being in Willow Creek was to help her niece Caitlin and April after a horrific car crash temporarily immobilized the latter. Given the cost of home health care + driver services, April should be paying her to stay with them! But the presence of April herself is another

Pro: How delightfully the family relationships are portrayed outside of Emily’s strange head. April and Caitlin are both terrific and realistic (disclaimer: I myself am a bit of an April, a reluctant joiner who prefers city life,) as are the friends Emily makes on moving to Willow Creek. Even as an urban-loving suburbanite, I loved the portrayal of small town life as well as its charming inhabitants. Chris and Mitch and Stacey are all super fun, lovely people, in stark contrast to my main

Con: Simon. Ugggggggggh. Using an emotional trauma from three years ago as an excuse to be a fucking douchebag is classic manipulator behavior. For example, getting mad that Emily picked a Renaissance Faire name that is easy for her to remember to answer to is the most counterproductive nonsense I’ve ever heard: if he really cared about Faire, he’d be fucking grateful she chose a name that helps her stay in character instead of being pissy that she wasn’t “trying hard enough.” I don’t care that he’s not as bad as Emily’s ex because that is an unimpressively low bar to clear. And I haaaaated his relationship with Emily because neither of them could have a conversation worth shit. I sorta got why that was so in Emily’s case (see: Con #1) but the last time I had those kinds of incredibly terrible relationship talks with people defaulting to paranoia and insecurity was when I was 19 and in my first serious relationship, which you’d think Emily and Simon would have matured past by now. But that leads to my last

Pro: People are actually this dumb and awful in real life, so yay, more realism! I mean, it’s not a huge character flaw that Emily and Simon have a completely bizarre and insultingly ungrateful opinion of his parents giving him their house, and Emily’s flair for organization is something I truly connect with, as part of me being a reluctant joiner is that I usually wind up in charge of everything, which is exhausting. But none of that made me like either Emily or Simon very much, tho I’m glad they can go mildly tax each other with their self-obsessed, immature and ultimately realistic quirks.

I actually wasn’t going to read more of this series until I discovered two things. First, I read the included excerpt from Well Played, the immediate sequel, and I was absolutely taken with Jen DeLuca’s writing there. The voice is so impressively distinct from Emily’s that I have high hopes Stacey will be a completely different but still fully realized heroine. The second thing is that the third book will be about APRIL AND MITCH!!!! Given that I spent almost the entire back end of Well Met shipping those two in my head based off of one brief interaction, I’m so flustered and happy that Ms DeLuca feels they deserve an entire book to themselves too! While WM was a decent baseline/starter for the series, I’m really hoping, if not quietly confident that, it will just keep getting better and better with the next books. Because APRIL AND MITCH!!!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/05/28/well-met-well-met-1-by-jen-deluca/

May 25 2020

Hope Island by Tim Major

This page-turner of a slow burn horror novel features one of the most original — and in hindsight, one of the most ubiquitous, after a fashion — villains I’ve ever read. I spent far too much time wrongly guessing what lay behind the bizarre behaviors of the residents of Hope Island, and was dead impressed at the reveal.

The story itself revolves around Nina Scaife, a workaholic television producer whose partner Rob has just walked out on her. Determined to prove to their teenaged daughter Laurie that they’re still a family, she takes Laurie to visit Rob’s parents on Hope Island, off the coast of Maine. Rob and Laurie have made the trip plenty of times over the years but Nina has always begged off, claiming work commitments. Now, however, Nina finds that her somewhat rash idea of visiting people she barely knows with a daughter she still needs to break the news of the split to is perhaps even more ill-conceived than she’d expected.

Because Hope Island is strange. At first, Nina puts it down to a sense of culture shock, coming from metropolitan Britain to rural America and having to live with her husband’s seemingly disapproving family. But then she realizes that her dour mother-in-law Tammy’s idea of religion is a nearby artist’s colony called The Sanctuary, and that something is really odd about the island children who keep drawing Laurie into their midst, and soon Nina’s interior turmoil is matched by a vertiginous sense of wrongness. And that’s even before the murders start.

In addition to the revelation of the Big Bad, I was really taken with the way Tim Major wrote of Nina’s often physical losses of perspective, so reminiscent of a Christoper Nolan movie that I almost expected to hear the foghorn blare of one of Mr Nolan’s beloved Shepard tones as I read. The passages charting Nina’s disorientation are a terrific metaphor for the changes besetting a woman who has to learn how to family after her partner, who also happened to be their daughter’s primary caregiver, takes off on them. I’m also a big fan of how the voices felt authentically Anglo or American, depending on which character was speaking — tho the fact that I even noticed this seamlessly carried out last should be no surprise to long-time readers here.

In a previous interview with Mr Major, I noted that much of his writing up till and including his prior novel Snakeskins had to do with themes of maturation. While those are still present in Hope Island, this novel feels more like an exploration of a different kind of growing up, with perhaps even a healthy acknowledgment of growing apart. It’s an excellent addition to his oeuvre, and just a really good, original horror novel.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/05/25/hope-island-by-tim-major/

May 24 2020

The Fourth Crusade by Jonathan Phillips

Where Jonathan Riley-Smith provided an overview of crusading as a movement over many centuries, Jonathan Phillips looks closely at one particular crusade, with an eye toward answering the question of why an expedition intended to take Jerusalem and other sites in the Holy Land wound up instead besieging, conquering and sacking Constantinople. Apparently this was an important question for quite a number of people over a long period of time, but given how many other crusades either strayed far afield from Jerusalem or were directed against fellow Christians in France, Italy, and parts of the German Empire, it’s not all that surprising that at some point crusaders would fight against Byzantium. Indeed, given previous relations between Greeks and crusaders that ranged from grudging passage to active attacks and subversion, it might be more surprising that the two parts of Christendom had not come to blows earlier, not least because they regarded each other as schismatics who had turned away from the true faith and thus, by some measures, worse than actual infidels.

The Fourth Crusade

The short version of why the Fourth Crusade wound up at the gates of Constantinople is that one thing led to another, and that choices the leaders made at early stages of the crusade both foreclosed other options and increasingly committed the crusaders to war on the Bosporus. Phillips of course tells a longer version, setting the stage with an overview of crusading in general, what the first three crusades had achieved, and what led to the preaching of a fourth at that particular time. Discussions of the preaching lead naturally into explanations of why leadership fell to men such as the Count of Flanders and the Marquis of Montferrat rather than the kings of England and France. First and foremost, the kings could not set aside their quarrels, even for such a cause as the recovery of Jerusalem. Second, the gap in resources between the prosperous counts and their nominal overlords was not as great in the late 1100s and early 1200s as would later be the case. Regional leaders could mobilize forces for crusades that were as strong as royal contingents. Third, many of these high nobles came from families that had strong crusading traditions, and they thus felt honor-bound to match the deeds of their forbears, or at least to make the attempt.

Two aspects of medieval politics and warfare that come through clearly in The Fourth Crusade are the immense amount of lead time involved and the wild uncertainty. Preparations for a new crusade began soon after the election of Innocent III as pope in 1198; the men of the Fourth Crusade arrived at their rallying point in Venice four years later, in the summer and autumn of 1202. Count Thibaut of Champagne, who had been expected to be one of the leaders of the crusade, died in late May 1201 before he had even mustered his followers, much less begun his way toward the Holy Land. Leaders tried to plan years advance, with little idea of what resources would be available to them, or whether key people would even be alive.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/05/24/the-fourth-crusade-by-jonathan-phillips/

May 21 2020

Giants at the End of the World edited by Johanna Sinisalo and Toni Jerrman

Giants at the End of the World is a nifty artifact, its subtitle “A Showcase of Finnish Weird” telling part of the story, and the headline of the back jacket text “Worldcon 75 proudly presents” telling the rest. The slender and compact collection of 11 stories was a present to attending members of the 2017 World Science Fiction Convention in Helsinki, and it is a fine glimpse into the worlds of strange fiction by Finnish authors.

Giants at the End of the World

Eight are translations from Finnish; two first saw publication in this volume, although one of those, “Summerland,” is the first chapter of a novel of the same name that was published in 2018. The editors introduce each story and author with a one-page note about their person and their works, and they round out the volume with eleven pages listing of contemporary Finnish SF/F available in other languages, a listing that is by no means confined to English. I was particularly pleased to see one novel that had been translated into Georgian, but larger and smaller languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese and French to Japanese were present as well.

The stories are, of necessity, shortish, and true to the subtitle tend toward the strange and fantastical, rather than toward the science fictional. Peculiar things simply happen, and the authors are typically happy to let readers try to interpret the occurrences rather than tipping their hand with an explanation. What is the proper perspective for viewing “The Haunted House on Rocketworks Street”? Why and how did the exiles of “Undine” wind up where they are? Is the first-person narrator of “Snowfall” coming unstuck from reality, or is she possessed of greater insight than the mundane people around her? Those questions and other are left satisfyingly unanswered.

Though the subtitle proclaims a geographic unity of the collection, the stories wear their Finnishness lightly. One features elements from the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic; some are explicitly set in or near Helsinki; others describe natural landscapes that are recognizably Finnish but could plausibly be in other places sufficiently far north. Some, too, are set in fully imaginary realms and do not have an explicitly Finnish connection at all. The editors have chosen their showcase to present a wide range of weirdness, and all of it is deliciously strange.

“The Bearer of the Bone Harp,” by Emmi Itäranta, is a case in the Holmes mode, with added elements of music, magic, and menace. It originally appeared in an anthology of short stories about the composer Jean Sebelius, and it left me wanting to find out more about the world it is set in and those particular characters. “The Skinner,” by Anne Leinonen, was creepily dystopic. “Summerland” also left me wanting to discover more about dueling NKVD agents in 1938 London with hints of magic emanating from rival Summer and Winter Courts. The title story closes the volume nicely with a story of travel and secrets, and giants at a place that may actually be just the beginning.

Giants at the End of the World is probably not generally available, but some of the authors are undoubtedly present in a book advertised in its endpapers — Never Stop: Finnish Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, selected by Emmi Itäranta.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/05/21/giants-at-the-end-of-the-world-edited-by-johanna-sinisalo-and-toni-jerrman/

May 18 2020

The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers #1) by Becky Chambers

Sometimes, when I’m in the middle of a long jag of perfectly fine to mediocre books, I start to wonder whether my reading skills are atrophying because I’m only managing 100 pages a day. But then I get a book like Becky Chambers’ The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet and crush all 500 or so pages in a little over 24 hours, and I realize that I was just waiting for the right book to come along to restore my faith in myself, to spark that alchemy that has me tearing through the pages, laughing and crying and barely believing how fast the book goes by.

TLWtaSAP was an absolute joy to read. A space opera focused on the crew of the Wayfarer, a ship specializing in building the tunnels through space-time that allow for interstellar travel, it hearkens back to the golden age of sci-fi, when Asimov and Bradbury told connected short stories revolving around their robots or colonists of Mars. To a large extent, it’s also reminiscent of episodic TV set in space, where you get to explore each character’s back story while unraveling an overarching plot. In this case, the Wayfarer has been hired for an ambitious job following the declaration of a peace agreement between the Galactic Commons and the Toremi Ka, a tribe of a warlike race of aliens who value conformity in thinking above all, and will fight dissenters to the death. While traveling to their destination in Toremi space, the Wayfarer engages in all sorts of adventures where secrets are revealed and deeper relationships forged, only to find that perhaps their mission isn’t as risk-free as the GC had promised.

TLWtaSAP felt like reading (or bingeing, in my case) the entire first season of a really great TV show like Firefly or Star Trek. I’m genuinely baffled by its description, for good or ill, as “feel good” or “slice of life.” Sure, there’s no overarching galactic conspiracy that our team has to save the known universe from but there’s still a shit ton of adventure, loss and death-defying to be had, with alien species, cultures and diplomacy to add complexity to the proceedings. There weren’t any dei ex machinae or other implausible plot twists: everything flowed smoothly because Ms Chambers is a terrific writer with an engaging style who clearly spent a lot of time thinking through the story she wanted to tell. Calling TLWtaSAP “feel good”, however well meaning the sentiment, sounds incredibly dismissive of a complex exploration of the kinds of relationships that develop between very different people thrust into close quarters (in space!) as well as the political and social machinations going on in the setting at large. But hey, if it draws in readers who might be searching for that kind of touchstone before trying out a new genre, then I guess I’m for it, even as I wonder at how much pain and grotesqueness its detractors prefer to see from their genre fiction.

Anyway, I loved this thoughtful, often moving, definitely hilarious (the scene with Sissix and the orchid, among others, had me guffawing so hard) novel and can’t wait to read the sequels. TLWtaSAP well deserved all the awards it received.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/05/18/the-long-way-to-a-small-angry-planet-wayfarers-1-by-becky-chambers/

May 17 2020

Saffron and Brimstone by Elizabeth Hand

I zipped through the eight stories of Saffron and Brimstone in about a day and a half when I was in the hospital and looking for something fantastical to read. The tales — one novella, a quartet of connected short stories, and three other stand-alones — all bring fantastic or horrific elements into the mundane world, sometimes to the characters’ surprise, sometimes not.

Saffron and Brimstone by Elizabeth Hand

The half-titular story, “Cleopatra Brimstone,” is the longest and concerns a gifted young woman who’s an insect researcher, and the delayed consequences of an assault perpetrated on her. “Pavane for a Prince of the Air” relates a free spirit’s death by mundane disease. It captures the way a serious illness seems to collapse the world into a narrow space — whether that’s a hospital room or a home — for the person bearing it and the people closest to them. It is also a sideways commentary on health care for artists in the United States, but mostly it is a portrayal of someone who has always lived by his own rules also dying in his own way, and how that affects the people close to him.

“The Least Trumps” pulls out some neat tricks from a love of Tarot and obscure fantasy novels, with some meditations on a life lived next to fame, obsession, and tattoos. “Wonderwall” shows a tawdrier side of bohemian life, how suffering doesn’t always lead to great art, and how having the resources to pull oneself out of a spiraling gyre can be better for creativity even if it sounds sort of mundane.

The four stories of “The Lost Domain” are “the result of an epistolary friendship that began sometime in the late 1980s… My correspondent and myself have met only a handful of times. We never, ever talk on the phone. We live thousands of miles apart, and never run into each other of the street.” (Author’s Afterword) The four parts — “Kronia,” “Calypso in Berlin,” “Echo,” and “The Saffron Gatherers” — are variations on the theme of people who are immensely important to each other but who seldom meet face to face. Sometimes when they do meet, the consequences are fatal; sometimes they are merely transformative; in one instance, it is not clear whether they do meet or whether the narrator merely thinks they do.

All of the stories in Saffron and Brimstone are lush and immersive, with atmospheres that linger long in my memory. In several of them, bad things happen to male characters immediately after sex; lover beware, I suppose. I liked this better than I liked Black Light because it was not as obvious where the stories were going, and when it was, I liked the characters and settings well enough to follow along anyway.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/05/17/saffron-and-brimstone-by-elizabeth-hand/

May 16 2020

The Crusades by Jonathan Riley-Smith

How could I resist a book that took my alma mater‘s motto as its epigraph? Of course I couldn’t, all the more so because I wanted to read something about knights and journeys and castles, and none of the fantasy that was close at hand was as immediately appealing.

The version of Riley-Smith’s book that I have is a second edition, published in 2005 as a revision of the 1987 edition. The brief preface to the new edition was very interesting to me because it sketched how the concerns of historians had changed over more than a decade and a half, a glimpse of the historicity of history, so to speak. (It also leads me to wonder what has changed in the time since, though not, mind, enough to seek out a current book on the topic.) Here was one of the most interesting points:

The Crusades by Jonathan Riley-Smith

“Most historians also seem to have lost interest in the question of whether the Latin settlements in the East were colonies or not. This may also be a result of general disillusionment with Marxism, but it should be added that the conviction that the settlements were examples of early colonialism is still axiomatic in Arab and in some Israeli circles.” (p. xxv) There are some adjectives missing between “Most” and “historians” that would go a long way toward clarifying who Riley-Smith thinks matter. It’s an interesting glimpse into how history informs and is shaped by current relations and controversies to say that viewing the crusades as colonial enterprises is “axiomatic” in Arab circles. It sets the stage for, at best, a great deal of miscommunication.

More aspects that changed between 1987 and 2005, according to Riley-Smith, include growing interest in the motivation of crusaders, greater knowledge of the smaller crusades to the East in between the traditionally numbered crusades, deeper understanding of the Latin settlements in the East, and increased interest in the military orders including the order-states of Prussia, Rhodes and Malta. All of these changes were shaped by greater access to a wider range of sources, something that will have only expanded in the meantime, especially as archives have become digitally accessible. (I do wish the maps had been re-done with 2005 technology instead of keeping 1987’s dot-screen overlays.)

In the course of just over 300 pages Riley-Smith lays out the history of crusading, from the ideas about violence, penitence and just wars that gave rise to the First Crusade just before 1100 through Napoleon’s extinguishment of Hospitaller Malta in 1798, by which time crusading had long since ceased to be a vital force in Western Europe. Riley-Smith gives the most details on the First Crusade as a way of explaining the movement, its trials, its successes, and its many legacies. He takes what is called a “pluralist” view of crusading, showing how similar acts, theology and papal perspective apply to crusades in the Baltic, Iberia and within Western Christendom every bit as much as to crusades to the Holy Land. Apparently this was in opposition to a traditional view that crusading only involved lands around the eastern Mediterranean. I am not sure who supposedly held this view, as the German and Polish history I am familiar with certainly regarded the actions in the Baltic realm as crusades. (And not just historians: the title of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s popular novel from 1900 is Krzyżacy, which is usually translated as The Knights of the Cross or The Teutonic Knights but could simply be rendered as Crusaders.) At any rate, that is more a matter for the guild of historians than for the general reader at whom Riley-Smith’s work is aimed.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/05/16/the-crusades-by-jonathan-riley-smith/

May 11 2020

Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

Ah, if only, if only. I’ve enjoyed enough romance novels to be able to differentiate between the wonderful modern-day version and the traditional version described by Sir Walter Scott, and only sometimes do the twain meet in ways more convincing than mere bad plotting. It’s bittersweet to feel that this charming tale of the First Son of the United States of America and the youngest prince in the direct line of the English monarchy falling in love with one another should feel at once realistic and achingly unlikely, a fact acknowledged by Casey McQuiston in her, er, acknowledgments when she mentions that the germination of the book came to a screeching halt following the debacle of America’s 2016 presidential election. But if you’d like to escape our present, miserable reality for a convincingly realistic parallel world with wildly different people in the White House and Buckingham Palace, then by all means crack this book open for some truly lovely writing about being in love against all odds.

Note: if progressive politics dismays you a/o you’re a member of #Cult45, you probably won’t like this book, and that’s too bad for you.

Anyway, Alex Claremont-Diaz is the younger child of America’s first female president, white Texan Ellen Claremont and her ex-husband, the Mexican-American Senator from California Oscar Diaz. Ever since an unpleasant encounter at the Olympics, Alex has held a grudge against Prince Henry, the youngest grandson of England’s reigning Queen Mary, but after the two accidentally fall into a cake together at Henry’s older brother’s wedding, political forces go into overdrive to cover up any hint of tension between the two. Towards this end, Alex and Henry are forced into bff photo ops, then slowly begin to discover that they actually like each other. And then they begin to discover that they actually like each other. Chaos ensues against a backdrop of international politics.

As with all romance novels, the reader’s buying into the relationship proceedings will depend on their own views in re a healthy romance. Personally, I’m of a mind with Oscar in his estimation of Alex and Henry’s relationship: it could all turn out to be a disaster in the end but that doesn’t mean love isn’t worth fighting for in the meantime. I’m not so convinced of a pledge of True Love from two young men in their early 20s in the first openly gay relationship each has ever had, especially when it’s primarily been conducted long distance for months, but I’m a curmudgeon so. The book does end in a good place, but I’d be intensely surprised if the two were still together ten, even five years down the line: YMMV, of course. I did like that a good chunk of the book deals with Alex realizing that he’s bi, a topic that isn’t often covered in romance but is extremely well-handled here. I was also really impressed by how Ms McQuiston got all the voices to sound authentically of their backgrounds. As someone with an Anglo-American upbringing, I’m super sensitive to missteps in this regard, so the authenticity of voice in this book is honestly one of the most impressive literary achievements I’ve read in decades. I don’t necessarily believe in the depiction of British monarchy (too rigid) and press (not aggressive enough) here, but the portrayal of American politics was both realistic and aspirational, a panacea to the “how the fuck did we get here?” times we’re living in now.

Red, White & Royal Blue was a good, escapist read, and I’m very much looking forward to Ms McQuiston’s next book, a queer time-travel romance with female leads. Also, I frigging love her round, over-sized tortoise-shell glasses and wish I could get away with wearing same.

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