Feb 13 2018

The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine

When it was built, the House of Government — maybe better known in English as the House on the Embankment thanks to the book by Yuri Trefonov — was the largest residential building in Europe. With The House of Government, Yuri Slezkine gives the building, its people and its first era an equally enormous treatment. The main text is just under 1000 pages; the book itself is something of an argument for electronic editions. Although I am very happy to have it as a physical object (heft! good design! many illustrations and diagrams integrated into the text!) there is no way that I am reading it anywhere but at home. The bookmark whose downward progress I am self-indulgently admiring reads “Yes I’m actually reading this.” My original caption for this picture was “That’s not a book, mate, this is a book.” One friend has already remarked on social media that maybe he will get to this one in his next lifetime.

His loss, though, because so far the book is totally worth the effort, and in a way that’s inseparable from its size. Occasionally, I will come across books where it feels like the authors have put everything they know about a subject on the pages, like they are stretching to fill the pages. More often, given my tastes, I find myself wishing for more, that authors had taken the time to make their arguments completely, that they filled in details on subjects that they touched on briefly. Heck, I wanted more of an 876-page biography of Khrushchev. (Still do. Khrushchev had a second marriage that was largely unknown for decades, and Taubman only spent a page or two on that relationship.)

So far, Slezkine gets the balance just right. There are details, there are a lot of details, but none of the individual excerpts or quotations feels like Slezkine is stretching a point or including it just to fill up space. Neither does he skimp on his arguments, or take certain things as read or self-evident. “Early in the book, the Bolsheviks are identified as millenarian sectarians preparing for the apocalypse.” (p. XII) Considerations of communism as very much like a religion are not new, it’s an argument that has been made many times. The Captive Mind (1953) is essentially a collection of conversion experiences, so the argument was current even while Stalinism held sway.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/02/13/the-house-of-government-by-yuri-slezkine/

Feb 12 2018

Dead Lions (Slough House #2) by Mick Herron

Good tho, to a certain extent, I enjoyed Slow Horses better because that one was undoubtedly a win for our agents. This one… well, it’s complicated. See, an old spy is found dead on a bus he didn’t have a ticket for, and no one seems to care except Jackson Lamb, who worked with the dead man back in Berlin before the wall came down. As Lamb sorts out Dickie Bow’s movements, he slowly entangles the rest of his Department of Deadbeats in the investigation.

Except for Louisa Guy and Min Harper, that is, who’ve been seconded to Regent’s Park by the ambitious James Webb, the same MI5 bureaucrat who played such a pivotal role in the current staffing of Slough House (the not-actual-but-close-enough name of the department Lamb runs.) Webb wants to make a sweetheart deal with a potential Russian asset, but with accounting at HQ on a tear due to recent financial scandal, has decided to fly under the radar by picking up Slough House assets and dangling before them the carrot all Slow Horses want: re-entry to Regent’s Park proper if all goes well. Of course, all doesn’t, and it’s a hell of a thrill ride through London and the Cotswolds as Webb inevitably screws up while Lamb locks horns with an old specter: a Cold War spy who was supposed to never have existed.

As always, I loved the interactions between Lamb and Catherine Standish, his right-hand woman. I also enjoyed the addition of the two newest Slow Horses, especially Marcus, whom I’m hoping eventually partners professionally with Louisa. Honestly, I’m still reeling a bit over what happened with her and Min. I’m feeling a bit protective of my team of misfits over here! But I needs must read something lighter before plunging back into this fascinating, if occasionally depressing world, so I’m off to read a cozy before devouring the next book in this series.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/02/12/dead-lions-slough-house-2-by-mick-herron/

Feb 11 2018

The Case of the Missing Marquess (Enola Holmes #1) by Nancy Springer

A surprisingly unsentimental view of life in Victorian England, far removed from romance and riches. Our heroine, Enola Holmes, does start out moneyed, after a fashion: she lives on her ancestral estate with her mother, but Nancy Springer is quick to point out that the women aren’t rich in their own right, as all their property and income are beholden to their male relatives.

On her fourteenth birthday, Enola is aghast to find that her mother has pretty much gone walkabout. After failing to track her down, she summons her older brothers, Mycroft and Sherlock, for help, unwittingly opening up a Pandora’s box of unpleasant surprises for everyone involved. While Sherlock continues to investigate the disappearance, Mycroft decides that the best thing for Enola is boarding school, a place against which their feminist, rationalist mother had railed. Enola decides to take matters into her own hands and runs away, stumbling across the case of a missing marquess in the meantime and setting her off on her own career path.

Ms Springer does not shy away from discussing how absolutely squalid London could be in the Victorian era, and how poorly women were treated across all social classes. I was a bit leery of the Sherlock connection but I think it’s handled well, overall, and used as a springboard for a more socially conscious sort of mystery. This is a terrific book for young women and mystery lovers of all ages: it’s a quick read, but it certainly punches above its weight in terms of refusing to ignore the realities of life for Victorian women and the poor.

Oh, almost forgot: I picked this up after hearing that Millie Bobby Brown had optioned it for production.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/02/11/the-case-of-the-missing-marquess-enola-holmes-1-by-nancy-springer/

Feb 10 2018

Kabale und Liebe by Friedrich Schiller

From the subtitle, “A Bourgeois Tragedy” to the Romeo and Juliet references that crop up in discussions of the play, it’s clear that Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, although I am glad to see that at least some translators go with the better order of Love and Intrigue) is not going to end well for the protagonists. And of course it doesn’t. Along the way, though, readers encounter what Theodor Fontane, quoted on the back of my little yellow Reclam edition, called the play’s “extraordinary dramatic power.”

Kabale und Liebe was Schiller’s third drama, his second important play after The Robbers, and his last in prose. From Don Karlos onward, he turned to verse for his plays. He also turned to historical subjects and away from fictional settings like the ones in Kabale und Liebe. The play follows Luise Miller, sixteen-year-old daughter of a bourgeois family, who has fallen in love with Ferdinand von Walter, the son of the president of an unnamed ruler’s court. (The dramatis personae says that it is a prince’s court; in the play, he is usually referred to as a duke.) The drama opens with her parents worrying about Ferdinand’s interest in their daughter, what his presents mean, the likelihood that this bodes ill for her and them, for a match across class lines cannot be made. The second scene sets the intrigues in motion, as the president’s assistant — the all-too-aptly named Wurm — asks Herr Miller for his daughter’s hand and is rejected.

The play premiered in 1784, after the American Revolution but before the French. Ancien régime rulers held sway across Europe while the Enlightenement brought new ideas into play. The ruler of Kabale und Liebe‘s setting seems far more despot than enlightened, and it is hinted that Ferdinand’s father attained his present position by well-timed murder, although the exact deed is never spelled out. Schiller has a great many targets as his tragedy unfurls: the arbitrary power of monarchs, the poverty of the people they rule (these two combine in the description of the duke’s selling thousands of his subjects into indentured servitude in America to finance jewels for his favorite; people who protest are massacred, and the whole takes place off-stage, an event merely to be reported), the impenetrable barrier between nobility and commoners, the servility and violence required at court life.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/02/10/kabale-und-liebe-by-friedrich-schiller/

Feb 09 2018

Slow Horses (Slough House #1) by Mick Herron

It’s a bit weird coming to this book after reading the author’s excellent, bleak Nobody Walks. At about the halfway mark of Slow Horses, I felt an uneasy stirring of familiarity, much like I had upon reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd after her excellent, bleak Endless Night. While the plot twist in Dame Christie’s more famous work was thoroughly spoiled for me because of it, I was exceedingly pleased that, while SH does bear a similarity to the standalone NW, it goes beyond and better, in a different direction and tone. I really enjoyed this.

Anyway, SH is about an office of sad sacks nominally employed by MI5 but relegated to a building kept away from the action, given busywork with the intent of boring them into leaving the service. When a young man is kidnapped by terrorists and threatened with public execution, River Cartwright, one of said sad sacks (or Slow Horses, as they’re called in a layered pun on the name of the building they work out of,) thinks the abduction might be connected to a work errand he was sent on, going through the trash of a disgraced former journalist. What he uncovers could put their entire department, and lives, in danger… or perhaps give them all a shot at redemption.

It’s hard for me to review this book without bringing up NW because that was a deeply affecting book, and the one that initially made me a fan of Mick Herron’s. I will say that I was very pleased that SH wasn’t as much of a downer as I’d feared it might be. I have to read and review the next two books in the series by the 13th, so I’m really glad it won’t just be a litany of sorrow, if this book is anything to go by. I’m especially looking forward to the continuing adventures of Lamb and Standish, tho I am rather fond of all of the Slow Horses still left standing.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/02/09/slow-horses-slough-house-1-by-mick-herron/

Feb 07 2018

Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1) by Yoon Ha Lee

Whoo, jeez, this was one hell of a read!

So you know that bromide, that any scientific technology, advanced enough, is indistinguishable from magic? To a very large extent, one can apply that to science fiction, where if we follow theoretical math and physics to their natural conclusions, the results are indistinguishable from fantasy. Because, y’all, this book works on the tenet that mathematical harmonics are codeable not only into weapons and defense systems, but also into genetics and physical behavior modification. The basis is the “calendar” or the overarching numerical system upon which the Hexarchate, the galactic empire that our heroes serve, hangs its technology, propped up by its citizens’ belief (which is another fascinating deep dive into the intersection between quantum mechanics and human philosophy.) There’s some crazy theoretical math made practical here, and if you’re not familiar enough with or willing enough to concede that these are a plausible, if speculative, use of the concepts, then you’re gonna have a bad time. But if you’re okay with accepting that there’s a future where pure math can be bent into applied, then ooh boy, are you in for a treat with Ninefox Gambit!

I just realized that the entire preceding paragraph makes this book sound like total nerd wankery, but I promise you, it’s a terrific space opera that just happens to use some crazy ass tech as its basis (insert comparison of Yoon Ha Lee to the Hexarchate here, lol.) There’s this Captain, Kel Cheris, who is selected to lead the assault on an important fortress that has sunk into calendrical heresies. To this end, she has been given the weapon that is the shade of the legendary general Shuos Jedao, who was executed and kept in a sort of limbo to be brought back whenever the Kel Command saw fit. Jedao never lost a battle, not even the one where, two hundred years before this, he massacred not only an enemy base but also all of his own troops before being captured and condemned to undeath. Now, he is the greatest weapon the Hexarchate has against a heresy that threatens the entire empire. But is he really working with Cheris or does he have plans of his own?

Mr Lee writes like a man swiftly navigating a tangled, thorny tightrope. It’s a bravura performance that relies on the reader being smart enough to follow along as he plunges you into action and betrayal and scenes from lives and times in chaos. It’s a book that at once praises and despairs of military discipline and loyalty, even as it presents a refreshing view of gender and sexuality, devoid of stifling cultural baggage. Plus, it’s clearly rooted in an East Asian mythos, making for a gloriously original sort of sff. And it has sequels! I’ve already placed a hold on Raven Strategem from my local library and am very excited for the release of the final book in the trilogy this summer. Heady stuff for anyone into theoretical math and philosophy, but especially for anyone who loves a smart space opera.

Also, servitors sound cute as hell and while I’ve never given a darn about a droid, I totally want a servitor.

(Doug’s review is here.)

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/02/07/ninefox-gambit-the-machineries-of-empire-1-by-yoon-ha-lee/

Feb 06 2018

A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett

The second Tiffany Aching book, A Hat Full of Sky, picks up right where the first one left off. The Lancre witches have arranged for Tiffany to learn from a witch, in something like an apprenticeship. This matches with traditions in the Chalk, Tiffany’s home region, in which girls often went “into service.” Pratchett explains, “Traditionally, you started by helping an old lady who lived by herself; she wouldn’t be able to pay much, but since this was your first job you probably weren’t worth much either.” (p. 14) There’s a pointed message for any young adult readers!

Early on, Pratchett lines up elements that will be important later. Tiffany casually steps outside of herself to get a better look at herself than her farm’s meager mirror can provide. Just before Tiffany leaves to go into service the local Baron’s son, who is “a lot less of a twit than he had been” (p. 25) according to Tiffany, gives her a present to remember him and her homeland by. When she arrives at the new witch’s cottage, she sees a circus poster that, among other things, encouraged visitors to “See the egress!!” Pratchett slips a discussion of wishes into Tiffany’s musings on the Nac Mac Feegle, the formidable pictsies who have taken a liking to her, and even made her their chief for a brief while. The new chief, a proper Feegle kelda, makes her distrust of Tiffany plain early on, thus ensuring that she will be on her own — at least for a while – when unfortunate things start to happen. Which of course they do, or there wouldn’t be much of a story.

In A Hat Full of Sky, Pratchett introduces a new magical entity, called a Hiver. Even the Nac Mac Feegle are afraid of them. They are like bodiless parasites, taking over living beings and eventually consuming them. But a Hiver remembers everyone it has been, meaning that previous victims continue to exist, after a fashion.

About the first third of the book ambles along, showing Tiffany’s leave-taking, and how she settles into her new home and role. Miss Level, her mentor, has a secret that Tiffany soon figures out. It had made Miss Level unwelcome where she came from.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/02/06/a-hat-full-of-sky-by-terry-pratchett/

Feb 04 2018

Beren and Luthien by J.R.R. Tolkien

Beren and Lúthien mainly reminded me of why I never finished The Silmarillion. There is a paragraph late in the book that explains as well as any. Editor Christopher Tolkien is describing a misunderstanding that arose between his father and his father’s publisher after the apparently unexpected success of The Hobbit. Tolkien had sent the publisher several possible manuscripts for his second publication. What with one thing and another, they did not find a reader who knew what to do with the materials Tolkien had sent, and the publisher pressed for something else.

Many years later my father wrote in a letter (16 July 1964): ‘I offered them the legends of the Elder Days, but their readers turned that down. They wanted a sequel. But I wanted heroic legends and high romance. The result was The Lord of the Rings.’ (p. 222)

And thank God for that.

It’s not that Beren and Lúthien is a bad tale, it’s just that the prose versions in the book are in an ancient register that is so distancing as to render the story nearly bloodless, while the poetic versions are narrative poetry, using mostly modern English in an Anglo-Saxon verse form to tell a high romance from the distant past of an invented world. If this weren’t Tolkien, I never would have finished, and I dare say if it had been published in the 1930s or 1940s before The Lord of the Rings it would have sunk like a stone, leaving The Hobbit as a curious one-off by an obscure Oxford professor with a knack for invented languages.

The foregoing is a bit unfair to Beren and Lúthien, which is interesting for a number of reasons. It’s interesting to see how the story changed over the decades that Tolkien worked on it, to consider what he kept, what he left out in subsequent versions, how this great love story was increasingly tied to the other legends of the First Age that he was developing over the same years. Some things never changed: Beren’s outsider background, Lúthien’s love for him over paternal objection, the quest for a Silmaril, her rescue of him, their joint return to peril, his loss of a hand, the hunt for the great wolf, her retrieval of him from beyond the veil of death. Other elements vary more. In an early, prose version, Beren is held in thrall to the lord of the cats, whereas in later versions he is captive to an early version of Sauron. Early on, Beren is also an Elf; later, he is mortal. Their fates after Beren returns from the dead also vary. Sometimes they live long lives among their peoples, sometimes they wander long but alone together, sometimes they fade quickly from the world.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/02/04/beren-and-luthien-by-j-r-r-tolkien/

Feb 03 2018

Berlin by Rory MacLean

Rory MacLean gave his book on Berlin the subtitle “Imagine a City.” His American publishers changed this to “Portrait of a City Through the Centuries,” which is odd because it loses the ties to MacLean’s prologue “Imagine” and epilogue “Imagine Berlin.” Further, the book is not a portrait but rather a collection of almost two dozen portraits of particular people (most of them real) who stand as exemplars of particular periods in Berlin’s history.

Before commencing with his portraits, MacLean ventures a few words on the city’s meaning:

Berlin is all about volatility. Its identity is based not on stability but on change, as wrote historian Alexandra Richie. No other city has repeatedly been so powerful, and fallen so low. No other capital has been so hated, so feared, so loved. No other place has been so twisted and torn across five centuries of conflict, from religious wars to Cold War, at the hub of Europe’s ideological struggle. (pp. 1–2)

Moscow would like a word. As perhaps would Rome and Tokyo, and in terms of being twisted and torn across five centuries of European struggles, certainly many cities in the continent’s central and eastern regions could give Berlin a run for the title. At any rate, MacLean has not written a comparative treatise, and the book is much better when it is particular than when it is general.

MacLean also has a personal stake. He appears in later chapters involving Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie. His engagement with Berlin started earlier, as “a teenage traveller ‘doing’ Europe.” He continues:

During a happy, footloose summer I climbed the Eiffel Tower, tripped down the Spanish Steps and felt the earth move under the stars on an Aegean beach. Then on the last week of the holiday I saw the Wall. The sight of the heinous barrier shook me to my core. At the heart of the Continent were watchtowers, barbed wire and border guards instructed to shoot fellow citizens who wanted to live under a different government. …
Throughout that week I was drawn again and again to the Wall. I stood for hours on the wooden observation platform at the end of a bizarre cul-de-sac overlooking vanished Potsdamer Platz. I stared in silence across the death strip, stunned that a clash of ideas could be set in cement at the centre of a city. (pp. 2–3)

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/02/03/berlin-by-rory-maclean/

Feb 02 2018

California Bones by Greg van Eekhout

This was fun. It wasn’t deep, but it was fun. California Bones is set in an alternative present in which magic of various kinds works, and California is split into two independent polities — inexplicably not nicknamed Lo Cal and No Cal, although it is implied that southern California is colloquially known as the magic kingdom. The magic most prominent in the book is osteomancy, an arcane discipline in which the essence of magical or semi-magical creatures that were or are real in this world — gryphons, sphinx, kraken, cerebrus wolves, mammoth, saber-tooth tigers, and many more — can be appropriated by magicians who consume their remains. In most cases, they cook down the bones, but flesh will do the trick, too, if available. More darkly, the same principle holds true for other magicians, and the more powerful they are, the more puissance passes on to whomever eats them up.

The story follows Daniel Blackland, the son of a powerful magician who rose high in the service of southern California’s absolute ruler, the Hierarch, and then fell out of grace and was consumed in one of the Hierarch’s periodic purges. Daniel managed to escape, and grew up under the protection of a boss in local organized crime. About halfway through California Bones, Daniel learns that he only survived at all because the Hierarch thought he had been killed by border guards when his mother crossed into her native northern California. The crime lord is named Otis, which may be a reference to Otis Chandler; van Eekhout populates his southern California with a few other notable names from our history.

Under Otis’ tutelage and using the osteomantic abilities his father taught him, Daniel grows into a skilled thief and assembles a loyal crew that is capable of complex heists. When the main story starts, Daniel has left Otis’ employ and barely scraping by, lifting small bits of magical ingredients from the marketplace and staying half a step ahead of anyone who might betray his family history.

Then one day Otis’ thugs pick Daniel up and bring him in as the boss convinces him to take on a big job: a theft from the Hierarch’s own hidden reserve of magical items. Otis wants some basilisk parts that will fetch a fortune. Daniel, Otis says, should take the sword that his father was working on when the Hierarch captured him. Not only is it a potent weapon, more potent in Daniel’s hands, but there is enough of his essence in it that if the Hierarch chose to examine it, he could discover that Daniel is not as dead as he thinks. It’s a lure and a warning.

The rest is a good, solid heist story. Daniel re-gathers the surviving members of his old team, despite some misgivings because of how their last job ended. Van Eekhout also shows how the Hierarch’s world looks from the inside, with several chapters following someone within the security services who has figured out that Daniel is still alive. It’s akin to someone in Stalin’s Soviet Union finding out that there really is a Trotskyist plot to overthrow the ruler: dangerous to know, more dangerous to tell anyone who might do something about it, possibly more dangerous still not to tell anyone.

The setting is a vividly changed Los Angeles. A different path of development means that canals have replaced freeways in the city’s building, so that it’s much like large-scale Venice on the Pacific. The La Brea Tar Pits were one of the great sources of magical bones that powered southern California’s independence and economy. Griffith Observatory is the setting for a glamorous party, and Disney plays an important role too.

The pace is brisk, and van Eekhout puts in enough obstacles and reversals to keep the excitement high and the page turning compulsive. I tore through California Bones in about a day and a half.

There are two more books in the set, Pacific Fire and Dragon Coast, and I look forward to finding out what else is happening in this darkly sorcerous California.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/02/02/california-bones-by-greg-van-eekhout/