| CARVIEW |
When I recently re-read Pawn of Prophecy, the first volume of David Eddings’ epic Belgariad, for the first time in decades, I was pleasantly surprised.
Now, having re-read Magician’s Gambit, the third volume in the series, I find myself pleasantly surprised once more. But there’s a difference.
Because Pawn of Prophecy is surprisingly good for a the opening installment of a pulp YA epic fantasy from the 1980s. Magician’s Gambit is just… surprisingly good, point blank.
Continue reading →This isn’t going to be a very long review. I recently read and reviewed Pawn of Prophecy, the first volume of The Belgariad, and most of what I said about it remains largely true of this sequel, and will probably also largely be true of the third, fourth and fifth volumes when (/if) I get around to reading those. So this isn’t so much going to be a real review, and more just a collection of thoughts about how this volume differs from its predecessor, for better and worse.
I was pretty generous in my thoughts about Pawn of Prophecy, which was genuinely much better than I was expecting – so I’m going to start this review by talking more about the problems in this volume.
Continue reading →Let us go all the way back now, to the beginning. Or if not to the beginning, then to when the beginning had ended and the rest all began – when the seed, as it were, first sent up its shoots.
One of the seminal moments in my life was when, as a young boy, six years old or so, I was taken to a bookshop, with the intent, for the first time, of setting me out on a reading path with some provisions and foresight, rather than as until that point simply letting me pick up random books as I put the last one down. I was an obsessive reader of Tolkien already, and my parents thought that maybe it would be good to find me some more of the same sort of stuff. We went to the local independent bookshop – long since lost, of course – and picked out, fairly randomly, three fantasy novels, each the first in a long series, in the hope that one or more of these reading projects could keep me busy for a while.
I mentioned this on my blog in 2010, when I re-read Never Deal With a Dragon, the first Shadowrun novel, and again in 2013, when I re-read The Colour of Magic. I’ve alluded to it a few other times down the years as well. You may be bored of the story!
Continue reading →In many ways, the most impressive thing about The Separation, the thing that truly marks it out as a masterpiece, is that it’s hard to really think of anything good about it. I’m not sure why I like it. I don’t know whether you’ll like it. I don’t know why the author thought anyone would like it. It’s not really clear to me why he bothered to write it in the first place. Very little really happens in it, and what does happen neither makes sense nor is presented in the form of what would traditionally be called a story. Its general storytelling approach is just “here’s some stuff that happens”… and then even that premise is thoroughly undermined.
It’s great!
And it’s great, in my opinion, for a very simple, and yet very complicated, reason: Christopher Priest was one of the greatest writers I have ever encountered, if not THE greatest.
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Those of you who are familiar with this blog may remember – or at the least will certainly not be astonished to learn – that my childhood experiences of literature were dominated by fantasy. The first real novel I read was The Lord of the Rings (well, it may actually have been The Cat That Walked a Week, I don’t remember the exact order), and after I’d re-read that and The Hobbit too many times I went out and got started on David Eddings, on Terry Pratchett, C.S. Lewis, on the shared worlds of TSR and FASA, on David Gemmell, and later on Anne McCaffrey, Stephen Donaldson, and Raymond Feist, along with various other writers in the genre. Science fiction was an occasional visitor to my library (mostly Isaac Asimov), and “realistic” fiction I didn’t really start to pick up until my teenage years (and even now, to be honest, I view it with a sort of instinctive suspicion).
But there’s one exception to that: the very small but influential genre of small groups of young English children having adventures.
For me, that initially meant the Adventure series by Enid Blyton, which I’ve mentioned briefly here before. But another series has a particular and unique claim to my nostalgic affection: the Swallows and Amazons series, by Arthur Ransome. Because these were the first books I collected.
Oh, I wasn’t very good at it, of course. There were 12 books, and I probably only have half of them to this day. Book collecting has always been an attractive idea to me, but one to be left to some unidentified future time when I have the time, money and shelf space to indulge in it. But I did make an effort. This was an age of bookshops, and in addition to the bookshop in my hometown (where I had to wait months if not years for specially-ordered deliveries), and the various magical bookshops I visited in London for their American collections, and the two large chain bookshops in the neighbouring town, and the second-hand, specialist and antiquarian bookshop in that town (which still survives), there was also a fourth bookshop there, another second-hand shop, in pride of place right on the crossroads at the centre of the town. Unlike the antiquarian place, these were books a child could touch without scolding, and even buy with their own pocket money – the children’s section (which obviously included the small holdings of science fiction and fantasy) was in the little room up the rickety wooden stairs. And there I came across a copy of this novel I’m reviewing now, Swallows and Amazons. By my calculations I must have been about 8 or maybe 9 at the time, so this review is a little belated, I’ll admit.
But whatever my exact views at the time – and I don’t remember them in detail – it was clearly positive, because I decided I was going to buy second-hand copies of the rest of the series too. I failed, as I said, but I got a decent number, mostly at that shop. I think I may also have gotten one or two at Haye-on-Wye (by which time I was also half-heartedly collecting Pern, with its spectacular, tempting art covers on the older editions). This was a new thing for me. My earliest books were provided for me by my parents from some magical, unseen source (whether new or used), often with entire series appearing as a block. My sets of the Adventure novels, for instance (well, other than the first two – the first two I have in an older edition, but the remainder came as a bright new set with colour-coded, almost luminous spines) and of Narnia (the captivating Lavis covers from the 1980s). Later, I would buy the novels of authors like Pratchett and Gemmell as they came out (which they did on a very regular basis!), more for the story than for the book, and almost more as a subscriber to an ongoing (very wordy) newsletter sent to me direct from the author, hot off the press (hardback or paperback subject both to my level of passion at the time and to negotiations with parents).
The Swallows books were different for me. These weren’t communications from an author I knew (whose photograph was usually on the flap of the dustjacket if I was willing to buy the hardback), available in a choice of forms (big and expensive but immediate, or small and cheap but I’d have to wait six months). These were like artifacts, found just as they were, in whatever form and edition I happened to find them in. Books nobody else in my class read. I mean that was probably true of a lot of the books I read in reality (though there was a copy of Legend in the school library, and I actually lent a couple of books to one of my teachers), but it didn’t feel that way because they were in a well-lit area of a highstreet bookshop, piled high with discount offers and big “bestseller!” banners. Swallows and Amazons felt like something more alien – ancient, accidental, inscrutable. It felt like treasure.
It felt like a message in a bottle, found on the strand, from another time and place, another world.
And re-reading it today? It still does.
Continue reading →So, as some you may have noticed from my previous blog post… I am actually still alive, despite the long hiatus for this blog.
Recently, I’ve been trying to get on top of some things that I’ve been meaning to deal with for too long, and get back to some positive habits that I’d let fall by the wayside – this blog included (though no promises on frequency going forward).
As part of that (and partly triggered by some computer issues I’m having), I was looking the other day at some old files of mine, including two completed short stories, from many years ago.
Normally, as time goes by, I hate anything I’ve written more and more, as my satisfaction with what I intended to write is gradually replaced by disappointment with what I actually wrote. In this case, though, I find I actually still (or once again?) really like these stories. Maybe the passage of time has eroded my memory of my original intention enough that I can just read them for what they are – or, maybe my standards have just dipped…
In any case, I kind of feel it’s high time for me to actually think about what I want to do with these stories – whether that’s selling them, putting them up online for free, deleting them, stuffing them back in a metaphorical digital drawer for another decade, or I don’t know what. “Eventually I’ll know what to do with these” doesn’t seem like a strategy that’s been working.
The first step, though, is trying to persuade some poor fools to sacrifice a little time to read them for me and give me their impressions. Each has been read by one or two people before, but some time ago, and I’d like as broad a survey as possible (which, I’m aware, will not be very broad, but I can try). I’ve always thought “oh, I should try to persuade some people to read these stories and tell me what they think of them”, but I never got further than asking one or two people; so, now I’m asking. [and will probably still only hear from one or two people, I know, but at least I’m trying!]
Continue reading →Long, long ago – well, several years ago at least – in an internet that was generally far more useable than that of today, Goodreads had a function that counted each user’s most-read authors. The results were sometimes surprising. They were for me, I remember. Oh, sure, my most read author, obviously, was Terry Pratchett – not only is he one of my favourite authors, but he was also shockingly prolific. And after that there were no doubt the predictable authors of massive fantasy cycles I read when I was younger – Eddings, Feist, Gemmell, Jordan, Weiss, and more recently for me Hobb – and, when I thought about it, the inevitable authors of children’s fiction (for me including Blyton, Ransome, and Dahl).
But then there were a handful of more surprising authors, and one of them, for me, was Elaine Cunningham. I remembered the name, thought at once of some books – but had I really read so many? And, if so, why?
Well, many years later I’ve finally tried to remind myself of the answer to that question. As the hypothetical reader might have noticed, I haven’t been reading much the last few years. Not novels, at least (my readership of wikipedia, reddit and the like, on the other hand, has only increased!) I really wanted to change that (again – this entire blog, 15 years or so ago, was a semi-successful attempt to change it, for a while). And so, I thought, what better way that to revisit some comforting, nostalgic fiction from my youth?
I started at the beginning. Elfshadow – now there’s a title unafraid of hitting fantasty cliché bingo! – is the first of a series of novels following the same pair of protagonists, albeit a series cunningly hidden within a ‘series’ (“The Harpers”) of essentially unrelated novels by unrelated authors, itself a subseries within the shared-world enterprise (and D&D marketing exercise) of Forgotten Realms. I would go on to read four more of these novels, and a number of others by the same author beside. So what appealed to me back then?
Mostly, it turns out: this is actually quite fun. Somehow. I’m not 100% clear on how, but it is.
Continue reading →As you may be aware, tomorrow will see the final race of the 2021 Formula One season, and for the first time in many years, we go into the finale with the Drivers’ Championship still on the line: Max Verstappen and Sir Lewis Hamilton are exactly level on points. It’s exciting, if you’re a fan; and if you’re a recent fan it must seem remarkable. The battle for the title hasn’t gone to the wire since 2016, and even then that was only a contest between teammates. In the big picture, however, title-deciders aren’t actually that rare: of the 70 seasons of F1 completed so far, 30 have seen at least two drivers separated by less than the available number of points at the final race – and it’s not just because the early seasons had fewer races. As little as a decade ago, this sort of title-decider was commonplace, or even the norm: between 1994 and 2013 inclusive, 11 seasons came down to the final race, and only 9 didn’t. But it’s easy to forget those old races, so I thought I’d quickly run down (for my own benefit, mostly), every title-decider in F1 history so far, as we wait to see what happens tomorow… Continue reading →
A housekeeping digression:
I don’t generally review novels I’ve not finished – for one thing, doing so would be a confession that I’d not just indefinitely paused, but actually given up, reading the book. So I don’t know if I “should” be writing a review now. According to Goodreads, and to common sense and history, I have not actually completed a novel. All I have done is read about half of The Quiet Don.
However, it’s fair to say that there are some confounding factors here. For one, The Quiet Don was published in stages over the course of around a decade and a half. For another, (a somewhat abridged version of) the first half of the novel was published in English as And Quiet Flows the Don, six years before the novel was even completed – and I have a copy of that ‘novel’, that is a ‘novel’ in English translation but not in the Russian original. Since then, in addition to the second half of the novel being published (or the sequel, if you prefer), it’s also been published in sets of three, four, five or more volumes. And finally: the complete novel (or series, if you prefer), is gigantic. And I’m not going to get to the second half for a while. So, although I was reading a complete edition of the entire novel, I’m going to pretend that – like the first generation to read this in English – I’ve finished reading the first installment of a duology.
Further note: consider yourselves warned, this is a STUPIDLY long review, even by my circumlocutious standards…
It’s been a while since I read a proper epic fantasy novel. I must confess, I didn’t realise I’d be reading one now. And yet, just look at what we have here! Mikhail Sholokhov’s seminal The Quiet Don (or even just the first half, as reviewed here) is a colossal, hand-breaking tome, perhaps the heaviest book I’ve read – it may be only 1,400 pages, but they’re big pages (this edition is a full-size ‘trade paperback’ – a hardback minus the hard back). It begins, as every good fantasy novel does, with a map – a series of maps, even. There’s a dramatis personae at the beginning to refer back to (complete with pronunciation assistance), and at the back there are some hefty appendices. The content, likewise, is conventional for the (fantasy) genre: a simple farm boy discovers himself to be a leader of men, and plays an outsize role in world events, at a time of love, death, brutality, apocalyptic war, and the fall of empires. It’s grim, and it’s dark. Events are interspersed with long discussions of morality and political systems, and there’s a fair amount of worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding, particularly in depicting exotic cultural traditions; and then there are the subtler touches that mark out traditional fantasy – the random cultural terms left untranslated (distances are measured in verst, for instance (it’s equivalent to 500 sazhen, if that helps)), and the scattering of culturally-relevant songs and poems. It is, in effect, the archetypal epic fantasy.
The Grace of Kings is an innovative epic fantasy debut novel of 2015; and it’s hard for me not to pair it with another innovative epic fantasy debut novel, 2008’s A Shadow in Summer. Not because they’re similar, but because they almost completely aren’t.
Both Ken Liu in ‘15 and Daniel Abraham in ’08 burst into the genre (long-form – Liu was an established short story writer) with a distinctive take, each, as it were, pointing in new directions for fantasy. What the two novels have in common is that both seek to take fantasy out of its fauxdiaeval bubble by introducing notes and colours drawn from Asia rather than from Europe: Abraham invoking in a relatively enciphered way southeast Asia, and Liu drawing more transparently from China. Both, in addition, take unusual, and in some ways directly opposite, approaches to narrative. Both novels are, in their own way, creative success stories – certainly, enough to provide inspiration and encouragement to others who wish to explore new dimensions in fantasy. Yet both, in their own ways, have issues.
Occasional Mumbling