Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews

by John Grant

  This is all told amiably enough, but it's hardly white-knuckle stuff. Further, the solution to the mystery element – who's the next unlucky bride? – is glaringly obvious to the reader about 100 pages before it is to MacKinnon. In sum, this is a book that seems to have no aspirations higher than to be a time-passer. One feels Duncan could try harder.

  —Crescent Blues

  Regina's Song

  by David and Leigh Eddings

  Del Rey, 424 pages, hardback, 2002

  The Eddingses normally write the kind of fantasy I run a mile from – epic high fantasies that it's a surprise to find are merely multi-volume rather than, as they seem, endless. This novel, however, promises something very different: a contemporary urban fantasy based on the incredible psychological bonding between identical twins. In fact, it proves to be a serial-killer thriller of sorts; the faint smidgen of fantasy present could as easily be omitted because it has no real relevance to the plot and is confined to perhaps half a dozen scattered paragraphs.

  A few years ago the twins Renata and Regina were going home from a teen party when one of them was raped and murdered; the other, when found, was gibbering incoherently in the twins' own private cryptolalia. The two girls were so identical and so inseparable that even their parents had difficulty telling them apart, so it's difficult for anyone to know which is the one now confined to an asylum; the footprints taken just after their birth, the checking of which might have revealed the survivor's identity, have been lost by the hospital concerned. (No, there is no sinister reason for the loss: it's just plotting-friendly happenstance.) However, it's assumed from observing the girl that it was the marginally more dominant of the pair, Regina, who died.

  What jolts the presumed Renata out of her craziness is a visit from the quasi-cousin, quasi-elder brother Mark, son of the twins' parents' best friends. Indeed, she blossoms so much in Mark's presence that soon she is deemed well enough to have a trial period outside the asylum living with her aunt in Seattle and auditing classes at the university where Mark is both part-time teacher and student. Things seem to go pretty well, except that she has occasional "bad days" when apparently nightmares jerk her back temporarily into madness.

  Meanwhile, Seattle is being plagued by the activities of a serial killer called the Seattle Slasher, who gruesomely eviscerates small-time criminals and suspected rapists, sadistically keeping them alive as long as possible during the proceedings. It takes Mark about two hundred pages longer than it takes the reader to realize that, wowee zowee, there's a correlation between Renata's "bad days" and the murders – i.e., Renata has a "bad day" immediately following the night of one of the murders. Mark takes to following her at nights, and finally catches her not quite in the act but just slightly too late.

  However, DNA testing shows that her final victim was the guy who raped and murdered her sister, so that's all right then.

  With the connivance of a middle-ranking police officer and a "sensible" judge, not to mention the assistant DA and the injection of large amounts of Daddy's cash, it is ensured that Renata suffers none of that nasty embarrassing media coverage poor folks can expect, avoids the too-ghastly-dahling fate of psychiatric institutionalization, and has a happy ending of sorts in a secret nunnery the Catholic Church has established precisely to cater for such eventualities.

  Oh, I almost forgot to mention that another of the characters is our old pal The Incredibly Stupid Senior Police Detective.

  There's the feeling throughout this book that the Eddingses have read a lot of Charles De Lint. I would recommend this to any aspiring writer of urban fantasies, but De Lint does have his minor flaws. One of these, almost eradicated from his more recent books, is a too-frequent lapse into tweeness. In De Lint à la Eddingses, there may an occasional lapse out of cutesy tweeness, but it's pretty hard to find. The good-guy and -gal characters are just so goddam lovable, especially in their cutesy banter, that any sane reader very soon has the frantic urge to do a Seattle Slasher job on them. Take this:

  "Hugging doesn't have anything to do with that [sex]," Twink replied. "Every house should have an official hugger – no questions, no comments, just hugs. A few good hugs can take away acres of lonesome. The people with the notepads don't understand that. They talk and talk and talk, and it doesn't do any good at all. What we really need is hugs." She sighed then. "Nobody in the world of normies is ever going to understand the world of buggies, but you don't have to understand. A hug lets us know that it's not really important to you that we're crazy, and that you like us all the same... ."

  One can almost forgive Renata – universally called "Twink" or "Twinkie" – for this, because after all she's a recovering mental patient, and it's understandable for people during this stage of recuperation to be sometimes pretty nauseating in their efforts to re-establish their identity in the world and their social relationships. But in this book everybody's at it! As you'll imagine, after 424 pages of this sort of stuff you may find your home's supply of brown paper bags substantially depleted. Worst offender of all is Mark ("Markie", as Twinkie calls him, when not referring to her psychiatrist as "Docky-poo"); as he's the book's narrator, the reader has no real escape.

  What also becomes evident from fairly early on is that the Eddingses deploy a fairly limited vocabulary. Someone once devised the game of Clench Racing, whose simple rules were that each contestant took a Stephen Donaldson book at random, and the winner was the first person to find the word "clench"; games of Clench Racing, according to the lore, typically lasted just a few seconds. With this book one could play Grumpy Racing, Shifting Your Load Racing, Hitting the Bricks Racing, Low Crimes And Misdemeanours Racing, Barn Burner Racing and many others. The point of mentioning some of these is that they're jocular terms used by all the characters, whatever their station in life; no one says "losing her marbles" when they could say "shifting her load". It's as if the Eddingses cannot think of replacement equivalents for any of these slang expressions, even though, of course, in real life people use a wide diversity of phrasings for (in this instance) having a mental relapse. Perhaps what is being pointed to here is really a more deep-seated problem: that all of the characters, being drawn on paper tissue-thin, are effectively interchangeable.

  Such limitations of writing become especially apparent in the case of Twinkie's class paper. She has been auditing Mark's writing class, and he's assigned the students the task of writing a 500-word essay on "What I Did On My Holidays". Twinkie doesn't have to write this essay but she does, and it's reproduced in full (pages 111-12). One might be reasonably pleased with it had it been produced by one's ten-year-old, but Mark's reaction on reading this short piece by a university student is something other:

  "Jesus!" I said, gently putting the paper down. Damn! This girl could really write!

  This reader rubbed his eyes in incredulity. It's a mug's game, of course, for any writer to present a piece of writing purportedly done by one of her/his characters and then describe it as a work of genius, but if one has to do it then it's an elementary precaution to do one's best to make sure that the piece in question is at least not too terribly lame. One has to conclude the Eddingses believe Twinkie's essay really does exemplify fine writing. Well ... roll over, Molesworth.

  One more lesson in vocabulary from the Eddingses is revealing. We are told that the "delly" in the expression "delly-belly" is a corruption of "delicate". Oops. It says on the back flap here that David Eddings was once "a college English teacher" but this is hard to credit – not so much because of his ignorance of the UK-English expression "Delhi belly" but because of the lack of rigour in checking it out before pontificating about it.

  So much for the writing: what of the plot? I must confess I'd hoped for something of the nature of Thomas Tryon's fine novel The Other (1971), in which the identity confusion between twins leaves room for the reader to make a whole passel of misinterpretations, so that the result is a fantasticated text describing events that are not in themselves especially fantasticated. As
you'll have guessed, what I read fell far short of that. But let's leave that aside, and let's leave aside also the plot's seeming justification of torture-murder as a perfectly reasonable means of punishment. Let's just accept the somewhat plodding, predictable plot for what it is.

  Doing so doesn't help much, because the plot even on its own terms is terminally rickety. Two examples must suffice. Renata's psychiatrist decides this seriously ill patient may have at least a trial period out of the sanitarium living with her aunt – fair enough. But what reputable psychiatrist would agree to this trial being not in a family home but in the home of a single woman who works nights as a cop and sleeps much of the day, so the patient is left on her own much of the time?

  Second, towards the end of the book a bunch of Mark's chums (who're not mentioned above, but they're there all through the book providing lashings of cutesy badinage to test the strongest stomach) decide to use an elaborate ploy to make it impossible for the flocks of media vultures camping outside the sanitarium to follow as Renata is transferred to the secret nunnery. You really don't want to know all the details of the byzantine machinations involved, but an important element is that the local cops will be bribed to cut off the vehicles of the pursuing journos and impose upon their drivers a mandatory "random" breath test. Yup, that's sure to stop 'em in their tracks – and we're told that indeed it does. A wonderfully brilliant idea, that one! Unfortunately, it's beforehand been mentioned in the text that some of the media companies concerned have helicopters ... something presumably forgotten by the Eddingses (and by their editor) in the eagerness to show how clever are these bright young banter-swapping things.

  Poor characterization, bad writing, plot holes, a highly rebarbative narrative and dialogue style ... one hunts desperately for something charitable to say about this book. I quite honestly wish that I could.

  —Infinity Plus

  The Shroud of the Thwacker

  by Chris Elliott

  Miramax, 368 pages, hardback, 2005

  Struggling 20th-century writer Chris Elliott (a sort of alter ego of the author) is drawn by the prospect of making lots of money to write a book about the unsolved series of grotesque 19th-century Manhattan killings attributed to a mysterious Jack the Thwacker. After all, the case has everything a potboiling writer could want: an anonymous stalker who felled his killers with a back of Mackintosh apples and then turned their mutilated bodies into bizarre tableaux; a detective team comprising NYPD detective Caleb Spencer and his on-again-off-again lover, the spunky yummy-dame journalist Liz Smith, plus Teddy Roosevelt; and above all the suspicion that the murderer might have been someone in a position of high social authority. (Initially Elliott had thought the perpetrator might be Goya, for no particular reason other than that Goya was a famous artist, but had to withdraw that suggestion when Goya's surviving descendants threatened to sue.)

  As his "researches" continue, we spend most of our time in the 19th century among the filthy, violent, gaslit alleys of New York City – which the author actually does quite a good job of evoking, even as he triumphantly mangles most of the historical facts – and part of it in the present day, where Elliott, living in the famous Dakota building, must cope with the fact that neighbor Yoko Ono wants to have him evicted, by fair means or foul, so she can convert his apartment into another studio. But will Elliott be drawn not just figuratively but literally into the 19th-century murder plot?

  For the first one-third or so of The Shroud of the Thwacker the manic inventiveness of the plot, the joyful bawdy broadness of its portrayal of the main characters (I have the feeling the fart-happy buffoon Roosevelt depicted here is far closer to historical reality than the noble-idealist version we customarily meet), the constant barrage of excellently bad jokes and the satirical sideswipes at authors like Caleb Carr, Patricia Cornwell and Dan Brown more than compensate for the frequent examples of clumsy or even downright bad writing. The mixture makes for a merry melange that had me laughing out loud on more pages than not.

  But then things begin to flag. The inventiveness is still there, but it seems to have become self-conscious, almost desperate ("Oh, jeez, I've not had a wacky idea for a chapter or two, better think up something really outrageous quick!") while the jokes tail off in both number and hilarity. By the book's end the pages are still turning fairly readily, but without great interest, and smiles – let alone laughs – have become increasingly rare. Matters aren't improved by the exceedingly ho-hum illustrations, which seem intended to charm by their amateurishness but succeed only in seeming amateur.

  Terry Pratchett need not look to his laurels, but The Shroud of the Thwacker has a first hundred pages to die for and is at least moderately entertaining thereafter.

  —Crescent Blues

  Children of the Star

  by Sylvia Engdahl

  Meisha Merlin, 721 pages, paperback, 2000; omnibus reissue of books originally published in 1972, 1973 and 1981

  This volume contains the three novels This Star Shall Abide (1972), Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains (1973) and The Doors of the Universe (1981).

  Many generations ago, the home star of the human species that had evolved on the Six Worlds went nova, vaporizing the six inhabited planets of that solar system and almost completely extinguishing that human species. (Excuse the cumbersome language. Engdahl makes plain that this human culture is not ours – it has evolved separately.) Largely because of antiscientism, the species was unprepared for this disaster. A small colony had been established on a planet of another solar system, but only vulnerably so: there are elements within the ecosystem that are antipathetic to human life, while in the far past the world was stripped of its few metals by an alien species. Shortly before the nova a scientific party was sent to bolster this colony and to preserve the human species however they could, despite the hostility of the colonized planet.

  En route, the leader of the scientific party concluded that the sole way of ensuring the species survived was to preserve the technology the party was bringing with it by whatever means were necessary: otherwise, within a few decades the means of survival would be squandered. In order to do this he decided to set up something abhorrent to him and to his fellows: a caste system, with the designated Scholars at the top of the tree, under them being the Technicians (who have enough knowledge to maintain the technology) and then the Villagers, who must lead a primitive existence, surviving solely through the technological assistance of the Scholars and Technicians. Sometime later the First Scholar and his followers established a fake religion in order to keep this artificial structure in place – specifically, to give the Villagers what Karl Marx called the Opium of the People in order to dissuade them from rebelling.

  As noted, the scientific party found the caste system abhorrent: the Six Worlds culture had believed for centuries that knowledge should be freely available to all, and that no one was the born superior of anyone else. To get around this problem, the First Scholar decreed that the ranks of the Scholars should be replenished not through heredity but by recruiting new members from among those Villagers and Technicians who not only rebelled against the system and the religion, but had the courage to court torture and death in publicly doing so. In other words, the only people who can become Scholars are those who detest the notion of a privileged class, and desire not privilege but truth. With that as their guidance, they are fit to become part of the scientific research programme of the Scholars, which is to discover some way of synthesizing metals so they can build starships in order to search out a more viable homeworld.

  That this dream of synthesizing metals is a false one becomes clear in the time of Noren, a village lad who cannot tolerate the foundations upon which this society is based. Convicted of being a heretic, he is passed to the City where the Scholars dwell; he anticipates he will suffer torture and worse, yet feels this is a small price to pay for the retention of his honesty. To his astonishment, he discovers the words of the Prophecy of the Star, the keystone of the religious underpinning of i
t all, are literally true – albeit misleading – and, more important, are seemingly essential if this human species is to survive. He thus goes through the ordeal of a public recantation of his heresy, thereby graduating to become a Scholar.

  And he is regarded as the most promising new scientist for many a long year: if anyone can solve the problem of synthesizing metals, he will be the one. Except that he soon proves to his own satisfaction that the task is impossible, and so must investigate other possibilities ...

  The first few pages of this omnibus contain review quotes from the time of the three novels' original publication. This is fairly standard practice; what is less standard is that not all of the reviews are entirely favourable. The Association of Children's Librarians, for example, had this to say about The Doors of the Universe:

  This is a very sophisticated and technical book ... The subject is definitely popular, but the average child in eighth or ninth grade will not be able to comprehend the theme. This book will do better as an adult novel.

  Of the trilogy as a whole Children's Book Review said:

  They will not, unfortunately, be popular [with young people] because the intellectual level and reading difficulty will restrict their circulation to the more intelligent high school students.

  The two reviewers were right and they were wrong. Where they were wrong was in grossly underestimating the ability and willingness of young readers to tackle "difficult" themes in their fiction reading: most of them are absolutely bursting for such stuff. Where the reviewers were right is that these three novels are indeed in many ways tough reading, whatever the age of the reader. Engdahl's concern here is to present us with a succession of primarily moral but also philosophical problems, none of which have easy answers. The action of the novels is therefore secondary to the ethical wranglings through which Noren, his devoutly religious lover Talyra and the Scholars' Chief Inquisitor Stefred must pick their way. As in Isaac Asimov's original Foundation trilogy – to which this trilogy, in an odd way, earns comparison, for both good and ill – much of the "adventure" comes through the play of intellectual ideas rather than through physical thrills and spills. To say the books are very talky would be accurate, although not necessarily a criticism.