Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews

by John Grant

  Singer from the Sea is very definitely an orthodox science fantasy. The descendants of the colonists on the planet Haven have formed a society that is a vile aristocratic patriarchy – two societies, in fact, each as bad as the other. The women of the lower orders have a reasonable degree of autonomy, but those of the aristocratic classes are expected by their fathers and husbands to be little more than decorative sex-toys and child-bearers. Among the many limitations imposed on them is that they are forbidden to sing.

  Genevieve, our heroine, is not initially rebellious, or even that way inclined, despite her possession of a formidable intellect and psychic powers. She is, however, a little different, in that her equally formidable mother, now long dead, taught her to exercise her mind, to develop her powers and, most important of all, to sing – all of which she does in secrecy. Her spirit is kindled when her militaristic buffoon of a father determines to marry her off to the vile Prince Delganor, who has ambitions to take over the world; Genevieve, despite the fact that aristocrats should wed only aristocrats, has fallen in love with the well thewed New Man commoner Aufors Leys. In the course of their adventures towards a reconciliation of true love, they discover that the incredible longevity of the most senior aristocratic males relies on a drug that can be derived only through the murder of young women, preferably suckling mothers; and that individual living beings do not have souls but only (as it were) shares of the much grander entities that are the souls of worlds – a very pretty idea with obvious eco-conscious connotations. Genevieve, through learning to sing to the planet's soul, becomes a saviour of her world, and possibly of all the human universe; Aufors becomes – well, Aufors sort of fades about two-thirds of the way through and becomes her loyal if faceless sidekick. Various lesser characters achieve their own transcendences, while the bad guys get splatted in one way or another.

  The telling throughout has an aura of high fantasy, so one wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if a dragon popped out from behind a rock or a wizened witch waved a wand and explained everything. In fact, the technological underpinning that explains this strange longevity drug – the reason why its parent plant will grow only when sprinkled with the blood of young mothers – is of the order that is so sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic, and most of the rest of the technology is likewise – for example, there is an unexplained hi-tech means of bringing rare and threatened animals from other worlds (like unicorns, perhaps?) to be released into the Eden that is Haven. The plot of the book, too, follows one of the classic fantasy templates: there is wrongness in the land; there is a period of transition; virtue triumphs as everything is set in its rightful place at last (or again). In this instance there's even the standard element of the under-rated person who proves to be the rightful monarch; granted this person is female rather than the more usual male (the mocked kitchen urchin becomes king), but even this is nowadays not an uncommon high-fantasy spin. There are visitors from other planets, but they could as easily be from across the seas – very easily, in this instance, because Tepper has chosen to restrict the landmasses of her world to only two medium-sized and neighbouring islands, all the rest being ocean.

  One is accustomed to high fantasies being judgeable only in terms of how well or badly their tales are told – rarely do they actually mean anything (and many readers of high fantasy would run a mile if they did) – but this is Tepper, and so there are morals to be drawn. The first of these is ecological, as noted, and this is nicely enough handled; all of the familiar Tepper elegance of thought is on display here. The second, expectably from Tepper, is feministic, and unfortunately here her touch deserts her: the message is put across clumsily, and is based on false premises.

  The aristocratic males are, of course, the villains of the piece; and the message presumably is that, if given the chance and the right combination of circumstances, any male has at least the potential to act similarly – to countenance the mass murder of "mere" women in order to prolong his own existence and thereby increase or extend his power. This is of course arrant nonsense, and one suspects Tepper realized as much full well by the time she was halfway through writing the novel and spent the rest of the time trying desperately to cover up the foolishness of the premise. Certainly this is the case if we are to deduce correctly from her handling of one of the semi-major characters, the battle-hardened tactician who is Genevieve's father – "Arthur Lord Dustin, Duke of Langmarsh, Earl of Evermire etcetera, Councilor to the Lord Paramount and Marshal of the Royal Armies", no less. The Marshal starts off as a militarist of unusually rigid mind (an odd failing for a brilliant tactician?) but, as he is drawn into the evil plot of his male peers, becomes a complete caricature – he is the stiff retired major whom bit-part character actors made a living out of portraying in countless half-forgotten black-and-white B-movies, but with a dash of malevolence added – and no attitude becomes too stupid for him to adopt. Alongside him, the wicked Prince Delganor, engaged in countless subtle machinations of the sort that might seem brilliantly Machiavellian to schoolyard kids, becomes ever more implausibly loathsome. There is also a Shah; he cannot really be called a character because all he is is a cardboard despot who behaves in ways that would give religious fundamentalists of any stripe (although clearly Islamic despotism is Tepper's target) pause for thought. Yes, there are a few males among the good guys, but almost without exception (the exception being the very daintily painted minor character Jeorfy) they, like Aufors Leys, become or have always been mere cyphers – as if they have to be cyphers because otherwise, being males, their only possible characteristic could be brutishness.

  All of this does not do the feminist cause any favours; indeed, to weight the scales against the male characters of Singer from the Sea in this way is to patronize the females, as if they were pretty little empty-heads who could not compete in a world where men might be intelligent, strong-willed, free-minded, and so forth. If, for example, as I've pointed out when discussing other feminist fictions, all the blacks in a novel were portrayed as inevitably either brutish or vacuous, there would quite rightly be an uproar; feminist propaganda is not at all assisted by the use of the same tactics as are deployed in racist propaganda.

  This book does have redeeming qualities, however. Tepper has always been a mighty good storyteller, and for large stretches of the novel this quality shines through – although it is somewhat undermined by frequent interruptions of the flow caused by poor editing (not to mention sloppy proofreading). First-draft-style clumsinesses abound – irritating word repetitions and the like – and some passages are quite frankly astonishing in their crudity:

  He gave her a look of tragic intensity and went to gasp for breath outside the room, while she, inside the room, did the same.

  At which high dramatic moment of romantic tragedy Tonstant Weader, of course, rocked with laughter, all the involving power of the preceding pages effectively dissipated.

  Although Singer from the Sea is a poor thing by Tepper's standards, those standards have generally been high – and so perhaps we shouldn't complain too much.

  —unknown venue

  Terror Firma

  by Matthew Thomas

  Voyager, 437 pages, paperback, 2000

  The premise of this book is that every conspiracy theory you ever heard about is true, and in fact all part of a single conspiracy theory, which is that a small coterie of unimaginably wealthy humans rule the world with the assistance of alien UFOnauts, whose own ultimate objective is conquest of our planet. Approximately.

  Investigating this state of affairs are: a rogue US Government covert operative, Frank; the editor of a small-circulation UFO magazine, Dave; and Dave's permanently off-again tv production assistant girlfriend, Kate. They are opposed and eventually (when he rebels against his masters) assisted by the coterie's even more covert enforcement officer, Becker. The trail takes them over most of the globe until they reach a final cataclysmic confrontation with the aliens on a remote mountainside in the distant, backward
nation of Urgistan.

  This all sounds like the recipe for either nonstop pulse-pounding hilarity or a Dan Brown novel, right? Unfortunately, wrong. Well, Terror Firma is certainly sometimes funnier than a Dan Brown novel, except for those with the most masochistic sense of humour, but pulse-pounding hilarity it ain't.

  Matthew Thomas is an author desperately in need of an editor. In the first place he needs an editor to trim down his text, primarily with the aim of sharpening the jokes. There is hardly a joke in this book that is not pounded to death by a torrential rain of auctorial diarrhea, hardly a potentially witty one-liner that is not remorselessly extended to fill half a page. One is reminded of the misconception small children have that, if a joke is funny when you tell it once, it's twice as funny if you immediately repeat it, three times as funny if you ... and so on until the adults have no recourse except the coalhole.

  Examples:

  With a screeching wheel-spin they made off into the comforting darkness. It seemed fortunate that Frank had an even higher tolerance to man-made drugs than he did to the worst ravages of Watcher biotechnology. Frank's years as a gutter junkie finally began to pay off. His body had obtained more than just an immunity to just about every infectious disease known to man, plus a few that weren't; it had learned how to survive. Under a dosage which would have killed stone-dead a normal person, not to mention a tougher-than-average African bull-elephant, his battered system established some sort of equilibrium. The gale of fresher air, blowing headlong into his face, did its part too. After thirty minutes of Kate's high-speed driving Frank seemed to be making a tentative recovery.

  In other words, thanks to his past drug-use and the gale in his face, Frank recovered in half an hour from a dose that would have killed an elephant. Another:

  Not that their strategy, as it stood, was likely to win any prizes. If the French Foreign Legion started awarding Palme d'Ors [sic], in the category of "Best Foreign-Language Military Operation", then General Custer and the Seventh Cavalry were more likely to be getting a phone call and an all-expenses-paid trip to the Riviera.

  Overwriting of this sort is forgivable if it occurs a few times in a humorous novel, but not if examples – often more than one – can be plucked from virtually every page.

  That little parenthetical "sic" is worth noting, because another reason Thomas requires an editor is to clear up his grammar and especially his spelling. An example of the shoddy grammar is shown serendipitously in the first extract cited above:

  It seemed fortunate that Frank had an even higher tolerance to man-made drugs than he did to the worst ravages of Watcher biotechnology.

  What's meant, of course, is that it was fortunate that Frank seemed to have this tolerance. But the spelling errors are a greater concern, especially the proper nouns. It starts with the cover, which refers to "Rockwell" (perhaps the train of thought is that James Garner, of Rockford Files fame, starred in one of the tv movies about Roswell?), and goes on throughout the book: Richard "Millhouse" Nixon, the "Illuminanti", a "femme fatal", "hair-brained", "swotted" (for "swatted"), "grizzly" (for "grisly"), "least" (for "lest"), the "Templers" ... Two famously dead rock stars are referred to in a single phrase as "Janice" and "Jimmy". I did like the idea of the "spring role": alas, poor #46, I knew it well.

  Some of these are repeated numerous times, so obviously it's not the typesetter to blame.

  A third reason why Thomas needs an editor is to guide him towards the notion that, as well as the short-term jokes and one-liners, there should be the "macro-jokes" – to simplify, those jokes for which the foundations are laid several chapters before the punchlines are delivered. One could claim, somewhat desperately, that the book as a whole is such a macro-joke; but otherwise the text is marked by their absence, and thereby lacks the main device used by comic writers to keep the reader turning the pages. It's rather as if a thriller writer presented nothing but nonstop action passages without any linking rationale, without any build-up to each coup de théâtre; the pyrotechnics soon become pretty boring.

  The shame of all this is that it is perfectly obvious from Terror Firma that Thomas does possess comic flair. This is not an unintelligent book. But the net effect of its amazing superfluity of flaws is to render all its attempts at shafts of wit less rapier than blunderbuss. To give a charitable estimate, it raised a smile perhaps half a dozen times in 437 pages. That's less than one smile per 70 pages. Not a high strike-rate.

  —Infinity Plus

  Games Dead People Play, and Other Stories

  by C.S. Thompson

  iUniverse, 114 pages, paperback, 2001

  One major purpose of most novels is to paint a world, the world in which its characters move and breathe and follow the actions of the plot. That world may be one of the unnamed moons of Saturn, or a different part of the Earth, or just down the street from the reader's home; wherever its physical location in space or in time, it is nevertheless an alien world to the reader in that it is one formed and moulded by the perceptions of the novel's protagonists. If a novel succeeds in the painting of its world, then it can just about get away with deficiencies in other areas – plot, for example.

  By contrast, short stories tend to be much more plot-focused. Especially in genre fictions, they may neglect altogether the depiction of that alien world, and likewise characterization of the protagonists, to concentrate on the plot. (Whether this is a good or bad thing is not pertinent here.)

  These thoughts came to the forefront of my mind while reading this intriguing collection of somewhat noir, somewhat fantasticated short and short-short stories, because many of them, taken singly, hardly function as short stories in the traditional sense at all. Rather, they are vignettes, snapshots taken of a world that is far more fully depicted by the assemblage as a whole than in any one of its constituent items. Not all of the stories in Games Dead People Play are like this: some are excellent and complete stories in their own right, and would stand perfectly well alone. But even they benefit by, as at the same time they give benefit to, the overall affect presented by the assemblage.

  In other words, the collection can be read and appreciated almost as if it were a very unusually constructed novel, one in which not everything is explicit – there are gaps to be filled in by the reader's imagination – and in which the order of proceedings is not necessarily a reliable guide to the order of events.

  Some of the stories share characters. Some overtly share the same setting: Nottamun, which can be either a sort of mini-Chicago or a big town that is seeing its own essence being leached from it by the ruthless force of history, depending upon the viewpoint that seems most germane to the individual tale; this dichotomy is perfectly comprehensible to anyone who has been in somewhere like Nottamun. Others of the tales, while nowhere stated as being set in Nottamun, could as easily be located there as anywhere else. There is a coherence to the depiction of this world.

  The tales themselves are generally of small-time gangsters – big fish in the small pond of Nottamun, but small ones in any other terms – of murderers, of those who live on or beyond the fringes of the law, or of those whose lives are affected in some strong way by any of the foregoing. Some of the tales draw heavily upon the supernatural, such as the title story, whose protagonist is murdered but does not die; all give the impression that, even if the supernatural is not on stage during this particular segment of Thompson's world-depiction, it is waiting in the wings, its cold breath audible to the players. Perhaps the feel of the book is best expressed by Thompson's dedication: "To all the ghosts in the stones of the city."

  As noted, some of the individual stories are gems in their own right. I was particularly taken by "City at Night", a brightly gleaming miniature – it can't be more than about a thousand words long – that begins "We live on an uninhabited world" and, within its tiny scope, presents a searing portrait of the alienation of modern urban life; and by "White Noise", again very short, which should be read by every Anne Rice wannabe who thinks a vampire story ha
s to be at least four hundred pages long to create its effect.

  The closing story, "Until the Day we Die", powerfully shows the final hours of a gangster boss who knows that the river of time is bearing the coracle that is his own life inexorably towards the moment of death; none of that power is lost by the fact that we already know from one of the book's earlier stories, set later in time, just how and where the gangster will meet his end. That earlier story, "Ghost Town", is another powerful exercise in its own right, depicting the coexistence of romantic and seedy subjective realities, as focused upon the figure of Wendy, who seems to all her male worshippers to be an almost unattainable goddess whom they alone have the good fortune to, as it were, succeed in attaining – all of them.

  There are one or two weak and contrived segments in the twenty-part world-depiction that Thompson presents here. "The Valley of Silvio Cezar" is the prime example, having an uncomfortable self-consciousness about it, as if someone had foolishly told Thompson to concentrate on plot at the expense of all else. But these lapses are perfectly excusable in the context of the whole.

  This is a very short book – not only can you read it in an evening but you'll even have some of the evening left over – yet it is undoubtedly a very good one. Reading it at a sitting is almost certainly the best way to appreciate it, to be most effectively sucked into its world. It is a visit you may have great difficulty in forgetting.

  —Infinity Plus

  The Book of Revelation

  by Rupert Thomson

  Vintage, 260 pages, paperback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 1999