I have an artificial divide in my own mind between poetry and prose. Poetry is meant to evoke in people the familiarity of something that's already been experienced—the aha that you feel when someone has described, in an exact way, something that you've experienced yourself and recognize. Prose is meant to take people on the entire narrative journey; the story evokes emotion because you've traveled the road.
There are moments in this novel in which Pratchett is a poet; you can see the way he observes people, can feel what he doesn't squeeze into the words. When Tiffany's father says “I haven't mentioned this to your mother yet” in his very quiet, calm voice—it cuts. I don't know if the young adults at whom this book is ostensibly aimed will even understand how much pain the man is in and how he masks it, how much of a nightmare it is to ask your only daughter to risk her life to do what you can't do and would literally give your life to achieve. But there it is, in Chapter One: and it's so understated. It made me cry.
The nac mac feegle always make me laugh; the observations about people and the frailty of their very silly hopes and the strength of their even sillier superstitions make me laugh. The idea that the Wintersmith might try to become human is open for comic possibility—but also the poignancy of dreams that cannot be realized. And the core definition of what makes a man (or human being) ... I think it's at the heart of the way Pratchett handles his universe, and that's why the Disc, in all its larger than life characters, is like a second home to me now; a place I return to time and again, a place I never tire of. It's not for the new and the dazzlingly original that I crave Pratchett—it's for the humanity of his humor, the sharp and yet at the same time gentle sting of his observations. He sees people clearly as they are, foibles and nastiness notwithstanding, and he still cares for them.
After the end of Hat Full of Sky, I was sure Pratchett was taking Granny Weatherwax and Tiffany in a certain direction—and after this book, I'm not so sure. And I'm happy to wait for him to surprise me. But I'm not waiting patiently.
* * * *
Jasper Fforde hit the ground running with his stories of Thursday Next, a detective in an alternate universe in which literary crimes (fake Samuel Clemens counterfeits, for example) are crimes. He then turned his hand to Jack Spratt and Mary Mary of the NCD—the Nursery Crimes Division. It's called the Nursery Crimes Division because in the universe of Jack Spratt, fairy tale characters are flesh and blood, and living among us. It takes a special kind of person to deal with the three bad wolves, talking eggs, ambulatory and intelligent pieces of cutlery—and Jack Spratt privately thinks that in this case, special equals not-quite-sane.
This is not the first time this conceit has been tried—the comic book series, Fables, deals with pretty much the same idea—but Fforde, of course, is vastly less serious. For one, his Nursery characters don't generally pretend to be mundane, and don't have to.
If his first book poked fun at the importance of good publicity, and the non-academic version of publish-or-perish, his second takes a few digs at the self-importance of the literary auteurs while along the way covering the Car that Dorian Gray Sold, the serial killing Gingerbread Man, and Goldilocks and the three bears. Well, sort of three; the title implies more.
The Gingerbread Man is in theory the responsibility of the NCD—but the glory of solving the Humpty Dumpty murder in the previous Spratt novel, The Big Over Easy, has faded, as all things do, and the ignominy of failing to save Red Riding Hood and her Grandmother, added to the questionable use of children as bait for the Scissor-Man who cuts off the thumbs of children who suck them, has once again landed Jack and the NCD at the top of the PR heap, and not in a good way.
Also, the small stress of the Red Riding Hood case has caused Spratt's immediate supervisor, Briggs, to suspend him pending the results of an independent psychiatric assessment, which a very harried Jack Spratt doesn't have time for. A new addition to NCD—a literal alien—and a new pet in the Spratt household add a few complications, but really, Jack barely notices them. He's got a probable murder on his hands, a definite murderer on the loose—one he's not actually allowed to pursue—and also the illegal distribution of porridge to bears, who are walking, talking NCD cases if ever there were one. Fforde is crazy; he's all over the place. He's aware of the conventions he's mocking, he mocks them openly, and he still has a really decent romp of a mystery novel on his hands.
* * * *
Ellen Kushner's new novel—after too long an absence—is not the intentionally humorous work that either Prachett or Fforde offer. A direct sequel to the excellent Swordspoint, it's set many years later, when Richard St. Viers has left the Duke Tremontaine, and the city in which they made a name and a life for themselves by the simple expedient of not dying. Well, and by killing people who wanted to change that state.
Alec Campion has an estranged sister who is not doing well financially, and he ushers his niece, Katherine, into High Society in Riverside as the price for bailing his sister out of her debts. Katherine has been brought up well; she knows how to be the almost perfect country girl of good breeding. Nothing in her life has prepared her for life with Alec Campion, the Duke Tremontaine, a man who is known far and wide for his vices—and not, to her shock, without good reason.
Alec sends Katherine out to a summer house, where she meets a man who will train her in the art of swordplay, something she has no interest in at all. But the man—quiet, almost humble—is so passionate about the one thing he knows well that, in the isolation of a summer house, she is drawn into his world. She takes up the sword and learns to use it because there's not a lot else to do.
Unhappy to be parted from her swordmaster (especially as the method of her departure is almost a kidnapping), she is not prepared to wake in the vast halls of the Riverside manor the Duke Tremontaine calls home. Completely off her stride, she meets the young man who acts as valet and personal attendent to the Duke, one Marcus by name. And she tries more or less to land on her feet in the games that society plays—games which are not necessarily safer than the sword she's been learning to wield.
But the feet on which she lands aren't the delicate and daintily shoed feet of a Duke's niece—for the amusement of her cynical uncle, she's kitted out as a swordsman, and as a swordsman, she begins to meet society.
Because she's still a young lady of import to the Duke Tremontaine—who is, among other things, quite rich enough to survive his vices (his multiple lovers, and his odd household)—she meets various people, and one of these is the primping but perfect young lady, Artemisia, a girl with fashion sense and the honed romantic instincts of someone who is meant to make her future by marriage.
And because of events surrounding the nave Artemisia, Katherine's natural sense of honor and outrage cause her to challenge a man with money, power, and the ability to destroy the lives of those around him. Life begins to unfold in a perilous sequence of events that will require Katherine to be the swordsman she's dressed as.
There is wit enough in this book to cut yourself on, and Alec Campion is no angel; he's a rather self-indulgent man who is bitterly, bitterly attached to the love of his life, and can't have him. Were it not for the household he has built for himself—the Ugly Girl, whose gifts are entirely intellectual, the damaged Marcus, the Black Rose—I would have desired greatly to kick his butt across the nearest river and tell him to stop feeling so damn sorry for himself. But even in the fog of self-pity that his life has mostly become, he sees some things clearly, and he guides his niece toward a coming-of-age that is both unique for her time and place, and utterly rewarding for the reader.
There's a lot in this book about the lives of women in a society that treats women as either chattel or, well, chattel, really—but Kushner never sermonizes; it's there, it's a fact of a life, and it's part and parcel of the narrative drive. It might give some people something to think about if they're not so engrossed in the what-happens-next that makes this book such a delight.
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St
one and the Librarian by William Browning Spencer
Bill Spencer is the author of Resume with Monsters, Zod Wallop, and Irrational Fears, but around here, readers seem to remember him best for his story about a would-be nature writer and the animals he finds, “The Essayist in the Wilderness” (from our May 2002 issue and recently reprinted in his collection, The Ocean and All Its Devices). Originally from the Washington, D.C., environs, Mr. Spencer lived in Austin, Texas, for many years. Recently he and his wife relocated to a town in Lafayette County, Missouri, where strangers on the street ask him, “So, how's the novel coming along?” The novel, entitled My Sister Natalie, is nearing completion.
His new story was written in honor of the 2006 centennial anniversary of Robert E. Howard's birth. He adds that, unlike the hero of this story, he has always been fascinated by the works of Marcel Proust. (Okay, Proust and Howard—you've been warned.)
* * * *
"Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph."— Robert E. Howard
* * * *
I
In Africa, Again
He was a child of seven years when the Librarian's men came for him and carried him from the small village where his father labored in the mines.
They came in the afternoon, with his father away. His mother fought for him, fought until the Librarian's soldier slew her with a single stroke of his broad axe so that all the child took with him from that day was the image of his mother sprawled on the ground, her garments in disarray, one arm flung out, fingers grotesquely clutching the dirt as though attempting to retrieve her head, bare inches beyond her reach.
Bad luck for her, he thought, or later thought. He left the village forever, owning nothing but his name—and that given him by a stranger.
* * * *
He had acquired his name on the day of his birth, when his father, old Seamus McGarn, reeled into the pub. Already well-oiled through the diligent application of strong home-brew, McGarn called out for a beer.
"Me heir has arrived!” he shouted. “A wee stalling at the gate, but he's here!"
Someone in the crowd yelled out, “Likely he didn't care to come into the world, seeing his inheritance."
This might, at another time, have precipitated a brawl. McGarn was quick to anger and quick to use his fists, as were his fellows, for the poverty that clung to them did not teach brotherly love and tolerance but encouraged a constant Darwinian struggle.
McGarn was feeling uncommonly proud and pleased to be released from the long vigil of the birthing. “He'll be man enough to wrest a living from this blighted world, I tell you that. Fourteen pounds!"
"My God,” someone blurted. “A full stone!"
Amid laughter, he was named.
* * * *
Stone looked up at the hills ahead. Hundreds of birds, brown carrion feeders, flew over the green canopy and commenced to spiral slowly into the trees like muddy water down a drain. He had seen a dozen of these creatures on the plain below, a hunchbacked rabble pushing and shoving each other, snatching at the entrails of a dead antelope with much shrieking and flapping of wings. In the air they had a wind-borne grace that vanished when they touched the earth.
Stone inhaled deeply. For all its dangers and grotesqueries, he loved the jungle. This primitive continent had surely saved his life and set his soul free. The wildness of these African gods, with blood on their teeth and tongues, with not an ounce of mercy to quench a prayer, had renewed him. Without Africa, the sentences might have bound him fast, might have fastened round his chest like iron bands and pressed the air from his lungs, the blood from his heart.
He owed his freedom to the one called Hemingway. Not directly, of course, for the old man had killed himself in another world, another time.
The Librarian had asked him who, of the writers he was forced to read, did he admire most, and Stone had said, “Hemingway,” although, in truth, Stone hated the lot of them, hated the way the books bred inaction, turned everything into words, the sun and the moon and the wildness of the sea and the lust for battle or for women. But he had learned that the Librarian's questions were always to be answered. He was not suited for solitary confinement.
So when the Librarian asked why, Stone answered, “He stands up."
The Librarian had not understood this, was not, perhaps, familiar with the habits of this Hemingway, and so Stone explained. “I've read that most writers slouch in chairs as they write, and those that don't, lie in bed scribbling away on pads of paper. Hemingway stood as he wrote.” Hemingway's words showed this, showed a man who might walk, or run, from the words, forsaking them for the turbulent world of combat, of women, of storms upon the ocean.
"Ah,” the Librarian said. “Yes.” And yet it seemed the Librarian thought Stone's answer was a metaphor (an honest mistake, for many of the students deemed plain-speaking contemptible). Stone did not disabuse him of this notion, did not say that Hemingway's attraction lay not in his writing but in his willingness to forsake it, that the man was rightly skeptical of a vocation that harbored so many effete and degenerate types.
Stone's supposed admiration for Hemingway had lodged in the Librarian's mind. Not six months later, the Librarian called Stone into his office and said, “What would you say to seeing that Africa your Hemingway so loved? Seeing Kilimanjaro itself. What would you say?"
Yes was what Stone would say and did, his only reservation being that he had not killed the Librarian yet and now, if he wished to secure his freedom, might never have the chance.
As soon as the opportunity to leave the tour group presented itself, Stone took it and was gone.
* * * *
Stone heaved a great sigh and left the past behind. He'd need a clear mind for the climb ahead. If the birds signified what he suspected, they would lead him to the Temple of The Librarian, held to be a myth by all those who had never been to this land and could not, as a consequence, fit their minds to its wonders.
He plunged into the jungle, moving easily at first between tall trees whose smooth trunks sprang upward for a hundred feet before raising limbs to the green ceiling. Here there was little undergrowth; light descended in long-slanted beams, light of an almost palpable density, celestial lumber propped up against the trees as though awaiting its destiny in the frame of some magnificent cathedral. Then, as the incline rose, the sense of exaltation diminished and died. The venerable giants were replaced by shorter, gnarled trees and dank explosions of vegetation with mottled and weirdly shaped leaves. Stone's attention was drawn to a squat plant whose waxy leaves curved to form chalice-shapes filled with a pale green liquid. In one such goblet, a thick-bodied insect struggled to escape, its antennae waving frantically as it sank beneath the surface. Stone turned away and pressed on. Lianas as thick as a man's thigh blocked his path. He unsheathed his machete and began to hack his way upward through florid, steaming vegetation and stubborn thickets that were armed with long thorns, and inhabited, as every swing of the machete revealed, by angry, stinging ants.
Stone proceeded with grim purpose. He would find the monster who had killed his mother and held him in long bondage. He would avenge an old wrong.
As Stone went on, the incline grew steeper, and he was forced to pull himself up, gripping the smooth trunks of the trees with one massive hand while battling the undergrowth with the machete. The hours fell away as he fought the jungle. As the light of day retreated, shadows grew. Every yawning black hole that was born in the hollow of a stone or in the cleft of a lightning-savaged tree seemed filled with red eyes and malevolent movement, glittering black against black.
When the rise ended—abruptly—the darkness gave way to a luminous sky. Stone found himself in a clearing where tall, silver grass undulated in a fair breeze. He stood up, only now aware that his climb had necessitated a crouched and crippled posture. Above him stars glinted like knives, like assassins attending the moon. He saw the waterfall tumbling from a stone cliff and only then heard it,
although it made a roar that filled the air before entering the pool with a fanfare of roiling white spray. Stone hastened to the side of the pool, where he knelt amid the lichen-mottled rocks and thrust his face toward the clear water. Small angular fish exploded from his reflection; he drank. The water was cold with a brave taste of rock and metal. After the jungle, this place seemed a haven for gods, and Stone was tempted to spend the night here. In the morning, he would be rested and better equipped to deal with whatever awaited him.
But as he lifted his lips from the water, a small white object on the water's surface caught his eye. He reached for it. Something primal within recognized it with a thrill of revulsion. He lifted the wet, crumpled piece of ruled paper, pressed it smooth against his thigh, and read what the wretched student's hand had wrought:
GUILT IN ‘THE SCARLET LETTER'
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
by Harmon Perks
I read The Scarlet Letter so that I could write this paper. I have picked as my theme guilt.
Hawthorne was interested in how guilt reacted in people. He was especially interested in this aspect with adultery which is a sin that Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale completed. Arthur Dimmesdale is a minister, so the guilt is worse and causes a “scarlet letter” to appear on his chest. This is a symbol, but it looks like a red “A” and it might not really—
The writer had crossed out the next two lines with angry scribbles and then written, “I hate this book I hate this book I hate this book I hate this book I hate this book I hate this book I hate this book I hate—” before crumpling the paper and hurling it into the stream.
Stone uttered a powerful oath, one that he had vowed to use no more than five times in his life, honoring his mother by this frugality. He crushed the paper, his hand white-clenched as though it held an enemy's heart, and hurled it back into the pool. Confronted by such suffering, he could not wait until morning. He turned away from the pool and the surrounding glory of the meadow and plunged back into the jungle.
FSF Magazine, February 2007 Page 5