New book reviews: the swing of a cat’s tail

I went too long without doing a book review post, so here we are with the latest from Michael Connelly, Robert B. Parker, Jacqueline Carey, and Susan Matthews. I also have some thoughts on Julian Dibbell’s new book about Real Money Trade in MMORPGs, a comic series that caught my eye, and my (so far) favorite SF novel this year — and no, it’s not up for the Hugo.

Which reminds me — recently someone over at f13 commented that all this reading must be how I was making use of my free time… no, actually, I haven’t been taking much free time. I read this much all the time. When I have free time, I read much much more — 2 or 3 books a day. That’s my idea of a vacation!

By the way — a question. Do people prefer singleton book reviews, or these omnibus posts?

Lisa Tuttle’s The Pillow Friend is quite different from the other books of hers I have reviewed recently. Whereas the others felt like urban-to-modern fantasy somewhere in the vicinity of deLint’s stuff, this one feels more like Robert Holdstock’s work. It’s dark, and you’re never quite sure what aspects are magical and what are imaginary. There are plenty of hints that the protagonist is in fact mentally ill, but there are also some hints that she is in touch with something magical and weird. It’s definitely a book about wishes, and about a sort of Monkey’s Paw scenario where you may not want what you wish for.

The protagonist wants a doll, you see. The meaning of “doll” changes throughout the book: the literal, possibly magical doll that she gets as a child, the boyfriends, husbands, and lovers during her life, and towards the end, even more meanings. The question becomes how much of oneself should one invest in pursuing what is, basically, a doll, a toy, something that you can master and that perhaps masters you. It’s a dark book, with just the lsightest hint of redemption at the end, depending on whether or not you think she’s crazy. But it’s also excellently written. I’m not surprised Neil Gaiman blurbed it.

For those who haven’t discovered Tuttle yet, but who read George R. R. Martin, she did co-write a book with him, Windhaven, which was a fix-up of a series of stories set in a rather interesting world of winged people and islands.

Another series of juvies, the “Ember” books unfortunately start on a high note, and dwindle along the way. The first, The City of Ember, is an interesting tale of a city submerged underground in a vast cave, and of the final days when it is running out of food and supplies and must find a way to the fabled outside it has forgotten. Two children must lead the way, breaking the long-held rigid traditions of the city first by daring to want to do different jobs than those given to them by lot, and then by crossing bigger taboos.

By the second book, The People of Sparks, the tale-telling has grown more didactic, and the lessons more obvious. Simply put, the second book is “about how we should all get along,” and the third book is even more blatantly “about” hysteria and superstition and paranoia in the post-9/11 era. The result is that what starts out very promising goes from story to tract. In the third book, which ias actually a prequel, The Prophet of Yonwood, we are presented with the small North Carolina town of Yonwood, which actually believes it has terrorists in the local forest and a visionary prophet in the form of an old lady who had a stroke. Setting this tale in the modern day is perhaps what makes aspects of it so implausible and the didacticism so apparent. Note that this third book barely connects to the others, serving as it does as the barest form of explanation for how the underground city came to be. It also opens doors for future, more mystical books, via a side character. We shall see if those manifest or not.

It’s my own fault. I read the book jacket for Connelly’s Crime Beat and it said “Before he became a novelist… he was a crime reporter… These vivid, hard-hitting articles… tell the real stories of murder an its aftermath.” I even flipped through the book a bit before buying it, so I should have realized.

You see, this isn’t really a non-fiction crime book by Connelly (one of our absolute best crime novelists, by the way). It is literally a collection of the newspaper articles he wrote while on the crime beat.

It’s really hard to read a whole book of newspaper reports, never mind how good they are.

I was first told about The Traveler by an agent at UTA, the talent agency. He was raving about the opening, in which a man leads a young girl, his daughter, down into the London metro, and then leaves her there to deal with a soccer hooligan riot. Which she does, with an explosion of martial arts. She, you see, is a Harlequin, hereditary protector of the worldwalking people known as Travelers, and there’s a secret history of the world, and…

Oh, who cares. It’s Dan Brown minus minus, with clumsy writing and less interesting mythology. It was interesting to compare it to the much superior Dante’s Equation by Jane Jensen, but she clearly comes out the winner. It is also reminiscent of the mythology behind the recent Hatter M comics (only without the Alice in Wonderland tie-in, of course).

Oh, and it’s the first of a series. Next.

Speaking of comics, the first trade paperback of DMZ is out. Picture this: Manhattan is a war zone — far from demilitarized, it’s the buffer area between the survivalist rebel army on the New Jersey shore, and the remnants of the propagandistic and jingoistic USA that seems to be holed up on Long Island and points south. Into this blasted hellhole is dropped a photojournalist intern. The rest of the crew is blown away in the first few pages, and he has to survive on his own, becoming known on the island as the guy in the press jacket.

The bits collected in the trade get a bit muddled — there’s no clear sense of how much time passes, and it’s all a bit too episodic, but it packs quite a punch anyway. The strange accomodations people make with violence are well-described — the way in which rooftop restaurants still run, and people still grow crops even if they are surrounded by mines. The art is excellent and atmopsheric. Another strong book from Vertigo.

Rick Veitch is probably best known for his run on Swamp Thing, but Can’t Get No bears no resemblance to that.

It’s really a tone poem done in pictures. There’s no dialogue, but there’s an overwrought and overwritten set of captions that go with the pictures. You can cheerfully skim most of them, and refuse to get caught up in lines like “Subatomic yeast is fermenting… possibility is kneaded like ropy dough. Baked into spongy molecular meringue.”

The fact is that the book didn’t need words, so well do the pictures tell the tale. A man whose big company makes indelible markers gets the news on September 10th, 2001, that he is being sued into oblivion by the city of new York, because it’s the most popular graffitti tool there is. He goes on a bender, gets picked up by some girls, and ends up covered with designs drawn in that very same marker, a freak marked out by his own product. Then he tries to abandon his life, only to turn around and watch the jets crash into the World Trade Center.

Obviously, he has no choice but to go on a profane, spiritual, sexual, and mental odyssey to reclaim himsefl and a sense of place in the world. What comes of it is a metaphor for all of the national fragmenting that is the true legacy of 9/11: not the way in which the national population came together, but the divisions between the ways in which people came together, represented by the jigsaw puzzle that the hero himself has become. It culminates with the towers rebuilt in light in the middle of the Nevada desert — and a way to wash the ink clean.

Here’s hoping we figure out a way outside of the funnybooks.

After a two-book diversion into examining fantasy from the bad guy’s side, Carey is back to her much-enjoyed books in her alternate history nation of Terre d’Ange with Kushiel’s Scion. For those who haven’t read any of these, I would suggest starting at the beginning with Kushiel’s Dart. The first trilogy was about Phedre, a courtesan who is blessed or cursed with true masochism, the sensation of pain as sexual pleasure. She had a lengthy series of political adventures which culminated in her being acclaimed the sort of exalted heroine that fantasy books are full of, and never examine the consequences of.

Well, Kushiel’s Scion is about the consequences. It’s a book about a boy who has to grow up as the adoptive son of both the land’s greatest heroes, and as the child of the land’s worst traitor. As you might imagine, this leads to lots of conflict.

The leisurely pace that marked the earlier books is still here, and if anything, the issue is that the book feels too episodic — it is not until the very end that we see the overarching plot that will no doubt occupy us for the next few volumes start to really kick into gear. Still, a worthy follow-on.

The Carpet Makers came out in 1995, and was just translated into English recently.

But I think it’s the best SF novel I have read this year. It was more compulsively readable than Spin and more humane than Accelerando. It was, in fact, reminiscent tonally of Silverberg’s Majipoor Chronicles.

On a dusty, long-forgotten planet, generation after generation of men marry many wives for the color of their hair. They then take that hair, as it is shed, as it is cut, and weave it into carpets. It takes an entire lifetime, and they grow old hunched over their heirloom looms. They kill any extra sons, because the proceeds for the carpet, sold near their death, will only sustain the one family in the future — while the son makes his own carpet of hair.

The carpets are collected by spacefaring men, and word is that they go to carpet the amazing palace of the godlike Emperor of the galaxy. But now, rumors come that the Emperor is dead, toppled by a rebellion. And with his fall, so falls the entire culture of a planet.

But worse — the folks back at the Palace have no idea what these carpets are for. And so begins the mystery…

Clearly written as short stories and then turned into a novel, each chapter is impactful, and the worldbuilding is excellent, extrapolating from the scenario through many layers of society and many jobs. The stories are loosely connected to build a — dare I say it? — tapestry of perspectives.

If anything, the weakness comes near the end, for the resolution to the mystery is not all that might be hoped. But oh, the ride is great. Unsurprising that Orson Scott Card is the one who pushed to have this book brought to the English-language audience, because tonally, it has strong similarities with the short stories of his “cruel” period early in his career.

If you loved the Snicket books, if you think that One for the Morning Glory is John Barnes’ best book, and if the literary tweaks and in-jokes of The Eyre Affair are up your alley, then you should run to go buy the delectable Fly by Night by Frances Hardinge. It’s a book that delights in words. This is ostensibly a children’s book. But it’s a book that luxuriates in its writing — everything that The Traveler did not.

They had come to the halt at the edge of a square in which a gibbet dripped sullenly and a set of scaffolds swayed their ropes in the breeze, a patient motion like the swing of a cat’s tail as it waits by a mouse hole.

In a fairly British world where books are banned and under the sole control of the Stationers, one of the many Guilds that run life in the country, little Mosca is an orphan who knows how to read, taught by her father, the late Quillam Nye. She ends up in the company of a mountebank named Eponymous Clent, an erstwhile agent for various powers in the land, and caught up in the great political battles of her day, involving the reigning polytheistic religions versus the ominous monotheistic Birdcatchers. Every name glitters with subtle puns, every character is sharply drawn in that classic British exaggerated way, and the story is a tangled weave of divided loyalties and adventures involving a belligerent goose, a haughty ice princess, cafes that moor on the side of the river but change docks regularly so that they can host freethinkers, and a corpse that refuses to sink.

Never mind the description. If you love books, you probably want to read it already.

I can only assume that the reason why Susan Matthews is no longer published by Roc, Eon, and Avon is because her books didn’t sell well enough. The Jurisdiction series was about Andrej Koscuisko, a nobleman and chief medical officer in the Jurisdiction Navy who is also a reluctant torturer who fears ihe has come to love his work. Now comes Warring States: A Jurisdiction Novel, the latest and possibly final in the series, published by a small press I have never heard of.

The first thing that is apparent is that the touch of the editors at the big houses was sorely needed. This is a bloated book, dense and self-indulgent. The problem with such a troubled protagonist is that over seven books, he’s grown more than a little self-pityping, and that makes it hard to read. Far more interesting are the other characters in this vast political passion play — the professional assassins who do the dirty work fo r the Judiciary and who are also the only ones entrusted the future of the Judiciary’s political system.

As the cap to the series, it’s worth reading — and some of the earlier books have been quite good. But this one feels limp and loose, and needed tightening.

It had to happen. Robert B. Parker finally started merging the worlds of his detectives more. We’d previously seen Susan Silverman from the Spenser books showing up in the Sunny Randall books; now we have Blue Screen, which bills itself as a Sunny Randall book, features Susan Silverman, and also involves a love affair with Parker’s other detective, Jesse Stone.

This isn’t a bad thing. Sunny and Jesse have often seemed like two sides of the same coin. If Spenser is at this point an impressively self-comprehending character, someone who would never need a psychotherapist, the other two are messes. Jesse is a drunk, and Sunny has a real problem with relationships. The two of them together makes for some interesting scenes.

As usual, the real strength here is in the dialogue, the writing. Don’t think of Parker as in the tradition of the piles of crap detective novels on the shelf; reading stuff like Gunman’s Rhapsody reveals that he’s really in the Hemingwayesque tradition of revealing character with very spare lines. The mystery here is negligible, but it’s worth the ride anyway.

I hope Julian won’t take offense if I tell the world that I don’t think that Play Money was as enjoyable as My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. That’s because My Tiny Life is one of the true indispensable books for those working in virtual worlds — perhaps the only book to truly capture the headlong rush of falling into virtuality and not quite knowing how to get out, the immense magnification that tiny events have when you’re nose-against-the-screen immersed.

By contrast, Play Money is about distance, and that may be why the story it tells doesn’t provide, in the end, the same insights. It’s a story of falling out of love, rather than into it, on multiple levels. Whereas in the first book, we watch the formation of both a love affair with virtual worlds and also with Julian’s real life spouse, here we watch Julian stepping out of Ultima Online and coming to see it as a money factory, as buttons to push in order to generate eBay dollars — and in tandem, we see in the distant background, the dissolution of his marriage. Usually this story is told the other way: a choice between the real life lov or the virtual world, and in fact My Tiny Life did it that way — but now, with this book as a companion piece, we see the romance of the first book ovetaken by the commerce of the second.

There’s still a tremendous amount here that makes the book a must-read, however. Certainly plenty was going on within UO that I wasn’t aware of! The stories of strong-arm quasi-mob tactics by gold farmers, the various macro techniques, and so on, make for compelling reading. But towards the end, it feels all a bit too much like reading Julian’s blog along the way did: something always not quite in reach, as the narrative descends into ledger-keeping.

The central thesis, that work is being invaded by play, is certainly compelling. But one wishes that in the end, Julian seemed to be having more fun with the work.