Recent reading: the paperbacks

I am way way overdue for a books read post. I have such a backlog to comment on that here I am with seven paperbacks and 8 hardbacks, not counting a few business books and a bunch of graphics novels. So with no further ado, here we go on the paperbacks. Let’s get the fluffiest one out of the way first.
The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury. This was one of those impulse purchases in an airport. It’s also yet another of those “historian/archaeologist/Dan Brown clone finds earth-shattering secret from early Christianity and is pursed by the Catholic Church” books. I am hesitant to say it’s a clone of The DaVinci Code because it’s not like that book invented the genre. But… OK, it’s a clone of The DaVinci Code.

The McGuffin this time is, as the book says, a secret held by the “last Templar” — who isn’t actually the last Templar (since those get exterminated quite a while later), but rather is a random Templar who hides a chest containing something of immense value. Most specifically, it’s material that would disprove the divinity of Jesus. So of course, in the modern day we have the scientist whose faith is challenged, and the one who is in it just for the science, and the priest who seems to have forgotten everything he learned about Jesus’ teachings, and so on. The mystery is barely present — there’s none of that rich historical fakery going on that is in the better clones, making you want to go read up on the history of paintings or places — but the action is lively, with the book opening with the siege of Acre and moving immediately to the present day where four robbers in Templar outfits decapitate a museum guard on live TV and ride their horses into the Met to steal stuff.

Bottom line: yeah, it’s an airport book.

Bear Daughter by Judith Berman. It’s always nice to come across a truly original fantasy. And that’s what this is: instead of drawing on the overly familiar tropes of northwestern European myth, this instead draws on a different northwest: the Pacific Northwest. It is the story of a girl named Cloud, who was born of a human mother and a bear father. It is a setting where the membrane between the spirit world of Native American mythology and the real world is incredibly thin, and can be moved between by mastering tricks of perception, eating right right foods, or even just going to the wrong place at the wrong time.

Cloud started out in life as a bear, and the very first page is her reactions to finding herself suddenly human. The story of Cloud’s struggles to understand who she is in this mysterious new girl form is told in a sort of taletelling voice; don’t expect deeply realistic fiction here. Also do not expect it to be a cousin to the typical adolescent-reader fantasy novels for teen girls; Cloud ages to an adult, bears a child, and the love story within the book is far from tender and romantic.

Bottom line, though, this is one of the most original fantasies in years, told in pellucid prose and refreshingly different from the fare we’ve gotten used to.

Dauntless (The Lost Fleet, Book 1) and Fearless (The Lost Fleet, Book 2) by Jack Campbell. Jack Campbell is actually John G. Hemry, whose books about “JAG in space” (the most recent being Against All Enemies) I believe I have mentioned before. Those books are fairly light reading, with the slightly wooden writing one expects from an Analog alumnus, and a sense of humor. These Lost Fleet books are grim and grimmer. In short, two human space empires have been locked in an apparently endless war. One side was kinda bad when it started, sort of a totalitarian corporate sate, and the other was a beacon of classic virtues. But that was a long time ago. Now that the war has gone on for decades, both sides are basically not nice.

On top of that, so many of their military have been killed that now they not only wage a stupid endless war, they do so stupidly. They have no experienced personnel; everyone dies too often. And their entire method of battle is based off of some quotations by a martyred captain named “Black Jack Geary” who uttered some brave and foolhardy stuff right before engaging in a hopeless battle he knew he couldn’t win.

Only the martyred captain didn’t actually die. He made it into an escape pod, and gets picked up and revived right before the book starts. And then through a slightly goofy set of circumstances, he ends up being put in command of what is left of the last-chance fleet for the side that used to be the good guys. Only he isn’t that mythical figure from the past that everyone expects — he’s just the only vaguely competent military dude left alive in the universe. So he gets into constant political trouble for being reasonable, cautious, and smart, as opposed to foolhardy, reckless, and suicidal.

And that’s just the first chapter. 🙂

So, they are kinda fun to read despite the grim tone. By the second book we’re getting the hint that this huge war is actually serving some third party’s nefarious purposes, and that’s where it may get more interesting. But in the first two, the action is so slow and ponderous (thanks to the highly realistic descriptions of space battles at speeds close to that of light — think of fighting in slow moving battleships in a heavy fog as an analogy) that each book has scope for basically one battle, or at most two. Space opera, this ain’t. And there’s no flashes of humor to liven up the proceedings.

A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park. This was one of the best-received fantasies of last year, but it didn’t quite click for me. Imagine if our world was just a book. All of its history, all of its population, every bit of its science, a fiction, a fantasy made up for one purpose: so that there would be a magical book into which to stuff a princess of Roumania. You see, in the real world, Roumania is one of the most important and powerful nations on earth, though now suffering regreattably under the heel of German invaders. England drowned under a tidal wave and the few survivors now live as savages in the wilds of North America. And needless to say, alchemy and demonology and various other arcana actually work.

The titular princess is Miranda Popescu — well, she is if you believe the “book” version. She’s got another name in Roumania. But even after her blood enemies send emissaries into the book, yank her out, then casually destroy our entire universe by tossing the book into a campfire, she doesn’t quite accept her role as the savior of Roumania.

And that’s partly because the whole book is told in such a dreamlike tone that it takes forever to get anywhere. Frankly, all the various villians (there’s two really delectable ones, a hopped-up-actress-turned-noblewoman who chews scenery but desperately wants to be loved, and a villanous hideous German alchemist who is also the ambassador to Roumania) are so so so much more interesting that Miranda and her cohorts that every time we return to see what’s up with the hapless princess, we feel disappointed. Her best friends (that she managed to drag with her) are turning into other people in this other world, or perhaps always were other people, or maybe one of them is a dog. There’s some question whether that one is a guy or a girl, too. Anyway. This group is supposed to get from their home in Massachusetts (now a wilderness) to Roumania — and by the end of 460 pages, haven’t made it to Albany (the closest city) yet. One despairs of ever seeing them reach Europe, much less the shores of the Black Sea.

In the meantime, the events back in Roumania with the villains have multiple murders, double-crosses, arson, a dogged police detective with a crush, a simulacrum who dances at a ball, a seer boy locked up in a cage, a dead husband who speaks from one of the circles of Hell, a magic gemstone, and lots of other interesting stuff. Frankly, by the end, I wasn’t sure I wanted to pick up the second volume, because I just couldn’t give a damn about the alleged protagonist. The problem with A Princess of Roumania is the princess of Roumania.

Children of Chaos by Dave Duncan is one of two books by him in this round-up. This one is the first book of a simple duology — and the other is a single volume! This is impressively unusual for an author who usually writes quartets.

In any case — there’s a whole bunch of background mythology here about how this is a fantasy world that thinks the planet is shaped like a dodecahedron, and that huge mountain ranges block the edges. For some reason, there’s this sense that this matters in the book. Which it doesn’t in the least.

Instea,d what matters is that there are gods, and people go through a sort of confirmation when they come of age, where they pick which deity to be a devotee of. And different deities convey different and very real powers to their followers. There’s the deity of promiscuity, the one of death, the one of beauty and creativity, and the one which lets you transform into a slavering giant animal that wants to eat people alive. An entire nation of very Viking-like devoteees of this latter have invaded a country (on another “facet”) that comes across as rather Italian in nature. In the process, a family of four noble children gets kidnapped and distributed across various households of the invader’s nation, where they are raised in ignorance of their original lives. Needless to say, they are fulcrums of history, destined to restore order…

Except that one is a fanatical soldier for his adopted nation, another is a very selfish girl who is pledged to the goddess of death, another is a flighty artist who couldn’t organize a workshop much less a rebellion, and the fourth is apparently dead.

This is easily the richest Duncan novel I have read, with a satifyingly unique set of magic systems, a world that feels just slightly ad hoc, and real characters you can dig into. It also has plenty of his trademark humor. If you liked the King’s Blades books, definitely give this one a shot.

One the other hand, if you are a fan of thse books, you might not like the other book of his I read. The Alchemist’s Apprentice is that rarity, a historical fantasy murder mystery. It’s set in Venice, and our hero and narrator is a nobile homo who is apprentice to Nostradamus. No, not that Nostradamus. His nephew. And once again, it’s a world where the mysteries of alchemy and Tarot all actually work.

The mystery is actually pretty good, and so is the historical research. By sheer coincidence, I just started reading yet another book set in Venice, albeit 400 years earlier than this is set, so it was nice to move from one to the other. In any case, this almost feels like another writer’s work; there is no deep psychological stuff here, but there is a unity of tone throughout that bespeaks a lot of care on Duncan’s part. It is light, entertaining, a lot of fun, and captures a long-gone time and place very vividly. It’s just not the sort of fantasy I suspect a lot of his readers would be expecting.

At a private auction of rare manuscripts, one of the top nobles in the city is poisoned to death. Instantly, suspicion falls on Nostradamus, alchemical expert who was also at the auction. His apprentice, Alfeo Zeno, is set to the task of finding out who did it. Could the poison have been meant for the Doge, also there? Who swapped the cups? For that matter, when was the cup poisoned in the first place? Is it a plot by the Turks? Exactly how involved is the apprentice’s lover, a courtesan far savvier than he in the ways of politics and the world?

You’ll have a lot of fun finding out. It’s easy to envision this book becoming a series, with the naive Alfeo learning at the feet of his mistress and his master, all the while believing that he is in fact the smart one. Frankly, out of all the books in this batch, it may not be the best, but it’s probably the most enjoyable.

Ah, how nice to have read a bunch of books with no laser guns and no dragons. Too bad about that pesky Templar knight — but I guess one cliche out of seven isn’t too bad.