Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett

Title: Night Watch (Discworld)
Author: Terry Pratchett
Year of Publication: 2002
Length: 408 pages
Genre: urban fantasy
New or Re-Read? New!
Rating: 4.25 stars

This is the first City Watch book that I’ve really, genuinely liked. I’ve read others – Guards! Guards!, Jingo, and The Fifth Elephant (though none terribly recently) — and while they’re all good, because Pratchett is good, none of them quite ever grabbed me the way the Witches series did.

I decided to pick this one up after someone tipped me off to the fact that it was Pratchett doing Les Miserables – and, at a wide stroke, this is true. I was expecting a far stricter parody than I ended up getting, though, and I think I’m okay with that. Really what Pratchett does is invert the structure, giving us the story of a good copper with quite a lot to lose. Night Watch is not as broadly comic as many of Pratchett’s novels, particularly those involving the Watch, and there are few moments in it which are truly just gut-wrenchingly awful. Pratchett throws some punches here that he often pulls elsewhere, particularly with regards to mortality. His political satire is as good as ever, with some particularly incisive observations regarding the nature of mob mentality, of anything done for the good of “The People,” and, as Ankh-Morpork so often allows him to demonstrate, of the lifesblood of cities in general.

So: What happens in Night Watch? Well, we begin with Sam Vimes at the top of his career and not entirely sure how he feels about that. He’s restored the Watch to repute and efficiency, he’s been made a Duke, he has a wife and a child on the way… and there’s something discontent, like his life doesn’t fit him quite right. He ruminates on this as his wife is in delivery on the Twenty-Fifth of May — a local day of observation having something, we gather, to do with lilacs. Later that day, while pursuing the maniacal murderer Carcer, Vimes accidentally gets sent back in time thirty years, where he has to fill in the gap left in history when Carcer (also sent back) kills Sergeant John Keel pre-emptively. Keel was, it turns out, young Sam’s mentor when he first joined the force, so Vimes now has to mentor himself to make sure he turns out okay. Make sense? No? Well, here’s Monk of Time Lu-Tze on it:

“Nothing’s certain, ’cause of quantum.”
“But, look, I know my future happened, because I was there!”
“No. What we’ve got here, friend, is quantum interference. Mean anything? No. Well… let me put it this way. There’s one past and one future. But there are two presents. One where you and your evil friend turned up, and one where you didn’t. We can keep these two presents going side by side for a few days. It takes a lot of run time, but we can do it. And then they’ll snap back together. The future that happens depends on you. We want the future where Vimes is a good copper. Not the other one.”
“But it must’ve happened!” snapped Vimes. “I told you, I can remember it! I was there yesterday!”
“Nice try, but that doesn’t mean anything anymore,” said the monk. “Trust me. Yes, it’s happened to you, but even though it has, it might not. ‘Cos of quantum. Right now, there isn’t a Commander Vimes-shaped hole in the future to drop you into. It’s officially Uncertain. But it might not be, if you do it right. You owe it to yourself, Commander.”

It’s more of the exploration of alternate realities that Pratchett does so well, and a theme which I always adore (Trousers of Time, and all). Vimes realises that he basically has no choice, if he ever wants to get back to the appropriate future, and so he takes up with the then-dissolute Night-Watch-as-was, takes himself under his own wing, and pretty soon is running the whole operation, never mind what the higher-ups have to say about it. Of course, this is an extremely effective way to make enemies very fast — especially since Carcer has taken up with the Cable Street Particulars, a special force with an expertise in torture.

Vimes also realises that he’s had the highly-questionable fortune to land smack in the middle of the famous street uprising which led to the bright-but-brief People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road. He tries to assume the place in history left by John Keel, but his own thoughts and urges assert themselves, too, and as he tries to protect as many people as possible, he discovers that, thanks to his interference and Carcer’s, things aren’t turning out quite as he remembers them having done. Vimes has to out-think and out-react his opponents in order to keep both of himselves alive. We meet a whole contingent of Ankh-Morporkean regulars, including Rosie Palms, Nobby Nobbs, Fred Colon, Reg Shoe, Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, and even a young Havelock Vetinari, the Assassins’ Guild’s most talented if under-appreciated student.

The poignancy of the novel really comes into full swing when Vimes ends up in charge of the rebellion, knowing full well how it ends, knowing full well who dies — and trying like hell to change history and to save them anyway. He knows what’s going to happen, and he wants to change it enough to matter, but not so much that he can’t get back. It puts him in a terrible position, really, particularly as he tries to convey the importance of it all to his younger self. There are a few little moments that Pratchett sneaks in there that really do just seem to punch you in the stomach. Right in the feels, as it were.

Overall, I think what I can say the most about Night Watch is that it surprised me. It was not the book I was expecting to read, but I’m exceedingly glad that I read it.

Someday I really must read all of the Discworld novels in order.

Etiquette and Espionage, by Gail Carriger

Title: Etiquette & Espionage (Finishing School #1)
Author: Gail Carriger
Year of Publication: 2013
Length: 320 pages
Genre: YA steampunk
New or Re-Read?: New
Rating: 4 stars

I was super-excited to get my hands on Ms. Carriger’s latest novel, her first foray into YA fiction. I thoroughly enjoyed her Parasol Protectorate series, and I’m so glad that she’s decided to continue on in this world even though she wrapped that series up. Etiquette & Espionage did not disappoint me.

Sophronia, a fourteen-year-old youngest daughter in the 1850s, is unusual. She climbs dumbwaiters and gets herself into terrible fixes and is generally an embarrassment to her family, a socially-aspirant gentry . Little does her mother know that when she packs Sophronia off to finishing school, she’s actually giving the girl just what she needs. Her unusual new circumstances first become apparent when she chats with Dimity, also headed to Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality, and her brother Pillover, destined for Bunson and Lacroix’s Boys’ Polytechnique. As Dimity chatters cheerfully about evil geniuses, covert recruits, Picklemen, and Custard Pots of Iniquity, Sophronia begins to suspect something is odd. When her carriage is attacked by flywaymen, their escort goes into unconvincing hysterics, and Sophronia has to take command of the horses and rescue them all, her suspicions are rather confirmed.

It turns out that Sophronia has landed at a school designed not only to turn her into a lady but to turn her lethal as well. Or, rather, the Academy has landed at her — for it’s a floating school, suspended from enormous balloons. A werewolf named Captain Niall (!) serves as ship-to-ground transport and teaches combat, a vampire covers history and deportment, mechanical staff patrol the hallways as prefects, the students learn poisons and manipulation alongside powders and manners, and the headmistress has no idea that any of it is going on. Sophronia begins to settle in at the Academy and into an easy friendship with Dimity, though she has more trouble with the others in her dormitory. Sidhaeg (!) is prickly and recalcitrant, Agatha a shy wallflower, Preshea a snob, and Monique is none other than their escort, demoted back to debut rank for refusing to give up the whereabouts of the mysterious “prototype” which the flywaymen were after. Sophronia and Monique do not get on at all, and their rivalry drives much of the action in the book. Sophronia also uses her climbing abilities to sneak into the restricted areas, where she makes friends with the sooties who keep the ship running, including Soap, a London-born boy of African descent (and props to Carriger for including a non-white character in an English historical novel!). Sophronia, never having seen a black person before, is startled by him at first but gets over it quickly. The two become friends, and Soap introduced her to Vieve (!), niece to Professor Beatrice Lefoux (!) and a budding inventor. As the plot progresses, Sophronia finds them tremendously useful in her various schemes and maneuvers.

I felt as though the story bobbled a bit at the end of the first act and the beginning of the second. There’s a stretch where the sense of character isn’t particularly strong. It is interesting to have a leading character who is so introverted and private, but it also damages the narrative a bit, at least for me. When the POV character is not particularly reflective or emotive, I (a consummate extrovert) find it harder to engage with her. It was hard to feel emotionally connected to Sophronia, and sometimes her actions seemed very abrupt because there had been little build-up to them. I admire that Sophronia is such a practical and plain-dealing heroine, but I could’ve used a larger window into her soul.

The other problem that I had was that when Sophronia first arrives at the floating school, she has absolutely no idea what’s going on, and no one will tell her. Maddeningly, nothing gets explained for a very long time. After a while, this starts to frustrate me as a reader — and I recognise that not everyone may feel this way. It’s a valid literary trope and one frequently used in YA, but I personally struggle with it. I hate being left totally in the dark. It tends to make me rush, hoping I’ll get to the explanation, but then I end up having to go back and re-read chapters in case I missed something. I understand delaying gratification and teasing the reader, but some information in this book gets played a little too close to the chest.

There are still a lot of questions left unanswered at the end of the book, and I’m hoping we’ll get more information on them in future installments — I want to know why this extraordinary pair of schools exists. Right now, the answer seems to be “just because.” I find that unsatisfying. What need does England have for an elite cadre of female assassins and a coterie of admittedly evil geniuses? What role in society are they fulfilling? For what purpose? If the Headmistress has no idea what’s going on, who does? Who drives this whole thing? Who founded it? For what reasons? I love Carriger’s world-building, but I wish we’d gotten just a little bit more on this front at the outset.

I did think, though, that I saw a glimmer of potential for change in the school’s directives, one that I hope we’ll see expanded in future books in the series. Right now, the school seems quite competitive, designed to set these ladies against each other. Sophronia, though, sees more benefit in bringing her cohorts together, drawing on their disparate skills to achieve a communal goal. I would like to see that theme develop further. So much popular opinion, especially when it comes to teenage girls, likes to promote their potential for cattiness, sniping, and backstabbing; I would love to see more YA fiction promoting healthier ideas on what they’re capable of.

The second half of the book improves greatly, though, as a few things do finally get explained and as more action enters the narrative in the final act. Sophronia deduces that Monique must have hidden the prototype at Sophronia’s family home while collecting her, and so she determines to retrieve it with the help of her friends (and new pet, mechanimal dog Bumbersnoot). Sophronia’s skills really get to shine here, and the sense of action and excitement is wonderful fun.

For anyone who wondered why I (!)ed a few times in this review, it’s because there are several connections in Etiquette & Espionage to the Parasol Protectorate series. This book is set some twenty-odd years before that series begins, so there’s a lot of potential for crossover cameos. Even the MacGuffin of the book, the prototype, is a component of technology that becomes crucial by the time of the Protectorate series. Carriger also takes a few moments to poke fun at the steampunk world in general, through a clique of boys at Pillover’s school, the Pistons, who sew gears to their clothing for no reason but fashion, smudge their eyes with kohl, and like to crash parties and spike the punch. It’s a good-natured and, let’s face it, well-deserved ribbing.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with Etiquette & Espionage. There were a few bumps that kept it from perfection, in my opinion, but — that’s true of the first couple Harry Potter books as well. For a first foray into YA fiction, Carriger’s done a lovely job. I absolutely devoured this first installment, and I’m excited to see where the rest of the series goes.

Fables #2: Animal Farm, by Bill Willingham

Title: Fables #2: Animal Farm
Author: Bill Willingham
Illustrators: Mark Buckingham, Steve Leialoha
Year of Publication: 2002-2003
Length: 128 pages
Genre: graphic novel: magical realism, fairy-tale/folklore
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read
Rating: 3.5 stars

I know most people prefer this volume to the first, but I diverge from popular opinion here. The concept here is quite good, but I find the execution rushed and a little lacking.

As punishment for faking her own death — and ostensibly so the sisters can spend some quality time reconnecting — Rose Red has to go with Snow White for her annual visit up to the Farm, a protected area in upstate New York where all those Fables live who cannot pass for human. This includes the menagerie of talking animals as well as sentient bits of clothing and crockery, Lilliputians, mythical creatures, and other assorted beings. Some few “passing” humans live there, as well — the Old Woman has chosen that location rather than give up living in her Shoe, for example — but by and large, the population is bestial. And their forced segregation is causing problems. Snow White arrives unexpectedly in the middle of a highly suspect meeting, where the animals are purportedly discussing the prospect of returning to their Homelands — and she discovers that Weyland Smith, who had been in charge of the Farm, has mysteriously decided to “retire” without telling anyone.

Things take a swift and sudden turn for the worse when Colin, one of the Three Little Pigs, turns up murdered. Unlike in the first volume, Willingham doesn’t play coy with the mystery here — the reader learns quickly that Goldilocks and the Three Bears are behind it. Goldi has turned into quite the reactionary, guiding the revolt of the Farm community not out of any real idealism but simply because she seems to have gotten a taste for violence. (There’s also a pretty disturbing revelation regarding the nature of her relationship with Baby Bear). She musters the troops with a bloodthirsty enthusiasm that would do any third-world dissident proud, and Snow finds herself on the run, pursued by half the predators in legend.

My favourite character in this volume is definitely Reynard the fox, suave trickster but loyal friend to Snow, who plays a vital role in tamping down the insurgency. I also enjoy that this volume introduces a concept that becomes quite important later on — that the more popular a Fable’s story is, the more resilient the character is to destruction. Some, as you can imagine, are nigh-indestructible — while others, whose stories have faded from mundie culture, have more to worry about.

Not much happens back in the city while all of this is going on, but Willingham drops a lot of tantalising hints, both about other characters and about the way the Fables community functions — again, all things that will be important later. I appreciate this for the sense of wholeness that it gives. I love world-building, and I love when all the details and side stories are well-thought-out, even if we don’t get to see them in their entirety yet.

The art is nice in this volume — full of details, especially in the crowd scenes. The violence and gore are appropriately disturbing. These are not Bowdlerized fairy tales — but a lot closer to the spirit of the original tales, to be sure. Everything has a price, and sometimes that price is blood. Fables doesn’t pull its punches in that regard.

Beauty and the Werewolf, by Mercedes Lackey

Title: Beauty and the Werewolf (Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms #6)
Author: Mercedes Lackey
Year of Publication: 2011
Length: 408 pages
Genre: fantasy romance
New or Re-Read?: New
Rating: 3 stars
Spoiler Warning: Armed and active, because there’s no way to discuss what I liked and disliked about this book without “giving away” the ending.

This book suffers from its predictability. And that’s a shame, because there was a lot of potential here, and I did enjoy this book — but very much in a fluffy, easy-to-digest sort of way. This book is the latest in Lackey’s Five Hundred Kingdoms series, which I generally enjoy but which are far from the best fairy tale adaptations out there. She’s starting turning them into mash-ups more than just retellings, and this one smushes Beauty and the Beast and Little Red Riding Hood (as though the cover didn’t give those things away). So we meet Bella (and as a sidebar: is anyone else really sick of that name for heroines? Which is a shame, because it’s a lovely name, really, but Twilight has just caused it to be so overplayed. Especially as short for Isabella. Couldn’t we get more creative? Arabella? Annabella? Orabella? Something?), the eldest daughter of a merchant, who has for years run her household, keeping her stepmother and stepsisters in line. She also periodically makes trips out into the woods to chat with “Granny”, a wisewoman who lives out there — and while coming back from one of these jaunts, she gets nipped by a werewolf. When the King’s forces find out what happened to her, they essentially kidnap her and take her to the home of Duke Sebastian — the werewolf — for a quarantine to see if she’s infected. Sebastian’s werewolf curse is a great secret, kept from the world at large, and though not only a Duke but a magician in his own right, he is looked after by his illegitimate half-brother, Eric, a woodsman and gamekeeper who patrols the forests to try and keep everyone safe from him. Ostensibly. We first meet Eric when he’s sexually assaulting women at a party in town, and then when he encounters Bella in the woods and mistakes her for a peasant girl rather than the daughter of someone of consequence, he tries to coerce her into having sex with him — and as good as says that he takes that “in trade” when he catches female poachers, in exchange for letting them off. So he’s pretty clearly a sleaze and set up from the very beginning to be the villain.

I was so hoping he wouldn’t be. If Lackey hadn’t given him those casual rapist qualities, he would’ve been a really interesting character — because he knows his trade well, and . So I kept vaguely hoping that he would turn out to be other than he seemed and that someone else would be the real villain, because it would’ve allowed him to be a much stronger character. The trouble is that… we never meet anyone else. If Eric was a red herring, there was never any indication of who he might be a red herring for, so it’s pretty clear that there are not, in fact, any other villains in the story. And the other problem is that — again, casual rapist qualities aside — he’s a much more interesting character than our theoretical male hero, Sebastian, who is pretty much just a complete milksop. As is often the case in the Five Hundred Kingdoms stories — and this has been a criticism I’ve had of the whole series — the love story seems completely slapped on. There’s really no reason for Bella to fall for him except proximity, and we don’t get any emotional depth out of either of them. They just sort of… decide to get married because of … reasons. It’s odd. These books would, on the whole, be better without the romance angle at all.

All of that said — there are things to like about this book. I didn’t find Bella as annoying as it seems some Goodreads reviewers did. I thought she actually avoided a lot of pitfalls, and if there were points that were a little too “look how unconventional a female she is!”, well, that’s often true of many of the historical romances I read as well. The very best parts of the book, in my estimation, were the ones where Bella was interacting with the invisible servants, learning to communicate with them, and learning from them. That was very clever on Lackey’s part. They’re sort of wraiths (in a ghostly way, not a Dementor way), largely stripped of memory and personality, but a few of them hold a sense of themselves as individuals, and the way they interact with Bella is a lot of fun to watch develop. I always enjoy when she thinks about magic and explains its workings in new ways. Some of Sebastian’s practices are definitely reminiscent of her Elemental Masters series as well, and it gives a little more shape to magic in the Five Hundred Kingdoms. We also see Godmother Elena back again for a cameo, which is a nice sense of continuity.

Overall, this is perfectly serviceable fluff. Not exquisite, and I’m pretty sure that The Fire Rose is a far superior version of this story from Lackey, but it was a quick and enjoyable enough read.

Practical Magic, by Alice Hoffman

Title: Practical Magic
Author: Alice Hoffman
Year of Publication: 1995
Length: 317
Genre: magical realism
New or Re-Read?: re-read
Rating: 4.5 stars

This is one of those things where I love the book, and I love the movie, but they are completely different stories, and I love them in very different ways. Most people know the movie but not the book, and in a lot of ways, that’s a shame. The book is not as easy to digest. The characters are more complex and not always as likeable, but they’re very real. But that’s a lot of why I like it. I find something to empathise with in almost all of the main characters, and sometimes it’s for their flaws rather than for their virtues. Sally’s sense of justice, Gillian’s need to be adored, Antonia’s childish selfishness, Kylie’s spooky intuition. I don’t identify with any one of them entirely, but I can see some part of myself in each, and that makes the book thoroughly enjoyable.

The story: Sally and Gillian, orphaned at an early age, grow up with their aunts (or possibly great-aunts; it’s never made quite clear, but it doesn’t seem possible, age-wise, that Jet and Frances are their mother’s sister). Strange things happen all around their family, giving them a reputation for witchcraft and leading to the girls being ostracized by their peers — but the women of their town still come to the aunts for advice and help. The sisters grow up quite close, having no other options for companionship, despite how different they are; they also learn learn by negative example, watching the women who come to the aunts, crazy for love. They both end up building high walls around their hearts, though in different ways. Sally eventually does love and marry, but falls into a deep year-long depression when she’s widowed; Gillian begins using and losing men from the age of 14 on, tearing through hearts with no conscience or consequence, until a brute named Jimmy hooks her but good. Both girls end up running away from their childhood home, though it takes Sally rather longer to make the break. They don’t see each other for eighteen years, during which time Sally’s daughters grow into teenagers — nowhere near as close as she and Gillian were. Antonia is spoiled and self-centered and often quite cruel to younger, awkward Kylie.

Their lives up-end, though, when Gillian turns up unexpectedly with Jimmy dead in the car, believing she accidentally murdered him by dosing him with belladonna. She and Sally bury him beneath a lilac bush which is soon overteeming with unseasonal blooms. His malevolence bleeds from beyond the grave, putting all four women at each others’ throats until they can determine to come together to rid their lives of the influence (with a little help called in from the aunts).

The book isn’t called Practical Magic for nothing; the magic is far less overt in the book than in the movie, almost accidental in lots of ways, nothing more than folklore in others. But it definitely is still there, an undercurrent — whole sections of the book will go by that are just about life, plain and simple, and then one little thing will pop up to remind you that the Owens women are not like everyone else. But throughout it all, they are also still women — who grow, and make mistakes, and snipe at each other, and regret it.  There’s a lot in there about growing up — not just in the obvious ways, as we see both sets of sisters through the ever-tumultuous teenage years.

It was Gillian’s story, more than any other, that hit me this time around. Not that I’ve ever been as reckless as she is, but her lesson is one of recovering from damage and learning to trust. For both her and Sally, the romance is another understated theme — but an important one. Love catches them both by surprise, but when it hits them, it seems to do so like a ton of bricks. Things fall into place, despite the challenges, despite their damage, and when they do, both the women know it’s meant to be. And I find that inspiring.

Practical Magic is a great book and terribly compelling. It weaves reality in with the paranormal in a way that is so simple and elegant — no flash, no pretense, just human lives that happen to be touched by this little bit of something extra. Alice Hoffman is wonderful with creating complex, dynamic characters who are at once so special and so relatable. Highly recommended — especially if you like the movie. The book is different, as I said — less simple, less comical, with a more subdued supernatural element — but still definitely worth the try.

Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld

Title: Leviathan
Author: Scott Westerfeld
Year of Publication: 2009
Length: 448 pages
Genre: YA steampunk
New or Re-Read?: New
Rating: 3.5 stars

I hoped for more out of this book.

I like the story. It’s an interesting premise and a great use of steampunk themes to build an alternate universe. Leviathan re-envisions the start of World War I as a conflict between two pathways of technological development. The Darwinists, in England, France, and Russia, have gone into biodevelopment, discovering things like DNA coding a bit ahead of time, and using that knowledge to create fantastical new creatures. Airships made out of floating air-whales with other creatures grafted on, balloons out of jellyfish/blowfish type things, lizards who can memorise and deliver messages, wolf-dog-tiger hybrids for security or searching. The Clankers, in Germany/the Holy Roman Empire (still hanging on, apparently) and most of Eastern Europe, have chosen traditional mechanical technology, viewing Darwinist creations as hellish abominations.

The trouble is that, well… there sort of just wasn’t enough there. I know it’s a YA book, but that’s really no excuse. Plenty of authors manage to write YA novels and still use sophisticated storytelling devices. The later Harry Potter books are probably the most famous example, but the honest-to-goodness best example is probably Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Westerfeld’s style is a bit slapdash for my preferences. The vocabulary is basic, the sentence structure largely unvaried, the characterisation fairly flat. This disappointed me, and it’s not just because I’m an adult reading a YA book — it would have disappointed me just as much at age 11. You don’t have to write simply to tell a story on a level that young people will understand. (Quite the opposite, I’ve always thought — half the point of reading is to stretch your brainpan out a bit, to introduce new things rather than just dumping in what it’s already familiar with, and that goes for the language itself as much as for the story).

I found myself wishing that the book either had a lot more illustrations — I think it would’ve worked brilliantly as a graphic novel — or a lot fewer, with a lot more verbal description. It seemed in many places as if the illustrations were serving as a crutch for insufficient description in the text. This is particularly true of the Darwinist creations, which I found a little confusing to follow. I can tell there are good ideas there, that the dynamics of how these things operate has been thought out — I just sometimes had trouble following along with exactly what those dynamics were. It became clearer with illustration, but still not perfectly so.

I still haven’t said anything about the actual plot yet, have I? Prince Aleksandr, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, is fleeing after his parents’ assassination (the event that, y’know, starts World War I). His path improbably collides with that of Deryn, a British common girl with aspirations of aviation, who has disguised herself as a boy in order to join the crew of one of the dirigible-creatures. And… that’s pretty much the plot. It doesn’t really get to going much of anywhere in this first book. We meet the characters, we learn about the world, the war starts, there are adventures on the ground and in the air. That’s not to say nothing happens. Quite a bit happens, in your typical adventure-story sort of way. But it’s all rather thin and entirely unfinished — this is clearly the first book in a series, and it doesn’t wrap up on its own in any significant way.

So, this was a sort of interesting read, but not a really gripping one. I imagine I’ll get the next book the series eventually, but I’m in no rush. And when it comes to YA steampunk, I’ll be anticipating Gail Carriger’s new series a lot more.

The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, by Anne Rice

Title: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
Author: Anne Rice (as A. N. Roquelaure)
Year of Publication: 1983
Length: 253 pages
Genre: fantasy erotica (and I use the latter term loosely)
New or Re-Read? New
Rating: 1.5 stars, and that only because I was intrigued/bewildered enough to actually finish the damn thing
Warnings: As this book is definitely For Mature Audiences Only, this review will also carry an NC-17 rating, as well as trigger warnings for rape and sexual abuse (because that’s sort of, well, the entire basis of the story). You also may learn slightly more about my sex life than you had intended to know.

Edit 27 Dec 2012: Because this post is still getting a fair bit of traffic, I thought I’d stop by and encourage anyone who reads this review to check out Deathless, by Catherynne Valente. Deathless is as gorgeous an exploration of a D/s relationship as I’ve ever seen in fiction, outstripping even Kushiel’s Legacy. The relationship is nuanced and clever, a constant negotiation of power and seduction, not a forceful and unfeeling subjugation or a humiliation. Do yourself a favour – especially if you are new to BDSM relationships or are considering the concept — and read that instead of The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. Plus, it’s extraordinarily well-written. Valente has talent pouring out of her ears and is well-steeped in mythology and poetry.

—-

Well, this is just porn.

And no, it’s not that I don’t recognise erotica as a valid genre. I do. This isn’t it. This is just plain porn in verbal rather than visual form.

So, here’s the “story”, such as it exists — The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty revisits the classic fairy tale’s less savoury origins. In an early Italian version of the story, Sleeping Beauty’s prince doesn’t awake her with a kiss, he rapes her while she’s sleeping, and in at least one version, even that doesn’t wake her up; she later gives birth to twins and one of them suckles the enchanted spindle out of her finger. In Rice’s version, Beauty awakes mid-violation; rather than marrying her, the Prince then claims her as a love slave and hauls her back to her kingdom. Her parents allow this because, we learn, they each spent time as slaves in his kingdom in their own youth (in his great-grandfather’s time, thanks to the hundred-year sleeping spell). Claiming to love her overwhelmingly, the Prince begins stripping her of dignity on their journey, forcing her to walk naked in the view of everyone they pass, letting a tavern girl spank her for the amusement of the town, making her enter his castle on her hands and knees — all the while telling her that she needs to surrender her pride, that she’s been a spoilt little Princess, but he loves her anyway and all this will improve her.

… Yeah.

And this is all in the first, like, twenty pages of the book. He gets Beauty back to his castle, where the reader discovers that the entire freaking kingdom is basically one giant BDSM dungeon. Princes and Princesses are sent — as young as eleven years old, it seems, which puts a whole new level of WTFery on this book — to serve time as sex slaves in this other kingdom, where the whole court follows the example of the monarchs in sexual games and punishments. No sooner does Beauty arrive than she gets tied up in public view and subjected to all sorts of fondlings and gropings from the lords and ladies. And the entire rest of the book is pretty much that — Beauty’s training as a slave, the breaking of her willpower, and her interactions with members of the court and with other slaves.

Perhaps I was too spoiled by Kushiel’s Leagcy, where the eroticism exists as part of a well-defined world with history and religion and reasons for being the freaking way it is. The world of this story has all the depth of a porn set. There’s never any background given as to why the Prince’s kingdom is set up like this, why the other kingdoms allow it and send tributes and are apparently all okay with the set-up and have been for hundreds of years. The entire premise seems to me to be entirely bizarre. We’re told that the Princes and Princesses will return to their own kingdoms “much improved” by their time in slavery, but… how? We get no indication. They spend their formative years learning to fetch and carry like dogs and being violated in every way conceivable, learning to surrender their wills completely, being broken of any independent thought, and that… will make them good rulers? Wait, what? I don’t get it.

I got this book because a friend thought I might be interested in it — at least, she thought it would be more up my alley than it had been up hers, and she isn’t wrong there. Aspects of this book do appeal to me. I have an interest in kink, I’ve enjoyed other books that explore it, so, I gave this a shot. The trouble that impeded my enjoyment is that, well, this book isn’t just about BDSM. There’s a whole lot of humiliation in it as well, and that is something that absolutely triggers revulsion in me. There is a difference — for those who don’t know — between masochism and submission, between the role of bottom and the role of slave. Enjoying pain, enjoying bondage, enjoying a struggle in lovemaking — that is not the same as enjoying being made to feel inferior, enjoying being ordered around, enjoying the frustration of inadequacy. I draw a very, very deliberate line — and this way crosses it.

Now. It may not for everyone. Kinks are definite cases of Your Mileage May Vary, and I certainly don’t judge people if this is what gets them off. It’s a fantasy, and it’s no one’s place to cast aspersions on that. So, if you like ritual humiliation, pony play, debasements of all kinds — this book will deliver for you. But I’ll still judge you for liking it, not because of those kinks, but because the book is also pretty terribly written. Seriously, there’s much better smutty fanfiction out there (I should know; I’ve both read and written plenty of it). The dialogue is absurd, the vocabulary tediously unvaried (I’m pretty sure “spank” in some conjugated form occurs at least once a page), the characters flat and undeveloped. Why is the Queen such a stone-cold bitch? Lady Juliana actually seems like she might be an intrinsically decent person, so why does she so enthusiastically go along with all this? What makes Lord Gregory such a rampaging douche? What sympathy does Leon feel for his charges? I don’t know. There are a lot of characters in here that, in another novel, might be interesting. But not here. They exist only as their functions. We get no insight into any character’s mind except Beauty’s, and even that is uneven and hard to follow. She seems to volley between acceptance of her fate and horror at it with no explanation as to how she transitions from one feeling to the other. There’s no motivation for anything, and her reactions and internal thoughts are completely inconsistent. So, yeah — I accept that Your Kink Is Not My Kink, but whatever the kink is, it’s no excuse for bad writing.

There are two more books in the series, but I doubt I’ll be getting them. I don’t know if I could put myself through another five hundred pages of the humiliation aspect, and it also seems, from the summaries, that a lot of Books 2 and 3 is slash, which is just not my cup of tea. I’m all about people having gay sex, but guy-on-guy action does nothing to titillate me personally, and since these books have no purpose other than titillation, that would seem a silly way to spend my time.

So. If you’re interested in fantasy with an erotic edge, I totally get that and encourage you in it. But pass on The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, and pick up Kushiel’s Legacy instead.

Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Title: Good Omens
Author: Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Year of Publication: 1990
Length: 367 pages
Genre: well, I shelve it at the end of my historical fiction section, but that’s because I’ve got a somewhat warped sense of humour
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read, many, many times
Rating: 5 brilliant, glittering stars

When I’m reading a book and come across a passage I really like, some quote I want to write down later or remember forever, I have a terrible habit of dog-earing the bottom corner of the page.

The bottom of Good Omens looks like a particularly jagged comb.

Apart from being one of my all-time favourite novels, Good Omens just has so many of my all-time favourite passages in it, and I attribute that to the combination of genius you get by mixing up Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett — two of my all-time favourite authors. Pratchett’s irreverence and Gaiman’s ethereal qualities, with the sense of the ludicrous profundity that they both possess, together make for a fantastic book, capable of being laugh-out-loud funny and spiritually transformative in the same paragraph.

So what is this book about? Well, the Apocalypse. Happening on a Saturday (in 1990). Eleven years earlier, the demon Crowley manages to misplace the Antichrist (with some help from a Satanic nun), so that while the powers of Heaven and Hell think they’re focusing their efforts on influencing him towards Good or Evil, they are in fact just confusing a normal child, while the Antichrist, alias Adam Young, grows up as normal as you could please in an idyllic English country village. He’s a good-natured troublemaker, the leader of his gang, the Them, and has astonishing powers of imagination and a limitless capacity for belief in the incredible. When he turns eleven, gears start moving to start the Apocalypse — but Crowley and his angel friend Aziraphale, who have been on Earth for six thousand years and rather gotten to like the human race, decide to try and put a stop to it. Swept up in this mess are Anathema Device, professional descendent, whose ancestress Agnes Nutter wrote the only truly accurate book of prophecy in the history of the world; Newton Pulsifer, a would-be computer engineer who breaks everything electronic he touches; and a whole host of villagers, Atlanteans, Tibetans, and other phenomena.

I never can decide what my favourite aspect of this book is. The moral center, as it were, is obviously Adam, who starts to get caught up in the idea of remaking the world in a more favourable image, the ichor in his soul tugging at him, and has to decide what would really be best. He and the Them are pretty amazing. The description of Pepper (and the explication of her name) is a dog-eared page; sensible Wensleydale and grungy Brian fill out the quartet in excellent balance, and through them, the reader experiences the awe of an idealised childhood. This certainly doesn’t mean that everything is perfect and flawless — do you remember being a kid? The best days were the messy adventures, the ridiculous schemes, the trouble you got into but had had too good a time to care. Adam makes sure his friends have that damn near every day — until Armageddon starts spinning things out of control. So that’s a lot of fun to watch happen. (Though I do wonder if it will resonate quite as strongly for this generation’s kids, who are less used to taking off on their bikes, taking over the quarries and ravines that adults won’t go near, scaling trees, skinning knees, finding impossible messes, tangling in nettles, staying out until the last possible minute you could get away with, and all the other things that used to be de rigeur for an active childhood. I remember that from my early years; I don’t know that all modern kids have the same experience — which is sad).

But then there are Aziraphale and Crowley, who, while not the center of the story itself, are nonetheless the impetus behind the narrative. For six thousand years, they’ve organised a careful neutrality between them; when Crowley does something evil, Aziraphale balances it with something good, and vice versa. Neither side gets an advantage, but everyone can demonstrate what brilliant progress they’re making. Aziraphale currently runs a used book store, mostly as a place to store rare books where no one will take them from him; Crowley wears sunglasses at night, drives a classic car, and practises horticulture by means of terrorism. But they’ve realised they actually have more in common with each other than with their ostensible colleagues and immediate superiors. They’re a classic odd couple, and it’s a brilliant pairing. As they put it, towards the end of the book:

“I’d just like to say,” [Aziraphale] said, “if we don’t get out of this, that… I’ll have known, deep down inside, that there was a spark of goodness in you.”
“That’s right,” said Crowley bitterly. “Make my day.”
Aziraphale held out his hand.
“Nice knowing you.”
Crowley took it.
“Here’s to the next time,” he said. “And… Aziraphale?”
“Yes.”
“Just remember I’ll have known that, deep down inside, you were just enough of a bastard to be worth liking.”

Aziraphale and Crowley are probably the ultimate fan favourites of the entire book. When fancastings get discussed, it’s usually about them (and I’m all for Jude Law and Tom Hiddleston, respectively, for what it’s worth). But then you get some of the other humans. Anathema Device is a witch in the same cast as Discworld’s, practical and quick-thinking. Poor Newt is sort of charmingly pathetic. The history of the Witchfinders’ Army is entirely ridiculous. Andthen there are the Four Horsemen, riding inexorably towards Adam (on motorcycles), who are some of the most evocatively drawn characters I’ve ever experienced. From them, I get what might be my favourite passage in the entire book, if only because I have so often found it applied to myself. And it is, well, rather perfect.

The men in the room suddenly realized they didn’t want to know her better. She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, but not up close.

And that’s sort of the way the whole book is written — the language isn’t but so sophisticated, it’s not a difficult read, but it’s nonetheless complexly woven, layered and nuanced, and capable of striking you right to the core. Gaiman and Pratchett both have an ability to make the reader know exactly what they mean, to pull memories and feelings out of you.

So I don’t know what my favourite part of this book is, or even who my favourite cast members are, because the whole thing works together as a single organic unit, breathing and pulsing, as a truly excellent book should. My real favourite thing about it, then, is probably what it has to say about being human — about making mistakes, about how we create the world we live in, what our brains can cope with and how they slide around the things they can’t. The last two pages of this book may be the most incredible commentary on the grace of the human condition I’ve ever read.

The book is also hilarious. It’s fantastically witty, and broadly comic, and delightfully absurd. It’s crammed with sly references, as is so often the case with both Gaiman’s and Pratchett’s works, little nuggets of brilliance for an avid reader to discover (individually or with the help of annotations). But none of that is what makes it great. What makes this a five-star book for me is that incisive quality, that ability the words have to cut straight through me and expose my soul. Only the very best books have that magic. Good Omens possesses it in spades. And that’s why I’ve read it so many times, why I can return to it again and again and always feel the book in a new way.

At the end of this re-read, I find myself suddenly dying for — not a sequel, precisely, but just some sort of follow-up short story. And wouldn’t this be the year for it? 2012, with all the histrionics that entails? And Adam Young, I realised, would be 33 this year, and how perfect is that? I just want to know they’re all doing — him, and the Them (but especially Pepper), and Anathema and Newt, and Aziraphale and Crowley. What does the world look like for them, 22 years on?

Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett

Title: Hogfather
Author: Terry Pratchett
Year of Publication: 1996
Length: 354 pages
Genre: fantasy
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read
Rating: 4.25 stars

It’s the annual solar festival on the Discworld, but something’s gone terribly wrong. The Hogfather — a mythical being in a red and white suit who brings good children presents on Hogswatch Night, if any of that rings some bells for you — has gone missing. And Death has, against all sensibilities, decided to fill in for him until he can be retrieved.

And who has to retrieve him? That task falls to the unwilling Susan, Death’s granddaughter (it’s complicated), who just wants to live her blissfully normal life as a governess without having to deal with supernatural cataclysms interfering. It isn’t a matter of choice, though, and Susan’s journey leads her to discover just what has happened to the Hogfather. A group of beings called the Auditors have put a hit out on him with the Guild of Assassins — the Auditors appear in more than one Discworld novel, often in opposition to Death. The Auditors hate life and wish it had never been. They govern the universe, making sure things like gravity and centripetal force work, and would much rather that the universe was nothing more than rocks moving in circles, without these horrible little bundles of spontaneity and free will getting in the way. They’ve set their sights on the Hogfather as something too irrational to be endured and want him eliminated. The Guild gives the job to Mr. Teatime (pronounced Te-ah-time-eh), an Assassin who somewhat embarrasses the rest of them by enjoying his job a little too much. He’s the sort of person who has, in fact, devoted time to figuring out how to kill anthropomorphic manifestations, and anyone who cheerfully admits to that has to be functioning without some essential components of sanity.

But he is good at his job, and he sets to work immediately. Without giving too much away, because the way Pratchett teases around the concept is so enjoyable, he finds a way to control belief — and with that control, eliminates the Hogfather from it. It’s an interesting commentary, really, since in our own world, it seems like children stop believing at younger and younger ages. But Teatime has an opponent more than he bargained for in Susan Sto Helit, who is one of Pratchett’s more wonderful creations. Much though she tries to be normal, she has certain supernatural abilities inherited from her grandfather — like the ability to stop time, or walk through walls, or remember the future, or use Death’s voice to scare the everliving daylights out of someone. She’s eminently sensible and practical, but in a way that makes her dangerous rather than boring. She can see things that are really there, and she lacks the human ability to edit out things that are illogical. She’s well-educated but sees that as a possible hindrance to understanding rather than a benefit, and many of her comments on methods of education and teaching principles are particularly hilarious to someone, like myself, who works in the field of education also:

Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.

Susan is close to being my favourite thing about Hogfather, just because her voice is so distinct and such a joy to read.

What Hogfather does best, though, is explore the correlation between belief and being human. This is something Pratchett ponders on frequently in his works (as does his friend Neil Gaiman) — the idea that belief creates gods and other figures. That is not new, though it’s given a delightfully weird edge in Hogfather, as the wizards of the Unseen University start accidentally creating the Oh God of Hangovers and the Cheerful Fairy and the Eater of Socks (in whom I fervently believe now) out of the extra belief left sloshing around by the Hogfather’s absence. But what Pratchett really does magnificently here is tie that capacity for belief with what it means to be a human, what it means to be this marvelous sentient creature, this marvelously narcissistic creature who thinks the whole universe is inside of its head and secretly believes the whole universe was created just to lead to its own existence. Things like the Hogfather and the Tooth Fairy are stepping-stones of belief, the training wheels of childhood so that a human can believe in the really big imaginative things later on. Death sums this all up for Susan (and us) near the end of the novel:

HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMANS. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little–”

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO A FINE POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET– Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE UNIVERSE, AS IF THERE IS SOME… SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or else what’s the point—”

MY POINT EXACTLY.

She tried to assemble her thoughts.

THERE IS A PLACE WHERE TWO GALAXIES HAVE BEEN COLLIDING FOR A MILLION YEARS, said Death, apropos of nothing. DON’T TRY TO TELL ME THAT’S RIGHT.

“Yes, but people don’t think about that,” said Susan. “Somewhere there was a bed…”

CORRECT. STARS EXPLODE, WORLDS COLLIDE, THERE’S HARDLY ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE WHERE HUMANS CAN LIVE WITHOUT BEING FROZEN OR FRIED, AND YET YOU BELIEVE THAT A…A BED IS A NORMAL THING. IT IS THE MOST AMAZING TALENT.

‘Talent?’

OH, YES. A VERY SPECIAL KIND OF STUPIDITY. YOU THINK THE WHOLE UNIVERSE IS INSIDE YOUR HEADS.

“You make us sound mad,” said Susan. A nice warm bed…

NO. YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME? said Death.

There’s a nice counterpoint to all of this at Unseen University, where young wizard Ponder Stibbons is desperately trying to drag Discworld into a place where things like advanced physics make sense. He’s created an artificial intelligence called Hex, which broadly resembles one of the first computers, except that, as with most things in the Discworld, it’s slightly askew — requiring honeycombs, mice, and other oddities to function. Hex is meant to be what the Auditors want, really — the epitome of rationality and predictability. But it isn’t. It goes wrong. Hex understands itself and humanity a little too well.

+++ Humans Have Always Ascribed Random Seasonal, Natural, Or Inexplicable Actions To Human-Shaped Entities. Such Examples Are Jack Frost, The Hogfather, The Tooth Fairy, And Death +++

“Oh, them. Yes, but they exist,” said Ridcully. “Met a couple of ‘em myself.”

+++ Humans Are Not Always Wrong +++

“All right, but I’m damn sure there’s never been an Eater of Socks or a God of Hangovers.”

+++ But There Is No Reason Why There Should Not Be +++

So, as the plot rolls on, Pratchett explores these concepts, along with a host of others — gift-giving, various traditions, the origins of some familiar carols, the commercialisation of holidays — all with his usual crisp humour and delightful oddities. That said, I don’t think the book is totally flawless. My attention wanders a bit during some of the sections involving the crew of thugs that Teatime recruits. The last hundred pages aren’t quite as tightly plotted as they might be.

For what it’s worth, the move adaptation (currently available on Netflix Watch Instantly) is magnificent. It’s remarkably true to the book, and what few cuts there are are ones I don’t notice, because they trim all those parts of the books I tend to forget about anyway. They tighten and streamline the plot without losing the quirky sense of serendipity that governs Pratchett’s world. It’s joined the ranks of my must-see holiday films.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone looking for non-standard holiday fare. If the radio’s been driving you mad and you’re feeling the compulsion to spear someone through the ear with a sprig of holly, pick this one up. It has a delightful way of restoring holiday spirits with just the right blend of snarkiness. No one said you had to be nice in order to believe, after all.

Sandman, Volume 5: A Game of You, by Neil Gaiman

Title: Sandman, Volume 5: A Game of You
Author: Neil Gaiman
Year of Publication: 1993
Length: 192 pages
Genre: magical realism – graphic novel
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read
Rating: 3.5 stars

Everyone has worlds inside of them.

This theme isn’t new to the Sandman series, but it’s revisited more strongly here than elsewhere in the ongoing saga. A Game of You features Barbie, who we first met back in Volume 2. She’s left her husband, moved to New York, and now lives in an apartment building with a lesbian couple (Hazel and Foxglove, both connected back to characters we’ve met before as well), a transwoman named Wanda, a quiet woman named Thessaly (who turns out to be a centuries-old witch), and a strange man named George (who turns out to be no sort of human at all). And in her dreams, Barbie lives in a fantasy realm. We caught a glimpse of it back in Volume 2, but it’s more fully realised here: an expansive world populated by talking animals, Narnia-esque. Here, Barbie is a princess, called upon to defeat the evil Cuckoo and restore justice to her realm.

The two worlds collide when a figure from the dream realm crosses over to the waking world — an enormous doglike creature called Martin Tenbones, who manages to pass a message and a strange gem on to Barbie before being gunned down by the NYPD. Bizarrely confronted by what she thought was only a dream, Barbie (not inexplicably) wonders if she’s cracking up. That night, the gem — the Porpentine — sends her into a coma-like sleep. Deep in her dreamworld, . George, revealed as a servant of the Cuckoo, releases nightmares in bird form upon the other inhabitants of the apartment building; when Thessaly catches one trying to get to her, she first kills it and then kills George. Gathering Hazel, Foxglove, and Wanda, she starts working old, bloody magic, using George’s remains to get answers about the Cuckoo and Barbie’s dream world, then drawing down the moon to walk its path into the magical realm. She takes Hazel and Foxglove with her, but leaves Wanda, chromosomally a man and thus unable to travel the moon’s path (and anyone looking for commentary on transgender issues will have loads to deal with there), behind to deal with a talking corpse, a comatose Barbie, and an impending hurricane caused by Thessaly’s meddling.

Meanwhile, in the dreamscape, Barbie’s trekking across a frozen wasteland, through a dark forest, and other such fantastical . In the end, we learn that this dreamworld was an island, a skerry of dreaming, isolated unto itself, and that its original inhabitant was a woman named Alianora, proud and beautiful and with a scar cutting across her right cheek. From her brief conversation with Morpheus, we can intuit that they were lovers once (and from what we know of Morpheus, we can assume it ended poorly) — but to the best of my knowledge, her full story is never told, a mystery left past the end of the series. Barbie was just the latest in a series of women who came there to dream, populating the realm with their imaginations.

We get Dreaming from a more human perspective here, rather than the viewpoint of Morpheus or other immortals. Morpheus only comes in at the very end of the story — Endless ex machina — and as a result, this story is rather more personal than a lot of the story. Its scope is (hurricane notwithstanding) less epic. When Barbie sleeps, she finds herself dropped into a world that is strange yet somehow familiar, which operates on its own set of rules — some of which she instinctively knows, and some of which she has to learn as she goes along. And everyone knows that feeling. Dream logic doesn’t resemble waking logic, but it does have its own patterns.

So, there’s the outline. I don’t really care for this volume, to be honest — and I’m not sure why. Barbie’s the sort of figure I ought to empathise with tremendously, but something about it just falls flat for me. Maybe it’s just that I do prefer the epic scope. Maybe it’s that there are places where this volume seems too conscious of making a point, rather than just telling a story. Maybe it’s that — despite bringing back a character we’ve seen before and introducing one we’ll see again — it feels more disjointed from the rest of the series than most of the volumes do. It still has considerable technical merit, and there are parts of it I enjoy, but ultimately this isn’t one that sticks with me.