Sandman, Volume 8: Worlds’ End, by Neil Gaiman

Title: Sandman, Volume 8: Worlds’ End
Author: Neil Gaiman
Year of Publication: 1994
Length: 168 pages
Genre: graphic novel – magical realism
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read
Rating: 4.5 stars

This is a wonderfully imaginative volume of Sandman — and considering that the entire series is a celebration of imagination, that’s really saying something.

A series of nested stories, reminiscent of Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Worlds’ End introduces us to a mismatched set of characters who meet by happenstance, during what we learn is a reality storm. Something tremendous has caused the walls between the worlds to bend and quake and crack, and some hapless souls caught in the shivering have ended up at the Worlds’ End Inn, telling tales until the ripples settle. This collection is somewhat like Dream Country and Fables and Reflections, in that it takes place outside of what continuum of the larger story arc exists; there are discrete stories, but, unlike in the other two volumes, they are connected through the frame device.

The frame focuses on one man, Brant, and his traveling companion, Charlene, who had just been driving home from a business trip when a fabulous creature runs into the road, causing Brant to wreck the car; they wake in the Inn. As they accustom themselves to their new surroundings, they begin to hear tales. The first, of a sleeping city that traps its inhabitants in its dreams, isn’t one of my favourites, but it is told in a rather interesting way, both in its words and its images. There are no outlines; everything is blocks and shadows and and shapes, and there are no word balloons, only plain text narrative. It creates a very stark sensation. The second story is about as far in contrast from the first as it could be; our old friend Cluracan of the Fae tells it, about a diplomatic mission of his that turns into a political intrigue and tale of vengeance. Because it belongs to the Fae, it overflows with colour and details and whimsy. We meet another Queen of the Fae — Mab, this time, rather than Titania — and we get to see another imagined world, entirely apart from our earth. In The Sandman Companion, Gaiman states that he thinks this story fell flat, that it needed to be much longer to work well; I actually rather like it. I think the pace, which clips along with a rather casual shrug at cause and effect, suits Cluracan well.

The third story is one of the more fantastic in the series, among the best illustrated, and also revisits some old friends. A sailor lad names Jim decides to tell a true story here, in the Inn, where it might be believed, or if it isn’t, it won’t matter — a story he could never tell back at home, about an amazing voyage. This starts out, in many ways, like a classic eighteenth- or nineteenth-century sea tale; there are flavours of Treasure Island, Moby Dick, and Kipling. Jim takes to sea, and the boat he ends up on is chartered by none other than Hob Gadling — now a respectable businessman. They travel and talk and Hob passes on some wisdom. I love this for getting to see more of one of my favourite characters in the entire series; it’s magnificent to see Hob in-between his meetings with Dream, and it’s wonderful to see him look back at lessons learned with a touch of regret. He remembers the slave trade, which he took part in, because, at the onset, no one thought to question it as wrong; but now he feels ashamed for it, resolving to do better in the future — but with an awareness that, in the moment, you may not ever be able to tell right from wrong, and that he possesses hindsight on a near-unique scope. We learn at the end of the story that Jim is, in fact, a girl, approaching the age when she won’t be able to hide her gender anymore. Both her time on the sea and the era of the tall ships are ending, and the reader definitely gets a sense of mournfulness. So, too, a sense of romanticism; not everything is as pretty as a wistful memory makes it — as Hob Gadling is always swift to point out to us.

Next, an alternate history of America, where a remarkable young boy named Prez becomes President at the age of 18. Through this story, Gaiman explores politics from point of view that is both a fairy tale and semi-religious, a tale of promises made and hopes fulfilled — as they almost never are in our version of reality. It’s ideal and idyllic, a world where everything goes right in the 1970s and America enters a Golden Age more true and magnificent than any Golden Age has probably ever been. It ends as swiftly as any Golden Age must; Prez declines the calls to run for more than two terms and retires quietly. Things don’t suddenly become bad, but the shine’s gone off. And one day, Prez dies — though no one knows how or where, there’s a mythic awareness that it happens. The readers witness his conversation with Death and his choice to move on, through the worlds, to find more things to fix. There’s definitely a messianic quality to Prez, an implication that he comes when needed and never overstays his welcome, never falls prey to the downfalls of normal humans, never fades in the hearts of those who love him.

The next story is one of the most complex, exploring the lives of interdimensional undertakers, who live in the Necropolis, a City of the Dead tasked with maintaining the funereal customs of various worlds. This one, like many of the story in the Decameron or Canterbury Tales, nests within itself. A young apprentice speaks of his experiences; someone in his story tells about his mistress’s youth; the apprentice eventually has to tell his own tale within his tale. They twist and intertwine, spreading outward to the Inn, as well, as we’ve seen the apprentice wandering around and having conversations in the framework.

Through that framework, we learn, bit by bit, more about the Inn. It is a “free house”, a clever bit of play on Gaiman’s part. In Britain, a free house is a pub unattached to any brewery; for Worlds’ End, it means that it exists outside reality, attached to the bounds and rules of no world, entirely its own place. There is an implication that the current hostess may be a Hindu Goddess (Lakshmi, perhaps, or a version of her?). And people can come, and go, and pass through to worlds not their own. Towards the end of the collection, Charlene is asked for a story — and she replies that she has none. Except, in saying so, she does tell her own tale, a female story (the only one in the collection, really), and one of futility and frustration. Ultimately, she decides to stay, to work at the Inn, determining that she has nothing really worth returning to in her version of reality. When the storm ends and Brant wakes back up, he discovers that it is not as if Charlene has died, but as if she had never existed; her car is in his name, no one remembers her. And then the reader learns that everything in this volume has been told by Brant (who never had to share a story in the Inn) to a bartender.

The art in this volume may be the best in the series — at least it’s among the best. Evocative, enormously detailed, full of colour and nuance — it’s an absolute visual feast. One of the best centerfold splashes ever features a phenomenal sea monster, bursting up out of the ocean to dwarf the tall ship observing it. Perhaps the most spectacular series of images, however, comes towards the end of the issue, when the denizens of the Worlds’ End look out the windows and witness what they suppose to be the cause of the reality storm — a funeral procession of truly incredible proportions. It lasts over three full two-page splashes — a circumstance unique in the entire series. We see many, many familiar faces — Destiny, leading the way; Titania, Odin, Bast, Emperor Norton, Mervin, an angel, a raven. But whose funeral is it? We may make an educated guess, based on the attendees, but we have no confirmation. And when is this happening? Where? Is it even real? And, most important of all, how did it come to be? We don’t know yet — but we will.

Worlds’ End is fantastic and imaginative and explorative, but through it all, you feel an ebb. Things are receding, failing, ending. The energy at the end of Brief Lives, where you first sense that the greater story of the Sandman is nearing its close, continues here, though we hardly see Dream at all. The mood carries over. The reader approaches The Kindly Ones with trepidation, both wanting and not-wanting to know what’s going to happen, reluctant to confirm suspicions, but inexorably drawn to the story’s climax.

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, by James Shapiro

Title: Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?
Author: James Shapiro
Year of Publication: 2010
Length: 338 pages
Genre: nonfiction – history
New or Re-Read? New
Rating: 5 stars

One of the greatest challenges for a modern historian is to remove the filter of Romanticism and Victoriana when we look backwards through time. Modern society has inherited a lot of inaccurate notions about the pre-Industrial world from our more immediate forebears, creating an assumption that the medieval and early modern worlds shared the same values, the same culture, the same societal structures, the same goals as the Victorian world – an assumption that is, in many ways, far off the mark. To achieve greater understanding of anything early modern, a historian – professional or recreational – must first clear her eyes of the haze which the nineteenth century imposed on them.

Lifting this veil is, to my reading of it, the major triumph of James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?. Both history and historiography, this book examines the case both for and against Shakespeare as the author of the works attributed to his name – and comes down, quite definitively, on the side of Shakespeare. Shapiro notes, in the opening pages of the book, his interest, which lies “not in what people think – which has been stated again and again in unambiguous terms – so much as why thy think it. No doubt my attitude derives from living in a world in which truth is too often seen as relative and in which mainstream media are committed to showing both sides of every story.” Noting the prevalence of opposing viewpoints in modern society – such as those on creationism vs evolution, whether or not man walked on the moon, and “more disturbingly,” those who deny the Holocaust deniers – Shapiro states, “I don’t believe that truth is relative or that there are always two sides to every story. At the same time, I don’t want to draw a naïve comparison between the Shakespeare controversy and any of these other issues. I think it’s a mistake to do so, except insofar as it too turns on underlying assumptions and notions of evidence that cannot be reconciled. Yet unlike some of these other controversies, I think it’s possible to get at why people have come to believe what they believe about Shakespeare’s authorship, and it is partly in the hope of doing so that I have written this book.”

Shapiro begins with the first attempts, in the eighteenth century, to expand knowledge of Shakespeare’s life and works, with George Steevens and Edmund Malone arguing their various perspectives. This idea of construction, of needing to find reasons in Shakespeare’s life for the events and viewpoints in his plays, led to a somewhat desperate search on the parts of Samuel Ireland and his son, William-Henry, for new evidence about Shakespeare’s life. Unfortunately, these gentlemen came to the idea several decades too late; any evidence not already preserved was long gone. William-Henry, motivated in Shapiro’s depiction as somewhat pathetically frantic to bolster his father’s deflated confidence, embarked on an orgy of forgery, creating numerous documents in “Shakespeare’s hand”: deeds, letters, inscriptions, even entire plays. Briefly celebrated, then proved false under William-Henry’s own confession of fraud, these documents nonetheless opened the door to the search for biography in Shakespeare’s plays. Even Malone, who vigorously attacked the Irelands for the fraud, still entertained:

the presumption that Shakespeare could only write about what he had felt or done rather than heard about, read about, borrowed from other writers, or imagined. The floodgates were now open and others would soon urge, based on their own slanted reading of the plays, that Shakespeare must have been a mariner, a soldier, a courtier a countess, and so on. By assuming that Shakespeare had to have experienced something to write about it with such accuracy and force, Malone also, unwittingly, allowed for the opposite to be true: expertise in the self-revealing works that the scant biographical record couldn’t support – his knowledge of falconry, for example, or of seamanship, foreign lands, or the ways that the ruling class behaved – should disqualify Shakespeare as the author of the plays.

Shapiro also positions these early days of the search for authorship evidence in light of the early attribution studies for the Bible and the works of Homer; for the first time, literary monoliths were subject to question and interrogation. Shapiro then moves through the first seeds of the anti-Stratfordian argument to its full-blown manifestations in the propositions of first Francis Bacon and then Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as alternate candidates. The Baconian theory, for instance, began with Delia Bacon (no relation) in the mid-19th century. Shapiro explains how Delia’s ideas about Francis Bacon connected to the notion of a grand conspiracy, focused on the polymath English courtier as the center of a radical proto-republican political movement. The evidence for these claims, she determined, was present in a close reading of the plays as biographical in nature. Shapiro demonstrates how the logic of such an association is inherently flawed, thanks to the limited scope both of Delia’s historical awareness and of the plays which she examined:

The framework within which [Delia Bacon] imagined the world of the English Renaissance, also typical of her day, was limited to monarchs, courtiers, and writers. The rest were written off as ignorant masses. […] It was history from the top down and limited geographically to London and the court. Her Shakespeare canon was no less restricted and also typical of nineteenth-century readers: at the center of it were Hamlet and The Tempest, and it extended to the plays meatiest in philosophical and political content – Othello, Julius Caesar, Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Richard the Second, and, unusually, Coriolanus – but not much further. While she had surely read the other thirty or so plays, as well as the poetry, they didn’t serve her purpose, and for the most part she passed over them in silence.

Delia Bacon published, to moderate success, though most people who supported her initially came to regret it, because of the mental instability she developed following a very public jilting. Shortly after the release of her book, she was institutionalized, and spent the last two years of her life in an asylum. Despite this tragic end, her ideas caught fire in the decades following her death, earning the attention, if not always the outright endorsement, of celebrities including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, and Henry James. Delia Bacon also introduced the notion of a secret cipher embedded in the texts of the plays, an idea picked up and popularized by Ignatius Donnelley – and an idea risible under even the lightest scrutiny for several reasons, not least of which is that a tweak of the cipher could yield any result the seeker wanted, but also because, as Shapiro points out, “Donnelly didn’t have a clue about how compositors worked in Elizabethan printing houses, where such a scheme would have been unimaginable and the layout he describes impossible to reproduce.”

By the 1920s, however, Shapiro points out that “Philosophy and politics were out, Oedipal desires and mourning for dead fathers in,” giving rise to the new Oxfordian theory. Psychoanalysis imagined a link between the writer of Hamlet and the character of Hamlet, based on repressed sexual urges and dysfunctional family relationships. Sigmund Freud questioned Shakespeare’s identity but did not embrace Bacon as the alternative; John Thomas Looney (pronounced “loany”, despite temptations to the contrary) picked up the psychoanalytic thread and proposed Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Shakespeare’s life did not mirror the required narrative; the Earl of Oxford’s could, especially if you layered on other theories about de Vere being Queen Elizabeth’s lover and/or son. From a secret political group under Bacon’s direction, the anti-Shakespearean case now rested on a more lurid narrative: a conspiracy tinged with sexual misconduct, succession anxiety, and disrupted inheritance.

For decades, the Oxfordians plagued themselves with divisive conclusions about this reading, however: nobody knew about the conspiracy; everyone knew and didn’t think it worth mentioning; everyone knew but was kept silent by Queen Elizabeth’s totalitarian state; a select group knew and kept it quiet to protect the Queen; and so on. Never mind that Oxford died in 1604, before many of Shakespeare’s plays were written; in the scope of such an all-encompassing conspiracy, Oxfordians find that small matter to explain away. They were written earlier, and released after his death, as a way of perpetuating the myth of William Shakespeare as the front man. Shapiro details how, in more recent years, the Oxfordian theory has gained traction due to the public’s increasing fascination with conspiracy theories of all sorts. From moon landings to who shot JFK to the vast circulation of conceptions about secret government involvement in nearly every act of tragedy or terrorism of the past three decades, modern culture has propagated a pervasive suspicion of authority. “In such a climate,” Shapiro says, “a minor act of conspiratorial suppression on the part of Tudor authorities made perfect sense.”

Overall, the impression this book leaves a reader with is that the anti-Shakespearean case is one stuffed with tragic figures and ulterior motives. Its very earliest characters are among the saddest: poor William-Henry Ireland, desperately seeking a father’s approval, and jilted Delia Bacon, who clung to her theories as a way of reclaiming agency over her life, but with a paranoid mania that drove her to madness and death. These are the figures often left out of the Baconian and Oxfordian narratives; they prefer, naturally, to tout the support of such grand figures as Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud. As Shapiro demonstrates, however, the rationale of the great figures is not untainted, either. They all require vast constructs, additions and suppositions to the historical record. Freud’s support of the Oxfordian case is deeply tied to his own theories about Oedipal desire; he had to read Hamlet in terms of Oxford’s own familial-sexual-philosophical entanglements, because to suppose that the story came from any other origin was a strike against the psychological theories on which he made his living and his fame.

It’s Twain’s rationale, and Shapiro’s dissection thereof, that I find most interesting and most telling. Twain echoes Malone in supposing it impossible for a writer to draw from anything but experience; “For Twain, the notion that great writing had to be drawn from life – rather than from what an author heard, read, or simply imagined – was an article of faith, at the heart of his conception of how serious writers worked.” It is, in many ways, a very strange idea, taking imagination so entirely out of the equation, but it was a product of its time; in the 19th and early 20th centuries, more and more writers were publishing memoirs, and biography was a popular genre. The close association between fiction and experience was deeply embedded in the culture, providing fertile ground in which the anti-Shakespearean attitudes could take root. This is one of the more difficult veils to penetrate when looking back at the early modern period through modern eyes – the idea that the early modern writers simply did not view their craft in the same way that the Victorian tradition has convinced us all writers must.

Shapiro asserts that this legacy lives on in writing today, that modern readers retain assumptions that “novels necessarily reveal something about a writer’s life.” I would argue that this is more true in so-called “literary” fiction than it is of genre fiction. Readers of science fiction and fantasy novels (or viewers of those movies) — and to an extent, of mysteries, thrillers, and romances as well — have no more expectation of a creator’s personal experience with the subject matter than Shakespeare’s original audiences had. We need no more assume that Shakespeare had first-hand knowledge of Italy than that George Lucas had of Tatooine, J. R. R. Tolkien of Middle-Earth, or J. K. Rowling of Hogwarts. While “serious” fiction often retains a more autobiographical bent, I think it is in genre fiction that writers operate more like Shakespeare did: indulging freely in the realm of imagination, drawing off of previous stories, history and mythology, and timeless tropes for their inspiration. There you find writers more interested in telling a good story than in talking about themselves – which is not to say that glimpses of a writer’s viewpoint won’t peep through from time to time, but they don’t dominate in the way that post-Romantic assumptions would indicate. (It is in many ways ironic that the very people who disdain the use of imagination in writing are so wonderfully and copiously imaginative themselves, at least when it comes to creating the fantasy narratives necessarily to support alternate authorship candidates).

The final chapter of the book is a tour de force in defense of Shakespeare – though Shapiro acknowledges the absurdity that Shakespeareans should even be on the defensive, that the burden of proof has somehow shifted to us to prove there is no conspiracy, rather than on the Oxfordians to prove that there is. After entertaining the anti-Stratfordians and exposing their flaws, Shapiro comes down unquestionably (and refreshingly unapologetically) on the side of Shakespeare of Stratford:

When asked how I can be so confident that Shakespeare was [the plays'] author, I point to several kinds of evidence. The first is what early printed texts reveal; the second, what writers who knew Shakespeare said about him. Either of these, to my mind, suffices to confirm his authorship – and the stories they tell corroborate each other. All this is reinforced by additional evidence from the closing years of his career, when he began writing for a new kind of playhouse, in a different style, in active collaboration with other writers.

Shapiro then defends Shakespeare with a barrage of real, concrete evidence – text-based evidence including examples of speech prefixes, the process of printing plays, the relationship of typesetting to the variant spellings of Shakespeare’s name, his demonstrated familiarity with actors, and so forth. The proof of such deep association with the playing companies, the theatre building, and the workings of the shareholders effectively eradicates any validity to the presumption that the plays could have been written by someone who did not inhabit that world.

Shapiro also engages with the testimonies of so many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, identifying the man from Stratford as the man who wrote the plays: George Buc, Master of the Revels; Robert Greene, vitriolic pamphleteer; Francis Meers, whose Palladis Tamia lists all of Shakespeare’s plays which had been acted by 1598; Gabriel Harvey, poetry critic; William Camden, historian; playwrights John Webster, Francis Beaumont, and Thomas Heywood — the list goes on and on, but the trump card is fellow playwright, rival, and friend, Ben Jonson, who “left the most personal and extensive tributes to Shakespeare. For many, his testimony alone resolves any doubts about Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays.” Consider me one of them. Even if we did not have the voluminous other evidence that we do have, Jonson alone would convince me. He comments both so prolifically and so personally on Shakespeare’s writing that I find it a violation of Occam’s Razor to imagine that he was either ignorant or part of a vast conspiracy – and knowing what I know about Jonson, I really can’t believe he could have kept a secret of that magnitude.

Finally, Shapiro draws a connection between Shakespeare’s plays and the playing spaces he wrote for, discussing how the space affected what kind of story Shakespeare could tell and how he could tell it, particularly thanks to a distinct change towards the end of his career:

We have also had drummed into us that he was Shakespeare of the Globe – though that playhouse was built only in the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign. Long forgotten are the other playing spaces in and around London in which he had built his reputation over the previous decade: the Theatre, the Curtain, Newington Butts, the Rose, Richmond, Whitehall, perhaps a brief stint at the Swan. … But had you asked anyone on the streets of London in the winter of 1610 where you could go to see Shakespeare’s latest play, there would have been only one answer: ‘Blackfriars.’ The Blackfriars Theatre means little today to most admirers of Shakespeare; so far as I know, only a single replica of it has ever been erected, in rural Virginia, which attracts both spectators and scholars. The story of the Blackfriars Theatre is also the story of the Jacobean Shakespeare, and of the particular challenges he faced toward the end of his playwriting career. And that, in turn, helps explain why only Shakespeare could have written his late plays that were staged there.

Shapiro’s recognition is apt and accurate, and that close relationship between writer and playing space is one we frequently refer to in our educational materials and workshops. A different kind of theatre demanded a different kind of plays, and Shakespeare’s latest works reflect that shift, making a reconstruction of the plays’ timeline to fit a 1604 death date absurd. I hope this spatial connection becomes a stronger part of the narrative of the “controversy” – perhaps it will help the Blackfriars Theatre and its descendent, our Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, earn greater recognition as one of Shakespeare’s prominent theatrical homes.

The final chapter of Contested Will ought to hammer home, once and for all, that Shakespeare was Shakespeare, setting the matter entirely to rest. Except, as Shapiro ably points out, there is no arguing with a conspiracy theorist. Any evidence just gets twisted to support the idea of a vast cover-up. Nonetheless, Shapiro’s book is a veritable armory of weapons, both offensive and defensive, for the Shakespearean set. What’s more, he delivers all of his information with felicity and wit; the book is a wonderful read as well as an intellectual triumph. I highly recommend it to anyone with a dog in this fight, as it were, but also to anyone who is simply interested in writing and in how ideas about it have evolved over time. Shapiro provides us not only with a rousing defense of Shakespeare, but also a valuable peek through the veils of time, rolling back our assumptions and laying bare the reality, insofar as it is knowable.

(Originally posted at the American Shakespeare Center Education Blog).

Sandman, Volume 7: Brief Lives, by Neil Gaiman

Title: Sandman, Volume 7: Brief Lives
Author: Neil Gaiman
Year of Publication: 1994
Length: 168 pages
Genre: graphic novel – magical realism
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read
Rating: 4.5 stars

Brief Lives probably has the most cohesive plot of any of the Sandman collections, excepting maybe Volume 9, The Kindly Ones. In this collection, Delirium, youngest of the Endless, has conceived a fierce need to go in search of “the Prodigal”, Destruction, the middle of the siblings, who has abandoned his realm and who has not been seen in some 300 years. But she doesn’t want to go it alone (and is vaguely aware that she can’t, fractured and unstable as she is). She first asks the twins, the siblings nearest to her in age, Desire and Despair; both refuse. Then she asks Dream, who, surprisingly, consents — though his reasons have little to do with helping Delirium or finding Destruction, and far more to do with having an excuse to walk in the mortal world.

Dream, we learn, has just been dumped by his latest girlfriend, the witch Thessaly (from A Game of You), and he’s gone into quite the existential funk over it. Several of the inhabitants of the Dreamworld discuss how his mood affects their manifestation of reality:

Nuala: Brrr. Listen to that thunder. Poor Lord Morpheus. He must be very sad.

Mervyn: Nah. He enjoys it. I mean, hell, it’s a pose. Y’know? He spends a coupla months hanging out with a new broad. Then one day the magic’s worn off, and he goes back to work, and she takes a hike. Now, guys like me, ordinary Joes, we just shrug our shoulders, say, hey, that’s life, flick it if you can’t take a joke. Not him. Oh no. He’s gotta be the tragic figure standing out in the rain, mournin’ the loss of his beloved, so down comes the rain, right on cue. In the meantime everybody gets dreams fulla existential angst and wakes up feeling like hell. And we all get wet.

I like this little poke at the Dream-lord’s massive ego — he is, in many ways, a figure that takes himself quite seriously (as his sister Death frequently reminds him). So, both to shake himself out of this depressive fit — but also hoping that he might cross paths with his ex-lover — Dream agrees to accompany his sister on the search.

The search goes badly right from the start. Delirium has a list of people who were acquainted with Destruction, who might know his whereabouts, but they all suddenly die or disappear before Dream and Del can get to them. This is more worrying since these figures are immortal — some gods, some figures out of mythology, and some who have just refused to die. In one of the more memorable openings of the series, one chapter begins:

There are not many of them, all things considered: the truly old.

Even on this planet, in this age, when people consider a mere hundred years, or a thousand, to be an unusual span.

There are, for example, less than ten thousand humanoid individuals alive on this planet today who have personal memories of the saber-toothed tiger, the megatherium, the cave bear.

There are today less than a thousand who walked the streets of Atlantis (the first Atlantis. The other lands that bore that name were shadows, echo-Atlantises, myth lands, an they came later).

There are less than five hundred living humans who remember the human civilizations that predated the great lizards. (There were a few; fossil records are unreliable. Several of them lasted for millions of years.)

There are roughly seventy people walking the earth, human to all appearances (and in a few cases, to all medical tests currently available), who were alive before the earth had begun to congeal from gas and dust.

How well do you know your neighbors? Your friends? Your lovers?

Walk the streets of any city, and stare carefully at the people who pass you, and wonder, and know this:

They are there too, the old ones.

I love that passage. It’s chilling, unsettling, and somehow inspirational, all at the same time (a Gaiman specialty). And the first of these that we meet, we meet at his death; Bernie Capax remembers the stink of mammoth during his morning commute, and moments later, gets crushed by a construction site accident. He doesn’t want to believe it at first — after all, he’d made it so long, and for it to end like this? Who could blame him for feeling cheated at the last? But, as Death reminds him, “You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less.” We find out later that Bernie was on Delirium’s list; somehow, Destruction left a trip-wire in his wake that’s disrupting any attempts to find him, often at great cost.

Dream and Del also incur some purely mortal collateral damage, as accidents and mishaps plague their travel. Eventually, Dream throws in the towel; he’s had enough, he isn’t getting what he wanted out of the trip anyway, and he’s tired of their efforts getting people killed. Delirium takes this poorly, throwing a fit, retreating to her realm, and locking it down; Death intervenes, chastising Dream for being callous and selfish, and he agrees to try again. After coaxing Del back out, the pair journeys to their eldest brother, Destiny, who tells them to seek out an Oracle who is of the Family — Dream’s son Orpheus. Orpheus reveals Destruction’s location in exchange for a boon which he can claim from his father; despite knowing full well what price he’s going to have to pay, Dream agrees, and off they go to find Destruction — who is, as fate would have it, on an island neighboring the one where Orpheus has been kept all these years.

The meeting is, if anything, anticlimactic. Destruction reiterates his reasons for leaving his realm — he doesn’t think that the Endless should behave as they do, toying with mortals and governing their lives — that mortals quite have the hang of it now on their own, and the functions of the Endless can go on without their personal supervision. (Clearly this is correct for Destruction — we do a plenty good job of that — but what happened with Dream’s absence from his realm at the very beginning of the series calls the truth of his assertion into question). The conversation ends to no one’s satisfaction, and Destruction decides to pack up and go on the move again. Dream returns to the other island and kills his son, at Orpheus’s own request.

I really, really enjoy this volume, for several reasons. I appreciate the progression of the saga’s overarching plotline and thematic concerns. I like getting to see more of Delirium, who is a fascinating figure in her own right. Her contradictory nature and unpredictability show best when she and Dream visit Destiny; when Dream has a minor breakdown, Delirium briefly reigns herself in in order to console him. She says it hurts, and she doesn’t like doing it — but she can, when the need is great. The idea isn’t explored much further, but I think it’s tremendously interesting. I also like getting to see Destruction, on his own, attempting like anything to create and finding that he cannot do so in any sort of satisfactory manner. But perhaps more than all of that, I like what this collection has to say about immortality. It anticipates American Gods (published in 2001, 7-8 years after these issues first appeared in stores) in many ways, particularly in the idea of how old gods and other mythological beings survive: namely, any way they can. Most poignant to me is the story of Ishtar, reduced to dancing in a seedy strip club for the scraps of sexual worship she can glean there. She doesn’t seem to take it too badly, honestly, but there are echoes of such greatness and such loss in some of her conversations with her friends. And then, when she takes herself out in rather spectacular fashion:

I know how gods begin, Roger. We start as dreams. Then we walk out of dreams into the land. We are worshipped and loved, and take power to ourselves. And then one day there’s no one left to worship us. And in the end, each little god and goddess takes its last journey back into dreams. … And what comes after, not even we know.

She’s a stunner, to the end, and no mistake, and she makes a powerful statement — even the gods are not truly immortal; only the Endless are, and even they, as we learn in this collection, can falter, perish, and be replaced by a new aspect of themselves.

Brief Lives also includes, in a flashback to the seventeenth century, an interesting commentary on Reason. Poised at the edge of the Age of Enlightenment, Destruction comments that man has turned away from other methods of explaining the world and has focused on reason.” It is no more reliable a tool than instinct, myth, or dream.  But it has the potential to be far more dangerous.” Dream agrees that it is a flawed tool at best. This is an interesting thing to consider, from a modern standpoint, in an age when science and faith so often find themselves at loggerheads — when we debate whether or not evolution should be taught in schools and whether or not religion ought to be allowed to govern what women can do with their own bodies. It’s interesting for me in particular because I somewhat straddle the line where reason is concerned. I love science, believe in science, am fascinated by science — but I have faith, too. I don’t see that the two have to be incompatible — the world is no less miraculous just because it’s composed of atoms and forces and chemical reactions — and yet there are so many who would insist on making them enemies. I think we need all of those things — instinct, myth, dream, and reason — in balance, to be the best versions of humanity that we can be. But that is, of course, only my own musing on the topic; I do love when Gaiman makes me think these thoughts.

In Brief Lives, you can really feel the saga spinning towards something. All the pieces are not only in place but now in motion. There’s more of an intensity to this volume, that will only ratchet up further in The Kindly Ones. Before that, though, we get the delightful imaginative exploration of World’s End…

Sandman, Volume 6: Fables and Reflections, by Neil Gaiman

Title: Sandman, Volume 6: Fables and Reflections
Author: Neil Gaiman
Year of Publication: 1993
Length: 264 pages
Genre: fantasy/magical realism – graphic novel
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read
Rating: 3.5 stars

This collection has some really great stories, and some that I find rather unengaging. As with Dream Country, there’s really no through-line here, so it’s probably best to take each story individually.

Fear of Falling- The opening story, which, honestly, I find a little pedestrian. It’s the sort of thing every writer indulges in sooner or later, I guess: a story about creation, a story about when it fails, a story about fearing success. The best thing in this episode is the advice Morpheus gives to the struggling writer/director in his dream: “Is it that bad to fail, that hard to fall? Sometimes you wake, and sometimes, yes, you die. But there is a third alternative.”

Three Septembers and a January – I love this story to bits. It is the true tale of one of history’s quirks, Joshua Abraham Norton, the First Emperor of the United States from 1859 until his death in 1880. As Joshua is contemplating suicide, Despair tempts her older brother Dream into a bet: to see if Dream can claim and keep him, rescuing him from Despair, without his falling into Desire or Delirium. Against his better judgment, Dream takes the bet, and gives Joshua a dream of being Emperor — and so he becomes. What follows is an incredibly charming story of how he sets himself up in imperial majesty, never mind his actual poverty. He becomes a beloved local celebrity in San Francisco, cherished for his eccentricities, protected from persecution, selfless and benevolent in all his dealings. Desire cannot tempt him, and as Delirium notes, “His madness keeps him sane.” The best thing about this story is that, as I said, it is entirely true — or, given that (as we learned several volume ago) things need not have happened to be true, I should better say — it happened, it is historical reality, well-documented. It’s a wonderful inspiration, a testament to the power of a dream to sustain a life, to keep someone going. Cocooned in his perfectly sane madness, Emperor Norton is inviolable.

Thermidor – Lady Johanna Constantine, who we met back in Hob Gadling’s origin story, is on a mission from Morpheus in the fading days of the Reign of Terror. An Englishwoman, undercover in Paris, steals the head of Orpheus, the Dreamlord’s son (the head, incidentally, is still alive and talking, which we’ll learn more about later) and take it to safety. Robespierre, we learn, seeks to destroy the head, as he seeks to destroy everything he dismisses as superstition, sacrificed to the altar of Reason. The story progresses through several philosophical tangents, exploring the nature of liberty, the double-edged sword of revolution, and the place that the mystical and the impossible have in a post-Enlightenment world (a thread which the series will pick up again later). I like this story a lot, largely for that mix of historical reality and the fantasy of the Dreamworld. I also loved seeing Johanna Constantine in action, and I always wished she would have become a more regularly featured character.

The Hunt – In the modern age, a grandfather tells his reluctant granddaughter a story of their people. In the Old Country, a young man named Vassily meets a gypsy woman, who in exchange for dinner gives him a chain with a picture of a beautiful duke’s daughter on it, and he decides to set out in search of her. From there, it becomes largely an Eastern European/Russian fairy tale — with a couple of notable diversions. For one thing, the thin veil over the story is that “the people” are werewolves. For another, Vassily runs into Lucien, Dream’s librarian, who has misplaced a book that has fallen into Vassily’s hands — and thus, when Vassily most needs assistance, Lucien becomes the unlikely fairy godmother to help him out of trouble.

August – Late in the reign of Emperor Augustus, formerly mere Caius Octavius, the emperor disguises himself as a beggar for a day and discusses the world he rules with an actor named Lycius. I really enjoy this story in some ways, and it irritates me in others. It’s incredibly inactive — most of the panels are Augustus and Lycius just sitting on a stoop, talking. Some of the history is good, but a lot of it is completely wrong, the stuff of popular misconceptions about Roman society. I don’t know whether I’m disappointed in Gaiman for shoddy research, when he’s usually so precise about it, or if I should let it slide on the basis of this being 20 years old and thus an entire generation of scholarship behind. The most interesting part is the explanation of why Augustus set the boundaries of the Roman empire where he did — and, historically, the Empire’s swift decline began when they over-extended themselves. By Gaiman’s account, this had to do with a prophecy, that Rome would either flame and sputter for a few hundred years, or else spread to the ends of the earth and rule for ten thousand years. (Personally, I’d give quite a lot to see a graphic novel series on that version of history). Overall, this one somehow falls flat for me, which is odd, since the material should’ve been a gimme.

Soft Places - A young Marco Polo gets lost in a desert sandstorm and finds himself stumbling through the veils of time and reality, meeting with people from the past and the future, as well as our old friend Fiddler’s Green. I like the inherent concept behind this one — the very idea of “soft places” where reality thins, time bends, and the mystical collides with the mundane — but somehow this is an issue that never sticks with me. Somehow the characters just don’t reach out and grab, and while the art pretty perfectly reflects the story, that also means it ends up a whitewash in my mind. So, Soft Places is effective in weird ways, but not one of my favourites from this volume.

Orpheus – This is a good if not particularly inventive retelling of the myth of Orpheus, the musician whose bride dies on their wedding day, who goes to the Underworld to find her, only to lose her through his own lack of faith before he reaches the realm of the living again. The best thing about this storyline, which spans several issues, is the integration of the Endless into the tale. Orpheus is, in this version of the tale, the son of Calliope and Morpheus — an interesting twist, since most versions put him as the son of Calliope and Apollo, and in “August”, Augusts mistakes Morpheus for Apollo. That’s one of those little ways Gaiman twines his stories together, that you might not appreciate on the first or even the fifth read, but which curls there, underneath, waiting for you to notice it. Anyway — we meet, for the first time, the entire family of the Endless gathered for Orpheus’s wedding to Eurydice, including the missing prodigal, here called only Olethros — which translates as “Destruction”. When Eurydice dies, as in the myth, Orpheus wants to go to the Underworld for her; here, the decision involves the Endless. Dream initially refuses to help, and father and son quarrel, but Uncle Destruction sends Orpheus to talk to Death — who says the way to get in and out of the Underworld alive is for her to agree not to perform her function on him. The myth progresses as we know it, all the way through the less-often-told story of Bacchantes tearing him to pieces (in a few rather gruesomely detailed pages) and his still-sentient head floating down the river.

The Parliament of Rooks – Another one that fails to impress me. Of all the elements of the Dreamworld, the Eve-Cain-Abel part always seemed weird and out of place to me. They always seem like they’ve come in from a very different kind of storytelling, and so I never much enjoy their presence. The best note in this story is Eve’s tale of the three wives of Adam, from the Jewish apocrypha.

Ramadan – This story has some of the best art in the series, though I find the tale itself somewhat lacking. The sultan of Baghdad believes that he is living in the most glorious city in the most glorious time ever created, and he strikes a deal with Morpheus to keep it so forever, in the Dreamworld. And so Morpheus locks the city in a magic ball, removing its glory from the real world but preserving it forever in fantasy. The story ends in what was then modern Baghdad, in 1993 — eerily similar to what is modern Baghdad in 2012, war-ravaged and destitute, but still a place where a young boy might dream of a golden past.

Overall, there’s a lot in this volume about the place where dreams and the mundane world collide, and that’s a theme I really enjoy. There are also a lot of threads, less pronounced, about family, other relationships, and their value. From Vassily’s choice to prize a soulmate above wealth and carnal delights, to Augustus’s pronounced familial disappointments, to the amazing love that wraps Emperor Norton, to, of course, the tangled web of the Endless. It centers, ultimately, on Morpheus’s fraught relationship with his son. Orpheus disowns him in a moment of despair, and unyielding Morpheus refuses to reconcile even after tragedy befalls his son. If you know where the story’s headed, you can feel what it’s beginning to spin to in this volume, as certain aspects of the story pick up more energy and as more information falls into place. Fables and Reflections is thus oddly situated between plot-advancing and ponderous, displaying both the overall arc of the series and the imaginative exploration at which Gaiman excels.

The September Queen, by Gillian Bagwell

Title: The September Queen
Author: Gillian Bagwell
Year of Publication: 2011
Length: 389 pages
Genre: historical fiction
New or Re-Read?: New
Rating: 3 wobbly stars

I have tremendously mixed feelings about this book. The 3-star rating is sort of an average, which is why it’s wobbly and rather blurry around the edges. There are things I liked about it better than that, and there are things I disliked it on the level of a 2-star book.

The September Queen is the story of Jane Lane, who played a critical part in helping Charles Stuart, who would become Charles II, escape from England following his defeat to Parliamentarian forces at the Battle of Worcester. During their flight, Charles and Jane become lovers. Most of the book takes place during the Interregnum, an under-represented period in historical fiction, but the events cast their shadows both forward and backward, as the narration reveals what came before and the nuances of the political struggle, and as most readers inclined to pick up this book probably know that Charles does, in fact, reclaim the throne of England. (Hope I didn’t just spoil the 17th century for anyone, there).

So, we begin with Charles about to make what would be his last great stand against Cromwell’s forces, through the eyes of a well-bred girl from the local gentry. I was inclined to be on Jane’s side from the start.

I have come to the great age of five and twenty, and but one man has stirred my heart, and that came to naught. An old maid, her eldest sister, Withy, would say.

What is wrong with me? Jane wondered. Why can I not like any man well enough to want to wed him? It is not as though I am such a great prize. Pretty enough, I suppose, in face and form, but no great beauty. Witty, and learned, but those features are of little use in a woman, of little use to a man who wants a wife to be mistress of his estate and mother to his heirs.

What if there will never be someone for me?

I empathize. As the book went on, though, it got a bit harder for me. Jane wishes for adventure and gets far, far more than she bargained for — and in that sense, her story rings as a cautionary tale. And she loses herself in the bargain. She falls desperately in love with Charles while helping him escape and spends the rest of the book mooning over him, despite not seeing him for years at a time. Years. Years during which she lives a celibate life, shuffled between the courts of his relatives, while Charles is out doing pretty much everyone he encounters, occasionally dropping Jane a line to let her know that he’s going to give her some money someday. It’s a terribly uneven relationship, and it paints Jane in a pretty pathetic light. I do appreciate that, eventually, at the end, she tells Charles just what he’s done to her. She forces him to own up to that, and it’s a very powerful moment. But this flicker of self-awareness and empowerment comes far too late in the story, and she backs away from it pretty quickly.

As I read more books about the Interregnum and Restoration (the period appears to be growing in popularity, perhaps as authors and readers both realise that it has a whole lot more sex appeal built right in than the Tudors did), the overwhelming message seems to be one that reinforces the importance of female fidelity, while casually shrugging off male philandering. If you really love him, this model says, it doesn’t matter how many other women he’s seeing. He’ll value you for staying true even when he ignores you for years at a time. That’s how you know that your love is pure, and that you’re superior to all those other avaricious/libidinous whores. Since so much of Jane’s story is a historical blank, I would have loved to have seen Bagwell take some more exciting risks with it — give her a love affair with someone else, some other dashing Cavalier in exile, rather than just swallowing her feelings for ten years and enduring like a good little neglected cast-off. Instead, she ends up in emotional paralysis for a full decade and for most of the book — and that’s both frustrating and a little boring to read. Ultimately, it made it much harder for me to like Jane as a character. I lost respect for her, more and more so as the book went on and she shied away from every opportunity to assert herself. I would have liked to have seen some show of spirit from this woman that Bagwell so clearly wanted us to believe was intelligent, capable, and special. Perhaps this is why I’ve always had a soft spot for Barbara Palmer, even though in many ways she really was a nasty piece of work. She was a fascinating study in contrasts, vivacious and temperamental, kind and cruel, extravagant and exuberant, envied and detested — and she, at least, didn’t allow Charles to hold her to a higher moral standard than he held himself to. Perhaps some historical novelist will take up the challenge of Barbara soon — I would find it a tremendously welcome change from the narrative of pathetic, doomed fidelity.

Other things I disliked were more on the side of technique. Jane is, emotional paralysis aside, a little too perfect. Everyone adores her, from men she spurns to half the princesses and queens in Europe. Though she undoubtedly has trouble in her life, she has no personal enemies whatsoever — or even personal rivals. She never encounters most of those she competes with for the king’s affection, or encounters them only briefly and at a distance. Not only is it rather unbelievable, it makes the story a little dull in places. I was aching for something — anything — by way of actual conflict. In the first half of the book, we at least get the excitement of evading Cromwell’s army, but in the second half of the book? Nada. Even Jane’s conflicted feelings about Charles mostly take place at a distance, and when her cousin and then her brother find out about her affair, their anger with her lasts less than two pages. This utter lack of personal conflict gives the book a rather meandering feel, without a real drive, particularly since the exciting historical events happen at such a distance once Jane is removed from the immediacy of Charles’s story.

My other major criticism is of pacing. The first half of the book takes place in a matter of days; the latter half over a decade. That alone makes for a somewhat odd read. There are ways in which I feel this book might’ve been better if it had been more of the first and hardly any of the second. Even within each half, though, there are definite pacing oddities, and for the first hundred pages or so, the book seems very uncertain what it wants its mood or even its genre to be. The story doesn’t flow particularly well.

Overall, this is a very sad book, I think. The reader knows from the start, if she knows anything at all about Charles II, that the romance is doomed. Honestly, I’m surprised that in the thorough peppering of Shakespearean quotations (appropriate in places, annoyingly intrusive in others), Bagwell resisted the urge to refer to Charles as “one who loved not wisely but too well” — which is (taking the quote removed from original context) how I’ve always thought of him. Bounteous with his affections, not a drop of malice in him — but utterly faithless, incapable of loyalty, and very much an “out of sight, out of mind” sort of man. And so I find Jane’s story very sad — and not in a moving or cathartic way, just in a vaguely dissatisfying way. Charles ruins her life, flat-out. Not only does he tear her from her home, her family, her country, her friends, not only is he the direct cause of dire misfortune for her, but he steals her heart and never gives it back. It makes him seem tremendously selfish, among other faults. He strings her along for ten years, knowing he can’t promise her fulfillment but unwilling to let her go. She loses a decade to him, and, despite the ending (which I’m trying very hard not to spoil), I never got the sense she ever really breaks free of his influence. Which I think is more tragic than anything else that happens to her.

So, really, I don’t know how to recommend this book. If you don’t mind being as conflicted as I was, or if you just plain like the Restoration that much, it’s worth the read. I do commend Bagwell for taking on such a little-known heroine. It was a treat to read a historical novel without an awareness of the major details of the story; I mean, though I knew she couldn’t end up with Charles, I didn’t know what would happen to her, if she would marry eventually and who, where her travels would take her. I got to find all of that out as I went along, which is almost never the case for such a thorough history geek like me. (And I somehow mastered the urge to get on the DNB and spoil myself, which is even more impressive). I did also enjoy the sexy bits — while they lasted. One of the many genres The September Queen tries on in those first hundred pages is straight-up romance novel, and those are actually some of the best bits (not least because they seem to have the strongest sense of intention). As I stated at the beginning of the review, this book averages out to 3 stars… but just barely, and that mostly on the credit of taking on an obscure character. After having enjoyed The Darling Strumpet so much, this one rather let me down.

The Dovekeepers, by Alice Hoffman

Title: The Dovekeepers: A Novel
Author: Alice Hoffman
Year of Publication: 2011
Length: 504 pages
Genre: historical fiction
New or Re-Reads? New!
Rating: 4.25 stars

The Dovekeepers is the story of four women, Yael, Revka, Aziza, and Shirah, who find themselves at Masada in 70 CE. I don’t consider it a spoiler to give away what happens at Masada, because it’s an at-least-relatively well-known historical event anyway, and because the bookflap tells you right off. I’m pretty sure nearly 2000 years is long enough for a spoiler warning to expire, and as with most historical fiction, it isn’t the what but rather the how that makes the book interesting. Masada was a fortress, the last holdout of the Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire, famous for the fact that rather than surrender or be captured when the siege broke, the rebels committed mass suicide. The Romans found only two women and five children surviving when they finally broke through. I didn’t mind that I knew, going in, that most of the characters would be dead by the end; instead I was wondering the whole time who would be the 7 to survive. (I was right on both women and on three of the children, for what it’s worth). Hoffman explains, in a short note at the end, some of the things that inspired the work — a trip to Masada and a collection of artifacts. Disjointed as they are, Hoffman draws imaginary threads between them, weaving them into the tapestry of the story. I love that she gave us that glimpse, to let us know that this book, while entirely fictitious, has such concrete roots. It’s a lovely marriage of fact and invention, masterfully handled.

For this review to make any sense, I have to introduce you to the women. Yael is a young woman whose mother died in her childbirth, for which her father has never forgiven her. She’s carried the psychological stigma of a murderess her whole life. She and her father, a famed assassin of the radical Sicarii, flee Jerusalem after the destruction of the Second Temple, and spend months wandering in the wilderness before they come to Masada. Revka is an older woman, a refugee from a sacked town, traveling with her two grandchildren and her son-in-law, all of whom have witnessed shattering atrocities. The two young boys are so traumatized they no longer speak, and the son-in-law has turned into a Jewish version of a berserker warrior. Revka holds the family, such as it is, together. Aziza is a girl who was raised as a boy among the nomads of the Moab desert. She knows how to fight, how to shoot, how to ride, but has had to suppress that identity entirely in Masada, where women cannot so much as touch weapons without making them “unclean”. Shirah is the Witch of Moab, Alexandrian born, cousin to the leader of the rebels, and thus occupying a strange liminal state between outcast and honourable. All four of them end up working in the dovecotes, which indirectly keep the fortress afloat — their droppings are the fertilizer used in the fields and orchards. Their lives intertwine and entangle as their world decays around them, and they face not only personal challenges but the increasingly desperate situation of Masada. As the Roman legions draw near, the rains fail to come, and the food stores dwindle, fraught nerves and the threat of danger brings many secrets to the surface.

I was troubled, at first, by the structure of this book. It begins in first-person narrative from Yael, and remains in her voice for fully the first third of the book. I’m not a big fan of first-person narration to begin with; it’s difficult to do well, can become tedious, can lead to large gaps in the story, and has, for a lot of authors, become something of an easy crutch. But Hoffman’s quite good at what she does, and Yael’s voice was compelling enough that I overcame my distaste. Then, rather abruptly, we switch to Revka’s first-person narrative. Then Aziza’s. Then, finally, Shirah’s. Initially I felt cheated by this; I had gotten so invested in Yael and her journey that being ripped out of her head and plunked down in someone else’s felt unsettling. Yael remained in the story, still a part of events, but I no longer knew how she felt about things — I only got Revka’s perspective. And then that feeling repeated each time the narrator changed. Towards the end of the book, though, the stylistic reasons for the shifts became apparent. In many ways, this is a story about secrets, about what you hold in your heart and what you choose to share. It would be more difficult to convey that sense in a third-person or a more frequently rotating first-person narrative. I still wish I’d gotten more from each of the women along the way, but I can appreciate why Hoffman chose to tell her story in the way that she did. Of the four, Aziza’s was the story that felt least connected to the others — odd, perhaps, in that she’s the daughter of one major character and the lover of two secondary characters. But in a lot of ways, her voice seems the least well-developed; it felt as though her section could have as easily been told from Shirah’s perspective without much being lost. I still appreciated her presence, though, because she cast an interesting light on the gender issues of the story — and perhaps she had to have her own voice for that, if no other reason, in which case I just wish it had been better integrated.

Magic permeates this book, without turning it into a fantasy novel. It’s a tremendously thin line, and Hoffman walks it with great care. There’s no point where more than a few pages goes by without mention of some incantation or protective amulet or prophecy or divine intervention or ghostly presence — and yet it blends seamlessly into the world. It isn’t even particularly mystical, not so much esoteric or occult as just another side of life, another tool to use. There’s also not so much of the tang of the unknown about it; Jewish holy men perform magic regularly; a lesser caste peddle charms and talismans; the magic of women is forbidden yet tangibly present in the shadow-world they live in, hidden from the men. And it’s on that last that the book focuses. What I found particularly interesting is the way it all intersects with religion, absolutely inextricably, and how much of that focuses on the feminine and on polytheistic traditions — but not in an obnoxious way. It doesn’t overwhelm the story, and it isn’t as burdened by some of the more woobly Neopagan ideals as books like Mists of Avalon are. There’s something refreshingly plain and straightforward about it.

The trade of magic dominates so much of the interpersonal reactions in this book. Debts to each other, debts to god, debts to the dead, all of these things are real and vital for the characters; magic affects their lives on every level. And it’s dark — both the magic and the book overall, as you’d expect from something centered on a tragedy. But a lot of the darkness has nothing to do with the eventual outcome of the rebellion; these women suffer, sometimes by their own errors, sometimes by fate, sometimes by sheer bad luck, sometimes just through the consequences of living. As they suffer, so too do they persevere. There’s a lot in this book that felt very psychologically real to me — from issues of denial to self-harm, stages of depression, degrees of guilt and grief. In some ways, this makes it a bit of a brutal read, but I actually enjoyed that. It’s cathartic, in a way, and quite intense.

This book is not fluff. If you’re looking for historical fiction treated with a light hand, this is not it. The magic is bloody and requires sacrifice, the imagery is almost disturbingly vivid, the main characters are not always thoroughly likeable, and the whole thing does end in, you know, mass tragedy. I adored it. It’s one of those books that got into the back of my head and took up residence. It’s an oblique approach to history, a compelling story, and a thoroughly good read. I don’t think it’s a book that will please everyone, but it certainly pleased me.

Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff

Title: Cleopatra: A Life
Author: Stacy Schiff
Year of Publication: 2010
Length: 400 pages
Genre: biography
New or Re-Read? New!
Rating: 4 stars

This is a very strong biography, and Schiff does an admirable job rescuing Cleopatra’s reputation from the vagaries of history. Her story as the world commonly knows it is one of erasure and revision. The men who wrote her earliest biographies were not only men but her enemies, Romans eager to blame her for the downfall of the Republic.

Unfortunately, just due to the fragmented nature of the historical record, that means Schiff does spend a lot of time defining her subject in the negative — talking about Cleopatra by talking about who and what Cleopatra wasn’t. And that does become tedious in places. I can’t blame Schiff for this — it’s the nature of the beast, and as someone who spends most of her life with her head in the 16th century, I know how many frustrations there are when it comes to trying to circle in on what the truth might’ve been. It does, however, make for a bit of roundabout reading. She also has to spend a lot of time on Caesar and Antony’s lives, despite her frequent assertions that Cleopatra wasn’t defined solely by her relationships with them. I don’t know that there’s a way around that — her readers need to know the political entanglements of the time, and those entanglements were largely engineered by those specific men — but it is a bit of an odd juxtaposition with her intended goal.

I like the book best when it’s extrapolating Cleopatra’s probable life based on what we do know about the culture of the time, about Alexandria, about other leaders of her ilk. Those are the passages that come most to life and which show Cleopatra nearer to who she probably was: a clever, resourceful woman holding onto her survival — and that of her country — with both hands. Schiff spends considerable time on Cleopatra’s likely education, on the social culture of Alexandria, and on the conflicts between the native Egyptians and the Greek immigrants. That structure created a fascinating dichotomy both within Alexandria and between Alexandria and the rest of Greece; I enjoyed learning more about how Cleopatra, grateful to the native Egyptians from her period of exile, worked further towards ingratiating herself towards them and towards improving their lives than had previous Ptolemies. She learned their language, adopted their religion, took part in their rituals, all to a far greater degree than anyone else in her dynasty had. It made her unpopular with the Alexandrians — a new level of political turmoil to add to the swirling charybdis Cleopatra had to negotiate — but it gave her a lot of support in other ways and from other quadrants.

Another fascinating political narrative is that of the East. So often, Rome in this period overshadows the history of what was going on elsewhere, which is a shame, because the machinations of Parthians, Armenians, Anatolians, Judaeans, Nabataeans, and other peoples of Mesopotamia, the Arabian peninsula, and the eastern Mediterranean are well-worth consideration. Cleopatra’s ongoing feud with Herod — as well as the complex and murderous dynamics of his family, to which Schiff devotes some time — is a narrative all in itself, and one which directly refutes claims that Cleopatra seduced every man who dropped into her path.

I also like this book because of the ways in which it remains so relevant. The shaming of women’s sexuality, the body-policing, the castigation of an independent woman, the naked fear of a woman in power — these things still resonate so clearly. The vitriolic criticisms of Cicero would not be out of place in conservative mouths today. As Schiff deftly notes:

It has always been preferable to attribute a woman’s success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life. Against a powerful enchantress there is no contest. Against a woman who ensnares a man in the coils of her serpentine intelligence — her ropes of pearls — there should, at least, be some kind of antidote. Cleopatra unsettles more as sage than as seductress; it is less threatening to believe her threateningly attractive than fatally intelligent.

This is still true. So much about modern culture imbues women with the idea that they are only worth as much as their body, that their sexuality and ability to bear children defines them — the source of all virtue and all vice, depending on how it’s used. And, of course, men get to decide whether you’ve used it properly or not, now as then; modern women are subject to the same binary judgment as Cleopatra was, cast as the vile, ambitious seductress opposite proper, devoted, modest Octavia. In that way, this book is importantly feminist; we need more of this version of history in the world.

I’ve seen a lot of criticism about this book being dry and boring — and, well, it is a non-fictionalized history. There’s a lot of difference between this book and, say, Hand of Isis, Lily of the Nile, or even the particularly dense Masters of Rome series. But one should not be judged by the other’s standards. Cleopatra: A Life is a bit dry in some places, perhaps, but definitely not boring. It is a comprehensive and engaging biography which clears away the accumulated detritus of centuries’ worth of defamation. Well worth the read.

The Grass Crown, by Colleen McCullough

Title: The Grass Crown (Masters of Rome #2)
Author: Colleen McCullough
Year of Publication: 1991
Length: 1132 pages
Genre: historical fiction
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read
Rating: 4.5 stars

The second book of Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series follows up admirably on the first. The scope of the world expands, Rome faces new crises, and the Republic continues to crumble inevitably towards its own destruction. The reader gets to see it all through the eyes of some of the most fantastic characters who’ve ever lived, men and women who are at once larger-than-life and all too real.

Much of the first half of the book focuses on events in the east. First Gaius Marius and then Lucius Cornelius Sulla travel through the nations that border Rome’s province of Asia Minor: Bithynia, Pontus, Armenia, and even into the westernmost part of Parthia. We get some background on the labyrinthine genealogy that dictates the succession of eastern kings, we see Mithridates grow to power and eliminate his rivals — and we see him tuck tail and wait for better times when faced with the Romans. But wait he will. Mithridates dreams of ruling an empire that stretches far further than his little Black-Sea-bordering Pontus; he wants to take Rome’s provinces, and then take Rome. So though Marius and Sulla finagle some negotiations to keep him behind his borders for a while, he’s still lurking, waiting for the first opportunity to strike out.

The first half of the book also spends some time on domestic matters in Rome. We become better acquainted with Livia Drusa, whose brother Marcus Livius Drusus married her off in the last book to his friend Quintus Servilius Caepio (son of he who stole the Gold of Tolosa). I really love her arc for a lot of reasons. It’s the most in-depth view we get from a woman in either this or First Man in Rome, and I like that. I’m glad McCullough takes some time out from the heavy politics and the wars to give us this angle on events. Women’s history is too often overlooked, and particularly in the case of Livia Drusa, that’s a shame — because without her, the next generation of Rome might’ve looked quite different. When we left Livia Drusa last, she’d been forced to marry Caepio, a man she despised, to solidify an alliance for her brother. To his credit, Marcus Livius Drusus eventually realises what an error he made — the Battle of Arausio changed him, and he starts moving away from the conservative ideals that his friend Caepio still stalwartly adheres to. Bitterly unhappy, Livia Drusa takes advantage of Caepio’s absence from Rome to engage in an affair with Marcus Porcius Cato Salonianus, grandson of the famous Cato the Censor and a freedwoman (and thus not at all of the appropriate patrician pedigree). When Caepio returns and finds he has a new redheaded son, he takes to beating Livia — and when Marcus Drusus finds out about that, he and Caepio have a falling out, Caepio divorces Livia, and Livia marries Cato. Through all of this, Livia is spied on and betrayed by her eldest daughter, Servilia, as nasty a piece of work as you could possibly imagine. And yes, this is the Servilia who will become Julius Caesar’s mistress.

And speaking of Julius Caesar — he’s old enough now to be a proper character, though still a child. McCullough portrays him as a true prodigy, whose mother has to fight to keep him firmly rooted in some kind of humility (considering how little of it he demonstrates, one wonders what would have happened if not for Aurelia’s influence). Remarkably intelligent, both book-wise and possessing a keen insight into human nature, Young Caesar shows tremendous promise even at a terrifically young age. Unfortunately for him, this (and the prophecy of Martha the Syrian) mark him out as the man who will someday overtake Gaius Marius’s legacy — and Gaius Marius intends to have none of that. Of course, readers know better — Gaius Marius won’t be able to keep Caesar down — but it is an interesting insight into little-known details of his youth and early life.

Meanwhile — Drusus’s plot intertwines with that which takes over most of the second half of the book: the Social War when the Italian Allies rebelled against Rome over issues of political enfranchisement. Drusus tries desperately to find a way to reconcile the old guard with the demands of Rome’s rapidly expanding and changing world — but to no avail. War breaks out, instigated in large part by his friend, Quintus Poppaedius Silo, one of the other survivors of the Battle of Arausio. And the war is devastating; war in Italy is civil war, with no plunder to be taken, just wealth and food to be lost. It does, however, provide Sulla at last with his opportunity to shine. He takes command following Gaius Marius’s second and more debilitating stroke, seizing the opportunity to show Rome his worth. That, while it saves Rome from Italy, eventually provokes conflict between Sulla and Marius, and their strife is what dominates the last section of the book.

Interestingly, despite dangling him in front of us for the first half of the book, McCullough actually holds off the confrontation with Mithridates until the next book — for this one, he’s just a spectre, the boogeyman haunting the edges of the realm. He does take advantage of the Social War to start attacking at Rome’s borders, taking over Asia Province and ordering towns throughout the region to put to death over 80,000 Roman citizens. But we don’t actually see this or what happens next. We hear about it from poor exiled Publius Rutilius Rufus (who escapes the slaughter and reports back from Smyrna), and we see Sulla eventually head off to do battle with him — but we never actually get there. In a way, this is a little maddening — all the buildup in the beginning of the book doesn’t pan out — but in a way, it’s also rather magnificent. McCullough knows she’s writing a serial, after all, and history rarely ties itself up neatly. By structuring the book the way she does, you get a better sense of how Rome could be blindsided by Mithridates’s attack; the reader gets as consumed in the conflict with the Italians as Rome herself does, and so by the time we remember to think about Mithridates, it’s too late. He’s already made his move.

There’s only one point where the story really starts to drag, and it’s towards the end, in the complicated political situation that leads to Marius’s return from exile during his conflict with Sulla. Things get pretty twisty, and since most of the major players involved at that point aren’t folk we’ve been following all along, it’s a little confusing. Other than that, McCullough does a great job leading the reader through the twists and turns of Roman politics and military maneuvers.

At the end of the book, McCullough leaves Rome in dire straits: ravaged by civil wars, starving, blood-soaked, and with the threat of Eastern invasion still looming large. I promised myself I wasn’t picking up Fortune’s Favorites just yet — not least because I have five books to read before the end of the month if I want to win my 100-book Challenge, and starting another 1000-page monster is not a good way to make sure that gets done — but I’m anxious to get back to it. I so enjoy being immersed in McCullough’s Rome, precisely because total immersion is so possible. McCullough drops you straight into history, fully-realised, not sketchily glanced at. It’s a wonderful indulgence.

The First Man in Rome, by Colleen McCullough

Title: The First Man in Rome (Masters of Rome #1)
Author: Colleen McCullough
Year of Publication: 1990
Length: 1152 pages
Genre: historical fiction
New or Re-Read?: Re-Read
Rating: 4.25 stars

I love a panoptic. I really do. Nothing pleases me better than a truly epic story, crossing decades, with a cast of thousands. I have no trouble keeping track of it all, and so that never detracts from my enjoyment. Rather, it enhances it — I love to feel as though I’ve been dropped not into an isolated story, but into an entire world, fully realised and teeming over with real people.

Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series (at least the first four books, which are all I’ve managed to read thus far) is a masterful example of this sort of literary indulgence.

The First Man in Rome, the first book in the series, chronicles the meteoric rise of Gaius Marius. He’s not a name most of us know anymore, unless you’re a devoted classical scholar. But he was a huge name in his own time, and he is, in fact, the reason so many of the things we do know about Roman history are the way they are — particularly with regard to the army. Gaius Marius is a New Man — meaning he’s the first man in his family to have entered the Senate. Though some of the Romans deride him as “an Italian hayseed with no Greek” thanks to his Picentine origins, Marius has his thumb on Rome’s pulse better than most of the Senate. He also has unparalleled military instincts — and he can tell where trouble’s going to come from (Africa, then the Germans). Fed up with the mismanagement of patrician generals, who have gotten tens of thousands of Romans killed with their ineptitude, Marius decides that no one but him can really set things right. He sets about restructuring the legions, improving the training of the troops, and knocking the self-important senatorial generals off of their high horses. His most controversial measure is to begin recruiting from a new source. Typically, Roman soldiers had to come from a certain rank — Roman, Latin, or Italian citizens who were landowners. Marius begins recruiting from the Head Count, the poor men who own no land, but who might just be in need of a good solid career. The old guard, of course, squabbles and fusses about this move degrading the sanctity of the armies — but with so many men of the proper rank dead, they really have no choice, unless they want to get invaded.

Marius is well past the traditional age to be consul for the first time (42), but when he’s in Numidia, warring against Jugurtha, he meets the Syrian prophetess Martha, who tells him that he’ll be consul not once, but seven times. This ought to be impossible; the traditional rules of Rome stated that ten years had to pass between consulships. Not fussed by that, Marius sets his sight on that goal and goes for it. He has a lot of enemies — mostly patrician men loathe to support a New Man from the provinces — and the political tangles are rendered in a fascinating way. McCullough makes a reader feel these battles, manipulations, and gossips every bit as keenly as the politics of the modern world — and we see these ancient Romans not as removed figures, but as very real people with very real foibles.

The secondary plot focuses on Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a man escaping his family’s downfall. Though the Cornelii are patricians, Sulla’s father was a drunk who left his son in penury, reliant on his mistresses (a Greek and his stepmother) for his livelihood. But when he turns 30, the age when he should be entering the Senate, Sulla decides to turn his life around. It takes him a few years (and a few murders), but he manages to get into the Senate and embark on a promising career. His rise starts when he serves as quaestor to Marius in Numidia, demonstrating a keen mind and a talent for covert ops. Marius and Sulla become linked not just by their military ambitions, but by their wives — Julia and Julilla, two daughters of Gaius Julius Caesar. No, not that Gaius Julius Caesar — he won’t be born for a while yet. These women will someday be his aunts.

Finally, there’s Gaius Marius’s best friend, a sensible man loyal to him, though he doesn’t always agree with his politics: Publius Rutilius Rufus, who is related to almost every other important character in the books. Among the most important of them are Marcus Livius Drusus, a young politician who will become more important in the second book, and Aurelia Cotta, who marries one of the Julian sons (and she will someday be our famous Caesar’s mother). Much of the story gets relayed through Publius’s letters to Marius, and those letters have a wonderful voice to them. It’s a clever way of summarizing the gaps in the story without getting too bogged down or making it feel like a history lesson. Publius gives colour to some of the dryer parts of the timeline.

The story follows these men and women through the beginning of the end of the Republic, from 110 to 100 BCE. This period sees the subjugation of Numidia as well as an invasion from German tribes, and McCullough gives both depth and breadth to those events. The Jugurthine War gets wonderful detail, both in the lead-up to it, the personality of Jugurtha, and the complex politics that governed Rome’s intervention. This is really the war that kickstarts Rome’s period of rapid expansion. Up till then, they had mostly acquired territories almost accidentally; from this point forward, they will go after them with greater initiative. We see the tragedy Rome suffered at the Battle of Arausio, when Cimbri and Teuton tribesmen slaughtered over 120,000 Romans in a day, through the eyes of a few young legates (including Marcus Livius Drusus). And we see the politics, the ins and outs of Roman elections, the power of the tribunes (especially one Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, a populist-turned-revolutionary), the nuances of religion, and the tensions between patrician and plebeian, between the Five Classes, in vivid, colourful detail.

There are points where the book drags, at least for me — they tend to be the sections more heavily focused on military history, rather than personal, and I confess that’s where my attention wanders a bit. I also wish McCullough gave more time to the female characters. They get a better shake later on — even the very next book features several rather more prominently — but there are definitely some wasted opportunities here. Julia and Julilla are counterpoints to their respective men, rarely granted individual voice, and the formidable Aurelia does not even appear until a few hundred pages in, and does not assert herself so magnificently until almost the tail end of the book.

Still, this book is fantastic in so many ways that I’m willing to overlook those shortcomings. McCullough does a magnificent job bringing Rome to life. This book is educational without being a textbook, which I also enjoy. The maps are astonishingly helpful, and the extensive glossary of terms (and by extensive, I mean almost 100 pages in itself) provides all the detail you could possibly want about these facets of ancient Roman life. Better than all of that, though, McCullough presents characters. The First Man in Rome has people in it — weak and strong and in-between, prejudiced and considerate, conservative and liberal, hot-tempered and cool-headed. Even the minor characters are nuanced and three-dimensional, and the major characters are so well-drawn that, by the end of the book, you’ll feel like you’ve known them forever. Reading The First Man in Rome is an all-over wonderful experience.

Recommended to: history geeks, fans of HBO’s Rome, and anyone who loves awesome stories.

Classical Compendium, by Philip Matyszak

Title: Classical Compendium: A miscellany of scandalous gossip,
bawdy jokes, peculiar facts, and bad behavior from the ancient Greeks and Romans
Author: Philip Matyszak
Year of Publication: 2009
Length: 192 pages
Genre: history / nonfiction
New or Re-Read?: New
Rating: 4 stars

Matyszak has a great approach to history. He displays it not as staid, overworn stories of famous individuals, but as the real experience of ordinary people — sex, violence, whiny complaints, and all. Matyszak’s Rome is not a land of starched white togas and squeaky-clean marble; his is the Rome of garish dyes and roughspun tunics, of squabbling neighbours and petty disputes, of bad behaviour and its often quite public shame, and, most importantly for the reading experience, of dry wit, frank judgments, and explicit language. I’ve previously read Matyszak’s Legionary, and I hope to read more of his books in the future, because I so appreciate his voice.

In the Classical Compendium, Matyszak has combed the annals and anecdoates for the best tidbits, juiciest gossip, and weirdest tall tales out of Greco-Roman history. And there is, no doubt, some strange stuff in there. Matyszak’s scope includes travel, the military, religion, love affairs, animal lore, odd jobs, criminal records, and even the customs surrounding death in the ancient world — and some of most notable suicides and murders. He also sprinkles the text with traditional jokes from ancient Greece, many of which could be told today without anyone having the slightest feeling of anachronism.

You’ll learn about silphium, a plant worth its weight in gold for its medicinal uses, which included cough syrup and fever relief, as well as birth control and abortifacent; it went extinct sometime in the first century. You’ll find aphrodisiac recipes, and love poems guaranteed to win a woman’s heart — alongside invective poetry guaranteed to drive her away, if that’s your aim. Pompey had trouble with elephants, chameleons live on air, dogs got crucified once a year, and Julius Caesar had a horse with toes. Augustus Caesar imposed strict morality on his people, but couldn’t govern his own family (as anyone who’s watched I. Claudius knows). You’ll learn about some of the ancient world’s most bizarrely specific jobs, like anti-elephant infantrymen, pig igniter, theatre shade operator, professional informer, and phallus manufacturer. If you have someone you desperately need to curse, the ancients have some delightfully specific recommendations. Everyone from commoners to emperors sought advice from the oracle, for questions as big as whether to go to war, as small as “Will I retrieve the mattresses and pillows I have lost?”, and as universal as “What have I done to deserve this?”

What all of these tidbits bring to life is the idea of an ancient world that was full and lively, in some ways as sophisticated as our own, lacking only our technology. It’s a treasure trove, the gems of which illuminate a world long gone, alien to us in some ways, but alarmingly familiar in many others. Matyszak’s books are fantastically educational, but eminently readable and entertaining as well. This isn’t a stuffy recitation of dates and famous names; this is people, as they were and as they still are. And that, to me, is the very best kind of history.

This book got 4 stars instead of 5 mostly because I wish there had been more things in here that I didn’t already know. I would say the book is probably half-and-half information that was new to me versus information that I’ve picked up somewhere along the way, either in school or just in my own trawling of historical topics. I also think that, because this book relies more heavily on the primary sources, there’s less of Matyszak’s sense of humour coming through than there was in Legionary, and I missed that. The Classical Compendium is, well, exactly what it says: a miscellany, bits and pieces out of the original authors or generally summarised, without a lot of connective material or commentary. Still, it’s thoroughly delightful, and a wonderful historical reference book. Every lover of the ancient world should have this on her shelf.