Imperial Purple

K.J. Parker
Colours in the Steel
The Fencer Trilogy Vol. 1
Orbit 1998

Sometimes it takes me a little while to catch up on my reading. Colours in the Steel is ten years old now but still worth a review for those, like me, who weren’t aware of it. Orbit have been reprinting it repeatedly since its original publication which is always a good sign.

Colours in the Steel is the first book of a fantasy trilogy. It is based inside the trading city of Perimadeia, a rich place which has never in its history been conquered. It is aggressively mercantile and willing to extend the hand of friendship even to enemies if they can make money out of it.

Paramadeia has a slightly bizarre legal system which takes the concept of trial by combat to its illogical conclusion of hiring advocates to fight to the death for you. I like the whimsy of the concept but wasn’t totally convinced that anyone would actually want to enter a profession with an approximate life expectancy of two court cases. Still, this is not central to the book although one of the main characters is Bardas Loredan, a fencer-at-law.

The city’s main foes are the People of the Plains - nomadic people who were kept in check for many years by a General Maxen and his cavalry (one of whom was Bardas Loredan). Maxen’s simple tactic was to instill terror by randomly attacking camps and massacring the inhabitants. However, the General is ten years dead and his murderous chickens are coming home to roost.

Temrai, the other pivotal character in the story, is the young leader of the plains people. He is intelligent, ruthless and has vowed revenge on the city due to Maxen having wiped out nearly his entire family during a raid. The city is deemed to be impregnable but it has never before faced a foe like Temrai. It looks as if its day might be numbered.

This conflict between Temrai and Bardas (who, as one of Maxen’s few surviving men is co-opted to defend the city) over Paramadeia is the core of the first book. The book is pretty much a complete story in and of itself but enough is left open for the second book to seem like an interesting proposition.

I haven’t encountered Parker’s work before and I have been the poorer for it. I see he has written at least nine books - I shall certainly be seeking them out.

J.J.R. Tolkien
Edited by Christopher Tolkien
Illustrated by Alan Lee
The Children of Húrin
HarperCollins 2008

I have literally (and I mean ‘literally’ literally) lost track of the number of times I have read The Lord of the Rings. It is a towering work of fiction. On the other hand, I have never been a particular fan of his extensive posthumous work - what a friend of mine refers to disparagingly as ‘Tolkien’s Laundry Lists’.

He is being unfair but there is sometimes the feeling that every bit of paper that the good Professor ever scribbled on must have been published somewhere. I remember the dismay with which I discovered that Frodo originally suffered under the name Bingo. Tolkien rightly rejected this idea - probably after hearing his children singing B-I-N-G-O and Bingo was his name, O. This is the sort of thing an author should be entitled to keep secret - it is a cruel thing to publish early drafts.

Having got that off my chest, I can say that The Children of Húrin is a fish of very different fettle. According to Christopher Tolkien’s editorial notes this is a story that his father worked on for a long time, both before and after The Lord of the Rings. Although he never completed it to his satisfaction he nevertheless left many complete sections and drafts of other sections. His son has done a good job of tying these manuscripts together into a coherent narrative.

The story concerns, as you might expect, Húrin’s children - mainly his son Túrin but also his daughter Nienor. Húrin, if I have understood the genealogical chart at the back correctly, is the great, great grand-uncle of Elrond Halfelven. It is set during the First Age within the context of the wars against Morgoth. It is epic in tone and full of words like ‘foreboding’, ‘doom’ and ‘fell’.

Túrin is the quintessential hero - sturdy, tall, a great warrior and a leader of men (and elves). He also has a streak of darkness and hubris which, in a tragedy which might come from Shakespeare or Euripides, ultimately drags him to his doom.

Although we see a fair bit of fighting in the book, the wars are peripheral to the main story. We do see the fall of the elven stronghold of Nargothrond to the dragon Glaurung. But our main focus is that much of the blame for the fall belongs to Túrin and his warrior pride which builds a bridge across the defending chasm so that his army can easily ride out. He neglects to consider that the bridge might also be used by enemies going the other way.

Heroically, Túrin eventually slays Glaurung but the dragon, with his dying words, tells Túrin that he has unknowingly married his own sister and she is pregnant by him. Euripidean indeed.

It is not a light read but it is a quality one. This is Tolkien at his most majestic, full of rolling phrases and poetic sentences. His son has done good work in bringing this one to light.

Naomi Novik
Empire of Ivory
Harper Voyager 2007

Earlier this year, I reviewed Black Powder War - the book before this one in the Temeraire series. I had reservations about it and gave it three stars. This one is better although not perfect.

Temeraire and Laurence have returned to England with the precious fire-breathing dragon. Unfortunately, while they were away a dragon plague has struck and the great creatures and dying in droves. With Napoleon camped across the channel with a hundred dragons, desperate for a chance to invade, the situation is serious.

They are dispatched to Africa where, by slightly tenuous logic, they believe a cure might be found. A few sick dragons are sent with them as test cases. It is Britain’s last hope - a cure must be found before Napoleon realises how thin the aerial defenses are.

But Africa is not called the Dark Continent for nothing. With slave traders, hostile natives and wild dragons the hunt for the cure is anything but simple and things go very, very wrong for the British adventurers.

The book ends with Laurence having to make the most difficult moral choices of his career where duty and humanity are in direct conflict. The book ends with the consequences of his choices left hanging - we must await the next installment.

There were a couple of practical difficulties I had problems with. I had difficulty believing that an almost complete absence of aerial defense could be kept secret from Napoleon for the better part of a year. He would surely have had spies working like industrious train-spotters, plotting the movements of the British squadrons. I also wasn’t convinced that the African savannah eco-system could sustain as many voracious dragons as it apparently did.

These are mostly quibbles I guess. The other problem Novik has is that there are only so many ways that you can describe an aerial combat and in this, the fourth book, she is running out of them. I tend to flick through these combats pretty rapidly because I know what they are going to say.

As I said, this book is superior to its predecessor. It confronts some difficult moral choices and reminds us that abhorrence of the slave trade was by no means universal in the early 19th century. Indeed more than fifty years after this book a bloody civil war was fought over the matter in the United States of America.

I am looking forward to the next one which promises a difficult time for Laurence, Temeraire and the people and dragons of Britain. It has become pretty clear that Britain treats its dragons worse than just about any other nation. It is a state of affairs which cannot endure and I am keen to see what the resolution will be.

Lilith Saintcrow
Night Shift
Orbit. 2008

Earlier this year I reviewed Saintcrow’s Working for the Devil. For me, Night Shift is a slightly better book although there are aspects which are not to my personal taste.

It is the story of Jill Kismet, the resident demon hunter in the city of Santa something-or-other. I know the name was mentioned in the text somewhere but I can’t find it again. Not that it matters. Jill deals with (in her own words) nonstandard exorcisms, Traders, hellbreed, rogue Weres, scurf (don’t ask), Sorrows, Middle Way adepts and anything else the nightside can throw up.

Like Dante Valentine in Working for the Devil she is very competent at fighting and she kills lots and lots of things in the course of the book. Fortunately they are all evil so that’s all right. And she’s very fond of children.

I’m falling into sarcasm again which is unfair because the book doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is - a jolly "kick-arse" (or "kick-ass" if you prefer) story of a girl who kills demons and saves the city. The old town-tamer story that drove a thousand westerns and none the worse for that.

Jill has made a bargain with a powerful demon named Pericles. He has given her demon-like powers but in return she has to give him a couple of hours of her time per month. The sessions are bad but could be much worse and the demon is continually playing mind games with her. She finds this even worse than the monthly sessions. This aspect of the book is good and raises it above Working for the Devil.

For the rest it is non-stop action as Jill fights off a succession of nasties while trying to find the truth behind the rogue Were and the demon lady who are terrorising the city. On her side are some good monsters (were-thingies - mostly feline), a white magician who keeps her house as a Sanctuary, and a supporting cast of police and forensics who are there mainly to make sure the bodies are dealt with in a tidy and timely manner. The aforementioned Pericles may or may not be on her side - he is rather ambiguous.

If this sort of story appeals to you it’s not a bad example of the genre. I don’t much care for the genre myself which may mean it is better than I give it credit for. I don’t think fans will be disappointed. Three stars.

Liz Williams
Snake Agent
Night Shade Books 2008 (original edition 2005)

Inspector Chen is a police detective in "Singapore Three" - one of a series of artificial islands. His special responsibility is for crimes involving the supernatural and for liaison with Hell. His wife is a demon who has a pet badger-spirit disguised as a teapot.

Young girls are dying and their spirits are not ending up in Heaven as they should be but are cropping up in some very strange places in Hell.

Enter Zhu Irzh, a demon officer with Hell’s Vice Squad. Some influential characters in Hell have caused him to stop promoting vice and work out what is going on with these young girls. He and Chen must work together and fight their way through the labyrinthine bureaucracies of Hell and back.

I enjoyed this book in parts. Williams’ vision of Hell as warring bureaucracies of mind-boggling inefficiency is entertaining and amusing. The ill-matched buddy story of Chen and Zhu Irzh works quite well also.

However, I wasn’t completely convinced by the Chinese cultural aspect although I am no expert here. The sinister demon hunter didn’t really go anywhere and in any case lost a certain credibility when the teapot bit his ankle and Chen’s wife pushed him into the harbour.

The supernatural part had a slightly pasted-on feel. The story could pretty much have been the same if we were talking the criminal underworld rather than the demonic one although the chrome would have been different. Substitute kidnapping for spirit-stealing, rival gangs for rival bureaucracies, weapons and lockpicks for magic and there you are.

Nevertheless not a bad read for train, plane or rainy day. Williams has written lots of other stuff since this book was first published in 2005 and I suspect that subsequent Inspector Chen outings will be better. I’d certainly give them a try. Three stars.

Lisa Lutz
Curse of the Spellmans
Simon and Schuster 2008

Curse of the Spellmans is the sequel to The Spellman Files which was published in 2006. I didn’t review the original (Imperial Purple didn’t exist then) but I enjoyed it a lot. As well as being smart and sassy it had a surprising amount of real human feeling in it - particularly in the relationship of the central character (Isabel (Izzy) Spellman) and her little sister, Rae.

I am happy to say that Lutz has kept up the good work. Possibly spending two years on the book rather than rushing it out in a year has helped. Certainly it has a polished feel to it.

The Spellmans are a disfunctional family of Private Investigators. They compulsively spy on each other, record each other’s conversations and follow each other around, eager to acquire whatever is needed to blackmail the other before being blackmailed in turn. Izzy has noticed suspicious things happening with her family - her Dad is going to the gym and eating tofu, her Mom sneaks out in the night to vandalise motorbikes, her big brother David has abandoned his law business and sits around all day drinking and her little sister Rae is pestering a policeman old enough to be her father and has just run him over with her car. Oh yes, and her best friend has run away and refuses all contact.

All this is nothing compared to the suspicious behaviour of their new neighbour. What else can you say of a man who keeps his office locked, even when he is the only one there; who shreds his correspondence and puts different parts of it into the garbage separately thereby making it impossible to reconstruct; whose very household waste has nothing suspicious in it? Women he contacts just disappear. Is he using his cover as a landscape gardener to hide the bodies?

Izzy is determined to work it all out. Nothing, not even being arrested four times (twice at the behest of her own family), is going to stop her. You’ll have to read it yourself to get the plot details - I’m not going to spoil it for you - but suffice to say that all is revealed and wrapped up exceedingly well.

A worthy successor to an excellent first book. Go and buy it. Four stars.

Robert B. Parker
Stranger in Paradise
Quercus. 2008

When you buy a Robert B. Parker novel you know what you are getting. The protagonists will be strong, internalised and with no respect for position, only for person. Spenser and Hawk are the most famous but there are others and probably the most successful of these is the Paradise series starring Jesse Stone.

Jesse Stone fits the mold. Fired from the L.A. cops for being drunk on the job he has found redemption as the Police Chief of a small town in Massachusetts called Paradise. He fits in like a barracuda in a goldfish pond but the little fish come to appreciate his strength and, on occasion, ruthlessness. This is the seventh book in the series.

A self-proclaimed Apache warrior named Wilson Cromartie (Crow) is Jesse’s main opposition. We saw him as one of the bad guys in Trouble in Paradise where his one redeeming feature was an odd chivalry towards women. Ten years later he has returned and is looking for someone. He and Jesse are of a type and the mutual respect they have transcends, up to a point, their good-guy/bad guy relationship. For Spenser fans, think Hawk and you won’t be too far out.

The plot is predictable but then you knew that when you bought the book. Parker’s style gets sparser and sparser the more he writes but it is a paring down of an already sparse style, not the style of an author who no longer cares. After ten years Jesse seems to be finally getting the sometimes tedious on-and-off relationship with his ex-wife under control which I, for one, appreciate.

The book doesn’t break any new ground but it delivers on Parker’s usual promise - a fast-paced, well-written story about tough guys and what they do. I read it and enjoyed it and moved on. Three stars.

Shaun Tan
Tales from Outer Suburbia
Allen & Unwin 2008

In a previous review I gave Shaun Tan five out of five for The Arrival. Tales from Outer Suburbia does not quite achieve such heights but it is still an excellent book.

It contains fifteen stories, all set more or less in the suburbs of an unspecified city and all told in Tan’s gentle and often surreal style. The off-beat nature of his vision serves to increase rather than diminish the humanity of his subjects. His artwork is, of course, superb.

In any book of stories there will be some you like more than others. Some, such as Broken Toys and Stick Figures are downright creepy. Some, like Our Expedition and Grandpa’s Story are little slices of life - not perhaps completely within what we would call normality but insightful. Eric is a beautiful, poignant little story and I loved The Water Buffalo.

There are lots of others to love but there were a few I felt didn’t work so well. When he strays into satire with The Amnesia Machine and Alert but not Alarmed he loses his sure touch although I did like what people did with their ICBMs in the latter. With Wake he lets anger take over and for me this did not work as well as his normal oblique approach.

Because of these (for me) little glitches I can only (!) give it four stars. I do recognise that others might disagree with me and think it should have been four and a half and I wouldn’t object at all. It is not the work of genius that is The Arrival but it is a damn fine book. A worthy addition to any library.

Diana Wynne Jones
House of Many Ways
Greenwillow. 2008

House of Many Ways is set in the same world as Howl’s Moving Castle and is described as a sequel to it. It isn’t really a sequel although Howl, Sophie and Calcifer do appear in it. I enjoyed seeing Calcifer again - I have missed him.

The central character Charmain is a young girl who is a chronic bookworm. She is sent to look after the house of Great-Uncle William (aka Royal Wizard Norland) while he is away being cured of sickness by the elves. She has led a privileged existence until then and has to cope with her ignorance of matters domestic.

Unexpectedly someone called Peter, the Wizard’s new apprentice, appears. He too has manifest areas of domestic imcompetence with which they must cope. They must both also cope with the Wizard’s house where doors lead to unexpected places and with a bunch of recalcitrant blue kobolds.

The story winds along with Charmain working in the Royal Library part time. There she meets Howl et al who are looking for the Elfgift (although no-one knows what it is) to stop the kingdom falling apart and coming under the iron fist of Prince Ludovic.

It has all the elements and is well written as Diana Wynne Jones always is but I found it a bit disappointing. The story sort of meanders along with no particular sense of tension. Every so often there are dangerous encounters but they just sort of happen. Calcifer seems a lot less dangerous than he was, using his undoubted powers cheerfully to help out with problems.

So it’s readable and pleasant enough but it doesn’t compare to Howl’s Moving Castle or to many of her other excellent books. A three star read but could have been better.

Justine Larbalestier
How to Ditch your Fairy
Bloomsbury 2008

Well, the Advance-Copy-Of-Brilliant-Books fairy has struck again. In a manner most mysterious I have found and read a copy of Justine Larbalestier’s latest literary foray (due out in September) and I saw that it was good. In fact, it is her best novel to date.

It is set in a world where, like this one, our destinies are controlled by fairies. For many years when I was younger my life was made miserable by frequent visits from the Fuck-up Fairy resulting in disasters ranging from backing my parent’s car into a tree to drenching my girlfriend while trying to fix the toilet. Fortunately the FuF eventually moved on and my life improved.

Larbalestier’s heroine is cursed with the Parking Fairy. Many of us would, if not kill, then at least commit GBH to have a fairy that gives us perfect parking spots whenever we want them. But Charlie is still at school, can’t drive and is really tired of being bundled into cars for other people’s convenience. Why can’t she have the Shopping Fairy or the Fabulous Hair Fairy or something useful?

There’s only one thing to do. She has to ditch her fairy. But, as I know only too well from my time with the FuF, this is easier said than done.

I don’t want to say too much more because I’ll end up spoiling it for you. Suffice to say that Charlie’s increasingly desperate attempts to ditch her fairy are both touching and hilarious. And, as so often in life, things have to get much, much worse before they get better.

The only bad thing about this book is it’s not due out for another three months. Thank you Advance-Copy-Of-Brilliant-Books fairy. You’ve made my day.