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.

Terry Pratchett
Nation
Doubleday 2008

Terry Pratchett has achieved such a reputation now that his latest book - Nation - does not even have any blurb. It is assumed that you will buy it just because it is by Pratchett, never mind what it is about.

Well, it worked for me. I bought it and did not regret doing so. It is one of Pratchett’s best books to date.

The setting is, more or less, our world during the Victorian era on a small Pacific island. Its inhabitants refer to it simply as The Nation. Their idyllic existence is brought to an abrupt conclusion by the arrival of an enormous tidal wave. The only survivor is Mau, a boy on the edge of manhood, who is at sea when the wave arrives.

A European ship, the Sweet Judy, is wrecked on the island at the same time and here too there is only one survivor - a young girl named Ermintrude who prefers, quite reasonably, to be known as Daphne. She is also 139th in line to the throne of England. As her ghastly grandmother once informed her "it only needs one hundred and thirty-eight people to die and your father will be King!"

What we have is a wise and charming coming-of-age story. Mau and Daphne must learn to cope with language, a steady trickle of refugees from other islands, and the distant but worrying threat of the Raiders. Mau must come to terms with the failure of his gods - what good were they when they let the entire population be wiped out? His struggle with belief is one of the strong elements of the book.

The point of view of the book switches between Mau and Daphne but very smoothly, without the need for specific chapters for each. We get a different world view in each case and can see the same events from two completely different perspectives. It is the work of a clever and mature writer.

I’m not going to say any more about the story elements. You will find them out for yourself when you read the book and I don’t want to ruin it for you.

If, by some chance, you fail to read Nation you are missing out on something very special.

Robin McKinley
Chalice
Putnam 2008

I have been a great fan of Robin McKinley since discovering the Damar books (The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown) more than twenty years ago. A new book by her is always a reason for celebration.

McKinley has two levels of writing - slightly fey fantasy (such as the Damar books) and frankly coruscating works such as Deerskin. The latter is a wonderful book but it left me feeling scoured and wrung out. So I was (perhaps because of some character flaw) hoping for Chalice to be one of the fey fantasies and was happy to find it so.

Chalice goes straight for the classic fantasy trope of "the health of the king is the health of the land". It is good to see the theme addressed directly rather than floating nebulously in the background. The ‘King’ in this case is called ‘Master’ and he has a circle or court of whom the Chalice is the most important. The Chalice is the person responsible for maintaining harmony both of the court and of the land itself.

The book is told from the point of view of Mirasol, the newly appointed but completely untrained Chalice. Her actual training is as a beekeeper and bees and honey are interwoven throughout the story.

The previous Master (a ‘bad King’ - unresponsive to the needs of the land) and his Chalice have both perished in a fire. The old Master’s brother is appointed in his place but this brother has been training as a Fire priest. Fire priests work directly with elemental fire and, as their training progresses, slowly lose their humanity. The new Master has not completed his training but is nevertheless only borderline human.

The new Master and Chalice must work together and find, despite their ignorance of their proper roles, a way to heal the land, Fire, honey and love must all work their magic before this healing can happen and the way is not easy.

I loved this book. It captures for me the wonderful feeling of otherness that first drew me into Damar. The central character, Mirasol, is uncertain of what she needs to do but has the courage to try anyway. She is a warm and very human character and the interplay between her, the new Master and the old Seneschal make for a great story. Four and a half stars.

Garth Nix
Illustrated by Sholto Walker
One Beastly Beast
Allen and Unwin 2008

One Beastly Beast is a collection of four children’s stories by Australian author Garth Nix. Only one (The Princess and the Beastly Beast) is actually new, the others being first published in 1998 to 2000 but since I have never read any of them before this is not an issue for me. Nix fans who already have the stories in their libraries may feel differently.

The first story is about Captain Blackbread (sic) and his gang of scurvy pirates who have stolen young Peter’s DVDs. Fortunately Captain Erasmus Rattus of His Majesty’s Royal Ratship Tumblewheel arrives and takes Peter to Neverworld where, with the help of a giant cheese, they defeat Blackbread and get the DVDs back.

The second story (containing the eponymous Beastly Beast) is of Princess Chlorinda who is bored in a castle where nothing ever happens. She sets out to search for adventure but without success. As she is trudging home in the dark she suddenly encounters a very strange monster.

Bill the Inventor is a young orphan in the O’Squealin Home for Lost Children. Bill is an inventor and his inventions (and some friendly mice) help to save him from being adopted by (in order) pirates, a wizard and a witch and aliens. The fourth set of potential adopters are a much better proposition.

Serena and the Sea Serpent is about a little girl who is very, very clever due to an unfortunately accident with a super-computer and a bolt of lightning when she was a baby. A sea serpent has been menacing the coast and sinking local shipping. The only way to keep it away seems to be sacrificing a young girl to it. Serena volunteers and uses her bulging brains to sort things out.

I’m something of a fan of Nix although it has mostly been his work for older children and young adults that I have read. These stories for younger readers are lots of fun and well up to standard. Walker’s illustrations are excellent and he is particularly good at rats and mice. Murex junior is still too young but when he is eight or nine I shall bring the book out again and I’m sure he will enjoy it.

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.

Pamela Freeman
Deep Water
Orbit. 2008

Disclaimer: same as for Blood Ties

Deep Water is the second volume of Freeman’s Castings Trilogy following Blood Ties. I gave Blood Ties four stars and Deep Water is better. The Australian edition is available now - the rest of the world must wait until September.

It continues the stories of the four main protagonists - Ash, Bramble, Leof and Saker - but their paths have diverged and each follows his or her own destiny. Clearly their paths will converge again but it will be in the third volume (Full Circle) for which we will have to wait another year.

Saker, the enchanter, continues to bring back the ghosts of the original inhabitants who were massacred by the invaders. As he gains in strength, purpose and knowledge the attacks become more dangerous and the major town of Carlion is invaded and many of its terrified citizens killed. As for book one, most of Saker’s actions occur off stage but his influence on the stories of the others is even stronger in this one.

This is the book in which we learn about Acton, the man who led the invaders through Death Pass a thousand years earlier, causing the formation of the eleven domains and the system of warlords which has controlled the domains every since. In Deep Water he is no longer the shadowy, larger-than-life legend of Blood Ties. Bramble is forced to re-live parts of his life seeing him always out of the eyes of his companions. She sits uncomfortably inside the minds of others, unable to communicate but seeing and feeling all that they see and feel. As more of Acton’s life unfolds she is forced to confront that fact that one-thousand-year-old legends are not a reliable guide to what really happened.

The first book ended with Ash and Bramble about to see Safred, the Well of Secrets. It is Safred, to whom the gods regularly speak, who informs them the key to dealing with the enchanter lies with Acton whose ghost must make reparations to the ancient dead. They reluctantly agree that they must do something and Bramble agrees to try and find Acton’s bones. Safred believes that Ash knows the songs that can raise Acton’s ghost but he has never heard of them. Ash sets of to find his father and discover why he was never taught them.

Leof, meanwhile, struggles with his conscience as he continues to serve the rapacious warlord, Thegan. Thegan is planning to become warlord of the entire eleven domains and doesn’t much care what he has to do to get there. Saker’s army of the dead throws his plans awry but, with the cunning of a true opportunist, he tries to turn it to his own advantage. By the end of the book he discovers that defeating the dead is harder work than defeating the living.

Unlike many epic fantasies we have not left world-building behind with the first installment. We continually learn new things about the world and the unseen forces which hold it together. The local gods are not, we find, all-powerful and all-knowing. There are greater powers that barely acknowledge their existence.

Enriching the world are more of the short stories of the common people, interspersed with the main narrative. These were one of the main strengths of Blood Ties and once again give the sense of a larger world around the main narrative - a world inhabited by real people, not just a backdrop of trees, villages and a cast of extras.

Deep Water ends on more of a “cliff-hanger” than Blood Ties. Major issues are left tantalisingly on the edge of resolution leaving the reader impatient for the final volume. It should be a cracker but we will have to wait until next year to find out. Four and a half stars.