My February Reading

 

The Razor’s Edge by W Somerset Maugham  A

This is my third Maugham book, and I really enjoyed this story. It is my favorite of his so far. It is mostly a character study of supposedly real people deeply disguised. It might be, Maugham had used real people and events, slightly disguised as characters in his earlier novels. There are several people who either claim to be or have been suggested to be the real characters, but if so, he as taken such great liberties with their real life as not to matter.

The story follows the life of a young American from Chicago who comes back from World War One changed. He has friends and good prospects, but all he wants to do is “loaf” as he tells his friends. He is in love with a young woman who also loves him, but she can’t understand why he doesn’t seem to want to work to make something of himself, given that he has friends who will give him the opportunity to do just that. The "Maugham" in the story meets this young man because he has a friend who is the uncle of the young woman. This friend, an American, got rich by brown nosing his way into European society, mainly the society of lonely wealthy widows, and dealing in art – selling the painting of hard pressed European aristocrats to wealthy American millionaires. We follow the lives of these people, and meet others along the way, as periodically throughout the 1920’s & 30’s Maugham encounters them in his life. We discover  how the young man lives and what he is looking for. And that’s it – Maugham’s engaging writing and his interesting characters make for an excellent story.

Fated, An Alex Verus Novel by Benedict Jaka  C+

I came across this book on Mike’s Book Review YouTube channel. He was asking viewers what fantasy series he should read next. This one, a 12 book series, is an urban fantasy set in London. As you may have gathered, I am a big fan of London, and so it interested me simply because it was set in London. I looked it up on the library website and the ebook version of it was available, so I picked it up.

The premise is that there are wizards and other types of magical people and creatures in our familiar world. I’m not sure if it supposed to be our world, or an alternate version of it where magic is well known. Since he makes a sly reference to Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden, whatever that world is, so is this one. My C+ rating reflects the fact that while I enjoyed the narrator and characters, this is really not my type of story. The story is fast paced and the narrator fulfills what I really like in a story – a character that I can enjoy traveling alongside of through the book. All to the good. What doesn’t click with me is my typical fantasy complaints, namely that with magic, an author can  their your character a special trait to pull out when he or she seems doomed. That and the fact that the hero can never totally defeat evil, since it is need for the next book in the series. In this story, all the utterly cruel and ruthless people the hero betrayed, just decide to let him be after their plans are defeated. No doubt we’ll see them again. And again. The library seems to have more or less the complete collection, so I might read the next book, someday. Who knows, anything can happen even in the non-magical world.

Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry  C+

This is the second book, chronologically, in the Lonesome Dove series of four books, but the last written. This takes place about ten years after Dead Man Walk, starting a few years before the Civil War and ending after that war. One might call this a sweeping tale of the old west. But in reality, it's an interconnected series of little tales of the old west, some concluded, others left hanging. We have our two main characters of Lonesome Dove, Woodrow Call and Augustus, Gus, McCrea who are now veteran Texas Rangers, but perhaps because they are more thoroughly explored in Lonesome Dove, they remain rather sketched in, Call especially. Many minor characters are more developed than the two key characters.

To be honest, before I finished the book I had started the review, and had it pegged as a B- book, a minus mainly because of McMurtry’s signature style, i.e. that of a bee or humming bird flirting from one flower to the next, or in the case of McMurtry, from the mind of one character to the next, restlessly, within a chapter, and from chapter to chapter, which can get tiring after 590 pages or so. While this technique allows the reader to get to know something of all the characters, it is doled out in small and often incomplete doses. Indeed, major things happen to characters that are never explained, even though he spent pages exploring little things about them. Moreover, he will sometimes start a story arc with a character and never finish it. Perhaps that is intentional making the readers think about the story without any resolution. He did, after all, win the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove, so this can't be a problem for most. Still, I have to wonder is he just didn’t know where to go with it. In any event, it loses points in my book.

The book is divided into three books, each focusing on a different main story, with all the continuing characters tagging along. I was getting pretty weary by the end of the second book, but the third books starts fresh with the civil war, and I thought, well, this should be interesting. However, it is more of the same, with a great deal of confusion thrown in. It seemed like Texas had joined the Confederacy, and yet the Rangers were riding with “Blue Coats”, which I take to be American soldiers, i.e. Union soldiers. And, well, it skips through the war pretty briskly, in McMurtry’s signature style of snippets, of character and action. And yet, despite this hopping about, the book still dragged, with pages of the thoughts of minor characters, that I began to skip past. So for me, McMurtry did not stick the landing, leaving his main characters walking across Texas, failing again to achieve their mission, hence the final C+ rating.

Lonesome Dove is next up, but to tell the truth, I’m not really looking forward to it. We’ll get to it, but I’m going to take a month or two or more off before tackling 858 pages of small text.

NOTE the story depicts violence, killing, rape, and graphic torturer.

Life Class by Pat Barker  C

Looking for something new to read, I searched the library website for “London Historical Fiction” and came up Noonday by Pat Barker set in London during the blitz. While the blurb said it could be read as a standalone novel, it features characters from two other books, Life Class and Toby’s Room. Despite my rather disappointing experience with the Lonesome Dove series, I decided to start at the beginning rather than the end, and read Life Class.

Part one of the story follows two main point of view characters, Paul and Elinor who are art students at the Slade School of Art in London in the summer of 1914, along with two other characters, a young successful artist, Neville, and Teresa, a model (for artists to draw). We have a love affair and a love triangle of sorts with both Neville and Paul in love with Elinor, or maybe not. Paul, though a point of view character is either opaque or wish-washy. Actually both. Part two follows Paul as he goes to war working for the Red Cross as a dresser (one who bandages the wounds) and an ambulance driver. We get a slice of the human price of war in the field hospital, and letters between he and Elinor as she pursues her art career in London and a tentative affair.

Pat Baker is an award winning British author of the Regeneration Trilogy. Life Class is the first book in another trilogy about young English characters. English author, English characters, first book of three, perhaps those factors explains the rather cool and colorless characters, and the rather pointlessness, and damp squib of an ending for this story. While we sometimes get the thoughts of the two point of view characters, and have their thoughts expressed in their exchange of letters, they remained, to me anyway, ciphers. I never could quite make out what they were thinking since their attitudes seemed to shift constantly even if we were privileged to view their thoughts. Often, however, we had to rely on their dialog, which may well not have been fully honest. I expected more – more life in the story, and a more complete novel – than this book  turned out to offer.

The other thing I was hoping to find in this story is a taste of the times. A bit of Earl Grey’s line: "The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time." in the writing. However, all that was mentioned was that people were talking about the crisis that lead to WW1, which apparently her characters didn’t care much about. There was little period atmosphere in the story, though I did learn that even in WW1 there was a blackout in London, complete with streetlights dimmed and searchlights in the sky. Still, it was a I believe a Big Thing, and recognized as such at the time, and that seems missing in this story, which does not bode well for a story set in the Blitz of WW2. All in all, I won’t be reading further.

The Midnight Bargain by C. L. Polk B-

What the heck? For someone who doesn’t like fantasy and has given up on SF, what’s yet another fantasy book doing on this list this month? If I can blame the last one on my love of London, I can blame this on on my love of tea. The TOR blog recently had a piece on books to read while drinking tea, and this book was the one to read while drinking Earl Grey tea. My daughter’s family spent a long week in London last fall (a long COVID delayed holiday) and for both Christmas and my birthday, I received gifts of tea from them, one of which was Twinings Strand Earl Grey, and the other Fortnum & Mason’s Earl Grey Classic, so I’ve been drinking Earl Grey tea. Thus, when I found that this book was available as an ebook from the library, I borrowed it. And I rather enjoyed it.

It is basically a regency romance with magic, as well as a story about the emancipation of women from men’s expectations. The setting is entirely fictional, though perhaps on a human colonized planet – just a guess from some subtle hints, though it doesn’t matter in the story. The story is set around something like the “coming out parties” of England, where the debutantes began their quest to find a suitable husband. In this story, that quest is quite specific, as arranged marriages to enhance the families’ fortunes was the open intent of the book's "Bargaining Season" setting. While both sexes can possess the talent to summon and take control of immaterial spirits whose various powers can be used as magic – with the proper training – females of childbearing age are forced to wear collars that suppress their magical powers, since the immaterial spirits that they have the talent to summon can take over a fetus in their womb uninvited, thus giving the immaterial spirit a real body without the control a human. They can become powerful monsters with a body of their own. The hero of the story is a young lady of a family on the verge of ruin who is expected to land a rich husband. But in doing so, she must give up her magical abilities, at least until she is old. She doesn’t want to give up her abilities, as so doesn’t want to marry… but falls in love anyway. Reconciling all these factors and finding her own way to what she wants is what the novel is about.

There are plenty of twists and turns, that, in the end are happily resolved, perhaps a bit too sugary sweetly, but then, it is a romance, after all, and romances require happily ever after endings. But still, it is a light, entertaining read. Nothing too grim and dark here.