The Saturday Morning Post (No.2)

I've reread three books in June, two of them old favorites, and one from so long ago that I had no recollection of it. The first, one of the favorites, is Flashman and the Mountain of Light. I picked it off the shelf to read early in June while waiting for The Book That Wouldn't Burn to arrive from the library. The second book is John Masefield's The Brid of Dawning, a sea story that I no doubt read some 30 years ago, and remembered nothing about it. And the final one, another old favorite is Patrick O'Brian's H.M.S. Surprise.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

 Flashman and the Mountain of Light by George MacDonald Fraser A+

After last month's two books set in India/Burma in the 1840’s, and with none of my free books I had on hand appealing to me, I selected this Flashman book off my shelf to reread. Truly, this book is an order of magnitude better than those two previous historical fiction books set in India and Burma, Sands of Truth and Windrush. Fraser really knows how to write, and because he writes in the first person, he can showcase his vastly entertaining skill with words by having them “written” by the central character of the story, Flashman, which makes the character himself all the more entertaining.

What I mean by this is that when a writer had a distinctive voice – think of Chandler or Wodehouse – their writing risks overshadowing the story when written in third person, as their distinctive style can insert the writer between the story they are telling and the reader, perhaps outshining the story being told. In some cases, this might be the author’s intent. But if not, by using a first person narrator, their wit and styles becomes that of the character and comes from within the story – fleshing him or her out as they tell their story, in their style, keeping the story itself in the fore.

This Flashman story set in 1845-46 India. Flashman is sent as a secret agent to Punjab city Lahore in the guise of an attorney to settle the question of who is entitled to a treasure held by a British bank. The Punab is ruled by a child, with his drunken and luscious mother, as regent. The Punjab has a large, European trained army that is itching to drive the British from India, waiting only for an excuse. Fraser seamlessly inserts his (anti)hero, Flashman in to an extensively researched historical event, the first Punjab War – which includes footnotes highlighting the various historical events and people. The two book covers suggest something of how Flashman fits in to history. This combining fiction with real history facts and facets that are often too unbelievable to be fiction, makes for both entertaining and educational history. This is the way I like my history. Highly recommended.

The Bird of Dawning by John Masefield C+

This is a sea story written by a fairly well known British author, first published in 1933. At the age of 15 in 1893, Masefield went to sea as an apprentice in a Cape Horn windjammer. He became ill in Chile and abandoned the sea, working at odd jobs in the U.S. before returning to London in 1897 to become literary editor of the Speaker. He went on to publish many books of novels, prose, and poetry until his death in 1967. 

The novel is set on a tea clipper in the late 1860's, a time when tea clippers raced from China to London with the new crop of tea. A time when hard nosed Scottish ship owners would spend a fortune building fast, yacht like sailing ships, manned by large crews, hard-driving captains, especially designed to bring the first crop of tea each year from China to London in the least amount of time. In the Great Tea Race of 1866, five ships arrived in London within three days, the leading three ships within hours of each other after a voyage of 99 days from the far side of the world. I came across Basil Lubbock's The Tea Clippers while exploring the stacks of the University of Wisconsin Library while in college, and fell in love with the romance of tea clippers and the sea stories he told of their exploits over the decade or so of their brief heyday until steamships and the Suez Canal replaced them.

This novel is a fictional account of a tea clipper that is struck on a foul night by a steam ship, It sinks, leaving 16 survivors in an ill provisioned boat in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. Having been trained as a sailor, Masefield writes about their plight and the measures taken to deal with their situation in extensive detail, probably more than most casual reader would need, or care to know. Even I found it so, plus shipwreck survivors in a small boat is not one of my favorite tropes. It does, however have some twists and turns, that I won't spoil and ends with an exciting race; a fictional account similar to the ending that Great Tea Race of 1866 that I mentioned, which lifts it up from a simple C to a C+.

H. M. S. Surprise by Patrick O’Brian  A+

I written about how much I admire the writing style of Raymond Chandler, P. G. Wodehouse, and George MacDonald Fraser, and I do, but the writing style of Patrick O’Brian is, in my opinion, every bit their equal, though subtler. His writing style is very different than these others, and though his style may take a little getting used to, it is every bit as clever and delightful, while being perhaps more insightful and literary. Though it is written in a modern, if unique style, it is written in such a way as to suggest the period of which the novel is set. Found families are a trope these days, and a ship's crew in the days of sail is very much a found family. The books feature many shipmates who follow their captain from ship to ship, so that the stories are filled with both old friends as well as new characters, unique for each story. His books are a perfect blend of great literature and exciting genre fiction, fiction that in the 21 book series takes the reader around the early 19^th century world, several times over, with many unexpected events and interesting ports of call.

This is the third book in the series. I’ve read all but the last two or three books at least twice and probably three times, so I could just pick this title off the shelf to read, knowing where I was in the saga. Not only is this one perhaps my favorite, but it takes us to India, something of a theme these last two months.

The story opens with Captain Jack Aubrey in temporary command of the frigate Lively while the ship’s captain, a member of parliament is sitting with parliament. They are on tedious blockade duty in the Med, keeping an eye a French fleet in harbor. He is ordered home to return the ship to its captain, and to stop along the way to pick up his best friend, Stephen Maturin, who, though he usually sails with Aubrey as the ship’s surgeon, is also a volunteer secret agent for the British. Maturin had gone to the Spanish/French controlled island of Minorca to meet with Spanish resistance groups. However, it had been leaked to the French that Maturin might be a spy, and so they had taken him into custody. Aubrey must rescue him in a daring night raid. After this episode, in order to “rehabilitate” Maturin, i.e. to make the French think they made a mistake about him being a spy, he is to be sent as an aide to a diplomat bound for Kampong in Indochina. Being very well regarded by the boss of British naval intelligence, and knowing that Captain Aubrey is aware of this second, secret occupation, Aubrey is appointed captain of the frigate, Surprise, that will carry the diplomat to Kampong. The story then relates various incidents at sea during the long voyage, first to Bombay. In India the ship is refitted after a harrowing passage south of the Cape of Good Hope, giving us a taste of India. And when they sail on to Kampong, they eventually come upon a French squadron consisting of a ship of the line and several frigates that have been sent to the India Ocean to disrupt British trade. This leads to a sea battle in between the French squadron and the East India Company's yearly convoy of large merchant ships bringing a vast quantity of tea and good from China to London, aided by the Surprise.

The series is best read in order, and though every book has its own story, there came a point where the series simply became one 21 volume novel. I have read other books of this period and in this sub-genre from a number of other writers including C. S. Forester, Alexander Kent, and Dudley Pope, and I can say that O'Brian's books stand head and shoulder above them, not only in writing, but in bringing in the world and society of the time period into his stories.

If you have any taste for historical fiction of this period and/or the sea, be sure to give Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin books a try. I can not recommend them enough.

Coming up next week: Three cozy mystery/medical/monster urban fantasy books. Stay tuned.

The Saturday Morning Post

I am reading a lot these days. By the end of the month, I will likely have read 11 books and sampled one more. If I review all the books I read or sample, they, for better or worse, threaten to overwhelm this blog. So I have decided to break them down and out into their own post, The Saturday Morning Post. I may also include some book reviews in my Wednesday post if I have nothing else to say, but the Saturday post will be primarily for books reviews.

In the past I listed books in the order I read them, but for this post I think it would be better to jump around a bit to feature only one book, or group similar books together in a post. I will simply note the month I read the books. So where we go. Since these reviews reflect my taste in books, I will restate my tastes so that you can discount my opinions according to your taste in books.

This reviewer's taste in books:

I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

With that out of the way, let's launch this post with a new fantasy book.

The Book That Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence C+  (June 2023)

The first, 200K word, fantasy/ SF book in The Library Trilogy. The story takes place on a dusty world of dried up oceans with humans, humanoids, and bug eyed monsters at war with each other. It set in a magical/medieval type of walled city that lays at the foot of a mountain. The city is small enough to walk through in an hour. Bow and arrows are the weapon of choice at the start of the story, an indication of its technological level. 

Set within the mountain and reached from the city is a library containing billions of paper books from countless places – apparently including Earth – and from untold ages. This library is so vast that it is divided into hundreds of rooms many of which can be measured in miles. Librarians can spend days search for books within it, sometimes getting lost and dying in it. Books are shelved in some rooms on racks of wood, in others, metal or carved stone. And in at least one room are just piled in rows and towers, and in another, scattered like a sea. Some of these rooms are accessible, others lay behind doors that can only be opened with magic of some sort. There are magic machines in the library that can be entered that recreate the world of the book one bring into it. People can apparently live within this machine for years. Oh, and monsters that need to be killed come out of these machines as well. The vast rooms have places that can magically heal wounds. The library also has a staff of magical robots of various sorts and shapes, like crows, dogs, as well as humanoids. Some appear to be broken, others serve the human librarians, sometimes. Oh, and the robot “blood” can open sealed doors. And last but not least, there is a section of the library where one can travel back and forth in time at will – even becoming a flying ghost when visiting the past. This part of the library will also create any illusion that one wants. As you can see, it’s a magic library. Anything goes.

The plot involves the city outside of the library being under increasing pressure from their traditional enemies, a humanoid race from somewhere, who, over the course of the decade which this book covers, close in and eventually gather in the desert outside the walls of the city with the intent of sacking it, for some reason. Only Lawrence knows what this army has to eat while camping in the desert outside of the city for years, and he isn’t saying. As the enemy closes in the city’s scientists begin to use the books in the library to design and build new weapons like rifles, to defend themselves. And nail polish. The final fifth of the book involves on extended battle/action/danger/chase sequence in which we also get dramatic plot twists, revelations, magical rescues and heroic sacrifices, as well as a metaphysical explanation of the library’s purpose that may, or may not, make any sense. It didn’t to me, but that might just be me, I was doing a lot of skim reading by this point, as I found it tedious reading.

The story is told in close third person, with two point of view characters. One is Livira, who begins the story as a 10 year old child refugee from the dried up sea bottom desert whose boldness gets herself assigned to the library. Over the course of the books she grows to become a young woman and a bold and curious librarian. The other point of view character is Evar, who is one of four children, raised by two of those robots, who have grown up to adulthood within one of the miles wide rooms of the library, trapped by doors that do not open. Each of his two “brothers” and his “sister” have great skills taught to them by the book that went with them when, somehow, they entered that machine I previously mentioned as children. All except Evar, our point of view character, who remembers nothing about his experience and has no special skills as a result. As a result, we don’t get to know much about how this machine works.

I am fairly certain that fans of fantasy will find this book very enjoyable given its sweeping scale and plenty of action. Indeed, the only reason why I ordered it up from the library is that it was getting almost universal rave reviews. However, as you can gather from my grade, I was less than impressed, and gave it the “+” mostly for ambition. However, I did read the whole book – though as I said, by the long action sequence at the end, I was skim reading parts to get to the outcome.

I enjoy Livira as a character and found her story far more interesting than of Evar’s. In the chapters featuring Evar, Lawrence kept repeating the same story of their origins over an over again, sometimes within a page or two, but only that story. And in that, I seemed to see the hand of the author deliberately withholding or dribbling out bits of the more complete explanations for the sake of using it at some other point in the story. He was keeping secrets for his own purposes. While not exactly cheating, I found it to be a peak behind the curtain of the story to glimpse the craft behind its construction, which took me out of the story a little.

I’m not a visual person, so that intricate action scenes don’t work for me. I can’t picture them. I find them tedious reading and if they’re long, I’ll skim read to the end. All I need to know is the outcome. I mention this because I had to slog through or read several long sections of wandering around the library discovering mysterious things, plus, as I said, skim read nearly100 page at the end where everything comes together for a conclusion that, in the end, mostly just sets up the next book in the trilogy. Don’t expect a complete story here. It serves to introduce characters and setting up the next one.

I also found the library to be more of a plot device than a believable, organic, or even fantastic reality. The metaphysical/biblical explanation of it made no sense, at least to me. And, well, It seems to be the case here, as with most fantasies, that an author can create anything they care to, and then explain it away with an airy sweep of a hand saying it’s “magic.” Moreover, the world beyond the library is barely sketched it, with little thought put into it, such as, as I pointed out previously, how a barbarian army can lay siege to a city for years from a vast desert – or why. One can only hope that in the next volumes the world beyond the library and its place in it becomes more, dare I say, realistic. Alas, I don’t think I care enough to find out.

Extra bonus book... 

Agent Zero by Jack Mars DNF  (June 2023)

A widowed college professor is kidnapped. The kidnappers, in searching for answers they believe he (unknowingly) possess find and remove a small device that had been surgically implanted under the skin behind his ear. With it removed, he is flooded with memories and abilities that had been blocked from a previous career as some sort of secret agent… 

I am undecided about this book. I wasn’t in the mood for another thriller, so I did not read on beyond this point, but I have nothing negative to say about it, as a thriller, at least so far. I may return to it if or when I am in the mood for a thriller.