Review of Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad

Spirits Abroad

Zen Cho

London: Tor, 2023

ISBN: 9781035015658

341 pp.

The Malay Chinese world is full of complex but fascinating conjunctions. Many people might be familiar with this phenomenon when it comes to the Nyonya food culture but it is also true of the world of the imagination. There are vampires which feed on human flesh, for example, but they must moderate their appetites so that they can manage their multi-generational family relationships and continue going to school because they understand the importance of education. There are oil-covered doppelgangers preying upon the Malaysian Oxbridge community but they too must navigate the various class and age-based epiphanies with which the other members must contend. There are monsters who, as bad boy communist philosopher Slavoj Zizek observed somewhere, follow us from the old country and latch on to us no matter how we try to escape (in this argument, Zizek equates Dracula with incest but I think we need not explore this too deeply here). The result of this conflation of traditions is a rich seam of magical realism that has been well mined by the author Zen Cho.

I first came across Zen Cho’s work with her delightful novel Sorcerer to the Crown, which I have reviewed elsewhere on this site. In this collection of short stories, all of which have been published previously, although I had not read any of them, she often seems to bring herself into the limelight, often on the cusp of adulthood or else reflecting on that time from a few years thereafter. Generally, there is some dissatisfaction with how the character (who may not be the author after all) has managed the transitions involved and this in itself is a suitable topic for personal horror. When it comes to an association of some kind with the supernatural, it is not surprising that there comes about a combination of the mundane with the fantastic.

Most of the stories were published from 2010-2, although there are some from 2014-5 and even one from 2020, Odette, which has a melancholy feeling of a much stronger nature than others in the collection. It is more common to find a measure of humour in the conflation of mundane and fantastic, as in “The House of he Aunts” and “First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia.” Her work is particularly well-served by her ear for dialogue (from The House of the Aunts, p.92):

“’Nanti kena rotan by the discipline teacher then you know,’ said Ah Lee. ‘You know Puan Aminah doesn’t even let us wear coloured watches. Must be black, plain black strap.’ She showed him the watch she was wearing. ‘Metal watch also cannot. Too gaya kanon.’

‘Weh lau,’ said Ridzual.”  

I find this very amusing but then I have become relatively familiar with the way that Malaysian (and Singaporean) people speak in English and I imagine it might be a bit of a barrier for those who do not have such familiarity. However, an open and enquiring mind will surely welcome the chance to expands its horizons.

That the stories have been written over the course of a decade by someone who is still a young author (she was born in 1986, which is scarcely more than being a teenager as far as I am concerned) rather encourages the desire to try to establish some kind of arc of development in the work but I am not sure how much that would be valid here. Some of the stories, for example The Fish Bowl, seem to rely on well-established themes which might be related to youth but that one appeared in 2013, while the seemingly more sophisticated The First Witch of Damansara was first published in 2012. Of course, stories are not necessarily published in the order in which they were written so maybe such speculation is all pointless anyway.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable collection of stories which I would have no hesitation in recommending to anyone. If readers have not had any opportunity to explore the Malay world before, then this is a splendid opportunity to do so. Those who have had the opportunity will surely welcome the chance to learn more. It will also be of interest to readers who just enjoy the kind of genre writing or who are interested in the tensions between modernity and tradition.

John Walsh, Krirk University

Review of Wesley Chu’s The Art of Prophecy

The Art of Prophecy

Wesley Chu

London: Daphne Press, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-83784-005-2

515 pp.

There is a clear and obvious prophecy: a child has been born who will grow up to be a great champion of the land and who will slay the great Khan, the most egregious enemy of the empire. Not only that but the youth has been identified and is safely ensconced within a castle where he is being prepared by the very finest minds of the land for the challenges that will come his way. There are only two problems: first, the very finest minds of the land are a bumbling mob of corrupt hangers-on and, second, the prophecy itself has been invalidated by events on the ground. As a result, the young man, Tian, is required to follow a different path to reach his destiny. This will require him to accompany a diverse and unlikely group of protagonists (they are not heroes, at least according to the evidence of this book, which is the first in The War Arts saga). All of this may be discovered by looking at the back cover so I am not spoiling the book here. Indeed, this does encapsulate the principal events but that thinking that this is the main event is rather to miss the point – this is an extraordinary and undulating adventure in which many of the tropes of the oriental fantasy genre are pleasingly upended. Not the least of these us that the men are all pretty useless and the women are the ones who get things done, from the mature grandmaster Taishi to the fierce warrior Sali to the vicious assassin Qisami. These are all women to fear but also to enjoy.

It is somewhat unusual for fantasy books to have genuinely interesting characters who demonstrate change and development but that is what we are offered here. Fans (self included) of Wesley Chu’s earlier works, including Time Salvager and Time Siege and the various lives and falls of Tao and Io, will have been suspecting as much since those works also had characters who were both amusing and interesting, albeit in a more limited way than has been shown here. They will be delighted to think that this is the first book in a series and that we can hope to be in the company of the characters as they explore the world and seek to achieve agency over it. This first book seems to have set up a path to the future, with a party of four established (more or less) and a sense of the way that the world works such that the contours of the future are beginning to be possible.

Of course, Chu is a dab hand at the outrageous reversal of fortune and this has been evident already. It is quite possible that the plot will lead off in quite a different and unexpected direction.

The story is set in a Wuxia-like background: that is, it follows itinerant martial arts proficient people as they pursue various goals while using superhuman powers of various sorts. There are a number of cool combat-assisting semi-magical effects to enjoy and, presumably, non-human personages to encounter in due course. East Asian sagas tend to be more unruly and topsy-turvy than Western ones, which have a tendency towards the teleological – we all know, for example, that Frodo is going to the mountain in as straight a line as possible, unlike Hanuman, the beloved monkey, who might have some excursions along the way that drag the plot into completely unexpected locations and then back again in the blink of an eye. I would anticipate there being a number of excursions in this unfolding saga and I look forward to following them to the very end.

John Walsh, Krirk University

Review of Ken MacLeod’s Beyond the Reach of Earth

Beyond the Reach of Earth

Ken MacLeod

London: Orbit, 2023

ISBN: 9-780356-514802

335 pp.

Beyond the Reach of Earth continues the story begun in Beyond the Hallowed Sky; a third and probably final episode, Beyond the Light Horizon is also promised. We return to the Scottish exploration of space – MacLeod, like the late, great Iain K. Banks, introduces elements of his own culture into his narratives. Born on the Isle of Lewes in the Outer Hebrides, he has a graduate degree in biomechanics and puts the scientific process to good use in his work. Good and quite hard science fiction (i.e. the story is anchored in physical reality rather than magic realism) is infused with politics in a winning fashion. The world has become divided into three main blocs. One is the Anglo-American (and India) alliance (Scotland has, of course, become independent) and is living true to its underlying ethic of rugged individualism to pursue interstellar exploration and exploitation at full speed. This alliance is balanced by one featuring Russia and China and various supporters which, not concerned about the problems of winning elections, can also push ahead without qualms. Scotland, meanwhile, is imbricated into the European Union which, worried about issues like personal rights and workplace safety has rather lagged behind (we do not see what conditions are like in the other two blocs on Earth itself). Worse still, faster than light travel had been concealed from the Union until being dramatically revealed in an instance of time travel in the first book (and described on the back cover so this is not a spoiler). However, the Union can call upon a secret superpower in Scottish engineering, which was in fact extremely influential in developing the British Empire. Consequently, the Scots (led by John Grant) have been building faster than light engine-powered nuclear submarines which have been sent into space and, particularly, towards terraformed planets and moons which offer freedoms for those willing to be pioneers. Amusingly, the principal villain (there are aliens but we have been given no idea of what if anything they are thinking), a robot, is definitely English and gives the impression of being the amoral, talented and privileged amateur who has played such a large role not just in imperialism but in Scottish history through the ages.

As the book develops, several strands emerge and evolve. There are various sites of exploration and colonization of places in space which are suitable for this purpose and the struggle against diverse obstacles preventing this (space is hard) and I enjoyed these sections the most. There is also a political aspect, as mentioned above but which also has the complication of Black Horizon, a trans-bloc cabal of the most powerful involved in disposing humanity’s future in space. This also involves the relationship between people and technology represented not just by the robot but by the presence of an omniscient artificial intelligence that controls just about everything and, therefore, everyone. The third element concerns revelations about space and time involving the aliens (Fermi) who are, improbably but there you are, present on all the places humanity discovers and wishes to inhabit in the form of giant and perhaps sentient rocks. All themes become more complex and inter-connected and it seems likely that the resolution of the story will involve moving in an unexpected direction (unexpected by me, in any case).

MacLeod is an experienced and skilled writer with the best part of a score of novels under his belt now and so it is not surprising that he is able to conjure up vaguely interesting characters that can mostly be distinguished easily enough but whose personal development does not get in the way of the story. There is a slightly unusual anodyne nature to the names used for the characters and some are little more than necessary operatives filling a specific function but that is characteristic of science fiction: if I thought that was a problem, I would not be reading it. At 335 pages, the book is not too long and the pace is brisk throughout. Speaking as a migrant worker, I have a certain affection for the Scottish settlers and hope that they do well and live happy and productive lives, although I fear the worst for them. I am also keen to find out how the whole aliens-from-beyond-space-and-time elements become resolved. Roll on the next book, then.

John Walsh, Krirk University

Review of Susanna Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu

The Ladies of Grace Adieu

Susanna Clarke

London: Bloomsbury, 2006

ISBN: 9-780747-592402

239 pp.

In this collection of short fiction, Susanna Clarke reports again on the world of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell that propelled her to fame. We are in the England (and it is England and not the UK) of the Napoleonic Wars period, with some additional attention paid to the class system than most contemporaneous fiction and with the addition, of course, the world of the fantastic. While both eponymous characters of the main work were magicians of some repute and quite willing to demonstrate their abilities so as to achieve various objectives of their own, there is very little sorcery in these stories, apart from the obtrusion of Faerie. Indeed, it is the presence of Faerie in the midst of the mundane world that marks out the difference between Clarke’s vision and that of reality.

The prevalence and importance of the Faerie world may have waned a little but it is still an important and everyday aspect of life in this England. Unfortunately, it is almost entirely exploitational and even vampiric in nature. There are endless examples of people – frequently young women – who are in different ways removed from their normal lives and forced into servitude in a place which might appear to them to be places of enormous luxury and privilege but which are, in fact, no more than filthy hovels full of vermin and disease. As for the Faeries themselves, they are autocratic and hyper-violent creatures eager to create and then re-create systems of social relations that are despotic and patriarchal in nature. Women, it appears, exist for the pleasure of their alpha overlord and, should their offspring become uppity, are liable to become part of a bloodbath of sons which creates an example to encourage the others to behave. This state of affairs can only be tolerated because of the Faerie ability to make things look better than they are, such that fair is foul and foul is fair. It is hard to feel much sympathy for them to or to mourn the fact that their age is coming to an end as the forests are cut down for the industrial revolution and to make warships which will restrict their habits to ever smaller areas until finally they disappear altogether.

It is tempting to map Faerie onto the space occupied by organized religion and its ultimate defeat in what is now, in large part, a post-religious country. However, this should be balanced by the realization that Faerie is being replaced by the English class system, that was as that time and thereafter creating the British Empire that did so much to enrich certain rich white people at the expense of so many other people. Perhaps we should try to avoid these easy explanations of complex art because they do not lead us to any great leaps of insight.

As for the stories themselves, they are mostly delightful, at least in parts, although more than one of them could be read as if they were excisions (or subsequent versions of excisions) from the novel. Some are quite slight, which in itself is not a bad thing but they give the impression that they have not been fully developed. That the author has not provided an introduction or even a preface (although there is a short paragraph of acknowledgements in which she declares that she was prevailed upon to write her first short story when she did not want to do so) further suggests that the motivation for this collection came from the publisher or editor or some other third party. However, there are sections and some entire stories that make reading the book overall a pleasure. The better ones, for example Mr. Simonelli or the Fairy Widower, combine the otherworldly with the tedious details of daily life in the way that illuminated her earlier novel and which has been seen again much more recently in Piranesi. I only wish there were more of her books to read.

John Walsh, Krirk University

Review of Cixin Liu’s The Supernova Era

The Supernova Era

Cixin Liu

London: Head of Zeus Ltd., 2017 [first published n 2004]

ISBN: 9-781800-248960

XV + 426 pp.

Translated by Joel Martinsen

One of the Sun’s nearest neighbours has undergone something of an existence crisis and gone supernova (the title of the book gives a clue to this). As part of the explosion, waves of deadly radiation are blasted into space in all directions. There is not much to be done in the event of radiation of this kind – I suppose one might try to be completely encased in lead for the duration but that will not help if no one knows it is coming. Anyway, the result is selectively damaging: young human bodies are able to recover from the event and everyone aged 13 or younger survives. Alas, everyone else is a goner (there is no mention of its impact on other life forms; indeed, there is no mention in the text as far as I recall of any plant or animal, with the exception of one dog).

This, then, is the central concept of a novel from the celebrated Chinese author of science fiction Liu Cixin, who is best known for the trilogy that began with The Three Body Problem. Liu is partial to a large, central concept – the one change from the actual universe in which we live that forms the basis of the plot. What would we expect to find, therefore, from a world not just ruled by children but seen primarily through the eyes of Chinese children? This is, quite characteristically, a Chinese book in which people think at a very large-scale and over an extended time period. At first, the expectation is that the children will just have to turn into small adults who, with appropriate and intensive training, will be able to reproduce the world ante-supernova. Consequently, at the necessary moment, all the Chinese people aged 14 or more take buses to the reception centres where they will all be peaceably euthanized to prevent future suffering. It does not seem to me to be very likely that this could really be done, certainly not outside China. Yet we are led to believe that humanity accepts this quite severe setback with rationality and even a sense of equanimity in that the human race will continue. This must be the case, from the author’s perspective, I imagine, in that were it not the case, then the narrative would have been taken over by desperate attempts by various people to rage against the dying of the light. Instead, we have a narrative that is quite surgically divided into distinct chunks of time of eras, in a way that is reminiscent of the changing dynasties of Chinese history and which is also redolent of the work of Olaf Stapledon.

So, we are in Lord of the Flies country, with the children turning on each other and society devolving into tribal warfare and whataboutery? To some extent, this does seem to be the case, especially when the reader’s gaze is drawn to the USA, when even in 2004 when the novel was first published it was obvious that the plethora of guns in the country and the socialization of younger generations that it was quite normal for mass murders to take place would lead to ever more horrifying outrages. The children, it is discovered, like playing with the guns. This brings us to another Chinese-like feature of the narrative: the scale of the suffering. It is not, I think, giving too much of the game away to say that there are various moments when children die, not least because of entropy as infrastructure breaks down and the climate does unexpected things in the wake of the various disasters suffered. However, what is unexpected is the numbers of children that Liu kills – thousands here and tens of thousands there. Millions in all, around the world – with no real policy for proper disposal of the bodies. Well, it is the case that the author’s success has meant there is a great appetite for bringing to the public his earlier works (usually in unfussy translations such as the one provided here). Unfortunately, that has shone an unforgiving light on some of the immaturity of the earlier work which has subsequently been overcome. Even so, the pace of the narrative is rapid and the events and their consequences rush on to the stage. Besides which, it is a fascinating concept.

John Walsh, Krirk University

Review of Alastair Reynolds’ Eversion

Eversion

Alastair Reynolds

London: Gollancz, 2022

ISBN: 9-780575-090774

306 pp.

The back cover of the edition of this book that I have rather gives away the main premise and so I do not feel like I am committing any kind of spoiler if I say we are in the realm of time travel here. We follow the travails of Dr. Silas Coade as he seeks to assist his crew to reach the mysterious edifice that awaits them within an icy lagoon. He is called upon to conduct precarious brain surgery on one of his shipmates and trepans him with success. However, not all is well on board – there are divisions within the crew and an enigmatic outsider, Ada, whose presence Silas finds particularly unsettling.

Disaster is only ever a stone’s throw away and duly comes to pass – as we might have learned from reading the back cover, the second attempt takes place on a zeppelin, with the same crew, although each has subtle differences compared to their first appearances. I rather like the concept of repeated attempts to make things right in slightly shifting circumstances, although this might be related to the fact that I can hardly ever guess what is going to come next (indeed, I never know who the killer is in detective fiction – I console myself with the supposition that, when not reading, I am far too busy with other issues that I just do not have time to speculate on the book, although that seems a weak excuse even to me). In this case, author Alastair Reynolds, many of whose books I have read and reviewed elsewhere, has created an adventure that builds tension and adds knowledge on the several occasions a reset takes place. However, I did wonder at what stage, if at all, did he come up with the final denouement, which strikes me as a little bit improvised.

Science fiction always gives writers and other creators the opportunity to ask ‘what if’ one fact or variable were different from the real world with which we are familiar and then extrapolate on how that would affect daily life and social relations. Such a world is then generally best explored by the actions of individuals for whom the reader can feel some empathy (this is the step that quite often trips up some if not many authors in the genre). From this initial situation, the characters can reveal themselves to be quite other than might have been expected through a series of gradual revelations or, in the notable case of I Am Legend, for example, by a single dramatic coup. Reynolds’ approach to this is subtle and clues which are subsequently revealed for their true nature may seem obvious in retrospect. A panoptic arc of character development does take place, although it seems to take place quite quickly and quite close to the end. That we see all the action through Silas’ eyes also means that we do not really get to know the other characters very well, especially since they are reinvented more than once. Some plot elements are also left unresolved, while the book ends in such a way that it seems hard (but not impossible) to imagine that a sequel would be likely. Nevertheless, Reynolds is a mature and skillful writer and is able to deploy his characters and their interactions well enough that the reader is thoroughly entertained and might even be said to have learned something, which is good enough for Aristotle or, possibly, Walt Disney.

On an unrelated note, this is the first time I can remember seeing such a long list of people who have been involved in publishing the book: 66 in all. This includes four dealing with editorial management and with contracts, five dealing with rights, seven dealing with finance and 28 with sales. Is this common for a contemporary publisher? I have seen other authors give thanks to their agent, editor, friends who have read an earlier draft and so forth but this seems to be industrial in scale. Perhaps it shows how popular our author (notably a fan of The Fall, of course) really is.

John Walsh, Krirk University

Review of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses

Slow Horses

Mick Herron

London: John Murray (Publishers), 2022 [2010]

ISBN: 9-781399-803052

328 pp.

I have used the term ‘Vampire Wars’ to describe the way that politics is done here in Thailand. We know that, in the dark of night, the big political beasts are both conniving and fighting with each other but we are not allowed to know what is going on or even who is involved. All we do know is that, in the mornings, some bodies will be left on the streets, drained of blood, while other people simply disappear altogether. There is a similar feeling in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, which is the first in a series of books about British spies set in Slough Houses, in London, of course. The whole of the circus (all spy fiction exists in the context of the world created by John Le Carré) is responsible for rather more death and destruction than might be suspected by the outside observer. And a fair amount of this violence and misery is caused by the internecine conflict within different branches of the secret service. Can this be true, actually? Well, the book is written, expertly, as if it might all be true. IF so, it is quite a disturbing thought.

Our eponymous heroes receive their nicknames from that of their office; they have all been displaced from the main office because of some indiscretion in their job history (or, in some cases, just because nobody likes them) and are regarded as little more than servants capable, perhaps, of ferrying documents from one place to another or scaring off homeless people who might be spending time on a nearby public bench and could, therefore, spot that there is something fishy going on in the building opposite. Inevitably, those who are Slow Horses react to this treatment in different ways: some have got fed up with the whole thing and gone off to other forms of employment; others see more value in hanging on and seeing whether things might improve in some way (or else they feel themselves to be so useless they have given up all hope). At the same time, the whole country is in seemingly terminal decline. The novel was first published in 2010, after the banking crisis and in the wake of the disastrous Tory austerity crisis which made everything so much worse, purely for ideological reasons. The second self-inflicted disaster, Brexit, was still half a decade away but it is already obvious that Britain is no longer considered an important power – there are no interactions with foreign services or interests, even the Americans are not mentioned (although this might all change in further books in the series). Instead, the focus is inward, on a small People’s Front of Judea-type far right group, who have kidnapped a young man with Pakistani heritage. The narrative pits the various struggles against the race against time to rescue him before he is executed.

Other elements exist in the book and I was particularly taken with the ‘Paul Judd’ character, who is clearly based on disgraced former Prime Minister Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson (aka ‘Boris Johnson’). Even as early as 2010 Herron had correctly identified the thuggish corruption and serial dishonesty in this vile thing. I look forward to seeing how this characterization might develop. There is also a sense that the characters have a real physicality and genuine hunger, particularly embodied in the person of Jackson Lamb, who is at the centre of what power the Slow Horses are able to deploy.

Herron establishes the various premises of this world very deftly and if there is a sense that we are being set up for repeated visits so we should get used to the basic architecture, then that might be considered skillful and necessary. This is the hallmark of an experienced novelist. Certainly, I am planning to investigate the subsequent entries in the series in due course.

John Walsh, Krirk University

Review of Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility

Sea of Tranquility: A Novel

Emily St. John Mandel

New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022

ISBN: 9-781524-712174

259 pp.

There is a moment during this novel when a female author (in whom we see some of Emily St. John Mandel herself), on a book tour, is confronted by a reader who complains about her previous book that it contains disconnected fragments which just peter out in the end. The author is a little aggrieved by this but cannot manage a robust defence. Perhaps it is true, she wonders, perhaps the book too closely resembles real life in this respect. This occurs at a time when it feels like Sea of Tranquility might be following a similar path. We have had a nice outing to colonial Canada and then are brought back to the present with an episode which is only partly marred by the use of Vincent as a female name (I asked ChatGPT about this and it said that it was possible but it could not provide an example).

Anyway, the point of this introduction is to say that, rather thrillingly, the author then reveals the hitherto hidden structure of the plot in what I thought was quite a brilliant manner. From then on, the book travels in something of a different direction but with good sense and logic. I enjoyed it all the more for that.

Mandel reached a high level of success and prestige with a previous book, Station Eleven, which had the topic of living through a pandemic while people actually were living through a pandemic. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that she has become a little recursive in thought patterns. However, she does write in a plain and straightforward way, although certainly not artlessly. Her characters give the impression of having some depth without her seeing the need to provide a detailed psychological analysis (or, indeed, an evaluation of their class and social relations). The sections are mostly short – this is intensified in the edition that I have which uses a large font size and plenty of white space. Reading the work is somewhat like reading a thriller, wherein events pile up at a cracking pace but it does not feel rushed, even though the pace of events does accelerate as the book continues. It is, necessarily, because of the style, a little light on details. The book’s title refers to colonies that have been established on the moon (and others, further afield) and people do live there but, apart from the postcode, the experience of doing so is not really different from living in any small American town. As a reader, one cannot have everything.

This is the first book from Mandel that I have read but I would certainly be open to reading more of them. As science fiction, it is the type of work that would give some readers conniptions, because of the lack of violence and conflict but it is more welcome for just that reason. Her characters are like us in that they continue with getting on with their lives as best they can in circumstances that can change suddenly and radically (which is the lesson we are taught by Adam in Paradise Lost). They can be stopped in their tracks by a sudden sense of the beauty of nature or else a powerful memory in a way that seems reminiscent of Wordsworth’s dictum of poetry being emotion recollected in tranquility, which is of course mirrored in the title.

John Walsh, Krirk University

Review of Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris

Stella Maris

Cormac McCarthy

London: Picador, 2022

ISBN: 9-781447-294016

190 pp.

This is the first book by Cormac McCarthy that I have read that does not have any horses in it (are there horses in The Road? There must be). I was going to say that I have read all of his books but this is no longer the case since he published two around the time that he died. This, Stella Maris, is one of them – I saw the two books together in Kinokuniya and I decided on getting this one because it was much slimmer than the other and I associate McCarthy’s best work with pithy brevity and men (on horses) keeping their mouths closed as much as possible for fear of swallowing a fly. However, this might have been a mistake as the current book is described as a companion to the other, The Passenger and, as I now see on the book cover, as a ‘coda’ to the other. Well, let me just review Stella Maris as a book in its own right and if, some day, I get around to reading the other one, then we will see where that will take us.

Stella Maris takes place in an eponymous residential home for people with serious mental health issues. The action enfolds almost entirely as a series of dialogues between two people. The first is Alicia Western, a 20-year old woman who has brought herself to the home carrying a bag with 40,000 dollars in cash and very little else. The second is her doctor, about whom we pick up a few fragments of personal information during the course of the text. The majority of the conversation features the doctor trying to get Alicia to explain why she has come to Stella Maris and Alicia fending him off by talking instead about mathematics and various aspects of philosophy. It becomes evident early on that she is a genius who graduated from university at the age of 16 and could have completed her doctorate within a couple of years after that but never submitted the thesis (the book is set in 1972 when it would have been much more possible to drop out from a university and wander around the country with a car and a bag full of cash (it would have been quite a different story if she had to rely on what passes for public transport in the USA). She is also the daughter of one of the scientists on the Manhattan Project and is accustomed to being in the presence of scientists. She could also have been a world-class violinist but has shied away from that too. She has a strong and possibly unhealthy interest in her older brother, Bobby, who is a racing car driver and seems to be in a coma. These two latter facts are apparently linked. It is not explained where she got enough cash not just to be carrying around a big bag of it but also to have enough to have bought one of the world’s finest violins outright.

McCarthy uses dialogue only, without either prompts or as much punctuation as many people consider to be necessary. Interestingly, every contraction has an apostrophe apart from negatives involving a ‘not’ at the end. Why? Is he suggesting that the difference between a negative and a positive statement is less important or more important or, perhaps, so insignificant that it is not worth bothering to punctuate? Would we learn more about the characters if there were not the conventional older man-younger woman dynamic? Do we really learn very much from the philosophical and mathematical speculation? Would this book have been published at all if it had not been apparently the last work of a renowned novelist such as McCarthy, notwithstanding the fact that this is an interesting, well-written and even occasionally compelling as book? Maybe if I had read the other companion first I would have different answers for these questions.

John Walsh, Krirk University

Review of Esslemont’s Deadhouse Landing

Deadhouse Landing

Ian C. Esslemont

London: Bantam Press, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-857-50284-1

473 pp.

Deadhouse Landing is the second part of the trilogy Path to Ascendancy and follows on from Dancer’s Lament. In the first part, we are introduced to our two heroes, a fighter and a wizard, whose early misadventures denoted youthful learning and endeared them to this reader. In the second part, they – and others who are also introduced (there is a handy list of the main characters at the front of the book) – start their transition into more obviously Malazan characters. Esslemont has been writing books about the shared world he created with fellow writer Steven Erikson which is usually referred to as the Malazan Empire (much of the present book is set on the slightly desolate island of Malaz). Erikson wrote the first ten or so books and they are characterized by a wide range of very diverse characters in diverse settings doing diverse things for diverse reasons, not all of which are explained. There may be multiple expositions of events from different perspectives, there may be unexpected interpolations from unanticipated participants, such as ungulates.

This is all very entertaining and so forth but it does mean it can be necessary to concentrate quite hard so as to keep it all in mind. In Dancer’s Lament, Esslemont allowed himself to tell a much simpler tale with a reduced (but by no means minimal) list of characters and the result was rather refreshing. However, Deadhouse Landing seems to mark a bit of a transition towards the dense prose likely to be found in the concluding part of the trilogy. To a certain extent, this is appropriate to the content, assuming that the name of the series refers to the ascendancy of characters to which we have been introduced and creatures in that divine state presumably have acquired a wide range of experience and intense interactions with the world (we might call this ‘ascendant capital’). At the same time, of course, the world keeps on spinning and everyone else needs to keep body and soul together and, so, they continue with their mundane considerations involved in making a living, whether by tending a bar, threatening violence for money or being an actual pirate. This is the kind of world in which money is always scarce and fortune constantly changing, in part because very few of the characters portrayed seem willing and able to hold down a long-term job and plan in a pragmatic and rational way for what tomorrow might bring.

That Esslemont is writing prequels here brings its own problems – readers familiar with subsequent events will have their own ideas and understanding of what has gone before in order to have brought the world to the state that it has reached. Those early precursors should, therefore, not contradict what would then be the future but, also, characters who are to be encountered subsequently should not be in the same state then as they will need to have changed and change others along the way. It must be difficult to contend with all of this while writing and still remember to provide a compelling plot and entertaining events. However, Esslemont is by now experienced enough to be able to manage all of this with aplomb. The magician, now revealed as Kellanved, drives the main plot of ascension and Dancer is often dragged along in his wake. Kellanved’s relentless (and dangerous) curiosity about the world in its many dimensions is the reason that they are able to link the power of the distant past with the present in a way that will conjure forth the future. Around this, powerful figures such as Dassem Ultor, Cowl, Tattersail and Dujek follow their own paths. It is a good combination.

Now that Erikson has returned to writing more novels about the Malazan Empire, after having made some attempts to strike out in other directions, one wonders whether the two writers will feel at all stifled by what they have created – I have been reading these books for twenty years I believe and their creation must have predated that by a while. Other writers whose writing careers have become defined by a single series – George RR Martin comes to mind – at least have comfort that they wrote well-known books of other stripes beforehand. It must be a somewhat daunting situation to face. Anyway, I will be enjoying the books as they continue to arrive.

John Walsh, Krirk University