Monthly Archives: April 2003

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

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I don’t get out to the movies
all that much, and I have so many interesting ways to fill my time that
I’m rarely willing to sit and watch one on TV for two hours on end. So
even if I have the DVD, it can take me quite a long while to get around
to watching it. When the movie is one that’s not suitable for little
kids, it takes even longer–those hours after they go to bed are precious.
So even though I got a DVD of Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and
the Ugly in a gift exchange last Christmas, I only got around to
watching it last night. My friend Dave the co-worker (as opposed to my
son Dave, or my friend Dave the non-co-worker) came over to watch it with
me, as it’s one of his favorite flicks. Myself, I’d never seen it before.

They say that constraints foster creativity; in this case, I think Leone
was chiefly constrained by having relatively few actors who could speak
English without an Italian accent. Consequently, this is a film of
little dialog and long silences in which the storytelling is almost
completely visual and cinematic. Toward the beginning, for example,
Lee Van Cleef stalks slowly into a hacienda. The family members all
hide, except for the man of the house. The man is clearly terrified, but
he makes a play of bravery: he sets the table for dinner and then sits
down and serves himself some kind of soup. Van Cleef has been leaning in
the arched doorway at the far end of the house; now he walks slowly
forward, sits down, serves himself a bowl of soup, and begins to eat
it–all without talking his eyes off the man for even a second. And his
eyes clearly say, “You’re mine. I can crush you like a bug.”

There’s a similar moment toward the end, when Van Cleef, Eli Wallach, and
(of course) Clint Eastwood are having a kind of three-way shoot out.
There’s something all three of them want; realistically, only the last
man standing will get it. The camera jumps from face to face as you see
them thinking: who will draw first? If I draw first, will I be able to
gun down both of them? And you notice (or perhaps you don’t) that
Wallach is sweating profusely, and that even the face of the normally
cool Van Cleef has a sheen of perspiration, while Eastwood is both
relaxed and dry as a bone, and you think, “What’s going on here?”

But I expected the meaningful glances, the tumbledown buildings,
the wide open spaces, and the violence. What surprised me was
the humor–there are many points that are laugh out loud funny.
Unfortunately, few of them are truly quotable; the funny lines are funny
only in context, as when Eastwood admonishes Wallach, “And after all the
times I’ve saved your life.”

All in all, I enjoyed it–it’s a good bit of story telling.

The Overloaded Ark, by Gerald Durrell

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I found this book in a bookstore in the Kingston neighborhood of
Canberra. I plucked it off of the shelf because of its title, and
submitted it to the Page 100 test, a trick I learned from one of
Donald Knuth’s books. Having read the cover blurb and
perhaps the table of contents, open the book to page 100, and
read that page. This is far more effective than reading the first few
pages; the author expected you to look at those pages first thing, and
probably spent lots of time polishing them. But there’s nothing to
distinguish page 100 of the book from any other in the author’s
mind–indeed, when he submits his manuscript, he probably doesn’t even
know what’s going to end up on that page–so it’s a more representative
sample of the quality of the book as a whole.

Now, The Overloaded Ark is a memoir of an animal collecting
trip to the Cameroons (as they were called in the 1950’s) by the owner of
an English zoo. It’s intended to be light and funny, though factual, and
for the most part it succeeds. Page 100, for example, concerns the
author’s attempts to teach the village boys that he won’t buy animals from them
unless they are in good condition. He finally shames them into it by
publically rewarding a little girl who brings him a bird she’s handled
gently and well, and then questioning their manhood. After that, he
says, he has no more difficulty.

And that sample is indeed representative, but not in the way the author
would have expected. Because what’s most interesting in this book isn’t
the depiction of African flora and fauna (though these are presented by a
loving and witty hand), or even the travails of collecting the animals
and keeping them alive for the return trip to England. Rather, it’s the
relationship between the author and the natives. They are dark-skinned;
he is the great white sahib. He calls them by name; they call him Masa.
They have villages dances; sometimes he deigns to adorn their dances with
his presence. He is erudite; they are ignorant, frequently knowing less
about certain animals than he does. He is masterful; they are
subservient.

And yet, he genuinely cares for his native employees, and takes care of
them in many ways; and they, for their part, seem genuinely honored by
his attention.

Quite frankly, it’s a PC person’s nightmare. And though I don’t try to
be politically correct, it nevertheless gave me much food for thought.

So it was an interesting book to read, as well as being a useful source
book should I ever wish to write anything about collecting animals. On
the other hand, it wasn’t quite the laugh riot I’d been hoping for.

Canberra Trip, Days 3-7

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Naturally, John the Tester and I spent most of the work week working, so
there’s not much to tell. Still, there were a few highlights, including
several more half-pints of Toohey’s Old.

On Monday another JPLer showed up; he’d gone through hell trying to get
here. His flight got four hours out from LAX, had a problem, and flew
back to LAX. After five hours in the terminal, the passengers were
loaded on to another plane and flown to Sydney. He missed the last
flight to Canberra last night by fifteen minutes, so they put him up in a
hotel in Sydney. He woke bright and early, not surprisingly, and caught
the earliest flight to Canberra, and then got lost on the way to
the complex at Tidbinbilla.

Tuesday we had dinner at the Santa Lucia Trattoria in Kingston. I’d been
there with some folks from the complex on my previous trip, and had had a
chicken and veal risotto that was out of this world. I’d been wanting to
have some more, and was not disappointed. John and Bob, the other JPLer,
had a seafood risotto which featured, among other things, Baby Octopus.
Lots of restaurants that we looked at had dishes which included Baby
Octopus; I asked an Australian friend whether this was some kind of fad,
and was assured that the friend had grown up with it.

There was a neat bookstore near the restaurant, where I picked up a few
oddments you’ll be seeing reviews of in the next few days.

Not much happened on Wednesday and Thursday, but on Friday I learned a
valuable life lesson: Australian hot dogs are made with an unnatural red
dye, and are to be avoided. That was at lunch at the Moonrock Cafe, a
little snackbar and giftshop attached to the museum at the complex.

John and I left after lunch, because we were going to be coming in again
for Saturday morning to talk to some operators who weren’t going to be in
on any of the weekdays we’d be there. After some discussion, we decided
to spend the afternoon at the Canberra Zoo. It’s a nice zoo. We got
some excellent pictures of the koalas, and also of the little
fairy penguins, one of whom, we were assured, is the original of Tux the
Linux penguin. It’s unique among zoos, in my experience, in that you
could actually see all of the animals fairly well. Most of the new
exhibits at the Los Angeles Zoo seem to be designed to let the animals
hide from you.

Then, that evening we went shopping for gifts for friends and family
(Jane scored a blue denim pullover covered with aboriginal art), and
ended the day with a glass of Toohey’s Old Black down in Manuka.

Sometime during the week, I don’t remember exactly when, John was
telling me about the places he’s been. He’s just out of college, but
compared to me he’s a world traveller; and he has a way of tossing off
the most exotic comments with a straight face. The best example, and my
favorite, was

I went to this hookah lounge in the Egyptian section of Bangkok…

He didn’t get any farther than that, because I stopped him. I couldn’t
let a remark like that pass without comment. And since then, I’ve been
completely unable to think of anything else as casually exotic that doesn’t
involve either sex or illicit drugs. I mean, who knew that there were
hookah lounges in Bangkok? Who knew there were Egyptians in Bangkok?
For that matter, who knew there were hookah lounges in Egypt? Not me.

Justice Hall, by Laurie R. King

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This is the latest of King’s Mary Russell Holmes mysteries, just out in
paperback; I bought it a couple of weeks before leaving for Australia,
intending to read it on the plane, and would that I had. I’d have gotten
more enjoyment out of it in that context than I would have out of either
of the books I actually did read on the flight over. But I enjoyed it once
I got to Australia anyway.

For those who aren’t aware of this series, it postulates that there was a
real Sherlock Holmes, similar to but rather younger than the familiar
character. In the first book, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice,
he meets a young woman, Mary Russell, and takes her on as his apprentice.
Later they marry, despite the age difference between them. (Yes, there’s
a bit of an Amelia Peabody feel to the whole thing, but only a bit.)

In an earlier book, O, Jerusalem, they become acquainted with
two British intelligence officers in the Middle East. In the current
book, one of them is in serious trouble and calls on the pair to help
out. The action largely takes place at a stately country home called
Justice Hall, the seat of the Dukes of Beaufort.

I try not to say too much about the plot of mystery novels; after all,
plot is everything in a mystery, and I don’t want to give it away. But I
will say that the book involves (in part) a young soldier summarily
executed at the front lines during World War I–and that
Reginald Hill did a better job at it in The Wood Beyond.
Also, I disliked the ending; although it tied up
all of the loose ends satisfactorily, it wasn’t very satisfying. It
seemed rushed; and while the actual events were OK, I think they could
have been motivated better.

But I’m being picky. Justice Hall is a worthy addition to the
series, and a good read besides.

Murder Being Once Done, by Ruth Rendell

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This is the first book by Rendell I have read. I’ve seen her name on
author’s lists, usually coupled with P.D. James as
great-British-women-detective-novel-writers. When you see a list of
adjectives that long, certain, often unmet, expectations are created. And
then, this is a novel right smack dab in the middle of a series, which
isn’t the best place to start if the series is a continuing one and
knowledge of the previous installments are necessary for the
understanding those following.

None of that seems to matter, though. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Inspector Wexford has had some sort of bleeding in his eye leading his
doctor to prescribe rest, healthy food and no work as a cure. I gather he
prefers to work hard, drink a bit and eat badly. The novel opens with him
and his wife in London staying with his nephew, a detective for Scotland
Yard. He is being coddled, pampered and generally bored out of his wits
by his wife and niece while his nephew, lucky man, gets to go off to work
everyday. On one of his prescribed and hated daily walks, he passes a
cemetery where a murder investigation is taking place, decides to just
pop in for a quick look and stumbles on his nephew heading up the
investigation. His aid is enlisted, surreptitiously lest the women find
out, and he begins to nose around. A very young woman has been strangled
and left in a crypt. Investigators find her identity but have no luck
tracing the girl using the name she is known by and no one steps forward
to claim her as missing or lost. And sometime in the last year she has
had a full term pregnancy. Hmmmmm….

As a detective novel, it was pretty good. I had the wrong person pegged
as the killer most of the way thru the book. Actually there were about 4
candidates I came up with in the course of reading the book, none of
which actually were the killer. And while Rendell deliberately was
messing around with my mind and setting up false trails, she was also
equally giving the same sort of clues for the correct candidate.
Interesting. I want to hunt up more of her work to see if she does the
same thing in other novels. I would also like to see Inspector Wexford in
his home setting in rural England, working too hard, drinking a bit and
eating badly.

I love it when I find a new author to follow. It’s been lonely without
Peter Diamond books.

High Fashion

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My little girl is just over a year and a half old.
I came down for dinner tonight and spotted her playing with two video
cassettes. She’d pulled a few inches of tape out of each, and had one
dangling from each arm. I can only assume that they were supposed to be
purses. A third cassette was lying on the floor, discarded after the
tape broke (for the record, it was “The Empire Strikes Back”).

Both of her brothers ruined their share of video cassettes…but unlike
their sister, I don’t believe they were driven by the need to accessorize.

Canberra Trip, Day 2

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On day 2, a Sunday, I woke up about 7 AM. Actually, I woke up about 3
AM, which would have been 8 AM in Los Angeles, but after a little tossing
and turning I managed to get back to sleep again. When I finally got up
I walked out to the living room of my suite, and beheld two hot air
balloons hanging in the air outside my window. I grabbed my camera and
took a picture.

Sleeping until 7 AM counts as a major victory; my first morning in
Canberra in 1999, I woke up around 4:30 AM or so and simply could not get
back to sleep. That set a bad tone for the rest of the trip.

I took a quick shower, and then drove down Canberra Avenue four or five
blocks to St. Paul’s Manuka, a vaguely gothic brick church of the Anglican
variety. It’s not
nearly as pretty as All Saints Ainslie, the church I went to in 1999, but
it’s the local church so that’s where I went. Just my luck–they were just
beginning their planned giving compaign. I didn’t get warm vibes about
the place–I don’t think I’d pick it as my regular church, given a
choice–but the service and especially the Eucharist was joyous and
comforting. God is good, and I was glad to praise him.

Then I returned to the hotel and called John the Tester as we had agreed
the night before; no answer. I called him at intervals, getting no
answer, until he finally called me about 10:30 AM; apparently he’d been
out drinking until about 5 AM with folks he’d met in a bar up in City
Center, and my last phone call woke him up. (Whoops!)

Well, anyway, we went out to the Australian National Museum, which I’d
not seen before as it had opened just a couple of years before. It’s
got some interesting stuff, but I have to question the judgement of both
the architect and the folks who approved his design.

Canberra is divided into north and south halves by Lake Burley-Griffin;
the halves are joined by the Commonwealth Avenue bridge. The museum sits
on a peninsula just west of the north end of the bridge; the site is
incredibly scenic. You’d think the architect would have taken advantage
of this, but instead he built a museum that looks inward onto a
courtyard; and the courtyard is filled with a strange mixture of
rubberized concrete, fencing, and pond called “the Spirit of Australia
Garden”. Personally, if I were Australian I’d be insulted.

Next we toddled of to Woden Plaze, one of the local malls, where
we had lunch; I was also able to buy some books by
Reginald Hill, Peter Lovesey,
Iain Banks, and Terry Pratchett.

On the way back to the hotel we saw another car coming at us head on.
It honked at us madly, and we realized that indeed, we were in the
right-hand lane. John quickly swerved into the left lane, and we escaped
injury, though John was a bit shaken. But then we remembered that we were
on Canberra Avenue, which, like many thoroughfares in Canberra, is a
divided road. There are two lanes each way, with a thirty-foot-wide
island in between. In other words, the other driver was the one driving
the wrong direction.

At one point I heard an ad on the radio about some store called The Lettuce
Connection. They have lots of different kinds of Lettuce in stock, or
you can have your Lettuce custom designed. It wasn’t until the ad was
almost over that I realized that the store’s name was really The Lattice
Connection.

Around 6 PM we walked down to Manuka and had dinner at a place called El
Rancho. My dinner was nothing special; but following John’s lead
I elected to try a half-pint of Toohey’s Old Black, and that was really
nice. It tasted good and went down smoothly. I don’t drink beer very
often, and a half-pint is usually more than enough, but I was almost
tempted to have another.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett

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Pratchett generally writes two sorts of books: Discworld novels and young
adult novels. The Discworld novels are always written to be accessible
to Americans; the young adult novels are intended for young adults in the
UK, and make much or use of UK slang and terminology. They generally
aren’t as satirical, either, and they generally aren’t available in the
United States.

This present novel is an exception to the rule–it’s both a Discworld
novel (though it’s not marketed as one) and a young adult novel. I
nabbed it joyfully at a bookstore in Australia, and read it with glee.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is a sterling
example of the Small Story. It takes place on the Discworld, but doesn’t
depend on any prior knowledge of the Disc; in fact, the only standard
Discworld character to make an appearance is Death (no surprises there).

Maurice is an intelligent talking cat; his Educated Rodents are
intelligent talking rats. Apparently the animals ate something that agreed
with them from the trash heap of Unseen University, the Disc’s premier
college of wizardry. Once blessed with intelligence, Maurice found a
stupid-looking kid playing the pennywhistle, and then enlisted the rats
into a continuing Pied Piper scam–the kid, the cat, and the rats move
into a town, the rats raise a ruckus, and (for a sizeable fee) the kid
pipes them out of town.

The rats are starting to grumble that maybe this is unethical (being
intelligent is giving them ideas) when the troupe arrives in the
Uberwald village of Bad Blintz–a village on the verge of starvation due
to a plague of rats, except that Maurice and his Educated Rodents can’t
find any rats there but themselves. What goes on?

This is a small book, shorter than the usual Discworld novel, but it was
a lot of fun.

Canberra Trip, Day 1

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My trip to Canberra DSCC officially started at 6:20 PM on March 13 when
the Super Shuttle arrived to take me to LAX. I kissed Jane and the kids,
and then waved through the shuttle window after I
got inside. The driver got extra points–it was dark outside, and he
turned on the inside lights so that the kids could see me.

I really had no desire to be leaving my family, let alone with a war
in the offing. My imagination was running riot, telling me that either my plane
was going to crash, or that a terrorist attack was going to wipe out Los
Angeles while I was gone, and that either way I’d never see them again.
That’s ridiculous, of course; but people do die in plane crashes, and it
reminded me to spend some time talking with God on the way to the airport.

I have to give the shuttle driver credit. I wasn’t sure how he could
possibly do it, but he got me to my terminal in fifty minutes, dropping
me off outside the United International Terminal at 7:10 PM, exactly
three hours before my flight was due to leave. I had to show my ticket
at the terminal door, and then wait in a line specifically for my flight.
Checking my bag went quickly; then I had to wait for a couple of minutes
while they screened my suitcase. A fat old security guard got a call on
his walky-talky, and told me I could go ahead.

The next barrier was the security screening for me and my carry-on stuff.
It was no big deal, as I’d made sure my pocket knife was in my suitcase
and that I was wearing a minimum of metal–my wedding ring, and the
rivets on my blue jeans. I had to take my laptop out of its case and let it go
through the X-Ray machine by itself, but that was the only annoyance.
The security was a lot more stringent when I flew to Vancouver, B.C.,
last September.

On my way through the terminal I stopped at a McDonalds and got some
fries and a Diet Coke. Gastric distress is my great fear on a long plane
flight, and taters are a rare good ballast for an empty
stomach, as the Gaffer said. Fries are one of my favorite things for
preventing heartburn. The Diet Coke was simply a source of caffeine to
help me stay awake on the plane until it was worth trying to sleep.

My flight was scheduled to leave Los Angeles at 10:10 PM, Thursday, and
arrive in Sydney around 7:30 AM on Saturday. With the time difference
(19 hours), that amounted to a little over fourteen hours in the air.
Boarding was at 9:25, making fifteen hours on the plane in all. I had a
plan for surviving those fifteen hours:

First, hope that (given the unstable political situation) the plane would
be nearly empty, so that I’d have an empty seat next to me–and maybe and
entire empty row.

Next, stay up until about 2 or 3 AM, California time. I had some books and
my Nomad Zen Jukebox to help with this; with the Jukebox I had some
special earbud headphones that incorporate earplugs, making it easier to
hear the music and harder to hear the plane. Plus, they’d be giving us
dinner, and maybe there would be a movie worth watching.

Next, take a couple of Excedrin PM tablets (the normal adult dose)
resulting in a 76 mg dose of Diphenhydramine–the anti-histamine
otherwise known as Benedryl; and put in the regular ear plugs I’d bought.
If I was lucky, this would knock me out for six-to-eight hours, leaving
me just enought time to have breakfast on the plane before we landed in
Sydney.

Jane had her own plans; she’d heard rumors that various airlines were
cutting service in lieu of going into bankruptcy, and so she packed me a
nice lunch: sandwich, cheese stick, brownie (from the best batch
she’s ever made), carrots, celery.

But nothing goes according to plan. We started boarding on time, but
what with delays at the gate and delays on the tarmac it was 10:30 PM
before we left the ground. By that time I’d already been on the plane
for a full hour. (I was sitting next to a couple of guys from Holland
who work for a company that writes and sells software that runs on cargo
ships. Or something like that. We chatted a little bit as we waited for
the plane to take off. They’d already flown from Cuba to the Netherlands
to New York to Los Angeles.) Then, the Captain told us there was a storm on
the direct path from Los Angeles to Sydney, so he was going to fly toward
Hawaii then hang a left, thus lengthening the flight.

The food on the plane was actually reasonably good. On the other hand,
the cabin interior was showing signs of poor maintenance. The arm rests
all looked worn, and the woman just ahead of me had no reading-light.
Also, the TV projector in our cabin was busted, so there was no movie to
watch. (It was “Jerry Maguire” anyway, a movie I have
no desire to see.) So I spent several long hours reading. And this is
where I made my first mistake.

My book leading up to the trip was The Arms of Krupp, by
William Manchester. It’s a good book, but it’s a thick trace
paperback, and that’s clumsy on a plane. Still, that’s the main book I
had in my backpack when I arrived at the airport. I wandered around the
terminal gift shop, looking at this and that, and found a paperback of
Stephen King short stories called Everything’s Eventual. See
my review for why this was a mistake.

Finally, I decided at about 1:30 AM to turn out my reading lamp and try to
sleep. That was a little early, but mine was the only active reading
lamp in my cabin. (Some folks had been sleeping since we took off.) I
went to the lavatory and took a couple of Excedrin PM; I put in
the earplugs; I waited for oblivion. The earplugs were a great idea, by
the way. You can still hear the dull roar of the jets quite clearly,
but they are much quieter, as are all of the other things going on.
Details are hazy, but I believe I managed to doze until maybe 4:30 AM.
(Most of that was due to the ear plugs and fatigue, I think; there was no
oblivion. I’ve been taking anti-histamines for my allergies for too many
years.) Then I sat up and went back to reading.

A couple some rows ahead of me had a little girl about Anne’s age with
them; every so often she came running down the aisle on the way to or
from the lavatory. She was a cutie. She wasn’t a nuisance–I only heard
her cry once, and the ear plugs got most of that–but watching her got me
a little misty.

At around 6 AM (PDT) they served a snack, which I skipped; but I did have
a Diet Pepsi. I wasn’t hungry, and in fact
I was wondering what I was going to do with the lunch Jane had made for
me. My digestion was happy, a condition not to be trifled with; but I
couldn’t take the lunch into Australia. I didn’t want to throw it away,
as it was much more than a lunch; it was really a statement of Jane’s
love. She knew I didn’t want to go, and that I needed to, and she
couldn’t do anything about that. But she could pack me a lunch of
comfort food. In the end I got genuinely hungry at around 10 AM (PDT)
and ate it, and it was good, especially the brownie.

At some point in there I finished the King anthology, and this is where I
made my second mistake. Instead of pulling out the
Laurie
R. King mystery I’d been saving, I pulled out the
first book in a series by Elizabeth Haydon.
My brother recommended it to
me just a couple of days before I left, and I went out and bought it at
the same time as my new suitcase. Now, I don’t want to imply that it’s a
bad book. I enjoyed it, in fact. But see the
review for why it was also a mistake.

Around 11:30 AM (PDT) they served breakfast, which I wasn’t
expecting. The snack at 6 AM was pretty substantial, even though I
didn’t eat it, and my itinerary only called for two meals. I guess
supplying food is a kind of crowd control on long international flights.
I had apple pancakes, which were overcooked, and two sausages, which were
OK, and a bit of croissant, and some milk.

My jukebox’s battery ran out of juice about then, so there was no more
music after that.

We finally landed in Sydney around 1:15 PM (PDT), or 8:16 AM
Sydney/Canberra time, almost 16 hours after I boarded the plane and about
45 minutes after our scheduled arrival. Then came passport control, the
baggage carousel, and Australian customs, which took me until 9 AM. My
connecting flight to Canberra was scheduled to leave at 9:15 AM.
Sydney’s domestic terminal is quite a ways from international terminal,
and although there’s a shuttle bus dedicated to that purpose it still
took until 9:15 AM to get there. I finally took the 10:15 flight,
landing in Canberra just before 11:15 AM. It didn’t take long to get my
rental car, and I arrived at my hotel (the Bentley Suites in the Manuka
neighborhood of Canberra) before noon despite making a couple of wrong
turns and doing some exploring.

Yes, this is still Day 1 of my trip.

I ran into John the Tester in the hotel’s reception area; we agreed to
get something to eat after we’d taken time to shower.

I got a nice one bedroom suite on the fourth floor; the hot water
pressure was lacking. And when I tried to adjust the shower head’s spray
pressure it broke off in my hand. That wasn’t a bad thing, actually, as
it worked better that way.

JPL allows you to make one call home at company expense, so that your
loved ones know that you’re safe, so after I showered I made it. I
talked to Jane, and told her how to call me; I talked to Dave, who had
just (just that minute!) lost his first tooth, one of the lower ones in
front. (Damn it!) He was worried because he’d dropped
it or something and couldn’t find it. Jane told him that she’d put a
note under the pillow for the tooth fairy, and I assured him that the
tooth fairy wouldn’t mind; it was the sort of thing that happened all the
time.

Then John and I went and got lunch, and bought some groceries. By this
time it was about 6 PM Canberra
time, and I didn’t dare go to sleep until at least 9 or 10 PM. Just for
the record, 10 PM is 3AM, California time; by then I’d had only
three or four bad hours of sleep in the past forty hours.

For dinner we walked down into Manuka and had a nice little meal
at an Italian place puzzingly called Le Rendezvous. I had an
“American Style” pizza, which is a thin crust pizza with cheese, tomato
sauce and mild (!) salami (!) (according to the menu). Actually, the
salami didn’t taste much liked salami; it had a smoky flavor. It wasn’t
bad, though I don’t think you could find anything quite like it back in
the States. (Note: I went back to the same place a couple of nights
before we came home, and ordered the same pizza, and let me tell you–
either they made it differently, or I was really sleepy the first night,
because it was awful.)

It was getting dark as we walked back, and the crickets chirruped
noisily as we passed the Australian Capitol Territory Cricket Oval.
That observation was much more amusing to me at the time than it is now.

And so to bed.

Rhapsody, by Elizabeth Haydon

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My brother recommended this book to me, along with its two sequels, just
before I left for Australia; he said that he and my sister-in-law had
rather enjoyed it. I was out buying a new suitcase, and on a whim
stopped at a bookstore to see if they were available. They were, and I
bought them. I packed the second and third books
(Prophecy and Destiny) in my checked luggage, and
brought this first book along to read on the plane.

As with Everything’s Eventual, this was a mistake. Not
because it’s a bad book–it isn’t. It’s the story of a young woman who
calls herself Rhapsody. She’s a Singer, on the verge of becoming a
Namer; which is to say that she’s a bard, in a world in which bardic
songs have real power. She’s brave, brash, and clever; she’s also good
looking, and is much sought after by a admirer, a military commander who
call himself Michael the Wind of Death. Michael is a confirmed sadist,
and Rhapsody sees no reason to have anything to do with him. And then
Michael sends his troops after her, and she’s forced to flee.

As it happens (this is an epic fantasy, after all), she runs into the
arms of the only people who can help her–a mismatched pair of killers on
the run from their demon master. The three of them flee from Michael’s
forces (leaving quite a few of them dead) in search of a secret and
magical passage to the other side of the world.

And therein lies the problem. After a number of scenes to get the ball
rolling, the first part of the book consists primarily of a long,
torturous slog through the center of the earth. A lot of character
development occurs, along with a few pertinent adventures, but most of
that part is simply a painful endless ordeal of trudging, trudging,
trudging through cramped, confined tunnels while fighting off nasty
vermin. And whenever I looked up from the book during this phase, I found
myself in my seat at the back of the plane–a plane in which the shades
were drawn, the main lights were off, and most of the reading lights were
off as well. I was cramped and confined, and while I was sitting instead
of trudging the flight still seemed endless. And the cabin of a dark
plane does look rather like a tunnel

Needless to say, this did not help my mood, which was not good to begin
with.

But none of that is really the fault of the book or its author. It’s a
competently written epic fantasy, and considered dispassionately I
enjoyed it. Especially the parts I read after I got off the plane.
I’m looking forward to the subsequent volumes.

However, I do have a few complaints. First, this is a Big Story with a
vengeance–the fate of the world depends on Rhapsody and her two friends.
Second, the story depends greatly on
ancient history, and on creatures and people who have survived from
ancient times. J.R.R. Tolkien managed to pull that off, but
he spent years on the historical background, purely for his own
enjoyment, before he wrote the books that made his reputation. In the
hands of other authors the result usually seems rather comic book.

But mainly, the book is too darned long. I’d estimate that the book
could be trimmed quite a bit without affecting the plot or the character
development in the slightest.

It’s hard to know what to say about this book. It’s not perfect; parts
of it are too long, for one
thing. A little more editing could have taken care of that. And it’s a
bit comic book, too; like so many fantasy writers these days, she’s
forgotten that in fantasy some things must remain mysterious and
evocative. She’s a systematizer, and it shows, and that’s not entirely a
good thing.

But anyway. It’s a competently written epic fantasy, and is certainly
worthy of your time if you like that sort of thing. I’m looking forward
to the later books.