The June issue of
Ex Libris Reviews is now on-line. As always, if you’ve been following the web log for the past month you’ve already read my reviews and Deb’s reviews; but don’t miss Craig Clarke’s.

This is the new third volume of Lustbader’s epic Saga of the Pearl,
currently out in hardcover; it continues the story of the Dar-al-Salat’s
struggle to free the planet Kundala from the oppression of the ruling
V’orrn.

Up until about a century before the current action, Kundala was ruled by
the Ramahan priesthood in the name of the Goddess Miina. The priesthood
included both male and female Kundalans (I’d say “men and women”, except
that Lustbader goes out of his way not too), many of them sorcerors, but
it was always led by a powerful sorceress called Mother. Shortly prior
to the arrival of the V’orrn, a cabal of male sorceror priests staged a
coup and deposed Mother–but they’d reckoned without Miina, whose
reaction was swift and decisive.

First, the members of the cabal lost their sorcerous powers; in addition,
Miina gave each one an unmistakable mark–a sixth finger, black and
clawlike, on one hand, and extended life in which to enjoy their
punishment. The Pearl, the repository of Miina’s wisdom,
was locked away beyond retrieval. And Miina herself turned her back on
her creation until the coming of the prophesied Dar-al-Salat–after which
the V’orrn landed, unopposed in the aftermath of the coup, and began
their bloody conquest.

The members of the cabal scattered into the wilderness, and were later
known as the “sauromicians”. I have no idea what “sauromician” means, or
if Lustbader himself coined it; certainly, the only Google hits I get on
it reference Lustbader’s work. But it’s certainly a delightful name for
evil sorcerors. For sorcerors they had been, and sorcerors they were
again, though of a different kind–for they took up the study of
necromancy, a sorcery powered by the shedding of innocent blood.

The sauromicians appear in the previous book,
The Veil of a Thousand Tears, but only in passing. In this
volume, they come to center stage. The sauromicians
have no affection for Miina, and hence no sympathy for the Dar-al-Salat;
they now live only to acquire more power. Riane, the Dar-al-Salat, and
her companions, must oppose them and prevent them from destroying one of
Miina’s sacred dragons.

So much for the plot, which is tolerably baroque (but fun).

This volume of the saga took longer to get moving than its predecessors,
and struck me as less focussed–that is, it spent proportionally more
time on subplots and less on the main plot, and some of the subplots
seemed a little too drawn out. On the other, this is a
many-threaded saga with a cast of hundreds, and I expect some of the
subplots will have big payoffs in future volumes.

One of my principles in my own writing is to carefully control the
revelation of the back-story. Ideally, the past history should be
revealed slowly, with each fact inserted where it will do the most good.
Lustbader’s doing a bang-up job of this, with respect to both the history
of Kundala and the history of the V’orrn.
The Ring of Five Dragons is an intimate book, focussed on the
Dar-al-Salat and companions, with a minimum of subplots. In
The Veil of a Thousand Tears it’s as if the world expands–we
learn much more about the history of Kundala, and quite a bit about
certain of the mysterious V’orrn technomancers, the Gyrgon, and the cast
of important characters increases. And finally, in this volume it expands
yet again.

I’m quite looking forward to the next book.

Last October
I reviewed an early Wodehouse novel called
A Gentleman of Leisure, which was first published in 1910. It
was interesting but flawed–Wodehouse couldn’t seem to decide whether he
was writing a serious novel with comedic overtones, or a farce. The plot
was delightfully absurd, but the characters were too real, as were the
consequences if their schemes came to naught. By 1915’s
Something Fresh, the first Blandings novel, he’d worked out
the breezy style that makes his farces so enjoyable.

All of which means that I was completely unprepared for the present work,
A Damsel in Distress. It was first published in 1919, after
he’d got the bugs out, and so I was expecting a typical Wodehouse farce.
And to my great and exceeding surprise, it’s not a farce at all. Instead,
it’s a genuine comedy of manners. The characters are finely drawn and
realistic, and the plot is no more far-fetched than any romantic comedy.

The difference between this book and Wodehouse’s other novels is only
highlighted by its resemblance to Blandings. Like Lord Emsworth in the
early Blandings novels, Lord Marshmoreton only wants to be left alone to
putter in his garden. Like Lord Emsworth, he is afflicted by an
efficient secretary, a young woman named Alice Faraday, and an old
battleaxe of a sister, Lady Caroline. His son Percy is a conceited snob
of the first water, but his daughter Maud (the Damsel of the title) is a
peach. She wants to marry an American fellow she met on vacation in
Wales, but Lady Caroline and her brother Percy will have none of it, and
confine her to quarters in the stately family home.

It all seems straightforward enough, and tolerably Blandings-like; and
yet, Belpher Castle isn’t simply Blandings Castle with the serial numbers
filed off. Rather, it’s the real thing, the model from which Blandings
Castle was drawn. Blandings, Bertie, Jeeves, the Drones Club, all of
them inhabit a dream of England in which the World Wars never came, in
which a good silk top hat and a properly tied tie were the key to
society, and in which nothing bad ever really happens to upper class
twits. In this dream of England, most of the stories are indeed love
stories; you have to hang the plot on something, after all. But here
we have a tale of the real England, where consequences are real and where
the hero really might not get the girl.

The tone is light, to be sure, and I frequently stopped to laugh out
loud, but the undertone is deeply serious–and honestly, is there is anything
more serious, at root, than a solid romantic comedy? It’s funny
precisely because the consequences are so serious.

Anyway, I enjoyed this as much as anything I’ve read in a great while. It
warmed my heart and lifted my spirits, and I could wish that he’d written
more books in the same vein.

Apropos of nothing, and at the risk of lowering the tone of this review,
Jane insisted that I quote one paragraph from the later part of the book:

There was, so the historians of the Middle West tell us, a man of Chicago
named Young, who once, when his nerves were unstrung, put his mother
(unseen) in the chopping-machine, and canned her and labelled her “Tongue.”

The Wodehouse wit is here in full flower. Go thou, and read.

A week or so ago I posted an essay on the genre of Christian Fantasy, and I listed a few authors whom I thought had done a good job with it: Lewis, Tolkien, George MacDonald, and I was hard put to think of any others.

And somehow I completely forgot Madeleine L’Engle. How could I do that? Anyway, she’s done a good job with it, too.

This past month has been something of a watershed in my life as a book reviewer. In the past month I’ve read five books which I received as free review copies–and for the first time one of them was a book which I’d have read anyway (Mistress of the Pearl, by Eric Van Lustbader, which I’ll be reviewing in the next day or so).

I’ve said a few words about review copies in the past. The books I review are the books I read, and the vast majority of the books I read are books I simply felt like reading. Or re-reading. Or re-re-reading. And all through the time I’ve been reviewing books on-line (I started in December of 1996) I’ve occasionally been asked if I’d enjoy a review copy of an author’s book.

The first time it happened, I was tickled that I gladly accepted. The book turned out to be an awful, horrible, unreadable philosophical/political screed, self-published by the author. I won’t name it; let it rest in peace. Most of the requests that followed were similarly self-published, and most of them I skipped. A notable exception was Susan Wenger’s The Port Wine Sea, a delightful parody of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series. That was just over four years ago.

But just recently I’ve been getting more such requests, and the quality has generally been going up. The three Lars Walker novels I’ve reviewed recently I was sent at the behest of Mr. Walker himself; I didn’t mention it in the reviews simply because, for a change, I didn’t feel that it unduly affected the reading experience. It’s surprising–you’d think I’d be inclined to favor books I get for free, but it doesn’t work that way. It can be a burden–I accepted the free copy with the understanding that I’d review it, and reading something out of obligation tends to put me out of sorts and make me more critical. In Walker’s case, his tales pulled me right in, without let or hindrance. And then, I was reassured by the fact that they are published by Baen Books, the publisher of Lois McMaster Bujold, and also by the diffident manner with which he approached me. What can I say, I’m a sucker for a soft sell.

The fourth book was No Secrets, which I reviewed a few days ago, and which was a bit of a disappointment.

And the fifth was the aforementioned Mistress of the Pearl, which is published by Tor Books; they also publish Steven Brust. As I say, it’s the first book I’ve been asked to review that I would have bought anyway. (Though, to be fair, I’d have bought Susan Wenger’s book, and Lars Walker’s books as well–except that until they approached me with them, I didn’t even know that they existed.) I feel like I’ve finally come of age as a book reviewer–real publishers of real books that I really like have deigned to notice my existence. It’s all too silly for words, I suppose, but gratifying nonetheless.

Here’s yet another book by Lars Walker; I liked it almost as much as I
liked The Year of the Warrior, although it’s different in
almost every way, being set in the near future instead of the distant past.
The one thing they have in common is that both are tales of the clash of
conflicting worldviews: the struggle of pagan Scandinavia against the
coming of the White Christ in one case, and the struggle of a tired, emaciated
Christianity against the new paganism in the other. Though perhaps I
should say new paganisms instead, for Walker includes not only the overtly
neo-pagan, but also the Gnostic paganism that’s been creeping into the
mainstream Christian denominations over the last few decades.

Walker has written a book that is both a tale, well-told, and a
cautionary look at the end point of certain current trends. In his
near-future America, the only real gods are the twins of
multi-culturalism and diversity. It is illegal to use racial or ageist
epithets. Every town has a Happy Endings euthanasia clinic; every person
has a right to die when they wish. The Extinctionists are a growing
political force; they believe that the Earth can best be preserved by the
extinction of humanity. The Definition of Religion Act, passed
unanimously by Congress, determines which sects will be recognized
legally as religions, worthy of receiving tax-exempt status–and only
those sects which accept that all religions are equally valid pass the
test.

Yes, it’s a bit unlikely–it was meant to be extreme. I think we have
too much sense as a nation to go so far astray. But every one of the
points I mention is a simple extrapolation of a current trend.

That’s the background. The foreground is a small college town named
Epsom, Minnesota, home of a small “Lutheran” college. The scare quotes
are required; the school still has a chapel and holds services there, but
our hero, Carl Martell, was hired as a professor there mostly because he
wasn’t Christian–something to do with diversity requirements.

It’s an interesting time in Epsom, which is an old-fashioned Minnesota
community. A bachelor-farmer died recently, and his farm has been taken
over as a commune by a neo-pagan group from California; it’s making a few
people nervous, and there’s a lot of angry sentiment in town.
Meanwhile, the college is being visited by a famous
Norwegian poet named Sigfod Oski, a controversial figure and avowed pagan
who delights in shaking things up.

And what he’s after at the moment is bringing back Odin the All-Father.
Not for Oski the pale neo-paganism of today–he’s after the
blood-drenched paganism of yore. And only Carl Martell and a few others
stand in his way.

As I say, I enjoyed it. G.K. Chesterton often talked about the wild
romance of Christianity, the glorious adventure of it. It didn’t
surprise me when Walker captured that glorious romance in
The Year of the Warrior; the setting was tailor-made for it.
It does surprise me that he managed to capture it so well in a tale set
in modern-day Minnesota.

I got hit by the “lipitor guy” again; 120 more spam comments. This time it took me only about five minutes to clean up the mess, instead of an hour. Very, very nice.

It took me several tries to get past the first 100 pages of this book. I
picked it up thinking it was similar to the Vlad Taltos series and got mired
down in the language and details of the story. Will gave me words of
encouragement so I went back to it and started over, mentally shunting aside
any thoughts about Vlad and enjoying it for what it is on it’s own.

On it’s own, it’s really good. One of the first things I noticed is that
Brust has total control over his narrator. The book operates on two levels.
There is the general story of Khaavren and his fellow Guardsmen and the
intrigues of the Court and the Empire. There is also the story that the
narrator, Sir Paarfi of Roundwood, is telling. The narrator’s voice is as
much a character in the story as the actual participants in the events that
he is telling about.

Brust is writing a blatant ripoff of the style and some of the plot elements
in Alexander Dumas‘ Three Musketeer books. (Click the link, if you aren’t
familiar with them.) The best known is The Three Musketeers but Dumas went
on to continue the story in 4 more volumes, three of which are actually
subdivisions of one book. So, like Dumas’ books, this book is a historical
romance, a swashbuckling tale of sword fighting and dueling with a love
interest and court intrigues. It’s wordy and has long, complex sentences and
takes forever to get to the point. And that is what is so fun about it.

One suggestion I would make to any reader coming to this series after
reading the Vlad Taltos series is to read the Author’s preface and the two
About the Author sections at the end before beginning the book proper. It
will clue you into the narrator’s voice and how it relates to the action of
the story.

OK, I’ve upgraded to MovableType 3.0. The blogging interface looks about the same as the version I’d been using…a little less eye-candy, but then it seems to load more quickly too. Of the changes I’ve noticed, the best one is that there’s a now a comments page where I can see all of the posted comments–and delete them by mass quantities if necessary.

Anyway, we’ll see how this works; if the site behaves oddly for you, please let me know!

This is a family blog, more or less, so I can’t tell you how I really feel about the rude individual who posted approximately 120 individual pieces of spam in this weblog’s comments section today. It took me about an hour to delete all of them.

I’d planned to post another book review tonight, but instead I’m looking into upgrading to a later version of Movable Type.