Having thoroughly enjoyed Wilkie Collin’s The Moonstone, I went out and got a copy of the same author’s The Woman in White. Short answer: it’s even better. The Moonstone‘s climax is marred by a plot point that seems completely implausible today, although it would have seemed more more reasonable when it was written, whereas The Woman in White has no such problems.

The premise is straightforward. While out walking late at night, a young drawing master named Walter Hartwright encounters a strange young woman, dressed all in white, who calls upon him for help. He grants it, only to discover later that she is a madwoman escaped from a private asylum. Later he encounters another young woman who might be her double, and loses his heart. She, of course, is promised to another…and therein hangs the tale.

Like The Moonstone, the story is told by a number of voices, each supposedly first person; like The Moonstone, it’s a mystery, perhaps the first mystery novel in the English language; like The Moonstone, a romance is central to the tale. It’s long, a bit slow, but it kept me reading.

If it has a fault, it lies in two notions that were commonplace in novels of the day: that a good, cold wetting invariably leads to a horrible, life-threatening illness, and that the minds of women (and of men) are all too easily unhinged. Its strengths, as with The Moonstone, are its characters. I was especially taken with the larger than life Count Fosco. I wouldn’t want to know him, mind, but I enjoyed all of the scenes in which he appears.

One minor quibble: if young Walter had any sense, he’d have fallen in love with Marian rather than Laura. Marian’s worth the whole rest of the family.

Note: Lars Walker has also recently read and reviewed this book; go here for his take.

Priscilla Hutchins—”Hutch” to her friends—is a starship pilot for the Academy of Science and Technology, circa 2200 AD. It seems that faster-than-light space travel (“superluminal” travel in the parlance of the book) has caused a revolution in the field of archaeology; intelligent races are scarce in the galaxy, but relics of intelligent races are surprising common. Thus, Hutch spends her time ferrying archaeological teams around and about, here and there, and willy-nilly participating in the grand foolishness they get involved in.

To date, Jack McDevitt has written six books about Hutch and her colleagues, along with some short stories; I’ve read the first four books, which are uniformly entertaining, with lots of gosh-wowness, neat alien tech, ancient alien civilizations, and deadly mysteries in the depth of space.

In The Engines of God, we find out why there are so few advanced civilizations out and about in the galaxy, and that archaeologists won’t leave a promising site until the very last minute, even if it’s likely to get them killed. We also learn that Jack McDevitt has a taste for destruction on the planetary scale, and breathtaking last-minute escapes.

In Deepsix, we learn that about more advanced civilizations that at least used to be around and about the galaxy, and Hutch and her crew are nearly killed investigating archaeological sites on a planet that is about to be destroyed by a rogue star. To be fair, the archaeological team would have loved to be able to leave the site well before the last minute, but were prevented. The final rescue is more convoluted and involved than the denouement of Toy Story 3.

Are you detecting a pattern, here?

In Chindi, the death and destruction are on a somewhat smaller scale, if I’m remembering correctly, which is to say that I don’t think we lose any planets. I could be mistaken about that. Nevertheless, there are still breathtaking last minute escapes, and even a little true love, and archaelogists who won’t leave a promising site until the very last minute. I think I like this one the best of the four.

In Omega, there’s yet another breathtaking last-minute escape, yet again involving an entire planet, and much is learned about why the galaxy is as it is. There’s also a lot of reflection about religion.

So basically, we’re talking here good hard science fiction mind candy. The science is reasonable, the archeology well-done (so far as I can tell), and the plots and situations are both spectacular and completely over the top. Not five stars, consequently; but sufficiently entertaining to keep me coming back for more.

I will say, I find McDevitt’s approach to religion refreshing. The books are not overtly about religion—certainly, I have no idea what McDevitt’s religious views might be, assuming he even has any—but there are religious people in them. This usually comes out at funerals, of which there are an appalling number, where the religion of the deceased is duly noted. And that’s simply right: religion is part of life, and despite the New Athiests people will go on being religious right on into the future. Not all of them—Hutch, herself, expresses a materialist worldview—but some of them. It’s not the main thing, there’s nothing like advocacy here, one way or the other, but it’s present.

These are not kids’ books, either in style or substance; McDevitt is reasonably frank about the presence of sexual relationships and the wide variety of possibilities that can arise when bored travelers are cooped on superluminal starships for months on end. But he’s not graphic either, which is pleasant.

Recently I reviewed Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. In the interests of equal time, I recently got Louis L’Amour’s Silver Canyon, and read that. And I have to say, the two books are both westerns, by which I mean they both have guns and horses and cattle and strong men and beautiful women, but beyond that they have almost nothing in common.

Riders of the Purple Sage reads like a well-researched historical novel. The plot and dialog are rather melodramatic, I don’t quite buy all of the characters, and it’s absolutely lacking in any sense of fun, but the settings seem real and the sense of place is astounding. It’s like Blu-Ray for your imagination.

Silver Canyon, on the other hand, is precisely what I was expecting Riders of the Purple Sage to be: a Wild West shoot-em-up from the great era of the Western Movie. It’s great fun, don’t get me wrong—but an honest picture of cowboy days it ain’t.

Our hero is a young drifter with a steady eye and a fast draw. Inside of three pages he’s met the girl he intends to marry—and has told her so—and has pissed off both sides in the range war that’s currently dividing the town. Inside of six pages he’s been half beaten to death by the girl’s boyfriend, and inside of eight he’s signed up with the third rancher in town, the one whose ranch the other two are fighting over. During the course of the book he gets shot, of course, and recovers fully with no treatment but hot water and clean living (to be fair, this happens in Grey’s book, too), is nearly lynched, unites the town, and gives the bad guy his comeuppance. Oh, and naturally he gets the girl. The only things missing are a conflict between the cattlemen and the sheepherders, and between both and the railroad.

The book’s well-enough written, but there’s a kind of ramshackle feel to the whole thing, like a movie set where the buildings are all false fronts with nothing behind them. The whole thing kind of reminds me of an old movie called Rustler’s Rhapsody, in which there are supposed to be vast cattle herds, but you never actually see them, you just hear them offstage.

But it’s a rousing tale, and would be a grand thing to read at the beach or by the pool. You might want to get several, because it goes by really quick; I don’t think the whole book took me more than a couple of hours.

Another of the Oxford’s World Classics I picked up on sale is Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, a title I’ve been familiar with just about forever. Note well: it’s not the book I’ve been familiar with, just the title. For some reason, people like to riff on it. There’s a country rock band, “New Riders of the Purple Sage”; Philip Jose Farmer wrote at least two tales with variants of the title, a Thieves’ World story called “Spiders of the Purple Mage” and a novella called “Riders of the Purple Wage”, and I seem to recall seeing others by him with similar titles.

I’m not vouching for any of these, you understand. I just mention them.

But though I seem to have always known the title, I had never read the book, and knew nothing about it except that it was a western. I was in a susceptible mood, so when I saw it on sale with the others I grabbed it, and this last week I read it.

First, a brief precis. It’s set on the southern Utah border in the days of Mormon polygamy. Jane Withersteen is the unmarried daughter and heir of a Mormon rancher. Her father founded the town she lives near, and she’s now the largest rancher and land-owner in the vicinity. She’s rejected the advances of some of the more powerful men in town; and being almost supernaturally good, kind, loving, gentle, and charitable she’s in bad odor with them because of her charity to the poor Gentiles (non-Mormons) in the vicinity. They are determined to use every means at hand, licit and illicit, open and under-handed, to “break” her.

Yes, this is a book in which the Mormons are the villains.

Strike that. This is a book in which the Mormon men are the villains, who are only out for lust and power even if they put a pretty face on it. The Mormon women (and most especially Jane Withersteen) are strong, faithful, ill-used, long-suffering, kind, gentle women who deserve much better than they are getting. Jane is ultimately saved by a gunman in black, a man whose love she tries to win to prevent him from killing Mormons. Plus, there are horses, and riders, and canyons, and rocks, and rustlers, and gunshots, and wild chases, and stampedes, and evil and goodness, and you know, like that.

I’ll pass lightly over the anti-Mormon message. Grey was writing about a rough place in a rough time, and I’ve no doubt that there were some real pieces of work among the Mormon community in southern Utah in those days, if only because real pieces of work are fairly evenly distributed across the family of Man. I’m sure there were those who were attracted more by polygamy than by the other aspects of the LDS church. More than that, there certainly was violence between the Mormon communities and outsiders from time to time; you can google the Mountain Meadow Massacre if you like. All that said, there are lots of Mormons here where I live, there have been as long as I’ve been around, and to have them painted as villains strikes me as odd.

The themes of the book should be clear from what I’ve already said. Hypocrisy, and especially religious hypocrisy, are front and center. Frontier justice is often violent, and sometimes it’s necessary to cut corners to see that justice is done. None of that surprised me.

So what did I think of it as a story?

First, Zane Grey had an extraordinary ability to describe the landscapes of his stories. Southern Utah is not the prairie, flat and broad; it’s broken into canyons of all sorts, and I was consistently amazed by his skill at describing extremely complex terrain in a way that I could visualize it, and least think I knew what he was getting at. I think he’d be worth studying for that alone.

Second, the dialog, and less often the prose, can be rather purple and melodramatic. Grey puts the “opera” in “horse opera”.

Third, the foreshadowing is at times heavy-handed. We’ve all heard the dictum that if there’s a gun on the mantel in Act I, it had better be fired before the end of Act III. It’s not unreasonable to have a character contemplate the gun and think, “You know, when that gun is fired nothing will ever be the same.” It’s probably overdoing it to have the character reflect on those cosmic repercussions four or five times. Those who have read the book will know what I’m talking about.

Fourth, there’s not a trace of humor from one end to the other. Emotions are huge, vibrant, rolling with thunder from one end of the sky to another. There’s great joy, and enormous, ponderous happiness, massive sorrow, hatred, guile, and so on, but there’s no quiet, wry amusement. This is a not a book where people laugh. Consequently, I found it a bit of a slog. There was much to like, but it wasn’t what you’d call fun.

So there you go. I’m in awe of Grey’s descriptive skills; I may well re-read certain passages just to figure out how he did it. Beyond that, I’ve no particular interest in looking up his other books.