Being at home sick for a day, I put the Burton bio aside for awhile and
picked up this, the penultimate volume in O’Brian’s long, long saga.
I’ve gotten the impression from little things I’ve seen here and there
that many fans don’t think much of it; and to be fair it never really
seems to catch fire. Plus, O’Brian did some really obnoxious things.
The book begins with a passing mention of the death of Stephen’s wife
Diana; and toward the end another of my favorite continuing characters is
killed with hardly any notice taken–and to no literary end that I can
see.

Apart from that it’s a pleasant enough book; lots of nautical to-ing and
fro-ing about the Mediterranean Sea and a few nice sea battles, with the
escaped Bonaparte floating about Europe and a complicated Islamic plot to
help him back into power. Of course, by the time Aubrey succeeds in
forestalling said plot Wellington has succeeded in defeating Bonaparte at
Waterloo, rendering the whole thing rather moot.

I have some suspicions on where O’Brian might have been going. I say
“might have been”, because I haven’t yet read the final book,
Blue at the Mizzen, and because he had just begun writing a
subsequent book when he died. But in the previous book,
The Yellow Admiral, Stephen meets a lovely woman, a
naturalist in her own right, and the wife of the governor of Sierra
Leone. Though she doesn’t appear in this book she’s mentioned a number
of times; and it’s rather pointedly mentioned that (1) the governor has
just died, and (2) the marriage was not as happy as it appeared to be,
and in fact was never consummated. It begins to look as though O’Brian
was getting Diana out of the way, so as to interest Stephen in somebody
new.

So I’m quite curious to see what happens in Blue at the Mizzen,
a book about which I’ve heard none of the unpleasant little whispers. But
that’s a tale for next month.

I am not going to say much about the plot of this book. First, it’s still
in hardback and unless you want to spring for the $23 it’s priced at, any
plot description is going to be a spoiler.

Second, and this is the main reason, I have my knickers in a knot about
what Lovesey did in this book. I will say it is the end of the Peter
Diamond series. And if it is funny in any way, I totally missed the
humor. You kind of grow to expect certain things from a series and when
the author throws the right hook he did in this one, it’s a little
disconcerting. Don’t get me wrong. The writing is great. The murder
investigation is interesting and has some twists you can’t see ahead of
time. I am just a little ticked at Lovesey for doing what he did to Peter
Diamond. I kept waiting for it to be an elaborate charade similar to what
he has done in previous novels. It isn’t. Rats.

This book explores the locked room mystery plot. A murder victim is found
in a room locked from the inside with no discernible way that the
murderer could have gotten in or out. But Lovesey is not only writing a
book with the plot. The opening chapter of this book reads like a Who’s
Who in crime fiction. A young woman joins a meeting of Bloodhounds, a
bookclub dedicated to crime fiction that meets weekly in the crypt of the
Abbey. Her fellow club members are all eccentric, opinionated critics
with their own favorite authors in the genre, which they discuss in
painful detail. When someone sends a riddle to the local radio station
predicting a crime, the group decides to work solve the mystery,
thankfully.

Lovesey is writing his normal humorous murder mystery with all the twists
and dodges that he has put in the other books of the series. Peter
Diamond is his normal grumpy self. The end is unpredictable at the
beginning unless you are paying very, very close attention. However, it’s
not the best in the series. I found it a bit repetitive, though still
totally enjoyable.

I realized after about 2 paragraphs that this book is part of a series
that needs to be read in order. It takes place in Carmel, California in
1907. Fremont Jones, the heroine, has moved to Carmel after the San
Francisco earthquake to take a temporary job of lighthouse keeper. On
watch one day she spots a dead woman floating in the sea, unknown by
anyone around and unclaimed by family.

Fremont Jones reminded me a little of Amelia Peabody or Mary Russell. She
is the “independent woman heroine,” refusing to give into accepted norms
for women’s behavior and lifestyle for the period. If you accept the
conceit and ignore the unlikelihood of such a heroine, the novel works
fairly well. This book didn’t have the slapstick humor of Peters
mysteries but I enjoyed it nevertheless. She includes a love interest
named Michael who is some sort of spy–I think that came out in previous
novels. My only gripe with the book is that for all the detecting going
on, Fremont doesn’t really figure out much of anything. And I wish I knew
more about Michael and what he is doing sneaking around in the background
of the plot. I have to read the earlier books in the series.

The dearth of book reviews early in the month isn’t helped by the
fact that my current book is a slow, thick one: a biography of Sir
Richard Francis Burton. Burton was a 19th Century soldier and
adventurer; he’s best known these days for his pilgramage to Mecca (he
was one of the first Europeans to go there), and for his translation of
the 1,001 Arabian Nights (the original translation, and still the raciest,
I’m given to understand). More about him when I’ve finished the book.

If you’ve got kids of the right age, you’ve probably heard of
Redwall; not only is it a popular and still growing
series, but the first book was made into a PBS TV show. That’s
where David first encountered it, and he was too excited for
words to find out that we actually had a copy of the book for
me to read to him. It took us the tail end of September, all of
October, and the first few days in November, but by golly we
did it.

A quick plot summary: the peaceful mice of Redwall Abbey are
known all over the countryside for their willingness to help others.
But an evil rat, Cluny the Scourge, is coming with his horde; he wants
to take Redwall Abbey for his castle. The Abbey was founded in part by
the great warrior mouse Martin, who defended it and then pledged himself
to peace. Now a young mouse, Matthias, must find Martin’s armor and
sword, and take up arms to defend Redwall as Martin did. So it’s about
knights and armor and derring do and battles and brave scouting missions;
it’s a coming of age story, naturally; and since it’s written for kids
there’s lots of good stuff about the importance of forgiveness and
turning enemies into friends. Martin succeeds, of course, and a great
celebration is enjoyed by all.

I find I need to approach this review from two points of view,
David’s, and my own.

David loved it. He was thrilled. I couldn’t possibly have had a
better audience. If Redwall the novel has any faults,
David was immune to them.

Now, my point of view. I bought our copy of Redwall
some years ago; I often like kid-lit if it’s done well. I liked it,
with caveats, but didn’t feel at all motivated to by any of the
other books in the series.

Nothing about this reading changed my mind. The writing isn’t great.
The prose frequently edges into the purple; a good editing could make
it a much cleaner, crisper read. The plot is rather contrived.
The quest for Martin’s sword involves hints which require Martin to
have been seriously prophetic, for which no decent explanation is given.

The laws of physics get stretched in a cartoon-like way far more often
than I like. And no, I’m not being overly critical here. It’s one thing
if the laws of physics are stretched by magic–that’s part of the story.
So are talking mice who live in an abbey. But in this case, they are
simply stretched to make the story work properly.

I can almost hear the author saying, “Yeah, that’s implausible, but the
kids won’t care.”

And he’s probably right a lot of the time. But I think that books for
younger readers must play fair and follow the rules. The author is
free to set the rules; and one of the rules for Redwall is
that it’s a world more or less like our own. The rules of physics apply.
To break them just to make the story come out is an insult to the readers
and an unwarrantable liberty on the author’s part–the more so as
(given its vocabulary) Redwall is clearly aimed at the teen
market. These kids are smart enough to notice these things.

It doesn’t really read-aloud well, either (most flaws are at their most
visible when read aloud), and it doesn’t break up into nice chunks for
for bedtime reading. You finish a chapter with Matthias in a serious
cliffhanger, and it doesn’t get resolved until a full chapter later, for
example. Plus, the chapter lengths vary widely. I can’t really criticize
these last two points so much, though, as it just reflects that
Redwall is really a book for much older kids.

Now, there’s a lot to like here as well. The plot is fine, and the
storytelling was adequate. I wasn’t writhing in bored horror as I read
the tale to Dave. Jacques clearly accomplished what he set out to do.
But I really wish the writing was better and the solutions a little
less strained.

I believe this was Jacques’ first book; it may be that his writing
improves in the subsequent volumes. I have every reason to expect that
I’ll find out…but it’s with a sigh of relief that I remember that
we’ll be starting Prince Caspian tomorrow night.

This book is a popular survey of Mayan archaeology, with the decipherment
of Mayan writing being the uniting theme. The topic may sound dry, but
the book isn’t–because it’s really the story of people. It’s the tale
of the Mayans themselves, of course, but even more of the wide and varied
cast of characters who have studied them over the last five-hundred years.
And unlike the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, which was
accomplished (with the help of the Rosetta Stone) by the great
Champollion in two busy years, the decipherment of the Mayan script took
many strange turns and odd directions courtesy of the many strange and
odd people who have studied it.

It’s a surprisingly engaging tale–this is my second time through it, in
fact. I learned quite a bit about the Mayans, dispelling quite a few
myths, but also about language and writing systems in general (by the
end, our alphabet alphabet seems a thing of wonder).

It’s also something of a cautionary tale about trends in academia. The
Old Guard in Mayan Archaeology had decided that Mayan script was
“ideographic”, that is, that each glyph corresponded to a particular
idea, rather than to any particular word. The same has often been said
of Egyptian writing, and Chinese as well, and it turns out that it’s
hogwash. Every writing system known encodes spoken language, and every
writing system known has a phonetic component. In Mayan script, for
example, a jaguar’s head might be used to mean “jaguar”, but it might be
used purely for the sound of the word “jaguar” as part of another word.
If we wrote English the way the Mayans wrote their language, we might use
a glyph that looked like a cat to mean “cat”, but also as the first sound
in “catapult”, “cattle”, “category”, and so forth.

This has been known to be true for Egyptian, for example, since the
mid-nineteenth century; the Old Guard’s ideas were 50 years out of date
even at the beginning of this century. And although the first successful
phonetic decipherment of Mayan script was done in 1952, it was thirty
years before that small beginning was able to blossom and bear
fruit–largely because the staunchest member of the Old Guard was dead
by then.

Anyway, it’s a cool book. There’s a second edition out, with more
pictures than I’ve got in mine; I should probably find a copy.

This is the fifth book of Flint and Drake’s “Belisarius” series, now
finally available in softcover; I reviewed its four predecessors last
fall. For those who’ve joined us since then, it’s an alternate history
series with a fun but goofy premise. Evil people from the far future
have sent an artificially-intelligent computer called “Link” to Earth in
the days of Byzantine Emperor Justinian I and his highly-competent general
Belisarius. Link’s goal, naturally, is to so adjust Earth’s history that
its creators ultimately end up on top of the kind of world they like.
Pursuant to this, Link has caused the founding of the Malwa Empire in
India. The goal of the Malwa empire, naturally, is to take over the
world in the most brutal and inhuman way possible, all under the
guidance of Link. This is a series with White Hats and Black Hats, and
the Black Hats (with the exception of a few misguided souls who
eventually come ’round) are very Black indeed. It’s not enough for them
to have evil ends; they must have despicable means as well.

On the other side you’ve got General Belisarius and his happy, jovial
crew of soldiers of all kinds. Belisarius is accompanied by another
visitor from the far future, the crystalline entity called “Aide”.
Unlike the inhuman, emotionless machine-entity Link, Aide is funny,
sarcastic, and caring by turns–but Aide is equally determined to see
Link fail. Naturally, both Link and Aide give advanced technology and
tactical tips to their teams. The difference is, of course, that fascist
Link wishes to control the flow of information whereas Aide is happy to
give Belisarius and his followers anything they can possibly use.

Unsurprisingly, competence, good humor, and the free flow of ideas is
going to triumph over evil totalitarianism, and this is book in which we
begin to see it happen. Like it’s predecessors, it’s a rollicking good
time; the good guys beat the bad guys six ways from Sunday, the villains
get theirs in suitably ironic fashion, and so on and so forth–though
there are some surprises.

There will be at least one more book in the series, in which Link and the
Malwa Empire will presumably be destroyed; it’s to be called
The Dance of Time.

If this sounds like anything you’d enjoy reading, I think you’ll enjoy it
quite a bit. I did.

For some reason that I haven’t quite discovered none of the Large Chain
Bookstores carry books by this author. Even Small Independent Bookstores
don’t stock her work unless they have a used section. A pity, because she
writes award winning mysteries that are excellent for suspense without
all the guts and gore you find in a great many of what is on the shelves
these days. I don’t like guts and gore. Plus, I’ve read 5 or 6 of her
mysteries now and she hasn’t repeated a plot. Usually after that many,
the mediocre start getting repetitious.

Fall From Grace centers on the relationships of 5 people who went to
high school together way back when. The Good Looking Bad Boy, Bobby
Ransome, is back in Sechelt after doing a stint in prison. And for some
reason, the school nerd and photographer, Stephen Grayson, who hasn’t
shown his face in Sechelt since leaving right after high school, has
decided to come back to visit his elderly widowed mother. And then there
is Annabelle, Wanda and poor frustrated Warren, who are just trying to
live their lives with messed up relationships and none too hot marriages.
So when Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg finally gets his girlfriend,
Cassandra, on a boat to go sailing for a day, it seriously interrupts his
romantic visions to find Stephen Grayson lying at the bottom of cliff
with all the signs that he has been pushed and a whole crew of people who
could have done it.

This is one of those mysteries where you know who did it but you can’t
figure out why. The pleasure from reading it comes from watching Alberg
work his way thru all the leads and clues. And with this one, the
solution is delightfully ambiguous. Did he or didn’t he?

In high school, years and years ago, a friend of mine read Wodehouse and,
on her recommendation, I read a couple Bertie and Jeeves stories. They
were ok, I guess. I don’t remember much more than that. Then a couple
years ago our local PBS station ran or reran the Bertie and Jeeves
stories with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie and I loved them, especially
Stephen Fry as Jeeves. So when I started reading Will’s reviews, bells
went off and whistles whistled in the back of my head but I never got
around to buying any of them. Then last summer, I was looking for
Virginia Woolf in the used bookstore and found Wodehouse instead so I
bought a couple. But I never got around to reading them. So last week, I
was browsing the shelves in my sewing room where all my books are stashed
and I found the books I bought and read one. And then I read another. And
then I went to the Large Chain Bookstore and bought a bunch more. Which
is to say, I am hooked. Thanks, Will.

Anyway, I started with Pigs Have Wings, a Blandings story
published in
1952. The Blandings stories have at their center Blandings Castle and
it’s owner the slightly dim Lord Emsworth. And the center of his world is
the Empress of Blandings, his beloved pig, whom in this story he is
fattening up to win the prize at the local Fair for largest pig. And then
there is Sir Galahad Threepwood, his old but rakish brother, and Beach,
his port-drinking butler. His competition at the Fair is his grossly
overweight neighbor, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe and his pig, The Queen
of Matchingham. And he employs Lord Emsworth’s former “pig man,” George
Cyril Wellbeloved, who smells of, um, pig and has a mighty taste for beer.
There are love stories, deceptions, mistaken identities, pig thefts and
general rushing about in the two seater that fill in the plot of the
novel. Summer Lightning, published in 1929, is essentially the same
with different girls and a few other characters. In fact, whole passages
are repeated at the beginning of the book, which gave me a weird sense of
deja vu. I suppose Wodehouse thought it worked well one time, why not
repeat it again.

The first thing I noticed is the language. His puns are merciless. I
spent much of the time reading and chuckling out loud, to my husband’s
annoyance. Sir Galahad Threepwood has some of the funniest lines I have
read in a long, long time. And the descriptions of the way characters
move or look is priceless. I thought about underlining them so I could go
back and find them later. About half way thru the Pigs have Wings, I
realized that Wodehouse had woven a pretty complicated web of
interconnection between the characters that he then was peeling back one
by one in the final pages of the story. You know the ending will be
happy, you just don’t quite know how he is going to do it.

I can’t wait to read Bertie and Jeeves.