2023/095: A Man of Some Repute — Elizabeth Edmondson

...this was quintessential England. Inward-looking, still licking the wounds of war, keeping the flag flying and hoping that Life Was Getting Better. [p. 105]

Rural England in 1953: Hugo Hawksworth, former intelligence officer, is confined to desk work following an injury. With his 13-year-old sister Georgia, he moves to the little town of Selchester to work on 'statistics' (which are clearly nothing of the kind) and is accommodated at the Castle, once the home of the Earl of Selchester but now inhabited, since the Earl's mysterious disappearance in a blizzard nearly seven years ago, by his niece Freya and a number of staff.

New evidence suggests that the Earl's disappearance is not as mysterious as all that, at least to one or more of the guests he'd invited to dinner on the night he vanished. Someone knows what really happened, but who? Hugo, Georgia and Freya -- with able assistance from Mrs Partridge, the housekeeper, and Hugh's uncle Leo -- navigate a maze of clues, red herrings, random discoveries and improbable revelations to discover what really happened on that winter night.

I bought this, some time ago, because I'm a great admirer of Elizabeth Edmondson's Mountjoy novels (2005 review, 2014 review) which were published under the name of Elizabeth Pewsey: she also wrote as Elizabeth Aston. I didn't find A Man of Some Repute quite as likeable as the Mountjoy books (perhaps because of the lack of that vague tinge of the supernatural that I found so intriguing; perhaps because Hugh, the protagonist, is somewhat opaque) but I'm keeping the other two novels in this trilogy in reserve for when I want cosy crime, rural England and interesting characters. Though it has to be said that the villains here are rather more stereotypical than in the author's other works.

For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 01 JUN 2015, prompt 'outside' -- I read most of it in the garden on a sunny Sunday morning.

2023/094: Empire Games — Charles Stross

“They’ve given me a Priority One tasking to look at the state of geological and paleontological research and confirm that BLACK RAIN [timeline 2] was created in the Year of Our Lord 4004 B.C., just like our own time line.” [p. 269]

The first of a trilogy set in the same universe as Stross' six-volume Merchant Princes series, of which I've only read the first volume (The Family Trade). I picked up the essentials very quickly in Empire Games, which is set some time after the Merchant Princes series, but shares the concept of 'world-walkers' who can move between Earths on different timelines. In the Merchant Princes books, it turns out, the USA (not quite our USA, but recognisable) behaved very badly. Refugees from a devastated timeline (referred to as 'timeline 1' in Empire Games' useful preface) are now working hard to bring technological innovation to timeline 3, where the North American Commonwealth confronts the French Empire. Timeline 2, very similar to our world but heavier on surveillance and policing, is the initial setting of Empire Games, introducing Gen Z slacker Rita Douglas. Rita was educated by her grandfather, a former Cold War spy, in all manner of tradecraft, but she's working as a 'booth babe' at a tech show when she's recruited by the Department of Homeland Security. Apparently Rita is an inactive carrier of the world-walking gene, and the DHS believes they can activate her ability and send her to spy on timeline 3 ...

This was great fun, and I'm keen to read the rest of the trilogy when the TBR pile has gone down a bit -- especially as Empire Games does feel like the first third of a larger work, rather than a self-contained novel. Stross' humour chimes with my own, and his characters, even stereotypes like 'bad cop' Agent Gomez, are credible and rounded. I'm intrigued by the ruins in timeline 4, and by the genetics of the Clan: I applaud the cultural references ('they canceled the War on Drugs and replaced it with the Crisis on Infinite Earths'), and I look forward to watching Rita come into her full power.

For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 01 AUG 2018, prompt 'games'.

2023/093: Thursbitch — Alan Garner

She heard Jack again, but his was the only mortal voice, and even for him Nan Sarah could not move. Something was in the field. It grew from the mass, and was it, yet made it more, drawing the dark writhing into its own purpose, the yelling to its own tongue. What was there grew to reach the moon and gave one cry such as Nan Sarah had not heard in all her days: the cry of both man and bull. [p. 59]

A short (178 pages in print) but very dense novel: I've read it twice and suspect I will find new angles, new elements, when I read it again.

The setting is the valley of Thursbitch, a name which Garner has interpreted as either 'the valley of the demon' or 'the valley where something big dwells'. There are two parallel narratives, which may intersect but do not do so explicitly. In the eighteenth century, a jagger (salt-trader) named Jack Turner undertakes epic journeys, but always returns to his home. He has been chosen by the previous incumbent to be the focus of a religious ritual that occurs once every eighteen years: a kind of tauroctony, aided by hallucinogenic mushrooms and shared by a dozen or so families. Christianity does not seem to have reached this corner of Cheshire -- there is a delightful exchange between Jack and his father on the nature of sin: "Yon’s a word; same as, It’s long sin we had such a storm. Or, It’s a while sin you gave me this here thackstone to hold while you rambled and romped with your mither." (p. 101) -- and Jack, whose origins are mysterious, is pledged to the Bull.

In the twenty-first century (or the twentieth? this novel was published in 2003) two friends, Ian and Sal, visit Thursbitch. Ian is a Jesuit priest: Sal is a professor of geology, and is suffering a degenerative disease. She's convinced that the valley is 'sentient', and the two experience some oddities: a thrown cup, signs of a bull where no bull should be, a distant figure who vanishes.

Whatever happens to Jack is real, to Jack, and is recounted as stolidly (and in as dense a dialect) as his roof-mending or pack-leading. He's very much at one with the valley, with its elements (sun, stone, brook and cloud; fire, earth, air and water) and he accepts without question -- as must the reader -- that the massive stones come down to the brook to drink. (Sal determines that they all weigh about the same, seven-tenths of a ton, and posits that this was the maximum practical weight.)

I loved the rhythm and flow of the eighteenth-century scenes, even when the language was puzzling. Jack's faith is Mithraic, possibly a relic of Roman times (though I can't find anything in the text to support that). Jack himself is clearly a well-travelled character, speaking of the 'Red Erythræan Strand' and 'bog o' Mirollies' as easily as of Derby and London, and perhaps earlier travellers brought the Bull and the Snake back with them...

I would love to be able to talk to the late Maureen Kincaid Speller about this novel. I miss her.

Garner's lecture 'The Valley of the Demon'. From the same site, Thursbitch Tangents (warning! rabbit hole!).

Fulfils the ‘a book I meant to read last year’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 15 OCT 2022, prompt 'standalone'. I'd previously owned a paperback copy, acquired in 2013, and eventually discarded in 2019 as my deteriorating eyesight made me take a good long look squint at my shelves of physical books, which I would now struggle to read.

2023/092: Plutoshine — Lucy Kissick

He came to understand that humans needed, on some deep-seated level, the sight of the Sun in the sky. But why? Why try to light the Martian sky with dangerous mirrors? Why build a vulnerable structure on the Mercurian surface below its searing heat, and not move sensibly underground? The Sun, he decided, was a tyrant. [loc. 1665]

Lucian Merriweather is a solar engineer, part of a team of terraformers who've come to Pluto (no longer a planet, in this near-future solar system, but very definitely a world) to bring sunlight and warmth to this furthesy outpost of humanity. There, Lucian and his colleagues find a thriving community, with indie and folk bands, gardens, a swimming pool, cake, cider and -- possibly, terrifyingly -- a saboteur.

The colony's charismatic founder, Clavius Harbour, is in a coma after an expedition with his son Edmund and daughter Nou to investigate Nou's tale of life on Pluto. No life, apparently, was found, and a freak accident damaged Clavius' air supply. In his effective absence, Edmund is running the colony, and Nou has not spoken for a year. But she wants to help with the terraforming project, and Lucius takes her under his wing, teaching her sign language and involving her in the preparations for the 'sun-bringing'.

There's a lot of science here, but nothing that I found too technical. There are fabulous descriptions of the Plutonic landscape, and some of the most urgent and thrilling writing about a scientist tackling an emergency that I have ever read. The focus for me, though, was the characters. Lucian -- who brought his cat, Captain Whiskers, all the way from Earth, and clearly loves his 'dear savage' a lot (thus instantly winning my affection) -- is an absolute delight, extroverted, inventive, great sense of humour, splendid hair. His older colleague Halley, the grande dame of terraforming, is an acidic counterbalance to Lucian's exuberance. Stan, Lucian's PhD student, provides a lot of the technical detail whilst trying to prove his credentials. And Nou, who is one of the viewpoint characters, is a fascinating enigma: her friendship with Lucian and her increasing confidence are powerfully written.

There are so many neat and pleasing details here: the vegetarian, self-sufficient diet of the colony (see also Dinner on Mars); the naming of captured asteroids (which'll graze Pluto's negligable atmosphere to increase atmospheric pressure) after powerful beings in a cult fantasy series; Captain Whiskers and his plot-relevance; the Tombaugh Day festival, commemorating Clyde Tombaugh who first observed Pluto in 1930; the backstories of successful and failed terraforming schemes; the discovery of primitive life on Europa and Enceladus, and the desire to move people off Earth and save the only known planet with multi-cellular life... Kissick, who's a planetary physicist, achieves a compelling balancing act here, with science, setting and characters all integral parts of the plot. I liked this much more than I'd expected, and it would be a worthy winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award, for which it's shortlisted.

2023/091: The Secrets of Pain — Phil Rickman

'...Had what you might call a spiritual experience where I seen the poetic truth of ley lines. Looked at the veins in my wrist and seen the arteries of the countryside. Magic, that was.’
‘I thought it was acid.’
‘Well, aye, it was, but a vision’s a vision, ennit?' [loc. 3489]

Jumping from the first to the eleventh in a series means discovering that a lot has happened in the intervening nine books... Having read and enjoyed The Wine of Angels, first in the Merrily Watkins series, I found The Secrets of Pain in my well-populated Kindle TBR folder, and dived in.

Merrily, formerly the new vicar of Ledwardine on the Welsh Borders, is now a bona fide Deliverance Consultant for the Diocese of Hereford: that is, a professional exorcist. She encounters an old friend, SAS soldier turned chaplain Syd Spicer, who seems unsettled about something from his past. But hey, 'every SAS chaplain worth his kit knows thirty-seven ways to kill with a wooden cross': surely Syd can look after himself? Because there's plenty else on Merrily's plate: her daughter Jane's plans to sabotage a local landowner who's running shooting weekends at the Lodge; the savage murder of a local farmer; the deaths of two Romanian refugees in nearby Hereford; the reports of shadowy figures coming up from the river...

There are more perspectives in this novel than in The Wine of Angels, and plenty of plot that isn't directly related to Merrily and Ledwardine. The local police are attempting to find the murderer or murderers, and their complicated web of personal relationships might affect their investigations. There's still plenty of psychogeography, weirdness and the supernatural, from Alfred Watkins and his Old Straight Track to Julian of Norwich, from Mithraism to motor sports, with a diversion into exactly why the SAS have moved their headquarters to a site at the junction of two Roman roads, in the shadow of an Iron Age hillfort. Several delightful new characters join the 'starter set', in particular Miss White, currently resident in a care home (all the staff are scared of her) but with 'over fifty years’ experience of the techniques for personal growth circulating in the ruins of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Tragically, I shall have to read the rest of the series!

Interesting Phil Rickman interview, describing Merrily as "a decent woman trying to do a medieval job in a scornful world".

Read for Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 31 MAR 2018, prompt 'In the Same Series'.

2023/090: The Wine of Angels — Phil Rickman

'...standing in that orchard, covered with that poor old bloke’s blood, that was when I decided to go for it. I clearly remember thinking that nothing so immediate and so utterly shocking ever happened quite that close to me in Liverpool. That maybe, in some ways, this village could actually be the sharp end. I thought, am I going to wash off his blood and walk away?’ [loc. 339]

Set in the charming and picturesque Herefordshire village of Ledwardine, and featuring single mother Merrily Watkins and her teenaged daughter Jane as they arrive in the village and adjust to local life, this -- the first in the Merrily Watkins series -- has all the ingredients of a cosy mystery. It also features apples, poetry, the Church, and a long-standing tradition of violence, prejudice and paganism.

Merrily Watkins decides to take up the post of Ledwardine's vicar after witnessing the suicide of an elderly local during a reinvented apple orchard ritual. She quickly discovers that beneath the picture-postcard calm of the village lurk a number of nasties, including the great old families of Bull-Davies and Powell; the nouveau-riche incomers, eager to preserve and wallow in the olde-worlde atmosphere; the three-hundred-year old legend of a local priest who was found hanging in the orchard after reports of depravity; and the teenaged oiks who leer and jeer at Jane and her new friend Colette. Oh, and Merrily is convinced that the vicarage is haunted... To counter those unpleasantnesses, there are more benign elements: Lol Robinson, washed-up rock star and devotee of iconic musician Nick Drake; Gomer, a dyed-in-the-wool yokel with a penchant for farm machinery; and Lucy Devenish, who may just be an eccentric old lady.

There's violence and murder, but it's not the focus: this is a novel about Merrily and the village learning to rub along together, and about Jane's reaction to some very unChristian experiences, and about the local legend of priest Wil Williams, who may have been hounded to death by ancestors of the contemporary villagers. There are all manner of prejudices, including misogyny, homophobia, class conflict, and a fierce grip on tradition ('we always fetches ’em back yere'), and Merrily's faith is tested in several ways.

I've owned this for over a decade! And once I read it, I was very much inclined to dive into the whole series: it reminds me, in ambience though not content, of ELizabeth Pewsey's delightful Mountjoy series (2005 review, 2014 review). Merrily and Jane are splendid characters, and the setting, with its blend of paganism and Christianity -- plus a nice old pub, an unsettling orchard, et cetera -- is beguiling.

For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 13 APR 2012, prompt 'In A Series'.

2023/089: The Cost of All Things — Maggie Lehrman

“If you really loved him, you would’ve wanted the memories and the pain. You excused yourself from being a human being.” [p. 285]

A hekamist can sell you a spell that'll give you what you want -- or what you think you want. Ari's boyfriend Win has just died, and she can't bear the grief, so she buys a spell to make her forget him. She doesn't tell the hekamist that she's already had a spell, years ago, to alleviate the trauma of her parents' death in a fire. And spells ... well, spells react with one another. When Ari wakes up the next day with no memory of Win, she finds that her gift for ballet has deserted her too.

Set in an America very like our own, this YA novel is told from four viewpoints: Ari; Markos who was Win's best friend; Kay who's insecure about her friends; and Win (before his death) trying to hide his depression from everybody, including himself. Each of their lives is changed by spells in ways they don't expect, as well -- in some cases -- as ways that were what they thought they wanted. Markos' relationship with his brothers is not what he thought it was, and Ari's friends discover that she lied about mourning Win: she can't remember him at all. And as the timeline skitters back and forward, zeroing in on the night before Win's death, it becomes clear that there's another spell at work.

Spells protect themselves, says the nameless hekamist. They don't want to be broken. They work by rebalancing body, mind and soul: they consist of 'food, blood and will', and are typically presented as sandwiches or cookies. What the spells most reminded me of, though, were medication (especially medication prescribed for mental health issues). They have side effects, especially when combined, and they might stop you being the person you were. "I’d be changing the “real” me forever... [activating the spell] would be the same as killing myself."

There are some powerful themes here, well-handled. The central characters, though occasionally annoying, feel rounded and real: their interactions, their lies and selfishness and love, feel authentic. Every piece of the novel, from Kay's cookies to the hekamist's physical and mental deterioration, fits together to make a whole. The ending is a little melodramatic, but overall an engaging and thought-provoking read.

For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 11 MAY 2017, prompt 'Water' (the cover shows four silhouetted people on a boardwalk against bright water).