#72: 100 Great Short Short Fantasy Stories -- Isaac Asimov (ed)

Following 100 Great Short Short Science Fiction Stories, this should really have been entitled Another Hundred Great &co: the majority of the stories collected here -- by authors from Asimov himself to Zelazny (a master of the very short genre story) -- seem more easily categorised as SF or horror than as fantasy. I did start tabulating themes (pacts with the Devil or his minions; 'three wishes'; ghosts; vampires, werewolves and that ilk; alt history ...) but was distracted by some of the puns I encountered herein. Even without quantitative data, though, I'd maintain that the majority of these stories aren't strictly 'fantasy' in the contemporary sense. And I'd also like to point out that presenting the stories in alphabetical order by title means that similar tales may be clumped together, to their detriment. When it comes to an anthology, contrast is good.('The Third Wish' followed by 'Those Three Wishes'; 'Deal with the D. E. V. I. L.' by 'The Devil finds Work'.)

The stories collected here were published between 1940 ('The Haters' by Donald Wollheim) and 1984 (several stories including 'Vernon's Dragon' by John Gregory Bettancourt: this anthology's copyright date is 1984). It's a whirlwind tour of the (primarily) American short-fiction market over that period, from the ancient horrors of Lovecraft to the psychological nasties of the sixties to the smaller apocalypses and stranger worlds of the eighties.

It is perfectly possibly to write a neat, well-formed story in a thousand words or less, and many of these authors manage it. James Gunn's 'Feeding Time' will stick in my head (and is proof that there's room, even in a story this short, for pacing and suspense). I'd read Wollheim's 'Rag Thing' long ago, not remembering title or author: the story's stood the test of time. There are clever stories, wry stories, stories that are deeply surreal (Raylyn Moore's 'Getting Back to Before It Began', about a bus ride to the end of everything, to where there are no names for places ...) and stories with the simplicity of a fairytale (Jane Yolen's 'The Lady and the Merman' is a bittersweet delight, wonderfully visual and melancholy).

There are also quite a few stories that exist to support a pun or a one-liner (not my thing, but fine in moderation), or to explore a hitherto-murky aspect of a classic story -- literary fanfiction, if you like, where a crewman from the Flying Dutchman makes his escape and is rescued by the Marie Celeste; where the ghosts from Hamlet plot together to ruin everyone else's stories; where God welcomes Adam and Eve's rebellion. One thing that does strike me about these stories is the sense of fun -- that these are tales their authors produced for the hell of it, because they wanted to, because the idea suddenly popped fully-formed into the writer's head.

A good anthology to dip into, but be prepared to groan at some of the really dreadful puns.

#71: The Virtu -- Sarah Monette

What hooked me into reading this more or less as soon as it arrived in the post was the prospect of seeing Felix (who spent most of Mélusine mad) in a state of sanity. Kethe's blessing (as Mildmay would say): what you asked for but not what you wanted. Felix is sharp enough to cut diamond, arrogant, insensitive and vain, a very Romantic hero, very Byronic and intrinsically, perhaps irrevocably, damaged.

Actually I rather like him. Though not nearly as much as he likes himself.

I've read elsewhere that Mélusine and The Virtu were originally conceived as a single novel: if so, the structure (and the rather episodic feel of Mélusine) make much more sense. The structure of The Virtu, and the physical journey that Felix and Mildmay undertake, is a mirror of the previous novel -- though both men are changed by what they've experienced, the ordeals they've undergone, and by Mildmay's solution to the situation he left behind in the city of Mélusine. (A solution that could hardly be signalled more strongly in the earlier book, but still surprises, because Mildmay, even as narrator, isn't in the habit of telling anyone more than a quarter of what he thinks.)

As before, the most fascinating aspect of the plot is the interaction between the two. There's Felix's growing respect for Mildmay ("he'd simply taken a short-cut through the conversation I'd anticipated having and reached the finish line ahead of me. I'd known he was much smarter than he seemed, but I hadn't appreciated before how quick he was"). There's Mildmay's need to hold onto, stay with Felix (quite different from the cult of Felix he observes in others, which gives us an external yardstick for Felix's charisma). There are all the things they have in common (both damaged by physical and psychological abuse when younger, but Felix is far readier to blame those responsible for the way he is, while Mildmay internalises, thinks he deserved everything, and seldom makes explicit connection between his past and his character), and all the ways in which they complement one another (Felix has little sense of direction; Mildmay doesn't get lost, even in mazes).

And it's hard not to like a character named Mehitabel, even if she speaks normally (formally, even) and is not given to saying wotthehell*. For one thing, she calls Felix 'sunshine' and completely fails to fall under his spell. Perhaps one day she will give him the resounding slap he deserves. Go Mehitabel!

One thing that really did strike me about this novel -- though I hadn't consciously made the connection with Mélusine -- was how well it fits the 'fantasy of manners' subgenre, as originally suggested by Don Keller long long ago in a galaxy far far away NYRSF. (Now butterfly-me has spent a while googling the original article: no joy, but there are good write-ups of a couple of Readercon panels.) Urban setting? Yep, once they get back to Mélusine. Elaborate social structure? Yes, and then some. (Thrown into relief by Felix and Mildmay coming from very different levels of said structure.) Protagonists pitted against their peers? More so than against any external Blight, for sure. "Duels may be fought," says Wikipedia, "but the chief weapons are wit and intrigue." Spot on. (I found myself thinking about fantasy tropes that aren't featured here, and one of those is swordplay: neither protagonist uses, nor wishes to use, a sword. Bernard uses a sword, but even Mildmay thinks he's a thug.)

Which is not to say there's no plot. I am intrigued by several elements of same: the mazes and labyrinths that recur, and are key; the Sibylline, a local variant of the Tarot with some extra cards and a Major Arcana that's congruent but distinctly not ours; obligations, d'âme and du sang, and how they might be broken; memory and forgetfulness, which is all I'm saying about the ending.

Oh, there's a very definite ending to one arc of the story -- and, I thought but was mistaken, to another arc (because I thought something was not forgivable, but underestimated a bond) -- there are elements that are left ready to be drawn back into the weave, in the third or even fourth book of the series. And there are no easy answers, no quick fixes, no happy endings. Just broken people, afraid of but craving intimacy, afraid of what's broken and wanting to mend it.

*yesterday sceptres and crowns
fried oysters and velvet gowns
and today i herd with bums
but wotthehell wotthehell

#70: Dream Angus -- Alexander McCall Smith

Another in the Canongate Myth series (in which mainstream authors tackle classic myths, with mixed results): this is the first work I've read by the author, despite his near-constant presence on the bestseller lists. His style is deceptively simple, and his approach -- a kind of Impressionist melange of simple retelling and contemporary echo -- suits his subject, the Celtic god of love and dreams, very well, though it has a vague unfinished feel like a dream fading at waking.

Angus's father is the Dagda, ruler of the Celtic pantheon, cunning and paranoid and fickle as Zeus. The Dagda banishes Angus after one of those nasty prophetic dreams: Angus is raised by a foster-father, and grows up gentle and peaceful, loved by his foster-family, inspiring dreams of romance in the young women he meets, drawing songbirds to him as he sleeps, calming the fiercest hound by his presence.

Angus's story weaves through others: the tale of Jamie and Davie, two brothers in Depression-gloomy 1930s Scotland, inseparable until Davie's invited to seek his fortune in Canada, which development devastates Jamie 'til he's sent a dream of dark trees and snow and knows, somehow, that Davie will still be there for him in the dream-world. The tale of Pig Twenty, a genetically-modified pig bred for medical reasons, and the gentle unambitious keeper who wants to rescue him -- and of the secretary who falls in love with the pig-keeper, against all inclination but with a joyful recognition of something that's right. The tale of two honeymooners, a man with a secret and a woman who dreams of it. Of a son who finds out that his father is not his father. A wife who walks out on her husband and seeks therapy. Brothers, secrets, childhood, the sound of birdsong.

McCall quotes Auden in his introduction: "Angus puts us in touch with our dreams - those entities which Auden described so beautifully in his Freud poem as the creatures of the night that are waiting for us, that need our recognition." I hadn't encountered that phrase before: I like the way it made each dream a vulnerable entity rather than a divine messenger or a symptom of some inner sickness. But are the dreams characters in and of themselves, separate and distinct from the god who bestows them? From these stories, I'd call the dreams gifts rather than entities: blessings given, not something born.

#69: Natural Flights of the Human Mind -- Clare Morrall

Pete Straker lives, hermit-like and apparently impoverished, in a lighthouse on the north coast of Devon. He is haunted by the ghosts of those whose death he caused.

Imogen Doody (known as Doody), a school caretaker with an interesting and painful past, has just inherited a run-down cottage in the nearby village. She is not practically-minded: but Straker is ...

I have surprisingly little to say about this novel. I did find it very readable, and the pacing was masterful. Straker and Doody are not especially likeable characters, but they're sympathetically written and there's never a sense that the author has dismissed them in the way that others have. There are some glorious passages describing the coast -- ribbons of kelp, grey light, the sun coming up over the sea. And the patchwork of memory, rumour and dreams (I suspect the reader ends up knowing more about what really happened, what Pete Straker made happen, than anyone in the novel) is carefully and compassionately constructed.

A thought-provoking novel about grief, mourning, guilt and redemption, about overwriting and crossing out the past, about escape and reinvention; also, incidentally, about the creative process (is Morrall mocking Doody or herself when she pokes quiet fun at the half-finished novels in exercise books?). It's a good read, and I don't think it's the book to blame for my lack of response to it.

#68: Brethren: Raised by Wolves, vol. 1 -- W. A. Hoffman

First instalment of the 'Raised by Wolves' series, Brethren is a gay pirate romance: and like many romances it focuses on the emotional aspects of the plot to the detriment of the rest.

The novel's set in the 1660s. The Viscount of Marsdale ('duellist and libertine' it says here), down on his luck in Florence, returns to the family seat in England and is promptly packed off to Jamaica to set up a sugar plantation. Once in Port Royal, he finds the buccaneers -- the Brethren of the Coast -- far more congenial (and profitable) company than the other planters (and much more accepting of his preference for male lovers). Marsdale, now going by the name of Will, meets Gaston, a handsome Frenchman with a mysterious past, and ends up pledging matelotage to him. The two sail on the North Wind and pillage and plunder and rifle and loot. And so on.

I was hoping to like this novel rather more than I did. It's probably unfair to read a swashbuckling romance with a beady eye for historical detail -- and a great deal of the detail is accurate and well-researched, even if the novel occasionally makes heavy weather of that research -- but my sense of period took a serious knock when someone rode to Brighton in 1667, and another when they went to the docks there. (It's a fair assumption that a South Coast town would have docks, but in this case wrong: Brighton, as can be seen from old maps, simply didn't exist in 1667, though there may have already been an unfashionable and unremarkable fishing village named Brighthelmstone.)

The novel could do with a serious edit, not only for things like repetition and poor word choice (one expiates, not expurgates, one's guilt) but to even out the balance of plot and background, and to make the dialogue pacier and less reliant on attempts to transcribe dialogue and verbal tics.

Given all that, I do want to find out what happens, and how various plot threads are resolved. (Will Will ever return to England and his title? Will Gaston's morbid habits be 'cured'? Will the plantation prosper? Will the wicked cousin get his just desserts? Will there ever be hot sex?) However, the Raised by Wolves series is self-published, and the cost of the paperback is almost double what I'd expect to pay for a good-quality hardcover novel. Unless I find the other books second-hand, I suspect I'll never know how things work out.

#67: Melusine -- Sarah Monette

[I'm having a huge problem writing this review, because every time I pick up the book to check a name or remind myself of a plot point, I find myself reading another chapter or two. And The Mirador, third in the sequence, is imminent, if Amazon's delivery estimate is to be believed ...]

Mélusine (a place, not a person, despite my initial assumption that it'd feature a serpent-woman) has two first-person narrators: Felix Harrowgate, a court sorcerer, and Mildmay the Fox, a cat burglar and assassin. Both are intriguing characters, but where the novel really takes off, for me, is when the two meet.

That encounter isn't as straightforward and predictable as it might be in a typical quest fantasy with its carefully randomised selection of characters from Central Casting; but Mélusine is not, in any way that matters, a typical fantasy. Both Felix (whose persona of aristocratic magician is deliberately shattered in the first few pages) and Mildmay (who might conform more closely to the 'lovable thief' archetype if his voice wasn't so distinctive, and his doubts less internalised) have unpleasant secrets in their pasts. That they are secrets until Monette chooses to reveal them -- without there being any sense of gaping voids in plot or characterisation -- is assurance enough that we're in safe hands.

Felix is used as a weapon and sent mad by it: Mildmay, meanwhile, falls in with a shopgirl with aspirations named Ginevra, and ends up crossing some people it'd be best not to cross. Both Felix and Mildmay end up leaving Mélusine for their health: Felix disturbingly, vividly, credibly insane and prone to seeing animal-headed monsters; Mildmay in the company of a crippled sorcerer and his unsociable henchman Bernard. Also, there's the slight matter of the fire consuming the city ...

Given the title of the novel, it's surprising that so much of the action happens after the characters have, effectively, exiled themselves from the city. Mélusine is a richly-detailed metropolis, saved from sprawling by immense walls, where cathedrals soar above dark and nasty alleyways; where multiple gods, saints and darker entities are worshipped or placated; where two calendars are used; where ghosts and ghouls are physical dangers after dark, or in the wrong place; where there are more 'wrong places' than one might expect. This is not our world, but the names of streets and suburbs have familiar echoes: Rue St. Bonamy, Plaza del'Archimago, Catacombes des Arcanes. The history that Felix and Mildmay know (which Monette surely knows in extravagant detail, though it's referenced only in passing) mentions Troians, Kekropians, Merrows. And, incidentally, there are alligators (as well as nastier things) in the swamps.

All of which inclines me to view this as a very American fantasy, with a melting-pot of cultures and history and a certain flexibility about social class (Felix goes slumming; Mildmay, while not a habitue of the Mirador, is perfectly capable of scrubbing up nice and being bored in middle-class bars.)

There are flaws. At points (especially, but not exclusively, before Felix and Mildmay meet) the plot seems somewhat episodic: a trial is overcome, and along comes another trial. Later, some of these events do join up and assume greater significance. Not all of them, though, so the effect is occasionally of a series of swashbuckling episodes adrift on a dark and roiling sea of myth, metaphor and magic.

And that episodic feel leads me nicely to another kind of flaw, which is that it wasn't at all clear that Mélusine was first in a series -- a series, in fact, in which the second novel (The Virtu) leads on more or less directly from its antecedent. Having come late to Mélusine , I picked up an edition with the first chapter of The Virtu as endmatter: it would have been extremely frustrating if the novel had just stopped without indication of more.

This review might be rather longer if The Mirador (third in the series) had not just arrived. Which should give you an indication of just how hooked I am.

#66: The Shining Company -- Rosemary Sutcliff

Set around 600AD -- long enough after the departure of the Romans for their presence to be a folk-memory, yet with Roman ruins still inhabited and Artos the Bear (Sutcliff's portrayal of the historical King Arthur, in The Lantern Bearers) still a hero -- The Shining Company recounts the tale of three hundred warriors who make a last valiant stand against the Saxons.

The story is a retelling of 'The Gododdin', the first surviving North British poem, written (or at least created) by the bard Aneirin. Sutcliff tells the tale from the point of view of Prosper, the second son of a minor chieftain, whose quiet life alters course on the day that Prince Gorthyn arrives to hunt a magical white hart that roams the Welsh hills.

A couple of years later, when he's grown to manhood, Prosper, along with his bondsman (and friend) Conn, answers Gorthyn's summons to train as a warrior (not one of the three hundred, but a shield-bearer and backup) in King Mynyddog's army. Conn, meanwhile, finds himself drawn to the smithy: as a bondsman he can't train to be a smith, because smiths are free men and such training would grant him his freedom: but Prosper counts friendship more important than slavery, and Conn learns his trade with Prosper's blessing.

What I love about this novel is what I've always loved about Sutcliff's writing -- the detail, the sense of real people living, feeling, acting in famiiar ways, in a recognisable setting and a distinctly remote time. There are familiar moments: the sour taste of beer to one accustomed to wine, the smell of green wood burning, the thickening of the evening light. And there's the wider world in which these characters move: Prosper studying Latin and being aware of the Greek classics, in particular the tale of the three hundred Spartans; his fascination with the 'archangel dagger' that he's shown by a trader, who tells him that it was the cherished possession of an Emperor's bodyguard, and speaks to him of Byzantium. And because the framing narrative -- present in only the lightest of allusions -- is of an old man looking back on his life, that wider world has more significance to the reader than to the young Prosper.

The Shining Company is far from the best of Sutcliff's novels: I think it may have been her last. But it brings the period to life, and peoples it with characters more real and credibly flawed than most.