2025/063: The Tainted Cup — Robert Jackson Bennett

That’s the problem with the damned Empire these days . . . All these complacent bastards think the only thing that matters is which tiny beast is dancing in your blood, altering your brain, making you see and feel and think differently. The person an enhancement is paired with is just as important as what enhancement they get. And we get some say in what kind of person we are. We do not pop out of a mold. We change. We self-assemble. [p. 65]

I read and enthused about Robert Jackson Bennett's 'Divine Cities' trilogy, beginning with City of Stairs, though was a little disappointed by the trilogy's conclusion: that might be why I skipped the Founders trilogy (though I note I own the first volume). The Tainted Cup -- the first in yet another trilogy a new series (source), 'Shadows of the Leviathan' -- has been shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel of 2024, and was on offer, so I thought I'd give it a try.

In the Empire of Khanum, augmentations (temporary grafts, long-lasting suffusions) are used to shape living beings -- plants, animals and humans -- to imperial needs. Chief amongst those needs is the annual wet season, with its incursions of leviathans from the eastern ocean. The leviathans can be detected days or weeks before their arrival by the seaquakes which signal their movement out of the depths towards the continent. They are mountain-sized, unique, devastating. Walls are built to keep them out, and the Legion attempts to distract them with gunnery. (But every augmentation is sourced from the blood and bone of leviathans...)

The story opens with a death: or, rather, with the arrival of Dinias Kol, youthful apprentice to Iudex investigator Anagosa Dolabra, at the house where the death has occurred. An Imperial engineer has died in a peculiarly horrible fashion, burst apart by the explosive growth of vegetable matter from within his body. The household staff are not especially helpful, but Din, augmented to have perfect recall of every experience, returns to his master and recounts what he's seen and heard. Ana Dolabra -- eccentric, neurodivergent, constantly blindfolded ('best to keep the senses limited... too much stimulation drives a person mad') but able to read print with her fingertips -- deduces that the engineer was murdered, and that he may not be the only victim.

Din has some neurodivergence of his own (he's dyslexic, though has developed workarounds in order to keep this secret) but he can't comprehend Ana's leaps of intuition, or her rather brutal sense of humour. And this is their first murder case: until now, they've worked only on cases of pay fraud. Still, his stubborn determination pairs well with Ana's intense focus and gift for pattern recognition, and he discovers more about his own unique set of skills as well as learning to appreciate hers.

It's a pretty good murder mystery, obfucscated by the sheer biopunk weirdness of the setting: but what I liked most was the characterisation of the protagonists. Din's first-person narrative (like Doctor Watson's) gives us the chance to see Ana's brilliantly non-linear deductive process. I am looking forward to reading the second in the series (out now...).

A final thought: this is very much a society which thinks all the danger comes from outside, and has built up a framework to deal with an external threat while ignoring internal matters. This, from the author's afterword:

Regulations have their uses, but we cannot allow them to form the jar that will eventually be used to trap us and pickle us in our own brine. I wanted to write about civil servants and bold builders for that exact purpose. Keep up the fight! [p. 410]

2025/062: The Road to Roswell — Connie Willis

“Are you sure this here’s a good idea?” Joseph whispered to Francie. “In every dang Western I ever seen, people who pretend to get married end up really gettin’ hitched by the last reel.” [loc. 4613]

Tropetastic romantic comedy set in, and near, Roswell during a UFO festival. Francie is in Roswell to attempt to prevent her friend Serena marrying a UFO hunter, one of a series of unsuitable swains. She is abducted by ... well, by an alien, who she genders as male and soon nicknames Indy (for 'his' prowess with tentacles, reminiscent of Dr Jones' whip). They pick up a hitchhiker named Wade; then another UFO nut, a retiree who's a fan of Westerns, and an old lady who likes playing cards. Each, of course, has something to add to the plot, which mostly consists of driving around New Mexico and Nevada, learning to communicate with Indy, helping Indy search for a mysterious 'tsinibitai', and evading the FBI. Oh, and preventing an alien invasion.

I've enjoyed several of Willis's romcoms (though not in the last, er, twenty years, according to my blog) but this one felt rather shallow and even more improbable than my plot summary might suggest. Francie's fun, but superficial; Wade is obviously hiding something (which Francie never seems to consider is a possibility) and so is the elderly Western fan. And the elderly card-player. There is a romance which, despite apparently popping out of nowhere, was the obvious 'happy ending'. There are aliens, of varying types (but apparently at risk from rattlesnakes, despite biology). And somewhere under the romcom there's an interesting story about Monument Valley and aliens and language. Unfortunately, it's very well concealed.

I ended up returning this novel because of the plethora of unnecessary hyphenations -- 15 in the first chapter or so, including defi-nitely, uni-forms, be-cause, her-self... Publisher, do better! Author, please return to form!

2025/061: Checking Out — Meryem El Mehdati (translated by Julia Sanches)

I find it harder and harder to put my finger on what exactly incenses me: whether it’s the knowledge that no matter how long I live in this place, some people will never believe I’m from here, or the fact that I am not and never will be from there. [loc. 236]

This caught my eye because I'm familiar with the big Canarian supermarket chain HiperDino -- who are, I'm sure, nothing like Supersaurio, the big Canarian supermarket chain for which Meryem, the narrator of Checking Out, works. The daughter of Moroccan immigrants, she's started as an intern: as the novel opens, she's working in Compliance and wondering if her boss Yolanda actually wants to send her home in tears three days a week. She no longer has time to write fanfic, or read, or do much except survive the commute and daydream about people spelling her name correctly.

This is an excellent novel about gradually selling out and becoming a cog in the corporate machine; about the exhaustion that comes from constantly having to push back against sexism, racism, and classism; about being an outsider; about Canarian life. The translation seems smooth (I had to look up a few colloquialisms, but I'm glad they were left untranslated) and I found Meryem extremely relatable. (Especially the line 'I’ve learned that growing up is about pretending, day after day, hour after hour, that you don’t want to just go home and be on your own.' [loc. 1910].)

Things I learnt from this novel:

• guiri - 'a colloquial Spanish word often used in Spain to refer to uncouth foreign tourists'
• Harrylatino, a Spanish Harry Potter fanfic site
• 'It’s impossible to live in the Canary Islands and not feel like you’re in a developing nation instead of Europe. I mean, come on, H&M doesn’t even deliver here.'

And I have a better sense of what it's like to grow up in relative poverty in a major tourist resort. 

Thanks also to anyone who’s ever made fun of fanfiction. I’ve got a book. I don’t know about you. [afterword]

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 8th May 2025.

2025/060: The Vengeance — Emma Newman

“Alas, mademoiselle, there are some problems that cannot be solved with violence.”
“Nah.” Morgane sheathed the knife. “Any problem involving a man can always be solved with violence. Violence or gold, to be fair.” [loc. 2374]

Morgane has grown up crewing on a 17th-century pirate ship, the Vengeance. It's a marvellous life and the ship's captain, Anna-Marie -- Morgane's mother -- is notorious for daring raids, especially on the ships of the Four Chains Trading Company. She's also famous for being the first captain to put in the Articles that women can be crew, with equal shares. And she's brought Morgane up to fight, to be brave, and to eschew shore life.

But Anna-Marie is killed, and Morgane heads for distant France (which she believes is an island) to track down her family and the Comte who ruined them. Of course, it is not that simple: Morgane is confronted with con-men, feral wolves and, worst of all, courtly etiquette. Only with the help of the sensible Lisette, initially engaged as her governess, does Morgane begin to solve the mystery of her birth and of the reasons her mother is called a monster.

Despite the piratical elements (left behind when Morgane set out for France), the cross-dressing (Morgane, of course, disguises herself as Lisette's brother) and the queer relationship (which seemed to come out of nowhere), I didn't engage with this novel. Most of the characters seemed shallow and one-note, and had a terrible habit of dying violent deaths just as they were about to reveal the Shocking Truth. Morgane did not show much in the way of common sense: yes, France is very different from Port Royal, but surely by observing the behaviour of others, and listening to those who are more familiar with the local customs, she might have avoided some of those inconvenient deaths? 

And the grammar is shaky: far too many paragraphs where the third-person pronoun is used for two different people. ('Anger at what she’d been told and anger that she’d been killed'; 'She was petite, looked to be about the same age as her'; 'So she had been duped, just as much as she had?'). Also, though Morgane's dialogue is not too horribly anachronistic, some of the surrounding prose really jolted me out of the historical period. 'She was given the chance to speak but shook her head, feeling like she’d forgotten how to do that. What even were words?' What, indeed...

If I had seen the cover properly, or even the series title, I would probably not have read this novel: it is the first in the '--- of Dumas' series, which is a massive spoiler considering that the presence of --- is only revealed very late (and rather abruptly) in the novel.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 6th May 2025.

2025/059: Agent Sonya: Mother, Lover, Soldier, Spy — Ben MacIntyre

Mrs Burton of Avenue Cottage drank tea with the neighbours, joined in their complaints about the shortages and agreed that the war must soon be over. ... Colonel Kuczynski of the Red Army, meanwhile, was running the largest network of spies in Britain: her sex, motherhood, pregnancy and apparently humdrum domestic life together formed the perfect camouflage. Men simply did not believe a housewife making breakfast from powdered egg, packing her children off to school and then cycling into the countryside could possibly be capable of important espionage. [loc. 4269]

Another of MacIntyre's entertaining biographies of 20th century spies, this is the story of Ursula Kuczynski, a German Jew and communist who spied for the Soviet Union before and during WW2, and was instrumental in the USSR's acquisition of 'the science of atomic weaponry'. Hers was a fascinating life: China in the 1930s, then Poland, Switzerland, and finally England. She was married twice, had three children by three different men, and was never exposed as a spy. In 1950, on the day before the trial of Klaus Fuchs (one of her major contacts), she returned to Berlin, where she began a second successful career as ... children's author Ruth Werner, who (writes MacIntyre) 'has been described, with only slight exaggeration, as East Germany’s Enid Blyton' [loc. 5535].

Why wasn't she exposed? Perhaps because she looked like a respectable housewife: perhaps because Roger Hollis, MI5, was 'either a traitor or a fool'. MacIntyre holds the latter view, describing him as 'a plodding, slightly droopy bureaucrat with the imaginative flair of an omelette' [loc. 4360] and 'really quite thick'. The only person who might have recognised 'Mrs Burton' for the spy she was seems to have been Milicent Bagot, apparently the inspiration for Le Carre's Connie Sachs. She campaigned to keep Ursula's brother interned, and was immensely suspicious of Ursula's husband Len. But Hollis saw only a housewife, devoted to her children.

MacIntyre manages to strike a balance between admiration for his subject's backbone, steely nerve and commitment to a cause, and the consequences of her actions. Her first husband was imprisoned in a Soviet gulag for years; her lover Richard Sorge was hanged by the Japanese; her children (especially her son Michael) were scarred and traumatised; and her work was pivotal in starting the Cold War. An astonishing woman, and a well-paced and thoroughly referenced biography.

2025/058: The Mask of Apollo — Mary Renault

... a show put up by some Etruscans from up north. ... their faces were quite bare; they were using them to act with. It is hard to describe how this display affected me. Some barbarian peoples are ashamed to show their bodies, while civilised men take pride in making theirs fit to be seen. But to strip one’s own face to the crowd, as if it were all happening to oneself instead of to Oedipus or Priam; one would need a front of brass to bear it. [loc. 1579]

I believe this is technically a reread: I certainly owned a copy of this novel in my early teens. But nothing felt at all familiar, and it's possible I found it too difficult back then.

The narrator is Nikeratos (Niko), an Athenian actor, and the time is around 350BCE. Niko is noticed by Dion, advisor to the tyrant Dionysios I of Syracuse. ('Tyrant' in the original sense: a ruler who holds power without any constitutional right.) After Dionysios' death, Niko becomes a witness to Dion and Plato's efforts to mould the dead king's son, Dionysios II, into the platonic ideal of a ruler. It does not end well.

I found the political plot less engaging than the theatrical scenes. Niko has an antique mask of Apollo, made of olive wood, which seems to speak to him and guide him. He is a successful actor (and sometimes also a courier for Dion and his allies): passionate about his craft, appalled by Plato's ideas about reforming the theatre ('the parts of base, or passionate, or unstable men should be related in narration' [loc. 2547]), and dedicated to Apollo, whose mask he wears and whose role he plays at three key moments in the novel. One is during the (or 'a') sack of Syracuse, which Renault describes with understated horror: 'It took them a good while to go through the temple. After a time, we heard the wails of the women left alive, being dragged off to Ortygia. The child screamed on one note until, I suppose, it died.' [loc. 4584] In that scene, Niko uses the theatre's special effects -- a sounding-board with particular qualities, the thunder machine -- to strike the fear of Apollo into the invaders.

Many of the plays Niko performs in, or mentions, have been lost to us. I was especially struck by the use of Aeschylus' The Myrmidons as a cultural marker: "Lovers meet at it, as if it were a shrine like that tomb in Thebes," muses Niko, realising that Dion and Plato had been lovers. Renault slyly slips in a reference to Hamlet: 'I dreamed I was beside some tomb or grave, holding a skull in my hand. It was clean, and I knew this was a play. Some flashes still come back to me; I was the son of a murdered king whose shade had cried me to avenge him...' [loc. 2146].

And the final page has Niko reflecting on how 'All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? ... No one will ever make a tragedy – and that is as well, for one could not bear it – whose grief is that the principals never met." Renault has written that tragedy, and made it clear that Plato was wasted on Dionysios II, and Aristotle inadequate for the young Alexander (whom Niko meets). Someday soon I'll need to (re?)read the Alexander trilogy...

Renault's afterword, which sets out her sources and provides some context for the lost plays she mentions, also includes this comment: "No true parallel exists between this passage in Syracusan history and the affairs of any present-day state. Christianity and Islam have changed irrevocably the moral reflexes of the world." And yet it's easy to see partial parallels, of corruption and nepotism, fascism and oligarchy, dictatorship and tyranny.

2025/057: The Gentleman and his Vowsmith — Rebecca Ide

What is unethical is ... a society where we’ve turned magic into a cage and love into an impossibility, such that murder is an easier resort than words... [loc. 4733]

A delightfully Gothic country house murder mystery set in a Regency-flavoured queer-normative England, with magic, automata, dark family secrets and a legal mechanism for severing one's family ties and owning oneself. 

Nicholas Monterris, our viewpoint character, is 'gay as a spoon' [do not expect historically-accurate slang here] and has seldom left the draughty and probably-haunted decay of Monterris Court. He's aghast to discover that his father, the Duke of Vale, has arranged a marriage between Nic and Lady Leaf Serral, daughter of a wealthy family. Worse, the bride-to-be and her family have descended on Monterris Court, where all those in possession of Brilliance (magical ability) will be locked in while the marriage contract is vowsmithed. And worst of all, the master vowsmith engaged to make sure that contract is watertight and magically binding is Nic's ex -- Dashiell sa Vare, who left abruptly and without explanation nine years ago.

Monterris Court has all the trappings of a Gothic mansion: Nic's mother, gently mad and reclusive; the mysterious fate of Nic's uncle Francis; a grotto full of automaton parts, and the sigil tape on which automaton-instructions are magically encoded; secret passages, rumours of ghosts, crumbling stonework and moss and mould. Leaf, who is an avid reader of murder mysteries, wants to start a school for young women, and does not want to marry (or have sexual relations with) anybody, is a breath of fresh air for Nic. And soon enough there's a murder to solve... and then another... 

Meanwhile, Dash and Nic warily circle one another, failing to communicate. (Indeed, Dash's version of 'closure' seems to be anything but.) Who's the murderer? What really happened to Lord Francis? Why did the Duke not marry the man he loved? What is the Duchess writing so obsessively? And why is it so vital that Nic and Leaf's marriage be accomplished as soon as possible?

Despite the presence of books by Mrs Radcliffe and Laurence Sterne, it's not 'the Regency' -- for one thing, there's a king -- and the history of this alternate Britain is only lightly sketched. The magic seems to be syllabic, and can produce startlingly vivid effects. Nic, though immensely talented as a magic-user, has seldom left Monterris Court: instead, he's devoted his time to making mechanical frogs, and to reading. Leaf quickly becomes a friend (a much more pleasing development than the all-too-common 'obstacle to true queer love') and Dashiell and Nic manage to resolve the issue of Dash's sudden departure all those years ago. The epilogue ties everything up neatly, and the author's afterword explains the notion of 'sasine' ('a historical word meaning the conferring of possession of feudal property') and how it can be used to confer self-ownership -- something Leaf has requested nearly thirty times since her eighth birthday, and you can see her point. 

I enjoyed this immensely, and forgave the occasional typos. Nic and Leaf were delightful, the villains were suitably wicked, the victims were sympathetic enough that their fates were shocking. I'm fascinated by this world of Brilliance and sasine, and would love to read more about it.