2018/14: The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle -- Stuart Turton

I'm reminded of Daniel's pleas yesterday, his delicate way of speaking, as though I might fracture if pressed too hard. He thought I was mad, as this maid does now. Given what's happening to me, what I think is happening to me, I can't be certain they're wrong. [loc. 1563]

A country-house murder with a time-loop twist. Our narrator wakes in a forest, with no memory of his own name: no memory of anything except the name Anna. He hears a woman's scream, then is given a silver compass and told 'East' by a mysterious figure whose face he never sees. Following directions, he stumbles up to the front door of Blackheath, where a house party is taking place. Soon, a masked figure appears, and informs him that a murder will occur late in the evening -- a murder that won't look like a murder. (The title, of course, refers to the victim.) Our narrator is there to solve it -- and he has eight chances, living the same day eight times as eight different guests. If he succeeds, he will have a tomorrow. If he fails, says the masked figure, the loop will reset, and he'll live through this day another eight times.

He's not the only person investigating the crime. He has rivals, each aiming to be the one to solve the murder and win their freedom. He may also have an ally -- though he's not always clear as to which of the other characters that might be. And, of course, the masked figure's information may be inaccurate. Can our narrator retain enough sense of himself and his mission to solve the murder? And if he saves the murder victim in the process, has any crime been committed?

This is a cleverly-constructed whodunnit, effective on several levels. There's the standard murder mystery: one of the people in the house kills one of the other people in the house. There's the way that each loop, and the associated host, adds both context and confusion to the narrator's understanding. There's the underlying issue of why he's been set to solve the murder at all. And there is the deliciously subtle way in which his personality is modified -- sometimes in unpleasant ways -- by the personalities of the hosts he inhabits.

There are some interesting philosophical notions here, as well as the convolutions of what turns out to be a very twisty murder-mystery. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is packed with detail, and eminently readable (though I could have done with fewer run-on sentences). Interesting, unusual, recommended.

2018/13: Lud-In-The-Mist -- Hope Mirrlees

He knew so well both that sense of emptiness, that drawing in of the senses (like the antennæ of some creature when danger is no longer imminent, but there), so that the physical world vanishes, while you yourself at once swell out to fill its place, and at the same time shrink to a millionth part of your former bulk, turning into a mere organ of suffering without thought and without emotions; he knew also that other phase, when one seems to be flying from days and months, like a stag from its hunters – like the fugitives, on the old tapestry, from the moon. [loc. 521]

I have owned a paperback of this novel for at least fifteen years, but hadn't read it until prompted to do so in advance of the 'Fantastic Read' panel at Follycon. My loss. (Other books discussed on that panel: Swordspoint and Summer in Orcus.)

Published in 1926, this novel has been hailed as a classic of high fantasy. I wonder if Mirrlees would be pleased at its success, or disappointed that her theme of 'life vs art' was ignored in favour of the lush, almost preRaphaelite descriptions of Lud-in-the-Mist.

Lud-in-the-Mist is the capital of Dorimare, a country that borders on Fairyland. Centuries before the events of the novel, the two countries coexisted peacably: then the merchants rose up in revolt, banished their ruler Duke Aubrey (who, rumour has it, fled to Fairyland and lives there too) and forbade mention of anything to do with Fairyland.

But now, it seems, Fairy fruit is being smuggled into Lud-in-the-Mist: and Nathaniel Chanticleer, law-abiding citizen -- indeed, Mayor -- must face up to the uncomfortable truth that both his children (Ranulph and Prunella) have tasted that forbidden produce, and are languishing for want of it. When Ranulph escapes his chaperone and runs away to Fairyland, Nathaniel sets out to rescue him. How fortunate that the young ladies of Miss Crabapple's Academy, lured by their odd new dancing master Professor Wisp, have already skipped away in the same direction: they -- including Nathaniel's own daughter Prunella -- can be returned to the bosoms of their families by some never-detailed action of Nathaniel's. (I am thoroughly unimpressed by Nathaniel's lack of concern for his daughter.)

En route to Fairyland, which is also in some sense the land of the dead (the country people call both Fairies and the dead 'the Silent People), Nathaniel Chanticleer investigates a cold-case murder; uncovers a smuggling racket; and discovers some unexpected truths concerning the disreputable physician Endymion Leer. And returning from Fairyland, he brings reconciliation of a kind that the Dorimarites had, apparently, never considered before.

Lud-in-the-Mist feels like a conservative (or indeed Conservative) idyll of bourgeouis Englishness: its colours are rich (though its inhabitants are homogeneous) and its characters self-satisfied, prosperous and law-abiding. Yet there's this dark underside, the awareness of 'impenetrable shadows' surrounding the small bright places where civilisation reigns: and there is, too, Nathaniel's own underlying melancholy, 'life-sickness', an oversensitivity to 'the figments of his own fancy'. All this against a backdrop of Dionysian 'fairy fruits', the recurring image of fugitives fleeing from the moon, and the memory of lost Duke Aubrey.

Mirrlee's writing reminds me of pre-Raphaelite paintings, jewel-coloured and vivid. There is, too, a certain sardonic tone to some of her descriptions that, had it been more pervasive, I would have found irritating: Mirrlees, though, balances it nicely with gentle amusement at the gentlefolk of Lud-in-the-Mist, and with occasional profundities -- 'There is nothing so dumb as a tree in full leaf' [loc 355] -- which have stayed with me.

I think I'll be returning to this novel again and again.

2018/12: The Fall of the Kings -- Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman

"...We know, up in the North, we've always known; about the Sacred Grove and the Deer Hunt and the Royal Sacrifice."
"The Royal Sacrifice, or the King's Night Out," drawled Fremont into the silence. "It sounds like a bad play." [p. 147]

Set forty years after The Privilege of the Sword, and about sixty after Swordspoint, this is the story of Theron Campion, posthumous son of the Mad Duke (his parentage is revealed in the short story 'The Death of the Duke), and his love affair with scholar Basil St Cloud, an historian who's interested in the legends of the old kings and their wizards. It's common knowledge that the wizards claimed they were bound by magic to the Land; they chose the kings who would rule; the system was dismantled two centuries ago by the nobles, who saw through the wizards' fraudulent tricks. Even the suggestion that magic might exist is illegal. St Cloud, however, insists on researching primary sources, and what he finds makes him question the consensus.

Meanwhile, the nobles on the Hill are becoming increasingly concerned about rumours of trouble in the North. Can the so-called Companions of the King be anything more than 'an association of young men, young and unmarried, who gather in the woods from time to time to celebrate elaborate rituals that draw equally from local folklore and a youthful taste for mysticism and indiscriminate copulation'? [p. 348] And does Theron's family tree explain their interest in him?

Theron is something of a dilettante, studying at the University until he takes up his duties as Duke Tremontaine: Katherine, the heroine of The Privilege of the Sword, is the current head of the family, and between her benevolent rule and that of Theron's mother Sophia (a surgeon), Theron is allowed to indulge himself. He doesn't reveal his relationship with Basil to his family: Basil, after all, is a commoner, whose father is a tenant farmer on Theron's estates at Highcombe. (Basil can't complain, as he can hardly be open about having an affair with one of his students.) Instead, Theron courts Lady Genevieve Randall, who he thinks might rather like to be Duchess Tremontaine some day.

The Fall of the Kings is much longer, and more richly detailed, than the two preceding books. There are more characters (including more women), and more plot threads: I especially liked the scenes of student life, with claret and eels and arguments about whether the earth revolves around the sun. And I'm especially glad to have read this novel, at last, in its proper place in the sequence, with the weight of backstory behind it. I can see, from Theron's 'outsider' point of view, how Katherine grows up (though I do wonder why she has chosen to remain single) and learn the fate of the Black Rose's child, the utterly splendid Jessica. And it's interesting to see why magic has gone unmentioned in the previous novels -- and how the Tremontaine family have retained their power over the centuries. [I note, too, that the revelations of Tremontaine cast the events of The Fall of the Kings in a different light.]

Now I am more than ready to embarque upon Tremontaine Season 2 ...

2018/11: The Privilege of the Sword -- Ellen Kushner

"A nobleman of the city brought your poetry's virtue into question — 'Duller than a rainy Tuesday and twice as long' was the way you put it, Bernhard, I believe? A challenge was issued. There was a duel, and the swordsman defending the honor of your verse was defeated."
"But — one man sticking another with a sword cannot change my poetry from good to bad just like that."
"The duel is the ultimate arbiter of truth. Where men's judgment may be called into question, the opinion of the sword always holds fast." [p. 100]

Reread after rereading Swordspoint: my previous review of The Privilege of the Sword, from 2006, is here. That review gives a good summary of the plot: Katherine Talbert goes to stay with the Mad Duke, who is Alec from Swordspoint; is taught sword-fighting by the Duke's reclusive friend; uses her new-found martial skills to avenge a female friend's honour, and her increasing confidence and independence to begin to make her own choices.

Rereading this time around, I found myself noticing the feminist aspects of the novel. Katherine is scornful of the swordsmaster who suggests she might be frightened by the mess and blood of a sword fight: "I am not afraid. I see twice as much blood every month". She dislikes the masculine clothing the Duke asks her to wear, because it shows her body more than she likes. She becomes profoundly aware of the ways in which her society treats women as second-class citizens.

I'm also much more aware of structural and narrative techniques than when I first read The Privilege of the Sword. We see Alec and Richard from an outsider's viewpoint: the great romance of Swordspoint, and how time and society have warped it, and what remains true. Alec, here, has matured into something glittering and powerful and, to be honest, not always very happy: Richard has undergone other changes, but is less altered by them. And I did feel that Alec, for all his delight in affronting society, was not nearly as subversive as his niece Katherine.

Onwards to the third novel in the sequence, The Fall of the Kings: I had never read them in sequence, or without intervening distractions, before ...