2018/26: Drowned Ammet -- Diana Wynne Jones

"You don’t understand – can’t you think how it feels when everyone you know is scared sick all the time? You couldn’t trust people. They’d turn round and tell on you, anytime, even if it weren’t you done it, because they didn’t want to get marched off in the night themselves. That’s not how people should be.” [p. 179]

My paper copy of this novel came to me via a friend who noticed a heap of withdrawn library books in a skip and thought I might like it. Coincidentally, I had just read The Spellcoats for the first time ...

There are two plot threads in Drowned Ammet: one protagonist is Mitt, born in a poor but happy household but getting involved in revolutionary terrorism after his father's departure; the other is Hildrida (Hildy for short), the somewhat spoilt daughter of Earl Hadd's second son, Navis. Hildy has been betrothed to the Lord of the Isles against her will, and is spitting mad about it. Mitt, meanwhile, has had 'his life's work' ruined by the betrayal of a plot to assassinate Earl Hadd.

So when Mitt and Hildy, and Hildy's younger brother Ynen, all end up on the same boat, heading north in stormy weather, it's not exactly a pleasure cruise -- even before they pick up a passenger who repulses them all.

There's magic here too, and the Undying: the passage north is aided by the mystical figures of Old Ammet and Libby Beer (both of whom feel like gods with the corners worn off, made comfortable and traditional with use but still capable of being dangerous).

Like Dogsbody, this novel features terrorists who aren't wholly reprehensible: it was published at the height of the IRA bombings on the UK mainland, and I wonder what contemporary audiences made of Mitt with his bombs and conspiracies. (The conflict is fairly clear-cut: Earl Hadd and most of his sons are tyrants, oppressing the poor, assassinating enemies and raising taxes. But still.)

Afterthought: having reread three out of the four Dalemark novels, I have no desire to reread Cart and Cwidder. I wonder why?

2018/25: The Crown of Dalemark -- Diana Wynne Jones

Six people set out wandering the old roads – one of those six accused of theft by a voice in the air too! – in search of a crown buried in a city that did not exist any more, with no provisions and almost no baggage, and this was supposed to prove that the wrong girl was Queen. [p. 116]

Reread after The Spellcoats because I knew that some of the same characters were mentioned. This fourth volume of the quartet was published quite a while after the others: I'm glad I wasn't following the series at that stage. (I think I might have bounced off one of the Dalemark books during my first eager exploration in the early Eighties.) It would have been a long wait, and this is quite a different book from the others, though I think it ties everything together very well. Like Drowned Ammet, it's darker than many of Diana Wynne Jones' novels (a teenager is asked to assassinate someone, for instance, and there are actual battles where people die) but Jones paces the story well, and leavens it with plenty of humour.

There are two main plot strands. The focal figure of one is Maewen, a girl from 'contemporary' Dalemark (they have cars, trains, phones etc) who is transplanted -- possibly courtesy of the weird dude in the University library -- to a time centuries before her own. There she encounters the other focal character, Mitt, who is thoroughly disillusioned with life in the North. Maewen finds herself at the centre of an uprising, and it becomes apparent that more than mere political supremacy is at stake.

But if Maewen, masquerading as Noreth, is so important, how come she's never seen her (assumed) name mentioned in history books?

The Undying feature strongly in this volume, but the character I like best is Navis, who appeals strongly to my competence kink. Also, he behaves like an actual, flawed adult, which is always refreshing. His daughter has become quite vile though. And Mitt is charming (though, unsurprisingly, feels old for his age).

Note to potential buyers: the Kindle edition is missing 'A Guide to Dalemark', the occasionally tongue-in-cheek and often pedantic in-universe guide to the quartet. I had to locate my paperback! (If I'd remembered the actual title of this section, I'd have Googled ...)

Ah, Navis. So then I had to reread Drowned Ammet ...

2018/24: The Spellcoats -- Diana Wynne Jones

I need understanding. When I have woven my understanding, then Kankredin will have cause to fear. This is what I must understand. Why is Gull’s soul of such special value? Why is Robin so ill? And what is the One? These questions are all bound to lesser ones, such as what have Hern, Duck and I sworn to the Undying that we will do? [p. 186]

Reread whilst ill: it's been a long time, and as usual with deliberate rereads I remembered some aspects very vividly and others not at all.

The Spellcoats is the first-person narrative of Tanaqui, a girl living in what's effectively the prehistory of the other Dalemark books. She is weaving her narrative into the eponymous spellcoats -- and she understands much more about what she is doing by the end of the novel than she does at the beginning, when events are set in motion by the King's recruitment of Tanaqui's father, and her elder brother Gull, to fight the Heathens.

Tanaqui and her siblings (their mother is dead) are ostracised by the villagers (they look nothing like their neighbours, and they worship different gods) and are eventually forced to flee downriver. They meet a young man, Tanamil, who teaches each of them something important; they reach the river's mouth and encounter a great evil; most importantly, they find out something of their own origins.

This is a novel which demanded immediate rereading way back when I first read it, because the revelations of the latter half shed a different light on earlier chapters. I'm pleased to see that the slow build still works for me. And now, of course, I see that it is also a story about xenophobia, about being driven from one's home, about trying to tell the story of your life when you don't have a firm foundation on which to stand and look back on the events that shaped (and are still shaping) you.

2018/23: Exit West -- Mohsin Hamid

War in Saeed and Nadia's city revealed itself to be an intimate experience, combatants pressed close together, front lines defined at the level of the street one took to work, the school one's sister attended, the house of one's aunt's best friend, the shop where one bought cigarettes. [loc. 568]

Saeed and Nadia are citizens of a country that's never named. It might be Syria, or Bosnia, or Columbia: it might be anywhere. The country is being torn apart by civil war, and people are desperate to leave. As though summoned into being by this need for escape, doors are appearing, doors that open onto other places, other countries, though there's no way of knowing where or when: 'a normal door, they said, could become a special door, and it could happen without warning, to any door at all' [loc. 610].

The doors constitute a major global crisis, according to the media of the developed world -- the countries into which the doors open, the countries that are at peace. The doors are a passage to a better life, according to people like Saeed and Nadia, whose budding romance is stifled by the everyday inconveniences of war: a faltering phone network, irregular electricity, shelling, curfew, deaths in the family, the breakdown of the civil contract.

Nadia is something of a rebel, living alone though she is unmarried: later, outrageously, she moves into Saeed's house to help him care for his widowed father. Saeed is more solemn, increasingly braced by his faith: he prays 'as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go'. Once they have passed through the door, become refugees -- with some, if not all, of the hideous pragmatism that attends such a choice in the real world -- their relationship changes, as each of their selves is changed. For although there are no border guards or quotas or overcrowded dinghies in the world that Hamid describes, there is still racism, xenophobia, fear of the other; there are camps, and the need to work at menial jobs to earn enough money for food; the need to keep moving, and the longing for a place to call home.

This is a short and powerful novel, simultaneously stoic and lyrical: it doesn't dwell on the losses, the deaths, the partings, but it does feature arrestingly thought-provoking lines such as 'when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind'. It made me think anew (as did 2016's Queens of Syria at the Young Vic) about the realities of life in a city being destroyed by war: about the effort of maintaining normalcy as everything crumbles. And Exit West examines the idea that once you've fled your home, there is nowhere to stop.

2018/22: Absolute Friends -- John le Carré

"How do we make it impossible for your country, or America, or any damn country, to take the world to war on the strength of a bunch of cooked-up lies that in the cold light of day look about as plausible as the pixies in your fucking garden?" [p. 325]

The eponymous friends are Ted Mundy, son of a disgraced British major stationed in Pakistan, and Sasha, son of an East German Lutheran pastor and his wife who've defected to West Germany. Ted and Sasha meet in Berlin in the late sixties, discover that they share ideological passions (as well as lusting after the same women) and save one another's lives. Ted is deported, and drifts through the next decade of his life, marrying a nice Labour activist and working for the British Council: on a theatrical tour of Eastern Europe, he encounters Sasha again, and is recruited -- as Sasha has been -- to work as a double agent.

Then the Cold War ends, the Wall falls, Ted and Sasha are cast adrift. Ted ends up as a tour guide in Bavaria, Sasha as an academic entrepreneur: but when they meet again they find their ideologies still aligned, except that now they're fighting corporate capitalism and the phony wars of Bush and Blair.

Both Sasha and Ted are drawn with unsentimental affection. Their friendship is a delight: their codependence and loyalty to one another poignant. Because, of course, there's no room for Cold War spies in the 21st century... For most of the novel the prose is clear, precise, wry and sometimes fond: classic le Carré, and the reason that every time I read one novel by this author I crave more. The final chapters of Absolute Friends, though, are very angry, very emotional: the ending lacks the icy dispassionate calm of early le Carré, and though it's effective, devastating and exquisitely paced it casts the rest of the book in another light.

2018/21: The Henchmen of Zenda -- KJ Charles

"[Rudolph Rassendyll's account] gives us a beautiful, passionate princess, a man who renounces love and crown for the sake of a greater and purer cause, and a villain -- such a villain. Rupert of Hentzau: reckless and wary, graceful and graceless, handsome, debonair, vile, and unconquered. Rupert flees the pages of Rassendyll's story a thwarted monster, never to be seen again; Rassendyll retires from the field with honour unstained; and the true King of Ruritania reigns in Strelsau.
What a pile of shit.
My name is Jasper Detchard, and according to Rassendyll's narrative I am dead. This should give you some idea of his accuracy ..." [p. 1]

KJ Charles' witty, swashbuckling and cynical take on Anthony Hope's A Prisoner of Zenda, as told by professional henchman Jasper Detchard ('I had not lived the life I had to be called proper'), and featuring the dashing young Rupert of Hentzau, who has previously confined his amorous exploits to women but can, it turns out, be persuaded to diversify.

Charles' pastiche of Hope's style is commendable, though Jasper's narrative lends itself to more insalubrious language and innuendo than the original ('unless you feel there might be any chance of unlawful entry tonight?' [loc. 870]). More to the point, she turns Hope's story inside out and examines each character's actions, motivations, loyalties and affections -- discovering, or illuminating, quite a different tale that's considerably less high-minded. Charles' women have agency and intelligence: they are, indeed, the drivers of the story, and their roles are correspondingly more complex. Rassendyll is a pompous fraud (so, pretty much exactly like the original) and neither Rudolph nor his black-haired brother Michael are especially fit to be king. Rupert of Hentzau is, as advertised, dashing and melodramatic, and good with a blade. And Jasper ... I like Jasper a great deal. He is cool, detached, often exasperated: he sets more store in good manners than in passionate avowals. I think he could be described as aromantic, though I find the ending (which isn't the traditional monogamous till-death, etc) remarkably happy and wholly in character for Jasper and his lover.

I interviewed Charles last year and she swore that she'd manage to insert a reference to the better-known, more Christmassy Rudolph. I am happy to confirm her success.

2018/20: The Prisoner of Zenda -- Anthony Hope

If you say that I ought to have spent my time in useful labour, I am out of Court and have nothing to say, save that my parents had no business to leave me two thousand pounds a year and a roving disposition. [p. 6]

I'm sure I've read this classic of swashbuckling pseudohistorical romance before, yet little seemed familiar.

Englishman Rudolf Rassendyll decides to visit Ruritania, to which he has tenous (wrong side of the blanket) family ties. How fortuitous! He bears a striking resemblance to King Rudolph V, who is due to be crowned the very next day -- and whose dastardly brother Black Michael has abducted and drugged him. Can Rudolf Rassendyll help the true king by impersonating him? Of course he can.

Meanwhile, Black Michael's villainous but dashing henchman, Rupert of Hentzau, steals every scene he's in -- unlike the female characters (King Rudolph's fiancee Flavia, with whom Rudolf Rassendyll falls violently but chastely in love; Black Michael's scheming mistress Antoinette de Mauban, who makes some unpleasant discoveries about her lover) who are, period-typically, somewhat feeble and ruled by their hearts, rather than their heads.

Rudolf Rassendyll is not an especially likeable character, I have to say. But I'm glad I (re)read this, so that I could fully enjoy the delightful reimagining of KJ Charles' 'queered classic' version, The Henchmen of Zenda. Watch this space...

2018/19: Tremontaine: The Complete Season 3 -- Ellen Kushner, Tessa Gratton, Karen Lord, Joel Derfner, Racheline Maltese, and Paul Witcover

Micah began to feel more and more uneasy. It was as if their words made one pattern while their bodies made completely different ones — discordant, inelegant, nothing like the perfect logic of geometry and equations. The game of Social Graces as Diane's guests played it was frustrating and jangling and somehow, she felt, dangerous. It was like looking at the stars' patterns and realizing that they weren't moving in a way that explained everything but just the opposite, an order of confusion. [loc. 4084]

After the events at the end of Season 2, I devoured Season 3 in search of resolutions -- some of which were granted -- and came away with further convolutions of plot. And Season 4 is mere rumour at present ...

Various characters bade permanent farewells to others at the end of Season 2: some of them are bearing their losses better than others. Kaab is steely, fearsome and haunted; Rafe is ill-advised and impetuous; and Micah, jarringly, is resident in Tremontaine House. More new characters are introduced, and characters who've been part of the cast since the beginning change and evolve, sometimes in unexpected directions. There are new romances, new ventures, and rising tension between the City and Riverside. And threats from outside the City, too: the arrival of an inspector from Kinwiinik, who has reason to hate Kaab; the continued presence of a military expert who has made an exhaustive study of the City's and the Land's defences; and the Land itself, which still has a taste for blood.

Delightfully complex, with a diverse cast (not just racially or culturally diverse, though they're that too) and a maze of motives, grudges, feuds and affairs: it can become overwhelming, but then we are not Diane, Duchess Tremontaine, whose hand is on all the threads, who plays games with everyone she knows. Only a few are clever and perceptive enough to provide much of a challenge. I'm looking forward to seeing their next moves.

2018/18: Tremontaine: The Complete Season 2 -- Ellen Kushner, Tessa Gratton, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Joel Derfner, Racheline Maltese, and Paul Witcover

If hubris had effected the downfall of some of history's most famous charlatans, Diane comforted herself with the fact that history would never, of course, record the lies and outrageous dares of its more successful players. [loc. 2644]

The cast of Tremontaine reassembles, configurations and allegiances still shifting. In the City -- whether Hill, University or Riverside -- nothing is safe: nothing stays the same.

Rafe Fenton is desperate to find his lover William, who is imprisoned at Highcombe by his loving wife Diane. The family ledgers, which Rafe is examining in an excess of filial duty, are distractingly perplexing: the figures never seem to add up quite right. Perhaps he could engage Micah's help? But Micah (who is delightfully unaware that several of her closest acquaintances think she's a boy) has thrown herself with gusto into the life of a mathematics student.

Ixkaab, meanwhile, is still deeply in love with Tess (whose fair skin is likened by Kaab to ant eggs). But Tess is increasingly alienated by Kaab's devotion to her family, and Kaab's habit of secrecy -- also a family trait.

New characters are introduced, too: an exotic courtesan who is in no way demeaned by her liaisons; a charming ambassador who secretly mourns his lost lover; and the differently-charming Florian, whose lover Shade is very much present, homicidal and prone to theft, scheming and backstabbing.

And as ever at the heart of everything is Diane, who has ambitions to become Duchess Tremontaine in her own right rather than simply because her ailing husband is Duke. No woman has ever held such a high position. Place your bets.

There are a number of startling developments at the end of Season 2: luckily, I was able to embarque instantly upon Season 3 ...

2018/17: Time Was -- Ian McDonald

"That's them," Thorn said. "I'm sure of it. But ..."
I have never been able to resist the word "but." It's the ragged edge of the photograph, the texture of a provenance disturbing the flat perfection of a book. [loc. 275]

Book dealer Emmett Leigh, skimming stock at a closing-down Spitalfields bookshop, finds a slim volume of poetry entitled 'Time Was'. The author is anonymous, identified only by initials: more intriguingly, the book contains a letter from one soldier, Tom, to his lover Ben. Emmett (whose own romantic record is nothing to write home about) is fascinated by the letter and eager to find out more about Tom and Ben: his researches lead him to other copies of 'Time Was', and to photographs of the two men together. They always look more or less the same age, but the photos and letters date from different eras, different wars: Norfolk in 1915, Alexandria in 1942, the Crimea in 1856, Bosnia in 1993 ...

Ian McDonald's novella encompasses the Shingle Street mystery (rumours of a failed German invasion in 1940, and burned bodies washing up on the beach of this small Suffolk village) with the Rendlesham incident (UFO sightings in a Suffolk forest in the winter of 1980). It's a love story -- actually, it's two love stories, though Emmett's affair with the redoubtable Thorn is somewhat derailed by his growing obsession -- and a story about identity. (I did wonder why Emmett didn't make an obvious connection.)

Beautifully written with a cracking sense of place -- whether Shingle Street, Spitalfields or Rome -- and a real poignancy. This could have been fleshed out to novel-length (perhaps with more from Tom, and especially from Ben), but it says all that needs saying in novella form.