2018/33: The Faithful -- S. M. Freedman

Even worse than the loss was the suspicion that new memories were waiting just beyond my view, ready to fill the empty space with something far different from what had been removed. [p. 89]

FBI Agent Josh Metcalf is haunted by the memory of a little girl whose disappearance was one of his first cases. He uncovers what he believes is a long-standing conspiracy: hundreds of children have gone missing since the 1960s, many of them rumoured to have had some kind of psychic ability.

Rowan Wilson, who hunts asteroids for a living, is also haunted: in her case, by dreams of a childhood she can't recall, nightmares about cosmic catastrophe, and visions of dead people.

And Sumner Macey is haunted by the memories he's given everything to hold onto -- and by his mission to uncover a terrifying cult and destroy its priests.

This was a pacy read, but not a compelling one: I started reading it by the pool last Christmas, forgot about it for six months, picked it up to finish it, and promptly forgot (within about a week) that I'd read it. I'm not sure if this was because I read it during a difficult time, or because I actively disliked quite a few of the characters, or because I found the prose -- despite its short sentences and preponderance of dialogue -- sluggish. The plot isn't awful and the novel is well-structured: but the female characters seem to either be haggard, comical sex maniacs or pure young things who fall victim to predatory priests. While the theme of memory alteration is intriguing, its remedy seems improbably straightforward.

I think it'd make a watchable film, but as a novel, for this reader, it lacked depth.

2018/32: The Abbess of Crewe -- Muriel Spark

They want to know how we reconcile our adherence to the strict enclosed Rule with the course in electronics which we have introduced into our daily curriculum in place of book-binding and hand-weaving. [loc. 197]

The newly-elected Abbess of Crewe, Alexandra, is an innovator. Cool and serene, prone to reciting erotic poetry, she has 'discarded history' and reestablished the ancient Benedictine rule (Matins at midnight, Lauds at 3 a.m., nettle soup and mystery meat [cat food] for supper). Her minions, Sister Winifrede (and Sister Mildred, are wholly supportive without necessarily understanding what they're supporting. Occasionally, via the telephone, we hear the oddly deep voice of Sister Gertrude who is off converting the heathen (but nevertheless seems extremely well-informed about conversations in the cloisters).

Felicity, Alexandra's defeated rival for the role of Abbess, has involved the police in what should be an internal matter: the theft of her love letters to a Jesuit priest. Felicity being an advocate of free love, she would much prefer to destroy the electronics lab and install a love-nest. Now she has left the convent, and is complaining to Rome about Alexandra's innovations and her Machiavellian play for power. And the Vatican are keen on an explanation from Alexandra.

I suspect this would have been a wittier, more satirical read when first published: much of the comedy relies on knowledge of the Watergate affair. A brief dive down the rabbit-hole indicates that The Abbess of Crewe was filmed as Nasty Habits, starring Glenda Jackson: the Wikipedia page for the film provides a handy guide to parallels: Alexandra/Nixon, Gertrude/Kissinger etc.

It is an entertaining read, because Spark's pacing and dialogue is blackly comic and her gift for characterisation sharp. But most of its humour -- the context of its satire -- was wasted on me.

2018/31: The Tea Master and the Detective -- Aliette de Bodard

She climbed back into her own body — curled up in her heartroom, withdrawing from her sensors and letting go of her bots, space stretching around her, vast and cold and unchanging, the wind whispering against her hull like a lullaby — the sharp light of the stars a restful, familiar sight. [loc. 784]

This novella has been described as 'gender-swapped Sherlock Holmes in space', but that pseudoblurb, though accurate, doesn't convey the inventiveness, the depth of character or the ways in which The Tea Master and the Detective subverts and transforms the Holmes/Watson relationship.

The eponymous tea master is The Shadow's Child, a mindship left alone, impoverished and psychologically damaged by war, just about covering the rent by mixing up individual psychoactive blends that let humans deal with the mental and physical distortions of the deep spaces. The detective goes by the name of Long Chau, a human woman whose past The Shadow's Child can't trace. Long Chau wants to buy tea that'll keep her sharp in the deep spaces, the in-between of physical space, where she hopes to find a corpse to study (she's researching the decomposition of the human body in deep spaces). The Shadow's Child needs the money, so agrees -- not expecting to have her secrets, and her past, recounted to her as a series of deductions.

The plot is loosely based on 'A Study in Scarlet', but in a vastly different cultural milieu. Long Chau definitely shares a number of traits with Holmes, but she also has secrets, which pertain to the mystery she's trying -- with the initially reluctant aid of The Shadow's Child -- to solve. Because the corpse she selects, from a wreck in the deep spaces, isn't a casualty of that wreck.

I'm trying to understand why this felt like a story of two halves: as if the author started in one key, and finished in another. It may simply be that as the two protagonists grow more accustomed to one another, they begin to interact more, to communicate more: there's less description of Long Chau's mannerisms, patterns of speech, body language as observed (seen?) by The Shadow's Child.

I only realised after I'd read this that it's set in a universe that de Bodard has explored in other works (notably On a Red Station, Drifting and The Citadel of Drifting Pearls): those works are now on my wishlist, because I'd like very much to explore more of the background. That said, I would love to read more of the interaction between Long Chau and The Shadow's Child.

I also note that The Shadow's Child is the latest in a trope which may have started with McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang: that was certainly my first encounter with the notion of a living spaceship, a ship that's also a human. Here, there is less ableism, and a sense of family, of parents and relatives, that poor Helga utterly lacked. The Shadow's Child feels like a more rounded -- if less stable -- individual.

2018/30: The Girl Next Door -- Ruth Rendell

‘I just asked if you thought we’d led a dull life.’
‘Well, I don’t think so. I’d have said we’ve had a happy life, not very adventurous, but those sort of lives are full of trouble. We haven’t committed adultery or gone in for domestic violence or anything like that. We’ve brought up our children decently. What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing,’ he said, but he thought, ‘Everything.’ [p. 35]

The skeletal remains of two hands, one a man's and one a woman's, are found in a buried tin box. They date from the Second World War, and news of their discovery stir childhood memories in the people who grew up playing in the tunnels beneath the leafy suburb of Theydon Bois. The protagonists, friends and playmates during the war, are in their seventies or eighties now. Their relationships have grown and changed with them -- but the distant world in which they grew up comes vividly to life as memories resurface.

There's little mystery to the murder (it is described in the opening chapter of the novel). What only gradually unfurls is the web of relationships -- friendships, feuds, romances and betrayals -- between the children, and the ways in which their childhood experiences have shaped them. There's an underlying continuo of the difference between the world then and the world now: house prices, knowing the names of flowers, not telephoning after 9pm, having hobbies. And yet not everything has changed: people have always been driven by physical desire, jealousy, love and hate. And those urges don't necessarily vanish in old age.

What I liked most about this novel was that nearly all of the protagonists are past retirement age: Alan and Rosemary, married for nearly half a century; Daphne, Alan's old flame from before he went to university; Lewis, still wondering about his Uncle James' fate; Michael, who still fears and resents his emotionally distant father. Some of them are physically or mentally frail, but they are all strongly characterised individuals whose age doesn't define them. Some find themselves less emotional as they pass seventy: others ... not so much. I hadn't expected to find The Girl Next Door hopeful or life-affirming: I was charmed, surprised and interested.

2018/29: Lost Things -- Melissa Scott and Jo Graham

Jerry tilted the tablet. The surface was blurred, worn, almost as though it had been exposed to wind or water. Or to something that rubbed constantly against it, trying slowly and without patience but with infinite time to wear away its bonds. [loc. 762]

America in the late 1920s: Alma Gilchrist runs the small aviation company founded by her late husband. Her fellow pilots, Lewis Segura and Mitch Sorley, are both veterans of the Great War, as is their friend Jerry Ballard, an archaeologist and academic who was gravely injured in the line of duty. None of them are quite ... ordinary. Lewis is prone to oracular dreaming: Alma, Mitch and Jerry are what's left of the Aedificatorii Templi, an occult lodge of magical practitioners. And some acquaintances from the old days have become involved with an ancient entity originating at Lake Nemi, where Caligula conceived a monstrous affront to the Temple of Diana ...

Lost Things, the first in the 'Order of the Air' series, is as much about the relationships between Alma, Lewis, Jerry and Mitch (and the late lamented Gil) as it's about the supernatural threat released by the excavations at Lake Nemi, or the arcane methodologies that the splintered lodge musters against that threat. The setting -- the early air transport industry of the USA, back when airships were still the luxurious way to cross the Atlantic and planes were unable to fly high enough to cross mountain ranges -- is fascinating and well-researched. And above all, this is a novel about team; about families of choice, found families, and the ways in which the protagonists, lost and drifting in different ways, find or make a place where they can be true to themselves.

2018/28: Swansong -- Vale Aida

This new blond Savonn was overlaid on the old one, two paintings ghosting through each other on reused canvas: one looked at him and saw, discomfitingly, both entities at once. The effect was cumulative. “He bleached his hair,” said Iyone. “Alas, he could not bleach his heart.” [p. 133]

Having read Elegy, I went straight on to the conclusion of the duology, which does not disappoint. All the charm of the previous book, with some truly astonishing reversals and betrayals. (Or are they?) There is more explicit magic, or perhaps simply the presence of the divine: there is outright war as well as the spying and subterfuge that underlay Elegy.

Iyone Safin comes into her own in this novel -- she's the heroine of half the book -- but there is also more of Savonn's viewpoint -- especially in flashback chapters set in Astorre. More, too, of the Empath, who was last seen gleefully hurling Savonn's silver knives at the city guard of Cassarah, and who turns out to have a plethora of weapons at his disposal. (Like many weapons, these are double-edged.)

The character who I felt developed and matured most in this volume, though, was Emaris, Savonn's squire. He discovers the identity of his father's murderer, and remains true to himself; he acknowledges love, and sets it aside. He is a delight, and humanly fallible: unlike Savonn, who is always wearing some mask or other, Emaris is affected by what happens to him.

Swansong kept surprising me until the final chapter, which is another refreshing aspect of these novels. And there is a sense of balance, of debts repaid and deaths avenged, of freedom and barter, trust and treason, victory and defeat. Though all the major characters' plot-lines are tied off (some more satisfactorily, and some more permanently, than others), I would happily read more about them: more by this author.

Today's mild niggle, to band-aid the gushing, is 'brigantine' in place of 'brigandine'. One is a ship, one is armour.

2018/27: Elegy -- Vale Aida

"Whatever shall we do? You wish to kill me, and I return your ardour most fervently. Yet here we are, dancing together in a city under truce.” [p. 144]

Kedris Andalle, Governor of Cassarah, has been murdered: ostensibly by brigands, but the consensus is that it was actually at the behest of the Queen of Sarei. The members of the Cassaran Council are squabbling over who gets to be Governor next: consensus here is that it had probably better not be Kedris' only son, Savonn, known as Silvertongue.

Savonn's unsuitability is evident from the first chapter, in which he transforms his father's funeral into a theatrical production. The next time we encounter him, he's masquerading as a gardener in order to infiltrate the Council's deliberations, to which he has not been invited. A former actor who became a soldier at his father's behest, it's his responsibility to avenge the death: he may have other motivations for leaving Cassarah before old secrets can be laid bare.

Meanwhile, his all-but-sister Iyone is investigating a series of murders, and falling in love; and Savonn's squire Emaris is learning a great deal about his commander's past. Though not, obviously, from Savonn himself.

This novel was an absolute delight. I find myself nitpicking at small worldbuilding details (it's a fantasy world, so why is there a planet Venus and a month July when gods and vengeful spirits get new names?) just to stop myself, briefly, from gushing. Item: our dashing hero is not especially good-looking. Item: there are major characters who have no apparent romantic or sexual interests at all. Item: all sexualities and genders seem to be equally accepted (there's at least one trans character; Savonn was (is?) in love with another man; there are hints at a polyamorous relationship). Item: multiple strong female characters. (Item: nemeses in love.)

What I liked best, I think, was the emotional complexity, which makes up for any over-simplification in worldbuilding, and which reminded me strongly of Dunnett. As did the witty dialogue, the fondness for disguise and stratagem, the rumours of children with questionable parentage, the baffled viewpoint characters ...

I wish this book and its sequel (Swansong) were as popular as C. S. Pacat's Captive Prince trilogy. Personally, I find Vale Aida's duology more enjoyable: there's no explicit sex or torture, the characters are more diverse, and the plot somewhat twistier. Your mileage may vary.