Friday, May 24, 2019

2019/58: Amnesty -- Lara Elena Donnelly

“I’m not the man I used to be, Aristide.”
“Darling, you never were. Neither was I.” [loc. 5229]

Five years after the events of Armistice, eight years after the events of Amberlough: the leader of the One State Party has been assassinated, but the new memorial on Temple Street isn't for him. Aristide Makricosta, living in exile in tropical Liso, has been invited to the dedication ceremony for the memorial, and has refused emphatically. But perhaps, with the right companion ...

In Amberlough, the Ospie regime has been overthrown, and two parties are vying for victory in the upcoming elections. Lillian DePaul is working for the transitional government and forging alliances with both Forward Gedda (liberal but somewhat naive, headed by a veteran of the revolutionary group known as the Catwalk) and the more conservative faction led by industrialist Emmeline Frye. Lillian doesn't care which of them she ends up working for: in this, as in other matters, she turns out to be considerably more ruthless than her brother. Her partner Jinadh is unhappy with her priorities: her teenaged son has been excluded from school due to some challenging behaviour. (He is fascinated by his uncle's career.) Lillian is trying not to repeat the mistakes that their parents made with Cyril: only now is she starting to recognise how little choice he was given about working for the intelligence services. Sadly, this is not a narrative that will wash with the populace.

Amnesty is about what happens after the revolution: after the fascist regime has been toppled, after the bombs have been planted, after the collaborations and the subterfuge. What can you do when your agenda is imperilled by the war criminal in the family? How much will you risk to be reunited with a lost lover? What place is there for an ageing spy in the new regime? And what counts as justice, when so many have died because of you?

It's hard to discuss the emotional resolutions of this novel without spoilers: highlight to read ...
Cordelia's death, 'off-screen' between Armistice and Amnesty, hit me hard. I kept hoping it would all turn out to be an elaborate ruse, or a case of mistaken identity, or rumour and hearsay solidified into 'fact'.
Aristide's behaviour is not that of a rational man. He's madly in love, all right. Daoud gets a raw deal, but I applauded his final words to Ari: "I expect an excellent reference". But then Ari is unwell -- years of drinking and bad habits, and he's scared to go back to the doctor ... One wonders how long he'll last, in Ishin Sao.
But then Cyril is in surprisingly good health, at least physically, for someone who's endured eight years on the front line of a conflict that happens -- again -- off-screen. I didn't get as much sense of Cyril's presence in this volume, but that's hardly surprising given his state of mind. He's much more passive than in Amberlough.
But I am glad that Ari and Cyril choose exile, together, and a quiet life: and glad that Cordelia's memory is revered: and hopeful that Lillian can rebuild her family and her career.


I was especially pleased by the return of Ari's fake stutter. Though it did make me want to return to the first volume ...

[And now I'm actually all caught up on my reviews, for the first time in years, because I'm ... not quite ready to start reading something new, not until my crush on these books and these characters starts to fade.]

Thursday, May 23, 2019

2019/57: Armistice -- Lara Elena Donnelly

He was everything the Ospies hated: brown-skinned, boy-loving, and crooked as a kinked zipper. Queen Yaima was happy to give him a home, casually displaying her stance against Gedda like someone newly affianced might let their ringed hand rest, just so, in a patch of sun. [loc. 639]

It's three years since the events of Amberlough. The One State Party (the Ospies -- xenophobic, homophobic, repressive) are in power in Amberlough, and a number of people are living in exile. The setting of Armistice is mostly Porachis, a matriarchal monarchy (not shown on map at front of book). Aristide Makricosta, sans stutter and with short hair, is now a lauded film director, mingling with the rich and shameless: he prefers not to think about the political situation, or Cyril DePaul (missing, presumed dead), and alcohol helps.

Then Cordelia Lehane, former burlesque dancer turned terrorist, turns up looking for work: and Lillian DePaul, press attache at the Geddan embassy, turns out to be implicated in a complicated game of loyalties and betrayals with a former colleague of her brother's. And worst of all, Aristide's sponsor Pulan Satri, queen of the Porachi movie industry, is embroiled in some underhand deals of her own. Aristide has managed to remain ignorant for years, but he can no longer refuse to see what's happening around him.

My structure-loving soul wants to class this as Cordelia's book, but I think that's just because she was one of the 'original cast', the trio at the heart of Amberlough. The focus in Armistice, though, is certainly more on powerful women than on deceptive men. In Porachi culture it's men who are regarded as weak, decorative, frivolous: 'a pretty boy is the fruit peel beneath a woman's shoe', teases Lillian. Several of the Porachi men introduced in Armistice chafe, in one way or another, under the restrictions of their society.

In Amberlough, many of the characters avoided arguments (and indeed honesty) in favour of maintaining their masks and their composure. Here, there is more openness: disagreements, all-out shouting matches, some appalling behaviour -- and that's just at Pulan's dinner table. The stakes are high, both personally and politically, and most of the protagonists act with some degree of self-interest. But there are also affection, loyalty, friendship, and many flavours of love. (I was especially moved by Aristide's growing vulnerability, and Cordelia's empowerment, and the changing relationship between the two.)

And it is all beautifully observed: the ache of an inhaled lungful of smoke when a critical piece of information is revealed, the soft slipperiness of applying lipstick in a tropical climate.

Armistice is a switchback chase, full of reversals and new dangers. I am so very glad I had the third volume ready to read as soon as I'd finished it.

Monday, May 20, 2019

2019/56: Amberlough -- Lara Elena Donnelly

There was the Aristide lying beside him in bed — the charming performer and monarch of the demimonde — and there was the other Aristide, the one he was supposed to arrest and interrogate. The one whose life and livelihood he was meant to raze. They both knew where the boundaries lay. It was impossible to love someone when you spent your time digging at their secrets in the hopes of undermining their career. And vice versa. [p. 83]

It's easy to describe Amberlough as 'Cabaret meets Le Carré', not least because those are the two sources from which Donnelly has chosen epigraphs. The comparison is not inaccurate, but I was also reminded of Ellen Kushner's Riverside, another secondary-world fantasy with no magic, rooted in an urban landscape, featuring a city where homophobia and racism play little part, but crime, corruption and social classism are endemic.

Gedda, the four-state nation of which Amberlough is the wealthiest and most liberal quarter, is also reminiscent of Robert Jackson Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy, which began with City of Stairs: I think the resemblance is mostly because they're both more modern in flavour than many secondary-world fantasies. This is one of the aspects of Amberlough, and Amberlough, that I liked most: there are gramophones, cocktails, nightclubs, trolleys (= trams), telephones ... People have favourite songs, and they read novels, and recognise their favourite colognes on other people's skin. They use idiom and slang, which is never explained but is thoroughly comprehensible in context. There is no organised religion, though some of the characters swear by the 'Wandering Queen', relic of 'the old religion' (which allowed marriage between more than two individuals). The map at the front (I told you it was a fantasy) is not especially informative.

I feel right at home.

Amberlough has three protagonists: Cyril, from old money, who works in the intelligence services; Aristide, drag queen and crime lord; and Cordelia, a red-haired nightclub performer. Cyril is the only white male, and he's the focal character of this volume, in that the other two are greatly affected by his actions: neither Aristide nor Cordelia is at all passive, though, and the events of Amberlough hinge on Cyril's self-confessed cowardice and hedonism.

(I did wonder why I initially read Cyril as the protagonist -- was it simply being accustomed, however wearily, to white male leads? -- but he does have more viewpoint scenes than either of the others (including the very first chapter), and he is the pivot on which the story hangs.)

Cyril is, to be honest, not a pleasant character: but he's charming, flawed, and to some extent the victim of circumstance. He has a traumatic back-story, only hinted here, and is betrayed by a mole within his own faction. He cuts a deal to keep himself and his lover, Aristide, safe. The only problem with this scheme is that Cyril and Aristide are technically on opposite sides, and can't trust one another with their secrets. They do have one thing in common: a kind of unscrupulous arrogance. Cordelia is the only protagonist who seems to be guided by actual moral scruples.

I should add that at the beginning of the novel, the rise of the repressive right-wing One State Party (a.k.a. the Ospies), is regarded as little more than an inconvenience. (Draw your own parallels here.) By the final page, Amberlough, and the whole of Gedda, are wholly changed. En route there are murders, betrayals, torture, sex, verbal abuse and some very painful conversations.

Which is to say: this is not a gentle book. But it seized hold of me and did not let go.

Off to reread the second one ...

Saturday, May 18, 2019

2019/55: The Fifth Gender -- G. L. Carriger

Tris had learned early on that there was very little humans would not do in pursuit of entertainment. They were easily entertained, especially, as it turned out, by Tris. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Tris was wildly curious and naturally flirty, and humans were easily flattered by both. Perhaps cats were the same. [loc. 72]

Tristol, an exile from the planet Gal, has built a new life on a predominantly human space station. He has friends, colleagues and a massive crush on Detective Drey Hastion. But he doesn't know if Drey returns his interest ...

Drey Hastion is massively attracted to the lavender-skinned, tentacle-haired Tris, though he doesn't really understand the galoi, or the fact they are rumoured to identify five genders. And the galoi he's encountered are sexually promiscuous, though Drey would prefer to settle down in a comfortable monogamous relationship.

Then a galoi ship hails the station: there has been an intentional death on board: and the galoi don't even have a word for murder. Perhaps a human detective -- and his galoi companion -- can help solve the mystery.

In a lot of ways this was a delightful novel: the romance develops quickly, yet credibly, once Tris and Drey start actually communicating, and the world-building is thorough without any plot-halting explanations. The galoi are a mysterious race, and Tris is initially unwilling to explain his sociobiology to humans, though as the murder case progresses he does divulge relevant information about the roles of the five genders, and his own exile.

Tris and Drey are likeable characters, and Carriger's writing is well-paced and often humorous, with excellent dialogue. I felt that there was some feminisation of Tris: most noticeably, the repeated description of Tris as 'little' though he's only a little shorter -- though much slighter -- than Drey ... Many of the traits that could be read (by me, anyway) as skewing feminine, such as the homemaking instinct and the flightiness, are wholly appropriate to Tris's character and his gender role: but Drey, and perhaps some of the other humans, seemed to react to him as feminine, and this increased over the course of the book.

There were a few elements and allusions that felt underdeveloped: for instance, the 'pakaa nova' (an alien species that nobody likes?), and the 'advocate strand' notion, which I felt should have been highlighted much earlier in the novel.

I feel curmudgeonly for these criticisms, because The Fifth Gender is a fun, well-written and intriguing book: but it just ... didn't quite work for me in those specific aspects. I am definitely going to read more in Carriger's 'Tinkered Stars' series, though.

Monday, May 13, 2019

2019/54: When I Hit You: Or, a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife -- Meena Kandasamy

And I am thinking of how I am someday going to be writing all this out and I am conscious that I am thinking about this and not about the moment, and I know that I have already escaped the present and that gives me hope, I just have to wait for this to end and I can write again, and I know that because I am going to be writing about this, I know that this is going to end. [loc. 862]

I doubt I'd have read When I Hit You -- a partially autobiographical tale of a physically, mentally and emotionally abusive marriage, told in the first person by a young female writer -- without the Reading Women Challenge 2019, which gave me impetus to buy and read a novel by a woman from 'South Asia' (that is, the Indian subcontinent). And I'm glad I did read it, despite the grim subject matter. Rather than a dystopian vision of The State vs Women -- a theme all too prevalent in fiction and fact, lately -- this is very much a conflict between two individuals. And this narrator survives, walks free, makes her suffering into art, because she tells her own story.

The narrator, never named, is a successful writer who marries a left-wing academic. Unfortunately, it's only after their wedding that she realises he wants to discipline and dominate her. The title of the novel is taken from one of his poems:
When I hit you
Comrade Lenin
weeps [loc. 844]

He forces her to leave Facebook; he curtails her internet use; he deletes all her emails and changes her password; he forbids her to write poetry. He beats her to drive out her demons. ('My demons are not happy. They do not want to leave me to the mercy of this man. They decide to stay.' [loc. 1537]). And because she is afraid of disgracing her family, of seeking a divorce in conservative India, of being blamed, of being hunted down and killed: because of the culture in which she lives, she does not leave. Until she can take control of the narrative: 'his verbal threat ... is enough. It's what I came for. He is scripting the ending that I wanted for us. I generously allow him this authorship.' [loc. 2109].

She (it's hard not to think 'Meena Kandasamy') takes that control, transforming something ugly into something with structure and beauty. This is a writerly escape: that quotation at the top of this review is from the middle of an episode of violence, and the sense of removing oneself from a horrific present is as much an escape for the writer as for the reader. Would it be difficult to revisit times of pain and misery in order to trap them safely in words on a page? Would it be cathartic? Would it be a kind of recycling, repurposing? Would one become numbed by the work of writing it all down?

I don't know. But I think it's important for women -- for all of us -- to tell our own stories.

Sunday, May 12, 2019

2019/53: The Calculating Stars -- Mary Robinette Kowal

"It has been made abundantly clear to me that the moon mission isn't going to succeed without a computer on board." [p. 400]

Obviously you need computers for a space mission. But what if it's 1952, before electronic computers were reliable, fast or accurate?

On March 3rd, 1952, a meteorite destroys Washington DC, causes widespread devastation and loss of life, and triggers catastrophic climate change which threatens life on earth: a potential extinction event. The only hope for humanity is to head outwards -- to build colonies on the Moon and Mars, and throughout the solar system. Which means that the space race (no longer really a race, more of an international effort) is under way.

Dr Elma York is a mathematician, physicist and pilot: she logged hundreds of hours during the Second World War, outflying Messerschmidts and transporting planes to where they were most needed. Now, like her fellow WASPs (Women Airforce Service Pilots: though, yes, they were all white), she's grounded, forced to sit back and watch while men with less experience are admitted to the astronaut training programme.

Elma is Jewish, and a woman, so encounters a plethora of prejudice: she's not without her own bias, predominantly racial, though she does work hard on overcoming this when she realises that she is failing to consider or respect the Black women she knows -- many of whom are also pilots, and / or mathematicians. A lot of the women in The Calculating Stars are professional mathematicians: computers, as they were known. And of course you need computers for space missions.

I greatly enjoyed this novel, the first in a duology, which I received as part of the Hugo voters' pack. Elma is a likeable, flawed protagonist with anxiety issues -- largely connected with being a female prodigy in a male-dominated discipline -- and a determination to be judged by merit, rather than by gender. She's opposed by several men in positions of power (one of whom has nursed a grudge since Elma reported him for harassment), but finds a supportive community among the women she encounters. And she is instrumental in challenging sexist assumptions: for instance, when told that she needs to show her workings on a maths test, her friend Nicole points out that Elma wrote the equations. The examiner says it's not enough to write out the answers: he needs to see the workings. Elma explains that she originated many of the equations, and has used the others on a daily basis for years. "He blinked. 'Oh.' He set the pages down and smoothed them. 'I see. That would have been useful information to know earlier.'" (p. 349)

It's not all antagonism. There are several positively-depicted male characters here, including Elma's well-meaning and generally delightful husband (who does need nudging to question his own assumptions, but accepts such nudges with good grace), and the new Quaker President, formerly the Secretary for Agriculture -- extremely useful to have someone who understands climate and farming in such a situation!

The meteorite's effects on the climate are not the focus of the novel. They're a slow, quotidian annoyance. Children grow up not knowing what the stars look like: there's constant cloud-cover due to the steam in the atmosphere: there's a long, long winter, and then the start of a summer that may never end. What The Calculating Stars does best, its big idea, is the acceleration of the space age, and the pivotal role of women.

Also, as it turned out, a perfect fit for the 'a woman in science' rubric of the 'Reading Women Challenge 2019'.

Saturday, May 11, 2019

2019/52: Awfully Glad -- Charlie Cochrane

Somehow his being a rugby-playing, Military Cross-winning officer added a certain authority to the deception. A female impersonator he might be, but nobody would ever accuse him of being a pansy. [loc. 150]

A charming novella set during and after the First World War. Sam Hines is a war hero who's hung up 'Madeleine', the female alter ego who charmed so many soldiers, with his medals. There's no place for Madeleine in peacetime -- and Sam is all too aware of how swiftly rumours about sexual deviance can ruin a man's life. Settling into normality as a stockbroker, he welcomes a new client who remembers Madeleine. Is this mere coincidence, or somebody set on blackmail?

Sam's constant fear of betrayal, and his mistrust of the likeable Jonny, felt wearing: but I suspect that's how it did feel, to know that one false step could lead to ruin. I'd have liked Sam to be slightly less ready to leap athletically to erroneous conclusions about his new friend, but I think he's dealing with a certain degree of survivors' guilt, as well as anxiety and loneliness. And I suspect he misses being Madeleine, too.

Thursday, May 09, 2019

2019/51: Proper English -- K J Charles

“You’re contorting yourself to be fair to him,” Fen observed. “I don’t suppose you’d tolerate a fiancĂ© treating you with disinterest.”
“To be honest, if I had to marry, I’d far prefer a husband who was mostly unaware of my existence.” [loc. 825]
Patricia Merton is at something of a loose end. Her brother, whose household she's managed for years, is getting married, and Pat decides it would be better all round if she were to set up on her own. Luckily, she doesn't have to start her new life just yet: her old friend the Honorable Jimmy Yoxall is hosting a shooting party in Northumberland, and Pat -- who is an excellent shot (All-England Ladies Champion) and prefers to be 'one of the boys' -- is looking forward to spending time with her friends and her older brother Bill.

Until, disastrously, it turns out that Jimmy's fiancée, a 'daughter of industry' whose dowry might save Jimmy's estates, has invited herself to the gathering. Together with Jimmy's acidic sister Anna, her husband, an offensive friend of Anna's, and Jimmy's mother's goddaughter (Miss Victoria Singh, a Girton graduate and principled vegetarian) it's far from the quiet, amicable break that Pat had anticipated.

And that's before she meets Miss Fenella Carruth, the fiancée in question, who is giggly and blonde and buxom, and utterly charming -- and whose presence Jimmy barely acknowledges.

A delightful love story wrapped around a murder mystery that satisfies from the moment the (despicable) victim is discovered, Proper English is witty, warm and well-paced. The secondary characters are interesting individuals (even the household staff have characters!) and the various means, motives and methods are pleasingly twisty. The narrative viewpoint is entirely Pat's: she is eminently sensible and practical, but not especially worldly, and she's in for several surprises.

And Fen is a delight. She knows that people don't take her seriously: "I don’t look serious. I’ve got a big bosom and a giggle. " She's curvy and pretty and frothy, and far from stupid..

This novel's set a couple of years before Think of England, and readers familiar with that volume will note a few subtle references (as well as, of course, being quite sure of the happy ending). Proper English certainly doesn't require any knowledge of the other book, though: it stands alone perfectly well, though may tempt you to read or reread Think of England.

Wednesday, May 08, 2019

2019/50: The Jackal's House -- Anna Butler

"I am very pleased to make your acquaintance, Master Winter." I would have said more, but I couldn't offhand remember the words of the ritual of exorcism, and a simple "Avaunt, ye daemonic spawn of Satan!" was likely to hurt [his father's] feelings. [p. 22]
Not as much fun as The Gilded Scarab, possibly just because it was set in Aegypt rather than London Londinium (and there was rather less coffee, and fewer cold-fusion pistols). Ned Winter's excavations are plagued by sightings of a jackal-headed figure, and by a myriad of little 'accidents' that, taken together, don't seem so accidental. Meanwhile Rafe, seconded by the head of his House to pilot the expedition, is beginning to realise that he can't escape the schemes and toils of the Houses: even so far from Londinium, relations and acquaintances show up with tedious inevitability.

Somewhat reminiscent of the Amelia Peabody books, The Jackal's House features intriguing world-building (the Imperium is [even] more ruthless than the British Empire) and some interesting developments for Rafe. I felt the machinations became overly complex towards the end of the novel, but of course life is sometimes like that.

I look forward to the next in the series, though can't help hoping it sees a return to Londinium ...

Monday, May 06, 2019

2019/49: Underland: A Deep Time Journey -- Robert Macfarlane

The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful... Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save. [loc. 113]
Macfarlane's epic journey to the 'underland' -- the places beneath the earth -- is formed of three parts: 'Seeing' (caves, forests and a dark-matter research facility, all in England);'Hiding' (catacombs, underground rivers and the caves and fissures of karst uplands, in Europe); and 'Haunting' (cave paintings, undersea oil extraction, glaciers and a nuclear waste depository, all in 'the North'). One certainly gets the sense that the author, an experienced caver and mountaineer, is pushing his own physical limits at times.

But he is not, or not primarily, a scientist. He's given to poetic pronouncements, such as (speaking of sand-grains, once wind-smoothed in a desert, retrieved from beneath a glacier) he describes them as 'desert diamonds from the bottom of the world.' 'I can tell you’re not a scientist,' says his companion. Macfarlane, though, does have a keen understanding and an eye for significant detail. Throughout his explorations, he finds the right people to talk to, and these often are scientists: a mycologist describing the intricate network of fungi that connect the trees in Epping Forest, a physicist in search of dark matter 'shielded from the surface by 3,000 feet of halite, gypsum, dolomite, mudstone, siltstone, sandstone, clay and topsoil'.

Underland is full of myth and literature, too, from the Mithraic cults and katabases (descents underground) of pre-Christian religions to the claustrophobic explorations in Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. (Personally, Garner's description of getting stuck in a narrow tunnel beneath Alderley Edge, horrified me so much that the chances of my willingly going caving are microscopically low.) Macfarlane is eclectic: Philip Larkin ('what will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207'), Greek tragedy, the Kalevala, Ursula Le Guin, Jules Verne ... And the connections are not limited to the claustrophobia (or claustrophilia?) of the underland: Macfarlane ranges through the sense of disconnection experienced by those who see their familiar landscapes destroyed, the urge towards art -- cave paintings, friezes of bone, sculpture -- underground, the 'past pain and present beauty' of former war-zones, the way that time seems to work differently when one is hidden from the sun.

The cover design ('Nether') is splendid. Like Macfarlane, I thought it showed a bright sunset at the end of a country lane. No, says the artist. "[It] isn't the sun. It's the last thing you'd ever see. It's the light of a nuclear blast that has just detonated, seen down a holloway. When you look at Nether, you've got about 0.001 of a second of life remaining, before the flesh is melted from your bones."

Because running through Underland is the urgent message that we are wrecking the world: that the nuclear waste and the proofs of genocide will surface, the abandoned diggers beneath the North Sea and the concrete-entombed body of a dead caver will outlast us, the glaciers -- retreating faster than satellite mapping can follow -- will unbury their burdens of ancient ice and forgotten corpses.

That Underland succeeds in being a beautiful and erudite description of what lies beneath us, as well as a discourse on climate change, ecological catastrophe and human suffering, seems to me a triumph. Even when I was reading about topics that distressed or angered me, I was enjoying the prose. True, Macfarlane does occasionally stumble on that thin line between 'poetic' and 'flaky', but he's so sincere that I didn't balk much at sentences such as 'I'd like to die and be reborn as a boulder here'. And his prose is immensely evocative and often moving: there's a description of a chunk of black ice calving from a glacier that is spectacularly immediate.

Underland flickers from reports of conversations with the people who know these places best -- cavers, ecological activists, cataphiles -- to passages that feel like simple transcriptions of notes scribbled 'on site', the author's stream-of-consciousness narrative of what he is experiencing. It's not just darkness and silence, not just doom and gloom: there is fascination, appreciation of beauty, and a real joy in his surroundings. I almost want to go caving. Almost.

I am extremely grateful to NetGalley for providing a free review copy in exchange for this honest review.

Robert Macfarlane on creating the cover of Underland with artist Stanley Donwood
Robert Macfarlane on writing Underland
Alex Preston's review in the Guardian

Sunday, May 05, 2019

2019/48: The Gilded Scarab -- Anna Butler

"...I was the most famous living-dangerously aeronaut in the history of the Corps, and now I'm reduced to adding spices to my coffee to try and get my pulse racing." [p. 190]

M/M romance set in an alternate, late-Victorian steampunk-flavoured London -- or rather Londinium, heart of the Britannic Imperium. Rafe Lancaster, black sheep of a minor House, was the jewel of Her Britannic Majesty's Imperial Aero Corps until a stray Boer shell knocks his fighter out of the sky, and Rafe (whose eyesight is permanently damaged) out of the Corps. Returning to London, he finds himself at something of a loose end. His House would like him to repay their investment in his education and military commission: but Rafe is not fond of the House system, and anyway would rather retain his independence. His preferences do not incline him to marriage or settling down -- though he does enjoy a liaison with a handsome archaeologist, and yearns after the handsome chap he meets at the select Margrethe's -- but an unexpected business opportunity opens new doors.

Why, yes, this is a steampunk coffee-shop story, albeit with added Aegyptology and some intricate political manoeuvering. Rafe is a charming and witty first-person narrator with a stiff upper lip and hidden reserves of sentiment, vulnerability et cetera. Londinium is recognisably London, complete with the Britannic Museum (Rafe's establishment is in Museum Street) and an upstart chain of American coffee shops, Philtre Coffee, which is 'spreading its tentacles across Londinium', and is finally quelled by taxation. Rafe's next-door neighbour is a pastry chef whose wife is an opera singer, but knows how to handle a cold-fusion pistol. These things bring me joy: as does a romance between two men of the world, neither of whom is in the least feminised, fragile or slight.

The Gilded Scarab has a thoroughly satisfactory ending, though there are plenty of unresolved threads setting up the next in the series. Which of course I purchased as soon as I'd finished this one ...