2021/102: Luckenbooth -- Jenni Fagan

Can’t you feel the energy of this place? All those other years are tugging at our coats.[loc. 2415]

Luckenbooth begins in 1910, with Jessie Macrae rowing to the Scottish mainland in a coffin, leaving behind her island home and her dead father, who may have been the Devil. Things do not become any less strange when she lands in Edinburgh, and makes her way to 10 Luckenbooth Close. Jessie has been hired by (or sold to) the unsettling Mr Udnam, property owner and crime lord. ('He has all the keys to all the buildings and every one of them is bloodstained.') She is to be a surrogate mother, since Elise -- the soon-to-be-Mrs Udnam -- is unable, or unwilling, to bear Udnam a child. Jessie's pregnancy proceeds at a fairytale pace: as the child grows, so do the horns on Jessie's head. Mr Udnam is not pleased.

The novel tells the stories of various inhabitants of the building through the turbulent twentieth century: a medium haunted by the sisters of dead Elise; a black medical student from Louisiana who creates a mermaid from bones; a bisexual teenager who yearns to become an assassin; and William Burroughs, inviting his lover to travel to other dimensions with him. There are drag balls, gangland killings, a parrot who's suffered a breakdown, and a miner who is allergic to daylight. And throughout the story there are women refusing to be victims, kicking back against the pricks, taking their revenge in elaborate and witty ways.

Luckenbooth is humorous, horrific, warm-hearted and raw, a palimpsest of lives layered as thick as generations of wallpaper on the tenement walls. (But what's hidden beneath the wallpaper?) It's intimately rooted in, and richly evocative of, Edinburgh's culture, geography and mythology: ritual sacrifice on Carlton Hill, whale bones in Meadow Walk, the 'skittery, lying, drunk, untrustworthy foe' that is the Edinburgh summer. And ultimately, though many of the characters are afflicted by violence and poverty, Luckenbooth is about winning free. Angry, lush and hopeful.

2021/101: Guardian of the Horizon -- Elizabeth Peters

'Good Gad! This isolated oasis is beginning to resemble Victoria Station!’ [p. 279]

Set in 1907/8, ten years after The Last Camel Died at Noon (and following The Ape Who Guards the Balance), this tells the story of the Emersons' return to the Lost Oasis, where an ancient Meroitic culture has survived for centuries. A messenger, Merasen, turns up at the family's home in Kent, urging them to assist King Tarek. Ramses does not consider Merasen wholly trustworthy, but they decide that they can't ignore the plea for help.

Of course Merasen is not trustworthy: Amelia, Emerson, Ramses and Nefret, together with friends, relatives and a plethora of suspicious new characters, have to contend with lascivious seductresses, ancient rituals, duplicitous nobles and oddly flattering statues.

Ramses manages to distract himself from romantic thoughts of Nefret by being a suitably swashbuckling action hero (Rider Haggard would be proud) and Nefret is confronted with memories of her early life as a priestess in an archaic culture. It was good to see the younger generation taking more of a central role here: I also liked their fond and gentle mockery of Amelia's idiosyncrasies. Again, great fun, an undemanding and highly entertaining read.

2021/100: The Snake, the Crocodile and the Dog -- Elizabeth Peters

It is much more sensible to be an optimist instead of a pessimist, for if one is doomed to disappointment, why experience it in advance? [loc. 4428]

I'd been sampling various non-fiction books about the history and archaeology of Egypt: eventually, I had to admit to myself that what I really craved was more cheery historical mystery set in the world of early twentieth-century Egyptian archaeology. It did take me a while to work out how far into the Amelia Peabody series I'd read on my previous foray, back in 2017. Tragically, I had to reread several of the novels to reacquaint myself with the cast ...

The Snake, the Crocodile and the Dog fits, chronologically, between The Last Camel Died at Noon and The Hippopotamus Pool. It's set in 1898/9: Ramses, who is 11, has stayed behind in England while Amelia and Emerson go to Egypt for another season of archaeology. Old friends and new enemies progress the plot. More dubious ethics: administering laudanum without the patient's consent (especially heinous given that the patient was recently forced to consume opium), and planting archaeological artefacts. There is a new cat, Anubis, and a delightfully named German medic, Dr Schadenfreude. And matters back in England do not seem to be wholly under control, despite Ramses' assurances in his letters.

Great fun: I'm glad I saved some books in this series, because I was very melancholy between cats, and this had just the right combination of humour, heroics and intelligence. (I don't think I'd consciously noted just how much history, archaeology and political commentary Peters slides into her settings.)

2021/099: The Nine Tailors -- Dorothy L Sayers

[The bells] rioting and exulting high up in the dark tower, wide mouths rising and falling, brazen tongues clamouring, huge wheels turning to the dance of the leaping ropes. [p. 35]

Reread to comfort myself on a day of misery. As usual, I'd forgotten nearly all of the plot, and rediscovering it was a gentle delight. The Nine Tailors is not really one of the major Wimsey novels, but it might be one of the most beautifully-written. I love the setting: the wintry fenland, the bell-ringing, the coming flood. Sayers' descriptions are glorious and Lord Peter is charming, likeable and kind-hearted (witness his willingness to step in and help ring a nine-hour peal on the church bells). I found myself focussing more on the prose and the characters, and the depiction of rural Fenland in the years after the First World War, than on the murder mystery. Comfort: achieved.

2021/098: We Keep the Dead Close -- Becky Cooper

I had deluded myself into thinking that I had some choice in whether or not to pursue her story, not realizing that the truth was that she had already started to seep into the borders of me. [loc. 1400]

I don't often read 'true crime': like Becky Cooper, I feel that 'the culture of true-crime fandom [flattens] crime into entertainment' [loc. 4398]. When I was looking for interesting non-fiction, though, I found this book, and -- perhaps because I'd just emerged from Leigh Bardugo's excellent dark fantasy novel set at Yale, Ninth House -- I was intrigued.

In 1969 a young female graduate student, Jane Britton, was murdered in her apartment. It took fifty years for her case to be solved. When Becky Cooper, herself a student at Harvard, first heard the story of the murder in 2009, it had assumed the status of urban myth: the body covered with fur blankets and sprinkled with red ochre like an ancient burial, the whispers that the murderer was a member of faculty, the archaeological and anthropological elements that seemed to echo prehistoric ritual.

Cooper became fascinated (perhaps obsessed) with the case, and spent years untangling fact from fiction. More than forty years had passed without a suspect being identified: was this incompetence or cover-up? Coooper talked to those who'd known Jane Britton: her friends, her fellow students, her academic supervisors. Her account of the meeting with the faculty member popularly supposed to be the murderer is gently horrific: he had been promised the 'full support' of Harvard, without the dean even asking if he was the killer ...

This isn't just about a single dead woman: it's about the perilous situation of women in academia at that time (and still). It's about institutionalised misogyny, victim-blaming, and the dark underside of the privileged, 'velvet and sherry' ambience of Harvard. What really gripped me about this book, though, was Cooper's exploration of her own relationship to the story: the empathy she felt with Jane Britton, the ways in which the stories are told, and above all the search for meaning. That search failed: Britton was apparently murdered at random, by a man who'd died years before DNA identified him as a suspect. Cooper concludes bleakly: "There had never been any puzzle to be solved; no code to decipher. And because of that, I can no longer believe that I have any power to protect myself." [loc. 7027]

2021/097: Ninth House -- Leigh Bardugo

... magic wasn’t something gilded and benign, just another commodity that only some people could afford... [p. 401]

Alex Stern -- brown-skinned high school dropout, small-time dealer, and sole survivor of a gory drug-fuelled massacre -- has been granted a second chance, a full scholarship to Yale, an escape from her LA roots. Her imposter syndrome is wholly justified, but she's been recruited to Lethe, one of Yale's ancient secret societies, for her unique ability to see and interact with ghosts.

There are (there really are) a number of secret societies at Yale. In Ninth House, each of the eight Houses of the Veil practices a different form of magic -- haruspicy, necromancy, illusion et cetera -- with the eponymous ninth house, Lethe, monitoring the rituals and standing 'between the living and the dead'. Alex's mentor is Darlington, the epitome of East Coast privilege: wealthy, handsome, white, well-mannered, and kind to Alex despite his sense of betrayal at having this messy, trashy loser forced on him by Dean Sandow. Darlington envies Alex's 'gift': it takes him a while to realise that to Alex it's not a gift but a curse, and to understand how furious she is that nobody ever helped her, or told her how to ward off the dead, or believed in the things she saw.

Most of Ninth House is told retrospectively: the murder of a young woman, the disappearance of Darlington, and Alex's ill-informed attempts to uncover some uncomfortable truths. She's aided by the third member of Lethe, Pamela Dawes, and by one of her roommates, Mercy: she's hindered by almost everybody else, living or dead. But Alex's rage, and her refusal to buy into the ways in which the rich and powerful prey upon everyone else, are powerful forces.

This is a dark and gory novel -- there was discontent about the trigger warnings when it was first published -- and very definitely, despite the young adult protagonist, not intended for a YA audience. Ninth House features graphic scenes of murder, rape, child rape, mutilation, coprophagia, drug abuse ... This is not a light happy novel, nor is it a fast-paced one, but I liked it very much. It's a compelling and timely read, questioning white male privilege and the role of the outsider: the #metoo generation's The Secret History, if I'm being glib. I liked both Alex and Darlington, who are pretty much polar opposites: Alex's rage and pragmatism, Darlington's romantic yearning for real magic. The occult history of Bardugo's Yale was intriguingly constructed, and the secondary characters (Dawes, Dean Sandow, Mercy, the Bridegroom) felt as though they all had stories of their own. I admire the twists and layers of plot, and the writing is crisp and evocative. After a tantalising ending, I'm pleased to see that a sequel is coming.

2021/096: The Old Ways -- Robert Macfarlane

Landscape and nature are not there simply to be gazed at; no, they press hard upon and into our bodies and minds, complexly affect our moods, our sensibilities. [loc. 4120]

A thoughtful, fascinating book about walking the land, especially (though not exclusively) the 'old ways' of the British countryside. I'd already read Macfarlane's account of walking the Broomway, the invisible path over the sands and mudflats between Wakering and Foulness: I grew up nearby, and am as captivated as he was by the shifting skies and the marvellous light. (Here's a piece I wrote twenty years ago, about the light ...) Macfarlane's travels take him to the Gogs near Cambridge, Sula Sgeir (a small island off the north-west coast of Scotland), Minya Konka (a mountain in Tibet), and the holloways of Dorset. He is as curious and informed about folklore as he is about geology, and he considers the many ways in which landscape affects thought and mood.

I was very aware of a privilege that Macfarlane has and I envy: the ability to be drawn into all-male groups as a peer. I might manage the roaming but the journeys' ends, the conversations and camaraderie, are closed to me.

Macfarlane's chapters on the poet Edward Thomas, interwoven with his experience of walking the South Downs way and his evocation of Thomas's last days on the Western Front, were the high point of The Old Ways for me: beauty, poignancy, and a compassionate account of the experience of depression. It made me want to walk the Downs again: it made me want to be in a landscape, rather than a city.

At times, though – at the worst times – nature’s beauty and exuberance feel to him like accusations. ‘I am not a part of nature. I am alone. There is nothing else in my world but my dead heart and brain within me and the rain without.’ [loc. 4079]

2021/095: Meddling Kids -- Edgar Cantero

NATE: We have all the symptoms you listed: the nightmares, the bitterness, the feeling of being lost!
DUNIA: I just described any twenty-five-year-old ever, you self-centered twit! .. I'm afraid the only evil that possessed you was Generation X. [loc. 4735]

It's thirteen years since the Blyton Summer Detective Club's last case, in which they uncovered a staged haunting and sent Thomas Wickley to jail on charges of fraud, kidnapping and child endangerment. (Dressing as a giant salamander is not a federal crime.) Of course the haunting was staged. Of course the mystic symbols, the dead animals, the hanged corpses et cetera were all props. Of course the case didn't derail the lives of the four teenagers: Peter, Nate, Andrea (who prefers 'Andy') and Kerri. It's sheer coincidence that Peter committed suicide, Nate's in Arkham Asylum, Andy is on the run and Kerri's a washed up, alcoholic bartender, sharing a vile apartment with Tim the Weimaraner, descendant of the Detective Club's Sean.

This novel is a homage to Scooby Doo and H P Lovecraft. Cantero blends humour and horror, epic drama and the blank generation, neologisms and novel similes in a playful novel with dark undertones. Many elements are borrowed from the teen detective genre: chases in mining carts, books of power, ghosts, hauntings, irascible authority figures ... and a catalogue of triumphs including insurance fraud, a sheep-smuggling werewolf, and forged Indian craftwork. But did the Blyton Summer Detective Club really solve that last case? Or was there more to it than a man in a rubber suit with some awesome props? The five of them (well, only Nate can see Peter, on account of him being either a ghost or a hallucination) return to Blyton Hills to close the case -- and to achieve some closure on their own stories.

I really enjoyed this: I liked the changes of format (narrative, screenplay, script) and the self-referential voice ("All three fell silent for a second, admiring the seamless connection of that loose end"), the neologisms ('tragichuckled', 'howlretched'), the similes ('A lazy rain began to wash out the defiled streets, all casual and gleeful like a late authority figure at the end of a teen detective story.'), though I can see how these might be incredibly annoying to a different reader, or to me in a different frame of mind. I liked the diverse cast of characters, including the villain(s) and the high school bully made good, and the dog. I appreciated Cantero's treatment of mental health, gender and sexuality, and substance abuse. And the plot itself (lake monsters, Lovecraftian horrors, necromancy) hung together pretty well, though certainly wasn't the main attraction. Will definitely look out for more of Cantero's work.

2021/094: Magic's Pawn -- Mercedes Lackey

“If you do not touch,” said Moondance, as if he read Vanyel’s thought, “You do not live. If you seal yourself away inside your barriers, you seal out the love with the pain." [loc. 4903]

Grandiose epic fantasy, with a gay protagonist (and quite a few other gay characters), doomed romance, human-animal Bonds, beautiful people with jewel-coloured eyes, and emotional arcs as epic as the magical conflicts. I wish I'd discovered this book in my early teens: but it hadn't been written then ...

Vanyel Ashkevron is the son and heir of a minor noble. He is handsome and rather vain, and his greatest ambition is to become a Bard. His father is profoundly disappointed by Vanyel's disinterest in martial skills: father and son do not have a good relationship. Vanyel is sent off to study with his aunt, the Herald-Mage Savil: he meets the charming and ambitious Tylendel -- a powerful empath who can sense Vanyel's loneliness and self-doubt -- and they fall in love. Tragedy ensues ...

The story's bold and dramatic, and there's little subtlety about the messages of tolerance, acceptance, openness: Lackey's depiction of Vanyel as a miserable teenager is thoroughly relateable, and despite being well past that stage in my own life I found myself empathising with him, and appreciating his gradual realisation that he had to be self-reliant -- and self-confident -- rather than leaning on others. He matures considerably over the course of the novel, and there are the beginnings of a remarkable relationship with his Companion Yfandes, the guardian spirit (in the form of a blue-eyed white horse) who has Chosen him. The foundations of a hero's journey are laid, and it's clear that Vanyel is going to become a legendary hero, wielding magic rather than mundane weapons.

Intrigued by the discussion of forthcoming TV adaptation, I purchased this in an omnibus edition that includes the other two novels in the 'Last Herald-Mage' trilogy: I'll keep those for when I need uncomplicated, emotional, epic fantasy...

2021/093: Ghosts and Exiles -- Sandra Unerman

‘Whatever happened on the island, there is no magic here, in twentieth century London.’
‘There was for a while,’ Rowan said and Tilda’s heart sank. [loc. 188]

A generation after the fall of Spellhaven (see Spellhaven for details), the refugees from that realm, and their English families, are still coming to terms with a very different world. Tilda Gray is the widow of a man from Spellhaven: she admits that if she had really listened to Alick's stories, really believed in the magic, she would never have married him. She doesn't give much credence to the stories her sister-in-law, Rowan, tells her, and she doesn't believe that her sons' schoolmate Hugo is haunted by actual ghosts. When Hugo's guardian, his uncle Stephen Cole, asks for help, though, Tilda agrees to do what she can. Unfortunately, this means seeking out Spellhaven's exiles, and discovering that Spellhaven wasn't the only place where spirits dwelt.

I didn't enjoy this as much as Spellhaven, perhaps because it's wholly set in the mundane world -- though 'mundane' may be the wrong word, since there is plenty of magic spilt over from the lost realm, and some intrinsincally English magic too. I wasn't wholly convinced by Hugo's sketchy account of how he acquired his ghosts (‘It was in a book. A grown-up book about primitive tribes. I didn’t think it would work nowadays, though.’) or by Tilda's stubborn refusal, in the face of mounting evidence, to believe that her husband's family came from a magical realm. The novel switches between Tilda's story and that of the three boys -- the latter narrative reminded me, at times, of Diana Wynne Jones -- which I sometimes found frustrating: Tilda's story has a very different ambience to the boys' adventures.

Ghosts and Exiles felt ... shimmery, allusive: the magical elements were seldom clearly seen, perhaps because we were experiencing them through Tilda's perspective. I liked the sense that a whole new story was beginning, a story about Nick (the elder son, his father's heir) and about Stephen and Tilda, and about how Hugo finds shelter. Would be happy to read more set in this world ...

2021/092: Spellhaven -- Sandra Unerman

'...that is how magic is done, by taming spirits?’
The mugs of ale rattled on the table between them and Violante’s head jerked as though at a tug on her hair. She said, calmly, ‘Tame is the wrong word. Learning to deal with the spirits, to humour and engage with them, that is what magic is.’ [loc. 598]

Summer 1914: Jane Fairchild, an accomplished flautist, receives an unwelcome approach from a strange young man -- and finds herself compelled to journey to Spellhaven, a magical island untethered from the world she knows. Spellhaven is sustained by the magic of bound spirits, the Unseen Audience who must be appeased with song, dance, art and theatre. Jane's role, like that of so many in the city, is to keep the Unseen Audience happy. But Jane is stubborn: she refuses a contract with Lucian Palafox, the man who brought her to Spellhaven, and instead makes a deal with Lucian's rival Bohemond. Jane agrees to serve the Audience, to be part of Bohemond's company, in exchange for being taught magic.

Naturally, this does not proceed as Jane had hoped. She comes to understand the bargains and bonds that maintain Spellhaven, and she encounters people -- beings -- who seem to exist outside those bargains. And when cataclysm strikes, she finds herself back in wartime England with a horde of refugees ...

I loved the worldbuilding here, the echoes of faerie isles such as Hy Brazil, the notion of art as payment for magic. There was a dreamy, unanchored sense of the passage of time, both in Spellhaven and after Jane's return to London. Sometimes an hour might pass between scenes, sometimes several months. However, I didn't really engage with Jane, whose angry detachment from Spellhaven life was entirely believable but also somewhat distancing. It wasn't always easy to relate to her emotions, or to understand her actions. And I was alienated by the way that she seemed to have no emotional ties in England: "Could she have written? Jane had never thought of it... She had not missed her family and she had not considered their feelings for a moment." [loc. 3551] When she does form an emotional bond, it seems to come from nowhere.

Despite these criticisms, and the occasional inelegant or unpolished sentence ('Jane put her fists in her mouth to stop herself screaming'), I enjoyed the novel very much, and was especially intrigued by the hints of Spellhaven's rich history, and the interactions with the 'real' world beyond the encircling mists. And I went straight on to Unerman's other novel set in the same world, Ghosts and Exiles.

Purchased 2019 after meeting (and being on a panel with) the author at Eastercon...