2022/088: A Narrow Door -- Joanne Harris

An old St Oswald’s proverb goes: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a woman to enter these gates. Well, not only have I entered, but now the gates are my gates, and the rules are my rules. The mistake you made was one of scale. Men always do, used as they are to taking the main entrance. Women must be more discreet. All we need is a narrow door. And when we have crept in unseen, like a spider through a keyhole, we spin ourselves an empire of silk, and fill you with astonishment. [loc. 108]

The final instalment in the St Oswald's trilogy, which began with Gentlemen and Players and continued with Different Class. For the first time in five hundred years, the headmaster of St Oswald's Academy (formery St Oswald's School for Boys: now co-educational) is a woman, Rebecca Buckfast, forty years old and fearsomely competent. There are tragedies in Rebecca's past, beginning with the still-unresolved disappearance of her brother Conrad when she was just five years old. When Roy Straitley's star pupils find human remains on the site where a new swimming pool is being erected, Rebecca can't help wondering if the secrets hidden in her own repressed memories will finally be revealed. For she has some vague, confused recollections (Mr Smallface, the green door, a pair of feet) of the last time she saw Conrad ...

Meanwhile, Straitley is finally almost ready for retirement. His health isn't good; he's appalled by the influx of girls; he's having to deal with preferred pronouns, and he's mourning the death of his old, disgraced friend Eric. He discovers that 'La Buckfast' taught at the neighbouring grammar school, King Henry's -- where Conrad was a pupil -- and that her time there overlapped with Eric's years at that establishment. In return for her 'full explanation' (including her time at King Henry's), he agrees to delay calling in the police to investigate the bones found at the building site. But the tale spins out in unexpected directions, and Rebecca's past is revealed, not only to Straitley, but to herself.

A deeply unsettling novel about memory and forgetfulness, about the glorification of the dead, about ties of friendship and the amorality of children. The sections of the novel are (mostly) named after the rivers of the underworld in Greek mythology, which helps to emphasise the story arcs: from Acheron (woe) through Lethe (forgetfulness) and Styx (hatred) ... and finally to Elysium. The alternating narratives -- Rebecca telling the story of her life, with her daughter and her husband, and the shadow of Conrad hanging over her relationship with her parents; Straitley musing on her story, on his own past and on his deteriorating health -- is beautifully paced. Straitley has less agency in this novel than in the previous volumes: he's more of a captive audience to the Scheherazade-figure of Rebecca Buckley. It's very much Rebecca's story, in the end, and as the trailing threads -- from throwaway comments to a child's interpretation of a traumatic event -- are knitted tidily into the story, it's clear that Rebecca has influenced events more than Straitley would have imagined.

I read Harris' Malbry novels over the course of a week, including a hasty reread of Gentlemen and Players, and this immersion was a powerful experience: somewhat claustrophobic, wholly engaging, surprisingly emotional. I've enjoyed Harris' other novels, but these dark psychological mysteries are something else: something unsettling, meticulous, densely plotted, human and humane.

2022/087: blueeyedboy -- Joanne Harris

'Mark' is a blue word, like market; like murder. He likes it much better than 'victim', which appears to him as a feeble eggy shade, or even 'prey', with its nasty undertones of ecclesiastical purple, and distant reek of frankincense. [p. 112]

blueeyedboy is set in Malbry, in the working-class area of White City -- geographically near, but socially distant from, St Oswald's School for Boys, the setting for Harris' Gentlemen and Players and Different Class. Social class is very much a factor in this novel: 'BB' grows up in poverty, one of three sons of Gloria Green, who works as a cleaner, and a father who is out of the picture. When the novel opens, BB is in his forties and still living in his mother's house. Or, more accurately, living as 'blueeyedboy' on WebJournal, a blogging site curiously reminiscent of LiveJournal: 'Restricted entries for private enjoyment; public – well, for everyone else. On WeJay I can vent as I please, confess without fear of censure; be myself – or indeed, someone else – in a world where no one is quite what they seem...' [p. 19]. blueeyedboy holds court on a community called badguysrock, to a small but devout group of followers. He posts accounts of family tensions, childhood anguish, and even murder -- and then assures us that 'this is fic ... I never murdered anyone'. Some of the other members of badguysrock know BB in real life (or think they do): Albertine, whose identity is blurry for most of the novel, is one of the few individuals whom BB interacts with outside the blog.

BB was a sensitive child, flinching when Gloria punished his brothers, experiencing overwhelming synaesthesia: for him, smells evoke colours, sometimes to the point of nausea. He makes the acquaintance of Dr Peacock, who's researching synaesthesia: but then Dr Peacock's attention is drawn to a young blind girl, Emily White, who paints the colours that she 'sees' when she listens to music. Emily is a prodigy, but is she telling the truth? Or is she simply trying to please her artist mother and musician father?

As a former LiveJournal afficionada, I found BB's blogging incredibly nostalgic: as a Joanne Harris fan, I enjoyed the twists and turns of this story. As with her other Malbry novels, there are dark and unsettling elements: domestic abuse (Gloria is a monstrous mother), murder, manipulation... It's hard to like any of the characters, but one can certainly sympathise with them, and relate to the various ways in which they are trapped by circumstance.

BB turns up, I think, in Different Class: I had to go back and reread parts of that novel with fresh eyes after finishing blueeyedboy, because the events of this novel cast those scenes in a different (but wholly consistent) light.

Harris on the origins of blueeyedboy: "...I didn’t want to write, and spent far too much time online, hanging around various sites and searching out ever more ingenious ways of evading reality. Under a pseudonym, I made a number of online friends, wrote a great deal of fanfic, and began to take an increasing interest in the way people interact online, the communities they create and join, and the way they choose to portray themselves. I began to understand that the small communities that have always informed my writing also exist in the virtual world, with the same little cliques of insiders, outsiders, gossips, liars, exhibitionists and bullies as in the “real” world. I understood too, how emotionally dependent people can sometimes become on their virtual friends and their virtual communities, even though there can be no way of knowing how honest these avenues of communication really are." source.

2022/086: Different Class -- Joanne Harris

Memory isn’t a camera. It’s an anthill, a thing of layers, built around a central core. And inside the core, there are sleeping things. Things that change, and sting, and fly. Things that come out of the walls at night, and crawl all over everything. [loc. 3987]

Second in the St Oswald's trilogy, which began with Gentlemen and Players. After the upheavals of that novel, St Oswald's is teetering on the brink of failure: a Crisis Team is brought in to turn things round, but Roy Straitley, Latin master and eccentric-but-beloved technophobe, is horrified to find that the 'Super-Head' leading the Crisis Team is none other than Johnny Harrington, who as a boy almost cost Straitley his job, 'and cost the School a whole lot more'. Harrington's plans include a paperless school and a merger with a local girls' school, where the 'Classics' class watches Gladiator and discusses Roman fashion.

Straitley's narratives, past and present, form half of the novel: the other half is the diary of 'Ziggy', who was a pupil at St Oswald's in the 1980s, and who -- while not necessarily a reliable narrator -- has a unique perspective on the events leading up to the dismissal and imprisonment of a charismatic teacher. Ziggy, who acquires his nickname in honour of his response to David Bowie's music, has a Condition, and has already been removed from one school. Like the Mole in Gentlemen and Players, he is a study in sociopathy, both monstrous and sympathetic.

There are some very dark moments in this novel, including not only murder but animal death, as well as sexual abuse. The cycle of abuse is depicted with masterful understatement: I like to think that Ziggy would receive better treatment today, but all too often the neurodivergent are left to their own narratives, their own mythologies. And, sadly, false accusations and abuses of power persist.

Though many of the events in Different Class are grim, this is a surprisingly cheerful novel, for which we have Straitley to thank: he is a delightful character, honourable and loyal, genuinely caring about the boys he teaches and the school which has claimed more than half his life. He's unmarried, and doesn't seem to have any sexual orientation beyond occasionally admiring the female form. He's loyal to his friends, but a bit of a loner. And he is given to Latin epigrams, most of which I had to look up, and many of which made me smile. 'Still, id imperfectum manet dum confectum erit, as I think Clint Eastwood may have said.' [231].

After reading Different Class, I went back and reread parts of Gentlemen and Players -- then realised that there were two other novels set in the fictional village of Malbry. Reader, I read them ...

2022/085: Embertide -- Liz Williams

Outside, the rain had passed and it was very still and starlit; Bee looked up and there was Orion, striding high in the southern sky with the blue fire of Sirius at his heels. There was a small, hard moon, bitterly white. [loc. 2314]

I knew I was in good hands when I opened Embertide to find that Part One is entitled 'Our Thumping Hearts Keep the Ravens In', a quotation from Kate Bush's song 'Lionheart'. (Part Two is 'Selling England by the Pound'.) Third in the splendid 'Fallow sisters' tetralogy, following Comet Weather and Blackthorn Winter, Embertide is very much a springtime book, and I wish I'd been able to read it earlier in the year, because Williams' evocation of the season is so vivid.

The four Fallow sisters (Bee, Stella, Serena and Luna) are regaining equilibrium after the events of Blackthorn Winter. At least they remember those events: Ben and his mother Caro seem to think that, instead of tangling with otherworldly forces, they simply fell ill with some virus. (Note that these novels are a Covid-free zone.) But there's an underlying theme of how human perceptions make rational narratives of the irrational spiritual world; even sensible and grounded Bee only perceives an essential truth about a friend in the nick of time.

Spring is stirring, in the lanes and woods of Somerset and in the green corners of London, and the sisters are separately swept about by the tides of time, experiencing various metamorphoses, encountering new friends and foes (the Huntress, Kit Coral, Davy Dearly, Aiken Drum), piecing together the scraps of knowledge and understanding that they've accumulated, and trying to come to terms with their mother's new relationship. Like the previous novels in the series, Embertide is centred on women, human and otherwise. There's little in the way of romance (though I'm vastly intrigued by hints of Master of Foxhounds Nick Wratchell-Haynes' 'romantic interest of unusual origins') but plenty of female friendship and solidarity. (That said, one of the more villainous characters is also a woman). This is a novel that deals with the Wild Hunt, the ravens at the Tower, and White Horse Country: but also with road protests, class privilege, and land ownership: all very English.

I'm fascinated by the 'Knowledge', by Alys' alter ego Feldfar, and by an offhand mention of American cousin Nell (who has inexplicably become 'Nan') and her baby, presumably conceived during Comet Weather: I'm very much looking forward to the fourth and final novel, which should be a summery one.

2022/084: Song for the Basilisk -- Patricia McKillip

She could not talk to birds, or summon monsters; she had no defenses against history. [loc. 3843]

A twisting, dreamlike tale told in McKillip's typically stained-glass, luminous prose, this novel from 1998 has been on my shelves, on and off, for a couple of decades: now, in memoriam, it's a book club read. McKillip's 'Riddlemaster' trilogy was a salvation to me as a teenager, and I read and reread those novels so often that even now I find fragments of McKillip's sentences glimmering in my own writing. For some reason, though, I didn't form similar attachments to any of McKillip's other novels, though in general I've enjoyed them. (Checking my reviews of her work, I see I have read at least one of them twice, with no recognition of the second time being a reread ...)

Song for the Basilisk opens with a massacre, and the sole survivor -- a young boy -- hiding in the ashes. He's taken north to the bards of remote, rocky Luly, and given the name Caladrius 'after the bird whose song means death'. Caladrius, who mostly goes by 'Rook', grows to manhood, sires a son, journeys into the hinterlands ... and eventually, accepting his true name and his fate, to the city of Berylon, where Prince Arioso Pellior, the Basilisk, rules. An opera is planned for the prince's birthday; a hoard of musical scores is discovered, and must be catalogued; a gang of revolutionaries realise there is more to fighting than just waving a sword around; and the Prince's younger daughter falls in love with the new librarian.

Song for the Basilisk features many of my favourite fantasy tropes: blurred identity, music both high (opera!) and low (tavern), revolution, hints of something 'older than human language', vengeance, a mature protagonist ... Yet it didn't quite click and I'm not sure why. Perhaps there were too many intriguing characters -- Caladrius himself, Giulia the musician, Luna Pellior, Hollis, Hexel -- for me to engage fully with any of them. Perhaps some aspects of the story were too oblique, or I missed or skimmed over important elements. (I do think this novel would reward a second reading.) Perhaps the beautiful prose lulled me into a dream-state and I simply accepted each plot development, each change of scene, without considering how it fit into the arc of the novel.

That said, I found the ending very satisfactory, and did not predict the various resolutions: admirable convergence of characters and plot-threads and themes, and much more positivity than expected.

2022/083: The Brilliant Death -- Amy Capetta

“It’s true that I contain more than one thing,” Cielo said. “And sometimes the balance shifts.”
Understanding rustled through me, soft as leaves. It wasn’t quite the same, but I’d often felt I didn’t fit inside the boundaries of the word girl. It reminded me of a country I could happily visit, but the longer I stayed, the more I knew I couldn’t live there all the time. There were moments when I sorely wished to be free of the confines of this body, the expectations it seemed to carry. [loc. 847]

Teodora di Sangro is a strega, a witch: her particular gift is transformation, and her bedroom is cluttered with the enemies of the di Sangros, in their new forms as mirrors, music boxes, shoehorns and the like.

One day a messenger arrives from the Capo, summoning the heads of the five great families to the capital to discuss the new management. Teo's father is struck down by invisible poison, and Teo sets out with her brother Luca to represent the family. But there are many perils on the road -- not least the charming shapeshifter, Cielo, who is sometimes a young man and sometimes a young woman. (Their pronouns shift with their appearance.) Cielo knows more about magic than Teo has ever learnt: Teo's dead mother taught her of the 'brilliant life', 'battling the harshness of this world with as many forms of beauty as possible', but Cielo tells Teo about the brilliant death, and Teo begins to understand the root, and the branches, of her own powers.

This is a well-plotted fantasy novel with a YA feel and a setting reminiscent of medieval Italy: the gender theme distinguishes it from a plethora of similar works. Vinalia, like medieval Italy, is a strongly patriarchal society, but Teo learns to question the inherent misogyny. Why can't she be her father's heir, even though she's a girl? Why do men get all the power? Capetta explores Teo's internal and external metamorphoses with sensitivity and restraint, but she isn't coy about the sexual elements: nothing too explicit, but Teo is comfortable with the notion of being attracted to girls as well as boys.

The magical system is intriguing, and I'd have liked more about the 'old gods' who, despite the theocratic Order of Prai, are still worshipped. Cielo and Teo are excellent protagonists, Cielo's joyful acceptance of their fluidity a nice contrast with Teo's gradual discovery of her powers, and though there are some dark and bloody developments the overall mood is optimistic and positive. There's a sequel, The Storm of Life, which does not seem to be available in ebook format. That's vexing, because The Brilliant Death, though effective as a standalone, doesn't resolve all its threads.

2022/082: The Boy from Reactor Four -- Orest Stelmach

That was the end of the Soviet Union and the birth of the free Ukraine. Chernobyl is the single-biggest reason this is the free country. [loc. 2185]

Ukrainian-American forensic analyst Nadia Tesla goes to meet a Mr Milan who claims to have known her father -- only to hear a shot ring out and her contact's murmured last words as he falls to the sidewalk. Those words, and her connection with Ukrainian crime syndicates, send her to the mother country, and into the forbidden zone surrounding Chernobyl, in search of her mysterious Uncle Damian and a boy named Adam, a teenage hockey prodigy who grew up in the Zone, and who may hold the key to the secret whispered by the deceased Mr Milan.

The Boy from Reactor Four is a fast-paced thriller, replete with exotic locations, improbable coincidences and dyed-in-the-stereotype villains. Nadia is a feisty heroine, quick-thinking and courageous, and she copes well with the deluge of reversals, revelations and (possibly) romance. ("Anton held Nadia in his arms and sang a tragic Ukrainian folk song about the maiden, the Cossack, and their unrequited love.") Very readable, though somewhat shallow: I enjoyed the descriptions of Kyiv, and the Chernobyl scenes resonated with other recent reading.

I bought this in 2015: it's taken me a while to get around to it ...

2022/081: Homecoming -- Michael Morpurgo

I was nearby anyway, so I had every excuse to do it, to ignore the old adage and do something I'd been thinking of doing for many years. "Never go back. Never go back." Those warning words kept repeating themselves in my head ... [p. 1]

Read via Internet Archive: I hadn't previously been aware of this children's book set in Bradwell-on-Sea, near where I grew up. The framing narrative is that of a middle-aged man, 'Michael', returning to the village in which he lived as a child, and revisiting his memories of the 1950s. He remembers the friendship of the mysterious Mrs Pettigrew, who lived in a railway carriage out on the marsh. Mrs Pettigrew loved nature, and had a donkey (named Donkey) and three greyhounds: she was the widow of a botanist, and grew up in Thailand.

Michael's childhood was idyllic, until men in suits came from London to present a plan to the villagers: a nuclear power station, to be built on the marshes where Mrs Pettigrew lives. The plan divided the village, with Michael, his mother and Mrs Pettigrew all being firmly opposed. Some of the villagers welcomed the benefits that the power station would bring: jobs, money, investment.

As a child I often swam at Bradwell beach (the water was always warmer there) and I remember the science-fictional hum of the power station. It was decommissioned in 2002, though there are plans for a second power station. Meanwhile, the remains of the reactors loom over the fields: the older, present-day version of Morpurgo's narrator sees the 'monstrous complex' and feels as though his memories have been trampled.

Homecoming is a melancholy book, very evocative of the salt-marsh landscape and its vibrant ecology, but also of loss, death, defeat. Understandably negative about nuclear power, too: the power station was built only 12 years after Hiroshima was bombed, and the perils of radiation were very much in the public imagination. Mrs Pettigrew, who'd researched the risks, claimed that even after the power station had ceased operation, it would need to be entombed in concrete for centuries to be anything like safe. Turns out it's 80-90 years, which is quite bad enough.

Lovely watercolour illustrations by Peter Bailey, which were the reason I read the scanned Internet Archive version rather than the ebook.

Never go back, never go back: your memories will be trampled.

2022/80: The Time of the Ghosts -- Gillian Polack

Lil says that the things I see all came with us Europeans. It’s a palimpsest laying over Canberra and we scrape it off so Canberrans can live in the real city. [p.23]

Kat is a teenaged runaway who finds herself under the protection of three old ladies: Lil, Ann and Mabel. She refers to them as her grannies, and she runs errands and does housework in exchange for food and board. Not explicitly mentioned in the deal: ghost-hunting, werewolves, dead bushrangers, the thing in Mabel's wood pile, and dark children. For Kat's grannies are not entirely what they seem, and one of them (at least one of them) is much older than anyone would suspect.

This is a novel focussed on female characters and on the small kindnesses and accommodations that they perform for one another. Kat, it should be noted, often exhibits more consideration than the older women. There are a lot of meals (the ladies cook for one another once a month, and now Kat is present to help prepare and serve the food) and quite a few excursions to Canberra's suburbs. Though I don't know the city at all, it began to feel comfortable and familiar.

Some of the supernatural elements, such as Mabel's garden of protection and her wood pile guardian, seem comfortable, too: others, like the drowning girl who cries, and the large cat that lurks outside the Japanese embassy, are much more threatening. And there are mundane horrors, too. Lil is becoming frail; Ann's husband is divorcing her; Kat is trying to summon the courage to phone home, to the family who seemed to have replaced her with a younger half-sister.

There are three narrative threads here: the account of Kat's education with the grannies, Kat's later (or mostly later) blogposts with their benefit of hindsight, and the 'tales of Melusine', which initially seem to be versions of fairy tales written down by Lil. Melusine, in those tales, is a fairy and also Jewish, and her stories span centuries, from medieval France to the horrors of Nazi Germany.

I'd been meaning to read something by Polack for a while, and The Time of the Ghosts -- with its themes of found family, friendship and kindness -- tempts me to read more.

2022/79: Knot of Shadows -- Lois McMaster Bujold

If a man found dead in the harbor in his nightshirt was mysterious, a man found dead in the harbor in somebody else’s nightshirt was utterly inexplicable. [loc. 415]

This latest instalment in the Penric and Desdemona series is another novella, a murder mystery set in the port city of Vilnoc in winter. A corpse is found in the harbour, wearing another man's nightshirt: so far, so ordinary. But when the 'corpse' wakes up in the morgue and starts banging on the door (from the inside), Learned Penric and his attendant chaos demon are called in to advise. Surely this is a textbook case of demonic possession?

Of course it is not nearly that simple or straightforward, and Pen and Des, assisted by Penric's student Alixtra, end up investigating fraud, finding a missing child and arguing with a god. This is in some ways quite a 'cozy' mystery, with little of the wider world intruding: though there are echoes of themes from The Curse of Chalion, the stakes here are not nearly as high. But it's also quite dark, though Pen does his best to provide closure, justice and mercy.

Despite the deaths, and the grieving of them, this was a comforting read. I was especially struck by Penric's reaction to the death of a Temple rabbit, unable to bear being possessed by a god. It was such a kind and compassionate moment, and it epitomises Pen's character. After all, Pen's kindness is the reason that Penric and Desdemona are together at all.

2022/78: The Apparition Phase -- Will Maclean

Is it more terrifying to believe somewhere is haunted, or to believe that nowhere is? [loc. 3009]

Set firmly in the Seventies, the decade of The Unexplained (part 2 free with part 1!) and Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World, of The Stone Tape, of ghosts and UFOs and cryptozoology, of ouija boards and Soviet telepaths and flexidiscs of the voices of the dead. Tim and his twin sister Abi grow up in suburbia, fascinated by the supernatural and obsessed with ghosts. When they acquire a camera, they fake a ghost photo and show it to a girl at school: she faints, and though Tim and Abi congratulate themselves they also feel slightly bad. But when they confess to the hoax, Janice doesn't believe them: "You drew a shape on a wall, thinking it was clever, thinking it was funny. But it’s not. And now it’s here. And you live here."

Fast-forward a couple of years, as the twins -- sent to separate schools -- become less codependent. And then Abi goes missing: and Tim ends up at a run-down manor house in Suffolk, with a group of teenagers who are trying to contact the spirit world.

Tremendously atmospheric for anyone who (like me) was a solitary weirdo in the Seventies: I do wonder what younger readers will make of the closely-observed minutae of teenage life during that period. The Apparition Phase is a distinctly British, suburban sort of horror novel, with Tim's class consciousness another way in which he's alienated from his peers (the boys at the manor house call him 'Comprehensive'), and the vividly depicted post-industrial landscape: slow-running ditches sheened with oil and littered with abandoned appliances, sagging wire fences, old tyres, phone boxes that smell of stale cigarettes.

The horror is primarily (though not exclusively) psychological, and the nastiest scenes happen between the lines: the LSD that Tim drops with a bully-turned-friend, Juliet's secret, Abi's fate. Tim is, it becomes clear quite early on, not entirely reliable as a narrator: he isn't exactly likeable but I ended up feeling considerable sympathy for him, and for the ways in which he's failed by the adults in his life. An excellent novel, and a debut: I'll look out for more by Maclean.

2022/77: How High We Go In The Dark -- Sequoia Nagamatsu

I wish I could taste. I wish I wasn’t so tired all the time. I hate that when I do have the energy to go out, I get angry at all the people who didn’t get the plague or somehow walked away from it scot-free. I hate how the world is finally coming together to help the planet when I’m coming undone. [loc. 3748]

It starts with the discovery of an ancient corpse in the permafrost, part Neanderthal and part something else, and the precautionary (and haphazard) quarantine that follows. Or perhaps it starts when a woman leaves her child behind to embark on a long journey. Or when a robot dog malfunctions. Or when a pig starts to speak.

How High We Go In The Dark is more a collection, a connection, of short stories than a traditional novel: I was reminded of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, though the mood and the setting(s) are quite different. The chapters are distinct first-person narratives, though the narrator of one story may be a character in another. There are overarching themes: family, mutual acceptance, the industry of death. For, although parts of How High We Go were published in the Before Times, this is very much a pandemic novel, exploring the human side of the 'Arctic plague' which transforms the world. There are euthanasia theme parks (apparently the Euthanasia Coaster is a thing); death hotels; genetic modification; public grieving. There are stories about reconnecting with one's community, and stories about holding onto whatever remains of the dead.

The writing is beautiful, despite the bleakness of the scenario, and there are glimpses of connections that are never explained. I was moved to tears by some chapters (a man trying to preserve the recording, the spirit, of a dead woman within a failing robotic dog; a pig declaring that it wants to help) and left cold by others.

Unfortunately one of the chapters that really didn't work for me was the final one, 'The Scope of Possibility', in which the story comes full circle, the plague's origin is explained, and a great many names are clunkily dropped. This chapter felt like a trivialisation of what had gone before, and I found it oddly distressing.

Yet there are happy endings here, and reunions, and homecoming: there is art, and kindness, and love, and hope. Sometimes surreal, sometimes melancholy, the best of this novel has lodged in my brain.

2022/76: Assassin's Apprentice -- Robin Hobb

I’m going to be teaching you how to kill people. For your king. Not in the showy way Hod is teaching you, not on the battlefield where others see and cheer you on. No. I’ll be teaching you the nasty, furtive, polite ways to kill people. [p. 68]

The setting is a pseudomedieval world with two flavours of magic: Skill, which involves telepathy and coercion between humans, and Wit, which is more about the bonds between humans and animals. The nobility, in the Kingdom of the Six Duchies, are given names according to the virtues to which they should aspire: Shrewd (a king), Verity (a man), Patience (a woman), Regal (a villain). When Prince Chivalry's bastard child is deposited with the castle guard, he has no name. Growing up in the royal household, he becomes known as Fitz; forms a close connection with a dog named Nosy, until that connection is discovered; and is selected for training as an assassin.

There is a lot of detail in this novel, a lot of worldbuilding and politicking and machination. Hobb tells the story from the viewpoint of an older Fitz looking back on his youth, and sticks to a narrow first-person voice: no 'as I learnt later' or 'if only I had known that'. This means that there's considerable tension. I'm not sure it accounts for Fitz's precocity, though perhaps his pariah status and solitary nature inclines him to observe, reflect and extrapolate rather more than the average pre-adolescent.

The vast 'Elderlings' series of novels -- eighteen to date, mostly over 500 pages long -- is immensely popular, and has been recommended to me by many people. Assassin's Apprentice, I'm afraid, seems likely to be my sole foray into it. Fitz simply did not engage me, and the setting was so grim. Child abuse (emotional rather than sexual), animal abuse and death, child soldiers (what else is a pre-teen assassin?), enforced personality change (using magic to turn an enemy into a 'lapdog'), zombies ... No, thank you. I was intrigued by the character of the Fool, who does not seem quite human and who declaims prophecies in doggerel: but not enough to persevere with the multi-trilogy series.

Purchased in 2014 ...

2022/75: The Dark Between the Trees -- Fiona Barnett

The wood was a liar, but beneath that was buried something true, and fascinating, and the wood was telling her what it was, if only she could tune into it properly, or decipher it. [loc. 829]

In 1643 a small company of Parliamentarian soldiers is ambushed on a hillside somewhere in Northern England. Their only hope is to seek shelter in nearby Moresby Forest. Never mind that the locals tell stories about terrible secrets among the trees...

In 21st-century England, five women pass through the boundary fence and into Moresby Forest. Dr Alice Christopher, historian, has devoted her career to the lost soldiers. Why did seventeen men enter the wood, and only two emerge? Dr Christopher is accompanied by Nuria, a PhD student; Sue, from the Ordnance Survey, who haven't published a map of the wood for fifty years; and Kim and Helly, representatives of the National Parks authority. The women have GPS, and phones, and metal detectors: and it's not a very large wood ...

This was slow and spooky. I was inescapably reminded of The Blair Witch Project, though for reasons of ambience and forestry rather than anything more specific. The narrative cuts between the women and the soldiers, which heightens the suspense. It quickly becomes clear that there is something unnatural about Moresby Forest, and the two parties each recount tales of witches, of a medieval charcoal-burner whose family might have died of plague, and of a fearsome beast known as the Corrigal. Around them, trees appear and disappear. Gradually, each party – the all-female expedition and the all-male military company – diminishes …

Some interesting themes here: the different ways in which leadership works in the two companies are especially well-drawn, with Alice’s obsessive curiosity in strong contrast to Captain Davies’ sense of duty to his men. The women are dismayed by the failure of their technology: the men turn to prayer, which is as good an option as any.

There are evocative descriptions of the forest in both narrative threads, but – perhaps because of the aforementioned oddities of that forest – there is very little sense of season. Anyone who’s walked in a forest knows it’s a very different place in spring than in autumn: but the forest that the characters are walking through is timeless, reminiscent of Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, and seems to manifest its own microclimate. I didn’t get much sense of the characters’ physical appearances, either, or of their lives outside the forest: even Alice, perhaps the most detailed of the characters, was described more in terms of academic grudges than everyday life. I think that sense of isolation was part of the story, but it made the characters less engaging. And I didn't find the (fairly abrupt) conclusion wholly satisfying, but it was logical.

Thanks to Netgalley for the free ARC in exchange for this honest review. UK publication date is 13th October 2022.

2022/74: The Assassins of Thasalon -- Lois McMaster Bujold

The god’s Presence had to be a devastating certainty to every person there, Sighted or not, though some might not quite recognize the source of the awe that scraped on their souls so rawly. Foretaste of death. Too much World beyond the world for mortal minds to encompass. [loc. 3526]

Set two years after The Physicians of Vilnoc, this is a novel rather than a novella, with plenty of intrigue and action. Penric (and Desdemona, his chaos demon) are comfortably settled in Orbas. Penric's wife Nikys is pregnant with their second child. Her brother Adelis, approached by agents of their homeland Cedonia, is attacked by a sorcerous assassin: only Penric's presence, and Desdemona's power, saves his life. Penric would rather rid the assassin of her demon, thus making her a secular problem, and return to his books. But the White God refuses to take the demon from the assassin, a young woman named Alixtra: and Penric, Desdemona, Alixtra and her demon, and a charmingly rustic saint, head for Thasalon to unravel the assassination plot and, perhaps, the machinations of the god.

There they encounter Adelis' excellent fiancee, Lady Tanar, and her secretary Surakos Bosha (both introduced in The Prisoner of Limnos) and are caught up in the aftermath of another, more successful, assassination. After which matters become extremely complicated.

This isn't, or isn't only, a murder mystery. Both assassins have very good reasons for their acts; various villains have convoluted and well-established webs of influence; Pen and Des find their responsibilities, as well as their sympathies, changing rapidly. Kindness, compassion and mercy are set against ruthless ambition and greed: and here, in this novel, with the direct influence of gods as well as mortals, good triumphs over evil. Though nothing in The Assassins of Thasalon is quite as black and white as that.

Comforting, amusing, well-written and theologically intriguing: an enjoyable read.