#53: The Angel's Cut -- Elizabeth Knox

It was cold and dark under the water. Far away the ships' propellers whined like bees caught behind a curtain. Xas hung beneath the surface and looked up through murky transparency at that surface in reverse -- the gleam of light on the backs of the waves. After a moment he saw the ragged star of Lucifer's form pass above him. The sea turned momentarily smooth in the downblast of the angel's wings. Then Lucifer banked and drove upward ... (p.7)

Sequel to The Vintner's Luck, which I adore and am now eager to reread: not yet sure if I love this one as much but it's taken up residence in the back of my mind. The Angel's Cut, unlike the earlier novel, is told predominantly from the point of view of unwinged angel Xas (though there are other, more human and equally compelling narrators), and Xas is distinctly different, preternatural, strange. The multiple voices triangulate Xas's experience of the world, showing us the strangeness of his everyday behaviour (walking like a drunkard, each step a caught fall) and the invisibility of his inner turmoil.

Sobran, Xas's true love, is long-dead, and Xas -- following a brief career as navigator on a German airship in World War I -- winds up in California, in the nascent Hollywood film industry. He's drawn to fascinatingly broken people: to eccentric producer and aviator Conrad Cole (perhaps modelled on Howard Hughes); to Flora MacLeod who's survived a horrific accident and endures chronic pain with grace and style; to Millie Cotton, woman of colour and stunt pilot who has a sense of which jobs to take and which to leave.

Xas is also pursued by his nemesis / brother Lucifer, who needs him: the nature of the compact between Xas, Lucifer and God is explored more thoroughly, and Xas's unique state explained.

The Angel's Cut is a term relating to winemaking; it refers to the portion of a barrel of wine that evaporates during ageing. The novel, though, is firmly grounded in the world of film, with discussions of the difference between conversation and dialogue, the inadequacy of flashbacks as a method of character development, the shape of a story. Flora's a film editor, and she's constantly looking for the flow, the shape of her own story: perhaps she also helps to give shape to Xas's history.

And Xas has some hard lessons to learn: about the nature of love, about speech and silence, about broken souls. He loves a lot -- Cole, Flora, his captain Hintersee, Alison -- and he's fearlessly submissive, ready to give everything and still suspecting that it's not enough, that it -- that he -- is irrelevant to human life. Is there anything that can bring him closer to being human, to being 'people'?

... harm or homage, he deserved both. He let it happen. He'd think about what it meant some other time... He took what hurt but couldn't harm him. It was better than being dropped out of a plane into the sea. It was more personal. And afterwards they weren't so far apart. (p.290)

This novel made me cry (O'Brien) and laugh and marvel at Knox's use of language -- though some especially resonant sentences take a surprising amount of unravelling.

#52: Tampa Burn -- Randy Wayne White

I sometimes wonder if focussing on marine biology as a life's work isn't a way of justifying, or at least validating, a specific and unsentimental view of existence. From biology's elemental view, human beings ... are not only guided by the tenets of natural selection, we are mandated. In such a world, eliminating enemies or behavorial anomalies isn't a decision to be made. It is a necessary process.
I've participated in that process. I can do it again if required. (p.119)

Rather later in the series, and rather darker than the others I've read lately. Doc Ford's past comes barrelling into his present: his long-lost love Pilar reappears, appalled by the revelation (from an anonymous party) that Ford was once a political assassin, but nevertheless demanding his help in rescuing their son from Incendario, a kidnapper with a taste for torture.

A twisty plot with plenty of reversals. Ford doesn't behave very well to his friends or family -- but then few of those closest to him are wholly as he believes them to be. His friend Tomlinson's amnesia is clearing just enough to reveal tantalising hints of past events. His girlfriend Dewey is not at all impressed with Pilar's presence. Ford's son Lake is mature and capable for his years, possibly the most likeable character in the book though he's got a couple of surprises for Ford too.

Ford (or possibly the author) is somewhat sexist -- thinks women can't get satisfaction from a career or life's work the way a man can, but only from having children. Bah.

Good pacy read with some excellent scenic description and interesting insights into carnie life: but I'm less eager to read more than I have been after the last few Doc Ford novels. Luckily there are plenty left.

#48-#51: Sanibel Flats, Captiva, Shark River, Twelve Mile Limit -- Randy Wayne White

Sanibel Flats -- Randy Wayne White
Captiva -- Randy Wayne White
Twelve Mile Limit -- Randy Wayne White
Shark River -- Randy Wayne White

I can't really review these individually, because I've read 'em at breakneck speed: they are not trashy airport thrillers by any means, but they're lighter reading than I've been tackling lately, and they were just what I needed.

I discovered White's Doc Ford novels with The Man Who Invented Florida a couple of years ago: liked it a lot -- covers similar territory to Hiaasen's eco-thrillers, but it's different in tone: more reflective and less headlong, and rather more character-driven, it says here -- and gradually acquired others in the series, and just lately the time's been right to read them.

Basic premise: Marion 'Doc' Ford (you can see why he doesn't use his first name) is an ex-Special Ops operative turned marine biologist; makes a living selling sealife supplies to educational institutions, and has a lacksadaisical attitude to the women who seem to find him irresistable. He's proud of not being governed by emotion (despite the fact that at least once per novel he's almost certainly swayed by, eww, feelings): meanwhile, his friend Tomlinson is very much in tune with the mystical, with auras and reincarnation and past life and hefty doses of ganja. A lot of the fun of these novels is the interplay between the two, and from the supporting cast of Dinker's Bay denizens -- boat and marina people, people who'd rather live a happy lazy low-key life on the Gulf Coast of Florida than be anywhere else.

Sanibel Flats is the first in the series, with a plot somewhat reminiscent of an Indiana Jones movie (Mayan emeralds! moving lakes! mystic riddles!) but rather more in the way of character development and sense of place. (All the Doc Ford novels evoke the Florida coast, and the environmental and cultural issues that affect those who live there.) Ford's past is more obvious in this novel than in later ones: also, it's written in third person, and the others I've read are first person. I wonder why the author decided to switch? First-person definitely gets us inside Ford's head, and I think it makes him less stereotypically heroic ...

Captiva is about the feud between pro-net and anti-net factions, and there's some excellent social observation in there. Enjoyed but little to say about it!

Shark River reveals quite a bit more about Ford's murky past as a secret government operative. Again, enjoyed but have little to say.

Twelve Mile Limit is based on a true story of four divers whose boat sunk out in the Gulf: one swam to a light tower and survived, the other three vanished without trace. White's afterword notes that he's tried to explain their disappearance, what could have happened to them in the peculiar wind and water conditions of the Gulf -- basically a thousand-mile-wide lake with two narrow outlets. I found this novel unsettling, but compulsive reading: it did, though, seem to become a little too headlong near the end.

I have one more on hand, Tampa Burn, after which I may have to acquire more. Or maybe the urge -- is it perhaps just an urge for beaches and colourful characters and descriptions of good food?! -- will mellow ...

#47: A Song for Nero -- Thomas Holt

When you're the last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, heir to the likes of Tiberius and Caius Caligula, you're pretty well obliged to measure up to a fairly high standard of debauchery. It's expected of you, like wearing the toga and being able to recite your Homer. When they bring on the Libyan eunuchs on all fours dressed in goatskins, you can't turn round and say, No, thanks, I'd rather read a book. (p.38)

I don't read much comic fantasy, so I'm not familiar with Holt's better-known work (though I did enjoy Expecting Someone Taller and Who's Afraid of Beowulf?). A Song for Nero is a historical novel: what if Nero didn't die by his own hand as everyone thought, but switched places with a boyfriend who strongly resembled him, and went on the run with his dead boyfriend's brother Galen? What if Nero and Galen have been roaming around the Mediterranean for ten years, living on their wits as not-very-successful conmen and hustlers? And what if Nero's ready to rediscover himself? His great crime, according to the establishment, was to sing and play an instrument in public. Lucius Domitius -- as he's always known in these pages -- still yearns for recognition of his artistic talent, though he's terrified of being recognised if he actually performs his own work.

A Song for Nero is a pacy romp through the seamy underside of Roman life: slavery, brothels, crime syndicates, disgustingly bad wine, Queen Dido's fabled treasure and Virgil's Georgics (a.k.a. 'On Farming'). There's more than a few similarities to Homer's Odyssey, too, especially as the novel moves towards its conclusion. Galen and 'Lucius Domitius' are oddly likeable characters, considering their lack of morals, general bad behaviour and sleazy pasts. (Holt has Seneca delivering a speech about the virtues and achievements of Nero as Emperor: there's a certain amount of exculpation here. But it's not all hagiography by any means: several characters have very good reasons for wishing Nero properly dead.)

There are few women in this novel -- something I didn't notice until the first female speaking role, if you see what I mean, around page 200 -- and mostly they're rather unpleasant. Luckily Galen and Lucius Domitius don't seem to be greatly interested in any flavour of carnal pursuit: Galen does fall for someone, but this does not turn out well. And Lucius Domitius may have had all the carnal pursuits he can handle for one lifetime. Also, though there's no hint of sexual attraction between the two, it's clear that they are codependent: I hesitate to tag Galen's feelings for Nero as 'love', but there is a strong attachment.

Holt's prose, and some of his imagery, reminds me strongly of K J Parker. There's the colloquial, cynical tone; a certain fatalism; an emphasis on the randomness of life; the sense that there might or might not be something slightly odd, supernatural-type odd, going on, but that it's really not important, just one of those things the universe dreams up to confound humanity. There are some insights into family history at the end of the book that cast both Galen and Lucius Domitius in quite a different light. Reading Holt's description of returning to a familiar house, now run-down and ruinous, felt so familiar that I was sure I'd read that part of the novel before, perhaps in a review: then I remembered similar scenes in several of Parker's novels.

There was the gate, probably the same bit of mouldy old string holding it onto the post as when I'd left; there was the mounting-block, half crumbled away, with weeds growing up through the cracks. There was the well, and the staked-off rectangle of gravel we tried to grow beans in, and right next to the back door, the midden -- maybe a tad taller and nastier-smelling than it'd been in my day, but you can't really call that progress ... (p453)

But maybe it's just that they've read the same books. Or that I'm manufacturing similarities in the prose of two authors I like very much.

And once or twice I thought, this is a better ending than the one in all the books. Far better this way than the big fight scene, stringing the great bow and shooting down the noble lords of Ithaca like stray dogs. So much more sensible, if you will insist on coming home, to settle down in a quiet way, do an honest job of work, raise a good crop of corn and grapes and beans, and not worry about who rules over who, or what the rights and wrongs of it all are. ... the trouble with Ithaca is, when you finally get there, you find out it's moved on, and the place where it used to be is called something else now, and strangers live there who don't hold with your sort. (p. 498)

#46: Fathom -- Cherie Priest

I knew when I took you that you were evil. That's why I pulled you under the waters and held you against myself. That's why I saved you, because you were formless and void, and I thought I could bend you to join and assist me. I brought you in as a daughter, and as a companion to my son. I received and restored you knowing that you were made of bile and nails, so I suppose the fault is mine after all. I did not frighten you enough while I had the opportunity. (p. 304)

Cherie Priest's latest novel (the only other of her books I've read is Four and Twenty Blackbirds) is a dense, rich elemental tale that I think I'll need to read again to appreciate in full. It has something of the same feel as Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides: the fury of tropical storms, ancient horrors concealed beneath the sun and sand of Florida, pirates (pirates!), magic, the stifling lushness of the land and the blue waters that, for all their clarity, hide a great deal.

I think there are echoes and overtones of Shakespeare's The Tempest in here, though it's far from a direct remapping of that tale. Still: there are individuals (not quite people, not exactly human) who correspond to the four elements -- Earth, Water, Fire and (at a stretch) Air: a girl trapped in a form not her own, a water-witch, a Greek smith ...

And pirates! Specifically, José Gaspar -- a popular figure from Floridan folklore, the island Gasparilla named after him -- who turns out to've failed at the task appointed to him: for punishment, says Arahab, I removed from the face of the earth every trace that he'd ever lived. There remains neither note nor relic to confirm he ever breathed before I claimed him. (p. 56). Now Gaspar (one of the more likeable characters in the novel) has work to do, and a new companion: the young, modern and amoral Beatrice. Arahab the water-witch deems it time to wake a slumbering god: against her stands a creature with no name, and Beatrice's cousin Nia, and an insurance adjustor named Sam.

Fathom feels like being at sea: it's a novel full of movement, pursuit, violence and change. Some beautifully evocative scenes and some shocking volte-faces: Priest has the power to surprise and shock, to catch the reader in her characters' reactions.

It's a distinctively American fantasy, and a Southern Gothic fantasy, and though it's a world away from the Florida-set thrillers I also enjoy, the landscape is the same -- albeit lashed by huger waves and lit by a weirder light. I liked this a lot, though there were occasional phrases or paragraphs that made me want to edit ...

#45: Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science -- Mary Roach

Orgasm appears to be a state not unlike that of the alien abductees one always hears about, coming to with messy hair and a chunk of time unaccounted for. (p. 241)

Subtitled 'The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science', this pop-science book is an enthusiastic, idiosyncratic survey of the scientific study of sex. It is incredibly funny, warmly human and full of fascinating factoids: the premarital medical examinations that took place in a majority of US states during the fifties and sixties, which often involved a medical practitioner breaking the hymen; bisexuality in farm animals; observations of fetal masturbation; the percentage of young American males reporting sexual activity with animals in Kinsey's groundbreaking surveys.

Chapter titles include "The Upsuck Chronicles: Does Orgasm Boost Fertility, and What Do Pigs Know About It?"; "The Taiwanese Fix and the Penile Pricking Ring: Creative Approaches to Impotence"; "Re-member Me: Transplants, Implants and Other Penises of Last Resort". Truly, this is an important reference work for anyone writing about sex.

Roach adopts a no-nonsense approach to the subject, but Bonk is far from clinical: contacting Dr Deng, a lecturer in medical physics who's doing ground-breaking work in coital imaging, Roach receives a reply asking if her organisation can recruit volunteers 'for an intimate (but non-invasive) study'.

My organisation gave some thought to this. What couple would do this? More direly, who wanted to pay the three or four thousand dollars it would cost to fly them both to London and put them up in a nice hotel? My organisation balked. It called its husband.
"You know how you were saying you haven't been to Europe in twenty-five years?" (p. 113)

It's hard to review a book that's so packed with facts, with humour and with humanity. I like Roach's style a lot -- she has fun researching and writing about this, and she manages even the most graphic sections with grace and tact -- and I learnt a lot about Kinsey's findings, about the medicalisation of impotence, about genital anatomy and about some of the modifications that are made to it in the causes of fertility, pleasure and repression.

And most importantly, Roach doesn't lose sight of the non-scientific aspects of these studies. Though they no doubt have their uses, ultrasound movies are a superficial rendering of the complex and varied mind-body meld that we call sex. Sex is far more than the sum of its moving parts. (p.128)

Excellent bibliography, which made it very easy to find this:

Dr Shafik's work on the effect of different types of underpants on the sexual activites of rats

#44: Nova -- Samuel R. Delany

Colours sluiced the air with fugal patterns as a shape subsumed the breeze and fell, to form further on, a brighter emerald, a duller amethyst. Odours flushed the wind with vinegar, snow, ocean, ginger, poppies, rum. Autumn, ocean, ginger, ocean, autumn: ocean, ocean, the surge of ocean again, while light formed in the dimming blue that underlit the Mouse's face. Electric arpeggios of a neo-raga rilled. (p. 22)

An old favourite, reread: I love Delany's early novels, and I marvel anew at his prose style. Nova is the Grail Quest in a space-opera setting, with Captain Lorq von Ray (space pirate!) recruiting a motley crew of drifters to grab seven tons of the element Illyrion -- 'source of untold wealth and key to the shifting balance of Galactic power' -- from a star that's going nova.

Nova is rich in symbolism -- especially the Tarot Major Arcana -- and in prose: the characters are vivid, especially the Mouse (gypsy kid with a rare talent for the sensory-syrynx he stole at the age of ten) and Katin (intellectual, socially maladept, devoted to moons). On this reread I noticed how distinctively each of the crew is sketched -- and how each of them has a personal space, an object or skill or habit, that's invaded by the others. And, too, how each of them has lost something and is searching.

I like Delany's future, too: a thousand years from now (though with frequent references to life in the 20th century!) when the means of production have become immediate once more, and workers with cerebral sockets plug directly into all manner of machinery. There are three major factions -- Draco, the Outer Worlds and the Pleiades -- and plenty of double-dealing, piratical behaviour and violence: but there's also art and grace and beauty. Astonishingly detailed for such a short novel, and I realise how much this shiny future has influenced and inspired me.