2022/105: A Presumption of Death — Jill Paton Walsh / Dorothy L Sayers

...with wry amusement she remembered how appalling to her in prospect had been the wealth and privilege of being Peter’s wife... and how brief in the event had been the enjoyment of wealth and comfort, how swiftly the war was levelling everyone, casting down the mighty so that not even crowns and coronets got you more than four ounces of butter a week, and a large house with space and air meant you got strangers billeted on you, and an end of peace and privacy. [p. 156]

Second of Paton Walsh's continuations of Sayers' Wimsey novels: this one is founded on The Wimsey Papers, a series of letters that appeared in the Spectator during the early years of WWW2. The novel opens with Harriet at Tallboys, the couple's country residence, bravely tending her children and their cousins. (Well, she has the housekeeper, the cook, the house-maid, another maid, and a nursery-maid to help.) Peter is off doing intelligence work somewhere abroad, and Harriet finds life during wartime both boring and frustrating. Then a young woman, one of the Land Girls, is murdered during an air raid practice, and Harriet investigates -- discovering all manner of rural oddities including a pig club, an RAF pilot with a broken ankle, and the mysterious nocturnal ramblings of Miss Agnes Twitterton. Peter's nephew Gerald, here 'plain Jerry Wimsey', is also on the scene, and wows the children (and this reader) with a truly poetic account of what it's like to fly a Spitfire.

This is a perfectly reasonable murder mystery, with the typical historical-fiction flaw of relating events to our own present ('when this war is long over there will be people still alive in the next century who will bear the psychological marks of all this. War damage, so to speak' [p. 108]) and a recognisable facsimile of the characters and relationships created by Dorothy L. Sayers. Harriet felt more convincingly Sayers-esque than Peter or Bunter. Some nice details of rural wartime life, but slightly too much rushing around the countryside at a time when people were asked to consider whether their journey was really necessary. A pleasant read, but ... not Sayers.

2022/104: The Tiger's Wife — Tea Obreht

When your fight has purpose — to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent — it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling — when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event — there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. [loc. 4056]

Natalia is a young doctor, travelling with her childhood friend Zora across a new border to administer vaccines to orphans created by the recent war. En route, she learns of her grandfather's death: not unexpected, as she was one of the few who knew he had cancer, but mysterious because he'd claimed to be on his way to visit her, but died in a remote village that neither she nor her grandmother has ever heard of. As she pieces together the truth of his death, she recalls the tales he told her, of the deathless man and of the tiger's wife. Meanwhile, in the village where she and Zora are staying, a group of travellers are digging busily in the vineyard for the bones of a cousin left buried there during the war: “Doesn’t like it here, and he’s making us sick. When we find him we’ll be on our way.” [loc. 1333].

The Tiger's Wife is a fable about war, death, superstition and reparation. The chapters each tell a different story, past and present: the grandfather's childhood in the small village of Galina, and the tiger that escaped from the city zoo and came to live in the forest nearby; the deathless man, who claimed to be Death's nephew and proved his immortality not once but several times; the resistance of the gypsies to modern medicine; the legacy of centuries of war, from Ottoman incursions to the civil war that divided the country; the marriage of Luka, the butcher of Galina, to a deaf-mute Muslim girl. Kipling's Jungle Book is a durable connection between Natalia and her grandfather, between the tiger ('it's Shere Khan!') and the deathless man: in a sense this is a novel about stories and how they shape lives as much as, if not more than, the plain facts upon which fables are built.

This is Serbian-American author Tea Obreht's first novel, published when she was just 24. I loved the prose and the vivid imagery, and the zoo animals' pitiable experience of war: the grandfather's tales of his youth, and his memories of the people he knew, felt more rounded and more real than Natalia's occasionally tepid narrative. There are elements of magic realism, and the names and geographies are invented: but this novel is firmly rooted in the history and culture of the former Yugoslavia.

2022/103: The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea — Maggie Tokuda-Hall

“We don’t just read to imagine better lives. We read to be introduced to all kinds of lives. Any kind. Not just for ourselves, but for everyone around us. To understand others better. It’s escape, and it’s also a way to become more connected to everyone around you. There’s power in that, you know. In understanding. It’s like magic.” [p. 56]

Lady Evelyn Hasegawa, the daughter of noble parents, is contracted to marry a man twice her age on the other side of the world. Her possessions are packed in her coffin, and she embarks on the Dove for the long voyage. Little does she realise that (a) the Dove is a pirate ship (b) the pirates are also slavers. Befriending young Florian, who is assigned as her guard, she begins to teach him to read.

Flora and her brother Alfie were street urchins before they became part of the Dove's crew. Flora redefines herself as Florian, while Alfie bears the brunt of the crew's vicious and abusive 'hazing'. The siblings (the only Black crew members on board) become inured to violence and cruelty, but Flora -- despite her loathing for the privileged Imperials -- is drawn to Evelyn's soft beauty and kindness. Then the crew captures a mermaid -- an act prohibited by the Pirate Supreme: mermaid blood is a powerful and addictive hallucinogen -- and Flora and Evelyn mount an audacious rescue / escape attempt.

Flora/Florian's dual nature was thoughtfully and evocatively portrayed, though I am not sure why they almost always used female pronouns even when performing the masculine Florian identity. I also liked the non-binary Pirate Supreme, and the witch Xenobia: the novel's emphasis on non-heterosexual relationships was refreshing. While Evelyn and Flora carry most of the story, there are also scenes from other viewpoints: first mate Rake (an intriguing character in his own right, who I'd have liked to hear more of), and the Sea herself. The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea has a strong theme of the importance of story: of shaping and reshaping one's own story, of magic being a way of looking at the world and changing the course of the story so far.

On the other hand, there is a lot of violence and abuse, mostly but not wholly off-page, which felt weightier than the rather shallow romance between Flora and Evelyn. The worldbuilding also felt somewhat two-dimensional: the Nipranese Empire encompasses most of the Known World [sic]; the Floating Islands have witches, savagery and magic; the Red Shore is where the slavers hang out. The novel's pacing was uneven, with the last chapters feeling rushed and inconclusive.

Some really intriguing ideas and characters here, but they didn't engage me: this may be a function of having read the novel whilst unwell.

2022/102: The Black Witch — Laurie Forest

“Real education doesn’t make your life easy. It complicates things and makes everything messy and disturbing. But the alternative, Elloren Gardner, is to live your life based on injustice and lies.” [loc. 5397]

Elloren Gardner has been brought up in seclusion by her beloved uncle. She's the spitting image of her dead grandmother, a national hero, and although she has shown no signs of magical ability, her relatives seem sure that it's only a matter of time. Then her Aunt Vyvian arrives unexpectedly, and whisks her off to the city and thence to Verpax University. Aunt Vyvian has an agenda: she wants Elloren to 'wand-fast' to attractive and powerful Lukas May -- and she's not afraid to fight dirty when Elloren protests that she barely knows the man. Elloren ends up in squalid university residences, sharing with winged Icarals ('demonic, monstrous, winged'), studying with Lupines ("savage" and lewd) and working in the kitchens with Kelts ('accepting of intermarriage ... mixed'). She is bullied mercilessly, both by members of the 'impure' races (everyone who isn't Gardnerian: selkies, werewolves, elves, Fae) and by fellow Gardnerians, such as her aunt. She's grown up believing that the Gardnerians have been oppressed for centuries, until the time of her grandmother: brought up to regard herself as a deserving member of a pure-blooded elite, and to require ritual cleansing after meeting the eyes of an Icaral. But gradually Elloren begins to question her perspective and her culture...

I was discussing various fantasy-academia novels with a friend, and she mentioned The Black Witch, which it turned out I'd purchased a while back. I decided it was time to read it -- and after a few chapters I remembered / realised why I'd bought it: because it was targetted as toxic, racist, homophobic and elitist on Twitter a few years back. In general, I prefer to make up my own mind about such accusations, and my conclusion is that this is indeed a novel about toxic, homophobic, elitist, misogynist racists, at least one of whom -- Elloren, our viewpoint narrator -- is capable of overcoming her prejudice. This level of cultural baggage isn't easily or quickly overcome, but Elloren and her brothers are on the path to redemption by the end of this novel, first in a series. The Black Witch depicts bigotted behaviour: it does not endorse it.

Controversy aside, this is a very readable YA novel that reminded me in places of L J Smith's great unfinished Night World series: the pairing-up of unlikely couples, the diversity, the sense of world-views being adjusted to fit a wider reality. I didn't find Elloren very relatable, and for at least a third of the book she was really quite whiny (as well as racist, elitist, ignorant et cetera). But she changed: people do.

On Disagreement

2022/101: MythWorld Book One: The Festival of Bones — James A Owen

“This, as far as I can tell, is the Prime Edda — a completely unknown work of Snorri Sturluson’s. What’s more, this manuscript apparently belonged at one time to Franz Liszt, who worked on the translation before giving it to a young companion of his whom he referred to as ‘Dearest Friend’.
..."Wagner," breathed Galen. "It's Wagner." [loc. 875]

Alexandra David-Neel! Trepanning! Wagner and Liszt! A lost Edda! Absinthe! A magician going by the stage name of 'Obscuro', whose name is actually Jude!

All so promising. But also: very few female characters, none of them with any significance to the plot; not much in the way of characterisation (our three protagonists are all white male academics); a sprawling, convoluted and sometimes repetitive plot full of conspiracies and ancient wisdom; some clunky writing... Despite being published in 2002, I suspect this was written a lot earlier ('Yugoslavian Airlines'?). And despite my acquiring it in 2012 (!) it's taken me a decade to get around to reading it. (Or so I thought: see below.) Luckily I wasn't hooked -- 'luckily' because the rest of the series seems to be currently unavailable, and has possibly never been published in English.

Come for the Norse myth, stay for the trepanned zombie students roaming the streets of Vienna, but don't expect resolution.

...Oh, for heaven's sake: turns out this was another accidental reread. My original review from 2012/13.

2022/100: Husband Material — Alexis Hall

...the reason I'd needed to date someone like him to begin with was that I’d needed to distance myself from the parts of queer culture that looked bad to a certain kind of rich straight person. And while I’d come to realise that Oliver was more than a respectable job and a wholesome jumper, it still weirded me out that he found so little value in what I’d always instinctively thought was our community. [p. 140]

This is a surprisingly difficult book for me to review: I enjoyed it a great deal, but discovered something about myself while reading, which is that I don't especially like 'staying together' romance. Or, perhaps, that I don't find it as relatable as 'getting together' romance. This tells you more about me than about Husband Material, though: the latter is a sequel to the adorable Boyfriend Material (in which embittered Luc finds true love with straightlaced Oliver), and begins two years later. Alexis Hall has echoed the structure of a well-known romantic comedy (can you guess which one?) in this tale of multiple weddings -- some heterosexual, some not -- and an unexpected death. Luc is nearly (gasp) thirty years old, and all his friends are settling down, with more or less drama. (Bridget, naturally, experiences more drama than anyone. But she works in publishing -- we get more fleetingly-mentioned anecdotes, each of which'd make a splendid story in its own right -- and should be accustomed to improbable coincidences by now.) Luc is blissfully happy with Oliver, and he thinks it's mutual: but the two are very different, with Luc embracing queer culture and Oliver preferring podcasts and straight friends, alienated by flamboyance and rainbow balloon arches. They're both gay men, and they've both grown up in the UK, with marriage (not to mention giving blood) having been an impossible dream for most of their lives: but do they have enough in common to make a commitment?

This was such an entertaining read, with very much the same cast as the first novel (plus the intriguing Tyler, who's apparently going to get a novel of their own) and entirely credible developments in the lives of each. There are also new characters, and new locations (outside London, OMG), and very definitely new developments. The final chapters put a big smile on my face (as did the scene where Luc, about to give a speech, realises that fountain-pen ink and sweat don't mix too well. I feel your pain, Luc).

Frivolous and funny but also insightful, this novel doesn't flinch from the difficult moments -- a couple of which brought tears to my eyes -- and is very much in favour of emotional honesty, as well as surprising sweetness. My sourness is my own!

2022/099: Notorious Sorcerer — Davinia Evans

”All any of us can do is make the best of the cards we are dealt.”
Why? Why can’t we —“ Zagiri waved her free hand wildly. “Draw blade on the dealer, seize the deck. Make the best better. For everyone, not just us.” [loc. 3220]

Siyon Velo comes from the wrong side of town, Dockside, but he's built a successful business retrieving alchemical supplies from the other planes -- the Empyreal, the Abyssal, and the Aethereal -- and selling them to various alchemical practitioners. His clients are mostly azatani, or aristocrats: Siyon is well aware that they have privilege he can't even imagine. But when he commits an impossible act in a crowded square, he finds himself attracting the attention of several well-connected individuals. And maybe, just maybe, he can pull off another impossible feat...

Notorious Sorcerer contains an abundance of my favourite things: opera, alchemy, queer romance, card games, mannerpunk, swordfighting, women chafing at social mores, friendships between men and women. The worldbuilding is intriguing, though lightly drawn: hints of the lands beyond the city of Bezim, which is the only place in the world where the planes can be accessed, and characters from those other lands with their distinct customs and culture. There are a lot of likeable characters here, too: the azatani sisters Anahid and Zagiri Savani, who want very different things from life; Siyon, who’s reinvented himself but is still a product of his experiences; Izmirlian, who’s voyaged extensively but yearns for further horizons; even Anahid’s husband Nihath, stubbornly adhering to the classical methodology of alchemy as laid out centuries before. Alchemy colours every aspect of life in Bezim, from the suits of cards (each with their Power) to the plots of popular operas, from the concordances of emotions to the City itself, divided by the geological consequences of an alchemical endeavour. That it's technically illegal is just one more way in which social class manifests: the alchemists of the Summer Club (to which Siyon yearns to be admitted) can get away with rather more than a street-wise supplier of infernal kelp and phoenix feathers.

This is a novel about alchemy, about balance, about draconian policing and social negotiation: but at heart it’s a story about finding one’s place in the world, and the importance of living in one’s own life. I liked it immensely — perhaps even more on second reading, when I could see how cleverly the plot had been constructed. [Disclaimer: I should confess that I've known the author (mostly online) for lo these many years. Nevertheless, I was fully prepared to nitpick like mad: but I didn't need to, because this is a brilliant, engaging, emotional whirlwind of a novel, which made me laugh out loud and also reduced me to tears.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review. UK publication date is 13 September 2022.