2011/62: The Charioteer -- Mary Renault

Darling Mother,
I have fallen in love. I now know something about myself which I have been suspecting for years, if I had had the honesty to admit it. I ought to be frightened and ashamed, but I am not. Since I can see no earthly hope for the attachment, I ought to be wretched, but I am not. I know now why I was born, why everything has happened to me ever; I know why I am lame, because it has brought me to the right place at the right time. (p.56)

Set in autumn 1940 and published in 1953 (1959 in the USA), The Charioteer is not a historical novel in the usual sense of the term: Renault was writing of England in the recent past, an England at once transformed and defined by the state of being at war. Sixty years later, that wartime setting has a cliched familiarity born of decades of film, TV and literature. But Renault is not interested in writing another story about home-front heroism -- at least, that isn't the focus of the story. The Charioteer is primarily a story about love.

The protagonist, Laurie Odell, is male; so are the two people with whom he falls in love.

Homosexuality was illegal, regarded as a mental illness and as morally objectionable. (Mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing, convicted for homosexual conduct in 1952, was given the choice between a prison sentence or treatment with female hormones: he opted for the latter in the hope that it would be less disruptive to his work. Within a year he was dead.) Laurie, and the other gay men in the story, are outsiders, keeping their selves secret, having to be 'sure' about someone before they can allude, however indirectly, to anything sexual.

And Laurie, though he realises that he is 'different', is pretty much an innocent. How could he not be? How could he discover himself?

The title of The Charioteer derives from Plato's Phaedrus: the charioteer drives two horses, one black and one white. As Laurie describes it to Andrew, "Each of the gods has a pair of divine white horses, but the soul only has one. The other ... is black and scruffy, with a thick neck, a flat face, hairy fetlocks, gray bloodshot eyes, and shaggy ears. He's hard of hearing, thick-skinned, and given to bolting whenever he sees something he wants." (p.101). The white horse is the moral urge; the black horse is base lust and mindless passion. Or, perhaps, the white horse is pure, intellectual love, founded on morality and respect; the black horse is sexual indulgence, succumbing to the body's urges, hedonism.

On the one hand, there's Andrew, a Quaker, a conscientious objector who's working in the hospital where Laurie is taken after being severely wounded at Dunkirk. Laurie's instantly drawn to Andrew, fascinated by him, but Andrew (a man of integrity, trying to live an ethical life) seems oblivious.

On the other hand, there's Ralph Lanyon, who was at school with Laurie and was expelled for inappropriate behaviour with a younger boy. (This, it seems, was Laurie's first glimpse of the possibility of homosexuality. Ralph gave him his own copy of Phaedrus, which Laurie keeps with him for the next seven years.) Ralph, it turns out, was captaining the ship that brought a doped-up and hallucinating Laurie back across the Channel from Dunkirk. The two meet again through a string of coincidences (an air raid, a chance encounter, a birthday party doubling as a gay social -- 'we can't offer you any girls', says the host guardedly, not yet wholly sure of Laurie -- and the mention of a name).

Laurie finally has someone with whom he can talk, "a speaker of his own language; another solitary still making his own maps". He begins to realise that he needs to keep Andrew safe; that Andrew doesn't know, and doesn't need to know, anything about the way in which Laurie loves him.

Laurie also rejects the exclusive / excluded coterie of gay men to whom he was introduced at that party -- a group who've 'identified themselves with their limitations', who are promiscuous and melodramatic and jealously possessive.

What's left? Can he accept his own nature and have a meaningful relationship? Will he have to close the door on love and sex?

There's a lot more to The Charioteer than I've mentioned here. The ways in which Laurie's friends and acquaintances react to him (especially Reg, a working-class bloke who's in the next bed at the hospital, and has to square his prejudices with his knowledge of Laurie as an individual). The allusions -- this is not an explicit novel -- to the dark underside of the homosexual 'scene' in wartime Britain; the compromises that must be made. Laurie's relationship with his mother, who's about to marry a noxious clergyman. The peace that Laurie finds in Andrew's company; the tension between him and Ralph. And throughout, Renault's fine, subtle (sometimes opaque) prose, the prose that hooked me on her historical novels in my teens.

I think I'll be coming back to this novel again and again.

It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this was what you wanted. (p. 291)

2011/61: The Flood -- Ian Rankin

Why would he sit there? To experience, and so that afterwards he could curse his maker for creating the incident. he believed in God now, but it was a malevolent thing and he would speak of it with a small, vehement 'g'. He believed in god. He believed in the cruelty and the inevitability of suffering. And he believed that he was doomed. As if to reassure him, thunderclouds gathered above the Firth of Forth ... He knew that it was all because of him. (p.221-2)

Rankin's first novel, published when he was a 25-year-old student, is not a crime novel but an attempt to mythologise his hometown, a dark fairytale of rumoured witchcraft, uncertain parentage and prejudice.

Mary Miller, age ten, is pushed into the 'hot burn' (a steaming outflow of chemical run-off from the local coal mine) by Matty Duncan and his mates. She survives, but her hair turns white overnight. Soon afterwards Matty Duncan dies in an explosion at the mine, and the whispers of 'witch' begin.

By fifteen, Mary is something of an outcast. Then she compounds the problem by falling pregnant and refusing to reveal the father's identity. Her beloved brother Tom emigrates ('hastily', say the whisperers) to Canada. Walking home drunk one night, her father is struck and killed ('suicide') by a car.

Fast forward to the mid-Eighties. Sandy, Mary's son, is fifteen, and thinks of himself as the man of the house. He's accustomed to his mother's strange ways (talking to her mother and father at their graves, attending church despite the stares and whispers, dating Sandy's English teacher) and is making a place for himself in the community. Then he falls in love with Rian, a gypsy girl, whose brother Robbie may or may not have rather too much influence over her. His mother's sure to approve: after all, she knows what it's like to be an outsider, like Rian ...

I didn't find this a very satisfactory read. It's very much a young man's book: the older characters, and the women, seem one-dimensional. Sandy acts, thinks and exists in a teenaged maelstrom of melodrama. (More than once his choices are explicitly influenced by 'Hollywood films'.) Perhaps the most vivid depiction is that of the town itself: Carsden is small, close-knit (apart from those it shuns) and very much a victim of the changing economic climate. Carsden, of course, not being an actual person, doesn't get any closure or resolution: but then, neither do Sandy or Mary or Rian.

I'm not very familiar with Rankin's later, better-known work, but I get the impression that The Flood is not typical.

2011/59-60: The Sharing Knife: Beguilement / Legacy -- Lois McMaster Bujold

"Groundsense. It's a sense of everything around us. What's alive, where it is, how it's doing ..."
"Magic?"
"Not the way farmers use the term. It's not like getting something for nothing. It's just the way the world is, deep down." (Beguilement, p. 68)

Again, books I've owned for a while but only just got round to reading. I'm a fan of Bujold's Vorkosigan saga, and I like the first two of her Chalion novels (not so keen on the third), but these two volumes -- really two halves of a single long novel -- weren't as enjoyable a read, for me, as I'd expected.

Some elements are familiar from Bujold's other works. The maimed hero (like Miles); the  vulnerability and strength of a pregnant woman (like Cordelia); the quiet feuds of domestic life (nothing quite as hilariously awful as the dinner-party scene in A Civil Campaign); the tension between the peaceful majority who must be protected and the warrior-class who protect them (ImpSec, Simon Illyan); a protagonist set apart by their ability to see through superficial appearance to the underlying essence of a person (Ista, Miles ...) Other elements seem new: The Sharing Knife has a distinctly rural ambience, drawing on the trope of pioneers settling an empty land; there's a romance between two characters at greatly different stages of their lives; there's an enemy that seems wholly evil.

The Sharing Knife: Beguilement and Legacy fall further towards the 'romantic' end of the 'SF&F Romance' spectrum than Bujold's other works. There's a strong fantastical element, but the plot is more focussed on the relationship between Dag (a Lakewalker, or magic-user, half in love with easeful death, who's spent many years combatting malices -- beings of pure magic, or 'ground', who enslave and corrupt mortal life) and Fawn (teenaged farmgirl runaway, feisty as all get-out, who finds that life on the road holds more hazards than brigands and sore feet).

The emotional weight isn't in the magical conflict or the mystery of the malices, but in the interactions of Fawn and Dag with one another and with their respective families. There's a striking contrast between Dag's 'family', the Lakewalkers, who respect but don't truly love him, and Fawn's farmer-folk, who love her but don't respect her.

And in the end, the finale of Legacy doesn't feel like any kind of ending: Dag and Fawn step back from their situations and choose a third path. I expect that there's much of interest in later books about malices, about the ancient history of this world, about the gods and their absence: but I'm not intrigued enough, nor fond enough of the protagonists, to rush to read more.

2011/56-8: Arthur trilogy -- Kevin Crossley-Holland

Sometimes what happens in my life echoes what happens in the stone, sometimes it's the other way round. But my stone also shows me people and places I've never seen before -- the fortress of Tintagel, King Uther, Ygerna, the hooded man. (The Seeing Stone, p. 301)

I've owned these books for many years, and only read them recently (enforced inactivity plus Indian summer). The first volume was lauded for the quality of the prose and the format (one hundred short chapters): it was awarded the Guardian Children's Fiction Award, the Tir na n-Og prize, and the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize bronze medal, and shortlisted for the Whitbread Awards.

The trilogy begins in the year 1199. Arthur de Caldicot is thirteen years old, living in a castle in the middle Marches (English / Welsh border) at the heart of a community of sixty. He fights with his elder brother Serle, comforts younger sister Sian when her cat goes missing, trains to become a squire and eventually a knight, and cherishes dreams of marrying his cousin Grace.

Merlin, a mysterious and unholy wanderer who comes and goes as he pleases, gives Arthur a piece of polished obsidian, telling him it's the most valuable thing he will ever have. Arthur sees visions in the stone: he watches, and recounts, the story of the legendary king whose name he shares, colouring what he sees with his own experience, perception and perspective.

The first novel, for me, is the most successful and the most interesting: it contrasts an intimate and vivid description of medieval life, the rhythm of the seasons and the equalities and inequalities of feudal society, with the glories of King Arthur's birth, youth and ascension to the throne.

The second novel, At the Crossing-Places, is about the imminence of change. Arthur, now wiser as to his own heritage, is preparing to go on crusade with Lord Stephen de Holt. He's becoming more aware of the wider world, and thinking more rigorously about his place in it. And in the stone, he sees the glory that was the legendary Camelot -- and begins to wonder if he, too, might bring about an age of justice and honour.

There's a long hiatus, in story-time and in Arthur's personality, between the second and third novels. Some of the events that occur in that hiatus are described, with benefit of hindsight, by Arthur: others are merely alluded to, or left implicit.

King of the Middle March -- the title itself is the spoiler -- mostly deals with Arthur's experiences abroad. There's a great deal of frustration: Crossley-Holland really brings to life the sheer logistic challenge of mounting a crusade; recruiting tens of thousands of fighting men, feeding and watering and transporting them, and keeping them spiritually pure.

Arthur comes to question the morality of war against the 'infidel': he meets Saracens, sees the horrors perpetrated against them in the name of God, and watches as Arthur-in-the-stone strives for, and fails to achieve, peace.

King Arthur is standing on the beach at Dover, under the white chalk cliffs. He's up to his knees in water, and around him pairs of men are locking, arrows are whirring, pikes are jabbing, swords are swinging, soldiers are lurching, landing-skiffs are bobbing, blood is staining, words are cursing and praying, ordering, threatening, begging... (King of the Middle March, p. 311)

The language is lovely, with Anglo-Saxon rhythm balanced by Arthur's own lyricism and knack for the detail that unlocks a description and makes it real. (Ocean waves make 'short sounds without memories'.) The parallels between his story and that of Arthur-in-the-stone aren't always as clear as they might be, but over the course of the three novels Arthur progresses from wondering if Arthur-in-the-stone is himself to turning away from the blood-stained history he perceives in the polished obsidian. Crossley-Holland ties in myth, folklore and superstition -- hunting the hare on Easter Sunday, turning back from a journey if there are too many bad omens -- with Arthur's own Christian beliefs and the pervasive influence of religion in his world. That contrast brings to life the medieval period, and makes for an absorbing and fascinating read.

2011/55: Ombria in Shadow -- Patricia McKillip

Mag never told Faey that she knew she was other than made. Human being what it was -- raging, messy, cruel, drunken and stupid -- she decided to remain wax. If, she reasoned, she did not say the word, no one would ever know. Saying 'human' would make her so. (p.20)

Ombria is a bright city sparkling with the decadent seeds of its own downfall. Its Prince is dying and Domina Pearl, the malevolent Regent, sets courtier against courtier and banishes the Prince's mistress Lydea to the streets from whence she came. Beneath those streets lies the city's own shadow, a maze of forgotten alleyways, disused cellars, sunken houses and gardens buried beneath dead leaves. The undercity is the realm of Faey the sorceress, who has a thousand faces and sells her magic to whoever might buy. Her waxling, Mag -- who Faey makes out to be a made thing, a magical construct, but a spell goes astray and Mag discovers the truth -- runs Faey's errands, slipping through Ombria's streets, watching and reporting and helping those who Faey makes her business. Among those she watches are Ducon Greve, the dead Prince's bastard nephew; Kyel, the young heir, who misses his friend Lydea; and Kyel's tutor Camas Erl, who's fascinated by the legends of a catastrophe that will transform Ombria from a city of despair and fear into something light and full of hope.

McKillip's prose often feels, to me, like a medieval tapestry, rich with colour and detail and odd, precise glimpses of magic. (The mirrors in Faey's sanctum are old, 'overused, shadowy with images'. Outside the palace gates, a garden of sunflowers stands guard.) Ombria in Shadow is beautifully written, and the protagonists rounded and realistic, heartsore with grief but not incapable of action. Despite the urban setting and the convolutions of shadow and light, the ambience of this novel brings to mind McKillip's Riddlemaster trilogy in ways that some of her more recent fantasy novels don't: perhaps it's the comfortable and credible quasi-medieval setting, without much overt magic, where characters are as likely to do laundry or visit a brothel as they are to cast spells or fight enemies.

The ending, which I shan't spoil here, felt sudden and hollow on first reading, but on reflection I find it wholly satisfactory. I'd love to encounter these characters again.

2011/54: The Celtic Ring -- Bjorn Larsson

I then perceived that what I had discovered myself about the sea amounted to no more than fragments of an unsuspected whole. For MacDuff the seagoing was not merely a way of life, it was the very basis of how he looked at reality. It meant learning to live with perpetual change, never taking anything for granted, being trained continually in humility and respect for what you have not mastered, for what you must safeguard at every instant. (p. 281)

One dark January night in a Danish harbour, Swedish sailor Ulf encounters a fellow sailor, Pekka, who hands him a secret log-book and then disappears. The voyage recorded in the log -- Pekka's flight, with a woman named Mary, from a shadowy organisation calling itself the Celtic Ring -- inspires Ulf and his friend Torben to follow in Pekka's wake. They set out across the North Sea, and through the Caledonian canal, one step ahead of their pursuers and one step (at least) behind a gentleman named MacDuff, who seems to know more than a little about the Celtic underground, its ancient history (Druids!) and its goals.

I very much enjoyed Larsson's Long John Silver, but the prose of The Celtic Ring doesn't sing: the translation's stolid and rarely poetic (and jars, with phrases such as 'I said spontaneously'), though there are some fine passages about sailing.

As a book about a sailing trip, this is excellent reading: I was drawn in by the precision and vividness of Ulf's seacraft, and fascinated by the accounts of how sailing in fiercely tidal Scottish waters challenges a sailor who's accustomed to the almost-tideless Baltic. The plot never quite gels, and the characters -- Ulf with his refusal to embrace mainstream society, Torben the dilettante, Mary who believes her life is mapped out by fate, MacDuff who inspires Ulf but whose charisma doesn't sparkle on the page -- didn't engage me. In particular, Mary felt like a cipher, a plot token, passing from one man to another: even when she gains agency we're not clear on her motives. Fate, probably.

There were some interesting references to Celtic lore, for instance the triple death, Ludlow Man, Life and Death of a Druid Prince etc. (On the other hand, Beltane is not on 4th May!)

The Celtic Ring was published in 1992 (first English translation 1997), when Eastern Europe was in turmoil and former states were declaring independence. MacDuff (who reveres Erskine Childers, author of The Riddle of the Sands and fervent Irish nationalist) seems certain that Scotland and Wales would never be granted any form of self-government by the British. Ah, hindsight ...

Could have done with more maps, too.

2011/53: Black Swan -- Farrukh Dhondy

The play is so great a success that the company immediately commissions Master Shakespeare to write a second part and even a third. Master Lazarus gets down with quill and candle to compose them each day and night while the drunkard from Warwickshire plays bowls at Newington Butts, drinks at the Mermaid and is now and again entertained by my Lord Essex. (p.139)

Rose Hassan is a mixed-race schoolgirl, living in Brixton with her mother and hoping to study drama at university. Her mother falls ill and Rose has to take over her job as carer and amanuensis to the elderly Mr Bernier. Mr B, as Rose calls him, needs Rose to be his eyes and ears, visiting a churchyard in East London and transcribing the diary of Elizabethan alchemist Simon Forman. Within the pages of that diary is concealed the secret identity of the man who authored Shakespeare's plays, and the true fate of Christopher Marlowe. And out in the real world -- riots in Brixton, a burglary, Mr B's shady past as Education Minister for a small Caribbean republic -- Rose finds herself targetted by people who want to know Mr B's true identity.

Black Swan was a quick and somewhat unsatisfactory read. There's a marvellous story in there -- Lazarus, the former slave who fakes his own death and finds love, learning and liberty in London -- but it never seems to become wholly clear.

I was surprised to find that this novel was published as YA: I found it complex, with a confusing finale, and younger / less experienced readers could find the Elizabethan passages dull. Few of the characters come to life (though Rose is vivid and likeable, despite being remarkably sanguine about the dangers she's in) and the voices aren't distinct enough. Neither Elizabethan nor contemporary London felt real, and the language never really sang.