Books: A Darker Shade of Magic By V.E. Schwab (2015)

Back in the 1980s when I began to read fantasy novels in earnest, I liked the idea of multiple volumes –usually three, but longer ones were fine- those tales, however, were usually compact in size; no thousand page tomes per book, another words. I liked that format a lot, but over the decades, trilogies have expanded into ongoing series of seven to twelve (or more) books, each carrying anywhere from 800 pages to nearly a thousand.  And I’ve found that longer does not necessarily mean better. They may be richer in depth and world building, but I’ve found that writers have become so obsessed with the detail, that they’ve forgotten to move their story along. 

One thing that I like about V.E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic is the book moves swiftly. She is able to do her world building in an efficient and understandable way, without getting caught in the ennui, the detail of details that have stopped me from reading Brandon Sanderson, George R.R. Martin, and Diana Gabaldon. Don’t get me wrong, I know a lot of people think this is impressive, and it is, but I don’t have the time or the inclination anymore to read books that need flow charts to keep tabs on characters and their adventures.

The unique premise has four London’s living parallel to each other. There is grey London, one under the rule of George III, white London, red London, and they mysterious and destroyed, black London. Kell is an Antari, one of the magicians who can travel between these worlds. Now grey London (our world) does not have much magic and most people have forgotten magic even existed. Red London, the world in which Kell is bound to, is a place full of magic, where people exist in balance with it. White London is where magic is dying, and where those who live there and wield it, are willing to do anything to get control of more magic, even trying to open the doorway to black London. But Kell knows this will destroy everything if that doorway is re-opened.

As one of the last of his kind, Kell tries to keep all three remaining London’s in balance (with great power comes great responsibilities danced through my mind a lot reading this book) and implies that King George III (the mad king) knows of the existence of the other London’s and this could be the reason he was a bit off his rocker. Kell is also willing to smuggle items between worlds, which is how he eventually bumps into Delilah Bard, a women with lofty aspirations. Lila is what they once called back then, a highway man. Or in this case a highway woman, essentially a thief and a pickpocket. And when these two people meet, our heroine picks the pocket of Kell, stealing one half of a magical stone, an artifact from black London (shades of the One Ring here). And that begins an adventure that leads to being chased by all means of magic and those bent on obtaining the stone that can give them unlimited power.

While a lot goes on over 400 pages, the Schwab does not go much into the background of either Kell or Lila, though she drops enough information to make me want to know more. As characters, Lila is much more interesting than Kell, and there were at times where I wished the book was more about her. And Kell comes off a bit naïve; he has lived in luxury with the royal family of red London (so much so, he’s seen as the son and brother of the royals) and lacks the ability to see that others have to struggle to make ends meet. He also, strangely, seems oblivious to politics of power that exists between these three remaining London’s and lacks any diplomatic skills.

Perhaps, because of the influence of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, we also get a glimpse of the ruthless rulers of white London, run by the twins Astrid and Athos Dane. Both crave power and are willing to destroy everything, kill everything in their way to do it. They are stereotypes, paper tiger villains that are pretty dumb. I mean there is no style to them, no grey area so to speak of; they’re one dimensional and, in the end, weak, so their threat to balance of magic is never really believable. 

Again, Lila is a fun character and may be the only reason I continue reading the series. But it moves swiftly, and that is also a key reason to follow up with the sequel. I just hope that Lila figures out a way to dump Kell.

Books: Me Before You By Jojo Moyes (2012)

 Me Before You is the second book I’ve read in the last couple of months that dealt with someone wanting to end their life due to an illness, or in this case, an accident that left Will Traynor a quadriplegic. Though The Universe Versus Alex Woods took a more in depth look into assisted suicide and leaving the reader to decide if it was right or wrong, in this novel, the idea of what Will wants sits like an elephant in the room. No one wants to talk about it.

While we don’t get much of a glimpse into Will’s life before the accident, writer Jojo Moyes alludes enough that he was once an adrenaline junkie, moved fast, owned his own company, and was generally living the high life of a very successful, very wealthy man (some may venture, an elitist white man as well) who also comes from an equally wealthy family. But after the road accident that left him paralyzed below the chest, with only minimal movement in his right arm, his life comes to a standstill. And he discovers, as time passes, that he lost more than the use of his body.

Two years later, Louisa Clark loses her job at the local café The Buttered Bun. She is a 26 year old, unambitious woman with very few qualifications. She lives with her working-class family and is constantly outshone by her younger, more intelligent sister, Treena, who is a single mother. Her parents become disappointed because the entire family depends on her wages. Louisa goes to the Job Centre where Syed, the Job Centre assistant, finds an ultimate option which is to look after a disabled man. Louisa gets accepted and is hired by Camilla Traynor, the mother of Will, because she thinks her son needs someone able to brighten his spirits. Louisa also notices how falsely everyone is acting in Granta House, Will's family mansion.  During her first few weeks, Louisa notices that Will's wrists are covered with scars, and then, one day, she overhears Will's mother and sister talking privately and finds out that he tried to commit suicide shortly after his mother refused to grant his wish to end his life through an assisted suicide organization known as Digntas (a real life group based in Switzerland). Horrified at his attempt to commit suicide, his mother agrees to honor his wish, but only on the condition that he agrees to live six more months. In that time, Louisa secretly plans to change his mind and show him life is still worth living.

I liked this book, despite the fact that this could be considered “chic lit”, a derogatory description for books generally designed to be read by women. While I knew of the book (well, mostly because of its sequel, Me After You, was being set for release soon and there was press about it), it wasn’t until I was working on the film adaptation of novelist Jay Bell’s Something Like Summer last summer in Portland that I saw someone actually reading it. One the star’s of this film, Ben Bauer, was reading it between scenes one morning. He was nearly finished with it, and I knew he was a big reader, so I tried to engage in conversation about books. But that didn’t go very far. Of course, he finished it, mentioning he was in tears during the final pages. So, as I generally am with books, I stored the information in a cabinet in my brain and knew I would eventually consider reading it.

Then Katie, a former co-worker of mine at Borders, posted a picture of used books she recently acquired. Then another co-worker, Jen, asked Katie if she read Me Before You. I chimed in mentioning I was considering reading it as well, but Jen seemed to think that was a silly idea. Well, as I’ve discovered in my old age, it’s things like this (even in some minor way like this) that make me then want to read it. It’s part stubbornness and part competitiveness, I think.  

Anyways, I enjoyed the book, even though I knew the ending (the sequel’s title sort of gives it away. Not a very bright piece of marketing, if you ask me. Then again, The Return of the King sort of did the same thing). I think I liked it, partly, because of it being British. While correct manners and what’s proper is subtly played out here, but what I loved the dry humor and Louisa’s family. Katrina is a blast, and the sibling rivalry is painted very well (though Treena’s son Thomas seems to get very little in the way of development and seems, more or less, to be used as a plot point later in the book).

It’s not maudlin in any sort of way, which I think is good. I was happy, yet also disappointed for some reason, that book never got into great detail about the moral ambiguities of assisted suicide. There is some minor discussions -can someone be prosecuted for it, and what not, but it’s oddly glossed over with Louisa only talking to other quads in chat rooms on the internet. But Louisa is the Cinderella heroine that books like this are targeted towards women have a tendency to be. But she is flawed and vulnerable in very believable way, she’s like today’s Millennial’s who grow up not really achieving much and suddenly discover they’re on the road to thirty with nothing to show for it. And while she seems fine with this, it’s clear what she needed (and what many of us need) is a mentor to push them onto the right path.

Of course the pusher is not always handsome and rich, but then would anyone really want to read this book and see the movie version (trailer here) if he wasn’t? Not sure I will read the sequel, but I may end seeing the film (mostly because it’s got Jenna Coleman (Clara from Doctor Who) playing Louisa’s snarky, smarter younger sister.

Books: Why We Came To The City By Kristopher Jansma (2016)

We begin at a New Year's party in 2008, with a snowstorm that is blowing through Manhattan. And while the economy is collapsing, none of that matters to a handful of guests at a holiday party. Five years after their college graduation, the fiercely devoted friends remain as inseparable as ever: editor and social butterfly Sara Sherman, her troubled astronomer boyfriend George Murphy, loudmouth poet Jacob Blaumann, classics major turned investment banker William Cho, and Irene Richmond, an enchanting artist with an inscrutable past. Amid cheerful revelry and free-flowing champagne, the friends toast themselves and the new year ahead—a year that holds many surprises in store. They must navigate ever-shifting relationships with the city and with one another, determined to push onward in pursuit of their precarious dreams. And when a devastating blow brings their momentum to a halt, the group is forced to reexamine their aspirations and chart new paths through unexpected losses.

In many ways, I found Why We Came To The City refreshingly old fashion in its tale, but also remarkably present day in its themes. I mean, we’ve seen many authors attempt to write a love letter to the city of New York, and we’ve seen many stories featuring characters moving through its veins, attempting to survive and live in a place that seems magical most of the time, but like a thief in the night, it can take things from you. So when you read the opening sentence, you almost become instantly hooked into the coda of the novel: "We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died.”

I admit I was at first reluctant to read the book, feeling that we’ve seen this story before, but after reading Kristopher Jansma’s debut novel The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards back in January, and the opening sentence of this book, I knew no matter what, I was going to be in for a linguistic treat. The novel is warm, often funny, sad at times, and a bit sentimental, but as a love letter to New York, it brims with so much charm, so much love, you can sometimes over look the over-romanticizing.

Books: Medusa's Web By Tim Powers (2016)

Reading a Tim Powers novel, like Medusa’s Web, is always accepting that while the author explains a lot of things, there is much he will not. His plots blend many genres, mostly speculative science fiction and fantasy, but they’re always set in the real world Los Angeles –which the author always paints as an area at war with its past and future. 

“In the wake of their Aunt Amity’s suicide, Scott and Madeline Madden are summoned to Caveat, the eerie, decaying mansion in the Hollywood hills in which they were raised. But their decadent and reclusive cousins, the malicious wheelchair-bound Claimayne and his sister, Ariel, do not welcome Scott and Madeline’s return to the childhood home they once shared. While Scott desperately wants to go back to their shabby South-of-Sunset lives, he cannot pry his sister away from this haunted “House of Usher in the Hollywood Hills” that is a conduit for the supernatural. It is decorated by bits salvaged from old hotels and movie sets, and in its dark halls, Caveat hides a dark family secret that stretches back to the golden days of Rudolph Valentino and the silent film stars. A collection of hypnotic eight-limbed abstract images inked on paper allows the Maddens to briefly fragment and flatten time—to transport themselves into the past and future in visions that are both puzzling and terrifying. Though their cousins know little about these ancient “spiders” which provoke unpredictable temporal dislocations, Ariel and Claimayne have been using for years—an addiction that has brought Claimayne to the brink of selfish destruction.”

Like I said, in reading any Powers book, you enter a world of probabilities, where dimensions intertwine with reality, where the past and possible futures come together. Here in his world, magic exists and where classical mythology never went away. Though Medusa’s Web is more Gothic in tone, reminding me of B films made about old Hollywood and usually starring a faded actor and actress, it still retains much of Powers strengths of dealing with the weird and the odd, where the magic and the mythology become one. Much like Stephen King, who seems obsessed with the 1950s, Powers love of old Hollywood is evident in a lot of his books, and this rare stand-alone novel, he gives us a speculative novel where real-life movie people of the 1920s can interact with people from 2015.

My only issues with the book –beyond the fact that Powers only explains things when he feels like it -are some of the characters. Oddly, most seem one-dimensional. Scott, the sanest of them all, seems to have the inability to make proper decisions, even when given the solution, and I got frustrated at his lack of any real action. And Claimayne is the obvious villain from page one –you always sense that. You know he’s the crazy one which makes his arc sort of predictably boring.

Still, Powers weirdness can be intoxicating, and that is always a good reason to read a book by him.  

Books: Arcadia By Iain Pears (2015)

As far back as his 1997 debut, author Iain Pears books are driven by the past. I remember when An Instance of the Fingerpost was released. It looked impressive, got some good reviews and was right up in my wheelhouse, a historical murder mystery. Alas, for reasons I truly can’t remember, I never got into the book.  I tried, and even kept the book for years in storage hoping to try it again, only I never have. ,

Now why Arcadia? I’m not sure, again. Perhaps it’s to appease my guilt at not reading any of his books, or maybe the premise seemed a bit interesting. Perhaps in the nearly 20 years since that books release, I’m reaching to mind more complex tales with deeper meanings. Perhaps it’s because this novel’s narrative, much like the works of David Mitchell, has stories that are nested within each other, with different storylines that are intertwined. Or that the books appeal lies in its jumble of genres (as the author noted its “a spy story, a fantasy, a historical novel, a romance, a mythology and a work of science fiction…a meditation on literature and narrative, or just a lighthearted romp”) and was curious to see how it all dovetailed together. My choices in reading, I guess, while sometimes predictable, are also sometimes chosen at random.

We start in 1960 with Henry Lytten, a retiring spy who –to counter his boredom- creates the land of Anterworld, a fictional universe designed to be much like the works of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, but not as complex and deep. In this world the Storyteller is the most significant person of all and students spend decades studying The Story, memorizing it, understanding its commentaries and giving out interpretations to the people. Then it shifts some 200 hundred years into the future where the brilliant Angela Meerson –a psychomathematician- is working for what is a third-rate scientific organization on some isolated island off the English coast. She has created a machine that is designed to transport people to parallel universes to alive overcrowding in this time. Instead, however, she’s discovered she’s invented a time machine. Much as today, Angela understands her device can be perverted into something horrible and fearing that corporate overlords will allow it to fall in the wrong hands, she transports herself –and all the prominent data on the device-back in time, arriving in 1937. After some difficulties with her arrival, Angela begins setting up her machine again, but on a smaller scale. But she is having difficulties creating and stabilizing her experimental universe. During the years, she’ll become friends with Henry Lytten and work for MI5 and when she discovers that Henry is creating this story, she sets up her device in his basement and using what is in Lytten’s mind, creates a pocket universe called Anterworld. But while all seems to be going as planned, a 15 year-old friend of Henry, Rosie stumbles upon the pergola in basement and steps through, and sets in motion something that Meerson never planned on.

Author Pears deliberately creates a complex novel that takes on old school fantasy and marries it with the popular dystopian tales of today and adds a John le Carré (who makes a cameo appearance in the book) like-spy story to set it in the real world of 1960. The plot reminds me of old style Doctor Who, as well, especially the villains of the future (think Planet of the Ood of recent years and for a lot of old school fans, some of the bad guys that pullulated the 1970s Doctor Who serials of Jon Pertwee).

Further research on this title, I found out the original intent of this story was about creating an app for IOS devices. In a piece he did for the British Guardian newspaper, called "Why You Need an App to Understand My Novel," Pears explains he wanted "to make my readers' lives as easy as possible by bypassing the limitations of the classic linear structure. Once you do that, it becomes possible to build a multi-stranded story … where each narrative is complete but is enhanced when mingled with all the others; to offer readers the chance to structure the book as best suits them."

He adds: “I undertook the project because I had reached the limit of my storytelling in book form and needed some new tools to get me to the next stage. I have always written novels that are complex structurally; in An Instance of the Fingerpost, published many years ago now, I told the same story four times from different points of view; The Dream of Scipio was three stories interleaved; while Stone's Fall was three stories told backwards. All worked, but all placed quite heavy demands on the readers’ patience by requiring them to remember details often inserted hundreds of pages before, or to jump centuries at a time at regular intervals. Not surprisingly, whatever structure I chose there were some who did not like it.”

I’ve not seen the app, and was unaware of its existence and this novel until I saw it at the bookstore and added to my queue at the library. So while the book does not fully have a linear aspect, I did find it fun to try and figure out how all the strands of the tale would eventually come together. It takes some time to understand, and does require the reader to remember certain details, but as something different, as something that seemed designed to challenge the readers notion of standard fiction, Arcadia does that wonderfully.