Off To Be The Wizard, Scott Meyer

May 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Off To Be The Wizard, Scott Meyer

Off To Be The Wizard, Scott Meyer

Most people who are familiar with Scott Meyer’s name know him as the author of the webcomic Basic Instructions. Off To Be The Wizard is Meyer’s first novel, a time-travel fantasy that leaves the heavy lifting to other writers and sets out to offer the reader nothing much beyond a good time. For the most part, Meyer succeeds at this goal.

I feel compelled to start by pointing out that this book is self-published, and Meyer might want to make use of a professional editing service for future books—it’s riddled with misspellings and missing punctuation, mostly in the form of quotation marks missing around chunks of dialogue, which drives me bananas. Also problematic, to me, is the hand-waving away of sketchy plot points within his premise—there are vague explanations for these, but they’re deeply unsatisfactory. I don’t demand my fantasy novels have a factual basis in general (because, hey, fantasy), but when you start explaining away some things, you have to explain them all away in order to maintain some internal consistency.

So here’s the deal: a 20-something geek working a dreary, dead-end job (unspecified past the dreary and dead-end parts) who spends his spare time poking around in various corners of the internet stumbles upon a buried file. Out of habit, he pokes around in the unguarded file and discovers that it contains his name and basic info. On a whim, he adds two inches to his height in the file, and is surprised to find himself growing two inches. This leads to more poking around, and Martin Banks soon discovers that the human race is basically nothing more than a giant computer construct. From there it only takes a little computer, er, wizardry to figure out how to teleport and how to time travel, two skills he figures out how to manage by developing crude apps for his smart phone. Martin is smart enough to realize that he may, in the future, need an escape plan in case whomever oversees this file figures out that he’s messed around with it.

Martin decides the best place to escape to is the past, and chooses a benign time in the Middle Ages in England as his escape destination, figuring he can pass off his new crude skills as magic and himself as a powerful wizard. He’s forced to put his plan into action quite soon when all of his monkeying around with his bank account lands him in trouble with the Treasury Department. Dressed in Slytherin robes, Martin teleports himself back in time, landing outside the village of Leadchurch which, unfortunately for him, already has a wizard in residence. So the locals aren’t exactly impressed. Been there, done that.

As a premise, this has loads of potential, and Meyer milks it pretty well. He also doesn’t waste any time setting it up, which has positives and negatives. On the one hand, there’s not much in the way of info-dumping here. On the other, there’s not a lot of detail—one page, Martin is running from the feds and the next he’s hit his escape app and landed outside Leadchurch. But on the plus side, the swift removal of his character to the Middle Ages allows Meyer to get down to business and have a little fun.

See, it turns out ALL the wizards in his new time period are actually time-travelers who’ve come from various decades. Like Martin, they chose to escape to the Middle Ages thinking it’d be easy-peasy to pass their ability to manipulate the file off as magic. Eventually, they all created a shell file to standardize their wizardry. Leadchurch’s Wizard-in-Residence, Philip, takes Martin under his wing, offers to train him up in the use of the shell program so that he can pass the Wizard Trial, and shows him how to live a modern lifestyle in the Middle Ages. So Martin gets some snazzy robes and a hat, makes a staff, and eats a lot of stew while learning to pull burritos out of his hat, fly, and transport his bed from home to his hut in Leadchurch. He also meets a clutch of other time-travelers/wizards and begins to make friends.

The set up gives Meyers a chance to make zillions of funny pop culture references about everything from The Simpsons to Apple computers to Pontiac Fieros, and Martin’s adventures in learning his new trade are genuinely amusing. The problem, which you’ve no doubt figured out by now, is that these people all need computers to access the shell and make their tricks actually work because in this world, wizardry is actually nothing more than a series of macros that are created to respond to vocal commands, and there was no electricity in the 1300’s to run the computers on. Meyer gets around this difficulty by letting them use the shell to create certain fields around themselves and objects to preserve a constant, which is actually fairly clever—they can create fields to maintain their body temperatures at a constant level of their choice, and, more important in the world-building sense, they can create fields that will allow their computer batteries to forever remain at a full charge. Because Meyers is working from the premise that all of life is basically a computer construct, he can get away with this—manipulate the program to get whatever you want, be it a burrito or fully-charged computer battery.

Where it all gets a bit hand-wavy is with the use of cell phones and cell phone apps to control things. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how their smart phones could actually work in the Middle Ages. Because they can carry them back and forth, and they can conserve the battery charge at a permanent level, but it’s a fact that my cell phone, full battery or not, will not work if I’m in a dead spot. And I can’t think of a bigger dead spot than the 1300′s. I finally just gave up and waved my hands too. It was easier than imagining cell phone towers dotting the landscape of medieval England, and Meyer at no point described how they might make this work.

Martin has more adventures once he becomes a fully-trained wizard, and Meyer leaves himself enough room that he could easily make this into a series if he’s so inclined. I found this a fast, entertaining read. It’s not going to win any points for style, but it’s told in an engaging, undemanding fashion. My biggest issue with it was that the characters never really bloomed: they each seemed to have an assigned character trait (Martin, for example, is impulsive, while Phillip is very steady and conservative) and didn’t ever grow or change along the way; the result is that they’re not really driving the plot, just walking through it. If he does carry on with these characters in a series, he’ll need to work on that. But he has a very promising foundation to build on.

Filed Under: Fantasy Tagged With: ,

The Seduction Hypothesis, Delphine Dryden

May 13, 2013 by 2 Comments
The Seduction Hypothesis, Delphine Dryden

The Seduction Hypothesis, Delphine Dryden

Based just on the blurb, Delphine Dryden’s The Seduction Hypothesis, should be right up my alley.

A bunch of nerds are headed to a convention by way of a road trip and there is geekery and costumes galore and…it just did not work for me.

I’ve been trying to think about why it didn’t work for me and I think it comes down to the fact that I simply did not buy into these characters. They just…didn’t feel real. I can often suspend my disbelief when it comes to the physical perfection of romance novel characters but I just couldn’t do it here–I know too many people who go to conventions and very, very, very few of them are the perfect physical specimens described in this book.

And this is not to buy into the fake geek fallacy–obviously, all kinds of people can be geeks. That goes without saying. But there are six in the group that goes to this con and the four that the narrative interacts directly with are Hottie McHottersons.  It seems a bit unlikely, especially since other convention attendees were described in ways that made it clear that not everyone there was a Hottie McHotterson and the snideness about an unfortunate costume on a “hefty” man really rubbed me the wrong way.

But anyways, on to the specifics of the book. Lindsay and Ben had been dating but broke up, somewhat messily a few months before BeastCon–which they’d committed to roadtripping to with a few of their friends. Ben though Lindsay had a crush on their friend Ivan, newly partnered with Cami.

Lindsay doesn’t actually have a crush on Ivan. What she has a crush on, if it can be called a crush, is the relationship dynamic between Ivan and Cami. It’s something she wants for herself and when she tried talking about her needs with Ben, he basically blew her off.  Lindsay, see, is interested in exploring BDSM and when she broached the subject by way of a comic she enjoyed she was subjected to a lecture about feminism and how that stuff is degrading, etc. (Not to get too personal, but I had a very similar experience with my former fiancé nearly two decades ago and that part really rang true to me.)

Once they get to the convention, Lindsay ends up working in the booth for the comic–as Sub Red, a submissive character who wears next to nothing and the pieces start to fall into place for Ben–and after some missteps and a hilarious trip to a very pink sex toy shop, they get their freak on and things seem to be working out.  Right up to the point where Lindsay decides that Ben isn’t serious and breaks things off with him, much to Ben’s chagrin. He then–of course–has to prove to her that he is serious.

This is a very, very brief synopsis of the book–the BDSM parts were clearly well-researched and felt authentic to me (although there was a bit about “official” positions and a reference to John Norman that just made my face go all squinchy) and I did like the way the characters used their words–which is important for all kinds of relationships.

I think, ultimately, that it all comes down to voice–the book was more than competently written, the characters were interesting  and did, despite all being Hottie McHottersons, seem realistic but I just couldn’t buy into it. There was something missing from this book for me and I think that if the voice had been more compelling, I would have been more willing to suspend my disbelief than I was.

Filed Under: Romance Tagged With: , ,

Guest Post: New Life, Bonnie Dee

May 9, 2013 by 7 Comments

Note from Natalie: Donna and I are absolutely delighted to have our very first guest post here at the Radish, by the inimitable Jessica from The Hypeless Romantic. Enjoy!

New Life, Bonnie Dee

New Life, Bonnie Dee

I had never heard of Bonnie Dee’s New Life, until a gift link appeared in my inbox, courtesy of a friend who thought I would like it. Well, she was right. New Life (Jan. 2013, self-published) is the love story of twenty-somethings Jason Reitmiller and Anna Stevens who meet in an office stairwell where new attorney Anna has taken teary refuge after a disastrous court performance. Jason, the building’s janitor, takes out his earbuds, turns off the floor buffer, and asks her if she’s ok. They have a sweet, funny, promising conversation, each aware of the other’s attractiveness. Later, they invent reasons to run into the each other — not easy, since Jason works second shift — and soon they are dating.

New Life has a somewhat unusual narrative structure: alternating first person perspectives. I happen to really enjoy first person, and this format gave me first person without the downside of never getting inside the other protagonist’ s head.  It’s not gimmicky: no replaying scenes from one point of view and then another, and I enjoyed viewing the development of the romance from two different, but complementary angles.

There’s no good romance without a good conflict or three, and you can probably guess at one of them: differing class status. Early on, Anna refers to Jason dehumanizingly as “the janitor” and fears her employers’ discovery of her growing friendship with him: “The last thing I wanted was for anyone to see me flirting with the janitor.” Although Jason works for a janitorial service, not directly for the law firm, Anna’s colleague orders Jason to do a menial chore that isn’t within his job description. And, later in the book, Anna hesitates to introduce him to her parents as her boyfriend: “Everything about him from his appearance to his job proclaimed ‘underachiever’— the biggest taboo possible in my parents’ book.”

Jason has internalized the low status of his occupation. He can’t seem to tell anyone he is dating a lawyer without seeming to brag, and, mirroring the incredulous response this apparent romantic mismatch elicits, he frequently asks himself “Why in the world would a successful career woman be interested in a janitor?” But Anna’s romantic interest in Jason has, at the same time, the opposite effect: it helps him to see himself in a more positive light, to feel good about himself. And now we’ve come to a second barrier closely connected to Jason’s class status: he experiences a host of cognitive and physical disabilities as a result of a traumatic brain injury he sustained in a car accident.

If having a hero who is a janitor isn’t unusual enough, here’s a list of the challenges Jason faces: aphasia (difficulty finding the right word), motor (stiff hip and leg), memory (both short and long term), impulse control, vomiting when anxious, depressive episodes, headache, fatigue, sensitivity to light and sound, and self-image issues due to scarring on face and torso. It’s not hard to see how these challenges generate smaller conflicts, for example, when Anna suggests a loud dance club for their first date, or when Jason is reluctant to disrobe during sex.

If this were a less ambitious book, Anna’s love would fix all of Jason’s health challenges, and his class status would amount to a temporary barrier, much like “surprise nobility” in a historical romance. But Jason’s accident occurred three years prior to the start of the novel, and his disabilities are unlikely to disappear.  Recovery is not the road his character needs to travel:

Anyway, that’s not the story I want to tell. Who really needs to hear about comas and thousands of hours of rehab? My story begins the night I was cleaning black shoe marks off the floor, which could be any night since my life became all about industrial cleaners and swabbing toilets. This particular night, I was buffing the corridor floor of the office building where I clean. I remember the Naked Farmers blasting through my headphones, when I saw a woman sitting in the stairwell, head down, shoulders hunched and shaking.

A third thing about Jason that is unusual in romance is, sadly, a potential deal breaker for many romance readers. He can behave badly. Without putting in a spoiler, I’ll just say quite badly, and you can picture both of my eyebrows raised as I do. I liked this, because the tendency to hold disabled heroes up as paragons of naive virtue is one not all romance authors have managed to avoid. Jason has little memory of his life prior to the accident (perhaps the least medically realistic feature of this portrayal of TBI, but very consistent with the literary genre), but discovers that he was not exactly a prince. One of the big challenges of recovery from TBI involves personal identity: is Jason the same person he was before the accident?  If not, which Jason is the “real” one? If he acts impulsively, is that “Jason” or “Jason’s disability”, and how would he know? Questions of personal identity, and especially the question of his moral character, preoccupy Jason:

I can admit when I’ve been a dick. I just can’t seem to stop doing crap like that. It’d be easy to call it part of the impulse control issues brain-damaged people are prone to, but my little sister, Katie, will tell you I’ve always been a douche.

Later, he wonders, “Maybe I’m a jerk at the core.” But New Life raises the question, not just for Jason but for Anna, and for the reader, what is anyone’s “core”? Is acting out of character a sign of our hidden “true self” or a deviation from it? What part of any of us are the unique circumstances, luck, and other aspects of our lives we don’t fully control?

Although Jason’s disabilities are made manifest throughout the text (and, actually, that is one criticism I would make: he rarely acts without being described in a way that brings to light the challenges he faces), the novel consistently normalizes them, or at least places them on a continuum with the challenges anyone without a disability might face. For example, in their first meeting, Jason evidences his halting speech pattern, while Anna describes how she lost track of what she was saying in court and babbles. Jason has his lists (“repatterning”), but Anna engages in “life mapping”.  Jason was only a 21 year old college student who had yet to shed his adolescent selfishness and lack of empathy when his life became focused on mere survival, then recovery. And although New Life is not marketed as “new adult”, the protagonists are younger than I tend to see in recent contemporary romance. They are both just starting out, experiencing their first intense adult romantic relationship, finding a career, and dealing with new financial and emotional independence from their parents. Although in some ways Jason’s journey is very unusual, in other ways his challenges are similar to Anna’s (especially apparent as Anna herself makes some impulsive and hurtful choices) and to any other 24 year old.

Eventually, the question of what part is core personality versus what part is brain injury becomes moot. Jason has to adapt, grow, and change if he wants to live a fully human life, which in a romance novel means developing a deep, meaningful romantic relationship. Many survivors of trauma would object to the way I framed the identity question in the last paragraph, insisting that identity is fundamentally relational, and that therefore rebuilding a self after trauma requires others to bear witness and to actively co-construct  a new narrative.  The way Jason’s relationship with Anna helps him grow in his other relationships — family, friends — is a testament to that idea.

Although there is a fairly high amount of conflict compared to happy moments in New Life, I think the author does a good job showing the attraction Anna feels to Jason.  If the development of her romantic feelings aren’t portrayed as fully as I might have liked, that may be because in general the character of Anna takes a back seat to Jason. The first chapter gives hints of some of Anna’s solo struggles: imposter syndrome, the worry that she’s become a lawyer merely to get to the next rung on the ladder of her parents’ expectations, etc., but none of these bear fruit, and as a result, her character was developed almost entirely in terms of her relationship with Jason. Because I didn’t have as clear a sense as I wanted of who Anna is, I did feel that the HEA while believable, was not, as Jo Beverley once put it at a conference, triumphant.

But New Life was a very rewarding read, with interesting facets I have not even touched upon in this already too long review. True, New Life is not a light fluffy romance. And although the bedroom door stays open, those who seek a lot of sex scenes in their romance should look elsewhere. I often think there is a line of “realism” romances just can’t cross and still work as romances. New Life pushed this line further than I would have thought possible.

Filed Under: Guest Post, Romance Tagged With: , , , ,

The Doomsday Book, Connie Willis

May 7, 2013 by 4 Comments
The Doomsday Book, Connie Willis

The Doomsday Book, Connie Willis

I came somewhat late to Connie Willis.  I don’t remember exactly who first recommended her to me, but it wasn’t that long ago—maybe 15 years—and I’ve been trying to catch up on her back list ever since.  I’ve always given The Doomsday Book a miss in the past because one, it’s reeeeallllly  long and two, The Black Death didn’t sound like a cheerful subject to me and I don’t think my brain was in the right place to read it.

I’m not sure why I decided to read it now.  But holy cow, what an amazing book.  It is long, but it doesn’t feel long.  And I can confirm that if you read it while the movie Chicago is playing in the background, you might have some very odd dreams about flappers during the 1300’s.

The Doomsday Book concerns two pandemics: The Black Death that swept through Europe and finally into England in 1348 and a flu pandemic hitting Oxford in “real time” (which is really in the future).  They meet in the person of Kivrin, an Oxford Historian set to travel to The Middle Ages and 1320.  Unbeknownst to her, Kivrin has been exposed to an influenza virus right before travelling, and she arrives disoriented, with a high fever, and other flu symptoms.  She is found by a “contemp” (a person contemporary to that time period) and taken to the local manor house, where the lady of the manor, Eliwys, her miserable mother-in-law Imeyne, and the local priest, Roche, tend to her.  Kivrin eventually recovers, but in her delirium during her fever she has completely blown her cover story, so she feigns amnesia in order to have a chance to get back to her drop.  If she can remember where it’s at.  What she doesn’t realize is that there’s been a terrible error on the other side and that she has not been sent to 1320, but to 1348 and that the plague is about to sweep through England.

Meanwhile, the tech in charge of Kivrin’s drop has come down with this new strain of influenza and the entire city of Oxford has been placed under quarantine.  Just before succumbing to the flu, Badri tells Mr. Dunworthy, Kivrin’s mentor, that something “is wrong” with the drop.  As the local authorities and medical staff work frantically to prevent Bahdri’s flu from spreading, Dunworthy obsesses about Kivrin’s drop– and Kivrin– when it becomes clear she has been exposed to the influenza virus that is now killing people in Oxford.  Previously worried about her being set upon by thieves or cutthroats, Dunworthy is now concerned that she is ill during a period of history where medical intervention consisted of ineffective herbs and the application of leeches, a time when people routinely died from infected scratches.

It takes a good deal of skill to stitch together two separate narrative strands occurring so far apart in time without showing the seams, and Willis does a great job of fitting the two narratives together seamlessly.  This is helped by a fundamental feature of time-travel: while Kivrin has no idea what’s going on in the Oxford she left behind, the people there certainly know exactly what’s going on in 1348.  Still, it’s crucial that the Kivrin character be someone capable of holding a nearly 600 page novel together across 700 years.  She has to be heroic, yes, but she also has to be someone others care about and whom the reader cares about.  She’s all that and more.

What I found most fascinating about this book is that Willis makes it clear that despite all the technological advantages and all the medical advances of the future, people themselves have not fundamentally changed much.  They don’t follow instructions , they’re selfish, and they’re always looking to assign blame for problems to anyone but themselves, but they’re also selfless, kind, and heroic.  There are parallel characters working throughout the two narratives that help tie them together—for example, the awful Imeyne who does nothing but assign blame, criticize, pray, and consider her own needs finds a counterpart in a contemporary woman who selfishly harangues the college staff about trivial matters when she’s not depressing flu patients by reading them gloomy passages from the Bible or smothering her more than capable son with what she sees as motherly love.  Dr. Mary Ahren  devotes all of her time to her patients with no regard for her own health, just as Roche, the priest, tends to his flock.  Mr. Gilchrist, the acting head of Brasenose College, takes steps to protect his own butt with no regard for anyone else’s needs, just as the majority of priests during the black death fled from it to protect themselves (the comparisons between the Bishop’s delegates and Father Roche make a powerful statement about what constitutes a true Christian without Willis ever having to connect those dots).  Nope.  People don’t change.

But that’s not a bad thing because ultimately what you learn here is that despite the odd bad apple, people are fundamentally decent.  Everyone rallies to help Dunworthy when it becomes clear that Kirvin is in trouble—rules are bent or circumvented, helpful tech people are scrounged out of nowhere—just as the people of the manor rally to help Kirvin in her illness, despite being suspicious of her.  And Kirvin, whom I’m sure no one would blame for fleeing once it becomes clear to her that she’s in the wrong time period, stays and does what she can to help these people she’s become attached to.  Watching the plague devastate the village and the characters you’ve come to admire is like being repeatedly punched in the gut—we already know the outcome, know Kirvin’s meager medical knowledge is going to provide palliative relief at best.  The end of this book is both heartbreaking and uplifting, somehow.  I challenge you to not find your eyes welling up toward the end.

Willis spent five years researching this book, and the sections set during the Middle Ages come alive.  Everyday life 700 years ago wasn’t all that different: mothers-in-law still criticized, children still whined and got excited about Christmas, edible food and potable water still had to be found. People were born, people died.  Only the trappings are different now—we drive instead of riding horseback, our water comes from a tap or out of a plastic bottle and not hauled by bucket out of a well, we rely on doctors instead of folklore when we’re ill.  We face medical and spiritual crises differently, but we still face them regularly.

The more contemporary sections of The Doomsday Book are a little more problematic, but only because the book, written 20 years ago, seems kind of dated, which is a weird, weird thing to say about a book set in the future.  But in our current age of instant communication, it seems odd that these people are struggling with landlines, even if they are landlines with video features, and not using cellphones, twitter, facebook, or email to communicate with both each other and the general population.  At one point, a character is putting up placards about the flu and I kept thinking “why don’t they just use the internet?”  In a world where computers are used to facilitate time travel and technology is able to allow translator implants in the brain, it seems a bit wrong that there are no cell phones or internet.  But it’s hardly Willis’ fault that our current communications tech has outstripped her book.  And that doesn’t make the book any less readable or less enjoyable.

I’m sorry I waited so long to read this.   The Doomsday Book won virtually every major SFF award in 1993, and with good reason.  If you’re like me and hesitant to read something that looks like it’s going to be depressing, take a leap of faith.  This is a great book.

Filed Under: Science Fiction Tagged With: , ,

How to Suppress Women’s Writing, Joanna Russ

May 6, 2013 by 2 Comments
How to Suppress Women's Writing, Joanna Russ

How to Suppress Women’s Writing, Joanna Russ

As I mentioned on Friday, some of my weekend reading was devoted to filling a large gap in my reading, Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing.

Two things struck me as I read this book.

First: this is a magnificent accounting of how writing by women is suppressed using a variety of different techniques–many of Russ’s ideas seem to have permeated feminist discourse in general, so there wasn’t a whole lot that was new to me. So that’s good. Less good is that this year marks the 30th anniversary of its publications and why aren’t we making a big deal of this?

Second: wow, things really haven’t changed much, have they? I was struck by this as I read Russ’s account of Samuel R. Delany’s 1961 revelation about the difference between the pockets in men’s and women’s clothing.  Kyle Cassidy wrote about pockets just last week.

It is 2013 and we are still talking about pockets.  (I direct everyone’s attention to this nifty post about historical pockets.)

How to Suppress Women’s Writing is such an illuminating text–Russ very clearly lays out exactly how women’s writing is discounted and uses many examples. I was a bit worried that this book was going to be full of complicated academic jargon, but it’s not. It’s very readable and I really like the voice used throughout.  It’s conversational but authoritative without being patronizing–which is a difficult thing to pull off, in my opinion. (I might have a thing about being patronized.)

One thing that is central to this book is the idea of writing on the edges and in the margins: “Get out of the ‘major’ genres and into the ‘minor’ ones. Stay on the periphery of culture” (100). As I read this part, I could help but think of the romance genre and how, despite it being such a major player in terms of making money in publishing, it is very much on the edge of culture and how, to so many, there’s something inherently trivial and amusing about it.  Just throwing that out there.

I am so glad that I decided to pick up this book, so very glad. It is such an important piece of criticism and, I think, one of it’s main strengths is the fact that it helped me to clarify my own thinking–I can see going back to this book several more times, possibly with a highlighter or two.

She didn’t write it.
She wrote it, but she shouldn’t have.
She wrote it, but look what she wrote about.
She wrote it, but “she” isn’t really an artist and “it” isn’t really serious, of the right genre–i.e., really art.
She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it.
She wrote it, but it’s only interesting/included in the canon for one, limited reason.
She wrote it, but there are very few of her. (76)

Indeed. Let me end this review with another quotation:

Well, as in cells and sprouts, growth occurs only at the edges of something. From the peripheries, as Klein says. But even to see the peripheries, it seems, you have to be on them, or by an act of re-vision, place yourself there. Refining and strengthening the judgments you already have will get you nowhere. You must break set. It’s either that or remain at the center. The dead, dead center. (132)

Filed Under: Non-fiction Tagged With: , , , ,

Brat Farrar, Josephine Tey

May 2, 2013 by 14 Comments
Brat Farrar

Brat Farrar

So having reread The Franchise Affair recently, and still unable to locate my copy of The Daughter of Time, I turned to one of my other Josephine Tey books recently, Brat Farrar, but in this case, the question that I went into this reread with was wondering if it would still feel as relevant as the Franchise Affair did to me.  Because Brat is a very different kind of book, which is in my opinion one of the marvelous things about Tey’s work—there’s no “Tey formula” to them.  If you’re new to her, you’ll find that you’re never going to know what you’ll be getting.  It’s like a present.  I like presents.

So does Brat Farrar hold up?  I think thematically the larger questions of morality and the whole “ends justify the means” stuff certainly holds up just fine, and I’ll discuss those themes in a bit.  But the writing here feels somewhat more old-fashioned, although the book is still very readable—I gulped it right down, just like I did the first time I read it.  One thing I did notice this time that I apparently missed on my first reading was that the setting seems a bit off, and it took me a bit to put my finger on what the issue was.

The novel is not really anchored in any specific time that Tey points out, but it presumably takes place after WWII because there are references to people being “bombed out”.  So given its publication date (1949), one just assumes it’s set somewhere in that vicinity in time.  But it somehow feels like it’s set more interwar, and there are a few iffy timeline items as a result.  Given that the lynchpin events of the book—the disappearance and presumed suicide of Patrick Ashby following the death of his parents in a plane crash off the coast—take place some eight plus years earlier,that puts those events right smack in the middle of The Blitz.  I’ll leave it to you to work out the problem with that and just say that there’s no sign here that the war ever happened—no mention of rationing, of the post-war issues Britain faced.  It’s a little timey-wimey, to quote The Doctor.

The story itself is one of those things that seems so implausible that it’s actually believable: a young orphan named Brat Farrar is mistaken for Simon Ashby by Ashby’s cousin Alec Loding on a London street.  Loding, a down-at-heel actor, realizes that Brat bears a striking resemblance to Simon, who is due to inherit his parents’ estate in a few weeks upon his 21st birthday, and thus to Simon’s dead twin Patrick, who presumably committed suicide and whose body was never recovered from the sea.  A plot is hatched for Loding to tutor Brat in everything Ashby, for Brat to collect what would have been Patrick’s inheritance (as the older twin), and to split the money after.  Brat refuses the offer initially, but eventually gives in upon learning that part of his inheritance is Latchett’s, a stud farm.  Brat loves horses.  From there it’s a matter of convincing his “brother” and his “sisters” and his “aunt”, as well as the family solicitor, that he is indeed the missing and presumed dead Patrick Ashby.

If you’re wondering where the mystery is, well, the mystery is that Brat eventually becomes convinced that Patrick Ashby did not commit suicide, but was murdered.  This naturally puts him in a bit of a quandary, because he obviously can’t voice his suspicions to anyone because he’s supposed to be Patrick Ashby.  It’s not like he can go to the police and say “I suspect X killed me.”—to expose the truth about himself would most certainly land him in the quod.  So he needs to continue his deception, which he grows increasingly uncomfortable with, in order to unmask a killer.

It’s a pretty little ethical dilemma that takes the usual imposter trope and gives it a good shake.  Normally, we don’t get to see things from the imposter’s point-of-view in detective fiction.  We get lead up the path by them just like the great detective and assume that they are who they say they are right up until the point where the detective says “But you’re not really Old Murder Victim’s Nephew, are you?  You’re really X, impersonating the nephew in order to get his inheritance!”  But here, we know right from the get go that Brat is not Patrick Ashby.  So it’s not a matter of “is he or isn’t he?” but one of “will he get away with it or won’t he?” followed by “will he keep this up or won’t he?” and a host of other questions.  Seeing the action from his point of view allows us to develop some empathy for the character—a young man, a foundling, with no family of his own and no real prospects or talents save his amazing skill with horses, is suddenly impersonating a much-loved young man with a huge family, a trust fund, and a horse farm.  Talk about your presents.  It’s easy to understand why Brat agrees to Loding’s scam, it really is.

Plus he’s just so charming.  Tey is a whiz at building a character.  I remember the first time I read this that I wanted him to get away with it, to get the money and the farm and live happily ever after.  I began devising these complicated scenarios in my head while I was reading that would allow him to actually be Patrick Ashby so that he wouldn’t be stealing Simon’s inheritance, but taking what was rightfully his.  I was convinced there was some sort of double-double twist to the whole thing, I wanted it so badly.  And I found myself doing the exact same thing this time.  You know he can’t be Patrick, that he’s not him, but you want him to be.  Brat is really a very awesome guy for a liar and a con artist.

And his moral dilemma is tricky.  As he enters into the Ashby family situation, he feels a real affinity for the siblings and their guardian, Aunt Bee, and he comes to regret what he’s doing because he knows that if they find out the truth that the pain they experienced over Patrick’s suicide, barely suppressed for 8 years, will all come back to the surface, and stronger.  He does not want to hurt these people.  But to continue with his impersonation will hurt them financially as well as emotionally.  And when he uncovers the truth about Patrick’s death, they will be hurt even more.  So it becomes a matter of which pain, and how much, he has to inflict upon them, because no matter what, his agreeing to enter into the deception sets up a load of hurt down the road.  So he has to ask himself if it’s better to continue deceiving these nice people and letting them believe the beloved Patrick is alive while he tries to find out what happened to the real Patrick, or expose himself as a fraud, and he then has to decide whether to expose the truth about Patrick, and thus himself, or whether to allow someone else to get away with murder.  Do the ends justify the means?  Are they better off thinking Patrick is alive or knowing for certain that he’s not, and if it’s the latter, is it right that he should continue to let them think Patrick is alive while he finds and exposes the truth?

It’s all very well done: the Ashby family is so real and carefully drawn that you feel like you’ve sat down to dinner with them, and it’s their disbelief, then hope, then belief that Brat really is Patrick that helps build the suspense.  I’m trying to think of the best way to explain how the suspense in this book follows several paths at once—there’s the “will Brat get away with it?” trail and how he risks being discovered in his deception the entire way through.  Then there’s the “will Brat figure out what really happened to Patrick?” trail, closely followed by the “Will Brat realize who did this?” trail and “Now Brat is in danger!” trail, not to mention the “How will he solve his problem?” trail and the “Is this the right choice morally and ethically?” trail.  It’s very layered, and deceptively complex.

From where I’m sitting, that makes Brat Farrar utterly delicious.

Filed Under: Classics, Mystery Tagged With: , ,

Over the Borderline: More on Genre, Gender, and Reviews

May 1, 2013 by 14 Comments

As I read some of the responses to my post last week, I kept thinking about boundary policing, moving goalposts, and gaslighting.

Which is an awful lot for a thesis statement, so let me break it up a bit. In the form of a simulated conversation!

Group A: Hey, we really like $thing! It would be awesome if more people were talking about $thing!
Group B: We really like $thing, too! And we’re talking about it over here!
Group A: You’re talking about it wrong.
Group B: …

That’s boundary policing–this is so Group B knows that they are viewed with a certain degree of scorn or low esteem by Group A.

Now, Group A will start to move the goalposts around–this is to ensure that Group A will never have to concede common ground to Group B.

Group B: What do you mean, we’re talking about it wrong? We have space devoted for it and we are certainly talking about the same $thing because we have data to prove it!
Group A: Well, maybe, but you also talk about those other things that we’re not interested in.
Group B: Can’t we talk about both?
Group A: You also don’t talk about $thing enough.
Group B: We talk about it as much as those other places do!
Group A: Well, maybe, but you’re just not doing it like we do, so it doesn’t count.
Group B: …

And finally, it’s time for Group A to attempt to gaslight Group B–the point of this is to make Group B doubt themselves and, eventually, to go away (or stop talking or whatever).

Group A: We never heard of you, you aren’t part of us.
Group B: But we are definitely talking about $thing, maybe you should listen to what we have to say?
Group A: Don’t you know that we get to decide these things?
Group B: But we thought you wanted to have more people talking about $thing?
Group A: Why did you think we’d ever listen to you? That’s wishful thinking. You’re very confused and possibly deluded.
Group B: …

It was, let me say, interesting to have some of this pointed in my direction. It was not something I’d ever really experienced directly although I had seen it happen to other people many times. There were a lot of people who didn’t do this and thank goodness for them because it gave me hope that we might actually be able to see some change. Someday.

And I guess that’s part of the reason my eyebrows damn near jumped off my face when I read Sarah’s guest post over at Fantasy Cafe last weekend in which she (rough paraphrase) claimed that there is too much emphasis put on people’s plumbing and not enough on the quality of the writing and that she believes people to be mixed up and confused. The authoritative nature of her statements is perplexing to me; it seems to imply that she believes her perspective to be, I don’t know, the one true perspective? I found her argument to be essentialist  and reductive and therefore fundamentally flawed and unsupportable.

This conversation about review coverage and gender parity isn’t about discrimination against specific authors–it’s about systemic discrimination. In short: the game is rigged and it needs to be un-rigged.

Note: It is not my intent to erase genderqueer or genderfluid individuals from this discussion; it’s just that I don’t think I ever reviewed books by anyone who identified in either of those ways during my tenure at RT–it should go without saying, I hope, that I believe books written by people who identify as genderqueer or genderfluid should be given the same degree of consideration.

Let me describe the process I used to decide which books to cover in RT.

I’d make a list for the current month–based on what I had received as well as what I knew was coming out but didn’t have yet. I usually tried for 10 to 12 books a month (summer months always had more books than winter ones; January was always the absolute worst to fill).

Some titles would automatically make it in–part of an ongoing series, an author whose prior work I liked, a title I’d heard a lot of good things about, that sort of thing. I would usually have, at the end of this process anywhere from 3 to 6 books for 1 or 2 remaining slots. And do you know what I did then? I looked at the books by women first. If it looked like a readable and reasonably entertaining book and something that I thought that the readers of the magazine would like, it would get one of the remaining slots. If it didn’t look like any of those things, I set it aside and went on to the next book–almost always prioritizing books by women over those by men (the reasons for this I will explain shortly).

The result was that I was able to run a fairly balanced section most of the time with minimal effort on my part. I often opted not to cover some books written by men because I knew they had a high enough profile that they would get sufficient coverage elsewhere or that their fan base was established and large and not being reviewed in RT would not be a detriment.

I await accusations of affirmative action and tokenism here. Also exhortations to think of the men.

The thing is this: I knew that most of the books by men I was choosing to exclude would still be covered elsewhere. That there would be plenty of reviews on Amazon to buoy them up in the search algorithm, that they wouldn’t be shy about promoting their work in public spaces online (see Seanan McGuire’s response to claims of over-promotion during the Hugo nomination period). I wasn’t so sure about the books by women–especially the debut titles. Sales of an author’s debut book can make or break their career and it seemed like making sure that women were equally represented overall was the right thing to do.

One thing that’s important to keep in mind is that when women talk just 50% of the time, they are often perceived as “dominating” the conversation–I know I’ve had this happen to me at various points in my life. I’ve been interrupted when talking by men and when I attempt to finish my thought or redirect back to my point, I’ve been told to be quiet and let the man have his say. Who gets to talk is very much an expression of who has the power–and in Western society and culture, men have that power by default:

It appears that men generally talk more in formal, public contexts where informative and persuasive talk is highly valued, and where talk is generally the prerogative of those with some societal status and has the potential for increasing that status. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to contribute in private, informal interactions, where talk more often functions to maintain relationships, and in other situations where for various reasons they feel socially confident. (also from Language as Prejudice)

As I read  Juliet McKenna’s post over at Fantasy Cafe earlier this week this point was really hammered this home for me–McKenna points out that male authors get the bulk of the promotion (i.e., more opportunity to “talk”) from publishers and this helps to constrain or limit what folks in the industry like to call “discoverability”:

Lack of visibility by way of reviews matters because that’s the information which so often guides the non-fan book-seller making disproportionately influential choices.

Women write all kinds of speculative fiction and a lot of it’s damned good. And yet. And yet. When a bookstore decides to sell promotional space based on the popularity of Game of Thrones, the only books that publishers feel are worthy of promotional dollars are those written by men? That doesn’t seem quite right to me.

Women writers of speculative fiction find themselves open to accusations of writing too much about feelings and having too much romance–and that these things are actively detrimental to speculative fiction (why is this? and “I don’t like it” is not an acceptable answer; there’s lots of stuff I don’t like and I wouldn’t necessarily call it detrimental to an entire genre). I’ve seen this in reviews of books by women–books where, if the author were a man (or if they simply appear to be male), the romantic plot would have been described as “nuanced” and possibly also as “subtle” or “sublime”–but since the book was written by a woman, the fact that there’s a romantic plot is suddenly a flaw.

Obviously, readers have preferences. I myself have preferences. But when a preference is cited repeatedly as a fact, as something intrinsic to works written by one group or another, then it’s a problem (there’s that pesky essentialism again!). And it seems to me that the very idea that it is a rational decision to promote and review books written by men over those written by women is a huge problem–it’s all very circular, in my opinion. If male authors of speculative fiction receive the bulk of promotional space and funds, is it any surprise that their books tend to sell better?

Finally, this essay by Foz Meadows really talks about this tension better than I can–she starts from a different place than I do–she’s talking about escapism, but her thoughts on privilege are well worth reading:

…there’s a very real sense in which a default policy of abstinence from the critical analysis of narrative is itself a product of privilege: of being afforded so many positive representations of oneself in so many different media that negative portrayals are never demonstrative of authorial prejudice towards, ignorance of or disinterest in the type of person you are, because the variety of portrayals on offer is itself proof of the fact that everyone likes, knows and is interested in you – or at least, in your attention.

Male writers may not necessarily notice that they’re getting a higher level of service than the women with the same publisher–or it may be dismissed with a glib, “Well, my sales are better.” And they may very well be, but one of the reasons for that may be the higher level of investment by the publisher–in other words, a self-perpetuating cycle. And publishers are definitely in business to make money and the P&L rules many (but not all) of the decisions made–much, I think, to the detriment of marginalized voices. Large companies–be they publishers,manufacturers, whatever–have very little incentive to invest in areas where they don’t feel as if they’ll make a profit. Which I believe is a loss for everyone.

Additionally, I’ve been following the discussion around Wikipedia’s “American Novelist” category and the inclusion and exclusion of women from it.  According to some of Wikipedia’s editors (all male), American writers are men and American women writers should be shunted into their own category, a subset of the larger one.  There are many rules they’re using to justify this action, yet another case of boundary policing.

The act of moving women writers into a subcategory reduces their overall visibility–how many people, looking for an American author to read and using Wikipedia as a resource (hey, it could happen) will stop on the first page? I know that when I’m using WIkipedia that if there are ten million subcategories and hardly anything listed in the main category I stop poking around on Wikipedia and go elsewhere. (Of course, this is because I usually don’t take Wikipedia as a serious source of information except in the most general sort of way.)

Take a look at what Jess Zimmerman said on Twitter about Wikipedia–I think this is applicable to the review gap as well:

Men are people. Women are a subcategory of people. Men are writers. Women are a subcategory of writers.

As long as men’s voices seen as intrinsically more authoritative than women’s voices, as long as they receive greater attention from review outlets and other mass media, then this is always going to be a problem and I think the only way to begin to solve it is to take an active part in talking about it and proposing ways to make women, their voices, and their work more visible.

Also exacerbating the problem is the fact that women are often dismissed for being emotional when they talk about this–in my gaslighting example at the beginning of this essay, I chose the words “confused” and “wishful thinking” on purpose–those were both words or phrases that were being applied to me when I published my post with RT’s data last week. Despite the fact that I had data and provided it to whoever wished to look at it, I was still perceived as being “emotional”. I would like to suggest that getting emotional when one’s voice isn’t heard actually isn’t a bad thing–it should be an indication that there’s a problem.

I believe that these discussions around gender parity in reviews are one way of disrupting the cycle of invisible women. To ask that venues be a bit more thoughtful in their process of assigning titles for review and to ask that more women reviewers be recruited when there are openings. For editors to be vigilant around reviews that talk about what the reviewer wishes the author wrote as opposed to what the author actually did write.

This is a big, complicated puzzle and there aren’t any easy answers. But there are some initial steps that we can all take in order to begin to address this inequality.

Madonna Does Not Want to Wear Your Ridiculous Hat

Madonna Does Not Want to Wear Your Ridiculous Hat

Filed Under: Opinion Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Sidelines, Lois McMaster Bujold

April 30, 2013 by 5 Comments
Sidelines

Sidelines

As I mentioned last week, I recently picked up a copy of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sidelines, her collection of speeches, essays, travel notes, and other bits and pieces she’s collected over the past 30 years or so.  While I pretty much mined the genre stuff out of the book for the post linked to above, there’s still plenty of interesting stuff in there, and while I think this book will appeal primarily to the Bujold Compleatist, anyone interested in writing or in a peek inside how a writer works will likely enjoy this as well, with one caveat: if you’re not familiar with Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan Saga, you’ll miss a lot of the nuance in what she’s saying.

The book is divided into easy, obvious sections: there are convention and other speeches where Bujold was the Guest of Honor or an award winner, and there are essays written for a variety of purposes—Hugo nominations, blog posts for Tor or Eos or the Baen Bar, local papers, etc., afterwards and forwards to omnibus editions of the books, travel notes covering three overseas trips (to Russia, Croatia, and Finland), and a few other things, such as the suggested reading order for the Vorkosigan books.  Everything is clearly labeled, and every piece comes with a paragraph or more of commentary to put that particular speech or essay into some context for the reader.  If you own the omnibus editions to the Vorkosigan books, you likely have a whole section of this book; likewise, Bujold, like any wily writer, reuses parts of previous writings in newer ones, both to save herself some time and because, hey, if she said it well once, it likely bears repeating.  So there is some overlap among the selections, a fact she herself notes from time to time.

As a Vorkosigan nut, I was mostly interested in those pieces that talked about Miles and the Miles books, and there are a lot of them.  Bujold ranges freely over her early years when she first began writing that series, how she overshot the ending of Shards of Honor and had to go back and find its ending, how she knew Aral and Cordelia would have a crippled child, and how her basic premise for dealing with the series has always been to make sure each book could stand independently to a great extent, and how her plans for each book basically involved her asking herself “what’s the worst thing I could do to this character?” and then doing it to him.  It’s an interesting glimpse into how she works.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, she also spends a great deal of time talking about Falling Free, which is set in the same world as the Vorkosigan books but takes place much earlier.  Bujold seems very fond of the quaddies, of Leo Graf, and of this particular book, which was her effort to make science the hero of the story instead of the villain and to explore the consequences of what happens to obsolete technology when that technology is bioengineered humans.  There is an entire essay devoted to Falling Free, a book I have not read for some years.  I’ll be rectifying that soon now that I have a new way to think about it.

Fans of her Sharing Knife and Chalion books will also find much to enjoy here, particularly her musings on how she set out to tackle the romance genre in the Sharing Knife books—there is, in fact, a set of six short essays she wrote for Eos on these books that explore the various themes in them and what she was hoping to achieve when she wrote them that I found both informative and interesting, and I should note that I have not read that series.

Of somewhat less interest were the travel notes—Bujold herself likens their inclusion to “looking at someone’s travel slides” and to some extent, that’s pretty accurate, although she clearly enjoyed her travels and glimpses into other cultures.  But they tend to be a matter of “They took me here, I did a signing, there were translation issues, I ate a meal, I did a signing, I gave a talk, I was carried off by fans, I fell into bed and got up and did it all again the next day” which, you know, if you’ve never been there, yeah.  Someone else’s vacation pictures.

Mostly, though, what I really enjoyed were her thoughts on writing, on genre issues, and what books are: “The book is not an object on the table; it is an event in the reader’s mind.”  True, and it leads to this thought she has later in the same essay:

“As a writer, I am keenly aware that I am not in control of half my art. The exact same text one reader finds exciting, subtle, nuanced, funny and moving, the next reader may find boring, dull, or unmemorable.”

That particular quote made me think very hard about what it means to be a reviewer, actually—not to get all sidetracked from what I’m supposed to be doing here, which is telling you if checking out Sidelines is worth your time, but my dilemma has always been just how much of my own prejudices and preferences should go into a review.  One of the things I like about writing here is that I can interject my own likes and dislikes and warn the reader of my own biases (note: I hate elves in books).  I try to be objective, I try to address expectations.  But unless you know me and what I like and don’t like, what I find interesting (like a 350 page book on how one writer I happen to admire a lot approaches her craft) you may in fact find mind-numbing.  And it really can’t be helped.

That said, I really did enjoy reading this—I found it enlightening in a lot of ways, and on a lot of different levels, and her comments about genre, about valuing any book based solely on its “social utility” (her words), and about how genres can be made to work together were especially thought-provoking.  But I’m a rhetorician by training, and this kind of rhetorical and narrative examination fascinates me.  If you’re not interested in that kind of thing, or in Miles Vorkosigan, then you might find this far less interesting than I did.

Filed Under: Non-fiction Tagged With: , ,

After Hours, Cara McKenna

April 29, 2013 by 4 Comments
After Hours, Cara McKenna

After Hours, Cara McKenna

Cara McKenna has a reputation for writing stories with characters that one wouldn’t normally see in romance and After Hours–much like her previous book, Willing Victim–delivers on that front.

Erin Coffey is a newly minted LPN and starting a new job at a lockdown ward at Larkhaven Psychiatric Hospital in an area of Michigan I’d describe at Flint-ish. As someone from a small-ish town halfway between Detroit and Flint, I really appreciated the attention to detail, even though McKenna got a tiny detail of Hamtramck geography wrong (it and Highland Park are completely surrounded by Detroit not on the edge). Carbonated cola is referred to as “pop” throughout and there’s a paczki reference, too. It’s the little details that make the setting for me.

On Erin’s first day on the ward, she meets Kelly Robak, an orderly. Their schedules line up so they’ll be working pretty closely together–Erin will be relying on Kelly’s calm presence and muscle to keep her safe from patients who are unstable and who can be physically intimidating.

From the first time they meet, there’s a little something between them, as Kelly puts it. Erin is fascinated by Kelly from the beginning, even though she is also a bit scared of him. He’s reminiscent of all the bad idea boyfriends both her mother and younger sister have had over the years and Erin isn’t sure she wants to go down that road herself.

Eventually, her interest in Kelly and his blunt statement that he wants what he wants when he wants it outside of work overcome her reluctance to get involved and do they ever get involved–the sex scenes are scorching hot and absolutely essential to the growing closeness between Kelly and Erin. Even though Kelly is domineering in many ways, he’s also very self-aware and hurting or taking advantage of Erin is simply not something he’s interested in doing. In fact, by being there for Erin and being willing to take care of her, she’s able to relax from a lifetime of caring for her various family members and enjoy being taken care of instead.

Kelly admires Erin’s scrappiness and he comes to enjoy the fact that she gives as good as she gets–both in and out of the bedroom. And even when Erin transgresses against him, he’s still there for her when she needs him–and it is, in fact, his presence in the face of her transgression that proves to Erin that Kelly can be depended upon (this is contrasted with that father of Erin’s niece–he’s noticeably absent at this critical point in the story). Kelly might be a domineering ass but he’s also kind and thoughtful.

This book ends on a happy for now note–which feels entirely appropriate considering the short period of time that elapses between the beginning and end (a matter of weeks). I like that it’s not a happily ever after ending–that feels like too much at this point in their relationship, considering that they’re really only starting to consider actual couplehood at the end of the book. No instalove for these two emotionally distant characters who can really only open up around each other.

As I read this book, I felt like I knew these people. Or people like them. I saw echoes of my friends and family and their various struggles in all the characters in this books and I really liked that.  McKenna really has a way ramping up the emotional and sensual intensity in her books in a way that I find very believable and authentic. I find that novels about people who come from the kind of background as both Kelly and Erin do to be few and far between, so I’m really happy that this book exists.

That’s one thing I really love about digital publishing–that books that are perceived to be niche or marginal for whatever reason can be made available and then, hopefully, find their audience. Of course, this assumes access to devices which can read digital publications which can be problematic in some communities, but the way digital-first can help authors and books find audiences is so powerful and important.

Jackie C. Horne at Romance Novels for Feminists has a really great review of this book, too. I found myself highlighting a lot of the passages she cites–a lot of them really resonated with me.

Filed Under: Romance Tagged With: , , ,

A Man Lay Dead, Ngaio Marsh

April 23, 2013 by Leave a Comment
A Man Lay Dead

A Man Lay Dead

In hindsight, rereading Ngaio Marsh’s A Man Lay Dead directly after Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair might have been a mistake.  Stylistically, the two do not compare: Tey is by far the better stylist, and her characters have much more depth than Marsh’s.

It’s a bit of an unfair comparison, though, for several reasons.  First, A Man Lay Dead was Marsh’s first novel, whereas Tey was well into her career with The Franchise Affair.  And they’re two distinctly different types of mysteries, and written at different points during that time known as The Golden Age—the Marsh book is over 10 years earlier, at a time when Agatha Christie was in full reign over the British Crime novel.  So it’s really very much an apples and oranges kind of comparison.  Still, it’s a fact that the far more sparse Marsh left me wanting, following on the heels of the Tey as it did.  And that’s too bad, because I really like Ngaio Marsh as a whole—she’s a great plotter with a theatrical flair to her mysteries that’s entertaining.  But again, in hindsight (that useful creature!), she’s obviously struggling to find her way in this first effort.

The plot of A Man Lay Dead is fairly simple: a country house party, a game of Murder, a real dead body instead of pretend.  There’s a side order of bolshie Russians causing trouble, several women scorned, the intrepid BYT, and, of course, the enigmatic Roderick Alleyn in his first appearance in print.  As plots go, it’s pretty standard stuff—the country house mystery had been done prior to this, and the Russians, the BYT, the tom-cat victim and his various women are all familiar types in a mystery of this era.  In as far as those things go, nothing here really stands out, and in fact, you’d find any of these elements in a Christie book from the same time period.

Where Marsh differs from Christie is that Alleyn is a professional policeman—these books are, therefore, more in the procedural vein than the private investigator line.  So whereas someone like Hercule Poirot can be all “ah, yes” and engage his little grey cells after an inscrutable conversation with someone, or Miss Marple can gently nose her way around by asking seemingly innocuous questions, Alleyn follows police procedure.  He collects evidence, he interviews the suspects, he works on alibi breaking and confirming, constructs a timeline, looks for motives, and pries into personal lives.  It’s all a bit more cut and dried, and Marsh has to labor a bit in this first book to make Alleyn interesting enough for the reader to want to spend an entire novel with him.

In that sense, it’s probably wise that she starts out with an accidental Watson for him in the person of Nigel Bathgate, a reporter who has been invited to the house party along with his cousin Charles, who ends up dead.  Nigel has an unbreakable alibi, so Alleyn can use him in places where he, as a policeman, cannot tread.  The story is told from Nigel’s point-of-view, and as he has a natural interest in what Alleyn is doing, he conveys that interest to the reader.  It works up to a point, but in later books she’d jettison Nigel in favor of a more omniscient point-of-view for the simple reason that once Alleyn’s character is established, Nigel becomes more of an encumbrance than a useful character.  But here he serves his purpose by introducing us, so to speak, to Alleyn and his methods. But it turns out that Roderick Alleyn is pretty hard to get to know.

It’s obvious this is an early book in the series because Marsh seems a bit unclear with what exactly she wants Roderick Alleyn to be—at times he’s a totally conventional policeman, at others a bit of a maverick; he is at turns both capricious and logical.  Sometimes he’s straightforward with Nigel and at other times he’s clearly leading him up the garden path.  He seems an ordinary guy doing ordinary work for Scotland Yard, but there are hints that he’s something a bit more—a vague suggestion of an aristocratic pedigree that she would never spell out even 30 books later, just hint at.

It’s very hard, in this first book, not to see the influence of both Christie and Sayers, and yet Marsh also had a third influence: the theatre.  All of her books have a whiff of theatricality about them, and many of them are set either in the theatre or concern actors.  A Man Lay Dead, with its dramatic murder (a knife in the back is quite plebian compared to some of the later methods she conjured up—one thing about Marsh was that she was rarely at a loss for an unusual means of killing someone, and she came up with some real doozies) and the later recreation of the crime, demonstrate her theatre roots most ably—reading the scene where the body is discovered, for example, I could see it as a stage piece: the gong, the staircase, the body face-down with the dagger in the back, the houseguests standing around gaping.  Enter the Great Detective, stage left.  One thing you can always do with Marsh is visualize every scene, right down to the tray clothes and the leaves on the trees.  She was also an artist, and it shows.

Her theatre experience, and she had a great deal of it, is a great plus in terms of straightforward plotting and limning out basic characters.  But none of the characters in this particular book really develops much past the two dimensional stage—it’s like she’s cast them in the book and told them to take care of developing themselves.  In later books, this doesn’t really get much better, and her seeming determination to keep Alleyn’s roots a mystery even prevents her from doing much with him.  There are exceptions—A Surfeit of Lamphreys, for example, is a great example of what she could do with characters when she felt like bothering.  But just as Christie wasn’t particularly concerned with the people in her books, but the plot, one gets the idea that Marsh is more worried about setting the scene and then filling in the gaps with the expected people.

All of this sounds hyper critical now that I’m reading back through it, and I don’t mean it to be.  While I don’t reread her books as often as others, I do like them, and some of them, like the four set in New Zealand or the ones with a theatre setting, are quite evocative.  When she’s happy and comfortable with her setting, the books seem elevated to another level.  Here, though, her discomfort with the country house setting shows, I think.  So it’s a fun book, and the solution is a bit far-fetched, but it showed the promise of someone with better books in her.

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