Where Ghosts Are Laid to Rest

Historical Romances of William harrison Ainsworth Rookwood by Ainsworth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a flawed but entertaining historical novel from an author I usually really enjoy. I don't love everything here, and I have quibbles, but I can't give him a 3. This is enough fun it still has to be a 4.

Most of his novels are historical romances in the same vein as most of Alexandre Dumas or Sir Walter Scott. They're well-researched, exciting, action and adventure novels, though they have pretty high diction and read a little stuffy. I don't mind that. The historical settings and castles and swordplay and escapes are all very fun. This one is a bit different though.

First of all, this one is intentionally filled with gothic elements. We spend a lot of time in crypts, talking about spooky curses and murderous ancestors. The gothic bits come and go, though, and we spend most of the time in action, with disputed wills and secret marriages, with songs and highwaymen and thief-takers, but then get back into Castle of Otranto territory. It's a bit uneven--but that's okay.

Another difference in this novel is how it feels like two stories jammed together. We have the Rookwoods, with half-brothers disputing their inheritance, with relatives attending the old lord's funeral, and one beautiful cousin seemingly destined for one of the half-brothers. The other part of the story is about Dick Turpin the highwayman, with a long scene in the middle where he is chased from London to York. It has nothing to do with the Rookwood manor or anything that went before, except that Turpin was present for some of that. (I hate that he rides his amazing horse to death. No excuse for that. I liked him as a character until then.)

Then back to the Rookwood story. It ends well, IMO, but in the middle we have characters acting so strange that I can't account for their motivations. Sybil, a Roma girl, loves Luke Rookwood, and he loves her, while his half-brother loves Eleanor, their beautiful cousin. But as soon as Luke sees her, he falls in love with her and is done with Sybil. Sybil meanwhile was ready to marry Luke, then said no (when he found out he was the rightful heir) then tricked him to marry him, then was going to kill Eleanor, but then instead killed herself........

Sorry for the spoilers.

There are many more instances of characters behaving oddly. I think we're meant to assume that the curses and prophecies talked about in the beginning have an effect on the characters, pushing them down certain paths, rewriting their wishes, but I could be making that up.

And yet the book is very fun to read, very brisk, with some characters to admire and to hate, with lots of great action. I like that the curse on the family is finally laid to rest, thanks to poor Sybil who saw what had to be done. I could have said this was a wild ride of a 3, but I think I'd rather call it a quirky 4. A curious reader who is new to Ainsworth might just read book III chapter 14 to the end of book 5, which is almost everything with Dick Turpin and his long ride to escape the thief-takers, full of close escapes and amazing action. That bit could probably be a novella all on its own.

Recommended for Ainsworth readers. Others should probably start on another novel.

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Where Grimdark Got Its Start

The Divine Comedy, Volume 1: Inferno by Dante Alighieri
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My score of 4 is a bit of a fudge. As a world classic, you'd think it deserves a time-tested 5. Based on how fun it is to read (not very) it's probably a 2 or maybe a 3, and even that is due more to curiosity more than genuine reading pleasure. But the version I read--the Penguin classic--is very useful, with excellent notes throughout and helpful drawings, making the reading much easier, and that support makes me give this volume an overall 4. You wanna read the Inferno? This edition works for that.

As a story, it reads like fantasy, though there's no real plot--no main conflict, no real danger or trouble for the main character. But at least it's in a fanciful, exotic setting, if horrible, and that imagination is probably the most interesting part of the work for me. It wasn't meant to be taken as fantasy, though. Even in its time, people knew the story wasn't literally true, of course, and could read it like a dream or vision or guess about hell, but Dante treats his work as if it really could be true, as if the whole thing was mere extrapolation from church teaching. That hell existed was a given. That sinners (as defined by the church) would go to hell was also a given. That they would be punished eternally was the same thing. Exactly what that looked like was an open question; I don't know whether Dante thought he was even in the ballpark, but my guess is he kinda did.

The work serves as spectacle, like reading cosmic horror along the lines of H.P. Lovecraft, allowing the reader to imagine more fully a barely-glimpsed idea of a hidden universe. That alone is a pretty good selling point, back in the day anyway. But it also teaches religious lessons like you'd only find in fire and brimstone preaching like "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Do the right thing or you'll end up like the liars or the gluttons or the scammers in the Inferno. Probably scared a few straight.

For me, though, it reinforces the emptiness of that kind of faith, the kind of faith motivated by fear of eternal, horrible, unrelenting punishment, an idea so evil that it's hard to imagine it held in the same brain as the idea of virtue. What could be more evil than subjecting a sentient creature to horrible pain, not just for a moment or an hour or a year even but for all eternity? Be good or god will have you tortured. Forever. It's beyond my imagination, though it made perfect sense to Dante and a lot of other people for centuries.

There's a lot to think about, anyway, from art to religion to history to government, and even if you've read it before, or pieces of it, Present You might see more here than Old You did. Who knows?

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Where Simonini Crimes Through Life

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Umberto Eco has brilliantly assembled the story of a (mostly-true) series of frauds, deceptions, forgeries, and violent crimes that, together, tell us a lot about European society, about prejudice, about hate, and all of that ugliness comes together to make a tedious and difficult novel. I struggled through it, and I was really trying to like it. It's like a finely crafted symphony so full of intentional dissonance and unpleasant themes that the only pleasures are intellectual--like, why did the composer do that? Where is this going? Will there be any resolution at all? Can I go home now?

IMO: this is 5-level brilliance and maybe 2-level enjoyment. I gave it a 3. That will satisfy no one.

I mean, it is seriously an incredible achievement. That's not irony. The amount of complexity, first of all, in the story itself is pretty impressive, and clearly based on massive amounts of research. Parts of the novel deal with Italy's efforts at unification under a republican government, with our despicable MC working with various partisan groups to achieve certain political/military ends, mostly by forging documents that others use to sway public opinion. Much of the rest is in France, dealing with changing governments and international affairs of the late 19th century, with the MC working with spies and intelligence officers in creating false documents and lurid propaganda of many types--anti-catholic, anti-Masonic (full of demonic and satanic stories invented out of whole cloth and turned into bestsellers), and especially antisemitic material of many types. That includes the famous Dreyfus affair. So many characters, so many social movements, so many details. It's a lot.

And the organization of the story is wild. Most of it is told like two people writing letters, but the two people are living in the same house and never see one another and are actually writing in the same diary. Both have lapses in their memory and are trying to piece together what is happening. Of course, it's just what you think is happening--that's not much of a spoiler. But it makes following the story very tricky, enough that the author put a chart in the back to help you make sense of who is doing what and what part of the character's history is being dealt with. It's more than one can easily absorb in a single read-through, in my opinion. As a reader, you're wondering about the point of the double perspective; what does the author want us to make of all this? What, beyond the themes of hatred and prejudice and deception, does this format tell us? I have ideas; I don't have much confidence in the answers. But it's interesting, I suppose--intellectually, again.

It's just such a drag to read, though. I knew it was about the creation of the blood-libel fake book called "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and I was curious about how that happened and how it was exposed. That's in the book, in pieces here and there, but really it's about one man's long career as a forger, along with all his crimes and his racism, his antisemitism and misogyny. Nothing good happens. Nothing fun. Nothing enjoyable. No kindness. No humanity. No love. The reader has nothing to root for or look forward to, nothing to nod over, nothing to applaud except maybe the very last page. (That's not snark. There is one event hinted at at the very end, and that is the only sort of good thing in the book.)

I'm sure it's useful, for most of us, to think deeply about these matters, about intentional acts of social sabotage, looking at the methods by which unscrupulous people sway public opinion, the way they stoke the flames of hate with lies, and how they poison society. But it's like a long soak in a sewer. Maybe it helps to really internalize that smell to learn firsthand how bad it is, but I kinda already knew.

Like I say, this is a brilliant book, in a way, but the amount of enjoyment found in the hours I spent reading this (over many weeks, widely spaced out) was almost nothing. I am glad to have read it, but it's too much like eating your spinach.

People read for different reasons--you may find much more to enjoy than I did.

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Where Evadne Has a Point. And Stabs the King With It.

The Maid's Tragedy by Francis Beaumont
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Set in a Medieval version of Rhodes that seems more like England or Western Europe, this is the story of disappointed lovers and a king taking advantage of his power. I liked it and I didn't, but I'm going with 4 stars after a lot of internal debate. :)

To cover for secretly taking beautiful young Evadne as his mistress, the king makes her marry a young man, Amintor, who the king supposes (somewhat accurately) he can push around. The couple are married just ahead of the action of the play. Amintor was in love with Aspatia and she was in love with him, but he went along with the marriage to Evadne because the king wanted it. He didn't hate Evadne, though, so he was sorta okay with it. This act of unfaithfulness creates tension between the families of the two women, breaking Aspatia's heart and nearly leading to fighting, but the real tension is between the newlyweds when Evadne makes it clear on their wedding night that theirs is a sham marriage and she will never sleep with her new husband.

Ouch.

Amintor is furious and embarrassed and ashamed, but vows to tell no one and do nothing, because again, it's what the king wants, besides the fact that he doesn't want his shame to be broadcast to the world. Eventually, though, his brother-in-law (and old friend) sees he's not as happy as he's pretending and forces the truth out of him. This leads to a series of actions that are pretty predictable if you know this is a tragedy and not a comedy. Lots of stabbing.

That's the part I don't care for. I really enjoyed reading the play, and found it much more readable than most drama out of that era--just overlapping with Shakespeare--but I pretty much hate tragedy. I hate a sad ending. I understand bad things happen in real life, but I don't understand wanting to see a play that shows it to you. I don't want to dwell on misery and sadness and misfortune. It just doesn't work for my brain. (So why do I read such things? Kind of a curiosity or literary FOMO, I guess.) Anyway, I wish it had ended with bad guys down and good guys up, but that's not the story. I still liked it, mostly. A surprising amount.

Just not the end.

I'm still giving it a 4. Well written, interesting, entertaining, and fun--right until it wasn't. And since I'm reading it out of this a very cool little edition from (probably) 1887, a beautiful book with cool old-fashioned wingdings between scenes and acts, I enjoyed the reading experience way more than if I'd read it online.

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Where William Wouldn't Take No For an Answer

The Conqueror by Georgette Heyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a good book, one well worth reading, even though it took me quite a while to work through it. Rating it for fun, I'd lean more 3, due to some pacing issues (IMO). But there's more to this novel than entertainment. For historical scholarship, its finely crafted setting, its welcome complexity, and a very educational narrative, I'd give it a 4 at least.

I know Heyer mostly from her Regency romances, the books I was sent to when I asked other lovers of Jane Austen what author they thought wrote most like Austen. Since then, I've read maybe 9 or 10 of them, and I've enjoyed them collectively more than I originally expected. I've also read a mystery or two of hers, and I'd say those were okay; I'm not a huge fan of country estate murder mysteries, though I'll read one here and there. What I didn't know until now was that Heyer wrote straight-up historical novels. That's what this is. There's no more than a touch of romance here, and there's no mystery at all. There are women, and lovers, and love stories found in these pages, but this is book is closer to a biography of William the Conqueror. Told mostly from the perspective of Raoul, one of his closest supporters, the book covers about 20 years of William's life, ending shortly after the invasion of 1066.

(Hope that's not a spoiler.)

The beginning wasn't what I expected. Grimmer, maybe. The focus seemed odd. (This was all my fault, btw.) Even 50 or 100 pages in, I started to think the book would turn out to be a romance (of the bodice-ripping, chest-heaving, raven-haired tresses sort that I don't have much interest in), with a melodramatic tone and low stakes. But no. This is a no-nonsense historical novel with a very serious tone and heavy themes. It's about war and battles and strategy and putting down rebellions. It's about friendship and trust and honor and keeping one's word. It's about a man driven to make his mark on history and the people who gradually learned to believe in him, trust him, and follow him, helping him go from a beleaguered warlord to the leader of a stable regional power to the sovereign of a whole nation.

It was pretty fun to read, but not super fun. I didn't relish every page. However, there is nothing I could point to and say should have been edited out or abridged, and overall I'm glad I read it. Yes, I wish it moved a little quicker or varied in tone a bit more, but maybe it's better this way--leaning more toward an educational work of scholarship. This is no textbook, though; it's a novel, and I think a good one. Perhaps the greatest pleasure I've gotten from it is having a fuller picture of the historical setting and the Norman Invasion, filling in a picture that has been very sketchy most of my life.

So, yes, recommended.

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Where Reacher Hunts an American in Germany

Night School by Lee Child
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked it quite a bit. I found this one more rewarding to pick back up than the first couple I've read; either it's a little better or I'm more in the groove with the series.

Reacher is a good character, and I feel like Lee Child uses him well. He's not unstoppable or a super genius, but he's good at the things that an investigator should be good at--like reading witnesses and guessing how a suspect might be thinking and getting ahead of them--and he's especially good at not getting beat up by a random bad guy. And he's not just good at that; the author uses those things in the plot. You can count on him to come out on top in most hand-to-hand encounters, which so far are found in every novel I've looked at.

(I point this out because I've read a few books lately where the main characters are supposed to be good at something but then we don't see it much or at all in the story. Sherlock has got to see clues nobody else sees. Elizabeth Bennet has to say witty things. Captain Kirk better win against the odds. And Reacher needs to show out. He's a good investigator, so he's gonna figure some stuff out in a clever way, and he's a great big guy who can fight, so he better be fighting somebody or I'm gonna be disappointed.) ;)

This novel is set earlier in his career when he was still in the army, and I found that difference interesting. He had to work with a number of people instead of just doing everything his way, and he had to restrain himself in some cases. The constraints made him have to be even more creative than usual, and I think it made the plot work.

I thought it was pretty fun. 4 stars.

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Where It's Nine Hibiscus's Story

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a good book, in a lot of ways, which I was expecting; the first book was really great. But even though I mostly enjoyed reading this, the flaws and bad decisions (as always, in my opinion) nearly overshadowed everything else. This was a four, but a disappointing four, which is my rarest score...

Arkady Martine is a wonderful writer of prose. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, cool idea by cool idea, she is great writer. Her style is brisk and entertaining, even when little is happening, and that kept me coming back.

But.

Okay, for one thing: Eight antidote, the little kid who will be the next emperor, is just a really boring character. Every time the POV switched to him, the book slowed to a crawl. At the very end, the author gave him something cool to do, an interesting bit of action, and that almost redeems the long, dull pages filled with trivial nothings. Except no, it doesn't. Almost every page devoted to him, except the last handful, could have been simply cut to improve the pacing a ton without losing anything.

Worse, Mahit Dzmare is supposedly the main character, but she's entirely forgettable and pointless in this novel. She's there for a lot of the action, like a fly on the wall or a purse under someone's arm, but she contributes almost nothing. She's spoken of and treated like she's brilliant and special and remarkable, but the author gives her nothing brilliant or remarkable to do. Three Seagrass drags her along on this war adventure, and everything they accomplish could have been done by Three Seagrass alone. Except for their love scenes, obviously. I wanted the Mahit we had in the first book, and she just wasn't here.

The real main character is Nine Hibiscus, the fleet commander, and she is interesting. If the book had been just about her, leaving Mahit out of it entirely, it would have made more sense. She makes a sort of Jean Luc Picard series of decisions, and that was the best part of the book.

If you want an action story with movement and brisk pacing, it's a bit hit-or-miss. If you were looking for spectacle, which an interstellar war promises, you'll get very little, hardly more than a few scattered pages. If you want to see your favorite MC be awesome, you'll have to squint, because it's kinda there, but it's more suggested than shown. But if you read the book for fine prose, or for ideas on language and identity, or for themes such as sacrifice and nationality and cultural hegemony, you'll probably be rewarded.

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