The Quantum Thief

Hannu Rajaniemi
Gollancz (orionbooks.co.uk)
978-1-575-08888-7

Every now and then an authorial début attracts the kind of attention usually reserved for the second coming of Christ, the launch of a new iPhone or some equally monumental happening. The Quantum Thief was one of these, appearing on the shelves with the ringing endorsement of various stars of the SF pantheon. And it’s almost, almost as good as they say it is.

To start at the start, the opening line is an absolute gem:
As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk. (p.1)

It’s a great hook, throwing open a dozen intriguing questions, and its dust-dry wit speaks volumes about the man narrating it. Jean le Flambeur: posthuman, mind-thief, trickster and wag, the prisoner of the Axelrod Archons. 

And prisoner is the operative part of that description, at least as far as the first chapter is concerned, because Jean is an inmate of the Dilemma Prison, forced to play endless iterative games of the Prisoner’s Dilemma – a classic example of game theory, in which combinations of cooperation and defection between the two participants prompt various patterns of reward and punishment – against his fellow inmates. Over thousands and thousands of iterations, the inescapable logic of the system will burn away the selfish, sociopathic inclination to betray, turning career criminals into cooperative, productive citizens.

It’s a fascinating idea, barely given time to breathe before Jean is broken out of the prison – and perhaps that’s just as well, because there’s only so many times you can replay the Prisoner’s Dilemma before it becomes a kind of prison for the reader, too. But the swiftness of the pace in this opening chapter is brutally unforgiving, hurling concepts and terminology at the reader and expecting them to keep up.

It’s a risky strategy which could easily intimidate and overwhelm, but Rajaniemi tempers the information overload with a snappy, stylish delivery which just about manages to keep the novel from capsizing.

Things stabilise quickly after the breakout, once Jean and his rescuer – and her sentient spaceship – evade their pursuers and come to a delicate truce, and the novel settles into a comfortable, slower (but by no means sedate) rhythm as they head to Oubliette, the moving Martian city which is the main setting for most of the novel.

That’s not to say that the flow of ideas slows to a trickle, however. Oubliette has a time-based economy where the population are eventually, once their allocated time runs out, re-uploaded into beings called Quiet to carry out various necessary public functions until they’ve earned back the right to exist as themselves.

Even more complex and fascinating is Oubliette’s social structure, which takes the currently-raging privacy debate to an extreme but logically solid conclusion; every citizen has a ‘privacy sense’ or gevulot which allows them to limit how much of themselves they share – including memories, names, faces and even their physical presence:
‘Let’s have a look at the agora memory – like this.’ The sensation is sudden, like finally finding the word that was at the tip of your tongue. Mieli remembers seeing the agora from high up, in incredible detail, knowing that she can recall every face in the crowd. She has a clear memory of the thief running across the agora.
  “Oh,” the Gentleman says. There is a sudden gevulot request from him asking her to forget his reaction. She accepts…(p.103)

The concept is fresh and fascinating, and impeccably well thought-through, from its effects on Oubliette’s social mores to the inevitable ways people find to get around it – ‘analogue holes’ such as newspapers, for example, which are technically illegal but tolerated:
There are pictures; a black-and-white shot of him… The awareness that people he has not shared gevulot with now know who he is and what he has done makes him feel dirty. The gentleman at the next table is looking at him sharply now. He pays quickly, wraps himself in privacy and makes his way home. (p.121)

The way Rajaniemi presents this and other ideas – as fragments and passing asides, building up a sensation of depth through an organic layering of information – can be a little intimidating, but it’s a technique which comes with its own rewards. The barrage of ideas and unfamiliar words grant the world they inhabit a bewildering, complexity, at once filled with alien concepts and strangely familiar in its richness and variation. Every concept and location reveals itself as just another small cog, meshing with what’s come before and hinting at the shape of a larger, interlocking machine. And it gives The Quantum Thief longevity as a novel, as well; terms and events you took on faith the first time round develop an additional richness on re-reading, granted additional context by your foreknowledge.

This is fractal worldbuilding, a whole made up of little details which are themselves comprised of smaller parts within, and down and down the rabbit hole. It’s not always perfect, unfortunately, and certain aspects of the setting start to look a little shaky when you focus on them too hard. For example, how is the Martian space elevator anchored to a moving city without centrifugal forces plucking the scuttling settlement off the face of the planet? And what are the exact mechanics of Oubliette’s time economy – one character, a ‘millenniaire’ possessed of thousands of years, dies like any other man as his Watch winds down – so are time (money) and time (remaining until Quiet) not the same thing? Everyone in Oubliette acts as though they are, and yet.

But for the most part the setting is well thought-through, and rewarding to think about. This is the sort of novel which isn’t just great entertainment. Its refusal to condescend is an education, in that it makes you want to go away and look things up you didn’t understand – the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in my case – and rewards you when you do, with little in-jokes and nuggets of deeper insight.

It’s worth taking a moment to talk about the Shakespearean flair of the language, too. The Quantum Thief has a vocabulary all its own, mixing quirky neologisms with re-purposed words from across the globe: zoku, gogol, qupt, q-dots, archons, Sobornost, spime, tzaddik, gevulot, exomemory, vasilev and guberniya, among others.

Again, there’s little in the way of hand-holding – the words are allowed to glitter and tantalise un-exposited, building a sense of both the alien-ness of the setting and its complexity. Yet it’s astonishing how the reader’s assimilation of the novel’s vocabulary subtly aids suspension of disbelief, easing them into a living, breathing world.

For all that this is a glimpse of a far-future, truly posthuman society – and handles its posthumanism seriously, with talk of requiring ‘permissions’ to access a body’s full superhuman capabilities, and discussion of body designers’ taste in movie star – The Quantum Thief wears its science lightly. As in other areas, the novel prefers to skip lightly across the surface of its concepts, rather than getting bogged down in the dense technicalities which are a common danger of ‘hard’ SF.

Content to let the science tick away in the background, the plot calls on older, pulpier forms, hinted at in the belle époque flavour of Oubliette society and architecture, and outright waved in your face when one character is gifted a genetically engineered Cthuloid monstrosity as a pet and names it ‘Sherlock’.

Because both main threads of the plot are detective fiction of sorts, with Jean le Flambeur trying to hunt down whatever parts of himself he left on Mars, and a teenage super-sleuth becoming mixed up in a cryptographic conspiracy that goes to the heart of Oubliette society. In this way The Quantum Thief gets to both have its cake and eat it, wrapping an intelligent, challenging piece of SF in the slick and entertaining tropes of a space-opera detective novel.

Even the action is first-class, drawing on high-tech superhumanism to create thrilling and sensational set pieces. Rajaniemi does indulge in the overused trick of winding time down to a crawl, but here it’s a necessary evil; on one occasion we see the action from an unenhanced participant’s perspective, and it’s a nightmarish blur of impossibly fast sound and fury.

The action isn’t frivolous, either, but given the weight of consequence. A particularly exciting knock-down drag-out faceoff between two augmented characters comes to a screeching halt when both, having temporarily shut down each other’s techno-superpowers, realise the third person in the room is pointing an antique (ie 20th-century tech) revolver in their direction. Even when death is mostly temporary, it doesn’t seem to be taken lightly.

So. The novel’s first and second acts are brilliant, effortlessly balancing the interweaving plot lines with a perfect evocation of a living, breathing – and very alien – society. If The Quantum Thief falls down anywhere, however, it’s in the climax. The pace picks up as it’s supposed to, and the stakes are suitably elevated, but the brilliantly-evoked setting begins to get a little motion-blurred.

Too much happening, too fast – for the first time you’re reminded that this is Rajaniemi’s début novel, as the climax teeters on the edge of incoherence. It just about holds together, but it takes a close re-reading before all the motivations which drive it start to make sense – and having to stop and puzzle out what exactly is going on isn’t terribly compatible with the last act’s breakneck flow.

Nonetheless, it’s to The Quantum Thief’s credit that the plot is completely driven by character motivation rather than the other way around. And there’s a lot more to recommend, from the novel’s sly wit and superb characterisation to the hints at how this world links back to our own. The zoku, for example, appear to be an evolution of twentieth-century gaming clans into a sort of quantum-entangled socialist collective, swapping and reshaping their virtual and physical presences with casual indifference and gamifying everything from relationships to war.

But it feels like going into any further detail would be to spoil the pleasure of discovery. While some of the ideas might not be all that new, it’s the way they’re realised that is The Quantum Thief’s real joy. And now this review is finished, I’m off to read the sequel.

Warrior

Jennifer Fallon
Orbit (orbitbooks.net)
978-1-84149-653-5

Two things happen in Warrior. This isn’t hyperbole, or writerly misdirection to hook you into reading more of this review: the second book in the Wolfblade Trilogy could have been stripped down to a dozen pages or so and still served as a functional second act.

You’ll notice I said functional, not fun. What happens is what has to happen, and what’s so obviously been coming since the prologue of Wolfblade, the first in the trilogy. Those critical scenes lay the foundations for a confrontation we don’t get to see here, and which will presumably take up most of the third book’s equally ample girth.

But for almost seven hundred pages of Warrior, nothing happens. There is incident, but it’s all incidental. A more sophisticated writer might have used the biblical thickness of the novel to build tension and tighten the screws, instead of dwelling on the banal to the extent Warrior does. Where there’s foreshadowing, it’s clumsy and overt; where there’s an attempt at suspense, you can all-but hear the cheesy musical sting.

And critically, the politics which makes up the central driving motivation for almost every character is simply boring – modern politics might be sadly lacking in backroom backstabbings, but the medievally fantastical sort needs a bit of fizz and intrigue to keep it from turning into a slightly less sophisticated version of Prime Minister’s Questions. It’s hard to persuade yourself that any of this really matters when Fallon seems to treat it mostly as an afterthought – and when even the rival schemers spend twenty-four years manoeuvring to negligible effect.

Which chronological shoe-horning allows me to smoothly segue into the odd structural choices which do little to distract from Warrior’s slack, bloated through-line. The book starts eight years after its prequel, giving Marla Wolfblade’s children a little time to grow up and become characters rather than plot tokens, which does give the novel a suitable dynastic heft.

But it’s as though nothing else has changed in all those years – the nation of Hythria is still ruled by Marla’s wastrel brother, while the same political enemies are still skulking around the corridors of power, plotting and scheming to very little effect. The same people hold the same posts, and about the only other sign of time passing is that Marla’s tally of husbands has risen to a black-widowy four.

It’s unclear why Fallon decided now rather than then was the time to pause and start her trilogy’s second act; the action focuses on a new arrival in Marla’s household, in the shape of the painfully emo Luciena, daughter of a Wolfblade husband who lived and died off-page between the books. Her childish defiance is instantly tedious, and even as a political pawn she barely makes a ripple in the plot.

Her effect on Marla is more profound, making the matriarch look at herself and her actions in a new light, but barely touched upon which is a shame. I’d rather have spent more time examining the effect of Marla’s political streetfighting on her battered soul than spend precious pages on the next generation of Wolfblades.

The children. Not that they qualify for that title for long, as the tying off of the Luciena subplot abruptly catapults us forward another twelve years, and Hythria remains locked in social and political stasis. Damin Wolfblade is Marla’s eldest and heir to the throne; a gaggle of cousins, siblings and milk-brothers surround him, of varying levels of cardboard-cutoutery, but he’s the real focus of Warrior.

Damin’s interesting. His uncle, the nominal ruler who Marla has quietly usurped, is a hedonist, paedophile and sociopathic waste of space with little interest in keeping a fragile country from tearing itself apart, and everyone around Damin is subtly terrified that the heir will turn out just the same. Fallon is playing her cards more carefully here, and it takes a closer reading than the novel has really earned to establish exactly what Damin’s worth.

Unfortunately it’s primarily Damin’s passivity which makes him inscrutable, and when you can only observe your protagonist in the reflected glow of his peers’ behaviour, that tends to put the focus elsewhere. And just as with Luciena earlier in the novel, it’s the rest of the Wolfblade mob who wallow in the limelight.

While none of them have quite the same depth as Damin here, or his mother did in the trilogy’s first book, the action does at least begin to pick up a bit. Towards the end of Warrior we see genuine incident, and while the plot developments may have been telegraphed, trumpeted and writ large in letters of neon fire, they’re nonetheless affecting. Here we see flashes of the uncompromising insistence on cause and consequence which made Wolfblade so refreshing, but it’s too late, too late. And too reliant on the almost wilful blindness of the supposedly-canny Marla and her brood to the unapologetic lunatic they’re harbouring in their midst.

I enjoyed reading Wolfblade; the writing wasn’t going to win any awards, but it had an uncompromising streak which made it quite a break from the cosy norm. Warrior retains the pedestrian prose, but little enough happens that its forerunner’s brutal pragmatism barely gets to rise above the murky surface. Even when it does, it feels a little like a rehash of earlier, better scenes. The offing of a (relative) innocent, the reluctant setting-aside of bloody vengeance in favour of political pragmatism – we’ve heard these songs before.

However, having ragged on Warrior for close to a thousand words now, it’s necessary to caveat this review a little by noting that in the last few dozen pages Fallon doesn’t merely recover her authorial mojo, but also teases at an action-packed, exciting final volume. So here I am, hoping Warlord can live up to that promise and redeem this sagging second act.


This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com

The Gathering Storm

Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
Orbit (orbitbooks.net)
978-1-84149-165-3

The Wheel of Time turns, and authors come and go. The Gathering Storm is the twelfth doorstop in Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy series, and the first to be published following Jordan’s death in 2007. Even fans of the Wheel of Time would admit that the series had lost its way somewhat, becoming bloated with characters and descriptions of soft furnishings.

Memories abound from the last few novels of hundred-page prologues in which I recognise not a single character, or entire books which not only fail to drive the plot forward but actually end, chronologically speaking, before the events of the previous novel’s climax. Reading the Wheel of Time was beginning to feel less a pleasure and more like an endurance race, where you only continue in an attempt to justify the countless hours invested in the series.

The Gathering Storm, however, feels like a transition – like one of the winds with which each novel in the Wheel of Time traditionally opens had blown through the book and swept out all of the cobwebs. It seems primarily concerned with beginning to tie off the thousands of loose ends still extant – and with only one (now two) more novels planned for the series, it’s about time.

While there are still occasional troublesome reversions to the same meandering, unfocused narrative that crippled the preceding books, you get the sense that Sanderson spent much of his time balancing the need to respect those parts of The Gathering Storm which Jordan had already written with an abundant awareness of the series’ shortcomings.

Plotwise, it’s labyrinthine enough to defy any attempt at summary. Broadly – the end of the world is coming, and Dragon Reborn Rand al Thor is still trying to forge the various bickering nations of men into an army capable of staving off the darkness at the Final Battle. Which is much the same summary as the preceding novels, but where The Gathering Storm differs is in its focus on Rand’s internal struggle. I’m little able to construct an adequate timeline of his rise from shepherd to messianic ruler, but it can’t be longer than a couple of in-book years – a short period in which to adjust, and one which has had its consequences.

One of the most interesting parts of The Gathering Storm is in showing the effort Rand’s expended on turning himself into a weapon, a cold, unfeeling monster able to justify almost any atrocity by the knowledge that he’s trying to save the world. For the first time, we’re shown how disturbing his transformation is for those who know (and knew) him, and just how brittle his mental state has become. Given that his past self, the Dragon Lews Therin, went mad and blew an Everest-dwarfing hole in the world, doesn’t bode too well.

What The Gathering Storm manages better than its predecessors is to provide a window on Rand’s mental disintegration, to let us see why he makes the decisions he does… and the damage it does to his increasingly fragile psyche. It’s to Sanderson’s credit how interesting he manages to make the previously anodyne Rand, showing a deft touch for characterisation. Unfortunately, even with 766 pages to burn there’s simply too much going on to allow this level of characterisation to filter down, and while the story is veritably chock-solid with political intrigue, supernatural battles and the personal crises of its many, many supporting characters, it all feels a little thin in comparison.

Mat Cauthon, mercenary warlord and Rand’s childhood friend, is given particularly little to do and plenty of pages to do it in – his meandering journey towards the city of Caemlyn feels almost leisurely, and detracts from the tension which otherwise runs through The Gathering Storm. The superficiality and tedious repetitiveness of his own internal monologue – women are pretty, but I’m married now, but I just want to be free, but I have responsibilities, but oh what’s the harm in a little gambling and wenching, but ad infinitum – makes these particular sections of the novel almost unendurable. The book would have been better off without him, or at least with giving him something more interesting to do.

Nonetheless, despite the wooliness and lack of drama which seeps into the novel on occasion, there’s a decent sense of rising tension and periodic bursts of action which keep The Gathering Storm from becoming another near-unendurable bore. And more importantly, whereas the preceding eleven books have just continued to grow thicker and more tangled, like some ever-expanding ball of wool, here we finally get a sense that resolution might be in sight. Loose ends are tied off, long-running plot arcs are resolved, and minor characters are allowed to fade into the background as their purpose is served.

Incomprehensible unless you’ve read through the entire series, and hard work even if you have, The Gathering Storm is nonetheless a substantial step up in terms of quality and content. Sanderson’s style is simply more focused on effective storytelling than Jordan’s, showing a willingness to dispense with much of the vast quantity of peripheral plots, places and people in order to focus on what really matters. Whether it’s due to a detachment from the material which Jordan as its creator found impossible, or simply down to talent, is fairly irrelevant. The Gathering Storm is better than the Wheel of Time has been in a long time, and the groundwork Jordan laid is as complex and vital as ever. If Sanderson can continue to steer the remaining novels in the same direction, reading the end of the Wheel of Time might even become a pleasure rather than a chore.


This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com

Wolfblade

Jennifer Fallon
Orbit (orbitbooks.net)
978-1-84149-652-8

So this is Wolfblade, then: the first in a fantasy prequel trilogy to the unpromisingly-named The Demon Child. Let’s run through the reviewer’s checklist. Wolfblade’s style is somewhat pedestrian, and the world-building sketchy, although that might be blamed on the assumption that returning readers would remember their way around; characterisation is solid, with a hint of stock fantasy archetypes given a fresh coat of paint.

I’ve made the novel sound like just another lost soul, damned to wander the blighted wastelands of generic purgatory. But there’s a lack of sentimentality to Wolfblade which lets it squeeze through the gates of belaboured metaphor and enter the kingdom of heaven.

Not that heaven would likely take it, were there any choice in the matter. That same unsentimentality makes this a brutal read, whose characters – protagonists and antagonists alike – are morally compromised even before the usual backstabbing and treachery begins. The nominal heroine is Marla Wolfblade, a naïve young beauty and the sister of Hythria’s grotesquely debauched ruler; her arrival in the capital upon reaching marryin’ age signals the start of not just the novel proper but of a rapid education in the fate usually reserved for eligible princesses in a rigidly patriarchal society.

Wolfblade’s portrayal of a deeply misogynistic system is one of the things which makes it a little bit special. Modern novels too often opt for heavy-handed moralism, and one can almost sense the author wringing their hands as they write (no mean feat). It’s as though they’re terrified of being condemned for political incorrectness by those incapable of understanding that writing about something is not the same as condoning it. Jennifer Fallon manages a far more difficult trick, however: instead of bludgeoning her reader with that kind of intrusive narratorial censure, she lets the subject matter – and her characters – condemn themselves.

It’s not just institutional misogyny, either, which makes Fallon’s world such a jewel of progressive enlightenment; Hythrian society, like that of neighbouring Fardohnya, is built on the backs of its slaves. This again is presented without overt comment, the injustices of the system allowed to speak for themselves. Even Elezaar, the cunning, intelligent slave whose grasp of intrigue gives Marla the tools she needs to survive – and thrive – in politics, shows no particular inclination to fight the system; he’s too busy carving out a niche for himself as Marla’s indispensible adviser. Everything he does is directed towards a single goal – survival.

It’s this preference for pragmatism over romance which sets the novel apart from its peers. There’s a breathtakingly revelatory moment about halfway through the novel when one of the nicer characters, universally adored by the rogues gallery surrounding them, is in terrible danger; despite early hints at the novel’s willingness to plumb dark places, genre savvy tells you they’ll somehow scramble to safety through a combination of pluck, spunk and tedious plot contrivance. But… hang on… no, surely they wouldn’t… whoah. Didn’t see that coming. Why didn’t I see that coming?

It’s a delightful fake-out, swiftly followed by another shock – albeit one tempered with comedy as the guilty parties flail about in desperation – as staggeringly unromantic pragmatism overrules the expected declaration of bloody vengeance. Fallon’s willingness to twist against dramatic convention is as sharp and refreshing as a bite of lemon, and I haven’t seen an author so eager to brutalise or bump off her characters since George RR Martin – although I suspect a reader familiar with The Demon Child might find the fate of Wolfblade’s cast-list a little less surprising.

If the novel has one principal weakness, though, it’s in the character of Wrayan Lightfinger. Apprentice in the Sorcerers’ Collective – an organisation which seems vastly more concerned with power of the political sort than that of the arcane – he’s one of a tiny handful of humans who’re able to wield even the feeblest magics. He’s also a walking plot device, whose only seems to exist as a way for the author to write herself out of the occasional corner.

He’s one of the novel’s few really likeable characters, which earns him a lot of slack, but also creates a problem when he casually mind-rapes another character for little more purpose than to attract their master’s attention – the sorcerous equivalent of a slap with a duellist’s glove. Few of Wolfblade’s ensemble are exactly saintly, but the careless way he violates another’s mind doesn’t seem to mesh well with the character who in the very scene before expressed his abhorrence at the behaviour of Marla’s loathsome brother, Hythria’s crown prince:

  “DO you know how often they carry slaves out of his room in sacks? This is a man who thinks drinking the milk of new mothers and the blood of young boys will make him more virile, for pity’s sake!”(p.258)

It isn’t just his shaky characterisation, either, as the main sub-plot surrounding Wrayan and the semi-divine Harshini (a gaggle of low-rent elves-without-the-pointy-ears) feel like they belong to a different book. As established, I haven’t read The Demon Child, but certainly there’s a by-the-numbers feeling to Wrayan’s sub-plot which suggests Fallon’s primary focus here isn’ton telling an interesting story but on laying the groundwork for tales already told. Whether Wrayan’s story can develop a bit of substance in the second and third chapters of the Wolfblade trilogy remains to be seen, but the first book alone does a fairly poor job of integrating him with the far more interesting political wrangling going on elsewhere.

A solid work with a refreshing subversive streak, Wolfblade yanks itself up out of the bloated ranks of fantasy fiction through a wicked willingness to follow its flawed characters’ decisions through to the logical, often-disastrous conclusions. It wouldn’t mean much if the basics weren’t there, but they are; the result is a worthwhile read. 


This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com

Crossing Midnight v3 – the Sword in the Soul

Mike Carey, Jim Fern, José Villarrubia
Vertigo (vertigocomics.com)
978-1-4012-1966-6

The Sword in the Soul completes the story of Toshi and Kai Hara, twins born either side of midnight and worlds apart. Toshi, who no blade can harm, robbed of her past and future and pressed into the service of the sword-kami Aratsu; Kai, immune to all magics, just trying to find his sister and bring her home. But as he closes in on Toshi, Kai doesn’t realise she is hunting him in turn. Aratsu has promised the return of her lost memories should she slay her forgotten brother, and so they spiral round and round one another, drawing inevitably closer to one final climactic confrontation.

The Sword in the Soul is a perfect climax to the story, ramping up the action and hounding the overarching themes to their logical conclusion. Everything which occurs in this novel is a natural progression of what came before, generated in the hearts and minds of its characters rather than being imposed upon them by the needs of the plot. It’s a masterly demonstration of narrative control from writer Mike Carey, and it gives the fates of the Haras – and the supporting cast around them – serious emotional punch.

But I’m probably making this sound more Lost in Translation than it actually is. The novel’s underlying substance is its greatest strength, but what it underlies is a story packed to the rafters with action and wonder. The previous instalments in Crossing Midnight have shown a fairly measured progression from the everyday into the supernatural world, from the shocking intrusion of the kami into modern Japan through the surreal, neon strangeness of a night in mythic Tokyo. The Sword in the Soul cranks it several notches higher, throwing the Haras headlong into a full-blown war between supernatural factions – a magical, profoundly strange conflict which is superbly realised in the faint surrealism of Jim Fern’s linework and Jose Villarrubia’s lush, almost hallucinatory colours.

If the art excels, Carey demonstrates that he knows how to make the best of it – playing with the strengths inherent to the visual form. Take, for example, the way Carey cuts away from an incipient sex scene to show the childish joy of Saburo – a boy lost in Mythic Japan, who never grew up – as he plays with the ghost of the Haras’ childhood pet (p.112); the juxtaposition of innocence and experience is handled with admirable restraint, and provides a touching reminder of just what the Haras have left behind in their journey.

If the first two volumes of Crossing Midnight were concerned with the often painful transition from child- to adulthood, The Sword in the Soul drives the lesson home with uncompromising ruthlessness. Toshi Hara was always the more grown up of the twins, the five minutes she has on her brother seeming to grant wisdom far out of proportion to the length of her head start. But in The Sword in the Soul it’s Kai who’s growing up fast while his sister strips away her humanity, turning herself into a weapon in the single-minded desire to reclaim her lost past – even as she flees from the consequences of her ever-more-monstrous actions.
 
 “This isn’t about strength. You think to remove the hurt by removing your own knowledge of it. But those memories are rooted in your soul.”
 “My soul is a blade, Uso-Tsuki. A blade must narrow to its point. To its edge. Make me--- ---as sharp as you can.”
(p.113)

Without her memories and the opportunity to learn from her mistakes, Toshi reverts to something like childishness – albeit a child with alarming power, as demonstrated when a tantrum costs her valuable allies. This book is like a lesson in consequences, and learning to understand – and deal with – the fallout from your own decisions; something Kai can manage, growing into a man able to make sacrifices and take responsibility as he comes to term with who – and what – he is.

 “Life folds each of us into many curious shapes before we finally become what we are meant to be.”
(p.129)

As you might expect from a work so interested in matters of responsibility and consequences, The Sword in the Soul doesn’t pull any punches. The stakes climb higher and higher as the book winds towards its conclusion, and the depth of its characterisation, both here and throughout the series as a whole, invests every confrontation and loss with serious weight. Toshi might be a monster by the time she faces her brother, little more than a weapon in the hands of her master Aratsu, but you remember the decisions which forged her. And if Kai’s story is one of growing into an adult, Toshi’s regression towards childhood – and eventual, inevitable rebirth – mirrors her brother’s journey beautifully.

 Forgetfulness armours you against almost every pain there is.
 And makes every morning like another birth.(p.75)

For all that I’ve gushed so far, The Sword in the Soul isn’t perfect. Its bittersweet, open-ended conclusion, while dramatically apt, has just a whiff of sequel-bait about it – probably not Carey’s intention, given the lack of loose ends at the close of the tale, but inescapable nonetheless. And the pace of the novel sags a little towards the middle, as a jaunt into rural Japan turns up a key ‘missing persons’ with eyebrow-raising ease – subsequent to which, half the supernatural world seems to descend upon them. If he was that easy to find in the first place, why hadn’t those so hungry to locate him already done so? An explanation is supplied, but while Carey handles his magic with a light touch and avoids the sort of overt exposition which can bring a narrative grinding to a halt, the mythological framework he’s built from traditional Japanese fairy tales occasionally feels a little too hand-wavy to bear the weight of the story.

What criticisms of The Sword in the Soul I can muster, though, are a little half-baked themselves; certainly they pale into insignificance when measured against the novel’s effortless characterisation and tense, intricate storytelling. This is essential reading, matching the brilliance of the Sandman series at its best. If you haven’t found yourself a copy already, what are you waiting for?


This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com

Crossing Midnight v2 – A Map of Midnight

Mike Carey, Jim Fern, Eric Nguyen, Mark Pennington
Vertigo (vertigocomics.com)
978-1-4012-1645-0

The second volume of Mike Carey’s Crossing Midnight is much like any other middle volume of a trilogy – hampered by its lack of a concrete beginning, frustrated by the need for unresolved tensions to roll over into the third and final act. Yet for all that, A Map of Midnight is excellently realised, rich in style and character, and about as self-contained as it’s possible to get under the circumstances.

The twins Toshi and Kai Hara, born either side of midnight and each possessed of their own strange destinies, left their parents’ home at the end of Crossing Midnight’s first volume: Toshi, whom no blade can harm, pressed into the service of the Kami Aratsu, Lord of Knives; her brother Kai, immune to magic, to find his sister and break Aratsu’s hold on her.

The first of two stories told in A Map of Midnight, and the one from which the volume takes its name, focuses on Toshi as she learns her place in the Kami’s palace… and learns that even a girl immune to blades has something to fear from the strange and supernatural creatures which populate mythic Tokyo. Not that she’s really Toshi Hara; Aratsu has cut her past and future away from her, leaving only a creature of the present which he calls Hasharito. With no memory of her brother or her parents, she walks the streets of Tokyo on her master’s business, collecting ‘impressions’ cut from the fabric of sleeping mortals’ dreams.

Hasharito isn’t the only power to be plying their trade in the neon darkness, though. When her ignorance and temper blend, she attacks a servant of the Gleaner, one of the five faces of Death, and has to learn that her actions can bear terrible consequences.

It’s in the volume’s second tale, Bedtime Stories, that Carey really excels himself. Dragged to Tokyo on his sister’s trail, Kai finds himself caught up in a series of grisly murders. Someone or something is killing off the enjokosai girls – teenagers whose youthfulness and innocence fulfil a popular fetish in Japanese culture. They offer their company – and sometimes more – in exchange for the designer clothes and high-tech goods they could never otherwise afford.

Bedtime Stories is dark, mature and beautiful – both in terms of the art and of the story. It benefits greatly from the addition of Loretta, one of the aforementioned enjokosai girls Kai encounters. While Kai himself is neither as strongly characterised nor as fundamentally interesting as his sister, Loretta is a spiky, vibrant bundle of contradictions and the way the two of them strike sparks off one another makes for fun and fascinating reading. The narrative they inhabit is equally engaging, deftly treading the line between full-on detective fable and a sensitive, often disturbing examination of innocence. It’s a story not just supported but actively enhanced by Eric Nguyen’s expressive, nuanced art; images filled with cinematic tricks. Off-kilter angles and unexpected framings put an unheimlich spin on conventional scenes, granting them an implicit wrongness far more effective than the overt supernaturalism of this volume’s first tale, A Map of Midnight. And it has its humour, too; Nguyen seems to poke fun at the conventions of Manga art by sneaking the reader up-skirt shots of Loretta every chance he gets, even as the narrative considers the moral implications of Japan’s cultural obsession with school-age girls. Funnier still is a marvellously surreal collaboration between writer and artist in which Loretta’s eerie, nursery rhyme-esque dream is invaded by ‘generic detectives from [her] left hind brain’ in full noir get-up, who arrest her for spoileriffic crimes.

If Bedtime Stories concerns itself with matters of sex and sexuality, the theme running through A Map of Midnight is equally mature. Toshi Hara’s jaunt through the weird night of mythic Tokyo could be interpreted as a crash-course in taking responsibility for your actions, as her rash hot-bloodedness lands her in one scrape after another. If this tale is less fulfilling than its companion, that’s mostly due to the inherent structural weakness of the narrative. A Map of Midnight feels more like a loosely connected series of anecdotes than a proper story, as Toshi drifts through the supernatural world in the service of her new master and blunders her way through one strange encounter after another. The world Carey is building here is a wonderful and surreal one, aided by inker Mark Pennington’s lush, even lurid colouring, but for a narrative primarily concerned with questions of responsibility A Map of Midnight seems to take the easy way out on more than one occasion. The blades of Aratsu’s court are intelligent, magical beings in their own right, and the scissors Toshi chooses – or more accurately which seem to choose her – are the smooth-talking definition of a deus ex machina. They provide the means or the magic to get Toshi out of one difficult situation after another, rather diluting the effectiveness of the ‘cause and consequence’ theme which seems such a central part of the tale.

Jim Fern’s pencilwork doesn’t help matters much either, sketching the city in clean, simplistic lines which fail to do its complexity justice. While Toshi does admittedly work during the darkest hours of night, the sheer emptiness of the streets – no cars, no people, no life – seems unlikely in any major city, never mind one with Tokyo’s neon reputation, and prevents the reader from feeling anything like an authentic sense of place.  Or a sense of time, come to that; despite the midnight of the story’s title, much of the action could be occurring on a sunny mid-afternoon. Given the effort Pennington spends on bringing such surreal lushness to the city’s supernatural denizens, this bland, almost greyscale rendering of night-time Tokyo seems a peculiar choice.

Failures of the artwork aside, the story does at the climax at least allow Toshi to deal with the consequences of her decisions without supernatural aid. That climax is well handled, coming across as exciting and tense as the seriousness of the challenge – and the consequences of further failure – give the narrative greater emotional weight. It’s short lived, however, as the story’s resolution again feels as if Toshi has been given too many chances; together with the hand-holding she received earlier, this cop-out undermines the apparent severity of her situation.

A Map of Midnight isn’t bad; it’s merely mediocre, and suffers from the pairing with such an excellent work as Bedtime Stories. Nonetheless this second volume of Crossing Midnight is worth picking up just for the latter tale, and to further the narrative begun in volume one’s strong opening. Second acts are often the weakest part of any story, redeemed by the third; hopefully volume three can deliver on that promise.


This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com

The Folding Knife

K J Parker
Orbit (orbitbooks.net)
978-1-84149-512-5

If K J Parker were a film director, you’d call them an auteur. Critics being an argumentative lot, there’s little in the way of consensus on the meaning of the word, but the general gist is that all of the director’s works share some common tendency, whether it be of theme, of style, or of something less easily defined.

So with Parker. From early works to The Folding Knife, the author has presented a series of variations on the same theme – and what’s kept these novels from ever feeling repetitive isn’t only the superb quality and idiosyncratic style of the writing, but the sheer difficulty of answering the questions it poses – or even nailing down the precise nature of said questions. Parker is a student of the banality of evil, fascinated by its range and complexity.

Before I dive off into cod philosophy and a comparative reading of the author’s whole back catalogue, however, there’s a review to be getting on with. So, The Folding Knife.

Bleak. Funny. Troubling.

That’s clearly not enough, but within those three words can be found the whole of the novel. The world inhabited by Parker’s characters is an extraordinarily dark one – you’d call it nihilistic, if not for the subtle, unshakeable sense that the universe is not so much indifferent to the sufferings of human beings as actively hostile to their interests. No good deed goes unpunished; no error comes without its consequences. This is a world where every life describes a tragedy.

The life in question here is that of Bassianus Severus, First Citizen of the Vesani Republic and financier extraordinaire. The tragedy is watching Basso face all manner of crises, whether personal, professional or political, and generally overcome. Where’s the tragedy in that, do I hear you ask? But The Folding Knife is all about the journey, not the destination; whether a lifetime of public service – which just as an aside happens to make one absurdly rich – is enough to offset a single act of evil. ‘In a lifetime of crucial decisions’, the back-cover blurb tells us, Basso has ‘only ever made one mistake’. But it’s a mistake which haunts him, which taints every success, and which he’s spent everything he is trying to make up for.

Heavy stuff. But balanced against the novel’s weighty theme and vindictive universe is Parker’s trademark style. Without the writing’s utter lack of pomposity, its blissful lightness of touch and fierce wit, the novel would be just about unreadable. Instead we’re privy to Basso’s internal processes, or at least a slice of them somewhere between a Woolfian stream-of-consciousness and the deliberate opacity of surface movements; in lesser hands this could prove maddeningly incomprehensible, but Parker’s control of voice is utterly assured.

  “We’ll do our best,” Festo said.
  “Of course you will,” he replied, and something prompted him to add, “and if you make a good job of it, I’ll let you go to Badava for the summer. Well? Is that a good deal?”
  They were grinning at him, and he thought: they assume I’d planned that all along, the reward, the incentive. It’s how a good father would have structured it; first the bluster and the stern eye, then the special treat, whipped out of the sack at the end. But Badava was just an afterthought, because I was feeling guilty.
(p.146)

Basso is a man who lies to everyone, even (especially?) himself; even when he’s telling the truth, he’s lying as to why. The ambiguity this builds is refreshing, and rare; the only way to even come close to understanding what drives him is to view his actions in terms of the bigger picture. And the way in which Parker handles dramatic scale, smoothly changing gear between personal tragedy and geopolitical intrigue, is a pleasure in itself.

Basso himself would say that there’s little difference between the two. In his early training in financial sleight of hand, Basso learns how something as apparently simple as a shortage of barrel staves at the perfect moment can bring about the capitulation of a mighty empire. While he proves adept at applying this mastery of connectivity – of minimal action for maximum gain – for political and business success, he seems incapable of applying the same logic to his own life. And all the while he builds a house of cards, as if unsure himself how the whole thing doesn’t just tumble down around him…

So: the potential for utter social, political and economic ruin, brought about by the manipulations of devious bankers? The novel’s rather pointed comment on the real world financial crisis is unusually broad for Parker, but no less pertinent for its lack of subtlety. For all Basso’s cleverness, his successes effectively stem from luck – something he accepts but doesn’t seem to accommodate: “I’ve always got the impression luck gets stronger with use, like a muscle” (p.119), he tells his old teacher. When things go wrong, though, he simply has no idea what to do – as demonstrated in the peculiar moment when the normally assured, commanding  Basso becomes utterly passive in the face of terrible news, while a nameless military courier lays out the various bad-case scenarios before the floundering First Citizen and guides him to the least-appalling conclusion (pp.434-438). What at first seems wildly out-of-character is simply the reaction of a man ill-equipped to deal with unpleasant surprises.

With the exception of The Company, Parker’s novels tend to focus almost exclusively on a single central figure, and The Folding Knife continues the usual trend. This is the Basso show, a one-man tour de force which inevitably leaves the rest of the cast little room to manoeuvre. But while the supporting cast have little in the way of page time, Parker works wonders with the little they’re granted and sketches out a handful of well-rounded characters with admirable economy. Where the characterisation comes across a little sparse, as with Basso’s two sons, you get the impression this is less a flaw than a deliberate decision. To Basso the boys are of no interest; when they figure in the novel it’s inevitably as either a distraction or an afterthought, and their lack of distinctiveness to the reader is simply a reflection of Basso’s overwhelming indifference.

A similar lack of interest is generated in The Folding Knife’s few female characters, but it’s one less easily rationalised. The novel’s women are ciphers, usually referred to as ‘she’ without even a name to place them in the scene; it’s possible that Parker judged their rarity made something so trifling as a name redundant, but the lack leaves a nasty taste in the mouth when responsibility for the majority of the novel’s many ills can be laid at their feet. While the author’s gender has never been made public – hopefully explaining the convoluted sentence-mangling to which I’ve had to resort in order to avoid personal pronouns during the course of this review – The Folding Knife bears the fingerprints of what seems at best an uncomfortable distain for the worth and motivations of its female characters.

Perhaps it seems unfair to celebrate the novel’s ambiguity with regard to Basso and his fellow men, while complaining about the same trait with regard to the women. There’s a critical difference of tone, however: Basso’s inscrutability feels like the result of carefully sculpted characterisation; that of his sister and wives feels more like authorial indifference.

Uncertain gender politics aside, The Folding Knife is another solid effort from Parker. If it’s not up to the quality of, say, The Company, that’s scant criticism. Fiction with this depth of intelligence is a rarity in any genre, and if nothing else the novel deserves some kind of medal for making the details of budget-balancing and deal-making so utterly fascinating.


This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com