Currently Reading - 13 June 2015
Jun. 13th, 2015 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidgillonThe Truth, Terry Pratchett
Or this being Ankh-Morpork, The Truth Will Make Ye Fret.
The printing revolution and newspapers come simultaneously to Ankh-Morpork. (I've been re-reading the Watch books, but I've decided that actually needs me to read anything Sam Vimes appears in). Clearly the printing revolution is an idea whose time as come, and the revolution is mostly in Lord Vetinari deciding not to oppose it, but newspapers come about purely by accident - the cart carrying the press accidentally knocks down William de Worde, who writes a small newsletter about Ankh-Morpork goings on for foreign nobles, and Gunilla Goodmountain's crew of dwarves, whose press it is, spot a potential good thing and run-off a few hundred copies while waiting for him to wake up. Vetinari, canny as ever, decides to let them run with it, and, as he does in later books such as Going Postal, makes a chosen victim personally responsible for the new technology, in this case William.
It's worth remembering with The Truth that Pratchett got his start on a local paper, and his experience of doing it for real shines through in some of the observations such as 'names sell papers', though there was one moment where I thought the observation strayed into outright cynicism about the nature of most readers, in a way I don't remember ever seeing from Pratchett in other books.
William, Goodmountain and the dwarves soon start to accumulate a staff to write The Ankh-Morpork Times (and it's clear The Thunderer is the model Pratchett's drawing on), there's Saccharisa the engraver's daughter as reporter and to bounce ideas off, Rocky the troll to make sure no one (such as the rest of the engravers) burns down the presses, Otto Chriek the photographer (and vampire), and Foul Ol' Ron and the rest of the Canting Crew (and Gaspode, their thinking dog), the beggars not even the Beggar's Guild will have, to act as street sellers. But there are murderers abroad in the city, murderers who aren't Assassins, and there's a plot against Vetinari (isn't there always?) and suddenly the Times has its first big story as Vetinari's assistant is stabbed and Vetinari is the prime suspect, and it's a plot that throws William and Commander Vimes on a collision course.
And that's where I run into problems. Not with the plot per se, but with the characterisation. Mr Pin and Mr Tulip, our two murderers, are Pratchett showing off his ability to write colourful, unforgettable characters at his best. Mr Tulip is an out-and-out thug, who'll kill anyone sooner than blink an eye, usually while attempting to shove anything even vaguely reminiscent of chemicals up his nose, but can be reduced to tears by works of art, on which he is an ___ing expert (he also has ___ing unusual speech patterns), while Mr Pin is like a smarter Nobby Nobbs (with somewhat better personal hygiene) who turned to the dark side. And in a sub-plot we have the first appearance of the King of the Golden River, Harry King, a businessman who is taking 'where's there's muck, there's brass' to its most elemental level. William, by comparison, is down right dull, and Sacharisa is worse. She's the only recognisably female character (bar William's Dickensian landlady* and a couple of walk-on appearances by Sergeant Angua), but she has almost no agency, and what she does is mostly directed towards making her a pastiche of what an unreconstructed old-fashioned newspaperman would expect a woman reporter to cover. I went back to Tansy Rayner Roberts' Pratchett's Women to see what she makes of her, and while she actually thinks that Sacharissa is much more empowered than I do, she doesn't quite seem to know what to make of her either. On the other hand I did say recognisably female, and there are a hoard of dwarves running the presses, and knowing which dwarves are female and the development of dwarvish feminism are an ongoing arc. We find out quite late in the day that Gunilla Goodmountain and Gunilla's second in command Boddony are engaged, but it's not entirely clear who's male and who's female. I think it's Goodmountain, which would make for a second major female role (well technically, at least), if it's Boddony, then we're back to women as sidekicks.
And then there's the Watch, seen through other's eyes. Mostly we're talking about Sam Vimes, because it's Vimes we're used to having as the primary character. I found having Vimes in a supporting role less than entirely convincing, which I think is mostly because in comparison to Sam Vimes most people are unconvincing, but I don't think William's the best character to give us our first view of him, and particularly not to outsmart him. Vimes is a character with too much agency for his own good, and the story requires him to run into a brick wall. His passivity isn't entirely convincing, nor his crude attempts to intimidate William - Vimes is smarter than that, he can recognise who that will work on and who it won't, except this time he can't. As for the others, Angua gets a couple of scenes, one of which does show her off as as smart as Vimes, but the other shows her off as comic victim, there's a running joke around Nobby, Cheery has precisely one scene, despite this being a novel in which dwarves have a large role, and Carrot and Detritus drift across the screen a couple of times, and that's it. It isn't a Watch novel, I simply happen to be re-reading it because I'm reading all the books where Vimes shows up, but I'm not convinced that's the only reason I'm having problems with their portrayal.
It's Pratchett, it'll make you laugh, it'll make you think, but I'm not convinced it's one of his strongest works.
* the scenes around the guest house dining table are almost throwaway, but some of the best obseved writing in the book, particularly the one with Mr Longshaft and the egg....
One Salt Sea, Toby Daye Book 5, Seanan McGuire
I said when reviewing the last book that I was unhappy with the way the Luidaeg's part in the affair was curtailed and hoped it was because of a plot point that would be picked up in a later book, this is that book. But the cross-overs in plot-points between the two are strong enough I can't really discuss One Salt Sea without mentioning spoilers for Late Eclipses, so most of the rest of the review is hidden behind a cut.
Toby is settling, uncomfortably, into her role as the Countess of Goldengreen, and into her new body, her mother having saved her life in the previous book by undoing a change she made to Toby as an infant to try and make her more human, returning her to her true nature, or something close to it. She's still a changeling, still only half-elven, a perpetual commoner in the halls of the purebloods, but she's no longer the Daoine Sidhe half-breed she thought she was, she's one of only two Dochas Sidhe in Faery (the other being her mother, Amandine), and as if changing species wasn't a big enough shock to deal with, she now knows her mother is one of the Firstborn, the near-Godlike children of Oberon and either Maeve or Titania, which makes series scary monster/ally the Luidaeg her aunt (I'm not certain her brain is ready to accept this makes Faery god Oberon her grandfather). All of which means her fetch May now looks more like Toby than Toby does (on the bright side May is no longer the harbinger of Toby's death). Toby's patron, Duke Sylvester, is set on helping her face up to her responsibilities, and is taking a two-pronged approach by a) beating her black and blue with a sword at every opportunity so that she develops a better ability to defend herself, and b) heaping even further responsibility on her, in this case by making his page and her regular teenage sidekick Quentin officially her squire. Being Toby she promptly acquires another one unofficially, Raj, nephew of Tybalt, King of Cats.
But there's trouble afoot (isn't there always), or in this case afloat (asink? afluke?). Tensions between San Francisco's faery Kingdom of the Mists and the Undersea Duchy of Saltmist have escalated to the point of war, and now someone has kidnapped the Duchess of Saltmist's children. The Queen of the Mists would be happy to go to war (even if some of her nobles have rather more sense), but there's a teeny-tiny problem, the Undersea will win. And she still hates Toby, perhaps moreso after being cheated out of her opportunity to burn her at the stake in the last book. Then the Luidaeg steps in and shanghais Toby to stop the war, by finding the kids, which means talking to not one, but two sets of angry nobles. And then the assassination attempts start. And as if that wasn't complicated enough, Toby's Selkie lover Connor isn't from the Kingdom of the Mists, he's the ambassador for Saltmist, and, twisting the knife further, assumed competition for Toby's love, Tybalt, king of San Francisco's cats chooses that moment to saunter back into her life after kissing her in Late Eclipses and then going AWOL for a month.
The story takes us to parts of the faery kingdoms neither Toby nor we have seen before, the undersea territories of the Merrow, the Selkies and the Roane, with new species such as the Cetacea and the Cephali and their fantastical ducal court - even faery architects have to think about gravity, but if you're under water then things like floors are less of an issue. There's the new, and the strange, and the disturbing, with a Roane prophetess covering the latter, and I'm fairly sure there's setup for at least one if not two future stories in what she says, but as seers go she's even more obscure than most.
But we're soon back on familiar territory, and a familiar villain - Rayseline Torquill, Sylvester's daughter, the little girl lost who Toby failed to save. And Rayseline raises the stakes by going after the other little girl who Toby lost, her daughter Gillian. So it's all hands to the pump as Toby races to save a daughter who can't know about Faery from keepers who don't care if she sees them for what they are, and to save Faery from itself. There's a scene going through Rayseline's room which is heart-rending for showing how damaged she is, and Gillian faces just that kind of damage, just by knowing about Faery, and if Toby saves her, then the saving likely comes at a price.
And that's only the half of it, there's a war to be stopped, and egos to be soothed, and just where does the plot stop and the innocence begin.
Like all of the Toby Daye books, victory in this one comes at a price, and I think it's one a lot of readers will have seen coming. There's at least one explicit hint, but sometimes a story can settle into what Pratchett calls narrative determinism, and even if stories don't write themselves into reality in quite the way they do in the Discworld, sometimes they write themselves into the page in just that way, and do it with sufficient malice aforethought for you to see them coming hundreds of pages in advance. I'm not certain if you could have written One Salt Sea without that foreshadowing, I've been suspecting this was coming for a while, but it is most certainly there.
And beyond everything else, we finally discover a little about the Luidaeg, and about why she doesn't like Selkies, and there's definitely the set-up for another tale in that little story.
Once you finish One Salt Sea, go to Seanan's website, and the Toby Daye Short Stories page, which has two short stories best read afterwards. In Sea Salt Tears is about the Luidaeg, and first loves, and the price of desire, and gives the context needed to truly understand something that happens towards the end of the book, while Forbid the Sea is about Tybalt, and love, and the price of desire, and throws yet another perspective on the story.
(When you finish the book and the stories, flip back to the Luidaeg's first appearance in chapter 2, there's a detail you'll likely have missed, but now have the context to appreciate, and wonder).
Other Stuff:
Weber's Hell's Foundations Quiver and The Sword of the South have new preview chapters up at Collected Driblets of Baen, while the first nine chapters of S M Stirling's The Desert and The Blade are also there. I talked about the Webers a couple of months ago, the only revelation in the new stuff is how much later Sword of the South is set than other books in the series - about 60 years later, which I guess gets Weber around the previously established prophetic hook that one of the characters was going to do something fundamental, but not for a good few years. The Stirling is the latest in the Change Cycle, book 12 (15 if you count the Nantucket books), and I guess now counts as a generational saga as the third generation of characters are now off on a quest, only rather than looking for the mystical, and Change related 'Sword of the Lady' their parents quested for, they're looking for a sword out of Japanese myth, Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, the Grass Cutting Sword, which is part of the Japanese Imperial Regalia. It's a tightly written sequence with multiple threads involving parties travelling by land and sea, other groups who are about to get caught up in everything, and the previous generation tearing their hair out that their kids have gone and done exactly the same thing they did 20-odd years ago/haring after them to try and stop them getting themselves killed as they walk into an ambush (you know it's an ambush from the prologue). It's another story set in San Francisco, only in this case a post-apocalyptic San Francisco populated by tribes of cannibals - I did like one character being ordered to activate Plan Baywatch, the pacification of San Francisco, though as the Change Cycle premise is basically the Society For Creative Anachronism shall inherit the earth that's an invasion by knights in armour, horse archers and Roman Legionaires, not David Hasselhoff in swim trunks.
Or this being Ankh-Morpork, The Truth Will Make Ye Fret.
The printing revolution and newspapers come simultaneously to Ankh-Morpork. (I've been re-reading the Watch books, but I've decided that actually needs me to read anything Sam Vimes appears in). Clearly the printing revolution is an idea whose time as come, and the revolution is mostly in Lord Vetinari deciding not to oppose it, but newspapers come about purely by accident - the cart carrying the press accidentally knocks down William de Worde, who writes a small newsletter about Ankh-Morpork goings on for foreign nobles, and Gunilla Goodmountain's crew of dwarves, whose press it is, spot a potential good thing and run-off a few hundred copies while waiting for him to wake up. Vetinari, canny as ever, decides to let them run with it, and, as he does in later books such as Going Postal, makes a chosen victim personally responsible for the new technology, in this case William.
It's worth remembering with The Truth that Pratchett got his start on a local paper, and his experience of doing it for real shines through in some of the observations such as 'names sell papers', though there was one moment where I thought the observation strayed into outright cynicism about the nature of most readers, in a way I don't remember ever seeing from Pratchett in other books.
William, Goodmountain and the dwarves soon start to accumulate a staff to write The Ankh-Morpork Times (and it's clear The Thunderer is the model Pratchett's drawing on), there's Saccharisa the engraver's daughter as reporter and to bounce ideas off, Rocky the troll to make sure no one (such as the rest of the engravers) burns down the presses, Otto Chriek the photographer (and vampire), and Foul Ol' Ron and the rest of the Canting Crew (and Gaspode, their thinking dog), the beggars not even the Beggar's Guild will have, to act as street sellers. But there are murderers abroad in the city, murderers who aren't Assassins, and there's a plot against Vetinari (isn't there always?) and suddenly the Times has its first big story as Vetinari's assistant is stabbed and Vetinari is the prime suspect, and it's a plot that throws William and Commander Vimes on a collision course.
And that's where I run into problems. Not with the plot per se, but with the characterisation. Mr Pin and Mr Tulip, our two murderers, are Pratchett showing off his ability to write colourful, unforgettable characters at his best. Mr Tulip is an out-and-out thug, who'll kill anyone sooner than blink an eye, usually while attempting to shove anything even vaguely reminiscent of chemicals up his nose, but can be reduced to tears by works of art, on which he is an ___ing expert (he also has ___ing unusual speech patterns), while Mr Pin is like a smarter Nobby Nobbs (with somewhat better personal hygiene) who turned to the dark side. And in a sub-plot we have the first appearance of the King of the Golden River, Harry King, a businessman who is taking 'where's there's muck, there's brass' to its most elemental level. William, by comparison, is down right dull, and Sacharisa is worse. She's the only recognisably female character (bar William's Dickensian landlady* and a couple of walk-on appearances by Sergeant Angua), but she has almost no agency, and what she does is mostly directed towards making her a pastiche of what an unreconstructed old-fashioned newspaperman would expect a woman reporter to cover. I went back to Tansy Rayner Roberts' Pratchett's Women to see what she makes of her, and while she actually thinks that Sacharissa is much more empowered than I do, she doesn't quite seem to know what to make of her either. On the other hand I did say recognisably female, and there are a hoard of dwarves running the presses, and knowing which dwarves are female and the development of dwarvish feminism are an ongoing arc. We find out quite late in the day that Gunilla Goodmountain and Gunilla's second in command Boddony are engaged, but it's not entirely clear who's male and who's female. I think it's Goodmountain, which would make for a second major female role (well technically, at least), if it's Boddony, then we're back to women as sidekicks.
And then there's the Watch, seen through other's eyes. Mostly we're talking about Sam Vimes, because it's Vimes we're used to having as the primary character. I found having Vimes in a supporting role less than entirely convincing, which I think is mostly because in comparison to Sam Vimes most people are unconvincing, but I don't think William's the best character to give us our first view of him, and particularly not to outsmart him. Vimes is a character with too much agency for his own good, and the story requires him to run into a brick wall. His passivity isn't entirely convincing, nor his crude attempts to intimidate William - Vimes is smarter than that, he can recognise who that will work on and who it won't, except this time he can't. As for the others, Angua gets a couple of scenes, one of which does show her off as as smart as Vimes, but the other shows her off as comic victim, there's a running joke around Nobby, Cheery has precisely one scene, despite this being a novel in which dwarves have a large role, and Carrot and Detritus drift across the screen a couple of times, and that's it. It isn't a Watch novel, I simply happen to be re-reading it because I'm reading all the books where Vimes shows up, but I'm not convinced that's the only reason I'm having problems with their portrayal.
It's Pratchett, it'll make you laugh, it'll make you think, but I'm not convinced it's one of his strongest works.
* the scenes around the guest house dining table are almost throwaway, but some of the best obseved writing in the book, particularly the one with Mr Longshaft and the egg....
One Salt Sea, Toby Daye Book 5, Seanan McGuire
I said when reviewing the last book that I was unhappy with the way the Luidaeg's part in the affair was curtailed and hoped it was because of a plot point that would be picked up in a later book, this is that book. But the cross-overs in plot-points between the two are strong enough I can't really discuss One Salt Sea without mentioning spoilers for Late Eclipses, so most of the rest of the review is hidden behind a cut.
Toby is settling, uncomfortably, into her role as the Countess of Goldengreen, and into her new body, her mother having saved her life in the previous book by undoing a change she made to Toby as an infant to try and make her more human, returning her to her true nature, or something close to it. She's still a changeling, still only half-elven, a perpetual commoner in the halls of the purebloods, but she's no longer the Daoine Sidhe half-breed she thought she was, she's one of only two Dochas Sidhe in Faery (the other being her mother, Amandine), and as if changing species wasn't a big enough shock to deal with, she now knows her mother is one of the Firstborn, the near-Godlike children of Oberon and either Maeve or Titania, which makes series scary monster/ally the Luidaeg her aunt (I'm not certain her brain is ready to accept this makes Faery god Oberon her grandfather). All of which means her fetch May now looks more like Toby than Toby does (on the bright side May is no longer the harbinger of Toby's death). Toby's patron, Duke Sylvester, is set on helping her face up to her responsibilities, and is taking a two-pronged approach by a) beating her black and blue with a sword at every opportunity so that she develops a better ability to defend herself, and b) heaping even further responsibility on her, in this case by making his page and her regular teenage sidekick Quentin officially her squire. Being Toby she promptly acquires another one unofficially, Raj, nephew of Tybalt, King of Cats.
But there's trouble afoot (isn't there always), or in this case afloat (asink? afluke?). Tensions between San Francisco's faery Kingdom of the Mists and the Undersea Duchy of Saltmist have escalated to the point of war, and now someone has kidnapped the Duchess of Saltmist's children. The Queen of the Mists would be happy to go to war (even if some of her nobles have rather more sense), but there's a teeny-tiny problem, the Undersea will win. And she still hates Toby, perhaps moreso after being cheated out of her opportunity to burn her at the stake in the last book. Then the Luidaeg steps in and shanghais Toby to stop the war, by finding the kids, which means talking to not one, but two sets of angry nobles. And then the assassination attempts start. And as if that wasn't complicated enough, Toby's Selkie lover Connor isn't from the Kingdom of the Mists, he's the ambassador for Saltmist, and, twisting the knife further, assumed competition for Toby's love, Tybalt, king of San Francisco's cats chooses that moment to saunter back into her life after kissing her in Late Eclipses and then going AWOL for a month.
The story takes us to parts of the faery kingdoms neither Toby nor we have seen before, the undersea territories of the Merrow, the Selkies and the Roane, with new species such as the Cetacea and the Cephali and their fantastical ducal court - even faery architects have to think about gravity, but if you're under water then things like floors are less of an issue. There's the new, and the strange, and the disturbing, with a Roane prophetess covering the latter, and I'm fairly sure there's setup for at least one if not two future stories in what she says, but as seers go she's even more obscure than most.
But we're soon back on familiar territory, and a familiar villain - Rayseline Torquill, Sylvester's daughter, the little girl lost who Toby failed to save. And Rayseline raises the stakes by going after the other little girl who Toby lost, her daughter Gillian. So it's all hands to the pump as Toby races to save a daughter who can't know about Faery from keepers who don't care if she sees them for what they are, and to save Faery from itself. There's a scene going through Rayseline's room which is heart-rending for showing how damaged she is, and Gillian faces just that kind of damage, just by knowing about Faery, and if Toby saves her, then the saving likely comes at a price.
And that's only the half of it, there's a war to be stopped, and egos to be soothed, and just where does the plot stop and the innocence begin.
Like all of the Toby Daye books, victory in this one comes at a price, and I think it's one a lot of readers will have seen coming. There's at least one explicit hint, but sometimes a story can settle into what Pratchett calls narrative determinism, and even if stories don't write themselves into reality in quite the way they do in the Discworld, sometimes they write themselves into the page in just that way, and do it with sufficient malice aforethought for you to see them coming hundreds of pages in advance. I'm not certain if you could have written One Salt Sea without that foreshadowing, I've been suspecting this was coming for a while, but it is most certainly there.
And beyond everything else, we finally discover a little about the Luidaeg, and about why she doesn't like Selkies, and there's definitely the set-up for another tale in that little story.
Once you finish One Salt Sea, go to Seanan's website, and the Toby Daye Short Stories page, which has two short stories best read afterwards. In Sea Salt Tears is about the Luidaeg, and first loves, and the price of desire, and gives the context needed to truly understand something that happens towards the end of the book, while Forbid the Sea is about Tybalt, and love, and the price of desire, and throws yet another perspective on the story.
(When you finish the book and the stories, flip back to the Luidaeg's first appearance in chapter 2, there's a detail you'll likely have missed, but now have the context to appreciate, and wonder).
Other Stuff:
Weber's Hell's Foundations Quiver and The Sword of the South have new preview chapters up at Collected Driblets of Baen, while the first nine chapters of S M Stirling's The Desert and The Blade are also there. I talked about the Webers a couple of months ago, the only revelation in the new stuff is how much later Sword of the South is set than other books in the series - about 60 years later, which I guess gets Weber around the previously established prophetic hook that one of the characters was going to do something fundamental, but not for a good few years. The Stirling is the latest in the Change Cycle, book 12 (15 if you count the Nantucket books), and I guess now counts as a generational saga as the third generation of characters are now off on a quest, only rather than looking for the mystical, and Change related 'Sword of the Lady' their parents quested for, they're looking for a sword out of Japanese myth, Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, the Grass Cutting Sword, which is part of the Japanese Imperial Regalia. It's a tightly written sequence with multiple threads involving parties travelling by land and sea, other groups who are about to get caught up in everything, and the previous generation tearing their hair out that their kids have gone and done exactly the same thing they did 20-odd years ago/haring after them to try and stop them getting themselves killed as they walk into an ambush (you know it's an ambush from the prologue). It's another story set in San Francisco, only in this case a post-apocalyptic San Francisco populated by tribes of cannibals - I did like one character being ordered to activate Plan Baywatch, the pacification of San Francisco, though as the Change Cycle premise is basically the Society For Creative Anachronism shall inherit the earth that's an invasion by knights in armour, horse archers and Roman Legionaires, not David Hasselhoff in swim trunks.
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Date: 2015-06-14 12:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-06-14 02:54 pm (UTC)