Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (35 page)

Thief of Time

by Terry Pratchett

HarperCollins, 324 pages, hardback, 2001

Well, the initial report from the Front is that the cover's okay, but inexplicably HarperCollins still refuse to use the Josh Kirby cover illustrations that do so much to enhance the experience of reading each new Pratchett novel. No wonder there's a healthy trade here in the States of the UK editions of Pratchett's books – the ones that have the
real
covers ...

What sets Terry Pratchett head and shoulders above almost all his rivals in the field of comic fantasy is not just that he is at his best a very funny writer but that he is also a very clever and inventive fantasist. On those (fairly rare) occasions when the humour flags, he can rely on the wit of the fantasy to pull the reader delightedly through. The importance of this is exemplified by one of his own, earlier books,
The Lost Continent
, which has plenty of jokes – some of them good ones – but through the paucity of its fantasy inspiration is, overall, perhaps the least enjoyable to read of all his novels; it's not
bad
, but ... Scribes who venture into the field would do well to learn this lesson from Pratchett, or from the very few other writers who have handled comic sf/fantasy with any panache, such as Ron Goulart, Douglas Adams (who, as I write, has just died tragically young), Christopher Moore, and of course Tom Holt.

The point is worth making because
Thief of Time
has fewer moments of uproarious humour than most of Pratchett's books, and the best of the jokes show a darker, more satirical aspect than we generally associate with him, like:

"Hold on, hold on ... how can you take a piece of, oh, some old century, and
stitch
it into a modern one? Wouldn't people notice that ..." Susan flailed a bit, "oh, that people have got the wrong armor and the buildings are all wrong, and they're still in the middle of wars that happened centuries ago?"

IN MY EXPERIENCE, SUSAN, WITHIN THEIR HEADS TOO MANY HUMANS SPEND A LOT OF TIME IN THE MIDDLE OF WARS THAT HAPPENED CENTURIES AGO.

or

Every society needs a cry like ["Remember Koom Valley!"], but only in a very few do they come out with the complete, unvarnished version, which is "Remember-The-Atrocity-Committed-Against-Us-Last-Time-That-Will-Excuse-The-Atrocity-That-We're-About-To-Commit-Today! And So On! Hurrah!"

Thief of Time
, more than is usual for Pratchett, must therefore largely stand or fall according to its merits as a fantasy novel rather than as a comic novel.

It is indeed full of inventiveness. The Auditors – the anonymous, unidentitied spirits who, rather like an Accounts Department from Hell, try to keep the Universe in order without the slightest heed to the catastrophic counterproductiveness and total pointlessness of such efforts – have decided that their self-appointed task would be much easier if time could be made to stop: then they could get everything sorted and it would
stay
that way, because, frozen in time, such irritating pests as human beings wouldn't constantly be disordering things again faster than the Auditors can sort them. One Auditor accordingly incarnates itself as the lovely but offputtingly
odd
Lady LeJean in order to encourage the Discworld's finest, if most unstable, clockmaker, Jeremy, in the construction of a new clock that will on completion, because of its unique precise accuracy, have the effect of bringing time to a halt. Unfortunately for the Auditors' plans, once this particular Auditor discovers itself in a human body it begins to develop human traits, like individuality and the yen for chocolate. And – it having become a she – Lady LeJean falls head over heels in love with Jeremy.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Discworld in what one might consider to be the high mountains of Tibet, the Monks of History are becoming aware of what is going on. It is their task to make sure that the world's time is sensibly managed, with reserves being held so that they may, in an emergency, be pumped to locales that suddenly need a bit extra; they can indeed stitch bits of one century into another, and have done so on occasion – which goes to explain why history doesn't make much sense if you look at it too closely. Among their number, humblest but reputedly most powerful and sagest of them all, is Lu-Tze; to Lu-Tze has just been apprenticed the mysterious Ankh-Morpork orphan Lobsang Ludd (no relation to T. Lobsang Rampa, I'm sure), who possesses in raw form the ability to locally manipulate time – an ability he has put to use by becoming an undetectable petty thief. The abbot of the Monks of History sends Lu-Tze and Ludd off on a quest to Ankh-Morpork to thwart the endeavours of the Auditors.

Death, too, is concerned by developments. Although he is duty-bound to organize the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Five, if you count Ronnie, the one who left the group before it made it big – for their final Ride, he entrusts his granddaughter Susan (one of Pratchett's finest character creations) with a similar quest.

And that is where, as you would expect of any Pratchett novel, the complications begin ...

The difficulty with this book is that, while all is eventually resolved and the
status quo ante
restored, it somehow doesn't quite hang together as a fantasy novel; there is a pervasive slight feeling of arbitrariness about the developing course of events. Because of this, the narrative fails to engender any sense of urgency in the places where it should. Of course it's true of most genre novels that we know in advance that right will prevail in the end (or whatever); at the same time we expect to be caught up by the story so that we ignore the foregone conclusion for the thrill of the moment. Not so here, because of that lack of any necessary inexorability about the unfolding events. (There's also some very occasional careless copy-editing, which doesn't help.) The words do not disappear from the page, which is surely the aim of the taleteller. Reading
Thief of Time
is still an entertaining experience, but even to judge the book at that level it is not as entertaining as it could be because (at least this reader found) there is none of the emotional involvement in events or characters that one usually expects from a novel that is fully successful
as a novel
.

Still, Terry Pratchett's millions of well earned fans will presumably be undeterred by such considerations and will enjoy
Thief of Time
just the way it is, thank you very much. And certainly one could swiftly lay hands on a dozen genre-fantasy novels that are less worthwhile. But Pratchett himself has done far better than this.

—Infinity Plus

Song of the Bones

by M.K. Preston

Intrigue Press, 300 pages, hardback, 2003

The strapline on the cover of this novel reads "A Chantalene Mystery," and the blurb gives little indication that the book is other than a cozy murder tale. In fact, although it has many elements of the mystery, most particularly in its first half, it's really a thriller – and a very engaging and good one.

Chantalene (who has a past of her own, presumably treated in Preston's earlier novel
Perhaps She'll Die
) works as assistant to her lover, lawyer/accountant Drew, in the small town of Tetumka, Oklahoma. Her best friend Thelma, the local postmistress, comes to them with the request that they try to track down her husband Billy Ray, who walked out of her life decades ago but is still co-signatory to the papers on her property, now eagerly sought by an oil company. The search for him has not long begun when a handsome stranger walks in and announces himself as the long-lost Billy Ray, returned to attempt a reconciliation with his wife. Thelma accepts him as the genuine article, and at first all seems blissful; but within days she becomes convinced he's an impostor – and calls on Chantalene to help her establish the truth. Before long the tale emerges of how, all those decades ago, Billy Ray and his brother Donnie Ray, together with co-conspirator Songdog, robbed a Mob-run casino that was fleecing the Native Americans; Billy Ray fled so Thelma could not be connected to the crime by the vengeful mobsters.

Meanwhile, unknown to Chantalene, Songdog, now living as an elderly hermit, has come to believe Chantalene is a shapeshifted version of his step-daughter and lover Liddy, whom he many years ago murdered as she attempted to steal the proceeds of the robbery. He determines to murder Liddy's "new incarnation." Just to add to Chantalene's dangers, the oil company chasing Thelma's land is evidently not all that it seems, while Drew's eye-popper of an ex-wife looks ready to claim back her man.

The stage is set for further murders ... and more than once before the book's end Chantalene must fight for her life.

The telling of this excellent
Grand Guignol
tale is deceptively genial, mimicking the laid-back ambience of the folk of back-of-beyond Tetumka. This serves to increase the impact of the thriller elements of the plot when they arrive; they're like a punch suddenly thrown at you by an old friend in the middle of an amicable chat. In places, indeed, the writing approaches a definite lyric beauty, enhanced by its lack of selfconsciousness; alas, it's also occasionally rendered rebarbatively muddy by an inability, shared by so many current American writers and their editors, to master the pluperfect tense.

But that's a relatively small flaw, and one that can be lived with. Certainly
Song of the Bones
is overall impressive and enjoyable enough that I for one will be looking out for the earlier
Perhaps She'll Die
– and for future M.K. Preston novels.

—Crescent Blues

The Extremes

by Christopher Priest

Simon & Schuster, 400 pages, hardback, 1998

Teresa Simons, a highly trained FBI agent, is widowed when her husband Andy is shot down by a spree killer, John Aronwitz, in a small Texas town. Still in grief, she comes to Britain, the land of her birth – in particular to the sleepy southeastern town of Bulverton, which was itself, on the same day that Aronwitz carried out his slaughter in Texas, the victim of a spree killer, Gerry Grove. She finds a community that seems determined to try to deal with its collective trauma by expunging it from the public memory. This stratagem is proving all too obviously unsuccessful: people directly or indirectly affected by Grove's massacre have the sense that in its aftermath they are living an artifice, that they have been in some obscure sense
scripted
.

As an FBI agent, Teresa has been subjected to a new virtual- reality training system called Extreme Experience, or ExEx. By interviewing people who have been through an extreme of experience – usually involving violence – and directly scanning their memories, it is possible to construct highly detailed VR scenarios. Into these can be projected the consciousnesses of FBI trainees, who may adopt the roles and personas of those close to the event (even the perpetrators of the mayhem) and attempt to affect the outcome – to alter, at least within the context of the particular scenario, what actually happened. Now ExEx has become available to the public as leisure entertainment, and is proving immensely popular, people flocking in droves to enjoy the vicarious thrills of extreme experiences of all types, sexual encounters being of course prominent among them.

Teresa hopes in a somewhat confused way that, through finding out what happened in Bulverton, she may begin to understand or at least come to terms with the events in Texas that culminated in the death of her husband. The Bulvertonians, however, generally resent her presence and her prying; and her sense of rejection from mundane reality is intensified when officers of the GunHo Corporation, prime manufacturers of ExEx scenarios, arrive in Bulverton and pressure her to leave, because her inquiries, by disturbing the psychological status quo of the locals, are likely to affect the accuracy of the definitive VR scenario concerning the Bulverton Massacre that the GunHo people have come here to construct. Although not fully aware of her own motivations, Teresa responds to these rejections by withdrawing ever more readily into the ExEx scenarios on offer to the public at Bulverton's own GunHo centre.

Already she has experienced what seem to her to be paranormal flashbacks to that dreadful day when Grove strutted through Bulverton's streets, mowing down anyone who came into his path. Moreover, she has discovered there are inconsistencies in the records of what actually happened – for example and most notably, that there appear to have been two sets, one used and one unused, of the weapons with which Grove carried out (or did not carry out) his killings, almost as if, immediately before the massacre, he came to a crux point where the options open to him were (a) to perpetrate his slaughter and (b) not to, and that he somehow took both choices. The clues are there for her to deduce that there has arisen a conflict of realities, that there is a leakage (as it were) from the virtual reality into the historical one.

These clues, quite naturally, she fails to pick up – they defy common sense and everyday rationality – until she is drawn further and further into the web of innumerable interconnecting VR scenarios that can be explored through ExEx. For interconnecting these are, although the interconnections may not always be – in fact rarely are – obvious. Moreover, she discovers that the immensely complex compounded reality that has been constructed (more accurately, has constructed itself) within the confines of ExEx has assumed the status of an
alternate
reality, one that has begun to have at least pretensions to be a rival of the world outside. Some of the "actors" within the scenarios are perfectly aware of what they are doing – they have developed autonomous personalities to the extent that Teresa can hold mental conversations with them. More and more, as she affects the outcome of a particular scenario, she discovers that the change she has made to it is no longer just a temporary matter: the revised scenario has assumed an identity of its own, rather as if your playing of a video game permanently altered that game for every subsequent player of it or any other video game. And, by altering one scenario, she inevitably affects the innumerable rest as well, because of the overt or subtle interconnections between them. The distancing tricks we all use to protect ourselves from the harshness of the world around us – we read in the newspapers about (for example) mass killings and, while we know the accounts are factual, we mentally process them as if they were gory fictions – no longer work for the participant within the ExEx web: what were merely
virtual
realities, merely
stories
, have attained a higher status. Moreover, the shifts in the alternate reality that is the ExEx world are affecting the world outside, so that in a very true sense "real" reality is coming to be no more than one possibility among many.

In due course Teresa must abandon her role as perpetual spectator in the scenarios directly involving Grove, Aronwitz and her dead husband; she must not so much confront the beast as
become
the beast. In so doing she discovers her heart of darkness – but not in any predictable or clichéd way.

That, believe it or not, is a much simplified and only partial outline of the premise of Christopher Priest's new novel,
The Extremes
. In the hands of a lesser writer this conceptually extremely complicated mass of material might become muddled, but Priest controls it all masterfully. Although his concerns are, obviously, to do with the frontiers and limitations of the human mind and consciousness – our
own
, personal mind and consciousness – he manages to conjure from this web of probings towards the edges of our perceptual and consensual reality (and of our perceptions, our modes of perception, and our consensuses) a novel that reads with all the compulsiveness and clarity of a thriller. The effect
The Extremes
has on the reader is therefore, very definitely and by clear design, twofold – as if you had enjoyed, complete with popcorn, all the thrills and spills of the latest Bruce Willis action movie and then discovered, later, that this had been no mindless actioner but in fact a very thoughtful, very careful and quite rigorous philosophical exploration. In this the novel imitates its subject matter: the reality you think you are inhabiting as you read it proves to be quite different from the reality into which Priest has so deftly lured you. The book's true scariness does not come directly from the events depicted on the page – though these can be quite horrifying enough – but from the way in which we, as readers, are like the unfortunate Teresa drawn into the final confrontation with those parts of our
selves
we would rather leave ignored.

Beautifully written and utterly absorbing,
The Extremes
is a quite exceptional piece of work.

—Samhain