Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (8 page)

Keepers of the Peace

by Keith Brooke

Cosmos, 179 pages, paperback, 2002; reissue of a book originally published in 1990

Set in 2083/4, this novel envisages a future in which a fair percentage of humanity lives in Lagrangian-orbit space colonies which have not long before successfully fought their war of independence to rid themselves of direct governance from Earth. Indeed, now the boot is more on the other foot, since the colonies have a strong political and military presence on the home planet, where they dominate the waging of a not-quite-war between its dictatorship ally Grand Union and neighbouring CalTex – two of the states into which the former USA has split.

Jed Brindle is an average lad from a small, largely agricultural space colony. When called up for the draft he does not, like many of his peers, opt for one of the seemingly relatively easy excuses to deny the call; he is eager enough to leave the stifling confines of home and find adventure in the military. Once there and fitted with implants to control mood, communicate with his fellows and all the other things cyber-implants might be expected to do, he proves to be a frighteningly effective soldier – possessed not just of the requisite fighting skills but also of a ruthlessness that scares his superiors. This book is his story.

Before we look at that story, a note on the book's structure. The main narrative runs linearly through the odd-numbered chapters. The even-numbered chapters consist of flashbacks that take the form of diary entries (some by Jed), interview quasi-transcripts, etc. The result of this structuring is a very interesting one: at the same time that we are being pulled along by the events of the "now" we are being given an ever more rounded, and sometimes subtly shifting, depiction of Jed himself and of his times. There's something of the same feel, because of this, as when reading the John Dos Passos-influenced novels of John Brunner such as
The Sheep Look Up
(1972) and
Stand on Zanzibar
(1968). Brooke handles the dual strands of his narrative adroitly.

In the "now", Jed and a group of colleagues are conducting a plane hijack in order to kidnap a prominent CalTex figure, Cohen. Things go wrong, and the plane crashes in the middle of the desert with massive loss of life. Jed sets out to lead a small party comprising his injured military colleagues Amagat and Jacobi as well as the uninjured Cohen across the hostile terrain to the nearest Grand Union outpost, which is separated by a matter of just a few miles from the nearest CalTex outpost.

Along the way, as they survive the desert rigours and occasional aerial attack, Jed goes through a rite of passage – not the stereotyped transition from adolescence to adulthood but something far more interesting than that: the transition from killing machine to human being.

The cover quotes for
Keepers of the Peace
cite Heinlein and Haldeman as obvious precursors. In novels like
Starship Troopers
(1959) and
The Forever War
(1974) these two authors did indeed tell the tale of futuristic war from the worm's-eye view of the common soldier, showing how the brutalities of active military life can turn a normal, sensitive human being into something quite other. Yes, but ... In
Keepers of the Peace
there's nothing of the triumphalism of
Starship Troopers
or of the omnipresent large-scale-combat blood and guts and Vietnam allegory of
The Forever War
; Brooke keeps his focus far tighter, far more intimate than that, holding scenes of actual fighting to a minimum and tending to depict them with the same flat, sparse starkness that characterizes Jed's own thinking about them. A better comparison, in terms of the feel of the novel, might be with the opening chapter (based on a short story) of David Langford's 1982 novel
The Space Eater
. Jed's entirely cyborged father at one point spells out this destruction of the personality in the grinding machines of military exigency:

My son is dead. I guess he started to die back in March when they sent his draft notice, but now it's all over. There's a new person in that body of his.

And:

When Jed was called up, Toni was worried about what they would do to his body. I guess she doesn't want him ending up like me. But she was focused on the wrong thing: it's what they do to your mind that matters.

The military is like one big computing system. The generals do the programming, and there's one awful lot of equipment to be coordinated. The soldier is the place where hardware and software come together and do their work.

In this view, the individual soldier
cannot
be a human being: in order for everything to function properly, she or he, whether regarded as stalwart hero or murderous war criminal, must be reduced to the status of not even a silicon chip but of one of its electronic switches. It's a grimly powerful metaphor, and one that is, even more grimly, hard to challenge on its own terms.

As noted, there's no Vietnam allegory here. In this book's scenario it's rather as if, instead, the triumphant Vietcong had rather rapidly transformed themselves into the US Army. While preaching freedom and democracy – and while doubtless practising exactly those ideals outside the confines of this story – the colonies are in reality, in an echo of US foreign policy, propping up a seedy dictatorship against what appears on the scant evidence presented to be a reasonably liberal democracy, the fundamental spur being, despite the idealistic demagoguery, plain self-interest. Although we can hope it will not, we can anticipate that what is in 2084 merely the making of unpleasant friends will develop into a tyranny of economic dominance, reinforced as necessary by military means, by the colonies over the Earth.

Despite all the drama of its events and the sternness of its political message, this is an oddly quiet book – something that Brooke effects through a studious restraint of writing style. Those who seek the measured provocation of thought when considering our military future – and indeed our military present – can be heartily recommended to read
Keepers of the Peace
. Those who seek out militaristic sf for the thrills, the gore, the glory and the melodrama should be prescribed this novel as therapy.

—Infinity Plus

Collecting Candace

by Susan M. Brooks

Small Dogs Press, 200 pages, paperback, 2005

The nameless protagonist of this neo-noir piece first encounters Candace in a Florida bar, and is instantly captivated by her. Long legs, skimpy clothing, cute face, suggestive tattoo,
beaucoup de
bosomry – what sensitive, reconstructed male ascetic could resist her? He picks her up – or is it the other way round? – but not for sex: not only is she seemingly oblivious to the notion that sex might be anticipated, but his desire for her is entirely psychological, you understand, rather than physical, so that an act of sex with her would destroy the iconic Candace he has so swiftly created for himself. He wants to discover her mentally rather than carnally ... with the carnal option perhaps left open for later.

What he discovers about her is that all the previous males in her life – notably her three husbands – done her wrong in one way or another, perhaps most particularly through their quite inexplicable eventual dumping of her. It soon becomes plain to the reader why all this inexplicable dumping went on: Candace is a vapid moron of the most tedious imaginable kind. The protagonist, however, effectively conceals this patent fact from himself, finding her a constant maze of fascination and desirability. He casts himself into the role of her Knight in Shining Armor, and sets off, with her in tow, to exact revenge upon those males in her past who have so grievously ill treated her. In merry road-movie-psycho fashion, the pair of them cheerfully and gruesomely slaughter Candace's exes, the inspiration for their crimes being almost as much the searingly hot Florida summer as the protagonist's obsessed quixotry.

This is a novel with a great deal going for it, and its central premise has a sort of brutal effectiveness. However, the fact that the central
femme fatale
is seemingly such a complete bimbo, complete with a love for the Bible coupled with a total inability to understand the first word of the New Testament's message, means that soon the reader is filled with the same urgent compulsion to escape her company as her exes undoubtedly experienced. The protagonist is little better: the novel's conceit, initially intriguing, that he can be capable of such profound self-deception over Candace, eventually plummets to become exasperation and even incredulity that he could be such a halfwit. If she were banging his brains out one could at least understand his addiction to her: is there a male who cannot look back on protracted periods of gonads-driven idiocy? But that's not the case, and can't be: he's made her into a figure of chastity.

Collecting Candace
could get around these problems if it were exquisitely written. Unfortunately, the writing is rather clumsy. Were the two central characters possessed of one single scintilla of appeal, this roughness could add to the novel's overall noir ambience. As it is, the roughness soon begins instead to grate.

Oddly enough,
Collecting Candace
is worth reading despite all these adverse comments ... if you can stomach the unremitting bleakness of its vision of the most Neanderthal aspects of, and indeed members of, modern American society. It is from such ground that there springs the culture-of-ignorance whose current dominance has done so much to topple our country so swiftly from the position of world leader to world laughing stock. Brooks is to be heartily and very sincerely congratulated on having managed, in such a brief work, to do so much to explain this phenomenon.

—Crescent Blues

The Curse of Chalion

by Lois McMaster Bujold

Eos, 442 pages, hardback, 2001

Bujold is of course extremely well known for her science fiction: her mantelpiece must groan under the weight of all those Hugos. Yet this particular reader – and it's perhaps an embarrassing confession – has always had deep reservations about her sf novels. They have seemed to be no more than enjoyable light entertainment: books to be picked up and read quickly, mildly enjoyed, then forgotten about just as quickly. If some of them have a deeper-rooted agenda, then they have been among the ones I've not encountered. Nevertheless, the decision of a writer of such prominence in the sf genre to shift to the high-fantasy genre is an event of some significance; moreover, the very softness of the themes that characterize to their (debatable) detriment the sf novels might be a positive advantage when deployed within genre fantasy.

Well, yes ... and no.

As the book opens we encounter its central character, Cazaril, making his way on foot from the distant land of Ibra back to his homeland of Chalion. A soldier by profession, he is now a disfigured, frail remnant of his former self, having spent a while in the brutal environment of the Roknari galleys, into which he was betrayed by the vile Jironal brothers. When he gets back to Chalion he discovers that the elder of those brothers is now Chancellor and virtual proxy for the ailing king, Orico. In short order Cazaril finds himself detailed to escort Orico's half-siblings Iselle (girl) and Teidez (boy) to Cardegoss, Chalion's capital city, for Orico has fathered no children and so Teidez is the heir presumptive. Cazaril and his charges are immediately pitched into all kinds of derring-do, for the Jironals plan to take over the kingdom ...

I've been using words like "king" pretty freely here. I shouldn't have indulged in this sloppiness. Because this is a fantasy, Orico is called not a king but a "roya". His queen – oops, another taboo word – is a "royita", while Iselle and Teidez are, respectively, a "royesse" and a "royse" rather than the princess and prince you might take them for. Such silly tricks of vocabulary, presumably utilized solely in order to persuade us that the story is occurring in an imagined, fantasticated otherworld rather than the real one, are actually profoundly irritating: they reach their nadir in the universal use of the word "nuncheon" to describe a meal that takes place around the middle of the day ...

The reader does, in fact, need rather a
lot
of persuading to believe this is a fantasticated otherworld, because great stretches of the novel seem rather to be set in the sort of haphazardly remembered history still lingering in the mind of someone who's read superficially about the Middle Ages a long time ago – a very long time ago, and perhaps only in the pages of
Reader's Digest
. There is much for the likes of Sarah Palin to recognize here.

One could of course make similar snide remarks about 99% of other generic fantasy novels, some of which are excellent fantasies for all that; but here it is particularly obviously the case because there's not a great deal of fantasy to divert the attention. Indeed, with an exception that could be explained as a matter of the characters' belief rather than as a manifestation of the supernatural, the fantasy part of the novel doesn't really get started until about page 175, over one-third of the way through this long novel. Bujold's focus up until that time has been on the burgeoning romance between Cazaril and the scrummy Lady Betriz – a high-born virgin half his age – and on setting up the various intrigues and character-clashes that will drive the rest of her tale.

The romance aspect should be stressed. This humble reviewer has long maintained that most of the high fantasy published today should be considered not as part of the fantasy genre at all, but as a subgenre of the romantic novel.
The Curse of Chalion
fits this classification to a tee: it is stuffed to the gills with Harlequinesque tropes. There's another significant romance in the tale, but, sticking with that between Cazaril and Betriz for now, we have the classic older-and-somewhat-disabled-man/younger-woman scenario in which neither, for several hundred pages, dares come out into the open and Speak Their Love. Anyone for
Jane Eyre
...?

The fantasy elements, when they do finally shuffle to centre-stage, are actually quite a lot of fun. The younger and viler Jironal brother, Dondo, is foisted onto Princess (dammit, I mean
Royesse
) Iselle as a husband, as part of the Jironals' plans for domination. The thought of wedding and bedding him makes Iselle puke. Loyal Cazaril decides to stop the marriage by use of "death magic": this involves persuading one of the five gods, the Bastard (I'm not being pejorative: that's the god's name, and it's one of the brighter features of the book that this be so), to send a demon to scoop up the soul of the enemy and cart it off to hell, the only trouble being that the demon always takes the soul of the magic-worker at the same time and to the same destination. Cazaril, however, survives the experience, thanks to the unwitting prayers of Iselle, but Dondo's soul ends up quasi-tumorously in Cazaril's belly, as does the demon, where both make their resentful presences felt. Thereafter Cazaril has a form of second sight that enables him to see not only ghosts but the auras of others who have been, like himself, god-touched ... including the dark, malevolent auras that shroud all members of Chalion's ruling family, who inherited the curse of the book's title when one of their ancestors used the death magic to save the kingdom.

Of course – I'm giving away no secrets here, for this is a romantic novel – Cazaril foils the surviving Jironal brother's ambitions, lifts the curse, and gets the gal.

If the destination of the tale is predictable, what of the journey to get there – its telling?

In keeping with the vocabularistic tricks referred to earlier, Bujold also often makes use of ye olde antiquated vocabulary and grammatical constructs, plus dialogistic forsoothery in order to keep reminding us that we're in fantasyland. Aside from that, however, the telling is delightfully slick (no criticism intended):
The Curse of Chalion
is a genuine page-turner, primarily perhaps because the character of Cazaril, unlike most of the others (there are some nicely portrayed minor characters, though), is so well delineated – in fact, one could almost say that it is concern for Cazaril's fate that keeps the pages turning rather than his adventures themselves.

Viewed as a light entertainment, then,
The Curse of Chalion
is a definite success: it does everything a romantic adventure novel should do, and does it well. Yet is it really a fantasy?

Obviously the answer is "yes" in terms of the shelf in the bookstore where you'll find it placed. But otherwise? That's a lot less certain. Throughout my reading of
The Curse of Chalion
I was constantly reminded of Judith Merkle Riley's excellent novel
In Pursuit of the Green Dragon
(1991). The point is that Riley's novel is a historical fiction; essentially it is a yarn rooted in genuine history. It does, though, have fantasticated elements (the "green dragon" of the title is an alchemical reference, for example), but these fit well alongside the more straightforward elements. What made my mind revert so frequently to
In Pursuit of the Green Dragon
was that Riley's
historical
novel has as much fantasy in it as has
The Curse of Chalion
. The only real difference is that Bujold's tale is set not in a real history but in a cobbled-together one where kings are called royas. In effect, she has written a historical novel without all the pain of doing the necessary but boring research.

So you pays yer money and you takes yer choice. As a jolly way of whiling away a long train journey,
The Curse of Chalion
will amply, and expertly, satisfy you – it could even keep you reading in bed long past official lights-out, as it did me – but if it's fantasy you're after you'd be better off looking elsewhere; and the same, obviously, is true if your taste is for historical fiction.

—Infinity Plus