A tree of immense girth grows from a tufted shoot; a terrace of nine levels rises from a clump of soil; a journey of a thousand miles begins under the first tread.
--Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 64
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Sabriel, Garth Nix (1995), 491 pp (pb).
I don't read a lot of fiction from the "Young Adult" category, but there are some real gems occasionally to be found in its midst. There's some fine reading to be had, from classics like Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, Cooper's The Dark is Rising series, and Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, to the recently published His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. Sabriel is certainly a YA book, but it's also an interesting and enjoyable book.
Sabriel takes place in a bifurcated land, with the divide defined and maintained by a sea-to-sea barrier known simply as The Wall. To the south is the land of Ancelstierre, a largely non-magical region that bears a fair resemblance to ca. 1920 Britain in culture and technical level (motorized vehicles are just starting to become common, for instance). To the north is The Old Kingdom, a place where magic is common and climate and time can both be observed to move on a different track than in the south. Near the Wall, magic does "leak" into the south, and the southerners maintain a military guard that relies on both magic and mundane means to patrol the border, while passage into the Old Kingdom is restricted and rare. To the north, the Kingdom is in a state of increasing decay, and has been for a couple of centuries, ever since disaster struck its royal house.
That's the set-up, but the focus of the tale is the eponymous protagonist. Sabriel is a young woman of eighteen, who has just graduated from a young ladies finishing school located not far south of the Wall. She has some skill in magic, but more importantly, she's also a hereditary necromancer. Her father, living north of the Wall, sent her south for safety while she was still young, and she has only seen and learned from him via a spirit sending of his that comes to her at twice-yearly intervals. The narrative really springs into action when on the appointed night, her father appears in something other than his customary guise, and Sabriel realizes that his spirit is caught in the land of Death. He has brought her his necromantic tools--sword and bandolier of seven bells--and she must venture into the Old Kingdom to figure out what happened.
Two of the most interesting facets of the novel are the magic system and the conception of Death. The magic appears to be divided into (dangerous, scary) "free" magic, and so-called Charter Magic, which is never really directly explained but seems to be magic power constrained and channelled by symbols, marks, and diagrams that have vaguely religious overtones (or so it seemed to me). Death is an actual separate demesne, visualized as a cold river with nine gates; once a spirit has passed or been compelled (some don't want to go) beyond the ninth gate, death is final. Some of the best parts come when the heroine passes into Death:
Sabriel, eyes closed now, felt the boundary between Life and Death appear. On her back, she felt the wind, now curiously warm, and the moonlight, bright and hot like sunshine. On her face, she felt the ultimate cold and, opening her eyes, saw the grey light of Death.
With an effort of will, her spirit stepped through, sword and bell prepared. Inside the diamond her body stiffened, and fog blew up in eddies around her feet, twining up her legs. Frost rimed her face and hands and the Charter marks flared at each apex of the diamond. Three steadied again, but the North mark blazed brighter still--and went out.
The river ran swiftly, but Sabriel set her feet against the current and ignored both it and the cold, concentrating on looking around, alert for a trap or ambush. It was quiet at this particular entry point to Death. She could hear the water tumbling through the Second Gate, but nothing else. No splashing, or gurgling, or strange mewlings. No dark, formless shapes or grim silhouettes, shadowy in this grey light.
Sabriel tells an interesting story in an engaging fashion. Only in a couple of ways does it really betray its affiliation as a Young Adult book. The prose is pleasant and well-written, but also fairly simple and straightforward--it's not childish or unintelligent, but neither is it, say, Patrick O'Brian. Additionally, the central relationship between the heroine and the companion she picks up midway through the adventure flares into romance near the end with almost no underlying emotional structure, almost as if convention (and the plot) expects and demands it, so there it is. These are observations more than quibbles, though, and shouldn't detract from a pleasant--not earthshattering--but pleasant reading experience.
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1632, Eric Flint (2000), 592 pp (pb).
Another re-read, I'm afraid. I have a real weakness for a certain sub-genre of escapist fare that's well-represented by 1632, and have had it since I first devoured The Swiss Family Robinson as a kid. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what the proper name for this type of book is: Castaway stories? Marooned stories? At any rate, the salient features are that our plucky and self-reliant protagonist(s) are somehow (usually inadvertantly or unexpectedly) flung into an alien and (usually) hostile environment, where they must use their wits, skills, and courage to bend the natural environment to their will and turn their seemingly disasterous displacement to their ultimate advantage. I love reading about this sort of stuff, even when the cold voice of realism whispers that in any given story, the protagonists would most likely be eaten by wolves (or the equivalent) inside the first month. 1632 is more commonly referred to as an "alternate history" novel, which is accurate enough; it's just that its attraction, such as it is, lies much less in its character as alternate history tale than in this "good guys out of place" factor.
1632 takes the same broad tack as S.M. Stirling's Island in the Sea of Time trilogy, published a couple of years prior. In those books, the island of Nantucket is cast back in time to ca. 1200 B.C. by an unexplained event. In 1632, the (fictional) West Virginian town of Grantville is cast back in time to, well, 1632 A.D. Oh, and they're displaced not just temporally, but also spatially--they end up plunked down in the middle of what today would be Germany. Flint tacks on a goofy little prologue about the displacement being caused by some wacky space aliens irresponsibly fooling around with their time travel machine, but it doesn't really matter: either one swallows the initial premise and jumps into the story, or decides this sort of wildly speculative tale is of no interest and moves on.
The story revolves around the town getting back on its feet and dealing with the enormity of suddenly being in a very unexpected time and place, and then integrating itself into the surrounding culture and society, all while standing resolutely for truth, justice, freedom, and the American Way (it's maybe not quite that explicit, but it's close). I know, or knew, very little of Continental history and politics at this point in time, but Flint does a more than adequate job of filling in what any neophyte reader needs to know. Indeed, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden plays a rather large part in the tale, and the exposition of his place in the world gets downright tedious in a couple places. But no matter. For the most part, the narrative clips along at a brisk pace, focusing on the building of a new nation and leavened by several set piece battles. An excerpt from one of the first of these battles:
Deliberately, slowly, he lowered the bike's kickstand and climbed off. Then he removed the shotgun slung over his shoulder. A twelve-gauge pump-action, it was, loaded with buckshot. It had belonged to his father, just like the 9mm pistol holstered at his waist.
Jeff began stalking toward the oncoming mercenaries. They were thirty yards away. He pumped a round into the chamber....When the first mercenary was fifteen yards away, he brought the shotgun to his shoulder. The mercenary stumbled to a halt. The ten or so men with him did likewise.
Jeff moved the shotgun, waving it slowly back and forth to cover the entire little crowd. Dimly, he sensed a tide of other mercenaries breaking around the knot he had stopped....Then, Larry was standing at his left, his own shotgun leveled. And then, not more than a second later, Jimmy and Eddie were bracing him on the right. Both of them had their own shotguns up also.
Jeff heaved a sigh of relief. He had acted without thinking, on impulse. Now that some time had elapsed, he realized how insane his situation was....He had no idea what to do. He was amazed the mercenaries hadn't already attacked them. He decided that they were simply too confused by the situation to know what to do.
Then, Jimmy's squeal of glee came. And then, the bellowing toot of the first truck's air horn. And Jeff Higgins found himself fighting not to tremble.
The Seventh Cavalry had arrived, so to speak. In the proverbial nick of time.
Flint has a rather large chip on his shoulder about several things, it seems to me, and he has a habit of speechifying about his bugaboos here and there. For instance, he has some good rants stored up about pointy-headed intellectuals and their tendency to sneer at the tough but honest working man. My grandfathers were, respectively, a farmer and a rancher, so I need no convincing as to the inherent virtue of salt-of-the-earth types; sermons on the topic get pretty tiresome in Flint's hands.
The prose in 1632 is straightforward and unexceptionable. Flint often has a tendency to discourse on a character's inner thoughts and feelings, and outline his or her decision-making process, in much greater detail than needed. I find it a little bit clumsy, frankly. These various criticisms aside, however, it remains an enjoyable bit of entertainment. I own that I was a little bit surprised to like it as much as I did. It's not great literature, nor anything like, but on the whole, 1632 is a fun way to pass a few hours.
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The Last Dancer, Daniel Keys Moran (1993), 594 pp (pb).
This is the sequel to The Long Run, and seemed a natural choice to pick up next, as long as I was in a re-read sort of mood. Unfortunately, The Last Dancer is not as enjoyable as its shelf-mate. It's still worth reading (and re-reading), but it lacks the simple energy, as well as the disarmingly sympathetic protagonist, that The Long Run employs to such good effect. Said protagonist, Trent the Uncatchable, is referenced here and there throughout The Last Dancer; he even has a couple of cameo appearances, which largely served to remind me that I would rather have seen more of him than some of what we got in his stead.
But Moran has other fish to fry here. There are two distinct narrative strands in the book. The main one is set several years after the conclusion of events in The Long Run. The second strand, which eventually ends up tying into the main one, starts out roughly fifty thousand years prior to the present. As long as Moran sticks to leavening his tale with just enough backstory to allow the narrative to maintain coherency, all is more or less well. I actually found the 'pre-history' tale to be reasonably entertaining. The trouble comes when Moran either gets seduced into elaborating over-much on this complicated cosmology he has all worked out, or alternatively, when he tries to delve into the 'deeper meaning' of his characters' transformations and evolutions, rather than mostly letting events speak for themselves. Tolkien can get away with stuffing in gratuitous details at every turn to sketch the richness of his milieu. Moran, well, not so much.
A second difficulty I had with the book were many of the characters, starting with the protagonist. The main character is Denice Castanaveras, who I really wanted to like. Hell, I did like her in The Long Run. Denice is a telepath, and by the end of the book (she doesn't do so bad in the beginning, for that matter), she's also a physical specimen with a level of ass-kicking potency that the various Hong Kong cinema martial arts studs can only dream about. She is, in fact, a Dancer; a figure having what amounts to magical powers that accrue through the standard mystical hand-wavery. So far, so good. The mystical religious angle is ultimately laid on too thickly for my taste, though (it's tied in to the complicated cosmology that I mentioned earlier), and it makes things a little bit incoherent in spots. Denice is trying to find her way and place in the world, but I was just never really able to warm to her struggles or some of the choices she makes; at times, too many times, I actively disliked her.
The main plot strand, set in the 'present' (that is, 2076 A.D.) has various twists and turns, mostly weaving around political unrest in Occupied America and the rising of same against the hegemony of the U.N. overlords. It's serviceable enough, but never intensely compelling. All this is to perhaps leave the impression that I'm panning the book, which is not true. I think it has a number of enjoyable sections, and is worth reading. Taken as a whole, it just never quite rises to the level of sheer entertainment that its predecessor provides.
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The Long Run, Daniel Keys Moran (1989), 372 pp (pb).
I picked this book up to re-read because I was really in the mood for something light and entertaining. This book is nothing if not "light and entertaining," so mission accomplished.
Let's get the obvious out of the way first. Yes, I have a little added fondness for this book because the protagonist shares a name with me. Big deal, huh? Well, yes, but when your name is Trent, that doesn't happen quite as often as when your name is John or Mary. It helps that he's a genetically enhanced super-genius who bleeds cool without even trying hard. Hey, there's nothing wrong with fiction that carries a faint whiff of wish fulfillment, is there?
Anyway, this is a book that does best when taken as a pedal-to-the-metal caper story. The background is that of a post-semi-apocalypse world in the mid to late 21st century. The UN is running a bona fide world government, with the French in the driver's seat (okay, stop laughing, and just go with it). Several years prior to the novel's beginning, the government has wiped out a rebellious experimental enclave of genetically engineered telepaths (a story apparently recounted in Moran's earlier novel Emerald Eyes, which I've never managed to get ahold of). The Long Run opens when Trent serendipitously encounters his long-thought-lost childhood friend Denice, a fellow survivor of the aforementioned enclave.
Trent is an extremely skillful user of the world's computer networks, a "player" in the novel's parlance. He's also an accomplished thief, something in which he takes a lot of pride:
'I hoped...that you would be different. More committed. And it turns out,' he said, with what he plainly considered the most telling point, 'that you're just a common thief after all.'
Trent stared at the boy for a moment with very real offense, held back the reflexive anger with genuine effort. 'I,' he said with icy self-control, 'am a brilliant thief.'
One of the UN cops has become suspicious of Trent's smooth cover image, and when he has him pulled in for questioning to see if any damaging admissions can be shaken loose, Trent's friends launch an ill-considered (but successful) rescue attempt. He has to go on the lam. Hijinks--quite a few of them--ensue.
The book stumbles when it tries to strike an overly serious or philosophical tone, but fortunately, it doesn't try too often, and the narrative largely skips along with what can fairly be described as a manic energy. Lots of fun.
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