Book Review: A Game of Thrones (Part II: The Review)

George R. R. Martin

1996

Awards: Locus

Nominations: Nebula

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Note: For a brief-ish synopsis of the story of A Game of Thrones, please see the post immediately prior to this one. This one contains only my analysis.

PART II: THE REVIEW

In evaluating A Game of Thrones, I must begin with my admiration.

First and foremost, this book is a masterwork of planning, organization, and focus. Every story line for every character had something to contribute to the larger picture. No one’s narrative seemed like it was unnecessary, or just there for comic relief or love interest.

Martin excels not only at the structural big picture, however, but also in the tactical details. He writes specific scenes and incidents with great clarity. Physical confrontations small and large—from mano-a-mano swordfights to huge battles between armies—are so well described you can almost picture the exact choreography in your head. This is refreshing; there is almost nothing more frustrating than a murky battle scene (I’m looking at you, John Varley).

Speaking of battles, it’s interesting to me that the reader witnesses only about half of the key battles that happen during the timeline of the book. Sometimes you actually are there during the fighting (like Cersei’s bloody coup at King’s Landing), but other times you just hear it described by characters who were there (like a battle at Riverrun in which Catelyn’s brother is captured). It is a bit like in The Hobbit when Smaug is killed and you don’t even see it, you just hear it told by someone who was there. It’s a little bit frustrating, but it still works. And I guess if you saw everything, the book would be two thousand pages long.

Much of Martin’s ground-level imagery is striking and vivid. There is almost nothing so visceral as the scene where Dany Targaryen has to eat the entire completely raw heart of a recently killed horse so that her unborn child will have good luck. And I was particularly impressed with Tyrion’s prison cell in the Tullys’ castle Aerie: the dungeon is set into an impossibly steep mountainside cliff face, with one wall of each cell open to the air. Any prisoner rolling over in his sleep carelessly enough could roll over the edge and fall to his death.

The characters are distinct and memorable.  There are, of course, a large number of them, and I did lose track of most of the innumerable “smallfolk” (handmaidens and bloodriders and knights and servants and slaves). But with a bit of concentration and/or note taking, you can keep track of a surprisingly high number of the main players. There are those who are honest, appealing, and trustworthy (Jon Snow), and there are others who are sleazy or mean or power mad (Queen Cersei), and others who are harder to pin down (Tyrion). Over the course of a book this long, even the good guys often end up making mistakes that add to their complexity.

When I say that the writing is good, however, that is not to say I didn’t have any frustrations with the book.

Most of the time the fantasy language and the medieval terms aren’t so stilted that you’re overly conscious of it. I liked the direwolves and the dragons and the grumkins. But there are a few frequently words that really started to jar after a while (starting around page 245). The ones that particularly got to me were: 

• Ahorse (as in, “He was not walking, he was still ahorse.”)

• Mummer’s farce (as in, “This trial is nothing but a mummer’s farce!”)

• Whickering (in A Game of Thrones, horses do a lot more whickering than they do neighing.)

• Manhood (referring to a male’s genitalia, as in, “When next you bare steel on Shagga son of Dolf, I will chop off your manhood and roast it in the fire.”)

Then there is the brutality. The world of A Game of Thrones is rough and not for the faint of heart. Most of the characters are (or are forced by circumstance to be) anything from harsh and unkind to violent and cruel. It can be quite hard to take—in particular, the stories of Sansa Stark and Danaerys Targaryen, who are both stuck alone in abusive situations with little outside support. And there are innumerable women raped—whether it is as prisoners of war on the battlefield or as wives or servants or slaves going along with sex with their husbands or masters because they do not have the power to refuse.

And then there is the frustration I was warned about more than anything else when I first set out to read this book: BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO PEOPLE YOU LIKE.

Horrible things did happen to the characters I liked. All of them were forced through honor, or circumstance, or both, to be alone much of the time, fighting for themselves against evil and irrational and usually overwhelmingly powerful people. I wanted some kind of vengeance, justice, vindication, refuge, solace—for crying out loud, even just a resolution of one kind or another—for them. But after 800+ pages, I got almost nothing of that. And now I might have to read another 800-page book to see if the bad guys will get their comeuppance at last? And it might not even happen then? Damn you, George R. R. Martin!

Book Review: A Game of Thrones (Part I: The Story)

George R. R. Martin

1996

Awards: Locus

Nominations: Nebula

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

A Game of Thrones is the first book in George R. R. Martin’s multi-volume, as yet unfinished series A Song of Ice and Fire. It is mostly grounded in realistic medieval-type characters and locations (knights, kings, castles) but with occasional ranges into the fantastic and mythical (dragons, direwolves, magicians).

It is also enormous and complicated. The paperback version I read was 807 pages long, not including the family-tree appendices, and followed the interrelated stories of at least ten separate characters (and their entourages) simultaneously.

For this reason, I am splitting this review up into two parts. Part 1 (below) will give a relatively brief synopsis of the plot, including as much information as I think is relevant but hopefully not so much that I give away too many crucial spoilers, inasmuch as such a thing is possible. Part 2 (forthcoming) will be my actual analysis and review of the book.

Thus, herewith...

PART I: THE STORY

A Game of Thrones is set in a fictional land, an island that seems to be roughly the size and shape of Britain. The island is divided up into several fiefdoms, each ruled by a different family, or House. Each House has a proud and ancient history, two or three distinctive colors for their flag, and a unique animal emblem for the sigil on their heraldry. Sometimes the blood relatives of a House will have common characteristic hair and eye coloration to boot.

Over the past thousand years or so, the hatreds and allegiances between the various Houses have been continually shifting. Not satisfied with only their own traditional homelands, several of them have tried at one time or another to gain ultimate control over the entire country.

For many years, the Targaryens were able to do just that; the head of House Targaryen reigned as king over all of the other Houses for decades. However, about a generation before the book begins, the last Targaryen king, Aerys, was killed by the allied invading forces of the Baratheons and the Lannisters. Aerys himself was killed by Jamie (heir to the house of Lannister), and Aerys’s son, Rhaegar, was killed by Robert (heir to the house of Baratheon).

The end result was that Robert Baratheon then became king over the entire land, and he married Jamie Lannister’s sister Cersei to solidify the Baratheon-Lannister alliance. But Robert’s control over the other Houses—including even that of his own wife—is tenuous at best. And there are several (including, of course, the Targaryens) who think he is nothing but an illegitimate usurper.

By the time the book starts, only two descendants of the last King Targaryen are still alive: Daenerys, a 13-year-old girl, and her abusive older brother Viserys. Viserys promises Daenerys (or “Dany”) in marriage to Khal Drogo, the lord of a Rohan-esque horse-riding people called the Dothraki, in exchange for a huge sum of money that will let him raise an army and go reclaim the kingship he believes is rightfully his. Drogo procrastinates in fulfilling his end of the bargain, so Viserys and Dany are relegated to the fringes of the story for most of this book, but there are hints that they will be more important in later installments.

The central family that A Game of Thrones mainly follows is actually none of the three named above. No, our heroes are the men and women of the House of Stark: the trustworthy, honorable guardians of the cold northern lands. Their sense of rightness and decency starts with the head of the household, Eddard (“Ned”) Stark, and flows through his strong, smart “trueborn” sons and daughters, right on down to his strong, smart bastard son Jon Snow, who has been raised with the rest of the Stark children as if he was no different from them.

The Starks rule over the territory closest to the Wall, which is a gigantic wall of ice crossing the entire island from east to west, cutting the very northernmost tip of the island off from the rest of the land to the south. Terrifying rumors swirl about what lurks in the Haunted Forest, the land north of the Wall. Nobody knows exactly what dangers it holds, but everyone knows that it is awful, and that all that stands between it and civilization are the men of the Night Guard, men sworn to guard the Wall above all other family loyalties.

Ned Stark was a childhood friend of King Robert Baratheon. So, at the beginning of the book, when Robert’s second-in-command, or “Hand,” Jon Arryn, dies, Robert asks Ned to be his new Hand. Ned agrees and travels all the way from his northern castle, Winterfell, to the king’s southern castle at King’s Landing to be the Hand. He brings his two daughters with him, but leaves his three trueborn sons at Winterfell with his wife, Catelyn Tully.

At the same time, Ned’s bastard son Jon Snow is of an age where he is looking to make a way for himself in the world, and, seeing no real other opportunity for himself, he accepts an invitation from his uncle to go up north to become a man of the Night Guard at the Wall.

Ned’s new position as the King’s Hand should be great, theoretically—except that King Robert’s wife, Queen Cersei, is a Lannister, and the Lannisters are ruthless and power-mad and hate the Starks. Actually, the Lannisters also hate the Baratheons and the Arryns and pretty much anybody else who isn’t a Lannister. As a matter of fact, the old Hand Jon Arryn’s widowed wife, Lysa Tully, who happens to be Ned’s sister-in-law, thinks Jon was poisoned to death by the queen in an attempted power grab, and Lysa warns her sister Catelyn, who rushes south to King’s Landing to warn Ned in person to be careful.

To make matters worse, Ned quickly discovers that all of the queen’s children have actually not been fathered by the king, but by her own brother, Jamie. Meaning that they’re not truly King Robert’s heirs.

Meanwhile, back at Winterfell, a mysterious midnight assassin tries to murder one of Ned and Catelyn’s children, Bran, with a dagger that turns out to be owned by Cersei’s other brother, Tyrion Lannister. Catelyn naturally jumps to the conclusion that Tyrion hired the assassin, and that he must have had his family’s okay to do it.

                                                    

Tensions continue to mount until finally Catelyn (on her way back north to Winterfell) accidentally runs into Tyrion (on his way back south after taking a tour of the Wall) in a roadside inn. Catelyn has her men take Tyrion prisoner, brings him to her sister’s castle in the eastern mountains, and casts him into a cell to await trial for the attempted assassination of her son.

This, of course, totally enrages the Lannisters. Tyrion does eventually prove his innocence in a trial by combat, and Catelyn has to let him go. But before people can find that out, King Robert is severely wounded by a boar while hunting, and Cersei uses the opportunity to stage a bloody coup. She takes Ned hostage and puts her bratty teenaged son Joffrey (by Jamie) on the throne. Then she sends her armies—led by her brother/lover Jamie—marching up north to make war on the rest of the Starks, who she says are traitors because Ned won’t acknowledge Joffrey as king.

War ensues. Ned’s oldest son, Robb, leads the Stark forces from Winterfell down south to engage the Lannisters. Jon Snow is frustrated because he is bound by oath to the Night Watch and can’t go to his brother Robb’s aid. Tides shift back and forth during the war, during which horrible things happen to good people, and no final outcome or closure is really resolved, meaning that to get any hope of closure, or satisfaction, or justice, you have to read the next 800-page installment.

I will explore more of this phenomenon, and other aspects of the book, in the next part of this review, which will be posted on December 26.

It's Tempting

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Book Review: Boneshaker

Cherie Priest

2009

Awards: Locus

Nominations: Nebula, Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

I am terrified of zombies. They are far more scary to me than anything else. I can handle (and enjoy) quite a lot of vampire, werewolf, or mega-monster horror. But when a story has zombies in it, it often tends to be too much for me.

So when the cover of this book said that it was going to be a “steampunk-zombie-airship adventure of rollicking pace and sweeping proportions,” I readied myself to be really scared.

The book takes place in Seattle in 1879. Priest alters history quite a bit to fit her story, which is fine, but it does mean that you have to accept that it’s not going to be an exactly historically accurate 1879 Seattle. The Civil War is still going on, for example; the Alaskan gold rush happened many years later than it really did; and Seattle’s population is about eight times larger than it really was at the time.

The prelude for the events in the book is this: in 1863, sixteen years before the story really starts, Russia held a competition to see who could invent a machine to let them mine their Klondike gold the fastest. A brilliant and somewhat crazy Seattle inventor, Leviticus Blue, won the competition with his design for “Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine.” The Russians pressured him to get it operational too soon, however, and on its first road test it went horribly out of control, destroying most of the financial district of downtown Seattle.

Not only did the Boneshaker’s rampage itself kill many people, but the machine also dug so deep that it opened up a subterranean vent of a hideous, heavy, toxic gas. The gas, which quickly became known as “the Blight,” poured out of the vent, killing almost everyone left in the downtown area. And then the Blight turned out to have an even lovelier side effect: it turned a large proportion of the recently dead people into “rotters,” or zombies, who of course had an insatiable appetite for living human flesh.

The survivors immediately threw up a wall around the downtown area to contain the zombies and the still-spewing Blight, and to protect the people who still eked out a meager living in the impoverished “Outskirts” neighborhoods right next to the city. 

No one knew what happened to Leviticus Blue after the accident. But his pregnant wife, Briar, escaped the city, and she raised their son, Zeke, alone in near poverty in the Outskirts for the next fifteen years.

The main story of Boneshaker is set in motion when Zeke, at fifteen years old, decides he wants to go to his parents’ old house in the walled city to try to find evidence to prove his father’s innocence. He packs a lantern, a gas mask, and Blight-seeing polarized goggles; leaves his mother a note; and sneaks into the city through a half-buried outflow pipe for what he thinks will be a quick day trip.

Whereupon, of course, there is a major earthquake, and it collapses the pipe, Zeke’s only known route of escape. His mother panics and goes in after him.

What follows is a romping chase (at a “rollicking pace,” as advertised) as Zeke tries to find the old house and Briar tries to find Zeke and both try to avoid the ravenous zombies, the ever-present Blight, and living humans who might do them harm. For, as it turns out, there are still plenty of people living in the city. They have sealed up buildings with wax and tar so the Blight can’t get in, and they pull in clean air with a system of bellows and pipes coming over the wall. They are well-masked and well-armed and they travel mostly through underground tunnels and roof-to-roof catwalks. And they’re not all nice.

There is also a small population of black marketeers who swoop in over the city in zeppelins, collect bags of the Blight gas, and turn it into a highly dangerous drug used by addicts on the outside. These illegal airships turn out to be very helpful to both Briar and Zeke more than once.

There is not much in the way of actual plot complexity in this book. What there is is a lot of breathless up-and-down rushing through basements, streets, and catwalks as mother and son try to find what they respectively came for and get out alive. They run into dangerous people and people who are kindhearted, and of course they run into zombies. And they gradually get closer and closer to a rendezvous with the mysterious, tyrannical Dr. Minnericht, an eccentric recluse who holds the citizens of walled Seattle in thrall with their dependence on his brilliant anti-zombie inventions, and who may or may not be Briar’s long-lost husband Leviticus.

I liked the premise and I liked the mid-19^th century steampunk aesthetic, which is manifested primarily in the quirky mechanical inventions and the characters’ names. Many of the characters are charismatic and appealing, like the mechanical-one-armed crossbow-toting bar-mistress Lucy O’Gunning, and the stoic, heavily armed zombie-fighting warrior Jeremiah Swakhammer. And much of the time it is a lively, page-turning ride.

But at the same time, the book has a lack of depth and direction that is frustrating. The challenges that Briar and Zeke face hardly ever seem to be as difficult to conquer as I thought they would be. There are too many times when fortuitous accidents land one of the other of them where they need to be just at the time they need to be there, and other times when they are fortuitously rescued by someone showing up out of the blue or a fortuitous piece of just the right type of equipment showing up in their hands at just the right time. And the sinister Dr. Minnericht turns out not to be pretty anticlimactic; he's not as much of a satisfying twist as I thought he was going to be.

I also have to say that the zombies were--dare I say it?--disappointingly non-frightening. Most of the trouble Briar and Zeke had was actually with living people, not the dead ones. And when they did encounter zombies, it was usually in the form of sudden, action-packed, almost silly scuffles with large crowds of them, and the battles were too frantic and over too quickly to be really frightening. Zombies are known not for their agility and fighting ability but for their mindless, unrelenting, predatory pursuit, and using a few of them in quieter, more suspenseful situations might have made them far more terrifying. There were occasionally times when I’d be scared by someone hearing a suggestive moan or a sliding shuffle down a dark tunnel, but not very often, and it usually didn't amount to anything.

Starship Octopi

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Book Review: Black Cherry Blues

James Lee Burke
1989
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This book was well-paced and suspenseful. The core plot was good. It wasn’t cheap or sloppy or half-heartedly put together. Otherwise, however, it was pretty much a disappointment.

The descriptions of the Louisiana and Montana landscapes, cuisine, and people seemed self-conscious and smug. So did the main character’s constant running and weightlifting. Conversations were full of phrases that I think were supposed to be clever but just came out as annoying. The treatment of race was weird. And the hero had a streak of violence in him that seriously undercut his indignation about violent behavior in others.

The story is about a former cop, Dave Robicheaux, who lives on the Louisiana coast making a modest living running a bait shop and fishing boat rental business. His inner circle consists of two people who help him out around the shop and his house, and an adopted daughter, Alafair, from El Salvador. He is continually haunted by dreams of both the Vietnam war and his dead wife, who was killed by gangsters getting revenge on him for some past escapade.

Aside from the dreams, all is basically well with Robicheaux’s life until he bumps into an old friend: a drug-addicted, down-on-his-luck former rock-and-roll star now working as a leaseman for an oil company. His friend asks him to investigate a conversation that he overheard between two co-workers talking about how they killed a couple guys up in Montana. Before he knows it, Robicheaux is sucked up into a web of danger and intrigue involving mobsters, hired hit men, hot-blooded Salish Indian women, and, of course, winsome elementary school principals who have such incredible generosity they don’t mind that he keeps dumping his kid on them when he needs to go beat up a guy or confront a mobster or otherwise put himself in a life-threatening situation.

In the course of his investigation, Robicheaux has to travel from Louisiana to Montana, giving the author plenty of opportunity to show his intimate knowledge of both (Burke lives in Louisiana and spends a lot of vacation time in Montana). Sometimes an author will bring you into a country with them, sharing it with you, making you feel like you understand it too (as in The Healer’s War, Dance Hall of the Dead, or The Lingala Code). But Burke’s descriptions mostly came off as either braggadocio or as inside jokes I wasn’t privy to. Also, although his descriptions of scenery are quite detailed, I nevertheless found it strangely hard to picture.

I had a bit of a hard time with how Burke portrays black people in the book. Robicheaux is white. About the black man and woman who work for him (whose poor grammar he is constantly making fun of), he says: “I was always amazed by the illusion of white supremacy in southern society, since more often than not our homes were dominated and run by people of color.” I think this is supposed to come across as a compliment, or perhaps wryly funny, but, since he shows no real understanding of what his employees are like as people, it comes across as a tad patronizing. When push comes to shove, who’s really in charge of that bait shop? This is also the only time in the book he calls them anything but “Negro.” I might be a prude, and I might not be understanding the cultural context in Louisiana, but I’m not sure that “Negro” is the absolutely best term for 1989.

Robicheaux is a recovering alcoholic, but I found his recovery very glossy. It felt more like a gimmick than an integral part of his character. He goes through a dry drunk complete with fever and tremors one day, and then the next day goes to get an ice cream cone with his daughter like nothing ever happened. He is also very smug about abstinence with his rock-and-roller friend, who still struggles with self-control every day. It is a pale shadow of Lawrence Block’s excellent Matt Scudder novels, another detective series with an alcoholic lead, which, fortunately, I’ve had a chance to rave about already.

And, finally, Robicheaux is self-righteous and judgmental about the violence of the mobsters he’s investigating, but he himself has horrifyingly violent episodes. At one point, for example, he ambushes two goons who threatened the life of his daughter and spends probably fifteen minutes beating them within an inch of their lives with a five-foot length of chain. It doesn’t fit. If you’re going to be an anti-hero, you can’t go around on the one hand talking like you’re a saint and then on the other hand be eagerly and gratuitously bloody in your revenge. You need to take care of your problems with reluctant but necessary dispatch.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

I Ate Him

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Book Review: Helliconia Spring

Brian W. Aldiss

1982

Awards: Campbell

Nominations: Nebula, Locus

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

Sometimes it seems to me that every lengthy science fiction novel published in the ‘50s and ‘60s was promoted as “the greatest epic since The Lord of the Rings,” and that every lengthy science fiction novel published in the ‘70s and ‘80s was promoted as “the greatest epic since Dune.”

Very few of the books thus described actually measure up to either of these standards. Helliconia Spring is a case in point, advertised on its back cover as “the most magnificent epic since Dune.” It certainly is epic in its ambition, but as for its magnificence, I beg to differ.

Helliconia Spring is set on Helliconia, an Earth-like planet orbiting a binary star system. Helliconia circles its primary star once every 2,000 Earth years. During each of these Helliconian years the planet suffers through a devastating, icy-cold winter that is 600 Earth years long.

This means that the inhabitants are stuck in a stultifying cycle: civilizations flourish and advance technologically during the summers, but then any progress they make is wiped out when winter comes; the cold drives them back to a hunter-gatherer existence, leaving them to scrape out whatever kind of living they can.

The novel sweeps across hundreds of Earth years, starting in the middle of one of these prolonged winters and ending with the onset of spring. It mainly tells the life stories of three principal patriarchs of the same family, several generations apart (but there are plenty of digressions into other characters’ narratives along the way).

The first of these patriarchs is Yuli, a nomadic hunter living deep in the heart of winter. Yuli and his father are out on a hunting trip when they are attacked by a band of the other intelligent beings living on Helliconia: the horned, furry, goat-like, human-hating phagors. The phagors kill Yuli’s father but Yuli himself escapes. Eventually Yuli finds his way to Pannoval, a huge and relatively advanced but repressive underground city where he is adopted into a foster family. He gets the best education Pannoval can give him and even becomes a priest, but he never forgets his former life above ground. Eventually he runs away from Pannoval with a few friends and makes his way back up to the surface where he founds a new village, Oldorando.

The story is then taken up many generations later with Yuli’s direct descendant “Little” Yuli, who is the leader of the now much larger town of Oldorando. Little Yuli gets pretty short shrift; he dies soon after he is introduced, and we learn more about his life from the stories told by the citizens gathered at his funeral rather than seeing events happen for ourselves. The main contribution Little Yuli makes to the novel is that his death opens up a succession controversy; his only child is a daughter (and everyone knows that women cannot rule), and his only grandson, Laintal Ay, is too little to govern.

The rest of the book is a frustratingly aimless recitation of Laintal Ay’s twisting, turning early life story. He grows up under a series of interim town leaders, none of whom are model citizens. He becomes a trusted lieutenant of one of them, then falls out of favor; he falls in love and is rewarded, and then rebuffed; he goes on a heart-stricken pilgrimage far away during which he contracts a horrible disease, then he comes back.

I started out optimistically at the beginning of this book, moderately bored but hopeful that it would pick up steam, and ended up actively resentful at sitting through meandering story lines with little resolution to them. Time really whips along: people grow, marry, have children, and die, and you can barely keep track of them (and barely want to). At one point, in just six pages, Oldorando changed from a backwards agricultural settlement to a village that launched mounted raids on other villages to a trade economy using metal currency.

There are occasional tantalizing hints of more interesting things we could explore further—in particular, an approaching phagor invasion, a woman who revolts against traditional women’s work and founds an academy of learning, and an Earth observation satellite hovering unseen above all the action—but we get no real long-term satisfaction from of any of them.

I think Lord of the Rings and Dune worked as epics because, even though they are incredibly long and detailed, they also center on distinctive, charismatic characters that I really grew to know and understand and often care about. Helliconia Spring, on the other hand, is more of a dispassionate biblical litany, a string of names and places and incidents happening to people to whom I felt no particular attachment.

The tone isn’t helped by Aldiss’ somewhat formal prose and his frequent use of the passive voice, as in “the Vakka had been bridged” and “his figure could be seen.” The characters’ names also tend to be a little bit ridiculous, and are easy to confuse with each other if you aren’t paying close enough attention. To wit:

                                          

Raynil Layan

Laintal Ay

Loil Bry

            Loilanun

Eline Tal

Rol Sakil

            Dol Sakil

            Hrr-Brahl Yprt

Yhamm-Whrrmar

I think I am probably more disappointed in this book than I might otherwise be because I had higher expectations for Aldiss. His novella The Saliva Tree, which won the Nebula in 1965, was really very good. It just may be that the epic is not his best format.

Geordi Cat: Beam Me Up a Treat Right Meow

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Book Review: The Laughing Policeman

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
1970
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This book was an enjoyable combination of decent plot, good characters, and great style.

It is a murder mystery set in Stockholm. It sucks you in right away, starting with a pretty gripping description of the shooting of nine people on a double-decker bus late at night in a remote part of the city. Two less-than-enthusiastic patrolmen from the bordering suburb of Solna stumble across the bus first and trample all over the scene, eliminating many of the clues.

To make matters worse, one of the murdered passengers turns out to be an off-duty member of the homicide squad who had no discernable reason for being on that bus.

The case, naturally, becomes a red ball for the Stockholm P.D. and you spend the rest of the book watching the stressed-out detectives solve the crime.

It was neat to read a mystery set in Stockholm. I got to see not only the Swedish police but also a bit of Swedish culture from the inside. Stockholm becomes not an abstract, glamorous European destination but a big, real, gritty city. Northern and southern Swedish accents set peers apart and make them feel inferior. Americans start to look a little bit strange and foreign.

I liked that the team of Stockholm detectives is made up of distinctive, believable characters. You see the story from almost every detective’s point of view and you see how confused and frustrated they all are.

I also loved the writing style. The authors (a husband and wife team) use matter-of-fact, uncomplicated sentences that are just a little bit quirky. The book was originally written in Swedish but I don’t think it’s the translation to the English that makes the writing style so entertaining. This is the description of the patrol route the uninspired Solna patrolmen chose before they ran across the bus – a route designed to avoid running into anything that might actually require policing:

“It was a brilliantly thought-out course, leading through areas which were almost guaranteed empty of people. They met not a single car the whole way and saw only two living creatures, first a cat and then another cat.”

Often what the authors will do is start out with a really short sentence that has only basic information in it. Then they’ll repeat the sentence, making it a little bit longer by elaborating just a little bit. And then they’ll do that again… and again. Until after about five sentences, you have this really long sentence with all kinds of crazy detail in it that is a hundred times more informative than the original sentence. It’s like they’re reluctant to tell the story but can’t help letting it dribble out in spite of themselves.

There were, however, a couple things about the book that were annoying. For one thing, sometimes key pieces of information would be withheld from me and then would be revealed by the policeman I’d been following without me even knowing that he’d been doing any extra investigation. I don’t mind surprises but I like at least knowing that there’s something I don’t know. This felt like my characters were sneaking around behind my back.

And, frankly, the motives of the culprit, some of the victims, and the dead policeman’s girlfriend, all of which were key to the plot, seemed a bit dicey and unrealistic.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: A Cold Red Sunrise

Stuart M. Kaminsky
1989
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I really liked most of the characters and the setting of this book. But the main murder plot just wasn’t very gripping.

The story is set in the tiny town of Tumsk, Siberia. Police detective Rostnikov is sent from Moscow to investigate the murder of another detective who was killed while investigating the death of a little girl – the daughter of a dissident who is about to get deported to the west.

Rostnikov is extremely appealing; gruff and plainspoken. He is honest and works very hard but has run afoul of the KGB a couple times back in Moscow, so this is sort of a test for him. He has a very tall, unemotional, doggedly loyal assistant, Karpo, who is a little like Lurch from the Addams Family. The Party watchdogs are, of course, totally incompetent and full of bluster. I felt like all the townspeople were well-defined, down to the nervous old woman who serves the visiting policemen their food. The conversation was spare and direct.

Siberia itself also plays a great part in the book. Rostnikov is sent to Tumsk during the winter, so it is always ridiculously cold and the sun barely rises at all in the sky in the daytime. Snow is piled everywhere, several feet high. A snowplow (run by the Navy personnel manning the town’s weather station) clears the streets at 6:00 am every morning and serves as the town alarm clock. Most of the town’s residents are dissidents or skeptics or (like the incompetent Party watchdogs) rejects from Moscow of some kind. Everyone seems very much alone, isolated by the cold and the remote location.

The problem is that the murder story itself is a little simple and maybe a little tired. Rostnikov keeps all his information close to the vest, including from the reader, which is frustrating because you aren’t really able to make your own guesses (and thereby build up your suspense) from the evidence he uncovers. I do appreciate last-minute surprise revelations but in this book practically all the information you need comes out in the last ten pages.

It turned out that I did correctly guess who the murderer was, but mainly I just guessed that person because he/she seemed like the least likely suspect, and that’s who Agatha Christie teaches you to look out for. I still am not sure I really understand his/her motive.

Because of the plot issues, I was a bit surprised that this book won the Edgar. But the book did come out at the perfect time: the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union was in its final crumble. Kaminsky’s detective and his assistant both have integrity and are just trying to do their jobs, and yet–or maybe because of that–they both end up struggling in their own ways against the oppressive system they live in. They are very sympathetic characters for the end of the Cold War.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Clash of the Titans

In 1980, a book named Titan won the Locus award for best novel. In 2007, another book named Titan won the Campbell award for best novel. Herewith, I give you a comparison of the two.

Novel	Titan	Titan
Author	John Varley	Ben Bova
Year Published	1979	2006
Award Won	Locus	Campbell
Stars	2	2
Plot Summary	Group of Earth scientists goes out to Saturn and gets swallowed up by giant alien orbital construct	Group of Earth scientists goes out to Saturn and gets swallowed up in convoluted melodrama
Ostensible reason for main characters visiting Saturn	Scientific exploration and research (investigating anomalies on Saturn’s moons)	Scientific research (mixed bag of atmospheric, ring, and moon investigation)
Intended duration of visit	Temporary	Permanent
Name of spaceship	Ringmaster	Goddard
Percent of book actually taking place on Titan	0%	20%
Snappy, male-sounding name of female spaceship captain main character	Cirocco Jones	Pancho Lane
Female main characters’ view of procreation	Determined to control their own procreation; three have to have an abortion to do so	Determined to get the right to have children in their space habitat; one has to run for chief administrator to do so
Forms of life discovered by humans	Centaurs; winged humanoids; killer mudfish; intelligent gas-filled blimps	Microbes in Titan’s methane seas; tiny creatures in Saturn’s ring ice
Irritating writing habits of author	Gratuitous use of palm-slapping, knuckle biting, and lip chewing	Silly regional accents; gratuitous use of dipping of the chin