Book Review: Red Prophet

Orson Scott Card

1988

Awards: Locus
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Red Prophet is the second book in Orson Scott Card’s “Tales of Alvin Maker” series. It picks up the story of Alvin Miller right where the first book, Seventh Son, left off, in Alvin’s tenth year.

But while Seventh Son focused mainly on Alvin himself, Red Prophet spends much more time on wider historical events (or at least the versions of them that happen in this alternate history). It is also a lot more depressing and grisly.

America in the 1810s—both in real life and in Alvin’s world—is ripe for conflict. White settlers are expanding into the Midwest, displacing and, of course, angering the Native Americans who already live there. Various would-be governors and/or dictators are jockeying for power in the incompletely defined and often lawless territories. And other international powers such as France are meddling as much as they can to advance their own interests.

One of the most ruthless of the would-be dictators is William Henry Harrison, who, by the beginning of the book, has built himself a little fiefdom on the Hio, the river that forms the southern border of Wobbish Territory. He has formed an army and is using bribery, muscle, and malicious tactics to put himself in position to be the first governor of Wobbish, if and when it becomes a state. He controls trade up and down the river, especially the trade in liquor, which he parcels out strategically to keep the local Indians incapacitated and subservient.

One of the major threats to Harrison’s goals is the booming town of Vigor Church, up in the northwest corner of Wobbish Territory. The town seems to be doing very well economically, without his interference, and has relatively peaceable relations with the Indians. And one of the residents, Alvin’s brother-in-law, Armor-of-God Weaver, could well prove to be gubernatorial competition for Harrison.

The other major threat to Harrison is Ta-Kumsaw, a strong-willed and charismatic Shawnee tribesman who doesn’t drink and who wants to unify the Indian tribes and drive all the white men off the land.

Harrison thinks he has a lever against Ta-Kumsaw in the form of Ta-Kumsaw’s brother, Lolla-Wossiky, a hapless, one-eyed, pathetic alcoholic who will do whatever self-abasing thing Harrison wants him to do in order to get more liquor. But things start to crumble for Harrison when Lolla-Wossiky has a vision of Alvin—it's the same vision Alvin had in Seventh Son, but this time we see it from Lolla-Wossiky’s point of view. After the vision, Lolla-Wossiky changes his name to Tenskwa-Tawa (“Open Door”), renounces alcohol, and heads up north to found a peaceful, pan-tribal Indian settlement on the Tippy-Canoe river.

Never one to take threats lying down, Harrison concocts an evil plan. He hires a sociopathic mercenary to go up to Vigor Church, kidnap and murder some white children, and plant evidence that indicates that Ta-Kumsaw and Tenskwa-Tawa did it. Harrison plans to then ride in with his army to avenge the children’s deaths, giving him an excuse to kill the Indian leaders and making him a victorious hero to the white settlers.

But, of course, the white children that Harrison’s mercenaries make the mistake of choosing to kidnap are none other than Alvin and his brother Measure, innocently on their way eastward to deliver Alvin to his blacksmithing apprenticeship.

After that, nothing goes according to Harrison’s plan. Alvin and Measure evade the kidnappers, hook up with Ta-Kumsaw and Tenskwa-Tawa, and go on a long, somewhat tedious cross-country journey that is educational and character-building for all of them. And the unrelenting Harrison pursues them until they all finally confront each other at what ends up being a horrific massacre at the Indian settlement on the Tippy-Canoe. 

 

Tecumseh

What gives this story extra weight is that the core events really happened. The Battle of Tippy-Canoe (Tippecanoe) was, in reality, a major battle in the War of 1812. Harrison, Ta-Kumsaw (Tecumseh), and Tenskwa-Tawa (Tenskwatawa) were all real people. And Tenskwa-Tawa’s settlement, Prophetstown, was a real place. It all just plays out differently—and with more than a dash of magic—in this alternate America.

Folk mysticism pervades this book, as it did in Seventh Son. I liked that most of the movers and shakers of this period had special abilities that, often, were what had allowed them to get where they had gotten. This included Napoleon, who had an uncanny way of making people admire him and want do whatever he said, and de Lafayette, who had an amulet protecting him from Napoleon's wiles.

Inasmuch as Alvin himself enters the story, it is mainly to give him an opportunity to learn more about what he can do and to expand his powers into new areas. He learns from the Indians, both of whom have powers too, but who draw theirs directly from the land and water, and aren’t as clunky and obvious as the white men with their “knacks.”

It is also to give Alvin the opportunity to grow up and stop being a child (even though he is only ten). This is understandable and necessary, given what is going to come next for Alvin; a boy with the powers he has is going to have to grow up fast. But I found that his increasing visions and know-it-all instinctive understanding of everything made it a little harder to identify with him as a person, and made me a little less sympathetic to him as a character. He started to seem less like a vulnerable boy in the world alone, and a little more godlike.

Relative Truth

“Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth. If it feels true to me, then there is something true in it, even if it isn’t all true.”

  

-  Alvin Miller, Jr., in Seventh Son, p. 132.

Ouch My Laptop

http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/

Book Review: Last Call

Tim Powers

1992

Awards: Locus

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

In general, I enjoyed this book, although I was somewhat hindered in my enjoyment by my lack of poker savvy.

The story revolves mainly around one character, Scott Crane. Scott’s father, Georges Leon, is not only a professional Vegas poker player, but also a master of the black arts of the tarot. When Scott is a little boy, his father uses the magic of the cards to take over Scott’s brother’s body, using it as an alternate vessel for himself. He is planning to do the same to Scott, except that Scott’s mother realizes it in time and sacrifices her own life to set Scott free and hide him in Los Angeles, far from his father.

Scott is adopted (coincidentally?) by another magic-aware card player, albeit a kind-hearted one, who also adopts a baby girl a little bit later under similar circumstances to Scott. Scott and his adoptive father and sister grow up relatively happily after that...

...except that Scott, in his 20s, makes the mistake of playing in one poker-like card game called “Assumption” on a houseboat on Lake Mead, and he doesn’t realize that the game is actually a magical one run by his biological father, who is using it to ritually procure more bodies to inhabit (having lost Scott’s). The deal with Assumption is that if his father “buys” someone’s hand in the game, he’s really bought their physical body, except that it takes twenty years for his power over them to mature and to actually let him take control.

Of course Scott does lose a hand in the game and has it bought by his father, thus putting him in line to have his father assume his body in twenty years’ time.

Unaware of this, Scott goes his merry way after the game. He lives a basically normal (if somewhat alcoholic) life for the next twenty years, until finally fate and the pull of the cards conspire to draw him, and his adoptive father and sister, and a horde of other cosmic hangers-on, back to Vegas where his father is once again preparing to host another game of Assumption in the same houseboat on Lake Mead, and is getting ready to take over the bodies he acquired two decades before, not realizing that his real son is among them.

Scott is slow to realize what is happening to him, and the power of the magic he’s dealing with, so he marches into the situation unprepared. He has to sober up and pull together his wits and defenses, fast, to try to prevent his father from taking over his body.

The premise is definitely clever. And the good guys are mainly likeable, except that the seediness of their lives of gambling and alcohol does stick to them like grease. The bad guys are quite repellant and some are completely bat-crazy insane.

The action drags on a bit too long to be completely riveting. The plot goes slowly in the first half of the book, as you are introduced to the characters and the tarot and the magic, and then the pace picks up considerably in the second half, after everyone converges on Las Vegas and starts getting ready for the big game. But it still seems to take quite a long time to get to the final showdown between Scott and his father—especially when for a frustratingly large amount of that time Scott is barely functional, drunk on beer and whisky.

There is a lot of card playing in Last Call. Mostly it is the standard varieties of poker, but there are also more obscure alternate versions, including Lowball (where the lowest hand wins the pot) and the aforementioned Assumption (which uses antique Tarot cards and is magical). Most of the suspenseful action in the book happens around very tense hands of cards. The play is thick and fast, and I have to admit I got kind of lost in the dust with all the calling and raising and remembering what beats an unsuited flush. And when the ancient suits and major arcana of the tarot were added to the mix, it got even harder to follow. But Powers’ writing explained enough to at least let me follow the generalities of what is happening, even if I didn’t get all the specifics. I got it enough to feel suspense when the game was suspenseful, and to be nervous when the good guys had dicey hands.

What I liked the most about Last Call was how Powers brought the mythical power of the tarot to life in the real gritty world. I liked the manifestations of magic in everyday things—like that you could tell that a particularly cosmically powerful card game was going on when the water in the drinking glasses balanced oddly and the cigarette smoke formed strange patterns in the air. And I liked how mythical characters from the tarot were personified in actual human beings. Sometimes that meant that the god or spirit itself took human form, as with Death and the goddess of the moon. And sometimes that meant that the real human characters took on attributes of the legendary beings, like the joker and the one-eyed jack.

It reminded me of Neil Gaiman’s later book American Gods, in that both books involved the physical embodiment of legendary figures from ancient cultures who were mostly forgotten, but who still held a lot of power for those that did remember them. Except that Last Call did it with more depth and subtlety and didn’t make the technique feel so much like a gimmick.

Fear Is the Mind-Killer

http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/

Book Review: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

John LeCarré
1963
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

On the back of my 1977 paperback edition of this book there is a quote from one of my favorite authors, Graham Greene. His quote says, “The best spy story I have ever read.” Below that is a quote from the New York Times that says, “It may be the best spy story anybody has ever read.”

I don’t usually go by what the reviewers say on the back of books, but in this case they’re right. This book is awesome from beginning to end.

The main character, Alec Leamas, is a British intelligence agent. He works in Berlin at the height of the cold war. He’s fed up and tired. All of his best East German agents have been exposed and murdered, one by one, and he wants to quit. But his superiors in London give him one more assignment before he can come in from the cold – a mission to kill his old nemesis in the East German Abteilung spy agency. And, of course, this one turns out to be the hardest mission he’s ever had.

The first time I read this book, way back in the ‘90s, it was the first book I had ever read by LeCarré (who himself had been a British secret agent). It started me on a tear of reading everything he ever wrote and then seeing all of the movies based on his books.

I just love the way LeCarré writes. Dry, matter-of-fact, with great descriptive details that it seems like only someone who had actually done this job would think of.

And the atmosphere is perfect. He shows you that spycraft is not glamorous: it can be dingy and cold and often requires months of careful research, uninteresting waiting, and tedious attention to detail. It is lonely: you can’t have a real connection to anyone. And it also is incredibly tense: you spend ages waiting for your opportunities, and live in constant fear of being found out. You always have to keep up your cover even when you are alone. And after all the tedium, then there are rare moments of fast action, times when the spotlight is on you and you’d better play your part exactly right or you’re dead.

I like that the people who Leamas is most impatient with are the people who try to understand why he does what he does. The people who think there must be some kind of religion or political philosophy that makes spies live this kind of a life. LeCarré seems to be saying that the best spies–on both sides–are the people who are lost; the ones who aren’t sure what they believe in.

The always-disheveled Richard Burton is perfect as Leamas in the 1965 movie version of this book. This book also introduces the character of master spy George Smiley, who reappears in several of LeCarré’s other books including the awesome Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (which was made into a spot-on BBC miniseries starring Alec Guinness, and a not-too-bad feature film starring Gary Oldman).


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