Review: Sam in the Suburbs

Sam in the Suburbs by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A charming and amusing romantic comedy fairly typical of early Wodehouse (and mostly none the worse for that).

As with most of his early books, the plot is firmly based on a foundation of blatant coincidence, which enables him to have a cast of about a dozen people who keep bumping into each other in three or four locations. For example, the eponymous Sam, before the story starts, has spent some time in a fishing shack in Canada, where a previous inhabitant had pinned up a picture, torn from a magazine in a way that removed the caption, of an attractive young woman with a horse. Sam falls in love with this woman purely through gazing at her picture, with no idea who she is. Having read a number of early Wodehouse books recently, I was barely surprised at all when, sacked from his uncle's firm in New York and sent to London, Sam almost immediately connects up, by complete chance, with an old school friend of his who is, on that particular day, staying in the house where the same young woman lives, having known her all his life (they were neighbours growing up). Why the school friend is staying there, and not at his house in Mayfair (which is much closer to where he is giving a speech that same night), is never clarified, though perhaps his fear of his housekeeper and the fact that he is likely to drink too much at the event and come home drunk (which he does) may be relevant. The important thing is that Sam is almost immediately connected with his beloved in two different ways (her uncle, who she lives with, works for the same firm that he's been sent to London to join, and Sam asks to work under him - so protagonist agency does at least play some role), and then moves in next door to her.

This is where the second plot comes in, because the house he takes was once the residence of a bank robber, who stashed his take there and never got back to pick it up. Dying, he has given the address to one of his old colleagues, Soapy Molloy, who has shared it with his new wife Dolly, and has given the location within the house to another old colleague, Chimp Twist, forcing them to work together. Twist, by another coincidence, has set himself up (for obscure reasons) as a fake private investigator and taken offices directly opposite where Sam works. This gets the plot moving into a series of tangles, along with the coincidence of Sam happening to mention in a pub that he's taken the house, and Soapy Molloy (out of all the people in London) being in the same pub (out of all the pubs in London) at the time.

Cue multiple romantic misunderstandings, comic blundering by the criminals, various disapproving elders who threaten the happiness of the young people, an amusing dog, and in general a fun time for the reader, though rarely for the characters.

Wodehouse has a knack of creating a memorable character in just a few words, a knack he shared with Charles Dickens. Unlike Dickens, though, his characters tend not to get much deeper on longer acquaintanceship. They remain a quick caricature sketch, rather than a portrait in oils. If you don't mind that, and his tendency to rely far too much on ridiculous coincidence, his early works can be a lot of fun. This is one of the better ones, for me, up there with Uneasy Money , Something Fresh or A Damsel in Distress . The romance plot is a little more developed than was often the case with Wodehouse, the couple is appealing, the B plot of the criminals is hilarious, and the minor characters (like the vicar and the charity-promoting policeman) shine.

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Review: Zuleika Dobson, or, an Oxford love story

Zuleika Dobson, or, an Oxford love story by Max Beerbohm
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

DNF at 52%.

Not because it was badly done. The prose is perhaps a little bit too clever, but it's resonant and accomplished, and not as needlessly wordy as a lot of classic fiction.

No, I stopped reading because I came for a comic novel, and it turned into a tragic novel that was still trying, intermittently, to be funny.

My read on it is that this started out as a satire of some romance tropes that are still very much with us today. Zuleika, for instance, is one of those women who every man who sees her instantly falls hopelessly in love with, even though she's completely self-centred and self-involved, has no heart whatsoever, no talent in or real dedication to her chosen profession (that of a conjurer), not much in the way of brains (her "library" consists of two books - Bradshaw's railway timetable and the ABC Guide to London), and not even conformity to the classical ideals of beauty.

My own opinion is that the "irresistible woman" is a myth propagated by men who want an excuse not to resist them, but that's another discussion. The best you can say for Zuleika is that she's not a Mary Sue, because far from being good at everything, she isn't good at anything; but that only highlights the fact that there's no actual reason for every man she meets to fall in love with her.

One of the people who does is the Duke of Dorset, an Oxford undergraduate, and another trope: the absurdly eligible bachelor. As well as his main title, he holds several others in the peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and even France; he's extremely wealthy; he's effortlessly talented, keeps his diary in five different languages (Italian when he's at his villa in Italy, French when he's at his place in the Champs Elysees, and depending on his mood, Latin, Sanskrit, Greek - in which he writes verse - and English), and is looked up to by the whole of the university. Even the other men who are in love with Zuleika (which, again, is all of them) acknowledge that he's probably the only one actually worthy of her. He has refused all women up to this point, because he thinks (probably rightly) that they're only after his title, but like everyone else, he can't resist falling in love with Zuleika.

But Zuleika doesn't love him, because she can't love anyone who loves her (or rather, I suspect, because she can't actually love anyone but herself), and this is where the trouble starts.

I'll put this bit in spoiler tags, but I'll mention that if I'd been fully aware of it upfront, I wouldn't have started on the book, and when I became fully aware I stopped reading.

(view spoiler)[The Duke decides, if he can't have Zuleika, he'll kill himself, and because of the high regard he's held in at Oxford - and because people in a mass are sheep, a point the author makes explicitly, and because all the other undergrads are in love with Zuleika too - every single undergraduate at Oxford decides to kill himself as well. What's more, thanks to a traditional omen of the death of a Duke of Dorset being observed, the Duke, against his better judgement, goes through with it, and so do the others.

Now, real young men do have suicidal thoughts when refused by women they imagine they're in love with. It happened to me - though that was far from the only stress I was under at the time, and I would like to point out that I'd known the woman in question for considerably more than the 24 hours that the Duke has known Zuleika, and that I was never in any real danger of going through with it. So this isn't completely satirical. And that's where I think I started to have a problem. Having shown us that Zuleika is heartless and that the young men were foolish, why go all the way through with the tragic outcome? I'm not sure what the author's thought process was, but it took the book out of the realm of comedy for me. Black comedy is not at all to my taste, and I felt like this was ceasing to be comedy at all.
(hide spoiler)]

Interestingly, there are some speculative elements - ghosts, portents, and the like - which are treated completely matter-of-factly. I wonder how much of an influence this novel was on Robertson Davies?

So, a clever book, with some good skewering of tropes that are still (sadly) with us, but ultimately took a direction that lost me as a reader.

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Review: Drunk on All Your Strange New Words

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fresh and interesting premise, which always catches my attention. Lydia works as a translator for an alien cultural attaché. His people are telepathic, with no spoken language, and translating for them gradually makes humans drunk (or drunkesque; it's not exactly drunkenness, but very similar). This causes some behavioural problems in public places, but people mostly just deal with it.

From there, it becomes a highly unusual murder mystery with some fascinating aspects. (view spoiler)[Her alien boss, though unquestionably dead, seems to still be talking to her, and puts her on what appears to be the trail of a convoluted plot to kill him for hate-crime-type reasons. (hide spoiler)] There are red herrings in all directions, there's danger, Lydia gets to use her unusual ability to drive a car manually, and the mystery keeps heading in one direction and then turning into something else quite unexpected. I did find the final resolution a bit of an anticlimax after all the running around, but it didn't sour me on the book.

The writing style is what I refer to as "British breathless"; it's along these lines (not a real quotation): "Yeah that's not going to happen Lydia, it's clear the cops suspect you." More technically correct would be: "Yeah, that's not going to happen, Lydia. It's clear the cops suspect you." In this case, though, it reads more as authentic voice than incompetent writing (and, since I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley, it may be different in the published version).

As a matter of personal taste, I am not a fan of alienated, emotionally distant protagonists in a crumbling near-future, but I have a paradoxical love of cyberpunk, and while I still didn't enjoy those aspects, I was able to enjoy the book despite them. It's not full-on cyberpunk in the sense of being in VR (particularly as Lydia is unable to use VR rigs for long without nausea; it's a minor plot point), but the feel is cyberpunkish.

The social media in this book does feel quite contemporary rather than futuristic (except that each post has a "truthiness rating" added by an algorithm; this is also a plot point). That struck me as a slight weakness in the worldbuilding, but it wasn't a major for me. I also wondered why the embassy was in New York. For the cultural attaché to be based in NY made sense, but ambassadors are based in capitals; important non-capital cities get consulates.

Except for a couple of small issues, though, this was a strong and engaging book, with a fresh concept well explored.

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Books Not Taken: In the Shadow of the Throne

Third in my occasional series about books that I decided against reviewing based on issues with the blurb. In the Shadow of the Throne, by Kate Sheridan and Gaia Cardinali. Blurb (my emphasis):

When his younger siblings and parents become too much to bear while on vacation, Jordan tries to get some space. But instead of wandering around the local museum, Jason finds himself dropped into a fantasy world where he can finally have fun! Except in this Elven Kingdom, there's a sinister secret kept hidden by the queen that'll thrust Jordan, the rebellious Prince Astel, and the brave knight Sir Griffith in the middle of a magical battle they never could have anticipated.

I could forgive the paragraph break in mid-sentence (after "dropped" - it's not as obvious in the formatting on this blog), and "in" instead of "into" in the last sentence, but if you can't keep your protagonist's name straight in the blurb, what other errors are you making?

Review: Wallet of Kai Lung

Wallet of Kai Lung by Ernest Bramah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amusingly told tales, some fantastical but most not, set in a version of China that is part what Westerners of the time imagined China to be like and part sly satire. A number of the "wise traditional sayings" are cliched English phrases like "having a skeleton in the closet" paraphrased into the overly formal and elaborate diction that is used throughout, and quotations from a famous Chinese writer are similarly paraphrased Shakespeare, which leads me to suspect that a lot of the satire is actually about England, not China at all. In other words, this book's relationship to China is approximately that of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado to Japan, though the pastiche is a touch more sophisticated and the names are not obvious jokes.

The framing device for all but a couple of the stories is that they're being told by the professional storyteller Kai Lung, and parts of the frame are amusing too. The stories vary, but are mostly about deserving people ending up on top against conniving and corrupt rivals. Some of these are young men, others are middle-aged men; I don't recall a story with a female protagonist, and the women, while occasionally contributing intelligently to the resolution, are mostly prizes to be won or obstacles to overcome.

That overly formal diction is a bit of a trial at times, and some of the longer sentences take some parsing. I enjoyed it enough that I would read others in the series, but I'm not going to rush out and do it straight away.

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Review: The Crock of Gold

The Crock of Gold by James Stephens
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was sold to me as a comic novel (and by "sold to me" I mean I was convinced to download it from Project Gutenberg because it was on Michael Dirda's list), but it falls short on both comedy and novelness.

The first section (or "book") is mildly amusing, as the author gently mocks a couple of philosophers. But then he starts into his own philosophy, asserted (not argued) in a great many poetic words which boil down to "all men are rational, and all women are intuitive, and because of this all men and all women are inevitably at war forever, until they both manage to be both intuitive and rational (which has never yet happened), and then Paradise will come." Which is obvious nonsense, from a 21st-century perspective; during the time I was reading this, I had a great conversation with my very rational wife, in which we supported each other as equal partners in understanding and expressing our feelings. I'm aware that that would have been a lot less likely in early-20th-century Ireland, but that doesn't excuse unsupported generalizations about the nature of humanity.

As the book progresses - more as a series of disparate events that are loosely connected than as a plot, which is why I cast doubt on whether it's a novel - we get rural Irish life and some romanticism about it; a generous helping of Irish myth; and a not-at-all-comic exploration of what it looks like when there's no social safety net, with an old widow woman forced to wander the roads begging, and two thieves who turned to crime because they lost their jobs (one through illness, the other through age). The thin thread of what might generously be termed a plot involves one of the philosophers being framed for murder by leprechauns, who are angry at him for helping a neighbour steal their crock of gold. At the end, unable, apparently, to bring together Irish myth and contemporary Irish social injustices in any coherent way, the author declares (tells, rather than shows) a literal deus ex machina to finish his book.

I'm sure that if I was better acquainted with the Ireland of 1912, which I know very little about, or Irish myth, which I have only a passing knowledge of, I would have got more out of it. But the philosophy is bad (and tedious) whichever way you cut it, the story hangs together poorly through the shifting tone and disparate elements that aren't well integrated, and overall, for me, it was far too much crock and not nearly enough gold.

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Review: The Extractionist

The Extractionist by Kimberly Unger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this author's previous book, Nucleation , which, like this one, I had as a pre-publication version from Netgalley. I noted on that one, and will note again, that the author (despite her degree in English/Writing) has a poor grasp of basic mechanics, as the unedited version reveals; it's full of comma splices, there are a good few excess hyphens and coordinate commas inserted because she's only learned half of a rule, a number of sentences have words dropped out (or occasionally repeated), the past perfect tense goes missing frequently, and there are a smaller but still significant number of other errors. Worst of all is her use of pronouns. Not infrequently, there are two female characters being discussed in a sentence, and "she" or "her" will be used to refer to both characters, often in alternation, with no clear signalling as to which is which. At other times, the gender of a pronoun is simply wrong for the person it's referring to - not, as far as I can tell, for any deliberate reason; it's just a mistake the author is prone to making.

All of this may (and, I hope, will) be cleaned up by publication, though as usual I will note that having a great many errors in the unedited book is a strong predictor of having more than a few in the edited version, since editors are human and miss things.

It isn't a sequel to Nucleation, and can be read as a standalone, though if you enjoy one I think you'll also enjoy the other; leaving aside the mechanical issues, this is a strong piece of writing, with excellent pacing and tension. It makes William Gibson's Agency look like the proverbial pile of puke, in this regard (or rather, Gibson managed to do that himself). The cyberpunk premise, while still a bit handwavey, is better justified than average, too. The idea is that (using quantum computing as a sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic) people are able to write out versions of themselves, known as "personas," into the "Swim" to transact business on their behalf. If the persona encounters too much of a paradigm shift, however, writing them back into the original person is tricky, and this is the niche skill that the protagonist has. Unfortunately, mysterious parties are opposed to her completing her latest contract, and are willing to use strongarm tactics to get her to leave off. She herself, using an advanced and experimental brain-computer interface that she built herself, interfaces directly with the Swim, which makes her vulnerable to events occurring in it.

While it does suffer from the usual cyberpunk issue of overliteralizing the interface metaphor in some of the action scenes, that didn't do too much to hinder my enjoyment of a well-structured story that rises beyond the cliches of the genre, while still honouring its key tropes. It comfortably makes it onto my Best of the Year list, though low down the list, because I suspect there will be a residue of those many mechanical issues in the published version.

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Review: Something New

Something New by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

British title "Something Fresh," but in America that had connotations of "cheeky".

The first in the Blandings Castle series, which Wodehouse returned to throughout his long life, lays the groundwork for the familiar classic Wodehouse style. The absent-minded Earl of Emsworth (at this point, obsessed with gardening rather than pigs); his humourless secretary, the Efficient Baxter; assorted relatives who are either idiots, termagants, or schemers; and a supply of a few more schemers from external sources make up an entertaining cast for a farcical plot full of imposture, hilarious mishap, and well-intended theft.

Like others of his early books, the central romantic couple are in difficult economic straits, having to take bad work in order to make ends meet, and willing to take significant risks for a chance of improving their lot. It's a theme that would recur again in future, but as his own success mounted, the sense of true desperation tended to fade.

We also get the theme of escaping from an unwanted engagement, which was to form such a keystone of the Jeeves books.

I've been reading a few of the early Wodehouse books, and this is the first that really feels like the later books in style and tone. It also doesn't rely quite so much on blatant coincidence as the other early works, though a big coincidence is needed to get everyone to Blandings so the plot can unfold. Accordingly, I'm giving it a slot in my Best of the Year list.

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Review: Sojourn

Sojourn by Jana Oliver
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While it has a degree of freshness and is not badly executed on the whole, if this won seven awards I don't imagine the other candidates for those awards were up to much. It's above average, but it's not a long way above quite a low average, and there are enough issues that I can't in good conscience give four stars. It's a high three.

The two completely separate speculative elements (time travel and shapeshifting) are more plot devices than they are fully worked out setting elements, and there's a bit of a tonal clash between the high technology of one and the scientifically inexplicable, quasi-supernatural nature of the other (not that either one is really explained).

The editing errors (including a number of dangling modifiers and some missing words, plus a few vocabulary glitches) are not constant, but they are numerous - see my notes and highlights. They include the common errors of inserting a comma between non-coordinate adjectives and omitting a comma after a term of address. There's a scene in which the point of view jumps between two characters over the course of three sentences, which is generally considered a craft error. The author does get a point for (I'm reasonably sure) using the word "sojourn" correctly, to mean a period of time spent in a place, rather than a journey, as I often see it incorrectly used. However, there are a number of other homonym and vocabulary errors.

The 19th-century-London vibe feels just a little off; I'm fairly sure 19th-century British police didn't talk about someone "fitting the profile," for example, and that few people referred to them as "cops".

The characters are appealing enough, and have some depth, but could have more. There's a love triangle (or square, or something), because the heroine is one of those Everyone Wants Her heroines; to be fair, she is a capable character, though rather given to running around at night unarmed and unaccompanied in a bad part of Victorian London. This makes her previous survival as a Time Rover in various historical periods seem less plausible. The fact that everyone notices her makes her unlikely as an agent, too (real-life agents are mostly unremarkable), but that's a genre trope, so I'll give it a pass.

One of the characters is a shifter who refuses to shift, giving no reason much beyond that he doesn't want to, even though he knows it's dangerous for him not to (he eventually does when the situation gets dire enough). It felt like that was more of a plot device than anything, used to build tension, and I felt the same about the heroine's "time lag"; it was supposed to mean she had to stop time travelling, but after it was used for some initial tension-building it stopped being treated as a serious problem, so that the plot could continue to happen.

The future world she comes from is a lightly sketched, prefabricated cyberpunkish dystopia dominated by corrupt corporates, and neither the business model for time travel nor the way it's conducted (drop academics in the past to do research; send experts to retrieve them if they overstay) make a whole lot of sense. The worldbuilding in general is undercooked.

On the upside, it's a longish book, but I was entertained enough to keep reading to the end. There are plenty of worse books, but there are also a lot of better ones.

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Books Not Taken: Earthlings

The second in an occasional series about why I have chosen not to pick up certain Netgalley books for review. Blurb begins: "Peridot has lived a sheltered life, raised by an overprotective mother on a remote island, the ways of the world remain a mystery, until the arrival of a young boy Euan, and she finally learns the truth." That needs to be at least two sentences, and rearranged a bit. It's in the style I call "British breathless," a particular way of punctuating that shows very little understanding of where a comma belongs or what it does. Further dings against the book from my personal perspective are that it's a Chosen One story of a young girl with magick (with a "k"), able to use the traditional five elements, and it's a dystopian. The cliches come thick and fast. And then there's the fact that, among the "Advance Praise," I read this: "An Enid Blyton of the social media age" - THE HECKINGTON POST There doesn't appear to be any such publication, and the only three instances of the quoted text I can find in Google are on pages controlled by the author. Is he making up his own press?