Review: Queen Lucia

Queen Lucia by E.F. Benson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was hoping that this classic comic novel would be a warm comedy, like Wodehouse, Jerome K. Jerome, or England, Their England . In places, it is; there are certainly kind and well-intentioned people in it, and the title character is treated, if anything, more sympathetically than she deserves, but occasionally it feels catty.

Lucia, as she calls herself (real name Emmeline Lucas) is based in part on the novelist Marie Corelli, real name Minnie Mackay, who had some of the same affectations: pretending to speak Italian (and in her case to be Italian by descent, which at least Lucia doesn't claim), being devoted to Shakespeare and the Elizabethan era in general, and sometimes talking to her friends in baby talk. Lucia believes herself to be a great lover of music, so much so that she theatrically can't stand the sound of a gramophone, but on two separate occasions she demonstrates that she's not reacting to the actual music she's hearing but to what she assumes it to be, based on who she (incorrectly) believes to be performing it.

She's a more successful version of Margo Leadbetter (Penelope Keith's character in the classic 1970s comedy The Good Life): queen bee of her little village, where she controls her neighbours and is the arbiter of taste and the premier social hostess. But there are rumblings of rebellion. Some of these come from her sidekick Georgie (clearly presented as what we would recognize today as a "gay best friend," though he falls emotionally in love with a woman later in the book; the author was discreetly gay, and some of the cattier moments are descriptions of Georgie's small affectations and vanities). Also contemplating rebellion against the rule of Lucia is another of her neighbours who goes in for fads and is, in the course of the story, duped by not one, but two confidence tricksters posing as spiritual advisors (both of whom Lucia attempts to annex, the first one successfully and the second one unsuccessfully).

The other village characters at first look like the stock cast of any novel set in an English village of the time (1920): the retired military officer, the disabled widow in her bath-chair, the snooty lady of the hall with her put-upon companion and her pug, the deaf widow who is the only one with any offspring (young adult daughters who are known to everyone as Piggy and Goosie, apparently without malice). As the story progresses, though, some of them - notably the Colonel and the disabled widow - develop other dimensions.

A big driver of change in the book is Olga, the opera singer who has risen from an orphanage to fame and a degree of fortune, but remains straightforward, openhearted and genuine, all of which makes her a foil for Lucia. Olga, who has recently moved to the village, organizes an evening party spontaneously (Lucia's functions are, even when they're purportedly spontaneous, actually carefully rehearsed) and everyone has a great time, much more so than they do at Lucia's. Olga is, unintentionally, behind both of the occasions on which Lucia is revealed to not have much musical perception at all, as well as innocently exposing her pretensions to speak Italian as, to say the least, exaggerated. Olga never means to make Lucia look ridiculous; Lucia does that for herself, but Olga feels responsible, is sorry for Lucia, and sets out to make it up to her and put her back on her little throne, since after all she does no real harm there, and it makes her happy.

It's a character-driven rather than a plot-driven novel, though incidents do occur; the interactions of the characters in the context of those incidents are what is important, rather than the incidents themselves. And in terms of giving us memorable characters, it definitely succeeds.

It's part of a series, and I'm considering reading more of them, because even though it wasn't quite the kind of comedy I was hoping for, it's excellently done.

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Review: The Secret of Safe Passage

The Secret of Safe Passage by Martin Baynton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm finding this a tricky one to rate.

I've read quite a few books lately where the emotional throughline, the story, is handled effectively, but there are significant mechanical issues (the things a copy editor looks after; mostly punctuation, but also things like grammar and tense) and underdeveloped worldbuilding. This is one of those, except that instead of the worldbuilding being undeveloped there are a large number of small errors of continuity and fact. The overall feel, then, is of a story lacking a lot of polish, so much so that I hesitate to add it even to the bottom tier of my recommendation list.

Now, I did get a pre-release version via Netgalley. It's possible - though, honestly, not highly likely - that a skilled copy editor will go through it between the version I saw and the version that's published in about two weeks from now, and fix the two it's/its errors, the many comma splices, the many places where a comma is missing before a term of address, the many places where a question is missing a question mark, the carelessly dropped quotation marks, and the small words from sentences that are missing or substituted for different words. They may even fix up the bits of dialog where the response doesn't match the previous line, like the glaring one where person A describes someone as a "zombie" with no indication of gender, and person B says "Woman?" as if that word had been used in the preceding sentence.

If they're extraordinarily good, they may even fix up the subtle errors, like describing "charm" as a subatomic particle (it's a flavour of quark, which isn't quite the same thing), or claiming that "faster" should be corrected to "more quickly" when both are acceptable, or Ali saying that she was a blood donor several years before, even though she's 15 and the minimum age for blood donation in the UK is 17.

What all of that wouldn't fix was the big swallow at the start - in the prologue, in fact - where we get a major revision to well-known history. In reality, Alice Pleasance Liddell was one of three sisters to whom Charles Lutwedge Dodgson, who transformed his first two names to the pseudonym Lewis Carroll via Latin, told the original Alice in Wonderland story, using her name for the protagonist. Alice was, at the time, 10 years old; she lived to the age of 80, marrying and having three children. Dodgson wrote several other works, none of which are as good (especially Sylvie and Bruno, which is awful) or as well known, but which are certainly in a similar style. In this version, Alice Carroll Grey, exact age unspecified, wrote both Alice books herself, filling them with secret messages about a real otherworld, and then disappeared into it after handing them over to Dodgson to be published as being written by him. She had to flee there because the White Rose, a sinister organization, was hunting her in order to get the secret of access to Wonderland (and safe return, which is harder, hence this novel's title). This organization has survived for 170 years since then without apparently achieving very much at all; the operatives are called Knaves and the head of it is Mrs King (i.e., obviously, the White Queen). The original Alice's great-niece (there are probably several more greats, but even if there are there seem to be too few generations mentioned to account for the 170-year gap), also named Alice but going by Ali, discovers and begins decoding the secret when she's manipulated into getting suspended from school and sent to relatives she's never previously heard of at an old country house that's been in the Grey family since her Great-Aunt Alice's time.

Ali is not a nice person. Her mother died on a humanitarian mission when Ali was quite young, her father is away a lot for work (he's a scientist studying gravity waves, which involves being incommunicado in a Faraday cage down a mine in Wales for days at a time), and she's now an angry, stubborn teenager, given to striking out in rage, actual tantrums, and, even when not specifically angry, weaponizing her intelligence to make cruel remarks. Her elderly relatives, who are lovely, do manage to tame her down a bit, and she eventually grows as a person and realizes how awful she's been, but she's still a piece of work. Still, her character and her arc of growth are the best thing about the book, which from my particular perspective is damning it with faint praise, because I prefer, as a matter of taste, to read about people who are actually well-intentioned from the start and not awful. The storytelling and the handling of Alice's character show the skill that is notably lacking in the mechanics, the background, the continuity, and the incidental facts.

So: a very rough piece of work with a main character that I didn't care for. I hovered between three and four stars, and finally landed on three, because I don't recommend it. That isn't to say that someone with different tastes, who doesn't notice the same kinds of issues that distracted me so frequently, won't enjoy it.

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Review: The Tinted Venus

The Tinted Venus by F. Anstey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A comic treatment of a theme that Prosper Merimee, in his La Venus de Ille , treated as horror. The source for both was a medieval legend of a young man who accidentally betroths himself to Venus by putting a ring on her statue; the elderly scholar who advises the hero at one point mentions William Morris's poem The Earthly Paradise as a source, though he's very unreliable and I can't find it in there, nor is it likely to have been in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, the other source he mentions. The earliest known version of the story is by William of Malmesbury, but it was often retold by other medieval writers.

This version of the story involves a young London hairdresser, Leander, whose friend drops him into an awkward situation; the friend is engaged to the sister of a young woman who Leander had previously been interested in, before meeting Mathilda, now his fiancée, and the friend has arranged a trip to the Rosherwich Pleasure Gardens (a transparent pseudonym for the actual Rosherville Gardens) along with the two sisters. Leander tries to get out of it, but in the end has to explain to Ada, his former interest, that she's been superseded by Mathilda. In the course of the conversation, he mentions Mathilda's small hands, and demonstrates by putting the engagement ring he happens to have just picked up from a jeweler (who has altered it to fit Mathilda; it's a family ring of Leander's) on the notably small hand of a statue of Venus in the sculpture garden.

Unfortunately, this brings the statue to life, infused with the power and personality of the goddess, and she insists that he's committed himself to be hers. He has to resist her attempts to take him away to her isle of Cyprus as her lover (he's not attracted to her, and is faithful to his Mathilda), while also dealing with the fact that the statue, which was stolen property before it ended up in the sculpture garden, is being sought by both the police and the criminals who had parked it there until the hue and cry died down. His case becomes more and more desperate, as he tries to do the right thing and extricate himself from the situation.

The title refers to his subterfuge of applying makeup (which he invents and compounds as part of his business) to the statue to make it attract less attention when it walks around in London.

One thing I didn't like about the book was that the author makes mockery of this honest and good-hearted tradesman for his lack of education, though he also has the scene with the elderly and disagreeable scholar, who is portrayed as unpleasant and snobbish when he mocks Leander for his ignorance (despite his own unreliable memory). Still, Leander comes across as a hapless but well-intentioned, honest and faithful person, and he does eventually solve his problem himself by his own intelligence. His Mathilda is also very understanding and forgiving, once she understands what's going on, and faithful to him in turn. They are portrayed positively for rejecting the wild sexuality represented by Venus and remaining within respectable bounds; apparently this is not so much the case with the 1921 silent film based on the book, if Wikipedia is to be believed, and very much not the case with the 1941 musical A Touch of Venus, also based on this book.

I found it amusing, more for the farcical shenanigans than the hero's malapropisms and ignorant errors. It's not comparable to classic Wodehouse, but then when it was published nor was Wodehouse (as another reviewer has remarked); I'd say it's as funny as Three Men on the Bummel , though not as funny as Three Men in a Boat . It's not the author's best-known work, either, so I might take a look at some of the others.

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Review: Follow the Shadows: The Tales of Moerden Book 1

Follow the Shadows: The Tales of Moerden Book 1 by Rosemary Drisdelle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A strong YA novel with actual character growth that doesn't feature an overpowered or "perfect" protagonist.

In fact, Marise starts out looking unpromising as a protagonist. She comes across as self-absorbed, not very empathetic, ignorant, and a bit lazy, though no more of any of these things than a lot of teenagers. And she continues throughout to be slow on the uptake; I predicted most of the major plot points well before she figured them out, but because the author hasn't presented her as some kind of exceptional prodigy, this largely works. Through the book, she grows in courage, empathy, effectiveness and problem-solving ability in a believable way.

She needs all of those things, because after her biology tutor (a retired professor) mysteriously disappears, she surreptitiously takes something of his that he'd kind of promised to her - a sphere that she intends to use as a crystal ball in a Wiccan rite. It turns out to be from the tail of a dragon, and transports her to another world, where she gets caught up in trying to solve a dragon health crisis (caused by short-sighted, selfish humans, which means that some of the dragons want to kill her). She builds friendships, overcomes obstacles, takes risks, goes through considerable physical hardship without whining about it even once, and (eventually) figures out the solution.

The challenges are varied, but keep on coming at a good pace. Some of the worldbuilding is better than other parts; I wasn't convinced that the river acted much like a real river, and there's a cave with the river running through it that's inexplicably warm, for example. The pre-publication version I had from Netgalley needed a bit more polishing from a copy editor before release, though it's better than a lot I see. But the emotional heart of the story is sound, and it's a true coming-of-age story free from annoying tropes. There's no romance for Marise, for example (she doesn't seem to be particularly interested in that for herself, though she encourages it for her dragon friend). She doesn't have green eyes, or if she does the author doesn't mention them. And she's an ordinary hero, not a Chosen One, who chooses to stay and help the dragons at her own risk, even though she could walk away and return to her life in our world.

I like that kind of hero.

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Review: The Navigating Fox

The Navigating Fox by Christopher Rowe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Interesting, unusual, enjoyable and well executed.

In an alternate version of our world, a form of the Roman Empire has colonized part of North America (it did take me a while to figure out that the action was taking place on that continent and not in Europe), but the rest of the continent is still in the hands of its indigenous people. That's not the original bit. The original bit is that someone (possibly not the person credited by legend) has figured out an alchemical process which makes non-human animals "knowledgeable" - sentient, in other words.

The Navigating Fox is such a person. The adjective used for a knowledgeable creature differs depending on the species; for a fox, apparently it's "navigating," though since he is the only knowledgeable fox perhaps it isn't. He can guide people on a system of mysterious paths that take them between places more quickly than would otherwise be the case - nobody knows how.

A lot of things are not clear-cut, in a good way, and most of the major characters believe at least one thing that turns out to be significantly untrue about the way the world works and the intentions, motivations, knowledge and actions of other characters. The story opens with the fox, in a Tom and Huck's funeral moment, secretly attending a procedure to throw him out of the Explorers' Sodality on the basis that he is lying about the existence of the paths (but really because his accuser's sister was on his last expedition, the one from which only he returned). From there, we get two narrative threads. The main thread is a second expedition, commissioned by a senior priest, ostensibly to close the gates of hell and end death; the secondary thread consists of several chapters detailing how the first expedition unfolded.

While short, it packs in plenty of worldbuilding without any infodumping, plenty of character development without long passages of introspection, and a surprising amount of twisty plot. It takes a very capable author to pull off that kind of concise writing; the pre-release version I got via Netgalley is also very clean from a copy editing point of view, barring a few minor typing errors. It's a solid piece of writing, and gets an unhesitating recommendation from me.

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Review: The Quavering Air

The Quavering Air by Simone Snaith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A kind of book I enjoy from time to time is something that, while feeling a lot like D&D, isn't just D&D. That's the kind of book this is; the various intelligent species, monsters, spells, and character classes are not just the familiar D&D ones (whether for copyright reasons or otherwise), but they have the same kind of vibe to them. For example, the main character has the ability, by a kind of meditation or concentration, to use her cloak to make herself hard to see; she then lays about herself with a staff. She's not exactly a monk, but she's not exactly not a monk either, just as the guy with the antlers isn't exactly not a ranger, the huge guy isn't exactly not a barbarian, and the little old crotchety guy isn't exactly not a wizard (nor is he exactly not a gnome).

They've been assembled by a council of near-immortals for an important quest. The world they live in is kept separate from a dimension of monsters/demons by a pair of magical clocks, which, when they're set an hour apart, prevent travel between the two - but someone has synched the clocks. Their mission is to fight their way to the tower where the clocks are and de-synch them again. This calls for plenty of courage and determination, a number of pitched battles in which they get significantly battered (with minimal magical healing available, and what there is doesn't restore them to full health), and some clever tactical decisions. A good many of those decisions are made by the main character, who has to prove that humans are not lesser than some of the other stronger or longer-lived or more magical peoples. There are personal stakes, there are questions about loyalty and commitment to the mission, there are interpersonal squabbles and personality clashes, there's character growth, there's even a romance subplot. It's good stuff.

While I did like the freshness of the world in many ways, it also was one of the drawbacks, because I couldn't just go with "Oh, he's an elf, I know what they're like"; I had to put in some effort to remember what each of the different party members looked like and could do, which since they were all introduced in a single scene was initially difficult. Likewise, since all the monsters were new and their names didn't convey anything about them, it was sometimes hard to keep them straight. But on the whole, I think having a fresh take on the world was more of a benefit than otherwise, even if I had to work harder as a reader to imagine it clearly. I also enjoyed the fact that the sky didn't have the usual astronomical bodies, but swirls of light and colour, different ones for day and night, and that this ended up being a plot point as well as a decorative piece of worldbuilding.

I had a pre-release version from Netgalley, and it was in better shape in terms of editing than most books I get that way. The author does need to learn when not to use a comma between adjectives (when the order of them couldn't be swapped without it sounding weird, basically, though there's a bit more to it than that); how to punctuate a sentence that has a dialog tag in the middle of it (no capital when the same sentence resumes); and how to choose the correct one among a few easily confused homonyms. But these are minor issues, easily taken care of by a good editor.

Overall, the book scratched an itch that I have more often than I find capably-written books to satisfy it, and I would read more from this author.

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Review: Down Below Beyond

Down Below Beyond by T.A. Bruno
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

DNF.

A very old-school space opera, populated with rubber-suit aliens that physically are reminiscent of Earth animals of various kinds, mostly, and psychologically are completely indistinguishable from humans. The planets seem to have single biomes in many cases, and the spaceships don't appear to require any fuel. It's definitely way up the trope end of the trope-to-actual-science spectrum; what little original worldbuilding there is doesn't make any attempt at plausibility.

But how about the story?

Observing from afar, I'm starting to think that it's increasingly difficult for an author living in today's USA not to write dystopian fiction, which is a pity, because I'm not a fan of it. This is a corporate dystopia, with an obviously evil corporate overlord who's rewritten history to remove or demonize the courageous and generous Beyonders, who want everyone to have access to their utopian tech. Instead, characters like the protagonist are stuck in dead-end jobs which exploit their labour for the benefit of the corporation and force them into increasing debt. He was sold by his parents as a child because of debt, and worked in a sweatshop growing up; sweatshops have, inexplicably, since been abolished (there's no sign of any government that could make the corporation improve its policies, at least as far as I read). When he finds a piece of Beyonder tech while scavenging a post-apocalyptic world, he ends up on the run, using a Beyonder device which opens portals to random places (though always ones that are survivable), in a way that, for reasons that seem more story-related than realistic, can't be predicted or controlled. Fortunately for him, it's almost impossible for a named character to die in this setting (you basically have to be shot at close range; even firing superheated plasma at someone just pushes them away, for some reason, and falling a long distance or being shot only once or from a distance generally leaves the characters just fine).

His one friend is an Enforcer, a member of the corporation's private security, who befriended him when they were children together, but he's a company man and believes the obviously evil boss's disinformation about the Beyonders being a dangerous cult, so the friends end up on opposite sides. In fact, the enforcer, coerced into heinous acts by the evil boss, falls down the slippery slope and becomes a bit of a psychopath, with no sign of the compassion that made the two friends in the first place. At the point I stopped reading, he had just captured his old friend, and since convenient coincidence had played a bit of a role up to that point, I found myself unwilling to wade through whatever dystopian scenes were to come to get to what I assumed would be a convenient coincidence enabling the plot to be resolved.

None of the characters had much depth, even the protagonist; they had, at most, one simple motivation and a plot role.

Very few authors seem to know how (or at least when) to use the past perfect tense these days, and this author is not one of those who do, though at least most of the other mechanical issues are minor and could be cleaned up relatively easily by a good editor.

I'm willing to give undercooked worldbuilding and mediocre mechanics a bit of a pass if the emotional arc of the characters is working for me, but this wasn't, certainly not well enough for me to wade through the dystopian bits. For someone with different tastes, it may well work better.

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Review: England, their England

England, their England by A.G. Macdonell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A warm and affectionate comedy. A Welsh publisher commissions Donald Cameron, a young Scot, who he met in a pillbox in Belgium during World War I, to write a book about the English from the point of view of an outsider. The Welshman's theory is that they are a nation of poets (which is what many people would say about the Welsh); Donald thinks, at least at one point, that they don't have a national character, "they're all different". But they are probably mad, and definitely (in many cases) kind, although he doesn't shy away from highlighting the exceptions. The fox-hunting chapter is particularly biting, and a masterpiece of "show, don't tell" applied to satire.

With many sparkling comic moments, this book somehow manages to combine brilliant satire with warmth, even sentimentality. It's well known for the description of the village cricket match, and deservedly so, but there are plenty of other wonderful chapters: the country-house stay where an eccentric English friend of the hero "helps" him by ringing up and pretending to be various important people leaving messages for him with people who'll be impressed that he knows those important people, leading to conversations which poor Donald finds either incomprehensible or deeply embarrassing; the hotel fire, in which the English partygoers trapped on the roof behave with complete calm under the command of the Major-General; the fox-hunting chapter already mentioned; the episode at the League of Nations, an organization the author worked for at one time, where the English delegate gives speeches that are so careful to say nothing that they get attached to the wrong issues and nobody notices. There are some marvelous characters, too: the English landowner who, after agreeing with his wife that they won't collect the full rent (or, in some cases, any rent) from tenants who are having a hard time of it, insists vehemently that he's a good businessman; the Yorkshire engineer who has been all over the world delivering machines and teaching the recipients to use them, sometimes for years at a time; the varied literary eccentrics; the secretly virtuous film star, true to the precepts of her father, the vicar; the noncommittal trio of young men who work at the League of Nations, and whose answer to any question is "yes and no"; the young man and woman, siblings, who have no topics of conversation and only one adjective at any given time (currently the adjective is "grim").

It closes with a sentimental chapter set at Winchester, where the author (but not his character) went to school, in which one of the boys (or "men," as they're known at Winchester; this particular man is about 12 years old) explains that a piece of terminology used at the school is based on something that used to happen "until quite recently," and when pressed clarifies that by this he means 70 or 80 years ago. Given that Winchester was founded in 1382, 70 or 80 years does count as recent in terms of its history. (I went to a school founded 5 years before I started there, so by the time I left I had witnessed half its history to that point, and the country I was born in was only founded in 1840, so it's hard to imagine what it would be like to go to a school with such a depth of history.) I was reminded of Wodehouse's Psmith in the City , where the viewpoint character visits Wodehouse's old school (which is not the character's old school).

I was left with the impression that Donald thinks that the English are kind largely because he is kind. A lot of the time, he has no idea what is going on, what his English acquaintances are talking about, or why they are doing what they're doing, but he struggles on as best he can.

If the book has a fault, it's that it's very much about its own time (which is also a strength, if you're interested in getting an insight into that time), and a lot of the contemporary references have lost their resonance in almost a century. But you can generally pick up from context what's being referenced, at least in general terms, and the Wikipedia feature on my Kindle was helpful in many cases too.

Genuinely witty in its observations and phrasing, with hilarious set-pieces and mostly affectionate portraits of a dozen varieties of eccentricity and oddness, this is a book for fans of Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome, or anyone who wants a comedic exploration of the England of the 1920s.

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Review: Beyond the Gloaming Pass

Beyond the Gloaming Pass by Rebecca Holmes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Dystopian, a genre which I wasn't expecting from the blurb, and which I dislike.

In the pre-publication copy I had from Netgalley, I found most of the usual mechanical issues: missing past perfect tense, "may" where it should be "might," a few punctuation issues, and some quite basic vocabulary errors. These may (or, more probably, may not) be fixed by the time of publication. The larger issue, though, was that the limited third-person point of view was periodically violated, with the narrative including information that the point-of-view character couldn't have known. The worst example, just before I stopped at 34%, is that a character who has not yet introduced himself to the viewpoint character is referred to in the narrative by his name.

That character is one of a series of fortunately helpful strangers that the protagonists keep encountering, reducing both tension and their agency, and he appears in the role of a deus ex machina, rescuing one of the protagonists in the middle of nowhere from a situation she couldn't have escaped by herself.

The two protags are separated from an early point, which means their relationship isn't able to have the importance it otherwise could. I did wonder at one point if they were going to turn out to be a couple, but they are just friends - which I did like; it seems that (under the influence of fanfiction, perhaps) it's rare these days for two characters to be friends with no romantic connection, and I do like to see a good friendship. However, as I mentioned, the fact that they're geographically separated and not interacting does undermine that aspect. As far as I'd read, there doesn't seem to be such a thing as romance in this world, in fact; none of the male strangers that help the two women do anything remotely approaching hitting on them, and neither of them, having reached early middle age, appear to have had any romantic involvement at any time in their lives. That's not necessarily a negative, as such, but I did find it a significant and unexplained absence.

The blurb claims that this is:

"A gripping fantasy novel that weaves together themes of friendship, resilience, and the search for truth. With its vivid world-building, profound emotional depth, and heart-wrenching conclusion, this book will keep readers enchanted until the very last page.

If you liked... Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, you’ll love the immersive world and strong female main characters of Beyond the Gloaming Pass."

Unfortunately, I can report that from my perspective, none of this is true (except possibly the heart-wrenching conclusion, because I didn't get that far, thanks to being neither gripped nor enchanted). I found it rather dull, in fact, and both the general execution and the worldbuilding struck me as mediocre. The characters weren't unusually strong, and I either hadn't reached the emotional depth part yet at 34% or else that, too, is false advertising. I should know better by now than to believe the praise a book's blurb gives it, or the old "if you liked [popular book] you'll also love this" line, which is almost without exception untrue, so the joke's on me for being fooled.

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Review: Khaled: A Tale of Arabia

Khaled: A Tale of Arabia by F. Marion Crawford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An Arabian-Nights-style tale of a djinn who, after taking it upon himself to kill a hypocrite who would have pretended to convert to Islam in order to marry a sultan's beautiful daughter, is both punished and rewarded by being made human. However, he has to win a soul for himself by getting the sultan's daughter to love him. Along the way, they encounter a femme fatale, a slave from Georgia who, desiring the newly human djinn for herself, ends up orchestrating a plot against him when he refuses to take her as a second wife.

Not all of the decisions people make necessarily seem to make a lot of sense, and the main character is often passive and fatalistic, partly because he's not very subtle and so can't work out what to do; he has to be rescued by wise and heroic beggars. His love interest doesn't have a lot of depth to her either, and (partly because of the status of women in the culture of the time) also doesn't have much agency. Yet somehow it managed to be a reasonably satisfying story, possibly because of the vigorous descriptions and the well-sustained Arabian Nights tone.

The edition from Standard Ebooks is cleanly edited and professionally presented, making this volunteer effort a lot better than most of the books I see from Open Road, which is converting old books for money. Of course, it's had a lot more work put into it by volunteers than Open Road could afford to pay for and still make a profit, but it's proof, if proof were needed, that the voluntary sector can do better than the commercial sector sometimes.

It wasn't quite enough of a favourite with me for me to add it to my Best of the Year recommendations list, but it almost made it; if you have a particular liking for the Arabian Nights, it's definitely worth a look.

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Review: Simple Sabotage Field Manual

Simple Sabotage Field Manual by U.S. Office of Strategic Services
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Read for research, not for any specific book, though it could fit into my Realm Agents series easily enough.

This is a formerly classified manual which doesn't seem to know whether it's for citizens of occupied or despotic enemy countries or for their OSS (predecessor of the CIA) handlers. It gives a lot of advice, much of it specific to the technology of the time but some which is timeless, about how to degrade the efficiency of a country, not only by actual physical sabotage of machinery (whether by maintaining it badly or actually introducing foreign substances which will make it break down), but by being generally obstructive and officious and inefficient in a way that can be passed off as just being kind of an idiot. Unfortunately, some of the advice is very recognizable as the behaviour of colleagues and managers we've all had, who weren't (presumably) trying to sabotage the organization but who were doing so quite effectively anyway:

'(11) General Interference with Organizations and Production

(a) Organizations and Conferences (1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.

(2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.

(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible—never less than five.

(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.

(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.

(7) Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision—raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

(b) Managers and Supervisors

(1) Demand written orders.

(2) “Misunderstand” orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.

(3) Do everything possible to delay the delivery of orders. Even though parts of an order may be ready beforehand, don’t deliver it until it is completely ready.

(4) Don’t order new working materials until your current stocks have been virtually exhausted, so that the slightest delay in filling your order will mean a shutdown.

(5) Order high-quality materials which are hard to get. If you don’t get them argue about it. Warn that inferior materials will mean inferior work.

(6) In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines.

(7) Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. Approve other defective parts whose flaws are not visible to the naked eye.

(8) Make mistakes in routing so that parts and materials will be sent to the wrong place in the plant.

(9) When training new workers, give incomplete or misleading instructions.

(10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.

(11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.

(12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways.

Start duplicate files.

(13) Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.

(14) Apply all regulations to the last letter.'

Because of how dated and specific much of it is, and because it's not an amazing example of a piece of technical writing, I'm giving it three stars, but it's an interesting document.

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Review: Three Men on the Bummel

Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Jerome
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A less successful follow-up to Jerome's extremely successful Three Men in a Boat, published a few years later. Both J. and Harris now have wives and children, though George is still single; the opening chapters are, in part, about convincing the wives to let them go on a trip together, this time a cycling holiday in Germany rather than a boating holiday up the Thames, all the while pretending that they don't actually need their wives' permission.

It very deliberately does not have the same travelogue feel as the first book; J. promises that there won't be any "scenery," by which he appears to mean the lyrical descriptions of places that are such a feature of Three Men in a Boat, and also that there will be no useful information (at least some of the "facts" presented are not at all factual). Somewhat surprising myself, and contrary to the general taste, I actually liked the lyrical bits and rather missed them here, but what we do have here are the comedy set-pieces, the scrapes and situations the three get into and the slice-of-life feel, with general observations on humanity and, in this case, Germany. The last chapter makes the prescient observation that the Germans, good-hearted people who always obey authority, will be fine as long as they have good rulers, but a bad ruler could take them down a dark path. There are plenty of absurd examples scattered throughout of German officials with no sense of humour, perspective, or logic who enforce nonsensical rules.

It's definitely a lesser book than its predecessor, but it has its charm and is often amusing.

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