Review: The Book Witch

The Book Witch by Meg Shaffer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought I didn't much care for metafiction. I'm glad I took a chance on this anyway; it changed my mind.

The problem I've had, I think, is that I'd never previously read a metafiction book that really worked for me as a novel, apart from the premise. Not that you could separate the premise from this one; it's thoroughly premise-driven, which is how I like my fiction. But more than that, it has the kind of reflection on the human condition, on finding meaning in life, and on human relationships that takes a book up to five stars for me. Not to mention reflection on the role of fiction and reading in the lives of book lovers, and how it can be more than just "escapism." (Tolkien's words in On Fairy-Stories are relevant here: "Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? ... In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.")

The whole book is a love-letter to reading and stories, and to the way fictional characters can inspire us and teach us to be better, stronger people in our difficult moments, even in fiction that's usually thought of as juvenile and lacking in literary merit. (There's particular love here for Nancy Drew.) The villains - who are, honestly, a bit cartoonish - are the Burners, people who want to destroy books they think are in some way unworthy to exist, because they're unable to see the merit in them.

They do this by going into the books and wreaking destruction, opposed by the Book Witches, whose goal is to preserve fiction as it is. It's kind of the same dynamic you get in a lot of time-travel stories, where the heroes want to preserve the timeline and the villains want to disrupt it.

The struggle against the Burners, though, isn't the main plot. The main plot is that the particular Book Witch who's narrating most of this book, Rainy March (the absurdity of the name is acknowledged right upfront), has fallen in love with a fictional character, the noir detective known as the Duke of Chicago, and the rules don't let them be together. Also, she wants to solve several mysteries, such as what was up with her mother disappearing for a while, returning pregnant with Rainy, refusing to say who the father was, and dying shortly after Rainy's birth? Also, where has her grandfather, who raised her, disappeared to?

The meta gets multi-layered before the end, with at least four levels of fictionality/reality, and it all contributes to the plot and makes sense, which is a feat in itself.

What boosted it into the Platinum tier of my annual book recommendations was not the assured execution, the well-thought-out reflections, or the appealing characters, including a non-speaking but intelligent cat familiar. Those took it to five stars, but what catapulted it to the top was that it made me feel something genuine, not manipulatively but through depicting a human moment - a funeral of someone beloved for her work and its impact - with empathy and warmth. In fact, I had to read a bit further than I'd intended and delay going off and doing something adult that required me to be in control of my emotions because of that scene. (That's the opposite of a complaint.)

It's one of those books that you want to keep reading, but also want to save because it's so good and you can see that you're getting closer and closer to the point where it stops, and then you won't have that experience anymore.

If you love books because of the way they tell human stories that matter, this is a book you should definitely take a look at. It's a strong recommendation from me.

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Review: By the Pricking of My Thumbs

By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

By the time Christie wrote this, she'd been writing for fifty years, and I'm glad to say she wasn't stuck in the style of the 19-teens; she'd learned, grown, taken on extra dimensions of psychology without making it obvious or all about her research, and was writing a deeper, more satisfying story than the rather silly (though entertaining) one that begins the series. This gets complex, and dark, and suspenseful.

Tommy and Tuppence have aged in something at least approximating real time - their exact age isn't specified, but they're roughly in their sixties, it seems, which is consistent with being in their early 20s at their first appearance in 1922. Their two children are married, with children of their own. (There's no mention of Betty, who they spoke of adopting at the end of N or M?, so presumably that didn't happen for some reason.) Tuppence continues to belie her real name, Prudence (as her daughter remarks, nobody would associate that name with her), going off investigating something that's pinged her remarkably accurate spidey-sense without leaving any record of where she's going, and this leads to some anxious moments for Tommy and Albert. (Albert is back to being their servant, having presumably given up the pub he owned in the previous book.)

There are a lot of threads in the book. An elderly woman who was in the same rest home as Tommy's aunt, who has been removed from there apparently without trace. An entirely legitimate-seeming lawyer who pings Tommy's also accurate spidey-sense, after which he sees the lawyer being followed by a detective he knows. A painting of a house that Tuppence thinks she's seen before, given to Tommy's aunt by the now-missing elderly woman. Garbled stories from the local gossip about who used to live in the house. A criminal gang who hide their loot in various places. A series of child murders which took place years before. A cadaverous knight with a woeful countenance. An elderly vicar. A woman who runs everything in his parish.

Eventually, they come together. Some turn out to be not especially important, while others go in a direction I absolutely had not expected. And Tuppence ends up in danger more than once, to Tommy's enduring frustration.

One thing I sometimes don't like about these books is how often the couple split up and follow separate investigations, when they're so good as a pair. We get to see them working together a lot in the short story collection, Partners in Crime, but in the other three books I've read so far (with one to go), they're often apart. It does give an opportunity to contrast Tuppence's erratic and intuitive brilliance with Tommy's dogged and systematic focus, though, which might be more obscured if they were always in the same scenes.

I'm looking forward to Postern of Fate.

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Review: The Man with the Club Foot

The Man with the Club Foot by Valentine Williams
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

There's "plot relies on coincidence" - often the case with early-20th-century books - and then there's whatever this is. Pantheon ex machina? Basically, the author keeps creating incredibly lucky encounters for his hero to get him into the next stage of the plot, though to be fair he does go through some suffering (mostly of the "have to endure discomfort" sort), and occasionally solves his own problems by taking courageous, though seldom particularly intelligent, action.

Spoilers below, which I haven't tagged. I'm not going to recommend reading it, and the spoilers reveal why. I was alerted to the book's existence by a mention in Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime , where her characters Tommy and Tuppence take on the methods of various fictional detectives of the time; I'm not sure why they bothered with this guy.

The protagonist and narrator, Desmond Okewood, has been put on medical leave from the army during World War I with a head injury and "shell shock" (what we would call PTSD). Neither of these seem to hinder him much in his adventures (like whatever Hastings' unspecified injury was in The Mysterious Affair at Styles ) - unless the head injury is why he's such an idiot - but they account for the fact that he is at a loose end and able to follow up a cryptic clue to the whereabouts of his brother, who is "in the intelligence" and seems to have vanished somewhere in Berlin.

Of course, a young English officer without intelligence training or support would have no chance of getting to Berlin during the First World War, right?

Except that in Rotterdam, where he's gone to follow up the clue and can't get a hotel room on a rainy night because he's bad at planning ahead, he speaks in German for no particular reason (he and his brother both happen to speak fluent German with no English accent) to a hotel porter. The porter, who happens to be German, thinks he's German too, and directs him to a hotel run by Germans. There, an American man who is also a member of the German secret police (with a badge in his effects to prove it) happens to die of natural causes right outside our hero's room, and conveniently happens to resemble Desmond closely enough that Desmond can use his papers to get to Berlin. The badge comes in handy too a couple of times, until he carelessly loses it. The American was also carrying half of a letter, which is the book's McGuffin.

He has to make a daring escape from the hotel to avoid an interview with someone who has met the man he's impersonating, and goes to the railway station. There, a British undercover agent conveniently happens to notice before any of the numerous German agents there that he's wearing a British regimental tie (because idiot), and helps him to avoid people searching for him by a mechanism I didn't quite follow, and get on the train to Berlin. Before he does so, he stashes the half of the McGuffin in left luggage and posts the ticket to a friend in England (showing some sense, at least).

In Berlin, he goes through a series of adventures, including meeting the Kaiser (whose many personal faults he enumerates, in the expected manner of a British person during WW I), slips out of the palace and goes to a hotel before anyone can tumble to the fact that he isn't who he says he is.

At the hotel, he's coincidentally discovered by someone he'd met before at a stop on the journey, who was already rightly suspicious (since when he speaks English he does so with an English accent, even though he's meant to be American). This man takes him to see the villain and title character, who has the other half of the McGuffin. Desmond knocks him out - fortunately the stone windowsill was loose and could be used as an improvised and unexpected weapon - and flees with McGuffin part 2, but how will he escape? Well, he very conveniently happens to bump into a woman who was his neighbour (and his brother's love interest) growing up, and is now married to, though living separately from, a senior German official - she's one of the very few people in the part of the hotel he flees to, where she happens to have left a party to visit a friend in the middle of the night, and has coincidentally just emerged into the corridor when he gets there - and she helps him get out of the hotel and gives him a place to stay.

At this point, I was still reading mainly because I wanted to see how much more ridiculous it could get. Actually, though, that was the peak of the silliness. The lady helps him escape, he has numerous vicissitudes, reconnects with his brother, re-encounters the man with the clubfoot, and (mainly through his brother's cleverness rather than his own) they manage to get away. There's really only one more fortunate coincidence, when they happen across an escaped British POW in the forest who can conveniently sacrifice himself as a distraction so that they can get across the German frontier. He's a lower-class man with a heavy regional accent, so this is his natural role, of course.

The whole thing is extremely silly and contrived, and although there are some decent scenes of suspense and conflict, they don't make up for the shonky way the plot has been knocked together to compensate for the fact that the protagonist couldn't plan a cat fight if you handed him two cats and a small sack. It's also, of course, heavy-handedly propagandistic in its condemnation of the faults of the awful Germans; living among them long enough to have learned their language fluently doesn't seem to have endeared them to him, and he depicts them as having no positive features whatsoever.

There were several sequels, but I don't think I'll bother with them. Of course, sometimes a first-time author manages to correct their faults in later books - I've seen it several times - but this is a terrible start, and given that the author now languishes in probably-deserved obscurity, I'm not eager to pick up the next volume.

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Review: Partners in Crime

Partners in Crime by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a bit of fun, and not to be taken too seriously.

Following their success in the first book, Tommy and Tuppence, now married, apparently received a big whack of money as a reward for their help, because money no longer seems to be a consideration for them (and at one point one of them says they are "rich," though this seems to be an exaggeration). Tommy is able to quit his office job with the Secret Service and take on a detective agency with only occasional clients, which is a front for some kind of Russian spy operation that has been taken down. The Chief, their contact in the Secret Service, wants it kept running as a honey-trap and says they can run it how they like and take whatever cases they care to. Perhaps he's paying them, but if so it's never mentioned. They can clearly afford to employ Albert, the young lad who helped them in their previous case, as an office boy, as well as keep up their own establishment.

They then, basically, play at being detectives, inspired by various fictional sleuths, which is an occasion for gentle parody from Christie of her contemporaries (and herself; one of the models they select is Poirot). They have fake personas - Theodore Blunt (the name of the man who owned the front business) and his "confidential secretary" Miss Robinson - and their standard shtick when a client comes is to pretend that Mr Blunt is in conference with Scotland Yard and engaged on other important cases for important people, but can manage to spare the time for the new client somehow. The cases they take on are real, though, at least after the first publicity-stunt one, and they're mostly successful (with one embarrassing exception). They solve murders, thefts, a disappearance, and eventually - through a suspenseful struggle - foil the Russian spies they were put there to trap.

Some of the cases are clever, and others, to me, were painfully obvious before they solved them, like (view spoiler)[the one with the twins (hide spoiler)]. Coincidence plays an important role sometimes, though more in smoothing the story and making it more compact than in getting them out of trouble as such; for example, they are talking through a case in the newspapers in a cafe and their Scotland Yard contact happens to be sitting at the next table and overhears their solution, which, again, was pretty obvious to me but appears to be fresh to him.

I've read a few of the other classic detectives that are parodied, though most of them were new to me, and I've picked up one of them as a result of this book (it's extraordinarily far-fetched, and I can see why it fell into obscurity). Christie clearly read widely in her genre, as befits a popular genre writer; there are references to other well-known contemporary novelists in some of her other books, too, as there naturally would be when people are discussing crime in a time when crime fiction was so popular. This is a combination of parody and actual detective writing, varying in quality like most short story collections, but overall entertaining.

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Review: Mystery Mile

Mystery Mile by Margery Allingham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Margery Allingham knew how to write a gripping and complex mystery, and this is one.

An American judge whose career has been spent on a crusade against a specific criminal gang has had several narrow escapes from death in New York, and has now come to England with his son and daughter. They connect up with Albert Campion (not his real name, nor the only one he goes by), a disowned scion of the aristocracy who acts as something adjacent to a private detective or situation fixer, with some flexibility about his methods, and has a number of criminal contacts, some of whom he draws on in this book.

Campion brings the judge down to stay in the country with old friends, on a peninsula with only one entrance by land, surrounded by dangerous tidal mudflats. From this location, the judge disappears mysteriously and seemingly impossibly. The sister of the young squire is then kidnapped, and Campion, the girl's brother, the judge's son (who is in love with her, as Campion also is), Campion's ex-con manservant and the manservant's dodgy friend launch a thrilling rescue.

Meanwhile, they're trying to discover the identity of the gang leader, who has almost never been seen even by his subordinates. The judge had collected a clue in a children's book - which he doesn't know how to interpret.

Characters ranging from yokels to Cockney criminals to a remarkable Turkish art expert to a beloved old rector all come vividly to life, and in a couple of cases to death, in the course of the story, and our heroes get severely battered fighting for the right. It's gripping and thoroughly well executed, like Edgar Wallace if he had had a higher-class background and more education (which isn't a slight on Wallace; he did what he did extremely well).

I look forward to reading more in this happily long series.

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Review: Small Magics for the Traveling Wizard

Small Magics for the Traveling Wizard by S.A. McKenzie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I did something unusual for me with this one: I bought a book that wasn't on sale.

I read far too much to pay full price for every book I read, especially since I seldom know going in whether it will be any good, but in this case, I wanted to support a fellow NZ author, and the preview had convinced me that I would be in good hands.

Having said that, it did have a couple of editing issues that didn't turn up until after the preview. One was dialog punctuation. The convention that isn't observed here is the one that says that if you start a new paragraph of dialog with the same speaker and no tag in between, you don't finish the first paragraph with a closing quotation mark. This tips the reader off that the speaker is still the same. This book several times includes the closing quotation mark, and in at least one case misses out both the closing and opening quotation marks when starting a new paragraph.

Also, if you put a dialog tag in the middle of a sentence of dialog, you don't treat the end of the tag as the end of a sentence, close it with a full stop and start the second part of the dialog with a capital; instead, you use a comma at the end of the tag and continue the dialog with the same capitalisation it would have if the tag had not been there.

There are some misplaced apostrophes as well, mostly to do with plural nouns and constructions like "a few days' journey," where, because we would say "a day's journey" and not "a day journey," the apostrophe is required, and comes after the s.

Otherwise, though, the copy editing was good, the prose smooth and capable. Most people wouldn't even notice the issues I've mentioned, apart from maybe being confused about who was speaking a couple of times without necessarily knowing why.

This is more epic fantasy than my preferred cozy fantasy, with a high body count among named characters who we've got to know and, in some cases, like. But what I liked about it was that it wasn't just made-from-box-mix standard epic fantasy. Yes, the protagonist (view spoiler)[turns out to be an orphan whose special powers have been hidden because people are killing her kind of magic user (hide spoiler)], and there's a quest with a lot of walking. But there's a fresh twist on the tropes that are used, and the worldbuilding isn't just ordered by the yard from the generic fantasy world shop; some thought has gone into it. For example, there are three gods and three moons. Ninety-nine fantasy authors out of a hundred would then have a legend in which the three gods and the three moons were identified with each other in some way, but this one doesn't. And there were several other little touches that made me think, "Here's someone who understands something about how our actual world works, has taken note of the little oddities and asymmetries in real culture, and has built a world that feels authentic as a result."

Having said that, it had what is currently the norm for cozy fantasy, a culture in which gender is fluid and not binary, and also where plural marriage is common - though it was called out that the same was not true in other nearby cultures. This can easily feel like 2020s-progressive-orthodoxy box-ticking, and because neither of these cultural features was particularly important to the story, it did feel a bit that way to me, but it wasn't too obtrusive either. And it was well incorporated into the background culture, not just a difference that made no difference.

The characters had a good balance of capable-but-self-doubting, especially the protagonist, whose viewpoint we're in, and their backstories drove their current actions in ways that made sense. The bard worked a wonderful and completely bardlike trick at one point which resolved a dangerous situation solely through cleverly chosen words said confidently. The very elderly wizard was believably dangerous because he wasn't always completely in touch with reality. The fights were not overdescribed slogs, but quickly resolved and fairly deadly, which added a note of realism. I could mostly keep the minor characters straight and distinguish between them, and since there were about half a dozen, this is something not every author can achieve.

All told, it was an enjoyable adventure with appealing characters in a well-thought-out fantasy world, definitely at a higher level of ability than a lot of fantasy writing I've come across. The author has put in some thought and some work in places that often get neglected, and it shows.

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Review: N or M?

N or M? by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was thinking for a while that this was unaccountably bad for a Christie book, especially given that she'd been writing for about 25 years by the time it came out. For example, there was a Cavalry Rescue that seemed staggeringly unlikely, both in its last-second timing, its apparent silence, and even its existence at all. But later, it's given a more than adequate explanation, and I revised my opinion. It still does rely a bit on people saying random things that turn out to be significant, but the plot is not outright dependent on coincidence.

The strength of Tommy and Tuppence is that they're a great pair, with a strong relationship, and they balance each other's weaknesses. Tommy is solid and reliable, but not very bright; Tuppence is clever, but can be erratic. So they're at their best when working together, but in this book, as in the first book of their adventures, they spend a significant amount of time separated, after Tommy does something boneheaded and gets captured. There's some good tension, though, the villains are clever but not quite clever enough, and overall it's a good time.

It was an interesting choice to let the characters age in real time. They're now middle-aged (in their 40s), rather than the inexperienced young people they were when we first met them, and everyone including their newly-adult children treats them as past any usefulness when it comes to action, espionage, detection or other direct contributions to the war effort (it's now World War II, in the book as in real life at the time it was published). The subverting of these expectations is one of the strengths of the book.

It's not clear what they've done in the interim; the second book of the series, which I thought I'd read but apparently haven't, has them running a private investigation agency, but at the time of this book they don't seem to have any occupation, nor is a previous one mentioned. Perhaps they inherited some money, enough to live modestly on, but why not continue private investigation anyway? Perhaps they wanted to focus on raising their children.

This book apparently got Christie a visit from the authorities, who wondered why she had called one of the characters Bletchley when nobody was supposed to know about Bletchley Park. They seem to have been satisfied by her explanation that she'd spent an unpleasant few hours at the station of that name on a railway journey once. It reflects paranoia that was no doubt current at the time; in the fiction, the British government, police force and military are rife with fascist sympathizers and fifth columnists, and the goal of the story is to uncover their network by identifying the leader, who is codenamed either N or M. N is known to be a man and M a woman, so that doesn't narrow the field. Pretty much everyone at the seaside boarding-house where the spymaster is thought to be staying is suspected for one reason or another, but the resolution is still surprising.

It's a good period piece, and encourages me to continue with the series (and go back and read those short stories in Book 2).

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