Review: Echoes of the Imperium

Echoes of the Imperium by Nicholas Atwater
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Too dark for my taste, but as far as I read (not very far), well done.

Opens with a bloody and destructive battle at the fall of the Imperium; in the next chapter, 20 years later, the narrator is an airship captain with a serious drinking problem. The words "dark," "gritty" or "brutal" are not in the blurb, but ought to be, because they warn people like me off books like this that we won't enjoy. I've enjoyed the much, much gentler books of Olivia Atwater before, so massive death and destruction in the first chapter blindsided me.

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Review: A Presumption of Death

A Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Continuation novels - continuing a classic series, but written by someone other than the original author - are always controversial. Some fans will always find something that strikes them as a jarring note, that marks this upstart thing as inferior to the genuine product, that doesn't ring true to them for the characters. And Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane are complex characters, too, both highly intelligent, determined to respect one another in a way most couples of the time did not, and with by now a complicated pair of backstories to be reckoned with, not to mention their habit of quoting widely from English literature.

All that as preface to saying that for me, this did work as a continuation of the series, and that's a big compliment to the author. It draws in part on the "Wimsey Papers," a series of epistolary pieces that Dorothy Sayers published in 1939 in the Spectator, so Jill Paton Walsh did have a foundation to build on of events in the characters' lives and their thoughts about the war.

If anything, I felt that there were moments when it seemed a little too carefully researched, or expressed thoughts which make sense to us in hindsight but which might not have occurred to people at the time, like the reference to Quisling ("may his name be cursed for centuries" - his name is, indeed, a synonym for "collaborationist traitor" now in English and several other languages, but at this point he was in many ways an obscure figure who was not obviously going to have such a fate). I did wonder, too, whether there was going to be too much intertextuality, a common failing of continuation novels, when the topic of advertising people came up; but there wasn't, in the end, a reference to Lord Peter's undercover stint at an advertising agency. (There was in the previous volume, briefly.)

Generally, though, to me it read smoothly, and the characters felt continuous with their earlier appearances. We even got Miss Climpson, with her distinctive rambling and opinionated but still insightful style of communication, and Miss Climpson is my personal favourite.

The plot is not quite like any of the previous books, and this, too, helps it to resemble the previous books, no two of which are quite like each other. In fact, I could make a stronger case, on purely internal textual grounds, for The Five Red Herrings not belonging to the canon than I could for this one, without cheating any more than the average textual critic.

Speaking of the plot, it's one that is particular to its time and place, rural England in early World War II, and both time and place are strongly evoked. It has resonance for me, because it involves youthful members of the RAF, and just five years later than this book is set, my father went to England with the RNZAF and had a lot of the same experiences as those young men (he was then 22) - I'm sure including hiding his actual feelings in order to be able to carry on. There are also a couple of references to servicemen snatching what might be the last opportunity to be intimate with their girlfriends before going off to fight; the mother of my oldest friend was the result of just such a liaison. The reality of an entire population not having enough food or sleep and yet somehow carrying on comes through strongly, and it's made clear how the government was out of touch with the population and often poorly organized, and how some of their measures were resented and even circumvented, even while people in general were fully committed to the goal of winning the war.

Peter spends much of the book off on a secret mission somewhere with Bunter, with Harriet left to happily take care of not only her own but her sister-in-law Mary's children at their country house, to participate in village life (much changed by the war), to do the initial spadework on the murder of a land girl during an air raid practice, and to overthink everything, particularly her own feelings about the war (which is classic Harriet).

The ultimate resolution of the mystery is very much in tune with the feel of the times that the whole book has created: a messy, uncomfortable, improvised, best-efforts thing that's not at all how it would have been done in peacetime, but that tries its best to live up to at least some ideals in non-ideal circumstances. Because the rest of the book's emotional beats come to a satisfactory conclusion, this works.

I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series, where Jill Paton Walsh had even less of Dorothy L. Sayers to work from and had to create it largely out of whole cloth. Will it still feel organic with the rest of the series? I think it's likely.

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Review: A Presumption of Death

A Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Continuation novels - continuing a classic series, but written by someone other than the original author - are always controversial. Some fans will always find something that strikes them as a jarring note, that marks this upstart thing as inferior to the genuine product, that doesn't ring true to them for the characters. And Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane are complex characters, too, both highly intelligent, determined to respect one another in a way most couples of the time did not, and with by now a complicated pair of backstories to be reckoned with, not to mention their habit of quoting widely from English literature.

All that as preface to saying that for me, this did work as a continuation of the series, and that's a big compliment to the author. It draws in part on the "Wimsey Papers," a series of epistolary pieces that Dorothy Sayers published in 1939 in the Spectator, so Jill Paton Walsh did have a foundation to build on of events in the characters' lives and their thoughts about the war.

If anything, I felt that there were moments when it seemed a little too carefully researched, or expressed thoughts which make sense to us in hindsight but which might not have occurred to people at the time, like the reference to Quisling ("may his name be cursed for centuries" - his name is, indeed, a synonym for "collaborationist traitor" now in English and several other languages, but at this point he was in many ways an obscure figure who was not obviously going to have such a fate). I did wonder, too, whether there was going to be too much intertextuality, a common failing of continuation novels, when the topic of advertising people came up; but there wasn't, in the end, a reference to Lord Peter's undercover stint at an advertising agency. (There was in the previous volume, briefly.)

Generally, though, to me it read smoothly, and the characters felt continuous with their earlier appearances. We even got Miss Climpson, with her distinctive rambling and opinionated but still insightful style of communication, and Miss Climpson is my personal favourite.

The plot is not quite like any of the previous books, and this, too, helps it to resemble the previous books, no two of which are quite like each other. In fact, I could make a stronger case, on purely internal textual grounds, for The Five Red Herrings not belonging to the canon than I could for this one, without cheating any more than the average textual critic.

Speaking of the plot, it's one that is particular to its time and place, rural England in early World War II, and both time and place are strongly evoked. It has resonance for me, because it involves youthful members of the RAF, and just five years later than this book is set, my father went to England with the RNZAF and had a lot of the same experiences as those young men (he was then 22) - I'm sure including hiding his actual feelings in order to be able to carry on. There are also a couple of references to servicemen snatching what might be the last opportunity to be intimate with their girlfriends before going off to fight; the mother of my oldest friend was the result of just such a liaison. The reality of an entire population not having enough food or sleep and yet somehow carrying on comes through strongly, and it's made clear how the government was out of touch with the population and often poorly organized, and how some of their measures were resented and even circumvented, even while people in general were fully committed to the goal of winning the war.

Peter spends much of the book off on a secret mission somewhere with Bunter, with Harriet left to happily take care of not only her own but her sister-in-law Mary's children at their country house, to participate in village life (much changed by the war), to do the initial spadework on the murder of a land girl during an air raid practice, and to overthink everything, particularly her own feelings about the war (which is classic Harriet).

The ultimate resolution of the mystery is very much in tune with the feel of the times that the whole book has created: a messy, uncomfortable, improvised, best-efforts thing that's not at all how it would have been done in peacetime, but that tries its best to live up to at least some ideals in non-ideal circumstances. Because the rest of the book's emotional beats come to a satisfactory conclusion, this works.

I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series, where Jill Paton Walsh had even less of Dorothy L. Sayers to work from and had to create it largely out of whole cloth. Will it still feel organic with the rest of the series? I think it's likely.

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Review: Uncle Dynamite

Uncle Dynamite by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Despite references to the atom bomb and Eric Johnston (president of the MPAA at the time of original publication, 1948), this is clearly set in Wodehouse's eternal interwar period for all practical purposes, and the characters have not noticeably aged from their pre-war appearances. In fact, it remixes so much of his classic material that any Wodehouse fan will recognize most of the elements immediately. There's an uncle, to start with (Uncle Fred/Lord Ickenham), one of Plum's genial, eccentric old buffers who ought not to be let out without a keeper; an ill-tempered retired British civil servant; a determined, managing young woman, daughter of the civil servant, to whom a hopeless poop (Lord Ickenham's nephew Pongo Twistleton) is engaged; a bright young thing, to whom the hopeless poop ought to be engaged; a large Man of Action type, to whom the managing young woman ought to be engaged; a ponderously interfering policeman; a country house; a Maguffin which ought, by all principles of natural justice but against the actual letter of the law, to be stolen from said country house; and a complicated plan to do so that involves people impersonating other people and sneaking about at night, and that is foiled by one of the many coincidences which abound in the plot (most of them aimed at getting the cast together in one place).

Is this a criticism? No, it's not, because as Wodehouse fans we love these elements, and will read them over and over in fresh combinations, all the while distracted by the sparkling of the language.

One element that I don't remember seeing before is the sympathetic treatment of a middle-aged woman, the wife of the grumpy retired civil servant and mother of the managing young woman. She looks like a horse, but that's not her fault, and she personally regrets it; she makes up in good-heartedness for the failings of her spouse, which she puts up with out of devotion to him. There's also a housemaid who has a lot more personality than most of the female servants in Wodehouse, who usually have few and basic lines and act like frightened poultry when they're not simply furniture. This one rises to the level of a character, and a determined, intelligent and effective character at that, despite her Cockney origins, gender, and occupation, which don't normally get such positive treatment in the master's earlier work. He appears to have been quietly progressing in some ways; perhaps his experience of being interned during World War II played a role.

The other shift I noticed from his pre-war work is that, for Plum, this has its risqué moments. There are several references to Lord Ickenham's grandfather's collection of nude statues of Venus, and a young woman gets her dress accidentally torn off while escaping a policeman. The actual relationships are just as pure as always, though.

Though Wodehouse had been involved in controversy because of his wartime (non-political) broadcast from Germany while interned there, and had suffered some loss of popularity as a result, he still had plenty of dedicated fans, and perhaps he didn't want to risk alienating those he had left by too much of a departure from his classic style. In any case, his classic style is what this is in, and if you enjoy Wodehouse it will be pleasantly familiar.

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