Review: Mulliner Nights

Mulliner Nights by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mr Mulliner is always fun, with his unlikely stories of distant relatives (told in the bar-parlour of a fishermen's pub, so we know upfront that they're likely tall tales). Like the Oldest Member of the golf club, Wodehouse's other famous raconteur, he cannot be prevented from telling a story once he starts, though I would imagine that the regulars looked forward to these absurd, hilarious tales as much as I do. Those regulars, and any visitors to the pub, are always referred to by the drinks they have ordered, rather than by name. Only Mr Mulliner himself and the barmaid, Miss Postlethwaite, get names.

If there's a theme to this volume, it's subtle moral influence, whether that's the detective with a smile that gives aristocrats with a bad conscience the sense that he knows all and will, unless conciliated, tell all; the cat, raised in ecclesiastical surroundings, who projects such an aura of upright disapproval that the artist whose clerical uncle asked him to look after the beastie changes his whole way of life; the feeble youth who gets the wrong correspondence course in the mail and accidentally develops an iron will; or the female novelists who gush such nonsense in interviews that their interviewers have mental breakdowns. Only in a society like that of Britain before World War II (or parts of East Asia to this day) could social and interpersonal expectations be so powerful in people's lives. Along the way, we see a man in quest of strawberries in December for his lady-love, and another man and his prospective mother-in-law at odds over a copy of a detective novel.

The thing Wodehouse does so incredibly well is that he takes someone who is pursuing something that really, in the great scheme of things, matters very little or not at all, and somehow gets us to care about it as intensely as the character does, and want them to succeed. Not that the assorted Mulliner relatives in these stories always succeed; sometimes they end up not getting what they want, but getting something else that is probably, in the broad view, better, though they might not think so at the time. Not every love affair works out, and sometimes that's a good thing, if the person the young fool is in love with is patently unsuitable.

And when things go wrong, they go hilariously and catastrophically wrong, and the hero is left attempting to babble implausible explanations to which nobody is listening. Sometimes, all he can do is exercise the better part of valour and escape through a window.

Compared with some of Wodehouse's other classic series (Jeeves and Blandings Castle, specifically), these are more stories of the middle class. "The Smile that Wins" specifically roasts the aristocracy. Part of how that manifests is that most of the protagonists have jobs of some sort, and they're a lot less given to quoting English (and Latin) literature. In place of all the aristocratic foolishness, there's more slapstick. This makes them, to me at least, more relatable - not that I don't thoroughly enjoy the Jeeves and Blandings stories, but they're about a very different place and time and stratum of society that has little to do with my daily life, whereas the Mulliner stories are a bit more grounded.

If you enjoy Wodehouse at all, you will probably enjoy these.

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Review: Modern Magic.: A Practical Treatise or The Art of Conjuring.

Modern Magic.: A Practical Treatise or The Art of Conjuring. by Angelo John Lewis Hoffmann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A thorough presentation of the state of the conjurer's art at the time of its publication (1876), detailing a number of tricks and variations on them. This includes tricks with cards, coins, handkerchiefs, watches, rings, dominoes, dice and the like, and the still widely popular cups and balls. The instructions are comprehensive and clear, and accompanied with diagrams of special apparatus and of the methods of manipulation. Many of the tricks don't require any special apparatus or preparation, but rely purely on manipulation of everyday objects.

I'm sure the magician's art has come a long way in the subsequent century and a half, but the foundation is still sleight of hand and cleverly constructed apparatus. I'm sure a modern aspiring magician could probably still find inspiration here, and many of the tricks have likely remained unchanged in their essentials.

This would also be a great book to read if you were thinking of writing a magician character in the late 19th century, or even some other-world equivalent. I'm not currently thinking of doing that, at least not seriously, but if I ever do, I'll return to this book for material.

One of the key points I took from it, which applies to clever mystery stories too: if a magician ever wants you to believe that an object is somewhere, it is inevitably somewhere else, and if they want you to believe that it's a particular object (say, the one they borrowed from an audience member), you can rely upon the fact that it is not that object but a substitute. If they want you to believe that something is happening at a particular time - like an object moving from one place to another - that thing has definitely already happened. Anything the magician says or does openly is intended to mislead or distract, and nothing is as it seems.

All of this reminds me very much of the kind of mysteries you get in, say, the TV show Death in Paradise, which my wife and I are currently watching in sequence from the beginning. If anyone has a rock-solid alibi for the time of the crime, you should suspect that the crime did not, in fact, take place at that time, or if it did, that the alibi has been faked. If someone claims that the victim was dead when they found them, suspect them of killing the victim after their apparent discovery (probably having previously rendered them unconscious or duped them into pretending to be dead). If a room appears to have been locked with just the victim inside, either it wasn't really locked, or it was locked in some clever way that only made it look as if it had been locked from the inside, or the victim died after locking it themselves, or... You get the point.

Another interesting point he makes is that you should never do the same trick twice in the same way, but if you create the same effect twice in two different ways, you can use the opportunity to show something with each method that would make the other method impossible. The audience will assume that both tricks were done the same way, since the effect is the same, and so won't guess either method.

The author has one verbal peculiarity: he sometimes says "either" when he means "any," for example referring to "either of the four categories". It's pretty clear from context what he means, though.

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Review: Five Phantom Discount

Five Phantom Discount by Marcus Fell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First of all, if bad language offends you, this is not the book for you. There's a lot of it.

Secondly, if you enjoyed Ocean's Eleven, this has a lot of the same elements. It starts out with a con man just out of prison who wants to do a job on a guy who is now sleeping with his ex-wife, for one thing. But it isn't just Ocean's Eleven retold.

It's set in a version of our world where some people can use magic, and this appears to be publicly known, since there are US federal laws about it; the main character, Frank Phantom, fell foul of these laws as part of a job six years previously, and has spent the interim in a prison for magic users. Now that he's out, he and his partner Clay Bishop, who were betrayed by Deacon, their third partner on that previous job, want to steal from him. Deacon's used two of the three wishes that the genie he gained through that heist granted him, in order to screw them over and reinvent himself, and is about to be elected as the Mayor of New York, as a prelude to running for president.

The book follows the usual beginning for a heist story; the team is gathered and told how impossible the job is. (I would note that not all of the impossibilities are really dealt with in the actual heist. In particular, (view spoiler)[the impossibility of getting into the vault - that turns out to be super easy, barely an inconvenience - and the inconvenient fact that even if you get in you'll be hit with a death curse, which is part of the "this is impossible" discussion but never comes up again. (hide spoiler)] There's a creepy Ukrainian necromancer who can gather information from dead ex-employees of the security team; a technomancer hacker (a young woman whose grandfather was the first choice for the position, but he's dead); Bishop, who's a glamourist and can make things look like what they're not; Phantom, who's the mastermind, and can't work magic because he's on parole and has tattoos that prevent him from doing so or at least will report if he does; and Lemonade, a retired criminal who they convince to come back for one last job. (view spoiler)[Another inconsistency: Phantom's "shadow walk" after the job takes more than 20 minutes, but the part of the heist that prevents the tattoos from functioning only lasts 8 minutes - which includes getting into the vault and doing the actual job itself - and yet the alarm doesn't go off when he comes out. (hide spoiler)]

There are two main ways of telling a heist story. One is for the reader to know the plan in advance, see it all go wrong, and then see how the crew improvise their way to success anyway (or actually have another secret plan which involved things going wrong in exactly that way). The other is for us not to know the plan in advance, but watch it unfold in narrative time, which is what this book does. Both can be enjoyable, and this plan is clever (and involves the main character going through some rough times). As already noted, not everything in the "this is impossible" scene gets addressed when the heist unfolds, though.

There's a lot of banter - sometimes, for me, too much; it bogs down the pace of some of the scenes, without being quite good enough banter to make up for it. A lot of it consists of people insulting each other and being mutually hostile, with, as I've noted, copious swearing. Sometimes it's creative and funny; other times, less so.

Not badly edited; there are a few of the usual issues, including dialog punctuation, the odd vocabulary error, unclosed quotation marks and missing or added words in sentences, but they're thinly scattered. As always, I include the disclaimer that books I get from Netgalley may (but also may not) receive more editing after I see them, but before publication.

Overall, it's a good heist novel, if you don't mind sweary and not very likeable characters who banter a bit too much, and can ignore or don't notice the fact that not all of the threads are tied up neatly. Those factors together dragged it down to the Bronze tier of my annual recommendation list.

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Review: The Garden Of Resurrection: Being The Love Story Of An Ugly Man

The Garden Of Resurrection: Being The Love Story Of An Ugly Man by E. Temple Thurston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The author is a poet, and it shows, though he's not so lyrical and fanciful as to exceed my (relatively low) tolerance. What I did find irritating was the characteristic early-20th-century assumption that women are a monolith, and men a completely different monolith; that they think and feel and act entirely unlike each other, in ways that can be generalized across the whole of each gender. From a 21st-century perspective, this is nonsense, and since there's so much of it, annoying nonsense. It's not, by the way, misogynist; the opposite, if anything.

The ugly man of the title, Bellairs, is disfigured from a childhood illness, presumably smallpox, which causes women to distrust him, but he is a deeply kind person when you get to know him. He narrates in the first person and as if keeping a diary, though it's not stated to be a diary (there are a lot of things that are implied clearly enough that we understand them, even though they're not said outright). He has no occupation, receiving 1500 pounds a year from his father, which is enough for him to live quietly in central London with a manservant to look after him and eat out at a nearby restaurant regularly. While at this restaurant, he overhears another patron talking about his fiancée, a woman for whom he has little feeling other than contempt and whom he has convinced to leave her home in the Caribbean to come and, eventually, marry him on account of the money she would bring with her. He has her lodged with his two maiden aunts in a village in Ireland, and they are, it is clear, busy repressing her and twisting her into something that will be more socially acceptable. She has some black ancestry, so they make her wear a veil on the rare occasions that they allow her out at all (both the man and the female friend he is talking to are out-and-out racists, in a way not unusual for the time; the narrator gives no indication of sharing in this prejudice except that he does remark, when he finally sees the woman in question, that she has no "racial coarseness" in her features).

Bellairs, overhearing this conversation, is incensed on behalf of the woman, and takes advantage of the fortunate coincidence that an old university friend lives in the same Irish village to take up his friend's long-offered hospitality and get on the spot, with the aim of cluing the woman in to what a loser her fiancé is and convincing her to go back to her home country and be happy as herself, instead of unhappy as an unsuccessful version of a British woman.

He takes his dog Dandy, of whom he's very fond, in part because dogs don't mind what you look like and won't ever judge you. He doesn't take his faithful manservant. His hosts, the old university friend and his wife, call each other by nicknames, which Bellairs adopts too; the man is Cruikshank and his wife Bellwattle. Cruikshank is a gardener, and Bellairs immerses himself in the beauty and joy of nature while attempting to fulfil his quest of speaking to the woman and warning her.

Things develop in both expected and unexpected ways, and there are some passages that I found moving and gripping as Bellairs deals with them. The ending, in particular, moved me, and it's this emotional power that lands it in the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list. It falls short of Platinum only because of the annoying gender stereotyping.

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Review: In The Night: A Detective Novel

In The Night: A Detective Novel by Ronald Gorell Barnes
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Dorothy L. Sayers apparently said, quite accurately, “Lord Gorell has a nice ear for dialogue, and a light and pleasant touch with description.” Considering he was a poet, his prose is solid, workmanlike and never attempts to be lyrical or fanciful, though personally I would relocate a few of his commas. I wonder if Sayers drew inspiration from the general tone of this book for her Lord Peter Wimsey books? They do have some resemblances, not least that the amateur detective discovers that "to investigate was interesting, to discover horrible," which is a neat summing up of how Wimsey feels about the consequences of his detecting hobby for the criminals he detects.

This is a textbook example of an early-20th-century mystery novel: country house, unpopular rich man dead in the night, everyone a suspect, apparent locked-room (or rather locked-house) aspect, inspector who has tenacity but lacks brilliance, amateur detective who is better at detecting than the professional. Interestingly, the amateur detective here is a young woman, the close friend of the daughter of the victim, and she shows considerable intelligence and ability while not being some kind of prodigy. She also has a more developed personality - as do all the characters - than I'm used to encountering in these early-20th-century mysteries. They're not just archetype plus plot role, but have believable motivations and emotions and, in general, an interior life. A lot of early detective novels, particularly those by men, had lifeless characters who were only ever seen from the outside, and went through a kind of puppet-play acting out the author's plot. This is not one of those.

(view spoiler)[I said above that everyone is a suspect. That's not completely true, but almost. The amateur detective herself is never a suspect, for the reader because we're in her head and know she wasn't involved in the crime, and for the policeman because... contrary to his declared practice, he just doesn't think she's the type and rules her out immediately, thus avoiding some complications that would otherwise have ensured. This is pretty much the only forced part of the plot, though.

The other way in which it's not true to say that everyone is a suspect is that neither detective - amateur or professional - ever suspects the actual killer, which is largely why I suspected that person intensely. Their exclusion from the list of suspects was itself suspicious, though fully understandable in the context of the story.

There's a one-sided attraction, rather than a romance - the dead man's secretary for the young woman who functions as amateur detective - but it's briefly covered near the beginning and never develops into anything; the secretary himself hardly appears after it's clear he's not the murderer. (hide spoiler)]

Overall, it's a good piece of work, better than a lot of superficially similar books from the time, and I'll be looking out for other books by the same author in the hope that they are just as good. Unfortunately, this is the only one so far on Project Gutenberg,

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Review: The Fractal Prince

The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If the first book of this trilogy has a fault, it's the worldbuilding firehose. You just get doused with high-pressure names and words with no explanation, and have to struggle through until it gradually clarifies. This book, if anything, pushes the same fault even harder. For a long time, even having read the first book, I didn't have much idea what was going on in at least one and sometimes both of the two slowly converging storylines, mainly because there was an entirely new jargon vocabulary with absolutely no explanation, and not even much in the way of contextual clues. And by the end, I was once again confused about what exactly had happened in the plot.

The author lists Roger Zelazny among his influences, and I can definitely see it. Not just starting with an amnesiac character in the first book, whose amnesia frees him to be more sympathetic than would otherwise be the case (like Corwin of Amber), and the siblings at each other's throats, but Jack of Shadows , Lord of Light , Isle of the Dead .... There's a general Zelaznian feel to a lot of the ideas and characters, especially the thief and trickster at the centre of the story.

The thing is, though, no matter how weird Zelazny's highly imaginative settings got, he had the gift of orienting you to them with a few well-chosen words (not an extended infodump, just a sentence that made it clear from context what the thing was), so that instead of struggling to figure out what was going on, you could enjoy the wild ride through weirdness. Rajaniemi seems to lack that gift, or not care about using it. Now and again, he does throw in a few words that tell us what one of his neologisms means, but that usually happens after he's already been using it for many chapters, during which time we have had no idea what image to attach to it. The most obvious example is when he says "Masrurs, they are called, jinn insurgents" - this is the seventh (and last) time that the term "masrurs" is used. Why couldn't the author have thrown those five clarifying words in at the first mention instead? Is it actually his intention to leave the reader floundering, not knowing what he's talking about most of the time?

What I did piece together was that the second story here involved an echo of Sheherazade and the Thousand and One Nights, but in a place where fictional stories were forbidden, because, through a vaguely handwaved mechanism, they could be a vector for infection leading to possession by hostile entities. (The author, I think, slips up at one or two points and forgets that fiction is forbidden.) It's also, notably, an Arabian Nights setting without Islam, which is a bit like a medieval European setting without Catholicism: possible, but you have to work hard to leave it out. We have jinni, flying carpets, ghuls, rhuks (rocs), all of which behave at least in some ways like their mythical counterparts, but are given a technological explanation that fits into the world established in Book 1. You have to be very good to make fantasy with an SF excuse work, and I think this author mostly pulls it off, though it does feel a bit like everyone has agreed to live in an Arabian Nights theme park. Also, the SF side eventually breaks down, and we get something that feels very much more like fantasy, or even mysticism, despite all the smartmatter and quantum physics. I was reminded of what Neal Stephenson did with ancient Sumerian in Snow Crash ; the magical power of language is similar in both books.

We also get someone with another Arsene Lupin alias (Don Luis Perenna), though oddly it didn't seem to be the thief who adopted it. It's just a random character in a flashback. This makes it a fourth-wall-breaking Easter egg for Lupin fans, rather than an organic part of the fiction, unless we're meant to conclude that it was, in fact, the thief and he's forgotten that fact and somehow not himself noticed the Lupin tie-in when he gets a third-person version of the memory. There's also a reference to the Lupin novel The Crystal Stopper .

The strengths of the first book were in its characters and its plot; it was emotionally coherent, even when the worldbuilding was confusing. This book, for me, didn't manage to achieve that, and the worldbuilding was even more confusing, to the point where I wondered if that was deliberate. I wasn't particularly moved, just mildly surprised, at the several twists, and honestly I couldn't follow the plot particularly well, or work out all the layers of false identity around the nominal main character (the thief). There are more stumbles over English idioms, too, which, while it's not blameworthy in the author, whose first language is Finnish, is blameworthy in the publisher, who didn't make sure they were edited properly.

Overall, my experience of the book was that the faults of the first book were magnified, while its strengths were reduced or overwhelmed by the faults. It's still very clever, probably too clever, but I found it incoherent, and a disappointing follow-up to a promising first novel. I bought and read it immediately after finishing Book 1, but I'll not be rushing out to get the third book any time soon.

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Review: The Quantum Thief

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those books where you're not going to follow everything, so you just have to let the worldbuilding wash over you and concentrate on the plot and characters. I even found myself wistfully wishing for an infodump now and again, but no; you just have to either work it out or let it go (or, as I eventually did, look up an online glossary). I did get at least some of the references to the character Arsene Lupin, from a series of early-20th-century novels I've been reading on Project Gutenberg (Lupin is a gentleman thief who later turns detective), and it made me feel like Steve Rogers recognizing the Wizard of Oz reference. The main Lupin reference, apart from how the character Jean le Flambeur is in general, is the name "Paul Sernine," which both le Flambeur and Lupin use as an alias; it's an anagram of "Arsene Lupin," and would be a dead giveaway to anyone who happened to be a fan of early-20th-century crime novels that here is a criminal who is, nevertheless, disposed to help people.

This is a world of mind uploads, smart matter, and quantum entanglement, by an author who holds a PhD in mathematical physics, and it gets pretty wild, but you don't really have to understand the theoretical physics to follow the plot, fortunately. You can treat it as a kind of magic and just focus on the characters, the factions, and their interactions, which is what the author does.

It's well worth reading the Wikipedia page for Nikolai Fyodorov to understand why one of the factions is called fyodorovs and what their Great Common Work is (basically, to upload everyone so they can eventually all be resurrected). There are various bizarre posthuman factions with different attitudes to the use of copied consciousness, all of which are involved in the plot in one way or another.

It's one of those dual-threaded novels, where we follow two main characters in alternation for a while as they gradually converge. One is the thief of the title, the other a detective (not by occupation, but by avocation). The thief's first target is himself, since he has been broken out of a virtual prison, and in this world of uploaded minds his particular mind is missing a lot of context - rather like the reader.

There are some heavy-duty revelations dropped during the book, which tie the characters together even more tightly and give them even more motivation to protect the Martian city where most of the action takes place. And there is plenty of action; despite its strong foundation of advanced science and philosophy, it's not a book where people sit around and talk about philosophy, at least not any more than they have to in order to justify their actions in pursuit of what they believe in; nor does it contain science infodumps, as I've alluded to above. It's more or less the opposite style to Andy Weir (for the science infodumps) or practically any 21st-century novel by someone with an ideological position who has to tell you about it all the time, of which there are so many to choose from it would be unfair to pick just one to mention. The setting and the beliefs of the factions and individuals drive the plot, which, to my mind, is how a novel ought to work.

In its high-concept gonzo worldbuilding and setting-influenced, character-driven action, it reminds me of Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jackson Bennett, or (at his best) Max Gladstone. These are writers I rate highly, and so I gave this a 5-star rating and, as soon as I'd finished it, immediately bought and started the sequel, which isn't something I do often.

The author speaks English as a second language, and there are a few minor issues with the occasional idiom getting the wrong preposition or a plural instead of a singular verb. I could name three or four books by native English speakers that are far worse in this regard, though those probably haven't been professionally edited at a major publishing house (not that major publishing houses never put out badly edited books). Between the author and the editor, in any case, this is largely free of stumbles, allowing the reader to focus on the spectacular set-pieces, the conflicts, and the alliances.

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