Books I had some issues with
May. 5th, 2007 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraChristopher Fowler, Full Dark House. This one is the first in a series about two elderly detectives in charge of London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit, and bounces between near present day and their first case together, a series of murders at a musical theatre during the London Blitz.
It took a long time for this to get going for me. Fowler’s dialogue, in particular, never quite strikes me as real, and I felt as if I were being forced into certain opinions of characters without getting the chance to make my own mind up. The Blitz is not as physically – and emotionally – present as it is in Sarah Waters’ Night Watch, or Mary Wesley’s novels, or the Noel Streatfeild autobiography that covers the same time period. I also kept wanting Russell Hoban to be writing the elderly men (because he does such wonderful elderly men in London). What it does do well is the world of the theatre – the unexplored sprawl of it, the passageways and galleyways, ropes and lights and bits of staging. I don’t know whether it says more about me than it does about the book that the first real suspense I got out of it was whether or not the first night performance would actually make it through to completion. Those moments, where you can feel the cast and the play as an organic whole, threatened by mysterious forces, are where the story comes alive for me, and it’s a shame that it’s such a small part of the story.
I don’t know if I’ll look out for the second one (it’s another library book). The detective parts were obvious, although the coded message of the crimes was nicely done.
Jeffrey Deaver, Garden of Beasts.
Jeffrey Deaver, The Twelfth Card.
Jeffrey Deaver wrote two excellent thrillers – The Bone Collector and A Maiden’s Grave – and, although nothing of his before or since have quite lived up to them, I keep hoping.
The Twelfth Card is a Lincoln Rhyme/Amelia Sachs mystery and, really, I think his heart isn’t in the series format. There’s one good character moment between them, right at the end, but Amelia feels like she’s run out of depth and Lincoln, although still interesting, also feels like he’s been spread over too many books. The last one in the series I remember reading had a discussion about the possibility of them having children (Lincoln’s a quadriplegic)that felt more real.
What he still does well is putting twists on things, plot and character, and making them believable and unexpected. He’s a little too fond of slipping into a different pov to describe a scene that will turn out to run counter to the character’s and the reader’s expectations, and sometimes the cliffhangers grate, but, by and large, these are still well done. The background to this one - a black girl in Brooklyn, tracing an escaped slave ancestor who may have been framed for a crime because he knew a still-dangerous secret - is effective and interesting.
Garden of Beasts also has a great backdrop - Berlin, 1936, the Olympics - and its particular strength is having one of its main characters be a German police officer who is both sympathetic and effective at tracking down the main character. This does get across the sheer organisational skills of the third Reich, and setting it in the mid-thirties makes the reader's recognition of this all the more disturbing.
Beka Cooper:Terrier: A Tortall Legend. Tamora Pierce. Terrier. Some good stuff, but spoilt for me by too much specialness surrounding the main character. I had the same problem with the Protector of the Small series - I thought it was great that another girl was, finally, trying to follow Alanna's example and enter knight training, but if the problem was that people were being scared off by Alanna's amazing abilities, why have Kel be a) stunningly skilled in martial arts and b) capable of bonding with various small birds and animals, both things that don't seem to be shared by her fellow trainees, let alone the standard female population?
Beka's grown up in a rough part of the city, and if that and her precocious skills at tracking down criminals were all, it would have worked for me (although I'd still be surprised that ten-year veterans in the area don't know street cant, and being fostered/adopted by the Provost after her success sits a little oddly with her character at the start). However, she also has a Gift that enables her to speak to the souls of the dead, carried by the city's pigeons, and talk to the dust whirlwinds at the streetcorners that pick up all the gossip (I had trouble picturing these - just little eddies, like you get here, or people-sized? Beka walks into them, which suggests they're pretty huge and potentially dangerous). Naturally, this information is always vaguely helpful, a drip-feeding of plot points. And maybe I could cope with this - but she's also accompanied by Pounce, a violet-eyed cat who is (of course) a manifestation of the Divine. There is, as I said, good stuff in here - some nice moral ambiguity with the Dogs, Beka's bluntly practical attitude towards sex - but I don't know why all this marked by the Gods stuff has to be there, and I really wish it wasn't.
It took a long time for this to get going for me. Fowler’s dialogue, in particular, never quite strikes me as real, and I felt as if I were being forced into certain opinions of characters without getting the chance to make my own mind up. The Blitz is not as physically – and emotionally – present as it is in Sarah Waters’ Night Watch, or Mary Wesley’s novels, or the Noel Streatfeild autobiography that covers the same time period. I also kept wanting Russell Hoban to be writing the elderly men (because he does such wonderful elderly men in London). What it does do well is the world of the theatre – the unexplored sprawl of it, the passageways and galleyways, ropes and lights and bits of staging. I don’t know whether it says more about me than it does about the book that the first real suspense I got out of it was whether or not the first night performance would actually make it through to completion. Those moments, where you can feel the cast and the play as an organic whole, threatened by mysterious forces, are where the story comes alive for me, and it’s a shame that it’s such a small part of the story.
I don’t know if I’ll look out for the second one (it’s another library book). The detective parts were obvious, although the coded message of the crimes was nicely done.
Jeffrey Deaver, Garden of Beasts.
Jeffrey Deaver, The Twelfth Card.
Jeffrey Deaver wrote two excellent thrillers – The Bone Collector and A Maiden’s Grave – and, although nothing of his before or since have quite lived up to them, I keep hoping.
The Twelfth Card is a Lincoln Rhyme/Amelia Sachs mystery and, really, I think his heart isn’t in the series format. There’s one good character moment between them, right at the end, but Amelia feels like she’s run out of depth and Lincoln, although still interesting, also feels like he’s been spread over too many books. The last one in the series I remember reading had a discussion about the possibility of them having children (Lincoln’s a quadriplegic)that felt more real.
What he still does well is putting twists on things, plot and character, and making them believable and unexpected. He’s a little too fond of slipping into a different pov to describe a scene that will turn out to run counter to the character’s and the reader’s expectations, and sometimes the cliffhangers grate, but, by and large, these are still well done. The background to this one - a black girl in Brooklyn, tracing an escaped slave ancestor who may have been framed for a crime because he knew a still-dangerous secret - is effective and interesting.
Garden of Beasts also has a great backdrop - Berlin, 1936, the Olympics - and its particular strength is having one of its main characters be a German police officer who is both sympathetic and effective at tracking down the main character. This does get across the sheer organisational skills of the third Reich, and setting it in the mid-thirties makes the reader's recognition of this all the more disturbing.
Beka Cooper:Terrier: A Tortall Legend. Tamora Pierce. Terrier. Some good stuff, but spoilt for me by too much specialness surrounding the main character. I had the same problem with the Protector of the Small series - I thought it was great that another girl was, finally, trying to follow Alanna's example and enter knight training, but if the problem was that people were being scared off by Alanna's amazing abilities, why have Kel be a) stunningly skilled in martial arts and b) capable of bonding with various small birds and animals, both things that don't seem to be shared by her fellow trainees, let alone the standard female population?
Beka's grown up in a rough part of the city, and if that and her precocious skills at tracking down criminals were all, it would have worked for me (although I'd still be surprised that ten-year veterans in the area don't know street cant, and being fostered/adopted by the Provost after her success sits a little oddly with her character at the start). However, she also has a Gift that enables her to speak to the souls of the dead, carried by the city's pigeons, and talk to the dust whirlwinds at the streetcorners that pick up all the gossip (I had trouble picturing these - just little eddies, like you get here, or people-sized? Beka walks into them, which suggests they're pretty huge and potentially dangerous). Naturally, this information is always vaguely helpful, a drip-feeding of plot points. And maybe I could cope with this - but she's also accompanied by Pounce, a violet-eyed cat who is (of course) a manifestation of the Divine. There is, as I said, good stuff in here - some nice moral ambiguity with the Dogs, Beka's bluntly practical attitude towards sex - but I don't know why all this marked by the Gods stuff has to be there, and I really wish it wasn't.
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-06 04:09 pm (UTC)And it's not the standard assumptions, like assuming women can't do whatever - it's something subtler lurking in the way the world is built and the plot runs, some greater assumption about the way the universe works.
She does similar stuff in the quartet sets about the four kids with craft magic that I mentioned earlier, and it bugs me there, too.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 11:47 am (UTC)And yes to Tamora Pierce having some odd background assumptions. I also can't describe them - I know the specialness of her characters bothered me a lot in this book, and Protector of the Small, but there was something else going on in the first craft quartet that I can't quite describe. Still, I'd like to read the second quartet sometime for the same-sex relationship bit.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-18 06:23 pm (UTC)And, unfortunately, the same-sex bit is past the second quartet and in the standalone book that finishes off the series. So you have a ways to go. ;)
You're making me want to reread them now, to try to pick out what it is that's so bothersome. I think it's something about the worldbuilding, and how the characters interact with/are treated by the rest of the world. There's something very soft-edged about it... I want to say privileged, but I know that's not the proper word. Maybe it's layers of specialness? The main characters are way special, and the group of people they fall in with are specialer than other people, and named characters are specialer than unnamed? But I'm not sure exactly how to define 'specialness' in this context.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-23 01:27 pm (UTC)Yeah, I don't remember the quartet bothering me so much, because the characters did feel like four particular magic-users in a world where there were lots of them, but I can see that that might change in the next quartet. Fantasy is almost by definition about special people, but there's special that drags the story out of shape around it (Terrier) and then there's special that makes the story go.
It's probably just as well most of my books are in storage and I can't dig out the Alanna series. I liked the first two a lot.