Here we are again, and
me much delayed. Unfortunately I’ve had a few other things on. I
was busy with my Marvel Essential Warlock series – which belongs
properly in Q4 – and wrote a review of The Fractal Prince, the
sequel to The Quantum Thief, which belongs also in Q4. Plus, of
course, the perennial nuisance of DIY.
I have been reading,
though, and in the three months to 30 September, I read:
The Three Musketeers by
Alexandre Dumas
Some Kind of Fairy Tale
by Graham Joyce
The Great God Pan by
Arthur Machen
A few John Service
stories by Algernon Blackwood
Bring Up the Bodies by
Hilary Mantel
Marvel Essential Super
Villain Team-Up vol 1 by various.
So, that was summer! We
got a week of hot sunshine and then the rain came back and we rented
a cottage in Cornwall to have some rainy fun in a different part of
the country. I’ve been busy with DIY and become quite a dab hand at
filling gaps and holes with TouPret, which is apparently French for
Polyfilla. A few coats of paint and I think it’ll all hold long
enough for my finances to recover and be in a position to pay someone
to fix it properly. Sometime in 2057.
While waiting for paint
to dry and in other odd corners of the day, I have managed to read a
few books, some stories and lots of comics and write a review.
The Three Musketeers
was a copyright-free classic downloaded from Project Gutenberg and
read on my Kindle. The problem with Kindle is that you don’t really
get an idea of how long a book is before you’re well into it. You
know how far through you are, but it takes a while to figure out what
that means in the way that’s instantly obvious from a paper copy.
I don’t know if this
is good or bad. I might not have taken this on if I’d known how
long it was. I’m a fairly slow reader and don’t like to spend
long periods with the same book if I can avoid it. I’m glad I did,
though. It’s a fun mix of sword-fighting, banter and gallantry of
the sort we’ve come to know as swashbuckling. As I noted on
Goodreads, this one really reminded me of stories by Jack Vance.
Dartagnan is the typical Vancian wandering youth, left or ejected
from home to find his fortune. He suffers early set backs and makes a
powerful enemy. This his the same sort of desire for vengeance that
drives him forwards like Gastel Etzwane in Durdane or Ghyl Tarvoke in
Emphyrio.
Like Vancian heroes the
Musketeers hold their dignity and comforts in high esteem. They are
courageous and noble in their way, but what makes their adventures so
enjoyable is the way that however dire the situation, they never lose
sight of the importance of fine food and wine, a wealthy mistress,
the frills on their uniform or the shine on their hauberk. At greater
stake than anything is their honour, and this inevitably leads to
unlikely wagers and duels to the death.
The first half in
particular – the affair of the diamond studs – is jolly exciting.
There’s a bit of a lull at the start of the second half, but the
bits where Milady is imprisoned by the Baron are brilliant. She’s a
wonderfully cold character and in that section has the determination
and guts of any modern action hero.
It’s hard not to
admire her, but then she goes and poison’s poor innocent Constance.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the Richard Lester film, but I
couldn’t help but picture Spike Milligan and Racquel Welch as
Monsieur Thing and Constance. It was quite a shock when she was
killed off – it certainly gave a bit of energy to the Musketeers’
pursuit of Milady later on.
After that I needed
something modern, and got Some Kind of Fairy Tale for review. I liked
this book a lot. It was just I felt like as the summer turned hot,
those sunny later summer days when London was eerily deserted – I
got a seat on the train everyday of the Olympics. You can read my
review here.
After reading this I
floundered for a while. I read the story The Great God Pan by Arthur
Machen, which was similarly brilliant. Maybe it’s just me but the
story seemed to entirely about stifled Edwardian sexuality. The chap
at the beginning never really describes the medical procedure
undertaken on Helen Vaughan, nor what disturbed him so much when he
sent her away. The precise nature of the outrages in the wood is
elided as are the sins of Mrs Herbert of Paul Street and Mrs Beaumont
of Dover Street. The Great God Pan himself is usually shown in the
guise of the Satyr, a symbol for rampant male sensuality. It’s such
an incredibly salacious story – forget your 50 Shades of Grey, this
is spicier than anything in there. It was also handy reading at the
same time as writing my review of Some Kind of Fairy Tale because
they are somewhat related.
The story is also a
fine demonstration of the montage technique, the gradual build up of
the story through disjointed narratives and artefacts like newspaper
stories and related ephemera. The many viewpoints give a horror story
verisimilitude. It’s a vision shared by a number of narrators that
leaves behind material evidence to be perused and judged. It’s
similar to the Charles Gray figure I talked about when I reviewed TheCase of Charles Dexter Ward – an omniscient narrator apparently
piecing a story together from reportage, witness statements and their
own deductions. In a story like this one, though, without a narrative
voice contextualising the evidence, it relies more on the reader to
bring it all together as the evidence mounts up. Machen does a
brilliant job of building up the story of Helen Vaughan into
something suggestive and disturbing. Definitely a story that deserves
its reputation!
I also read a couple of
the stories in the volume Six John Silence Stories by Algernon
Blackwood. These reminded me a bit of Carnacki the ghost hunter, but
even sillier. They are a reminder, though, that the ‘urban fantasy’
genre isn’t as new as all that, as these are essentially the same
dull bollocks.
Lastly, I read Bring Up
the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. Like Wolf Hall, I enjoyed this a lot. At
the same time as I read it, I was watching the first series of A Game
of Thrones on DVD, and I was struck by the similarities. They both
feature bibulous kings who’ve tired of their queens, both are
concerned with the idea of legitimate heirs, and both stories have at
their heart a faithful retainer. This backs up my idea that trad
fantasy is just historical fiction with the scholarship filed off, or
perhaps that historical fiction is just fantasy without the magic.
Either way, I thought
Mantel’s Tudor court seemed a richer place than Westeros. In
fairness, I don’t know what Martin’s books are like, but I found
the TV show a bit leaden and expository. Mantel’s Tudor novels seem
more confident to just drop you in, perhaps because the history is
well enough known that even the most incurious reader can be assumed
to have some knowledge.
But the historical
familiarity makes the reading experience richer than pure fantasy,
too. It adds a layer of cultural expectation, generations of reading
about Good King Hal
and Anne Boleyn laid over what’s going on here. Mantel brilliantly
humanises the main players, especially Cromwell, and brings the era
alive with lightly worn research on food and dress and manners, but
she also benefits enormously from the half-remembered history lesson
that the story keeps evoking. In comparison, the pretend medievalism
of A Game of Thrones seems a bit pointless. I am aware there are more
fantastic elements coming up – dragons and whatever the hell it is
beyond the wall – but series on looked a bit too much like pretend
history for me to maintain much interest at the moment.
Comics reading in this
quarter was the usual pamphlets and Marvel Essential Super Villain
Team-Up, the latter a re-read as I didn’t have anywhere else to
turn. Aside from everything else, one of the great innovations of
Marvel was complex villain. Doom and Namor – who figure prominently
in this volume – are brilliantly complicated figures. Namor is as
often hero as villain, but has trouble letting go of his hatred of
the surface world. Doom’s a little more unambiguously evil, but
here’s also the leader of a nation, and this book makes a big play
of his role as king of Latveria. It’s an interesting angle on the
super-hero world from before figures like Doom and Magneto became
borderline good guys.
It gets a little less
interesting after the Red Skull turns up, but then Marvel Essential
Warlock turned up and so I put Super Villain Team Up aside.
In addition, I read
another heavy load of Avengers vs X-Men, and issues of Fantastic Four
and Future Foundation. I have something to say about these, but I’m
going to hold over for next time, because this month I made a Big
Decision.
This month, I have
cancelled my standing order with Gosh and am now an ex-collecter.
I’ll have more to say
about this decision and Avengers vs X-Men, plus and my reflections on
forty years of comic collecting next time around.
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