Tag: fantasy

The Black God’s Drums (2018): P. Djèlí Clark

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★★★★

You know the most annoying thing about reading on a Kindle? You have no idea of how long your book is, or where you’ve got to. Imagine the scene: I’m thoroughly absorbed in P. Djèlí Clark’s atmospheric tale of sky pirates and steampunk in an alternate-universe New Orleans. The initial action has rounded off nicely, and I’m savouring the (surely) imminent start of the plot… when, suddenly, boom. The end! What I’d thought was a novel turned out to be a novella, a mere 114 pages; and what I thought was the first act turned out, in fact, to be the whole. I actually felt bereft: I wanted to know so much more about the characters – the streetwise urchin Jacqueline and the dashing pirate captain Ann-Marie St. Augustine – but it looks as though this is it, for now. My disappointment, I stress, was simply due to the book’s abbreviated length. Clark’s evocative story shows how quickly an accomplished author can draw you into their world, with intriguing characters backed up by a glorious narrative voice, full of bayou rhythms and Yoruba folklore.

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Wendy, Darling (2021): A.C. Wise

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★★★★

I tend to avoid novels which retell or continue classic stories (why do so many people want to rewrite Pride and Prejudice?), but something about A.C. Wise’s Wendy, Darling caught my attention. Peter Pan is already a book that speaks to children and adults in different ways: reading it, as a grown-up, provokes a sense of discomfort that simmers beneath the sheer joy of its nostalgic anarchy. Wise has grasped that sense of ‘somehow wrong-ness’ and anchored it at the heart of her book, a fierce story of female autonomy, courage and memory. It begins, of course, on a dark night in London, in a nursery, where a small girl sleeps in a bed. A slight, lean shape appears at the nursery window: it’s Peter, come to carry Wendy back to Neverland. But Peter has left it too long. The child in the bed is not Wendy. It’s 1931 and Wendy, now a married woman, is in her room when she feels the warning sense of danger. She runs to the nursery, but she’s too late: Peter has spirited away her daughter, Jane. Outraged by the theft, Wendy can do only one thing: she must gather her courage and go to bring her daughter home.

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Before They Are Hanged (2007): Joe Abercrombie

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★★★½

The First Law: Book 2

Wow, that got dark very quickly. The second instalment of the First Law trilogy spreads our characters out across the world, many of them facing insurmountable odds, and all of them, at various points, encountering an awful lot of violence. There is a lot of blood. This is not one for the faint-hearted, but Abercrombie’s sense of irony prevents it from getting too crushingly miserable. In her comment on the last post, Heloise noted that he undermines the conventions of the fantasy genre throughout the series, and I noticed more examples of this here: not so much in terms of characterisation, now, but in the plot itself. And yet this does feel very much like a ‘middle book’: while it begins with the feel of a new chapter, taking our characters away from the debatable safety of Adua and into foreign climes, it finishes with many storylines still in progress. Nevertheless, it manages to keep up the pace with aplomb, and raises more questions than it answers.

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The Blade Itself (2006): Joe Abercrombie

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★★★★

The First Law: Book 1

I bought this book in 2013 and have started it several times over the years but, for some reason, kept getting distracted after a few chapters. Now, however, the stars have aligned, and I raced through from the first page to the last, happily captivated. In fact, it’s remarkable that it’s taken me this long. I’ve read and enjoyed other works by Joe Abercrombie, and his First Law trilogy seems to be widely regarded as a modern classic of fantasy. I should have come to it much earlier. It blends elements of sword-and-sorcery with court politics and, though it does little but lay the foundations of the plot for the rest of the series, it introduces us to a series of deliciously complex characters. This first instalment drops us into a world peopled by fantasy tropes, who gradually develop into rounded, complex individuals before our eyes, treated both with wit and compassion. For those who’ve read the series, I wonder: can you guess who my favourite character is?

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The Final Empire (2006): Brandon Sanderson

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★★★½

Cosmere: Book 2 / Mistborn: Book 1

I’ve now been back at work for a couple of weeks, thank goodness, and have been happily readjusting; although this strange new world brings new challenges. How, for example, does one manage to appear professional on a Zoom call from one’s bedroom? (I need to experiment with backgrounds.) However, weekends are still sacred and I’ve spent this particular chilly Sunday afternoon curled up on the sofa with The Final Empire. It’s the first novel I’ve read by Brandon Sanderson and, while it isn’t the first in his Cosmere saga (that would be Elantris), it marks the beginning of its own sub-series, Mistborn. I’ve heard a lot about Sanderson in recent years – he’s definitely one of the most popular modern fantasy authors, in part thanks to his completion of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series – and my expectations were, inevitably, high. While his inventive world-building and magic system didn’t disappoint, I was initially underwhelmed by his writing style; but that bothered me less as I made my way through the book. In part a self-contained adventure story, and in part a clearly-signposted springboard for future events, this is a satisfying romp full of honourable thieves, dark religions, disguise and politics: just up my street.

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Piranesi (2020): Susanna Clarke

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Photo: Polly Borland/Contour by Getty Images

★★★★★

Piranesi lives in the House. There is nothing beyond or outside. He has explored with scientific rigour, as far as he can go, diligently mapping his progress. His findings suggest the House is infinite, its upper halls thick with drifting clouds, its lower levels submerged beneath silent waters. Each hall has its own collection of statues, which Piranesi catalogues with earnest devotion. He is entirely alone, save for weekly meetings with the elusive Other, the only other living man in the House. Piranesi likes to believe that they are colleagues, working together for the greater good, but he knows deep in his heart that he and the Other have different ambitions. The Other dreams of discovering some great and terrible knowledge hidden within the House, while Piranesi cares only for the well-being of the House itself, in all its majesty. Susannah Clarke’s long-awaited new novel transports us to an extraordinary world and poses a question: How can we understand and rationalise our world when we can’t escape it? Dream, reality and perception tremble on the brink in one of the most original novels I’ve ever read.

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The Fetch (1991): Robert Holdstock

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★★★½

So far, I’ve only read one book by Robert Holdstock: Mythago Wood, an utterly captivating tale of mythic power and ancient legends, closely bound to the English landscape. The Fetch turned up in a second-hand bookshop some months after I’d finished Mythago Wood and, although I was keen to explore more of Holdstock’s imaginative world, it didn’t take me long to realise that The Fetch is a very different kettle of fish. I’ve never actually read any Dennis Wheatley, but I suspect this has a similar flavour to his books; I’m reminded, too, of those horror films in which wholesome families are gradually reduced to primeval terror. Yet this isn’t an outright horror novel: if it were, I wouldn’t have read it. In some ways it’s a classic Holdstock story, a tale of the past weaving itself into the present and breaking through in unexpected ways, a tale of treasures and quests and miracles – but one underlaid with the slow, inescapable thrum of something nasty in the woodshed.

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The Second Sleep (2019): Robert Harris

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★★★½

Robert Harris’s new novel opens on a bleak evening in 1468, as a young priest makes his way wearily towards the village of Addicott St George. The parish parson, Father Thomas Lacy, has recently died and Christopher Fairfax has been sent by the Bishop of Exeter to oversee the burial. It’s supposed to be a quick job but, when Fairfax arrives, he begins to hear rumours of murder that he feels bound to investigate. Even worse, he makes shocking discoveries in Father Lacy’s study: the former priest was dabbling in dangerous heresies, which seem to have had some bearing on his mysterious death. And that, my friends, is all I feel able to say before the cut. I will add that I found this an engaging, amusing and unexpectedly engrossing novel, and that if you’ve enjoyed Harris’s earlier works you would do well to give this a go. But The Second Sleep is a novel best approached in complete innocence. If you haven’t yet read it, but think you might like to, I urge you to stop right here. Don’t read past the cut, where there will be spoilers. Come back when you’re done and, while you’re reading, pay attention. Those with sharp eyes will realise pretty swiftly that all is not quite as it seems.

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Johnny and the Dead (1993): Terry Pratchett

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★★★

Johnny Maxwell: Book 2

It was just a matter of time. I wrote a few days ago that we’ve been exploring some of our local cemeteries during the lockdown, piecing together the stories of the families buried there, and judging people on the quality of their gravestone poetry. Inevitably, this reminded me of one of my few childhood books that I brought with me to London: Terry Pratchett’s Johnny and the Dead, which I promptly unearthed (‘exhumed’?) from my bookshelves. I don’t remember the circumstances of this purchase – I never read the other Johnny Maxwell books and this was long before I started reading Discworld – but my parents got it right. There’s something ineffably British about Pratchett’s story of a young lad who realises to his alarm that he can see dead people in the local Victorian cemetery. And, as he’s apparently the only one who can talk to them, he feels that he’s the one who has to break the news. Because the town council has decided that the cemetery is no longer relevant, and has decided to sell it off to a glossy modern company for a glossy progressive modern office block. Needless to say, the dead are not happy…

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The Goldsmith and the Master Thief (1961): Tonke Dragt

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★★★

You know when you buy a book and mean to read it, and keep meaning to read it, but never quite get round to it, and then it’s adapted for TV and you realise that you’ve missed the moment, and that now whenever you read it people will assume you’ve only read it because you’d seen it on Netflix? Yep. That’s happened to me with Tonke Dragt’s story The Letter for the King, so I was keen to get ahead with her novel The Goldsmith and the Master Thief. I should emphasise that this is a children’s story and it’s written as such: there are no winks or extra layers of meaning aimed at adults, just a good old-fashioned fable which follows the adventures of two very different (and yet very similar) brothers. Cynics need not apply: in this world, duplicity is always punished, the misguided mend their ways, and the pure of heart are always rewarded. Reading it feels like a deliciously self-indulgent step back in time, to the days when life was simpler.

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