Review: Boy in Darkness and Other Stories by Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Peake and I just don’t get along.

Perhaps it’s a tragedy of missed connections, varied personalities, and drastically opposed attitudes towards tale-telling. Maybe I’ve had the misfortune to chance upon his works at inopportune times, but whatever the case, his stories have never evoked that imaginative stirring in me. I had plunged into his Gormenghast novels with high hopes, but found that world too oppressive. I fared no better with Boy in Darkness and Other Stories.

My impression of this collection of tales was that of reading a compilation of literary templates. Any of these tales could easily be the outline that an aspiring writer could use to create his own tale, much as a blogger might customize a template design. These stories are the bare bones of tales, waiting for color and details, strung together with a theme of underdevelopment.

The eponymous story tells of the journey of Titus – of Gormenghast fame – into a dark wilderness, where he encounters a Goat and a Hyena who serve a demonic Lamb. It’s a bewildering world, as the Lamb – a Biblical symbol of God and salvation – is a sort of devilish deity, while the Goat and Hyena who serve him are men degraded to animal form, rather than raised higher by a god. The Boy – who has not yet become Man – must make his way through this darkness, but his path through it is at once too long and too short. The intriguing premise itself is passed over, while the atmospheric descriptions drag on.

The other stories are five in number, and suffer from the same flaw of underdevelopment. The first of these, “The Weird Journey”, is supposedly a play on Baudelaire’s idea of Correspondances, but Peake seems to have tried too hard. Its opening paragraph reads so much like an exercise from a creative writing class that I seriously debated whether I should read the second one:

“Once upon a time-theory, when alone on the great bed, I found that no sooner had my head left the pillow than I fell wide awake. How far I fell I cannot say, but the light was brilliant all about me and the shrill cries of birds were loud in my eyes – so loud, they seemed, that I could not tell whether they were in my brain or whether, all around my head and limbs, they spiraled in a flight too fleet for vision.”

The story goes on in more or less the same vein, and while this oversaturation of metaphors might be someone’s cup of tea, I found it to be unpalatable.

The next tale is a short one, “I Bought a Palm Tree,” and this is perhaps the most enjoyable of them all, for its humor adds spice to a volume that is otherwise rather lacking in it.

Next, one encounters “The Conoisseurs”, two art lovers whose dialogue is supposed to read like a “snippet from one of Oscar Wilde’s short plays,” as the introduction claims. The tale’s ending does indeed have the biting irony of Wilde, but Peake’s style holds it back, preventing that harmony of form and function that was such an integral part of Wilde’s charm – and artistic credo. The following piece of hyphenated callousness, for example, lacks the aesthetic context of Wilde’s writings, and thus ultimately fails as a witty imitation of Lord Henry Wotton’s posturing, which it clearly intends to be:

 “yes, yes, the vase. But, surely, very far from poor. Are the poor ever so elegant? I have been told they have their own kind of beauty – somebody told me that once – I don’t remember who- don’t ask me- but all the same, leaving the poor aside (as one usually does, God help us) – if you see what I mean – they are hardly vases – nor are they rare – my dear chap – one might say they are never rare.”

The penultimate tale is “Danse Macabre”, which, as the introduction claims, “takes a familiar image from the traditional Gothic tale and gives it a new and sinister twist.” But this story finds itself in an uncomfortable tug-of-war between its Gothic atmosphere and its drawing-room setting. The Poe-esque nightmare with which the tale begins – not entirely unreminiscent of The Tell-Tale Heart – is quickly followed by an elegant dinner and drinks party; its attendees are the mere sketches of socialites, lacking the psychological depth that made Poe’s tales so sinister.

The volume ends with “Same Time, Same Place,” a yarn which could perhaps be subtitled “Same Story” for its predictability: a young man, curious for adventure, leaves his familiar home and finds a beautiful woman with whom he falls in love and to whom he rash makes promises. Well, of course she turns out not to be what he imagined, and of course the promises he made to her are meaningless, and of course he returns back home, better able to appreciate what he’s left behind.

This simplicity could perhaps be excused by the fact that these are supposedly children’s stories – except that children’s stories rarely utilize the word “adumbrate” in the opening paragraph or attempt to define themselves as Kafka-esque or Poe-esque. Peake’s collection of tales seems to be having a sort of internal identity crisis, oscillating desperately between simplicity and attempted complexity.

 This article was originally published at Blogcritics. 

Book Review: Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

Imagine two men. The first: a mastermind who lives for solving pretty little problems. Eccentric and amoral, he sees the truth through the fog of that distant Victorian London. The second: a war veteran from Afghanistan, tough, scarred, addicted to danger. He’s a faithful sidekick and chronicler. Admittedly, I didn’t mention a deerstalker or pipe, but nevertheless, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson come to mind.

Except that that’s not who I mean. That description applies equally to Professor Moriarty and Sebastian Moran. Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ arch nemesis, is mysteriously – and tantalizingly – absent from most of the Sherlock Holmes stories. He was created by Doyle to kill off Holmes in The Final Problem, turns out to be beyond the events of The Valley of Fear, and appears in none of the other fifty-eight tales. Holmes only encounters him once (with the exception of that fateful meeting at Reichenbach Falls), and Watson himself never actually meets the Professor. In fact, the only time the reader actually “sees” Moriarty is in a narrative by Holmes later related by Watson. That makes Moriarty a rather tantalizingly mysterious blank slate.

Kim Newman has courageously taken up the challenge of filling up that slate in his book Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles.  He’s put together a delightful series of stories – tied together into a novel – narrated by Moriarty’s right hand man, Sebastian Moran. The idea of Moriarty and Moran as a sort of dark-double duo of Holmes and Watson, with Moran recording Moriarty’s crimes, is not entirely new – there are hints of it in Doyle’s stories (referred to as the Canon), and in a few of the more obscure Holmes movies. But never has it been developed to this extent, and never (with the exception of a particular Neil Gaiman story), as delightfully as this.

These stories don’t take place in Holmes’ world, but in a mirror reflection of it. Everything is exactly the same, except that Moriarty’s quite literally replaced Holmes. Newman has carefully, methodically disassembled the edifice that is the Canon, added a few crooked building blocks of his own, and reassembled the entire thing in a skewed, backwards, disturbing and utterly brilliant way. If Neil Gaiman can be described by a reviewer as a demonic chef, then Newman is certainly a possessed architect.

Newman’s Moriarty makes tea, plots dastardly deeds, drives his enemy to lunacy (or, as the latter would prefer, “moonacy”), and avoids being a walking cliché – all before breakfast. The stories are absolutely stunning in their inventiveness, the crimes are ingenious, and the humor is literally breath-taking. Yet they contain just enough reverence for Doyle’s originals. Particularly remarkable is “The Red Planet League,” a play on “The Red-Headed League” and perfect for fulfilling one’s daily humor needs. The prose – which I can’t call “stunning” because there must be a limit to how many times that word can appear in a review – is sizzling, engaging, witty, and punctuated by particularly remarkable passages, such as the following:

“They’ve called him the Napoleon of Crime, but that’s just putting what he is, what he does, in a cage. He’s not a criminal, he is crime itself, sin raised to an art form, a church with no religion but rapine, a God of Evil. Pardon my purple prose, but there it is. Moriarty brings things out in people, things from their depths.
He poured me tea.”

And, of course, the book has its fair share of witty variations on famous Canonical lines: “To Professor Moriarty, she was always that bitch,” and “the worst and wildest man I have ever known.”

There’s only one downfall to the novel, which is more of a small bump in the road than a pitfall, and that’s the question of the intended audience: avid Sherlockians or casual readers? The book is packed with clever references to minor Doyle villains and other Victorian literary works. The avid Sherlockian likes nothing better than a puzzle to solve, and finding these well-hidden hints to familiar works is like getting an early birthday present – except that the endnotes give it away. Answers at the back of the book may make the story clearer for the casual reader, but it certainly spoils the fun for the Sherlockian. And yet, to enjoy the clever, provocative twists on the Canon Newman offers at the deepest level, the detailed knowledge of a Sherlockian is necessary. For example, Moriarty presents himself as a scientist, juxtaposing himself to a conjurer who dabbles in deductions. It’s a clever contrast to Doyle’s Holmes, who is often referred to as a magician or wizard for the deductive skills that make him a beloved hero. Presumably the Sherlockian who catches this twist would know about the conundrum of why Watson had never heard of Moriarty in The Final Problem? Yet this explanation, like many others, finds its way into an endnote. But that’s a minor complaint, really.

In a world overcrowded with Holmes adaptations, pastiches, sequels, prequels, and re-writes, true gems can be as rare as the Pearl of the Borgias, and this is truly one of those gems that Moriarty himself would create a dastardly plot to obtain. There’s much of the Canon Newman left untouched, and one hopes that one day, more ink may flow from his pen onto paper…

This review was originally published at Blogcritics. 

Review: The Scar Crow Men - Mark Chadbourn

It’s been said once, it’s been said a million times: sequels are hard.

Mostly, that’s because the author has to compete with his own originality. A first novel of a series often introduces a stunning magical world that will whisk the readers away by its very originality. In a sequel, however, the novelty of a faraway land fades away; the unexpected becomes familiar. Hence, the characters, plot, storytelling and humor in a sequel need to be pretty damn amazing to make up for what’s lost in novelty. The author can’t just do the same thing – he has to do something twice as good.

That, unsurprisingly, is the problem with Mark Chadbourn’s The Scar-Crow Men. It’s a sequel. 


It's set in the same intricate, but now familiar world, a magical Elizabethan England, and continues the story begun in The Silver Skull of Will Swyfte and Walsingham's band of spies (though Walsingham is dead by this point) in their fight against the Unseelie Court. Chadbourn's originality in the ways he intertwines history and myth is still stunning: the Plague becomes the doing of the Unseelie Court, Marlowe's Faustus actually conjures up a devil...but the characters and plot are less engaging this time around, and that, coupled with a familiar world, is a death sentence for a story.


In my previous review of The Silver Skull, I explained the kind of characters that we women like to develop infatuations with (and who are heroic enough for men to probably like reading about them too). We like our bitter, cynical, disenchanted yet heroic men...we really, really don't like it when those men whine about it. Perhaps two hundred years ago, back when Romanticism was all the vogue, and writers from Byron to Chateaubriand were inventing being emo, that would've been cool. Nowadays, an occasional bitter line is quite attractive, proffered tantalizingly here or there. Mark Chadbourn, however, has treated the readers to very large helpings of such lines. This is true not only of Will Swyfte, but of all the protagonists of this novel. They complain disenchantedly about their happy past, about what they've lost, about how they can't be happy, about their sacrifices. Oh, shut up already, and actually do something interesting. 


It's not even that the characters are unlikeable, or pretend to be heroes when they're not, or that I"m a terrible, heartless person who doesn't care (I am a terrible, heartless person, but fictional characters have been known to melt the ice that I have in place of a heart). It's that they'd be much more interesting as characters if they actually did things instead of complaining about things. After all, with the first book, the reader signed up for reading a book about Bitter, Cynical Heroes doing Heroic Things (and not for reading The Sorrows of Young Werther). In this book, the bitter and cynical is there, but the heroic seems to have gone for a walk somewhere.

That's why I'm rather hard-pressed to summarize the plot of the novel. It begins with London being stricken by the Plague, and Marlowe getting murdered. After that, there's a lot of angry Will Swyfte running away from things and blundering about, only to then conveniently be informed of the enemy's plot by an ally a few chapters from the end. An appearance is made by Red Meg, a feisty, red-haired Irish spy, who strides her way confidently through the story and rescues Will on more than one occasion. She brightens the story with her flaming red hair and fiery personality, but it's certainly not enough to make the tale colorful and engaging.

It may be universally agreed that sequels are hard, but it's also universally agreed that the third time's the charm. The question remains: will the next book be just the sequel of a sequel, and hence even less up to par, or will Chadbourn work his magic again?

The Silver Skull - Mark Chadbourn

It all started in the bookstore. Borders bookstore, to be exact, back when it still existed. My friend Amy and I were bravely fighting our way through shelves of spinoff vampire romance and formulaic sword-and-sorcery in a quest for literary treasures of the science fiction and fantasy variety. I picked out a book with a man in Elizabethan dress on the glossy cover; he was holding a sword and looked to be in the midst of an exciting scene.

“Meet Will Swyfte -- adventurer, swordsman, rake, swashbuckler, wit, scholar and the greatest of Walsingham's new band of spies,” the back cover proclaimed.

Amy glanced over and laughed.

“He sounds like exactly your type,” she said.

Indeed.

Will Swyfte is, after all, exactly the type of character that women (including me) tend to develop literary crushes on. He is a bitter, disenchanted figure with a dark past, yet on the inside he hides a heart, a heart that once loved and suffered terribly. And now, he has become a hero with a mask of cynicism. We women have a weakness for our anti-heroes with a heart of gold (and his wits about him), and I admit that I spent a large part of the novel with a minor infatuation with Will Swyfte.

That’s not to say that Mark Chadbourn’s The Silver Skull has nothing else going for it besides its main character; it simply means that it’s a novel for people who like a certain kind of story with a certain kind of character. In some ways, Will Swyfte is like the Elizabethan James Bond, with John Dee as his Q, and the scenes in which Swyfte gets his latest “gadgets” really do mirror those of the Bond movies. It’s a story whose hero is unheroically heroic: he’s really good at saving the world, and despite all the cynicism, he’s going to be the Hero who does Right in the end.

And he’s going to become famous for it. In fact, he’s going to become known as England’s greatest spy.

But what is the point of a spy who is famous for being, well, a spy?

The already-intriguing back cover has an answer for that, too:

“Swyfte’s public image is a carefully-crafted facade to give the people of England something to believe in, and to allow them to sleep peacefully at night. It deflects attention from his real work — and the true reason why Walsingham’s spy network was established. A Cold War seethes, and England remains under a state of threat. The forces of Faerie have been preying on humanity for millennia. Responsible for our myths and legends, of gods and fairies, dragons, griffins, devils, imps and every other supernatural menace that has haunted our dreams, this power in the darkness has seen humans as playthings to be tormented, hunted or eradicated.”

Mark Chadbourn has a talent for intertwining mythology and history to create a unique setting and a unique story, and he’s certainly done it here. It’s not uncommon knowledge that Walsingham was several centuries ahead of the MI6 when he created his vast spy network; it’s quite probably the first secret intelligence service in the modern world. But Chadbourn adds another defining part of Britishness to the Elizabethan era – Britain’s mythology. He is extremely well-versed in both history and mythology, and he intertwines two worlds intricately, seamlessly, and with fastidious attention to detail and accuracy.

Of course, that makes it very easy to say that he allows the reader to truly plunge into a different world and live in it – after all, isn’t that what fantasy is supposed to do? But Chadbourn’s book does more. It’s engaging and well-researched to such an extent that it’s amazing how much one can learn about Elizabethan Britain. Reading it is, in a way, reassuring – it’s not necessary to worry about whether somebody actually dressed like that or if some minor event actually occurred. The accuracy with which Chadbourn writes of his time period makes the story as real as the best of fantasy worlds.

The plot itself is part Indiana Jones, part spy story (rather more Mission: Impossible than James Bond, though), and part fantasy. There are labyrinths, riddles, gadgets, sword fights, and all manner of magic. There are also some really scary bits – it’s not just fog and darkness, but a feeling of foreboding about a mystery that Will Swyfte spends the book hunting for. But saying any more than that would be spoiling the story.

A swashbuckling fantasy spy story in Elizabethan England – you know you want to read it.

Book Review: Lies of Locke Lamora

Before the bookstore chain Borders so lamentably closed, I used to visit in the original Borders store in my hometown of Ann Arbor to browse the science fiction and fantasy shelves, looking for something new and exciting. But (and this, in my opinion, is part of the reason for the downfall of Borders), it seemed like the bookshelves were always full of the same formulas, over and over again: yet another sword-and-sorcery story in which an unlikely hero must save whatever version of Middle-Earth he lives in, yet another vampire romance tale, often with scantily clad women on the cover…Sometimes, though, among that plethora of similar titles, it was possible to find something new and unique. The Lies of Locke Lamora is one of those breaths of fresh air. It’s the first volume in Scott Lynch’s planned series of seven (though at this point the release date of the third book is one of the biggest enigmas yet to be solved by science fiction and fantasy fans), and it’s a stunning debut.

The story takes place in Camorr, a magical metropolis that seems to be loosely based upon the European Middle Ages. It follows the fortunes of Locke Lamora in his journey from a simple child sneak-thief to head of the Gentleman Bastards, a group of con-artists. Locke seems to have an uncanny knack for plotting and stealing; both are talents which Chains, a priest of Camorr’s Thirteenth God, a patron deity of thieves, notes. He raises and trains Locke, who maintains the pretense of being a perfectly ordinary sneak thief while pulling off complex heists along with his loyal friends and fellow thieves – Jean, Bug, and the twins Calo and Galdo Sanza. What’s particularly fascinating about Locke’s character – and the entire setup – is the way in which Locke becomes a thief with principles, so to speak. He’s not exactly a Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor, but he does have greater values than gold. Decency, friendship, and loyalty weigh more on his scales than the riches he steals. It is always inspiring to read of heroism, and those qualities do, indeed, make the characters in some way heroic. Thus, what drives the novel is not just the breathtaking heists the Gentleman Bastards pull off, but the dynamic among the characters through their machinations, joys and troubles. And those troubles are not lacking once someone named the Gray King shows up to make things sticky for Locke and the Gentleman Bastards.

It’s certainly true that the Gentlemen Bastards don’t always deal with this particular enemy in the most clever – or even rational – way, which seems like rather a lapse on Lynch’s part. For example, when blackmailed by the Gray King to help him carry out his plot without quite knowing what it is, they opt to go along with it without trying to find out what it is they’re getting involved in. And when Locke confronts the Gray King, well, he unimpressively attempts to fight him instead of coming up with a clever plan, as the reader would expect. In fact, the climax of the story is a bit of a letdown after all of the buildup and intricate plotting by Lynch and his characters. In addition, there are several places where many paragraphs of description make the story lag. Nevertheless, the entire novel is driven by Lynch’s inventiveness. He dreams up brilliant heists within heists, an infernal garden with blood-sucking glass roses that then take on a brilliantly red color and in which Jean Tannen must learn to fight and not lose his life to his opponent, or the flowers, and a whole society of thieves, priests, dukes, counts, guards, and every other imaginable member of society. His world is as delicately crafted as a sugar castle, and just as charming (albeit darkly so).

However, sometimes it’s Lynch’s inventiveness that gets the better of him. It’s not easy to create a world, and, inevitably, contradictions and inconsistencies arise. For example, the religion in Camorr seems to be based upon a belief in thirteen gods, by which the characters often swear, and which Lynch often describes. And yet, Locke often expresses himself with phrases such as the following: “why the hell should I bother telling you anything?”(635) Hell is part of the Christian religion, and in any case, Lynch, in all his detailed descriptions of thirteen deities, has omitted mention of the afterlife. So how is it that a facet of the Christian religion suddenly exists in a world where this faith is unheard-of? This is, of course, a minor detail, but in a novel in which the author goes to so much effort to create an intricate world, something like this stands out.

Then, there’s also Locke’s methods, that is, what would be called con-artistry in our world, and which seems not to exist in Locke’s. Camorr has a vast underworld of thieves and lawbreakers, so vast, in fact, that within the larger social structure of Camorr, the thieves and criminals have their own society, ruled over by the Capa of Camorr. There’s even a Secret Peace between criminals and nobles, which allows both to do as they please as long as the other is not targeted. Clearly, law-breaking has become a way of life for a large portion of the population, and this population has created their own community. Given such circumstances, it seems rather incredible that nobody’s thought of con-artistry yet. In fact, one of the characters, Ibelius, tells Locke “I’ve never conceived of such a thing as this false-facing of yours.”(613). Con-artistry seems so unheard-of in Camorr that it doesn’t even have a name. Much of the plot of the book is dependent on the premise of this originality, and it could do with a bit more justification.

There’s also the interesting question of Lynch’s style, which has been much debated. Though his descriptions do lag a bit, his prose is nevertheless engaging, full as it intrigue and humor, of which I can’t help providing an example here:

“There are only three people in life you can never fool--pawnbrokers, whores, and your mother. Since your mother's dead, I've taken her place. Hence, I'm bullshit-proof.”

Nevertheless, his book is sprinkled with more swearwords than there are spices in an exotic dish. In fact, statistically, Lynch probably uses the f-word on average once per page. The issue here is not even the word itself, which exists in the English language to be used, just like any other word, in certain situations, to make a certain impression and evoke a certain response. Just like any other word, it can be used to develop a character’s personality or hint at their origin. Yet in this book, this word is used by everyone of every social class, in every situation, all the time. Therefore, it adds no emphasis to anything; it cannot be used to differentiate between a character’s different moods and reactions, or between the origins of different characters. It serves no purpose whatsoever. Try repeating the word “fuck” several hundred times and you’ll see that it becomes simply a syllable.

Despite these discrepancies, however, this is still a marvelously entertaining story. Its sequel, Red Seas Under Red Skies (of which I hope to post a review soon), is even more captivating, and one hopes that the promised release date of June 2012 for The Republic of Thieves (book 3) is actually accurate.