Category Archives: Books

Young guns, having some fun

Posted on by

I’ve had boys on the mind in the last week or so, but only in a good way. I’ve been reading the adventures of young James Bond (Silverfin by Charlie Higson), young Sherlock Holmes (Death Cloud by Andrew Lane) and young Alex Rider (Crocodile Tears by Anthony Horowitz). Young Alex of course has never been anything but: the series started when he was 14 ten years ago and a decade later his fifteenth birthday is scheduled to happen shortly after the end of the book (“next Thursday”). The other two are prequels to the adult adventures, authorised by the respective estates and drawing on what we know of the protagonists’ early lives to give pointers as to how the boy became the man. Horowitz however can do what he likes with Alex – and frequently does – without having to worry about staying canon: we’ve never seen the man Alex and don’t know what he will turn out like.

The secret of a good boy’s tale is get rid of the adults as soon as you reasonably can and have them drawn into good, wholesome, sex-free adventures without too much wild coincidence or suspension of disbelief. That is an inevitable weak point of both young Bond and young Holmes. As adults, they always have the advantage of being given a case or assignment to solve, though in Bond’s case coincidence also played a part a bit to often – in both Goldfinger and Thunderball he has a chance encounter with the bad guys before it becomes official. That is the genius of Alex – he is a kid recruited by MI6, so he too gets given the assignment, though again not without some helpful coincidence first to pave the way.

In order of enjoyment:

3rd place, Silverfin. It’s not bad, you understand. Charlie Higson knows his Bond. Ian Fleming could never quite decide how old Bond was: in the early books there’s a reference to work he did “before the war”, whereas by the later books he was obviously too young for that; Higson seems to have fixed on a 1920 date of birth, meaning that he could have been in naval intelligence by 1945, if not 1939. The original books provide a good deal of information about young Bond in the form of an obituary published in You Only Live Twice (don’t worry, it’s premature). That’s how we know his father is Scottish and his mother Swiss; he was raised by his aunt after the death of his parents; and educated in reverse order at Cambridge, Fettes and Eton, having to leave the latter after only a couple of terms because of an “indiscretion” with one of the maids. Apparently a later Higson book tells the truth of that “indiscretion” and it isn’t what you might think. However I will be very surprised if he also covers the trip to Paris aged 16 on which Bond lost his virginity – also canon in the original books and a little less susceptible to reinterpretation for a young audience.

And that is the problem with Silverfin, really. Higson’s young Bond is a nice lad. Adult Bond is anything but. He is arrogant, sexist and minimally moral – they don’t hand out Double-O licences to boy scouts, you know. Young Bond does not have to become old Bond: these could be the adventures of any 1930s boy hero.

Also, the coincidence level that gets him into the adventures is just a bit too high for my liking.

2nd place: Crocodile Tears. This series has ranged from middling to superb and this is at the upper end. A few years ago there was the feeling that Horowitz was just turning them out and quality declined accordingly, as it always must – but this comes after a couple of years’ reflection and recharging. Still not quite up to my favourite, Scorpia (the eponymous organisation is quite obviously SPECTRE by another name), and the baddy isn’t up to Damian Cray of Eagle Strike, who was quite obviously an evil Elton John. But fun.

Alex of course is young James Bond, essentially: he has similar adventures with similar suffering, similar gadgets, similar villains and even a similar on-off girlfriend, Sabina Pleasure (think about it). But what sets him apart is that he emphatically isn’t Bond: he hates the things he has to do and he is aware of how each adventure damages him. In almost every case his motivation is to prevent the widespread suffering that will ensue if the bad guy has his way. Alex is a likeable, moral lad and there is a good chance that the adult will turn out the same way.

1st place: Death Cloud, and I’m not just saying this because I happen to get a mention in the dedication. Young Holmes is well drawn as a sympathetic, slightly insecure, very intelligent, socially awkward boy and here you can actually see the seeds of the man being planted. He already has a querying, analytical mind and during the novel it is taken and moulded by a tutor who teaches him to use it, as well as have adventures.

There is very little early Holmes biographical material in the original stories, other than the existence of Mycroft, so Andrew Lane fills in the gaps with his own invention and by plundering the canonical, off-the-cuff references to earlier adventures. The villain of this one is Baron Maupertuis; the next will reveal the truth about the Red Leech. Andy knows his Holmes and he knows his Victoriana, which gives the book a good period setting. Young Holmes is much easier to get on with than the adult but you can still see how the one will lead to the other; and even at his most insufferable, adult Holmes has redeeming qualities: a deep unspoken love for the people closest to him, a thirst for justice and the plain enjoyment of the intellectual challenges of each case. But he too is a damaged man and without pulling many punches we see the first signs of the damage being inflicted.

And absolutely no Watson or Moriarty. That would not be canon.

I wasn’t planning on doing any further plugging, but random web searching led to Andy’s original proposal and thus the official web site. The proposal itself is worth the price of admission: this is how these things should be done.

Turkish delight (well, what else could I call this post?)

Posted on by

The Vampire Plagues has arrived in Turkey, or at least London, the first volume has. As you can see it continues the totally not being Twilight in any way shape or formvibe. I don’t know whether “Vampir Alacakaranligi” means either “Vampire Plagues” or “Vampire Dusk” but I do know it’s not something to say lightly.

In fact a lot of Turkish seems to be made up of words that people forgot to stop spelling. Give or take an accent or two, “Jack Harkett lurked beside a pile of weathered tea crates from a Calcutta merchant ship” comes out as “Jack Harkett, Kalka’dan gelen bir ticaret gemisinden indirilen günes ve rüzgârdan yipranmis çay kasalarinin olusturdugu bir yiginin yaninda salaniyordu“. And boutros boutros to you, too. “Goodbye, Father” is (rather sweetly) “Güle güle, baba“. I’m very pleased with myself for tracking down a line in the mass of Turkish text without reference to the English at all: “Limon yemek istiyormus da limon onu yemis gibi görünüyor” (“She looks like she wanted to suck a lemon, only it sucked her instead“.)

One day – one day, I promise – I will use my Swedish copy of Vampyrguden as a Rosetta Stone for learning my wife’s mother tongue. Learning Turkish, for the time being, goes on the back burner.

Heroic factasy

Posted on by

I don’t read much heroic fantasy, for various reasons. A good one is that it all comes in such fat multi-volume series that I simply don’t have the time. But a deeper, slightly more sneaking one is that, well, it’s all a bit silly, isn’t it? It’s not real. Science fiction is generally set in present-day or future societies that could happen. Fantasy is based on past societies that didn’t happen, or can’t happen, so there.

This isn’t entirely fair but it’s always there. Good heroic fantasy gets around it by being good. I recently read Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself and enjoyed it a lot: for the characters, the world-building, the humour and the sheer enjoyment of the writing. But still I get this nagging feeling that tells me I should be reading something else, and it isn’t at all helped by reading something like Jan Guillou‘s Templar Trilogy.

Guillou himself is an interesting character – an investigative journalist and spy writer who did time in jail for revealing that the land of cuddly Volvo-driving Abba fans has a secret intelligence agency that can match the CIA dirty trick for dirty trick. That’s life on the front line of the Cold War. His character of Arn Magnusson is a local Swedish folk hero because Guillou cleverly takes Arn’s fictitious life and wraps it into real history in the form of the birth of the modern kingdom of Sweden. (Where I happen to be right now, but that’s for a later blog post.) For instance, with a bit of handwaving the fictitious Arn becomes the grandfather of the very real Birger Jarl, whose grave I have seen and once sort of wrote a poem about. All the locations are visitable, and most of them are within a few miles of my inlaws. One of life’s innocent pleasures is to watch Bonusbarn’s face when he asks with resignation why we’re looking at yet another church and we say “This is where Arn …”

I was introduced to Arn’s adventures by my future wife several years ago, but it’s taken till now to finish them because at first only the first two books were translated into English. After that the publisher pulled the plug … until recently. Different publisher, different translator, still the third book. Finally I know how it ends! Though given that Sweden exists, I had a shrewd suspicion.

In the first book, The Road to Jerusalem, Arn is born into minor Swedish nobility and for various reasons spends most of his childhood raised by monks, including an ex-Templar who teaches him various extracurricular non-monkly fighting skills. This is handy because at the end of the book Arn inadvertently sleeps (consecutively) with two sisters (hey, it could happen to any innocent young lad from the monastery), one of whom is his true love and one of whom is a scheming minx. For this sin he must do 20 years penance as a crusader in the Holy Land.

This brings us to the second book, The Templar Knight, which switches between his story and the story of the second crusade, and his beloved Cecilia doing her own 20 years penance in a convent back home. From her perspective we see the birth pangs of the new Swedish nation, while Arn’s purity of heart, nobility and Christian virtue earn him the respect of Christians and Muslims alike, and make him one of the few crusaders, and very few Templars, to make it out of the Holy Land alive after the disastrous Battle of Tiberias. And finally – finally! – in Birth of the Kingdom Arn returns home determined to use his military skills and considerable wealth to bring peace to his homeland and forge it into a new nation, the kingdom of the Sveas, or Svea Rige, as you might call it.

If you read heroic fantasy for the world-building then medieval Sweden is described in enough detail to suit your every need, with no feeling of anything being contrived just to get a little extra buzz or laugh. (Plucking just one example from the air, like Arn and Cecilia’s wedding night being unable to commence until the archbishop has made it up the stairs to bless them in bed.) If you read it for the military clashing and banging then Arn has it in spades, and the version of Christianity practised by the Swedes – a mixture of literalism, ritual, pragmatism and Marian veneration, all with residual pagan overtones – presses all the right buttons for anyone expecting arcane religions and magic. It’s exactly the same as reading heroic fantasy, except that it isn’t and it’s a guilt-free trip.

Next up: Robert Harris’s Lustrum, follow-up to Imperium, which I have previously reviewed and which has a similar effect.

Note: nothing herein in any way precludes me trying to write heroic fantasy if I ever decide that’s the direction my career should take.