Recent reading is all accidentally historical fantasy

I started with rereading A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay. I still like it! I fell off reading Kay at a certain point and am not planning to run to keep up with the stuff he’s written in the last ten years, but I do like going back. I had entirely forgotten the plot of this one, I enjoyed being swept up in it as though for the first time. Melodrama about the hinge-points of lives and kingdoms set in slightly-fantasy alt versions of bits of history: it’s Kay’s thing, he does it well. He gets more polish in later books but has the heart of what he’s doing here.

Notes: it is so easy to knock people unconscious with a sharp blow to the head and this never causes problems. Every named female character wants to sleep with the protagonist if the book considers them figures of desire (the two exceptions are, respectively, old and disabled.) The words ‘nuance,’ ‘implications,’ and ‘complexities,’ are used as often as they possibly can be, and it is funny to me that Kay loves the sense of subtlety so much he always waves at it with great sweeping gestures. This is a book that underlines everything in gold ink and then repeats it to be sure you noticed. That is a thing I enjoy about it, though I do have a dosage limit, I went in to reread one of the Sarantine books and two Kays in one month is too much for me. I finished it, but haven’t gone on to read the second half of the story.

But it does mean I have read two Byzantine books this month: I am awake at five am because of high billowing winds outside, so I just finally finished M.T. Anderson’s Nicked, a book about a Byzantine saint heist conducted by a monk who can’t tell a lie to save his life and a con artist who can never be pinned down on a truth. (They fuck.) I did not find this propulsive exactly, I put it down for a week here and a fortnight there even though it’s very short. But I do like it a great deal. It is funny, neat, precise in its blending of formal and informal language, vividly descriptive in few words, going off into flights of abstraction and poetry. I see why George Saunders is blurbing it. The opening invocation includes the line ‘Though I am an unbeliever, I pray for faith,’ and faith and holiness are things this book about stealing a saint’s bones for reasons mainly of tourism cares about and respects. Also, travellers’ tales from the period are true and there is actually a nation of people with the heads of dogs, we meet one in the first paragraph.

I am now listening to an audiobook of Kushiel’s Dart, by Jacqueline Carey, which I’ve not read before. One can guess from Arbonne that Guy Gavriel Kay is interested in bdsm because there’s a lot of power-play and erotic masked balls and people getting tied to beds by wicked seductress Italians. One can guess that Carey is into bdsm because the protagonist is the chosen one of the bdsm angel and receives training at the bdsm guild. This one is also set in fantasy-France (so I’ve gone France, Byzantium, France, Byzantium): there is scheming, mentorship, foreshadowed grief, sex, and people who despite living in a society consisting solely of incredibly beautiful people are even more beautiful than that. I am having a good time.

Recent reading was not actually all historical fantasy, I lied.

From Hell, by Alan Moore.

I wonder what this would’ve been like in black and white. This is a book about Jack the Ripper’s killings, and it was interesting to see when this edition’s colourist chose to use black instead of red for blood. I read it because a media podcast I listen to, Shelved by Genre, is doing a run of Alan Moore. I am more interested in the podcast than I was in this book. I want them to tell me about Jack the Ripper scholarship, and British comics takes on Jack the Ripper (supernatural elements thereof) and this book in its context. I think the book is good and I didn’t need to read it, I got to the end and went ‘okay, I could’ve stopped in the middle, but I guess I needed to read to the end to discover that.’

(Also, why would you call this book The Master Edition? Maybe I am too attuned by Le Guin’s thoughts about the word Mastery. Maybe they thought it through, maybe they thought it was apt for this book full of the deliberate symbolic weight of men doing violence against women and Man doing violence against Woman.)

Tripoint, by C J Cherryh.

Which is also among the kinds of violence this book involves. The first of them, anyway: actually the second not so much. I do not recommend this as a place to start Cherryh because the emotional dynamics of the start of it made me put it down and go read various other things I’ve just posted about. It makes me think that I found Merchanter’s Luck so palatable in contrast to other Cherryh because its main characters start out in positions of deep control and competence. Do they stay there? Are the places they start in healthy ones? Not necessarily! But there is a comfort to it. Which this book does not have at all, the protagonist has very little to hold onto in life except a bad relationship with his mother. Also, Cherryh does not miss the opportunity to invent a kind of hyperspace travel that involves physical discomfort and sedative-hazed dreams about incest that might drive you insane. There’s one Diana Wynne Jones story in which a writer uses the sensory experience of being tiredly slumped over a keyboard drinking coffee and trying to finish a draft novel to write umpteen heroic captains at the controls of spaceships battling through physical discomfort, and I want to reread it to see if I think Jones read Cherryh directly before writing it.

Anyway! Do the emotional dynamics of this book get less fucked-up by the end? …arguably they get more so, but in a more bearable-to-me-personally way.