Books

I read this book more than 20 years ago, and remember liking it, so I was worried whether it would hold up to a critical re-read as an adult. This book combines a lot of things that normally are huge turn-offs for me. It’s low-magic fantasy with plenty of war and politics, embedded in a quasi-historical real world setting. Any one thing on that list is often enough to make me completely mentally check out. Luckily in this case the story and characters are well-written and compelling, and the Arthurian legend is both beloved and familiar but also flexible enough to withstand many interpretations. The combined effect is a book that I routinely stayed up hours past my “bedtime” for, eagerly devouring chapter after chapter.

The Crystal Cave is the first book in a series, and the whole story takes place before the birth of Arthur. Instead, it follows the life of Merlin from his childhood as a royal bastard with an unknown father, through his mundane and magical education, and sees him coming into his powers as an advisor and a prophet. One of the things this book does so well is it forces us to see Merlin as a human being, one whose magical gifts aren’t always controlled. We see his seemingly unending need for information and knowledge, and how much of his magic and prophesy are really just a combination of soaking up information and combining it with intellect to suit his needs. He’s a man who has a small amount of magical power, but uses his wits to leverage that into a larger-than-life reputation and political clout.

I know the shape of the myth of King Arthur but not all the details, so I don’t have the clearest sense of what is “canon” and what is unique to this retelling. What I do know is that this book places the coming-of-age of Merlin into a historical context that feels authentic from my admittedly fuzzy point of view. The details of daily life, the scope of the battles and military intelligence, the medicine and engineering were all touched on with a level of care that drew me deeply into the world and held me there. It may not be completely accurate, but the world felt alive and real on every page.

Honestly I was surprised that The Crystal Cave was listed by itself, instead of as the full series like so many other works on this challenge list. It left me wondering if the quality of the later books isn’t up to the level of this one, or whether this was just the most well-known of the series. I loved this one enough to want to keep reading. Honestly my only complaint is that it wasn’t available on Kindle, which made it harder for me to read in bed until the middle of the night like I wanted to.

I’m back with yet another installment in my reading challenge series. This time we’re discussing #86, The Codex Alera Series by Jim Butcher. According to the all-knowing internet, there are 6 books in this series. For this challenge I read the first one, “Furies of Calderon”, published in 2004.

The story has multiple threads, but the main ones follow Amara, a Cursor (a sort of combination courier-spy), and Tavi, an apprentice shepherd. This book is quite action-packed even from the start, when Amara uncovers the scope of a plot to overthrow the First Lord and the treachery of her teacher, Cursor Fidelias. Amara escapes the enemy camp and after reporting to the First Lord is sent to the Calderon region, where she meets Tavi. The boy had seen enemy  scouts, which Amara recognizes are likely part of the larger plot against her Lord. The rest of the story follows them as they both try to warn enough people to mount a defense, and find and report evidence of who is behind the coup attempt.

Their stories take place in a world where almost every person controls furies,  elementals that help them serve various roles depending on which element they can control. So people with wind furies can fly and speed up their attacks, earth furies can raise stone walls from the ground and sense where people are walking, and water furies can help people sense emotions and heal wounds. I think the cool part of this idea isn’t exactly what the furies can do, it’s that everyone in the kingdom has access to this power to some degree. Everyone except Tavi. He can’t do something as simple as turning on a lamp, because he has no control of the tiny fire fury inside.

I think it is quite interesting that supposedly this series is the result of a bet that Jim Butcher couldn’t write a good book based on a lame idea. The world-building seemed really fun. I enjoyed the idea of the furies, and the thoughts about what a world where all people had their own elemental familiars would look like. The plot on the other hand, was merely adequate. The foreshadowing of some plot points felt very heavy-handed, and made the later “surprise” reveals not surprising at all. Actually the biggest surprise to me was that they did not reveal Tavi as the lost grandson of the First Lord. A quick glance at the internet tells me this happens in a later book. It feels a bit bad to have something telegraphed so loudly and yet not pay off until a different novel. Still, the characters and the world were engaging, and the story zipped along in a way that kept me engrossed. I read this one start to finish in just two sittings so it must have done something right!

My reading challenge stalled out for a bit as I tried to make my way through #87, The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. This entry was originally published as 4 novels in 1980-83. The kindle versions I found split the collection into 2 parts, so this review will only focus on the first two “books”.

This story follows Severian, a member of the Torturers’ Guild in a far-future Earth. When I first read that description, it turned me off of the story very quickly, but the Torturers’ Guild was more interesting than I gave it credit for.  Yes, they do in fact torture people, as well as acting as jailers and executioners as part of the justice system of their future world. However, they have a professionalism and a moral code that makes their profession seem tolerable enough to me as a reader to at least engage with the story. They have a job to do and they do it, and you don’t get the sense that they are enjoying the suffering of their “clients”.

The first book, The Shadow of the Torturer, shows us Severian as he is finishing his training, entering full membership in the Guild, and eventually being disgraced and cast out from their tower.  His disgrace is due to his strange loyalty to Vodalus, a revolutionary he encounters at the beginning of the story. That loyalty gets him entangled with Thecla, one of the Guild’s clients and the sister of Vodalus’ lover. Rather than let Thecla’s full sentence be carried out, Severian gives her a knife so she can kill herself quickly. Instead of being tortured and killed himself as he expects, Severian is cast out, given a sword and an assignment as executioner in a faraway city.

The rest of the book follows Severian’s journey from the Guild tower to the outskirts of Nessus, highlighting the city’s sprawl, some of the people who live there, and the general state of the world. Under the light of the dying sun we see a world that obviously used to be beautiful and almost magical which has now faded into decay. Places like the botanical gardens give hints about how magnificent things could have been, but most of the city feels more medieval than futuristic. Through this part of the story, other characters move through Severian’s orbit like in a dream, helped along with fantastic images like a duel to the death with meters-high poison flowers. Just when you think he has a fixed set of companions, they are separated in the chaos of the tunnel exiting the city, and the book abruptly ends.

I enjoyed the first book quite a bit, and on its own I would probably rate it 4/5 stars. Unfortunately the second book lost me, and it is the reason why it’s taken longer than usual to make it through this book challenge entry. In some ways the second book had more narrative cohesion than the second half of the first book. Severian has one constant companion, Jonas, for most of this story. He gets to meet Vodalus again at last, and enters his service. And he gets to enter the House Absolute, the seat of power of the ruler of this land. The plot still staggered around strangely like the first book, but large chunks of it lacked the  dreamy quality that made it work so well the first time, and dragged a bit in a few places. After the second abrupt ending I was not compelled to keep reading and decided to call it quits for now instead of buying the second half.

There’s a definite sense of deeper meanings being written into this work, of allegory and rebirth and redemption. A great deal of that is probably lost without seeing how the next two books turn out. Like a book you’ve been assigned in a literature class, I can see the author is trying to impart more layers to this story but my brain steadfastly refuses to comprehend them unless I take the time to step away for a while to give it more thought. Unlike the Elric stories, which I really want to get back to once I finish this challenge, the underlying story here is less coherent, and I think I’m content to abandon this one. I do suspect that it probably does get better again, as all the dangling threads start getting tied up and those deeper meanings become clearer. If you’ve finished it and enjoyed it I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on how book 2 compares to the later ones.