Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (15 page)

The Shroud of the Thwacker

by Chris Elliott

Miramax, 368 pages, hardback, 2005

Struggling 20th-century writer Chris Elliott (a sort of alter ego of the author) is drawn by the prospect of making lots of money to write a book about the unsolved series of grotesque 19th-century Manhattan killings attributed to a mysterious Jack the Thwacker. After all, the case has everything a potboiling writer could want: an anonymous stalker who felled his killers with a back of Mackintosh apples and then turned their mutilated bodies into bizarre tableaux; a detective team comprising NYPD detective Caleb Spencer and his on-again-off-again lover, the spunky yummy-dame journalist Liz Smith, plus Teddy Roosevelt; and above all the suspicion that the murderer might have been someone in a position of high social authority. (Initially Elliott had thought the perpetrator might be Goya, for no particular reason other than that Goya was a famous artist, but had to withdraw that suggestion when Goya's surviving descendants threatened to sue.)

As his "researches" continue, we spend most of our time in the 19th century among the filthy, violent, gaslit alleys of New York City – which the author actually does quite a good job of evoking, even as he triumphantly mangles most of the historical facts – and part of it in the present day, where Elliott, living in the famous Dakota building, must cope with the fact that neighbor Yoko Ono wants to have him evicted, by fair means or foul, so she can convert his apartment into another studio. But will Elliott be drawn not just figuratively but literally into the 19th-century murder plot?

For the first one-third or so of
The Shroud of the Thwacker
the manic inventiveness of the plot, the joyful bawdy broadness of its portrayal of the main characters (I have the feeling the fart-happy buffoon Roosevelt depicted here is far closer to historical reality than the noble-idealist version we customarily meet), the constant barrage of excellently bad jokes and the satirical sideswipes at authors like Caleb Carr, Patricia Cornwell and Dan Brown more than compensate for the frequent examples of clumsy or even downright bad writing. The mixture makes for a merry melange that had me laughing out loud on more pages than not.

But then things begin to flag. The inventiveness is still there, but it seems to have become self-conscious, almost desperate ("Oh, jeez, I've not had a wacky idea for a chapter or two, better think up something
really
outrageous quick!") while the jokes tail off in both number and hilarity. By the book's end the pages are still turning fairly readily, but without great interest, and smiles – let alone laughs – have become increasingly rare. Matters aren't improved by the exceedingly ho-hum illustrations, which seem intended to charm by their amateurishness but succeed only in seeming amateur.

Terry Pratchett need not look to his laurels, but
The Shroud of the Thwacker
has a first hundred pages to die for and is at least moderately entertaining thereafter.

—Crescent Blues

Children of the Star

by Sylvia Engdahl

Meisha Merlin, 721 pages, paperback, 2000; omnibus reissue of books originally published in 1972, 1973 and 1981

This volume contains the three novels
This Star Shall Abide
(1972),
Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains
(1973) and
The Doors of the Universe
(1981).

Many generations ago, the home star of the human species that had evolved on the Six Worlds went nova, vaporizing the six inhabited planets of that solar system and almost completely extinguishing that human species. (Excuse the cumbersome language. Engdahl makes plain that this human culture is not
ours
– it has evolved separately.) Largely because of antiscientism, the species was unprepared for this disaster. A small colony had been established on a planet of another solar system, but only vulnerably so: there are elements within the ecosystem that are antipathetic to human life, while in the far past the world was stripped of its few metals by an alien species. Shortly before the nova a scientific party was sent to bolster this colony and to preserve the human species however they could, despite the hostility of the colonized planet.

En route, the leader of the scientific party concluded that the sole way of ensuring the species survived was to preserve the technology the party was bringing with it by whatever means were necessary: otherwise, within a few decades the means of survival would be squandered. In order to do this he decided to set up something abhorrent to him and to his fellows: a caste system, with the designated Scholars at the top of the tree, under them being the Technicians (who have enough knowledge to maintain the technology) and then the Villagers, who must lead a primitive existence, surviving solely through the technological assistance of the Scholars and Technicians. Sometime later the First Scholar and his followers established a fake religion in order to keep this artificial structure in place – specifically, to give the Villagers what Karl Marx called the Opium of the People in order to dissuade them from rebelling.

As noted, the scientific party found the caste system abhorrent: the Six Worlds culture had believed for centuries that knowledge should be freely available to all, and that no one was the born superior of anyone else. To get around this problem, the First Scholar decreed that the ranks of the Scholars should be replenished not through heredity but by recruiting new members from among those Villagers and Technicians who not only rebelled against the system and the religion, but had the courage to court torture and death in publicly doing so. In other words, the only people who can become Scholars are those who detest the notion of a privileged class, and desire not privilege but truth. With that as their guidance, they are fit to become part of the scientific research programme of the Scholars, which is to discover some way of synthesizing metals so they can build starships in order to search out a more viable homeworld.

That this dream of synthesizing metals is a false one becomes clear in the time of Noren, a village lad who cannot tolerate the foundations upon which this society is based. Convicted of being a heretic, he is passed to the City where the Scholars dwell; he anticipates he will suffer torture and worse, yet feels this is a small price to pay for the retention of his honesty. To his astonishment, he discovers the words of the Prophecy of the Star, the keystone of the religious underpinning of it all, are literally true – albeit misleading – and, more important, are seemingly essential if this human species is to survive. He thus goes through the ordeal of a public recantation of his heresy, thereby graduating to become a Scholar.

And he is regarded as the most promising new scientist for many a long year: if anyone can solve the problem of synthesizing metals, he will be the one. Except that he soon proves to his own satisfaction that the task is impossible, and so must investigate other possibilities ...

The first few pages of this omnibus contain review quotes from the time of the three novels' original publication. This is fairly standard practice; what is less standard is that not all of the reviews are entirely favourable. The
Association of Children's Librarians
, for example, had this to say about
The Doors of the Universe
:

This is a very sophisticated and technical book ... The subject is definitely popular, but the average child in eighth or ninth grade will not be able to comprehend the theme. This book will do better as an adult novel.

Of the trilogy as a whole
Children's Book Review
said:

They will not, unfortunately, be popular [with young people] because the intellectual level and reading difficulty will restrict their circulation to the more intelligent high school students.

The two reviewers were right and they were wrong. Where they were wrong was in grossly underestimating the ability and willingness of young readers to tackle "difficult" themes in their fiction reading: most of them are absolutely bursting for such stuff. Where the reviewers were
right
is that these three novels are indeed in many ways tough reading, whatever the age of the reader. Engdahl's concern here is to present us with a succession of primarily moral but also philosophical problems, none of which have easy answers. The action of the novels is therefore secondary to the ethical wranglings through which Noren, his devoutly religious lover Talyra and the Scholars' Chief Inquisitor Stefred must pick their way. As in Isaac Asimov's original
Foundation
trilogy – to which this trilogy, in an odd way, earns comparison, for both good and ill – much of the "adventure" comes through the play of intellectual ideas rather than through physical thrills and spills. To say the books are very talky would be accurate, although not necessarily a criticism.

But it's an important factor nevertheless in one's enjoyment of the omnibus. For quite a long time while reading it I was thinking how superb it was to have the three novels available back to back, so we could experience the full impact of Engdahl's vision rather than absorbing it in diluted form through reading the novels separately and perhaps years apart. After a while, however, this view changed: I now wish I had indeed read the books separately, because there are so many moral dilemmas being raised here that eventually my brain began to suffer overload. A very good thing of course! And yet ...

So I end up both heartily recommending this book and at the same time doing so with reservations. You will almost certainly come away enriched from
Children of the Star
, but you'll probably find the experience in some ways a gruelling one – this is not an easy read, in any sense of that term. Which is perhaps another way of saying it's an extremely good book.

—Infinity Plus

Enchantress from the Stars

by Sylvia Louise Engdahl, foreword by Lois Lowry, illustrated by Leo & Diane Dillon

Walker, 288 pages, hardback, 2001; illustrated reissue of a book originally published in 1970

Right at the outset this reviewer should confess to having had a long-term love affair with this novel.

At one stage during the 1970s I was sent from the UK on a six-week business trip to the USA, going to various cities. As one does, I picked up fistfuls of disposable paperbacks along the way, most of which got left in anonymous hotel rooms after serving as forgettable mind-fodder. One of them that I picked up, assuming it would be just a way of passing a lonely evening and probably better than American television, was the Atheneum paperback of
Enchantress from the Stars
. I can still vividly remember my astonishment on discovering – I think the view outside the hotel window was downtown Boston – that this was much more than the standard crud. Rather, it was a beautifully written and beautifully conceived book, one of the best sf novels I'd ever read – all the more remarkable, perhaps, in that it was obviously intended for older children rather than adults. It was one of the few books that travelled home with me to the UK, where I naively expected my peer group to be buzzing about it, on the everybody-else-already-knows-about-this-marvel-except-me principle.

Not at all. I was alone in my enthusiasm: no one else around me knew the book at all. Over the years and eventually decades I reread it a few times, and was richly rewarded when my daughter grew to be of an age that she could enjoy it as much as I repeatedly did. Obviously I looked around in UK bookshops for other Engdahl titles, but – although I gather some others were indeed published in the UK – I was never lucky.

It's been perhaps a decade since last I read
Enchantress from the Stars
, so the news that it was being reissued in a redesigned, re-illustrated and re-edited edition was received here at Snarl Towers with great delight. The delight intensified when the book itself arrived: this is an exquisitely lovely piece of design and production, a book made to be treasured forever, with extra copies bought to be given to special friends. The cover by the Dillons should be up for every relevant art award (their illustrations inside are fine, but not so exceptional); in addition, an award should be invented for the book's designer, Ellen Cipriano, whose work here is beyond even the Dillons'. This is one of those books you want to kiss from time to time when no one's looking, it's so beautifully made.

But what of the novel itself? I was naturally a bit nervous about actually reading it. What if nostalgia had coloured the text beyond its real worth?

I needn't have worried. This book is if anything even better than it was the last time I read it.

Young (perhaps aged 20) Elana belongs to a galactic culture called the Federation whose technology and psychology are so far advanced beyond our own that they obey the Clarke law that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". On an early page Engdahl spells out rather more explicitly her own, presumably independently derived, variant of this:

It is by now a well known fact that the human people of the universe have similar histories – not that the specific details are similar, but the same patterns emerge on every home world. Each must pass through three stages: first childhood, when all is full of wonder, when man admits that much is unknown to him, calling it "supernatural", yet believing. Then adolescence, when man discards superstition and reveres science, feeling that he has charted its realms and has only to conquer them – never dreaming that certain "supernatural" wonders should not be set aside, but understood. And at last maturity, when the discovery is made that what was termed "supernatural" has been perfectly natural all along, and is in reality a part of the very science that sought to reject it.

The folk of the Federation, in short, are completely
familiar
with their own technology – Elana doesn't regard any of the marvels she can perform using it as in any way remarkable – while at the same time they're empowered by various abilities that we, still in "adolescence", would regard as belonging to the credulous fringe, notably telepathy and psychokinesis. Yet the Federation people are not superhumans: as human beings they are as vulnerable as the rest of us ... and vulnerable not just physically but emotionally.

One of the duties the Federation has taken upon itself is the succouring of Youngling civilizations – those still in the stages of "childhood" and "adolescence". This task it must perform completely unknown to the Youngling civilizations concerned, for it has been established that overt intervention – and anything on a major scale – is likely, however well intentioned, to deleteriously affect a civilization's continuing evolution towards the level the Federation enjoys.

Elana is the daughter of a Federation field agent whose responsibility it is to silently assist selected Youngling cultures. With him and her assigned fiancé Evrek she is on her way to a family gathering when their starship is diverted to the planet Andrecia. The feudalist ("childhood") culture there is not yet aware that its world has been invaded by the advance party sent by a technological ("adolescence") culture, the Empire, which is intent on establishing a beachhead on Andrecia preparatory to colonizing the planet, with its aboriginals to be herded off into reservations. Elana's father is instructed to send down a team onto Andrecia in the hope of subtly and secretly tweaking affairs so that the Empire is induced to withdraw from the planet and leave the aboriginals to follow their own cultural-evolutionary course. By hook and crook Elana becomes part of that team.

The Empire's military crew has come down in a remote forested area, where they are using a massive mechanism called the rockchewer to clear some terrain for the establishment of the first colony. Because of the rockchewer's long "neck", loud roars and habit of devouring everything in its path, the aboriginals believe it is a dragon. The local king, who emerges as being as brutal as anything you could expect from a feudal society – barbaric executions a speciality – accepts the offers of self-styled heroes to go slay the Dragon of the Enchanted Forest and rid his kingdom of it; their rewards should they succeed (and so far none has ever come back) will be the traditional ones, ranging from half the kingdom through to his daughter's hand in marriage ... or even all the king's wisdom, which is the reward sought by Georyn, the youngest of four sons of a woodcutter who resolve to kill the dragon and acquire glory.

The Federation team of which Elana is part realizes that the weakness in the Empire's armour is its antipathy to "superstition"; if the Empire can be made to believe that at least some of the natives of Andrecia are capable of wielding magical forces then it will withdraw and hereafter regard the planet as fearful and taboo. Elana is therefore set to intercept Georyn and his brothers as they journey towards the king's court, and to find out if any of them have the aptitude to be given a rush course in the "supernatural" powers of the mind.

Georyn and one of his brothers prove to have it, but the brother is soon killed by an Empire psychopath, and so all hopes rest on Georyn's fortitude if the dragon is to be slain and the Empire driven off ...

What no one has reckoned on is that Elana and Georyn might fall in love, which they do despite the presence of Evrek as part of the Federation team. Their love, however, can never be allowed to reach fulfilment, for it would be as impossible for Elana to stay on Andrecia as it would be for Georyn to be plucked out of his own culture and introduced into the Federation: the cultural gap is simply too large.

The tale of this inevitably frustrated romance is a large part of the appeal of
Enchantress from the Stars
(Elana is an enchantress in more than one sense), and of course the story of how Georyn in the end, through his own courage, eventually defeats the dragon is another.

But the book is very much more than this. Ringing through its pages is an extraordinarily appealing faith in humanity – not in leaders or prophets, to be sure, but in common or garden human beings, whatever the level of the culture in which they happen to be fixed. Elana comes to learn that Georyn is in every way her moral and intellectual equal, despite the fact that he sees –
can only see
– his world in terms of enchantments and "supernatural" forces; and she learns that the same is true also of Jarel, a medic sent along as part of the Empire's expeditionary force: although his leaders believe in such retrogressive notions as conquest, he (and hence presumably countless other subjects of the Empire, who in a simplistic
Star Wars
-type scenario might be regarded as mere mindless clones, and thereby legitimate laser-fodder) believes the act the Empire is preparing to commit to be a deeply criminal one, and that the Empire's designation of the Andrecian aboriginals as "subhuman" is merely a trick of thinking designed to obscure the stark immorality of the Empire's plans. These (and much else there is no room to describe here) are deeper philosophical points than, alas, one is accustomed to encountering in children's sf.

Another matter of significant interest about
Enchantress from the Stars
is the way its story is
told
. Most of the narrative is related in the first person by Elana, but large parts are told in the form of the much later legend the Andrecians have derived concerning the actions of the quasi-historic hero Georyn, who with the aid of an otherworldly Enchantress once slew a Dragon. As a result of this dual mode of telling (triple, really, because there are a few sections told in the third person) the novel has sometimes been described as a science fantasy or just as a fantasy. The fact of the matter is that it is neither of these: one of its many great achievements is that it is without a doubt a science-fiction novel, yet one which has a massive amount to say about the emergence and evolution of fantasy and legend. Metafiction is, thus, a primary component of this book; and yet there's no sense that anything so pompous-seeming is being thrust upon the reader, for
Enchantress from the Stars
never stops being a riveting tale, and can be fully enjoyed on that level alone.

Enchantress from the Stars
was originally published as a children's book, and thereby failed to gain the more widespread recognition it so manifestly deserved; it received a Newbery Honor in 1971 and the Phoenix Award in 1990, but has generally been ignored in sf/fantasy circles. The new and lovingly created reissue is likewise aimed at the children's market. This is a sensible decision from the commercial viewpoint, because it's likely to sell ten times as many copies that way; but this time round, hopefully, it will be recognized also as not just a novel for young adults but also as one of sf's great classics. The only possible complaint one can make is that, after finishing it, you will likely find yourself disinclined for a while to pick up anything else in the genre for fear it will, as it were, taste of ashes.

In sum, it is almost impossible to convey how good this book is. Please just read it.

—Infinity Plus