Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (40 page)

The Grail Conspiracy

by Lynn Sholes and Joe Moore

Midnight Ink, 343 pages, paperback, 2005

The Da Vinci Code
has a lot to answer for. For the past couple of years or more we've had floods of historical-conspiracy novels, rewriting-the-history-of-the-early-Christian-Church novels, Grail-hunting novels, secret-societies-that-seek-to-rule-the-world novels, and so on. Some of these – like
The Rule of Four
by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason and even more so David Hewson's
Lucifer's Shadow
– are very good; most are better than
The Da Vinci Code
itself (not a difficult task); and a few are ... well ...

The Grail Conspiracy
falls into the central category: it's better than
The Da Vinci Code
, but that's about as much as one can say for it. It opens with the chance discovery, amid bloodshed, of the Holy Grail in an Iraqi desert by TV investigative journalist Cotten Stone. The implausibility in that sentence is obvious – no, not the bit about the Grail, the idea of an American TV news channel (Cotten works for "SNN") employing a fleet of investigative journalists.

Cotten smuggles the artefact back home to the US in the hopes of the journalistic scoop of her life, and sure enough that's what comes her way after the goblet has been verified by various scientists and scholars, notably those in the employ of the Vatican. Indirectly linked to the Vatican is the academic and priest John Tyler who, despite being considerably older than Cotten and, like, you know, a
priest
, has a considerable allure so far as she's concerned – and (you've guessed this bit, haven't you?) the attraction's mutual.

But, astonishingly, there are Bad Guys after the Grail as well, and murders start happening all around Cotten and John – at least one of them, a car bomb, intended to have Cotten herself as victim. Behind all this mayhem is, of course, a secret and ancient society made up of Very Rich and Influential Men who want the Grail in order to ... Yes, well, anyway, they want the Grail a lot and don't mind killing to get it. After all, they might be able to avert the imminent Apocalypse.

There's nothing outrageously
wrong
with
The Grail Conspiracy
aside from the occasional clumsily written passage and the obvious two-dimensional nature of the characters, but at the same time there's nothing particularly right about it either. The action scenes are well handled, but there's the feeling about them of having been here before. The plot displays a lack of originality: read a pile of other, similar books, put the best bits of their plots into a bowl, stir well, and – bingo! And the book itself seems to have low aspirations: it's as if it's not
trying
to be anything more than a routine "product".

This is moderate entertainment which, if you're a devotee of historical-conspiracy novels, you can expect to enjoy, well, moderately. Other readers might prefer to look elsewhere.

—Crescent Blues

The Longest Way Home

by Robert Silverberg

Eos, 294 pages, hardback, 2002

Long ago, life evolved on the planet now called Homeworld without any one of several intelligent species establishing overall dominance in the way humankind has on Earth. Possibly the brightest of the species is the one now called the Indigenes, who are very roughly humanoid and probably our equal in intelligence, but of such a different philosophical bent that no comparison would really be possible – their system of thinking sufficiently overlaps with ours for the species to communicate adequately, but full communication is fundamentally impossible.

But then a first wave of colonists arrived from Earth. There was no real conquest, because of the lack of a single dominant species: the Folk, as the descendants of the first wave are now called, simply moved in and effectively became part of the ecosystem. A long while later came another colonial wave from Earth, and this time there was a war of conquest against the Folk; the descendants of the second wave are now called the Masters, and they rule the roost with the Folk as their serfs – in fact, as their slaves, although the Masters are in general benevolent overlords.

Young Joseph, a Master from the south, is staying with family friends on an estate in the north when there is a widespread revolt of the Folk. He alone is spared from massacre on this particular estate, and he decides to quest as best he can the several thousand miles back to his homeland. En route he is assisted by various of the indigenous species – including, for purposes of their own, the Indigenes – as well as some of the Folk, the latter being ignorant of his status as a Master. He has divers adventures, including the loss of his virginity to a Folkish girl.

Joseph gets home in the end, despite being captured by the Folkish army; they have an uneasy armistice with the Masters of the south, and so ship him the last distance.

All of that is a fairly thin plot upon which to construct a novel, and this feeling of thinness is pervasive while reading the book – as if Silverberg, who has demonstrated countless times that he can be a masterful writer when he wants to be, were here working on autopilot. Joseph's adventures are not particularly exciting (although obviously they'd be pretty goddam exciting if you had to live them yourself), and many of his other experiences during the quest seem fairly pedestrian. One is left looking for flashes of Silverberg's conceptual genius for want of a continuous diet of it.

And of those flashes there are a few. One delight is a moderately intelligent – it can talk – native lifeform called the noctambulo, which is possessed of two brains: one brain sleeps during the day and the other during the night, with the result that the daytime noctambulo is an entirely different person from the nighttime one. Joseph is befriended by the nighttime persona of one of these creatures, but with sunrise must struggle to be noticed at all by the other individual living in the same body.

Another treasurable moment occurs when Joseph is treated by one of the Indigenes to an exposition of the Indigene theology. The Indigenes have no objections at all to the terrestrial colonists, because in their view these are but two waves, out of many, of godlings sent by the
real
gods to bring knowledge, albeit in a jumbled fashion, to the intelligent species of Homeworld. Each wave of godlings will stay a while, doing a lot of good things (as directed by the gods) and a lot of bad things (because godlings are pretty flawed emissaries), and then depart. It is tantalizingly implicit in the exposition that the two sets of colonists from Earth are by no means the first waves of "godlings" to have spent some time on Homeworld, although we are given no details of the earlier ones.

But such flashes of delight make up only a small portion of a novel which otherwise, well, plods a bit. Overall, aside from a few elements of graphic sexuality, it reads like a well written but not especially inspiring young-adult novel from the era before writers (and more importantly publishers) of young-adult novels had cottoned on to the fact that the kids are every bit as sophisticated as readers as are their adult counterparts.

The Longest Way Home
can, then, be viewed as Silverberg Lite. As with Bud Lite, there's froth but not a whole lot of body.

—Infinity Plus

Way Station

by Clifford D. Simak

Gollancz, 189 pages, paperback, 2000; reissue of a book originally published in 1963

There was a time between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s when every novel by Clifford Simak seemed to capture the true magic of science fiction, conveying often quite complicated ideas with an astonishing readability and flow, and displaying a delightful expertise in capturing mood and atmosphere – most often the mood and atmosphere of the American Midwest, which seemed to be Simak's natural territory.

Time and Again
(1951),
City
(1952; in fact a fixup of stories from the 1940s),
Ring Around the Sun
(1953),
Time is the Simplest Thing
(1961),
They Walked Like Men
(1962),
Way Station
(1963) and
All Flesh is Grass
(1965) – one by one they came, and one by one they delighted. And then, quite abruptly, he seemed to lose it. His novels from
Why Call Them Back from Heaven?
(1967) onwards are generally enjoyable enough (although progressively less so), yet give the impression of a writer content to tread water.

Most of the novels of Simak's Golden Age are full of action and drama. In this context
Way Station
, often argued to be the greatest of them, is the odd one out. For approximately the first half of the book – perhaps more – the plot is virtually static, the concern being to set up and explore the situation in which the action of the later pages, such as it is, can take place. This of course sounds like a recipe for disaster – one is reminded of the writer
manqué
in George Gissing's
New Grub Street
(1891) who plans a novel about the owners of a corner shop who for three volumes do nothing but own their corner shop – and yet
Way Station
is compulsively readable for all its seeming lack of event. Because what Simak succeeds in doing is to give us a galaxy-spanning space opera all within the restricted confines of a lonely Wisconsin farmhouse.

Enoch Wallace is the occupant of that farmhouse. He was of age to fight in the American Civil War, but soon thereafter, his folks having died, he was approached by a representative of the Galactic Council and asked if his home could be converted into a way station for matter-transmitted travellers through our spiral arm of the Milky Way. Agreeing, he received the gift of immortality, but at the same time had to accept the burden of eternal loneliness, for no human being may ever be permitted to share his secret. Until now, that is, when a covert US Government agency has become intrigued by this unaging eremite ...

It might seem that the stage is being set for a tale of derring-do between the aliens and the snoops, but in fact the plot elements concerning the Government agency are really somewhat tangential, serving partly as a component of the tale's resolution and partly as a quasi-catalyst for the rest. More to the point are the political and religious shenanigans among the member species of the Galactic Council, and the way in which they reach out to affect and eventually focus on Wallace and his humble way station. Like Wallace, we do not directly experience these crises and their consequences until close to the end of the book: instead they are related to us by various of the visiting aliens, and we actually
see
only the tiny but crucial part of the whole that concerns Earth. In the process, however, we are treated to sketchy details of enough alien civilizations and biologies to spark off at least a couple of dozen other, more extrovert space operas.

This is not a flawless work (in his rush towards the resolution, Simak indulges in some pulp plotting), but it is nevertheless a mightily impressive one. Long after the plot itself has faded from the memory – this reviewer could remember nothing of it after thirty years – the situation delineated in the novel remains indelibly imprinted, as does the eloquent capturing of Wallace's solitude, which is not joyless, and of his timelessness of mind. In terms of human society he is an anonymous cypher living out a meaningless, monotonous life; in terms of the true reality he has a richer existence by far than any human before or since. And it will continue to become richer, and to enrich him, for all eternity, whatever the transient events of the world around. It is actually a
disappointment
to the reader that the novel's resolution – which in virtually any other tale would give us the typical sf adrenaline rush as horizons are suddenly hugely expanded for humanity – must inevitably lead to a disruption of this curiously idyllic
status quo
.

Way Station
, the most unusual space opera in all of sf's canon, is a book to treasure, and one to re-read rather more often, perhaps, than once every thirty years.

—Infinity Plus

Worlds Enough & Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction

by Dan Simmons

Eos, 262 pages, paperback, 2002

Dan Simmons is such a fine writer that it's unthinkable that any collection of his stories would be anything less than okay. But, by the same token, one expects a Simmons collection to be a bit
more
than okay, and I'm not too sure this one is.

The five long stories are "Looking for Kelly Dahl" (1995), "Orphans of the Helix" (1999), "The Ninth of Av" (2000), "On K2 With Kanakaredes" (2001) and "The End of Gravity" (2002; original to this collection). The first of these is fantasy; the next three are science fiction; and the final piece is less a story than an edited movie treatment that has touches of quasi-magic realism but is really a straightforward fiction concerned with the roughly contemporary Russian space program.

"Looking for Kelly Dahl" is the story that you're likely to want this book for. Its narrator is a reformed-alcoholic ex-schoolteacher who, in a fit of depression, commits suicide by driving into a disused pit only to discover that, rather than dead, he is in a world created by one of his old pupils, Kelly Dahl, an obviously troubled, intelligent, sexually abused girl who oddly fascinated him while he taught her but of whom he has long ago lost track. He and Kelly are the only occupants of this world, which is composed of tracts of Colorado drawn from different epochs of historical and geological time. Kelly spells the rules out to him on his arrival: the game is that they are to hunt each other, most likely to the death. At the end of the hunt he returns to his original reality – but to discover that there's been a slight change: now there never was a Kelly Dahl under his tutelage; she has existed only in his memory.

A lesser writer would have tied all this together with some neat explanation – some explication of a mechanism that would make all the pieces of the story make sense. Wisely, Simmons doesn't do this: such a reduction would detract from the tale. The piece is beautifully written in a slow leisurely style that adds to the feel of its strangeness.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book is a bit of a downhill slide, and matters aren't helped by the somewhat overblown and certainly overlong introductory material scattered through the book. (I'm a great fan of authors' introductions to their stories, but I several times grew impatient with these.) In his introduction to "Orphans of the Helix" Simmons tells us how he dickered over making it a
Star Trek
screenplay rather than a story, and was pleased that he chose the latter option. Unfortunately, it still reads like a
Star Trek
scenario with the names and details changed a little; it also seems more than somewhat derivative of Larry Niven's
The Integral Trees
(1984), among others.

"The Ninth of Av" has much of the feel of Michael Moorcock's
Dancers at the End of Time
tales, although its far-future decadence plays out against a more "realistic" backdrop – sciencefictional rather than fantasticated. In his prefatory remarks Simmons tells how the piece was commissioned for an anthology of tales set in 3001; racking his brains for something that wouldn't so have changed in the course of a millennium as to be unimaginable today, he came up with the notion that one permanent element of the human condition was antisemitism. Well, ho hum. A potentially fairly strong story is wrecked by this conceit.

Far closer in the future is the setting of "On K2 With Kanakaredes". The Kanakaredes of the title is a young member of a party of alien visitors who have arrived on Earth to observe us from their allocated settlement in the Antarctic. Kanakaredes wishes to experience mountain-climbing, and a somewhat amateurish trio of human mountaineers is dragooned into taking him along on an alpine-style assault up K2. Although somewhat longer than its paradigms, this is really just a straightforward sf tale of the type found aplenty in the US magazines thirty or so years ago – complete with the cheesy denouement. It's not boring, but neither is it especially interesting; it'd help pass a train journey.

The final piece is just plain annoying. The place for movie treatments is, in almost every case, on the desk of a potential movie producer, not in a story collection. It has a plot (of sorts) that might work on the screen but doesn't on the printed page; the characters never materialize because they would require actors to make them complete. There are some nice moments, but ...

By book's end one has the feeling that this whole effort has been rather half-hearted – an impression not one whit dispelled by the sloppy proofreading throughout. Neither is one cheered by the fact that this title was used for a Joe Haldeman novel only a decade ago; surely Simmons and his publisher must have been aware of this, so it's as if they couldn't be bothered looking around for something a tad more original. (It wasn't, to be honest, among Haldeman's more inspired titles to begin with.) One superb story, three acceptable ones and a swiz do not a collection make. We can only hope that Dan Simmons – the
real
Dan Simmons, one's tempted to say – is back putting his whole heart and soul into his next book.

—Infinity Plus