Hench: A Novel (Natalie Zina Walschots, 2020)

[amazon]

This book has been on my to-read list for a while, ever since I happened to see the author in some Twitter conversation earlier this year (I don’t remember the context, for better or worse). Anyone who’s known me for any length of time is probably aware that I love stories that subvert expectations and explore the perspectives of characters who normally tend to be glossed over (villains, servants, etc), or which attempt to interrogate tropes through the lens of “what if we take it seriously and let reality ensue”. I also tend to enjoy what I’ll call “competence porn”, which it looked like this might be (it is). If anything, this book seemed too perfectly designed to push my buttons so I worried it might be too good to be true, but I was cautiously optimistic nonetheless.

I finally got around to reading it (in more or less one sitting) this week, and, well. I did end up having some quibbles here and there (as I tend to do; I’ll get into them later in this review), but overall I can’t help but say I absolutely loved it. It feels weird to say something so explicitly positive, but it’s true.

Hench is an ambitious book (especially for an author’s first novel) that is willing to engage with a lot of complex and charged topics and unabashedly take sides, while remaining fast-paced and entertaining, and it genuinely impressed me. It is also very refreshing to see a story like this in which the main characters have no powers and the narrative is firmly on their side. We need more books like this.

 

Monthly Spotlight: Good Omens

I wasn’t going to do this. I mentioned this book way back during the Terry Pratchett spotlight, and that was going to be it, even though it’s one of my favourite books of all time. It’s not as if it needs my recommending it, I’m sure 99% of you have already read it anyway. But then the TV adaptation was released a month ago, and here we are because it’s amazing and I love it.

So what did I say about it in the past?

My favourite non-Discworld work is without question Good Omens, co-written with Neil Gaiman, which almost got a full post to itself. Whilst I do enjoy Mr Gaiman’s works, he’s probably not going to feature here again, but Good Omens is a work of genius. I can’t really talk about it too much without giving away the plot, but the short version is that an angel and a demon team up to try and stop the Apocalypse because they quite like Earth. Featuring the Antichrist, the Four Horsemen, dire prophecies and all the old classics, and I guarantee none of them are what you’d expect.

A television series is currently in development, hopefully coming out on Amazon later this year. I am very excited about this. There’s also a very good BBC radio adaptation.

Well, that’s all very true. Let’s go a little further now. Just in case there somehow is anyone reading this who hasn’t read it, I’m not going to go into too much detail about the plot.

[Before Loten gets too far into a plot overview, I think it’s also worth doing a quick thematic one. Good Omens has a few things at its core: a silly comedy of errors, a well-deserved parody of Christian eschatology, a fundamentally humanistic message, and (depending on your goggles) a story about deep friendship or gay romance. None of these things are particularly surprising if you know anything about the authors, really, but it’s worth pointing them out nonetheless. I do think the humanism is an important aspect of the story and one I don’t see discussed as much; it’s also not a religion-antagonistic humanism, so even if you’re not an atheist, give the story a chance, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.]

Our joint protagonists are the demon Crowley and the angel Aziraphale. They both live on Earth and follow the orders of their respective superiors, tempting and blessing humans at various points, ostensibly opposing one another and trying to win souls to their side. In reality they first met in the Garden of Eden, they’ve known one another for six thousand years or so, they realised a long time ago that they have more in common with one another – and with humanity – than with their fellows, and would much rather be left alone to enjoy life.

Then Crowley is handed the baby Antichrist and ordered to kick off the end of the world. Both Heaven and Hell are very keen that this should happen because they want to fight each other and are of course each convinced that their side will win. Crowley and Aziraphale would really rather not, thank you, and decide to help bring up the Son of Satan with a more balanced view of the world in the hope that he’ll decide not to destroy it when he comes into his power.

Of course it doesn’t work the way they planned – human error is a far stronger force than any divine power – and eleven years later they find themselves racing to try and avert the apocalypse with no idea of what’s going on and with their own teams trying to stop them. The rest of the cast include the Four Horsemen, the descendant of the last witch in England (who foresaw all this), the last witch-finders in England, a few people in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the Antichrist himself.

It’s a fantastic book. It’s funny the whole way through, the drama moves at a good pace and the characters are wonderful. And the recent Amazon Prime adaptation is easily the best TV adaptation I’ve ever seen.

It ought to be, really, since it was written by Neil Gaiman and co-produced by him and Rob Wilkins on behalf of Terry Pratchett. Getting Good Omens to the screen was one of Pratchett’s last requests and nobody’s been allowed to mess with it too much, and it’s obvious that everyone involved loved what they were doing. (I’ve seen a few reviews complaining that it’s too faithful to the book, which confuses me since to my mind the point of adapting a book is to transfer the book to the shiny screen, not to retell it in the process.)

There are some additions, particularly Aziraphale’s superiors in Heaven, who were taken from the sequel that was sadly never written. There’s additional material covering more of Crowley and Aziraphale’s history and an ending dealing with the consequences of their defiance. Sadly some things were cut – the Other Four Horsemen just didn’t have time to ride out, and the Antichrist himself has reduced screen time apparently because of the regulations around child actors. Almost all the jokes made it in, even if some of them wouldn’t be noticeable to someone who hadn’t read the book.

[I do think there were a few things that didn’t quite work well in adaptation, and some of the things that were cut (like the bikers) really were an unfortunate loss because that was one of my favourite moments in the book, but it’s still damn good and one of the best book adaptations I’ve seen in a long time. I do think that people unfamiliar with the source material might struggle to understand (or just miss) some things, or be confused why some jokes or plotlines are getting focus relative to others. Also, YMMV as to whether all of the jokes land: in order to preserve the wordplay and jokes that only work verbally, they chose to have the series be narrated by the Voice of God. That allowed them to get a lot of things in that couldn’t have worked otherwise, but it can feel a bit pedantic at times (I didn’t mind it at all the first time through, but it can grate a little on repeat viewing).]

The casting is absolutely superb. David Tennant is Crowley, completely. I wasn’t sure about Michael Sheen as Aziraphale when it was announced but the first trailer sold me immediately. Ned Dennehy as Hastur nearly stole the show [he absolutely did for me] and almost everyone else was spot on, with some cameos that probably escaped most non-British viewers.

[There are some other things worth discussing about the casting, too. They clearly went out of their way to have a diverse cast both in terms of race and gender, which I did find occasionally jarring, but usually in a good way; it was just such a pleasant surprise to see how committed they were to it. I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but this might be worth discussing further in the comments. Anathema being American was the one we found strangest, but it’s not as though it actually harmed anything.]

And, of course, the show is its own fanfiction. (I wish I could take credit for this line, I can’t remember who said it because I’ve read quite a lot of reviews for this show by now.) It’s really about the relationship between Crowley and Aziraphale, with the apocalypse happening in the background.

The vast majority of the fandom ships them to some extent. Not always sexually, but you know, fandoms gonna fan. The official stance of the writers has always been, more or less, “Well, we didn’t actually intend it that way when we wrote them, but we can see why.” (One reason I love both authors is that they’ve never lashed out or mocked their fans for having different headcanons.) Gaiman decided to lean hard into it and Tennant and Sheen happily played along.

Tor’s review says it all (beware spoilers if you haven’t watched it yet): https://www.tor.com/2019/06/04/the-good-omens-miniseries-is-a-love-story-and-i-will-never-recover-from-it/

I could go on for pages about this, I have a lot of FEELINGS, but I’ll refrain. If you haven’t read the book yet, do it now. If you haven’t seen the show yet it is absolutely worth finally taking that free trial Amazon keeps waving in your face – it will be coming to DVD eventually but it’s more than good enough to justify seeing it as soon as possible. It makes me very happy and I’ve already rewatched it more than once. [So have I.]

As a final addendum, there’s inevitably been some backlash from a lot of very angry Christians who missed the point completely (watched with some bewilderment by a lot of other Christians who possess basic comprehension). Bless their little cotton socks, the group who started a petition to cancel it must be feeling a little silly now after approximately half the population of the internet pointed out that none of the 20,000 frothing balls of blind outrage who signed it had spotted that the petition was aimed at Netflix, rather than Amazon Prime.

Netflix very nicely promised not to make any more.

Amazon offered to cancel Stranger Things if Netflix cancelled Good Omens.

Neil Gaiman just enjoyed watching it happen, as did a lot of other people.

Now go watch the show again.

 

Monthly Spotlight: Naomi Novik’s Temeraire

One day I will get around to the next spotlight on my planned list, I swear. But last week I picked up the first Temeraire novel and he is the most adorable dragon ever and everyone needs to read these books immediately.

Captain Will Laurence is serving in the Navy during the Napoleonic War when his ship defeats and captures a French vessel that has a dragon egg on board. When it hatches the baby dragon will only accept a harness and a name from him, so he has to leave the Navy to join the Aviation Corps as a dragon rider. For some reason he’s initially not very happy about this, but the dragon – who he names Temeraire after a famous ship – wins him over through sheer cuteness, more or less. Temeraire is very intelligent, and he is incredibly curious about everything, very enthusiastic, and sweetly attached to his rider.

All I knew about these books going in was ‘Napoleonic War with dragons’. Nobody told me how goddamn cute said dragons were. Inevitably for a Fantasyland-esque protagonist there’s a degree of Sueishness – Temeraire is not only a rare breed but the rarest of the rare with all the special things ever, and Laurence easily sees and solves all sorts of problems none of the veteran aviators do – but I don’t care, because dragons.

Novik is a great author with a good eye for detail, and she’s managed to balance the addition of dragons to the war. There are still ships and cannon and everything else, and it all makes sense together; not everything is explained but there aren’t any obvious holes. The rider training is handled more sensibly than a lot of books do it and there’s a decent variety of characters, human and dragon. The dragons feel convincing as well; they’re not just big scaly humans, they don’t necessarily share their riders’ views or values, and there are a lot of different breeds with different abilities and levels of intelligence. Most of them don’t breathe fire but have a nice variety of other skills.

The combat is pretty epic too. Hard not to be excited by fighting taking place on dragonback.

I’ve currently binged my way through the first three and a bit books – there are nine in total. It’s going some very interesting places. Laurence and Temeraire haven’t spent all that much time actually dealing with the war; they’ve been travelling, dealing with various diplomatic issues arising from Temeraire being a Chinese dragon, gifted to France, who was never meant to end up in England, and they’ve seen a lot of other cultures and how they treat their dragons. Abolition is being debated in human society at the time and Temeraire’s getting very interested in the question of dragon rights. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes because I don’t think it’s going to be the predictable and unrealistic fairytale solution that most series would throw out.

Why can’t someone adapt awesome stuff like this for TV instead of producing utter garbage? I saw the trailer for the upcoming His Dark Materials show recently. They’ve clearly rushed to do it on a very, very small budget and it looks awful. Given the great source material it’s surprising nobody’s managed to do anything half decent; this may be the worst attempt yet. And we’re not even going to talk about Game of Thrones. Though I can’t complain too much, Good Omens is coming out at the end of this month and looks amazing.

 

Monthly Spotlight: W R Gingell’s Shards of a Broken Sword

Thanks all for your comments on the post regarding the Harry Potter continuation, I appreciate the understanding.

Another shorter spotlight this month, for a trilogy of shorter books. These are a fairly quick read, but they’re funny and sweet and well plotted. Each of the three stands alone, but there is a core plot winding through them as well that ties it all together – the Fae are slowly beginning to take over human lands, and the broken sword of the title holds the key to banishing them, and various characters come across shards of the blade while enacting their own stories.

In Twelve Days of Faery a young enchantress comes to break the curse on a prince that seriously injures or kills any eligible woman he comes into contact with. The story is told from the point of view of King Markon, the prince’s father; the enchantress, Althea, is probably my favourite of the various characters.

In Fire in the Blood a dragon is bound to help a prince (not the same prince) pass the trials that will let him rescue a princess. I can’t say much else without spoilers but suffice to say things aren’t quite what they seem.

In The First Chill of Autumn we learn what the shards actually mean and what the main plot is, and various characters reunite to help the Chosen Ones attempt to remake the sword and banish the Fae.

W R Gingell has written quite a few other series and standalones, mostly dealing with fairy tales in some way and from the sound of things also some mythology and some modern urban fantasy. I have some of them in my waiting-to-be-read pile, and others I’m sure I’ll get to eventually, because her books are fun and happy and interesting.

In other news, I did a thing! More precisely, an author interview! Someone on fanfiction.net contacted me, they run a SSHG Facebook page and wanted to interview me. If that’s something that interests you, you can find it:

Here: https://relishredshoes.tumblr.com/post/184220751800/interview-taken-from-the-severus-snape-and
here: http://www.facebook.com/groups/199718373383293/
here: http://www.tumblr.com/blog/relishredshoes
and here: http://sshg-hub.livejournal.com/129691.html

 

Harry Potter, going forward

It’s time to address the elephant in the room that is the Harry Potter series. I keep getting asked whether it’s going to continue, which is understandable given how long it’s been. (Incidentally, I see all comments, not just the ones on the most recent posts. If your comment isn’t about the newest post, please try and leave it on a relevant post instead.)

The honest answer at this point is that I don’t know. I want to keep going but every time I think of starting up the next chapter I just don’t have the motivation. When we started, it was supposed to be fun; we were supposed to enjoy at least the first two books and gradually ease in to the bad stuff later on, and slowly pick it apart over time while still preserving the good parts. Yeah, that didn’t happen.

I never thought these books were the most amazing literature to ever grace the earth, but I really didn’t think they were this bad, and part of me doesn’t want to keep going because I don’t want to end up actively hating them. This series has been a huge part of my life and had a tremendous impact on who I am, dumb as that is, because of what it led to, and I don’t want to lose that or taint the memories. I’m also still planning to write more fanfics someday (ah, the elusive someday), and while I don’t think I’m ever going to end up hating my favourite characters specifically, I’m not going to be able to write about them if I hate literally everything about their entire universe and canon history.

Rowling is really not helping matters by her constant gleeful abuse of a very, very dead horse. Everything she says about the franchise makes me dislike it more, which makes me harsher when analysing it, which makes my opinion sink further.

So I don’t know. I’m doing some thinking and juggling some ideas, I’ll try to come up with a way to keep going without burning out and ruining things for me (obviously in consultation with Mitchell). It might be that he takes over and I just drop the occasional comment, though he’s not much more motivated than I am at this point. It might be that we stop doing every single chapter and just cover scenes we think are worth discussing. Not promising anything, it might well be that we stop completely.

[Honestly, the most likely outcome is that I take over so that the brunt of the impact falls on me. It helps that I’m more comfortable hating them than Loten is, so that particular issue isn’t a deterrent for me, but it’s still a matter of not knowing when I’ll have the energy. I’ve tried to start the next chapter on my own a couple of times and didn’t get anywhere, but I’m not giving up yet. One of the reasons we started this project was that it was something to do together, after all, and doing it separately is less appealing. There are a lot of things in the series I do think are well worth getting to, but I guess we’ll have to see.]

I am aware that most of you are only here for Harry Potter content and that the other stuff gets far, far less attention, but so it goes.

 

Character Development vs Character Assassination, a Failure Mode Analysis

Well, hello there. This is Mitchell, the person you’ve probably forgotten exists because I’ve barely written anything substantial for the better part of two years (fuck depression and fuck the ability of politics to exacerbate depression), but technically this is my blog too. I’m back to talk about a story about wizards and how it disappointed me. No, not that one, sorry. The other one.

Over two years ago, I wrote this post, and, more significantly, the Magic: the Gathering fanfic I link to in it. That context may be helpful to understand the rest of this post, but I’ll try to write this in a way that is comprehensible without it. I mainly want to use this opportunity to talk about character development, what makes it work and ways it can go wrong, but in order to do that I’ll need to go into detail about this particular example.

Honestly, writing about this at all is a bit self-indulgent, but please bear with me, I think there are some useful lessons to take from it.

 

Monthly Spotlight: J Zachary Pike’s The Dark Profit Saga

Once again my planned spotlight for this month was thrown aside due to me being very impressed by something new. The series isn’t finished yet but I’m recommending it anyway; these books are fantastic comic fantasy, and you should read them immediately. They have a very Dark Lord of Derkholm feeling and touches of Pratchett, and really there’s no higher praise than that.

The Dark Profit saga currently comprises two books, Orconomics and Son of a Liche – the titles alone should give you some idea of what the series is like. I’m now waiting impatiently for the third and final book, Dragonfired.

The series is set in a world where DnD-style campaigns are real, essentially – there’s an official Guild of Heroes who operate under licence and the economy depends on a stock market driven by quest speculation and shares of loot tables. It gets as silly as you might expect, but it’s also thoroughly worked out and well plotted rather than just being a joke. Various firms navigating and/or manipulating this market is one of the… four, I would say? main story threads.

The primary story follows our band of protagonist-adventurers; two mages, a ranger, a bard, a cleric, a fighter and a berserker. The party interactions are deliberately reminiscent of someone’s DnD group but it’s not over the top; they’re all developed enough to be people, and we’re given just enough backstory and time in the heads of most of them to understand them without it all being vomited at us. In the first book they undertake a fairly standard quest; in the second book they try to deal with the fallout after it all goes horribly, horribly wrong.

There’s also an undead army with a very strong marketing department holding recruitment drives and forming committees.

Under all the jokes – and they are fantastic jokes; my favourite scene in the series is someone making a veiled dig at the old Lord of the Rings saw about why didn’t they just take the giant eagles to Mordor, and the response is that the giant eagles are unionised and the Heroes’ Guild can’t afford their fees – is an actual serious plot founded in Fantasyland racism. Races in this world are divided into Lightlings – humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes – and Shadowkin – goblins, ogres, orcs, trolls, kobolds, gnolls, gremlins. At the start the Shadowkin are able to apply for NPC status, letting them get jobs in Lightling settlements and giving them papers protecting them from hero attacks, but that’s affecting the money generated from the system, so various factions start doing shady things to stir up conflict. As the story develops we see a few main characters slowly understanding the racism the Shadowkin have endured that they never noticed before, and the message about class privilege is very well done.

There’s also possibly the best pun I’ve ever encountered, regarding a book called the Retconomicon. It’s been a long time since I literally laughed out loud, especially in public.

Really can’t recommend these enough. They can’t quite decide if they want to be satire or if they want to have an actual serious plot, so they do both, and they do it very well.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have Pokemon Generation 8 spoilers to scrutinise very closely.

 

Monthly Spotlight: Ellis Peters’ Cadfael

A belated Happy New Year to you all. This month we’re taking a look at a historical murder mystery series; possibly one of the first, begun in 1977.

There are twenty Cadfael novels, set in Shrewsbury, England, during the 12th century. I’m not generally a big fan of crime novels and mysteries, but I find the historical ones interesting because of the ways characters have to find to solve things without the benefits of modern technology, and this series also benefits from great characters and an enjoyable writing style.

Cadfael is a Benedictine monk and most of the stories take place in and around the Abbey and its grounds. He’s the herbalist and medicine-maker for the monastery and ends up drawn into the various crimes because unlike his fellow monks he came to the life late and has real-world experience to draw on; he was a soldier in one of the many Crusades and thus has some expertise in wounds and much more advanced medical techniques.

He’s a nice cheerful protagonist, with a good balance of cynicism and optimism; he’s curious about the world around him and a very good judge of human nature, and his fellow monks aren’t just bland stereotypes but distinct personalities and they feel like a very real group of people, with all the problems that entails. The various heroes and villains of the books are all well developed (including the women; the whole series is surprisingly progressive and equal considering the setting) and mostly sympathetic, and again all feel very real. There’s a bit of humour running through everything and some clever twists here and there, and according to people far more knowledgeable than I am the whole series is very historically accurate and touches on a lot of real events of the period. Some of the happy endings are a little trite, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The first in the series is A Morbid Taste for Bones; the individual plots all stand alone so it’s not absolutely necessary to read them in order, but there are recurring characters and minor plot threads so it’s probably a good idea.

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There is a TV adaptation comprising thirteen episodes, though I haven’t managed to see all of them yet. Very sensibly they stuck to adapting the books and made no attempt to write original stories. A lot of the monks are superbly cast, I all but applauded Oswin (the actor plays a very similar character in the British soap Emmerdale) and Jerome and Robert are perfectly irritating and wonderfully punchable, particularly Jerome. Season One’s Hugh Beringar is also good, which makes it hard to like his successors.

Derek Jacobi is a great actor but in my opinion wrong for Cadfael, he’s not humourous enough or peasant enough (and certainly not Welsh enough, Cadfael being Welsh is a minor plot point in several books rather than merely authorial whim), though he did grow on me over time. A lot of the side role actors are really, really bad, though there are some gems who hopefully advanced their careers. (I think a lot of them did, I spent some time thinking ‘Aaargh who is that’ in almost every episode.) Acting aside, the adaptation is fairly good and fairly faithful to the source material, though as ever the books are better and occasionally there are some bizarre leaps away from the original. I’m not sure how easy some of the plots would be to follow without knowledge of the books, though; it’s easy to lose track of who’s who.

There are also a scattering of radio episodes that I haven’t managed to find, and all the books are available on audio.

 

Monthly Spotlight: Wilkie Martin’s Unhuman

Another short one this month, and another new thing rather than an old favourite – we’ll be seeing more lengthy rambles about established obsessions next year, I imagine.

There are four books in the Unhuman series: Inspector Hobbes and the Blood, Inspector Hobbes and the Curse, Inspector Hobbes and the Gold Diggers, and Inspector Hobbes and the Bones. Despite the titles, the inspector is not the protagonist; while he is arguably the main character, the narrative is provided by Andy Caplet, a reporter for the local newspaper who is assigned to shadow a notorious policeman and spends the whole series in a state of complete confusion finding out that absolutely nothing about the world is what he thought it was. The reader will sympathise.

The best way I can think to describe these books is… imagine if P G Wodehouse decided to write urban fantasy. The series has that eccentric and very British whimsy to it, and frequently borders on the farcical. I didn’t realise at first; I was reading an omnibus edition and the blurb provided with it implied that these are more typical paranormal mysteries. Once I figured out what sort of world this actually was and stopped yelling ‘but that wouldn’t happen that way!’ at every page I enjoyed them a hell of a lot. They are very silly, fun reads, perfect for miserable winter afternoons in a comfy chair.

A brief caveat – in my opinion the fourth book wasn’t as good. The series feels like a trilogy with a later book tacked on when it proved to be successful, which never works out. But it was still enjoyable enough.

I don’t have much else to say – if you want a fun way to pass the time for a few hours, you’ll probably enjoy these.

Now for next month: obviously I’m going to be a little busy around the end of December, so there won’t be a spotlight. We’ll pick back up in the new year. And I know I’ve been vaguely promising for a long time but I will also attempt to get back to Chamber of Secrets, before the franchise finally dies a slow and lingering bloody death.

 

Monthly Spotlight: Charlie N Holmberg’s Paper Magician

A short one this month, I’ve not been well – The Paper Magician, The Glass Magician and The Master Magician. (There’s a sequel story, The Plastic Magician, in the same world but with different characters; I haven’t got around to it yet but I will someday.) Holmberg has written other things that sound good and that are on my ever-lengthening list, but these were the first of hers I picked up and I was utterly charmed by them.

Our protagonist is Ceony, a young woman recently graduated from magic school and apprenticed to a senior magician. The magic system in these books is original and interesting – every magician bonds to a single element (you can guess three of the possibilities from the titles above but they may well literally be endless) and can only use that single element. Within that apparently narrow restriction Holmberg finds lots of really creative ways for her characters to do some very cool things, which is always a favourite for me where magic is concerned. You wouldn’t think paper was all that useful, but…

I suppose these count as young adult. The setting is carefully unspecified but feels Victorian-ish (I believe the fourth book is set a few years later). I’m not going to say much more because you really should go into these unspoiled if possible. The characters are funny and sweet and the story is clever and they’re just happy, well thought out books. In trying to describe them to Mitchell I said they felt like a fluffier Tamora Pierce, if that helps anyone, though there’s a solid and action-filled plot under the cute.

(…it’s also going to be pretty obvious for anyone who knows me even slightly to pick out why I like them long before the end of the first book. But that’s neither here nor there.)