Shards of Empire, by Susan Shwartz

Shards of Empire

Susan Shwartz

Can I review the Library of Congress annotation and the book jacket descriptions of this novel?  Well, neither related much to the book.  Both say it's set in the 10th century.  No, it takes place in the 1070s.  I was clued to this fact when the Verangian guards were throwing out insults to each other about leaving their brains at Hastings.  Why future Verangian guards would have been at Hastings is quite another question.  They have their nerve making comments about arrows in dear Harold's eye when he had just trounced them at Stamford Bridge!  But I digress.  The description is correct up to the main character's return to Constantinople, after which it bears little to no resemblance to what happens in the novel.  I don't mean it was made more lurid or interesting which shouldn't happen in a LOC annotation anyway, but that it outlines a story that just plain doesn't happen in the book.

Ah, but you say, don't judge a book by its cover, not even by its LOC annotation.  OK, then I will judge it on its own merits, though it may not come out ahead that way.

Leo is a disgraced son of a great Byzantine family fighting with the Basileus Romanus when almost everyone else but the Verangians and Leo desert him in the midst of battle.  He sticks with his emperor who ultimately dies all but in his arms due to burned out eyes that got infected.  This is what is meant by Leo being disgraced.  A priest who is also a mage is after him now for fear he will try to make himself emperor. So Leo leaves the city for the burbs, the far burbs, to become a hermit.  He meets Ashara again, a Jewish woman who had shown kindness to Romanus at his blinding.  Wandering about in ancient caves some force draws the two together and they fall in love.  The rest of the novel is about Leo preparing the locals for onslaughts of Turks amidst earthquakes and other threats.  Oh and there is this cool Verangian guard who affixes himself to Leo and provides both mystery and comic relief.  (The Jewish women love that he will eat everything put in front of him.)

It is obvious that Shwartz had a great time writing this novel.  I can't say I had as good a time reading it.  The word I would assign to this book is "forgetful".  Often throughout the novel the author will repeat a sentence or the sense of it just one or two lines later, as if she forgot she already said that.  One major plot point, a holy man's suggestion that maybe they should just let the Turks come live in their towns, seems to meet with Leo's and other's approval, but then they gird their loins for war and have a bloody time of it.

And I just don't know why this novel needed a werewolf in it.  It did not fit in with the "one from column A and one from column B" mystical backdrop of the novel.    In a class I took on fantasy writing we were told to develop the "world" in which a story would take place, a strange world but consistent within itself.  In Shards of Empire the spiritual influences jump all over the place, Christian, Jew, Goddess religion, folk religion, whatever the werewolf is.  There are elements that just don't seem to be part of any known tradition, like a living stone goddess in childbirth.  It is an uneasy assemblage, bordering on Hieronymus Bosch.  Only not as good as he did it.

I did enjoy the story in spite of its prominent warts.   It was full of love, sex and adventure and had a not-overly-heroic hero, a nice difference.  I just kept wondering if anyone read it through before it was published.

I downloaded this book from the national Library Services' BARD site and listened to it on my lovely new digital "talking book" machine.

The Ruby in Her Navel, by Barry Undsworth

The Ruby in Her Navel

Barry Undsworth

Thurston Beauchamp is a half Saxon half Norman young man living in Sicily where the Norman Roger is now king. His knight father suddenly decided to become a monk, giving away all his patrimony to the abbey, so Thurston is left to live a double life un-knighted.  His double life is as the purveyor of the king's entertainment, a cover for his job for the Office of Control as a purse bearer.  That is, as he scouts for acts throughout Italy and Sicily, he also carries secret gold to pay informers, conspirators, and to his added dismay, an assassin.  He is basically what they call an "D-personality", a fellow who has a rather rigid view of the world based on knightly virtues.  He worships his king, seeing his role in the Kingdom of Sicily as one of the creatures in the murky depths under the king's silver ship of state dealing with the other denizens who must be put to use to maintain the seamy underpinnings - sorry about the mixed metaphors - that hold the king in place.  In other words, he is an idealist and a born dupe.

The others in this tale play on Thurston's illusions, and illusions abound.  Watch for glowing white images and mirrors that distort reality.  That might keep you clued in better than Thurston.  His boss is a Saracen he admires and who has affection for him, but is aware of irregularities in Thurston's activities suspecting  worser than Thurston's silly motivations.  Alicia, an old love from his page days who suddenly reemerges bears watching.  Nesrine, the belly dancer, teaches Thurston something about independence and real integrity.  The underworld kingpen Muhammed proves more moral and steadfast than the knights and king Thurston worships.

I found the book absolutely required that I keep reading in order to enjoy it.  I did not like Thurston much.  He was just too easily swayed, too rigorous in his immaturity.  As I encountered the distorted images symbols I started to warm to the novel.   Watch here too for comparisons of what the Latins, Greeks, Muslims and Jews bring to the illusions and how the thorough outsiders, the entertainers, break through them.

One thing I expected to be resolved in the novel never really was, and that is why Thurston's father dropped out of society.   All you learn is that he was a prisoner after being captured in a battle between nobles, was imprisoned for six months, and has a particular antagonism towards the Byzantine acceptance of homosexuality.  Whatever expectations or understanding of his choice to literally cloister himself go nowhere, unless it is simply to suggest that his father also dropped out disillusioned, as Thurston is fated to do.

I downloaded this novel as a digital file from the national Library Services for the Blind etc.

Libertas, by Alistair Forrest

Libertas

Alistair Forrest

My regular readers are watching me spread my wings and read novels from other than the Middle Ages. Thanks to the proliferation of independent publishing, and in the case of Libertas, many more small publishers, divers authors' love for and knowledge of so many more times and places is becoming available. This novel is a case in point.

The time is the first century BC, the place Roman Spain. I should say "grudgingly Roman" Spain, but then that is one of the themes of this novel. Pito is a young boy whose heritage goes back to the seafaring Phoenicians. He lives in a town in south central Iberia which has been "civilized" by Roman influences. The Romans did an excellent job of coming in to a culture, offering the best of their civilization, sewage disposal, clean wells, communications systems, and so forth, and winning their tacit support of "the Roman Way". The trouble is that the Romans did not stop there. Ultimately it was the sword they wielded to command loyalty. In Libertas what Pito and his people face is Julius Caesar just as he is angling to be God and Emperor. The two sons of the great Pompey are in Spain to try to keep it Julius-free, part of the on-going and fascinating struggle between republicanism and dictatorship throughout the Roman Empire. The younger, Sextus, is a charismatic and fun-loving fellow, very clever and just flexible enough to be a survivor. He befriends Pito, who turns out to have a flair for engineering and invention in general. He develops a signaling system to warn the republican armies of Julius Caesar's movements. Sadly the resistance is not successful, many of the leaders are killed, and the rest are refugees. Pito's family is enslaved and he leaves with no less a celebrity as Agrippa for Rome.

Thanks to mischance Pito winds up in Sicilia, which just happens to be where Sextus has flown. He remains and helps this old friend to develop some improvements in weaponry in exchange for Sextus finding and rescuing his family, who are now slaves in Rome. It is the downfall of Julius Caesar, "Et tu, Brute" and all that, that facilitates their emancipation. Pito and family return to Spain where they discover that in Caesar's wake the petty warlords they set up have gone to town, especially Arsay, Pito's long archenemy. Arsay is a real S.O.B. and is crucifying people right and left. The mountain people, Celts I assume, are only too happy to help Pito and his friends fight Arsay's force. They are outnumbered and "outgunned" and though encouraged by a talking eagle who tells Pito to get over himself, Pito is not so sure they can win.

There are several things I really liked about this novel. One is that it takes place in a new time and place for me. I mean, I have read about the depredations of Julius Caesar in Gaul in Druids by Morgan Llywelyn, and about the Peninsula Wars in Portugal and Spain in Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels, but putting Spain and the Roman era together was fascinating. I am starting to want to know more and more about more and more times and places. I personally find historical fiction offers a more human and identifiable way of telling about a place and time, so I am in hog heaven with books like Libertas.

One thing I have discovered about myself is that I am most drawn to novels with what they call in Hollywood "a good ensemble cast". Translated to novels, that means distinct characters who are believable because they think differently, they talk differently and they act differently. Forrest did a fine job with this. Besides Pito, who is daring but painfully aware of the odds he is up against, and Sextus who is not surprisingly bound to become a sort of swashbuckling pirate, there are Liandra, Pito's early girlfriend who becomes a leader and warrior in her own right - nicely done, Alistair! - Ziri, the Berber who is mystical, Pito's mountain friends who are rather like Native Americans in that they live on the land, value it, and stick to themselves, Agrippa, valiant and capable, and, of course, Arsay, the epitome of the big dumb bully who is nevertheless able to take over.

The spirituality in this novel tends to an amalgam of polytheism, angels, mystical monotheism, and Earth religions. Eagles symbolize for Pito and the reader the overwhelming power of the elemental. One eagle promised Pito he would be a light to his people.  And in regard to that, the next thing I liked about this novel is how Pito handles this knowledge, not at all the brave and bold hero but with self-doubt, fear he has to fight to control, and plenty of humility.

“Libertas” in this novel is not just freedom from oppression of the Romans but Pito’s invitation to and initiation into what the author calls “covenant”, a bonding and promise between people that is their free choice, and the sort of freedom symbolized by the eagles and their flight, their oversight of all below. In contrast, the villain Arsay subscribes to eagles as a spiritual force, but he wore eagle feathers, as a way to co-opt the power for himself.

My single favorite thing in the novel is one line, describing Agrippa's men's departure from the nomad camp where they have stayed for some days: “the hardened soldiers among us were moved, waving last farewells to the women each had befriended.” Befriended! What a wonderful way to describe the bonding, even temporarily of sexual partners! What a female-positive and refreshing approach to the whole issue of soldiers and the women they take to their beds while in foreign places. I think Richard Sharpe would understand that line. Along with Liandra and her companion Cassia it is clear from this characterization of friendship between the sexes that Forrest embraces the strength of women. Bravo!

There were times when I thought the action skipped forward too abruptly,the plot becoming ragged.  Aetna eripts while Pito is in Sicilia, but I am unsure what the point of this was as it did not seem to me to advance the story.  Nevertheless this was a thoughtful and at the same time exciting novel.

The publisher, Queastor, sent me a copy of the digital file of this book in exchange for a review, which I have finally gotten to. I read it using the text-to-speech feature on my Kindle 2.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Post #175.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

The very first novel in the English language was Samuel Richardson's Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded, composed as a series of letters written by the heroine to the folks back at home.  The epistolary style of story telling has been used often, and that is the case with The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  Through letters and a few cables  exchanged by an author and a number of her acquaintances, we are presented with character development  in each person's own words as well as the gradual unfolding of a human drama that could not get more personal.

Juliet Ashton is a journalist and author who penned a series of columns for the newspaper in England during World War II.  When these columns are published as a book, Juliet feels the pressure to follow this first success with another writing project.   As she is agonizing over the familiar, to authors, "do I have a second book in me?" angst, she received a letter from a man on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a Dawsy Adams, who bought a used book by Charles Lamb that had once belonged to her.  Their ensuing correspondence introduces Juliet to the hardships and tragedies of the residents of the island which was occupied by Nazi Germany and then blockaded by Allied navies.  The reader comes to know a range of both sympathetic and unpleasant characters both through their own letters or through stories written about them in others'.  The one person who is not part of the correspondence is Elizabeth, a charmingly heroic figure who was taken away to a concentration camp for defying the Nazi authorities. As she first writes to islanders then writes to her editor and others about her own stay on Guernsey, she realizes that Elizabeth's story is her next book.

The title seems frivolous, but this is by no means a "light" novel.  It is full of hope, despair, loss and mindless cruelty.  It is a love story but more it is about the courage of a group of friends and neighbors who endure often alongside the occupying soldiers the privations and dangers of the occupation.  The mother-daughter team of authors' success with defining individual voices for each of the correspondents and for showing only what each one can know on his or her own is meticulous.

This is the July book for Let's Read Historical Novels, a monthly book discussion group conducted via voice chat at Accessibleworld.org, to which you are cordially invited whether you are visually impaired or not.  I downloaded and read this book from the National Library Seivices' BARD catalogue.

The Sallee Rovers, by M. Kei (Pirates of the Narrow Seas)

The Sallee Rovers   - Kndle Editiion
Can also be found in Pirates of the Narrow Seas - Paperback

M. Kei

Pirates of the Narrow Seas

Imagine a novel about life on a tall ship during the age of the corsairs, privateers and pirates written by someone who has sailed as part of the crew of such a ship.  That is exactly what you have with the Pirates of the Narrow Seas series.  I don't see how you could be more thoroughly immersed in the time and the reality of such a life.  The author, M. Kei, knows not only the terminology but has faced many of the challenges and dangers his characters do.  The result is exciting, captivating, rich and authentic.

In the first book of the series, The Sallee Rovers, we meet Royal Navy Lieutenant Peter Thornton who is just happy to have gotten a position on a ship so soon after his unexpected promotion.  Joy of joys, his best friend, Roger Perry, will be one of the other lieutenants aboard the HMS Ajax.  Peter is in love with Roger, but it is not until they are aboard the Ajax that Peter, who can be rather impulsive, informs Roger of his feelings.  He is rebuffed but not cruelly.  His real trouble is that the inept captain of the Ajax doesn't like him, for no apparent reason than he doesn't like Peter's vibes.  Roger tells Peter it's his lack of social skills but nothing Peter does makes the captain happy.  When the Ajax comes upon a Spanish galley that is sinking, Peter insists he will not leave the stricken craft unless the galley slaves are freed from their chains.  The Ajax leaves the slaves, Peter and two other crew members to drown.   One of the freed slaves is a striking North African man called Captain Tangle by the British.  He is dying of galley fever, but with Peter's help he manages to get the galley to shore and regains his health.  In the meantime Peter learns that Tangel is an important man in his Sallee Republic and a legendary corsair.  he also learns that Tangle wants what Roger did not: Peter. Through a series of events Peter winds up remaining with Tangle, being forced to choose where his loyalties will lie, and confused from day to day about his choices.

This novel is first and foremost an action-packed swashbuckler of the Captain Blood tradition.  The sailing scenes, the battle scenes, all of it is taut, fast paced and engrossing.  The characters both large and small are well drawn, individual, and appealing in their individual ways.  The author calls The Sallee Rovers a period novel as opposed to a historical novel, the distinction being that Kei is not attempting to retell historical events or portray historical people  but rather to offer an original slice of a sort of general 17th-18th century pirate story.  Never has a period novel felt so historical, thanks to the technical and historical detail Kei brings to it.

Peter is quite a complex character.  He seems rarely certain of anything, but that is because he has conflicting passions, not because he is indecisive, and he has to guard those conflicts and not share them.  Though a central part of the novel is a gay love story, this is not at all a gay novel any more than most novels are "heterosexual novels".  The fact that Peter is gay means he has lots more conflict, between religion and his sexual preference, between risking hanging for sodomy if he remains with the Ajax,and with whether he wants to pursue the relationship with Tangle, a man who though he prefers men, is very much in love with and involved with his wife.  For Peter it needs to be more than a sexual relationship.  For Tangle it already is in spite of his multiple partners.  He tells Peter, "You complete me."

Peter is the sort of character who leaves the reader feeling as ambivalent and anxious as he does.  That is the hallmark of a well-understood and well-written character.  His emotions and your own about him are indistinguishable.

The faults I found were rather trivial.  I have to admit that though the details regarding the ships and so forth were amazing, I found the intricate descriptions of clothing tiresome.  Fortunately they are short and not too many, and admittedly that is a personal issue for me.  The novel ends quite abruptly, but with the promise that the next novel in the series will take the story the next step. 

One thing I dearly hope is that readers will not ghettoize novels like The Sallee Rovers because the protagonist is gay.  If they do, they, like certain men who will not read a novel or see a film about a woman,  are erecting an artificial barrier to enjoyment of a ripping good yarn.  If I did not have a couple dozen other books to read next, I would be right on to Volume 2, Men of Honor.

Mr. Kei, by the way, is at this very moment part of the crew aboard the Kalmar Nyckel!

Mr. Kei's editor arranged for me to receive a Kindle edition of this novel so I could read it using text to speech which they wisely have enabled for all readers.  Thanks.. I wish more authors would broaden their readership this way.

A Serpent's Tale, by Ariana Frankliln

A Serpent's Tale

Ariana Frankliln

Mistress of the Art of Death Mystery Series

The Fair Rosamund is dead, poisoned by an unknown hand. The Bishop, Adelia Aguilar's former lover and the father of her child, asks her to investigate the murder in order to avoid a civil war between the king, Henry II, and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who is bound to be blamed.  Enter the famous labyrinth and a severe and crippling blizzard and you have all the props and plot twists you need for this CSI Oxfordshire episode.

This was my first Adelia Aquilar mystery, and I did mostly like Adelia herself.  She is all about her intelligenc and not at all fashion obsessed, unlike the Ursula Blanchards of the historical fictional world.  I liked the era too, the 12th century, and found the characters as an ensemble pretty satisfying.

I would venture to say the clues were just too easy, as I pretty much figured it all out about halfway through the novel.  There seemed to be a lot of cross-dressing going on, with underlying hints of homosexual relationships, both male and female.  That, I reasoned, had to be a clue or the book was just sloppy.  The former proved to be the case. 

Throw in some proto-feminism and a whole lot of "royal worship", ascribing far sighted and progressive qualities to Eleanor and Henry II, and you basically have this novel.  There is a phenomenon among many women readers, I have discovered, of extraordinary attachment to certain kings.  The most notable, of course, is the Ricardian Obsession, i.e. Richard III.  Then there are the Edward II groupies.  This was my first exposure to Henry II worship.  It seemed as if Franklin would not thank anyone for mentioning Thomas à Becket, whom she assails bitterly not only in the novel but in her author's note.

This was an easy read, satisfying most of the time, a little creepy in places.. everyone has their bugaboo issue in reading.. child sexual abuse, rape, in my case, animal cruelty featuring a cat, and this book has mine.  I skipped that part, something I once told another reviewer disqualified her from reviewing... mea culpa.  For some reason Franklin made Rosamund fat, perhaps to show that henry preferred women who were ample and comfortable, as opposed to Eleanor's sharpness.

I downloaded the novel from National Library Services' BARD site.

Gentlemen of the Road, by Michael Chambom

Gentlemen of the Road

Michael Chabon

When in the author's note at the end of this very short novel the author, Micherl Chabon, says that when he originally told people he was calling the novel "Jews with Swords" they all laughed.  e said they pictured Woody Allen wisecracking as he backed towards the exit sign.  What that tells me is that Mr. Chabon was not counting on many readers like me, and I suspect you, who immerse ourselves in novels where all kinds of people and creatures have swords.  Not only Jews, but priests, women, little girls, even a cat or two.  "Jews with Swords" would have received a interested, "Really?  Cool."

Gentlemen of the Road is an odd but entertaining little book.  It is billed as very funny, but while there were a couple lines that got a guffaw out of me -- notably the Norse battleaxe named "Defiler of your Mother" -- I found it more tongue in cheek than outright funny.  It's a situation comedy, taking place in Central Asia in about the 950s,  the situation being that two loners, a Frankish Jew named Zelkgman and an Abyssinian Jew named Amram find themselves fighting for a young prince of a Jewish kingdom, Khazaria, against Norsemen whom the Hussarian's usurper has let into his country to exterminate Mohammedans.    The two "gentlemen of the road" start the story by pulling a scam on a whole caravansary full of travelers,  but quickly find themselves, while wanting to throttle the prince who is constantly complaining, frying to fulfill a vow to protect him.  They manage to accomplish this primarily by trickery, in spite of a revelation about the young fellow that threatens the entrie mission.

Gentlemen of the Road is supposed to be an entertaining and rather absuird bit of swashbuckling, and in this it is a total success.  The characters are appealing and vivid and you really aren't supposed to take very mucn -- I take that back, anything seriously.  Get the book.  Read it. Enjoy.  Mazeltov.

I downloaded this novel from the National Library Services' BARD site.  It is not even five hours long.

Please let me know if I mi spelled the characters' names.  I listened to a sound recording of the book and did not see how proper nouns are spelled.

The Cross-legged Knight, by Candace Robb - Owen Archer Mystery Series

The Cross-legged Knight

Candace Robb

Owen Archer Mystery Series

I read Candace Robb’s The Cross-legged Knight a couple years ago along with all but the two most recent in the series. Reading it again was like coming among old friends again. I make no secret of being nuts about Owen Archer, the male half of Robb’s detective team with his wife, apothecary Lucy Wilton. He is sexy, sharp, thoughtful, very much in love with his wife. And he wears an eye patch. What’s not to love?

In The Cross-legged Knight Owen, who works for the Archbishop of York as captain of his palace guards, has an annoying task, to protect the visiting Bishop of Winchester and to investigate two incidents the bishop is convinced are efforts by his enemy, John of Gaunt, to intimidate him. First he is narrowly missed by a tile that fell from a stack of scrap masonry from the in progress Lady Chapel. When a young woman is found dead in the undercroft after a fire damages a house the bishop owns the paranoid man cares less for the victim than in casting himself in that role. To complicate matters, the young woman is a midwife and healer who had attentively treated Lucy after a serious fall and a miscarriage for whom Owen feels extra affection. At home Owen and Lucy are giving a rocky time of it as the miscarriage has thrown the latter into a depression that worries him and makes her testy and morose. His duties are both a burden, taking time from his marriage, and a relief, as he feels so powerless to help her.

The reference in the title to the “cross-legged knight” is to Sir Ranulf, whose widow blames the bishop for abandoning during ransom negotiations with the French in whose court the old knight had been planted as a spy. While the investigation of the two “attacks” on the bishop’s life continues, suspicion for the midwife’s murder, for murder it proves to be, points a finger at a few different suspects including her husband, family members and retainers of the angry widow, and members of the bishop’s household.

You have the same wonderful panoply of well drawn and appealing characters you find in most of the Owen Archer stories. Besides Owen and Lucy, you have the Archbishop, stern and ever suspicious of Archer’s loyalties. There is Magda Digby, the river woman, an unrepentant pagan with a real talent for healing body and mind and a most amusing manner of referring to herself in the third person. Other members of the Archer-Wilton household and their neighbors include Jasper, Lucy’s young apprentice, Dame Philippa, her senile aunt, and Bess and Tom, the keepers of the York Tavern next door. At the Minster is the irrepressible Brother Michaelo. Robb manages ably to acquaint readers with these characters even if they have not read any of the other novels. Yet another “character” is the England of the end of Edward III’s reign, full of ambitious men and women plotting for control of the next regime.

One thing I must admit I find less than satisfactory is Robb’s invention of an apothecary shop that sounds more like a pharmacy of the modern era, where someone can come in with a cough or a bellyache and get a “prescription” filled. This is a common convention of medieval historical fiction and one that has no resemblance to reality. Lucy an d Jasper go so far as to make up little packets of cough syrup and keep them on the counter. I half expect them to come up with a line of deodorants and toothpaste to sell. Can a housewares section be far behind?

The novel does not tie up all loose ends. The murderer is caught but his punishment is uncertain. It turns out he knew the murdered woman in the past, but you don’t find out how. And Lucy may have finally recovered from her funk enough to make love to Owen, but she is still afraid the depression will return. Whether these elements make the novel better or ultimately unsatisfying is up, I guess, to the reader.

This happens to be the only Candace Robb novel that has made it into the downloadable books catalogue at the National Library Service’s BARD collection, but that is where I got it. Once you have experience the digital books it is very hard to go back to the often damaged cassette books being phased out. I suppose one must be thankful that any of a particular series of novels made it there, but it’s hard not to be impatient.