Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (45 page)

Games Dead People Play, and Other Stories

by C.S. Thompson

iUniverse, 114 pages, paperback, 2001

One major purpose of most novels is to paint a world, the world in which its characters move and breathe and follow the actions of the plot. That world may be one of the unnamed moons of Saturn, or a different part of the Earth, or just down the street from the reader's home; wherever its physical location in space or in time, it is nevertheless an alien world to the reader in that it is one formed and moulded by the perceptions of the novel's protagonists. If a novel succeeds in the painting of its world, then it can just about get away with deficiencies in other areas – plot, for example.

By contrast, short stories tend to be much more plot-focused. Especially in genre fictions, they may neglect altogether the depiction of that alien world, and likewise characterization of the protagonists, to concentrate on the plot. (Whether this is a good or bad thing is not pertinent here.)

These thoughts came to the forefront of my mind while reading this intriguing collection of somewhat noir, somewhat fantasticated short and short-short stories, because many of them, taken singly, hardly function as short stories in the traditional sense at all. Rather, they are vignettes, snapshots taken of a world that is far more fully depicted by the assemblage as a whole than in any one of its constituent items. Not
all
of the stories in
Games Dead People Play
are like this: some are excellent and complete stories in their own right, and would stand perfectly well alone. But even they benefit by, as at the same time they give benefit to, the overall affect presented by the assemblage.

In other words, the collection can be read and appreciated almost as if it were a very unusually constructed novel, one in which not everything is explicit – there are gaps to be filled in by the reader's imagination – and in which the order of proceedings is not necessarily a reliable guide to the order of events.

Some of the stories share characters. Some overtly share the same setting: Nottamun, which can be either a sort of mini-Chicago or a big town that is seeing its own essence being leached from it by the ruthless force of history, depending upon the viewpoint that seems most germane to the individual tale; this dichotomy is perfectly comprehensible to anyone who has been in somewhere like Nottamun. Others of the tales, while nowhere stated as being set in Nottamun, could as easily be located there as anywhere else. There is a coherence to the depiction of this world.

The tales themselves are generally of small-time gangsters – big fish in the small pond of Nottamun, but small ones in any other terms – of murderers, of those who live on or beyond the fringes of the law, or of those whose lives are affected in some strong way by any of the foregoing. Some of the tales draw heavily upon the supernatural, such as the title story, whose protagonist is murdered but does not die; all give the impression that, even if the supernatural is not on stage during
this
particular segment of Thompson's world-depiction, it is waiting in the wings, its cold breath audible to the players. Perhaps the feel of the book is best expressed by Thompson's dedication: "To all the ghosts in the stones of the city."

As noted, some of the individual stories are gems in their own right. I was particularly taken by "City at Night", a brightly gleaming miniature – it can't be more than about a thousand words long – that begins "We live on an uninhabited world" and, within its tiny scope, presents a searing portrait of the alienation of modern urban life; and by "White Noise", again very short, which should be read by every Anne Rice wannabe who thinks a vampire story has to be at least four hundred pages long to create its effect.

The closing story, "Until the Day we Die", powerfully shows the final hours of a gangster boss who knows that the river of time is bearing the coracle that is his own life inexorably towards the moment of death; none of that power is lost by the fact that we already know from one of the book's earlier stories, set later in time, just how and where the gangster will meet his end. That earlier story, "Ghost Town", is another powerful exercise in its own right, depicting the coexistence of romantic and seedy subjective realities, as focused upon the figure of Wendy, who seems to all her male worshippers to be an almost unattainable goddess whom they alone have the good fortune to, as it were, succeed in attaining – all of them.

There are one or two weak and contrived segments in the twenty-part world-depiction that Thompson presents here. "The Valley of Silvio Cezar" is the prime example, having an uncomfortable self-consciousness about it, as if someone had foolishly told Thompson to concentrate on plot at the expense of all else. But these lapses are perfectly excusable in the context of the whole.

This is a very short book – not only can you read it in an evening but you'll even have some of the evening left over – yet it is undoubtedly a very good one. Reading it at a sitting is almost certainly the best way to appreciate it, to be most effectively sucked into its world. It is a visit you may have great difficulty in forgetting.

—Infinity Plus

The Book of Revelation

by Rupert Thomson

Vintage, 260 pages, paperback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 1999

A white dancer-choreographer, at work in Amsterdam, is accosted by three hooded women whom he assumes are fans; the first he realizes otherwise is when he notices they have slipped a hypodermic into the back of his hand. When he wakes he finds himself in a room that is featureless save for the starkest accoutrements of bondage around the walls. For what he later discovers is a period of eighteen days he is subjected by the three masked women to escalating levels of inventive sexual and sadistic humiliation and torment: one day his naked, blindfolded body is used as the table/tableau for an invited banquet of unseen guests; another, his foreskin is crudely pierced with a screwdriver so that he may be chained by it to the wall. He attempts to personalize his captors, despite their anti-personalizing hoods, which they never shed; he believes that he succeeds in this, though perhaps all he observes are incomplete jigsaws whose not quite interlocking pieces comprise tones of voice, glimpsed birthmarks and vaginas, body languages and body morphologies.

Released abruptly back into the land of the living he realizes that he cannot explain himself and his absence. The dancer with whom he has lived assumes he has been indulging in a wild fling; his description of the truth is met with blank incredulity, and so he opts for a more plausible lie that is similarly disbelieved. Unceremoniously dumped, he embarks on a years-long campaign of seduction among the women of Amsterdam whose purpose is not consummation but identification: only when women are naked might he have a chance of recognizing them. After hundreds of conquests, however, he realizes that the viewed female bodies whose characteristics were once so firmly imprinted upon his mind have now become, perhaps, overlayered by all the others he has scrutinized.

After a long period of dislocation during which he is unable to establish any relationship with a woman beyond adding her body to the extending (but dismissed) identity parade in his mind, he discovers new love with a black woman, Juliette (Thomson deliberately keeps most of the characters in this novel as cyphers, but Juliette is a joyous exception); she is certainly innocent because none of his captors was black.

Finally, meeting a woman in a bar, he is convinced that he has discovered one of the three rapists. Following her to the lavatory, he rips the clothes from her and tries unsuccessfully and finally apologetically to find the identificatory marks; he ends up in jail, where still he cannot bring himself to confess to his new (and analogous) captors what happened to him. Only in the last couple of pages can he start making the revelation that is the book you, the reader, hold in your hands.

Rationalized fantasy, to use a technical term, is not often a fertile field. For every time that an author has knowingly created a work of major impact to fantasy that consciously omits the elements commonly regarded as
essential to
fantasy, there are a thousand extremely tedious failures. The task for the writer is an extremely complex and convoluted one: (a) to understand the heart, the core, and the entire sensibility of fantasy; (b) to deconstruct all of this, so that one is left with a barebones; (c) to erect upon that barebones a structure that bears all the appurtenances of fantasy yet is not in itself a tale that must necessarily be fantasticated – one knows it
could
have happened at the same time as one knows it never did, that this is a fictional/fantasticated construct.

It's a neat trick that very few have been able to pull off. John Fowles did it with
The Magus
(1965) and
The French Lieutenant's Woman
(1969), in both of which reality eternally shifts. Theodore Roszak did it with
Flicker
(1991). Valerie Martin did it with
Mary Reilly
(1990). Donna Tarrt did it with
The Secret History
(1992) – Carlos Ruiz Zafon's
The Shadow of the Wind
is a masterpiece of this form. There are other examples – while reading this novel I found myself constantly thinking of Kafka – but essentially we're talking about a select crew. In the case of
The Book of Revelation
we discover ourselves in the presence of someone who has been captivated into the land of Faerie – he is away for a longer or shorter time (and who can decide?) than has elapsed during his absence. At the same moment he is desperately telling himself that the thing he has gone through is reducible to the mundane – as if men are constantly being seized by predatory and preternatural women. He is entering a conspiracy to eliminate the possibility of the fantastic, even though he himself is the one who has endured the fantastic – the Tom or Tam who has survived Faerie and its cruelties.

This is a novel which can be taken in terms of its surface as a psychological thriller of sorts, but it's very much more than that. It both subverts and substantiates what fantasy is all about. It survives in the mind long after the reading is done.

—Infinity Plus

The Assassins of Tamurin

by S.D. Tower

HarperCollins Eos, 454 pages, hardback, 2003

Young Lale was discovered as a baby floating down the river by the natives of a remote village in Fantasyland. She is reared by them but not loved – indeed, she is made the scapegoat for all their ills. After one serious error she is socially ostracized by them, and so she flees to make her way in the world. Soon she is picked up by the Despotana (female Despot) of a neighbouring country, Tamurin. Taken there, she is schooled and eventually graduates to become, as she thinks, a religious acolyte. However, the Despotana's supposed convent is in fact a training academy for spies ...

And so on.

This is an amiable enough tale and it's rather nicely written in a very simple, almost simplistic style; in most contexts the plainness of the prose might be tedious, even irksome, but here it works well. Lale is a likable heroine, and her best buddy Dilara is an extremely appealing figure.

However, despite the appeal of the telling, the tale eventually does indeed become tedious, because there seems to be nothing new here. There's a certain amount of magic, but nothing we've not seen before; overall, there's surprisingly little fantasy at all in this novel except for the fact that it's set in a Fantasyland ... which is much like any other Fantasyland, although at least not a straightforward clone of Middle-Earth.

"S.D. Tower" is apparently, to judge by the cover flap and the book's Acknowledgements, the joint pseudonym of "an artist and the internationally published author (under another name) of espionage thrillers". This may give a clue as to why
The Assassins of Tamurin
is so unambitious in terms of its content. There is, of course, absolutely no reason in theory why artists and the authors of spy thrillers shouldn't write groundbreaking fantasies – just think of Mervyn Peake as a fantasy-writing artist! – but this particular book has the air of one whose authors are proudly re-inventing the wheel. It hardly needs to be said that a good many authors of generic fantasy do exactly this, repeatedly, and neither have the excuse of unfamiliarity with the field nor write so nicely; but that's a consideration of little relevance to the reader.

On the evidence of
The Assassins of Tamurin
, S.D. Tower may be an author to watch for the future, but with only moderate expectations.

Special mention should be made of the cover illustration, which is by Mark Harrison. Although it's in fact quite simple, it's very striking, probably due to the strength of its composition, and genuinely evocative. It made this reviewer's disappointment in the text perhaps more acute than otherwise might have been the case.

—Infinity Plus

Big Planet

by Jack Vance

Gollancz, 218 pages, paperback, 2000; reissue of a book originally published in this form in 1978

There have been countless sf novels over the years set on huge planetary surfaces or their equivalents, the prime examples probably being Larry Niven's
Ringworld
(1970) and Bob Shaw's
Orbitsville
(1975). It was perhaps as a result of the success of these two novels that in 1978 there was published in book form Jack Vance's 1952
Startling Stories
serial that is widely regarded as having been the granddaddy of them all. Although it was good that the book was back in print, and a restored version at that – earlier, 1950s book editions having been cut – the reissue may have been a bad publishing move, since, despite its title, Vance's novel has very little in common with those other works.

For a start, it cannot sensibly be read as sf (although it has a sciencefictional underpinning) but is picaresque fantasy of a kind vaguely reminiscent in some ways of the works of James Branch Cabell and in others of those of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The term "planetary romance" is often used in connection with this work to indicate that, while fantasy, it's not quite science fantasy (there's nothing supernatural or magical here), yet it's not really science fiction either. There is no genuine attempt to persuade the reader that the events of this book could ever really happen, no invocation of the voluntary suspension of disbelief; while it wouldn't be impossible deliberately to
stage
such events, the chances of them ever coming about otherwise are so close to zero as makes no difference.

This isn't just a fusspot and fundamentally irrelevant terminological matter. Rather, it relates to the way in which one can read
Big Planet
– and it also explains the reference to Cabell a few lines ago. The art of world-building in either fantasy or sf includes the conscious attempt to convince the reader that the world built somehow "really" exists, even if its landscapes are purely mental ones and endure only until the book is closed. Like Cabell, Vance in this book (and of course others) declined the chance at world-building, preferring instead to construct scenarios which the reader is forced to accept purely on their own terms.

This is an extremely difficult writing trick to pull off – well, anybody can
do
it, but the difficulty lies in keeping the reader's interest sustained. After all, as a single example, a basic requisite for engrossing fiction is generally taken to be the creation of plausible characters to whom the reader can relate emotionally (and, depending on the character, identify with). But, if the setting of the novel is merely a painted backdrop upon which the artist's brushstrokes are perfectly visible, it is constantly borne in upon the reader that the characters, too, are mere artifices. Who cares about the fates of people who, we're constantly being reminded, aren't real?

Well, there are other ways to keep a reader reading, among them the sustained inventiveness of the writer's imagination and the grace and stylishness of the writing. A few good jokes – verbal, situational or conceptual – don't hurt either.

I'm not certain Vance actually does pull off the trick in
Big Planet
, primarily because the plot is unfulfilled.

What is that plot? Sometime in the past, Earth colonized an enormous but low-density planet; despite the planet's size, the surface gravity here is not much different from that on Earth. The planet is desperately poor in metals, which must almost exclusively be imported. The policy of the Earth government is not to enforce its laws outside the confines of the Solar System. Thus the colonists on Big Planet were all the kooks and oddballs who couldn't fit in at home, tempted here by the prospect of effectively unlimited space in which to indulge whatever practices they wished.

Now the tyrant Charley Lysidder, Bajarnum of Beaujolais, is attempting the takeover of, if not the whole of Big Planet – which would probably be impossible – at least a sizeable percentage of its surface. He is doing so with considerable ruthlessness. Earth has sent various missions to try to halt this, but all have vanished. The latest, headed by Claude Glystra, is nearing the giant world when sabotage forces a crash-landing. In order to survive, Glystra's plucky little band – aided by hormone-rich local girl Nancy – must somehow trek forty thousand miles across the surface of the planet to the safety of Earth Enclave (in essence, the Terran Embassy). No planes, trains or automobiles to help them on this journey: because of the paucity of metals, Big Planet's technology is rudimentary. Also, of course, the Bajarnum is aware of their existence and will do his best to stop them.

Off they go on their forty-thousand-mile trip. They have various adventures and encounter various fantasticated societies. But the ever-diminishing group – almost all get killed off
en route
– don't in fact get further than a tiny fraction of the distance before Vance runs out of steam and the curtains come down on the play: the evening's entertainment is over.

Yes, the guy gets the gal despite all vicissitudes and misperceptions; but that's not exactly a surprise and, anyway, these have never been real characters. The Bajarnum and his tyranny are somewhat arbitrarily terminated; again, hardly a shock twist. The zillion other social problems that plague Big Planet are left unaltered: the massacres, child-rapes, tortures and the like are permitted to continue in the not-so-merry fashion of the past. In sum, there's a strong sense of coitus interruptus as one finishes page 218; to put it another way, it's as if one had paid for the Magical Mystery Tour and all that happened was that the bus went round the block and dumped you back on your own doorstep.

Yes, there's some inventiveness here. A few of the fantasticated societies are fastidiously intriguing, although none has the wit and quasi-plausibility of those depicted by, say, Eric Frank Russell in his tales in
The Great Explosion
(1962) and elsewhere. Yes, there are one or two good jokes, but they don't stick in the mind (at least, not in this reviewer's mind, because I've been sitting here desperately trying to remember one). And, yes, the writing is stylish by comparison with much else of what was on offer in 1950s pulp sf magazines; but a little too frequently what must have seemed stylish half a century ago reads today instead as simply affected.

Picking up this very attractive new edition, I tried to remember anything at all about my first reading of
Big Planet
, some twenty or more years ago, and all my memory could come up with was a vague sense of dissatisfaction on having finished the book. To be honest, this was why I decided to read the novel again, to discover what it was that my youthful self had so obviously missed out on. Yet, on finishing
Big Planet
in 2002, my feeling was exactly the same: Well, that was okay, I guess, quite fun in places, but, er, so what?

All of that said,
Big Planet
is one of those books that anyone seriously interested in the evolution of fantasy/sf should ... well, not so much read as, at some stage,
have read
. It is significant to the history of the genre even if no longer, as a novel, especially significant in itself.

—Infinity Plus