Two by Tanya huff

Long Hot Summoning, Tanya Huff

In this, the third instalment in Huff’s truly hilarious Keeper series, Claire Hansen and her powerful Keeper-in-training younger sister Diana face something even more terrifying than the mouth of Hell – a shopping mall gone mad. And it will take an alliance with street kids turned elves and a leather-rocker version of King Arthur himself to save the world. Meanwhile, Claire’s partner Dean meets his mummy.

Seriously. This is superb urban fantasy that combines the deeply weird and profoundly absurd with a sure hand that is both comic and satiric, but never loses track of the thrill of the adventure or the truth of the characters.


Stealing Magic, Tanya Huff

This is a actually two anthologies in one, and the publisher (Meisha Merlin) has set it up like one of the great old Ace doubles – whichever way you pick the book up, you’re looking at the cover of one of the two books.

One side is a collection of Huff’s short stories featuring Magdelene, the most powerful wizard in the world. Also the laziest wizard in the world, which is a good thing, because if she really wanted to do something other than relax in the sun and enjoy the simple pleasures life has to offer, there would be no escape from her power. Of course, because Magdelene is a good wizard, she’s willing to help people out when she’s really needed, and because she is the most powerful wizard in the world, other wizards and less savoury lifeforms often see her as a challenge, a threat, or the first obstacle to be removed on their path to world domination or destruction. Magdelene is a very unconventional wizard, and Huff’s stories about her are not only great fun to read, but also a trenchant exploration of gender-based fantasy tropes.

The other side gathers Huff’s stories about Terazin the thief, a delightful and daring kick-ass woman hero. The tales of Terazin are less convention-breaking than those about Magdelene, simply because Terazin’s life story and exploits are cast in what has become a more-or-less standard mould – brilliant but poor outcast child passes the initiation tests, joins the thieves’ guild and spends the rest of her life stealing more and more challenging things. Huff does it very well, though, and works some undertones dealing with gender and power politics within the thieves' guild into her well-crafted adventure tales.

Blaze of Glory

The Aware
Gilfeather
The Tainted

I’m really not certain how to begin praising Australian writer Glenda Larke’s Isles of Glory trilogy. Do I begin with her detailed and intricate world-building? Her skill in characterisation? Her original take on the whole business of magic? Her seamless incorporation of highly intellectual explorations of the psychology of perception, the social and personal functions of religion and the dynamics and consequences of colonialism into a damned jolly action thriller with a truly kick-ass, take-no-prisoners swordswoman? The structure of the trilogy that permits not only multiple perspectives on the action, each from characters with their own culture and personal philosophy, but also a metanarrative from another culture altogether?

Larke’s novels are deceptively easy to read and enjoy, but so difficult to talk about. And they’re brilliant. The Isles of Glory, where the novels are set, form an isolated archipelago of many small kingdoms and divergent cultures, dominated by a ruling class of magic-users. In the Isles of Glory, a person may have one of three orientations with respect to magic: most people do not use magic, but are wholly susceptible to it; some both use it and are susceptible to it; and some, the Aware, can see magic but are not affected by it. The three main protagonists of the series (who are, each in turn, the focal point one of the three novels) are Blaze, a swordswoman, a half-breed outcast, an agent of the magic-users and an Aware; Kelwyn Gilfeather, a physician from an obscure part of the Isles of Glory who seems to be something new – he neither casts magic, nor is affected by it, nor is Aware of it; and Flame, an illusionist with a past full of intrigue and tragic love, and a future that it seems almost everyone in the Isles of glory wants to control. Two other key characters who plays significant roles in all three novels are Tor Ryder, a priest of a religious order that is challenging the control of the magicians over the Isles of glory, and Morthred, a powerful practitioner of dunmagic or evil magic.

The three novels are framed within a completely different perspective, that of colonial scholars from some decades after the events of the narrative proper who are editing accounts of interviews with surviving witnesses into what they feel are charming legends of a magical past among these inhabitants of a slightly backward and recently discovered part of the world. From the framing narrative, we learn that the Isles of Glory have undergone rapid and massive cultural changes in the years since the beginning events of the trilogy, changes which are finally explained from the perspective of the Glory Islanders by the end of the third novel, when one colonial scholar finally chooses to encounter the Glory Islanders who remember how things were as equals, not as examples of a quaint and somewhat primitive people.

And I haven’t even mentioned the considerations of changes in gender roles, the horrors of religious intolerance, the nature of corruption, the necessary values of living an sustainable life in a fragile ecology, the challenges faced by stateless persons, or any of the other issues that Larke weaves into her narrative.

Oh, and did I mention a great action adventure story, and a damned fine love story to boot, with realistic characters who aren’t always right, and aren’t always heroic, and don’t always save the day, or if they do, it’s not what they hoped it would turn out to be?

Oh, just read the books. You won’t be sorry.

On Reading Jeanette Winterson for the First Time

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

I must confess, I hadn't read anything by Jeanette Winterson until this spring, when I picked up Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. I'd been meaning to read her for some time, I'd have multiple recommendations from trusted reader-friends, and I wasn't resisting her, it's just that, well, there's so many books and so little time.

And now I'm glad that I have finally read this book, because I enjoyed it immensely (although I gather than her other books are a stylistic departure from this first novel, so I shall now read something else to see if I enjoy Winterson, or just this reportedly semi-autobiographical coming out story).

Winterson's portrayal of a young lesbian growing up with a deeply religious mother, in the heart of a somewhat quirky fundamentalist church community and an equally quirky small-town working class English neighbourhood is profoundly moving and rather funny all at once - just as life is. Interlaced with the events of the protagonist Jeanette's life are passages of fable and fantasy, including an exploration of the life of Sir Percival (one of several "perfect knights" in the Arthurian mythos), which expand and present new perspectives on Jeanette's quest to discover her true self, as separate from the expectations and prescriptions of those around her.

Count Saint Germain and the Reformation

States of Grace, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Another Saint Germain novel is always a source of great delight for me. I freely admit that there’s a formula to the Saint Germain books, and the key plot points can be seen coming in advance, but as always, the way that Yarbro particularises her selected themes to a specific time and place delight the history buff in me.

This episode in the vampire count’s life takes place in Europe during the Reformation. Saint Germain is heavily invested in the new business of publishing, owning presses in both Venice and Germany, and must deal with issues of censorship fueled by religious intolerance on both sides of the great spiritual debate – even though the books he aims to publish are not in themselves religious books, but rather what in the time of the Reformation would be the best available scientific and cultural studies.

I can’t help thinking that this book, which addresses censorship of the press directly (censorship and religious intolerance are frequently depicted in the Saint Germain books), is Yarbro’s comment on the growing interference (at least in North America) of a particular religious view – fundamentalist Christianity – on the teaching and publishing of science, and more generally, the dangers that religious fundamentalisms of all kinds pose to true intellectual inquiry when they gain the power to dictate what is and is not acceptable in a society.