More Mercedes Lackey

The Serpent’s Shadow, Mercedes Lackey

The first volume of her Elemental Masters series, The Serpent’s Shadow represents another venture into historical fantasy by Mercedes Lackey – set in Edwardian England this time, instead of the Elizabethan England of the series she’s co-writing with Roberta Geillis – and one that is successful on a number of levels.

First, Lackey’s protagonist, Maya Witherspoon, is one of her most complex and interesting characters to date. Maya is the daughter of an English physician who settled in in India and an Indian woman of the Brahmin caste, who gave up her position as priestess (and mage) to marry her lover. Maya has inherited her mother’s magical gifts, but has had no training – her mother has always told her that her path lies with the magical traditions of her father’s people, not her mother’s. Maya has also inherited her father’s gifts as a healer, and following her graduation from medical school in India, she worked with her father as his associate. When double tragedy befalls her with the death of both parents in suspicious circumstances, Maya has reason to believe that she herself is the next victim of the unknown mage who has brought about her parents’ deaths and decides to move to her father’s homeland.

The early part of the book touches on Maya’s struggles, as a woman and a person of mixed race, to establish herself in England as a practising physician at the same time as it lays the foundation for a more-or-less standard plot about evil mage determined to destroy good mage for reason not entirely reasonable. And that’s part of what makes this a more interesting book than Lackey’s usual offerings.

In addition to addressing Maya’s fight against blatant racism in imperial England and her personal quest to find balance in her own life between her two heritages, the book also has a strong feminist and anti-domestic violence stance, and a refreshingly positive perspective on sex work. Once certified as a physician, Maya sets up a practice in one of the less affluent areas of London. Her business plan is to offer both general and reproductive medical services to the elite of London’s courtesans and entertainers – including contraception and abortion – in order to subsidise her practice among poor women and men – where she also advocates family planning and champions abused women. Oh, and she’s also a suffragette.

It’s hardly surprising that I was sold on this book, and its heroine, before the mage vs. mage plot had even got rolling. There are some potentially problematic issues in that plot, but Lackey treads carefully when she pits Maya, newly-trained by English mages, against the Indian mage responsible for her parents’ deaths who has followed her to London with murderous intent. Maya receives assistance from figures out of her mother’s traditions, as well as support from English mages, in her magical battles, and it is made all too clear that the goddess in whose name her opponent has acted repudiates her servant’s excesses.

Lackey has always made an effort to be socially conscious in her writing, particularly in her use of powerful female characters, and positive queer characters. She’s often used her novels to further awareness of child abuse, and there tends to be a feminist slant to her work. I think she’s taken another step forward in this book, and I hope to see more of this kind of complexity in her characters.

Lynn Abbey: more in the rRfkind saga

The Black Flame
Rifkind’s Challenge

Some months ago, I re-read Daughter of the Bright Moon, the first of two books written in the late 1970s by Lynn Abbey, about Rifkind, a priestess/healer/warrior of the nomadic Asheera, and enjoyed it just as much as I had 30-odd years ago.

So naturally I had to re-read the second book, The Black Flame, and of course I had to follow that with Rifkind’s Challenge, the recently published third volume of the tale of Goddess-touched healer and warrior, which takes up the story some 15 years after the end of the second volume.

The Black Flame is a rousing sword and sorcery adventure and a doomed romance, one that takes the hero Rifkind through some profound emotional changes. At the end of the novel, she returns to her homeland, gives up her warrior ways, and accepts a role among her people as a healer.

Rifkind’s Challenge finds her once more prepared to leave her people, summoned by dreams of old companions from the adventures of her younger days. Abbey has matured as a writer, and her central character has matured as well, making this third adventure even better than the first two.

And the ending seems to contain a set-up for yet another adventure for Rifkind, so I’ll be keeping my eyes open to see if Abbey does have more plans for this character.

Saints and sinners

A Mortal Glamour, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

In A Mortal Glamour, Yarbro turns her not inconsiderable talents at researching and writing historical fantasy to a story of sexual tensions and repressed longings – for love, for freedom – and their consequences in the tightly controlled environment of a Catholic convent during a time of social and religious unrest.

It is the 14th century, the time of the Avignon popes, when Catholicism was split between two competing political factions within the Church. Plague is abroad in Europe. Groups of wandering, often violent adherents of assorted heresies have created an internal threat, while the Eastern borders of Europe are once again facing invasion, driven by the migratory pressures that have periodically pushed new populations westward out of Central Asia.

Trouble is brewing in a remote French convent, la Tres Saunte Annunciation. A young nun, Seur Angelique, child of a wealthy family, in love with an unsuitable young man, rages against the unyielding father who has given her an ultimatum – marry an older man she fears and despises for dynastic reasons, or face permanent incarceration in this community of religious women, many of whom are not themselves in possession of a true vocation. Into this unstable set of circumstances comes a new Mother Superior, who may not be exactly what she seems.

Yarbro has written a fascinating account of the consequences of mixing religious hysteria with sexual repression, and if, in this work of fantasy, she gives a supernatural flavour to the proximate cause of the events she recounts, the underlying causes are clearly delineated.

Fascinating reading.

The things we do for love

Webs of Discord, by Jason Sizemore

Webs of Discord, a chapbook published by Apex Publications, is a satisfying collection of short stories by author and Apex publisher Jason Sizemore, in the fantasy and horror genres. In one way or another, the stories focus on love – love gone wrong, love denied, love distorted, even a little bit of love triumphant – in ways that are interesting and unusual. Most of these short stories are solid offerings in the vein of horror, and deliver webs of discord indeed; particularly chilling is the story “Breaking Up is Hard to Do.” This deliberately unsettling mix is leavened with a delightful fantasy piece, “Milton, the Christmas Fairy,” the collection’s one unqualified happy ending.