Month: November 2006

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Robb, J.D.: (23) Born in Death

J.D. Robb’s Born in Death is the book where poor Mavis finally gets to give birth. (She’s been pregnant since book 15, Purity, and this is #23. This is what happens when books take at most a month each.) I got it out of the library a couple of weeks ago.

The problem with writing in the mystery genre is that, paradoxically, the genre itself sometimes removes suspense. When one of Mavis’s friends disappears, it’s pretty clear that since we’re already halfway through the book, the disappearance must be related to the ongoing mystery, and given the existing setup, it’s not hard to guess how. I found the book a little flat as a result.

As for the plot itself, I have one quibble and one internal debate. The quibble: I would have preferred just a little more attention to a key underlying assumption of the underlying conspiracy. The debate: whether the stuff that made it traumatic for Eve was gratuitous.

However, Mavis finally has her baby, and it’s all heartwarming and stuff, which is what I was reading the book for anyway, so I can’t complain too much.

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Christie, Agatha: ABC Murders, The (radio play)

In The ABC Murders, Hercule Poirot gets a taunting letter warning him to look out for Andover on a certain date, signed “ABC.” Of course, someone is murdered on that date, and an ABC Railway Guide is found near the body. More murders follow, and Poirot must track down an apparent psychopath.

As usual, I listened to this as a radio play, so I’m not sure whether the presentation of a particular form of misdirection originated in the book or in the adaptation. The misdirection worked almost too well: I said to myself, “ugh, is this the kind of story we’re getting?” and stopped giving it my full attention. It seemed to end satisfyingly, however, and in a way consistent with the characters. I should remember that my skepticism apparently is reduced when I’m tired.

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Wrede, Patricia C., and Caroline Stevermer: (03) The Mislaid Magician

The Mislaid Magician is the third book in Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer’s series of epistolary novels set in an alternate Regency with magic. However, that description isn’t quite accurate any more, as the subtitle “Ten Years After” indicates:

6 March 1828
Tangleford Hall, Kent

My dear Thomas,

 . . . Our new prime minister found some letters that had been sitting unopened in the “Secret” packet since October, if you please! Some Prussian railway surveyor has gone missing in the north. It ought to have been looked into at once, but Lord Wellington has had his hands full with the royal family since he became PM last month. King George has never seen eye to eye with his brothers on political matters, and he and the Duke of Cumberland have had another row about the succession. Something about the Duchess of Kent and her daughter, I believe. It was all Old Hookey could do to keep it out of the papers.

But that business has blown over, for the time being at least, and now Cecelia and I are off to Leeds to see what we can find out. . . .

Meanwhile, if you have forward me any information on the theoretical interactions between magic and railway lines or steam engines, I’d appreciate it.

Yours,
James

8 March 1828
Skeynes

Dear James,

Make up your mind. Railway lines or steam engines? The current state of opinion on theoretical interactions varies considerably with whom you ask. As usual. . . .

If you care to hear my theory, although God knows you have seldom paid the slightest attention before, I think the steam engine is certain to lend itself to some exceedingly useful interactions. Nothing so thoroughly comprised of the elements of earth, water, air, and fire could fail to do so.

I am of two minds on the questions of railway lines. On the face of it, the lines should great promise as a way to link two (or even more!) points with a durable physical connection. . . . Yet, because railway tracks are made of many bits of metal placed end to end, considered as a staging point for a spell, it would be like running the Derby in installments. The enterprise might eventually work, but one would need a dashed good reason to take the trouble.

I plan to be in town before you . . . . The Bull and Mouth is far from elegant, but I suspect your children will love the bustle of the place. For once they will behold chaos they did not create themselves. I’ll meet you there.

Sincerely,
Thomas

Yes, we’re back to a letter-only format, adding Thomas and James’s correspondence to Kate and Cecy’s, and we’re out of the Regency and fully into the Industrial Revolution. While they investigate, Cecy and James leave their children with Kate and Thomas; the book is not overburdened with children, however, as only three of the collective six are particularly visible. (I was, in fact, able to keep James and Thomas straight now that they’re apart. Oddly, I could keep all their children straight too, which I did not expect.) Thomas and James’s letters are a nice addition to the narrative, and of course it’s always good to see Kate and Cecy again.

Separating the characters gives the added bonus of generating more than enough plot to go around, as stuff must happen at both ends of the correspondence to keep the book going. (Though at one point, things are so quiet at Kate’s home that she reports the solution to a mystery without even noticing that she’s done so. I’ll forgive her lapse of analytic reasoning under the circumstances, and, more importantly, forgive the authors for getting that bit of information in through her lapse.) All in all, then, this was as enjoyable as I’d hoped. My only quibble turns out to be with the previous (second) book, not this one: there, we were told in passing that Aunt Charlotte had apparently become a magician in the short time since the first book. It was such a small reference that I missed it, and so initially thought this book had mixed up the aunts when Aunt Charlotte’s magicial ability suddenly became relevant. Not the case, though, and don’t fear, there’s not very much of Aunt Charlotte in this book either.

If you liked the first one, you’ll like this one. If this one sounds interesting, you could start here perfectly well, but you might as well read the first one too. I don’t know if the authors contemplate any more: the ending is a satisfying conclusion but creates the possibility of further book-worthy happenings. I would certainly welcome reading about the characters for as long as the authors want to write about them.

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Minekura, Kazuya: Saiyuki, vols. 1-9

A long-delayed post: all nine volumes of Kazuya Minekura’s Saiyuki. (I booklogged volume 1 nearly 18 months ago). The delay is because I’d been doing LiveJournal posts on the art (spoilers inevitable), wanted to finish those before writing up the story as a whole, and never got around to volume 9 until just now. I haven’t re-read the other eight volumes for this post, but I’m mostly going to speak in generalities anyway to avoid spoilers.

First, a couple of notes on structure. Saiyuki is a nine-volume action/fantasy manga that sends four characters off on a roadtrip to save the world (see the volume 1 post for more details). The ninth volume wraps up a couple of arcs, but the story continues in Saiyuki Reload, which is still in progress; Tokyopop has currently released five volumes. There is also a prequel, Saiyuki Gaiden, which is set 500 years earlier when the major characters were in Heaven together; it’s almost finished and Tokyopop has licensed but not yet released it. I think you can pretty well get the general idea of Gaiden from the references in Saiyuki, but it probably helps to know that the backstory does exist.

[Spoil me for Reload and die. Since Gaiden hasn’t been released yet in English, spoiler-protect any comments referring to it with ROT13.]

(Oh, and there is an anime; apparently it is awful.)

The nine volumes of Saiyuki, as was helpfully pointed out in this LiveJournal post full of spoilers, have their own internal structure. The initial volumes superficially introduce the four main characters and then move beyond that to the backstory of three of the four (the fourth, Goku, gets his backstory in Gaiden, basically). The story then moves to the two strongest relationships within the four, Hakkai & Gojyo and Sanzo & Goku, and then to the weaker but still important relationships between the other pairs. (One of the things that I like about the series is that they each have distinct interactions and relationships with all the others.) Finally, the story considers the four collectively.

This summary suggests three things that I want to highlight about the series. First, it is ultimately character-centered: pretty much everything in it eventually comes back to the characters. Second, the pasts of the characters are vitally important; they didn’t just appear fully-formed one day when they were needed to save the world. Third, the series gets better as it goes along. I hate recommendations of the form “well, you really need to read eight gazillion volumes before it really gets good, but it’s worth it!”, but, well, the first volume in particular is not very strong. We get hints about the depths of the characters, but not more than that until the end of volume 2. Since the plots tend to be very character-centered, they aren’t that strong in the early volumes either.

(Also, the art in the early volumes isn’t exactly bad, but it also gets noticeably better in the later volumes: the lines are cleaner and the characters’ jaws get much less pointy. As I said in the original post, however, the page layouts are quite easy to follow—Minekura is very good at composing panels and pages so that the text and shapes naturally drawn the reader’s eye in the direction it ought to go. Since manga is read right-to-left, and since Minekura’s layouts are rarely rectangular boxes in succession, this is not insignificant.)

Right. I think those are all the caveats: on to the gushing.

Since, as I said, this is an ultimately character-centered story, the characters are naturally the main attraction for me. Like a lot of people, I started by liking one character best, but very shortly I found myself liking them all equally, and then loving them all. The characterizations are angst balanced by humor, threaded through with complex relationships, and anchored by really distinct voices (Tokyopop’s translation is apparently quite good), all wrapped around running themes of independence/dependence, attachment/detachment, Buddhism, and moving forward (there’s a reason this is a road trip). The series doesn’t have the deliberate and thorough worldbuilding of Fullmetal Alchemist—indeed, the world is deliberately anachronistic and the epic nature of the quest is frequently undercut—but it shares the virtue of carrying out sustained examination of themes through putting the characters in difficult positions.

The plots get better as the series goes along, partly because they are so strongly character-centered, and partly because they start inverting and subverting prior understandings in fun and interesting ways. I haven’t been panting after reading Reload because I knew it wasn’t complete yet, but I’m very much looking forward to seeing where Minekura takes things after the happenings of volume 9.

Anyway. As suggested by the fact that I wrote several posts analyzing just the art of the series, I really enjoyed this, both in itself and as an introduction to manga. If it sounds at all interesting, give it a browse.

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