a journal of the plague, sword, and famine year

Read Brent Weeks’ The Way of Shadows, a rather traditional tale of an orphan boy learning assassin’s skills from a master, within a crime guild organisation tolerated by a feudal structure itself ruled by a below-par king, with the usual dilemma between dedication to the (gory and amoral) job and love+friendship+loyalty constraints. Both collide when the love+friends+kingdom come under actual threat from a neighbouring total-evil kingdom. Some aspects of the dilemma are interesting, other are not and weaknesses in the scenario abound. The final climax of this first volume is quite disappointing, but cannot be discussed as a sequence of major spoilers. I wonder whether the following volumes will see some improvement. And Gone to Dust by Matt Goldman, a somewhat enjoyable detective novel but… lacking a proper level of surprise, with whiffs of Marlowe emanating from the central character, Nils Shapiro, an annoying tendency to brand name dropping, detailed descriptions of itineraries that should bore even the locals, and the of-so-convenient! recourse to Somali terrorism in the middle of Minneapolis, to solve the day. Plus a painful insistence on how foul Winter is in Minnesota…

Had a week of Venetian fare at Da’a Marisa, the de facto cantine of Ca’Foscari! And a sampling of neighbouring cannoli, not always successful and not competing with the cannoleria I visited in Milano, which made me cook a batch myself for Easter weekend. With the result that the tubes were reasonable but the ricotta filling too liquid.

Watched the last season of the BBC series His Dark Materials, while wondering whether or not the third volume of the Book of Dust would ever appear. And Kill Boksoon (길복순) which is a manga style movie playing on the hardship of being a single mother when working full time as a contracted killer! Very light (and gory) if rather funny.

Thin Air [book review]

When visiting Vancouver last December [at a time when traveling was still possible], I had the opportunity to revisit White Dwarf Books [thirty years after my first visit] and among other books bought a Richard Morgan‘s novel, Thin Air, that I did not know existed and which was recommended by the [friendly] book seller. As superior to Morgan’s foray into dark fantasy (that I did not dislike so much). As I had really enjoyed the Altered Carbon series, I jumped on this new novel, which is a form of sequel to Th1rt3en, and very very similar in its futuristic pastiche of tough detectives à la Marlowe, dry humour included. A form of space noir, as The Guardian puts it. I sort of got quickly lost in the plot and (unusually) could not keep track of some characters, which made reading the book a chore towards the end. Thanks to the COVID-19 quarantine, I still managed to finish it, while home cycling!, the very end being more exciting than the beginning drudgery and the predictable sex scenes bound to occur in every of his novels. The Martian world in the novel is only alluded to, which makes it more appealing, despite the invasive jargon, however it sounds too much like a copy of our 20th century with car chase and gun/knife fights. Enhanced by an embedded AI when one can afford it. Certainly not the best read in the series but enough to tempt me into looking at the first episodes of Altered Carbon on Netflix. [Note: the book is not to be confused with the bestselling Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, which relates the 1996 Everest disaster, soon turned into a rather poor movie. I had not realised till today that the same Krakauer wrote Into the Wild…!]

Prussian blue [book review]

This is the one-before-last volume in Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series (one-before-last since the author passed away last year). Which I picked in a local bookstore for taking place in Berchtesgaden, which stands a few kilometers west of Salzburg and which I passed on my way there (and back) last week. Very good title, full of double meanings!

“When you’re working for people who are mostly thieves and murderers, a little of it comes off on your hands now and then.”

Two time-lines run in parallel in Prussian Blue, from 1939 Nazi Germany to 1956 France, from (mostly) hunter to hunted. Plenty of wisecracks worth quoting throughout the book, mostly à la Marlowe, but also singling out Berlin(ers) from the rest of Germany. An anti-hero if any in that Bernie Gunther is working there as a policeman for the Nazi State, aiming at making the law respected in a lawless era and to catch murderers at a time where the highest were all murderers and about to upscale this qualification to levels never envisioned before. Still working under Heydrich’s order to solve a murder despite the attempt of other arch-evils like Martin Bormann and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, as well as a helpful (if Hitler supporter!) Gerdy Troost. Among the Gunther novels I have read so far this one is the closest he gets to the ultimate evil, Hitler himself, who considered the Berghof in Berchtesgaden as his favourite place, without ever meeting him. The gratuitous violence and bottomless corruption inherent to the fascist regime are most realistically rendered in the thriller, to the point of making the possibility of a Bernie Gunther debatable!

‘Making a nuisance of yourself is what being a policeman is all about and suspecting people who were completely above suspicion was about the only thing that made doing the job such fun in Nazi Germany.’

As I kept reading the book I could not but draw a connection with the pre-War Rogue Male imperfect but nonetheless impressive novel, where an English “sport” hunter travels to Berchtesgaden to shoot (or aim at) Hitler only to get spotted by soldiers before committing the act and becoming hunted in his turn throughout Europe, ending up [spoiler!] in a burrow trapped by Nazi secret services [well this is not exactly the end!]. This connection has been pointed out in some reviews, but the role of the burrows and oppressive underground and the complicity of the local police forces are strongly present in both books and somewhat decreases the appeal of this novel. Especially since the 1956 thread therein is a much less convincing plot than the 1939 one, despite involving conveniently forgotten old colleagues, the East Germany Stasi, hopeless French policemen and clergymen, the Sarre referendum, [much maligned!] andouillettes and oignons.

Altered Carbon

I happened to read Richard Morgan‘s Altered Carbon by chance, thanks to a colleague who left it on my desk and I wonder why this 2002 book did not get enough fame for me to have heard of it earlier. It is a fantastic (in the sense of superb, not of fantasy!) futuristic roman noir, set in a San Francisco more than 400 years from now. Altered Carbon is somewhat of a mix between Chandler and Gibson, in that the hero Takeshi Kovacs, is a hard-boiled private à la Marlowe, keeping well-hidden a soft inner core that takes over each time or so he meets a woman [which happens rather regularly in the novel], the whole thing taking place in a cyberpunk universe that reminds me of Neuromancer. In fact, the book has a lot in common with Neuromancer in that it is set in a highly technological universe, involves yakuza-like conglomerates and crime-ridden cities, San Francisco, a corrupted police force, an economy that seems centred on legal drugs and legal prostitution, computer viruses, virtual realities, some lingering influence of a vague Japanese culture, and they are both Philip K. Dick awardees. The major difference with Neuromancer is that the technology is not the point of Altered Carbon, the detective (and muscle) work being the focus. This use of a scifi world and of the possibilities offered by a sort of technological reincarnation makes for a very good plot in that the book does not get mired into endless descriptions but instead provides about the minimum explanation about the way this universe operates. It is delicate to draw the comparison with Neuromancer any further because, first, Neuromancer came twenty-five years ago and, second, Gibson always seemed more interested in the ethical and philosophical implications of this kind of culture. Anyway, Altered Carbon is truly gripping and, while I may have missed some of the intricate details of the plot, I had to rush through it to get the resolution, as in any Chandler‘s story. There are two sequels by Morgan involving Takeshi Kovacs and I am looking forward to them.