Can You Dig It?

TITLE: Warriors
EDITORS: George RR Martin, Gardner Dozois
PUBLISHER: TOR

Rating
5/5 "Can you dig it?"; 4/5 "OK, let's get down to it, boppers."; 3/5 "Warriors, come out and play-a-ay!"; 2/5 "The chicks are packed!"; 1/5 "What's the matter? You turning faggot?"
Score: 3/5

"OK, let's get down to it, boppers"

Call it the antidote to the Amazon effect. Modern technology is good at helping us find things similar to the ones we already own or like, but it's completely duff at leading us to new discoveries. Enter the short-fiction anthology. In the foreword to "Warriors", Editor George RR Martin compares anthologies to old-fashioned wire spinner racks, with "all the books jumbled up together". In "Warriors", he and co-editor Gardner Dozois set out to break the walls between genres by mixing up stories from all shades of the literary spectrum.

It's a laudable effort, and one that feels especially timely now, with the rise not only of chain superstores, as lamented by Mr Martin in his foreword, but also of on-line retailers offering sophisticated recommendation engines. It's a pity that much of the material in "Warriors" is not up to the task.

"Warriors, come out and play-a-ay!"

Partly, this is due to the subject matter. Mr Martin and Mr Dozois have made stories about warriors their unifying theme, and this has inevitably limited the range of stories they have collected. The 20 stories gather mainly around the poles of science fiction and historical fiction, with only a few pegs from other genres to support the idea that all fiction can fit under one tent. However, there are one or two exceptions, which not coincidentally turn out to be some of the best in the book.

It is also partly due to the very uneven quality of the stories on offer. While there are a few which are genuinely worthwhile entries, there are far too many which feel merely phoned in or hastily scribbled on the back of an envelope. Surprisingly, Mr Martin himself is one of the culprits here.

Now, let me say I stand in awe of Mr Martin's literary talent. I have encountered few writers in any genre with his gift for instant, vivid, believable characterization and ability to communicate this personality through the character's own voice. I am also staggered and humbled by the man's ability to juggle a best-selling fantasy series, a spin-off TV series, convention appearances, and still find time to edit this collection. So I call automatic BS on anyone who suggests I am insufficiently appreciative of his work.

The fact is, "The Mystery Knight", the latest in his "Dunk and Egg" series of short stories set in the same world as the "Song of Ice and Fire" novels, is just plain no good. Rather than building on our investment in Sir Duncan and his squire, Egg, Mr Martin invents a host of new characters, gives us no reason to care for them, then abruptly resolves the whole situation in an unsatisfying deus ex machina. Considering Mr Martin's name and the prospect of another entry in the Dunk and Egg saga was my main reason for buying the book, this is a terrible letdown.

"We're gonna rain on you, Warriors!"

Mr Martin can perhaps take small comfort in the fact that he has plenty of company. For a bunch of warriors, there are a disappointing number of misfires. Mr Dozois's own entry is not so much a letdown as simply baffling. Some of the big names, including Robin Hobb and Tad Williams, produce only shrug-inducing duds.

There are worse offenders, though. "King of Norway" by Cecelia Holland features a long, tepid battle scene followed by an escape that is pure hokum. David Weber's "Out of the Dark" is a shambling patchwork of Roland Emmerich's "Independence Day", Tom Clancy style military techno-fetishism ("the fifteen-pound round from the M-136 light anti-armor weapon struck the side of his vehicle's turret at a velocity of 360 feet per second") and a truly cringe-worthy Gothic third act. Diana Gabaldon's piece is utterly twee and far too taken with its own preciousness.

"You Warriors are good, real good." "The best."

Fortunately for those of us who already paid full-cover price for the hardback, the collection is not a total loss. In a development that's almost worth a "warriors" story on its own, the day is saved by the veterans of the old guard. Robert Silverberg, 75, turns in a melancholy yet thought-provoking piece on what warriors would do once there is nobody left to fight. Peter S. Beagle, 71, takes the warrior theme in an interesting direction, in a story that unfolds like a dream, which may be appropriate, since the hero may not--if you want to get technical about it--actually exist. S. M. Stirling, 56, gives us a light-hearted, fast-paced romp in a neato retro-future that mixes Napoleonic with post-apocalyptic settings. There are also solid entries from veterinarian James Rollins and closet botanist Naomi Novik.

Five out of 20 hits might be a good average in pro baseball, but makes these warriors look decidedly amateurish. Mr Martin's fumble as the slugger of the team is especially galling for us fans that were rooting hardest for him. We can only hope this shows his entire attention is going into the "Ice and Fire" series. Sadly for Mr Martin's lofty aims, none of the stories here were impressive enough to make me want to read more from the contributors. Though in a weird way, this is also a defeat for the Amazon effect he rails against, since I only got the book because Mr Martin's name was attached to it.

Call it a draw, then.

Not Dead Yet

TITLE: Before They are Hanged
AUTHOR: Joe Abercrombie
PUBLISHER: Pyr

RATING
5/5 “Hang ‘em high”; 4/5 “Just hangin’ out”; 3/5 “Hung jury”; 2/5 “Hung out to dry”; 1/5 “Hangover/Sexual hangups (tie)” DNF “Hanged, drawn & quartered” DISQ “Hung like a horse”
SCORE 4/5

Iconoclasm is fun at first, but it's got a shelf life shorter than a Japanese pop band. Once the glitter rubs off, what once seemed glam feels about as hip as Jefferson Airplane.

"Before They are Hanged" doesn't fall quite so far, but the biting satire is beginning to dull. I confess, I had a whale of a time with Joe Abercrombie’s first book in the series, “The Blade Itself”. Here, Mr Abercrombie cheerfully vivisected some of the ropiest fantasy clichés, from savage barbarians to kindly old wizards. Logen Ninefingers, the barbarian, spent more time screaming in pain than anger. The old wizard proved as kindly as Vlad the Impaler, and the nicest bloke in the whole book turned out to be the torturer.

Mr Abercrombie returns to the bonfire of the inanities in the second book, this time stoking the flames with the concept of heroic journeys and quests, heroes who get through battles without a crease in their woolens, traitors and sieges, heroic romance and famous last words. Nothing is sacred. Again.

The action quickly picks up where “The Blade Itself” left off, with the ramshackle kingdom called the Union facing threats on multiple fronts. The armies of the prophet Khalul, led by a coterie of invincible, cannibalistic Eaters are bearing down on the Union city of Dagoska from the south, while those of the barbarian King Bethod threaten the province of Angland to the north. Inquisitor Glokta arrives in Dagoska to shore up the defenses and unravel the mysterious disappearance of his predecessor.

Bayaz, the First of the Magi and former brother-in-arms to Khalul, journeys in search of a weapon that can stop Khalul’s unnatural underlings. He is joined by a mismatched band of five would-be heroes: Logen, Bayaz’s apprentice, a talkative guide, a dashing swordsman and a feral escaped slave.

A third story arc follows another band of misfits with colorful names like Dogman, as they accompany a Union army heading north, under the dubious leadership of the Union’s vain and cretinous Crown Prince.

We've already been introduced to this identity parade of characters, which leaves Mr Abercrombie more time to expand and enrich his world. We get a little further under the unwashed, flea-bitten skin of Logen and Dogman in particular, and these fatalistic, straightforward yet blackly humorous heroes are easily Mr Abercrombie's best inventions. The backstory to the adventure also contains intriguing hints that all this has gone before--hints that Mr Abercrombie has something to say other than "high fantasy sucks!"

All the same, there’s still plenty of fun to be had in “Before They are Hanged”, watching a string of stale genre staples receive a well-deserved comeuppance. Sword fights become interesting again once you realize Mr Abercrombie is unlikely to let his heroes escape unscathed. Their mask of invulnerability gets its face quite messily mashed in, knocking one hero out but waking the reader up to the possibilities inherent in a story that doesn’t handle its characters with kid gloves. The sex is almost as messy as the fighting, uncomfortably believable, mildly embarrassing and—because hey, it’s not you—sniggeringly funny.

However, all this relentless stereotype-bashing is starting to wear a little thin. There’s now something almost predictable about the character’s inability to dig themselves into anything except more trouble. Some of the catch lines too, such as “Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say…”, have outstayed their welcome, and feel shoehorned into the narrative to suit the author’s desire for continuity. Some of Mr Abercrombie’s deconstructions have themselves become stereotypes—the hapless Crown Prince being a classic example. If Mr Abercrombie really wanted to surprise, he’d have the foppish Prince suddenly turn out to be a military genius. Surprise—nepotism works!

It’s always easier to destroy than make something new, and I hope that before the end Mr Abercrombie builds something on the smoking rubble of fantasy conventions he’s created. In any event, after two books in the series I wonder if he’s run out of targets to obliterate. I kind of hope so, otherwise he might be heading back to the remainder bin with all the other glitter boys.

Pop Goes the World

TITLE: The Windup Girl
AUTHOR: Paolo Bacigalupi
PUBLISHER: Night Shade Books

RATING
5/5 "Led Zeppelin"; 4/5 "99 Luftballons"; 3/5 "Balloon boy"; 2/5 "The Hindenburg"; 1/5 "Lead Zeppelin"
SCORE 3/5

Dirigibles. I knew we were in trouble as soon as the story introduced dirigibles. They’ve become a sort of billboard for an entire class of bloated speculative fiction, an all-too literal metaphor for lardy, lumbering stories flogging thinly-veiled allegories of modern ills—Goodyear blimps for the beard-and-ponytail set. My advice to authors is, you see a zeppelin lumbering into the airspace over one of your stories, show no mercy—shoot that bastard down. Kill your darlings, as Faulkner said. You’ll be glad you did.

Mr Bacigalupi’s novel has rightly won praise and awards for its original blend of futurism and steampunk, a kind of retro-future that preys on modern fears, but the whole structure is a bit like a dirigible itself—the impressive-looking frame most just holds a tub of gas.

“The Windup Girl” is set in Thailand, in a near-future where pretty much every bad thing you’re worried about happening, happened. It’s a kind of scrapbook of apocalyptic newspaper headlines. Oil and gas have run out, leaving civilization dependent on muscle power and a bit of coal (peak oil fears, check!). Airplanes and cars have gone the way of dinosaurs and mammoths, which is ironic, since thanks to genetic engineering, mammoths (“megadonts”, sorry) are back in fashion as a source of muscle. Oh yeah, zeppelins are back in too. Sigh.

Speaking of genetic engineering, geneticists at a “calorie companies”, a bunch of evil corporations located in Des Moines for some strange reason, have deliberately created super-parasites and crop blights, to wipe out the world’s food sources and make everyone dependent on their genetically-modified (GM) products (GM food fears, check! Large, faceless company fears, check! Fears of Midwestern states, che—wait, what?!).

Genetic engineering ain’t all bad though, since it’s allowed the Japanese to neatly solve their problem of a declining population without having to rely on any foul-smelling foreigners. They’ve created “windups”, tailor-made test-tube people, smarter, faster and stronger than ordinary folk, but with deliberate built-in weaknesses to stop them taking over the planet, such as the stuttering motion that gives them their nickname.

Emiko is the “Windup Girl” of the title, bred to be a businessman’s ideal personal secretary—sexy, multilingual, obedient, and when you’re done with her, pop her in the recycling bin. Her last boss didn’t want to keep her but didn’t have the stomach to mulch her, so she has been abandoned in Bangkok, forced to work in a nightclub where she is continually humiliated as subhuman.

There she meets Anderson Lake, whose name sounds like it should be the title of an accounting firm, ostensibly the owner of a factory manufacturing coiled springs, but actually an agent of the “calorie companies”, searching for Thailand’s secret source of new foodstuffs. His mission is complicated by his scheming factory foreman, Hock Seng, an ethnic Chinese from Malaysia who barely escaped an Islamic-inspired pogrom against his people (Fears of fundamental Islam, check!).

Mr Bacigalupi’s Thailand is filled with bowing and corruption, ladyboys and royalist-popularist tensions, a weird mish-mash that feels cribbed from the introduction to a Lonely Planet guide and the “Asia” section of the Economist magazine. This is symptomatic of the wider problem with the book—once you get past some rather neat ideas that went into building this world, there’s not much to keep you there.

The setting is relentlessly grim, and other than Emiko none of the characters is even remotely sympathetic. I enjoyed the book, I’ll admit, but I don’t think I smiled once the whole time I was reading it. It feels downbeat and didactic, more like a Greenpeace manifesto than a work of fiction. I wonder if Mr Bacigalupi isn’t preaching to the converted here, though. I imagine plenty of speculative fiction readers are already composting and bicycling to work and eating locally-grown organic vegetables, or at least wish they did.

The plot, too, feels as thin as a zeppelin’s skin, with events floating from point to point without any particular thrust or trajectory. The climax in particular feels just plain false, involving a sudden and near-psychotic change of heart on the part of one character, while the epilogue’s note of hope jars against the crushing despair of the rest of the book.

In short, I feel Mr Bacigalupi’s imagination and talent for twisting modern fears into future fables is not matched by his skills as a storyteller. I’ve already noted the lack of humor, or even humanity in his characters. At times, he slides into cliché—just once, I’d like to read about a band of evil misfits and rebels brought to heal by a benevolent faceless corporation, just for the hell of it. I’d read that.

Just so long as you promise not to put any dirigibles in it.

Pip of the Pacific

TITLE: Mister Pip
AUTHOR: Lloyd Jones
PUBLISHER: Vintage Canada

RATING:
5/5 “Oahu Island”; 4/5 “No Man is an Island”; 3/5 “Bikini Atoll”; 2/5 “Dan Ger Iland (unpublished manuscript by Giles Gammage, age 5)”; 1/5 “Island of Domination”
SCORE
4/5

Your first really good book is a bit like your first cigarette, your first drink, your first lover. It’s an experience that lodges within you, one you keep coming back to, so deeply unique and personal you cannot share it on anything but the most superficial level. “Mister Pip” is at once a really good book itself, and a book about reading really good books.

Matilda is a teenage girl growing up on Bougainville, a large island North East of Australia, during the early 1990’s. A war of independence against the rulers on the neighboring island of Papua New Guinea is in full swing, causing the entire white population and many of the black, including the local schoolteachers, to flee the island. Only one white man remains, a lonely eccentric named Mr. Watts, who begins to teach the children of Matilda’s village by reading from Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations.”

At first glance, there’s not much common ground between Victorian England and a tropical island, but the story of Mister Pip, the hero of “Great Expectations” who rises from poverty to riches, strikes a chord with Matilda and the other children, and their own dreams of escape. “It was always a relief to return to Great Expectations,” says Matilda. “It contained a world that was whole and made sense, unlike ours.”

Fantasy is not always healthy of course, and reality, if shut out, has a way of kicking in the door. At first there is resistance from some of the more religious parents, including Matilda’s mother, who feel the Bible is the only book worth reading. The not-quite-battle of words between Matilda’s mum and Mr. Watts is a triumph of understatement, a subtle thing that swims beneath the surface of otherwise placid encounters. Later, the war intrudes, as you knew if must from the beginning, with sudden, deadly consequences for the entire village.

Anyone who has ever felt affected by great literature will find resonance in the story. “Mister Pip” is a slim little thing, almost waif-like, weighing in at a hair over 250 pages. No Dickensian language or convoluted phrasing here: there is an economy of words and emotion in Matilda’s voice, which only underscores the horror as events go from bad to worse. Yet in the end the novel’s message is one of hope, if tempered by a realistic awareness of the limitations of what fiction can accomplish.

Much could be made of white guilt in the setting of this novel, of the exploitation of Bougainville’s copper mines, which leads to the rebellion, and of the backing provided to the Papua New Guinean government’s efforts to crush it. Mr Jones acknowledges these issues, but never takes sides nor lets them overwhelm the main story.

You might also be forgiven for feeling there’s something a bit too “Dances With Wolves” about the story of a white teaching a black village, but Mr Watts is never presented as a heroic or wise figure, someone at the mercy of events rather than their master. The character of Matilda helps illustrate the interplay between the two cultures, with her fascination of Dickens balanced against her love of folk tales and stories, proving there is something for both sides to gain from the exchange. “We feel white around black people,” says Mr Watts, uncomfortable with the truth, only to be answered with “We feel black around white people.”

I like the book, really I do—see the rating I gave it at the top of this review—but allow me to let my cynical side show for a moment. It must be said there’s something a little self-serving about novelists writing novels that tell you how wonderful novels are—a bit too close to patting yourself on the back, that one.

Still, with a work this accomplished Mr Jones can probably be forgiven for patting himself on the back a little. I can’t say I will always remember it—the title of first great book is already taken for me—but it is one I will certainly be in no rush to forget.

The Killing of Words

TITLE: Succession (Risen Empire/Killing of Worlds)
AUTHOR: Scott Westerfeld
PUBLISHER: TOR

RATING
5/5 "Obsession/Nonagression (tie)"; 4/5 "Expression"; 3/5 "Impression"; 2/5 "Recession"; 1/5 "Depression"
SCORE 3/5

So much SF gets garishly tarted up in a bid to make it more appealing to 'mature' audiences, only for the end result to turn out like a five-year-old getting into Mommy's jewelry and make-up (anyone for midi-chlorians?). This is cute with kids, squirmingly embarrassing with adults.

So when author Scott Westerfeld proudly proclaims he wrote "Succession" as a space opera "for [his] 14-year-old self", the teenage part of my brain lights up like a video game played by preschooler after three cans of Red Bull. While "Succession" stays on this caffeine high for most of its first half, it crashes badly in the second half with some misjudged material and poor handling of pacing.

The key to impressing boys is, in a vulcanized, carbon-fiber machine-actuated cyber-nutshell: Cool Stuff. And early on, Mr Westerfeld delivers cool by the ice bucket.

In the fine tradition of space opera, Mr Westerfeld drops us straight into the middle of the action, as Laurent Zai, captain on the imperial frigate Lynx, prepares a mission to rescue the Child Empress held hostage by the cyborg Rix on the planet Legis XV below. Mr Westerfeld gleefully pushes us to the logical extremes of both technological and human capabilities, teetering just on the edge of scientific plausibility: millimeter-scale remote spy drones, orbital drops by imperial space marines embalmed in shock-absorbent gel, spaceships controlled via deliberately induced synesthesia (the perception of one sense being felt in another—seeing sounds as colors, for example).

The central Cool Thing in all of this is Laurent Zai's Emperor, who happens to be dead, and has been for quite some time. This slows the Emperor down less than you'd think, because 1,600 years ago he discovered a means of reanimating the dead by implanting something known as a Lazarus symbiont, which not only restores life but also keeps the risen dead in perfect health. For example the Emperor's sister, the aforementioned Child Empress being held hostage, is physically a child but over a millennia old.

The ever-growing ranks of the undead have produced an unstable, two-tier society in the Empire, which the recent Rix attacks threaten to tear completely asunder. A second strand of the novel, intercut with the action above Legis XV, revolves around empathic Senator Nara Oxham as she leads a sort of "loyal opposition' political faction against the aristocracy of the dead. Additional chapters taking place 10 years before the main action of the novel cover the romantic history between Zai and Oxham.

The cuts between characters come thick an fast, keeping the action zipping along like an overexcited nerve cell, spitting out new ideas and technologies on every page. The weightier questions hanging on Oxham's story—is death necessary for progress? Do new ideas only arise because the older generations pass away?—form a nice complement to the shoot-'em-up frenzy of Zai's rescue mission.

The neurons begin to misfire in the second half, however, as once-perky ideas are replaced with sluggish technobabble. There is much talk about virtual matter involving "quantum wells", hardly the space adventure fare the target audience is looking for. Oh hell, even if they were begging for it, it's still dreadfully dreary. To fill the gap, a subplot involving a self-building, sentient house suddenly gets more air time, which is about as exciting as it sounds. The already fractured plot speeds up, skipping whole blocks of time, before juddering to a sudden halt that positively screams for a sequel, though as of June 2010 none has been forthcoming.

In short, "Succession" is hugely fun when it acts its age, a bit of a bore when it puts on grown-up airs.

More Fiction, Less History Please

TITLE: Conspirata
AUTHOR: Robert Harris
PUBLISHER: Simon and Schuster

RATING
5/5 "Plot to kill Hitler"; 4/5 "Gunpowder plot"; 3/5 "Garden plot"; 2/5 "Plot device"; 1/5 "Excel scatter plot"
SCORE: 3/5

Halfway through "Conspirata", I had one of those terrible epiphanies, the sort that usually only strike middle-aged men in dead-end jobs just before they either leap out the window or take up organic farming. And the epiphany was this: There really is no point to this.

"Conspirata" is the second in a series of novels by British author and former political correspondent Robert Harris, based on the life of famous Roman statesman and orator, Marcus Cicero. The first book, "Imperium", charted his rise from ambitious lawyer to his election as consul, the highest political office in Rome. The narrator in both books is Tiro, a slave owned by Cicero and something of a historical figure himself, thanks to his purported invention of a system of shorthand (though Mr Harris erroneously also attributes the invention of the ampersand, "&" to him).

Readers drawn by the martial-looking eagle on the cover, or who assume any Roman epic is going to involve gladiators, orgies and crucifixions will be cruelly disappointed. "West Wing" fans will be pleased, though. This is a political drama, proudly all talk and no action, where the climactic scenes take place on the rostra, not the colliseum. The single, solitary episode of toga-lifting naughtiness, a tryst between Tiro and a slave of another household, takes place firmly off-camera.

Instead, Mr Harris throws us headlong into the political arena, when Cicero uncovers evidence of a plot against both himself and the City of Rome. The plotters are never much of a mystery, and the focus is instead on how to outmaneuver them. Once they are defeated, the focus in the second half of the novel shifts to Cicero's diminished status once his term of office ends, and on the rise of a fellow named Julius Ceasar in the ensuing vacuum.

Mr Harris displays a casual knowledge of the inner workings of Roman government, but despite the notes provided at the end of the book it can sometimes be a headache to keep your praetors separated from your tribunes, your augurs from your pontifex, your Metelli from your Claudians. Indeed, there is precious little description of anything outside of Senate speeches and private intrigues. The storytelling is competent but uninspiring. Certainly, no Cicero.

I say the novel is "based on" the life of Cicero, but this is doing Mr Harris a disservice. Hell, this is the life of Cicero. "Conspirata" is first-rate history, which sadly sometimes makes it second-rate entertainment. Ostensibly a novel, the story line hews so closely to historical fact that five minutes on Wikipedia ruined the entire plot for me. For a work of historical fiction, this is too much history, too little fiction. Mr Harris neither alters nor adds to the facts, never suggests an alternative interpretation, never illustrates some unrecorded adventure. The whole thing soon becomes a bit like being cornered at a party by a dreadfully earnest history professor.

This flaw is exacerbated by Mr Harris's choice of Tiro as narrator and Cicero as subject. Particularly during the second half of the book, once Cicero's term as consul is over, he is reduced to mere bystander in greater events. That makes our man Tiro peripheral to the periphery, a third-hand news source doubly removed from all the action. Here you have Julius Ceasar, Rome's most ambitious and ruthless man, Pompey, her greatest general, and Crassus, her richest man, seizing control of the republic, but we see none of it.

It was then that the epiphany hit me. Why bother reading "Conspirata", when a history book would achieve much the same end?

The limited insights Mr Harris offers us are that Cicero was patriotic, Ceasar unscrupulous, Pompey vain and Crassus dim. What is the point of historical fiction, if not to make suggestions, interpretations or changes, to fill in the missing pages or otherwise doodle in the margins of history's textbooks? Why write a novel if not to present us with a work of fiction? This is not a bad book; the plot plows along straightforwardly, characterization is consistent if a little thin. Mr Harris just doesn't seem to have anyting particularly interesting to say about any of it.

Now if you will excuse me, I have some organic vegetables to tend to.

Rick of Conscience

TITLE: Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944
AUTHOR: Rick Atkinson
PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster

RATING
5/5 "Battle of Hoth"; 4/5 "Battle of Wits"; 3/5 "Battle of the Sexes"; 2/5 "Battle of the Bands"; 1/5 "Battle for Terra"
SCORE: 4/5

World War 2 is our low-fat war. One we can indulge in as much as we want, secure in the knowledge that the glorious fallen do not remain to lard our consciences, but rather have been transported to light, airy heaven. With other wars, we may have to rationalize, but there's little doubt that fighting the Nazis was the Right thing to do.

When you get to the question of when and where we fought them, though, things get a little stickier. Not every battle or campaign is so easy to justify, and as Rick Atkinson shows in "Day of Battle", the Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy is the ten-pound ball of deep-fried butter ruining our no-guilt diet. The campaign left 100,000 soldiers dead, perhaps four times that many wounded, without striking any decisive blow against the Germans or sufficiently distracting them from other theaters. Was it worth it?

Mr Atkinson equivocates on the question, but he does so beautifully. "Day of Battle" forms the second of Mr Atkinson's planned "Liberation" trilogy following the history of US armies in the major European campaigns of World War 2. The series began with 2002's Pulitzer Prize-winning "An Army at Dawn", an engaging, in-depth history chronicling the US landings in North Africa. "Day of Battle" maintains this high standard of writing, even if it lacks the former book's driving narrative.

Mr Atkinson brings a humanist touch and eye for detail to the little-studied invasion of Italy. His book combines memoirs, first-hand as well as official accounts, and stacks of letters to from soldiers to those waiting at home. This intimate look at the war, combined with a heavy dose of poetic license, makes this a surprisingly readable book despite its 600-page-plus length. The only fault in the style is the aforementioned poetic license, which crops up in Mr Atkinson's tendency to embellish his descriptions. "The dappled sea stretched to the shore in patches of turquoise and indigo," he says, which is nice to read but hardly good history.

The supporting maps are likewise something of a mixed bunch. While clean and informative for the most part, in the paperback edition I read a number of printing errors had left some names with missing letters, so that "Monte Lungo" is rendered "Lun o" and Major-General Hawkesworth "Awke w r".

The level of detail of Mr Atkinson's account is, however, amazing, covering the US involvement in the campaign from the Anglo-American conference in May 1943 where it was conceived, to its climax in the fall of Rome in June 1944. Altghough the descriptions of acutal battle are sometimes a little vague, "thrusts met stout resistance", "a flanking attack ... unhinged the German line", Mr Atkinson's coverage of the leading personalities, from US commanders George Patton and Mark Clark, to divisional commanders like Lucian Truscott and even more junior officers, is much stronger. Mr Atkinson projects genuine respect and admiration for these men, though you feel he might be too easy on them sometimes. Mr Atkinson lists their ailments and worries sympathetically, but I can't stomach commanders sleeping in sprawling Italian villas and complaining about stress or tiredness, when a dozen kilometers away their men are getting dismembered by the truckload. Clark in particular gets off lightly, despite coming across as slighly insubordinate and egocentric.

Rather, Mr Atkinson saves his venom for the real enemy: the British. "Day of Battle" is a fine account of the campaign, provided you are utterly uninterested in the involvement of the British, Canadians, Polish, New Zealanders, Indians and other nationalities who made up the Allied force. Whenever the "cousins" do pop up, they soon disappear under a barrage of criticism for poor leadership, lack of offensive spirit, and failure to support or appreciate their American allies enough.

The most troubling part of the book, however, is Mr Atkinson's attempt to justify the campaign as a whole. In "An Army at Dawn", he convincingly argued that the African campaign helped steel US forces for the war in Europe. The argument doesn't work as well here, especially as he himself notes that soldiers not killed or wounded tended to become psychiatric casualties after 200-240 days; men can only be tempered so far before they break. Instead, Mr Atkinson falls back on the stale comfort that, in the words of war correspondent George Biddle, certain qualities "give war its justification, meaning, romance and beauty. The qualities of valor, sacrifice, discipline, a sense of duty". This flies in the face of the evidence Mr Atkinson presents in the previous 600 pages, that the war was horrible, meaningless, savage and hellish.

Far better is another quote by Biddle, "I wish the people at home, instead of thinking of their boys in terms of football stars, would think of them in terms of miners trapped underground or suffocating to death in a tenth-story fire." Sometimes, I think, it's only right that our consciences should be troubled.

War is Hell for Other People

TITLE: D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
AUTHOR: Antony Beevor
PUBLISHER: Viking

RATING
5/5 "The Mother of All Battles"; 4/5 "The Aunty of All Skirmishes"; 3/5 "The Granny of All Protest Marches"; 2/5 "The Niece of All Arguments"; 1/5 "The Step-Sister of All Tantrums"
SCORE: 4/5

The D-Day invasion of France, the golden moment of the Greatest Generation, is probably one of the best-known battles of the whole war. A new book on the subject sheds little new light on the events, but helps remind us of the staggering cost in lives, Allied, German and civilian, that was the price of victory.

In "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy", British historian Antony Beevor attempts to recreate the award-winning formula that served him so well in 1998's "Stalingrad" and 2002's "The Fall of Berlin 1945". With these books, Mr Beevor found something of a niche between scholarly, broad and sweeping histories like John Keegan's "The Second World War", and more intimate accounts like Stephen Ambrose's "Band of Brothers".

Mr Beevor's style is to weave together first-hand accounts of generals, soldiers and civilians into a coherent and comprehensive account of battles. This again is the pattern for "D-Day", flitting among personal anecdotes as it follows the campaign from the initial airborne landings to the liberation of Paris. He does an admirable job of balancing his sources, including American, British, Canadian, French and German voices.

If the objective is to let you know how it felt to be there, then the book fails. You can't pretend that reading about the explosions, the screams, the fear, the stench can come within shooting distance of the real thing, any more than watching "House MD" trains you to be a doctor. It does, however, give you a better sense of war as something experienced by its participants, rather than some abstract development on a map. You can appreciate the feelings expressed, even if you can't understand them.

Mr Beevor's style also allows him to highlight previously under-appreciated aspects of the campaign. In "Stalingrad", this was the role of the hapless Soviet "volunteers" in the German armed forces, viewed as traitors by their countrymen and sub-humans by their new masters. In "D-Day", the spotlight again falls on those dealt the lowest of war's playing cards: civilians, prisoners and the wounded.

These people tend to get short shrift in most accounts. War is hell, we are often told. Yes, but who for? "Saving Private Ryan" or "Letters from Iwo Jima" focus on the plight of the men in uniform, but by contrast Mr Beevor's account makes it clear the real horrors happen not on the front lines, but behind them. Indeed, the book leads me to the (admittedly unoriginal) insight that it's much easier to shoot people who aren't shooting back, and the safest thing to do on the battlefield was probably to be the one holding the machinegun. Mr Beevor presents us with a series of saddening, sickening stories of prisoners and wounded shot, civilians murdered, towns massacred and destroyed. It's sobering to realize that more French people died being liberated by their allies, than Englishmen did being bombed by their enemies.

However, what worked so well in "Stalingrad" and "Berlin" begins to feel a little forced here. The two previous books were both about sieges, which by nature gave them both a limited scope and a natural beginning, middle and end. The colossal scale of D-Day, and the lack of clear ending work against Mr Beevor's style.

"D-Day" provides only a sketchy overview of the strategic course of the battle, supplemented by some awkwardly-placed maps. It does not stay with any one figure long enough to give us any insight into their personal lives. Analysis of leading figures never rises above the level of oft-repeated cliches: vain Montgomery, nagging Churchill, foul-mouthed Patton. The rank-and-file get even less air time. Ironically for a book built on first-person recollections, we never get to know any of the participants as people. Instead they frequently get used as local color, to spice up the account and move it along, before returning to obscurity. The book does not so much reach a conclusion as abruptly stop, with a lame comment on how different the world would be if the invasion had failed.

In spite of these shortcomings, "D-Day" is a highly readable addition to the coverage of the campaign, and a useful guide to the true costs of war.

Sharp-Edged Wit

TITLE: The Blade Itself
AUTHOR: Joe Abercrombie
PUBLISHER: Pyr

RATING
5/5 "Go ahead, make my day."; 4/5 "You talking to me?"; 3/5 "Say "hello" to my little friend!"; 2/5 "Yo, Adrian!"; 1/5 "You maniacs! You blew it up! Oh damn you! Goddamn you all the Hell!"
SCORE 5/5

Logen Ninefingers is the toughest, baddest fighter in all of the North, the kind of stone-cold killer who could eat Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone for breakfast, and still have room for Arnold Schwarzenegger for desert. When we first meet him, he's doing what he does best: killing things. Of course, like all action heroes, he cracks wise as he breaks heads; his first lines are, "Shit", followed by "Gah!", "Hah", "Shit" yet again, then "Aaargh!". Ah, such poetry. He whimpers, grunts, squeals, then falls off a cliff.

He what?

Yes, the heroes of "The Blade Itself", by British author Joe Abercrombie, are not what you expect. It's as though Mr Abercrombie has taken well-worn archetypes of fantasy and swords & sorcery, the Tough Barbarian, the Wise Wizard, the Young Gallant, the Cynical Veteran, the Damsel in Distress, placed them lovingly on a pedestal, bowed deeply before them, then cut their throats, ripped out their entrails and set them on fire. Rarely have such genre clichés been deconstructed with such élan and obvious glee.

Gritty, dark fantasy seems to have enjoyed a surge in popularity over the past decade, boosted by authors such as George R R Martin, Stevan Erikson and Scott Bakker. Their heroes are anything but heroic, sometimes die, and frequently swear. Of course, there's an inherent contradiction in trying to write a "realistic" fantasy, and all too often such stories become a race to the lowest, pimpley-est of adolescent common denominators, stuffed with blood, gore, swearing and sex. Mr Bakker's "Prince of Nothing" series springs to mind as a particular culprit. "The Blade Itself" neatly avoids these pitfalls. The charm of Mr Abercrombie's work is that he manages to wallow in the mud without getting dirty. He remembers fantasy is, above all, supposed to be fun.

Mr Abercrombie has a rare talent for sketching vivid personalities in just a few strokes. His characters may be more memorable than believable, but always sympathetic. Take Logen, for starters. You'll never have such a soft spot for such a hard lump of a man. He's lost his family, his friends and his axe – now all he has for company is a cooking pot. Mr Abercrombie deftly portrays him as a worn nub of a man, tired from years of fighting, who could still snap you in two if he had a mind to.

His fall from the cliff is not the end, and eventually he falls in with Bayaz, a man who claims to be the First of the Magi. Unlike most Wise Wizards, he's not much of a one for fireside wisdom and heartwarming homilies. Waving magic wands and speaking pig-Latin doesn't appear on his "To Do" list, either. The Darth Vader neck-crushing thing is more Bayaz's speed, when he's not making people spontaneously explode, like Tetsuo in "Akira".

Bayaz brings Logen to the city of Adua, the capital of a massive but decrepit, patchwork kingdom called the Union. There, they cross paths with Jezal dan Luthar, a dashing and dishy young swordsman callow to the point of almost mental incapacity, and Inquisitor Glokta, a torturer with unique insights into his job thanks to two years spent in the dungeons of the Union's enemies. He walks with a limp, climbs stairs with reluctance, is missing half his teeth but none of his wits. You feel sorry for him, when he's not cutting people's fingers off.

There are plenty of fingers in line for the chop, as the Union is beset by enemies within and without, real as well as imagined. People claiming to be powerful wizards go right to the top of the inquisition's Suspicious People list, and Glokta is put on the case of finding out whether the old man really is who he claims to be. In this, he's aided by two thuggish helpers, an ex-criminal and a giant, near-mute albino, who naturally gets one of the novel's best lines.

There also are a number of minor stories, each packed with equally quirky characters. The requisite Damsel in Distress is Ferro Maljinn, an escaped slave and, incidentally, a feral, evil spirit of a woman, madder than a pit bull on acid. When offered salvation, her first instinct is to stab her rescuer. Other interwoven lines follow dour Major West and his hard-drinking sister, and a band of northern outlaws with colorful names like Dogman and Threetrees.

As the first book of a trilogy, much of "The Blade Itself" is spent on stage-setting and world-building. You get the sense of forces gathering, like mountaineers under a snow shelf after someone says, "Atchoo". The aims and motives of the protagonists remain mostly shrouded, and the overarching mythology is revealed in teasingly brief glimpses. The action is therefore episodic rather than epic. Some readers may be put off by the slow plot development, but although small-scale, the fights are never less than electric in intensity. It all builds nicely to a climactic, crimson scene where we learn why Logen Ninefingers is also known as "The Bloody-Nine."

"The Blade Itself" is stripped-down fantasy, anarchic and endless fun to read, Monty Python does Conan the Barbarian, with Jason Bourne in the lead. It is not an Important Book, it won't change your life, just give you a few hours of genuine pleasure. You'll whimper, grunt, and perhaps even squeal with laughter. Then you'll go and buy the next book in the series.

Guilty on all Counts

TITLE: Previous Convictions
AUTHOR: AA Gill
PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster

RATING
5/5 "Espionage"; 4/5 "Treason"; 3/5 "Blasphemy"; 2/5 "Sedition"; 1/5 "Littering"
SCORE: 3/5

There comes a time in every love affair when the emotions finally release the optic nerves, letting you see your partner as they really are, when last night's date becomes this morning's hangover, when you stop locking the bathroom door and start cutting your toenails in front of one another. It's surviving that moment, more than any other test, that makes or breaks relationships.

That moment arrived for me and AA Gill about a third of the way into "Previous Convictions". I'll save you from skipping to the end: it turns out all right, we're still together, but it was a close-run thing.

Partially it was my fault. I was quick to overlook Mr Gill's faults. At first, I knew him only vaguely by reputation, as a witty and acerbic columnist for the UK's Sunday Times newspaper. The first book of his I read was "Angry Island", and I was hooked. The vitriol sometimes fell wide of the mark -- he seems to have a personal animus against the Welsh, for instance, which seems to be about as relevant as being against quilt-making or the color green. But he was always original, always fun to have around. His travel writing collection, "AA Gill is away", sealed the deal. It's like pumping ten thousand volts through your literary nerves, blowing all your preconceptions of what travel writing should be. I had it bad, as you can see.

"Previous Convictions" started out right. Oh sure, there was a bit of pretentiousness in his division of the articles into "Here" (the UK) and "There" (everywhere else). The first piece though, on the Glastonbury music festival, had me in hysterics. The high point arrives when the police attempt to escort away a naked, elderly woman noisily masturbating in front of the stage. "Come quietly, love".

But then, I started to notice the little things. How his heart really wasn't in it sometimes. The line about Africa waking up with such promise? That's from "AA Gill is away". The paean to India, ditto.

Sometimes, he was so self-indulgent, like he couldn't even be bothered trying. Like the article devoted entirely to a phone call to his 11-year-old son. Worse yet, he started throwing his own relationship in my face. Here's AA Gill and Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson in Texas. Here's AA Gill and "Jeremy" in Iraq, in Mykonos, in Amsterdam. Other than as showcases for Jeremy's asinine prejudices and Mr Gill's love of name-dropping, there's not much to recommend about any of these pieces.

I was almost in tears. The bastard, how he let me down. Then I went back, reread the better pieces, the middle stretch especially. Wait, the magic was still there. The piece on gold mining in South Africa, that's good, you get a real sense of the oppressive heat, the stifling dark, the hellish noise. His take on the essential loneliness and desperation of fitness clubs ("As close as most of us non-Hindus will ever get to knowing what it's like to be a hamster") has the disturbing ring of truth, his anger at the massacre in Darfur feels genuine (the book was pusblished in 2006, before Darfur became a cause celebre).

His bleak portrait of Haiti is timely given the recent earthquake, and a reminder that it will take more than money to get this basket-case country on its feet again. The trip to Peshawar, near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, is nicely balanced, a human look at the conflict that has dragged on through British, Russian and American occupations for over a century.

In short, "Previous Convictions" is patchy, baldingly uneven, but when Mr Gill gets it right, it shines. Brilliantly.

Sometimes you just have to close one eye, accept the other's faults, and learn to appreciate the good times. Luckily, in "Previous Convictions" there's still plenty of the latter. I just pray that's the last I've heard of Jeremy-bleeding-Clarkson.