Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (18 page)

—Infinity Plus

The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

by Jeffrey Ford

Morrow, 307 pages, hardback, 2002

In Victorian-era Manhattan, fashionable portraitist Piero Piambo receives a most unusual commission. His client, Mrs. Charbuque, demands that he paint her portrait without ever once setting eyes upon her or upon any other likeness of her; instead, she will sit for him only behind a screen, telling him tales about herself from which he must attempt to deduce her appearance. Piambo would of course normally reject such a nonsensical commission out of hand – he has plenty of rich potential clients drooling to give him their business – but the fee Mrs. Charbuque offers is an enormous one and, perhaps even more important, the challenge is so unique that it inspires a jaded Piambo, although at first he is not fully conscious of this, to revert to the ideals of art he embraced so passionately in his youth, before cynicism and commerce turned him into the darling of the well heeled chic set he is today.

The tales Mrs. Charbuque relates over and through the screen are almost beyond – sometimes completely beyond – belief, and yet Piambo, while knowing at one level they are not to be accepted at face value (as it were), is driven to try to research what he can of the facts behind them, and uncomfortably often his researches seem to show the tales may, after all, be true. It is as if the tales' fantastication itself is giving him the gift of art in place of the slick picture-manufacture at which he has become so adroit – or, rather, that they are forcing him to regain what he once had but discarded. And real life intrudes all too bluntly on occasion upon his dreamlike obsession with these strands of fantasy that have come to dominate his perceptions: there seems to be a Mr. Charbuque, who is none too keen on Piambo's assignations with his, Mr. Charbuque's, wife. Piambo's mistress is not especially pleased, either. It is of no use for Piambo to protest that, far from engaging in amorous congress with his sitter, far from even touching her, he has yet to clap so much as a fleeting glimpse upon her; partially false, too, for him to protest too much, because the truth is there's a decidedly erotic element in his fascination with the voice that tells him these wild stories.

Not all of the tales have equal charm. The tale of the seer who bases his divinations upon the morphologies of snowflakes, and who one day is confounded to discover two of them impossibly identical, is exceedingly beautiful. That of his copromantic counterpart ("turdologist", to use Ford's term), who is thrown into consternation by discovering two identical turds, comes across not so much as a delightful flight of fancy as profoundly unfunny schoolboy scatological humour masquerading as arch wit behind a gauze of elegant articulacy.

But that elegance is truly remarkable. Consider this:

"How did you know it was me?" I called after him.

Before he disappeared into the night, I heard him say, "The smell of self-satisfaction; a pervasive aroma of nutmeg and mold."

Or this, concerning a numerological system:

An abracadabra of addition, division, and multiplication would follow, capped off by the subtraction of the digit one hundred forty-four, the numerical constant for human error.

Or this, describing a professional lockpicker:

"There is no ring of keys," said Wolfe. "I'm the ring of keys." He held up his open hand, knuckle side out, before my face. It was a rather squat, round mitt, the fingers like sausages, but from their tips grew exceedingly long nails that had been precisely trimmed to the thinnest width. At their very ends, those of the pinky and ring bearer were cut in a serrated pattern, the thumb bore a three-inch hat pin, and the remaining index and middle sported eruptions of nail that evidently would fit a lock's baffle.

(There's also the occasional instance where the conscious stylistic elegance trips up over its own two feet, as in this: "Upon voicing my question, the door opened and Watkin announced that my time was up.")

I'm quite certain the term "magic realism" will be bandied about quite widely concerning this book, and indeed it does have a strong magic realist feel – which is in no way diminished by the serial-killer aspects of its real-world plot. However, its concerns seem to be somewhere else entirely; one should look for similarities not among the magic realist writers but instead to a writer like John Barth, obsessed with the power of Story in such novels as
The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor
(1992). For really the real-world elements of
The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque
– dramatic as they become, personally threatening to Piambo as they are – fade almost into insignificance in our minds as well as his beside the Story-empowered alternative truth that Mrs. Charbuque creates. The real world becomes just a jostle of trivial stories; hers is
Story
, and therefore
truer
– even though, as with its creator, for it to be perceived (which it can be) one must strain to perceive the invisible.

Which is, of course, something at the very core of human fantasy.

Despite any minor criticisms,
The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque
must be one of the best novels of 2002. The fact that Ford has chosen to use fantasy as a means of investigating fantasy is of course its appeal to die-hard fantasy readers; but really this is a novel of interest to all, whatever their normal literary palate. This novel is a deftly constructed creation every bit as lovely as any of the invisible sitter's flights of fancy. The sense of it – its air – lingers long in the mind, and is welcome there.

—Infinity Plus

Daughters of a Coral Dawn

by Katherine V. Forrest

Naiad Press, 226 pages, paperback, 1984

Although outwardly completely human, Mother is an alien from the planet Verna III, brought home to Earth by Father, with whom she has a passel of seemingly human daughters. But, as they grow older (which they do much more slowly than humans do), it becomes evident the daughters are far more intelligent than the Earth-humans around them. This might be tolerable were it not for the fact that this near-future Earth has reverted to a complete male domination, with testosterone being the currency of the day. Might is right, and it's the men who've seized the might.

The daughters go out and marry Earth men, by whom they in turn have daughters who seem fully human but are in fact as talented as their mothers. And the daughters have daughters ...

By the time there are thousands of this all-female clan, the world situation has deteriorated yet further, the male tyranny having become yet more oppressive; a means of artificial fertilization has become available, but has been outlawed because it would diminish the male grip upon the female thralls. The women of the clan decide that they should leave to find another world to claim as their own – a habitable planet of which Earth has not yet become aware, of course, because otherwise the males will hunt them down and either try to exterminate them or, perhaps even worse, try to bring them back. The logistics of locating such a world and getting there are not so daunting as they might seem, because, despite their femaleness, many of the clan members have, through their hyperintelligence, risen to fairly high-ranking positions within the scientific/technological hierarchy.

The first half of this book – which very much falls into two halves – concerns all of the above and the journey, aboard a seized super-starship, to the planet, which they christen Maternas in honour of the still-jaunty Mother, the only heterosexual among the thousands-strong party of settlers. At Mother's insistence, the women appoint a new leader, perhaps the most intellectually talented of them all: the synthesist Megan.

In the second half, Maternas is accidentally discovered by a ship from Earth containing three hyper-chauvinist males and a young female lieutenant, Laurel. After an attempted rape by one of the males, and after Laurel has described how she has been harassed and bullied throughout the flight, it is clear the males cannot be allowed to stay. On the other hand, neither can they be allowed to go back to Earth and report their discovery. There are some difficult decisions ahead for Megan.

And some equally difficult decisions ahead for Laurel, too. Should she return to Earth, her home and, despite everything, the world to which she has at least some emotional allegiance; or should she stay in the semi-idyll of Maternas? Previously a practising heterosexual, can she adapt to the homosexual ways of the women of Maternas?

To a large extent, her mind is made up for her, because she falls headlong in love with Megan. For her part Megan, who has hitherto preserved her virginity in the interests of maintaining distance from and impartiality towards her people, finds to her intense annoyance that she's fallen completely for Laurel ...

Unabashedly a work of lesbian evangelism,
Daughters of a Coral Dawn
is a work of very considerable charm, a quasi-allegory (genetic considerations alone make it a dubious candidate for straightforward science fiction, and the astrophysics is bizarre) that manages to make its profoundly anti-male sentiments, despite their irrationality (all blanket descriptions of millions of individuals are by definition irrational), quite unexceptionable, quite inoffensive. Where perhaps one really
ought
to take offence, because this sort of sexism is the cousin of racism, instead one grins and understands.

In part this is because of the sensitivity and sympathy with which Forrest draws a few of her central characters. One grows genuinely to
like
Megan, Laurel and Minerva, the latter being the historian who carries the main burden of the story in, particularly, the first half of the book. Outside this central circle, Forrest's hand is less sure; many of the women are just blurs distinguished only by their names, the three men are of course merely crude stereotypes, and Mother becomes fairly swiftly a rather annoying caricature. But that doesn't really matter because one becomes so involved in the tales and emotions of those three main protagonists.

For the lascivious, there are a few fairly graphic sex scenes, the last of which seems to go on forever for no reason other than attempted titillation. These scenes, although written with an extremely appealing wry yet loving lyricism, seem to have been grafted onto the main body of the book in order to establish its credentials – political or commercial – within its perceived market ghetto. It's as if Forrest had been told that there was no real market for sf with a lesbian theme, so she should aim primarily for the lesbian erotica reader and hope readers would tolerate the rest. This is actually a very great pity, because
Daughters of a Coral Dawn
is far too interesting and pleasing a book to be confined to
any
ghetto.

Copies of
Daughters of a Coral Dawn
were until very recently rather hard to find, because the book had been out of print for quite a while. However, in September 2002 Alyson Publications released a new edition (not seen by this reviewer; paperback, $13.95). Unfortunately, Alyson is a press whose main focus seems to be gay porn (oops, I meant "erotica"); back to the ghetto with a vengeance for this very charming, certainly non-pornographic work – but at least it's readily available once more. Whatever your sexual orientation,
Daughters of a Coral Dawn
is a book that's worth your time.

—Infinity Plus

Reunion

by Alan Dean Foster

Del Rey, 328 pages, hardback, 2001

Because of his prolific production of movie novelizations – some pretty good, some, to be honest, pretty dire – it is often almost overlooked that Alan Dean Foster has created a significant body of other fictions. These are often very enjoyable entertainments, and at their best can be something more than that.

Among the most popular of these independent novels have been those in his Pip and Flinx series, set in the far future when the Galaxy is divided up between the Humanx Commonwealth and a fairly limited number of alien cultures. Flinx is Philip Lynx, an empath who owes his erratic talent to his genetically engineered origins as an experiment by a now outlawed eugenicist cult, the Meliorare Society. Pip is his lifelong pet and ally, an alien creature that resembles a miniature dragon, spits corrosive venom and is capable, like Flinx himself, of a high level of empathy. Because of his abilities, Flinx feels – and in fact is – an anomaly in humanx society, and thus devotes his life to a quest for an understanding of his origins and hence of himself.

This episode of that quest starts on Earth, where he discovers that a computer file containing details of his origins has been stolen from a central databank, with the sole copy being expropriated to the remote desert world of Pyrassis, which lies within the region of the Galaxy governed by the AAnn, a hostile reptilian species. During a lengthy sojourn on Pyrassis, Flinx discovers a mountainous ridge there is in fact a vast alien transmitter, half a million years old. Sparked into activity during a gunfight between himself and a couple of AAnn xenarchaeologists, this device transmits a signal, its content unknown, to the gaseous moon of the Pyrassis system's outermost planet (which seems to be the sixth world if you go by page 86 or the tenth world to judge by pages 201 onwards). Still pursuing the stolen file, Flinx heads for this moon and discovers that all is not what it seems there. As he engages in a three-way struggle between himself, a vengeful AAnn military mission and a humanx party led by his infinitely evil yet also infinitely beautiful alter ego, he gets answers of a sort.

During the course of this entertainment there are flashes of early Harry Harrison and of Eric Frank Russell, yet Foster's telling lacks certainly the slickness, verve and humour and arguably the wit of either of these authors. In place of these attributes he deploys – or, more accurately, invites us to wallow in – an excess of vocabulary. (Okay, okay, so I'm calling the kettle black here.) Occasionally his logophilia runs rampant to deliberately amusing effect, but more often it leads him into linguistic booby-traps or to produce tracts of hugely over-adjectived narrative that feel consciously padded and are, not to put too fine a point upon it, a bit dull.

As an example of over-adjectiving, we find on page 181 that Flinx "followed his excited former reptiloid captors", which has at least one adjective too many because of course the beings concerned were not former reptiloids. Again, on page 243 we discover that a membranous construct "looked like a razed segment of electrified soap bubble", a description markedly difficult to construe. Similarly hard to understand is this, from page 281: "Warm particles trickled from her tail where it emerged from the soothing sand, as it did from those of her staff." Or, on page 300, "Mahnahmi had moved so rapidly that the ... escort she had coldly and efficiently liquidated still lay where they had fallen in the corridor" – the corpses hadn't had long enough to crawl deadly off, one assumes. (The word replaced by an ellipsis in that sentence is actually "stunned". No, Mahnahmi didn't stun her escort: she killed them. Foster's meaning is that they had been stunned by the fact that she should suddenly turn on them and kill them.)

There is really rather too much of this sort of stuff.

The whole central section of the book, in which Flinx wanders about the desert surface of Pyrassis to no particular purpose except to have brushes with death – thirst, hunger, cunningly camouflaged alien predators, pursuing AAnn, etc. – seems uncommonly overextended. All that happens of any real importance during the course of 120 pages or so is that Flinx learns of the existence of the alien supertransmitter, alerts the AAnn to the presence of a human intruder in their territory (so that they can start chasing him), and in conjunction with a couple of AAnn inadvertently triggers the supertransmitter into activity. This portion of the book ends somewhat perfunctorily: suddenly, inspired by quasi-intelligent plants aboard, his ship's AI decides to send down a shuttle to rescue Flinx – and, whoosh, away he goes.

This anticlimax could be more disappointing to the reader were it not for the fact that, during those preceding 120 pages, the pulse has largely failed to pound. The great disadvantage of throwing vocabulary into a text by the bucketful is that all possibility of dramatic tension is smothered under the verbal scree. Here is just an abridged part of the description (pages 110-11) of those quasi-intelligent plants coming to the conclusion that Flinx needs rescuing from the Pyrassian surface:

His emboldened convictions were not matched by certain growths he had left behind on board the
Teacher
[his ship]. In ways that could not be explained by contemporary biology, physics, or any other branch of the familiar sciences, they sensed that something had gone seriously wrong with the warm-blooded vertebrate in whose charge they had been placed. When his absence persisted, they grew quietly frantic. Leaves twitched imperceptibly in the windless confines of the
Teacher
's lounge. Petals dipped under the influence of forces far more subtle and less obvious than falling water. Unseen roots curled in response to wave patterns that had nothing to do with the subtle movements of soil and grit.

The situation was analyzed in the absence of anything Flinx or any other chordate would recognize as a brain. It involved a manifold process of cogitation far more alien than any propounded by AAnn or thranx, Otoid or Quillp. Among the known sentients, only the cetacea of Cachalot or the Sumacrea of Longtunnel might, upon exerting a supreme effort, have glimpsed an intimation of the process, but no more than that. It was not possible for compartmentalized organic brains deliberating by means of sequential electric impulses to fathom what was taking place among the plants of Midworld. [...]

In silence broken only by the whisper of air being recycled through the hull, envisionings sprang lucent and undiminished among the alien flora. What inhered among them inhered among every other growing thing on the world from which they had come. It was not a discussion in the sense that subjects were put forth for disputation and debate. Did clouds moot before resolving to rain? Did atmosphere argue prior to sending a breeze northward, or to the east? When a whirling magnetar blew off overwhelming quantities of gamma rays, was the direction and moment of eruption a consequence of cognizant confutation?

And so on. A later piece of description (page 154) seems curiously apropos in this context: "Like black pudding, the maze threatened to congeal around him ..." Maybe it's all intended to be a parody of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Or Lionel Fanthorpe. Or Michael Innes ...

The net effect of such overwriting is to turn what should have been a fast-moving romp – as per Harry Harrison's
Deathworld
(1960), shall we say – into something rather sluggish and tedious. Although the abrupt removal of Flinx from his Pyrassian hazards is, as noted, anticlimactic, certainly this reader greeted it with a heartfelt sigh of relief in that it signalled the end of an extended section in which it seemed the author had lost his way – as if his schema insisted that 40% or so of the book should consist of Flinx's adventures on Pyrassis but that, once Foster had got his protagonist there, he discovered there was a paucity of adventures to be had.

And the telling does indeed improve a bit thereafter, as we head towards the final confrontation between Flinx and his alter ego, although still there is never any great suspense because of the continuing plethora of unnecessary vocabulary. (The first section of the book, set on Earth, is much more plainly told and hence much more enjoyable and effective.) The ancient artefacts display their wonders, as ancient artefacts do; the greatest wonder of all is that Flinx has, at some stage in the past, encountered something just like one of them, and so knows what to do with it even if unclear as to its actual function. No real surprise for the reader here: what it does is zap the AAnn who have been malevolently hunting him down.

The conclusion of the book, alas, leaves much unresolved, thereby allowing for the inevitable sequel.

Foster is a very much better writer than this book portrays him – novels like
Icerigger
(1974) and
Midworld
(1975), while hardly heavyweight classics, are memorably enjoyable, even if the latter is perhaps a bit too redolent of Brian Aldiss's
Hothouse
/
The Long Afternoon of Earth
(1962).
Reunion
, by contrast, comes across as a romp that doesn't romp or a space-operatic Sense of Wonder tale that lacks the Sense of Wonder. It is reasonably entertaining in parts, but lacks either the vivacity or the central driving idea to pull the reader delightedly forward. Its blurb describes it as "a roller-coaster ride into the unknown", but the car – although occasionally trying to hiccup itself into motion – stays fixed in its place at the start of the rails, while the ideas and imaginings of the book seem to stick only too resolutely to the known.

Yet Foster can never be discounted, as far too many people do on the basis of all those novelizations. In the past he has often enough followed an unsatisfying novel with one that is tremendous fun. Dedicated followers of the adventures of Pip and Flinx will doubtless enjoy
Reunion
as a minor entrant in a series that began as long ago as 1983. Other readers might wish to wait until the next volume.

—Infinity Plus