Neo-Victorian magic in short form

I have, rather frustratingly, been doing a lot of partial books reading lately so it has been far too many weeks since I have been able to finish a book and write a review of it. It was due to this trend that I decided to pick up one of my many unread short story anthologies so that I at least wouldn’t be too frustrated trying to keep track of too many goings-on if for some reason this book was also interrupted before I finished it. Fortunately, I was able to polish off Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy in about four days, without having to read anything else in between except a few entries of Dracula Daily.

I believe I picked up this book in a Readercon dealers’ room a few years ago, and even if I don’t remember picking it up precisely it’s a good guess because I know I have lots of books that were picked up in fugue states in various Readercon dealers’ rooms over the years. The author list is about half names I recognize (many from their attendance at Readercon) and half I don’t. The anthology has 18 stories in it, which I will not be reviewing individually even though I feel like I should.

The stories vary wildly in mood and subject matter. Perhaps I’m dour and burnt out but I found that I seem to have somewhat gone off the fluffy, indulgent meta-fantasy type of stories a bit–both the Catherynne M. Valente story (an earlier version of The Glass Town Game) and the Theodora Goss story ended up not holding my interest quite as much as either of those authors’ other writings directly geared toward fans of nineteenth-century fiction have in the past. Probably my favorite story in the whole anthology was “Phosphorus” by Veronica Schanoes, an author I’d never heard of before, which is about a match worker dying of phossy jaw (the cancer you get when you ingest a lot of white phosphorus because you work at the match factory and have to eat lunch at your workstation) and the matchgirls’ strike of 1888. That one nearly made me cry.

Overall I think this was a really strong anthology–even the stories that personally gripped me less were pretty good, and they showcase a range of different approaches to writing fantasy about nineteenth century Britain.

Murder, blackmail, and opera, Part II

I really liked Katherine Addison’s The Witness for the Dead, a quiet little murder mystery set in the world of The Goblin Emperor, so as soon as I heard The Grief of Stones was out I put in a hold for it at the library.

This one again follows the quiet, tenacious Thara Celehar as he solves murders and meets interesting people and stumbles upon some plots that are bigger and more sinister than even the murders he is trying to solve.

Like the prequel, the book is fairly quiet, at least right up until the final showdown. Thara is provided, or perhaps landed with, an apprentice, a widow who discovered her ability to hear the dead late in life. Thara hangs out with his friend Anora, who works at the cemetery, and Pel-Thenhior, who continues to write scandalous (but successful) operas. He hears some petitions and meets a bunch of other interesting folks in varying levels of respectability and winds up uncovering a major scandal at a home for foundling girls, which results in him battling ancient monsters near the Hill of Werewolves again, though this time differently. The book does not feel at all repetitive but it does neatly reproduce all of the things I liked about the first Cemeteries of Amalo book, and it ends on a promising teaser for a third installment.

While it is definitely a comforting little cozy mystery it doesn’t feel lighthearted, as Thara’s office is a grim, dignified one and his entire personality is weighted down by grief. It is, in some ways, a fairly serious book about grief, even as it is also a delightful book about a quiet little priest solving murders with his friends and fretting about the state of his coats. (Thara’s not particularly vain, but his coats are in rough shape.) The elaborate system of titles and other fantasy words/names continues to be opaque to me in a way that could easily be goofy (so many zh sounds!) but is deliberate and consistent enough to end up lending some density to the worldbuilding, plus I find it nice that it’s not over-explained. Maybe someday Addison will release some notes on the language that we can all be big geeks about, Tolkien-style.

I don’t know what else to say about either this or its prequel; they’re just both lovely little jewels of books.

Moles in the old boys' club

In addition to the obligatory yearly pirate book I have a couple other genres that are rapidly becoming my Lakeside Reading Subjects, and one of those is shaping up to be “spy shit.” Last year I read Agent Garbo, about the prolific misinformation agent Juan Garcia Pujol, and this year I decided to get over my fear of “What if it isn’t as good as Operation Mincemeat” and dig into the other Ben MacIntyre book I own, which I’d picked up at a Harvard Book Store Warehouse Sale back in 2017: A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal.

Kim Philby is, apparently, the most impressive double agent in the history of spycraft. He was recruited as a Soviet spy as a college student and somehow managed to hide that he’d ever been involved in anything more left-wing than a bit of canvassing for the Labour Party, feigned a swing rightward after graduating, got himself hired as a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War, and then was old-boys-clubbed right into MI6 at the outbreak of World War II, where he not only fit right in but was considered a rising star. His star rose so high, in fact, that he became the head of British counterintelligence against the Soviet Union once WWII was over and the Cold War started in earnest. From this perch, and via his close personal friendships with other counterintelligence officers in MI6 and the CIA, he was able to almost singlehandedly fuck up every major British and American operation against the Soviets through the forties and into the fifties.

A Spy Among Friends is not a straight biography of Philby; it is almost as much a biography of Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s best friend in MI6. It is predominantly a book about friendship, and about friendships between spies, and the ways in which those friendships work (and, sometimes, don’t work). It’s also, of course, a story about some incredibly privileged and overpowered British gentlemen of the old school, and the way that the old British establishment worked to create this new crop of spies.

The result here is that it’s not really a book about politics or history–if you don’t already have a basic grasp of the European history of that time period, or what spies do, or the various ideologies at play, MacIntyre is not going to take the time to explain it to you–but more of a psychological study of MI6’s officers and culture, with the narrative history of the friendship between Philby and Elliott as its main case study. Personally, I found this a fascinating angle, but your mileage may vary. Rich British people at the height of the Empire were incredibly fucked up in ways that I think are very interesting, but I could hardly fault anyone else for being less than interested in plumbing the psychological depths of a class of people who have already been the center of attention in world history for so long. But I do think the look at the old boys who were doing such hyper-clandestine work is a worthwhile one for what it says about the effects of secrecy on people and the human limitations of suspicion and operational discipline.

Things get really interesting when a bunch of MI5 guys quite rightly suspect Philby but, importantly, 1) don’t have any proof and 2) are clearly also caught up in a resentful McCarthyite mindset that sees Reds under every bed. To top it off, Kim’s wife, Aileen, has basically figured out that he’s a Soviet spy, but she’s also got severe Munchausen syndrome and there’s only so many times she can ineptly make up “evidence” that he’s a Red, like claiming he’s run off to Moscow when he actually just went to the beach and was back home the next morning, before it really does become entirely sensible to discount her opinion as proof of anything. Thus, the bitter fight over the first round of Philby accusations–which basically operated as a test of how much each side would be embarrassed over a blowup–has a really interesting mix of predictable ranks-closing and class solidarity with a fairly solid argument that the folks accusing Philby should probably come up with something resembling a case against him if they wanted to put everyone through the ordeal of bringing a case against him, which, at that point, they hadn’t got. The absolute paranoia that consumed people on both sides of the fight when, several years later, the vague, unsubstantiated, and obviously resentment-driven suspicions of Philby turned out, in this one specific case, to actually be borne out turned into a real clusterfuck.

I feel like I had more to say here but I don’t have the book on hand to look through to jog my memory, as I left it behind in Maine so my dad could read it. I should get around to reading more of MacIntyre’s stuff; both books of his I’ve read have been really engaging.