Second Breakfast

If memory serves, I discovered Laurie King’s “Mary Russell” books from Diane Rehm’s “book group”. I’ve never read the Conan Doyle “Sherlock Holmes” mysteries (for some reason the Holmes character didn’t particularly interest me, perhaps because of the ham-handed way Star Trek: The Next Generation used the trope), but for whatever reason, the description of “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice” fascinated me, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

This is my second time around re-reading the series, and they are perfect summertime companions. The central conceit of the books is that King was sent a trunk of various scraps and mementos, including a series of manuscripts of one Mary Russell, the young female apprentice and later wife of the famed investigator Sherlock Holmes. Holmes himself is quite different (given my impressions at least) from the character that Conan Doyle (and his followers) invented. Although still incredibly perceptive and ferociously intelligent, the Holmes character here is singularly focused and somewhat manic-depressive. Facing what he sees as an uninspiring future of solitude and research, he has retired to the Sussex countryside to tend his bees and retire from public life. Into his life literally walks Mary Russell, a young American orphan and Oxford student, still recovering from the circumstances that led to death of her entire family.

The two characters strike up an immediate if unlikely friendship. While the series follows their progressive adventures and intrigues in good mystery-novel fashion, there is also a continuing thread of the development of their relationship and marriage, and the events that threaten to dismantle their sometimes fragile partnership. This progression on two levels - intellectual and emotional - makes this a quite satisfying series. The books are set in the period during and immediately after The Great War, and King has a wonderful ability to evoke both the atmosphere of the period and the place.

Of the first three books in the series: “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice”, “A Monstrous Regiment of Women”, and “The Moor”, I find “The Moor” to be particularly delightful. Set in the Dartmouth region of the southwestern-most corner of England, the story is a continuation of the famous “Hound of the Baskervilles” tale. What I find so appealing about this book are two particular characters: The Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, and the moor itself. Baring-Gould is a name that was familiar to me, as he is enormously published (he held forth on any topic that caught his attention, however briefly), and was famous for collecting the songs and lore of Dartmouthshire. As a result, several of his tunes are published in church hymnals, including the Presbyterian one. There’s an Advent tune in there I think.

I read “The Moor” for the first time while traveling in London and Ireland for my honeymoon in 2002, and so enjoyed the book that I was half-tempted to change our travel plans and go tromping down to the south-west, but I was certain my more practically-minded husband would have other ideas. But the book is such great fun, and King is so clearly in love with the place and Baring-Gould that I wanted to follow along.

The series continues with “O Jerusalem”, “Locked Rooms”, and “The Art of Detection”, which brings together the Mary Russels series with King’s contemporary Kate Martinelli series (and likely brings the latter series to conclusion). King was in Ann Arbor quite recently (alas! I did not know!) promoting her most recent book, “The Language of Bees”, which continues the Mary Russell series with the appearance of Holmes’ long-lost and previously unknown son.

These are great fun. I’m not at all a fan of the mystery genre, but these are for me a wonderful exception.

This is the second offering from Susanna Clarke, whose 2004 novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell I enjoyed when it was published in 2004.

This collection of well-crafted short stories inhabits the same Victorian England-meets-Faerie world of Jonathan Strange, and Clarke’s follows the same discursive, amusingly-footnoted style of her novel.

For fans of Neil Gaiman there’s a story in this collection titled “The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse” which concerns the same village of Wall from Stardust.

Probably the finest, and funniest story in this collection is also the last, “John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner”, which concerns the mythical fairy king, the misfortunes of a poor man he inadvertently harms, and the intervention of several Christian saints. Not only is it a fine story on its own merits, it also encapsulates much of Clarke’s style and some of the central ideas she’s working through in this collection and in Jonathan Strange.

Great fun.

The first of these books won a Hugo award a couple of years ago, and while Hugo-award-winning books aren’t always to my taste, I’ve rarely found books so honored to be badly-written.

The premise of the first book is that, in our not-too-distant future, the Earth is inexplicably wrapped in a force-field or “membrane” that shuts out the stars, and after some investigation is understood to slow the passage of time on the planet while the universe outside passes by, thousands of years for each day. The discovery of purpose of this envelopment, and the nature of the entities responsible - eventually labeled “the Hypotheticals” - consumes much of the book, and the well-drawn characters that inhabit it.

The story is told through the eyes of three characters, brother and sister Jason and Diane Lawton, and their friend and neighbor Tyler Dupree. Jason becomes involved at the center of the scientific and technological response to the “Spin” as it comes to be called, Diane retreats into a series of religious cults and communities, and Tyler acts as a narrator and observer.

One of the things that struck me as interesting about the first book is that Wilson shows a respect for the religious impulses of his characters - when faced with something immensely larger than oneself that changes the destiny of the entire world, the question “Is this God’s will?” isn’t entirely unreasonable. That’s unusual in a genre that often treats religion and belief in God with a Gene Roddenberry-esque amount of disdain.

Because of the accelerated passage of time outside of the Spin membrane and the inevitable expansion of the Sun as billions of years pass outside, Jason puts in motion an audacious plan to terraform Mars and send humans to live there, to develop and possibly understand the purposes of the Hypotheticals. What ultimately happens is unexpected, and Jason, Diane, and Tyler are all literally transformed by the end of the book by the alien technology that has come to determine to course of their lives.

The second book follows the events of the first. The Spin has ended and the Hypotheticals have placed an Arch in the Indian Ocean which leads to another habitable world (and other Arches with other, less hospitable worlds, beyond). But while the New World is being colonized and exploited, the still-unscrutable purposes of the Hypotheticals are working themselves out as a group of scientists try to engineer a human being who can communicate with what are now understood to be alien machines.

Ultimately some of the big-picture purposes are worked out, although the answers aren’t entirely comforting or expected.

These are good page-turners, particularly the second book, with a good mixture of Big Ideas, exciting plotting, and vividly-drawn and sympathetic characters. Wilson does a good job of mixing his speculative “What If” questions that are the hallmark of good science fiction with real, and very human people.

If you’re a fan of or at least familiar with Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series, then you’ll find this review comprehensible and potentially interesting. Otherwise this is probably just gibberish.
I remember reading the Foundation books as a teenager, in a grey, omnibus hardback edition that I bought used at a county library booksale. From the introduction to that edition I remember Asimov mentioning that his series and the Lord of the Rings were contenders for the 1966 Hugo award for best series, and surprisingly Asimov’s book won.
The setting of the Foundation books is a distant future when humanity has colonized much of the galaxy, and a huge galactic empire has emerged as the central government for quadrillions of the galaxy’s human inhabitants (with no aliens in sight). Hari Seldon, a mathematician and historian, has developed a branch of predictive mathematics called “psychohistory” that can, with considerable accuracy predict the future destinies of human societies. Seldon come to understand that a collapse of galactic society is immanent and unavoidable, and develops with his colleagues a master Plan to dramatically shorten the inevitable interregnum and dark age, and preserve what he can of human scientific and cultural knowledge from the immanent chaos. The rest of the series follows the execution of that Plan, its inevitable setbacks, and ultimate success. Asimov drew heavily on Gibbons “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, and the Foundation series is in a sense that account writ large on a galactic stage.
There was a trio of “Foundation” books published in the 1990s — I read a couple of them, but found them almost as forgettable as the (terrible) Brian Herbert successor books to the Dune series.
“Crisis” is set many thousands of years in the future, in the height of the Second Empire, which is even greater and more powerful than the First. The galaxy is benevolently run by the Lyceum, a group of scholars who manipulate human events to ensure stability and optimal outcomes using the now much more deeply-developed tools of psychohistorical prediction. They also ruthlessly suppress development of advanced mathematics, knowing that emergence of other groups of “predictors” would diminish their ability to control events.
Humankind has also developed the “fam”, a “tuned psychic probe” that grants the wearer dramatically enhanced cognitive abilities, memory, and access to the omnipresent data network and is permanently linked the the human mind with which it is joined.
The book follows Eron Osa, a psychohistorical scholar who is “executed” by having his fam destroyed for a crime he doesn’t even remember. The novel unfolds as we trace Osa’s childhood into the present, while also following him as he struggles to orient himself in a world that he can no longer understand and missing much of his past.
The big ideas here are about the nature of prediction and secrecy, and the uses and misuses of power. This is a big, long, and baroquely-complex book. However I find Kingsbury’s book a pleasure to read at times, and worth a now second reading. If you liked the Foundation books, then you’ll find this a faithful successor.

Found in the break room at work…