What I've been reading...

One of the strangest results of having endometriosis excision surgery last month is that I've been able to read fiction for the first time in years. A subtle effect, at first, it's grown more obvious over a few weeks.

Whereas before, my periodic immune flares would wipe me out as thoroughly as flu, I can now read for pleasure while ill. Anyway, the result is I've read A LOT.

Howl's Moving Castle (and related Ingary books)

I'm going to start with the stories I can say least about. I've always loved the Studio Ghibli movie Howl's Moving Castle, which may - or may not - be partly influenced by the fact that Howl is gorgeous. I must have watched this movie about four times now and watched it again last month (as child-friendly viewing) with the Red-Headed Reference Toddler.

I realised I'd never read Howl's Moving Castle, the award-winning Diana Wynne Jones book on which the film based, and decided to fix this oversight. The book and the film are very different animals. The film makes less sense, but - at the same time - feels darker and more hard-hitting, mostly because of director Hayao Miyasaki's opposition to the Iraq War.

There isn't really any war in the Diana Wynne Jones book. It's all a bit of a cutesy read, delivered in the style of a fairytale, with no real sense of danger. Howl is also somewhat more ruggedly Welsh than his Japanese counterpart (I prefer the Japanese version).

I went onto read the sequel, Castle in the Air, incase it was an inspiration for Laputa: Castle in the Sky, another Studio Ghibli movie.

Unfortunately, it wasn't. Instead, Castle in the Air is a retelling of Aladdin by someone with no understanding of Middle Eastern folktales. I understand why non-Western authors want Own Voices writing when this kind of thing exists because, honestly, it was cringe.

If I hadn't been ill, I swear I wouldn't have continued to the third book, but GoodReads suggested that House of Many Ways was better.  I found it similarly cringe, but for different reasons. As with Howl's Moving Castle (the book), this is gentle, cutesy fantasy with stakes that feel relatively low. I found several problems with this, not least that Howl behaves like a total clown. He's not stupid, but - regardless of his sorcerous power - he wouldn't get away with causing constant immature chaos, even as a distraction, in a more realistic universe.

Fatherland by Robert Harris

My fiction reading is eclectic, to say the least. Fatherland is a famous alternative history detective novel set in a world where the Nazis won World War II. The protagonist wears an SS uniform, but he's an honest cop character who ends up in trouble while investigating the drowning of an elderly man...

It's a great book with a great style and superficially-excellent worldbuilding. Once it gets going, the pace is electric and propulsive. The stakes are never anything but high, and get higher as it goes along. However, on the downside, I felt the story was very much like the AI art image I've included. It feels great on first inspection, and is very enjoyable to view, but is subtly wrong in the details.

I couldn't get past how readily the protagonist, Xavier March, continues investigating a crime when he knows the Gestapo are involved, and there's some kind of cover-up going on. He's in a dictatorship where people get sent to KZ (concentration camps) at the drop of a hat. People in that situation are typically too scared to probe deeply unless they have a compelling motive (which he does, but not at first).

As you might guess (I did), March eventually discovers the reality of the Holocaust, and sacrifices himself to reveal this to the world. The true horror of reading this book, however, was what I saw as unspoken assumption by the author (and characters) that, once everyone saw the nightmare of the Holocaust recorded in cold facts, geopolitics would change for the better.

Maybe I'm a cynic, but I think - in reality - there would be far too many willing to disbelieve/rationalise away the systematic extermination of 20 million people while their killers were still a powerful force in the world. The Nazis are demons to a 21st century Western audience because they (thankfully) lost World War II and their ideology was thus discredited forever. If they'd been on our side against Stalin, or they'd survived to the 1960s, their atrocities might have been ignored or papered over - regardless of how much evidence existed.

And that's a REALLY depressing thought... (and a depressing coda to that book)

The Coldfire Trilogy (Black Sun Rising, When True Night Falls, Crown of Shadows)

I was looking up Villain Protagonist on TV Tropes when I discovered Gerald Tarrant, the villain hero of The Coldfire Trilogy by C. S. Friedman who also wrote This Alien Shore, one of my favourite sci-fi books as a teen.

I'm going to spend a paragraph explaining how much I loved This Alien Shore, largely - I now realise - because of its sympathetic depiction of neurodiversity. There's an entire society, the Guerans, who are all mutated to be neurodiverse and indicate their specific divergence using facial markings, called kaja. It has a couple of autistic characters who are, again, depicted with some degree of nuance.

Anyway, as I've got a villain in my WIP (work-in-progress) with significant point-of-view scenes, I figured I'd see how C. S. Friedman handled a villain protagonist. As with This Alien Shore, the Coldfire Trilogy has some imaginative world-building. It's sort-of science fiction (sort-of...). Long ago, humans colonised a new planet and found out that it had ether-like element forces that responded psychically to their presence, meaning they could generate mythical horrors just by thinking about them. The resulting world developed something like magic, with limited technology, but where humans have learned to work the 'fae'.

The book also features some interesting meteorology, tides and day/night variations from Earth caused by multiple moons and what sounds like either two suns, or a sun and being close to the galactic centre (?). The fact that I've got a question mark here explains my main problem with the trilogy - there was so much promise in the amazing world-building and it didn't really get used that much.

Most of the story is about the bromance between a standard Dungeons & Dragons paladin, Damien, and Gerald Tarrant who is a brilliantly-realised villain hero. He's an immortal vampire sorcerer who feeds on fear, especially the terror of beautiful women. Among his sins, apart from the serial killing, are murdering his family and custom-designing a dark forest straight out of a gothic horror novel. Throughout the three books, he never lets up on murdering people, including terrorising a young woman into suicide.

The problem for our paladin is that, although Tarrant is evil, he's also very powerful, smart and capable, and they're facing an even greater evil than him. Does Damien sacrifice his godly principles to use Tarrant's power? Does he agonise about his choice (constantly)? Or does he allow the world to fall into ruin?

Patently, for the books to exist, Damien teams up with Tarrant. They subsequently spend three books wandering about the dangerous but unimaginative scenery and bickering with each other like an old married couple, while the world-building is largely neglected.

The first two books are a straightforward Tolkein-esque quest through murder-scenery to the crystal lairs of the slightly-levelled-up penultimate villains. The third book tackles the big bad with a side-quest into murder scenery and [spoilers] a second plot surrounding a weakling duplicate of Tarrant (because one Tarrant-looking male was not enough volume of handsome for the author). Eventually, Tarrant gets something of a (probably undeserved) redemption arc**.

Someone on GoodReads wrote The Coldfire Trilogy should be retitled He's Not That Into You because He's A Vampire and Heterosexual. And, yep, this series is totally homoerotic. Dollar to doughnuts, the author was looking through Damien's eyes the whole time, drooling over Tarrant with a desperate longing for this elegant, arrogant, murderously-unattainable genius vampire stud. Everyone, repeat everyone, in this novel finds Tarrant unutterably handsome (being an undead demon, he is beyond human carnality), which feels like an extension of the author's desires.

Anyway, psychology apart, the books felt a bit of a lost opportunity. Tarrant is an amazing villain hero (doubtless because the author lavished LOTS of attention on him), but I wish there'd been more use of the world-building. And more emphasis on the characters who weren't him...

** NOTE: I'm aware I sound extremely critical, even of books I enjoyed. I think it's a function of reading like a writer. I'm always noticing writing style, plot devices and tropes - so, I can both be wowed by something, and notice where things don't work. It doesn't mean I write better, necessarily, as knowing and doing are different, but I am making the attempt.