What's New at Green Man Review

It's that time of the week again, and we've got good stuff:

All things Zelazny, Kasaugai Roasted Nuts, James Gunn’s Inside Science Fiction, early Doc Watson, new Cotton-Eyed Joe, Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass, Kronos Quartet, and more

With some surprises. (And that's news exactly how?) At any rate, click on over and enjoy.

Review: Emma Bull: Bone Dance

Another foundling from the late, great Epinions.

A good argument can be made for calling Emma Bull’s Bone Dance an urban fantasy. There is a great deal to do with the spirit world, events that are only explainable in terms of magic of some sort, and there are visitations from supernatural beings. However, the fact that it is set in a post-Apocalyptic dystopia, technology plays a pivotal role (although that is more because of its scarcity than because of its reliability), and the magic comes from “hoodoo” (Voudou is part of modern reality, for some of us at least) make me place it firmly in science fiction (which does, after all, leave room for beings with advanced mental powers).

Sparrow is the narrator, leading us through the maze of the City (which is only the City, no other name; it could, perhaps, be Minneapolis, Bull’s hometown, although a couple of references seem to place it south of The Border) a few decades after someone pushed the Button. The history is unclear, which doesn’t really matter – the damage was done, and what we must deal with is now. Life in Sparrow’s City runs on the Deal – money is hard or soft, favors are owed one way or the other, and that is the basis of trade. Sparrow is an electronics expert (although the explanation for this comes not until midway through the story) who runs a black market in old videotapes and sound recordings – black market because most of the information from before the Bang is subject to seizure and destruction by whatever authority there may be. In this case, the authority is A. A. Albrecht, who holds a monopoly on energy in the City proper. He is also one of Sparrow’s best customers for old movies, especially originals (as opposed to dupes), which bring very high prices. One of Sparrow’s haunts is the Night Market, where goods of all sorts are available from dusk until dawn; another is the Underbridge, a dance and video club of which Sparrow is one of the operators. Sparrow also has blackouts – periods of varying length that leave no memories, although Sparrow’s absence is apparently not obvious. Into this mix comes Frances, who, as it turns out, is one of the legendary and hated Horsemen, secret military weapons who could take over the bodies of others. It was the Horsemen who pushed the Button; Frances is on her way to kill Tom Worecski, who put together the plot to rain nuclear death on the Western Hemisphere and duped Frances and other of the Horsemen into participating. Mick Skinner is another who comes into Sparrow’s ken, seemingly briefly, since we discover that he has been dead since before they met. Events conspire to draw Sparrow into Frances’ search for Tom, and the interlocking relationships – Sherrea, perhaps Sparrow’s closest friend, who is a talented card reader; Theo, one of the other operators of Underbridge, who has a surprising relationship to Albrecht; Cassidy, who is setting himself up to be a victim; and Dana, who has connections – provide a fair measure of suspense.

I don’t really know what to compare this book to in order to give you some touchstones – perhaps Dhalgren meets The Maltese Falcon. The environment is near-hallucinatory, the more so because the main lighting seems to be neon (the Night Market is, after all, the Night Market). The context is very rich and detailed. Sparrow’s blackouts begin to intercut with hallucinations, involving stick figures who pass on cryptic messages; one of them is definitely Kokopelli, the trickster-hero of the ancient American Southwest, who speaks in lines from movies; another is, perhaps, Oya Iansa, who governs wind and the lightning and brings change.

Sparrow is a true anti-hero. Many of the surprises in the book come from the fact that Sparrow has an obsession about privacy, and is consequently not terribly perceptive of the details of others’ lives, even when those details are available. The reason for Sparrow’s privacy fetish is unveiled halfway through the book, along with revelations about the Horsemen: Sparrow, it turns out . . . no, I don’t think I’ll tell.

Bull is one of those writers who can pull you into a context with no effort. As hallucinatory and distasteful as this world is, you are there, and you go willingly. Her prose is tight and lucid, particularly when she is writing about the supernormal, which only makes it more real. Voudou and the Tarot form a major part of the foundation for this story, along with the key plot issue, which is energy as the operative force of the universe. Bull’s treatment of this reminds me of the philosophy of the creators of the original Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of my touchstones during the 1970s – if energy keeps the universe turning, anything that has the potential to block the flow – like money, or too much power in too few hands (which seems to have become the same thing) – needs to be dealt with very carefully, and sometimes very forcefully.

“Coming of age” has a multitude of meanings, and it’s a type of story that I seem to have been running into a lot lately. Maybe that’s because every work of fiction is about coming of age in some sense. We move from childhood to adolescence to adulthood to maturity, and not all parts of us make the progression at the same rate. Bone Dance is a coming-of-age story as much as anything else; and Bull uses it to explore one other thing that I want to note: how our perceptions of what others’ perceptions are or might be color our reactions – often before there is anything to react to. It’s also an object lesson in how opening ourselves to the wider world – the next stage of our lives – is often costly and hurtful, but necessary unless we are to give up our responsibility as human beings to be human beings.

This is a terrific book.

(Ace Books, 1991)

Review: Neil Bartlett: Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall

Another from Epinions.

Every once in a long while, you read a book that you may have read before, or may not have read before, but in either case, it is as though you had read it only yesterday and have sat down to find it all new again, but known. Then you know you have myth in your hand. This is the case wiith Neal Bartlett’s Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, which I first read about ten years ago, and have read a couple of times since.

Bartlett is a well-known British playwright, director, translator, and novelist. He has told a tale, in this work, that every gay man will look at and say “Yes! I have lived that – I know those people, I know those places.” It is, if not our creation myth, perhaps the myth of how we survived – are surviving -- to come into the Promised Land.

The tale takes place in a city – by inference, London, but it needn’t necessarily be London, it needn’t be any particular city at all – and is told by a narrator who remains nameless throughout, merely an observer, an observer who is either omniscient, or makes it up as he goes along. We will call him “the Auntie,” in keeping with the spirit of the book: the characters are the Boy; O (shortened from “the Older Man”); Mother, who begins as “Madame;” the cast of regulars at The Bar (we all know The Bar – we have all been there, whatever its name, and it has had many); there is even a Father, who appears mainly through letters.

To anyone caught firmly in the real world, in real time, the characters, and their behavior, border on the bizarre, when not completely beyond the line. Auntie explains the motivations, the rationales, sometimes, because, after all, he knows. So do we all, somehow. The Boy is nineteen when he first enters The Bar, and he is beautiful: white of skin, black of hair, slim, well-muscled, dark, dark eyes, every detail perfect for what he is: the Boy. O is the most handsome man in The Bar, perhaps in the city, also pale, dark-eyed, dark-haired, muscular, a face that could have graced a statue of any hero, any king, any god. Mother is the mover, the owner of The Bar, the one who precipitates “The Great Romance of Our Time,” as Auntie calls it. We see the first meeting, when the Boy has been coming to The Bar for eleven weeks, and has worked his way through the regulars, learning from each one, and never saying “No.” Auntie takes us through the courtship, the engagement, the wedding, all filled with detail, all rich in theater, encapsulating a century of gay history from a gay perspective: Bartlett’s note at the end of the book cites fragments and reworkings of Wilde, Baron Corvo, Genet, the blues, Hollywood, and more. The narration is rich, as only a story told by someone like the Auntie could be – sets, costumes, and cast are all examined fully. There is a kind of Lucy-Ricardo-meets-Harold-Pinter humor to the story.

It is theater, but it is also a war zone, given reality by small touches, small details: Mother installs a baptismal font in the bar, kept filled with condoms, and reminds “her boys” to use them. And, with a kind of sporadic, random regularity, Auntie reports another attack on a man, usually one of The Bar’s regulars – attacks with fists, with clubs, with knives.

It is very, very hard to explain the impact of this book, except that it is myth: Bartlett makes stereotypes into archetypes; there is a resonance to events, cast through Auntie’s eyes into scenes from movies – they are scenes from movies, whether anyone has filmed them or not; we have been these people, and we have seen them bigger than life. “Of course every year or so there is a new reigning couple, a new pair of heroes that the young men arriving look at and think, oh, I want it to be me, I want it to be me, I want it to be me; and that is why men like them are fabulous, in the true sense of the word. Because we need them to be. When people say, was it really like that? you want to say, yes, and you want to say, and it still is.” That’s the kind of reality that exists in this novel: not the humdrum, mass-produced, functional reality of daily life, but the bigger reality of real life, which is only real if we let it be, if we remember that we need more, we always need another dimension, we really need that.

Father, who is not the Boy’s real father, dies; the Boy brings him home to die, and the three of them – the Boy, O, the Father – all know that he is there to die. And at the funeral, another side of gay reality comes out: “O held onto him, but Boy said, don’t try to stop me from crying. Boy said, I am not crying because he’s dead. I am crying for the life he led. And it isn’t my fault and it wasn’t his fault but I wish there was somebody to blame, if he wasn’t to blame then who was to blame, who was it, oh I want to hurt them, I want to hurt them, I want to hurt them.”

To say that this novel is a tour de force is selling it short. I am very serious when I say that this is myth, with all the power and all the universality that implies. It is ceremony, it is ritual, it brings love, sex and death into the realm of the numinous, and it does it with the voice of an aging queen.

(Dutton, 1991 [orig. Serpent’s Tail, 1990])

Review: Camille Bacon-Smith: Eye of the Daemon

Camille Bacon-Smith is a folklorist and author who has written, in addition to her four novels, several books and articles about popular culture. Eye of the Daemon is the first book in the “Daemons, Inc.” series, about Kevin Bradley, known as Brad, a private investigator who is actually the demon Badad; Evan Davis, his half-human son; and Lily Ryan, their partner and Evan’s lover, who is the demon Lirion.

Bacon-Smith’s background for the daemons and their relationship to humans is set up as a series of forewords to each chapter, which explain the seven spheres of creation and read as though they were taken from the Qabbala; the Princes, each composed of a quorum of daemons, occupy the Second Sphere, in which only space exists; Badad and Lirion are lords of the Prince Ariton. Earth and humanity occupy the First Sphere, which contains both space and time – hence, mortality. We learn, in the course of the story, that Evan, as a daemon halfling, is a wild-card, a being of immense power who works in both time and space. By the mere fact of his existence, he could cause the destruction all seven spheres; other halflings have been insane, and either killed themselves or been killed early in their lives, and so have never posed the threat that Evan does. Evan has had his own bit of hell to live through, centered around a club in New York called the Black Masque, run by the demon Omage, which figures in the present tale. He was rescued by his father, who, given the choice of destroying Evan or taking responsibility for him and allowing him to live, chose the latter. He is at a loss to explain his motives, except perhaps that he has spent too much time in human form, and the “meat thinking” starts to take over. Badad and Lirion have also been, in essence, exiled to the material plane to keep Evan under control until his natural death as the price of his life. Kevin has taught his son to control his wanderings between the planes. The reader also begins to become aware of anomalies in the natural world that seem to be tied to Evan’s moods.

The firm of Bradley, Ryan and Davis specializes in cases requiring a great deal of discretion – recovery of stolen art, for example. They are distinctly high-end. The story begins when Marnie Simpson, a wealthy horse-breeder, comes to Bradley, Ryan and Davis about her missing brother. He has been kidnapped, and the ransom note – burned into the top of her dining-room table – leaves no doubt that the case is one for Kevin Bradley: the note demands the return of the “Eye of Omage,” or her brother will spend eternity wishing for death, and specifies the firm of Bradley, Ryan and Davis as the ones to handle the exchange. Omage is a lord of the Prince Azmod, a rival prince to Ariton – or, to the daemon way of thinking, Asmod never makes alliances with Ariton -- and an enemy especially to Badad, since Omage is the daemon who almost destroyed Evan. After Evan’s initial research turns up some surprising connections between Marnie Simpson, her husband Franklin, and the Black Masque, Kevin and Lily decide that they will handle the case; Evan is overdue for a vacation, so he will spend some time in Europe, relaxing.

Early on, it becomes apparent that this case is a trap, but who is the target? The Eye of Omage, it appears, is a large topaz that Lily had brought back from Venice with the stolen Picasso, and for which Evan feels a strange affinity. Evan, staying with his friends in London, Claudia and Jack Laurence, friends from the Black Masque days, runs into the client for whom they had recovered the Picasso, Charles St. George, in a small bookstore in which Claudia works, and the three have dinner together. The next day, Kevin is visited by another daemon lord of Azmod, Pathet, who burns Jack to a cinder and tries to implicate Evan in the murder. Within the hour, the bookstore in which Claudia works is firebombed and she is kidnapped.

This is a fair mystery story, with its share of plot twists and revelations – no one is telling the truth, no one is who they seem to be. It is even more a story that explores the mysteries of relationships between sons and fathers, in the persons of Badad and Evan. Do generations ever really understand each other, even without the twist of a daemon father? Mature men are in authority, and there is always that tension between mature man and young man, who needs to move into his own power, his own independence. Even, as in this case, when father says, simply, “It’s up to you,” there is the question, “Will he save me this time?” in balance with the question “Can I do this alone?” Evan, after surviving the nightmares of his childhood and the nightmare of his early manhood, has a father who is a daemon, and is, at least in theory, as incapable of feeling love as he is of understanding death – and how many of us have felt that way about our fathers?

Evan is a damaged man – he had been well beyond the bounds of sanity when found by his father, and even with the healing he has managed, he still suffers from exaggerated feelings of guilt and inadequacy. Evan’s feeling of guilt sometimes come very close to getting in the way of the story; Kevin’s ruminations about his feeling for this son, on the other hand, are illuminating. (It would seem that the daemon Badad, having spent so long in human form, has fallen prey to the human propensity to wonder “Why?”). Lily, by contrast, is very direct, almost elemental; she never bothers to worry about her feelings for Evan, if any – she calls him “monster” and her “toy.”

About binding daemons: Bacon-Smith has set up a strong contrast between the bindings under which Pathet and Omage are held, based on greed and the desire for power, and the binding that Evan places on Badad and Lirion, proposed and agreed to purely as a means to protect them from whoever is controlling the lords of Azmod – they understand the danger to Badad and Lirion early on. This contrast opens up another, tangent question: the impossible tangle of human motivations, particularly our capacity for self-sacrifice, which is incomprehensible to daemon-kind – humans barely understand it themselves. The final confrontation is intense – Evan is held in check only by his humanity – and is actually two confrontations: Evan has to deal not only with the daemons Omage and Pathet and their human captors, but Count Alfredo da Costa – art thief and something more – whose duty at this point is to kill him. (Da Costa’s character, which comes into prominence only at the end of the book, never really gels – he has a duty, but manages to drag out the execution of it long enough to give Evan the chance to defy him.)

Bacon-Smith has made an absorbing story, although it suffers from a little bit too much self-examination on Evan’s part; its sequel, Eyes of the Empress is better in this regard. She is, however, a good writer, with a unique presentation of daemon’s in a modern urban fantasy.

(DAW Books, 1996)

Review: Bernd Heinrich: Mind of the Raven

Another Epinions piece that almost went down the memory hole. (I just spent ten minutes looking for one that did. Grr. . . .) At any rate, in case you were wondering about ravens, here you are.

Bernd Heinrich is a researcher and professor of biology at the University of Vermont. He is also the author of several books, including Bumblebee Economics, which was nominated for a National Book Award, and is a winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Natural History Writing. In his Preface to Mind of the Raven he recounts the origins of his focus on ravens and their behavior – for those who know and enjoy the raven's place in mythology and folklore, it seems only fitting that it started with a dream.

Among the questions Heinrich posed for himself was one that is very basic and not strictly scientific: why is the raven, of all birds, credited with being extraordinarily intelligent and, in many respects, almost human? Heinrich's studies over the next few years focused on the social life of the raven: mating, family life, group behavior, dominance patterns, communication (a very rich area), and a host of other areas and sub-areas. Heinrich has supplemented his own research, from studies carried out in Maine and Vermont, with information from other researchers in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The result is a fascinating picture of a remarkable bird.

Ravens, like other members of the crow family, are opportunistic feeders, largely scavengers (although Heinrich cites observations of ravens trout-fishing in Yellowstone Park, which I have done myself, although not quite the way they did it). Foraging and food-sharing lead to complex social behaviors, in that, while ravens are largely solitary, there exist associational networks among ravens that determine who will be allowed to share a find and when. There are also observations of ravens flushing game for other predators and then attempting to steal the kill – they come by the "thief" epithet honestly, it would seem.

As one might expect, communication is highly developed, and apparently has some fluidity. They also play. Ravens exhibit complex behaviors, such as caching food, defending caches, deception, and raiding other ravens' caches, that necessarily demand some learning and some freedom of action. Heinrich includes comments on these activities as well as a chapter entitled "Morality, Tolerance, and Cooperation" which includes his observations on how tolerance develops between a group of ravens and a newcomer.

While his approach to his subject leaves Heinrich scope for philosophical rumination, he does take off from hard fact. Although he does not bring in the raven's role in folklore to any great extent, one can easily see how its reputation was earned – thief, trickster, fighter – it's easy to see how a raven's croak could be taken for an omen.

There are places where I would have preferred less rumination and more fact, although the wealth of information itself can give the reader pause. On the whole, for anyone interested in ravens and their behavior, it is a valuable book, although not one that makes an easily used reference.

(HarperCollins, 2007)

What's New at Green Man Review

Our usual wide range of material:

Tull live, a really big chocolate treat, a favourite reading space in Kinrowan Hall, Irish music books, good milk chocolate, live music from De Dannan, an excerpt from de Lint’s Forests Of The Heart and other matters as well

Those "other matters" include a lot of music. From all kinds of places. Click on through and enjoy.