NewCon Press, 2024, 298 p. Reviewed for ParSec 11.

In his first novel Gambino gives us space opera of a fairly traditional type, though shorn of big interstellar battles. Nevertheless, fans of the form will likely lap it up.

Via the kind of wormhole known as a Reality Interstitial Paradox, RIP, humanity has spread across the galaxy but is restricted to a certain volume of space beyond which trips cannot be made. There is evidence that a previous space faring civilisation known as the Firsts deliberately blocked off expansion beyond this, possibly to prevent whatever their nemesis was from affecting any subsequent culture which evolved to expand into space. Legend surrounding an alien spacecraft known as the Derelict suggests that an artefact from those First times was retrieved from it by the expedition which found it.

At the book’s start our protagonist, Breel, is working breaking up scrapped spaceships on the Beach, a more or less desolate plain on a minor planet called Hope. She is plagued by her sexually predatory boss and other workers trying to deny her the salvage rights that are her due. A confrontation leads to her being sacked – though she was on the point of quitting anyway.

Winding down alone in the pub before she goes home to tell her (step)father, Falian, the news, she is approached by Matt Harken-Court, a spaceship owner, whose interest she at first misinterprets. During an intrusion by proselytisers of the Church of Second Light, each marked by a distinctive white circle round one eye, Harken-Court vanishes. On her way home, in an alleyway, Breel rescues him from an extremely violent encounter with hired thugs. When it comes to it Breel is no shrinking violet.

She takes Matt home to clean him up but his questioning of her stepfather reveals that Falian, a survivor of the encounter with the Derelict, had indeed brought something back from there, a detail which Breel had not known about up till then. Their examination of the artefact is interrupted by agents of the Church, Matt and she have to flee with it, chased by an augment, whom they with great difficulty finally manage to shake off, while Breel’s childhood home is destroyed, Falian presumably with it.

Orphaned and disorientated, examining her life in this new context, Breel agrees to go along on Matt’s ship, the Scavenger, which is crewed by Ellyella, Matt’s longtime associate, the Deacon, a renegade priest, and Kaemon, another refugee from the Church. Scavenger is piloted by Cross, a symbiont who can interface with the ship’s controls and through it sense everything which it does, across all wavelengths of light. The Deacon apparently knows the coordinates of an RIP which would give access to space beyond the boundary, something which the Church would dearly love to find in order to precipitate the Coming of Light and the salvation of true believers. The Deacon and Matt have plans to block that RIP instead, in case what lies beyond is inimical.

During the first stage of the trip, to a hub known as All-Points for its many RIP connections, Cross introduces Breel to the ship’s symbiont interface, with which she has a natural affinity, while the Deacon notices her unnaturally quick healing abilities. At All-Points, Matt’s meeting with fellow Church opponents and Ellyella’s, Cross’s and Breel’s R&R while the ship undergoes necessary repairs are cut brutally short by a Church invasion from which they barely escape, though Cross was deliberately assassinated. It is left to Breel to fly the ship, though she has to overcome resistance to the idea. After doing so strange patterns appear on her skin.

In the meantime and subsequently, some chapters dwell on the Church’s head, the Emissary, a charismatic and hypnotic individual, who started off cynical but came to see the light and rose rapidly through Church ranks. Life on worlds saved by the Church is harsh, restrictive and far from woman friendly as is evidenced by Church soldiers on All-Points using the term breeder as a form of abuse.

More adventures ensue before the ship, pursued by the Church and the Emissary himself, reaches its destination RIP, and the final confrontation. During these Breel finds out the truth about her nature and origins via a message her mother left in the artefact.

This is all good space-operatic stuff, if sometimes a bit heavy on explanation of acronyms and information dumping, with the occasional dose of visceral violence.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- “dust …. like the waves of a particulate sea” (seas made of water are actually particulate as well, only the particles are very much smaller,) “mechanics grated” (these were parts of machines, not people; ‘mechanisms grated’,) “two story building” (two storey,) “temperatures of 40c” (40C,) “that could comfortably fit a billion suns’ inside it” (no need for the apostrophe.) “‘That the murder you talking about?’” (you’re talking about,) meters (innumerable times, metres,) “a visitors eyes” (visitor’s,) “the crushed stories” (storeys,) “potential problems of any addiction, an addiction,” (only ‘an addiction’ not in addition ‘any addiction’ needed.) “‘I could give a Deshi-damn for any of it’” (I couldn’t give,) “on my resume” (in my resume.) “Breel eyes widened” (Breel’s eyes,) “adapting to the dark.- It” (has an extraneous dash.) “New Haven” (elsewhere always Blue Haven,) “but Emissaries soul” (Emissary’s.) “‘Don’t thank me, Breeder,’ He snarled” (either full stop after Breeder or ‘he’ before ‘snarled’,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “‘playing us for fools, girl.’ the armed man growled” (comma, not a full stop, after girl,) “to find something anything to hold onto,” (to find something, anything, to hold onto,”) Amaris’ (Amaris’s – as elsewhere,) hanger (several times; hangar,) “pleasures of flesh” (pleasures of the flesh,) “believe Deacons’ evidence” (Deacon’s,) CO2 (CO₂,) “inertia sling-shot the Scavenger away from Hygot” (slung-shot?) “as shocked las the rest of us” (as the rest of us.) “Now her father had died” (this was about something that happened years ago; that ‘NowC is inappropriate,) “to the Deacons tests” (Deacon’s.) “‘Aw, come on ‘Deac’” (no need for the apostrophe before Deac,) gasses (gases,) “mother load” (mother lode.) “‘He said Brokers a dick’” (Broker’s.) “‘I’m Sorry Riva’” (no capital needed on Sorry,) “beyond anyones experience” (anyone’s,) Sarcophagus (in the middle of a sentence, therefore ‘sarcophagus’.) “It’s engines were” (Its engines.) “‘It had to the Firsts, right?” (It had to be the Firsts. And elsewhere Firsts is usually italicised.) “‘as we approach the transit.’ The Deacon supplied” (as we approach the transit,’ the Deacon replied.) “‘Look here.’ Breel said” (Look here,’ Breel said,) “‘along with everyone else’” (along with everyone else’s,) “‘of full disclosure we, should go through everyones room’” (no comma required; and ‘everyone’s room’.) “‘Who’s going to do it,’ Kaemon demanded” (should be a question mark, not a full stop, after ‘it’.) “‘You sure about this, Matt,’ Breel said” (question mark, not a comma, after ‘Matt’,) “clothing draws” (drawers,) “paused crouched and pulled a trunk out” (paused, crouched and…,) “the Emissaries fleet” (Emissary’s.) “ ‘Just what is it you think we can do, Breel?’ The Deacon asked” (‘… we can do Breel?’ the Deacon asked,) “a shout of fear anger and frustration” (a shout of fear, anger and frustration.) “The Emissaries preferred method” (The Emissary’s,) Rip (elsewhere always RIP,) “on the one hand the room the Deacon and Ellyella” (on the one hand the room, the Deacon and Ellyella,) “by creating a damn” (creating a dam,) “if a small build up of energy might arrived at that collection” (might arrive.) “The whole drama was playing out silence” (… playing out in silence,) “By nowHarken-Court and his companion reached the far side if the chasm. rendered in harsh chiaroscuro by the troopcarrier lights” (… Harken-Court and his companion had reached the far side if the chasm, rendered in harsh chiaroscuro by the troopcarrier lights,) “the Scavenger” (the Scavenger,) “the troopcarriers cabin” (troopcarrier’s,) “revealed in, the Scavenger’s outer hull” (revealed in the Scavenger’s outer hull,) “‘he is not to disturbed’” (not to be disturbed.) In About the Author; “the peak district” (the Peak District.)

White Rabbit, 2020, 172 p

The book is prefaced with a biography of one David W Keenan who committed suicide in 1995, lists his interest in occult matters, his published pamphlets relating to his home town of St Andrews and that he self-published one novel in his lifetime, Xstabeth by David W Keenan, Illuminated Edition with Commentary, reproduced in full thereafter – including various commentaries (as by diverse academics) interpolated between the narrative chapters.

With this I found myself in Russia again, seemingly in the immediate post-Soviet era, though this time St Peters (not for some reason St Petersburg) rather than Moscow where narrator Aneliya is the daughter of a famous musician, who is friends with one “even famouser,” Jaco, though the story later transfers itself to St Andrews.

Jaco is not the type a respectable girl ought to be getting mixed up with. He drinks and frequents strip clubs. But Aneliya is drawn to him nonetheless, with the consequences we might expect. During one of their encounters, in which Aneliya describes one of Jaco’s sexual kinks, she has the disturbing thought that Jaco had performed similar deeds on her mother.

The mysterious Xstabeth enters the story when an impromptu performance by her father in a club is secretly recorded on an old reel-to-reel recorder by one of the staff who is so besotted by it he determines to release it pseudonymously. The music has a force all to itself which is mesmeric but an acquired taste.

The transition to St Andrews is somewhat surprising but gives Keenan an opportunity to display his knowledge of the town. The street known as The Scores – thought to be named after golfing record cards – is said to be a place to pick up prostitutes (think about it) but little evidence is given for this in the text. Nevertheless, the famous golfer – never actually named but sufficiently accomplished to be tied for the lead in the tournament ongoing in the town – Aneliya has met at the hotel asks her to attempt to ply the trade there. It is only he (the famous golfer, who opines that Russian whores are the most desirable,) who obliges himself though.

Aneliya tells us “Naivety gets me every time. Knowledge can be cynical. It just gets used to undermine things. Sarcasm and irony are horrible. Naivety is the deepest form of belief. It’s closer to reality. To wonder. Plus it has more love in it” and “Writing is always starting from scratch. On the blank sheet. Always beginning again. Even when you think you’ve cracked it.”

David W Keenan’s Xstabeth is a strange but compelling confection. The narrative parts are written in short sentences. Sometimes broken up. Into even shorter ones. The effect is as if we are listening to someone speaking to us in staccato fashion. The addition of the commentaries makes David (without the W) Keenan’s Xstabeth even more idiosyncratic. Like the music it is named for, Xstabeth is a genre of one.

Pedant’s corner:- famouser (why Keenan chose to employ this for some while rather than the more familiar ‘even more famous’ is obscure,)  “the lay of the land” (x 3. It wasn’t a tune. The correct phrase is ‘the lie of the land’,) neck-in-neck (it’s neck and neck,) confectionary (confectionery.)

Mariner Books, 1998, 187 p

Here we are in Moscow in 1913. Though educated in England, printer Frank Reid has spent most of his life in Russia, inheriting the business from his father, but that life is thrown into disarray when his wife Nellie ups and leaves leaving him with three children to cope with, Dolly, Ben and Annushka, and so he engages a young woman, Lisa Ivanovna, as a sort of nanny.

The details of life in pre-revolutionary Russia seem convincing, the sealing up of houses windows’ for the winter, the casual bribery (connected with a mention of the venality of Grigory Rasputin,) the petty regulations, the restrictions placed on the movement and employment of Russian citizens, the necessity to assuage the police and other relevant authorities. Some incidents are at times reminiscent of Doctor Zhivago, particularly the association between Lisa Ivanovna and Volodya Vasilich, the man who breaks into the printing shop one night and fires a gun at Frank, though the dynamic is reversed.

Reid’s interactions with others, his deputy Selwyn Osipych, whose main interest is in having his volume of poems published but who may have been involved with Nellie’s decision to flee, the print shop supervisor, Tvyordov, are both friendly and distanced. His daughter Dolly seems remarkably composed in the face of the situation – but adolescent girls often are.

However, Reid’s burgeoning attraction to Lisa Ivanovna is told to us rather than shown and so does not contain as much force as it might have.

Pedant’s corner:- “Jeyes’ fluid” (Jeyes’s?) “‘I don’t think so. She certainly didn’t say so?’” (isn’t a question,) “there was still barrel organs playing in the streets” (there were still,) benzine (a word used in other languages certainly but the British one is ‘petrol’. Petrol was used later in the phrase “This Russian petrol is very low on benzine.” Make of that what you will.) “Their breaths rose together as steam into the bitterly cold lamplit air” (I know people refer to it this way but steam is actually invisible, the misty you can see emanating from people’s outbreaths is actually water droplets, condensed steam/water vapour.)

Jacaranda, 2021, 310 p, including 2 p Map.

I was attracted to this by its cover which reminded me of the Trylon and Perisphere at the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40 but having now read it there’s nothing in the book which links to that at all.

It is set in 1977 in a fantasy area called Anacostia whose geography actually corresponds to part of Washington DC. Many of the references are to contemporaneous places in our world to which in most respects Anacostia corresponds. However, it is surrounded by the various Kingdoms of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia so clearly not our world.

Nephthys Kinwell drives a Plymouth round town as a kind of taxi service where she just seems to turn up where- and whenever she is needed. Every so often the text mentions the white girl in the boot (Yejidé uses the term trunk) thumping on the tyre or otherwise making a noise. The girl is a ghost. A pointer to the fact that strange happenings are in store is that Nephthys’s domestic life is plagued by the mysterious moving of bottles and other objects.

Nephthys was a conjoined twin and where they were separated she and her brother Osiris both have/had a half finger which sometimes glows but Osiris died in the local river some while ago; thought to have been killed by a shark due to the teeth marks on his body.

His daughter Amber is the author of the lottery, a newspaper column which predicts odd deaths and other occurrences. On his sojourns to the river Amber’s son Dash sees and converses with someone he calls the River Man. A schoolmate witnessed him there apparently talking to no-one and goads him about it. His response gets him in trouble.

Dash also is concerned by an act of molestation he thinks he saw committed by his school caretaker, Mercy Ratchet, on a girl in his class. Ratchet of course has a long history of such acts including on Rosetta, another viewpoint character, whose life’s trajectory he precipitated, as his was by his own experiences at the hands of a priest.

Osiris exists in the book’s main timeline as a ghost, though flashbacks show how he actually died. His travels in the realm of the dead, his name and that of Nephthys reflect ancient Egyptian mythology and the book’s five sections are titled according to the five ways creatures of passage die: moving through spaces; staying in one place; resigning life to another; surrendering one’s life; entering the void.

The writing style is fluid but often non-standard, frequently omitting commas in lists, “Where signs omens bones transpired in infinite ways and indefinite outcomes …… Each hour was a day year decade,” the continued (over?)use of the phrase “Many years later” perhaps meant to invoke Gabriel García Márquez. A flavour of the novel’s interests lies in the invocation of the Conundrum of Three, where the mind sought the memory of a body long gone, and the body withdrew from the mind and the spirit, and the spirit chased the echo of the other two.

There is a lot going on here, some of which I may have missed as my knowledge of Egyptian myth is sketchy but Yejidé brings all the strands together. Creatures of Passage‘s portrayal of the humans involved, their flaws and dilemmas is convincing. Though it looks at life from an odd angle it is one that illuminates.

Pedant’s corner:- “boys hung in jail cells” (hanged,) “found a remnant of indigo cloth that their mother had made in her closet” (to avoid ambiguity this is better phrased as ‘found in her closet a remnant of indigo cloth that their mother had made’,)

Plus points for areolae and for the subscripts in C₁₆H₁₄N₂O.

riverrun, 2023, 315 p.

Allan’s writing has always been idiosyncratic, never straightforward. While skirting the borders of Science Fiction, though absolutely acknowledging the genre’s existence, often tipping over into Fantasy, there has usually been something that sets it apart. It has never quite been full-on SF. Perhaps this is as it should be. Her writing has all the qualities the reader of literary fiction would expect and any writer would want to broaden her possible readership. So much the better then from that point of view if any Science-Fictional allusion can be taken as just that, or a manifestation of a character’s state of mind.

Such is the case here. Frank Landau imagines the Earth is engaged in an interstellar war and he is in training to be a supersoldier in that war. A friend of his is convinced that the next war will be fought against aliens, single-celled organisms and viral pathogens, biological contaminants that have been introduced into Earth’s eco-system without our realising. Which might already be here. Frank is also an enthusiast for music, especially of Bach. Indeed a fair bit of the book is given up to considerations of the merits of various recordings of differing, not necessarily classical, musical pieces – not a feature of your average SF novel it has to be said.

To give some flavour of these musings on music consider this, “I don’t think he (Bach) discovered tonality. I think tonality discovered him. Either that or he was given it. Tonality is like code – a complex programme that is all the more ingenious because it’s universally applicable. Everyone understands tonal counterpoint the moment they hear it. It’s as if the human brain is hard-wired to receive it.”

But the novel is more complicated than the above suggests. Of course it is. It’s by Nina Allan.

Frank may be the book’s driving force but the main narrative is actually concerned with Private Investigator Robin’s search for him after she is contracted to do so by his girl-friend Rachel Gabon when he disappears after meeting up in The Netherlands with a group known as LAvventura, a group whose obsession is The Tower, a 1950s SF novel as by John C Sylvester.

This book, no more than a novella really, is given us in its entirety as one of Conquest’s twelve sections, two others of which constitute a,) a review of The Tower by one Edmond De Groote, a LAvventura luminary, and b,) another review (by De Groote’s acquaintance, Jeanne-Marie Vanderlien,) of a concert at the Concertgebouw. Each of these is of course written in a different register to the rest of Conquest and each is entirely complete in itself. I note here that any dialogue in Conquest is not punctuated as such.

The plot of The Tower is important to Frank’s world view. In the future, Earth has won a gruelling war against an extraterrestrial civilisation. As a monument to human resilience and his own awesomeness, an egotistical billionaire plans to build an enormous residential tower out of a unique kind of rock mined from the alien homeworld. The rock is black and gives off a curious warmth. But what if it is also alive?

Which is fine – and arguably necessary to Allan’s creation. My problem with it is that it doesn’t actually read like a 1950s SF novella. But I suspect it’s not meant to.

LAvventura take The Tower to be an accurate prophecy of an actual forthcoming war among the stars. This is, of course, known to terrestrial governments, who have developed the secret supersoldier programme to deal with it and are probably quietly eliminating people who find out too much.

Robin’s search for Frank takes her to Scarborough to research the of a journalist who’d contacted Frank’s brother Michael about his disappearance but who died the day after the interview. There she discovers Edmund de Groote’s involvement with Frank.

There is a Scottish flavour to the book too. Ex-cop Robin’s memories of the speech of her former Chief Inspector Alec Dunbar, a man with a past to hide, and Robin’s trip to Tain, in Ross-shire, where the train’s journey through the landscape is described.

Robin has the perception that “my entire career has been focused on the dividing line between delusion and genius, which a lot of the time is barely a line at all,” and at one point begins “thinking about a story in which a private detective sets out to discover the truth behind the disappearance of a man who believes Earth stands on the brink of an interstellar war. I ask myself what might happen if the detective becomes convinced the war is real,” which prompts thoughts that maybe the book is about to disappear up its own fundament.

Then a late twist reveals Robin’s heretofore obscure and unsuspected parentage – this is perhaps another elaboration too far – before we are presented with alternative endings.

Robin is an engaging protagonist and Conquest is an accomplished and exceedingly well-written book with many strings to its bow. But is it hedging its bets?

Pedant’s corner:- cul-de-sacs (culs de sac,) “Nunc Dimitis” (Nunc Dimittis.) “De Groote” (Okay, it was the beginning of a sentence but the man’s surname was de Groote, not De Groote.)

Gollancz, 2024, 474 p. Reviewed for ParSec 11.

Aila Macbhairan has been besotted with exotic birds, in particular the Silimalo phoenix, since she was eight years old. Now, having been through zoo college, she is, along with other responsibilities, the keeper of the Silimalo phoenix at San Tamculo zoo, which specialises in magical animals. The Silimalo is critically endangered but her zoo’s breeding facilities have been in abeyance for over ten years and the exhibit houses only one specimen, a female called Rubra.

Aila’s other main charges are an archibird, somewhat unimaginatively dubbed Archie, a kind of superannuated magpie, with an eye for shiny objects and whose spit is a superglue for metals, and, oddly, (birds and sea creatures tend to be somewhat different,) the zoo’s kelpie, Maisie, a carnivorous aquatic horse usually wreathed in mists.

Aila is socially awkward, tongue-tied in public, shy of contact with others, but can be voluble when she is talking about phoenixes. The only people with whom she feels at ease are her parents, who encouraged her youthful enthusiasm, and her friend Tanya, the girl with whom she shared a room at college, who always took her for who she was and now looks after the zoo’s Bix phoenix.

Others of the zoo’s employees are the impossibly accomplished, perfectly groomed Luciana, with whom Aila shares a dislike having its origins at college, which Luciana seemed to breeze through with effortless grace and who puts on the zoo’s popular show starring her peacock griffins, while the “gorgeous” Connor looks after its diamondback – and other – dragons.

Aila’s main trouble is her interest in and concern for animals overrides any she might have for humans. I note, though, that she shows no distress for the mice Luciana feeds to her griffins or the goat carcases the kelpie is fed. It seems empathy can only go so far. But, of course, these animals have to eat.

Plot kicks in when a break-in at Jewelport Zoo in the South Coast area of Movas sees its recently hatched phoenixes stolen without trace. Within hours Aila has emailed the directorate of the International Magical Wildlife Service, in charge of the phoenix breeding programme, to put forward San Tamculo as the ideal site for the transfer of Jewelport’s remaining male phoenix. There follow anxious times waiting and preparing for the IMWS inspection, the further wait for its decision and the inevitable (without it there would be no story) arrival of that male, Carmesi.

Minor plot tension comes from whether the pairing of Rubra and Carmesi will be successful and if any chicks hatched will be safe from theft but there is also a gradual development of both Luciana’s and Aila’s characters.

So far so fine, if not particularly remarkable, and it is pleasing to read a fantasy eschewing the default mediaeval setting, but on the level of the writing there are some reservations.

The planet this is set on is clearly not Earth and there is no mention of it being a colony world yet the people are referred to as humans. While the planet’s geography is sketched out in terms of its different climates, and the zoo (map provided just before chapter one) has exhibits from the various regions, Kenkaila, Vjar, Fen, Ziclexia, Ozokia, the creatures depicted – vanishing ducks perhaps aside – are not noticeably magical, as opposed to Earth-mythical, unicorns and dragons for example. It does come across as odd, though, that among all this fancifulness the vegetation – olives, cypress, eucalyptus and so on – is not exotic, characters’ names, Connor, Tanya, Teddy, Patricia, Tom etc, are profoundly quotidian, and the societal trappings here, mobile phones, an internet, live camera feeds, would not be out of place in the twenty-first century of the reader. MacLean’s inventiveness has clearly gone into what she considers to be the interesting aspects of her story, including cod illustrated zoo information plaques for the Silimalo phoenix, the archibird and the peacock griffin, but this lack of attention to incidentals nags at suspension of disbelief. (Or is this asking too much of a debut novelist?)

There is a problem, too, with pacing, most of the background information has been front-loaded rather than drip-fed through the book. To be fair, though, the information MacLean has let us know about her creatures and the compounds in which they are held comes into play in the dénouement, in which Aila is faced with a pair of (rather cartoonish) villains along with their insider accomplice.

There is overuse, too, of unconvincing, invented minor expletives – horns and fangs, skies and seas – (despite usages of the f-word occurring elsewhere,) and expressions like “scrunched her nose,” plus a plethora of raised or rocketed up eyebrows, with MacLean’s treatment of sexual matters being coy to the point of sub-adolescence. (If this is supposed to be a YA book there is no hint of that in the accompanying blurbs.)

MacLean’s writing here is undemanding, doubtless targeted at her intended audience – who will most likely take to it. There is a place for simple entertainment after all. There is a story here but for me it is too overdosed with persiflage. Once MacLean has found the resolve to kill her darlings she may well come up with something a little more absorbing.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- pegasi (this plural of ‘pegasus’ looks odd but then so does ‘pegasuses’,) “the perceptive mink” (minx?) “Teddy had an inch of height on her – unfair, both her tall parents passing on the lamest genetics” (has MacLean not heard of regression to the mean?) “an merlion” (a merlion – unless merlion is pronounced in a very unusual way,) “lights shined” (lights shone,) “from griffin show” (from the griffin show,) “a silver poof” (pouffe.) “Not teachers telling her” (this was in a list of sentences beginning with ‘No’. So. ‘No teachers telling her’,) “like a baton in a championship foot race” (like a baton in a relay race,) Movas’ (Movas’s,) “to get her feathers laying right” (lying right.) “She brought up her legs up” (only one ‘up’ necessary,) “the sweet of mango lingered on the air” (the sweet smell of mango,) “on rare occasion” (on rare occasions,) “laying low” (lying low.)

NewCon Press, 2024, 128 p (including 1 p Introduction by Tade Thompson, 2 p In Memoriam (of Nick Wood,) 1 p About the Authors, 2 p Genesis of the Pantheon, 3 p Interview with Tade Thompson, 3 p Building Super-Heroes and 3 p The Last Word on the Pantheon. Illustrated by Tade Thompson. Reviewed for ParSec 11.

This book is in part an In Memoriam for Nick Wood, who died in 2023. So it goes. Fellow author Thompson and he had an admiration for African superheroes of the 1970s like South Africa’s Mighty Man and Nigeria’s Power Man (who are name-checked in the story.) Together they wrote The Last Pantheon as a kind of homage and it was published in the collection AfroSFv2. Thompson’s Introduction here says this edition was more how they first imagined it would be, a short and sharp illustrated book wearing Silver Age bona fides on its sleeve. The illustrations were provided by Thompson himself, in his words a motivated amateur artist.

The story features Black Power (now using the name Sipho Cele) and Pan-African (Tope Adedoyin.) Though Pan-African refers to Black Power as brother they have been antagonists at various times over the years since they fled to Earth on a spaceship a very long time ago. Black Power can fly and move very quickly, Pan-African levitates, can read minds (and sometimes influence them) and is surrounded by a limited force-field. As the meat of the story unfolds their past is outlined in memories and flashbacks in one of which Black Power wonders at his anatomical and DNA similarities with humans. The story the book tells ranges over how they intervened (or failed to) at important moments in, mostly recent, African history – the deaths of Patrice Lumumba, Dag Hammarskjöld and Murtala Mohammed, the Sharpeville massacre – but also encounters with Shaka Zulu and a certain primate in 15,000 BP.

Black Power has always been on the side of law and order and Pan-African more or less the opposite. The last time they had clashed, the atmosphere over the Sahara was so disturbed it began to snow. In the aftermath Pan-African turned himself in. At this story’s start he is being released from prison after serving his time. Soon he is on a TV programme phone-in being interviewed by journalist Elizabeth Kokoro to explain his career choice. Black Power comes on the line. The ensuing conversation reveals their antipathies. Kokoro (who it’s later revealed has an extremely expensive brain implant connecting her directly to the internet) is amused by their verbal sparring but is then startled by Pan-African telling her the old comics featuring Black Power were propaganda, funded by the CIA and dosed with chemicals that may have been mind-altering. (Asides such as this help to provide an oblique critique of colonialism and its effects.) The interview, though, has laid the groundwork for the superheroes to meet in a televised last battle.

The novel has many grace notes, including a knowing nod to The Incredible Hulk, but, oddly, a scene near the end where Pan-African meets a pair called Nick Wood and Tade Thompson who are to write the graphic novel of the last encounter. A meta-fictional step too far?

For fans of superheroes there are plenty scenes of the pair demonstrating their powers but the structure and treatment, the characterisation, will also gratify appreciators of more literary virtues.

The illustrations are not (as Thompson warned us) up to comic standards, but neither are they crude.

I doubt anyone reading The Last Pantheon will have any cause for complaint.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- Thompson’s In Memoriam of Wood is attributed to “Tade Thomson” (Tade Thompson,) “both victims and perpetuators” (x2, perpetrators,) low lives (usually lowlifes,) Jonnie Walker (it was whisky, so, Johnnie Walker.) “She wore shorts and burdened under a backpack” (She wore shorts and was burdened … ?) “Once the settled in a price” (Once they settled on,) staunching (stanching,) a missing full stop. “‘Thembeka, some back!’” (‘come back’ makes more sense,) “ a twelve miles journey” (a twelve mile journey,) “onto the stationery boy” (stationary,) “a chair in the next table” (at the next table,) Thendeka (several times, but elsewhere usually spelled Thembeka,) a line break after two thirds of the line, “the corpses ragged head and body wounds” (corpses’,) “where the chances for collateral damage was less” (where the chances … were less,) “far side of he hall” (of the hall.) “He out a cowhide covered shaft” (He pulled out a …,) bonafides (bona fides,) Addidas (Adidas,) “knew his presence has been marked” (had been marked.) In ‘About the Authors’; “in ddition to” (in addition to.) In ‘Building Super-heroes’; “is being control of” (is being in control of) “the character’s and their supporting cast” (characters.)

Viking, 1998, 220 p.

Stella Brentwood has retired to Somerset after her career as a social anthropologist which took her all around the world – Cardiff’s Tiger Bay interviewing Lascar seamen, the Nile Delta, Malta, Orkney.

She had a lifetime friendship with her fellow Oxford graduate Nadine. They were at University in the fifties when women students were still rare and in a sense exotic. They always had different attitudes to marriage. Nadine was keen on the idea but at the time opined, “‘Marriage is for later. The thing right now is simply – men. Here we are, surrounded by them. Spoiled for choice. The point is to make the most of it – we’re never going to have it so good again.’” To which Stella as narrator adds, “She’s right about that, at least,” though she seems never to have been short of opportunities herself. Though she later reflects, “Extraordinary process, pair bonding. Quite as arbitrary, really, among humans as among animals.” It’s mostly a question of who’s there when the time is ripe. It certainly was for Nadine whose outlook on the subject is entirely practical, saying marriage isn’t about grand passion. Looking back, Stella writes – using the past continuous tense – that, “Divorce is entirely familiar to the children of the fifties, but marriage is still viewed with disconcerting sobriety. It is seen as a permanent arrangement,” adding, “Well, they will find out.”

But Nadine is now dead and her widower Richard has surprisingly got in contact and offers help with first the move to Somerset, recommending a property in Kingston Florey, and then with lawn mowing and such.

Down the road from Stella’s cottage are the premises of T G Hiscox, Agricultural Engineers, where live Mr and Mrs Hiscox and their two sons. Mrs Hiscox is fiercely protective and controlling of her family. The boys in turn feel suffocated by her strictures and take any opportunities for petty acts of vandalism out of her sight.

Over time Stella has realised that “Most people require a support base … the ‘us’ that supplies common cause and provides opportunity for altruism and reciprocal favours and also for prejudice, insularity, racialism, xenophobia and a great deal else.” She has never had that; by choice.

Nadine had described her as detached – which is perhaps a good thing for a novelist to be – and, except perhaps for the local shopkeeper, she is disconnected from the inhabitants of Kingston Florey. An incident involving her dog makes her appreciate she is quite as alienated as the rest of them, on the outside looking in. (Richard reminds her that that was what she was trained for.)

She reflects that emotion recollected in tranquillity is more like it is recollected in clarity, without the helter-skelter feelings which accompanied that emotion in the past and feels that “It is not true that people diminish with age – it is those earlier remembered selves who are in some way pared down, depleted, like those who look out all unaware from old photographs.”

In fact Stella has had a complex of different relationships, some ongoing others not, none of which defines her. Spiderweb is in effect the tale of someone who refuses to be trapped.

Pedant’s corner:- “were able to buy honey and candles made by his bees” (candle-making bees would be an interesting sight,) “none of the army bases were nearby” (none … was nearby,) medieval (mediæval would be nice but I’d settle for mediaeval,) “what looks like the foundations” (what look like the foundations,) “to see from whence” (whence = ‘from where’ so from whence = ‘from from where’,) racialism (nowadays the word is shortened to racism,) “to hove into view” (hove is past tense; ‘to heave into view’.)

B&W, 1998, 279 p. First published 1949.

This is the first sequel to McCrone’s Wax Fruit trilogy. For my reviews see here, here and here. I had seen a copy of a further sequel, The Hayburn Family, in a charity shop in Edinburgh’s Morningside but didn’t buy it since I hadn’t read this one. However we were at a book sale in Peebles a couple of months ago and there were copies of both books in this B&W edition so bought both of them.

Bel Moorhouse likes to think of herself as the extended Moorhouse family’s benefactress. When a nephew and niece of hers decide to marry she it is who arranges and pays for the wedding. (Well, her husband pays for it; she takes the credit.) Unfortunately, on the day the organist, Mr Netterton, fails to turn up and she goes to his house along with her almost adult son, Arthur (named after his father,) to see if he can recommend anyone else. No-one coming to mind, he asks his daughter Elizabeth if she could do it. With some hesitation she agrees and carries it off well. Bel is thereafter full of Elizabeth’s praises. Unbeknown to her, however, Elizabeth has attracted the attentions of young Arthur.

The plot revolves around the two youngsters’ suitability – or otherwise – for each other. In her rise through society Bel has developed snobbish attitudes, with which in this case her brother-in-law George agrees – a bit of a cheek considering both  the origins of the Moorhouse family on an Ayrshire farmand her own upbringing.

She manages to offend both Elizabeth’s father and the girl herself before realising the depth of the couple’s feelings for each other. Indeed Elizabeth is so incensed by Bel’s approach she considers not seeing young Arthur any more. The older Arthur has a more sensible attitude to proceedings.

As in Wax Fruit, the prose rarely – I’m tempted to say never – rises above the workmanlike. It is obvious from the moment Elizabeth comes in to the story where it will lead. It is all very easy to read however.

Pedant’s corner:- “the Prince of Wales’ elder son” (Wales’s,) “something about Lady Ruanthorpe’s being very kind” (why that possessive? ‘about Lady Ruanthorpe being very kind’ carries the meaning perfectly well.) Dandy (of a Dandie Dinmont terrier referred to as ‘Dandie’ two lines later.)

Hodder, 2010 , 437p.

The novel charts the course of the on-off, but mostly off, relationship of two people, Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, who hook up on the night of their graduation party, 15^th July 1988, St Swithin’s Day as it happens, on what, for him, was meant to be a one-off but for her a long-desired outcome.

The particular conceit of the book is that it returns to view the pair on the same day in the following years as their lives go on different trajectories, so we see their friendship evolve in snapshots, their comings together and driftings apart in the interstices looked back on.

Emma gained a double first at University but Dexter only a 2:2. She is the much more competent of the two mainly because he is a bit of an idiot but it is his career which takes off as he rapidly becomes a success on late Friday night television as co-presenter of a vapid TV show. His rising without trace is emblematic of the unfairness of life. She struggles to get by with writing before finding work in a Tex-Mex restaurant and eventual success when she takes up teaching English. With his life spent in drinking and womanising, quite what she continues to see in him is a mystery.

Their friendship endures in a sporadic way, she an emotional crutch for him, he usually taking her for granted. They have relationships with other people, unsatisfactory for the most part though his short marriage to Sylvie brings a daughter Jasmine, a bright spot in his life, but he is not really mature enough to be a father.

Only the odd unfelicitous phrase mars the writing and there are some nice authorial touches. In a restaurant on a mutual holiday, “The waiter arrived with complimentary Greek brandies, the kind of drink that can only be given away.” In her early thirties “She owns a cafetiere and for the first time in her life she is considering investing in some pot-pourri.” At a restaurant there is a mild critique of culinary pretension – a tower of jenga-cut chips – all but raw – with the dish’s fish component balanced precariously on top.

Really though this is the same old often told story. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, they continue to hold a torch for each other. There seems to be an infinite number of ways to chart the vagaries of human attraction.

Pedant’s corner:- “gin and tonics” (gins and tonic,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech. “‘Someone I can rely onto stick around’” (rely on to stick,) “took a bit an upturn” (a bit of an upturn,) “as if were an” (as if it were an,) “his palette cleansed with a pail of iced Lilt” (the only stuff you can cleanse a palette with is paint-stripper, a palate though could be cleansed with Lilt. Palate was used correctly later,) “‘from the teets of cows’” (teats,) “ ‘not to go the premiere’” (not to go to the premiere,) focussed (x 2, focused,) “as the band play” (as the band plays) “‘That’s that what I meant’” (that ‘that’ isn’t needed,) “laying down again” (lying down again,) smoothes (smooths,) “aqualine features” (aquiline,) “a ball-peen hammer” (ball-pein,) “Suki Meadows’ face” (Meadows’s,) snuck (sneaked,) “a pair of booties” (bootees,) soccer (Grrrr, it’s football,) “a funeral directors” (a funeral director’s,) podiums (the Latin plural is podia.)