Comic Book Review | Memorial by Chris Roberson and Rich Ellis

So what if I were to tell you that there's a world where the folks from our favourite childhood storybooks live and breathe like real people? Would you be blown away?

No?

Well, nor was I. Though I had high hopes for Memorial: a six-issue miniseries - now a single gorgeous graphic novel - written by iZombie's Chris Roberson, complete with cartoonish art courtesy of comic book newcomer Rich Ellis, and lush covers by M. W. Kaluta. But it's basically another take on Fables.

That said, the great game that made Bill Willingham's name was for its part far from original, so I certainly didn't come to Memorial desperate to dismiss the thing as a pointless carbon copy based on a couple of conceptual coincidences. Sadly, however, this short series never really rises above its clear and present predecessors — and please, pay particular attention to that there plural, because other obvious influences are waiting in the wings. The Sandman, for example. At times, Memorial reads like a deleted scene from said, set in The Dreaming.

Roberson sets the bar hella high, then, and perhaps that's part of the reason why Memorial misses the mark. But make no mistake: several other factors contribute to its at best graceful failure, including lazy storytelling devices like the amnesia our heroine Em - named after the letter on her necklace - suffers from at the outset.

Another thing that annoyed me was how absolutely passive Em is as a protagonist. Throughout the series she stumbles from fantastical place to place, meets a overwhelming cast of characters, becomes drawn into a potentially crucial conflict... all the while without asserting her agency. Come the last act, even, Em's a pawn in someone else's play for power, and unsurprisingly, the path of least resistance she follows - and we with her - makes for a lackluster narrative.

In the final summation, Rich Ellis' art fares better than Roberson's writing, but I didn't find it particularly inspiring either. He deserves some applause for his attention to detail, but well developed backgrounds can only carry one so far, and I'm afraid Ellis' characters looked too much like cartoons for my liking. As ever, your mileage may vary — after all, beauty lies in the beholder's eyes.

So: the storytelling is twee, the cast never quite comes alive, and the setting - to put it politely - could be better differentiated. But putting aside my problems with Memorial in terms of narrative and character, as well as its telling resemblance, I don't actually doubt that there are interesting stories to be told in this world. Better Roberson had started with one of them than the six issues of insipid set-up this collection consists of, certainly, but even then, this book bears a small portion of potential.

Which is to say, Memorial is far from the home run I had hoped for, but it isn't entirely terrible either. It's muddled, derivative, and difficult to get into, but now that the worldbuilding's well and truly begun - if not done - and we've met the major players, it's got to get better. Or else... what was the point?

Short Story Corner | Let Maps To Others by K. J. Parker

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the lead story in the Summer 2012 issue of Subterranean Press Magazine. "To Be Read Upon Your Waking" was a real treat, and it's great to see Robert Jackson Bennett on the receiving end of such recognition, but for my money - not, I should stress, that I spent any - "Let Maps To Others" by K. J. Parker is a hair's breadth better than Bennett's very fine fairytale.

It begins, as ever with the work of this wildly witty writer, brilliantly:

There is such a place. And I have been there.

They all say that, don’t they? They say; I met someone once who spent five years there, disguised as a holy man. Or; the village headman told me his people go there all the time, to trade timber and flour for spices. Or; the priest showed me things that had come from there—a statuette, a small, curiously-fashioned box, a pair of shoes, a book I couldn’t read. Or; from the top of the mountain we looked out across the valley and there it was, on the other side of the river, you could just make out the sun glinting off the spires of the temples. Or; I was taken there, I saw the Great Gate and the Forbidden Palace, I sat and drank goat-butter tea with the Grand Master, who was seven feet tall and had his eyes, nose and mouth set in the middle of his chest.

You hear them, read them. The first, second, third time, you believe. The fourth time, you want to believe. The fifth time, you notice a disturbing pattern beginning to emerge—how they were always so close they could hear the voices of the children and smell the woodsmoke, but for this reason or that reason they couldn’t go the last two hundred yards and had to turn back (but it was there, it is there, it’s real, it really exists). The sixth time breaks your heart. By the seventh time, you’re a scholar, investigating a myth.

I am a scholar. I have spent my entire life investigating what I now firmly believe to be a myth. But there is such a place. And I have been there.

This sumptuously circular excerpt is evidence enough, I think, of why I believe K. J. Parker to be amongst genre fiction's foremost talents.

And at long last, it appears I'm no longer alone (or as near as dammit) in that assertion, because of late the blogosphere has been abuzz with talk of Parker's new novel, Sharps. Which I need not add makes me very happy - this breakthrough has been an age in the making - alas, my happiness has been blunted somewhat by the sad fact that I'm going to have to stop referring to the rising pseudonymous star as fantasy's most under-appreciated author.

But hey, all's well that ends well!

In any event, like the mind behind Mr. Shivers' discomfiting contribution to the latest edition of Subterranean Press Magazine, "Let Maps To Others" is also on the long side, at 25,000 words — and the stories are thematically similar to boot.

Both, in a sense, are about discovery; both revolve around the systematic investigation of the unknown, indeed the unknowable. In "To Be Read Upon Your Waking," Bennett's protagonist becomes obsessed by a ruin in the woods which ultimately opens a door into time. Meanwhile, in "Let Maps To Others," Parker's single-minded scholar has spent his entire adult life extrapolating a map of the legendary island of Essecuivo from the only surviving sources. In this pursuit, he is bitterly at odds with another addict.

I should explain about Carchedonius. He’s a fine scholar. He’s painstaking, insightful, clear-headed, occasionally brilliant, always worth listening to. His work on the manuscript tradition of Thraso’s Dialogues was what started me on the road to my finest hour, the deciphering of the Sunao Codex. Between us, we know everything there is to know about Aeneas, and Essecuivo. All in all, it’s a shame we hate each other the way we do.

But that can’t be helped, any more than you can get an injunction to stop the winter. The stupid thing is, neither of us can account for it. I’ve never done him any real harm, though not for want of trying, and all his wild schemes to encompass my downfall have failed or backfired on him. Apparently he has some kind of grudge based on some relative of his losing a lot of money when the Company went under. If that’s really the case, he must’ve nursed it like a shepherd’s wife with an orphan lamb. I think I hate him so much because he hates me, though I’m not sure I didn’t hate him first. In any case, it’s been going on since we were both seventeen-year-old freshmen. I guess it’s an interest for both of us; cheaper than collecting pre-Mannerist miniatures, slightly more exciting than watching the donkey-cart races.

So, when Carchedonius finds proof that his rival's assertions were correct, thus definitively disproving his own competing theory, he does what any arch-enemy would: he destroys the evidence, but only after showing it to our man, who - thus spurned - takes his nemesis' deception to the next level, forging a version of the very document that Carchedonius can only disprove by confessing to his own terrible transgression.

This lie, then, this rivalry, becomes the cornerstone of a long and torturous trip to Essecuivo which of course spirals out of hand, costing the lives of many hundred men. And where, one wonders, lays the blame?

"Let Maps To Others" is a sly, sinuous narrative with - if I'm not mistaken - loose ties to The Company, K. J. Parker's first standalone fantasy, and at 25,000 words, it strikes an ideal balance between the prolonged obfuscation that can come to frustrate in Parker's long-form fiction and the necessarily abbreviated scope of his or her short stories.

(I'm currently inclined towards the latter answer, incidentally.)

It's characteristically twisty and oh so deliciously tricky... yet somehow, at the same time, fairly straightforward. Parker's talent for condensing complex narratives - or else confusing simple ones in such a way as to make them seem more involved than they are - is on superb form in "Let Maps To Others," and I'd recommend it to all and sundry, whatever their exposure to K. J. Parker in the past.

I don't know if "Let Maps To Others" reaches quite the same heights as the lately acclaimed "A Small Price To Pay For Birdsong" - which you may read more about here - but Parker's new novella is a stunner, still. It's that rare story that leaves you feeling smarter for having read it, and it's currently available online for the princely sum of nothing.

Well, what are you waiting for? :)

Quoth the Scotsman | Steven Erikson On Deconstructive Criticism

You may or may not realise that I'm basically AFK at the moment.

I haven't made a thing of it, and there's enough content on the roster for the next few weeks that the difference is likely to be minimal - plus I'll be tweeting and talking in the comments second as much if not more than as I usually do - but I've had to resolve to stop blogging for long enough to take in a few of the tomes that have arrived in my mailbox lately.

Which is to say, I have copies of Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton, The Twelve by Justin Cronin, and Forge of Darkness by Steven Erikson — three huge books that I'd love to read. None of which I would, if I'm honest, unless I put the brakes on for a bit.

So that's what I'm going to do. In fact I've started, and I'm already reaping the rewards. Forge of Darkness has been absolutely fantastic so far: if not easy reading - far from it, actually - then nevertheless incredibly compelling. Thoughtful and evocative, powerfully put and smartly structured, this first volume of Erikson's dark Kharkanas saga engaged me from word one, once I made the decision to slow down for a moment.

But this is a Quoth the Scotsman post, so let's get to the quote in question!

It's of a conversation - from the very early going of the novel, so not at all a spoiler - that's stuck with me in a strange way. A dialogue about the relationship between art and art appreciation that speaks, in a sense, to my own relationship as a reviewer with the books I blog about.

First, a bit of scene-setting: over supper after a sitting, Urusander, so-called saviour of the Tiste people, attempts to express his opinion on the portrait in progress by the famous artist Kadaspala. But Kadaspala doesn't want to know what his subject thinks of the piece, for these reasons:

"When stripped down to its bones, criticism is a form of oppression. Its intent is to manipulate both artist and audience, by imposing rules on aesthetic appreciation. Curiously, its first task is to belittle the views of those who appreciate a certain work but are unable or unwilling to articulate their reasons for doing so. On occasion, of course, one of those viewers rises to the bait, taking umbrage at being dismissed as being ignorant, at which point critics en masse descend to annihilate the fool. No more than defending one's own precious nest, one presumes. But on another level, it is the act of those in power protecting their interests, those interests being nothing less than absolute oppression through the control of personal taste." (p.33)

A typically provocative point from a fantastically confident author.

Riddle me this, then, readers: are critics essentially the antithesis of opinion? Or is Kadaspala's perspective tantamount to an arrogance as offensive as any suggestion or assertion about the perceived quality of an objet d'art?

Book Review | Lord of Slaughter by M. D. Lachlan

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

On a battlefield strewn with corpses, a ragged figure, dressed in wolfskin and intent on death, slips past the guards into the tent of the Emperor and draws his sword.

The terrified citizens of Constantinople are plagued by mysterious sorcery. The wolves outside the city are howling. A young boy had traded the lives of his family for power. And a Christian scholar, fleeing with his pregnant wife from her enraged father, must track down the magic threatening his world.

All paths lead to the squalid and filthy prison deep below the city, where a man who believes he is a wolf lies chained, and the spirits of the dead are waking.

The Norsemen camped outside the city have their own legends, of the wolf who will kill the gods, but no true Christian could believe such a thing. And yet it is clear to Loys that Ragnarok is coming. Will he be prepared to sacrifice his life, his position, his wife and his unborn child for a god he doesn't believe in?

And deep in the earth, the wolfman howls...

***

How to start talking about Lord of Slaughter?

Well, we've been here before, of course: this savage, century-spanning saga - of mad gods tormenting mortal men - has played out again and again through the ages. It started, nominally, with Wolfsangel, and continued last year, in Fenrir. Lord of Slaughter is not the final volume of The Claw, but it does represent the severing of several threads, and readers of the series will be relieved to hear these end as brilliantly - and as blackly - as they began.

"Under a dead moon, on a field of the dead, a wolf moved unseen beneath the rain's great shadow. [...] The downpour had started with nightfall as the battle ended. There was too much blood for Christ to bear, said the victorious Greeks, and he had decided to wash it away." (p.1)

With these words, M. D. Lachlan - a pen-name for British ladlit author Mark Barrowcliffe - portends much of what sets Lord of Slaughter apart from its predecessors. In the first, its era and setting, which is to say 10th century Constantinople, make for a markedly more focused and relatable tale that those thus far chronicled in The Claw.

Of late, this great Christian city has been plagued by hellish weather; by cantankerous clouds and gathering thunderheads that the heathen believe the deities of yesterday are responsible for. Amongst themselves they whisper - because to discuss such subjects in public would be an invitation to lifelong imprisonment in the world city's stinking cellar - they whisper, then, of Fimbulwinter, "the barren and frozen time before Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods. The end of the gods is happening here, so the men say, and the city will fall when it does." (p.227)

The Emperor is too busy playing butcher on the battlefield to pay any attention to the malcontents of Constantinople, so his chamberlain Karas takes on the task. He, in turn, solicits the services of an impoverished scholar, Loys, who has only recently arrived in the imperial capital, with an assassin dispatched by his runaway wife's angered father hot on his heels. Thus, though he fears for his soul, Loys cannot afford to refuse the offer of a protected and elevated place in the palace while he investigates the supposed sorcery plaguing the people — particularly given that he and Beatrice have a baby on the way.

Meanwhile, in the tent of the Emperor, a man wearing a wolf - or a wolf wearing a man, perhaps - appears before Constantinople's foremost figure. Ragged and ruined, Elifr, or the creature that had been he, presents no threat as yet. The wolfman's only demand of the Emperor is his own death. Somehow he has become cognisant of the perverse part the fates would have him play in the latest round of the mad gods' games, and Elifr has no desire to see the show through.

Instead, he's after an end to it, once and for all eternity: an end to his life, as well as the sickening cycle of heartrending love and awful loss it is intertwined with. However, not one to grand the wishes of unwelcome intruders, be they sent from heaven or the depths of hell, the Emperor has Elifr cast into the lowest level of his city's subterranean prison to rot... or not.

Last but not least, Lachlan gives us a boy who wishes he were a man — though he is destined to become so much more. As the only witness to the unlikely turn of events that occur in the Emperor's tent, Snake in the Eye has his overlord's ear, so when in the pursuit of puberty he commits an offense usually punishable by death, he is only exiled. Later, in Constantinople, Snake in the Eye comes into his own whilst in the employ of a monkish mercenary, who is searching the city for a certain scholar.

Already you can see how Lord of Slaughter's expansive cast of characters are poised to come together. And when they do? Why the heavens themselves could not compete with the apocalyptic electricity generated.

"This is the time. This is the needful time. The time of endings. [...] Listen, the black dogs are barking. The wolf is near. Can you not hear her call?" (p.178) 

Some of our protagonists are predators, others amongst them their prey, and you will not be able to tell which is which until all is revealed - albeit obliquely - in Lord of Slaughter's ghastly last act, when we come face to face, finally, with "King Kill. The back-stabbing, front-stabbing, anywhere-you-like-and-plenty-of-places-you-don't-stabbing murder god. Odin, one-eyed corpse lord, corrosive and malignant in his schemes and his stratagems. But of course you know all this, you've met him before." (p.53)

If not, know this: you surely should have done. I fear readers unfamiliar with Wolfsangel and Fenrir are apt to find Lord of Slaughter essentially impenetrable. Newcomers need not apply, unless they're prepared to go back to where this grimdark Viking saga started.

That said, the brooding books of The Claw have never had a clearer narrative throughline than that offered by the chamberlain's pet scholar Loys in Lord of Slaughter. As a newcomer to Constantinople, and an investigator whose business it is to unearth an explanation for all the ungodly goings-on that have stilled this thriving Christian city, his perspective soothes like ointment on an injury, or a salve for the soul.

In a sense, then, this installment is both the least and the most accessible of the three volumes of The Claw to date. But do not mistake me: Lord of Slaughter is far from light or easy reading. You have to be intimately engaged with the fiction, on every level, to follow along without incident. As per the series' standard, Lachlan's prose is awfully involved — dense and intense, on the sentence level it straddles the poetic and the prosaic, demanding and rewarding in equal measure. 

In the interim, the medieval metropolis of Constantinople is a pitch-perfect backdrop for the lament of Loki and Odin; in terms of faith and society and civilisation, it represents a crossroads of sorts, where what was shares a space with what will be, when dark magic is no less likely a factor than science. And that is this book to a T. In this perilous place, at this tumultuous time, one imagines that almost anything is possible.

Lord of Slaughter is in sum as forbidding and ferocious a novel as its darkly ambitious predecessors, and though the barrier for entry is high - thus it is unlikely to earn M. D. Lachlan very many new admirers - it satisfies, and then some, those of us who have followed The Claw from its first fresh yet fetid flush.

Thank the mad gods for that!

...

This review was originally published, in a slightly altered form, on Tor.com.

***

Lord of Slaughter
by M. D. Lachlan

UK Publication: June 2012, Gollancz

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository 

Recommended and Related Reading

Film Review | The Dark Knight Rises, dir. Chris Nolan

The question of expectations, especially as regards a tentpole flick like this, is a necessary evil in any account of The Dark Knight Rises, but for once in my life, I went into a thing without my blinkers. I was neither primed for a pale imitation of the pitch-perfect previous film, nor desperate to declare The Dark Knight Rises the greatest film since Citizen Kane. I'll admit to high hopes... but there's no harm in those.

Above all, I was aware that the last chapter of Christopher Nolan's re-imagining of all things Batman would have to change things up hugely to escape the long shadow of its immediate predecessor, and the tragic absence of its stunning star.

I don't know that it does, ultimately. In fact The Dark Knight Rises is such a deliberately different film from the summer smash it succeeds that it invites the very comparison one suspects the filmmakers were attempting to sidestep. In a sense, it begs the question. And alas, it can only answer in the negative.

That is certainly not to say this final chapter is a failure. On the contrary, it trumps Batman Begins, the above-par but sub-sterling origin story which kicked off this trilogy, and which The Dark Knight Rises hearkens back to both narratively and thematically. Beyond the initial set-up, however, so little of this series' centerpiece survives that Nolan's lavish new movie feels almost... compromised.

 

Eight years on from the events of The Dark Knight, crime in Gotham City is at an all-time low because of an act championed by the late DA. Accordingly, the caped crusader - having taking the fall for the death of the very fellow: the duplicitous Harvey Dent - is in retirement. Yet when a new threat arises, Bruce Wayne dons the mantle once more to meet the challenge posed by what amounts to a muscle-man in a gas mask — only to be found unequal to Bane's brute force. Beaten, if not wholly broken as in the pseudo-source material of the surprisingly straightforward screenplay by the brothers Nolan, The Dark Knight must now rise again... again.

Of course it's not a question of "if" but "when" - and perhaps "how" - and in this protracted act The Dark Knight Rises is at its weakest. We who have seen films before know perfectly well that Batman is going to come back, and the time Nolan takes to patch up his protagonist is inexcusable. Superficially this seems a mere over-indulgence, but beneath the sheen the sequence is more insidious still, for what does it offer except a convenient means to a predestined end? How many times must we watch the same Bruce Wayne defeat the same demons in the same film, one wonders.

This repetition does The Dark Knight Rises a disservice, made doubly more damaging because of its incredible length, and the various ways in which - even then - this second sequel fails to flesh out the vast majority of its supporting characters. Lucius Fox, Alfred Pennyworth and Commissioner Gordon are all sidelined or saddled with thankless arcs, meanwhile a few of the major new players also fall flat: Marion Cotillard's Miranda is as wasted as the franchise's past attempts at a love interest, and as Blake, an idealistic young police officer who just so happens to have worked out Batman's deepest secret, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is nearly meaningless.

Almost without exception, however, the star-studded cast makes a herculean effort. In the title role, Christian Bale is a substantially better Bruce Wayne than he's been in the past, and Tom Hardy's Bane is a more credible antagonist than his silly voice suggests, however short-changed he is by the last act. Finally, Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle strikes a smart balance between a damaged femme fatale and the Catwoman of the comic books, complete with cartoonish antics.

Credit where it's earned, incidentally: hers is a character you can imagine easily oversexed, objectified with precious little effort, and yet - despite a few long shots of her bum on the back of the Batbike - she is by a large margin the best-developed woman the Nolans have written into existence. Which may not be saying a great deal, given the caliber of the last candidates.... but every little helps!

I've raised a fair few of my issues with it over the course of this review, but you mustn't misunderstand me: at the end of the day, I had a pretty fine time with The Dark Knight Rises at the IMAX. The unbearable sense of tension that made its predecessor so remarkable may have taken a time out, yet the action is every bit as astonishing, and if Hans Zimmer's score is more of the same, it's more of the same stunning score — plus, it adds at least one memorable new dimension.

It must stand as a testament to how very much the filmmakers do right in this crucial conclusion that even with so much wrong, still The Dark Knight Rises rises above the vast majority of comic book movies. It's more of a sequel to Batman Begins than The Dark Knight, and it fares far better in the former comparison than the latter... but then, what wouldn't?

Coming Attractions | Two Adaptations To Rule Them All

From the outside looking in, 2012 seemed set to be an incredible year for speculative cinema, boasting promising prequels or super-sounding sequels to three of the most beloved genre film franchises in... ever, I guess.

Alas, from the inside looking out, 2012 has been substantially less impressive. Both Prometheus and The Dark Knight Rises have divided audiences, and though they're very fine flicks, I think it's fair to say both... could have been better.

Of course, the year is only half over, and there's still The Hobbit to look forward to, but of the three aforementioned prequels and sequels, I expected - indeed I still do - the least of the first installment of Peter Jackson's fast-multiplying precursor to The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

We'll just have to wait and see if it, too, disappoints. Don't get me wrong: I may be primed for a mixed bag, but at the same time I'm sorely hoping for a pleasant surprise.

Even from here, however, the road to The Hobbit is awfully long, and for a second there I was idiot enough to think that there was precious little to look forward to before its release in mid-December. The recent release of two terrific trailers, for a pair of exciting adaptations, showed me just how wrong I was.

The first to hit cinemas is, of course, Cloud Atlas.

Based on the revolutionary novel of the same name by David Mitchell - author of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I reviewed way back when on The Speculative Scotsman - Cloud Atlas looks to be one of the most ambitious adaptations of all time. The book takes in six separate yet connected narratives which occur throughout human history, and the Andy and Lana Wachowski, who are writing and directing alongside Run Lola Run's Tom Twyker, appear to be taking into account each and every one in in the forthcoming film.

Until recently, the rare presence of international treasure Tom Hanks in the star-studded cast was the most promising this about this potentially vast disaster, but late last week saw the release, or the leak, of the six minute trailer embedded above... and it very nearly blew my mind.

Cloud Atlas will be out at the end of October, and as of now, I'm optimistic.

Admittedly, I loved the second trailer we're looking at today a little less, yet Ang Lee is markedly more reliable behind the camera than the Wachowskis, and it does look like he's homed in on some of the most memorable moments of the book his new movie's based on.

Life of Pi is due to hit cinemas in late November, and I'll be there, in part because this book meant the world to me when I read it.

Ang Lee's long-in-gestation adaptation certainly does look lush... though it's a touch too cartoonish - melodramatic maybe - for my liking.

And another caveat: the screenplay is by one David Magee, whose most notable credit to date is the J. M. Barrie biopic Finding Neverland. Again, not a bad film, but very far from brilliant. I can't help but wonder if Magee is really the dude to do a wonderful novel like Life of Pi justice.

That's it from me today, but I want to know about you guys too. Do you think the adaptations discussed above are going to be awesome, or has 2012's track record left you wishing for greener grass?

Meanwhile, where are we all on The Hobbit now that Peter Jackson's announced his dark design to make a trilogy of it?

Me, I'm more concerned than ever, and I was worried anyway...