TJ

This is a good book, but not as good a book as it would have been had it been better.

My understanding of the genesis is that the original concept was Pratchett's from the ‘80's, and the execution was truly collaborative. The writing has definite Pratchettesque moments, and the book starts out very well, but in the end I get the feeling that this is a story that wants to be written by a collaboration between Brian Stableford and Baxter's sometime collaborator Arthur C Clarke, not Sir Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter.

The positives are pretty considerable: the authors tell the story of a huge shift in physical possibility (“stepping” between alternate Earths) over the few decades following it from multiple points of view, interspersed with amusing anecdotes regarding particularly unfortunate encounters with the unknown, often involving the Four Horsemen of the New Apocalypse: Greed, Confusion, Inability to Follow Rules, and Miscellaneous Abrasions (or something like that.)

But the evolutionary speculations are a walking shadow of Stableford's far deeper insights, and the eerie evocation of lost civilizations and alternate solar systems fall short of Clarke's inimitable (apparently) poetry.

“Not as good as Stableford or Clarke” is admittedly fainting with damned praise. I'm not familiar with Baxter's stand-alone work (and I've avoided Clarke collaborations since the Gentry Lee debacle) so I have a tendency to assume it's all his fault, which is hardly fair. It may well be that it's really the fault of the story itself, which does seem to want a particular type of telling. On the other hand, the Disc World stories wanted a particular type of telling too, and it took a few runs at it for Pratchett to develop that voice, so I have every expectation that future books in this series will take us in new and interesting directions as the authors find their feet in the remarkable universe they have created.

As a walking tour of a particular era in the Atlantic slave trade this is a very good book. The degree of awfulness on the part of participants in the slave industry is unfathomable, and the degree of incomprehension, hypocrisy, and wilful ignorance on the part of “civilized” beneficiaries of the slave industry is uncomfortably close to home in a world where Chinese labour toiling under conditions that are not at times very far from slavery dominates the world's productive capacity.

The book is very descriptive. This was probably a wise choice on the part of the author: really inhabiting the lived sensations of the narrator would have made almost impossible reading, but I still wish some of the scenes were more visceral in their impact. I felt like I was seeing into the past, but not inhabiting it in the way some historical fiction manages to achieve (read the opening chapter of Patricia Finney's “The Firedrake's Eye” and you'll know how it feels to come awake lying in an Elizabethan gutter, for example.)

Events are at times too clearly a result of the need to move the characters across the landscape and through time in a particular way, which makes them predictable, which also reduces the emotional impact of their eventual resolution.

But still: a solid, well-researched, and readable historical novel that covers the trans-Atlantic slave industry extremely well.

Ever wonder why politicians behave the way they do?

This book will go a long way toward answering that question. It isn't a work of “political theory” in the traditional sense so much as a presentation of a theory of practical politics. It doesn't focus on lofty ideals or just states, it focuses on what people in various political systems have to do to gain and keep power, and how broadening the required footprint of support tends to produce better public policy, while narrowing it tends to produce autocrats who are propped up by a relatively small circle of essential supporters (often in the military/security forces) who are bought off with bribes, favours, and privileges.

It isn't just about dictators, though. The principles of practical analysis can be applied to any political leader in any system of government by asking whose needs they have to really satisfy to achieve power and retain power. I've found it has enhanced my understanding of–and ability to predict the behaviour of–Canadian and American political leaders.

It falls short of five stars because I think the authors sometimes are muddy in their use of their own conceptual framework, but that is a small quibble against a very good book.

It's hard to think of a more tired, stale, boring, clapped-out premise than “famous historical tale told from the perspective of the women involved”, which has been done to death and far past it in the last 20 years, mostly by authors who unfortunately think that the premise is somehow so inherently interesting that they don't have to do any more work.

So the only reason I read this book is it's by Pat Barker, who is a genius, and my god she did not disappoint.

This is better than Homer. Really. The story lives and breathes with a visceral reality and enormous compassion, both completely typical of Barker's work, who I swear understands men at war better than any living writer.

This is the story of the Illiad as told in the voice of the female captive whose seizure by Agamemnon is the source of the “rage of Achilles” in the first place. Briseis was born a princess whose city fell the marauding Achaeans as they set siege to Troy. Chosen by Achilles as a prize, taken from him by a churlish commander, she sees the relations of power and love and lust and pride and honour that drive these men to the pursuit of glory, and their doom.

The brilliance of Barker's work is we both feel for Briseis's plight while somehow also finding sympathy for her captors, who are no less trapped in the same system of power and violence.

One really notable feature of her telling is the linear modernity of the narrative structure: Homer frequently introduces characters and only much later tells us important information about them–I swear he was making it up as he went along–which can make the Illiad challenging for modern audiences who don't already know who everyone is. Barker isn't having any of that, and uses all the lessons we have learned in the past two thousand years to tell the story more fluently and effectively than Homer did.

An acquaintance described this book, in analogy with “horse opera” and “space opera” as “opera opera”, and that's a pretty good description. Conrad Scalese is strong-armed into writing the libretto of an opera under an impossibly tight deadline, working with a composer he has reason to hate (and not just because Conrad is the librettist and Roberto is the composer, which is usually sufficient...)

Volcanoes, secret societies, Napoleonic politics, personal intrigue, betrayal, lust, love, hatred... opera at it's best.

I found the style a tad flat and the plot verging on over-dense, but those are decidedly personal preferences. The long climax is extremely well-paced and the ultimate resolution operatically satisfying.