Martin's Booklog

Night of Knives – Ian C. Esslemont

Published on April 19, 2009

Cover of Night of Knives

Night of Knives
Ian C. Esslemont
284 pages
published in 2005

I’m always wary of books set in another writer’s world. Normally therefore I would’ve skipped this book, as it’s set in Steven Erikson’s Malazan universe. But as it turns out this isn’t a book by a new writer using an established colleague’s world to make a name for himself, as Ian Esslemont was in at the creation of Malazan from the start. Erikson and Esslemont had first met in 1982 on an archeological ditch and recognising kindred spirits, set out to create their own fantasy world. Scroll down roughly two decades and Erikson is the first to get his part of the world published with Gardens of the Moon, but it was always the idea that Esslemont would follow. As Erikson says in the introduction, this is not fan fiction, but Esslemont’s part of the enterprise. Malazan is too big an universe for one writer, but two?

Night of Knives fills in the backstory to some of the plot twists not explained in Erikson’s novels, but nobody will mistake it for his own work. It missed the widescreen, epic feel of the Erikson books, being set in a single place during a single day and night. Night of Knives also misses the deep layer of allusion, hint and complexity Erikson loads on to his epics. It’s much easier to follow and much more straight forward; it might make a good starting point for people curious about Malazan.

Prador Moon – Neal Asher

Published on April 18, 2009

Cover of Prador Moon

Prador Moon
Neal Asher
248 pages
published in 2006

When I read The Voyage of the Sable Keech last year I dind’t realise at first it was part of a series of novels and quite late in the series too, which rendered it slightly more confusing than it needed to be. What I should’ve gotten instead is Prador Moon. It’s a prequel to the main series, set much earlier in its internal chronological order, doesn’t depend on knowledge of other books in it and is also a much simpler story altogether. Prador Moon is a straightforward tale of interstellar war, proper space opera. It all starts when the Polity, Asher’s star-spanning a.i.-cracy ruled from Earth central, comes up against the first alien race ever encountered by humans, the titular Prador.

Said Prador are a race of aliens looking something like a very large landcrab with slightly too many legs and which are very much a race of magnificent bastards, reveling in their evil. They can’t help it, biology makes them do it. A Prador’s life is full of danger, being reared in creches to serve their Father as loyal servants, stormtroopers and occasional food source, kept under control by pheromones. The biggest, meanest and most intelligent of the children become First Children, with some limited indepence and the potential to challenge their father’s supremacy. Whether there are female Prador is not mentioned. A Prador lives to conquer and subjugate and their whole society is built around conflict, which is why the first diplomatic meeting between humanity and the Prador was cut short when the ambassador didn’t surrender immediately, as was the ambassador himself…

The Iron Wall – Avi Shlaim

Published on April 13, 2009

Cover of The Iron Wall

The Iron Wall
Avi Shlaim
670 pages including index
published in 2000

Avi Shlaim is an Israeli/British historian, one of a generation of revisionist historians who from the 1980s started tearing down the foundation myths of the state of Israel. History always has political undertones and perhaps nowhere more so than in Israel, which after all justifies its existence with the historical claim of the Jewish people on the lands of Palestine, as developed through zionist ideology. With the succesful establishment of Israel as a Jewish state came a set of founding myths and in the first decades after independence Israeli historians by and large confirmed rather than challenged those myths. In the eighties this changed, as new historians started re-examining those core assumptions. Unlike the earlier generation, people like Avi Shlaim had not had the same personal experience and direct involvement in the foundation of Israel and its wars and could look more objectively on the facts rather than let ideology steer their interpretations.

In The Iron Wall – Israel and the Arab World Avi Shlaim takes aim at Israel’s foreign policy concerning its immediate neighbours. It’s a big book, tracing the evolution of Israel’s approach to the Arab countries from its struggle for independence up to 1998 and the failure of the Oslo peace process. The title of the book comes from two 1923 essays by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Zionist leader and according to Shlaim, “spiritual father of the Israeli right”. In these essays Jabotinsky set out the possibilities for dealing with the socalled “Arab problem” and coming to the conclusion that the only way to deal with it is to continue the settlement efforts “under protection of a force that is not dependent on the local population, behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down”.

A Writer’s Diary – Virginia Woolf

Published on April 12, 2009

Cover of A Writer's Diary

A Writer’s Diary
Virginia Woolf
350 pages including index
published in 1953

A Writer’s Diary is an extract of her personal diaries put together by her husband and widower Leonard Woolf a decade or so after her death. It’s been edited to keep out the more personal entries as well as to slim down the original twentysix handwritten volumes to a more managable size. What remains is a volume of entries detailing Virginia Woolf’s writing process, enlivened by sprinklings of literary gossip and the occasional entry talking about the general state of the world. The diary starts in 1918 and ends in march of 1941, not long before her death. Although the only other Virginia Woolf book I’ve read was A Room of One’s Own some four years ago, this didn’t really matter; you don’t need to know her other work to find meaning in this, nor is it spoiled by reading about the process by which it was created first.

Virginia Woolf was not the happiest of writers. Throughout her life she suffered from nervous breakdowns, as also seen in her diary, and she ultimately ended her life by drowning herself after she felt “the madness” returning. She also suffered from extreme mood swings, which is clearly visible reading through A Writer’s Diary, where one day she would write with pleasure how well the writing on a given book went, the next day despairing about the critical reception she expected for the same book. In some of the entries talking about social events you can also see that while she enjoy being social, these sort of things took a lot of energy out of her. As somebody relatively introvert myself, I can sympathise.

Inventing Ruritania – Vesna Goldsworthy

Published on April 6, 2009

Cover of Inventing Ruritania

Inventing Ruritania
Vesna Goldsworthy
254 pages including index
published in 1998

What immediately came to mind when I picked up this book from the library was Edward Said’s Orientalism. Where that book looked at how Europe created its image of the Middle East, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination looks at how the western idea of the Balkans has been shaped or even created by writers of popular fiction and travel literature. Goldsworthy focuses mainly on British literature, as for British writers “the Balkans are sufficiently close to remain in the field of vision, yet remote enough to be relatively free of the ‘traditional friendships’ and ‘historical alliances’ which frequently inspire the specific interests in the area of other European powers” while they are “too far away to be of consistent interest to American writers”. Historically, she limits her inquiries to relatively modern times, from the early nineteenth century up to now, as she argues that the Balkans as an area of interest only emerged as Ottoman supremacy in the area was broken. Before there can be stereotypical images of the Balkans, there first has to be a Balkans, obviously and until the Ottoman empire started to disintegrate there wasn’t.

A book like Inventing Ruritania, which wants to expose the cliches with which western thought has been riddled about the Balkans, can’t help but be political. This is more so when you consider when it was published, in 1998, barely a year before NATO would wage its first humanitarian war against Serbia, just after the wars in Bosnia and Croatia had ended. You could see Inventing Ruritania as a sort of metacritique of the sloppy thinking in Britain and elsewhere with which these events were explained and written about. One of Goldsworthy’s points in this book is indeed to lay bare the sort of racist stereotyping language about the Balkans that is still used thoughtlessly, often by people who would never dream about deescribing areas like Africa or India in similar terms… Yet Inventing Ruritania isn’t a polemic, not even to the extent Orientalism was.