The Tamir Triad by Lynn Flewelling

From The Week of September 10, 2012 As much as we define ourselves by the fidelity of our friends, the magnitude of our wealth, the customs of our culture and the values of our families, identity dictates who we are. For long before the trappings of civilization influence us, identity demands that we pursue the passions that burn in our hearts. Everything, from how we cope with fear to how we manage our expectations, is filtered through our self-regard. For the pain of acting against how we think of ourselves is too much to bear. We must be the person we feel inside or else we are lost to shame and humiliation, to lies and deceptions. Ms. Flewelling vividly demonstrates this truth in her trilogy which is as bold in conception as it is brave in execution.

A kingdom of warriors and wizards, queens and knights, Skala is a realm in conflict. Defined by an ancient pact with its divine patron, the Lightbringer, who promised to protect it from rack and ruin so long as the realm was lead by a queen of the blood, Skala has long been a land in which men and women were equally free to pursue their own destinies. But after centuries of female rule, a king has elevated himself to the throne, usurping the place of his own sister in order to claim for himself the might of Skala. This duplicitous turn of events not only drives the king's faithful sister mad, it has exposed the land to all manner of blood plagues and foreign armies, both of which threaten to decimate the realm. Skala has broken faith with a god. And such beings are rarely known for their forgiveness or mercy.

In The Bone Doll's Twin, the trilogy's opening volume, we are witness to a terrible secret. Mad princess Ariani, deposed by her brother, labors to give birth to twins. A boy and a girl, this ought to be a joyous event for Skala, but Ariani's misfortune deepens when the boy fails to survive the night, leaving only the girlchild as living proof of her blood and her agony. Worse yet, her brother, the king, has cruelly decreed, as a part of a wider crackdown on women participating in matters outside the hearth, that female offspring of the royal blood are to have their lives ended in order to secure his position on the throne. Should the king learn that Ariani's surviving child is a girl, he is sure to insist she be killed.

Fatefully, wizards attending Ariani save the girlchild's life by mystically disguising her, using the essence of her dead brother to impose upon her the appearance of a boy. Thus, to all but a secret few, Tobin, child of Ariani, is a prince, free to grow up unencumbered by the king's scorn and suspicion. Not even Tobin himself is aware of his true identity, not until he has become a young, promising companion of the crown prince Korin, son of the usurper king, and then it is far too late to go back. For Tobin is now a warrior, a young man of station and power. To reject that life for one of a girl, even if it is to heal her realm, is a bridge too far. But then she has not reckoned on the will of the gods.

In The Hidden Warrior, the trilogy's second instalment, Skala's deterioration reaches critical mass. Attacked by its rival, Plenimar, who employ necromancers to steel their assaults, its capital is burning and its king is flailing. The gods have withdrawn their favor from the beleaguered realm, plunging its people into chaos and war. Their only hope now resides in prince Tobin who must reveal his true identity as the sole female heir to the throne. For if she were to sit the throne, reborn as queen Tamir, she could mend the pact with the gods and bring peace back to her land. But then, how can she declare herself to the world when she cannot even accept her own identity?

In The Oracle's Queen, the trilogy's final entry, the war between Skala and Plenimar reaches fever pitch. What's left of Skala's nobility has rallied to Tobin's banner. And yet, a once faithful friend, crown prince Korin, lurks in a damp but important fortress, nursing his wounded pride. For Tobin, or Tamir -- he does not know which story to believe -- has usurped his place, an event which causes the affection Korin once had for Tobin to be devoured by anger and enmity. These dark emotions open the door to the manipulations of a powerful wizard who has so far cynically served the royal family. Civil war hangs like an ugly haze on Skala's cloudy horizon. It is a realm battered and beaten, but the desire for power is too strong for the selfish to let the land rest. Power must be had. And war seems the only way.

As confrontational as it is laborious, The Tamir Triad is a breath of original air in a fantasy genre paralyzed by derivations. While her world and its magics rarely deviate from the norm, Ms. Flewelling's bold choice to take on the painful dilemmas thrown up by gender confusion affixes to her familiar hull an unapologetic masthead that leads the reader into uncharted waters. Unsurprisingly then, sad prince Tobin animates this entire series. Reminiscent of children compelled by their parents to assume a gender that does not suit them, he labors to please his parents, little knowing that they have bestowed upon him an identity he didn't choose and a destiny he didn't ask for. It is left to him to not only discover that he's been living a lie, but to forge a path out of that lie to some kind of identity he can live with, some manner of self-representation that will allow him to marry together the two people nature and nurture have forced him to become.

However, as much as Tobin elevates this trilogy out of the ordinary, Ms. Flewelling's greatest accomplishment here is the darkly aggressive manner in which she raises these questions of identity. This sgrim, challenging and even brutal series is not one easily swallowed by young adults. For Tobin is not ushered into girlhood by puppies and faeries. In her case, accepting herself is also accepting the uneasy mantle of absolute, monarchical power, power which can, and is, easily abused. In this, the author steers clear of making any sort of feminist declarations. In fact, Tobin's journey reads much more as as the acceptance of the cares and responsibilities of adulthood than it does as any sort of parable for the superiority of womankind. This, combined with an unwillingness to pull any punches, lends the trilogy a wonderful, Gothic energy.

But for all that is praiseworthy about The Tamir Triad, there are missteps here. Ms. Flewelling's roster of supporting actors leave a lot to be desired. Though they have clearly been given a great deal of thought, too many of them fall into the simplistic polarities of good and evil, heroic and villainous. In particular, there is insufficient explanation for why the story's antagonists insist on defying the protagonists. Greed and the thrill of manipulation are apparent, yes, but there is almost no sense of the kind of self-preservation that would ordinarily cause such villains to reform their strategies and live to fight another day. Instead, their relentless assaults serve little purpose but to force the heroes to strike them down. Moreover, large swaths of the three novels are taken up with meticulous reconstructions of medieval life which, though appealing initially, wears upon the reader, fattening up an already lengthy epic.

Nonetheless, while the work may be flawed, the degree to which Ms. Flewelling willingly engages with a difficult and even torturous issue transforms the trilogy from a stone into a diamond. And though it may be rough around the edges, the degree to which it shines leaves the reader unconcerned with its blemishes. (4/5 Stars)

The Coldfire Trilogy by C. S. Friedman

From The Week of August 20, 2012
As much as we yearn to know ourselves and our loved ones as profoundly as possible, divining the depths of the human soul is a dangerous and oftentimes scarring experience. For down in that abysmal chasm churns the darkness of our grim nightmares, our secret desires, and our raw emotions, none of which should ever be allowed to rise up into the light of day. For these are the antecedents of our animalistic heritage, the leftovers of our primal urges that have been tamed by both the strictures and the structures of civilization. They are the ghostly shadows of who we might have been had we been born a million years ago, when there existed nothing other than the law of the jungle.

What if they were brought into the light? What if all of our worst thoughts and fears, needs and passions, were given form, made reality by nothing more than the wishing of it? What kind of world would result from such unleashed animae? Ms. Friedman speculates in her sprawling trilogy.

On a world thousands of lightyears from Earth, life has evolved along profoundly different lines. For while some conventional animals prowl the surface of Erna, these are but offspring of an immense, unknowable force that emanates from the very heart of this enigmatic world. In ways unfathomable to anyone else, Erna is alive, its eminently malleable power distributed along spiritual and physical faultlines that cover the planet's surface, ever changing to perfectly reflect the wishes and the needs of the creatures that call Erna home.

e Having known only tranquility for millennia, this power is profoundly disturbed when human colonists first descend upon this strange new world. Refugees from thousands of years of cold sleep, this small band of men and women were lead to Erna by the judgement of their ship's AI which, having been designed to comb the galaxy for worlds habitable to humans, decided that Erna was hospitable to human life. But the AI could have never imagined the threat into which it sold its creators. For Erna's lifeforce can now learn the patterns of the nightmares fostered by human fears, turning once peaceful Erna into a dangerous world of darkness and despair.

In Black Sun Rising, the trilogy's opening salvo, more than a thousand years have elapsed since humanity's disastrous arrival on Erna and, though humans have lost the knowledge and the use of the advanced technology that delivered them to this exotic world, life has stabilized. For not only has humanity managed, to a limited degree, to work these energies unique to Erna, a powerful church has also risen to impose order upon the chaos of human civilization, teaching its followers to control their emotions and their dreams, to redirect those energies to a benevolent divine. It's clear that this divine does not exist, not initially, but if sufficient numbers believe in him, then he too shall be conjured into being by Erna in the same way the vampires and ghosts, demons and ghouls, have been.

A ranking member of this church, Rev. Damien Vryce is one of the sorcerous few who can influence the native Fae, a fact which earns him nothing but suspicion and standoffishness from the notoriously anti-Fae church. Still, the church will require Damien's specialized talents if they are to discover just what kind of nightmare is stalking the streets of its capital and devouring the memories of some of its citizens' brightest minds. Taking on the duty to find and kill this nightmare, Vryce initially sets his sights on the legendary Hunter, a vampire-like nobleman who has fed off of the fears of young, impressionable women to stay alive for centuries. But when the answer to this mystery proves to be far more profound, Damien is forced to make unpleasant alliances in order to cross half the world to find and uproot the source of this destructive evil.

In When True Night Falls, the trilogy's second instalment, Rev. Vryce finds himself at the heart of an even more insidious web. For his most recent mission has revealed that a deeper game is afoot, one that will require he and the Hunter to leave everything they know to travel east, into an empire from which no westerner has returned in living memory. Received warmly by the empire's matriarchal version of the Church, Vryce is initially taken by the peace and the cohesion the Church has managed to exert over the notoriously fickle subconsciousnesses of its human subjects. But when a series of shocking revelations expose the truth of this place, Vryce embarks upon a dangerous journey south, into the very lair of a demon, in hopes of averting a war that will drench his world in blood.

In Crown of Shadows, the trilogy's concluding work, events come to a climactic head when Rev. Vryce discovers that a class of powerful demons has been ruthlessly manipulating recent disasters, conjuring threats that have not only cost Vryce his friends but the support of his Church. Left isolated by his enemy's maneuverings, Vryce is forced to once again draw upon the knowledge and the power of the hated Hunter to try to steer the world from the demonic vision of the future his enemies are trying to bring about, one in which everything he knows and cares for is sold into slavery to a dark power made manifest by their own dark desires. What hope have two almost men have against a thing that can draw power from the pain of millions?

Though troubled, at times, by poor pacing and burdened, throughout, by an over-reliance on quests, The Coldfire Trilogy is imaginative work that withstands the test of time. In her attempt to externalize, to make real, the fears of mankind, Ms. Friedman has conceived of a darkly fascinating world with the atmosphere of Gothic, Victorian England married to the tropes of the classic, questing high-fantasy novel, the union of which has produced a series that is as readable as it is chilling. The Fae as manifestation of human emotion is not precisely novel, but the vigor with which it is applied here causes the work to rise well above the fray, confronting, head-on, the profound costs, to our environment and our fellows, of the arrogance of the human-centric worldview.

Ms. Friedman is, here, positively ruthless. Whereas many authors of fantasy shield their heroes from not only the worst of what their evil enemies have to offer, but the consequences of their own actions, she is willing to pervert what is pure, to defile what is holy, to end what is innocent. She compels her characters to compromise themselves in every imaginable way and then she demands they surrender yet more of their humanity in a kind of cosmic test of their endurance, to see how much they can take before they break under her remorseless hands. In this, she is well ahead of her time. For this work, initially published in the early 1990s, calls to mind trends from much later in that decade, and the next, in which authors and television-show creators tested their heroes on the wrack of their wills, pushing them beyond their stress limits, demanding that they take more, more, more, until they, and the illusions they were responsible for, give way. We are meant to love what is unclean and rebel against what is pure, not as an exercise in simple, dumb hedonism, but in order to shed our prejudices and our blinders, to embrace ourselves in all our flawed glory.

But whereas Ms. Friedman excels at dark storytelling, each work in this trilogy is troubled by lethargic pacing and relentless questing. Each novel is easily a hundred pages too long, bloated by repetitive details that do nothing to deepen the already rich mythology, or advance the already elaborate story. They serve only to hammer away at the grimness of the reality which has been already thoroughly established. Moreover, the high-fantasy conceit of a quest to save the world seems decidedly out of place in a story this dark. Yes, they are handled well in each volume, but Ms. Friedman is a talented enough storyteller to leave aside this tired structure that, anyway, poorly fits her world. The against-all-odds questing merely serves to re-enforce the specialness of her characters, none of whom require such gilding.

The Coldfire Trilogy is engrossing work. It establishes a challenging world and sticks to it with enviable consistency. Moreover, its characters are as flawed as its environment is Gothic, a fact which should please anyone who appreciates darkly flavored fantasy. Well ahead of its time... (4/5 Stars)

Prince Of Thorns: The Broken Empire 01 by Mark Lawrence

From The Week of March 12, 2012

Revenge is a powerful emotion. It can sustain us through the darkest moments, burning away all of our secondary concerns to leave a hardened core of vengeful purpose. But for all of revenge's potence, it is ultimately a corrupting and abrasive emotion, the use of which erodes both morals and personality. For in time, even the hardened core must inevitably give way and then what is there left but a grim, purposeless void, an emptiness that can never be filled up by light. This is the enduring and oppressive lesson of Prince of Thorns, Mr. Lawrence's first and uneven novel.

In a world riven by war and rivalry, life labors onward in the Broken Empire. A once united whole that gathered up everyone from the knights down to the peasantry, the empire has since shattered into a hundred fragments, fiefdoms ruled by warlords who masquerade as nobility. Titles that once denoted honor and chivalric service are now merely pretty decorations to distract from the awful truth that there is very little of actual nobility anywhere in this realm, let alone in its landed classes.

Deeply scarred by being a witness to the murder of both his mother and brother, Honorous Jorg Ancrath is but thirteen and already a man. For he has spat into the eye of death and lived to tell of it. The leader of a band of cutthroats, he fully intends, before his grave is dug, to wear crowns, first a king's and then an emperor's. But to realize his ambitions, he will have to regain his hard father's prickly faith. For that is the avenue to power. But when even his own family betrays him, Jorg is left with no choice but to summon his will, his determination, and his cruelty to forge his own bloody path to victory. For there is nothing left but to make revenge upon all those who have taken from him the life he could have had.

Prince of Thorns is a vulture, an irredeemably bleak adventure that'd as soon pick out your eyes as look at you. Its dirty, jagged world is strongly suggestive of a far future England limping along after a global, nuclear holocaust. Though the environment appears to have recovered somewhat from the Day of a Thousand Suns, society has gone the other way, descending from chaos into authoritarianism. From authoritarianism, matters have regressed even further into a kind of fractious feudalism where the law, as such, resides along the sharp edge of a swordblade. While other cultural elements have survived the holocaust -- Christianity, if not its church; historical text, if not their meaning --, this medieval society, animated by mysticism and ghoulishness, has, by far, the strongest sway.

This is a difficult novel. While it presents a portrait of the bleakness of medieval life that is rightfully stripped of all its romantic claptrap, the utter lack of any redemptive elements makes the novel a bitter pill indeed. Anyone interested in gritty fantasy should be braced for such grotesque grimness, having no doubt cut their teeth on the likes of Abercrombie, Morgan, Kearney, et al. And yet, for all their cynicism, moments of levity and hope broke through the unremitting blackness of these other tales. True, they were lights that glowed but weakly, sickly, but they glowed nonetheless. The extent to which Mr. Lawrence has taken this theme to its nihilistic conclusion, total gloom, is either the natural progression of a genre ridding itself of High Fantasy's nonsense, or it is simply the efforts of a hack to carve out some space for himself in a genre that demands more skill from its authors than he can summon. Genius or failed mimicry? I lean towards the latter, but I may well lack that spark of brilliance that allows those rare few among us to spot genius even while it emerges.

Bold and provocative, but if you needed a sickbag for Joe Abercrombie, you'll need a mental enema for Mr. Lawrence. (2/5 Stars)

The Etched City by K. J. Bishop

From The Week of March 05, 2012

Human nature demands that we apply narratives to both our lives and our history. It is, after all, how we think, a quirk of the brain's memory-storage system that compels us to turn everything we are and everything we were into a chronicle. But these narratives, embellished over time, are deceptive. They are assemblages of events which, individually, had no meaning, or pattern. They were simply events, things that happened in spacetime that do not have to be governed by the laws of cause and effect. It is merely hindsight that prompts us to gather up these disparate threads and weave them into a meaningful tapestry, a portrait that applies some kind of order to the randomness of life. Though Ms. Bishop's dreamy, Gothic adventure is animated by the nightmarish, the grotesque and the painfully realistic, it is this absence of gilded history, this jagged dislocation, that underpins the piece.

In a world of deserts and snow, of sun and ice, the Copper Country is some of the deadliest territory imaginable. Riven by war and treachery, these dusty plains are antithetical to a long and fruitful existence. Yes, bounty hunters and brigands can find much coin here, but what happens when that life grows too hard, when ones luck has run as dry as the earth? Then one has but two options, death or a new beginning, elsewhere, in a place of meager hopes and fantastic dreams.

Raule and Gwynn, once friends and mercenaries, have chosen survival over an anonymous death in the baking sands. Teaming up on the road, the female doctor and the male gunslinger ride for Ashamoil, a sodden city on the edge of the tropics which, far from being a respite from the lives they've known, seems to harbor magic and nightmares all its own. Having fended off their vengeful pursuers -- ex-colleagues from the old country --, Raule sets out her shingle in a hospital run by nuns, trying in some small way to turn away from her past. Gwynn, however, is unrepentant, signing on with a powerful crew of cutthroats who more or less operate autonomously within this humid outpost of civilization. As Raule buries herself in healing work and Gwynn lives the life of a mercenary soldier -- killing, drinking, whoring --, their orbits drift apart, but when war comes to town, setting off a chain reaction of increasingly violent incidents, their worlds will once again overlap, much to their pains and their cost.

The Etched City is without doubt one of the strangest pieces of genre fiction to have recently floated to the cultural consciousness. Ms. Bishop has a poet's skill with words and a dreamer's talent for imagery, virtues which, together, invest her work here with a Gothic majesty. The setting is strongly reminiscent of the 19th century Wild West with Ashamoil taking up the mantle of the lively but amoral border town nestled on the edge of the untamed frontier. Pre-electric, knightly chivalry has nonetheless given way to the advent of guns which have turned every man, armed with a grudge and grandiose aspirations, into a deadly weapon capable of instantaneous and irreversible violence. In this, the world is similar in feel to Steampunk's Victorian revival.

What's striking about Ms. Bishop's work, however, is not the lengths to which it revels in the visually grotesque, the mystically bewildering, or even the understandably nihilistic. It is the grace with which the author interweaves discussions of morality, godliness and reality into what is otherwise episodic escapism. Though the work is difficult at times to swallow, and a challenge at other times to enjoy, it leaves no doubt that it was the product of a talented mind. It is as if Hemingway, or Joyce, or Dickens, or any of the greats had decided to descend from high art to put to paper the fancies of their powerful imaginations. And so even though it is occasionally repellent, The Etched City is, like the magnificent snakes with which it is so fond, always hypnotizing. I must seek out some of the author's short fiction to see if it too bears this compelling amalgam.

Mesmerizingly gruesome. (4/5 Stars)

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

From The Week of March 27, 2011

For many, the tempestuous relationship of Catherine and Heathcliff, the dyad around which Wuthering Heights revolves, is darkly, fantastically romantic. It burns with a boundless, dangerous passion that has kept this classic of British literature circulating through English syllabi for decades. But while I agree that Catherine and Heathcliff are magnetic characters worthy of celebration, Wuthering Heights is, in almost every other respect, an inferior, Gothic novel.

Narrated almost entirely through dialogue, Ms. Bronte's most famous work is comprised of the recollections of Ellen Dean, a housekeeper for the wealthy Mr. Lockwood who has traveled to northern England in search of a respite from his troubles. Dean, who works at the home in which Mr. Lockwood is staying, relates to her rich, southern tenant the legendary tale of Catherine and Heathcliff Earnshaw. One night, in an act of charity, Catherine Earnshaw's father collects and brings home an orphaned gypsy boy (Heathcliff) whom he later adopts. But when, some few years later, Catherine's father dies, Heathcliff loses his best advocate, leaving him no armor against the jealous spite of Hindley Earnshaw, brother of Catherine. What began as a sibling rivalry between the boys has flared, now, into enmity as, after years of living as part of the Earnshaw family, Heathcliff is reduced to playing a servant in their household. Perhaps Heathcliff would've endured this humiliation for the love of Catherine with whom he is clearly besotted, but when, after associating with their rich, cultured neighbors, she too turns on Heathcliff, the scarred adolescent hurls himself from the only home he's ever known, bent on transforming himself into a man of power capable of exacting revenge upon the family that has wronged him.

Though Wuthering Heights is beautifully written and powerfully tragic, the core conceits of its plot prevent it from truly taking flight. In order to advance the story, Ms. Bronte finds it necessary to interfere and maneuver her characters into positions where the right piece of dialogue is heard by the right character in exactly the wrong mood. For instance, on the heels of Hindley demoting him to a servant, Heathcliff just happens to overhear Catherine announcing her affection for Edgar, the Linton's son in whom she's made a friend, but he misinterprets her meaning, assumes a betrayal and flees the house, setting into motion the second half of the book. Literary lights as luminous as Shakespeare have deployed such tricks in the execution of a tale, but that doesn't make it any less sloppy. In order for any story of note to have meaning, it must have a gloss of realism. But repeatedly, Ms. Bronte intercedes to position her characters just right, so they might overhear the right piece of dialogue, so they can ask the right questions. This leads to my second criticism.

Wuthering Heights is poorly served by its narrators, Dean and Mr. Lockwood. While having Dean relay the story simplifies the structure for Ms. Bronte by releasing her of the necessity to tell, first-hand, a story that spans more than 30 years, it distances the reader from the piece's emotional events. The reader is aware, from the moment Dean begins her story, that all we are about to experience has come to pass. Mr. Lockwood could, at any time, go out and ask Heathcliff himself for his version of events. Instead, the reader is locked into consuming hundreds of pages of improbable dialogue, most of which provided by Dean who apparently possesses the most remarkable memory in human history. If Mr. Lockwood had a stronger presence in the story, perhaps choosing this structure would have brought something to the table. But as it is, Mr. Lockwood is nothing more than an ornament, a stand-in for the reader.

Wuthering Heights is a wonderfully savage book, shot through with raw and emotional characters. Heathcliff's journey into darkness is fascinating and disturbing, while Catherine's decline as a result of Heathcliff's passion is powerfully potent. But I felt far too manipulated by the author to enjoy a story about a love sundered by spite. Such strong emotion should be truly earned; it shouldn't be a cheap trick to facilitate what comes. (3/5 Stars)

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

From The Week of March 20, 2011

Ever since High School English crammed Charles Dickens down my throat, I've had an awkward relationship with classic literature. Seventeen-year-old boys don't, as a rule, groove on stories they can't immediately relate to. The result? The blurry-eyed, when will this nightmare be over slog of skimming through chapters and pounding out semi-coherent assignments for books loaded up with antique language and populated by culturally alien characters. Doesn't exactly scream love affair, does it? Well, more the fool me because, it turns out, ten years on, I love this stuff! Jane Eyre has Gothic gravitas, sympathetic characters, emotional acuity and a delicate sense of horror. But all this is merely icing atop the cake, Jane herself, surely one of the best heroines in English literature.

Living at the sufferance of her aunt, Jane Eyre is an unwanted orphan girl whose existence within the Reed family is only tolerated because of her uncle's dying wish that she be given a roof over her head. Once her only advocate is dead, however, the Reeds prove to be merciless with Jane until, one day, the ten-year-old girl snaps and forces her aunt to confront the extent to which she has allowed, and participated in, Jane's emotional and physical abuse. Such disobedience cannot be tolerated, especially not in 19th century England, and so Jane is packed off to boarding school where our young protagonist is acquainted with the hardships of the outside world: disease, poverty, religiosity and cynicism. It's only when an eighteen-year-old Jane, now a governess by trade, is hired on as a servant in the home of the wealthy and mannerly Edward Rochester that life catches fire and she's plunged into a long and winding love affair with enigmatic Edward and his mannerly set.

Standing in the way of the union of Eyre with Rochester, however, are forces both predictable and supernatural. The former takes the form of Blanch, the elegant daughter of a wealthy family who would make Edward a fine but empty marriage. The latter is far more ominous, a demonic force which has taken root in the Rochester home, threatening to murder both Jane and her impossible love. Will the myriad impediments of class, jealousy and wounded pride prevail over Jane's and Edward's love, or will they find a way to unite in spite of a world dead set against them?

Though most everything about British, and Western, society has changed since the 1848 publication of Jane Eyre, Ms. Bronte's themes here are so universal, so strikingly relevant to the 21st century, that her lovely book wears its age better than most of its contemporaries. Jane is an exceptional protagonist who manages, somehow, to be self-assured, dignified and heroic, all without indulging in piousness or self-righteousness. She does not whine or fuss over the hand that life dealt her; admirably, she puts her head down and pushes onward, trying to succeed in a world that does no favors to women of her class. But it's Her cool disregard for the cruel conventions of British life I love most. Jane Eyre doesn't hesitate to attack the inequities of British society. Blanch may be a caricature, but her sense of entitlement has the echo of authenticity. Set against Jane's pragmatic but penniless goodness and there's little doubt of where virtue lies.

Good things come to those who work hard, expecting nothing but the results of their own labor. This doesn't mean be a pushover; one has to stand up for their beliefs, to be the best while demanding the best from those around them. Jane is the only one here who walks the walk and talks the talk and, as a result, she can't lose. It's so refreshing to read a well-written piece from a more cloistered time that features a heroine superior to those our more advanced society puts forward. Not to mention, Jane Eyre has, in St. John, the perfect villain. No violence, no thunder, no gratuity... Just a man doing wrong as a result of acting out of pure selfishness. The man virtually does nothing untoward, yet, Ms. Bronte succeeds in making him, in all his self-righteousness and moralizing, an infuriating figure.

This is superior fiction: tension, anxiety, horror, and even a little joy. For fans of Gothic fiction of the Sarah Waters ilk, a must consume. (5/5 Stars)

Affinity by Sarah Waters

From The Week of May 23, 2010

Affinity may plod along at times as Ms. Waters does her level best to keep a number of literary balls in the air at once, but an outstanding final third of this dark, Gothic novel is well worth the wait.

Set in Victorian London of the 1870s, our story concerns one Margaret Prior, a thoroughly miserable young woman who, despite her upperclass privilege, has attempted suicide at least once. Though the true cause of Margaret's unhappiness does not out until later in the novel, it's immediately clear that her disposition hasn't been helped by the death of her father. Her mother only worsens the situation by treating Margaret like an invalid, stripping away the young lady's autonomy out of a fear that she'll upset herself and attempt again to end her life. As a result, young Margaret wastes away inside her house, which might as well be a prison, dying a little with each day that passes and generally seeing little light on the horizon.

If one were to compile a list of ideas on how to cheer up a depressed girl, sending her to tour a prison wouldn't be anywhere near my top ten, but this is Victorian England where at least the notion of piety towards the lower classes is encouraged among the well-off. And anyway, visiting, as its called, offers Margaret an opportunity to get out in the world, to seize her own initiative, to be her own woman by engaging with the female prisoners of Millbank. Quickly, Margaret takes a liking to these wretches. In a way, she's quite like them, a societal outcast among a group of societal outcasts. Perhaps this new arrangement will work out for Margaret and give her hope for the future, unless of course her passions run away with her and she gets in too deep with the wrong inmate, an inmate just waiting for an opportunity to reclaim her lost powers.

This is an excellent piece of fiction which channels the Bronte sisters and filters it through the lens of the late 20th century inclination for graphic detail. If Ms. Waters had been just a bit more circumspect in her subject matter, this could have been a 19th century Gothic novel. The prose is wonderfully period and the sense of creeping despair is pitch perfect. My primary quibble here is with Selina Dawes, the inmate with whom Margaret entangles. Quality character, but the flashbacks to her past, while probably necessary, slowed the novel considerably. Ms. Waters clearly wanted to explore the spiritualism of the period, but it always seemed too disconnected from the main, narrative thrust. It certainly never animated as the rest of the piece did. All in all, a great read if you like a little non-gory horror. And as mentioned, the final act is absolutely first class. (3/5 Stars)