Hold Me Closer, Necromancer

Today is a great day; it's the release day of a new YA novel by Lish McBride entitled Hold Me Closer, Necromancer.

When I saw that a novel with a title that great was coming out (from an announcement at Tor.Com), I emailed the publisher, (Macmillan Children's Publishing Group) and asked if they would send me a copy, which they did. Naturally I wanted to be one of the first to tell you about it. . . and to find out if this is a book in which necromancy ever pays.

I am happy to report that the answer is no, as the hero, Sam, doesn't actually raise anyone from the dead. That has already been done by an evil necromancer named Douglas (most notably to Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones), and when Sam is capable, he uses his power to help put some of them to rest again (Keith not included).

As you can tell from the joke of the title (can you even read it without humming Elton John the rest of the day?) and the chapter titles (which include lots of songs--most amusingly "C'mon baby, don't fear the reaper"), this is not a gloomy or scary read. It's as sweet and finely woven as the pink cotton candy Sam buys when he is ordered to meet Douglas at the zoo, because "you can look tough eating popcorn....But something about a pink fluffy ball screams pansy to most people. I decided that pansy was probably a better look."

The verisimilitude of the opening chapters is terrific. You enter a world where nineteen and twenty year old kids work in fast food and the reason a scary older guy comes in to the restaurant is because one of them has broken the headlight of his fancy car while playing a game in the parking lot. A few chapters later, when the scary older guy--Douglas--discovers that Sam is a necromancer, it's as much a surprise to Sam as would be to any one of us:

I laughed, saw he wasn't joking about the necromancy thing, then stopped. "I'm nothing like you," I said. I guess my keep-my-mouth shut policy had gone out the window. "Necromancy." I laughed again. "You could have at least worked up to that one. You know, started with 'Luke, you have the power' or something like that." I snorted. "Come over to the dark side."

Sam is also surprised--but perhaps not quite as surprised as any one of us would be--to discover that his mother is a witch, and that she's afraid of his powers, enough to have enlisted the help of his uncle to bind his powers right after his birth. When Sam comes to confront her about what he's learned from his encounters with Douglas, he brings the "living" head of a friend that Douglas killed and resurrected, and when his mother sees the head she says:

"Oh Sam, how could you?"
Out of all the things I thought she might say, that was not on the list. "What do you mean, how could I" I said, voice rising. "You think I did this?"
She blinked at me. "You brought me your friend's head in a bowling bag, honey. What did you expect me to think?"
"I expect you to know I'm not a killer," I said through gritted teeth.

But necromancers have a bad rep, you know. For the rest of the novel, Sam learns more about what being born a necromancer has to mean, and how he must act once his powers can no longer be hidden from the world by his mother's protective spells.

The first spirit Sam calls up is a perky one named Ashley, who seems so cheerful and unassuming that the werewolf/fairy girl Douglas has imprisoned with Sam in his basement takes some convincing to believe she's dead:

"She pointed to herself. "Dead. As in a doornail. I took a dirt nap, pushed up some daisies, reached room temperature, pined for the fjords--"
"Pined for the fjords?" Brid said.
"Monty Python," the girl and I both said at the same time.

The second time Sam calls up spirits is when he is defending himself from Douglas, who has discovered that Sam is more powerful than he thought and has resolved to rid himself of him. Left alone in the basement, strapped to a table, Sam discovers that:

"Douglas had killed a lot of people in this room. And a lot of other things.
And they were pissed....
They were all angry, and they were all howling for Douglas's blood. I doubted there were many places on earth that looked like that. I wanted to cover my ears, drown out the sound of it. I wondered how Douglas could even walk into the basement, how he could concentrate over the din. Or were they simply calling out for help from the first necromancer that came around besides their killer?"

Sam, of course, with the help of his friends, succeeds in granting the spirits their wish and ridding the world of the evil Douglas, all without doing anything actually evil himself, and with a charming nod to E. Nesbit's story "The Dragon Tamers."

I love this novel. In the modern-day spirit of Lestat and Edward Cullen, who don't want to be evil even when they find that they've become creatures who are, by definition, evil (and with a joke or two on the side about vampires), Sam tells a thoroughly enjoyable story about becoming your own person and finding the power to do it on your own terms.

Capitol Murder

Last year FreshHell sent me one of the books left in her rented beach house and I found it hilariously bad, so this year she rented a different, more upscale house and sent me one of the books she found there, William Bernhardt's Capitol Murder. Although it's better written--no, probably because it's better written--it's an even more repellent book, one that I'd certainly try to leave wherever I discovered it.

The action begins with a video of a young girl having sex with a U.S. Senator, a video which includes gagging and retching noises and is eventually shown in court during the Senator's trial for murdering the girl. And the description gets much worse from there.

An investigator for the senator's defense explores various S&M sex clubs, complete with details on what he sees, and progresses to the inner "temple" of a vampire cult who "call upon the Undead Gods, the ancient Sumerian vampire dragon goddess, Tiamat, and the way of the Magick" before they use their specially sharpened teeth to bite each other's shoulders and drink blood.

The leader of the "vampires" is a murderer who enjoys torture. There's a graphic description of how he forces an underling to torture the investigator, complete with scintillating lines like "hurt him again." But the exposure of the vamp leader is merely a red herring. The girl's murderer is someone else, someone you don't really know enough about to suspect.

Why fiction of this kind is written, I don't know. But I think it's now established that you should never read a paperback novel you find abandoned in a rental beach house. It's like necromancy...it never pays.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

Children's: What question does a baby bird ask of a dog, a cow and a steam shovel, in P.D. Eastman's classic?

Classics: What did Raymond Chandler describe in The Long Goodbye as "a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness"?

Non-Fiction: Whose second memoir, The Play Goes On, opens with his wedding to Marsha Mason?

Book Club: What 1989 novel had its title character's name changed for the film Simon Birch, when the book's author objected to the adaptation?

Authors: What author began life as Adeline Virginia Stephen, but was called "the Goat" by her siblings?

Book Bag: What pen name did married co-authors Judith Barnard and Michael Fain adopt for their debut collaboration, Deceptions?

Tooth and Claw

Jo Walton's novel Tooth and Claw is, she says in the prologue, "the result of wondering what a world would be like...if the axioms of the sentimental Victorian novel were inescapable laws of biology." Dragon biology, that is.

Unlike Naomi Novik's Temeraire novels, which are concerned with the Napoleonic wars, Tooth and Claw "owes a lot," Walton says, to Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage. So it's a drawing room novel, commencing with the death of the patriarch and following the fortunes of his children, including two young, unmarried daughters. It is done without winking or allegory (Walton discusses the attempts of her translators to insist on allegorical meaning in her article about reading protocols for science fiction and fantasy).

The conventions are fun because they're so literal--when a young female dragon gets engaged or becomes a "soiled dove," she turns pink to show it. Class struggle involves not only having your wings bound so you can't fly, but includes the possibility of being eaten. Male dragons have more power because they have claws and, possibly, fire.

Dragonflesh has a particular appeal, because it bestows health and greater length on the devourer, causing some landowners to go too far in eating servants and the weaker children of tenant farmers. The novel begins with a quarrel over the bestowal of the patriarch's body and ends with the results of the lawsuit over the way his flesh was distributed.

Immediately after the death of the patriarch, his married daughter "came in, walking delicately as always. She sighed at Penn, and he knew she must have heard the whole quarrel and wondered how she would act. She bent and took one bite, but one very large bite, from the breast. It was a bite that satisfied both what Penn had said and her husband's insistence. She could say to Penn that it was one bite, but she could also say to her husband that she had consumed the greater part of the breast. It was a most diplomatic bite, and Penn, despite himself, was awed at her grasp of such nuance."

One of the funniest bits--because of the mental image--is about the casual way the dragons "dress" when they're in the country, as opposed to the way they must dress in the city (here called Irieth):
"In the country, in summer, it is permissible to go about with any hat or none. Blessed parsons may be seen in battered old toppers. Respectable young ladies fly around bareheaded, and August ladies take to the skies in caps of tattered lace...In Irieth, however, at any time of year, hats were obligatory for any dragon who wished to be thought gently born."
Don't you just love the picture of the dread beasts flying about with Victorian-style bonnets and top hats perched precariously on their heads?

The descriptions of dragon dinners were also amusing:
"As the family were alone, dinner consisted of six muttons, their skin and wool removed before they reached the table by farmers expert in that craft. Wool, and whole muttonwool fleeces, were much prized in millinery. The fleeces would be sent to the cities and reappear in the form of cunningly contrived headcoverings...."
"I wonder why it is that there is a prohibition on cooking meat?" Berend said, conversationally, swallowing a great bite of the fatty underbelly of her mutton. "It smells rather pleasant."
"Flaming at it isn't cooking it," Daverak said, looking a little guilty....
"The prohibition is because the filthy Yarge do it," Daverak said, turning his seared haunch in his claw a little as if wondering if it would make him a social pariah to eat it. "That's what they told me in school anyway. Apparently they tried to make us do it during the Conquest, and it was one of the reasons we revolted. Disgusting cooked meat sticks in the craw. That's what they said, anyway. I've never tried it myself."
"Is the haunch you flamed disgusting?" Berend asked.
"I already said that was different from cooking," Daverak said, frowning.
"But how does it taste?" Berend asked. "As cooked meat is illegal, that's probably the closest I'll ever come to seeing any, and it does smell pleasant, or at least interesting. How does it taste?"
"The same as always, only a little warmer," Daverak said, taking a tentative taste. "Besides, if you really want to try cooked meat there are places in Irieth you can get it. It's one of those thrills some dragons go in for...."

Humans, of course, are the "filthy Yarge," but there aren't any in this novel until the happy ending, when a Yarge ambassador comes to court for a formal occasion and a newly betrothed young lady kindly helps her mother-in-law-to-be bear the sight of him in public.

This is not an adventure story. Despite the dinner and dragon-eating scenes, it is not bloody. It culminates with a celebration of a happy--and propertied-- marriage for all the remaining characters, and so ends, as Oscar Wilde's novel-writing character Miss Prizm says all fiction should: "the good ended happily, and the bad unhappily."

Perfect Reader

Every once in a while I have to watch the movie Elizabethtown in order to have the courage to go on with my life, to make 'em wonder why I'm still smiling. And then I go out into the world and remind myself that it's really not all about me. Even if I am six feet tall and wearing red, everyone is not looking at me; in fact many of them saw and dismissed me years ago.

I obsess, though. I think about what I'm going to do and say as if it's going to make some kind of indelible impression. I'm like the speaker of this poem by Mary Ruefle, who I think believes what she is saying at the same time she's being amused by the absurdity of it:

Perfect Reader

I spend all day in my office, reading a poem
by Stevens, pretending I wrote it myself,
which is what happens when someone is lonely
and decides to go shopping and meets another customer
and they buy the same thing. But I come to my senses,
and decide when Stevens wrote the poem he was thinking
of me, the way all my old lovers think of me
whenever they lift their kids or carry the trash,
and standing outside the store I think of them:
I throw my arms around a tree, I kiss the pink
and peeling bark, its dead skin, and the papery
feel of its fucked-up beauty arouses me, lends my life
a certain gait, like the stout man walking to work
who sees a peony in his neighbor's yard and thinks ah,
there is a subject of white interpolation, and then
the petals fall apart for a long time, as long as it takes
summer to turn to snow, and I go home at the end and watch
the news about the homeless couple who met in the park,
and then the weather, to see how they will feel tomorrow.

Trying on other points of view can be, oddly, a solipsistic exercise. I like the title of this poem, the way it seems to intimate that the perfect reader is the one most like . . . you.

Paris to the Moon

Oh, faithful readers, I owe you a big round of thanks for suggesting I try Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon when I was becoming convinced that I was done reading autobiographical essays. They are exactly the kind of essays I like most, full of small observations that add up to a description of a place and time. And, of course, they're for anyone who has ever loved Paris: "the site of the most beautiful commonplace civilization there has ever been: cafes, brasseries, parks, lemons on trays, dappled light on bourgeois boulevards...."

Gopnik says that his aim is to look for "the large in the small, the macro in the micro, the figure in the carpet, and if some big truths passed by, I hope some significant small ones got caught. If there is a fault in reporting, after all, it is not that it is too ephemeral but that it is not ephemeral enough, too quickly concerned with what seems big at the time to see what is small and more likely to linger."
Perhaps the circumstances under which I was reading this book contributed to how much I loved the way Gopnik notes the small things as they go by. I was finishing it while I spent the weekend with Walker at a chess tournament, and he had a very good tournament indeed, full of one victory after another, culminating in first prize for his section and a likely promotion to the next, top, section. And what I will remember, I think, is the way he rested one foot on the other knee as he sat with some of the adult chess players gazing at a football game between rounds, after lunch. The way his breathing slowed within a minute of his head reaching the pillow. Finding the hotel lotion bottle on the rim of the tub once again after he got out of the shower.

One of the little things I love best in the story of Gopnik's life in Paris with his pre-school-age son, Luke, is what happens after about a month of their weekly visits to a cafe with a pinball machine in the back:
"When we began to play, I would always discreetly drag a cafe chair over from the table and put it alongside the machine for Luke to stand on. But after we had done this five or six times, over five or six weeks, I noticed that someone had quietly tucked that small cafe chair under the left flipper. The chair, the little bistro chair, was permanently pushed under the pinball machine on the left, or Lukeish, side. There was no talk, no explanation; no one mentioned it, or pointed it out. No, it was a quiet, almost a grudging courtesy, offered to a short client who came regularly to take his pleasure there. Nothing has changed in our relation to that cafe: No one shakes our hands or offers us a false genial smile; we pay for our coffee and grenadine as we always have; we leave the tip we have always left. But that chair is always there."

And, of course, Gopnik talks a lot about food and restaurants. I think he's right when he says that "most people who love Paris love it because the first time they came they ate something better than they had ever eaten before, and kept coming back to eat it again." He lists the dishes at his favorite brasserie:
"There are leeks and tomato salad and herring for starters--foie gras if you're in an expansive mood--and then the same five or so plats: steak au poivre, roast chicken, grilled sole or salmon, calf's liver, gigot with white and green beans. The wine list is short, and usually the best thing on it is the Reserve Balzar, a pleasant red Bordeaux. The only sauces are the sauce au poivre on the steak and a bearnaise for the grilled salmon. The pommes frites are fine, the creme caramel is good, the profiteroles the best in Paris."
This short menu makes me contrast the extensive one at a Parisian-style brasserie we went to last spring in Philadelphia. They had excellent food and wine, but somehow none of it quite measured up to our memories of real Parisian brasserie fare.

I also enjoy hearing Gopnik's thoughts on the differences between American and French people, especially in terms of soccer:
"Soccer was not meant to be enjoyed. It was meant to be experienced. the World Cup is a festival of fate: man accepting his hard circumstances, the near certainty of his failure. there is, after all, something familiar about a contest in which nobody wins and nobody pots a goal. Nil-nil is the score of life. This may be where the difficulty lies for Americans, who still look for Eden out there on the ballfield. But soccer is not meant to be an escape from life. It is life, in all its injustice and tedium."

Gopnik explains the French to his American audience so well because he sees them from the American point of view: "I don't believe that something can be horrible and beautiful. I am too American for that...." He even concludes that some of what we love about Paris is the difficulty:
"Perhaps in the end this is why Paris is 'romantic.' It married both the voluptuous and restricted. It is not the yeses but the noes of Paris, not the licenses it offers love but the prohibitions it puts in its way, that makes it powerful. All the noes of French life, the way that each gate to each park is bounded by that endless ten-thousand-word-fine-print announcement from the government dictating all the things you are absolutely not allowed to do in the park, contribute in some odd way to the romance of Paris."

There are so many lovely ideas and turns of phrase along the way that when I got to the end of the book, I felt kind of lonesome, as though it was time for someone whose company I had been enjoying to go home.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

Children's: What member of the Grateful Dead co-wrote with his sister Wendy an environmental children's book called Panther Dream?

Classics: What nickname for 12-year-old Dolores Haze is the title of a 1955 novel?

Non-Fiction: What 1987 Allan Bloom tome called American culture "a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family"?

Book Club: Who won a 1998 Pulitzer for his multigenerational novel American Pastoral?

Authors: What best-selling Aussie author moved to tiny Norfolk Island, where she met and married a local descendant of Fletcher Christian?

Book Bag: Who created the world of Darkover, then made it available for other writers to set stories there?