a confusion of books
Recently I've read some books I wish I didn't like, and some books I wish I did.
A Kiss Before the Apocalypse, by Thomas E. Sniegoski
Dancing on the Head of a Pin, by Thomas E. Sniegoski
Where Angels Fear to Tread, by Thomas E. Sniegoski
These are the first three books in the Remy Chandler series, and there's a hell of a lot wrong with them, and yet I keep crunching them up like potato chips and will probably give in and read the fourth one before long.
Remy Chandler is a private investigator. He's also an angel, a Seraphim (Sniegoski appears sadly unaware that Seraphim is plural and its singular is Seraph) who left heaven after the war between God and Lucifer, sickened by all the things he'd done in God's name. He's not fallen, but he has chosen to live on earth and be as human as he can manage (given that he's immortal, doesn't age, has pretty extreme healing powers even in his human form and is virtually indestructible in his angelic one, etc.). It's a little unclear how long Chandler has been on earth--at a couple of points Sniegoski seems to imply that the war in heaven happened a thousand years earlier [in about the year 1000 CE, in other words, which makes for an interesting timeline considering that real-world references to Lucifer as a fallen angel predate that by a hell of a long time]--but it's only since the 1950s, when he met his wife Madeline, that he's really begun to feel comfortable here. (And yes, Chandler did name himself after Raymond Chandler; he also has a dog called Marlowe.)
When we first meet Chandler, in A Kiss Before the Apocalypse, Madeline is dying of cancer, and due to their apparent age difference he's had to tell the nursing home staff she's his mother. Things get worse when the Angel of Death stops doing his job, and Remy has to choose between keeping his beloved Madeline alive longer and possibly triggering the Apocalypse, or saving the world and letting her die.
That's what I like about these books: they're not ashamed to be about emotions and human (or quasi-human, or human-and-animal) relationships. Remy's story is shaped throughout the books by his marriage and his grief, as well as his gradual emergence from that grief. That's a really unusual emotional focus for this kind of book, and I both admire and enjoy it. Remy also has great connections with his dog Marlowe (Remy can speak the language of animals, and I know it's an utterly twee conceit but I can't help being charmed by Marlowe's dialogue); with the repentant fallen angel Francis; and with his best human friend, homicide detective Steve Mulvehill. I find the awkward tenderness of that friendship quite moving, and I have to confess that I wish there was a fandom so there could be slash.
Other good things: the plots are brisk and entertaining, if not very creative; the books use a Christian mythos but keep a skeptical distance from it (God exists and is powerful, but it's not at all clear that he's loving; also, other gods have existed); and there are occasional moments of real inventive strength, like Remy drifting slowly through the universe after a visit to heaven.
And then there are the bad things. The prose is mediocre at best, downright klutzy at worst ("four-legged friend" is not a phrase to be used unironically), and Sniegoski has a bad habit of repetitiveness both within and between books. The women characters, including Madeline, are all ciphers. This is a World Without LGBT People, except for some hinted bisexuality among decadent semi-fallen angels. And there's creepy, recurrent ableism fail, including disabled characters being repeatedly described by their disability ("the handicapped man," "the blind man") and the claim that "the handicapped" often have special supernatural sensitivity to compensate.
That's why I wish I didn't like these books. And yet I do, in the potato-chip, this-is-bad-and-yet kind of way.
The Affinity Bridge, by George Mann
Ghosts of War, by George Mann
I ordered Ghosts of War because Paul Magrs enthusiastically recommended it on his blog, and I'm a huge fan of Paul Magrs. And then I bought The Affinity Bridge while waiting for Ghosts of War to arrive. Unfortunate, I did not like either of them one bit.
Each books is from a separate series, and both have awesome premises. The Affinity Bridge features Sir Maurice Newbury and his assistant, Miss Veronica Hobbes, who work secretly for the crown in a steampunk late-Victorian England. This book has airships, automatons, ghost policemen, and a zombie plague . . . how could it go wrong? And yet I was bored by it, because Mann is unable to give his characters any emotional depth or their interactions any force. Nor does he do much with the world he's built, and to be honest the worldbuilding isn't all that deep; the book's a bit of a grab bag of popular tropes. To make matters worse, Mann is enamored of ridiculously long action scenes, which I find boring even in a visual medium, and he pushes the limits of my suspended disbelief by injuring his characters badly again and again and having them soldier on regardless.
Ghosts of War is set in a steampunk-ish 1920s United States that's locked in a cold war with the British Empire. Its hero is, by day, the rich playboy Gabriel Cross, but by night he's Batman The Ghost, protecting the streets of New York from villains. In particular, he's trying to protect them from people-snatching robotic birds and a plot to turn the cold war into a hot one. Various sidekicks and minor characters come into play, most notably British agent Peter Rutherford. Who is gay, meaning this is not a World Without Queer People, yay. And yet not even Rutherford manages to be an interesting character. This book has all the flaws of The Affinity Bridge, with the additional one that Mann's prose in this book is a string of cliches and dull, overused phrasings. I haven't a clue what Paul Magrs saw in this one.
Both these books sound much better in summary (airships! automatons! zombies! flying robots! mad scientists!) than they turn out to be in execution. I wish I could like them, but I can't. In fact I haven't managed to finish Ghosts of War yet, because I started reading the Sniegoski novels instead. *hangs head*
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.
A Kiss Before the Apocalypse, by Thomas E. Sniegoski
Dancing on the Head of a Pin, by Thomas E. Sniegoski
Where Angels Fear to Tread, by Thomas E. Sniegoski
These are the first three books in the Remy Chandler series, and there's a hell of a lot wrong with them, and yet I keep crunching them up like potato chips and will probably give in and read the fourth one before long.
Remy Chandler is a private investigator. He's also an angel, a Seraphim (Sniegoski appears sadly unaware that Seraphim is plural and its singular is Seraph) who left heaven after the war between God and Lucifer, sickened by all the things he'd done in God's name. He's not fallen, but he has chosen to live on earth and be as human as he can manage (given that he's immortal, doesn't age, has pretty extreme healing powers even in his human form and is virtually indestructible in his angelic one, etc.). It's a little unclear how long Chandler has been on earth--at a couple of points Sniegoski seems to imply that the war in heaven happened a thousand years earlier [in about the year 1000 CE, in other words, which makes for an interesting timeline considering that real-world references to Lucifer as a fallen angel predate that by a hell of a long time]--but it's only since the 1950s, when he met his wife Madeline, that he's really begun to feel comfortable here. (And yes, Chandler did name himself after Raymond Chandler; he also has a dog called Marlowe.)
When we first meet Chandler, in A Kiss Before the Apocalypse, Madeline is dying of cancer, and due to their apparent age difference he's had to tell the nursing home staff she's his mother. Things get worse when the Angel of Death stops doing his job, and Remy has to choose between keeping his beloved Madeline alive longer and possibly triggering the Apocalypse, or saving the world and letting her die.
That's what I like about these books: they're not ashamed to be about emotions and human (or quasi-human, or human-and-animal) relationships. Remy's story is shaped throughout the books by his marriage and his grief, as well as his gradual emergence from that grief. That's a really unusual emotional focus for this kind of book, and I both admire and enjoy it. Remy also has great connections with his dog Marlowe (Remy can speak the language of animals, and I know it's an utterly twee conceit but I can't help being charmed by Marlowe's dialogue); with the repentant fallen angel Francis; and with his best human friend, homicide detective Steve Mulvehill. I find the awkward tenderness of that friendship quite moving, and I have to confess that I wish there was a fandom so there could be slash.
Other good things: the plots are brisk and entertaining, if not very creative; the books use a Christian mythos but keep a skeptical distance from it (God exists and is powerful, but it's not at all clear that he's loving; also, other gods have existed); and there are occasional moments of real inventive strength, like Remy drifting slowly through the universe after a visit to heaven.
And then there are the bad things. The prose is mediocre at best, downright klutzy at worst ("four-legged friend" is not a phrase to be used unironically), and Sniegoski has a bad habit of repetitiveness both within and between books. The women characters, including Madeline, are all ciphers. This is a World Without LGBT People, except for some hinted bisexuality among decadent semi-fallen angels. And there's creepy, recurrent ableism fail, including disabled characters being repeatedly described by their disability ("the handicapped man," "the blind man") and the claim that "the handicapped" often have special supernatural sensitivity to compensate.
That's why I wish I didn't like these books. And yet I do, in the potato-chip, this-is-bad-and-yet kind of way.
The Affinity Bridge, by George Mann
Ghosts of War, by George Mann
I ordered Ghosts of War because Paul Magrs enthusiastically recommended it on his blog, and I'm a huge fan of Paul Magrs. And then I bought The Affinity Bridge while waiting for Ghosts of War to arrive. Unfortunate, I did not like either of them one bit.
Each books is from a separate series, and both have awesome premises. The Affinity Bridge features Sir Maurice Newbury and his assistant, Miss Veronica Hobbes, who work secretly for the crown in a steampunk late-Victorian England. This book has airships, automatons, ghost policemen, and a zombie plague . . . how could it go wrong? And yet I was bored by it, because Mann is unable to give his characters any emotional depth or their interactions any force. Nor does he do much with the world he's built, and to be honest the worldbuilding isn't all that deep; the book's a bit of a grab bag of popular tropes. To make matters worse, Mann is enamored of ridiculously long action scenes, which I find boring even in a visual medium, and he pushes the limits of my suspended disbelief by injuring his characters badly again and again and having them soldier on regardless.
Ghosts of War is set in a steampunk-ish 1920s United States that's locked in a cold war with the British Empire. Its hero is, by day, the rich playboy Gabriel Cross, but by night he's Batman The Ghost, protecting the streets of New York from villains. In particular, he's trying to protect them from people-snatching robotic birds and a plot to turn the cold war into a hot one. Various sidekicks and minor characters come into play, most notably British agent Peter Rutherford. Who is gay, meaning this is not a World Without Queer People, yay. And yet not even Rutherford manages to be an interesting character. This book has all the flaws of The Affinity Bridge, with the additional one that Mann's prose in this book is a string of cliches and dull, overused phrasings. I haven't a clue what Paul Magrs saw in this one.
Both these books sound much better in summary (airships! automatons! zombies! flying robots! mad scientists!) than they turn out to be in execution. I wish I could like them, but I can't. In fact I haven't managed to finish Ghosts of War yet, because I started reading the Sniegoski novels instead. *hangs head*
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.