This was the first book in the series I read, and an odd introduction. I think I might have even read it before I read Lord Of The Rings, but after The Hobbit. I probably didn't know yet that I wanted more and more fantasy quests and adventures. Here, however, was the hero's journey, as much into maturity as into dark realms. Poor Taran receives an education in some harrowing life lessons in each volume. I also note, for reasons of my own, that the three ladies of the marsh made far more of an impression than I could possibly have imagined, or even remembered for that matter.

Third volume in the series, more instructive adventures for our young hero and his companions, introducing the wonderfully clueless and inept Prince Rhun. It's a bit of a cheat about Elionwy, because even though she is an important part of the story she's not in it very much, or not enough, anyway. On the other hand, Taran finally works out that he may in fact be smitten, and there is jealousy and a sense of unworthiness and the usual underestimating of her and misguided attempts to protect her. Of course he loves her. Everyone loves her. Elionwy is awesome.

Is is back, travelling with Arun from the north to find his mother in the south. But the house on Cold Shoulder Road is empty and the people are unfriendly and there are smugglers and bandits abroad with a fierce grip on the land, with hostage children and terrible reprisals and mammoth-tusk ivory smuggled through the channel tunnel. Another Tale Of Twites, good and bad, dogged heroism versus diabolical mischief. Chases and kidnaps, traps and escapes, inventive hidey-holes and strange folk of one stripe or another. Classic Aiken.

One of the most interesting things about this book is that even though it's set in modern day London, it never feels like a novel set in a hi-tech city and a world of Facebook and celebrity reality shows, but an older, period that could be anything from Dickensian times to Edwardian England to the post-war years, evoking the atmosphere of the likes of MR James or Agatha Christie or any number of old black and white BBC children's programmes. This gives the book a certain timeless quality that fits well with the ghost-riddled world it inhabits.

Lockwood & Co are ghost hunters, and there are lots of ghosts around nowadays and they're very dangerous and only children can see them so only children can hunt them. Lucy Carlyle is the Company's newest employee, bringing the grand total to three, including the dashing Lockwood himself and the gnomish George. Most of their cases so far have not been triumphs, and their current case ends in a flaming disaster that threatens to finish the Company for good. Lockwood struggle to make the best of a bad lot by pushing to find the person responsible for an old murder in the hopes that the publicity will bring more business. It does. They are invited to spend the night in the most haunted house in England. They're not expected to survive.

The Screaming Staircase is incredibly well written, and it is the style of writing and Lucy's narrative voice that contributes most to the timeless quality. The set-up is intriguing and mysterious, the types and behaviours of ghosts and the rules and methods of ghost hunting are well constructed, the plot is extremely clever, the pace is quick and exciting and the characters are lovable in the extreme. I was a big fan of Stroud's Bartimeus Trilogy. If he keeps this up, Lockwood and Co could be even better.

Raised on his grandfather's strange stories, our hero gradually grows out of believing them until a terrible day in Florida that sends him spiraling into a kind of mental breakdown. He travels with his father to a remote Welsh island where his grandfather lived during the War, discovering the ruins of a once-grand old house destroyed by a single German bomb, killing everyone inside, finally putting to rest the strange and hauntingly unreal tales of his childhood. Then he meets the children who should have died on September 3rd 1940.

Very well written indeed, this is illustrated with spooky and unsettling vintage photographs. I must say, I found the narrator a little unlikable at times, though this didn't harm the book, it's a little wry that I identified with the poor old dad, caught between and cut off from his peculiar father and his peculiar son, struggling to achieve something and inevitably abandoned and left in the dark yet again.

This being a full disclosure type of livejournal that puts great store in the faith our readers place in our integrity and objectivity, it behooves us to point out that the author of today's object of reviewage is none other than whatsisname on that other livejournal with whom I have exchanged much witty banter and good natured badinage. We here at uglychicken livejournal inc wish to reassure whatever readers we might have that this will in no way affect our assessment of said object, and that had we found said object to be a vile excresence, less comely than the most pus-ridden pustule poised atop Lucifer's own knobbly nose, we would not hesitate to pretend that the whole thing never happened and never bring it up again in any converstion whatsoever, polite or otherwise.
Fortunately, it's not quite that bad.
What it is, is readable. Now listen, I grew up in Ireland. In the seventies. The eighties. The Irish literary scene of that vintage did not do science fiction, fantasy or even crime for that matter. It just didn't. There was high-falutin' literary miserabilism, or romance. That was it. We were too poor for anything else. Any attempts to make brave forays into other genres were, by and large, anything but readable. This is why I do not read Irish science fiction, fantasy or crime. That will probably have to change.
So: readable. Very readable. You know that smooth way of writing that just slips through and goes down easy and carries you along? That kind of readable. Halfway through the damn book before you even realise it kind of readable. It's not just style, of course, it's plot and character and pace and all the things that go into making a book clicking together and running like a smooth machine. The fiction equivalent of class. You either got it, or you don't.
The Inferior is a bloody tale of a human tribe stranded in a world full of alien tribes competing to see who can eat the most of all the other alien tribes because they are yummy, and because there isn't that much else to eat.
To hero Stopmouth and his family, of course, this is the normal natural way of things. You go out, you kill something, bring it home and eat it. Occasionally something kills and eats you, and when you're too old to go out killing things, you're sent off as meat on the hoof to a tribe with whom there is a more or less peaceful arrangement. It's not natural, of course, as the white eggs buzzing around near the roof will indicate to the savvy reader. It's some sort of horrifying prison/entertainment arrangement, and it soon becomes apparent that for all the ugliness of their situation Stopmouth's people retain far more of their humanity, in their loyalty to family and tribe, than those who watch them. When the eggs go to war and a mysterious woman arrives amongst them, their fragile existence is threatened, and the truth begins to emerge.
There's an old-fashioned sense of bravura to the whole adventure that reminds me of Philip Jose Farmer. Riverworld, Dark of the Sun and World of Tiers all featured humanity thrown into conflict against hosts of strange creatures across vast alien, and sometimes artificial, landscapes. So with The Inferior as our hero contends with one bloody alien horror after another. It'd make for grim reading if the characters weren't so engaging that the reader empathises with their situation rather than recoils with disgust at their actions. As it is it's a rollicking, breathless adventure full of unexpected twists and an amazing menagerie of alien monsters, though, of course, they're generally no more or less monstrous than human. With one or two exceptions.
It reaches a satisfying conclusion, but obviously there's more to come. If only there was some way to communicate with the reclusive author to find out whether or when there might be a sequel due...


We here at uglychicken livejournal inc were going to post the whole 'train ticket story' as part of the review, but we have wasted enough time at work already, so maybe in comments.

The train ticket story:

Well, let's see. In those days we had these things that we called trains and we used them to get round. They were like, I dunno, really long snails that crawled along these things like the bits you get on a fork? Only there were two of them instead of four and they were tied together with these big matchsticks. The matchsticks kept catching fire and exploding and the snails would get scared, thinking flaming Frenchmen were coming to eat them, and they'd fall over and retract into their shell and everybody'd get squashed until France dropped below the horizon and the snail would get moving again.

To travel on the snails you had to have a ticket. Tickets could be tricky enough to come by because when the conducter came round to sell them he'd just wave his baton at you and the orchestra would run in and start playing, and if you were lucky it was just a short piece like a madrigal or a detumescent and we'd all clap delightedly and say oh, how baroque, but sometimes they'd play an entire symphony, and if the snail fell over and retracted all their intruments would get mixed up and you'd have the percussonist playing the bassoon and the oboe playing the cellist and then they'd have to start all over again and sometimes Robert Wagner would come along and they'd do the entire Ring Cycle, which takes three years and a cast of five thousand, half of them castrati, about a millionare husband and wife detective team and their loyal dwarf who must solve murders, rescue cursed gold and contend with a pantheon of neurotic Norse gods. Frankly, by the time they got to the passengers, we were lucky if they had any tickets left at all.

So we used to make our own. Couldn't go on a trip by snail without your own design and print booth. Everyone was expected to chip in. Some brought trees for the paper, others brought squid for the ink and others brought distraught, lovelorn artists, shot them up with heroin and lsd, and forced them to run up a series of attracive but functional designs. Later, the valkyries would ride them for the big finale of Gotterdammerung.

So we ended up with tickets of our own for travelling on the snail. Sooner or later, usually during the third act of Siegfried which just gives everyone a headache, the conducter came round and punched the tickets. We would weep quietly to ourselves as he battered our poor tickets into oblivion, jumping up and down on them, calling them mean names. At last I had enough, so I hit him over the head with a copy of The Inferior and he fell down, and all the passengers jumped up and started hitting him with their copies of The Inferior and then the orchestra came running up and started hitting him with their copies of the libretto, which turned out to be the German translation of The Inferior, then a hundred hungry flaming Frencmen descended from the sky and ate the snail and I alone am returned alive to tell thee.

This is a lovely, lovely book, and it has every ounce of the charm for which it gets praised, but what struck me is the acute sadness that seems to underlie it all. I wonder if I would give it such weight if I'd read it when younger, since a lot of it is quite comic, but it seems to me there's quite a serious grown-up novel quite close to the surface of the charming, amusing romance, and its dogged and wholly admirable refusal to tie things up neatly is merely the most obvious sign. The death of Cassandra's mother, the monstrous egotism and violent temper of her father, for which she never once properly upbraids him even in the privacy of her own thoughts - but locking him in the tower is a kind of justice and the long overdue kick in the pants, so she and Thomas punish him without poisoning themselves with a trace of bitterness, and in a sense, that's what keeps the book so charming and Cassandra so innocent, in spite of everything: the complete absence of bitterness - not to mention the tangled Jacob's ladder of love that causes so much pain. Cassandra's voice at first is so sweet and innocent, but that gets undercut quite early on when she overhears herself being described as 'consciously naive' and thereafter her voice becomes considerably less arch. She is, after all, a child becoming a woman and at the end is left in an adult's dilemma, and as teenagers may not realise, but hopefully most adults are aware, many of those never get truly resolved.

Alas and alack, if Midwinter Nightingale felt underdeveloped, this is sadly undercooked, almost a short story. Nonetheless, Aiken's wit and invention are present on almost every page, just not the energy and not the proper momentum that a book featuring plots about Dido's search for a new heir to the throne and Simon marching to war should have. The conclusion is rushed, but nothing is really left hanging and there are some fine jokes, and the letters from the witch are worth reading all on their own. Maybe only completists will make it this far, and maybe they'll be sad, but hopefully they'll be satisfied, too.

Another great and rousing adventure for Aiken. If her ability to craft a fully realised novel waned somewhat in her latter years, her capacity for invention and for voice and place and drama did not. A stew of creepy characters and plots surround the dying king, hidden away by Simon. Dido, returned from Nantucket, is rudely kidnapped and held captive by as despicable a trio of villains as has ever graced the pages of a children's novel: a werewolf, his revolting son and the Duchess of Burgundy. Flood waters rise and invading forces approach and mysterious letters are exchanged by pigeon and Simon befriends some sheep and Dido meets a Woodlouse. Too brief, perhaps, but easily loved.

Something I noticed when I read Clive Barker's Abarat was that when an author of extreme material turns to YA and operates withing the restrictions of YA - cutting down on the bad language, the gore, the plumbing of the murkier depths of human nature - you often end up with some of the author's strongest works. Excess can be indulgent and gratuitious. Joe Abercrombie has excelled in flaying the fantasy genre, not only with violence and grim realism, but also in attacking the foundations of epic fantasy with a profound, almost nihilistic cynicism. The First Law Trilogy was an exercise in turning the very idea of quest-battle-siege-heroic journey into one long cunning trap of futility and waste in order to maintain rather than upset a balance of power. It would be a crushing read if not for a certain amount of wit and charm in the blood and mud.

Half A King is a YA fantasy about a young prince thrust into kingship and then thrust out of it, and his quest for revenge. Yarvi is a crippled younger son of the king of a warlike northern tribe, destined to escape the shame and humiliation by becoming a Minister - half adviser and half priest. The murder of his father and brother results in his sudden unwilling ascent to the throne. Betrayal follows, but Yarvi survives and ends up chained to an oar on a merchant ship. He must put his mind and his training to work in gaining his freedom and his revenge and his throne, and every step of the way sees him make hard choices with heavy costs and terrible compromises.

So in some ways a typical epic fantasy tale of an outcast rising and regaining their birthright, but tightly plotted and fast-paced with twists of the story and twists of the knife as nothing comes easy or clean. Relative to his other work, Half A King has a light touch, but that doesn't mean Abercrombie pulls his punches, and when they land they land all the harder. On the other hand, there is a cast of likable, well-drawn characters surrounding our driven, self-loathing hero, and not all of them die horribly or end up completely alienated from Yarvi, so it's not quite as soul-crushing as the First Law Trilogy. With a complete story told in volume one, I'm dying to see where this trilogy goes next.