Leap In The Dark

There's been a trend in recent years to sentimentalize nature and smooth out her rough edges to make her into something people can use as a relaxation tool. Walk into even drug stores these days and you're liable to find some sort of CD listening booth advertising titles offering you relief from stress through the soothing sounds of the natural world. You can buy anything from the sounds of a forest coming awake in the morning to the restful sounds of a gentle tide breaking on the beach.

Those relaxation recordings have as little to do with the natural world as a sit-com has to do with the human world. Just like real people don't act anything like what we see on the television, nature isn't the collection of soothing sounds that they make her out to be. We only need to listen to the reality of the element, water, they make the most use of for these CDs to understand how far removed from reality they really are. Thankfully there now exist people fascinated by the real sounds of nature who are willing to go to great lengths to capture them on tape and create recordings that remind us that this force can create a tsunami as easily as a gentle breeze on a summer's day.

Norwegian sound artist Jana Winderen creates soundscapes from recordings that she has made with specially designed microphones of rivers in China, far beneath the surface of the North Sea, and crevices that run into the hearts of icebergs. Touch Music has now released her first full length solo CD, Heated, a record of a performance she gave in October 2008 in Tokyo. According to the credits on the disc the source material used for this show was gathered with various types of hydrophones and microphones in Greenland, Iceland, and Norway. Believe me when I tell you, listening to this disc is unlike anything you're likely to have experienced ever before.

For those of you expecting to hear something along the lines of the delicate sounds of raindrops plopping onto leafs you'll be sorely disappointed. This is a world of mysterious groans, squeaks, and loud unearthly growls, as Winderen's microphones pull sounds from depths beneath the ice pack in the frozen north. For twenty-six plus minutes she plays back sounds that are so alien to our ears that they could be from another planet. Of course when you think about it they are, for when was the last time you went for a walk either inside a glacier or in the depths of the North Sea?

After, what is to a non Japanese speaking audience a meaningless introduction by Tetsuro Yasunaga, Winderen's recordings begin and we are immediately plunged into a world populated by noises that few of us could have ever imagined existed. The initial reaction is to try and find your bearings by searching for some sort of identifiable sound that you can hold onto - something we can use to get our bearings with. The trouble is that each time we might think something sounds familiar, the lapping of waves for instance, it changes and we are left floating without any idea of where we are or which way we are pointed.

You really have two options when listening to this type of creation; keep trying to latch onto something that will give you an idea as to what it is you're listening to or surrender to the experience of being immersed in the unfamiliar. While the mind will occasionally, almost involuntarily, offer an image to go with something it hears based on previous knowledge, these pictures are as misleading as they are wrong. There's no way that squeaking noise could be the sound of a creaking floorboard or a door's hinges in desperate need of oiling no matter how hard your brain tries to convince you otherwise.

It's no wonder though that you might think that, for what we are hearing evokes the same sort of reactions as those you would have wandering in any place where you feel in constant danger. I don't think it's because the noises are what you'd call threatening, but it's just a natural reaction to hearing the unfamiliar. It's a lot like being early man seated in front of caves as dark falls listening to the sounds that come alive in the night and not knowing which could spell death or which is harmless. Deprived of our ability to see, and not recognizing anything of what we hear, panic on an instinctual level is understandable.

However if you can overcome any panic you might experience, and accept that nothing you hear is necessarily what you think it is you can begin to appreciate what you're listening to. First of all you'll notice it's not just a randomly amassed collection of sounds as Winderen seems to have established some sort of arrangement. If I were to guess, and I've nothing to base this assumption on, it feels like we are being taken on a journey from the surface to the depths and back again. When you descend under the sea pressure increases as the density of the water builds and over the course of the performance the density of the sound gradually increases until it reaches a peak followed by a decrease that would indicate a return to shallower waters.

Of course I've no way of knowing if that was her intent, or whether I was just supposing something in an attempt to make the alien recognizable. What I am sure of is that I've never experienced anything like the journey Winderen takes us on in Heated before. While I've always understood on an intellectual level that nature is random and wild, these recordings allow you to experience that on an emotional level. Like a wild thunder storm, this is beautiful and frightening at the same time. Not the most pleasant or relaxing of experiences, but a very real one that reminds us how little we still know of the world around us.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 02:15 PM | Permalink

Like most North Americans my first exposure to Ladysmith Black Mambazo came through Paul Simon's Graceland recording. While the album featured other guest performers from various backgrounds, this amazing sounding male vocal ensemble from South Africa stood out from the rest. In those days, the mid 1980's, the idea of world music was still a novelty to most people, and the sound of their voices was enough to make us notice them. During the North American tour that followed Graceland's release they appeared on Saturday Night Live (SNL) with Paul Simon, and I was given a far too brief glimpse of this amazing vocal group's power.

In the ensuing years I've had plenty of opportunities to listen to their music on CD and each time have been amazed anew at their ability to harmonize and the sounds and atmosphere they are able to create with their voices alone. One of my biggest regrets is that I've never had the opportunity to see them perform save for that brief appearance on SNL nearly twenty-five years ago. Thankfully the perfect remedy is now at hand as on January 27th/09, Heads Up International will be releasing the DVD Ladysmith Black Mambazo Live. Recorded live from EJ Thomas Hall at the University Of Akron in Ohio, the DVD captures not only the music that bewitched me from their recordings, but their awe inspiring ability as live performers.

Those of you who have seen them in performance, either live or through concert footage, know what I'm talking about and how simply listening to them perform fails to capture their complete essence. I'm not just talking about the dance steps or hand movements that are a choreographed part of all their shows, although that is a key component. No, what you fail to experience when listening to their CDs is the brilliance of the energy they exude while performing.

At the beginning of the concert the group's founder and leader, Joseph Shabalala, talks about the power and strength of tradition and how when its properly rooted, people, like the strongest of trees, are able to withstand any storms the world can throw at them. Watching Ladysmith Black Mambazo perform is to see that personified, for what else could explain the mesmerizing influence they have on an audience. Without instruments, without fancy light shows, or any of the other accoutrements that we associate with music concerts these days, they hold us spellbound. When they sing they seem to be drawing upon the history of their land and their people and are expressing the feelings of joy that they derive from being who they are.

Even a deceptively simple song like the fourth track "Hello My Baby", that appears to be nothing more than a typical love song, evolves into something far more compelling than the song's title seems to justify. The lyrics aren't overly complicated or even stimulating, nor does the way the group arranges itself on the stage, a row of nine with the tenth, leader Shahbalala, standing alone in front, lend itself to supposing anything dramatic is about to happen.

Then they start to sing. You may not notice anything besides their wonderful voices, the amazing harmonies, and the effortless grace with which they incorporate small and large movements into their singing to start with, but as the song continues you can't help but be aware that something is gradually building. I know it sounds sort of "New Age" and flakey, but it begins to feel like they are weaving some sort of ritual that takes you inside the music so that at some point what's being said ceases to matter and the music takes on a life of its own.

Although Ladysmith Black Mambazo are still up there singing and moving, they are now accompanied by another presence - the music. Okay, I know what that sounds like, and let me assure you my days of pharmaceutical experimentation are long in the past, but there is a quality to their performance that verges on the hypnotic, akin to the chanting that one would associate with rituals used to evoke trances. The more you allow yourself to be drawn into the music the stronger its pull on you becomes, until you can't help but feel it as a distinct, living, and breathing entity.

One of the reasons that you are able to experience this sensation while watching this video is the magnificent job that has been done in filming the concert. The cameras have been situated such that you are right on stage with the performers. Imagine having seats at a concert where you're on stage with the band and have the freedom to wander around so that one moment your standing nose to nose with an individual and the next you have stepped back and are able to take them in as a full ensemble, and you'll have a good idea as to what a good job they have done.

Even more remarkable though was the quality of the sound recording. Like everything else these days you have the option of 5.1 surround sound, but it's what the cameras pick up that make it special. Periodically the members of the group dance while singing, and there are moments when their movements take them out of range of their microphones yet you can still hear their voices singing faint but clear. It's touches like this that really bring the magic of this concert to life in a way that I've never seen done before on DVD.

Included on the DVD are interviews with Shabalala, and other members of the ensemble. Shabalala gives an account of how the group was originally formed and a little of his own personal history. While these are interesting enough, it's the music that makes this disc truly remarkable. Singing in a mix of Zulu and English, unaccompanied by any instrument, a Ladysmith Black Mambazo performance has to be one of the purest forms of musical expression you can hope to experience. Ladysmith Black Mambazo Live brings that vibrancy into your living room via your television and DVD player.

If you've never had the chance to see Ladysmith Black Mambazo in person, this is the next best thing. In fact it might even be better, as the cameras capture moments that you could easily miss while sitting in the audience of a concert hall. Note for note this is probably one of the best concert DVDs that I have ever seen.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 11:33 AM | Permalink

Henry Eric Hernandez is a historian even though you'll not find his name listed as the author of any text book or learned article about the subject. For he doesn't "write" the kind of history that deals with dates, battles, or famous historic figures. In his book published a couple of years ago, La Revancha (Revenge), Hernandez documented a series of what he called interventions where he and a group of people carried out renovations on buildings in Cuba where events of historical significance had taken place. Through these restoration projects he brought history to life as he recalled what it was that had originally made a building famous; what is now a rundown toilet in a school was once the military barracks that both Batista and Fidel Castro had used as their the staging grounds prior to marching on Havana during their respective revolutions.

While the work he carried out in La Revancha focused primarily on events that took place in the earlier part of the twentieth century, either before Castro had taken power or in the early days of revolutionary government, his most recent book, Otra Isla Para Miguel (Another Island For Miguel), published by Perceval Press brings us into the modern era. This time though he has turned to the people of Cuba in order to paint a picture of the effects its involvement in the Angolan, Ethiopian, and Somalian civil wars of the late 1970's and early 1980's. The focus is split between stories that reflect the economic impact of the wars and personal accounts from women left widowed.

In his introduction to the book Kevin Power provides us with the basic facts surrounding the civil war in Angola, and the circumstances which led to Cuba's involvement first there and subsequently in both Somalia and Ethiopia. This being the height of the Cold War, Russia and America were up to their usual tricks of vying for influence in the region. Russia, instead of deploying their own troops "asked" Cuba to send advisors to the side they supported in Angola, while the US, South Africa, and China backed the other side. In excerpts from speeches given by Fidel Castro that are included in the first couple of stories, we see that in the late 1970's Cuba was considering normalization of relations with the United States as part of a plan to expand their industry and economy. Instead, they involved themselves in the civil wars in Africa and deepened the split.

There are two parts to Otra Isla Para Miguel, the stories included in the book and a DVD of Cubans telling their stories. Like the book, some of the people in the DVD talk about loved ones lost in the wars in Africa, while others detail the economic hardships they face and what they have to do in order to survive. In an interesting twist both the book and the DVD combine visual elements with "words" to tell the story of the impact these wars have had on Cuba and her people.

Throughout the text Hernandez has scattered photo's celebrating people's contributions to the cause of Cuba. Tawdry certificates commemorating years of service and charitable contributions, pictures of men and women posing under banners celebrating agricultural triumphs, and images of men in uniforms either at training facilities in Cuba or in action in Africa are juxtaposed with a widow's reflections on losing her husband or an account of a woman working as a prostitute because she has no other way to raise her family.

In the DVD interviews with individuals talking about their lives cut away to footage of life in Cuba. We see row after row of buildings crumbling in disrepair, dirty streets with garbage heaped in mounds against the sides of buildings, and aimless groups of people wandering, sitting in desolate groups on street corners, wearing the blank expression of the hopeless poor the world over. While the individuals we see being interviewed are animated, the primary emotions that appear to be driving them are anger, fear, and grief, as they recount what they have been though and what they continue to experience.

Without using any of the usual characteristics of a history text book, dates, statistics, and the names of famous people, Ora Isla Para Miguel gives the reader/viewer a history of Cuba. While the picture that gradually develops isn't positive by any means, at the same time you never once get the feeling that anybody involved in the project has a particular political agenda in presenting this information. This is a people's history of their day to day lives, not a rant against the horrors of Communism or the "evils" of the Castro regime.

In the 1970's Cuba's government made the decision to become involved with a series of wars overseas with results that have proved catastrophic for the country. Not only did they leave countless of people bereft of fathers and husbands for reasons they still don't understand, they took the country down a path that has resulted in their near economic ruin. Not only does Ora Isla Para Miguel bring that reality to life in a way no text could, Henry Eric Henandez reminds us of the human face that resides behind the events that are called "History". In the process he has rendered one of the most accurate histories of a country and its people I have ever experienced.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 10:05 AM | Permalink

Have you ever noticed how different sorts of popular music requires different listening arrangements. Personally I don't find I can get the full experience offered by punk bands like the Clash or The Sex Pistols while listening to them on my headphones. You need a lot of space around that music to really appreciate it. On the other hand there is some music that seems to cry out for the intimacy offered by headphones. It's not that they may or may not be able to fill a concert hall with their sound when performing live, rather you just don't want to miss a single moment of what is being performed and headphones seem the best recourse.

Such was the case with the new Antony And The Johnsons disc, The Crying Light, released by Secretly Canadian on January 20th/09. Prior to listening to their EP Another World, I had only previously seen Antony perform on DVDs in concert with other people, and so although I was aware of his voice, until then I hadn't known the nature of his own work. Any of you who have heard Antony's voice are aware that it can easily be misconstrued as delicate because of his tone and might think I'm talking about that when I refer to the need to use headphones to listen to his music.

What I discovered on Another World, and have now had borne out by The Crying Light, is that there is an intensity to the music of Antony And The Johnsons that I find requires headphones to capture when listening to their music on disc. I don't know if it actually makes the music sound any better (although considering the quality of some of my sound equipment it probably does) but it reassures me that I won't miss any of the moments in each song that go such a long way towards making them individual works of art. When I go to a museum or art gallery I like to be able to focus as closely as possible on the works that I'm looking at. As far as I'm concerned the music of Antony And The Johnsons demands that same respect and headphones are the best way that it can be given.

It all begins with the voice; Antony's voice is a pure tenor that rings like a bell, soars on the wings of his passion, and is powered by the depth of his soul. If that sounds like extravagant praise then you haven't heard him sing yet. Prior to Antony the only time you'd hear a man singing higher up the scale, with the singular exception of Roy Orbison, was either to squeak like Michael Jackson, shriek like Getty Lee, or sing pabulum like Frankie Vali And The Four Seasons. After years of aural assault from people like the Gibb brothers piercing my ear drums, it was something akin to a miracle to hear a real voice singing in the upper reaches of the scale. Even the so called female divas of pop music with pretences to having serious voices aren't able to put a fraction of the expression into their voices that Antony manages.

While Antony's voice is easily the most distinctive element of their sound, the Johnson's music is further distinguished from the majority of popular music by their willingness to take chances. The use of orchestral instruments like cellos and violins is nothing new of course, but what separates the music of The Crying Light from so many others is that it doesn't sound like pop music using violins and cellos. It's simply a matter of them having selected the instruments that will best convey the meaning of the song regardless of any associations it might have to a particular genre.

Whether it's the simple beauty of "Her Eyes Are Underneath The Ground" with its string and piano accompaniment, the perfect mix of strings and guitar on "Epilepsy Is Dancing", or the staccato snare drum countering sweet sounding strings and flute on "Kiss My Name", the arrangements on each sound like an organic progression that grew out of needs of the song, rather than the whims of a producer. For not only does the music sound good, it also works on an emotional level to help convey each song's meaning.

While that's obviously what the music that accompanies any song's lyrics is supposed to do, with this disc it plays an even more important role. For like abstract paintings or free verse poetry you can't always look for a literal meaning in the pieces on The Crying Light. Instead, allow the combination of the music, lyrics, and overall sound create an impression of the emotion or idea that the artist is trying to convey.

Certainly you can take Antony literally when he says he's looking for another world to live in on "Another World". Yet you can also look behind the lyrics and hear a plea for acceptance from someone who is different and desires a world where that doesn't matter. Or, on another level, it could also be a prayer on behalf of the world for us to wake up before we lose her.

The lyrics on this song, and others, may not spell out things out for you, but that doesn't prevent them from conveying ideas or emotions. Each of the songs on The Crying Light are examples of how music can be greater than the sum of its parts as they each end up conveying something beyond the meaning of their lyrics. Much like orchestral music, Antony And The Johnsons utilize the various instruments at their disposal, including Antony's voice, to convey images and emotions through the imagery the sounds evoke.

With The Crying Light Antony And The Johnsons take pop music places that it hasn't gone before. However, that doesn't mean its inaccessible or difficult to listen to, for they have also created some of the most beautiful music that you'll have heard in a long time.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:56 AM | Permalink

The last time I had interviewed R. Scott Bakker it was in reference to his book Neuropath that was due to be released. To say that Neuropath was a departure from his previous books - the epic fantasy trilogy The Prince Of Nothing (The Darkness That Comes Before, The Warrior Prophet, and The Thousandfold Thought) was an understatement, so we had lots to talk about at that time.

However, his latest novel, The Judging Eye is not only a return to epic fantasy, but a return to the world he had created in the previous trilogy. The Judging Eye is the first book in a new trilogy, The Aspect Emperor, that picks up a couple of decades after events described in The Thousandfold Thought. So the questions I e-mailed to Scott to answer focused mainly on the forthcoming series, as well as specifics to do with aspect of the books that piqued my interest in particular.

Like his books, Scott's answers are though provoking and intelligent, so enjoy the read.

Can you describe the evolution of what is now I presume going to be a sextet - the three books that make up The Prince Of Nothing and the new trilogy The Aspect Emperor - Had you always visualized six books, or did it gradually take on a life of its own?

The entire sequence is titled The Second Apocalypse, which in its initial conception way back in the 1980's was to be a trilogy consisting of three books, The Prince Of Nothing, The Aspect-Emperor, and The Book That Shall Not Be Named. The Prince Of Nothing, of course, turned into a trilogy in its own right, as has The Aspect-Emperor. The final book will likely be a standalone or a duology, with the second book containing a massive omnibus.

The amount of detail that you provide your readers when it comes to the world you've created is incredible - the history and the various cultures in particular. Was there any specific time period in our own history that you used as a springboard? What's the overall impression you were going for?

Epic fantasy is unique as a literary genre in that it strives to tickle its readers with a sense of awe. The thing I realized long ago–in my teenage D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) days as a matter of fact–was the importance of believability. From that point, I strove to create the most believable world I could–the world that ultimately evolved into Earwa. It’s literally been twenty-five years in the making.

In The Prince Of Nothing trilogy we witness society, for the most part, through the eyes of four characters who are outsiders; Drusus Achamian - as a schoolman (sorcerer) is considered damned by society, and even among schoolmen he is an outsider because his order believes in something no one else does, Esmenet, a prostitute, Kellus, and Cnaiur the barbarian. Was that a deliberate choice on your part, and what opportunities did it allow you as a writer?

Great observation. I initially chose my characters because of the generic types they represented–the sorcerer, the barbarian, and the whore–not because they were outsiders. The fact that they were outsiders, of course, afforded more than a few dramatic opportunities. If you think about it, The Prince Of Nothing is a kind of ‘rags to riches’ narrative: I had to have rags (disempowerment) to make the rise to riches (power) dramatic. And now, particularly with Esmenet in The Judging Eye, you have the dilemma of someone bred to subservience finding themselves forced to rule.

I've always loved words just for their own sake, the layers of meaning that can be found within just one word, a sentence, or how you can change meanings just by repositioning one or two letters. The system of magic that you introduced us to in the first trilogy, especially as practised by Achamian's school, reminded me of that and I wondered how and why you devised it.

Humans are born essentialists, which is to say, we generally think things and people are what they are by virtue of their intrinsic properties or characteristics–their ‘immutable essence.’ We think that the way things appear to us are what they are fundamentally–and given the invisibility of ignorance, we generally encounter few reasons to think otherwise. No matter how narrow, how stupid or peevish, our perspectives always strike us as exhaustive.

This (combined with the logical function of language) underwrites the intuition that words have ‘essential meanings,’ that a passage of scripture, say, has one fundamental reading (which always magically happens to be our reading). So for the longest time essentialist interpretations of language ruled the theoretical roost.

In Earwa, however, essentialism is true, words have pure meanings, significations unpolluted by the contextual vicissitudes of circumstance. The idea is that if you can speak from the all-seeing perspective of the God, then you can literally rewrite the world. The different Schools of sorcery are based on the way in which these essences are mined. In the Anagogis, concrete metaphor is the primary mechanism. In the Gnosis, conceptual abstraction is the royal road to sorcerous power. (Both of these are what I call discursive magics in that they are linguistic and compositional, and as such quite distinct from intuitive magics like the Psuke).

Why did I design the world this way? Because I think epic fantasy has to be believable to succeed (and the fact that my fantasy theory of magic has interested a few real occultists (!!) suggests I succeeded). I’m certainly not an essentialist myself. I’m actually starting to think that language as we experience it doesn’t exist, that it’s a kind of epiphenomenal smoke. But the fact is no one knows what the hell language is...

You've allowed nearly twenty years to pass in the world of the books before continuing with the story - while this allowed certain things to be established - Kellus as Aspect Emperor over all the world of The Three Seas - it also left large holes in your reader's knowledge of events leaving them to pick up the information through second hand sources rather than being first hand observers and making them sift through a variety of perceptions to form their impression of the state of the world. What was your intent with disseminating information in that manner?

Since history in the real world is interpretative and fragmentary, I think this approach actually makes the world more believable. This isn’t a license to be lazy–quite the contrary–since you have to continually gauge the way each fact (and I introduce more than a few contradictions) you give will contribute to the reader’s sense of the whole. When you get this right, you can generate and sustain not only some cool atmospherics, a real sense of epic gravitas, but quite a few message board debates as well!

In the first books Kellus was an active character who we saw the world through, but in The Judging Eye he is no longer a character, merely somebody we see through other people's eyes. Why did you make that change?

The original plan was to have Kellhus progressively disappear as a viewpoint character as he gained power throughout The Prince of Nothing. The problem, it turned out, was that all my draft readers began to believe him, rather than continually conditioning everything he said and did with what they had learned from their initial glimpses into his manipulative psyche. So I was forced to go back and to add several viewpoint sections to remind them what Kellhus was up to.
The reader is on their own in The Aspect-Emperor, I’m afraid. This is a lesson I learned from Hawthorne: if you want to create the intimation of power and transcendence, it’s far better to draw down the veil than to lift the skirts. I presume this is why all the ways the Bush Administration has saved America from further terrorist attacks seem to be ‘classified.’

The Judging Eye of the title can be seen as referring to a talent that one of the characters introduced in this book, Mimara - Esmenet's daughter from when she was a whore- possesses, the ability to see a person's nature - evil or good. Yet in spite of her ability to see these absolutes you've still left a certain amount of ambiguity when it comes to good and evil in the book, why?

The thing about fantasy worlds–what makes them fantasy worlds, you might say–is that good and evil are more than projections of human self-interest. But think about a world where good and evil not only exist, but can be intuitively apprehended by everyone. Almost all conflict–and by extension, all narrative–turns on our inability to resolve our incompatible moral claims. If Earwa didn’t share the same problem, it would be so conceptually alien as to be unrecognizable. A hard place to tell interesting stories about, for sure!

I've often wondered why people who claim to be the reincarnation of somebody or other always say they are princes and kings but never somebody mundane like a slave. So I find it interesting that in Achamian's dreams that it's when he starts reliving mundane details of his forerunner's life that he realizes an important change is occurring. Did you have any particular intent with making the mundane and personal memories that come to Achamian in his dreams important, or is it just because they were different from the world changing events he and other sorcerers of his school normally experience in their dreams?

The relationship between the epic and the mundane is something that I’m deeply interested in, which is why I explore it throughout The Prince Of Nothing as well. Academics and literary writers generally regard spectacle with suspicion or outright derision–unless it happens to be more than a century old. I just finished reading a piece by Russell Smith in The Globe and Mail (Canadian Newspaper), where he describes how unbearable he found The Dark Night–because of the spectacle, it turns out. I’m sure that for him his disdain feels entirely obvious and natural, and that given time he could cook up numerous aesthetic rationalizations for why he dislikes spectacle.

I actually think this attitude is not only self-serving and pious, but socially pernicious as well. It’s no coincidence that literary specialists only came to regard spectacle as a kind of ‘opiate for the masses’ around the same time literacy rates boomed in Europe and North America. Humans have a hardwired yen for the spectacular, so if you want to distinguish your tastes from the general public, all you gotta do is turn your nose up at it. The next thing you know we have a literary culture a la Russell Smith, where our brightest, most socially and psychologically penetrating writers waste all their creative output on people who already share their values–become high-end entertainers in effect.

And where the masses harbour a defensive contempt of the mundane. (It never ceases to amaze me the extent to which the media ignored the fact that Obama’s single biggest liability wasn’t his race but his intellectualism).

From the very beginning, I’ve looked at The Second Apocalypse as an experiment in bringing criticism, writing that actually challenges, back to mass commercial culture. I see myself as part of larger sea change, one which integrates rather than segregates criticism and community. The Russell Smiths of the world need to be disabused of the self-congratulatory illusion that they are doing something critical with their artistic output, as opposed to simply confirming the educated assumptions of the educated classes. The so-called ‘literary mainstream’ is simply where we lock up our cultural rabble rousers where they can do the least amount of damage. The fact that they write books that would curl an evangelical Christian’s toes if they were to read it means nothing. Challenging is as challenging does. I’m no more clear on the ‘essence of literature’ than the next guy, but it strikes me as painfully obvious that literature–real literature–reaches out rather than in, that it bridges differences rather than reinforcing them.
And I can think of no better way of reaching out than with genre and spectacle.

You first introduced the ancient race of beings, the Nomen, in the books of the first trilogy, mainly through Achamian's knowledge of history and his dreams/memories, but Kellus also briefly met one in the first book. In the The Judging Eye not only does Achamian take one for his companion, but he enters into the ruins of one of their former retreats deep within the ground. Where did you draw your inspiration for the creation of the Nomen from?

Tolkien’s Elves have always exercised an almost totemic power over my imagination, and the Nonmen are simply my way of exploring that fascination. Psychologists will tell you that we are inclined to see individuals as belonging to moral orders, to see some as essentially better than us, and others as essentially worse than us. The tradition in epic fantasy is to concretize this with various races.

But where the Elves of Middle-earth have dwindled, the Nonmen of Earwa have fallen, the idea being that the very things that once made them better have reduced them to depravity over the ages. The result, I hope, is an associational palate quite distinct from the one you find in Tolkien, a sense of something glorious that has become ingrown and dark–something halfway between ruined and rotted.

As I hope The Judging Eye makes clear, the Nonmen will figure large in the events to follow.

I've been trying to avoid mentioning any particulars of the events in The Judging Eye, but I have to ask about Cil-Aujas, the ancient retreat of the Nomen. The journey through it reminded me of a cross between Dante's Inferno and the trip through The Mines of Moria in The Fellowship Of The Ring. If neither of those, what did inspire your descriptions of those events and the environment?

I reread both several times in the course of writing the Cil-Aujas chapters. There’s the ‘journey through the underworld’ component to be sure–which is a classic saw of the ancient epic. But there’s also a concretization of the past involved as well. In Cil-Aujas, you actually pass through the layering of history, plunging deeper into the atavistic bowels of Earwa’s past. But the bottom line is that I’m an just old, dope-addled D&D addict. Dungeons, man! Dungeons! Like many writers, I’ve had a life-long love affair with my fear of the dark.

R. Scott Bakker's fantasy isn't quite like anybody else's that you'll ever read, and I hope that you were able to catch a glimpse of what makes him so special through this interview. I didn't bother asking him what he had planned for the future as its pretty obvious he has his work cut out for him over the next little while. I'd like to thank Scott for taking the time to answer these questions, and encourage you to start reading his work. It's an adventure you'll not soon forget.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:03 AM | Permalink

It's hard to believe that their first appearance was back in 1970, but that's the year that A Clubbable Woman introduced the world to Reginald Hill's fictional Mid-Yorkshire's Odd Couple of police officers Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe. Numerous awards for crime fiction, and a television adaptation later, Reginald Hill and his creations are still going strong, much to the delight of anybody who enjoys intelligent, humorous, and challenging writing.

Not only have the plots for each book always been a notch above the usual you'd expect from the police procedural genre, but Mr. Hill has never allowed his characters to descend to the level of predictability. Where other authors have been content to keep presenting the same collection of mannerisms and passing it off as a recurring character, Pascoe, Dalziel, and their colleagues, have continued to fascinate by their refusal to be predictable. Although you can be pretty sure that you'll end up buying if you head off to the pub with "Fat Andy", don't count on being able to anticipate anything else about him.

So when the opportunity arose to pose some questions to Reginald Hill about his work and his two most famous constables, I leapt at it. As Mr. Hill and I are divided by an ocean of water and a few time zones, it was easiest to e-mail him my questions about his creations and have him e-mail back his answers. So what you are reading are his answers as he's written them, not my stumbling efforts to try and transcribe a phone conversation. For those of you familiar with the series I hope that this interview provides you with answers to some of your own puzzles about the history behind of the characters and the books they feature in. If you have never read anything by Mr. Hill, let alone one of Pascoe and Dalziel's investigations, maybe this will pique your interest sufficiently to give them a go. You really don't know what you've been missing.

With the publication of A Cure For All Diseases (Price Of Butcher's Meat in America) how many Dalziel and Pascoe novels does that make? Obviously when you wrote A Clubbable Woman back in 1970, their first appearance, you could have no idea that they would become as popular as they have, but when did you first have an inkling that you might be spending a good portion of your life writing about them?

21 full length novels, plus a couple of novellas and some short stories. After the first (A Clubbable Woman) I had neither inkling nor intention that there would be any more. The second (An Advancement of Learning) was a campus mystery that needed a couple of cops to investigate the crime and it occurred to me that like the TV chefs I had one that I’d prepared earlier, so out they came again. But when I found myself wondering what was going to happen to the Peter Pascoe/Ellie relationship which I’d left dangling at the end of that story, I did begin to get that inkling – a most appropriate word as I was writing everything longhand back in those days.

Where did the idea for Andrew Dalziel come from - and does anybody not from Great Britain ever believe you when you tell them it's pronounced Dee-ell?

In the first book, Andy D was intended as a foil for Peter P – the antediluvian, steam-age, seat-of-the-well-scratched-pants cop against whom the new age, university educated whiz-kid would shine. It didn’t quite work out like that! As for the name’s pronunciation, it has I think become the shibboleth by which the series’ hard-core fans identify each other!

You've written novels not featuring Dalziel and Pascoe, but you've never strayed too far from what people would call mystery stories or thrillers. What is it about the genre that first appealed to you and that still inspires you?

I should have thought my two historical novels, two war novels and two sf novels were quite a long divagation from the mystery genre, but yes, my main track has been along the crime route. I have always been a great fan of the genre, but I think that creatively the its initial attraction was that it provided something interesting to be happening while I explored my characters and said what I wanted to say! In other words it provided (sometimes literally) a skeleton to support what might otherwise have been a somewhat flaccid narrative. Soon I began to feel, and still do feel, that it is such a varied and variable format that it can contain almost anything. To the essential narrative dynamic of nearly all good novels – what happens next? - it adds the intellectually intriguing question – what really happened in the first place? And because its so elastic a form, it readily expands when I want to focus on matters perhaps peripheral to the main whodunit themes, such as animal rights protest, the First World War, or medieval mystery plays! One of the reasons I’ve been able to keep going with D&P for so long is that knowing them so well means I can hit the ground running, and don’t have to spend too much time rebooting them every time I start a new book. This gives me space to stretch out in any direction I fancy. Of course I have to be sure to provide enough basic information to involve new readers, but I know from my mail as well as from personal encounters that my old readers are a lively adventurous bunch, ready to go anywhere I may take them so long as the company remains good!

Which comes first the crime, the criminal, or how to go about solving it? You write stories where you already know the answers to the questions that most of your characters are trying to figure out - so I was curious as to how you go about putting all those pieces together

It’s not quite true to say that I know all the answers when I’m writing the stories. Like most novelists, I often find the process is a voyage of discovery rather than the simple tracing of a path to a known destination. Often I have set out for the land of spices and found myself making landfall in America instead! Anything can be a starting point, a newspaper paragraph, a conversation overheard in a pub, a dream, a good idea for a title, an urge to write about a certain topic – sometimes the crime is there from the beginning, sometimes I stumble across it during the journey – and frequently the point I start from becomes irrelevant during the writing and the last thing that I write in the book is the first chapter. It’s an organic not an architectural process. No blueprints, and sometimes the looked-for rose turns out to be a cauliflower after all.

Andy Dalziel came pretty close to snuffing it in Death Comes For The Fat Man (did you ever seriously consider letting him die?), and, even if he's reluctant to admit it, it's fairly obvious that his near death experience has changed him somewhat in A Cure For All Diseases. He's always hidden surprises under his gruff exterior - even though sometimes it's been an even gruffer interior - but to see him have moments of introspection was a bit of a shock, and I wondered what inspired you to push him down this road?

Certainly not. It would have been like killing an old friend! Obviously the experience has left its mark on him, and, being a bright guy, he wants to understand why he feels as he does, what he can learn from it, and where it is going to leave him. Throughout the books I’ve been at pains to portray Fat Andy as a man with much more going on inside than he ever cares to show. All that happens in A Cure For All Diseases is that for the first time his situation permits him to speak directly to the reader. In the next book (Midnight Fugue, out later this year) Dalziel is back at work and discovering what most people discover if absent from their job for a while, or when they retire, that no one is indispensable.

Why did I push him down this road, you ask. Because, like all my character, I hope, he’s not a fixed point. He has to develop, change, and, yes, get older. Bit like me, I suppose. With the first third of my life behind me, I suppose I may be getting a tad more reflective….

A Cure For All Diseases, is much lighter in tone than the two or three that proceeded it, was this a deliberate decision on your part, or was it just the way the story worked out?

Is it? I suppose so, though I always like to have a bit of a giggle as I go along. In the case of "A Cure"…I’d like to think its tone might owe something to its origins in Jane Austen who mingled mirth and high seriousness more deliciously than almost any other writer.

As the series has advanced you've gradually been introducing two new members of the Mid-Yorks; Hat Bowler and Shirley Novello, giving each of them gradually larger roles. When you first introduced them did you have long term plans in mind, or has having them available as cast members, so to speak, suggested ideas for putting them to use - as each of them have now had a "starring" role and are now given more to do in each subsequent book

I hate creating characters simply in terms of their function. No matter how brief their appearance, I like to know them as people. Even dear old PC Hector had to be more than just a clown. While I don’t have usually long terms plans for anyone when they first appear, if they “live”, then obviously they aren’t going to simply vanish after a single appearance.

The character of Fanny Root has been popping up to plague Peter Pascoe for a number of years now, and although the dynamic of their relationship has changed radically since he saved Peter's daughter, there's still the feeling that Fanny is Peter's personal Albatross to bear and perennial blind spot. Where did you get the idea of coming up with a character who plays this type of role in Peter's life, and what did you hope to accomplish with him?

Franny Roote was a very early creation, appearing in the second D&P novel over thirty years ago, God help us! I was fascinated by him and though he was obviously out of commission in jail for several years, I often found myself wondering what he would do when he came out. So I decided to take a look – that’s the great thing about being a writer – we have free access to everyone’s private life! He’s a very laid-back, cool kind of chap, and thinks it would be rather amusing to gently haunt Peter Pascoe, but he is in the end hoist on his own petard and finds that Pascoe has come to mean great deal to him also. He is a spirit of mischief, and in some ways he’s even a match for Dalziel, who like to think he sees through him, yet finds it very hard to lay a finger on him.

I'm curious as to why the American edition of your latest book has such a radically different title from that released in Canada and Great Britain? Considering the story line I thought A Cure For All Diseases was a highly appropriate title

My American publisher assured me that for reasons I still fail to understand, A Cure For All Diseases would not signify anything to an American audience. Across the border in Canada they had no such problem. In fact given the choice of the two titles, they opted for A Cure… nem con! What the American choice does have going for it is that it’s a direct quote from Sanditon. I’d put it on my list of possibles when I was still looking for a title as I wrote the book, but nobody over here liked it and as the book developed, I could see it wasn’t really suitable myself. But in New York they seized upon it with glee, and I hope that sales figures will prove they know their market!

The idea of Andy Dalziel attending a "health spa" was funny enough on it's own, but to find him plunked down in the midst of a town filled that's billing itself as a centre for "New Age" health treatments brings the words Bull and China shop to mind. What inspired that particular combination?

This really all came out of JA’s (Jane Austen) Sanditon, the theme of which was clearly going to be absurdities which always dance attendance on the new, whether it’s in art or fashion or healing or anything. It’s time alone that tells us what works and what is merely daft. There is real healing going on in my Sandytown, and that’s why Dalziel is there. But all the alternative stuff’s there too, a lot of treatments that mainstream medicine would like to dismiss out of hand, but which are proving remarkably resilient. With Dalziel in need of somewhere to convalesce after his explosive experience, this updating of 19th century Sanditon to 21st century Sandytown seemed the perfect place for him. He too, remember, is in a somewhat ambiguous state!

At some point even Andy Dalziel will have to consider retirement, have you given any thought to what the future might hold if that ever came to pass?

As those who have read my novella "One Small Step" will know, next year, if I am spared, I will have reached a time that seemed so far ahead back in 1990 that I was able to imagine Andy Dalziel coming out of gouty retirement to investigate the first murder on the moon. How I will reconcile this with his continued presence in Mid Yorkshire as a very active head of CID I have not yet worked out. One thing I am certain of - my lively, imaginative and hugely intelligent readership, having come thus far along this always winding and often perilous path with me, will not be daunted by whatever outrageous explanation presents itself.

Perhaps it has all been a dream….

I don't think we have to worry too much whether Reginald Hill will be able to figure out some innovative means of reconciling his truth and fiction. As he's proven so many times in the past he never seems at a loss for an inventive plot. I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for answering the questions I posed with the same intelligence and humour that he brings to all his writing.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 01:36 AM | Permalink

Anybody can pick up a camera and snap off a bunch of photos that will serve as a memento of an occasion. However doing that has a much in common with the work of a photographer as the scribbles of a five year old have with the writings of William Shakespeare. For while the digital age has given us unprecedented access to the means to take pictures it hasn't changed the fact that only a few of us have the ability to not only see and capture something special in a moment in time.

In his most recent volume of photographs, Mostly People published by Perceval Press, American photographer Robert Whitman, shows that not only does he possess that ability, his photographs of people display an understanding of the importance of environment in portraiture. Yet his skills as a photographer, as the title of this volume suggests, don't end with his ability to bring people and their surroundings to life as he is equally capable of letting us see the meaning in the rust stains of a swimming pool as he is the frown lines of a brow furrowed in concentration.

Ask anyone who has ever attempted to take a picture of a loved one, or who has ever posed for their picture, about the process and you're more often than not bound to hear a variation of one of two complaints. That doesn't look like them/me and I/they aren't photogenic. Sure all the bits and pieces that make up the subject are contained within the frame and are all in the right place, but somehow or other nothing that you or they do can make your pictures look like them. Every holiday season it's the same thing; collections of photos filled with people who look vaguely familiar sitting on the family couch. Taking pictures of people so that we are able to see them is a skill that seems to escape most of us.

Where most of us fail is by attempting to capture an accurate representation of a person in an atmosphere devoid of life or activity. Unless we have trained to work in front of a camera, standing still, or posing, leaves the majority of us incredibly self conscious and awkward. Without the focus that an environment can give - even if its something as simple as waiting in the lobby of a theatre for a play or movie to begin - the subject of a photograph appears lifeless or artificial. Yet the instant we liberate them from the shackles of posing and photograph them candidly, they miraculously turn into living breathing souls.

Of course we can easily ask people to go about their business and photograph them in the hopes of creating some wonderful portraits, but it takes a special eye to chance upon instances out in the world, recognize them for what they are, and capture that moment on film so that all can experience that same instant in time. Even a casual perusal of the content of Mostly People will give you an idea as to how talented Whitman really is. From the photograph of a street urchin crouching under the elevated chassis of a derelict auto on a street in Havana Cuba, the image of a mother and daughter talking in a kitchen, to one of the many pictures taken either at the beach or a swimming pool, each are examples of his excellence at capturing moments that contain the stuff of life.

A mother leans against her kitchen counter with one arm crossed under her chest and the other bent at right angles to her torso holding a cigarette while she stares at her daughter seated at the kitchen table. Instead of returning her mother's gaze, the teenaged girl is leaning her chest on the edge of the table staring into her clasped hands. While the daughter appears to be lost in her own thoughts, the mother is obviously focused on her daughter, her faced creased in what appears to be a mixture of anger and worry. If you didn't know before what it was like to worry about an adolescent child, looking at this picture tells you more about that experience than any text book or self-help manual could hope.

Scattered throughout the Mostly People are shots that Whitman has taken of the modern dance troupe Pilobolus in a variety of environments. The members of the troupe are contortionists of extraordinary abilities, able to fold their bodies back on themselves, and into a variety of shapes and forms. They interweave their bodies together to form constructions in an attempt to become part of their environment and as an exploration of the the relationship between humans and our surroundings. In one shot they are seen crammed within a barred opening in a brick wall with their naked bodies stacked one on top of the other much like the bricks in the wall that extends in either direction away from them.

While at first we can't help but only feel awe at the way they contort their bodies, after a while you stop thinking of them as humans. Instead they now begin to merge into the background and gradually begin to become one with the rest of the wall. For as they no longer look like our idea of what a human should they begin to take on the characteristics of the inanimate objects around them. Of course we will never mistake them for the brick wall, but as they have lost their original identity of "human" they become environment instead.

While Mostly People shows us that photographs of humans don't have to be the stilted things most of us are familiar with from the posed shots that pass for portraits there are the occasional pictures in the collection that also blur the lines between human beings and the environment that surrounds them. While completely different in their representation of people, each has its own haunting beauty that is thought provoking and that resonates with emotional honesty. No matter what his subject matter, Robert Whitman is a photographer with an exceptional eye that allows us to experience the world and the people in it in a way that we wouldn't otherwise.

As is usual for a book from Perceval Press, Mostly People is beautifully laid out, and shows the photos to their best advantage. The company has a history of presenting the work of individual artists in such a manner that our focus is always where it should be, on the work, and Mostly People is a perfect example of what a great job they do in honouring an artist's work. You can purchase a copy of Mostly People, and many other fine books of art or CDs directly from the Perceval Press web site.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:53 AM | Permalink

They don't seem to make Western movies much anymore. I'm not sure why, and to be honest I don't really miss them all that much. That's not to say there weren't some redeeming features in Westerns. Nothing I've seen to this day can match the panoramic camera work that permeated the best of John Ford's movies in their ability to capture the Big Sky of the desert and the western plains. Or on occasion you'd get a movie which featured two actors whose chemistry together on the screen who made the movie a delight to watch no matter how lame the overall story line might have been. It takes a couple of special actors to pull that off, and aside from the occasional comedy pairings, I haven't seen any in recent memory that have done so successfully.

That is until I downloaded the DivX version of Appaloosa, written, directed, and co-starring Ed Harris. He and Viggo Mortensen play a pair of hired guns who work on the right side of the law. Harris' character, Virgil Cole, acts as Marshal and Mortensen's Everett Hatch as Deputy. Over the years the two have been bringing law and order to towns willing to pay their price and accept their authority, and the town of Appaloosa is the latest in need of their special skills. Their last Marshall was gunned down by local rancher Randell Braggs (Jeremy Irons) and since then he and his men have been acting like they own the town; stealing, beating, and even murdering with impunity.

After Cole and Everett dispatch three of Braggs' men in a gun fight the movie appears to be heading down the well worn Western path of a series of minor gun fights leading up to an O.K. Corral type of shoot-out as the grand finale. However Harris throws a couple of twists into the plot, the bane of all buddies, the woman with the potential to come between them, and a witness willing to testify that he saw Randell Braggs shoot the former Marshall and his deputies. The widow Allison French, Renee Zellweger, shows up one day on the train and immediately latches onto Cole. Before he knows it Cole finds himself looking at curtain samples for the parlour that Allison is planning for their new house. Never having been involved with a women for more then a night, and doing nothing more with them than what they were there to do, he's a little at a loss as to what's expected of him.

It's a different story when one of Braggs' men comes forward and claims to be willing to testify that he saw his boss commit murder, Cole knows exactly what to do in those circumstances. But bringing someone to trial and getting them sentenced is a far cry from having that sentence carried out, and Braggs knows Cole's weak spot. He hires two gun-men to kidnap Allison and they force Cole and Everett to turn Braggs over if they don't want her brains blown away. Unfortunately the widow French has a roving eye, she'd all ready made a play for Everett by then, and when our boys catch up with the bad guys they find her frolicking naked in the water with one of Braggs' hired guns.

As co-writer and director Ed Harris has created an interesting dynamic between the three main characters of Cole, Everett, and Allison French. Instead of having the "girl" come between the men, Allison's character helps clarify the strength of the bond between the two men. With both Harris and Mortensen giving new meaning to the word understatement when it comes to their performances, it's only through subtle indications from both of them over the course of the movie that we come to understand the depth of their relationship. Needless to say over the years they have developed an instinctual understanding of how each of them are going to react under a given set of circumstances, and that is depicted beautifully, but there's more to it than even that.

There's the notes that each man is able to strike with the intensity of their gaze or the quirking of an eyebrow while talking that communicate a level of understanding of the other person's character that can't be expressed in words. The slump of Mortensen's shoulders when his character recognizes what the stubborn set of his buddy's chin means, quickly followed by him squaring them in acceptance of shouldering his share of whatever will ensue says more about the level of trust the two men have for each other than any speech. In those two movements you not only see Everett's loyalty to Cole, but the knowledge that Cole's would do the same for him without question.

While Mortensen and Harris are undoubtedly the stars, both Zellweger and Irons do fine jobs with their characters. Zellweger in particular manages the difficult task of ensuring that we don't hate her character, which it would be easy to do. Every so often she allows the genuine fear of being alone her character suffers from to slip through the various masks she wears in her efforts to snare the man who will bring her the most security. A single woman in post Civil War America out west has very few options for survival, especially if your trying to maintain the illusion of civility.

Irons doesn't get to play villains often enough in my opinion, because he does such a wonderful job. His Braggs is a cultured and educated man who is personal friends with the President of the United States. Yet beneath that veneer lies a viscous killer who strikes with the speed of a snake. It would have been easy for Irons to overplay this role, but instead of chewing the scenery he only occasionally allows his character to explode. There is something very frightening about how he allows Bragg's suave exterior to crack momentarily and allow the monster within loose, only to seal it over again immediately.

Appaloosa is one of those rare movies that manages to transcend its genre and the cliches normally associated with it through the strength of its script and the quality of the performances from the actors involved. This movie will appeal to all those who appreciate fine acting and a well told story whether you're a fan of Westerns or not. The cowboy may ride off into the sunset at the end of this movie, but it's the how and the why he does so that makes it worth watching.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:47 AM | Permalink

The problem I had with soul music is that by the time I was listening to pop music actively in the 1970's it was becoming obvious that there was a huge difference between a lot of what was called soul music and music that had soul. Soul had always been smoother and slicker than its cousin funk, but as the '70s progressed it lost whatever edge it might have had and degenerated into middle of the road sludge with all the sexuality of the suburban shopping malls it was being pumped into. The idea that anyone could consider what Hall & Oates sang as being in anyway related to the music of Isaac Hayes and James Brown was almost as nauseating as equating Pat Boone with Little Richard because he covered "Tutti Frutti". (To this day one of pop music's biggest abominations)

Of course one of the problems was the continued lack of integration of pop radio, as there was some music that was still considered too "black" to be played on the mainstream pop stations. Growing up in lily white Toronto Ontario of the 1970's you hardly ever heard James Brown or Isaac Hayes on the radio, and is probably the reason that I never even heard of Al Green until the Talking Heads covered his great song "Take Me To The River" on their More Songs About Buildings And Food album. Even their minimalist version couldn't disguise the song's great mixture of soul and gospel and set me to wondering who this guy Al Green was.

Well of course Al Green still is; in fact he's just released a new album, Lay It Down, a collaborative effort with a variety of hip-hop and soul singers from today's generation of musicians. While Al has been releasing soul records since the late 1980's there was more than just the usual reasons for me not being familiar with him back in the 1970's as he had stopped doing pop music to concentrate on performing gospel. Now I had vaguely known about his change of life for some time now, but I didn't really know any of the details. Twenty-five years ago American documentary film maker Robert Mugge released Gospel According To Al Green that talked to Green about that issue, and in celebration of the movie's twenty-fifth anniversary Acorn Media will be releasing a special edition DVD version of the film on January 27th/09.

As well as including the original ninety minute documentary the DVD also contains special features like a ninety minute audio interview with Al Green and extended cuts of him performing and preaching. You see Al wasn't just fooling around with his born again stuff, nor experimenting like Dylan, Al became a Baptist minister, bought himself a church, and began leading people in worship every Sunday. There's been plenty of folk who have graduated from the church to secular music, but it's a rare person who feels the calling so strong that they make the reverse journey.

While the movie includes interviews with Al's first producer, Willie Mitchell of Memphis Hi Records, and Al himself, that deal with how his career as a soul singer began and talks about the recording of his first albums, when it comes to the matter of Al's conversion we aren't given very much information. When Mugge asks Green about how it happened he simply says that he woke up in the middle of the night in a hotel room praising God. It sounds like he had some sort of miraculous conversion while asleep and avoids mention of any events in his personal life that might have influenced his decision.

In an article entitled "Scared Straight" Robert Brunner describes how in 1974 Green's girlfriend Mary Woodson burst into his bathroom while he was in the shower and dumped a pot of scalding grits on his back, burning him so badly he was in hospital for several months. She then ran to his bedroom where she took a pistol registered in Al's name and shot and killed herself. While Al's conversion had happened a year prior to those events, it was shortly after that he made the complete break from pop music and switched over entirely to gospel and two years later was ordained as a minister.

While it's understandable that Al Green would want to distance himself from those events, it's not for a documentary film maker to leave out information on his subject as significant as that. Yet, instead of researching his subject, or even checking out a few other sources or news reports, it seems like Mugge decided to rely on Green and his intimates as his only sources of information. The result is that what appears to be an intimate portrait is actually somewhat sanitized.

On the plus side there are plenty of opportunities to watch Al Green perform on this disc and whether he's delivering a sermon praising God or singing there's no denying the man is an amazing performer, His voice has an incredible fluidity that allows it to slide up and down the scale with ease and sound equally full and expressive no matter how high or how low he goes. You can also see how he must have been a magnet for women when he was a pop-performer, for although he lacks the unbridled sexuality of a James Brown, he has a smooth charisma that is nigh on irresistible.

Ironically it was only a short while after the release of this movie twenty-five years ago that Al Green started to return to performing secular music with the release of his duet with Annie Lennox "Put A Little Love In Your Heart" for the 1988 film Scrooge. Since then he has gradually eased back into performing popular music again. His achievements in both pop and gospel music haven't been unrecognized either as he's been inducted into both the Rock And Roll Hall and Gospel Music Halls of Fame as well as receiving a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

While some of the footage in the documentary is a little grainy, the sound quality, especially for Green's performances are fine. As a record of the man's life Gospel According To Al Green might not be the most accurate or complete, but what it does do is provide a wonderful opportunity to see Al Green perform when he was still at the peak of his powers. Watching him perform makes it very clear that no matter what the reasons were for his conversion, being born again, there can be denying the sincerity of his beliefs and the joy he brings to people as a preacher and a singer. In spite of any flaws this movie may have, it proves that without a doubt Al Green's music got soul!

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:55 AM | Permalink

The phrase, are you paranoid if they're really out to get you?, might have been invented for Alby Starvation. Alby, the title character in Martin Millar's 1987 debut novel Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation being re-issued by Soft Skull Press, and distributed in Canada by Publishers Group Canada, on February 9th/09, worries constantly about his health, the hit man that the Milk Marketing Board has set on him, the Chinese gang leader trying to find him, and which of his friends and acquaintances are after his comic collection.

While those friends of Alby's who he's still talking to, well not really friends but some folk who buy drugs from him, tend to think that it's all in his head, the reality is that the Milk Marketing Board really have set a hit man on him and a mysterious Chinese gentleman is trying to get in touch with him. So he stays huddled in his apartment with only his hamster and his comics to keep him company watching as his reflection in the mirror looks gradually sicker and sicker. His doctor won't believe that there's anything wrong with Alby - but than again he's only waiting for Alby to die so he can scoop up his complete set of Silver Surfer comics.

It was Alby's health, and that bastard doctor, that was the cause of all his trouble to begin with. Certain he was dying, he wasn't able to keep food in and was gradually wasting away, he went to his doctor only to be told that it was nerves. It was only his buddy Stacey's suggestion that he might have food allergies that saved his life as far as Alby is concerned, unfortunately it also signed his death warrant with the Milk Marketing Board. You see Alby turned out to be allergic to milk and once he stopped drinking milk he got instantly better.

That would have been fine and dandy, but he had to go and tell somebody else suffering from similar ailments and she got better instantly too. Which might have been okay as well except she had a friend who was also very sick and asked Alby to talk to him, and he turned out to be a reporter for the local community newspaper and wrote a little article about being allergic to milk. That's when things began to snowball, and Alby eventually found himself the head of an anti-milk campaign that galvanized all of Britain because it turned out there were millions of people across the country allergic to milk suffering horribly.

When the sale figures for milk go south, the Milk Marketing Board turns the matter over to their dirty tricks department - modelled after the CIA - to sort it out. With no time to lose they decide the best course of action is to nip things in the bud and take out the person at the top of the anti-milk campaign - Alby. By sheer luck the first person sent out on the job is "Born Again" on the way to kill Alby, and in a fit of remorse for past killings tips him off that he's a target for assassination. You'd think that nothing could make a paranoid happier than finding out somebody is really out to get him, instead it makes Alby all the more miserable.

Now Alby isn't the only odd soul living London's Brixton district during the waning days of punk in the mid-eighties. They're are the speed freaks he supplies; the archaeology professor posing as a city employee so he can dig up the street in his search for a lost crown said to be buried in Brixton; the mysterious Chinese gentleman who used to be in charge of Heroin quality control in the Golden Triangle; the psychic nurse who doesn't know she's psychic; and of course the second hit man hired by the Milk Marketing Board, who turns out to be a woman named June.

With the story bouncing around like a pinball game on acid, (or is it like you being on acid watching a pin ball game) what with the plot bouncing off one character or story line after another and back again, and with no clue as to whether somethings happening in the past or the present, it's initially hard to quite follow what's going on in Alby's life. In some ways its akin to reading a cubist painting by Picasso where instead of merely seeing a single view of the subject the artist shows you all sides simultaneously in what looks like a an insane jigsaw puzzle of body parts.

The past and the present appear in adjacent paragraphs offering no clue as to which is which; we see the world through the eyes of characters who are on the periphery of the story; and intermingled with all of that we have Alby's disjointed narrative of events. Yet out of this seemingly random scattered collection of information a picture gradually forms of Alby's life, the lives of those around him, and the general air of desperation to find meaning to existence that grips so many of us.

Milk, Sulphate, And Alby Starvation is the flip side of the popular image of punk as a revitalizing movement for social change as we meet the ones who came for the party that never realized it wasn't just about loud music, getting drunk, and doing speed so they could dance all night. Like the dregs of the hippies on heroin after the days of flower power and peace and love had passed, the characters of Alby and his friends are pathetic lost souls with no direction who wanted something for nothing and ended up going nowhere fast. Whiles there's a dark humour to Ably's neuroses, in the end it's just sort of sad and pathetic.

What saves the book from being ultimately depressing though is Millar's sense of the absurd, for the story line is right out of Monty Python's school of taking an illogical situation to its most logical conclusion. That Alby is not crazy and the Milk Marketing Board has really hired an assassin to kill him because he has adversely affected milk sales across Britain, is merely the tip of the very peculiar iceberg contained within the pages of the book. While it might not be to everyone's cup of tea, if you're willing to put up with the slightly bitter taste and the twist and turns of the style,Milk, Sulphate, And Alby Starvation will never bore you and will continually surprise you. That alone makes it worth reading.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 06:15 AM | Permalink

At the conclusion of Eldest, book two of his Inheritance Cycle, Christopher Paolini had seemingly laid the ground work for the series' climax in book three. Concluding as it did with a second major battle being fought and a meaty surprise being revealed it would have been easy for him to throw all his characters into the final confrontation and bring the story to an end. After all many a trilogy before this one has rushed headlong to its conclusion with an eye for its destination without worrying overly much how it arrived there.

However, Paolini has risked his reader's impatience by not giving into that temptation with Brisingr, book three of four, that was published by Random House Canada in the fall of 2008. Instead he takes the time to build a more complete picture the world and the people who inhabit her as well as continuing the story. Of course with each step down the road there is less and less time and the pressure on Eragon and Saphira to discover a means of defeating Galbatorix, the king who would destroy all the free people, increases. For unless they can solve that riddle it doesn't matter how many battles they win, they will ultimately lose the war.

Brisingr sees Eragon spending and extended period of time among the dwarfs. While he'd much rather be staying with the army of the Varden, (the resistance), their leader, Nasuada, insists that he go to the dwarfs as her representative. The King of the dwarfs had been killed in the last battle of book two, and they are now going to select from among the thirteen clan chiefs a new monarch, and its vital that whoever it is continue to support the war against Galbatorix. Nasuada hopes that Eragon's presence there will serve to remind those dwarfs who might be wavering in their commitment, of the need to fight for their freedom.

Paolini's decision to enmesh Eragon in dwarf politics and spend a sizeable chunk of the book in the dwarf kingdom observing the process of selecting a monarch, instead of hastening the conclusion of the series might seem odd at first glance. However, by doing so Paolini is making the point that just because you're under threat doesn't mean you surrender those things that define you, even if there is a risk that it will cause a result not to your liking. If Eragon were to use his power as a Dragon Rider to influence who is chosen as the next dwarf king, no matter what his intentions, he would deprive the dwarfs of their freedom of choice, making him no less a tyrant than Galbatorix.

Throughout Brisingr Paolini returns to the theme of being responsible for one's actions with different people. For this isn't just Eragon's story, and the character of Roran, Eragon's cousin, represents how any of us can make a difference. How, even without magic or the companionship of a dragon, we each have the power to exact change. Yet Roran too learns about having to take responsibility for his actions, when he disobeys a direct order from his commanding officer in the midst of a raid against an enemy patrol.

It doesn't matter that by doing so he saved the lives of a great many men, ensured the success of his mission, and personally slew a great many of the enemy, Nasuada still has to have him punished. No one, no matter who they are or what they have done, can be seen to be above the law. After reading Roran's heroics it might seem ridiculous to us that Nasuada punishes him. but that is her living up to her responsibility to the people she leads to ensure that the law is equally enforced. Of course the fact that she demotes the officer who gave the orders that Roran disobeyed and then promotes Roran to be one of the Captains of her army mitigates the punishment and shows that she understands the true nature of justice.

The sign of a really good author is if he can draw you so deeply into the story that you're reacting to characters or situations as if they were real. At one point while I was reading Brisingr I was really frustrated with Eragon's impatience and near arrogance when it came to accepting other people's orders or suggestions. It was only in the middle of saying to myself, "What an arrogant little..." that I realized what an amazing job Paolini had done in his depiction of Eragon.

Sure he's gone through all sorts of magical transformations, has magical powers, and has a spiritual link to a dragon, but at the heart of it all he's still only a teenage boy unsure of his identity and insecure about his capabilities. For Paolini to have been able to elicit that reaction from me about Eragon, is a perfect example of the magnificent job he's done in bringing this world to life. Though Eragon is the hero of the series, Paolini, doesn't shirk from showing him warts and all. Even when we are seeing the world through Eragon's eyes, his character is so honestly presented we can't help but wanting to slap him upside the head on occasion.

While the first two books of The Inheritance Cycle were exciting, fun to read, and well written, Brisingr gives us a deeper understanding of the world the series takes place in, and brings us closer to the people we had been getting to know in the first two books. Christopher Paolini took a risk by slowing down the course of events to allow us this opportunity, and its a risk that's paid off handsomely as I feel we now know more, and care more, about Alagesia and the people who inhabit her then we did before. If you weren't emotionally involved with the story before now, there's no way you can avoid it now. The table is set - let the final confrontation begin - we're ready.

Brisingr can be purchased either directly from Random House Canada or an on line retailer like Amazon.ca.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:09 AM | Permalink

When I began editing the on line magazine "Epic India Magazine" a little over two years ago I had read very few books by Indian authors. Since it was meant to be an arts and culture magazine I figured that was a situation that needed to change. Thankfully India is now probably the largest English speaking market for books in the world, and it's becoming increasingly easier to find works written by Indian writers.

In her collection of short stories The Convent Of Little Flowers Indu Sundaresan gave us glimpses of lives that have felt the brush of change, and also showed how powerful the forces resisting change can be. Known for her historical fiction, these stories were her first foray's into her native country's current circumstance and I was intrigued as to what brought about her change of venue - so to speak.

With that in mind I contacted Ms. Sundaresan and she very generously gave of her time to answer my questions about this collection of stories, her writing, and her life in general. If you haven't all ready read any of her work, I hope this encourages you to at least pick up her collection of short stories if not one of her novels

You were born in India and came to the United States to finish your studies, can you fill in some of the biographical details from before you came to the US, and maybe explain how it is you ended up staying there, or if it was always your intent to emigrate?

My father was a fighter pilot in the Indian Air Force, so I’m the proverbial “army” brat and spent most of my childhood moving around India, from one base to another. When I finished my undergraduate degree in economics, I decided to apply for graduate school, went to the University of Delaware, and ended up with two graduate degrees. I don’t know that it was my intention to stay on here in the US in the beginning. But I started writing fiction very soon after, and have found a community of writers through classes and conferences that I would not have had access to in India—being here in the US is a blessing for my career as a writer.

Did you find that you had a period of adjustment that you had to go through when you first arrived in the States, and was there anything you found particularly difficult to acclimatise your self to?

In the beginning, it was all very new, very interesting, thought provoking at times. And I am a writer (though I didn’t know it then), so I watched and listened, took notes in my head, never really let anything shock me too much.

Perhaps the funniest thing to happen was the day I landed in NYC. As I was wheeling my luggage out of customs and immigration, tired from the long flight and somewhat disoriented, a man leaning on his cart whistled and said, “Com’ere, baby, give us a hug and a kiss.” I remember that I laughed and shook my head and ran out of the terminal, but that was my introduction to America!

How did you first become interested in telling stories - in writing?

Not until I had finished graduate school and had a story in my head. I decided to write a novel, so we bought a computer and I wrote one. And then I wrote another novel, and then I wrote my first published novel, The Twentieth Wife. I don’t recall being intimidated by the process then, though I know now just how difficult it is, which was in some senses advantageous to me—I tell this story of my beginnings of a writer as a very simple tale, and it was thus. I didn’t think I couldn’t do it, so...I wrote my novels.

There's a long tradition of story telling in India, one generation passing along the stories they learned to the next generation. How do you see yourself as a writer fitting into that tradition - if at all?

My father and my paternal grandfather were storytellers, and they loved having an audience. I remember that my father would make up bedtime stories for me, two sagas about a horse named Silver and an elephant named Jumbo. He also told my sisters and me stories of the kings and queens of India when we went to visit all the forts and palaces around the country, but at bedtime, his favourite trick was to tell us only part of the story and then switch off the light, leaving us to think (until the next day or until he was free again in the evenings) of how the stories ended, or how the plot resolved itself. My father taught me how to tell stories in my head long before I came to put them down on paper.

In the afterward to In The Convent Of Little Flowers you make mention of how either a news story or a casual remark was the inspiration for some of the stories. It sounded like this wasn't a way you had worked before, where have you previously found your inspiration for your work?

The stories of In The Convent Of Little Flowers are contemporary, so their sources are those you mention.

My first two novels, The Twentieth Wife and The Feast of Roses, are based on the life of Nur Jahan, a seventeenth century empress of Mughal India. Her story I stumbled upon while I was in graduate school (though I ought to have known this better from my school days; I was an indifferent student of history). One evening, homesick for family and friends in India, I went to the university library, typed in “India” in the subject keyword at the computer, and went to the section that housed books on India. I returned to my apartment with an armload of books, one of which was a book on Mughal harems and Nur Jahan. It wasn’t until I had finished my first two unpublished novels, that I began to think of what I had read about her, checked out that book again, researched her life more thoroughly and wrote The Twentieth Wife and its sequel.

When Deepa Mehta was filming Water - a movie about the harsh ways in which widows are still treated by some elements of Indian society - she was attacked (literally) by extremists. Do you worry about any, or has there been any, backlash in regards to some of the stories in this collection

Some of the topics I describe in this collection are, by their very nature, somewhat taboo in Indian society. But they exist. And I would like to think that there is a growing awareness and openness in India today that will allow some thought, some dialogue about the stories because we all will have to confront this either within our own families or in our communities at some point in our lives.

Having said this, I did not put Convent together for the controversy; I rarely analyse my fiction thus before I write, or indeed after I have finished a story. Consequently, most of the stories in Convent were written from a strong emotion, whether anger, upset, outrage or pain and sorrow at what I had heard/read. This (the emotion) has always been the most basic premise of all of my work.

Once I have the idea for a story, in whatever form, I’m methodical in studying the best voice for it, whose point of view should be predominant, what tense to use, how the story should be told—in other words, the craft is what interests me. Then I write, continuously and steadily, until the story is done. And then I revise, send it out to friends, read their comments, revise again.

When the book is done, I hope (as I think all writers hope) that the emotion still carries through the stories, that it affects my readers as much as it did me, that it causes them to think—this is all I ask from my work.

Do you find that living outside of India has changed your perspective of the country and if so how has this shown up in your writing?

The distance from India has given me the ability to write about India. It’s a personal thing, other displaced Indian writers tell fluid stories about the immigrant experience in the US (or elsewhere), something I still find difficult to do for I live the life and find myself unable to find an adequate perspective for this.

I love my homeland, love the history and living away as I do, use my writing to find my connection to India.

In recent years there seems to have been an explosion of English language writers from India/Pakistan. Is this something new, or is it just that the rest of the world is finally noticing?

It’s new, in that even if writers have been writing stories, it’s only in the past twenty years or so that we are being published internationally on such a large scale. And people are reading, listening to what we have to say about India.

Some of the stories in In The Convent Of Little Flowers deal with the social situation and status of women, and others with the social hierarchy known as caste. Why do you think it necessary to write about these subjects?

Again, I’ve never analysed the stories from this point of view. The social status of women, the prevalence of the caste system, these are inherent in Indian society, changing slowly with the times. Most of the stories in Convent deal with the ordinary people facing somewhat extraordinary conditions in their lives and learning how to deal with them—I would say this could happen anywhere in the world. I set my stories in India, and having done so, to provide a complete and full picture, these are issues I must address in the story-line. My intention though, first and foremost, is to be a storyteller.

While there were some genuinely shocking stories in Convent, the ones I found most moving were the ones showing people overcoming the conditioning that has kept them trapped - "The Most Unwanted" for instance. What do you hope that your readers take away with them from those stories as compared to the other ones?

We’ve all heard these stories before, and I’ll address “The Most Unwanted” specifically where a grandfather struggles to come to terms with a grandson his unmarried daughter brings into his home, and all the impact it has had so far on his life. I thought deeply about Nathan, the grandfather, about where his prejudices came from and how he shatters them by the end of the story because the child puts his head on his lap to sleep.

If I were to continue “The Most Unwanted” beyond that point, the end of the story, then Nathan would never again in his life doubt his decision to accept his grandson. He would defend both the child and his daughter ferociously and in doing so, will force the people around him to accept his decision.

We’ve heard these stories, and assume that they always happen to other people, so the question then for me was how someone would react when it happened to them and I think it depends so much on the specific situations and histories of the protagonists.

If there’s anything I’ve hoped for in this collection (apart from wanting to keep its emotion as close to the source after all the revisions and edits), it is that people will think about my characters, their circumstances, what they are battling and how they win or lose.

Your previous books have been historical epics, set anywhere form Mogul times to the last days of colonial rule, and this collection was set in modern India, have you given any thought to where you want to travel to next?

I just completed my fourth novel, Shadow Princess, which takes me back to the Mughal India of my first two and picks up the story-line after the end of The Feast of Roses. I’ve always wanted to write this novel, and so this story was definitely next in line for me—though I’m not done yet, still working on revising and editing this novel which has a tentative publication date for end of 2009.

I have a vague idea for my next book right now, though it’s still too early to take my head out of Shadow and research this more thoroughly—I expect to be doing this over the coming year.

I just wanted to thank Indu Sundaresan again for taking part in this interview and encourage you once again to at least pick up her collection of short stories, if not one of her novels. In The Convent Of Little Flowers was my introduction to her work, and it has certainly whetted my appetite for more of her work.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:10 AM | Permalink

History is the record of what came before us and reminds us of who we once were and how we became who we are now. However, there is often a marked difference between what is recorded as history and what actually happened. Whether it's the mists of time that cloud people's memories or a deliberate colouring of the truth that distorts reality doesn't matter in the end as the result is the same and the past becomes a murky shadow filled with rumours and half truths.

In the world of The Three Seas that R. Scott Bakker introduced the world to in his The Prince Of Nothing trilogy most men had forgotten or refused to believe what had come before them. Partially from ignorance, and partially from hubris, for wasn't their civilization the pinnacle of achievement, they refused to believe that thousands of years ago the world came within a hair's breadth of being obliterated. However over the course of the trilogy events unfolded that brought history into the present and a long forgotten enemy was revealed for all to see.

Anasurimbor Kellhus is descended from the kings who fought against the doom two thousand years ago. Over the course of The Prince Of Nothing he rises from being an obscure outsider to becoming the Warrior Prophet who leads the faithful in battle against the heathen so they can reclaim their southern empire and he also confirms the existence of The Consult, the long forgotten enemy. When Kellhus is acclaimed Aspect Emperor at the end of the trilogy, one of his first promises is to seek out the strongholds of the Consult in the Northern reaches of The Three Seas and destroy them to prevent a return of their master the No-God.

Ten years have passed since the events described in the first trilogy as Bakker picks up the story again in The Judging Eye, book one of The Aspect Emperor trilogy, being released on January 20th by Penguin Canada. It's been a busy decade for the newly anointed Aspect Emperor, what with eliminating opposition to his rule, consolidating the power of the Empire, and making the necessary preparations for his war on The Consult.

Yet there are still those who harbour misgivings, if not even doubts, about their Aspect Emperor, and chief among them is his former teacher Drusas Achamian. In the days before the ascent of the Emperor Achamian had been one of the few who believed in the existence of The Consult. A schoolman, the name given sorcerers in The Three Seas, he had belonged to the school known as the Mandate were gifted with possession of the most powerful sorcery in the world, The Gnosis, and cursed with the memory of two thousand year old wars.

Although it was Kellhus who vindicated Achamian and his fellow Mandate schoolmen by verifying the existence of The Consult when all else had ridiculed their belief, he turned his back on the Emperor the day he was crowned. Kellhus had stolen Achamian's lover, Esmenet, and made her his consort, a betrayal that Drusas could not forgive or forget. He also possesses the knowledge of who Kellhus really is and where he so mysteriously came from, which only increases his doubts and suspicions.

In the Judging Eye Bakker sets in motion two great quests; "The Great Ordeal", the holy war, led by the Aspect Emperor to scour the world of The Consult and prevent the rise of the No-God and a second apocalypse, and Achamian's quest to find Ishual, the birth place of Kellhus.
The two quests are as different as night and day. For while Kellhus and company are the bright shining light set forth to cleanse the earth of evil, Achamian's party are a motley collection of mercenaries and bounty hunters who have lived on the edge of civilization for years.

In The Prince Of Nothing trilogy Bakker not only was able to bring to life the sweeping events of history but take us inside of it by rendering his characters and their place in events in exquisite detail. In book one of The Aspect Emperor, The Judging Eye, he shows that he hasn't lost that touch. No matter where we are, or whose eyes we are observing the world through, we not only live through overwhelming events as if they were happening to us, but Bakker never lets us forget the overall picture either. He is able to do this because not only are his characters are so well drawn that we feel we've known them all our lives after only just meeting them, but the environments they move through are depicted so vividly they appear in our mind's eye as if painted there.

Bakker has deftly laid the foundations for the various strands of plot and intrigue that will run through out the trilogy. From the religious cult plotting against the Emperor, the inner workings of the Emperor's court (and the strange behaviour of his children), the Emperor's army in the field, to Achamian's perilous journey into the North, events have been set in motion that promise the The Aspect Emperor trilogy will be just as memorable and remarkable as its predecessor. Return with R. Scott Bakker to the world of The Three Seas for a journey unlike any other you have experienced. Part Dante's Inferno and part Conrad's Heart Of Darkness this is fantasy literature like you've never read before.

You can purchase a copy of The Judging Eye as of January 20th/09 either directly from Penguin Canada or through an on line retailer like Amazon.ca

Posted by Richard Marcus at 02:12 AM | Permalink

It's difficult enough as it is to try and adapt a well known novel as a movie without disappointing audiences, but when somebody else has already made what many consider the definitive adaptation of the same work, the job becomes nearly impossible. Such was the case for director Julian Jarrold and the rest involved with bringing the version of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited to the big screen in 2008 that's now being released on DVD January 13th/09. Back in 1981 Granada Television of England had produced an eleven part television serial that not only faithfully reproduced the entire novel, but featured truly iconic performances from Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in the lead roles of Charles Ryder and Lord Sebastian Flyte respectively.

Of course comparisons between the two are decidedly unfair as this latest version is trying to tell the same story in around a tenth of the time. The entire movie is probably only a little longer than two episodes of the television series and it can't afford to spend the same amount of time paying attention to details. Very wisely Jarrold and his script writers decided to not even attempt to compete with Granada's production, and have streamlined their focus to an investigation of the interrelationship between the characters.

While the story begins and ends during the Second World War, the majority of the action takes place between the wars. Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) is from a stolid middle class family and is just beginning his first term at Oxford University. Although he is ostensibly studying history, his true ambition is to be a painter. His introduction to Lord Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) is not what one would call auspicious, as one evening the young aristocrat leans through Charles' window and vomits. The next morning an apology in the shape of three large bouquets of flowers and an invitation to lunch are delivered to Charles, marking the beginning of their relationship.

Sebastian and Charles come from two decidedly different worlds, and not just in terms of social position. For as well as being landed gentry Sebastian's family are Catholic. While that may not be a big deal now, in England at this time it was a very significant difference, especially among the nobility. Since the days of Henry Vlll and the establishment of The Church Of England, Catholic nobility were viewed with suspicion and mistrust because it was believed their loyalties were divided because they obeyed the Pope over their own monarch. They had been subject to persecution since that time and had subsequently become a very insular community dividing the world into us and them.

While Charles doesn't understand the significance of the difference in faith, he does understand the significance of the wealth represented by Sebastian's home, Brideshead. From the first moment that Charles sees Brideshead he falls in love with its grandeur, and the wealth that it represents. Sebastian is loath for Charles to meet his family, or even visit the estate, but during the summer break from classes he invites him to come and stay. It's during this visit that Charles first meets Sebastian's sister Julia (Hayley Atwell) and their mother, Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson), and the events are set in motion that will shape the three young people's lives.

Sebastian is gay, and very much in love with Charles. While Charles is undoubtedly infatuated with Sebastian, he's equally infatuated with the lifestyle that Sebastian's wealth allows them to lead. Although he's initially content with Sebastian, the introduction of Julia quickly changes the dynamics of their relationship as he becomes increasingly more attracted to her. When Lady Marchmain asks Charles to accompany Sebastian and Julia on a trip to Venice to visit their father Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon) and his mistress in order to keep Sebastian out of trouble he agrees readily enough, but ends up abandoning him in order to pursue Julia.

While Charles seems on the surface to be perusing a relationship with both Julia and Sebastian, the truth of the matter is he's really in love with Brideshead and the wealth and power it represents. However, with both Julia and Sebastian, what he failed to understand was the role religion played in their lives and how much it dictated how they behaved. For them Charles was a means of rebelling against the confines of their faith, and in the end they both choose their religion over him. Dazzled by the grandeur and wealth they both represented he failed to see who either of them really were.

While this version of Brideshead Revisited was unable to go into the same depth of detail as the television series, it did a remarkable job of depicting the book's major themes of betrayal and faith through its examination of the relationship between the three young protagonists. It's important to remember that Evelyn Waugh was a devout Catholic while watching the movie, for although there are times it appears that it is being critical of the church, it is also very clear in showing the comfort that faith can bring to troubled people.

The acting is superlative throughout the movie, but Ben Whishaw as Sebastian and Emma Thompson as his mother are truly remarkable. Thompson manages to make the formidable and easy to hate Lady Mrchmain very human by giving us glimpses of the scared and vulnerable woman hidden behind the mask of propriety. She gives us occasion to ask ourselves what it must have been like for a woman of her position to have spent the majority of her married life with her husband living abroad with a mistress. It's a remarkable job that I don't think another actor could have carried off with the same grace and style.

Whishaw as Sebastian is a brilliant combination of vulnerability and charisma. While he is obviously effeminate he never once crosses the line into camp or making his character an object of ridicule. While to all outward appearances he is the epitome of dissolute nobility, Whishaw is able to make him substantial enough that we can understand why Charles is attracted to him. There is an inner core of steel underneath the fey exterior that gives him the strength of character needed to survive the betrayals and hurts his character experiences at the hands of those he loves the most. It's a breathtaking performance by an incredibly skilled and talented actor.

The version of the DVD that I viewed was widescreen which helped to emphasis the grandeur of the Brideshead estate so that, like Charles, our first view takes our breath away and leaves us slightly awe struck. As is the case with all new releases the sound is 5.1 surround, but it was a bit overwhelming at times with the orchestration drowning out some of the dialogue even when played through a surround sound system. As far as special features go there is the usual optional audio commentary that can be listened to while watching the movie, a collection of deleted scenes, and a making of featurette.

When I first heard that a film version of Brideshead Revisited was being released I admit I had my doubts as to its ability to compete with the mini-series that had been released in the early 1980's. However through a combination of superlative performances and intelligent film making, the people behind this new release have created their own masterpiece. A remarkable achievement and a wonderful film.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:21 AM | Permalink

If there wasn't any truth to an expression it probably wouldn't ever have been said, so although you can't take a saying like "nice guys finish last" as gospel, you can be sure there has to be some truth to it. One only needs look at the way the world conducts business to realize how a saying like that could have come about. In everything from running for political office to office politics if you're not prepared to be a little underhanded or dirty, your chances of finishing on top of the heap are reduced substantially.

There are some professions where even the very notion of niceness having a part to play in getting the job done seems too ridiculous to contemplate. Take being a police officer, can you imagine politely asking someone in the midst of robbing the corner store to please drop their weapon, put their hands down, and give themselves up? Sure a police officer is polite to the general public, but when it comes to dealing with criminals, well that's another story. All of which could explain why Detective Constable (DC) "Dangerous" Davies of the British television series The Last Detective remains firmly planted at the bottom when it comes to his job and his personal life.

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of watching DC "Dangerous" Davies in action, the good people at Acorn Media are going to be releasing The Last Detective: Complete Collection on January 20th/09. The nine DVD set not only contains all seventeen episodes of the television series, it also includes the 1981 Granada TV movie Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective as a bonus feature, which offers a different take on the story told television series' first episode.

Everybody knows and likes DC "Dangerous" Davies (Peter Davison) except for perhaps his colleagues who think he's a bit of a joke. The word on the street is that if you're going to get nabbed, "Dangerous" is the one you want to get picked up by, as he's always polite and never out of line. As one bloke says to him, "Always a pleasure to be picked up by you "Dangerous", you never go in for any of that rough stuff or racial epithets like some others". Unfortunately that high opinion isn't shared by his north London police station's Inspector: "You're the last detective I'll ever think of for a job, unless it's shit, the stuff that no one else wants, then you'll be the first I'll think of".

In episode after episode we see that DC Davies is the one who gets to deal with the little old ladies who believe their neighbour has cut up his wife and is throwing him out in the garbage, and all the other calls that his fellow officers thinks are beneath them. He's the one who gets called to the scene when a petty thief is threatening to kill himself with a home made bomb made from an alarm clock and sausages, or to deal with anyone whose being particularly bothersome.

Yet what's probably most aggravating about "Dangerous" is his unerring ability to make the rest of his colleagues look bad. A case that's been unsolved by his, younger, higher in the ranks, fellow detectives, gets handed to him because the victim is being a bother in the episode "Tricia". Through perseverance, dogged determination, and a willingness to spend time listening to the victim, Davies figures it out. What makes matters worse, is that the answers weren't that hard to come by, if only the detectives investigating the case in the first place had bothered to do their job properly. Nobody likes a loser, especially when he wins and makes you look bad doing so.

For the viewer the great thing about DC Davies is how human he is. How often do you see on a cop show the officer kicking the door in fallinf on his face on top of the door and then being stepped on by the other officers running into the apartment? It's not that DC Davies is literally a door mat, he wouldn't be the sympathetic character he is if he was, but he just can't bring himself to be rude. Sometimes you have the distinct impression he wants to be, the way his shoulders stiffen when his back is to someone, and the deep breath he takes before turning around. Yet, by the time he's facing the camera again, his smile is hitched firmly in place and he's ready to give who ever his total attention.

Peter Davison does a wonderful job portraying DC Davies as we see all sides of his character. The frustration he feels at the way he's treated, at the crap jobs he's given to do, war with his desire to do his job to the best of his capabilities and his very real belief that he is supposed to be helping people. He is a genuinely decent man and the compassion he feels for the people he deals with is honest. On the other hand, in spite of what anybody he works with might think, he's not a pushover and has no sympathy for the real villains of the world. He might have a kind word and smile for the winos, the petty thieves, and other basically harmless types, but those who do genuine harm will find out that "Dangerous" isn't necessarily just a sarcastic nickname.

As he receives little or no help from his fellow officers, Davies is forced to call upon the services of his friend Mod (Sean Hughes) for advice and the occasional helping hand. Mod seems to change jobs like some people do shirts, as at one point he's a dog walker, another teaching English to Japanese au-pair girls, and in one instance doing a door to door survey of the sexual habits of the local senior citizens. However, in spite of his peculiarities he's a good friend to Davies, and one of the few people he can count on. Hughes has a lot of fun playing Mod and its obvious that both he and Davison have a great time doing their scenes together.

In fact the quality of the acting through out the entire series is spot on (look for guest appearances from various familiar faces including Roger Daltry of the Who) from the actors in the continuing roles of Davies' ex-wife and colleagues to those who only show up for a single episode. What I especially appreciated were those characters who you think you have figured out and either over the course of an episode, or the series, they surprise you by the way they change and how well the actors are able to make those transitions work.

As the show The Last Detective is fairly recent, the picture and sound quality are of very good quality. While the special features are limited to an interview with actor Peter Davison, and some on screen reading material about the author of the books the series is based on, the inclusion of the the 1981 television movie Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective is a real treat. With Bernard Cribbins playing Davies we get a different view of the character, and I found it only increased my enjoyment of the series as a whole rather than forcing me to choose which of the two I preferred. It was like seeing a photograph of the same scene from a different angle with each one offering an equally fascinating perspective.

DC "Dangerous" Davies is not your typical television police officer and The Last Detective is definitely not your typical television cop show. However if you like intelligent television that's a little off the wall, and mysteries that are sometimes not what they seem to be, than you are sure to enjoy The Last Detective: The Complete Series.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:32 AM | Permalink

Prior to the coming of the Spanish in the 16th century Peru was home to the sophisticated civilization of the Inca empire. Although the Inca had managed to subjugate their various neighbours and raise exquisite cities, they quickly fell to the Spaniards due to gunpowder, disease, and deceit. Once the conquistadors had sated their lust for gold it was time to start settling the territory, and since they had pretty much exterminated the local crop of potential slaves they had to rely on importing Africans like everyone else.

As has been the case throughout the Western hemisphere where Africans were used as slaves, the African population in Peru brought with them their own traditions, including music. However, unlike North America where it became one of the key foundations for popular popular music, in Peru their music, like their population, has remained segregated from the mainstream. African Americans in South America are routinely second class citizens, and anything associated with them is considered inferior, including their music. So, aside from sporadic recognition from outside performers like David Byrne's The Soul Of Black Peru released in 1995, little Afro-Peruvian music has been heard outside of its own community.

In 2001 four young Peruvians, Ramon Perez-Prieto, Grimaldo Del Solar, Rafael Morales, and Carlos Li Carrillo, from outside the Afro-Peruvian community formed the group Novalima as a way to experiment with their appreciation for both Peruvian and modern music, and in 2002 released their first disc, Novalima. They had invited various musicians from the Afro Peruvian community to participate and created a disc that mixed both traditional rhythms and contemporary sounds. When the disc went platinum in Peru, they realized they were onto something and in 2006, they released Afro internationally, and firmly establishing Afro-Peruvian music on the world scene as it spent ten weeks at number one on the US Collage Music Journal's Latin Alternative and New World charts.

The band has now expanded to include permanent Afro-Peruvian musicians; Juan Medrano Cotito, Mangue Vasquez, Milagros Guerrero, and Marcos Mosquera, as well as renowned Peruvian drummer and percussionist Constantino Alvarez. It's this group, plus a variety of guest performers from the Afro-Peruvian music community, who can be heard on the band's forthcoming release (January 13th/09 US & Canada and the 16th for the rest of the world) Coba Coba on the Cumbancha label.

On first listen the disc was almost overwhelming with its seemingly inexhaustible supply of rhythmic variations. My first impression was of one continuos song whose sole purpose was to enable me to forget it was minus twenty out and I was trudging through ice and snow. It was only once I had recovered from the initial exhilaration that the music inspired, and was able to listen to the disc with something approaching a critical ear, that I began to discern the distinctive elements of each song. For although all the tracks share a common foundation, what's been built up around it gives them each unique characteristics.

The opening track on the disc, "Concheperla" (Mother of Pearl or Pearl Shell) is a traditional Peruvian dance called a marinera that dates back to the 1800's. These "mariner" dances were composed as patriotic tributes to Peru's navy and were originally performed by brass bands. Originally transcribed and arranged by the great grandmother of band member Rafael Morales, its a perfect example of how the band reaches back into their country's history for inspiration without getting stuck in the past. While the trumpet you hear is a nod to the military bands of yesterday, the rhythm and beats are the sound of today and a recognition of the band's African roots.

"Concheperla" is a fitting overture to the rest of the disc in the way it successfully combines traditional, or older, melodies with modern musical technology and a variety of musical influences. While in this instance the foundation is a song from the dominant culture's history, some draw upon Afro-Peruvian songs for their inspiration and others the folk music of various regions around the country. However, regardless of a song's provenance, they are all subject to a creative process that gives them added depth and dimension by adding new layers of rhythm and different musical textures.

"Ruperta/Puede Ser", the fourth track on the disc is a great example of this as it takes an older song, "Ruperta", combines it with "Puede Ser" by the Cuban hip-hop duo Obesion, and mixes it all together in Jamaican dub style inspired by the likes of Mikey Dread (known for his dub work with The Clash). The result is something really spectacular, as the dubbing techniques serve to tie the two songs together rhythmically, without being overbearing or dominating the melodies. I have to say that normally I find dub music tedious and and annoying, but that's not the case here. Instead of making the song sound like someone with speech a impediment who was forced fed Quaaludes like dub normally does, here the dubbing is used to accentuate the beat like an additional percussion instrument and gives the song an extra spark of life.

In fact one of the most impressive parts of the disc is the manner in which they have combined the old and the new. Far too often when you hear of these types of projects you end up with little idea of what the original music sounded like as it ends up buried under the bells and whistles of the modern technology. Novalima never lose site of the original music and keep it front and centre all the time. They understand that you can't replace, or simulate, the power and passion of these songs with studio tricks or programmed beats. What they have done is use the technology to give the original music a platform on which it can be shown off to its best advantage.

It's not often you get to hear a funky bass line accompanied by traditional percussion instruments like the jaw bone of an ass or cajon (a hollow box with a resonator hole like a guitar's) like you do on "Tumbala", or hear the words to a poem describing the history of Afro-Peruvian music turned into a song like you do in "Africa Lando", but Coba Coba is replete with moments like that. Not only does this disc shine a spotlight on music that has been neglected for far too long, but it does it in such a manner as to make it appealing to a wide variety of people without diluting any of its passion or diminishing its integrity.

Novalima sets the standard for all other bands wishing to bring modern technology into play when adapting traditional music. This is brilliant stuff that will not only keep you dancing, but will hopefully open some eyes to the ongoing discrepancies in Peruvian society.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:54 AM | Permalink

Anthologies of short stories are usually put together to honour the best of a particular genre for the past year. It's not uncommon therefore in January to see collections titled The Best Fantasy, or The Best Science Fiction being released by various publishers. In those instances the editor's job isn't really that difficult as they simply round up those stories that were either prize winners of runners up from the year in question and republish them with a little blurb on each author.

In recent years a new type of anthology has started to appear, especially in the fantasy genre, where authors are asked by an editor, or editors, to write a story according to a theme. These have included retellings of classic fairy tales, new takes on the hero myth, and other variations on that idea. Since this format has become popular, the name of one editor has become synonymous with the best of these collections. I don't know if Ellen Datlow was the first person to put together one of these anthologies, but her name as editor on one of these collections has become a guarantee that you're going to be reading a great collection of short fiction. It doesn't matter whether you've heard of any of the writers or not, because Datlow knows exactly which authors to approach for the type of story she has in mind for a particular collection and the results are always worth reading.

So when I saw that she was responsible for editing Poe, a collection of stories inspired by Edgar Allan Poe in honour of the two hundredth anniversary of his birth being published by Simon & Schuster Canada on January 6th/09, I knew that it would be a must read for anyone who liked the late, great master. Yet, even I was surprised at what I found within the pages of this book, as the stories exceeded all of my expectations.

The guidelines for each author were simple, write a story inspired by any of the works of Edgar Allan Poe in whatever setting you'd like. As one might expect the results range all over the place with some stories being funny, others mysterious, and some downright macabre. Yet what each have in common is that one way or another they have managed to capture the spirit of what made Poe's stories so effective. More than just your common garden horror story, filled with creaking floorboards and knife wielding maniacs (although he had his fair share of them too) Poe was famous for his ability to create atmosphere, and in their own way each tale in this collection rises to that challenge in grand style.

Kim Newman's "Illimitable Domain" provides a light touch as the opening story, and is as much an homage to the many cheesy film adaptations of Poe's work as the author himself. Written from the point of view of your almost stereotypical Hollywood agent, he represents a slightly gone to seed chimpanzee whose place in the sun has been taken by Bonzo and Cheetah, who latches onto a new way to grab his ten percent. When a low rent, low budget production company that specializes in three day shoots is looking for a change of pace, he suggests the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Although the works are in the public domain, our erstwhile hero gets his cut by claiming to be the representative of a group that has registered Poe's name as a trademark and offering to negotiate rights to its use.

Once the company gets rolling producing Poe movies they can't stop. Initially it's because they are successful, but then mysteriously, no matter what movie they set out to make, Vincent Price ends up in the lead role and the plot turns into a variation on The Fall Of The House Of Usher. By turns funny and high camp, the story is a brilliant love letter to the tacky horror movies of the sixties where a heroine's quality was measured by how well she filled a sweater, and Technicolor was an excuse for buckets of blood.

Laird Barron's contribution, "Strappado", is far more traditional in its approach and leads the reader deep into familiar Poe territory. Our hero is part of a group of drunk, jaded, thrill seekers who come together while slumming with the "natives" in India. European and American jet setters looking for something off the beaten path, they first start in a bar catering to locals instead of staying in a designated tourist spot, then are lured to an underground "art" event. The big appeal is that the artist behind the event isn't even allowed into Great Britain because his work is so controversial. What the group don't know is that they won't be witnessing one of his "events", but are slated to be the next work of art.

Barron has cleverly recreated the feelings of impending doom that Poe was so adept at rousing in his readers. So while the characters in "Strappado", though their arrogance and delusions of importance, willingly go to meet their fates, we see what they are too blind to realize. If you've ever asked yourself how did people go to their deaths so willingly in the concentration camps or in similar situations, this story gives an indication of just how easy it is to lead sheep to the slaughter.

The writer's have covered all the bases with their stories; from the gothic romance of Delia Sherman's "The Red Piano", which reads like a typical Poe story although set in contemporary New York City; offering an explanation for the manor of Poe's early death (he was found wandering the streets of Baltimore, stone cold sober, in somebody's else's clothes) in E. Catherine Tobler's "Beyond Porch And Portal"; to Melanie Tem's surreal take on "The Raven" - "The Pickers". Part of the fun is trying to guess which story, or aspect of Poe's life, inspired individual author's to write what they did. Unless your a Poe scholar, intimate with all his writings including his essays, there are some that will stump you, however each author has written an afterward that explains their choices, so that mystery will at least be cleared up.

Poe has been credited with writing the first ever mystery story, The Murders In The Rue Morgue, and his stories have been the inspiration for many a horror and dark fantasy writer over the years. The nineteen stories commissioned by Ellen Datlow for the collection Poe are works of mystery and imagination that not only do justice to the author they celebrate, but are fine stories in their own right. Datlow has once again shown an uncanny talent for approaching just the right writers for the task at hand, as not one disappoints.

Poe can be purchased either directly from Simon & Schuster Canada or an on line retailer like Amazon.ca

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:40 AM | Permalink

In our chauvinism the West puts Florence, and its renaissance as a place of arts and learning, at the centre of the world when it comes to cultural achievements in the 15th and 16th centuries. Our bias has prevented us from seeing that while supposedly civilized Europe struggled through dark ages of ignorance and plague in the years prior to that enlightenment, empires of sophistication and culture thrived under the rule of Sultans and Caliphs. The Ottoman Empire had stretched into Spain and by the 1500's their cousins had entered Northern India and established the Mogul Empire.

While we might believe that relations between the West and the Muslim world are tense these days, they are positively cordial when compared with the fervour of Christian hatred for the infidel during the renaissance. However, that did not prevent there being interaction between the two worlds and even the Vatican sent representatives to the court of Akabar the Great, the heart of the Mogul empire in North India. Still, there would be no reason to suspect any connection existing between Florence and Akabar's capital of Sikri.

Yet in his elaborate work of historical fantasy, The Enchantress Of Florence, published by Random House Canada, and being released in trade paperback January 6th/09, Salman Rushdie weaves together strands of fiction and history to tell a tale of how these two cities might have been linked. It is the story of three childhood friends from Florence whose love and loyalty stands the test of time and of two great cities equally capable of grandeur and self destruction. Yet, it's also the tale of a remarkable woman's quest to make her own way in a man's world and how the reverberations of her efforts shattered kingdoms, defeated generals, and brought about the ruin of one of the two great cities.

The court of Akabar the Great is thrown into confusion when a mysterious blond stranger shows up at court. At first he attempts to pass himself off as the ambassador from the English queen Elizabeth, but when that ruse is seen through he finally reveals the truth of the matter. He is none other then Akabar the Great's uncle. At first this news is greeted with the derision that any lie deserves, but being the just ruler he is, Akabar gives the blonde stranger a chance to tell him how it could be possible for a non-believer from Florence to be his relative.

So begins the story of the princess whom history forgot, Lady Black Eyes, Qara Koz. When her elder sister was wed to the Wormwood Khan as the cost of preserving her father's life, Qara Koz was dragged off into exile as her companion at the tender age of eleven. Eight years later when the Shah of Persia, their father's cousin, overthrew the great Khan he offered to send both women back to their home, but surprisingly the young princess refused and elected to stay with their saviour as his wife. It was then that Akabar's grandfather, father to the sisters, caused her to be written out of the annals of the family's history - and Qara Koz was a name never spoken in public again.

In Florence there were three young friends, of whom one was destined to wander long and far before returning home again to die in the streets where he was born. Niccolo Machiavelli (the author of The Prince), Ago Vespucci (cousin of Amerigo whose name now graces our continent), and Antonino Argalia, were inseparable until the age of eleven when Antonino's mother died of plague and his father fell into the depths of depression. The young Argalia took it upon himself to leave Florence to seek his fortune among the mercenary companies fighting the "cursed Turk", although he said to his friends he wouldn't care if he made his fortune fighting for the Ottomans or against them.

Which is how years latter he found himself leading the armies of the Ottoman Empire when they defeated the Shah of Persia, and found himself face to face with the beauty of Lady Black Eyes. She had accompanied her husband the Shah to the battle field, but when he refused to follow her advice and attack the Turks before they were encamped (it wouldn't have been honourable) she turned her back so as not to see the carnage. As a result she did not see her husband flee the battle field and abandon her to his vanquisher, Argalia of the Turks.

There's a lot to wonder at when reading The Enchantress Of Florence, not the least is the way in which Rushdie makes the seemingly implausible perfectly reasonable, with the remarkable tale of how a Florentine could be the uncle of Akabar, emperor of the Mogul Empire in India. Yet that pales in the face of what I consider his even greater accomplishment - bringing to life the two worlds in which the story takes place. Not only does he render both Florence and Sikri with such accurate brush strokes that we can see them in front of us as if he had painted their pictures, it's the manner in which he describes them that makes them fully alive.

Rushdie has developed a different language for each city, so that each is not only distinguished by their physical characteristics, but by the way they sound to our ear as well. Sikri flows like elegant silk draped over the arm of a beautiful woman, but with an undercurrent of danger that reminds you how quickly a scarf can be twisted to form the garrotte that cuts off a person's life. There is an assurance to her voice that only comes from years of experience and the surety of knowing everyone will listen to you no matter how quiet you whisper.

Florence is brash and bold, with a voice to match as she trumpets forth both her successes and her failures. Yet, in spite of the traces of insecurity that one hears in her proclamations of greatness, you can't help but notice the subtle notes that twist underneath the blare. It is the home of the infamous Medici after all, who smile to your face while plunging a dagger in your back, and whose most famous son became Pope. However, in the end the cities are still only the backdrop for the woman who was the Enchantress of Florence, and the bewitcher of every man, and not a few women, who came in contact with her.

In Lady Black Eyes, the princess whom history forgot, Qara Koz, Rushdie has created one of the most enigmatic and romantic female characters since Sheherazade. For its around that one strand that Rushdie has woven his entire story and creates the elaborate web which eventually snares all his characters and us his readers. For not only is she able to enchant all of Florence by her presence, just by telling her story, the blond stranger claiming kinship with Akabar, brings Sikri to its knees.

The Enchantress Of Florence is a beautiful story that in delineating the differences between renaissance Italy and the Mogul Empire actually brings East and West closer together than anything I've read before. With guest appearances by everyone from Vlad the Impaler to the Medici Pope, Rushdie has created a historical fantasy that's both a pleasure to read and an education in its recreation of two of history's most fascinating cities.

You can purchase a copy of The Enchantress Of Florence in trade paperback format as of January 6th directly from Random House Canada or an on line retailer like Amazon.ca.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:09 PM | Permalink

Another year has winged its way by and with a day left it's fair to assume that I'm not going to be reviewing any more books slated for publication in 2008. So it seems like as good as time as any to put together a list of the books that I liked the most over the past twelve months. Naturally the ones I liked the most stuck in my memory, but I still had to wade through the site's archives so I could locate their links, and I was shocked to see how many articles I had actually published in this time, and how many had been book reviews that I'd forgotten about.

The trouble was that even before I started to wade backwards in time to last January I had already compiled a list of nine books, and the list didn't change. The criteria I used for selecting the books that would make my top list was simple enough; which ones would I be most inclined to re-read. I also decided to limit myself to books that were published in 2008 for the simple fact it made my life somewhat easier when it came to choosing.

So, in no particular order, here are the nine books, of those I reviewed in 2008, that I preferred over the rest.

Binu And The Great Wall by Su Tong was a retelling of a traditional Chinese folk tale/myth of one woman's quest to find her husband after he was conscripted to work on the construction of The Great Wall of China. Accompanied by only a blind frog, she sets out across the breadth and length of China in what seems a fruitless quest to bring her husband a winter coat so he might stand a better chance of surviving the deprivations of slave labour. A beautifully told, and eloquently written story of devotion that provides readers with a wonderful portrait of life in China during the time of the Emperors.

You wouldn't expect a book that deals with the accumulation of statistical evidence about HIV/AIDS to be entertaining, but The Wisdom Of Whores, by former UNAIDS worker Elizabeth Pisani, not only crunches the numbers of the whys and wherefores of the spread of the disease, it does so in such a manner as to leave the reader fascinated. Part of that is due to Pisani herself, who is equal parts iconoclast and idealist. The breeziness of the writing style only accentuates the passion she feels for her subject, and the compassion that she feels for the people her work on the front-lines of the fight against HIV/AIDS has brought her in contact with. From board rooms to brothels, Pisani, takes us behind the scenes everywhere to paint one of the clearest pictures about the state of our attempts to curtail the wave of death and destruction the disease is causing.

Skovbo by Viggo Mortensen, is the companion book/catalogue to a photography exhibit in Reykjavik Iceland. As befits the title, Danish for forest, Skovbo is a collection of photographs of trees and forests taken by Mortensen. Not merely content to "take pictures" of trees, he manages to depict their interaction with light and shadow to bring them alive in ways that makes even the solitary tree in a town square majestic. Even more impressive is his ability to celebrate the tree without romanticizing nature as something ethereal and beautiful. There are dead animals in the fields, broken branches on trees, and ugly and gnarled limbs proliferate. The true beauty of nature is its wildness, and that's at the soul of each picture in Mortensen's latest collection.

Neuropath by Scott Bakker probably caught a lot of people by surprise. Bakker's first three books had been the opening salvo of a major epic fantasy series, so for him to come out with a psychological thriller that bordered on a horror story was a bit of a shock. Be that as it may, it was a brilliantly written, terrifying descent into the potential (and unfortunately very real) dangers of how the mind can be controlled and manipulated. Pleasure becomes pain, feelings and emotions can be artificially stimulated with the flick of a switch or the removal of a synapse. Nothing you feel is real, it's all just conditioned response, and the government can condition you to feel and believe anything they want. Neuropath might be one character's roller coaster ride into a personal hell, but we're all along for the ride, and while the scenery isn't very attractive if we don't learn to recognize it now, it soon might be too late.

One of the best ongoing epic fantasy series took another step towards its conclusion this year as two new instalments in the Malazan Book Of The Fallen were released. Toll The Hounds by Steven Erikson, was followed by The Return Of The Crimson Guard by Ian C. Esslemont and what a one two punch they packed. For while Erikson was following events that were unfolding in the farthest reaches of the Empire affecting the pantheon of Gods and Goddesses of the world, Esslemont was writing about the Empire's struggle for survival. Both men once again prove that not only can they handle the sweeping events of history, but the demands of creating characters who we care about and believe in. Each new book released in this series only reconfirms its pre-eminence among a world of pretenders in the field of epic fantasy.

The King's Gold by Arturo Perez-Reverte continued the adventures of Captain Alatriste during the waning days of Spain's power on the world stage. Here he has been chosen for the delicate task of stealing gold from Spanish merchants for the King's treasury. Hiring some of the worst cut throats and pirates he can find, Alatriste once more takes on the jobs no "honourable" man could be trusted with. However, since Alatriste has no illusions about fights for glory, king, and God, and only does a job when the money is good, he can be counted on to succeed where others would fail. Set against the backdrop of the Inquisition and the church's grab for power in 17th century Spain, The King's Gold proves once again that cynicism can be every bit as noble as blind faith.

A Man Most Wanted by John Le Carre drips with the author's scorn for the "War On Terror". On the surface it deals with the attempts of a German intelligence officer to convince his superiors to let him use an illegal Islamic immigrant as the means to establish a double agent among the jihad terrorists. However, at the moment where he thinks he's scored his ultimate triumph, it's snatched away and he's left holding nothing, while the Americans and British have another prisoner to interrogate at their leisure. What does it matter that the subject knows absolutely nothing? It looks like you're getting results when you arrest somebody, even though the next bomb attack will surprise you as much as the last one did. This is Le Carre's searing indictment of the way in which intelligence communities the world over have botched their job, and succeeded in motivating terrorists more than stopping them with their ham fisted behaviour and stupidity.

Ravensoul by James Barclay sees an author carry off the impossible; bring back a group of characters from the dead and succeed in making the story believable. Most of the Raven had been killed in their last battle, but when even the dead are no longer safe, who else is there to ride in and save the day again but dead heroes? It's a rollicking good time when the Raven come back from the dead, and once they convince their old companions its really them, it's time to try and save the world if they can. Of course if they can't do that, there's the next best thing - find a new one where we can all start over again. Probably the most fun you can have with sword and sorcery without strapping on a sword yourself.

Well that's it, I know these lists are supposed to be ten, but only these nine were able to pass the test of being ones that I'd want to re-read. Whether they're the best books of the year is another matter, but I read because I like too, and these were the books I liked reading most of all. See you next year.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:03 AM | Permalink