Tag Archives: Fantasy

book report: Last Call, by Tim Powers

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My first Tim Powers book was the great Declare. I like European history and spy thrillers and Fantasy, so for me Declare was like Alan Furst’s Dark Star, impregnated by The Dark is Rising. Alas, everything else of his I’ve read has been interesting & well-written, but unengaging – at least for me.

Last Call is one of the unengaging reads, for me. As far as I could tell, it’s about a guy who lost his soul in a poker game, to his father, who blinded him with a Tarot card when he was a small boy, and now he’s in Las Vegas with a Greek neighbour who has a huge moustache, and his sister, who is also Isis, trying to do something to play poker with his father again, and win this time. It’s occasionally difficult to follow, as the father figure has several identities so I often thought “who is this, again?” and also I found it a big of a slog so read it in pieces over several weeks, forgetting parts of the plot en route.

It is however well-reviewed elsewhere, and not a bad book by any means. I like this kind of magic realism, where instead of an outright Fantasy world of dragons & whatnot, you have the modern world in all its mundane grime & absurdity, overlaid with strange magics. In this, it resembles Twin Peaks, the last season of which was also partly set in Las Vegas. Powers is good at this, e.g. the edifices of gambling:

Leon had suspected for years that the mannequins in the built-to-be-bombed houses out at Yucca Flats in the 1950s had been, unknown even to the technicians who had set them up, sacrifices to the gods of chaos that were about to be invoked by the detonation of the atomic bomb, and it had seemed to him, too, that the multitude of statues around Las Vegas, from the stone Arabs in front of the Sahara on the Strip to the towering figure of Vegas Vic over the Pioneer Club on Fremont Street, exposed constantly to the sun and the rain, were offerings to the random patterns of the weather, another manifestation of the chaos gods. Chaos and randomness, after all, in the form of gambling, were the patron saints of the city, and had to be appeased.

I found the characters utterly uninteresting, flat, American and kind of pointless, but I suspect that’s just a personal reaction. As I get older my tastes become narrower & more violent. I’ll probably try at least one other Powers novel, in case it captures some of Declare’s, well, power.

book report: The Hounds of the Morrigan

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Pat O’Shea’s children’s classic, The Hounds of the Morrigan, published in 1985 after 13 years of writing and presumably rewriting and editing and authorial hardship. I read it a few times in my teenage years and revisited it over Christmas, to my benefit.

It’s a very good if not perfect or great work. Although its publication date coincides with the glut of´80s D & D Fantasy novels, it’s a very different beast: it could have been written in the 1950s, where it is set, in a barely-modern Ireland suffused with mystery and superstition and Gaelic divinities. The story is episodic and at times unsatisfying, as two Irish children basically hop from one mythic difficulty to another, each time helped out by Gaelic deities. However, it’s only unsatisfying if you’re reading it as a modern novel; if you read it as a typical fairy tale it’s perfectly enjoyable and indeed meritorious. It is a gorillion times better than the one drearily bearable Harry Potter book I endured. There are many fine mythic notes, e.g. as the children are being pursued by the eponymous hounds, they are warned to walk but never run if the hounds are within sight:

‘Hunting is one thing; catching is another thing entirely. You have a long way to go and you have started gently. Don’t think it is easy not to run. You are only thinking it’s easy because you have never been hunted by a beast of prey.’

‘Beast of prey?’ Pidge echoed with a shiver. ‘Are we prey?’

‘Not unless you run. Only if you run. You will be followed but not hunted, do you understand? You may run but never within sight of the hounds.‘

This explained for me something of Vox Day’s attitude. There are also some nice observations of human nature:

When a person lives in the country where the population is sparse, he doesn’t get much chance to study things like sneers. With so few people about, the one sneer of the week could well be happening in the far side of the parish and he’d miss it if he wasn’t there. On the other hand, there could even be six sneers per hour at the farm a half a mile away and he wouldn’t get the chance to see them. For as sure as anything, the ones who are good at sneering, become best at smiling when a visitor arrives.

I have had recent opportunity to observe Millennial/Gen X Irish and they are definitely different to the English; there is a certain fey note, an anarchic strain even as they are all seemingly one world government New World Order fans and think the EU and George Soros are the best things since sliced bread. It is sad to think that even now Ireland is being colonized by Arabs, Pakistanis, and negroes, and that (given birth rates) the country will be wholly non-white in a hundred years, the progressive Open Borders/Soros agenda having utterly destroyed the Irish beyond the wildest dreams of Oliver Cromwell – and that the Irish are happily acquiescent, indeed joyful about their extermination.

However, I also wondered if the mythic forms of e.g. the Morrigan and Cuchulain are so deep and so old that they will eventually reassert themselves. There is something intractable about the Irish myths, that I wonder if a mere generation or two of liberal degeneracy is enough to eradicate them; will the children or grandchildren of the current Sorosian retards be fighting a race war under the banner of the old Gaelic gods, cursing their idle, liberal forebears?