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brigdhWatchers of the Dead by Simon Beaufort. The second in the Alec Lonsdale series, murder mysteries set in Victorian London and starring an intrepid newspaper reporter. Watchers of the Dead opens with the murder of Professor Dickerson, who was working with the brand-new British Natural History Museum to put on a human zoo: a supposedly educational but usually horrendously racist display of real people, in this case ~~savage cannibals from the darkest jungles of the Congo~~. Unfortunately the Africans disappear on the same day as the murder, making them prime suspects. Lonsdale and his fellow reporter Hulda Friederichs set out to find and protect the Africans and simultaneously catch Dickerson's real killer. They soon discover multiple similar murders, all of prominent men, which have been covered up. Are the deaths connected to Roderick Maclean, who years earlier attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria and who has recently escaped from his insane asylum? Or is the culprit the mysterious gentlemen's club known only as The Watchers, who have an "unspeakable Happening" planned for Christmas Eve? Or does snobby and pompous Sir Humbage, father of Lonsdale's fiancée, know more than it seems?
It's an intriguing premise, but unfortunately the writing in Watchers of the Dead dragged it down beyond recovery. There's an enormous and hard to remember cast who are given little characterization beyond the shallowest of caricatures. Even Lonsdale, who as main character should get more depth, is bizarrely unemotional about topics such as his fiancée, death threats, friends' secrets, and change of job. There's extremely little descriptive writing of setting, background, or characters' looks, and what few bits we do get is poor:
Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum was imposing and rather frightening. A giant complex encompassing fifty-three acres within its secure area, its entrance was through giant metal gates housed between two massive rectangular towers.
A giant complex with giant gates! Such a rich vocabulary on display here.
There are major plot mistakes, as when characters know things they shouldn't (and in a mystery, you really need to keep track of who has what information). Another mistake that bugged me is that early on, Lonsdale is given a deadline for the Dickerson investigation, as the newspaper's editor is heading to Ireland to investigate a different case and Lonsdale will have to take over editing duties. A short while later, we're told that the Ireland case has been solved, but the deadline remains Lonsdale's major motivation for the entire rest of the book, despite the regular editor presumably no longer needing to leave town. There's also no resolution to this at the end of the book – does Lonsdale ever become editor? How long does he remain so? Who knows! Certainly not the reader of Watchers of the Dead. There are also minor mistakes that I found equally annoying, such as this complaint from Lonsdale about his fiance: Anne talked about independence of spirit but would rather admire it in others than express it herself. He thought she might, when they had first met, but since becoming engaged she had fallen happily into the role of the traditional Victorian lady and all that entailed. Would anyone in the Victorian era actually think of themselves as, well, "in the Victorian era"? I certainly don't see myself in such broad historical terms. If no one in 2019 is priding themselves on being a proper Second Elizabethan lady, why would people in the past do so? I know it's a minor point, but it feels so weirdly anachronistic.
But my biggest problem with Watchers of the Dead is that the whole book feels rushed and summarized, like a plot outline that hasn't been fully fleshed out. The idea of a mystery centered around a human zoo is fantastic, but the Africans barely appear on screen and their situation and its ramifications is given little attention. Characters consistently enter and exit scenes without acknowledgement, chases and fights are recapped rather than allowed to be exciting action displays, and conversations break off suddenly. It's hard to describe exactly how frustrating such summarizing feels, but imagine an entire book that reads like this scene, where Hulda needs to write a secret message that the intended recipient will understand but that no one else will be able to parse:
Lonsdale handed them over, and she went to lean on a wall to write. He read over her shoulder, marvelling at the cleverly cryptic nature of her words. She phrased the message in such a way that no one but Peters would know she was the sender, or that she wanted him to hasten to Cleveland Square at his earliest opportunity.
Really excellent writing there. Tell the readers how awesome this note is, while not bothering to come up with anything to actually show us. And yet somehow there's enough time for not one, not two, but three twist endings.
In short, there are far, far too many other Victorian mystery series to bother with this one.
Also, because I really need to complain about this despite spoilers: the Africans' hiding place is eventually uncovered because Lonsdale smells them out. Yes, really. In a book published in goddam 2019. I mean, it's described as a nice smell, and it turns out to be the scent of their favored bush tea rather than the Africans themselves, but that just leads to another problem. Bush tea (better known as rooibos these days) is not particularly strong-smelling. It wouldn't linger after it's been drunk, nor would you be able to smell it from the next room over when it's still in the packet. What a bizarre plot point.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James. An epic fantasy novel, the first in a proposed trilogy, which has been marketed as "the African Game of Thrones". I have a lot of complicated feelings about Black Leopard Red Wolf, but the most clear and strindent of them all is that this marketing decision is the worst thing that could possibly have happened to the book. Black Leopard Red Wolf is African, I suppose; that's the only accurate thing about that statement. Honestly I'm not even sure it should be called a fantasy novel. I think "magic realism" better captures the baroque, surreal worldbuilding, which conveys the experience of folk tales and fables more than it does the rules and logical consequences of the modern-day fantasy genre. Black Leopard Red Wolf is fantasy as political critique, fantasy as psychology, fantasy as metafiction, and not remotely fantasy as Game of Thrones, or even fantasy as Tolkien. Even describing the plot of Black Leopard Red Wolf is a challenge, since the book deliberately obfuscates and complicates and reverses the flow of events, so while I could lay out in a sentence what it's "about", it took me several hundred pages to decipher that sentence, and so giving it to you here at the beginning seems unfair.
The story is told in a somewhat stream-of-consciousness first person, as our main character (who claims to have forgotten his real name but sometimes goes by Tracker) is imprisoned and questioned by an Inquisitor, who wants to know about a young boy Tracker was hired to find. Tracker (for lack of anything else to call him) doesn't particularly want to answer, and so we get several hundreds of pages of backstory, side-stories, and episodic adventures before finally circling back to the boy and the central mysteries around him: who is the boy? where is he now? why does he matter? who hired Tracker and his companions (including Tracker's ex-lover/current best friend Leopard, who can shapeshift between a man and a black leopard)? who is the Inquisitor working for? why is Tracker imprisoned? This structure feels deliberately obtuse, as though James is challenging the reader to fight their way through a dense jungle if they want to find the meaning and emotional connections deep within. The opening is severely off-putting (there's graphically-described murder, child rape, and torture in just the first three pages) and I believe it's there for the same purpose; Black Leopard Red Wolf is incredibly uninterested in accommodating its readers. James has apparently said that the two subsequent books will retell the same events from different perspectives, Rashomon-style, and betraying the usual narrative conventions to instead focus on subjectivity, nonlinearity, and ambiguity really seems to encapsulate everything he's going for here.
Do I recommend it? I don't even know. I spent at least half, possibly two-thirds, of Black Leopard Red Wolf hating it and wishing I'd never bothered opening the first page (I always feel obligated to finish books once I begin them), and then somehow I got to the end and really wanted to read the sequel immediately. Recognizing that everything I hated about those early pages was an intentional choice didn't make it any easier to slog through the confusing, violent, opaque, disjointed reality of them. And yet, it did pay off in the end; much of what had seemed random and rambling ultimately tied together for a powerful climax. But is that enough to make it all worth it? I've been considering that question since I finished reading, and I still don't have an answer. If you wanted African Game of Thrones, read something else. If a magical realist, literary, post-modern hallucination with every possible trigger warning in existence sounds up your alley, then maybe you're the person Black Leopard Red Wolf was written for.
I ended up giving it four stars, because, well, I'm pretty certain James succeeded in everything he set out to do. Which is a very different matter than succeeding in everything I wanted, but it's the closest I could possibly come to giving a single numerative value to this experience.
It's an intriguing premise, but unfortunately the writing in Watchers of the Dead dragged it down beyond recovery. There's an enormous and hard to remember cast who are given little characterization beyond the shallowest of caricatures. Even Lonsdale, who as main character should get more depth, is bizarrely unemotional about topics such as his fiancée, death threats, friends' secrets, and change of job. There's extremely little descriptive writing of setting, background, or characters' looks, and what few bits we do get is poor:
Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum was imposing and rather frightening. A giant complex encompassing fifty-three acres within its secure area, its entrance was through giant metal gates housed between two massive rectangular towers.
A giant complex with giant gates! Such a rich vocabulary on display here.
There are major plot mistakes, as when characters know things they shouldn't (and in a mystery, you really need to keep track of who has what information). Another mistake that bugged me is that early on, Lonsdale is given a deadline for the Dickerson investigation, as the newspaper's editor is heading to Ireland to investigate a different case and Lonsdale will have to take over editing duties. A short while later, we're told that the Ireland case has been solved, but the deadline remains Lonsdale's major motivation for the entire rest of the book, despite the regular editor presumably no longer needing to leave town. There's also no resolution to this at the end of the book – does Lonsdale ever become editor? How long does he remain so? Who knows! Certainly not the reader of Watchers of the Dead. There are also minor mistakes that I found equally annoying, such as this complaint from Lonsdale about his fiance: Anne talked about independence of spirit but would rather admire it in others than express it herself. He thought she might, when they had first met, but since becoming engaged she had fallen happily into the role of the traditional Victorian lady and all that entailed. Would anyone in the Victorian era actually think of themselves as, well, "in the Victorian era"? I certainly don't see myself in such broad historical terms. If no one in 2019 is priding themselves on being a proper Second Elizabethan lady, why would people in the past do so? I know it's a minor point, but it feels so weirdly anachronistic.
But my biggest problem with Watchers of the Dead is that the whole book feels rushed and summarized, like a plot outline that hasn't been fully fleshed out. The idea of a mystery centered around a human zoo is fantastic, but the Africans barely appear on screen and their situation and its ramifications is given little attention. Characters consistently enter and exit scenes without acknowledgement, chases and fights are recapped rather than allowed to be exciting action displays, and conversations break off suddenly. It's hard to describe exactly how frustrating such summarizing feels, but imagine an entire book that reads like this scene, where Hulda needs to write a secret message that the intended recipient will understand but that no one else will be able to parse:
Lonsdale handed them over, and she went to lean on a wall to write. He read over her shoulder, marvelling at the cleverly cryptic nature of her words. She phrased the message in such a way that no one but Peters would know she was the sender, or that she wanted him to hasten to Cleveland Square at his earliest opportunity.
Really excellent writing there. Tell the readers how awesome this note is, while not bothering to come up with anything to actually show us. And yet somehow there's enough time for not one, not two, but three twist endings.
In short, there are far, far too many other Victorian mystery series to bother with this one.
Also, because I really need to complain about this despite spoilers: the Africans' hiding place is eventually uncovered because Lonsdale smells them out. Yes, really. In a book published in goddam 2019. I mean, it's described as a nice smell, and it turns out to be the scent of their favored bush tea rather than the Africans themselves, but that just leads to another problem. Bush tea (better known as rooibos these days) is not particularly strong-smelling. It wouldn't linger after it's been drunk, nor would you be able to smell it from the next room over when it's still in the packet. What a bizarre plot point.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James. An epic fantasy novel, the first in a proposed trilogy, which has been marketed as "the African Game of Thrones". I have a lot of complicated feelings about Black Leopard Red Wolf, but the most clear and strindent of them all is that this marketing decision is the worst thing that could possibly have happened to the book. Black Leopard Red Wolf is African, I suppose; that's the only accurate thing about that statement. Honestly I'm not even sure it should be called a fantasy novel. I think "magic realism" better captures the baroque, surreal worldbuilding, which conveys the experience of folk tales and fables more than it does the rules and logical consequences of the modern-day fantasy genre. Black Leopard Red Wolf is fantasy as political critique, fantasy as psychology, fantasy as metafiction, and not remotely fantasy as Game of Thrones, or even fantasy as Tolkien. Even describing the plot of Black Leopard Red Wolf is a challenge, since the book deliberately obfuscates and complicates and reverses the flow of events, so while I could lay out in a sentence what it's "about", it took me several hundred pages to decipher that sentence, and so giving it to you here at the beginning seems unfair.
The story is told in a somewhat stream-of-consciousness first person, as our main character (who claims to have forgotten his real name but sometimes goes by Tracker) is imprisoned and questioned by an Inquisitor, who wants to know about a young boy Tracker was hired to find. Tracker (for lack of anything else to call him) doesn't particularly want to answer, and so we get several hundreds of pages of backstory, side-stories, and episodic adventures before finally circling back to the boy and the central mysteries around him: who is the boy? where is he now? why does he matter? who hired Tracker and his companions (including Tracker's ex-lover/current best friend Leopard, who can shapeshift between a man and a black leopard)? who is the Inquisitor working for? why is Tracker imprisoned? This structure feels deliberately obtuse, as though James is challenging the reader to fight their way through a dense jungle if they want to find the meaning and emotional connections deep within. The opening is severely off-putting (there's graphically-described murder, child rape, and torture in just the first three pages) and I believe it's there for the same purpose; Black Leopard Red Wolf is incredibly uninterested in accommodating its readers. James has apparently said that the two subsequent books will retell the same events from different perspectives, Rashomon-style, and betraying the usual narrative conventions to instead focus on subjectivity, nonlinearity, and ambiguity really seems to encapsulate everything he's going for here.
Do I recommend it? I don't even know. I spent at least half, possibly two-thirds, of Black Leopard Red Wolf hating it and wishing I'd never bothered opening the first page (I always feel obligated to finish books once I begin them), and then somehow I got to the end and really wanted to read the sequel immediately. Recognizing that everything I hated about those early pages was an intentional choice didn't make it any easier to slog through the confusing, violent, opaque, disjointed reality of them. And yet, it did pay off in the end; much of what had seemed random and rambling ultimately tied together for a powerful climax. But is that enough to make it all worth it? I've been considering that question since I finished reading, and I still don't have an answer. If you wanted African Game of Thrones, read something else. If a magical realist, literary, post-modern hallucination with every possible trigger warning in existence sounds up your alley, then maybe you're the person Black Leopard Red Wolf was written for.
I ended up giving it four stars, because, well, I'm pretty certain James succeeded in everything he set out to do. Which is a very different matter than succeeding in everything I wanted, but it's the closest I could possibly come to giving a single numerative value to this experience.
