The Vagrant

Peter Newman

Harper Voyager

£14.99, hardback, 400pp.

Review: Ian Hunter

He is “The Vagrant”, that “is his name. He has no other” proclaims the cover, below a cover illustration – by whom? I don’t know as this is clearly a very advance proof copy, so there is no mention of the illustrator and there are blanks for the author’s dedication and acknowledgements, although the cover is slightly misleading as we are given a hooded figure (so hooded that his face is in shadow),who wears a tattered coat, with one hand balancing a sword across his shoulders, while his other hand holds a bundle of baby close to his chest, and all this beneath a looming cityscape, crowding in on him from both sides. I say, misleading because The Vagrant we read beyond this cover would never be so brazen to reveal the fabled sword that he carries or the baby tucked within the confines of his coat. Both are precious to him. The sword is a lost treasure, bearing great power that many covet, because of its worth or because they want to see it – and the forces of darkness christen the weapon “The Malice” – destroyed. The baby is also coveted, but it’s probably better not to dwell on why and what for in a world where body parts of the living and dead are sought after. As for the name “Vagrant”? Given that our hero cannot utter a word, and has to communicate by facial expressions and gestures, I’d be hard pressed to remember an instance when someone else, other than Newman, actually refers to our wandering hero as “The Vagrant”, although he does gather a few other names along the way.

Eight years ago, ten thousand Seraph Knights fought in the Battle of the Red Wave, fighting on the side of the Empire of the Winged Eye, fighting alongside Gamma, one of the fabled, all-mighty, Seven, but the Seven have been complacent, too remote from human affairs in their ivory towers in the Shining City. It has taken them over a year to deliberate what to do when the first demonic hordes started rising from the Breach, and when they finally decide to fight, those that have risen from the Breach have a foothold in this world and are waiting for them. Incredibly, Gamma falls, along with eight thousand knights, and soon the two thousand that remain are reduced to only a handful, and the world around the Breach starts to change, become malignant, and the demonic entity known as the Usurper is created and eight years later, travelling across this devastated world walks a stranger, a man with a mission, bearing two secrets - gamma’s sword and a baby, and he has to get them both to the Shining City.

I’m reminded of that line out of Amadeus when the King complains to Mozart that his music has “too many notes”, and if you’ve ever listened to the jazz compositions or classical music that Frank Zappa wrote, you’ll know what I mean as they are just too busy. There is a heck of a lot going on in Newman’s debut novel as we journey with the Vagrant and various “hangers on” and encounter a whole host of exotic characters and equally exotic, or decaying locations. The invention here is probably on a par with the “Arabat” novels of Clive Barker, the series of Fourth World DC comics of the late Jack Kirby, and more recently “The Relic Guild” by Edward Cox. Rather like Cox’s novel the story is told in a linear fashion, punctuated by a series of past events, that become more and more recent, thus we learn of the Breach being breached and the fall of Gamma, right up until a year ago, and these glimpses into the past reveal the story of the Vagrant, why he carries Gamma’s sword and whom the baby belongs to. Given that this is an uncorrected proof copy, some of these chapters set in the past did slip into the present when I think they should have been a brand new chapter, no doubt something that will be corrected for the final edition.

“The Vagrant” isn’t really my cup of tea, and I had problems with all the situations and scenarios and the denseness of the description in places and a lack of lead character viewpoint, in a writing style that reminded me of William Gibson and Gene Wolfe because of its tendency to distance things slightly through a present tense, observational delivery. Credibility was also stretched in for too many places where the plot could be termed as “and with one mighty leap the Vagrant was free”. Yet, despite these misgivings, I did devour whole chunks of the novel at one sitting, and I did even start to care about the minor characters, even the goat that gets dragged along behind them to provide milk for the infant. One character in particular showed interesting character development and could have spawned a few interesting plot lines, but no, Newman ruthlessly cut them down, or rather the Vagrant did, albeit reluctantly. He is the archetypal hero, the stranger, on a quest, on a mission. The man with almost no name that changes everything. He does not speak nor do we get into his head, rather we see how he reacts and interacts with others and the effect he has on the lives of those he encounters, a flickering light of hope in a land of darkness. I look forward to seeing how that effect continues in the sequel called “The Malice” due out next year.

The Fire Sermon

Francesca Haig

Harper Collins

£12.99, hardback, 419pp

Review: Noel Chidwick

The Fire Sermon is a novel that hits the ground galloping, scooping up Cass onto the back of a horse to be thrown into a dungeon lit only by the buzzing glow of a single lightbulb. Chapter one is a masterclass for fledgling writers in how to grab your readers by the eyeballs and hurl them into your story.

Some 400 years after the ‘Blast’ mankind is back to pre-industrial existence, but with a twist. Births are always boy-girl twins where one—the Alpha—is perfect, but the other—the Omega—is deformed in some way. The deformation is usually visible and the Omega twin sent away. But sometimes the deformation is not obvious and the twins are brought up together until the Omega becomes apparent. Cass—short for Cassandra, unnecessarily—the Omega twin to Zach hides her ‘deformation’ for years until as teenagers she finally has to reveal that she is a seer, sensing events to come. She dreams of the Blast too:

“There were no written tales…what was the point…when it was etched on every surface? It was still visible in every tumbled cliff, scorched plain and every ash-clogged river. Every face. It had become the only story the earth could tell, so who else would record it?”

Yes, the first thought that sprang to my mind is John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. Set in a similar post-nuclear apocalypse where the deformed infants are similarly scorned, and the protagonist whose ‘deformity’ is similarly of the mind, in this case David being a telepath. But Francesca Haig sets us old-timers’ minds at rest when she cheekily names her main town where Cass is incarcerated as Wyndham. Thereafter I relaxed into the tale to see where we are taken.

The Fire Sermon relies on the new cast-iron law of nature of linked twins (when one dies, so does the other) and the story rattles along as we understand Cass was imprisoned by her twin who by now is a High Heid Yin on the Council, who is protecting his sister in the cell and thereby protecting himself.

Soon Cass is on the run with her new friend Kip as they try to find their way to a safe colony for Omegas and the story becomes a strong chase around this neatly described future of mankind knocked back to an agricultural lifestyle. We sympathise with Cass as she struggles internally to understand her world, how to restore her relationship with her brother and also right the wrongs of the persecution of the Omegas. Although a contrivance, the linking of severe pain and deaths of twins sets up an agonising balance, asking us to consider that when we harm others we also risk injuring ourselves.

I rattled through the book, eager to turn the page. It’s a mix of adventure and plot turns, with ample space to explore themes of oppression and reconciliation.

Wyndham fans may well each raise an eyebrow, but they can lower them again: The Fire Sermon is a thoroughly good read. It is craftfully written and reaches a satisfying conclusion, but with enough loose ends to guarantee the story continues. I look forward to the sequel to be published in the New Year.

The Good, The Bad and The Smug

Tom Holt

Orbit

£8.99, paperback, 368pp

published 30th July 2015

Review: Jacob Edwards

What’s in a name?

Book covers of old would sometimes describe Tom Holt’s writing as seriously funny, and because the funny aspect was predominant there was a tendency to assume seriously was being used in the informal sense; to wit, substantially. But it would also be true (if somewhat more demanding on the rolling tongue) to call Holt funnily serious, and over the last umpteen years the tone of his books has been darkening slowly towards this inversion. The words black comedy have come by way of misappropriation elsewhere to indicate a non-comedic work, particularly a flop, trying to shift genres and pass itself off with imperial majesty, but in Holt’s case the term might genuinely be applied. Earlier this year, he came out as the author behind award-winning pseudonymous fantasy writer K. J. Parker — not altogether surprising; the acknowledgments page at the back of Parker’s novel Sharps, where she describes herself as overweight and middle-aged, was clearly a prelude to confession — and if his/her bodies of work are examined in parallel, a certain amount of cross-pollination is indeed discernible.

Tom Holt is both serious and funny, and it is this blend, this melding of authorial attributes, that gives his books their mouth-watering allure.

The Good, the Bad and the Smug is the fourth and most recent of Holt’s forays into YouSpace (an operating system that affords its users access to the multiverse, using portals invoked by looking through the eye of a doughnut). Its tagline is a novel beyond good and evil, and though the paronomastic title renders unto this a certain levity, Holt’s exploration takes us outside the box and in fact allows for some atypical, rather sobering perspectives on this not-quite-so-unambiguous tenet of human existence.

The book is still gently uproarious (fair dinkum droll, as we say in Australia), but whether due to subject matter or delivery, it’s also just a tad less accessible than usual. One contributing factor must be that, with the exception of the South Cudworth and District Particle Physics Club (unforgettably hapless in trying to bake a doughnut), the protagonists are all non-human: there’s Mordak, the nominally bad yet progressively enlightened king of the goblins; Efluviel, an elf driven by self-interest but made to detour along the road of doing the right thing; Archie, a goblin enduring human form; a rogue commodities broker (technically human, but...); and the Dark Lord himself, whose millennia of incorporeal floating have given rise finally to a new body with in-built, not-so-dark motivations.

To a fault these characters either exhibit or experience human foibles, their alien mind-sets giving homo sapien the chance to stand outside looking in; and perhaps at heart this is what makes the book ever so slightly uncomfortable a read: humanity is bad enough when it’s happening to you; to step back and find it’s just happening, and that you’re an inseparable part of it, well, that’s enough to make a person dash for the nearest bakery...

In a multiverse all things are possible, so anything we can imagine, no matter how absurd, must take place; and while the bad news is that it mostly seems to be taking place in our particular universe, the good news is that we have Tom Holt (quoz-finder by royal appointment, somewhere at least) to point it out to us: the film industry; gala awards nights; journalism and bureaucracy; prophesy; quest fantasy; interactive operating systems; grand scale economic policy; good and evil; the whole shebang. If it’s going on and really, by any measure of common sense, shouldn’t be, expect to read about it in a Tom Holt novel. (Or in more sombre tones, distilled down to the essence of human nature, something by K. J. Parker; and if you’ve read one but not the other, you have a lot to catch up on.)

The Good, the Bad and the Smug is Holt’s first book since owning up to the Parker pen name — rarely has a pun waited so long to germinate — and to anybody who might fret as to his ongoing efficacy as a humourist, it should serve to assuage all worry.

Tom Holt remains his usual, vivid, parlously witty self. All told, in fact, he’s now twice as accomplished as you probably thought.

Meet the Artists

Dave Alexander (The Brat and the Burly Qs, Website banner) was born and dragged up in Glasgow in the mid 20th century—in a time of steam trains, tramcars and black and white tv.

He was bitten by the science fiction bug (eyed monster?) at an early age, through the combined onslaught of comics, picture cards, SF films and television. He trained as a technical illustrator, inspired by the cutaway illustrations he had seen in Eagle comic. he painted covers for D.C. Thomson's Starblazer comics.

He turned to drawing and publishing his own comics—the adult humour titles 'Electric Soup' in 1989, and Northern Lightz in 1999.