December 2010 Book Reviews

by Paul Witcover and Elizabeth Bear

Temporary Culture is a small press out of Montclair, New Jersey, owned and operated by Henry Wessells, an antiquarian bookseller who also happens to be a talented writer—his self-published collection, Another Green World, was a highlight of 2004. To call Wessells a publisher is to sell him short; he does not produce books so much as beautifully eclectic artifacts: high-quality bindings containing exquisite fictions enhanced by lovely art, all very obviously the result of devoted attention and craftsmanship. He has a discerning eye, and a small but prestigious list, including works by such authors as Michael Swanwick, Gregory Feeley, and Howard Waldrop—writers of a certain sensibility, whose fictions and non-fictions are themselves apt to be somewhat eclectic.

All of which is my roundabout introduction to his latest offering, a finely wrought short story by Ellen Kushner, The Man with the Knives (Temporary Culture, chapbook, 22 pp., $15.00, ISBN: 978-0976466062), which appears with sinuous Pre-Raphaelite-style drawings by Thomas Canty, a two-time World Fantasy Award winner. The story is set in the fantasy world first introduced by Kushner in her influential novel Swordspoint, and revisited in the novels The Fall of the Kings (with Delia Sherman) and, most recently, The Privilege of the Sword. Temporary Culture only sells its books by mail order; the necessary information can be found at http://cargocollective.com/temporaryculture.

Kushner is credited with creating what has been variously labeled the fantasy of manners and mannerpunk—the Swordspoint novels are set in a quasi-medieval milieu that has no obvious magical component and is characterized by a complex social structure, reminiscent of Regency etiquette in all its decadent roses and thorns, in which, among other departures from reality, homosexuality carries no stigma but, rather, is simply another thread of human emotion to be tugged, woven, or snipped by ambitious, too-often unscrupulous power-seekers. Among the many memorable characters in these books, the two that hold the readers’ interest most enduringly are the lovers Richard St. Vier, a swordsman and duelist without peer, and Alec Campion, the “Mad Duke” of Tremontaine, a dissolute, fiercely intelligent young nobleman with a self-destructive streak. There is an element of high romance to Kushner’s work, but it is honed to a bleeding edge by a deep appreciation of what motivates men and women. These are fantasies for adults, with the pang of real love and loss in them, sometimes surprisingly violent, sometimes breathtakingly tender, and sometimes very passionate indeed.

The Man with the Knives is set between the events of The Privilege of the Sword and another short story, “The Death of the Duke.” Without some knowledge of those events, readers are apt to find the story enjoyable for its carefully wrought prose, stripped of every excess of expression, and its impressionistic evocation of the slow and painful reawakening of a shattered heart after profound tragedy, but, all in all, will likely judge it a slight piece of work: a character study, no more. But for readers familiar with the history of Campion and St. Vier, what might otherwise seem shallow reveals depths of feeling and nuance masterfully evoked through subtle details, allusions, repetitions, and thus the story takes on a whole world of unspoken feeling and meaning as a spinster doctor named Sofia, on a remote island, endeavors to save an all-but-dead stranger who calls himself Campion and carries no property but a case of surgical knives. Part of the story is Sofia’s, of course—a woman of a certain age, awakening to love for the first time. But the meat of the story belongs to Campion, and to the past he endeavors to keep secret—a past that Kushner tenderly yet unflinchingly unfolds for her readers.—Review by Paul Witcover

We join the series to which Kelley Armstrong’s newest belongs already in progress: book eleven in the Women of the Otherworld series. However,Waking the Witch (Dutton, hardcover, 320 pages, $25.95, ISBN 978-0525951780) functions quite nicely as a stand-alone novel. The protagonist, a twenty-one-year-old motorcycle-riding witch named Savannah Levine, is a private investigator sent to rural Washington State in order to solve the mystery of three murdered women.

The plot is mostly a small-town mystery, with Savannah taking the place of the Continental Op with reasonably entertaining results. Along the way, she encounters a cookie-baking hippie commune that is more sinister than it seems; the inevitable problems with small-town law enforcement; and the usual clutch of locals who either want to mislead her, control her, recruit her, or run her off the road.

This book offers a lot of the same pleasures that Nancy Drew does, updated and aimed at grownups. —Review by Elizabeth Bear