My latest two non-SF novels were published about a century apart. The
Anthologist is Nicholson Baker's brand new novel. Half a Rogue, by
contrast, was published in 1906, by Harold MacGrath best-selling
novelist (and an early writer for films) who is all but forgotten
today, despite reputedly having originated Boris Karloff's stage name.
(Karloff was born William Henry Pratt, and MacGrath's 1920 novel The
Drums of Jeopardy, which was filmed twice (in 1923 and 1931), featured
a mad scientist named Boris Karlov. However, William Henry Pratt
apparently used the name Boris Karloff as early as 1912, so if
anything the inspiration for the name in MacGrath's novel may have run
the other direction.)

I'll treat the newer and better book first. I should say to begin with
that Nicholson Baker is a favorite novelist of mine. His first novel,
The Mezzanine, is perhaps my top choice among his works, but I've
never been disappointed. (Though I have not read Human Smoke, his most
recent nonfiction book, and I probably won't.)

The Anthologist of the title is the first-person narrator, a poet name
Paul Chowder, who had some early success (including a Guggenheim), but
has fallen on hard times in his career. Chowder has compiled an
anthology, called Only Rhyme, a collection of rhymed poetry. However
he has become blocked on writing the introduction. Partly out of
frustration at his fecklessness in this effort, his long time
girlfriend, Roz, has left him.

The book covers a few weeks of his life. (A long time period for a
Baker novel -- The Mezzanine took about an hour, Vox however long a
phone sex call takes, Room Temperature about 20 minutes.) In his
personal life Chowder spends most of his time cat vacuuming -- that
is, avoiding writing. He cleans out his office. He mows his lawn. He
helps a neighbor put in a floor. And he moons over Roz, even visiting
her a few times, especially when he suffers a minor hand injury. He
gives a reading. He renews his passport. And he attends a conference
in Switzerland.

Around all this he discusses his theories about poetry. Chowder is a
strong advocate of rhyme (as his anthology's title suggests). He's
also a strong believer that the fundamental rhythm of English poetry
is the four beat line of the ballad. Metric theory (iambs and anapests
and all) is a distraction. Iambic pentameter is a mistake. Free verse
even more so. (Yet he constantly mentions how good some free verse
poems are -- and, ironically, he admits that he himself can't rhyme
very well.) It's all quite well argued, with excellent examples. Even
if you disagree, it's very entertaining. (Assuming you like poetry.)

Aside from those details of plot and theme, the book is just very
nicely written. Baker is a wonderful, funny, writer of prose, and a
great observer of details. (For instance, he complains about something
I've complained about -- the way it is so hard to tell which side is
up on a USB connector.) Prose example: talking about Horace meant when
he wrote "carpe diem" -- not exactly "seize the day" but pluck it:
"Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without
damaging it, is what Horace meant -- pick the day, harvest the day,
reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don't freaking grape the
day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping
bite out of it. That's not the kind of man Horace was." Not the best,
nor most euphonious, passage I could have chosen, but it gives a good
sense of the rhythm and light humor and knowledge of the book. Highly
recommended.

I can't really highly recommend Half a Rogue. I have a certain
interest in old popular fiction. And the book is short (perhaps 80,000
words), and on a brief scan looked like it might turn sexily on a love
triangle or quadrangle, so I thought it might be fun. And to be fair,
it reads quite breezily, and holds the interest OK. But it's full of
cliche, both in the writing and in the characterization. There's some
offensive characterizations of ethnic groups, particularly Italians
and Irish (no mention of black people) -- I suppose par for the course
in popular fiction of that era. There's also a notable classism --
there's a strong sense that we are to be led by "gentleman", though to
be sure the main character is the son of a potato farmer, a self-made
man -- but still, it's clear, a "gentleman".

Anyway, the novel opens curiously with playwright Richard Warrington
approached in a restaurant by a young woman, who it seems cannot pay
for her meal, due to a sad story concerning her father's bad habits.
Of course he pays for it (the gentleman), and then it turns out she's
an actress who can't get a fair hearing, and this her means of proving
how talented she is. As it happens, Warrington is looking for a new
lead for his latest play, because his current star is insisting on
changes to give her a more flattering role, and that would ruin his
art. This made me think the story would be set on Broadway at the turn
of the century ... but then suddenly we are several years in the
future. Katherine Challoner, the actress he had hired in the first
chapter, comes to him with news -- she is getting married, and will
leave the stage. There is a hint of romantic entanglement in the past
between Warrington and Challoner, but nothing came of it (their hearts
were not truly engaged). Meantime Warrington is pondering a very
flattering letter praising his work -- from an anonymous very young
woman. And then his old University friend, the rich businessman John
Bennington, visits and asks him to be his best man -- for he will be
married soon. Of course it turns out that Bennington is in fact
marrying Katherine Challoner ... and (gasp!) Katherine left her gloves
with Warrington when she came and told him of her plans to leave the
stage and get married.

The wedding of course will be in Bennington and Warrington's common
home town, Herculaneum, in upstate New York. (It seems overtly
modelled on MacGrath's home town, Syracuse.) The scene shifts quickly
there. A few threads are set up. In one, the local social leader, Mrs.
Franklyn-Haldene, an odious woman, begins to plot to make sure that
the soon to be Katherine Bennington will not be able to upstage her
social position -- after all, an actress! In another, Warrington, who
comes to stay with his beloved Aunt, who raised him after his father
died (his mother have left at his birth), again meets Bennington's
much younger sister, Patty, and an attraction quickly blooms.
(Warrington, no surprise, soon discovers that it was Patty who had
written the anonymous letter of praise that he so treasured.) In a
third, Warrington is recruited to run for Mayor, to oppose the
entrenched candidate, who is the tool of an odious man named McQuade,
who uses his influence to arrange for corruptly awarded city
construction contracts. And in the fourth, Bennington's steel mill is
threatened with a strike because he employs a non-union engineer, who,
even worse, is British, and worse still, is perfecting a labor-saving
device.

Naturally all these threads converge. Bennington's association with
Warrington means that his business decisions may throw votes to the
other guy. McQuade plots to ruin Warrington's reputation, and his
eventual tool is to suggest that Warrington and Katherine Challoner
had an affair. Patty's love for Warrington is threatened if she too
believed that her new sister-in-law (whom she loves) was previously
involved with her new paramour. And the same scandal that may affect
Warrington's reputation of course also affects Katherine Bennington's
-- which plays into Mrs. Franklyn-Haldene's hands.

Ace Double Reviews, 86: Endless Shadow, by John Brunner/The Arsenal of
Miracles, by Gardner F. Fox (#F-299, 1964, 40 cents)

Here I continue my exploration of the minor works of John Brunner via
Ace Double. Which is a good way to do it, I think -- Brunner wrote a
lot of short novels, many of them published as Ace Doubles, and they
tend to be entertaining but fairly obviously dashed off quickly.

So, this Ace Double includes Endless Shadow, a very short (about
31,500 words) novel from Brunner. The other side is a novel by Gardner
F. Fox. Fox (1911-1986) is a fairly legendary figure in the history of
comics. He was a lawyer who turned to writing fairly early, and by
1939 was already writing comics, inventing the character the Sandman.
He worked mainly for DC, it seems. He was one of the earliest writers
of Batman stories, and he created the Flash. All that is very well,
but what about Fox the prose writer? Fox wrote a fair amount for pulps
in many genres, but he was an avowed fan of SF (beginning with
Burroughs). My previous experience with him was a story or two for
Planet Stories. I thought them truly awful, among the worst stuff I
read in Planet. The Arsenal of Miracles is the only Ace Double I know
of by him, though he did do some pseudonymous work, so perhaps he
wrote others under different names. It's about 52,000 words long.

Endless Shadow isn't one of the better John Brunner Ace Doubles I've
read, but it is better than the last one, "Keith Woodcott"'s The
Psionic Menace. This novel uses an idea most familiar to me from John
Barnes's Thousand Cultures series: a number of planets have been
colonized using STL methods (or perhaps slowish FTL methods) and have
progressed in isolation over the centuries, but teleportation
technology has been developed (called here the Bridge System) and
slowly authorities on Earth are establishing instantaneous links to
the various colonies. I'm sure I've seen this idea explored elsewhere
than in Brunner or Barnes, but I can't offhand call up examples.
Anyone have any ideas? I suppose in a weird way C. J. Cherryh's early
novels beginning with Gate of Ivrel resemble this idea. (On the other
hand, the notion of STL colonies being united by later-developed FTL
spaceships is fairly common.)

The problem of course is that some of the colonies have developed some
pretty weird, potentially rather vile, cultures. The immediate problem
faced by Bridge System Director Jorgen Thorkild is Riger's World,
which has engendered a cult of snakehandlers which threatens to spread
to Earth. But that problem can be solved ... Thorkild's more serious
issues are personal. He is obsessed with gaining the favors of his
previous boss's mistress, Alida Marquis. But Alida has no interest in
him, even though her lover, and Jorgen's boss, is out of the picture,
having committed suicide.

It turns out Jorgen's real problems are internal -- he, like his
predecessor, is losing his sanity. This particular issue is brought to
a head when a new planet named Azrael is contacted. The chief religion
on Azrael is rather nihilistic -- death is prized as the ultimate
experience, and it is best achieved by murdering another person, which
act is punishable by death. The "programer" (Brunner's spelling of
"programmer" -- I confess I had to pronounce it pro-Gray-mer) in
charge of figuring out Azrael culture is himself murdered. A brilliant
young programer, Hans Demetrios, is assigned to Azrael.

Azrael's representative comes to Earth and quickly rejects Earth's
offer of a link to the Bridge System. This act somehow drives Thorkild
over the edge to insanity. Meanwhile Alida Marquis has fallen in love
with Hans Demetrios, who has gone to Azrael to take a desperate risk
which should bring Azrael into line -- perhaps at the cost of his own
sanity. And Thorkild, in the asylum, meets a naked young woman with
her own problems. Somehow her nakedness signals that Thorkild must
fall for her ... but her dilemma -- how to find meaning in the overly
abundant culture of Earth -- gives him the keys to his own similar
problems.

It all never really makes sense. Brunner is clearly trying to write a
philosophically engaging novel -- at times it reads a little bit like
Ayn Rand -- but the ideas at the center don't ever convince. Perhaps
the book is simply too short -- it is certainly at the beginning very
confusing, and perhaps a chapter or two of backstory would have
helped. It is for an Ace Double oddly free of real action -- it truly
does turn on the philosophical issues, not on action or derring do or
even, really, politics. I didn't dislike it, but neither did I really
like it.

It sometimes seems like Don Wollheim chose the novels paired in Ace
Doubles because he could find links between them. The Arsenal of
Miracles isn't very much like Endless Shadow, but it does have one
slight link: it turns to an extent on the discovery of "gates" between
worlds otherwise only linked by much slower (though in this case still
FTL) spaceships. In this case the gates are a legacy of a long
vanished race. The novel opens with Bran Magannon, the "Wanderer",
losing a dice throw to a mysterious woman on the planet Makkador. His
penalty: she owns his service. She is, naturally, his long lost lover,
Peganna of the Silver Hair. Peganna is the Queen of a humanoid race,
the Lyanirn, that had opposed humanity years before. Bran was the
commander of the human forces, and he figured out how to beat them,
and then worked on a deal to let the two races co-exist -- while he
fell in love with Peganna. But a jealous subordinate purposely
undermined the deal, and the Lyanirn fled to an isolated planet, while
Bran, relegated to a humiliating desk job, resigned and began
"wandering". His secret was the gate system he found, left by the
long-vanished Crenn Lir.

Although surprisingly non-SFF-y.

--

"What is art to me and my way of living?"
replied the tumblebug, wearily.

    The only circumstances under which a lady can properly call upon a
    gentleman are if he is old and ill and has requested the visit.
    Whether he is also rich is irrelevant, but it never hurts.

A preceding item is

    A gentleman may express his passion for a married woman in a
    letter, but the letter must not suggest that his love has been
    looked upon with favor in any way that would be intelligible to a
    jury of their peers.

So, while the etiquette is doubtless correct, I suspect that she
wasn't entirely serious in manner.

I get pissed every time I see that Intel commercial where the guy
who invented USB is treated like a rock star. If he's so smart, why
didn't he make the damned connectors trapezoidal?