The Evil Shepherd by E. Phillips Oppenheim

All tease with little payoff

British author E. Phillips Oppenheim was a very popular author of crime and espionage suspense novels from the 1890s up into the early 1940s. I tend to think of him as the Alfred Hitchcock of English literature. Oppenheim wrote over 100 novels, but I couldn’t tell you which of those are considered his best, so when I’m in the mood for his sort of fare I tend to just pick a novel at random, based on its title. His novel The Evil Shepherd was published in 1922.

Francis Ledsam is a young defense attorney in London who has established a stellar reputation with his courtroom success record. His enthusiasm for his profession sours, however, when he finds out that a client he recently defended, who was acquitted of all charges, is actually a guilty criminal and despicable human being. From that point forward, Ledsam decides he will only defend clients who he knows for sure are innocent. After having proclaimed himself a crimefighting do-gooder, he is approached by a mysterious character, Sir Timothy Brast, who teases Ledsam with the prediction of a murder that takes place soon after. The wealthy Brast is also rumored to hold wild parties in a walled compound where all manner of illegal activity takes place. Ledsam sees Brast as a sort of Professor Moriarity-type criminal mastermind who acts as an “evil shepherd” over a flock of criminal henchmen, not so much committing crimes himself as facilitating them. Ledsam works to uncover Brast’s evil secrets, a task complicated by the fact that Ledsam has also fallen in love with Brast’s daughter.

Since one of these gentlemen is devoted to stamping out crime while the other openly sympathizes with criminals, Ledsam and Brast each considers the other his enemy. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop the two from wining and dining one another as if they were the best of friends. Oppenheim takes the idea of “frenemies” a bit too far. Despite their differences, the two adversaries have clearly formed a mutual admiration society. Throughout most of the book, relations between Ledsam and Brast are so cordial that it nullifies any tension that should exist between them. The main problem with this book is that for all Brast’s talk of himself as being evil and immoral, the reader never actually learns of him doing anything wrong. His career as a criminal mastermind is apparently all talk and no action. Oppenheim keeps hinting at crimes, foreshadowing a revelation of evil deeds at the very end of the book. The reader waits and waits for the climax, but when it comes it’s a disappointment, and it feels like the whole story was just a big tease.

The problem with a lot of Oppenheim’s books is that they were published at a time when one couldn’t really write about the hideous or horrific details of crimes. The audience of his day would have been disgusted and offended by a truly frightening description of a murder. Thus, authors of Oppenheim’s era had to resort to “gentleman killers” who don’t feel very threatening by today’s standards. (On the other hand, Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t have that problem with Moriarity, but Oppenheim always reads as if he were aiming at a more genteel audience.) To his credit, Oppenheim is a skilled enough writer that he manages to keep this cat-and-mouse game interesting for its entire length. Ultimately, it may be a letdown, but it’s not a bore. Nevertheless, since Oppenheim was such a prolific author, you’d be better off avoiding The Evil Shepherd and trying one of the other hundred-plus books he wrote.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.

https://www.amazon.com/review/RGIE5EV211AP6/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm

Aztec by Gary Jennings

Fascinating history retold with inappropriate kinks

I have an avid interest in Mexico and its pre-Colombian history, and I have often wondered why there aren’t more historical novels set in that world. When I heard about Gary Jennings’s novel Aztec, published in 1980, it sounded like that Mexican epic I had long been looking for, but in some respects it turned out to be a case of “Be careful what you wish for.”

Aztec is ostensibly the autobiography of an elderly Mexica man named Mixtli. His narrative is transcribed verbatim by a team of Spanish clergymen in the year 1529, under the direction of Bishop Juan de Zumárraga. This clever structure allows the bishop to provide brief commentaries from a Spanish perspective in his letters home to King Carlos. In a wise choice by Jennings, Mixtli is not an Aztec king, high priest, or great warrior, but rather a minor noble with a talent for languages. Through his work as a scribe, interpreter, and diplomat, he is able to move in all circles of Aztec society and is present at some of the most important events in Mexican history. The book takes place mostly in the ancient metropolis of Tenochtitlan and focuses on the culture of the Aztecs, Mexica, or Triple Alliance (three names for the same civilization), but if you are interested in other cultures of ancient Mexico, have no fear. Mixtli travels quite a bit, so the reader also gets glimpses of the Maya, Olmecs, Tarahumara, and several other peoples of ancient Mexico.

Unfortunately, one aspect of the book that’s really awful are its sex scenes, of which there are many. One minute you’re deeply involved in the history of ancient Mesoamerica, and the next minute you’re reading Penthouse Forum. These scenes are almost all totally unnecessary and positively juvenile in their boyish glee over salacious details of reproductive anatomy. Did you know that earthquakes make people horny? Well, if you didn’t, Jennings manages to work that into the story not once but twice. The sex scenes are not only annoying but unrealistic. If an Aztec were recounting his life story to a bunch of Spaniards, would he describe everything in minute detail as if his listeners had never seen genitalia before? I don’t know if incest and pedophilia were common in ancient Mexico, but even if they were, the giddiness with which Jennings recalls such incidents is uncalled for. As one would expect, there’s also plenty of violence in this novel, which is more excusable. Human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism were part of Aztec culture, and the gore inherent in their description is justified, but beyond that Jennings also includes a few over-the-top scenes of gratuitous torture porn.

Something else that’s exasperating about this novel is its inordinate length. I could have read five or six other books in the time I spent on this one, and the meandering plot, repetitious dialogue, and unnecessary scenes (see previous paragraph) do not justify its overly protracted duration. If it’s the Spanish conquest you’re interested in, Cortés doesn’t show up until about 80 percent of the way through, but the book does move pretty briskly after that. The conquest of Tenochtitlan is a familiar story, but Jennings does a good job of bringing it to life.

To his credit, Jennings strikes a good balance between research and storytelling. Some writers of historical novels rely too heavily on research to the point where you feel like you’re reading a textbook. Jennings, however, puts the fiction on an equal footing with the facts, resulting in a novel that reads like a novel. It’s possible that Aztec may be one of the best novels (in English) about pre-Colombian Mexico (because there aren’t many), but that still doesn’t excuse its faults and excesses. If you’re interested in ancient Mexican history, you’re going to want to read this, but expect to be periodically frustrated, annoyed, disappointed, and bored by it.

If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.

https://www.amazon.com/review/RLGWDP4K3HMOM/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm

Destiny Doll by Clifford D. Simak

Somewhat boilerplate Simak but with a few refreshing innovations

This novel by Clifford D. Simak was published in the Spring 1971 issue of Worlds of Fantasy magazine under the title of Reality Doll. Later that same year it was published in book form as Destiny Doll. Neither title is really indicative of the book’s contents, but Destiny Doll is an improvement over the original title, which makes even less sense. Destiny is a topic of conversation in the book, but the titular doll only plays a small part in the plot. Destiny Doll is now published by Open Road Media, bundled with Cemetery World as a two-in-one ebook.

The story takes place in an unspecified future, after interstellar travel and colonization of other planets has become commonplace. Captain Michael Ross, the narrator, is a spaceship pilot and opportunistic entrepreneur. While stopping over on Earth (though he wasn’t born there), he is approached by some clients who want to hire him to pilot them on a voyage to other worlds. Sara Foster is a big-game huntress who seeks adventure, Friar Tuck (yep, that’s his name) is a brother of some unspecified religious order, and George Smith is a blind man. George has been hearing voices that he believes are interstellar transmissions from a long-lost legendary Earth adventurer who is rumored to have found a paradise among the stars. By following George’s mysterious sixth sense, the travelers are led to a distant unknown planet that appears to be the abandoned home of an advanced civilization, its skyscraping edifices having remained pristinely intact but apparently uninhabited.

I wasn’t too impressed with the first half of Destiny Doll, quite frankly. The things seen and heard on the mysterious planet are a bit too weird for weird’s sake. Early on, for example, the travelers are met by a race of intelligent porcelain hobby horses with rocking-chair feet. Why would such beings exist? It is hinted later that they must have been created by human visitors who would have had memories of such an Earth toy, but no further explanation is given. The world Simak presents here is full of such fanciful details. Though set in a distant future on a distant world, this isn’t hard science fiction but rather just as much fantasy as sci-fi.

Destiny Doll soon settles into a familiar pattern of Simak’s fiction. The human heroes set off with a few robots and/or aliens on a cross-country quest through a harsh landscape (see also A Heritage of Stars, Shakespeare’s Planet, Special Deliverance, Enchanted Pilgrimage, The Fellowship of the Talisman, Where the Evil Dwells). The landscape is largely deserted, just the way Simak likes it, which requires the party to rough it in the wilderness. In Simak’s books, the campfire is the ultimate bonding experience between characters, and this story includes an ample supply of campfires. Simak is sometimes called science fiction’s preeminent pastoralist because of the attention he pays to nature and rural life. Even on distant worlds, he still explores man’s relationship to nature. The second half of Destiny Doll steadily improves as Simak delves deeper into his philosophical conjectures about the destiny of humankind, multiple realities, and alien intelligences. Though it may read a bit like a goofy children’s book at first, Destiny Doll eventually delivers the kind of deep, sensitive thinking one expects from Simak.

One thing that makes this novel more interesting than some of Simak’s other quest narratives is its protagonist. The heroes of Simak’s books are often mild-mannered average joes who rise to the occasion when necessary and face their fears in the end. Mike Ross, however, is atypically more of a macho action hero in the Han Solo mold (pre-Star Wars, though). Destiny Doll is not one of Simak’s best novels, but it’s a good solid piece of work that fans of his will find sufficiently thought-provoking and entertaining.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R31TAXDMG9220C/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm

Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren

Another fascinating tour through the peculiarities and politics of language

If you are fascinated by foreign languages, Gaston Dorren’s books are a must-read. Babel, published in 2018, is the follow-up to Dorren’s excellent 2014 book Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages. In both books, Dorren looks at many different languages, examining their histories, their structural oddities, and their political and cultural controversies. While Lingo focused entirely on European languages, in Babel, Dorren examines the twenty most widely spoken languages in the world today. Chapters devoted to each language are arranged like a top 20 countdown from least popular to most popular (though even number 20 has 85 million speakers, so they’re all winners here).

Though it delves into some complicated linguistic concepts, Babel is not written for linguists. Rather, if you’ve ever tried to learn a foreign language—successfully or not—and enjoyed it, chances are you have a linguistic curiosity that will find satisfaction in Dorren’s exploration of these top twenty tongues. Dorren expounds upon each language differently. Sometimes he will delve into the unusual mechanics of a language, such as his discussion of the grammatical peculiarities of German that make it one of the most difficult languages to learn, or his examination of the differences between male and female speech in Japan. He recounts his own attempts at learning Vietnamese, with limited success, and attempts to demystify Arabic by pointing out the numerous Arabic words that over the centuries have made their circuitous way into English. In many chapters Dorren explains the history of a language and its effect on the politics and culture of its speakers, such as Turkey’s ambitious program of language reform in the early 20th century, or how Persian and Malay became the dominant languages in their respective regions. Unfortunately, some of these histories involve genocide along linguistic lines, as has occurred for example in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Dorren does not limit himself to spoken languages but discusses scripts as well, providing brief explanations of the Chinese and Japanese systems of writing, for example, or the differences between the different scripts used in India. In all cases, Dorren is really a wizard at concisely explaining the complex intricacies of language in terms that a general reader (not a professor of linguistics) can easily understand, and he manages to keep the discourse entertaining without dumbing down the subject matter in the least.

Although Dorren resides in the Netherlands, and Dutch is his first language, he wrote both Lingo and Babel in English. He then wrote the Dutch editions, which were published later. The English editions are clearly written specifically for an English-language reading audience because they include numerous examples comparing the grammar and vocabulary of different world languages to British and American English. In addition, Dorren is able to provide an educated outsider’s perspective on the English language, and he offers a balanced critique on its difficulties and oddities in a way that a native speaker who takes such oddities for granted could not.

Of Dorren’s two books, I would have to say I slightly prefer Lingo over Babel, probably because the broader scope of 60 languages allows for more intriguing anomalies among lesser-known languages. Nevertheless, Babel is really a fascinating and enlightening read. I look forward to reading whatever Dorren publishes next. I’d love to see him do a book where he can examine some of the more obscure languages of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.

https://www.amazon.com/review/RBOULYAI91M9/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm

Weapon X: The Return Omnibus by Frank Tieri, et al.

They’ll let anyone into this club

Weapon X: The Return Omnibus is a mammoth hardcover tome compiling about 50 issues worth of Marvel Comics. This includes the entire 28-issue Weapon X series that began in 2002, as well as several related issues of Marvel’s Wolverine and Deadpool titles. Most of these issues were written by Frank Tieri; the artists vary. In the Marvel Universe, Weapon X is the name of a Canadian government program that experiments on mutants to transform them into ultimate killing machines. This is how Wolverine got the adamantium grafted onto his skeleton. In Weapon X: The Return, that clandestine project resurges under a new director who enlists many mutants into the program by offering them enhanced powers. Wolverine, however, wants no part of the new Weapon X and works to shut it down.

The original Weapon X story appeared in 1991 issues of Marvel Comics Presents. This Wolverine origin story, written and drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith, is one of Marvel’s masterpieces. As a sequel to that saga, Weapon X: The Return doesn’t measure up to the classic upon which it is built. At first, Wolverine was the only Weapon X experiment that we knew about. Over time, however, it was revealed that Sabretooth and several others were also products of the Weapon X program, and with Wolverine they comprised a CIA covert ops team. That made for a pretty good storyline also. Over time, however, Marvel writers couldn’t resist adding more heroes and villains to the Weapon X fold. In doing so, Weapon X devolved from an exclusive team of elite killers to a club that will pretty much let anyone in, no matter how obscure of a superhero they may be. Here in Weapon X: The Return, for instance, three of the main characters are Marrow, Chamber, and Aurora, who I’m not sure even qualify as C-team Marvel heroes. As a result, the name Weapon X doesn’t mean what it used to. It’s now just another alternative SHIELD for antiheroes, like so many others that Marvel has introduced in the last few decades.

The story is rather repetitive. It seems like everyone’s always hunting Sabretooth. Then he shows up, kills somebody, and disappears, so everyone’s hunting him again. The director of Weapon X and his second-in-command continually wrestle for control of the program, and it bounces back and forth between them like a tennis ball. The last five issues of the book are from a miniseries called Weapon X: Days of Future Now, which is one of those possible future stories that turns into a What If alternate reality where you have the pleasure of seeing many hallowed Marvel heroes get killed. As a time travel story, however, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and it’s a rather inconclusive way of ending this 50-odd issue story arc.

The art is a mix of good and bad. No creator credits appear amid the comics themselves, only a one page list of artists at the front of the book, so it’s hard to even recall who drew what. Personally, I’m not a big fan of Marvel’s twenty-first century style. I think the influence of manga, along with digital coloring, has resulted in a lot of stylized figures that look like plastic dolls. No matter how gory or risqué the story, more often than not the art just looks like a children’s book. I remember when Neal Adams drew Sauron back in X-Men #60, he looked like a horrifying creature. In these newer comics, however, Sauron looks like a Saturday morning cartoon designed for a toy tie-in. In terms of both story and art, Weapon X: The Return Omnibus is a big book loaded with mediocre work. You can almost hear Barry Windsor-Smith rolling his eyes in disgust.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon and leave me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.

https://www.amazon.com/review/RQWHE52K2170I/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm

Hilda Wade by Grant Allen

A mansplainer’s half-baked idea of “women’s intuition”

Hilda Wade was published in 1900, shortly after the death of its author, Canadian-British writer Grant Allen. On his deathbed, Allen received some assistance in the completion of the novel from his friend and neighbor Arthur Conan Doyle. The two seem like an odd couple of pals since Allen was an atheist and skeptic, while Conan Doyle was so heavily into spiritualism. Nevertheless, they must have had a strong friendship. Any finishing touches Conan Doyle may have made to the manuscript are undetectable; the book reads like it’s all Allen. By the standards of his time, Allen was a liberal thinker, and he often wrote fiction that promoted radical ideas like atheism, socialism, and feminism. He was still firmly ensconced in the literary world of Victorian England, however, so any forays he made in those directions were baby steps at best.

Hilda Wade is a single woman who works as a nurse at a London hospital. She deliberately chose her place of employment because she wanted to work with a certain medical genius, Dr. Sebastian. In the first couple chapters, Hilda proves herself an able aid in Sebastian’s medical research. At first the expert physician doesn’t always greet Hilda’s suggestions with approval, but eventually he comes to learn that Hilda Wade is always right. The novel is narrated by Dr. Hubert Cumberledge, who also works with Sebastian, forms a friendship with Hilda, and not surprisingly develops a crush on her.

Similar to earlier works like The Woman Who Did and Miss Cayley’s Adventures, Hilda Wade is a novel with a strong, independent female protagonist who stretches the traditional gender role of the Victorian heroine. Any feminism that Allen intended with the novel is somewhat misguided, however. Like Miss Cayley, Hilda Wade is only allowed her independence until she fulfills her foregone destiny of marriage. Allen also places inordinate emphasis on Hilda’s superhuman power of “feminine intuition,” which sometimes allows her to magically predict the future. How does she use this wonderful power? Well, in one cringeworthy episode early in the book, Hilda asserts that lippy wives are destined to be murdered. Then she doesn’t do anything to save the woman in question from that horrible fate, but rather waits until after the killing to say I told you so.

The first four chapters of the book are really pretty bad. Fortunately, the plot then takes an unexpected twist and the novel evolves into a mystery. It is not, however, a Conan Doyle-style mystery in which clues lead to a revelation. Instead, the villain is revealed early, and from that point on the plot is really more of a cat-and-mouse chase that leads to far-off lands like Rhodesia and India. Allen never really takes full advantage of such exotic locales, however. Overall, Hilda Wade is a rather boring novel in which the possibilities for suspense are squandered and the characters are difficult to care about. In his desire to hold Hilda up as some kind of poster girl for new womanhood, Allen ends up creating a character with about as much depth as a cardboard cutout. In general I prefer Allen’s nonfiction writings to his novels, but even in the latter category, Miss Cayley’s Adventures and An African Millionaire are better than this. In the mystery and suspense department, Allen isn’t in the same league with his buddy Conan Doyle.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon and leave me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R1WNGQF7ESIYKV/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm