I have a friend who loves reading, and reads widely. Over the years he has designated certain authors as ‘palate cleansers’. He returns to these books when he needs a dose of something clean, fresh and better. Seymour Hamilton is one of those authors for me. I have just finished Ellie, the latest of several books set in the world of Hamilton’s Astreya trilogy.
Full disclosure, I first met Seymour Hamilton over 30 years ago, when I was a graduate student in Ottawa. I learned that past the charming, whimsical and well spoken presentation is a sharp and educated mind. The books reflect the man. He writes fantasy, but on another level his stories speak of people dealing with the forces of nature, marine and human. The protagonists invariably bring a level of decency and intelligence to their tasks.
Ellie, like the Astreya books and River of Stones, is a deceptively straightforward fantasy. It is an adventure story, based in a recognizable world, set in a time simply called After. Many of the characters are skilled sailors. Hamilton knows sailing, and his writing really shines here. You may happily read it only at that level, but take your time with this and all of Hamilton’s books to feel the undercurrents. He writes about what it takes for a community to form and operate successfully. There is a current in his books of the need for thoughtfulness and decency in human affairs. Ellie should be read for all these levels. I came away refreshed, ready again for the real world.
Lorraine McFadden PhD ABPP/CN (ret’d) author of Mind Phases (2022)
Category Archives: Reviews
Jaguar Paloma and the Caketown Bar by Jess Wells
Jess Wells is an enchantress who weaves words into a magical spell of a book that completely charmed me into believing every larger than life character and each magically real event.
There is something musical, even symphonic in the way Wells can sustain so many interwoven narratives from the first thematic opening phrases on inevitably towards the marvellous conclusion. Her writing has a rhythmic, singing quality. She can deftly sustain luxurious sentences, paragraphs and chapters; and also capture a human frailty or foible in a short, mordant turn of phrase.
Jaguar Paloma and the Caketown Bar is a celebration of many wonderful women. The giantess Jaguar Paloma and her devastatingly beautiful friend Orietta are emblematic of contrasting aspects of being a woman. Jaguar evolves into a goddess who leads, inspires and nurtures an incongruous collection women damaged by men, religion, and war, helping them find self-confidence and joy together, even as their fortunes rise, fall and indomitably rise again. Orietta wrestles with the burden of her beauty, and the curse of being smarter than the men who would dominate her. And then there are the other marvellous characters: the tiny Hummingbird Jade and her tiny daughter Jewel, Cosimo who falls for her, the Drunken Monk and Agnes the (fallen) Nun, twins, brides, forgers, conmen, mule-skinners, Romani, a banker … In the end, despite all that has marked them, the female (and some of the male) characters, are triumphant.
If you hear the music in Keats’ words in “Ode to a Grecian Urn” or if you delight in the lilting Welsh voice of Dylan Thomas’ “Under Milk Wood”, if the rhythms and rimes of Tennyson’s “Lady of Shallot” sing in your memory, if you read Ursula LeGuin’s “A Wizard of Earthsea” with your ears, then you will relish the richness of Jess Wells’ writing.
A new way to choose your next book to read
Looking for something to read but overwhelmed by choices? Shepherd.com offers an attractive way to search for books that doesn’t involve a soulless algorithm. Writers pick their favourite books that “go-together” with one of their own books. See what you think of the idea, and while you’re there, take a peek at my pick of five books: “The best books in which reality and fantasy meet and meld.”
Because WordPress won’t accept a link to Shepherd, you’ll just have to use your browsers to get to Shepherd.com, where you can put in my name and you’ll see what a great idea this is.
Review of Hellfire Corner by Alaric Bond
Hellfire Corner by Alaric Bond
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Hellfire Corner, Alaric Bond’s latest nautical adventure, departs the Age of Fighting Sail where his other 13 novels are set and instead goes aboard MTBs (Motor Torpedo Boats) and MGBs (Motor Gun Boats) of the Coastal Forces in the English Channel during WWII. MGBs were made of wood and powered by two or three massive petrol-drinking internal combustion engines. The boats were lightly armed with half-inch Vickers and 20mm Oerlikons and their wooden hulls had no armour whatsoever.
Fast but vulnerable, MTBs and MGBs were in the main manned by men with little sea time or experience prior to the outbreak of war. Bond accurately depicts the struggle to fight both the elements and the enemy, as well as the constant need to maintain and repair the boats and their hard-pressed engines. He accurately catches the “business as usual” heroism of such men who simply got on with their dangerous and at times near suicidal jobs. Unlike novels based in the age of Nelson, these people talk like us, and Bond catches their voices.
Where the historic great sea battles wounded or killed men in horrific numbers, this Channel war at sea is intimate. Bond excels in generating suspense by depicting the randomness of combat, in which one man may live when another man beside him is killed or maimed. In Hellfire Corner, the eight men aboard MGB 95 are all fully realized characters. We feel we know the men because they are not faceless, nameless crew.
When not on sorties that typically lasted less than 24 hours, men in the Coastal Forces during WWII lived ashore in barracks, hotels or homes that were often under cannon fire from the German guns across the Channel. Their shore lives are therefore much more a part of Bond’s Hellfire Corner than are women characters in novels about the 18th Century. We meet members of the WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service), who served ashore in communications and the detection of enemy ships and planes.
There is no single hero in Hellfire Corner, waiting to appear in a sequel. Instead, we are immersed in the unpredictability of war, where success and survival can be earned, but are always partly a matter of chance.
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