The Natural History of Calamity
Robert J. Howe
Black Gater 14, $15.95

The current issue of Black Gate is so thick, and has so many stories in it, that I want to look at another one before moving on to other venues to examine short fiction.  Next up in this series of posts will be something seasonal (a ghost story), probably followed by something science fictional.

Anyway, on to the story at hand.  This one concerns a female private investigator, one Debbie Colavito, who works as a karmic detective.  She has the ability to detect a person’s karma, and, although it’s not exactly explained how, she can make changes in that karma.

Now the whole concept of karma is one I’ve never bought into.  At all.  So right off the bat, I had a hard time getting into the story because I couldn’t accept its basic premise.  However, since I had made up my mind to examine the story here in my Long Looks at Short Fiction series of posts, I decided I would try to put my prejudices aside and give the story a try.  Fortunately, that wasn’t as hard to do as I thought. 

The story opens with Debbie being visited by a prospective client, Will Charbonneau.  Seems Will’s lady love, Becky, has suddenly up and dumped him for a car salesman.  Will and Becky met in the Peace Corps, moved in together after they both returned stateside, and are working as high school teachers.  Will is clearly heartbroken and confused over Becky’s sudden change of heart.  They were talking about getting married, after all.  Can Debbie check into things and help him understand why this has happened?  He’s seen a feature about her in the paper, so he knows she’s a karmic detective.

Debbie takes the case, albeit with a little reluctance, since she’s sure that Becky’s decision to move out was made without any influence from the car salesman.  That is until she discovers the car salesman is Micheal, someone she dated in high school until he raped her on a date.  She hasn’t seen or heard from him in years.  As they used to say, from this point on, the plot thickens.

Howe gives Debbie Colavito a distinctive voice, one that’s part wise-cracking PI, part single woman making ends meet on her own.  Now I’m a huge fan of traditional PI stories, especially those told in first-person.  I don’t care how cliched some people consider the trope to be, it’s always been one of my favorites.  And Howe does a good job with this one.  There’s a genuine mystery here.  Not all the people or situations are as they appear.  Even if I did have trouble buying into the whole karmic detective angle, Howe develops Debbie’s character well and made her someone I cared about. 

He does a good job of writing a woman’s perspective.  Conventional wisdom is that many men can’t write from a woman’s viewpoint effectively.  While I don’t completely buy that I idea either, (people are people no matter what their gender) I don’t completely diasgree with it.  Men and women are wired differently mentally and emotionally.  Debbie is not simply a male detective in drag.  She is able to bond with Becky, whereas a male detective in a more traditional PI story would probably end up in bed with her.  Which is not to say Debbie is completely sexless.  She finds Will attractive.  She just doesn’t try to manipulate his emotions to get in bed with him.  In fact, when a situation arises in which she could, she deliberately doesn’t.

The writing is in the story is smooth, and the action flows.  The characters are individuals.  Howe has an easy to read style, probably due to his journalism background.  I don’t know if Howe has written any other stories about this character.  The author bio doesn’t mention any, and Black Gate does a good job of listing previous installments in a series.  While it wasn’t what I would consider exactly my cup of tea, I would certainly consider reading more about this character.

It’s been over a week since I last posted, which is longer than I would prefer.  To make up for it I’m going to post two reviews over the weekend, plus this post.  I guess that makes 2.5 posts, since this one is going to be brief.

Part of the reason I’ve not posted has to do with travel.  I’ve been trying to a get a former residence fixed up (anybody wanna buy a house?), and that took me to the other side of the state.  Texas is a big state.

Anyway, since I posted the review about Nomad The Warrior, I’ve done some further thinking (six hour drives are good for that).  Specifically about how religion is portrayed in the movie.  There’s some ancester worship and shamanistic beliefs shown on the part of the Jungar.  The Kazakhs refer to the Almighty, and this is what intrigues me.  Whether they mean Allah, Jehovah, or someone else is never made clear.  I may be wrong, but I’m fairly certain by this time that the Kazakhs were Muslim.  Much of the story takes place in Turkestan.  The photo I posted from my visit there was of the Kodzha Achmed Yosavi Mausoleum, which dates to the 14th century, well before the events of the movie, and is considered to be the Mecca of the East in the Islamic world.  In other words, the hero of the movie should have been muslim.

I’m not sure why the movie referred to the deity of the Kazakhs as the Almighty.  Maybe this was a holdover from the Soviet days, but I don’t think so.  It could have been a result of translating the movie into English.  On the other hand, it could have been done to make the movie more palatable to American audiences by omitting any overt references to Islam and thus making the hero more sympathetic to US movie-goers.

I haven’t had time to watch the Kazakh version of the movie, but I understand in places there are some significant differences in the dialogue from the English version.  I need to make time to watch the Kazakh version and see who the Kazakhs pray to.

Nomad the Warrior (2005)

So I’m in the grocery store, looking at a selection of DVDs on an endcap between the cereal aisle and the cookie aisle (don’t tell me these people don’t understand product placement) when I pick up this movie with a guy holding a sword while screaming at some sort of army in the background.  Looks promising.  I turn the case over to read the synopsis and notice the movie is in two languages.  English.  And Kazakh.

Having spent some time in Kazakhstan, I’m sold.  It could have been a terrible movie, and I would have bought it simply because as I read the credits more closely, it was produced in Kazakhstan.  Fortunately, it wasn’t a horrible movie.  It wasn’t as great as it could have been, but it wasn’t horrible.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The movie is set in 18th centurty Kazakhstan, where the nomadic Kazakh tribes, split into fueding factions by the typical greed and desire for power, are being slowly defeated by the Mongol Jungars.  Enter Oraz (Jason Scott Lee), who is some sort of an Obi-Wan figure, a warrior mystic respected by all the tribes, who is searching for a prophesied child who will become a warrior to unite and deliver the Kazakh tribesmen from their enemies.  The Jungars (often spelled Dzunghars) are lead by Galdan (Dokshan Zholzhaksynov) and his evil henchman General Sharish (Mark Dacascos).  Oraz manages to rescue the child, son of the sultan of Turkestan, just before his mother and the rest of their caravan are slaughtered by Sharish and his men, who are seeking to destroy the child and prevent fulfillment of the prophecy.  Oraz manages to convince the boy’s father to let him raise the child to fulfill the prophecy. Even though the savior is supposed to be the son of a sultan and a direct descendant of Genghis Kahn, I kept wondering why Oraz simply didn’t do the job himself.  Oraz proceeds to take one child from each of the Kazakh tribes and raises a brotherhood of freedom fighters. 

Once the boys have grown, Mansur (Kuno Becker), the prophesied one, and his best friend Erali (Jay Hernandez) fall for the same girl, Hocha, which complicates things and ends up driving a good portion of the plot.  Meanwhile Galdan has discovered that he didn’t kill the prophesied child after all.  Sharish and his army lay siege to Turkestan.  I’m not sure where these scenes were shot, but it wasn’t Turkestan.  There are too many hills outside the citiy.  Turkestan is on a plain.  I know; I’ve been there.  The picture below was taken in November, 2004, and shows the main surviving structure.  As you can see, no hills.  But that’s a minor point that most Americans wouldn’t be aware of.

Raiders from the North:  Empire of the Moghul
Alex Rutherford
St. Martin’s, 436 pgs., $24.95

The cover was what first attracted me to this book.  I mean, a big axe about to fall against a backdrop of a marching army, with the “O” in the word “North” a shield.  What’s not to love?  But many a book has failed to live up to the promises inherent in its cover, so what about the contents?

I’m delighted to say that, while not quite what I was hoping for, this book was well worth the price.  The book is a biographical novel about Babur, founder of the Moghul dynasty in India, and the first in a series called Empire of the Moghul.  This is not a period of history with which I have much familiarity.  Must have been absent when the football coach history teacher covered that unit in school. The term Moghul is the Persian word for Mongol, given to Babur by Shah Ismail as an insult.  Of course Babur adopts it with pride.

The book opens with Babur’s father, king of Ferghana, in what is now Uzbekistan, telling him about his destiny to uphold his heritage.  Babur was descended from Timur, known as Tamerlaine in the West, on his father’s side and from Genghis Kahn on his mother’s side.  This speech, while sounding a bit contrived, sets the tone of the rest of the novel.  Following his words to his son, Babur’s father goes to his dovecote on the side of the palace wall, which breaks off and falls to the bottom of a ravine, killinng him and most of the doves.  Thus at twelve, Babur becomes a king.

The schemes, intrigues, and hatching of plots begins immediately.  Aided by the commander of his army, Wazir Kahn, and his wiley grandmother, Esan Dawlat, Babur manages to survive and prosper, at least when he isn’t hiding in the hills from his enemies.

Alex Rutherford is the pen name of Michael and Diana Preston, a husband and wife writing team, and they drew heavily from Babur’s diaries, known as the Baburnama.  The diaries contain gaps, possibly because Babur didn’t always write in them or possibly because some volumes were lost during or shortly after Babur’s life.  For example, there is an eleven year gap between parts 3 and 4 of the novel.  In a brief afterward, the Prestons mention that they condensed some portions of Babur’s life as well as combined characters in the diary into single individuals.  These characters include Wazir Kahn and Baburi, a market boy Babur befirends who becomes his most trusted companion.  A quick internet search revealed that much of Babur’s reign in Kabul and conquest of India were condensed or omitted.

This being a historical novel, there is none of the neatness of plot one would expect to find in a work of pure fiction set in an imaginary world.  Major characters come and go with little or no warning.  Acts of villainy, and there are plenty, often go unavenged, at least by Babur.  Because the authors chose to stick to the main outline of Babur’s life, they were compelled to follow to the basic facts rather than tie things up neatly.  This strengthens the novel rather than weakens it.  The speech Babur’s father gives him in the open pages sets the theme for the rest of the book, Babur’s destiny as a descendant of Timur.  After he has lost both his home kingdom of Ferghana and the city of Samarkand (long coveted by his father and held by his uncle until Babur captures it) and is being pursued by an army of Uzbek raiders, Babur never loses sight of his goal and gives up, even when wallowing in the depths of self-pity.  Indeed there are several exchanges between Babur and Baburi over this notion of destiny.  Baburi at times serves as a foil for Babur, contrasting the freedom of a street urchin with the bonds on a ruler.

Where the book least met my initial expectations were the battle scenes.  While the authors don’t shy away from details at times, the details are used sparingly. This makes the specifics more powerful, such as when Babur and his men come upon a small village pillaged by the Uzbeks.  This is probably one of the more graphic scenes in the book and is one of the most effective.  Whereas a writer such as Robert E. Howard would have given detailed accounts of the battles, bringing the reader into the scene with his use of details (which is what I was expecting when I bought the book), the Prestons paint the canvas of the battlefield in broad sweeps, using enough detail to convey the ebb and flow of the armies, but on a less personal scale.  Very little details are given about individual combat except when Babur is directly involved in the attack (or retreat). 

Instead the book focuses on Babur’s rising and falling in his attempts to fulfill his destiny and reclaim lands once belonging to Timur.  Character is the emphasis here, not carnage, although there is enough of that to whet the appetite of most fans of action adventure.  Babur grows from an inexperienced, and soft-hearted, young king to a harsh, and at times merciless, emperor.  While I thought the last few years of his life were given short shrift, overall the picture painted is a complete one, with Babur spending the last years of his rule trying to groom his sons to succeed him.

The book closes with Babur’s death in his late 40s.  The second volume, Brothers at War, was published this past June in Britain.  I’m looking forward to reading it.

It seems I may have been a bit premature in my remarks last week about not finding what I was looking for after the Cimmerian blog shut down.  One of the main things I had in mind was a lack of posts about historical events, people, and fiction.  Well, over at REHupa, Morgan Holmes has posted three items relating to historical fiction (plus an announcement of a collection of about Robert E. Howard as well as a post two weeks ago about a collection of tales from the pulp Adventure), while this morning at Black Gate, Bill Ward posted a review of Robert Low’s The White Raven.  Undaunted, I intend to blog on.  There is enough heroic fiction and fantastic adventures out there that haven’t been blogged about that I’m sure I can find something to discuss.  And who says I can’t review an item someone else has already looked at.  Isn’t this sort of dialogue and interchange of ideas and opinions what fandom is all about?