A Man & His Cat, book 8, by Umi Sakurai. Square Enix Co Ltd.

In volume 8, we finally meet Mr. Kanda’s two children, both grown up (or almost grown up; I never did figure out their exact ages) and home for a visit- not realizing that their father has houseguests now, both human and feline. With his own cat, his cat’s sister, and the box full of kittens, the house is full. These kids had never had a pet growing up, so the cats presence is a huge surprise. And an unwelcome one for his son, who is both afraid of cats, and hates them. We get to see him heal from the childhood wounds that caused this, along with seeing the joy of family, both blood and found. Five stars, as usual.

 

All the Living and the Dead: From Embalmers to Executioners, an Exploration of the People Who Have Made Death Their Life’s Work, by Hayley Campbell. St. Martin’s Press, 2022.

The author admits right in the introduction that she has been fascinated with death since she was a small child; her father was the artist who illustrated Alan Moore’s graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, so she was used to seeing pretty gruesome images. So it’s not a big surprise that she eventually decided to interview people who’s careers are dealing with the dead.

A journalist by trade, Campbell has experience doing interviews, so she visits a number of death workers at their places of work. Several let her have a ‘hands on’ experience; she holds a brain; watches a body being embalmed and then made up for viewing; visits a crime scene when it’s going to be cleaned up; visits a hospital unit where still born babies are warmed up and prettied up so they look like they are sleeping, so that their parents can hold them before they are taken away; visits a cemetery while the gravediggers prepare a grave for burial; sees a cryonic storage site; and more. She enquires why and how the people ended up in their jobs. She asks about how the public sees their services. She includes how these visits made her, personally, feel. She asks how their jobs make the workers feel; how does it feel to be a state executioner who has ended 62 lives? What about crime scene cleanup- how does the obvious violence that had occurred make them feel?

I found the book very interesting; some chapters more so than others, for instance I found the chapter about funeral direction less interesting than that about bodies donated to science (a surprisingly large number get rejected). If you’ve any interest in the subject of death and how it’s handled today (at least in the UK), read this book. Don’t worry; there are no illustrations.

 The Secret History, by Donna Tartt. Vintage Contemporaries, 1992.

This is a kind of strange book. I picked it up because I read that it’s the foundation of the ‘dark academia’ strain of books. Sadly, it did not have any supernatural aspects to it, but it was very, very dark.

Richard Papen is our narrator. He is from California, in an area where there are no cultural enrichments available (in Richard’s opinion). His father expects him to go into his boring-as-can- be business, and so will fund him going to a local college to get a business degree. Richard has different ideas; his forte is languages, particularly dead languages. He wants to go to an eastern college, where ivy climbs the walls and the classics are studied. He applies to Hampden College, and, surprisingly, gets a scholarship- which doesn’t go very far to pay the bills other than tuition.

Shortly after arriving, he sees a group of students who are different from the rest. They are dressed expensively and somewhat eccentrically, they don’t go to the popular places on campus, they are always together, frequently with the professor of Greek. They pique his interest; he feels he is meant to be a part of their group, although they seem unapproachable and decidedly better than any others on campus. He applies for entry in the Greek classes; the charismatic older professor turns him down. On a second try, he is accepted into the lofty company of the 5 who are the only students in the Greek classes.

The group members are upper class, well-funded, intellectual, and snobby. Twins Camille and Charles, fey Francis, tightly wound Henry, and Bunny, who is always short of money and forever getting the other four to pay his way. (I swear this character would be played by Vince Vaughn if this were made into a movie) Richard almost immediately invents a life for himself, wherein he, too, is also from wealth and culture. He finds as job on campus, which gives him enough money to survive during term- barely- and not at all during winter break. His fake biography and facility with ancient Greek get him past the rarefied group’s cursory inspection and he finds himself included in their get- togethers and antics.

At the start of the novel we are given the information that they have committed murder. This is not a spoiler; this is where Richard pretty much starts with his narration. It turns out the murder was an accident, but they go to lengths to hide it. When one of their number, Bunny, discovers this, he threatens to go to the police and the group decides to commit premeditated murder-and insist that Richard (who had nothing to do with the first death, and was not even part of the group at the time) take part in it. Therein ensues the core of the book, the disintegration of the Greek students, both personally and as a group. It’s painful to watch. Very painful.

This is a very long book, but Tartt’s prose carried me along effortlessly, even in the painful sections. And that’s a good thing, because the characters are… thinly portrayed. There are no souls behind the window dressing of their elitism. There isn’t really a lot of plot- there are a few events, and a lot about how the characters react to them. In the end, the secret society of elite intellectuals is nothing more than teenagers trying on guises and finding out that there are real world consequences to their actions. Did I enjoy the book? Yes, I did. Despite its weak spots, I couldn’t put the gigantic thing down. I just had to see what those kids did next- and the ending did have quite a surprise.

 

The Golden Enclaves: Lesson Three of the Scholomance, by Naomi Novik. Del Ray, 2022

Starting just minutes after the end of Lesson Two, Lesson Three starts with Galadriel “El” Higgins having just gotten all grades of the students in the Scholomance out alive- all except one. The door way has closed, forever, with one person left behind- Orion Lake, her love. And, given the circumstances, he has almost certainly been eaten by a maw-mouth. A death which is not actually death, but an eternity of conscious suffering. El feels she cannot leave her love to suffer like that; she- the only one who can kill a maw-mouth- must somehow return to the decaying Scholomance and kill the maw-mouth, freeing Orion to die completely. But she can’t do it alone. Re-enter her allies from the previous book, for a brief return to the Scholomance. Then the action moves to the existing Enclaves. Someone is attacking the enclaves, tearing them down, one after another. El has never even been in an Enclave, and has no idea how they are formed. The answer to that is pretty horrifying.  But she has her precious book of sutras about creating Golden Enclaves, and figures she can put the world right, with her allies supplying the mana she needs.

I had problems with this volume. There isn’t the kind of character growth we saw in the first two books. As a narrator, El is still sarcastic and amusing, but she’s become someone who is never once tempted by taking the malia road for ease, and she keeps thinking how much better than other wizards she is because of this. Then she has sex with a girl she doesn’t even like, and never gives it a thought. The first time, she believes Orion is dead, but the second time they are just sort of bored and have the spare time. Now, I have no idea what the wizard world thinks about sex. It is stated that the girl and her partner have an open relationship, but I don’t think El and Orion have even had a chance to talk about it. Or I missed it when they did.

Then there is how disjointed the action is. When El gets Orion back, there is a (very) brief idle, and then there is non-stop running from one enclave to the other, killing mals, learning about how enclaves are formed, meeting Orion’s skeevy parents, making alliances that El really doesn’t like… it’s almost too much. Coming back to the book after a pause in reading, I frequently found myself having to go back a few pages to try and figure out where El was and what crisis she was currently taking charge of. The pacing is sort of “info dump- fast and sudden action- info dump- fast and sudden action” which I just found difficult to get into.

Was I disappointed? Yes. The first two volumes are definitely better. If Novik wrote a fourth novel to continue this story, would I read it? Definitely!