The Most Achingly Beautiful Book I've Ever Read (Probably)

I picked up American Girl by Baird Wells (writing as Iowa Riley) in response to a social media post. I'd no idea really what to expect except that I'd read a couple of Baird's blogposts and been amusingly impressed by one and deeply moved by the other.

I have always loved trying to spot connections and influences that shape people's writing. Looking back now at those blog posts I see resonances then.

The first post was advice to men about talking to women at conventions. More specifically a ballsy blast of the trumpet of reproach in response to some male authors who think conventions are a phone free tindrfest - fingers raised to swipe left or right at every female face they see."how-to-talk-to-women-at-cons-probably"


The second post was a poignant reflection on friendship in the direst of adversity and what one can or should do with the time we have together."the-time-we-are-given"


Both those themes swirled soulfully together in this soft whirlpool of a story about a writer, Kate Archer, her career and her relationships. There is a point where one character claims in exasperation that the protagonist latest book is about him and Kate replies with the line and the thought

"...it's not." No more than the soil is about the colour of a rose.

It's an astute (almost meta) comment on the struggles of writing in a book of and about writing and writers.

Life experiences - for good or ill - may be the fertile ground that fuels authorial imagination. But, despite that indefinable link between fact and fiction, the story that emerges is a different thing.  It is at its best - as in the American Girl - a beautiful and fragile thing way beyond any earthy origins in the soil of Riley/Wells' experiences.

This intimate first person point of view story follows Kate Archer through two different timelines. The present story begins in Portugal, the past story a year or so earlier, the one building to a point of earth moving crisis, the other reeling in the recurring aftershocks.

Braided through both past and present stories are the would-be lover Rob and the friend Natalie. The one is an author, gifted but insecure, craving reassurance as much as companionship, the purveyor of hackneyed lines like the ones that Wells brilliantly punctured in her blog post

"No One Has EVER Told Me I Have Beautiful Prose Before" 

The other is that life long companion, the sister in all but name and blood, who has traded vulnerabilities, shared heartbreak and healed wounds since they were old enough to cross the street unaided.

In different ways these two key figures provide succour to Kate confined within an increasingly barren marriage more by habit and parental expectation than love or understanding.

This is a book about writers and writing, how the people and the craft interact and mingle.  Wells/Riley smoothly captures the heady holiday atmosphere of writing conventions represented here by an invented London Litfest; The easy creeping intimacy of conversations conducted over social media - confidences shared, borders skirted - or crossed. The opportunity through the internet to foreshorten geography so that people can be tempted to stray across continents without ever leaving their own homes.

But this book is not about the means or mechanisms by which relationships can be threatened or formed - it is about what happens next. As the onion layers of husbands and lovers, parents and friends are peeled away Wells/Riley shows us painful credible truths about people and how they can hurt and ultimately how they can heal.

She does with prose that is beyond beautiful - at times exquisite.  At every page turn with my kindle I found a fresh line to note and murmur acknowledgement at a idea so elegantly expressed.

This from the man who ... negotiated his way back to beer a night like a dog creeping onto an off-limits sofa.

"I am proud! but one of us has to come first, and I'm begging you to make the sacrifice." His eyes are wet and wide when he says this. He's not sorry for asking me to be less; he's sorry that I don't know I should be. 

...acquaintances peer to decipher our body language but know better than to ask. They feel it too, the contagious rush, the amphetamine momentum of two people falling into trouble. 

The red A-line makes a reappearance five years later. It's a bit more snug through the waist but nothing that has me reading Cosmo fitness articles.

There is so much about this book that appeals to me -

• the fresh science similes with which Wells/Riley calls on Schrodinger, Hawking and the metamorphosis of caterpillar into butterfly
• the world of writing and publishing evoked in all its paradoxes. At once mutually supportive yet fiercely competitive, confidently assertive yet cripplingly insecure.
• the way Wells/Riley evoked Lisbon and Paris and London and the Azores as surely as if I lived there. 
• the passing nods to history and literature, Anne Boleyn cut short, the Wizard of Oz de-curtained, the Great Expectations Kate has of her rental accommodation

But it is the people, their flaws and foibles as colourful and fragile as butterflies that felt so real, that led me so ardently through their story and had me murmur oh my god, on more than one occasion. 

4th Time round and Still the Charm (I re-review Pretty Little Dead Girls).

I've just finished re-reading Mercedes M Yardley's gentle masterpiece "Pretty Little Dead Girls" for the fourth time.  The joy of a kindle is that I can mark up fresh notes to myself when different lines caught my eye, and also refresh my memory on old notes from previous readings. On page 220 I found myself adding to "I cried at this bit" with "and again on reread 4 even though I knew it was coming somewhere."

Just some of the freshly caught lines include

"her mind went cottony with despair and panic"

"the car was silent except for the rain and the gallantry of the windshield wipers"

"a grim smile crept onto his lips and held them hostage."

I have written about this book before (here,and here). A book about a beautiful girl who is doomed by fate to be horribly murdered does not, at first hearing, sound like a barrel of laughs or joy. However,  for all darkness at its core there is in it a joyful whimsical celebration of life. It is my absolute go-to re-read for the distraction of some uplifting escapism whenever the vagaries and demands of real working life weigh particularly heavily on me.

It quite defies categorisation being unlike any other book I have ever read. The only novelette/novella that matches it for brilliantly written unique but lyrical strangeness is "Danse Macabre" by Laura M Hughes - which I have reviewed here on Goodreads (reviewed it twice in fact - another book I felt compelled to reread). 

I can only hypothesise that having that M as an author's middle initial must have something to do with this particular gift.

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I don’t get out much, but when I do… I drink and I learn things

Reflections on an October trip to Bristol and Bristolcon2017

Counting back the fantasy related gatherings and events that I have attended, it only just used up the fingers of one hand.

• The Grim Gathering in London in August 2014,
• The Grim Gathering in Bristol in April 2015,
• Bristolcon in September 2015
• Bristolcon in October 2016
• Bristolcon in October 2017

However, like successive books in a much loved fantasy series, these experiences seem to be getting progressively bigger and better. There is a vibrant and growing online community of fantasy fans who are seizing the opportunity to meet in person in convivial surroundings. Those who miss out one year enviously watch and comment on events unfolding through social media with one hand, while booking tickets for the next year’s event with the other.

There is nothing quite like meeting people in person for fleshing out the typed comments and avatar images of social media with actual faces, anecdotes and even accents.

The Bristolcon team did another excellent job of setting up a cosy but intriguing one day convention.  I have not yet been to Worldcon, but I have gathered that it can be a sprawl of size, variety and people in which individuals can get lost in a crowd of mingled conference goers and general public. Bristolcon with its relatively compact Hilton Doubletrees venue and adjacent generous hotel bar space, has instead a wonderfully intimate atmosphere.

Over the course of three days and two nights I got to attend panel discussions, a fringe event at Waterstones, try out local restaurants in full fantasy geek/nerd company, spend a lot of time with some wonderfully entertaining and generous people and even visit my local favourite author for tea!

So what are my key takeaways from Bristol (and by that I mean learning points, not the many pizzas – great though they were - that Kareem ordered from the long suffering local emporia)?

What have I learned from Bristolcon?

Reasons to be cheerful about science, Sci-Fi and Fantasy?

The panel about how the upcoming scientific and world challenges and advances may influence fantasy/science fiction got quite bleak quite quickly. The authors found lots of potential for post-apocalyptic realities on which future writers could draw (scratching their books out on cave walls beneath the shadow of a nuclear winter.)   GRMatthews' geography background dragged him into a perspective of pessimism with his glaciers always seeming to be half full. However, between them the panel identified the self-driving canoe as the not-yet-invented-but soon-to-become-essential item.  You heard it here first, invest in those startups now.

Info dumps may not be all bad.

The panel on info-dumps decided they had their place in fantasy provided they were kept sufficiently compact and perfectly formed. Though according to Peter Newman, authors may lavish their greatest subtle info-dumping technique on the first book in a series and then becoming more functional at a stage where the author feels secure in the loyalty of their readers. Perhaps this is in the same way that people doll themselves up to the nines for a first date, and yet relax into jeans and sweatpants a few dates down the line.

Bristolcon again welcomed many visitors from overseas, travelling distances great and small. Dyrk, Petros, Marielle, Julia, Andreas, Sadir and Rita may have experienced a certain bafflement at being thrown into the miniature portrait of cultural variety that is the United Kingdom.  Their experiences suggest that infodumps may not be just be a (hopefully well-judged) staple of fantasy – but an essential tool in the survival kit for real life tourists. A means to answer those essential questions; What is black pudding? How can you wash your hands without a mixer tap? Which side of the car should a passenger try and get into? and Why did 1.00 am happen twice on Sunday morning?  The panel's final advice from Juliet McKenna was that writers should travel widely and – as they do so – “notice what they notice” if they want to get know what a traveller in fantasy land might need to pick up on

Not all partners have the stamina for fantasy.

One trend in Bristolcon seemed to be that a number of partners who made it to the event last year, did not return for a second time. Andreas, Julia Kitvaria-Sarene’s husband is an honourable exception. He not only returned for a second year but heroically videoed some of the later bar shenanigans (past 5 in the morning) for the benefit of (future generations’ entertainment/personal blackmail purposes/the police investigation)*

*delete which ever does not apply.  

One of my favourite films is “Truly, Madly, Deeply” starring Juliet Stevenson as the desperately bereaved girlfriend who is benignly haunted by Alan Rickman as the ghost of her dead boyfriend. The companionable haunting enables her to come to terms with grief, to realise that the boyfriend has moved on and to do the same herself.  But a key scene occurs when Rickman starts bringing his fellow ghosts back to their house to have parties, watch films, and generally hang out, while a bemused Stevenson exclaims from the bath “What, there are dead people in my living room?”

In some ways that community of fantasy writers and readers reminds me of Rickman and his new-found friends – which is not say that we are all dead – just that there is a fellowship there that not all partners can understand, enjoy or come to terms with. But they also serve who only stay at home and wait, so those partners who let us all get away by ourselves deserve our thanks for their (slightly mystified) indulgence.

Other takeaways

• That Julia gives the best presents, although even booksellers occasionally have to deal with assholes in their working life. It does sadden me that anybody with enough regard for books to go into a bookshop in the first place could be a git when they get there.
• That Kareem’s anecdotes once heard can never be unheard and sharing the experience doesn’t lessen the pain, no matter how often Graham Austin-King tries it.
• That Ed Macdonald has an alarmingly good theoretical grasp of how to fend off knife attacks and Anna Stephens knows how to make the assailant stab himself with his own knife. I have to say the technique worked perfectly when I used it a dream on Saturday morning.  Running away, however, always seems the safest option, particularly if you are with a friend who cannot run quite as fast as you.
• That RB Watkinson won the prize (I think) for getting the most out of Bristolcon by virtue of having had the least total hours slept over the course of the weekend.
• That Dominick Murray knows more about turtles than any man (or woman) should.
• That hotel night-managers are wonderfully patient and understanding people.
• That my efforts at self-promotion should probably have meant more than mentioning to a couple of people in the bar that Lady of the Helm was free on Amazon for the whole three days of Bristolcon related events.
• That making your excellent and very reasonably priced editor (albeit an increasingly busy editor) cry with your writing (or weep as she verbally edited it for me) is not actually a bad thing. As Gandalf put it “I will not say do not weep, for not all tears are an evil.”  Though at various points in the weekend we seemed to be seeing more @halfcutharp than @halfstrungharp.     
• That I am very grateful to Mark Lawrence for his blog posts about Bristolcon past, for the competitions based on his writing and his sponsorship of SPFBO. This has done so much to bring together people who would otherwise never even have known each other existed, let alone been energised enough to descend on Bristol to meet in person. I know Kareem Mahfouz because I saw a picture of his chest hair shaved to spell out Prince of Fools at the same time that I had mown the grass in my garden to spell out the same title. I know Laura M Hughes because she entered a piece of entertaining flash fiction in a Thatthornguy competition that Agnes Mezsaros kindly invited me to judge.  I am sure many others have similar tales of chance Lawrencian connections.
• That Celyn Lawrence has the best cheeky smile and surely the reddest hair in Bristol. (All the best fantasy heroines have red hair, or at least so says the author of Lady of the Helm.)  That Celyn means holly in welsh and is pronounced ke-lin not kay-lin and definitely not seline. 

A Marked Story - my review of "Ismark, the Marked boy" by JH Lillevik

I first met this story at an early stage in its development, when the author shared some initial thoughts and drafts with me and few other friends on social media.  I find it an exciting and privileged position to be able to see how the story has developed from its early stages to this final published novel. 

The story has many dark elements. We join Lillevik's eponymous hero Eirik the marked boy when he is a brutally mistreated slave in a mining community, part of the half conquered land of Ismark.  From there Eirik's life takes a series of turns for the worse in a succession of trials that would test the fortitude of a saint. However, Eirik survives where others do not, and finds spiritual strength in the midst of debilitating physical weakness. Sustained by dream-like memories of friends, relatives and homes he has lost, he strives to adapt to the challenges and opportunities of rapidly changing circumstances.  

At 271 pages, the book is relative short for a fantasy epic and this allows it to start at a reasonable pace and accelerate rapidly as it approaches its shattering conclusion. I can see where some of the authorial excursions on those initial drafts have been trimmed back to allow us to get to grips more quickly with Eirik's journey - both in geographical and developmental terms.

The world building is intriguing. Various nations struggle against the might of the Sorian Empire, in its determination to subjugate the rest of the world through military or economic might. The Sorian's reminded me of many historical and fictional archetypes, most notably Rome, or ancient China. However, one particularly memorable character put me in mind of none other than Jabba the Hut from Star Wars. 

The Sorians built their empire by stealing cities from a sophisticated dwarven civilisation and Lillevik leaves a few loose threads hanging, temptingly - to assure us that dwarves have a bigger part to play in Eirik's story than the magnificence of their architecture.

There are other characters too, besides Eirik and his immediate Ismarkian associates, that the reader will look forward to hearing more from: Master Cal - the inept Sorian merchant; Rhun - the Wrenian spy and his charming companion Amalie; Kef - the Sorian with friends in high places and swords with sharp edges.

Lillevik's writing is a little raw in places, and there is the occasional misplaced word or typo which a skilled editor's eye might have tidied up.  However, the story has at its heart the endurance and triumph of the human spirit. There were times, when I felt we were being told rather than shown the characters' experience of and reaction to adversity, but Lillevik's eagerness, in this his debut novel, is understandably to convey the shape and urgency of his story.

As E.M.Forster said nearly a century ago in Aspects of the Novel "The story... can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next." Lillevik's story - with its nicely judged denoument - succeeded in that,                   

A Story with Heart, - my spoiler free review of "Court of Lions" by Jane Johnson

Decades ago I studied History at A'level - including a paper in European History from about 1480 to 1680.  My revision strategy consisted of stringing together every incident of European History and making them but branches from a single stem of "Why did Spain decline in the 1600s?"  It was a sure bet as this precise essay question had come up on every exam paper since before even my History teacher had been born.

That long ago study came back to me as I read Jane Johnson's glorious twin tale. In essence it is two stories separated by half a millenium, but conjoined in Geography. Johnson follows two parallel threads - a double helix if you will, not so much intertwined as touching gently on each other - with points of connection as light yet poignant as a lover's kiss.  This is a story of duality - at once a present day mystery taut with tension and conflict and yet also a piece of historical fiction vividly bringing a lost world to life,

In the present day we follow Kate, a woman with a bruising past taking a far from secure refuge in the back streets of Granada. In the past we ride with the strangely named Blessings - companion to the boy prophesied to be the last Sultan of Granada.

My school boy study of Spain began with the reigns of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, As formidable a pair of monarchs as Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine - though the legacy of the Spanish Catholic Monarchs has endured better than Henry II's Angevin Empire. Blessings' account has the same starting point as my A'level European History, but sheds an alternative light on the deceptive (arguably duplicitous) simplicity of Ferdinand and Isabella's crusade against the moors.

Tolerance is another theme that seems to run through the book, in both the sense of being accepting of difference, and also in the sense of to tolerate or put up with something. Kate is a woman who has tolerated too much. The worm has not so much turned as run and - in Kate's case - run  to a place that was once celebrated for its tolerance, indeed its celebration of diversity.

Today we live in interesting times, and Johnson's book reflects that. Fear, prejudice and zealotry simmer below the surface of any civilisation and the parallels between the past and the present are easy to draw.

However, neither in Kate's tale nor Blessings' does Johnson fall into the trap of casting either side as wholy saints or sinners.  The moors of Granada have their bloody villains, as crimsoned as any grimdark anti-hero. The christians of Castile and Aragon have their honourable champions alongside their venal sovereigns. But the conquest of Granada still ranks alongside that of the American midwest, or aborginal Australia, as an episode of human history littered with dishonour and broken treaties. Once again history greatest gift to the winners has been to allow their perspective on events to be the one best preserved for posterity - and Johnson's novel offers a different slant on that history.

Blessings stands watching from the margins of history, harbouring secrets great and small, trading in them yet driven always by a purity of love to which all other considerations are ultimately subordinate.  His voice is convincing, his tale compelling - told in Johnson's effortless liquid prose.

Kate in her journey meets similar prejudiced zealotry as she struggles to emerge from a shell into which great trauma had driven her. Yet she is endlessly drawn to the Alhambra the Moorish palace around which both Blessings' and her own story revolve.

The writing is at its most convincing when describing the people, the culture, the food even of those whose lives straddled and still straddle the Straits of Gibraltar. The author's fondness - passion even - for the places, the period and the people add well defined flesh to the bare bones of the story.

Kate's past trials - while truly dreadful - do not have quite the depth of flavour that we get when the story stalks the streets of Granada. We are necessarily removed from the events in England - which are described either as past occurrences or through panicked telephone conversations. In such circumstances it is difficult to deliver the tension of a full blooded thriller. Nonetheless, Kate's story provides an engaging counterpoint to Blessings' and brings something of that lost age into the present.

A book's power is best felt in what the reader does when it is finished. Does the story's grip persist beyond the last page? In the case of The Court of Lions, I scoured through the author's notes before throwing myself at Google to research for myself the captivating events Johnson had described.  

As to my long History A'level - gentle reader. Well that year for the first time in centuries the History paper did not have a "Why did Spain Decline?" question, instead there was a different question.  "How did Portugal break free from the Spanish Yoke?"  So I wrote "Portugal broke free of the Spanish yoke because Spain declined." - and then wrote my planned essay.
  

The Grey Bastards, by Jonathan French. A spoiler review

I try to observe a rule not to read other people's reviews of something that I've read until after I have written my own, lest their opinions should colour mine.  So I am writing this review of The Grey Bastards in some haste so I can freely indulge my curiosity about what other friends and reviewers have thought of this brilliant and fascinating tale.

Of the last twenty books I have read, The Grey Bastards will be the fourth that I have been introduced to via Mark Lawrence's Self-Publishing Fantasy Blog Off. This is, I think a testament to the competition's success in lifting some very good books above the noise signal and anti-selfpublishing snobbery that has hidden some remarkable talents from a wider audience.

The Grey Bastards came first in the 2016-17 contest and is an extremely well polished book - even if its protagonists are as rough as sandpaper toilet tissue. The story's feet appear planted in the Dungeons and Dragons milieu of my youth - huge birds called rokh and amorphous digesting blobs called black sludges could have sat quite happily between the pages of the Monster Manual. The Grey Bastards are themselves a troop (or rather a hoof) of hog riding half-orc cavalry who we see and bond with through our point of view protagonist - Jackal. Jackal himself, is young, ambitious and - if not exactly handsome - at least less intrinsically ugly than others of his kin.

Make no mistake, this is a brilliant book, that challenges the reviewer only in knowing where to begin tackling the task of describing it, much as one might wonder how to bring down Jackal's brother in arms the mountainous and formidable thrice blood - Oats.

Thrice bloods are one of French's many linguistic, cultural or even biological developments that add a deep and rich additional dimension to what - in other hands - might have been a mere parade through a flat role playing campaign.  The half-orcs are all bastards, beget by orcish rapes - fierce and formidable fighters the various hoofs have become part of the Empire's defense against orcish incursions. Thrice bloods are the most formidable half-orcs, born of a half-orc mother and an orc father. The half orc hoofs - and other re-purposed denizens of familiar myth - each patrol their own parcel (or lot) of the near lawless borderlands between the orcs and the empire. The lots are a barren dangerous place - home only to those who have no other place to turn to - a wild land that makes the wild west look like a kindergarten's playground - where the only safety is in the mutual loyalty and reliance of belonging to a group.

I daren't say too much more of the plot - this is a book to discover for yourselves.

It is perhaps fair to warn you that - from the very outset - the tone and language of our half-orc hero and his friends is beyond bawdy, beyond coarse and yet all the more believable for it. These are the roughest of rough soldiers bound by the close knit camaraderie and carnal preoccupations of many a troop of specialist mercenaries operating under near constant duress. I have seen the like of their crude language previously only in Jeff Salyards' coarse-tongued Syldoon soldiers who rode through the Bloodsounder's arc trilogy.  However, the fluent variety of the Grey Bastard's cursing might raise a blush even in Lieutenant Muldoos.

However, the story is no testosterone driven male monopoly. The female characters - Fetching (the half-orc warrior), Beryl (sometime nursemaid, sometime director of the half-orc orphanage), Delia (the whore who dares) amongst several others are all given agency and screen-time aplenty and you come to love and fear for them as much - if not more so - than for Jackal himself.

French's half-orcs are eloquently, entertainingly, crudely, witty, but his writing is also skillfully evocative in its descriptions. Some of the lines that caught my eye include
"... there was a threat buried in the thick folds of politeness."
"The morning sky was newborn, still jaundiced before a proper sunrise."
"... the wet defeat in her eyes betrayed she did not know how to proceed."

The action scenes are gripping, the technicalities of hog cavalry warfare absorbing, the pacing brilliant. I consumed the last 43% of this book in a single evening - breathlessly borne along through a sequence of ascending climaxes (of the plot variety). The various threads of the story wound round and through each other to an ending that was so beautifully perfectly fitting that I put down the kindle with a sense of utter satisfaction.

This is a tale of the fellowship, of the loyalty that each individual must bear to the greater whole - and in the final analysis due recognition must be and is paid to the one willing to sacrifice everything for the others,    

Nothing is Ever Simple - Corin Hayes book two by G.R.Matthews

This is the second book in G.R.Matthews' series of underwater dystopian sci-fi series.  It sees our hero on a mission to a different underwater city - one that is neither silent nor homely.  The nature of Corin's work, his past, his setting, and his personality - make for a man born and borne by solitude. In consequence we spend a lot of time in Corin's head seeing the world through the grim and slightly distorting lens of his experience.

Corin's is an engaging voice - world-weary but still wise-cracking, with some quotes sharp enough to cut.  For example, "We hold onto our past, sometimes with fingers dug so deep into its flesh that we are part of it."

Book 2 carries us in a different direction, both geographically and narratively, from Book 1.  The threads of personal tragedy and deferred vengeance are left dangling as fresh challenges and swift undercurrents sweep Corin into new and deep dangers,

After the distinctive noir-ness of Corin's voice, the next feature of the book to catch the eye is the world building. In a population condemned to living at the bottom of its oceans, there will be many difficulties of economy, nutrition and society to address.

Long ago I watched a horror/sci-fi film about a team of divers investigating a Titanic like sunken liner decades after it foundered. They found against any expectation that there were survivors - that shocked moment when the diver's torch sweeps over a porthole and a live face peers back. They had fashioned some kind of existence within the sunken hull all led by an extremely resourceful purser.  (Oh the joys of the internet - somebody else roused by the same curiosity of imperfect memory asked the same question and got an answer The film was led not by Vincent Price as I had thought but Christopher Lee and is titled Goliath Awaits )

Just as the sunken survivors of the Goliath had to be resourceful and inventive, so too Matthews lavishes care and thought on how some kind of normality might assert and define itself in such submerged circumstances as Corin's world faces. It makes for an engaging and thought provoking read.

The plot is at once simple and complex. There are bad guys who put Corin in danger and he has to work his way out of it. Their motivations and the routes to confound them prove somewhat tortuous. I read the Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep a long time ago and the plot to Nothing is Ever Simple has the same kind of organic style. The story appears to advance by the author throwing a series of curve balls at his protagonist and then following his reactions.  In that sense, the plot feels more like the gym in which Matthews tests and develops his world building and the protagonist's persona, rather than the engine which drives the plot. Nonetheless it rattles along at a good pace.

I will again raise reservations about the freedom with which Corin uses blunt instruments. People are bludgeoned into lengthy periods of unconsciousness with the same abandon that I last saw in a Modesty Blaise book (and before that in early Enid Blyton's).



While my younger self accepted this, decades of watching the TV show Casualty have heightened my knowledge of subdural haematomas - while health and basic safety training taught me to treat any potential concussion with extreme caution.  So my suspension of disbelief skated over some thin ice (in so far as a suspension can skate) when Corin bound up an unconscious villain and blithely waited hours for the fellow to make a natural and total recovery.

Those reservations aside, Corin continues to be an engaging and readable hero in a radically different but eminently sustainable setting.