And Then There Were None

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE (Agatha Christie) - Three Stars

Between the move and everything, my brain has been in "shut-down" mode and not really ready to tackle anything intellectually demanding. Agatha Christie is a good way to ease back in, because her stories are interesting, entertaining, and short.

They're also impossible to review, since to talk about the story at all would be to give something away. Mrs. Mallowan's habit of italicizing every dramatic revelation is charming (I had to keep reminding myself that most of the murder mystery cliches started with Agatha Christie). The book was good, but not as good as Murder on the Orient Express, the best of her stories that I've read.

The epilogue cleared up a lot, per usual. Christie was brilliant in that her stories are always feasible (fantastic, maybe, but not implausible) and she never has to resort to crappy deus ex machina endings (teeny, tiny, mini-spoiler: this means that, yes, one of the ten on the island is the murderer). But I will say I had trouble with the last two deaths. If you haven't read the book, don't highlight this next section:

The last two deaths are Philip Lombard and Vera Claythorne, and their final scene together struck a wrong note for me. Lombard had been painted as an unscrupulous, mercenary type figure. If, at the end, he knew he wasn't the murderer, he would automatically assume Vera was: why didn't he just shoot her and be done with it? Then there's this exchange: Vera said, "How was it worked--that trick with the marble bear?" He shrugged his shoulders. "A conjuring trick, my dear--a very good one..." Now, if you've read the book, you know that neither of these two were the murderer. Why does Lombard's response sound like a confession to a murder he didn't commit? If he suspected Vera as the murderer, why was he answering as to how SHE committed the murder? To wrap up the Lombard puzzle, I find it incredible that he could be so guileless as to let her lift the gun from his pocket and kill him.

Lastly, Vera's death. While Christie (rather heavy-handedly) elaborated on Vera's guilty conscience, her "suicide" comes FAR too quickly after she shoots Lombard and (for all intents and purposes) "wins" as the last survivor.

The Sons of Heaven

THE SONS OF HEAVEN (Kage Baker) - Three Stars

I actually finished this book two weeks ago, but didn't sit down to write the review until today. I also haven't started a new book yet. Between the move and everything else, there probably won't be another review until July sometime. Anyway...

I'm okay with how this series ended. The series wasn't as good as it could have been, but it didn't completely fall apart like I'd feared. The triple-Adonai conceit I still find particularly annoying, because there was simply no reason for it. One Adonai personality became a main character, the other two served no purpose to the story (except for being the basis of an extremely bizarre, Oedipal plot arc). The Tiara and Lewis storyline was also wholly unnecessary and contributed little.

But, once again, Baker showed skill and manipulating a large-scale story, with numerous main characters in numerous plot arcs all converging on the same place and time. The subplots involving Joseph & Budu, Labienus, Suleyman, and others were all well developed. Still, the conclusion of the series leaves one with a slight feeling of "what might have been" if Baker had honed in on a specific direction for the series sooner than the fourth book.

The Machine's Child

THE MACHINE'S CHILD (Kage Baker) - Three Stars

I kind of wonder what this series might have been like had Baker made up her mind a little earlier. The first three books were all focused on the individual (Mendoza, Joseph, Mendoza), and pretty much stayed in one place and told one story. And they were good.

Much of the last few books have a much broader scope: numerous characters, places and times. The "X-Files" conspiracy angle of the storyline has come to the forefront, and Baker has handled this stylistic device with adroitness. Instead of becoming a jumbled mess, I've found the macro-scale Machiavellian politics to be some of the more interesting parts of the series.

But, I fear, at the end of this book the series takes a turn for the worse.

It may seem a strange complaint for a book about time-traveling cyborgs, but it asks me to suspend my disbelief just a little too far. I don't have any expectations of a happy ending, and I won't hold Baker to task for characters doing things I don't like. I do, however, expect them to be consistent, or at least have reasonably explained development (apologies to Mr. Twain, my stance could be summed up something to the effect of "When a personage acts like an intelligent, confident, aggressive, bold, lively entity at the start of a sentence, he shall not act like an inconsequential milquetoast at the end of it").

Quite simply, my problem is this: nowhere in the history of time has a version 3.0 been weaker or less advanced than a version 2.0. Regardless of whether or not I like or dislike Nicholas (Adonai v.1.0), Edward (Adonai v.2.0), or Alec (Adonai v.3.0), I just can't bring myself to accept that Edward, who spent his entire life in the 19th century, could quickly "out-learn" high-end technical concepts better than 23rd/24th Century Alec and Captain Morgan (the world's most powerful A.I.) (especially considering that Alec initially was presented to the reader as an astonishing mechanical/technical savant). I don't buy it.

I also take technical issues with how Nicholas, Edward, and Alec, at one point three very separate and uniquely developed characters, have been kind of boiled down into simple writer's constructs (Nicholas: melancholy or invisible, except when his fundamentalist rage would serve to move the plot along; Edward: one-note conniving superiority; Alec: depressive dimwit, a jarring change from the way he was initially written); and how Mendoza, also a well-fleshed out character, has been hollowed out into almost an emotionless object.

I'm already reading the eighth and final book in the series, but the ending of this one did not encourage me.