All reviews copyright 1984-2008 Evelyn C. Leeper.
THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT by Oliver Sacks:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/18/2005]
Oliver Sacks's THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT (ISBN 0-684-85394-9) is a collection of essays about various peculiar neurological syndromes. The title essay is about a patient with the inability to interpret visual images: show him a rose and he cannot identify it as a rose, but let him smell it and he has no problem. "The Lost Mariner" is about a man with retrograde amnesia (a.k.a. Korsakov's syndrome). I can't remember if it used the term, but that is what the film MEMENTO is about. I would be surprised if the writer of that was not at least partially inspired by Sacks. And this is not the only pop culture derivative of Sacks's work. Just a few weeks ago, the "B" story on "House, M.D." was almost precisely the case described in "Cupid's Disease". (And the writers of "Medical Investigation" seemed to have taken their pilot episode from Berton Roueche's "Eleven Blue Men". This seems to be the season for taking television plots from classic medical case histories.) Michael Nyman has even written an opera based on Sacks's title essay. At times the writing is a bit dense, but still readable. (Roueche, mentioned earlier, wrote for a wider audience and is somewhat easier to read. Paul de Kruif, with his MICROBE HUNTERS and MEN AGAINST DEATH, predates both of them in this genre.) The consensus among our book discussion group, however, was that the descriptions of the cases were far more interesting than Sacks's philosophizing about them.
To order The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat from amazon.com, click here.
CONTACT by Carl Sagan:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/05/2004]
In an attempt to get more people interested, our science fiction discussion group chose Carl Sagan's CONTACT as this month's book. It seemed like a good possibility to get readers who were not normally involved, given the familiarity of Sagan's name outside of the field of science fiction and the success of the film version. We did get three new people, but 1) they came only because they knew of Sagan as a scientist, 2) they said at the beginning they didn't like science fiction and that basically they wouldn't be coming to future meetings, and 3)they thought we would be reading the book at the meeting, rather than having read it beforehand and discussing it at the meeting. The last seems particularly strange--how could one read a 430-page book at a two-hour meeting. In any case, we didn't really build up our attendance and we all pretty much agreed that Sagan was not a very good science fiction writer. Many people found his digressions annoying, and one also pointed out that Sagan never really describes any action. For example, he leads up to the explosion, but then "cuts away" and resumes writing quite a bit after it occurs. This was a bestseller when it was published (1985), but I don't think it was highly regarded by science fiction fans then, and does not stand up well over time.
[And a follow-up]: I got a couple of comments on my comments last week on our book group's discussion of Carl Sagan's CONTACT. Mark Leeper said of the idea that we would be reading it at the meeting, "Perhaps they expected excerpts. We do call it a 'reading group' not a 'discussion group.'" Charlie Harris also said this, as well as saying of the digressions, "I'd distinguish between two types of digression: the science pedagogy--which I did not find annoying-- and the routine, non-sf, not-plot-related stories involving non- central characters--which I did."
To order Contact from amazon.com, click here.
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J. D. Salinger:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/05/2004]
J. D. Salinger's THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (ISBN 0-316-76948-7) was a book that everyone but I seemed to have read, so I read it. I'm sure that in 1946 the frankness about sexuality, and the opposition to authority was quite new and arresting, especially when being read someone in its apparent target audience, teenage boys. But it's now 2004, everything in the book (and then some) has been on primetime television, and I'm a middle-aged woman. Which is a long way of saying that while I can recognize it was an important work, it did not do much for me.
To order The Catcher in the Rye from amazon.com, click here.
INSIDE HAMMER by Jimmy Sangster:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/05/2004]
For fans of Hammer horror films, Jimmy Sangster's INSIDE HAMMER (Reynolds & Hearn, ISBN 1-903111-20-X) is mostly a wonderfully collection of anecdotes of his life at Hammer Studios. Towards the end it does devolve into a listing of "then I worked on this film, and then they made that film", but on the whole, his comments are amusing and entertaining, if not entirely insightful and meaningful about film-making. For example, he recounts how Bray Studios was an old mansion used for storing army coats, but when the roof leaked, the coats on the [British] first floor got so heavy with water, they caused the ground floor ceiling to collapse. He is also more honest about the various folks' negative qualities, without making this a tabloid sort of book. (For those who want a more academic approach, there have been several other books about Hammer Studios.)
To order Inside Hammer from amazon.com, click here.
THE CASE OF THE MISSING BOOKS by Ian Sansom:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/21/2007]
THE CASE OF THE MISSING BOOKS by Ian Sansom (ISBN-13 978-0-06-082250-7, ISBN-10 0-06-082250-3) is "A Mobile Library Mystery", which makes it sound like a later book in a series, but in fact it is the first book in a series. It is billed as "expertly comic", and I suppose of you find the notion that people who live in rural Northern Ireland act and talk as though they are brain-damaged comic, you will laugh a lot. It struck me as of the same ilk as Stella Gibbons's COLD COMFORT FARM, but not as funny.
To order The Case of the Missing Books from amazon.com, click here.
STARRING T. REX! by José Luis Sanz:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/07/2003]
Another import of sorts, though published by Indiana University Press, is José Luis Sanz's STARRING T. REX! Sanz is a professor in Madrid, and the book was first published in Spain, then translated and published here. (The translation is adequate, though occasionally there is an awkward turn of phrase, and I noticed at least one "bare" where "bear" was intended.) The book is a look at how the various theories about dinosaurs reflected the sociological and philosophical climate of their times. (For example, early theories tried to fit dinosaurs into a Biblical universe.) But a large part of the book is devoted to dinosaurs in popular culture--books, movies, and even advertising. Sanz is a lover of categories, categorizing the ways dinosaurs are portrayed in fiction as "The Synchrony of Humans and Dinosaurs", The Myth of the Lost World", "Frozen Dinosaurs", "Time Travels", "Dinosaurs of the Future", and "Exodinosaurs". and in addition to the authentic dinosaurs of more recent films, there have been -paradinosauroids" (a mix of different theropods and sauropods; e.g. the Rhedosaurus in "The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms"), "sauriodinosauroids" (lizards passed off as dinosaurs; e.g., "Journey to the Center of the Earth"), "dragodinosauroids" (a man in a suit; e.g. Godzilla). (One wonders if this was the original word in Spanish, as it seems to come from the English-language phrase "to dress in drag.") It also has a lot of nifty stills and posters from movies, and illustrations from books.
To order Starring T. Rex! from amazon.com, click here.
BLINDNESS by José Saramago:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/30/2004]
I decided to skip José Saramago's BLINDNESS, though it's hard to judge whether the problem was Saramago or the translator or the fact that I was stuck reading it in a large-print edition. Certainly whoever decided that the use of quotation marks or paragraphing were unnecessary for dialogue is partly to blame.
To order Blindness from amazon.com, click here.
DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS by José Saramago
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/28/2008]
DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS by José Saramago (translated by Margaret Jull Costa) (ISBN-13 978-0-15-101274-9 ISBN-10 0-15-101274-1) is a straightforward fantasy novel, written by a major author and published by a major publisher, yet it has received surprisingly little coverage by reviewers of fantasy novels. (A review at sfgate.com seemed promising, but it turned out to be the "San Francisco Chronicle" website.) The reason seems to be that the author is too major--Saramago has did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. Either the reviewers figure that people will hear of this book a lot elsewhere, or that it is somehow above being reviewed by "mere" genre reviewers. Neither seemed to affect them in the case of Philip Roth's THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA. though, so I am confused. (And there was a review of Saramago's science fiction novel BLINDNESS in "Locus", back in 1999.)
The premise is certainly not new--it is basically "Death Takes a Holiday". In a small country somewhere (it feels like South America, though I cannot pin down why), on the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, death ceases. Well, to be more precise, human death ceases--all the other animals and plants seem to be dying in normal numbers. At first, people are overjoyed, but soon the consequences become more obvious and what had seemed a blessing becomes a curse. The Church, the undertakers, and the insurance companies see the negative aspects first, followed by hospitals and nursing homes. Halfway through the novel, death (who insists on a lower-case "d") takes a slightly different approach, which I will not reveal. I will say that the second half is weaker than the first.
Saramago is not an easy author to read. Thank goodness the book is short (238 pages), because the sentences are very long and complex. The second sentence of the novel (for example) is 91 words long, with fifteen commas. And I suppose one might observe that some of the consequences will be obvious to readers familiar with fantasy. But Saramago covers much more than the obvious. For one thing, there is a long dialogue about its effect on religion, a topic carefully avoided in earlier genre treatments of the same premise. And there are other topics, such as a discourse on how the initial display of the country's flag by a few people who used it as a symbol of gratitude for (one supposes) Divine pleasure with the country turned into an effectively compulsory requirement: "Anyone who doesn't hang our nation's immortal flag from the window of their house doesn't deserve to live. Anyone not displaying the national flag has sold out to death." (Sound familiar? I can remember shortly after 09/11 someone asking us why we weren't flying a flag in front of our house, as if that were some sort of requirement, like keeping your lawn mowed.)
In spite of the "run-on" sentences, this is clearly a book worth reading, and I suspect will probably be better than the Hugo nominees, yet it is so off-the-radar of most fans that its chance of being on the ballot are vanishingly small.
To order Death with Interruptions from amazon.com, click here.
INTRODUCING MATHEMATICS by Ziauddin Sardar, Jerry Ravetz and Borin Van Loon:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/20/2006]
INTRODUCING MATHEMATICS by Ziauddin Sardar, Jerry Ravetz and Borin Van Loon (ISBN 1-84046-11-3) has the same flaws that Sardar and Van Loon's INTRODUCING SCIENCE (reviewed in the 07/29/05 issue of the MT VOID) had: it spends more time criticizing Western colonialism and imperialism than introducing mathematics. I suppose that Eurocentrism and ethno-mathematics may be interesting topics, but they are not mathematics per se.
To order Introducing Mathematics from amazon.com, click here.
INTRODUCING SCIENCE by Ziauddin Sardar and Borin Van Loon:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/29/2005]
Ziauddin Sardar and Borin Van Loon's INTRODUCING SCIENCE (ISBN 1-84066-358-9) is another book in the "Introducing" series that did not live up to expectations, because it didn't introduce science, but instead introduced philosophies of science. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but when one is expecting an overview of science and the scientific method and instead get a comparison of the different philosophical attitudes toward science--what it is, how it is done, what is permissible, and so on--in different cultures, it is a bit jarring. Had it been called INTRODUCING PHILOSOPHIES OF SCIENCE, I might have been more positive towards it. But it is ironic that on one page the authors decry the Western attitude that only Western science is important and on the next say that nothing happened in science between the Greeks and the Renaissance! And when on page 101, they explain that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is "ethnocentric and racist", I decided that even as an explication of different philosophies, it left a lot to be desired. Then again, I suppose that the authors may have an explanation for this when they claim that "both claiming and maximizing cultural neutrality is itself a specific Western cultural value."
To order Introducing Science from amazon.com, click here.
CALCULATING GOD by Robert J. Sawyer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/31/2003]
I'm in two book groups at our public library, the "original" group (which does all sorts of books), and the science fiction group. So almost every month I have a couple of books chosen for me by other people.
But this month I think I chose both of them. I know I chose Nikolai Gogol's DEAD SOULS, and I think I may have chosen Robert J. Sawyer's CALCULATING GOD, based on the group's request to do something recent, not too long, and that the library network had enough copies of. We all thought the book had a lot of ideas--maybe even more than a single book should hold. There was first contact with aliens who have proof that God exists, and immortality, and gun-wielding religious fanatics, and .... Actually, in my opinion, Sawyer should have left out the gun-wielding religious fanatics. I got the impression that he put them in because he felt the book needed some action instead of all the people and aliens just talking, but I didn't feel that way. I also thought that the details seemed somewhat artificially constructed so that the story could progress exactly as Sawyer wanted. For example, the aliens have enough technology so that Sawyer can justify why the government has to let the main character be the only contact with them, but not enough to solve his main problem. I liked all the philosophical discussions among the characters; I just wish there had been more of that.
To order Calculating God from amazon.com, click here.
FACTORING HUMANITY by Robert J. Sawyer (Tor, ISBN 0-312-86458-2, 1998, 350pp, hardback):
After the relative simplicity of his last book (Illegal Alien), Sawyer is back to his typical high-density story. A. E. Van Vogt claimed one show write by having a plot twist every 600 words; sometimes I think Sawyer has decided to throw in a new idea every few thousand words. I mean, I would think that deciphering the messages from our first alien contact and building a machine from their instructions with the functionality of the machine in Factoring Humanity would be enough without adding an entire sub-plot of artificial intelligence, suicides, accusations of abuse, and repressed/manufactured memories. Yes, they all tie together, but they make for a very busy novel. (And it's all the busier because Sawyer keeps his novels to a reasonable length. He doesn't take a thousand pages to cover all this--he does it in 350. Hang on to your hats.)
I'm sure I could work up an explanation of how this novel ties in with Sawyer's Canadian-ness and hence feelings of isolation, etc. (as Clute did with fellow Canadian Robert Charles Wilson and Darwinia), but I don't think that has anything to do with it. I do think that this does deal with isolation, but on the level that everyone feels when they are trying to communicate with or understand someone else.
To order Factoring Humanity from amazon.com, click here.
FRAMESHIFT by Robert J. Sawyer (Tor, ISBN 0-312-86325-X, 1997, 347pp, hardback):
The only problem with Robert J. Sawyer's novels is that they're busier than Shinjuku Station at rush hour. This one has a scientist working on the Human Genome Project, driven by the fact he has a fifty-fifty chance of developing Huntington's disease, mugged by neo-Nazis who may be connected to the Treblinka guard Ivan the Terrible. Meanwhile the scientist and his wife arrange to have a child by artificial insemination by donor, and this child may or may not inherit some of the wife's telepathic powers. There's also the question of whether the scientist can get health insurance and how the insurance companies try to get around legislation protecting people from being excluded due to genetic pre-dispositions toward disease.
All of these are important, and all of these are interesting, but all of these in a 347-page book makes for a lot of coincidences, strange connections, and red herrings (and one whopper that's all three).
I found the parts about the genetic testing to be the most relevant. (Of course, whether relevance is important is a subjective decision on the part of the reader.) I understand why the rest was there, at least in some sense, and Sawyer does connect it thematically. But as in The Terminal Experiment, I found myself wishing for more concentration on, and examination of, fewer topics.
This probably all sounds negative, but given that I plan on nominating Frameshift for the Hugo this year, perhaps I should say something positive. Okay: Robert J. Sawyer is the one of the two authors I first think of when I think about who the successors to Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and the other Golden Age authors in this "literature of ideas" are. (Greg Egan is the other.) So maybe my complaints about too many ideas seem a bit odd. If what you are looking for are ideas, and consequences of science, and all that sort of stuff, Sawyer is definitely high on my recommendation list.
To order Frameshift from amazon.com, click here.
HOMINIDS by Robert J. Sawyer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/02/2003]
I read another Hugo nominee, Robert J. Sawyer's HOMINIDS. This seemed a typical "Analog" story--a lot of emphasis on the science, but the actual story and characters were not very interesting. Part of the problem was that Sawyer seems to have designed his non-human society so that it's better in all sorts of ways, and without having religion. (Or maybe even *because* it doesn't have religion.) As a result, it reads a lot like Heinlein, and when the character talks about how well it works, I find myself thinking, "Well, yes, because Sawyer wrote it that way." Ultimately, in the context of the story, *Sawyer* is God, so it's rather disingenuous of him to construct an ideal fictional society and then say, "See, you don't need God."
To order Hominids from amazon.com, click here.
HUMANS by Robert J. Sawyer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/20/2004]
I read Robert J. Sawyer's HUMANS, the middle book of his "H" trilogy. (Well, what else would you call a series with books HOMINIDS, HUMANS, and HYBRIDS?) As usual, it seems to have every idea that occurred to Sawyer during its writing, although most of them are connected to the plot. (It seems obvious that Sawyer read Jared Diamond's GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL.)
[And later]: Last week, I referred to Robert Sawyer's new trilogy as his "H" trilogy, but Joe Karpierz points out that it is actually called "The Neanderthal Parallax".
To order Humans from amazon.com, click here.
HYBRIDS by Robert J. Sawyer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/26/2004]
I finished Robert J. Sawyer's "Neanderthal Parallax" series with his book HYBRIDS, and found that I thought it the weakest of the three, with Sawyer getting up on a soapbox about a lot of things: Americans' supposed love of guns, selective breeding, rape, male versus female psychology, and so on. There was also what might truly be called a deus ex machina about religion, the human brain, and the earth's magnetic field which all just happens to come to a climax at a few minutes before midnight on New Year's Eve in Times Square. This has always been my problem with Sawyer's books--he seems to put everything in, and doesn't spend enough time to develop a lot of it sufficiently. Somehow after working through three books, I was very dissatisfied with the resolution. (This, of course, is another problem with a multi-volume work. If at the end a reader doesn't like it, the reader is going to be even more annoyed at having spent so much time over such a long period to read it.)
To order Hybrids from amazon.com, click here.
"Identity Theft" by Robert J. Sawyer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/12/2006]
"Identity Theft" by Robert J. Sawyer (in DOWN THESE DARK SPACEWAYS, edited by Mike Resnick, ISBN 1-582-88164-2) is a hard-boiled science fiction mystery story in the vein of Isaac Asimov (on the SF end) and Raymond Chandler (on the hard-boiled end). (Sawyer has written at least one science fiction mystery story before, ILLEGAL ALIEN.) Alexander Lomax (the first-person narrator) is a detective on Mars hired to find the missing husband of his new client, both of whom are "transfers"--people whose consciousnesses have been transferred to mechanical bodies. As usual, Sawyer deals with a lot of issues: the nature of identity, consciousness and individuality, and of course the mystery itself. There do seem to be a couple of flaws in the reasoning, though, which detract from the story. (At one point Lomax says that a certain murder must have been committed, but later we discover that this is not true. Since his reasoning is part of what is given to the reader as explanation, it seems unfair for it to turn out to be false.)
To order Down These Dark Spaceways from amazon.com, click here.
ILLEGAL ALIEN by Robert J. Sawyer (Ace, ISBN 0-441-00476-8, 1997, 292pp, hardback):
Robert J. Sawyer has changed gears a bit for this novel. Rather than an analytic look at the existence of souls or the implications of genetic testing or a tour of the cosmos, he gives us a here a classic first contact situation that rapidly becomes a murder mystery. I found myself thinking of Isaac Asimov's science fiction mysteries, and this is a worthy successor in the genre.
We start with a spaceship that lands in the Atlantic Ocean. It turns out to be disabled and, after communication is established, arrangements are made for the Tosoks to exchange their advanced technology for our help in making repairs. All is going along splendidly until a human turns up dead, and it appears as though he was killed by a Tosok.
There is a lot of "courtroom procedural" here as well, and I can't help but wonder if this was inspired somewhat by the Simpson trial. (Sawyer has his characters make reference to it, which seems to support this.) On one hand, this gets a bit heavy-handed at times. On the other hand, I think this could be made into a very interesting movie. (Not that it would be, knowing movie-makers, but it could be, a la Witness for the Prosecution or even To Kill a Mockingbird.)
Illegal Alien is an enjoyable mystery, a bit lighter than Sawyer's recent works, but certainly worth a read.
To order Illegal Alien from amazon.com, click here.
ITERATIONS by Robert J. Sawyer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/24/2006]
ITERATIONS by Robert J. Sawyer (ISBN 0-88995-303-1) is a collection of some of Sawyer's short fiction. In fact, it is the only collection so far of his short fiction. Considering that he has been nominated for nine Hugos, you would think an American publisher would have been interested in doing a collection, so it could be that Sawyer felt that as Canada's most visible science fiction author, he should have this collection published in Canada. It includes his one Hugo-nominated short piece that was published before the collection came out, but also a few pieces less likely to have been seen by readers, such as one originally published in "The Globe and Mail" newspaper, and several from small press publications. Sawyer also wrote an introduction for each piece, although in most cases it is just the explanation of where it first appeared. I suspect that at some point a more comprehensive collection may be done of Sawyer's work, but until then, fans of his writing will want to seek this out. (It is available from amazon and other sellers in the United States.)
To order Iterations from amazon.com, click here.
ROLLBACK by Robert J. Sawyer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/04/2008]
ROLLBACK by Robert J. Sawyer (ISBN-13 978-0-765-31108-9, ISBN-10 0-765-31108-9) has two major problems. One, it has *two* assumptions of the "what if?" variety: we've made contact with aliens, and it is possible to "rollback" someone to the physiological age of twenty-five. Either one of these would be a reasonable basis for a book; both together seem like overkill. In fairness, this is a standard Sawyer technique, so it could just be me who finds this irksome. The other is that the ending depends on a massive coincidence--literally a one-in-a-thousand chance--to work out. (Actually, it is an even less-than-one-in-a- thousand chance, now that I think about it.)
And there are smaller problems as well. Sawyer manages to fit it his usual speech about how much better the Canadian health system (and educational system) is than the United States version(s). Even if it is true, I am not sure a statement to that effect needs to be in every novel he writes. And every once in a while there's something to bring you up short and destroy the sense of time and place. For example, though it's 2048, any sense of being in 2048 the reader might have is quickly stomped on when one character says the following: "Hell, I got an email today with a PDF attachment, and I thought, geez, I wonder if this is going to be worth reading, 'cause, you know, it's going to take, like *ten whole seconds* for the attachment to download and open." Which is less likely: that in 2048 we will still be receiving email with PDF attachments, or that if we were, it would take ten seconds to open them? (For that matter, how likely is it that both the Canadian and United States health systems will remain unchanged by then?)
Sawyer can't have it both ways. He can't write a novel set forty years in the future and have everything the same as now. Nor can he write a novel set in the near future and have the alien contact and rollback as he wants. (The alien contact is *not* faster than light, so he needs time after our reception of the first messages for our reply to travel out and their reply to travel back.)
Clearly, Sawyer has his fans (Joe Karpierz gave this a very positive review in the 05/04/07 issue of the MT VOID, and it did make the Hugo ballot), and Sawyer is usually the example of an "Analog"-style author on the Hugo ballot. But I have to say that this book will not be high among my choices for "Best Novel" on my ballot. [-ecl]
To order Rollback from amazon.com, click here.
"Shed Skin" by Robert J. Sawyer:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/17/2005]
"Shed Skin" by Robert J. Sawyer ("Analog" 01-02/04) has a plot involving uploading a duplicate of oneself into a robot. This is very similar to several other notable stories over the past few years, and in particular this seems to be a response to David Brin's KILN PEOPLE (reviewed in the 04/25/03 issue of the MT VOID). I'm not sure how much new this adds to those stories, but at least it is centered on an idea.
LORD PETER by Dorothy L. Sayers:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/14/2005]
Dorothy L. Sayers's LORD PETER (ISBN 0-060-91380-0) is a collection of all Sayers's short stories featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. I'm not a big Wimsey fan--I guess the whole upper-class thing does not work for me, and she seems to feature less of the puzzle aspect than, say, Agatha Christie. However, I enjoyed the short stories more than her novels, maybe because of necessity they have a higher proportion of puzzle and less of the setting than the novels.
To order Lord Peter from amazon.com, click here.
THE SONG OF ROLAND translated by Dorothy L. Sayers:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/29/2006]
THE SONG OF ROLAND, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers (ISBN 0-140-44075-5), is a classic, and also a classic example of messing around with history. On 15 August 778 the rear-guard of Charlemagne's army was killed in the Pyrenees by a small party of Basque marauders. There were a couple of contemporary reports of this, then nothing until around the end of the 11th century. At that point, right about the time of the First Crusade (1096), the story re-surfaced, with Charlemagne 200 years old rather than the more accurate 38, and with the Saracens rather than the Basques who attack. Oh, and there are about 100,000 of them rather than just a small party (now against 20,000 French). Regarding this tendency toward "historical adjustment", Sayers writes of one character: "[The] historical prototype [of Richard the Old] is Richard I of Normandy, who lived (943-996) later than Charlemagne's time, but has been attracted into the Carolingian cycle by the natural tendency of epic to accumulate famous names regardless of chronology." The whole story has become the Cross versus the Crescent, with Muslims willing to see their own sons killed as hostages in order to defeat the Christians.
The problem (for me, at least) is that Roland appears to refuse to blow his horn and call for reinforcements out of sheer cussedness. He has decided that it is nobler to fight while out-numbered five-to-one than to call for reinforcements, and besides, being Christians of course they will defeat the "paynims". That does not make him a hero--it makes him a dolt. (The latter attitude--that the French are a match for any foreign force--has gotten France into a lot of trouble since then, of course.)
Even the poem acknowledges this. After most of the battle, when there are sixty Frenchmen left and 96,000 Saracens [Lines 1685- 1689], Roland cries, "Why aren't you here, O friend and Emperour?/Oliver, brother, what way is to be found?/How send him news of what is come about?" [Lines 1697-1699] And Oliver suddenly does his own about-face as well, saying, "And how should I know how?/I'd rather die than we should lose renown." [Lines 1700-1701] Oliver then goes on to say, in effect, "Look, if you had blown the horn when it might have done some good, that would have been one thing. But now you've lost the battle and are just trying to save yourself." But the Archbishop convinces Roland to blow his horn anyway so that Charlemagne can exact vengeance on the Saracens. Bleh.
If you are looking for early racial stereotypes, how about this description of Ethiopian warriors: "As black as ink from head to foot their hides are,/With nothing white about them but their grinders." (Note the use of "hides" rather than "skins", in addition to the actual description.) And of course, when the French defeat the SaracensMuslims), "Some thousand French search the whole town [of Saragossa], to spy/Synagogues out and mosques and heathen shrines./With heavy hammers and with mallets of iron/They smash the idols, the images they smite." [Lines 3662- 3664] So we learn two things from this. One, even though the Jews were not involved in the battle, they get persecuted afterwards. And, two, whoever wrote the "Song of Roland" was seriously confused--synagogues and mosques are notable for their *lack* of images and idols; those are found almost entirely in Catholic churches. Oh, and afterward, any "Paynim" who does not convert to Christianity is killed.
I do not know whether it is the translation or the original, by the way, but both the French and the Saracens seem to have a group called the "Twelve Peers". So Line 1308 says, "Of the Twelve Peers ten already are killed," then later Lines 1511-1512 say, They urge on Roland and Oliver likewise/And the Twelve Peers to flee for all their lives." In the first case, the reference is to the Saracens, in the second, to the French. It is somewhat confusing.
By the way, I just ran across a mention of Roland's Horn elsewhere a week or so previous. The 1936 version of THE MALTESE FALCON, titled SATAN MET A LADY, has the characters from THE MALTESE FALCON (with slightly changed names) chasing after Roland's Horn, supposedly stuffed with gems to keep it from ever being sounded again. Why the jewels could not just be poured out was never made clear, and in any case Roland broke the horn at the end of the battle when he killed a Saracen with it.
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THE UNPLEASANTNESS AT THE BELLONA CLUB by Dorothy L. Sayers:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/12/2003]
Lord Peter Wimsey is a very popular amateur detective, but reading Dorothy Sayers's THE UNPLEASANTNESS AT THE BELLONA CLUB still didn't make me put him up with Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. (Sherlock Holmes is clearly above them all, of course.) It could be that the trendy, social set that Wimsey travels in just doesn't fascinate me as it does some others. I'm not saying the book was bad, but I would place Wimsey in the second rank of English sleuths.
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