When writing a review of Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche, it’s almost obligatory to quote the first line, often considered one of the best in English literature:

He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.

(I added the second line as a bonus, because I’m in a generous mood.)

Rafael Sabatini is chiefly remembered today as the author of Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk, which had the good fortune to be turned into classic movies starring Errol Flynn. Scaramouche has been filmed twice, once as a silent with Ramon Navarro, and once in sound and technicolor with Stewart Granger. Granger isn’t quite up to Flynn’s standards as a swashbuckler, and the film is pretty radically telescoped from the book’s plot, but I understand it’s not bad. Haven’t seen it myself in a while.

“Scaramouche” is not the hero’s real name, but the name he takes on when he joins a traveling comedy troupe. Stage comedy in those days, only slightly evolved from the Italian Commedia del Arte, was kind of like a TV situation comedy, if there were many networks and they all broadcast the same series, just with different casts playing the roles. The stock characters, recycled from plot to plot, became familiar types. We still speak of Harlequin and Pantaloon today, and occasionally you may even dig up a reference to Peirrot and Columbine. Scaramouche was another such character, a shifty, black-clad figure who was constantly devising plots and conspiracies. The trick of this novel (and Sabatini carries it off very well) is that his hero, Andre-Louis Moreau of Brittany, is a Scaramouche in real life as well as on stage. And the book’s plot is clearly based on a standard comedy plot of the time. Even the climax is technically right out of the Comedie Francais, except that it’s handled with far greater restraint and ambiguity.

Andre-Louis becomes an actor in order to hide from the law, after he delivers a revolutionary speech in the city of Nantes which (to his own surprise) becomes one of the sparks that sets off the French Revolution. He gives the speech, not because he’s a revolutionary himself, but as a sort of tribute to a friend who has just been murdered in duel by a nobleman, the arrogant Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr. Andre-Louis has vowed to promote his friend’s ideas and to kill the Marquis.

He finds that he has a natural gift for acting, and before long becomes not only the star, but the business manager, of the theater company. But a disappointing romantic interlude with the other manager’s daughter, plus a further brush with the Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr, causes him to leave the theater and become a fencing master’s assistant. Eventually, once he has perfected his swordsmanship, he goes into politics, sitting on the left side of the National Assembly, in order to get his final revenge on his mortal enemy.

The whole thing is rather preposterous, in the best tradition of the picaresque novel, but Sabatini carries it off with great style. As old books are wont to do, Scaramouche starts a little slow, but the longer I read the more fascinated I grew. This is a classic adventure story, well worth re-discovering.

Recommended for anyone old enough to understand the grammar.

I bought Ice Cream and Venom for my Kindle because it was written by the anonymous “Republibot 3.0” who hangs out at Threedonia, as I tend to do. He (I assume he’s a he) participates in this conservative science fiction blog. The book is a collection of seven short stories, diverse in setting and tone.

I have an ambivalent relationship with science fiction. I enjoyed the juvenile stuff when I was young, but as I tasted the more adult variety my interest waned and I shifted to fantasy. I’ve always suspected I never gave science fiction a fair try, although I’ve read a fair (at least representative, I think) selection of stories and books over the years.

Ice Cream and Venom, in my opinion, is pretty good. I liked some stories better than others, as you’d expect, but I thought the quality of the writing was high (marred, as is so often the case nowadays—especially in electronic publishing–by poor proofing). There are lots of confused cognates and wrongly placed apostrophes, and in one story the author lost track of characters’ names, calling two guys by the others’ names for about half a page.

Still the contemporary reader has grown used to such things and learned to work around them. When the author is on his game, his writing is very good indeed.

My favorite story was “The Man Who Would Not Be King,” an oddly heartwarming story of Elvis Presley in an alternate universe.

“Superheroes Are Gay” was a well realized, if disturbing, picture of a world where superherores are real—and it’s not a good thing.

“The Truth About Lions and Lambs” is a dystopic tale, troubling and hard to forget.

Christian readers will find that the themes are generally positive ones, but the details sometimes offensive. A very short story called “Just Moments Before the End of the Age” borders on sacrilege, and will certainly put some Christians off (I think it also betrays a lack of theological understanding on the part of a writer who seems pretty familiar with the faith and the evangelical community).

But if you enjoy that kind of challenging material, it’s only a buck on Kindle, and you could do a lot worse.

Phil has already reviewed Auralia’s Colors for the blog. But I have read it at last, on his recommendation, and feel compelled to add my word of appreciation for a fine, fine creative work, informed by Christian truth. I am tentatively prepared to declare Jeffrey Overstreet the best Christian fantasist working today (Walter Wangerin is doing other things). Possibly even better than me (!).

What are the things that irritate me about contemporary fantasy generally, and Christian fantasy in particular?

First of all, contemporary fantasists tend to use words badly. They strive for the same effects as Tolkien or Lewis, but lack the rich erudition of those scholars. Their prose is stilted and artificial, their word choices poor.

Overstreet does not suffer from this problem. He uses words deftly, as Rembrandt used brushes and paint. Every description is vivid, every image apt. It’s a delight to read his prose. I was reminded of Tolkien’s use of Old English names to evoke unconscious meanings in the reader. Overstreet doesn’t use that technique, but the whimsical names he gives to humans and beasts had a similar effect on me.

Contemporary fantasists tend to be derivative. When you read their work, you can easily detect a) which favorite writers they are trying to ape, and b) their political and social beliefs and prejudices.

Overstreet’s work is as original as a new baby. He goes his own way, telling his own story. The only thing Auralia’s Colors reminded me of was—in a general way—Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books, but the resemblance is superficial. Where Peake portrayed a grotesque world, barely concealing the disease under its skin, Overstreet creates a world full of wonder and beauty, its potential buried under the weight of destructive ideas.

I won’t give a synopsis of the plot, except to say that it involves a country stripped of all color by law, where a miraculous young girl named Auralia, working in the wilderness, gathers and weaves together wonderful hues that remind the people of a better life and give them hope. It would have been easy to make the characters in this story black and white, but Overstreet’s creations have the stamp of real life on them—in their various ways they all think they are doing good, and they often commit their greatest sins in full assurance of righteousness.

Some readers will be tempted to allegorize Auralia’s Colors. This would be a mistake, I think. It needs to be allowed to speak on its own terms, to work secretly in our dreams.

Auralia’s Colors (the first of a series) is a book to savor; a book to break your heart. Not for young children (a little too intense), but highly recommended for anyone older.

I believe this is the last “new” Lew Fonesca book I’ll be able to read, and that makes me sad. Midnight Pass isn’t the last book in the series (that was Always Say Goodbye, which I’ve already reviewed). But it was the last one I found. Stuart M. Kaminsky’s bald little hero, whose stories would never have appealed to me purely on the basis of their synopses, won me over completely. I miss all the books Kaminsky might have written if he’d lived, but I miss the Lew Fonesca stories most.

Lew Fonesca, if you’re not familiar with him, is a man hiding from life. After the death of his wife he moved from Chicago to Sarasota, where he lives in a room behind his tiny office. His existence consists of delivering summonses during the day and watching old movies on his VCR at night. At least that’s his plan. But life keeps intruding. People need help. He helps them. They tend to become friends. Lew’s saga (I only realized it after reading this book) is the story of the gradual re-integration of a traumatized personality. These books could have been downers, but in fact they’re full of hope.

In this story, Lew is hired by a minister, also a city council member, to find a fellow councilman who has disappeared and whose vote is needed to fight a development project. He also gets involved in the problems of a married couple, involving the wife running off with her husband’s business partner. There’s kidnapping, and shots are fired. Meanwhile, Lew keeps his appointments with his therapist, and contemplates becoming a Big Brother. In the end he solves the mysteries and averts some evil.

Reading a Lew Fonesca mystery is like spending time with the best friend you ever had. I’ll miss you, Lew.

Cautions for language and violence, but nothing over the top.

According to an anecdote, E. Z. C. Judson, better known as Ned Buntline, traveled west to Fort McPherson, Nebraska, to meet the famous pistoleer, Wild Bill Hickok, about whom he wished to write dime novels. He found him in his natural environment (a saloon), and rushed up to him, crying, “There’s my man! I want you!” Hickok pulled a revolver on him and told him to be out of town in 24 hours.

Perhaps it’s the memory of Wild Bill’s nickel-plated Colt Navy .36 that accounts for the jaundiced view of the man we find in the deservedly forgotten little novel, Wild Bill’s Last Trail.

Ned Buntline

I downloaded it to read on my Kindle because I’m a Wild Bill buff, and although I’ve read much about Buntline over the years (whatever they tell you in the movies, he never gave Wyatt Earp a long-barreled revolver) but had never savored the quality of his actual prose.

Well, it’s quality prose, in the sense that pretentiousness is a quality, and floridity is a quality too.

“…there’s a shadow as cold as ice on my soul! I’ve never felt right since I pulled on that red-haired Texan at Abilene, in Kansas. You remember, for you was there. It was kill or get killed, you know, and when I let him have his ticket for a six-foot lot of ground he gave one shriek—it rings in my years yet. He spoke but one word— ‘Sister!’ Yet that word has never left my ears, sleeping or waking, from that time to this.”

I must admit that, although I expected the purple prose and the improbable action, one aspect of the book surprised me. I had expected “white hats” and “black hats,” one-dimensional good guys and bad guys. But in fact, this is a Wild West where the deer and the ambivalent play. Wild Bill is arguably the real villain, and everybody who wants to kill him (there are many) seems to have a good reason. One sympathetic character—shades of Dances With Wolves—is not only a professional killer, but has made common cause with the Sioux and plans to join Sitting Bull.

The only explanation I can think of for all this is that Ned must have really held a grudge for the Fort McPherson incident. He also finds numerous opportunities to condemn Wild Bill’s drinking (Ned Buntline made a sideline of lecturing on Temperance—utterly hypocritically, as he drank plenty himself),

I might add that the climax manages to be at once melodramatic, historically inaccurate, and confusing. If you can figure it out on the first reading, you’re a better reader than I am.

Not a good book, Wild Bill’s Last Trail is an interesting historical curiosity.