Michael Chabon is a brilliant writer, and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a masterful, scintillating book. It’s lyrical as a poem, funny as a Shecky Greene monologue, and engaging as a crossword puzzle. It’s the kind of book that makes lesser authors (like me) want to throw their laptops through the window and take up careers in online marketing.

And yet I don’t recommend it.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a hard-boiled police novel, set in an alternate universe in which the state of Israel failed in 1948. The homeless Jews were (grudgingly) offered a home in the Alaska panhandle, around Sitka. There they have lived for almost 60 years (the book is set in 2007), but next year the mandate runs out, and the land is scheduled to be returned to the Tlinkit Indians (that’s pronounced “Clinkit,” by the way. You probably didn’t know that. I know it because I spent a summer in the Shumagin Islands, long ago).

It’s in this climate of insecurity and futility that police detective Meyer Landsman is taken to view the body of a gunshot victim in the seedy hotel where he’s lived since his divorce. The body turns out to be that of a once-famous young man, a chess prodigy, rabbi’s son and miracle worker who many thought would be the Messiah. Depressed, self-destructive, alcoholic, Det. Landsman sets about solving the mystery, sometimes helped and sometimes hindered by his half-Tlinkit partner and his ex-wife, who is now his boss.

Be warned—the rest of this review includes spoilers. Not spoilers about the plot, but about the meaning of the book. Of course, I may have misunderstood the meaning altogether, as ordinary chess players in this novel are baffled by the moves of the great masters. But I’ll tell you what I got out of it, for whatever that’s worth.

The lesson of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is that the real danger in the world comes from the devout, whatever their religion. Chabon has cleverly, in his alternate universe, created a world without Islamic terrorism (because we all know there’d be no Islamic terrorism if there were no Israel). But there is terrorism nevertheless, coming out of those famously vicious groups, orthodox Jews and Christian evangelicals.

This book, it appears to me, is the heart-cry of the assimilated, secular, self-hating Jew. When the Muslim terrorist says it’s all the Jews’ fault, Chabon (it would appear) hangs his head and says, “It’s true. But it’s not my fault. It’s the fault of those black hats. They’re just crazy.”

So the book saddened me. I should also mention that I read it to the end, though—something which I rarely do with books that offend me deeply. This one was just too good to put down, even when I thought it morally perverse and dangerous.

Cautions for language apply—not only obscenity and cursing, but actual blasphemy. Also a lot of jokes about Jews that no Gentile could get away with.

Read at your own risk.

I picked up my first novel by Stephen J. Cannell with some misgivings. Cannell is, of course, one of television’s biggest producers and writers, responsible for some great shows (like The Rockford Files and The Commish) and some I consider less noteworthy (like The A Team, which strained credibility farther than I was willing to tolerate).

But being able to put together a successful TV show doesn’t necessarily qualify someone to craft a decent novel. There’s overlap in the two occupations, but big differences as well. And, like any literary snob, I suppose I looked down my nose at the TV connection.

But now I’m convinced. The Tin Collectors was a very good mystery—well written, hard to put down and graced with vivid, sympathetic characters.

Shane Scully is a Los Angeles police detective. As the story opens, he’s awakened from sleep by a call from Barbara Molar, a former girlfriend who is now married to his ex-partner, Ray. Ray has come home mad, she tells him, and he’s trying to kill her. Continue reading The Tin Collectors, by Stephen J. Cannell →

Among evangelical Christian fantasy writers today, I consider Stephen Lawhead perhaps the best. When he hit his stride, with the Song of Albion trilogy and his Arthur books, I thought he might be poised to produce genuine classics.

And yet, like a swimmer poised on the edge of a pond, hesitating, afraid that the water’s too cold or too shallow, he never seems to make that perfect dive.

Tuck is another very good book from his pen, head and shoulders above the rank and file of CBA fiction.

But I can’t help feeling it could—and should—have been better.

Tuck finishes off Lawhead’s King Raven trilogy, his version of the Robin Hood story. In Lawhead’s imagining, Robin Hood was not a Yorkshireman, but a Welsh petty king, in the days of King William Rufus, the son of William the Conqueror. When his father was murdered and their kingdom taken by Normans, young prince Bran fled and became Rhi Bran y Hud, King Raven, the fearful and magical forest outlaw.

In this book, Bran has once again been cheated by the Normans. He has saved the king from a conspiracy, but once again all he’s gotten in return is a slap in the face. He makes the decision then to drive the Normans out of his lands by main force, calling on his kinsman kings for help. But although victorious in the field, he is frustrated at every turn. His heroics go for naught, and those he looks to for help give him none, even after (in one case) he rescues a king from captivity.

And yet, where he looks for it least, forces are moving to help him.

The story is told from the point of view of Friar Tuck, a decent, brave and unassuming monk (if you like my Father Ailill, you’ll very probably like Tuck). Tuck serves as a check on Bran’s rashness, and a spiritual guide (though the spiritual leader of Robin’s band is actually Angharad, a Celtic wise woman, an element that doesn’t please me particularly). Tuck is an engaging narrator and an attractive character.

It should be noted that, in spite of Lawhead’s reputation as a fantasist, the King Raven books are essentially historical fiction. There’s a minor mystical element, but not enough for these books to be classified as fantasy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I won’t say the ending is a disappointment. It’s satisfying and in keeping with story, and harmonious with Christian morality. It surprised me personally, because the true story of King William Rufus offers an obvious climax that, I would have thought, would be too good to resist. But resist it Lawhead did, which shows (I guess) a certain narrative self-control.

But the book didn’t soar. I was looking for a climax that carried me away, that sent a Tolkienesque shiver up my spine, and that wasn’t on offer here.

I can recommend the book without reservation, for teens and up.

But I can’t deny a small degree of disappointment.

A friend lent me his copies of Expecting Someone Taller and Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? I’m glad he did. I enjoyed reading them very much.

English writer Tom Holt has mastered (perhaps invented; I’m not sure) a form of contemporary, humorous fantasy in which mythical or historical characters mix with the modern world (kind of like some of my works, or Neil Gaiman’s, but funny). A critical blurb on the cover of EST says the book “recalls Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Twain’s Connecticut Yankee….” I’d say the writing is more reminiscent of Wodehouse’s, at least some of the time (which is high praise indeed).

Take this passage from EST:

[Alberich] was a businessman, and businessmen have to travel on aircraft. Since there seemed to be no prospect of progress in his quest for the Ring, he had thought it would be as well if he went back to Germany for a week to see what sort of a mess his partners were making of his mining consultancy. He had no interest in the work itself, but it provided his bread and butter; if it did not exactly keep the wolf from the door, it had enabled him to have a wolf-flap fitted so that the beast could come in and out without disturbing people.

Continue reading Expecting Someone Taller and Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? by Tom Holt →

The fact that I haven’t read the previous books in this series (created by Larry Niven) probably disqualifies me from making intelligent comments on Man-Kzin Wars X: The Wunder War, but I picked it up because Hal Colebatch is an e-mail friend, and a wise and perceptive writer over at the American Spectator (also a lawyer and sometime government functionary in Australia).

Full disclosure: I did not get my copy for free as a reviewer. I sprung for it out of my own money.

The premise of the Man-Kzin Wars series, as I understand it, begins with the assumption that space-traveling cultures are generally peaceful cultures. Warfare is too much of a scientific and economic drain for warlike civilizations to get far in interstellar exploration and commerce.

However, there is an exception—the Kzin, a race of tiger-like (but larger and stronger) bipeds who sweep across the galaxy like Romans on the march, conquering and enslaving (often devouring) peaceful civilizations as they go. When they first approach a human colony, the paradisaical planet called Wunderland, it looks like more of the same. The humans there have put warfare so far behind them that the study of it is next to illegal, and curious scholars are at a loss to understand the functions of weapons, or what military ranks indicate. Continue reading The Man-Kzin Wars X: The Wunder War, by Hal Colebatch →